Books Archives

Dicing with death

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A book on Waterloo as short as this (the text proper is 100 pages, small format) tempts a rush to judgment; it has certainly been widely acclaimed already. Paul Johnson’s dust-jacket puff says that the battle ‘is both one of the most decisive in history and the most difficult to describe’. Decisiveness is important: Waterloo is the first in a series called ‘Making History’. The editors, Amanda Foreman and Lisa Jardine, claim that ‘there are moments when a single event topples the most apparently certain of outcomes, when one intervention changes the course of history. They are the landmarks along the horizon of the past.

Tom Rosenthal

Memoirs of a genius

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Tom Maschler, son of a distinguished Jewish publisher, was born in Berlin in 1932 and came to England with his parents in 1939. After Leighton Park School, having turned down a place at Oxford, he worked on a kibbutz and as a tour guide, hitch-hiked round America and did a brief stint of National Service before getting himself discharged on health grounds. He then worked for various publishers: André Deutsch, whom he left because André wouldn’t increase his wages of six pounds to eight pounds a week, MacGibbon and Kee, where he wasn’t allowed to publish Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and Penguin. In 1960 he became Literary Director of Jonathan Cape only a month after Cape himself had died.

John De-Falbe

A late run on the rails

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All of a sudden, there is a buzz about Cynthia Ozick. Although respected for many years as a writer of fiction and criticism, no one ever seemed to expect her to reach a wide audience. Now, together with more famous luminaries, she has been announced as a contender for the first Man Booker International Prize: the media circus has opened itself to her. Her last novel, The Puttermesser Papers, was never published in the UK at all, despite critical acclaim in the USA, but The Bear Boy (called Heir to the Glimmering World in the US) has been published with a conviction that looks as if it expects substantial sales. The Mitwisser family are German Jews who have been rescued by the Quakers and brought to the Bronx in the 1930s.

Interconnect

End-of-term report on our masters

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The only good thing New Labour have done in office they did in their first week: the granting of independence to the Bank of England. In every other respect, things have gone the other way: a 60 per cent increase in taxes and spending; the ruthless subordination of schools, hospitals and police forces to the imperatives of politics; and a great extension of the state into the lives of individuals, families and businesses. This book is an unqualified celebration of that achievement. Written by the Guardian journalists (and husband and wife) Polly Toynbee and David Walker, Better or Worse? concludes happily that the state has grown much larger under Labour, and shows, in detail, how. It is ineffably boring.

M R-D-Foot

Recording secrets under orders

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This book is a goldmine of once highly secret intelligence material: the diary kept, night by night, by the head of the counter-espionage branch of the security service, MI5. Diaries were forbidden to British combatants (though, luckily for historians, the chief of the general staff, among others, broke his own rule, and kept a long one). A special exception was made for Guy Liddell, who was ordered to keep one by his director-general. Here is the result as dictated nightly in the office, and kept for over 50 years in successive director- generals’ office safes, codenamed ‘Wall-flower’; now released to the national archives at Kew.

Peter Phillips

The latest and the best

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For once the publisher’s blurb has it right. This is a ‘sweepingly ambitious’ project, written by a ‘towering and often provocative figure in musicology’, ‘an accomplished performer as well as scholar’ who, while achieving numberless other things, contributed ‘160 articles on Russian composers’ to the New Grove. I can personally vouch for his toweringness, his provocativeness and his work as a performer, my experience of the latter commencing in Smoky Mary’s on 42nd Street in 1978 when he conducted a concert of Eton choirbook polyphony. It is perhaps comforting to know that the author of an epic like this both wrote up all those (largely 19th- and 20th-century) Russians and knows his way around a 15th-century English antiphon.

Caroline Moorehead

Policemen who didn’t keep the peace

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‘This book,’ notes Roméo Dallaire in his account of the 100 days of genocidal killing in Rwanda in 1994, ‘is long overdue, and I sincerely regret that I did not write it earlier.’ With the continuing massacres in Darfur, however, Shake Hands with the Devil could hardly be more timely. Dallaire was a highly respected general in the Canadian army when he was appointed commander of the UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda in the summer of 1993. Born into a soldier family and passionate about all things military, this was his first active war command. He was delighted to be given it. Arrriving in Kigali on a misty August morning, he was charmed by the people, the light and the lush greenness of the countryside.

Interconnect

Theatre of cruelty

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‘The Colosseum is the most famous and instantly recognisable monument to have survived from the classical world.’ In the 19th century the thing to do when in Rome was to visit the Colosseum by moonlight, and quote Byron. This is no longer possible. The ruin is closed at dusk, and anyway the moon will have been obscured by the combination of street lighting and traffic fumes. Thronged with tourists, the Colosseum is not the place for Romantic reveries. Perhaps they were always inappropriate. Everybody knows the Colosseum, but far less is known about what went on there than many of us may suppose. Misconcep- tions abound. Thanks to Quo Vadis? we know that the Emperor Nero watched Christians being devoured by lions in the arena.

12 March 2005

Tim Congdon

A dove with a touch of hawk

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Sir Samuel Brittan has long been a national institution. As economics editor of the Observer in the early 1960s and the principal economic commentator on the Financial Times from 1966 to his retirement in 1998, he wrote an influential weekly newspaper column for almost 40 years. He still contributes to the Financial Times, often to great effect. Consistent themes in his writing have been support for free markets over state planning, and the advocacy of open- ness towards other countries in trade, investment and migration. He has managed to keep his own party-political preferences shrouded in enough uncertainty to have influenced all three main parties.

Olivia Cole

A quartet of debutantes

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The Great Stinkby Clare ClarkPenguin, £12.99, pp. 358, ISBN 0670915300 The Second Life of Samuel Tyneby Esi EdugyanVirago, £10.99, pp. 278, ISBN 1844081060 The Icarus Girlby Helen OyeyemiBloomsbury, £16.99, pp. 320, ISBN 0747575487 With an aversion to ghost stories I was surprised to find myself greatly moved by Strangers. Like the author, Taichi Yamada, Haidi is a scriptwriter. Orphaned as a child and divorced from his wife (‘the bond uniting us had become indifference,’ he notes with a professional writer’s economy), to save money he lives in his high-rise office, a deathly quiet place once emptied of its daytime inhabitants.

David Hughes

Watch this space

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I read this nice well-intentioned book with devotion, despite its being thoroughly reader-resistant to anyone of a sceptical turn. For a start, these days, alien is corn. Everyone but a bonehead regards the universe as altogether a subtler mystery than is explicable either by science or via little men with misshapen heads descending on saucers to frighten nonentities on lonely American highways far beyond reliable witness. Happily earthbound, or sometimes miserably so, I have been less concerned with ufos than ufas: unidentified flying angst, as we call it in our family, and we all know how our waking days, for at least one hour in ten, are decimated by that phenomenon. It is why we look for gods.

Grey Gowrie

The sensuous recluse

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What in the world has happened to the culture of France? If you enter a room almost anywhere in the West when two or three of the arterati are gathered together and ask them to name interesting young artists, no one will mention anyone French. The same goes for literature and drama.

Ian Garrick-Mason

The lights that failed

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While the Victorian age was certainly one of unprecedented industrial and technical advances — an age, if there ever was one, of science and reason — it was also an age of unconventional religious enthusiams and spiritualist vogues. From seances held in the drawing-rooms of upper-class London families to Christian revivalist gatherings in the slums and countryside, a strong counter-current of faith flowed beneath the 19th century’s surface of rational progress.

Digby Durrant

Edinburgh still rocks

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Will Alexander McCall Smith’s readers remain loyal now that he’s not writing about Bots- wana, which he sees as an earthly paradise, but about Edinburgh, which even her most devoted citizens couldn’t claim for her, beautiful though she is. He’s as amazed by that skyline as they are, but no one is more aware than he that it’s the people that make the city what it is. And here they are, warts and all, the ordinary and the extraordinary, the misfits and the prosperous, as they have already seen themselves in the pages of the Scotsman where this first appeared as a daily serial. In the book, that comes to 110 chapters with headings like, ‘The Rucksack of Guilt’ and ‘God Looks Down on Belgium’.

William Brett

The battle of Babel

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Apparently, this book is a work of ‘diachronic sociolinguistics’. Sensibly, the author doesn’t mention this disconcerting fact until the last chapter, by which time it is clear that diachronic sociolinguistics is not as terrifyingly obscure as it sounds. Empires of the Word bills itself as ‘A Language History of the World’, and charts the careers of the major world languages for which there are written records. The aim is to find reasons for language successes and failures, but to find them in historical, social, political and economic factors, not in explicit comparative linguistics. This makes the book surprisingly accessible to the non-specialist, since it reads more like a historical narrative than a dense academic study.

Andrew Barrow

Lady into urban fox

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This is a thoroughly rotten book, a squelchingly well-researched period piece with sex, lust, over-ripeness and what one character calls the ‘odour’ of the scholar permeating every paragraph. It is also, let me quickly add, a remarkable tour de force, jam-packed with poetry, verbal fireworks, vitality and charm. Set during the overheated summer of 1784 and composed entirely of letters and diary extracts, A Factory of Cunning describes a visit to London by a foreign lady calling herself Mrs Fox. On the first page, this tricky character asks one of her correspondents, ‘Does all mankind wish me harm?’ but rapidly reveals herself to be hell-bent on corrupting innocent lives and seeking out people, as a form of sport, to kill or ruin.

Sam Leith

Profit without honour

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Early on in Piers Morgan’s memoir of his career as a tabloid editor, there is a very funny incident. It is a Saturday in 1994 and Morgan, then editor of the News of the World, knows that the Sunday Times, his broadsheet stablemate, has bought the serialisation rights to Jonathan Dimbleby’s book about Prince Charles. Its editor, John Witherow, declines to tip Piers off about what’s in the book. So Piers decides to get one over on his snooty rival. He gets his colleague Rebekah Wade to sneak into the Sunday Times’s offices dressed as a cleaner. She hides in the loo for two hours waiting for the presses to roll, then jumps out, snaffles one of the first copies to be printed, and legs it back to the NoW.

Petronella Wyatt

The price of happiness

Features

Richard Layard, the founder of the LSE Centre for Economic Performance, is a brave man. The Labour peer and adviser to the government has written a book on happiness. Or to be more precise, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science. This is big stuff. I mean, happiness is the whole point of life, right? Philosophers since Aristotle have been trying to puzzle it out. And then this geezer with no philosophical training claims to have knocked out a tome containing all the answers. Not only that; Layard thinks that governments should legislate to reduce unhappiness, as they legislate to reduce unemployment or crime.

5 March 2005

Sarah Burton

Mother both superior and inferior

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In January 1831 26-year-old Aurore Dupin Duvenant abandoned her secure provincial existence, her husband and small children, and set out for Paris and la vie bohème. She soon took a 19-year-old lover, adopted male dress, and began to write for a living. The publication of her novel Indiana led to a staff job on La Revue and she became, overnight, both rich and famous. She was no longer Mme Duvenant but known to the world as George Sand. Aurore adopted her male nom de plume on the advice of her editor who believed that books by women would not sell.

Rob White

A star but not a team player

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In January 1942 Orson Welles finished filming The Magnificent Ambersons, his follow-up to Citizen Kane (1941). When he flew to Rio the next month to begin work on a new project (which would soon be scuppered by the RKO studio), he left behind a rough cut of a picture about the decline of a genteel 19th-century family and the coming of a new world. The ending was meant to be devastating. The Amberson mansion has become a retirement home, encroached upon by tarmac and traffic. ‘Everything is over,’ Welles explained some years later, ‘everything is buried under the parking lots and the cars.’ Only this is not the end of the film as we have it.

Sibylla Jane-Flower

Bad presentation of a good cause

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Brian MacArthur’s credits as an author include three Penguin anthologies and a tribute to Princess Diana. He embarked on the emotive and complex subject of prisoners of war of the Japanese in 2002 and had completed his text with the help of three research assistants by the beginning of May 2004. MacArthur’s aim is ‘to speak in the voices of the Fepows [sic] themselves’ and his source material includes more than 150 unpublished diaries. The quotations are linked by MacArthur’s commentaries on Changi military camp, the Thailand-Burma Railway, the ‘Hellships’, the prisoners in Japan, Haruku and Sandakan, and subjects such as food, religion, medicine, black markeeters and clandestine radios.

Jonathan Gathornehardy

Trouble at the sex factory

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I should perhaps declare, not an interest quite, or at least not only an interest, but an expertise. Ten years ago I spent seven months in Bloomington, Indiana researching a biography of Alfred C. Kinsey, the pioneer entomologist and sex researcher. The book appeared in 1998. T. C. Boyle has had the bright idea of writing a novel based on ‘Prok’, as Kinsey was called, and his ‘inner circle’: ‘Mac’ his wife, and his three assistants and their wives. A bright idea fortuitously, since his novel is able to coincide with the film Kinsey starring Liam Neeson and just out.

Olivia Glazebrook

Going astray abroad

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These days we are all sophisticates, or so we like to think. Thanks to the media and the internet we can become worldly without leaving home. What’s more, if we stay at home our theoretical broad-mindedness is never put to the test; we can express hip views and appear open to cultural differences whilst remaining comfortable by the fireside. So, asks Matthew Kneale, what happens to that kind of shallow sophistication when it finds itself on foreign ground? What happens to a smug moral code removed from its context? In these 12 short stories Kneale demonstrates the convenient elasticity of moral values.

Charlotte Hobson

A tale of January and May

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So you’d like your child to be a successful writer (as the classified ads might say)? Well, the least you can do, in that case, is to ensure that he or she grows up as a first- or second-generation immigrant. That way, you will provide them with an incomparably rich (literarily speaking) background straddled between two cultures, with all the sense of irony, alienation and identity crisis this entails. They will absorb two different languages and, even better, the mish-mash of both which inevitably ends up being spoken at home and which has enlivened Anglophone literature in a hundred different ways over the past half century.

Robert Oakeshott

Mau Mau and all that

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Surprisingly (but maybe not to those who knew him well) it was the Duke of Devonshire who, having been appointed colonial secretary in Bonar Law’s government, issued a White Paper in 1923 about the paramountcy of African interests in the then colony of Kenya: Primarily Kenya is an African territory and HMG thinks it necessary definitely to record their considered opinion that the interests of the African natives must be paramount and that if and when those interests and the interests of the immigrant races should conflict, the former should prevail.

James Stourton

Living it up in Paris

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The French no longer keep diaries or go in much for social memoirs. They take their secrets with them to the grave, which is why so many of the best accounts of postwar Paris social life are Anglo-Saxon. It is therefore all the more extraordinary to read this memoir dictated from the pinnacle of Parisian social life by the Baron Alexis de Redé before he died in July 2004.

Euan Cameron

From mourning into morning

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Grief hangs like a pall over the opening section of Christopher Rush’s account of how he came to make a journey in the footsteps of Robert Louis Stevenson. A 49-year-old Edinburgh schoolmaster and writer, his life disintegrated in 1993 when his beloved wife Patricia died suddenly from breast cancer after 25 years of marriage, and this book is at once a memorial to her and a story of his own catharsis and re-emergence into the life of the living. In the first 80 pages Rush describes the onset of ‘the obscenity of cancer’ and its effects on his poor wife’s ailing body in such painfully forthright detail that anyone of a squeamish disposition is likely to wince in horror.

26 February 2005

Robert Stewart

How much of a saint?

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Most biographies are written against a sketchy background of historical events drawn with just enough broad strokes of the brush to provide context for a life. Martin Crowe’s book, apart from the affecting last chapters on the autumn of Schindler’s life, is just the opposite. The milieu in which Oskar Schindler, the famous saviour of Krakow ghetto Jews during the Holocaust, operated is presented in exhaustive and brightly lit detail, while Schindler himself haunts the pages as a shadowy figure, elusive to the eye. The explanation is twofold. Crowe’s indefatigability as a researcher is beyond question. But Schindler was a minor figure in the great scheme of Nazi things and the evidence on which to build a biography is flimsy and bafflingly inconclusive.

Joanna Kavenna

The frozen, unruly north

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John Gimlette is a writer of vivid comical prose, whose first travel book appeared under the title At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig. For his second, he has followed an ancestral trail, padding along in the footprints of his great-grandfather, Eliot Curwen. Curwen, a doctor, set off for Newfoundland and Labrador in 1893, ‘lands generally supposed to have been gnawed away by poverty and cold’. Gimlette finds a ‘theatre of fish’, where the locals speak a curious dialect, riddled with surviving elements from ‘Old English, Middle English, bad English, both classical and bog Irish, Portuguese, Micmac, Basque, Breton and babble’. Newfound- land, according to Gimlette, is a land neither entirely North American nor entirely European, a wild hinterland.