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Throw a hoodie

My book of the moment is Mark Law’s brilliant exploration of judo, The Pyjama Game (Aurum). A specialist book on a marginal sport? Not at all. There is something about the “gentle art” (in which I used to dabble a little) – throws, hold-downs, strangles, and arm-locks - which absorbs and changes people. Vladimir Putin, William Hague, Guy Ritchie: they all do it. And, as my former sensei, Simon Hicks (now sadly departed) explains in the book, it is a sport that teaches hopeless young people self-respect and respect for others. I can vouch for this having been amazed as a private school boy competing around the country never once to have had the slightest aggro even from the toughest nuts. I hope Mark is sending a copy of The Pyjama Game to David Cameron.

2 June 2007

Jonathan Mirsky

The madness of the two Georges

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I saw Jeremy Paxman lose his languid scepticism a few weeks ago on Newsnight and exhibit what looked like amazement. Michael Rose had just said that if he were an Iraqi he would fight the Americans, or at least he could see why Iraqis did it. Is that, Paxman asked, what you want the families of our servicemen fighting in Iraq to know? Rose said yes. Now the reason, I suppose, Paxman abandoned his customary eyebrow-lifting was that Michael Rose is retired General Sir Michael Rose KCB, DSO etc, the ex-Commander of the 22nd SAS Regiment that fought in the Falklands, and commander of the UN Protection Force in Bosnia. If his slim book doesn’t convince you that Iraq is a lost cause and prompt evacuation is the only sane course, you are a Bush-Blair True Believer.

Allan Mallinson

Drang nach Osten

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Another book on Napoleon, or General Bonaparte as the author properly notes, though only because the man had not crowned himself emperor when he invaded Egypt. Insisting on calling him General Bonaparte, as an Englishman should, is now, alas, regarded as mere pedantry. If you type ‘Napoleon’ into the British Library catalogue, the result (13 May) is 10,861. So Paul Strathern, philosopher, mathematician, novelist and historian of the Medicis, is certainly labouring against the odds in offering us more. Except that his eclectic qualifications are probably as good as any historian’s when it comes to making sense, and making interesting, the extraordinarily muddled, vainglorious adventure that was this half-military, half-philosophical expedition.

Peter Oborne

The leading edge

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Three out of the last ten prime ministers have been cricket fanatics. The first was Clement Attlee. In the immediate aftermath of the second world war a newswire service was installed in 10 Downing Street. Attlee ignored it except that during the summer months he used what he called his ‘cricket machine’ to keep up to date with the close-of-play scores. Sir Alec Douglas-Home is the only prime minister so far to have played the first-class game, including two matches for Middlesex in the mid-1920s. After retiring as Tory leader, he became president of the MCC. Finally we have John Major, a useful player before a crippling knee injury forced him to abandon the game. When he was at Downing Street, cabinet meetings would be interrupted by the latest scores.

Lloyd Evans

It will never be buried

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Why a book at all? This guide to email etiquette, written by a pair of New York Times hacks, ought to exist as a viral attachment bouncing around the world from computer to computer. It kicks off with Jo Moore’s notorious and oft-misquoted email. Here’s the exact wording: ‘It is now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury. Councillors’ expenses?’ It’s the details that make this sorry little haiku so grisly. The verb ‘bury’ is spectacularly tasteless and the macabre contrast between the epoch-shifting events unfolding in New York and the parochial timbre of councillors’ expenses gives it a final gruesome seal of insensitivity. The timing, 14.

Victoria Glendinning

Tasty Woolf rissoles

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When I was a child, an aunt gave my mother a cookery book called 100 Ways with Mince. This made a huge impression on me, because of my mother’s irritation — it was not her idea of a present — but even more so because of the enormity of the title. It sprang into my mind for the first time for ages as I embarked upon Virginia Woolf: The Platform of Time. In the larders of literature, as well as the left-overs of major works, there are generally minor meaty morsels lurking in saucers at the back of the shelf. Ever since Virginia Woolf died in 1941 her literary remains, large and small, have been continuously collected and published, whether in book form or in specialist journals.

Leanda De-Lisle

The return of the maypole

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The return of the king follows a death. As the Lord Protector of the three kingdoms draws his last breath a great storm rises up, blowing down houses, trees and ships at sea. To Charles Fitzroy it is as if the elements themselves were celebrating Oliver Cromwell’s passing. But it was expected that tempests should mark the death of great rulers and in 1658 the violent winds must have appeared less a celebration than a warning of coming bloodshed. There was no more dangerous a time in a nation’s life than the passing of a ruler when the succession was in doubt. Although Cromwell was not a king in name, the idea of monarchy had survived the trial and execution of Charles I.

Christian House

Fighting naked on the beaches

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Few have done more than Noble Frankland to dissipate the myths and propaganda that fog our understanding of modern warfare. After serving as a navigator in Bomber Command during the second world war, Frankland went on to become a historian in the Cabinet Office, Director of the Imperial War Museum and adviser to the Thames Television series The World at War. He has proved to be a consummate pathfinder, leading the public through the murky details of 20th-century hostilities. So it’s surprising to find him suddenly embracing the wild fantasies inherent in fiction. Luckily his keen intellect is still evident in his debut novel The Unseen War, as is an eye for the more absurd aspects of political and military power.

John Bercow

Women of no importance

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The Kite Runner, said to be the first Afghan novel to be written in English, told an epic tale of individuals whose lives were lived across two continents amidst relentless political upheaval. Its author, Khaled Hosseini, stunned the critics with the extraordinary quality of that debut novel which has sold over eight million copies and will shortly be the basis of a film. All too often, the sequel to a fine book can disappoint. A Thousand Splendid Suns does not. The story revolves around two women, Mariam and Laila, born a generation apart, whose lives come to be interwoven. Mariam is the illegitimate child of Nana and Jalil.

Kate Grimond

A fickle jade

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Strix would have been 100 on 31 May. Before he had decided on a screech owl as his nom de plume, he had been Moth, and occasionally Scadavay and Apemantus. He had joined The Spectator in 1931 as a bumptious young man with a first in English from Oxford, where he had also been editor of Isis and president of the OUDS. His name was Peter Fleming and his association with The Spectator lasted for nearly 40 years, though it is as a travel writer that he is now remembered by aficionados. ‘A relaxed and somehow amateurish atmosphere pervaded No. 99 Gower Street in 1931,’ he wrote, ‘and it was comparatively easy to introduce such revolutionary innovations as the appointment of a film critic (me).

29 May 2007

The Spectator

G

When Günter Grass confessed last year that he had been in the Waffen SS it took everyone by surprise. It seemed like a cynically timed admission coming after he had won the Nobel prize for literature and before his autobiography came out. That slightly odd feeling isn’t shaken by this long essay in the New Yorker in which Grass explains how he ended up in the SS and stresses that he never actually fired a shot.

26 May 2007

The Spectator

Why Gordon will go soft

This review of Gordon Brown’s book on Courage from Blair’s pollster Philip Gould is absolutely fascinating. This is his take on Brown’s chapter on Bobby Kennedy’s career: “its fascination for Brown, is Kennedy's metamorphosis from "hard" to "soft" courage in the course of his later life, moving from tough-guy enforcer to open, empowering and empathetic politician. Brown sees Kennedy as a prototypical New Labour politician rejecting old left bureaucratic, top-down welfare solutions to poverty in favour of empowerment, the dignity of work and the potential of education. But it is clear Brown also sees Kennedy as a model of how it is possible to be renewed as a person and as a politician.

Philip Hensher

An unpromising land

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The enjoyment you take in this novel will depend on what sort of animal you think the novel is. If you think novels are moral journeys, examinations of the troubles of the world, you will enjoy it as an ingenious example of the ‘alternate world’ fantasy. If you think they are principally aesthetic objects made out of language, you will enjoy it mostly as a dazzling game with styles and genres. Either way, there’s no denying the high hilarity and wit, in the largest sense, of this exceptional book. Michael Chabon’s conceit is that the state of Israel was briefly founded, but was destroyed almost immediately, chased into the sea in 1948. The Jews of the world found a homeland instead in Alaska.

Richard Beeston

The voice of moderation

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Abu Suleiman looks back on his time in al-Qaeda as a reformed drug addict in Britain might consider his past life as a junkie. Speaking English, learnt from his American jailers at Guantanamo Bay, the young Saudi is now a respectable member of society and has a wife and a job as a stock market analyst in Riyadh to prove it. Like other Muslim men recruited by militant Islam to the cause of jihad, he knows that he is lucky to be alive, and fortunate to be given a second chance. Most others who made the trek to join Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan or his associates in Iraq have been captured, killed or ended their lives as suicide bombers. The story of what happened to his generation of young Muslim men across the world over the past decade and a half is only now being told.

Pd James

Fearless freedom fighter

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Sara Paretsky is one of the most respected and influential crime novelists of today, and this poignant and compelling personal testimony explains both the influences which made her a writer and the kind of writer she became. She was born in 1947 in Ames, Iowa, and grew up in Lawrence, Kansas, the only daughter in a Jewish family of five children. It was a world in which white Republican Protestants were the decision-makers, any questioning of their social mores provoking an aggressive reaction. Both parents were well educated and highly intelligent, both actively worked for social justice, but paradoxically kept their only daughter in emotional and educational subjection.

Francis King

Deep, dark truths revealed

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A few nights ago I was at a dinner party at which all those present knew each other far better than I knew them. For what seemed an interminable time their sole topic of conversation was the tempestuous relationship of a couple of whom I had never even heard. The story, in as far as I could piece it together, was fascinating; but with its oblique references to long-past events and to people merely indicated by their first names, it also exasperated me. I had the same experience during my reading of this novel. When we meet one of the two main characters, Lewis, he is looking down on a lake from his high perch on a builder’s ladder. All at once he suffers a hallucination of an arm raised out of the lake, a forefinger pointing. Subsequently there are references to a Manny and a Carl.

Noble Frankland

Last but not least

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Of six million Russian soldiers captured by the Germans, only one million are still alive in 1945, two million German women raped by Russian soldiers in the last months of the war, countless millions of Jews and others done to death in German concentration camps, 12 million displaced persons wandering about in Germany at the end of the war not knowing where to go. Such are a few of the statistics of Hitler’s legacy inherited by Europe in May 1945. These figures perhaps have become familiar, but how often do those to whom they have become familiar pause to consider what they really mean? Huge figures such as these have a self-defeating quality rather like those about money that are bandied about by chancellors of the exchequer; five billion more for this, five billion less for that.

Matthew Dennison

Uncomfortable home truths

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In a large house in north London, thick with the fug of kosher cooking and unspoken secrets, lives a lopsided family. The Rubins are envied — and enviable, surely? Claudia Rubin is a rabbi. She is also a writer, media personality and, par excellence, mother. She dominates her gentle, disappointed biographer husband Nor- man and their four ill-assorted children: an emotional, intellectual, motherly leviathan. Her standards are exactingly high — ‘For Claudia, good enough has never been good enough’ — but the veneer of family perfection Rabbi Rubin takes pride in sharing with the outside world is built on shaky foundations. The obligations and responsibilities of love have ousted simple affection.

Lee Langley

A romantic looks back

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The unending journey of this book takes Mark Tully from slums to skyscrapers as he explores the past, present and future not only of the subcontinent but of society, both eastern and western; how democracy is facing up to fundamentalism — Hindu, Muslim and an atheism he scathingly labels ‘aggressive secularism’. The Dawkins camp would not be welcome in his compound. There was a time when Tully was the most famous Englishman in India — ‘What does Tully Sahib say?’ the man on the village charpoy would ask when political or economic upheaval loomed. Tully’s mellifluous voice filled the airwaves for the 22 years he ran the BBC’s New Delhi bureau, trusted and loved by his millions of listeners.

Joanna Pitman

A paradise for bookworms

Any other business

Imagine coming across a book that has lain untouched for 100 years, and making an unexpected historical discovery. Ed Maggs, an antiquarian bookseller, had just such a thrill recently. ‘I was reading the epistolary diaries of a rather eccentric Victorian called Cuthbert Bede. I became strangely fixated by the story of this man who was obsessed by an unnamed woman. He fell into a state of schizophrenia and was incarcerated in an asylum called Munster House in Fulham. But as I was reading, I was wondering who this woman could have been — and wouldn’t it be fascinating if it turned out to be Alice Liddell? In the end it did turn out to be her. It was a real hair-on-the-back-of-your-neck moment. We sold the book to the Bodleian.

Allan Massie

Ordering the steps of the Dance . . .

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Writing a novel is a voyage into unknown territory. (Reading one is also, of course.) The author explores possibilities. To some extent even those novels which seem far removed from autobiography represent the author’s imaginary, or alternative, life, characters owing more in the last resort to him than to any identifiable models. He is a puppet-master, ordering the steps of the dance. Nevertheless he is likely, in the writing, often to be taken by surprise. ‘How do I know what I mean till I see what I’ve said?’ What to the reader seems right, even inevitable, might have taken a different course. The truth of this is well illustrated by the jottings Anthony Powell made, published posthumously as A Writer’s Notebook.

25 May 2007

The Spectator

Reading Wagner

I've been having a Wagnerian time of it lately, organizing a festival of events to coincide with the Royal Opera's performances of the Ring cycle in October. On Wednesday I was deep in the Nibelheim-like bowels of the Royal Opera House, recording extracts from Wagner's letters with Simon Callow. He read with the most spine-tingling concentration and a vivid fluency that made me unnervingly feel as if I was sitting next to the composer himself. Wagner was undeniably a monster but the energy and passion of the man was astounding. One minute he's writing exaltedly to Franz Liszt - 'I now consider my powers to be immeasurable: everything seethes within me and makes music'; the next he is in a rage of despair at the 'cruelly difficult task of creating in my mind a non-existent world.

19 May 2007

Philip French

An affair to remember

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New movie festivals spring up every year and pictures can achieve fame and reach large, if not especially lucrative, audiences by playing on the worldwide festival circuit without ever getting into normal commercial cinemas. But pace John Huston, who over half a century ago described Edinburgh as ‘the only film festival worth a damn’ (a tribute the organisers repeat annually), there are still only three that truly matter, and all began with political motivations. Mussolini launched the world’s first film festival in Venice in 1932 to advertise his Fascist regime.

Jane Ridley

When friends fall out

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Political biography is in the doldrums. No one wants to read 800 pages or so of cradle-to-grave dead politics, especially if it’s familiar stuff and has all been written about before. The detail is too much, and the potted narrative of forgotten political manoeuvring tends to overwhelm the life. One way out of this dilemma is to write about relationships. Friendship in politics is the hidden key to the top — can you think of an anorak who made it as prime minister? Even the nerdish ones had friends — the younger Pitt had Wilberforce, Bonar Law had Beaverbrook; but once our hero climbs to the top of the greasy pole the dynamics change and old relationships fall apart.

Michael Glover

Haunted by the past

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This curious and wearisomely long novel, the third of a trilogy, and set in Ashford, Kent, is partly an exercise in the fantastical impregnated by the historically serendipitous, and partly a crudely shaped slab of kitchen-sink realism, complete with passages of high comedy. These two elements strain to come together, to knit into some seamless whole, but, ultimately, they remain yawningly apart from, and on occasions almost entirely invisible to, each other. What is more, these looming elements of the fantastical never become sufficiently realised, or even sufficiently comprehensible, for the reader to be able to weigh — or even properly to register — their emotional impact upon each other.

Pj Kavanagh

Richness in diversity

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I seem to have missed the name David Crystal. He is clearly a phonetician, expert in linguistics, but the blurb tells us little about him except that he appears on television. He comes across as a genial cove. In one of his many digressions on the subject of words — this book is composed of them — he tells us of the arrival of that very word ‘blurb’. ‘Just occasionally we can be in on a word-birth.’ In 1907, in New York, an author didn’t like his book-jacket, he wanted it more appealingly lurid. So he ‘sketched out a buxom blonde on one of the jackets and labelled her “Miss Belinda Blurb”.’ The name caught on. The same author later defined what that word came to mean. ‘1.

12 May 2007

Allan Massie

When the going was better

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In January 1923 Aldous Huxley signed a contract with Chatto & Windus, which would guarantee him a regular income for three years. He would be paid £500 per annum and in return agreed to ‘supply the publishers with two new works of fiction a year, one of them to be a full-length novel’—an onerous undertaking. The royalty rate was to start at 15 per cent, rising to 20 per cent after the first 2,000 copies sold, and to 25 per cent after 8,000. This contract was regularly renewed over the years, with some emendations (one non-fiction book being substituted for one of the works of fiction) while by the second or third renewal the initial royalty rate would rise to 20 per cent. Novelists today can only be envious.

Anthony Daniels

Kicking a man when he’s down

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The desire to wage war as if it were keyhole surgery is, after a certain fashion, a laudable one. It indicates that a government can no longer afford to treat its own population, if not that of the enemy, as mere cannon fodder. Each soldier killed is ten, a hundred, votes lost. But the new-found tenderness towards the lives of soldiers has two inconveniences. The first is that keyhole-surgery war is a chimera, and what is impossible cannot be desirable. The second is that the decline of what one might call the cannon-fodder spirit makes the prosecution of long-drawn out wars and military occupations very difficult. Keyhole surgery is limited not only in space but in time.

Patrick Skene-Catling

A rector wrecked

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John Walsh’s new novel is a paradoxically enjoyable account of the decline and fall of an Exeter College student of theology who becomes for a short time a performer in vaudeville and then an evangelist of Longford innocence and charity who believes he can perceive potential good in even the most depraved young women. Walsh frames this moral tale in the few known facts of the real life of the Reverend Harold Davidson (1875-1937), for a quarter of a century the rector of the country parish of Stiffkey and Morston in Norfolk, who spent most of every week in London in the 1920s and early 1930s, trying to save girls from poverty and prostitution.