It is 30 years since the Falklands war, and a flush of anniversary memoirs is being published. The best of the bunch is Down South, by former navy man Chris Parry. We’ll have an interview with Parry later this week; but, in the meantime, here’s Max Hastings (£), who made his name reporting on the war, on Parry’s account:
‘The SAS — “a strange lot” in Parry’s words — may indeed be the best of its kind in the world, but its institutional conceit creates problems both on and off the battlefield. At South Georgia, in the first British attempt to take back territory, the SAS’s insouciant insistence on landing on the Fortuna Glacier on April 21 in appalling Antarctic weather almost caused a disaster, especially when two helicopters crashed rescuing them. This was followed by an ignominious foray in inflatable boats, where again only a miracle averted tragedy. South Georgia fell four days later after the helicopter in which Parry was serving attacked an Argentine submarine with depth charges. SAS and marines exploited enemy disarray and demoralisation to stage a hastily improvised coup de main ashore.’
Peter Ackroyd has written a slim biography on Dickens’ friend, Wilkie Collins. There are those who think that Ackroyd should be stopped, and perhaps John Carey is among them. He wrote in the Sunday Times (£):
‘It is not entirely clear that another ¬biography of Collins is needed, since Ackroyd’s book, though short and enthusiastic, makes no real advance on Catherine Peters’s comprehensive and beautifully written The King of Inventors, published in 1993.’
And he thinks much the same of Collins’ later work, which Ackroyd is hoping to rehabilitate:
‘His style alternates between the flat and the melodramatic; he has (as Ackroyd grants) no insight into human nature, and he is pitilessly verbose. Readers can, however, judge for themselves as all the novels are freely available on the internet.’
Were there a prize for Retrospective Hatchet Jobs, Carey’s excoriation would win.
The Rachel Cusk hullabaloo continues. Julie Burchill, no less, has defended Cusk’s honesty:
‘Cusk doesn’t pretend for a moment that she couldn’t help herself or doesn’t know what came over her when she renders down her marriage into material; she does it with all the care and deliberation of a monk illuminating a medieval manuscript.’
It is a ‘predictably brilliant book’, says Burchill, which is as close as she comes to unbridled praise. Rod Liddle takes a different view of Cusk and her predicament. Writing in the latest issue of the Spectator, he says:
‘She is, I would gently contend, a self-obsessed, self-pitying idiot.’
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