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Saturday

Selina Hastings

For richer, for richer

In her introduction to this extraordinary memoir, Etti Plesch warns the reader that the life she is about to describe will seem unfashionable as it contains no ‘stories of great suffering’. True enough. As recounted in Horses & Husbands, Etti’s 99 years seemed to have been passed at a level of luxury and self-indulgence almost impossible now to imagine. Knowledgeably edited by Hugo Vickers, this is the story of a woman who, uniquely, was the owner of not one, but two Derby winners, and who married wealthily six times. Born to aristocratic parents in Vienna in 1903, Etti was brought up in a romantic castle in Czechoslovakia belonging to her grandmother, her parents having divorced when she was four.

Penelope Lively

A ghastly crew | 6 October 2007

Jennifer Johnston is adept at economy. Here is a short novel in which the eight characters are introduced one by one, with minimum fuss — some dialogue, a brief reference by someone else — and their complex relationships obliquely revealed. Complex indeed are these connections. ‘I am gay, bent, queer, homosexual, call it what you will,' says Donough, coming out to his mother Stephanie. Sexual identity lies at the heart of the narrative — who is inclined to what, and with whom. By the end, four of the eight are defined as gay, bent, call it what you will, and the past is floodlit, with all its confusions and deceptions. Stephanie’s ex-husband Henry is in hospital, recovering from a car accident in which the driver, his wife, was killed.

Robert Salisbury

Relishing the death throes

Piers Brendon does not much like the British empire. In over 650 pages of closely researched, patronising disdain he uses his Stakhanovite labour to perform a smug hatchet job on empire- builders, administrators and the British military. He warns us in his introduction what to expect: ‘Less emphasis is placed here on triumphs than on the disasters that undermined the future of the empire.’ As a result, he accumulates the impression of an empire consisting entirely of unimaginative, hypocritical despots embattled by racial attitudes, snobbery and smug military incompetence. You have to ask yourself how such a useless people as the British managed to acquire a quarter of the earth’s surface and hang onto it until the middle of the 20th century.

Byron Rogers

A case of missing identity

This could have been a wonderful book. Take a scene from it which could so easily have been the start of a film. It is the 1920s, and in the garage of a large stockbroker’s mansion in the Home Counties two youths, the spoilt and jobless sons of a rich man, are noisily tuning a hell bat ( actually a modified Model T-Ford ), a car already capable of 100 m.p.h. Dissolve to the woods above them, to silence broken by tinkling notes. Among the trees their elderly father is playing a musical box. A huge and powerful individual, with the sort of moustache then popular among army officers of field rank, he has, according to his earlier biographer Hesketh Pearson, ‘no more mystery about him than a pumpkin’.

Nicholas Haslam

How now Browne cow?

The Christmas book market is about to be flooded, if that’s the word for these somewhat juiceless jottings, by not one but two biographies of the actress Coral Browne. This dual assessment is perhaps just as well, as quite clearly there were two Coral Brownes, one a witheringly witty, ravishing (in the early 1960s she was voted one of the three most beautiful women in the world, along with Princess Grace and Nina of aristo folk singers Nina and Frederick), loyal and quintessentially ‘West End’ creature; the other an insecure, sour, mercenary, and often cruel self-creation, the Coral evident in her attitude to, and treatment of, the children of her second husband, the epicene actor Vincent Price.

Max Hastings

The worst of friends

In this his latest book Max Hastings aims not so much to write another history of the war in the Pacific but to describe ‘a massive and terrible experience, set in a chronological framework’. It is a companion volume to his Armageddon which did much the same for the last phase of the war in Europe; but the experiences he describes are yet more terrible, and the framework will be even less familiar to British readers.

Simon Rae

Inheritance

A poem Inheritance It glinted on your finger all my life, Clicked on your whisky glass or the steering wheel. You used to twist it off to wash your face In restaurant Gents before we had a meal. The seal’s a warlike claymore in a fist — Though you were the most peaceable of men, Relaxing with The Bookseller and your pipe. It could though, at a glance, look like a pen. And that’s how I prefer to look at it, A great, plumed, ink-primed quill, Although I always type, and my first book Was published just too late for you to sell.

Michael Heseltine

Riding out the storm

I share with Richard Mabey a love of trees. Beechcombings begins with the great storm of 1987, although Mabey’s love of trees has its origins in his childhood in the Chilterns. The childhood romance shines through. Trees were family. When I had the privilege of being Member of Parliament for Henley, and so the Stonor Valley, the great beech woods of the Chilterns were in my constituency. Mabey’s particular affection for the beech — fagus sylvatica — is touching, human and altogether understandable. I took a rather more positive view of the consequences of the 1987 storm than Mabey does. Of course there were some sad losses. Mabey refers to the beeches of Chartwell which Churchill so admired. If you looked at the carnage on the ground it was devastating.

Sebastian Smee

The pleasure of his company

Some writers have the ability to poison one’s daily existence. James Salter, I have discovered, is one of them. To read him is to be painfully reminded of how mundane, how blurry, how fatally lacking in glamour one’s own life is. Still, if you can hold such feelings at bay, reading him is also an intense pleasure. Salter has written no great novel. But he has written a couple of very good ones, some superb short stories, and an amazing memoir, Burning the Days. His writing is lyrical, dashing, succinct — modelled on Hemingway, but with strains of Fitzgerald, Colette and Cheever. Rich in the kinds of experience most writers lack, Salter’s life feeds into the writing at every point. It makes it incandescent, and gives it credibility, too.

Interconnect

Examine my thoughts

The following extracts are from The Blind Eye: A Book of Late Advice: Please don’t be misled by the apparent self-certainty of these utterances; be assured that after each one I nervously delete the words but that’s probably just me, right . . . I can see exactly what not to do at the moment. No doubt through the usual process of elimination I’ll arrive at my favourite strategy of total paralysis. With your back to the wall, always pay a compliment. Even your mugger or torturer is not immune to flattery, and still capable of being a little disarmed by a word of congratulation on their choice of footwear or superior technique.

Gary Dexter

Alternative reading | 6 October 2007

A Journey into God is one of four books by Delia Smith on the subject of Christian spirituality, the others being A Journey into Prayer, A Feast for Lent and A Feast for Advent. Delia journeys into God painfully aware of her own lack of recipes. She takes the apophatic approach, describing God as what he is not: he is not ‘the Life-Stifler God’, nor ‘the God of Fear and Anxiety’ nor ‘the Cuddly-Bear God’ nor ‘the God of the Well-Informed'. He lies outside human rationality, including human theological enquiry (which is useful, since it means you don’t have to read Barth, Bultmann or Strauss). Delia, while a patient student of the Bible, is seduced, ultimately, by mysticism of no particular denomination.

Saturday

Interconnect

The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau

The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau While my mother chokes on a fishbone, I am shuffled into another room to watch The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau. Bubbles rush upwards from a diver’s mouthpiece as my mother coughs up blood. Beyond the window, snowflakes rim the leafless trees. The deep teems with presences. My mother’s face takes on a distressing error in form. The ocean generates a sad music all of its own. Ambulance lights dye the snow blue. A siren bends the air to zero.

Sam Leith

He does not know how much he does not know

There’s a wonderful story in this book, told by the biologist Lewis Wolpert, about a vistor to the office of the physicist Niels Bohr. The visitor, a fellow scientist, was astonished to see a horseshoe nailed above the Nobel laureate’s desk. ‘Surely you don’t believe that horseshoe will bring you luck?’ he said. ‘I believe no such thing, my good friend,’ replied Bohr. ‘Not at all. I am scarcely likely to believe in such foolish nonsense. However, I am told that a horseshoe will bring you good luck whether you believe in it or not.’ As John Humphrys says, that’s ‘funny and profound in the same breath’.

Martin Vander Weyer

Papering over the cracks

The first thing to be said about this combination of history, autobiography and polemic is how heavy it is — not in the literary sense, though it is by no means light reading, but in the literal sense that it is a surprising weight in the hand. Befitting its title, it is printed on unusually thick, glossy paper, the better to carry a set of beautiful illustrations relating to the development of paper money and the follies and manias connected with it. Befitting its multimillionaire publisher-financier-connoisseur author, the book is an idiosyncratic artefact, a craftsman-made container for the distillate of a lifetime’s observation of the interaction of paper and wealth. In short, it’s a rich man’s book, but none the worse for that.

Jonathan Mirsky

The very special relationship

‘Here is a hot potato,’ The Spectator’s book review editor wrote in a note accompanying this book. Radioactive, actually. In 2006 Chicago professor John Mearsheimer and Harvard’s Stephen Walt posted a version of an article they had written on the Israel lobby for the London Review of Books on a Harvard faculty website. It was downloaded more than 275,000 times, and provoked what the authors call a firestorm of abuse.

Matthew Parris

Not quite there yet

In political journalism, as in warfare, relish is taken in a parade of defectors. Media neocons will therefore cheer the publication of the very personal tale of one Observer journalist’s journey from the dovecote to the hawks’ nest, not least on the issue of global terrorism and fundamentalist Islam. The author — once what he calls a ‘left-liberal’ — now sees this as the greatest threat facing the West. ‘Wake up, and smell the cordite,’ he writes. Andrew Anthony is an inspired phrasemaker and the phrase will serve for many armchair crusaders as a six-word summary of a 300-page book. Which is a pity, because this is a more interesting story than that.

Jonathan Keates

The undiscovered county

Worcestershire is England’s most undervalued county. Sauce, Elgar and cricket, not necessarily in that order, are what most people associate with the name. Otherwise it is that place we cross on our way to Herefordshire, its far smarter western neighbour, or the territory glimpsed on either side of the M5 as we whiz northwards to Birmingham, whose sprawl has chewed up a sizeable part of the ancient shire. Among those small towns which ‘heritage’ enthusiasts like to claim as a distinctive English speciality, Pershore, Upton and Bewdley must be among the most spectacularly unvisited.

Sargy Mann

A choice of recent audiobooks

How do you like a book to be read? There is the way my wife reads to me with her normal, unaccented voice throughout, just as she reads to me from the newspaper, say, letting the words on the page establish in my brain what the author intended — or so we hope. At the other extreme there is the fully acted and dramatised reading with old voices, foreign accents, all speaking angrily, casually, suspiciously, humorously etc. I hate this sort of reading. I feel irritated and patronised, as if the reader is saying, ‘Obviously you and the author can’t get it together on your own but don’t worry, I am here with my great understanding and dramatic skill, not to say artistry, to deliver the goods; aren’t you lucky?

Andrew Taylor

No end to hostilities

The war in Iraq cast a long shadow over Minette Walters’ previous novel, The Devil’s Feather, and it also plays a part in her new one. Lieutenant Charles Acland suffers horrific head injuries, including the loss of an eye, when he runs into an ambush while leading a convoy on the Basra-Baghdad highway. The two troopers with him in his Scimitar reconnaissance vehicle are killed. Invalided to the UK, Charles makes a remarkable physical recovery from his injuries in a Birmingham hospital. But he refuses the cosmetic surgery which could have reduced the visible damage on his shattered face, and his emotional state worries his doctors. Churlish and withdrawn, he is reluctant to see his parents and refuses to see his friends. He is increasingly violent too, especially to women.

Sarah Burton

Nanny comes to the rescue

Footballers’ wives and girlfriends, pop stars’ and politicians’ sons and daughters, are gilded by proximity to the golden ones, often regardless of their own intrinsic talent (or lack of it). It is unusual to find this phenomenon operating upwards through the generations, however. Jennie Churchill, despite her great beauty, charisma, notorious marriages, and reputed 200 lovers, would not merit a page in the history books were it not for the place deservedly reserved there for her son. Anne Sebba dutifully makes a case for Lady Randolph Churchill’s achievements in her own right, but they do not exceed those of a legion of other contemporary politicians’ wives or society hostesses.