More from Books

Saturday

Felipe Fernandezarmesto

Facts and fables of the New World

The Amazon can drive you mad. In Werner Herzog’s cult movie Aguirre: Wrath of God, Klaus Kinski affected a crazed stare that bordered on self-caricature. But the real-life explorer he portrayed was a first-class, unquestionable, copper-bottomed maniac, who systematically murdered his companions, as they drifted downriver in torrid, febrile paranoia in 1560. He recast himself as both pope and king, and, when he at last emerged from the rivermouth, launched an ill-starred attempt to conquer the Spanish empire. His was an extreme case, but the strange, overpowering environment is unnerving to outsiders even to this day. The first Spanish explorers who navigated the river in 1540-2 showed some of the symptoms.

Peregrine Worsthorne

Blindfolds and mindmists

Without the existence of ‘apparently [my italics] sophisticated circles’, which the great historian and poet Robert Conquest also calls ‘an intellectually semi-educated class’ (soon abbreviated into just ‘cerebral jellies’) his latest book would never have been written. For its express purpose, he avers, is to tease ‘these misinformed strata’ — yet another description — into abandoning the ‘brain blindfolds’ and ‘mindmists’ which have robbed them of all sense of present realities and future possibilities.

Stephen Glover

The Times it is a-changin’

Because the Times is, or was, a newspaper like no other, it has enjoyed the distinction of successive volumes of official history. The last, written by John Grigg, covered the years 1966 to 1981, when the Times was bought by Rupert Murdoch. Volume seven, entitled ‘The Murdoch Years’, takes us up almost to the present day. Graham Stewart, a historian of the 1930s, should be congratulated on agreeing to undertake the task. For although earlier chroniclers have had to deal with controversial or painful passages in the newspaper’s history, such as its prewar embrace of appeasement or its postwar emollience towards the Soviet Union, none has been asked to wade into so perilous a minefield as was faced by Stewart.

John McEwen

Cheeps, tweets and warbles

In his old age John Ruskin lamented, ‘I have made a great mistake. I have wasted my life with mineralogy, which has led to nothing. Had I devoted myself to birds, their life and plumage, I might have produced something worth doing.’ Here are two bird books which have been eminently worth doing. Both are by North Americans but their sweep is global. David Rothenberg is a musician, composer, author and professor; the Canadian, Graeme Gibson, is a renown- ed novelist and chairman of the Pelee Island Bird Observatory. Gibson only succumbed to the charm of birds at 37, which is why he begins his book with the Ruskin quotation. Rothenberg’s interest in birds has also intensified with age — it is only since 2000 that he has taken to playing music live with them.

Sam Leith

The very best of bad verse

In the mid-1930s, the poet Ogden Nash visited a rodeo, where the star attraction was a handsome cowboy parading with his wife and son. ‘This is Monty Montana,’ the announcer declared, ‘who is a great example to American young men and young women. He has never smoked a cigarette, he has never touched liquor.’ Nash’s voice rang out from the bleachers: ‘And that little boy is adopted.’ The chief thing about Ogden Nash was that he was funny. Though he wrote a handful of straightforward and affecting simple lyric poems, what he will be remembered for is his light verse.

The Spectator

Books of the Year | 19 November 2005

A selection of the best and worst books of the year, chosen by some of our regular contributors Jonathan SumptionNiall Ferguson’s Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (Allen Lane, £25) is a marvel of objective iconoclasm, much better than the associated TV series, which presents one of the world’s great liberal empires without the usual overtones of Pecksniffian disapproval.

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 19 November 2005

The Normal and Adventitious Danger Periods for Pulmonary Disease in Children (1913) by William Carlos Williams The great American modernist poet William Carlos Williams was also a full-time paediatrician. He received his MD in 1906 and practised continuously until 1951. The rare booklet above is among his small corpus of medical writings, appearing originally in The Archives of Pediatrics in August 1913. In it he explores the possibility of a ‘danger period’ for children just before puberty, when greater growth in height in relation to chest capacity makes them more vulnerable to pulmonary disease. As he puts it, ‘The height always increases, relatively, at the expense of the chest ... Developmentally, length of body is always dominant to weight.

Saturday

John Michell

Toeing the party line

John Brockman, the New York literary agent and science writer, had an artist friend, James Byars, who had a grand idea. It was ‘to gather the 100 most brilliant minds in the world together in a room, lock them in and have them ask each other the questions they were asking themselves’. The result, he supposed, would be a ‘synthesis of all thought’. He drew up his list of minds and telephoned them all. Seventy per cent of them proved their brilliance by hanging up on him. Brockman, undeterred, carried on where Byars had left off. He started a website, Edge, where he invited fellow-thinkers to answer the question, ‘What do you believe is true, even though you cannot prove it?

Paul Binding

Small is beautiful | 12 November 2005

The British, publishers and booksellers regularly tell us, have an antipathy to the short story; they respond unfavourably to even a well-known writer coming up with a collection, and for an emergent one to devote creative energy principally to the medium would be regarded as literary suicide. And this despite determined efforts by certain key literary editors, competition-setters and indeed the South Bank itself to keep the art-form alive. Elsewhere the short story is differently regarded. In the English-speaking world, Ireland, the American South, and, thanks to Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff, the Pacific North-West of the US have long exhibited short stories as supreme expressions of their culture’s genius.

Simon Heffer

The boy done bad

One of Sir Mark Thatcher’s friends once told him he was ‘born guilty’. Many, including the two authors of this book, would contend that he has done his best to live up to his billing. Apparently, in moments of persecution, he has taken to quoting this observation about himself in the most rueful of tones. If he can bring himself to read this book he will feel far more persecuted by the end of it. The authors are unquestionably experienced investigative journalists, with various scalps to their name. They are suited to their subject remarkably well, in that their style and approach are almost as unattractive as they claim their subject to be.

Rupert Christiansen

The thinking man’s poet

‘The most intellectual British poet of the 19th century’ is Anthony Kenny’s judgment of Arthur Hugh Clough — a tribute which implies the absence of Tennysonian musi- cality in his verse as well as a prescient understanding of contemporary philosophical and scientific issues that far exceeds Browning’s or Arnold’s. Kenny’s study of this still underrated figure takes the refreshingly old-fashioned form of a ‘life and works’. Biographically, it has no sensational revelations to offer, and, in terms of fact, it doesn’t substantially advance on the mid-20th-century researches of Katherine Chorley and R.K. Biswas. But Kenny has been thinking about Clough for over a quarter of a century, and it shows.

Pj Kavanagh

Band of brothers

In bad light, after some confusion, the bails were ceremonially removed by the umpires late in the evening of 12 September 2005, to signify that the game was ended, was a draw and that England had won the Ashes. Less than three weeks later, a handsome, well-written account of that exhausting 25-day battle, Ashes Victory, was landing on the desks of literary editors, an achievement almost as astonishing as the Ashes series itself. Sent to Orion by the Professional Cricketers’ Association, the author is credited as the England Cricket Team, which is fair enough because we spend most of the time in the dressing-room hearing them talk, and, judging by the number of times the phrase ‘to be honest’ appears, the chat is verbatim. It is also articulate and revealing.

M R-D-Foot

The still unwithered laurel wreath

In the reviewer’s childhood, Scott was a national hero, almost as revered as Nelson. Revisionists did what they could in the 1960s and 1970s to cut him down to size; generations have been brought up to despise him. David Crane’s new life seeks to restore the balance, to show the man as he was and to explain why he behaved as he did. He emerges a hero after all, even if a limited one. He was trained as a naval officer in the rigid school of the old Britannia, under stiff discipline, with the watchwords of conformity and obedience. No one was encouraged to think for himself; but it was a help to have a patron.

Christopher Fraser

Chipps with everything

Commander Chipps Selby Bennett was a traditional officer and a gentleman; a Dorset dandy with a monocle, tartan trews and size 12 shoes. He’s a man whose life experience encompasses the navy, hunting and the Conservative party. His autobiography, Seahorse! Between the Sea and the Saddle, reflects with characteristic eloquence his surprisingly wide-ranging life, and chronicles the highs and lows of a man who has navigated his way through all levels of society. The memoirs start with an unusual upbringing and the Spanish Civil War and continue with adventurous travels in the wartime and peacetime navy. One moment Chipps is nearly drowned as a midshipman in Scapa Flow and again in the Clyde; the next, aged 18, he is in love with the daughter of an Egyptian bey.

Michael Crick

A billionaire at bay

In the late 1990s it began to look as if the media were gunning for millionaire Tories in alphabetical order. First Jonathan Aitken, a joint target of Granada and the Guardian. Then Jeffrey Archer, jailed after a sting operation by the News of the World. Next in line seemed to be the mysterious Michael Ashcroft, appointed Conservative party treasurer by William Hague, donor of many millions to the party, and victim of the strange, new alliance between New Labour and the Times. In 1999 Hague tried to nominate Ashcroft as a ‘working’ member of the House of Lords, only for the nomination initially to be blocked by Tony Blair on the recommendation of the Honours Scrutiny Committee.

Robert Stewart

Elusive brothers in arms

History and fiction have their differences. The most obvious and the most important is that scrupulous historians hesitate to say anything for which they cannot provide some form of documentary evidence. But history and fiction are also more alike than is usually acknowledged. Both historians and novelists seek to show how the world operates (or operated) and both do so on the basis of fragmentary knowledge, the one chiefly from whatever survives in the various forms of historical record, the other chiefly from perceptions acquired from life in the world. The demarcation is less clearly defined than it once was. For some time — at least since the publication of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood 40 years ago — genre boundaries have been collapsing everywhere.

James Astill

A disaster waiting to happen

A few days after Baghdad fell to American soldiers, CNN aired footage of a harassed marine wrestling to contain an unruly mob, and yelling, ‘We’re here for your fucking freedom! Now back up!’ The occupation was already in trouble. Looters had grabbed their freedom with greedy hands, ransacking almost every state building left unbombed, stripping them of police records, Babylonian antiquities and porcelain urinals. And America had no plan, and no clue, of what to do with the broken and bitter country.

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 12 November 2005

The Exploits of Mr Saucy Squirrel (1976) by Woodrow Wyatt LORD WYATT of Weeford, Chairman of the Tote, the ‘Voice of Reason’, and the only member of the British peerage whose cigars could remain alight underwater, says in the preface to this tale, ‘Mr Saucy Squirrel has an alert and enquiring mind. That is how he discovered a hoard of gold sovereigns though he did not know what they were at the time. His curiosity prompts him to live in the style of a human being and to find out what goes on in the world. His belief that everybody is entitled to have a good time provided that they don’t hurt other people encourages him to set about having a good time himself.

Saturday

Rupert Christiansen

Antipodean wit and wisdom

Shocking, I know, but I hadn’t paid much attention to Clive James since my dim distant undergraduate days 30 years ago, when I remember being vastly amused by his verse satire of Grub Street parvenus, Peregrine Prykke’s Pilgrimage. Since then he’s rather passed me by — I never thought his television shows up to much, his byline has never grabbed me and I have yet to consult his latest project, described by the blurb as ‘the world’s first serious multimedia personal website’ (serious?). Nothing personal, no formulated opinion of his talent one way or the other, I just wasn’t a fan. Then came the prospect of a trans- atlantic flight, for which I decided his new collection of recent essays would be just the thing.

Anthony Daniels

Colossally bad taste

Everyone loves a good dictator, at least at a distance. Dictators exert the same horror and fascination that snakes have for some people; Latin American literature, for example, would be very much the poorer without them. It seems that we cannot ever know too much about their daily lives, for their arbitrary power over life and death seems to give a wider significance to the most trivial detail of their existence. Peter York, whom the blurb describes as ‘Britain’s original style guru’, has had the clever idea of making a picture book of dictators’ homes, 16 of them in all. The premise of the book is that by their décor shall ye know them.