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Saturday

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.

Judith Flanders

Pea-soupers and telegraphic paralysis

Lee Jackson is the creator of that cornucopia of Victorian delight, the Victorian London website (www.victorianlondon.org). From Mogg’s Strangers’ Guide to London, Exhibiting All The Various Alterations & Improvements Complete to the Present Time, produced in 1834, to mortality rates in various parishes in London in 1894 (26.8 per thousand in the overcrowded slums behind the Strand, 12.2 per thousand in salubrious Hampstead), his website is a constant series of discoveries and delights. But, while it is wonderful, it is not always convenient. Dorothy Parker once described the perfect bathtub book as one that balanced neatly behind the taps, and was easy to read through before the water got cold.

Malcolm Deas

Yo-ho-ho and a barrel of crude

Tariq Ali, the Johnny Depp of international comment, sails out in this little barque, gaily fitted out by the New Left Review, to assault the top-heavy galleon Washington Consensus, as she labours leaking through the South Seas and the Spanish Main … On the jacket, above three pirate ships anchored off Wall Street and bundles of dollars going up in flames, a smiling Fidel Castro, surmounted by a halo, looks out flanked by Evo Morales and Hugo Chávez. At least you know what you are in for. In his preface Tariq Ali refers to Michael Oakeshott’s opinion that politics is ‘a conversation, not an argument’. No, it is — they are?

Jonathan Keates

One of those who simply are

‘I don’t want to act with you ever again,’ Katharine Hepburn told John Barrymore after appearing with him in A Bill of Divorcement. ‘I didn’t know you had,’ came the smart rejoinder. Hollywood stars divide into those who do and those who are. The divine Kate, with her sawn-off cheekbones, narrow eyes and weird Yankee version of a Southern drawl — ‘Yow owuld foowul!’ she shouts at Henry Fonda in On Golden Pond — belongs firmly in the latter category. None of her performances, not even in The African Queen or Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, involves overmuch histrionic ingenuity. The woman on the screen is all the more entertaining for doing her usual shtik as the feisty, crap-cutting amazon staking her claim on male territory.

Fiona Maddox

A last, affectionate look

Three decades ago, in one of modern musicology’s great labours of love, David Brown began work on his definitive four-volume study of Tchaikovsky. Fifteen years after his initial researches, he laid out the composer on his death-bed and pulled up the sheet, so to speak, in 1991. Brown’s efforts transformed Tchaikovsky’s reputation from that of sentimental tunesmith of the ‘1812’ Overture, the B flat Piano Concerto and a few sugary ballets (as they were perceived) to towering figure of late Romanticism and an opera composer of genius. Even the Russians were startled.

Ed Smith

Winning against the odds

How serious a subject is sport? We know it is dramatic and revealing, but beneath the veneer of action and celebrity does sport justify a more considered analytical approach? There is a dual aspect here: does thinking have much to do with winning, and, if so, can the lessons of victory enhance our thinking about other, more ‘highbrow’ spheres? Michael Lewis — formerly of Salomon Brothers on Wall Street and this magazine — is at the forefront of those sportswriters who answer ‘yes’ to both questions. The heroes of his intimately researched sports books are the philosopher kings of sports coaching, men with original minds who rise above cliché-ridden sports chat.

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 11 November 2006

187 Men to Avoid (1995) by Danielle Brown Danielle Brown ... Danielle Brown ... isn’t there something familiar about this name? Hold on. If you ... remove the ‘ielle’ ... it’s ... No. Yes. 187 Men to Avoid was written by the author of the Da Vinci Code in 1995, before he was famous and rich. Described on the back cover as ‘a survival guide for the romantically- frustrated woman’, this first edition (above) is now highly collectable (it was later reprinted with a slightly different cover announcing ‘by the author of the Da Vinci Code!’, which is worth nothing). The text of the book simply lists, in very large print, and with no further comment, the ‘men to avoid’: ‘Men who think yeast infections cause mouldy bread ...

Saturday

Jonathan Sumption

Versailles by the Potomac

Bob Woodward is famous for persuading people to be indiscreet. This book comprises the collected indiscretions of a large number of people who have been at the heart of American policy-making about Iraq over the past five years. We can guess who some of them are. But we do not know, because most of them have been careful to speak off the record. ‘The information in this chapter comes primarily from background interviews with six knowledgeable sources,’ reads a typical sentence from the author’s endnotes. ‘Some supplied documents,’ adds another. The book is packed with quotations from documents bearing various classifications of secrecy, or portentously marked NODIS (not to be distributed) or NOFORN (not to be shown to foreigners).

James Delingpole

Men worth remembering

On 8 November 1917 Lieutenant Darcy Jones was trotting across the Negev desert with the Worcestershire and Warwickshire Yeomanry when the order came to charge some Turkish gun positions. Jones and his fellow Worcesters drew their sabres, split into twos and threes and rode at a full gallop under heavy fire towards the 2,000-strong enemy who outnumbered them by more than ten to one. Over half the Worcesters were killed or wounded, but the enemy were routed. Jones, not unreasonably, considered the action ‘the most exhilarating moment of my life’. Well, quite. If there’s a man alive who wouldn’t happily exchange every single one of his life experiences for the chance to have done what Jones did that day, then I should like to know what’s wrong with him.