Books Archives

Was Flann O’Brien at his best when writing about drink? (Answers on a damp stressed envelope, please)

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On his deathbed in Dublin in the spring of 1966, Flann O’Brien must have been squiffy from tots of Paddy. A bottle of the amber distillate was smuggled in to the hospital on April Fool’s Day by a couple of well-wishers. O’Brien rang the bell to summon a nurse. ‘Sister,’ he told her solemnly, ‘I have two friends who are constipated and need a dose. Would you bring two glasses?’ Within a matter of hours the poker-faced Count O’Blather (O’Brien’s preferred authorial pseudonym) was dead. Flanneurs everywhere had reason to lament the passing of a notable Dublin wit and a writer of comic genius. But all was not lost.

Philip Marsden

What seamen fear more than Somali pirates

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If a time traveller were to arrive in our world from, say, 1514 — a neat half-millennium away — what single feature would strike them most? What could they use on their return to try and explain the sheer weirdness of the future? A crowded mega-city? A hospital? An international airport? A computer? What about this — a container ship, a fifth-of-a-mile of steel transport travelling thousands of miles across unknown oceans filled with 150 tonnes of New Zealand lamb, 138,000 tins of cat food, 12,800 MP3 players and any amount of the paraphernalia for which the frenetic people of the 21st century work so hard to be able to afford? In fact, you don’t need to come from the Tudor period to be amazed by the scale and extravagance.

Selina Hastings

Australia’s entrancing Sheila

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The ‘dollar princesses’, those American heiresses who crossed the Atlantic in search of a titled husband, are familiar figures from the 19th and early 20th century. Less well known are the young ladies who made the much longer journey from Australia, and who, like their transatlantic counterparts, arrived in England with large fortunes, ready to be launched on an intensely competitive marriage market. Sheila Chisholm was one of these arrivals from ‘the Land of the Wattle’, as the colony was often described. The daughter of a wealthy grazier from New South Wales, she reached London in July 1914 with barely enough time to be presented at court before the outbreak of war.

Amanda Craig

Fiction embroiled in the Profumo affair

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Sex, spies, aristocrats and atom bombs — the Profumo affair is in the news again, thanks to the recent Andrew Lloyd Webber musical about Stephen Ward. William Nicholson has chosen to hang his seventh novel around it in Reckless, which takes place between the end of the second world war and the Cuban missile crisis. Our hero, Rupert, is a quiet Englishman and aide to Lord Mountbatten. During the war he is invited to tea at Cliveden, where he meets the teenage Princess Elizabeth in the company of a Russian and an American; inspired by her gentle thoughtfulness, the three young officers vow a pact for there to be ‘no more wars’. The ensuing two decades intertwine the personal and the political as the world inches towards nuclear Armageddon.

Katie Waldegrave

How miserable a marriage can be

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In Never Mind Miss Fox, Olivia Glazebrook’s second novel, the revelation of a long buried secret releases a Pandora’s Box of disasters. At the heart of the book is a disturbing sex scene between a 16-year-old girl and an older, soon-to-be-married man. With intelligent restraint, Glazebrook gives only a partial description of the event itself. Alcohol and the distorting effect of time and memory render the details hazy. But the ramifications of the brief affair play out with devastating consequences. The novel turns on the lives of Clive and Martha, a successful, if slightly dull couple who, during the course of the book, marry and have a child. On one level, Never Mind Miss Fox is simply a powerful cautionary tale about marital infidelity and dishonesty.

Philip Hensher

When intellectuals are clueless about the first world war

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No one alive now has any adult experience of the first world war, but still it shows no sign of respectable ossification; no armistice of opposing historians seems in prospect. It maintains a terrible, vivid, constantly mutable life. Like the French Revolution, its meaning shifts from generation to generation and according to which politician happens to be speaking at the moment. In 1989 Mrs Thatcher took the opportunity to deliver a highly tactless speech to the French on the real origins of political liberty. In recent weeks, Michael Gove, Sir Richard Evans and Tristram Hunt have embroiled themselves in an argument about the significance of the war which showed none of the abstruse nature of most discussions about history.

Blair Worden

What Englishmen learnt from Europe

Lead book review

The pattern of foreign travel by wealthy young Englishmen that became known as the Grand Tour began in the Renaissance and matured in the 17th century. In its origins it was a training for statesmanship. The state’s takeover of the church, which had done so much of the state’s official business, enlarged the employment opportunities of the nobility and gentry. So did the expansion of the government’s administrative resources and ambitions. But with the opportunities came challenges. Monarchs needed their advisers and officials and diplomats to be skilled and knowledgeable. So noblemen and gentlemen urged their sons to look beyond the accustomed pleasures of the hunting field and get down to educational business.

25 January 2014

Lucy Vickery

Competition: Children’s classics hard-boiled

Spectator literary competition No. 2834 This week it’s Enid Blyton meets Dashiell Hammett. You are invited to submit an extract from a classic of children literature of your choice rewritten in the style of hard-boiled crime fiction. Entries of up to 150 words should be emailed to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 5 February. The most recent challenge, to compose what might be a quintessential opening paragraph from the pen of either Graham Greene, Frank Kafka, Jane Austen or Tolkien, attracted an entry of modest size. It was a tall order to channel such literary genius, but on the whole you did it pretty well. Greene, with his immediately distinctive voice, was by far the most popular choice. As Nicholas Shakespeare wrote, ‘It rarely takes more than three ...

24 January 2014

Ed West

Why do most children’s books have a liberal bias?

Anyone who wonders why conservatism is such a lost cause in this country only needs to turn on children’s television to see what the voters of tomorrow are being taught. I used to think that I was the only person who detected a liberal bias in children’s programmes, but if I am actually losing the plot, at least there are two of us. As Henry Jeffreys writes in this week’s magazine: The purpose of children’s stories has always been to educate as well as entertain. I was brought up on the Railway Stories by Revd W. Awdry, which later became the TV series Thomas the Tank Engine. These stories have a strict moral code: when an engine misbehaves he is chastised and often punished by the Fat Controller.

23 January 2014

Richard Walker

Hope for one of the most turbulent, traumatised regions in the world

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John Keay’s excellent new book on the modern history of South Asia plunges the reader head first into some wildly swirling currents. Here are India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, not to mention Sri Lanka and Nepal, and a supporting cast of mini-states present and past that you may not even have heard of, all tumbling, overlapping, in a state of perpetual contradiction and collision, flowing like a tide of crazed tsunami debris down some great tropical floodplain. This is the world’s biggest population zone, and possibly even the world’s coming economic superpower, in full and violent flow. Midnight’s Descendants is primarily about the partition of India, the moment in 1947 that initially created independent India and a new state called Pakistan.

Ben Lawrence

A cruel novel about an India-born, world-famous, possibly real-life author

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It is six years since Hanif Kureishi’s last novel Something to Tell You, a kaleidoscopic meditation on life and death seen through the eyes of a Freudian analyst striving to make sense of middle age. It was regarded as a return to the highs of The Buddha of Suburbia, Kureishi’s first and still best-loved novel, populated by irresistible characters who ploughed through life with a feckless sexual voracity. The Last Word displays a similar chutzpah, although things are hampered by an unlikely story which over-sexualises every character in the claustrophobic atmosphere of a shabby country house.

Simon Akam

Write what you know — especially if it’s the second world war

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Adam Foulds’s latest novel is less successful than its predecessor. In 2009 he reached the Booker shortlist with The Quickening Maze, which saw Victorian poets orbit a lunatic asylum in Epping Forest. Now, with In the Wolf’s Mouth, he has shifted his attention to the Mediterranean theatre of the second world war. Will Walker is an English field security officer, Ray Marfione an American GI. Both find themselves in North Africa and Sicily, as ancient corruption permeates Allied liberation. The subject matter is Foulds’s primary failing. The Quickening Maze fizzed because the author, who has a separate reputation as a poet, knows what it is to write verse and that informed his resurrection of Alfred Tennyson and John Clare.

Patrick Skene-Catling

The two people who brought us The Grapes of Wrath

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John Steinbeck (1902–1968), an ardent propagandist for the exploited underdogs of the Great Depression, had barely enough money for subsistence during the years he spent preparing and writing The Grapes of Wrath, the protest novel regarded as his masterpiece. It made him a Nobel laureate and a very rich man. The Nobel committee praised his ‘realistic and imaginative writing, combining . . . sympathetic humour and keen social perception’. Seventy-four years after first publication, the book still sells more than 100,000 copies a year. In his Nobel acceptance speech in 1962, Steinbeck said that ‘a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature’.

Charles Saumarez-Smith

Where the Whigs went

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A book about one of the London clubs, published to mark its 250th anniversary, might be regarded as of extremely limited public appeal, designed only for the enjoyment of its members, 800 of whom have subscribed more than 900 copies (one blenches to think why members might want more than one copy). But Brooks’s, halfway up St James’s Street, has always felt that its history deserves wider public interest, partly because of its association with the life and gambling of Charles James Fox and partly because it has been so central to the formation of the 19th-century Whig party. (This book includes the rather amazing statistic that, during the Melbourne administration in the 1830s, nearly half the members were sitting MPs and every member of the cabinet belonged to Brooks’s).

John Preston

Why are Scandinavians so happy when they should be so sad?

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As I sit here in my Sarah Lund Fair Isle sweater, polishing my boxed sets of Borgen and nibbling on a small piece of herring, it briefly occurs to me that perhaps I too have fallen victim to the prevailing mania for all things Scandinavian. Just about the only person who’s stayed resistant, it seems, is Michael Booth, the author of this book. At home in Copenhagen — he’s married to a Dane — watching the incessant drizzle falling through the perpetual twilight, Booth begins to think he’s losing his mind. How come every survey ever commissioned into human happiness puts the Scandinavians at the top of the list?, he wonders.

Jonathan Rugman

From Nasser to Mubarak — Egypt’s modern pharaohs and their phoney myths

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Reporting Egypt’s revolution three years ago, I had a sense of history not so much repeating itself as discharging sparks which seemed eerily familiar. Smoke was billowing into my hotel bedroom from the building next door, the headquarters of the Mubarak dictatorship which protestors had set alight; yet also visible from my balcony in Cairo that night were the flickering lights of Zamalek, the island of privilege in the River Nile where my father grew up before fleeing the flames of the Nasser regime on a flying boat in 1956. At last comes a book which links the coups and revolutions witnessed by father and son. The Cambridge sociologist Hazem Kandil has produced a compelling history of Egypt’s 60-year power struggle.

Justin Cartwright

The Good Lord Bird, by James McBride – review

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James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird is set in the mid 19th century, and is based on the real life of John Brown, the one who lies a-mouldering in his grave. Recently it won a National Book Award in the USA. Brown, the Old Man, was a religious fanatic who believed that he had the nod from God to free the slaves. Early in his harum-scarum life he killed and beheaded some pro-slavery opponents with God’s sanction; like many fanatics he had a direct line to the Almighty. But it all ended in tragedy when, with his small band of followers, very few of whom were slaves, he took a federal government arsenal at Harper’s Ferry in West Virginia. The plan was to distribute thousands of guns to the ‘negroes’ (as McBride calls them).

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

When No Man’s Land is home

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Countless writers and film-makers this year will be trying their hand at forcing us to wake up and smell the first world war. How do they plant a fresh, haunting, horrifying image into our unwilling and saturated heads? We know it all: the trenches, the mud, the shell holes, the rats, the man plodding towards the house with the telegram, the local surnames repeated with different initials on the war memorial. All very much in the ‘too sad to think about’ department, particularly if you love Edwardian children’s stories and start contemplating What Happened to Oswald Later. Helen Dunmore, an assured writer who in a previous novel has forced us to live through the siege of Leningrad with its freezing and starving babies, does not shirk from her task.

Sam Leith

Reviewing reviews of reviews — where will it all end?

Lead book review

About halfway through reading this collection of essays I had one of those hall-of-mirrors moments. These are mostly book reviews, you see: high-toned, long-form New York Review of Books-type review-essays, given — but book reviews nevertheless. There I was, dutifully noting what David Lodge wrote about what Martin Stannard had to say about Muriel Spark, for instance. At once I found myself entertaining the baseless, pleasing notion that, some years from now a collection of my own book reviews would appear in an edition called something awful like Writing Things Down or Twelve-Point Garamond.

21 January 2014

Nick Cohen

How to kill a columnist

The typical plot of a Sophie Hannah thriller sounds ridiculous when you condense it. A man yearns for a family. His wife has a child to please him, but she does not love her daughter. Desperate for affection, the little girl gets angrier and angrier and throws an electric heater in her mother's bath. Realising her mother is hurt, she throws herself on top of her, and electrocutes herself as well. To cover up the scandal, the father hides the bodies. When a spiteful classmate of his daughter hints to her mother that she knows about the tensions in her family, he kills her and her mother, and hides their bodies as well.

16 January 2014

Laura Freeman

The Angel of Charleston, by Stewart MacKay – review

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Above the range in the kitchen at Charleston House is a painted inscription: ‘Grace Higgens worked here for 50 years & more, she was a good friend to all Charlestonians.’ The words are those of the art historian Quentin Bell, once one of Grace’s young charges. Grace was taken on by the Bloomsbury group painter Vanessa Bell in 1920 to be nursemaid to her three children: Julian, 12, Quentin, nine (by her husband Clive Bell) and one-year-old Angelica (by her friend and lover Duncan Grant). She was the heart and hearth of Charleston, Vanessa’s studio-cum-farmhouse in Sussex. Where Vanessa was austere and Duncan distracted, Grace was warm, smelling always of ‘moist, homemade fruitcake’.

Lloyd Evans

The ‘semi-detached’ member of Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet

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John Biffen was mentally ill. This is the outstanding revelation of Semi-Detached, a memoir which has been assembled from his diaries and from the autobiographical writings which he completed before his death in 2007. During the mid-1960s he tried psychotherapy, which he described as ‘lugubrious’, ‘painful’ and ‘not a cure’. He got far better treatment from a Harley Street specialist, Peter Dally, who regulated his lithium doses with blood tests and improved his health to the point where he felt able to join the shadow cabinet in 1976. He served as Trade Secretary under Mrs Thatcher and later as Leader of the House. Biffen loved gossip.

David Womersley

Hugh Trevor-Roper, the man who hated uniformity

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The arrival of a letter from Hugh Trevor-Roper initiated a whole series of pleasures. Pleasure began with the very look of the envelope, addressed in his wonderfully clear, elegant hand (writing to Alasdair Palmer in 1986, he advised ‘No, don’t type your letters . . . reject the impersonality of the machine’; and towards the end of his life, when his sight was failing, it was a matter of particular regret that this ‘played havoc’ with his handwriting). But the envelope was just the prelude to the contents, which could be relied on to be stylish, amusing, witty, imaginative and playful.

Cressida Connolly

‘Where are the happy fictional spinsters?’

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This book arose from an argument. Lifelong bookworm Samantha Ellis and her best friend had gone to Brontë country and were tramping about on the Yorkshire moors when they began bickering: would it be better to be Cathy Earnshaw, or Jane Eyre? Ellis had always been fervently in the Cathy camp, re-reading Wuthering Heights every year (often in the bath) and swooning. But now, in her thirties, came an epiphany. She’d chosen the wrong heroine. This was understandable, given the ‘high drama’ of her family background, in the small community of north London Jews exiled from Baghdad. As she puts it: An Iraqi Jewish endearment, fudwa, means ‘I would die for you’. In a five-minute phone call about yoghurt my grandma can offer to die for me ten or fifteen times.

Anne Chisholm

Breakdowns, suicide attempts — and four great novels

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Among the clever young Australians who came over here in the 1960s to find themselves and make their mark, a number, as we all know, never went back. A few became household names — Germaine Greer, Barry Humphries, Clive James — and British cultural life owes them a great deal. Madeleine St John, the novelist and semi-reclusive eccentric who smoked herself to an early death in London in 2006, was one of them; but although eventually she made a minor literary reputation for herself, writing four novels in her middle age of which the third, The Essence of the Thing, made the Booker shortlist in 1997, she has remained largely unknown here.

Harriet Sergeant

Is there a way to live without economic growth?

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During Japan’s lost decade in the 1990s I found myself handing out rice balls to Tokyo’s homeless on the banks of the Sumida river. The former salary men — it was always men — slept in cardboard boxes the size of coffins. I peered into one. Its owner had neatly arranged his last few possessions. Crockery, two wash rags and a blanket were all emblazoned with the designer logos I associated with Japan’s boom years when I had lived in Tokyo. They had washed up like artefacts from another age in this unlikely setting. They signalled more than anything else to me that Japan’s economic miracle was well and truly in the past. Financial Times Asia editor David Pilling lived in Japan for seven years.

Adam Foulds

Butcher’s Crossing is not at all like Stoner — but it’s just as superbly written

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John Williams’s brilliant 1965 novel, Stoner, was republished last year by Vintage to just, if surprisingly widespread, acclaim and went on to sell tens of thousands of copies and appear in many Books of the Year lists. Written with a sober perfection of style that suits its subject — the elegantly factual glowing with a careful lyricism — Stoner depicts the life of a diligent Midwestern literary academic that is often one of quiet desperation but is periodically shot through with luminous moments of insight and love. Now Vintage have republished Williams’s earlier novel, Butcher’s Crossing.

Simon Blow

My family’s better days

Lead book review

The Sargent painting reproduced opposite suggests the wealth and comfort that these three sisters, Mary, Madeline and Pamela, were born to. Their father, Percy Wyndham, was the younger son of Lord Leconfield of Petworth, Sussex. He was his father’s favourite, and was left by him as much of the immense Wyndham riches as was possible. With his inheritance Percy bought a 4,000-acre estate in Wiltshire, romantically named Clouds, where he built a vast country house, designed by Philip Webb. Pamela, the youngest sister (and my great-grandmother), is seated on the sofa, flanked by her two siblings.

Emily Rhodes

By the book: The NSA is behaving like a villain in a 1950s novel

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The continuing drip-feed of stories about governments and friendly-seeming internet giants sifting through our data has left some citizens feeling outraged and a bit duped. I have no doubt that they would sympathise with poor deceived Ellen North in Dorothy Whipple’s brilliant 1950s novel Someone at a Distance. ‘Ellen was that unfashionable creature, a happy housewife’, who works herself to the bone to make a cheerful home for her children and indolent, self-satisfied husband, Avery. When Avery’s mother employs a young French companion — the vain and poisonous Louise Lanier — we sense that Ellen may not be a happy housewife for long.