More from Books

Saturday

David Caute

The most charitable interpretation

Late November 1950: United Nations forces commanded by the legendary General Douglas MacArthur are approaching the North Korean frontier when Chinese forces suddenly strike, an overwhelming onslaught precipitating a devastating retreat. At a presidential press conference held on 30 November, Harry Truman is pressed by journalists whether the atomic bomb might now be used to stem the tide. He rules nothing out: ‘That includes every weapon we have ... The military commander in the field will have charge of the use of weapons, as he always has.’ But has he? According to conventional wisdom, Truman and MacArthur fell out on the use of atomic weapons against the Chinese in Korea, with the result that MacArthur was famously recalled as Far Eastern supremo.

Robert Cooper

Hellish motorway experience

Listening to Jim Norton reading The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man on this outstanding recording is a first-class way of either revisiting James Joyce’s autobiographical novel or of dipping your toe in the water for the first time. I am a toe-dipper and whilst there were moments when Joyce’s ‘stream of consciousness’ technique threatened to drag me out to sea, I found that a few jabs at the ‘Play Again’ button kept me both buoyant and enlightened with regard to the author’s alter ego, Stephen Dedalus. A memorable early scene sees young Dedalus home from boarding-school for Christmas. He is allowed to join the grown-ups for the first time for Christmas dinner, which provides a launching pad for some vocal acrobatics from our reader.

Saturday

Anthony Daniels

Jaw-jaw about civil war

Bernard-Henri Lévy is possessed of a large fortune, great intelligence and film-star good looks (if now a little ageing). He therefore had the wherewithal to go through life like a hot knife through butter, but yet has chosen many times to expose himself to great danger in the continuing wars of torrid zones. Why? In this book, he reprints his reportage from five lengthy, indeed seemingly eternal, civil conflicts — Angola, Burundi, Colombia, Sri Lanka, Sudan — and then appends philosophical reflections as footnotes to what he wrote. These footnotes form two thirds of the book.

Jonathan Beckman

Recent first novels

Harry Thompson’s death last year cut short a rampantly successful television career and a budding literary one. He will not be remembered for his fiction, but his only novel is strong-limbed, clean-cut and robustly hearty. It bravely makes straight for the most torturing of Victorian questions, the challenge to religious faith by the brash self-confidence of science. The two voyages of the Beagle fill the majority of the book, the second of which was accompanied by a young naturalist and prospective churchman, Charles Darwin. He is a formidable antagonist, though his increasingly sceptical rumblings provide an ostinato accompaniment to the tremulous flutings of the soul of Robert Fitzroy, the Beagle’s captain.

Christopher Woodward

The invisible patient

Recently an auction house in Swindon sold for more than £11,000 a cracked tooth of Napoleon’s, extracted during his exile on St Helena. Although Napoleon did little except talk, write and dig and garden, his final six years have been the subject of more books than any other period of his life. It was recently announced that Al Pacino will play the dying Boney in a new feature film. The memoirs of three of the four doctors who looked after him on St Helena have been published. This is the missing manuscript. Dr James Verling was a 31- year-old surgeon in the Royal Artillery appointed to the job in July 1818. He was given a room in the long, white, wooden bungalow called Longwood which Napoleon shared with his court.

Sam Leith

Funsters and fantasts

A phrase often used in praise of comics artists is that they ‘transcend the limitations of the medium’. The apologetic subtext to that phrase tells you a lot. Even as we praise the greats of comics, we tend to do so as if their achievements are in spite of, rather than because of, their chosen medium. You seldom hear people saying that a work in prose, in paint or for piano ‘transcends the limitations of the medium’. Comics have been ‘transcending the limitations of the medium’ from the get-go, as the lavishly printed and compendious coffee-table book, Masters of American Comics, accompanying a joint exhibition at the Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, makes clear.

Saturday

Anita Brookner

French prize novels

Although it was set up as a contest between a flagrant outsider and a more traditional intimist there was little doubt that Michel Houellebecq would lose out in the Goncourt stakes. His sulphurous vision and unapologetic rule-breaking were too much for the reading public, not to mention the Goncourt judges, who took little pleasure in his grand design in what amounts to a memento mori for our present civilisation and his unanswered plea for a future that would promise some relief from our various discontents.

Hugh Massingberd

Between the two Georges

Until reading this stimulating and sumptuous study from the archives of Country Life I had only associated the name Edward Knoblock, an American-born dramatist, with one of the best-known anecdotes about John Gielgud’s gaffes. You remember the scene: Gielgud and Knoblock are lunching at the Ivy when Johnny absent-mindedly describes someone as ‘nearly as boring as Eddie Knoblock . . . no, no, not you, of course, I mean the other Eddie Knoblock’. Now I learn from the far from boring John Martin Robinson that poor old Eddie was actually a key figure in the Regency Revival (affectionately mocked by Osbert Lancaster as ‘Vogue Regency’) and rediscovered the significance of Thomas Hope of The Deepdene, nicknamed ‘the gentleman of sofas’ by Sydney Smith.

Interconnect

Friction that makes sparks fly

Though the relentlessness of its attack is kept up almost to the end, nothing in Mother’s Milk is quite so funny as its second chapter. This finds the Melrose family — 40-something barrister Patrick, wife Mary, five-year-old Robert and newly born Thomas — hiding in the guest bedroom of old Mrs Melrose’s house in the south of France as they wait for Margaret, the maternity nurse, to take her leave. The wait is enlivened by Robert’s pin-point impersonations of this dim but innocuous hired hand: ‘It’s no use trying to blind me with science, dear … I can tell he doesn’t like that formula you’re giving him, even if it is made by organic cows.

Anthony Daniels

Onward and downward

Man is a constitutionally ungrateful creature, taking all progress immediately for granted and making the most of whatever complaints still come to hand. However privileged he is, either in relation to people who have lived in previous ages, or to contemporaries living elsewhere in the world or even in his own country, a man can always find reason to believe that he is the most unfortunate of creatures, and that all is for the worst in this, the worst of all possible worlds. In this invigorating, clever and often very funny satire, Ross Clark mocks the pieties of our age that have replaced the pieties of our forefathers.

Hugh Brogan

A Yank at the court of King Louis

In 1967 Claude-Anne Lopez brought out a perfectly delightful book, Mon Cher Papa: Franklin and the Ladies of Paris. It described Benjamin Frank- lin’s eight years as the infant United States’ first ambassador to France from the slightly oblique angle of his relations with his French women friends. The book was amusing, subtle, beautifully written and, in its way, said everything that needed saying about Franklin’s achievement as the architect of the alliance without which the British might well have won the war of American Independence. It enjoyed great success: The Economist urged its readers to buy it, beg it, or forget to return it.

Philip Hensher

Signs and portents of the times

Only a fool would try to explain fashions and tendencies in novel-writing. Everything can change so quickly, and it only takes one really good novel to rescue a genre which we’d all thought consigned to the dustheap. A year ago, I would have laughed drily at the notion that the campus novel still had some life in it; the form seemed as dead as the concerto grosso. But Zadie Smith’s brilliant On Beauty revived it with fizzing energy. On the other hand, a fictional standby which has seemed perfectly serviceable for some years may suddenly start looking creaky.

Saturday

Frank Johnson

View from the engine room

Most readers probably remember the name Guy Liddell, if at all, as the Fifth Man. Or possibly the Fourth, since we remember the first three, Burgess, Maclean and Philby, but cannot remember the next one, since the name kept on changing between Straight, Hollis and others. Liddell’s death in 1958 was largely un- noticed. He only became better known in the 1980s. David Mure, who in Cairo during the war had organised deception operations across the Middle East (on our side, I emphasise) announced that Liddell deliberately arranged a series of British intelligence failures. To the Cambridge historian John Costello, in his biography of Blunt, Master of Deception, Liddell’s long friendship with Blunt seemed to be much of the proof that Liddell had been a Soviet spy.

Richard Dorment

A dog by the name of Flower

with a foreword by David Hockney and an introduction by Lucinda Lambton It is a well-known fact that artists love dachshunds. Bonnard had Poucette, Picasso Frika, Andy Warhol Archie, and Hockney his Stanley and Boodge. Less often noted is the attraction these adorable creatures have always had for royalty.

David Crane

Grace under pressure

One evening in the Antarctic winter of 1912, some months after all hope of Scott had been given up, the surviving members of his expedition at base camp sat down to vote on their sledging plans for the coming spring. Along the coast to the north of them a party of five men under the command of Victor Campbell might or might not still be alive, while to the south of them, somewhere out on the ice between Hut Point and the Pole itself, 700-odd miles away, lay the bodies of Scott and the four men with whom he had set out on his final journey.

Patrick Marnham

A great ‘campaign’ socialist

Paul Foot, the ‘campaigning’ journalist who died last year and whose funeral attracted a crowd of 2,000 mourners, was a Cornish nonconformist who retrained as a Marxist revolutionary. Had he lived a century ago he would have made a stalwart Liberal member for West Cornwall, savaging the tinmasters. But Foot was condemned by the ideology of the 1960s to political obscurity, and to the enclosed, distrustful world of Marxist orthodoxy. When he died, after a lifetime of revolutionary struggle, his political epitaph could have been: Cut his teeth on Harold Wilson, Failed to dent Margaret Thatcher, Died under Tony Blair. But that epitaph would be a little unfair because his real achievement lay in journalism, not in revolutionary politics.

Emma Tennant

Heroes who looked, saw and thought

I imagine that most people, if asked who was responsible for the familiar method of classifying plants and animals into families, genera and species, would name the 18th-century Swedish naturalist Linnaeus. It is true that he named more species than anyone else, but in this magisterial book his work is seen as little more than a footnote to that of his predecessors. Linnaeus was a filer and an organiser, who eliminated synonyms, and standardised the binomial system whereby two words — the generic name and the specific epithet — describe every species in the Kingdom of Creation. Linnaeus’ predecessors were the original thinkers whose story Anna Pavord tells.

Bevis Hillier

Smut from the Warden of Wadham

Like Sir Edward Marshall Hall and the first Lord Birkenhead, Mr Justice Rigby Swift was one of those lawyers around whom stories accrete like barnacles. He was a Lancastrian who stayed what they call ‘true to his northern roots’; barristers referred to him as ‘Rig-ba’ in imitation of his accent. Born in 1874, the same year as Churchill, he had not gone to university but trained in his father’s chambers in Liverpool; in court, the two called each other ‘m’learned friend’. In 1920, at 46, Swift became the youngest High Court judge. In most respects he was liberal and jovial. He thought the divorce laws ‘cruel’ and believed there was some good in every criminal.

Simon Baker

The character who refused to die

‘You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.’ It could be a fanciful tryst between George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden, but it is something far more auspicious: the first meeting between Sherlock Holmes and his chronicler, John Watson, MD, in 1881. Their friendship spawned many things: worldwide societies, sightseeing tours, commemorative deerstalkers (though Holmes never wore one), theme pubs and comedy sketches are just a few. Amid all that, it’s easy to overlook the four novels and 56 short stories which constitute one of the great contributions to English story-telling. The ‘Canon’ (as Sherlockians call it) was for a long time denied serious appraisal, possibly due to our snobbish disdain for genre fiction. Fortunately, things have improved.

Deborah Devonshire

House-to- house battling

Of all the books on houses and gardens, inside and out, this one takes the cake. Nancy Lancaster was the possessor of those two attributes, difficult to describe but instantly recognisable, of style and charm. Together with her unstoppable energy and plenty of money, she made an indelible impression on one of England’s most envied assets just referred to as the country house. In her long life (she died aged 97 in 1994) she found herself in charge of houses of all sizes from palace to cottage. Her unerring instinct for beauty, originality and comfort resulted in perfection, whatever the scale. After she joined the firm of Colefax & Fowler, her influence spread beyond her own houses. Anyone who could afford it had the chance to mirror her taste. That influence holds good today.