Books Archives

Captain of a dreadful crew

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Listing page content here To meet Oswald Mosley was a most unpleasant experience. You knew at once that you were in the presence of someone who had lost touch with everything except his own ego. So he bullied, so he lied, denying that he had been a willing agent of Hitler, that he would have proved a Quisling in the event of a German invasion in 1940, or that he had ever been an anti-Semite. On a television programme with him once, I read out some of the foul things he had said on platforms in the Thirties; his eyes turned red with rage, and I saw that he would have done violence to me if he could. If I did not suppress the book I had written about his sister-in-law Unity Mitford, Mosley and his lawyers threatened, they would not be responsible for the consequences.

Noble Frankland

No reason to pull down the statue

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Listing page content here The title of Gordon Corrigan’s book tells us it is not going to be a Churchillian panegyric, so it comes as almost a disappointment to find no new revelations needful for the dethroning of the former national hero. All we are given is an emphasised reminder that Churchill’s history, The Second World War, was biased, that he was prone to indulge in disastrous expeditions, notably, in the first war, Gallipoli and, in the second, Norway and that he unreasonably pestered his generals to mount offensives before they were ready to do so. But none of this, of course, is news and it certainly gives no ground for taking down the statue of Churchill in Parliament Square nor, indeed, for revising his entry in the Dictionary of National Biography.

Martin Vander Weyer

A philosopher rescued from politicians

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Listing page content here In February 2005 the then chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, travelled to Kirkcaldy on the windy shores of the Firth of Forth in the company of our very own Chancellor of the Exchequer, so that both could pay tribute to the town’s most famous son, Adam Smith, in their own distinctive way. For Greenspan, the stability and growth of free-market capitalism as seen in ‘today’s awesome array of international transactions’ could be attributed to a modern version of ‘Smith’s invisible hand’.

John Laughland

Giants in petty strife

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Listing page content here ‘In London, if a man have the misfortune to attach himself to letters, I know not with whom he is to live, nor how he is to pass his time in suitable society.’ David Hume was notorious for preferring Edinburgh’s intellectual life to London’s, but the city where the philosopher was most successful, at least socially, was Paris. He was sent there in 1763 as secretary to the ambassador, the Earl of Hertford, and was feted as ‘le bon David’. ‘In Paris,’ Hume wrote, ‘a man that distinguishes himself in letters meets immediately with regard and attention.’ Hume’s remark about the anti-intellectualism of the English remains true to this day, but he was to some extent the cause of it.

Digby Durrant

Ghosts from the past

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Listing page content here Andrew Taylor has written on a wide range of subjects, but it is for his crime thrillers that he has become famous and won so many awards. By my estimate he’s written 26, which is just under half of the 59 books he’s credited with by Amazon. Until now I have only read one of these and it was excellent. The American Boy is a long, gripping mystery novel of the kind that Wilkie Collins invented to delight the Victorians, and so I looked forward to Taylor’s new one, A Stain on the Silence. When James’s phone rings and he hears a tiny voice say ‘Jamie’ he would have been wise to have rung off immediately. Only Lily Murthington has ever called him that and she had almost ruined his life. Now she’s dying and wants to see him.

Alistair Irwin

Fighting a war in all but name

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Listing page content here There is much in common between a Richard Holmes book and a bottle of the finest Speyside malt. Both look and feel good, full of promise. Extract the stopper from one, open the other and the anticipation quickens. After that it is a question of taste or habit as to whether you gulp them down for maximum intoxication or extend the life of the contents by savouring them gradually. For this latest Holmes volume I recommend a preliminary dram or two as the author sets the scene. Then take a breath of fresh air to absorb the implications of what you have read.

19 May 2006

Interconnect

Serious but not solemn

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Towards the end of the Seventies I was asked to write a short, critical study of Muriel Spark’s novels. I accepted, with some trepidation and misgivings. At least I hope there were misgivings. There should have been, first because nothing equipped me for the task apart from my admiration for her novels and, perhaps, the fact that I had, at long last and after many false starts, written a novel myself and had it published. The second reason to hesitate was more cogent. I had enjoyed her novels from the start. Memento Mori and The Bachelors were as clever and witty and as much fun as pre-Brideshead Waugh; they delighted us as undergraduates. Yet the question nagged: how serious was she?

Philip Hensher

How writers behave and misbehave

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Oxford publishes, or has published, a number of anthologies of anecdotes relating to various professions. There is a very enjoyable one of military anecdotes, edited by Max Hastings, Elizabeth Longford’s of royal anecdotes (competing in a crowded field), and Paul Johnson’s of political anecdotes. Some professions more readily generate anecdotes than others. I could imagine an anthology of anecdotes about philosophers or doctors, but no one is going to buy The Oxford Book of Banking Anecdotes. A lot of serious-minded people probably disapprove greatly of the idea of an anthology of literary anecdotes. After all, full-dress scholarly biographies of writers are, in some circles, not regarded as particularly worthy enterprises.

Andrew Taylor

Infant identity crisis

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Listing page content here Women in peril flit through the pages of traditional Gothic fiction, murmuring ‘Had I but known!’ as they fall for the wrong man, open the wrong door or apply for the wrong job. The poet Sophie Hannah takes the trusty formula in both hands, gives it a vigorous shake and uses it to produce something fascinating and original in her first novel. In this case the woman in question is Alice. Still reeling from the death of her parents in a car crash, she has married the dashing David and acquired a new family in the shape of his welcoming (and wealthy) mother Vivienne and his son Felix by a previous marriage. David’s first wife was murdered, but the killer was caught and is now in jail. Alice moves into the lavishly equipped family home.

A.N. Wilson

The man who loved one island

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The poet and storyteller George Mackay Brown was the son of the postman at Stromness, Orkney. His father John had also been an apprentice tailor before becoming the postman. George, in one of his poems, speaks of how ‘not wisdom or wealth can redeem/The green coat, childhood’. In his knowledge of every cranny of the Orkneys, but in particular in his feel for the town of Stromness, George retained some of the postman’s instinctual topographical grasp for the one dear perpetual place in which his genius was rooted. In the exactitude of his meta- phors, the flair of his tragic impulse, there is something of Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, the pessimistic tailor ever struggling to say an Eternal Yes to life.

William Feaver

A free spirit in Philadelphia

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‘Eakins errs just a little — a little — in the direction of the flesh,’ Walt Whitman observed in the late 1880s. Ideally he would have had the Frenchman Millet do his portrait, but the painter of humble peasants was already dead. Eakins made him a flushed old soul in jovial mood. Sidney Kirkpatrick’s account of Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) errs a little in the direction of voiceover-speak. His Eakins is ‘a neglected and tortured genius’ for whom Philadelphia, city of love, was no fleshpot and who, though somewhat prim himself, was rated outrageous by the leading figures of that God-fearing hell-hole. This Eakins is one of those posthumously vindicated figures common in popular accounts of 19th-century painting.

Jane Ridley

The thrill of the illicit

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Listing page content here Hunting is cool. Ten years ago no one in her right mind would have dreamed of writing a novel about hunting, but now Candida Clark has done exactly that. Just as George Bush’s ‘war of terror’ gave a huge boost to al-Q’aeda, so Labour’s attempt to impose a ban has actually invigorated hunting. Today it’s more popular than ever, given an extra shot of adrenalin by the thrill of dodging the law. Parliament spent 700 hours debating hunting, and the result was a botched and unworkable law which makes things worse, not better, for the fox. The reason for this fiasco is simple. As Charlie Pye-Smith explains in his excellent essay, Rural Rites, the ban was driven by class war, not by a concern for animal welfare.

Tom Holland

Never simply a soldier

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There was nothing that a Roman general relished more than the chance to raise an earthwork. ‘Dig for victory’ was an injunction that legionaries often followed with a literal cussedness. Advancing into enemy territory, they carried shovels as well as spears. The camp that a legion would build after every day’s march, always identical to the one that it had built the evening before, was the expression of something almost obsessive in the Romans’ military psychology. The blend of caution and remorselessness that this addiction to entrenchment reflected was, in strategic terms, stupendously successful. Who better, then, than a specialist on the Roman army to absorb its implications?

Byron Rogers

She was only a farmer’s daughter . . .

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Why are we so interested in biographies of the old film stars? I don’t think our children will be. I can’t see them reading 550 pages, the length of this book, about the lives of far better actors like George Clooney or Gwyneth Paltrow. But then we don’t see the stars as actors. For that period straddling the middle of the last century we really came to believe the old gods were back. This illusion was the achievement of the Hollywood studios, in particular of the Eastern European Jews who ran them, and were some of the most appalling human beings who have ever walked the earth. According to Lee Server, L. B.

Jonathan Sumption

The new Machiavelli

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Should the state take action against people who have done nothing wrong, if there are plausible grounds for thinking that they are about to? Suppose, says Alan Dershowitz, that reliable intelligence shows that a large-scale terrorist attack is about to happen. Should the law allow the police to round up whole categories of potential perpetrators in advance, in the hope of stopping the conspiracy in its tracks? Should it authorise the use of torture to obtain information that will prevent the attack? What if the suspected mastermind is identified in a foreign country where the authorities are too weak, wicked or incompetent to arrest him? Might one assassinate him instead? Or invade the foreign country? Or bomb it from a great height?

18 May 2006

Frank Johnson

Waiting for Gordo, by Margaret Beckett

Any other business

‘You don’t have to be an intellectual to enjoy Beckett.’ A theatre critic, in this centenary year, wrote on Sunday, ‘You don’t have to be an intellectual to enjoy Beckett.’ Many theatregoers must also have thought that, for maximum enjoyment, it helps to be a pseudo-intellectual. Doubtless plenty of the people at present lauding Beckett are saying what they truly think. But common observation of the way of the world tells us that plenty are not. They are only saying what they think they should say. There have, so far this year, and so far as one can tell, been no dissenting voices about Beckett. That is implausible, suggestive of a climate of fear. This is also a Mozart anniversary year.

17 May 2006

Philip Hensher

Odd odds and ends

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Listing page content here Thin scrapings from the bottom of the Orwell archives, this volume; less than ten years after Peter Davison’s 20- volume complete Orwell, he has taken the opportunity to put some subsequent discoveries into print. The on dit is that the publishers of the complete edition declined the opportunity of presenting this supplement. Though this decision falls squarely into the ha’porth of tar category, and the complete Orwell must have been much more commercially successful than most comparable enterprises, it’s an understandable one. Orwell’s ephemeral writings fared unusually well in the 50 years after his death, thanks to two editors.

Lloyd Evans

Beauties and eyesores

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Listing page content here To call him a polymath would be a gross slander. Alain de Botton knows everything. Sim- ple as that. He’s just far too modest to admit it. And I’m happy to report that his great mission to turn every facet of civilisation into a coffee-table book continues. Philosophy, art, travel — all done. Buildings are next. His approach is studiously unhurried. He gives the impression that he didn’t set out to write a book at all. It just sort of happened. He apparently spends his life flitting from continent to continent, staying in fancy hotels, roaming capital cities, noticing things and examining the condition of his temperament.

Olivia Glazebrook

Solving a confidence crisis

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Listing page content here When I saw this book’s subtitle, ‘What to Read and How to Write’, I felt a hot and cold prickle — but then I do tend to respond badly to direct orders. Hoping my fears were unfounded, I turned to Smiley’s summary of The Great Gatsby. ‘I have to admit that I don’t care as much for The Great Gatsby as many people do,’ she writes. My prickle turned into a frown, and with feelings of panic and hostility I turned next to her comment on Tom Jones. Thank heaven, she admires it: ‘Tom Jones exhibits complexity and generosity of character portrayal ... it justly became a great English classic.’ Phew, my panic subsided. I was able to turn to Chapter 1 — her introduction — and begin in earnest.

Andrew Taylor

When the kissing stopped and the killing began

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Listing page content here As a genre, perhaps the most important question that the thriller asks is this: do we care sufficiently about the hero to want him (or, of course, her) to survive? In this case the hero is Nick Atkins, who in 1989 is just down from Cambridge. On the brink of law school, he spends time in California, where his life is hijacked by Tabatha, a beautiful Stanford student with a taste for Yeats’s poetry. After several months, Tab abruptly and inexplicably decides that their passionate affair is over and sends him home. She promises to communicate occasionally through cryptic small ads in the California Literary Review. For the next 17 years, her teasing, allusive messages flow like a dark sub- terranean current through Nick’s life.

Elfreda Pownall

Chewing it over

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Listing page content here I spent many of my school holidays with a kind great-aunt, a deeply religious maiden, most of whose friends were nuns. Beside my bed, as well as Lives of the Saints there was always her favourite book, Jottings from a Gentlewoman’s Garden. Not ideal reading for a nine-year-old, but how glad I am now that I did occasionally dip into it before getting down to reading Bunty under the bedclothes. Otherwise I would not have appreciated the gentle pre-war style that Simon Courtauld seeks to reproduce in Food for Thought: A Culinary Tour of the English Garden.

Frank Johnson

A rather unBritish achievement

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Listing page content here Who would have thought that the British, of all unexotic peoples, would turn out to be good at ballet; both at dancing and choreographing it? One minute they could do next to nothing of either. The next the world knew about Britain and ballet was that this damp, dour island off the Continent had a company as famous as any in the world. The newly formed Vic-Wells Ballet gave its first full evening’s programme in the — for ballet — unglamorous Old Vic in 1931. By 1949, as Sadler’s Wells, it was thought glamorous enough to appear in the world’s most star-struck opera house; with Fonteyn and the Sleeping Beauty opening its first season at the New York Metropolitan.

Interconnect

Who done it in Boston?

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Listing page content here I’m so glad I came to this book fresh, my mind open and unsullied by all that had gone before. As it was, I could sit back and enjoy the labyrinthine plot with all its platitudinous twists and unexpected turns as a real beginner without one preconceived idea in my head. The mystery of the Boston Strangler, I now know, must be one of the most complex, contentious and still inconclusive cases in the sad and shocking modern history of serial homicide. But let me say straight away that the current wunderkind of American journalism Sebastian Junger is unable to bring us any closer to a satisfactory answer for all his meticulous and exhaustive research.

Caroline Moore

Welcome, little strangers

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Listing page content here Every time I pick up the latest novel by Anne Tyler, I wonder whether she is quite as good as her fans, of which I am one, like to think. Is she, in fact, no more than the Thinking Woman’s Good Holiday Read? No more than that! many readers will exclaim (and perhaps, like Henry Tilney, add that men ‘read nearly as many as women’): only a thoroughly readable book that doesn’t insult your intelligence! Even outside the airport bookshop, we are all grateful to find such a treasure. But there are a lot of readable books out there of the sort recommended by the Richard and Judy Book Club (no sneer at all intended: their choice encompasses some excellent works); and the question is why Anne Tyler should stand out.

13 May 2006

Theodore Dalrymple

Medicine and letters | 13 May 2006

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‘That Shakespeare,’ a German friend of mine once said to me, ‘knew a thing or two.’ ‘That Shakespeare,’ a German friend of mine once said to me, ‘knew a thing or two.’ You can say that again. Sometimes, indeed, I think he knew everything, at least everything about human nature. When a religious fanatic tells me that this or that holy scripture is all I need as a guide to life, I reply with a single exclamatory word, ‘Shakespeare!’ He even knew about — or perhaps I should say, anticipated — insurance and social security fraud. At any rate, they would not have surprised him, or an attentive reader of him.

Bevis Hillier

Books do furnish a TV series

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Listing page content here When I was younger, I used to think, ‘If ever you become famous, on no account agree to be interviewed by Lynn (“Demon”) Barber.’ The call never came; but, if it had, I hope my resolve would have remained adamantine, whatever her blandishments. You can see what she made of her victims in her collected profiles, Mostly Men (1991). Richard Harris has ‘a very surprising habit’: he ‘plays pocket billiards’ throughout the interview. ‘He puts his hand down inside his tracksuit and sort of rearranges things.’ Richard Adams, author of Watership Down, is in floods of tears most of the time, even blubbing into his meat pie at lunch.

Douglas Hurd

Ill-considered imperial gestures

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Listing page content here During 1956 three major powers made dramatic efforts to prop up their position by the use of armed force. The British and French, in collusion with Israel, invaded Egypt to overthrow its dictator and regain the Suez Canal; their attempt failed within a few hours. The Soviet Union used its tanks to suppress a working-class revolt for the freedom of Hungary; despite the world’s execration they succeeded in re-establishing their control for another 30 years. It was the coincidence of these clashes which made the drama. Both came to a head in the same few days at the end of October. Peter Unwin comments and analyses these events in the best Foreign Office style — which is a compliment.

Sebastian Smee

Missing the middle path

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Listing page content here Reading David Mitchell’s fourth novel, which is told through the eyes of a 13-year-old boy, reminded me why girls have little or no interest in the contents of boys’ heads until they are well out of their teens. It’s horrible in there. Thirteen-year-old boys, in particular, are revolting concoctions of fear and loathing, of hormones and confusion and clumsy self-assertion. This presents Mitchell, a writer of enormous talent but uncertain depth, with a problem. The truer and more lifelike he makes his narrator’s voice, the more he risks boring us silly with early teen preoccupations.

Judith Flanders

The master and the loyal retainer

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Listing page content here It was not easy to be an attendant at the court of King Pablo, for Picasso, ‘with his fringe of white hair round the back of his head, his never tiring black eyes, his red shirt, is always the centre of everyone’s thoughts, especially as everyone else’s movements depend on his and no one, not even he, knows what it will be’. It was no easier to be King Pablo: P. wanting everyone to enjoy themselves started making masks with the tablecloths and most of the guests put them on, but some began to smuggle them under the table as valuable souvenirs. P., seeing this, looked around with an angry face and, collecting all the masks, crumpled them up and threw them into the sea.