More from Books

Saturday

D.J. Taylor

Laughing to some purpose

As a late Seventies teenager, I was exposed to two distinct brands of American humour — or ‘yomour’ as it tended to be pronounced — each diametrically opposed to the other. One was the Bob Hope school of urbane wisecrackery that drifted over the Radio Two airwaves on Saturday mornings while my father sat approvingly by. The other was the opening salvo of NBC’s Saturday Night Live, then featuring Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase and the late John Belushi and Gilda Radner; never broadcast on this side of the Atlantic, alas, but periodically written up in that hip young person’s bible, the New Musical Express.

Zenga Longmore

Happy days in Middle America

According to Bill Bryson, 99.9 per cent of the world’s ills originated in America during the 1950s. Well, he doesn’t actually say that, as such, but in the course of his book he reveals some pretty grisly statistics concerning his homeland. Apparently, chemicals in food, endless nuclear-bomb testing, teenagers, intensive television- watching, American world domination, overeating and, most gruesome of all, Disney World, were all invented in the USA between 1950 and 1959. The Frightful Fifties was the age when it was every American’s God-given right not only to own a car but also to live in one.  ‘They dined at drive-in restaurants, passed their evenings at drive-in movies, did their banking at drive-in banks, dropped their clothes off at drive-in dry cleaners.

Alan Judd

The sage at the wheel

The late Leonard Setright was a rightly admired, genuinely idio- syncratic, provocatively pedantic and engagingly discursive motoring writer who loved any excuse to show off his Latin or to get Milton, Mozart or Ecclesiastes into a car column. He relished his reputation for having been quoted more often than anyone else in Private Eye’s Pseuds’ Corner, was obsessive about tyres, drove very fast, wrote the best book there will ever be on the Bristol (Palawan Press) and one of the best books there will ever be on the social history of motoring (Drive on!, Granta). This, his last, is an unfinished memoir, ranging from his first bicycle, through the legal profession, National Service and test-driving heavy lorries to the launch of the Citroën CX Turbo.

Martin Vander Weyer

A crash to remember

One of the lessons taught in these pages over many years by Christopher Fildes was that, because financial markets are human nature in action, anything that goes wrong in them is almost certain to have happened before and highly likely to happen again. Technology may advance, the language and methods of business may evolve, the objects of speculative desire may transmute from tulip bulbs in one era to dotcom shares in another, but the propensity to err remains constant.

Miranda France

The full gothic treatment

Over the coming weeks you are sure to hear a good deal about The Thirteenth Tale. The author of this novel, a teacher of French literature living in Harrogate, has already netted 1.5 million pounds in advance royalties from British and US publishers alone. Foreign deals and film rights will surely garner much more. Comparisons have been drawn with Daphne du Maurier and some classics of the gothic genre. Diane Setterfield herself says that she turned to writing after ten years of reading French literature made her hanker for the English novels of the 19th century. If a literary estate agent were to show you around a classic gothic mansion, you might demand certain ‘period features’.

Ben Wilson

A fox with a bit of hedgehog

Replace the commas in the subtitle of this book, ‘Thomas Young, the Anonymous Polymath who Proved Newton Wrong, Explained How We See, and Deciphered the Rosetta Stone Among Other Feats of Genius’, with exclamation marks, and it reads like the title of a Gillray cartoon or the patter of a circus huckster. The problem we have with polymaths, as Andrew Robinson points out in his introduction, is that they do seem too good to be true. When it comes to Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction between thinkers — hedgehogs, who know one big thing, and foxes, who know many things — we are generally more comfortable with the hedgehogs. Or rather, preferring to pin thinkers down into easily memorable categories, we will foxes into hedgehogs.

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 30 September 2006

My Love Affair with Miami Beach (1991) by Isaac Bashevis Singer Isaac Bashevis Singer, the 1978 Nobel laureate, wrote mainly on the Jewish experience in pre-war Poland, the Holocaust, Israel, and the diaspora to the USA, particularly New York, not an awful lot about Miami Beach. But Miami Beach nevertheless held a special place in his heart: it was his home for much of the latter part of his life, and was the hub of a unique population of elderly Jews in flight from the rigours of the northern US climate. My Love Affair with Miami Beach, for which Singer provided the text, is a photographic tribute to this suburb, with its art deco hotels, nursing homes, barber shops, Judaica stores and synagogues.

Saturday

Ian Sansom

Spycams in Seattle

Five years on, and the 9/11 books begin to mount up: we’ve had Philip Roth doing it as historical allegory in The Plot Against America; John Updike doing it as a thriller in Terrorist; Jonathan Safran Foer doing whatever it is that Jonathan Safran Foer does in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; Ian McEwan’s Saturday; and now, Jonathan Raban’s Surveillance. You can already hear the sound of university critics drawing up the reading lists for their ‘Post- 9/11 Fiction’ courses: undergraduates, pay attention to what follows. Raban’s book should certainly be required reading rather than a secondary source.

Rupert Christiansen

Departing wisely from the text

This enthralling and important book offers vital reading for anyone with a serious interest in opera. Its author Philip Gossett describes himself as ‘a fan, a musician and a scholar’; more specifically, he works from a base at the University of Chicago as one of the foremost authorities on the period broadly circumscribed by Rossini’s Tancredi (1813) and Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera (1859), supervising the ongoing complete editions of those two composers and counselling singers and conductors on productions and recordings. This volume is the summation of his life’s work.

Diarmaid Macculloch

Church and Chapel

I ought to declare a tribal interest in Patrick Collinson’s latest instalment of collected essays: he and I both grew up in that unjustly overlooked and astringently beautiful county, Suffolk, which figures largely in his text. Our respective childhoods embraced the polarity of Suffolk religion in the mid-20th century: solid Prot, of course, but divided by the great contraries of Church and Chapel. I was the parson’s son: on Sundays I sat in the Rectory pew in the chancel of our parish church, staring at the monument to one of my father’s predecessors, the Regency baronet who had turned a Tudor farmhouse into an elegant parsonage (rather faded in splendour since his day).

Philip Ziegler

Not so duplicitous as painted

Narendra Singh Sarila has a theory. Because he is a man of high intelligence and has researched diligently into the sources, his theory must be treated with respect. As one of India’s most senior ambassadors he is well qualified to assess the limitations of state papers and to distinguish between what politicians say and what they really mean. He is moderate in his judgments and, for the most part, fair in his treatment of individuals. The only pity is that he is almost entirely wrong.

Peter Porter

Leafing through the Latin Dictionary

fuga, fugas — music now, not backat school where Harry Roberts flashed his gown,a toga to berate a class as slackas Rome became; we’d been meant to be English Augustans, but were soon brought downto being worthy only of a fewemotive Saxon nouns and verbs: the sea had brought our Fathers to a sanded shore,packed tight with iron sermons on The Poor —but still the dictionary had work to do:peregrinus, wanderers in needof some Virgilian outcome — might this bookhave shown how Europe’s words could safely bleedon strands Aeneas left to Captain Cook?

Simon Baker

Brooklands goes ballistic

An oddity about J.G. Ballard is that his unquestionable truths about English society are often encased within deliberately, and stupendously, implausible plots; his trick is to conjure reality from the deeply unrealistic. Kingdom Come, his latest novel, demonstrates that he is still, in his eighth decade, as outré as ever, and still as keen to understand the national psyche. It begins, conventionally enough, with its narrator, Richard Pearson, describing outer London suburbia, a place where every resident... was constantly trading the contents of house and home, replacing the same cars and cameras, the same ceramic hobs and fitted bathrooms. Nothing was being swapped for nothing. Behind this frantic turnover, a gigantic boredom prevails.

William Brett

The peacock and the belly-dancer

Although Barry Unsworth’s latest novel might in some sense be about the relationship between Islam and Christianity, other less trendy themes are much more effectively addressed. Besides, The Ruby in Her Navel is told by a fictional character so convincing in his strengths and weaknesses that all considerations of politics, religion, history and morality are subordinate to his enormous and realistic charm. So the reader would do well not to graft modern political notions on to this beautifully constructed historical romance, and instead enjoy it for the simple elegance of its story. The narrator, Thurstan Beauchamp, is a young Norman working at the court of the tolerant 12th-century King of Sicily, Roger II.

Allan Massie

The original Dylan

The suggestion was made the other day that Dylan Thomas may have been dyslexic. Apparently, the experts deduced this from the style of his poetry. It seems an odd assertion. Dyslexic children find difficulty, and therefore no pleasure, in reading. Dylan, according to his parents, taught himself to read when he was three, and thereafter read, in his own words, ‘indiscriminatingly and all the time, with my eyes hanging out on stalks’. Doesn’t sound like a dyslexic child to me, though doubtless the experts know better. Also in the news recently was the announcement of a Dylan Thomas Prize, worth £50,000 to the winner.

Sarah Burton

The Welshman in the Court of Vienna

In the opening pages of Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller books are memorably divided into certain useful categories: Books You Needn’t Read, Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Need To Read First, Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered, and so on. Most intriguing of all these categories is Books That Everybody’s Read So It’s As If You Had Read Them Too. Along similar lines is Mr Crawford’s observation in Mansfield Park: ‘Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is a part of an Englishman’s constitution. His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them every where, one is intimate with him by instinct.

John Casey

A hunt for origins

No modern country wishes to understand itself through its remote past more ardently than does Korea. Nineteenth- century Korean nationalists were anxious to trace their state back to a mythical semi-divine hero, Tan’gun, who founded Korea in the third millennium BC. (Koreans will probably be irritated if it is suggested that this resembles Japanese eagerness to trace their imperial family back to an Emperor Jimmu, about 2,500 years ago.) The communists enthusiastically join this hunt for origins. When the ‘Great Leader’, the late Kim Il Sung, dictator of North Korea, wanted to propose a federation of the North with the South, he suggested that the name for the united country should be Koryo, after a state that had existed from the 10th to the 12th centuries.

Saturday

Sam Leith

Beauty, chastity and unruly times

It may have taken until the late 1960s for the expression ‘the personal is political’ to condense an important truth, but — as Lucy Moore’s fascinating new book shows — that truth is not a new one. Liberty tells the story of the French Revolution through the lives of the great salonnière Germaine de Staël, the passionate middle-class ideologue Manon Roland, the kind-hearted flibbertigibbet Thérésia de Fontenay, the feisty former courtesan Théroigne de Méricourt and the much younger Juliette Récamier — whose beauty and chastity (a very rare thing, to judge by this book) caused her to become an icon of the Republic.

Byron Rogers

Haunted by hunting

This is an ambitious book. Andrew Motion set out to write a memoir of his childhood but not from the standpoint, and distance, of a grown-up looking back; he set out to write it in the character of a child and teenager living through his experiences. The result can be startling. Of his father, a third-generation brewer and a colonel in the TA (a rank he used in private life), he says: ‘every time my dad said “Surrey” he made a tsk noise, because he’d once met someone from Esher who wore a Gannex coat like Mr Wilson’. In other words, Motion Senior was a hair-raising snob. The county of Surrey was written off because of one man’s mac. His son makes no comment of any kind. You don’t when you are 16.