Culture

By a fortunate coincidence these books treat the same subject: old age at the mercy of time, the ‘blind rider’ of Goytisolo’s title. Ageing is a matter of temporary victories and final defeats. At 75, you can succeed in getting on your horse by using a mounting block and shortening your nearside stirrup leather; at 81, you can’t hold your horse out hunting. You give up. What is the point of it all?

Going to Italy for his latest book, Jamie’s Italy, Jamie Oliver is, in a sense, coming home. Though he learnt to cook in his parents’ pub in Essex, all his early professional experience was in restaurants serving good, authentic Italian food. He worked for Gennaro Contaldi, Antonio Carluccio and, of course, at the River Café, where he was discovered and made a television star. Jamie’s recent television series have had a serious purpose, improving the abysmal standards of school dinners and helping disadvantaged young people find a trade and self-respect through cooking.

Early one morning in August 1826 two men stood facing each other 12 paces apart in a sodden field a few miles outside Kirkcaldy in Fife. One man was a linen merchant named David Landale, the other was George Morgan, his banker. At the words ‘Gentlemen are you ready? — Fire!’ two pistol shots went off instantaneously. As the smoke cleared it was plain that Morgan had fallen to the ground. He was shot through the chest and died at once. Landale escaped unharmed. This was the last duel ever fought in Scotland (the last duel to be fought in England was in 1845) and the wonder is that it happened at all. As James Landale shows in this enjoyable book, the quarrel between David Landale and George Morgan was not a matter of honour in the aristocratic sense of the word at all.

The British, publishers and booksellers regularly tell us, have an antipathy to the short story; they respond unfavourably to even a well-known writer coming up with a collection, and for an emergent one to devote creative energy principally to the medium would be regarded as literary suicide. And this despite determined efforts by certain key literary editors, competition-setters and indeed the South Bank itself to keep the art-form alive. Elsewhere the short story is differently regarded. In the English-speaking world, Ireland, the American South, and, thanks to Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff, the Pacific North-West of the US have long exhibited short stories as supreme expressions of their culture’s genius.

One of Sir Mark Thatcher’s friends once told him he was ‘born guilty’. Many, including the two authors of this book, would contend that he has done his best to live up to his billing. Apparently, in moments of persecution, he has taken to quoting this observation about himself in the most rueful of tones. If he can bring himself to read this book he will feel far more persecuted by the end of it. The authors are unquestionably experienced investigative journalists, with various scalps to their name. They are suited to their subject remarkably well, in that their style and approach are almost as unattractive as they claim their subject to be.

‘The most intellectual British poet of the 19th century’ is Anthony Kenny’s judgment of Arthur Hugh Clough — a tribute which implies the absence of Tennysonian musi- cality in his verse as well as a prescient understanding of contemporary philosophical and scientific issues that far exceeds Browning’s or Arnold’s. Kenny’s study of this still underrated figure takes the refreshingly old-fashioned form of a ‘life and works’. Biographically, it has no sensational revelations to offer, and, in terms of fact, it doesn’t substantially advance on the mid-20th-century researches of Katherine Chorley and R.K. Biswas. But Kenny has been thinking about Clough for over a quarter of a century, and it shows.