More from Books

Saturday

Philip Hensher

No more school

When, ten years ago, you bought for Jack or Chloe a jolly-sounding novel about a schoolboy getting up to all sorts of pranks at an academy for wizards, I don’t suppose you could have predicted the tone of the seventh and last book in the series. It is apocalyptic, redemptive, Wagnerian and quite extraordinarily keen on violent death. I think there are 24 named characters who meet a specified death through violence in this volume, and over 50 others, we are told, are killed anonymously. To the adult reader, the routine nature of all these deaths, the inability to register much in the way of a fresh response will be troubling. We are promised grief when somebody on Harry’s side is killed, and ‘screams and cheers and roars’ when an enemy dies.

Oliver Gilmour

The unromantic approach

John Worthen, a D.H. Lawrence specialist, approaches Robert Schumann’s tormented life without any apparent musical or medical expertise. His aim is ambitious: to prove that Schumann was not the quintessential Romantic figure of folklore and that he died of tertiary syphilis. He attempts to argue that Schumann was not manic-depressive, schizophrenic, unbalanced or even unstable. His publishers, meanwhile, claim that this book ‘frees Schumann from 150 years of myth-making and unjustified psychological speculation’. Worthen hardly covers the music, so nor do I. In 1985, Peter Ostwald, professor of psychiatry at the University of California, published Schumann: Music and Madness.

Saturday

Allan Massie

Beware the lie of the lips

Everyone, I suppose, now knows that Gordon Brown was the first student rector of Edinburgh University. Though based on Continental models, the rectorship is a peculiarly Scottish institution. The rector is elected by the students, and elections have often been lively affairs. (The plot of John Buchan’s Castle Gay turns on the kidnapping of a newspaper magnate in the course of one such election, though this is a case of mistaken identity.) The rector is entitled to chair the University Court and serves as the representative of the student body in relations with the university authorities. A new rector’s inaugural address used to be fully reported in the Scottish press and some of them became famous — J.M.

Peter Oborne

A dark tale of insider dealing

For the most part political diarists are located on the fringes rather than at the centre of power. The two finest British journals from the 20th century were written by failures — Alan Clark and Chips Channon. Only rarely did they gain the sustained access they craved to the great figures of their day. They were looking in hungrily from outside, yearning for advancement which never came. Both journals gain a great deal of narrative pace and comic structure from this frenetic search for power and status. The reader knows, but the diarist does not, that the quest is doomed. Alastair Campbell, by contrast, was at the centre. His comparatively lowly title of press secretary, enhanced to director of strategy and communications after 2001, gave no hint of his true importance.

Anita Brookner

Linked by an oblique sadness

Connoisseurs of the short story will welcome this new collection by William Trevor, his first since 2004. Trevor has been compared with Chekhov, not without justification. He works by indirection, avoiding judgment, his sense of tragedy well concealed by a partiality for unfulfilled lives left free to exist on the page without the author’s intervention. Here destinies may be thwarted but the process will be a reflective one, mercifully free of irony. It is the absence of irony that gives these stories their pre- as opposed to post-modern stamp, and the scrupulous neutrality that refuses to pander to the reader’s expectations. Certainly his characters lack ardour, but that is the price one sometimes pays for dignity and even a sort of wisdom.

Edward Skidelsky

Faith in the future

John Gray’s latest work brings together many themes that will be familiar to fans of this scintillatingly gloomy intellect. It denounces neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism as forms of utopianism, destined like all previous forms to shipwreck upon the hard facts of human existence. It emphasises al-Qa’eda’s roots in Western political extremism rather than Islamic tradition. It envisages a world in which history, far from coming to an end, has resumed its usual bloody course against a background of dwindling oil resources and proliferating weaponry. And it insists that our only escape from this miserable farrago lies in the company of ‘mystics, poets and pleasure-lovers’. All this is vintage Gray.

Jane Rye

The Painters’ Painter

‘Give me the cheque, you look like a decaying oyster’ — thus Roger Hilton accepting the John Moores First Prize in 1963, at the height of his career. At the dinner afterwards, very drunk, he was so rude to an alderman sitting next to him that the poor man had a heart attack and died at the table. It beats Tracey Emin’s ‘I want my mum’ by a country mile, and, although for British artists in recent years the reverse may have seemed to be the case, Andrew Lambirth believes that Hilton’s standing as a painter has been affected by such outrageous episodes, there being ‘a lingering belief in the art establishment in Britain that no artist who could behave so badly could actually be the real thing as a painter’.

Robert Stewart

Shakespeare got it wrong

The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England’s Self-Made Kingby Ian Mortimer Henry IV, in Ian Mortimer’s graceless (and sense-defying) words, is ‘the least biograph-ied English king to have been crowned since the Conquest’. No longer. Here is a full and richly detailed life. Not a deal more would need to be said were it not that Mortimer has invited us to look upon his book as representative of a new species of biographical history. In his introduction Mortimer argues against the traditional view that a lack of documentary evidence (chiefly letters) places limits on medieval biography. His book is intended to demonstrate that not only is a ‘personality-based’ biography of Henry possible, but that biography is the most important approach to the past.

Noble Frankland

The ebb and flow of war

Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions that Changed the World 1940–41by Ian Kershaw Britain’s decision to fight on in 1940; Hitler’s to attack the Soviet Union in 1941; in the same year, Roosevelt’s to wage undeclared war in the Battle of the Atlantic; Japan’s to attack Pearl Harbor and expand southwards; Hitler’s declaration of war against America and his decision for genocide of the Jews. These are the choices, together with a few related ones, plus Mussolini’s by comparison less important decision to enter the war on Germany’s side, that Kershaw sees as the keys that turned the lock of the second world war.

Philip Hensher

Cosseting a bestselling author

There was once a Greek called Herostratus, who, in search of enduring fame, set fire to the Temple of Diana at Ephesus. (A successful strategy, clearly.) It’s odd to think that the second John Murray’s permanent fame rests on such an act of destruction, since in undertaking it he was not, like Herostratus, trying to make his name remembered. He did it in all good faith to secure the reputation of what he was destroying. On 17 May 1824, six of Lord Byron’s friends, having read his two volumes of posthumous memoirs, decided to burn them as obscene and damaging to his reputation. Murray was only one of the group, but he will always be associated with the atrocious act because the burning took place in his firm’s fireplace.

Saturday

Patrick Marnham

Back in the dark and the rain

In 1931, a Belgian pulp-fiction writer living in Paris and churning out four titles a month using various noms de plume decided to publish a series of detective stories under his own name. His publisher had to ask him what his real name was;everyone in Paris knew him as ‘Sim’. Georges Simenon, as he identified himself, proved to have a flair for publicity: he had already made a small fortune from his pulp fiction and he could afford to launch the new series with an all-night party in a club in Montparnasse.

Blair Worden

Man with a mission | 14 July 2007

There has not been an abler or more decent prime minister than Sir Robert Peel, and peacetime has not produced a more courageous one. Perhaps none has assembled a more gifted ministry or commanded Cabinet more effectively. Before and during his premiership he made huge choices and implemented them with skill and resolve. Like Attlee or Thatcher he stamped the future. Yet what chance would he have stood before our feral media, or with the public which indulges them? Viewer-friendliness would have been beyond him. ‘Such a cold, odd man’, Queen Victoria found him. He won her round, but such adjectives as ‘chilly’, ‘frosty’ and ‘frigid’ have adhered to him from his time to ours.

George Osborne

Right for his times

Visit the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, high on a hill overlooking Simi Valley, California and you are greeted at the door by a bronze statue of the former president dressed as a cowboy. For many on the Left in Britain that is exactly how they saw the 40th president of the United States. They should read his diaries and think again. Reagan was no Pepys, or even an Alan Clark — he was far too close to the action to be a wry observer — but his daily entries provide a fascinating insight into a presidency that saw the end of the Cold War and a resurgent belief in the power of the individual. Yet these diaries also show that Reagan the man was not as simple as Reagan the myth.

Interconnect

The chthonic nub of things

Don’t imagine this book by a 42-year-old Englishwoman who has been in her time an English undergraduate at Oxford, a digging-in anti-roads campaigner and a lonely depressive in her London flat, is anything resembling your average expedition into the wild. The usual elegant reflections on wilderness and its transcendent emptiness are absent here.

William Brett

Lessons from the father of lies

Ryszard Kapuscinski, who died in January this year, was a literary-minded reporter. As the Polish Press Agency’s only foreign correspondent for most of the 1960s and 1970s, he would prepare for his journeys to Africa, Asia and the Americas by reading extensively. Later, he used his exotic experiences as material for what might best be described as literary journalism. He wrote beautifully phrased books on, among other things, the Iranian revolution (Shah of Shahs) and the court of Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie (The Emperor), using these topics to construct anti-authoritarian allegories that passed unnoticed by the censors in Poland. But in writing these stories with the assumed authority of a foreign correspondent, he has been accused of factual inaccuracy.

Cressida Connolly

Double trouble and strife

Is there anyone, hearing a story about bigamy, who does not feel a tiny jolt of admiration, even envy, for the wrongdoer? How many of us can say that, if we could suffer no ill consequences, we wouldn’t rather like to have a second household, with different plants in the garden, different curtains, a different — perhaps more exotic or sympathetic — spouse? Like walking a circus tightrope, bigamy requires daring, agility and a certain amount of dash: the onlooker cannot help but gasp at the feat. This is one of the reasons why stories about it hold such fascination. Another is that secret lives are always exciting, whether it’s espionage, transvestism or multiple wives.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Dropping himself in the soup

One of Richard Nixon’s salient characteristics was his clumsiness. No one ever called him a man of the Left politically, but in the other figurative sense he was quite unusually gauche or linkisch. By the last grim days of his presidency that might have been explained by the martinis he was downing as if they were mineral water, but even sober he was always accident-prone. He bloodily cracked his forehead getting into a motor-car, he stopped serving soup at White House dinners after spilling it down his shirtfront, and, when asked to look in on a Cabinet meeting by Harold Wilson, President Nixon upset an inkwell on the hallowed table at No. 10. This gaucherie was not merely physical.

Saturday

Allan Massie

Interest still accruing

Galsworthy is one of those writers who obstinately survives. Critical opinion wrote him off long ago. His plays are rarely staged. Most of his novels have sunk below the horizon. Yet the three which make up The Forsyte Saga have rarely, if ever, been out of print, and continue to be read — not only on account of the famous TV dramatisation — and A Modern Comedy, the trilogy he wrote as a sequel, perhaps also, even if his grasp of the world after 1918 was uncertain, sketchy, journalistic. The Saga itself was not conceived as such. The Man of Property was published in 1906, In Chancery not till 1920, with To Let following the next year. One has the impression that at some point Galsworthy thought, ‘I can do more with these characters.

Vernon Bogdanor

Two cheers are quite enough

The 20th century saw the triumph of democracy; by its end, 140 out of the world’s 189 states held multi-party elections. Yet this triumph was greeted, not with enthusiasm, but with apathy and indifference. Democracy appeared to be valued more by the rulers, who had become its cheerleaders, than by the ruled, more by the elites than by the people. The elites, indeed, were tempted to blame the people for being insufficiently appreciative, and for failing to turn out to vote or join political parties. The people, however, did not reject democracy as an ideal; what they criticised were its practical short-comings. Nevertheless, the consequence may be that democracy is less secure than we think.

Anthony Daniels

The commonsense approach

Medical advance has been startling in the past half-century. To give only one example, more or less at random: if the techniques of resuscitation and trauma surgery that were available in 1960 were still in use today, our homicide rate would be three to five times higher than it is (and it is two or three times higher than it was in 1960 nonetheless). Atul Gawande is a surgeon at one of the world’s greatest surgical centres, the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. As such, he is committed to medicine’s noblest ideal, the dedication of science to the cure of disease. It seems almost unfair that he should also be a gifted writer with an ability to tell medical anecdotes whose dénouement the reader awaits with suspense.