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From Charles Lamb to ‘netiquette’

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A few years ago the American author Anne Fadiman scored a hit with Ex Libris, an amiable miscellany of book-talk touching lightly on such topics as the quirks of proof-reading and the vicissitudes of plagiarism. The subject matter of her new book, At Large and At Small, is much more varied, but the flavour is scarcely less literary. It is a collection of essays, designed to illustrate the continuing possibilities of what used to be known as the familiar essay — the bundle of personal reflections of which the most famous exponent was Charles Lamb. Familiar essays, cherished in their heyday by belletrists and inflicted on generations of schoolchildren, have long since lost favour as a literary form. But Fadiman isn’t afraid of being thought old-fashioned.

Victoria Glendinning

More marks on paper

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Life is not fair. Talents are not distributed equitably. The likelihood is that if you are good at one thing, you will be good at other things too. But there is a twist in the tail. The more things you are good at, the less you will be perceived as pre-eminent in any of them. The American Paul Horgan, for example — singer, actor, set-designer, painter, poet, writer of stories, essays, novels, plays and libretti — is quoted in The Writer’s Brush as deploring his ‘accursed versatility’, and the truth is that I, unlike my better-informed readers, am unfamiliar with his oeuvre. A few of the writer-artists featured in this hefty book are first-class at neither authorship nor art, and most are much better writers than they are artists, or vice versa.

Vernon Scannell

A Yorkshire Christmas Eve

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A Yorkshire Christmas Eve His nearby town wore annual evening-dress, cheap jewellery of lights, white fur and bright drapes of Santa red which might impress late shoppers on this final trading-night, persuading them to spend their all before indifferent time slammed shut the last shop door. He heard hyena voices and he saw splashed vomit on the pavement as he left saddened by this evidence of more contempt of what was once the numinous. He headed for the moors and his small house. Later on, as he prepared for bed, he could not rid himself of melancholy: the world had changed, Christmas seemed stone-dead or turned into a tasteless parody of what was thrilling once, yet innocent.

Greta Stoddart

A Puzzle in Four Seasons

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A Puzzle in Four Seasons Look at us. It must be Christmas. Our heads are bowed, the lamp close. We could be cracking a code or a body, so intent are we tonight on Spring, whose large foreground of wild daffodils could take us all winter. We check the lid from time to time like artists more absorbed in what they’re doing than what’s there: a village coming into itself all at once, in all weathers; yielding itself to nothing more than the hours of its own slow resurrection. It’s not often we come together like this. Nor do we believe for one minute in this village or its charmed stoicism. We attend to it quietly, with quick fingers.

Roger Lewis

Perfecting the art of rudeness

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Everyone will have met Basil and Sybil Fawlty in real life — the would-be genteel types who, in running a provincial hotel, have condemned themselves to quite the wrong vocation, who are convinced their clientele are riff-raff and by whom the most modest request is interpreted as an unforgivable imposition. I encountered a classic couple only the other day — the virago muttering behind the desk, pen poised, and her lanky, put-upon husband sighing to me as he emerged from the cellar and lifted (quite violently) the grille at the bar, ‘Has the Gestapo given you the wine list?’ Such people loathe the idea of service — like those antique dealers and gallery owners who’ll kill you if they get mistaken for shopkeepers.

Rachel Johnson

Sunlight on stucco

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This affordably handsome book confirms in my own partisan mind what a rich subject the area of Notting Hill in London is, and I can’t help approving of it for that reason alone. Like it or not, Notting Hill exerts a peculiar fascination over many who don’t live there as well as all who do, but it is the latter who will fall on this book with cries of pleasure. It is a solid rebuff to those who prefer to think that Notting Hill is not so much a place of bricks and mortar, but an annoying media construct instead.

David Ekserdjian

A choice of art books

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First, and by no means simply by virtue of its weight, is Judy Egerton’s George Stubbs, Painter: Catalogue Raisonné (Yale, £95), which effortlessly combines awesome scholarly authority with what in academic circles is, alas, a far rarer commodity — wit. Seen whole and supported by such eloquent advocacy, Stubbs emerges as a truly great artist, who has been held back by his Britishness and his subject matter. As Judy Egerton rightly observes, it was the subject of the Fitzwilliam’s ‘Gimcrack’ — a racehorse with jockey up — ‘whose seeming triviality had long caused more nervous art historians to twitch their petticoats’.

Juliet Townsend

Children’s books for Christmas | 15 December 2007

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Part of the charm of giving books to children at Christmas is that they are so easy to wrap. After an evening spent wrestling with a variety of soft toys with elongated limbs and tails, a large combine harvester, an assortment of weapons and a pogo stick, it is a relief to settle down to all those nice regular rectangles. Christmas is also the only time that many children get given hardbacks, and the opportunity to enjoy a book as an object, not simply for its contents. One agreeable object is the latest edition of Clement Moore’s well known poem The Night Before Christmas, with beautiful black- and-white cut-paper illustrations by Niroot Puttapipat (Walker Books, £12.99.

Patrick Marnham

A gathering of ghosts

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Fire in the Blood is the second recently discovered and hitherto unpublished novel by the author of Suite Française, the two-volume work that was written shortly before French police arrested Irène Némirovsky in July 1942 and deported her to Auschwitz. The story of the discovery of Suite Française, the child running from the gendarmes who had just arrested her mother and grabbing a briefcase that contained the manuscript of a posthumous masterpiece, has become one of the great biographical anecdotes of the French Occupation. But the same small briefcase also contained another fragment, this time an un-titled typescript that led researchers in the Némirovsky archive to the complete version of Fire in the Blood.

Robert Salisbury

How to ruin a country

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As Zimbabwe celebrated its independence in April 1980 President Nyerere of Tanzania had a piece of advice for Robert Mugabe: ‘You have inherited a jewel. Keep it that way.’ At first, it seemed that Mugabe would take his fellow socialist’s advice. His address to the nation on the eve of independence gave all Zimbabweans hope that, white and black, they could together rebuild the country after the miseries of the guerrilla war. Guguletho Moyo and Mark Ashurst quote the speech in full at the beginning of their useful compendium, and Martin Meredith reminds us that, after an initial interview, Ian Smith himself reported that he had found Mugabe not ‘the apostle of Satan’ but ‘sober and responsible’.

Peregrine Worsthorne

Conservative iconoclasts required

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Having been a monarchist all my life, it was a bit embarrassing the other day to have to admit to a television interviewer that I could not remember the reasons why I had become one in the first place. In truth, of course — as I explained — I became a monarchist as a matter of course, pretty well by instinct; everybody was doing it. So I did it. The interviewer was not impressed. ‘Sounds like prejudice to me’, he said, putting me to shame. Now, along comes the highly cerebral prison doctor, Theodore Dalrymple to assure me that I was wrong to be ashamed.

Deborah Devonshire

The full-blown country-house look

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It is not given to many for their surname to be turned into an adjective immediately recognisable by a section of society. ‘Fowlerised’ meant a house transformed by John Fowler to his (and the owners’) taste. In spite of having known John for many years, I had little idea of the extent of his work and influence until I read this book. Dedicated to looking and learning, he dealt with all dates and styles of buildings through scholarship and his prodigious memory. He was born in 1906, a one-off in his family with artistic talents that took him to painting furniture for Peter Jones in 1934, earning £4 a week. He was refused a rise in wages so he and his colleagues downed brushes and set up on their own. They struggled on till 1938 when John joined Lady Colefax.

Anthony Blond

A master of self-invention

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When I announced, in London in 1962, that I was going to publish The Carpetbaggers, Harold Robbins replied, ‘Everyone here has already read it.’ ‘Here’ was the Carlton Hotel, Cannes, and The Carpetbaggers had hit the international jet set before the book arrived in England. But of course there were hundreds of thousands who hadn’t read it, with 35 shillings to spend on guaranteed sexy entertainment. (When we opened an envelope containing seven five-shilling postal orders from a factory in the Midlands, we knew we were on to something big.

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 15 December 2007

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Who is Cleo Birdwell?’ begins the flyleaf text of this book. ‘The simple answer is that she’s a New York Ranger, a schoolteacher’s daughter from Badger, Ohio, who becomes the hottest thing in hockey.’ Well, not quite. The simplest answer is that she’s Don DeLillo, author of White Noise, Underworld and Falling Man, publishing pseudonymously early in his career. Amazons is a woman’s first-person confessional account written covertly by a man. Not content to stop there, DeLillo makes this a book almost entirely about sex (there is very little hockey in it).

8 December 2007

Alex Massie

O tempora, o mores! | 8 December 2007

More Paddington Bear blogging: Paddington, the bear from Peru, will be arrested and interrogated over his immigration status in a book marking his 50th birthday.Paddington Here and Now, due to be published in June 2008, is set around the bear's home at 32 Windsor Gardens, Notting Hill, west London. It will mark the 50th anniversary of his debut in A Bear Called Paddington. In other Paddington news, he's not forsaking marmalade at all. Whew!

Paul Johnson

From Renaissance Florence to Hollywood in only one contrapposto step

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The other day I came across a clever book on the movie actor John Wayne. I forget the name of the author but it may have been Simon Louvish, who writes better than anyone else on the film-star world. This suggested that the secret of Wayne’s immense physical appeal was his instinctive contrapposto. When filmed standing he never held himself stiffly to attention, as Laurence Olivier and Clark Gable tended to do, but shifted his weight casually on to one leg. This is the posture adopted by both Donatello and Michelangelo in their splendid, and splendidly different, renderings of ‘David’. The concept of contrapposto is subtle as well as important, and goes right to the heart of aesthetics.

Philip Ziegler

All passion spent

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Sargent’s portrait of Balfour, shown below — an elegant figure, languid, etiolated, arrogant — illustrates brilliantly the popular conception of this complex statesman. Like most popular conceptions it tells only part of the story; like most popular conceptions it is substantially correct. To say that Balfour lacked the common touch is an understatement: he lacked the middle-class touch, he lacked even the upper-middle-class touch. He would have viewed the Forsytes with mild disdain; the rich industrialists of the Midlands and North, who every year played a more significant role in Conservative affairs, were an alien breed.

Elfreda Pownall

A choice of cookery books

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Let’s start in the garden. This year cookery writers are as happy digging and planting as slicing and braising. Sarah Raven is a great gardener and, on the evidence of her latest book, Sarah Raven’s Garden Cookbook (Chatto & Windus, £35), she’s a good cook too. This is a book for a lifetime of cooking: there are more than 400 recipes based on fruit and vegetables. It is not vegetarian — she uses fish and meat too — but vegetables and fruit are to the fore. Raven’s recipes are simple, practical and enticing, and there isn’t one I don’t want to cook.

Christopher Howse

Recent books of photographs

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In England by Don McCullin (Cape, £35) is, as might be expected, more gritty than pretty. Yet it is approachably humane compared with his famous war photography, where from Vietnam to Beirut the horrors are as terrible as Goya’s. McCullin escaped the London gangland of Finsbury Park by means of the photograph that forms the frontispiece of this book. It shows The Guvnors, a gang of young men with whom he had grown up, posing in the sun in their sharp Fifties Sunday suits and thin ties on the beams of a half demolished house. One of them was hanged after a policeman was knifed; McCullin sold his picture to the Observer, and set off into a wider world of war.

Kevin Brownlow

Too funny for words

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In 1989, when David Gill and I celebrated the Chaplin centenary with a week-long run of City Lights at the Dominion Theatre, several critics declared than no one under 40 found Chaplin funny. That ruined our advance box office and not even the presence of Princess Diana on the opening night revived it. Yet those that came were thrilled. We had a live orchestra conducted by Carl Davis, and there were times when you couldn’t hear the music above the laughter. We recorded all those people under 40 not finding Chaplin funny and sent the tapes to the critics. That was as satisfying as the ‘House Full’ notices that went up halfway through the week. So I was delighted to discover that Paul Merton, one of our top comedians, is an unrepentant Chaplin supporter.

Allan Mallinson

Fear and loathing in old Europe

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What marks out the Napoleonic wars from what had gone before, the great dynastic clashes of the two earlier centuries? It is by no means the only, or even the predominant, question that Charles Esdaile poses in this sweeping study, but in many ways it is the most challenging. Professor Esdaile’s The Peninsular War demonstrated a mastery of the interplay of the many forces and factors in war, of which the economic, social and cultural are sometimes all too easily relegated to footnotes, together with the force of personality of the prime mover himself, and that factor which makes even the simplest thing in war difficult: what Clausewitz calls friction.

Christian House

Don’t judge a book by its cover

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With its quartos, rectos and folio, the language of book-binding lends itself to the novelist’s palette. It’s a terminology rich in tactile pleasures and potential metaphor for a writer. So it’s a joy to find Belinda Starling doing it justice in The Journal of Dora Damage, not least by situating this idiosyncratic profession in the equally emotive world of Victorian London. In a clammy corner of Lambeth in 1859, within earshot of the clattering rails of the Necropolis Railway, Dora Damage struggles to keep her family out of the workhouse. Her husband Peter, proprietor of Damage’s Bookbinders, has succumbed to crippling arthritis, leaving Dora and their epileptic five-year-old daughter at the mercy of loan sharks and local gossip.

Daniel Swift

A love story

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The pilots called it ‘the Spit’, ‘my personal swallow’, ‘a real lady’, or, simply, ‘the fabulous Spitfire’. It was not a perfect machine. Due to its long nose, forward visibility during take-off was poor; it was freezing cold in the cockpit, and so small that the pilot did not have room to wear a bulky flight suit. He had to make do with chamois leather gloves and wool socks. Yet all who flew it marvelled at its grace and power, and it was equally adored by those on the ground.

Allan Massie

The enduring mystery of Mrs Bathurst

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A Kipling novel that still defies comprehension ‘Listen, Bill,’ wrote P. G. Wodehouse (in a letter published in Performing Flea), ‘something really must be done about Kip’s “Mrs Bathurst”. I read it years ago and didn’t understand a word of it. I thought to myself, “Ah, youthful ignorance!” A week ago I re-read it. Result: precisely the same.’ Wodehouse is not alone in finding the story baffling. At once rambling and compressed, told entirely in reminiscent and speculative conversation, it is powerful but murky. You may feel it is a masterpiece yet be unable to determine just what happens. Summarising it is difficult, but, for the benefit of anyone who doesn’t know the story, here goes.

1 December 2007

Samuel Brittan

Mill! thou shouldst be living at this hour

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Britain has had few public intellectuals. The one undeniable example was John Stuart Mill who lived from 1806 to 1873 and whose utterances dominated the more intelligent public debates of the mid-19th century — predictably he was keenly studied by Gladstone and mocked by Disraeli. In the last year of his life he was persuaded to be godfather to the infant Bertrand Russell, who was the nearest runner-up in the UK public intellectual stake. Mill’s own influence was on the wane for much of the 20th century when Marx became the centre of attention. But it has been rekindled in the past few decades as faith in collectivist nostrums has evaporated and there have been numerous academic studies of different aspects of his work.

Bevis Hillier

Christmas funny books

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Reading reviews of new books of poetry, I am staggered at how seldom the critics quote from poems they are assessing. Describing what a poet is like, without quoting him, is like trying to describe a smell. In the latter exercise, you can get somewhere by using such adjectives as ‘fragrant’, ‘acrid’ or ‘foul’; but only by unstoppering a phial and waggling it under a person’s nose can you convey what the scent is like. It’s a similar case with poetry.

Graham Stewart

A criminal waste

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With an estimated one surveillance camera in Britain for every 14 Britons, reality television has never been more invasive. The reason Big Brother has been allowed to watch its citizens so comprehensively in this way rests with the claim that CCTV is a protection rather than an intrusion. Only the guilty should fear the all-seeing eye. Those with nothing to hide have nothing to worry about. It is tempting to imagine this is what Calvin’s Geneva might have been like if only the technology had been the equal of the theology. Except, of course, the inner cities of 21st- century Britain are patently not where the Godly Elect hang out on a Saturday night. The creation of this surveillance society shows scant sign of making us conform to the orderly sobriety of the Swiss.

Alan Brownjohn

Ludbrooke: His Multiculturalism

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Alan Brownjohn Ludbrooke: His Multiculturalism Shows in the delicate way he rests his head — Despite every fear that she will remove it — On the shoulder of Miss Chiang to watch Duck Soup, The video, from his reproduction sofa. The alarm clock rings beside the bed of the man Made President with the aid of American money In the person of Margaret Dumont, and the lovely Miss Chiang Is completely puzzled by Mr Groucho Marx. ‘This gentleman — he is really President?’ she asks. Ludbrooke needs to lift his romantic head To look at her, and answer. As he tries to explain That this is not quite like life, her mobile rings; As it does three times on the way back to Finchley Central.

Charlotte Mitchell

His own short story

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This is an academic monograph on Saki’s literary work, which does not pretend to add much to the work of his biographers, but summarises and quotes lavishly from the evidence available about his short and rather secret life. It begins with the miserable childhood and the odious aunts and ends with his death aged 44 at the hands of a German sniper at Beaumont Hamel in 1916. Its ten chapters include four which focus mainly on the fiction, but the other chapters, which are mainly biographical and arranged more or less chronologically, also include copious references to his writings. Like most of Saki’s fans, Professor Byrne is curious about his life, which is badly documented and enigmatic.