More from Books

Saturday

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.

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.