More from Books

Saturday

Pj Kavanagh

All together now

In my English school our hymns were mostly in Latin which, despite years of instruction, rendered them sufficiently opaque to be appropriate. What few hymns we sang in English seemed rather weepy, which didn’t appeal. Therefore, emerging from that place into a wider England, it was a surprise to discover there was a culture of hymns in good English, some with marvellous tunes, and almost a lingua franca derived from them among those who had dutifully bellowed those tunes and words when young. Nor was this only middle-class — think of the Salvation Army. This little book is a selection of the best of them: 52 hymns, 15 carols, each with a punchy introduction and a few necessary bars of the tune, and that tune’s provenance.

David Crane

Prodigious from the word go

There is a wonderful set of medieval wall tiles from Tring Abbey in the British Museum depicting the legendary infancy of a particularly mutinous and unappealing Jesus. A charitable interpretation of the sequence might suggest that they are the chronicles of a Child Who Did Not Know His Own Strength, but as one wretched little schoolmate or interfering adult after another is struck dead or buried upside down for doing nothing more than annoy the little Infant, the one theological message to emerge from it is a tough and unambiguous Don’t mess with me.

Matthew Dennison

Falling foul of fashion

J. B. Priestley described the forgotten interwar novelist Dorothy Whipple as the Jane Austen of the 20th century. Posterity has balked at this assessment — as indeed, within Whipple’s lifetime, did both publishers and readers. Although in 1932 her third novel, Greenbanks, topped the bestseller lists in the Observer and the Sunday Times, by the Fifties Whipple had fallen sufficiently foul of fashion to take an enforced extended break from writing, only later to be resumed with a series of low-key children’s books. Hers is a Barbara Pym story without the happy ending in the form of late-in-life rediscovery. Whipple’s re-emergence had to wait for the reissue of her final novel, Someone at a Distance, by Persephone in 1999, 33 years after her death.

Lloyd Evans

The importance of being earnest

Michael Billington is the Val Doonican of theatre criticism. He’s been at it since the days of black and white telly and he shows no sign of giving up. Starting at the Times in 1965, he moved to the Guardian in 1971 and there he remains, rocking, crooning and warbling. He reckons he’s spent 8,000 nights in the theatre, so he probably knows more about the subject than anyone alive apart from Peter Hall. State of the Nation is his overview of the last six decades and he opens the book on a strident note. British post-war theatre, he announces, began not on VE Day, nor in 1955 with the first London performance of Waiting for Godot, but on 26 July 1945 when the Labour election landslide was declared.

Emma Tennant

Keeping it green and pleasant

John Watkins is Head of English Heritage’s Gardens and Landscape Team. Tom Wright was for 25 years Senior Lecturer in Landscape Management at Wye College. They are two professionals who have made an immense contribution to gardening in this country and abroad. This book makes available their combined lifetimes’ knowledge and experience. The authors begin by reminding the reader that gardens, if neglected, will revert to woodland, which is the natural climate vegetation of the British Isles. Neglected lawns and borders become first scrub, then forest. Lakes and ponds silt up, then form swamps which are soon colonised by willow and alder. Without maintenance even garden buildings eventually decay, collapse, and become lumps and bumps in the ground.

Jonathan Mirsky

The Godfather of the Steppes

First published in 1836, this novella shows Alexander Pushkin’s mastery of almost any form. The following year — after a miraculously productive short period — he died in a duel over the alleged adultery of his wife with the adopted son of the Dutch ambassador. Evocative, swashbuckling, romantic and sentimental, The Captain’s Daughter centres on the peasant rebellion, 1773-75, of the Cossack Yemelyan Pugachov. Pushkin had already written A History of the Pugachov Rebellion published in 1834 in two volumes, one describing the events, the second consisting of the source materials.

Fay Hart

Yard sale

Yard Sale Oh, but it is incalculable — this side yard full of her things laid out on folding tables ranged along a chain link fence. Her Tupperware cake saver takes precedence over egg timers hand mixers, Pyrex, 4-H ribbons, and forty-seven souvenir shot glasses, one from almost every State. The cake saver’s ridged base (slip-proof in a swerving car) holds fast a translucent milky dome with crossover plastic handles yellowed now after how many years transporting her prize devil’s food to summer camp at Raccoon Lake.

Philip Hensher

The golden writer

Doris Lessing was last week awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Philip Hensher traces the career of ‘one of the greatest novelists in English’. Doris Lessing’s Nobel win came as a surprise to everyone, the author apparently included. Despite her enormous, decades-long international reputation, she was less fancied than dozens of patently smaller writers. That could only have been ascribed to a cynical estimate of the way the Swedish academy works. On literary merit, no one would have questioned her right to it. She is one of the greatest of novelists in English. Her career is a matter of savage breakthroughs into quite new territory, as if her searching, sceptical intelligence could never be satisfied with stasis for long.

Stephen Knight

The Head

The Head would like to see us. Now, Inside: before the day is done. But we are having too much fun Out here. We will not listen now, Now smoke obscures the pot-holed yard. This is going to be hard. The Head cannot believe we’ve gone This far. Have we been fighting? Yes, We have. The cause of some distress Around these parts, though we have gone To ground before the grown-ups come. Our actions leave them dumb. The Head’s contention? SICK, we are. Graffiti, ash, this path of glass The fruits of all that come to pass — But we will tell you what we are. Hunched behind a garden wall, The answer no one’s call.

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 20 October 2007

John Cage was the composer of 4’33”, the piano performance piece that consists of 4 minutes and 33 seconds of complete silence — except for the mutterings of the audience — and Imaginary Landscape No. 4, in which 12 radios are played at the same time for several hours. He was also the inventor of the ‘prepared piano’, in which a grand piano is filled with nuts, bolts and scrap metal to alter its sound. But Cage once said that if he were to live his life over again, he would be a botanist rather than an artist. He was in fact an amateur mycologist of some distinction, helping to found the New York Mycological Society, winning an Italian TV quiz on mushrooms in the 1950s, and co-writing (with Lois Long and Alexander Smith) The Mushroom Book, shown above.

Saturday

Michael Tanner

Moving between philosophy and science

This is the latest in the long- running series of popular books that Steven Pinker, a professor in the Psychology Department at Harvard, has written about the human mind, particularly about the nature of thought and its relationship to language. Pinker is extremely interested not only in the nature of language, and the way in which languages work, but also in lots of odd or striking things about languages. As part of his attempt to make some highly complex and abstract ideas comprehensible and even attractive, he uses a huge number of examples. Sometimes you feel that his hope is that even if you don’t quite cotton on to his theoretical positions, at least you will enjoy the quotations, jokes, even illustrations, that he bombards you with.

Peter Eyre

The ideal romantic partner

Before embarking on Julie Kavanagh’s magnificent Nureyev, I had recently the pleasure of reading Richard Buckle’s The Adventures of a Ballet Critic. This passionate and witty memoir (a book so obsessively driven by the author’s love of dance, I defy anyone to read it and not be intoxicated by this love) gives a wonderfully vivid picture of the English ballet scene after the war. The main characters featured among the dramatis personae include Fred (Ashton), Billy (Chappell), Bobby (Helpmann), Margot (Fonteyn), and Madam (Ninette de Valois).

Edward Norman

The withdrawal of God

Here is a book which the theological establishment will doubtless fall upon as an obese child might reach for a packet of crisps. Not that they will understand much of it: for this is a universal explanation of things, written from a philosophical perspective, and which, despite the homely illustrations to which philosophical writers are sometimes given, is densely composed and at times difficult to follow. It is also nearly 1,000 pages of fine print. Yet endurance is rewarded; this is a distinguished work both of scholarship and of understanding, by an academic from McGill University of international reputation.

Jane Ridley

The name of the game

Between 1997 and the passing of the Hunting with Dogs Act in 2004, parliament spent 700 hours debating hunting. Over 250,000 people took part in the Countryside March through London in 1998. Why such an apparently marginal issue, involving a tiny minority of rural troglodytes, should have mattered so much in the modern age of New Labour is a question well worth asking. Emma Griffin is an admirably even-handed historian with very long sight. By casting back to 1066 her study gives a fresh perspective, and she achieves the difficult feat of saying something new about hunting. Her argument goes like this. From the time of the Normans all the ingredients of hunting were in place. There were riders and dogs and they chased a solitary prey — in the Middle Ages, this was deer.

Alberto Manguel

Scenting the storm

One of the stories that haunted my childhood (I can’t remember where it came from) was the ancient conundrum of the mandarin, which I later found retold by Eça de Queiroz and Ursula K. Le Guin and goes like this: If you can get anything you want by pressing a bell and killing an unknown mandarin in China, would you do it? Moral qualms aside, what terrified me was the idea that a seemingly innocuous act could have such far-reaching consequences. Because if pressing a bell could fatally touch someone oceans away, what trite and distant event might affect my own life without my knowing it? I think this was the first inkling I had of the peculiar notion we call Fate.

D.J. Taylor

War-war and jaw-jaw

Much of The Painter of Battles takes place in a crumbling watchtower on the Spanish coast, its silence broken only by the respectful commentary issuing from the daily tourist boat. Here on the circular wall of the tower a veteran war photographer, Faulques, is painting a gigantic mural on the theme of conflict through the ages: ‘the photo I was never able to take’, he explains. His routines include occasional supply-trips to the local town, morning swims out to sea and back and, less agreeably, ‘a sharp stab in his side over his right hip’ that comes on every eight hours or so and requires dousing with analgesics.

William Leith

The line of least resistance

This is a book about drugs, drug addicts, and the people who try to help drug addicts — and the author, a prison doctor, thinks we’ve got it all wrong. For instance, most people think of heroin addiction as something like a terrible disease. We also tend to think that withdrawal from heroin is an appalling physical ordeal. Not so, says Theodore Dalrymple. ‘Addiction to opiates,’ he tells us, ‘is a pretend rather than a real illness, treatment of which is pretend rather than real treatment.’ This is a bold assertion, and I know some people who find it offensive, but it’s worth following Dalrymple’s logic.

Jonathan Sumption

Triumph of the clerks

To the outside world, France has always seemed monolithic. The richest and most powerful of Europe’s nation-states until the 19th century, intellectually and artistically insular at most times, intensely nationalist throughout, the French have been fascinating neighbours but never easy ones. Yet until the revolutionary wars of the 1790s, few of its inhabitants felt truly French as opposed to, say, Auvergnat or Périgourdin. They lived in a geographically isolated and highly diverse provincial communities. They spoke many languages and dialects, venerated different saints and observed a variety of possessive local customs. Until well into the 18th century, most Frenchmen used the word ‘France’ to refer to the region around Paris.

James Delingpole

The road to Yorktown

James Delingpole The American War of Independence is one of my least favourite periods and I expect it’s the same for a lot of Englishmen. For a start, the wrong side lost. Also, it’s fiendishly complicated, what with all the Whigs, Tories, Loyalists, Patriots, Frenchmen, Indians, Militia, Virginians, Marylanders, Light Bobs, Fusiliers and Continentals biffing one another in a confusing melee. And there is the lurking suspicion that, as Michael Rose has recently argued, it has depressing things to tell us about the US’s (and her allies’) current involvement in Iraq. Indeed, about the only thing that persuaded me to read a book on the subject is that it was written by Mark Urban.

Douglas Hurd

Handing your life to a stranger

Adam Lang, until recently Prime Minister, is keen to write his memoirs as soon as possible. He employs for this task a hulking apparatchik who was part of his inner team at 10 Downing Street. He takes his wife Ruth, his secretarial staff and this ghost-writer to a luxurious house made available by a millionaire at Martha’s Vineyard in New England. He has an argument with the ghost-writer; the writer gets drunk, falls off a ferry and is washed up on the shore. After he has identified the body Adam Lang quickly recruits a replacement ghost-writer through his lawyer. This replacement, whose name we never hear, is the hero and narrator of the book.