More from Books

Saturday

Matthew Dennison

Surprised and doomed by joy

At the centre of Rachel Billington’s new novel is love, but this is not in any conventional sense a romantic novel. Claudia, a schoolgirl, falls in love with a man 24 years her senior. He is not a romantic man, though given on occasion to the poetic flights of fancy associated with his chosen occupation, that of would-be writer. He is also married, though this, too, is a union lacking in romance: ‘Of love he did not think. He and Fiona were inextricably bound together. He could not imagine life without her and had no wish to try.’ Claudia, at 16, has few of the attributes of the romantic heroine save her youth and a talent for music: she plays the viola with passionate intensity.

Zenga Longmore

Rescued by reindeer

‘Something about the idea of being a travel writer distresses me,’ laments Jenny Diski in the introduction of her book. ‘So,’ she continues, ‘this is not a travel book.’ Well, distressing as this news may be to both author and reader, this is a travel book. All travel writers have their foibles. Some wish to delight their audience with tales of dangerous adventure. Others strive to amuse their public with wry and witty observations. Jenny Diski’s sole purpose is to do nothing. She wants to keep still. Her deeply uninspiring book slithers into action when she jets off to New Zealand to attend an International Writers’ Festival. Hey-ho, what a drag.

Jonathan Keates

Zero tolerance in Florence

It is easy to get misty-eyed about Renaissance Florence. How gorgeous it was, we tell ourselves, this City of the Lily, with its lissom youths and comely maidens, each one a Gozzoli ephebe or a Botticelli Venus, its humanist scholars poring over the latest haul of Greek manuscripts, Donatello and Cellini fashioning flawless marble and bronze, Brunelleschi winching the last blocks of his miraculous cupola into place, Masaccio slapping down the sublime ‘Tribute Money’ on the wet plaster of the Brancacci Chapel, and those dear, wise Medici guiding it all towards a purple-prose apotheosis in the pages of Burckhardt and Berenson. Oh to be in Fiesole now that April’s there! Fra Girolamo Savonarola has traditionally been seen as the party-pooper at this cultural banquet.

Richard Beeston

Time out in Cuba

For three years Moazzam Begg, former DHSS officer, one-time Birmingham estate agent and top al-Qaida suspect, survived at the sharp end of America’s war on terror. Seized in the middle of the night from his home in Pakistan, Begg was taken through grim makeshift prisons, endured hundreds of hours of interrogation and ended up one of the faceless caged figures in Guantanamo Bay, the US detention facility in Cuba. Thanks to a campaign by Western human rights lawyers and the fact that he is a British citizen, Begg emerged from captivity last year to be reunited with his family. He has now produced the first authoritative version of conditions in Guantanamo and the legal no-man’s-land where hundreds of terrorist suspects are trapped.

Michael Vestey

The murky side of Murano

This is Donna Leon’s 15th Commissario Guido Brunetti novel set in Venice and once again the author succeeds in capturing the light and shade of a city that has plenty of both. As in this edition she even provides maps, including the island of Murano, so that the reader can follow the detective’s various per- ambulations in search of the solution to a mystery, also slipping into the story details of which vaporetti stops he uses when he’s not summoning a police launch to take him out across the lagoon to an inhospitable outcrop where, perhaps, a body has been found. Leon is good at portraying the social tensions, the rivalry between and even the resentments of, say, the people of Murano and those who live in other districts.

Saturday

Pankaj Mishra

Spring forward, fall back

Republics, as much as monarchies, need founding myths in order to legitimise themselves in the eyes of their subjects. For a long time, the image of Chairman Mao leading his rag-tag troops over 10,000 kilometers, across 18 mountain ranges and 24 rivers, offered abundant proof of communist bravery, endurance and selfless idealism to the Chinese. Com- pared to Mao’s exertions, Gandhi’s Salt March, the central legend of Indian nationalism, looks like a public relations gimmick. The Long March was first mythologised by the American journalist Edgar Snow, who visited Mao at his safe base in north-west China in 1936, and whose largely admiring account of Chinese communists in Red Star Over China shaped international perceptions of them for the next few decades.

Hugh Massingberd

Harnessing the horses of Apollo

In my ignorance, before reading this most instructive, entertaining and beautifully produced book, I had idly regarded sundials as agreeable garden ornaments with little or no practical purpose. To quote Hilaire Belloc, ‘I am a sundial and I make a botch / Of what is done much better by a watch’. Yet our expert guide to the subject, Sir Mark Lennox-Boyd, a former Tory politician who is now Patron of the British Sundial Society and a prolific designer of sundials, is having none of this. Echoing Professor Joad of The Brains Trust, he counters Belloc’s couplet with ‘it all depends on how you measure time’. He suggests that ‘you could just as easily say that sundials tell the right time but clocks do not’.

Philip Ziegler

A talent for losing

Wavell was a great soldier and a great man: wise, courageous, clear-headed, an inspired and inspiring leader, a pattern of integrity. It is peculiarly unfair that the three greatest tasks he undertook all ended in near total failure. He made his name between the wars as a thoughtful, forward-looking soldier who did as much to prepare the British army for war as any of the men who were his titular superiors. On one thing all his officers agreed; that with him they were learning all the time. His basic principle, which may appear obvious but seemed daring, even heretical to the more hidebound commanders, was, ‘There is nothing fixed in war, except a few elementary rules of common sense.’ Training must be not for ‘a war’ but for ‘war’.

Christopher Hitchens

Relocation with a vengeance

In 1975, a few months after the two Turkish invasions of Cyprus that had stormed across the northern tier of the island in the preceding summer, I stood in the square of Lawrence Durrell’s old village of Bellapaix and watched the Greek villagers being rounded up for deportation to the south. Within a short space of time, almost 200,000 people had been forcibly expelled, so this little uprooting job was more in the nature of a mopping-up operation, involving those who had been too old or young or ill to be removed the first time round. Many miles to the south, a comparable scene was being enacted in Turkish Cypriot villages near Limassol.

Jasper Griffin

A toddle along the Gibbon trail

What is likely to be the future of Europe? Is some kind of unity really on the cards? Boris Johnson, in his formative period a student of the classical world, finds his mind turning back from the Treaty of Rome to the pukka Romans, the ancient chappies. What do they have to tell us about this EU caper? Being a politician, and consequently at least as subtle as your average serpent, Johnson does not start out in quite that direct way. He follows the approved manner of the poet Horace, not to mention the philosopher Aristotle, by beginning in the middle of events, with a bang.

Douglas Hurd

What next — after the end of history?

Professor Fukuyama is famous for having told us at the end of the Cold War that history was at an end. By this he meant that the slow advance of liberal democracy was inevitable. As he explains in his latest book he did not mean that we should try to accelerate the process by killing thousands of Iraqis and creating a political context in which Iraqis kill each other every day while American occupation forces look on. Saddam too was a killer; but Saddam is on trial for his life. Fukuyama now carries his thinking forward into the world after the poisonous flowering of the neocon doctrine which he once favoured in more innocent form.

Jonathan Bate

Mad about the Bard

At school there was a group of us who thought that Samuel Beckett was the coolest person on the planet. What could be more thrilling than the apocalyptic minimalism of a play featuring two people who lived in dustbins? We found validation for our passion when a teacher drew our attention to the Polish critic Jan Kott’s essay comparing Beckett’s Endgame with King Lear in his Shakespeare Our Contemporary. Intrigued, I read the rest of the book. Kott brought Shakespeare into the present with a passion I’d never encountered before in any other work of literary criticism. I particularly liked his claim that if Titus Andronicus had had a sixth act, Shakespeare would have used it to turn machine-guns on the audience.

Ronald Blythe

All go in the name of God

The Bickersteth family has performed its Levi-like role in the Church of England for several generations, providing it with some of its best traditional pastors. Rectories, vicarages, deaneries, palaces have homed them and parish churches and cathedrals have long witnessed their work. And work it still is, as this autobiography of a 20th-century bishop proves, although the word in any put-upon or compulsive sense never seems to have entered his head. His chief motivation has been Christ’s brief instruction ‘Do this.’ John Bickersteth is candid, some might think to the point of naivety at times, and his book reads like an opened-up diary, a free view of himself in which he shows pleasure rather than vanity. He knows that he has had a good time.

Saturday

Philippa Stockley

Slash and burn

‘A ship is sooner rigged by far, than a gentleman made ready,’ scoffed Thomas Tomkis in 1607, about how long men took to dress. But in the 17th century wasting time this way was no male preserve. ‘Women,’ wrote Joseph Swetnam, ‘are the most part of the fore-noone painting themselves and frizzling their haires and prying in their glasse, like Apes.’ In her new book, Fashion and Fiction, Courtauld professor Aileen Ribeiro shows, by interpreting a gallery of arresting portraits backed up by contemporary literature, that clothes were a consuming, costly passion — a social index, suitor’s shorthand and poet’s primer.

Ian Ker

The everlasting bonfire

This splendid book of articles, essays and reviews, some published for the first time, begins with a long, masterly piece on the unfashionable doctrine of Hell, the best thing in the whole book. Having been taught about Hell by the monks of Ampleforth in the 1950s, Piers Paul Read asks, ‘Why was damnation dropped from Catholic preaching in the last decades of the 20th century when a monk from Ampleforth, Basil Hume, was Arch- bishop of Westminster?’ If there is a consistent theme in this book, it is the sense that what Read learned at Ampleforth and its prep school Gilling has been betrayed by the post-Vatican II English Church led by the former abbot of Ampleforth.

John De-Falbe

Memories of loss

The first short chapter of The Other Side of You looks so simple. After introducing us to Elizabeth Cruickshank, a suicide patient who ‘in a certain light could have been 14 or 400’, Dr McBride explains how he and his psychiatrist colleagues ‘come alive at a certain kind of raving’. For McBride it is ‘the suicidally disposed who beckoned’. Then he tells us matter-of-factly how, when he was five, he saw his older brother run over by a reversing lorry, and of the loss that has weighed on him ever since. In these five pages Vickers discreetly and with immense skill establishes her narrator and sets out her primary theme. Perhaps because the author is herself professionally familiar with her subject matter, there is an ease to the narrative voice.

David Crane

Pathos of the expatriate

I don’t know if it is still there, but in the museum at Lord’s there used to be a glass case containing a stuffed sparrow killed in mid-flight by Jahangir Khan. It always felt somehow dismally appropriate that the one sparrow to substantiate biblical claims should have to spend its eternity at Lord’s, but a different age and a more exuberant game demand a more optimistic symbol and in an incident during a one-day match at the Oval in 2002 between India and Sri Lanka Romesh Gunesekera has found it. ‘The whole of the Oval was hushed,’ he writes on the death of a London pigeon, sacrificial victim of a Sachin Tendulkar drive: The nearest fielder walked over and picked the bird up as though it were the dove of peace. He carried it slowly towards the boundary.

Cressida Connolly

Scarcely on speaking terms any more

The ancient Athenians were mad about it, but the Spartans thought it a waste of time. It flowered in the coffee houses and clubs of 18th-century London, but fell out of favour when the Romantics made it fashionable to prefer solitary communion with nature. Swift thought women improved it and Hume agreed: ‘Women are the Sovereigns of the Empire of Conversation,’ he wrote. Virginia Woolf considered that including talk about sex greatly enlivened the conversations at her Thursday soirées: The word bugger was never far from our lips. We discussed copulation with the same excitement and openness that we had discussed the nature of good … it was, I think, a great advance in civilisation.

Martin Vander Weyer

Trying times on Easy Street

The multibillionaire Warren Buffett, a folk hero of the age of affluence, once reminded disciples of his hugely successful investment techniques that ‘money can’t change how many people love you’. Avner Offer’s potent analysis of 50 years of socio-economic data makes a similar point in less folksy style: ‘Affluence breeds impatience, and impatience undermines well-being.’ As Oxford’s Chichele Professor of Economic History and a fellow of All Souls, Offer is scrupulous about defining terms.

Raymond Carr

Ventures into the Spanish past

The complex plots of C. J. Sansom’s novel revolve around the adventures in Spain during the civil war and its aftermath of three old boys of a fictional public school. Harry Brett comes from an army family, prospers at school and is elected a fellow of a Cambridge college. Bernie Piper is a working-class scholarship boy who regards public schools as machines for grinding out compliant servants of bourgeois capitalism. Leaving in disgust, he joins the Communist party, volunteers for the International Brigades and is presumed killed at the battle of Jarama in February 1937. Sandy Forsyth, son of a bishop, detests school as restricting his activities on the racetracks and in London brothels.