More from Books

Saturday

Matthew Dennison

Uncomfortable home truths

In a large house in north London, thick with the fug of kosher cooking and unspoken secrets, lives a lopsided family. The Rubins are envied — and enviable, surely? Claudia Rubin is a rabbi. She is also a writer, media personality and, par excellence, mother. She dominates her gentle, disappointed biographer husband Nor- man and their four ill-assorted children: an emotional, intellectual, motherly leviathan. Her standards are exactingly high — ‘For Claudia, good enough has never been good enough’ — but the veneer of family perfection Rabbi Rubin takes pride in sharing with the outside world is built on shaky foundations. The obligations and responsibilities of love have ousted simple affection.

Lee Langley

A romantic looks back

The unending journey of this book takes Mark Tully from slums to skyscrapers as he explores the past, present and future not only of the subcontinent but of society, both eastern and western; how democracy is facing up to fundamentalism — Hindu, Muslim and an atheism he scathingly labels ‘aggressive secularism’. The Dawkins camp would not be welcome in his compound. There was a time when Tully was the most famous Englishman in India — ‘What does Tully Sahib say?’ the man on the village charpoy would ask when political or economic upheaval loomed. Tully’s mellifluous voice filled the airwaves for the 22 years he ran the BBC’s New Delhi bureau, trusted and loved by his millions of listeners.

Caroline Baum

The wild one

You can hardly blame a woman of 102 for being a bit hazy when it comes to giving directions. ‘Drive to the Italian border,’ said Lesley Blanch on the telephone, after initially attempting to discourage my visit. ‘When you get there, make a U-turn and I’m the first on the right.’ And so she was, tucked away in a house high above Menton on the French Riv- iera. ‘It is always useful to be near a frontier, in case you need to make a dash for it.’ There were countless times when she crossed frontiers that most people would have trouble finding on a map, not fleeing but restlessly searching for romance, experience and adventure.

Allan Massie

Ordering the steps of the Dance . . .

Writing a novel is a voyage into unknown territory. (Reading one is also, of course.) The author explores possibilities. To some extent even those novels which seem far removed from autobiography represent the author’s imaginary, or alternative, life, characters owing more in the last resort to him than to any identifiable models. He is a puppet-master, ordering the steps of the dance. Nevertheless he is likely, in the writing, often to be taken by surprise. ‘How do I know what I mean till I see what I’ve said?’  What to the reader seems right, even inevitable, might have taken a different course. The truth of this is well illustrated by  the jottings Anthony Powell made, published posthumously as A Writer’s Notebook.

Saturday

Boris Volodarsky With Oleg Gordievsky

Untangling the web of deception

This is perhaps the most amazing non-fiction spy book that has ever appeared during or after the Cold War. There is little doubt that all intelligence historians interested in the past 50 years of espionage games played by the CIA and the KGB will read it as we did — in one take: A day in the 1990s must count as one of the extreme low points of CIA counter- intelligence. When this KGB provocateur and deceiver concluded a lecture to CIA staff personnel in their Langley auditorium, the audience — all professional American intelligence officers — rose as one, eager-faced and thrilled, to give Yuri Nosenko a standing ovation. What a wonderful grand finale!

Philip French

An affair to remember

New movie festivals spring up every year and pictures can achieve fame and reach large, if not especially lucrative, audiences by playing on the worldwide festival circuit without ever getting into normal commercial cinemas. But pace John Huston, who over half a century ago described Edinburgh as ‘the only film festival worth a damn’ (a tribute the organisers repeat annually), there are still only three that truly matter, and all began with political motivations. Mussolini launched the world’s first film festival in Venice in 1932 to advertise his Fascist regime.

Jane Ridley

When friends fall out

Political biography is in the doldrums. No one wants to read 800 pages or so of cradle-to-grave dead politics, especially if it’s familiar stuff and has all been written about before. The detail is too much, and the potted narrative of forgotten political manoeuvring tends to overwhelm the life. One way out of this dilemma is to write about relationships. Friendship in politics is the hidden key to the top — can you think of an anorak who made it as prime minister? Even the nerdish ones had friends — the younger Pitt had Wilberforce, Bonar Law had Beaverbrook; but once our hero climbs to the top of the greasy pole the dynamics change and old relationships fall apart.

Michael Glover

Haunted by the past

This curious and wearisomely long novel, the third of a trilogy, and set in Ashford, Kent, is partly an exercise in the fantastical impregnated by the historically serendipitous, and partly a crudely shaped slab of kitchen-sink realism, complete with passages of high comedy. These two elements strain to come together, to knit into some seamless whole, but, ultimately, they remain yawningly apart from, and on occasions almost entirely invisible to, each other. What is more, these looming elements of the fantastical never become sufficiently realised, or even sufficiently comprehensible, for the reader to be able to weigh — or even properly to register — their emotional impact upon each other.

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.