More from Books

Saturday

Digby Durrant

Always her own woman

The Grandmothers consists of four novellas, very different from The Golden Notebook, that sprawling, seemingly unedited, over-talkative, rather wonderful book that made Doris Lessing famous and became as stirring a call to arms for the swelling ranks of the feminist movement as Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch. Lessing disliked being pigeon-holed like this, insisting it was the whole of the human condition not just a part that fired her imagination. In 1971 she wrote, ‘The whole world is being shaken into a new pattern by the cataclysms we are living through … if we do get through … the aims of Women’s Liberation will look very small and quaint.’ None of this bothers Lil and Roz in the title story.

Helen Osborne

A bland and baleful stoic

‘Woke up this morning feeling fine. Notices for Lorca’s comedy, Jack’s the Lad, terrific (even from that goof on the Times). Rehearsals for the new Arnold Wesker a real gas. Long lunch with Aimé Planchon (hot French bombshell); short siesta; drinks party at NT for all of us with CBEs … rest of evening a bit of a blur.’ April Fool. National Service, Richard Eyre’s diary of his ten years (1987-97) at the helm of the bunker on the South Bank, reads like Penal Servitude. What a chronicle of woes, crises and wariness, of ‘panic, insecurity and inadequacy’. The mystery is why Eyre, in his father’s phrase, chose to ‘nail his balls to the wall’.

Jane Ridley

The theatre of the globe

Atlases are things that one takes for granted, but they have an interesting history. This book tells the story of the world’s first atlas, which was published in Antwerp in 1570. It was the brainchild of a Dutchman named Ortelius. Of course, maps had existed for many centuries. Ptolemy put together a Geographia in Roman Alexandria in the 2nd century AD. But mediaeval men weren’t really interested in maps which were topographically accurate. For them maps were conceptual — a sign language about Christendom, centring on Jerusalem. This all changed during the Renaissance. Explorers such as Magellan logged their voyages, and the first recognisable world map appeared in 1507. Merchants needed maps too, and cartographers developed the maths to draw to scale.

Bevis Hillier

Gallery crawl with a guiding star

In the ancien régime of John Murray (before the publishing firm was taken over by Hodder Headline) it used to be joked that their typical book title would be Sideways Through Abyssinia by Freya Stark. Rupert Hart-Davis suggested as a characteristic Faber title How to Grow Grass on an En Tout Cas Court.

Some of our Regular Contributors

CHRISTMAS BOOKS 1

Clive James Three books of non-fictional prose kept me awake like thrillers. Frederic Raphael’s The Benefits of Doubt (Carcanet, £14.95) is an exemplary book of humanist essays, although I would hate to have him doubting me, because he makes me laugh too hard when he doubts Heidegger. Published posthumously, D. J. Enright’s Injury Time (Pimlico, £12.50) is only part of his memorial: the full set of his volumes of casual reflections distills the civilised views of an era. Richard Eyre’s National Service (Bloomsbury, £18.99), subtitled ‘The Diary of a Decade’, inhabits two different political worlds. ‘Terrifying events in Yugo- slavia,’ he notes on 18 April 1993, ‘and we’re helpless.

Saturday

Nicholas Fearn

Airbrushing out and filling in

If one ever wonders just how important memory is to our selfhood, consider patients in the later stages of Alzheimer’s disease. The condition as good as demonstrates that there is no afterlife, because if you can be dead when you are alive, then you can certainly be dead when you are dead. Without memory our minds are nothing, which should have made the cynical among us realise long ago that something so important could not possibly be fully under our control. According to the research psychologist Daniel Schacter, memory is far from the passive aide we imagine — the dutiful if fallible servant who hopefully brings us what we need, when we need it.

Olivia Glazebrook

A girl’s own adventure

Olivia Joules is born Rachel Pixley, a ‘normal schoolgirl, living with two parents in Worksop’. But after she is cruelly orphaned, sent to live with a batty aunt, and then abandoned by her boyfriend she takes ‘a long hard look at life’ and decides to ‘search this shitty world for some beauty and excitement’. She reinvents herself and arrives in London as Olivia Joules: thin, clever, fanciable, quick-witted and well-dressed. In fact, she is damn near perfect — the kind of girl other girls might resent — but of course no one knows girls better than Helen Fielding, so Olivia has a touch of daffiness. Now we like her after all.

Murray Sayle

The Marxist and the Methodist

Even in his glory days Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, durable president of the Republic of China, had his critics. American liberals derided him as ‘Cash-my-cheque’ in acknowledgment of the monstrous corruption of his in-laws, although not of the abstemious Gimo, as his grandiose rank was usually abbreviated, himself. General Joseph ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell, the American chief of staff forced on him by President Roosevelt, referred to him as ‘The Peanut’ because of his short stature and shiny bald head, and described him to a journalist as ‘an ignorant, illiterate, superstitious, peasant son-of-a-bitch’.

Interconnect

Plumbing the freezing depths

Pretty soon after beginning his two-week descent into the Dantean world of the modern deep-sea North Atlantic trawler, Redmond O’Hanlon, far too old to be anywhere near one of these boats, let alone in January, let alone with a Force 12 Category One hurricane in the offing, not to speak of the burden of being ‘Worzel Gummidge’ or ‘Mister Writer-Man’, as the trawlermen call him, with his incomprehensibly expensive camera equipment and his vast literary-cultural-natural-historical baggage, lies in the cramped coffin of his bunk and starts to feel sick: My gullet and stomach rose out of my body.

Anne Chisholm

The butler’s done it now

In all the uproar of indignation surrounding the publication of this book, Paul Burrell’s riveting, hilarious and ultimately rather touching account of his time as a royal servant in general and butler to Diana, Princess of Wales, in particular, one curious fact has been obscured. He was, and appears to remain, so far, the most tremendous monarchist. Just as his late employer convinced herself that she could, if only she was permitted, be a shining force for good in the royal family and indeed the whole world, so Burrell believes that by breaking all the rules of loyalty and confidentiality he is actually doing his victims a service. Both of them, blinded by self-regard and publicity and short on common sense, can have had no idea of the amount of damage done.

Raymond Carr

Battling for Britain Prussian style

During my first term at Oxford in 1938, when walking down the south side of the Christ Church quad, I passed a large man in a bowler hat and a smart London suit. The only persons in the college who wore bowlers were the porters and most dons followed David Cecil’s advice to dress in Oxford as if staying in a modest country house. The large man was clearly a man of importance but he seemed out of place. I was no wiser when told that he was Professor Lindemann, the owner of a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce and a private bathroom in his college rooms, both unheard of luxuries for a don. Adrian Fort traces his rise to eminence in this scholarly book which provides fascinating, if sometimes disconcerting, glimpses of the world of science and government in the 1930s and 1940s.

Montagu Curzon

Backing into the limelight

The traditional boffin, as is well known, wore round specs and a white coat, tended to be rather bald, and was soft of speech and mild of manner whilst devising the destruction of thousands. Hammed up, he became the figure of Q, indispensable component of James Bond films; older black and whites show the genuine article. Alas, he is gone, his devices scrapped or obsolete, along with the concept of the Britain that he served. Francis Spufford has, and gives, a lot of fun arguing that a neo-boffin has appeared to take his place, following the painful demise of the manufacturing economy and the rise of what he tactfully calls ‘something else’.

Philip Hensher

It’s the same the whole world over

One has to ask the question: is this, intrinsically, an interesting subject? Personally, I would say not. Homosexual-ity, fairly clearly, is a genetic or innate human variation, comparable to left-handedness and probably occurring, like left-handedness, in about 5-10 per cent of humanity. That is, rationally speaking, about the limit of its intellectual interest: and who on earth, even left-handed people, would read a history of left-handedness? Of course, for various other reasons, homosexuality does acquire a sort of social history, because it was rarely allowed to rest as simply a biological variation, but was turned into a sin, a disease or a crime by society at large.

Saturday

Simon Courtauld

Dogged by ill fortune

Sir Ranulph Fiennes has done Captain Scott’s memory some service. For the past two decades, since Roland Huntford’s devastating demolition job — Scott bad, Amundsen good — was first published (also by Hodder & Stoughton) in 1979, ‘the world’s greatest explorer’ has dropped quite a few places in the league table. Fiennes may not have succeeded in putting his man back at the top of the first division, but he has certainly written a more dispassionate and balanced account than Huntford ever set out to do. Yet Fiennes is not entirely objective. A distingushed polar explorer himself, he is, like Scott, a manhauler.

George Osborne

A soldier breaks ranks

Here’s a good rule of thumb: never read a book by a politician running for office. Whether it is George W. Bush’s folksy evangelism in A Charge to Keep or the then Opposition Leader Tony Blair’s toe-curdlingly awful New Britain: My Vision of a Young Country, they are all the same. Safe, saccharine, ghost-written by some aide, full of ‘let me tell you about the wonderful lady I met helping inner city kids’, they are little more than political manifestos with a dust jacket. However, every rule has its exception. General Wesley Clark’s Winning Modern Wars is just such an exception. Perhaps that is because Clark says he wrote the book this summer, before he finally decided last month to run for the presidency. Thankfully, it shows.

Andrew Gimson

Getting both socks on

Children, like dogs, need to be trained. After this promising start, Cassandra Jardine sets out to offer parents some practical advice on how to teach children ‘good habits from an early age’. Heaven knows such advice is needed, not least because, as Jardine remarks, ‘Many is the time when the children of delightful parents have left me speechless with irritation as they behave boorishly around our house.’ I had hoped, after reading her opening remarks, that Jardine was going to come down like a ton of bricks on modern parents and belabour us for spoiling our children rotten.

Tom Stacey

Shooting lions and lines

It’s not fair to blame a book for its subject — a book by a decent fellow who delights in Africa in the wild, a book of charm and perception, thoughtfully put together on fine paper with pictures in sepia which make you see and smell the African bundu where the author followed loyally in Hemingway’s footsteps or vehicle tracks or light aircraft hops.

Lloyd Evans

Rocks and guts and bullocks

Ted Hughes was the first living poet I loved. The same is probably true for countless kids who went to school in the 1960s and 70s. The general rule that classroom study engenders a lifelong dislike of poetry must make an exception of Hughes. Only a teacher of chart-topping ineptitude could prevent a child from enjoying those magical early portraits of animals. I still remember the sensational shudder that ran through me at the opening of ‘The Jaguar’: ‘The apes yawn and adore their fleas in the sun.’ It was ‘adore’ that got me. Pluck or pick or squash or sift, yes, I was ready for those, but ‘adore’. It didn’t belong but it belonged. For me it was like the moment when the lozenge cracks and honey floods your tongue.

Byron Rogers

From the sublime to the ridiculous

Hah, that’s had you fumbling with your bi-focals, but no, there is no printing error. It is £375. The Gregynog Press, which in 1923 started its eventful history with a volume of poems by George Herbert, has now 80 years later published a selection chosen by his kinsman the Earl of Powis, with engravings by Sarah van Nierkerk. This appears on the eve of the UK Fine Press Book Fair in the Oxford Brookes University on 1 November and it would require a battalion of the British Army to prise its purple quarter leather and gold lettering from hands which have never held anything like this before. My hands. And I have not done, for there is more. Beyond this edition there is another, of 15 copies in dark purple goatskin on dyed calf, with endbands of purple and grey silk.

Jonathan Mirsky

More honest than most

It is a mark of the excellence of this memoir by the highest-ranking woman in American history, ex-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, that it could not have been written by a man. Imagine Douglas Hurd saying that the happiest years of his life were with a spouse who dumped him for a younger woman and that if he could have kept his wife he would have given up a public career. In his recent memoir, in fact, Mr Hurd skates past his divorce, while the serialisation of her book and recent interviews with Ms Albright have mentioned barely anything else. Or imagine a male foreign minister saying, after days and nights of negotiations with the Israelis and Palestinians, ‘I had eaten so much junk food in nine days I had trouble fitting into my clothes.