More from Books

Saturday

Raymond Carr

Only one factor among many

This is a fascinating book on a fascinating subject, written by a master of his craft as a military historian. Sir John Keegan’s declared purpose is to answer a simple question: ‘How useful is intelligence in war?’ The answer he gives is that, however useful intelligence is in disclosing the enemy’s intentions, strengths and weaknesses, wars are won not by knowledge but by brute force in battle. The modern fad to give primacy to knowledge he rejects as misleading. Addicts of spy fiction will be disappointed. Spies rarely supply relevant information in time for it to be of use. This book is not cloak and dagger stuff but a superbly researched series of case studies on the use of intelligence in war from the 18th century to the present war against terrorism.

Alberto Manguel

The precious core of civilisation

In 1989, two years before the Gulf war, I travelled to Baghdad to write an article on the Hanging Gardens of Babylon which the Iraqi Ministry of Culture then planned to have rebuilt. The project never materialised, but instead I was able to explore Baghdad and its intricate labyrinth. One experience was memorable above all: the discovery, in the National Museum, of two small clay tablets which had recently been unearthed in Syria, and dated back to the fourth millennium BC. Each tablet was the size of the palm of my hand and bore a few simple marks: a small indentation near the top, as if a finger had been stuck into the clay, and below it a stick-drawn animal meant to represent on one tablet a goat, on the other perhaps a sheep.

Peter Mckay

Animal funny farm

Working in the Washington DC of 1982, I noticed that friends and colleagues cut Gary Larson’s drawings from the Washington Post and stuck them on their fridges or office walls. On 28 October of that year, they were perplexed. Larson’s drawing featured a cow (standing human-style on its hind legs) behind odd-looking objects, bones of some kind, resting on a trestle table. The caption said, ‘Cow tools’. What did it mean? Next day, there were stories on the wire services saying Larson fans nationwide were in crisis. No one got the joke in ‘Cow tools’. There were discussions on university campuses and on TV and radio shows. A reader in Texas wrote to their local paper: Enclosed is a copy of ‘Cow tools’ of last week. I have passed it round.

Fiona Maddocks

How to shut up and listen

Stuck for the bumper Christmas gift? Try Robin Holloway’s collected essays of music criticism. It is impressively big and will take about five years to read if you listen to the music discussed at the same time. Since that includes most of Wagner and Strauss and plenty of Brahms, Bruckner and Mahler, you will have little time left over to indulge in snooker or bridge. No thanks, you smirk. A brick would do better as a door-stop. That was certainly the attitude of at least two major publishing houses, including Faber, when they turned the manuscript down. Fools. They should have known better. This outstanding book, gathered to mark Holloway’s 60th birthday, is one of the most invigorating, elegantly written and passionate of its kind.

Jane Gardam

Bloody-minded and unbowed

The head of history at a well-known English girls’ school was wont to say that she had learned nothing at Cambridge and all her history had been set in place at the age of ten by The Children’s Encyclopaedia. Rebecca Fraser will know exactly what she meant. Massively informed, she is as unstuffy as the rest of the Fraser historians. On page one of her introduction she mentions ‘the immortal words of 1066 and All That’. She has written this splendid history of Britain — 800-odd pages from the arrival of the Romans to Queen Elizabeth II’s Golden Jubilee — because she could find nothing like it for her own children.

Andrew Lambirth

Doing the state some service

At university I had a tutor who would announce once a year, when the subject duly came round, ‘I’m too emotionally involved with Simone Martini. I can’t lecture on him. I’m now going to the Buttery. Any or all of you are welcome to join me there.’ And he would depart, trailing clouds of glory for the more romantically minded, but furthering my education in Sienese painting not a jot. I could have done with this book then. For Simone Martini is one of the key figures discussed in this excellent new study, an early Sienese master along with the Lorenzetti brothers, Pietro and Ambrogio.

A.N. Wilson

The elusive face of God

The biographical note on the jacket of this magisterial book tells us that Professor Geza Vermes was born in Hungary in 1924 and that from 1957 to 1991 he taught at the universities of Newcastle and Oxford. It also tells us that ‘his pioneering work on the Dead Sea Scrolls and the historical figure of Jesus led to his appointment as the first Professor of Jewish Studies at Oxford’. His moving autobiography Providential Accidents, which is not mentioned in this short blurb, tells us how he was caught up at the most painful imaginable level in the central drama of 20th-century history in Europe, namely in the culmination of centuries of Christian anti-Semitism.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

A ruthless ally

One of the paradoxes of our age is that the hereditary principle is in eclipse everywhere except the first great republican democracy. With all our faults, we love our house of peers no more, and there are no longer any political dynasties in England (unless you count Benn) or elsewhere in Europe. But the last American presidential election was contested between the son of a former president and the son of a former senator; while the most famous American president of what one of his vice- presidents called the century of the common man was a rich patrician who grew up as far as could be imagined from the proverbial log cabin.

Saturday

Anne Chisholm

Granny takes several trips

Why, oh why, would a pleasant-looking, intelligent woman of 66, a retired English teacher with a grown-up son living in California, place an ad in the New York Review of Books announcing her age and inviting men to approach her for sex and then publish an account of the gruesome encounters that followed? A profound desire to be noticed as a writer seems a more likely answer than a need for erotic adventure; this is a book which takes the literature of exhibitionism to new heights. Ostensibly, it was an Eric Rohmer film in which a woman of fortysomething advertises for a lover on behalf of a friend that gave Jane Juska her bright idea. However, her book — which is, on the whole, well-written as well as funny and brave — offers several other clues.

Justin Marozzi

Beholding sundry places

Here’s a Christmas present for anyone with a serious interest in travel. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an armchair aficionado or grizzled explorer. There’s something for everyone, as they say. Eric Newby, the octogenarian doyen of the travel-writing genre, has put together a wonderful literary journey through the centuries and across the seven continents. Where to begin? How about Herodotus, Father of History, affable Greek aristocrat and probably the world’s first travel writer to boot? Here we find him musing on the unfathomable geography of Europe, ending his erudite aside with the splendidly modern conclusion, ‘But that is quite enough on this subject.

Harry Mount

Sexing up American history

This lovely little bluffers’ guide to the founders of the American Republic came out of a chat Gore Vidal had in 1961 with his old friend, John F. Kennedy. There they were, Jack, Bobby and Gore, lounging around the Kennedy holiday compound in Hyannis Port after a vigorous game of backgammon — Gore won. Jack — ‘dear Jack’ — and Gore fell into conversation, although it was less of a conversation than a question-and-answer session. Need you ask who was doing the questioning and who was giving the answers? The President of the United States was the pupil, Vidal his master.

Stephen Abell

Making it a just so story

This new collection is, surprisingly for a little black book, decidedly unsexy. In fact, A. S. Byatt — unsurprisingly, perhaps, for those readers who persisted through the Victorian mumblings and fumblings of Possession — does bad, awkward sex rather well. Here is a gynaecologist and an art student getting together (note especially the prophylactic double negative of the last sentence): She put cold fingers on his lips, and then on his sex, which stirred. He touched her, with a gynaecologist’s fingers, gently and found the scars of the ovarectomy, a ring pierced into her navel, little breasts with rings in the left nipple ... She began, not inexpertly, to caress him. Elsewhere, a wartime couple fiercely go ‘at it ...

Caroline Moorehead

Above and below blood temperature

Who Killed Daniel Pearl?by Bernard-Henri Levy, translated by James X. MitchellDuckworth, £20, pp. 454, ISBN 0715632612 The last time Mariane Pearl saw her husband Daniel, correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, she was preparing a celebratory dinner for their last night in Karachi, and he was setting off for a final interview he believed crucial for a story about the ‘shoe bomber’ and the fundamentalist Islamic underground groups in Pakistan. She was six months pregnant. Pearl, by all accounts, was an energetic, loving, humorous man, full of intelligence and curiosity. He never returned. Eight days later, his kidnappers murdered him.

Andrew Barrow

The Dutch manipulator of the Pelvis

Behind many great stars of stage and screen lurks a mysterious, sometimes sinister manager figure, minder or mastermind, whose precise role in their protégé’s life, especially in terms of creative input, may be hard to define. Richard Burton’s career was kick-started by the Welsh schoolmaster whose surname he took. Tommy Cooper’s affairs were handled for years by a character called Miff Ferrie who lived in Eaton Square. My fragile friend Michael Barrymore was frogmarched to precarious stardom by his amazing wife Cheryl. And even poor little Tom Thumb had the great P. T. Barnum to give him stature.

Interconnect

Hunting the killer rhyme

Twenty years ago Clive James’s poetry represented all that I most disliked about contemporary Englit. For a start it was practically ubiquitous. Barely had one laid down the Christmas number of the London Review of Books containing a lengthy Jamesian summary of the bygone year, it seemed, than one walked into a bookshop to find a remaindered copy of Charles Charming’s Challenges winking at one from the bargain bin. Then again, an air of metropolitan cliquishness rose off its shiny surface like sweat.

Anita Brookner

A season in hell

When Philippe Labro, novelist, journalist, cineast, television producer and man about Paris, woke up one morning in 1999 at his usual hour of three o’clock it was with a profound and intimate conviction: ‘Quelque chose a changé.’ This was not occasioned by a physical malaise, although his bedclothes, even his pillows, were drenched with sweat, a phenomenon that was to recur in the days and weeks that followed, but something more seismic, what Scott Fitzgerald had called ‘the crack-up’, a nervous breakdown, unheralded and prolonged, from which he emerged two years later. Unavailing attempts at the sort of cure conscientiously recommended by doctors, who prefer to describe the process as depression, were just as conscientiously undertaken.

Marcus Berkmann

Letting it all hang out

For all of us who are paid to make jokes about pop music, Sting is a bit of a godsend. Earnest to the point of pomposity, visibly self-satisfied and even more serious about his music than George Michael, the former teacher and long-term sex symbol has come to represent a certain sort of middle-aged rock star: one that needs taking down a peg or two. And so we try, but it never makes any difference. Despite his prickly public persona, Sting has sold millions of records around the world and continues to sell them, unlike most of his contemporaries. More astoundingly yet, he has maintained this level of success while only ever making the music he wants to make.

Aidan Hartley

The age of innocent adventure

Between antiquity and the 18th century, aside from a couple of Portuguese priests in Abyssinia, we have no record of Europeans venturing into the heart of Africa; incredible but true. Following in the priests’ footsteps came James Bruce, the Scottish laird who returned home to be ridiculed by Dr Johnson for his tales of Ethiopians hacking steaks from living cattle. Anthony Sattin picks up his narrative after that in 1788, when at last Sir Joseph Banks, veteran of Cook’s voyages and a beacon of Enlightenment science, brought together a circle of learned friends in a London tavern to found the African Association. Their challenge was daunting, yet simple. The Association would fill the empty spaces on Africa’s maps with towns, rivers and mountains.

Saturday

Brian Masters

The prank that grew to giant proportions

The story has been told dozens of times already, but never gets dull, and until the 1996 McDonald’s libel case there had not been a longer saga played out in any English court. From 1867 the Tichborne claimant dominated conversation for years, and people openly despaired they might die before a verdict was reached. Photographs of the claimant outsold those of the royal family, and such was the hypnotic fascination of the case that even they fell victim to it, the Prince and Princess of Wales sitting next to the judge on the bench on one occasion (on another, George Eliot was in the public gallery).

Olivia Glazebrook

Predictable plots, familiar faces

A Place of Hidingby Elizabeth GeorgeHodder & Stoughton, £18.99, pp. 576, ISBN 034076709X Blacklistby Sara ParetskyHamish Hamilton, £12.99, pp. 432, ISBN 0241141885 I have in front of me three novels, all of which are over 400 pages long. Their average length, in fact, is 482 pages and their average weight is 783g. A Place of Hiding is Elizabeth George’s 12th novel. Blacklist is Sara Paretsky’s 12th novel. And Blow Fly is the 12th Scarpetta novel (although Patricia Cornwell has written a total of 18 books). So from three authors we have a total of 42 books which, if you bought the lot, might easily cost approximately £800, weigh in at a total of around 20kg, and number 16,000 pages at a conservative estimate. That’s just three authors.