Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Paul Johnson

And another thing | 25 October 2008

In times of anxiety, I always turn to Jane Austen’s novels for tranquil distraction. Not that Jane was unfamiliar with financial crises and banking failures. On the contrary: she knew all about them from personal experience. As a young girl she seems to have regarded bankers as rather glamorous figures. In Lady Susan, written when she was 22, she observed: ‘When a man has once got his name in a banking house, he rolls in money.’ So when her favourite brother, Henry, decided to become a banker, and set up his own bank, she was delighted. Henry was four years older than Jane. He was clever and self-assured, with beautiful

Thursday

Wednesday

Philip Hensher

Hero to a continent

Gabriel García Márquez, by Gerald Martin In July 1965, or so the story goes, a Colombian writer in early middle age, living in Mexico City, decided to take his wife and two young sons on a short and much needed holiday to Acapulco. He had had some small successes, and was respected in the small world of Latin American letters. Still, money was tight and imaginative writing had to be supplemented with income from other sources — journalism, the writing of advertising copy. He had driven some way on the winding road to Acapulco when suddenly, ‘from nowhere’ he afterwards said, a sentence came into his head: Many years later,

Christopher Meyer

Only good news will do

There is a startling passage in this book. It recounts an intimate moment (among many, it should be said) between the President of the United States, George W. Bush, and his Secretary of State and long-time adviser, Condoleezza Rice. They are sitting on the porch of Bush’s Texas ranch. It is December 2006 and, after more than three years of war, the situation in Iraq is dire. Bush and Rice are debating the pros and cons of a ‘surge’ — the despatch of five extra brigades to pacify Baghdad. Condi has her doubts, Bush has none. She tells him that if he goes ahead, he has to get it right

Mary Keen

Ancient and modern unite

Once, when Adam Nicolson was asked the question ‘will you be writing a family memoir?’, he answered, ‘I think my family is the most memoired family in the history of the universe. It’s like a disease. “No” is definitely the answer to that.’ But Sissinghurst: An Unfinished History is at least a quarter family memoir. After ‘a whispering gallery of family meanings, lasting more than a century’, the son and grandson of those most written-about writers has spoken out loud, in a voice of truth and tenderness. When he was 12, his mother left his father, and ‘the warmth left Sissinghurst that day’.  Before the arrival of a family ice

Caroline Moore

Hungry for love

Love All, by Elizabeth Jane Howard Love All is a dreadful title — sounds like the memoirs of a lesbian tennis player — for an elegantly old-fashioned novel. It is set in the late 1960s; but there is little to anchor it to this period: the occasional references to the Beatles, or to Mary Quant, give a temporal specificity so at odds as to seem perversely anachronistic. This is not because Elizabeth Jane Howard’s settings lack physical specificity. Love All is set partly in Maida Vale (indeed, in the very house, with its marble-floored conservatory, where Howard lived with Kingsley Amis in the Sixties) and partly in a village in

Charlotte Moore

A mystic and an administrator

Florence Nightingale, by Mark Bostridge No eminent Victorian has shaped our daily lives in more ways than Florence Nightingale. Her influence continued far beyond her 20 months of bloodsoaked toil in Scutari and the Crimea. Her vision of a public health-care system was the foundation of the National Health Service. Disassociating nursing from religious vocation and charity work, she initiated the systematic training of hospital nurses. We are rightly shocked when poor hospital hygiene causes preventable disease; it was Nightingale who taught us to be shocked. She reformed army conditions, overturning Wellington’s dictum that British private soldiers were ‘the scum of the earth enlisted for drink’. She unshackled young women

Caroline Moorehead

The yellow star of courage

Journal, by Hélène Berr, translated from the French by David Bellos ‘What must be rescued,’ wrote Hélène Berr in her diary on 27 October 1943, ‘is the soul and the memory it contains.’ The need to see and understand and later to remember is the theme that runs through Berr’s remarkable diary of Jewish persecution in German-occupied Paris in the second world war. There were, she believed, two kinds of people in the world: those who recognised what was happening to the Jews, and who felt with them, and those who either could or would not see. And in the first and ‘preferred’ group were to be found surprisingly few

Saturday

Peter Hoskin

For old times’ sake

A hundred chorus girls sashaying through a Busby Berkeley musical. Bugs Bunny munching nonchalantly on a carrot. Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone in Hollywood’s greatest swordfight (‘The Adventures of Robin Hood’ or ‘Captain Blood’ — take your pick). Bette Davis pulling the trigger in ‘Deception’. James Cagney smashing a grapefruit into a moll’s face. Alex and his droogs in the Korova Milk Bar. Heath Ledger’s Joker hissing, ‘Do you know how I got these scars?’ The lilting music of Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Raoul Walsh. ‘Bonnie and Clyde’. Michael Curtiz. ‘Rio Bravo’. Sam Peckinpah. ‘Dirty Harry’. ‘Made it, Ma! Top of the world!’ Warner Bros — the studio which brought us

Allan Massie

Life & Letters

Allan Massies dips into Brideshead Revisited Having just read something about the new film of Brideshead Revisited, I picked up the novel, opened it at random, and then, some two hours later, a good part of my working evening was gone. I suppose it is now Waugh’s most popular novel — his Pride and Prejudice as it were — but, when first published, ‘it lost me’, he wrote in the introduction to the revised 1960 edition, ‘such esteem as I once enjoyed among my contemporaries and’ — perhaps worse? — ‘led me into an unfamiliar world of fan-mail and press photographers’. His confidence had been high when at work on

Wednesday

Ben Wilson

The romance of science

The Age of Wonder, by Richard Holmes Just what some- one who studied science should be called was mooted at the 1833 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. ‘Formerly the “learned” embraced in their wide grasp all the branches of the tree of knowledge, mathematicians as well as philologers, physical as well as antiquarian speculators,’ reported the geologist William Whewell. ‘But these days are past.’ The meeting was chaired by Coleridge, who vetoed the use of ‘philosopher’; ‘savants’ was instantly rejected as too French. But ‘some ingenious gentlemen’ (including Whewell himself) proposed ‘that, by analogy with “artist”, they might form “scientist” ’. Natural philosophers did not,

James Buchan

Great expectations dashed

Origins: A Memoir, by Amin Maalouf, translated by Catherine Temerson The Lebanese Amin Maalouf is best known as a writer of historical novels in French, such as Le Rocher de Tanios, which won the Prix Goncourt in 1993. Yet before moving to Paris during the Lebanese civil war of the mid-1970s, Maalouf was a newspaper journalist in Beirut like his father before him. These two elements in his character, romancier and reporter, come together in this fine essay in family history. First published in French by Grasset as Origines in 2004, it is based on a trunk of family letters, photographs, newspaper clippings, receipts and title deeds preserved by the

Anne Applebaum

The spectre of Spielberg

Searching for Schindler, by Thomas Keneally Which would you rather read, The Great Gatsby or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s day-by-day account of the whisky he drank and the cigarettes he smoked while writing it? La Comédie humaine or a list of the cups of coffee Balzac downed, between midnight and sunrise, while putting all of those words down on paper? Barchester Towers or Trollope’s fond recollections of the time he spent in composition (wake up at 5:30, write until 8:30, leave for the post office, go home. Next day: wake up at 5:30, write until 8:30, leave for the post office, go home…) Descriptions of the process by which novelists come

Sarah Burton

First knight and his lady

A Strange, Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and Their Remarkable Families, by Michael Holroyd It is rare today to come across a non-fiction book that does not include in its title or subtitle the assertion that the tale it tells is ‘remarkable’, ‘extraordinary’, or ‘fas- cinating’, publishers presumably having decided that we readers are unlikely to guess that a book might be interesting unless it says so on the cover. Inevitably, these claims have become devalued. Michael Holroyd, perhaps in ironic homage to this trend, puts no less than four appetite-whetting adjectives on his menu, with the original twist that the feast they advertise actually

Tuesday

The Spectator

Going green

We’ve just posted up Lloyd Evans’s review of Thomas Friedman’s talk at Intelligence Squared last night on his new book, Hot, Flat and Crowded. Why the world needs a green revolution and how we can renew our global future. It is well worth reading.

Saturday

Michael Heath

The Best of Punch Cartoons

In 1956 I joined other new kids on the block at Punch magazine: Quentin Blake, Ed McLachlan, Mike Williams, Honeysett, Ray Lowry, Ken Pyne, Bill Tidy, Pav, Petty, plus Gerald Scarfe and Ralph Steadman who were going to blow the world apart with their blood-and-guts drawings. While Punch’s pages were curling at the edges, up popped Private Eye — naughty, rude, fearless and funny. Punch took a mortal blow from which it never recovered. People said that Punch had ceased to be funny, but this simply wasn’t true, as the cartoons collected here demonstrate. Cartoonists then had room to stretch themselves and put into their drawings details of the surroundings

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

On stage from the start

Henry: Virtuous Prince, by David Starkey Among the glories of Flanders and Swann is a long, erudite and silly shaggy-dog story about the Tudor theatre. It culminates in the appearance as from nowhere of a score for the tune known as ‘Greensleeves’ — or ‘Greenfleeves’ as Flanders and Swann have it. Someone wonders aloud who composed it, and a voice from the back of the auditorium booms: ‘We did.’ ‘Who are you?’ ‘We’re Henry the Eighth, we are.’ David Starkey’s new book adds an extra valency to this joke. It wasn’t just his royal status that called for the plural pronoun; there were, he argues, two Henry VIIIs. There’s the

Andrew Taylor

A choice of crime novels | 8 October 2008

Alan Furst, The Spies of Warsaw George Pelecanos, The Turnaround Ian Rankin, Doors Open Alan Furst’s espionage novels have a melancholic tinge, depending, as they so often do, on the debacles of recent history and, on a personal level, on the mechanics of betrayal. His tenth, The Spies of Warsaw (Weidenfeld, £16.99), is set in his trademark period, Auden’s low, dishonest decade, and provides another monochrome glimpse of a continent sliding inexorably towards war. The dashing but damaged war hero, Colonel Jean-François Mercier, is France’s military attaché in Warsaw in 1937. Through a network of venal but scarcely evil informers he gathers scraps of technical material that, properly interpreted, reveal

Jane Ridley

Living with a dark horse

The Horsey Life, by Simon Barnes Dolly Dolores was a big-bottomed mare with a white star on her forehead who loved to jump. Simon Barnes experienced an instant connection with her on his first ride. He had never owned a horse before, but his wife persuaded him to buy her. He spent a royalty cheque on her. She was always a lively ride. At first Barnes just gave Dolores her head and let her do what she wanted. She was an ace jumper, never refused, never ran out — one of those rare horses with a passion for jumping. Barnes competed in cross-country events (though he is modest about this)

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 8 October 2008

Alexander McCall Smith is best known for his No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series of novels (Tears of the Giraffe, Morality for Beautiful Girls, The Kalahari Typing School for Men etc.) as well as the Isabel Dalhousie mysteries and the 44 Scotland Street series. But McCall Smith has a number of other strings to his bow. He is, for example, an Emeritus Professor of Medical Law at Edinburgh University, and has written or co-written several books in the field of law and medicine, among them The Forensic Aspects of Sleep, The Duty to Rescue and The Criminal Law of Botswana, all of which could serve as titles for No.1 Ladies’