More from Books

Saturday

Vernon Bogdanor

Two cheers are quite enough

The 20th century saw the triumph of democracy; by its end, 140 out of the world’s 189 states held multi-party elections. Yet this triumph was greeted, not with enthusiasm, but with apathy and indifference. Democracy appeared to be valued more by the rulers, who had become its cheerleaders, than by the ruled, more by the elites than by the people. The elites, indeed, were tempted to blame the people for being insufficiently appreciative, and for failing to turn out to vote or join political parties. The people, however, did not reject democracy as an ideal; what they criticised were its practical short-comings. Nevertheless, the consequence may be that democracy is less secure than we think.

Anthony Daniels

The commonsense approach

Medical advance has been startling in the past half-century. To give only one example, more or less at random: if the techniques of resuscitation and trauma surgery that were available in 1960 were still in use today, our homicide rate would be three to five times higher than it is (and it is two or three times higher than it was in 1960 nonetheless). Atul Gawande is a surgeon at one of the world’s greatest surgical centres, the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. As such, he is committed to medicine’s noblest ideal, the dedication of science to the cure of disease. It seems almost unfair that he should also be a gifted writer with an ability to tell medical anecdotes whose dénouement the reader awaits with suspense.

Edward Harrison

The price of defeat

This substantial and fascinating book looks at the aftermath of the Third Reich in the German-speaking regions of Europe. The Allies ‘came in hate’, their memories of Nazi atrocities refreshed by the liberation of concentration camps like Auschwitz, where the Soviets found more than a million items of clothing, and Buchenwald, where the piles of corpses made the ferocious General Patton physically sick. The Archbishop of Cologne protested in 1945 that ‘the whole nation is not guilty, and that many thousand children, old people and mothers are wholly innocent and it is they who now bear the brunt.’ Women in particular suffered at the hands of the victors.

Harriet Waugh

A beastly upbringing

Minotaur in Love is Fraser Harrison’s second novel. His first, High on the Hog, published in 1991, set around a family Christmas in the country, was funny and moving. Minotaur in Love is altogether odder. Written in epistolary form, the Minotaur of the title is Bruno, a publisher, who tries to explain his strangeness to a female former colleague. He does this in a journal, starting with his birth shortly after the accidental death of his five-year-old sister. He has the distinct feeling that his father dislikes him, and he attributes this to his father’s unassuageable grief. Their estrangement becomes obvious when the ten-year-old Bruno, on his brand- new birthday bicycle, follows his father on the latter’s weekly pilgrimage to his daughter’s grave.

Christopher Esher

Boom and bust in Sarawak

On stage at Wyndham’s Theatre just now, the curtain for Somerset Maugham’s The Letter is a map of South-east Asia, circa 1920. In the middle lies Sarawak, a slab of northern Borneo about the size of England. This is appropriate because Sarawak, which he visited frequently, was the mise-en-scène for much of Maugham’s work. Less appropriate is the fact that, along with Ceylon, Burma and Malaya, Sarawak is picked out in red. But Sarawak wasn’t a colony or a British possession; it belonged to a single English family, the Brookes. The last king of that land, known as the White Rajah, was Vyner Brooke who married an Englishwoman called Sylvia Brett, the subject of this biography. I met the lady in question, my great-aunt, only once.

Marcus Berkmann

The birth of structuralism

Of all the sciences and pseudo-sciences that clamour for our attention, none is a tougher sell than pure mathematics. The British have never been noticeably keen on abstraction, but there’s something about algebra, analysis and, indeed, topological vector spaces that sends even the calmest and cleverest of us reaching for the gin. I think this is because each of us, bar the truly gifted, reaches a point with maths when we simply don’t get it. It may be the seven times table, it may be differential equations or differential calculus, and for me it was classical mechanics in my first year at university, but there it goes — whoosh! — straight over your head. After that lie only incomprehension and frustration, or in my case a Third.

Edward Norman

Protesting too much

Christopher Hitchins writes with exuberance and a sense of the great emancipation which he supposes modern knowledge offers humanity. ‘Scepticism and discovery have freed them from the burden of having to defend their god as a footling, clumsy, straws-in-the-hair mad scientist,’ he says of religious believers, whom he invites to abandon their faith and to embrace ‘reason’ — though should they choose not to do so, he insists, they are at liberty to believe whatever they like, ‘as long as they make no further attempt to inculcate religion by any form of coercion’. This book is a lengthy denial of religious belief, and an advocacy of atheism rendered in the familiar tones of evangelical assurance.

Charlotte Moore

The good ended happily

The most difficult task for a novelist is to engage the reader in an account of happiness. In Consequences, Penelope Lively manages to pull this off. She examines happiness as ‘a state of being that lifts you above ordinary existence, that pervades every moment, that confers immunity’. This ‘sublime content’ is achieved by Lorna, the first of three generations of women; the consequences of Lorna’s idyll shape the lives of her daughter Molly and grand-daughter Ruth.There is another set of consequences, however; Lorna’s beloved husband Matt is killed in Crete in 1941; the consequences of loss are intertwined with those of fulfilled love for these succeeding generations. The damage sends fault lines snaking down through the decades.

Sam Leith

The biography of a soul

This is a book that really ought not to work. Being Shelley is not quite a biography and not quite a critical reader and not quite anything most people will have seen before. If you want to know, in order, what happened in the life of Percy Bysshe Shelley — where he went, who he met, what he did — you’d be best off looking elsewhere. If you’re an undergraduate looking for a line-by-line interpretive guide to his canon, likewise this is not your book.Yet I think Being Shelley will grow to be indispensible to anyone writing or thinking about the poet from now on — a vital companion to the two more conventional volumes that it isn’t.

Saturday

Sarah Standing

Familiar but fascinating

Princess Diana was two years my junior and eight years younger than her most recent biographer Tina Brown. Our collective generation was one in search of someone or something to provide the soundtrack to our lives. We hadn’t lived through the second world war, we were too young to have connected with Vietnam or fallen for Kennedy, Sinatra was already old and our own royal family appeared atrophied, boringly embalmed in pomp and circumstance. We were Thatcher’s kids, who may well have been raised on a gentle diet of Mallory Towers and Jackie magazine but we were also seduced by punk and possibilities and ready for a seismic change. It was the dawn of a much racier media age.

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’.