More from Books

Saturday

James Delingpole

All’s fair in love and war

Weevils, sodomy and flogging or Baker rifles, jangling bits and ragged squares? For most authors dealing with the Napoleonic era, it’s an either/or. C. S. Forester and Patrick O’Brian do the Royal Navy, Bernard Cornwell does the land battles. But there’s one greedy-guts out there who wants to have his cake and eat it. Step forward Allan Mallinson, creator of both cavalry officer Matthew Hervey and sea Captain Sir Laughton Peto. Not that we’re complaining, obviously. It’s true that it can be irritating when a book’s narrative hops between the separate adventures of two distinct characters, but in the case of Mallinson’s latest, Man of War, it works splendidly.

Zenga Longmore

Venus in tears

Saartjie Baartman, who performed under the name of ‘the Hottentot Venus’, became one of the most famous theatrical attractions of Georgian London. Exhibited like an animal for the entertainment of a paying crowd (‘two bob a head’), she was routinely obliged to suffer sharp prods in the buttocks from her curious audience who ‘wished to ascertain that all was nattral’. Tears would roll silently down her heart-shaped face. The deathly sighs she emitted on stage became as great a wonder as her Venusian form. Saartjie was born in the Eastern Cape in South Africa in 1789. Her Afrikaans name translates into Little Sarah, an apt choice for a girl who would grow no taller than four foot six and a half inches.

Clive Aslet

The house that coal built

I opened this book expecting to  find the sort of volume a considerate host would place in your country- house bedroom. It is a bit more than that. Taking the decline of the Earls of Fitzwilliam and their enormous house Wentworth Woodhouse, outside Rother- ham, as her theme, Caroline Bailey evokes the social revolution that occurred in 20th- century Britain. The almost inconceivable riches of the Fitzwilliam family — coming- of-age parties were celebrated with entertainment for tens of thousands of people — are contrasted to the squalor in which local miners lived. The Fitzwilliams were not bad employers.

Saturday

Raymond Carr

Bouncy castles in Spain

Hugh Thomas is widely known as the author of scholarly blockbusters 1,000 pages long. He now excels in what he calls an intermezzo, a learned and lively book of 192 pages, full of good things including splendid pen portraits of worthies: of Choiseul, the easygoing foreign minister of France; of King Charles III of Spain, rising at dawn to spend the day shooting game and going to bed early after a frugal dinner. It concerns the visit to Spain in 1764 of Pierre Augustin Caron, later to be known, the result of assiduous social climbing, as de Beaumarchais. Beaumarchais’ father was a famous Parisian watchmaker in an age when possession of a fine pocket watch, a technological breakthrough, was for a nobleman as necessary an indication of status as fine clothes and a wig.

Honor Clerk

An ever-present absence

It is a curious phenomenon of the modern novel that so many writers entrust their narrative voice to a character that in real life they would go a long way to avoid. In the right sort of hands, of course, it can be brilliantly effective, but imagine a Jane Austen novel narrated by Miss Bates or Jane Eyre told by Mrs Fairfax and one can see some of the problems that Margaret Forster sets herself when she refracts her story of tragedy and obsessive grief through the person of Louise Roscoe. Louise teaches in a primary school. She is married to Don, an advertising executive. Over is her diary, written to try to help her deal with the death in a sailing accident of her teenage daughter, Miranda.

William Brett

More Angry Young Men

Clinton Heylin is a celebrated Bob Dylan expert, which makes his subsequent concentration on punk rock something of a surprise. But there’s a connection — Dylan shares with the best punk bands a devastating originality and a refusal to toe the established line. It is this free-spirited mentality that clearly attracts Heylin to his subjects, and his admiration for this quality is evident throughout Babylon’s Burning, a complete and authoritative account of the punk and post-punk movement from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s.

Jonathan Clark

A driving sense of duty

The American Revolution is the gorilla in the corner of the room. Some used to pretend that it was safely dead, merely a stuffed gorilla. Others argued that it was inherently friendly. Others again thought it safely distracted by its banana. Alas, it was none of these things, as recent events show. The American Revolution produced a wholly novel society. Its potential for action will dominate our century, as German unification dominated the early 20th. Yet we prefer to pretend that nothing much has happened. So the British still edge round this momentous question by discussing instead King George III. Nineteenth-century Whigs blamed the loss of the colonies on the king alone, mad or tyrannical or both.

Olivia Glazebrook

Behind protective glass

Jane Smiley suffered a period of writer’s block after 9/11. In the middle of writing a novel, Good Faith, she found herself unable to continue. It all suddenly seemed pointless. So, to inspire herself to complete her own, she read a hundred novels — one of which was Boccaccio’s The Decameron. After finishing Good Faith (published in 2003) she wrote a book about the hundred novels she had read (13 Ways of Looking at the Novel), and then she wrote this book, Ten Days in the Hills, which is a ‘reworking’ of The Decameron. Writer’s block can rarely have been put to such good use. Finding herself unable to write was a shock for Smiley since inspiration had always come easily to her.

Ian Thomson

Out of joint

At a Clapham dinner party recently I was offered marijuana. Nothing unusual in that, only the joint took me to a far continent of anxiety; I had been inhaling skunk, a modern Special Brew strain of marijuana and about as beneficial. Next morning, still mildly hallucinating, I craved to reread T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Time was literally out of joint, but Eliot’s mystico-religious reflections on the nature of the universe might leave me feeling bright and beatifically attuned. I began to read ‘Burnt Norton’, and waited for the visionary moment. It never arrived; instead I was struck by how pretentious the poetry was. Craig Raine, in this pungent critical essay on Eliot, concedes that Four Quartets ‘has it faults’.

Frederic Raphael

The poetry of panic

Tenn — as friends and sycophants called him — Williams was one more of those American writers whose lives have spectacular first acts, but dwindle away, more or less slowly, into repetition, sterility and self-pity eased (and exacerbated) by sex, alcohol and drugs (‘Way to go’, some might say). Williams was born in 1911, in Mississippi; if he had died 45 years later, admirers would be wondering what masterpieces he might have written, had he survived into maturity. In fact he did survive, but he did not mature: he lasted till 1982, his small body and fragile genius having endured as much punishment as its owner could inflict. He choked finally on a pill-bottle top, in a hurry for nirvana: a melodramatic final curtain worthy of his better days.

Anna Vaux

Not quite as we like it

‘What you will’ has a Shakespearean ring to it. It is, after all, the second part of the title of Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night. It suggests romance. And comedy; a little mayhem, girls dressing up as boys, and vice versa. Possibly on an island. Alas there are no cakes and ale in What You Will, Katherine Bucknell’s third novel, set mainly in Hamersmith, W14. More  sackcloth and ashes. Recalling her days at Oxford, American Gwen pictures people fondly, ‘toiling towards some unspecified advancement in their woollen suits, woollen skirts, woollen tights, and over the top their black gowns’. She ‘relished the atmosphere of difficulty, of chill, of foreboding’.

Allan Massie

First person singular

The young Evelyn Waugh, it’s said, once declared in a newspaper article that the writing of novels in the first person was a contemptible practice. One would like to think he gave his reasons, but, according to Somerset Maugham, ‘he threw out the statement with just the same take-it-or-leave-it casualness as Euclid used when he made his celebrated observation about parallel straight lines.’ Subsequently Waugh would write his most popular novel, Brideshead Revisited, in that despicable first person. It would have been a poorer novel if he hadn’t shown the glamorous Flyte family through the eyes of his narrator, dazzled (if also dull) Charles Ryder.

Saturday

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

A tale of treachery

When The Spectator recently said goodbye to 56 Doughty Street, we said goodbye to more than three decades of memories. Whatever else we were any good at under Alexander Chancellor’s editorship, we knew how to throw a party, from the great sesquicentennial ball in 1978 to the summer garden parties to the Thursday lunches. Among other happy moments in that dining room perched giddily at the top of the building I remember a ludicrous exchange on biblical topography between Enoch Powell and Auberon Waugh; or Richard Cobb, the great historian of France, waking from a post-prandial nap with the words that he must get the 3.

Charles Chadwick

Hospital Music

In the square at St Bartholomew’s hospital,Crates of flowers are stacked for bedding outRound the plane trees. Patients with paper cups sit aboutIn wheelchairs or under the shelters. Above, in the hall,An orchestra is rehearsing: a Mozart piano concerto,The Bach double, some Handel — clearly audible outsideThrough the fountain’s splash, as if filling a tideOr a sound the wind makes. Nobody seems to knowIt is there. A youth with a reconstructed faceGlares at a girl, grey-lidded, lip-white, drip-fedWho stares at a scabbed tree permanently disfigured,While nurses, a doctor, go by at a determined pace.Either the sound is of all things the most naturalOr there is no connction of any kind, none at all.

Philip Hensher

The greatest honour of all

The Order of Merit is the only honour which almost everyone would like to possess. The Garter is picturesque but would be felt by some to be anachronistic and somewhat pompous. Gs, Ks, Cs, Os and Ms are handed out with the rations and can anyway probably be bought. Companions of Hon- our are respectable enough but unequivocally second eleven. The OM is tops. For one thing, it is in the gift of the sovereign and so comes without any taint of party favour. ‘His Majesty entirely disregards the question of the political opinions of anyone who may be suitable for an honour,’ wrote Stamfordham loftily when Gilbert Murray’s candidature was in question.

John Michell

The lunatic space race

The 1960s brought in the Beatles, drugs, long hair, hippy communes, eastern gurus and the alternative culture, so called. Against all this was the ‘straight’ world whose denizens were short-haired Frank Sinatra fans in suits. The two types seemed quite different from each other, but one thing they had in common was their obsession with fanatastical notions. The alternatives were into UFOs, ley lines, psychic healing and whatnot, while the straights believed in flying to the moon and founding colonies or military bases in outer space. And since the men in suits had the power and the money, they were in a position to realise their fantasies. In 1969 an American rocket deposited two men on the moon’s surface.

Andrew Taylor

The longest day

As Hitchcock knew, the best thrillers use the very simplest materials to achieve their sinister purpose of enthralling and terrifying their audience. Nicci French’s previous novels have shown an impressive ability to dramatise the darkest concerns of her readers. Her latest book taps into the universal fear of parents: what do you do when your child goes missing? It sounds a simple formula, and it is. But getting it right is extraordinarily difficult. Saturday 18 December is Nina Landry’s 40th birthday. She and her children — 15- year-old Charlotte and 12-year-old Jackson — are off to Florida for Christmas with Nina’s boyfriend. The Landrys live on Sandling Island off the Essex coast.

Grey Gowrie

Bells to St Wystan

This week sees the centenary of the birth in York of W. H. Auden. All over the world this season, Audenites should at 1755 hours precisely prepare a very cold, very dry Martini and at 1800 hours, six o’clock, again precisely, down it in praise and memory of a giant of English letters. Vital to be meticulous about the hour. As he said of himself in an autobiographical sketch: So obsessive a ritualista pleasant surprisemakes him cross.Without a watchhe would never know whento feel hungry or horny. Like many Oxford undergraduates of my generation (he was Professor of Poetry when I went up), I knew Auden slightly and dined with him a few times. He had aged prematurely, become repetitive and, away from the page, fairly boring.

Saturday

Charlotte Hobson

A genius for living

Perhaps the only drawback to this highly enjoyable biography is the shadow of utter banality that it throws over one’s own life by comparison. Princess Sofka Dolgorouky, the author’s grandmother and namesake, began life as scion of one of the great ruling families of Russia and a playmate of the Tsarevich. She was brought up by her grandmother, a figure reminiscent of the Countess in Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades who did not know how to dress herself. Her mother, meanwhile, astonished Petersburg society by becoming a surgeon, flying her own plane, and receiving not one but two Crosses of St George for her bravery as a doctor during the first world war; her father occasioned less surprise but no less scandal by marrying his gypsy mistress.

Robert Stewart

When tobacco worked wonders

The British empire in North America was not founded in a fit of absence of mind, though it might be said, in its beginnings at least, to have represented the triumph of hope over experience. From the outset, King James I and his chief minister, Robert Cecil, the Earl of Salisbury, were sceptical. A royal charter was granted to the London Virginia Company in 1606 and a Royal Council appointed to oversee the trans-Atlantic adventure, but the king was interested only in grabbing the lion’s share of the profits that might accrue. Otherwise, as Cecil put it, the colonists were to be left on their own ‘unto the peril which they incur’. The omens were bad.