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The man and the myth

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Tolstoy’s legend is not what it was; but sometimes the world needs idealised versions of ordinary men, argues Philip Hensher The truism that Tolstoy was the greatest of novelists hasn’t been seriously questioned in the last century. The nearest competition comes from Proust and Thomas Mann, I suppose. But when you compare two similar moments in the writings of Tolstoy and one of these other supreme novelists, a difference emerges. Both War and Peace and In Search of Lost Time culminate in a glimpse of the next generation.

Nicky Haslam

Deadlier than the Mail

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This is an effervescent, elegantly written and faultlessly researched romp through the life and times of someone whose name in Britain was spoken with genuine fondness by an urbane few, with self-righteous anger by some and with disdain or fascination by almost everybody who can read — as, like it or not, very few people don’t enjoy gossip. This is an effervescent, elegantly written and faultlessly researched romp through the life and times of someone whose name in Britain was spoken with genuine fondness by an urbane few, with self-righteous anger by some and with disdain or fascination by almost everybody who can read — as, like it or not, very few people don’t enjoy gossip. Tim Willis has caught the atmosphere of the Dempster decades with uncanny precision.

Justin Cartwright

Positively Kafkaesque

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This is a companion to a collection published earlier this year of Nadine Gordimer’s non-fiction, called Telling Times. This is a companion to a collection published earlier this year of Nadine Gordimer’s non-fiction, called Telling Times. Short stories are, of all her endeavours, the most successful. Their heyday was in the Seventies, when they perfectly realised the awful but fascinating contrasts of South African life. As a boy I lived in Johannesburg just two streets away from Gordimer. She was a towering figure, known to be very close to the ANC. Her presence cast a certain penumbra over our modest house.

Anthony Daniels

Fear of the unseen

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There was a time when detailed case histories, including direct quotations from patients’ accounts of their own experiences, formed a significant part of the medical literature. There was a time when detailed case histories, including direct quotations from patients’ accounts of their own experiences, formed a significant part of the medical literature. French doctors of the 19th century were particularly adept at writing such case histories; the lucidity of their prose, as of their thought, was exemplary. Indeed, French medical prose of the 19th century was often as good as that of Flaubert. But the extended case history has gone out of medical fashion, as being too anecdotal and therefore unscientific.

Francis King

The odd couple

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Some years ago now I bought from the artist Robert Buhler a pastel portrait of the composer Lennox Berkeley (reproduced above). Since I knew neither of the two men well (although in the case of each I admired the work without having an irresistible enthusiasm for it), even today people often ask me why I made the purchase. The answer is that in that one work Buhler shows so much more than his usual blithe accomplishment; he is perfect not merely in his portrayal of his sitter’s outward features but also in conveying an inner character of brooding spirituality. Tony Scotland’s book performs the same feat.

Raymond Carr

A split personality

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By the 1970s Ronald Fraser had established himself as an expert on modern Spain and an authority on its oral history, when that discipline was an exotic new concept. As a radical socialist, and a friend of the Marxist historian Perry Anderson, he published a series of distinguished books on popular risings and guerrilla warfare in 19th-century Spain. It was society seen from below. But no one reading the first edition of Fraser’s memoir, published in 1984, would have guessed any of this. Only in a new introduction does he mention his friendship with Gerald Brenan, whose The Spanish Labyrinth was a sacred text to all of us who wrote on 20th-century Spain.

Douglas Hurd

A going-away present

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A great time ago when the world was young there was a pleasant and harmless custom by which a British ambassador when leaving his post could sit down and write a valedictory dispatch to the Foreign Secretary. This was not compulsory; often an ambassador withheld his opinions until he was leaving not just a particular post but the foreign office as a whole. The motives of the valedictory dispatch varied. Some ambassadors concentrated on summarising the country in which they had last served; others attempted to sum up the whole period of their service. Some took the opportunity to deplore the present state of Britain; others told amusing stories; almost all thanked the staff who had supported them, and in particular their wives.

Harry Mount

Piling Pelion on Ossa

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Bettany Hughes is the Nigella Lawson of the classical world — all tumbling raven curls and smoky-voiced seduction, as she takes telly viewers through the greatest hits of the olden days; recent programmes have covered the Spartans, Athens and the Bible. Bettany Hughes is the Nigella Lawson of the classical world — all tumbling raven curls and smoky-voiced seduction, as she takes telly viewers through the greatest hits of the olden days; recent programmes have covered the Spartans, Athens and the Bible. She’s just been on Radio 4 talking about Britain under the Romans. She’s no slouch on the academic side, either: a scholar at Oxford and a research fellow at King’s College, London, she got rave reviews for her first book on Helen of Troy.

Mark Girouard

Murder in Madison Square Garden

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In Victorian and Edwardian England architects did not get themselves murdered. They weren’t playboys, they didn’t have it off with their clients’ wives, they were in no way fashionable even if designing for fashionable people.They were solid members of the professional classes. Lutyens, with his grand marriage and his socialising, was an exception, but his Peter-Pan philanderings with Lady Sackville in the 1920s pale beside the stormy sex life which brought Frank Lloyd Wright into the headlines in 1909. No English architects inspired a novel or a film; a Secret Life of William Butterfield would be unthinkable; John Galsworthy’s Bosinney had no model in real life.

Judith Flanders

A palace in miniature

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There’s nothing like a really good wallow in nostalgia. There’s nothing like a really good wallow in nostalgia. And if it can be arranged so that the nostalgia is for a time that never was, that’s even better. So it is hardly surprising that when, after the horrors of the first world war, Princess Marie Louise, Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, approached Sir Edwin Lutyens to design a dolls’ house for Queen Mary, they settled stylistically on creating a house firmly rooted in that semi- mythical long Edwardian pre-war summer, when God was clearly an Englishman, his home was his (miniature) castle, and his servants were, decently, not only omnipresent but also invisible.

Gary Dexter

The body in the library

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Jacques Bonnet is a distinguished French art historian and novelist who has amassed a private library of 40,000 volumes (around double the number contained in the average Waterstones). Phantoms on the Bookshelves is Bonnet’s meditation on a life lived with so many books. Particularly pressing is the matter of classification. ‘Should I put Norbert Elias’s What is Sociology? next to his more historical works?’ he worries. ‘Should Paul Veyne’s Comment on écrit l’histoire be next to his studies of sexuality and euertegism (gift-giving) in ancient Rome? Does Picasso count as French or Spanish? Modigliani as Italian or French? And what am I to do with Michelangelo?

William Joll

Labour of love

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I visited the Hebridean island of Canna in May 2008 — Canna being John Lorne Campbell’s island, donated by him to the National Trust for Scotland in 1981 — and was immediately struck by three things, all of which presented a considerable contrast to the island of Colonsay, some little way to the south, where I live. I visited the Hebridean island of Canna in May 2008 — Canna being John Lorne Campbell’s island, donated by him to the National Trust for Scotland in 1981 — and was immediately struck by three things, all of which presented a considerable contrast to the island of Colonsay, some little way to the south, where I live.

The Spectator

Books of the Year | 13 November 2010

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Blair Worden J.R. Maddicott’s The Origins of the English Parliament 924–1327 (OUP, £30) is not one for the bedside, but its wide and profound scholarship has much to teach us about the roots and functions of an institution now subjected to so much unhistorical criticism. Nicholas Phillipson’s Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life (Allen Lane, £25) is an absorbing and elegant account of Smith’s mind and of the Scottish context, social and intellectual, that produced it. D. R. Thorpe’s Supermac: The Life of Harold Macmillan (Chatto, £25) gives a wonderful sense of Macmillan’s complexity and stature and of the place of personality in the fortunes of power and the making of policy.

12 November 2010

Peter Hoskin

Bookends: Flesh and blood

Every Friday, on the Spectator Book Blog, we'll be publishing the latest Bookends column from the magazine. For those who haven't come across the column before, it's a 250-word review of a recent book – somewhat shorter than the rest of the reviews in the print edition – and well-suited to the blog format. Anyway, here's the latest: Flesh and blood Flesh. Lots of flesh. That was the simple promise of a Hammer horror film. In this collection of classic Hammer posters (The Art of Hammer by Marcus Hearn, Titan, £24.99) we have cleavages, writhing torsos and shining thighs aplenty. But it’s not just that kind of flesh.

11 November 2010

Marianne Gray

Breakfast at Tiffany’s: the official 50th Anniversary Companion

It hardly feels like 50 years ago that Audrey Hepburn’s Holly Golightly tripped her way into cinematic folklore on her journey to become a timeless icon. In her little Givenchy black dress and long cigarette holder, Holly has endured dramatically and improbably. But then, the Holly Golightly’s of this world are improbable girls to begin with.

David Blackburn

Political memoirs galore – at last, a surprise

So, you thought you knew Dubya? His memoir has leapt to the top of the sellers' charts (£) in the States and The Spectator is publishing a comprehensive review by Sir Christopher Meyer next week. But, judging by extracts in the Times’ serialisation, Bush's ghostwriter Christopher Michel (the former President’s premier speech writer) has done a spectacular job: turns out we didn’t know George Bush at all. Certainly, the embodiment of manifest destiny emerges from the text, as we expected it to – resolute in action, defiant in moral certitude and confidant that history will remember him at least. ‘Did you use water boarding?’ ‘Damn right we did’.

10 November 2010

David Blackburn

Do women not like Jonathan Franzen?

I haven’t read Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, for lack of opportunity rather than lack of will. However, the loud critical response has not escaped me. How could it? The Corrections and Freedom have both been crowned with the thorns of being a ‘Great American Novel’; and he is the celebrated author of the moment, gracing the cover of Time Magazine and making regular though unseen appearances in the latest series of Gossip Girl no less. Critics are unanimous: Freedom is ‘very good in parts’ – a green-eyed euphemism for 'bloody brilliant'. But when it comes to Franzen himself, the man divides the sexes in America, vehemently so.

Peter Robins

A cracking wheeze

There is an evil genius in Peckham Library. Not among the patrons: the book stock is sound enough, but, were you researching a plan for world domination, you’d want more extensive reference shelves and perhaps quicker Wi-Fi. No, the evil genius is on the staff. He or she was responsible for the offer that marked the library’s 10th anniversary: a free canvas bag for any user who withdrew ten books in one go. Some readers may already be snorting at the spendthrift generosity of this. But Peckham Library’s anniversary is worth marking - it is, for better or worse, an icon of regeneration. And the offer is more cunning than it initially seems.

9 November 2010

David Blackburn

Michel Houellebecq wins the Prix Goncourt

Ageing roué Michel Houellebecq, the Serge Gainsbourg of the literary world, has won France’s most prestigious literary prize for his latest novel, La Carte et le Territoire (The Map and the Territory). Not before time, his supporters will say. But, then again, Houellebecq has long polarised opinion, and Les Cartes et le Territoire - featuring a foul-smelling, alcoholic, atrociously dressed writer called Michel Houellebecq, who is murdered in brutal fashion - promises to entrench that reputation. He was interviewed by the Paris Review last month.

The Spectator

Introducing the Spectator Book Blog | 9 November 2010

Just a quick post to point CoffeeHousers in the direction of the new Spectator Book Blog (or http://spectator.com/books/blog/). In addition to the in-house team, the new blog will host independent bloggers and writers, providing a wide range of book reviews and discussion topics. And, as ever, the comments section is yours. The Book Blog will also house the Spectator Book Club's Book of the Month feature. The current book of the month is Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman by Friedrich Christian Delius – which you can discuss in this post, or by following the link in the 'Book of the Month' box, located in the top right hand corner of every books page. And do feel free to make recommendations for future Books of the Month while you're there.

Rhys Tranter

Visions of the future

Rhys Tranter writes the A Piece of Monologue blog. Here is his first collaboration with the Spectator Book Blog. You might be forgiven for considering Don DeLillo’s White Noise as a survival manual for contemporary life. Now celebrating its 25th anniversary, the novel’s relevance continues as a philosophical checklist of twenty-first century culture. On its initial release in 1985, DeLillo’s novel stood out for its wry commentary on the ubiquity of commercialism — ‘Mastercard, Visa, American Express’ — and its portrayal of neurotic anxiety at the heart of the Western nuclear family.

8 November 2010

David Blackburn

A lone voice of dissent

There are few heretics before the Church of Ian McEwan, but Thomas Jones’ uses his review of Solar in the London Review of Books to make two points. Monomania is a feature of English writing – think motherhood to Mrs Bennett, hypochondria to Mr Wodehouse or climate change to James Delingpole. McEwan is unusual in that many of his protagonists are monomaniacs. Jones argues that this robs them of their humanity. Henry Perowne, the neurosurgeon in Saturday, is an extreme example. He perceives everything from the perspective of his profession.

Natalie Fast

Small, but perfectly formed

“Thought provoking, well designed, short.” ‘Well, that last one is a good thing,’ says a friend who takes about five years to finish one novel. And on this occasion I agree. Peirene Press seek out acclaimed European short literature (never more than 200 pages) and revel in translating it. Peirene’s canon is also short, only three novellas, but already it is diverse. I have picked their first release, Véronique Olmi’s Beside the Sea and their newest, Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman by Friedrich Christian Delius (published in September), and have set aside a day in which to hunker down and read them both.

Orlando Bird

The ‘Big Society’ in Georgian and Victorian literature

When David Cameron unveiled his plans for a ‘Big Society’, transferring power from ‘the elite in Whitehall to the man and woman on the street’, Ed Miliband accused him of wanting to drag the welfare state back to Victorian times. Presumably he feared a Tory Britain in which a latter-day David Copperfield was left to be thrashed by Mr Murdstone. Actually, though, the idea of the Big Society has other precedents, many of them literary, with different implications. We find it in Samuel Johnson’s journalism. ‘The Benefits of Human Society’, an article written for The Rambler, balances scepticism with an uplifting idealism.

The Spectator

Introducing the Spectator Book Blog

Welcome to the new Spectator Book Blog. We hope that the exchanges that were a feature of the Book Club’s old discussion boards will thrive in a more expansive space. In addition to the in-house team, the new blog will host independent bloggers and writers, providing a wide range of book reviews and discussion topics. And, as ever, the comments section is yours. The Book Blog will also house the Spectator Book Club's Book of the Month feature. The current book of the month is Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman by Friedrich Christian Delius – which you can discuss in this post, or by following the link in the 'Book of the Month' box, located in the top right hand corner of every books page.

6 November 2010

Interconnect

BOOKENDS: Inspiration for a cult hero

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This is an odd book: the exhaustive biography of a complete nobody. Vivian Mackerrell was the primary inspiration for the cult that is Withnail. In that, at least, he doesn’t disappoint. This is an odd book: the exhaustive biography of a complete nobody. Vivian Mackerrell was the primary inspiration for the cult that is Withnail. In that, at least, he doesn’t disappoint. Mackerrell emerges from Colin Bacon’s eulogy, Vivian and I (Quartet, £12), as a rakish Charles Pooter, sunk by alcoholic degeneracy at the age of 24, though he staggered on gamely for another 30 years. The paucity of Mackerrell’s life leaves Bacon to indulge in bawdy nostalgia about the Sixties.

Sam Leith

Far from idealism

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If you think the Special Relationship has been looking strained in recent years, consider its condition during the American Civil War(1861-65). In 1863, an anonymous letter was delivered to Charles Francis Adams at the US legation in London: Dam the Federals. Dam the Confederates.Dam you both. Kill you damned selves for the next 10 years if you like; so much the better for the world and for England. Thus thinks every Englishman with any brains. NB PS We’ll cut your throats fast enough afterwards for you if you ain’t tired of blood, you devils. Brevity, they say, is the first grace of style. The feeling that letter encapsulates ran pretty high in England.

Allan Mallinson

The other Prince of Darkness

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This is a clever publishing idea, a light academic-historical cloak for another set of political memoirs. Jonathan Powell, chief of staff (the term should not be taken literally) at No. 10 throughout Tony Blair’s premiership, kept a diary. Blair himself couldn’t, Powell explains: ‘There simply isn’t time for a prime minister to set out detailed reflections and lead a country at the same time’. One wonders how Ronald Reagan managed it. Besides, is not reflecting on events, actions and consequences — ‘examining with diligence the past’ — one of Machiavelli’s precepts? Despite its title, however, the book is not a re-casting of the tenets of Machiavellianism.

Mary Keen

Vale of tares

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‘Feather footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole.’ Nature writing used to be a subject for ridicule. ‘Feather footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole.’ Nature writing used to be a subject for ridicule. Evelyn Waugh, the arch sneerer, might have found it harder to parody the modern breed of literary naturalists. Richard Mabey is perhaps the best known English author of recent fashionable books about the natural world. He belongs to a group of new naturalists which includes Robert Macfarlane the Cambridge don, Kathleen Jamie the poet, and the late Roger Deakin. They are all intellectuals, whose pitch is more observant and scientific than romantic.