Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Wednesday

Alan Watkins

Man and urchin

Frank Johnson, the finest and funniest parliamentary sketch-writer of his generation died, too young, in late 2006. His widow, Virginia Fraser, has now compiled and edited a selection of his writings. It is mostly about domestic politics as seen from his seat in the press gallery of the House of Commons, interspersed with expeditions to by-elections and general elections. There are also pieces on his early life in Shoreditch, his lifelong enthusiasms — opera, ballet, warfare, diplomacy — and at the end of his life, his newly acquired house near Montpellier. In a work of this kind it is a temptation to review the man and not the book. I

Andro Linklater

When words were scarce

Most of us are brought up not badly, but wrongly. Trained to the tenets of Mrs DoAsYou-WouldBeDoneBy, we are easily trampled underfoot by students of the Master DoItMyWay-OrBeDoneOver school. Consider the career of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery as an example of the second method of upbringing. Mercilessly whipped and humiliated as a child, he grew up self-obsessed, wilful, arrogant, and it would seem without any redeeming personal qualities. Yet it was largely Monty’s egotistic drive that made him the most effective British general of the second world war, while more sympathetic commanders like Wavell and Alexander were relegated to the sidelines. High among the surprises of this delightful memoir of

Charlotte Moore

Delight and horror

‘Everything that the lovingest of husbands can express to the best of wives, & love to the little ones, not forgetting the kicker in the dark,’ Jack Verney wrote to his pregnant wife in 1683. ‘Everything that the lovingest of husbands can express to the best of wives, & love to the little ones, not forgetting the kicker in the dark,’ Jack Verney wrote to his pregnant wife in 1683. I read this 326 years later with a pleasurable frisson. I don’t know why it is so charming to find that our ancestors felt as we do, but it is. In Louisa Lane Fox’s fascinating anthology, that thrill of recognition

David Crane

Behind the white face

Has there ever been a more compelling period in London’s history than the first years of the 19th century? Has there ever been a more compelling period in London’s history than the first years of the 19th century? There is, I suppose, a case to be made for the London of Shakespeare, but any city that can boast a Byron to look after its poetry, Sheridan its drinking, Hazlitt its journalism, Nash its architecture and Brummell the cut of its coat would certainly edge it for fun. There was admittedly no Lancelot Andrewes to preach it into sobriety — it would have to make do with Sydney Smith — and

James Hamilton

The last man to know everything

Joscelyn Godwin, the author of this vast and beautiful book, admits at the outset that while Athanasius Kircher was held in awe during his lifetime in the 17th century as ‘some rugged headland jutting out to sea’, when he died this had been eroded to the point of collapse: ‘the seas wash over it as if it had never been.’ Kircher’s triumph and tragedy was that his work was the final complete expression of magic, arcana and dogma, and when he died the world was moving into the Age of Reason. Joscelyn Godwin, the author of this vast and beautiful book, admits at the outset that while Athanasius Kircher was

Saturday

Allan Massie

Life & Letters | 7 November 2009

Way back in 1984 when I was editing, rather incompetently, the New Edinburgh Review, I published a story by Raymond Carver. It was entitled ‘Vitamins’. I can’t remember how much I knew about Carver then, or even how the manuscript arrived on my desk. Probably it was sent by his agent, and was taken from a new collection, Cathedral which was to be published by Collins. It is a good story — I’ve just read it again — and less minimalist than some of the work by which he made his name. Which is very much to the point, for it seems that these stories owed a great deal to

Wednesday

Philip Hensher

Nothing succeeds like excess

‘Why are you laughing?’ they demanded again and again, as Cheever tittered at some grindingly miserable memory from his youth, or some cruelty he’d inflicted on his children. What his keepers were pathologising was the writer’s genius to see the hilarious in the chaotic, the respectable, the insulting and the desperate. Cheever was, above all, extremely funny, and he has been served now by a marvellous biography which, through it all, manages to keep its sense of humour. Blake Bailey’s Life is alarming, truthful, scabrous, but above all absurdly funny. You feel Cheever wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. The medical professionals had never heard of Cheever — ‘he

Rodney Leach

A wild goose chase

The conventional view of global warming originates in the environmentalism of the Sixties. Alone, the Green movement might have done little more than raise awareness among consumers and legislators of the need to limit pollution and conserve natural resources. But in the Seventies environmentalism joined forces with the continuing backroom campaign of international bureaucrats for world government. At the time, temperatures had been falling, sparking fears of a new Ice Age. By the Eighties the trend had reversed. Runaway warming and cities submerged by rising seas replaced the spectre of Chicago and Rome buried under miles of ice. No matter. Either prediction would suffice to justify demands for a supranational

Sarah Burton

His island story

‘If you don’t come to terms with the ghost of your father, it will never let you be your own man.’ Here Christopher Ondaatje (brother of novelist Michael) combines his voyage of filial discovery with another quest: to pursue his obsession with a story he heard at his father’s knee, of a man-eating leopard. ‘If you don’t come to terms with the ghost of your father, it will never let you be your own man.’ Here Christopher Ondaatje (brother of novelist Michael) combines his voyage of filial discovery with another quest: to pursue his obsession with a story he heard at his father’s knee, of a man-eating leopard. If the

S E-G-Hopkin

Cheering satanism

‘For my generation of Essex teenagers, Dennis Wheatley’s novels represented the essential primer in diabolism,’ Ronald Hutton, the historian and expert on paganism, recalls. ‘For my generation of Essex teenagers, Dennis Wheatley’s novels represented the essential primer in diabolism,’ Ronald Hutton, the historian and expert on paganism, recalls. It wasn’t peculiar to Essex. In the Sixties, reading Dennis Wheatley was something one did to prove one’s daring — and to get the atmosphere right for spooky parties. We may not have realised that they were seriously dated; that they represented a British tradition of gentlemanly adventure (which Colin Watson neatly dubbed ‘snobbery with violence’); or that we were engaged in

Patrick Skene-Catling

A literary gypsy

When Lavinia Greacen undertook her magisterial yet intimately sympathetic biography of James Gordon Farrell, she gained access to his diaries and many of his letters, especially love letters and letters to his literary agents, editors and publishers about his professional desires and requirements. In this supplementary volume, a selection of her prime sources is presented in their full extent, amounting to a warts-and-all self-portrait of the novelist. It might well serve as an inspiration or a warning. Even with his fecund talent, ardent ambition, sound education (Rossall and Brasenose), eagerness to work and sufficient charm for social survival (English father, Irish mother), writing novels for a living proved intellectually arduous,

Anne Applebaum

Skeletons in the cupboard

Freudian analysis, Soviet communism and the garment industry: what do all of these things have in common? If your answer has something to do with central and east European Jews born at the end of the 19th century, you wouldn’t be far off. Freudian analysis, Soviet communism and the garment industry: what do all of these things have in common? If your answer has something to do with central and east European Jews born at the end of the 19th century, you wouldn’t be far off. That generation formed an important part of the intellectual and mercantile elite of Europe, but not the political elite — which is partly why

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 4 November 2009

William Tell Told Again was published by A & C Black in 1904 (‘Black’s Beautiful Books for Boys and Girls’), and is now extremely rare. William Tell Told Again was published by A & C Black in 1904 (‘Black’s Beautiful Books for Boys and Girls’), and is now extremely rare. In substance it is a reworking of the Swiss tale from a humorous angle. This was long before Jeeves and Bertie, Lord Emsworth, Mr Mulliner and Ukridge, and before even most of the school stories (Mike only appeared in 1909, five years after William Tell). Evelyn Waugh wrote in 1941: ‘Collectors prize as bibliographical rarities such early works as William

Michael Henderson

Fun and games

Sport, say those who write about it, is only the toy department of daily journalism. They don’t really mean it. Some of the finest wordsmiths in what may still be called Fleet Street earn a crust by writing about games, and the people who play them. In some cases — the late Ian Wooldridge comes to mind — they transcend their specialism. People bought the Daily Mail to read Wooldridge, just as they buy it now to read Quentin Letts. In recent years sports journalism has been invaded by outsiders who, to borrow a phrase from Paul Hayward, one of its finest practitioners, display nothing more than ‘strident ignorance’. They

Michael Carlson

Engrossing obsessions

With Blood’s a Rover James Ellroy finally finishes his ‘Underworld USA’ trilogy. With Blood’s a Rover James Ellroy finally finishes his ‘Underworld USA’ trilogy. It’s been eight years since the second volume, The Cold Six Thousand, written in a staccato shorthand prose that seemed always about to veer out of control, marked the apotheosis of Ellroy’s feverish and frenetic style. Something had to give, and at first it was Ellroy himself, who suffered a breakdown and eventually quit Middle America to return to his spiritual home of Los Angeles. Reviewing The Cold Six Thousand back in 2001 I called Ellroy either our greatest obsessive writer or our most obsessive great

John McEwen

Romantic approaches

Spectator readers will know that Andrew Lambirth is a romantic, a force for the literary and poetic approach to art criticism, so he is an admirably empathetic guide to Hoyland: In England the subversive underground Romantic spirit has never run dry, it consistently nourishes art in this country and erupts forth in strange and unexpected ways. The late work of John Hoyland is one such unpredictable manifestation. Mel Gooding’s standard monograph covers Hoyland’s career to 2006, but such is the artist’s productivity that, despite serious heart surgery last year, many of the excellent colour plates — the majority in the case of the 46 full-page illustrations — are of new

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

A bland villain

I’ve always thought of fraud as a relatively attractive form of crime — not, of course, in the sense that I daydream of committing it, but in the sense that it involves intelligence, imagination and nerve, rather than violence and damage. I’ve always thought of fraud as a relatively attractive form of crime — not, of course, in the sense that I daydream of committing it, but in the sense that it involves intelligence, imagination and nerve, rather than violence and damage. Leaving aside the matter of moral conscience, a really smart fraudster has to combine the confidence of an actor with the sleight of hand of a magician and

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Impossible to dislike

In 1968, when he was still a student at Oxford, Gyles Brandreth was interviewed in the Sun. The headline was a quote from him: ‘I’d like to be a sort of Danny Kaye and then Home Secretary.’ It’s about bang on. He achieved the first, rather than the second, and the fact that it never occurred to him that he couldn’t do both is what’s great about him. He’s a very clever fellow and a colossal show-off. He is all over Isis, and the Oxford Union and the Oxford University Dramatic Society within weeks of starting university, not to mention selling fabricated diary stories about himself and arranging to be

George Trefgarne

Even oilmen are human

Until the credit crunch sent bankers to the naughty step of capitalism, the spot was occupied by oilmen. The consequence is that an exciting tale of human endeavour — how the abundant resources of the earth have been harnessed to power an era of unimagined prosperity — is often obscured by hostile forces and, it has to be said, spectacular blunders by oilmen themselves. However, it is, if you think about it, remarkable that in the 150 years since it all began when one Colonel Drake first struck oil in Pennsylvania, a global market — designed by no one individual or authority — has grown up which keeps the energy

Tim Congdon

Rural romanticism

The bibliography to Zac Goldsmith’s The Constant Economy includes The Trap by his father, Jimmy Goldsmith. The bibliography to Zac Goldsmith’s The Constant Economy includes The Trap by his father, Jimmy Goldsmith. When it was published in 1993, The Trap caused a bit of a stir because it challenged the consensus that free trade and globalisation were good for mankind. But it also contained a deeper theme, that the world had become falsely enamoured of the commercialisation of science and technology. Goldsmith père protested not just that economic orthodoxy was wrong, but that society had become too materialistic and complex, too far from nature. Since the early 1990s these anxieties