Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Matthew Adams

Larkin’s misty parks and moors — in all their lacerating beauty

When Philip Larkin went up to St John’s College, Oxford, in the early 1940s, he found himself in a world of deprivation and departures. The arrival of war had ruined any hope he might have had of living the sybaritic student life mythologised by Evelyn Waugh; the majority of the younger dons had departed to serve in the forces or the ministries; the few undergraduates at the college who hadn’t already followed suit could expect to be called up soon. And most were. But Larkin was not. Deemed unfit for active service because of his poor eyesight, he remained at Oxford for the full three years of his degree, while

Nicky Haslam

Vanity fair and foul | 10 December 2015

People tend to use the term ‘fashion victim’ somewhat damningly — and maybe jealously — to describe someone obsessed by the latest look. I’m not sure I agree. There’s something endearing about anyone who wants to dress in the newest style, and anyway, isn’t being up-to-date the whole point of fashion? It’s no more reprehensible than wanting the newest car, or iPhone, or flattest TV. ‘Victims’ are surely those who get it wrong — the mutton and lamb syndrome. More like what my beloved friend Melissa Wyndham called ‘fashion casualties’. But now Alison Matthews David has brass-tackled the subject. In Fashion Victims: The Dangers of Dress, Past and Present (Bloomsbury,

Matthew Dennison

Osbert Lancaster: a national treasure rediscovered

True to his saw that ours is ‘a land of rugged individualists’, Osbert Lancaster, in his self-appointed role of popular architectural historian, presented the 1,000-year history of Britain’s built environment from a resolutely personal perspective. Like the majority of his generation — Lancaster was born in 1908 and published Pillar to Post in 1938, following it with Homes Sweet Homes a year later — he cultivated a vigorous dislike of all things Victorian. Again and again he demolished the earnest conceits of 19th-century orthodoxy: ‘the antiquarian heresy’; ‘the great dreary moth of Victorian revivalism’; ‘the jackdaw strain inherent in every true Victorian’. Lancaster’s skill lay in the accuracy and apparent

Mark Mason

Looking for Nessie

It wasn’t until I drove past Loch Ness a couple of years ago that I realised just how enormous it is. Over 20 miles long and deep enough to hide Blackpool Tower, it could hold the water from all the lakes in England and Wales combined. But it’s still not as big, I found myself thinking, as the human imagination. Gareth Williams’s excellent book isn’t about the Loch Ness monster; it’s about the people who have looked for it. There is Alexander Keiller, rich from marmalade and ‘fond of sex, sometimes on a near-industrial scale’. There’s wing commander Basil Cary and his wife Winifred, known as Freddie, who can work

Simon Heffer

A Horrible History of English Hymns

Given that for much of English history the country’s main musical tradition was that connected with the church, it is surprising that so little effort has been made to describe the evolution of, as the subtitle to Andrew Gant’s book puts it, the ‘History of English Church Music’. If we read biographical accounts of the lives of composers from Tallis to Vaughan Williams we pick up some of the story, but far from all of it. Gant is supremely well qualified to write about it. He has been organist and choirmaster of the Chapels Royal and worked at Westminster Abbey, Oxbridge colleges and the Guards’ Chapel; and he also composes.

Henry Jeffreys

Assorted Christmas crackers

There’s a moment in a child’s life where Christmas begins to lose its magic. Once lost it cannot be regained, but as adults we can catch glimpses of that wonder through our own children, through booze, and most of all through songs, films and stories. Christmas is the one time of the year when it’s not only acceptable to cry over such sentimental things, it’s almost compulsory. The wonder ceases at around eight or nine years old. Andrew Szlachetko (who publishes this book, £5.99) addresses this in The Age of Not Believing. The hero, Thomas, on his way to Santa’s grotto, is mocked by some other boys for his belief

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Chrissie Hynde writes like an angel on angel dust

‘The day I found out that Suzi Quatro wasn’t a dyke was the worst day of my life!’ a teenage Joan Jett once complained to a teenage me — and, substituting Chrissie H for Suzi Q, I knew well how she felt. Here I am popping up on page 150: Little teenagers out in the sticks like Julie Burchill lapped up my half-baked philosophical drivel and prepared their own versions of nonsensical tirades for the day when they too could make a ‘career’ out of it. I even sold the darling little Julie my typewriter for £15 when my time was over, like passing the baton of ‘how to fuck

Christopher Bray

Homage to awesome Welles on his centenary

One day in May 1948 in the Frascati hills southeast of Rome, Orson Welles took his new secretary, Rita Ribolla, to lunch. After eating enough food for ‘a dozen hungry people’ and sinking ‘one glass of wine after another’, all the while enchanting his guest with gossip and conjuring tricks, Welles downed his coffee and said it was time to go. Ribolla smiled and waited for him to get the bill. And waited. Eventually she asked for it herself. When it arrived Welles passed it over, saying, ‘Leave a large tip for these nice waiters.’ ‘But Mr Welles, I can’t afford meals like this.’ Welles turned sulphurous: ‘How dare you

Simon Drew

Answers to ‘Spot the Line of Poetry’

1. Ill-met by moonlight (Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream) 2. Hope springs eternal in the human breast (Pope’s ‘An Essay on Man’) 3. To be or not to be (Shakespeare’s Hamlet) 4. Into the mouth of Hell/ Rode the six hundred (Tennyson’s ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’) 5. Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink (Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’) 6. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways (Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘Sonnet 43’) 7. When shall we three meet again? (Shakespeare’s Macbeth) 8. Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams (W.B. Yeats’s ‘The Cloths of Heaven’) 9. Not with a bang but

Jan Morris

Pastoral scene of the gallant South

During the first ten pages of this long work Paul Theroux, on a journey through the American South, meets two citizens of Alabama. The first, encountered in Tuscaloosa when he asked the way to the Cornerstone Full Gospel Baptist Church, was named Lucille, called him ‘Mr Paul’, said ‘Ain’t no strangers here, Baby’, took him to the church and said ‘Be Blessed’ when they parted. The second, a citizen of Gadsden, was named Wendell, called him ‘Sir’, clamped him on the shoulder, said ‘Kin Ah he’p you in inny way?’ and before they parted suggested they meet again for ‘a sandwich, peanuts or anything’. In neither encounter, in a part

Ferdinand Mount

Bored and lonely in Kathmandu

It started as a ‘shoke’ — the Anglo-Indian slang word for ‘hobby’. Bored and lonely in Kathmandu, the young Assistant Resident, Brian Hodgson, began studying the flora and fauna of the hills, about the only occupation he was allowed to pursue apart from shooting woodcock and snipe under the constraints imposed by the Raja. The unicorn of the Himalayas had cantered through Chinese mythology for centuries. In no time, Hodgson found a living specimen in the King’s menagerie, a panting antelope from the Tibetan plateau which, alas, soon expired, unable to survive at lower altitudes, but not before Hodgson had established that it in fact possessed two horns. The unlucky

Daniel Swift

Casual, funny, flirtatious, severe

When The Waste Land first appeared, there were rumours that it was a hoax. It seemed so strange: 400 lines in many languages, and even the sections that were in English looked as if the author was only teasing. ‘Twit twit twit’ ran one line: ‘Jug jug jug jug jug jug.’ Eliot’s long poem was published first in Criterion in October 1922, and then in an American magazine the following month. Eliot had also sold the rights to publish it as a book, but his publishers feared that the poem alone was too short. To make it a little longer, Eliot added half a dozen pages of sporadic notes. The

Wilkie Collins

Mrs Badgery

Wilkie Collins’s ‘Mrs Badgery’, rarely seen since its first publication in Dickens’s Household Words magazine in September 1857, is an enchanting little chip off the block. Like a lot of British short stories, it is absurd, very funny, and in uproarious bad taste. British writers have often enjoyed stories of making a home, and also the theatrical trappings of grief. (George Bernard Shaw commented on the national enthusiasm for requiems). Here they collide, with richly enjoyable results. The narrator is clearly stuck withMrs Badgery for ever. In time, he might even regard her as a picturesque addition to his home, like an indoor and rather saline water feature. Philip Hensher

Wednesday

Sara Wheeler

Spectator books of the year: Sara Wheeler wallows in a witty grammar memoir

My Book of the Year is Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, a grammar memoir by Mary Norris, a copy editor at the New Yorker for 30 years (Norton, £15.99). Anyone who loves language will wallow in this book. Working with the greats (Roth to McPhee) and digressing on the foibles of the serial comma, Norris infects every line with wit and wisdom. In the travel department I commend Elephant Complex: Travels in Sri Lanka by John Gimlette (Quercus, £25), a gripping account of an under-reported island. As for fiction, I pick John Banville’s The Blue Guitar (Viking, £14.99) — perhaps for the tone of elegiac melancholy

Tuesday

Christopher Howse

Spectator books of the year: a new biography of the Pope changes Christopher Howse’s mind

Two biographies that changed my mind. Gerard Kilroy’s Edmund Campion: A Scholarly Life (Ashgate, £80) vividly sketches the intellectual worlds of Oxford and Prague in the first half of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. They were not as cut off from each other as we might suppose. Campion, one of the men who connected the two, dominated his time with impressive composure, even as he suffered appalling treatment. Too late for last year’s best books was The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope by Austen Ivereigh (Allen & Unwin, £20), which shows why Pope Francis is not a silly old commie. The author’s insights into his Argentine background

Monday

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: poems about HS2

The idea to ask for poems about HS2 came to me as I was listening on YouTube to W.H. Auden’s poem ‘Night Mail’, which he wrote to accompany a section of the terrific 1936 documentary about the London to Glasgow Postal Special directed by Basil Wright and Harry Watt (who described Auden as looking like a ‘half-witted Swedish deckhand’). Not altogether surprisingly, the tone of the entry was less celebratory than Auden’s, with the notable exception of Carolyn Thomas-Coxhead’s prize-winning submission, written in the finest MacGonagallese. Her fellow victors are rewarded with £30 apiece and George Simmers snaffles the extra fiver. George Simmers There’s a thunder down the line at

Ruth Scurr

Spectator books of the year: Ruth Scurr on a terrific year for women writers

2015 has been a terrific year for women writers. I have especially enjoyed Mary Beard’s sceptical and subversive history of Rome, SPQR (Profile, £25); Alexandra Harris’s literary history of the English weather, Weatherland: Writers and Artists Under English Skies (Thames & Hudson, £24.95); and Antonia Fraser’s witty memoir of growing up, My History (Weidenfeld, £9.99). I loved Anne Enright’s darkly glinting novel of family life, The Green Road (Cape, £16.99), but my female novelist of the year is Elena Ferrante. I found Ann Goldstein’s translations of the Neopolitan novels — My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of

Sunday

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Spectator books of the year: Julie Burchill discovers the story behind Labour’s self-immolation

Now that I’ve given up drugs, I find myself addicted to psychological thrillers written by women, featuring no gore and a great deal of malice aforethought. My favourites this year were (in order of preference) Disclaimer by Renée Knight (Doubleday, £12.99), You by Caroline Kepnes (Simon & Schuster, £7.99) and I Let You Go by Clare Mackintosh (Sphere, £7.99). And Nick Cohen’s brilliant What’s Left: How the Left Lost its Way (Harper Perennial, £9.99) was reissued just in time to provide an explanation for the Labour party’s current ecstatic self-immolation. I have bought and given away a dozen copies of this book, and I plan to buy and give away

Saturday

Bevis Hillier

Spectator books of the year: Bevis Hillier on the closest thing to a British War and Peace

Though artfully plotted and well written, some of Rachel Billington’s early novels, starting with All Things Nice in 1969, had a tinge of Mills & Boon. Reviewing one of them, Auberon Waugh wrote: ‘The hero is described as “smooth and pink”. Good: I hate green, prickly heroes.’ By the time she wrote A Woman’s Age (1979) — a novel covering roughly the same lifespan as that of her mother, Elizabeth Longford — Billington had matured into about the same standing as Elizabeth Jane Howard. Though Howard’s Cazalet chronicles are pleasurable to read and laced with intellect and wit, she is not in the same class of acclaimed ‘literary novelist’ as,

Friday

Mark Amory

Spectator books of the year: Mark Amory finds Anne Tyler’s latest ‘pure pleasure’

Since retiring from coping with new books I have found it a pleasure not to have to glance at any of them. One, however, Anne Tyler’s 20th novel A Spool of Blue Thread (Vintage, £7.99), was pure pleasure. A quiet family drama over four generations, set in Baltimore as usual, it was never obvious which way it was going. but patterns emerged in the end. My interest in India is matched only by my ignorance, so almost everything in Ferdinand Mount’s Tears of the Rajas (Simon & Schuster, £25) came as a surprise to me. Through the careers of various enterprising relations, he tells the story of the British in