Books Archives

One out of five

Nocturnes is a collection of five longish short stories, four about musicians and a fifth about friends who once bonded over musical tastes. As the title neatly suggests, the book is filled with characters living in obscurity; the stories are populated by people, often musicians, who have been forced to downgrade their ambitions dramatically. While the title also suggests classical music, however, jazz and its related forms feature more prominently. The standout success among the five is ‘Malvern Hills’, which features a university drop-out who is trying (like countless others) to write songs, while helping out at his sister’s café in Worcestershire.

Martin Jacomb

Nor all that glisters

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Fool’s Gold, by Gillian Tett Millions of words and scores of official reports on the credit crisis have poured out. There has been no shortage of criticism, especially from political leaders eager to deflect responsibility from themselves. The catastrophe is a man-made disaster, and in years to come historians will ask how it could possibly have been allowed to happen. Gillian Tett’s Fool’s Gold is the book they will turn to. The story she tells reveals in painful detail how credit derivatives came to be invented and then misused on an unimaginable scale. It is a thriller. The idea emerged from a wild weekend party of J. P. Morgan ‘rocket scientists’ (as they used to be called) in 1994 at Boca Raton, a Florida resort.

Christopher Booker

Poisoned spring

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Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo, by Michael McCarthy Wings and Rings: A History of Bird Migration Studies in Europe, by Richard Vaughan On a May night in 1967, walking home down a Dorset farm track, I counted the song of 13 nightingales. Today in those woods no nightingale is heard. For 40 years I visited a bridge on the Dorset Stour to watch sand martins nesting in the riverbank. Since 1984 they have vanished. In 2002 I wrote a letter to the Times, headed ‘The last cuckoo’, to note that for the first time in decades I had not heard the cuckoo arriving on the button (17 April in Dorset, 18 April in Somerset), My letter was not printed.

D.J. Taylor

Trouble at the Imperial

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It was probably a mistake for Monica Ali to call the hero of her third novel Gabriel Lightfoot. The reader thinks of Hardy’s bucolic swains and the reddle-man’s cart disappearing over Egdon Heath, whereas instead there lumbers into view a 42-year-old hotel chef with an incipient bald spot and inadequate leisure. On the other hand, Hardy would doubtless have cocked a knowing eye at the complexities of Gabe’s personal-cum-professional life, the fading nightclub singer avid to marry him and bear his children, and the pair of business associates keen to bankroll a swish Pimlico restaurant with his name above the door.

Sebastian Smee

Home is where the heart is

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Brooklyn, by Colm Tóibín Colm Tóibín’s Brook- lyn is a simple and utterly exquisite novel. The writing is so transparent, so apparently guileless, that I kept wondering what trickery Tóibín had used to keep me so involved, so attached, so unaccountably warmed. The tale’s simplicity is, in a sense, like life’s: an Irish girl called Eilis can’t find good work in her home town of Enniscorthy, so she goes along with a well-intended family conspiracy to send her to a decent job in Brooklyn. It is the early 1950s. Her father is dead. In Brooklyn, she finds her feet and falls in love. But when her older sister dies, she must return to Enniscorthy.

5 May 2009

Alex Massie

Krapp’s Last Sale

From John Banville's TNR review of The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929-40: In London, Beckett considered a number of possible day jobs, toying with the notion of becoming an airline pilot or--wait for it--an advertising copy writer. (There is food for a dinner-party game, devising the jingles that Beckett might have thought up for washing powder or diapers.) Quite so! Readers are therefore invited to suggest advertising copy that could have been written by Mr Beckett...

29 April 2009

The Spectator

Fatal attractions

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The Oxford Despoiler, by Gary Dexter Twisted Wing, by Ruth Newman Windows on the Moon, by Alan Brownjohn The Oxford Despoiler is a collection of eight stories introducing Henry St Liver, a Victorian detective, and his biographer and assistant, Olive Salter. Henry is tall and lean, with a lofty bearing but the habits of the most dishevelled bohemian. Olive drifted to London and met Henry, and in very little time became his invaluable foil. If it sounds familiar, it should, since this is in part a warm and cleverly observed pastiche of the Victorian detective genre and of the Sherlock Holmes stories in particular.

Philip Hensher

Back to the future?

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With the economy in recession, the close attentions of the IMF, taxation rising to punitive levels and a general sense of our having lived beyond our means, reminders of the 1970s are all around us at present. Last week, both the death of the union leader Jack Jones and Alistair Darling’s extraordinary budget in their different ways took us back to the atmosphere of 30 years ago. Andy Beckett’s history of the political engagement of those years comes at a highly opportune time. He rightly focuses not on the familiar popular culture — there is no mention of flared trousers, the Osmonds, platform shoes or space-hoppers — but on the much stranger political landscape of the time.

Caroline Moore

An irresistible highbrow

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The Children’s Book, by A. S. Byatt I should declare an interest. Nineteen years ago, I believe that A. S. Byatt saved the lives of my unborn twins. When I went into premature labour at 22 weeks, I was rushed into hospital, put on a drip, and told it was absolutely vital Not to Panic. Useless advice. So I took to fiction, as narcotics for the unquiet heart and brain. On that first long night, day and night, I read Possession, at a single sitting, or rather lying; and it worked, magnificently. The twins were not born until eight weeks later, and survived. The point of this confession is to remind readers that Byatt’s novels, at their best, are tremendous page-turners. Few other modern novelists could have absorbed me in such circumstances.

Kate Hoey

No longer beautiful

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To some it might seem unbelievable that a goal scored at a football match at Anfield between Arsenal and Liverpool 20 years ago could be the event around which anyone could write an entire book. But this is exactly what Jason Cowley has done. Despite a childhood spent in the East End, and with a West Ham- supporting father, the author has been, from an early age, an avid Arsenal fan and wears his Arsenal shirt under his jacket when standing with his father at Upton Park. This book is certainly not just for Arsenal or Liverpool fans but for all who want to reflect on the huge changes which have taken place in the culture of football over the past 20 years. The watershed year was 1989.

Hugh Cecil

Living the pagan idyll

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For years an intimate friend of my mother Rachel Cecil, Frances Partridge inhabits my memory from early childhood. Before she reached 50, her dark, delicate skin was already seamed with a thousand wrinkles like a very old woman’s, although she remained youthful all her prodigiously long life, retaining an acute power of sympathy. She would ask one searching personal questions and loved arguing, but good-humouredly, despite her strong pacifist and anti-religious convictions which were hotly contested in my home. Her youthfulness showed also in her birdlike gaze and musical, emphatic voice, the hallmark of the Bloomsbury circle with which she was so long associated.

Interconnect

A load of hot air | 29 April 2009

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As a general rule, I do not believe in reviewing bad books. Review space is limited, and the many good books that are published deserve first claim on it. But climate change is such an important subject, and — thanks to heavy promotion by that great publicist, Tony Blair — the Stern Review of the economics of climate change has become so well known (not least to the vast majority who have never read it, among whom in all probability is Mr Blair), that anything from Lord Stern deserves some attention.

25 April 2009

Matthew Parris

Another Voice | 25 April 2009

Columns

Two small professional duties, and as much pleasures as duties, have recently overlapped in an unexpected way. I’ve read a colleague’s book on genetics; and I’ve recorded a BBC programme on the psychoanalyst C.G. Jung. I know of no evidence that Jung took a close interest in genetics; and I imagine a typical modern geneticist would regard Carl Jung’s work as mystical mumbo-jumbo and a branch more of literature than of science; but in the overlap there may be something of interest to both disciplines. Jung was the choice of my guest Ruby Wax for a programme we were recording for future broadcast in my BBC Radio 4 Great Lives series.

22 April 2009

Justin Cartwright

Zuluboy is here

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South Africa’s Brave New World: The Beloved Country since Apartheid, by R. W. Johnson After the Party: Corruption and the ANC, by Andrew Feinstein I am writing this in Cape Town on the very day that Jacob Zuma is exonerated of all charges of corruption, racketeering and money-laundering — not by a judge, but by an ANC-appointed acting Director of the National Prosecuting Authority. This man defended his decision by claiming that there had been an abuse of due process when the head of the Scorpions anti-corruption unit was recorded by the National Intelligence Agency talking with ANC high-ups, including Thabo Mbeki, about the timing of Zuma’s prosecution. This abuse of process has apparently made the strong case against Zuma unwinnable.

Allister Heath

A predictable guru

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There is only one politician who has emerged from the recession with his reputation enhanced. Yes, you’ve guessed right: I’m referring to Vince Cable, the ubiquitous grey-haired, sober-suited deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats. Even many Tories would feel reassured were Cable, who exudes reasonableness, to become Chancellor; broadcasters with little understanding of finance defer to him, with the BBC treating him as a cross between a living saint and a Nobel laureate in economics. A former chief economist at Shell, he is always at the other end of a mobile phone; journalists know they can count on better copy talking to him than anything on offer from the Tories.

William Leith

Not so special

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Alain de Botton recently said that he’d been congratulated on his prescience for writing a book about the nature of work in these times of economic woe. But he wasn’t prescient, he said — just interested in the subject. He has been pondering it for several years now, in his specific, de Botton-esque style, which is calm and leisurely, and sometimes faux-naif; a killer combination when it works. Here it works; he has pretty much got to the bottom of the subject. In his time, Alain has got to the bottom — or close to the bottom — of several subjects. Love, travel, Marcel Proust, and happiness, to name a few. As a writer, he can be attracted to the paradoxical and the counter-intuitive.

William Feaver

Dilly-dallying romance

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Translated to Borsetshire, John Constable’s courtship of Maria Bicknell would provide more material than any script editor could handle without straining audience impatience beyond endurance. Nine years it took, from initial yearnings and tacit engagement to get them to the altar at St Martin-in-the-Fields and even then, in October 1816, it was the quietest of weddings. Over those years Constable’s ardour was divided. ‘Deplorable as our case is, I would not be without it for the world’, he wrote to his beloved early on when she was at her most inaccessible. That left him plenty of time in which to obsess over his art. Martin Gayford has an eye for emotionally-charged episodes or ‘detailed microbiography’, as he puts it, set in and around art history.

Charlotte Moore

The actress and the orphan

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Ask Alice combines two narratives, one beginning in 1904 in the emptiness of the American Midwest, the other in the muffled stasis of Edwardian rural England. The first follows the swift trajectory of Alice, a pretty orphan from Kansas who thinks ‘it must be fun to go places’. Alice, on the train shuttling between one set of backwoods relations and another, is waylaid by a predatory travelling salesman named Drouett; before long she really is ‘going places’. Alice is an adventuress, a red-haired opportunist, a Becky Sharp without the wit.

Dan Jones

The long and the short of it

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An apocryphal housemaster is asked, on the occasion of his retirement, how he intends to fill his days. ‘Gibbon,’ he replies, succinctly. Real-life housemasters might now answer ‘Sumption’. Such is the intimidating length and fine detail of Jonathan Sumption QC’s history of the Hundred Years War. Divided Houses is the third volume. The Hundred Years War was not a single war, nor did it last for 100 years. Rather it was a long and wearisome period of mutual hostility and violence between England and France, which lasted from the 1330s until the 1450s. Scotland, Wales, the German principalities, the Iberian kingdoms, the Italian city states and the papacy were all dragged in at various moments. It was in every sense a bloody mess.

18 April 2009

Interconnect

Henry’s VIII’s Psalter

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In this illumination from Henry’s VIII’s Psalter, the young David prepares to confront Goliath. In this illumination from Henry’s VIII’s Psalter, the young David prepares to confront Goliath. Dressed in Tudor costume, he wears a soft black hat with a white feather brim, similar to that worn by Henry in the famous Holbein portrait in Whitehall. Goliath is modelled on Pope Paul III, who excommunicated the ‘heretic’ King in 1538. David’s victory over Goliath is thus directly analagous to Henry’s ‘liberation’ of England from servitude to Rome. From Charlemagne onwards, European monarchs identified themselves with King David. But Henry had a better claim than most to do so.

Matthew Dennison

The day the music died

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An earnest young man upbraids his singing teacher. ‘Why don’t you sing classical more often?’ It is Bombay in the early Eighties. The young man’s father has enjoyed a successful career in management, with the result that ‘his childhood had been almost entirely chauffeur-driven’. His singing teaching, peddling remarkable gifts to earn an unremarkable living in the rambunctious city in which his talent is only one among many, is older and pragmatic. You cannot practise art on an empty stomach. Let me make enough money from these lighter forms; and then I’ll be able to devote myself entirely to classical. The argument is not a new one.

16 April 2009

Toby Young

Leave Derek alone

Reading these “reviews” of Derek Draper’s new book on Amazon.co.uk, I’m beginning to feel a bit sorry for him. Yes, he’s made some silly mistakes, but I’m not sure he deserves quite such a beating. Watching someone being turned into a national hate figure is never pretty and in this case the moral opprobrium being heaped on Derek’s head seems a tad excessive. If he’d gone ahead and published the anti-Conservative smears on an anonymous website that would have been one thing. But he didn’t. All he did was describe them as “brilliant”. I can understand why Guido Fawkes has gone after him.

15 April 2009

Eric Anderson

Tales out of school

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The Old Boys’ Network, by John Rae At Westminster School, under the shadow of Big Ben and at the very centre of national life, 600 of the brightest, quirkiest and most stimulating boys and girls in the country spar with teachers of similar character. Results are spectacular. The difficulty for the headmaster, however, is that by long tradition some of the governors and a great number of those who teach at Westminster have little time for headmasters. So he treads a thorny path, saying to himself, as John Rae confesses to his diary: ‘I am lucky to be here, but my days are numbered.’ Actually Rae survived in the job from 1970 to 1986. These extracts from his diaries, put together just before his death two years ago, remind us what a time of change it was.

Richard Shone

From worthless to priceless

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A combination of art history ‘lite’ and the personal touch — a common yoking together these days, even in books supposedly of art history ‘full strength’ — makes for, in Philip Hook’s hands, an engaging read. As a dealer and auctioneer, and the author of several thrillers, he has advantages not given to the general run of such investigative writers. His subject is the rise of French Impressionist painting, after its initial years of critical contempt and commercial failure, to international mass appeal and soaring value. It’s a familiar story, frequently told, and a reader looking for new light on the fortunes of Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Sisley et al. will search in vain. Where Hook scores is in his practical experience.

Toby Young

Fame is still the spur

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In The Frenzy of Renown, Leo Braudy’s magisterial study of fame and its history, he identifies the principal allure of being a celebrity: ‘In the heart of the fan and the famous alike, fame is a quiet place where one is free to be what one really is, one’s true, unchanging essence.’ The belief that you can only become fully realised in the glare of the media spotlight is, of course, an illusion. In fact, the opposite is true. Far from enhancing the personality, fame corrodes it. Responsible adults are reduced to an infantile state in which the sole purpose of others is to satisfy their needs. As John Updike said, ‘Fame is a mask that eats into the face.

14 April 2009

Alex Massie

Damn those ugly sociopathic nerds and their squalid ejaculations!

Imagine that, until now, the only books you'd been able to read were those that had been carefully selected by your parents and that, not surprisingly, these were books of a type that your parents approved of, written by authors who, for want of a better word, they considered sound. These books weren't necessarily bad, you understand, but the more you read the more you began to wonder if this was the only type of book there was and these the only perspectives ever committed to paper. Imagine how you might feel, then, if you were suddenly freed from this prescribed reading diet and handed a pass to the British Library. You might be amazed at the variety on offer and bewildered by the sheer range of subjects waiting to be discovered.

7 April 2009

Robert Salisbury

Looking back without anger

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Margaret MacMillan’s Peacemakers deservedly attracted the highest praise. It was illuminating and a compelling read. Equally, her Women of the Raj evoked the lost world of the memsahibs — courag- eous, often narrow and intolerant, but dauntless as they nearly always were. Now, from her eminence as Warden of St Anthony’s College, Oxford, she stands back a little and considers the uses and abuses of history. The result is not a long book — always an attractive characteristic — but it is a worthy one. It will certainly bring back memories for those who, in the mid 20th century, offered a special paper as part of their A-levels or who attempted the Modern History School at Oxford shortly afterwards. Why should we study history? Can we learn anything from it?

Sophie Ward

Puzzling out the past

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How do you write an autobiography without referring to almost anyone else in your life? In The Pattern in the Carpet, Margaret Drabble has done just that, using her interest in jigsaw puzzles to create a ‘hybrid’ book, part memoir, part history. The device allows Drabble to reveal more about herself than any exposé or biographer’s dissection, whilst leading us through the museums and galleries of the world in the search for puzzle trivia. The mildest of pastimes is Drabble’s ostensible subject, but the book is lively with an anguish only partly alleviated by the correct placing of a cardboard shape. As a child, Margaret Drabble would lie on her back and contemplate infinity ‘quite faint with my own stupidity and desire’.

Bevis Hillier

Shrine of a connoisseur

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Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, by Tim Knox, photographs by Derry Moore Sir John Soane’s Museum is very nearly a folly — a mad grotto in the midst of Georgian London. It is clearly the monument of someone both eccentric and egocentric. What saves it from being Hearst Castle, Liberace’s palace or Michael Jackson’s Neverland, is that its creator was a great architect — the Bank of England was his masterpiece. In the early 1790s Soane and his rich wife bought No. 12 Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The house was rebuilt to Soane’s designs, and they moved there in 1794.