Books Archives

Recent crime novels

More from Books

Rumpole is back with us. In Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders by John Mortimer (Viking, £16.99) Rumpole is writing his memoirs and looks back on his first murder case when, as a pupil in a lazy barristers’ chambers, he takes over the defence of a young man accused of murdering his father and his father’s closest wartime friend. The chambers are lead by C. H. Wystan, QC, the father of Hilda (She Who Must Be Obeyed), and the reader learns for the first time how Rumpole succumbs to her demands and marries her. Very funny it is too. Henning Mankell appears to be getting bored with his policeman hero, the middle-aged, pessimistic Kurt Wallander.

Elfreda Pownall

Around the world in 18 cookery books

More from Books

Long before she became a finger- lickin’ television star Nigella Lawson’s ability to conjure tastes in vivid prose and her celebration of the pleasures of eating were known to readers of The Spectator as she was this magazine’s first restaurant reviewer. And it was the writing in her first book, How to Eat, with its confidential tone of voice, her larky attitude to cooking and eating, as well as brilliant, original recipes that brought her legions of fans. To them she became what Elizabeth David had been to their grandmothers. Nigella’s latest book, Feast (Chatto, £25), which arrives without benefit of a television boost, is another big, comprehensive book, its subject nothing less than ‘food that celebrates life’.

The Spectator

Books of the Year

More from Books

A selection of the best and worst books of the year, chosen by some of our regular contributors Jonathan Sumption There is no point in mincing words about the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (60 volumes, £6,500 until 30 November). It is the one of the greatest feats of scholarly publishing ever. Forget the on-line edition. You will miss the special pleasure of straying into the article next door. No, take out a second mortgage, call in the cabinet-maker and buy the volumes.

13 November 2004

Roger Lewis

Well, no, yes, ah

More from Books

So Meby Graham NortonHodder, £18.99, pp. 342, ISBN 0340833483 Frankie Howerd’s career was a series of comebacks. In the early Fifties he was a radio star with listening figures of 16 million; he topped the bill at the Palladium and appeared in a Royal Variety Performance eight times. He flopped on live television, however, and between 1957 and 1962, when he was rescued from oblivion and put on at the Establishment Club by Peter Cook, he’d so lost his confidence he thought of leaving show business to run a country pub. Edgy and depressed, and feeling like ‘a disintegrating jigsaw’, he could scrounge work only at the pier-end in Scarborough and Yarmouth and in ‘poorly paid pantomimes’ in Streatham and Southsea.

Lucy Hugheshallett

Is your journey really necessary?

More from Books

Pen Hadow goes to the North Pole quite often. For a price he’ll take you there too. When not under- taking one of his private expeditions he acts as a guide for his own travel company. For those with the time and cash and courage he can organise an arduous months-long trek. If you have to cram your polar adventure into your annual three-week holiday, then you can join one of his ‘Last Degree’ trips: you’ll be dropped by plane some 50 miles short of the Pole and make the last part of the journey over the ice on skis or, if you prefer, by snow-mobile. Hadow has escorted a client suffering from muscular dystrophy, he has posed at the Pole with a wheelchair-bound 11-year-old.

Stoker Devonshire

Just mad about horses

More from Books

A Year at the Races, the title of this extraordinary book by Jane Smiley, is the peg on which to hang the author’s remarkable insights into the horse and all his workings. It is indeed about racing and her experiences with her various horses at the Californian tracks, but that is almost a sideline. This is about Jane Smiley and horses. Smiley is already a hugely successful writer, and so her horses’ life must come as her, at best, third preoccupation, after her children and her writing; this she denies, emphasising her obsession with the horse, but surely she cannot be serious? She has clearly thought about horses not only a great deal and for all of her life but with originality.

Hugh Massingberd

Playing the marriage market

More from Books

Although the publishers assure us that this study of three sisters is ‘one of glamour, money and love in equal measure’, Fortune’s Daughters should not be confused with the new novel by The Spectator’s most decorative diarist, Joan Collins, entitled Misfortune’s Daughters. Elisabeth Kehoe’s book is non-fiction and covers, as the sub-title puts it, ‘The Extravagant Lives of the Jerome Sisters: Jennie Churchill, Clara Frewen and Leonie Leslie’.

Francis King

Past, present and future at odds

More from Books

There are eerie parallels between the career of the author of this all too brief masterpiece and that of Nicolai Erdman, whose play The Mandate recently opened at the National Theatre. Novelist and playwright both achieved acclaim for pugnaciously satirical works produced in the mid-Twenties, a period of extravagant experiment in the Soviet Union. Then, within a short period, both were suffering the same denunciations — for formalism, objectivism, cosmopolitanism and so forth. Erdman spent three years in Siberia, Olesha fell precipitously from favour. Daunted, they devoted the rest of their lives largely to working on film scripts. Olesha died in 1960, Erdman some ten years later.

Douglas Johnson

Worth a mass of detail

More from Books

No one wants to write a history of Paris from Caesar to Sarkozy. Histories that are largely political, which tell the story of the city’s expanding boundaries, endless wars and growing importance within France as a whole tend to be tedious. Most authors try to show that the history of Paris is special, involving a multiplicity of subjects and demanding sentiment and admiration. Colin Jones is determined that his history should demonstrate the richness and complexity of the city. One gains the impression from his introduction that he will surprise the reader, for he begins with a quotation from the avant-garde writer George Perec who, in 1975, spent three days watching the Place Saint-Sulpice.

David Ekserdjian

A conservative convict

More from Books

At the moment, a whole room of the Sainsbury wing in the Nation- al Gallery is devoted to Carlo Crivelli (c. 1430-95), but even the author of this monumental, learned, and absorbing monograph would not claim that he is a household name. Perhaps he is too much of a one-off to merit that double-edged accolade, for all that his ‘Annunciation’ must be one of the most memorable pictures in Trafalgar Square. Long before Caravaggio was kicking up fusses over how his artichokes were prepared or the outcome of a game of tennis, the bad boy artist was a recognised type.

Ferdinand Mount

The end of the pied piper

More from Books

At the age of 13, William Norton, the son of a police sergeant and a Post Office worker, wrote to John Betjeman warning him of the impending destruction of Lewisham’s Victorian Gothic town hall. In no time Betjeman put William on to the recently founded Victorian Society, urged him to organise a petition, wrote him several long letters alerting him to other fine churches in Lewisham and Catford and then turned up at the town hall to be photographed with the boy. Despite all this, Lewisham town hall was demolished. It was still 1961, after all. England still slept. Betjeman at the same time was vainly battling to save the Euston Arch and the great glass rotunda of the Coal Exchange.

Edward Smith

Finding and losing a voice

More from Books

What does it take to turn artistic talent into its full creative expression? Then, once you’ve found your authentic artistic voice, how can you stop critics and followers over-defining it until you feel penned-in to the point of paralysis? And if you finally lose your voice altogether, how do you find it again? Bob Dylan’s brilliant autobiography Chronicles invites us to share that creative voyage, to listen to his emerging artistic voice. Singing is only a small part of the story. It is much, much bigger than that. The story starts as abruptly and arrestingly as one of his own ballads, when the 20-year-old Robert Zimmerman arrives in New York in 1961 wanting to sing folk songs. Where he came from is unimportant to this particular story.

Noble Frankland

Cooking the books

More from Books

Churchill conceded that the ultimate verdict on his conduct of the second world war would have to be left to the judgment of history. But, as a precaution he resolved to write that history himself. The result was the six volumes and nearly two million words of The Second World War published between 1948 and 1954. David Reynolds, in the relatively short space of 527 pages of text, now gives us a detailed, Gospel-commentary-style analysis of this mammoth work. His purpose is to judge the extent to which Churchill has succeeded in providing the judgment of history upon his own achievement — how far he has, in fact, commanded history by writing about the fighting which he also sought to command.

Ronald Segal

Trenchant but tendentious

More from Books

R. W. Johnson’s book purports to be a history of South Africa, from the emergence of humankind to the last nation (whatever that may mean). The pace is necessarily brisk and only seldom falls over its feet in the process, as in the movement of numerous ethnic entities provided with little more than their names. This is a trenchant treatment of the subject. It is also, as it advances into recent territory, increasingly tendentious. The part played by economic sanctions in the defeat of apartheid was so important that the record of their adoption and deployment requires an informed, accurate recital.

Edgardo Cozarinsky

Private pain and public glory

More from Books

How a timid, subdued, frustrated man from Buenos Aires, with failing eyesight and blind for the last part of his creative years, turned out to be one of the major, if not the major writer of the 20th century, is the central mystery this book preserves, untouched, at its centre. Edwin Williamson’s biography of Borges is what its title claims to be — ‘a life’. Whether it is the ‘definitive biography’ (as Mario Vargas Llosa in a publicity blurb claims it to be) is something only time, unearthed documents and loosened tongues may prove. But ‘a life’ is two things — Borges’ own and Williamson’s version of it.

Interconnect

Copses and corpses

More from Books

What a welcome change from the energetic staccato style of many modern thrillers is this, Rennie Airth’s second book. No short thudding sentences for him, no relentless brutality and spattered swear-words, more a leisurely, gentlemanly unfurling of a story which yet is as bloody and grim as any. The rape and murder of a Surrey schoolgirl, her face hammered beyond recognition, tax the police from the local constabulary. Her body is found lying beside a stream in a wood frequented by tramps. Gradually a few other cases of young girls with smashed faces come to light in other counties and Scotland Yard is brought in. The investigation widens and enquiries are made as far afield as Germany.

Judith Flanders

New technology, component costs and product placement

More from Books

The fashion for novelty is scarcely, well, novel. In the 18th century Dr Johnson warned that the frenzy for the new had reached such a pitch that men would even look to ‘be hanged in a new way’. New fashions, new fabrics, new furniture, new decorations and ornaments, all cascaded out of workshops and factories. Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, his 1776 summation of the new theory of supply and demand, talked about the ‘universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people’. And leading the way in supplying the voraciously consuming masses for the previous two decades was Josiah Wedgwood, ‘Potter to Her Majesty’ as he proudly styled himself.

6 November 2004

Colette Clark

Dancing and death

More from Books

I thought at first that this was going to be a truly marvellous book, and in many ways it is, but I soon found that, in common with most modern biographies, it is too long, too detailed and there is too much talk about sex. It is hard to believe that non-professionals want quite so much description of ballets and ballet personalities long departed. Richard Buckle once shouted at Margot Fonteyn at the end of a long party, ‘Are you trying to tell me that ballet is a totally ephemeral art?’ ‘Yes, I am,’ replied Margot firmly. That said, this is a gripping story, and there is not much that one can add to it. Meredith Daneman has left no stone unturned, even those Margot might have preferred to have remained undisturbed.

John Mortimer

Orphan of the Raj

More from Books

Old Filth is a barrister, a QC and unlike Trollope’s great Old Bailey cross-examiner Mr Chaffenbrass, nobody could ever say of him ‘What a dirty little man!’ In spite of his appearance on this book’s jacket wearing a gown without a coat, Old Filth was always scrupulously neat and tidy. Halfway through an unremarkable career, he followed the one-time lawyer’s rule, ‘Failed in London, Try Hong Kong’. Unlike the many barristers who have made fortunes in Hong Kong, he became a judge and then retired to Dorset with his wife Betty, where much of this beautifully written and strangely moving novel takes place.

Lloyd Evans

A charming chap after all

More from Books

Sad to report, but this book is a gem. Why sad? Because Michael Winner, a sensitive, witty and extremely gifted artist, has made such a cock-up of his personal PR that to praise him in public is like applauding the Holocaust. There are nasty silences. Faces go white. Plates drop. The man is not well liked. But he deserves to be. This is one of the books of the year. It’s easy to forget that in the late Sixties Winner was the most enterprising young director in Britain, popular with audiences, loved by stars and saluted by critics on both sides of the Atlantic. This book is the story of his 30-year career as a producer and director. His style is lucid, chatty, aphoristic and acutely observant.

Mick Brown

The great enemy of dogma

More from Books

Nobody could accuse Pankaj Mishra of lacking ambition. A mixture of memoir, history, political and philosophical treatise, An End to Suffering sets out to tell the historical story of the Buddha and to contextualise his teachings in the development of the Western philosophical tradition. Hindu by birth and rationalist by disposition, Mishra leads us on his own journey from India, to Europe, to America, to the mountains of the Hindu Kush. Descartes, Schopenhauer and Hume jostle for attention, along with pensées on the rise of the nation state, the end of history and Islamic fundamentalism. It sounds an almighty mess. The extraordinary thing is that it works, and triumphantly.

Byron Rogers

When the laughing had to stop

More from Books

It has been Sue Townsend’s misfortune to live on into a time of events more fantastic and of public figures wackier than any of her own comic creations. Her method, like that of the authors of The Diary of a Nobody, was to take a credulous nerd, strip him of any sense of the ridiculous, then to loose him on the real world and his own diary. But she, being angrier, always ran more risks than the Grossmith brothers. Unlike them she touched on politics and living people, yet managed deftly to move in and out of her two worlds, the one of reality, the other of fantasy, until now. Her undoing has been New Labour in the full flood of its absurdity.

David Hughes

When the going was bad

More from Books

Billed on the cover as ‘The True Story of America’s Greatest Crime Wave’, this blockbuster movie of a volume shoots through the months between 1934 and 1936 when a star was born: the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Enter J. Edgar Hoover, vain and dapper. At first he presides over a ‘group of gentlemen’, unarmed because they were only investigators. So strict was the code that Hoover’s agent in Denver was fired for offering a drink to a visitor. But in 600 days — during which the likes of Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd were bumblingly gunned into legend — Hoover turned from moralist to killer, from closet queen to household name.

Eric Hobsbawm

From Harlesden to Zaire

More from Books

The really talented observers are not like travellers or journalists reporting colourfully on the unknown (‘Anyone here been raped and speaks English?’), nor even like the real insiders, who risk taking for granted what strikes us as strange, but somewhere in between. They have to mix perception, curiosity and information. Roy Kerridge demonstrates their ambiguous gift in this misleadingly modest booklet. Like the Alexandrian poet Kavafy (in E.M. Forster’s famous phrase), he ‘stands at a slight angle to the universe’, being both outside and part of the scene on which he comments.

Rupert Christiansen

Stooping, but not to conquer

More from Books

Here is yet another attempt to interest a wider public in classical music, in the form of a book ‘as told to’ Tim Lihoreau by Stephen Fry, based on a show the latter hosted on Classic FM. Falling concert attendances and CD sales, as well as the general downward slide of the culture, means that somebody needs to do mission work in this area, especially among the ear-numbed young. But I’m afraid that this isn’t going to do the trick. I should say at once that I have no doubt that Fry’s passion for the great composers is sincere and that, perfectly honourably, he aims low.

30 October 2004

Jane Ridley

A statesman who reinvented himself

More from Books

Christopher Hibbert is a publishing phenomenon. Now 80 or thereabouts, he has published at least 37 books, mainly on British history. You name it, Hibbert has written a book on it — from Charles I to the Marlboroughs, from Napoleon and his Women to Queen Victoria. Hibbert is rarely interviewed, but his books are always well-received and, to judge from the shelves of W. H. Smith, they certainly sell. How does he do it? Take this latest life of Disraeli. Hibbert has done none of the things that modern biographers are supposed to do. He has not spent time laboriously transcribing documents in the archives, nor has he slogged around the country retracing his hero’s footsteps. He doesn’t really attempt to explain Disraeli’s politics.

Jonathan Mirsky

A low score in the intelligence test

More from Books

During an interview with James Naughtie, recorded in his keenly analytical The Accidental American: Tony Blair and the Presidency, the Prime Minister observed, ‘I never quite understood what people mean by this neo-con thing.’ This is not an obscure term. Can Mr Blair really not know that the neo-cons are a small group of like-minded policy-makers, clustered in or around the top layer of the Pentagon, who began agitating for the removal of Saddam Hussein long before George W. Bush became president? When Mr Naughtie mentioned the neo-cons’ uhr-text, The Project for the New American Century, Mr Blair asked, ‘What’s in it?’ What unites Mr Blair and George Bush is their conviction, in the face of the facts, of mission and rightness.

Richard Shone

The girl who played Ophelia

More from Books

‘A truly extraordinary achievement,’ trumpets A. N. Wilson on the jacket of this book. In a sense, of course, he is right. Lucinda Hawksley deserves praise for making something substantial out of very little. With the addition of some original research, she has synthesised what is known of Elizabeth Siddal (1829-62), the long-suffering model for Millais’ ‘Ophelia’, the muse and wife of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and herself a painter and versifier. Hawksley sifts the evidence, commendably trying to unravel truth from legend in order to bring proportion to her subject’s story, one which, boiled down, is not unfamiliar.

Philip Hensher

The lady’s not for exhuming

More from Books

It’s curious to reflect that in reviewing Olivia Manning’s biography alone and prominently one is paying her more attention than any of her novels had in her lifetime. They were invariably reviewed as one of a group, rather than stand-alone, and for the general reader she fell into the category of novelists whose name is somehow familiar but whose novels are not familiar at all. After her death, an excellent television adaptation of her Balkan Trilogy and Levant Trilogy starring Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson at the height of their vogue did turn her into a famous name; but during her lifetime she never attained the celebrity which she felt was her due. It must be said that her lack of success was partly her own fault.