More from Books

Saturday

Philip Hensher

The music of the language

Wodehouse, all in all, is lasting astonishingly well. His world is dated, but then it was always dated; it is basically Edwardian, and went on, barely changed, into the 1960s and 1970s. But his appeal is not the period charm of a Diary of a Nobody or a Saki; it is much more alive than that. By now we should probably start suspecting that he will prove one of the great novelists. Apart from England, I think the only country in the world which truly loves and understands Wodehouse is India. It seems bizarre, but there's something illuminating in that. Indian English is passionately in love with English grammar at its most formal; in the commuter trains of Bombay, the subjunctive and the gerund still thrive in ordinary speech.

Saturday

Jonathan Cecil

Pure and impure genius

As Hamlet said, 'Look here upon this picture and on this.' Early this year Garry O'Connor produced a book about Paul Scofield. The actor's personal life being famously uneventful, there is little there for lovers of theatre gossip. It is, despite a few pretentious notions about Scofield's psyche, an admirably thoughtful book on the player's art, combining a thorough knowledge of Scofield's roles with a generous admiration for the man. Now O'Connor has written Alec Guinness's biography, and a much less respectful piece of work it turns out to be.

Hugh Massingberd

A choice of funny books

'I don't know if it is a sign of old age,' wrote P. G. Wodehouse in the mid-1950s, 'but I find I hate Christmas more every year.' Another marked change that the Master noticed in 'the senile Wodehouse' was that he no longer had the party spirit and preferred to stay at home with a good book. Both these observations are quoted in a pleasantly discursive set of reflections on old age, The Time of Your Life, compiled and illustrated by John Burningham (Bloomsbury, £14.99, pp. 288, ISBN 0747560854), which would certainly tempt one not to venture out. The principal themes are how quickly time passes for the old (as Christopher Fry remarked, 'After the age of 80 you seem to be having breakfast every five minutes') and the relief of not having to worry about what others think.

Tam Dalyell

The price of admission

I first met Tim Slessor when we were contemporary undergraduates at Cambridge, half a century ago. Etched into my memory are Slessor's pride in and sadness about his naval officer dad, whom he had adored, and whom he had lost as an eight-year-old. Becoming a successful TV producer and journalist, Slessor worked in the United States and Britain, being for many years a senior editor of the BBC's documentary department. In recent years, Slessor has used this considerable and relevant probing experience to try to ascertain the truth behind his father's death, on the carrier, HMS Glorious on 8 June 1940, during the evacuation from Norway. His devastating chapter, 'An accident of war', starts with three quotations. The Admiralty has tried to suppress the truth for 40 years. (Capt.

Richard Ollard

Not rushing to judgment

It is hard to overpraise this admirable - indeed one would have thought impossible - account of the history of England, Scotland and Ireland from the accession of Charles I to the restoration of his son Charles II. The great masters of English 17th-century historiography, S. R. Gardiner and Sir Charles Firth, between them took nearly 30 volumes and even then did not quite make it to the finish.

Jonathan Keates

Smoothing the rough edges

Much is made by writers these days of the need for 'getting distance', for putting frontiers, oceans, whole continents between themselves and the sources of their inspiration. A spell on a Mediterranean island, a prolonged residence in some foreign capital or a creative writing fellowship at an American university are all supposed to do the trick. To advertise the whole business more effectively, you can always engineer a noisy parting of the ways with the British reading public, so unforgiving of your success, so philistine and parochial, and flounce off to New York, where your genius will be properly nurtured and cosseted.

David Ekserdjian

A selection of art books

I cannot think of many less festive offerings than Richard Avedon Portraits (Abrams, £24.95), but it has to be admitted that his merciless exposure of such grotesques as a blood-and-guts-spattered rattlesnake-skinner and a Duncan Goodhew-lookalike beekeeper, whose naked body is swarming with the six-legged tools of his trade, makes one sit up and take note. One of the minor pleasures of this collection is that literary and artistic celebrities have the same unflinching treatment meted out to them as drifters, and unless one happens to recognise the likes of William Burroughs, it is hard to tell which is which. After Avedon, the images in Richard Calvocoressi's Lee Miller: Portraits from a Life (Thames & Hudson, £27.

Alan Judd

Playing with Henry James

The theme of Henry James's The Aspern Papers is well known: an unscrupulous biographer seeks the unpublished papers of his subject, a long-dead poet, through the cultivation of the poet's former mistress, a forgotten old lady living with her spinster niece in Venice. He insinuates himself into the household, leading the niece to hope for marriage, until his real intentions are revealed. It is also well known that James's story was inspired by his discovery that, living in reduced circumstances in Florence with her niece during the 1870s, was Claire Clairmont, one-time mistress of Byron (whose child she bore) and perhaps also of Shelley. A predatory biographical collector, a Massachusetts sea-captain, insinuated himself into the household, much as James's protagonist did.

Frederic Raphael

What will the oracle answer?

THE WEST AND THE RESTby Roger ScrutonContinuum, £12.99, pp. 196, ISBN 0826464963 Two reincarnations of the Old Oligarch - alike in deploring The Way We Live Now, different in emphasis and style - jostle for the moral high ground. Gore Vidal's diagnosis of global schism centres on the US and its (mal)administration. Like a liberal, Enlightened mutation of bin Laden, Vidal doubles for Coriolanus and tribune of the put-upon plebs. Exiled from what he takes to be his patrimony - the good, old US, based on the Bill of Rights - he points out that bin Laden was first a CIA protZgZ (but never the first) in Afghanistan, the recent devastation of which was 'like destroying Palermo in order to eliminate the Mafia'.

Jane Gardam

Found and lost

Byron Rogers for years wrote the 'Village Voice' column in the Daily Telegraph, and this collection of articles on his life over the past 22 years in an English village is published because of the continued weekly requests of his readers. Blakesley is not a picture-book village. Rogers found 'a lost triangle of land where Oxfordshire, Warwickshire and Northamptonshire meet, which the main roads circle and where no tourists come'; not at all unlike Ronald Blythe's 'Akenfield' in Suffolk in the early Sixties. By leaving the city for the country in the Eighties, Rogers was ahead of his time. It was rare then to settle in the dead centre of England in a place of no 'outstanding natural beauty', far from anywhere and knowing absolutely nobody. He was married.

Raymond Carr

The greatest Briton

MAN OF THE CENTURY: WINSTON CHURCHILL AND HIS LEGENDby John Ramsden HarperCollins, £25, pp. 652, ISBN 002570343 In January 1965 John Lukacs came from France with his son to attend Churchill's state funeral. He came, he writes in the contemporary account of his visit, reprinted in this book, in order to say 'farewell to the spiritual father of many, including myself'. The many included those who queued in the cold to file past his coffin in Westminster Hall. Victory in 1945, they sensed, had been the achievement of the Russian and American armies. What they mourned was the man who restored their self-respect by saving them from the humiliation of defeat in 1940. He accomplished this from a position of weakness.

Saturday

Simon Courtauld

Magnificent joint venture

One might think that Henry Kamen, having written books on Spain in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, on the Inquisition, on Philip II and on the War of the Spanish Succession, had just about done, not to say saturated, the period. But no - he has apparently not covered the Spanish empire to his satisfaction; and so we have the present volume, spanning the years 1492-1763. There is no doubting Kamen's scholarship, much of it drawn from Spanish texts, as he moves magisterially over the centuries: from his setting of the 16th-century European scene under Charles V, to the conquests of the New World, to the sea-change in Spain's fortunes following the demise of the childless 'human wreck', Charles II, and the Habsburg dynasty.

Sebastian Smee

Naughty but nice

The first story in this very fine collection takes the most risks, not unlike its protagonist. Ariel, a sophisticated, self-aware, American wife pays for two high-class prostitutes to entertain her wealthy Italian husband: 'It's a birthday present,' she explains over the phone, trying hard to picture the girl on the other end of the line as she speaks. The idea is the suggestion of her husband's provocative friend, Flavio, for whom Ariel has come to feel affection. Five or six years ago, Flavio 'gave up trying to seduce Ariel, and settled for the alternative intimacy of tormenting her subtly whenever they meet'. But to this particularly intimate taunt Ariel has a surprising response: she agrees to the idea, and the birthday present is crisply, efficiently arranged.

Mary Keen

Finding Paradise in your own back garden

Gardening is the nation's hobby. It is worth around £3 billion in annual business, much of it generated by television makeovers. No one is letting on that what keeps us spending is the pursuit of a dream. Makeovers are showbiz, brilliant marketing tools, but Eldorado will never be found at B & Q or the garden centre. Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall's new book, The Garden: An English Love Affair (Weidenfeld, £25) takes a beguiling look at what gardens have meant to us over the last 1,000 years. Garden histories, for the general reader, tend to employ recycled facts to demonstrate a bewildering number of trends, but recent books have tried different perspectives.

Graham Stewart

New figures in our national story

In the first two volumes accompanying his History of Britain television series, Simon Schama had a clear framework in which to work. Essentially he told of the dynastic struggles of kings, queens and pretenders, adding a little bit of plague here and a touch of religious fervour there as and when it became necessary to discuss lesser mortals. In Professor Schama's hands, the technique worked well, but there was no prospect that he could sustain such an approach in this third and final volume, covering the period between the dawn of an independent America and midnight's false bonhomie on the Greenwich peninsula. Instead, Schama had a few options.

Andrew Roberts

A good tale spoilt in the telling

Michael Dobbs is a charming, intelligent and self-effacing man, but you would not have guessed it from the blurb on the dust-jacket of his latest political thriller. 'Michael Dobbs always makes an impact,' it tells us. He has worked with prime ministers, written about kings, and always seems to be in the right spot at vital moments in history. His experiences have led him to be described as a man who, in Latin America, would have been shot. How can he possibly have approved this guff? Winston's War has an intriguing plot, based on the real-life meeting between Guy Burgess and Winston Churchill at Chartwell at the time of the Munich crisis. It uses suspense well, as Dobbs managed so successfully in his House of Cards trilogy.

Henry Hobhouse

Can you spot the difference?

FAUNA BRITANNICAby Duff Hart-DavisWeidenfeld, £30, pp. 415, ISBN 0297825321 Time was that this sort of confusion did not occur. In the days when 'publishing was a business for gentlemen', the aforesaid gents would meet for luncheon ('Your Club or mine?'); they would agree that they would not each publish a book with the same title at the same time. If unable to agree as to who would concede, they would probably toss a coin, winner to have the title. In these more commercial days, with plenty of regulations against collusion and combination, we have two apparently similar books with the same title purporting to meet the same demand. And do they?

Jane Ridley

The self-promoting recluse

'If Charles Darwin had spent the first half of his life in the world of Jane Austen, he now stepped forward into the pages of Anthony Trollope.' Thus Janet Browne begins what must at times have seemed an almost impossible task: how to write an interesting book about the second half of Darwin's life. When this book opens, Charles Darwin is 49. On his desk sits an unwieldy pile of papers, the unfinished manuscript of the interminable book on the origin of species which he has been working on for longer than he cares to admit. At Down House in Kent, Darwin lives comfortably on a private income, but this retiring gentleman scholar and paterfamilias is no slouch.

Ian Thomson

Stooping to conquer

Anthony Lane has been film critic for the New Yorker since 1993, and the light lash of his humour is waspish and urbane in its New Yorker-ese. Nobody's Perfect, a collection of his film and literary criticism, including author profiles and essays, is a glory. Throughout, Lane upholds the sterling virtue of good writing combined with wit and emotional engagement. But he makes no claim to be right about anything. 'Nobody's perfect', as Osgood Fielding III chuckles in Some Like it Hot. Lane is a 40-year-old Englishman who knows the work of every American writer and director from Hawthorne to Preston Sturges. And to judge by his zingy prose, he has a taste for the New Yorker's old stalwarts E. B. White and James Thurber.

Jane Gardam

The lines are immaterial

I once met a thoroughly heterosexual old naval officer who had been a midshipman on the ship that sailed to Gallipoli with Rupert Brooke on board, the voyage during which Brooke died. I asked him what Brooke had been like. He said at once, 'He was a god. Extraordinary beauty, law to himself. Like Lord Byron, I expect. There are these people.' Fiona MacCarthy says towards the end of her thoroughly researched and very readable 600-page biography of Byron, the first to come from John Murray, keeper of the Byron flame, for nearly half a century, that 'there are always private reasons behind the choice of a biographical subject'.