More from Books

Saturday

Lee Langley

A marvel in marble

The Moghul monarchs’ way of life was an extravaganza of such breathtaking splendour that in comparison the Sun King’s Versailles seems understated. Both Shah Jahan and Louis XIV came to the throne in 1643 and their courts had much in common: architectural grandeur, luxury, a love of jewels and a flair for excess. What was unique to the Muslim emperor was his devotion to a consort throughout their long marriage. Her death in childbirth and his desire to create a worthy mausoleum resulted in what many consider the most beautiful building in the world — the Taj Mahal.

Michael Carlson

Murder in the South

When David Rose visited Columbus, Georgia, to write a story about capital punishment in the United States, it drew him inexorably into a decade-long battle for justice on behalf of Carlton Gary, a black man on death row, convicted 20 years ago of a series of rape/murders of elderly white women committed some eight years earlier. The handsome, womanising Gary, what would now be called ‘a player’, was an unlikely candidate for such killings, and the ‘violation’ of the title is as much his by the criminal justice system as that of the murder victims. The setting is pure To Kill a Mockingbird. Columbus is a typical small Southern city, its economy dependent on nearby Fort Benning.

Andrew Lambirth

Barbarity tinged with splendour

If you missed the exhibition of Glitter and Doom which ended last month at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, this handsome hardback catalogue is a good armchair substitute. It contains three very readable essays — by no means typical of exhibition catalogues — and a wealth of colour illustrations. Sabine Rewald, the show’s curator, sets the art historical scene in her introduction, followed by an excellent piece by the cultural critic Ian Buruma, entitled ‘Faces of the Weimar Republic’. The third contribution is again art historical: a brief history of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement in Germany by Matthias Eberle. Neue Sachlichkeit translates as ‘New Objectivity’, and it is the portraits of this tendency which form the subject of the book.

Marcus Berkmann

Broadening the vision

‘Popular science’: for some readers this remains a problematic category. I’m sure proper scientists look askance at civilians reading such books on public transport, imagining their own abstruse specialities dumbed down for the hard-of-thinking. And the vast mass of arts graduates, who hate and fear science, remembering the bad trousers and unfortunate hairstyles of science undergraduates in their day, happily admit that they know nothing of the subject and understand even less. Some people I know have been boasting for nearly 20 years that they gave up A Brief History of Time before the end. It’s all too sad for words. Stephen Hawking, though, has much to answer for.

Allan Massie

Angus Wilson taking risks

Auden, discussing Troilus and Cressida, remarked that major writers set themselves new challenges, and so risk failure, while minor ones are content to do the same thing as before and so risk nothing. There’s something in this, though, like many of his pronouncements, it’s too sweeping to be altogether true. (Besides which, the major/minor categorisation is tiresome, even if we all resort to it from time to time.) Instead of indulging in the sheep-and-goats of major/minor, it may simply be that some writers become bored with what they have done, or fear becoming what Graham Greene called ‘prisoners of their method’, and so strike out on a new line; plenty of bad writers after all set themselves new and different challenges, even if they fail to meet them.

Saturday

Charlotte Moore

Wisdom through waiting

Grace Waterhouse ‘knew in general terms that [she] was marrying a hero’. Grace is the central character of this, Thomas Keneally’s 24th novel. In old age she looks back to the second world war and tries to disentangle the circumstances of her widowhood: her husband Leo’s capture and beheading at the hands of the Japanese. Leo Waterhouse, ‘the most beautiful adult boy’, was ‘a fulfilment of daydreams’. He looked like Errol Flynn and was as adventurous and brave as the characters Flynn played. As a key member of the Independent Reconnaissance Squad, Leo’s job was to spearhead stealth raids on the new Japanese empire in the southern Pacific.

Said K-Aburish

Ignorance is no excuse

Imperial Life in the Emerald City is the best account I have read of why the American occupation of Iraq has gone so drastically wrong. It is an exceptional piece of work, well researched, well written and well judged. Having lived the Iraqi story for over 30 years, from advising Saddam’s government on Iraqi-American relations to resigning in protest against his use of chemical weapons, I cannot remember a book that does more to enhance our understanding of the country than this one. On the whole the quality of reporting on Iraq since the American invasion has been dismal.

Anthony Sattin

The future is black

The title of Peter Godwin’s beautifully written and magnificently poignant memoir is taken from Zulu lore, which states that solar eclipses are caused by a celestial crocodile eating the sun. Within the covers we are offered twin eclipses, one caused by life ebbing away from Godwin’s father, the other by the darkness of Robert Mugabe’s increasingly repressive regime in Zimbabwe. Godwin was born and brought up in Zimbabwe by white immigrants. His parents were among the last of the pre-independence white arrivals, escaping the horrors of a Europe made ugly by the second world war and arriving in what was, at the time, an oasis of calm, wealth and beauty. They became good, solid citizens.

Kenneth Steven

Voting with My Feet

I wish I could be fun at parties too: Slap men across their backs and flirt with girls, Tell ribald tales, play games with young blonde curls, Shout, ‘Murphy, man, remember at the zoo!’ Instead I drink too much and hog the loo, Avoid the crowd and wince at insults hurled, Trip over doctors’ shoes, get caught in pearls, Knock over priceless Mings . . . but then what’s new? At home they thought me hapless, shook their heads At all attempts to play the suave, cool guy, Just said that I’d been born with two left feet. So now I’m stuck at parties with fat Neds With gorgeous dolls upon their arms. Bye bye, I’m off wherever the real thinkers meet.

William Skidelsky

The critic and the novelist

Novelists do not always make the best critics, and vice versa. But there are writers — Henry James, Virginia Woolf and John Updike spring to mind — who are similarly gifted in both fields. Such cases are interesting because of the questions they raise about the relationship between the novels and the criticism. How similar are the two stylistically? Can the judgments of the critic ever be independent of the inclinations of the novelist? (Or, to put it another way, are writers likely to favour those novelists who most resemble themselves?) Trickier still is the question of truthfulness: which, out of the fiction or the criticism, can best be said to represent the real author? Fiction’s domain is the imagination, whereas criticism deals with facts.

Jonathan Keates

A golden age for ghouls

The 17th century was the heyday of the English ghost. Up and down the kingdom during those ‘distracted times’ of the Gunpowder Plot, Civil War and Commonwealth, spectres, revenants and phantoms were at their most restless and fretful. Church bells rang without human agency, invisible armies clattered to and fro in the darkness, drummers sounded a ghoulish tattoo through midnight bedchambers, a whole menagerie of ectoplasmic beasts terrified kitchenmaids or sent children into hysterics.

Adam Zamoyski

No redeeming features

Until fairly recently, the name Thyssen-Bornemisza held generally positive associations — with vibrant German industrialism, responsible capitalism, pan-European cosmopolitanism, artistic connoisseurship and philanthropy, all tinged with a pleasant whiff of Hungarian nobility. Just how deeply erroneous these are revealed to have been is staggering. August Thyssen, who created the family fortune in the second half of the 19th century, was neither an inventive manufacturer, nor an adventurous entrepreneur, nor a creative capitalist. He made his money by marrying sensibly, associating with the right people and taking advantage of opportunities. He was a careful, thrifty, cost-cutting, cheese-paring and exploitative industrialist, more of a quartermaster than a captain of industry.

Sam Leith

A singularly plural life

If nothing else, this biography has to be a candidate for the Title of the Year prize. The fact that it’s about Willie Donaldson gives it a good shout, too, at Subject of the Year. Just amble through the CV: feckless squanderer of inherited shipping fortune; impresario of Beyond the Fringe; ponce (though he was frequently and, he felt inaccurately, described as a pimp); submariner; author of the Henry Root Letters; lover of Carly Simon and Sarah Miles; unsuccessful glass-bottomed boat entrepreneur; geriatric crack-fiend; self-confessed pervert; corrupter of innocence; balletomane; Old Wykehamist. ‘Disgraceful’ he frequently was.

Saturday

Anne Applebaum

From chessboard to boardroom

If I were a leading venture capitalist, the CEO of a large company, or in any case a person in search of ways to win friends and influence people, then I would be in a much better position to judge the utility of How Life Imitates Chess, Garry Kasparov’s bid to convince business executives that there is much to be learned from studying the game of chess. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that this book represents Kasparov’s bid to convince business executives that there is much to be learned from Kasparov’s game of chess. In the course of the book, for example, Kasparov re-examines his ‘development as a decision-maker’.

Theodore Dalrymple

One that got away

In a society in which multicultural pieties have for so long replaced genuine thought, it is hardly surprising that very little real interest has been evinced in how important minorities actually live. The fate of many young women of Indian sub-continental origin has not excited the interest, much less the sympathy and outrage, that it ought to have done, at any rate among people who like to parade the breadth of their sympathies as martyrs parade their wounds. The author of this very impressive and moving memoir was born of Punjabi Sikh parents in Derby. Although her mother spent more of her life in England than in India, she never learnt a single word of English: in itself a tragic self-enclosure.

Christopher Ondaatje

Dear, unhappy isle

Roma Tearne’s first novel of love and war is set almost entirely in the strife-torn island of Sri Lanka, and sweeps away only in its final pages to Venice and to London. It is a heart-rending story of an expatriate who returns to his homeland only to find himself immersed in a poisonous civil war that slowly escalates to shatter both relationships and any hope of safety. Jealousy and revenge are the two strongest emotions in Sri Lanka, and when the British finally granted the country its independence in 1948 the politically powerful Sinhalese moved quickly to assert their power and position in politics.

Michael Henderson

Norman knows best

For a man whose appearances at London’s concert halls and opera houses are rarer than golden eagles above Highgate, Norman Lebrecht has a lot to say about the state of orchestral music. His first book on the subject, The Maestro Myth, had the merit of revealing certain facts (the huge salaries of conductors, for instance) that may have surprised the people who buy tickets. When the Music Stops, which considered the parlous state of the classical recording industry, was so-so. Now comes a third (and surely final) one, and very thin it is. Lebrecht, rightly, has never regarded popularity as a badge of honour. This has advantages for a journalist; it offers a form of liberation.

Philip Ziegler

Just right for a desert island

It would be difficult to write a boring book about Michael Foot. As well as being eloquent, imaginative and idealistic he possessed the priceless quality, from the point of view of the biographer at any rate, of intemperance. He did nothing by halves. ‘No attempt is made at impartiality,’ he announced defiantly in the preface to his first book. ‘Impartial historians are as insufferable as the people who profess no politics.’ He was as committed in his politics as in his history; his career consisted of a series of crusades, tilting sometimes at windmills, sometimes at real dragons, but always conducted with courage and panache.

Caroline Moorehead

A Frenchman for all seasons

From soon after his death in 1838, Prince de Talleyrand, First Minister, Foreign Minister, President de Conseil and Grand Chambellan under a succession of French governments, became the subject of innumerable biographies. They have continued to pour out, year after year, though few of them have been as enjoyable as Duff Cooper’s Talleyrand in 1932, or as comprehensive as Michel Poniatowski’s five volumes in the 1980s. Some writers, like Sainte-Beuve, painted a man so venal and corrupt that lies came to him more naturally than the truth, but most sought hard to discover inner principles behind the cynical and secretive facade. For Robin Harris, boldly tackling Talleyrand’s life again, the balance has in recent years swung too far in favour of the inner principles.

Allan Massie

Is he or isn’t he?

Reginald Hill’s many readers may not trust the title, Super- intendent Andy Dalziel seeming to belong, like Captain Grimes, among the immortals. Can the author really have brought him to his version of the Reichenbach Falls, and, if so, will the Fat Man no’, like Holmes, come back again? Certainly it seems that he is dead, blown up by a terrorist bomb in the first chapter, and, if not quite dead, then dying, despite the certainty of DCI Pascoe’s seven-year-old daughter Rosie that ‘Uncle Andy’ can’t do such a thing. While we wait to find out we are given quite a lot of his subconscious visions and out-of-body experiences; quite the worst thing in the novel, examples of the pretentious ‘fine writing’ which Hill is inclined to indulge in.