Book Reviews

When Margot Asquith’s name crops up these days, it is usually in a retelling of the story about her meeting Jean Harlow, sexy star of the silver screen, who repeatedly called her Margotte. Eventually, Margot became irritated. ‘No, my dear,’ she corrected. ‘The “t” is silent, as in Harlow.’ It’s a good story, but apocryphal and, I was always told by those who knew her (she was my great-grandfather’s second wife), quite untypical of her. No matter. She had plenty of good lines that were unquestionably her own, as this diary vividly attests. She was at her best when analysing friends and enemies, which were sometimes interchangeable categories. And as

Do movie musicals matter? Most readers, even those who love them, will embark on Richard Barrios’s short history of the genre with the thought: not much. They’ll very likely, I’m afraid, finish it holding much the same opinion. But not mattering much doesn’t prevent the best film musicals from being captivating. This is a book by someone who is indeed captivated: a love letter for the best of musical cinema and a blown raspberry for the worst. Barrios is sensitive and scholarly about the ebb and flow of the popularity of musical film over the years — the dunts administered to it by 1934’s killjoy Production Code, by changes in

Nadezhda Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya was a literary celebrity in pre-revolutionary St Petersburg. She chose the pen-name ‘Teffi’ because it was androgynous, and because it was the kind of name a ‘lucky’ fool would have; in Russia, fools were held to tell truths, albeit obliquely. ‘Teffi’ wrote for newspapers, most notably the Russian Word. By 1911 she was writing more fiction than journalism; her short story collections achieved instant popularity. In 1919 the Russian Word was closed down. Teffi was evacuated, ending up, like so many ‘lesrusses’, in Paris. She never returned to Russia, except in her stories. Teffi’s fame evaporated almost immediately after her death in 1952. Pushkin Press has issued

With Elvis has Left the Building, the longstanding editor of GQ has inexplicably written a book that could serve as a handy, if perhaps overly comprehensive, compendium of bad journalistic habits: from the over-arching flaw of failing to decide what you want to say to such specifics as the excessive use of the phrase ‘American dream’ and wildly random scene-setting. (In the lengthy section on 1977, the year of Presley’s death, we learn that ‘five days before Luciano Pavarotti made his first appearance on American television, the rings of Uranus were discovered’.) Admittedly, for the fairly niche audience of readers interested in Elvis but entirely ignorant of the circumstances and

‘Phlogiston’ is an interesting, if obsolete, word. Of Greek origin, it referred to the ‘fire-making’ quality thought to be present in, among other things, the ashes gathered by London dustmen. In the mid-18th century these ashes were mixed with earth and even ‘excrements taken out of the necessary houses’ to create the vast numbers of bricks needed for the explosion of house-building taking place at the time in London and elsewhere. The dramatic rise in building is pivotal to this densely detailed observation of the British obsession with their ‘home’ and ‘comfort’ which, we’re told, Robert Southey describes as particularly English and untranslatable. The first third of this trivia-packed and

Vladimir Putin calls it ‘the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century’, a viewpoint which explains much of his recent behaviour. Few others anywhere in the world, particularly people who live around Russia’s borders, would agree that the collapse of the Soviet Union was anything to lament. From Riga to Tbilisi and from Kiev to Tashkent, Christmas Day 1991, when Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as leader of the USSR and the Red Flag was lowered from the Kremlin, remains a day to celebrate. With nearly a quarter of a century’s hindsight it still seems astonishing that a great superpower and, with it, an entirely different way of looking at the world