More from Books

Saturday

Philip Mansel

Who wore the royal trousers?

Revolutions no longer seem so inevitable, nor the overthrown governments so hopeless, since the failure of the greatest of all European revolutionary regimes, the Soviet Union. In The Fall of the French Monarchy Munro Price analyses, with skill and a light touch, the policies of two celebrated royal failures, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and of some of their ZmigrZ advisers, during the first years of the French revolution. The central figure is the Baron de Breteuil, an energetic former ambassador and minister, chosen by Louis XVI to co-ordinate resistance to the revolution, both from Versailles during his brief ministry of 12-15 July 1789 and, in the opinion of Munro Price, from exile in Brussels in 1790-2.

Byron Rogers

Some very cross references

Mr William Donaldson, the most subversive and mischievous Englishman since Titus Oates, started his literary career with Both the Ladies and the Gentlemen, a DIY guide to brothel-keeping and the choreography of orgies. He extended it with the Henry Root Letters, in which, posing as a demented if upwardly mobile fishmonger, he entered into a correspondence with the great, the good and the gullible in public life, flattering them outrageously, even trying to slip them the odd fiver. And they, Mrs Thatcher (who kept her fiver), Esther Rantzen, and President Zia-al-Haq, innocents undented by humour, wrote back. Donaldson published the lot and held them up to ridicule. But why?

Judith Keppel

Beating the Wet Blanket

I am not an avid television watcher, so I did not tune into Who Wants to be a Millionaire? for about a year, but when I finally did, like nearly half the nation (19 million viewers at its peak) I was gripped. At the time I was also rather poor and thinking of going to live in France. Night after night, in an atmosphere vibrating with tension, huge sums of money were being won on questions that were no harder than Trivial Pursuit, and the germ of the idea of trying to get on began to lodge in my mind. 'How vulgar!' said my inner Aunt Agatha. And I would read about the 5,000 telephone lines which were open 24 hours a day, the tens of thousands of people trying to get on and one man on the programme said he'd rung 400 times. 'Pointless and hopeless' said my inner Wet Blanket.

John Keegan

Servant of a theory

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy read Barbara Tuchman's August 1914. As President George W. Bush prepares for a second Gulf war, he apparently is reading Eliot Cohen's Supreme Command. Kennedy would have had more fun. Tuchman is a better read than Cohen. She also advances what proved in the circumstances to be important advice: leave the subordinates to deal with the telegrams while the boss keeps a clear head to decide for peace or war. Curiously, the episode itself produced a book still eminently valuable to a statesman in crisis, Robert Kennedy's Thirteen Days. It tells how Bobby, as chairman of the Executive Committee, spared his brother Jack the confusions that helped to drive Europe into the first world war. There is a strong case for arguing that George W.

A.N. Wilson

Overdone and undercooked

This is a hopeless mishmash of a book. It is over 600 pages (736 with the notes), and it only covers a mere 24 years of its subject's life. Some reviewers would say that it was badly written, but the trouble is, it isn't really written at all. It is hurled together, without any apparent distinction between what might or might not interest the reader. Episodes of supreme importance in the subject's life are given less space than such things as the film reviews he dashed off (with increasing distaste for the task) for the Evening Standard. One does not mean to be unkind about the author, who has devoted more than 25 years to writing Betjman's life.

John McEwen

The gate lodge to the big house

This book succeeds The Painters of Ireland, published in 1978, which established the Knight of Glin and Anne Crookshank as supreme authorities on the subject. The update adds a further 20 years and takes account of an abundance of new research; but it remains what they describe as 'a general survey on traditional lines', a simple, chronological, account in what some critics of their first collaboration disapprovingly called 'a conversational style'. What a relief, will surely be most readers' reaction. The authors have no delusions of grandeur. They quote the artist and critic, Brian O'Doherty, who has described Irish art as 'the gate lodge beside the big house of Irish Writing'.

Michael Vestey

The reign of King John

When, in these pages, John Birt expresses wonderment at how the boy from Bootle went on to become the 12th director general of the BBC, to enter the House of Lords and be an adviser to the prime minister it is a sentiment shared by many. The clue probably lies in the brutal Irish Christian Brothers school he went to, St Mary's in Liverpool, where beatings with the strap were carried out sadistically every day. The boys even had a name for it: Strapology. A fellow pupil at the school has since said that as a result it tended to produce authoritarian figures who also knew how to be submissive towards the masters to avoid punishments. In other words, people who knew how to creep.

Alan Coren

So near and yet so far from the target

High on the teetering list of all the things that, down the long arches of the hacking years, have dissuaded me from trying to cobble a novel is the dreary business of describing how the characters look. You have a picture of this person or that in your head, and your reader, having coughed up his £15.99, has every right to know what so-and-so looks like when he or she walks into a room, feels cheery or glum, gets on top or underneath this or that other person, eats his dinner, rides a horse, lands a fish, strangles his landlady, or any of the hundred-and-one things a character has to do in the course of 300 pages, but how can you be certain that the reader is getting the image as precisely as you intend?

The Spectator

Christmas Books I

Rupert Christiansen How embarrassing. The authors of the four books I have most relished this year - Nicola Shulman's elegant monograph A Rage for Rock Gardening (Short Books, £9.99), Virginia Nicholson's exuberant Among the Bohemians (Viking, £20), Giles Waterfield's brilliant satire The Hound in the Left-Hand Corner (Review, £14.99) and Selina Hastings' fascinating biography of Rosamond Lehmann (Chatto, £25) - are all friends of mine, and the etiquette of this exercise therefore inhibits me from nominating them.

Saturday

Richard Shone

Verdict as open as ever

Readers of the thrillers of the American writer Patricia Cornwell will find elements of her new book familiar but others oddly different. Her novels are fiction closely based on fact; Portrait of a Killer purports to be a work of fact but is founded on fiction. It supposedly unravels the mystery of Jack the Ripper, a name given by the press to the most notorious serial murderer in Britain, about whom virtually nothing is known. Cornwell squarely lays these atrocious murders of East End women in 1888 at the door of the painter Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942). When this story first broke on US television late last year, Cornwell said that if she were to be proved wrong 'not only will I feel horrible about it, but I will look terrible'. These may well be prophetic words.

Charles Kennedy

The great little Welsh conjuror

It is a discomforting thought that, had the present fashion for kiss-and-tell memoirs, or the intense media scrutiny of politicians' private lives, been in place a century ago, David Lloyd George might never have become prime minister. Yet, as this masterly fourth volume in John Grigg's biography proves, he was a towering figure in exceptional times. Grigg picks up his story with Lloyd George's arrival in office in December 1916. Things were at a very low ebb in the war - the troops mired in Flanders, the Somme a dreadful and present memory, and Britain's very existence threatened by the submarine war being launched by Germany to cut our oceanic life-lines.

Matthew Parris

The longing to be liked

This cracking book is missing something and the want is telling. Jeremy Paxman virtually discounts the possibility that people might go into politics driven by ideas or conviction. These being the spur politicians routinely claim, Paxman's study becomes a detective hunt for ulterior motive or unacknowledged greed. 'This fellow says he wants to make the world a better place, but let us find out what he's really in it for' is the gist.

Jonathan Cecil

The man who hated being typecast – and was

Whenever, searching through the television channels for something worth watching, I come across a Dad's Army repeat I invariably stay with it. The series has not dated, partly perhaps because it was dated when it started. Few of us who were young in the 1960s had clear memories of the Home Guard and many of the plots could have come straight from an old Will Hay film. Yet the interplay between the characters has remained unsurpassed. And the lynchpin is the great Arthur Lowe. Captain Mainwaring remains a superb comic creation. A pompous, narrow-minded petty tyrant, he is not an obviously attractive character.

Harry Mount

His biting is immortal

If Harold Pinter's plays are about the weasel under the cocktail cabinet, Matthew Parris's autobiography is about the butchered segment of electrical cable that lies on the dusty roof of the throne of the Speaker of the House of Commons. For several decades this piece of copper wire, unused, long-neglected, has rested above the heads of Bernard Weatherill, Betty Boothroyd and Michael Martin, and no one has noticed it except for the eagle-eyed former parliamentary sketchwriter for the Times up in the press gallery. It's the perfect example of a Parris observation. Take something grand, respected, highfalutin, like parliament, and show quite how lowfalutin and dull it really is.

Jake Auerbach

Asking the awkward questions about history and us

Art can raise our spirits, stimulate our intelligence and increase our knowledge; it is therefore disappointing that much of our arts writing is so impenetrable. Academics seem to address their peers and forget us; it is like eavesdropping on a private conversation carried on in a foreign language. Despite this, business is booming. In 1910 the RZpertoire de l'art et d'archZologie had a combined subject and author index of 4,000 entries; there are now about 30,000 entries each year, written by about 22,500 art historians and critics. Professor James Elkins provides these figures. He does so to illustrate that one of the problems with art writing is that there is too much of it, which is ironic coming from a man who publishes two books a year.

James Noel

Point counter- point

It was a Catholic priest - Dom Philip Jebb, the 'fighting monk' and later headmaster of Downside School - who introduced Richard Cohen (alongside, as it happens, your reviewer) to fencing in the 1960s - just one of the many ironies which this new and full history of the ancient art and modern sport of swordplay delights in. There can be few activities as old or varied as the disciplined exchange of two foes bearing sticks of steel trying to hit or kill each other. Depending on your era or intentions, fencing is an act of war, a mediaeval spectacle, a judicial device to establish guilt or innocence, a defence of honour, the murdering of your enemy and, of course, a way to woo women (those sexy German sabre scars). For some writers, swordplay is the perfect simile for life.

Saturday

Interconnect

More debit than credit

The people in Hanif Kureishi's short fiction are rarely in the first flush of youth. Adam, the bleary sixtysomething protagonist of the title story, soon allows himself to be talked into experimenting with a new physical frame. Even at 45, Rick, the focus of 'Remember This Moment, Remember Us', is darkly conscious of having fetched up 'on the wrong side of life'. To corporeal frailty can be added emotional mishap. Festooned with ex-partners, children seen at weekends, weighed down by complex domestic arrangements, the average Kureishi male can seem faintly dogged in his efforts to secure some private space amid the chaos of his fraught, middle-aged life.

Jonathan Mirsky

How the Ming fleets missed Manhattan

Gavin Menzies declares, he does not claim, that between 1421 and 1423 the Chinese discovered Australia, South and North America, and nearly reached the North Pole - in short, the world. He is 'certain' that if there hadn't been a disastrous fire in Peking's Forbidden City, killing the favourite imperial concubine and causing the emperor to lose interest in long-range exploration, 'China, not Europe, would have become the mistress of the world'. Furthermore, Mr Menzies suggests, had there been no fire New York might now be called New Beijing, and Buddhism not Christianity might 'have become the religion of the New World'.