Books Archives

No end of a lesson

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Listing page content here ‘We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse.’ Kipling’s re- proof, in ‘The Lesson’, on the conduct of the Boer war would serve well as the subtitle of this impressive review of the mess that is the Iraq intervention. The authors are the chief military correspondent of the New York Times and a retired Marine Corps lieutenant general and sometime military correspondent for the same newspaper. Their access to officials and classified documents is remarkable. They are certainly no apologists, unsurprisingly, coming from the NYT. Their intention is ‘to provide a comprehensive account and rationale of the foreign policy strategy, generalship and fighting … in all its complexity’.

Eric Anderson

Public skool monkey business

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Listing page content here I misjudged this book. I thought the airport fiction promised by the literary editor would take me nicely to New York, where I was going the next day. However, at 846 pages, weighing in at one kilo, Jilly Cooper’s Wicked! is long enough to get you to Australia. On my second evening in America the waitress, after reciting in a sing-song monologue the specials for the evening, added, ‘And I also must recommend that you see Wicked, the musical, while you’re here.’ ‘What’s so good about it?’ I asked. ‘Oh, the flying monkeys,’ she said. ‘They’re marvellous and they really fly.’ It turned out to be a different Wicked.

Alexander Waugh

The book that didn’t make the short list

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Listing page content here The councils of the early Christian Church were not always agreeable occasions. The bishops quarrelled terribly, at times getting so angry with one another as to clash in frenzied battles of ripped clothes, flying fists, blood and broken noses on the council chamber floor. Of all the issues that most inflamed these holy men none was more contentious than the question of which books should be chosen to constitute the official canon of the New Testament. The bishop who finally won his way was one of the most violent and intimidating of them all, Athanasius of Alexandria, but it was not until 405 AD (some 40 years after his death) that Pope Innocent I eventually ratified Athanasius’s list.

Richard Ollard

Humanity makes all plain

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Listing page content here The title of this well edited and interesting book is misleading. First it suggests a complete collection, which would, if it were ever accomplished, require several volumes. Second, the letters, though mostly written by Pepys, include a considerable number of those written to him and even occasional papers which are not letters at all but throw light on incidents that were important to his career. These are all well chosen and their annotation makes their significance clear to the reader who is not already a knowledgeable Pepysian.Pepys’s letters, though always characteristic and generally well expressed, have not the piercing quality of the Diary.

22 April 2006

Ronald Segal

The most sinful of the seven

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Michael Dyson is Foundation Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Religious Studies and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, the author of 12 previous books, and an ordained Baptist minister. Pride is his own contribution to a series of linked lectures and books on the seven deadly sins. There is no doubting the primacy of pride among the seven. The Greeks had a word for it. As hubris, presumption or arrogance, it loomed large, often along with its retribution or nemesis, in drama, poetry, history, philosophy. In the development of Christian theology, St Augustine saw pride as the source of original sin, and Pope Gregory confirmed it as the root of all evil.

Emma Tennant

Songs of prayer and praise

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The Church of Scotland has recently published a new edition of its hymnary, the first for 30 years. A committee of ministers had the difficult task of deciding which of the old hymns to reject in order to make room for the new songs — many of them from Africa and South America — which have ‘enlivened worship’ over the last few decades. John Bell, who convened the committee, tells us in his introduction that the aim was ‘to combine the best of the new hymnary with the cherished and rich tradition that had nourished and sustained previous generations, and so sound forth the eternal gospel in a world constantly changing in customs and culture’. Bell is himself a distinguished composer and hymn-writer.

Stephen Abell

Swansong at twilight

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It is, if you stop to think about it, an important literary question: what, exactly, is the point of short stories? They so often can — to this reader at least — be dismissed merely as stunted or early-aborted novels, a single idea gestated in the writer’s imagination that has inescapably failed to divide, multiply and develop into a full-grown body of work. They feel incomplete, inconsequential, unsatisfying. Fortunately, Francis King has shown us a (perhaps the) redeeming feature. He has realised that a short story is the perfect form to tell of shortened existence, of life not being allowed fully to develop or finally being brought to an end. His writing is dissatisfied, but not unsatisfying.

Charlotte Moore

Missing the happiness boat

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‘Competitive and rapacious and amoral and moralising and just plain mad.’ That’s how middle-class American motherhood seemed to Judith Warner when she returned to the ‘pressure cooker’ of Washington DC after having her first child in Paris, where she had enjoyed the readily available support and relaxed attitude to parenting that French mothers apparently take for granted. Perfect Madness arises from Warner’s conversations with American parents in their thirties and forties — educated, able, affluent people who ought to be leading happy and fulfilled lives. Instead, she finds a society fuelled by neurotic anxiety.

Marcus Berkmann

Portable and to the point

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An old biographer friend of mine, having churned out several lives of the great over the years, eventually told me over a boozy and depressing lunch that he had had enough, and that he wouldn’t be writing another one ‘for as long as I live’. As it happens he didn’t live that long, but you can still see his point. The literary biography has become such a massive, thumping, thudding beast, vaster than books have a right to be, that the prospect of opening another one weighs heavily on the heart, and several other parts of the body as well. How has this ridiculous situation come to pass? One hesitates to point a finger at anyone, but let’s do so anyway. Peter Ackroyd is the man to blame.

Ben Wilson

Keeping the best of order

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The preceding volume in the New Oxford History of England, covering the years 1727-1783, described the people as ‘polite and commercial’. Boyd Hilton does not imbue their sons and daughters with Byronic qualities, as his title might suggest; rather, it expresses the extreme volatility of the period. In the 1820s 60 per cent of the population were no older than 24. This generation had known little respite from war and its dismal aftermath, frequent and biting economic depressions, scarcity of food and recurrent unrest. Malthus’s warning of the destructive power of population growth and millenarian prophecies of the Apocalypse offered scant reassurance.

William Feaver

Trademarking the ordinary

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Lecterns have been installed in some bookshops enabling customers to flip through the 625 tabloid-format pages of what must be the largest volume ever devoted to a single modern artist. Andy Warhol ‘Giant’ Size is Warhol the Lot, a bulk buy, a gross amplitude of Warhol the Simple, Warhol the Smart and Warhol the Resourceful Blank capitalising on paradox and incorrigibility. Weightlifters could try, I suppose, for a Buy One Get One Free deal: two vols screwed to a plank, ideal for workout purposes. Alternatively, imagine Buster Keaton doggedly lugging his copy down Charing Cross Road and dumping it — perfect timing — in front of a runaway bendy bus. Ordinary purchasers, however, will need wheels. Enough of sizeist whimsy.

Jean Hayes

His Day

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Saint George has spent years in denial.His image has had a bad press.There’s been, as shrinks say, for some whileA problem he needs to address. I suppose it’s not really surprisingHe’s pining for something to clout,For even with wide advertisingThere aren’t many dragons about. And where is the Maiden Worth Saving?(To find any maiden is rare.)White flags with red crosses are waving.His country is deep in despair. This England is full of old womenWho’d love to be saved by a Saint.The Union flag needed trimming.Old age is disguised by war paint. There’s a wild Paper Dragon in BrusselsWhose fierce breath brings tears to old eyes.Our Patron is flexing his muscles.Saint George, England needs you. Arise!

15 April 2006

Interconnect

The march of folly

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This wonderful small book brings to an end much journalistic nonsense that followed 11 September 2001 in its definitive treatment of its causes and repercussions. To the Palestinian journalist Abdel Bari Atwan, what happened on that day was a natural conclusion to decades of Arab frustration and Western neglect. Honourably, but not totally successfully, he tries to be condemning of both sides. The sweep of his broad, sensitive and near perfect judgment cancels the importance of individuals, Osama bin Laden included, and focuses instead on the march of folly, which promises more such catastrophes in the future. However, bin Laden is still central to the tale. Atwan begins his narrative by recalling his own 1996 trip to Afghanistan to interview him.

Charlotte Hobson

The heart and stomach of a king

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When Princess Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst arrived at the Russian court in 1744, one of the many daughters of minor German royal houses who came to St Petersburg in the hope of an advantageous marriage, she was just 15 and ‘as ugly as a scarecrow’ after a severe illness. Her future husband, the heir to the throne, Grand Duke Peter, was a bizarre character whose main interests were his toy soldiers and ‘romping’ with his valets.

M R-D-Foot

One of Vichy’s vilest

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This is a ghastly story, powerfully well told. Lives of criminals form an accepted part of biography; within it, lives of con men are more difficult, because conmen cover and confuse their tracks so carefully. Carmen Callil triumphs over innumerable difficulties to make clear the career of Louis Darquier, one of the villains of the Vichy regime in France. His father was a notable at Cahors, doctor, mayor, radical deputy, with a devoutly Catholic wife of superior lineage who bore him three sons; Louis, born in 1897, was the second. He survived the war as an artillery subaltern, and then went to the bad: a tremendous womaniser, a heavy drinker, a sponger and a cad. Wherever he went, he left a trail of debts.

James Fleming

Talking about the birds and the bees

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Were I swimming for my life with these four books between my teeth and were I to be tried more sorely, the first to go would be Parrot. It has three gems: that Warren Hastings, who died (from starvation) in 1818, owned a parrot that was still alive in Swindon in the 1920s; that Charlotte, George V’s parrot, would perch on his shoulder and in a ‘strident, seafaring voice’ call out, ‘Well, what about it?’ as the monarch deliberated over state documents; and that in Australian slang tight male swimming briefs are known as ‘budgie smugglers’. But these are insufficient rewards for trawling through Paul Carter’s unfocused and matey prose. Too often his meaning eluded me. And his style verges on the cute.

Matthew Dennison

Surprised and doomed by joy

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At the centre of Rachel Billington’s new novel is love, but this is not in any conventional sense a romantic novel. Claudia, a schoolgirl, falls in love with a man 24 years her senior. He is not a romantic man, though given on occasion to the poetic flights of fancy associated with his chosen occupation, that of would-be writer. He is also married, though this, too, is a union lacking in romance: ‘Of love he did not think. He and Fiona were inextricably bound together. He could not imagine life without her and had no wish to try.’ Claudia, at 16, has few of the attributes of the romantic heroine save her youth and a talent for music: she plays the viola with passionate intensity.

Jonathan Keates

Zero tolerance in Florence

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It is easy to get misty-eyed about Renaissance Florence. How gorgeous it was, we tell ourselves, this City of the Lily, with its lissom youths and comely maidens, each one a Gozzoli ephebe or a Botticelli Venus, its humanist scholars poring over the latest haul of Greek manuscripts, Donatello and Cellini fashioning flawless marble and bronze, Brunelleschi winching the last blocks of his miraculous cupola into place, Masaccio slapping down the sublime ‘Tribute Money’ on the wet plaster of the Brancacci Chapel, and those dear, wise Medici guiding it all towards a purple-prose apotheosis in the pages of Burckhardt and Berenson. Oh to be in Fiesole now that April’s there! Fra Girolamo Savonarola has traditionally been seen as the party-pooper at this cultural banquet.

Richard Beeston

Time out in Cuba

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For three years Moazzam Begg, former DHSS officer, one-time Birmingham estate agent and top al-Qaida suspect, survived at the sharp end of America’s war on terror. Seized in the middle of the night from his home in Pakistan, Begg was taken through grim makeshift prisons, endured hundreds of hours of interrogation and ended up one of the faceless caged figures in Guantanamo Bay, the US detention facility in Cuba. Thanks to a campaign by Western human rights lawyers and the fact that he is a British citizen, Begg emerged from captivity last year to be reunited with his family. He has now produced the first authoritative version of conditions in Guantanamo and the legal no-man’s-land where hundreds of terrorist suspects are trapped.

Michael Vestey

The murky side of Murano

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This is Donna Leon’s 15th Commissario Guido Brunetti novel set in Venice and once again the author succeeds in capturing the light and shade of a city that has plenty of both. As in this edition she even provides maps, including the island of Murano, so that the reader can follow the detective’s various per- ambulations in search of the solution to a mystery, also slipping into the story details of which vaporetti stops he uses when he’s not summoning a police launch to take him out across the lagoon to an inhospitable outcrop where, perhaps, a body has been found. Leon is good at portraying the social tensions, the rivalry between and even the resentments of, say, the people of Murano and those who live in other districts.

8 April 2006

Hugh Massingberd

Harnessing the horses of Apollo

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In my ignorance, before reading this most instructive, entertaining and beautifully produced book, I had idly regarded sundials as agreeable garden ornaments with little or no practical purpose. To quote Hilaire Belloc, ‘I am a sundial and I make a botch / Of what is done much better by a watch’. Yet our expert guide to the subject, Sir Mark Lennox-Boyd, a former Tory politician who is now Patron of the British Sundial Society and a prolific designer of sundials, is having none of this. Echoing Professor Joad of The Brains Trust, he counters Belloc’s couplet with ‘it all depends on how you measure time’. He suggests that ‘you could just as easily say that sundials tell the right time but clocks do not’.

Philip Ziegler

A talent for losing

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Wavell was a great soldier and a great man: wise, courageous, clear-headed, an inspired and inspiring leader, a pattern of integrity. It is peculiarly unfair that the three greatest tasks he undertook all ended in near total failure. He made his name between the wars as a thoughtful, forward-looking soldier who did as much to prepare the British army for war as any of the men who were his titular superiors. On one thing all his officers agreed; that with him they were learning all the time. His basic principle, which may appear obvious but seemed daring, even heretical to the more hidebound commanders, was, ‘There is nothing fixed in war, except a few elementary rules of common sense.’ Training must be not for ‘a war’ but for ‘war’.

Christopher Hitchens

Relocation with a vengeance

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In 1975, a few months after the two Turkish invasions of Cyprus that had stormed across the northern tier of the island in the preceding summer, I stood in the square of Lawrence Durrell’s old village of Bellapaix and watched the Greek villagers being rounded up for deportation to the south. Within a short space of time, almost 200,000 people had been forcibly expelled, so this little uprooting job was more in the nature of a mopping-up operation, involving those who had been too old or young or ill to be removed the first time round. Many miles to the south, a comparable scene was being enacted in Turkish Cypriot villages near Limassol.

Douglas Hurd

What next — after the end of history?

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Professor Fukuyama is famous for having told us at the end of the Cold War that history was at an end. By this he meant that the slow advance of liberal democracy was inevitable. As he explains in his latest book he did not mean that we should try to accelerate the process by killing thousands of Iraqis and creating a political context in which Iraqis kill each other every day while American occupation forces look on. Saddam too was a killer; but Saddam is on trial for his life. Fukuyama now carries his thinking forward into the world after the poisonous flowering of the neocon doctrine which he once favoured in more innocent form.

Jonathan Bate

Mad about the Bard

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At school there was a group of us who thought that Samuel Beckett was the coolest person on the planet. What could be more thrilling than the apocalyptic minimalism of a play featuring two people who lived in dustbins? We found validation for our passion when a teacher drew our attention to the Polish critic Jan Kott’s essay comparing Beckett’s Endgame with King Lear in his Shakespeare Our Contemporary. Intrigued, I read the rest of the book. Kott brought Shakespeare into the present with a passion I’d never encountered before in any other work of literary criticism. I particularly liked his claim that if Titus Andronicus had had a sixth act, Shakespeare would have used it to turn machine-guns on the audience.

Ronald Blythe

All go in the name of God

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The Bickersteth family has performed its Levi-like role in the Church of England for several generations, providing it with some of its best traditional pastors. Rectories, vicarages, deaneries, palaces have homed them and parish churches and cathedrals have long witnessed their work. And work it still is, as this autobiography of a 20th-century bishop proves, although the word in any put-upon or compulsive sense never seems to have entered his head. His chief motivation has been Christ’s brief instruction ‘Do this.’ John Bickersteth is candid, some might think to the point of naivety at times, and his book reads like an opened-up diary, a free view of himself in which he shows pleasure rather than vanity. He knows that he has had a good time.

Theodore Dalrymple

Medicine and letters | 8 April 2006

Any other business

The most beautiful book to come out of South Africa, at least that is known to me, is Pauline Smith’s The Little Karoo. It was published in 1925, when the racial question (as it was then called) concerned the relations of Boer to Briton. The blacks in those days were considered to have mere walk-on parts in the drama of history. Pauline Smith was a timid soul who became a protégée of Arnold Bennett. Self-advertisement had not yet become the greatest literary virtue, and her collection of eight tragic stories about the inhabitants of the Little Karoo, a sparsely populated arid area of Cape Province inhabited by simple Boers with Old Testament ways, was widely praised. The emotions of her characters were, of course, all the deeper for not being openly expressed.

1 April 2006

Philippa Stockley

Slash and burn

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‘A ship is sooner rigged by far, than a gentleman made ready,’ scoffed Thomas Tomkis in 1607, about how long men took to dress. But in the 17th century wasting time this way was no male preserve. ‘Women,’ wrote Joseph Swetnam, ‘are the most part of the fore-noone painting themselves and frizzling their haires and prying in their glasse, like Apes.’ In her new book, Fashion and Fiction, Courtauld professor Aileen Ribeiro shows, by interpreting a gallery of arresting portraits backed up by contemporary literature, that clothes were a consuming, costly passion — a social index, suitor’s shorthand and poet’s primer.

John De-Falbe

Memories of loss

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The first short chapter of The Other Side of You looks so simple. After introducing us to Elizabeth Cruickshank, a suicide patient who ‘in a certain light could have been 14 or 400’, Dr McBride explains how he and his psychiatrist colleagues ‘come alive at a certain kind of raving’. For McBride it is ‘the suicidally disposed who beckoned’. Then he tells us matter-of-factly how, when he was five, he saw his older brother run over by a reversing lorry, and of the loss that has weighed on him ever since. In these five pages Vickers discreetly and with immense skill establishes her narrator and sets out her primary theme. Perhaps because the author is herself professionally familiar with her subject matter, there is an ease to the narrative voice.