From our UK edition
Cancer is usually associated with death. For the cancer specialist, however, cancer is more about life: not just patients’ lives; the cancer itself often lives the life of Riley. If it has a life, then, it is entitled to a biography. Here, Siddhartha Mukherjee, an obviously compassionate oncologist, provides that biography. The basis of any biography is the story.
From our UK edition
Writing an autobiographical account of middle age is a brave undertaking, necessitating a great deal of self-scrutiny at a time of life when most of us would sooner look the other way and hope for the best. Jane Shilling took up riding relatively late (she even joined a hunt, as described in her book The Fox in the Cupboard), so she has physical daring. The Stranger in the Mirror shows that she also has emotional and intellectual courage. Unsurprisingly, the news is not good. God and gardening are the traditional refuges of the menopausal, but neither seems to hold much interest for Shilling. Romantic entanglements seem unlikely and her teenaged son is advancing towards independence: solitude looms. Career prospects diminish. Looks aren’t what they used to be. Regrets prosper.
From our UK edition
All modern biographies, one could say, are books of secrets; certainly all biographers during the past four decades have felt entitled to ferret around in their subject’s private as well as public lives. All modern biographies, one could say, are books of secrets; certainly all biographers during the past four decades have felt entitled to ferret around in their subject’s private as well as public lives. This development is routinely ascribed to the new frankness with which Michael Holroyd re-invented the genre in the late 1960s with his biography of Lytton Strachey, who had himself revitalised it 50 years earlier with his subversive portraits of Eminent Victorians.
From our UK edition
Following Sir Christopher Meyer's review of George Bush's Decision Points, here is the other half of the double act. The closest I’ve come to meeting Tony Blair was knocking into Michael Sheen on the street. I got no closer reading Blair’s memoir, most of which is beyond parody. Cherie Booth QC is a strong armed nocturnal adventuress; Anji Hunter is a bountiful babe; and Mr Blair is a would-be Casanova with a taste for premonitions and Schindler’s List. You barely notice New Labour’s reform programme under the torrent of erratic writing and bizarre digressions.
From our UK edition
Sir Christopher Meyer, the former British Ambassador to the United States, has reviewed George Bush's biography for the latest issue of The Spectator. We've pasted his entire review below, for readers of our Book Blog. Taking the long view, Christopher Meyer, The Spectator, 20 November 2010 While Tony Blair emerged from his memoirs as a chameleon of many colours, there is only one George W. Bush in Decision Points. The book reads like the man speaks. If it has been ghosted — and Bush gives thanks to a multitude of helpers — it has been done with consummate skill to preserve the authentic Bush voice. The result will be unexpected, even unwelcome, to many.
From our UK edition
This is an odd book: the exhaustive biography of a complete nobody. Vivian Mackerrell was the primary inspiration for the cult that is Withnail. In that, at least, he doesn’t disappoint. This is an odd book: the exhaustive biography of a complete nobody. Vivian Mackerrell was the primary inspiration for the cult that is Withnail. In that, at least, he doesn’t disappoint. Mackerrell emerges from Colin Bacon’s eulogy, Vivian and I (Quartet, £12), as a rakish Charles Pooter, sunk by alcoholic degeneracy at the age of 24, though he staggered on gamely for another 30 years. The paucity of Mackerrell’s life leaves Bacon to indulge in bawdy nostalgia about the Sixties.
From our UK edition
Just as it will sometimes happen that a critic feels obliged to preface a review with a declaration of interest, so I should now declare a lack of interest. Prior to being commissioned to review David Bellos’s heroically well-researched and hugely entertaining biography, I confess I had never managed to finish one of Romain Gary’s books. When I lived in Paris in the 1970s Gary was in fact my near neighbour.
From our UK edition
The best book so far about Bob Dylan, the only one worthy of his oeuvre, is his own astonishing Chronicles, Volume One (2004), but while we wait for the next fix, Bob Dylan in America will keep the withdrawal symptoms at bay. Sean Wilentz is a history professor at Princeton, and author of books about Jefferson, Lincoln and Reagan. He is also a second-generation hipster and a Dylan fan since 1964, when he first saw him play. Wilentz planned this book, he explains, as ‘a coherent commentary on Dylan’s development, as well as his achievements, and on his connections to enduring currents in American history and culture’.
From our UK edition
Paul Johnson reviews Roy Hattersley’s life of David Lloyd George No politician’s life is so difficult to write as Lloyd George’s. All who have tried have failed, and wise heavyweight historians have steered clear. I applaud Roy Hattersley’s courage in tackling this rebarbative subject and congratulate him on his success in making sense of Lloyd George’s early life up to his emergence as a major figure in parliament. Thereafter, however, he tends to lose his way in the trackless jungle of endless political crises during Lloyd George’s 16 years in office, festooned as they are with the undergrowth of his financial fecundity and the florid canopy of his love affairs.
From our UK edition
Some of us are still startled that Wallace Stevens was 44 when he published Harmonium. So what to make of the fact that Roald Dahl was past the midpoint of his forties when he wrote his first children’s book in 1961, James and the Giant Peach? At the time, he was known as a dark little adult fabulist; macabre like Saki, twisty like O. Henry. A hint as to his view of children’s writing thereto is found in a letter anticipating the birth of his first child: ‘Parenthood is a great strain. I can see it all. Nursery books for Knopf. Once upon a time there was a dear little bunny . . .’ He did indeed end up writing nursery books for Knopf, but dear little bunnies were thin on the ground.
From our UK edition
Tom Frayn, says his son Michael in this admirable memoir, trod lightly upon the earth. He belonged to a class and a generation who didn’t think their story mattered. Even his profession — he was an asbestos salesman — has ceased to exist. At the request of his own children, who felt that they had ‘risen from an unknown place’, Michael Frayn has collected the few scraps of evidence and pieced together this unobtrusive life. His father was a ‘smart lad’, youngest of a family of seven housed in two rooms off the Holloway Road, and the only one not born deaf. (He suffered hearing loss later, but, characteristically, used it to enhance his comic timing.) Tom’s wit and charm found plenty of customers for his toxic wares.
From our UK edition
Because Deborah Devonshire’s journalism has nearly always made me laugh, and because she seems like one of the jollier aunts in P. G. Wodehouse — an Aunt Dahlia, not an Aunt Agatha — I had expected her memoirs to provide chuckles on every page. Because Deborah Devonshire’s journalism has nearly always made me laugh, and because she seems like one of the jollier aunts in P. G. Wodehouse — an Aunt Dahlia, not an Aunt Agatha — I had expected her memoirs to provide chuckles on every page. In fact it is a sad book, taken all in all. Two of the more poignant passages, which will linger in my memory for a very long time, are about her dead babies, and about the alcoholism of her magnificent husband, the 11th Duke of Devonshire.
From our UK edition
He insisted that he was not a pornographer but an entertainer, and told the Daily Herald that the Folies Parisienne (sic) — one of his early shows, featuring the ‘Harlem Nudes’ and their ‘taunting, scantily clad Native Mating Dance’ — was intended for family audiences, and that children were taken along by their ‘doting elders’. When he booked a celebrated American stripper to appear at the Raymond Revuebar (‘The Athenaeum of Strip Clubs’ — Spectator), she was appalled to learn that he and his wife proposed to let their five-year-old daughter watch the show. This family image was rather dented by such assurances as ‘this theatre is disinfected throughout with Jeye’s [sic] Fluid’.
From our UK edition
In equal measure, this book is fascinating and irritating. The ‘Hi, guys!’ style grates throughout. From this, it is tempting to conclude that Tony Blair is incorrigibly insincere. But that is not the whole story. Although Blair is no friend to truth or self-knowledge, this is an involuntary study in self-revelation. The most revealing sentence is a throwaway line, in which he tells us that we are all psychological vagrants. That is the clue to his character. It is certainly impossible to read this book without wanting to psychoanalyse the author. So here goes. He comes across as a potent mixture of insecurity and certitude. Always prone to self-doubt, he also became aware that he could play the pipes of Pan, and bewitch man, woman or beast.
From our UK edition
At nursery school, along with her warm milk, little Lena Gorokhova imbibed the essence of survival in the post-war Soviet Union. It consisted of a game called vranyo — pretence: My parents play it at work, and my older sister Marina plays it at school. We all pretend to do something, and those that watch us pretend they are seriously watching us and don’t know that we are only pretending. The school teachers pretended that their pupils’ 100 per cent attendance at Young Pioneer meetings was unconnected with the padlocked door of the meeting hall. The women standing in line pretended they saw no contradiction between reports of record harvests and empty shops, or glittering construction projects and shoddy, just-built university dorms.
From our UK edition
‘Facebook’, says the excitable author of this hero-gram, ‘may be the fastest-growing company of any type in history.’ ‘Facebook’, says the excitable author of this hero-gram, ‘may be the fastest-growing company of any type in history.’ ‘Thefacebook.com’ went live on 4 February 2004, as an on-line directory for students at Harvard, inviting them to upload a picture of themselves and some basic info, such as their ‘relationship status’, favourite books, music, movies and a quotation. Once they had set up their own profiles, they could ask others to be their ‘friend’ and direct a jokey ‘poke’ (never defined) at them.
From our UK edition
We are not going to agree about Bruce Chatwin. The five books he published in his lifetime are, to some readers, magnificent works of art, setting out grand ideas about the human condition with reference to a closely observed local type — a Czech porcelain collector, Australian nomads, a displaced slave-king, taciturn British farmers and the communities of remotest Patagonia. In other eyes, he was an absurd pseud and show-off, whose work never extended much beyond a tremulous aesthete’s gush over exotic objects, half-digested history and anthropology. It is fair to say that the latter view has gain- ed ground since his death, and even his most passionate defenders would concede that his work was advanced, during his lifetime, by an unusually compelling personality.
From our UK edition
About 100 years ago two brothers settled in the same small English town and raised 12 children. Charles Greene was a scholar, destined for the Bar, who blundered into schoolmastering while eating his dinners at the Inner Temple and later became headmaster of Berkhamsted School. His younger brother, Edward (known as ‘Eppy’), declined to go to university and blundered into the coffee trade in Brazil. Having made a fortune, he returned to England and bought a large house in the same town. Shades of Greene is the story of those two families and of what happened to eight of the more interesting children. They included the novelist Graham Greene, whose life occupies the largest part of this account. Graham had three brothers.
From our UK edition
‘Stuart Kelly’ the author’s note declares, ‘was born and brought up in the Scottish Borders.’ Not so, as he tells us; he was born in Falkirk, which is in central Scotland, and came to the Borders as a child. ‘Stuart Kelly’ the author’s note declares, ‘was born and brought up in the Scottish Borders.’ Not so, as he tells us; he was born in Falkirk, which is in central Scotland, and came to the Borders as a child. The publisher’s mistake is appropriate. Kelly’s Walter Scott himself is a man who was never just what he seemed to be, and who invented an idea of a country and nation we can’t escape from. He wore a mask, several masks indeed, throughout his life, and put another mask on the face of Scotland.
From our UK edition
This year America celebrates the cent-enary of Mark Twain’s death. This year America celebrates the cent-enary of Mark Twain’s death. He is the nearest that country gets to a national treasure, with a hefty bibliography to show it: the University of California Press’s 70-volume Works and Papers represents but a fragment, and in June Penguin published an entire book on the food Twain ate. Now here comes Roy Morris Jr with a contribution covering Twain’s pre-fame journeys among the mines and saloons of the western frontier. What does it add? Samuel Clemens (as Twain was born) worked as an itinerant printer and a Mississippi riverboat pilot before a reluctant stint as a Confederate guerilla at the outbreak of civil war.
