Culture

The introductory Apologia sets the scene: ‘These chapters are potentially autobiographical: even when something didn’t actually happen to me, it might have done … The central character — the “I” of each chapter — is myself.’ My Nine Lives is subtitled ‘Chapters of a Possible Past’ and that is what we are given: variations on a theme of displacement, the search for love, and the often painful gaining of knowledge. The possible lives are turbulent, though the narrator, a trusting girl who gives more than she gets, is invariably passive, and willingly exploited.

The Ancient Olympicsby Nigel SpiveyOUP, £17.99, pp. 264, ISBN 0192804332Olympics in Athens 1896: The Invention of the Modern Olympic Gamesby Michael Llewellyn SmithProfile, £16.99, pp. 290, ISBN 186197342X So politics should be kept out of sports? Tell that to the Greeks. Two absorbing new books about the ancient Olympic Games, each crammed with information about the sporting events themselves, abundantly demonstrate that the athletic contexts represented far more than sporting prowess. Stephen Miller’s richly detailed study, beautifully illustrated, is an examination of the whole of Greek culture and the role that athletics, games and festivals played in the moulding of Greek literature, vase painting, democracy and politics.

When I married Tony Parsons in the late 1970s, he immediately took me to live in a town called Billericay in Essex — his ‘calf country’, I suppose, in a Spam sort of way. To say it was a one-horse town would be to insult horses, any one of which with reasonable social aspirations would have turned back to Brentwood the minute he realised that there wasn’t even so much as a teashop in the high street. The reason Mr Parsons took me to live there, I can’t help but think, is that I was at the height of my pallid, livid beauty and he figured that before long I’d be off with someone a bit cuter, smarter — better in every way, basically. I do remember the time I looked at him and said, ‘Didn’t you used to be taller?

John Bierman, the co-author of a recent book on Alamein, had doubts about writing this biography of Lazlo Almasy, the Hungarian-born explorer of the Libyan desert, whose exploits were ‘immortalised’ in Michael Ondaatje’s Booker Prize-winning novel, The English Patient, and the subsequent Oscar-winning film by Anthony Minghella. Bierman did not want to be seen to be taking ‘a ride on the coat-tails’ of the novel and the film (in which case a change of subtitle might have been advisable). He was also, rather puzzlingly, concerned that he might find ‘something nasty in the woodshed’ with regard to Almasy’s alleged Nazi past.

Richard Holmes wrote this book 20 years ago when he was a humble lecturer at Sandhurst, long before his splendid television performances had made him a national figure. He has not had to do much to update it. In a useful foreword he describes the progress made since he wrote it in the historiography of the war — the Lions v. Donkeys debate, the research into both the operational doctrine and the social background of the British army, developments on the home front — but the focus of this biography is too limited for him to have felt it necessary to modify his original text. He might have reconsidered what he has to say about the Schlieffen Plan in the light of the recent controversy as to whether it existed at all, but this is nit-picking.

Sir Peregrine is a romantic. He has drawn his sword from its scabbard in defence of aristocracy in a self-conscious act of courage which defies the pressures of self-censorship. We should admire his intention and welcome an essay whose style is so reminiscent of the man with its echoes of the dégagé elegance of corduroy suits, casually knotted scarves and agreeable luncheons in the Beefsteak Club. Every successful polity is run by an élite. They lay down the rules, written and, even more important, unwritten. Their manners become the aspiration of the majority and in consequence civility and social coherence trickle down the social scale. Public service then becomes the indispensable companion of riches, reducing selfish ostentation to mere vulgarity.