More from Books

Alan Judd on Marc Sageman's latest book  Marc Sageman is deservedly one of the best-known academics working on terrorism. A clinical psychologist and former CIA officer, in 2004 he published Understanding Terror Networks, a book which enlarged the way the subject was seen. Hitherto, most researchers and governments had located the ‘root causes’ of terrorism either in religion (Islam) or in social and economic conditions. A third approach, the biographical, offered fascinating case-histories of terrorists thought to be mad or incomprehensibly evil and who generally turned out to be rather more commonplace. Sageman’s achievement was to start with evidence, not theory.

Matthew d'Ancona on Paul Morley's latest book In 1980, the Manchester pop impresario, Tony Wilson, showed Paul Morley the dead body of Ian Curtis, the lead singer of Joy Division, who had hanged himself. Wilson hoped that Morley would one day write the definitive account of the band and Curtis’s martyrdom. He also knew that Morley’s father had committed suicide, and that, alone with the body in a room in Macclesfield, the young journalist would be confronting much more than the earthly remains of his favourite singer. Another book about Joy Division? No, the book.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, ‘the father of the atomic bomb’, remembered that when he saw the first mushroom cloud rise in its terrifying beauty above the test site in New Mexico, a line from the Bhagavad-Gita came into his head: ‘Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’ According to a colleague, however, what he actually said was, ‘Now we’re all sons-of-bitches.’ Oppenheimer the legend vs. Oppenheimer the man. Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, in this magisterial reconstruction of the rise and fall of America’s first great theoretical physicist, are careful to give both sides, the Sanskrit-reading mystic and the down-to-earth pragmatist.

In 1999, Rosalind Bleach, whose mother had just died, opened for the first time her rosewood bureau with a swivel top and four drawers. She discovered 41 letters written between 1907 and 1915 by the Master — Henry James — to Mrs Ford, a now nearly forgotten upper-middle-class woman who lived at Budds, a country house six miles from James’s house at Rye. Everything about these letters breathes another age. James wrote, with a Harrods stylograph pen, or dictated, up to 40,000 letters, which eventually will be published in perhaps 140 volumes. These letters to Mrs Ford have never been seen before.

The century or so before the Civil War, the era of the Tudors and early Stuarts, did not think well of itself. Contemporaries lamented the decline of social responsibility in the nobility and gentry, the erosion of honour and virtue, the spread of enclosures, the parasitism and arrivisme of wealth, and the emptiness and falsity of its display. The picture has often been endorsed in later generations, from both the traditionalist Right and the anti-aristocratic Left, but Adam Nicolson has an altogether happier image of the period. There flourished, he tells us, a ‘communal wisdom’, ‘in which principles of hierarchy and of mutuality were deeply embedded’.

Patrick Modiano is a nostalgic novelist who has consistently shown courage in investigating the boundaries between duty and loyalty. This ambiguity has featured in all his novels and seems to have had its roots in the character of his own father, whose activities in the troubled era of wartime and post-war Paris have left their mark on his writing. Conscious of his flawed moral inheritance, Modiano has applied himself to testing the limits of his own freedom and has found that shame is not so easily dispersed. It is a quality that inhabits all his elegantly written novels and is equally present in Dans le Café de la Jeunesse Perdue which reverts to the same troubled era as its predecessors and occupies a doubtful position on the periphery of the natural order.