More from Books

Tuesday

Nicholas Lezard

The art of exclamation marks!

This is a short book, but it carries a punch, as does its subject, the exclamation mark – or shriek, or bang, as it is occasionally and graphically called. I use the word ‘graphically’ advisedly, for the punctuation mark falls into an ambiguous territory overlapping orthography and illustration. I say to myself that I don’t like it, but I do on occasion. I recently used it to describe the noise of my horrible doorbell (‘BZZZT!’) to convey the sensation of panic that occurs when I hear it. I also love it when the speech bubble above a cartoon character’s head contains nothing but an exclamation mark: pure surprise. My favourite example is in Snoopy’s case, for often his ears also stand up like exclamation marks themselves.

Lynn Barber

The life of Elizabeth Taylor was non-stop drama 

What is so startling about Elizabeth Taylor’s life story is how quickly everything happened. She was an MGM star at 12, a wife at l8, a widow at 26 and a grandmother at 38. Aged 16, she was playing Robert Taylor’s wife in Conspirator while still doing school lessons every day. ‘How can I concentrate,’ she wailed, ‘when Robert Taylor keeps sticking his tongue down my throat?’ MGM paid her mother Sara to be her chaperone, and Elizabeth felt that the only way she could escape their control was to get married – which she did, to Nicky Hilton. He had managed to stop drinking while courting her, but two weeks into the honeymoon he started again, and beat her up so badly she had a miscarriage – ‘I saw the baby in the toilet,’ she said.

Boyd Tonkin

Luminous fables: Night Train to the Stars, by Kenji Miyazawa, reviewed

Talking animals – as anyone who has watched a Studio Ghibli animated film will know – are big in Japan. But not always cute. The snooty hawk, for instance, looks down on the ugly but peaceable nighthawk (‘quite harmless to other birds’), who half-shares his macho name despite a deplorable lack of raptor credentials. Just to humiliate him, Hawk decides to call Nighthawk ‘Algernon’ instead. In despair, the little creature flies up to the heavens, only to be told: ‘One has to have the proper social status in order to become a star.’ The nighthawk awaits a lonely death in the frozen skies but finds his frail body ‘glowing gently with a beautiful blue light’. He has joined the constellation Cassiopeia, ‘still burning to this day’.

Chloë Ashby

A fierce defiance: Love Me Tender, by Constance Debré, reviewed

‘I don’t see why the love between a mother and son should be any different from other kinds of love. Why shouldn’t we be allowed to stop loving each other? Why shouldn’t we be allowed to break up?’ So begins Love Me Tender, the simply told but deeply felt new novel from Constance Debré, a story inspired by the French writer’s experience of leaving her husband and losing custody of her child. A story that’s quietly heartbreaking and fiercely defiant. When we meet our narrator, Constance, she has been separated from Laurent for three years, though definitions are fuzzy: ‘I call him my ex, he still calls me his wife.

Oliver Soden

Caring for the dying in a world of Zoom

Ten years ago, recently graduated and unemployed, I sent my CV to a raft of radio producers. Just one replied. ‘Dear Oliver,’ wrote Marilyn Imrie, in an email with the subject line ‘YOU’: ‘How nice to hear from you and about you.’ Her generosity and enthusiasm were writ large in those three capitals, which headed a letter that came festooned with advice, offers of work experience and an anecdote about her adaptation of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. It takes skill to shorten one of the longest novels in the language, but then Imrie was a legendary figure in the world of radio. We briefly corresponded but did not meet. Runcie’s real subjects are not death and disease, but love, and the object of his love Motor neurone disease runs the following course.

Clinton Heylin

Bob Dylan’s idea of modern song is nothing of the sort

Between 2007-9, Bob Dylan compiled no fewer than 100 Theme Time Radio Hour broadcasts of songs he rated, prefaced by seemingly off-the-cuff verbal riffs on their meaning, history and importance. He was no natural DJ, but his love for the form shone through, as did a well-honed gruff ol’ man persona. The series was produced by Dylan’s ‘fishing buddy’ Eddie Gorodetsky, a successful sitcom scriptwriter (Mom, Big Bang Theory), with many of the selected songs more reflective of his taste than Dylan’s. Now we have Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song, and the suspicion remains (confirmed by a generous dedication) that Gorodetsky is in the wings, throwing out suggestions again. For Dylan’s idea of modern song is nothing of the sort.

Sarah Crompton

Lord of the dance: the genius of George Balanchine 

Sex and dance were the twin themes of George Balanchine’s life. ‘I am a cloud in trousers,’ he said, using a phrase borrowed from the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. Jennifer Homans quotes the sentence early in her biography of the man who co-founded New York City Ballet: What this suggested, and it was a central theme of his life, was that he felt like a man with two bodies and he lived in them both simultaneously, with at times heartbreaking personal consequences. The first was the trousers – the earthly man, delighted by sensual feelings and desires, who loved good food, fine wine, beautiful women... The cloud or breath was something else, and he saw it as the source of his gift.

David Patrikarakos

The depressing durability of dictatorships

Many years ago, in Tehran, I spent a few hours in a bookshop run by an Armenian whose adult life had coincided almost exactly with the existence of the Islamic Republic. As I browsed, he fell into conversation with a German-language student who had come in looking for what appeared to be an obscure Persian grammar. The student was hopeful for change in Iran. A young population with growing social media use, together with state-wide oppression and economic mismanagement, would, he argued, see the end of the mullahs soon enough. The bookshop manager listened politely for a long time and then, clearly deciding his potential customer could be trusted, replied that none of that mattered.

Martin Vander Weyer

How the Romans set an example of good business practice

‘The purpose of corporations,’ writes William Magnuson, ‘is, and always has been, to promote the common good.’ That’s a very bold claim in an era when the left is convinced that shareholder-owned limited liability companies (which is what Magnuson means by corporations) largely exist to exploit the customer, the worker and the planet for the enrichment of owners and executives; while plenty of entrenched boardroom opinion believes with Milton Friedman that the sole social responsibility of business is ‘to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits, so long as it... engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud’.

Monday

David Profumo

Miller’s thumb and Mother-in-law’s garotte: the marvellous lexicon of angling

Despite its many centuries of popularity – enthusiasts have ranged from Cleopatra to Eric Clapton – angling has been the subject of precious little historical scholarship, giving rise instead to anecdotalists or grim technicians. So Chris McCully’s latest animated and vigorous addition to the Bibliotheca piscatoria arrives as fresh and welcome as a run of summer salmon from the estuary. The lexicon of angling, he suggests, can encode cultural histories – and so it does. The result is a stargazy pie of a book rich in natural lore and quirks, assembled with etymological rigour and finished with crisp wit.

Ruth Scurr

Empress Eugénie’s shrine to the Bonapartes

The empress Eugénie – the Spanish-born last empress-consort of France, wife of Napoleon III, mother of the prince imperial – lived for the last 40 years of her life in Farnborough, between the military towns of Aldershot and Sandhurst. There she created a home, museum, mausoleum and chantry in commemoration of the first and second French empires.  Farnborough Hill was the place she chose ‘après que tout fut fini’ (after it was all over).  In 1870, Eugénie had accompanied her husband into exile in England, following the defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War.  Together with their teenage son, they lived in Camden Place, a large country house in Chislehurst.

Mark Bolland

A courtier’s lot: writing to prime ministers one minute, acting as nanny the next

Apart from when the government has been self-immolating, the royal family has dominated the news recently: the passing of Queen Elizabeth II and the solemn accession of the King; the continuing and rather tragic psychodrama of the Sussexes; the sad tale of the Duke of York. And, of course, we now have the latest series of The Crown. Apart from the weird sensation of seeing oneself portrayed on screen (thank you, Ben Lloyd-Hughes), I found the ten episodes, with their portent of tragedy to come, quite gripping. Just the right time, then, for a book revealing the hidden wiring which powers the royal family. Courtiers is a suave history of the monarchy over the past century, seen through the prism of those who serve it. What is a courtier?

Julie Burchill

Whoever persuaded Bono he could sing?

There are a few pop stars whose work I can’t help liking in spite of myself – their song-writing, that is. I’d be happy never to see the faces or hear the voices of Mick Hucknall or Chris Martin again, but the moment ‘Stars’ or ‘Trouble’ starts, I’m mesmerised – only to wonder crossly the minute the song ends: ‘Why couldn’t they have given it to someone with a decent voice?’ Think about it: dancers have choreographers and actors have scriptwriters, so why should we assume songwriters can sing? Bono’s another.

Mark Amory

The bad boys of the Hypocrites Club

Members of the Hypocrites Club were Oxford undergraduates, and those with whom David Fleming’s book is chiefly concerned were born between 1903-5. It had originally been a respectable club, founded in 1921, its two most mentioned members being L.P. Hartley, the novelist, and David Cecil, the biographer and historian. But all that changed when Harold Acton arrived, closely followed by many of his fellow Etonians. Acton himself was always fastidiously polite, and spoke in a curiously hesitant way; but his friends were not, and shouted. Soon the club became celebrated for drunkenness and homosexuality, and closed in 1924. It would be impossible to depict the whole circle, and Fleming does not try.

Lynn Barber

Meghan and Harry have never grasped the notion of ‘only connect’

In June 2017 Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, was surprised when Jane Sarkin, his features editor, told him they should do a cover story on Meghan Markle, the star of Suits. Carter had never heard of Markle, but then nor had most people. In her own eyes she was a huge Hollywood celebrity, but actually she was mainly unknown outside Canada, where Suits was filmed. She wasn’t even the star of the series; she was about sixth in the billing. But Sarkin knew something else about her: that she was rumoured to be marrying Prince Harry. Markle happily agreed to the interview, but said, of course, she could not talk about Harry. She wanted to be celebrated as a global ‘activist and philanthropist’.

Michael Hofmann

Robert Lowell struggled all his life to elude his rarefied Boston heritage

The American poet Robert Lowell (1917-77) was a so-called ‘Boston Brahmin’, a Lowell of Boston, where, in the widely known distich, ‘the Lowells speak only to Cabots, and the Cabots speak only to God’. (In 1923, when one Harry H. Kabotchnik, against furious protests from the Cabots, succeeded in getting his name changed, this briefly became ‘and the Cabots speak Yiddish, by God’.

Michela Wrong

The butcher of Chad who died in a private Senegalese clinic

Recent years have not been kind to the campaign for universal justice. The notion that some crimes are so serious that perpetrators should be hunted down and prosecuted irrespective of where the atrocities were actually committed has taken something of a beating since the International Criminal Court (ICC) opened for business in the Hague in 2002. Just this August, William Ruto, a politician once charged with crimes against humanity by the ICC, was voted president of Kenya, wresting power from Uhuru Kenyatta, who had faced identical charges before the same court. A lawyer accused of witness-tampering in their cases then died in what looked very like a poisoning. So much for ending impunity for the ethnically targeted violence that swept Kenya after its 2007 polls.

Roger Lewis

The utter vileness of Richard Harris

Brawling, boozing and womanising, those vaunted hell-raisers of the 1960s – Peter O’Toole, Oliver Reed, Richard Burton and, of course, Richard Harris – were all frightful bores. Because their professional lives involved dressing up and wearing mascara and silly wigs, it was essential for them to show what he-men they were: how hard. Like Stanley Baker (another one), Harris boasted to columnists: ‘I’ve got great contacts with the underworld,’ especially the Krays. He never had anything to say about the artistic merits or meaning of any of his films. His stories were exclusively about his prowess as a bully. Crushing an apple, he typically said to one of his directors: ‘If you don’t get out of this room right now, this is what I’ll do to your skull.

Andrew Neil

David Dimbleby turns out to be a bit of a closet republican

In Keep Talking, David Dimbleby takes us through a gentle romp of a stellar, unrivalled broadcasting career spanning, incredibly, 70 years. There are no great revelations (even the name of the BBC boss who tried to fire him from Question Time is withheld), no dramatic insights to make us rethink well-known events, no ponderous thoughts on broadcasting for media studies students to pore over (andthe book is all the better for that). As the face of the BBC’s coverage of our most important national events over the decades, from general election nights to every major royal ceremony, Dimbleby has been authoritative, well-informed, impartial and appealing.