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Friday

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.

Andrew Taylor

When the kissing stopped and the killing began

Listing page content here As a genre, perhaps the most important question that the thriller asks is this: do we care sufficiently about the hero to want him (or, of course, her) to survive? In this case the hero is Nick Atkins, who in 1989 is just down from Cambridge. On the brink of law school, he spends time in California, where his life is hijacked by Tabatha, a beautiful Stanford student with a taste for Yeats’s poetry. After several months, Tab abruptly and inexplicably decides that their passionate affair is over and sends him home. She promises to communicate occasionally through cryptic small ads in the California Literary Review. For the next 17 years, her teasing, allusive messages flow like a dark sub- terranean current through Nick’s life.

Robert Beeston

The double life of a people

Listing page content here The crowd of bearded men looked and sounded as though they meant it, punching the air in unison and chanting the familiar slogans: ‘Death to America!’, ‘Death to Israel!’. A quarter of a century after the revolution that swept the Islamic regime to power the official message in Tehran had barely altered. America remained the ‘Great Satan’ and Britain, Iran’s traditional foe, still merited the title ‘little Satan’. But a chance encounter with one of the participants in this supposedly spontaneous, but evidently well-rehearsed, demonstration revealed a very different side to the country. ‘You are from England?’ he said, beaming. ‘You are welcome. My cousin lives in Manchester.

Elfreda Pownall

Chewing it over

Listing page content here I spent many of my school holidays with a kind great-aunt, a deeply religious maiden, most of whose friends were nuns. Beside my bed, as well as Lives of the Saints there was always her favourite book, Jottings from a Gentlewoman’s Garden. Not ideal reading for a nine-year-old, but how glad I am now that I did occasionally dip into it before getting down to reading Bunty under the bedclothes. Otherwise I would not have appreciated the gentle pre-war style that Simon Courtauld seeks to reproduce in Food for Thought: A Culinary Tour of the English Garden.

Frank Johnson

A rather unBritish achievement

Listing page content here Who would have thought that the British, of all unexotic peoples, would turn out to be good at ballet; both at dancing and choreographing it? One minute they could do next to nothing of either. The next the world knew about Britain and ballet was that this damp, dour island off the Continent had a company as famous as any in the world. The newly formed Vic-Wells Ballet gave its first full evening’s programme in the — for ballet — unglamorous Old Vic in 1931. By 1949, as Sadler’s Wells, it was thought glamorous enough to appear in the world’s most star-struck opera house; with Fonteyn and the Sleeping Beauty opening its first season at the New York Metropolitan.

Interconnect

Who done it in Boston?

Listing page content here I’m so glad I came to this book fresh, my mind open and unsullied by all that had gone before. As it was, I could sit back and enjoy the labyrinthine plot with all its platitudinous twists and unexpected turns as a real beginner without one preconceived idea in my head. The mystery of the Boston Strangler, I now know, must be one of the most complex, contentious and still inconclusive cases in the sad and shocking modern history of serial homicide. But let me say straight away that the current wunderkind of American journalism Sebastian Junger is unable to bring us any closer to a satisfactory answer for all his meticulous and exhaustive research.

Caroline Moore

Welcome, little strangers

Listing page content here Every time I pick up the latest novel by Anne Tyler, I wonder whether she is quite as good as her fans, of which I am one, like to think. Is she, in fact, no more than the Thinking Woman’s Good Holiday Read? No more than that! many readers will exclaim (and perhaps, like Henry Tilney, add that men ‘read nearly as many as women’): only a thoroughly readable book that doesn’t insult your intelligence! Even outside the airport bookshop, we are all grateful to find such a treasure. But there are a lot of readable books out there of the sort recommended by the Richard and Judy Book Club (no sneer at all intended: their choice encompasses some excellent works); and the question is why Anne Tyler should stand out.

Allan Massie

The fate of the Running Man

Listing page content here Evelyn Waugh told Ann Fleming that ‘Tony Powell’s latest volume [Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant] is a sad disappointment — only three pages of Widmerpool’. That was in 1960. A few years earlier, my classics master, urging me to read Powell, said, ‘The pre-war novels; I don’t like this chap Widmerpool.’ Few Powell fans would agree. Most are on Waugh’s side, delighting in the monster. Still, I’ve been thinking about a question posed by Colin Donald in a paper given at last December’s Anthony Powell Centenary Conference. ‘Does Widmerpool “add up” as a character?’ he asked.

Saturday

Theodore Dalrymple

Medicine and letters | 13 May 2006

‘That Shakespeare,’ a German friend of mine once said to me, ‘knew a thing or two.’ ‘That Shakespeare,’ a German friend of mine once said to me, ‘knew a thing or two.’ You can say that again. Sometimes, indeed, I think he knew everything, at least everything about human nature. When a religious fanatic tells me that this or that holy scripture is all I need as a guide to life, I reply with a single exclamatory word, ‘Shakespeare!’ He even knew about — or perhaps I should say, anticipated — insurance and social security fraud. At any rate, they would not have surprised him, or an attentive reader of him.

Bevis Hillier

Books do furnish a TV series

Listing page content here When I was younger, I used to think, ‘If ever you become famous, on no account agree to be interviewed by Lynn (“Demon”) Barber.’ The call never came; but, if it had, I hope my resolve would have remained adamantine, whatever her blandishments. You can see what she made of her victims in her collected profiles, Mostly Men (1991). Richard Harris has ‘a very surprising habit’: he ‘plays pocket billiards’ throughout the interview. ‘He puts his hand down inside his tracksuit and sort of rearranges things.’ Richard Adams, author of Watership Down, is in floods of tears most of the time, even blubbing into his meat pie at lunch.

Douglas Hurd

Ill-considered imperial gestures

Listing page content here During 1956 three major powers made dramatic efforts to prop up their position by the use of armed force. The British and French, in collusion with Israel, invaded Egypt to overthrow its dictator and regain the Suez Canal; their attempt failed within a few hours. The Soviet Union used its tanks to suppress a working-class revolt for the freedom of Hungary; despite the world’s execration they succeeded in re-establishing their control for another 30 years. It was the coincidence of these clashes which made the drama. Both came to a head in the same few days at the end of October. Peter Unwin comments and analyses these events in the best Foreign Office style — which is a compliment.

Sebastian Smee

Missing the middle path

Listing page content here Reading David Mitchell’s fourth novel, which is told through the eyes of a 13-year-old boy, reminded me why girls have little or no interest in the contents of boys’ heads until they are well out of their teens. It’s horrible in there. Thirteen-year-old boys, in particular, are revolting concoctions of fear and loathing, of hormones and confusion and clumsy self-assertion. This presents Mitchell, a writer of enormous talent but uncertain depth, with a problem. The truer and more lifelike he makes his narrator’s voice, the more he risks boring us silly with early teen preoccupations.

Judith Flanders

The master and the loyal retainer

Listing page content here It was not easy to be an attendant at the court of King Pablo, for Picasso, ‘with his fringe of white hair round the back of his head, his never tiring black eyes, his red shirt, is always the centre of everyone’s thoughts, especially as everyone else’s movements depend on his and no one, not even he, knows what it will be’. It was no easier to be King Pablo: P. wanting everyone to enjoy themselves started making masks with the tablecloths and most of the guests put them on, but some began to smuggle them under the table as valuable souvenirs. P., seeing this, looked around with an angry face and, collecting all the masks, crumpled them up and threw them into the sea.