Books Archives

Classic Coe

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You sense that writing Seb Coe: The Autobiography (Hodder, £20) must have been a pleasurable task for the Lord of the Five Rings: it’s about his favourite subject. ‘I am known for many things,’ he says. And ‘I’ve always been able to read people pretty well.’ ‘Good athletes tend not to be good ball players, but I may be the exception that proves the rule.’ A crowd gets ‘classic Coe being Coe’. He even praises his own handwriting. Other people receive plaudits, but only for bringing out the best in Seb. Chief among these is the second-most important person in Coe’s life, his late father Peter, the athlete’s trainer for much of his career. Not that the relationship was saccharine.

Mary Kenny

Wild, wild times

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There are, I believe, only two jokes in Diarmaid Ferriter’s latest voluminous tome: one, citing Liam Cosgrave, sometime Taoiseach, considered a rather dull character, who apparently said that ‘the Jews and the Muslims should settle their differences in a Christian manner’ (which is almost as insightful as the Tyrone newspaper which once carried the headline: ‘Catholics and Protestants unite against ecumenism’). The second is a quotation from a woman in Sandy Row, in deeply Loyalist Belfast, expressing her distaste for a United Ireland with the words ‘Dublin would have us practising celibacy on the streets’.

Juliet Townsend

Children’s books for Christmas | 29 November 2012

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My 20-month-old granddaughter totters into the room. Her eyes are shining with the fervour of St Bernadette. She has caught a glimpse of the divine. Two small stuffed pigs are clasped in her arms. Clearly she has been in heaven. Actually she has just returned from a visit to Peppa Pig World, the most exciting experience of her short life. Anyone who has contact with very small children today will be all too familiar with Peppa, the toddlers’ Harry Potter in her universal appeal. There are two new Peppa books out this Christmas, both published by Ladybird at £4.99. Peppa’s Christmas Wish is a robust board book for the rougher young reader.

Ian Thomson

A heady mix of vice and voodoo

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By any standards, Haiti represents a great concentration of misery and dashed hopes. From the air, the Caribbean republic is a sun-scorched clinker; deforestation, caused by a ruinous cutting of timber for charcoal, has destroyed much of the green. Since independence in 1804, moreover, a succession of emperors, kings and presidents-for-life has contrived to instil terror in the people. François ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier, dictator of Haiti from 1957 to 1971, entertained more than an anthropological interest in Afro-Caribbean sorcery rituals. His wardrobe of black suits and black homburgs lent him the aspect, says Bernard Diederich, of the voodoo divinity Baron Samedi, who haunts the churchyards in a top hat and tails like a ghoulish Groucho Marx.

William Wootten

The Ladies’ Man

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The ladies that he spoke to, soft and sure, Believed in dresses longing to be made Of no material but that very shade Of fabric he laid out. So his demure Debs’ fingers would dip gracefully to azure Yards of silk, and his housewives’ eyes, displayed A deep vermillion with a silver braid, Would find themselves seduced by its allure. On flipping round the CLOSED sign for the day, Before easing his scissors on their hook, The pleasant-suited draper paused a while At his tall mirror, practising his smile, Trying to figure quite how he might look Now all his many ladies were away.

Cressida Connolly

The thin end of the wedge

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Aunts, generally of an antic or highly unconventional kind, are a literary staple. Anyone wanting to find the best of them would do well to turn to Rupert Christiansen’s excellent companion study of the breed, The Complete Book of Aunts. Literary uncles are rarer, but no less enjoyable to meet. Nancy Mitford’s Uncle Matthew is one of the great comic creations, while Laura Shaine Cunningham’s Sleeping Arrangements is moving and funny by turns. A memoir of the two very peculiar bachelor uncles who brought her up after the early death of her mother, it is one of those yardstick books: you couldn’t really like anyone who didn’t like it. Now Selina Guinness has written a memoir, The Crocodile by the Door, which introduces a memorable new uncle.

David Ekserdjian

A selection of recent art books

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With one or two exciting exceptions, almost all art books fall into a very limited number of easily identified categories, such as the monograph and the exhibition catalogue. In some cases, of course, they cunningly manage to be both, not least since the authors of some exhibition catalogues seem to feel that the last thing they want to do is to provide a simple guide to the material for visitors to their show. A case in point is The Early Dürer by Daniel Hess and Thomas Eser (Thames & Hudson, £40), which is brim-full of cutting-edge and often revisionist scholarship, but is written by specialists for specialists.

William Skidelsky

Rich pickings | 29 November 2012

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Despite its playfully obfuscating title, the rationale behind this anthology is pretty straightforward. A ‘fake’ is a fictional text that purports to be — or, perhaps more accurately, is presented in the guise of — a non-fictional document. Of course, there’s nothing new about stories of this type: the epistolary novel has been around for centuries. However, as the editors point out in their introduction (itself a kind of fake, being presented as a ‘how to’ guide), ours is an age awash with different types of written communication, from texts, blogs and emails to marketing mailshots, application forms and end-of-year-reports. Any writer inclined to fake it, therefore, has a wide variety of formats to choose from.

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

The gulf of greatness

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Ladies and gentlemen,’ Laurence Olivier declared in his clipped, semi-metallic tones to the audience at the Vic as he took his curtain call, ‘tonight a great actress has been born. Laertes has a daughter.’ The man playing Laertes to Olivier’s Hamlet on that evening in January 1937 was Michael Redgrave. The daughter was Vanessa, who would, as Olivier foretold, grow up to be a great actress. This vignette, you might say, contains all the majesty and mawkishness of the theatre. And a touch of its tawdriness, too. For rather than hurry to the bedside of his wife Rachel, Redgrave, it is said, slipped away instead to spend the night with his mistress, the incomparable Edith Evans. Does the possession of genius necessarily bring with it a moral carte blanche?

Wynn Wheldon

Redemption through rock and roll

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‘I’m the President, but he’s the Boss’, Barack Obama declared a couple of years ago, and most Spectator readers will know Bruce Springsteen as the President’s celebrity pop star friend. (One of the first of the many pleasures Peter Ames Carlin’s book affords is the story of how Springsteen came byhis nickname: he was a ruthless player of ‘Cut-throat’ Monopoly.) Bruce Springsteen is much more than a celebrity, and Carlin’s book far from a dispiriting celebrity hagiography. Although written with the full co-operation of Springsteen himself, it pulls no punches in describing the singer’s faults and weaknesses, cruelties and mistakes.

Nigel Jones

Two angry old men

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Though lasting literary friendships between natural rivals are not rare — Byron and Shelley, Coleridge and Wordsworth and Edward Thomas and Robert Frost spring to mind — few have been as durable as the one that began in the Front Quad of St John’s College, Oxford, one afternoon in May 1941 when a mutual friend introduced what their biographer calls ‘the odd couple’ by pointing his fingers at Kingsley Amis while imitating the sound of a gunshot. On cue, the fair-haired freshman yelled in pain, clutched his chest and staggered back to fall on a convenient pile of laundry sacks.

Paul Johnson

A deeply stricken country

Lead book review

When, many years ago, I finished reading Cecil Woodham-Smith’s fine and tragic The Great Hunger, I swore never to read another book about the Irish famine of 1845-9. But they continue to be published, and they do not always agree. Tim Pat Coogan’s The Famine Plot: England’s Role in Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy, whose title says everything about the book, claims that ‘fully a quarter’ of Ireland’s population died of starvation or emigrated. John Kelly’s The Graves Are Walking puts the proportion at one third. There is a huge difference between one third and one quarter. Which is correct? There is also much emotion.

28 November 2012

David Blackburn

A new short story prize, courtesy of The White Review

Where to publish my fiction? The question will have occupied all aspiring writers. It is famously hard to publish fiction in Britain, which is why each of the few prizes for unpublished fiction attracts vast attention. There is a new prize in this sparse field: The White Review, the thriving independent quarterly arts journal, has inaugurated a short story prize for unpublished writers. The competition, which is limited to residents of Great Britain and Ireland, opens on 1 December 2012 and closes on 1 March 2013. Submissions should be made at thewhitereview.org. The prize will be judged by the writer Deborah Levy, Karolina Sutton and Alex Bowler, editorial director at Jonathan Cape.

Daisy Dunn

The Way the World Works by Nicholson Baker – an ideal Christmas present

Nicholson Baker is intensely interested. He looks at the world like he has never seen it before, fixating on the mundane and capitalizing upon the strange lacunae which exist between seeing and understanding. In the purist sense, his interest makes him interesting. The Way the World Works is a colourful digest of his essays, conference papers, feature articles, and observations, divided into five main sections: Life (his own, principally), Reading, Libraries and Newspapers, Technology, and War. Well over a decade’s worth of eloquent umming and ahhing is encased in a single volume, a follow-up to his first, The Size of Thoughts.

27 November 2012

Stephen Mcewen

Eastern promises – the rediscovery of Stefan Heym

A German Jew fleeing Nazism to America; a soldier in the D-Day landings; a US citizen moving to the GDR for the socialist cause; a writer denounced by the Party; a Berliner politician in a newly reunified Germany: all sound like separate characters in a novel, yet all apply to Stefan Heym, the pseudonym of Helmut Flieg, whose strikingly under-celebrated life would appear to intercept a myriad of major twentieth century historical gradients. Despite being written in the 1960s, The Architects comes to us posthumously following years of state suppression in the GDR – Erich Honecker's attack on Heym during a Party conference prevented the novel from seeing the light of day - and rejection in the West.

26 November 2012

Austen Saunders

The Atlantic, the ocean that made the modern world

Just as the classical world was built around the Mediterranean, the modern world was built around the Atlantic. The Romans called the Med ‘Mare Nostrum’ – Our Sea. The Atlantic, on the other hand, was a place of contest for centuries. European nations fought for supremacy and plunder upon it, traded for wealth across it, and scrambled for territory around it. According to John K. Thornton, author of A Cultural History of the Atlantic World 1250-1820, the creation of an ‘Atlantic World’ was driven by the hunger of European states for hard cash. Money was needed to support the fantastically expensive armies which, from the late Middle Ages onwards, European nations were obliged to maintain as they engaged in a prolonged arms race.

23 November 2012

J P O'Malley

Secrecy and the State in Modern Britain

In his new book Classified: Secrecy and The State In Modern Britain, Dr Christopher Moran gives an account of the British state's long obsession with secrecy, and the various methods it used to prevent information leaking into the public domain. Using a number of hitherto declassified documents, unpublished letters, as well as various interviews with key officials and journalists, Moran’s book explores the subtle approach used by the British government in their attempt to silence members of the civil service, and journalists, from speaking out about information that was deemed classified.

22 November 2012

Emily Rhodes

When ‘boycott’ isn’t quite the right word

Boycott Amazon was the message from Margaret Hodge MP in last weekend’s Observer. This comes in the wake of new revelations about just how little UK tax is paid by Amazon and other corporate giants Starbucks and Google. According to Conservative MP Charlie Elphicke, Amazon’s UK sales amounted to £3.9 billion last year, but it paid just 2.5 per cent tax on its estimated profits thanks to channelling sales through its Luxembourg HQ. There is a feeling that although it is legal, it isn’t fair that a company which has warehouses and employs 15,000 people in the UK doesn’t pay enough tax. Some argue that it is down to HMRC to tighten these tax loopholes so as to prevent multi-national corporations from taking advantage of them.

Anne Chisholm

Truth and beauty

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Almost 20 years ago, Alice Munro, the Canadian genius of the short story, was interviewed by the Paris Review. She recalled a time when she was having trouble with her writing, and found herself looking round the ‘great literature’ on the shelves of the bookshop she was then running with her first husband as if seeking help. All she could think was: ‘You fool. What are you doing here?’ She was admired then, but has gone on to huge acclaim. There was some early rudeness from nervous local newspapers in small- town Ontario, where she grew up and where her fiction is rooted, but nowadays, and for a long time, the waves of praise come steadily and grow with every new book. Awed comparisons with Chekhov are routine.

A.N. Wilson

Such fun!

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Nearly all the pages in this book are filled with thank-you letters. As a child, Elizabeth Bowes Lyon was writing to thank for presents of sweets and chocolates. As the Duke of York’s betrothed, she was writing ‘Dear Prince Bertie, Thank you ten million times for sending me all those gramophone records, which arrived in record time (oh! A joke, accident I promise).’ To Queen Mary, as a dutiful Duchess of York, she was writing ‘Thank you very much for my delightful time at Balmoral’. As a widow, ‘My darling Lilibet, I did so love my week at Windsor, and send millions of thanks for so much sweetness & thought and care for your venerable parent.

Rachel Redford

Length and quality

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The final volume of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, released at the end of last month, is a landmark in audio publishing. The seven volumes — over twice the length of War and Peace — are narrated unabridged by the actor Neville Jason: at a staggering 150 hours, it is the longest audiobook in existence. Between 1991 and 2000 Jason, who was awarded the Diction Prize at RADA by Sir John Gielgud, and appeared on stage with Olivier and Leigh, not only already narrated an abridged Proust for Naxos but actually abridged it himself. He worked with the translations by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, most of which appeared before Proust died in 1922, but Moncrieff never translated the final volume, Time Regained.

Wynn Wheldon

Little boxes, all the same

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This book purports to be a history not of London but of its suburbs. In the end this amounts to much the same thing, because the author is referring not to the present suburbs but to all the suburbs of London that have ever been, from Southwark onwards. After Boadicea sacked their original wooden settlement, the Romans rebuilt it using stone, putting up walls that lasted for almost 2,000 years. Within these walls was the city, and ‘without’ were the suburbs. This book, then, is a history of London minus the Square Mile (in other words of the 599 other square miles). The epithet ‘suburban’ has tended in latter years to be used snootily by those who regard themselves as fully-detached cosmopolitans.

Bevis Hillier

The ‘ism’ that ruined the West

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In 1974, as editor of the Connoisseur magazine, I ran an ‘1874’ issue to mark the centenary of Winston Churchill’s birth, to which John Betjeman, Asa Briggs and Lady Spencer-Churchill all contributed. So I know the virtues of selecting a single year and ‘sinking a shaft into history’. Effective use has often been made of this genre. Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger wrote the bestseller The Year 1000. James Shapiro chronicled a year in Shakespeare’s life, 1599. Thomas Pakenham wrote on 1798: The Year of Liberty (the story of the Irish rebellion). In her nineties, Rebecca West produced a volume on the year 1900, which she had the advantage of remembering as a young Victorian.

Alexander Starritt

Dreams that fade and die

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The Dutch writer, Cees Nooteboom, was living in West Berlin in 1989 when the gates opened and the Wall finally came down. At the time he wrote a series of essays about what was happening around him, which were published to great acclaim in Germany and form the first part of Roads to Berlin. He describes a revolution taking place on his doorstep, but there is no shooting in the streets. He goes to the theatre and museums as normal, but his German friends feel at every instant that they are making history, as though all actions and words have become denser and more lasting. It’s an apposite feeling in a city where, as he says, the past feels at home.

Anthony Sattin

A duty to protest

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A few years ago, in West Africa, a woman came up to me and said, ‘You know what’s wrong with our men? They go crazy once they get power. Crazy and bad.’ Chinua Achebe’s saving has been the fact that he never sought power, at least not of the kind that leads to conflict and the cutting off of heads. His curse has been to observe things that most of us should be happy never to have seen. Now 82, Achebe has done what many elderly people do when they have seen remarkable things: he has borne witness and set down his version of the rise and fall of the short-lived state of Biafra.

Peter Oborne

Shameful home truths

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One of our more cherished national myths is that we British do not torture prisoners of war and criminal suspects. We support decency and fair play. Ian Cobain’s book proves beyond doubt that we do indeed make use of torture, and sometimes with relish. It shows that the British state has long practised a secret torture policy and continues to do so. It is easy to predict the fate of this carefully researched and well-written book. It will be ignored, glossed over and quietly rubbished by a political and Whitehall establishment which has persistently covered up or denied the very troubling state crimes that are documented here. Cobain traces British involvement with torture and prisoner abuse back to the second world war.

Charles Duff

Portrait of the artist as a young man

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Had the artist Rex Whistler not been killed in Normandy in 1944 at the age of 39, in what direction would his great talent have gone? It is futile to speculate, write Hugh and Mirabel Cecil, the authors of this sumptuously illustrated new biography. But many did. Cecil Beaton thought he would have become another Turner. My mother Caroline Paget, his greatest love (but who loved him without the intensity that he loved her), thought he would have become one of the greatest portraitists of the 20th century and, relishing new ideas in stage design, also one of the most famous designers of his day. All his friends thought that soldiering had changed both him and his art. His work, so often fanciful, rococo and gorgeous, became increasingly darker and more naturalistic.

Martin Vander Weyer

Business as usual | 22 November 2012

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Dear old Pesto, we all make jokes about him but we all secretly admire him. The BBC business editor’s strangulated elocution and stream-of-consciousness style were never going to make him a natural broadcaster — ‘He won’t last six months,’ one of his household-name colleagues whispered to me in the early days.

The Spectator

Books of the year | 22 November 2012

Lead book review

Byron Rogers When TV presenters write history books it is the mistakes you treasure most, as when David Dimbleby blithely pronounced that Augustine had introduced Christianity to Britain (Christianity being over 200 years old in Britain, with Welsh bishops, before Augustine came). But Andrew Marr’s A History of the World (Macmillan, £25) is different. It is a distinguished work of history in its own right. The TV series wasn’t up to much, but the book is wonderful, and better than H.G. Wells’s The Outline of History. It made me wonder what else is deliberately hidden away to advance the careers of those prattling public faces that appear on our screens. All we need now is Simon Cowell’s concordance to the Gododdin.