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Saturday

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.

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).