More from Books Archives

Saturday

26 March 2005

The lower slopes of the magic mountain

The English don’t read German literature. This is not, I suggest, because of our vulgar prejudice towards the Germans for being the people they are and having the history they do. That over-repeated Fawlty Towers episode, those ‘Vorsprung durch Technik’ commercials and endless how-we-won-World-War-II documentaries keep such unselective loathing robustly alive, but in the case of books and authors the reason for our indifference is altogether simpler. Since most of us don’t speak the language, where are we to get hold of them?

Lloyd Evans

The not so beautiful game

Same rubbish, new wrapper. This is the criticism usually levelled at those big bad soccer clubs who put out a new kit every season with minor alterations. Where the clubs lead, the publishers follow. David Winner, the author of this rambling and incoherent discussion of the national game, is a theoriser so prolific that he can prove his case on one page and refute it a few paragraphs later. To show that English football is bloodier than the continental game he quotes the Frenchman Robert Pires: ‘Some of the tackles are like rugby. People will run you over.’ A little further on we hear that Ravanelli and Zola came from Italy and ‘enjoyed English sportsmanship, the relaxed atmosphere, and the huge amount of space they had to play in’.

Victor Sebestyen

An elegy for Yugoslavia

The title of this charming book refers to the last summer the author spent in her native city of Belgrade in 1986, just before she married an Englishman and emigrated to London. Twenty-four-year-old Vesna Bjelogrlic, as she then was, picked berries in the hills near her home to make jam. Nearly two decades later, when she discovers she has breast cancer, she imagines that her illness had been caused by poisoned fruit. Ukrainian winds had borne fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear reactor to her favourite strawberry fields. As a medical diagnosis this may lack scientific rigour, but Goldsworthy could claim minor celebrity as a teenage poet and she makes the idea work effectively as a literary device.

C J Tyerman

A monumental mediaeval muddle

The history of England in the 14th and 15th centuries has traditionally been regarded either as a corrupt aftermath (as in ‘Bastard Feudalism’) or a confused prelude (as in the ‘New Monarchy’ of the Tudors). Its most vivid narrator remains Shakespeare who, perhaps surprisingly, supplies the title for this earnestly modern new account by Professor Miri Rubin of London University’s Queen Mary College. As so often, tradition misleads.

Philip French

Sunset over the Boulevard

Betsy Blair was born Elizabeth Boger in 1923 into a middle-class episcopalian family in New Jersey, her mother a teacher, her father an insurance broker. By the age of 12, this prodigiously confident child performer was dancing before Eleanor Roosevelt in Washington. At the age of 16 she came to audition at Billy Rose’s Manhattan nightclub, the Diamond Horse- shoe and, as in a Hollywood musical, she mistook the resident choreographer for a waiter. He was Gene Kelly, 12 years her senior, of whom she says in her attractive and evocative biography, ‘He gave me — and the world — an unforgettable legacy of joy.

Nicolas Barker

Royal taste in reading

Henry VIII is the first English monarch whose features everyone knows. The sharp little eyes in the massive head, the golden beard, above all the commanding stance in which Holbein painted him, are infinitely familiar and always terrifying. This is the man who sent More and Cromwell, two of his wives and many others to the scaffold, who dissolved the monasteries and proclaimed himself head of a new English church. He was also the man who built up the navy and created the new, rich, confident Britain with imperial ambitions, but that is not so obvious in the portraits. Nor is his intellect, although it was that which distinguished him from most of his subjects and other contemporaries.

Patrick Skene-Catling

Hunting the French fox

Which of the acts of courage does the title mean? In the Peninsular War, there were so many it’s hard to choose. In the seventh volume of the Matthew Hervey saga (a novel well able to stand alone), Allan Mallinson’s protagonist is a hero among heroes, when the cavalry was the cavalry and his regiment, the 6th Light Dragoons, Princess Caroline’s Own, seems in retrospect to have been an order of chivalry. Young Matthew, son of a country parson, was recently ‘an ink-fingered boy at Shrewsbury School’. Now he is a cornet, the most junior cavalry officer, in Wellington’s army. He is already a veteran of the famous retreat to Corunna, where the regiment had to destroy all its horses before sailing back to England.

Hugh Cecil

A season in Hell

This sensitive, outspoken diary begins during the dark last days of the ‘dead little, red little army’, the British Expeditionary Force which bolstered the French left flank in Flanders from mid-August 1914. With the desperate defence of Ypres, through Hallowe’en into December, when the Germans were repeatedly beaten off, began the stalemate of trench warfare. The war was expected to be over by Christmas, but all that was over was any movement. The diarist, the redoubtable Sir Morgan Crofton Bt., was a regular soldier from a line of military forebears. Wounded in South Africa, he had retired at 35, as a captain in the Second Life Guards, early in 1914, only to rejoin when war broke out.

Salley Vickers

Chekhov in the home counties

Dorothy Whipple was once a highly regarded bestselling novelist and it is typical of the excellent Persephone books that they have restored her glory within their elegant silver jackets and distinctive floral end papers. In They Were Sisters, with its, surely intentional, Chekhovian undertones, Whipple explores the fortunes of three sisters: Lucy, Charlotte and Vera. Lucy is clever and studious but must abandon her intellectual aspirations when their mother dies and, in the custom of the times (the novel is set in Thirties Britain), Lucy, as the eldest, becomes duty-bound to raise her siblings. Charlotte is sensitive but wilful and, dis- regarding all the signals, marries an out-and-out rotter, while Vera, an egocentric beauty, marries a mother’s boy and a bore.

Robert Salisbury

Rumours of death somewhat exaggerated

Geoffrey Wheatcroft is rarely dull in print and this book is no exception. It is a rattling good read, although more because of its knowledge of insiders’ gossip, its pithy judgments of both men and measures and the rhythm of its prose than because of the force of its central thesis. His judgments of men may be pithy, but they also often hit the mark. For instance, he recognises the Tory party’s recurrent faiblesse for charming mountebanks. So, he has Disraeli and Macmillan bang to rights and, while acknowledging Churchill’s greatness in 1940, he can say with perfect accuracy, ‘Churchill may have been the grandson of a duke, an Old Harrovian and a hussar officer, but he wasn’t a gentleman.

Saturday

19 March 2005

Allan Mallinson

Dicing with death

A book on Waterloo as short as this (the text proper is 100 pages, small format) tempts a rush to judgment; it has certainly been widely acclaimed already. Paul Johnson’s dust-jacket puff says that the battle ‘is both one of the most decisive in history and the most difficult to describe’. Decisiveness is important: Waterloo is the first in a series called ‘Making History’. The editors, Amanda Foreman and Lisa Jardine, claim that ‘there are moments when a single event topples the most apparently certain of outcomes, when one intervention changes the course of history. They are the landmarks along the horizon of the past.

Tom Rosenthal

Memoirs of a genius

Tom Maschler, son of a distinguished Jewish publisher, was born in Berlin in 1932 and came to England with his parents in 1939. After Leighton Park School, having turned down a place at Oxford, he worked on a kibbutz and as a tour guide, hitch-hiked round America and did a brief stint of National Service before getting himself discharged on health grounds. He then worked for various publishers: André Deutsch, whom he left because André wouldn’t increase his wages of six pounds to eight pounds a week, MacGibbon and Kee, where he wasn’t allowed to publish Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and Penguin. In 1960 he became Literary Director of Jonathan Cape only a month after Cape himself had died.

John De-Falbe

A late run on the rails

All of a sudden, there is a buzz about Cynthia Ozick. Although respected for many years as a writer of fiction and criticism, no one ever seemed to expect her to reach a wide audience. Now, together with more famous luminaries, she has been announced as a contender for the first Man Booker International Prize: the media circus has opened itself to her. Her last novel, The Puttermesser Papers, was never published in the UK at all, despite critical acclaim in the USA, but The Bear Boy (called Heir to the Glimmering World in the US) has been published with a conviction that looks as if it expects substantial sales. The Mitwisser family are German Jews who have been rescued by the Quakers and brought to the Bronx in the 1930s.

Interconnect

End-of-term report on our masters

The only good thing New Labour have done in office they did in their first week: the granting of independence to the Bank of England. In every other respect, things have gone the other way: a 60 per cent increase in taxes and spending; the ruthless subordination of schools, hospitals and police forces to the imperatives of politics; and a great extension of the state into the lives of individuals, families and businesses. This book is an unqualified celebration of that achievement. Written by the Guardian journalists (and husband and wife) Polly Toynbee and David Walker, Better or Worse? concludes happily that the state has grown much larger under Labour, and shows, in detail, how. It is ineffably boring.

M R-D-Foot

Recording secrets under orders

This book is a goldmine of once highly secret intelligence material: the diary kept, night by night, by the head of the counter-espionage branch of the security service, MI5. Diaries were forbidden to British combatants (though, luckily for historians, the chief of the general staff, among others, broke his own rule, and kept a long one). A special exception was made for Guy Liddell, who was ordered to keep one by his director-general. Here is the result as dictated nightly in the office, and kept for over 50 years in successive director- generals’ office safes, codenamed ‘Wall-flower’; now released to the national archives at Kew.

Peter Phillips

The latest and the best

For once the publisher’s blurb has it right. This is a ‘sweepingly ambitious’ project, written by a ‘towering and often provocative figure in musicology’, ‘an accomplished performer as well as scholar’ who, while achieving numberless other things, contributed ‘160 articles on Russian composers’ to the New Grove. I can personally vouch for his toweringness, his provocativeness and his work as a performer, my experience of the latter commencing in Smoky Mary’s on 42nd Street in 1978 when he conducted a concert of Eton choirbook polyphony. It is perhaps comforting to know that the author of an epic like this both wrote up all those (largely 19th- and 20th-century) Russians and knows his way around a 15th-century English antiphon.

Caroline Moorehead

Policemen who didn’t keep the peace

‘This book,’ notes Roméo Dallaire in his account of the 100 days of genocidal killing in Rwanda in 1994, ‘is long overdue, and I sincerely regret that I did not write it earlier.’ With the continuing massacres in Darfur, however, Shake Hands with the Devil could hardly be more timely. Dallaire was a highly respected general in the Canadian army when he was appointed commander of the UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda in the summer of 1993. Born into a soldier family and passionate about all things military, this was his first active war command. He was delighted to be given it. Arrriving in Kigali on a misty August morning, he was charmed by the people, the light and the lush greenness of the countryside.

Interconnect

Theatre of cruelty

‘The Colosseum is the most famous and instantly recognisable monument to have survived from the classical world.’ In the 19th century the thing to do when in Rome was to visit the Colosseum by moonlight, and quote Byron. This is no longer possible. The ruin is closed at dusk, and anyway the moon will have been obscured by the combination of street lighting and traffic fumes. Thronged with tourists, the Colosseum is not the place for Romantic reveries. Perhaps they were always inappropriate. Everybody knows the Colosseum, but far less is known about what went on there than many of us may suppose. Misconcep- tions abound. Thanks to Quo Vadis? we know that the Emperor Nero watched Christians being devoured by lions in the arena.

Saturday

12 March 2005

Tim Congdon

A dove with a touch of hawk

Sir Samuel Brittan has long been a national institution. As economics editor of the Observer in the early 1960s and the principal economic commentator on the Financial Times from 1966 to his retirement in 1998, he wrote an influential weekly newspaper column for almost 40 years. He still contributes to the Financial Times, often to great effect. Consistent themes in his writing have been support for free markets over state planning, and the advocacy of open- ness towards other countries in trade, investment and migration. He has managed to keep his own party-political preferences shrouded in enough uncertainty to have influenced all three main parties.

Olivia Cole

A quartet of debutantes

The Great Stinkby Clare ClarkPenguin, £12.99, pp. 358, ISBN 0670915300 The Second Life of Samuel Tyneby Esi EdugyanVirago, £10.99, pp. 278, ISBN 1844081060 The Icarus Girlby Helen OyeyemiBloomsbury, £16.99, pp. 320, ISBN 0747575487 With an aversion to ghost stories I was surprised to find myself greatly moved by Strangers. Like the author, Taichi Yamada, Haidi is a scriptwriter. Orphaned as a child and divorced from his wife (‘the bond uniting us had become indifference,’ he notes with a professional writer’s economy), to save money he lives in his high-rise office, a deathly quiet place once emptied of its daytime inhabitants.