More from Books

Saturday

Helena Drysdale

Urge to be first

It’s an alien species. Its habitat is scorching deserts or polar wastes, its diet Smash potato reconstituted with snow melt, and a concoction called ‘pre-stress’ drunk from a bottle that is also used to collect its own urine. Its pastimes include running marathons, writing books and climbing mountains. This is the Sir Ranulph Twistleton Wykeham Fiennes. Just reading about his exploits is exhausting. The first circumnavigation of the world via both Poles was succeeded by frequent attempts at other ‘firsts’ in both Arctic and Antarctic, mostly by dragging laden sledges over ice using nothing but man power.

Allan Massie

Norman at the Ritz

Andrew O’Hagan wrote a very nice piece about Norman Mailer in the Daily Telegraph last week. Affectionate and admiring, it was just the sort of tribute a young writer should pay to a senior one, and it was pleasant to learn how encouraging Mailer had been to O’Hagan and indeed to other young writers. This is as it should be — a handing on of the torch. No doubt this was easier for Mailer than for less successful elderly writers who find themselves elbowed out of the way by younger generations, and quite possibly dropped by their publishers. Nevertheless it’s commendable, jealousy or envy being sins to which writers are prone. I only once saw Mailer.

Saturday

The Spectator

Books of the Year | 17 November 2007

Deborah Devonshire The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett (Profile Books, £9.99) is small, short, cheap and perfect. It is a gem among the dross, without a wasted word. It conjures a picture so skilfully that whenever I see the Derbyshire County Library van in the village I see Norman and his employer inside discussing their lists of books to borrow. Several bedside copies have already been taken away by my guests. I don’t blame them. Black Diamonds by Catherine Bailey (Penguin Viking, £20) proves truth to be stranger than fiction. It tells the history of the Fitzwilliam family, with its convoluted relationships, living in royal style at Wentworth House, the biggest-by-far private house in England.

Alan Strachan

Love from Snoop or Poj

Noël Coward owned always that luck played a part in his astonishing career alongside his various talents as an actor, dramatist, composer, artist (he described his painting as ‘Touch and Gauguin’), film director and fiction-writer. At various times his reputation nosedived. After he catapulted to fame in his drama of society love affairs and drug-taking in 1924’s The Vortex he unwisely retrieved rather too many plays from bottom drawers before bouncing back to the top with his masterpiece, Private Lives, to launch his glittering 1930s.

Frederic Raphael

The conquering hero as show-off

How should ancient Roman history be written? Gibbon larded his account with ironic elegance. Echoing Tacitus’ epigrammatic sarcasm, he made ponderously light of the vanities and savagery of imperial rule. Yet the Latinate charm of his prose implied wry nostalgia, not only for the age of the Antonines, but also for the whole myth of Roman grandeur. In my undergraduate day, Professor F. E. Adcock continued to lisp in Tacitean epigrams, but the great modern iconoclast was Ronald Syme. A New Zealander whose The Roman Revolution cut the classy crap, Syme denounced Augustus and his family as proto-mafiosi who had taken over Rome in what François Mitterrand later called (when speaking of de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic) ‘le coup d’état permanent’.

Sebastian Horsley

Why does Tintin never have sex?

I had two great childhood heroes: Marc Bolan and Tintin. Marc provided me with wit just as Tintin provided me with wisdom. From an early age I realised that fame doesn’t have to ruin you. Look at Tintin. I determined to use him as my role model. Tintin was for people who found Asterix too intellectual. But there were a lot of us. To date, The Adventures of Tintin have sold over 200 million copies in some 70 languages. Michael Farr in The Adventures of Hergé tries to explain why. It is the most marvellous portrait. People fascinate me if their qualities are opposed by a wholly contradictory set of qualities. For example, we learn that Hergé never travelled.

Clare Asquith

Traced to an underground car park

Nine years ago Park Honan published a modest biography of Shakespeare which alerted the literary world to the amount of hard fact that has gradually accumulated over the centuries alongside the speculation and mythology. Honan’s book opened the floodgates. A spate of Shakespeare biographies followed which shows no sign of abating. According to Honan, this is just how it should be: ‘Our collective picture of the poet’s life is surely best when many people test it, doubt it, discuss it ...when we are not under any illusion that it is to be finished.

Ben Wilson

Balance and counterbalance

Until the 1760s British statesmen had two empires to manage. One exercised the public imagination and awoke patriotic dreams: the colonies in America and the West Indies. The public frequently wished the other away — the Holy Roman Empire. Britain had been dragged into the morass of European politics from 1714 with the accession of George I, who was ruler of Hanover and one of the Electors of the Empire. Britannia ruled the waves, the people were told; surely it was better to leave the Continent to its own concerns, follow a ‘blue water policy’ and build up a maritime empire. In this bold and convincing account Brendan Simms shows that Britain reached the height of her glory when she was actively engaged as a European player.

Bevis Hillier

A choice of quirky books

The humorist Paul Jennings wrote for Punch when it was still funny — that is, up to and including the editorship of the late Alan Coren. The humorist Paul Jennings wrote for Punch when it was still funny — that is, up to and including the editorship of the late Alan Coren. Jennings also wrote such books as Oddly Bodlikins (1953) and I Said Oddly, Diddle I? (1961). It was he who classified book reviewers as batchers, betchers (‘Betcher I could write it better than you’), bitchers, botchers and butchers. In this and my next review, I am cast as a promiscuous batcher. This first batch is of ‘quirky’ books; the next will be of ‘funny’ books. I reserve the right to be a betcher, a bitcher and a butcher too — I hope not a botcher.

Peter Oborne

Settling old scores

English cricket was in a desperate state seven years ago. The players had just been booed off the field after defeat at home by New Zealand. Team morale was poor, while there was little organisation and no vision. To the rescue came Duncan Fletcher, a little-known coach from Zimbabwe. He had few connections at the top of the England game, and employed his own methods. Fletcher turned out to have a remarkable knack for spotting the international potential of apparently middling players in the county game: Marcus Trescothik, Andrew Strauss, Michael Vaughan and Simon Jones are some of his personal picks. He had a quiet and inscrutable manner, preferring to guide his players rather than instruct.

Byron Rogers

The mad emperor and his cannon

I approached this book with some trepidation, fearing it would be a load of old bollocks. For my one previous experience of Ethiopian history had been the following sentence in my daughter’s GCSE textbook, when, describing their defeat of a modern Italian army in 1896, the author, Tony McAleavy, wrote, ‘The Ethiopians castrated the Italian prisoners of war taken at Adowa.’ Not a history book you will note, but a textbook, so a whole generation of schoolchildren would read something that could affect forever their attitudes to Ethiopia and Africa. So why had I not heard of this atrocity? There were over 1,000 Italian POWs after Adowa — can you imagine what the effect on European public opinion would have been had 1,000 repatriated eunuchs turned up in Italy ?

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 17 November 2007

The slender book above was the last thing Roald Dahl ever wrote, and was published posthumously by the British Railways Board. It is something of a deathbed conversion. The author spends the whole of it telling children — whom he describes as ‘uncivilised little savages with bad habits and no manners’ — how to behave themselves, in VERY LARGE RED CAPITAL LETTERS. ‘I have a VERY DIFFICULT JOB here,’ he admits in the first paragraph. ‘Young people are fed up with being told by grown-ups WHAT TO DO and WHAT NOT TO DO ... and now I am going to have to tell you WHAT TO DO and WHAT NOT TO DO.... This is something I have never done in any of my books.

Saturday

Theodore Dalrymple

If music be the food of health…

Oliver Sacks is a famed neurologist whose books of case studies combine the latest neuroscience with deep humanistic learning. He not only describes his patients with great precision, but also seeks to enter empathically into their experience and then, by means of limpid prose, to communicate it to the general reader. Ever since the publication of his book Awakenings, about patients with encephalitis lethargica who were recalled to life by the drug levodopa after decades of immobility, he has deservedly found a large and appreciative audience. He has had many imitators but no equals. Case studies are not favoured in contemporary medical literature as they once were.

Digby Durrant

Pity the oppressed; fear the oppressed

The fight to abolish slavery and its consequences is an immense subject so it’s not surprising that the Nigerian Simi Bedford’s new book could be likened to the kind of film once made famous by Cecil B De Mille with a cast of thousands and dramatic events at every turn. There are no quiet pages here. We start in Oyo, the capital of a West African tribe for whom a constant state of tribal war is an economic necessity and the internal struggles for power inevitable and deadly. All smiles are lies and hidden threats; here are screams in the night. Abiola is being trained as a warrior. The least breach of behaviour will be punished by having to stand stock-still from dawn to dusk in scorching heat without food or water.

Tom Holland

A tale of two timeless epics

It is oddly moving, at a time when mention of the name ‘Homer’ invariably conjures up thoughts of donuts, to know that the author of the Odyssey remains the first classical author to whom most children are introduced. At my daughters’ primary school, for instance, they are told the story of the Cyclops in Year One. The thread of continuity that this represents reaches back ultimately all the way to archaic Greece. Homer’s epics, wrote Alexander Pope, are ‘like a copious nursery, which contains the seeds and first productions of every kind’. The metaphor is doubly effective: for Homer stands at the beginning both of the Western literary tradition and of many an individual’s experience of it.

Linsey Mcgoey

Betrayed by their disciples

It’s rarely encouraging when a book apologises three times on the first page for its content. First, Tim Congdon regrets that his latest book, a history of monetary policy in post-war Britain, has no proper chapters, but is simply a loose compilation of academic essays and journalistic vignettes. Second, he’s sorry for skipping between the first-person ‘I’ in his journalism, and the avoidance of personal pronouns in the more academic pieces. Finally, he’s contrite about the repetition that could have been reduced ‘with harsher editing’. Congdon is a polemicist, and one of his rhetorical tricks is to apologise for his own deficiencies before a rival has the chance to point them out.

Olivia Cole

Monsters and others

Olivia Cole ‘Make somebody up’ was the instruction to the 23 contributors to Zadie Smith’s short-story anthology The Book of Other People, published to benefit the Brooklyn children’s writing charity, 826 NYC, founded by Dave Eggers. While that might seem about as radical a command as telling screenwriters to use dialogue, the only rule being that each story should take its title from the central character, none reads as though pinched and twisted to fit the theme. That said, of course, there are those that feel they must wriggle in the opposite direction. ‘Monster’, by Toby Litt, threatens for a moment to become some sort of Bildungsroman for monsters: ‘One day, the monster set off to...’ before it remembers itself.

Stanley Johnson

Some like it cold

I first went to Antarctica in the (Antarctic) summer of 1984 on board the John Biscoe, a research and supply ship belonging to the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). Over a period of several weeks we visited various BAS stations on the Antarctic peninsula, including a small station known as Faraday at which vital measurements of the Earth’s ozone layer were being conducted. I remember climbing up into the loft with my fellow-passenger and now good friend Adrian Berry, science correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, past piles of cornflake packets, Bovril jars and tins of Horlicks which were stored for convenience in the roof, to see the Dobson’s photo-spectrometer at work.

Andrew Roberts

Talking it over

‘It is not easy to see how things could be worsened by a parley at the summit,’ said Winston Churchill in a speech on foreign policy in Edinburgh in February 1950, thus coining a phrase for meetings of international leaders that has stuck, and indeed spawned further ones, such as ‘summitry’ and ‘summiteer’. Churchill’s hope for a parley with Truman and Stalin failed in 1950, but his general concept is still with us.

D.J. Taylor

The fading of the Cambridge dawn

An exhausting life it must be, being the hero of a Frederic Raphael novel. There you are, writing your bestselling books, finessing those Hollywood film scripts that pile up on your doorstep like fallen leaves, pondering those offers to sit on the boards of TV companies and wondering all the while what the nasty man in the Times Literary Supplement is going to say about you, and then alongside floats a whole convoy of merely human dilemmas craving resolution. The sister of your dead college chum wants a saucy threesome, the admiring fan met in Venice murmurs, ‘I would do anything to spend time with you’, while the wife of your bosom, a quarter of a century soignée, and not to be outdone, opens the door stark-naked with a cry of ‘Special offer!