Sam Leith

I knew that I was onto a good thing with this book before the page numbers were even out of roman numerals. Describing the wealth of new material that has come to light in the three decades or so since the last biography of Thomas De Quincey, Robert Morrison men- tions the areas in which it has enriched our understanding: . . . his enduring sorrow over the loss of his sister Elizabeth, his masochistic desire for humiliation; his association with prostitutes; his pursuit of, and subsequent alienation from, Wordsworth and Coleridge; his struggle with drugs and alcohol . . . his horrendous battles with debt; his imprisonment in Edinburgh gaols . . . This was a lively life, and this is a lively Life.

In 1968, when he was still a student at Oxford, Gyles Brandreth was interviewed in the Sun. The headline was a quote from him: ‘I’d like to be a sort of Danny Kaye and then Home Secretary.’ It’s about bang on. He achieved the first, rather than the second, and the fact that it never occurred to him that he couldn’t do both is what’s great about him. He’s a very clever fellow and a colossal show-off. He is all over Isis, and the Oxford Union and the Oxford University Dramatic Society within weeks of starting university, not to mention selling fabricated diary stories about himself and arranging to be followed around by TV crews wherever he goes.

In 1837 The Quarterly Review’s anonymous critic — actually, one Abraham Hayward — turned his attention to Charles Dickens, then in the first flaring of his popularity as the author of Sketches by Boz, The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist. In 1837 The Quarterly Review’s anonymous critic — actually, one Abraham Hayward — turned his attention to Charles Dickens, then in the first flaring of his popularity as the author of Sketches by Boz, The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist. ‘It requires no gift of prophecy to foretell his fate,’ wrote Hayward. ‘He has risen like a rocket, and he will come down like the stick.

I am not I: thou art not he or she: they are not they.’ Few epigraphs to fiction have been so widely disregarded as the disclaimer with which Evelyn Waugh presaged Brideshead Revisited. Immediately it was published, as Waugh’s great friend Nancy Mitford wrote to him, the general view was simply: ‘It is the Lygon family. Too much Catholic stuff.’ And it is easy to see why people were tempted to see Madresfield Court, seat of the Earl of Beauchamp, as the original of Brideshead. Just as in Brideshead, here is a stiff older son and a younger son losing the golden beauty of his youth to alcoholism. Here were clever sisters, a starchy and religious materfamilias, and a father in exile following a scandal.

‘No English monarch until Victoria — that is, long after monarchy had become the “dignified”, rather than the “efficient” part of the constitution — remained free from challenge, and three lost their thrones to rebellions.’ David Horspool’s new book is a detailed survey of the English men, women and mobs who have been prepared to risk life and property to rise up against power. It starts in the time of the Norman yoke and ends with the Poll Tax riots in the time of the Norman Tebbit. It is, to adapt Carlyle, a ‘history of irate men’. There’s an awful lot of ground to cover and Horspool goes over it at a hell of a scamper.

Ox-Tales: Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Oxfam, £5 each Buy short stories and help the wretched of the earth! I don’t mean short-story writers, on this occasion, though that injunction usually holds too. No: I mean, if you buy one or, preferably, all four of these pretty, pocket-sized paperbacks you’ll be donating to Oxfam. Cooked up between the Hay Festival’s impresario Peter Florence and Mark Ellingham of Profile Books, Ox-Tales is a sort of literary equivalent of the War Child album: a gallimaufry of short fiction donated by various authors — about two thirds original stories, about a third novel-extracts.

Pendulum, eh? Well, there’s certainly something swing- ing back and forth here. Pendulum, eh? Well, there’s certainly something swing- ing back and forth here. Two years ago, lest we forget, Cultural Amnesia came out — all 900-odd pages of it. Now here’s Clive with another fat wedge of ‘essays’, some of which are essays, and some of which are more recognisable as old book reviews and feature pieces for newspapers. In the section marked ‘Handbills’ he reproduces pieces he’s written to promote his stage shows; in ‘Absent Friends’, addenda to obituaries.

It was in The Spectator, in 1954, that the Movement was christened, and its members’ stereotyped image was soon set: white, male (except for Elizabeth Jennings), non-posh poets who rhymed and scanned, hated Abroad, thought T. S. Eliot was arse, Didn’t Come From London, and disconcerted the students at the redbrick universities where they taught by wearing flat caps and scarves in lectures.

Love Stories, edited by Diana Secker Tesdell In Bed With: Unashamedly Sexy Stories by Your Favourite Women Novelists, edited by Imogen Edwards-Jones, Jessica Adams, Kathy Lette and Maggie Alderson When Kurt Vonnegut was interviewed by the Paris Review in 1977, he was asked: ‘Let’s talk about the women in your books.’ ‘There aren’t any,’ he replied. ‘No women, no love.’ He described this as ‘a mechanical problem’: I try to keep deep love out of my stories because, once that particular subject comes up, it is almost impossible to talk about anything else. Readers don’t want to hear about anything else. They go gaga about love.

The Natural History of Unicorns, by Chris Lavers ‘A long time ago, when the earth was green,/ There were more kinds of animals than you’ve ever seen./ They’d run around free while the earth was being born,/ But the loveliest of all was the unicorn.’ So Shel Silverstein’s saccharine ditty informed generations of kiddies. As Chris Lavers’ whimsical, scholarly and continually absorbing book tells us, there’s a lot more to unicorns than that. The first mention of a unicorn in literature appears four centuries before the birth of Christ, in a ‘mess of a book’ called Indica by the Greek orientalist Ctesias of Cnidus.

Henry: Virtuous Prince, by David Starkey Among the glories of Flanders and Swann is a long, erudite and silly shaggy-dog story about the Tudor theatre. It culminates in the appearance as from nowhere of a score for the tune known as ‘Greensleeves’ — or ‘Greenfleeves’ as Flanders and Swann have it. Someone wonders aloud who composed it, and a voice from the back of the auditorium booms: ‘We did.’ ‘Who are you?’ ‘We’re Henry the Eighth, we are.’ David Starkey’s new book adds an extra valency to this joke. It wasn’t just his royal status that called for the plural pronoun; there were, he argues, two Henry VIIIs.

Eden, the only male British prime minister known to have varnished his fingernails, was easily the best-looking individual, of either sex, to occupy that office in the 20th century. With Our Times, A. N. Wilson concludes the sequence of British history books he started in The Victorians, and the sentence that opens his chapter on Suez is a fine instance of his style. It has three characteristic qualities: it is irrelevantly judgmental; it drops in a nice piece of gossip (the pregnant ‘known to’, arguably, making that two pieces of gossip); and it makes you want to read on. This is an enormously enjoyable book, a non-systematic, chatty and wilful piece of work, slaloming through familiar terrain with brio and dash rather than statistics and documents.

It’s pretty seldom that, only a few pages into a novel, you know you’re in the hands of a writer who does what he does as well as anyone else alive. Lush Life is that sort of book: entirely imagined, dense with life, and written sentence by sentence without a false note or a moment of drag. In the opening chapter we are introduced to the ‘Quality of Life Task Force’ — a team of four undercover cops ‘in a bogus taxi set up on the corner of Clinton Street alongside the Williamsburg Bridge off-ramp to profile the incoming salmon run’. As the figure of speech suggests, they’re fishing — random car-stops, hoping to pull guns, dope, knives.

BEEN SICK IN BED FOUR MONTHS AND WRITTEN AMONG OTHER THINGS TWO GOOD SHORT STORIES ONE 2300 WORDS AND 1800 BOTH TYPED AND READY FOR AIR MAIL STOP WOULD LIKE TO GIVE YOU FIRST LOOK AND AT SAME TIME TOUCH YOU FOR 100 WIRED TO BANK OF AMERICA CULVER CITY CALIFORNIA STOP EVEN IF ONLY ONE SUITED YOU I WOULD STILL BE FINANCIALLY ADVANCED IN YOUR BOOKS PLEASE WIRE IMMEDIATELY 5521 AMESTOY AVENUE ENCINO CALIFORNIA AS AM RETURNING STUDIO MONDAY MORNING THAT GHOST SCOTT FITZGERALD Scott Fitzgerald sent this cable to Arnold Gingrich on 17th July 1939. He was re-establishing contact. Gingrich was the founding editor of Esquire, the men’s magazine which had published several of Fitzgerald’s essays and short stories over the preceding few years.

The Goat, they called him; and goatish he certainly was. He was stubborn, self-willed, exceptionally adept at climbing upward over rocky ground — and then there was the other thing, the thing that gives rise to this book. If there was a single force in his life to rival David Lloyd George’s ambition it was his sex drive. From the very outset of his political career, and from the very outset of his marriage, the former was the hostage of the latter. (How little, Spectator readers, things change!) Yet, miraculously, the roof never came down. After his second marriage to his mistress of three decades was saluted in the press, his principal private secretary A. J. Sylvester recorded in his diary: ‘He has lived a life of duplicity. He has got clean away with it.