History

Senior civil servants are generally expected to be shadowy figures, influential rather than powerful, discreet rather than flamboyant, probably — in Gladwyn’s generation at any rate — educated at Winchester. To describe such a being as a Titan might seem an oxymoron. The Titans, it will be remembered, were a family of giants who had the temerity to challenge Zeus and duly got their comeuppance. In this well-researched and thoughtful book Sean Greenwood convinces one that in the case of Lord Gladwyn — not least in the ill-judged challenge to the superiority of Zeus — this far-fetched analogy is amply justified.

The Sisters Who Would Be Queen, by Leanda de Lisle Only recently a portrait minature by Lavina Teerlinc was identified as being of Lady Jane Grey. Her diminutive size, coiffed red hair and crimson lips had suggested that it might be her — except that the eyes are blue, while Jane’s were known to be brown; but Teerlinc was accustomed to giving all her subjects blue eyes. It is all we have; no other portrait of Jane is known to exist. The absence of a recognisable image reflects the problem facing any historian wishing to study her. The evidence is simply not there to form a credible description, let alone a biography, of England’s shortest reigning monarch.

Journals: 1952-2000, by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, edited by Andrew Schlesinger and Stephen Schlesinger Before sitting down with this hefty doorstopper of a diary, first ask yourself whether you agree — or can imagine yourself agreeing — with the entry Arthur Schlesinger, Jr made on 27 March 1950: ‘I adore sitting around hotel rooms with politicians and newspapermen exchanging gossip over drinks.’ If you do, or can, then you will enjoy this book, for it largely consists of a half-century’s worth of gossip, most of it obtained by sitting around hotel rooms with politicians and newspapermen over drinks.

The Natural History of Unicorns, by Chris Lavers ‘A long time ago, when the earth was green,/ There were more kinds of animals than you’ve ever seen./ They’d run around free while the earth was being born,/ But the loveliest of all was the unicorn.’ So Shel Silverstein’s saccharine ditty informed generations of kiddies. As Chris Lavers’ whimsical, scholarly and continually absorbing book tells us, there’s a lot more to unicorns than that. The first mention of a unicorn in literature appears four centuries before the birth of Christ, in a ‘mess of a book’ called Indica by the Greek orientalist Ctesias of Cnidus.

‘The 20th century was not kind to Pakistan’, Tariq Ali says in the first sentence of his latest book on his native land. ‘The 20th century was not kind to Pakistan’, Tariq Ali says in the first sentence of his latest book on his native land. The glib opener is a taste of what’s to come. It is both annoying and accurate. The 20th century created Pakistan, after all, and — apart from eight most difficult years since the turn of the millennium — the country has known no other.

‘Blinker’ Hall, Spymaster, by David Ramsay The first world war admiral, ‘Blinker’ Hall — so-called for the obvious reason — is less widely known than Jellicoe, Beatty & Co., but his contribution to victory and history was arguably greater. He was the Director of Naval Intelligence (DNI) who ensured the success of Room 40, the 1914 equivalent of Bletchley Park in 1939. Less famous than its successor, partly because radio was less used then, its ability to decrypt German naval and diplomatic ciphers was no less significant. Not the least of its achievements, enhanced by Hall’s outstanding political skill, was the decoding of the Zimmerman telegram, which effectively brought America into the war.

This unassuming book is in fact a valuable addition to the Proust bibliography. The author, himself a painter, has had the apparently simple idea of extracting all references to works of art in the great novel in an attempt to demonstrate Proust’s knowledge of, and reliance on, paintings to give resonance to his characters and to present them to his readers in an indelible physical form. The exercise proves both seductive and enlightening. Proust was a translator of Ruskin, yet he rejected Ruskin’s message that art has a moral foundation. For Proust art was a self-explanatory and self-sustaining exercise which excluded praise and condemnation. His work is filled with characters who are undoubtedly venal.

Wales, by Simon Jenkins Last year, having been to Scotland, I called on the mother of an old friend. Mrs Molly Jones of Carmarthen, I found to my great surprise, was very enthusiastic about Scotland. It was so unlike Wales, she said. All those castles . . . ‘But Mrs Jones, there are castles at six-mile intervals from where you’re sitting.’ ‘Yes, but they’re so . . . well . . . dilapidated.’ The first delightful thing about this gazeteer to what his publishers describe as ‘the best Welsh buildings’ is that Simon Jenkins is quietly, and sometimes not quietly at all, of her persuasion. This is Jenkins on Caernarfon, the best preserved (having had a 19th-century makeover) of all Welsh castles.

The Triumph of Music, by Tim Blanning This is an often entertaining, occasionally illuminating, but cur- iously unsatisfying book, written by a distinguished historian of early modern Europe. Subtitled ‘Composers, Musicians and their Audiences, 1700 to the Present’, it purports to be a study of the ways that the art of music has increasingly come to dominate western culture. ‘Triumph’ is not, I think, the mot juste here; something more like ‘increasing ubiquity’ would be more apt. Professor Blanning is never dull or dryasdust: he writes with lucidity, grace and wry wit, and he clearly has a passionate enthusiasm for music.

Much great American writing is regional in a way that British or French writing never has been. Most of the best writing coming from the States inhabits a place which apparently feels no pressure from the great metropolitan centres — Annie Proulx on the Texas panhandle, Cormac McCarthy on the Mexican border territories, Jane Smiley on the Midwest. Even when a great city is in the vicinity, as in Anne Tyler’s or David Simon’s very different considerations of Baltimore, we feel a specific regional flavour emerging; John Cheever’s fictions of elegant suburban life have a distinctly north-eastern flavour which evidently still weighs heavily with writers of that particular region.