The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
My guest in this week’s Book Club is the rock musician, writer and sometime Faber editor Pete Townshend. Pete has just published his first novel The Age of Anxiety, an ambitious work jointly conceived as an opera. We talk about madness and creativity, Who lyrics popping up in the fiction, how he settled on an Aristotelian plot, and the unusual way his psychic second wife sends him off to sleep.
Clive James is gone. What a great spirit, what a lively and curious mind, what an instinct for laughter we’ve lost. I had the chance to talk to him in 2017 at his home in Cambridge about poetry, fame, late style, discovering Browning, being silly and serious, watching box sets, facing the end, and why he wants to be buried back home in Australia. I found a Clive still curious, still engaged, and fiercely in love with life. If you didn’t hear it first time round - or if you did, and are feeling Clive’s loss - you can listen to our conversation here.
Clive James died last weekend at his home, surrounded by his family, after a long illness. The poet, writer, critic and television star was one of the most remarkable, talented and insightful members of his generation. Loved by millions, he was an incomparable presence in the lives of his friends and readers right up until the end. In 2014, when he seemed very near that end, I went to see him at his home in Cambridge to talk about life, love, poetry and the proximity of death. I feared that it would be our last conversation. Thank medicine it wasn’t. But before I’d even got home, Clive had written again to say that he wanted to re-emphasise to me the ‘gratitude’ he felt about his life. It was a very Clive sentiment that. There is much to say.
The call for the comically appalling first or final paragraph of the memoir of a well-known figure was one of those challenges where we raise a glass in memory of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Victorian novelist and patron saint of purple prose. The oft-cited example of his florid style is the opening to the 1830 novel Paul Clifford — ‘It was a dark and stormy night’ — which was used by Charles Schulz as the first line of Snoopy’s novel, and by Brian Murdoch in his winning entry below. You didn’t quite hit the spot this week and the standard was patchy. Some creditable entries were disqualified because they didn’t strike me as plausible beginnings or endings.
If it were not for a banker with a hangover, we would not have Eggs Benedict. Or so one of the creation stories goes. One morning in 1894 Lemuel Benedict walked in to the Waldorf Hotel, New York, feeling a bit rough. He asked the Maître D’, Oscar Tschirky, for hot buttered toast, bacon, two poached eggs and — crucially — a ‘pitcher’ of hollandaise sauce. This story is recounted in Signature Dishes that Matter (Phaidon, £35), a chronology of 200 or so inventions, from gelato (ice cream) in 1686 to Claude Bosi’s ‘duck jelly’ in 2017. Put together by seven food critics with global knowledge, this is a truly gorgeous book to own and to give to that friend or relative who dines out like a collector.
‘If I wanted to make a foreigner understand the mood of a typical English landscape,’ the art critic Eric Newton wrote in April 1939, ‘I would first show him a good Constable and then one or two of John Nash’s best watercolours.’ This is about as good an endorsement any painter could ask for, but Nash is more usually bracketed with, and overshadowed by, his older brother. There have been major exhibitions of Paul Nash’s work at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in 2010 and at Tate Britain three years ago, whereas the last truly substantial retrospective of John’s work was at the Royal Academy in 1967.
Sometimes I have to admit the reason I read children’s books with pleasure is that I’m essentially puerile —and look, that’s not a bad thing if it means getting to read The Steves by Morag Hood (Pan Macmillan, £6.99), aimed at three year olds. It’s about two puffins called Steve who keenly resent the claims of the other to be Number One Steve. It is the kind of infantile playground name-calling which makes me laugh, and I reckon young children will like it too, especially Steves. Judith Kerr, the peerless, razor-sharp author of The Tiger Who Came to Tea as well as the tear-jerker My Henry has, alas, gone to her reward in heaven, but we still, thank God, have Shirley Hughes, whose picture books for small children are as engaging as ever.
It is almost five years since two trained jihadists went into the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris and killed 12 people. Philippe Lançon survived the editorial meeting that was taking place as the gunmen burst in. Published to huge acclaim in France last year, Disturbance is his account of events. It is long, perhaps too long, with numerous discursions. But who would edit such painful, painstaking testimony? On the morning of the attack, Lançon had been weighing up whether to go to Charlie or to Libération, where he also worked. He chose to go to Charlie, whose difficult, brilliant, brave team had kept producing the magazine, despite a decade of growing attention from Europe’s modern-day blasphemy police.
I’m joined from beyond the grave on this week’s Spectator Book Club by the late Laurie Lee — to talk about Gloucestershire’s Slad Valley, the landscape that made him as a writer. Acting as medium, so to speak, is David Parker — whose 1990s interviews with Lee before his death provide the material for the new book Down In The Valley: A Writer’s Landscape — and who’s here to talk about the pleasures and difficulties of coaxing reminiscences out of this laureate of English rural life. Essential listening for anyone for whom Cider With Rosie and As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning formed part of a literary education.
Here is a test to tell you whether you will like this book or not: when I write ‘So, no one told you life was going to be this way…’, do you secretly clap your hands four times? If so, could you be any more excited to get your hands on it? The excellent news is that, just like the show, Still Friends, which rabid fans would almost certainly buy whatever old rubbish was in it, is much, much better than it needed to be. It will appeal to anyone interested, not just in the six stars (seven if you include Marcel the monkey, which I most certainly do) but in how the extraordinary 24-episode-a-year studio system managed to churn out such quality at such a pace (answer: with extreme difficulty). This is the ultimate deep dive, told in a breezy journalistic style.
Things keep recurring in the novels of Ben Lerner — snatches of conversation, lines of poetry, Lerner himself. But in The Topeka School, while things keep returning, something has also been lost. Lerner’s third novel reunites us with Adam Gordon, the protagonist — and Lerner surrogate — of his much acclaimed debut, Leaving the Atocha Station. Adam is a senior at Topeka High School in the late 1990s, an aspiring poet and champion debater (as was Lerner), whose parents are psychologists at the Foundation, ‘a world-famous psychiatric institute and hospital’ which treats just about everyone in the book.
‘The strong do what they can. The weak suffer what they must.’ Thucydides’ principle expresses an uncomfortable truth. The eight-day meeting between Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill at Yalta in the Crimea in February 1945 settled the fate of Eastern Europe and beyond. Its effects are still with us. President George W. Bush compared it with the way Britain, France and the Soviet Union sold out to Hitler before the war began: he called it ‘one of the greatest wrongs of history’. ‘Yalta’, like ‘Munich’, has become a synonym for the cynical betrayal of the weak by the strong. It is an oft-told, well-documented and controversial story. Diana Preston retells it fluently, perceptively and with meticulous scholarship.
Gladstone’s Library began as that most English of things: a great man’s visionary idea. William Gladstone, at the age of 85, decided that he had amassed too many books, and wanted to share them with the less fortunate. As his daughter Mary put it: ‘He wished to bring together books who had no readers with readers who had no books.’ He duly spent £40,000 of his own money on founding and building the library that bore his name, carrying 32,000 of his own volumes three-quarters of a mile between his home, Hawarden Castle in Flintshire, Wales, and the temporary structure that housed them, aided only by his valet and the long-suffering Mary.
Richard Ingrams A book that gave me great enjoyment (for all the wrong reasons) was Harvest Bells: New and Uncollected Poems by John Betjeman (Bloomsbury Continuum, £16.99). The compiler, Kevin J. Gardner, professor of English at Baylor University, Texas, claimed that all the poems in the book had been subjected to his ‘rigorous scrutiny’; yet somehow a spoof Betjeman poem, published in Private Eye after the exposure of Anthony Blunt as a Russian agent in 1979 (for which I was partly responsible), had found its way into the professor’s ragbag of a compendium: Who’d have guessed it? Blunt a traitor And a homosexualist, Carrying on with tar and waiter — There’s a sight I’m glad I missed.
The campaign against Isis was pretty big news for most of 2016. But by the time the final showdown got under way in Mosul, it was late October. Western journalism was already departing on a bold new chapter, with great new villains much closer to home. For news consumers, one tableau of confusion and anxiety cross-dissolved into the next. Fortunately, James Verini, a reporter for the New York Times magazine, was on the ground in Mosul, still working to bring closure to the previous nightmare. But that’s no easy task when ‘you’re usually sitting in some house or truck, or squatting behind some berm, listening to the destruction’, as he confides early on in They Will Have to Die Now. ‘Experientially, war is mainly sound.
I was looking the other day at a video of the artist Celia Paul in conversation with the curator of her recent exhibition at the Huntington Library in California. The image projected there of a reserved and quietly-spoken woman, hesitant, diffident and patently ill at ease in the spotlight, left me very unprepared for the raw honesty and openness of this memoir. Two early stories give an idea of what lies ahead. The first is of her five-year-old self, the youngest so far in a family of four daughters of a missionary father in India, making herself seriously ill with jealousy on the arrival of a fifth sister.
Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer-prize winning Olive Kitteridge (2008) is the novel I recommend to friends who don’t read much. Talk about bang for your buck. Strout packs more character and life into 337 pages than you’d expect to find in a novel twice that length and combines classic storytelling with elegant formal innovation. Each chapter works individually as a short story, yet they are all harnessed together by the deceptively simple title. By announcing that the novel is about Olive Kitteridge, Strout frees herself to depict many other inhabitants of the small coastal town of Crosby, Maine. Sometimes, a chapter’s protagonist only interacts briefly with Olive, but this piecemeal portrait is deepened by the variety of angles from which Strout approaches her subject.
It’s telling that perhaps the best wine book of last year, Amber Revolution by Simon Woolf, was self-published, though you’d never guess from the quality of the design, photography or editing. Wine books are a tough slog for publishers unless they’re written by one of the big four: Clarke, Johnson, Robinson and Spurrier (sounds like a firm of provincial solicitors). Hugh Johnson wrote the first World Atlas of Wine in 1971. Since the 1998 edition he has been, in his words, ‘progressively passing the baton’ to Jancis Robinson. It’s astonishing how much has changed; early editions were little more than France, Germany, Italy, sherry and port.
What strikes me most about the Christmas gift-book industry — for industry it surely is, as I can confirm, having toiled on that production line myself — is the incurable optimism of everyone concerned. After all, most of these books are terrible. Some are merely appalling. But the simple act of writing and publishing them is to hope beyond hope that this will be the year for you, the year that your not-very-good book will become a bestseller and buy you everything you want and need, and that no one will notice its manifest flaws until it’s far too late. Or maybe not; because every year a few decent titles do somehow manage to peek through the clouds. These are the ones that genuinely deserve to be bought, read and loved.
Eleanor of Aquitaine is the most famous woman of the Middle Ages: queen of France and England, crusader, mother of kings — ‘lionhearted’ Richard and ‘bad’ John — and ancestress to the royal dynasties of Europe. Yet more nonsense has been written about her than almost any other woman. Much of what we think we know is falsehood or half-truth, and many respected historians fall foul of her myth, endlessly repeating misinformation as fact. For someone so renowned, the written record is astonishingly thin. Even her birth date (1122 or 1124) is uncertain, as is her place of birth. We know nothing of her looks, personality, education or early familial attachments.
In this week’s Spectator Book Club, my guest is Christopher Tugendhat, whose new book offers a refreshing and thought-provoking survey of twentieth-century history; not through wars and treaties and policies, but through the pages of the books from his extensive private library. In A History of Britain Through Books: 1900-1964, Christopher argues that we can get a special understanding the temper of a given time through the pivotal works of fiction and nonfiction that expressed it; books written without the historian's hindsight. Here’s a survey of familiar landmarks — as well as texts that have fallen into undeserving (and sometimes deserving) obscurity.
When the sex trade survivor Rachel Moran published her memoir, Paid For: My Journey through Prostitution, she knew not everybody would be happy that she'd laid bare the realities of sexual exploitation. Pimps, brothel owners and punters would hardly be pleased that she'd lifted the lid on the world’s oldest oppression. What she could never have imagined was having to sue another woman for defamation, for repeatedly claiming that Moran had based her book on a pack of lies. Gaye Dalton, who was also a prostitute in Dublin’s southside red-light district, one of the spots where Moran was bought and sold, has repeatedly alleged that Moran fabricated her entire life history, and had never even been in prostitution.
Liberty is a fragile thing. For thousands of years, civilisations have risen, flourished and fallen, and most of them have been rigid, brutal and despotic. Freedom for the masses is a historical rarity. It arises only as the product of a fine balance between competing interests. That balance is the subject of this book. According to the authors, both of whom are American economists, the first of those countervailing forces is the state, or what Hobbes called the Leviathan. The second is society. For liberty to exist, the state and society must achieve equilibrium. If one dominates the other, the result is a slide away from liberty towards despotism.
In 1585, Jacques du Perron presented to the court of the French king Henry III, as a kind of after-dinner entertainment, a formal logical argument for the existence of God. Du Perron, formerly a Protestant, was now well on his way to becoming a cardinal. He was a highly intelligent and rhetorically gifted man and he performed his task well, to the great pleasure of the assembled nobility. Flushed with success, he then turned to his audience and announced that, if they wanted, he could prove the opposite case too. The king was not amused. Most of us like to believe that we believe what we believe because rigorous reasoning and reliable evidence have led us there. Most of us are wrong.
It sounds in bad taste, but Scarlett Thomas has written a riotously enjoyable novel about a boarding school full of girls with eating disorders. It’s not that Thomas doesn’t take eating disorders seriously; she takes them so seriously that one of the girls dies. But there are few more vivaciously original novelists around today, and surely none of them is having as much fun while making serious points. Elsewhere, Thomas has written compellingly about her own orthorexia (or obsessive desire to control her diet); but this doesn’t mean that she is above lampooning the hysterical pronouncements of the diet-obsessed — not least that fruit, unless you pick it in the wild yourself, contains so much sugar that you may as well eat Haribo, which is nicer, after all.
Gastronomy is one of the deepest forms of culture. If you’ve grown up in France you know this, to the depth of your Camembert-calcium-enriched bones (I have, and do). In my Year 2 classroom near Paris there was a poster with the most famous cheeses of France on it: heart-shaped Neufchâtel, orange Mimolette; Reblochon, Roquefort, Comté and Cantal. You were considered a cretin if you couldn’t tell your Crottin from your Pélardon, or the age of a Tomme at first bite. The poster which hung alongside that one was of Charles de Gaulle broadcasting during the Resistance. In Britain, we are less good at celebrating our native foods, and we’ve long felt that our cheeses pale in comparison to those of the continent.
Philip Hensher The best novels of the year were Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys (Fleet, £16.99) and James Meek’s To Calais, In Ordinary Time (Canongate, £17.99). These days, novels are often praised for the gravity of their subjects, but what elevates Whitehead’s treatment of race and American brutality is the elegance of its style and the satisfying inventiveness of its form. Meek’s book is an astounding linguistic fantasy about the advent of the Black Death. French, Anglo-Saxon and Latin collide in a world of fake news, uncertain sexual borders and the dread of a catastrophe which looks in some ways very much like our own.
Bill Bryson has come a long way from being the funniest, most irreverent travel writer around. He’s still as amiable, avuncular and amusing as ever, but his subject matter has broadened over the decades to cover nearly everything, from science to Shakespeare. His modus operandi, however, has not changed. He absorbs reams of facts, the most interesting of which he presents liberally sprinkled with mischief, wit and lateral thinking. On seeing this book’s title, I prepared myself for the arid science I ingested when I studied to be first a doctor, then a hospital physician and then a consultant anaesthetist. But I needn’t have worried. Bryson feeds the pith, pulp and bitter pips of a subject into his brain and produces a sweet, zingy quantity of juice.
There is no longer much point buying strictly practical gardening books, such as were a staple of the publishing industry in years gone by. Those colourful, cheery, cheap volumes have been superseded by trustworthy websites, such as that of the Royal Horticultural Society, which can quickly answer any query you have about cultivation, plant identification or pest damage. Gardening books these days must offer something not to be found online, if readers are to shell out their precious British pounds: deep, hard-earned knowledge, elegant writing, attractive illustrations and, preferably, all three. This year, at least, there are a number that pass the test.