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Crying in the wilderness

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For 30 years Alastair Crooke was ostensibly a British diplomat working in Northern Ireland, South Africa, Columbia and Pakistan. Ten years ago he became Middle East adviser to Javier Solana, playing an important role in negotiating ceasefires between Israel and Hamas, as well as helping to end the siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem in May 2002. In the summer of that year an Israeli newspaper named Crooke as an agent for the Secret Intelligence Service, and shortly after he was recalled to London. It has been reported that his sympathy with the Palestine cause caused embarrassment to Tony Blair’s government.

Judith Flanders

Lurking beneath the surface

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One’s past life is, usually, comfortably past. One’s past life is, usually, comfortably past. Susan Morrow’s first husband, Edward, is so firmly in her past that his second wife even sends her Christmas cards, signed ‘love’. Apart from that once-a-year token, she hasn’t heard from Edward in two decades. Their early marriage had been brief, and at cross-purposes: she had wanted a conventional bourgeois life, while he wanted to write — worse, he wanted to be a writer. Now, out of her past, comes a novel from Edward, with a note saying ‘Damn! but this book is good.’ But it’s still missing something, he fears, and he asks his long-ex-wife to read it, and tell him what.

8 May 2010

John R. MacArthur

Under false colours

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‘With time,’ writes David Remnick, ‘political campaigns tend to be viewed through the triumphalist prism of the winner.’ Never more so, perhaps, than in Remnick’s idolatrous new biography of Barack Obama, which presents the First Black President’s ascension to the White House as nothing less than a glorious saga. Deeply read — if not rooted — in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, Obama is said to have derived his spectacular political success from the great and martyred prophet Martin Luther King, Jr and King’s closest disciples, especially John Lewis.

John McEwen

A towering talent

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Ian Massey is a writer, artist and lecturer and this is his first book. There have been two previous books on Procktor: a ghosted autobiography and a slim volume to celebrate his 60th birthday. About the second, one reviewer wrote that what was next required was ‘a full retrospective to answer the critical question that has been asked repeatedly over the last 30 years, “Is there anybody there?” ’ This handsome, copiously illustrated, well-researched and sensitive appraisal of the art and artist fully meets that requirement. Massey did not know Procktor, but he shows there was much more to him than facility and a façade.

David Sexton

The houseguest from hell

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Once upon a time, an untrustworthy story- teller seemed rather an enterprising creation — and some great books were written this way, like Lolita and The Good Soldier (from which Blake Morrison takes an epigraph). But nowadays having a fibber as compère seems painfully predictable. Only if our dodgy raconteur is strikingly engaging or funny do we, as readers, feel inclined to stay the course, to have it confirmed that our guide is actually a fraud, or killer, and his life a hollow sham. The trick can still be pulled off. John Lanchester did it in The Debt to Pleasure, and Sebastian Faulks in Engleby, a book made interesting by the way it seems to be Faulks’s nightmare about how wrong everything could have gone for him in another life.

Colin Amery

How long have I got?

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It was the neon lit windowless corridor in the surgery in Dumfries that did it. It was June 1993 when Maggie Keswick and her husband Charles Jencks heard the prognosis that she had two to three months to live as the breast cancer had spread to her liver and her bones. In fact Maggie was to live fighting the disease for another 18 months — she died on 8 July 1995. But she lives on every day through her inspired idea that cancer patients need a place to deal with the facts of what she called ‘the dreaded disease’. She wanted to show that things need not be so awful, that patients are not victims and that self-help is possible if you can be in the right kind of place. This book is moving, ambitious and brave.

Kevin Myers

Irishmen of myth

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If stupidity is defined by the inability to connect an oft-repeated policy with the failure that it always produces, then Irish republicanism is easily the stupidest political movement in Europe. The claim of Irish republicanism is that it unites Catholic, Protestant and dissenter under the common title, Irishman. This is mountebank bluster. In fact, Irish republicanism usually unites people under the common title, corpse. Brendan Hughes truly personified this bloodthirsty idiocy. He was a major player in the IRA campaign from 1970-1996, and his is the most important voice heard in Voices from the Grave, in which the journalist Ed Moloney has sewn together the tapes of interviews recorded with Hughes and with the loyalist terrorist leader David Irvine.

Michela Wrong

When words fail

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Ignore the title, with its subliminal echoes of Mills & Boon. Aminatta Forna’s magnificent second novel is not really about love. Its themes are far grittier, and all the more compelling for it: war, loss, and how a society emerging from civil strife must reinvent its own history, fabricating a tolerable narrative in order to remain semi sane. The country in question is Sierra Leone. Its charming capital, Freetown, dotted anomalously with chimney-potted villas recalling an era when this was a British colony, is framed by green hills which tumble into a beach-fringed sea. It doesn’t attract many tourists, though.

Jonathan Bate

By divers hands

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Contrary to the Romantic image of him as a solitary scribbler in a garret, William Shakespeare was a deeply collaborative artist. He wrote his plays for a particular theatre company, tailoring each part to the actor he knew would perform it. He began his career patching up old plays in the existing repertoire and ended it working in partnership with John Fletcher, his chosen successor as company playwright for the King’s Men. Never mind the Keatsian genius with fevered brow; a better comparison for early and late Shakespeare would be the team player banging out scripts in the golden age of Hollywood or, for that matter, in the quick forge and working-house of television sitcom or soap opera.

Caroline Moorehead

Stemming the human tide

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Long before the Allies landed in Normandy in June 1944 and began their advance across France, preparations were underway for what to do about the civilians who had been displaced by the German occupiers. What everyone feared was a repeat of the chaos that followed the first world war, when refugees and returning prisoners of war brought with them typhus and a flu epidemic which, by the time it had spent itself, had killed more people than all the casualties of the war itself. What no one had envisaged, however, was either the number of displaced people adrift across Europe, nor the state that they would be in. And, as the Allies advanced, causing more destruction, so the numbers and the confusion grew.

John Preston

An end to cordiality

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On the first page of this book there is a sentence so extraordinary that I had to read it several times to make sure my eyes weren’t playing up. On the first page of this book there is a sentence so extraordinary that I had to read it several times to make sure my eyes weren’t playing up. Despite what the English and French may say about one another in public, writes Stephen Clarke, the truth is that ‘we find each other irredeemably sexy’. If only this were the case. Alas, as the would-be English Lothario bruised by yet another dismissive ‘Non!’ knows only too well, the traffic tends to flow in just one direction. Mercifully, Clarke is a lot less even- handed in his history of Anglo/French relations.

Allan Massie

The Lives of Others

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‘My wife doesn’t understand me,’ the man said to his Jewish psychoanalyst. ‘I should be so lucky!’ was the reply. It’s a common complaint, not being understood. Yet surely only the most shameless would like others to know us exactly as we are or as we know ourselves. This is one reason some writers shrink from the prospect of having their Life written. Kipling called biography ‘the higher cannibalism’, and tried to pre-empt one by writing his own decidedly reticent memoir, Something of Myself. Something indeed, but not a lot.

1 May 2010

Philip Hensher

For the simpler reader

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David Mitchell’s fifth novel, an exotically situated romance of astounding vulgarity, has some things to be said for it. David Mitchell’s fifth novel, an exotically situated romance of astounding vulgarity, has some things to be said for it. It will certainly entertain the simpler reader that lurks within all of us, the one that hungers for the chase and the mysterious Oriental maiden with a fascinating physical flaw, that enjoys the spurt of blood, thrills to the race against time and positively hankers after bald, inscrutable, mind-reading villains in blue silk robes; and to the reader who hardly cares how these things are put into prose.

Lucy Beresford

A year of living dangerously

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After 14 months working as an inter-dealer bond broker, posh totty Thompson was fired in February 2008 for gross misconduct. Her crime? Writing a warts-and-all article of the broking industry which was published in The Spectator. Enjoy- ment of this memoir (basically an extension of that original piece) will, I suspect, depend on either an underlying interest in the technicalities of Collateralised Debt Obligations, or an ability to stomach anecdotes about vomiting. It’s a macho tale, choppily told, of lap-dancing clubs, benders at Nobu, prescription drugs, and c-bombing (it’s a See You Next Tuesday thing). Unsurprisingly, the unintended subtext of this story is more compelling.

Caroline Moore

The old Adam

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Final Demands is the third volume in Frederic Raphael’s trilogy, which began with the publication of The Glittering Prizes in 1976. Final Demands is the third volume in Frederic Raphael’s trilogy, which began with the publication of The Glittering Prizes in 1976. The second in the series, Fame and Fortune, did not follow until 2007; and showed a distinct shift in mood — a silting up of bitterness and disdain. In The Glittering Prizes, Raphael was more tenderly ambiguous towards the ambitions of his characters. Perhaps this is because their obvious faults (and particularly those of his central character, Adam Morris) are so forgivable in the young.

Bevis Hillier

Strawberry Hill forever

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When I became a cub reporter on the Times in 1963 (the front page was still covered with small-ads), an old sweat in the newsroom gave me two pieces of advice. The first was: Don’t get too proficient at shorthand. If you do, you’ll find yourself in a stuffy courtroom, recording the proceedings verbatim. The second was: Never describe any incident as ‘unique’ or say it is the first time it has happened. If you do, sure as eggs is eggs, a reader will write in to point out an identical occurrence in the near or distant past. He added: And don’t suggest that such-and-such will never happen again. If you do, it will inevitably happen again before you can say ‘Déjà vu!’.

James Buchan

Dangerous liaisons | 1 May 2010

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For the impartial reader, this book is doubly disagreeable. An account of National Socialist short-wave radio broadcasts to the Arab world in the second world war, it prints pages of anti-Jewish propaganda as monotonous as it is vile. The author then shows no sympathy at all for Arab grievances, which makes the brew no more palatable. Jeffrey Herf, who is a professor at the University of Maryland, contends that Nazi anti-Semitism broadcast across the Middle East from Berlin and Bari between 1939 and 1945 has borne fruit. Hatred of the Jews, discredited in mainstream politics in Europe by the Holocaust, has found ‘renewed life’ in the Arab world and Iran.

Olivia Glazebrook

Suffer the parents

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One morning in 1979 a six-year-old American boy, Etan Patz, set off on foot to catch the bus to school — the first time he had been allowed to walk to the bus stop by himself. One morning in 1979 a six-year-old American boy, Etan Patz, set off on foot to catch the bus to school — the first time he had been allowed to walk to the bus stop by himself. He did not arrive; he vanished without a trace and was never found. In 2001, still missing, he was declared dead. Etan’s was the case that changed the way America looked for its lost children: his search was given huge — unprecedented — media coverage, and his photograph was the first of many to be used in the ‘milk carton’ campaigns of the 1980s.

Will Robinson

A firm believer in leniency

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Ninety years after the ill-fated European peace settlement dictated by the victorious Allies at Versailles, it is fitting that a publisher should commission a series of 32 monographs devoted to the men and consequences of the Peace entitled ‘Makers of the Modern World’. Ninety years after the ill-fated European peace settlement dictated by the victorious Allies at Versailles, it is fitting that a publisher should commission a series of 32 monographs devoted to the men and consequences of the Peace entitled ‘Makers of the Modern World’. Collectively they will reveal the full extent of debate among the statesmen who redrew the map of Europe in 1919, setting the agenda for international relations in the age of Hitler, Stalin and Churchill.

24 April 2010

Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man | 24 April 2010

This may be an extreme point of view, but I think novelists should learn to drive. I don’t know how exactly, but a reader can tell when an author has never gripped a steering wheel. Perhaps there are no descriptions of motoring in any of the books, or too many train journeys — or else the motoring passages simply don’t ring true. It’s a trivial detail, I agree, but somehow it seems only fair that a writer can plausibly describe an activity that might occupy many people for several hours a day. In the same vein I think politicians should make some use of the internet.

Michael Burleigh

The map turns red

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Norman Stone forsook the chair of modern history at Oxford university for Ankara after realising that the ‘conversation at high tables would generally have made the exchanges in the bus- stop in the rain outside seem exhilarating’. Norman Stone forsook the chair of modern history at Oxford university for Ankara after realising that the ‘conversation at high tables would generally have made the exchanges in the bus- stop in the rain outside seem exhilarating’. Dur- ing an earlier incarnation at Cambridge, Stone taught a galaxy of historians. His protégés include David Blackbourn, Harald James and Richard Overy, followed by Niall Ferguson and Andrew Roberts, all bar two now working at Harvard or Princeton.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

A bolt from the blue

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The memoirs of the Grand Duchess Olga are an entertaining record for anyone interested in the imperial family’s home life during the last years of Russian autocracy. The memoirs of the Grand Duchess Olga are an entertaining record for anyone interested in the imperial family’s home life during the last years of Russian autocracy. Olga was the youngest of Alexander III’s six children; her mother was the Danish princess, Maria Fyodorovna. She was born just after her father’s accession, in 1882, when the throne was already in crisis.

Joanna Kavenna

To strive, to seek, to find . . .

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In 1931, a 23-year-old Englishman called Henry ‘Gino’ Watkins returned from an expedition to the white depths of the Greenlandic ice cap. In 1931, a 23-year-old Englishman called Henry ‘Gino’ Watkins returned from an expedition to the white depths of the Greenlandic ice cap. He was hailed as a precocious talent, even as a worthy successor to Fridtjof Nansen, who had recently died. When Watkins died the following year, during another expedition to Greenland, King George remarked on the tragedy of his death, and Stanley Baldwin wrote that ‘If he had lived he might have ranked . . . among the greatest of polar explorers’. Yet Watkins had only just begun to establish himself, and his reputation swiftly faded.

Quentin Letts

No earthly good

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Peter Hitchens writes a stern column most weeks in the Mail on Sunday. It expresses disdain not only for today’s politicians but also for those of us who vote for them. The weekly Hitchens can leave even his fellow right-wingers feeling demoralised. He argues that David Cameron’s Tories are no better than Gordon Brown’s clowns. Anyone who swallows campaign promises from Wesmtinster’s stinking fraudsters — a plague on all their second houses — is, in his view, a fool. Hitchens is brave and clever. He writes fluently, with the eye of a shrewd reporter. The best newspaper columnists have always been contrarians, but surely few have been so consistently against everybody with such Old Testament hotness.

Christian House

Red faces in the galleries

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Art fraudsters, especially forgers, have a popular appeal akin to Robin Hood. Their cock-a-snook cunning provides a twist on those money shots on the Antiques Roadshow when some dotty great aunt from Sidmouth discovers her umbrella stand is Ming Dynasty. ‘How much?’ cries Dotty. The forger levels the field from the other side of the pitch. When some shipping magnate finds his Monet ‘Nympheas’ is more pond scum than Giverny gold the public collapses into bouts of schadenfreude. Many books and films have covered this subject, and yet The Conman has a particularly interesting tale to tell. This is a true story not only of dubious oils but also the obfuscation of the paper trail which allows a work of art to be declared genuine.

Anne Applebaum

Ghosts from the Soviet past

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Above all, it is the inhuman scale of things which impresses the visitor to Moscow: the vastness of Red Square, the width of the uncrossable streets, the implacability of the traffic. The city’s history seems equally inhuman, haunted as it is by centuries of tyrants, millions of political prisoners, countless wars. Impossible to navigate and impossible to know, Moscow doesn’t exactly embrace the casual tourist. But Rachel Polonsky was not a casual tourist. A scholar of Russian literature who lived in Moscow for a decade, she knew better than to start looking for the essence of the city in Red Square. Instead, she began on a single street, inside a single flat. The street was her own: Romanov Lane.

Andrew Taylor

Low dishonest dealings

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The strange, unsettled decades between the wars form the backdrop of much of D. J. Taylor’s recent work, including his novel, Ask Alice, and his social history, Bright Young Things. At the Chime of a City Clock is set in 1931, with a financial crisis rumbling in the background. The strange, unsettled decades between the wars form the backdrop of much of D. J. Taylor’s recent work, including his novel, Ask Alice, and his social history, Bright Young Things. At the Chime of a City Clock is set in 1931, with a financial crisis rumbling in the background. James Ross, a struggling writer, tries to keep his landlady at bay with the meagre income he earns as a door-to-door carpet-cleaner salesman.

Jonathan Mirsky

The ultimate price

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Lesley Downer is one of the most unusual authors writing in English. Years ago, determined to become an expert on the Japanese geisha, ultra-sophisticated entertainers and hostesses who are neither prostitutes nor courtesans, she became a Kyoto geisha herself and wrote Geisha: The Secret History of a Vanishing World. Now she has written her second novel (the first being The Last Concubine), the story of Hana, a young samurai wife in the late 1860s. She lives in Edo, soon to become Tokyo, the capital of Japan. The country is being ripped apart by civil war — vividly narrated here — and, no longer isolated, is adopting enough Western ways to escape the colonialism that afflicted most of the rest of Asia. As in Downer’s previous books I noticed her careful research.

17 April 2010

Sam Leith

Scourge of the ancien régime

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Voltaire’s was a long and amazing life. Voltaire’s was a long and amazing life. He was tragedian, satirist, mathematician, courtier, exile, jailbird, swindler, gardener, plutocrat, watchmaking entrepreneur, penal reform campaigner, celebrity, provocateur, useless loan-shark, serial feuder, coward, astronaut, niece-shagger, spy . . . Except ‘astronaut’, obviously. I made that up to check you were still paying attention. But he did shack up with his niece, the filthy old goat. It seems a shame, then, that for most of us nowadays that long and amazing life is compressed into a couple of quotes from Candide and a few apocryphal stories about his table talk. Ian Davidson’s biography is the corrective: here’s the great man in the round.