More from Books

Saturday

Salley Vickers

The dark side of laughter

As a rule, I disapprove of reviews which review the author and not the book, but some occasions demand it. The British, I don’t know why, are notoriously myopic, mean-spirited even, about multiple talents. In France one could be a poet and a stripper and be taken equally seriously as either. David Baddiel is best known as a comedian and thus his chances of being read as anything but a comic novelist will be compromised. I know this, for I was guilty of the prejudice myself when I served as a Man Booker judge in 2002 and learned that David was to be a colleague. He was, I presumed, to be the media floozy; I could hardly have been more wrong.

Jonathan Sumption

The pros and cons of Euromarriage

Timothy Garton Ash has become a bishop. In Free World, he has written something which is less a work of political analysis than an extended sermon about the value of political liberty and international co-operation between Western states. Of course, no one is against these admirable things, but they sometimes come at too high a price. Yet there is not much about the price in this worthy and rather parsonical volume, which manages to fill 250 pages while paying only the most perfunctory attention to the difficulties or the side-effects of our good intentions. The argument goes like this. Britain’s political classes are divided into two camps: the Europhiles and the Atlanticists. This is profoundly tragic and unnecessary.

Olivia Glazebrook

The return of the native

‘When you look at families, there is no such thing as normal.’ Indeed not. Justin Cartwright gives us the Judds, an apparently ordinary English middle-class family, and examines their response to a private catastrophe. The book begins as Juliet Judd, eldest child and ‘prodigal daughter’, is released from prison in America. She has been locked up for two years, jailed for selling a valuable stained-glass window which she knew to be stolen. Juliet’s prison sentence cast her whole family into a state of suspended emotional animation from which they now begin to stir, as Juliet makes her way home. This awakening is a painful process. Juliet’s father, Charles, is bewildered by the turn of events which landed his favourite child in an American jail.

Sam Leith

Short on names, tall on tales

Two or three years ago, I was invited with my rather posh then girlfriend to a grand party up in Yorkshire somewhere, and we were billeted for the night with a fellow guest who lived nearby. Our host was one Sir Tatton Sykes, Bt — known around those parts, as ‘Sir Satin Tights’ — an immensely dapper and personable toff, who showed not a flicker of dismay at our dishevelled clothes and overnight luggage scrunched up into old Woolworths bags. His ancestral pile was really something, too. It seemed to be filled with four-poster beds, cooked breakfasts, servants, eccentrically decorated private chapels and enormous cast-iron Victorian bathtubs with gurgling pipes and weird metal columns instead of plugs.

Saturday

Jonathan Keates

The impact of the immigrants

In New York in 1920 the writer Hattie Mayer, under her pen name Anzia Yezierska, published her first collection of short stories, entitled Hungry Hearts. Poignant sketches of Jewish family life among the tenements and sweatshops of the Lower East Side, they gain additional impact from the reader’s continuing awareness that English is not the author’s first language. She grew up in a shtetl in the Pale of Settlement speaking Yiddish and Polish, and made the transatlantic voyage with her parents in the wake of Tsar Nicholas’s pogroms. Given such experience, the final story, ‘How I Found America’, seems, for all its sentimentality, the most moving.

David Crane

Escaping the gallows — and classification

If any of Byron’s contemporaries at Cambridge had been asked to nominate The Man Most Likely To, it is a safe bet that it would have been William Bankes, and while things did not turn out quite as any but his immediate set might have guessed, that hardly detracts from his biographical appeal. Rich, clever and brave, a much lionised traveller, an inspired collector and generous patron, ‘Nubian’ Bankes would seem to have had it all, when a meeting with a guardsman in a convenience ‘that afforded accommodation for only one individual’ threatened him with disgrace and the gallows. In the same year that a Captain Henry Nicholls was hanged for sodomy, Bankes was lucky to get away with an improbable acquittal, but caution had never been his longest suit.

Christopher Howse

Limping to the holy presence

A 12th-century eyewitness at Sant- iago de Compostela described his fellow pilgrims: Some, such as the Greeks, hold the image of the cross in their hands; others distribute their possessions to the poor; some carry iron or lead for the construction of the basilica of the Apostle James; and others, who have been liberated by the Apostle from the prisons of the wicked, bear their shackles and manacles upon their shoulders. Conrad Rudolph bore neither iron nor shackles on his 1,000-mile walk from Le Puy through the Pyrenees to Santiago. His 20lb-pack held a light sleeping-bag, a bottle of water, a towel, soap, lip-balm, nail-clippers, a first-aid item called Second Skin for blisters, a pocket knife and plastic spoon.

Nigel Spivey

The past as good entertainment

The main lesson of history is that we do not learn the lessons of history. Did (for example) anyone at the Pentagon heed the wisdom of Colonel T. E. Lawrence, soundly advising against the military occupation of Iraq? Of course not. That was way back, buddy: this is now. Experience teaches, time and again — and again. The present volume accepts the pragmatic irrelevance of history, and celebrates Clio, a muse. It has historians owning up to the fact that history is good entertainment, with some figures from journalism and the entertainment industry affirming that historians indeed possess the extra-mural potential to fill airtime and column space.

Saturday

John Michell

Stranded by the tide of fashion

Colin Wilson is a very great man, ‘the only important writer in Europe’. That is his own estimation, and I do not quarrel with it because Wilson’s self-esteem is not just vanity but necessary to his career. As he sees it, the pattern of our lives is created by ourselves through the use of imagination and will. At the age of 13 he decided to become the greatest writer of all times. His first project, never completed, was an encyclopaedia of science, literature and all human knowledge. In preparation for this, he studied geology, biology and astronomy, mastered the whole of philosophy and psychology and read through the imaginative literature of Europe, with special attention to the Russians.

Digby Durrant

Erudition without tears

There never was a ticket with the word ‘POSH’ stamped on it by the P&O shipping line, which meant a passenger to India went out on the port side and returned on the starboard and got the best of the cooling breezes. So, where did the word come from? Michael Quinion says humans fear the unfamiliar and will go to great lengths to discover how a word or phrase came into being and remove its mystery. The mixture of laboured logic and startling inventiveness that gave birth to the word ‘posh’, though, is not completely unfounded. ‘Posh’ was originally the Romany for halfpenny and though it would have taken sackfuls of the stuff to get to India and back it was money.

Owen Paterson

When the (fish and) chips are down

There is much to commend this book. Charles Clover lays bare the depths of a neglected subject — the rape of our seas — to expose the destruction caused by modern technological fishing. This is an issue which needs populist exposure; Clover has done it admirably. I hope it will attract readers who might otherwise have shown no interest in the subject. The framework of his book is a series of visits to selected fisheries around the world and the lessons he gleaned from them. Every visit seemed to have a gruesomely early start, and to involve eating delicious fish; the author’s obvious pleasure was then mitigated by his guilt. Later he expiates this with fierce criticism of celebrity chefs who seem oblivious to the growing crisis he identifies.

Robert Barnard

Pioneer in whodunnit country

A crime novel by Chekhov? Professor John Sutherland positively chortles in the introduction at his readers’ likely surprise. Indeed, any novel by Chekhov is probably news for those readers, and Sutherland, who delights in literary mysteries, waves in front of our eyes the date of the only previous translation: 1962. It was the date of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, whose sensational solution this novel anticipates. And he has a point, even if he does refer to Hercule Poirot as an ‘amateur sleuth’: The Shooting Party is awash with tricks of the detective-story trade, then (1885) in its infancy.

James P-Carley

That woman again

The meteoric rise and swift fall of Anne Boleyn, she of the thousand days, has gripped the imagination even of sober-minded academic historians, Eric Ives describing it as ‘the most romantic, the most scandalous tragedy in English history’. Much of the fascination derives from the fact that the evidence is confusing, and no explanation appears to reconcile all contradictions. Even her contemporaries could not agree about her. Was she a delicate beauty, as Sir Thomas Wyatt’s poetry suggests, and as she herself insinuated in her allusion to her long slender neck ever so convenient for the headsman? Or was she only moderately attractive, as some foreign diplomats reported in their dispatches home?

Rupert Christiansen

An enemy of stuff and nonsense

Just how unhappy was Jane Welsh’s 40-year marriage to Thomas Carlyle? For decades after the publication of J. A. Froude’s scandalously revealing biography in 1883, it was widely regarded as one of the dirtier secrets of Victorian literary history. She never wanted him in the first place, he was sexually impotent, she was bitterly jealous of his friendship with Lady Harriet Ashburton, he was either morosely taciturn or explosively violent. This new collection of Jane’s letters — a one-volume offshoot of the gigantic and still incomplete Duke edition — follows a revisionist line and paints a more ambiguous picture. Jane’s warmer feelings towards Lady Harriet are presented, and her possibly lesbian inclinations explored (to no plausible end).

Philip Hensher

Axeman on the rampage

A curious volume, this, and you would be right in thinking that anyone writing a book review of someone else’s book reviews needs to justify himself. (Indeed, the first essay in this book is a review of Sven Birkerts’s book reviews, at which point we seem an unnecessarily remote distance from literature itself — I mean, I’d be thrilled if anyone were interested in my views of Dale Peck’s views of Sven Birkerts’s views of Robert Musil, but you could perfectly well go and read Musil yourself, so let’s not kid ourselves.) The point about Dale Peck is that he has earned himself a notoriety by writing some fairly unforgiving book reviews.

Saturday

D.J. Taylor

Tales of a Scottish spa

I will cheerfully own to having struggled in the past with Ronald Frame’s novels. Brooding once over a stack of photographs brought back from a fortnight’s holiday in Kerry, I realised that lurking among the margins of practically every snap — here flung down on a bathing-towel, there wedged beneath the picnic basket — was a copy of Penelope’s Hat, read at an ever more slower rate, and ultimately very nearly chucked into the Atlantic. Frame’s short stories, on the other hand, are a different matter.

Allan Mallinson

Upstaging the Prussians

‘The victor writes the history,’ says Peter Hofschröer in his latest attempt to rewrite it himself. ‘Rarely has this old adage been more apposite than when applied to Wellington and Waterloo.’ In his two previous books, the second of which is called 1815, The Waterloo Campaign: The German Victory, he argued that the Duke of Wellington deliberately let the initial French attack fall on the Prussians, dallying at the Duchess of Richmond’s ball instead of going to their assistance, then subsequently concealing the evidence and claiming the victory at Waterloo three days later entirely for himself and British arms, whereas the battle was won by increasing pressure from the Prussians on the French right, and by the German troops in British pay.

Alan Campbell

A coalition that failed

Miles Hudson is a military historian with several interesting books to his credit, especially his War and the Media (1981), written with Field Marshal Sir John Stanier. He gives his latest book the subtitle ‘A Cautionary Tale’, and so indeed it is. It tells the story of the various forces sent to Russia in 1918–19 by the Allies for what seemed at the time good reasons. Each was a separate expedition within the vast geographical range of Russia’s western frontier. Eventually all of them ended in humiliating failure, and their presence was used by the Bolsheviks (or Bolos as they were often called at the time) as patriotic propaganda in their struggle to win their own power. The British were of course not alone in this venture (except in the Baltic sector).

Roy Kerridge

Me and my white mates

Michael Collins, he tells us, was brought up in a terraced street south of the River Thames in Southwark, a district I don’t know very well. I have been there a few times, usually visiting west African friends and acquaintances, a fact that might strike Michael Collins as ironic. For if you look closely at his book’s title, you will not see ‘A biography of the working class’ but ‘A biography of the white working class’. Infirm of purpose, Collins wavers between a history of the entire working class, an autobiography, a history of Southwark, and a biography of his grandmother, spiced up with quotes from other authors. This confused book seems to have been inspired by a Julie Burchill article in the Guardian of 5 May 2001.