Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Wednesday

Gilbert Adair

Repeat that, repeat

When the Louvre invited me to organise for the whole of November 2009 a series of conferences, exhibitions, public readings, concerts, film projections and the like on the subject of my choice, I did not hesitate for a second and proposed the list. Thus Umberto Eco on the genesis of this book, published simultaneously in Italian, French and English. Considering those parallel manifestations of the project, it was perhaps to be expected that this, its sole printed version, would be situated at the more ingratiatingly ludic end of the Eco spectrum. The Infinity of Lists is a work less of theory than of taxonomy. Flaunting his extraordinary erudition, but flaunting

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Debt and addiction

I knew that I was onto a good thing with this book before the page numbers were even out of roman numerals. Describing the wealth of new material that has come to light in the three decades or so since the last biography of Thomas De Quincey, Robert Morrison men- tions the areas in which it has enriched our understanding: . . . his enduring sorrow over the loss of his sister Elizabeth, his masochistic desire for humiliation; his association with prostitutes; his pursuit of, and subsequent alienation from, Wordsworth and Coleridge; his struggle with drugs and alcohol . . . his horrendous battles with debt; his imprisonment in Edinburgh

Raymond Carr

Looking back in anger

Portugal has given the world two distinguished novelists. Eça de Queiros, is the Proust of Portugal. His masterpiece, The Maias, describes the decline of an aristocratic family in the late 19th century. Whereas Eça was a member of the Portuguese intellectual elite, José Saramago was born in a wretched shack in the the rural hamlet of Azinhaga. When he was two, his family moved to a series of two-roomed flats in the poorest quarters of Lisbon. I cannot think of any writer of consequence who endured such grinding poverty in his childhood and youth. His grandfather was a foundling and both he and his wife illiterate peasants. In an early

Christian House

Novelty value

Auction house catalogues are multi-faceted publications. Primarily, of course, they’re sales tools, reassuring buyers that something is what it says it is, that it can legally be bought and where to do just that. Yet, they’re so much more. They can be a simple full stop to one of life’s chapters or, alternatively, a celebratory exclamation mark. An anonymous 1895 house-contents catalogue (of which there are only four known surviving copies) for a Chelsea abode on Tite Street bears secret testament, through a haphazard compilation of loose-lotting, to the Icarus fall of one Mr Oscar Wilde. Conversely, the accompanying volume to Sotheby’s 1996 landmark auction of the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

Victor Sebestyen

Before and after the Fall

No one here (I mean in Britain, not perhaps in the columns of The Spectator) likes to read anything nice about the Germans. So I shall warn you that there will be some praise for Germany in this review, mixed with the usual level of bashing. If the very thought of this shocks or appals you, I’ll do that rare thing for any journalist and suggest you turn the page and move on to something more comforting. In the last few weeks there has been one principal story told in several new books, most of the press and broadcast coverage, and even the material on the Tweets that have marked

James Buchan

Tensions that disrupt the world

In 1981, two books on Saudi Arabia were published within days of each other: The House of Saud by David Holden and Richard Johns and The Kingdom by Robert Lacey. If the first had the faint air of the Financial Times and the second the hothouse scent of Town & Country, they nevertheless advanced our knowledge of Saudi Arabia and its ruling house by a distance. At a time when the very institution of monarchy in the Middle East seemed doomed by the fall of the Shah of Iran, neither book was ready to write off the Al Saud (‘the clan of Saud’). If both books are now dated, it

Mary Keen

Recent gardening books | 2 December 2009

Philippa Lewis is a picture researcher, with an eye for uncommon facts and a wry way of presenting them. Her book Everything You Can Do in the Garden Without Actually Gardening (Frances Lincoln, £16.99), is a scholarly and entertaining social history with pictures. Most books of this type recycle old material, but this writer has a knack of discovering fresh facts. The Wordsworths papered their cottage with newspaper. Eric Ravilious tried to include a man diving into a swimming pool for his Wedgewood Garden service, but was told that the design would not be accessible to the British public. Princess Charlotte thought skittles were low grade at Claremont, so she

Bevis Hillier

A choice of art books | 2 December 2009

Had I not been sent this year’s art books to review, the one I would most have liked to receive as a present would be Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill edited by Michael Snodin (Yale, £40). Had I not been sent this year’s art books to review, the one I would most have liked to receive as a present would be Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill edited by Michael Snodin (Yale, £40). J. H. Plumb — the historian who achieved the unusual distinction of being shouted out as a wrong answer by a schoolboy in Lindsay Anderson’s 1968 film If…. — dismissed the creator of this delectable Gothick meringue of a house

Gary Dexter

Alternative reading | 2 December 2009

Thomas Keneally is the Booker-Prize-winning author of Schindler’s Ark and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith. Tom Keneally is the author of The Utility Player, a biography of the rugby league player Des Hasler. Naturally Thomas and Tom are the same person. The unashamed idolatry of The Utility Player is difficult to convey here, but can be glimpsed in the following description: ‘Des is an Australian version of an Arthurian knight. His heart was strong because his soul was rigorously aligned . . . he is the Zen practitioner of rugby league, the code’s monk.’ Keneally is one of those people who see a single sport as a template for the

Frederic Raphael

Thoughts on the Great Depression

The Great Depression of the 1930s has passed into myth as essentially American, not global. The Wall Street crash ended the Good Times and led, apparently inevitably, to the crisis of Capitalism. Europe suffered from the effects, but had the glum fun of watching the dollar lose its almightiness. America’s internal response was dramatic and, literally, moving: the migration of John Steinbeck’s Joad family of ‘Okies’, from the dust bowl towards the golden mirage of California, exemplified a general restlessness. At much the same time, Richard Wright’s Native Son spoke up, for the first time, for the mute, oppressed southern Blacks who would find no promised land in their northward

Friday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Woman in White

I’ve had Wilkie Collins on my To Read list for, well, for years now. Somehow it’s never happened. And with a dozen or so still-not-finished books at the moment it would be foolish to add another to that menacing pile. On the other hand, it’s 150 years since The Woman in White was first published by Charles Dickens’s All Year Round (Does exactly what it says on the tin…) and so really one ought to read it this year… The first episode appeared in the issue of November 26th 1959.Now some canny fellows are “re-publishing” the novel in serial form. Each week’s episode will be available to read online here

Wednesday

Philippa Stockley

All Paris at her feet

In what was intended as the opening line of a 1951 catalogue essay to an exhibition by the painter Leonor Fini, Jean Cocteau wrote: ‘There is always, at the margin of work by men, that luminous and capricious shadow of work by women.’ Not surprisingly, Fini excised it. In what was intended as the opening line of a 1951 catalogue essay to an exhibition by the painter Leonor Fini, Jean Cocteau wrote: ‘There is always, at the margin of work by men, that luminous and capricious shadow of work by women.’ Not surprisingly, Fini excised it. But it was an attitude that would plague her, and other female artists in

Vernon Bogdanor

Disunited from the start

Twice in the 20th century, men have sought to create a new world order. The League of Nations, conceived with high hopes as a result of the Treaty of Versailles, failed catastrophically. At the outbreak of the second world war, it was to be found solemnly engaged in the task of standardising European railway gauges. The United Nations, by contrast, was born in a mood of profound disillusionment in 1945. It was not, so it seemed, only the League that had failed, but also the conception of man that had been embodied in it, a conception that had been torn apart so savagely by the Nazis. Unlike the League, the

Philip Ziegler

Home thoughts from abroad | 25 November 2009

This book is companion to a television series (though the times seem slightly out of joint — on the front cover we are told that it is ‘As seen on the BBC’ while at the back the series is described as ‘first broadcast in 2010’). This book is companion to a television series (though the times seem slightly out of joint — on the front cover we are told that it is ‘As seen on the BBC’ while at the back the series is described as ‘first broadcast in 2010’). As such, perhaps unfairly, few would expect it to be scholarly or profound. Sir Christopher, certainly, has no pretensions to

Anthony Sattin

The last five hundred years

In the aftermath of the destruction of New York’s World Trade Center, an elderly Arab from the Gulf told me that he thought it was the work of American agents. In the aftermath of the destruction of New York’s World Trade Center, an elderly Arab from the Gulf told me that he thought it was the work of American agents. The claim, however fantastic, seemed perfectly logical to him, for it gave the US an excuse to intervene in the Middle East and Asia’s oil-rich regions. Eugene Rogan’s book explains why that Arab, and Arabs generally, feel so suspicious of the West. There has been a plethora of books about

Lewis Jones

Adored friends

Years ago the late ‘Brookie’ Warwick, 8th Earl, asked me to ghost his memoirs. Years ago the late ‘Brookie’ Warwick, 8th Earl, asked me to ghost his memoirs. In conversation he was full of amusing scandal, but the transcript of his dictated reminiscences was painfully discreet. I suggested they might be ‘sexed up’ — a new, comparatively innocent but still obviously vulgar expression — and he looked puzzled. ‘The first boy I met at Eton was my cousin Bingham,’ the transcript read, ‘who was very stupid and rather dirty, and came to a bad end.’ Bingham became Lord Lucan, so if there were more about his stupidity and dirtiness, along

Byron Rogers

The myth survived

You may find this book irritating. A complex exposition of 2,000 years of history, it is intended for the general reader, whoever he is (a general reader would surely not attempt it), so its source material is not identified but tidied away into long footnotes, presumably on the principle of pas devant la bonne. Thus the 12th-century historian William of Newburgh is introduced in the main text only as ‘a crusty old scholar’, and the family of Geoffrey of Monmouth as ‘the Monmouths’. All right, so Simon Young thinks he knows his readership. Yet he has this for an epigraph, ‘Ac nyt oed uawr yna y weilgi : y ueis

Elfreda Pownall

Cookery nook

Delia Smith first published her recipe ‘My Classic Christmas Cake’ 40 years ago. Delia Smith first published her recipe ‘My Classic Christmas Cake’ 40 years ago. The cake re-appeared in 1990 in Delia Smith’s Christmas, and now pops up again unchanged in Delia’s Happy Christmas (Ebury, £25). Though some of her newer recipes reflect changes that have crept up on us in the past 19 years (year-round salmon and the ubiquitous cupcake), her best Christmas recipes are the recycled ones. Since Delia’s How to Cook (1998), the first book where she dropped the Smith, beautiful photography by the world’s best photographers (Petrina Tinslay in this case) has made up for

Philip Hensher

A lost masterpiece?

These long anticipated literary mysteries never end in anything very significant — one thinks of Harold Brodkey’s The Runaway Soul, falling totally flat after decades of sycophantic pre-publicity, or Truman Capote’s Answered Prayers, emerging in fragments in 1975, after 17 years of non-work, to scandal but no acclaim. These long anticipated literary mysteries never end in anything very significant — one thinks of Harold Brodkey’s The Runaway Soul, falling totally flat after decades of sycophantic pre-publicity, or Truman Capote’s Answered Prayers, emerging in fragments in 1975, after 17 years of non-work, to scandal but no acclaim. (I wouldn’t get your hopes up for the quality of anything J. D. Salinger

Andrew Taylor

Recent crime novels | 25 November 2009

Fever of the Bone (Little, Brown, £18.99) is the sixth novel in Val McDermid’s Jordan and Hill series. Fever of the Bone (Little, Brown, £18.99) is the sixth novel in Val McDermid’s Jordan and Hill series. Someone is using a networking website to lure young teenagers, both boys and girls, to their deaths. Meanwhile Detective Chief Inspector Jordan is struggling with the demon drink, and also with a new boss, who questions both the cost-effectiveness of her unit and the nature of her personal and professional relationship with clinical psychologist Tony Hill. As for Hill, a father whom he never knew has just left him a posh house, a lot