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The greatest rogue in Europe

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On 11 November 1743, the most sensational trial of the 18th century opened in the Four Courts in Dublin. The plaintiff, James Annesley, claimed that his uncle, Richard Annesley, the sixth earl of Anglesey, had robbed him of immense estates in England and Ireland worth £10,000 a year. The scale of the theft and the rank of the alleged thief would by themselves have made the case exceptional. According to Viscount Perceval who was present, it was ‘of greater importance than any tryall ever known in this or any other kingdom.’ But what really attracted attention was James Annesley’s allegation that in 1727, the year he became heir to the earldom, his uncle had had him kidnapped and shipped to America as an indentured servant, and thereby stolen the title.

Gilbert Adair

Cast a long shadow

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Many years ago I invited a young student of mine to see Psycho, a film of which she had never heard, made by a director (Hitchcock) with whose name she was unfamiliar and shot in a format (black-and-white) whose apparent old-fashionedness so mystifed her she wondered aloud why no one thought to complain to the projectionist. Yet, shrieking on cue at all the spooky moments, she ultimately admitted to having been so bowled over by the film that she asked what other Hitchcocks she ought to see. I recommended North by Northwest — only subsequently to learn, to my stupefaction, that she had found it boring. Boring? The most euphoria-inducing comedy thriller in cinema history? I asked her why. ‘Well,’ she replied. ‘I was under the impression he made horror movies.

Aidan Hartley

Entrance exam

Wild life

Before disembarking at Bulawayo airport I stuffed the book I was reading in the front-seat pocket. It was Peter Godwin’s fine When a Crocodile Eats the Sun. I did not want to be carrying anything that might identify me as a subversive — or a foreign correspondent. Mugabe’s Zanu-PF goons threatened two-year jail sentences for Western journalists entering Zimbabwe illegally. Most hacks went in pretending to be ornithologists. My best friend Jonathan Clayton had arrived in Bulawayo with a set of golf clubs. He was rumbled, blindfolded and beaten. They threw him into a succession of overcrowded cells where, despite the chill nights, starving inmates stripped down to their underwear to reduce the infestations of body lice.

25 February 2010

Alex Massie

Newspapers, Mrs Rochester and a Presumption of Literacy

Sometimes, you know, stuff appears in the newspapers that offers just a smidgen of hope. Consider this tidbit from the Guardian's account of the oh-so-entertaining revelations in Andrew Rawnsley's new book. At the time of the botched 2006 attempt to topple Tony Blair: In the middle of the coup, the former welfare minister Frank Field went to No 10 to plead with Blair not to give way to Brown. "You can't go yet. You can't let Mrs Rochester out of the attic," he said. Rawnsley writes: "Blair roared with laughter." The grounds for hope, you see, lie in the fact that the Guardian doesn't feel it necessary to explain the Mrs Rochester reference. The New York Times, by contrast, does. Even on its books pages.

22 February 2010

Alex Massie

Correction of the Day | 22 February 2010

From a New York Times post on David Remnick's forthcoming Obama biography An earlier version of this post misquoted Mr. Remnick on his comparison between the book and a New Yorker article he had previously written. He said the book would not be a “pumped up” version of the article; he did not say that it would not be a “pimped out” version of the article. Actually, like many such books this, while likely to be rather good, will still be both a pumped and pimped out version of the original 12,000 word article.

20 February 2010

Sam Leith

Not ‘a boy-crazed trollop’

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For someone who barely left the house, Emily Dickinson didn’t half cause a lot of trouble. For someone who barely left the house, Emily Dickinson didn’t half cause a lot of trouble. Lives Like Loaded Guns — which combines biographical material, critical readings, and an assessment of the history of her reputation — tells a completely hair-raising story. The Dickinsons were one of the first families of respectable Amherst. Emily and her sister Lavinia — ‘Vinnie’ — lived in one house, Homestead, right next door to her brother Austin, the head of the family, and his wife Sue. Susan Dickinson was a highly intelligent and sensitive woman, bosom friend to Emily. The poet called her ‘Sister’.

Matthew Parris

On our shoulders

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Our politics is such a shallow game that any senior British politician who has read a book is apt to be considered cerebral, and if he has read two, feted as an original thinker. So I had never quite dispelled the suspicion that the nickname ‘Two-Brains’ might have been awarded to David Willetts for no better reason than that he knew his stuff, could talk like an academic, had a lively sense of the complexities of things, and sounded a little vague. I had wondered whether he might be one of those men to whom the learned footnote meant more than the useful conclusion. This book goes a long way towards dispelling such suspicions. The Pinch is a powerful personal credo, a mine of information, and a solid and remorseless argument.

Judith Flanders

Riding for a fall

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Many attempts have been made to portray the ‘Roaring Twenties’, or the ‘Gilded Nineties’, or the something-or-other sometime-else, but in truth the 1930s is one of the few decades that fits neatly into a nice round summary, with the Great Depression at one end, the second world war at the other. Many attempts have been made to portray the ‘Roaring Twenties’, or the ‘Gilded Nineties’, or the something-or-other sometime-else, but in truth the 1930s is one of the few decades that fits neatly into a nice round summary, with the Great Depression at one end, the second world war at the other. The 1920s had seen a sharp recovery from a war in which 30 per cent of all men aged 20–24 had died.

David Davis

The great bailout

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Hank Paulson’s new book is called On the Brink, but it could well have been entitled Over the Edge. Hank Paulson’s new book is called On the Brink, but it could well have been entitled Over the Edge. The story of his role as US Treasury Secretary throughout the great banking crash of 2008–9 gives an impression of people being swept along by a swirling chaos of unexpected events, often completely out of control. ‘This is the economic equivalent of war,’ Paulson said in the middle of the financial crisis in 2008, scrambling to find a resolution for AIG before the insurance behemoth brought down the entire economy. Warfare is certainly what it felt like.

Malcolm Deas

The ghost of an egoist

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Very long books appear at intervals about Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Rarely do they contain anything both significant and new, and they get longer and longer. This one too is a long book, though it is mercifully an abridgement of the original Spanish edition, which ran to over 1,400 pages. Anything in it both significant and new has escaped me. Most of it is about Castro’s childhood, youth, the overthrow of Batista and the early years of the revolution: Castro gave up smoking many years ago, but here he is still puffing away. All the same, it provokes thoughts. The first is that it confirms the view that history or biography is best written straight, and that funny business should always be avoided.

Andrew Taylor

From gloom to dispair

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In little more than a decade, the cosy world of Anglo-American crime fiction has been transformed by wave after wave of Scandinavian invaders. Some, like Steig Larsson, are suddenly parachuted into the bestseller lists almost before we have had time to become aware of their existence. Others, like Iceland’s Arnaldur Indridason and Norway’s Karin Fossum, advance steadily but less dramatically in terms of sales and critical plaudits. And then there’s Henning Mankell, the Swedish commander-in-chief of the invading forces, who deserves a category to himself. He is a distinguished playwright, publisher and children’s author, who has a long and honourable record of supporting charitable causes, especially in Africa.

Andrew Taylor

I smell a rat

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The Diary of Miss Idilia presents the reader with an unusual problem. The writing is entirely comprehensible, the tale it tells couldn’t be easier to follow. The tricky bit, though, comes with trying to work out what on earth the book is. In 1851, 17-year-old Idilia Dubb was on holiday in the Rhineland with her middle-class Edinburgh family when one morning she disappeared. A lengthy search found nothing, and her parents returned home. Then, in 1860, workmen restoring Lahneck castle outside Coblenz discovered her remains at the top of a seemingly inaccessible tower.

13 February 2010

Victoria Lane

An 80-year-old mystery

Features

‘The older I get, the more inclined I am to say those three words: I don’t know,’ says Baroness Rendell of Babergh. She turns 80 this week, and seems milder in person than in her writing. In photographs, too, she looks a bit haughty and forbidding, with incredible Ming the Merciless eyebrows. But the door was opened by a smallish woman with a sandy helmet of hair, a quizzical expression and an illuminating smile that appears from nowhere and sends her features skywards. The mouth, the eyebrows, the hair — everything lifts, as though she has stuck her finger in a socket. She has written, she estimates, about 70 books: her output is catching up with her years.

Paul Johnson

A dangerous fellow

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Do we need another huge life of Arthur Koestler? He wrote a great deal about himself, including three autobiographical works: Spanish Testament (1937), describing his experience as a death-row prisoner of General Franco, Arrow in the Blue (1952) and The Invisible Writing (1954). He also contributed to The God that Failed, the fascinating collection of testimonies by former Communists which Dick Crossman edited in 1949. He and his last wife wrote an unfinished joint memoir, published a year after their deaths as Stranger on the Square (1984). An ex-wife, Mamaine, contributed a volume, Living with Koestler (1985). Then a quarter-century after his death came a large-scale 640-page biography entitled Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind by David Cesarani (1998).

Susan Hill

Unhelpful issues

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It would not have been so easy to describe what Joanna Trollope’s early novels were ‘about’ in a few words, but recently she has been writing what the Americans call ‘issue books’, and they can be more readily encapsulated. It would not have been so easy to describe what Joanna Trollope’s early novels were ‘about’ in a few words, but recently she has been writing what the Americans call ‘issue books’, and they can be more readily encapsulated. The Other Family is about just that — a man who has, or had, two of them.

Ian Thomson

Survivor syndrome

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In late middle age, William Styron was struck by a disabling illness, when everything seemed colourless, futile and empty to him. In fact, as he recalled in Darkness Visisble (1990), he was suicidally depressed. So when he died in 2006, at the age of 81, it was assumed he had taken his life. His father, a Virginia-born engineer, had, moreover, been a depressive himself, and maybe a suicidal tendency had transmitted down the generation, like a dangerous gene? In reality, the author of Sophie’s Choice had died of pneumonia, complicated by alcoholism and addiction to tranquilisers. A lifelong malcontent, Styron indeed had few reasons to be cheerful.

Christopher Woodward

A dramatic streak

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Late in the 19th century, archaeologists digging in the Roman Forum discovered a lime kiln. It had been built to incinerate marble into an aggregate for the mortar for the new structures of the Middle Ages. Inside were statues of six Vestal Virgins, stashed together like firewood. Their arms had been snapped off. The image came to mind as I read this excellent new book on the artist John Armstrong (1893-1975). In the 1930s he painted a series of ruined streets, with broken statues and broken monuments. They are bare and stark, and there is nothing like them in 20th-century British art. The first Armstrong I saw stopped me short: ‘Phoenix, 1938’, in Leeds City Art Gallery. When the guard turned I took a photograph, and still have the bright blue slide.

Jonathan Sumption

Weighed in the balance

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We sanctify some expressions, and in the process empty them of meaning. ‘Democracy’, ‘freedom’ or ‘equality’ are all used in ways that beg more questions than they answer. As Orwell pointed out, those who reject the concepts have a habit of appropriating the words. And so it is with the ‘rule of law’. At a time when the arbitrary power of the state has rapidly increased in most western countries, the ‘rule of law’ is invoked more than ever. Is it any more than another august slogan? Tom Bingham, one of the greatest English judges of the past century, presided over the Judicial Committee of the House of Lords for eight years until his retirement in 2008.

A.N. Wilson

Before she was a novelist

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‘It’s hard in letters quite to hit the mean between being earnest and sounding damn silly’ — as Iris Murdoch admits on page 205 of this book. ‘It’s hard in letters quite to hit the mean between being earnest and sounding damn silly’ — as Iris Murdoch admits on page 205 of this book. It is extraordinary to read these journals and letters written by Murdoch in her very early twenties. Her tone of voice, and the preoccupations, and the turns of phrase are exactly as they were when I, a shy teenager, first met her in her late forties. Even her handwriting — reproduced in the end papers — is the same as it was then.

Charlotte Moore

A slave to her past

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It is to Andrea Levy’s credit that for this, her eagerly-awaited fifth novel, she adopts a narrative approach strikingly different from that of the best-selling, prize-winning, televised Small Island. It is to Andrea Levy’s credit that for this, her eagerly-awaited fifth novel, she adopts a narrative approach strikingly different from that of the best-selling, prize-winning, televised Small Island. The Long Song is also an historical fiction, but it is as much a critique of the way history is made and distorted as it is an evocation of time and place. Miss July was born a slave on a Jamaican sugar plantation.

Alexander Starritt

An affable tour guide

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In mentioning Heinrich the Fowler, 10th-century King of the Germans and one of the many obscure figures who appears in his book, Simon Winder describes a painting in the Hall of Electors in Frankfurt. A product of the historicising 19th century, it is part of a series of German monarchs stretching from Charlemagne to 1806, the first seven centuries of which are ‘simply fantasy’.

6 February 2010

Rian Malan

F.W. de Klerk: a hero of our time

Features

I almost punched an Englishman the other day. We were sitting in a bar, talking about the 20th anniversary of F.W. de Klerk’s Great Leap Forward of 2 February 1990 — the day he rocked the world by announcing that he was about to unban the revolutionary movements, free Nelson Mandela and turn South Africa into a land of peace and justice. I was explaining why I thought de Klerk’s move was an act of heroism almost unparalleled in the history of humankind, but the Englishman didn’t want to know. ‘De Klerk was a loser,’ he said, ‘a racist battered into submission by sanctions, township violence and global isolation, and then forced to do a decent thing that should have been done decades earlier.

Richard Bradford

It happened one summer

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For those unfamiliar with Martin Amis’s short story, ‘What Happened to Me on My Holiday’, written for The New Yorker in 1997, it was a purist exercise in autobiographical fiction; not even the names were changed. For those unfamiliar with Martin Amis’s short story, ‘What Happened to Me on My Holiday’, written for The New Yorker in 1997, it was a purist exercise in autobiographical fiction; not even the names were changed. The Pregnant Widow is a far more complex, troubling piece of work. Amis did indeed spend much of the summer after his second year at Oxford in a castle near the Mediterranean, though not in Tuscany; that would come later.

Philip Hensher

No example to follow

Ahundred years ago, a character in a novel who was keen on music would, like E.M. Forster’s Lucy Honeychurch or Leo- nard Bast, be as apt to stumble through a piece at the piano as listen to it at a concert. Ahundred years ago, a character in a novel who was keen on music would, like E. M. Forster’s Lucy Honeychurch or Leo- nard Bast, be as apt to stumble through a piece at the piano as listen to it at a concert. Given the relative- ly rare opportunities to hear a Brahms or Beethoven symphony before the invention of the LP, the easiest way to enjoy one was probably to play it in piano duet reduction.

Anne Chisholm

An institution to love and cherish

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Books about marriage, like the battered old institution itself, come in and out of fashion with writers, readers and politicians, but never quite die away. These two, from the latest crop, are by women in early middle age, both experienced journalists with several books behind them; but Elizabeth Gilbert, a chirpy American describing herself as ‘a cross between a golden retriever and a barnacle’, is flamboyantly personal and unacademic, while the quietly British Kate Figes is a careful, responsible researcher and interviewer who keeps her own marital history to the margins. All the more surprising, then, to find that their attitudes to marriage have a certain amount in common.

John Preston

A couple of drifters

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Paul Torday was 59 when his first novel, the highly acclaimed Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, was published in 2006. Since then, he can barely have stepped away from his keyboard. The Hopeless Life of Charlie Summers is his fourth novel and it represents a return to the comic tone of Salmon Fishing. Or at least it does in part. There are scenes of high comedy here, but some pretty dark swirls too. And hanging over the whole book is the question of what makes for a fulfilled life. The narrator, Hector Chetwode-Talbot — known, mercifully as ‘Eck’ — is a former soldier who has drifted into the City.

Tim Congdon

Bank-bashing with a vengeance

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Over the decades of (relative) macroeconomic stab- ility in the second half of the 20th century, profit-seeking com- mercial banks and state-owned central banks worked together to lower the cash-to-asset ratios in the banking industry. An understanding grew that profitable and well-capitalised commercial banks should be able to borrow cash from the central bank if they had trouble maintaining a positive cash reserve balance. The associated arrangements were technical and complex, and were of no interest whatever to politicians and journalists. Fashionable economic commentators regarded them, or rather ignored them, as the municipal drainage of the financial system.

30 January 2010

Allan Massie

Writing of, or from, yourself

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'All literature is, finally, autobiographical’, said Borges. ‘Every autobiography becomes an absorbing work of fiction’, responded H. L. Mencken, though not, you understand, directly. Certainly the fictional element in autobiography is evident; Trollope thought that nobody could ever tell the full truth about himself, and A. S. Byatt has said that ‘autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction’. An exaggeration, perhaps, but one with a kernel of truth. Borges’s remark must, however, set any novelist pondering. In the most immediate sense it appears to be untrue. ‘What about invention?’ we may cry, ‘what about the imagination?

Raymond Carr

Double vision | 30 January 2010

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Thomas Babington Macaulay’s early essays in the Edinburgh Review were an immediate success, and soon made him a respected figure in Whig society. Thomas Babington Macaulay’s early essays in the Edinburgh Review were an immediate success, and soon made him a respected figure in Whig society. In 1830 Lord Lansdowne offered him a seat in parliament for the rotten borough of Calne. In 1848 he published the first volume of his History of England from the Accession of James II. It was an instant bestseller. He gave his readers a flattering image of themselves. The Whig Revolution of 1688 had made the English ‘the greatest and most highly civilised people that ever the world saw’. By 1857, when he was raised to the peerage, he had become a National Treasure.