Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Wednesday

Anna Baddeley

The Pursuit of Love: Not just for girls

After a lacklustre year of books programming, the low point being a serialisation of a middle-class family’s failed attempt to live without internet, Radio 4 has lately come into its own. Already this month we’ve been treated to Beware of Pity (which I wrote about here), the surprisingly enjoyable Gargantua and Pantagruel, Claire Tomalin’s biography of Dickens and Craig Taylor’s Londoners. This week it’s a Timberlake Wertenbaker adaptation of Possession and an early Christmas present, The Pusuit of Love by Nancy Mitford. Many of us will have a comfort book, something we return to in times of illness, romantic strife, double dip recession and so on. Mine would have to

Tuesday

Ferdinand Mount

Ferdinand Mount’s books of the year

What strange persons get themselves chosen to govern us. I have spent quite a bit of the past year reading some brilliant lives of our prime ministers, each of them heavy enough to sprain a wrist but light enough to tickle the imagination: in historical order, David Brown’s Palmerston, D. R. Thorpe’s Supermac: The Life of Harold Macmillan, and Philip Ziegler’s Edward Heath. Pam, Supermac and Ted managed to put across very different images of themselves, but all three were essentially solitary and implacable personalities who kept their enmities in better repair than their friendships, all unpopular in youth and chilly in old age. No coincidence I think that they

David Blackburn

Library campaigners hunt the secretary of state

Library campaigners in Brent suffered a setback yesterday when the Court of Appeal decided that the local council was not in breach of the law when it closed 6 local libraries. The library campaigners lost on all counts, including on grounds of equality. The judgment also said that the burden of centrally imposed budget cuts was a determining factor: ‘Given the scale of the spending reductions the council was required to make, and the information available following earlier studies, a decision that the library service should bear a share of the reduction was not, in my judgment, unlawful.’ It remains to be seen how Lord Justice Pill’s decision, in what is regarded

Matthew Richardson

Rumpole’s seasonal cheer

Music fans may groan at the glut of greatest hit collections clogging up shelves at this time of year. Bookshelves are usually immune from such compilations, though the odd one slips through. In this case, it’s a positive. Forever Rumpole: The Best of the Rumpole Stories brings together some of the most winsome of John Mortimer’s tales. With a healthy range, and stories breezy enough to tackle on a full stomach, it is a timely fireside companion.   The charm lies largely with Horace Rumpole, Mortimer’s caustic lawyer. With his waistcoat, cigars and fondness for a tipple or two, Rumpole takes his rightful place in the pop-fiction pantheon. The back

Monday

Allan Massie

Allan Massie’s books of the year

Graham Swift is probably still best known for Waterland, published almost 30 years ago. I rather think he is now out of fashion. Certainly Wish You Were Here received less attention that it deserved. Swift has the admirable ability to write literary novels about characters who would never read such books. He presents us with a complete world, one which his inarticulate characters struggle to understand. William Empsom wrote that ‘the central function of imaginative literature is to make you realise that other people act on moral convictions different from your own’. Graham Swift does just that. The Fat Years by Chan Koonchung is a novel that everybody interested in

David Blackburn

Across the literary pages: Three dead wise men

Death has made a telling visit to the literary world in the past week: Christopher Hitchens, George Whitman and Vàclav Havel have all died. The appreciation of Hitchens is fast approaching the precedents set by his targets, Princess Diana and Mother Theresa — an irresistible irony that he would certainly have appreciated. The growing beatification is the measure of journalists who aspire to Hitchens’ undoubted courage and style; the greatest possible testament to the man himself. Next to the fabled Hitchens, Whitman needs further introduction. He restored the Shakespeare & Company English bookshop on the Rue Bûcherie in Paris after the war. But he was rather more than a shopkeeper. Whitman’s acumen was for

Saturday

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Portrait of a singular man

The posthumous publication of Hugh Trevor-Roper’s wartime diaries continues the restoration of his reputation, says Geoffrey Wheatcroft Nothing is more elusive than reputation. A writer’s standing goes up and down like a share price, during his life and after, for no obvious or objective reason, as D. J. Taylor observed in a recent perceptive essay in the TLS on the fall from favour of Angus Wilson, although I still read his novels if no one else does. Then again, others recover. Terence Rattigan’s stock was very low when he died in 1977, long sneered at as the epitome of middlebrow, middle-class West End theatre. But lo, there has been a

Martin Gayford

Currents of imagery

In the first book of his scientific-cum-philosophical poem ‘De rerum Natura’ — or ‘On the Nature of Things’ — Lucretius draws the reader’s attention to the power of invisible forces. The wild wind, he wrote, whips the waves of the sea, capsizes huge ships, and sends the clouds scudding; sometimes it swoops and sweeps across the plains in tearing tornado, strewing them with great trees, and hammers the heights of the mountains with forest-spitting blasts. It was a description I was well placed to appreciate as I read this whimsical, scholarly and original book while staying in a Georgian folly on a country estate in Kent. All around this mock

Richard Davenporthines

Poison Ivy

‘Who was she?’, a browser might ask on finding three re-issued novels by Ivy Compton-Burnett, and ‘Why should I read them?’ Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884-1969) was one of 13 children of a Victorian physician. After his death, his widow wrapped herself in anger and subjected her children to cruel, neurotic tyranny. Their verbal laceration continued after her death in 1911, for Ivy took control of her siblings, and enforced a sadistic autocracy learnt from her mother. On Christmas Day 1917, the two youngest girls, ‘Topsy’ and 18-year-old ‘Baby’, for whom family life seethed with aggression, nerve storms and spite, locked themselves in a bedroom, and died in one another’s arms

Patrick Marnham

Funny old world

The most remarkable thing about this book is that it should have been published at all. No one could have imagined in 1961 that Private Eye — a blotchy reproduction stapled together on what looked like yellow scrap paper — would still be going 50 years later, selling hundreds of thousand of copies every fortnight and apparently employing about 50 people. Adam MacQueen has not written a history of the paper but has compiled a biographical album of contributors, staff, stories and various dramas in its history. The author suggests that it could be read from cover to cover, but that would be hard work even for a satirical anorak.

Adam Marsjones

Glamour on the campaign trail

Though this book is published by Oxford University Press and the author teaches at the University of Southern California, it is really only semi-demi-academic. Steven J. Ross has conducted interviews and trawled through archives, but his instincts are for the flat vividness of journalism rather than anything more scholarly or searching. In a footnote he may mention that Harry Belafonte, in an interview in the mid-1990s, got the date of a crucial meeting with Martin Luther King wrong by three years, but is happy to quote Belafonte’s version (in that same interview) of what King said — ‘We are caught up in a struggle that will not leave us’ —

Colin Amery

Soaring splendour

The glorious monuments built in India by the Mughal emperors, from Babur in the early 16th century to Bahadur Shah Zafar II in the mid-19th century, have long deserved a comprehensive illustrated survey in one volume. George Michell is the ideal author. He is both a great scholar and a fervent communicator on many aspect of India’s cultural history. He has worked as a hands-on archaeologist on major Indian sites and recently established a Deccan Foundation to protect the wonders of that little-known region. He has been extremely well served in this magnificent book by the photographs of Amit Pasricha, who describes himself as a ‘panoramic photographer’. His photographs are

Peter Oborne

Guilty by association

It has become increasingly obvious that something went terribly wrong with British intelligence-gathering, both its methods and morality, after the destruction of the Twin Towers on 11 September 2001. Earlier prime ministers had displayed scruples about the use of intelligence gained from torture. But during the Blair premiership this changed. Britain became part of a nightmarish universe where the standards which we claim to represent were undermined and sabotaged. It is important to stress that there is no evidence at all that our intelligence officers were (unlike their gung-ho counterparts at the CIA) directly engaged in torture. But there is a great deal of evidence that we despatched terrorist suspects

Selina Hastings

Friends across the sea

On 12 February 1952 the novelist Anthony Powell received a letter from a bookseller in New York. Robert Vanderbilt Jr was the proprietor of a couple of Manhattan bookstores and a great admirer of Powell’s. He wrote to ask if he might himself publish a couple of the novelist’s out-of-print works. Powell was delighted. The two titles chosen were Venusberg and Agents and Patients, the covers of both to be designed by Powell’s old friend Osbert Lancaster. As their letters make clear, Powell and Vanderbilt quickly found they had much in common, and as Powell had worked in publishing before the war, he was able to engage very much on

Robert Chandler

A kind of tenderness

The son of a grocer, Anton Chekhov was born in 1860 in Taganrog, on the Sea of Azov. While studying medicine at Moscow university, he published hundreds of comic sketches in order to pay his way and support his parents and siblings. After becoming famous in the late 1880s, he practised as a doctor only intermittently; most of his medical work was on behalf of the peasants, and unpaid. In 1890 he made the difficult journey across Siberia to Sakhalin Island, where he investigated the living conditions of the convicts, around 10,000 of whom had been exiled there. During the 1890s Chekhov’s tuberculosis worsened and from 1897 he had to

Bevis Hillier

Wearing well

Born in the same year as John Lennon (1940), I was a sucker for the Beatles from the start. They were the accompaniment of my youth, love’s obbligato. I liked their music because it replaced the raw animality of rock ‘n’ roll with sophisticated melody. I think Schubert would have been proud to have composed ‘Yesterday’ or ‘Hey Jude’. Also, unlike most of the rock ‘n’ roll hunks, the Beatles were skinny. So was I — grievously thin — and it was a relief that we skeletons could now come out of the cupboard. In the early photographs of the Fab Four, wearing the monkey-suits their manager Brian Epstein insisted

Richard Shone

Oh brother!

Long in the writing, deep in research, heavy to hold, this is the latest of umpteen biographies of Vincent van Gogh (1853-90). But it should be said straightaway that it is extremely readable, contains new material and is freshly, even startlingly re-interpretative of a life whose bare bones are very familiar. The more one reads, the more absorbing it becomes, both in its breadth of approach and its colossal detail. Potential readers, however, should be warned: this is no sentimentalising study, no apologia for the excesses of the ‘mad genius’ of popular renown. Quite the contrary: one’s dismay intensifies as the self-crucifixion of Van Gogh’s life unfolds, disaster after disaster

Kate Grimond

The tale of Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang

On 31 May 1961 Ian Fleming wrote to Michael Howard at Jonathan Cape, publisher of his James Bond novels: ‘I am now sending you the first two “volumes” of Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang. Heaven knows what your children’s book readers will think of them.’ He ended his letter: ‘I am gradually reactivating myself and I hope to be up in London for about two days each week. Though much will depend on a gigantic medical conference this afternoon.’ Six weeks earlier, Fleming had suffered a serious heart attack. He was 52. Despatched to convalesce at a seaside hotel on the south coast and forbidden a typewriter to prevent him from working, he passed

Mark Mason

Bookends: A metropolitan menagerie

London has always loved its animals. James I kept elephants in St James’s Park (allowed a gallon of wine per day each to get through the English winter), while as recently as Live Aid an urban myth arose that the revolving stage was pulled by horses. The capital’s no different from the rest of the country; if the British showed as much concern for their fellow humans as they do for their dogs, life would be easier. The latest book tapping this market is Animal London (Square Peg, £9.99). Not that the photographer Ianthe Ruthven has gone for fluffy or cute. Her animals are inanimate, either because they’re statues, monuments,