Book Reviews

‘Pauline was as beautiful as it was possible to be’, the Austrian statesman Metternich once observed. ‘Pauline was as beautiful as it was possible to be’, the Austrian statesman Metternich once observed. ‘She was in love with herself alone, and her sole occupation was pleasure’. Metternich was not quite fair. Pauline, as sculpted in Canova’s famous statue of the barely clad reclining princess, was indeed extremely beautiful. But along with her undisputed love of herself, she was also devoted to her brother Napoleon, delighting in his victories, and fretting over his defeats. She went with him into exile on Elba, sought to join him on Saint Helena, and campaigned frantically

Here’s a tricky question for your next pub quiz. What do the following people have in common? Here’s a tricky question for your next pub quiz. What do the following people have in common? The protagonist of Christopher Nolan’s film Memento, Scott Bakula’s character in Star Trek: Enterprise and Steve Wozniak, one of the co-founders of Apple Computers? Answer: they have all suffered, at one time or another, from anterograde amnesia, an unusual form of memory loss which can follow a traumatic brain injury. To their number may now be added the central character of Yoko Ogawa’s new novel, a professor of advanced mathematics whose memory ‘stopped’ in 1975 when

Eleven years after Jean Rhys’s death in 1979, Carole Angier published a monumental biography, a model of its kind, with 70 pages of notes and seven of bibliography. Lilian Pizzichini’s ‘portrait’ of Rhys is a book of a wholly different kind. The best way to describe it is that it bears the same relationship to Angier’s work as Beryl Bainbridge’s novel According to Queeney to Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson. Both Pizzichini’s and Bainbridge’s books rely for their potent fascination not on extensive research but, to a remarkable degree, on empathy and imagination. Pizzichini shows herself at her best when she writes of the 17 years spent by Rhys in

Rennie Airth’s first John Madden mystery, River of Darkness, published ten years ago, was set in 1921. His second, The Blood-Dimmed Tide, was set in 1932 and this, the third and reputedly the last, takes place in the closing months of 1944. The series spans, therefore, more than 20 years. In the first, Inspector Madden of Scotland Yard solves some gruesome country-house murders. He is a man still much troubled by his experience in the trenches, but during the case he meets and falls in love with Dr Helen Blackwell, who becomes his wife. By the time of the second book he has retired from the police, and has a

Gillian Tindall has had the ingenious and sympathetic idea of combining biography and topography in an overview of British visitors to Paris from 1814 to the present day — an enterprise of formidable research and enviable lightness of touch. Selecting various members of her own extended family, she traces their temporary residence in Paris and the reasons for their displacement. In so doing, she maps the various quartiers, along with deft reconstructions of the forces that drove these characters to seek enlightenment or advancement in the city that promised them both. Their time in Paris was instrumental in the achievement of careers that brought both wealth and satisfaction of a

A couple of years ago, Adam Zamoyski — who is, yes, a friend — told me that he was revising The Polish Way, a history of Poland he had published back in 1987. At first he had thought merely to shorten a few over-long paragraphs and check facts. But as he re-read his work, he decided it needed more dramatic changes. In 1987, Poland had not been a sovereign country: Polish domestic and foreign politics were still directly controlled by the Soviet Union, which itself was still very much in existence. That meant, he explained, that he was writing the history of a country which had failed. His task, as