Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Wednesday

Pj Kavanagh

Fighting his corner

This author said of her biography of the wealthy Siegfried Sassoon, ‘A study of his life is a study of an age’. So is this one, from another aspect, deep down among the poverty of Jewish immigrants at the end of the 19th century, and it is warming to learn how the more successful of these banded together to help the strugglers. The eldest son of Orthodox Russian Jews, the painter and poet Isaac Rosenberg was born in 1890, in the Jewish quarter of Bristol (astonishingly, we are told that the Jewish population of Bristol in 1901 was 328,945). His father was an itinerant salesman, away from home for half

Robert Stewart

Last but not least | 30 April 2008

‘Love is but a frailty of the mind when ’tis not to ambition joined.’ So Thomas Seymour, destined to be Catherine Parr’s fourth and last husband, expressed a notion taken as read in Tudor families of sufficient standing to seek social and financial ladders to climb. Catherine understood the ways of the world. When at the age of 30, already twice sold into marriage and twice widowed, she married the corpulent, ailing Henry VIII, she did so for her family’s sake, suppressing, but not killing, her ardour for the rakish Seymour. ‘You are,’ she wrote of her wedding to her brother, ‘the person who has most cause to rejoice.’ Susan

Saturday

Claudia FitzHerbert

More mayoral election fever

Once Upon a Time in the North is not to be confused with The Book of Dust, the big book which Philip Pullman has been promising for some time in interviews about His Dark Materials trilogy and what happens next. It is, instead, a short, elegant, simple story about what happened between two of his best-loved characters — the Texan aeronaut and the talking polar bear — a long time before the events of Northern Lights (1995). And while the title pays tribute to a classic western, and the story itself, although set in an Arctic port, has about it more than a whiff of cowboy gunshot, this little volume

William Brett

What we lost last summer

It’s startling to read about extremely recent news events in a book presented as a novel. In Born Yesterday, Gordon Burn uses the McCanns, the floods, the foiled terrorist attacks in London and Glasgow, Blair’s farewell and Brown’s hello as the meat of his narrative. Although this isn’t a conventional novel, in that the narrator appears to be Gordon Burn (addressing himself as ‘he’) and his ‘journey’ consists merely of reflecting on last summer’s major news stories and conducting the occasional interview, its approach to the news is nevertheless novelistic. It’s as if you’re reading a secret Sunday supplement which reports the news not as reality, but as components of

Allan Massie

Children of a genius

The subtitle is ‘The Erika and Klaus Mann Story’, and the shadow is that cast by their father, Thomas Mann, the greatest German novelist of the 20th century. Erika and Klaus were the oldest two of his six children, and, while it is fair to say they lived in his shadow, they were not obscured by it, being extraordinary people in their own right, Klaus at least a remarkable writer himself also. Andrea Weiss, an American film-maker as well as writer, an associate professor at the City College of New York, tells their story with enthusiasm, sympathy and insight, in a style mercifully free of the clotted jargon we tend,

David Prycejones

Blood on their hands

The first 100 or so pages of this book almost made me give up, so saccharine is the description of the childhoods of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, with even a reference to the latter’s ‘dear diary’. I am glad I persisted. Mills and Boon duly evolves into Kraft-Ebbing. Carole Seymour-Jones may assert that she continues to admire this pair, but she has laid the foundations of a demolition job from which they should not recover. The relationship between these two goes back to a compact in 1929 whereby they decided to have a union but not a marriage. In practice, conflating love with sexual freedom, they deceived themselves,

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Were we any better than the Nazis?

In July 1940, Hitler issued what Nicholson Baker calls ‘a final appeal to reason’. ‘The continuation of this war,’ he said in a speech, ‘will only end with the complete destruction of one of the two warring parties . . . I see no reason that should compel us to continue this war.’ ‘It’s too tantalising, since there’s no shadow of a doubt we will reject any such suggestion,’ Frances Partridge wrote in her diary afterwards, adding the savagely deflating rider: ‘Now I suppose Churchill will again tell the world that we are going to die on the hills and on the seas, and then we shall proceed to do

Robin Hanburytenison

Wilful destruction of a world wonder

This is the ‘Compleat History of the Amazon’: everything you ever wanted to know about the biggest and most important environment left on earth, and it’s a rattling good yarn at the same time. The spread of subjects and themes is as wide and diverse as the geographical area itself. It ranges from ethical issues — man’s inhumanity to man and the gratuitous destruction of priceless species and ecosystems — to the riveting history of those who discovered, exploited, plundered, studied, fell in love with and then, through insatiable greed, brought to its knees the richest culmination of all that nature could achieve. John Hemming has the rare gift of

Zenga Longmore

Growing up in no man’s land

People who say, ‘Why don’t Asians try to integrate?’ ought to have known Yasmin Hai’s father. A Marxist Anglophile from Pakistan, Mr Hai imposed ‘true Englishness’ on his bewildered English-born children. He forbade them to speak Urdu. Western clothes were favoured instead of the traditional salwar kameezes and his girls’ beautiful ebony locks were cropped into English bobs. The Muslim religion was only practised when it was Eid, Mr Hai’s reasoning being that ‘Eid could be enjoyed like Christians enjoyed Christmas.’ Attempting to become British must have been an increasingly painful project during the1970s. Practically every time a member of the Hai family switched on the telly they would have

Leo McKinstry

A working-class villain

Leo McKinstry on Andrew Hosken’s biography of Ken Livingstone One of Margaret Thatcher’s more bizarre achievements during her premiership was to have transformed Ken Livingstone from municipal hate figure into popular folk hero. When she embarked on her campaign in the mid-Eighties to abolish the Greater London Council because of its perceived inefficiencies, Ken Livingtone, the GLC’s leader, was probably the most despised politician in Britain, reviled for his infantile gesture politics, extravagance with public money and noisy support for violent Irish Republicanism. But the saga of GLC abolition completely altered his image. He was no longer the town hall Trot, the moustachioed Marxist, but the people’s champion battling against the

Theodore Dalrymple

Between deference and insolence

In reviewing this book about the social, political and intellectual indispensability of disrespect, I should perhaps declare an interest: I am several times disrespected in it. I hope the author will not conclude, if I fail to take my revenge on this occasion, that I am suffering from the wrong kind of niceness. All my niceness is of the right kind. My problem is that I agree with quite a lot of what the author says, at least in his individual judgments, though I am not sure that he provides anything like a coherent or consistent argument. For example, he uses the term ‘deontological’ as a term more or less

Saturday

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 19 April 2008

Charles Moore’s reflections on the week When informed that this was to be The Spectator’s English Special Issue, I happened to be reading a novel by John Buchan called Midwinter. It concerns an unsuccessful attempt by a young Highland laird, Alastair Maclean, to raise English Jacobites for Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1745. Like most Buchan novels, it has a rather weak plot which requires exciting, brilliantly described journeys up and down the country. In Buchan’s favourite Oxfordshire, the hero is rescued by Midwinter, a gentleman-outlaw who leads the mysterious Spoonbills. Maclean asks him who he is. ‘I am a dweller in Old England,’ says Midwinter. ‘That explains little,’ says Maclean. ‘Nay,

Allan Massie

Open to the world?

One may make a distinction between two types of novel: the self-enclosed and the open. The distinction is not absolute. Such things never are. Genre fiction may merge with what is called the literary novel, for instance. Still the categories I have in mind are useful, or at least interesting. By the self-enclosed novel, I mean one which makes no reference — or almost no reference — to anything beyond itself. It belongs to its age of course, but it does not appear to be set in time. Time naturally passes, as it must in a narrative, but there is no suggestion that events in the world of fact beyond

Simon Baker

A boy’s own world

The pilcrow is a typographical symbol which looks like this: ¶. It was once used in writing (often of the philosophical or religious kind) to indicate a new line of discussion, before the habit of physically separating work into paragraphs changed its status to that of the exotic and learned yet largely useless. It is an apt nickname for John Cromer, the narrator of this novel, who grows up in the 1950s and early 1960s as a bright yet disabled boy: like a human incarnation of the pilcrow, John has intellectual pedigree but society gives him no outlet for it. As a child John is afflicted with Still’s Disease, a

Wednesday

Patrick Marnham

A radical, pantheistic nationalist

In 1932 a young English art historian recently returned from his travels sent an enthusiastic article to The Spectator about a series of brand new murals he had seen in the courtyards of the Ministry of Education in Mexico City: All these paintings [he wrote] are conscious expositions of Communism. The ultimate object … is always propaganda … to expound the lesson of Communism, just as that of the mediaeval artists was to expound the lesson of Christianity … If mediaeval art was the Bible of the Illiterate, these frescoes are the Kapital of the Illiterate. The young historian’s name was Anthony Blunt and the Mexican artist who had so

Andrew Taylor

House of horrors

On the morning of Saturday 30 June 1860, the mutilated body of three-year Savill Kent was discovered in an outside privy at Road House, Wiltshire. The circumstances suggested that the murderer was almost certainly a member of the boy’s family or one of their servants. The case became something of a national obsession because of the age of the victim, the violence with which he had been attacked and the apparently secure and comfortable setting of the crime. The master of the house was Samuel Kent, a government sub-inspector of factories. Also present on the night of the murder were his second wife (formerly the governess), four children by his

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Best of British?

Mike Leigh. Ground-breaking maverick or pretentious miseryguts? To ask the man himself isn’t perhaps the best way to secure an impartial verdict, but the personality that emerges in this series of interviews (composed with superb fluency by Amy Raphael) is an articulate, engaging, generous, highly original and occasionally peppery creative spirit. No British film-maker since Hitchcock has had Leigh’s array of talent. He can act, write, design and direct and he could easily have become one of the industry’s most bankable players had he not doggedly pursued his peculiar working method. He doesn’t use a script. Each film is built up through months of painstaking research and improvisation which he

Nicolas Barker

Firing the youthful imagination

I must first declare an interest, now almost subliminal, in the subject of this vast, comprehensive, polymorphous and wholly captivating book. I was six when the war broke out and 12 when it ended. I read a lot of the books described new, as well as many more that were older. I remember the Magnet, best of comics, closed when the Amalgamated Press ran short of paper; we had to make do with the Dandy and Beano, published by D. C. Thomson of Dundee. George Orwell was less sorry. In ‘Boys’ Weeklies’, published in Horizon in March 1940, he asserted that comics preserved the ruling class attitudes of 1910. ‘The

Tuesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Strolling the Streets of Baltimore

Attention Wire fans: if you haven’t done so already you should really make sure you read Peter Mosko’s new book, Cop in the Hood. Moskos, a Princeton and Harvard sociologist actually joined the Baltimore Police Department and spent more than a year patrolling in the city’s Eastern District ghetto (where much of The Wire was filmed). The results are fascinating – and gruesome. But then that’s your War on Drugs for you, ain’t it? Incidentally, does anyone know why neither the BBC nor Channel Four bought The Wire? It could have been a success* in Britain, I think. Instead it’s been consigned to the FX backwater with, as best I

Saturday

Alexander Chancellor

Out of puff

The third volume of Simon Gray’s incomparable ‘smoking diaries’ opens with a bold statement of intent to drop the habit that has sustained and comforted him for more than six decades. The third volume of Simon Gray’s incomparable ‘smoking diaries’ opens with a bold statement of intent to drop the habit that has sustained and comforted him for more than six decades. ‘This diary is going to be about my attempt to give up smoking,’ he writes on page 1: It is also going to be my main help in giving up smoking. By the time I’ve finished it I will be a free man, able to leave the house