More from Books

Saturday

Jane Gardam

Dirty hands with green fingers

The unpretentious title of this excellent, delicious book is clever. Does it mean ‘a modicum of garden history’ or, in a Victorian sort of way, ‘a little volume’ of it? Either, for it is beautifully produced, would make you want to buy it but neither would prepare you for nearly 350 pages of entertaining, scholarly riches; fine type, fine text, colour plates, MS reproductions from Aelfric to The Ladies’ Flower Garden, illustrations, drawings, cartoons and photographs. British gardens began early BC, with nomadic clearings in the wilderness and thorn hedges to keep out wild animals. The book ends with 2003 AD and the children’s Mughal Garden in Bradford and the Eden Project in the south-west.

Digby Anderson

The crushing burden of proof

Anthony Kenny does not believe in the existence of God, but his disbelief is qualified and complex. He does not believe that the existence of God can be proved through something like the five Thomist ‘proofs’: they depend too much on ‘outdated Aristotelian cosmology’. Further, he thinks that the traditional attributes of God such as omniscience, omnipotence and benevolence are incompatible. He implies that there is also a traditional attribution to God of (total?) ineffability and this, too, damages proof of existence. I don’t quite understand his emphasis on the un-utterability of God. It’s true there is a strand of ineffability-thinking in the Church, but there are even stronger strands of Revelation.

Jane Ridley

Jumping for joy

Jane Shilling is a Times journalist and single parent who lives in Greenwich with her 12-year-old son. One day, for no particular reason, she decides to take up riding lessons. She turns up at a livery stables at Rooting Street in Kent, an establishment run by a formidable lady named Mrs Rogers. Jane Shilling had never swung her leg over a saddle before. ‘I kept thinking of poor, mad Zelda Fitzgerald and her loopy attempts to train as a ballet dancer years after it was too late to begin.’ She was too old, ‘well into middle age’ (she never lets on exactly how old, but she must be 40-something), her legs flail helplessly, and she wobbles off at a trot. But soon she is hooked.

Rachel Johnson

The mating game in Manhattan

A publishing friend arrived with an armful of new books as a cadeau maison. I have to confess I picked up Plum Sykes’s Bergdorf Blondes with a groan, expecting it to be bad, on the grounds that the young author was thin, beautiful, had an irritating name and should therefore be doomed to fail. A few minutes later I had decided that her sparkling effort represented an important milestone in the history of the genre of book best read as a teenager at boarding school under the duvet in the dorm, whilst pretending to Matron to be racked by terrible curse-pains. It is a romantic rollercoaster starring a fashion moppet referred to merely as Moi (as in mwah mwah, not Daniel Arap), who is of Anglo-American heritage, and who works for a glossy in New York. So far, by the way, so Plum.

Sam Leith

The neocon’s imperial burden

‘They can’t like us a whole lot,’ was the report of one American soldier. ‘If we came into a village there was no flag-waving, no pretty young girls coming out to give us kisses as we march through victorious. ‘Oh, here come the fucking Americans again. Jesus, when are they going to learn?’ That was Vietnam. Even the well-intentioned imperialist, as Niall Ferguson puts it, is ‘seldom loved’. Ferguson is both a lucid and prolific newspaper commentator and a historian whose book-length specialisms have been money, and empire. So he is well-positioned to consider the place of the United States in the world just now — a time when it seems to have more of both than most nations would decently know what to do with.

Saturday

Judith Flanders

Dark deeds on the District Line

In 1863, the London underworld was revolutionised — not the crime statistics, but the literal underworld, when the first underground railway opened, with trains running, unimaginably, beneath the surface of the earth. This was, as the Times had pointed out when plans were first mooted, as silly as thinking of machines that could fly through the air, or of battles that could be fought in the sky, or trains running in tunnels under the Channel.

John De-Falbe

Outposts of the imagination

This novel, translated from the Afrikaans by André Brink, was offered to me for review with an apologetic note advising me to abandon it at the first onset of boredom. Seven hundred and fifty dense pages later I can report that it is riveting throughout. Based on the first 50 years of Dutch settlement in South Africa, it is a monumental, vividly imagined epic that, in spite of its huge cast and range, maintains its balance and direction. It may give some idea of the book’s scale to observe that the central character, Pieternella, is not born until page 154. She is the first half-caste to be born in the colony. If this immediately makes the book sound schematic, then nothing could be further from the truth.

Stephen Abell

A failed kiss of life

For a writer or critic to describe something as ‘interesting’ is, of course, neither revealing nor interesting. Which is a shame, for Peter Ackroyd is rather fond of this sort of information underload: Richard II is ‘perhaps the most interesting and mysterious of English sovereigns’; the putative affair between Chaucer’s wife and John of Gaunt ‘would throw an interesting light upon his characteristic irony and detachment’; the actual affair between her sister and John of Gaunt ‘throws an interesting light upon the nature of the royal household’, and so on.

Peter Clark

A roving ambassador for culture

‘The pay was good, you had a nice house and you met some interesting people.’ Thus the late John F. Kennedy on the US presidency. Something of the same could be said of an overseas British Council career a generation ago, it would appear, from these engaging memoirs by Stephen Alexander who held a succession of different overseas postings in three continents between 1946 and 1979, promoting British culture. Life was great, with few demands and plenty of opportunity to indulge in travel, friendships and cultural pursuits. Stephen Alexander had his first extended taste of overseas life as a prisoner of war in a Japanese camp.

Byron Rogers

A tale of suspense

This account of a public execution in Wales is a delightful book. Beautifully designed, it is by that rare bird, an academic who not only can write but also seems to have had in mind what the French historian meant, if I remember the quote, when he mourned, ‘My book is long because I have neither the time nor the wit to make it short.’ Professor Bartlett’s 168 pages are thus more readable than most thrillers. But its most extraordinary feature is something no one ever thought to encounter until some kind of time travel was invented: in The Hanged Man men and women long dead (and, in one case, resurrected) walk and talk across 800 years.

Noble Frankland

A hiding to nothing

The story of Hitler’s last days in his bunker has been told and retold many times, perhaps most famously and certainly first by Hugh Trevor-Roper, an elegant writer and witty satirist but not really much of a historian. No doubt it will continue to be told again and again for many generations to come. The sheer frightfulness of his power and the devastating effect that Hitler personally had upon the course of history marks him out as unique in modern times and the whiff of mystery that envelops his demise excites a still incompletely quenched curiosity. So there was certainly room for a pulling together of the available evidence about, and a reassessment of, the macabre circumstances and events concerning Hitler’s bunker.

Matthew Spencer

Rock and soul

If you were a poet returning from war-ravaged Yugoslavia with a marriage on the rocks and credit-card companies after you, where would you go to get away from it all? Christopher Merrill’s choice, several times between 1998 and the millennium’s eve, was Mount Athos. The only women to have entered this thousand-year-old monastic republic in northern Greece — a watchtower for Byzantium, he calls it — have been halted by guards as they stepped from the boat or warned off by the voice of the Virgin Mary. Some of Merrill’s experiences on Athos are equally forbidding. He arrives at the Serbian monastery, to be asked ‘You like racquet ball?’ and, nodding politely, is told the world championship results: ‘Yugo- slavia just won...

Jeremy Treglown

A voracious collector

‘The only novelist now writing in English whose works are likely to stand as literary classics...who has the power, range, knowledge, and wisdom of a Tolstoy or James.’ Verdicts like this American one on John Fowles were a lot more common in the 1960s and 1970s than they have been since, and in the USA more than the UK. Fortunately, you don’t have to agree with them to be absorbed by Eileen Warburton’s well-written, thoroughly researched and even-handed biography — her first book, and evidently a labour, if not of love, then of the queasy fascination which will also be most readers’ main response.

Anne Applebaum

Poets under surveillance

Without a doubt, Moscow Memoirs is an extraordinary book, one of those literary memoirs that comes along once a decade. Emma Gerstein, in her nineties when she published it, has shed completely new light on some of the most important poets and writers of the 20th century, providing previously unknown biographical details, some of which will lead to new interpretations of their work. The book has been beautifully translated, introduced and annotated by John Crowfoot, one of the great translators of Russian to English. Having said that, I would caution readers: the poets and writers in question were Russians living in Stalin’s Soviet Union, a civilisation as remote from ours as the moon.

Saturday

Eric Christiansen

A rather ferocious person

Christina became queen of Sweden because her heroic father Gustavus Adolphus had been killed in battle, winning glory in Germany but having sired no legitimate sons. She was not quite six at the time, and they were not sure whether to call her king or queen; an ambiguity of roles, not of sex, which lasted a long time. Her armies went on fighting all comers in Germany for another 16 years, until everyone else was sick of war, and unable to prevent the Swedes from pulling off one last gigantic heist: the removal of the great imperial collection of books, art and curiosities from Prague. It was the biggest art-theft in Europe before Napoleon, and Christina got most of it.

Byron Rogers

Led by donkeys

The National Army Museum of the Crimean Warby Alastair MassieSidgwick & Jackson, £25, pp. 379, ISBN 070113904 The most extraordinary single detail about the Crimean war occurs in Alastair Massie’s book. It is this: the dim lordlings who commanded on the British side had forgotten to impose censorship on private mail, just as they had forgotten other things, like supplies, equipment and medical care. The difference was that the one efficient agency was a cheap and quick postal service collecting mail by steamship. Out of the Crimea the letters poured. The result was that more was known about conditions at the front, not afterwards but at the time, than in any war before or since.

Philip Ziegler

The foundering ship of state

Henry Fairlie may have coined the phrase ‘The Establishment’ but it was Anthony Sampson who gave it flesh and blood. His Anatomy of Britain, first published in 1962 and revised at intervals over the years, sought to explain how Britain worked, where the power really lay, what covert networks underlay the at first impenetrable surface of society. Now the Sampsonian bear has emerged once more from its lair, sniffing the air uneasily, looking around for landmarks, rootling up the occasional corpse to see what is left upon its bones. The view is dramatically different; even what is superficially unchanged has in fact been profoundly modified.

Sebastian Smee

His cup runneth over

Nick, the central character in Alan Hollinghurst’s wonderful new novel, is a young, alert middle-class boy with precociously refined aesthetic sensibilities and a gift for endearing himself to others. ‘He liked to be charming, and hardly noticed when he drifted excitedly into insincerity.’ He has come out as gay shortly before the novel’s opening, but lacks — at least until chapter two — any actual experience. His friendship with the straight son of a junior minister in the Thatcher government — actually a longstanding erotic infatuation kept painfully under wraps — has led to a successful wooing of the friend’s entire family.

Mary Furness

What makes us unique?

What does it mean to be human? The many possible answers to this question and their rejection form the cornucopian content of this book. Is language, for example, a defining characteristic of being human? It can’t be because other species have forms of communication which qualify as a sort of language; dolphins whistle, bees dance, ants squeak, apes can learn human sign language and there are many well-attested cases of parrots understanding what they are saying. Are humans part of the animal continuum and if, as seems probable, they are, then what is it that singles humans out as unique? Is there a particular non-animal quality that only humans have? Could it be, for example, purposiveness or imagination?