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Saturday

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.

Matthew Dennison

After the fall

There is nothing new about the ‘had-it-all, lost-it-all’ plot. It provides common ground for the story of Adam and Eve and the labyrinthine ramifications of any high-gloss American soap opera. It is also the stuff of Lady Rose and Mrs Memmary, a fairytale for adult readers with a sting in its tail, a bite in the telling. Ruby Ferguson’s novel was first published in 1937. It is the story of Lady Victoria Elspeth Rose Grahame-Rooth-Targenet, ‘the happiest little girl in Scotland’ and also its most materially blessed, heir to the ‘dream mansion’ of Keepsfield on the shores of Fife and its park stretching ‘as far as the eye could see, as they always say in books’.

Hugh Massingberd

Living with the Inspector

In this ingenious ‘double biography’, which covers not only her own life and that of her late husband, the peerless television actor John Thaw, but also their life together, the actress Sheila Hancock has achieved an impressive and affecting work of art. Unfort- unately, though, it is flawed by the author’s self-indulgence in ranting on about her tiresome Bel Littlejohnish political views by way of furnishing what her publishers (who really should have told her to chuck it) quaintly call ‘a study of Britain from the 1930s to the present’. It is as if a subtle and beautifully executed painting has been spoilt by being daubed with cheap political slogans. Here are a few samples of Hancock’s excruciating ‘takes’ on modern history.

David Caute

What the President saw

A staff writer for the Boston Globe, Mark Feeley is also a lecturer in American Studies at Brandeis University. I mention this because evidence has been accumulating these past 20-odd years that American Studies departments, like Cultural Studies, Film Studies and, of course, Media Studies are busily engaged in subverting that central but antiquated notion dear to traditional history departments — ‘because’. Causality is oldhat, it’s risible, and it’s out. The new history is virtual history, or ‘alternate’ history, the kind that did not happen but might have happened, just as novels and movies and genre paintings depict realities which somehow failed to occur.

David Edelsten

The bad old times recorded

The inconsistency between how they lived their own lives — the sort of people that they seemed to be — and the virtues they championed in their heroes and heroines, so much greater in male than in female authors (from which category I exclude George Eliot) is possibly nowhere more marked than in the case of Thomas Hardy. The creator of Marty South, Giles Winterborne and Gabriel Oak was himself a stinker. ‘ ’E didn’t ’ave nothing to say to the likes o’ we,’ our old gardener used to say. Born in Bockhampton, and familiar in his boyhood with the presence of the great man if not his notice, he had no opinion of him.

Ian Garrick-Mason

The doubtful eye of the beholder

In this historic moment of struggle between freedom and tyranny, with the destinies of entire nations hanging in the balance, the question of what ‘beauty’ is might seem a frivolous one, best put off until happier times. Until, that is, one remembers that now is always a historic moment, that the destinies of nations are always hanging in the balance. Given this, the contemplation of beauty seems like a perfectly reasonable way to pass an afternoon. Umberto Eco has kindly laid it all out for us in On Beauty, an illustrated sourcebook of ideas about the nature of Beauty (that’s his capital ‘B’) throughout the ages.

Christopher Howse

Heroes of the world of words

I should like to claim the credit for the Bloomsbury English Dictionary’s inclusion of the word carminative. It did not appear in the dictionary’s previous incarnation as the Encarta World English Dictionary in 1999, and I pointed out the omission at the time. Perhaps finding that the words Encarta and World English did not sell dictionaries, the publishers are now selling a second edition in Britain under this nice new name, with ENGLISH in big capitals on the spine instead of ENCARTA. Unfortunately, many of its absurdities and errors have been retained. I wasn’t the only one who laughed at the first edition. The reviewer for the TLS mocked its definition of Oxford Movement as ‘a movement ...

Byron Rogers

The sea that retreated

The most startling historical fact I have come upon in recent years is on page 62 of this book. In 1882 an attempt was made to evict three crofters on the Isle of Skye. These were humble men pursuing a way of life little changed in recorded time, in a place which to them would have seemed like all the world. The eviction failed, so do you know what the British government did? It did what British governments had always done when there was trouble in the colonies, it sent a gunboat. Only this was no colony. This was part of Great Britain, and it occurred as Queen Victoria was spending most of her time in the Highlands, convinced that there she was among her most loyal subjects.

Sarah Bradford

A typically Tuscan joke

There is something irresistible about forgers, cocking a snook as they do at their target establishments — in this case the formidable intellectual and historical talents of Baroque (hardly Renaissance as the title claims) Rome, a circle which included the towering figure of the polymath Athanasius Kircher. What makes this case even more piquant is that the forger was a 19-year-old Tuscan nobleman, Curzio Inghirami, and the forged manuscripts posing as important Etruscan relics were wrapped in his 13-year-old sister’s hair.

Philip Hensher

Very down under

One of the things which drew Nicholas Shakespeare to Tas- mania was that it was one of the few remote places that Bruce Chatwin, whom he’d spent seven years writing a biography about, had never been to. But Shakespeare has written a wonderfully Chatwinesque book about a place, in which individual historical narratives are woven in with the writer’s own research and encounters. Shakespeare doesn’t have the faint smugness of Chatwin, and the book, though containing a good deal of his own family history, is much more self-effacing; but it is just as inquisitive, and has the same energetic enjoyment of fantastically abstruse local detail, and a sheer love of story-telling. Tasmania is a very odd place.

Harriet Waugh

Recent crime novels

Rumpole is back with us. In Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders by John Mortimer (Viking, £16.99) Rumpole is writing his memoirs and looks back on his first murder case when, as a pupil in a lazy barristers’ chambers, he takes over the defence of a young man accused of murdering his father and his father’s closest wartime friend. The chambers are lead by C. H. Wystan, QC, the father of Hilda (She Who Must Be Obeyed), and the reader learns for the first time how Rumpole succumbs to her demands and marries her. Very funny it is too. Henning Mankell appears to be getting bored with his policeman hero, the middle-aged, pessimistic Kurt Wallander.

Elfreda Pownall

Around the world in 18 cookery books

Long before she became a finger- lickin’ television star Nigella Lawson’s ability to conjure tastes in vivid prose and her celebration of the pleasures of eating were known to readers of The Spectator as she was this magazine’s first restaurant reviewer. And it was the writing in her first book, How to Eat, with its confidential tone of voice, her larky attitude to cooking and eating, as well as brilliant, original recipes that brought her legions of fans. To them she became what Elizabeth David had been to their grandmothers. Nigella’s latest book, Feast (Chatto, £25), which arrives without benefit of a television boost, is another big, comprehensive book, its subject nothing less than ‘food that celebrates life’.

The Spectator

Books of the Year

A selection of the best and worst books of the year, chosen by some of our regular contributors Jonathan Sumption There is no point in mincing words about the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (60 volumes, £6,500 until 30 November). It is the one of the greatest feats of scholarly publishing ever. Forget the on-line edition. You will miss the special pleasure of straying into the article next door. No, take out a second mortgage, call in the cabinet-maker and buy the volumes.

Saturday

Roger Lewis

Well, no, yes, ah

So Meby Graham NortonHodder, £18.99, pp. 342, ISBN 0340833483 Frankie Howerd’s career was a series of comebacks. In the early Fifties he was a radio star with listening figures of 16 million; he topped the bill at the Palladium and appeared in a Royal Variety Performance eight times. He flopped on live television, however, and between 1957 and 1962, when he was rescued from oblivion and put on at the Establishment Club by Peter Cook, he’d so lost his confidence he thought of leaving show business to run a country pub. Edgy and depressed, and feeling like ‘a disintegrating jigsaw’, he could scrounge work only at the pier-end in Scarborough and Yarmouth and in ‘poorly paid pantomimes’ in Streatham and Southsea.

Lucy Hugheshallett

Is your journey really necessary?

Pen Hadow goes to the North Pole quite often. For a price he’ll take you there too. When not under- taking one of his private expeditions he acts as a guide for his own travel company. For those with the time and cash and courage he can organise an arduous months-long trek. If you have to cram your polar adventure into your annual three-week holiday, then you can join one of his ‘Last Degree’ trips: you’ll be dropped by plane some 50 miles short of the Pole and make the last part of the journey over the ice on skis or, if you prefer, by snow-mobile. Hadow has escorted a client suffering from muscular dystrophy, he has posed at the Pole with a wheelchair-bound 11-year-old.

Stoker Devonshire

Just mad about horses

A Year at the Races, the title of this extraordinary book by Jane Smiley, is the peg on which to hang the author’s remarkable insights into the horse and all his workings. It is indeed about racing and her experiences with her various horses at the Californian tracks, but that is almost a sideline. This is about Jane Smiley and horses. Smiley is already a hugely successful writer, and so her horses’ life must come as her, at best, third preoccupation, after her children and her writing; this she denies, emphasising her obsession with the horse, but surely she cannot be serious? She has clearly thought about horses not only a great deal and for all of her life but with originality.

Hugh Massingberd

Playing the marriage market

Although the publishers assure us that this study of three sisters is ‘one of glamour, money and love in equal measure’, Fortune’s Daughters should not be confused with the new novel by The Spectator’s most decorative diarist, Joan Collins, entitled Misfortune’s Daughters. Elisabeth Kehoe’s book is non-fiction and covers, as the sub-title puts it, ‘The Extravagant Lives of the Jerome Sisters: Jennie Churchill, Clara Frewen and Leonie Leslie’.

Francis King

Past, present and future at odds

There are eerie parallels between the career of the author of this all too brief masterpiece and that of Nicolai Erdman, whose play The Mandate recently opened at the National Theatre. Novelist and playwright both achieved acclaim for pugnaciously satirical works produced in the mid-Twenties, a period of extravagant experiment in the Soviet Union. Then, within a short period, both were suffering the same denunciations — for formalism, objectivism, cosmopolitanism and so forth. Erdman spent three years in Siberia, Olesha fell precipitously from favour. Daunted, they devoted the rest of their lives largely to working on film scripts. Olesha died in 1960, Erdman some ten years later.