More from Books

Saturday

Timothy Mo

The spider spied ‘er

Sarah Waters is a rarity - an up and coming writer in this age of hype who actually deserves the prizes and plaudits bestowed on her, and then some more. She is not a literary dot.com but a true novelist, with strengths that are fundamental to the form rather than traditional, although all kinds of interesting experiments with language and content are bubbling through the retorts of her fiction. Whilst idiosyncratic, Fingersmith is in the tradition of The Wide Sargasso Sea, The French Lieutenant's Woman, and even of a work of drama, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.

Dot Wordsworth

Master and mistress of ambiguity

Charlotte Bach was unusual even in those who stood by her: Don Smith, a gay sado-masochist with whom she was collaborating on a book called Sex, Sin and Evolution; Bob Mellors, a founder of the Gay Liberation Front, who had custody of her papers until he was murdered in his Warsaw flat; a man whose name she never knew who met her every Wednesday for several years for a meal at a Wimpy bar and a trip to the cinema, where she would play with his 'thing' during the trailers - although this regular engagement came to an end in 1979 when she bought a colour television and forsook the cinema; and Colin Wilson, the author of The Outsider, who took her scientific theories seriously.

Michael Beloff

Justice changing gear to keep up

Fifty-one years ago no one would have written this book, and, if someone had, no one would have read it. The constitution was not changing; and the judges' role as the third arm of government would have been of interest, if at all, to lawyers only. It was minimal and marginal. Judges still proclaimed themselves as not creating law but discovering it. Their approach to statutory construction was literal, not purposive; indeed some tended to regard legislation with the disdain of a supercilious examiner for the work of an under-educated schoolboy. The concept of public law had not yet permeated the judicial mind: the courts even held that natural justice (or fairness) had no application to ordinary administrative action, itself seen as an exercise from review of which judges would abstain.

David Caute

Great helmsman or mad wrecker

KOBA THE DREAD: LAUGHTER AND TWENTY MILLIONby Martin AmisCape, £16.99, pp. 306, ISBN 0224063030 Eric Hobsbawm is arguably our greatest living historian - not only Britain's, but the world's (as the torrential translation of his oeuvre tends to confirm). The global reach of his knowledge and culture, his formidable linguistic armoury, his love of jazz (although the saxophone was banished by Stalin), and his acute readings of personalities (though not Stalin's) are invariably conveyed in a prose measured yet fluent. Perhaps there is no substitute for an ZmigrZ background, for schooling in Vienna and Berlin before arriving at Marylebone Grammar School and King's College, Cambridge.

Hugh Massingberd

Lord of loony laughter

Of all my heroes whom I have been fortunate enough to encounter in the flesh, none was more friendly and relaxed than Peter Cook. Unlike some previously worshipped from afar, he was completely lacking in self-importance and had an almost puppyish desire to amuse - as well as a generous readiness to be amused. As he wove surreal fantasies about odd items he had spotted in the pile of newspapers he was clutching or cheerfully elaborated upon snippets he had picked up from watching trashy daytime television programmes, Cook still - not long before his death in 1995 - seemed more like an unaffected undergraduate than 'The Comic Legend Gone to Seed' as he was by then idly categorised in popular mythology.

Saturday

Julie Burchill

Sins against theology and haberdashery

From the time I was a little girl, long before I knew I wanted to be a writer, I had three ambitions which I felt that I must achieve in order fully to realise my potential as an adult. And they were: to take drugs, to sleep with Jews and to be notorious. In short, I wanted to be a bohemian, even though I had never heard the word. Well, I certainly did what I set out to do, but by the age of 35 the idea of the bohemian life held a beat too long fair turned my stomach, and I embraced Hove, the Church of England and strict monogamy - surely the terminal trio of anti-bohoism - with a fervour which I retain today; for while to be a young bohemian is both soulful and sexy, to be an old bohemian is very sad indeed.

Beryl Bainbridge

A whodunnit below zero

The more one reads about polar exploration in previous centuries, the more one comes to the conclusion that men were different in times gone by, stronger, wilder, possessed of an almost perverse capacity to withstand cold and hunger. They travelled without the benefit of radios, thermal underwear or light-weight sledges; when things went wrong no aeroplanes would zoom in to rescue those in danger. Captain Scott and three of the four men who accompanied him on the final slog to the South Pole were well on their way to the grave by the time the return journey began. Oates and Scott had gangrene from frostbite, and Taff Evans was losing his mind - he gave up the struggle after the descent of the Beardmore Glacier - but then, he was not a product of the public schools.

Paul Fox

A window on the world

It is two years since Panorama was shunted out of peak time on BBC1 into exile late on Sunday night. There were one or two protests, but the BBC reassured its critics that 'we will strengthen the News'. Two years on, the Six o'Clock News has the agenda of a second-rate tabloid newspaper and the Ten o'Clock News is about to be decimated by the departure of its heavyweights, Michael Burck and Peter Sissons. Allegedly 'too old' (i.e. wise and worldly), they will be replaced by a presenter who calls in a figure called Fergus to explain the significance of the news. The current BBC regime ignores such a lowering of standards. Ratings are paramount, marketing is what matters and the words 'public service broadcasting' have lost any significance.

Ronald Mutebi

A very African story

The voices we rarely hear in literature are those of the children of the men and women who have shaped modern Africa. The parents leave behind fulsome, instructive, self-justifying autobiographies as a matter of routine, but little is ever known of the plight of their offspring. Conditioned by the knock-on effects of their parents' actions and causes, their careers are often made or destroyed by the way they carry that legacy, especially if that legacy includes personal tragedy. A notable exception was In the Shadow of the Saint, Ken Wiwa's remarkably frank book published a few years ago.

Oliver Rackham

Trees with personality

The English have loved ancient trees for centuries, have celebrated them in story and poetry, have given them names, sung songs and danced dances in their honour, have invested them with railings, plaques and chains. Artists and photographers have tried to portray special trees, along with special horses, people and pigs: notably Strutt in 1822 with his Sylva Britannica, or portraits of Forest Trees distinguished for their Antiquity, or Menzies in 1864 with early photographs of the remarkable trees of Windsor Great Park. Today most professional photographers are ill at ease with trees of character.

Margaret Forster

Girls will be girls

You'll have noticed them on the roads, minibuses, full of schoolgirls, being driven by harassed teachers to some country location where the girls will be put through end-of-term, healthy outdoor activities, protesting all the way. Among any group of eight 13-year-olds there'll be a victim, a loner, a leader, and so on - it's been the stuff of many a novel since Lord of the Flies, but it is Bella Bathurst's considerable achievement to bring to this scenario something contemporary and fresh. Right from the beginning, there is a ferocious undertone to this story. Anyone familiar with modern teenage girls will recognise the authenticity of the dialogue - brutal, vulgar, full of jeers and sneers understood only by themselves.

John Mortimer

The wrong label that stuck

A young writer produced a brilliant novel that attacked religious fundamentalism, rubbished the press, found politics corrupt and the members of the British upper class shallow and boring. The date was 1930 when the 27-year-old Evelyn Waugh published Vile Bodies. Sixteen years later Kingsley Amis read Brideshead Revisited at St John's College, Oxford and sent quotations to Philip Larkin with a 'burp' printed after what he thought was every precious line. Although it has to be said that a burp after 'made free of her narrow loins' is justified, the incident shows how important it is, if you are struggling to find a new literary voice, to burp at the immediate past.

Michael Portillo

From Chaucer to Channel Four

'Everything of value in our spiritual and cultural life springs from our soil.' Thus spake Vaughan Williams; and Peter Ackroyd has undertaken a detailed proof of that proposition in this exploration of the origins of the English imagination. He has constructed a vast genealogical table, decorated with tiny marginalia, to identify the begetters of our national artistic consciousness, and to trace their lineage. We English are the sum of countless cultural influences drawn from across our history. Ackroyd delves into the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf and there identifies the four- beat alliterative line 'in an insistent rhythm which will affect the whole subsequent movement of English poetry'.

Saturday

Brian Masters

Climbing among the skyscrapers

According to Ward McAllister, the fabled gate-keeper of New York high society in the 1890s, to be counted among the privileged few you needed poise, an aptitude for polite conversation, a polished and deferential manner, an infinite capacity of good humour, and the ability to entertain and be entertained. And also, by the by, pots of money. Given that one was expected to change one's entire outfit nine times a day and take 20 gowns just for summer hols, the cost of belonging could have floated a small country, let alone a young lady. Yet the need to be part of an icily exclusive set with a profound sense of position was so desperate that women tormented themselves into obedience to shared rituals of numbing idiocy which must surely have smothered their humanity.

Simon Courtauld

The Orwell of Notting Hill

Roy Kerridge is conservative in attitude, he loves the works of Kipling and he enjoys the company of those whom he describes as of the African diaspora but would rather not call blacks. His affection for that race may have originated with his West African stepfather; he has certainly spent much of his time in the coloured districts of London. And I remember a previous book of his recounting his travels in parts of the southern United States, which appealed to him mainly because of their history of black enslavement. It is also relevant to point out that Kerridge is physically quite small: he has a round, studious, bespectacled face and a slight stammer, and he carries his belongings in a plastic shopping bag.

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Driving on a dark night

Ken Nott is the most annoying man in England. It's his job (he's a shock jock, a prime-time talk-radio DJ), and also his hobby (he's unfaithful to his girlfriend, has bedded his best mate's wife, and, worst of all, likes to take his controversial opinions into the pub with him). And then, just when you thought he couldn't be any more irritating, he attends a flash drinks party where he meets - on a roof, and, yes, in a thunderstorm - Celia, a mysterious and beautiful woman who apparently wants nothing more than to have passionate, no-strings-attached sex with him in a series of eight-star hotels. The only downside is that her husband is a violent criminal. This is just one of the many U-turns, dead ends and blind corners in Dead Air. Someone (I think it was E. L.

Sebastian Smee

Putting it all in

Not for nothing has Jeffrey Eugenides, on the strength of just one novel published seven years ago, been cropping up again and again in magazine lists of the top 10 or 25 young novelists in America. He has spent all these years in seclusion in Berlin cooking up a very cunning solution to the notorious literary divide between women's fiction and men's fiction: hermaphrodite fiction. A marketing dream. The narrator of Eugenides' second novel, Middlesex, is a hermaphrodite, and, at least through the second half of the novel, which relates the narrator's own life, you are sure to find aspects of Eugenides' hero/heroine with which to identify, no matter what your gender. One minute it's plucking eyebrows, the next it's picking up the tab.

Interconnect

A poet under strict controls

This vast work has the distinction of being both unreadable and unputdownable. It consists of nearly half a million words, a mountain of unsifted facts - who was whose cousin and what otherwise irrelevant uncle died in South Africa - which make you clutch your brow, tempt you to skip and thereby to run the risk of missing something revealing, amusing, germane. Perhaps these bits should have been printed in different type. Not a mountain, perhaps, a quarry for future Yeats scholars. However, these - a last complaint - will not be helped by the index: under 'astrology', for example, there are no less than 150 page references but no indication at all what occasion, or aspect of astrology, the pages mention; as an index, therefore, it is useless.

Allan Mallinson

Mastery of time and space

Even Churchill might have been discouraged had he, instead of Lord Portland, been prime minister and surveying the scene in 1807. Bonaparte had crushed the Prussians, knocked out the Austrians, and forced Russia to sue for peace. He had organised an almost total blockade of the continent against British trade, was redrawing the map of central and eastern Europe to consolidate his position, and had placed his family on thrones from the Mediterranean to the Baltic. Britain's only allies were Sweden and Naples, and even Naples was in French hands except for Sicily, whence the king had fled.

Digby Anderson

The organisation man

In 1743, 393 livings within the gift of the Archbishop of York were occupied by clergymen who did not live within that diocese and another 335 incumbents held plural livings. One bishop of Winchester distributed 30 incumbencies among his family. The Church of England was corrupt and slumbered. The facts of John Wesley's life and of his 'Great Awakening' which disturbed the slumbers are clear. Born in 1703, he was ordained and died a priest in the Church of England.