More from Books

Saturday

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?

Philip Hensher

Three founding fathers of the media

We had all probably agreed by now that the whole memoir thing was getting out of hand, and a UN-negotiated ceasefire between memoirists and suffering readers was urgently needed. We have had more than enough, surely, of whiny books about alcoholism, rape, criminal pasts, drug addiction, all of which culminate, for some reason, in a scene where the narrator sits alone in a hotel room and ‘considers committing suicide’. Enough already, as they say. But, hey, what do you know? Take the form away from juvenile American solipsists and give it back to a wily old English fox with some interests in life, and see how enchanting it instantly becomes.

Saturday

John Bayley

One of the great Russians

The Priest Who was Never Baptisedby Nikolai Leskov, translated by James MuckleBramcote Press, 81 Rayneham Road, Ilkeston, Derbyshire, DE7 8RJ, £13.95, pp. 216, ISBN 1900405121 In 1936 Stalin walked out of the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk which for two years had been performing with great success in Moscow and Leningrad. He objected that it was ‘modernist’, vulgarly sensational that is to say, as well as disgustingly pornographic. In fact altogether nekulturny. It was very nearly the end of poor young Shostakovich’s career; he had been just 26 when he completed the opera. With one or two alterations it was based on Leskov’s powerful sketch of 1865 with the same title.

Allan Mallinson

A well-calculated risk

Sir John Keegan’s account of the origins and conduct of the war in Iraq is at once striking for its succinctness. In a comfortable but pacey afternoon and evening’s read we have the long cultural and historical background to the region’s instability, the course and legacy of the 1991 Gulf war, the diplomatic build-up to war last year, the campaign itself, and the aftermath. It is a remarkable achievement, and one that the author himself at first doubted was possible in the timeframe. But Keegan’s editor at Hutchinson, Anthony Whittome, persuaded him that, once begun, the difficulties would dissolve. This conviction, that the story is essentially straightforward, before the fighting, during and after, Keegan demonstrates in masterly and often bravura fashion.

David Hughes

A child of Qwertyuiop

Employed by Reuter’s in the early 1930s, the author’s father introduced him at six years old to a typewriter. The empty office that weekend was soon filled with ‘the noise of a he-man at work’. The damage done Patrick Skene Catling in that moment of parental lapse led to ‘a twisted psyche’, moods that ranged from ‘nervous aspiration to arrogance to resentment and despair’, not to mention ‘the valley of the shadow of debt’. In other words a writer was born. No book can expect a compliment more heartfelt than ‘I enjoyed myself.’ This may be because, with a trace of reflected vanity, I see my own image in the mirror of Catling’s memoir.

Clemency Burtonhill

A man of many names and faces

If you’ll excuse the pun, Paul Delany’s biography of the man commonly dubbed ‘the greatest British photographer’ brings one thing sharply into focus. For Bill Brandt was not, as it happens, British at all, but was born in 1904 to German parents of Russian extraction — a fact he denied vehemently all his adult life. This rather fundamental inconvenience raises all manner of questions about psychological identity and the ethics and artifice of self-image-making. It also forces us to re-open the century-old can of worms as to whether an artist’s work can be more profitably understood by having some knowledge of their private life. The definitive word on this issue came in 1919 from Brandt’s contemporary T. S.

Sasthi Brata

Blood at the root

If you were talking to a group of particle physicists and mentioned the word ‘fundamentalism’, they would assume that you were referring to Isaac Newton (who kept his belief in alchemy a well-guarded secret). To stem-cell researchers fundamentalism would mean going back to Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of blood. Post-Darwinians wouldn’t pass the time of day with Creationists. Over six millennia of civilisation, fundamentalism was not only not a dirty word; the concept was the plinth, the fundamental basis, the trunk of the tree on which a system of beliefs was built and from which other branches grew.

Andrew Gimson

King of the charm offensive

There could scarcely be a more delightful way to remind oneself of the British and French statesmen who created the Entente Cordiale, signed on 8 April 1904, than to read this book. Ian Dunlop’s method of composition is unfashionable. It consists largely of the skilful selection of amusing passages from diplomatic memoirs and other works published during the last century, with no preference given to the latest research and certainly no attempt to make daring reassessments. This is history without the idea that we know better than those who made it; history where due respect is paid to the personalities involved, whose lives were set down in the ponderous volumes which gathered dust on our grandfathers’ shelves.

Sandra Howard

At sea with oneself

The Voyage Home is the third book I’ve read about Africa recently. Like the others it captures and distills the unique texture and smell of Africa, the touching sense of being a decade or two out of time. Both The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith, so wonderfully tender and funny, and Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller — civil-war-torn Rhodesia seen through the eyes of the author’s childhood self — brilliantly evoked early chapters of my own life in that part of the world. I haven’t lived in Nigeria but I was still transported back five decades by Jane Rogers’s new novel — one more than the period she is writing about for part of the story.

Francis King

Home town blues

A preliminary riffle through this novel is not all that encouraging. Three pages of spoof Acknow- ledgments (‘some of them are dead; most of them are strangers; the famous are not friends’) range from Graham Swift to Jonathan Swift and from Stevie Wonder to Ralph Vaughan Williams. There is a spoof Preface and a spoof 19-page index of ‘Key Words, Phrases and Concepts’ of absolutely no use even to a reviewer in a hurry. The jacket quotations from reviews of the author’s previous The Truth About Babies are also clearly spoofs (‘A kind of phenomenology of fatherhood’, TLS, ‘It’s cute and it comes with sharp little teeth’, RTE Guide, ‘Just naff’, the Times).

John Shaw

A backward Nowhere

There are hundreds of references to Molvania on the Web, and one airline shows passengers a video about the place, but it is not on the maps. Michelin does not mention Molvania. However, this book locates it ‘north of Bulgaria and downwind of Chernobyl’. A new Mittel-Europa republic emergent, Slovakia-like, from the fall of the Curtain and the Wall? The first clue to the mystery is the publisher’s logo, Jetlag Travel. The second is the London launch date, which was 1 April. Like Ruritania and Shangri-la, Molvania is on the atlas of imagined countries, not, however, for matinee romance or high adventure, but as the subject of a hilarious spoof of a backpacker Baedecker. The tone is Lonely Planet meets Monty Python.

Stuart Wheeler

The general and the particular

‘Gays are cowardly.’ ‘Capricorns are self-confident.’ Both prop- ositions are (pace astrologers) simply untrue or, as the author puts it, spurious. ‘Gays are more likely to get Aids than non-gays.’ There is plenty of evidence for this, although of course not all gays get Aids. So this is what the author calls a non-universal but also non-spurious proposition. What follows? Should gays pay a higher health insurance premium? If not, why not? Would it be discrimination? I found this book fascinating. The author quotes William Blake: ‘To generalise is to be an idiot. To particularise is the alone distinction of merit .

Christopher Woodward

To and from Russia without love

My Ladybird book of The Story of Napoleon had two pages to illustrate 1812. Napoleon sits on a white horse and watches Moscow burn, torched by fleeing Russians. Then the Grande Armée retreats, a column winding into a blurry, white oblivion. ‘With the thermometer seventy degrees below freezing’, read the text, ‘few of those who had crossed the river Niemen into Russia in June ever got back to France.’ But for a few images such as this — and War and Peace — not many English people know what actually happened. I didn’t, until I read this magnificent book. Adam Zamoyski is the first writer in English to have properly researched Russian, Polish and French sources.

Saturday

Andrew Barrow

Heirs and graces

This provocative, titillating and seductive novel is about upper-class affectations and ‘the mystery of unearned greatness’. It focuses on a network of rich, blue-blooded and slightly dim grandees which apparently stretches ‘far beyond national boundaries’. Snobs describes in forensic detail a world where duchesses are ‘taken in’ to dinner and desperate, social-climbing women feel deeply ashamed that they never ‘came out’. Can such people still exist? Can this fascinating story really be set in modern times, or at least in the late 1990s? A few contemporary references to Volvo estates and Partridge’s upmarket food stores are not enough to convince me.

Tony Geraghty

An unanswered SOS from the SAS

The epic survival story of the SAS patrol known as Bravo Two Zero during the first Gulf war until now, has largely overshadowed a darker story of incompetence and worse on the part of some of those who sent eight brave men into the desert on foot, on a Scud-hunt that was doomed from the start. In 1991, soldiers of the regiment’s B Squadron had been here before. A quixotic proposal to land a raiding party on an Argentine airfield a decade earlier, during the South Atlantic war, prompted a refusal on the part of some of the key players to perform. In cases such as these, a political imperative when things are not going well — the need to buoy up public morale, as in the ill-fated St Nazaire raid of 1942 — overrides military sense.

Michael Beloff

Some moaning at the Bar

This is a sad little story of the author’s annus horribilis as a pupil barrister in the late Nineties. Today the Bar bends ever deeper before the winds of modernisation — an all-graduate profession which subordinates even the best and brightest to the continuing rigours of further training and examination, piling acronym upon acronym — for those without a law degree the CPE (Common Professional Education) and for those with any degree the BVC (Bar Vocational Course). But the apprentice year as a tutee of a junior barrister remains in the new millennium the Bar’s mummified memorial to its mediaeval origins.

George St-Andrews

Old Baghdad in Hertfordshire

Who would have thought of Harrow as ‘the heathen temple’ or suburban Penge as Celtic pen ced, ‘head of the wood’? This new dictionary, the better part of 20 years in the making, re-enchants the prosaic and gives historical resonance to the timelessly English. We are reminded of the mixed Celtic, Roman, Scandina- vian, Germanic and other roots of what came to be England, and given Contin- ental and Indo-European parallels for English place-names. It tells the history of the landscape and of those who owned and worked on it, and is an invaluable companion to books like W. G. Hoskins’s classic Making of the English Landscape and Oliver Rackham’s History of the English Countryside. Take names of British Celtic origin.

Isabel Colegate

Sixth son of Himself

Have we had enough Irish childhoods, lackadaisical days remote from English stresses, charming eccentrics, amusing turns of speech, rain, religion, nostalgia? Well, no, not if they are as acute and funny as this tale of a Protestant boyhood in County Meath. Homan Potterton is the youngest of eight children of long-established farming stock. He grew up in the 1950s, in de Valera’s Ireland, insulated by its neutrality in the late war, quiet, poor, safe. The Pottertons had lived for the best part of 300 years at Rathcormick, a plain 18th-century farmhouse only embellished by a portico over the front door added with uncharacteristic grandeur by Old Elliott. Old Elliott was the cousin who left the property to Homan’s father on condition that he provided a son and heir.

Noel Malcolm

Taste and passion — with a dash of luck

Available from Heywood Hill, 10 Curzon Street, London W1J 5HH Producers of ‘period dramas’, on film or television, go to tremendous trouble to create the right ‘period look’. In the late Victorian town house, everything is late Victorian; in the Regency rectory, everything is Regency; and so on. All of which is, of course, absurd — not as absurd as having late Victorian things in the Regency house, admittedly, but absurd nonetheless. For most well-stocked houses — except those of the mail-ordering nouveaux riches —have always contained a mixture of styles, an accumulation of objects from earlier periods.