Books Archives

Deadened by shock

More from Books

The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold’s first novel, sold 2 ½ million copies, so it’s not surprising that Picador are calling the nation’s attention to its successor with posters on the Tube and ‘page-dominating full-colour national press advertising’. I remember finding The Lovely Bones original, even thought-provoking; why, then, did The Almost Moon provoke little more in me than weary irritation? Its essential flaw is contained in its opening sentence: ‘When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily.’ This is eye-catching, and reminds readers of the striking premise of The Lovely Bones — ‘I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973.’ The sentence is given prominence in Picador’s marketing campaign.

Marcus Berkmann

The story behind the story

More from Books

And so we enter the Christmas books season, a phase in the publishing calendar so terrifying, so utterly without hope, that more sensitive bookbuyers may wish to hide in second-hand bookshops, or under their beds, until it’s all over. But amidst the piles of useless non-books in Borders and Waterstones, probably right at the back where they think we won’t find them, there will be a handful of genuinely good titles. They may not be very serious books, you may not necessarily buy them for yourself, but if you were given them for Christmas you would be more than pleasantly surprised. You might even read them all the way to the end. Tracking these books down, though, is the challenge. Why Not Catch 21?

Jane Gardam

People keep appearing

More from Books

Susan Hill knows exactly how to please. This small, smart, elegantly printed little notepad of a book is a delicious Victorian ghost story, nostalgically and expertly comforting. It opens as smoothly as an M. R. James or Conan Doyle short story, over a good fire in a shadowy room on a winter’s night: The story was told me by my old friend, Theo Parmitter, as we sat in his college rooms one bitterly cold January night. There were still real fires in those days, the coals brought up by a servant in huge brass scuttles. . . . We know this room and we know the professor’s story, too. It is the fine old chestnut to roast upon the coals: the story of the haunted painting. Oscar Wilde examined it in The Picture of Dorian Gray and M. R.

Harriet Sergeant

No mean feat

More from Books

Rows of black suits filled the China Airlines flight from Beijing to Paris in September 1984. The People’s Liberation Army had ordered its entire delegation of dancers and musicians to wear the same ill-fitting outfit. Only one 17-year-old dancer had disobeyed the order. For this, his first visit to Europe, Jin Xing had bought a dazzling, white three-piece suit. ‘Only I shone out,’ he declared proudly. It is this desire to shine against the bulwark of the Chinese state that defines Jin Xing’s autobiography, Shanghai Tango. It has been no easy feat. Jin Xing was born a boy and became a colonel in the People’s Liberation Army. A sex change saw her start a new career as an international ballerina, choreographer and, most improbably of all, Beijing bar owner.

David Caute

Joan of Arc with connections

More from Books

This is a book long anticipated, as much in dread of dire news from Zimbabwe as in expectation of brilliant reporting spiced by mordant wit. It does not disappoint. Judith Todd’s chronicle of Mugabe’s crimes against his people appals, yet the ‘life’ of the subtitle has been a high-spirited crusade for justice, democracy and freedom of the press. Firmly attached to the progressive values of Grace and Garfield Todd, benevolent paternalists engaged in ranching, healing, teaching and politicking in south-west Zimbabwe since 1934, their daughter has proven to be cut from the same cloth. But now they are all gone. Through the Darkness displays the sly humour long ago apparent in The Right to Say No.

William Boyd

The artist as a middle-aged man

More from Books

It’s perhaps worth reminding ourselves at the outset, as we reach the third volume of John Richardson’s stupendous biography of Picasso, exactly where we are. Picasso died in April 1973, aged 91, and it comes as something of a shock to realise that at the end of this volume, in 1932, he’s a middle-aged man entering his fifties: yet he had another 40 years to go. Is it this that daunts us when we try to weigh up the man and his work — his longevity, his century-straddling superhuman productivity? When we think of the kind of artist he was, or even the kind of genius he was, Archilochus’s old adage comes to mind — particularly useful when we come face to face with prodigious gifts: ‘The fox knows many things; the hedgehog knows one big thing.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

The curse of riches

More from Books

When the second half of the 19th century began, South Africa was barely even a geographical expression, as Metternich had contemptuously called Italy. It certainly wasn’t a country, but merely an ill-defined area which included two Boer republics, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, two British colonies, the Cape and Natal, and a number of African principalities. The British had acquired the Cape from the Dutch during the Napoleonic wars not quite in a fit of absence of mind, but with little enthusiasm, and although the Cape of Good Hope itself was of great strategic importance, commanding the passage to India and the Far East, James Stephen of the Colonial Office unpresciently called the lands of the interior ‘the most sterile and worthless in the whole Empire’.

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 3 November 2007

More from Books

The Fixed Period is the most un-Trollopian thing Trollope ever wrote. It is a first-person futuristic narrative set in the state of Britannula, an island somewhere near New Zealand, in the year 1980. The President of Britannula, John Neverbend, decides to institute a fixed term of 67½ years for the life-span of his citizens, after which they will be dealt a painless and compulsory euthanasia. The Fixed Period is similar in style to a book published a few years earlier, Samuel Butler’s Erewhon; in film perhaps its closest kinship is with Logan’s Run or Soylent Green. Let any man look among his friends,’ Neverbend says, ‘and see whether men of 65 are not in the way of those who are still aspiring to rise in the world.

27 October 2007

Sam Leith

Getting to the bottom of John

More from Books

The first time I came across John Mortimer was while I was working as a gossip columnist. I had for some reason or another to telephone him in search of a quote, and did what dozens of my kind had done before, and dozens have done since. The telephone was answered by an elderly lady’s high, reedy voice. ‘Good afternoon, Lady Mortimer. I am sorry to trouble you. Is Sir John available?’ The voice, slightly peeved, fluted back: ‘This is John.’ Poor old John Mortimer —- this happens to him, as I understand it, all the time. I dare say it happens too, occasionally, to his second wife Penny, who speaks in a tobacco-seasoned growl.

Cressida Connolly

Growing old disgracefully

More from Books

It is a mark of how various are Jane Gardam’s interests that this collection of short stories does not read as a collection at all, but more as a very agreeable hotch-potch. Only place unites them, for several take place in leafy London suburbs, Hampstead, perhaps, or Wimbledon. The stories are unalike in subject, length and form: there are ghost stories, tales of quiet revenge; what might, in heavier hands, be called social commentary. Inevitably, some are better than others. Flights of fancy, jokes and telling moments spill across the pages. If there is a common thread, it might be described as growing old disgracefully.

Selina Hastings

The triumph of hope over experience

More from Books

Derek Jackson was one of the most distinguished scientists of the previous century, whose work in atomic spectroscopy contributed significantly to British success in aerial warfare. Throughout his life Jackson remained absorbed in his highly specialised subject, regarded with profound respect by colleagues throughout the world, and yet there was almost nothing about him that conformed to the usual image of the boffin.

Vernon Bogdanor

Strong family ties

More from Books

Kathleen Burk, Professor of History at University College, London, has written a magisterial overview of Anglo/American relations from 1497, when John and Sebastian Cabot, in Hakluyt’s words, ‘discovered that land which no men before that time had attempted’, until the modern age. Old World, New World is a remarkable achievement, based as it is upon massive and wide-ranging scholarship. It will undoubtedly become the first port of call for anyone seeking to understand this vast subject. But Professor Burk is, in Isaiah Berlin’s terms, a fox who knows many things rather than a hedgehog who knows one big thing. Her survey lacks a conclusion, and, in a sense, lacks also an overarching theme. Unlike her former teacher, A. J. P.

Jonathan Cecil

From Cleopatra to Queen Elizabeth

More from Books

In my childhood we used to make what were called ‘scrap screens’. We pasted magazine photographs, coloured and black-and-white postcards, reproductions, advertisements and flower friezes on to a folding screen, overlapping sometimes unevenly, to create a colourful collage; it was a pleasant, inexpensive pastime. Helen Mirren’s In the Frame is a scrap- screen autobiography. Her story is copiously illustrated with luminous studio portraits of herself, snap shots, stage pictures, film stills and all kinds of memorabilia from letters and telegrams to school books and even Mrs Mirren’s ration book from 1953, an austere post-war memento. Helen’s family was a remarkable one.

Simon Baker

A yarn about yarn-spinners

More from Books

In 1937 Vladimir Nabokov described the perfect novel during a lecture in Paris which he delivered to an audience including, rather Nabokovianly, the Hungarian football team: What an exciting experience it would be to follow the adventures of an idea through the ages. With no wordplay intended, I daresay this would be the ideal novel: we would really see the abstract image, perfectly limpid and unencumbered by humanity’s dust. Miss Herbert, Adam Thirlwell tells us, is an attempt at Nabokov’s ideal novel — ‘which is not really a novel’. It is a book about novelists and their work, in which we are given themes, motifs and a fairly large caveat: ‘It just has no plot, no fiction, and no finale.’ So what is it, exactly?

Juliet Townsend

The view from the nursery

More from Books

It was a perpetual source of regret to me at the age of ten that my parents were so boringly agreeable. My attempts to persuade my friends that my father, in reality the mildest of men, was a violent sadist, who regularly whipped me with his cane while uttering the sinister words, ‘I’ve got Tickler here!’ (cribbed by me from the children’s version of Great Expectations) met with a fascinated half belief, but what I really wanted was a Worldly Mother. Children in the Victorian stories to which I was much addicted often boasted one of these. They were generally only seen on their way out to a society dinner ‘in a soft satin dress and pearls, tall and stately but somewhat cold in expression’.

Jeremy Treglown

Stein and Toklas Limited

More from Books

As in her brilliant study of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Janet Malcolm’s focus in Two Lives is on the writing of biography, especially the biography of a couple — here, the ebullient Gertrude Stein and her ugly, much exploited lover, Alice B. Toklas — and, behind that, the construction of identity itself. Like Stein’s own work, the book is vivid, elliptical and distrustful of artificial order. It’s un-Stein-like, though, in the lucidity of Malcolm’s underlying thesis: that life-writing often has a lot more in common with fiction than its practitioners have tended to admit. In the early 1930s, Stein wrote The Autobiography of Alice B.

Allan Massie

Sympathy for the Old Devil

More from Books

In his criticism of Sainte-Beuve’s biographical method, Proust observes that it ‘ignores what a very slight degree of self-acquaintance teaches us: that a book is a product of a very different self from the self we manifest in our habits, in our social life, in our vices.’ I would not enter the argument stirred up by Professor Terry Eagleton’s attack on Kingsley Amis if it weren’t for the fact that those who have leapt — gallantly in the case of his second wife, Elizabeth Jane Howard — to Kingsley’s defence have spoken of the man, rather than the writer. This is understandable.

20 October 2007

Paul Johnson

You can admire a roguish old pagan without approving of him

Any other business

Recently I managed to get hold of a copy of Alone by Norman Douglas. This series of essays about Italian towns at the time of the first world war was the author’s favourite book. But it is not easily found. Indeed several of Douglas’s works are rarities. Most people know his novel South Wind, about wicked goings-on in pre-1914 Capri. And Old Calabria, my own favourite, which deals with the toe and instep of Italy, is one of the finest books of travel ever written. It has been republished, notably in a 1955 edition, with an introduction by John Davenport. So has Siren Land, another fine travel discourse on the Sorrentino peninsula, and there is a modern edition of a third, Fountains in the Sand, about the hinterland of Tunisia.

Philip Hensher

A late and furious flowering

More from Books

Sceptical readers will immediately wonder whether 14 years of any composer’s life really deserve over 1,000 pages of biographical examination. The second volume of John Tyrell’s Janacek certainly goes into events in extraordinary detail — I had a definite sense of foreboding of things to come when, on page 361, it is reported that in December 1919, ‘a button flew off [Janacek’s] fur coat so that he had to have another sewn on’. If we agree that the significance of the life dictates the substance of the biography, however, it seems perfectly reasonable. The last decade of Janacek’s life is truly one of the most astonishing and important periods in musical history. There is nothing that prepares us for it, and we are still coming to terms with it.

Bryan Forbes

King of the lurid spectacle

More from Books

What a strange, gifted little martinet he was, this celluloid Nixon who demanded that his every word, no matter how trite or banal, was preserved exactly by his ‘field secretary’ while another acolyte, the ‘chair boy’, ensured that wherever he was he could sit down without looking. Surrounded by these perpetual attendants and telling his crews, ‘You are here to please me, nothing else on earth matters,’ he forged a career that began with the silents and went on to encompass 70 films. In the process he became a household word for a heady mixture of religion and sex. This proved a potent box-office martini which made him a multimillionaire who remained virulently anti-union and a much-quoted reactionary voice.

Theodore Dalrymple

The great misleader

More from Books

In my intermittent career as an expert witness, I have observed that the most eminent men make the worst witnesses. Speaking from the lonely heights of their professional pre-eminence, they sometimes claim that what undoubtedly happened could not have happened, and what could not have happened undoubtedly did happen. Their intellectual distinction and busy schedules excuse them, in their own opinion, from the tiresome necessity to read the documents of the case with minute attention. Sir Bernard Spilsbury was the most eminent British forensic pathologist of his day, which is to say from Dr Crippen to the outbreak of the second war.

Allan Massie

A legend in his lifetime

More from Books

There is a brand of Toscano cigars called Garibaldi. Until given a new design recently, the packet proclaimed him as ‘the hero of two worlds’ as well as a devoted smoker of cigars (‘naturalemente Toscani’). The description was fair. Garibaldi was the most famous man of his time, the most famous since Napoleon. His image was everywhere, like Che Guevara’s in our time. A Polish historian has called him ‘the symbol of popular revolution, and a model of a people’s military leader’. When he died a French newspaper described him as a citizen of the world. Like the knight errant, the medieval paladin, he had as many homelands as there were oppressed peoples.

Gilbert Adair

Going through the motions

More from Books

If book reviews in The Spectator were, God forbid, ‘starred’, this self-styled biography of James Bond would merit just two stars out of five. The rationale behind so mediocre a score, however, would not be, as you might expect, that Pearson’s book is a curate’s egg, good in parts. Rather, it would reflect the fact that, inept as it mostly is, it does contain a single good, even quite brilliant and, considering that it was first published in 1973, genuinely postmodern idea that rescues it from the zero rating it would otherwise receive. But since that idea is sprung on the reader two-thirds of the way through, and it would be horribly tricky reviewing the book without divulging the twist in its tail, I invite anyone intending to purchase it to look away now.

Paul Bew

Not the place it used to be

More from Books

Roy Foster’s new book has its origins in the Wiles Lectures delivered at Queen’s University Belfast in May 2004. This is a distinguished lecture series initiated in 1954 by Herbert Butterfield’s Man on his Past with such high points as Alfred Cobban’s The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (1964) and Eric Hobsbawm’s Nations and Nationalism (1990), but it is fair to say that no previous set of Wiles lectures witnessed the excitement and large audiences attracted by the Carroll Professor of Irish History on his return to his home country. It may be that some of those attending were attracted by the guilty pleasure of seeing Dublin — after so much hectoring the other way — being ‘lectured’ from a Belfast podium.

Pj Kavanagh

All together now

More from Books

In my English school our hymns were mostly in Latin which, despite years of instruction, rendered them sufficiently opaque to be appropriate. What few hymns we sang in English seemed rather weepy, which didn’t appeal. Therefore, emerging from that place into a wider England, it was a surprise to discover there was a culture of hymns in good English, some with marvellous tunes, and almost a lingua franca derived from them among those who had dutifully bellowed those tunes and words when young. Nor was this only middle-class — think of the Salvation Army. This little book is a selection of the best of them: 52 hymns, 15 carols, each with a punchy introduction and a few necessary bars of the tune, and that tune’s provenance.

David Crane

Prodigious from the word go

More from Books

There is a wonderful set of medieval wall tiles from Tring Abbey in the British Museum depicting the legendary infancy of a particularly mutinous and unappealing Jesus. A charitable interpretation of the sequence might suggest that they are the chronicles of a Child Who Did Not Know His Own Strength, but as one wretched little schoolmate or interfering adult after another is struck dead or buried upside down for doing nothing more than annoy the little Infant, the one theological message to emerge from it is a tough and unambiguous Don’t mess with me.

Matthew Dennison

Falling foul of fashion

More from Books

J. B. Priestley described the forgotten interwar novelist Dorothy Whipple as the Jane Austen of the 20th century. Posterity has balked at this assessment — as indeed, within Whipple’s lifetime, did both publishers and readers. Although in 1932 her third novel, Greenbanks, topped the bestseller lists in the Observer and the Sunday Times, by the Fifties Whipple had fallen sufficiently foul of fashion to take an enforced extended break from writing, only later to be resumed with a series of low-key children’s books. Hers is a Barbara Pym story without the happy ending in the form of late-in-life rediscovery. Whipple’s re-emergence had to wait for the reissue of her final novel, Someone at a Distance, by Persephone in 1999, 33 years after her death.

Lloyd Evans

The importance of being earnest

More from Books

Michael Billington is the Val Doonican of theatre criticism. He’s been at it since the days of black and white telly and he shows no sign of giving up. Starting at the Times in 1965, he moved to the Guardian in 1971 and there he remains, rocking, crooning and warbling. He reckons he’s spent 8,000 nights in the theatre, so he probably knows more about the subject than anyone alive apart from Peter Hall. State of the Nation is his overview of the last six decades and he opens the book on a strident note. British post-war theatre, he announces, began not on VE Day, nor in 1955 with the first London performance of Waiting for Godot, but on 26 July 1945 when the Labour election landslide was declared.

Emma Tennant

Keeping it green and pleasant

More from Books

John Watkins is Head of English Heritage’s Gardens and Landscape Team. Tom Wright was for 25 years Senior Lecturer in Landscape Management at Wye College. They are two professionals who have made an immense contribution to gardening in this country and abroad. This book makes available their combined lifetimes’ knowledge and experience. The authors begin by reminding the reader that gardens, if neglected, will revert to woodland, which is the natural climate vegetation of the British Isles. Neglected lawns and borders become first scrub, then forest. Lakes and ponds silt up, then form swamps which are soon colonised by willow and alder. Without maintenance even garden buildings eventually decay, collapse, and become lumps and bumps in the ground.