Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Monday

The Spectator

Introducing the Spectator Book Blog

Welcome to the new Spectator Book Blog. We hope that the exchanges that were a feature of the Book Club’s old discussion boards will thrive in a more expansive space. In addition to the in-house team, the new blog will host independent bloggers and writers, providing a wide range of book reviews and discussion topics. And, as ever, the comments section is yours. The Book Blog will also house the Spectator Book Club’s Book of the Month feature. The current book of the month is Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman by Friedrich Christian Delius – which you can discuss in this post, or by following the link

Saturday

Interconnect

BOOKENDS: Inspiration for a cult hero

This is an odd book: the exhaustive biography of a complete nobody. Vivian Mackerrell was the primary inspiration for the cult that is Withnail. In that, at least, he doesn’t disappoint. This is an odd book: the exhaustive biography of a complete nobody. Vivian Mackerrell was the primary inspiration for the cult that is Withnail. In that, at least, he doesn’t disappoint. Mackerrell emerges from Colin Bacon’s eulogy, Vivian and I (Quartet, £12), as a rakish Charles Pooter, sunk by alcoholic degeneracy at the age of 24, though he staggered on gamely for another 30 years. The paucity of Mackerrell’s life leaves Bacon to indulge in bawdy nostalgia about the

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Far from idealism

If you think the Special Relationship has been looking strained in recent years, consider its condition during the American Civil War(1861-65). In 1863, an anonymous letter was delivered to Charles Francis Adams at the US legation in London: Dam the Federals. Dam the Confederates.Dam you both. Kill you damned selves for the next 10 years if you like; so much the better for the world and for England. Thus thinks every Englishman with any brains. NB PS We’ll cut your throats fast enough afterwards for you if you ain’t tired of blood, you devils. Brevity, they say, is the first grace of style. The feeling that letter encapsulates ran pretty

Allan Mallinson

The other Prince of Darkness

This is a clever publishing idea, a light academic-historical cloak for another set of political memoirs. Jonathan Powell, chief of staff (the term should not be taken literally) at No. 10 throughout Tony Blair’s premiership, kept a diary. Blair himself couldn’t, Powell explains: ‘There simply isn’t time for a prime minister to set out detailed reflections and lead a country at the same time’. One wonders how Ronald Reagan managed it. Besides, is not reflecting on events, actions and consequences — ‘examining with diligence the past’ — one of Machiavelli’s precepts? Despite its title, however, the book is not a re-casting of the tenets of Machiavellianism. It is an extended

Mary Keen

Vale of tares

‘Feather footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole.’ Nature writing used to be a subject for ridicule. ‘Feather footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole.’ Nature writing used to be a subject for ridicule. Evelyn Waugh, the arch sneerer, might have found it harder to parody the modern breed of literary naturalists. Richard Mabey is perhaps the best known English author of recent fashionable books about the natural world. He belongs to a group of new naturalists which includes Robert Macfarlane the Cambridge don, Kathleen Jamie the poet, and the late Roger Deakin. They are all intellectuals, whose pitch is more observant and scientific than romantic.

Jonathan Sumption

Thynges very memorable

John Leland, who died in 1552, lived less than 50 years and was mad for the last five of them. Today he is one of the forgotten worthies of 16th-century England. An enormous edition of his major prose work may therefore seem an eccentric publishing choice. Yet there are many reasons why we should remember this gentle, melancholy and rather obsessive scholar from another age. Leland lived at a time when England was changing faster than it had ever done before. Henry VIII had broken with Rome. An aggressive protestantism had achieved a growing influence, and was soon to take possession of the English Church. The monasteries and friaries which

Paul Bailey

A case of overexposure

The subtitle of The Box, the oddly compelling novella Günter Grass wrote when he reached 80, is ‘Tales from the Darkroom’. The subtitle of The Box, the oddly compelling novella Günter Grass wrote when he reached 80, is ‘Tales from the Darkroom’. The darkroom, in this circumstance, is both a place where photographs are developed and the habitat of the famous writer’s imagination. The box in question is an Agfa box camera, producing snapshots of a six-by-nine format, which was purchased for a few marks in 1932 and has been in use for decades since. Its sole user is Marie, or Mariechen, the widowed friend of the Grass family in

Joanna Kavenna

In deep trouble

Atlantic by Simon Winchester and The Wave by Susan Casey are, at first glance, very different works. Atlantic is a historical-philosophical-fantastical meditation on the Atlantic ocean, from the ‘post-molten Hadean’ through the ‘cool meadows of today’s Holocene’, to the conjectured end-days of the ocean ‘about 170 million years’ from now. The Wave is a pithy account of some years Casey spent following the elite American surfer Laird Hamilton as he travelled from one storm-lashed coast to another in search of waves. Yet, on closer scrutiny, the two books have much in common: both authors are highly contemporary in the way they write about nature, with their mingling of humility and

Victoria Glendinning

Country matters

Clive Aslet was the long-time editor of Country Life, and now, as its ‘Editor at Large’, is released into the environment. Clive Aslet was the long-time editor of Country Life, and now, as its ‘Editor at Large’, is released into the environment. It obviously suits him. He writes wonderfully in Villages of Britain about building materials such as mud and stud, wattle and daub, and cob, which is where our oldest houses meet African mud huts. Cob is just earth ‘that has been sieved to a fine tilth and laid over straw; water is put on it to make it sticky, and more straw laid on top’, with a seasoning

Miles Johnson

Anthem for doomed youth

Britain’s greying post-war generation are getting increasingly used to a bad press. Britain’s greying post-war generation are getting increasingly used to a bad press. Once lauded for liberating British society, the teenyboppers of the 1960s are now vilified for squandering a time of plenty, having mortgaged their children’s futures to fund a reckless, debt-fuelled shopping spree. The Baby Boomers’ thirst for property speculation, their younger critics lament, has transformed the UK housing market into a vicious collusion between rack-rent retirees and latte-crazed estate agents. For the young, owning a house has become a distant dream. Bright-eyed graduates pump the bulk of their income into subsidising the Boomers’ buy-to-let investments, scrambling

Marcus Berkmann

Keep on running

Astonishingly, it is nearly ten years since Auberon Waugh died. I never met him — I came about half a glass of wine away from introducing myself at a party, but didn’t quite make it — but like most of his fans, read him avidly and admired him from afar. My girlfriend used to work at the Academy Club and was very fond of him, even though she was a lefty actress who thought he was the most right-wing man who had ever lived. It’s strange the way this reputation clung to him. After he died, Polly Toynbee wrote a quite crazed hatchet-job in the Guardian, describing him as the

Gilbert Adair

His own best invention

Just as it will sometimes happen that a critic feels obliged to preface a review with a declaration of interest, so I should now declare a lack of interest. Prior to being commissioned to review David Bellos’s heroically well-researched and hugely entertaining biography, I confess I had never managed to finish one of Romain Gary’s books. When I lived in Paris in the 1970s Gary was in fact my near neighbour. A conspicuous figure around Saint-Germain-des-Prés, ‘disguised as himself’, as Bellos phrases it, flashily tanned, resembling in his flamboyant black-leather outfits a cross between a plumper Dali and the clownish caricature of a Mexican dictator, the thick dye of his

Lewis Jones

Pirate and boy scout

Keith Richards is a cross between Johnny B. Goode and Captain Hook. Like Johnny, he can play the guitar just like ringing a bell. Like Hook, he is selfconsciously piratical in costume, speech and behaviour— though he is modest about his contribution to Johnny Depp’s performance in the Pirates of the Caribbean. ‘All I taught him was how to walk around a corner when you’re drunk — never moving your back away from the wall.’ Johnny B. Goode never ever learned to read or write so well, but ‘Keef’ ain’t half bad. He wrote ‘Gimme Shelter’, after all, one stormy afternoon in Mayfair while his girlfriend Anita Pallenberg was in

John McEwen

Bearing the brunt

Ostensibly this small book is a jolly and true story (illustrated with some charming black-and-white snapshots) about the military experiences of Wojtek (pronounced Voycheck), the bear who, bought as a cub by Polish soldiers in Persia, earned name, rank and number as the mascot of the 22nd Company of the Artillery Supply Command, 2nd Polish Corps. But it proves a deeper and, especially for British readers, a much darker tale. Neal Ascherson, in a fine historical essay, explains how Wojtek spread hope and fostered humanity among soldiers, who ‘had lost most of what is supposed to make a war worth fighting and a life worth living’. The men of the

Saturday

Lewis Jones

BOOKENDS: Wifelet-on-wifelet

Apparently Lord Bath is writing an online autobiography, ‘an oeuvre of some seven million words’. For those without a computer, a broadband connection or any better way of spending a few years, Nesta Wyn Ellis’s The Marquess of Bath: Lord of Love (Dynasty Press, £13.99) will make an adequate substitute. It is a repetitive and incoherent book, not obviously reliable – the author thinks that fellatio is performed on women and that Guy Burgess was heterosexual – or even strictly literate, but oddly appropriate to its subject. Apparently Lord Bath is writing an online autobiography, ‘an oeuvre of some seven million words’. For those without a computer, a broadband connection

Timothy Clifford

Objective thoughts

Timothy Clifford enjoys the British Museum director’s tour of human history – but misses the beauty of Kenneth Clark’s ‘Civilisation’ ‘Mission Impossible’ is how Neil MacGregor, in the preface to this book, describes the task set for him by Mark Damazer, controller of BBC Radio 4. MacGregor was to introduce and interpret 100 objects chosen by colleagues from the British Museum and the BBC. They had to range in date from the beginning of human history, around two million years ago, right up to the present day. The objects were intended to cover the whole world equally, as far as it is possible. They would necessarily include the humble things

Alan Judd

Two wars and three Cs

When in 1909 a 50-year-old retired naval officer, Mansfield Cumming, was asked to set up what became today’s Secret Intelligence Service — better known as MI6— the suggestion that there might one day be an official history would have been unthinkable. When in 1909 a 50-year-old retired naval officer, Mansfield Cumming, was asked to set up what became today’s Secret Intelligence Service — better known as MI6— the suggestion that there might one day be an official history would have been unthinkable. Indeed, for the next 85 years, MI6 had no official peacetime existence, let alone any thought of a history. Cumming later remarked that if ever he published an

Simon Williams

Pulling it off

Asking a resting actor to review the biography of a top producer is like asking a sheep to eat a shepherd. I was trained as a boy to hate theatrical producers by my father the actor Hugh Williams. To him they were common penny-pinching bastards. But the photographs of Michael Codron at Oxford smouldering like Al Pacino remind me what a high percentage of the great evenings I’ve had in the theatre are down to him. Not for nothing is he known as El Codrone. Calm and benevolent, he has been in the driving seat of West End theatre for over 50 years. The title of the book itself is

Anne Applebaum

A far-fetched war

First, a disclaimer: this review will not touch upon some recent, odd behaviour of this book’s author, Orlando Figes, because I can’t see that it’s relevant. First, a disclaimer: this review will not touch upon some recent, odd behaviour of this book’s author, Orlando Figes, because I can’t see that it’s relevant. The history of the Crimean war is far removed in time and in space from contemporary literary politics, and I think we should keep it that way. Second, an unexpected fact. Although the Crimean war is also far removed in time and space from contemporary American politics, while reading this excellent book I could not help but marvel

Robert Chandler

An open and shut case

Harvey Pitcher has been translating Chekhov and writing about him for much of the last 40 years. His earlier publications include a book about Chekhov’s plays and a portrait of Chekhov’s wife. His Chekhov: The Comic Stories (Deutsch, 1998) is the best translation of the still undervalued early stories. The present volume is a discussion of Chekhov’s work and life as a whole, but with a particular focus on the later stories. Harvey Pitcher has been translating Chekhov and writing about him for much of the last 40 years. His earlier publications include a book about Chekhov’s plays and a portrait of Chekhov’s wife. His Chekhov: The Comic Stories (Deutsch,