Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Alexander Starritt

Dreams that fade and die

The Dutch writer, Cees Nooteboom, was living in West Berlin in 1989 when the gates opened and the Wall finally came down. At the time he wrote a series of essays about what was happening around him, which were published to great acclaim in Germany and form the first part of Roads to Berlin. He describes a revolution taking place on his doorstep, but there is no shooting in the streets. He goes to the theatre and museums as normal, but his German friends feel at every instant that they are making history, as though all actions and words have become denser and more lasting. It’s an apposite feeling in

Anthony Sattin

A duty to protest

A few years ago, in West Africa, a woman came up to me and said, ‘You know what’s wrong with our men? They go crazy once they get power. Crazy and bad.’ Chinua Achebe’s saving has been the fact that he never sought power, at least not of the kind that leads to conflict and the cutting off of heads. His curse has been to observe things that most of us should be happy never to have seen. Now 82, Achebe has done what many elderly people do when they have seen remarkable things: he has borne witness and set down his version of the rise and fall of the

Peter Oborne

Shameful home truths

One of our more cherished national myths is that we British do not torture prisoners of war and criminal suspects. We support decency and fair play. Ian Cobain’s book proves beyond doubt that we do indeed make use of torture, and sometimes with relish. It shows that the British state has long practised a secret torture policy and continues to do so. It is easy to predict the fate of this carefully researched and well-written book. It will be ignored, glossed over and quietly rubbished by a political and Whitehall establishment which has persistently covered up or denied the very troubling state crimes that are documented here. Cobain traces British

Charles Duff

Portrait of the artist as a young man

Had the artist Rex Whistler not been killed in Normandy in 1944 at the age of 39, in what direction would his great talent have gone? It is futile to speculate, write Hugh and Mirabel Cecil, the authors of this sumptuously illustrated new biography. But many did. Cecil Beaton thought he would have become another Turner. My mother Caroline Paget, his greatest love (but who loved him without the intensity that he loved her), thought he would have become one of the greatest portraitists of the 20th century and, relishing new ideas in stage design, also one of the most famous designers of his day. All his friends thought that

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Business as usual | 22 November 2012

Dear old Pesto, we all make jokes about him but we all secretly admire him. The BBC business editor’s strangulated elocution and stream-of-consciousness style were never going to make him a natural broadcaster — ‘He won’t last six months,’ one of his household-name colleagues whispered to me in the early days. But six years on he’s still there, falling out of bed to cover breaking news from home, packing in 12-hour days in his ill-ventilated BBC cubicle to chase the multiple sources and ‘exclusives’ of which he’s boyishly proud, enduring the jibes of smoother talkers such as Eddie Mair, resisting the siren calls of corporate PRs and ministerial spin, sticking

The Spectator

Books of the year | 22 November 2012

Byron Rogers When TV presenters write history books it is the mistakes you treasure most, as when David Dimbleby blithely pronounced that Augustine had introduced Christianity to Britain (Christianity being over 200 years old in Britain, with Welsh bishops, before Augustine came). But Andrew Marr’s A History of the World (Macmillan, £25) is different. It is a distinguished work of history in its own right. The TV series wasn’t up to much, but the book is wonderful, and better than H.G. Wells’s The Outline of History. It made me wonder what else is deliberately hidden away to advance the careers of those prattling public faces that appear on our screens.

Marcus Berkmann

The one who got away with it

The first track on Neil Young’s latest album lasts nearly 28 minutes, for while he usually has no problem starting, he sometimes struggles to finish. Some of the same prolixity characterises his memoir, Waging Heavy Peace (Viking, £14.75). No ghost writer has been allowed near this: it’s Young in all his ragged glory. The narrative — well, there isn’t one. Over several hundred short chapters, he darts hither and thither, telling stories, loving his family, remembering old friends and tour buses he liked, ranting about the quality of the sound on CDs and MP3s. If you like his music — and there’s little reason to pick this up if you

Tuesday

J P O'Malley

Meeting J.G. Ballard

In the programme Frost on Interviews that was recently rebroadcasted by BBC Four, the distinguished journalist, David Frost, attempted to understand what makes a compelling interview. Frost’s programme concentrated primarily on the actions of the interviewer. Various questions were asked, most notably: should one take a relaxed or heavy-handed approach with their guest? I tell this anecdote because I was half way through reading Extreme Metaphors: Selected Interviews with J.G. Ballard 1967-2008,when I stumbled upon this insightful programme. But the process Frost was speaking about was light-years away from the text I was reading. For J.G. Ballard — arguably one of the most important prose fiction writers to contribute to

Monday

Austen Saunders

Do you wish you were far from the madding crowd?

From ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ ‘The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea, The ploughman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me. Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight, And all the air a solemn stillness holds, Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight, And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds; Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tower The moping owl does to the moon complain Of such as, wandering near her secret bower, Molest her ancient solitary reign. Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree’s shade, Where heaves the turf in many

Sunday

J P O'Malley

Wole Soyinka: Boko Haram must be destroyed

Born in 1934 in Nigeria, Wole Soyinka is the author of more than twenty plays, ten volumes of poetry, two novels, seven collections of essays and five autobiographical works. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. He was the first black African man to win the prestigious prize His latest book, Of Africa, is a 200-page polemic that attempts to understand the contradictory nature of African politics. Two important questions that arise from Soyinka’s book are: what is Africa? And what do we understand of its history? Soyinka expends considerable effort in his book discussing how the nihilist nature of fundamentalist Islam is destroying societies in certain African

Thursday

Mark Mason

Write a novel in a month

Could you write a novel in a month? Plenty of people around the world are trying to do just that right at the moment. November, you see, is National Novel Writing Month. Organised by a Californian outfit called the Office of Letters and Light (I know – please stick with me), the event has been running since 1999, and now answers to the moniker NaNoWriMo, which sounds like a toddler doing R2D2. The rules are simple: starting on November 1st, you have until November 30th to write a novel of at least 50,000 words. You upload it to the event’s website, which checks your word count, and assuming you’ve passed

Wynn Wheldon

Narrative drive

Michael Holroyd describes this tiny, charmingly pointless publication (On Wheels, Chatto, £9.99) not as a book but as an example of ‘nostalgic intertextuality’, which is a grand way of saying that it is a bit of this and a bit of that. The this is the part cars have played in his family’s history and the that is the part they have played in the lives of the famous biographer’s famous subjects. We learn that Holroyd’s father liked to drive his Zodiac with his miniature German police dog on his lap, and that the author’s wife Margaret Drabble ‘plumbed a special telephone into her car’.Lytton Strachey bought a car for

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

He knows it teases

Simon Hoggart has spent 20 years going to Westminster to annoy people. He entertains no high-minded delusions about politics and he writes his Guardian sketches in a state of amused bewilderment by the sheer barminess and abnormality of most parliamentarians. This collection reads like the diary of an intelligent, mild-mannered child whose parents happen to own a knocking-shop. He makes enemies along the way. John Prescott has several times threatened to kill Hoggart, even though he directs very few explicit barbs at the former deputy prime minister. What he does is to quote him at length and with terrible accuracy. And because Prescott’s brain is like a wrecking-ball to his

Paul Johnson

Apologia pro vita sua

Any fair-minded person who has looked into the matter knows that Conrad Black was wrongly convicted. Indeed under English law he would not have been prosecuted at all, I believe, and had he been so, the judge would have thrown the case out on the first day on the grounds that the pre-trial publicity had hopelessly prejudiced the case. He would then have jailed some of the hostile commentators until they had purged their contempt. However, it is just as well that Black has decided to describe exactly how and why he was wrongly convicted. He does so in fascinating detail, and in language which is always lively and sometimes

Digby Anderson

Give me stress

Christmas is one of the few remaining occasions when the English feel obliged to cook a proper meal at home. To help them, in the autumn, kind publishers bring out lots of huge, glossy books. The idea, or collusive polite fiction, is that the cooks read the books carefully, plan their meals, buy ingredients and any necessary equipment — Jamie Oliver lists a vast amount — and then successfully cook a whole delicious meal. I have long suspected that in reality, the purchase of the book, its subsequent prominent display and discussion are acts of propitiation that take the place of actually cooking and excuse the cook from her obligations.

Blair Worden

A cavalier attitude to monarchy

Historians have long been more interested in the Roundheads than in the Cavaliers. It was the parliamentarians who achieved England’s revolution, or the nearest thing the country has come to one. It was they who overthrew the monarchy, the House of Lords and the bishops, they whose insistence on parliamentary rights, and whose attainment of a measure of religious toleration under Cromwell, apparently pointed ahead to modern values. Now the balance is changing. Historians have become less ardent for progress. Under their increasingly sceptical gaze the gap between parliamentarian thinking and the outlook of its later congratulators seems ever wider. Besides, over-population has driven students of the parliamentarian cause into

David Gilmour

Fun and games — except with mother

The Duke of Edinburgh, a New Zealand typist claimed in 1954, was ‘the best investment that the royal family has made in all its history’. But would she have thought so had she seen him a few days earlier at a ‘crazy’ party where, according to his first cousin Pamela Hicks, he ‘excelled himself, managing to use three cracker blowers at once — one in his mouth and one up each nostril, the shiny rolls unravelling simultaneously’? Anecdotes like that are, I imagine, the chief reason why people buy books like this. Lady Pamela tells them well, especially those about her ancestors. The best-crafted character in the tale is her

Lewis Jones

Living on the brink

To write this book Aman Sethi, a journalist for the Hindu, spent five years hanging out with the casual labourers of Bara Tooti Chowk in Delhi’s Sadar Bazaar, who live and die on the streets. ‘Why,’ asks one of them, ‘are you spending all this time and money getting drunk with lafunters like us? What can we teach you?’ He explains that he is trying to write a book. Who would want to read it? ‘I don’t know. I suppose my friends will buy it and maybe a few people interested in Delhi.’ But the lafunters have taught him a lot, and for its observation, sympathy and humour A Free

Jonathan Mirsky

All in the telling

I like Jewish jokes. I begin every conversation with the literary editor of The Spectator with one or two, do the same with the judge across the road, and tell my newest joke to the lifeguards at the local swimming pool. The key to a good one is gentle self-mockery. But I dislike reading jokes and listening to them from non-Jews, who invariably tell them badly. But if you like Jewish jokes written down, dozens and dozens of them, and you think Michael Winner a witty fellow, then this is the book for you. Better skip the introduction, though, because in it Winner reveals what he thinks is really funny.