Books Archives

Shelf Life: Jeffrey Archer

Jeffrey Archer is on this week's Shelf Life. He lets us know what practical gift he'd give a lover for Christmas (apart from his latest bestseller Only Time Will Tell) and what spotting the Labour Manifesto on someone's shelf might make him do... 1) What are you reading at the moment? Boomerang by Michael Lewis 2) As a child, what did you read under the covers? Ian Fleming 3) Has a book ever made you cry, and if so which one? A Time to Love and a Time to Die, Erich Maria Remarque 4) You are about to be put into solitary confinement for a year and allowed to take three books. What would you choose? I was, for two years!

6 December 2011

David Blackburn

Jeffrey Sachs interview: The Price of Civilization

The Occupy camp outside St Paul’s received an eminent visitor last night. The economist Jeffrey Sachs dropped by to meet the London branch of the movement that is ‘changing American debate’. Sachs sees Occupy as an expression of the frustration at inequality and unfairness that is the subject of his latest book, The Price of Civilization. In 260 pages of fluent prose, Sachs describes the cynicism that has overcome what he calls ‘my America’. In a grubby office at the LSE, he tells me: ‘I grew up in the era of John and Robert Kennedy and they brought a lot of purpose to public life and lot of idealism, and I feel that that has been lost. So this is really a book about civic virtue and that sense of public responsibility.

Paul Johnson

Paul Johnson’s books of the year

The most nourishing book I have read this year is Armand d’Angour’s The Greeks and the New: Novelty in Ancient Greek Imagination and Experience. The author teaches classics at Jesus College, Oxford. He plays the piano beautifully, and also the cello, can talk fluently on art and literature and so is the ideal person to write this book, which ranges across the whole flow of culture. We all know that the ancient Greeks were the first to do many things, but d’Angour examines the underlying question: what did they think about novelty and why, given their conservatism in so many areas of conduct, did they regard it as desirable? His knowledge of Greek literature is exhaustive and he has a gift for the apt quotation, so every page glitters with gold nuggets.

5 December 2011

Anna Baddeley

Dauntless into the future

Gentleman shopkeeper James Daunt has given a cringeworthy interview to the Independent where he calls Amazon ‘a ruthless, money-making devil, the consumer’s enemy’. I wouldn’t be surprised if the manger of “Quills ‘R’ Us” had said something similar about William Caxton in 1476. Poor James Daunt. He clearly had a certain degree of business acumen to set up his successful mini-chain of London bookshops, but since taking over Waterstone’s he has yet to prove he knows what he’s doing. His only real achievement so far is to get rid of that notorious three-for-two. If I were a Waterstone’s bookseller reading the Independent interview online, my next click would be straight onto Guardian Jobs.

David Blackburn

Across the literary pages: Great reputations

The poet Christopher Logue has died aged 85. The obituaries make for fascinating reading. For instance, did you know that the author of War Music also edited Pseuds’ Corner and collated the True Stories column in Private Eye? Or that he was an occasional actor? Aren't some people almost too blessed? Perhaps, but Logue's beginnings were difficult. He joined the Black Watch in 1944 and was court martialled during a fractious tour of Palestine in 1946; he was imprisoned. Determined to write, he travelled to Paris in the early ‘50s, where he fell in with the expat writers’ crowd: that band of artistic Anglo-Saxons who fled the suffocating British Isles after the war. His career as a poet was very slow.

3 December 2011

Stoker Devonshire

A new chapter

Features

‘Dear Heywood, I hear Mollie is leaving at the end of next week, in which case so am I. Yours ever, Nancy.’ So wrote my ever-direct aunt, Nancy Mitford, to her employer Heywood Hill, the founder of the famous Mayfair bookshop, on 17 May 1944. Whether or not Nancy’s threat had some effect, she continued to work at the shop for another year. Here I should declare a strong interest in the fate of independent bookshops. I am the proud owner of a modest chunk of Heywood Hill, which is currently celebrating its 75th year. Not a bad milestone for any business. But can bookshops really survive in a retail world overgrown by Amazon? (Perhaps Leylandii would be a more accurate name.

Lewis Jones

Bookends: No joke being a comedian

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Failure is the very stuff of comedy, but not of showbiz memoirs, so Small Man in a Book (Michael Joseph, £20) is unusual. Rob Brydon’s success came quite late, with Marion and Geoff in 2001, when he was 35, after an ‘era of terrible job after terrible job’, and it makes a happy ending to his book, which is otherwise a gently amusing account of his long and gruelling Kampf. Born a Jones in Swansea, into a milieu of Sugar Puffs, Roy of the Rovers and discouraging teachers (‘You think you’re very funny, don’t you?’), he gave his first stand-up performance aged 14, with a routine pirated from The Two Ronnies’ Joke Book.

Patrick Skene-Catling

A serenely contented writer

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Beaming Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE, D.Litt. (Oxon), Mark Twain medallist and co-founder of the Hollywood Cricket Club (1881-1975), personified a rare oxymoron: he was a serenely contented writer. Shortly before the Queen awarded him a knighthood and the Queen Mother, a devoted fan, wrote a letter congratulating him, Madame Tussaud’s sent an artist from London to the final Wodehouse home, in Remsenburg, Long Island, to measure him for waxwork portrayal, which, up to that time, he said, was ‘the supreme honour’. He wrote his first short story at the age of five (the first of more than 300) and at 93 took the half-completed manuscript of his 97th book, a Blandings Castle novel, to his hospital deathbed.

Charles Glass

The original special relationship

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Of all the cities in all the world, Paris dominates the American imagination more than any other. Although Americans may admire Rome or London, more have enjoyed a love affair with the French capital since Benjamin Franklin represented the 13 rebellious colonies at the court of Louis XVI. Josephine Baker captured that sentiment with her theme song, ‘J’ai deux amours/Mon pays et Paris.’ And more Americans than Rick Blaine in Casablanca have mused from afar, ‘We’ll always have Paris.’ Just how many Americans had Paris before Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris crowd becomes clear in David McCullough’s delightful panorama of American life in Paris during the 19th century.

Anthony Daniels

Government health warning

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Few men are prepared to die for the right of others to say what they strongly disagree with; and most people’s faith in multiparty democracy is at best a lukewarm recognition that the alternative is much worse. Secretly most men would like their ideas (which they naturally believe to be correct) to rule absolutely and forever. Of this company is James Gilligan. He is a professor of psychiatry at New York University and would like to see the Republican Party in the United States disappear from the face of the earth. His argument for this consummation so devoutly to be wished is as follows: the death rate from homicide and suicide in the United States goes up when there is a Republican president and down when there is a Democratic president.

Michela Wrong

Not for sissies

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Nigeria is not exactly a tourist destination. A colleague chortles over the memory of trying to wangle his way in — without a journalist’s visa — during Sani Abacha’s military regime. ‘Purpose of visit?’ barked the immigration man. ‘Tourism,’ he lied. ‘No one comes to Nigeria for tourism,’ said the official. He was promptly expelled. The official was voicing a truism. Even seasoned Western adventurers avoid Nigeria — ‘is Lagos airport as terrifying as they say?’ you are often asked — while the country’s oil-fattened elite, oscillating between the national superiority complex and hardened self-loathing, regard an international flight as the obligatory start to any holiday.

Caroline Moore

Entry to the sacred grove

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Some readers may wonder if we need this book. Surely, the argument might go, one can summon up potted ‘lives’ on the internet, while serious biographies take book form. And how can even 294 lives of novelists offer, as the cover to this book claims, ‘a comprehensive history of the English novel’? Reason not the need: this book celebrates enjoyment. And it is itself hugely enjoyable. Few, if any, of those Wikipedia entries are well written, let alone witty; most current literary biographies weigh in at around 800 pages: Sutherland’s brief lives display the soul of wit — whose essence is to encompass the unexpected. There is a difficult balancing act, here. Sutherland’s potentially fatal Cleopatra is the donnish joke.

Mark Mason

The Ritz in the Blitz

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‘It was like a drug, a disease,’ said the legendary Ritz employee Victor Legg of the institution he served for half a century. There’s something magical about London’s grand hotels. Even those of us who usually experience them only when we nip in for a five-star pee know that. Matthew Sweet has tapped this glamour to tell tales of the human dramas the hotels hosted during the second world war. It’s surely the variety of people gathered together in one place that explains the fascination held by the Ritz, the Savoy, Claridge’s et al. The good, the bad and the clinically barking all share the same address for a night, then tomorrow the cast-list changes.

Colin Amery

Amazing grace

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It was in 1814 that the Benedictine monks arrived in Stratton-on-the-Fosse in Somerset from Douai in Flanders where, in 1606, they had established an exiled, but English, monastic house. They were forced to leave the Continent in 1795 after revolutionary France had declared war on England. They wandered a bit until they finally bought a decent house built in 1700 and a farmhouse with 21 acres at Downside. This book tells a complicated saga of the building of the present abbey and school that will enthral those readers fascinated by the morphology of the Gothic Revival. But it could appeal equally to those gripped by the ultra-montane tendencies in the history of English Catholic life. Downside Abbey’s church tower is what first strikes any visitor.

Allan Massie

Life & Letters: Shakespeare’s women

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Gordon Bottomley, Georgian poet with an unpoetic name, wrote a play called King Lear’s Wife with which he hoped to inspire a poetic revival in the theatre. It might be interesting to see it revived — though most 19th- and 20th-century verse-dramas proved forgettable. Nevertheless, he surely happened on an interesting subject, though one which L. C. Knights, among others, would have deplored. In a famous essay, ‘How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?’, he poured scorn on the practice of treating Shakespearean characters as if they were real people with an anterior life beyond the play. Yet surely it is tempting to do so.

Andrew McKie

S is for Speculative

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Margaret Atwood has written 20 novels, of which three (The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood) are science fiction. Indeed, the first— and far the best of them — won the inaugural Arthur C. Clarke award, Britain’s chief prize for books in the genre. She has, however, long resisted any description of her work as science fiction, for which she was mildly upbraided by Ursula K. Le Guin a couple of years ago. Le Guin wrote that Atwood’s distinction between her own novels, which she maintains feature things which are possible, and may even have happened already, and SF, in which things happen that aren’t possible today, was pointless.

Jane Rye

Lust for life | 3 December 2011

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Seduced by the hayseed hair and the Yorkshire accent it’s tempting to see the young David Hockney as the Freddie Flintoff of the painting world: lovable, simple, brilliant, undoubtedly a hero, and delightfully free of angst. In this enjoyable book, which sets out to to ‘conjure up the man he is and in doing so to put his paintings and drawings in the context of his extraordinary life’, Christopher Simon Sykes provides us, naturally, with a more complex story. Hockney is a hero if course — not least to homosexuals, for blazing a stylish and courageous trail to emancipation in the 1960s, and more recently to beleaguered smokers in his stand against politically correct bullying.

Marcus Berkmann

Quirky Books: Treasure-troves of trivia

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Connoisseurs of the Christmas gift book market — we are a select group, with little otherwise to occupy our time — will have noticed a couple of significant absences from this year’s line-up. There is no Blue Peter Annual, for the first time since 1964, when even Christopher Trace was still a young man. More tellingly, Schott’s Almanac appears to have ceased publication after six years of, one assumes, gradually declining sales. It was beautifully designed, lovingly compiled, funny and unpredictable, and I shall miss it. No doubt Ben Schott is now holed up in his gothic tower, surrounded by pieces of paper with bizarre facts written on them, wondering what on earth he should do next.

Jane Ridley

The woman in black | 3 December 2011

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The history of the royal family is punctuated by dramatic, premature deaths which plunge the monarchy into crisis. The most disastrous of these — historically more significant by far than the death of Princess Diana — was the death of Prince Albert in 1861. By the time he died, aged 42, this minor German prince, the second son of the obscure and dissipated Duke of Coburg, had taken over the entire public work of the monarchy. After 21 years of marriage, his wife Victoria had become deskilled and emotionally dependent upon him. His death left the monarchy in tatters and condemned Queen Victoria to a lifetime of black dresses. Helen Rappaport, who is best known as a writer about the Romanovs, has chosen an excellent subject.

Richard Ryder

Trading places | 3 December 2011

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Thirty years ago Sir Keith Joseph, portrayed by Sir Ian Gilmour, a fellow minister, as owning ‘a Rolls-Royce mind without a chauffeur’, sent a newly published book to every Cabinet colleague. Most groaned, some murmured oaths, and a lucky few skimmed it. The book was English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit (1850-1980) by Martin Weiner. The author, like Correlli Barnett before him, assailed Victorian and Edwardian entrepeneurs and inventors for ignoring family business. Scores and scores of tycoons yearned to be assimilated into the landed establishment by spurning their own mills and factories. They denied the infernos of noise and squalor the capital investment required for new technology.

Sam Leith

Saladin: hero or infidel?

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In Baghdad in the 1980s there was a children’s book published called The Hero Saladin. The cover bore an image of Saddam Hussein, identified, in what his biographer drily describes as ‘the second and longer part’ of the book, as ‘Saladin II Saddam Hussein’. Given that Saladin was actually Kurdish — and knowing what we do about Saddam’s respect for that section of his population — the gesture seems even more crass and insolent than it might otherwise. But then, it’s also absolutely standard. Jinnah was Saladin. Assad was Saladin. Saladin is, in modern Arab and Muslim political mythology, more icon than historical figure.

2 December 2011

David Blackburn

The art of fiction: Evelyn Waugh

Here is a short clip of Evelyn Waugh lambasting the "gibberish" written by modernist writers, a satirical staple of his. Waugh saw no reason to vulgarise traditional prose because it's understood and spoken by the common man. Christopher Hitchens makes a similar point in this Vanity Fair column about the importance of writing with a spoken voice.

Anna Baddeley

Hatchet Jobs of the Month | 2 December 2011

Eurozone crisis, what eurozone crisis? According to Spanish newspaper El País, the real global emergency is the state of literary criticism. British book pages, however, won’t need bailing out any time soon — at least if these splenetic offerings are anything to go by. Tibor Fischer on Parallel Stories by Peter Nadas, Guardian It's a great historical soup, with bits of this and that bobbing around, seemingly thrown in randomly by the chef — or, more succinctly, a mess. Hungary's literature had a puritanical 1950s, a sober 1960s, and they largely missed out on all the Henry Miller, Lady Chatterley, Jean Genet, William Burroughs jazz. It's almost as if Nádas is trying to catch up in one bound.

1 December 2011

David Blackburn

It’s literally a disgrace

Silly old Jeremy Clarkson, where would the chattering classes be without him? The Top Gear presenter has landed himself in hot water by saying that yesterday’s public sectors strikers should be lined up against a wall and shot — or words to that effect. He made the comments live on the One Show last night. To my mind, the outraged reaction to this latest Clarksonboob — demands for apologies, the prospect of legal action and so forth — is more intersting than Clarkson's apparent heartlessness. It reveals how prevailing social mores demand that figurative language be replaced by bland literalism.

Emily Rhodes

Inside Books: Beauty in the hands of the beholder

Call me superficial, but I would far sooner buy a beautiful book than an ugly one. It’s something to think about when Christmas shopping — a concern that’s only magnified when it comes to buying a book as a present, rather than for oneself. It’s also something to bear in mind in the broader context of the battle of physical books versus eBooks. Sales of eBooks are soaring ever upwards, making even the most old-fashioned of publishers think that they really must be the way forward. Why is it that so many readers don’t mind losing contact with books as physical things in favour of scrollable words on a grey background that only exist inside a pocket-sized computer?

Daisy Dunn

Portrait of a nation

Sir Henry Raeburn’s exquisite nineteenth-century portrait of Sir Walter Scott hangs — magisterial, but unfamiliar — in an ordered sea of Scottish portraits, of Scottish subjects, in the renascent Scottish National Portrait Gallery. As the stock picture question of University Challenge well attests, putting a face to a famous name, especially that of a writer like Scott, is no easy feat. Having succeeded, there’s always something satisfying about staring into the eyes of an illustrious figure formerly visualized in the mind’s eye alone. The Edinburgh gallery provides well for innate curiosity, making familiar the unknown faces behind great novels, philosophical tracts, paintings by those more accustomed to residing on the other side of the canvas.

30 November 2011

Walter Ellis

Is this the future, and do I like it? Pt. 2

After Paul Torday related his latest adventure in the digital new world, here is Fleet Street veteran Walter Ellis on the trials of self-publishing on Amazon. Soon kindled and soon burnt: The gentle art of online publishing The idea of a level playing field is that everyone engaged in a competitive activity should have the same opportunity to achieve success as everybody else. Kindle is supposed to offer independent authors a level playing field. But does it? So far as I can tell, unknown authors who break into the Top 1,000 are quite rare, though nowhere near as rare as those who make it into the Top 100. There are, of course, examples of complete unknowns rising to the top of the virtual pile and staying there.

Paul Torday

Is this the future, and do I like it? Pt. 1

Veteran SF writer and devout Luddite Ray Bradbury has finally bowed to the inevitable and allowed Farenheit 451 to be reproduced in a digital format. Bradbury's hand was forced by contractual reality: his publishers refused to re-sign him without digital rights. Surely print must now be damned if even Bradbury has to consort with his Devil? To mark the occasion, we have commissioned two posts about the brave new world of the eBook. Here, Paul Torday, author of the award-winning novel Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, tells of his latest digital foray. Where will this end up? This December,Breakfast at the Hotel Déjà Vu, a novella I have written, will become available only as an eBook.

David Blackburn

Andy McNab: I owe everything to the military education system

Last night, at a secret location in the East End, Andy McNab addressed the London branch of the Royal Green Jackets Association, the body representing former members of the Rifles Regiment. McNab, a decorated Rifleman before he entered SAS folklore on the botched Bravo Two Zero mission, was drumming up support at a private bash for Care for Casualties, the regiment’s appeal to care for the families of its wounded and dead. The building was packed and donations flowed as if these were times of plenty. Care for Casualties has raised more than £1.5 million in the last two years. Such generosity is necessary. Since the regiment was re-formed in 2007, 61 Riflemen have been killed in action, leaving more than 40 wives or long-term girlfriends and 31 dependent children.