Book Reviews

Edwardian Park Lane was lined with grand houses. The occupants, conspicuous consumers and domestic servants, acted out layers of deception. Gamblers ruined Victorian fortunes. Gaiety and social graces masked the insecurities of the new rich and their struggles for acceptance in London. Upstairs, married women, harnessed by corsets and discretion, embodied compliant game. Downstairs, actually in attics, rehearsals for the 1960s were in unbroken swing. Outside, Londoners endured soot and fog. This setting for Frances Osborne’s debut novel comes closer to John Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga than the Marxist doctrine of social values found in Robert Tressell’s The Ragged-trousered Philanthropists. Osborne takes a cue from Galsworthy whose judgments on the humbug

The god of nonsense, Edward Lear, is 200 years old this year. (Yes, the Inimitable can’t have the whole stage for himself, and must give way to another peculiarly English genius.) To mark the occasion, the Spectator’s Jubilee Double Issue (available from all good newsagents and doubtless a few bad ones too — alternatively, you can subscribe at new.spectator.co.uk/subscribe) carries a piece by Thomas Hodgkinson, a devotee of Lear who also shares the old man’s love of Corfu. I urge you to read the delightful piece in full, but here’s an excerpt to tickle your fancy: ‘The Owl and The Pussycat’ was my favourite childhood poem. And I must confess

On Desert Island Discs the other day, Peter Ackroyd chose a pen and some paper as his luxury. ‘Do you write longhand?’ asked Kirsty Young. Ackroyd’s reply was really intriguing: yes, he does write longhand – but only his fiction. To write one genre by hand but another on computer might seem bizarre, including to Ackroyd himself, who responds to my enquiry about why he works this way with an admission that he doesn’t know. He is, though, far from unique in having a strange approach to his craft. Many writers have been very … how can we put this … ‘particular’ in the way they turn words in their

Madeline Miller has won the Orange Prize — the last ever Orange Prize, in fact. She won the £30,000 and the coveted ‘Bessie’ statue for her debut novel, The Song of Achilles. Joanna Trollope, Chair of Judges, said: ‘This is a more than worthy winner – original, passionate, inventive and uplifting. Homer would be proud of her.’ This was a turn up for the books. Miller was the 8/1 outsider according to William Hill’s odds. Gamblers and pundits had expected Cynthia Ozick to win. Literary prizes have developed a habit of defying expectations in recent months. For instance, this year’s Costa Prize went to Andrew Miller for his novel Pure,

I’ve come late to this, but the trailer for Baz Luhrmann’s film adaptation of The Great Gatsby is striking. It is everything that you would expect of Luhrmann: sensational, self-conscious and hysterically camp. I doubt that anyone expected a literal interpretation from Luhrmann, but few can have anticipated this total re-imagining of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s beloved classic. The modern score, the cavernous nightclubs, the idiomatic speech — it’s more Gossip Girl than Gershwin. Doubtless, there will be those who decry Luhrmann’s audacity. But the trailer suggests that he has remained faithful to the book’s core themes: the transience of prosperity, that money is simultaneously everything and nothing, the dangers of

‘Rule Britannia’ When Britain first, at Heaven’s command,     Arose from out the azure main, This was the charter of the land,     And guardian angels sung this strain:  ‘Rule, Britannia, rule the waves;  Britons never will be slaves.’ The nations, not so blest as thee     Must, in their turns, to tyrants fall; While thou shalt flourish great and free,     The dread and envy of them all.  ‘Rule’ etc. Still more majestic shalt thou rise,     More dreadful from each foreign stroke; As the loud blast that tears the skies     Serves but to root thy native oak.  ‘Rule’ etc. Thee haughty tyrants ne’er shall tame;     All

In which Robert Macfarlane goes for a walk, again. But, as admirers of his previous works will know, Robert Macfarlane never just goes for a walk. This book’s four parts, each divided into three or four sub-sections, tell the stories of 16 expeditions: their declared intention to investigate ‘walking as a reconnoitre inwards’. His theme is the way that walking can be not just the occasion for thought but, in some sense, the method by which it is done; the way in which our experience of ourselves is shaped by moving through a landscape: Landscape is still often understood as a noun connoting fixity, scenery, an immobile painterly decorum. I