More from Books

Saturday

Interconnect

Rumours of life greatly exaggerated

Certain concepts send even the least reputable historian scuttling for cover. The Holy Grail heads the list. The Knights Templar inspire grave suspicion; so do Atlantis and the Round Table. The Ark of the Covenant is up there with the best — or worst — of them. The Ark was the repository for the two tablets of stone which Moses brought down from the mountain and on which were inscribed the Ten Commandments. To house it Solomon built a temple of stone and cedarwood, olive wood and gold.

Philip Hensher

That famous touch again

The most famous social encounter in British military history occurred in September 1805 in Lord Castlereagh’s vestibule, when the Duke of Wellington (as he then wasn’t) met Nelson for the first and last time. All we have is Wellington’s account of the meeting, told many years later to John Wilson Croker. At first Nelson did not know who he was talking to, and ‘entered at once into conversation with me, if I can call it conversation, for it was almost all on his side and all about himself and, in reality, a style so vain and so silly as to surprise and almost disgust me’.

Saturday

Susan Hill

With a nod to the Master

Literature feeds off other literature and why ever not? Think of Jean Rhys’s The Wide Sargasso Sea and Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, bred from, respectively, Jane Eyre and Mrs Dalloway. Think of Shakespeare for that matter, who told a good story provided someone else had told it to him first. To get the most out of this chilling little tale you really do need to have read Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. If you have not, shame on you, but Penguin Popular Classics have it for all of £1.50 and you have the treat in store of the greatest ghost story ever written. Come back here when you’ve done. Right. Good, isn’t it ? Now read on.

Victoria Glendinning

The music of the earth and the dance of the atoms

Science is sexy. It always was, as we who were forced to give up biology at the age of 14, for the irrelevant reason that we were quite good at French, have always resentfully suspected. Now, accessible and even inaccessible books on how the physical world ticks become bestsellers. The new president-elect of the Royal Society gets quizzed on BBC 4’s PM programme, and Cheltenham and Edinburgh run festivals of science in addition to their celebrations of literature and music. These happenings no longer represent straws in the wind but great bales of the stuff, and this marvellous Oxford Dictionary of Scientific Quotations is an ornament to the straw-stack.

Nicholas Haslam

Brilliance and bathos

That most astute of reviewers, Lynn Barber, recently wrote of this curiously bloodless biography that the subject is a minor star, now only remembered for one film, Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat. While this may be true, I imagine none but a dedicated cineaste can now name a film of Gloria Swanson’s apart from Sunset Boulevard, or any of Norma Shearer’s, both huge stars and Tallulah Bankhead’s Hollywood contemporaries. In fact Tallulah made nearly 60 appearances in films and theatre, some of them laughable, some memorable, all of them idiosyncratic because of her unique style. She was also one of the most famous figures of the 20th century.

Simon Heffer

Still in the dark

From the timing of Michael Crick’s book on the Leader of the Opposition we can surmise that the author, like most of the rest of us, has made his mind up already about the result of the imminent election. There will be nothing significant to add after 5 May. The Tory party will not win the coming contest, and Michael Howard will not be prime minister. So best to get this unauthorised biography out on the shelves now, when at least its subject is doing something interesting. Even though the Tories seem placed to do better than in the last two debacles, there is unlikely to be such consistent publicity for this work in a month’s time.

Jonathan Sumption

Don’t let’s be beastly to the Germans

It seems only yesterday that Margaret Thatcher was ranting away before an invited group of academics, journalists and experts at Chequers about the perils of German unification and the imminent subordination of all Europe to a nation of 80 million beasts, barbarians and bullies. The idea seemed distinctly odd even at the time, but not as odd as it seems now, after the passage of a decade and a half. Few of those present would have predicted that German unification would mark the beginning of a long period of relative economic decline, in which sclerotic institutions devised to achieve social cohesion and labour security after the second world war would undermine German competitiveness and push up its unemployment to levels not seen for half a century.

Charles Saumarez-Smith

God’s house with many mansions

Institutional history is a tricky genre, so prone to over-reverence, so likely to be tedious to anyone but those attached to the institution described. So it was superficially brave of a commercial press to commission a quincentenary history of a Cambridge college: brave, that is, until one discovers that its authors include Quentin Skinner, the late Roy Porter, David Canna- dine and Simon Schama amongst others, all of them alumni of the Jack Plumb school of history, which was based in Christ’s during Plumb’s long postwar reign there as history tutor and which became the forcing house for an engaged, literate, civic style of historical writing which can make even the introspective mores of a Cambridge college interesting.

Anita Brookner

A nest of ungentle Essex folk

Ruth Rendell, writing as Barbara Vine, is the author of 12 novels which deal with extremely aberrant behaviour treated on the easiest and most companionable terms. There is no doubting that the author herself is on the side of the sane, the balanced, and the well-behaved: this is apparent in the clarity of her sentences, which proceed without flagging from the outset of a complex narrative to its eventual resolution. Her astonishing productivity is another matter altogether. This is not so much devotion to the task as obedience to an impulse with which she is on enviably relaxed terms. She is in many ways qualified to be our foremost woman writer.

Andrew Taylor

Patron and prisoner

Joan Brady’s previous books include Theory of War, a powerful historical novel which won the Whitbread Book of the Year prize. Now she has written a thriller. It is set in Springfield, Illinois, once the home of Abraham Lincoln and now a prosperous city overshadowed by an unholy alliance of politicians, cops, lawyers and bankers. No one, however, doubts the integrity of Hugh Freyl, whose family has dominated the city’s public life for generations. Like justice itself, Hugh is blind, which means he cannot see the face of the person who bludgeons him to death in the library of his own law firm. The novel has a double narrative in which each strand enriches and comments on the other.

Sam Leith

A roll call of honour

‘This,’ announces Max Hast- ings at the outset, ‘is an old-fashioned book.’ So it is, and it is none the worse for it. As a schoolboy, Hastings thrilled to a 1920s’ anthology called Stirring Deeds of the Great War. His own book, a Brief Lives-style collection of essays on 14 of the most colourful or daring figures in (roughly) modern warfare, offers many of the pleasures those deeds must once have stirred, now overlaid with a more considered, war historian’s interest in what drives the very few people who turn out to be exceptionally brave in harm’s way. It is an old-fashioned book in other respects too.

Saturday

Stephen Abell

Small-town screwballs and surprises

In a 1925 essay, Freud unearthed an important linguistic truth about the concept of the uncanny (unheimlich). He noticed that it had drifted very close to its apparent antonym heimlich, which starts out as ‘homely’ and can, via ‘private and personal’, become ‘secretive and repressed’. This enabled him to offer the more important psychological insight that things closest to home can be the most disconcerting, that often the familial is really the least familiar. J. Robert Lennon has written a book of 100 anecdotes — between a couple of paragraphs and a couple of pages long — that chart the unpredictable nature of small-town life in middling America. And his use of the uncanny is, well, canny.

James Buchan

Tom Tiddler’s ground

For many people in the West, the Middle East is a source of perplexity and foreboding. Home to morose despotisms, political violence and a thoroughly ruined natural environment, the Middle East now sends us its refugees, headscarves and, most notably since 11 September 2001, violence. The peoples of the Middle East reply that their lives and political arrangements have been mutilated beyond repair by Western exploitation and bullying. This conversation, never very illuminating, has become even less so of late. Western reporters in the Middle East, restricted in their movements but relatively safe in their persons till the early 1980s, now find some stories simply too dangerous to report.

John Martin-Robinson

The inside story

This posthumous book is the summation of a lifetime’s research into aspects of the 18th-century interior in the British Isles by the leading historian of the subject. I say British Isles, for John Cornforth had strong interests in Irish and Scottish Georgian architecture, as well as English. As the former architectural editor of Country Life and co-author, with the decorator John Fowler, of English Decoration in the Eighteenth Century (1974), he had already aired some of the themes developed here, and many of the subjects have appeared in articles in Country Life. It is useful, however, to have them all melded together into a seamless celebration of the golden age of Georgian architectural decoration.

Interconnect

England’s greatest export

Shakespeare was the great glory of England. So wrote Victor Hugo. But he added that if you went to England to admire the statue of Shakespeare you would find instead the statue of Wellington. The English did not like Shakespeare. His fame came to England from overseas. And Hugo believed that the French played their part in making the English conscious of his greatness. There is a generation of English people to whom this will appeal. Those who went to France after the Liberation found themselves taking part in discussions about Shakespeare such as they never knew in England. Central was Jean-Louis Barrault with his production of Hamlet. Was he a great actor? Was the mis-en-scène appropriate? Were the translations acceptable?

Toby Lichtig

White-water trip towards wisdom

In his 12th novel, Tim Parks revisits a subject that has been dominating his writing of late: the middle-aged man, plunged into crisis, forced to re- evaluate his life. Destiny (1999) revolved around a suicidal son and a crumbling marriage, Judge Savage (2003) involved a crumbling marriage and a distressed daughter. In Rapids, the divorce has already taken place, though death, rather than emotional pestilence, is the cause. Vince’s wife, Gloria, died suddenly of a stroke, though she did manage to phone him in the process. Now he is haunted by her final words: ‘I’m so, so sorry.’ Gloria was a keen kayaker, and Vince has taken her place on a white-water trip in Italy, partly to accompany his adolescent daughter, Louise.

Anne Applebaum

Defending the Marxist citadel

In the last several years, English-speaking readers have been treated to a plethora of Soviet history books unlike others before them. The opening of Soviet archives has given us everything from Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad to Simon Sebag-Montefiore’s book on Stalin’s court, to new biographies of Rasputin, Lenin and Trotsky. Now, however, we have The Soviet Century, the work of a respected American academic. It is a book whose qualities are not easy to describe. Speaking frankly, my first reaction to Lewin’s book was one of puzzlement. Despite reading the introduction, which promised a ‘presentation of general aspects of the system’, it took me quite a long time to work out what the professor was getting at.

Interconnect

The unease of the distant East

Defying the geographical promise of its title, The India House turns out to be set in Shropshire. Here, in sequest- ered, Eden-era retreat, two generations of a decayed rentier family — embittered grandma Mrs Covington and frosty daughter Evelyn — are doing their utmost to prevent any noxious post-war fall-out from contaminating the third. They are abetted in this mission by fey Mr Henry, a failed Georgian poet deprived of his school- mastering job after ‘The Incident’, whose educative brief it is to provide Mrs Covington’s grand-daughter Julia with a curriculum from which all traces of the 20th century have been removed. Above this mirthless near-zenana hangs the penetrating scent of lost empire.

Bevis Hillier

Fumbling with the raw materials

Most great artists begin as mimics. They do not, as Clara Schumann claimed Brahms did, come into the world ‘ready-made’. Manet prided himself on painting ‘straight from nature’, but he had spent many hours copying Old Masters in the Louvre, and his friend Degas thought they were guiding his brush as surely as they were guiding his own. Van Gogh copied engravings in the Illustrated London News. Oscar Wilde gave himself a crash course of Restoration comedies before writing plays himself. We cannot expect too much of Philip Larkin’s apprentice pieces, collected in this book (which of us would like his contributions to the school magazine disinterred?

Saturday

Alan Judd

The King’s detective

In 1850 when William Melville was born in Sneem, Co. Kerry, there was no British secret service. There was the Secret Vote, used by the Foreign Office to pay the pensions of retired agents, code-breakers and letter-openers and as an embassy slush fund; and there were intelligence departments of the War Office and the Admiralty that grew and shrank according to need. But there was no permanent, established capacity for espionage or counter-espionage, and no secret — or, as they came to be called, political — police. By the time Melville died in 1917 there was M15 for counter-espionage, MI6 for espionage and the police Special Branch for conducting investigations and arrests.