Books Archives

Out of the deep

It is a pretty toothy jaw of hell that Philip II of Spain, the Doge of Venice, and the Pope kneel before in prayer in a famous El Greco painting of the late 1570s. Philip and the other rulers of the so-called Holy League might just observe within hell’s mouth the skeletons of those they deemed Infidels — the very Turks, perhaps, their men had recently defeated off the Gulf of Corinth in 1571. For a struggle so bloody, the Battle of Lepanto that inspired El Greco’s painting makes a relatively cameo appearance in David Abulafia’s masterful human history of the Mediterranean Sea. Even now in paperback, The Great Sea is still a very big book indeed.

11 June 2012

Austen Saunders

Discovering poetry: Thomas Wyatt’s dangerous games

‘They flee from me that sometime did me seek’ They flee from me that sometime did me seek With naked foot stalking in my chamber. I have seen them gentle tame and meek That now are wild, and do not remember That sometime they have put themselves in danger To take bread at my hand; and now they range Busily seeking with a continual change. Thanked be fortune, it hath been otherwise Twenty times better: but once in special In thin array after a pleasant guise When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall, And she me caught in her arms long and small; Therewithal sweetly did me kiss, And softly said ‘dear heart, how like you this?’ It was no dream: I lay broad waking.

Fleur Macdonald

Across the literary pages: Amis Asbo special

The promotional tour for Lionel Asbo: State of England has been suspiciously quiet. The fact that Martin Amis hasn't sworn, bitched or nominated the queen as guinea pig for euthanasia booths stirred the press into feverish levels of anticipation. Had the OAP (Old Age Provocateur) finally lost his teeth? Or was he simply biding his time before biting back? A satire on Lionel Asbo - Wayne Rooney look-alike and dedicated chav - and his lottery win, it seems written to offend ... even without subplots involving teenage pregnancy (she &"was six months gone when she sat her Eleven Plus”), incest with a thirty-something year old granny, pit bulls and acid attacks. As a loyal Amis disciple, Nicola Barker in the Observer.

9 June 2012

Fleur Macdonald

The art of fiction: Michael Morpurgo

The rallying call to save libraries – about as unifying a topic as the monarchy at the moment – was taken up by Michael Morpurgo in his slot at cultural juggernaut, the Hay Festival, last week when he called the closures a form of child abuse and tantamount to inciting more riots. During the Hay interview, timed to promote his memoirs and accompanying short story collection, the former children's laureate, in typically self-deprecating style, did not attribute his success to talent so much as to the joy his mother took in reading aloud to him. The reader rather than author is at the heart of Michael Morpurgo's art of fiction, which explains his enduring place on children's bookshelves.

8 June 2012

David Blackburn

Interview: Evgeny Morozov and the net delusion

You are reading this article thanks to the greatest invention of the last 50 years: the internet. The web is often regarded as a panacea for absolutely everything. It is revolutionising the world’s economy. It is changing leisure and entertainment. And it is also a political tool that can liberate oppressed people. Jared Cohen, a former internet guru at the US State Department, once remarked: ‘Any combination of these [digital] tools [Facebook, Google etc.] allows for a greater chance of civil society organizations coming to fruition regardless of how challenging the environment.’ There is nothing that this incredible device can’t do. It is the greatest ever democratiser. But, a few dissenting voices have risen above the fevered chorus.

7 June 2012

The Spectator

Shelf Life: Paul Daniels

Paul Daniels, whose first name is actually Newton, is this week's Shelf Lifer. He tells us what he's reading at the moment and what he thinks about Janet Street Porter. His website is found at pauldaniels.co.uk 1) What are you reading at the moment? Charles Dickens by Michael Slater 2) As a child, what did you read under the covers? The Water Babies by the Reverend Charles Kingsley 3) Has a book ever made you cry, and if so which one? No, never 4) You are about to be put into solitary confinement for a year and allowed to take three books. What would you choose? This is an old survey! I'd take an iPad, a Kindle and a charger.

Emily Rhodes

Fiction by subscription

What if you could pay £20 a year and get two good new books in return, with your name printed in the back of them? It sounds good to me, which is why I’ve just subscribed to And Other Stories, a new independent publisher that operates in this collaborative, subscription-based manner. By essentially paying for your copy of a book before it’s printed, you help to enable the whole process. Brilliant for all involved. This is an interesting model for And Other Stories to have chosen because, while it seems so revolutionary, in actual fact it’s surprisingly similar to publishing’s traditional set-up.

6 June 2012

David Blackburn

RIP Ray Bradbury, 1920 – 2012

The revered science fiction, horror and mystery writer Ray Bradbury has died aged 91. He was best known for Fahrenheit 451, his blockbuster of 1953. He became known as a curmudgeon, and was something of a Luddite. He was a virulent opponent of the internet, which he viewed as a transient nonsense, doomed to fail. He refused to allow his books to be sold in digital editions, a stance which was curtailed last year when his publishers made it a condition of his contract. His recalcitrance was perhaps borne of his love of the printed book and of old fashioned libraries. He maintained that libraries were one of the few places that children and adults could ‘meet people’ (in the pages of books).

Anna Baddeley

Across the literary pages: Post-Jubilee special

Now we’ve all had our fill of bunting, bladders and BBC-bashing, it’s time to turn our minds to more high-minded pursuits, starting with a long overdue glance at the weekend’s book pages. And you can’t get higher minded than a Nobel Laureate. 74-year-old Peruvian novelist, and ex-presidential candidate, Mario Vargas Llosa has a new book out. Called The Dream of the Celt, it’s about Sir Roger Casement, the Irish-born diplomat who was executed for treason in 1916. When the Telegraph’s Nicholas Shakespeare asked Llosa to explain his motive for writing, he replied: ‘In my case, literature is a kind of revenge.

2 June 2012

Ian Thomson

The world in arms

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The long summer that led up to the last days of peace in Europe in 1939 — the vigil of Hitler’s assault on Poland and the subsequent Phoney War — gave little hint of the storm to come. As German troops engulfed Poland, however, Britain at last declared war on Hitler. Infamously, the Nazi science of massacre was put to the test in occupied Poland. Within two months of Hitler’s invasion, over 5,000 Jews were murdered behind the Polish lines. One year into the occupation a ghetto was established in Warsaw as a holding place for Jews prior to their deportation and death. A total of 265,000 of the city’s Jews were gassed over a single summer at Treblinka nearby. It was the largest slaughter of any single community in the second world war.

Andro Linklater

The courage of countless generations

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The most stirring sermon I ever heard was delivered by a company sergeant-major in the Black Watch to a cadre of young lance-corporals, barely 19 years old, who were about to experience their first deployment to Northern Ireland during the Troubles. Like an old-fashioned Presbyterian minister, he warned them of the dangers of the world, in this case roof-top snipers and stone-throwing rioters, and the temptation these presented to the unwary soul, in this case, as he put it, ‘to run like buggery’. But they would not succumb, he said; indeed, they would lead their sections looking such dangers fearlessly in the face, because they were armed with a greater power — the red hackle, or feather, they wore in their khaki bonnets.

Richard Davenporthines

Hero or villein?

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‘Not one word’, exclaimed Turgenev of Tolstoy, ‘not one movement of his is natural! He is eternally posing before us!’ The recurrent underlying theme of A.N. Wilson’s prize-winning biography of Tolstoy, now re-issued after a quarter of a century, is the novelist as grand impersonator. Wilson (a prolific novelist himself) believes that there is a strong impulse in novelists to don masks or test alter egos, and that this impulse rioted in Tolstoy’s character. Throughout his long life Tolstoy switched between playing at sad orphan, landowner, libertine, crazed gambler, spiritual elder, holy fool, paterfamilias, historian, village idiot, cobbler and dissident.

Peter Parker

Girls and boys come out to play

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‘You are in the polymorphous-perverse stage,’ the school psychiatrist tells the assembled boys of Favorite River Academy in Vermont in the late 1950s. Just how polymorphously perverse his audience turns out to be would have surprised even Dr Grau, had he not fallen over drunk one evening and frozen to death. It is no accident that the all-male private school in which much of the action of John Irving’s new novel takes place should be in a town with the unusual name of First Sisters. Irving’s narrator is a bisexual novelist called William Abbott, known to friends and family as Billy. ‘Abbott’ is in fact the name of his stepfather, who teaches at the school: Billy’s real father disappeared during the boy’s infancy and is rarely talked about.

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

The dirty dozen

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I have this fantasy in which I’m the Emperor Nero. I’m relaxing in my toga, and there are these slave girls dancing for me, and one of them has the most incredible … Like all the best fantasies, it’s a little unrealistic, let us say, but I didn’t know how unrealistic until I read this magnificent book by Matthew Dennison. For Nero’s life, as absolute ruler of the known world, was hell, haunted by twitching doubts and gibbering fears. He was bisexual, to begin with. That was OK in ancient Rome, but when it came to sleeping with men he received rather than gave, and that was definitely uncool. (During the act itself, the sources say, Nero would ‘imitate the cries and laments of a maiden being deflowered’.

Judith Flanders

The pen was mightier than the brush

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Of the making of books about the Pre-Raphaelites, it appears, there is no end. Like the Bloomsberries, most of the PRB are more interesting to read about than the study of their work would suggest: a few towering talents stalk the mountaintops, while many lesser ones lurk in valleys and foothills. George Boyce was one of those lesser talents — a watercolourist of some small fame among his colleagues (although he was 52 before he was elected to full membership of the Old Water-Colour Society). His friend Henry Tanworth Wells had more worldly recognition, if not the esteem of the avant-garde: as a portraitist he painted the great, the good, the socially eminent or the just plain rich. The two men were also connected through a third painter, Boyce’s sister Joanna.

Charles Saumarez-Smith

Rus in urbe

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One of the pleasures of my week is walking across St James’s Square. The slightly furtive sense of trespassing as one opens the ironwork gates; the decision as to whether or not to follow the circuit of gravel paths or go straight across the grass; the equestrian statue of William III and readers from the London Library eating sandwiches. Although the surrounding architecture is an odd mishmash, the shape of the square and its urban form preserves a strong sense of its original 17th-century layout. St James’s Square plays a prominent role in the narrative of Todd Longstaffe-Gowan’s magisterial account of the ups and downs of the London square.

A.N. Wilson

Good queen, bad subject

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There is a paradox at the heart of all books about the Queen. The very thing which makes her such a successful constitutional monarch is what makes her an impossible subject for biography. We do not know anything about her. The only book which brings her to life as a person is Marion Crawford’s The Little Princesses (reprinted by Orion, £8.99), a vivid picture of nursery life when Lilibet and Margaret Rose were growing up at 145 Piccadilly. Crawfie saw it all — the neatness, the horse-obsession, the deference to the rather awful mother, the selfless sense of duty, and the goodness. No wonder this truth-teller had to be banished, punished forever.

Pj Kavanagh

Muddling through

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It so happened that in 1961 I was part of a little group — three of us — which welcomed ‘Mr Jazzman’ to London. That was the code name for Rudolf Nureyev, the dancer, who had that day jetéed over the barrier in Paris and defected to London. He had very little English but he was already amused, and giggling, at what he regarded as the quaintness of Englishness. ‘All the same, all the same’, he kept saying, meaning the rows of terraced houses he had glimpsed as he was swept from London airport to the Brompton Road. A year before this I had crossed on the ferry to the Isle of Wight with my mother-in-law, née Lehmann. She looked about her. ‘What an extraordinarily ugly race we are,’ she remarked.

Nicky Haslam

High society

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One evening in 1923, Edward, Prince of Wales, pretty as paint in his white tie and a cutaway-coat, went to the theatre to see a new Gershwin musical. It was called Stop Flirting. Always one to ignore instructions, the Prince returned to enjoy this froth no less than nine times more. Obsessed by anything and eventually, disastrously, anyone American, the heir to the throne was fanatical about the new-fangled craze then being displayed at the Shaftesbury Theatre by a dazzling young brother-and-sister act hot-foot from Broadway: ballroom dancing. Practising the charleston and the black bottom rather than studying charters and red boxes occupied the heir to the throne’s days, to the intense irritation of his father. Edward ‘continues to dance every night.

Anne Applebaum

Love conquers all

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Anyone who has ever written a history book will feel a twinge of envy on reading the preface to Just Send Me Word: We opened up the largest of the trunks. I had never seen anything like it: several thousand letters tightly stacked in bundles tied with string and rubber bands, notebooks, diaries, documents and photographs… It was a unique family archive, the property of Svetlana and Lev Mishchenko, and it contained, among other things, packets of their love letters. The two had met as university students in Moscow in the 1930s, but their relationship was cut short by the outbreak of war. Lev joined the Red Army in 1940, fought near Moscow but then fell into German captivity.

Anne Somerset

What did he see in her?

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When King George I came over from Hanover in 1714 to claim the crown he had inherited from his distant cousin Queen Anne, he was accompanied by his mistress of more than 20 years, Melusine von der Schulenberg. George’s wife Sophia Dorothea was left behind in Germany. She had made the mistake of taking a lover of her own not long after George had embarked on his affair with Melusine, forgetting that by the double standard that then prevailed in courts, it was acceptable for a man to have mistresses, ‘but shameful indeed to be a cuckold’. Sophia Dorothea had flaunted her infatuation with the glamorous adventurer, Count Konigsmark, and wildly compromising letters between the pair were intercepted.

Patrick Jephson

Monarchy’s golden future

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In a recent issue of The Spectator Freddy Gray warned that some royal press officers now resemble celebrity publicists, spoon-feeding whole narratives to lapdog hacks, ultimately to the detriment of the monarchy. Gray traced the poisonous origins of the current glossy operation. In the late Nineties senior St James’s Palace courtiers fell for political-style PR (aka spin) as a clever way to transform Prince Charles’s then-mistress into a future queen. Some very unsavoury tactics followed. In one example (not cited by Gray, but proving his thesis) in a bid to discredit William’s newly dead mother, one top adviser lent his personal support to a royal biographer to air a quack ‘diagnosis’ that Diana had been mentally ill.

Alex Moorehead

All the world’s a stage

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In Translations, Brian Friel’s play about English military and cultural imperialism, the frustrated teacher Manus explains how he uses ‘the wrong gesture in the wrong language’ to insult in Gaelic an English soldier. In Shakespeare in Kabul, Stephen Landrigan and Qais Akbar Omar’s account of the first production of Shakespeare in Afghanistan since before the Soviet invasion in the 1970s, an Afghan theatre group, led by the French director Corinne Jaber, attempt the ‘right’ gestures in their own language as they perform Love’s Labour’s Lost.

Richard Ryder

Women on their mettle

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Edwardian Park Lane was lined with grand houses. The occupants, conspicuous consumers and domestic servants, acted out layers of deception. Gamblers ruined Victorian fortunes. Gaiety and social graces masked the insecurities of the new rich and their struggles for acceptance in London. Upstairs, married women, harnessed by corsets and discretion, embodied compliant game. Downstairs, actually in attics, rehearsals for the 1960s were in unbroken swing. Outside, Londoners endured soot and fog. This setting for Frances Osborne’s debut novel comes closer to John Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga than the Marxist doctrine of social values found in Robert Tressell’s The Ragged-trousered Philanthropists.

Marcus Berkmann

Bookends: The Queen’s message

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It is a sad fact that most ‘self-help’ books end up helping no one, other than the people who wrote them, who pay off all their debts and move to California. Mary Killen’s How The Queen Can You Make You Happy (Elliott & Thompson, £8.99) could be the exception. For Mary has noticed that, at the age of 86, the Queen appears to be healthy, happy and fulfilled, and wonders whether her long life of service might not be the secret. In this brief volume, she suggests, with almost regal modesty, that restraint, dignity and good grace can bring us all a vestige of inner peace. Forgiveness can help too. ‘A central tenet of Christianity is forgiveness and, if the Queen can forgive even Fergie, then we must all take our lead from her.

1 June 2012

David Blackburn

Happy birthday, Edward Lear

The god of nonsense, Edward Lear, is 200 years old this year. (Yes, the Inimitable can’t have the whole stage for himself, and must give way to another peculiarly English genius.) To mark the occasion, the Spectator’s Jubilee Double Issue (available from all good newsagents and doubtless a few bad ones too — alternatively, you can subscribe at new.spectator.co.uk/subscribe) carries a piece by Thomas Hodgkinson, a devotee of Lear who also shares the old man's love of Corfu. I urge you to read the delightful piece in full, but here's an excerpt to tickle your fancy: ‘The Owl and The Pussycat’ was my favourite childhood poem. And I must confess that it remains among my favourite poems, appealing irresistibly to sentimentality and escapism in equal measure.

31 May 2012

Mark Mason

The mechanics of writing

On Desert Island Discs the other day, Peter Ackroyd chose a pen and some paper as his luxury. ‘Do you write longhand?’ asked Kirsty Young. Ackroyd’s reply was really intriguing: yes, he does write longhand – but only his fiction. To write one genre by hand but another on computer might seem bizarre, including to Ackroyd himself, who responds to my enquiry about why he works this way with an admission that he doesn’t know. He is, though, far from unique in having a strange approach to his craft. Many writers have been very … how can we put this … ‘particular’ in the way they turn words in their head into words on the page.

30 May 2012

David Blackburn

A turn up for the books

Madeline Miller has won the Orange Prize — the last ever Orange Prize, in fact. She won the £30,000 and the coveted ‘Bessie’ statue for her debut novel, The Song of Achilles. Joanna Trollope, Chair of Judges, said: ‘This is a more than worthy winner – original, passionate, inventive and uplifting. Homer would be proud of her.’ This was a turn up for the books. Miller was the 8/1 outsider according to William Hill’s odds. Gamblers and pundits had expected Cynthia Ozick to win. Literary prizes have developed a habit of defying expectations in recent months. For instance, this year’s Costa Prize went to Andrew Miller for his novel Pure, when Matthew Hollis’s life of Edward Thomas was thought to be a shoo-in.

The Spectator

Shelf life: John O’Farrell

One of the funny men behind Spitting Image, HIGNFY and the website Newsbiscuit, John O'Farrell is this week's shelf lifer. He reveals which comic writers were his childhood staples, that he might pity-date Miss Haversham and what usually happens when he finds one of his own books in the bargain bin. John O’Farrell’s latest novel, The Man Who Forgot His Wife, is published by Doubleday. He tweets @mrjohnofarrell 1) What are you reading at the moment? I’m enjoying Skios by Michael Frayn – a compelling farce about a great public figure failing to get to a major speaking engagement. So easy to read, it must have been really hard to write. 2) As a child, what did you read under the covers?