More from Books

Saturday

Ray Monk

Not a people person

‘Einstein’s personality, for no clear reason, triggers outbursts of a kind of mass hysteria,’ wrote a puzzled German consul to his superiors in Berlin during Einstein’s visit to America in 1930. Wherever Einstein appeared, the consul observed ruefully, he attracted huge audiences who were not just enthusiastic but positively worshipful. Overwrought admirers crowded round him, wanting to kiss his hand, touch his clothes, or just gaze into his eyes. The hysteria continued after his death, his relics preserved and treasured as if he were a medieval saint. His eyes, for example, are kept in a safe-deposit box in New Jersey.

Anthony Sattin

In the steps of Stanley

Of all the world’s under- developed and misruled countries few can compete with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The former Belgian Congo, more recently known as Zaire, has lived for so long with lawlessness, brute violence and neglect, with Belgian colonial and Mobutu’s post-colonial exploitation, that it seems to have justified Joseph Conrad’s selection of this particular slice of land to serve as the continent’s heart of darkness. Recently it has seemed as if someone had switched the lights off altogether: it comes as a surprise, in our Google-mapped age, to discover that somewhere has disappeared from sight. The DRC has managed this.

Simon Baker

A boy lost in Africa

What is the What cuts through the strata of criticism, and gets straight to a fundamental question, one which echoes the title: What is a novel? The plot is the journey to Ethiopia, Kenya and finally America of a Sudanese refugee, Valentino Achak Deng, but what makes this ‘novel’ unusual is that Valentino is a real person, who told his story to Dave Eggers over a number of years. Eggers now presents it in a voice pitched to approximate that of his subject. The reason this is not called a memoir, however, is that some passages are fictional, although the real Valentino himself states in the preface that they are faithful to the overall tenor of events.

Jonathan Sumption

Boos and hurrahs

The problem about contemporary history is that we know both too little about it and too much. The archives of the state are closed to the public for 30 years, leaving us dependent on those famous sources of myth and misinformation, political diarists, memoir writers and journalists. At the bottom end, a history of our own age can so easily turn out to be nothing more than a million newspaper cuttings placed end to end. But would we be better off if we knew everything? I doubt it. It is difficult for an author to think dispassionately about times which he has lived through, and no easier for his readers. Selection is everything, and virtually bound to be tendentious. Contemporary history dates badly. Andrew Marr’s history of Britain since the second world war is the book of the film.

Ben Wilson

Love in a time of chaos

We are promised a true American love story, but the lovers of this romance do not so much make love as f***, even in their tenderest moments. The couple in question are Rosalie, Duchess de la Rochefoucauld and William Short, Thomas Jefferson’s adoptive son and secretary at the Paris embassy in the 1780s and ’90s. The long-burning affair did happen, and here, in Ferdinand Mount’s translation, are their letters which criss-crossed Revolutionary Europe, between legations, palaces and prisons. Jefferson promised the American people life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. His protégé is determined to live up to the ideal, as are the glittering circle of aristocrats and intellectuals with whom he mixes in just pre-Revolutionary Paris.

Hugh Massingberd

No dilly- dallying

I have a hazy memory of a 1950s television series on stately homes in which Richard Dimbleby (dubbed ‘Gold-Microphone-in-Waiting’ by Malcolm Muggeridge) would respectfully prompt their Wode- housian owners into trotting out seasoned anecdotes. ‘And this of course is the celebrated Red Drawing-room. Your Grace, I think, ahem, you have a story about that curious portrait over the fireplace?’ ‘Eh? What? Ah yes . . .’ Half a century on, his eldest son David adopts a different approach. We see him turning up in his Land-Rover at eerily empty houses, with no sign of the present proprietor or (more usually) the National Trust manager, and proceed to poke about.

Tim Congdon

Two giants and wizards

‘Investigation favourable except conceited, egotistical and snobbish.’ The outcome of the Federal Bureau of Investig- ation’s 1955 enquiry into John Kenneth Galbraith was eventually revealed to him under the USA’s Freedom of Inform- ation Act. It added to his already immense store of anecdotes about the richness and variety of American public life. The FBI was not quite right. Other economists resented Galbraith as if he were conceited, egotistical and snobbish, but his actual or alleged vanity was not the reason. Instead Galbraith’s problem was that he was incapable of writing a dull paragraph.

Saturday

Richard Beeston

The rules of the meddling game

Paddy Ashdown was standing by a muddy roadside in mid-winter outside Sarajevo enduring the daily humiliation of the assembled members of the international community in Bosnia. The civil war was at its height. Sarajevo was under siege. The first horror stories of rapes and massacres were beginning to surface. And yet to gain access by the only road open to this desperate European capital, UN troops, aid workers, journalists and even the then Liberal MP had first to be subjected to an intrusive search by the very Serb soldiers responsible for tearing the country apart. They not only had a stranglehold on the city, but they also demonstrated their control over the feeble representatives of the weak and divided world powers.

Digby Durrant

Return of the native

We know the pressures the steady flow of immigrants has caused in our society though we hear less about the benefits of having them here; nor do we have much idea what they think about us. Lev, the Polish migrant in Rose Tremain’s new book, expected to find men who looked like Alec Guinness in The Bridge on the River Kwai but found they were slovenly geezers with shaven heads and garish tattoos and not so different from those he worked alongside in the sawmills back home before losing his job. The early death of his wife, his responsibility for his adored small daughter and his ageing mother, the need of money in a decaying village persuade Lev to leave for London.

Andrew Barrow

A female Colossus

During the post-war years, the author of this book was a much-talked about variety artiste, famous for breaking ten-inch nails, bending steel bars in her teeth and throwing Bob Hope over her shoulder. Billed as the Mighty Mannequin, Joan Rhodes enhanced her appeal by looking and dressing as if she had stepped out of the chorus line — at the height of her fame she had a 20-inch waist — and accompanying her feats of strength with plaintive little odes delivered in a girlish voice which apparently made her sound ‘like the bleedin’ Queen’.

Sophia Waugh

Just the one regret

Is he a monster, saint, genius or lunatic? In this massive book Naim Attallah attempts to lay to rest the gossip, slander and misconceptions that have dogged him for much of his life, while also coming clean about his own mistakes and failures. I have to declare an interest. I was, in the 1980s, one of ‘Naim’s girls’; I am very fond of him indeed, and for several years my father, Auberon Waugh, edited the magazine he once owned, the Literary Review. ‘Naim’s girls’ were a part of London’s social scene and provided Private Eye with one of many reasons to mock ‘Naim Attallah-Disgusting’. We were young, pretty, had ‘names’ and we loved parties. We were not paid very much but we certainly enjoyed ourselves.

Anne Applebaum

The children of Marx

Italian intellectuals, Cambodian peasants, Hungarian workers, Russian colonels, Angolan insurgents, French philosophes, American actors, British miners, Chinese craftsmen, Nicaraguan labourers: over the years, the adherents of the international communist movement have been so geographically and socially diverse as to defy classification. During the 100-odd years of the movement’s existence, nations as different as Czarist Russia, semi-feudal China and post- colonial Cuba subsequently developed into communist states. Marxist literature has been translated into hundreds of languages and read, by somebody, in all of them. Perhaps as a result of this diversity, the literature on the international communist movement is stunningly weak.

Edward Harrison

The tame Englishman

This is an unusual, disturbing and powerful book. It is part autobiography of an English schoolboy who grew up in Nazi Germany, and part biography of the mother who left him there. Widowed early, Norah Briscoe sought with great determination to build a career in journalism in the face of much prejudice. Adversity did not improve her. She was the mother from hell, unfeeling, selfish and cold. She never once kissed or embraced her son Paul. The logical culmination of Norah’s personal development was that she became a Nazi. As the authors point out, ‘Nazism did not count a lack of sympathy for other people’s feelings as a weakness; rather, it was seen as a strength.

M R-D-Foot

Decryption and deception

Two books just out from small publishers throw interesting light on the more secret corners of the British handling of the world war against Hitler’s Germany. Each covers a subject that was deadly secret at the time, but of critical importance for winning the war. Joan Bright Astley’s war autobiography, published to much less acclaim than it deserved in 1971, is now reprinted for a fresh generation to read; Robin Denniston describes his father’s life’s work in decipher. The Reverend Robin Denniston, publisher turned country priest, has written a work of filial piety — a charming, even old-fashioned gesture, but one that deals with a subject of both topical and historical weight. A. G.

Gillian Allnutt

Mr String, considering

Cups in the midden.Imagine.Made by madmen, nineteen hundred  of themIn the asylum’s heyday.Idle hands, then, idle minds.England.Whole institution round the bend.

Lloyd Evans

The food of love

‘Painting with money’ is how Michael Winner described making films. And if the money runs out you can always turn your script into a novel. Ken Russell’s Beethoven Confidential was to have starred Anthony Hopkins in the title role with Glenda Jackson and Jodie Foster as a couple of swooning aristos eager to sponsor the fuming maestro. Quite how that Oscar-encrusted team ran out of backers is a mystery Russell doesn’t address. And his prose still bears the traces of its celluloid origins: Chapter Two. Moonlight filtering through elegant windows hints at surroundings of great luxury. In silhouette, a pretty teenager is seated at the piano playing music that seems to be a manifestation of the atmosphere itself. The effect is the opposite of a film.

Allan Massie

The phantoms of the opera

No doubt Mr Blair will soon be at work on his memoirs; or perhaps his ghost will. Ghosts play a necessary role in the publishing business. Indeed all those firms who rely for their profits on the autobiographies — and even occasionally the novels — of celebrities might collapse without the work of these industrious spectres. Till quite recently their existence was veiled in obscurity and the pretence was maintained that politicians, actors, singers and sportspersons were indeed the authors of the books which appeared under their name. This make-believe is no longer sustainable. Too many so-called authors have casually remarked in interviews that they haven’t actually read their own book. (No politician has yet been honest enough to make this admission.

Saturday

James Forsyth

The odd couple

The more you reflect on the Clintons’ story, the more remarkable it becomes. A boy and a girl meet at a prestigious Ivy League law school, fall in love not so much with each other as with the concept of themselves as a couple, leave their sophisticated world to go back to his Southern backwater and despite him never controlling his roving eye and hands climb the political ladder and make it to the White House. Once there, he suffers one of the most crushing mid-term reverses of any president but still wins re-election at a canter. He gets impeached but still leaves office as one of the most popular presidents on record. She is responsible for many of the biggest political blunders of his administration but still salvages his presidency.

Philip Mansel

The Viennese charades

Europe had a party during the Congress of Vienna in the last months of 1814. Monarchs, ministers, ambassadors and their wives and mistresses had learnt what Lord Castlereagh called ‘habits of confidential intercourse’ while engaged in defeating Napoleon. Between balls and banquets in the city’s many palaces, they seduced, betrayed and negotiated with each other. Letters copied for the Austrian police tell us who slipped up which staircase, or quarrelled between which polonaises. ‘You, always you, nothing but you,’ wrote Metternich to the Duchess of Sagan, while ‘all Europe’ waited in his antechamber. Their love affair seemed to concern him more than ‘the affairs of the world,’ complained his secretary Friedrich von Gentz.

A.N. Wilson

Risen from the ashes

Many of us Europeans have visited the Smithsonian Insti- tution in Washington DC, and most of us have not the foggiest idea how it got its name. If quizzed, we should probably hazard a guess that Smithson was some rich old American codger, earlier in vintage than Frick or Pierpont Morgan, who had endowed one of the great museums of the world in the way that Americans do. But if we thought that, we should be wrong. James Smithson, who for 35 of his 66 years was known as Macie, was an Englishman who had never been to America in his life. He was the son of the first Duke of Northumberland, but illegitimate, and as far as is known he never met his father.