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Saturday

Jeremy Clarke

How good was the Boyo?

When Dylan Thomas first lived at the Boathouse, Laugharne (tel. Laugharne 68) there was no electricity, no running water and the rats took liberties. Today it is a spick and span little gimcrack museum. I went there recently hoping perhaps for a faint psychic whiff of Wales’ most famous son. But the place has been tarted up to such an extent that gawping at the memorabilia behind the glass all I felt was a terrifying sense of alienation from the recent past. The other visitors were mostly Welsh. They wandered grimly from room to room, passing critical comments about the meagre furniture and complaining about the entry fee.

Harriet Waugh

Howard’s end reconsidered

Minette Walters is an unusually uneven writer. Although we know she is just one person it is as though there are two writers taking it in turns to produce the novels. Her last one, Fox Evil, was a histrionic, scrappy affair, while Disordered Minds is far more intriguing, and has characters that seriously engage your interest since what they are, in the wide spectrum of good and evil, is as much at the heart of the mystery as the gradually accumulating evidence. Two people come together to re-examine the facts that led to the conviction for murder in 1970 of a retarded young man called Howard Stamp. His reclusive aunt, Grace, like him afflicted with a cleft palate, was stabbed to death in her house. She had cuts on her legs and thighs before being dispatched in a frenzied attack.

Charlotte Moore

All you need is love

‘Cora sits at the bay window, writing, in a fat manuscript book with a lock, about a man she once married … and wishing in the nicest possible way that he was dead.’ At the beginning of this novel, Cora, former madame of the Hotel de Dream, Jacksonville, Florida, finds herself alone and lonely in Surrey, England, where she has no social, financial, legal or emotional status. Her lawful husband, the one she wants dead, is too concerned about his reputation to grant her a divorce. Her ‘real’, common-law husband is Stephen Crane, an American adventurer, acclaimed author of The Red Badge of Courage. He is the love of Cora’s life, but his wanderlust has driven him to report the war in Cuba, beyond her reach.

Judith Flanders

Beta plus and beta minus

Say ‘Rossetti’ to most people, and you will get back ‘Dante Gabriel’, or ‘Christina’, or perhaps a description of paintings of exotically beflowered, heavy-jawed women. It is impossible to imagine that anyone will respond with, ‘Of course, William Michael’, much less ‘Lucy Madox’. Angela Thirlwell, in her passionately argued double biography, wants to bring Dante Gabriel’s little brother and his wife out of the wings and into the spotlight. William Michael Rossetti’s main claim to fame was as aid and support to both his feckless, ultimately chloral-sodden brother and his retiring, home-loving sister.

Hugh Thomas

Question mark over Cuba

In the United States several diplomats have written profound books about countries where they have been posted. For example, the works on the Soviet Union by George Kennan and Chip Bohlen were among the most important studies of that once menacing empire. I remember little recently by British ambassadors apart from Percy Cradock’s admirable Experiences of China. Autobio- graphies there have, of course, been in plenty, amongst which I rank highest Lord Vansittart’s extraordinary The Mist Process- ion, a curious mixture of arrogance and melancholy, each chapter of which had as an epigraph a line from one of the author’s own poems. There was Eastern Approaches of Fitzroy Maclean with its famous vignette of the show trials of 1937.

Allan Mallinson

When believing is not all there is to seeing

In his 100-page introduction to the Collins Guide to the Parish Churches of England and Wales (1958), John Betjeman does not deem it necessary to explain any of the symbolism in architecture or decoration. It is interesting to speculate whether this was because he could have assumed that, despite only ‘scattered worshippers in the nave’, the majority of the country was churched, if only through the common rites of baptism, marriage and burial, or the National Service church parade. Just a decade later he could surely not have made that assumption.

Zenga Longmore

A bas la différence!

Kathy Lette’s latest novel begins with a zany one-liner: ‘How can we win the sex war when we keep fraternising with the enemy?’ The next sentence is a zany one-liner: ‘God, apparently as a prank, devised two sexes and called them opposite.’ The third is also a zany one-liner, and the fourth and the fifth. Aaagh! Wacky one- liners choke the book, rendering the reader gasping for gravity. They elbow aside both plot and characterisation, which is just as well, because the plot is profoundly absurd and the characters are clichéd cartoon cut-outs. Shelly, a schoolteacher, suddenly finds she is about to marry a total stranger, handsome American Kit, ‘butter-blond with a chiselled physique’.

Jane Ridley

Talking to some purpose

Nineteenth-century British politics used to be the historian’s bread and butter, but it has gone sadly out of fashion. Instead of the Great Reform Act, what every schoolgirl knows today is Hitler and Stalin, studied over and over again. The story of reform is too narrowly political for today’s tastes. The historians spoiled it too. Doctoral students were taught to comb the archives for correspondence, the more obscure the better, and the dense and tedious monographs they wrote about ‘high politics’ added very little to the big picture. Edward Pearce’s new book shows what a mistake it is to ignore reform. It is quite simply a splendid story. The fact that Pearce is a political journalist not a professional historian is probably an advantage.

Mark Amory

Blood-brother and king-maker

At a garden party in Kampala, Uganda, in 1994 I overheard Tom Stacey, a tall elegant figure, saying with some urgency, ‘The Bakonjo when I first met them 40 years ago in the west of your beautiful country …’ and later noted, ‘Tom is fascinating for quite a long time about Rwenzori, their king Charles Wesley, who must be made to come back from America, 14 of his people killed yesterday, how he loves the people; but then he goes on for longer than that.

Robert Stewart

Their knavish tricks frustrated

The Enterprise of England, the name given by His Most Catholic Majesty, Philip II of Spain, to the attempted overthrow of Queen Elizabeth I and the conquest of England, was part of a great plan. In 1588, when the Spanish Armada set sail for the English Channel, Philip already controlled the greater part of the accessible globe. But Europe was divided into Protestant and Roman Catholic camps and the Calvinist Spanish Netherlands were in revolt against rule from Madrid. If Philip could bring England back to Rome and, by taking possession of the powerful Tudor navy, gain the means to subdue the Dutch rebels, the Counter-Reformation and the Spanish Crown might carry all Europe before them.

Andrew Gimson

Hitler’s unbalanced Orangeman

Lord Haw-Haw: The English Voice of Nazi Germanyby Peter MartlandThe National Archives, £19.99, pp. 308, ISBN 1903365171 Although I yield to no one in my admiration of Mary Kenny as a journalist, an uncomfortable doubt arose in my mind as I read the lengthy acknowledgments with which she prefaces her biography of Lord Haw-Haw. I feared she might be too kind and generous a person to get the measure of William Joyce, the cruel, brutal, vulgar, hate-filled propaganda director of the British Union of Fascists from 1934-37, who during the second world war became, as Lord Haw-Haw, the outstanding exponent of the Nazi cause in the English language.

Some of our Regular Contributors

CHRISTMAS BOOKS 2

Hugh Massingberd Surrounded by spin, mealy-mouthed political correctness and Orwellian ‘newspeak’, I longed for the absolute frankness demanded by the Memoir Club of Old Bloomsubry — and found it in A. N. Wilson’s joyfully funny Iris Murdoch As I Knew Her (Hutchinson, £18.99); the tenth volume of James Lees-Milne’s addictive diaries, Beneath a Waning Moon (John Murray, £22.50); Beaton in the Sixties: More Unexpurgated Diaries edited by Hugo Vickers (Weidenfeld, £25); and James Delingpole’s Thinly Disguised Autobiogra- phy (Picador, £12.99), which contains the most truthful descriptions of sex from the male point of view that I have ever read.

Saturday

Anita Brookner

Travelling far without finding home

This unusual and nostalgic novel comes from a writer whose last work, The Transit of Venus, remains as startling and effective today as it did when it was published in 1980. The Transit of Venus was an open-ended love story whose development could only be pieced together from clues dropped unobtrusively in the text and which had to be assembled by the reader after some cogitation. Like Nabokov, Shirley Hazzard clearly believes that Fate has the best plots. The lovers, brought together at the close, are divided for ever by an accident barely signalled but as conclusive as death. Both had followed parallel paths but were distracted by other alliances, other displacements, which they were only able to overcome by virtue of that same fate that ultimately divided them.

Brian Masters

So nice and yet so Nazi

We are none of us, thank heaven, one-dimensional creatures easily and succinctly defined by a single characteristic. It is an obvious truth, yet was almost entirely ignored in the reporting of Diana Mosley’s death in Paris last summer, announced with the same clamour as had enveloped her for many of the last 70 years of her life. She was often vilified with a glee and enjoyment which carefully avoided any thought and latched on to the remorseless repetition of two simple facts, that she had been Hitler’s friend and Mosley’s wife. Ergo, she had to be detestable. To their great shame, even some serious historians were prepared to join in the ranting lest their political sense might appear to wobble. This biography is more responsible.

Douglas Johnson

The grand passion of a philosopher

Abelard has been made to play many roles in French history. In 1796 Alexandre Lenoir created the first museum of French national monuments. The French Revolution had abolished the past, but they thought that the French people should know about it. So the tombs of the French kings illustrated the continuity of French history, and alongside their magnificence the pathetic remains of Abelard and Heloise demonstrated the wickedness of the Ancien Régime. Those who visited the museum showed their sympathy for these victims of fanaticism and intolerance. In the 1850s we find the name of Abelard linked to the emergence of a wealthy class which is spending fortunes on collecting art and antiquities.

Caroline Moorehead

A new breed of heroes

When aid workers, battling in distant places to bring some kind of comfort and safety to displaced and miserable people, are asked why they do what they do, many reply that it all comes down to the immediate and very simple satisfaction of giving a hungry person something to eat. ‘There are,’ notes David Snyder, a young American whose chapter on Sierra Leone appears in a new anthology of pieces by humanitarian workers, ‘few such pure exchanges in life.’ Something of this unaffected matter-of-factness marks much of Another Day in Paradise, the ironic title Carol Bergman has chosen for her collection of front-line stories from the aid world. If one was seeking a definition of all that is not paradise, one need do no more than read this book.

Elfreda Pownall

Receipts and recipes

The Pedant in the Kitchenby Julian BarnesGuardian Books, £9.99, pp. 96, ISBN 1843542390 ‘I haven’t cooked since the War,’ proclaims the Duchess of Devon- shire in the introduction to her Chatsworth Cookery Book. Though it was put to her that writing a cookery book was, in that case, ‘like a blind woman driving down the M1’, she went ahead with blithe self-confidence. It is audacious for someone who has not cooked in 58 years to collect together her favourite dishes, but not absurd. Dr Johnson said, ‘You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table’, and some of the finest food writers of the past (e.g.

Stoker Hartington

A charming toff of the turf

John Oaksey is the archetypal English gentleman. He is a sweetheart, a star, the bravest of the brave, funny and kind: the only person who will disagree with this is himself. His modesty is complete, his successes are never his, the credit always goes elsewhere, to the horses mostly, or to his friends, his colleagues, his wives, his parents, his opponents, to luck. Wherever, but never to him. Through these lenses so tinted with generosity as to make them sometimes almost opaque, we are treated to an account of his life, which has been a series of successes, triumphs over adversity and victories in many fields. He tries to pretend otherwise, but this is a rare failure. Horse-racing dominates the story as it has dominated Oaksey’s life.

Andrew Roberts

A continuation of empire by other means

Melvyn Bragg’s superb new history of the English language is told as an adventure story, and rightly so. Brought to the British Isles in the 5th century AD by Germanic warriors, ‘this hungry creature, English, demanded more and more subjects’, until today, with 1.5 billion speakers, it is poised for global domination. Nearly strangled first by the Danes and then by the Normans, its special genius is for morphing its enemies into itself, like some monstrous sci-fi extra-terrestrial growing ever stronger by gobbling up its opponents’ tongues.

Hugh Massingberd

It’s being so cheerful that keeps me going

When asked why he was always so incredibly cheerful, David Niven (Stowe, Sandhurst and the Silver Screen) used to reply, ‘Well, old bean, life is really so bloody awful that I feel it’s my absolute duty to be chirpy and try and make everybody else happy too.’ Niven’s extraordinary charm and delightfully light touch made him the perfect choice for Bertie Wooster in Thank You, Jeeves (1936), his first leading role in Hollywood after he had risen from the ranks of Central Casting (‘Anglo-Saxon Type No. 2008’). John Mortimer, who gave the address at the actor’s memorial service 20 years ago, nicely summed up Niven’s life as ‘Wodehouse with tears’.