‘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.
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!
Eric Clapton lost his virginity to ‘a girl called Lucy who was older than me, and whose boyfriend was out of town’. Lucky chap, you immediately think, and indeed, he seems to have lived a charmed life, which he hasn’t enjoyed one bit. ‘Something more profound also happened when I got this guitar. As soon as I got it, I suddenly didn’t want it any more. This was a phenomenon which was to rear its head throughout my life, and cause many difficulties in the future.’ He first saw the Beatles in the audience at the Crawdaddy club in Richmond: ‘I suppose that it was only natural that I would be jealous, and think of them as a bunch of w***ers.
Not long ago, I was invited to lunch at a plantation home in Jamaica. The sound of cocktail-making (a clinking of crushed ice against glass) greeted me at Worthy Park as bow-tied waiters served the guests at a long table draped in linen. The top brass of Jamaica’s sugar industry was there, enjoying the French wine and the chilled soursop juice. The waiters, with their plantation-bred obsequiousness, hurried to whisk flies away from our plates. For nearly three centuries the slave-grown sugar of Worthy Park has satisfied the British craving for tea (that ‘blood-sweetened beverage’, the abolitionist poet Southey called it), as well as for coffee, cakes and other confections.
Leon Sciaky was born in Salonica in 1893, when the city was still a provincial Ottoman town. His family were grain merchants, Sephardic Jews who had been settled there for 400 years and still spoke Ladino at home. In concise, elegant prose, he describes in this memoir a childhood of Oriental pace and comforts, surrounded by Muslims and Christians, in which Turks, Macedonians, Bulgarians, Serbs and Greeks appeared to live in harmony. Among many beautiful passages about how life once was in the region, there is one of a visit with his grandfather to an outlying village which seems to belong to the Middle Ages, or Eden; at any rate, a world that has long since vanished.
The Sloane is dead — but long live the Sloane. Her mother, Caroline, and father, Henry — the original Hooray — may be in their natural retirement homes in the Shires or Scotland along with the family dog snug by the Aga in the cosy kitchen, but she, we now know, using her native skills, has burst out of her famous 1980s stereotype to adapt to the new order. It’s an amusing conceit, with enough truth for 20-year-olds to have a wry laugh at themselves. Twenty-five years ago, a series of articles written by that grandee of social observation Peter York, in the then vital directory of upper-middle-class social mores Harpers & Queen, identified the various not-so-exotic creatures whose centre of the Known World was Sloane Square.
Stories abound of figures for whom the allure of the Left is eroded by cynicism and honest self-interest. Most treat their previous affiliation as a species of deluded immaturity; going Right is a natural consequence of growing up, albeit in early middle age. Alan Sillitoe is different. He too in the early Sixties was a radical leftist but his views changed incrementally and, most significantly, as the result of his private ordinance that opinions must be based on personal experience. His first visit to the Soviet Union is documented in Road to Volgograd (1964), and in his latest book he tells of trips he made at the end of the Sixties and his involvement in the defection, in London, of the Soviet writer Anatoly Kuznetsov.
Despite its puzzlingly hideous appearance, this is an excellent book. Subtitled ‘Reflections on the History of the Twentieth Century’, it consists of 18 chapters being, with one exception, the texts of lectures given by Professor Howard between 1991 and 2003. It is not easy to craft a good lecture that reads well on the page, or vice versa for that matter; it is a trick that Sir Michael brings off brilliantly. The introductory section gives us a lucid reminder of how the process of Enlightenment that began in the 18th century created freedoms, admittedly, but uncertainties too, uncertainties that created the conditions for a century of conflict.
When Professor Braude, a philosophy lecturer at the University of Maryland, told colleagues about his interest in psychical research, he was shocked and astonished by their reactions. They were angry and scornful and accused him of pandering to unreason. It would be the ruin of his career, they threatened. What is wrong with these people? he asks. Is it cowardice and fear of the unknown, or are they wilfully dishonest in ignoring his findings and persecuting him for drawing attention to things they do not want to hear about? That is the first of the mysteries displayed in this book. The others are centered upon notable characters in the history of ‘parapsychology’, as it is called here, beginning with the spectacular Daniel Dunglas Home.
It is odd to think that fatness — now known as obesity and apparently a serious problem — was not so long ago a subject for ribald hilarity. The disgraced clown Fatty Arbuckle was once considered funny simply because of his size. The fictional schoolboy Billy Bunter and his sister Bessie were icons of greedy grotesquerie, and real-life overweight girls and boys — rarer than nowadays — had to endure much unkind teasing at school. Hattie Jacques’s schooldays were no exception, and in her career as an actress her avoirdupois, while good for business, limited her choice of roles.
If George W. Bush goes down in history as the most disastrous US president since Herbert Hoover, it will be because of his foreign policy mistakes. Yet the person who tutored candidate Bush on foreign policy, co-ordinated it in his first term and was its public face in his second term is probably the most respected member of the Bush administration both at home and abroad. This is the paradox that Marcus Mabry sets out to explain in Condoleezza Rice: Naked Ambition. Throughout the Bush administration, Rice has been the most effective emissary for the President’s foreign policy because she doesn’t fit the stereotype.
Robert Adam is probably Britain’s most famous architect never to have built a house. This, of course, is an exaggeration, but it is certainly the case that the greater part of Adam’s professional output consisted of remodelling the internal architecture of existing buildings and creating interior decoration for houses already built by previous hands. When it came to the leap from architect’s drawing to finished item, Adam had a greater strike rate in fancy carpets than in country houses.
When people write about their experiences as drug addicts they often — wittingly or not — write with a degree of competitiveness. There is a tacit understanding that the reader will feel cheated by anything less than a full-blown addiction to class-A drugs. A handful of Solpadeine and two bottles of vodka every day for 20 years just isn’t going to cut it with a publisher. James Frey was well aware of this when he embellished A Million Little Pieces to make it more ‘appealing’, and how right he was: we lapped it up. Readers want the author of a sin-soaked drug memoir to lie, cheat and steal — preferably from his/her middle-class parents. Any of the following are recommended as extras: prostitution, sleeping on the street, mugging an elderly pedestrian.
Simon Barnes is chief sportswriter for the Times; wearing his other boots he is a fervent eco-warrior, a spell-binding preacher, a missionary. His book is broken into small descriptive sections and each contains a moment, an exaltation at a contact with ‘the wild’. These are perhaps best read in snatches, rather than as a continuum, because their fervour is so intense. By ‘wild’ he means anything that is not ourselves, not human, from gossamer to elephants, and he believes we need this contact precisely in order to be fully human. ‘I divide the whole world into lovers: you are either (a) a lover of nature or (b) a lover of nature who doesn’t know it yet.
Raymond Chandler praised Dashiell Hammett for having given murder back to the sort of people who commit it. Given that he himself followed in Hammett’s footsteps, this was an understandable remark, aimed at what might already have been called the classic English detective novel. ‘Can’t read Christie,’ he told someone who had sent him a questionnaire. This wasn’t quite true. In one letter he analyses, intelligently and judiciously, Christie’s Ten Little Niggers; elsewhere, in an essay, ‘Casual Notes on the Mystery Novel’, he wrote that he was ‘quite unmoved to indignation by The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’s violation of the rule that “the suppression of facts by the narrator ...
He was a noisy boy from the start. At the age of two, he was taken out for walks in order not to disturb his ailing grandfather and he would march down the main street of Bewdley shouting, ‘Ruddy is coming!’ Or sometimes, ‘An angry Ruddy is coming!’ Despite these precautions, his grandfather died and Kipling’s aunts and uncles believed that Ruddy’s tantrums had hastened and embittered his end. When he left the United Services College at Westward Ho! and returned to India, he quickly gained a reputation in the Punjab Club for boorish and bumptious behaviour.
Seated next to her at dinner, I was prepared for a dull evening with a politician. ‘Tell me, Chairman Greenspan,’ she asked, ‘why is it that we in Britain cannot calculate M3?’. I awoke. M3 is an arcane measure of money supply embraced by followers of Milton Friedman. We spent the evening discussing market economics and the problems confronting the British economy. Thus , according to Alan Greenspan’s semi-autobiographical The Age of Turbulence, began the first meeting between Alan Greenspan and Margaret Thatcher, at a September 1975 British embassy function in Washington. Greenspan evidently developed a great liking and respect for Thatcher, because, apart from anything else, she wished to conceptualise major issues of public policy.
Norah Lindsay had wit, beauty and a bohemian spirit. Diana Cooper described her dressing ‘mostly in tinsel and leopard skins and baroque pearls and emeralds’. At Sutton Courtenay, the house where she lived through the early years of her marriage to Harry Lindsay, she entertained non-stop. Raymond Asquith, Julian and Billy Grenfell, Maurice Baring and Jasper Ridley all flocked to her table from Oxford. ‘Sutton Courtenay, roses, the river and the youth of England splashing in the Thames and Norah, the sublime Norah,’ wrote Chips Channon. She was never out of love, often with several young men at a time. ‘Norah sometimes vexes me,’ wrote her sister Madeline Whitbread.
As the biopic comes back into fashion — think Kinsey, think A Beautiful Mind — somebody might consider the life of Roman Polanski as perfect big-screen material. Its component elements are the stuff of box-office dreams. Holocaust survival, dodgy sex, motiveless murder, a liberal sprinkling of celebrity, plenty of photogenic locations — the Oscar-winning script is in the bag. Its star, as Christopher Sandford’s biography suggests, boasts unfathomable reserves of chutzpah, and his recent epiphany at the Venice Film Festival was a reminder of how much life the old dog still has left in him. Polanski’s resilience was tested early, with the dispatch of his Jewish parents to Auschwitz and Mauthausen.
Not even the Akond of Swat in all his whoness, whyety, whichery and whatage could compare to the enigmatic, whimsical mask of deconstruction that purports to be Alasdair Gray. He was a student of the Glasgow School of Art and a quondam painter, but is he an artist? He wrote the 1980s magically realist novel Lanark, but is he a novelist? He was famous, but is he a success? Is this book fact or fiction or a gallimaufry of jottings? He asserts on the copyright page, his ‘moral right’ as Gray to be its author, but inside passes himself off as an American millionairess, a cake, an algorithm and a critic.