Book review

Saturday

Alan Judd

The ne plus Ultra

From our UK edition

The story of Bletchley Park, MI6’s second world war code-breaking operation, has grown with the telling since the early 1970s accounts — although, as Briggs points out, Bletchley’s first public disclosure was in Time magazine in December 1945. The story of Bletchley Park, MI6’s second world war code-breaking operation, has grown with the telling since the early 1970s accounts — although, as Briggs points out, Bletchley’s first public disclosure was in Time magazine in December 1945. In recent years it has become the stuff of fiction, film and feature, and almost anyone who was there and is still alive is guaranteed a publisher.

Saturday

Paul Johnson

When the going got tough

From our UK edition

The acute emotional pain caused by his first wife’s infidelity was of priceless service to Evelyn Waugh as a novelist, says Paul Johnson Evelyn Waugh died, aged 62, in 1966, and his reputation has risen steadily ever since. His status as the finest English prose-writer of the 20th century is now being marked by an annotated complete edition of his works, sumptuously published by the Oxford University Press. As a prolegomenon, Penguin is issuing another complete edition in hardback, the first eight volumes of which are now available, priced £20 each. They include his life of Rossetti, three travel books, Labels, Remote People and Ninety-two Days, and his first four novels, Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, Black Mischief and A Handful of Dust.

Caroline Moorehead

Good companions

From our UK edition

‘Choose your companions’, says an early Arab proverb, ‘thereafter your road.’ In the 1970s, Hugh Leach’s companion on his travels to Northern Yemen was Freya Stark, and she has become his companion again, in this affectionate hommage of photographs and short, scholarly texts. ‘Choose your companions’, says an early Arab proverb, ‘thereafter your road.’ In the 1970s, Hugh Leach’s companion on his travels to Northern Yemen was Freya Stark, and she has become his companion again, in this affectionate hommage of photographs and short, scholarly texts.

Lee Langley

Wool of bat and lizard leg

From our UK edition

When Julia Blackburn and her Dutch husband Herman move into an old village house perched on a cliff high above the Italian Ligurian Riviera they become part of a dwindling community in a landscape of forests and deserted villages with roofless ruins almost swallowed up by the riotous undergrowth. Seven hundred peasants once occupied this mountainous terrain, scraping a pitiful living; shepherds, chestnut farmers, cheese-makers — mezzadri, ‘half-people’, handing over half of everything, down to their last kilo of olives, to the padrone who was virtually their feudal lord; also sharing, when required, their women. They got by on a diet mainly of chestnuts — eaten raw, boiled, roasted, ground into flour, supplemented by an occasional thrush or dormouse.

Michael Beaumont

Up the creek

From our UK edition

Philip Marsden is a romantic historian. This is the story of Falmouth from its early days until the end of the age of sail. He writes with great love of the town near which he has lived all his life, and keeps darting from its history into personal anecdotes about expeditions made in his old motor launch Liberty, sometimes in search of pirate treasure. It makes for an attractive book. Until the 17th century there was no town of Falmouth. Its present centre is still known as ‘the Moor’, a place where swampy land meets the tide; a bog, in fact. For this reason the original town was founded up creek at Penryn, and even when the Killigrews, the leading family of the region, first began to build round their house at Arwenack, the place was known as Smithwick.

Marcus Berkmann

Casualties on the home front

From our UK edition

War correspondents aren’t like the rest of us: they can’t be. War correspondents aren’t like the rest of us: they can’t be. Most of the writers I know sit at home all day eating biscuits and staring out of the window. But war correspondents are out there, risking life, limb and sanity, seeing things we can only imagine; and as well as a journalist’s skills, they need a writer’s soul, to turn what they see into something people simply have to read. No wonder we’re so fascinated by them. Part of me would love to do a job like that. Fortunately the other 99 per cent of me, including the brain, knows better and keeps me indoors, safe from harm.

David Gilmour

Enterprising Scots

From our UK edition

If you wish to see how Scotland changed in the century after the Act of Union (1707), you might visit and compare the two houses in Edinburgh that belong to the National Trust for Scotland. Gladstone’s Land, built for a wealthy merchant in the 17th century, is a six-storey tenement in the old town, a place rich with period ambience but narrow, confined and in its heyday unhygienic. It could hardly contrast more vividly with The Georgian House in the new town’s Charlotte Square, which has space and elegance and the architecture of Robert Adam.

Charlotte Moore

Fun-loving feminist

From our UK edition

How to be a Woman is a manifesto memoir. Feminism, says the Times journalist Caitlin Moran, ‘has ground to a halt ... shrunk down to a couple of increasingly small arguments, carried out among a couple of dozen feminist academics’. Moran wants to pull feminism out of its rut, dust it down and sex it up. She does this by laying bare her own transition from childhood to adulthood, when she hurtled through adolescence like ‘a monkey strapped inside a rocket ... There isn’t an exit plan.’ Feminism is ‘serious, momentous and urgent’, which is why Moran seeks to make it accessible through anecdote and chat.

Saturday

Lewis Jones

Bookends: Scourge of New Labour

From our UK edition

Like all politicians, Bob Marshall-Andrews is fond of quoting himself, and Off Message (Profile Books, £16.99) includes a generous selection of his speeches and articles on such topics as Tony Blair’s messianic warmongering and David Blunkett’s plans for a police state. Less typically, perhaps, he is almost as generous in his quotation of others, such as Simon Hoggart, who has called him ‘a cross between Dennis the Menace and his dog, Gnasher’.

Philip Hensher

Flouting all those pieties

From our UK edition

If not equal to his best novels, Kingsley Amis’s short stories are still wonderfully entertaining, says Philip Hensher Some writers of short fiction — there doesn’t seem to be a noun to parallel ‘novelist’ — are dedicated craftsmen, like Chekhov, Kipling, William Trevor, Alice Munro or V.S. Pritchett. Others, like Evelyn Waugh or E.M. Forster, are more haphazard, producing stories to commission, or as a sketch, to try something out in moments when an idea on a small scale seems to be all that inspiration can supply. The result, when the collected edition finally surfaces, is generally more varied in surface than the works of the specialist — just think of Dickens’s stories, written for odd occasions and generally at short order.

Paul Johnson

Sense and magnanimity

From our UK edition

People see William Rees-Mogg as an archetypal member of the Establishment. But this is not quite true. His father’s family had been modest landowners for centuries, but his mother was Irish-American and Mogg was baptised a Catholic. His religion has brought him such happiness as he has enjoyed, including a long and comfortable marriage, but it also had a direct effect on his education. The family school was Charterhouse, but Mogg sat for the Eton scholarship and did well. Lord Quickswood, the Provost, vetoed him on religious grounds. He was the former Lord Hugh Cecil MP, leader of the Ultra-Tory anti-Home-Rulers, a gang known as the Hughligans. The veto was never again exercised, and Mogg was the last schoolboy to be barred from Eton as a papist.

Jane Brown

Bella vistas

From our UK edition

Many moons ago when I went to Sissinghurst to ask Nigel Nicolson (late of this parish) if I could write about his mother, Vita Sackville-West, he raised his hands, and eyebrows, in horror, ‘Oh! Not another book about my mother!’ These two titles on Italian gardens may provoke a similar reaction, for there has been a recent run of revisiting via Charles Latham’s vintage Country Life photographs, Edith Wharton’s Edwardian musings and Georgina Masson’s 1961 classic, now revived. Many moons ago when I went to Sissinghurst to ask Nigel Nicolson (late of this parish) if I could write about his mother, Vita Sackville-West, he raised his hands, and eyebrows, in horror, ‘Oh! Not another book about my mother!

Matthew Parris

Witness for the prosecution

From our UK edition

This is a humdinger of a tale. You might have thought that journeys into the heart of the Dark Continent with David Livingstone, Henry Morton Stanley and the likes of Richard Burton had already inspired so vast and breathless a literature that there were few surprises left to report. But that’s the miracle of this story. Alastair Hazell’s genius has been to plough through the huge and well-documented archive, follow his nose, and tell a tale from an entirely new perspective: the life of Dr John Kirk, an early companion to Dr Livingstone, and afterwards a humble Scottish medical officer and Acting British Consul in Zanzibar.

Jane Ridley

The gay Lambeth way

From our UK edition

Archbishop Edward Benson was the ideal of a Victorian churchman. Stern and unbending, he was a brilliant Cambridge scholar and a dreamily beautiful youth. Older men fell over themselves to promote him, and he climbed effortlessly from one plum post to the next, rising almost inevitably to become Archbishop of Canterbury. As Rodney Bolt shows in this fine book, Archbishop Benson’s domestic life was less than perfect. When he was 23, Benson chose an 11-year old girl named Mary Sidgwick to become his wife. She was his second cousin, and when she was 12 (which was at that time the age of consent) he proposed to her. They married when she was 18. Mary Sidgwick later claimed that being a child wife meant that ‘I did not grow up’. Benson tried to control her in everything.

Michela Wrong

Lucky miss

From our UK edition

In Dreams From My Father, his exploration of race and roots, Barack Obama recalled the tales heard in childhood about the man who gave him his name. His father, they said, was a brilliant economist who grew up herding goats in western Kenya, then won a scholarship to the University of Hawaii, where he fell in love with a white woman. ‘There was only one problem: my father was missing. Nothing my mother or grandparents told me could obviate that single, unassailable fact.’ My boy, I thought on finishing this book, you have no idea how lucky you were. Sociologists may worry about the impact absent fathers are having on a generation of young black men robbed of male role models. But there are worse things in life than being abandoned by your father.

Simon Baker

The man who came to dinner

From our UK edition

Each year Genevieve Lee holds an ‘alternative’ dinner party, to which she invites, along with her friends, a couple of people she wouldn’t ordinarily mix with — a Muslim, say, or homosexual. Each year Genevieve Lee holds an ‘alternative’ dinner party, to which she invites, along with her friends, a couple of people she wouldn’t ordinarily mix with — a Muslim, say, or homosexual. At her latest party a guest named Miles, whom she’s never met before, locks himself in the spare room, and refuses come out. In the first of the novel’s four sections, Genevieve contacts Anna, who had met Miles during a holiday in 1980, hoping that a familiar voice will persuade him to leave, but it does not.

Hywel Williams

Ghosts of the Teutonic Knights

From our UK edition

Do the trees of East Prussia still whisper in German when the wind blows in from the Baltic and across the featureless plain? The Russian poet Joseph Brodsky thought so when he visited in the 1960s. But keen ears, and a very long historical reach, are surely now needed in order to detect that particular susurration. A little over two million Germans lived here in 1940. Now there are just 10,000 ‘of German descent’. Eight centuries ago members of the Order of the Teutonic Knights, snobbish and aristocratic virgins almost to a man, arrived here from Acre to start that great Crusade of the North which was the counterpart to the adventure in Palestine. It took them some two generations to conquer the native Prusi, a Baltic and pagan people.

Justin Marozzi

Ways of escape

From our UK edition

When I compiled a list of the top dozen travel writers of the past century for an American magazine the other day, it required some effort not to come up with an entirely British cast. Freya Stark, Norman Lewis, Patrick Leigh Fermor and Jan Morris were musts. So too were V. S. Naipaul and Colin Thubron, still writing up a storm, and the Ibn-Battutah-mad Tim Mackintosh-Smith for a younger generation. Although there was no space for Byron, Bell, Thesiger or Chatwin, no great legerdemain was needed to squeeze in the brilliant Dutchman Cees Nooteboom, Ryszard Kapuscinski, the Polish master of literary reportage, the Irishwoman Dervla Murphy and Martha Gellhorn from across the Atlantic. That left one space.

Alexander Larman

The other man’s grass . . .

From our UK edition

Hundreds of thousands of hardy souls are preparing for a few nights under canvas this summer, often facing sunburn or trench foot while giddily jumping up and down in a muddy field as bands maul their better-known hits. And yet, for most of these people, camping is something that they wouldn’t dream of doing except at music festivals, despite its convenience, lack of cost, green credentials and genuine sense of excitement and adventure. This dichotomy, among many others, is explored with intelligence and wit in Matthew de Abaitua’s treatise on the values and social impact of camping.

Saturday

Sam Leith

Golden lads and girls | 2 July 2011

From our UK edition

Sam Leith tracks the careers of Alan Hollinghurst’s captivating new characters through youthful exuberance to old age, dust and a literary afterlife It’s quite hard to know where to begin, reviewing The Stranger’s Child. As I finished it, and was heard making bloody-hell-this-is-good noises, two people asked me: ‘What’s it about?’ That, as it turns out, is a very good question. Ostensibly, it’s about a fictional poet called Cecil Valance, a diffusion-line Rupert Brooke described years after his death in the first world war as ‘a first-rate example of the second-rate poet who enters into common consciousness more deeply than many greater masters’.