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Saturday

James Forsyth

Dignity at all costs

If George W. Bush goes down in history as the most disastrous US president since Herbert Hoover, it will be because of his foreign policy mistakes. Yet the person who tutored candidate Bush on foreign policy, co-ordinated it in his first term and was its public face in his second term is probably the most respected member of the Bush administration both at home and abroad. This is the paradox that Marcus Mabry sets out to explain in Condoleezza Rice: Naked Ambition. Throughout the Bush administration, Rice has been the most effective emissary for the President’s foreign policy because she doesn’t fit the stereotype.

Matthew Dennison

Many happy returns

Robert Adam is probably Britain’s most famous architect never to have built a house. This, of course, is an exaggeration, but it is certainly the case that the greater part of Adam’s professional output consisted of remodelling the internal architecture of existing buildings and creating interior decoration for houses already built by previous hands. When it came to the leap from architect’s drawing to finished item, Adam had a greater strike rate in fancy carpets than in country houses.

Olivia Glazebrook

A plain book about beauty

When people write about their experiences as drug addicts they often — wittingly or not — write with a degree of competitiveness. There is a tacit understanding that the reader will feel cheated by anything less than a full-blown addiction to class-A drugs. A handful of Solpadeine and two bottles of vodka every day for 20 years just isn’t going to cut it with a publisher. James Frey was well aware of this when he embellished A Million Little Pieces to make it more ‘appealing’, and how right he was: we lapped it up. Readers want the author of a sin-soaked drug memoir to lie, cheat and steal — preferably from his/her middle-class parents. Any of the following are recommended as extras: prostitution, sleeping on the street, mugging an elderly pedestrian.

Pj Kavanagh

‘Almost’ religious joy

Simon Barnes is chief sportswriter for the Times; wearing his other boots he is a fervent eco-warrior, a spell-binding preacher, a missionary. His book is broken into small descriptive sections and each contains a moment, an exaltation at a contact with ‘the wild’. These are perhaps best read in snatches, rather than as a continuum, because their fervour is so intense. By ‘wild’ he means anything that is not ourselves, not human, from gossamer to elephants, and he believes we need this contact precisely in order to be fully human. ‘I divide the whole world into lovers: you are either (a) a lover of nature or (b) a lover of nature who doesn’t know it yet.

Allan Massie

Murder most serious

Raymond Chandler praised Dashiell Hammett for having given murder back to the sort of people who commit it. Given that he himself followed in Hammett’s footsteps, this was an understandable remark, aimed at what might already have been called the classic English detective novel. ‘Can’t read Christie,’ he told someone who had sent him a questionnaire. This wasn’t quite true. In one letter he analyses, intelligently and judiciously, Christie’s Ten Little Niggers; elsewhere, in an essay, ‘Casual Notes on the Mystery Novel’, he wrote that he was ‘quite unmoved to indignation by The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’s violation of the rule that “the suppression of facts by the narrator ...

Saturday

Ferdinand Mount

A sensitive bounder

He was a noisy boy from the start. At the age of two, he was taken out for walks in order not to disturb his ailing grandfather and he would march down the main street of Bewdley shouting, ‘Ruddy is coming!’ Or sometimes, ‘An angry Ruddy is coming!’ Despite these precautions, his grandfather died and Kipling’s aunts and uncles believed that Ruddy’s tantrums had hastened and embittered his end. When he left the United Services College at Westward Ho! and returned to India, he quickly gained a reputation in the Punjab Club for boorish and bumptious behaviour.

Tim Congdon

Guru to five presidents

Seated next to her at dinner, I was prepared for a dull evening with a politician. ‘Tell me, Chairman Greenspan,’ she asked, ‘why is it that we in Britain cannot calculate M3?’. I awoke. M3 is an arcane measure of money supply embraced by followers of Milton Friedman. We spent the evening discussing market economics and the problems confronting the British economy. Thus , according to Alan Greenspan’s semi-autobiographical The Age of Turbulence, began the first meeting between Alan Greenspan and Margaret Thatcher, at a September 1975 British embassy function in Washington. Greenspan evidently developed a great liking and respect for Thatcher, because, apart from anything else, she wished to conceptualise major issues of public policy.

Mary Keen

Pioneer of the studied casual

Norah Lindsay had wit, beauty and a bohemian spirit. Diana Cooper described her dressing ‘mostly in tinsel and leopard skins and baroque pearls and emeralds’. At Sutton Courtenay, the house where she lived through the early years of her marriage to Harry Lindsay, she entertained non-stop. Raymond Asquith, Julian and Billy Grenfell, Maurice Baring and Jasper Ridley all flocked to her table from Oxford. ‘Sutton Courtenay, roses, the river and the youth of England splashing in the Thames and Norah, the sublime Norah,’ wrote Chips Channon. She was never out of love, often with several young men at a time. ‘Norah sometimes vexes me,’ wrote her sister Madeline Whitbread.

Jonathan Keates

The bad boy comes of age

As the biopic comes back into fashion — think Kinsey, think A Beautiful Mind — somebody might consider the life of Roman Polanski as perfect big-screen material. Its component elements are the stuff of box-office dreams. Holocaust survival, dodgy sex, motiveless murder, a liberal sprinkling of celebrity, plenty of photogenic locations — the Oscar-winning script is in the bag. Its star, as Christopher Sandford’s biography suggests, boasts unfathomable reserves of chutzpah, and his recent epiphany at the Venice Film Festival was a reminder of how much life the old dog still has left in him. Polanski’s resilience was tested early, with the dispatch of his Jewish parents to Auschwitz and Mauthausen.

Andro Linklater

Master of the masquerade

Not even the Akond of Swat in all his whoness, whyety, whichery and whatage could compare to the enigmatic, whimsical mask of deconstruction that purports to be Alasdair Gray. He was a student of the Glasgow School of Art and a quondam painter, but is he an artist? He wrote the 1980s magically realist novel Lanark, but is he a novelist? He was famous, but is he a success? Is this book fact or fiction or a gallimaufry of jottings? He asserts on the copyright page, his ‘moral right’ as Gray to be its author, but inside passes himself off as an American millionairess, a cake, an algorithm and a critic.

Charlotte Moore

Deadened by shock

The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold’s first novel, sold 2 ½ million copies, so it’s not surprising that Picador are calling the nation’s attention to its successor with posters on the Tube and ‘page-dominating full-colour national press advertising’. I remember finding The Lovely Bones original, even thought-provoking; why, then, did The Almost Moon provoke little more in me than weary irritation? Its essential flaw is contained in its opening sentence: ‘When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily.’ This is eye-catching, and reminds readers of the striking premise of The Lovely Bones — ‘I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973.’ The sentence is given prominence in Picador’s marketing campaign.

Marcus Berkmann

The story behind the story

And so we enter the Christmas books season, a phase in the publishing calendar so terrifying, so utterly without hope, that more sensitive bookbuyers may wish to hide in second-hand bookshops, or under their beds, until it’s all over. But amidst the piles of useless non-books in Borders and Waterstones, probably right at the back where they think we won’t find them, there will be a handful of genuinely good titles. They may not be very serious books, you may not necessarily buy them for yourself, but if you were given them for Christmas you would be more than pleasantly surprised. You might even read them all the way to the end. Tracking these books down, though, is the challenge. Why Not Catch 21?

Jane Gardam

People keep appearing

Susan Hill knows exactly how to please. This small, smart, elegantly printed little notepad of a book is a delicious Victorian ghost story, nostalgically and expertly comforting. It opens as smoothly as an M. R. James or Conan Doyle short story, over a good fire in a shadowy room on a winter’s night: The story was told me by my old friend, Theo Parmitter, as we sat in his college rooms one bitterly cold January night. There were still real fires in those days, the coals brought up by a servant in huge brass scuttles. . . . We know this room and we know the professor’s story, too. It is the fine old chestnut to roast upon the coals: the story of the haunted painting. Oscar Wilde examined it in The Picture of Dorian Gray and M. R.

Harriet Sergeant

No mean feat

Rows of black suits filled the China Airlines flight from Beijing to Paris in September 1984. The People’s Liberation Army had ordered its entire delegation of dancers and musicians to wear the same ill-fitting outfit. Only one 17-year-old dancer had disobeyed the order. For this, his first visit to Europe, Jin Xing had bought a dazzling, white three-piece suit. ‘Only I shone out,’ he declared proudly. It is this desire to shine against the bulwark of the Chinese state that defines Jin Xing’s autobiography, Shanghai Tango. It has been no easy feat. Jin Xing was born a boy and became a colonel in the People’s Liberation Army. A sex change saw her start a new career as an international ballerina, choreographer and, most improbably of all, Beijing bar owner.

David Caute

Joan of Arc with connections

This is a book long anticipated, as much in dread of dire news from Zimbabwe as in expectation of brilliant reporting spiced by mordant wit. It does not disappoint. Judith Todd’s chronicle of Mugabe’s crimes against his people appals, yet the ‘life’ of the subtitle has been a high-spirited crusade for justice, democracy and freedom of the press. Firmly attached to the progressive values of Grace and Garfield Todd, benevolent paternalists engaged in ranching, healing, teaching and politicking in south-west Zimbabwe since 1934, their daughter has proven to be cut from the same cloth. But now they are all gone. Through the Darkness displays the sly humour long ago apparent in The Right to Say No.

William Boyd

The artist as a middle-aged man

It’s perhaps worth reminding ourselves at the outset, as we reach the third volume of John Richardson’s stupendous biography of Picasso, exactly where we are. Picasso died in April 1973, aged 91, and it comes as something of a shock to realise that at the end of this volume, in 1932, he’s a middle-aged man entering his fifties: yet he had another 40 years to go. Is it this that daunts us when we try to weigh up the man and his work — his longevity, his century-straddling superhuman productivity? When we think of the kind of artist he was, or even the kind of genius he was, Archilochus’s old adage comes to mind — particularly useful when we come face to face with prodigious gifts: ‘The fox knows many things; the hedgehog knows one big thing.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

The curse of riches

When the second half of the 19th century began, South Africa was barely even a geographical expression, as Metternich had contemptuously called Italy. It certainly wasn’t a country, but merely an ill-defined area which included two Boer republics, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, two British colonies, the Cape and Natal, and a number of African principalities. The British had acquired the Cape from the Dutch during the Napoleonic wars not quite in a fit of absence of mind, but with little enthusiasm, and although the Cape of Good Hope itself was of great strategic importance, commanding the passage to India and the Far East, James Stephen of the Colonial Office unpresciently called the lands of the interior ‘the most sterile and worthless in the whole Empire’.

Molly Guinness

Old wine in new skins

Canongate has commissioned various distinguished authors to retell the myths, and whether by choice or bad luck, Salley Vickers got landed with Oedipus. The problem with this story is that the details are so horribly memorable and its poet so good that there is nothing really to add. The Greek tragedians could play fast and loose with the myths and adapt even major details to suit their purposes, but when a story has become so enshrined, we are left with little to do but admire and analyse it. This is what Vickers has done: Tiresias goes to see Freud and tells him the tale. She has plundered the Greek play freely and, in terms of plot, furnished us only with an elongated version of Sophocles, adding a little about Tiresias’ childhood for good measure.

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 3 November 2007

The Fixed Period is the most un-Trollopian thing Trollope ever wrote. It is a first-person futuristic narrative set in the state of Britannula, an island somewhere near New Zealand, in the year 1980. The President of Britannula, John Neverbend, decides to institute a fixed term of 67½ years for the life-span of his citizens, after which they will be dealt a painless and compulsory euthanasia. The Fixed Period is similar in style to a book published a few years earlier, Samuel Butler’s Erewhon; in film perhaps its closest kinship is with Logan’s Run or Soylent Green. Let any man look among his friends,’ Neverbend says, ‘and see whether men of 65 are not in the way of those who are still aspiring to rise in the world.

Saturday

Sam Leith

Getting to the bottom of John

The first time I came across John Mortimer was while I was working as a gossip columnist. I had for some reason or another to telephone him in search of a quote, and did what dozens of my kind had done before, and dozens have done since. The telephone was answered by an elderly lady’s high, reedy voice. ‘Good afternoon, Lady Mortimer. I am sorry to trouble you. Is Sir John available?’ The voice, slightly peeved, fluted back: ‘This is John.’ Poor old John Mortimer —- this happens to him, as I understand it, all the time. I dare say it happens too, occasionally, to his second wife Penny, who speaks in a tobacco-seasoned growl.