David Caute

Arthur Miller, 1915-1962, by Christopher Bigsby Arthur Miller was born in 1915 in Jewish Harlem, the son of immigrants from the shtetl, enjoying comfortable family wealth until his father’s business collapsed. The key events in forming his political outlook were the Depression, the Spanish Civil War, the Cold War — and the slow-to-dawn truth about Stalinism. The ever-present corollary is ‘New York Jew’. At the outset of a biography encompassing the man and his work, Christopher Bigsby points up Miller’s recurring debt to the classical Greek theatre, ‘where a society could engage with its myths, its animating principles.’ Tall and strong, Miller remarkably was never conscripted during the second world war.

This is a book long anticipated, as much in dread of dire news from Zimbabwe as in expectation of brilliant reporting spiced by mordant wit. It does not disappoint. Judith Todd’s chronicle of Mugabe’s crimes against his people appals, yet the ‘life’ of the subtitle has been a high-spirited crusade for justice, democracy and freedom of the press. Firmly attached to the progressive values of Grace and Garfield Todd, benevolent paternalists engaged in ranching, healing, teaching and politicking in south-west Zimbabwe since 1934, their daughter has proven to be cut from the same cloth. But now they are all gone. Through the Darkness displays the sly humour long ago apparent in The Right to Say No.

Mornings in the Dark: The Graham Greene Reader edited by David Parkinson Arriving at Oxford in 1923, the young Graham Greene made one move he was to regret 30 years later, when applying for a US entry visa — he joined the Communist party for a few weeks. Much less regrettable, he appointed himself the film critic of Oxford Outlook (editor G. Greene). This of course was the heyday of the silent movie and the undergraduate Greene could be found bent over the latest piece on montage by Pudovkin or Eisenstein in the magazine Close-Up. He later recalled his horror at the arrival of ‘talkies’ — it seemed like the end of film as an art form, just as he later regarded the arrival of colour ‘with justifiable suspicion’.

One point in Robert Mugabe’s favour, despite the Zimbabwean patriarch’s brutally protracted autumn, is that he was never planted in power by a CIA-supported coup d’état. As Larry Devlin’s self-congratulatory yet revealing memoir makes clear, the same cannot be said of Zaire’s esteemed dictator, Joseph Désiré Mobutu, otherwise known as Mobutu Sese Seko.

Late November 1950: United Nations forces commanded by the legendary General Douglas MacArthur are approaching the North Korean frontier when Chinese forces suddenly strike, an overwhelming onslaught precipitating a devastating retreat. At a presidential press conference held on 30 November, Harry Truman is pressed by journalists whether the atomic bomb might now be used to stem the tide. He rules nothing out: ‘That includes every weapon we have ... The military commander in the field will have charge of the use of weapons, as he always has.’ But has he? According to conventional wisdom, Truman and MacArthur fell out on the use of atomic weapons against the Chinese in Korea, with the result that MacArthur was famously recalled as Far Eastern supremo.

The day before this review was written Christopher Hitchens was insulted (‘ex-Trotskyist popinjay’ and other unrepea- tables) during a Washington press m.

The plumber came this morning — £75 including VAT. He was still expensively engaged when a bike brought Frederic Raphael’s Rough Copy in a paperback version whose glued spine is in constant contest with the reader. Anyway, surely an opportunity to recoup the plumber’s fee. Strangely, the author himself raises the question of my financial plight on page 164 — I was into the index in a flash — when he disobligingly records that in 1973 I had ‘no income whatsoever’, despite mouths to feed. And, he adds, I have been unemployed ever since. Admittedly FR is merely reporting the confidences of the famous Professor X, but with no palpable reluctance.

Closing Time by Joseph Heller Scribner, £7.99, pp. 464 ISBN 0743239806 Fortune granted Joseph Heller’s generation, raised during the Depression, not only service in a war whose good intentions were universally applauded but, once in uniform, a standard of living previously unknown to a boy like Heller himself, brought up on Coney Island in a modestly poor immigrant family. Thank you, Hitler and Mussolini. ‘For war there is always enough,’ Heller’s father says. ‘It’s peace that’s too expensive.

Perhaps this strange volume is a bang on the nose for political correctness, but one cannot be sure. It could have been written in the 18th century by a deranged sage determined to scotch the more famous Encyclopaedia of the Enlightenment and its absurd faith in progress and human perfectibility. Published on April Fool's Day, it may have been a hoax of the dwarf variety, like the peas I have been stupidly planting in spring sunshine, observed by their ultimate beneficiaries circling in smug silence overhead. The author is said to be an Amsterdamer, a man of letters who has been researching stupidity for over 20 years, but he may be one of those crows.

KOBA THE DREAD: LAUGHTER AND TWENTY MILLIONby Martin AmisCape, £16.99, pp. 306, ISBN 0224063030 Eric Hobsbawm is arguably our greatest living historian - not only Britain's, but the world's (as the torrential translation of his oeuvre tends to confirm). The global reach of his knowledge and culture, his formidable linguistic armoury, his love of jazz (although the saxophone was banished by Stalin), and his acute readings of personalities (though not Stalin's) are invariably conveyed in a prose measured yet fluent. Perhaps there is no substitute for an ZmigrZ background, for schooling in Vienna and Berlin before arriving at Marylebone Grammar School and King's College, Cambridge.

William Trevor is the voice of a civilised Anglo-Ireland capable of apologising for ancient privileges and extensive estates while discreetly lamenting their departure. Laying out and constantly refolding a finely observed landscape (County Cork) of water, rock and sand, of religious divide and class deference, Trevor conveys the baffled rage of Fenian fire-bombers and the sighing flight of their victims to relatives in Wiltshire. Deft touches of irony abound; the upright Gault clan, we are told, have gambled away much of their land to the neighbouring O'Reillys at the card table.