More from Books

Saturday

Alexander Chancellor

Master of most

Andrew Marr is a great adornment to his — our — trade. He is terribly clever and well-read, and I am sure he could have done something serious and useful with his life. But he decided early on that journalism was the thing for him. Despite his first-class degree in English at Cambridge, it quickly dawned on him that he wasn’t really qualified for any profession. ‘I was a scientifically illiterate innocent with the entrepreneurial instincts of a 13th-century peasant and the iron determination of a butterfly,’ he writes. ‘Journalism seemed the only option.’ But surely his instinct must also have told him that journalism was a field in which he would excel. He was gregarious, inquisitive, perceptive, energetic, and deft with his pen.

Saturday

Patrick Skene-Catling

Busy doing nothing

Tom Hodgkinson is a 21st-century Luddite. He wishes we could smash the principles of capitalist consumerism that enslave most of the population so they can service their debts. In this beguiling book, he persuasively advocates idleness as the way to gain access to the creativity of the subconscious mind, or at least to enjoy a few beers. Hodgkinson is a dedicated connoisseur of idleness. He is the founder and editor of Idler magazine, which enables him to support himself and his family in Devon. Endorsed by quotations from an interestingly variegated team of believers in the benefits of inactivity, including Dr Johnson, William Blake, Bertrand Russell, G.K. Chesterton, Oscar Wilde, Karl Marx’s son-in-law and Jeffrey Bernard, Hodgkinson now summarises his tranquil philosophy.

Robert Edric

That not impossible she

Matt Thorne’s new novel might have been more usefully subtitled ‘A Suspension of Disbelief’. A novel called Cherry about sexual desire and manipulation, about a real (or possibly imaginary and perhaps, at best, invented) woman called Cherry, and with a cherry on the jacket. A cherry surrounded by splashes of ...what? Blood, ink, barbecue sauce? Because whatever it is, it probably isn’t cherry juice. A strange and intriguing hybrid of a book: on the one hand firmly rooted in very contemporary obsessions and psychoses — the predictable ‘darker side of love’, according to the blurb — and on the other hand teetering on the crumbling and endlessly reforming brink of allegory and psychotic fantasy.

Diana Hendry

A refusal to mourn

‘Every true writer becomes a writer because of a profound trauma experienced in youth or childhood,’ wrote Amos Oz in The Silence of Heaven, his study of the work of the Israeli Nobel-prize winner Shmuel Yosef Agnon. With reservations, he added, ‘We might venture to say that the flight of the narrator’s imagination is as high as the depth of his wound....’ All this might apply to Oz himself, his own profound trauma being the suicide of his mother, Fania, when he was 12. Perhaps, too, it is possible to say that the depth of that wound has made Oz one of the greatest novelists of our times.

D.J. Taylor

Where the funny meets the horrible

A century ago, Paradise might have appeared in the stout bindings of the Religious Tract Society and been distributed to the deserving young in the form of Sunday school prizes. Or perhaps not, given that it begins in the dining-room of an alien hotel where its heroine, all memory of her previous life temporarily erased, lugubriously breakfasts, having just committed a sexual act with an unappetising fellow-guest known only as ‘Mr Wispy’. However close its moral proximity to one of those Victorian temperance hymns with titles like ‘Don’t sell no more drink to my father’, A.L. Kennedy’s third novel is, in its relish of bedrock-level physical detail, quite thoroughly up to date. By the time we first meet her, at 8.42 a.m.

Caroline Moorehead

The return of Cosa Nostra

When Silvio Berlusconi came to power for the second time in May 2001, in a landslide victory, Italy became unique among Western democracies: no other nation had at its head its richest citizen — the 35th richest man in the world — someone who also enjoyed a monopoly of the country’s private television broadcasting. More important, no other country had its prime minister on trial, accused of bribing judges, ruling over a coalition busy enacting special laws to protect himself and his friends. Drawing attention to these facts in the Economist not long afterwards, David Lane provoked fury in the Italian political and financial establishment, and talk among Italy’s EU partners, where his articles were widely read.

Jonathan Mirsky

A great-grandmother glimpsed

I have a faded photograph of Frances Osborne. I imagine the moment the picture was taken: perhaps she had just been told that this, her first book, would be published. She must have been happy and would have shared her happiness with her children, Luke and Liberty, who, I suppose, must have been happy, too. I can also picture Ms Osborne before she became an author, when she was a barrister, banker and a journalist. In each of these activities, she probably worked very hard, had been disappointed at times and happy at others. I like to think of her at her second home in Cheshire when this picture was taken. It must be a lovely place.

Saturday

Olivia Glazebrook

The return of the rotters

Finishing The Rotters’ Club and finding ‘there will be a sequel’ posted at the back was a bit of good news. As was finding that sequel on my doormat. And here’s more good news: The Closed Circle is terrific. Last seen on election night in 1979, the characters from The Rotters’ Club are now pushing 40 and bracing themselves for the new century. Coe manages to fill us in on the intervening 20 years with the minimum of fuss, and soon Benjamin Trotter, his brother Paul, Claire Newman (sister of the vanished Miriam), Doug Anderton and Philip Chase are up and running again.

Interconnect

Service with a smile

Alexis Soyer was Britain’s first celebrity chef, and the catalogue of his achievements dwarfs that of Delia or Jamie. He made his name providing banquets for the richest Victorians, including Prince Albert and half the Cabinet, yet he also designed a soup kitchen for victims of the Irish famine, which fed 8,750 people daily in Dublin (the ingredients of the soups supplied included turnip peelings and leek leaves). He wrote a ballet, and also invented relishes for Mr Crosse and Mr Blackwell. He was satirised, as M. Mirabolant, by Thackeray in Pendennis, but was a friend of Florence Nightingale, whose hospital kitchens at Scutari he re-designed and ran.

Jane Gardam

A fusillade from the last ditch

Here are 90 furious little spats about our extraordinary and inadequate attitudes to God. Alice Thomas Ellis has subtitled them her ‘assembled thoughts’ on her Roman Catholic faith and what she sees as its suicidal attempts at liberalisation. She is impassioned, funny, fearless and has been in hot water a number of times with the Church and the periodicals she writes for. The Universe sacked her. There is an affectionate introduction by Richard Ingrams, who says that he loves misfits and drop-outs and likes to provide them with soapboxes (e.g. in The Oldie, he describes her as a woman who has suffered in her time but keeps at the heart of the fight). She is no recluse.

Lee Langley

The gringo’s progress

In his History of the Conquest of Mexico, Prescott described the bafflement of the Spanish arriving in a country where savagery and sweetness, blood sacrifice and delicate manners co-existed unsettlingly. In Mexico nothing was straightforward. Anita Desai is known, and acclaimed, for her novels about India. The sub- continent is her birthplace and literary territory. Setting her latest novel in Mexico, she writes with a visitor’s eye about a visitor, Eric, a nice, unmotivated post-graduate student at a loose end, who stumbles into a quest for his roots. For the quiet Bostonian, the shock of Mexico is visceral, overwhelming.

Anne Chisholm

Shock tactics in love and life

In this enthusiastic study of the bohemian Garman family, Cressida Connolly has chosen a hard task. Group biographies are tricky to write and risk being muddling to read: there are 21 Garmans in her index. But her greatest problem has been to make her subjects, in particular Mary, Kathleen and Lorna, the three sisters at the centre of the book, signify in their own right rather than as wives, lovers and muses to a series of more talented men. They were indeed, as she writes, ‘strikingly beautiful, artistic and wild’; but that was about it. As Connolly is too honest to conceal, they were also frequently a pain in the neck.

Antonia Fraser

A most superior street

Nancy Mitford did not enjoy readers’ letters, according to Harold Acton’s sprightly memoir (how unlike us, Miss Beale and Miss Buss). But she did enjoy this one from a certain Mavis Mitford-Potts, following the enormous success of her first historical biography, Madame de Pompadour. It was along these lines: ‘I live alone in a bungalow and shall soon no doubt be murdered by one of the many people who think all Mitfords better dead’ and had the PS: ‘Please don’t think I admire your idiotic books.’ Nancy Mitford described this missive as ‘a breath of fresh air’ compared to the stack of fan-letters she was receiving: ‘It’s so odd why they should think one should want to know their boring reactions to one’s work.

Saturday

Byron Rogers

Coming in from the open air

Selected Poemsby R. S. ThomasPenguin Modern Classics, £9.99, pp. 368, ISBN 0140188908 Some 40 years ago, about to sit an entrance scholarship for Aberyst-wyth, I got hold of some papers set in previous years. One I have found it impossible to forget. It was a paper of literary criticism, only there were no questions, just a poem you were asked to discuss. And it got worse, much worse. The poem was a carol. Poems I thought I knew about: they were puzzles. Poems allowed me to write at length, using words whose meaning I was not entirely sure about, like ambiguity and irony. Yet here was something so simple, so clear, it had to be a trick.

John Michell

Fasten your seat-belts . . .

The end of the world is nigh. Well, of course it is. Everything falls apart, sooner or later, including ourselves and the Earth we live on. We are particularly vulnerable today, with so many mortal threats to civilised existence competing for attention — war, pestilence, pollution, economic breakdown and moral collapse. Ian Rankin adds another threat, the most terrible of all. The world is going to shift off its axis, causing widespread cataclysms and the destruction of everything we know and cherish. It has often happened before and it is bound to happen again — probably quite soon, says Rankin. This is a radical theory and it has powerful opponents.

Kate Chisholm

Music as the food of love

Susanna Burney was the younger sister of the more famous Fanny (one of the best-loved of English diarists and author of Evelina). Born in 1755, three years after Fanny, Susanna began writing a journal long before Fanny had conceived the idea of confiding her thoughts ‘To Nobody’. Susanna’s diaries (still unpublished) tell us less about the personalities in the Burney circle — and they were an extra- ordinary bunch, including not just Garrick, Johnson and Mrs Thrale, but also Burke, Sheridan and James Bruce, the explorer of Abyssinia — but they are recognised by those who have read them in the British Library, pasted into hefty leather-bound tomes, as a treasure chest of information about the musical life of London in the late 1770s and early 1780s.

Philip Mansel

Power behind the scenes

Parliament has so dominated the writing of English political history that the royal household has been sidelined. Moreover, the absence of a tradition of court literature as strong as the French, and prudent bonfires of such compromising documents as the letters to George III from Lord Bute, subject of this remarkable study — and to John Brown from Queen Victoria — have erected walls of silence around this elusive institution. In reality, well into the 19th century the court was the centre of power and pleasure in London. Someone as independent as Swift spent years haunting St James’s palace in search of a job.

James Delingpole

With a little help from our friends

Blenheim, 1704: Marlborough’s Greatest Victoryby James FalknerPen & Sword Military, £10.99, pp. 144, ISBN 184415050X By rights the battle of Blenheim in 1704 ought to be as well known as Waterloo. It was just as momentous, just as exciting, just as victory-snatched-from-the-jaws-of-defeat. In fact you could argue — as Winston Churchill did — that it was the event which opened for Britain ‘the gateways of the modern world’. So how come all most of us remember about it today is that it was won by John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough and that it had a palace in Woodstock named after it?

Harry Mount

The great and the grumpy

Denis Healey will never be the same, once you discover, as you do in this fizzing collection of mini-biographies, that his favour- ite question is, ‘Do you have sexual fantasies when you smoke cigars?’ Peregrine Wors- thorne is now forever fixed in my mind exchanging shirts with the first Mrs Nigel Lawson in a crowded Wheeler’s restaurant during a Brighton party conference. And the dynamics of Private Eye fall into place when you know that, in the 1950 scholarship list for Shrewsbury, Richard Ingrams came first, Christopher Booker third and the late Paul Foot fifth. Alan Watkins, the eminent political columnist, now for the Independent on Sunday and for many years in these pages, is the master of the well-deployed fact, and, more importantly, the personal fact.

Kevin Jackson

The gentle art of saying no

Cynics have long noted that there are certain, relatively coarse, artistic vocations in which premature death can be a shrewd career move: consider the presently thriving and/or grossly inflated reputations of, say, James Dean, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. For those who practise the more elite arts, an equally potent and far less drastic option is readily available. Why bother with the agony and mess of drug overdoses or car crashes when you can attain a comparable, pseudo-posthumous mystique just by renouncing your gift?