More from Books

Saturday

Ian Garrick-Mason

The Thirty Years Slaughter

Of the many obscure conflicts of the ancient world, the Pelo- ponnesian war is perhaps the least obscure to us, thanks to Thucydides’ carefully written, if unfinished, account of it. Despite the enormous influence it grew to have on the practice of history itself, Thucydides’ achievement did not prevent future historians from tackling the same subject — of whom Victor Davis Hanson, a prolific author of books on classical Greece and ‘the Western way of war’, is only the most recent. Hanson’s approach is not simply to recount the war’s events or its campaign strategies, but to describe how the war was actually fought, and thus ‘to flesh out this three-decade fight of some twenty-four hundred years past as something very human’.

Kate Chisholm

Change and decay

The prizewinning novelist Sarah Waters enjoys subverting our expectations, telling tales of the illicit, stripping away our veneers of polite respectability. In Fingersmith and Tipping the Velvet she laid bare a Victorian world of lesbian love, titillating her readers with the scurrilous idea that women could have had a good time without those bewhiskered men of empire. For her latest book, she has moved centuries, swapping bodices and ankle boots for slacks and silk pyjamas. The Night Watch is set in 1940s London — rubble-strewn, cheerless, unrecognisable without its bustling crowds, street signs, railings. But this is not a novel about plucky heroines and the cheery community spirit which is supposed to have erupted during the Blitz.

Philip Hensher

What should not be known

This elegantly argued, amusing and acute book has been put together, in the end, for a single overdue purpose: to piss all over Edward W. Said’s ludicrous 1978 polemical work, Orientalism. It may look, for most of the journey, like a scrupulous history of the academic study of Arabic cultures, and the steady growth in understanding, as well as some deft character sketches of the necessarily rather eccentric figures in the field. Don’t be misled: Robert Irwin has Said perpetually in his sights. It is quite incredible to conceive the influence Said’s Orientalism has had, within and outside academia. Said’s point was not just that the ‘orientalist’ styles of European art and literature traduced the reality of what they purported to represent.

Saturday

Jeremy Swift

A desert as dangerous as ever

Exploration has come a long way since the Chinese traveller Hsuan Tsang visited India and central Asia in the seventh century AD, returning to warn about biting winds and fierce dragons in the Gobi. His advice for future visitors was don’t wear red garments or carry loud calabashes. ‘The least forgetfulness of these precautions entails certain misfortune.’ Red rags clearly annoyed dragons. Until the early 20th century, exploration was largely driven and funded by missionary zeal, scientific curiosity and the search for natural resources. Early explorers were employed to stake claims to the imagined fabulous cities of Africa or the gold of the Americas.

Allan Mallinson

Good companion in the field

After a year and more of Trafalgar it is perhaps time to turn once again to Waterloo. By comparison with the feast, or glut, of Nelsoniana, there is something of a paucity of safe accounts of 18 June 1815. Besides Andrew Roberts’s ultra-compact Waterloo: Napoleon’s Last Gamble, an impressive overview of both the battle and campaign, there has not been a straightforward narrative in many years. The German historian Peter Hofschröer’s two-volume history (both reviewed in these pages) was an attempt to discredit the Duke of Wellington and claim the battle honours for the German-speaking people, and as such stands as substantial but indigestible, as well as wrong.

Hugh Cecil

Will Haig end up as a cuddly toy?

If you ask most people in Britain today for their views on the first world war, they tell you that it was a futile holocaust in which our nation’s brave and disillusioned young men were herded into a hell of mud and machine-gun fire by incompetent products of the English public schools. Executions for cowardice were a daily occurrence. Fairly or unfairly, they will cite such various sources as Ben Elton’s Blackadder Goes Forth, Alan Clark’s The Donkeys, Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong, the poems of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen and sundry articles by Max Hastings and others. This is the modern myth.

M R-D-Foot

A man in a million

Of the making of books about Churchill there seems to be no end. His own output was large, and largely self-centred. We already have an official life in eight volumes, with several volumes of supplementary papers, a number of single-volume lives, long and short, books by supporters, books by opponents, books by those interested in Churchill’s attachment to their own special subject, books by his personal attendants, books by those who never saw him. Here are two more: a study by a notable historian, who has applied his scholarship to one important corner of Churchill’s life as an imperial statesman, and one by a cousin, who has written a lavish book about the family home for 11 generations, Blenheim Palace.

Caroline Moorehead

Manners elevated to a high art

No society has ever thought about itself more intensely, or spent more time considering how best to present itself, than the ancien régime in France for the 150 years or so which led up to the revolution. As Benedetta Craveri demonstrates in her excellent and extremely readable The Art of Conversation, this ideal of living well, with elegance, courtesy and exquisite manners, giving pleasure to others and to oneself, became not only an art but an end in itself. And where this complex web of influence, etiquette and enjoyment reached its peak was not at the court of Versailles, but in the salons of Paris.

Jane Rye

The brilliant and the damned

It would be a mistake to assume that this account of the work of one of the 20th century’s most celebrated designers (a familiar name to many for his London Underground and Shell posters of the Twenties and Thirties) is a book to be bought chiefly for its illustrations, splendid though they are. The text is certainly scholarly, and there is talk of printing processes and type-faces, but it’s not just for the specialist. It is free from jargon and wide-ranging in its references to contemporary art and literature as well as to what you might call the cultural aspirations of the time: the anticipation of social revolution after the Great War, and the idealistic expectations of the part to be played in it by both art and mass-communication. Kauffer was a close friend of T. S.

Philip Womack

Just imagine that

This is a loosely connected series of tales which make up an intriguing, sometimes frustrating and occasionally both compelling and hilarious collection of ‘snatches’ from a bizarre alternative world history, which proclaims that there is no such thing as fiction, and that we are always one step away from destruction. Trotsky’s ghost, a cannibalistic contessa and a dog and his master who change places are just a few of the strange beings that stalk through the text as shadowy harbingers of our own inevitable doom.

Lloyd Evans

A very smokable blend

Even the rubbish on the flyleaf isn’t rubbish. One of the astonishing things about Simon Gray’s new book is that the publishers’ claim that their author has ‘developed a new literary genre’ turns out to be accurate. This is the same blend of autobiography, anecdote and random reflection that made The Smoking Diaries a bestseller. The new book is better. Less childhood memoir and more present-tense insight. The style is chatty and deliberately ‘unfinished’ and gives the impression that the book was dashed off during a few wet afternoons at the Renaissance café in Holland Park where Gray likes to smoke and muse and write notes over a double espresso.

Alistair Irwin

Duty and pleasure in happy tandem

I have never met the 2nd Earl Jellicoe. I wish I had because to shake hands with this remarkable man, the Achilles of the title, would be to shake hands with honour, courage and duty fulfilled. If the author has him right it would also be to shake hands with wisdom, fun and a whiff of the piratical. It is almost certainly a disadvantage to enter the world as the son of a nationally revered father, but this account of George Jellicoe’s life to date proves that famous men can indeed beget men famous in their turn. Three hedonistic but purposeful years in the company of the upper echelons of British and European society, and at Cambridge, formed a prelude to war.

Bevis Hillier

The other Life of Brian

In 1968 I was introduced to Gerald Hamilton, the figure of comic evil on whom Christopher Isherwood based the title character of his 1935 novel Mr Norris Changes Trains. When he died in 1970, I rang the obituaries editor of the Times to ask if he would like me to write about the old rogue. He replied that he thought Hamilton too minor a figure. The following morning the Daily Telegraph published a long obituary of Hamilton which revealed that he had once been on the staff of the Times. The obits editor telephoned me and said he would like a piece after all. In it, I suggested that Hamilton, like Alice Liddell, had gained almost all his réclame not from any achievement, but from being turned into fiction. The same is even more true of Brian Howard. As D. J.

Saturday

Charles Duff

But mad north- north-west

In 1966, a proud Tom Stoppard went to Foyles’, where to his delighted surprise 12 copies of his first novel were on display. Two weeks later, he checked up on how many had been sold: there were now 13, which led him to the paranoid conclusion that ‘people were leaving my book at bookshops’. Nearly 40 years later, Lord Malquist and Mr Moon is still Stoppard’s only novel and its rank in his complete works is low. Published almost concurrently with the first airing of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead at the Edinburgh festival, it is a piece that belongs to the earliest period of embryonic Stoppard: lots of clever little references for the educated, and a facility with words that runs away and trips over itself.

Jonathan Sumption

England’s 16th-century Stalin

Henry VIII is one of the most difficult and controversial figures in English history. The Victorian scholars who were the first to apply themselves seriously to his reign, regarded him as a lecherous despot. The king’s role in the foundation of the Church of England was either the providential by-product of his lust for Anne Boleyn, or the ultimate argument against its legitimacy, depending on one’s point of view. Another generation, inured to despotism and comfortable with lechery, has taken a more indulgent view. In popular imagination Henry has even emerged as the archetypal figure of a mythical Merrie England. The modern view of the period is due mainly to that fearsome, Germanic scholar, Sir Geoffrey Elton, who died in 1994 but still dominates the subject from his urn.

Iain Sinclair

The return of the colonel

This is a great Homeric return. With The Vengeance of Rome, Michael Moorcock releases his hobbled Odysseus, Colonel Pyat, from the maelstrom of history, the impossible burden of cultural memory. The original migrant — born in Kiev, assaulted and prostituted in Egypt, lionised in Hollywood — folds back into a case of greasy papers, technical drawings, sepia postcards, abandoned in Notting Hill and later deposited with Moorcock in Texas. Right from the start of the ‘Between the Wars’ quartet, a narrative trajectory was established. The conclusion of the sequence was as much predetermined as the fate of a family breakfasting in Stepney under the flight path of a V2 rocket.

Chris Patten

Cleverly out of step

In his second, revised edition of a history of Balliol College, John Jones — vice-master, chemist and archivist — shows the same sure touch that distinguished his earlier work as he carries the college’s story beyond the second world war. He writes with easy authority and the book rattles along to its final genuflection to the college’s benefactors, beginning of course with the Balliols of Barnard Castle and above all Dervorguil- la, the lioness of Galloway. The foreword to this edition by the university’s recent vice-chancellor and Balliol’s quondam Master, Colin Lucas, draws attention to Balliol’s ‘recurrent capacity for being out of tune with the prevailing orthodoxy of the times’.

Francis King

A brilliant autopsy on a dead regime

Although writers in languages of lesser currency suffer a cruel disadvantage when striving to establish themselves on the international scene, the Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare has succeeded in leaping that hurdle by the extraordinary athleticism of his writing. Translations of his novels have appeared in more than 40 countries, and in recent times he has been annually tipped as a possible Nobel Prize winner. Shamefully and typically, only his recent winning of the first Man Booker International Prize has caused him at last to be adequately acknowledged in this country.

Andrew Taylor

The long arm of technology

According to George Orwell, even homicide had its golden age. In his 1946 essay, ‘Decline of the English Murder’, he discusses what he calls ‘our great period in murder’, which was roughly from 1850 to 1925. He holds up nine murders (and ten murderers) whose reputations, he says, have stood the test of time. Jack the Ripper is among them, of course, but he is a category of his own. In the other eight cases, the murderers and their victims were almost entirely middle-class, the settings domestic and poison the favoured weapon. One of these — and arguably the locus classicus, as it were, of the Golden Age of Murder — was the Crippen case. There has not been a major re-examination of the case for nearly 30 years.

Mary Furness

Conundrums that will not go away

Nicholas Fearn has arrayed before us in his latest book a procession of Western philosophers, dead and alive, hailing from the dawn of rational thought in the ancient world to the present day. In the manner of a polite and cultivated ringmaster he impartially introduces, compares and sums up, giving all his characters a say, and occasionally gently interjecting his own opinions. Under the broad headings ‘Who Am I?’, and ‘What Do I Know?’ and ‘What Should I Do?’ the individual chapters include discussions of free will and fate, minds and machines, bodies and souls, knowledge, meaning, understanding, post-modernism and pragmatism and the latest ethical dilemmas.