More from Books

Thursday

Rupert Christiansen

Firebrand turned diehard

‘Do you pronounce it Sowthy or Suthy?’ asked a friend when I mentioned I was reviewing this book. Today, that small controversy probably marks the limit of public curiosity as to this remarkably prolific but not otherwise exceptional poet, novelist, historian, critic and political commentator, who flourished as a radical alongside his friend Coleridge in the early stages of the French Revolution, and later retreated to the Lake District where he became a diehard Tory and Poet Laureate, earning himself the contempt of Shelley, Byron and Hazlitt. This new biography follows relatively recent volumes by Geoffrey Carnall and Mark Storey; it adds little of significance to them.

James Delingpole

Blowing your mind on the road

Sex, Afghanistan without the risk of death, Nepalese temple bells; more sex, India when it wasn’t deforested and covered in a cloud of smog; yet more sex and a lot more drugs: yes, I can quite see why travel-writer Rory MacLean wishes that he’d been old enough to have done the Hippie Trail in its late Sixties/early Seventies heyday. I wish I’d been there, too — either that or a door gunner in Nam, anyway — and the only consolation is that I know damned well that it can’t have been nearly as much fun as the hippies cracked it up to be. How do I know? Because hippies are a bunch of mendacious, self-deluding, intellectually dishonest scuzzballs, mainly.

Wednesday

Robert Stewart

The minimum of turbulence

Glorious, bloodless, last, perhaps all of those things, but the revolution of 1688 was hardly a revolution at all. It was the neat solution to a succession crisis: how to keep the throne of England secure against a Roman Catholic successor to the Roman Catholic James II. The essential ingredients were the resolve of James’s Protestant son-in-law, William of Orange, to bring Great Britain into permanent alliance with the Netherlands against France and, in the face of that resolve, James’s timidity and eventual flight.

Ben Wilson

Pudding time for Whigs

Compared with the romance and legend of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, the ’15 is, as Daniel Szechi ruefully concedes, ‘a dowdier bird’. It has been ill-served by history, just as the Jacobites as a whole have been neglected by historians of the 18th century in favour of the broader trend of Britain’s march of progress. There is perhaps a failure to understand why people should have risked everything for a dynasty that had been twice kicked off the throne and in support of James Stuart, every bit a dowdy bird himself. That was certainly how the Whigs felt at the time. It was the ‘unnatural rebellion’ for them, started and carried out by stubborn and savage Scottish irreconcilables and a handful of Tory malcontents.

Clive James

In the Brisbane Botanical Gardens

In the Brisbane Botanical Gardens,Walking the avenue of weeping figs,You can see exuded latex stain the barkLike adolescent sperm. A metamorphosis:The trunks must be full of randy boys. At home, the Java willowsWhen planted alongside a watercourseWere said to stem the breeding of mosquitoes.Here, they have nothing else to doExcept to stand there looking elegantIn Elle Macpherson lingerie. From the walkway through the mangrove mud-flatsSpread south from overwhelming Asia,You can see the breathing tubes of Viet-Cong crabsAnd imagine Arnie hiding from the PredatorLike a mud-skipper playing possum,Although he did that, of course, in South America.Below the tangled branches, bubbles tick.

Wednesday

Ferdinand Mount

The Voltaire of St Aldates

Ah Oxford! Welcome to the City of Dreadful Spite, otherwise known as Malice Springs, the permanent Number One on the Bitch List. Not since the vituperative pamphleteers of the English Civil War has there been a community so dedicated to character assassination as the dons of Oxford. Living on the same staircase, dining side by side, night after night, term after term, dries up the milk of human kindness. Here is Hugh Trevor-Roper, Regius Professor of Modern History for 23 years, describing C.S.

Alexander Masters

Castrated by a grateful nation

Some people’s lives drive you into a rage. Alan Turing’s is one. In The Man Who Knew Too Much David Leavitt unexpectedly compares him to Alec Guinness playing Sidney Stratton in The Man in the White Suit. Like Stratton, who invented a suit that would never wear out, Turing was a brilliant scientific deviant, interested in ‘welding the theoretical to the practical, approaching mathematics from a perspective that reflected the industrial ethos of the England in which he was raised’. And, like Stratton, he was ‘hounded out of the world’. But Stratton was playing an Ealing comedy. The injustice done to Turing makes you want to spit at someone. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was Turing’s favourite film.

Byron Rogers

A tendency to collect kings

Some day this book may be in the footnotes of all social histories of the early 21st century, not for what it contains but for what it is: 500 pages of not the collected, but the selected letters of one human being. For, sidelined by the telephone and the email, the letter-writer is about to follow the fletcher and the high-street fishmonger into the past. And until they find some way of retrieving the spoken word from space, future historians, with only printed emails to go on, will puzzle over the terseness which at the turn of the century came into human communication. Suddenly we are as tight-lipped and purposeful as Western gun-fighters. Will anyone ever again write letters the way Martha Gellhorn did, 3,000 words, 4,000 words long, and one of 40 pages?

Anne Applebaum

Painter, dreamer, governor, spy

Of all the odd, forgotten corners of eastern Europe, the province of Volhynia must be among the oddest and most forgotten. A land of marshes and forests, memorable for its impassable roads and its lonely villages, Volhynia now lies in the north-west corner of Ukraine, along the Polish border. But before the second world war Volhynia was one of the easternmost provinces of Poland — as well as one of the poorest. In 1921, when the Polish state incorporated the province, having fought over it (and often in it) during the Polish–Bolshevik war, no Volhynian town had a regulated street network, only one had a sewage system and only three had electricity.

D.J. Taylor

More than meets the eye — or not

Not long ago I listened to a Radio Two interviewer interrogating Kate Bush about her new album. The particular track that had excited his interest was ‘Mrs Bartolozzi’, a puzzling little number about a woman who sits watching the clothes fly by in her washing machine. What was it all about?, he wondered. Ms Bush, famously Delphic in conversation, gave nothing away. ‘Perhaps,’ she suggested, ‘it’s about Mrs Bartolozzi.’ For some reason I thought about this exchange while working my way through Haruki Murakami’s bumper selection of short stories. A representative offering from Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, a career showcase going back to the early 1980s, might be ‘New York Mining Disaster’. Is it about a mining disaster? Well, no.

Simon Baker

In Cold Skin, a brilliantly suspenseful début novel

In Cold Skin, a brilliantly suspenseful début novel by Albert Sánchez Piñol set in the years after the end of the first world war, a young man arrives on a desolate Antarctic island, where for the next 12 months he will study the local climate. Oddly, his predecessor, who was due to be collected, cannot be found; there is only a half-mad lighthouse-keeper, who appears to be the island’s only other inhabitant — or so it seems until night falls, when the man hears the patter of feet outside his window. The novel borrows from so many popular genres — horror, thriller, B-movie — and yet ultimately transcends them all and is classifiable only as an excellent book.

Anne Chisholm

Rampant fascism near Henley

There can seldom have been a better first sentence in a book by a daughter about her mother: ‘“Heil Hitler!” shouted Mummy as she pushed Daddy down the stairs at Assendon Lodge.’ Even better, the next few lines reveal that the second world war was in progress at the time, Daddy was in uniform, and the author was watching and listening from her hiding place under the said stairs. Alas, the rest of the book fails to live up to its brilliant opening. This is a pity, because Julia Camoys Stonor has a bloodcurdling tale to tell and a monstrous parent to describe; and apart from taking the lid off her family, she has a serious purpose — to indicate just how strong, in certain pre-war English upper-class circles, sympathy for Hitler and Franco could be.

Allan Massie

Prince of self-pity

T S. Eliot thought Hamlet an ‘artistic failure’, Shakespeare being unable to reconcile the theme of the old revenge tragedy on which the work is based with the conception of the character of Hamlet himself. One may agree with this while still finding the play compelling; indeed the most puzzling of the tragedies. The revenge theme is admittedly tiresome and the reasons for postponing the act of vengeance both unconvincing and boring. We can accept the ghost only as a convenient theatrical convention. No doubt Elizabethan audiences saw it differently. Belief in ghosts was then common, and one wonders to what extent Shakespeare shared it. Banquo’s ghost appears only to Macbeth and is invisible to the other dinner-guests; invisible to Lady Macbeth also.

Wednesday

Philip Hensher

Showdown and climbdown

Of course, he never did. Margaret Thatcher had more sense than to enter into any kind of discussion with Arthur Scargill — the horror of the beer-and-sandwiches relations between previous governments and the unions was too great. Before the 1984-5 miners’ strike which dominated and defined Thatcher’s second term in office, just as the Falklands war dominated the first, she would not have wanted to be in the same room as Scargill. Afterwards, of course, so comprehensive was the government’s victory over Scargill’s intentions, the question would hardly have arisen. These days, as Patrick Hannan says, hardly one educated person in ten thousand could tell you the name of anyone connected with the National Union of Mineworkers.

Justin Cartwright

Betjeman’s world of trains and buttered toast

I am sitting in the London Library as I write this. I am wearing Rafael Nadal tennis shorts, which come below the knee. Obviously, I look ridiculous. But this is the role of the middle-class, middle-aged English male, to feel slightly out of time, out of kilter, with the world around him. Sometimes down in Rock I see middle-aged Englishmen in their holiday gear, capacious navy-blue shorts or those faded pinkish trousers they wear for golf, always topped with a polo shirt, and it is clear to me that the English seaside has a liberating effect on these people: in a rather crabbed English fashion, they are letting their hair down.

David Gilmour

Beauty and bigotry

When I was a child in the 1950s, I had a delightful book called The Golden Geography which tried to encapsulate every aspect of the globe — its landscape, its climate, its people and their occupations — in a small sketch with a brief caption. From a section called ‘This is Asia’, I learned that Arabs drank water from goatskins, that Indians usually lived ‘out-of-doors’ (a nice way of putting it) and that the Japanese had weird houses with sliding paper doors. Such apparently timeless images were imprinted on my mind and, without much scope for revising them, remained there a long time.

Tom Holland

Victims and/or beneficiaries

‘Roman Britain,’ I asked a friend of mine, a committed pacifist and the veteran of endless marches against the war in Iraq, ‘a Good or Bad Thing?’ ‘Oh, good,’ my friend answered, not even deigning to ponder the question. Startled by the knee-jerk speed of her response, I asked her to explain. ‘Well, the roads, of course. And the baths and the central-heating.’ She paused. ‘And the peace.’ I knew exactly where she was coming from. When I pressed her, it turned out that her hazy sense of Roman Britain derived in large part from a Ladybird book that I too had read when I was young. It was the pictures I chiefly remembered.

Ian Dunlop

Where golf is in the blood

Golfers, I have to admit, can be great bores. Just listen to the pros discuss their performance after a round in a major championship or ask a golfing friend about his game and you can be stuck listening to tales of triumph and tribulation with as much chance of escape as the Wedding Guest from the Ancient Mariner. So it was with some misgivings that I began to read John Greig’s reflections about taking up golf again after a gap of many years and a debilitating illness. Would it be all I, I, I — I hit this magnificent drive here, I then sank a monstrous putt 20 feet from the pin and so on? But Grieg has three qualities in his favour. Firstly, he can write and has six books of poetry, two mountaineering books and five novels to his credit.

John De-Falbe

The maze of the mind

With the publication last year of Your Face Tomorrow 1: Fever and Spear, the first volume of a trilogy and his eighth translated work of fiction, it was plain that Javier Marías was embarking on a project which required readers to leave behind all conventional ideas of what a novel is. At one point in the book the narrator cleans up a drop of blood. On the last page, someone rings his doorbell. There are no other events. But for patient readers with a speculative cast of mind and a taste for stylistic adventure it seemed to be a work of genius. The second volume, Dance and Dream, confirms this. Jacques Deza is a Spaniard living in London. Because of his acute powers of insight into other people, he has been taken on by a mysterious MI6- like agency to evaluate other people.

William Feaver

Shaggy dog story

Until 1970 when he got his first Weimaraner from a litter in Long Beach, California, William Wegman was just another West Coast conceptual tyro, doing regular doubletake stuff like spelling out the word WOUND in sticking plaster stuck to the face. He loved the way the puppy asleep looked like a dropped sock. That gave him an idea, a juicy bone of an idea, an idea worth fooling around with for years to come. Pausing only to name him Man Ray after the only all-American Surrealist, he began thinking up inappropriate poses. Being a Weimaraner Man Ray could be relied on to look long-suffering no matter what and this was great when it came to role-plays involving mind-blowing costume changes.