Many guests at the Spectator’s summer party on Wednesday night expressed their admiration for the magazine’s books section, which is edited by Mark Amory and Clare Asquith. Consistently strong, they said. What a cracking section, said an excited Australian gentleman. It’s a tremendous honour to have such support, and we’re grateful to all our readers. Here is a taste of what they’re going on about:
Jonathan Keates, author of Handel: The Man and his Music and Purcell, has reviewed David Starkey’s latest book, Music and Monarchy, which ties in with the forthcoming TV series:
‘Whatever made the Hanoverian and Saxe-Coburg Gotha melomane genetic inheritance disappear so completely during the 20th century and why, oh why is the existing royal family, with one or two honourable exceptions, so resolutely uninterested in music?’
You can read more here.
The great literary journalist Allan Massie revisits William McIlvanney’s classic crime novel Laidlaw, which has been reissued.
Laidlaw was first published in 1977, 36 years back from now, 38 on from The Big Sleep. Like Chandler’s classic it has survived the passage of time. William McIlvanney did for Glasgow what Chandler had done for Los Angeles, giving the city its fictional identity. Hemingway used to say that all American literature came out of Huckleberry Finn; all Scottish crime writing — ‘tartan noir’ — comes out of Laidlaw.
You can read more here.
The renowned novelist Jane Gardam remembers the life and times of Barbara Comyns.
Barbara Comyns, like Stella Gibbons, lived in a leafy London suburb for many years, though less quietly! I cannot now remember the year I met her in Twickenham. I lived in Wimbledon, and one morning I walked into the small and excellent private library on the high street where you could borrow a book for sixpence a week (ah, lost world!) and asked the erudite, formidable woman who owned it — we called her the Dong with the luminous nose — if she had any good new novels and she said: ‘Certainly not. There hasn’t been a good original English novel since The Vet’s Daughter.’ I said that I knew what she meant and she replied: ‘So you should. She lives next door to you.’
You can read the rest here.
Harry Mount, author of Carpe Diem: Put a Little Latin in Your Life, thinks that Harry Eyres’ Horace and Me almost works as a manual for life.
‘Non-classicists will be more familiar with Horace than they think. He’s probably the most quoted of all Latin writers. Among his famous lines are ‘Carpe diem’, ‘Nunc est bibendum’, and ‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’. These one-liners were ripped from the Odes, and Eyres rightly returns them to their fully-formed contexts.
That was how Horace was learnt by Eyres and earlier generations of schoolboys and how the late Paddy Leigh Fermor learnt him; which was why he could share his knowledge with General Karl Kreipe, the German -officer he kidnapped in Crete in April 1944. As they trudged to the summit of Mount Ida, Kreipe recited the first line of a -Horace ode: ‘Vides ut alta stet nive candidum -Soracte’ — ‘See how Soracte [a mountain north of Rome] stands white with snow on high.’ Leigh Fermor continued reciting the poem to its end — as he put it, he suddenly realised that they had both ‘drunk at the same -fountains’ before the war.’
You can read more here.
And architecture and design writer Stephen Bayley remembers what it was like to first pick up Adhocism by Charles Jencks.
‘Here, for time travellers, is the whack-job spirit of ’68 in distillate form, paperbound and reissued in facsimile (with some exculpatory, older and wiser material fore and aft). Adhocism (re)captures with magical realism the boldness and silliness of its day. This was the day when ‘new media’ meant colour television.’
You can read the rest here.
In addition to this selection, the latest issue of the magazine contains reviews by Jonathan Mirsky (on the awful lengths medicine went to in search of cures), Spectator Australia editor Tom Switzer (on US foreign policy) and Ian Shircore (on a new book about the death of Dr David Kelly).
Subscribers, all of this will be on its way to you. Non-subscribers, you can join us today from £1 an issue. All our subscription deals can be found here.
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