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Saturday

William Waldegrave

The Senior Service to the rescue

There is something unedifying in politicians apologising, without cost to themselves, for the sins of their predecessors while deploying all the black arts of their trade to suppress criticism of their own performance. The same goes for society at large. It would be more admirable for 21st-century Britain to be trying to imagine what our successors will see as incomprehensible moral blindness on our part than to be taking easy shots at the morality of two centuries ago. What will look as foul to Britons of 2306 as slavery does to us now? We don’t really want to know, because the answers might well be inconvenient. Abortion? The eating of animals? It is the people who get it right at the time who deserve celebration.

Miles Kington

Miles Kington on Jean- Jacques Sempé

There is a drawing by Sempé of the Tour de France which is so brilliant that when Geoffrey Wheatcroft first saw it, he just knew he had to have it on the front of his history of the Tour de France. It is an aerial view of a gloomy, grimy French town round the streets of which a stream of dazzingly coloured bicyclists flow like a river of jewels meandering through a rubbish dump. It’s not funny; it’s not pointful; it’s just a lovely counterpoint between the glamour of the big occasion and the banality of the watchers’ lives, exquisitely composed and drawn. The odd thing is that Sempé could never have done that 40, even 20, years ago. He started life as a journeyman cartoonist, drawing single gags.

Jane Ridley

The straight man and the courtier

Gladstone and Disraeli were the Punch and Judy of Victorian politics, and reams have been published about them, but no one has written a book which centres on their relationship. Richard Aldous has had the clever wheeze of charting their rivalry, retelling the story in what he calls a ‘modern way’ for a generation who know little about the past. Actually, the modern way turns out to be remarkably old-fashioned. This book is a romp. Aldous writes fluent, vivid prose and he excels at scene-setting. It’s all very filmic. The book opens with Gladstone at Hawarden Castle, his country home, receiving the telegram announcing the news of Disraeli’s death. Cut to Hughenden Manor, whence Dizzy’s coffin is carried out to the sound of peacocks screeching on the terrace.

William Feaver

Lashings of homely detail

Norman Rockwell’s the name. You’ll know it of course. Rockwell the byword. It wasn’t simply the perpetual air of impending Thanks- giving that gave his Saturday Evening Post covers such appeal. Rockwell covers were cover stories really; that was their distinction. Others, John Falter for example or Steve Dohano, delivered similar eyefuls of graphic cheer to the mass readership but never came near him in popularity. They could ape the manner but not the air. Legend has it that, in his heyday, every time the Post ran a Rockwell, they upped the print order by a quarter of a million. Whether this is true hardly matters: print the legend.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Fowler’s ‘Modern English Usage’

When the library of V. S. Pritchett was sold off after his death some years ago, I bought a few books as a mark of homage, among them H. W. Fowler’s A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. I’d possessed other copies, but this was a first edition, and while I was thumbing it idly one day I noticed that it was published in 1926. I then also noticed that The King’s English, which he wrote with his brother F. W. Fowler, was published in 1906, and these anniversaries seem to have passed unnoticed. A hundred years on, and eighty years on, have there been more useful and influential books of their kind in our time?

Alan Dixon

Jackdaws

Happy the jackdaws surrounded by their playmate Boisterous wind with which they wrestle and roll,Diving against it, wings closed; gripped and thrownMany ways, open-winged, spun in it chacking and looping. Easy to envy jackdaws. Even thoseWho never look up, who curse the stopped and creepingTraffic must see their low flight in the distanceAs they descend to towns jackdaws poke fun at,See them in swirling pairs, amused and matedFor life, defeated only when no one knowsAnd never bullied by a wind too gusty. Having lived too long in a town no jackdaw trusted,Where graveyards lacked their disrespectful tread,I spend my careless time airing my head.

Richard Shone

Richard Shone on Leonard Woolf

The large garden at Monk’s House, Rodmell, in Sussex, bounded on one side by the village street, and on the other by gently sloping ground towards the River Ouse, was locally famous for its summer brilliance. In August — the month in which I paid my first visit — when most gardens have a moment of exhaustion, Leonard Woolf had contrived a quilt of dahlias, lilies, purple Jerusalem artichokes, gaillardias and fuchsias in the flowerbeds. A conservatory along the side of the house bristled with cacti. Woolf appeared from a distant corner, secateurs in hand, twine dangling from a jacket pocket, a dog fiercely kept to heel.

Allan Massie

A world of snobs and swindlers

Orwell thought that Mark Twain’s  picture of life on the Mississippi showed ‘how human beings behave when they are not frightened of the sack’ and so are free to develop their personalities Something similar might be said of the rural England portrayed by R. S. Surtees, even if in his novels household servants, grooms and huntsmen may be in danger of being ‘turned off without a character’. Nevertheless Orwell’s observation that in Twain’s Mississippi stories ‘the State hardly existed’ while ‘the churches were weak and spoke with many voices’ might be applied to Surtees’s England too. Reading Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour again, one is struck by the complete absence of officialdom. There is poverty there.

Saturday

Malcolm Deas

A cold fish in deep water

There are many studies of Tocqueville’s books and writings. The publication of the surviving Oeuvres, papiers et correspondence began in 1951 and still drags on. Yet there have been few biographies. Hugh Brogan, who has edited for the Oeuvres the correspondence and conversations with Tocqueville with the English economist Nassau W. Senior, has now written the most complete life to date. He opens with a coy and whimsical declaration: In recent years, seeing me so preoccupied with Tocqueville, some of my friends took to asking me if I liked him.

Robert Stewart

Heads that wore the crown

David Starkey’s latest book has a Gibbonesque moment. Charles I was undone by ‘his unbending adherence to principle’; ‘in contrast the only rigid thing about Charles II was his male member’. Monarchy also, alas, exhibits some of the pitfalls encountered in turning the script of a television series into a book. Breeziness cohabits with an anxious, repetitive hammering of key points; cliff-hanging intimations of what is to come are overly dramatic; the syntax is frequently sloppy. The prose is disfigured, above all, by the unrelenting use and abuse of the conjunction ‘but’ that is the hallmark of lazy journalism in the present day. Still, Starkey is a fine scholar with the ability to show us the woods, not the trees.

Adam LeBor

A map of the road to Hell

Few organisations reward incompetence as richly as the United Nations. Consider Kofi Annan, head of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) during the genocides in Rwanda and Srebrenica. In January 1994 he twice refused General Romeo Dallaire, commander of the UN peacekeepers in Rwanda, permission to raid the Hutu arms caches, despite Dallaire’s warnings of the planned mass slaughter of Tutsis. In early July 1995, as the Bosnian Serbs advanced on the UN safe area of Srebrenica, Annan and several of his colleagues were away. The Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, was travelling in Africa. Shashi Tharoor, head of the DPKO’s Yugoslav desk, was on holiday. General Rupert Smith, the British commander of UN troops in Bosnia, was on leave.

Norman Bissett

Kofi

A limp soft-soaper, he wouldn’t say Booto a goose. Cautiously neutral, he triedemollience, thereby creating genocide —the massacre of the Tutsis by the Hutus. He similarly failed in Bosniawhere Unprofor, the UN mission, vetoedthe use of airstrikes to save Srebrenica.Now twenty thousand slain lie incognito’d. But from these holocausts was nothing learnt?Not in Darfur, whose people in their needwere raped, then disposessed, their hovels burnt —four hundred thousand slaughtered by the Janjaweed. What’s left? A peace prize. Eulogistic mention.Lavish farewells. A very handsome pension.

Harry Mount

Up close and personal

My apologies to the young, attractive couple in Perry Street in Greenwich Village, whose love-making I’ve been keeping a close eye on over the last year and a half. I can’t really help it. My eighth-floor flat is on exactly the same level as theirs, and their window is only 20 yards from mine across a tiny strip of garden. If it’s any consolation to the young couple, I haven’t seen much — they always drop down on the sofa out of my line of sight before the good bits. That’s the thing about New York — it’s a cheek-by-jowl place, and you can’t help getting a close-up on a lot of jowls and cheeks, upper and lower. This is the New York Alfred Hitchcock caught in Rear Window, filmed only a few streets from my flat.

Simon Baker

Lesser lives in the limelight

If James Boswell could glance at a few recent issues of The Spectator, he would be delighted to see that the literary form he did so much to modernise is thriving. In the last month or two, biographies of Hardy, Empson, Janacek and Betjemen have impressed this magazine’s critics with their attention to detail, elegance, clear-sighted analysis and balance. So many of the skills Boswell introduced to the endeavour are still adhered to. He might, perhaps, permit himself a well-earned pat on the back. However, if he then visited his local W. H. Smith, he would lose much of that satisfaction. Very few of the lives reviewed in the literary press are ever found in the shops. A request for Empson would be met with a blank look.

Elfreda Pownall

Christmas cookery books

Last year Jamie Oliver was seen on television grinning with pleasure as a class of tiny Italian children accurately named every vegetable he held up to them. He later grimly despaired of finding a class of English children who could do the same. The parlous state of our food culture has been Oliver’s abiding concern for years and his latest and best cookery book, Cook with Jamie: My Guide to Making You a Better Cook (Michael Joseph/Penguin, £26), is a part of his mission to improve the standards of British cooking for people of any age. The book would be a good present for a novice — or for a mother in need of some original ideas for family meals. It deals with everything from kitchen hygiene to making pasta at home.

Matthew Dennison

A mixed blessing

‘Lonely hopelessness’ assails Muriel Cottle. Her life is ‘one long pitfall interrupted by spasms of intense pleasure’ with nothing that is unequivocally happy. But is that all about to change? In Susanna Johnston’s new novel, Muriel finds herself in the sort of scenario that might have resulted had E. F. Benson and Alice Thomas Ellis ever coincided on the set of Midsomer Murders. Muriel Pulls It Off is a high-spirited romp populated by cranks and ghouls. And just for good measure, a member of the Royal Family hitherto unknown to Spectator readers, Princess Mathilda, third daughter of George VI and the Queen Mother, youngest sister of the Queen and Princess Margaret. Although no murder is committed, Muriel, one feels, is sorely tempted.

Francis King

The subtle art of suggestion

Prematurely, John McGahern published his Collected Stories 14 years before his death early this year. To prepare this Selected Stories he obsessively polished and ruthlessly cut stories that, even as they then stood, for the most part seemed already perfect. He also added two stories, one of which, ‘The Country Funeral’, strikes me not merely as the best that he ever wrote but also as the one that most accurately epitomises the sort of subject that he chose and his unsparing way of dealing with it. Three brothers, though long since transplanted to metropolitan settings, are still emotionally connected to the seaside hamlet in which, as fatherless children, an uncle invited them, as an act of grudging charity, to spend their summer holidays on his estate.

Ian Sansom

Will Count Olaf prevail?

This, in my experience, has been completely unprecedented, and I doubt will ever happen again: three members of the same family reading the same book at the same time. We had to read the book in shifts: it was like waiting on the docks to hear the plight of Little Nell, or gathering together to read samizdat in the former Soviet Union. Even more extraordinary, having read this book I voluntarily went back and read all of the others in the series. Thirteen books by the same author: I’ve read more Lemony Snickets than I’ve read Iris Murdochs. For the uninitiated, among whom I proudly counted myself until the past few weeks, The End is the 13th and final instalment in a series of novels by the American author Daniel Handler, writing under the nom de plume Lemony Snicket.

Ian Thomson

Hell and its afterlife

In 1882, while on a lecture tour of America, Oscar Wilde was surprised to find a copy of The Divine Comedy in a Nebraskan penitentiary. ‘Oh dear, who would have thought of finding Dante here?’ he marvelled. No doubt the inmates were supposed to be edified by Dante’s medieval epic of sin and salvation: ghastly retribution is meted out to sinners in the nine circles of Hell. However, if Dante speaks to our present condition, it is not because we fear damnation, but because he wrote the epic of Everyman who sets out in search of salvation. (A more recent sinner, Jeffery Archer, subtitled the three volumes of his prison memoirs ‘Hell’, ‘Purgatory’ and ‘Heaven’.

Juliet Townsend

Children’s books for Christmas | 9 December 2006

December, as far as children’s books are concerned, is the month of the hardback. For the rest of the year the young are fobbed off with soft covers, but the Christmas present book can be an altogether more substantial and permanent friend. This is true of picture books for the very young. Dimity Dumpty by Bob Graham (Walker Books, £10.99) is the story of Humpty Dumpty’s shy little sister, who saves his life when all the King’s horses and all the King’s men have failed, by taking off her T-shirt and bandaging what is delicately called ‘Humpty’s leakage’. The illustrations of the family’s life in the circus as ‘The Tumbling Dumpties’ are delightful.