More from Books

Saturday

Nicholas Harman

The making of a merry myth

Santa can still be a useful adjunct to the winter solstice. If there is a child whom you especially dislike, just ask it quietly what it hopes will be coming down the chimney and the little beast will cringe away, and stay away, in embarrassment. Otherwise Santa’s time is up. He cannot even safely go home to the United States, where liberals would like him banned for breaching the constitutional divide between church and state, while neo-conservatives find he offends their religious beliefs. Devout Christians may hope that, when the fat old chap in the red rompers quits the scene, he will make room for the Child whose festival it was once supposed to be. Jeremy Seal had the good idea of telling us how Santa took over.

Alexander Waugh

By guess and by God

It takes pluck to write about the historical Jesus, not just because doing so always stirs the wrath of hot-headed Christians but because there is not a single ‘fact’ relating to Jesus’s life that cannot be fiercely disputed according to any objective interpretation of the available evidence. Take, for instance, the supposed year of his birth. In 525 Pope John I issued a papal bull decreeing that this event had taken place in 1 AD. Matthew, however, stated in his Gospel that Jesus was born during the reign of Herod the Great who is known to have died in 4 BC.

David Dimbleby

Unconventional site- seeing

I know of a man who took his new bride as a honeymoon treat on a tour of the sites where the Yorkshire Ripper had murdered his victims. A curious choice, but she declared herself well pleased with the visit and in particular with the delicious salami sandwiches her husband provided. I remembered this odd tale when browsing through Clive Aslet’s Landmarks of Britain. Among his ‘Five Hundred Places that Made Our History’ is Bridego Bridge near Cheddington in Buckinghamshire, scene of the Great Train Robbery. All I remember of that night in 1963 was that the train driver was brutally beaten about the head and was so badly injured that he never worked again. Aslet adds that after the robbery the thieves, Ronnie Biggs and Bruce Reynolds among them, took their £2.

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 17 December 2005

The Devil’s Own Song and Other Verses (1968) by Quintin Hogg The Devil’s Own Song and Other Verses (1968)by Quintin Hogg Yes, that Quintin Hogg, Lord Hailsham of Woolsack fame. ‘Quite suddenly, during the summer of 1940, my personal and emotional situation was such that I felt an irresistible urge to write short lyrics,’ he says in the introduction. ‘I cannot explain this. I had not then, and have not now, any swollen-headed ideas about my quality as a poet ... Somewhere about 1963, whatever little rill of inspiration I had, dried up.

Interconnect

The seven ages

A selection from Keeping My Words: An Anthology from Cradle to Grave by Magnus Magnusson (Hodder & Stoughton, £6.99, pp. 280, ISBN 0340862645) What though his head be empty, provided his commonplace book be full?Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), A Tale of a Tub Lord knows what incommunicable small terrors infants go through, unknown to all. We disregard them, we say they forget, because they have not the words to make us remember … By the time they learn to speak they have forgotten the details of their complaints, and so we never know. They forget so quickly, we say, because we cannot contemplate the fact that they never forget.Margaret Drabble (b. 1939), The Mill- stone, 1965 I am fond of children (except boys).

Candia Mcwilliam

A bumper crop of Bondage

Here is part of an Evening Standard review of Goldfinger, written when it was first published in 1959 under the untentative title ‘The Richest Man in the World’: ‘The things that make Bond attractive: the sex, the sadism, the vulgarity of money for its own sake, the cult of power, the lack of standards.’ Over 50 years later (Casino Royale, the first Bond book, was published in 1953, its author born in 1908) what is the verdict? That highly accessoried and fetishistic sex in the novels is rather unpenetrative by comparison with thriller-sex now; it is too ultra-romantic, of course, in the mean-keen/ luxe-location mode.

Saturday

Interconnect

A hedonist of the old school

When the hero of Cyril Connolly’s novel The Rock Pool was asked which modern writers he admired, he replied, ‘Eliot, Joyce and Norman Douglas.’ Eliot and Joyce have held up well enough, but Douglas? ‘I thought he was quite forgotten,’ one well-read friend remarked to me. So perhaps he is. But he loomed quite large between the two world wars, and his reputation was still high for a decade or so after his death in 1952. There were admittedly extra-literary reasons for this. Admiring Douglas marked you out as a free spirit who had broken the bonds of Anglo-Saxon Puritan conformity. Douglas was a rebel, a scoffer, a hedonist, a pagan in the antique Mediterranean style. ‘Why prolong life save to prolong pleasure?’ he wrote.

John Martin-Robinson

A brace of noble piles

The great houses of England have been singularly blessed in their owners (with one or two exceptions) during the latter decades of the 20th century. None more so than Chatsworth and Holkham where the baton is currently being passed on to the younger generation. Both these volumes therefore have a slight valedictory quality, though they are different in scale and intention. Round About Chatsworth is not concerned with the house itself but with structures and objects in the surrounding estate landscape — pigsties, privies, pubs, pounds, and pavilions. ‘Whether old or new, grand or humble, beautiful or ugly, these kind of man-made architectural oddities give character to a place.

Jonathan Mirsky

How not to lose your shirt in China

Each time I write something about human rights in China, as I did recently in The Spectator, I receive e-mails from men, always men, doing business in China whose message is this: China is becoming a world-class economic power with its own moral standards, so why don’t I shut up and praise it for its tremendous accomplishments? Now comes James McGregor with this simple message: ‘The sad fact is that the Chinese system today is almost incompatible with honesty — almost everybody is at least a little bit dirty.’ And since McGregor’s book is a guide to doing business in China, here is some of his advice: ‘Once you get below the level of the big multinationals doing large deals, China becomes a swamp.

Frederic Raphael

Floundering in the shallows

This is a slim two-in-one offer of a pair of previously undisclosed ‘novellas’ (actually film treatments) by Graham Greene. In 1949, when they were written, The Third Man had just been a prodigious hit for the author, Carol Reed and Orson Welles. No Man’s Land — the sole complete piece on parade here — was an attempt to take another bite from much the same cherry (or a squeeze from the same Lime). This time, Richard Brown, a British agent with a ‘neutral name’, crosses into the Soviet zone, in the Harz mountains, in order to find what Hitchcock called ‘the McGuffin’, that vital doesn’t-matter-much-what which serves to prime a thriller’s plot.

David Ekserdjian

Christmas art books

The only halfway festive offering in this year’s crop of art books is Laurence Kanter and Pia Palladino’s Fra Angelico. Even in these secularised times, Angelico is still a favourite in the Christmas card stakes. First and foremost, however, this is a major scholarly reassessment of the artist’s career, but it also doubles as the catalogue of an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which closes at the end of January. For all that it is lavishly illustrated and gorgeously produced, it makes few concessions to non-specialists, but that does not mean it is not worth persevering with.

Sarah Burton

Challenged at the top level

Coming as I do from a long line of hairless wonders, baldness has fascinated me since childhood. One of my earliest memories is of my father harvesting and boiling nettles to produce a concoction which he then spread on his pate in the hope of checking the premature departure of his hair. What was more memorable was the following morning when, despite repeated shampooing, he appeared at the breakfast table with a bright green head. Memorable too, no doubt, to the 600 boys to whom he was headmaster and who he would shortly have to face in assembly. My father subsequently abandoned any attempt to interfere with nature’s plans for his hair, and this book would cheer his decision.

Caroline Moore

Nearly a burnt-out case

Would-be artists clinging to the belief that they are in possession of strangely unrecognised genius draw comfort from the thought of Van Gogh. For struggling writers, the biography of Herman Melville is almost equally potent. In some ways, indeed, it is even more poignant, for it is one of early success; early glamour, after the publication of Typee in 1846, as ‘the man who lived among cannibals’; abundant early promise that, in the eyes of contemporaries, merely fizzled out. He wrote published fiction for only 12 years of his 72 years, to increasingly bad reviews and poor sales: when he died, his last work, Billy Budd: Foretopman, was an unpublished manuscript. His last novel was published in 1857, when he was only 38, and the rest of his life is sad reading.

Bevis Hillier

Dics of fun quots

A few years back I had an argument with Ned Sherrin (now, but not then, a friend), which I have to say he won. Reviewing the first edition of his Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations — now reissued in a third edition — I complained that there were too many old chestnuts in it. Varying the metaphor, I wrote, ‘As a child, I would politely decline the gobstopper that three other kids had already sucked.’ Ned rightly retorted that it is precisely for familiar quotations, half-forgotten, that people often turn to dics of quots. (‘To be or ...’ — how does it go?). I had a more serious reservation about the book.

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 10 December 2005

Answers to Cancer (1962)by William Gaddis The William Gaddis canon is limited to five novels (The Recognitions, J. R., Carpenter’s Gothic, A Frolic of his Own and Agapé Agape), now recognised to be among the most distinguished in American literature. His career got off to a bad start, though. His first novel The Recognitions (1955) was either ignored or dismissed as sub-Joycean stuff (Gaddis commented, ‘I recall a most ingenious piece in a Wisconsin quarterly some years ago in which The Recognitions’ debt to Ulysses was established in such minute detail I was doubtful of my own firm recollection of never having read Ulysses.

Saturday

Anne Chisholm

Counting fewer and fewer blessings

One of these anthologies (Late Youth) is small and sprightly, with a pretty, jaunty cover depicting one cheery old person cavorting on a pony and a second catching a fish. The other (The Long History) is large and substantial and uses a detail from an 18th- century self-portrait by Jean Etienne Liotard on its glossy, coffee-table- worthy jacket: the painter, gaptoothed, with straggling grey hair and a maniacal grin on his wrinked face points mockingly at his canvas with a skinny finger. The former collection is light, gossipy, upbeat, based on a well-heeled, well-connected circle of friends and relations mostly aged between 60 and 80. The latter is solemnly academic and surveys the aging process from the ancient world to the present.

Andreas Campomar

The early corridors of power

Long after I had any need of it, I discovered one of the best pieces of advice on surviving one’s schooldays. Of course, it came from Cyril Connolly, though not from Enemies of Promise. I found it while at university in Connolly’s brilliant pastiche Where Engels Fears to Tread: In every group there are boys whom it is the fashion to tease and bully; if you quickly spot them and join in, it will never occur to anyone to tease and bully you. Foxes do not hunt stoats. From reading Prep and Gentlemen & Players, two very different approaches to the school novel, Connolly’s theory still holds true: either belong or go unnoticed, for what middle ground there is tends to be populated by the perennially eccentric and the terminally bullied.

John Charmley

New virtues for old

It can be reliably predicated that few Spectator readers will disagree with the general thrust of the essays in this volume, which is that our society is a decadent one, in which an emphasis on personal virtue and responsibility is being replaced by the intrusive activities of the nanny state. In every sphere of our public and private lives, there has appeared an army of clip-boarded bureaucrats dedicated to ensuring that at no time does anyone act on their own initiative (this would lack ‘transparency’) or discretion.

Ian Thomson

Cocking a snook at Manhattan

Born in New Orleans in 1924, Truman Capote wrote his first fiction at the age of eight. Or so he claimed. Rarely has a writer so elaborated his own legend; not only could Capote make the wildest nonsense about himself credible, he encouraged others to add to it. Drink was no doubt partly to blame. Close friends have described Capote as a ferocious malcontent, free-wheeling to self-destruction with the help of bourbon and barbiturates. The addictions finally got the better of the novelist in 1984, however, when he died of alcohol-related complications; he was a few weeks short of his 60th birthday. Oddly, for such a self-publicist, Capote kept quiet about the novel he wrote at the age of 19, Summer Crossing.