More from Books

Saturday

Adam Zamoyski

Solving the Polish conundrum

The Warsaw uprising of August 1944 was one of the most tragic episodes of the second world war, resulting in the destruction of the city and some 200,000 of its inhabitants. It is also one of the least well known. The fact that the Red Army had stood by while the city was pounded to rubble by the Germans meant that the subject was a touchy one in postwar communist Poland. And it was no less embarrassing to Poland’s wartime allies in the West, who had also failed to help. It was avoided by historians, as it aroused unease in those who liked to see the war as a straight- forward fight against the Nazi evil, and distaste in those with pro-Soviet sympathies.

Saturday

Lucy Moore

From chrysalis to butterfly

John Fowles’s diaries — or ‘disjoints’, as he calls them — are evidence of his own theory that while some writers have a genius for a specific genre, others ‘have merely a universal mind’. ‘I’m a mind-writer … I feel master of none, yet at home in all,’ he wrote in 1954, about halfway through this first volume which runs from his student days in 1949 until 1965. And why not present all one’s work — if one is a mind-writer (much more occupied with ideas than with words) — as it comes out; in years, or periods of time; short stories, fragments of plays, poems, essays, notes, criticisms, journals; the aim being a portrait of the total living artist, not a classified museum.

Jonathan Sumption

Politically almost too correct

Douglas Hurd’s political career ended only eight years ago, but it already seems to belong to another world. When he entered the House of Commons in 1974, at the age of 44, after a career in the diplomatic service, politics was still available as a second career. It had not yet been wholly professionalised. Overpowering ambition was not necessarily a qualification for the job. There was still a handful of fine political orators in the House, but Hurd felt no pressing need to add to their number. He was thoughtful without being original. He founded no movements. He joined no factions. He broke no moulds. Douglas Hurd built a distinguished career on being a competent man of business, decent, dependable and well-liked. He was dignified or aloof, depending on your point of view.

John Martin-Robinson

The stateliest and the starriest

This elegant synthesis (you can tell immediately that Simon Jenkins is an Oxford man and not a product of the other place) is intended to complement the author’s successful Thousand Best Churches. It could be argued that England’s houses are much better known than its churches and that this sister volume is hardly essential. ‘Not another book on country houses!’ Such an attitude would be graceless. For those who do not know their houses, this is an excellent general guide: it is impressively comprehensive in its coverage, and the entries are clearly written. For those who are already house buffs, Jenkins’s Best Houses should be regarded as an intelligent conversation with a friend.

Jonathan Keates

Tidings of comfort and joy

He was born to a virgin honoured with the attentions of the most high god. He assumed human form and gathered disciples around him who were derided for their adoration. Having performed a variety of miracles and made a journey to the underworld, he ascended to heaven, where he joined his father, president of the immortals, as the latest manifestation of personified divinity. In some versions of the story he took his mother with him. Was it embarrassment at the uncanny similarities between the myth of Dionysus (a.k.a. Bacchus) and the life of Jesus which caused early Christian writers to anathematise the cult of the pagan deity so vigorously?

David Crane

The sea monster that never was

It is never easy to tell a story that everyone knows and still harder to tell one that everybody thinks he knows. For more than 200 years the mutiny on the Bounty has been part of British folklore, and its main protagonists — William Bligh and Fletcher Christian — enshrined in myth as types of brutal oppression and romantic defiance. The interesting thing about the Bounty story, too, is just how early this popular caricature of events succeeded in passing itself off as history.

Robert Edric

Tales of the expected

Introducing the first true Dave Eggers’ McSweeney production (and it is a production — jacket, binding, illustrations, chapter headings and all) to be published here, Michael Chabon explains that the starting point for this eclectic collection is the notion that all the short genre fiction which once supported American magazines of the Fifties should be considered no less valid a part of the present literary landscape as the ‘sparkling, plotless and epiphanic’ stories of which it is all too often currently comprised. Where today, he asks — and here one has to wonder how hard he actually looked — is the ghost story, the horror story, the detective story, the story of suspense, terror, fantasy or the macabre?

Roger Lewis

A clump of plinths

The joke surely with Monty Python is that these trainee doctors, accountants, solicitors and bank managers, who met at college when they were reading law or medicine, never really stopped being those respect- able middle-class things. There’s an air of put-on daftness about the Pythons; this is an end-of-term cabaret by the chumps from Management and Personnel.

Matthew Dennison

A group of noble dames

‘Lucy could have wished that Florence were not quite so ingenuous. One should not seize on a delicate implication and put a pin through it,’ writes Frances Towers in ‘The Chosen and the Rejected’, one of ten short stories published in 1949, the year after the author’s death, as Tea with Mr Rochester, here reprinted by Persephone. Frances Towers’s writing is full of delicate implications; happily for the reader, each is neatly pinned. Such is the deftness of her touch, her elegant leger- demain, that she conceals the building blocks of her artistry, simply nudging the reader towards recognition of that implication that repeatedly in her stories provides the denouement.

Saturday

Andro Linklater

That land is their land

In 1961 the anthropologist Richard Mason was exploring a river in southern Amazonia when he was ambushed by a hitherto unknown tribe of Indians, later identified as the Panar.

Brian Masters

Aches and aphorisms

It is difficult to demonstrate why the Lees-Milne diaries, of which this is the tenth volume, are among the best of the 20th century. Easy to feel why, for you race through the pages with addictive passion, not wishing to miss a word, but awkward to justify the excitement. These are not records of momentous events (Greville or Nicolson or Channon), nor cleverly turned insults (overrated Alan Clark). They are simply the thoughts of an educated, emotional, rueful man with his eyes and ears perpetually on the alert for what makes human beings interesting or foolish, written with such tasteful ease one swallows them like Belgian truffles. They are nearer to Pepys than any other attempt at the genre.

Julie Burchill

Youth, I do adore thee

At the risk of being vulgar, I can’t help thinking that Dr Greer’s (‘At least she’s got an “ology!”’, I always say in her defence, when callow acquaintances mock her) attitude to matters sexual goes up and down like a bride’s nightie. Whereas most of us, thanks to our helpful male classmates, learn whether we are ‘frigid’ or ‘nympho’ back in Big School, and more or less manage to stick to these guidelines for the rest of our natural lives, the good professor’s libido has historically been all over the shop.

Stephen Abell

The play’s the thing

The early life of Arthur Miller reads a bit like the first chapters of The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow: a precocious Jewish boy during the Great Depression, an influential older brother, an adolescent sexual awakening with a prostitute. Indeed, his life as a whole — in which he was to marry and divorce Marilyn Monroe, be found in contempt of Congress for refusing to name (fellow) communists and write his century’s greatest play — contains narrative, novelistic elements that cannot fail to compel: sex and celebrity, politics and theatrics, tragedy and Tragedy. In 1987, Arthur Miller turned it into a narrative work in the sprawling, creatively crafted memoir Timebends, the Miller’s Tale against which any biography will inevitably be compared.

Ray Monk

When physicists don’t see eye to eye

When Michael Frayn wrote Copenhagen, he could surely scarcely have imagined the interest it would generate and the furore it would cause. A play that consists almost entirely of erudite conversations between two eminent physicists (Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg) about the development of quantum theory and the moral responsibilities of nuclear scientists is not obviously a crowd-puller. And yet, five years after its première, the play is still being performed and is still the subject of hotly contested academic debates at conferences throughout the world.

Peregrine Worsthorne

Family values under the hammer

In the course of John Campbell’s superb second volume of his Margaret Thatcher biography, he poses the question of what Alderman Roberts would have thought of the new Thatcherite Britain which his daughter did so much to create. It is a question which, to the best of my knowledge, has never been asked before. But it should have been since any attempt to answer it reveals the paradox at the heart of both her life and her life’s work. For, as Mr Campbell shows, Mrs Thatcher presided over and celebrated a culture of rampant materialism which was repugnant to everything her father stood for. While claiming to stand for thrift, she left behind a population with an unrivalled record of indebtedness.

Ian Garrick-Mason

A regiment to reckon with

In the spring of 1990, at the age of 21, I found myself sitting on an English hillside in the sun as one member of a brand-new training platoon of British squaddies. Having been marched up hill and down dale for a couple of hours that afternoon, we were handed large cans of beer by the corporals and told to stand up one by one — in front of the platoon, its NCOs, and its lieutenant — to explain what motivated us to join the Light Division. As a university-educated Canadian, my own reasons were odd-sounding and faintly naive, while the other soldiers’ reasons had an enviable clarity: ‘I got a job as a builder, but my supervisor was a twat. So I hit him in the head with my shovel.

James Delingpole

Ideas received or rejected

Until I read his enthralling account of what it’s like to be a middle-class sixtysomething crack addict, I’d never quite appreciated the genius of William Donaldson. I know his Henry Root letters are supposed to be very satirical but I found them a bit hard going myself — like a complex in-joke that you really need to have been somewhere weird like Harrow to understand. Initially, I felt the same way about I’m Leaving You Simon, You Disgust Me. Like Root, it’s sure to be found in every middle-class downstairs loo everywhere by the time Christmas is over, but on my first flick-through it seemed to me to fail in its most important duty: casual browsability.

Sebastian Smee

A great painter’s likeness perfectly caught

Robert Hughes has suffered no shortage of appalling things over the past five years. He has experienced deep depression and a second divorce; he suffered atrocious injuries in a car crash which came within inches of killing him, and has had to undergo 12 operations to piece his body back together again; a feeble attempt was made to blackmail him; he was tried for reckless driving; a scathing attack on his character was conducted in the Australian media on account of his perceived arrogance; he became an unwelcome figure of contempt in his own country, and his estranged only son committed suicide. From an outside perspective, all this has been dramatic and newsworthy, to be sure.

Saturday

Simon Jenkins

Speaking of God

Where is England’s smallest church? The question must have preoccupied nerdish retired vicars for centuries and is probably best answered then forgotten. Despite the title of this survey, John Kinross fails to give a clear answer. ‘Smaller’ churches would have been fine, but smallest raises expectations. The apparent shortlist is Culbone (Somerset), Dale (Derbyshire), Wide- mouth Bay (Cornwall) and Lullington (Sussex), though readers may devastate me with alternatives. Culbone is a delicious place nestling above the Bristol Channel beneath Exmoor, accessible only on foot a mile through the forest. On a sunny day with birdsong in the trees and sea glinting through the leaves, it is as sublime as any spot in England.

Interconnect

The other island

This massive volume weighs in at seven pounds on the bathroom scales and cost The Spectator £14.50 in stamps to send out for review. If it is difficult to write about, this is not because of its size and weight but because the eye is constantly caught and distracted by fascinating pieces of information, so that a reviewer reads on and postpones writing about it. (Which is, I suppose, the best mini-review such a compilation can hope for.) The general editor, Brian Lalor, says in his preface that ‘16 senior consultant editors and 50 consultant contributors have guided a standing army of 950 writers in four continents…’ and that the whole enterprise was able to be compressed into four-and-a-half years only because of email.