Book Reviews

Champion Hill, Camberwell, 1922. A mother and daughter, stripped of their menfolk by the Great War, struggle to make ends meet in their genteel villa. Servantless, Mrs Wray keeps up appearances while her daughter Frances confronts the reality of hands-and-knees housework. Reluctantly, they advertise for ‘paying guests’, and are rewarded with Leonard and Lilian Barber, who are young, noisy, sexy and vulgar, with a whiff of the music-hall about them. This is perfect territory for Sarah Waters. Women reshaping their lives without men, social barriers dismantled through economic necessity, notions of respectability challenged by the world convulsion of the preceding years. It’s a setting in which she can explore the

Over the summer I read Vilhelm Moberg’s The Emigrants, a documentary novel about the Swedes who emigrated to America in the 18th century. It powerfully describes what drove illiterate peasants to take such an extraordinary gamble on a country about which they knew almost nothing. The story, of course, could have been written about migrants from many European countries, and particularly those (including some of by relatives) from the Scottish Highlands. Moberg tells how some fled starvation, some religious persecution; some sought economic and political freedom. And they all risked a voyage which they might not survive: Moberg’s ship’s captain would take a clump of earth with him to scatter on corpses in the

When Napoleon Bonaparte captured Venice in 1797, he extinguished what had been the most successful regime in the history of the western world. The Venetian Republic had lasted over 1,000 years — longer than ancient Rome — without a revolution, a coup d’état or a successful foreign invasion.  Yet after 1797 it was never to be independent again: it was given to Austria, taken back by France, allotted once more to Austria and finally, in 1866, handed over to the young Kingdom of Italy. Most visitors to Venice are interested in its distant past, in the struggles to build a city on the mudbanks, in the glories of its gothic

Calling in a favour from a comrade to help flog your new book is hardly a new trick, but Mr S wonders if Owen Jones really thought this one through: Thankfully, Russell ‘the revolution is coming’ Brand is not known for his outrageous hyperbole.

I was prompted to ask for short odes on the death of a pet in unusual circumstances by Thomas Gray’s poem ‘Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes’. Gray wrote this charming and witty cautionary tale in 1747 in memory of Horace Walpole’s beloved tabby Selima, whose desire leads her to a watery demise. ‘She stretched in vain to reach the prize./ What female heart can gold despise?/ What cat’s averse to fish?’ D.A. Prince’s winning composition below has strong echoes of Gray and there was plenty of wit and charm on display elsewhere in the entry. Commendations to Poppy McLean, John-Paul

Proof that television has changed a bit since 1972 came with an archive clip shown on BBC4 on Sunday. ‘My first guest:’ Michael Parkinson announced matter-of-factly on his Saturday-night chat show, ‘W. H. Auden.’ Auden then made his way gingerly down the stairs, lit a fag and began by discussing the failure of the poetry of the 1930s to effect political change. ‘Nothing I wrote,’ he told Parky, ‘postponed war for five seconds or prevented one Jew from being gassed.’ The clip appeared in Great Poets in their Own Words, the first of a two-part series combining archive film with talking heads to provide a useful if workmanlike history of