More from Books

Saturday

William Feaver

The usual Soho suspects

When John Moynihan was three and living with his painter parents in a flat off Primrose Hill he used to be terrified by nocturnal howls and squeals from the Regent's Park zoo. Wetting himself, desperate to be 'rescued from the labyrinths of an unspeakable jungle', he was soothed by whoever happened to be around, sometimes the young Bill Coldstream, who would stand beside his 'blabbering urine-moistened form, urging restraint'. Initiated into parental artistic circles which extended, prewar, from St John's Wood to the New Forest, Bloomsbury and the Euston Road, Moynihan was reared in a ferment of rows and realignments. His father, Rodrigo Moynihan, had an 'Objective Abstraction' phase - thick, pitted and unsaleable - and was apt to slope off to Soho in search of amusement.

G S-Rousseau

In America we trust

Bill Emmott, the editor of the Economist and author of The Sun Also Sets which accurately predicted the decline of Japan, believes there are two fundamental questions to ask at the beginning of the 21st century. Can capitalism continue to be the dominant force? And, in his words, 'Will America continue to lead the world and keep the peace?' Both draw an unsurprising, resounding yes, with many qualifications and much invested in the fine detail where the book's heartland lodges. Emmott's discussion depends on two beliefs central to the framing of these questions. First is that we can only predict the future by looking at the past.

John Casey

The lure of the jungle

This is a curious story. In 1886, a year after the final British conquest of Upper Burma, a piano-tuner, Edgar Drake, is requested by the War Office to travel to the Shan States - still largely untouched by British power - to tune a rare 1840s Erard piano. The piano was originally shipped to one Surgeon-Major Antony Carroll, an ambiguous, slightly Kurtz-like figure, who rules a remote area in the Shan States, and who is either making peace or fomenting war or even (as we finally hear alleged) spying for the Russians among the Shan.

Julius Purcell

Tunes of vanishing glory

Just as Gustav Mahler wove a bugle fanfare into his symphonies, so Joseph Roth wove martial music into his novels. In Roth's case, it was invariably Johann Strauss's 'Radetzky March', a signature tune which tum-te-tums through his earlier fiction and then becomes the title of this, his 1932 masterpiece. For Roth, like Mahler, military tunes were the very symbol of Austria-Hungary. They underpinned a whole way of life, uniting that multi-ethnic empire that stretched precariously across central Europe. Born in 1894, Roth arrived too late to be a part of the astonishing creativity of Vienna in the dying days of Habsburg power.

Philip Hensher

Lost, stolen or strayed

This is a strange, tantalising book of unintentional poetry; it is rather like a book plucked from the shelves of one of Jorge Luis Borges' impossible libraries. The first book of the celebrated philanthropist, collector and Daimler heir, Gert-Rudolf 'Muck' Flick, it is a highly scholarly and lucid biography of a dozen or so great paintings; a biography so far as it is known, since this is the story of the provenance and history of paintings now thought to be lost. None of them is definitely destroyed; another book could be written about such works, like 'The Strolling Actresses Dressing in a Barn', which many of Hogarth's contemporaries thought his greatest painting, which now is only known through a stunning engraving.

Saturday

David Ekserdjian

Keeping one’s head above water in Venice

I have an unusually vivid recollection of the first time I met John Hall. I went to his flat in Chelsea to be interviewed - as I thought - to establish whether I might make a suitable lecturer for his Pre-University Course in Venice. However, when I arrived, he got straight down to the nitty- gritty of how many lectures I would be giving, what titles I had in mind, and so on. I must have been all of 25, and had never given a proper lecture - by which I mean one without a written text - in my life. In retrospect, it strikes me that John must have been mad, or at least that if his trust did not lead to total disaster, then that only proves that he is one of those truly rare people whose guardian angel puts in a lot of overtime.

Lucy Beresford

Recent first novels

I selected Overnight to Innsbruck by Denyse Woods by chance from the reviewing shelf and discovered a real treat of a read. It is pleasantly old-fashioned in having a strong, page-turning plot, and credible characters who panic and fret in recognisably authentic ways, yet bristling with smart, contemporary dialogue and psychological insight.

Michael Glover

Education via the gymnasium

Sven Lindqvist used to be a fairly flabby intellectual Swede with a natural disclination to engage in any kind of sporting activity whatsoever (well, he did a bit of sluggish swimming) - especially team sports. Then, at some point before 1988 (when this book was first published in Sweden), by which time he had reached the precarious age of 53, he met a rather threatening, gleamingly muscle-bound skinhead in a gym who changed his life. No, he didn't fall in love with the man. He fell in love with the idea - and the ideals - of body-building. The skinhead was himself a body-builder - every last, well defined pectoral testified to that fact. Sven, being a sedentary writer, had always pooh-poohed the whole thing - how vain, ridiculous, self-serving!

Patrick Boyle

A young explorer of horror

How many people have heard of Michael Reeves? Most biographies are written about famous people or people who hobnob with famous people or lesser-known people who have led particularly interesting lives. Michael Reeves is none of these. He was an English ex-public school boy, obsessed by cinema, who made three low-budget horror films and died from a barbiturate overdose at the age of 25. With such a short and relatively uneventful life, why should anyone bother to write a 360- page biography of him? The reason is that one of his films achieved 'cult' status. There seem to be two definitions of a cult movie.

Simon Ward

Going with the wind

It is rare for a first novel to be launched with the degree of enthusiasm that Fourth Estate have bestowed upon this saga of the American civil war. The jacket comes trumpeting its triumph on release in the USA. 'Deserves the Pulitzer Prize', it quotes from the Toronto Globe and Mail. A cynic might say, on observing that the author holds dual Canadian citizenship, 'Well, the Toronto Globe and Mail would say that, wouldn't they?' But then, so would I. And, what is more, that goes for any other literary prize for which Paulette Jiles is entitled by birth, age or gender, for with Enemy Women she has worked something of a wonder of storytelling.

Samuel Brittan

Blair’s lack of ‘process’

What is really wrong with the Blair government? The unease it excites is at least as strong on the articulate political Left as on the Right. Indeed the grounds for anxiety may overlap across the political spectrum. Until now it has been difficult to verbalise this sense of malaise. The citation of particular policies that are disliked, or even of the Downing Street style, is not sufficient. It is only after looking at Amartya Sen's new book of essays that the penny suddenly dropped for me. Unlike his earlier book, Development as Freedom, which I reviewed here on 31 January 2000, this is a technical volume containing some of the papers for which he received his Nobel prize.

Saturday

Geoffrey Owen

An early lead lost

In 1926 Simon Marks, head of a little-known chain of penny bazaars called Marks & Spencer, placed an order for men's socks with Corahs, a Leicester knitwear manufacturer. The order was kept secret - the Corah brothers did not want to offend the wholesalers, who forbade their suppliers from selling direct to retailers - but it proved to be the start of a beautiful friendship. The cost to Marks & Spencer was 8s 6d for a dozen pairs of socks, a shilling less than a wholesaler would have charged. But Simon Marks was not just interested in lower prices. He wanted to distinguish M&S from Woolworths by upgrading quality and giving consumers real value for money. Hence he entered into a dialogue with Corahs on how the shilling saved could be spent on producing a better garment.

John Jolliffe

The third man

In the 1840s and 50s, Douglas Jerrold, Dickens and Thackeray were the three best known literary men in England, and it was said at the time that it was 'hardly possible to discuss the merits of any of them without referring to the other two. What happened to Jerrold? He was born into a family of strolling players, and at the age of 11 served for a few months on a ship commanded by Jane Austen's brother. When he started writing plays, his great success began with a nautical melodrama called Black-Eyed Susan, the central figure being an innocent ordinary seaman who escaped the gallows in the nick of time. From then on, Jerrold, zealously and even brilliantly, continued to champion the cause of the poor and defenceless against arbitrary brutality and injustice.

Saturday

Robert Edric

The disappearing guru

In 1909, in a late letter to his brother, Henry James bemoaned the fact that the 'novel of ideas' - the novel 'built on the momentum and inspiration found in a solid, sustainable and infinitely expandable idea' - was finally dead, and that it had died from 'lack of want or appetite in the reading public'. He complained that the modern novel was too often concerned only with the 'circumstance of character and enforced narrative', that 'novelty and fantasy and the banality of everyday ordinariness' now held sway. Nicholas Mosley has written a novel of which James would have wholeheartedly approved. Inventing God is an unfashionable, unpredictable novel in which the characters and their interactions are wholly dependent on and sustained by the exploration of the ideas at their centre.

Jonathan Mirsky

Remembering to forget

In this exploration of her pain, terror, and ten years of barely surviving the trauma of rape and near-murder, Susan Brison's most piercing words are, 'For months after my assault, I had to stop myself before saying (what seemed accurate at the time),.

Nicholas Fearn

When conscience is a doubtful guide

In the summer, I met a man who made his living by selling computer hardware he found discarded around London's business districts. A Scorpion tank driver during the Gulf war, he told me how he had been wounded in a firefight and now found himself unequipped for ordinary employment. Soldiers who have seen action are not supposed to enjoy talking about their experiences, so I took him for a fantasist, until he pulled down the neck of his t-shirt and showed me his bullet wounds. The man may have risked his life for a cheap oil supply and the restoration of a despotic government, but he had come out of it with some good stories to tell - and this was recompense enough. Not every combat veteran conforms to the popular image of quiet dignity.

Alberto Manguel

Alpha minus query

VOLUME I: THE MODERN MOVEMENT VOLUME TWO: THE TWO NATURESwith a foreword by William Boyd As a formula for failure, the first line of Cyril Connolly's once famous 'word cycle', The Unquiet Grave, is unsurpassable: The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence. Engrave that over the lintel of any writer's study and you'll have put an end to the whole business, since what else is this craft of words but a fool's attempt to trap a flickering intuition of the world between a capital letter and a full stop?

Caroline Moore

High prairie, low life

Annie Proulx's latest work is a strange hybrid. It is more a series of short stories than a novel; and though it is immensely readable, fusing sentiment and bleakness with Proulx's customary wit and irresistible relish for the quirky, some may find the whole ensemble less than a fully fledged work of fiction.