Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

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’

Paul Binding

Terrors of the imagination

Of the four Prime siblings of the Beacon farm, Frank, the second boy, was, throughout their early lives, ‘almost invisible’. He did everything late, spent most of his time alone, and was a dunce at school, where he bemused teachers and children alike. They never knew what to make of Frank, they said; what went on in Frank’s head was one of the great mysteries. He did little speaking but a great deal of staring out of large green-grey, slightly bulbous eyes. He followed people too … Turn round, and Frank would be there, silent, watching, following. Beware of the individual close to you whom you have never got to

Saturday

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man | 4 October 2008

One of the most interesting books from the last year has been Revisiting Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (MIT Press, £20) — a reprint of a 1931 essay by J.M. One of the most interesting books from the last year has been Revisiting Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (MIT Press, £20) — a reprint of a 1931 essay by J.M. Keynes in which he describes what his readers’ grandchildren should expect 100 years on. The piece is followed by 14 essays from present-day economists (four of them Nobel Laureates) discussing why Keynes got some things right and others so wrong. To his credit, Keynes’s economic predictions seem spot

Allan Massie

A very slippery book

A review of another biography of that tiresome poser, Lady Hester Stanhope, sent me back to Kinglake’s Eothen and the account of the visit he paid the Queen of the Desert, who dwelt in tents (as he found she didn’t) and reigned over wandering Arabs (which wasn’t the case either). A review of another biography of that tiresome poser, Lady Hester Stanhope, sent me back to Kinglake’s Eothen and the account of the visit he paid the Queen of the Desert, who dwelt in tents (as he found she didn’t) and reigned over wandering Arabs (which wasn’t the case either). No doubt Lady Hester’s admirers find Kinglake intolerable, but his

Mark Amory

The Half

‘The Half’ is how actors refer to the half hour before their play begins, when they ready themselves, steady themselves, for their performance. For 25 years Simon Annand has been allowed to catch these vulnerable moments and the result is a series of intimate, revealing and beautiful portraits. Many of the subjects are famous, a few are not. Some do exercises like athletes, pulling their limbs into unlikely positions — sometimes sitting beside a wash-basin, like Saffron Burrows (above). Others lie on the floor; Derek Jacobi before ‘The Tempest’ may be asleep. Julia Stiles looks defiant. Glenda Jackson and Max von Sydow, surprisingly, roar with laughter. Naturally enough, many are

Robert Macfarlane

Diving into darkness

In 1972 Tim Robinson — a Yorkshireman by birth, a Cambridge mathematician by training, and an artist by vocation — moved to live on Inis Mor, the largest of the three Aran Islands that lie off the Galway coast. His first winter there was hard and ominous: long nights, big storms, and a series of accidental deaths among the islanders, by falling or drowning. Enough to send anyone home. But Robinson stayed, and shortly afterwards began work on what is, to my mind, one of the most remarkable non-fiction projects undertaken in English. He started to walk his island, obsessively and in all weathers, pacing off its coastline and traversing

Jonathan Sumption

The pragmatic approach

‘The Half’ is how actors refer to the half hour before their play begins, when they ready themselves, steady themselves, for their performance. It seems a bit early to be discussing how to survive the 21st century. After all, there are 92 years left in which to do it, years in which we can expect traditional verities to fall away, existing technologies to be transformed, and problems yet unheard of to supplant the imperative causes of our own day. Political pundits have always tended to extrapolate from both the problems and the solutions of their own time, and Chris Patten is no exception. Such works have a short shelf-life. Yet

Jonathan Bate

Of cabbages and kings

Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, by Robert Pogue Harrison When I was a student, my Cambridge supervisor said, in the Olympian tone characteristic of his kind, that the only living literary critics for whom he would sell his shirt were William Empson and G. Wilson Knight. Having spent the subsequent 30 years in the febrile world of academic Lit. Crit., with its lemming-like leaps from mandarin French theory to each latest fashion in identity politics, I’m not sure that I’d sell my shirt for any living critic. But if there had to be one, it would unquestionably be Robert Pogue Harrison, whose study of Forests: The Shadow of

Wednesday

Bevis Hillier

A laughing cavalier

Cartoons and Coronets: The Genius of Osbert Lancaster, introduced and selected by James Knox It is a cliché of book-reviewing to write, of a humorous book, ‘I began reading it on a train. It made me laugh out loud several times, to my embarrassment in the crowded carriage.’ Well, it happened to me recently with In Tearing Haste: Letters Between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor, edited by Charlotte Mosley. What started me off were Leigh Fermor’s variations on William Blake’s couplet: A robin redbreast in a cage Puts all Heaven in a rage. Leigh Fermor’s first conceit made me cackle: Blackbirds fluttering from a pie Cause four-and-twenty cheers on

Honor Clerk

Morality tale with a difference

A Most Wanted Man, by John le Carré Location, location, location is as much the mantra of espionage fiction as it is of another profession’s literature celebrated for making things seem what they are not. And location, not just in the sense of topographical reality, but of mood, atmosphere and the specifics of time and culture, is at the core of John le Carré’s latest novel. Stained by a centuries-long history of anti-semitism, tarnished by its recent association with Mohammed Atta, present-day Hamburg provides a writer with a rich mix of post-9/11 moral complexities — a city caught between an anxiety to make amends to the Americans for the outrage