Biography

Marianne Moore’s poems are notoriously ‘difficult’ but her personality and the circumstances of her life are as fascinating today as they were to the avant-garde writers and artists of 1920s New York. Much of the fascination lies in the contrast between what Linda Leavell calls Moore’s ‘maiden-aunt persona’ and her position as a ground-breaking modernist, whose highly idiosyncratic verse and technical experimentation dazzled and baffled her contemporaries.

I have to declare an interest: for many years the Knight and I were the closest of friends until a sequence of his unpredictable and volcanic rages drove us apart. Robert O’Byrne explains how the Knight suffered for most of his life from the illness and strong medication of manic depression. It is a tribute to him that I never knew of this medical diagnosis until much later and that, despite it, he achieved so much in his life, drawing international acclaim to Irish pictures, architecture and furniture and producing so many learned books on their quality and beauty. In fact there is a photograph in this book of the Knight and I dancing a jig to the melodious tin-whistle music of Paddy Maloney. But in the caption I am described as someone else, albeit a cousin.

It’s no joke, writing about comedians. Their work is funny, their lives are not. Rightly honouring the former while accurately relaying the disasters of the latter is a challenge few writers can well meet. Peter Cook and Dudley Moore have been extensively studied before. Harry Thompson published his excellent biography of Cook in 1997, Barbara Paskin her authorised biography of Moore the same year; Alexander Games’s joint biography Pete & Dud followed in 1999. There have been memoirs of Peter Cook by his first and second wives, Wendy and Judy, and his third wife, Lin, has edited Something Like Fire: Peter Cook Remembered. What’s to add?

Rhys Davies was a Welsh writer in English who lived most of his life in London, that Tir na nÓg in the east, the place of eternal youth and beauty to which in the mid-20th century many Welsh writers in English, adulterers and homosexuals ran. There were few chapels in London, but many bedsits. Also publishers. And guardsmen. Here Davies followed a career unique by Welsh standards, for he did not sell milk or teach. For 50 years he just wrote.

‘Experiences aren’t given us to be “got over”, otherwise they would hardly be experiences.’ The opening sentence of the first draft of The Bookshop, published in 1978 when Penelope Fitzgerald was 62, didn’t survive in the finished version, but its author had found her voice, and, in a way, her subject. She had learnt how to look back. She had begun publishing only four years earlier, with a life of Edward Burne-Jones. There followed a thriller, written to amuse her husband as he lay dying, and a second biography, The Knox Brothers. This was about her father, ‘Evoe’ Knox, editor of Punch and author of light verse, and his three brothers, two of whom became priests in different denominations.

When Prince Albert died in 1861, aged 42, Queen Victoria, after briefly losing the use of her legs, ordered that every room and corridor in Windsor Castle should be draped in black crepe. As a result, the country’s entire stock of black crepe was exhausted in a single week. One of the key factors of Victoria’s reign for Michael Dennison is that it was — not always consciously — a ‘performance monarchy’, in which the Queen sat in carefully fashioned stage-sets at Windsor, Balmoral or Osborne being discreetly ogled by the populace. This public posturing helped gloss over Victoria’s ‘dizzying’ contradictions, and the purpose of this short biography is to bring them back out of the shadows.

When John Drury, himself an Anglican divine, told James Fenton (the son of a canon of Christ Church) that he was writing about George Herbert, Fenton replied with gnomic brio ‘The poet!’ adding ‘Both in intention and execution.’ Herbert’s authentic lightness and strength, pathos and wit, alertness and sympathy have long been as precious to poets as to fellow believers. In Music at Midnight Drury has produced a pleasantly old-fashioned account of Herbert’s life and poetry which will serve as an introduction to new readers and remind devotees of many favourite passages, sometimes interestingly contextualised.

In the outrageous 2010 press hounding of the innocent schoolteacher Christopher Jefferies over the murder of his young female tenant (of which a neighbour, Vincent Tabak, was later convicted and over which the guilty newspapers later shelled out punitive sums), the Sun produced, as suspicious facts, that Jefferies was ‘obsessed by death’, and ‘scared the kids’ in his classroom. He had, for example, exposed his pupils to the ‘Victorian murder novel’ The Moonstone. As an English teacher at a high-ranked school, Jefferies would surely have prescribed my edition of Wilkie Collins’s novel— the only one, if I may toot my trumpet, to make comprehensive use of the manuscript. Pulp the edition, I thought with a shudder, before it kills again.

Given the outcome of recent military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is pertinent to look for one particular quality in our senior commander: honesty. In other words, after blaming vainglorious politicians for precipitating us into war without adequate preparation or resources, it is reasonable to ask, how capable are our generals of admitting their own mistakes? Their persistence in two failed strategies — the application of Northern Ireland peace-keeping tactics to Basra and the dispersal of troops among forward posts in Helmand — does not suggest any culture of mea culpa, and ruthless self-examination has not been a distinguishing feature of the annual lectures delivered by the Chiefs of the Defence Staff to the Royal United Services Institute in the past decade.

Philip Ziegler is best known for his biographies, often official, of politicians, royalty  and soldiers. They include Harold Wilson, Edward VIII and Louis Mountbatten, whose correspondence he also edited. What has driven him to write about an actor — and one whose life has been fully covered in so many biographies, the most recent being Terry Coleman’s in 2005? I take it he knows little of theatre on the inside and has had to base his book on the notoriously unreliable gossip of actors, not the least of whom was Olivier himself, a supreme fantasist. I am not even sure that Ziegler is a theatre buff.

The forecast is bad. Football is back. Gloom strikes. Cure the malaise by reading the book reviews in this week’s Spectator. Here's a selection: Richard Davenport-Hines introduces the celebrated American novelist and businesswoman Willa Cather to a British audience: ‘Cather was a pioneering career woman who in the late 1890s supported herself as a magazine editor and then as newseditor at the Pittsburgh Leader — an unprecedented post for a woman. She was later a successful managing director ofMcClure’s Magazine. With her gumption and vitality, she was a stalwart among women facing the ‘rough-and-tumble’ of competitive work.

More books have been written about Winston Churchill than perhaps any other figure in British history. Do we really need another volume added to the existing library? In Churchill and Empire, the historian Lawrence James makes a strong case for justifying another book for Churchillian bibliophiles. The narrative begins by looking back at Churchill’s career as a young army officer in the late nineteenth century, where he served in conflicts in India, South Africa and Sudan. It ends with Churchill’s slightly deluded view of Britain’s place in global politics as the Second World War is ending: when the British Empire is disintegrating and America is the most dominant superpower on the planet.

This is a book about Rwanda. It’s a book about cycling. But it’s not, in the end, a book about Rwandan cycling. Well, it is. Tim Lewis gives us the story of Adrien Niyonshuti’s attempts to qualify for the 2012 Olympics under the tutelage of American cycling legend Jock Boyer. Adrien and his teammates are desperate to put Rwanda on the world map for something other than the 1994 genocide. But while the tale has its dramatic moments, it never really bursts into life. It’s too messy for that; as Lewis himself says, ‘situations in Africa are rarely, if ever, neat’. For instance, one of the cyclists refuses to train, being too busy pirating videos for the profitable film showings he organises.

Henry Addington, first Viscount Sidmouth, was briefly and, on the whole, ingloriously Prime Minister at the beginning of the nineteenth century and then spent nearly ten years as Home Secretary at a time when Britain seemed as close as it had ever been to violent revolution. In both capacities he displayed an unwavering conservatism which seemed inexcusable to his political opponents and sometimes even caused disquiet among his supporters. He was a relic of the eighteenth century who signally failed to adjust to the realities of the nineteenth: when the Great Reform Bill was passed in 1832 it seemed to him bound to lead within a few years to the collapse of civilised society. 'I hope,' he told Lord Grey, 'God will forgive you on account of this Bill. I don't think I can.