Culture

The Rules of Perspective is set in a provincial German art museum as it is bombed by the Americans at the end of the second world war. The pivotal scene is revealed at the outset: Corporal Neal Parry comes across four corpses seated in the ruined museum’s vaults. There are two men and two women, and they appear to have been killed by heat. A fifth corpse lies on the ground further away. It is evident that some paintings had been brought down here for protection, but all appear to have been destroyed except one. This vivid tableau exerts a powerful tension throughout the book, for the narrative is structured as a counterpoint alternating between the events relating to the Germans beforehand and the aftermath which is seen through Parry’s eyes.

There is a dizzying profusion of texts and writers in Nicole Krauss’s second novel, The History of Love. There is an inset novel bearing the same name, written by one of her principal characters, Leo Gursky, excerpts from which are strewn throughout. Gursky, an 80-year-old Jewish refugee in New York, doesn’t know whether his book was ever published. He gave his manuscript for safekeeping to his friend in the Polish village of Slonim when the sound of the Nazi juggernaut’s onward rush had become unmistakably loud, and then he and his friend were severed for ever.

Not long after Alexander Chancellor had been appointed editor of The Spectator in 1975, and had then lightheartedly or pluckily taken me on to his small crew at Doughty Street, we had lunch at Bertorelli’s with David McEwen and a great friend of his: a man once met not easily forgotten. He was imposing or even overbearing; loud, handsome in a rather blatant way, charming in intermittent flashes, much given to malicious anecdote and reminiscence. This was my first encounter with Alastair Forbes, who has died at 87, and is still remembered by staff as well as readers of The Spectator with a mixture of amusement, irritation and awe. In his late fifties at the time, Ali was kicking his heels; and although I might not have met him before, almost everyone else apparently had.

Horny black hills on red grounds and exposed roots clawing the air like scary glove puppets are typical of Graham Sutherland in his prime. Teeth and thorns, the odd crucifixion and Somerset Maugham perched on a rattan stool with a jaundiced tortoise look on his face are typical of him soon after, in the Forties, when he and Bacon became friends and their work came close to colliding. Similarities between the two painters are mustered in a colour-plate section at the beginning of an unbelievably circumspect book. ‘This account proceeds,’ the author explains, ‘from the specifics of an interchange between two individuals to considering more general frames of reference within which their affinities and differences may be usefully considered.

Lord Rosebery was the great lost leader of Victorian politics. Today he is a forgotten figure, but in his time he was the most famous man in Britain. Precociously talented and a star orator, he could draw vast crowds and keep them spellbound. He was the heir apparent to Gladstone as leader of the Liberal party, but as prime minister he was a failure. He held office for little more than a year, and by the time he resigned the Liberal party was in a state of shambles from which it never fully recovered. His life is an extraordinary story of squandered talent and wasted opportunity. Until now, Rosebery has remained an enigma. There has never been a full biography. Historians have dissected his speeches, but no one has got close to the man.

Simon Hoggart writes:Douglas Johnson, who has died at the age of 80, was one of the most distinguished — and most entertaining — of the academic writers who have appeared in the columns of The Spectator. In fact, the word ‘academic’ has perhaps the wrong connotations, for in spite of Douglas’s great scholarship, few people working in university education were less remote; as a lifelong student of France, he was fascinated by the real life and real people of that country. For instance, many historians who have written about the Dreyfus affair used it to create ponderous studies of social and political change.