Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Allan Massie

Author! Author!

Malcolm Lowry liked to quote the Spanish philosopher, Ortega y Gasset, who saw Man’s life as a sort of novel, made up as you go along. Certainly there are times when life aspires to the condition of fiction. The story of Peter Mandelson, George Osborne, Nat Rothschild and the Russian oligarch might have been written by several novelists. Somerset Maugham, for instance, would have told it straight, dead-pan, through his favourite disillusioned, mildly cynical, narrator — old Mr Maugham himself, scarcely disguised — and would have presented it as an example of human folly. His focus would have been on Osborne, depicted as a callow young man of dangerous sincerity.

Adam Nicolson

Out of his shell

Notes from Walnut Tree Farm, by Roger Deakin, edited by Alison Hastie and Terence Blacker The writer, Robert Macfarlane, said of his friend, Roger Deakin, that everything Deakin had ever said tended ‘towards diffidence, an abrogation of the self’. It was a fierce verdict. Not a denial of the self or even a suppression of it but an abrogation, an annulment or cancellation of who he was. Macfarlane meant it as no criticism. He loved and even revered Deakin and Deakin, by his own account, replied, quoting Keats that ‘We should rather be the flower than the bee’, that the recipient, the quietist, whose governing quality was an alert passivity,

Byron Rogers

The mannikins don’t walk

All in the Mind, by Alastair Campbell It was a good idea. You start with a psychiatrist, and not any psychiatrist, but a professor of psychiatry, a man ‘widely viewed as one of the best psychiatrists in the business’, specialising in the treatment of depression; then you give him a caseload of depressives, and not any depressives, but a Balkan rape-victim, an alcoholic English Cabinet Minister, an immigrant forced into prostitution, a young woman hideously scarred by fire, a successful barrister caught out in his adulteries; and you see him as they see him, calm, omniscient, dispensing advice and hope. Then you have him crack up. It was a very

Philip Ziegler

Strength in numbers

My Three Fathers, by Bill Patten The mother to match Bill Patten’s three fathers was Susan Mary Jay. The Jays were cosmopolitan and very grand: they sent their sons to Eton and hobnobbed with the likes of the Mouchys and Boni de Castellane. They would have considered their fellow-Americans of The Ambassadors or Portrait of a Lady dowdily provincial. When Susan Mary took up with Bill Patten senior it was felt that she was marrying, not beneath her socially, since Patten was connected with all the right people, but beneath what should have been her aspirations. Patten, affable, intelligent, a victim of asthma and almost entirely without ambition, could not

Pj Kavanagh

Tough love

A Prickly Affair, by Hugh Warwick At a time when most of his fellow-mystics deplored this sinful world and longed to leave it, 17th-century Thomas Traherne ecstatically celebrated the world and confirmed his religious faith by observing its wonders. ‘The Ant is a great Miracle in a little room . . . its Limbs and Members are as Miraculous as those of a Lion or Tygre.’ Of late there has been an astonishing number of books that advocate this enthusiasm, this particularity — a book about the behaviour of rooks, a book about a single, nearly tame rook, even ‘conversations’ with particular trees. Now it is hedgehogs. Written too often

Andro Linklater

Nine-year wonder

The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age, edited by Neil Harris Think quiz. ‘A crescent-shaped town, 26 miles by 15, along a great lake. An unchallenged murder record — a splendid university — hobo capital to the country — and the finest of grand opera. Altogether the most zestful spectacle on this earth.’ Where are we? In case of doubt, the city’s short-lived house magazine spelled out the answer in 48 point type, ‘Chi – CA – go.’ Actually the emphasis should have been on the Chic, because as demonstrated by this elegant collection of covers, illustrations and stories from The Chicagoan, in its heyday Chicago was the

Andro Linklater

Money? It’s only human

The Ascent of Money, by Niall Fergusson New from Niall Ferguson: the book of the film, or rather, of the series. At any moment now his financial history of the world will take to the small screen and emerge on Channel Four. Programmers and publishers have learned to synchronise these things. It will be a brave effort, all the same, because finance is not exactly popular just now and has always been unresponsive to film. When Bank Rate comes down, television news producers fall back on a stock picture of the Bank of England, looking like a cheese-mould with a graph imposed on it. Ferguson helps them out by setting

Friday

The Spectator

Live chat with Philip Hensher – starting soon

Our live chat with the Booker-nominated author Philip Hensher will be kicking off in about fifteen minutes over at the online Book Club.  So, if you’re a fan of Philip’s work, a bibliophile or just stuck for something to do, do come and join us between 19:30 and 20:15.  You can take part by clicking on to this page.

Thursday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Four Characters in Search of an Author

In his latest Life&Letters column for the Spectator, my father has some fun imagining how different novelists might have treated the Curious Affair of Mandelson, Osbourne, Deripaska and Rothschild. For instance: Somerset Maugham, for instance, would have told it straight, dead-pan, through his favourite disillusioned, mildly cynical, narrator — old Mr Maugham himself, scarcely disguised — and would have presented it as an example of human folly. His focus would have been on Osborne, depicted as a callow young man of dangerous sincerity. However as the story unfolded in the newspapers — Osborne’s account of the conversation with Mandelson in the Greek taverna, Rothschild’s letter to the Times, the revelations

Wednesday

The Spectator

Books Of The Year

Sam Leith Richard Price’s meaty and fabulously enjoyable police procedural, Lush Life (Bloomsbury, £12.99), is a book I have pressed on a lot of friends. The new Robert B. Parker, Rough Weather (Quercus, £16.99), is bliss, too, because it has Spenser, Hawk and the Gray Man in it. Short stories from Kurt Vonnegut (Armageddon in Retrospect, Cape, £16.99), and Annie Proulx (Fine Just The Way It Is, 4th Estate, £14.99) were moving, funny and wise. In politics, Robert Kagan’s The Return of History and the End of Dreams (Atlantic, £12.99) offered a lucid account of the world order; while Joseph Stiglitz’s and Linda Bilmes’s The Three Trillion Dollar War (Allen

Saturday

James Delingpole James Delingpole

The Great Duke and others

Wellington, by Jane Wellesley There can never be too many biographies of the Duke of Wellington because, like Churchill’s and Nelson’s, his career path is so extraordinary, uplifting, chequered and involving that it reads more like (slightly overwrought) fiction than fact. The first thing you’d give your mildly implausible hero if you were a novelist or Hollywood screenwriter would be a miserable childhood, a sensitive nature and a sense of burning grievance. That way, the audience would like him, identify with him, and feel all the more happy when he triumphed over adversity. So it was with young Arthur Wellesley. His cold-hearted mother, Anne, dismissed him with a ‘he’s food

Friday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Department of Bumper-Stickers

With regard to the previous post, indefatigable commenter NDM has this to say: John Galt’s The Member and The Radical, available in a handy combined edition from Canongate, are also interesting on this topic. Talking of Galt, I was once driving along one of America’s more boring interstates when I saw a bumper sticker with “Ask me, who is John Galt?” I’m thinking why does this car have a bumper sticker about a long-dead and not overly fashionable Scottish novelist. At that time I didn’t know about the ever-fashionable Ayn Rand cult. Readers are invited to supply further examples of bumper-sticker confusion.

Wednesday

The Spectator

Welcome to the Spectator Book Club

Earlier this week, we launched the online Spectator Book Club.  You can access it by clicking here; clicking on the Book Club tab at the top of any Spectator.co.uk page; or by entering new.spectator.co.uk/books into your address bar.  Once there, you’ll find a host of content to satisfy even the most ardent booklover – from a discussion board and Book of the Month choices, to live chats with authors and a directory of local booksellers.  This month’s Book of the Month is Richard Holmes’s ‘The Age of Wonder’, while the Live Chat will be with the Booker-nominated Phillip Hensher.  Click here and here for more information. Spectator Book Club is also

Kate Chisholm

A prickly character

Hester, by Ian McIntyre ‘I must eat up my own heart & be quiet,’ confided Hester Thrale in her private notebook in the autumn of 1777. She was pregnant again, for the 11th time in 13 years. By then seven of her children had died, including her only and much loved son, and she was convinced that this child, too, would be taken from her. She had much to bewail. But Hester Lynch Salusbury Thrale Piozzi was indefatigable of spirit and merciless in her opinions. ‘Quiet’ was something she could never be — fortunately for us. When she died in 1821, aged 80, she left behind six large volumes of

Michael Henderson

Enemies within

Fifty People Who Buggered Up Britain, by Quentin Letts As readers of the Daily Mail know, Quentin Letts leaves no turn unstoned. His withering parliamentary sketches have left the blood of wounded politicians over the walls of Westminster. Wearing his theatre critic’s hat, he swims against the prevailing tides to tease dramatists and directors, and for good measure he is the ventriloquist who pulls the strings of the choleric Clement Crabbe. Nobody is better equipped to nominate the 50 people who have damaged this country most grievously in the past five decades, and he discharges his duty with flair and tracer precision. There are obvious targets, and six prime ministers

Juliet Townsend

Turning back the pages

Magic Moments: The Books the Boy Loved and Much Else Besides, by John Sutherland Curiosities of Literature: A Book-lover’s Anthology of Literary Erudition, by John Sutherland John Sutherland’s life has been devoted to the enjoyment of books and the passing on of that enjoyment to others, whether through his columns in the Guardian and Financial Times or through his teaching to the literature students at UCL, or the rather less bookish science buffs at the California Institute of Technology. It is hard to imagine anyone better suited to bringing the pleasures of reading to those for whom it has never been an important part of life. His quirky, amused and

Tony Gould

A rich harvest

Coda, by Simon Gray Were Simon Gray alive today, I could not have reviewed this book. Friends should not review each other’s work or reviewing becomes a form of puffery. But death changes everything. Coda, so named because it rounds off the trilogy of ‘Smoking Diaries’ (The Smoking Diaries, The Year of the Jouncer and The Last Cigarette), is a meditation on death, or rather dying, an account of living on borrowed time — how Simon would have pounced on that phrase, ‘borrowed time’, and subjected it to scrutiny: why borrowed? who from? can it be paid back? ‘and so forth’, as he might add. It is many other things

Christopher Howse

Celebrity is not enough

Annie Leibovitz at Work, by Annie Leibovitz, edited from conversations with Sharon DeLano When Annie Leibovitz started out as a photographer in 1968 her heroes were Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank. Cartier-Bresson’s ‘decisive moment’ turned out to be the antithesis of the celebrity portraits that have defined her career — not only posed but contrived and stagey. Her recent picture of the Queen standing against dark trees is faked up, with the trees taken the day before, and the figure added digitally. ‘You set the stage for them,’ she says of her subjects. ‘It’s studied. A kind of performance art.’ The other hero, Robert Frank, by driving across America in

Elisa Segrave

Remembrance of girls past

Past Imperfect, by Julian Fellowes ‘But why should people want to read about us?’ exclaimed my cousin, a debutante of the season of 1968, which forms the backdrop of this new novel by Julian Fellowes, author of Snobs, winner of an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay (Gosford Park) and screenwriter of the new film, The Young Victoria. Fellowes, a ‘debs’ delight’ of that year, has set himself up as the chronicler of the more old-fashioned members of the upper classes and their hangers-on. Snobs, which featured a middle-class girl with a socially aspiring mother, was about choices; Past Imperfect is more ambitious, with many more characters and a time-span of

Colin Amery

From pillar to post

The English House: The Story of a Nation at Home, by Clive Aslet Earlier this year a brave publisher republished in two volumes and nearly 800 pages the classic book on English domestic architecture, The English House, by Hermann Muthesius. It had first appeared in German as Das Englische Haus in 1904. Clive Aslet’s new book takes the same useful title for his much briefer account of some 21 dwellings that encapsulate for him the enduring qualities of the English home. Both Aslet in the 21st century and Muthesius in the 20th share the same strong sentiments about houses and the English. They both are convinced that domestic comfort and