Culture

When Boris Johnson was selected as the Conservative candidate for Henley in 2000, a year after being made editor of The Spectator, he called up Charles Moore and asked for his advice on how to handle Conrad Black, the magazine’s proprietor. The problem was that Boris had given him his word that he would not try to become an MP. After listening to Boris ramble on for a bit, Moore grew impatient and asked him what it was that he wanted.‘I want to have my cake and eat it,’ he said. What is remarkable about Boris Johnson, and the reason this biography is so fascinating, is that he has more or less been granted this wish. At Oxford, he became President of the Union in spite of being hopelessly unprepared for every debate he ever took part in.

As a late Seventies teenager, I was exposed to two distinct brands of American humour — or ‘yomour’ as it tended to be pronounced — each diametrically opposed to the other. One was the Bob Hope school of urbane wisecrackery that drifted over the Radio Two airwaves on Saturday mornings while my father sat approvingly by. The other was the opening salvo of NBC’s Saturday Night Live, then featuring Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase and the late John Belushi and Gilda Radner; never broadcast on this side of the Atlantic, alas, but periodically written up in that hip young person’s bible, the New Musical Express.

Five years on, and the 9/11 books begin to mount up: we’ve had Philip Roth doing it as historical allegory in The Plot Against America; John Updike doing it as a thriller in Terrorist; Jonathan Safran Foer doing whatever it is that Jonathan Safran Foer does in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; Ian McEwan’s Saturday; and now, Jonathan Raban’s Surveillance. You can already hear the sound of university critics drawing up the reading lists for their ‘Post- 9/11 Fiction’ courses: undergraduates, pay attention to what follows. Raban’s book should certainly be required reading rather than a secondary source.

It may have taken until the late 1960s for the expression ‘the personal is political’ to condense an important truth, but — as Lucy Moore’s fascinating new book shows — that truth is not a new one. Liberty tells the story of the French Revolution through the lives of the great salonnière Germaine de Staël, the passionate middle-class ideologue Manon Roland, the kind-hearted flibbertigibbet Thérésia de Fontenay, the feisty former courtesan Théroigne de Méricourt and the much younger Juliette Récamier — whose beauty and chastity (a very rare thing, to judge by this book) caused her to become an icon of the Republic.