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Saturday

Graham Stewart

Catch me if you can | 27 October 2007

It is a brave man who attempts to uncover the truth about George Galloway. One slip, one factual infelicity, one unguarded opinion and the biographer can expect to get his head bitten off. For, when it comes to receiving rather than dishing out abuse, the Respect MP and onetime Celebrity Big Brother contestant is no pussy cat. Perhaps therefore it is fortunate that David Morley is a seasoned documentary maker for radio and television who has no known links with the Republican party, New Labour, the security services, the Daily Telegraph or, indeed, any of the numerous entities that Galloway seems to believe are out to get him. Rather, Morley defines his objective early on, making clear that ‘this is not a critique of George Galloway’s political beliefs.

Cressida Connolly

Growing old disgracefully

It is a mark of how various are Jane Gardam’s interests that this collection of short stories does not read as a collection at all, but more as a very agreeable hotch-potch. Only place unites them, for several take place in leafy London suburbs, Hampstead, perhaps, or Wimbledon. The stories are unalike in subject, length and form: there are ghost stories, tales of quiet revenge; what might, in heavier hands, be called social commentary. Inevitably, some are better than others. Flights of fancy, jokes and telling moments spill across the pages. If there is a common thread, it might be described as growing old disgracefully.

Selina Hastings

The triumph of hope over experience

Derek Jackson was one of the most distinguished scientists of the previous century, whose work in atomic spectroscopy contributed significantly to British success in aerial warfare. Throughout his life Jackson remained absorbed in his highly specialised subject, regarded with profound respect by colleagues throughout the world, and yet there was almost nothing about him that conformed to the usual image of the boffin.

Vernon Bogdanor

Strong family ties

Kathleen Burk, Professor of History at University College, London, has written a magisterial overview of Anglo/American relations from 1497, when John and Sebastian Cabot, in Hakluyt’s words, ‘discovered that land which no men before that time had attempted’, until the modern age. Old World, New World is a remarkable achievement, based as it is upon massive and wide-ranging scholarship. It will undoubtedly become the first port of call for anyone seeking to understand this vast subject. But Professor Burk is, in Isaiah Berlin’s terms, a fox who knows many things rather than a hedgehog who knows one big thing. Her survey lacks a conclusion, and, in a sense, lacks also an overarching theme. Unlike her former teacher, A. J. P.

Jonathan Cecil

From Cleopatra to Queen Elizabeth

In my childhood we used to make what were called ‘scrap screens’. We pasted magazine photographs, coloured and black-and-white postcards, reproductions, advertisements and flower friezes on to a folding screen, overlapping sometimes unevenly, to create a colourful collage; it was a pleasant, inexpensive pastime. Helen Mirren’s In the Frame is a scrap- screen autobiography. Her story is copiously illustrated with luminous studio portraits of herself, snap shots, stage pictures, film stills and all kinds of memorabilia from letters and telegrams to school books and even Mrs Mirren’s ration book from 1953, an austere post-war memento. Helen’s family was a remarkable one.

Simon Baker

A yarn about yarn-spinners

In 1937 Vladimir Nabokov described the perfect novel during a lecture in Paris which he delivered to an audience including, rather Nabokovianly, the Hungarian football team: What an exciting experience it would be to follow the adventures of an idea through the ages. With no wordplay intended, I daresay this would be the ideal novel: we would really see the abstract image, perfectly limpid and unencumbered by humanity’s dust. Miss Herbert, Adam Thirlwell tells us, is an attempt at Nabokov’s ideal novel — ‘which is not really a novel’. It is a book about novelists and their work, in which we are given themes, motifs and a fairly large caveat: ‘It just has no plot, no fiction, and no finale.’ So what is it, exactly?

Juliet Townsend

The view from the nursery

It was a perpetual source of regret to me at the age of ten that my parents were so boringly agreeable. My attempts to persuade my friends that my father, in reality the mildest of men, was a violent sadist, who regularly whipped me with his cane while uttering the sinister words, ‘I’ve got Tickler here!’ (cribbed by me from the children’s version of Great Expectations) met with a fascinated half belief, but what I really wanted was a Worldly Mother. Children in the Victorian stories to which I was much addicted often boasted one of these. They were generally only seen on their way out to a society dinner ‘in a soft satin dress and pearls, tall and stately but somewhat cold in expression’.

Jeremy Treglown

Stein and Toklas Limited

As in her brilliant study of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Janet Malcolm’s focus in Two Lives is on the writing of biography, especially the biography of a couple — here, the ebullient Gertrude Stein and her ugly, much exploited lover, Alice B. Toklas — and, behind that, the construction of identity itself. Like Stein’s own work, the book is vivid, elliptical and distrustful of artificial order. It’s un-Stein-like, though, in the lucidity of Malcolm’s underlying thesis: that life-writing often has a lot more in common with fiction than its practitioners have tended to admit. In the early 1930s, Stein wrote The Autobiography of Alice B.

Philip Hensher

This splendid, brave, mad imagination

The last letter in Ted Hughes’s collected letters is to his aunt Hilda, recounting the way in which the Queen awarded him, two weeks before his death, the Order of Merit. It reads like a dream of wish-fulfilment: Then I gave [the Queen] a copy of Birthday Letters — and she was fascinated. I told her how I had come to write it, & even more so how I had come to publish it. I felt to make contact with her as never before. She was extremely vivacious & happy-spirited — more so than ever before. I suppose, talking about those poems, I was able to open my heart more than ever before — and so she responded in kind. This is not a considered letter, as that repeated ‘more than ever before’ suggests, but a passionately felt one.

Allan Massie

Sympathy for the Old Devil

In his criticism of Sainte-Beuve’s biographical method, Proust observes that it ‘ignores what a very slight degree of self-acquaintance teaches us: that a book is a product of a very different self from the self we manifest in our habits, in our social life, in our vices.’ I would not enter the argument stirred up by Professor Terry Eagleton’s attack on Kingsley Amis if it weren’t for the fact that those who have leapt — gallantly in the case of his second wife, Elizabeth Jane Howard — to Kingsley’s defence have spoken of the man, rather than the writer. This is understandable.

Saturday

Philip Hensher

A late and furious flowering

Sceptical readers will immediately wonder whether 14 years of any composer’s life really deserve over 1,000 pages of biographical examination. The second volume of John Tyrell’s Janacek certainly goes into events in extraordinary detail — I had a definite sense of foreboding of things to come when, on page 361, it is reported that in December 1919, ‘a button flew off [Janacek’s] fur coat so that he had to have another sewn on’. If we agree that the significance of the life dictates the substance of the biography, however, it seems perfectly reasonable. The last decade of Janacek’s life is truly one of the most astonishing and important periods in musical history. There is nothing that prepares us for it, and we are still coming to terms with it.

Bryan Forbes

King of the lurid spectacle

What a strange, gifted little martinet he was, this celluloid Nixon who demanded that his every word, no matter how trite or banal, was preserved exactly by his ‘field secretary’ while another acolyte, the ‘chair boy’, ensured that wherever he was he could sit down without looking. Surrounded by these perpetual attendants and telling his crews, ‘You are here to please me, nothing else on earth matters,’ he forged a career that began with the silents and went on to encompass 70 films. In the process he became a household word for a heady mixture of religion and sex. This proved a potent box-office martini which made him a multimillionaire who remained virulently anti-union and a much-quoted reactionary voice.

Theodore Dalrymple

The great misleader

In my intermittent career as an expert witness, I have observed that the most eminent men make the worst witnesses. Speaking from the lonely heights of their professional pre-eminence, they sometimes claim that what undoubtedly happened could not have happened, and what could not have happened undoubtedly did happen. Their intellectual distinction and busy schedules excuse them, in their own opinion, from the tiresome necessity to read the documents of the case with minute attention. Sir Bernard Spilsbury was the most eminent British forensic pathologist of his day, which is to say from Dr Crippen to the outbreak of the second war.

Jonathon Brown

Homage to Sebald

Despite its pun, Waterlog is not quite a catalogue of an exhibition; rather it documents, expands — and in some cases might seem to seek to justify — the contents of an exhibition held first in Norwich and now in Lincoln to honour the East Anglian resonances of the writer W. G. Sebald. It clearly would like to be judged in its own right. Just the fact that it speaks of the exhibition in the past tense, even though published between the two dates, gives it that vividly elusive quality so admired among attributes of Sebald that always demand similarly oxymoronic description.

Allan Massie

A legend in his lifetime

There is a brand of Toscano cigars called Garibaldi. Until given a new design recently, the packet proclaimed him as ‘the hero of two worlds’ as well as a devoted smoker of cigars (‘naturalemente Toscani’). The description was fair. Garibaldi was the most famous man of his time, the most famous since Napoleon. His image was everywhere, like Che Guevara’s in our time. A Polish historian has called him ‘the symbol of popular revolution, and a model of a people’s military leader’. When he died a French newspaper described him as a citizen of the world. Like the knight errant, the medieval paladin, he had as many homelands as there were oppressed peoples.

Douglas Dunn

Belfast to Edinburgh

Belfast to Edinburgh For Michael and Edna Longley At the beginning of descent I see Wind-turbines cast their giant, spinning arms. The Southern Uplands send out false alarms, Semaphore shadows, all waving to me. Then still descending, as the windows weep Or something out beyond the tilted wing Surrenders to the planet’s suffering, Plural phenomena that never sleep, A far-off brightness shines on the wet plane. A cockpit voice says something about doors. The Forth Bridge is a queue of dinosaurs. A field of poppies greets a shower of rain.

Linsey Mcgoey

The windfalls after the storm

By the time The Shock Doctrine lands on your desk, it’s hard not to feel suspicious. Seven years after her bestselling No Logo, Naomi Klein’s latest book promises to expose how natural disasters and political crises across the globe have been exploited by a cabal of secret operatives seeking fresh slates to introduce draconian financial measures of the variety championed by the late, great Milton Friedman. From Chile to Bolivia, to Russia, one finds the legacy of Friedman’s economic shock therapy, the idea that sweeping economic changes are best imposed when citizens are reeling in the aftermath of a crisis: a coup, a natural disaster, a terrorist act. In Friedman’s own words, ‘Only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change.

Gilbert Adair

Going through the motions

If book reviews in The Spectator were, God forbid, ‘starred’, this self-styled biography of James Bond would merit just two stars out of five. The rationale behind so mediocre a score, however, would not be, as you might expect, that Pearson’s book is a curate’s egg, good in parts. Rather, it would reflect the fact that, inept as it mostly is, it does contain a single good, even quite brilliant and, considering that it was first published in 1973, genuinely postmodern idea that rescues it from the zero rating it would otherwise receive. But since that idea is sprung on the reader two-thirds of the way through, and it would be horribly tricky reviewing the book without divulging the twist in its tail, I invite anyone intending to purchase it to look away now.

David Harsent

The Cure

The Cure (After Yannis Ritsos) Although the fever had left him months before, he kept to his bed: the invalid, his room a swelter of sweat and booze and that meaty smell from the hide draped on the floor. The creature had been skinned alive, he said; the underside of the pelt still carried the pain and sometimes, at night, you could see its hackles rise. Once he dreamed that he got out of bed and stood astride the thing. It made a back to carry him out of his sick room into the hall, then breakneck through the kitchen, through the yard, and down the street to the sound of whistles and drums.

Paul Bew

Not the place it used to be

Roy Foster’s new book has its origins in the Wiles Lectures delivered at Queen’s University Belfast in May 2004. This is a distinguished lecture series initiated in 1954 by Herbert Butterfield’s Man on his Past with such high points as Alfred Cobban’s The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (1964) and Eric Hobsbawm’s Nations and Nationalism (1990), but it is fair to say that no previous set of Wiles lectures witnessed the excitement and large audiences attracted by the Carroll Professor of Irish History on his return to his home country. It may be that some of those attending were attracted by the guilty pleasure of seeing Dublin — after so much hectoring the other way — being ‘lectured’ from a Belfast podium.