More from Books

Saturday

Patrick Skene-Catling

The sunset burns on

That beautiful, untamed brunette (or was she a woman in Zee & Co.?) was once more fervid than Elizabeth Taylor in party mood. Edna O’Brien at the age of 73, however, is a circumspect Titian, with a porcelain complexion and minimal maquillage. The rebellious country girl, who ran away from a village in County Clare, has been for many years a ladylike resident of London. Or so she appears. One should not judge novelists by their appearance, perhaps, but her presence in her writing is so relentlessly pervasive that it is impossible not to notice the altered superficialities and wonder how she has changed inside. She hasn’t. Readers who loved her anti-authoritarian previous books are sure to love this one too.

Jonathan Sumption

Beware of misleading labels

In the great prize-giving of history, there are only two truly ‘bad’ kings of England: King John and James II. Or three if you count Ethelred the Unready. There is more argument about the ‘good’ ones, but King John’s brother Richard ranks high in most people’s pantheon, right up there with King Arthur and Queen Elizabeth. Plainly, Ladybird Books, Robin Hood on TV and touring exhibitions of Magna Carta, have a lot to answer for.

Rupert Christiansen

Problems of production

Shakespeare aside, there isn’t a dramatist whose work has proved more protean than Wagner’s. Patrick Carnegy explores the astonishing variety of interpretation it has provoked, in a book that has been long meditated as well as meticulously researched. It isn’t comprehensive —Wolfgang Wagner, Rennert, Wernicke and Lehnhoff are only a few of the significant directors who are omitted — but its over-view is magisterial, and, despite its considerable length, the crisply organised structure and unfailing lucidity of the prose make it worth the effort of a thorough and continuous reading. Other scholars have written forcefully on aspects of this subject, but Carnegy’s treatment will surely be considered definitive.

Rod Liddle

A trail of blood and bigotry

This is an even better book than the author’s erudite, dense and sprawling triumph of last year, Earthly Powers. With Sacred Causes, we are now in the present day, near enough — and that terrible, human, susceptibility to secular or religious ideologies possessed of unbending certitude, which in a way is Burleigh’s theme, should tweak the interest of all those who worry a little about the rigorous proclivities of Islam; just as it should interest those who are dubious of the fashionable thesis that, were we to smite God fatally once and for all, our troubles would be over.

Victoria Glendinning

The Gang of Three

Adam Sisman begins his story of one of the most famous friendships in literary history with the vivid account of a young man who, having already walked 40 miles, takes a short-cut across a Dorset cornfield, running to greet two people working in their garden. The young man is Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the friends are William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy. Over the ensuing six years the three were rarely parted for long. Their rambles together in the Quantocks are legendary.

Raymond Carr

Gates to, or escapes from, reality

This anthology is a sheer delight, full of good things. It gets off to a splendid start. On its dust- cover is a picture of a dog with a light bulb in its stomach; underneath is a gem from Groucho Marx: ‘Outside a dog a book is a man’s best friend. Inside a dog it’s too dark to read.’ Reading this book is like riding a good horse through an interesting landscape. You get a glimpse of familiar great oaks: Wordsworth at breakfast cutting the pages of Burke’s works with a knife greasy with butter. You ride past newcomers like Helena Hanff, shocking her friends by casting into the waste- bin books she will never read again. You spot old friends like Tony Hancock. Authors, like actors, are narcissists.

Jane Gardam

Getting on and getting by

This is the sketchy diary of a 60-year-old woman with an amusing, runaway pen, written over 19 months. She is scatty, impulsive, open-minded and living cheerfully in Shepherd’s Bush, which never ceases to intrigue her (‘Today I saw a man standing on his head in the middle of the pavement’). Wide-eyed and aware of men, it is easy to see her as Bridget Jones’s mother, but she is not silly. She is strong in adversity, loyal to sick friends whom she sees through to the end and she expresses her fearless if curmudgeonly opinions even at her own dinner parties, where, often, silence falls. She is a passionate atheist, though the last entry has her embracing a black evangelical priest.

Adam Zamoyski

Correcting received opinions

Norman Davies is always at his best challenging received ideas and inherited perceptions, and the areas covered by these essays provide him with rich hunting-grounds for both. The title is misleading in that he ranges around Australia, California and Siberia, not to mention the Middle East, as well as Europe, and takes swipes at prejudices held by the pundits of many nations and cultures. I have to confess a slight prejudice against compilations of essays and lectures. There is always an element of unevenness in quality, a lack of unity and a certain amount of repetition. Ideally, each piece should be read on its own, independently of and at least a few days apart from the others, not a luxury a reviewer can permit himself. Above all, lectures are best listened to, not read.

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 14 October 2006

A Time Before Genesis (1986) by Les Dawson The rare book shown above (try getting hold of a copy) is Les Dawson’s only serious work of fiction. It provides a disturbing insight into the mind of the late comedian. Its thesis is that the earth has, for millennia, been controlled by alien forces who have had a hand in everything from the Maya to the Miners’ Strike; in its magisterial sweep the book takes in the Spanish Inquisition, the rise of Hitler, the Kennedy assassination, Glastonbury, the Second Coming, cigarettes stubbed out on the eyeballs (twice), various scenes of sexual mutilation, the projected collapse of the EEC in 1989 and the Sino-Russian war of 1992.

Saturday

Charles Moore

A voice crying in the wilderness

Richard Dawkins is an evangelical. The cover of this book, with its red explosion and large writing, reminds one of those popular volumes by Protestant pastors which purport to prove that JESUS IS ALIVE. Dawkins has all the fervour and anger of such persons, and their well-meaning puzzlement that so many cannot see what to them is so blindingly obvious. ‘Can’t you see’, yells Dawkins, ‘JESUS IS DEAD?’ As the more zealous evangelicals sometimes take refuge in statistics — ‘Last year, 13,732 people in the State of Oklahoma were healed of cancer by accepting Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Saviour’ — so does Dawkins.

Grey Gowrie

Drive

Medley of horses by the motorwayuntethered; the field surplus to transportor agriculture. At this speed the horses looklike Travellers’ horses beside a leftover woodwhere smoke rising sketches a caravan.As we flash by our road draws its own wake,a joyful anarchy of second growth — beechy and larchy shoots, scrub, militant bindweedwhose canker lilies, malign and beautiful,have everything to play and nothing to pay for.Two magpies land for luck, a third joins themto squabble across the brains of a struck fox.Unscrupulous nature reclaims the scar tissueof the M54; soon we shall see Walestake charge of the twilight, a swatch of sunset redfilter the cloudburst over Wolverhamptonas our windscreen wipers, moody with time delays,hypnotise a landscape of special pleading.

Clive James

Dreams before sleeping

The idea is to set the mind adriftAnd sleep comes. Mozart, exquisitely dressed,Walks carefully to work between soft pilesOf fresh horse-dung. Nice work. Why was my gift Hidden behind the tree? I cried for miles.No one could find it. Find the tiger’s face.It’s in the tree: i.e. the strangest place. But gifts were presents then. In fact, for short,We called them pressies, which was just as long,But sounded better. Mallarmé thought night A stronger word than nuit. Nice word. The fortDefied the tide but faded like a songWhen the wave’s edge embraced it at last light.Which song? Time, time, it is the strangest thing.The Waves. The Sea, the Sea. Awake and Sing. Wrong emphasis, for music leads to sex.

Allan Massie

The last time he saw Paris

One good reason to read Simenon is to recover Paris. It is now 75 years since Maigret made his first appearance, and, if his Paris is not yet utterly lost, you have to walk distances and search diligently to find it. The Brasserie Dauphine, for instance, rue de Harlay, which in real life was the Restaurant aux Trois Marches, is now the restaurant-salon of the Paris Bar (La Maison du Barreau). Maigret’s favourite blanquette de veau may still be simmering there, but consumption will be reserved to lawyers. Though fond of the district Maubert-Mouffetard, in his day a poor quarter, Maigret is essentially a man of the Right Bank: of the faubourg Saint-Antoine and the Marais, a quartier de petits gens and Jewish immigrants, of artisan workshops and small, disreputable hotels.

Charles Glass

Death of a billionaire PM

Rafik Hariri was Lebanon’s bulldozer. A buccaneer. A bruiser. Built like a heavyweight boxer, he looked more butcher than billionaire. His father was a dirt-poor, Sunni Muslim tenant farmer, who worked land near the south Lebanese port of Sidon. The French architects of the Maronite Catholic-led Grand Liban had reluctantly granted Lebanon its independence in 1943, a year before Rafik Hariri was born. The formula under which the Maronites agreed to relinquish their French protection and the Sunni Muslims to refuse union with Syria would succumb repeatedly during Hariri’s life to strains from outside. In 1948, Israel expelled over 100,000 Palestinians, most of them Sunni Muslims, to Lebanon.

Pd James

It was a dark and stormy night . . .

It is hardly surprising if from time to time a contemporary novelist should attempt to write a pastiche of Agatha Christie, if only in the hope of solving the mystery of her egregious popular success and its longevity. Year after year this gentlyreared Edwardian lady produced stories of sometimes fiendish ingenuity which were seized on eagerly by a world readership with the avidity of druggies awaiting their annual fix; murder without disturbing horror, loss without pain and class-consciousness without guilt. While prestigious prize-winning novels drop out of print, Christie’s paperbacks are still ranged on bookstore shelves. Gilbert Adair sets out his intention clearly, to pay homage both to the Golden Age of the English murder mystery and to its most brilliant practitioner.

Toby Young

Having your cake, eating it and selling it

When Boris Johnson was selected as the Conservative candidate for Henley in 2000, a year after being made editor of The Spectator, he called up Charles Moore and asked for his advice on how to handle Conrad Black, the magazine’s proprietor. The problem was that Boris had given him his word that he would not try to become an MP. After listening to Boris ramble on for a bit, Moore grew impatient and asked him what it was that he wanted.‘I want to have my cake and eat it,’ he said. What is remarkable about Boris Johnson, and the reason this biography is so fascinating, is that he has more or less been granted this wish. At Oxford, he became President of the Union in spite of being hopelessly unprepared for every debate he ever took part in.

Michael Gove

Anglo- German attitudes

One of the most dangerous tastes any British politician can admit to is a tendresse for the Teutonic. During the first world war the Liberal cabinet minister Haldane was compelled to resign because of his pro-German sympathies. It was not that Haldane harboured any political affection for Wilhelmine militarism, or had exhibited any slackness in his war work. He had been one of the most pro-war of Asquith’s divided ministry and as war minister had vigorously prepared British forces for confrontation with Germany. But Haldane was also a sensitive and open-minded intellectual with a deep interest in German culture and philosophy.

Hugh Cecil

Public servant, private saint

Leonard Woolf had a passion for animals, not unconnected with an appetite for control. Dogs (with the occasional mongoose or monkey) were his companions to the end of his life. Discussing human nature, he put them on an equal plane: ‘There are some people, usually dogs or old women, extremely simple and unintellectual, who instinctively know how to deal with life and with persons, and who display an extraordinary and admirable resistance to the cruelties of man, the malevolence of providence, and the miseries of existence.

Nicholas Haslam

Essex girl goes West

This highly entertaining and self-deprecating autobiography should dispel the myth, however craftily put about by the boy himself, that its author could ever have been a successful rent boy. Promotion of that role-play may rack up millions on the tabloid stage, but Everett is demonstrably far too original, headstrong and downright funny to ever have had the inevitable passivity requisite in a few quids’ quick shag. Judging by his prowess as a raconteur, you’d want Rupert to stay around for a good long time, but, though teenage, leather-clad nights at the Coleherne may have drilled him in the arts of being tied up, about the one thing he can’t deal with is being tied down.

Selina Hastings

The battle of the books

B y now Heywood Hill’s bookshop in Curzon Street must be almost as famous as 84 Charing Cross Road. Opened in 1936, the shop first became familiar through the lively accounts of Nancy Mitford, who worked there from 1942-45. Then came A Bookseller’s War, the correspondence between Heywood Hill, away in the army, and his wife, Anne, left in charge of the shop; and most recently, in 2004, The Bookshop at 10 Curzon Street, the letters written to each other by Nancy and Heywood. Now, published in the same attractive format, comes A Spy in the Bookshop, which might be described as reports from the front line in an ongoing shop war which had begun exactly as the other war ended.