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Saturday

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 25 November 2006

Action Cook Book (1965) by Len Deighton The fact that the cover of this book by Len Deighton shows a chap cooking spaghetti while wearing a gun lends itself to many interpretations. Was spaghetti so expensive in 1965 that it needed an armed guard? Will someone be paying the ultimate price for overcooking it? Is she checking him for nits? Was Deighton’s sense of his own masculinity so fragile that he needed a shoulder- holster and bird in a negligée to write about cooking? Is that an insufferably solemn question? But these are matters perhaps for the cultural historian. I will confine myself to saying that Action Cook Book was Deighton’s second cookbook, after Où est le garlic?

Jane Gardam

The uninteresting survivor

C. K. Stead was Professor of English literature in the University of Auckland and is a highly esteemed literary critic and author. He is not, to my knowledge, a theologian but was urged to write this novel about the life of Judas Iscariot by the professor of religious studies at Victoria University because, ‘These are our stories. They must be constantly retold.’ Stead has, I would guess, used his recent awards to visit the Holy Land, for the beauty of Galilee, its atmosphere and light, and the looming presence of Jerusalem are some of the best things in the book. The novel itself is oddly disappointing. It is based on the far from new idea that Judas did not commit suicide after the crucifixion by hanging himself on the fig tree once cursed by Christ.

Saturday

The Spectator

Christmas Books 1

Rupert Christiansen Recently I’ve had the good fortune to review three works of magisterial scholarship in these pages — John Haffenden’s William Empson: Among the Mandarins (OUP, £30), Philip Gossett’s Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera (Chicago University Press, £22.50) and Patrick Carnegy’s Wagner and the Art of the Theatre (Yale, £29.95). Because they run in total for over 1,500 pages, I haven’t had time for much else. But I hugely enjoyed John Bridcut’s sensitive study of boy-love, Britten’s Children (Faber, £18.99), and the narrative fluency and psychological acuity of Michael Arditti’s elegant novel A Sea Change (Maia, £8.99).

Philip Ziegler

A sharp-eyed, realistic royalist

He was visited only by his children and grandchildren and one or two very old friends, complained Tommy Lascelles a few years before he died; apart from that, ‘I only see some of the young scribes, who, poor boys, think my opinion of their writing is worth getting, e.g. Philip Ziegler and C. Douglas-Home.’ Lascelles delighted in tantalising this now elderly scribe by extracting from a locked chest a volume of his diaries, reading a few sentences aloud, and then returning it to its repository. ‘That won’t be seen by anyone for 50 years,’ he would pronounce with some relish. ‘It is the duty of the private secretary to be private.’ That was some 30 years ago.

Ed Smith

Why it’s more than just a game

Simon Barnes, the brilliant writer about sport and nature, would never claim he has had much influence. No, he would say with a journalistic shrug, influence? Me? Of course not: I merely describe, amuse and draw attention to significant events. But his sportswriting, some of it for The Spectator, has been so original and insightful that he has redefined the genre. In doing so, by showing that sportswriting can reveal profound truths about human nature, he has also changed the way many of us look at sport itself. Appropriately, his new book, The Meaning of Sport, has a dual nature. It is about journalism, what life is like as a newspaper’s chief sports writer, and it is about sport — the essence of the stuff itself.

Paul Johnson

Far from Holy Fathers

It is curious that despite Spain’s immense services to the Roman Church — expelling Islam from Western Europe over half a millennium of hard fighting, then opening up the Western hemisphere to Catholicism — only two Spaniards have become pope, and both were Borgias (Alfonso de Borja, who reigned as Pope Calixtus III, 1455-8, spelt his family name the Spanish way). The year after his election, Calixtus gave his nephew Rodrigo Borgia, then aged 24, a cardinal’s hat and in 1457 made him vice-chancellor of the Holy See. As such, he played an important role in the election of four popes, Pius II, Paul II, Sixtus IV and Innocent VIII, before becoming pope himself in 1492 and reigning 11 years as Alexander VI.

John Bercow

The poisoned olive branch

On paper, Adam LeBor boasts excellent credentials for writing about what is at best the spine- chilling failure of the United Nations to prevent modern genocide and at worst its active complicity with evil. He reported on the Yugoslav wars for both the Times and the Independent, his empathy with the victims of slaughter leaps off virtually every page and the man has certainly done his research. No one could accuse LeBor of underselling himself. In his own words, ‘This is intended to be much more than a historical study… by recounting at length the reasons for, and results of, the catastrophe at Srebrenica, I hope to provide a detailed template for understanding why the United Nations has not stopped genocide in Darfur.

Alan Coren

The pleasures of peripolitania

Were you to look up the word ‘peripolitan’ in the Oxford English Dictionary, you would not find it. Though the thing weighs three tons and preens itself on containing every word jotted in English since the language first dragged itself out of the primordial alphabet soup, peripolitan is not there. This irritates me no end, because I coined it, 20 years ago. I have, furthermore, deployed it at every subsequent opportunity, often in bold or italic the better to catch the lexicographic eye; but whenever I ring the OED to ask them when it’s going in, some snooty philological time-server tells me that they already have a perfectly good word to describe those who live on the edge of cities: they are suburban.

Nicholas Haslam

Around the world in 80 years

Two summers ago at La Rondinaia, during one of those last evenings before he flew from his sky-high eyrie for the last time, Gore Vidal advised me to read the 19th-century memoirist Augustus Hare’s The Story of my Life, an author with whom he felt great affinity. ‘And read all six volumes, too’, he added. Within a fortnight John Saumarez Smith had produced a set, and within moments I was hooked on Hare. Where but in Hare could one learn that Queen Victoria was in fact christened Victorina, but, in the trial of Queen Caroline, a little girl of that name ‘played a most unpleasant part’, so the Duchess of Kent changed her daughter’s.

Simon Heffer

A greedy, randy idealist

Rosemary Ashton has rather cornered the market in dissecting the lives of the intellectual movers and shakers of early Victorian England. She has already written well about the Carlyles, and about George Eliot and her lover G. H. Lewes. Now, all these and more have walk-on parts (rather more than that in Miss Eliot’s case) in this new account of life at 142 Strand, where between 1847 and 1854 the radical publisher John Chapman ran his business. Chapman was chaotic, often unscrupulous in both his business and his private dealings, but there is no doubt that he was an important piece of the jigsaw that made up the picture of London’s intellectual life at that time.

Michael Henderson

Worshipping at the shrines

So far as Robert Craft is concerned, Stravinsky represents a mine of limitless resource. Having spent the last 23 years of the composer’s life serving him as fan, friend, conductor, associate and general reviver of spirits, virtually as a member of the family, he remains the most loyal of servants, righting every wrong, fighting every battle and keeping the flame aglow. He has even arranged to be buried alongside Stravinsky and his second wife, Vera, in Venice, for, as the composer told him, ‘we are a trio con brio’. So the question must be asked: is the old boy worth it? When he died in 1971 Stravinsky was widely considered to be the most famous ‘serious’ musician in the world (Lorenz Hart gave him a name check in Pal Joey), and the greatest composer.

Allan Massie

Papa rises again

We were in a Béarnais restaurant in Montmartre and a young Canadian novelist and short story writer, Bill Prendiville, was speaking admiringly about Hemingway. This was pleasing, because you don’t often hear him being praised now. It was also appropriate, because most of the good early Hemingway was written in Paris, and the best of his later books is his memoir of Paris in the Twenties. Admittedly his Paris was the Left Bank — rue Cardinal Lemoine, Boulevard Saint-Germain, rue Mouffetard, Montparnasse — rather than up in the 18th, and some of the books Bill spoke warmly of are not among those I like. Still, it was good to hear him spoken of in this way.

Saturday

Ferdinand Mount

The monster we hate to love

What is it about fruit? There is no more searing passage in the memoirs of Auberon Waugh than the bit when three bananas reach the Waugh household in the worst days of postwar austerity and Evelyn Waugh places all three on his own plate, then before the anguished eyes of his three children ladles on cream, which was almost unprocurable, and sugar, which was heavily rationed, and scoffs the lot.

Robert Salisbury

When our servants become our masters

This country is incompetently governed. The cost to the taxpayer is vast and growing. The level of incompetence has increased almost as rapidly as public expenditure. Indeed, taxation has failed to keep up with Gordon Brown’s prodigality. So, in order to feed the Moloch, he has been obliged to raise taxes. That has proved inadequate to satisfy the public sector’s insatiable demand for money, so he has had to turn to ever more ingenious devices to squeeze the tax-payer. His most expensive device is likely to prove the longest lasting. The Private Finance Initiative failed to take off under the Major government, largely because Kenneth Clarke sensibly refused to soften the transfer of risk criteria as the potential private sector providers wished.

Marcus Berkmann

Making sense of crazy times

This is a huge book. Crikey, it’s a whopper. It’s impossible not to won- der, as you hold it in your hands and try your damnedest not to drop it on your foot, whether its author, for all his fame and eminence, is quite worth all this ink, paper, attention. And this is just the first volume. If, as seems reasonable to assume, several more collections are plan-ned, we could well end up with four such breezeblocks, between them covering 40 years of Michael Palin’s public and private life. It could take nearly as long to read them. Nonetheless, to comedy obsessives of a certain age, Palin remains an intriguing figure. The best actor of the six Pythons, and the peacemaker in the group, he has also enjoyed the most successful career after and apart from Python.

Nicholas Harman

The tyranny of nanny

Grumpy grand-dads do their job best when, behind the façade, they pretend to be really loveable. Michael Bywater, who accepts the irritating label of ‘baby boomer’ (born 1953), makes no pretence of loveability. Instead he is very, very funny. ‘Something has gone wrong,’ he says, and he knows what it is; the nannying that we all put up with in practically every transaction of our lives. A lesser man would blame it on the obvious culprits, the lying advertisers and politicians and health-and-safety regulators and all the jumped-up ‘authorities’ whose condescending orders and advice and cajolements plague us every day. Bywater knows that the ones to blame are ourselves, the big babies who put up with the nonsense.

A.N. Wilson

Escape into happiness

The central and the longest part of this all too brief memoir concerns a boarding school in Scotland, the Benedictine Abbey of Fort Augustus. The day-to-day atmosphere of the school was philistine, though the Abbey was not ... Most of the boys were Scottish thugs or colonial expatriates, and some of the masters seemed to me certifiably mad ... I became a crippling snob in self-defence, and this caused a regrettable narrowing of sympathies which only London eventually erased. I learnt one new thing there — hate ... I am often struck by the blandness of other people, with their vacant, trusting countenances. They were not tormented by ‘Dolly’ MacKenzie and his fellow prefects.

Sebastian Smee

When all the clocks have stopped

A great many unspeakable things happen in the course of Cormac McCarthy’s brilliant, distressing new novel. But the worst, the most unspeakable, has already taken place. We are not told precisely what that thing was. McCarthy is content to leave it ill-defined (‘a dull rose glow in the window-glass’ at 1.17am, when the clocks stopped forever), since his story gains its charge from a narrow focus on the desperate efforts of a man and his son to stay alive. But it quickly becomes clear that the two are living in the aftermath of a nuclear cataclysm. By now, years after the event, the earth is a cruel parody of its former self. Nothing grows, the air tastes of ash, the ground itself has been ‘cauterised’.

Philip Womack

In praise of unwanted gerundives

I had a succession of brilliantly eccentric Classics teachers. Father Hunnwycke, a kindly and acerbic priest, showed his hatred of school inspections by holding up a German book called Group Sex in Ancient Rome every time the inspector’s dreary head was bowed. Another, a small, military Scottish man, would, after berating my misuse of the optative, launch into a diatribe about the evils of Tesco — or the Antichrist, as he preferred to think of it. He eventually ended up on Mount Athos. These wonderful people are a dying breed, says Harry Mount in this likeable, easygoing book. It is an odd creature — part memoir, part grammar book, part history, with a call to arms at the end for more rigorous teaching and more teachers.

Jonathan Cecil

Carrying on with gusto

‘When you reach your seventies,’ mused a once successful actor, ‘you either don’t work anymore or you’re Leslie Phillips.’ Indeed Phillips’ career has been, and still is, something of a phenomenon, and not only his career in the theatre. His great secret from childhood onwards has been continual self- reinvention. Starting life in extreme poverty in Tottenham, he was quite a success at school, especially in plays; he joined Miss Italia Conti’s celebrated acting academy, became a boy actor and then worked in a menial capacity for the top West End management H. M. Tennent’s. The war intervened.