More from Books

Saturday

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.

Jonathan Cecil

One rung below greatness

Actors’ biographies, once a comparative rarity and usually ghosted and bowdlerised, spring forth every season. They are often pruriently, dubiously, sensational: we are told that Olivier had an affair with Danny Kaye, that Peggy Ashcroft was a near-nymphomaniac and Alec Guinness a covert gay cruiser, all with scant evidence and with little relation to their art. What a relief to read a sober biography of a distinguished player, Michael Redgrave, largely concentrating on his acting although not shirking the fact that he was a promiscuous, often guilt-ridden bisexual with a one-time flirtation with Stalinism.

Anthony Howard

An ersatz Boston Brahmin

The ‘campaign biography’ has become a familiar enough phenomenon in any American presidential year. So it should be said straight away that this book, with the slightly teasing adjective in its subtitle, is in no way representative of that genre. Far from being a dazzling encomium of the qualities of the Democratic candidate in this autumn’s presidential election, it offers a cool (and at times almost chilling) assessment of the various episodes that have gone into the making of the career of the present junior senator from Massachusetts. The perspective from which it is written is, it has to be said, predominantly a local one.

Inigo Thomas

When the Eighties had to stop

The Eighties, you might say, didn’t end on time. The speculative financial boom in the United States and elsewhere, which became synonymous with the price of reputation and the importance of money, which began with the Ronald Reagan tax cut and the gloss of Tina Brown’s Vanity Fair, which rode out a crash in 1987 and rolled on through the soaring Nineties, the decade of Clinton, the Internet and the first billion-dollar movie, began to unravel only after the millennium, when share prices fell, when the US Department of Justice took two leading art auction houses to court, and when it was discovered that executives of a Texan company few people had ever heard of had committed an absolutely massive fraud, or around about then.

Saturday

Saul Kelly

Only a moderately intriguing adventurer

John Bierman, the co-author of a recent book on Alamein, had doubts about writing this biography of Lazlo Almasy, the Hungarian-born explorer of the Libyan desert, whose exploits were ‘immortalised’ in Michael Ondaatje’s Booker Prize-winning novel, The English Patient, and the subsequent Oscar-winning film by Anthony Minghella. Bierman did not want to be seen to be taking ‘a ride on the coat-tails’ of the novel and the film (in which case a change of subtitle might have been advisable). He was also, rather puzzlingly, concerned that he might find ‘something nasty in the woodshed’ with regard to Almasy’s alleged Nazi past.

Stephen Abell

Taking matters seriously

For a critic as seriously intelligent as James Wood, a discussion about the nature of comedy is, inevitably, no laughing matter. And this is appropriate enough: modern comedy, in his opinion, appears to contain few actual laughs. The historical shift from an essentially religious, theatrical ‘comedy of correction’ to a secular, novelistic ‘comedy of forgiveness’ — the move from piety to pity — has instead brought with it a much fuller range of emotional intricacies. As a result, all comic novels are problem comedies, of ‘hilarious pathos’ or ‘mingled amusement and pity’; Wood is talking un-laughter and the novel. Wood’s view of comedy is closely related to his view of literature itself.

Simon Courtauld

The crown that fitted perfectly

Professor Preston has done his subject proud. This is a better biography than his 1,000-page indictment of Franco, not only because he is in sympathy with the Spanish king but because, in some respects, he now appears less implacably hostile towards the Generalisimo. It was thanks to Franco, after all, that the monarchy was restored, and in the person of a man who, by his sacrifice and dedication, was far better qualified than the other candidates for the succession to transform his country from dictatorship following civil war to a democratic system acceptable to his people. The old Caudillo might have turned in his grave a few times, but he unquestionably chose the right man for the job, albeit not quite the job which he had envisaged for his protégé.

Katie Grant

Just a wee drap of paranoia

When James Kelman’s novel, How Late it Was, How Late, won the Booker Prize in 1994, Rabbi Julia Neuberger, one of the judges, objected that the book was ‘just a drunken Scotsman railing against bureaucracy’. The Rabbi will find no more comfort in Kelman’s latest work in which blind Sammy Samuels struggling with Dysfunc- tional Benefit is exchanged for 34-year-old Jeremiah Brown, a ‘Skarrish’ immigrant to Uhmerika (Kelman writes as he speaks, which may be a problem for those unfamiliar with ‘Glesga patter’)railing against life as a Red Card Class III ‘unassimilatit alien furnir’.

Nicholas Harman

What feats we did that day

Stalin’s admirers wanted it sooner, to help our Soviet allies. Others wanted it sooner, to give us a chance of beating the Russkies to Berlin (as we didn’t). But time and tide set the date, and the invasion of occupied France had to be in spring, at low ebb, after many months of planning, training, accumulating resources, spying, and the brilliant spinning of lies to divert the enemy from the real target. Since the main ally was the United States with all its men, guns and oil, and the Germans had used up their fuel and pilots on the eastern front, success was likely. Yet the Nazis’ army, in an evil cause and stuffed but not strengthened by foreign recruits, fought on with desperate courage.

Saturday

Michael Howard

Both lion and donkey

Richard Holmes wrote this book 20 years ago when he was a humble lecturer at Sandhurst, long before his splendid television performances had made him a national figure. He has not had to do much to update it. In a useful foreword he describes the progress made since he wrote it in the historiography of the war — the Lions v. Donkeys debate, the research into both the operational doctrine and the social background of the British army, developments on the home front — but the focus of this biography is too limited for him to have felt it necessary to modify his original text. He might have reconsidered what he has to say about the Schlieffen Plan in the light of the recent controversy as to whether it existed at all, but this is nit-picking.

Ian Garrick-Mason

The five stages of a downhill descent

After defeating two fascist powers in a world war, the citizens of the democratic West have gradually come to throw the label ‘fascist’ around with abandon. Police officers are fascists to the protesters they confront. University administrators are fascists to the students they discipline. Think back: many of you probably had parents who were fascists — at least with regard to your curfew. Alas, the term has come to be used rather freely even in political discourse: to the Left, postwar non-communist dictatorships under generals Franco and Pinochet were fascist, and to today’s pro-war Right, Muslim fundamentalists are Islamo- fascists’, in Christopher Hitchens’ colourful phrase.

Sandy Balfour

One man’s Mexican dream

The author of a weighty tome on a 16th-century attempt to create a Utopia in Mexico might well expect to be exempt from Elmore Leonard’s advice to ‘leave out the parts readers tend to skip’. A book that runs to 60 pages of footnotes, bibliography and index might even be required to have such parts. But Toby Green’s tale of Vasco de Quiroga bills itself as ‘genre-defying’ and so we shall judge it accordingly. The bits the reader is tempted to skip are — of course — the same bits that ‘defy’ easy categorisation by genre. What Green does is to tell a good and captivating story of great interest and resonance in the modern world.

Francis King

A charming but alarming city

In the summer of 2001 Sofka Zinovieff accompanied her husband, Vassilis — first met when he was press officer to the Greek embassy in Moscow — on a posting back to Athens. This book is both an account of her enthusiastic, if often balked, attempts to transform herself into a Greek, and a vivid evocation of a city in a chaotic ferment of change. That change is at once demonstrated when the couple find a flat, undistinguished except for a tremendous view, in Vouliagmeni, 18 kilometres from the centre of the city. Some 60 years ago, when I used to visit Vouliagmeni before a direct road had been constructed to it, it was little more than a village, with a glorious crescent of a beach backed by a few simple cafés and tavernas.

Peregrine Worsthorne

The race of the thoroughbreds

I read every page, every line of this very long book with sustained interest and pleasure. It is a collective biography of four Grenadier Guards officers — Harold Macmillan, Lord Salisbury, Oliver Lyttelton and Harry Crookshank — who, after becoming friends at Eton, and serving together gallantly and bloodily in the trenches of the first world war, went on to play prominent roles on the stage of British politics for the rest of the century, usually as allies in the Conservative party cause but sometimes as rivals or even, towards the end, as enemies.

Evelyn Fitzherbert

A short-lived royal adventure

Jason Tomes’ excellent book charts the rise and fall of Albania’s only king. Of perhaps greater interest is the story it tells of this Ottoman outpost’s late essay into statehood. Overrun by seven foreign armies during the first world war, Albania was always under threat of being carved up among it neighbours. Ahmed Zogu can be credited with successfully manipulating Italian-Serbian rivalry, and earning Albania 20 years’ independence, of a sort. Zogu began his career as a hereditary chieftain with no more than a few thousand clansmen to his name.

James Buchan

Different heavens, same hells

Now in his late eighties, Bernard Lewis is one of the last representatives of a once venerable scholarly type, the Orientalist. Born and brought up in a Jewish family in London, Lewis effortlessly mastered Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish and Persian, wrote his doctoral thesis on the mediaeval Muslim sect known as the Assassins and taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London before being lured over to Princeton as Professor of Near Eastern Studies in 1974. In 1978, he was one of the chief targets of Edward Said’s truculent essay Orientalism. Said proclaimed that Western scholars of Islam such as Lewis were not selfless searchers after truth but volunteers in the old enterprise of colonial exploitation.

John De-Falbe

A thick Celtic mist

Areview copy of Shade comes with two pages of admonitory blurb about what an important film-maker Neil Jordan is. This information might be useful for those with gossip columns to fill but it has no more bearing on the likelihood of this being a good novel than if we were told that the author is big in Morris dancing. Either John Murray is indifferent to reviewers in its new berth at HodderHeadline, or the message is, Don’t dare review this badly, pipsqueak, cos we can make sure you never work again … Then there is this quote from John Banville, Ireland’s best writer: ‘With this fierce, dark and yet luminous novel, Neil Jordan once again demonstrates that he is one of Ireland’s most talented artists.’ One can almost hear the clink of glasses.

Interconnect

When Auntie was young and carefree

Stephen Potter, author, radio writer and producer (1900-69, floruit 1940s and 1950s), is an instantly recognisable name, as his son Julian ruefully remarks, ‘to those over 70’. He belonged to the particularly English genus of the highly professional amateur. Cantankerous J. B. Priestley — whom Potter revered and loved working with — had Potter’s number. ‘Mary asks when I’m coming back [after illness] and I say Tuesday. J. B. says, “Well, that’s the start of the week really. And then why not slog straight through to the finish, till Thursday?”’ That comes from Potter’s diaries, which his son has been burrowing into, photocopies sent from Texas. The entry begins revealingly.

John Martin-Robinson

The last of a noble line

The new, 107th edition of Burke’s Peerage comes in three massive volumes. It is likely to be the last in printed book format. The previous, 106th edition (1999) was in two volumes, and all the Burke’s Peerages before that were single volumes back to No. 1 in 1826. There seems to be a touch of Parkinson’s Law in this; the increasing scale and grandeur of the book counter- balancing the decline in the power and prestige of the peerage. The publishers’ preface has an elegiac tone. ‘This 107th is likely to be the Final Edition in the form as we have known it.’ Burke’s genealogical future will lie in digitalised data as an ‘on-line accessible subscription service’.