More from Books

Wednesday

Anne Chisholm

The dangerous edge of things

Listing page content here If her name rings a bell at all, Mary Wesley, who died aged 90 in 2002, is remembered for two things: publishing the first of ten successful novels at the age of 70, and knowing a surprising amount, for a ladylike senior citizen, about sex. Even her greatest fans, though, might wonder if she rates a serious, full-length biography, and why a well-regarded writer and journalist like Patrick Marnham, who has previously produced books on Simenon, Diego Rivera and Jean Moulin, should choose her as a subject. All such carping questions can be put aside immediately. This biography is pure pleasure, a riveting, hilarious tragicomedy of manners. Mary Wesley was born Mary Farmar, and her forebears were soldiers from the Anglo-Irish gentry.

Ian Sansom

Rhythm and blues

Nothing much to report here, no news and no surprises: dog bites man; Philip Roth writes another masterpiece. What would be truly shocking at this stage in the late, great unfolding of Roth’s genius would be if he were to write a bad book, something as bad as The Breast, his last bad book, and that was published in 1972. We expect — and rightly — intermittency of genius: Roth, in an effort which already seems like the stuff of myth and legend, defies our expectations.

Wednesday

Interconnect

Sermon

Out of the darkness and the bouillabaisseof nebulae and swirling gas we come,out of the toxic argon wilderness,seeking a sanctuary and a home. Be kind. Love one another. The frogs are dying. The old copper beechfesters in acid rain. The sky corrodes,contaminated birds are robbed of speechand, wrapped in fumes, Antarctica implodes.Be kind. Love one another. Towering tsunamis break upon the shore.The rich pursue a dream of lost content.Drought and starvation threaten more and more.An epidemic claims a continent.Be kind. Love one another. Antipathies accumulate of race.Jew, Muslim, Gentile — which can hate the best?A cashiered commissar, now fallen from grace,downs vodka, nursing gall within his breast.Be kind. Love one another.

Raymond Carr

A tapestry’s rich life

Listing page content here The Bayeux tapestry records pictorially in a series of 56 panels, stretching for 70 metres, the last successful invasion of England. It reveals that the invasion of 1066 was a combined operation involving the building of 800 ships to transport an army of some 12,000 men and 2,000 horses across the Channel. For its time it was as complex a piece of planning as the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944. Since its creation, probably in the 1070s, the tapestry had rested for centuries in comparative obscurity in the care of Bayeux cathedral. In the 18th century, squabbling British antiquarians, for whom the artefacts of the past constituted a supplement, even a substitute for the written record, had established its historical importance.

Graham Stewart

Toughing it out together

Listing page content here Since the Suez debacle, the chemistry between American presidents and British prime ministers has helped determine the ‘special relationship’s’ potency. Between Harold Macmillan and John F. Kennedy, as with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, it was dynamic. Between Edward Heath and Richard Nixon, John Major and Bill Clinton, it was inert. Many commentators reasonably assumed London-Washington relations would go the same way in 2000 when Tony Blair’s best buddy, Clinton, vacated the White House and in swaggered George W. Bush. To the horror of metropolitan opinion, Bush and Blair proceeded to form an alliance more controversial than any that had existed between their 20th-century predecessors.

Jonathan Cecil

Anxieties on and off the stage

Listing page content here On the face of it the actress Anna Massey’s life would seem to have been a charmed one. The child of distinguished theatrical parents — Raymond Massey, the powerful Canadian actor, and Adrienne Allen, the original Sybil in Private Lives — Miss Massey was steeped in the world of the stage and made her first professional appearance in a West End starring role. Hers was the title part in The Reluctant Debutante, working with the greatest light comedienne of her time, Celia Johnson, and a fine supporting cast. Anna Massey more than held her own in their company.

D.J. Taylor

Fragments of village life

Listing page content here Brick Lane, Monica Ali’s first novel, sold a great many copies and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. It was also criticised by those guardians of the public conscience who write letters to newspapers on the grounds of cultural tourism. Despite her impeccable Bangladeshi origins, these detractors alleged, the Oxford-educated Ms Ali was clearly unqualified to write about the realities of life in the polyglot East End. No doubt one or two of the same criticisms will be levelled at her choice of a sequestered Portuguese village as the setting for novel number two. For all the modesty of its style and some highly uncontentious subject matter, Alentejo Blue is a risky enterprise.

Deborah Devonshire

Jack the lad

‘Coming out’ had a different meaning in 1938 to what it has today. Nearly 70 years ago the London Season followed much the same pattern as it had before the first world war. For a small section of people there were three frantic months of entertainment. For 18-year-old girls and their young men friends there was a dance (and sometimes two) four nights a week, and often one in the country on a Friday night (not on Saturdays, because it was not seemly to dance into Sunday morning) from early May until the end of July. The bands, led by Ambrose, Carol Gibbons and, best of all, Harry Roy, played all night, every night for our pleasure. We took this strange state of affairs for granted; it was part of life to be enjoyed or endured according to temperament.

Sebastian Smee

The art of the matter

Listing page content here Peter Carey’s ropy, visceral prose casts a powerful spell. It has a swarming, improvised quality which besieges and easily overwhelms objections, including any reluctance to credit his convoluted, sometimes outlandish plots. And yet those plots remain a problem. They somehow bring a hint of affectation and conceit to a sensibility, a way with words, that is otherwise stridently free from mannerisms. Theft: A Love Story is told by two narrators in alternating chapters. One of them is Michael Boone, or Butcher Bones, a once renowned Australian painter now enduring a humiliating slump in fortune. He relates the bulk of the tale.

Allan Massie

A late beginner

Sometimes at book festivals I am asked which historical novelists I most admire and enjoy. ‘Alfred Duggan,’ I say first, and am usually met with a blank response. This is not entirely surprising. Duggan died in 1964 and most of his books are out of print. Some will know of him as a friend of Evelyn Waugh from Oxford days. ‘A full-blooded rake ... we were often drunk ... Alfred almost always.’ He remained in this condition for some 20 years, Waugh himself eventually doing much to rescue him from alcoholism. So there was an unusual pattern to his career, as Waugh remarked in an article published in The Spectator soon after his friend’s death.

M R-D-Foot

One who got away

Listing page content here Rather late, we have here the recollections of a then young German army staff officer, who saw Hitler almost daily for the last nine months of the second world war. As Guderian’s ADC, it was Freytag von Loringhoven’s duty to attend the daily Leader’s Conferences at which Hitler continued to direct his war in minute detail, shifting flags on maps without taking in that the flags stood for formations that had long dwindled in reality almost to nothingness. Having only set eyes on the Führer once before, at a big army review some years earlier, the ADC was shocked when confronted in late July 1944 at Rastenburg with a quavering and wizened figure who nevertheless retained mesmeric power over his entourage.

Thursday

James Buchan

Geography is destiny

Listing page content here Charles Glass, an American reporter for many years based in Lebanon, in 1987 set off to portray what used to be called the Levant, starting in Iskenderun in what is now Turkey and ending in Aqaba in what is now Jordan. This project, which sought to tell the political story of the Middle East through its cramped topography, was disrupted when Glass was kidnapped by Hezbollah in Beirut. He wrote a book out of it called Tribes with Flags (1990). It was another 14 years, and that ominous September of 2001, before Glass picked up the thread of his interrupted journey. Great changes had taken place, all for the worse.

Hugh Cecil

The sunlight on the garden parties

Listing page content here As a social and economic phase of English life the ‘Edwardian age’ had a longer span than the ten years of Edward VII’s reign. It began, roughly speaking, with Queen Victoria’s silver jubilee in 1887 and ended with the outbreak of the first world war in August 1914. Although a far from static period, it was characterised throughout by a jingoistic pride in British world power, then at its apogee, by a growing materialism and hedonism, and, despite an uneasy questioning of the social and political bases on which the Victorian age had rested, by an enduring belief in progress and Britain’s power in the future.

Graham Stewart

Flocking to the standard

Listing page content here Only in the last few years  have major memorials to  the wartime sacrifices of  the British Dominions and Colonies taken their place in the ceremonial plots of central London. They are a welcome if belated tribute. Yet, following the second world war’s end, the government made a more practical gesture. The 1948 British Nationality Act confirmed that passports would be granted not only to all Commonwealth peoples regardless of creed or colour but even to those in India, Pakistan and beyond who opted no longer to be the King’s subjects. It was a generous offer. Only the great take-up rate from so many of non-British stock led to its eventually curtailment.

Jane Ridley

Send her victorious

Listing page content here The Iraq war has shed a whole new light on the wars fought by the British during the reign of Queen Victoria. War was more or less continuous during the first half of Victoria’s reign, and very few of these imperial wars were actually provoked. The UN would not have approved of the wars in the Punjab or Burma, Persia or China which the British waged in the 1840s and 1850s. As Saul David shows in this new book, the Victorians routinely fought wars of aggression. Some were for reasons of regime change, to replace an unfriendly ruler by a puppet. Others were naked acts of conquest. The big difference between the wars fought by George Bush today and those of Victorian Britain is that the government back home in London played very little part.

Hugh Massingberd

Master of the picturesque

Listing page content here William Kent (1685-1748) was a Bridlington boy whose training as an artist in Italy was sponsored by squires from both sides of the River Humber including my kinsman Burrell Massingberd of Ormsby, Lincs. Kent’s correspondence with Massingberd is a significant source for any study of ‘the Signior’ and Timothy Mowl has made good use of it in this entertaining, provocative and stimulating biography which might be said to take the Cant (the architect’s real name) out of Kent. From the correspondence Massingberd comes across as a moaning minnie and fusspot (doubtless a family failing) and I fear Mowl has got his number. ‘Poor Massingberd,’ he writes, ‘a natural victim of life and of people like Kent.

Steven Berkoff

Needs

Listing page content here Our needs are really very mild,so please don’t be too critical,if we just crave a little seal,to decorate our winter coat.Don’t show those bloody, mashed- up cubs,it spoils our pleasure, gives us guiltto see the virgin snow stained red,and quite distressing for the kids.We love our s.u.v. so much,it’s big and strong and rules the road,don’t tell us how we heat the globe,it spoils the little fun we have.The ice-cap melting’s not our fault,it’s all those planes that stain the sky,of course we like to fly each yearbut global warming’s not our fault,the scientists will find a way,to make those jolly ice-caps stay.

Jonathan Keates

Those rich little Greeks

Listing page content here Plutarch, in his Life of Alcibiades, captures the fascination of the Greek warrior, politician and glamour boy by quoting a line from a contemporary comedy: ‘They long for him, they hate him, they cannot do without him.’ The same words sum up our ambivalent relationship with the cultural world inhabited by the Boeotian biographer and his illustrious subject. We yearn for ancient Greece as a utopian construct, rich in the purest incarnations of poetry, drama, philosophy, architecture and the elemental outlines of democracy. Yet at the same time we shrink from its fatalism, its brutality and the generally low value it placed on the quality of life for anybody who was neither male nor free.

Pj Kavanagh

The murder of Bamber Gascoigne

Listing page content here This book, about real people, was intended to be about quite different ones. In her postscript, Helena Drysdale, the travel writer, says that her initial purpose had been to write a biography of her great-great-grandfather Sir George Bowen, who was a serial governor of colonies — Queensland, New Zealand, Victoria, Mauritius, Hong Kong. Through all these governorships he kept elaborate scrapbooks, and by far the largest concerned New Zealand. In this one Drysdale’s eye was caught by a cutting about the Maori murder of Bamber Gascoigne, his wife and their children, in 1869. ‘This unusual name happened to be that of my cousin, the celebrated writer and quizmaster.

Lloyd Evans

Tales of the unexpected

Listing page content here As the large publishers get fatter, richer and duller, the little ones get nippier, sharper and more vigorous. Roy Kerridge is the author of many books, but none of the grand publishing houses wanted this eccentric and highly personal guide to Britain, presumably because it lacks the amenable and forgettable polish of most travel books. Kerridge is charming,  opinionated and a little bit mad. Excellent company, therefore. A lifelong ‘non- driver’, he strolls the lanes and by-ways of Britain with a stick, ‘cutting the heads off stinging nettles with clever whisks’, and singing ‘Zippety Doodah’, ‘useful for frightening wild creatures out into the open’.