More from Books

Monday

Noble Frankland

No reason to pull down the statue

Listing page content here The title of Gordon Corrigan’s book tells us it is not going to be a Churchillian panegyric, so it comes as almost a disappointment to find no new revelations needful for the dethroning of the former national hero. All we are given is an emphasised reminder that Churchill’s history, The Second World War, was biased, that he was prone to indulge in disastrous expeditions, notably, in the first war, Gallipoli and, in the second, Norway and that he unreasonably pestered his generals to mount offensives before they were ready to do so. But none of this, of course, is news and it certainly gives no ground for taking down the statue of Churchill in Parliament Square nor, indeed, for revising his entry in the Dictionary of National Biography.

Martin Vander Weyer

A philosopher rescued from politicians

Listing page content here In February 2005 the then chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, travelled to Kirkcaldy on the windy shores of the Firth of Forth in the company of our very own Chancellor of the Exchequer, so that both could pay tribute to the town’s most famous son, Adam Smith, in their own distinctive way. For Greenspan, the stability and growth of free-market capitalism as seen in ‘today’s awesome array of international transactions’ could be attributed to a modern version of ‘Smith’s invisible hand’.

John Laughland

Giants in petty strife

Listing page content here ‘In London, if a man have the misfortune to attach himself to letters, I know not with whom he is to live, nor how he is to pass his time in suitable society.’ David Hume was notorious for preferring Edinburgh’s intellectual life to London’s, but the city where the philosopher was most successful, at least socially, was Paris. He was sent there in 1763 as secretary to the ambassador, the Earl of Hertford, and was feted as ‘le bon David’. ‘In Paris,’ Hume wrote, ‘a man that distinguishes himself in letters meets immediately with regard and attention.’ Hume’s remark about the anti-intellectualism of the English remains true to this day, but he was to some extent the cause of it.

Digby Durrant

Ghosts from the past

Listing page content here Andrew Taylor has written on a wide range of subjects, but it is for his crime thrillers that he has become famous and won so many awards. By my estimate he’s written 26, which is just under half of the 59 books he’s credited with by Amazon. Until now I have only read one of these and it was excellent. The American Boy is a long, gripping mystery novel of the kind that Wilkie Collins invented to delight the Victorians, and so I looked forward to Taylor’s new one, A Stain on the Silence. When James’s phone rings and he hears a tiny voice say ‘Jamie’ he would have been wise to have rung off immediately. Only Lily Murthington has ever called him that and she had almost ruined his life. Now she’s dying and wants to see him.

Alistair Irwin

Fighting a war in all but name

Listing page content here There is much in common between a Richard Holmes book and a bottle of the finest Speyside malt. Both look and feel good, full of promise. Extract the stopper from one, open the other and the anticipation quickens. After that it is a question of taste or habit as to whether you gulp them down for maximum intoxication or extend the life of the contents by savouring them gradually. For this latest Holmes volume I recommend a preliminary dram or two as the author sets the scene. Then take a breath of fresh air to absorb the implications of what you have read.

Friday

Interconnect

Serious but not solemn

Towards the end of the Seventies I was asked to write a short, critical study of Muriel Spark’s novels. I accepted, with some trepidation and misgivings. At least I hope there were misgivings. There should have been, first because nothing equipped me for the task apart from my admiration for her novels and, perhaps, the fact that I had, at long last and after many false starts, written a novel myself and had it published. The second reason to hesitate was more cogent. I had enjoyed her novels from the start. Memento Mori and The Bachelors were as clever and witty and as much fun as pre-Brideshead Waugh; they delighted us as undergraduates. Yet the question nagged: how serious was she?

Philip Hensher

How writers behave and misbehave

Oxford publishes, or has published, a number of anthologies of anecdotes relating to various professions. There is a very enjoyable one of military anecdotes, edited by Max Hastings, Elizabeth Longford’s of royal anecdotes (competing in a crowded field), and Paul Johnson’s of political anecdotes. Some professions more readily generate anecdotes than others. I could imagine an anthology of anecdotes about philosophers or doctors, but no one is going to buy The Oxford Book of Banking Anecdotes. A lot of serious-minded people probably disapprove greatly of the idea of an anthology of literary anecdotes. After all, full-dress scholarly biographies of writers are, in some circles, not regarded as particularly worthy enterprises.

Frederic Raphael

Making the best of defeat

Listing page content here Vae victis, the Roman warning to the defeated, was probably more threatening than sympathetic. Ever after they themselves had been subjugated — forced, literally, to bow their heads under the Samnite yoke — they made a habit of ruthless winning. The defeated could expect slavery and pillage. After June 1940, both were endured by the French for four years which had traumatic consequences. They include the cussedness of France’s foreign policy and her resentment of les Anglo-Saxons. Helping hands too get bitten. As soon as he entered Paris, General de Gaulle set about fabricating the myth that Paris had ‘liberated herself by her own efforts’, which was much truer of Naples.

Andrew Taylor

Infant identity crisis

Listing page content here Women in peril flit through the pages of traditional Gothic fiction, murmuring ‘Had I but known!’ as they fall for the wrong man, open the wrong door or apply for the wrong job. The poet Sophie Hannah takes the trusty formula in both hands, gives it a vigorous shake and uses it to produce something fascinating and original in her first novel. In this case the woman in question is Alice. Still reeling from the death of her parents in a car crash, she has married the dashing David and acquired a new family in the shape of his welcoming (and wealthy) mother Vivienne and his son Felix by a previous marriage. David’s first wife was murdered, but the killer was caught and is now in jail. Alice moves into the lavishly equipped family home.

A.N. Wilson

The man who loved one island

The poet and storyteller George Mackay Brown was the son of the postman at Stromness, Orkney. His father John had also been an apprentice tailor before becoming the postman. George, in one of his poems, speaks of how ‘not wisdom or wealth can redeem/The green coat, childhood’. In his knowledge of every cranny of the Orkneys, but in particular in his feel for the town of Stromness, George retained some of the postman’s instinctual topographical grasp for the one dear perpetual place in which his genius was rooted. In the exactitude of his meta- phors, the flair of his tragic impulse, there is something of Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, the pessimistic tailor ever struggling to say an Eternal Yes to life.

William Feaver

A free spirit in Philadelphia

‘Eakins errs just a little — a little — in the direction of the flesh,’ Walt Whitman observed in the late 1880s. Ideally he would have had the Frenchman Millet do his portrait, but the painter of humble peasants was already dead. Eakins made him a flushed old soul in jovial mood. Sidney Kirkpatrick’s account of Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) errs a little in the direction of voiceover-speak. His Eakins is ‘a neglected and tortured genius’ for whom Philadelphia, city of love, was no fleshpot and who, though somewhat prim himself, was rated outrageous by the leading figures of that God-fearing hell-hole. This Eakins is one of those posthumously vindicated figures common in popular accounts of 19th-century painting.

Jane Ridley

The thrill of the illicit

Listing page content here Hunting is cool. Ten years ago no one in her right mind would have dreamed of writing a novel about hunting, but now Candida Clark has done exactly that. Just as George Bush’s ‘war of terror’ gave a huge boost to al-Q’aeda, so Labour’s attempt to impose a ban has actually invigorated hunting. Today it’s more popular than ever, given an extra shot of adrenalin by the thrill of dodging the law. Parliament spent 700 hours debating hunting, and the result was a botched and unworkable law which makes things worse, not better, for the fox. The reason for this fiasco is simple. As Charlie Pye-Smith explains in his excellent essay, Rural Rites, the ban was driven by class war, not by a concern for animal welfare.

Tom Holland

Never simply a soldier

There was nothing that a Roman general relished more than the chance to raise an earthwork. ‘Dig for victory’ was an injunction that legionaries often followed with a literal cussedness. Advancing into enemy territory, they carried shovels as well as spears. The camp that a legion would build after every day’s march, always identical to the one that it had built the evening before, was the expression of something almost obsessive in the Romans’ military psychology. The blend of caution and remorselessness that this addiction to entrenchment reflected was, in strategic terms, stupendously successful. Who better, then, than a specialist on the Roman army to absorb its implications?

Byron Rogers

She was only a farmer’s daughter . . .

Why are we so interested in biographies of the old film stars? I don’t think our children will be. I can’t see them reading 550 pages, the length of this book, about the lives of far better actors like George Clooney or Gwyneth Paltrow. But then we don’t see the stars as actors. For that period straddling the middle of the last century we really came to believe the old gods were back. This illusion was the achievement of the Hollywood studios, in particular of the Eastern European Jews who ran them, and were some of the most appalling human beings who have ever walked the earth. According to Lee Server, L. B.

Interconnect

A selection of recent paperbacks

Listing page content here Non-fiction: Rosebery by Leo McKinstry, John Murray, £10.99 Elizabeth The Queen Mother by Hugo Vickers, Arrow, £9.99 The Vote by Paul Foot, Penguin, £9.99 1599 by James Shapiro, Faber, £8.99 The Wreckers by Bella Bathurst, HarperPerennial, £8.99 Father Joe by Tony Hendra, Penguin, £8.99 The Ice Museum by Joanna Kavenna, Penguin, £8.99 Nature Cure by Richard Mabey, Pimlico, £7.99 Medici Money by Tim Parks, Profile, £8.99 Dr Johnson’s Dictionary by Henry Hitchings, John Murray, £7.99 How to be a Bad Birdwatcher by Simon Barnes, Short Books, £9.99 A Castle in Spain by Matthew Parris, Penguin, £8.99 Rough Crossings by Simon Schama, BBC Books, £8.

Jonathan Sumption

The new Machiavelli

Should the state take action against people who have done nothing wrong, if there are plausible grounds for thinking that they are about to? Suppose, says Alan Dershowitz, that reliable intelligence shows that a large-scale terrorist attack is about to happen. Should the law allow the police to round up whole categories of potential perpetrators in advance, in the hope of stopping the conspiracy in its tracks? Should it authorise the use of torture to obtain information that will prevent the attack? What if the suspected mastermind is identified in a foreign country where the authorities are too weak, wicked or incompetent to arrest him? Might one assassinate him instead? Or invade the foreign country? Or bomb it from a great height?

Wednesday

Philip Hensher

Odd odds and ends

Listing page content here Thin scrapings from the bottom of the Orwell archives, this volume; less than ten years after Peter Davison’s 20- volume complete Orwell, he has taken the opportunity to put some subsequent discoveries into print. The on dit is that the publishers of the complete edition declined the opportunity of presenting this supplement. Though this decision falls squarely into the ha’porth of tar category, and the complete Orwell must have been much more commercially successful than most comparable enterprises, it’s an understandable one. Orwell’s ephemeral writings fared unusually well in the 50 years after his death, thanks to two editors.

D.J. Taylor

Delivering the goods

Listing page content here The funniest episode in Leo McKinstry’s biography of Sir Alf Ramsey (1920-99) finds its subject — the time is 1973 — reaching the end of his tether with the talented but undisciplined Manchester City forward Rodney Marsh. ‘I’ve told you that when you play for England you have to work harder’, Sir Alf harangues his wayward protégé. ‘I’ll be watching you and if you don’t, I’m going to pull you off at half-time.’ ‘Christ!’ Marsh mutters. ‘At Manchester City all we get at half-time is a cup of tea and an orange.

Lloyd Evans

Beauties and eyesores

Listing page content here To call him a polymath would be a gross slander. Alain de Botton knows everything. Sim- ple as that. He’s just far too modest to admit it. And I’m happy to report that his great mission to turn every facet of civilisation into a coffee-table book continues. Philosophy, art, travel — all done. Buildings are next. His approach is studiously unhurried. He gives the impression that he didn’t set out to write a book at all. It just sort of happened. He apparently spends his life flitting from continent to continent, staying in fancy hotels, roaming capital cities, noticing things and examining the condition of his temperament.

Olivia Glazebrook

Solving a confidence crisis

Listing page content here When I saw this book’s subtitle, ‘What to Read and How to Write’, I felt a hot and cold prickle — but then I do tend to respond badly to direct orders. Hoping my fears were unfounded, I turned to Smiley’s summary of The Great Gatsby. ‘I have to admit that I don’t care as much for The Great Gatsby as many people do,’ she writes. My prickle turned into a frown, and with feelings of panic and hostility I turned next to her comment on Tom Jones. Thank heaven, she admires it: ‘Tom Jones exhibits complexity and generosity of character portrayal ... it justly became a great English classic.’ Phew, my panic subsided. I was able to turn to Chapter 1 — her introduction — and begin in earnest.