Books Archives

The ‘Foxy Knoxy’ case has stirred a deep prurience about women and murder

Features

It was true in Orwell’s day and it’s no less true now: there is nothing the British public likes more than a good, old-fashioned, grisly murder. Sixty-odd years ago, when Orwell wrote The Decline of the English Murder, the crucial ingredient was some hidden, shameful, sexual misdemeanour - almost always adultery, but sometimes homosexuality. The implication being that back then committing murder, and thus risking a possible death sentence from the courts, was preferable to some sordid secret leaking out. The English murders, the ones the public liked, were those committed in desperation by the deeply ashamed - a consequence, as Orwell saw it, of a hypocritical society. We have changed as a nation.

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 17 November 2007

More from Books

The slender book above was the last thing Roald Dahl ever wrote, and was published posthumously by the British Railways Board. It is something of a deathbed conversion. The author spends the whole of it telling children — whom he describes as ‘uncivilised little savages with bad habits and no manners’ — how to behave themselves, in VERY LARGE RED CAPITAL LETTERS. ‘I have a VERY DIFFICULT JOB here,’ he admits in the first paragraph. ‘Young people are fed up with being told by grown-ups WHAT TO DO and WHAT NOT TO DO ... and now I am going to have to tell you WHAT TO DO and WHAT NOT TO DO.... This is something I have never done in any of my books.

14 November 2007

Alex Massie

Not Writing is the new Not Reading

Jack Shafer explains why journalists are so keen on writing about the Hollywood wrtiers' strike and, more to the point, why we all root for the plucky scribblers in this fight. There's a natural hack-to-hack sympathy here that might, one would imagine, infuriate teachers or postmen or miners or train drivers whose industrial action tends not to be portrayed quite so sympathetically. But it is also true that, as Shafer says, many (perhaps even most) journalists would secretly rather be a Hollywood screenwriter than a beat reporter or pundit. There's a fine New Yorker cartoon in which one journo wearliy says to his drinking partner - all such conversations must take place in bars you know - "I'm not writing my novel either".

12 November 2007

Alex Massie

Literary Oneupmanship Cont.

In the comments to this post on Bookmanship I'm delighted to see commenter Jim make excellent use of what one would term the Foreign Poet Gambit: Personally I'd swing for the fences with: "A shame to devote so much time and money to yet another translation of a writer who does not wholly merit his reputation when the great Gaglyarev remains unknown outside his native tongue." I would respond to all inquiries about Gaglyarev with an archly raised eyebrow, and go get another drink.

10 November 2007

Theodore Dalrymple

If music be the food of health…

More from Books

Oliver Sacks is a famed neurologist whose books of case studies combine the latest neuroscience with deep humanistic learning. He not only describes his patients with great precision, but also seeks to enter empathically into their experience and then, by means of limpid prose, to communicate it to the general reader. Ever since the publication of his book Awakenings, about patients with encephalitis lethargica who were recalled to life by the drug levodopa after decades of immobility, he has deservedly found a large and appreciative audience. He has had many imitators but no equals. Case studies are not favoured in contemporary medical literature as they once were.

Digby Durrant

Pity the oppressed; fear the oppressed

More from Books

The fight to abolish slavery and its consequences is an immense subject so it’s not surprising that the Nigerian Simi Bedford’s new book could be likened to the kind of film once made famous by Cecil B De Mille with a cast of thousands and dramatic events at every turn. There are no quiet pages here. We start in Oyo, the capital of a West African tribe for whom a constant state of tribal war is an economic necessity and the internal struggles for power inevitable and deadly. All smiles are lies and hidden threats; here are screams in the night. Abiola is being trained as a warrior. The least breach of behaviour will be punished by having to stand stock-still from dawn to dusk in scorching heat without food or water.

Tom Holland

A tale of two timeless epics

More from Books

It is oddly moving, at a time when mention of the name ‘Homer’ invariably conjures up thoughts of donuts, to know that the author of the Odyssey remains the first classical author to whom most children are introduced. At my daughters’ primary school, for instance, they are told the story of the Cyclops in Year One. The thread of continuity that this represents reaches back ultimately all the way to archaic Greece. Homer’s epics, wrote Alexander Pope, are ‘like a copious nursery, which contains the seeds and first productions of every kind’. The metaphor is doubly effective: for Homer stands at the beginning both of the Western literary tradition and of many an individual’s experience of it.

Olivia Cole

Monsters and others

More from Books

Olivia Cole ‘Make somebody up’ was the instruction to the 23 contributors to Zadie Smith’s short-story anthology The Book of Other People, published to benefit the Brooklyn children’s writing charity, 826 NYC, founded by Dave Eggers. While that might seem about as radical a command as telling screenwriters to use dialogue, the only rule being that each story should take its title from the central character, none reads as though pinched and twisted to fit the theme. That said, of course, there are those that feel they must wriggle in the opposite direction. ‘Monster’, by Toby Litt, threatens for a moment to become some sort of Bildungsroman for monsters: ‘One day, the monster set off to...’ before it remembers itself.

Stanley Johnson

Some like it cold

More from Books

I first went to Antarctica in the (Antarctic) summer of 1984 on board the John Biscoe, a research and supply ship belonging to the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). Over a period of several weeks we visited various BAS stations on the Antarctic peninsula, including a small station known as Faraday at which vital measurements of the Earth’s ozone layer were being conducted. I remember climbing up into the loft with my fellow-passenger and now good friend Adrian Berry, science correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, past piles of cornflake packets, Bovril jars and tins of Horlicks which were stored for convenience in the roof, to see the Dobson’s photo-spectrometer at work.

Andrew Roberts

Talking it over

More from Books

‘It is not easy to see how things could be worsened by a parley at the summit,’ said Winston Churchill in a speech on foreign policy in Edinburgh in February 1950, thus coining a phrase for meetings of international leaders that has stuck, and indeed spawned further ones, such as ‘summitry’ and ‘summiteer’. Churchill’s hope for a parley with Truman and Stalin failed in 1950, but his general concept is still with us.

D.J. Taylor

The fading of the Cambridge dawn

More from Books

An exhausting life it must be, being the hero of a Frederic Raphael novel. There you are, writing your bestselling books, finessing those Hollywood film scripts that pile up on your doorstep like fallen leaves, pondering those offers to sit on the boards of TV companies and wondering all the while what the nasty man in the Times Literary Supplement is going to say about you, and then alongside floats a whole convoy of merely human dilemmas craving resolution. The sister of your dead college chum wants a saucy threesome, the admiring fan met in Venice murmurs, ‘I would do anything to spend time with you’, while the wife of your bosom, a quarter of a century soignée, and not to be outdone, opens the door stark-naked with a cry of ‘Special offer!

Marcus Berkmann

Rock’n’roll, drugs and a good roast

More from Books

Eric Clapton lost his virginity to ‘a girl called Lucy who was older than me, and whose boyfriend was out of town’. Lucky chap, you immediately think, and indeed, he seems to have lived a charmed life, which he hasn’t enjoyed one bit. ‘Something more profound also happened when I got this guitar. As soon as I got it, I suddenly didn’t want it any more. This was a phenomenon which was to rear its head throughout my life, and cause many difficulties in the future.’ He first saw the Beatles in the audience at the Crawdaddy club in Richmond: ‘I suppose that it was only natural that I would be jealous, and think of them as a bunch of w***ers.

Ian Thomson

Cargoes of despair

More from Books

Not long ago, I was invited to lunch at a plantation home in Jamaica. The sound of cocktail-making (a clinking of crushed ice against glass) greeted me at Worthy Park as bow-tied waiters served the guests at a long table draped in linen. The top brass of Jamaica’s sugar industry was there, enjoying the French wine and the chilled soursop juice. The waiters, with their plantation-bred obsequiousness, hurried to whisk flies away from our plates. For nearly three centuries the slave-grown sugar of Worthy Park has satisfied the British craving for tea (that ‘blood-sweetened beverage’, the abolitionist poet Southey called it), as well as for coffee, cakes and other confections.

John De-Falbe

Once happy havens

More from Books

Leon Sciaky was born in Salonica in 1893, when the city was still a provincial Ottoman town. His family were grain merchants, Sephardic Jews who had been settled there for 400 years and still spoke Ladino at home. In concise, elegant prose, he describes in this memoir a childhood of Oriental pace and comforts, surrounded by Muslims and Christians, in which Turks, Macedonians, Bulgarians, Serbs and Greeks appeared to live in harmony. Among many beautiful passages about how life once was in the region, there is one of a visit with his grandfather to an outlying village which seems to belong to the Middle Ages, or Eden; at any rate, a world that has long since vanished.

Amanda Herries

Caroline’s back in town

More from Books

The Sloane is dead — but long live the Sloane. Her mother, Caroline, and father, Henry — the original Hooray — may be in their natural retirement homes in the Shires or Scotland along with the family dog snug by the Aga in the cosy kitchen, but she, we now know, using her native skills, has burst out of her famous 1980s stereotype to adapt to the new order. It’s an amusing conceit, with enough truth for 20-year-olds to have a wry laugh at themselves. Twenty-five years ago, a series of articles written by that grandee of social observation Peter York, in the then vital directory of upper-middle-class social mores Harpers & Queen, identified the various not-so-exotic creatures whose centre of the Known World was Sloane Square.

Alistair Irwin

Causes and consequences

More from Books

Despite its puzzlingly hideous appearance, this is an excellent book. Subtitled ‘Reflections on the History of the Twentieth Century’, it consists of 18 chapters being, with one exception, the texts of lectures given by Professor Howard between 1991 and 2003. It is not easy to craft a good lecture that reads well on the page, or vice versa for that matter; it is a trick that Sir Michael brings off brilliantly. The introductory section gives us a lucid reminder of how the process of Enlightenment that began in the 18th century created freedoms, admittedly, but uncertainties too, uncertainties that created the conditions for a century of conflict.

John Michell

Spirits, shamans and sceptics

More from Books

When Professor Braude, a philosophy lecturer at the University of Maryland, told colleagues about his interest in psychical research, he was shocked and astonished by their reactions. They were angry and scornful and accused him of pandering to unreason. It would be the ruin of his career, they threatened. What is wrong with these people? he asks. Is it cowardice and fear of the unknown, or are they wilfully dishonest in ignoring his findings and persecuting him for drawing attention to things they do not want to hear about? That is the first of the mysteries displayed in this book. The others are centered upon notable characters in the history of ‘parapsychology’, as it is called here, beginning with the spectacular Daniel Dunglas Home.

Jonathan Cecil

Big is beautiful | 10 November 2007

More from Books

It is odd to think that fatness — now known as obesity and apparently a serious problem — was not so long ago a subject for ribald hilarity. The disgraced clown Fatty Arbuckle was once considered funny simply because of his size. The fictional schoolboy Billy Bunter and his sister Bessie were icons of greedy grotesquerie, and real-life overweight girls and boys — rarer than nowadays — had to endure much unkind teasing at school. Hattie Jacques’s schooldays were no exception, and in her career as an actress her avoirdupois, while good for business, limited her choice of roles.

James Forsyth

Dignity at all costs

More from Books

If George W. Bush goes down in history as the most disastrous US president since Herbert Hoover, it will be because of his foreign policy mistakes. Yet the person who tutored candidate Bush on foreign policy, co-ordinated it in his first term and was its public face in his second term is probably the most respected member of the Bush administration both at home and abroad. This is the paradox that Marcus Mabry sets out to explain in Condoleezza Rice: Naked Ambition. Throughout the Bush administration, Rice has been the most effective emissary for the President’s foreign policy because she doesn’t fit the stereotype.

Matthew Dennison

Many happy returns

More from Books

Robert Adam is probably Britain’s most famous architect never to have built a house. This, of course, is an exaggeration, but it is certainly the case that the greater part of Adam’s professional output consisted of remodelling the internal architecture of existing buildings and creating interior decoration for houses already built by previous hands. When it came to the leap from architect’s drawing to finished item, Adam had a greater strike rate in fancy carpets than in country houses.

Olivia Glazebrook

A plain book about beauty

More from Books

When people write about their experiences as drug addicts they often — wittingly or not — write with a degree of competitiveness. There is a tacit understanding that the reader will feel cheated by anything less than a full-blown addiction to class-A drugs. A handful of Solpadeine and two bottles of vodka every day for 20 years just isn’t going to cut it with a publisher. James Frey was well aware of this when he embellished A Million Little Pieces to make it more ‘appealing’, and how right he was: we lapped it up. Readers want the author of a sin-soaked drug memoir to lie, cheat and steal — preferably from his/her middle-class parents. Any of the following are recommended as extras: prostitution, sleeping on the street, mugging an elderly pedestrian.

Pj Kavanagh

‘Almost’ religious joy

More from Books

Simon Barnes is chief sportswriter for the Times; wearing his other boots he is a fervent eco-warrior, a spell-binding preacher, a missionary. His book is broken into small descriptive sections and each contains a moment, an exaltation at a contact with ‘the wild’. These are perhaps best read in snatches, rather than as a continuum, because their fervour is so intense. By ‘wild’ he means anything that is not ourselves, not human, from gossamer to elephants, and he believes we need this contact precisely in order to be fully human. ‘I divide the whole world into lovers: you are either (a) a lover of nature or (b) a lover of nature who doesn’t know it yet.

Allan Massie

Murder most serious

More from Books

Raymond Chandler praised Dashiell Hammett for having given murder back to the sort of people who commit it. Given that he himself followed in Hammett’s footsteps, this was an understandable remark, aimed at what might already have been called the classic English detective novel. ‘Can’t read Christie,’ he told someone who had sent him a questionnaire. This wasn’t quite true. In one letter he analyses, intelligently and judiciously, Christie’s Ten Little Niggers; elsewhere, in an essay, ‘Casual Notes on the Mystery Novel’, he wrote that he was ‘quite unmoved to indignation by The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’s violation of the rule that “the suppression of facts by the narrator ...

7 November 2007

Alex Massie

Oneupmanship Tutorial: War and Peace Division

I've had occasion to write about Not Reading Books before. As a public service I've also mentioned the importance of Oneupmanship. Today's text, then, is the new and handsome translation of War and Peace. Clearly this is the kind of gift horse no self-respecting Lifeman looks in the mouth. Needless to say it is not necessary to read the translation. Indeed, it is not strictly necessary to even possess a copy of the the book, though it must be admitted that casually leaving the book out on a sideboard or coffee table at home will intimidate any visitor, leaving you One Up and your guest One Down before you've so much as made reference to Tolstoy's Greatest Work.

3 November 2007

Paul Johnson

Are famous writers accident-prone? Some are

Any other business

I don’t want to know too much about writers. The endless revelations about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes have put me off their poetry. Nothing can shake my love of Keats’s Odes but I don’t have any desire to see his full medical records. Nor do I care to learn anything more about Byron’s club foot (though I am fascinated by the fact that the painter John Glover, who founded the Australian school of art, and whose masterpiece ‘Dovedale at Dawn’ I possess, had two club feet). We know quite enough about Shakespeare personally, and I am happy he is still surrounded by mysteries. Of course, if his diaries were suddenly to appear, or autographed letters, that would be another matter. The truth is, an author and his works are best kept separate.

Ferdinand Mount

A sensitive bounder

More from Books

He was a noisy boy from the start. At the age of two, he was taken out for walks in order not to disturb his ailing grandfather and he would march down the main street of Bewdley shouting, ‘Ruddy is coming!’ Or sometimes, ‘An angry Ruddy is coming!’ Despite these precautions, his grandfather died and Kipling’s aunts and uncles believed that Ruddy’s tantrums had hastened and embittered his end. When he left the United Services College at Westward Ho! and returned to India, he quickly gained a reputation in the Punjab Club for boorish and bumptious behaviour.

Mary Keen

Pioneer of the studied casual

More from Books

Norah Lindsay had wit, beauty and a bohemian spirit. Diana Cooper described her dressing ‘mostly in tinsel and leopard skins and baroque pearls and emeralds’. At Sutton Courtenay, the house where she lived through the early years of her marriage to Harry Lindsay, she entertained non-stop. Raymond Asquith, Julian and Billy Grenfell, Maurice Baring and Jasper Ridley all flocked to her table from Oxford. ‘Sutton Courtenay, roses, the river and the youth of England splashing in the Thames and Norah, the sublime Norah,’ wrote Chips Channon. She was never out of love, often with several young men at a time. ‘Norah sometimes vexes me,’ wrote her sister Madeline Whitbread.

Jonathan Keates

The bad boy comes of age

More from Books

As the biopic comes back into fashion — think Kinsey, think A Beautiful Mind — somebody might consider the life of Roman Polanski as perfect big-screen material. Its component elements are the stuff of box-office dreams. Holocaust survival, dodgy sex, motiveless murder, a liberal sprinkling of celebrity, plenty of photogenic locations — the Oscar-winning script is in the bag. Its star, as Christopher Sandford’s biography suggests, boasts unfathomable reserves of chutzpah, and his recent epiphany at the Venice Film Festival was a reminder of how much life the old dog still has left in him. Polanski’s resilience was tested early, with the dispatch of his Jewish parents to Auschwitz and Mauthausen.

Andro Linklater

Master of the masquerade

More from Books

Not even the Akond of Swat in all his whoness, whyety, whichery and whatage could compare to the enigmatic, whimsical mask of deconstruction that purports to be Alasdair Gray. He was a student of the Glasgow School of Art and a quondam painter, but is he an artist? He wrote the 1980s magically realist novel Lanark, but is he a novelist? He was famous, but is he a success? Is this book fact or fiction or a gallimaufry of jottings? He asserts on the copyright page, his ‘moral right’ as Gray to be its author, but inside passes himself off as an American millionairess, a cake, an algorithm and a critic.