Book review

Thursday

Charles Glass

John Wayne, accidental cowboy

From our UK edition

I’m not making a picture [The Green Berets] about Vietnam, I’m making a picture about good against bad. I happen to think that’s true about Vietnam, but even if it isn’t as clear as all that, that’s what you have to do to make a picture. It’s all right, because we’re in the business of selling tickets. It’s the same thing as the Indians. Maybe we shouldn’t have destroyed all those Indians, I don’t know, but when you’re making a picture, the Indians are the bad guys. — Mike Wayne, producer of The Green Berets, starring his father, John Wayne The words above appeared in a 1968 issue of Esquire magazine above a colour drawing of Wayne’s father in blue cavalry uniform and green beret, astride a stagecoach.

Mark Fisher

How good an artist is Edmund de Waal?

From our UK edition

For Edmund de Waal a ceramic pot has a ‘real life’ that goes beyond functionalism.This handsome book (designed by Atelier Dyakova) at the mid-point of his career, raises the question: ‘How good an artist is he?’ It is discursive, comprising essays by A.S. Byatt and Alexandra Munroe, short stories by Colm Tóibín and Peter Carey, an elegant photographic essay by Toby Glanville, a look at de Waal’s life to date by Emma Crichton-Miller and a piece by the man himself. ‘I am a potter who writes,’ de Waal said in a 2000 article in the Ceramic Review, although since then his book The Hare with Amber Eyes has carried his celebrity round the world. Is he a domestic potter or is he now making for museums and galleries?

Philip Hensher

The age of the starving artist

From our UK edition

What remains of art is art, of course; and what chiefly interests us is the creative talents of a painter or a sculptor. What we forget is that the work of art wouldn’t be there without some kind of engagement with the brutal forces of money. James Hamilton’s riveting book is a richly detailed study of how, in Britain in the 19th century, artists and a small army of opportunists, art lovers, collectors and businessmen of all sorts used their ingenuity to turn the visual arts into money.

Thursday

John Preston

The author’s father didn’t want you to read this book. It’s hard to understand why

From our UK edition

There were several times when reading A Dog’s Life that I felt as if I’d fallen into a time warp. It starts with a quote on the cover from Hugh Massingberd: Holroyd is ‘a brilliant writer blessed with perfect pitch’. Nothing wrong with that, except that Hugh, alas, is no longer in a position to review books, having died seven years ago. The book itself, a novel closely based on Holroyd’s own family, was written in the late 1950s but never published in the UK after his father took violent exception to the way he’d been portrayed. He also warned that publication could well kill Holroyd’s elderly aunt. Under the circumstances, he decided it might be prudent to withdraw it. At this distance, it’s hard to see what all the fuss was about.

Malcolm Deas

In the empire stakes, the Anglo-Saxons were for long Spain’s inferiors

From our UK edition

‘Every schoolboy knows who imprisoned Montezuma and who strangled Atahualpa.’ Macaulay, anticipating Gove, was complaining that the schoolboys by contrast did not get enough about Clive and the British conquest of India. Hugh Thomas, in this and in the two previous volumes of his trilogy on the Spanish empire, presumes that we have all forgotten about Montezuma and Atahualpa, and argues that we do not appreciate Spain’s imperial achievements. He is probably right, and he sets one off to speculate why. Take Philip II himself. He was musical, owning ‘ten clavicords, thirteen vihuelas, and sixteen bagpipes’. He had a library of 14,000 books, which we would consider more to his credit than his 6,000 holy relics, and an eye for Titian and Bosch.

Candida Lycettgreen

The ultimate guide to Cornwall

From our UK edition

Before writing this review I spent an hour looking for my original Pevsner paperback on Cornwall, published in 1951 (the first in the ‘Buildings of England’ series). It was falling apart, but I always took it with me on an architectural jaunt, together with my father John Betjeman’s Shell Guide to Cornwall, of course. The two books were good companions. The Pevsner was littered with notes in the margin, made by my dad, like ‘absolute balls,’ ‘what?’ or ‘wrong’ underlined. (I did not find the tattered book and can only conclude that some light-fingered book dealer has stolen it within the last year.) Admittedly there were inaccuracies but with no official buildings ‘list’ at the time, Nikolaus Pevsner was out on his own.

Nigel Jones

From slaves’ rectums to porn vids, there are few places people haven’t tried to conceal secret messages

From our UK edition

John Gerard, a Jesuit priest immured in the Tower of London in 1597, and tortured by being hung from manacles until he temporarily lost the use of his arms, was a resourceful as well as courageous fellow. Dependent on the kindness of his jailer, a warder named Bonner, for such intimacies as washing, dressing and shaving, Gerard also persuaded the turnkey to bring him a bag of oranges. Regaining the use of his hands, he employed the fruit for two purposes: to fashion crosses and rosaries from the discarded peel, and to make invisible ink from the juice.

Peter Parker

The long and disgraceful life of Britain’s pre-eminent bounder

From our UK edition

In his time, Gerald Hamilton (1890–1970) was an almost legendary figure, but he is now remembered — if at all — as the model for the genial conman in Christopher Isherwood’s novel Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935). ‘There are some incidents in my career, as you doubtless know, which are very easily capable of misinterpretation,’ Arthur Norris tells the book’s narrator, and Hamilton affected to be deeply shocked by the assorted vices attributed to his fictional alter ego. He nevertheless exploited the connection throughout his long and disgraceful life. When Isherwood met him, Hamilton (né Souter) was employed in Berlin by the Times as its German sales representative.

Johnny Grimond

This diary of a prime minister’s wife offers a front-row seat to the Great War

From our UK edition

When Margot Asquith’s name crops up these days, it is usually in a retelling of the story about her meeting Jean Harlow, sexy star of the silver screen, who repeatedly called her Margotte. Eventually, Margot became irritated. ‘No, my dear,’ she corrected. ‘The “t” is silent, as in Harlow.’ It’s a good story, but apocryphal and, I was always told by those who knew her (she was my great-grandfather’s second wife), quite untypical of her. No matter. She had plenty of good lines that were unquestionably her own, as this diary vividly attests. She was at her best when analysing friends and enemies, which were sometimes interchangeable categories.

Sam Leith

Why movie musicals matter – to this author anyway

From our UK edition

Do movie musicals matter? Most readers, even those who love them, will embark on Richard Barrios’s short history of the genre with the thought: not much. They’ll very likely, I’m afraid, finish it holding much the same opinion. But not mattering much doesn’t prevent the best film musicals from being captivating. This is a book by someone who is indeed captivated: a love letter for the best of musical cinema and a blown raspberry for the worst.

Charlotte Moore

The Russian literary celebrity who begged Tolstoy to spare Prince Andrei

From our UK edition

Nadezhda Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya was a literary celebrity in pre-revolutionary St Petersburg. She chose the pen-name ‘Teffi’ because it was androgynous, and because it was the kind of name a ‘lucky’ fool would have; in Russia, fools were held to tell truths, albeit obliquely. ‘Teffi’ wrote for newspapers, most notably the Russian Word. By 1911 she was writing more fiction than journalism; her short story collections achieved instant popularity. In 1919 the Russian Word was closed down. Teffi was evacuated, ending up, like so many ‘lesrusses’, in Paris. She never returned to Russia, except in her stories. Teffi’s fame evaporated almost immediately after her death in 1952.

Thursday

Justin Marozzi

Genghis Khan was tolerant, kind to women – and a record-breaking mass-murderer

From our UK edition

Genghis Khan, unlike most Mongols in history, is a household name, regularly misappropriated as a right-wing totem. If we recall the genocidal killing sprees of, say, Stalin and Mao, perhaps it would be more historically accurate to say ‘to the left of Genghis Khan’. In the popular imagination he is the despot’s despot, a one-man killing machine who led his army of mounted archers to triumph after triumph, terrorising and slaughtering by the million to carve out an empire that stretched from the Caspian to the Pacific. His martial conquests place him in the top trio of world conquerors, alongside Alexander the Great and Tamerlane.

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

A guide to marriage, moving and fatherhood – and also not a bad tool with which to beat your solicitor to death

From our UK edition

Over the past 12 months, I’ve proposed to my girlfriend, moved house, got married, and become a father. The most stressful of these tests, without a doubt, was moving house. Forget strappado (a torture whereby you’re strung up by your arms behind your back) or flagellation or sensory deprivation. Moving to Acton: that’s what’ll break you down. I really wish, back then, I’d had a copy of Tim Dowling’s How to be a Husband to hand. I might have used it, I think, if I’d gripped it at the maximal angle, to beat my solicitor to death. Sadly, this hybrid book — half-memoir, half-manual — is lacking in tips on how to inflict agony on lawyers (I would tentatively suggest strappado) but it’s solid on my other three recent rites of passage.

Theo Hobson

A gangster called Capitalism and its vanquisher The Common Good

From our UK edition

Once upon a time, a powerful unkillable beast menaced the nation. It had to be tamed. It could only be tamed by a robust ethos of the common good. This gradually emerged: a new democratic spirit was born! But soon critics popped up, complaining about aspects of the new order, calling it stifling, limiting, pompous and dated. They gained power: the fools uncaged the beast! For three decades it has trampled all over public life, declaring the profit motive to be the only realism; it has unbalanced industry, empowered reckless bankers, and forced public services to dance to its commercial tunes; it has utterly subverted the left, which dared not challenge it, but rather trusted that it would bring universal benefits.

Matthew Dennison

You’ll never look at dried pasta in the same way again

From our UK edition

A calculated ordinariness unites the protagonists in Graham Swift’s new collection of short stories. In each of these mini fictions, as in his novels, Swift revisits his conceit of the narrator as man (or woman) on the Clapham omnibus. Invariably he endows these blank ciphers with aspects of the extraordinary — percipience, insight or understanding — or exposes them to feelings and events which place them in extraordinary positions and offer them opportunities to behave remarkably while remaining apparently run of the mill. Swift revels in the trappings of Pooterishness while denying his protagonists Mr Pooter’s silliness. His vision may be contrived but it never patronises.

Amanda Herries

A paean to the British passion for our very own ‘castles’

From our UK edition

‘Phlogiston’ is an interesting, if obsolete, word. Of Greek origin, it referred to the ‘fire-making’ quality thought to be present in, among other things, the ashes gathered by London dustmen. In the mid-18th century these ashes were mixed with earth and even ‘excrements taken out of the necessary houses’ to create the vast numbers of bricks needed for the explosion of house-building taking place at the time in London and elsewhere. The dramatic rise in building is pivotal to this densely detailed observation of the British obsession with their ‘home’ and ‘comfort’ which, we’re told, Robert Southey describes as particularly English and untranslatable.

Victor Sebestyen

It’s not just Putin who misses the Soviet empire. President Bush did, too

From our UK edition

Vladimir Putin calls it ‘the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century’, a viewpoint which explains much of his recent behaviour. Few others anywhere in the world, particularly people who live around Russia’s borders, would agree that the collapse of the Soviet Union was anything to lament. From Riga to Tbilisi and from Kiev to Tashkent, Christmas Day 1991, when Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as leader of the USSR and the Red Flag was lowered from the Kremlin, remains a day to celebrate. With nearly a quarter of a century’s hindsight it still seems astonishing that a great superpower and, with it, an entirely different way of looking at the world — Soviet-style communism — disappeared almost overnight and with practically no bloodshed.

Thursday

Ben Hamilton

The soundtracked novel that won’t sit still

From our UK edition

The Emperor Waltz is long enough at 600 pages to be divided, in the old-fashioned way, into nine ‘books’. Each book has a date, sliding from 1922 to 1979 to next year to 203 ad to last month. This might suggest an overly systematic novel in the mode of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas or Eleanor Catton’s Booker Prize-winning breezeblock The Luminaries. But Hensher has always been a writer with a wandering, curious eye (on its most exhilarating display in 2011’s King of the Badgers), and The Emperor Waltz is a novel that, despite its superficial restraints, won’t sit still.

Tristram Hunt

Caught between Marx and a monster

From our UK edition

‘Curious to see Mrs Aveling addressing the enormous crowd, curious to see the eyes of the women fixed upon her as she spoke of the miseries of the dockers’ homes, pleasant to see her point her black-gloved finger at the oppression, and pleasant to hear the hearty cheer with which her speech was given.’ So Labour MP Robert Cunninghame Graham described Karl Marx’s youngest daughter, Eleanor, giving a speech to 100,000 demonstrators in Hyde Park at the height of the 1889 dock strike. ‘Brilliant, devoted and beautiful,’ agreed the trade union leader Ben Tillett. ‘During our great strike she worked unceasingly — a vivid and vital personality, with great force of character, courage and ability.

Cressida Connolly

The cruellest present you could give a hated old in-law

From our UK edition

It takes a special sort of talent to be able to make drawings of your own 97-year-old mother on her deathbed funny. The person with that gift is Roz Chast. Subscribers to the New Yorker will already be familiar with her marvellous cartoons, which often feature elderly and over-neurotic parents shouting dire imprecations to their rather dazed and mild-looking adult offspring. Their warnings tend to concern such mortal perils as crossing the road, running to answer the telephone or touching the handrail on public transport (the germs!). The subjects are from Brooklyn, but the appeal is universal: visiting a friend in Athens the other day, I saw a Chast cartoon stuck to the fridge door. Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? is a graphic memoir of Chast’s own parents.