More from Books

Saturday

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.

Saturday

Matthew Leeming

The making of the Taleban

I saw the first tourists arriving in Afghanistan this summer. I saw their incredulity at the graveyard of crumpled aeroplanes at Kabul airport and at the Hazara suburb of the city that looks like Berlin in 1945. The question everyone asked was: how did this happen? How did a country famous for its hospitality and poetry sleepwalk back into the Middle Ages? In future the tourists will be carrying this book. As an account of how the country got into its present state, and of the making of the grotesque regime of the Taleban, it could not possibly be bettered.

Sophia Watson

God’s own country

Photographs by Mark J. Rattenbury Further details are available on the archive website, www.somerset.gov.uk/archives/exmoor This is a puzzlingly titled book. Are we being encouraged to look on the contents as mirrored reflections of a way of life, or reflections on the death of the old Exmoor? Perhaps we, like the Lady of Shalott, are supposed to be glimpsing shadows of the world in the pages of the book, or perhaps we are meant to be pensive about it all. In any event, while many distinguished men and women are featured, there is, alas, no sign of Sir Lancelot tirra-lirra-ing his way across Exmoor. The book is made up of portraits of those people who have spent a lifetime on Exmoor, God's own country.

Anthony Smith

The higher the fewer

What to do if you plan a book whose essence is a single parachute drop? And what to do if, apparently, that particular parachutist was not deeply committed to the book? Similarly, if your two previous books have been Soup and Mushroom, and if your career has involved theology, minicab-driving, obituary writing, and founding a chain of soup bars, how can you detail the physics and technology embodied in such a subject as high-altitude parachuting? This actual drop was no casual tumble from the skies, being the highest ever such descent, starting at 102,000 feet above the earth and landing safely in New Mexico on 16 August 1960. No one has ever dropped so far in all the years since then, and only Joseph W.

Gerard Noel

A congregation of clergymen

This highly readable selection of obituaries is based on the original more general collections of Hugh Massingberd. His object was to celebrate life rather than death; and indeed the persons here described, though from a specialised category, come vividly alive in the capable hands of Canon Trevor Beeson. The period covered is the quarter century from 1987 to 2002. Of the 89 entries, 86 are of men, mostly, but not all, Anglican. Highlighted here are facts and events not, in general, mentioned in the actual obituaries, whose dates are given in brackets. The Rev.

Ruth Guilding

Off the straight and narrow

The picture of a maverick which emerges from this book is ever more strongly drawn. In this sequel to his auto- biographical No Voice from the Hall, published in 1998, John Harris takes us forwards, backwards and sideways around his earlier account. There is less fishing, and the kindly figure of 'Snozzle', his Uncle Sid, the upholsterer-cum-antique dealer who 'took on' Harris in his teenage years, appears only fleetingly. The anecdotes are more circumstantial, the edited and neatly dovetailed snapshots of the conservative upbringing against which Harris revolted, and subsequent revolts against authority in all its forms.

Zenga Longmore

Mr Nice and Mr Nasty

Quentin Crisp was, among other delightful things, a human paradox. He loathed the Gay Liberation Movement as bitterly as he despised Oscar Wilde, yet he did more than anyone else to change people's attitudes towards homosexuality. He was unashamedly flamboyant, yet spinsterish and celibate; the sex act, he explained, was like 'undergoing a colostomy operation without anaesthetic'. He was flippant yet wise. He hated England, but became an English figure of affection. Born Denis Pratt, he 'dyed' his name Quentin in his early twenties. His childhood was spent in 'middle-class, middling, middle-brow' suburbia where his unusual appearance prompted his father to expostulate that he looked like a male whore. Andrew Barrow takes us by the hand and guides us through Crisp's extraordinary life.

Candia Mcwilliam

Browsing for escape

The fine, rusty-gold building of the University Press presides over Walton Street in Oxford with its more monumental than collegiate presence. The touchstone of literacy in homes all over the world will be an Oxford dictionary, compact, shorter or the full, distinguished thing. The livery of the press is recognisable everywhere, ultramarine and gold. Reliably compendious, with such indiosyncratic flowerings as Quiller-Couch's Oxford Book of Modern Verse, the backlist of the Press fills a worthy niche for the second-hand bookshop browser. The OUP's own bookshop on the High in Oxford is, however, rather different. The assistants are young, helpful, conceivably not overlavishly paid. The beautifully printed Oxford University Gazette may be purchased, at 75p.

Saturday

Interconnect

Out of the commonplace

The following extracts are taken from George Lyttelton's Commonplace Book Zeuxis was said to have painted grapes on a boy's head so well that the birds came and pecked them. Sir G. Kneller said that if the boy too had been well painted the birds wouldn't have dared approach.An accurate daguerrotype portrait of a commonplace face, a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen in their elegant but confined houses.C. Bront‘ (1848) on Pride and Prejudice Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius (as distinct from fine intelligence) that I have ever known.

Grey Gowrie

Grand, ritzy and splendid

A consolation of being an international foot-in-the-door man in the 1970s, albeit one selling Monets and Moores, not Hoovers, was arriving from JFK at the Hotel Carlyle in Manhattan. You reached the superlative place at about 10 in the evening, and even though flesh complained that it was the middle of the night, spirit insisted on a Martini before bedtime in the Bemelmans Bar. Bobby Short would play a few Bogartish tunes on the piano, Ludwig's own murals soothed the eye and the America you entered seemed a throwback: older and more elegant than still trendy London, or the rest of busy neurotic New York fighting off its post-Vietnam blues.

Juliet Townsend

A choice of children’s books

This year my village school, like hundreds of others, is scrimping and saving to afford that Holy Grail of modern education - the Computer Suite. Of course computers are an essential part of every child's world, and will presumably be even more so in the future. Yet there is something rather soulless about the rows of mesmerised little figures staring into their screens while skilfully manipulating an army of mice. Somehow that world needs to be balanced by introducing children to the very different pleasures of the book, and there has never been a time when children's books were so varied, well-produced and such good value as today.

Interconnect

Uncle to the nation

It was only when David Attenborough's autobiography arrived for review that I realised I had been dodging his television programmes for years. Nothing personal; it was just that a pigeon on the pavement is more interesting to me than a bird of paradise on a television screen, a peep-show, that seems to push me further from 'nature', not nearer. This perhaps snooty self-revelation is only intended to highlight the way, when I came to open his book, I found myself laughing delightedly, and greatly warming to him. He is just a jobbing tellyman after all, a 'programme-maker', with all the compromises that entails, and he fell into it by accident. Bored with a job in educational publishing, he applied for a place on a BBC training course (Sound) and was turned down.

James Delingpole

The penis mightier than the sword

Next time you're stuck for conversation at a dinner party, why not use one of these fascinating facts to break the ice? 1. In mammalian terms the male of Homo sapiens is spectacularly endowed - his penis, when erect, being roughly three times larger than a 400lb gorilla's. 2. In Pharaonic Egypt, Egyptian men were so fearful of vaginal blood that they would hire Aethiops (famed for the blackness of their skin and the enormousness of their members) to deflower their brides. 3. The biblical 'sin of Onan' had nothing to do with every teenager's favourite pastime but in fact referred originally to 'coitus interruptus'.

Nicholas Harman

A fine solo performance

The sort of young person who once drifted into publishing now fiddles about with computers instead. The trade has been transformed both by its wretched economics and by the wretched spirit of the times. Solo publishing in particular, an eccentric business or a business for eccentrics, should have died out many years ago. Michael Russell didn't. He is vague about dates but seems to have been at it for about 35 years and is still going, perhaps even going strong. He puts it perfectly: 'In publishing terms I know I'm largely out of touch, but I seem to keep in touch all right with that part of the book-buying market which is also out of touch.' Now he has produced an anthology of snippets from works he has published over the years.

M R-D-Foot

Valuable second opinions

Professor Roger Louis's own expertise is in British imperial history; he edited the three-volume Oxford History of the British Empire. For years past, he has run seminars at the Harry Ransome Humanities Research Center at Austin, Texas, which holds ample stores of British literary and historical manuscripts; he invites leading dons and critics from Great Britain to discuss their current work, and has secured some unusually fine papers. This is his third collection of their essays; it covers many aspects of the history of this country during the 20th century. Old-fashioned, party-centred, parliamentary history hardly appears.

Jake Auerbach

Danger: man at work

My heart is always lifted when a book begins with a map; it is like getting on a plane, we are about to go on an adventure. The first image in this generously illustrated work is a map of Italy 400 years ago; it shows a loose collection of independent nation states which, at that time, stood in the middle of the world. Having, in his book Brunelleschi's Dome, successfully conjured up Florence in the 15th century, Ross King now moves to 16th-century Rome and Michelangelo's astonishing Sistine chapel ceiling; an artistic achievement so stunning that, according to Goethe, we cannot understand what one man is capable of without visiting the chapel.

Digby Durrant

The doubting priest

As Schindler's Ark shows, Thomas Keneally is at his best bringing the past to life undaunted either by the importance of the events or by the famous names at the centre of them. Two of his other novels that lie to hand, A Family Madness and Gossip from the Forest, confirm that he wastes no time in throwing the reader in at the deep end and keeping him there. In the first one it's Belorussia scrabbling to preserve its identity as Germany, Russia and Poland fight over it during the last war; in the other we eavesdrop on the private conversations between the French, British and German delegates when they meet in two railway carriages in a forest to discuss the armistice of 1918.

Jonathan Sumption

The last brick put in place

The publication of this volume marks the completion of Joseph Frank's enormous biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky, a work which he has spent half a lifetime in writing. 'Monumental' is the standard clichZ for such an enterprise, and Frank's is certainly that. The scale of the work is due mainly to the fact that it sets out to be not just a biography, but a work of literary criticism and a social and intellectual history of 19th-century Russia. This would be a marvellous achievement if it could be done. Dostoevsky's world is not easily accessible even to those who have read widely in its literature, and his ideas are certainly not self-explanatory. Dostoevsky was born in 1821 into a family that was legally classified as noble but would not have ranked as such by any other standard.