More from Books

Saturday

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.

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.