| | Review by The Spectator

Piers Paul Read

Having been steeped in the anti-clerical polemic of France in the late 19th century doing research for a book, I anticipated a sense of déjà lu when asked to review Terry Eagleton’s contra-Dawkins and contra-Hitchens polemic, Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate. (Yale, £18.99). I was agreeably surprised. Eagleton writes with lucidity, wit and panache and, though an atheist himself, successfully shreds what the conflated Ditchkins say in their books. He ‘ventriloquises’ his defence of religion in reaction to the ‘straw-targeting of Christ- ianity . . . now drearily commonplace among academics and intellectuals — that is to say, among those who would not allow a first-year student to get away with the vulgar caricatures in which they themselves indulge with such insouciance.’ For example, Dawkins’s refusal to admit that ‘a single human benefit has ever flowed from religious faith, [is] a view which is as a priori improbable as it is empirically false.’

Bevis Hillier

It has been a bumper year for biographies. I am very glad I am not a judge of the Whitbread Prize, as there is an embarras de richesse to choose from. My top two contenders would be Selina Hastings’s The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham (John Murray, £25) and John Carey’s William Golding (Faber, £25). In both books, gruelling research is transmuted into an engrossing, easily assimilable story. I’m not sure how ‘secret’ Maugham’s lives were — by the standards of the time, he was pretty ‘out’; but Hastings dissects them all with the same balance and wit that she brought to her lives of Evelyn Waugh, Nancy Mitford and Rosamond Lehmann. Golding may have been hiding more: on the surface he was a rollicking heterosexual, but more than one acquaintance thought he was gay, and Carey leaves the possibility on the table.

There are three other biographies the judges would need to consider: Michael Bloch’s James Lees-Milne (John Murray, £25); Frances Spalding’s John Piper, Myfanwy Piper: Lives in Art (Oxford, £25); and David Nokes’s Samuel Johnson: A Life (Faber, £25). Remarkably, Bloch manages to chronicle the life of his complex subject with hardly any direct quotation from the diaries of Lees-Milne which he has edited so adroitly. Perhaps he didn’t want to steal his own thunder? Necessarily, Spalding’s is an art book and a music book (Myfanwy’s libretti for Britten operas) as well as a biography: she scores high marks in each category.

Nokes’s Johnson coincides with the Great Cham’s tercentenary (born 1709). Inevitably, it will be compared not just with Boswell, but with Peter Martin’s Samuel Johnson: A Biography (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25), another excellent work, which jumped the gun, appearing in 2008. I’d award the palm to Nokes, a London University professor. He begins with an engaging preface about what it is like to have one’s office in Johnson’s part of London. And his research is that bit more thorough than Martin’s: for example, Martin suggests that Johnson may be the mystery figure in a Zoffany painting of David Garrick and his (Garrick’s) wife at Hampton, whereas it has been established from an inventory of Garrick’s household effects that the figure is Colonel George Bodens — like Johnson, a friend of Mrs Thrale. Neither author mentions Johnson’s alleged experiments at the Chelsea porcelain factory, or the fact that at the short-lived academy he ran at Edial Hall in Staffordshire, he taught a brother of John Offley who owned the house in which the Chelsea factory began.