More from Books

Saturday

Clive James

Tramps and Bowlers

In the park in front of my place, every nightA bunch of tramps sleep on the wooden porchOf the bowling green club-house. They shed no light.No policeman ever wakes them with a torch, Because no one reports their nightly stay.People like me who take an early walkJust after dawn will see them start the dayBy packing up. They barely even talk, Loading their duffel bags. They leave no trace,Thus proving some who sleep rough aren’t so dumb.Tramps blow their secret if they trash the place:This lot make sure that, when the bowlers come, There’s not a beer-can to pollute the scene.And so, by day, neat paragons of thriftAnd duty bow down to the very greenWhich forms, by night, for scruffs who merely drift, Their front lawn.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

How Stephen the Small came to save Montenegro and afterwards

In 1766, a diminutive adventurer appeared in Cetinje, the capital of the mountainous principality of Monte- negro, and managed to supplant the rightful claimant to the position of Vladika, the ruling Prince-Bishop. The adventurer was remarkable in many respects. Firstly, he was known as ‘Scepan Mali’, ‘Stephen the Small’, in a country where physical stature and strength were highly prized. Even more bizarrely, he claimed to be Tsar Peter III of Russia, who had been deposed by his wife Catherine the Great in 1762 in St Petersburg and strangled shortly afterwards by the brothers of her lover, Grigory Orlov. In fact he was neither a warrior nor a Russian but a snake-oil salesman, quack and purveyor of medicinal herbs.

Anita Brookner

What Henry knew

In October 1875 Henry James moved to Paris to advance his nascent career as a man of letters, specifically as a novelist. This was not his first visit: his enlightened family encouraged travel, but the desire to take up residence was intimately connected with his ambitions: Paris, after all, was the epi- centre of forward looking artistic endeavour. He was funded by his father and also by the reviews and articles he wrote for various American magazines, notably Tribune and the Atlantic Monthly.

Lloyd Evans

No longer a friend of the famous

Piers Morgan is big in the US. After his dismissal from the Mirror in 2004 he spent a thankless year as a freelance hack in Britain before popping up as the token ‘nasty Brit’ on Simon Cowell’s blockbusting show America’s Got Talent. This book traces his journey from sacked hack to superstar but unlike The Insider, Morgan’s chronicle of his first 20 years as a tabloid journalist, the new memoir covers barely 20 months. There’s enough padding here to insulate a barn. Morgan reprints in its entirety a Mother’s Day article listing ten important things Mrs Morgan taught little Piers when he was in shorts. The chaste details of his fling with Telegraph gossip columnist Celia Walden will make fascinating reading — for Piers and Celia.

Alberto Manguel

The survival of literature

Shelley (and later Paul Valéry) suggested that all literature might be the work of a single Author and that, throughout the ages, writers have merely acted as His (or Her) amanuenses. A visit to any large bookshop today seems to confirm this thesis: an infinitude of almost identical accounts of Da Vinci conspiracy theories, immigrant life in London or Los Angeles, dysfunctional families in Brooklyn or Glasgow, offer readers the impression of bewildering déjà vu. If literature has one Author, it’s time for Her (or Him) to change subjects. The figure in the carpet is wearing thin. Enter Enrique Vila-Matas.

Michael Gove

Winning the Cold War

John O’Sullivan has done much more with this book than provide three potted biographies; he has laid out a compelling account of how the Cold War was won, furnished us with a manual of political leadership and told us the inner secrets of a love story. At the heart of this story of the Eighties, a decade O’Sullivan rightly champions, is the remarkable relationship between Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. The strength of their bond was at the time regarded as semi-scandalous, a betrayal by the British Prime Minister of her first loyalty, to her country, in favour of a wild ideological fling. For those of us who were undergraduates when both were in power one of the trials of university life was finding one particular poster in all too many student bedrooms.

William Boyd

All at sea

On 2 July 1816 the French frigate Medusa, en route for Senegal, ran aground on the dreaded Arguin sandbank off the west coast of Africa. Incompetent seamanship had landed the vessel there and attempts to refloat the Medusa over the next couple of days proved to be in vain. The decision was therefore taken to press on for St Louis in Senegal, a couple of hundred miles to the south, in various of the ship’s boats and barges but, as they couldn’t carry all the passengers and crew, a large raft was constructed, from spars and timber lashed together, which would be towed behind four of the larger boats. The raft was substantial — 20 metres long by 7 wide — had a mast with a sail and even a small raised deck at the centre.

Eric Christiansen

One of the last Oxford thoroughfares with a bit of life

This book is about the Cowley Road, which runs for about a mile and a half south east out of Oxford towards a place where they assemble motor cars. Most of it was built up between 1830 and 1940, in many varieties of cheap and sometimes cheerful brickwork for the housing and lodging of ungenteel and downright working-class newcomers needed by but not welcome inside the well-fenced seat of learning across the river Cherwell. The far end crossed a marsh and was colonised and re-routed by Morris car workers between the wars; the dividing line was marked by the grandiose Regal cinema, which dwindled into a bingo hall in the 1970s and is now a huge, padlocked nothing.

Toby Young

Nothing to declare but his genius

Poor Colin Wilson. Has there ever been such a spectacular decline in an author’s fortunes? His first book, The Outsider (1956), was an overnight sensation. Hailed as a literary breakthrough by Philip Toynbee and Cyril Connolly, it earned him £20,000 in its first year of publication — the equivalent of £1 million in today’s money. ‘I have just met my first genius,’ declared Daniel Farson in the Daily Mail. ‘His name is Colin Wilson.’ He was only 24 at the time and, on the back of such fawning attention, seemed destined for a long and distinguished career. In fact, Wilson fell from grace within a year. To a large extent, he brought this on himself.

Tom Holland

Business as usual | 21 April 2007

Protests against international business are nothing new. Probably the wittiest, and certainly the most brutal, took place long before the first trashing of a Starbucks, way back in the early 1st century BC. This was a period when the Roman Republic, lacking a bureaucracy of its own, had opted to privatise the provincial tax-system — and huge conglomerates, complete with share options, board directors and AGMs, duly reaped spectacular profits. A spectacular whirlwind too, for in 89 BC, the entire province of Asia rose in revolt, and a year later, when the Roman commissioner was taken prisoner, he suffered a memorably hideous fate. ‘The Romans,’ pronounced his judge, ‘have only one abiding motive: greed.

Saturday

Sebastian Smee

Too much information

In managing too carefully the revelation of truth, parents often betray it. Graham Swift’s new novel is narrated by a mother and addressed to ‘you’, her teenage twins, boy and girl. It involves us, as voyeurs, in the revelation of a truth that will come as a bolt from the blue to the children. But it tries to manage this revelation so carefully, with so many detours, so much cushioning and qualification, that we may easily wonder whether the truth has been served or betrayed. The novel takes the form of a letter written by Paula, the mother, late one night while her children and her husband, Mike, sleep.

Christopher Bland

The be-all and end-all

In May 2004 the Royal Shakespeare Company was beginning to emerge from one of the more turbulent periods in its history. It had fled expensively from the Barbican, had an unhappy season at the Roundhouse, and run up a substantial deficit. Its plans to demolish the listed Memorial Theatre in Stratford- upon-Avon and replace it with an entirely new building had been received with less than utter rapture. Under a new team the RSC was beginning to find its feet creatively, and had made a healthy financial surplus. It was a time for caution and consolidation. Against this background, the RSC’s Artistic Director Michael Boyd clearly recalled the attitude of Marshal Foch at the battle of the Marne in 1914: ‘Hard pressed on my right. My centre is yielding. Impossible to manoeuvre.

Dorothy Pope

Family Home, Lincolnshire

and from the summerhouse, the viewis, first, that unmarked area of grass,where stood the Air Force quarters of a fewof England’s Few, that rings with silent laughs,our chipping green for practice golf. Beyond —the orchard’s gorgeous blossom, later fruitfor village children and the Anderson,now apple store. Then, topiary in privetand in box; my sculptor’s hands can seethe shape inside the mass. By Perkins’ grave,a clump of perfect daffodils blow freeof London’s politicking stress. I havea cherished weekend refuge where I come,say, ‘Hello House. Restore me.’ I am home.

Justin Cartwright

Historical- thrillery-factual fiction

Recently, Adam Mars Jones accused me in the Observer of being in some ways worse than Hitler, because at least Hitler had an excuse for idolising the German upper classes, namely race science, which I didn’t. I was outraged, and seriously considered suing him. I have since calmed down a little and see now that novels set in the recent past are particularly prone to judgments which are more about the history than the fiction, and sometimes even confuse the author with the fictional voice.  This was the point Allan Massie made so eloquently in these pages a few weeks ago.       Dancing with Eva raises some of these questions.

Ben Wilson

Making a virtue out of necessity

John Evelyn would find our agonies about food all too familiar. He was impressed with the modern ‘miracles of art’ whereby plants were forced in hot beds and meats and fish were preserved for months or years; but nothing tasted better or was more wholesome than fresh ingredients. He was preoccupied by healthy diets, noting that ‘husbandmen and laborious people [were] more robust and longer lived than others of an uncertain, extravagant diet’. Others, from the 16th century through to the 18th, who were lucky or rich enough to be able to eat wild produce, rated their taste far above cultivated or reared foods.

Simon Baker

Voodoo, rape and an apple tree

A summary of the events that take place in this novel might run as follows: a lost boy (who may be the soul of a comatose adult) walks around a hospital with an apple tree growing inconveniently in his stomach. He explores most of the floors, some of which are in a different dimension, and meets, among others, the kinky ‘Rubber Nurse’. Elsewhere, Nurse Swallow loves Mr Steele, a handsome surgeon. Nikki Froth, a prostitute, is hiding from her drug-addled pimps, Spanner and Case. PC Dixon loves Nikki. Sir Reginald Saint-Hellier, the head surgeon, leads a Satanist cult which murders babies and rapes virgins on the building’s 13th floor. Haitian porters perform voodoo rituals.

Allan Massie

Not content with the contents

Degas once complained to Mallarmé that he had been trying to write a sonnet, unsuccessfully, though he had had such a good idea for it. ‘Alas, my poor Edgar,’ was the reply, ‘poems are made with words, not with ideas’. A neat comment, but is it always possible to distinguish between the two? Even a ‘nonsense poem’ is not devoid of ideas: ‘The vorpal blade went snicker-snack’. Nonsense words, yet the idea is evident. How to separate aesthetic delight from content? The question becomes more acute still when you turn to consideration of the novel. Nabokov, better critic than novelist to my mind, went for aesthetic delight, ‘the tingle in the spine’. ‘Cherish the details,’ he said.

Saturday

Jonathan Mirsky

Our women at the front

In the horror that is the Iraq war reporters usually broadcast from the safety of the vast Green Zone where Coalition civilians eat, sleep, make policy and issue statements. What we see on television are pictures taken by non-white photographers; the face-to-camera commentary usually comes from within the Zone. We can only surmise what life is like for Iraqis and along with the guessing there creeps in an I-don’t-want-to see-anymore fatigue. Now comes Lynne O’Donnell who, as Joseph Conrad insisted about good writing, above all makes us see. A foreign correspondent with considerable experience in China, she now works for Agence France-Presse in Hong Kong. In 2003 O’Donnell found herself in the northern city of Mosul a few weeks after the American invasion of Iraq.

Montagu Curzon

From hero to villain

Patrick Bishop’s much praised Fighter Boys brought new life to the story of the Battle of Britain; by analysing the backgrounds of the pilots he added a dimension of who-they-were to the well-known what-they-did. Rescued from the status of national myth, they became people again. Trying the same with Bomber Boys is harder. Flying bombers had not the same dash: Guy Gibson likened it to driving a bus. And they were many, not a Few: 125,000 passed through Bomber Command. Hardest is the highly contested reputation of the bombing offensive. Once the scale of its devastation and carnage passed the point of comparability with that suffered in England, and then rose to apocalyptic levels, there was no moral high ground left.

Juliet Townsend

Starting out on the wrong foot

E. Nesbit once pointed out that, in order to write good books for the young, it is not necessary to enjoy a close relationship with children in adult life. The essential thing is to retain a true and vivid memory of one’s own childhood; not only of events and people, but of feelings and emotions, sounds and smells and all the minutiae of day-to-day life. Jacqueline Wilson, the enormously popular writer and most borrowed author from British libraries, is certainly a case in point. Her childhood covered much the same period as mine, and this account, written for her younger readers, brings back a host of memories. Many of the best descriptions of childhood are written by people whose own experience of it was miserable: Dickens and Kipling are obvious examples.