Today, the Spectator has published an Easter Weekend and Royal Wedding double issue. It’s full of goodies from the finest writers. Subscribers can read it here or you can open a subscription from £1 an issue; or you can buy it off the shelf of any discerning newsagent for £3.95. Meanwhile, here is a brief selection from the Books section.
A.N. Wilson reviews Ian Ker’s biography of G.K. Chesterton, the ‘man mountain of Fleet Street’:
‘Ker’s book is immensely long, and it is full of details which Chestertonians will savour. Everyone knew that GK was fat, but I had never realised quite how fat he was until I read this book: he was scarcely able to get into the bath, and his wife had difficulty persuading him to wash. He never went to the dentist. And, although Ker tries to play this down, I had never fully appreciated before just how drunken GK became. Ker tells us that Frances would go to bed early and that GK sat up with the bottle, working.
This would certainly explain what must have puzzled many of Chesterton’s admirers, of whom I have always been one. How can it be that he writes such very good stuff beside such utter rot?
When Chesterton is good, he is so very, very good. ‘Every citizen is a revolution. That is, he destroys, devours and adapts his environment to the extent of his own thought and
conscience.’ Only he could have written that. Then you come across a sentence such as, ‘Gothic architecture … is the only fighting architecture’. What would that mean if it
meant anything? But if we imagine that the author was drunk, then all is explained.’
Toby Jones takes a trip down memory lane with Esther Freud’s Lucky Break:
‘A chronicle of three young actors desperate to forge careers in the acting profession sounds like a dangerously familiar proposition. We are all now habituated to the weekly Saturday evening drama of wide- eyed dreamers drilled, mauled, culled and reculled in search of a Nancy, Dorothy or Maria. In Lucky Break, however, Esther Freud redraws the path that leads from Television Centre direct to London’s glittering West End.
These young hopefuls are plunged into the maelstrom of a three-year drama school programme that stretches and befuddles them in equal measure. There is a squirm- inducing accuracy to the
students’ earnest endorsement of their training, hilariously realised in the principal and the quasi-mystical movement teacher. The austerity of their regime reads like satire, though sadly
isn’t.’
Alexander Chancellor on Peter Paterson’s uplifting memoir, Much
More of This, Old Boy?:
‘Anyone who thinks that a stable and loving family background is the key to a happy life had better read this book; for its protagonist, now 80 years old, was rejected as a baby by his
unmarried mother, looked after by a doting and doted-on grandmother until he was four, and then, inexplicably (given that he had various relations who could have cared for him), consigned to an
orphanage of Dickensian grimness from which he was finally discharged at the age of 14 with nothing but a Bible, a new suit, and a ten-shilling note. Yet Peter Paterson’s fascinating memoir
shows him to have led a life of almost unnatural contentment. He has spent nearly 60 years of it in journalism, having drifted into it by accident and considered himself ever since the luckiest man
alive.’
Nicky Haslam casts his mind back to The Day of the
Peacock:
‘This new style, the cool child of late Fifties mods, had been given a huge public oomph by the Beatles and ‘their silly little suits’ as David Bailey (who has stated that he, along with myself, was the unwitting originator of the look) succinctly puts it. It was sharper, leaner and hinted at androgeny. Its creators were no longer found in caverns down Carnaby Street, nor high in the King’s Road, but centered round that time-honoured dandy’s inferno, Savile Row.
Certainly West End tailors had been turning out the archetypal three-piece for decades, but the author makes the somewhat dodgy statement that the Duke of Windsor’s clothes were ‘classical’. Classical? Those huge clown-check plus-twos and fairy Fair-Isle pullovers? And he maintains that teddy-boy gear was Edwardian inspired — though I would say it was more Mississippi river-boat gambler/western sheriff. The real retro Edwardians were that cast of hour-glassed figurines, Peter Coats, Bill Akroyd, Hardy, Cecil, Bunny et al, whose suits were wildly exaggerated versions of what clubland codgers had worn for a century and still are wearing, though somewhat whiffily, dry cleaning having always been absolute athenaeum to St James’s habitués.’
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