More from Books

Saturday

Ronald Segal

North, south, east and west

Among my earliest recollections is that of wandering into my mother’s bathroom and watching her, toenails incarnadine with polish like pillars above the foam, as she addressed herself sternly along the lines of: ‘I should have covered the jack. Then they could never have made the contract.’ Except for my brother Maurice, who played the piano, we all played bridge in the family, and we continued this in my own home, though my son came to be so much better than all of us that I refused to play with him. Impeccable kindness in criticism is especially hard to take. I had read and enjoyed Sandy Balfour’s previous book, Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose (8), with the subtitle, ‘A Memoir of Love, Exile and Crosswords’.

John Martin-Robinson

From Edgar all the way to Elizabeth

Once upon a time, the young Roy Strong spent many hours, with the encouragement of Sir Anthony Wagner, researching the records of the College of Arms in connection with his interest in Elizabethan and Stuart portraits and pageantry. This resulted in what many regard as his best work, Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals. Now, 50 years and 24 books later, he has trawled the heralds’ records again, this time for a history of the English coronation service from its Saxon origins to Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. The result is a well organised, sympathetic and fascinating account of the central ritual of the English people. This is a serious book with a full scholarly apparatus of notes, bibliography, charts, chronologies and index.

Simon Courtauld

The joys of rod and gun

The farmer and writer, A. G. Street, who in the 1950s co- edited with Max Hastings’s father a magazine which gives this book its title, wrote before the war: When the countryman turns his cows out to grass in the spring, he also gets out his rod and net ready for the fishing. The turning colour of the wheat makes the countryman think of both harvest and duck-shooting. In September he will thatch his ricks and shoot his partridges. He must wait until the leaf is off the tree before he can drive his pheasants. And when winter arrives he ploughs his land, feeds his stock, and goes hunting.

Raymond Carr

A short life and a shady one

Scholars face a formidable task when they set out to write the lives of the playwrights and poets of the Elizabethan age. They do not possess the personal revelations, say, of Byron’s letters. They must piece together scraps of information contained in the lawsuits of an astonishingly litigious population; the comments of friends and enemies in the literary world. They must then fit all this together with the supposed personal references in their subject’s works. Park Honan does this admirably in his life of Marlowe from his birth in Canterbury in 1564 to his death aged 29 in widow Bull’s house in Deptford. It is an ingenious piece of informed speculation. Marlowe emerges as a driven man. Like A. L.

Interconnect

A comfortably British Scot

Donald Dewar once said to me, ‘I can’t stand your journalism, but I like your novels.’ It was perhaps characteristic of him that he put it in that order, the disapproval first. It wasn’t just that he was given to speaking his mind, or that he was capable, as his friend, Fiona Ross, one of the contributors to this memorial volume of essays, remarks, ‘of spectacular rudeness’. It was rather that, like so many of us Scots brought up in the Presbyterian tradition, he was more comfortable criticising than praising. His political career was a long one, and for most of it he was condemned to wander in the waste land of opposition. This was frustrating and I suspect he often felt it was an essay in failure.

Diana Hendry

Growing up through grief

I’d like to defend Joyce Carol Oates —she’s had so many rotten reviews of this, her latest novel. Reviewers, I reason, must get tired of a writer who publishes a novel a year (Mother, Missing is Oates’s 44th) and seek something snide to say like ‘time to slow down’ (the Guardian) or ask, like Patrick Ness in the Daily Telegraph, how this esteemed author can produce ‘a novel of such careless mediocrity?’ But, alas, I think Ness is right and the best I can do is to say that I found the autobiographical origin of the book more interesting than the novel itself, raising questions about where fiction and memoir blend.

Cressida Connolly

Empty house blues

‘People who have recently lost someone have a certain look . . . one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness,’ observes Joan Didion in this painful memoir, which describes the first year of her widowhood after 40-odd years of marriage. She should know: the merest glance at her photograph confirms what the mirror must tell her, every day. Didion looks haunted, as indeed she is; haunted by grief, regret and longing. Mourners generally retreat behind closed doors, observed only by their closest family and friends. It is difficult not to feel slightly guilty for seeing her in this state. But any such reservations are out of place here, for Didion is effectively inviting the reader to stop sitting stiffly in the parlour and come and lie on the bed, with her.

Philip Hensher

‘I am a most superior person’

There’s an old definition of a gentleman: that he is someone who is never rude unintentionally. Rudeness, since then, has spread and spread, and 20 times a day we probably ask ourselves the same question which underlies these two books about contemporary manners. Do they mean to do it? Are they just bleeding ignorant, or does their rudeness reflect some kind of ethical conviction? One example. At my local branch of Sainsbury’s, you approach the check-out, and the operator says nothing, and does not meet your eye. If you say ‘Hello’, there is usually no response. He or she passes the goods over the scanner, ignoring you. At the end, the total comes up on the display. They say nothing; if you say ‘How much is that?

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 29 October 2005

Trilogy(1978) by Leonid Brezhnev Leonid Brezhnev produced the standard documents for a Soviet leader: speeches, articles and Leninophiliac tracts. In 1978 he added three books of jaunty memoirs: Little Land, Rebirth and The Virgin Lands, which told of his part in the Great Patriotic War and its immediate aftermath. Sample scenes include him single-handedly repelling a Nazi attack, then leading the way across a mined potato field. Since he had spent the war as a political commissar rather than a military officer, these were not regarded by everyone at the time as exhibiting the most complete veracity.

Saturday

Francis King

A stranger to the truth

Anthony Burgess was someone whose accomplishment as a fibber far surpassed even that of such formidable rivals as Laurens van der Post, Lilian Hellman and Patrick O’Brian. What made fibbing particularly perilous for Burgess, as for most fibbers, was that he rarely remembered his fibs. In consequence they varied widely from telling to telling. The best example of this is the case of the son, Paolo Andrea, of the Italian woman, Liana, whom Burgess precipitately took as his second wife within five or six weeks of the death of his first wife, Lynne. In a 1968 Spectator essay, ‘Thoughts of a Belated Father’, Burgess announced that, having just remarried (in fact the marriage did not take place until three days later), he had acquired a four-year-old stepson.

Robin Hanburytenison

A good and faithful but critical servant

As one who has always been a bit afraid of Virginia Woolf and daunted by heavy tomes on the Bloomsbury group, I opened this book cautiously. I soon found that I was wrong to be nervous as I became caught up in a fascinating story. Leonard Woolf was Virginia’s husband and his life was far more interesting than hers. The author, Sir Christopher Ondaatje, is one of the most remarkable men of our times. Now one of Britain’s leading philanthropists, his life, as he says himself, has been in some ways an echo of Woolf’s. Skilfully, he interweaves his own childhood memories and experiences of the Ceylon of 50 years ago with the modern, ongoing conflict between Hindu Tamils and Buddhist Sinhalese.

M R-D-Foot

A woman in a million

Of all the extraordinary secret careers that have gone public since the end of the world war against Hitler, one of the most dashing and farthest out of the ordinary was that of the woman the SOE called Christine Granville. Her father, the Polish Count Jerzy Skarbek, died when she was a child; her mother was the daughter of a Jewish banker. Krystyna grew up an unmanageable tomboy. She had been born in 1915, and spent her babyhood under German occupation; that did not make her pro-German. She adored skiing and knew well most of the skiing instructors on the mountainous Hungarian border, with whose help she organised several astounding escapes from newly occupied Poland in the winter of 1939-40.

Ian Thomson

The days of Hitler’s jackal

When Benito Mussolini invaded Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) in 1935, Italians were filled with jingoist pride. The dictator triumphantly announced the conquest of the promised sub-Saharan kingdom. ‘He’s like a god,’ marvelled one Fascist. ‘Like a god?’ returned another. ‘He is a god.’ Mussolini was part demagogue, part buffoon; on occasion he wore a tasselled fez and thrust out his chin pugnaciously for the world’s cameras. His cult of imperial Rome considered the handshake fey and unhygienic, so the stiff-armed salute was introduced. As the regime strengthened, the high priests of Fascism hailed Mussolini as ‘divine Caesar’, and called for an embargo on all foreign locutions and non-Latin terms.

John De-Falbe

Broadening the mind without moving

The phrase ‘armchair travel’ sounds quaint; suggestive of austerity at home and anarchy abroad; an era of currency restrictions and mustachioed bandits, when it was altogether more advisable to stay at home and read some daredevil’s account of the Damascene soukhs or the Grand Canal than risk venturing into such places yourself. But travel is now so easy that settling for its sedentary reflection looks like admitting to rather withered aspirations: so it is a surprise to see four attractively packaged books from Haus in a new series cheerfully called ‘Armchair Travellers’. Among them is one for which I can think of no precedent, a travel book written by someone who stayed at home.

Richard Beeston

Great reporter, lousy prophet

Eavesdrop on any gathering of Middle East correspondents huddled by the poolside of the Hamra Hotel in Baghdad or enjoying a late supper at Cairo’s Greek Club and the name Robert Fisk will inevitably enter the conversation. For three decades the reporter and author has energetically criss-crossed the Arab world and beyond, generating respect and loathing in equal measure from his colleagues and readers. For some Fisk is the apologist for every dictator and fanatic from Belgrade to Bagram, a prophet of doom with a giant ego who blames all the region’s ills on American arrogance, Israeli conspiracies and Western meddling.

Alan Judd

The making of a poet

I once considered attempting a biography of Siegfried Sassoon. Having now read Max Egremont’s comprehensive and perceptive book, based partly on access to private papers unavailable to previous biographers, I’m relieved I didn’t. Egremont has produced a thorough, sympathetic, balanced, engrossing account. There are two aspects to the 1886-1967 life of Captain Siegfried Sassoon, MC (he liked to use his rank and was proud of his medal) that make him a worthy biographical subject. The first is his literary achievement, essentially his war poems and his prose memoirs.

Sarah Bradford

A heart of gold — and steel

By the morning of Tuesday 9 April 2002 some 200,000 people of all ages had filed past the lying in state of the coffin containing the mortal remains of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. By the time she died, aged 101, Queen Elizabeth was a figure as familiar in the national consciousness as Winston Churchill. This is the first full- length biography — and who better to write it than Hugo Vickers, whose fascinated gaze has been riveted on the royal family since he was a schoolboy at Eton? Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, as she was when she married Albert, Duke of York, later King George VI, in 1923 was not initially enamoured of her royal prince, whom Harold Nicolson unkindly described as ‘just a snipe from the great Windsor marshes’.

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 22 October 2005

David Cameron (1950) by George Frederick Clarke David Cameron is what one might call a hatchet job. Written by one G. F. Clarke, it’s the tale of a simple Scottish lad sold into slavery in the New World, who escapes and leads a life of adventure in the wild fighting of the various tribes, finally becoming a chief. Among the big beasts he has to slay are the bloodhounds that follow him as he attempts to throw off his pursuers (see picture). Clarke is particularly vivid in his descriptions of Cameron’s early experiences of tribal initiation: Now I was handed a pipe … I glanced at Tomah. He nodded encouragingly, so I took a puff, smothered a cough and gave it back to the Chief. Then the pipe passed around the circle of men, each one gravely taking a puff.

Saturday

Interconnect

Fissures within the urban landscape

Published recently in the Times, William Rees-Mogg’s contention (in a well-meaning if speciously argued piece on the Vatican’s continuing opposition to the ordination of self-confessed homosexuals) that the sexual proclivities of priests attracted to pre-pubertal children was ‘comparable to Oscar Wilde’s relations with London rent boys’ is typical of a fashionable misapprehension which confuses paedophila (as it is currently understood) with the neo-Socratean, hopelessly idealistic conception of paederastia into which Wilde and his associates threw themselves so energetically at the end of the 19th century.

Andrew Taylor

Cracking the code of celebrity

Like revolution, fame has a nasty habit of eating its children. On one level Lunar Park explores the perils that an author faces when subjected to the sort of celebrity usually reserved for rock stars and supermodels. It’s not just any old author, either, but Bret Easton Ellis himself. Or is it? The narrator of the novel is ‘Bret Easton Ellis’. ‘There’s one thing you must remember as you hold this book in your hands’, he assures the reader. ‘All of it really happened, every word is true.’ The early chapters of this book invite the reader to play the chic, post-modern game of Spot the Join.