More from Books

Saturday

Kate Chisholm

Rebellion in the suburbs

First published in 1914, two years after he had married Virginia, Leonard Woolf’s second novel The Wise Virgins must have shocked its readers with its tale of an unfortunate coupling and hasty marriage. Now the romance/sex all seems rather tame, and this fiction startles for a very different reason: its harsh caricature of Jewishness (Woolf himself was Jewish) and its tart comments on suburban life. From the first page, Woolf reveals himself as an astute observer of social undercurrents: The thin brick walls and the manners of civilisation divide the stockbrokers, the lawyers, the merchants, the rich and the poor into families, as effectually as the jungle and ferocity divided their savage forefathers.

I K-Gricer

The beauty of signal-boxes

The Duke of Bedford insisted that railway stations built on his estate had to be picturesque. He chose a half-timbered design based on Loudon’s Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm and Railway Architecture. His stations can still be seen from that improbable survival, the slow train from Bletchley to Ridgmont, Millbrook, Fenny Stratford and Woburn Sands. Future dukes in search of ideas can now thank Gordon Biddle for a new encyclopaedia. In Britain’s Historic Railway Buildings they can look up stations, tunnels, viaducts and signal-boxes all the way from Penzance — where Brunel’s original station was described as a large dog’s house of the nastiest and draughtiest kind — to the king-post roofs of Wick and Thurso. The range is prodigious.

Graham Stewart

Northward and upward

This first volume of Bill Clinton’s biography, taking the story as far as his presidential election victory in 1992, comes at a peculiar time. Unlike many of the hasty invectives pronounced upon the 42nd president, Nigel Hamilton’s study is written on the grand scale, drawing on much of the published record and delving further with interviews and insights. Yet it has been published too late to take account of what Hillary Clinton has to say in her recent chart-topping memoirs (soon to be a staple of second-hand bookshops). And it has been published prior to Bill Clinton’s autobiography and the release of his archives. Nigel Hamilton has put in an awful lot of work for a biography that will soon be comprehensively superseded by the release of new material.

Marcus Berkmann

What you see is what you get

What’s It All About? joins Bob Geldof’s Is That It? and Auberon Waugh’s Will This Do? on a shelf of wryly self-questioning autobiographies, although, unlike the other two, it doesn’t make even a ghost of an attempt at answering the question. For this is Cilla Black, beloved popular entertainer, mighty-lunged singer of the 1960s and full-time professional Scouser for 40 years. Her book has been scheduled to coincide with nationwide celebrations of her 60th birthday (preparations for our street party are well advanced). It’s also the first autumn in living memory when she hasn’t been on TV every weekend presenting Blind Date. So it may be that after all this time her career is finally winding down. A good moment to write it all up, then.

Byron Rogers

All knickers and knockers

Whatever else this is, an intimate portrait of Mrs Parker Bowles it is not, or at least not one written by the author. This is a scissors-and-paste job, the bones of earlier would-be biographers whitening in every chapter, which gives it an air of California or Bust. Clearly done at speed, there are many errors of punctuation and of typography (Welsh has a lower-case throughout), and one can almost hear the prayer, ‘Lord, there be 2,000 words by lunchtime, and nothing decent on TV this afternoon. Oh dear, why ever did I sign that contract? Ah well, that’s paid the nanny for another six months.’ Because, with the exception of Jilly Cooper who gives the project her imprimatur on the dust jacket (‘I’m a great fan of Rebecca Tyrrel’s ...

Philip Ziegler

Sounding the last post

The work of the obituarist is not unlike that of the book reviewer. Both have to tell their reader what the subject of their piece is all about; both have to pass judgment on its merits and demerits; both have to provide something which will be entertaining as well as informative. Under the direction of Hugh Massingberd and with the encouragement of the editor, Max Hastings, the Daily Telegraph made obituaries a leading feature of the paper — a fashion which has been followed by most of London’s broadsheets. This book assembles 100 of them, dealing with soldiers who died between 1987 and 2002. Where obituaries and book reviews differ is that if the reviewer dislikes a book he need not be too mealy-mouthed in inveighing against its failings.

Harry Mount

Hobbling the sacred cows

Here’s a real cure for anyone with a bad case of things-are-getting-worse-itis. Written in 1962 principally for the American market, London Perceived has now been republished over here for the first time in 40 years, which seems staggering. I’ve never read a better summary of London or Londoners. And it has hardly dated at all. The sombre — and beautiful — black and white photographs are so elegiac that you’re conned into thinking that here is a sombre — and beautiful — but long-vanished city. The differences between London then and London now, though, are surprisingly few.

Eric Anderson

The old order changeth

As a historical novel Thomas Gage is more Hardy than Tolstoy. The classic historical novel — as concocted by Walter Scott and perfected by Tolstoy — gives the reader an unexpected viewpoint from which to witness a great historical moment. Fictional characters with fictional relationships are the centre of attention, but they weave in and out of the company of historical figures and take part in great events. Thackeray leaves Dobbin dead on the field of Waterloo beside the genuine casualties of the day; Scott removes Waverley from Prince Charles’s army to spare him a similar fate at Culloden.

Philip Hensher

Native wood-notes wild

This is an exceptional biography, which is just as well, since I don’t think one could bear to have the heartbreaking story it tells recounted carelessly. John Clare is one of the great Romantic poets, but his history and origins have always meant that he was either treated with neglect or used by his admirers for their own ends. This unusually tactful and sympathetic book tries, for once, not to claim Clare for any particular cause, but to see what he was trying to do in his own terms. Clare came from the poorest of the agricultural classes, and indeed continued working as a labourer even when he had attained some literary celebrity.

Saturday

Nigel Nicolson

Spillikins of wisdom

This is not exactly an autobiography — John Mortimer has written three already, one about old age — but more like a collection of reminiscences designed to inspire and warn his grandchildren of the delights and pitfalls of life. It is a testament, the ‘Will’ of his title, in which he bequeaths to them the experience of a long life. There is not much about what he will leave to them in tangible goods, though a house, its furniture, art and garden, and a bit of cash, are not to be sneezed at. What he leaves them is his wisdom, and this he conveys in a loose, anecdotal, joky, non-preachy way, knowing full well that experience cannot be transmitted but must be acquired, generation by generation.

Victoria Glendinning

For ever taking leave

Martha Gellhorn, an American who lost faith in America, was one of the most important war-reporters of the 20th century. She was not interested in briefings from the top brass, though she sometimes used her blonde charm to get the top brass to fly her where she needed to go. What she did, in her own words, was to ‘bear witness’ to what war did to innocent people, especially children. She found her stories on the street and in the orphanages. Her style was pared-down and succinct, powered by outrage. She believed in the ultimate supremacy of goodness and justice until she went into Dachau. Then, seeing what she saw, she gave up hope. Caroline Moorehead makes Dachau the hinge and the determining event of her intelligent and sensitive biography.

Tim Congdon

Not such a low and dishonest decade

If it is to be interesting, contemporary history has to be a battle between good guys and bad guys. In his The Roaring Nineties Professor Joseph Stiglitz lets the reader know at an early stage in the proceedings that he is a good guy. As he says in the preface, when he first fell in love with economics, I wanted to understand what caused the poverty, unemployment and discrimination that I had seen all around me growing up, and I wanted to do something about these problems. Stiglitz spent much of his early career in universities and made important advances in such highly theoretical areas of economics as the understanding of ‘information asymmetries’, which led to his being awarded the Nobel prize for economics.

William Trevor

The making of a professional

All the clichés are true: travel refreshes the taste for living; it brightens the jaded mind, it stimulates and deludes. The border that is crossed in leaving the familiar behind is the same one whether the journey is travel at its most serious — on perhaps the Terra Nova or the Endurance — or a cut-price trek to the fun palaces of Florida or the Costa del Sol. And equally for the heroic explorer and the three-week tripper there is the risk that escape may turn out to be the worst journey in the world — a hazard that is not, for either, an element in adventure’s allure. But when everything goes well, when disaster has been successfully negotiated or chance has been protective, the tonic of change is sweet no matter how it has come about.

Eric Christiansen

The love that dared to speak its name

As you went into the tower door of the church at Marsh Baldon (Oxon), there used to be two wall-tablets. One was to the relations of Sir Christopher Willoughby, who died in 1808, and the other was To the Memory of Friends, listed as John Lane, Elizabeth Lane, Phanuel Bacon, Margaret Bacon and Ann Barton. About which, 30 years ago, there seemed to be little to note, except that it was ‘unusual’. But why? Given the high value we still set on friendship and the tendency of some Britons to advertise themselves through their connections, such mementoes ought to be quite usual; if not in churches, then in fields and gardens and town squares. But they aren’t.

Grey Gowrie

Zimmerman bound or unbound?

What is going on here? What on earth is going on here? Christopher Ricks, the world’s leading critic of poetry in English, Frank Kermode and the American Helen Vendler his only rivals, has devoted, has lavished 500 pages of hard-core, hardback, exegetical analysis to the words which propel Bob Dylan’s songs. The issue is not proving a point about Dylan’s poetic talent. That could be achieved in an essay. Indeed Ricks has already written one, in the Listener, as long ago as 1972 when Ricks was 39 and Dylan 31. Now Ricks is 70 and Dylan in his early sixties and Ricks has decided to throw neither flowers nor tomatoes at Dylan from the stalls but a socking, concussing magnum opus.

Pn Furbank

Battle versus work

The great popular success of Forster’s Howards End, published in 1910, meant that he was under pressure to set to work on a new novel, and in the following year he did so, but in a mood of self-doubt. He told himself it was wrong to force oneself to write; that before attempting a new work he always felt he needed to reappraise his own existence; that (as he noted in his diary) he was weary of ‘the only subject that I both can and may treat — the love of men for women and vice-versa’. He was suffering moreover from a superstitious sense that success didn’t suit him and that he might ‘go smash’. Nevertheless an idea came to him.

M R-D-Foot

The run-up to a giant leap

World history is pitted with world wars. Last century was conceited enough to call its pair the First and Second. One of the turning-points of that Second was the Anglo-American landing in Normandy on 6 June 1944, of which the 60th anniversary falls next year. David Stafford, a leading 20th-century historian (once a professor at Toronto), has got in early with a fine book on what the run-up to the landing felt like, both to the much-publicised high command and to far more junior combatants and civilians. He notes that the opposing generals, Eisenhower and Rommel, were both appointed on the same day, 15 January.

Angela Huth

Happy band of brothers

Very occasionally one comes across a book which, in its unexpected delights, inspires one to leap about wild with praise, and rush out to buy copies for friends. This first work by William Newton, retired doctor, will surely have this effect on many readers. It is, simply, the story of remarkable teenage years in the late 1930s. The facts make fiction look uninventive. They are described in what might be called polished prose — but that implies a lot of buffing and shining. Dr Newton’s art, as a storyteller and a master of description, is to make the reader feel it has all poured out of him just as it appears on the page. There’s no sense of conscious working over of narrative or humour. Dr Newton is a natural writer of a very high order indeed.

Clive James

Slogging to Byzantium

Yeats was a great poet who was also the industrious adept of a batso mystical philosophy. Do we have to absorb the philosophy before we can appreciate the poetry? If we are lucky enough to be in a state of ignorance, the question won’t come up. The poetry will get to us first. Suppose you’ve heard this much: that Yeats’s best stuff came late. So you pick up the 1950 edition of the Collected Poems and start from the back. The last few lines in the book are the first you see. And now my utmost mystery is out:A woman’s beauty is a storm-tossed banner:Under it wisdom stands, and I alone —Of all Arabia’s lovers I alone —Nor dazzled by the embroidery, nor lostIn the confusion of its night-dark folds,Can hear the armed man speak.