Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Edward Norman

Scripture was composed by believers

It is difficult enough to evaluate the evidence that the British government is supposed to have received before its decision to engage in the Iraq war: imagine, therefore, the enhanced problem in determining the evidence for the Resurrection of Christ — 2,000 years after the event. There are also 2,000 years of accumulated attempts. Now Professor Vermes offers a further essay; his version is lucid and uncomplicated and unoriginal. His arguments are, in their way, fair- minded, but no new insights extend before us, and his conclusions, impeccably liberal, add virtually nothing to understanding. Vermes writes from a Jewish perspective, and with the authority of an established scholar; he is

Anita Brookner

Not going to London to visit the Queen

It is a pleasure to encounter a new writer, particularly if that writer is modest, competent, and above all unheralded. Frances Itani is Canadian and recognisably from the same background as Alice Munro, although lacking Munro’s wistfulness and emotional delicacy. She is unknown in this country, although the author of a previous novel. On the strength of Remembering the Bones she has it in her to reach a wider audience. Her story is simple. Her protagonist, Georgina Danforth Witley, has been invited to Buckingham Palace, one of a handful of Commonwealth citizens who share their birthday with that of the Queen. Her house is locked up, her suitcase is in

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Having the last laugh

Hard to define Lewis Hyde. Antiquarian, classicist, story-teller, mythographer, connoisseur, philologist, teacher and scholar, he is as multifarious as the trickster archetype which forms the subject of his new book. In Greece trickster appears as Hermes, and Hyde begins with the Homeric Hymn written around 420 BC which deals with Hermes’s birth and career. Zeus runs off with Maia and together they produce a cunning, wily boy, full of flattery and schemes. Hermes stumbles across a turtle and turns it into the first lyre. Longing for meat, he steals cattle from Apollo and evades discovery by driving them backwards across sandy ground so that their hoofprints point away from their

William Skidelsky

A world without frontiers

Alberto Manguel, the dust jacket informs us, is an ‘anthologist, translator, essayist, novelist, and editor’ who was born in Argentina, moved to Canada in the 1980s and now lives partly in France. A generous gloss on this would be to say that he is an intrepid crosser of boundaries, someone whose identity is too open-ended for him to confine himself to any one profession or place. Less charitably, one might say that he is a man who doesn’t like to be pinned down. I felt a similar ambivalence on reading The City of Words. It is a work of staggering scope and erudition, packed with interesting information and arguments, and

Tuesday

Matthew Dennison

Echoes of the invisible world

In 1958, Daphne du Maurier published a collection of short stories, The Breaking Point. Justine Picardie’s novel Daphne begins the year of the stories’ composition, 1957. Du Maurier, then Britain’s best-selling novelist, struggles with her own breaking point. Newly acquainted with the infidelity of her husband, Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Browning, known as Tommy, she oscillates between anger and despair. Tommy succumbs to a nervous breakdown. Daphne’s mood is not lightened by her current literary preoccupation, a biography of Branwell Brontë. In Picardie’s hands, Daphne dreams of rescuing Branwell from critical obscurity by proving him the author, at least in part, of his sister Emily’s Wuthering Heights. Ultimately she acknowledges

Peregrine Worsthorne

Putting the Boot in

So much was written about Bill Deedes at the time of his death — not to mention his own two autobiographies and the mass of other doting media coverage in recent years — that readers might be forgiven for thinking that this intelligently probing and well-written authorised biography would have little fresh to say. Truth to tell, that is what this reviewer feared. My hopes for the book, however, were soon realised because early on Stephen Robinson, himself a veteran Telegraph man, tells us that Bill went to great lengths ‘to weed out all the disobliging references to himself in his voluminous filing cabinet’. Disobliging references? Shurely shome mistake. Why

Bevis Hillier

A Scottish master of caricature

If, in Victorian Britain, you did not fall in with the oppressive religiosity that prevailed, you were in danger of becoming a pariah, like Charles Bradlaugh in politics and T. H. Huxley in science. If, in 20th-century Britain, you did not subscribe to abstract expressionism, Dada urinals, Pop Art, Op Art, minimalism, ‘installations’ and every subsequent development (I am tempted to say imposture), you were likely to become a cultural pariah. The arts establishment was very like the Victorian religious establishment. It too had — and has — its high priests, with Sir Nicholas Serota of the Tate as its Pope or Archbishop of Canterbury; its anathemas and excommunications. It

Saturday

Philip Hensher

The uneasy world between

Some roles in domestic service truly capture the imagination and have supplied English literature with several of its most enduring figures. There are the manservants from Sam Weller to Jeeves. There are butlers, including the terrifying one who receives the news of Merdle’s death in Little Dorrit with such equanimity, Henry Green’s Raunce, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s infinitive-splitting Stevens in The Remains of the Day. Surely, however, no domestic role has provided so many poignant inventions as that of the governess. From the moment the threat of the ‘governess-trade’ is made to hang over the head of Jane Fairfax in Emma, the 19th-century novel can hardly do without it. Governesses in

Juliet Townsend

The county personified

One of the glories of British public life is the way in which ancient institutions, if left unmolested by officious politicians, can evolve over centuries to become something quite different from their original function, but just as valid. This is certainly the case with the office of Lord Lieutenant. Originally created in Tudor times to take on the military duties of the over-powerful High Sheriffs, the County Lieutenancy was first and foremost responsible for the defence of the realm at a time when the country had no standing army. Over the centuries, from the threat of the Armada to the Battle of Britain, the Lieutenants struggled with a succession of

Alexander Masters

The short life and hard times of a mathematical genius

Any proof pleases me: if I could prove by logic that you would be dead in five minutes, I should be sorry you were going to die, but the sorrow would be very much mitigated by my pleasure in the proof. G. H. Hardy, one of the finest mathematicians of the 20th century and author of the best popular book about mathematical life, A Mathematician’s Apology, was a wistful and ascetic don at Trinity College, Cambridge. His lifelong collaborator was J. E. Littlewood. Though their rooms were only a corridor apart, they communicated almost entirely by postcard. But it is Hardy’s association with Srinivasa Ramanujan, the Indian clerk of David

David Crane

Always employ a slow bowler

It would be hard to imagine a worse title for a book, or one more likely to unite the sceptics of every camp. For those poor souls who think the Cheltenham Festival has something to do with books the idea will be ludicrous, and for the rest of us whose year begins with the Melbourne Test, and moves through the ‘Six Nations’, Champion Hurdle, Augusta, Aintree, Formula 1, the FA Cup Final, Epsom, Ascot, Wimbledon, and the Open back to the Charity Shield and another eight months’ dose of the Premiership, the notion that sport needs validation from ‘life’ or anywhere else is deeply offensive. I remember many years ago,

Simon Baker

No getting away from it

Some non-fiction books seem inevitable before they are even written. Dawkins on atheism, Hitchens on contrarianism, Ackroyd on London: with such works, the author is allied so closely to the subject that it is a question of when, not if, their full-length treatment of it will appear. Julian Barnes on death must fall into that category. Barnes’s preoccupation with old age and extinction is noticeable all the way back in his first novel, Metroland (1980), which he published at 34; even in his physical prime he was looking ahead towards the decay of the body and the end. Nothing to Be Frightened Of, therefore, is the result of a lifetime’s

Caroline Moorehead

Putting the jackboot in

He who holds Rome, Churchill told Roosevelt and Stalin in November 1943, ‘holds the title deeds to Italy’. Two months earlier, immediately after the armistice and the surrender of the Italian forces, the main Allied invasion force had landed at Salerno, just south of Naples, and were now fighting their way north. It was, as James Holland writes, a long and bloody campaign and it would cause immense suffering, to the Allies, to the Germans, and to the hundreds of thousands of Italians caught between the two armies. Italy’s Sorrow: A Year of War, 1944-45, opens soon after a partisan attack on a group of German soldiers in Rome resulted

Wednesday

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Is it worth the worry?

I first met Simon Briscoe when, as a young MP enjoying a summer evening by the House of Commons terrace bar, I observed a youth in a Refreshment Department staff uniform pelting a group of Thames ducks with dry roasted peanuts. ‘Could you sink one?’ I asked. ‘Thanks,’ he said: ‘a pint of lager and a packet of crisps if you’d be so kind.’ We fell into conversation. Briscoe had recently landed a coveted position as a graduate trainee at the Treasury, but for light relief was moonlighting as a glass-clearer over the road at the Palace of Westminster. He went on later to an investment bank, and now writes

Digby Durrant

Love goes begging

I was astonished by the huge success of Louis de Bernières’ Captain Correlli’s Mandolin which I staggered through back in 1994. Many separate passages were colourfully and beguilingly written, but the book as a whole was confusing and over- written, as if the author couldn’t bear to stop. I haven’t read any others since, and didn’t relish reading his latest, though I was encouraged to find it a mere slip of a volume compared to Captain Correlli’s’ adventures — and Christian a very different kind of hero. A medical salesman, he believes that marriage turns wives into sisters and sex soon dies out, a painless castration. If you call your

Andro Linklater

Princes, patriots and party-givers

In the midst of a passage devoted to the transcendent qualities of Henry V — ‘a true hero [with] a strong claim to be rated the greatest of all English monarchs’ — Paul Johnson abruptly drops in an aside that begins: Once when I was giving a history lesson to the late Princess Diana, we discussed the predicament of a person born to be king. She said she had found [her husband] utterly selfish and self-centred because he had been spoiled from the cradle on. I pointed out that this was the common fate of heirs apparent. Having blithely swung an axe-blow to the character of the Prince of Wales,

Christopher Ondaatje

Modern fusion architecture

Although there have been many architectural books featuring the works of Geoffrey Bawa, the Sri Lankan born architect, most notably a first monograph authored by David Robson a year before Bawa died in 2003, a second book, Beyond Bawa, also by Robson, is a biographical and artistic revelation. What is surprising and different about this new edition is that it reveals an extraordinary biographical account of the talented younger son of a wealthy Moslem lawyer and his Dutch burgher wife; and also illustrates the legacy of perhaps one of the most influential architects in south Asia in the 20th century, by discussing how his inspiration has continued in a number

Anthony Daniels

Running for shelter

It is questionable whether psychiatry as a whole does, or has done throughout its history, more good than harm. Certainly there are some patients who benefit from its ministrations; but there are many others who have been harmed by the wrongful administration of noxious drugs or other therapies. A less tangible, but nevertheless potentially serious, harm is that it persuades people with the difficulties in living that are inseparable from human existence that they are ill, and therefore disguises from them that the best remedy, if one there be, lies in their own hands. Indeed, psychiatry seems to have persuaded whole societies that all forms of mental distress are illnesses,

Frederic Raphael

And the Oscar goes to . . .

The subtitle of this account of the genesis and fate of the five movies in competition for the title Best Film at the 1967 Academy Awards is ‘the birth of the New Hollywood’. Hyperbole being the most reliable trope known to publicity, we are promised that 1967 was ‘the year that changed film’ and that ‘… a fight that began as a contest for a few small patches of Hollywood turf ended as the first shot in a revolution’. The loud implication is that the time taken to make the announcement ‘And the Oscar goes to …’ were ten seconds that shook the world. Mark Harris believes that at least

Tuesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Hillary’s Walter Mitty Fantasy

November I suggested that Hillary Clinton’s own autobiography provides no evidence to support her on-the-trail assertions that she was a foreign policy player during her husband’s administration: The book is not a policy manifesto of course. But even making that allowance it is striking how much of Hillary’s memoir is taken up with fluff – “I had given a lot of thought to how Chelsea and I should dress on the trip. We wanted to be comfortable, and under the sun’s heat, I was glad for the hats and cotton clothes I had packed” – and how little is concerned with affairs of state… Perhaps it’s unfair to judge Hillary