Books Archives

The Godfather of the Steppes

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First published in 1836, this novella shows Alexander Pushkin’s mastery of almost any form. The following year — after a miraculously productive short period — he died in a duel over the alleged adultery of his wife with the adopted son of the Dutch ambassador. Evocative, swashbuckling, romantic and sentimental, The Captain’s Daughter centres on the peasant rebellion, 1773-75, of the Cossack Yemelyan Pugachov. Pushkin had already written A History of the Pugachov Rebellion published in 1834 in two volumes, one describing the events, the second consisting of the source materials.

Philip Hensher

The golden writer

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Doris Lessing was last week awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Philip Hensher traces the career of ‘one of the greatest novelists in English’. Doris Lessing’s Nobel win came as a surprise to everyone, the author apparently included. Despite her enormous, decades-long international reputation, she was less fancied than dozens of patently smaller writers. That could only have been ascribed to a cynical estimate of the way the Swedish academy works. On literary merit, no one would have questioned her right to it. She is one of the greatest of novelists in English. Her career is a matter of savage breakthroughs into quite new territory, as if her searching, sceptical intelligence could never be satisfied with stasis for long.

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 20 October 2007

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John Cage was the composer of 4’33”, the piano performance piece that consists of 4 minutes and 33 seconds of complete silence — except for the mutterings of the audience — and Imaginary Landscape No. 4, in which 12 radios are played at the same time for several hours. He was also the inventor of the ‘prepared piano’, in which a grand piano is filled with nuts, bolts and scrap metal to alter its sound. But Cage once said that if he were to live his life over again, he would be a botanist rather than an artist. He was in fact an amateur mycologist of some distinction, helping to found the New York Mycological Society, winning an Italian TV quiz on mushrooms in the 1950s, and co-writing (with Lois Long and Alexander Smith) The Mushroom Book, shown above.

13 October 2007

Michael Tanner

Moving between philosophy and science

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This is the latest in the long- running series of popular books that Steven Pinker, a professor in the Psychology Department at Harvard, has written about the human mind, particularly about the nature of thought and its relationship to language. Pinker is extremely interested not only in the nature of language, and the way in which languages work, but also in lots of odd or striking things about languages. As part of his attempt to make some highly complex and abstract ideas comprehensible and even attractive, he uses a huge number of examples. Sometimes you feel that his hope is that even if you don’t quite cotton on to his theoretical positions, at least you will enjoy the quotations, jokes, even illustrations, that he bombards you with.

Jane Ridley

The name of the game

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Between 1997 and the passing of the Hunting with Dogs Act in 2004, parliament spent 700 hours debating hunting. Over 250,000 people took part in the Countryside March through London in 1998. Why such an apparently marginal issue, involving a tiny minority of rural troglodytes, should have mattered so much in the modern age of New Labour is a question well worth asking. Emma Griffin is an admirably even-handed historian with very long sight. By casting back to 1066 her study gives a fresh perspective, and she achieves the difficult feat of saying something new about hunting. Her argument goes like this. From the time of the Normans all the ingredients of hunting were in place. There were riders and dogs and they chased a solitary prey — in the Middle Ages, this was deer.

Alberto Manguel

Scenting the storm

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One of the stories that haunted my childhood (I can’t remember where it came from) was the ancient conundrum of the mandarin, which I later found retold by Eça de Queiroz and Ursula K. Le Guin and goes like this: If you can get anything you want by pressing a bell and killing an unknown mandarin in China, would you do it? Moral qualms aside, what terrified me was the idea that a seemingly innocuous act could have such far-reaching consequences. Because if pressing a bell could fatally touch someone oceans away, what trite and distant event might affect my own life without my knowing it? I think this was the first inkling I had of the peculiar notion we call Fate.

D.J. Taylor

War-war and jaw-jaw

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Much of The Painter of Battles takes place in a crumbling watchtower on the Spanish coast, its silence broken only by the respectful commentary issuing from the daily tourist boat. Here on the circular wall of the tower a veteran war photographer, Faulques, is painting a gigantic mural on the theme of conflict through the ages: ‘the photo I was never able to take’, he explains. His routines include occasional supply-trips to the local town, morning swims out to sea and back and, less agreeably, ‘a sharp stab in his side over his right hip’ that comes on every eight hours or so and requires dousing with analgesics.

William Leith

The line of least resistance

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This is a book about drugs, drug addicts, and the people who try to help drug addicts — and the author, a prison doctor, thinks we’ve got it all wrong. For instance, most people think of heroin addiction as something like a terrible disease. We also tend to think that withdrawal from heroin is an appalling physical ordeal. Not so, says Theodore Dalrymple. ‘Addiction to opiates,’ he tells us, ‘is a pretend rather than a real illness, treatment of which is pretend rather than real treatment.’ This is a bold assertion, and I know some people who find it offensive, but it’s worth following Dalrymple’s logic.

Jonathan Sumption

Triumph of the clerks

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To the outside world, France has always seemed monolithic. The richest and most powerful of Europe’s nation-states until the 19th century, intellectually and artistically insular at most times, intensely nationalist throughout, the French have been fascinating neighbours but never easy ones. Yet until the revolutionary wars of the 1790s, few of its inhabitants felt truly French as opposed to, say, Auvergnat or Périgourdin. They lived in a geographically isolated and highly diverse provincial communities. They spoke many languages and dialects, venerated different saints and observed a variety of possessive local customs. Until well into the 18th century, most Frenchmen used the word ‘France’ to refer to the region around Paris.

James Delingpole

The road to Yorktown

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James Delingpole The American War of Independence is one of my least favourite periods and I expect it’s the same for a lot of Englishmen. For a start, the wrong side lost. Also, it’s fiendishly complicated, what with all the Whigs, Tories, Loyalists, Patriots, Frenchmen, Indians, Militia, Virginians, Marylanders, Light Bobs, Fusiliers and Continentals biffing one another in a confusing melee. And there is the lurking suspicion that, as Michael Rose has recently argued, it has depressing things to tell us about the US’s (and her allies’) current involvement in Iraq. Indeed, about the only thing that persuaded me to read a book on the subject is that it was written by Mark Urban.

Douglas Hurd

Handing your life to a stranger

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Adam Lang, until recently Prime Minister, is keen to write his memoirs as soon as possible. He employs for this task a hulking apparatchik who was part of his inner team at 10 Downing Street. He takes his wife Ruth, his secretarial staff and this ghost-writer to a luxurious house made available by a millionaire at Martha’s Vineyard in New England. He has an argument with the ghost-writer; the writer gets drunk, falls off a ferry and is washed up on the shore. After he has identified the body Adam Lang quickly recruits a replacement ghost-writer through his lawyer. This replacement, whose name we never hear, is the hero and narrator of the book.

Philip Ziegler

And when they ask us how dangerous it was . . .

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As every biographer knows, all evidence is suspect. Probably the diary comes nearer to the truth than any other source: it is subjective and no doubt biased but a least it usually reflects what the author really thought at the time. Letters are second-best. They too are contemporary but they contain what the writer wanted someone else to think, not necessarily what he or she thought themselves. Most problematical of all is oral testimony. Memory plays fearful tricks. With the late Tom Harrisson I once conducted an experiment. From the diaries kept by Mass Observation volunteers during the second world war we picked a few which contained particularly vivid Blitz experiences. We then wrote to the authors, asking them, without referring to anyone or any document, to tell the story again.

John De-Falbe

Shifting hearts, shifting sands

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A man of about 60 who had read the American edition of this novel — it was published there a couple of months ago — told me lately that it was a ‘grown-up book’. Among other things, I take him to mean that besides recognising the difficulties of love, it embraces them; and that love is not the exclusive domain of the young and frisky. Toby Maytree is a poet who lives by the beach on Cape Cod. He ‘hauls houses’ for a living, but he has an insatiably inquisitive mind: ‘He pitched into the world for plunder, probed it with torches, filled his arms and brain with pieces botched — to what end? Every fact was a rune.’ Lou speaks ‘three languages and held her tongue in all of them’.

Justin Marozzi

Brief encounters with the dubious

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Volume five — or is it six? — in the Simpson autobiography series. For many people, one volume tends to be enough, but Simpson has a lot to tell. In this latest doorstopper, he offers us an engaging collection of ‘snapshots’, essays on a lively and eclectic bunch of characters he’s run into over the years. There’s a crooked extortioner, the maddeningly elusive Japanese emperor and empress, Saddam awaiting execution, film stars, Serbian contract killers, a child sorcerer in the Congo, Chinese tomb-raiders and ‘a variety of other thoroughly dubious people including Robert Mugabe and Alastair Campbell’. The last few words of that sentence, not buried midway through the book but on its very first page, are a masterstroke.

Piers Paul-Read

What’s become of Baring?

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Maurice Baring is one of those writers of whom it is periodically said that he is unjustly forgotten and ripe for reappraisal. In his own lifetime, he was a prolific and popular author: a uniform edition of his work published by Heinemann in 1925 lists over 50 works — novels, plays, anthologies, poetry, memoirs and reportage — most of which are now out of print. Clearly, the very volume of his output has made it difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff: in the 1970s Edmund Wilson wrote an essay entitled ‘How Not to Be Bored by Maurice Baring’. Baring was born in 1874 into one of the grandest and most influential families in England. Barings Bank was then second only to Rothschilds, and there were five Baring peers in the House of Lords.

Allan Massie

How sacred is Shakespeare?

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A couple of weeks ago I was at the Wigtown Book festival where I had been invited to give the first Magnus Magnusson Memorial Lecture. Magnus had been a great supporter of this festival — and no wonder, for it is quite charming — ever since it began when Wigtown was chosen as Scotland’s official book town. That selection was a surprise, partly because this small Galloway town on the Solway Firth is ill-served by public transport. (‘What’s the quickest way to get to Wigtown from Edinburgh by public transport?’ Answer: ‘Fly to Belfast and take the ferry.’). Nevertheless it has been a great success, and the little town seems more prosperous on every visit.

8 October 2007

Stuart Reid

Hitchens’s inconvenient past

It is good for the soul to be reminded what a sharp and funny writer Christopher Hitchens was in the days before he collapsed under the weight of his own pomposity. Over the weekend, to take my mind off the excitement in Westminster, I picked up his 1988 collection, Prepared for the Worst: Selected Essays and Minority Reports, which contains among many other good things his reflections on the ‘pseudoscientific propaganda word’ terrorism. The essay is called 'Wanton Acts of Usage' and appeared in Harper's in September 1986. You can find it here (subscription required). The piece makes hilarious reading today in the light of Hitchens's enthusiasm for the war on terror (and scorn for those who oppose it).

6 October 2007

Alex Massie

The Gentleman’s Gentleman Shrugged

Your weekend essay question comes from Blood and Treasure: It always struck me that the antonym of Ayn Rand is PG Wodehouse. In Wodehouse world, it’s the servants who have all the brains, do all the work and generally carry everybody else. If Jeeves shrugged, society would collapse. Who is John Galt? Bertie Wooster, that’s who. This is maybe why no-one takes Rand seriously in Britain. And Ayn Rand done by Wodehouse definitely strikes me as an opportunity missed. Discuss. Personally, I've generally been under the impression that Ayn Rand was something of an Aunt Agatha type. Best avoided, then.

Anne Applebaum

Memory speaks volumes

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It’s a dangerous business, oral history, at least when you try it in Russia. Without oral history a complete history of the Soviet Union is almost impossible to write. Archival documents are dry, containing only the official point of view; memoirs, often written years later, are unreliable and frequently slide over important details. In an interview, by contrast, one can pose questions, prompt forgotten memories, or ask an eyewitness about things no one would put in print. It is no accident that many excellent books on Soviet history written in recent years (Catherine Merridale’s Ivan’s War or Simon Sebag-Montefiore’s Court of the Red Czar) have made extensive use of interviews.

Bevis Hillier

How and why the Twenties roared

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Attempts to anatomise the Bright Young People of the 1920s have included Beverley Nichols’s The Sweet and Twenties (1958), Martin Green’s Children of the Sun (1977) and Humphey Carpenter’s The Brideshead Generation (1989). Osbert Sitwell called Nichols the first of the Bright Young People and Nichols claimed to be the last of them. D. J. Taylor suggests that this was not quite accurate, as there is still one survivor of that febrile group — I think he must mean Teresa (‘Baby’) Jungman, once the object of Evelyn Waugh’s desire, and now 100. Certainly Nichols was Bright Young Person in excelsis.

Alexander Smith

Never a dull moment

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In May this year Scotland had an election for its parliament. I was in London a couple of months earlier and was surprised by the blank stares with which some of my English friends greeted my remark that we were facing a very interesting political situation north of the Border. Some people, it seemed, did not even know that there was a parliament in Scotland, let alone one about to be the subject of an election. Then the Scottish National party won — in a sort of way — and, as we say in Scotland, perhaps people ken noo. English lack of interest in Scottish affairs is quite understandable. It is difficult and depressing enough to keep abreast of one’s own current affairs without following the unfolding history and politics of others.

Justin Cartwright

Accentuating the human factor

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It is a commonplace to say that novelists should be judged by their work rather than their private lives or their publicly expressed views. And writers, of course, subscribe enthusiastically to this idea. It is true that it is usually for their books that novelists reserve their most considered and ordered thoughts; but the fact is they arise inescapably from one consciousness, the same one that is occupied in all the other activities which make up a life. In Graham Greene’s case, I don’t think his novels are the key to understanding him. He writes, ‘I am my books,’ but this admirable volume of his letters suggests that for all his success he is not his books.

Selina Hastings

For richer, for richer

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In her introduction to this extraordinary memoir, Etti Plesch warns the reader that the life she is about to describe will seem unfashionable as it contains no ‘stories of great suffering’. True enough. As recounted in Horses & Husbands, Etti’s 99 years seemed to have been passed at a level of luxury and self-indulgence almost impossible now to imagine. Knowledgeably edited by Hugo Vickers, this is the story of a woman who, uniquely, was the owner of not one, but two Derby winners, and who married wealthily six times. Born to aristocratic parents in Vienna in 1903, Etti was brought up in a romantic castle in Czechoslovakia belonging to her grandmother, her parents having divorced when she was four.

Penelope Lively

A ghastly crew | 6 October 2007

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Jennifer Johnston is adept at economy. Here is a short novel in which the eight characters are introduced one by one, with minimum fuss — some dialogue, a brief reference by someone else — and their complex relationships obliquely revealed. Complex indeed are these connections. ‘I am gay, bent, queer, homosexual, call it what you will,' says Donough, coming out to his mother Stephanie. Sexual identity lies at the heart of the narrative — who is inclined to what, and with whom. By the end, four of the eight are defined as gay, bent, call it what you will, and the past is floodlit, with all its confusions and deceptions. Stephanie’s ex-husband Henry is in hospital, recovering from a car accident in which the driver, his wife, was killed.

Robert Salisbury

Relishing the death throes

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Piers Brendon does not much like the British empire. In over 650 pages of closely researched, patronising disdain he uses his Stakhanovite labour to perform a smug hatchet job on empire- builders, administrators and the British military. He warns us in his introduction what to expect: ‘Less emphasis is placed here on triumphs than on the disasters that undermined the future of the empire.’ As a result, he accumulates the impression of an empire consisting entirely of unimaginative, hypocritical despots embattled by racial attitudes, snobbery and smug military incompetence. You have to ask yourself how such a useless people as the British managed to acquire a quarter of the earth’s surface and hang onto it until the middle of the 20th century.

Byron Rogers

A case of missing identity

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This could have been a wonderful book. Take a scene from it which could so easily have been the start of a film. It is the 1920s, and in the garage of a large stockbroker’s mansion in the Home Counties two youths, the spoilt and jobless sons of a rich man, are noisily tuning a hell bat ( actually a modified Model T-Ford ), a car already capable of 100 m.p.h. Dissolve to the woods above them, to silence broken by tinkling notes. Among the trees their elderly father is playing a musical box. A huge and powerful individual, with the sort of moustache then popular among army officers of field rank, he has, according to his earlier biographer Hesketh Pearson, ‘no more mystery about him than a pumpkin’.

Nicholas Haslam

How now Browne cow?

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The Christmas book market is about to be flooded, if that’s the word for these somewhat juiceless jottings, by not one but two biographies of the actress Coral Browne. This dual assessment is perhaps just as well, as quite clearly there were two Coral Brownes, one a witheringly witty, ravishing (in the early 1960s she was voted one of the three most beautiful women in the world, along with Princess Grace and Nina of aristo folk singers Nina and Frederick), loyal and quintessentially ‘West End’ creature; the other an insecure, sour, mercenary, and often cruel self-creation, the Coral evident in her attitude to, and treatment of, the children of her second husband, the epicene actor Vincent Price.

Max Hastings

The worst of friends

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In this his latest book Max Hastings aims not so much to write another history of the war in the Pacific but to describe ‘a massive and terrible experience, set in a chronological framework’. It is a companion volume to his Armageddon which did much the same for the last phase of the war in Europe; but the experiences he describes are yet more terrible, and the framework will be even less familiar to British readers.

Michael Heseltine

Riding out the storm

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I share with Richard Mabey a love of trees. Beechcombings begins with the great storm of 1987, although Mabey’s love of trees has its origins in his childhood in the Chilterns. The childhood romance shines through. Trees were family. When I had the privilege of being Member of Parliament for Henley, and so the Stonor Valley, the great beech woods of the Chilterns were in my constituency. Mabey’s particular affection for the beech — fagus sylvatica — is touching, human and altogether understandable. I took a rather more positive view of the consequences of the 1987 storm than Mabey does. Of course there were some sad losses. Mabey refers to the beeches of Chartwell which Churchill so admired. If you looked at the carnage on the ground it was devastating.