Books Archives

Competition: merge some literary greats

This year saw the largest-ever merger between two publishing houses when Penguin and Random House joined forces in an attempt to compete with the might of Amazon. You are invited to effect a literary merger of a different kind by blending two existing well-known books and providing a synopsis of the new title. Thanks to Lawrence Douglas and Alexander George, who dreamt up this particular literary parlour game, giving us The Old Man and the Flea, ‘Hemingway’s classic as seen through a mirror Kafkaesquely, which finds the protagonist wrestling now not with a marlin but — yet more symbolically still — with a flea’. Please email entries of 150 words maximum to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 2 October and mark them Competition 2818.

19 September 2013

Mark Palmer

No, you did not ‘leave the modern world behind’: some phrases should be banned from travel writing

Clichés and travel writing, sadly, often go hand in hand. I look after the travel pages at the Daily Mail and have felt compelled to compile a list of banned words and phrases for writers. The list gets longer by the week. Because the Spectator's Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for travel writing is underway, I thought I'd pull out my list again. Here are just a few of the offending words and phrases on it. I'm sure you can think of more.

Peter Parker

Pine by Laura Mason; Lily, by Marcia Reiss – review

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After the success of their animal series of monographs, Reaktion Books have had the clever idea of doing something similar for plants. Writers are commissioned to investigate the botanical, historical, social and cultural aspects of individual plants, with volumes on oak and geranium already published, and yew, bamboo, willow, palm and orchid forthcoming. The structure and content of the books appears to be left up to the writers, but all the volumes combine scholarship with lively anecdote and are beautifully and generously illustrated. While lilies seem an obviously attractive choice for such a series, who would have thought conifers could be so interesting?

Miranda Seymour

Hanns and Rudolf, by Thomas Harding – review

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Confronted by this lavishly endorsed book — ‘compelling’ (David Lodge), ‘gripping’(John le Carré),‘thrilling’ (Jonathan Freedland) — I felt depressed. Two weeks ago, the New York Times’s savvy London correspondent accused the British of being obsessed with the Nazis. This might appear a case of pots and kettles: not for nothing did America’s widely watched History Channel become known as the Hitler Channel. Nevertheless, Sarah Lyall had made a valid point. A stupefying 830 books on the Third Reich were published in the UK in 2010 and — although no figures are yet available for 2013 — a reduction any time soon seems unlikely. Germany’s history of genocide is unforgivable.

Selina Hastings

Stage Blood, by Michael Blakemore – review

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Stage Blood, as its title suggests, is as full of vitriol, back-stabbing and conspiracy as any Jacobean tragedy. In this sequel to Arguments with England, his superb first volume of memoirs, Michael Blakemore presents us with an enthralling account of his five embattled years as an associate director of the National Theatre. When in 1970 Blakemore was offered the position by Laurence Olivier, he had a distinguished career as an actor behind him and was already well-established as a successful director.

Brian Sewell

Bizarre Cars, by Keith Ray – review

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My various Oxford dictionaries define bizarre as eccentric, whimsical, odd, grotesque, fantastic, mixed in style and half-barbaric. By so many tokens, and with the casuistry of both Calvinist and Jesuit, it has been possible for the author of this pretty little Christmas-stocking book to include as bizarre any vehicle he chooses, including motorcycles and the micro-cars that made motoring possible after the defeat of Germany in 1945. Without these categories, a bus-cum-truck-cum-tractor,variations on the Hummer and the stretched limousine, and too many excursions into the bizarrerie of car names that in other languages have meanings genital and scatalogical, this book would be very thin.

Christopher Booker

An Appetite for Wonder, by Richard Dawkins – review

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It is peculiarly apt that the author of this autobiography should be the man who coined that now fashionable term ‘meme’ — so long as it is written ‘me me’. His name is shown so large on the cover that one might miss the title printed below it. On the opening page he tells us that his full name is Clinton Richard Dawkins, which ‘serendipitously’ gives him the same initials as those of his greatest hero, Charles Robert Darwin. The time has come, he has decided, to tell the story of his life up to that seminal moment in 1976 when he published the book which made him famous, The Selfish Gene. He begins by describing where he has come from genetically, going back to the General Clinton who presided over the loss of the American colonies in 1783.

Cressida Connolly

Expo 58, by Jonathan Coe – review

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In 1958 a vast international trade fair was held just outside Brussels. As well as being a showcase for industry, Expo 58 gave each country the chance to present something of their own national character. What the Brits came up with was a far cry from the gorgeous opulence and spectacle of last year’s Olympic opening ceremony: instead, the United Kingdom chose to represent itself by building a full-scale model of a pub. Watneys brewery even invented a new beer for the pub and called it by the same name, The Britannia. This is the setting of Jonathan Coe’s new novel. In other hands it would be only mildly ridiculous: in his, it is delightfully funny and utterly absurd. Our hero, Thomas, works in a junior capacity for the Central Office of Information in London.

Petronella Wyatt

Royal Marriage Secrets, by John Ashdown-Hill – review

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My brother Pericles Wyatt, as my father liked to say, is by blood the rightful king of England, the nephew of Richard III in the 18th generation, and as such the senior surviving Plantagenet. Richard was crowned king of England on 6 July 1483. It was described at the time as a joyous occasion. Little did anyone present imagine that it would become an event of rancorous controversy, for never has it been so true, sadly for my own family, that history is written by the winners. Just two years later, an exiled adventurer called Henry Tudor took Richard’s life and crown at Bosworth Field and unleashed an assault of unprecedented viciousness on the reputation of the last Plantagenet king of England.

Ferdinand Mount

Isaac & Isaiah, by David Caute – review

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The scene is the common room of All Souls College, Oxford, in the first week of March 1963. It is the idle half-hour after lunch when fellows slump into armchairs and gaze out of the window at the sparrows in the Fellows’ Garden. David Caute, a young first-class mind in his mid-twenties, is buttonholed by the revered figure of Sir Isaiah Berlin. What did Caute think of Isaac Deustcher? Did he admire him, as so many young scholars on the left did? Well, Caute replied cautiously, he knew Deutscher’s book on Stalin and his trilogy on Trotsky. ‘Quite sufficient.’ And Berlin bounded off into one of his rapid-fire bombardments: there were Marxist historians such as Eric Hobsbawm and E.H.

Paul Johnson

The Story of the Jews, by Simon Schama – review

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The recorder of early Jewish history has two sources of evidence. One is the Bible. Its centrality was brought home to me by David Ben-Gurion when I went to see him in Jerusalem in 1957. He had a big Bible on his desk, and banged it repeatedly with his fist: There, it’s all there, the past, present and future of the Jewish people. God? Who knows God? Can you believe in someone you don’t know? But I believe in the Bible. [Bang, bang.] The Bible is a fact. [Bang.] A record and a prophecy. [Bang.] It’s all there, Mr Johnson. Read your Bible, understand your Bible, and you won’t go wrong about the Jews. [Final bang.] Simon Schama, being a learned scholar as well as a proud and sensitive Jew, is not so sure.

John Sutherland

Wilkie Collins by Andrew Lycett – review

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In the outrageous 2010 press hounding of the innocent schoolteacher Christopher Jefferies over the murder of his young female tenant (of which a neighbour, Vincent Tabak, was later convicted and over which the guilty newspapers later shelled out punitive sums), the Sun produced, as suspicious facts, that Jefferies was ‘obsessed by death’, and ‘scared the kids’ in his classroom. He had, for example, exposed his pupils to the ‘Victorian murder novel’ The Moonstone. As an English teacher at a high-ranked school, Jefferies would surely have prescribed my edition of Wilkie Collins’s novel— the only one, if I may toot my trumpet, to make comprehensive use of the manuscript. Pulp the edition, I thought with a shudder, before it kills again.

Gyles Brandreth

Britain’s best one-liners, from Oxford’s 2013 edition

Features

Modest about our national pride — and inordinately proud of our national modesty. —Ian Hislop I always invest in companies an idiot could run, because one day one will. —Warren Buffett I find it easy to portray businessmen. Being bland, rather cruel and incompetent comes naturally to me. —John Cleese I always wanted to be somebody, but now I realise I should have been more specific. —Lily Tomlin I don’t work that way .... The very idea that all children want to be cuddled by a complete stranger I find completely amazing. —Anne, Princess Royal A lovely thing about Christmas is that it’s compulsory, like a thunderstorm, and we all go through it together. —Garrison Keillor On nudity The part never calls for it.

Margaret Drabble

Marriage Material, by Sathnam Sanghera – review

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Sathnam Sanghera, in his family memoir The Boy with the Topknot, heaped much largely affectionate contempt and ridicule on his home town (now a city) Wolverhampton, with its shabby factories and shimmering new gurdwaras — ‘Wolverhampton, the arse of the Black Country, in itself the bumcrack of the West Midlands, in itself the backside of Britain’. In Marriage Material he returns to the same rich and little explored multicultural terrain, in a novel that ingeniously ‘shoplifts’ (his word) characters and elements of plot from Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale.

D.J. Taylor

To ‘Flufftail’ from ‘Pinkpaws’: The Animals is only good for celebrity-spotting

Lead book review

There is a fine old tradition of distinguished literary men addressing their loved ones by animal-world pet names. Evelyn Waugh saluted Laura Herbert, the woman who became his second wife, as ‘Whiskers’. Philip Larkin’s letters to his long-term girlfriend Monica Jones are full of Beatrix Potter-style references to the scrumptious carrots that his ‘darling bun’ will have unloaded on her plate at their next meeting should wicked Mr McGregor not get there first. Wanting to soften the blow of his sacking by the BBC Third Programme in the early 1950s, John Lehmann went off on holiday with an intimate known to posterity as ‘the faun’.

17 September 2013

Steerpike

Godfrey Bloom’s feminine touch

Mr Steerpike has obtained an exclusive extract of everyone's favourite Ukip MEP Godfrey Bloom's new book A Guinea A Minute, which comes out later this week. His response to accusations of misogyny is worth reproducing in full, not least for the chatter it might start: 'I was asked by a journalist what I would be doing on that committee. He was such an earnest young man, I could not resist the sport. I intend to get women to clean behind the fridge I told him with equal earnestness. Well it was one of those “no news days”. Someone shoved a camera in my face “what else?” they called sensing a story where none had been.

Gloria Deak

‘A banishment’ – Gloria Deak describes the visits of celebrated Victorians to America

No, they decidedly did not like us — this is true at least for the majority of the nineteenth-century British travelers to the New World. They came out of a sense of wonder, somewhat akin to the reaction of Thomas More who declared in his sixteenth-century Utopia that ‘nowadays countries are always being discovered that were never in the old geography books.’ Over the next few centuries, perhaps no emerging country west of the Atlantic would excite as much curiosity as the vast expanse of territory that would become known as the United States. It soon became manifest that, in expanding her geographical borders, the United States had staked out a new social order.

13 September 2013

Camilla Swift

Spectator Play: The highs and the lows of what’s going on in arts this week | 13 September 2013

As the new artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Gregory Doran might be expected to lie low as he settles into his new role. But on the contrary – Doran is full of ideas about how to develop the company, as Robert Gore-Langton finds when he interviews him in this week’s Spectator. As well as a plan ‘to stage every play Shakespeare wrote over the next six years’ – that is between now and 2018 – he has also banned Shakespeare from Stratford’s Swan theatre, deciding instead to put on plays ‘by his contemporaries’. Top actors and top ideas are all part of his plan – which you can read more of in the full interview, here. How do you know when you're a real fan of a band?

12 September 2013

Steerpike

A book Fred will want to shred

Michael Gove and Ed Vaizey were leading the government's representation at the launch party last night for Iain Martin’s book Making It Happen: Fred Goodwin, RBS and the men who blew up the British economy. David Davis and Liam Fox were also leading the laughter at the Travellers Club as Martin explained that many tried to warn him against writing his study of the financial crisis. Not only because he was about to upset some very rich people but also from a future sales point of view as apparently 'by then the economy would have been sorted out.

Mark Mason

Has anything in the recent past had a bigger effect on writers and writing than Twitter?

I’ve been trying to think of something – anything – in recent years that has had a bigger effect on the working day of the average writer than Twitter. And I can’t. Writing, for just about everyone who does it professionally, is the act of minimising your number of excuses for not writing. Nigel Farndale’s recent piece in the magazine addressed the problem of views; Julian Barnes, for instance, can only work if he’s facing the blank wall of his study. It reminded me of David Niven, who saw a plane flying over as ‘a bonanza – I’ll watch that for hours’. Eventually he had to retreat to a chair facing into the right-angle of a hedge in his garden: ‘I can’t even see the sky.

Marcus Berkmann

The Mitford Girls’ Guide to Life, by Lyndsy Spence – review

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For some reason you don’t expect people to be fans of the Mitford sisters, as others are fans of Doctor Who or Justin Bieber. But just in case this subset of humanity does exist, we have The Mitford Girls’ Guide to Life (The History Press, £12.99). Lyndsy Spence’s elegant little hardback is a compendium of all things Mitford, from family nicknames (‘Sir Ogre’ for Sir Oswald Mosley) and fashion tips (tweed skirts only on weekdays) to Pamela’s household hints (‘choose an aga to match one’s eyes’) and Diana’s guide to prison life (take a fur coat to use as a blanket, use congealed hot chocolate as face cream).

Ian Thomson

Mr Loverman, by Bernardine Evaristo – review

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In 1998, the Jamaican singer Bounty Killer released a single, ‘Can’t Believe Mi Eyes’, which expressed incredulity that men should wear tight trousers, because tight trousers are an effeminate display of gayness. Fear and loathing of homosexuals has a long history in the West Indies. Jamaica’s anti-sodomy laws, deriving from the English Act of 1861, carry a ten-year jail sentence for ‘the abominable crime’. Similar laws exist elsewhere in the Anglophone Caribbean, yet Jamaica is outwardly the most homophobic of the West Indian islands. A white man seen on his own in Jamaica is often assumed to be in search of gay sex. Batty bwoys (‘bum boys’) are in danger of being stoned, cutlassed or shot.

Sam Leith

Signifying Rappers, by David Foster Wallace – review

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Since his suicide, David Foster Wallace has made the transition from major writer to major industry. Hence this UK issue of a slender work of music history got up for a small US press in 1990 by a young Wallace and his college friend Mark Costello. The premise: it’s the early days of rap, and two overeducated white kids who like it produce a sampler considering What It’s All About. That it’s dated doesn’t matter much. That it’s juvenilia does. Its cleverness is that of a writer in possession of an immense talent but not yet remotely in control of it: a learner driver doing doughnuts in a powerful car. Almost every sentence is arch or overwrought.

Andro Linklater

Uncle Bill, by Russell Miller – review

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Given the outcome of recent military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is pertinent to look for one particular quality in our senior commander: honesty. In other words, after blaming vainglorious politicians for precipitating us into war without adequate preparation or resources, it is reasonable to ask, how capable are our generals of admitting their own mistakes? Their persistence in two failed strategies — the application of Northern Ireland peace-keeping tactics to Basra and the dispersal of troops among forward posts in Helmand — does not suggest any culture of mea culpa, and ruthless self-examination has not been a distinguishing feature of the annual lectures delivered by the Chiefs of the Defence Staff to the Royal United Services Institute in the past decade.

Duncan Fallowell

The World According to Karl, edited by Jean-Christophe Napias – review

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Every fashion era has its monster and in ours it’s Karl Lagerfeld, a man who has so emptied himself on to the outside that there is no longer any membrane between what he is, what he does and what he looks like: a macabre dandy for the electronic age, a Zen businessman as effective as Andy Warhol or Michael Jackson or David Bowie in propagating product and persona as one. ‘I enjoy the luxury of being at the centre of this complete universe that’s mine,’ he says with the concentrated generosity of a narcissist who wants to thrill the whole world in order to make it his pool.

Caroline Moore

Multiples, edited by Adam Thirlwell – review

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There is a hoary Cold War joke about a newly invented translating machine. On a test run, the CIA scientists feed in ‘The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak’, press the button to translate it into Russian, and then re-translate it into English. It emerges as ‘The vodka is passable, but the meat is putrid.’ Our modern translating machine is Google Translate. It takes more than one transmutation to scramble the Biblical quotation: however, if you shift it through Russian, Azerbaijani, Chinese, Hungarian, Tamil and Haitian Creole into French, you can get ‘J’aime la chair, elle était faible.’ Since the original is usually quoted by dieters reaching for a fourth cream bun, this, paradoxically, might in practice be accurate enough.

Jasper Becker

The Tragedy of Liberation, by Frank Dikötter – review

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The historian of China Frank Dikötter has taken a sledgehammer to demolish perhaps the last remaining shibboleth of modern Chinese history. This is the notion, propagated in countless books and documentaries, that Mao’s regime started off well, deservedly coming to power on a wave of popular support and successfully tackling the evils left behind by the corrupt and incompetent Nationalists. Then, at the end of the 1950s, it all started to go wrong. There were terrible natural disasters, followed by famine; and, seemingly unaccountably, the brotherhood of brave revolutionaries fell out, creating the bloodbath of the Cultural Revolution. This is the version still served up to A-level students in Britain.

Owen Bennett-Jones

Narcoland, by Anabel Hernandez – review

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It is by now surely beyond doubt that those governments committed to fighting the war on drugs — and on paper that’s all of them — face a total rout. To understand the scale of the defeat, all you need to know is that Barack Obama and David Cameron have both been unable to deny that they were once users. The US spends more than a billion dollars a year on international narcotics control and as a result, as a US official in Colombia once told me, has forced up the price of a gram of cocaine in New York by just a few dollars. That must have put drugs beyond the reach of a few potential consumers. But it seems a very modest achievement for a government programme that has enjoyed such sustained, cross-party support for decades.

Piers Paul-Read

Noble Endeavours, by Miranda Seymour – review

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Like Miranda Seymour, the author of this considerable work on Anglo-German relations, I was raised in a Germanophile home. I spent summer holidays on the Bodensee and, after graduating from university, lived for a year in Munich and then another in Berlin. It seems to me a pity that my children and most of my friends, familiar with the Dordogne, Tuscany, California, New York and Rajasthan, have never been to the Black Forest or the Bavarian Alps; have never visited Potsdam, Dresden, Würzburg, Freiberg, Heidelberg, Regensburg or Passau; in fact know next to nothing of either the culture or civilisation of the largest nation in western Europe. Yet there have been throughout our history many Britons who loved Germany and Germans who loved Britain.