More from Books

Saturday

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'.

Philip Hensher

Master of the shrug

Long long ago, they used to say that the difference between the Hohenzollerns and the Habsburgs was this. In Berlin, the situation was always serious, but not hopeless. In Vienna, on the other hand, the situation was invariably hopeless, but not serious. It should never be forgotten that Billy Wilder, that most adorable of film directors, was in origin, and at heart always remained, Viennese. That is the case, despite his long and wonderful career in America, and despite the fact that what, for me, is his best film, One, Two, Three, is a Berlin movie. The subject of the ZmigrZs from Germany and Austria to Hollywood is a fascinating one, and has inspired what ought to be a classic book, Salka Viertel's The Kindness of Strangers.

Saturday

Emma Tennant

People + places = life

You may never have heard of David Gentleman, because, unlike so many of the over-publicised charlatans who call themselves artists nowadays, he does not believe in personality cults. He is as modest as he is talented, which is saying something. But, even if you do not know his name, you will almost certainly have licked hundreds of stamps that he has designed, walked past his mural on Charing Cross Underground station, seen his National Trust acorn logo, read a Penguin book adorned with one of his drawings, or been influenced by a hard-hitting Gentleman poster. His work is a force for good. It celebrates the beauty of the world. It is elegant and witty, but also deeply serious. Gentleman has no truck with designers who misuse their talents to promote unworthy products or ideas.

Charles Allen

The banditry plays on

Forty years ago V. S. Naipaul enraged Indians by describing India as 'an area of darkness'. He also upset a great many Western liberals who were then discovering in India a land of all-pervading spirituality. Later, he returned to India to write more kindly about 'a wounded civilisation' undergoing a liberation of spirit through 'rage and revolt'. Which leads me to Kevin Rushby's new travel book, subtitled 'Through India in Search of Bandits, the Thug Cult and the British Raj', which takes India's liberation through rage and revolt as its central theme.

Eric Christiansen

When the consumer was king

Books as glossy as this are seldom as good as this. It is a sort of economic miracle in itself: fat, quarto-size, packed with illustrations, maps and plans, wide-margined, legibly typeset, efficiently proof-read, Hong Kong printed and priced under £25 hardback. It would almost be worth buying if it were a politician's memoirs or a cookery book. The difficulty is to explain that late mediaeval commercial history can be worth reading about at any price, even with the assurance that this is the distillation of a life's work by a much-admired master of the subject. Professor Spufford is the currency pundit.

John Colvin

A country to die for

Finland declared independence from Russia in 1917 during the Bolshevik revolution. The subsequent civil war ended in victory by the White forces under Marshal Baron Gustav Mannerheim, a former officer in the uniform of the Tsar, later to become commander-in-chief of the Finnish army in the Winter War of 1939/40. Mannerheim had been a chevalier garde to the Romanov royal court in St Petersburg. Passionate about baroque ceremony, he yet fought well in the savage Russo-Japanese war of 1904-05, travelled for the Tsar for over five years in wild Central Asia, including Tibet, and served with distinction under Bushilov in the first world war, before the imperial defeat by the Bolsheviks.

Alan Wall

Falstaff in a wig and gown

Rumpole is Falstaff on the right side of the law. He is rumbustious, shrewdly distrustful of authority and filled with substantial appetites others find gross. Leo McKern's television incarnation was unforgettable; his face had been hardened by confronting the world's absurdities and mangled by the rigorous pursuit of his own pleasure. One was reminded of Evelyn Waugh: 'The heavy port drinker must be prepared to make some sacrifice of personal beauty and agility.

Philip Ziegler

An eye for the unexpected

After his mountainous Gladstone and Churchill and barely less substantial study of the post-1886 chancellors of the exchequer, Roy Jenkins here enjoys himself in what by his standards is a mere jeu d'esprit. His new book is a collection of essays on 12 cities which he has lived in or often visited and which are in some way intertwined with his life. It is not, he emphasises, a disguised second shot at an autobiography: 'One navel-gazing is wholly permissible,' he writes. 'Two would point to self-obsession.' But the essays are intensely personal: this is Jenkins's Paris, Jenkins's Bonn, seen through his eyes and lit by recollections of his visits. There are surprising omissions.

Angela Huth

The snake in paradise

The title is a slight puzzle, a tease. But quickly all becomes clear. Here is a book of painful but fictional recollections recounted by fictional novelist Imogen Bailey, which in turn become a real novel of both power and delicacy. Imogen, a young woman of great sensibility, was traumatised by the loss of her beloved brother Johnny, who swam out to sea when Imogen was in her late teens, and never returned. Rendered speechless by this tragedy, Imogen was sent by her parents to a nursing home to recover from her breakdown. Thirty years after her brother's death, looking back, remembering, she tries to sort out the truth from the imagined: the reality, then, from the reality as she now perceives it. A jumble of elements darken the story. Imogen's parents were both doctors.

William Feaver

Very trying indeed

Ralph Steadman has always employed graphic spatter. The pen jabs, the ink spurts and - yoiks! - how the victims suffer. Eyes popping, they retch, they convulse, they become pinstriped roadkill. The projectile handling has extended from cartoons to illustrations (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) to caricature-biographies of Sigmund Freud and Leonardo da Vinci. In Doodaaa the spatter hits the fan. A 'Triography' he calls it, meaning, I guess, a 'Try-anything-once'. My, how he tries. He begins with drinks-all-round acknowledgments and several preambles before introducing the reader to his alter ego 'Gavin Twinge', a name with a Goon Show ring to it, a narrative conceit that one might have expected to find in the late Spike Milligan's wastepaper basket.

Interconnect

Bruiser, cruiser but no boozer

The subject of this intelligent biography was among the founders of the Modern movement in British art before the first world war, and a leading formulator of what he considered to be its principles. A philosopher/aesthetician, he was a friend of Epstein, Wyndham Lewis, Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska, and was thought a great poet by the young T. S. Eliot. Ezra Pound published Hulme's five short poems at the end of one of his own books, entitling them The Collected Poetical Works of T. E. Hulme. A joke, of course, but they consist of the pictorial, of images; publicist Pound borrowed a word from the French and founded the Imagist school. Hulme published no book in his lifetime and his scattered papers were put together in the 1920s by Herbert Read under the title Speculations.

Allan Mallinson

Waiting for the Bogeyman

On 19 August 1805, two months before his death at Trafalgar, Vice-Admiral Lord Nelson rejoined Emma Hamilton at their home in Merton after an absence of almost two and a half years. During that time, he had been continuously at sea, at first in the Mediterranean watching for Admiral Villeneuve to break out of Toulon to join the squadrons from the Atlantic ports, and then in the Atlantic itself, where the French tried to lure him into the Caribbean before dashing back to concentrate in the Channel to cover the invasion of England and Ireland.

Lee Langley

Accentuating the positive

There was a time when our man at the BBC was the most famous foreign correspondent in India, his broadcasts reaching one fifth of the world's population. Road-blocks and armed insurgents tended to melt when confronted by Tully-sahib, the man to trust, who understood the problems. For 30 years he trawled the sub-continent, covering its social, political, personal and religious upheavals, but his career with the BBC ended in 1994 after a doomed attempt to point out to John Birt, in a public forum, the error of his broadcasting ways. There have been many journeys in Mark Tully's life, the first from India, where he was born in 1936, going 'home' at ten to a dark, chilly England which he didn't much like after India's warmth and colour.

Michael Beaumont

The young woman and the sea

When Ellen Macarthur was nine she saved her pocket money, by eating less, to buy her first little boat and slept on the floor of her bedroom so as to store the boat's mast and sails. At 18 she decided that sailing round Britain alone 'seemed to be the most natural thing to do'. At 24 she raced alone single-handed around the world, was the fastest woman ever to do so and was only just beaten into second place in the race. Taking on the World is her autobiography. She is 26. The book is a thrilling adventure story, more interesting perhaps if you know a little of sailing and the sea, but written for someone who does not.

The Spectator

Christmas Books II

Hugh Massingberd 'It is difficult', writes A. N. Wilson in The Victorians (Hutchinson, £25), 'for me to conceive of a more agreeable life than that of a Victorian country parson.' Reading his brilliantly panoramic, constantly stimulating and humanely wise portrait of an age and the characters who created it left me longing to have been one of the Reverend Wilson's parishioners - well, all right, the squire.

Saturday

Theo Richmond

Growing up the hard way

You don't have to be Jewish to find this book rewarding, but you do need to be interested in humanity: every page seethes with it. There are no gruesome Holocaust testimonies: the youthful authors of these autobiographies, written in Poland in the years leading up to the second world war, had no premonition of the horrors to come. Standing on the threshold of life, they could not know how few of their generation would live to cross it. These writings emerged from three literary contests held in Poland during the 1930s. The organisers invited Jews between the ages of 16 and 22 to write about their everyday lives, their memories and thoughts; minimum length '25 standard notebook pages'. Of the 627 entries submitted, nearly half have survived.

Helen Osborne

Heroes, villains and bugbears

Unlike most journalistic cobble jobs, this collection of Nigel Farndale's interviews from the Sunday Telegraph has a real sparkle: intelligent, irreverent and often unexpectedly kindly. It makes you laugh and, occasionally, it makes you gasp. Over the past five years he has quietly garnered a reputation as one of the best inquisitors, up there with Lynn Barber if not yet so fearsome. After absorbing all that holy writ from rampant egos, most interviewers end up feeling like a piece of old blotting-paper and pull out of the game. Farndale is still resilient. Flirtation, Seduction, Betrayal - for him the weekly confrontation is an encapsulated love affair. He does his homework on his heroes and villains, and then is prepared to be surprised.

Martin Vander Weyer

Simple, spray-painted slogans

An awful lot has happened since the Canadian journalist Naomi Klein shot to radical prominence with the publication of No Logo, the first sacred text of the anti-globalisation movement, shortly after her co-religionists besieged the 1999 world trade talks in Seattle. They went on to wreck the World Bank/IMF meeting in Prague and, less successfully, to try to disrupt the G7 Genoa summit in July 2001, though we now know that the extraordinarily heavy security which thwarted them at Genoa was primarily designed to ward off murderous Al-Qaeda terrorists, rather than paint-spraying, slogan-chanting anti-globalisers.

Sam Phipps

A damned dark dozen

Indelible Acts is A. L. Kennedy's first book of fiction since Everything You Need, which was followed by a spell of suicidal desperation. We know all about that from On Bullfighting, her patchily received foray into the world of the matador which was only partly about matadors and partly about herself and her suicidal desperation. With fiction it's different, of course; you're not supposed to confuse author and content or to assume any link. Still, whatever the state of Kennedy's mind and emotions now, the predominant quality of these 12 stories - the common denominator - is, sad to say, gloom. And not always an interesting gloom at that. The Kennedy gloom tends to have a deep-seated, almost predetermined feel that makes it very hard to shift, let alone see through.