More from Books

Saturday

Sarah Bradford

The house that Jack and Jackie built

Within just a week of the tragic assassination in Dallas, the widowed Jackie Kennedy summoned the presidential chronicler Theodore H. White to a midnight conference at the family compound on the stormy Cape Cod shore. For four hours her whispery voice mesmerised him as she set out her vision of the Kennedy White House as Camelot, and, against his better judgment, White went along with it. Within years, as Jackie’s own image as Camelot’s widowed queen was defaced by her ‘gold-digging marriage’ to Onassis, and more and more scandal from the Kennedy years bubbled to the surface, the image of Camelot became a target for Kennedy critics, notably Seymour Hersh in The Dark Side of Camelot.

Robert Stewart

The man they love to write about

The Age of Napoleonby Alistair HorneWeidenfeld & Nicolson, £14.99, pp. 182, ISBN 029760791X More words have been written about Napoleon than about any other historical figure, even Abraham Lincoln. Whether he betrayed, or carried on, the French Revolution is a question that agitates historians. Certainly the seeds of the French urge to mastery over Europe were sown before Napoleon swept the Directory aside and installed himself as the autocrat of France. By 1807, having routed the Austrians and Prussians at Jena and Austerlitz and made peace with Alexander I of Russia at Tilsit, he commanded the Continent. One enemy remained, but after the destruction of the French navy at Trafalgar the ambition to conquer Great Britain lay in ruins.

Douglas Johnson

At home in Ferney

Ian Davidson begins his book by telling us that Voltaire is a famous writer but that his work is largely unknown. True, his plays are no longer performed and his poems are no longer read. But when he tells us that his historical works are also ignored, those of us for whom Siècle de Louis Quatorze and Essai sur les moeurs are outstanding must surely protest. That said, however, the section in which we are told what is still important in Voltaire is more acceptable. Firstly, he mentions Candide. This philosophical tale is singled out for praise, described as the author’s greatest and most enduring masterpiece. Then there are his letters.

John Oaksey

A horse to remember

Having just, laboriously, finished a book of my own (with a subtitle remarkably similar to Ian’s), it was with a sinking heart that I opened Making the Running. All too often in the past, the name I. Balding on the same race card, playing field, cricket pitch, or other competitive sporting arena has been, unless of course we were on the same side, an ominous sign for Oaksey, Lawrence, Marlborough, Audax, or whatever flimsy alias I happened to be using. Apart possibly from J. Francome, Ian is the closest to a genuine ‘all-rounder’ it has ever been my pleasure to encounter.

Eric Weinberger

The shadow cast by college

Tom Perrotta’s fourth novel, Little Children, is a book one should read for its last 50 pages, but that means having to read the 300 before to make sense of it. In a book that primarily takes place in a suburban playground, it ends, naturally enough, at the playground, although at a worrisomely late hour, when half the book’s protagonists converge, one by one, as if it were a Midsummer Night’s dream. For some of them it is: a heady, steamy dream of a life elsewhere, with different partners; and part of Perrotta’s irony is that rather than the garden or the wood his idyll is in the endless American suburb.

Saturday

Geoffrey Howe

Most sacrilegious murder

Nineteen eighty-five was the year in which I became closely engaged in the revolution that was to overthrow the Soviet empire. Poland was the last of five loveless republics of the Warsaw Pact which I visited between February and April, and it was the one which made by far the deepest impression on me. For the most publicly dramatic event of my entire iron curtain tour was my pilgrimage to the church of St Stanislaw Kostko and the grave of Father Jerzy Popieluszko. Popieluszko was the pro-Solidarity Catholic priest, whose murder by the Polish police in October 1984 is the core of this gripping and perceptive description of Poland’s decisive role in the demolition of European communism.

James Delingpole

Playing to posterity

My second most vivid memory of Brian Brindley — the first was the magnificent sepia risotto he served the first time I had dinner in his Georgian-style Reading dining-room whose walls had been painted a green so dark it was almost black — was the outrageously smelly fart he let rip as he wobbled into the bed next to mine when I went to stay with him one night, in the period after his disgrace, at his less grand new digs in Brighton. I remember lying there and thinking, ‘Should I make some jocund remark? Or should I pretend it never happened?’, which was always my slight problem with Brian.

David Hughes

Not a hanging judge

Welcome a volume that in all ways lives up to its title, even at a pinch a comparison with John Aubrey. The 18 characters who receive at the hands of this gentleman of the press a good-natured hearing make a great celebrity list for a party. As guests we the readers are no longer bored by Rhodesia’s Ian Smith; he springs alive in light prose. Mary Whitehouse has hidden depths. The Deedes version of Montgomery’s table talk makes the mouth water for more of the ‘idiosyncratic, dogmatic, tactless, quarrelsome’ Field Marshal. Lord Hartwell, Deedes’s former boss at the Daily Telegraph, might also be quite fun. Of Lord Spencer’s speech at Diana’s funeral, he muttered, ‘Bit over the top, I thought.

Nicholas Harman

An old buffer at large

Were I Lady Nott — a position for which I am ineligible — I would be a bit miffed. Sir John’s new little book is unremitting about his mild longings for young women. This, to be sure, makes it more fun than his last publication, the ‘controversial’ memoirs of yet another ex-minister. But he does go on about the girls, and the free bus pass he now has giving him a top-deck view into the knicker-shop windows. Nott was sent to parliament in the days before Mrs Thatcher and the marketing men, when the Conservative party put up gentlefolk as its candidates at elections, and therefore won them. Since he was cleverish they put him in the Cabinet, but he turned out to have inconvenient principles too, so resigned to become chairman of this and that.

Allan Massie

Scotching some of the myths

Rob Roy (1671-1734) is one of the most famous of Scotsmen. Whiskies, hotels, pubs, and junior football teams have been named after him. He has been portrayed on stage and screen. The 1994 Hollywood film, written by Alan Sharp, is a fine western set in 18th-century Scotland. He was already famous in 1817 ‘when’, as David Stevenson writes, ‘Walter Scott decided that Rob Roy would be a good title for his latest novel, even though Rob was a fairly minor character in the book.

Bevis Hillier

How they saw themselves

Softback edition - £29.95 ISBN 1904537111 Self-portraiture is akin to what used to be called self-abuse: often done for want of anyone else at hand. Artists’ models cost money and, with the invention of colour photography, the demand for oil portraits declined. But, just as every autobiographer is the world authority on his or her subject, so the artist has maximum familiarity with the face in the mirror. Self-portraits give much the same chances as memoirs: they can be vain or modest, revealing or concealing, superficial or deeply introspective. So, when a mass of self-portraits is set before you, as in this finely produced book, you soon begin to work out who is posturing and who is for real — and to decide whether Keats was right in equating truth and beauty.

Saturday

Hugh Massingberd

The geographer of Bohemia

To celebrate the centenary of Anthony Powell’s birth next year an exhibition is being planned at the Wallace Collection in Lon- don, which houses Poussin’s ‘A Dance to the Music of Time’, the work of art that inspired the novelist’s panoramic 12- volume sequence. The official biography, to be written by Hilary Spurling, a former literary editor of this magazine whose Handbook to Dance is an indispensable companion for all Powell fans, is still a long way off, but in the meantime we have this unauthorised life by Michael Barber, in which he sets out to try to ‘relate the man to his work’.

Robert Salisbury

Le style, c’était l’homme

We live in a demotic age. How is it therefore that by the beginning of the 21st century the Duke of Devonshire had become a national institution? If you doubt that fact you need only refer to Patrick Leigh Fermor’s lyrical account of the funeral in this magazine or the hundreds of column inches devoted to His Grace’s passing. There were hardly any sour notes from the commentariat. On the whole the Dutt-Paukers of Marxmount were silent and the new ruling class for once forbore to spin. It is not explanation enough to say that Devonshire was a kind and generous man with a witty turn of phrase and a Whiggish sense of style. He was indeed all of that and more.

Diana Hendry

A concern with appearances

I was bemused by this novel — a first from Katherine Bucknell, better known as an editor of Isherwood’s diaries and of Auden studies. In its concentration on houses (in London and Virginia) and their furnishings, I kept thinking of Henry James and such novels as Portrait of a Lady and The Spoils of Poynton and this had me holding my breath, hoping for more psychological complexity and characters changed by experience. In opposition to this, I sometimes had the exasperated feeling that I was reading Interiors magazine with a rather thin story attached. What is of interest in Canarino is that it is not so much a portrait of a lady as a portrait of a neurotic monster.

Norman Stone

A man, a plan, a canal . . .

Said Aburish, a Palestinian with excellent English who worked for years in Iraq, wrote a very good biography of Saddam four years ago. He brought out the full horror of the regime, and showed how Saddam’s hero was Stalin, even to the point that Stalin’s works were Saddam’s bedtime reading (such, at any rate, was the theory: porn magazines were probably the reality). Killing off Shias, clearing the Kurds out of the oil towns in northern Iraq, and launching himself as hero of the down-trodden Arabs, Saddam clearly had Stalin in mind. Aburish’s book was a good one, but it was also inspired by animosity — ‘from vigilance of grief compell’d/ To hate from having loved too well’, in the words of the old song.

Alan Watkins

Placeman without a place

One of the chief characteristics of New Labour, Blairism or the Project — they amount to the same phenomenon — is that many of the cheer-leaders began their careers not just on the far left of the Labour Party but so far to the left as to be outside the party completely. Peter Mandelson and John Reid belonged to the latter group; Charles Clarke, Patricia Hewitt and Jack Straw to the former. They then went on to serve Neil Kinnock with varying degrees of devotion. By and large, they had an unhappy time under John Smith, who tended to prefer old-fashioned Croslandite revisionists. But they return- ed to prosper under Tony Blair, whose most forceful critics were themselves in- clined to be old revisionists such as Roy Hattersley.

Anthony Daniels

Fantasies under the river gums

Just as vulgarity can sometimes transcend itself and become something else (I am thinking of Gillray and Las Vegas), so silliness can sometimes transcend itself and attain sociological significance. Germaine Greer has written a transcendently silly pamphlet about a proposed future for her homeland, Australia. She wants it to become what she calls an Aboriginal Republic, though the exact meaning of this term is unclear even to her, which is not altogether surprising, since Aborigines lived in stateless societies before the arrival of the Europeans. However, her mind is so completely stocked with clichés that she often uses words that have connotation but no denotation, as a kind of shorthand.

Saturday

Katherine Duncanjones

Infinite riches in a little room

Frank Kermode’s The Age of Shakespeare is an astonishing achievement. In fewer than 200 small-format pages he discusses each of Shakespeare’s works. No comments are less than telling; most are highly original. Examples of the latter include a discussion of familial and rhetorical ‘doubles’ in Hamlet; an account of the unvaried verse of Julius Caesar, ‘as if the important thing was to make everyone sound very Roman, like senators preparing to sit for statues of themselves’; and an analysis of the phrase ‘simple shells’ in Pericles which he sees as ‘an early warning to those who find the last plays simple; not even the word “simple” is simple’.

Interconnect

Much more than a game

It was comforting in the late 1960s to learn that the composed, sturdily elegant figure of Basil D’Oliveira was in the England cricket team. He was a man, we felt, who would see us through. This absorbing book, significant beyond the confines of cricket, is an account of the suffering and frustrations that beset his early career, the astonishing web of intrigue, bribery and political pressure in which he later found himself, and his eventual triumph. Because of his straightforward cricketing skills, his mere presence in England, and in the England team, could be said to have changed the world. This book is also a history of the stupidity and injustice of apartheid.

Mark Archer

Making the most of the obvious

James Surowiecki is a Martian. True, he doesn’t have pointy ears and he writes a financial column for the New Yorker. But only someone fallen to Earth would celebrate the obvious as much as he does. When he ventures out into a city, he marvels at the fact that fast-walking pedestrians don’t bump into each other on a crowded pavement. He calls it ‘the beauty of a well- co-ordinated crowd’. When he goes into a supermarket in search of orange juice, there’s the juice carton ready and waiting for him! How did the grocer know he was coming? And how does he know he’ll want some more juice tomorrow? He compares supermarket supply chains to the spontaneous movements of a flock of starlings.