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One that got away

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In a society in which multicultural pieties have for so long replaced genuine thought, it is hardly surprising that very little real interest has been evinced in how important minorities actually live. The fate of many young women of Indian sub-continental origin has not excited the interest, much less the sympathy and outrage, that it ought to have done, at any rate among people who like to parade the breadth of their sympathies as martyrs parade their wounds. The author of this very impressive and moving memoir was born of Punjabi Sikh parents in Derby. Although her mother spent more of her life in England than in India, she never learnt a single word of English: in itself a tragic self-enclosure.

Christopher Ondaatje

Dear, unhappy isle

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Roma Tearne’s first novel of love and war is set almost entirely in the strife-torn island of Sri Lanka, and sweeps away only in its final pages to Venice and to London. It is a heart-rending story of an expatriate who returns to his homeland only to find himself immersed in a poisonous civil war that slowly escalates to shatter both relationships and any hope of safety. Jealousy and revenge are the two strongest emotions in Sri Lanka, and when the British finally granted the country its independence in 1948 the politically powerful Sinhalese moved quickly to assert their power and position in politics.

Michael Henderson

Norman knows best

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For a man whose appearances at London’s concert halls and opera houses are rarer than golden eagles above Highgate, Norman Lebrecht has a lot to say about the state of orchestral music. His first book on the subject, The Maestro Myth, had the merit of revealing certain facts (the huge salaries of conductors, for instance) that may have surprised the people who buy tickets. When the Music Stops, which considered the parlous state of the classical recording industry, was so-so. Now comes a third (and surely final) one, and very thin it is. Lebrecht, rightly, has never regarded popularity as a badge of honour. This has advantages for a journalist; it offers a form of liberation.

Philip Ziegler

Just right for a desert island

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It would be difficult to write a boring book about Michael Foot. As well as being eloquent, imaginative and idealistic he possessed the priceless quality, from the point of view of the biographer at any rate, of intemperance. He did nothing by halves. ‘No attempt is made at impartiality,’ he announced defiantly in the preface to his first book. ‘Impartial historians are as insufferable as the people who profess no politics.’ He was as committed in his politics as in his history; his career consisted of a series of crusades, tilting sometimes at windmills, sometimes at real dragons, but always conducted with courage and panache.

Caroline Moorehead

A Frenchman for all seasons

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From soon after his death in 1838, Prince de Talleyrand, First Minister, Foreign Minister, President de Conseil and Grand Chambellan under a succession of French governments, became the subject of innumerable biographies. They have continued to pour out, year after year, though few of them have been as enjoyable as Duff Cooper’s Talleyrand in 1932, or as comprehensive as Michel Poniatowski’s five volumes in the 1980s. Some writers, like Sainte-Beuve, painted a man so venal and corrupt that lies came to him more naturally than the truth, but most sought hard to discover inner principles behind the cynical and secretive facade. For Robin Harris, boldly tackling Talleyrand’s life again, the balance has in recent years swung too far in favour of the inner principles.

Allan Massie

Is he or isn’t he?

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Reginald Hill’s many readers may not trust the title, Super- intendent Andy Dalziel seeming to belong, like Captain Grimes, among the immortals. Can the author really have brought him to his version of the Reichenbach Falls, and, if so, will the Fat Man no’, like Holmes, come back again? Certainly it seems that he is dead, blown up by a terrorist bomb in the first chapter, and, if not quite dead, then dying, despite the certainty of DCI Pascoe’s seven-year-old daughter Rosie that ‘Uncle Andy’ can’t do such a thing. While we wait to find out we are given quite a lot of his subconscious visions and out-of-body experiences; quite the worst thing in the novel, examples of the pretentious ‘fine writing’ which Hill is inclined to indulge in.

Andrew Lambirth

Everyday life in the army

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James Boswell (1906-71) was a New Zealander who settled in London in 1925, studying to be a painter at the Royal College of Art. In 1932 he gave up painting for illustration and joined the Communist Party. In common with many young people, he wanted to do something practical in a period of deprivation and want. He became a founder member of the Artists International Association, with such other committed left-wingers as Edward Ardizzone, Pearl Binder, Cliff Rowe and Misha Black. He also contributed satirical cartoons to Left Review, somewhat in the style of George Grosz. His other subject was everyday London life, for which he had a perspicacious eye and a deep affection.

John Martin-Robinson

No provincial laggard

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Inigo Jones is well-known as the first true English Classical architect, and his stature has been established by a series of books and exhibitions over the last 40 years. English historians, however, have tended to treat Jones as an isolated, even old-fashioned, disciple of Palladio, ‘catching up’ with the Italian Renaissance, at a time when mainstream Europe had moved on to the Baroque. The purpose of this book is to prove this accepted view wrong. Giles Worsley’s aim is to demonstrate that Jones was a distinguished figure in a European-wide classical architectural movement of the early 17th century.

Simon Baker

Struggling to survive the future

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Jim Crace’s latest novel, The Pesthouse, is set in a future America which, following an unnamed catastrophe, has endured a massive regression. There are no machines any more, no electricity or shops, no books and therefore no knowledge of history. In case this seems like an Arcadian idyll, there are also gangs of robbers skulking around, and regular outbreaks of plague. You might call the place faintly medieval, but it is worse because systems of trade are collapsing, not expanding. Unsurprisingly, then, many are trying to flee. The novel begins in Ferrytown, a village whose river must be crossed by those heading for the ocean.

Edward Harrison

The Last Days of Hitler revisited

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Hugh Trevor-Roper’s study of Hitler’s death was published by Macmillan 60 years ago this month. It won the Oxford historian an international reputation and remains one of the most powerful and readable accounts of the Nazi regime. It has never been out of print, yet this enduring quality is surprising. Trevor-Roper’s book was not the product of calculated research but resulted from an official enquiry. It was instant history, written very quickly a year after the events it describes, when many sources were not yet available. Nevertheless, the author constructed not only one of the most vivid portraits of Hitler but developed an analysis of his regime later confirmed by the specialist studies of German historians.

Allan Massie

The true and the credible

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Some 20 years ago A. N. Wilson published a novel entitled Gentlemen in England. It was savagely reviewed in The Spectator by the late Lord Lambton. He complained that two characters were portraits of old friends of his, whom, for the purpose of the review, he called Mr F and Mr Q. (Alastair Forbes and Peter Quennell, one guessed, without much difficulty.) Quoting a snatch of dialogue, he declared that Mr F (or it may have been Mr Q) would never have said such a thing, and therefore the whole edifice fell flat. This prompted me to write a letter pointing out that since Mr Wilson had written a novel in which neither Mr F not Mr Q was a character, how either would have spoken in real life was utterly irrelevant.

10 March 2007

Tom Stacey

Sick heart river

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Love can drive a man to his grandeur. H. M. Stanley, greatest of all of Africa’s explorers — let us agree with this fine biographer, Tim Jeal, on Stanley’s pre-eminence — was driven by the reverse: love denied, love rebuffed. And with Stanley, that deprivation was a good deal more complex. ‘This poor body of mine has suffered terribly,’ he was reflecting in his diary in June 1877, closing upon the final desperate stretch of his descent of the Congo river, having solved one of the last big geographical conundrums of central Africa: it has been degraded, pained, wearied and sickened and has well nigh sunk under the task imposed on it; but it is a small portion of myself.

Pj Kavanagh

Guilt and defiance

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It will be news to nobody that England (or ‘the Crown’) and Ireland had been in a state of mutual incomprehension since the time of the first Elizabeth. There had been much cruelty. Sean O’Casey spoke for his countrymen: ‘The English government of Ireland had often been soft-headed but never soft-handed.’ So, when Ireland, a newly made Free State, declared its neutrality at the beginning of the second world war, the explosion of anger on the one hand, and the grim defiance on the other, were to be predicted. What was not to be foreseen, however, were the tangled effects — political, cultural, moral, psychological — of this neutrality on Eire itself.

John Casey

Brutal, bankrupt Burma

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Thant Myint-U has a special perspective on the history of modern Burma because his family played a role, albeit a passive one, in one of the most dramatic and well-remembered events in its history. The military-socialist dictator, Ne Win, who seized power in an almost bloodless coup in 1962, overthrowing the elected prime minister, U Nu, ran a regime that was characterised by a distrust of educated or distinguished people. Ne Win himself conceived an intense jealousy of Thant Myint-U’s grandfather, U Thant, who, as Secretary General of the United Nations, was the most famous Burmese in the world. When U Thant died in 1974, Ne Win decreed that he should be buried in an obscure Rangoon graveyard, with no public ceremony.

Neil Clark

The human commodity

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Have two words ever said so much? President Bush’s unforgettable greeting to the British Prime Minister at the G8 summit in St Petersburg last summer epitomised how the ‘special relationship’ between Britain and America had descended into one of complete servility. Can anyone imagine Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher or even John Major being addressed in such a condescending way? Geoffrey Wheatcroft can’t, and in his masterly 150-page polemic describes how under Blair’s calamitous premiership, Britain has ceased to be an independent nation. It’s a depressing story of corruption, personal vanity and mendacity unequalled in our country’s political history.

D.J. Taylor

Too little, too late | 10 March 2007

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Aldous Jones, the hero of Gerard Woodward’s heroically odd third novel, has sunk into a decline. His wife dead, his only solace the bottle, the retired art teacher sits in the family house in north London brooding over relics of his married life and watching outgrowths of potato tuber lavishly uncoil from one of the kitchen cupboards. None of his three children seems much help: journalist Juliette, who lives in Holland Park with a quiz-obsessed political correspondent, occasionally steps round to nag; unforthcoming Julian works on the Channel ferry to Ostend; anthropologist James has recently married an Amazonian tribeswoman. With its fragmentary allusions to the London Evening News and the Falklands War, A Curious Earth eventually displays a grounding in the early- to mid-1980s.

Francis King

Thriving in adversity

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This book takes up the story, told so memorably in his Clouds of Glory, of Bryan Magee’s early years in working-class Hoxton. In the first chapter, the now nine-year-old Magee, always precocious in his search for knowledge, is learning about the facts of life from one of his chums. Soon after, separated from his family as a wartime evacuee, he is learning the facts of provincial life first in a remote Sussex village where only two people own cars, and then in Market Harborough where a high percentage of the inhabitants have never travelled farther than to Leicester. At the age of 11, the already intellectually robust, ambitious youth wins a scholarship to Christ’s Hospital, an ancient foundation far wealthier than Eton, where he enters a totally different world.

James Delingpole

All’s fair in love and war

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Weevils, sodomy and flogging or Baker rifles, jangling bits and ragged squares? For most authors dealing with the Napoleonic era, it’s an either/or. C. S. Forester and Patrick O’Brian do the Royal Navy, Bernard Cornwell does the land battles. But there’s one greedy-guts out there who wants to have his cake and eat it. Step forward Allan Mallinson, creator of both cavalry officer Matthew Hervey and sea Captain Sir Laughton Peto. Not that we’re complaining, obviously. It’s true that it can be irritating when a book’s narrative hops between the separate adventures of two distinct characters, but in the case of Mallinson’s latest, Man of War, it works splendidly.

Zenga Longmore

Venus in tears

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Saartjie Baartman, who performed under the name of ‘the Hottentot Venus’, became one of the most famous theatrical attractions of Georgian London. Exhibited like an animal for the entertainment of a paying crowd (‘two bob a head’), she was routinely obliged to suffer sharp prods in the buttocks from her curious audience who ‘wished to ascertain that all was nattral’. Tears would roll silently down her heart-shaped face. The deathly sighs she emitted on stage became as great a wonder as her Venusian form. Saartjie was born in the Eastern Cape in South Africa in 1789. Her Afrikaans name translates into Little Sarah, an apt choice for a girl who would grow no taller than four foot six and a half inches.

Clive Aslet

The house that coal built

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I opened this book expecting to find the sort of volume a considerate host would place in your country- house bedroom. It is a bit more than that. Taking the decline of the Earls of Fitzwilliam and their enormous house Wentworth Woodhouse, outside Rother- ham, as her theme, Caroline Bailey evokes the social revolution that occurred in 20th- century Britain. The almost inconceivable riches of the Fitzwilliam family — coming- of-age parties were celebrated with entertainment for tens of thousands of people — are contrasted to the squalor in which local miners lived. The Fitzwilliams were not bad employers.

3 March 2007

Raymond Carr

Bouncy castles in Spain

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Hugh Thomas is widely known as the author of scholarly blockbusters 1,000 pages long. He now excels in what he calls an intermezzo, a learned and lively book of 192 pages, full of good things including splendid pen portraits of worthies: of Choiseul, the easygoing foreign minister of France; of King Charles III of Spain, rising at dawn to spend the day shooting game and going to bed early after a frugal dinner. It concerns the visit to Spain in 1764 of Pierre Augustin Caron, later to be known, the result of assiduous social climbing, as de Beaumarchais. Beaumarchais’ father was a famous Parisian watchmaker in an age when possession of a fine pocket watch, a technological breakthrough, was for a nobleman as necessary an indication of status as fine clothes and a wig.

Honor Clerk

An ever-present absence

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It is a curious phenomenon of the modern novel that so many writers entrust their narrative voice to a character that in real life they would go a long way to avoid. In the right sort of hands, of course, it can be brilliantly effective, but imagine a Jane Austen novel narrated by Miss Bates or Jane Eyre told by Mrs Fairfax and one can see some of the problems that Margaret Forster sets herself when she refracts her story of tragedy and obsessive grief through the person of Louise Roscoe. Louise teaches in a primary school. She is married to Don, an advertising executive. Over is her diary, written to try to help her deal with the death in a sailing accident of her teenage daughter, Miranda.

William Brett

More Angry Young Men

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Clinton Heylin is a celebrated Bob Dylan expert, which makes his subsequent concentration on punk rock something of a surprise. But there’s a connection — Dylan shares with the best punk bands a devastating originality and a refusal to toe the established line. It is this free-spirited mentality that clearly attracts Heylin to his subjects, and his admiration for this quality is evident throughout Babylon’s Burning, a complete and authoritative account of the punk and post-punk movement from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s.

Olivia Glazebrook

Behind protective glass

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Jane Smiley suffered a period of writer’s block after 9/11. In the middle of writing a novel, Good Faith, she found herself unable to continue. It all suddenly seemed pointless. So, to inspire herself to complete her own, she read a hundred novels — one of which was Boccaccio’s The Decameron. After finishing Good Faith (published in 2003) she wrote a book about the hundred novels she had read (13 Ways of Looking at the Novel), and then she wrote this book, Ten Days in the Hills, which is a ‘reworking’ of The Decameron. Writer’s block can rarely have been put to such good use. Finding herself unable to write was a shock for Smiley since inspiration had always come easily to her.

Ian Thomson

Out of joint

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At a Clapham dinner party recently I was offered marijuana. Nothing unusual in that, only the joint took me to a far continent of anxiety; I had been inhaling skunk, a modern Special Brew strain of marijuana and about as beneficial. Next morning, still mildly hallucinating, I craved to reread T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Time was literally out of joint, but Eliot’s mystico-religious reflections on the nature of the universe might leave me feeling bright and beatifically attuned. I began to read ‘Burnt Norton’, and waited for the visionary moment. It never arrived; instead I was struck by how pretentious the poetry was. Craig Raine, in this pungent critical essay on Eliot, concedes that Four Quartets ‘has it faults’.

Frederic Raphael

The poetry of panic

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Tenn — as friends and sycophants called him — Williams was one more of those American writers whose lives have spectacular first acts, but dwindle away, more or less slowly, into repetition, sterility and self-pity eased (and exacerbated) by sex, alcohol and drugs (‘Way to go’, some might say). Williams was born in 1911, in Mississippi; if he had died 45 years later, admirers would be wondering what masterpieces he might have written, had he survived into maturity. In fact he did survive, but he did not mature: he lasted till 1982, his small body and fragile genius having endured as much punishment as its owner could inflict. He choked finally on a pill-bottle top, in a hurry for nirvana: a melodramatic final curtain worthy of his better days.

Allan Massie

First person singular

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The young Evelyn Waugh, it’s said, once declared in a newspaper article that the writing of novels in the first person was a contemptible practice. One would like to think he gave his reasons, but, according to Somerset Maugham, ‘he threw out the statement with just the same take-it-or-leave-it casualness as Euclid used when he made his celebrated observation about parallel straight lines.’ Subsequently Waugh would write his most popular novel, Brideshead Revisited, in that despicable first person. It would have been a poorer novel if he hadn’t shown the glamorous Flyte family through the eyes of his narrator, dazzled (if also dull) Charles Ryder.

Paul Johnson

What constitutes elegant company in the 21st century?

Any other business

Browsing through a Christie’s catalogue, I came across the description of a pen-and-wash drawing by Rowlandson, c. 1800, ‘Elegant company in a park’. It set me thinking. One knows very well what was meant by ‘elegant company’ at the beginning of the 19th century. It applied perfectly to the party Mr Bingley brings to the Merryton dance in Chapter Three of Pride and Prejudice. He himself is ‘good-looking and gentlemanlike’ with ‘easy, unaffected manners’ and £100,000. His two sisters each have £30,000 and ‘an air of decided fashion’, though one is married to a ‘Mr Hurst, [who] merely looked the gentleman’.

24 February 2007

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

A tale of treachery

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When The Spectator recently said goodbye to 56 Doughty Street, we said goodbye to more than three decades of memories. Whatever else we were any good at under Alexander Chancellor’s editorship, we knew how to throw a party, from the great sesquicentennial ball in 1978 to the summer garden parties to the Thursday lunches. Among other happy moments in that dining room perched giddily at the top of the building I remember a ludicrous exchange on biblical topography between Enoch Powell and Auberon Waugh; or Richard Cobb, the great historian of France, waking from a post-prandial nap with the words that he must get the 3.