Nicholas Harman

Grumpy grand-dads do their job best when, behind the façade, they pretend to be really loveable. Michael Bywater, who accepts the irritating label of ‘baby boomer’ (born 1953), makes no pretence of loveability. Instead he is very, very funny. ‘Something has gone wrong,’ he says, and he knows what it is; the nannying that we all put up with in practically every transaction of our lives. A lesser man would blame it on the obvious culprits, the lying advertisers and politicians and health-and-safety regulators and all the jumped-up ‘authorities’ whose condescending orders and advice and cajolements plague us every day. Bywater knows that the ones to blame are ourselves, the big babies who put up with the nonsense.

Santa can still be a useful adjunct to the winter solstice. If there is a child whom you especially dislike, just ask it quietly what it hopes will be coming down the chimney and the little beast will cringe away, and stay away, in embarrassment. Otherwise Santa’s time is up. He cannot even safely go home to the United States, where liberals would like him banned for breaching the constitutional divide between church and state, while neo-conservatives find he offends their religious beliefs. Devout Christians may hope that, when the fat old chap in the red rompers quits the scene, he will make room for the Child whose festival it was once supposed to be. Jeremy Seal had the good idea of telling us how Santa took over.

As soon as the British had pretty much done for their larger mammals, they took up birds. The ones you shoot or eat had been protected from time immemorial, and in the 1880s people began to look after the ones that it was just nice to have around. Parliament began passing protective laws, lobbied by the forerunner of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which now claims a million members and owns vast tracts of land. The publishing business followed the action; the shelves in rustic bourgeois households like mine are bent down with bird books, which have to earn their shelf-space. The fattest fledgling in this new nestful demands not a shelf but a sturdy coffee-table.

Ian Fleming pretended they were glamorous, John le Carré claimed they were brainy and unscrupulous. Commander Crabb, in real-life 1956, made Britain’s spies into the figures of fun they went on being until the Iraq fiasco showed they could be dangerous, too. He was the middle-aged chap, tripping over his flippers in a baggy wet-suit, who vanished into Portsmouth harbour near a Soviet warship, just when Anthony Eden’s government was vainly hoping to do some deal with the Bulganin-Khrushchev double act. If anybody knows what really happened, they have not yet told the rest of us. Tim Binding has embroidered a tale on to the bones of Crabb’s bizarre escapade. His novel sets out to do two things. It is an adventure story, but far too implausible to work as such.

They are a puzzle, those Victorian ancestors, gazing through their beards stock-still to keep the image sharp. How did they move when the photographer had left, how uncomfortable were their bulky coats? The Airds found out. Charles (1831-1910) wrote a memoir in his retirement, and his grandson and great-granddaughter have piously transcribed and published it. The family memorials include the first Aswan Dam, the West Highland Railway, the sewers of Copenhagen and Berlin, and the gasworks at Kingston-upon-Thames. Here are the private thoughts and doings of one of those Scotsmen who literally built the Empire. Less partial editors would have cut the boring bits, thought of a better title and generally smartened it up. That would have been a pity.

It is half a millennium since tobacco was launched upon the world, on 2 November 1492, when Columbus’s men captured their first American and were saddened to find that his most prized possession was not gold but a smelly bunch of herbs. Now that the weed’s reign is almost over it is time for a solemn history of the stuff, whose effects included the prosperity of English settlements in territories claimed by Spain, and eventually the rise of their world-dominating successors. This is not that kind of history. Instead, professors of this and that, from departments of ‘cultural studies’ here and there, contribute theses on the origins and consequences of smoking, plus lots of jolly pictures, mostly from advertising.

Stalin’s admirers wanted it sooner, to help our Soviet allies. Others wanted it sooner, to give us a chance of beating the Russkies to Berlin (as we didn’t). But time and tide set the date, and the invasion of occupied France had to be in spring, at low ebb, after many months of planning, training, accumulating resources, spying, and the brilliant spinning of lies to divert the enemy from the real target. Since the main ally was the United States with all its men, guns and oil, and the Germans had used up their fuel and pilots on the eastern front, success was likely. Yet the Nazis’ army, in an evil cause and stuffed but not strengthened by foreign recruits, fought on with desperate courage.

The sort of young person who once drifted into publishing now fiddles about with computers instead. The trade has been transformed both by its wretched economics and by the wretched spirit of the times. Solo publishing in particular, an eccentric business or a business for eccentrics, should have died out many years ago. Michael Russell didn't. He is vague about dates but seems to have been at it for about 35 years and is still going, perhaps even going strong. He puts it perfectly: 'In publishing terms I know I'm largely out of touch, but I seem to keep in touch all right with that part of the book-buying market which is also out of touch.' Now he has produced an anthology of snippets from works he has published over the years.

Forgery ranked with murder as a capital crime well into the 19th century. Faked texts and signatures could falsify wills and violate the sanctity of property, until photolithography, then typing, devalued the uniqueness of the handwritten text. But a modern forger can still make a decent profit by turning out the fake-historical or fake-literary stuff that collectors strangely hanker for, and news- papers sometimes eagerly swallow. This book about Mark Hofmann, a leading forger and a real-life weirdo worthy of the great Elmore Leonard's inventions, uncovers an especially American world in which literature, religion, lying, cheating, greed, gullibility and, eventually, murder are combined. The murders are shocking.