Non-fiction

‘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.

The Allure of Chanel, by Paul Morand, translated by Euan Cameron Should anyone ever ask me that daft magazine question about who you’d invite to your dream dinner-party (‘anyone in the world, alive or dead’) my answer would be short: Mademoiselle Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel, on her own, with only an ashtray between us. And maybe an ace simultaneous translator, lest my pidgin French bore her to volcanic rage. She was easily bored and, though she was a lifelong anglophile, she never liked women much. Fantasy dinners aside, this enchanting, tiny book is the closest anyone can get to a face-to-face with Coco.

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 Hugo Young Papers: Thirty Years of British Politics — Off the Record, by Hugo Young, edited by Ion Trewin The late Hugo Young was the political columnist of the chattering classes. This book, rather more grandly, describes him as the ‘the Pope of the liberal left’. A lifelong Cath- olic, educated by Ampleforth monks and Balliol dons, in his twice weekly Guardian columns he combined moral authority with shrewd insights into the ways of political man. His mission was to promote liberal democracy and a united Europe. He quotes the left-wing Tony Benn in 1986 ‘chiding me for my centrist views, saying that my position was that of giving my Episcopal benediction to all shifts to the centre’.

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.