More from Books

Wednesday

Caroline Moorehead

Papa on the warpath

In 1961, when he was 62, Ernest Hemingway shot himself. Almost half a century later, this bombastic, vainglorious, paranoid man, whose writing captured the minds not only of his own generation but of all subsequent ones, still exercises a powerful attraction for biographers. Though no one has yet written a better account of Hemingway’s unhappy and driven life than Carlos Baker, whose 700-page volume appeared in the late 1960s, scholars, historians, journalists and biographers continue to tease out little known aspects of it, chipping at fragments of the past, rearranging them into new patterns and mosaics.

Simon Baker

Getting the maximum pleasure

The premise of John Sutherland’s new book is that many people wrongly think of reading as an all-or-nothing ability, like, say, tying one’s shoes: either you can do it or you can’t. Such people would no doubt consider a book about how to read a novel as irrelevant as one titled How to Eat Crisps — and yet, Sutherland maintains, reading a novel well is almost as difficult as writing one well. Perhaps the word ‘reading’ itself is the problem. Strictly speaking, reading is something you can either do or not do, and it’s not terribly difficult. We say that novels by Proust or Pynchon are ‘difficult reads’, but in fact a child of ten could read them: he or she just wouldn’t understand them.

Kieron Winn

Unforgetting

The arc and light and breadth and nothing kempt,Flat shining fields of sand, the shallow-carvingTigris and Euphrates of the beach streamsWhere individual flying grains are seen,The wet compactions out of which grew keepsI slopped moat water on at the end of the day,Playing decay and knowing I was loved,Coves where my face would drop past the waterlineInto the wallowing playfully-deadly force,Blue-black rock, its surface softened by water,Broad outcrops, models of a savage planet,Clammy caves whose ground no man had trod—A language I absorbed, forgot I knew,Restarting after a sleepy train’s long snaking.

Christopher Woodward

The master left without masterpieces

Sir John Soane is London’s lost architect. You can visit his museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and the picture gallery he designed at Dulwich. But since his death in 1837 his greatest masterpieces have gone. The Victorians demolished the law courts at Westminster, and the glittering royal entrance to the House of Lords. The RAC club-house stands on the site of the Marquis of Buckingham’s palace on Pall Mall. His Bank of England was demolished in the 1920s —– to Nikolaus Pevsner the city’s greatest loss of the 20th century. Happily, this book by the architect Ptolemy Dean brings into the balance a multiplicity of new discoveries. It is the companion piece to Sir John Soane and the Country Estate which he published in 1999.

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 16 August 2006

Cry Shame (1950) by Katherine Everard Cry Shame! is the torrid tale of a 13-year- old girl who leaves home to become a dancer: in her brief career she learns things she is too young to know, runs off with a man four times her age, assiduously breaks the seventh commandment, has an affair with an ‘ambisextrous’ Hollywood screen idol and ends her harlot’s progress in a seedy hotel room with sleeping pills and bourbon. ‘Definitely adult reading!’ bawled the Cincinnati Enquirer. ‘Frank and revealing!’ ululated the Dayton Daily News. What no one knew at the time was that Katherine Everard was a fresh-faced young man called Gore Vidal.

Wednesday

Philip Mansel

The Prince and the F

Anyone interested in the history of Germany, of nationalism or of dynasties will be gripped by this book. Born at the start of the 20th century, heirs of an ancient German dynasty, Princes Philipp and Christopher of Hesse-Kassel were good-looking, modern young men. English was their second language, Queen Victoria’s liberal daughter the Empress Frederick their grandmother. No other German princes, however, rose so high in the Nazi party. Prince Philipp became a member of the Nazi party and the SA in 1930. Prince Christopher joined the SS in 1932. The timing of their adhesion, before Hitler came to power, proves its sincerity.

Paul Binding

A member of the awkward squad

On an autumn Saturday in 1944 Private Robert Prentice, an 18-year-old rifleman trainee, makes a long journey from his camp in Virginia to New York City, to see his mother. He is soon to be sent abroad, France most likely, and there he’ll see action, which will at least be a change from tedious, thankless camp duties. ‘Oh, Bobby!’ exclaims his ageing mother as she greets him. ‘My soldier! My big, wonderful soldier!’ A touching tableau, one would think, except that it’s riddled with falsity. Alice Prentice is a self-centred, self-indulgent, attitudinising spendthrift, who will occupy herself during Bobby’s long and endangered absence with plans for him to rescue her from an indigence largely her own fault.

Andrew Taylor

Meandering with a mazy motion

Kate Atkinson’s previous novel, Case Histories, was a successful experiment in crime fiction. One Good Turn is its sequel. In the first book, which was set in Cambridge, Brodie Jackson was a standard-issue private eye — ex-army, ex-police, with a broken marriage and a penchant for country music. Now, thanks to a £2 million inheritance from a grateful client, he’s an ex-private eye with a house in France and a swimming pool. Another legacy from Case Histories is his lover Julia, an actress in the Nell Gwyn mould, both physically and emotionally. Brodie and Julia are in Edinburgh, where Julia has a role in a doomed Fringe production, largely funded by Brodie.

Charlotte Moore

The past is always present

‘Nothing was over. Nothing is ever over.’ Thus muses Humphrey Clark as he travels towards the small windswept northern port of Finsterness, scene of formative childhood holidays. Humphrey, a reclusive marine biologist, is on his way to collect an honorary degree. Much more significantly, at Finsterness he will re-encounter Ailsa Kelman, his childhood companion and later — secretly, briefly — his wife. The idea that ‘nothing is ever over’ provides the momentum for this, Margaret Drabble’s 17th novel. As young adults, Humphrey and Ailsa believed that they had found a perfect, time-cheating happiness together.

Peter Jm-Wayne

The most famous, if not the tallest

Before the fire, before the ash, before theBodies tumbling solitary through space, oneThin skin of glass and metal met another….Two man-made behemoths joined in a       fatal kiss. Although this poetic and deeply philosophical expression of the author’s love (no other word will suffice) for the Empire State Building ostensibly celebrates the 75th anniversary of the great American icon, it has been thrown into more poignant relief, indeed could never have been written at all in its present form, without the sudden and awful twin demise of another icon just a few hundred yards downtown.

Hugh Massingberd

On the Wight track

In one of P. G. Wodehouse’s stories the attempts made by Oliver Sipperley, editor of the Mayfair Gazette, to inject some pep into the mag are hampered by poor old Sippy’s inability to ward off unwelcome contributions from his formidable prep school headmaster on recondite classical topics. I experienced not dissimilar difficulties when editing the Telegraph’s obituaries page as I was constantly being assured by the 2nd Viscount Camrose, the paper’s erstwhile deputy chairman, that one of his old sailing chums would make ‘a jolly good obit’ (though his brother, Lord Hartwell, always maintained that obits were a waste of news space).

Anita Brookner

The eyes have it

Early in January 2000 the art historian T. J. Clark arrived in Los Angeles for a six-month stint at the Getty Research Institute. He was fortunate to see, in the Getty Museum, two great pictures by Poussin, the Getty’s ‘Landscape with a Calm’ and the National Gallery’s ‘Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake’, on loan from London. Over a period of weeks Clark visited the pictures almost every day and was able to register the tiny but memorable changes brought about not only by the process of intense contemplation but the traces left in memory and dream fragments which could only be clarified by more looking. Attempts to translate these experiences stimulated but never dogmatically proposed a new form of art historical writing.

Dorothy Pope

Cool Morning

Mid-August, even so, a faint hint, giftof autumn momentarily — a sweetsoft breeze. With slender branches trees entreata sift of foliage. Their fingers lift.Then half a dozen paper leaves adriftblow in and dance round summer-sandalled feet,though brief, their restlessness another fleetingsign of imminent and massive shift.The season’s on the very cusp. We’ll seethe great sun climb and midday will be hotbut morning now, as evening later, sparesrelentless sultriness, humiditywith temperate caress. Long-shadowed autumn’sin the wings. The old earth cools, prepares.

Allan Massie

Fatal attraction

When Prince Harry stirred up a fuss by wearing Nazi uniform to a fancy-dress party he found a gallant defender in Paul Johnson who wrote that ‘in treating Nazi insignia as a party joke’ the young prince ‘reflects the instincts of his generation’. ‘The Nazis,’ he added, ‘do have an undoubted fascination for many young people’, because of their style, not their ideology. ‘Hitler still exerts some of the dread appeal he exercised in his lifetime ... A lot of his appeal, I suspect, is visual. Hitler was a kind of artist’ who ‘put his  artistic and inventive instincts to work’. This is surely undeniable, and Johnson is by no means the first to remark it. Thomas Mann was there before him.

Thursday

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 3 August 2006

ZABIBA AND THE KING (2000) by Saddam Hussein The first of several novels by the world’s bestselling war criminal, Zabiba and the King is a clunking allegory in which the king represents Saddam, Zabiba (a beautiful maiden) represents the Iraqi people, and Zabiba’s abusive husband represents the USA. Most of the book is presented in the form of a dialogue on statecraft between Zabiba and the king, who loves her madly (as Saddam loves his people), though he never has relations with her (that might be going a little too far). One of Zabiba’s musings, which may refer to Russia (the bear), reads as follows: ‘Even an animal respects a man’s desire, if it wants to copulate with him.

Sebastian Smee

One kiss too many

Something is eating away at Father David Anderton, the narrator of Be Near Me, a novel as beautiful and perfectly pitched as its title. An English priest working in the Scottish parish of Dalgarnock, he is afflicted by ‘a large private sense of wanting to depart from the person I had always been’. Not his faith but his willingness to evangelise has vanished, and all that remains is his propensity to favour the workings of private taste over public rallying cries. He hates bigotry and small-mindedness and believes in improving the mind; he despises the atmosphere at the local school where ‘education is a matter of bitter entrenchment as opposed to any sort of managed revelation’.

Dot Wordsworth

Shedding light in dark places

Scholars who want to accuse others of ignorant obscurantism have long taunted them with the phrase lucus a non lucendo. This is supposed to exemplify the stupidest kind of concocted etymology, and here it is in Book XVII of Isidore’s stout old compilation: ‘A “sacred grove” (lucus) is a dense thicket of trees that lets no light come to the ground, named by way of antiphrasis because it “sheds no light” (non lucere).’ So, if Isidore was so dim, why should anyone be interested, after 1,400 years, in an English translation of his magnum opus, The Etymologies? First because we have missed something big. The Etymologies was one of the most influential books from the time of its compilation around the year 620 until into the Renaissance and beyond.

Rupert Christiansen

Not all Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)

Born in 1965, Howard Sounes was scarcely out of short trousers by the time that Margaret Thatcher took power and kicked us out of the mire of complacent consensus and began to crush the tyranny of the unions. Perhaps his vivacious and enjoyable new book about the culture of the Seventies does romanticise ‘a low dishonest decade’ that he did not fully experience, but there is something to be said for his refusal to follow the common view that it was an era merely ‘amusingly stupid and vulgar... all about flared trousers, Starsky and Hutch, Chopper bikes and Showaddywaddy’.

Matthew Parris

Touching the hem of a lost world

First and most importantly, Hugh Thomson is a good thing. It takes a rare combination of scholarly focus and Boys’ Own derring-do to write books about adventuring in Peru (this is his third) which consistently rise above the level of backpackers’ companions, and convey not only Thomson’s great knowledge of the ancient civilisations of the Andes, but also the thrill of the chase for such knowledge. To a lay audience, academic archeologists are often dreadful communicators either of the excitement of discovery or of the human stories of the discoverers. Indeed to the general public they regularly fail to communicate even the meaning of their discoveries.

Ian Sansom

A never-ending story

You know the famous story about Freud and Einstein? Freud writes to Einstein, sending him one of his books and asking for his opinion of it. Einstein writes back, saying he enjoyed the book very much, that he thought it was outstanding, exemplary even, but that, alas, he was in no position to judge its scientific merits. To which Freud replied, if Einstein couldn’t judge its scientific merits, then the book could hardly be judged exemplary. About this, Freud, as in a number of other things, was gloriously and absolutely wrong. Greil Marcus is no scientist, but we shouldn’t hold that against him.