More from Books

Saturday

Carole Angier

Belonging and not belonging

Nicola Lacey wanted to write an ‘intellectual biography’ of Herbert Hart, on the model of Hermione Lee’s Virginia Woolf. It’s a tall order. How to cope with the fact that the philosophy of law is even harder to understand than Virginia Woolf’s novels? And though an academic lawyer like Lacey is the best person to understand Hart’s ideas, is she the best person to explain them to us? Is she the best person, indeed, to write a biography which should be scholarly underneath but ‘accessible’ (Lacey’s academic word for it) on the surface? Since I raise these questions you will guess that I am not about to answer them all in favour of The Nightmare and the Noble Dream. So I should say first that I did very much enjoy reading this book.

John Jolliffe

The very model of a modern duke

Miles Fitzalan-Howard was one of eight children of a fairly distant cousin of the previous two Dukes of Norfolk, and so grew up in the give and take of life in a large family. Up until the age of about 30, he had no great expectation that he would succeed his predecessor, who was married, with four daughters, and might well have produced a son and heir. He had been a rather average schoolboy at Ampleforth, excelling neither at work nor games, but ‘always cheerful and keen’. He made life-long friends there, including several of the monks.

Rob White

Shot from an idealist’s angle

A question posed early on in Mark Cousins’s book is bound to spur a reviewer’s pride: ‘Who are Griffith, Dovzhenko, Keaton, Ozu, Riefenstahl, Ford, Toland, Welles, Bergman, Truffaut, Ouedraogo, Cissé, Dulac, Chahine, Imamura, Fassbinder, Akerman, Scorsese, Almod.

Jonathan Keates

Cleansing the stables of language

During the mid-17th century the idea gained ground in various parts of Europe that the world was about to come to an end. Bewildered by the effects of widespread war and revolution, bad harvests and a miniature Ice Age taking the form of savage winters, people made ready for the sounding of the Last Trumpet, the arrival of the Four Horsemen and the whole apocalyptic shebang. Mad prophets, false messiahs and a host of other doomsters had a perfect field day proclaiming sinful mankind’s imminent annihilation. Something not altogether dissimilar is now happening in the case of the English language.

Lloyd Evans

Disguise that hides a hard punch

It is 50 years since Peter Porter arrived in ‘rain-veiled Tilbury’ from his native Australia. ‘I came, I saw, I conjured,’ is how he summarises his career. Death haunts this collection from first to last. The opening poem uses the sea as a metaphor for existence. Its initial line, ‘The engine dies,’ is both a reference to a stalling boat and a symbol of mortality. He approaches the inevitable head-on. ‘Within this calm,’ he muses quietly, ‘something is now to be.’ Directness is only one of Porter’s virtues. ‘Sex and the Over-Seventies’ is a straightforward comic elegy for the wasted energies of youth.

Noble Frankland

Bamboozling the opposition

This book, like so much of the modern western population, is obese. It weighs three pounds one and a half ounces (1.4 kg) and runs to 1,148 pages. I read it in a series of closely connected long sessions, hoping thereby to retain the thread, but unfortunately there is not much of a thread to follow. Instead, a concentrated mass of information, much of it of gripping interest, is presented in a bewildering series of disjointed chronological, geographical and systematical sequences. Sir Michael Howard, himself an expert aficionado in this subject, states in his encomium printed on the dust jacket that the book is ‘definitive’, that the author has ‘trawled through all the documentation’ and that he has interviewed ‘all the survivors’.

David Ekserdjian

Renaissance man in all his richness

The major challenge faced by biographers of artists is the almost impossible one of dealing with equal authority with their lives and works. It is tempting to wonder whether this is not one of the reasons why so few of them are written by art historians, although there are of course heroic exceptions, of which John Richardson’s ongoing Picasso is perhaps the most illustrious. In the specific case of Leonardo da Vinci, there is the additional problem of the seeming universality of his range of interests, above all in the direction of the sciences. Charles Nicholl’s approach is explicitly to start from Leonardo’s writings, not just about optics, anatomy, and so on, but also about such less elevated concerns as the day’s shopping list.

Jane Gardam

Changing history with a tenpenny knife

This is a strange and wonderful novel that deserves the most serious attention. Whenever Ron- ald Blythe’s name comes up in conversation the next sentence is always going to be, ‘Didn’t he write Akenfield?’ Akenfield is the unclassifiable classic of over 30 years ago, the portrait of Blythe’s birthplace in rural Suffolk and the memories and reflections of its people, and it is probably the first and best of its kind. But since then he has written in a steady stream histories, novels, short stories, literary criticism, studies of poets and diarists and divines (he’s an authority on George Herbert) and books about places, like the stunning Divine Landscapes about Britain’s holy sites.

Mary Keen

Recent gardening books

The late Paul Getty has left gardeners a surprising legacy. Gardens of the Roman World by Patrick Bowe was published in America last year by Getty publications and the copyright belongs to the J. Paul Getty Trust. Did our run-of-the-mill publishers miss a trick here? I imagine the proposal for a book about Roman gardens cannot have grabbed many editors. Picture them at the Frankfurt Book Fair muttering, ‘dead language, nothing to see, no stunning perennial borders, just a job lot of broken columns ...’ I hope they are all now eating hats and humble pie. The generosity and imagination of Paul Getty and his advisers have enabled Frances Lincoln to bring out an English edition of this beautiful book (£35).

Saturday

Graham Stewart

Moore means less

Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 is the most commercially successful documentary film ever made. It received a prolonged standing ovation from critics at the Cannes film festival where it became the first non-fiction film to win the Palme d’Or. If it does not win an Oscar at the next Academy awards, then do not rule out Moore making a documentary about the right-wing conspiracy at the heart of Hollywood. The acclaim, it has to be said, appears to have gone to his head. One can forgive the sort of puff his publishers and publicists put out on his behalf, but a little modesty from the great man himself would have been becoming. He loathes the smirking self-certainty of President Bush. He should look in the mirror.

William Oddie

They knew they were right

Pope Pius IX, to the ‘liberal’ mind, is the archetypal Catholic reactionary. When the present Pope beatified him, it was seen by his own critics inside the Church (a dwindling but, as John Cornwell’s latest anti-papal offensive demonstrates, increasingly ill-tempered band) as the final proof of their now largely discredited claim that the underlying purpose of John Paul’s pontif-icate has been to reverse the reforms of the second Vatican Council and to ‘restore’ the Church to what the first Vatican Council, the Council of Pio Nono, had made it.

Philip Ziegler

Some light shone in dark corners

When Lords Hutton and Butler were successively appointed to enquire into aspects of British participation in the invasion of Iraq, the more sensationalist elements of the media each time rejoiced. Incorruptible, fearless, Hutton and Butler would expose the rottenness at the heart of Whitehall and, if not actually bring down the government, at least give it a fearful pasting. When each enquiry in turn did nothing of the sort, the response was equally predictable. ‘We told you so,’ proclaimed the media. ‘Lickspittle, time-serving lackeys of the establishment! What could be expected but a whitewash?’ After such excesses it is a relief to be confronted by this thoughtful and dispassionate analysis of the issues most in question.

Nicholas Harman

The reign of King Tobacco

It is half a millennium since tobacco was launched upon the world, on 2 November 1492, when Columbus’s men captured their first American and were saddened to find that his most prized possession was not gold but a smelly bunch of herbs. Now that the weed’s reign is almost over it is time for a solemn history of the stuff, whose effects included the prosperity of English settlements in territories claimed by Spain, and eventually the rise of their world-dominating successors. This is not that kind of history. Instead, professors of this and that, from departments of ‘cultural studies’ here and there, contribute theses on the origins and consequences of smoking, plus lots of jolly pictures, mostly from advertising.

John De-Falbe

When someone has blundered

As a former second lieutenant leading a rifle platoon in France in 1945, Paul Fussell may be supposed to have an intense personal interest in posterity’s understanding of military combat. He is the author of The Great War and Modern Memory and several other related books, so this theme is certainly one of profound intellectual interest for him too. His latest book, The Boys’ Crusade, is short and anecdotal, manifestly not the product of great research. For an author of such experience, one feels, it could almost have been written off the cuff. So what is Fussell’s purpose?

John Laughland

The faulty French connection

In his magnificent funeral oration for Charles I’s queen, Henriette-Marie of France, the 17th-century French cleric Bossuet contrasted the stately continuity of French history with the turbulence and violence of English. France — of whose crown Pope St Gregory the Great had proclaimed, already by the end of the sixth century, that it outshone all the others — was ‘the only nation in the universe whose kings have embraced Christianity for nearly 12 centuries’. England, by contrast, was ‘more agitated … than the sea which surrounds her’.

Daniel Neill

Finding faces for Boz

Hablot Knight Browne worked as Dickens’s principal illustrator for more than 20 years, from the publication of The Pickwick Papers (1836-7) to A Tale of Two Cities (1859). He signed his first illustrations for Pickwick ‘N.E.M.O.’, but thereafter adopted the sobriquet ‘Phiz’, short for ‘physiognomy’, the popular pseudo-science of inferring character from facial features. ‘Phiz’, he decided, chimed better with Dickens’s ‘Boz’. Phiz and Boz certainly did chime well together. Though Browne worked with many authors and publications, including Charles Lever, Anthony Trollope and Punch, he was and remains best known for his collaborations with Dickens. Author and illustrator worked closely on the novels.

William Feaver

A true poet of war

‘On a hazy day Jerry comes droning over, three miles up.’ May sound Biggles-ish now, but it was OK for then, November 1940, in the commentary for Humphrey Jennings’s brief film Heart of Britain. Nine minutes is all it takes to cover the Lakes, Lancashire, the Pennines and Sheffield, homing in on aircraft spotters, air-raid wardens, mill hands and Sir Malcolm Sargent and then panning around the blitzed centre of Coventry to the sound of Beethoven’s Fifth. The action ends at full throttle with a Hallelujah Chorus from the Huddersfield Choral Society as a newly built Whitley takes off in freezing mist to give Jerry hell.

Robert Cooper

Recent audio books

Aclogged up motorway can provide the ideal conditions to play the balloon game; re-routed angst and venom will guarantee the ultimate cathartic experience. Raise your eyes to the heavens. The dot in the azure sky is a hot-air balloon heading earthwards at a disturbing rate. The basket dangling beneath the shrinking sac is crammed with every cad and rotter your imagination can concoct. There is panic on board. To maintain altitude human ballast is the only solution. Three passengers must be thrust overboard — quite possibly more. There are stacks of candidates in Julian Fellowes’ Snobs (Orion Audio Books. Abridged. 5 hours 20 minutes. CD £19.99. Tape £12.99).

The Spectator

Books of the Year II

Philip Hensher The two books I enjoyed most this year were both out of the usual run. Who was the last person to publish a book of aphorisms? No idea, but Don Paterson’s splendid The Book of Shadows (Picador, £12.99) will probably discourage anyone from entering into rivalry for a good time to come. Startlingly insightful, funny, exotic and, of course, from the finest poet of his generation, irreducibly well-put, this was a book everyone should read. Simon Gray’s The Smoking Diaries (Granta, £12.99) was difficult to categorise; a ragbag of stories and reminiscences, it must be one of the funniest books I’ve ever read.

Saturday

John De-Falbe

Where Vlad once impaled

If the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu, the Romanian dictator, is one of those world events that many people remember very vividly, it may be because of its inherent drama, or it may be because it happened at Christmas, when we were all at home and ready to enjoy the heady voyeurism it offered on television. Since 1989, international attention has moved along a bit. Dimly, perhaps, we recall in our self-righteous, warmongering times that this monster was toppled without outside intervention. Our masters in Washington and Downing Street would probably regard this as irrelevant, but then no foreign power ever had much of an interest in Ceausescu’s fall. There is one man, however, who has kept his eye on Romania in the last few years, and we should raise a glass of tsuica to him.