More from Books

Saturday

Melvyn Bragg

William carries on

This richly detailed and engrossing biography, a fine companion volume to William Hague’s life of Pitt, will still many arguments and feed others. Two hundred years ago the Act abolishing the slave trade was, as it remains, a beacon of humanitarian legislation, a defining moment when morality met commerce in open battle and won a famous victory. The anniversary has loosed a flood of opinions, apologies and accusations and too often the voice of William Wilberforce has been drowned. Hague restores him to his proper place, as lynchpin of the movement, though he was certainly one man among many. Thomas Clarkson did far more research, for instance.

Lucy Beresford

Too much in the sun

Reading this languid, chapterless novel is like spending the summer in Tuscany. The plot drifts along, punctuated by a few sharp shocks, just as a day at the villa might combine exquisite lethargy with a brisk dip in the pool or sumptuous meals. Sometimes there’s an obvious sting in the tail for such indolence: the cost, the sunburn, the extra calories consumed. In Esther Freud’s latest, set in the Tuscan hills, the sting is more subtle, less conclusive: avoiding responsibility can have consequences. Lara is invited by her historian father Lambert to stay a few weeks at the villa of an old friend. Even though Lara is now 17, she has spent little time in Lambert’s company. For most of the book she remains gawky around him.

Pj Kavanagh

Fresh woods and pastors new

It is good to be reminded of the left-wing writers of the 1930s who took arms against the injustices of a society in which they were themselves privileged members. Sometimes they were over-hectic preachers — Take off your coat: grow lean:Suffer humiliation: Patrol the passes aloneAnd eat your iron ration. — but there was nobility in their cause. Nevertheless, the question has to be asked: is any biography of a near-contemporary writer anything but an example of the Higher Gossip? Curiosity about the life can masquerade as revived interest in the work. This careful account of one such life can on the whole be absolved.

Anthony Thwaite

The space between

Tonight I heard again the rat in the roof, Fidgeting stuff about with a dry scuff, Pausing in silence, then scratching away Above my head, above the ceiling’s thin Skin that separates his life from mine. So shall I let him be, roaming so narrowly In a few finger-widths of carpentry? The evening passes by. I sit and write And hear him skittering here and there in flight From nothing. Maybe he hears My scratching pen, my intermittent cough, Below the frail thin lath that keeps me off From harming him, as it too keeps him there, Heard but unseen in narrow strips of air.

Stuart Wheeler

Roll over, Mozart

The author is nothing if not versatile. Apart from being the Observer’s music critic he has written books on a very wide variety of subjects. This book is about his experiences in the world of poker, specifically the form of poker that has taken the world by storm, No Limit Texas Hold’em. There is much good stuff. Poker players can be single-track-minded. ‘Who in the hell is this guy Saddam Hussein?’ asks one of the top poker pros. It reminded me of a Las Vegas blackjack dealer many years ago asking me where I came from. ‘England’, I told her. ‘Oh, that’s in Paris, isn’t it?’ she replied. The author has an amusing, though unkind, name for a holding of Ace King.

Tom Fleming

A choice of first novels

American Youth by Phil LaMarche (Sceptre, £12.99, pp. 221) is a sparsely written, penetrating tale of a boy who finds himself in a moral dilemma when he abets the accidental killing of a neighbour. Fourteen-year-old Ted LeClare tries to impress the Dennison brothers by showing them his father’s rifle, but when he leaves the room briefly the brothers squabble over the loaded gun and the elder one accidentally shoots the younger. Ted’s mother coerces him into denying that he loaded the gun, leaving him in a legal and ethical quandary. When he starts high school, moreover, he finds that he has become the poster-boy for a sinister, right-wing group of students calling themselves American Youth.

William Brett

Children of the night

‘Time moves in its own special way in the middle of the night,’ a bartender says in Haruki Murakami’s eerie new novel. And it’s not just time that can seem out of joint during the witching hours, Murakami suggests. After Dark explores the ways in which the night can heighten our sense of isolation, and threaten our conception of reality. It’s also an engrossing story and an easy read, yet another example of the much-admired Japanese author’s skill in couching challenging, intricate themes within beguilingly simple narratives. The story centres on the lives of two young sisters over the course of one night in Tokyo, between midnight and daybreak. One, Eri Asai, is sleeping a ‘too pure, too perfect’ sleep, and has been for months.

Edward Norman

The way, the truth and the life

It was conventionally believed, especially by liberal Catholics, that Pope John Paul II’s theological and ecclesiological conservatism derived from his Polish background. In fact his mind was deeply Western; it was formed by his early study of Max Scheler and phenomenological theory. Benedict XVI, similarly, is usually perceived as an entrenched traditionalist and regarded — again, especially by liberal Catholics — as somehow naturally antipathetic to modern readings of Christianity. How far this is a reality may be adduced from this study of Christ. It is not, and does not attempt to be, a biography.

Saturday

Andrew Taylor

A cut and dried case?

The modern crime novel tends to be a serious matter involving body parts and serial killers, sometimes with a spot of social analysis thrown in for good measure. It was not always like this, and Simon Brett is among the handful of distinguished contemporary crime writers who remind us of those far-off days of innocence when detective stories were meant to be fun. Death Under the Dryer is the latest title in Brett’s ‘Fethering mysteries’. Fethering, a fortunately fictional seaside town in West Sussex, has the sort of murder rate that used to distinguish Miss Marple’s village of St Mary’s Mead. It has two resident sleuths, ladies of a certain age whom one character describes as Fethering’s very own Marple Twins.

Hugh Massingberd

Better than chocolate

Surely the most sought after among what Lord David Cecil described as ‘The Pleasures of Reading’ (a lecture title that lured John Betjeman in the expectation of a paean to the architectural delights of Berkshire’s county town) is the moment when an author articulates a feeling that you imagined was peculiar to yourself, expresses an emotion that you have carefully suppressed. In Michael Simkins’s extremely enjoyable memoir of his lifelong obsession with the ‘summer game’, this moment occurred on the very first page where he confesses to constantly making the evocative sound of a cricket ball hitting a bat.

James Buchan

The great negotiator

Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, the Talleyrand of our age, was for over 20 years the dominant personality in Arab relations with the English-speaking countries. Born into the obscurest royal poverty, Bandar turned himself into a fighter pilot of dash and elan (if not of the very first proficiency), before serving as Saudi Arabia’s ambassador in Washington from 1983 until 2005. He is now secretary-general of something called the Saudi National Security Council, but it is hard to descry through the desert sand and wind his latter-day power and influence. This biography, written by a British classmate from the Royal Air Force College at Cranwell, is the usual courtier’s mixture of hero-worship and good information. The challenge is to tell them apart.

Andrew Lambirth

Simplicity and strength

Some of the best and most effective of 20th-century English posters were designed by the American, Edward McKnight Kauffer (1890-1954). Born in Montana, he was the only child of German and Swedish immigrants. His parents divorced, and young Ted Kauffer was put in an orphanage, where drawing became a release from what he described as a ‘lonely, nostalgic and uninspiring’ childhood. When his mother re-married, his stepfather encouraged the boy’s artistic inclinations, including his passionate transcriptions of Frederic Remington’s cowboys and Indians paintings. He became an itinerant stage scenery painter before knuckling down to some serious study at the Mark Hopkins Institute in San Francisco, and meeting the man whose name he was to adopt, Joseph E.

Caroline Moorehead

Lost and found

When Starbucks in the United States decided to promote Ishmael Beah’s memoir of life as a boy soldier in Sierra Leone it seemed to many a surprising choice. A Long Way Gone, with its descriptions of atrocities and terror, is a far cry from the daily travails of footballers’ wives and celebratory chefs. But stories of boy soldiers, casualties of the civil wars endemic across parts of Africa and Asia, have, in recent years, become a growing branch of disaster literature, alongside memoirs of the Holocaust in occupied Europe, the great famine in China, the killing fields of Cambodia, and the contemporary tales of loss and abuse in Western life. Savagery and trauma are now popular reading. Ishmael Beah writes simply and well.

Jonathan Sumption

Coping with a continent

Has there ever been a better time to be alive than the 18th century, provided that one were rich, healthy, literate and European? One would not necessarily have to be a Duke of Newcastle or a Prince-Bishop of Würzburg, although either would be nice. Many of the things which make life agreeable for humbler mortals originate in their modern form in this fascinating period: passable roads, fire insurance, tea, novels, newspapers, street lighting and innoculation to suggest only some random examples. At a more elevated level, an age which began with Bach, Newton and Racine and ended with Mozart, Hume and Beaumarchais plainly has much to be said for it. But there is of course another 18th century.

Bevis Hillier

A big talent spotted

In the late 1960s I was reviewing books in the Sunday Times alongside the great Cyril Connolly, and got to know him a bit. He said that the moment which compensated for the acres of tripe he had had to plough through in his career as a critic was when one of Evelyn Waugh’s early novels landed on his desk. He recognised genius. In over 40 years of reviewing I have been waiting for that ‘A star is born’ moment, and I think it has now come. I could be making as big a howler as Gertrude Stein when she claimed that Sir Francis Rose was an artist in the same league as Picasso; but Anne Lambton’s short stories — her first book — strike me as of superfine quality: the emotional insight of Katherine Mansfield, the satirical edge of Angus Wilson.

Allan Massie

Paradise before the guns opened fire

Reviewing recently a new English version of Alain-Fournier’s 1913 novel Le Grand Meaulnes, I was happy and relieved to find that it retains its magic. It has entranced generations of adolescents, not all of them French, but I had wondered if it would still appeal after so many years. It is an extraordinary book, part fairytale or romance, part realistic study of French provincial life, sometimes grim, in the last years of the 19th century; and some of its fascination comes from this curiously hybrid quality. It is both naive and knowing. It has the dewy freshness of a first novel, but it is also admirably constructed, reminding one that Alain-Fournier, though only 26 when the novel appeared, was no provincial innocent, but already belonged to the literary establishment.

Saturday

Jonathan Mirsky

The madness of the two Georges

I saw Jeremy Paxman lose his languid scepticism a few weeks ago on Newsnight and exhibit what looked like amazement. Michael Rose had just said that if he were an Iraqi he would fight the Americans, or at least he could see why Iraqis did it. Is that, Paxman asked, what you want the families of our servicemen fighting in Iraq to know? Rose said yes. Now the reason, I suppose, Paxman abandoned his customary eyebrow-lifting was that Michael Rose is retired General Sir Michael Rose KCB, DSO etc, the ex-Commander of the 22nd SAS Regiment that fought in the Falklands, and commander of the UN Protection Force in Bosnia. If his slim book doesn’t convince you that Iraq is a lost cause and prompt evacuation is the only sane course, you are a Bush-Blair True Believer.

Allan Mallinson

Drang nach Osten

Another book on Napoleon, or General Bonaparte as the author properly notes, though only because the man had not crowned himself emperor when he invaded Egypt. Insisting on calling him General Bonaparte, as an Englishman should, is now, alas, regarded as mere pedantry. If you type ‘Napoleon’ into the British Library catalogue, the result (13 May) is 10,861. So Paul Strathern, philosopher, mathematician, novelist and historian of the Medicis, is certainly labouring against the odds in offering us more. Except that his eclectic qualifications are probably as good as any historian’s when it comes to making sense, and making interesting, the extraordinarily muddled, vainglorious adventure that was this half-military, half-philosophical expedition.

Peter Oborne

The leading edge

Three out of the last ten prime ministers have been cricket fanatics. The first was Clement Attlee. In the immediate aftermath of the second world war a newswire service was installed in 10 Downing Street. Attlee ignored it except that during the summer months he used what he called his ‘cricket machine’ to keep up to date with the close-of-play scores. Sir Alec Douglas-Home is the only prime minister so far to have played the first-class game, including two matches for Middlesex in the mid-1920s. After retiring as Tory leader, he became president of the MCC. Finally we have John Major, a useful player before a crippling knee injury forced him to abandon the game. When he was at Downing Street, cabinet meetings would be interrupted by the latest scores.