Book review

Saturday

Jonathan Bate

Fatal impact theory 

From our UK edition

As schools are for education, so universities are for higher education. In a civilised society, children should leave school literate, numerate and with some knowledge of science, history and culture. But society also needs an elite educated to a higher level. Universities are for the preparation of the next generation of doctors, United Nations interpreters, lawyers, structural engineers, archaeologists, nuclear-weapon designers, literary critics, astronomers, economists and so forth. That’s the short answer. The long answer would require a great deal more than is found in Stefan Collini’s brisk and very witty book.

James Walton

Resounding successes

From our UK edition

The British Library’s ‘Spoken Word’ series, drawing heavily on the BBC archives, has already shown quite a range — from Tennyson’s famously crackly reading of ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ to Scott Fitzgerald declaiming a speech from Othello. Now, it moves on to the short story and, despite the curious decision to include two tales apiece from Somerset Maugham and Algernon Blackwood (none of them especially overwhelming), once again nobody is likely to complain about a lack of variety. The three discs are kicked off by Maugham’s chatty reading of ‘Salvatore’, a story in praise of a lithe young Italian fisherman. According to the final lines, this is a plucky attempt to hold our attention with a portrait of simple goodness.

Nicky Haslam

Portraits of an age

From our UK edition

By a fine coincidence, two legendary icons of British art were being feted in London on the same evening last month, and both are primarily famous, to the public at least, for their depiction of the Queen. At the National Portrait Gallery, the director Sandy Nairne hosted a dinner to celebrate the portrait oeuvre of Lucian Freud, while the Victoria and Albert Museum opened its major exhibition of Cecil Beaton’s lifetime lensing of Elizabeth II. In the 1950s these two artists were the epitome of London society. Beaton, by way of his groomed exquisite taste and laconic manner, was the epicene idol of sophisticated drawing rooms; the nascent Freud, 30-odd, untidy, brooding, supremely sexual, was a magnetic talisman for every smart hostess’s house, and often her bed.

Charles Clover

Epic toy story

From our UK edition

In January 1992 a container filled with 7,200 yellow ducks and the same number each of blue turtles, red beavers and green frogs, blow-moulded out of plastic for American children at bathtime, broke loose in a storm on the deck of a container ship on its way from China and fell into the Pacific somewhere south of the Aleutian Islands. The container ruptured, the boxes soaked away and 11 months later the Floatees — the name was embossed on each — began to be noticed washing up among the bottle caps and Japanese fishing floats on the shores of the Gulf of Alaska, sparking a flutter of news stories. The stories were still going 11 years later when a single yellow floaty duck made by the same Massachusetts company was sighted on the coast of Maine.

Leanda De-Lisle

His dark materials

From our UK edition

Like the dyslexic Faustus who sold his soul to Santa, the life of John Dee was a black comedy of errors. His vain and vulgar efforts to harness the occult for material ends often rendered him ridiculous. But there is a darker tale in Dee’s work for the Tudor state: a story of dodgy dossiers, fear-mongering and greed. During the Tudor period no clear distinction was made between science and magic. John Dee’s study at Cambridge of arithmetic, geometry and astronomy enabled him to become a navigational consultant, who worked with England’s greatest explorers. But it also helped him measure the rays of celestial virtue that emanated from the stars and influenced human affairs. Mathematics helped him predict the future — and that was a much sought-after skill.

Charlotte Moore

Tragedy of Antigone

From our UK edition

Sofka Zinovieff’s absorbing first novel has two narrative voices. Maud is the English widow of Nikitas, whose death in a mysterious accident leads her to contact Antigone, the mother-in-law she has never met. A former Communist freedom fighter, Antigone was forced to leave Greece for the Soviet Union following the Greek civil war. She gave birth to Nikitas, her only child, in prison, and handed him over to her family when he was three years old, severing all further contact. Maud was the third wife of the dominant, swaggering Nikitas. She remained passive throughout their marriage; now, liberated by his death, she starts asking the questions to which she ought always to have known the answers — answers which can be supplied only by Antigone.

William Leith

The view from the top

From our UK edition

Halfway through this book, the veil lifted, and I thought: ‘I see! I see what he’s trying to do!’ Pickering gets his characters, and moves them along, and then, after 150 pages, he manages to convey a really powerful sensation of something; you might call it amorality, or nihilism, or the sense of the pointlessness of it all. For the first 12 chapters, you are walking uphill, and then you get the view. For the hero, there is horror, and a Graham Greene-like sense of things not being what they seem. Before this moment, it’s a strange set up. I suppose it’s meant to be. Malone, our Greene-ish hero, is an American airman in his late twenties. He’s in Afghanistan, but not with the military — he flies supplies around.

Charles Glass

Man with a mission | 3 March 2012

From our UK edition

He was a Persian aristocrat who struggled to make his country a democracy. Given to mood swings and sulks worthy of Achilles, Mohammed Mossadegh was born in June 1882 just a month before Britain bombarded and occupied Egypt. His formidable mother, Najm al-Saltaneh, belonged to the family of Qajar Shahs who ruled Iran from 1794 to 1925 and instilled in him a strong noblesse oblige that matured into genuine dedication to democratic and constitutional government. During his childhood, the country barely governed itself, yielding important decisions to the Russian and British empires that held it in joint subjugation. Mossadegh’s father, Mira Hedayatullah Vazir-Daftar, had been a minister of finance and was 40 years older than his wife.

Andrew Taylor

A choice of recent thrillers

From our UK edition

Sam Bourne’s new thriller, Pantheon (HarperCollins, £12.99), is set just after Dunkirk in the darkest days of the second world war. James Zennor, an experimental psychologist, returns to his family’s Oxford home to discover that his biologist wife has disappeared, taking with her their two-year-old son. Zennor, scarred in body and mind by his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, fears that she may have fled from his ungovernable rages. Or was she acting under coercion? He pursues her to neutral America where uncomfortable truths gradually emerge in another university city. This novel is something of a departure for Bourne. Zennor’s emotional fragility lends an extra dimension to a powerful plot, skilfully constructed and narrated.

Marcus Berkmann

Bookends: Wasp without a sting

From our UK edition

‘It may be hard to accept that a chaste teenage girl can end up in bed with the President of the United States on her fourth day in the White House.’ In 1962, 19-year-old Mimi Beardsley (pictured above) landed ‘the plummiest of summer jobs’, an internship in the White House press office. On day four, she was invited for a lunchtime swim in the presidential swimming pool. John F. Kennedy was, not surprisingly, ‘taller, thinner, more handsome in person than he looked in photographs’. The affair lasted 18 months and involved a lot of waiting around in hotel rooms, like most affairs. Amazingly, no one found out until 2003, when a newspaper finally named her.

Saturday

Sam Leith

The family plot

From our UK edition

Sam Leith explores the effect that certain writers’ relatives have had on their published works This book’s sort-of preface is a lecture on aunts and absent mothers in Jane Austen — an odd diversion, given that nowhere else in its pages are aunts, or female writers for that matter, given much of an outing. Colm Tóibín sets out his stall early doors: he’s a formalist. Noting the difficulty critics have had getting to grips with Mansfield Park’s great couch-potato Lady Bertram — is she a goodie or a baddie?

Matt Ridley

Seeing red

From our UK edition

With each passing year it becomes clearer that the cure for global warming is worse than the disease. While wind power and biofuels devastate ecosystems and economies, temperatures and sea levels rise ever more slowly, just as the greenhouse theory— minus feedbacks — predicts. As James Delingpole acutely observes, the true believers are left with a version of Pascal’s wager embodying a ‘dismally feeble grasp of cost-benefit analysis’: that, however unlikely it is, the potential cost of global warming is so high that anything is justified. Not only does this argument apply to the cure as well as the disease; it also applies to every small risk of something big happening.

Byron Rogers

More sinned against than sinning

From our UK edition

When I saw the title of this book, then read that it only covered the period 1600-1800 I hoped this would be a riot of comedy, something along the lines of the most wonderful sentence in the English language. This is in Havelock Ellis’s Psychology of Sex and concerns a discovery made by the doctor Realdus Columbus: in 1593, a century after his namesake discovered the New World, this great man claimed to have discovered the clitoris.   But no, there is no comedy, apart from the doings of one Frances, Lady Purbeck, who in 1635, with the son of the Earl of Suffolk, lived happily and ‘adulterously’ in what the author calls ‘the depths of Shropshire’.

Marcus Berkmann

A deafening silence

From our UK edition

One morning in 2007, the music critic Nick Coleman woke up to find that he was profoundly deaf in one ear. ‘The silence did not descend silently, however. It made a small sound. You might compare it to the sound of a kitten dropping on to a pillow.’ Within an hour this pffff had developed a pulse, and over the next few days it evolved into an unceasing clamour of clanks, zizzes and whistles. By now Coleman was in hospital and doctors were scratching their heads, as they usually do with tinnitus. I can remember the eyes of my doctor glazing over with boredom when I told him about my own tinnitus. When he heard that I wrote about music, and had been to far too many deafening gigs over the years, his disapproval hardened. A scribble on the pad, and I was on my way. Next!

Andrew Gimson

Anglo-Saxon divide

From our UK edition

Philip Oltermann has set himself an almost impossibly ambitious task. In 1996, when he was 15 years old, he moved from Hamburg to London, so he has close experience of both England and Germany. In due course it occurred to him, as a man of wide cultural sympathies, that he ought to be in a position to write an interesting book about Anglo-German relations. But how to structure such a work? Oltermann is too polite to say so, but a great part of the problem is that modern English readers are abysmally ignorant of Germany. This used not to be the case: before 1914, to be educated was to be able to read German.

John McEwen

How do birds fly south?

From our UK edition

Did you know the external ‘shell’ of the ear is the pinna? That a woman’s oestrogen level alters the way she hears the male voice, making it richer, and thus may affect her choice of mate? That Pride and Prejudice was published the year (1813) that Europeans discovered the kiwil? That Leonardo da Vinci ‘was one of the first to comment on the extra-ordinary tongue of the woodpecker’? These are some indicators of the general interest of this book, subtitled ‘What It’s Like to Be a Bird’, which demonstrates humans are much more birdlike than previously thought. The principal reason is that, like them, we rely most on vision and hearing.

Ferdinand Mount

Spiritual superhero

From our UK edition

When totting up the positives from the British Raj, people often put the railways first, followed by the Indian Civil Service or the Indian Army. The Empire was won by the sword and held by the sword. It was racially exclusive, its taxes were often predatory, and its punishments savage. But at least it left an institutional legacy that helped to make independent India a startling success against all the odds, after the bloody wound of Partition and despite the excruciating poverty of the second most populous nation on earth. But what the British bequeathed to India was not only a usable future but a usable past. This may sound paradoxical. In the millennia of India’s more or less recorded history, the years of British dominance were an eyeblink.

Eric Weinberger

What makes Romney run?

From our UK edition

It can be odd to read a biography of a major political figure for whom, every day while one reads it, the story continues. Everything we hear in the news now about Mitt Romney seems to have been the case in 2008, when he first ran for president; or 2002, when after leading the Olympic Games in Salt Lake City he returned to Massachusetts and became governor (still the only election he has won); or even 1994, when his political career began with a race for US Senate against Ted Kennedy, to whom he delivered a few scares before losing comfortably, 41-58. Still the question of authenticity — what does Mitt believe?

Charles Cumming

Our man in Vienna

From our UK edition

Just in case Private Eye smells a rat, let me put my cards on the table. Not once, but twice, I have sent the galley proofs of my novels to William Boyd and, not once, but twice, he has responded with generous ‘blurbs’, which my publishers have gratefully emblazoned on the covers. Believe me, in the exalted literary company Boyd keeps, that kind of generosity of spirit is as rare as hen’s teeth (try asking Sebastian or Salman for a jacket quote and see how far it gets you). So I’m not about to give Boyd a stinking review. Waiting for Sunrise could have been a sub-Da Vinci Code catastrophe, and I would still have felt obliged to describe it as ‘a compelling and heartbreaking masterpiece from one of the great storytellers of the age’.

Marcus Berkmann

Bookends: Dickensian byways

From our UK edition

Is there room for yet another book on Dickens? Probably not, but we’ll have it anyway. The Dickens Dictionary (Icon, £9.99) is John Sutherland’s contribution to the great birthday festival — and possibly not his last, for since his retirement from academe, Sutherland has been nearly as industrious as the great man himself. This brief and lively ‘A-Z of England’s Greatest Novelist’ avoids all the obvious thoroughfares, and wanders instead along the byways and backstreets of Dickens’ s vast, sprawling achievement. This will be of no use to anyone who enjoyed the recent TV version of Great Expectations because it cut out all the subplots and extraneous detail, but for the rest of us, it’s a delight.