Byron Rogers

Some day this book may be in the footnotes of all social histories of the early 21st century, not for what it contains but for what it is: 500 pages of not the collected, but the selected letters of one human being. For, sidelined by the telephone and the email, the letter-writer is about to follow the fletcher and the high-street fishmonger into the past. And until they find some way of retrieving the spoken word from space, future historians, with only printed emails to go on, will puzzle over the terseness which at the turn of the century came into human communication. Suddenly we are as tight-lipped and purposeful as Western gun-fighters. Will anyone ever again write letters the way Martha Gellhorn did, 3,000 words, 4,000 words long, and one of 40 pages?

Why are we so interested in biographies of the old film stars? I don’t think our children will be. I can’t see them reading 550 pages, the length of this book, about the lives of far better actors like George Clooney or Gwyneth Paltrow. But then we don’t see the stars as actors. For that period straddling the middle of the last century we really came to believe the old gods were back. This illusion was the achievement of the Hollywood studios, in particular of the Eastern European Jews who ran them, and were some of the most appalling human beings who have ever walked the earth. According to Lee Server, L. B.

Who killed Lord Haw-Haw? It was I, said Hartley Shawcross. I was the attorney general who led his prosecution personally under the Treason Act, even though my constitutional expert advised me that we did not have a case in law, and one of my predecessors in office had confessed himself ‘incredulous’ at its being brought at all against someone who was not, and had never been, a British subject. It was I, said Frederick Tucker. I was the high court judge who heard the case even though six years earlier I had described the accused as ‘a traitor’, and should thus have considered myself ineligible. It was I who, instead of leaving it to the jury to decide, in the course of it ruled that the possession of a British passport in itself brought allegiance to the Crown.

With this book, character assassination reaches a level not known since William Shake-speare did the business with the Macbeths, another family with political interests. First there was Michael Crick with Jeffrey Archer, Stranger than Fiction. Now there is Crick’s ex-wife Margaret with Mary Archer. I see from the blurb that there is a daughter, who presumably even now is amassing files on William and James Archer. For the Cricks, nemesis has become a cottage industry. Lady — no, Doctor — Archer (‘call yourself “Lady” and they think you haven’t got your O levels’) did her best to stop the book being written. Photographers were asked not to let their pictures be used, friends were instructed not to speak.

A test for you. Viz, the comic now an improbable quarter of a century old, once ran a strip called ‘Harold and Fred’. It was the sort of thing you will remember from the days of Dandy and Beano, little characters running around and falling over, all with the three expressions of thoughtfulness, joy and shock. Except these faces were already familiar, not from films or television, but from the front pages of the tabloids. The strip had a subtitle, ‘They Make Ladies Dead’, and Harold and Fred, living next door to each other, were Dr Harold Shipman and Fred West. In the first of the four frames reproduced in 25 Years of Viz, Fred, looking thoughtful, sees a woman moving into the empty house across the street.

The most startling historical fact I have come upon in recent years is on page 62 of this book. In 1882 an attempt was made to evict three crofters on the Isle of Skye. These were humble men pursuing a way of life little changed in recorded time, in a place which to them would have seemed like all the world. The eviction failed, so do you know what the British government did? It did what British governments had always done when there was trouble in the colonies, it sent a gunboat. Only this was no colony. This was part of Great Britain, and it occurred as Queen Victoria was spending most of her time in the Highlands, convinced that there she was among her most loyal subjects.

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.

There is one glorious surrealistic sentence on page 6. Describing Clarissa Eden’s early adventures in magazine journalism, the authors write, ‘Her first published article, in 1944, was a dispatch from Berlin for Horizon.’ Eh? Only it gets stranger: ‘…reporting on what remained of theatre and cultured life in the devastated city’. I knew things were pretty bizarre in Berlin towards the end, with the Nazis legalising nudism and stores holding spring sales as the Russian tanks rolled in, but for Cyril Connolly to have had a cultural correspondent in the enemy capital at the end of a world war would have been the supernova of aestheticism. And a very catastrophic one for Lady Eden.

Selected Poemsby R. S. ThomasPenguin Modern Classics, £9.99, pp. 368, ISBN 0140188908 Some 40 years ago, about to sit an entrance scholarship for Aberyst-wyth, I got hold of some papers set in previous years. One I have found it impossible to forget. It was a paper of literary criticism, only there were no questions, just a poem you were asked to discuss. And it got worse, much worse. The poem was a carol. Poems I thought I knew about: they were puzzles. Poems allowed me to write at length, using words whose meaning I was not entirely sure about, like ambiguity and irony. Yet here was something so simple, so clear, it had to be a trick.

This account of a public execution in Wales is a delightful book. Beautifully designed, it is by that rare bird, an academic who not only can write but also seems to have had in mind what the French historian meant, if I remember the quote, when he mourned, ‘My book is long because I have neither the time nor the wit to make it short.’ Professor Bartlett’s 168 pages are thus more readable than most thrillers. But its most extraordinary feature is something no one ever thought to encounter until some kind of time travel was invented: in The Hanged Man men and women long dead (and, in one case, resurrected) walk and talk across 800 years.

The National Army Museum of the Crimean Warby Alastair MassieSidgwick & Jackson, £25, pp. 379, ISBN 070113904 The most extraordinary single detail about the Crimean war occurs in Alastair Massie’s book. It is this: the dim lordlings who commanded on the British side had forgotten to impose censorship on private mail, just as they had forgotten other things, like supplies, equipment and medical care. The difference was that the one efficient agency was a cheap and quick postal service collecting mail by steamship. Out of the Crimea the letters poured. The result was that more was known about conditions at the front, not afterwards but at the time, than in any war before or since.

Hah, that’s had you fumbling with your bi-focals, but no, there is no printing error. It is £375. The Gregynog Press, which in 1923 started its eventful history with a volume of poems by George Herbert, has now 80 years later published a selection chosen by his kinsman the Earl of Powis, with engravings by Sarah van Nierkerk. This appears on the eve of the UK Fine Press Book Fair in the Oxford Brookes University on 1 November and it would require a battalion of the British Army to prise its purple quarter leather and gold lettering from hands which have never held anything like this before. My hands. And I have not done, for there is more. Beyond this edition there is another, of 15 copies in dark purple goatskin on dyed calf, with endbands of purple and grey silk.

Whatever else this is, an intimate portrait of Mrs Parker Bowles it is not, or at least not one written by the author. This is a scissors-and-paste job, the bones of earlier would-be biographers whitening in every chapter, which gives it an air of California or Bust. Clearly done at speed, there are many errors of punctuation and of typography (Welsh has a lower-case throughout), and one can almost hear the prayer, ‘Lord, there be 2,000 words by lunchtime, and nothing decent on TV this afternoon. Oh dear, why ever did I sign that contract? Ah well, that’s paid the nanny for another six months.’ Because, with the exception of Jilly Cooper who gives the project her imprimatur on the dust jacket (‘I’m a great fan of Rebecca Tyrrel’s ...

A shilling life will give you all the facts, or at least a £20 one will. And in the case of Humphrey Carpenter it comes with a guarantee of research, honesty and fair play. Nothing flash, no tricks of style and perhaps not too much humour, but at the end a feeling that what you have read has been as close a likeness as you will get. Auden and Pound, Tolkien and Benjamin Britten, all subjects of Carpenter biographies, not one of them has much of a case for appeal. But his biography of Spike Milligan is different. It has a tension, for, while the author seems to have set out to write a celebration of a man whose Goon Show scripts had made him laugh as a boy, it ended up as not that at all: in the process he began to dislike him.

If this had a third act it would make a superb film, for the cast list is virtually a re-run of Front Page, with Richard Addis, formerly of the Daily Express, now, magically, of the Canadian Globe and Mail, as the hard-bitten editor Walter Burns, and Stephanie Nolen, a young and eager reporter on the paper, as Hildy Johnson. It starts with an editorial conference, which, if you are unfamiliar with such things, is a sort of daily re-enactment of a high command meeting underground with tanks in the suburbs of their capital. In our time it is a scene made for black comedy.

Mr William Donaldson, the most subversive and mischievous Englishman since Titus Oates, started his literary career with Both the Ladies and the Gentlemen, a DIY guide to brothel-keeping and the choreography of orgies. He extended it with the Henry Root Letters, in which, posing as a demented if upwardly mobile fishmonger, he entered into a correspondence with the great, the good and the gullible in public life, flattering them outrageously, even trying to slip them the odd fiver. And they, Mrs Thatcher (who kept her fiver), Esther Rantzen, and President Zia-al-Haq, innocents undented by humour, wrote back. Donaldson published the lot and held them up to ridicule. But why?

I remember the day, the time, the place. Discussing the world's news with the village butcher, I brought up the perjury trial, and he said, 'Who?' Silent among the sausages in Greens Norton, I looked at him with a wild surmise. Remember this: in July 2001, it was still possible to meet an Englishman who had not heard of Jeffrey Archer. Never glad confident morning again. It is Michael Crick I feel most sorry for. When you appoint yourself a man's personal nemesis you do not expect to find that in the process you are obliged to be a biographer to all of central casting.