More from Books

Saturday

Raymond Carr

Rare conjunctions of the stars

Lawyers meet lawyers, historians and economists meet their colleagues. They have a defined profession. Creative writers have no defined profession: their concern is human nature in all its complexity. Yet they do bump into each other and are often obsessively interested in each other’s works and lives. Rachel Cohen is concerned with the way their lives become intertwined as a result of ‘a chance meeting’. James Baldwin reluctantly goes to a Paris party of the Marxist writer Jean Malaquais where Norman Mailer, glass in hand, is doing his loud-voiced party piece. It is the point de départ of a friendship based on mutual admiration. Is this first chance meeting significant? They would inevitably have met, since they moved in the same radical circles in New York.

Matthew Leeming

The Quaker Prince of Ghor

The saga of the First Afghan War, one of the greatest disasters ever met by the British army, has been told many times before, and I had vowed to throw any book that told it again away in the bin. But Ben Macintyre has found a wholly original angle on it by turning the spotlight on a mysterious American, Josiah Harlan, whose story briefly crosses other accounts of this period. In doing so, he has produced a riveting book and a valuable contribution to Great Game literature. It is the story of the American adventurer who has passed into the folklore of the North-West Frontier and was almost certainly Kipling’s inspiration for ‘The Man Who Would Be King’. Some of the story has been told before in the comparatively obscure journal Afghanistan (July-September 1947).

Henry Patterson

Playing poker in the Last Chance Saloon

A biography of over 1,000 pages whose subject is the leader of a provincial political party which has five MPs at Westminster and could, if the more alarmist projections from the recent European elections are fulfilled, lose them all to Paisleyites at the next might seem excessive. Yet the story which forms the heart of the book is a fascinating and important one. Godson demonstrates that without Trimble the historic Belfast Agreement and the peace process itself could have long since foundered for lack of Unionist support. Although the book’s subject is David Trimble and the broader ‘Unionist family’ it provides much new information and many insights into the British, Irish and US dimensions of the Ulster conflict.

Saturday

Simon Heffer

Hit-and-miss history man

Since it was a prime social manifestation of the industrial revolution, the Victorian city more than merits serious attention by historians. It became the symbol of the de-ruralisation of the British (or more specifically, English) poor, and was the vehicle for the rise of the middle classes. These themes and others are discussed in detail by Tristram Hunt in this book. Its three sections deal broadly with the establishment of the new cities, their development, and their decline. Together with familiar tales from familiar sources about the condition of the urban poor, Dr Hunt has found some unfamiliar tales and sources as well.

Brian Masters

A week with a human monster!

Thirty years ago Sandy Fawkes was a Daily Express reporter following a story in the southern states of the USA. She met a good-looking young man in a bar, and spent the next six days in his company, driving around with him, eating out, and sharing a bed. He was enigmatic and monosyllabic, but sufficiently intriguing to keep her interest alive. Just as well, for had he been bored he might well have murdered her. She later discovered that he had been responsible for the hideous deaths of at least 18 people, the last four within the two days immediately before he picked her up. She had been intimate with wickedness, and the realisation frightened her. This was a better story than any she had been sent to cover, so she naturally wrote it up in a book she called Killing Time.

Graham Stewart

Two-way traffic: arrivals and departures

Britannia’s Children: Emigration from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland since 1600by Eric RichardsHambledon & London, £19.95, pp. 388, ISBN 1852854413 In the middle of the 19th century, Londoners grumbled about the number of Italian urchins grinding barrel organs on street corners. Criminals and people-traffickers had brought many of them to Britain and their melody- making was becoming a nuisance. Charles Babbage complained that their racket was disrupting his concentration while he was trying to build his calculating machine. The Times got equally huffy. With a change to the law making life more difficult for the grinders, the money, such as it was, fell out of the barrel-organ market. The boys grew up and went into the next big thing — ice cream-vending.

William Oddie

A good man in a naughty world

All Archbishops of Canterbury fail. Dr Carey quotes Archbishop Cosmo Gordon Lang’s famous dictum: ‘The post is impossible for one man to do, but only one man can do it.’ It is not simply that there is too much for one man to do. The real problem is that the internal contradictions of Anglicanism have become impossible to resolve. What do Anglicans believe? Archbishop Lang could have referred an enquirer to the catechism of the Book of Common Prayer. But that shiny little black volume is no longer to be found in most churches today, and the possibilities for schism and chaos have multiplied. Poor Dr Carey. He cannot be accused of ever having wanted this poisoned chalice; his appointment was as much a shock to him as it was to everyone else.

Jonathan Keates

A bully with a heart of gold

Philanthropists are a boring lot these days. Your modern seven-figure donor is either resolutely anonymous or else determined to be seen as approachable Mr Average, quiet and unassuming, who just happened to have the chequebook handy. Gone for ever, it seems, is the splashy, domineering article familiar to our great-grandparents, combining a certain Dickensian whiff of Bounderby and Pecksniff with an innocent delight in showmanship, exercising his benevolence as a kind of pantomime ‘Grand Transformation Scene’, ending in paeans of praise from a grateful proletariat. William Hesketh Lever never wanted to be seen as philanthropic, and was always at pains to emphasise the self-interest of any step he might take towards improving other people’s lives.

Harry Mount

When ’Omer smote ’is bloomin’ lyre

The scriptwriter behind Troy, Brad Pitt’s new muscle and breastplate epic, sounds like an alpha-plus idiot. Commenting on his decision to leave the gods out of the film because he thought they wouldn’t impress audiences, David Benioff said, ‘I think that, if Homer was looking down on us, he would smile and say, “Take the gods out.” ’ More likely, the gods would say, ‘Ouch, what a rubbish film.’ But they couldn’t attack Mr Benioff for playing around with the plot. That’s been going on ever since the Iliad was written in around 700 BC.

Lee Langley

Gurus, artists and exiles

The introductory Apologia sets the scene: ‘These chapters are potentially autobiographical: even when something didn’t actually happen to me, it might have done … The central character — the “I” of each chapter — is myself.’ My Nine Lives is subtitled ‘Chapters of a Possible Past’ and that is what we are given: variations on a theme of displacement, the search for love, and the often painful gaining of knowledge. The possible lives are turbulent, though the narrator, a trusting girl who gives more than she gets, is invariably passive, and willingly exploited.

Saturday

Robert Stewart

Much more than a sporting event

The Ancient Olympicsby Nigel SpiveyOUP, £17.99, pp. 264, ISBN 0192804332Olympics in Athens 1896: The Invention of the Modern Olympic Gamesby Michael Llewellyn SmithProfile, £16.99, pp. 290, ISBN 186197342X So politics should be kept out of sports? Tell that to the Greeks. Two absorbing new books about the ancient Olympic Games, each crammed with information about the sporting events themselves, abundantly demonstrate that the athletic contexts represented far more than sporting prowess. Stephen Miller’s richly detailed study, beautifully illustrated, is an examination of the whole of Greek culture and the role that athletics, games and festivals played in the moulding of Greek literature, vase painting, democracy and politics.

Lavinia Greenlaw

Lost and found in lonely places

Patricia Tyrrell has self-published two novels, both of which were shortlisted for major prizes. The Promised Land was runner-up for the Sagittarius Prize for a first novel by someone over the age of 60, and The Reckoning was a contender for the Encore Award. I am happy to declare an interest here as, along with Mark Amory, the literary editor of these pages, I was one of the Encore judges. The book didn’t win, but Tyrrell has gone on gaining admirers, including a major publishing house who have now brought her into mainstream print. This remarkable novel lifts off from a story of archetypal depth: a stolen child, a murder, a man seeking redemption and a couple whose grief has frozen them over.

Jonathan Sumption

Theirs not to reason why

Stanley Milgram was an academic psychologist at Yale who achieved a brief moment of fame in the early 1960s as the creator of ‘obedience experiments’. The idea was to discover how far people will act against their own most basic instincts if they are following someone else’s orders. A large sample of ordinary and superficially decent ‘subjects’ were persuaded to participate in what they believed to be experiments designed to establish the educational value of punishment. They were sat in a glass cubicle next to a room in which an actor pretended to go through a sequence of simple word tests.

Olivia Glazebrook

Who is laughing at whom?

Doctor Johnson’s excellent recipe for cucumber: ‘a cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing.’ Some readers will doubtless cry, ‘But what about sandwiches?’ There is, as we are all aware, no accounting for taste. Taste is a moot point for readers of James Hamilton-Paterson’s satire, Cooking with Fernet-Branca. Our feeble hero, Gerald Samper, lives on a Tuscan hilltop from which he looks despisingly down on ‘un-reddened Brits’ who flock to the lower slopes for their hols. Gerald considers himself a cut above the hoi polloi, but the joke is on him; he has fallen into the trap of thinking that only other people are tourists.

Carole Angier

His own worst enemy | 12 June 2004

Jonathan Coe is a novelist — a very good novelist. He is not a biographer; indeed he dislikes biography, as he frequently tells us. Given that, he’s done a damn good job. Poor B. S. Johnson leaps off these pages: pathologically morbid and clinically depressed, wildly superstitious and self-dramatising. requiring perfect love and devotion from everyone — women, publishers, agents, even critics — and becoming suicidal and violently vengeful when they can’t provide them; ‘a large, blond, maudlin man’, as a friend said; ‘unassuageable,’ said another, tormented and absurd. And that, as Coe would point out, is without mentioning the books, in which Johnson equally pursued the impossible, and blamed everyone else when they failed.

Martin Vander Weyer

Big is not therefore ugly

As in warfare and international relations, the Brits punch above their weight in the debate about globalisation and the onward march of the transnational market economy. The Guardian columnist George Monbiot, in The Age of Consent (Flamingo 2003), was the first anti-globalisation campaigner to offer a coherent manifesto for a movement which until then had tried to make a virtue of all-embracing incoherence. John Kay of Oxford and the LSE, in The Truth about Markets (Penguin/Allen Lane 2003), offered a brilliant analysis of why rampant capitalism does not need to be replaced — as anti-globalisers’ placards proclaimed at Seattle — by ‘something nicer’, but why it only delivers widespread benefits where it flourishes in well-ordered civic societies.

Anita Brookner

Back to the good old whodunnit

Long before the age of irony the novel meted out just punishment, or at least linked effect to cause. These functions have long since devolved to the murder mystery, which combines gruesome reality with superior logic, leaving logic the upper hand. The rules may have changed, but the stereotypes — the small town with its confected name, the aristocratic sleuth, the unloved victim — are all present in Susan Hill’s strikingly old-fashioned debut novel as a writer of detective stories. A respected and prize-winning author, she has reinvented herself as a purveyor of middle-class, middlebrow mysteries, complete with all the stereotypes listed above.

Saturday

Julie Burchill

The Fran and Jay show

When I married Tony Parsons in the late 1970s, he immediately took me to live in a town called Billericay in Essex — his ‘calf country’, I suppose, in a Spam sort of way. To say it was a one-horse town would be to insult horses, any one of which with reasonable social aspirations would have turned back to Brentwood the minute he realised that there wasn’t even so much as a teashop in the high street. The reason Mr Parsons took me to live there, I can’t help but think, is that I was at the height of my pallid, livid beauty and he figured that before long I’d be off with someone a bit cuter, smarter — better in every way, basically. I do remember the time I looked at him and said, ‘Didn’t you used to be taller?

Anthony Daniels

What happens when things go wrong

Only someone with the strongest self-control can resist looking, however furtively, at people with deformities. This is not very creditable to the human race, perhaps, but it is best to admit that it is so. A book about human deformities is almost bound to appeal to the voyeur in us, therefore, even if we feel that it ought not; but I am glad to report that Dr Leroi’s book is genuinely instructive and enlightening, a brilliant admixture of curious historical anecdote and up-to-date science, written in excellent and often elegant prose. No one need feel guilty about buying it. Francis Bacon was the first to appreciate that we might discover from the study of deformity something valuable about how the body develops.

Sam Leith

Seduced by the scent of a mystery

Visits from the Drowned Girl starts out with a gripping idea as old as crime fiction: the bystander. Benny Poteat climbs communications masts for a living. One day, from the top of such a mast out in the back- country, he looks down and sees a girl set up a video-camera on a tripod by the side of a river. The girl, as he watches, powerless to intervene, takes off all her clothes in front of the camera, walks unhesitatingly into the rushing floodwater, and dis- appears from sight. When Benny climbs down the mast and reaches the site of her suicide, he finds alongside her clothes a rucksack full of videotapes, and a business card. He knows he should call the police. But somehow he doesn’t. Instead, he takes the videos home and starts his own investigations.