Jane Ridley
Mark Bostridge’s Florence Nightingale (Viking, £25) is a major reassessment of the Lady of the Lamp and her legend. Bostridge shows how Nightingale both exploited and denied her femininity to drive her reforms through the male-dominated establishment of Victorian Britain. Balanced, engagingly readable and based on impressive research in Nightingale’s vast archive, this will surely be definitive.
The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth by Frances Wilson (Faber, £18.99) is another story of men behaving badly, in this case Dorothy’s brother, William, who hogged the credit for her ideas. Wilson’s subtle, prceptive criticism illuminates Dorothy’s extraordinary life with thought-provoking originality.
For relief from the angst of down-trodden women, James Knox has written a sparkling book about a witty man. Cartoons and Coronets: The Genius of Osbert Lancaster (Frances Lincoln, £25), published to
coincide with the exhibition at the Wallace Collection, is full of good things and provides a long-overdue appreciation. Who better than Maudie Littlehampton to cheer us up in these dark days?
Patrick Marnham
Semi-Invisible Man: The Life of Norman Lewis by Julian Evans (Cape, £25)celebrates the achievement of one of the greatest English writers of the last century. Lewis used to declare that he was the only man he knew who could enter a room, sum up the situation, and leave it without any one’s knowing he had been there. Evans’s heroically well-researched biography of this elusive subject is a triumph. He has created a vivid and just portrait of a very funny and difficult man whose books were recognised as classics by discerning readers. Lewis, who used to say that England gave him asthma, wrote some excellent fiction. But he was better known for his ‘travel writing’, which in his case was reporting elevated to the highest level of eye-witness history, and a far cry from the ‘cheeky chappy, aren’t the natives funny’ chatter that passes muster today. Julian Evans approaches his task like a doom, a technique that enables him to track Lewis through three marriages and numerous wars and to reflect the strange mixture of wariness and high-spirits that characterised the author of Naples ’44 and A Dragon Apparent.
Comments
Hannü
December 20th, 2008 10:01pmDialogues Tibetan Dialogues Han is a travelogue from Tibet as well as a book of conversations with dozens of Tibetans from all walks of life in Tibet on a wide range of subjects - the Dalai Lama, polyandry, sky & water burials, the Muslims, the Han, Tibetan mastiffs, aweto, languages, thangka, Buddhism, independence and more.
Published this year, it is the most democratic and down-to-earth book to have come out of Tibet in decades.
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richard milk
December 7th, 2008 3:35pm'vim, gusto and enthusiasm' mr hensher? that wouldn't be a spot of tautology, would it? please stop the pompous posturing - it almost reads as badly as your books.
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Lisa B.
November 26th, 2008 8:37pmThere's an unsung little book out there, quite politically incorrect and one publishers appear fearful of backing. It's called "Up Dog Street" and seems to be available only on Amazon.com. This little tome seems to be slowly gaining a life and a following of its own and the unique, but timely theme, seems the reason. It's a story about an immigrant who's lived in England most of his life, but he spends his days pining for the tundra left behind and condemning the foibles of democracy We all know a few). The author has a powerful voice (an immigrant to America herself) and conveys the idea that birthplace and lineage mean nothing and that "nurture" is everything. It was a great joy seeing how the protagonist "Carlo" in this story, ultimately finds his English soul, from Sussex nontheless.All Western democracies have a lesson to learn from this story.
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