Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

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

Philip Hensher

Real and imagined parents

There are now two full columns of entries on the ‘Also by Doris Lessing’ page — 58 separate books. Along with work of an entirely fantastical, invented variety there is a good body of her work which shades off, in calibrated degrees, from the realist and directly observed novel, towards the autobiographical fiction, and into autobiography proper. The urge to give an account of her own life has been a constant incentive from the Children of Violence sequence which begins with Martha Quest. There are, too, novels such as the recent, excellent The Sweetest Dream where we are invited to consider an autobiographical component, as well as two volumes of

Robert Salisbury

At the court of King Tony

The commentariat has at last realised that in practice, if not in theory, the Labour Party believes in the hereditary principle. This is a phenomenon that those of us who, for one reason or another, have innate antennae for such things have long recognised. Homo sapiens in settled societies is more likely to follow anthropology than ideology and therefore successful politics has been more acutely analysed by Mary Douglas than by Marx. What perhaps, however, has been forgotten in the rush to dump on Gordon Brown is quite how weird the Blair régime was. Michael Levy’s book provides us with a reminder. (In accordance with New Labour practice, he calls

Vicki Woods

The end of a period

This is a meretricious, puzzling and deeply unsatisfactory book and I resent every one of the 12 hours I spent plodding through it on a Sunday. Cherie’s publishers call her ‘insightful’ and ‘funny’, which she ain’t, and they bill the book as the inspiring tale of a clever, indomitable, feminist woman with a fierce sense of justice, a ‘working-class Liverpool girl’, the first in her family to go university, who pulled herself up by her own bootstraps from a hardscrabble Scouse background to the highest in the land. Fair enough, she did, alongside untold numbers of her lucky postwar generation. She told a poky interviewer (in one of her endless

Wednesday

Matthew Dancona

A manual for our times

This book is so important that I hope the publishers have the civic spirit to send a copy to every parliamentarian, decision-maker and opinion-former in the land. For Philip Bobbitt, the legal and constitutional historian best known for The Shield of Achilles, has drawn nothing less than a philosophical route-map for the war on terror and the geopolitical crisis of the early 21st century. The fact that he has done so in the calm, lucid tones of meticulous scholarship, without recourse to ideology or what Martin Amis would call ‘Westernism’, only adds to the book’s appeal. Bobbitt, who holds a chair at Columbia University and has served in the White

James Fergusson

John Saumarez Smith at 65

‘Might it amuse you to see (and perhaps even buy) Gibbon’s spectacles?’ John Saumarez Smith made Bevis Hillier a once-in-a-lifetime offer. It was 1976 and Hillier dithered. He neither saw nor bought Gibbon’s spectacles, but he did make a Saturday column out of it for the Times — characterising Saumarez Smith as ‘perhaps the most know- ledgeable of the younger generation of London booksellers’. Saumarez Smith, then 33, had been running Heywood Hill’s bookshop in Curzon Street for two years, having joined it in 1965 straight from Cambridge. Now, as his 65th birthday turns, and after purveying knowledge and amusement to Heywood Hill’s worldwide clientele for more than four decades,

Tuesday

Saturday

Paul Johnson

And Another Thing | 17 May 2008

When I was a child of four or five my big sisters told me edifying stories about the rise of the British empire, which then occupied a quarter of the earth’s surface. A favourite villain was Tippoo Sahib, Sultan of Mysore, a ‘little monster’ who was son of a ‘big monster’, Hyder Ali. Tippoo was known as ‘Tiger’ (like Stanley Baldwin) and hated Englishmen, and put to death any he captured in fiendish ways. He was finally put down, by the future Duke of Wellington, in the battle of Seringapatam, being killed in the process, leaving behind an immense pile of silver, gold, jewels and toys. Among the last was

Allan Massie

1968 and all that

Roger Scruton has called Les Orphelins by Louis Pauwels the best French novel since the 1939-45 war. Since it seems unlikely that even Professor Scruton has read all the good French novels of the last 60 years — after all, who among us has read all the good English or American ones? — this really means little more than that he thinks very well of it. He is quite right to do so. It’s a remarkable novel. I’ve just read it a second time and think even better of it than before. It was the approach of the 40th anniversary of the Paris events of May ’68 which prompted me

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Not a decent book

What is the point of this book? This isn’t a rhetorical question — and it isn’t meant to be a sneer. It’s one that needs answering. We have an extremely full biography of Kingsley Amis. We have an accomplished memoir by Martin Amis. Do we need either a joint critical study of these two unalike writers, or another biography? Neil Powell sets out his stall rather winningly. He concedes that it’s not quite a biography and not quite an academic work. He apologises for the sketchier biographical information about Martin, saying: ‘I believe it’s impertinent for the biographer or critic to poke his nose into those aspects of a living

Alan Judd

But what about justice, fairness and honesty?

There is growing unease at the contemporary proliferation and inflation of human rights. Not only do undeserving cases benefit from over-generous or quixotic judicial interpretations of Labour’s Human Rights Act, but there is a booming business in ascribing rights to groups. Peoples, nations, races, ethnic, cultural and religious groups are now perceived to have rights deriving somehow from their mere existence. To individuals, meanwhile, are ascribed — sometimes with the force of law — rights to such things as life, jobs, education, health, emotional well-being, self-fulfilment, holidays with pay and even happiness. Whence do these rights derive, how should we determine what they are and how far should they go?

Ian Garrick-Mason

Through Western eyes

‘Why have we come here? The Directory has deported us,’ grumbled the heat-stricken and exhausted soldiers of Napoleon’s Army of the Orient, having travelled for days across the desert to a spot just west of Cairo. There, at what would later be called the Battle of the Pyramids, they would face the forces of the Ottoman governor Murad Bey. Napoleon lifted his men’s spirits with a vision of history: ‘Go and remember that 40 centuries are looking down upon you,’ he told them. Though opposed by ‘vastly superior Mamluk forces’, the French exploited discipline, firepower and innovative tactics to win the day. Vividly described, this is just one of the

John Mitchell

The robots are coming

If you think that you or anyone else knows anything for certain about the universe, or stack of universes or whatever it is, you are probably wrong. I say probably because it is impossible in this world to be certain about anything. The firm ground of reality that progressive thinkers once expected to discover through science has been abolished by science itself, and we are wrapped in the same cloud of unknowing that has enveloped us since the beginning. Uncertainty is our constant condition, but Heisenberg’s recognition of it as a universal principle dismayed the progressives. They should stop worrying, according to Michio Kaku. The further you look into the

Wednesday

Cressida Connolly

Two were barking

Julia Blackburn has written about Goya, about the island of St Helena, about the naturalist Charles Waterton, about a talking pig; and she has turned her attention to other strange and various things besides, but she has never written a dull sentence. It is clear from the first few lines of this book that The Three of Us is going to be fascinating. Dark, too. This is a family memoir, from Blackburn’s early childhood with both her parents, progressing through their divorce to a series of ever more difficult triangles featuring herself, her mother and a series of male lodgers. There was nothing conventional about Blackburn’s parents. Her father, the

Jonathan Keates

Cities of the coast

In the days when English counties were untouched by the dead hand of central government rationalisation, odd little chunks of them used to fetch up in neighbouring shires, appearing as little green or brown blobs, defiantly labelled ‘part of Leicestershire’ or ‘part of Somerset’. The Mediterranean sometimes seems like a larger version of this topographical oddity. Officially it is part of the Atlantic, an awkward remnant of what was formerly a vast marine depression stretching far into central Asia. But who beside its shores has felt depressed for very long? The Atlantic is where we go for granite and fog, grey waves and annihilating icebergs, to be overwhelmed by ‘l’immense

John McEwen

Poles apart

With more Poles in Britain than at any time since the second world war, when the 17,000 remnant of the Polish army arrived after the fall of France, this book could not be more pertinent. Nor could it have been written by anyone better. Douglas Hall (b. 1926) was the first Keeper (indeed the Alfred Barr) of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. He made a virtue of a small budget by backing artistic outsiders rather than hot favourites, and these uprooted Polish painters were by definition eccentric. Under his keepership no British public gallery did more for them in the long years of their exile. It is a

Saturday

Jonathan Mirsky

The making of modern myths

Who are the big intellectuals today? There are academics, to be sure, each with their speciality, and journalists, ditto. When something comes up the BBC will call on them to pontificate, to explain, but only on their speciality. Off their own piste they are no more valuable than a saloon-bar or dinner-party bore, eager to tell you ‘what I always say’. I don’t exempt myself. Tony Judt, now a professor at New York University, is the rare real thing, the author of 11 books on Marxism and French intellectuals, European resistance and revolution, language in a multi-state world; he is to consider what has happened in post-war Britain, the US,

Matthew Dennison

Not the marrying type

Those days are gone in which romantic novels had heroines called Muriel. Even on first publication 84 years ago, The Crowded Street was not a conventional romantic novel nor Muriel Hammond a conventional heroine — but the former embraces elements of romance, the latter aspects of heroism. The subversion of our expectations of heroism and romance provides the dynamic of Winifred Holtby’s second novel, originally published in 1924. The Crowded Street is a family saga, comedy of manners and roman à clef. It tells the story of Muriel Hammond, from schoolgirl to maturity. The Hammonds inhabit the determinedly genteel Yorkshire village of Marshington, its confines narrow, its mindset small. Muriel

Paul Johnson

And Another Thing | 10 May 2008

Are there too many biographies? Thomas Carlyle thought so 150 years ago. ‘What is the use of it?’ he wrote growlingly. ‘Sticking like a woodlouse to an old bedpost and boring one more hole in it?’ He was then engaged in his 13-year task of writing the life of Frederick the Great, and spoke from a full and bitter heart. Since then over a million more biographies have been written in English alone. The public is to blame, as it is to blame for any other excesses, distortions, omissions and duplications in the book trade. I have been encouraged to write biographies, and have done six. Publishers will tell you

Andrew Taylor

Cries and whispers

C. J. Sansom’s Shardlake series concerns the activities of a hunchback lawyer struggling to make a living in the increasingly dangerous setting of Henry VIII’s reign. The first three novels have been deservedly successful, not least because of Matthew Shardlake himself, a man of intelligence and integrity who has managed to survive with his essential decency intact. He had a particularly harrowing time in the previous book in the series, Sovereign, when he narrowly averted a rebellion, survived torture in the Tower and was publicly humiliated by the bloated and paranoid tyrant on the throne of England. Now, 18 months later, things are about to get even worse. It’s 1543,