More from Books

Saturday

Pj Kavanagh

Richness in diversity

I seem to have missed the name David Crystal. He is clearly a phonetician, expert in linguistics, but the blurb tells us little about him except that he appears on television. He comes across as a genial cove. In one of his many digressions on the subject of words — this book is composed of them — he tells us of the arrival of that very word ‘blurb’. ‘Just occasionally we can be in on a word-birth.’ In 1907, in New York, an author didn’t like his book-jacket, he wanted it more appealingly lurid. So he ‘sketched out a buxom blonde on one of the jackets and labelled her “Miss Belinda Blurb”.’ The name caught on. The same author later defined what that word came to mean. ‘1.

Neil Rennie

That’s All

The dead are back at Sulphur Bay, dancingunder umbrellas, wearing three kinds of shorts:English, French and Seventh Day Adventist.Hair wavy, faces posthumously whiteas foam, they strum and croon the gospel of St Paul:‘You-me no die. You-me no buggerup. That’s all.

Donald Michie

Not so dumb

Students of ants, wasps, hornets, termites and bees have for more than a century realised that the intricately interlocking teamwork of these insect builders deserves some more respectful characterisation than ‘blind instinct’. Moreover, in certain mammals, as seen in the dams and dens of beavers, the leaps of engineering insight would do credit to human designers. To explain their feats requires us to credit animals with the ability mentally to map sense-data to objects and processes in the outside world. In some cases the animal first has to recognise the potential of materials and tools, and then to envisage and maintain a sequence of goals so as to determine how the tools are to be manipulated. Beyond this lies abstract reasoning, concept formation, insight and language.

Saturday

Allan Massie

When the going was better

In January 1923 Aldous Huxley signed a contract with Chatto & Windus, which would guarantee him a regular income for three years. He would be paid £500 per annum and in return agreed to ‘supply the publishers with two new works of fiction a year, one of them to be a full-length novel’—an onerous undertaking. The royalty rate was to start at 15 per cent, rising to 20 per cent after the first 2,000 copies sold, and to 25 per cent after 8,000. This contract was regularly renewed over the years, with some emendations (one non-fiction book being substituted for one of the works of fiction) while by the second or third renewal the initial royalty rate would rise to 20 per cent. Novelists today can only be envious.

Anthony Daniels

Kicking a man when he’s down

The desire to wage war as if it were keyhole surgery is, after a certain fashion, a laudable one. It indicates that a government can no longer afford to treat its own population, if not that of the enemy, as mere cannon fodder. Each soldier killed is ten, a hundred, votes lost. But the new-found tenderness towards the lives of soldiers has two inconveniences. The first is that keyhole-surgery war is a chimera, and what is impossible cannot be desirable. The second is that the decline of what one might call the cannon-fodder spirit makes the prosecution of long-drawn out wars and military occupations very difficult. Keyhole surgery is limited not only in space but in time.

Patrick Skene-Catling

A rector wrecked

John Walsh’s new novel is a paradoxically enjoyable account of the decline and fall of an Exeter College student of theology who becomes for a short time a performer in vaudeville and then an evangelist of Longford innocence and charity who believes he can perceive potential good in even the most depraved young women. Walsh frames this moral tale in the few known facts of the real life of the Reverend Harold Davidson (1875-1937), for a quarter of a century the rector of the country parish of Stiffkey and Morston in Norfolk, who spent most of every week in London in the 1920s and early 1930s, trying to save girls from poverty and prostitution.

David Gilmour

The lion or the donkey?

Giuseppe Garibaldi must be among the most commemorated secular figures in history. Italian towns invariably have a square or a street named after him, and many contain statues, stations and other sites as well. In Genoa Garibaldi is represented not only by a vast equestrian bronze in front of the Opera but also, in diverse and equally inappropriate ways, by a Via Garibaldi (a street of Renaissance palaces), a Piazza Garibaldi (a tiny space with a shop selling motorbikes), a Vico Garibaldi (a dingy cul-de-sac) and the Galleria Garibaldi (not an art gallery in this instance but a tunnel for motorcars — useful in a city which tried to solve its traffic problems by erecting a motorway on stilts that separates the old town from the port).

James Joll

Myth and minstrelsy

Winston Churchill once famously declared, ‘this pudding has no theme’. Michael Alexander’s book, subtitled ‘The Middle Ages in Modern England’ — a period which in his view stretches from well before the Industrial Revolution virtually to contemporary culture — has far too many. His contention is that medievalism sprang from two main impulses: the rise of antiquarianism in the second half of the 18th century, studying the material evidence of the Middle Ages, on one hand, and the imaginative adoption of what were conceived to be the ideals of that era, on the other. As a word, it is surprisingly recent with the first recorded use in the Gentleman’s Magazine as late at 1827.

Edward Norman

The saviour of the world

In Britain public money is being allocated to identify and promote ‘moderate’ Islam, in the hope of discouraging the ‘extremists’ and ‘fundamentalists’ whose supposed misunderstanding of the Faith is, in fact, the version most practised in those societies where it is the majority religion. The result is not likely to be much more than the detachment of a favoured westernised coterie of leaders from the main body of believers. The effects on the State are much more serious: the British government, after two centuries of receding Christian confessionalism, is beginning to endorse a particular interpretation of religious teaching — in the form of ‘moderate’ Islam — and even to offer it endowment.

Byron Rogers

Agony rather than ecstasy

One of the most interesting conversations I have ever had took place in a Carmarthen pub. There were three of us, the others a builder and a policeman. At one point the policeman told us the weight of a severed human head: it was 14 pounds, and he should know, he went on, having had to carry one in a hat-box. The conversation then turned, somehow, to impotence, which we agreed was something all sensible men should welcome. ‘Be a chance to talk to the wife,’ said the builder. Unfortunately not every man can be a philosopher king in the Black Horse.

Jonathan Mirsky

A monster in the making

One day in 1915, when Stalin was in exile in Siberia, he was eating dinner with a few other revolutionaries. Everyone had to say what his greatest pleasure was. Some said women, others — can this be true? — ‘earnestly replied that it was the progress of dialectical materialism towards the workers’ paradise’. Stalin, known then as ‘Soso’ or ‘Koba’, replied, ‘My greatest pleasure is to choose one’s victim, prepare one’s plans minutely, slake an implacable vengeance, and then go to bed. There’s nothing sweeter in the world.

Tom Fleming

Delicately exposing the past

John Preston’s fourth novel is a quiet dramatisation of the famous Sutton Hoo dig of 1939. Known as ‘the British Tutankhamun’, the excavation in Suffolk uncovered several Anglo-Saxon cemeteries, including one magnificent royal ship burial, and was thrown into relief in September that year by the outbreak of the second world war. The author exploits his setting subtly, as his fragile characters contemplate their lives in the face of history. It’s all a far cry from the mischievous humour of his last novel, Kings of the Roundhouse.

Justin Marozzi

Brushes with strangers

There are probably better ways to welcome tourists to your country than with the words, ‘Go home England. Bastards.’ To their credit, Henry Hemming and his travelling companion Al, both suspected by the Slovak border guards of being Islamic extremists and denied entry, do not go home. With a retaliatory cry of, ‘Go home Slovakia. Bastards,’ they drive away in their beloved truck Yasmine and the journey continues. And it is quite a journey. Fresh from university, the two fledgling artists travel through Turkey, Iran, Oman, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Israel and Iraq. Their mission: ‘an artistic expedition to the heart of the Islamic world in order to alter Western stereotypes of the region.

Helena Drysdale

Deep, romantic and savage

In 1842 my cousin Charles Gascoyne was home from India on furlough, when he heard some devastating news. His regiment, the 5th Bengal Light Cavalry, had been retreating from Kabul through the winter-bound Khyber Pass where it was wiped out by Afghan tribesmen. A memorial tablet in St Peter’s Church in Calcutta still vividly records his fellow officers, ‘the lamented braves’, who though greatly outnumbered by a most treacherous foe in snowy wastes and rugged defiles, for several days and nights together, without shelter or even a tent, and suffering from extremes of cold, hunger and thirst, in the depths of winter, sold their lives dearly, as became British soldiers. Over 16,000 people died. Charles never recovered from the shock, and from the loss of so many friends.

Saturday

Philip Hensher

A change of weather

One day in July 1945, a public schoolboy with a straw hat on stood with his trunk on Bishop’s Stortford station, and called out ‘My man’ to the porter. ‘No,’ the porter said, ‘that sort of thing is all over now.’ Whether it was or not, the Attlee period, 1945-51, is the most decisive and dramatic of our peacetime history. Society had utterly changed, and a government of extraordinary ambition set an agenda which was to go unchallenged until 1979. It was a period of great deprivation — rationing not only continued, but tightened after the war — and memory tended for decades afterwards to dredge up the horrible occasion of the hard winter of 1947 as a sort of macabre centrepiece to the whole experience.

Andrew Taylor

Challenging the Kremlin

Death puts a different value on a person, usually a smaller one than in life. Sometimes, how- ever, the opposite happens. For instance, how many medieval Archbishops of Canterbury can most of us name off-hand apart from St Thomas Becket? In some cases, death makes the man. It is likely that Alexander Litvinenko will be another example. He died in London on 23 November 2006, poisoned slowly and painfully with polonium-210 radiation. His murder, in circumstances recalling some of the fruitier episodes of Cold War espionage, brought him instant global celebrity. During his life, he and his fellow author, the historian Yuri Felshtinsky, had found it impossible to find a publisher for their book Blowing Up Russia. Now there is a British edition.

Leanda De-Lisle

The plot thickens

John Adamson’s The Noble Revolt asserts the crucial role of political ideas in the coming cataclysm of the English civil war. His focus is close: the 18 months before the final breach between Charles I and Parliament, but it is as scholarly in depth as it is cinematic in scope. Here is a dramatic retelling of a story we thought we knew well. The old Marxist interpretation of class struggle is put to rest and so is the revisionist view that the civil war was brought about by unfortunate conjunctions of personalities and events. Instead we discover how a small group of ideologically motivated noblemen came to dominate the state and attempted to reduced Charles I to a puppet king.

William Brett

At the feast

In 2003, two days after his now infamous interview with Phil Spector was published in the Daily Telegraph, Mick Brown heard that a woman had been shot and killed in the legendary pop producer’s mansion. Most journalists in his position would be exhilarated by their good fortune — the interview was the first that Spector had given in decades, and he had spoken openly about his unstable mental condition. But Brown’s reaction wasn’t to call up his agent and start cashing in. Instead, he panicked that Spector had read the interview and murdered the personal assistant that had organised it. Although he had no hesitation in suspecting the notorious gun-lover of murder, he also felt personally involved.

James Buchan

How the catastrophe happened

Ali A. Allawi has spent much of his life in exile from his native Iraq. Born into a family that had served the royal family that came to grief in 1958, he spent his childhood at schools in England and his career abroad as an academic, engineer and banker. Active among the émigré anti-Baathists in the 1990s, he returned in September 2003 to find his unfortunate country disintegrating into civil war with Britain and America and a troupe of home-grown adventurers and crooks hurrying it on.

Robert S-C-Gordon

Fantasy with a moral base

A Tranquil Star is a collection of 17 expertly translated short stories by Primo Levi, written between the 1940s and the 1980s. None has appeared in English before. They are presented by the publishers to mark the sad anniversary of Levi’s death 20 years ago; and also as a taster for a full new English edition of Levi’s complete works promised for 2011 or thereabouts. The stories belong not to Levi’s best-known vein of writing, on the Holocaust and his time in Auschwitz.