More from Books

Saturday

Jonathan Croall

All his world a stage

As in the theatre, so in his letters: John Gielgud was a man of many parts, and acutely aware of his audience for all of them. In this comprehensive volume of 800 letters spanning nearly 90 years, we see the great actor in a range of roles: loving son, wicked gossip, star actor, indecisive director, anguished lover, brilliant anecdotist. Some parts he plays with style, others with affectionate wit, yet others with sympathy, courage or blazing honesty. One of the many attractions of this absorbing and deliciously entertaining book is Gielgud’s capacity for self-criticism. He was by his own admission vain, impulsive, often selfish, totally impractical in ordinary life, and quite oblivious to the world outside the theatre.

Raymond Carr

A leading light amidst the gloom

Isaiah Berlin was a much-loved friend and a dominant influence on my thinking as an historian. His death in 1997 left a void that cannot be filled. I first met him in 1946 playing tiddlywinks on the floor of his room in New College. The letters in this book of some 700 pages, magnificently edited by Henry Hardy, cover his life before that date: at Oxford before the war, his time in wartime New York and Washington and his visit to Russia in 1945. What do the letters tell us of Berlin’s life up to 1946? First of all the central importance of his Jewish family. He was born in Riga in 1909, his father a prosperous timber merchant who had escaped with his family the horrors of the Bolshevik revolution to settle in England in 1921.

Saturday

Jonathan Keates

A very different sort of Balfour

Everyone — well, almost everyone — knows that in 1895, while The Importance of Being Earnest was packing in the punters at the St James’s Theatre, Oscar Wilde was foolish enough to take the Marquess of Queensberry to court for libelling him as a ‘posing somdomite’. The noble lord’s spelling mistake occasioned history’s most famous ‘[sic]’, and Oscar, subsequently shown to be exactly what his accuser claimed, with or without the redundant ‘m’, went to his martyrdom on the Reading treadmill.

Carole Angier

Hands across three centuries

Artemisia Gentileschi (b. 1593) is a feminist icon of such power that she has penetrated even to these islands, for instance in a book by our own feminist icon, Germaine Greer. Not only was Artemisia almost the only woman artist of her age, but while still in her teens she was raped by a fellow-artist, and again did what no woman had done before, standing up in court and testifying against her attacker. Her most famous painting, ‘Judith and Holofernes’, was a sweet revenge: it shows the biblical heroine hacking off the head of the invader as he sleeps, with streams of blood flowing towards our feet. This is not the only historical reality Artemisia draws on. Anna Banti (b.

Dean Godson

Labour’s forgotten army

If Slim’s 14th was the ‘Forgotten Army’ of the second world war, then the trade union Right and its sponsored MPs are surely the ‘Forgotten Army’ of Labour’s civil war of the 1970s and 1980s. They were ‘old Labour’, but not in the sense which the term has taken on in recent years to mean the hard Left: indeed, this largely working-class group constituted the Bennites’ staunchest opponents. The old Labour Right tended to be patriotic and conservative on social issues, whilst remaining firmly wedded to the welfare state. This wing of Labour was allied to (but culturally had little in common with) those middle-class ‘revisionist’ intellectuals who are the true spiritual forebears of Blairism.

Kate Chisholm

Behind the curtains, beyond the gate

‘Thank God that even in a family no one knows anyone else’s private thoughts! The meannesses of her own mind revolted her,’ confesses Rhoda, one of two sisters in Lettice Cooper’s 1936 novel, The New House. Cooper, who was born in 1897 and died in 1994, published 20 novels, many of them based loosely on her own experiences of family life, and all characterised by her gift for laying bare what really lies behind our social smiles and graces. The New House takes place on a single day as Rhoda and her mother move out of the family home, prosaically called Stone Hall — a Victorian mansion on the outskirts of a Yorkshire town, built from money made in the steel industry. The old certainties can no longer be sustained in this post-first-world-war England.

Interconnect

How the eagles were tamed

In AD 9 the Roman general Varus at the head of three legions was surprised by German forces in the Teutoburg forest, and utterly defeated. It was one of the greatest disasters ever suffered by a Roman army, even if not on a scale comparable to Cannae. This defeat marked the end of any serious attempt by Rome to conquer Germany as Julius Caesar had conquered Gaul and incorporated it into the empire. How serious that attempt had been is a matter of dispute. Nevertheless subsequently that frontier of the empire was fixed on the Rhine. In northern Europe the god’s promise to Aeneas of ‘empire without limits’, recorded by Virgil, proved false.

Frederic Raphael

Sorry symptoms trendily diagnosed

It’s no surprise that one of Alain de Botton’s favoured sources, in a text well-sprigged with neat citations, should be Matthew Arnold: sweetness and enlightenment are their common contributions to a culture in which anarchy is the liveliest art form. What can Arnold have been complaining about in Victorian England, as compared with what we applaud in multicultural, populist Tony Blairville? Public loutishness is echoed in the decline of grammar and of civility, the collapse of common reference points, and hence of wit and allusion. Literature is bestsellers and sport is watching Becks bend it. De Botton is a cut, and occasional thrust, above the usual social diagnostics. David Dimbleby introduces him on Question Time as a ‘philosopher’. You what?

Andrew Lambirth

A loner with panache and presence

This is the first book about the Scottish artist William Gear (1915-97), an abstract painter of international standing with an emphatic style and bold sense of colour. The son of a miner, Gear was born in Fife and studied painting at the liberal and francophile Edinburgh College of Art. From the start he was marked out as a man of panache and presence, of inner certainty. The art he was making (after a brief Surrealist phase in the Thirties) was abstract and experimental, and looked to Europe rather than London. He was a good organiser and even managed to continue painting and exhibiting his work during the war though he fought in the army abroad. (He had wartime shows in Siena and Florence, and in Hamburg in 1947.

Jonathan Mirsky

Led by the nose

In the spring of 1972 I met what I still think was the bravest man in China. An ordinary factory hand, he told me that the officially invited American China academics, of whom I was one, who the previous day had been brought to his ‘typical workers’ house’ in Canton, had been told a pack of lies by him and his family. In essence it was a Potemkin flat in which none of the new-looking things — TV, bicycles, kettles, even the bedding — belonged to the family. They lived near by in typical squalor. I had re-met him by chance very early the next morning and this daring Chinese invited me into his real flat and astounded me by telling me about his real life.

Anne Chisholm

Clouds over the sunshine state

Throughout her successful writing career, which began in New York in the early 1960s, the American essayist, novelist and critic Joan Didion has demonstrated two qualities not often found together: emotional fragility and moral strength. As the cover photograph on this new book shows, she looks frail, exuding nerves and tension from behind huge, and trademark, dark glasses. She has written openly about her own vulnerabilities and, in her fiction, about shy, thin-skinned women hovering on the brink of psychological collapse; her most memorable novel, Play It As It Lays, has just such a heroine who stays sane by driving the freeways around Los Angeles for hours on end.

David Hughes

The box in the attic

As with the opposite sex, there are few books you fall for and want for life, even fewer with which you can find little fault. Here is a right stunner, if it happens to be your type — a secret family history, hitherto interred by the accidents of time, across the events of which the author stumbled by luck. A drawing on the wall at home caught Josceline’s adolescent eye. It was by Burne-Jones. Other clues to her prenatal past turned up. A relative found a japanned Victorian box in, guess where, an attic. A boring soldier or two surfaced from the bog of the Boer war. Her brother produced four flat leather boxes, from which generations of family scandals and eccentrics leap out of hiding.

Jane Ridley

The royal road to ruin

The old Oxford Histories of England were trusty bestsellers bound in pale blue wrappers. Hugely authoritative but often dull, they provided confident narratives of kings and governments, together with a chapter or so on culture and economics. The Clarendon Press has begun to update the series, and several volumes of a New Oxford History have so far been published. Geoffrey Searle has spent a lifetime working on Edwardian England, and he is well qualified to provide a new overview. This is no easy task. Searle’s massive book, over 900 pages long, is ambitious but uneven. For a start, there’s the problem whether a history which is really about Britain can still be described as a history of England.

Saturday

Montagu Curzon

The year of the comet

The Battle of Hastings, 1066by M. K. Lawson Tempus, £25, pp. 252, ISBN 0752426893 The Bayeux Tapestry, nearly 75 yards long, the mother of all newsreels and the father of all strip cartoons, was embroidered at Canterbury (most probably) some years after the Conquest. With ‘626 human figures, 202 horses, 55 dogs, 505 other animals, 49 trees, 37 buildings and 41 ships’, plus as many corpses, some stripped, some in bits, as any self-respecting modern movie, and two sex scenes, it is one of the world’s great historical documents and its survival is a minor miracle. Its vivid images are stamped on our views of 1066, and on a great deal of All That.

Interconnect

Ungumming the ‘papist’ label

This book is so important and good it deserves a more crowd-pulling title. Besides, is ‘Revival’ the right word? True, after a silence of 300 years some authors began to write from the Catholic point of view, but this has gathered no popular momentum. Also the word ‘Catholic’ in a title is likely to put people off. Speaking as a Catholic myself (an interest to be declared at once), I know well the kinds of expression a reluctant confession of my allegiance provokes: incredulity, or suspicion or, worse, a sort of loopy awe, as though a Catholic must be privy to other crackpot mysteries, such as the magical properties of crystals (or crystal balls).

Jonathan Sumption

Behaving badly abroad

The First Crusade is one of the great historical adventures. Whatever one may think of the consequences or the moral issues, the migration of perhaps 100,000 people across Europe and Asia Minor, and the conquest of a large part of the Middle East by the 20,000 or 30,000 survivors, all over the space of three years from 1096 to 1099, was an astonishing feat of endurance and martial skill. In their own time, the armies of the First Crusade created an ideology of holy warfare which retained its hold on European minds until the end of the 14th century, and arguably for 200 years beyond that. It also set standards of achievement for later generations which would never be attained again. The rest of crusading history is an almost continuous tale of retreat and withdrawal.

Piers Paul-Read

From negative to positive

The late J. G. Farrell, author of Troubles and The Siege of Krishnapur, used to say that he never read novels by contemporaries: the bad ones bored him while the good ones upset him because they had been written by someone else. I do not know what he would have made of William Nicholson’s The Society of Others, but for me it is a novel that I would dearly love to have written yet one whose message is an antidote to envy. It is exciting, funny, wise and beautifully written. The hero is a young man of 22 who, having graduated from university, remains shut up in his bedroom paralysed by a black cynicism. I see things as they are. Nature is selfish. All creatures kill to survive. Love is a mechanism to propagate the species. Beauty is a trick that fades.

Hermione Hobhouse

The greatest show on earth

This generously illustrated book serves two purposes. First of all, it celebrates the centenary of the reopening of the Crystal Palace which housed the 1851 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations in Hyde Park, at Sydenham in June 1854. In this role it traces the history of the build- ing reopened as a venue for Londoners. Secondly, it focuses attention on a very comprehensive and magnificent exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery, which covers both its brief period of glory in Hyde Park, and its longer, more problematic, existence in South London.

Claudia FitzHerbert

Doing something about your mind

Peter Conradi is a retired academic best known for his critical work on Iris Murdoch and, more recently, as her authorised biographer. The biography, though painstaking and full of interesting material, exemplified the difficulty of constricting a linear portrait of a thinker who not only wrote obsessively about mages and the electric currents — for both good and ill — around them but also herself occupied that territory in her relations with friends, lovers, acolytes, pupils and biographers. Going Buddhist turns this difficulty to triumphant advantage. Conradi’s friendship with Murdoch and their long conversation about matters of religion are one of several connecting threads in what is in effect a long essay about the author’s personal experience of the Path.

John De-Falbe

Blundering after a bird

Anyone who gave themselves the pleasure of reading Death and the Penguin should certainly treat themselves to this sequel. And if you missed it, never mind, read this one anyway: it’s delicious; it will not detain you long and you can always go back and catch up later on its predecessor. The earlier book left our hero Viktor somewhere near the Antarctic. He had intended to repatriate his penguin, Misha, but a spot of bother made it expedient for him to go there himself and leave Misha behind (complete with his new heart). Now he wants to get back to Kiev and find Misha. Kurkov fixes things briskly at the start of Penguin Lost and Viktor picks up the trail with a mafia boss, now aspiring People’s Deputy in Kiev. The plot is at once labyrinthine and simple.