Books Archives

Overstretched and over there

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Douglas Hurd on James Fergusson’s new book Des Browne, our Defence Secretary, has recently returned from another visit to the British Army in Afghanistan. Once again he issued an optimistic statement on military progress. He should read the devastating account in James Fergusson’s book of his previous visits. The purpose of this excellently written book is to illustrate the gap between the public perception of the war in Afghanistan and the reality of what our servicemen have been enduring on the ground. We were surprised when the Chief of the General Staff, Sir Richard Dannatt, warned us ‘we can’t be here for ever at this level . . .

Charlotte Hobson

Variations on an enigma

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You may have caught Jonathan Dimbleby on television recently travelling across Russia, picking potatoes with doughty Russian women, baring all for a steam bath in Moscow, looking alarmed as a white witch from Karelia promised to heal his bad back with a breadknife, etc. Here is the book of the series, in which Dimbleby, drawing on Churchill, plans to ‘reveal the enigma, unwrap the mystery and solve the riddle’ that is Russia. What is it about Russia that inspires this desire, again and again, in Western Europeans? Why does it matter to us?

Frederic Raphael

Mudslinging in the groves of academe

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Mary Lefkowitz is a distinguished (i.e. no longer young) classicist who taught for over 30 years at Wellesley College. She has been particularly bold and articulate in promoting the role of women in antiquity. Married to Hugh Lloyd-Jones, a famously rigorous ex-Regius Professor of Greek, she can be presumed not to advance lazy arguments or to abuse her sources. Classicists do, of course, get involved in sometimes furious controversy but, in most cases, odium academicum is expressed with barbed courtesy. Civility is part of scholarship. So too, it is nice to imagine, is what one scholar calls ‘decency in proof’. Education is a common pursuit: even great scientists confess to standing on giants’ shoulders.

Caroline Moorehead

A futile solution

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In 1939, the six-year-old Eva Figes escaped Nazi Berlin for London. Her family were secular Jews and her father, who had been arrested after Kristallnacht, had spent some months in Dachau. Left behind were grandparents and two maids, Edith and Schwester Eva, both Jewish: by 1939, it was forbidden for Jews to employ Aryans. Schwester Eva died of typhus in a concentration camp, but Edith turned up in London 10 years later. It is her story that Eva Figes tells in Journey to Nowhere. The by now adolescent Figes did not learn it all at once. But over cups of tea in their kitchen in Hendon, having seen the newsreels of the liberation of Belsen, she slowly drew it out.

Ben Wilson

Giacomo of all trades

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One evening in November 1763 the splendidly named Sir Wellbore Ellis Agar passed a middle-aged Venetian man on Westminster Bridge who, he thought, looked a little glum. Sir Wellbore knew what the stranger needed: ‘a drink, a woman, beef and Yorkshire pudding’. And so he took the 38-year old Casanova to a tavern on Cockspur Street which supplied all these delights of British life. A band of blind musicians was rustled up, so that the orgy would be spared an audience. Casanova found he could only manage the drink; he was fastidious about his food at the best of times, but to his mortification he was too depressed even to enjoy the French dancing girls. Casanova’s visit to London was disastrous, and his humiliation that night crowned a miserable few months.

Francis King

Tangerine dreams

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In 1926, Tessa Codrington’s maternal grandfather, Jack Sinclair, once British Resident in Zanzibar, decided to buy for his wife a house on the ‘New Mountain’ in Tangier. One of Muriel Sinclair’s many eccentricities was that she had no wish to see her grandchildren. In consequence it was not until the old woman’s death that Tessa Codrington, then nine, first visited the house. Subsequently her mother was to give her a smaller house, built by Jack Sinclair, originally an architect, in the spacious grounds of the main one. An eager amateur photographer from her earliest years, Codrington is now a professionally accomplished one. As one turns the pages of this photograph album, one is repeatedly arrested by some striking image.

Allan Massie

Life and Letters | 28 June 2008

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Callimachus (fl. 4th century BC), admired by Catullus, Ovid and Propertius, was the author of some 800 books, including a 120-volume catalogue of the Greek writers whose works were to be found in the famous library of Alexandria. Of his own work, only six hymns, 64 epigrams, the fragment of an epic, and a description of the method he employed to compile his catalogue, survive today. Harvey’s Oxford Companion to Classical Literature also tells us that ‘his is the proverbial saying, “mega biblion, mega kakon” ’, which means, if my rusty Greek has not seized up completely, ‘big book, big bad’, a sentiment to which reviewers, confronted by an 800-page biography, may often give wholehearted assent.

Digby Durrant

Not for insomniacs

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In Sybille Bedford’s book, Jigsaw, a woman who is suffering from insomnia asks for books. ‘Oh, not real books, I couldn’t look at those. Detective stories only.’ So Sayers’ Wimseyland and Christie’s Poirot are required. How would she get on today? Ruth Rendell and P. D James would do excellently but none of these books would do at all: they are all thrillers, packed with blood, murder and mayhem, a nightmare diet. No time for quiet little grey cells to be working away here. Charles Maclean’s Home Before Dark is a particularly disturbing example of the genre.

Mary Kenny

Too close for comfort

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It was the late Lord Deedes who once succinctly explained to me what it was like to live through the second world war. I had said to him, ‘Those Battle of Britain boys were so brave’.And he had replied, almost impatiently, ‘No, it wasn’t bravery we felt. It was a strange, deep, primitive compulsion that we were up against it. We had our backs to the wall. It was us or them.’ To any defender of Irish neutrality during the second world war — among whom I would count myself — the Deedes doctrine explains everything. It particularly illuminates Winston Churchill’s leadership.

Sarah Bradford

A true Renaissance man

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Lorenzo de’ Medici was proverbially ugly. Machiavelli, describing an encounter with a particularly hideous prostitute, compared her looks to his. He was tall, well-made and physically imposing but contemporaries dubbed his features ‘homely’, his face was bony and irregular with a long crooked nose, a jutting pugilistic jaw and dark piercing eyes. In compensation, ‘his intellect and taste’ were outstanding. He wrote poetry in the Tuscan language, read Plato and other classical authors, whom he discussed with his circle of poets and philosophers, discovered the young Michelangelo and patronised Botticelli.

25 June 2008

Victoria Glendinning

Selective breeding

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The ‘entirely fresh view’ of childhood in England presented by Anthony Fletcher in 414 pages of text and apparatus may come to some as a bit of an anti-climax. Although material conditions changed enormously, and children by the end of his period had more toys and books and birthday presents, his 12 years of research have ‘not revealed any grounds for supposing that anything of fundamental importance changed, between 1600 and 1914, in the dynamic of the relationships between English parents and their children’. Not so much ‘entirely fresh’, then, as deep-frozen. He may well be right, at least in relation to his samples, which are made up entirely of families from the landed gentry and the upper professional classes.

21 June 2008

David Crane

A genius but not a hero

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If anyone ever wondered why Marlborough has so seldom enjoyed the reputation his abilities warrant he could do a lot worse than start with Richard Holmes’s new biography. England’s Fragile Genius is probably as comprehensive an account of Marlborough as a single volume can hope to be, and yet at the end of 500-odd closely argued and sympathetic pages he remains so completely the creature of his age in all its factionalism, double dealing and venality, that it is hard to see him ever comfortably fitting the popular notion of the British hero. Even those who dislike Wellington’s politics can hardly deny the consistency or integrity of the man, but Marlborough presents a different range of difficulties.

Adam Zamoyski

Obsessed by Ukraine

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This is the story of a very unusual man. ‘Wilhelm von Habsburg,’ Timothy Snyder tells us, ‘wore the uniform of an Austrian officer, the court regalia of a Habsburg archduke, the simple suit of a Parisian exile, the collar of the Order of the Golden Fleece, and, every so often, a dress. He could handle a sabre, a pistol, a rudder, or a golf club; he handled women by necessity and men for pleasure. He spoke the Italian of his archduchess mother, the German of his archduke father, the English of his British royal friends, the Polish of the country his father wished to rule, and the Ukrainian of the land he wished to rule himself.

Caroline Moore

The irritation of Jean

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The title of Isabel Fonseca’s first novel is promisingly witty: an ‘attachment’ is both a supplement to an e-mail, and a bond of human intimacy; and the main plot of the novel revolves around how the first may destroy the second. Jean Hubbard is a freelance health correspondent, living on a tropical island, from which she files 1,150 words every other Wednesday. Her husband, Mark, runs ‘one of the most innovative ad agencies in London’ (he is certainly innovative in doing so from St Jacques without a computer in the house).

18 June 2008

Jonathan Sumption

Ruthless but ineffective

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Gideon may or may not have overcome the Midianites by superior intelligence. The Book of Judges is a little obscure about that. But there is still something in the old adage that espionage is the second oldest profession. The rules of the game were set out more than six centuries ago in the advice given by one of his councillors to a king of France. Pay your spies well. Never let one of them know about the others. And don’t believe everything that they tell you. It is a good starting point, even today. Yet the profession is dying, progressively bypassed by electronic eavesdropping and satellite photography, and super- seded by computerised analysis. The trend is very ancient.

Shelby Tucker

Flying bison and half a cup of coffee

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The author’s uncle was a concert pianist who harboured a passion for Chopin. He extracted a deathbed promise from his nephew to ‘visit those places Chopin frequented as a young man . . . to better understand the patriotic roots of Chopin’s music’ and implored him ‘to scatter his ashes over the Mazovia plain near Chopin’s birthplace’. This was the genesis of the author’s engagement with Poland. Accepting an assignment to a Swiss-Polish joint venture formed to ‘introduce Polish companies to “the joys of the market economy” ’, he took up residence at its training centre near Warsaw in January 1992: It resembled an abandoned military barracks . . . .

Christian House

A choice of first novels | 18 June 2008

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The ghost of Harry Lime seems to be haunting the publishing houses of London. Graham Greene’s infamous anti-hero may have come to a sticky end in the Viennese sewers but his spirit lives on in several debut novels immersed in the noir world of post-war Europe. Hedi Kaddour’s Waltenburg (Harvill/ Secker, £20) is the most wide-ranging and ambitious of these. The book begins with the maelstrom inflicted on a French cavalry unit during the Great War before coursing through the second world war to the principal narrative of a 1950s CIA operation. The Hotel Waldhaus in the Swiss mountain village of Waltenburg proves the hub around which a German writer, an American singer, a French journalist and a shady, unidentified mole love and betray one another.

John McEwen

The sweetness pictures can add to life

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This is the tribute of a child to a parent, especially commendable when the very concept of fatherhood is threatened; rarer still, the co-authors are themselves artists in their separate fields. Peter Mann is responsible for the pleasing design and photographs, and Sargy Mann has answered his son’s questions to provide an autobiographical text which largely concerns visual perception, ‘not at all straightforward even when you can see’, as Peter Mann says. Jean Renoir’s Renoir, My Father is the prototype. Sargy Mann selected and discussed 27 paintings or series of paintings covering his career and Peter Mann has photographed them as they hang today in private houses. This novel idea is also indebted to Renoir, who told his son: You don’t look at a painting.

Philip Ziegler

Work and sex

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Ordinary mortals marrying into the upper reaches of the Royal Family are usually in for a rough ride. Their best chance seems to be to come from one of those families which privately consider that they are every bit as good as the House of Windsor: Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, Lady Alice Montagu-Douglas-Scott (though the formula proved a conspicuous failure in the case of Lady Diana Spencer). Otherwise they must decide whether they will opt for the deferential role, sidling through life perpetually two steps behind their royal spouse, or try to retain an independent career and existence. To do the latter successfully calls not merely for strength of character but a high degree of tact and patience and a capacity for unobtrusiveness.

14 June 2008

Hugo Rifkind

Shared Opinion | 14 June 2008

Columns

Gordon Brown’s moral compass is more like a dodgy satnav I often miss the glaring messages in fiction, because I am a prosaic and feeble-minded moron. Take Lyra and her altheiometer, in Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights trilogy. I read it ages ago, and it only clicked the other day. It’s basically a science-powered moral compass, isn’t it? Lyra makes her moral choices based on the readings of an instrument. The Church, her nemesis, does not. When Gordon Brown talks about having a moral compass, I wonder if this is the sort of thing he has in mind. Him and all his little daemons, crouched in a cupboard in Downing Street, watching a little golden needle swing between pictures of, say, a man with a beard, and a bomb, and the number 42. Maybe not.

Byron Rogers

The man who could not tell the truth

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This has to be one of the most courageous books ever written. Literary biography is a foolhardy venture anyway, a writer’s life being usually his own raw material, so he has usually written his own version, or versions, of this, however fragmentary, and, what is much worse, written it well, otherwise there would be no biographer. But what if he hasn’t told the truth, and not just once or twice, but not ever? In 1985 Norman Lewis published his autobiography Jackdaw’s Cake, which I had looked forward to more than any book published in my lifetime.

Simon Baker

The travels of an idealist

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Simon Baker reviews Andreï Makine’s latest novel In Andreï Makine’s previous novel, The Woman Who Waited (2006), which is set in 1970s USSR, the unnamed narrator sees through his peers’ weak ideologies; he knows that their anti- establishment stance is merely a neat justification for a life of indolence. In Human Love, Elias Almeida, a communist revolutionary, sees that many of his well-to-do comrades use their political activism as a means of escape or as preparatory research in a writing career; theirs is ‘the arrogant desire to transform other people’s lives into an “experiment”, into a testing ground for their own ideas’.

Rupert Christiansen

A gift for friendship

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This magnificent edition of Benjamin Britten’s letters reaches its fourth volume under the auspices of a new publisher, the Boydell Press (despite subsidy, Faber simply couldn’t make it pay), and the first thing to say is that the standards of production, design and copy-editing have not suffered (misspellings of names such as John Lanigan, Roderic Dunnett and Geoffrey Willans were the only errors that I picked up), while the scholarly quality of the annotation continues to be quite superb — meticulous, imaginative, and illuminating.

Andrew Taylor

Love lies bleeding | 14 June 2008

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Andrew Taylor reviews the fourth novel in Susan Hill’s crime series The Vows of Silence is the fourth novel in Susan Hill’s crime series. Like its predecessors, it is concerned with murder and its investigation in and around a cathedral city known as Lafferton, and with the lives of those concerned. The central character of the series, Detective Chief Superintendent Simon Serrailler, is now working for the Serious Incident Flying Taskforce. Serrailler is a civilised but solitary man who finds personal relationships difficult even with his family — with the exception of his sister Cat, a local GP, her husband and young children. His sense of isolation is increased by the presence of a new colleague whom he finds it hard to like.

Andro Linklater

Inspirational individuals

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My 85-year-old neighbour bows to passing magpies, casts spells, and gleefully claims to be ‘a mad old bat’. Eccentric you might say. But she also speaks Mandarin Chinese and sports on her desk a photograph of herself in 1945 carrying a rifle on a hillside above Kunming in southern China where she helped SOE run one of the most successful blackmarket operations of the second world war. So it would be truer to say that she has never cared much for being one of the crowd. Egregious is really the word. Reading this oral history of the Special Operations Executive, it is clear that being egregious was the one quality that everyone who served in SOE had to possess. Almost all other forms of warfare involved merging individuality into the unit.

Allan Massie

Can a novelist write too well?

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At least a couple of times, probably more often, Anthony Burgess declared that Evelyn Waugh wrote ‘too well for a novelist’. ‘Sour grapes’ you may say, remembering that in his own novels Burgess often wrote in clumsy and slapdash style, and that he was perhaps himself a better reviewer than novelist. But it wasn’t just sour grapes. There was an argument behind the opinion. He believed that writing a novel ‘should be, for its author, a journey into the unknown, and the prose should convey the difficulties of the journey’. Compare [he suggested] Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End with Waugh’s Sword of Honour.

11 June 2008

Sam Leith

Goats and donkeys

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The Goat, they called him; and goatish he certainly was. He was stubborn, self-willed, exceptionally adept at climbing upward over rocky ground — and then there was the other thing, the thing that gives rise to this book. If there was a single force in his life to rival David Lloyd George’s ambition it was his sex drive. From the very outset of his political career, and from the very outset of his marriage, the former was the hostage of the latter. (How little, Spectator readers, things change!) Yet, miraculously, the roof never came down. After his second marriage to his mistress of three decades was saluted in the press, his principal private secretary A. J. Sylvester recorded in his diary: ‘He has lived a life of duplicity. He has got clean away with it.

Caroline Moorehead

Less mighty than the sword

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Caroline Moorehead on Daoud Hari's memoir of Darfur When Daoud Hari was a boy, the villages of northern Darfur were peaceful places. He had a camel called Kelgi, to which he was much attached, and a vast clan of Zaghawa traditional tribal herdsmen as cousins. Sent away to school in El Fasher, he developed a taste for Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens and as a young man he left home to travel in Chad and Libya. It is what he saw when he returned that forms the heart of his remarkable memoir, The Translator. It was 2003. Crossing back into Darfur from Chad, he found the border full of frantic people, fleeing the violence that had broken out between rebel groups and the Sudanese army, helped by the Janjaweed raiders they support.

Jason Goodwin

A long and happy life

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Jason Goowin reviews the memoirs of John Julius Norwich In 1957 John Julius Cooper (later Norwich) was keeping open house in Beirut, ‘the Clapham Junction of the world’s air routes’.Guests were given dinner on the terrace, where the Coopers liked to watch their faces ‘as, promptly at ten minutes past nine, an immense, luminous grapefruit appeared from behind Sannine and climbed slowly up into the eastern sky’. JJ’s passions — for history, for Venice, for music — have always been enlivened by a sense of theatre: his books are erudite and entertaining.