| | Review by The Spectator

Alan Judd

Charlotte Moore’s Hancox (Viking £20) does more than catalogue the history of a Sussex house and the lively and distinguished family (her own) that has inhabited it for the past 120 or so years. She writes with insight and kindly wit, observing her forbears with an Austenian eye. You follow them as you would characters in a novel, which makes them more real than most historical figures. She should give us a fictitious sequel.

John Biggins is the author of a wry and fascinating tetralogy of novels beginning in the first world war Austrian navy’s submarine service (sic). The Surgeon’s Apprentice (ww.johnbigginsfiction.com) is another soundly researched tale of sea-faring and warfare, with the addition of 17th-century medicine, science and astrology. His hero has the misfortune to take part in the disastrous 1625 expedition to Cadiz, regarded ‘by connoisseurs of incompetence as the worst-conducted military operation in Britain’s entire history’. But it makes for a good yarn.

Another first world war tetralogy is Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End, arguably the most sophisticated British fiction to come out of that war. Carcanet’s reissue of the first volume, Some Do Not (£18.95), is the first reliable text, reconstructing Ford’s dramatic original ending. Brilliantly edited by Max Saunders and now to be filmed (scripted by Tom Stoppard), it deserves to be — and will be — better known.

P.J. Kavanagh

The Great Books (Icon, £20) by the philosopher Anthony O’Hear was published in 2007 but I only read it this year because the title made it sound too like a crib, which it is, but much more as well. O’Hear points out for example that the Greek heroes in Homer (whom Simone Weil called ‘ killing-machines’) were attacking a culture that was domestic and civilised. Andromache was preparing a hot bath for her husband Hector, not knowing that he was being dragged, dead, behind the chariot of Achilles. Homer tells us this, but amid the blood and clamour we might overlook the contrast. In the Aeneid Vergil can be sensed flinching at the violence of the pax romana — even ‘pious Aeneas’ could be guilty. This ‘piety’ is O’Hear’s theme.

All the books he describes and examines, from Homer to Goethe’s Faust, exist in an order that contains some form of transcendence, above and outside man. This order, essential to understanding the books themselves, O’Hear contends that we now too often push aside, treating ‘the mythology and mysticism of Plato’s thought as if these things were too naive and embarrassing even to notice’. Against this impoverishment O’Hear, unfashionably, goes doughtily to war.

I also admired Ian Ker’s John Henry Newman (OUP, £30) because Ker had the courtesy and good sense to let Newman almost write it himself. The quotations, especially from the letters, are a revelation and delight. The fruit of years of travel and study.