More from Books

Saturday

Jonathan Sumption

Sages of the world, unite!

Karen Armstrong likes to take on large subjects, and they don’t come much larger than this. Her latest book is nothing less than an attempt to describe the historical origins of all the great world religions. The nearest analogy is The Key to All Mythologies, the grandiloquently named tome which George Eliot’s Mr Casaubon never got round to finishing. But it would be unkind to press the analogy too far. Armstrong is not a pedant, and whatever else may be said about this book she has certainly finished it. Its focus is what she calls the ‘Axial Age’. The phrase was coined by the German philosopher Karl Jaspers to describe the sixth century BC, the period in which he wrongly believed that Buddha, Lao-tzu, Confucius and Zoroaster had lived.

Olivia Glazebrook

A quiet revolution in the studios

A book with the words ‘mavericks’ and ‘Hollywood’ in the subtitle should be a lot more exciting than this. After all, the movie business has been traditionally populated by monstrous egos with access to huge funds — a recipe for drama if ever there were one. Memoirs such as Bob Evans’s The Kid Stays in the Picture, or Julia Phillips’s You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again have described the film business we suspect is going on behind closed doors. The marvellous Easy Riders, Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind confirmed that in the 1970s everyone in the movies had big sunglasses and a runaway coke habit — as well as prodigious talent.

Judith Flanders

The Goddams and the snail-eaters

A French journalist writing in 1999 was succinct: ‘The English hate the French. Who reciprocate … A purée of prejudice on a bed of inherited loathing. The French consider the English to be arrogant islanders, eating boiled lamb with mint, and not knowing how to be seductive. The English consider us talkative, arrogant, dirty, smelling of sweat and garlic, flighty, cheating and corrupt.’ ‘Inherited’ may be the most telling word in that outburst, and it is Robert and Isabelle Tombs’ keynote in this magisterial study of the on-going love-hate relationship between the British and the French over three centuries.

Lee Langley

Bright light at the end of the tunnel

Christine Brooke-Rose is not an easy read. She is a sublime roller- coaster: hold on and hurtle with her — the ride will be exhilarating. She is dark, despairing, but her bleakness is Beckettian, the laughs never far away. Now 83, she lives in France, near Avignon. Born in Geneva (British father), she has written 12 novels (four of which are collected in the Christine Brooke-Rose Omnibus), worked as a critic and academic, teaching English language and literature in Paris, been claimed by the French as a nouveau-romancier, a membership she rejects like all other memberships. Perhaps her staunch stand-alone path has led to her status as both eminent and little known.

Saturday

Brendan O’Neill

An illness or an excuse?

How many times have you heard someone say ‘I am so stressed’? I say it at least ten times a day. I said it to myself when the books editor of this magazine asked if I might turn this review around in two days flat instead of taking the usual, more leisurely week or so to file my thoughts. Which is ironic because the book I’m reviewing is about the myth of stress. Angela Patmore, having spent a good 20 years researching the uses and abuses of the S-word, arrives at the conclusion that it is such an ill-defined and contentious category as to be meaningless, and argues that our rush to depict overwork or personal trial and tribulation as the harbinger of a sometimes crippling ‘stress’ threatens to turn out a generation of saps. Just what is stress? A sickness?

Anne Applebaum

Short-listing doomed intellectuals

So powerful was the image of Russia created by the extraordinary group of writers, artists and philosophers who dominated their country’s intellectual life at the beginning of the 20th century that it persists even today. Much of our admiration for Russian ballet, art and literature dates from that era, when the achievements of Russia’s creative class first became widely known abroad. Tragically, that image, and the accompanying admiration, are long out of date. Not only did the Bolsheviks comprehensively destroy Russia’s creative class, for 75 subsequent years they did their best to prevent its re-emergence. Lesley Chamberlain’s latest book on Russia relates one of the lesser-known chapters of that story.

Peter Jones

The best-Loebed hits

Before the dramatic expansion of Penguin Classics, it was almost impossible to find a translation of anything in Latin or Greek. Schoolboys were reduced to furtively ordering Brodies or Kelly’s Keys from the local bookshop. The great exception was the Loeb Classical Library. This was a series sponsored by James Loeb, a Harvard-educated American banker who loved classics and the arts and had amassed a fortune before retiring to Munich in 1905 to seek relief from his continuing psychiatric problems. He was persuaded to endow a foundation to publish the surviving texts of all Greek and Latin, with translation. The first volumes appeared in autumn 1912. Loeb died in 1933, emblazoned with honorary degrees.

Diana Hendry

Laughter in the howling wilderness

Hot on the heels of The Penelopiad, Margaret Atwood’s retelling of the story of Penelope and Odysseus, comes The Tent, a neat, must-have little volume with scarlet endpapers, a silky marker and Atwood’s own illustrations — devilish red dogs and Egyptian-looking ladies. And inside The Tent? A splendid mix of tales, retellings of myths, fables and fairy stories, a couple of poems and what the blurb describes as ‘fictional essays’. Come inside.

David Caute

God in the brain

Contemporary atheist writers are increasingly inclined to forsake purely rationalist or psychological arguments against the existence of God. The current bunch are gnawing at the edges of neurological and genetic explanations, with the implication that religion may emerge as a ‘natural’, built-in navigational error. The subtitles of the two books under review say more about the pitch they are making than the rather whimsical titles. The genetic approach suggests that religion could be a (sort of) virus inherent in the brain’s response to the human condition. ‘Sort of’ analogies abound in this experimental playground. Psychological explanations of religion were the norm among early 20th-century writers like Freud, Wells, Shaw and the estimable C. E. M. Joad.

Philip Longworth

A strange reluctance to be free

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 there was widespread talk of Russia soon becoming an open, democratic polity with a thriving civil society. Under President Putin such hopes have faded. The state has seized back much of the power it lost under Yeltsin, devolution has yielded to centralisation, and the prevailing tone is authoritarian rather than libertarian. Yet all this has been popular. Why should the Russian people prefer authority to liberty? The American historian Richard Pipes sets out to answer this question in his latest book. Montesquieu thought that autocracy was a function of Russia’s immensity. Controlling so vast a space with so low a population density encouraged centralised, authoritarian government.

Leo McKinstry

High priestess of Tory sleaze

‘She can’t stand that woman,’ an aide of Mrs Thatcher once said of Dame Shirley Porter, the notorious, scandal-prone leader of Westminster City Council during the 1980s. Such contempt was perhaps surprising, for Lady Porter was seen by many as the mirror image of Mrs Thatcher both in her outspoken character and in the aggressive way she ran her municipal fiefdom. Domineering, energetic and impatient, she liked to pose as the champion of business and the ratepayer against sclerotic civic bureaucracy. Like Mrs Thatcher, she was ferociously partisan, relishing battles with her opponents, while she could also be brutally intimidating to her own senior officials.

Saturday

Justin Marozzi

A diplomat with a difference

Senior diplomats may be a charming bunch, but as a rule they are not known for their modesty. Years of rubbing shoulders with world leaders, however inconsequential, tend to go to their heads. Taking themselves too seriously is an occupational hazard. When it comes to publishing their memoirs, such arrogance and pomposity are not necessarily a bad thing. A diplomat’s inflated sense of his own importance can be hilariously, unintentionally entertaining. What more wonderful example of the genre than DC Confidential: The Controversial Memoirs of Britain’s Ambassador to the US at the Time of 9/11 and the Iraq War, Sir Christopher Meyer’s gloriously self-regarding tome of last year? A monument to the man’s vanity, it superbly demonstrated what a complete ass he is.

Rupert Christiansen

The outsider who felt the cold

The journal ADAM — an acronym for Art, Drama, Architecture and Music — was the life’s work of a Jewish Romanian exile Miron Grindea (1910-95), who was its only editor. Embodying a style of cosmopolitan cultural sophistication, it represents a fascinating episode in the history of the London literary world, its bent being more internationalist than Bloomsbury’s and less Bohemian than Fitzrovia’s or Soho’s. Having started ADAM in Bucharest, Grindea arrived in London on the fateful day of 1 September 1939, re-establishing the journal in 1941 on the thoroughly insecure footing on which it steadfastly remained.

Jonathan Mirsky

Softly, softly, catchee English

Hooray for Signal Books, publishers of the ‘Lost and Found’ series of classic travel writing. Not long ago I reviewed in these pages The Ford of Heaven by Brian Power, a memoir, first published in 1984, of Power’s childhood in north China. The notable thing about Power was how deeply embedded he was in the city of his childhood, how much more he was a Chinese boy than the child of Westerners who much of the time had no idea what their son was up to. Now Signal revives Chiang Yee (1903-1977), who tells an opposite story, of a stranger in a strange land. A gentleman from a rich, artistic family in a middle-sized city on the lower Yangtze, with all the living generations under one roof, he studied chemistry at university — for reasons he couldn’t remember.

Alistair Irwin

From cornet to colonel

Sometime in 1995 Colonel Allan Mallinson came, somewhat sheepishly I thought, into my office. He was clutching a sheaf of papers that I feared would be another piece of heavyweight Ministry of Defence bureaucracy. But no, it was instead the first chapter of his first Hervey novel, A Close Run Thing. He asked if I would read it and say whether I thought it worth his while writing the rest of the book. Having rattled through it, I recommended that he forthwith abandon his military career and concentrate on converting Hervey into bank- notes. Luckily for the Army the Colonel stuck to his soldiering duties by day and, luckily for those who have been bitten by the Hervey bug, he sharpened his storytelling quill in what little spare time he had.

John McEwen

The Knight’s noble rescue

This handsome and scholarly book is a catalogue of a selection of pictures of Ireland, all, remarkably, collected over the past 30 years by Desmond Fitzgerald, 29th Knight of Glin, for his famous country seat in west Limerick, where his family have held sway since 1350. It whets the appetite for the next major publication by the Knight (with James Peill), a history of Irish furniture. Forty years ago, when the Knight first made his scholarly mark as a collaborator with Desmond Guinness and others on the pioneering exhibition ‘Irish Houses and Landscapes’, Ireland was an economic and cultural backwater. Today, as 250,000 people annually up sticks to escape the horrors of London, civilised and prosperous Ireland is of course acclaimed one of the most desirable places on earth.

Saturday

Judith Flanders

Lust for life

I must declare an interest. At my solitary meeting with Maggi Hambling, she suddenly barked, ‘Would you like to see my hysterectomy scar?’ (She was dissuaded by the rather nervous men present.) I had been ‘Maggi-ed’: hit with a piece of confrontational behaviour, simply to see what the response would be. Andrew Lambirth had a similar introduction: he first saw her as, fishnet stockings waving in the air, she performed at a cabaret for a friend’s birthday; she then announced he must be gay because the friend who introduced them was. Despite the terrible drawback of being hetero, he was permitted to stick with her, recording conversations over the next two decades, which now make up the text of the book that summarises her career to date.

Sebastian Smee

The fine art of appreciation | 4 March 2006

John Updike is, among one or two other things, a model art critic. Observant, sympathetic and knowledgeable, he also writes at a useful remove from the polemics that rack today’s art world. His status as an honorary non-combatant in the contemporary art wars owes something to his literary fame, to be sure. But it is also the result of a mildly disingenuous decision on his part to maintain an amateur’s attitude in a world beset by experts. Unlike most jobbing art critics, who are inclined to carve out partisan stances, Updike is content to appreciate both the painted, atmospheric delicacy of Hopper or Whistler and the nihilistic wit of Warhol or Duchamp, without worrying that one way of appreciating art puts in jeopardy the other.

David Gilmour

The resurgence of the puritan element

The words ‘fanatic’ and ‘Arabia’ are placed together so often that they almost seem designed for each other. A Syrian friend once asked Charles Doughty, the Victorian explorer, how he could abandon the orchards of Damascus, ‘full of the sweet spring as the garden of God’, and ‘take such journeys into the fanatic Arabia?’ Doughty did not really know the answer. He had passed ‘one good day in Arabia’, he recalled, but ‘all the rest were evil because of the people’s fanaticism’. In the late 1870s Doughty travelled to Nejd, the desert birthplace of the Wahhabi sect, an intolerant, puritanical and — to its adherents — very pure form of Islam.

Hugh Massingberd

The country of Sir Walter

Although the Scottish Borders contain some of the most picturesque and unspoilt scenery in the British Isles, with the country houses along the Tweed putting up a fair show to rival the ch.