Book review

Thursday

Roger Lewis

As Luck Would Have It, by Derek Jacobi – review

From our UK edition

Alan Bennett once overheard an old lady say, ‘I think a knighthood was wasted on Derek Jacobi,’ and I know what she means. It’s strange how he has always been singled out for prizes and high honours — why not Ronald Pickup, Charles Kay, Edward Petherbridge, Frank Finlay or the late Jeremy Brett? Ian Richardson absolutely hated him — just couldn’t contain his envy and incredulity, at least in my presence. Though I’ve never been able to believe in Jacobi on stage or screen as a villain or as a passionate lover, by being fundamentally unthreatening (and shrewd), he is esteemed — just like the Emperor Claudius, his signature role.

Lewis Jones

When Britain Burned the White House, by Peter Snow – review

From our UK edition

Peter Snow explains that he decided to look into this extraordinary story when he realised how few people knew about it, and was inspired to write a book by the wealth and quality of eyewitness accounts from both sides. The result is superb. When Britain Burned the White House is an exemplary work of history — lucid, witty and humane, with terrific pace, and so even-handed that it will surely be received as well in America as here. Annoyed by what he regarded as the excesses of the British empire — its fight with Napoleon interfered with America’s trade, it was in the habit of pressing American citizens into the Royal Navy, and it supported the Indian tribes who stood in the way of American settlers — President James Madison had declared war in June 1812.

William Ryan

One Night in Winter, by Simon Sebag Montefiore – review

From our UK edition

Simon Sebag Montefiore’s One Night in Winter begins in the hours immediately following the solemn victory parade that marked the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany — probably the high point of Stalinism. Two teenagers, dressed in 19th- century costume and members of a secret literary club called, aptly as it turns out, the Fatal Romantics, have chosen this moment, of all moments, to re-enact a duel from Pushkin’s Onegin on a bridge beneath the very walls of the Kremlin. Needless to say, when the duel goes fatally wrong and the dead boy and girl are revealed to be the offspring of members of the Soviet leader’s inner circle, we know there will be consequences for the families and friends they’ve left behind.

John Preston

Move Along, Please, by Mark Mason – review

From our UK edition

Mrs Thatcher was widely believed to have said that ‘any man over the age of 26 who finds himself on a bus can count himself a failure in life’. In fact there’s no evidence Thatcher ever said it — the most likely culprit is the Duchess of Westminster. Mark Mason loves buses, and doesn’t much seem to care if anyone thinks he’s a failure. He loves them so much that he decided to travel the length of the country by local bus. This, he declares, would be a kind of anti-travel, ‘a rejection of everything we always strive for’, namely speed. Along the way he’d visit all kinds of strange and exotic places — Tiverton, Kirkby Lonsdale, Dornoch — while trying to take the pulse of contemporary Britain.

Wynn Wheldon

Six Bad Poets, by Christopher Reid – review

From our UK edition

Is poetry in good enough health to be made fun of in this way? The irony is that this long, funny poem describing the incestuous peccadilloes of contemporary poetry’s social purlieus deserves to be read, and almost certainly will be read — and purchased — by far more readers than all but a few collections of poetry, even those by rather good poets. Christopher Reid was known originally as a poet of the ‘Martian’ school, which sought to find new ways of looking at the familiar: ‘Splitting an apple, / I find a cache of commas.’ More recently he gained wider attention as the author of the award-winning A Scattering, a moving collection of poems about his wife in her last illness and his own life as an ‘inhabitant/ of an empty house’.

Caroline Moorehead

Monsieur le Commandant, by Romain Slocombe – review

From our UK edition

There can be few characters in modern fiction more unpleasant than Paul-Jean Husson, the narrator in Romain Slocombe’s Monsieur le Commandant. Indeed, he is at times too nasty. If this otherwise compulsively readable novel about betrayal in Nazi-occupied France has a flaw, it lies in Husson’s irredeemable villainy, as if to make such a man more rounded, more subtle, were to allow a flicker of understanding for his actions, or to suspect the author of a degree of sympathy for the man. Husson is an anti-Semite, a Pétainist, a much-decorated hero of the first world war and a member of the Académie Française.

Fram Dinshaw

Music at Midnight, by John Drury – review

From our UK edition

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.

Richard Davenporthines

Colette’s France, by Jane Gilmour – review

From our UK edition

Monstrous innocence’ was the ruling quality that Colette claimed in both her life and books. Protesting her artless authenticity, she was sly in devising her newspaper celebrity and ruthless in imposing her personal myths. She posed as provincial ingénue, wide-eyed young wife of the Paris belle époque, scandalous lesbian, risqué music-hall performer, novelist of prodigious output, theatre reviewer, beautician, seducer, the most feline of cat-lovers and, ultimately, garlanded literary lioness. Yet her phoniness should not deter people from reading her books. Although most of her work resembled an imaginary autobiography, it was never self-obsessed or constricting.

Thursday

Peter Parker

Pine by Laura Mason; Lily, by Marcia Reiss – review

From our UK edition

After the success of their animal series of monographs, Reaktion Books have had the clever idea of doing something similar for plants. Writers are commissioned to investigate the botanical, historical, social and cultural aspects of individual plants, with volumes on oak and geranium already published, and yew, bamboo, willow, palm and orchid forthcoming. The structure and content of the books appears to be left up to the writers, but all the volumes combine scholarship with lively anecdote and are beautifully and generously illustrated. While lilies seem an obviously attractive choice for such a series, who would have thought conifers could be so interesting?

Miranda Seymour

Hanns and Rudolf, by Thomas Harding – review

From our UK edition

Confronted by this lavishly endorsed book — ‘compelling’ (David Lodge), ‘gripping’(John le Carré),‘thrilling’ (Jonathan Freedland) — I felt depressed. Two weeks ago, the New York Times’s savvy London correspondent accused the British of being obsessed with the Nazis. This might appear a case of pots and kettles: not for nothing did America’s widely watched History Channel become known as the Hitler Channel. Nevertheless, Sarah Lyall had made a valid point. A stupefying 830 books on the Third Reich were published in the UK in 2010 and — although no figures are yet available for 2013 — a reduction any time soon seems unlikely. Germany’s history of genocide is unforgivable.

Selina Hastings

Stage Blood, by Michael Blakemore – review

From our UK edition

Stage Blood, as its title suggests, is as full of vitriol, back-stabbing and conspiracy as any Jacobean tragedy. In this sequel to Arguments with England, his superb first volume of memoirs, Michael Blakemore presents us with an enthralling account of his five embattled years as an associate director of the National Theatre. When in 1970 Blakemore was offered the position by Laurence Olivier, he had a distinguished career as an actor behind him and was already well-established as a successful director.

Brian Sewell

Bizarre Cars, by Keith Ray – review

From our UK edition

My various Oxford dictionaries define bizarre as eccentric, whimsical, odd, grotesque, fantastic, mixed in style and half-barbaric. By so many tokens, and with the casuistry of both Calvinist and Jesuit, it has been possible for the author of this pretty little Christmas-stocking book to include as bizarre any vehicle he chooses, including motorcycles and the micro-cars that made motoring possible after the defeat of Germany in 1945. Without these categories, a bus-cum-truck-cum-tractor,variations on the Hummer and the stretched limousine, and too many excursions into the bizarrerie of car names that in other languages have meanings genital and scatalogical, this book would be very thin.

Christopher Booker

An Appetite for Wonder, by Richard Dawkins – review

From our UK edition

It is peculiarly apt that the author of this autobiography should be the man who coined that now fashionable term ‘meme’ — so long as it is written ‘me me’. His name is shown so large on the cover that one might miss the title printed below it. On the opening page he tells us that his full name is Clinton Richard Dawkins, which ‘serendipitously’ gives him the same initials as those of his greatest hero, Charles Robert Darwin. The time has come, he has decided, to tell the story of his life up to that seminal moment in 1976 when he published the book which made him famous, The Selfish Gene. He begins by describing where he has come from genetically, going back to the General Clinton who presided over the loss of the American colonies in 1783.

Cressida Connolly

Expo 58, by Jonathan Coe – review

From our UK edition

In 1958 a vast international trade fair was held just outside Brussels. As well as being a showcase for industry, Expo 58 gave each country the chance to present something of their own national character. What the Brits came up with was a far cry from the gorgeous opulence and spectacle of last year’s Olympic opening ceremony: instead, the United Kingdom chose to represent itself by building a full-scale model of a pub.   Watneys brewery even invented a new beer for the pub and called it by the same name, The Britannia. This is the setting of Jonathan Coe’s new novel. In other hands it would be only mildly ridiculous: in his, it is delightfully funny and utterly absurd. Our hero, Thomas, works in a junior capacity for the Central Office of Information in London.

Petronella Wyatt

Royal Marriage Secrets, by John Ashdown-Hill – review

From our UK edition

My brother Pericles Wyatt, as my father liked to say, is by blood the rightful king of England, the nephew of Richard III in the 18th generation, and as such the senior surviving Plantagenet. Richard was crowned king of England on 6 July 1483. It was described at the time as a joyous occasion. Little did anyone present imagine that it would become an event of rancorous controversy, for never has it been so true, sadly for my own family, that history is written by the winners. Just two years later, an exiled adventurer called Henry Tudor took Richard’s life and crown at Bosworth Field and unleashed an assault of unprecedented viciousness on the reputation of the last Plantagenet king of England.

Susie Dent

What’s in a Surname, by David McKie – review

From our UK edition

In South Korea, some 20 million people share just five surnames. Every one of Denmark’s top 20 surnames ends in ‘-sen’, meaning ‘son of’, a pattern that is replicated across Scandinavia. British surnames have never favoured such neatness, and we can be grateful for that. While we may have lost such delightfully chewy names as Crackpot, Crookbones and Sweteinbede, the average city will still provide its Slys, Haythornthwaites, and McGillikuddys. David McKie’s winding and sensitive study of British surnames is based on his findings in cemeteries, registers and oral accounts across six villages called Broughton, from Hampshire to Furness.

Ferdinand Mount

Isaac & Isaiah, by David Caute – review

From our UK edition

The scene is the common room of All Souls College, Oxford, in the first week of March 1963. It is the idle half-hour after lunch when fellows slump into armchairs and gaze out of the window at the sparrows in the Fellows’ Garden. David Caute, a young first-class mind in his mid-twenties, is buttonholed by the revered figure of Sir Isaiah Berlin. What did Caute think of Isaac Deustcher? Did he admire him, as so many young scholars on the left did? Well, Caute replied cautiously, he knew Deutscher’s book on Stalin and his trilogy on Trotsky.  ‘Quite sufficient.’ And Berlin bounded off into one of his rapid-fire bombardments: there were Marxist historians such as Eric Hobsbawm and E.H.

Paul Johnson

The Story of the Jews, by Simon Schama – review

From our UK edition

The recorder of early Jewish history has two sources of evidence. One is the Bible. Its centrality was brought home to me by David Ben-Gurion when I went to see him in Jerusalem in 1957. He had a big Bible on his desk, and banged it repeatedly with his fist: There, it’s all there, the past, present and future of the Jewish people. God? Who knows God? Can you believe in someone you don’t know? But I believe in the Bible. [Bang, bang.] The Bible is a fact. [Bang.] A record and a prophecy. [Bang.] It’s all there, Mr Johnson. Read your Bible, understand your Bible, and you won’t go wrong about the Jews. [Final bang.] Simon Schama, being a learned scholar as well as a proud and sensitive Jew, is not so sure.

John Sutherland

Wilkie Collins by Andrew Lycett – review

From our UK edition

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.

Gyles Brandreth

Britain’s best one-liners, from Oxford’s 2013 edition

From our UK edition

Modest about our national pride — and inordinately proud of our national modesty. —Ian Hislop I always invest in companies an idiot could run, because one day one will. —Warren Buffett I find it easy to portray businessmen. Being bland, rather cruel and incompetent comes naturally to me. —John Cleese I always wanted to be somebody, but now I realise I should have been more specific. —Lily Tomlin I don’t work that way .... The very idea that all children want to be cuddled by a complete stranger I find completely amazing. —Anne, Princess Royal A lovely thing about Christmas is that it’s compulsory, like a thunderstorm, and we all go through it together. —Garrison Keillor On nudity The part never calls for it.