More from Books

Saturday

Eric Christiansen

Doctor, diplomat, spy, philosopher

One of the best lectures I ever heard was given by Hugh Trevor-Roper nearly 50 years ago, and its merit was not in its delivery. He stood at a lectern in a ragged gown reading from a script with small gestures which hardly emphasised points but seemed necessary to keep the words coming, although they were already there in front of him. At times he paused and looked up, but not at us, as if something had occurred to him which he was trying to remember and use later, in less depressing circumstances. It ought to have been depressing for the audience, too; but it wasn’t. The words were so well chosen and artfully combined that they have not faded from memory yet.

Rupert Christiansen

Keeping cool over Wagner

Opera has fallen out of fashion as a recreation of our humanist intellectuals. Even when I was an undergraduate in the mid- 1970s, the tide was beginning to turn in favour of the vacuous verbiage of Bob Dylan, whose soi-disant genius was being forcefully sponsored by Christopher Ricks. Nowadays, I imagine high-table chat is more absorbed by gangsta rap than Khovanschina. But for the generations that span Isaiah Berlin and Roger Scruton, W. H. Auden and Susan Sontag, opera held powerful sway, with the focus on the complex case of Wagner, among the greatest of composers but a shit of a man.

Justin Marozzi

Jizz, blood and power

Had this excellent little book been available to American policy makers in 2002, say, it might have provided a usefully sobering corrective to the exuberance of the neocons. They wanted to rebuild the Middle East in their own image. Mark Allen would have judged that mission hubristic, inappropriate and, one suspects, doomed to failure. Ignorance of the Arab world, he laments, remains a striking feature in the West. ‘The number of outsiders who have a working knowledge of Arabic and a personal depth of experience of the region is tiny in comparison with its present significance to our own well-being.’ Five years after the Middle East crashed into our consciousness, that unfortunately remains the case.

Harriet Waugh

Heroines and horrors

It is possible that my interest in this book was heightened by the fact that, in as much as I am anything, I am an aunt. I have 14 nephews and nieces, a step-nephew and -niece and 20 great-nephews and -nieces — as well as two stepchildren who I feel very aunt-like towards. A few years ago, one of my nieces was paid by the Sunday Telegraph to write about travelling somewhere with an aunt (shades of Graham Greene), and off we went for a day and a night to the Ritz in Madrid with a photographer and had a whale of a time. But I am not sure whether any of my nephews and nieces would write about me with quite the affectionate appreciation that Rupert Christiansen clearly feels for his Aunt Janet, whose death inspired this volume.

William Feaver

A tasteless ham from Parma

Girolamo Francesco Mazzola was born in Parma (hence the tag ‘Il Parmigianino’), and died in 1540 aged 37. At some point he dropped the ‘Girolamo’, maybe round about when he painted ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’, a startling little picture in which the smoothy-chops young artist demonstrates a mastery of optical distortion, his face polished, his non-painting hand thrust towards the viewer like a fish foregrounded on a slab. Parmigianino attracts attention for two or three reasons. There’s the oddity: such furtive or chill characters, each portrait a study in black-eyed wariness or Parmesan complacency.

Anthony Daniels

The case for the defence | 4 November 2006

Hubris is followed by nemesis, and the idea that the English-speaking peoples (that is, those who speak English as their native language) exert an economic, political, moral and cultural hegemony in the world strikes me as distinctly hubristic. Whether it is true, or if true desirable, is another question. Andrew Roberts’ history is rather old-fashioned, and none the worse for that, in that it is mainly a narrative of political and military events: a tale of kings (or presidents and prime ministers) and wars. Social, intellectual, cultural and economic history are included only insofar as they impact upon high politics and the balance of power.

Norman Bissett

Oddball

The stripy blazer doesn’t match the pants belonging to his suit, the Hush Puppies worn for comfort, the rain mac — once his aunt’s — tied by a length of string. Chelsea yuppies mistake him for a shuffling derelict on the Embankment, where he hums and sings Cole Porter and recites some lines he’s picked from ‘Ode to Joy’ and Idylls of the King. He’s not a child-molester nor a wife- abuser but a Nobel Laureate in astrophysics, Chancellor for Life of Oxford and a Patron of the Tate. His mistresses have had six kids in toto. Rush Not to Judgment is his family motto.

Hugh Massingberd

The master of mistakes

In more than half a century of television viewing nothing has haunted me so much as what was transmitted on the evening of 15 April 1984. ‘Thanks, love,’ said Tommy Cooper, in mid-turn, to the dancer who had fastened his cloak. Then he clutched his chest and, as if in slow motion, collapsed on to the stage; the famous fez remained on his craggy head, a little awry. Cutting through the raucous laughter of the audience, who were under the impression that this was all part of the act, came the terrible sound, magnified by his radio microphone, of the great comedian’s last gasps of breath. The curtain fell and the programme switched to a commercial break with a caption bearing the unfortunate legend Live from Her Majesty’s.

Anita Brookner

This side of the truth

In the Foreword she writes to her new book Alice Munro, Canada’s best known and most admired short story writer, states that some 10 or 12 years ago she began to study the history of her family and envisaged a memoir, unlike the fictions which have engaged her all her working life. She was thorough in her researches and unearthed a great deal of material, almost all of it in the Selkirk and Galashiels public libraries. She even spent some months in Scotland, where the Laidlaw branch of her family had its roots. She then attacked the subject but discovered that she was not merely the legatee of her own family but Alice Munro, writer of fiction, whose stories exist in their own right and appear to owe nothing to her ancestry.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

A lesson still worth learning

Late in 1951, shortly after Winston Churchill had returned to Down- ing Street, with Sir Anthony Eden back at the Foreign Office also, there was an animated conversation, recorded by Sir Evelyn Shuckburgh of the Foreign Office, who was present. At the end of a bibulous evening, Prime Minister told Foreign Secretary how to deal with the Arabs, beginning with the troublesome Egyptians: Rising from his chair, the old man advanced on Anthony with clenched fists, saying with the inimitable Churchill growl, ‘Tell them that if we have any more of their cheek we will set the Jews on them and drive them into the gutter, from which they should never have emerged.

Ian Thomson

Going back to the books

With almost 30 novels to his name, Graham Greene was a prolific chronicler of human faith and wretchedness. A writer of his stature requires a very good biographer and, at first, it looked as though Greene had found him in Norman Sherry, a Joseph Conrad expert based in Texas. Sherry set to work in 1976, digging for information like a locker-room snoop. His first, 700-page volume up to 1939 scrutinised Greene’s every depression, love affair and alcoholic spree. ‘Oh why does Sherry waste so much time talking about me?’ Greene grumbled, though secretly, perhaps, he was amused by Sherry’s dedication to the task. He may even have enjoyed the vinous associations of his surname.

Allan Massie

What price George Meredith?

Another biography of Thomas Hardy, and, it seems a good one, by Claire Tomalin. But what is it about Hardy that so attracts biographers? There have been a good few of them, even in the last quarter century. Indeed Hardy (‘little Tommy Hardy’, as Henry James unkindly and not very sensibly called him) has survived rather well. His novels are regularly set for A-level and several have been filmed. His poetry too has lasted. What G. M. Young called its ‘ancient music . . . this gnarled and wintry phrasing’ endures, influencing, for instance, Philip Larkin. And what of his contemporary rival poet-novelist, with whom his name was coupled, and to whom he was compared? What of Meredith? Down in the cellar with no takers.

Saturday

Peter Porter

Learning to weep in a museum

It is reasonable to assume that this is the first instalment of Robert Hughes’s autobiography. After 400 pages he takes us to his appointment as Time Magazine’s chief art critic in 1970, so The Shock of the New, The Fatal Shore and Goya lie in the future. Some might think that his choice of title gives a hostage to fortune. Australians are notoriously members of the Quiz Kid Fraternity — Clive James, Barry Humphries, Germaine Greer and the rest of us who have much smaller claims to fame. But Hughes plays fair throughout: he modifies his assured assertions on art and society with humiliating instances of his ignorance, over- confidence and poor judgment. His renunciations are epiphanies in reverse. Memories of writing for Richard Neville’s Oz are pure mea culpa.

Judith Flanders

The bad old East End

‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’ L. P. Hartley’s famous opening is used by Gilda O’Neill as an epigraph to her delightful foray through 19th-century murder and mayhem, but in truth, as she shows in The Good Old Days, the past is our native country. Things were not different then: they were exactly the same. Mass murder has not disappeared; nor has the sale of women and children for sex; nor has robbery, nor street crime, nor mindless violence. The East End of London is O’Neill’s real focus, and she writes of it with the passion and understanding of an insider. She was born there, as were her parents, themselves the children of Victorian East Enders, with a great-grandmother working in the Whitechapel music halls.

Pj Kavanagh

John Bull as a master of delicacy

This is a book that tells the reader a great deal about a certain kind of Englishman in his interesting times (1753-1828), and also raises the irritating question — the distinction, if any, between art and craft. Thomas Bewick, wood-engraver, was a ‘provincial’ craftsman who became a great artist. John Ruskin saw this: ‘The plumage in Bewick’s birds is the most masterly thing ever done in woodcutting; it is worked just as Paolo Veronese would have worked in wood if he had taken to it,’ thereby, it seems, promoting Bewick to the artistic top table. However, Ruskin remains loftily puzzled. ‘Ruskin and his followers,’ says Uglow, ‘placed Bewick as a country clod...

Johnny Grimond

Uncle Sam on the couch

According to George Walden, the United States is a country with a psychosis, which the dictionary defines as a serious mental disorder characterised by, for example, delusions and a lack of insight into his condition on the part of the patient. No wonder that even sympathetic foreigners, says Walden, understand less than ever what makes America tick. This book is his attempt to enlighten them. ‘How can America’s intellectual and technological sophistication be reconciled with primitive attitudes on gun law and capital punishment?’ asks Walden. ‘How can its creed of self-seeking be combined with its religiosity? And how can its culture be at once infantile and highly mature?’ Why, in particular, is American society ‘manically sexualised’?

Rupert Christiansen

A good man among ambiguities

The second volume of this superb biography opens in 1939, as William Empson returns to London after two years of high adventure and real privation in a China up against Japanese invasion. Resolved to do his bit against Hitler, he drops poetry and literary criticism to join the BBC’s propaganda operation, where he put his expert knowledge of the Far East to subtle use. George Orwell became a colleague and friend — both of them liberal leftists, albeit of profoundly different literary bents. At the BBC, Empson encountered the Amazonian figure of Hetta Crouse, a splendidly forthright and fearless South African sculptor, whom Haffenden aptly describes as a ‘seminal hippie’.

Robert Stewart

A shortage of wine and olives

War and religion are the enduring themes of history and they, or at least war and the Church (for theology gets short shrift), are the chief matters in John Julius Norwich’s latest book. It attempts the difficult job of making a coherent entity of the history of Mediterranean lands from antiquity to the close of the first world war and it does not altogether succeed. The idea of a discrete Mediterranean history makes most sense for the millennium when Greece, then Rome, had reason to think of their compass as the ‘known world’ and the Middle Sea as their lake. A coherent theme is also provided by the mediaeval contest for mastery between Christian Europe and successive Arab empires.

Digby Durrant

Going under and coming up

It’s understandable that a man fails to kill himself with a puncture repair outfit or drown himself in a bucket but rather miraculous if he can’t throw himself under a bus successfully. Yet this is the melancholy achievement of ex-Sub-Inspector Swaminathan, Swami, from Mullaipuram in the state of Tamil Nadu in southern India. A good man unjustly struck down by fate after cracking the rib of a Very Guilty Suspect during a routine inquiry, he suffers a cerebral haemorrhage leaving him barely able to walk or speak. Even when a white man throws himself out of a hotel window and lands in front of his wheelchair he’s silent and only feels a strange peacefulness as he shares the dying man’s last moments.

Michael Carlson

How many deaths?

‘Suspicion is a shifting shade,’ Mark tells the police lieutenant who’s questioning him, and no one appreciates the tensions of suspicion better than Thomas H. Cook.  Cook remains relatively unknown, though he’s garnered numerous crime-writing awards, including an Edgar for The Chatham School Affair. Places in the Dark and last year’s Red Leaves rank among the very best suspense novels of the past two decades.  The Murmur of Stones is typical of Cook at his best. Its small-town setting is gently New England, a timeless stage that is the present but could just as easily be 50 years ago. It’s more the New England of John Cheever than Stephen King or H. P. Lovecraft, yet just as horrific.