Harry Mount

Coleridge was supposed to have been the last person ever to have read everything, and that was in 1834. So Peter Watson, a Cam- bridge archaeology don, is up against it when he tries to squeeze the history of all the clever things that mankind has ever thought into 822 pages. He makes a pretty good fist of it, though, even if he has to rattle through it at 1066 and All That speed. In the space of one page, he jumps from man getting up from all-fours — about 6,000,000 BC — to man making stone tools (2,500,000 BC). Still, as he whips along, Watson gives attractive thumbnail sketches of developing ancient man.

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Denis Healey will never be the same, once you discover, as you do in this fizzing collection of mini-biographies, that his favour- ite question is, ‘Do you have sexual fantasies when you smoke cigars?’ Peregrine Wors- thorne is now forever fixed in my mind exchanging shirts with the first Mrs Nigel Lawson in a crowded Wheeler’s restaurant during a Brighton party conference. And the dynamics of Private Eye fall into place when you know that, in the 1950 scholarship list for Shrewsbury, Richard Ingrams came first, Christopher Booker third and the late Paul Foot fifth. Alan Watkins, the eminent political columnist, now for the Independent on Sunday and for many years in these pages, is the master of the well-deployed fact, and, more importantly, the personal fact.

The scriptwriter behind Troy, Brad Pitt’s new muscle and breastplate epic, sounds like an alpha-plus idiot. Commenting on his decision to leave the gods out of the film because he thought they wouldn’t impress audiences, David Benioff said, ‘I think that, if Homer was looking down on us, he would smile and say, “Take the gods out.” ’ More likely, the gods would say, ‘Ouch, what a rubbish film.’ But they couldn’t attack Mr Benioff for playing around with the plot. That’s been going on ever since the Iliad was written in around 700 BC.

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.

This lovely little bluffers’ guide to the founders of the American Republic came out of a chat Gore Vidal had in 1961 with his old friend, John F. Kennedy. There they were, Jack, Bobby and Gore, lounging around the Kennedy holiday compound in Hyannis Port after a vigorous game of backgammon — Gore won. Jack — ‘dear Jack’ — and Gore fell into conversation, although it was less of a conversation than a question-and-answer session. Need you ask who was doing the questioning and who was giving the answers? The President of the United States was the pupil, Vidal his master.

Here’s a real cure for anyone with a bad case of things-are-getting-worse-itis. Written in 1962 principally for the American market, London Perceived has now been republished over here for the first time in 40 years, which seems staggering. I’ve never read a better summary of London or Londoners. And it has hardly dated at all. The sombre — and beautiful — black and white photographs are so elegiac that you’re conned into thinking that here is a sombre — and beautiful — but long-vanished city. The differences between London then and London now, though, are surprisingly few.

It isn’t good manners for somebody to criticise a great-uncle after his death, but I know from first-hand experience that my great-uncle, Lord Longford, either didn’t mind criticism or at least grew so used to it that he looked like he didn’t mind. After he appeared in an Oxford Union debate in the early 1990s attacking the porn industry, I asked him whether he minded the tactics of his opponent, a porn-film director. The director had tried to ridicule him by offering him a part in a film. ‘Oh, I rather enjoyed that,’ he said, ‘Anyway, you must be here because you’re interested in politics. Would you like to be a Tory prime minister or a Labour one?

The pleasure boat captains who ply the coast of the Gulf of Salerno beneath Gore Vidal's Ravello flat are inconsolable at the thought that the grand old man of American letters is returning to his homeland. The round trip that departs from Capri, and chugs past Positano and Amalfi, finishes with a flourish, as the captains point up the cliff to the Vidal residence - it perches so precariously over the bay that the 77-year-old can no longer negotiate the steep steps out of town. His fingers, though, are as nimble as ever. So many articles have been fluttering out of the Italian eyrie that this is his second collection of essays to be published within a year, most of them prompted by 11 September.

The big idea behind this little book has been touted as 'Americans are from Mars; Europeans are from Venus'. That's not quite right. The real thesis is not that Americans are war-hungry and Europeans peace-loving, but that Americans deal with problems, and Europeans avoid them. If anything, Americans are from the planet Can-do, and Europeans from Can't-face-doing. Try conducting practically any transaction in America and compare it to the way you're treated in Britain and you get the measure of what Robert Kagan, a Washington Post columnist and veteran of the State Department, is driving at. An American working in a deli, or shining your shoes, wants to make sure you get what you ask for and doesn't mind being told to stick some extra Dijonnaise on or to give your brogues an extra buff.

Has anybody ever struggled for Europe? They might have struggled for British Ulster or Free France or the village green in Moreton-in-Marsh. But Europe? There are supposed to be some people around who, when they're asked where they're from, trumpet, 'I'm European!'; if they really exist, they're doing a good job of keeping themselves to themselves. Europe is such a bulky ragbag of countries with such wildly different histories, languages and customs, that to say you're European is about as precise as saying you're a world citizen or a sentient being or a member of the mammal family. And to try to write a history of Europe as an organic whole, throughout most of its existence, is ludicrous - its different bits have been at each other's throats pretty much non-stop.

If Harold Pinter's plays are about the weasel under the cocktail cabinet, Matthew Parris's autobiography is about the butchered segment of electrical cable that lies on the dusty roof of the throne of the Speaker of the House of Commons. For several decades this piece of copper wire, unused, long-neglected, has rested above the heads of Bernard Weatherill, Betty Boothroyd and Michael Martin, and no one has noticed it except for the eagle-eyed former parliamentary sketchwriter for the Times up in the press gallery. It's the perfect example of a Parris observation. Take something grand, respected, highfalutin, like parliament, and show quite how lowfalutin and dull it really is.