Books Archives

From Wickquasgeck to Broadway

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I have a fantasy of returning to ancient London and finding the way to my Camden home, just using the Thames and various hills and hollows for navigation. What fun it would be to track down the hunting grounds of Wardour Street ringing to the cry of ‘Soho!’, the exclamation used by hare coursers that lent its name to the area. How moving to dip your feet in the river Fleet, now running under Fleet Street, or swim in the Westbourne along West- bourne Grove. You get the same sort of kick out of Russell Shorto’s heavy-going but authoritative account of the Dutch discovery of Manhattan (from the Indian word, mannahata — ‘hilly island’). Well, not entirely Dutch.

6 March 2004

Graham Stewart

The lure of the far horizon

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In 1795, John Evans, the son of a Methodist preacher, set out from St Louis across the unchartered plains of North America in search of a lost tribe of ‘Welsh Indians.’ He had heard reports of a pale-skinned people speaking a language that sounded like Welsh inhabiting the area that is now North Dakota. Rumour had it that they were the descendants of Madoc, a 12th- century Welsh prince and his retinue who had supposedly made it to America 300 years before Columbus stood before the mast. After 1,800 miles, Evans discovered the tribe. He was welcomed into their huts and swapped pleasantries with their two chiefs, Big White and Black Cat. But even Evans could see that the Mandan Indians were about as Welsh as the Grand Mufti. He returned dejected and drank himself to death.

Raymond Carr

Spain through true blue eyes

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Richard Ford is now a forgotten figure and we must be grateful to Ian Robertson for bringing him to life in this scholarly biography. His Handbook for Travellers in Spain was published in 1845 by John Murray as one of his guides for the middle-class tourists who had replaced the aristocrats of the Grand Tour. It must count as the most learned, long and lively guidebook ever published: a monster of 1,064 pages. But his interests extended beyond his hispano- phile concerns and expertise on Spanish painting, making him a much respected figure in London literary and artistic circles in the early years of Queen Victoria. Ford early made picture-buying Grand Tours.

John McEwen

No tendency to corrupt here

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Two things about this book — the first on the artist for over a century — are immediately off-putting: intermittent mustard-coloured pages, which make it look like a magazine, and the insistence of Robyn Asleson, a fledgling American historian, that Albert Moore’s paintings transcend words. Nonetheless she manages to hold the reader’s attention, despite the additional disadvantage that her subject had an uneventful life. Albert Moore (1841-93) was an important figure in the Victorian neo-classical revival, which in painting meant endless pictures of nude or draped beauties in a style derived from ancient Greece and Rome — none of it looking in the least classical, usually because the subject matter was clearly an excuse to paint a pin-up.

Philip French

When Hollywood trembled

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In its brief, action-filled history of 109 years the cinema has recapitulated the history of art from cave painting to Picasso, and conveniently for historians each decade has had a distinctive character. After the primitive but increasingly sophisticated fumblings of the first decade of the 20th century, the teen years saw the dominance of Chaplin and Griffith (respectively the great comedian who became the most famous man of all time, and the major pioneer of the popular feature film), and the creation of what were to be the great Hollywood studios. The Golden Age of the silent cinema came in the Twenties when Germany for a while challenged Hollywood and the Soviet film-makers had their hour of glory.

Mark Archer

Patent medicine for mankind

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Judging from his publications, since semi-retiring from his hedge fund empire George Soros has sorted out the world’s problems at the rate of about one a year: George Soros on Globalisation, Soros on Global Capitalism, Soros on Democracy, Soros on the Soviet System. Does the man have hobbies? Can we expect Soros on Pigeon-fancying, or Soros on Creating Small Formal Gardens? Hardly. Soros is on a mission. He helped topple John Major’s government when his hedge fund activity sent Sterling crashing out of the ERM. Now he is after bigger game. ‘I have made it my primary objective to persuade the American public to reject President Bush in the forthcoming elections.’ Soros not only helps to overthrow tyrants; he can nation-build too.

Salley Vickers

The pardoner’s tale

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Books about wartime experiences are thick enough on the ground to make one wonder if it is really worth the trauma of reading yet another, but Adriaan Van Dis’s book, translated, a little clumsily, from the Dutch, offers a fresh angle. Set in Holland, it tells in retrospect the story of an illegitimate boy, born to a Dutch mother whose first husband was executed by the Japanese, while she is interned with her three half-Indonesian daughters. The fractured family return to Holland, acquiring on the way a new father, who — bizarrely but convincingly — shares the same name as the dead one, and who, like the mother, is Dutch and, like the father, a native of Indonesia, but whose precise racial origins remain obscure.

Allan Mallinson

Full, frank and fraternal

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The Army Records Society was founded 20 years ago in order to publish original documents describing the operations and development of the British army. Each year, in conjunction with Sutton Publishing, the society produces a meticulously edited volume printed on high-quality paper. Occasionally the subject matter, though important, is arcane and a shade dry: volume VIII, for instance, The British Army and Signals Intelligence in the Great War, still brings a knowing sigh from members. Usually, however, they are fascinating — in more recent years Lord Roberts and the War in South Africa, Rawlinson in India, and Amherst and the Conquest of Canada. And from time to time they are gems, significant papers hitherto unknown. This year’s volume is in that category.

Clemency Burtonhill

Fame was the spur

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Larry Wyler is a man in conflict. He knows what makes him happy — the St Matthew Passion, sex, a beef sirloin ‘slightly charred on the outside and reddish pink in the middle, nicely peppered, with mustard aioli’. But he has all these things in his little Minnesotan life: he met his wife singing Bach; they have great sex; they eat good steak. It is not enough. Aspiring writer Larry wants more. He wants New York. His dream, in fact, is ‘to work at the New Yorker and go to lunch at the Algonquin with Mr Shawn’. Well Larry gets his ‘dream’, or something like it, and Love Me is a hilariously moving account of it.

Jane Rye

From education to catastrophe

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‘I do feel the strongest urge to talk,’ confides the narrator when a chance meeting with the beautiful Olivia after more than 30 years brings back disturbing memories of what she tells us is ‘a terrible story’. The encounter takes place in Bordeaux where Kate, American, is sightseeing while her English husband attends a conference, and for reasons which we shall eventually learn it threatens to shatter her orderly life. What she wants is an impartial ‘stranger on a train’ to tell her story to, and we are it — sitting, in Kate’s imagination, in a warm carriage crossing the Russian steppes, waiting for the approach of the samovar and little sticky cakes.

Alan Wall

Glories of the silver screen

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The anchoring memories of this novel go back to the second world war. That is where crucial people in the plot received their opportunities and their wounds. Less easy to fathom, for this reviewer anyway, was why most of the book seems to take place in the 1970s. Nothing much was done with this egregious decade: it was a given fact, an inexplicable datum of the plotting. I later discovered that the novel was begun at that time, which explains the matter externally, if not as it were from the inside out. Storey’s own journey was famously from Wakefield to London, the rugby-playing, Slade-attending writer, composing books on the train journeys that represented the no-man’s land in which he negotiated his two forms of existence.

Ian Thomson

God’s expeditionary force

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In the 16th century Montaigne voiced the fear that missionary endeavour — the white man’s ‘contagion’ — would hasten the ruin of the New World. Though Jesuits played their part in the spoliation of the Americas, only the most romantic could claim that Indian tribes there lived in a state of prelapsarian grace, so artless, happy and free. Brian Moore, in his marvellous novel Black Robe, portrayed 1640s Canada as a Huron backwater, where French Jesuits were in danger of being scalped and fur-trappers disembowelled. As Jonathan Wright makes clear in this informative history of the Society of Jesus, the earliest Jesuits were regarded as not quite regular clergy.

Hilary Spurling

An enchanted forest of family trees

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Michael Holroyd describes the first copy of his last book of memoirs plopping through the letterbox, the kind of moment that might have called for champagne anywhere but in the Holroyd household, which celebrated the book’s arrival with macabre revulsion: ‘I seemed to see, clambering through its pages, a troupe of ungainly, poignant, gesticulating clowns (my own relations) whose griefs and disappointments, as they tumbled over one another, rang out in sidesplitting farce.’ Holroyd shuddered and shut the book, which was Basil Street Blues, shortly afterwards hailed in three continents as an autobiographical masterpiece.

Rachel Johnson

You have been warned, Mr Blair

Features

Rachel Johnson talks to Vernon Coleman, the one-man publishing sensation who has now turned his sights on the ‘lying little warmonger’ in Downing Street If you’re a Telegraph reader — as I do hope you are — you too will have seen those ads placed by a Dr Vernon Coleman, MB. Not the ones that ask ‘Does Your Memory Fail You?’ above the ink drawing of the man in a suit and specs, but the ones that ask, even more worryingly, ‘Looking for a Present?’ Turns out, Dr Coleman has got the perfect present for just about everybody. For a golf lover, we have The Man Who Inherited a Golf Course, described as a ‘superb novel’ and ‘terrific present for anyone who enjoys golf,’ with 29,000 copies sold.

28 February 2004

John Jolliffe

‘The only man in Paris’

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Eugenia de Montijo was born in a tent, during an earthquake, in Granada in 1826. Her father, a Liberal minor grandee, had joined the French army, been wounded at Trafalgar, and welcomed the replacement of the Bourbons by the mediocre Joseph Bonaparte in 1808. Threatened by the Carlist wars, in 1833 he sent his wife and two daughters to Paris, where Eugénie, as she became, grew up in the world of Stendhal and Mérimée (both of whom became close family friends), Balzac and Chopin. Her ambitious mother sent her to learn English at a school in Bristol, which she disliked so much that she and another girl tried to stow away and sail off to India. This fierce spirit of independence was never to leave her.

Noble Frankland

Laying a persistent ghost

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Although it probably won’t, this book deserves to lay the ghost of Dresden, to demolish the myth and establish the rule of objective historical judgment. Frederick Taylor opens his investigation as long ago as AD 350 and carries it down to 2003. On the way, he gives us a condensed history of the strategic air offensive, explaining especially the evolution of area bombing, and of the development of the German air defences. He considers the policies and reactions of the British and American authorities, Churchill, Stimpson, the chiefs of staff and the C-in-C Bomber Command, Sir Arthur Harris, among them, and of the German authorities, including Hitler, Goebbels and Mutschmann, the Dresden Gauleiter, and of the Russians, notably General Antonov, their leading airman at Yalta.

Brian Masters

The bare bones of the case

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It seems only the other day that Ian Huntley was convicted at the Old Bailey of the pointless murder of two pretty Cambridgeshire schoolgirls, Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, and here, already, is a book about the case by a journalist who covered every day of the investigation. One is bound to ask why. What purpose can the book serve? What can it add to our understanding of what happened? What solace can it offer to the bereaved? What wisdom can it provide to the curious? The answer to all four questions is, I am afraid, not much. The book fulfils the very least of expectations by presenting a cogent narrative for posterity. This is exactly how the story unfolded and how it was resolved, with no added flourishes or embellishments.

Philip Hensher

And the winner is . . .

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My favourite titbit about the Oscars is that if at any point during the Wagner- ian length of the ceremony you get up to go to the loo, a young person who has been loitering in the aisles will instantly nip in and occupy your seat, giving it up gracefully on your return. The point is that the vast television audience must not, at any point, be shown the shocking sight of an empty seat in the auditorium. I worry about those young people: is that really what they hoped to do with their lives? If you win an Oscar, the smart north London thing to do, or so I understand, is to keep it in the downstairs loo.

21 February 2004

Douglas Johnson

Helping to set Europe ablaze

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The Museum of the French Resistance in Brittany lies just outside Saint-Marcel in the Morbihan department, near to Malestroit. It is extensive and consists of a number of buildings situated in a large wooded park. But what makes it special is that it covers the site of the battle of 18 June 1944 which was fought between the Germans and various French and British Resistance forces, including those organised by the Special Operations Executive (SOE) that had been created in July 1940 to ‘set Europe ablaze’. This was one of the great Resistance battles in which 560 German soldiers were killed, in contrast to 42 Resistance fighters. André Hue, who in the Museum and its publications is referred to as Hunter Hue, took part in the battle.

James Fleming

Sweet water and bitter

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‘Naturalist-in-charge’ was Shel-ton’s title as fisheries expert on board the Tellina, a research vessel. It holds good throughout this excellent memoir, which contains much pertinent information and few idle sentences. By page 30 I’d learned that apple wood makes the best catapult, about the guanine crystals in fish scales, about lampreys, the names of his grandmother’s two Rhode Island Reds, what the lower quadrant signal means to the railways, conjugated valve gear ditto, how to load a muzzle-loader (‘the flinty grains shining as they trickled from the measure at the head of the tooled copper flask’), and the weight of a Duchess class locomotive — 160 tons or about 140 mature Limousin bulls.

Sandra Howard

Here be dragons aplenty

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Walter Moers has cleverly built a fantastical tale around 21 drawings from the work of the famous 19th-century illustrator, Gustave Doré. The woodcuts reproduced in the book are of gryphons and monsters, naked damsels and dragons and the faces of the moon; Moers has plenty to go on. He spellbinds and spooks it all up into a well-knitted super-scary flight of fancy that should appeal to sophisticated and naive children alike. Moers’ young hero is Doré himself as a 12-year-old child. We meet him when he is rather incredibly captaining a ship which is at threat from perilous twin storms, the spiralling Siamese Twins Tornado.

David Prycejones

Scholar and Cold War warrior

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When not thinking and writing, Richard Pipes tells us in these memoirs, he is at a loose end. At different times he had ambitions to be an art historian or perhaps a musicologist, he also says, but settled to be a historian. The writing of history depends in the first place on scholarship. Vixi is the work of a man of immense learning, whose apposite quotations range through several classical and modern literatures from Praxilla of Sicyon in the fifth century BC and Seneca all the way to Trollope, Guizot and Sainte-Beuve. But selection of facts rests ultimately on the historian’s humanity and aesthetic sense. Most unusually, Vixi is also the work of an intellectual for whom beauty is truth, and truth beauty.

Caroline Moorehead

Fear of fleeing

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Tucked into the pages of The Tyrant’s Novel, Thomas Keneally has slipped a short letter. Giving his reasons for writing the book and stating that he believes it to be the best he has yet produced, the letter is presumably intended for reviewers and booksellers, and it provides information in many ways crucial for readers, so crucial that it is hard to see why it was not included in a preface. The Tyrant’s Novel, Keneally explains, grew out of visits he made to the Villawood detention centre for asylum seekers outside Sydney, a ‘double-walled gulag’ behind razor wire and prison walls, where he felt outraged by the visible signs of Australia’s current policy of exclusion and extreme hostility towards refugees who land on their shores.

George Osborne

A clear case of ‘misunderestimation’

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American Dynastyby Kevin PhillipsPenguin/Allen Lane, £18.99, pp. 397, ISBN 071399746X The prosperous Floridan seaside resort of Sarasota should be natural Bush country. Home to golf courses, marinas and retirement condos, the town’s Republican Congress- woman Katherine Harris shot to fame in the 2000 presidential election as the official appointed by Governor Jeb Bush to make sure the Florida recount gave the right result. Last month, a friend of mine who is an astute observer of American politics was having lunch in a Sarasota shopping mall and saw something significant. A young man was selling ‘Help Beat Bush’ badges to passing shoppers — not just one or two but dozens of them. People were stopping and queuing to buy them, and then pinning them on.

Harriet Waugh

Closely related deaths

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Good Morning, Midnight is an excellent novel by that mistress of introspective sensitivity, Jean Rhys. Reginald Hill hijacks the title for his far less morbid new detective novel starring that trinity of beings, Detective Superintendent Andy Dalziel, Detective Inspector Peter Pascoe and Sergeant Wield. Good Morning, Midnight is, however, definitely Pascoe’s case. Dalziel plays an entirely subsidiary role displaying bellicose discomfiture as Peter attempts to wrongfoot him and prove that a clear case of suicide is murder. We know that it is suicide because we witness antique dealer Pal Maciver killing himself. The novel is set a few weeks after the denouement of Reginald Hill’s previous novel, Death’s Jest-Book.

Caroline Moore

Flattening the literary landscape

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Despite the title, this is not one of those gloom-mongering surveys of the state of culture that so regularly (usually at the end of a decade) predict the Death of the Novel, the End of History, the Death of the Individual, and the like. Indeed, on closer inspection, ‘The Last of England’ turns out to mean only ‘the last volume, for the present, in this particular series of the Oxford English Literary History’, bringing us up from 1960 to the millennium. Still, it nevertheless managed to monger a certain mild gloom in me. My chief complaint is that it does not make the period exciting enough. On internal evidence, I must be much the same age as Stevenson, first becoming thrilled by modern poetry and the theatre in the Seventies. And goodness, it was thrilling.

14 February 2004

Robert Stewart

Butcher in the Rye

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In 1743 John Breads, a butcher, stabbed to death Allen Grebell in the declining Cinque port town of Rye on the east Sussex coast. Grebell was the brother-in-law of James Lamb, the mayor who lived in the town’s big house, Lamb House, that was later to be home to Henry James and E. F. Benson. Paul Monod has chosen that murder as a peg on which to hang his history of the town from the Civil War to the mid-18th century. The Grebell-Lamb interest was the cornerstone of the Whig oligarchy that had come to rule Rye. Can Breads’ story tell us something about the progress of Rye from the failure, amid the religious turbulence of 17th-century politics, of Puritan reformers to institute the rule of the godly to the ascendancy of the Whigs?

Digby Durrant

‘My libido’s last hurrah!’

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At first sight Gilbert Adair’s new book seems like shameless pornography of a particularly sad and depraved kind, but more charitably and more accurately we discover as we read on that it is the story of an unlikely martyr-hero who risks his life in the cause of militant homosexuality rather than suffer suicidal loneliness. As a youth Gideon occasionally has very mild spasms of lust for boys but is content enough to lie beside a girl, his clumsy fingers inching past the cups of her brassiere to toy with her nipples. Suddenly her record player sings out, ‘Mr Sandman, bring me a dream/ Make him the cutest I’ve ever seen /Give him two lips like rose and clover/Then tell him that his lonesome nights are over.’ The scales fall from Gideon’s eyes.

Jonathan Keates

Early Essex man

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Crime is a species of performance art. Acts of murder, theft or fraud assume the collusive presence of an audience formed from that law-abiding majority for whom felony on a grand scale holds an inextinguishable glamour. Even a simple mugging possesses elements of street theatre, as if some sort of scenario had been worked out between the robber and his victim before the offence took place. However much we proclaim our hatred of the sinner, his sinfulness nourishes our less respectable dreams and fantasies. Thus the agents of havoc are easily metamorphosed into folk heroes, loved, envied and applauded even at the foot of the gallows. Highwaymen were archetypal avatars of the criminal as popular entertainer.