Caroline Moorehead

From soon after his death in 1838, Prince de Talleyrand, First Minister, Foreign Minister, President de Conseil and Grand Chambellan under a succession of French governments, became the subject of innumerable biographies. They have continued to pour out, year after year, though few of them have been as enjoyable as Duff Cooper’s Talleyrand in 1932, or as comprehensive as Michel Poniatowski’s five volumes in the 1980s. Some writers, like Sainte-Beuve, painted a man so venal and corrupt that lies came to him more naturally than the truth, but most sought hard to discover inner principles behind the cynical and secretive facade. For Robin Harris, boldly tackling Talleyrand’s life again, the balance has in recent years swung too far in favour of the inner principles.

In 1961, when he was 62, Ernest Hemingway shot himself. Almost half a century later, this bombastic, vainglorious, paranoid man, whose writing captured the minds not only of his own generation but of all subsequent ones, still exercises a powerful attraction for biographers. Though no one has yet written a better account of Hemingway’s unhappy and driven life than Carlos Baker, whose 700-page volume appeared in the late 1960s, scholars, historians, journalists and biographers continue to tease out little known aspects of it, chipping at fragments of the past, rearranging them into new patterns and mosaics.

No society has ever thought about itself more intensely, or spent more time considering how best to present itself, than the ancien régime in France for the 150 years or so which led up to the revolution. As Benedetta Craveri demonstrates in her excellent and extremely readable The Art of Conversation, this ideal of living well, with elegance, courtesy and exquisite manners, giving pleasure to others and to oneself, became not only an art but an end in itself. And where this complex web of influence, etiquette and enjoyment reached its peak was not at the court of Versailles, but in the salons of Paris.

A grandmother, wrote Queen Victoria in a letter to her daughter, the Princess Royal, in June 1859, ‘must ever be loved and venerated, particularly one’s mother’s mother I always think’. Few are the modern grandmothers fortunate enough to attact much veneration, but, as Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall makes clear in her guide for the best grannies, it’s certainly possible to give and receive love of a kind never envisaged or anticipated. No one, after all, decides to become a grandmother: it simply happens to you. And as such there is no more profound pleasure.

Do campus novels reflect the reality of university life? When I was a Fellow of Peterhouse, back in the Eighties, I was asked with tedious regularity whether the experience resembled Porterhouse Blue, Tom Sharpe’s grotesquely overblown satire. But even as I (truthfully) denied it, a few vignettes would slide past my mind’s eye — such as my very first Governing Body meeting, when, sombrely robed, the Fellows debated, hotly and with manifest ill-will, whether the vomit by the chapel was beer- or claret-based. This was, of course, a matter of college politics.

Curious Pursuits is a collection of the ‘occasional writing’ of Margaret Atwood — essays, reviews, talks and introductions to books. Such rehashes often remind one of Juvenal’s adage that ‘twice-cooked cabbage is death’: it was, indeed, only as a fan of Margaret Atwood’s that I wanted to review this book at all, since it would give an excuse to write about her novels. It turns out, however, to be hugely enjoyable in its own right. Curious Pursuits reminds one that Atwood is a superbly funny (as well as serious) writer: her wit is winningly relaxed and genial as well as sharp. It is odd how often her humour is dis- regarded, particularly when she is routinely read in relation to the Women’s Movement.

The saga of Naim Attallah and his writing career continues. For readers who have just joined, Attallah’s short morality tale about his simple and happy childhood with his good and loving grandmother and great-aunt, The Old Ladies of Nazareth, appeared last year. It came swiftly on the heels of Jennie Erdal’s entertainting memoir, Ghosting. In this, she revealed that Attallah’s immense and impressive literary output — articles, collections of interviews, book reviews, erotic novels — had in fact been written not by him, but by her. For over 20 years, she had been his full-time ghost. Now, in another extremely short space of time, Attallah has produced the second volume in what is planned as a quartet of memoirs.

‘This book,’ notes Roméo Dallaire in his account of the 100 days of genocidal killing in Rwanda in 1994, ‘is long overdue, and I sincerely regret that I did not write it earlier.’ With the continuing massacres in Darfur, however, Shake Hands with the Devil could hardly be more timely. Dallaire was a highly respected general in the Canadian army when he was appointed commander of the UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda in the summer of 1993. Born into a soldier family and passionate about all things military, this was his first active war command. He was delighted to be given it. Arrriving in Kigali on a misty August morning, he was charmed by the people, the light and the lush greenness of the countryside.

It was soon after he finished work on Flora Britannica, his hugely successful book about the wild plants he had spent his life exploring, that Richard Mabey fell ill. It began as a nagging feeling of ‘ill- fittedness’, being out of kilter with his surroundings, and with the loss of all taste and hunger for work. An author and naturalist with a string of memorable and excellent books behind him, he simply ran out of words. By the time he was diagnosed as suffering from severe depression he had fallen out with his much loved sister, sold the family home, and was spending most of his time, when not in hospital or drinking in the pub, lying curled up on his bed facing the wall.

When Silvio Berlusconi came to power for the second time in May 2001, in a landslide victory, Italy became unique among Western democracies: no other nation had at its head its richest citizen — the 35th richest man in the world — someone who also enjoyed a monopoly of the country’s private television broadcasting. More important, no other country had its prime minister on trial, accused of bribing judges, ruling over a coalition busy enacting special laws to protect himself and his friends. Drawing attention to these facts in the Economist not long afterwards, David Lane provoked fury in the Italian political and financial establishment, and talk among Italy’s EU partners, where his articles were widely read.

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.

Who Killed Daniel Pearl?by Bernard-Henri Levy, translated by James X. MitchellDuckworth, £20, pp. 454, ISBN 0715632612 The last time Mariane Pearl saw her husband Daniel, correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, she was preparing a celebratory dinner for their last night in Karachi, and he was setting off for a final interview he believed crucial for a story about the ‘shoe bomber’ and the fundamentalist Islamic underground groups in Pakistan. She was six months pregnant. Pearl, by all accounts, was an energetic, loving, humorous man, full of intelligence and curiosity. He never returned. Eight days later, his kidnappers murdered him.

When aid workers, battling in distant places to bring some kind of comfort and safety to displaced and miserable people, are asked why they do what they do, many reply that it all comes down to the immediate and very simple satisfaction of giving a hungry person something to eat. ‘There are,’ notes David Snyder, a young American whose chapter on Sierra Leone appears in a new anthology of pieces by humanitarian workers, ‘few such pure exchanges in life.’ Something of this unaffected matter-of-factness marks much of Another Day in Paradise, the ironic title Carol Bergman has chosen for her collection of front-line stories from the aid world. If one was seeking a definition of all that is not paradise, one need do no more than read this book.