Books Archives

Love between the lines

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Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, edited by Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton Why does this book need to exist? It’s a legitimate question — the correspondence of both these poets has been published in generous selected editions — but an easy one to answer. Quite apart from the fact you’d need prehensile thumbs to follow their exchanges properly through those two fat volumes, the unexpurgated version gives you not only ease but texture: their ‘helter-skelter shop-talk’; gossip about Ezra Pound and Marianne Moore and Randall Jarrell; Lowell ‘exhaustingly’ changing his typewriter ribbons; Bishop getting ‘some of a very old & liquefied jelly bean’ stuck to her letter.

Robert Cooper

Recent audio books | 22 November 2008

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To some of us solitude may be sitting on a park bench amidst a bustling city. To Trond Sander, seclusion is a rickety forest cabin in the far east of Norway. For company his only companion is his dog, Lyra. Isolation is 67-year-old Trond’s chosen existence — ‘all my life I have longed to be alone in a place like this’. Do not think for one moment that Out Stealing Horses is in any aspect claustrophobic or disheartening — quite the contrary. Although Trond has recently lost his wife and sister, this is an entirely gloom-free novel. Law-abiders and lovers of our four-legged friends can also rest easy, as no horses were stolen in the making of this novel.

19 November 2008

Paul Johnson

And Another Thing | 19 November 2008

Any other business

Now that I am in my 81st year I have been wondering what to do about my art library, which has more or less taken over my country house in Over Stowey and occupies all the available space there. I originally began collecting it seriously 30 years ago, to help me write a general history of art. That has long been completed and published. But the books, most of them huge, remain, and make the white-painted, floor-to-ceiling shelves, all made by a local carpenter, groan in patient submission. Books are such heavy things, especially art books printed on glazed paper. My house is full now, so I have scaled down my purchases, buying chiefly the big catalogues of important exhibitions held in London, Paris or New York. But there are exceptions.

The Spectator

Books Of The Year | 19 November 2008

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A further selection of the best and worst books of 2008 , chosen by some of our regular reviewers Ferdinand Mount I’m not sure quite what it is that captivated me about Tim Winton’s novel, Breath (Hamish Hamilton, £14.99). It’s a sort of Huck Finn goes surfing in Australia. A scrawny kid bums along the coast in search of the ultimate wave and falls under the spell of Sando, the mysterious wizard of the surfboard. Not my scene, to put it mildly, but it is queerly compelling and I can still taste the spray. Mick Imlah’s The Lost Leader (Faber, £9.99) well deserved its Forward Poetry Prize.

Jonathan Sumption

New light on a dark age

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Millennium: The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom, by Tom Holland Millennia, like centuries, are artificial quantities, mathematical nothings. Medieval men may not have shared our obsession with marking the years in round numbers. But they had much the same desire to bring form and structure to a history that might otherwise be a mere jumble of events. Chronicles traditionally began at the Creation. All history was a divinely ordained cycle concluding with the last trump. Men lived under the perpetual threat of extinction. Apocalyptic writers of the age were remarkably precise about how it would happen. There would be natural calamities, human catastrophes, plague and mass-murder. Antichrist would come to reign on earth. Then all would be extinguished by the Second Coming.

Alan Strachan

Not always a saint

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On her sole experience of sharing a stage with Sybil Thorndike the redoubtable old dragon, Marie Tempest, found all her scene-stealing tricks foiled by her co-star. Hear- ing of Thorndike’s later damehood she muttered: ‘That’s what comes of playing saints’. Thorndike was, of course, always associated with Saint Joan from her first portrayal of Shaw’s heroine in 1924 through revivals at home and overseas to her final encounter with the role in her eighties on radio, that matchless voice still silver-toned. Other saints included Teresa of Avila along with women carrying a nimbus of sanctity or the mystic — Katharine of Aragon, Edith Cavell and a memorable Mrs Moore in a stage version of A Passage to India.

Harriet Sergeant

Three men and a singer

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Ian Buruma’s latest book, The China Lover, is a fictionalised take on themes previously examined in his impressive body of non-fictional work. His views on Japan, its history, films and underworld as well as the role of the outsider, the relationship between East and West and much more are all unpacked here as we follow the life of the teenage singer and actress, Yoshiko Yamaguchi. She takes us on a tour of Manchuria and Shanghai in the 1930s, Japan during the American Occupation and, finally, Lebanon in the 1970s. These are periods and places that Buruma knows intimately and writes about with confidence. Yamaguchi’s story is told from the perspective of three men who encounter her at different periods of her life.

James Delingpole

Extraordinarily ordinary

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I see from the cover of this book that at least three reviewers had kind words to say about Gordon Brown’s previous effort. ‘Very moving,’ the Guardian wrote. ‘Readable and intelligent,’ alleged the Sunday Times. ‘Trust me: this is a fine book,’ claimed The Spectator. Perhaps they were being polite because the author is not a professional writer, or because all his royalties will go to charity. Perhaps Courage was a dramatically better book. Wartime Courage, though, is lame. And I’m not just saying that because Gordon Brown’s economic incompetence has caused me such misery.

Hugh Brogan

Myth-maker at work

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The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington, by Jennet Conant It is a curious fact, not enough appreciated, that the qualities which make men successful entrepeneurs — imagination, courage, energy, ambition and so on — can be nearly useless in politics, diplomacy and war. Thus, William Stephenson, a rich Canadian businessman, was set up in New York (or set himself up) as one of Britain’s leading intelligence agents during the second world war. His principal achievement, for good or ill, was his contribution to the establishment of the OSS, forerunner of the CIA. ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan was a close friend.

Jonathan Keates

Grandmother’s footsteps

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The Island that Dared, by Dervla Murphy Up the airy mountain, down the rushy glen, where the deuce can we go without Dervla Murphy getting there before us? This miracle of ubiquity has rattled from end to end of the Andes, tracked the Indus to its source, ridden a mule through Ethiopia and a bicycle across Romania. If her curiosity, stamina and resourcefulness are remarkable, so too is her modesty, a virtue not always uppermost among travel-writers. She demands no special praise from us for having endured the rigours of her various journeys and this lack of ego-preening lends a greater authenticity to the overall atmosphere.

Joanna Kavenna

Top of the world

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Late Nights on Air comes daubed with the usual eulogies, yet this is one book that truly merits the ecstatic blurb and more besides. It is Elizabeth Hay’s third novel, after A Student of Weather (2000) and Garbo Laughs (2003), both of which have been lauded in her native Canada and, to a lesser degree, beyond. Late Nights on Air is set largely in the mid-Seventies, in Yellowknife, the main town of Canada’s Northwest Territories. Harry Boyd, edging into his forties, has failed elsewhere, and has come to lick his wounds at the local radio station where his career began.

Philip Hoare

Where did the joke end?

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Lord Berners, by Peter Dickinson Lord Berners spent his life with his reputation preceding him. Lovingly fictionalised as ‘Lord Merlin’, he of the multicolour dyed pigeons in Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, less sympathetically rendered as ‘Titty’ in Harold Nicolson’s Some People, Sir Gerald Hugh Tyrwitt-Wilson, 14th Baron Berners (1883-1950), suffered forever from a status imposed from outside. As a composer, painter, novelist, poet and parodist, Berners’s dilemma was diagnosed accurately by Harold Acton: ‘Had he been less versatile he would have been less charming but more profound’.

Jane Ridley

A scandalous woman

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Lady Worsley’s Whim, by Hallie Rubenhold There is a magnificent portrait by Reynolds at Harewood House in Yorkshire of Lady Worsley. She wears a sweeping red riding habit, she looks self-assured and alert, and she holds a riding crop as an allusion to her skill as a horsewoman. In reality, as Hallie Rubenhold’s book vividly reveals, Lady Worsley was one of the most scandalous women of her day, the subject of the first squalid celebrity divorce. Lady Worsley, who rejoiced in the odd first name of Seymour, was a massive heiress. She inherited a fortune of over £60 million in today’s money from her father, Sir John Fleming, who owned a farm in the London suburb of Brompton. Aged 18, she married a wealthy, socially ambitious baronet named Sir Richard Worsley.

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 19 November 2008

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Chekhov originally wrote the dramatic monologue, On The Harmful Effects of Tobacco, in 1886, and substantially revised it for a second version of 1902 shortly before his death. It deals with Ivan Ivanovitch Nyukhin, a hen-pecked husband who delivers a lecture (at the request of his wife) on the evils of smoking. The play has largely been ignored by Chekhov scholars in the West, despite the fact that the original version was popular in Russia in the 1880s as a farce: it was only published in translation in 1954, and appeared in the edition shown above in 1977.

15 November 2008

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 15 November 2008

The Spectator's Notes

My old friend ‘Posh Ed’ Stourton begins his new book about political correctness (It’s a PC World, Hodder and Stoughton) with an anecdote about the Queen Mother. She told him, in private, that the EEC would never work, because of all those ‘Huns, Wops and Dagoes’. Ed was displeased: ‘I thought that what she had said was nasty and ugly.’ He thinks what upset him was that the ‘ghastly old bigot’ (a bit of ageism in that description?) was expressing racist sentiments. I choose to interpret the matter rather differently. What really shocked him, I suggest, is that the Queen Mother forgot two basic points of etiquette to observe when one has the privilege of talking to members of the BBC family.

Charles Sprawson

‘The college of God’s gift’

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The only man from Dulwich College I have ever known, or met, was a master at my school, M. H. Bushby. A distinguished cricketer at Dulwich, he went on to captain Cambridge. Here he is described, in later life, as a ‘much respected and much loved housemaster’, so my attitude to Dulwich has always been entirely favourable, though all I knew of it was its vague outline on the edge of the South Circular road, a distant palazzo surrounded by extensive playing fields. This monumental volume, beautifully produced by the college, leaves nothing out. Old boys of Dulwich are known as Old Alleynians because of its founder in 1619, Edward Alleyn, who played all those ‘over-reaching’ heroes in Marlowe’s plays.

Allan Massie

Author! Author!

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Malcolm Lowry liked to quote the Spanish philosopher, Ortega y Gasset, who saw Man’s life as a sort of novel, made up as you go along. Certainly there are times when life aspires to the condition of fiction. The story of Peter Mandelson, George Osborne, Nat Rothschild and the Russian oligarch might have been written by several novelists. Somerset Maugham, for instance, would have told it straight, dead-pan, through his favourite disillusioned, mildly cynical, narrator — old Mr Maugham himself, scarcely disguised — and would have presented it as an example of human folly. His focus would have been on Osborne, depicted as a callow young man of dangerous sincerity.

Adam Nicolson

Out of his shell

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Notes from Walnut Tree Farm, by Roger Deakin, edited by Alison Hastie and Terence Blacker The writer, Robert Macfarlane, said of his friend, Roger Deakin, that everything Deakin had ever said tended ‘towards diffidence, an abrogation of the self’. It was a fierce verdict. Not a denial of the self or even a suppression of it but an abrogation, an annulment or cancellation of who he was. Macfarlane meant it as no criticism. He loved and even revered Deakin and Deakin, by his own account, replied, quoting Keats that ‘We should rather be the flower than the bee’, that the recipient, the quietist, whose governing quality was an alert passivity, was the man of virtue.

Byron Rogers

The mannikins don’t walk

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All in the Mind, by Alastair Campbell It was a good idea. You start with a psychiatrist, and not any psychiatrist, but a professor of psychiatry, a man ‘widely viewed as one of the best psychiatrists in the business’, specialising in the treatment of depression; then you give him a caseload of depressives, and not any depressives, but a Balkan rape-victim, an alcoholic English Cabinet Minister, an immigrant forced into prostitution, a young woman hideously scarred by fire, a successful barrister caught out in his adulteries; and you see him as they see him, calm, omniscient, dispensing advice and hope. Then you have him crack up. It was a very good idea.

Philip Ziegler

Strength in numbers

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My Three Fathers, by Bill Patten The mother to match Bill Patten’s three fathers was Susan Mary Jay. The Jays were cosmopolitan and very grand: they sent their sons to Eton and hobnobbed with the likes of the Mouchys and Boni de Castellane. They would have considered their fellow-Americans of The Ambassadors or Portrait of a Lady dowdily provincial. When Susan Mary took up with Bill Patten senior it was felt that she was marrying, not beneath her socially, since Patten was connected with all the right people, but beneath what should have been her aspirations. Patten, affable, intelligent, a victim of asthma and almost entirely without ambition, could not provide either the glamour or the stature which a Jay might legitimately expect.

Pj Kavanagh

Tough love

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A Prickly Affair, by Hugh Warwick At a time when most of his fellow-mystics deplored this sinful world and longed to leave it, 17th-century Thomas Traherne ecstatically celebrated the world and confirmed his religious faith by observing its wonders. ‘The Ant is a great Miracle in a little room . . . its Limbs and Members are as Miraculous as those of a Lion or Tygre.’ Of late there has been an astonishing number of books that advocate this enthusiasm, this particularity — a book about the behaviour of rooks, a book about a single, nearly tame rook, even ‘conversations’ with particular trees. Now it is hedgehogs.

Andro Linklater

Nine-year wonder

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The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age, edited by Neil Harris Think quiz. ‘A crescent-shaped town, 26 miles by 15, along a great lake. An unchallenged murder record — a splendid university — hobo capital to the country — and the finest of grand opera. Altogether the most zestful spectacle on this earth.’ Where are we? In case of doubt, the city’s short-lived house magazine spelled out the answer in 48 point type, ‘Chi - CA - go.’ Actually the emphasis should have been on the Chic, because as demonstrated by this elegant collection of covers, illustrations and stories from The Chicagoan, in its heyday Chicago was the most stylish, exciting and quintessentially American of all the cities that encircle the United States landmass.

Andro Linklater

Money? It’s only human

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The Ascent of Money, by Niall Fergusson New from Niall Ferguson: the book of the film, or rather, of the series. At any moment now his financial history of the world will take to the small screen and emerge on Channel Four. Programmers and publishers have learned to synchronise these things. It will be a brave effort, all the same, because finance is not exactly popular just now and has always been unresponsive to film. When Bank Rate comes down, television news producers fall back on a stock picture of the Bank of England, looking like a cheese-mould with a graph imposed on it. Ferguson helps them out by setting scenes.

14 November 2008

The Spectator

Live chat with Philip Hensher – starting soon

Our live chat with the Booker-nominated author Philip Hensher will be kicking off in about fifteen minutes over at the online Book Club. So, if you're a fan of Philip's work, a bibliophile or just stuck for something to do, do come and join us between 19:30 and 20:15. You can take part by clicking on to this page.

13 November 2008

Alex Massie

Four Characters in Search of an Author

In his latest Life&Letters column for the Spectator, my father has some fun imagining how different novelists might have treated the Curious Affair of Mandelson, Osbourne, Deripaska and Rothschild. For instance: Somerset Maugham, for instance, would have told it straight, dead-pan, through his favourite disillusioned, mildly cynical, narrator — old Mr Maugham himself, scarcely disguised — and would have presented it as an example of human folly. His focus would have been on Osborne, depicted as a callow young man of dangerous sincerity.

12 November 2008

The Spectator

Books Of The Year

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Sam Leith Richard Price’s meaty and fabulously enjoyable police procedural, Lush Life (Bloomsbury, £12.99), is a book I have pressed on a lot of friends. The new Robert B. Parker, Rough Weather (Quercus, £16.99), is bliss, too, because it has Spenser, Hawk and the Gray Man in it. Short stories from Kurt Vonnegut (Armageddon in Retrospect, Cape, £16.99), and Annie Proulx (Fine Just The Way It Is, 4th Estate, £14.99) were moving, funny and wise. In politics, Robert Kagan’s The Return of History and the End of Dreams (Atlantic, £12.

8 November 2008

James Delingpole

The Great Duke and others

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Wellington, by Jane Wellesley There can never be too many biographies of the Duke of Wellington because, like Churchill’s and Nelson’s, his career path is so extraordinary, uplifting, chequered and involving that it reads more like (slightly overwrought) fiction than fact. The first thing you’d give your mildly implausible hero if you were a novelist or Hollywood screenwriter would be a miserable childhood, a sensitive nature and a sense of burning grievance. That way, the audience would like him, identify with him, and feel all the more happy when he triumphed over adversity. So it was with young Arthur Wellesley.

7 November 2008

Alex Massie

Department of Bumper-Stickers

With regard to the previous post, indefatigable commenter NDM has this to say: John Galt's The Member and The Radical, available in a handy combined edition from Canongate, are also interesting on this topic. Talking of Galt, I was once driving along one of America's more boring interstates when I saw a bumper sticker with "Ask me, who is John Galt?" I'm thinking why does this car have a bumper sticker about a long-dead and not overly fashionable Scottish novelist. At that time I didn't know about the ever-fashionable Ayn Rand cult. Readers are invited to supply further examples of bumper-sticker confusion.

5 November 2008

The Spectator

Welcome to the Spectator Book Club

Earlier this week, we launched the online Spectator Book Club. You can access it by clicking here; clicking on the Book Club tab at the top of any Spectator.co.uk page; or by entering new.spectator.co.uk/books into your address bar. Once there, you'll find a host of content to satisfy even the most ardent booklover - from a discussion board and Book of the Month choices, to live chats with authors and a directory of local booksellers. This month's Book of the Month is Richard Holmes's 'The Age of Wonder', while the Live Chat will be with the Booker-nominated Phillip Hensher. Click here and here for more information. Spectator Book Club is also hosting a monthly competition, by which you can get your writing in the print edition of The Spectator.