Books Archives

Caring for the dying in a world of Zoom

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Ten years ago, recently graduated and unemployed, I sent my CV to a raft of radio producers. Just one replied. ‘Dear Oliver,’ wrote Marilyn Imrie, in an email with the subject line ‘YOU’: ‘How nice to hear from you and about you.’ Her generosity and enthusiasm were writ large in those three capitals, which headed a letter that came festooned with advice, offers of work experience and an anecdote about her adaptation of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. It takes skill to shorten one of the longest novels in the language, but then Imrie was a legendary figure in the world of radio. We briefly corresponded but did not meet. Runcie’s real subjects are not death and disease, but love, and the object of his love Motor neurone disease runs the following course.

Clinton Heylin

Bob Dylan’s idea of modern song is nothing of the sort

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Between 2007-9, Bob Dylan compiled no fewer than 100 Theme Time Radio Hour broadcasts of songs he rated, prefaced by seemingly off-the-cuff verbal riffs on their meaning, history and importance. He was no natural DJ, but his love for the form shone through, as did a well-honed gruff ol’ man persona. The series was produced by Dylan’s ‘fishing buddy’ Eddie Gorodetsky, a successful sitcom scriptwriter (Mom, Big Bang Theory), with many of the selected songs more reflective of his taste than Dylan’s. Now we have Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song, and the suspicion remains (confirmed by a generous dedication) that Gorodetsky is in the wings, throwing out suggestions again. For Dylan’s idea of modern song is nothing of the sort.

Sarah Crompton

Lord of the dance: the genius of George Balanchine

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Sex and dance were the twin themes of George Balanchine’s life. ‘I am a cloud in trousers,’ he said, using a phrase borrowed from the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. Jennifer Homans quotes the sentence early in her biography of the man who co-founded New York City Ballet: What this suggested, and it was a central theme of his life, was that he felt like a man with two bodies and he lived in them both simultaneously, with at times heartbreaking personal consequences. The first was the trousers – the earthly man, delighted by sensual feelings and desires, who loved good food, fine wine, beautiful women... The cloud or breath was something else, and he saw it as the source of his gift.

David Patrikarakos

The depressing durability of dictatorships

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Many years ago, in Tehran, I spent a few hours in a bookshop run by an Armenian whose adult life had coincided almost exactly with the existence of the Islamic Republic. As I browsed, he fell into conversation with a German-language student who had come in looking for what appeared to be an obscure Persian grammar. The student was hopeful for change in Iran. A young population with growing social media use, together with state-wide oppression and economic mismanagement, would, he argued, see the end of the mullahs soon enough. The bookshop manager listened politely for a long time and then, clearly deciding his potential customer could be trusted, replied that none of that mattered.

Martin Vander Weyer

How the Romans set an example of good business practice

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‘The purpose of corporations,’ writes William Magnuson, ‘is, and always has been, to promote the common good.’ That’s a very bold claim in an era when the left is convinced that shareholder-owned limited liability companies (which is what Magnuson means by corporations) largely exist to exploit the customer, the worker and the planet for the enrichment of owners and executives; while plenty of entrenched boardroom opinion believes with Milton Friedman that the sole social responsibility of business is ‘to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits, so long as it... engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud’.

Ruth Scurr

The imaginative energy of Katherine Mansfield

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A hundred years ago, in a former Carmelite monastery 60 kilometres south of Paris, Katherine Mansfield ran up a flight of stairs to her bedroom and died of a haemorrhage. She was 34 years old. She had known for five years that she had tuberculosis. After joining the spiritualist therapeutic community at Fontainebleau-Avon in October 1922, under the guidance of the Russian guru George Gurdjieff, she had been careful to avoid stairs, or only to take them very slowly. But on the 9 January 1923, her husband, the writer and editor John Middleton Murry, came to visit and they enjoyed an evening watching other members of the commune dancing.

12 December 2022

David Profumo

Miller’s thumb and Mother-in-law’s garotte: the marvellous lexicon of angling

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Despite its many centuries of popularity – enthusiasts have ranged from Cleopatra to Eric Clapton – angling has been the subject of precious little historical scholarship, giving rise instead to anecdotalists or grim technicians. So Chris McCully’s latest animated and vigorous addition to the Bibliotheca piscatoria arrives as fresh and welcome as a run of summer salmon from the estuary. The lexicon of angling, he suggests, can encode cultural histories – and so it does. The result is a stargazy pie of a book rich in natural lore and quirks, assembled with etymological rigour and finished with crisp wit.

Ruth Scurr

Empress Eugénie’s shrine to the Bonapartes

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The empress Eugénie – the Spanish-born last empress-consort of France, wife of Napoleon III, mother of the prince imperial – lived for the last 40 years of her life in Farnborough, between the military towns of Aldershot and Sandhurst. There she created a home, museum, mausoleum and chantry in commemoration of the first and second French empires. Farnborough Hill was the place she chose ‘après que tout fut fini’ (after it was all over). In 1870, Eugénie had accompanied her husband into exile in England, following the defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War. Together with their teenage son, they lived in Camden Place, a large country house in Chislehurst.

Mark Bolland

A courtier’s lot: writing to prime ministers one minute, acting as nanny the next

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Apart from when the government has been self-immolating, the royal family has dominated the news recently: the passing of Queen Elizabeth II and the solemn accession of the King; the continuing and rather tragic psychodrama of the Sussexes; the sad tale of the Duke of York. And, of course, we now have the latest series of The Crown. Apart from the weird sensation of seeing oneself portrayed on screen (thank you, Ben Lloyd-Hughes), I found the ten episodes, with their portent of tragedy to come, quite gripping. Just the right time, then, for a book revealing the hidden wiring which powers the royal family. Courtiers is a suave history of the monarchy over the past century, seen through the prism of those who serve it. What is a courtier?

Jonathan Sumption

The collectors’ obsession with rare medieval manuscripts

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Why do people collect? Cicero said of the Roman governor of Sicily Gaius Verres that his appetite for Greek sculpture was called a passion by himself but a mental illness by his friends. Freud attributed the collector’s mania to bad toilet training. Others claim to have proved that it is due to abnormalities in the medial prefrontal cortex. Psychologists have filled thousands of pages on the subject in peer-reviewed journals. It is safe to assume that Christopher de Hamel has not read any of them. But in this fascinating book he presents 12 case studies of men and women with just one thing in common. They were all obsessed with acquiring, selling, making or in one case forging medieval manuscripts.

Julie Burchill

Whoever persuaded Bono he could sing?

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There are a few pop stars whose work I can’t help liking in spite of myself – their song-writing, that is. I’d be happy never to see the faces or hear the voices of Mick Hucknall or Chris Martin again, but the moment ‘Stars’ or ‘Trouble’ starts, I’m mesmerised – only to wonder crossly the minute the song ends: ‘Why couldn’t they have given it to someone with a decent voice?’ Think about it: dancers have choreographers and actors have scriptwriters, so why should we assume songwriters can sing? Bono’s another.

Mark Amory

The bad boys of the Hypocrites Club

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Members of the Hypocrites Club were Oxford undergraduates, and those with whom David Fleming’s book is chiefly concerned were born between 1903-5. It had originally been a respectable club, founded in 1921, its two most mentioned members being L.P. Hartley, the novelist, and David Cecil, the biographer and historian. But all that changed when Harold Acton arrived, closely followed by many of his fellow Etonians. Acton himself was always fastidiously polite, and spoke in a curiously hesitant way; but his friends were not, and shouted. Soon the club became celebrated for drunkenness and homosexuality, and closed in 1924. It would be impossible to depict the whole circle, and Fleming does not try.

Lynn Barber

Meghan and Harry have never grasped the notion of ‘only connect’

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In June 2017 Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, was surprised when Jane Sarkin, his features editor, told him they should do a cover story on Meghan Markle, the star of Suits. Carter had never heard of Markle, but then nor had most people. In her own eyes she was a huge Hollywood celebrity, but actually she was mainly unknown outside Canada, where Suits was filmed. She wasn’t even the star of the series; she was about sixth in the billing. But Sarkin knew something else about her: that she was rumoured to be marrying Prince Harry. Markle happily agreed to the interview, but said, of course, she could not talk about Harry. She wanted to be celebrated as a global ‘activist and philanthropist’.

Michael Hofmann

Robert Lowell struggled all his life to elude his rarefied Boston heritage

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The American poet Robert Lowell (1917-77) was a so-called ‘Boston Brahmin’, a Lowell of Boston, where, in the widely known distich, ‘the Lowells speak only to Cabots, and the Cabots speak only to God’. (In 1923, when one Harry H. Kabotchnik, against furious protests from the Cabots, succeeded in getting his name changed, this briefly became ‘and the Cabots speak Yiddish, by God’.

Michela Wrong

The butcher of Chad who died in a private Senegalese clinic

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Recent years have not been kind to the campaign for universal justice. The notion that some crimes are so serious that perpetrators should be hunted down and prosecuted irrespective of where the atrocities were actually committed has taken something of a beating since the International Criminal Court (ICC) opened for business in the Hague in 2002. Just this August, William Ruto, a politician once charged with crimes against humanity by the ICC, was voted president of Kenya, wresting power from Uhuru Kenyatta, who had faced identical charges before the same court. A lawyer accused of witness-tampering in their cases then died in what looked very like a poisoning. So much for ending impunity for the ethnically targeted violence that swept Kenya after its 2007 polls.

Roger Lewis

The utter vileness of Richard Harris

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Brawling, boozing and womanising, those vaunted hell-raisers of the 1960s – Peter O’Toole, Oliver Reed, Richard Burton and, of course, Richard Harris – were all frightful bores. Because their professional lives involved dressing up and wearing mascara and silly wigs, it was essential for them to show what he-men they were: how hard. Like Stanley Baker (another one), Harris boasted to columnists: ‘I’ve got great contacts with the underworld,’ especially the Krays. He never had anything to say about the artistic merits or meaning of any of his films. His stories were exclusively about his prowess as a bully. Crushing an apple, he typically said to one of his directors: ‘If you don’t get out of this room right now, this is what I’ll do to your skull.

Andrew Neil

David Dimbleby turns out to be a bit of a closet republican

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In Keep Talking, David Dimbleby takes us through a gentle romp of a stellar, unrivalled broadcasting career spanning, incredibly, 70 years. There are no great revelations (even the name of the BBC boss who tried to fire him from Question Time is withheld), no dramatic insights to make us rethink well-known events, no ponderous thoughts on broadcasting for media studies students to pore over (andthe book is all the better for that). As the face of the BBC’s coverage of our most important national events over the decades, from general election nights to every major royal ceremony, Dimbleby has been authoritative, well-informed, impartial and appealing.

Simon Drew

Spot the book title

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For answers, click here.

6 December 2022

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

The house in Ghent haunted by Hitler

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In 2000, the author Stefan Hertmans was disturbed to discover that the house in Ghent he had lived in for more than 20 years and restored from dilapidation had once been home to a Flemish collaborator with the SS, Willem Verhulst. On the pink and brown marble mantelpiece which Hertmans had become so fond of Verhulst had kept a bust of Hitler. The fact that Hertmans would use this as a springboard to write a work of auto-fiction seems inevitable, given that his International Man Booker longlisted novel War and Turpentine (2016) and his later novel The Convert (2019), have their roots respectively in notebooks belonging to his grandfather and a historical essay about the village in Provence that Hertmans now lives in.

Craig Raine

Eliot’s ‘wretched old’ typewriter looms large in an analysis of The Waste Land

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In 2018, the ferocious American poet-critic William Logan took time off from routinely, invigoratingly eviscerating contemporary poets to write Dickinson’s Nerves, Frost’s Woods: Poetry in the Shadow of the Past – a study of classic poems in their historical contexts. It was an informative, interesting exercise, prefaced by this significant reservation: ‘Knowledge of the circumstance is not ipso facto knowledge of the poem.’ Ezra Pound eliminated the weaker passages of The Waste Land, some of them, surprisingly, downright bad Matthew Hollis attempts something similar: an immersion in the verité, the lost circumstances of composition. His subtitle, ‘A Biography of a Poem’, is a brilliant piece of marketing, a hook, an attractive promise of something new and original.

Rodric Braithwaite

How the West misunderstood Russia’s military capabilities

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Books about Putin’s war against Ukraine are like the No.11 bus: you wait for ages, then a whole bunch turn up at once. Owen Matthews and Mark Galeotti are among the first. They will eventually be superseded by the scholarly histories. Meanwhile they bring clarity to a picture confused by instant comment in the media. Both are prolific and engaging writers, long-standing and reliable observers of the Russian scene. Both pepper their accounts with illuminating comments by their innumerable Russian and Ukrainian contacts. Matthews’s involvement in the story is deeply personal. His mother descends from a Mongol who defected to Moscow five centuries ago. An ancestor was appointed by Catherine the Great to help manage newly conquered Ukraine and Crimea.

Melanie McDonagh

The year’s best children’s books, featuring animals real and imaginary

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It’s not often that my tastes are validated by Netflix, but Jonathan Stroud’s brilliant series about teenage ghost hunters, Lockwood & Co., is being turned into a series. If you haven’t read it, give it a go. The mordant talking skull alone is worth it. Stroud has already embarked on another series about a tough nut sharp-shooter, Scarlett, and her amiable sidekick, Albert Browne, who, handily, can read or sieve minds. The Notorious Scarlett & Browne: Being an Account of the Fearless Outlaws and their Infamous Deeds (Walker Books, £7.99) is the second in the series, and the subtitle gives the gist. Here they carry out an impossible heist, complicated by ghouls.

Nick Paget-Brown

Emma Dent Coad’s ‘love letter to Kensington’ is nothing of the sort

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Few places can rival the London borough of Kensington in diversity. In the 19th century, new mansions sat alongside the cholera-ridden slums around the piggeries and brick claypits. A speculative racecourse came and went. More recently, postwar slum clearance created new housing divides and Portobello Road became a key London destination. Racial tensions erupted in the 1958 Notting Hill race riots, and in the 1970s the Westway motorway sliced through the north of the borough, reinforcing its landlocked character and poor transport links to the rest of London. In 1965, following a major reorganisation of London’s government, Kensington was combined with Chelsea to create a new borough. In 2013, I became the leader of Kensington and Chelsea Council.

Chloë Ashby

The secrets of a master art forger

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Tony Tetro’s memoir starts with a bang – or, rather, a bust. On 18 April 1989, 25 policemen spilled into his condo in Claremont, California, confiscated the $8,000 he had just been paid in cash and proceeded to search the place, slicing through wallpaper, pulling up carpets and emptying drawers. The scene is pacy, thrilling, a bit silly. It reads like a Hollywood film script; which, if I’m being cynical, is probably the point. The pièce de résistance: If you pressed #* on the cordless phone, a full-length mirror would pop open and reveal my secret stash of special papers, pigments, collector stamps, light tables, vintage typewriters, certificates of authenticity, notebooks with signatures – everything a professional art forger might need.

Scott Bradfield

Tales of old Hollywood are always entertaining – even when they’re apocryphal

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Despite being known as a visually driven town, Hollywood has a rich oral history. This may be due to the fact that it is (like most literary communities) a small, gossipy village in which everybody knows everybody else and what everybody is saying about them. It also testifies to the fact that while Hollywood’s ‘players’ may often produce stupid films, they aren’t actually stupid themselves. Most of the time they know exactly what they’re doing – which is what makes them so perplexing. According to this hefty book, which assembles more than half a century’s worth of interviews conducted by the American Film Institute, Hollywood’s early days weren’t as glamorous as the later ones, but they certainly seemed a lot more fun.

30 November 2022

Declan Ryan

Shirley Hazzard – so in love with Italy she spoke in arias

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Shirley Hazzard’s ‘untimeliness’ is a recurrent aspect in most descriptions of her, both the writing and the person. She came to represent ‘a vanished age of civility’: there is something Victorian about her novels, despite the last of them, The Great Fire, being published in 2003, by which time she was starting to resemble ‘an exotic bird blown off course’.

John Gimlette

The world’s best wrecks and ruins

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Ruins, shipwrecks and lost cities are endlessly intriguing. I once went to Kolmanskop in Namibia and found myself wondering quite what it was that was so alluring. At one level it’s just a rather dowdy German town out in the desert, abandoned in 1956. But what’s special there is the sand and the way it has sifted through halls and kitchens and up the stairs. It’s as if a little bit of our history had somehow ground to halt and got left behind. Fordlandia, built in the heart of Amazonia in 1928, is now quietly crumbling away as the forest returns The travel writer Oliver Smith has a neat phrase for these places: ‘enclaves of the past’. In his Atlas of Abandoned Places, he offers us 50 wrecks and ruins, all exquisitely photographed and mapped.

Genevieve Gaunt

Neo-gothic horror: Strega, by Johanne Lykke Holm

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In Johanne Lykke Holm’s neo-gothic novel Strega, Rafaela, claustrophobic in her parents’ ‘yellow’ and ‘dusty’ flat, dreams of working as a maid at the mountain-nestled Olympic Hotel. She luxuriates in a bath with a brochure, mesmerised by photographs of ‘girls in pearl-white aprons, girls eating ruby-red apples straight from the tree’. It’s a foreshadowing of the post-lapsarian limbo she is about to enter. Rafaela arrives with eight other girls at the remote and unheimlich alpine hotel: the proportions seem ‘off’ and there’s a ‘smell of dust and water and burned hair’. Even the lake feels carnivorous, claiming lives every year.

Paul de Zulueta

The courage of the Red Devils

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At Goose Green during the Falklands campaign, the 2nd Battalion the Parachute Regiment forced the surrender of more than 1,000 Argentinian soldiers. It was an extraordinary feat of arms. The battalion numbered 650 men, far fewer than the accepted ratio of 3:1 when attacking a defensive position. The Parachute Regiment had upheld the old tradition: ‘fast, far and without question.’ In June 1940 Churchill ordered the formation of a parachute force. He had been taken aback and quietly impressed by the success of the German parachute forces, the Fallschirmjäger, in the Battle of the Hague the previous month. Their success in seizing crucial bridges in coup de main operations had opened up the heart of the Netherlands to the Panzer divisions.