More from Books

Saturday

Philip Hensher

The best committee that ever sat

There are two literary facts in English which it is almost impossible to examine, to see clearly. They are Shakespeare and the King James Bible. In both cases, the impossibility derives from the same point; that critical standards of what great English writing means stem so completely from Shakespeare's peculiar virtues and from the values of the prose in the King James Bible that all commentators and, indeed, all English-speakers subsequently have lived within their limits, and have been unable to step outside and discuss their subjects with any clarity, as one can step outside Spenser or Wordsworth, and see their world whole and distant, with an awareness of alternative models of excellence.

Saturday

Sara Wheeler

Serving Christ and colonialism

Fergus Fleming is the author of three volumes of narrative history, the best of which, Barrow's Boys, gives a rollicking account of 19th-century Arctic exploration. Now he has lighted on the 'conquest' of the Sahara, and it is a gripping saga, little known beyond the popular image of a kepi-wearing French officer riding into the desert on a white camel while hordes of Tuareg mass silently on the horizon. The Sword and the Cross begins with a trot through the history of Algeria, or the Barbary Coast as it was known to white men, and of Ottoman North Africa in general.

Roger Lewis

Still on his feet in the twelfth round

Norman Mailer was 80 years old on 31 January 2003, so let us salute the last of all the knights. He was very famous very quickly, with The Naked and the Dead, and for nearly six decades he has poured forth rich and provocative novels, biographies, non-fiction bouts of reportage - it's hard to know what they are any more. Fiction as documentary? Concealed memoirs? He's certainly unstoppable. The accounts of Marilyn Monroe and Picasso show him as the critic-as-artist; the treatise on Vietnam or the moon landings, his history of the CIA and the investigation into the life and death of Lee Harvey Oswald, make him America's Tolstoy.

Candia Mcwilliam

What voice can do

There was recently, in the serious and excellent Saturday Guardian review, a short piece on Oor Wullie, a small boy whose cartoon adventures divert the readers of the Sunday Post in Scotland. It was written by Ian Jack, distinguished editor of Granta, the influential literary magazine. The article mentioned a number of things that touched dear places for a Scot, and mentioned too that Mr Jack hadn't a recipe for black bun, a dense cake served at Hogmanay. Along with, it turned out, very many, others, I wrote to him. There is nothing so homesick as a Scot, and nothing, I suspect, as vigilant and quick to take exception.

Harry Mount

Old Wasp with a weak sting

The pleasure boat captains who ply the coast of the Gulf of Salerno beneath Gore Vidal's Ravello flat are inconsolable at the thought that the grand old man of American letters is returning to his homeland. The round trip that departs from Capri, and chugs past Positano and Amalfi, finishes with a flourish, as the captains point up the cliff to the Vidal residence - it perches so precariously over the bay that the 77-year-old can no longer negotiate the steep steps out of town. His fingers, though, are as nimble as ever. So many articles have been fluttering out of the Italian eyrie that this is his second collection of essays to be published within a year, most of them prompted by 11 September.

Byron Rogers

The young, red-haired man in the cupboard

If this had a third act it would make a superb film, for the cast list is virtually a re-run of Front Page, with Richard Addis, formerly of the Daily Express, now, magically, of the Canadian Globe and Mail, as the hard-bitten editor Walter Burns, and Stephanie Nolen, a young and eager reporter on the paper, as Hildy Johnson. It starts with an editorial conference, which, if you are unfamiliar with such things, is a sort of daily re-enactment of a high command meeting underground with tanks in the suburbs of their capital. In our time it is a scene made for black comedy.

Lloyd Evans

Tales of the unexpected

How's this for a good opening? 'I took out a gun and painted the bullets gold.' If that were a novel the author would win prizes; but he isn't a novelist, he's a nutcase. Let's call him 'J'. J was convinced that his wheelchair-bound grandmother was a vampire. He visited her one morning, did her laundry and asked if there was anything else he could help her with. She said 'No'. So I put on my suit and shot her in the heart. She was wiggling and screaming at me. Then I shot her three more times real fast. After this he laid her body on the bed, drank some of her blood, uttered a prayer and torched the house. What makes this testimony so vivid and compelling is the detail: the laundry, the suit, the prayer.

A.N. Wilson

The fatal Dogberry tendency

In June 1959, A. L. Rowse was sitting on a train in the United States, writing up his journal. He was in the middle of describing an enjoyable encounter with Elizabeth Bowen in New York. Unfortunately, he was interrupted by a young woman asking if the seat beside him was vacant. Rowse indicated with his pencil that 'There is a vacant seat, across the gangway.' 'But I want the one by the window.' 'I am sitting by the window,' I replied, still not looking up. 'Oh, I see', she said, and moved on. A trivial incident, and you might have wondered why the great Elizabethan historian, autobiographer and Cornish poet chose to record it in his diary.

Saturday

James Delingpole

DIY down the ages

One balmy summer afternoon in my final year at prep school, a group of my fellow-prefects and I gathered under the apple trees on the slope by the croquet lawn where only prefects were allowed, and reminisced about the five years we'd spent together. 'Do you know, Delingpole,' said one of them, 'it was you who taught us all how to wank.' This is possibly the nicest compliment anyone has ever paid to me and even though it was completely unwarranted - branleur? moi? - I have endeavoured to live up to it ever since by broaching the subject with friends, acquaintances and strangers as often as decently possible; by collecting wanking anecdotes (the man caught in flagrante by his au pair; the man whose father decided to appear on a ladder outside his bedroom window just when. . .

Jonathan Sumption

The first iron curtain

Religious tradition has defined human societies and shaped their habits of mind more strongly than any other factor. It still does, even in communities which have lost their collective belief in God. Indifference to formal creeds may be common to the governing elites of most countries, and in Europe to their electorates as well. Yet the world is still living with the consequences of centuries of mutual hostility and incomprehension among the three great monotheistic religions of the Mediterranean. The sudden birth of Islam and its rapid and violent spread through North Africa and the Middle East in the seventh century shattered the political and intellectual certainties of Europe more completely than the Germanic invaders of the Roman empire had ever done.

Jonathan Mirsky

What it’s really like

In a recent column in the Telegraph (8 March) headed 'How I long for the bombs to start falling,' Mark Steyn wrote, 'This interminable non-rush to non-war is like a long, languorous, humid summer, where everyone's sweaty and cranky and longing for the clouds to break and the cool refreshing rain to fall. Bring it on, please.' I don't know whether the Telegraph or The Spectator will be sending Steyn to Iraq, but this is what he may find. The description, in Jarhead, is by Anthony Swofford, a US Marine Corps sniper in the last Gulf war. Marching across the desert he comes on what is left of an Iraqi convoy which had been bombed by the Americans: 'Men are gathered dead around what must have been their morning or evening fire.

Jane Ridley

Not great but definitely good

Who was Hannah More? William Cobbett called her an old bishop in petticoats, and she was the subject of a hefty, pious Victorian biography, since when she has been pretty much forgotten. The Edwardian wit Augustine Birrell buried 19 volumes of her collected works in his garden for compost. She owes her disinterment to the fashion for writing the lives of women, the more obscure the better. Is she interesting enough to merit a book of nearly 400 pages? Almost certainly, the answer is yes. She was born near Bristol, the daughter of an impoverished charity school master, in 1745. Her older sisters ran a successful school for young ladies. Hannah, who was reassuringly plump, wrote poetry. Aged 28, she published a best-selling poem, and went to London.

Philip Hensher

A bit of a smash in Soho

The legendarily catastrophic life of Julian Maclaren-Ross has tempted biographers before. But the task of pursuing him, like the Hound of Heaven, through the sordid backstreets, rented basements and sodden saloon bars of his progress has always proved too much of a challenge. It is an extraordinary story of profligacy and waste which has been told, up until now, only in a million awed anecdotes and fragmentary glimpses of this Neronian figure. This biography is not quite what one might have hoped for, but I have to take my hat off to Paul Willetts for his sheer industry in following his subject to places where few literary biographers need to tread.

Saturday

William Leith

All the fun of the fair

In this chunky book, Joanna Pitman tells us something we already suspect to be true, and she does it beautifully. We are, she says, obsessed with blonde hair. For instance, even though only one in 20 of us is naturally blonde, a third of women lighten their hair. Why? Because blonde hair gets you more attention. Blonde hair is a magnet for sex and money. When she bleached her own hair, Pitman tells us, the change was dramatic. People stared. 'The way they looked,' she says, 'it felt as if my head was radiating some kind of spectral glow.' As a blonde, she got 'preferential treatment'. Men gave her 'wolfish looks'. 'I wondered,' she says, 'whether I could afford not to be blonde.' Pitman takes us on a blonde history of the world.

Michael Tanner

Failing to face up to Fritz

This is the most old-fashioned new book I've read for a long time, something that I think Curtis Cate would regard as a compliment. In the Preface he writes, characteristically: Perhaps, indeed, the day is not too distant when, new post-modern norms having imposed themselves through a process of Nietzschean 'transvaluation', marriage (even between 'heterosexuals') will be declared abnormal as well as deplorably 'old hat'. That letter-to-the-editor (most likely of the Daily Telegraph) tone consorts oddly with Cate's largely favourable view of Nietzsche, though he does only report a smattering of the developing opinions of the author he indifferently refers to as 'Fritz' and 'Nietzsche'.

Anne Applebaum

An oddball miles from anywhere

Translated by Theodosia Robertson Hot and silent, dusty and deserted, the town of Drohobycz seemed, during the few summer days I spent there some years ago, like a place forgotten in time. The houses had a certain faded, Austro-Hungarian glamour, but seemed to have been built for different people, in a different era. The central market square had a certain pleasing symmetry, but practically no business was conducted there. The peasant women who had carved small vegetable gardens out of the tangles of weed that passed for shrubbery looked up suspiciously when a stranger passed, and then looked quickly down again. The curse of Drohobycz is not merely that it is a provincial Ukrainian town, on the edge of what used to be the Soviet empire.

Harry Mount

Top dog and dogfights

The big idea behind this little book has been touted as 'Americans are from Mars; Europeans are from Venus'. That's not quite right. The real thesis is not that Americans are war-hungry and Europeans peace-loving, but that Americans deal with problems, and Europeans avoid them. If anything, Americans are from the planet Can-do, and Europeans from Can't-face-doing. Try conducting practically any transaction in America and compare it to the way you're treated in Britain and you get the measure of what Robert Kagan, a Washington Post columnist and veteran of the State Department, is driving at. An American working in a deli, or shining your shoes, wants to make sure you get what you ask for and doesn't mind being told to stick some extra Dijonnaise on or to give your brogues an extra buff.

Simon Jenkins

Famous and forgotten faces

Paperback edition £29.95 I was much attached to Kaled. She stood at the corner of Fleet Street and Chancery Lane, pert, stylish, mocking the scribes and hacks scurrying round her feet. She was faintly androgenous, a pageboy Tiresias who saw and knew all that passed along that street of shame. She is there today, much battered but still with her swagger. Nothing peoples a city as do statues. The more inhumane the architecture the more desperately we cling to relics of humanity, even if they are in stone and metal. Nobody seems to notice them. How many Fleet Street hands salute as they pass effigies to King Lud, Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scots, Northcliffe, Edgar Wallace, Prudence, Justice and Liberality? But that makes our enjoyment of them the more intimate.