Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Wednesday

Raymond Carr

Sound and fury, signifying nothing

In exile on St Helena, Napoleon brooded on the cause of the failure of his bid for the mastery of Europe. He confessed that ‘accursed Spain was the primary cause of my misfortunes’. Ronald Fraser’s book of over 500 pages may be seen as a commentary on this confession. Fraser made his name as the oral historian of Francoism and its opponents. Without the voices of the living, for his description of Spain from 1808 to 1814 Fraser has ransacked the archival sources and contemporary accounts. It is a fine example of what he calls history as seen from below. Whereas after Austerlitz the Austrian state survived defeat, and resistance

William Leith

Trouble and strife | 4 June 2008

William Leith on Dietmar Rothermund’s account of India If anybody knows about modern India, it’s Dietmar Rothermund. He’s the Professor Emeritus of South Asian history at the University of Heidelberg. He is, as he puts it himself, ‘a witness who has watched India for nearly half a century’. He first visited the place in 1960, and managed to interview Jalaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, twice. ‘I am convinced that India has a great future,’ he says. I’ll get back to that in a minute. In contrast to Rothermund, I knew virtually nothing about modern India until I opened his book. I’d seen the Attenborough film, with Ben Kingsley as Gandhi.

Charlotte Moore

Getting to the heart of the matter

Andrew Taylor’s latest thriller is set in London in 1934, when Mosley and his Blackshirts were beginning to capitalise on the miseries of economic depression while idealistic young Communists pounced with glee on evidence that the old class hierarchies were cracking. Taylor’s London is a murky, monochrome place of fog and cigarettes, stewed tea and bread and margarine. Older men still shake from the trauma of the trenches; younger ones scan the ‘Situations Vacant’ columns, desperate for anything that will earn them a shilling to feed the gas meter. The complicated story centres on a lodging house in Bleeding Heart Square, near Holborn, where a collection of Dickensian grotesques all

Paula Byrne

A house and its history

The new Brideshead Revisited film, out in September, was, like the 1981 television version, filmed at Castle Howard. For Jane Mulvagh, however, the ‘real’ Brideshead was Madresfield Court near Malvern in Worcestershire, a lovely moated house that has been in the Lygon family, headed by successive Earls Beauchamp, for nearly 1,000 years. This new book is a lovingly descriptive account of the house and the family history. The architecture of Brideshead — which does not have a moat — draws on Castle Howard, but Waugh’s famous description of the art nouveau chapel is based precisely on the one designed for Madresfield by the great Arts and Crafts artist, C. R.

Saturday

Paul Johnson

And Another Thing | 31 May 2008

Hard to remember an occasion when an author has aroused such unanimous distaste as Cherie Blair’s revelation that the birth of her son Leo was due to her unwillingness to take her contraceptive kit to Balmoral, where the royal butler would unpack her suitcase and see it. ‘Ugh!’ or ‘Oh dear!’ were the universal responses; and ‘Poor Tony! How embarrassed/ashamed he must feel!’ To the dismay of her friends, and the delight of her enemies, Mrs Blair has been made to realise the sheer adamantine power of cold print. A tale which might be tolerable, even amusing — or touching — when told, mouth to ear, in gossip, becomes offensively

Anthony Daniels

Nothing ever new out of Africa

When I was a young doctor working in what was still Rhodesia, I read a book by a nun who was also a political economist. She demonstrated that land reform was not only a requirement of social justice but would lead to greatly increased agricultural output, since African peasant farmers cultivated their land more intensively than commercial farmers. Her argument was positively Euclidean in its precision and I accepted it in its entirety. The only thing that she omitted to mention, and that did not occur to me at the time, was that the land reform would have to be carried out by men; and not just men in general,

Robert Stewart

Might is always right

Since the first political trial in modern history — that of Charles I in 1649 — not a single one has ended in the aquittal of the accused. That tells us everything. In no other category of trial would a perfect record for the prosecution be conceivable. In this important, timely, and cogently argued book John Laughland lays bare the truth that political trials, by which he means trials of heads of state or government ministers for acts of state, not for personal trangressions of the law, have never been properly constituted nor properly conducted judicial proceedings. They are staged events, intended as theatre, whose purpose is to legitimise the

William Brett

Giving the boy a bad review

William Brett reviews Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s new novel Do we carry the sins of our fathers? This sentiment may seem archaic — reminiscent, for instance, of the revenge cycles that play out in Greek tragedy. But in the Colombia of Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s The Informers, the notion of generational retribution is all too contemporary. In cultures riven by catastrophe and personal loss, where revenge and despair are rife, it seems natural for people to bear responsibility for their predecessors’ actions. Look at post-war Germans, who for decades (and still now, some might say) carried the shame of their Nazi past. Colombia certainly qualifies as a country riven by catastrophe. Its

Honor Clerk

The circle of a lonely psychiatrist

Honor Clerk on Siri Hustvedt’s latest novel Born into a second generation Norwegian immigrant family, Erik Davidsen is a divorced New York psychoanalyst with his fair share of sorrows and with a close circle of relations and acquaintances who in turn have their sorrows too. He is a compassionate and sensitive man and the troubles of his family and of his patients are central to his thoughts. He is also lonely, and finds himself involuntarily saying so, out loud. His father has just died, his sister is recently widowed and her famous husband’s life is the subject of intrusive press speculation. Her daughter’s double bereavement is compounded by having witnessed

Judith Flanders

A dying fall

Judith Flanders reviews Stephen Galloway’s novel about the siege of Sarajevo  Many novels about war deal with the horrors of the front line, of the terrors of battle. Steven Galloway, in this accomplished, gripping book, instead explores what happens to people who are caught up between warring factions. What happens when you wake up one morning and find that everything in your safe, ordinary, middle-class life has just vanished without warning. A small, true incident during the siege of Sarajevo is his starting point. In a day of death and horror like any other, a mortar shell fell on a group of men and women waiting outside a bakery — a

Anthony Sattin

Two sides of the dark continent

How would you like your Africa? Sweet and smiling or bold and bloody? A reassurance of a fundamental human goodness or a suspicion that we are all rotten to the core? Whichever you want, you can find it in one of these two very different books. The Swedish author Henning Mankell is best known for his immensely popular Inspector Wallander series, which the BBC is currently filming with Kenneth Branagh. But as an author he is as wide-ranging as he is prolific and The Eye of the Leopard moves away from the detective genre to focus on the vexed post-colonial relationship between black and white. The story revolves around a

Allan Massie

Life and Letters

A fortnight ago Sam Leith, reviewing Neil Powell’s book on the Amises, father and son, wrote: Powell is insistent — and for all I know dead right, but that’s hardly the point — that Kingsley was a sufferer from depression. Of the last sentence of The Anti-Death League (‘There isn’t anywhere to be.’), he writes: ‘This — the last sentence especially — is the authentic voice of depression, and only a depressive could have written it.’ You may wonder where that untestable assertion gets us. You may indeed, though the answer is pretty obvious: not very far. Powell has fallen into a trap that catches many critics and also, though

Wednesday

Magnus Linklater

The hammer of the Scots

This is a book from beyond the grave — the last that Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote, and though it is unfinished, there is no mistaking the sting in the tale. There was nothing the Regius Professor of History at Oxford enjoyed more during his lifetime than annoying the Scots. From time to time he would break off from larger works and pen an article or an essay on a theme with which Scottish historians became wearily familiar: that the story of Scotland before the Union was one of fractious rebellion and economic decline; that the country had only come into its own following the Treaty which united it with England in

Ian Sansom

Wisdom from beyond the grave

A few years ago a friend of mine, a writer, attended a conference with Kurt Vonnegut. During coffee breaks and intervals my friend would sneak outside with Mr Vonnegut, Vonnegut to smoke his famous unfiltered Pall Malls and my friend to smoke a couple of Marlboro Lights. ‘What was he like?’, I asked, as if I didn’t already know the answer. ‘To be honest,’ said my friend, ‘he seemed pretty miserable.’ There was nothing funny about Kurt Vonnegut. Like a goyische Woody Allen, all of his wisecracking was really a form of serious intellectual inquiry. He was a satirist, an ironist, a cynic, but above all he was rueful. He

Leo McKinstry

Fighting Gerry on two fronts

The Battle of Britain and the campaign by the French Resistance make ideal settings for fiction, since they are full of potential for conflict, romance, adventure, heroism and moral dilemmas. In this first novel, Patrick Bishop has exploited these rich possibilities to produce a gripping story. He has already proved himself a fine military historian, with two best-selling books on the second world war, the first about the fighter pilots who defeated the Luftwaffe in the summer of 1940, the second about the RAF’s bomber offensive over Germany. Bishop has put his understanding of the period to good use in this tale, conjuring up the atmosphere and linguistic idioms of

Mirabel Cecil

The lark and the economist

Mirabel Cecil reviews Judith Mackrell’s biography of Lydia Lopokova . Judith Mackrell describes her subject as ‘a star whom the world almost forgot’. Lydia herself lamented, on the death of Pavlova, that ‘a dancer can leave nothing behind her. Music will not help us to see her again and to feel what she could give us, nor the best words.’ And her own career vanished even more completely than most. That might be so, yet in this absorbing biography Lydia Lopokova comes alive again on every page. Lopokova’s life fell into three phases: the first as an internationally acclaimed ballerina; the second as the devoted — and inspirational — wife of the

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Forward to the past | 28 May 2008

When the planes flew into the Twin Towers many rushed to declare it the end of the end of history. But it was not. All the plans that emerged immediately afterwards about how to remake the Middle East were premised upon the assumption that history was at an end; that the world was moving inexorably towards liberal, market democracy. Indeed, al-Qa’eda’s nihilism appeared to prove that in the war of ideas, democracy’s dominance remained unchallenged. It seemed that the 9/11 attacks, far from marking the end of the end of history might actually have speeded its arrival. Today, though, the world looks starkly different. For the first time in a

Tuesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

America’s Largest Cult

I’ve been meaning to rave about and recommend Gene Healy’s terrific book The Cult of the Presidency for some time. Now George Will saves me the trouble of doing so. His Newsweek column this week is a useful precis of Healy’s case. Will makes the obvious point that the expectation that the President be some kind of Priest-King is infantile and doomed to leave the poor bloody voters disappointed: Michelle Obama says, “Barack will never let you go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.” Leaving aside the insult—her opinion that we are uninvolved and uninformed—do we really elect politicians to yank us out of our usual lives? Americans

Saturday

Melissa Kite

In the blood

Anyone who has been stuffed down a foxhole at a young age to pull out a hound, and has come back out attached to a hound attached to a fox attached to a badger, deserves to be read. Is it any wonder townies do not understand country folk you ask yourself as you read this wonderfully rich romp of a life story. Rory Knight Bruce bills his book as a hunting diary, but it feels much more than that. It is a vivid tribute to the personalities of the countryside and a love song to the land. It is also very funny. You know you are in for a good

Vernon Bogdanor

Linking Oxford with the world

Cecil Rhodes hoped that the scholarships established through his will, would, by creating educational ties between the Empire and the Anglo-Saxon world, ‘render war impossible’. The scholars, he insisted, should not be weedy bookworms, but manly, robust types, Plato’s guardians, a society of the elect. The 20th century has not been kind to such ideals; yet the scholarships have proved of enormous value to Oxford, giving it that wider international perspective and connection with the world of public affairs which differentiate it so markedly from the Other Place. In his will, Rhodes insisted that no candidate should be disqualified on account of race or religion. He almost certainly had in