Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Allan Massie

In the house of Hanover

Either Lucy Worsley or, more probably, her publisher has given her book the subtitle ‘The Secret History of Kensington Palace.’ This is enticing, or intended to be so; it is also misleading. Either Lucy Worsley or, more probably, her publisher has given her book the subtitle ‘The Secret History of Kensington Palace.’ This is enticing, or intended to be so; it is also misleading. There is no secret history, and the subject of this well researched and entertaining book is life at the court of the first two Georges, life which went on also at St James’s Palace and indeed Leicester House, where George II lived as Prince of Wales,

Kate Grimond

Turning up trumps

If you think that a room full of solemn people in groups of four play- ing duplicate bridge is deeply depressing, then this young-adult novel is not for you. If, on the other hand, that array of concentrated brows fills you with an urge to compete, then you may derive some pleasure from it. And if you are a keen player unable to convince your teenage children of the merit of the game, then you might consider this a useful present. Lester Trapp, a brilliant bridge-player, now blind, requires a cardturner to speak out the cards for him at his bridge club. He asks his nephew, Alton, a high-school boy

Peter Jay

Athene ruled the waves

One thing is certain: George W. Bush was no Pericles. For which reason it is a pity that John Hale’s new history of Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries BC is launched with a rhetoric more Texan than Attic. The ancient Greeks knew that building a navy was an undertaking with clear-cut political consequences. A naval tradition that depended on the muscles and sweat of the masses led inevitably to democracy: from sea power to democratic power. Athens was exhibit A in this argument, and radical democracy would indeed be the Athenian navy’s greatest legacy. To be sure it was not Dubya — nor even Hale, a classical marine

Saturday

Paul Johnson

Not every aspect pleases

Half a century ago I read W. G. Hoskins’s book, The Making of the English Landscape, when it first came out. It was for me an eye-opener, as it was for many people. Half a century ago I read W. G. Hoskins’s book, The Making of the English Landscape, when it first came out. It was for me an eye-opener, as it was for many people. It told us of the extent to which our landscape had been made by man, not God, and taught us to look much more observantly at it. Since then, landscape history has become a major subject. So has media and political interest in what

Christopher Howse

Fathoming the wine-dark sea

Gladstone found something very strange indeed in Homer, but the world was treating the future prime minister warily when he published his findings. It was 1858, the year he sailed off to the Ionian Islands as ruling commissioner, to address his puzzled Italian-speaking subjects in classical Greek. But even if Gladstone really was mad, as his political opponents said, he was undeniably right in noting that Homer’s use of colour was deeply odd. It wasn’t just the ‘wine-dark sea’. That epithet oinops, ‘wine-looking’ (the version ‘wine-dark’ came from Andrew Lang’s later translation) was applied both to the sea and to oxen, and it was accompanied by other colours just as

Edward Norman

Robbing Peter to pay Paul

Two hundred years ago Jeremy Bentham wrote a tract which purported to demonstrate that the Christian religion was in effect manufactured by St Paul and not by Jesus. This was actually quite a common ploy at the time: a means by which freethinkers could assail Christian tenets without being prosecuted. And because St Paul’s writings occupy such prominence in the New Testament, and are plainly a major authority for so much Christian theology and understanding, there was reason well in excess of mere subterfuge to justify the procedure. In his restrained and in many ways compelling Introduction to his translations of the New Testament Rabbi Brichto (who died last year)

Alexander Waugh

Insufficiently honoured here

‘Next time it’s full buggery!’ said Christopher Hitchens as I helped him onto a train at Taunton station after a full luncheon of Black Label, Romanée-Conti, eel risotto and suckling pig. ‘Next time it’s full buggery!’ said Christopher Hitchens as I helped him onto a train at Taunton station after a full luncheon of Black Label, Romanée-Conti, eel risotto and suckling pig. His jaunty remark was overheard by a little old lady standing next to me on the platform. ‘Gentlemen, honestly!’ she said, reaching for the train door. But it was locked. Hitchens stuck his torso out of the window and called to the platform manager to let her in.

A.N. Wilson

Mystery of the empty tomb

John Henry Newman was an electrifying personality who has attracted numerous biographers and commentators. John Cornwell, in his excellent guided tour around this well-ploughed field, recalls the young woman in Oxford in the 1830s who ‘wept with emotion’ at Newman’s very appearance. W. G. Ward recalls the awe which fell upon him and his undergraduate friends if Newman so much as passed them in the street. And figures such as Mark Pattison, James Anthony Froude and Matthew Arnold, none of them followers of the Newman cult in grown-up life, recollected similar feelings in their youth. When the mature George Eliot read Newman’s spiritual autobiography, she said it ‘breathed much life

Simon Baker

The loneliness of the long distance salesman

If only E. M. Forster hadn’t beaten him to it by exactly a century, Jonathan Coe could have coined the enigmatic phrase ‘only connect’ in this novel. If only E. M. Forster hadn’t beaten him to it by exactly a century, Jonathan Coe could have coined the enigmatic phrase ‘only connect’ in this novel. Maxwell Sim cannot connect at all. A depressed salesman approaching 50, he is adrift from his father, who moved to Australia 20 years ago, from his wife, an aspiring writer who left him to live in the Lake District, and from his daughter, who hardly speaks to him. He has 70 Facebook ‘friends’, but they are

Philip Ziegler

Golden youth or electric eel?

Patrick Shaw-Stewart was the cleverest and the most ambitious of the gilded gang of young men who swam in the wake of the not-so-young but perennially youthful Raymond Asquith. Julian Gren- fell, Duff Cooper, Charles Lister, Edward Horner: they were as one in their conviction that the British were superior to other races, that public schoolboys were superior to other Britons, that Etonians were superior to other public schoolboys, and that their own precious clique was superior to other Etonians. Apart from that, the only obligatory common factor was that one should love, or at least profess to love, Lady Diana Manners. The corrupt coterie, as they proudly styled themselves,

Richard Shone

Painting the town together

This book recounts a terrible story of self-destruction by two painters who, in their heyday, achieved considerable renown in Britain and abroad. Robert Colquhoun (1914-62) and Robert MacBryde (1913-66), both from Scottish working-class families, met in 1932 when they were students at the Glasgow School of Art. From then onwards they were personally and professionally inseparable in their headlong rise to fame and descent downhill. Although both have been the subject of anecdotes and snapshots in many a memoir of the period — all those accounts of Soho and ‘Fitzrovia’ — this is the first full-length study devoted to them, the result of over 20 years’ research. Their early life

Byron Rogers

Mountain sheep aren’t sweeter

Anyone who can speak Welsh is going to get a lot of fun from this book. Antony Woodward buys a six-acre smallholding 1200 feet up a mountain near Crickhowell in Wales where he sets about trying to fulfill his dream of creating what may be the highest garden in Britain. The smallholding is called Tair Ffynnon, which, he informs his readers, means Four Wells. Ooops. For this is where the Welsh will start to snigger. Part of his mad project on the mountain is the creation of a pond, which involves diverting water from his four wells into this. Only he has, of course, first to locate them, which proves

James Walton

On the brink

Stephen Potter’s Lifemanship contains a celebrated tip for writers who want to ensure good reviews. Stephen Potter’s Lifemanship contains a celebrated tip for writers who want to ensure good reviews. Simply make the dedication so emotionally blackmailing that no critic will dare attack you — something like, ‘To Phyllis, in the hope that God’s glorious gift of sight will be restored to her.’ It’s a ploy that springs inescapably to mind when reading the introduction to Winter on the Nile. What we’re about to read, Anthony Sattin explains, is the culmination of a dream he’s cherished for decades — a dream whose importance to him will only be truly understood

Saturday

Peter Hoskin

School days

There it is: Winder, one of the most imposing peaks across all the Howgill Fells. Whenever I visit my brother, a teacher at Sedbergh School, we make a habit of climbing it. Up you march, through grass kept short by wild horses and paths kept alive by other walkers, until you round back on yourself and see the entire town of Sedbergh contained within in the valley below. The school. The houses. The shops. The lives and cluttered history that make a community what it is.    Now two current Sedbergh pupils, Ben King and George Head, have done the literary equivalent of climbing up and looking down. In a collection

Victoria Glendinning

Home and away

Rats cannot be sick, says Bill Bryson. Not many people know that. Rats can have sex 20 times a day. Further down the same page, we read that they also sleep 20 hours a day. Do the sums. Rats must fornicate five times an hour in their waking period, as well as eating rubbish and not being sick. The phenomenally successful Bill Bryson is an American with an affection for this country, as is evidenced by his most famous book, Notes from a Small Island. He is president of the Society for the Preservation of Rural England and Chancellor of Durham University. He is also the huge, affable, best-selling presence

Andro Linklater

Charming, cold and unreliable

When you consider what a bloody mess the Houses of Lancaster and York made of the business, it is easy to see why, since the death of Edward the Confessor, the English have preferred to be ruled by foreigners. Normans, Angevins, Tudors, Stuarts, Hanoverians, anything to avoid having their own kind in charge. Arguably that great Welsh king, Henry VIII, was the last monarch to have personally directed the affairs of the nation, but Allan Massie has set out to show that Henry’s Scots successors, reigning over the larger realm of Britain, had a more pervasive influence. Descended from the high stewards of Scotland, the first Stewart (it was Mary

Michael Henderson

Some are born great

Are great sportsmen born with high talent, or do they win prizes through years of application? That question, as old as sport itself, forms the basis of this book, which tries to inform readers ‘how champions are made’. Are great sportsmen born with high talent, or do they win prizes through years of application? That question, as old as sport itself, forms the basis of this book, which tries to inform readers ‘how champions are made’. The author, a former Commonwealth table-tennis champion who is now a journalist, has investigated the subject thoroughly — too thoroughly, it might be said — but fails to make his case. For sport, like

Justin Cartwright

Taking on the turmoil

Nadine Gordimer is now in her mid-eighties. For as long as I have been alive, she has been the towering figure of South African literature, a fact recognised in l991 by the Nobel committee. This is a collection of her non-fiction over 60 years, running to nearly 800 pages. There is a belief, prevalent in South Africa, that she received the Nobel more for her politics than her literature. The distinction between politics and literature is to her absurd; she quotes with approval a maxim, ‘Once I am no more than a writer I will stop writing’. No writer, she says, should be required to separate the inner life from

Andrew Taylor

Recent crime novels | 29 May 2010

Tudor thrillers are thick on the ground nowadays but this one is rather special. The Bones of Avalon (Corvus, £16.99) is something of a departure for Phil Rickman, best known for his excellent Merrily Watkins series about a diocesan exorcist in contemporary Herefordshire. Here he writes in the first person as Dr John Dee, the astrologer, mathematician and adviser to Queen Elizabeth I. In 1560, William Cecil despatches him to Glastonbury, with his younger but more sophisticated friend Robert Dudley, to search for the bones of King Arthur. But Dee’s mission turns into far more than an attempt to strengthen the dynastic foundations of the Tudor dynasty: there’s a conspiracy

Saturday

Bevis Hillier

Ready for take-off

In 1969 John Gross wrote a justly praised book, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters. The phrase seemed slightly archaic then, and is more so now. I was going to suggest that Gross is the last Man of Letters, but I find that Stephen Bayley describes me as that in the current issue of GQ magazine — and I’m that bit younger than Gross. As editor of the Times Literary Supplement, Gross took the brave decision to end back-biting anonymity and give his reviewers by-lines: that was revolutionary, not old-fashioned. If you said he was the best-read man in Britain, I doubt there would be many challengers.