Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Justin Marozzi

His own man

What little most of us know about Omar Khayyam can be summarised in two words: the Rubaiyat, a collection of his free-spirited quatrains made famous around the world by the translations of the 19th-century poet Edward Fitzgerald. It has been said that these immensely popular books, first published in 1859 and running into numerous editions, contributed more phrases to the English language than the Bible and Shakespeare combined. Hazhir Teimourian, a respected commentator on Middle Eastern affairs, has offered readers a much broader study of this 11th-century polymath in a work of considered scholarship and tremendous imaginative sympathy. We learn a good deal of the challenging political and cultural environment

Mary Keen

Recent gardening books | 24 November 2007

Celebrity gardeners are what publishers are banking on this year. The Dowager Marchioness of Salisbury, known in New York as ‘the high priestess of historic garden design’, has given us her gardening autobiography. A Gardener’s Life (Frances Lincoln, £35) is illustrated by another aristocrat, Derry Moore — in private life Lord Drogheda. The book looks as beautiful as the gardens that the Marchioness makes. Her famous style of scholarly nostalgia can be seen in Ireland, France, Italy and America, as well as at Highgrove and in many English gardens, including her own newest venture, on a Chelsea roof. Cranborne remains for me the dream garden and Hatfield, perhaps her greatest

Allan Massie

Norman at the Ritz

Andrew O’Hagan wrote a very nice piece about Norman Mailer in the Daily Telegraph last week. Affectionate and admiring, it was just the sort of tribute a young writer should pay to a senior one, and it was pleasant to learn how encouraging Mailer had been to O’Hagan and indeed to other young writers. This is as it should be — a handing on of the torch. No doubt this was easier for Mailer than for less successful elderly writers who find themselves elbowed out of the way by younger generations, and quite possibly dropped by their publishers. Nevertheless it’s commendable, jealousy or envy being sins to which writers are

Saturday

The Spectator

Books of the Year | 17 November 2007

Deborah Devonshire The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett (Profile Books, £9.99) is small, short, cheap and perfect. It is a gem among the dross, without a wasted word. It conjures a picture so skilfully that whenever I see the Derbyshire County Library van in the village I see Norman and his employer inside discussing their lists of books to borrow. Several bedside copies have already been taken away by my guests. I don’t blame them. Black Diamonds by Catherine Bailey (Penguin Viking, £20) proves truth to be stranger than fiction. It tells the history of the Fitzwilliam family, with its convoluted relationships, living in royal style at Wentworth House, the

Alan Strachan

Love from Snoop or Poj

Noël Coward owned always that luck played a part in his astonishing career alongside his various talents as an actor, dramatist, composer, artist (he described his painting as ‘Touch and Gauguin’), film director and fiction-writer. At various times his reputation nosedived. After he catapulted to fame in his drama of society love affairs and drug-taking in 1924’s The Vortex he unwisely retrieved rather too many plays from bottom drawers before bouncing back to the top with his masterpiece, Private Lives, to launch his glittering 1930s. In the 1950s, with a new wave of playwrights emerging from the Royal Court, his work was more hurtfully dismissed as outdated, only for his

Frederic Raphael

The conquering hero as show-off

How should ancient Roman history be written? Gibbon larded his account with ironic elegance. Echoing Tacitus’ epigrammatic sarcasm, he made ponderously light of the vanities and savagery of imperial rule. Yet the Latinate charm of his prose implied wry nostalgia, not only for the age of the Antonines, but also for the whole myth of Roman grandeur. In my undergraduate day, Professor F. E. Adcock continued to lisp in Tacitean epigrams, but the great modern iconoclast was Ronald Syme. A New Zealander whose The Roman Revolution cut the classy crap, Syme denounced Augustus and his family as proto-mafiosi who had taken over Rome in what François Mitterrand later called (when

Ben Wilson

Balance and counterbalance

Until the 1760s British statesmen had two empires to manage. One exercised the public imagination and awoke patriotic dreams: the colonies in America and the West Indies. The public frequently wished the other away — the Holy Roman Empire. Britain had been dragged into the morass of European politics from 1714 with the accession of George I, who was ruler of Hanover and one of the Electors of the Empire. Britannia ruled the waves, the people were told; surely it was better to leave the Continent to its own concerns, follow a ‘blue water policy’ and build up a maritime empire. In this bold and convincing account Brendan Simms shows

Bevis Hillier

A choice of quirky books

The humorist Paul Jennings wrote for Punch when it was still funny — that is, up to and including the editorship of the late Alan Coren. The humorist Paul Jennings wrote for Punch when it was still funny — that is, up to and including the editorship of the late Alan Coren. Jennings also wrote such books as Oddly Bodlikins (1953) and I Said Oddly, Diddle I? (1961). It was he who classified book reviewers as batchers, betchers (‘Betcher I could write it better than you’), bitchers, botchers and butchers. In this and my next review, I am cast as a promiscuous batcher. This first batch is of ‘quirky’ books;

Peter Oborne

Settling old scores

English cricket was in a desperate state seven years ago. The players had just been booed off the field after defeat at home by New Zealand. Team morale was poor, while there was little organisation and no vision. To the rescue came Duncan Fletcher, a little-known coach from Zimbabwe. He had few connections at the top of the England game, and employed his own methods. Fletcher turned out to have a remarkable knack for spotting the international potential of apparently middling players in the county game: Marcus Trescothik, Andrew Strauss, Michael Vaughan and Simon Jones are some of his personal picks. He had a quiet and inscrutable manner, preferring to

Byron Rogers

The mad emperor and his cannon

I approached this book with some trepidation, fearing it would be a load of old bollocks. For my one previous experience of Ethiopian history had been the following sentence in my daughter’s GCSE textbook, when, describing their defeat of a modern Italian army in 1896, the author, Tony McAleavy, wrote, ‘The Ethiopians castrated the Italian prisoners of war taken at Adowa.’ Not a history book you will note, but a textbook, so a whole generation of schoolchildren would read something that could affect forever their attitudes to Ethiopia and Africa. So why had I not heard of this atrocity? There were over 1,000 Italian POWs after Adowa — can you

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The ‘Foxy Knoxy’ case has stirred a deep prurience about women and murder

It was true in Orwell’s day and it’s no less true now: there is nothing the British public likes more than a good, old-fashioned, grisly murder. Sixty-odd years ago, when Orwell wrote The Decline of the English Murder, the crucial ingredient was some hidden, shameful, sexual misdemeanour – almost always adultery, but sometimes homosexuality. The implication being that back then committing murder, and thus risking a possible death sentence from the courts, was preferable to some sordid secret leaking out. The English murders, the ones the public liked, were those committed in desperation by the deeply ashamed – a consequence, as Orwell saw it, of a hypocritical society. We have

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 17 November 2007

The slender book above was the last thing Roald Dahl ever wrote, and was published posthumously by the British Railways Board. It is something of a deathbed conversion. The author spends the whole of it telling children — whom he describes as ‘uncivilised little savages with bad habits and no manners’ — how to behave themselves, in VERY LARGE RED CAPITAL LETTERS. ‘I have a VERY DIFFICULT JOB here,’ he admits in the first paragraph. ‘Young people are fed up with being told by grown-ups WHAT TO DO and WHAT NOT TO DO … and now I am going to have to tell you WHAT TO DO and WHAT NOT

Wednesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Not Writing is the new Not Reading

Jack Shafer explains why journalists are so keen on writing about the Hollywood wrtiers’ strike and, more to the point, why we all root for the plucky scribblers in this fight. There’s a natural hack-to-hack sympathy here that might, one would imagine, infuriate teachers or postmen or miners or train drivers whose industrial action tends not to be portrayed quite so sympathetically. But it is also true that, as Shafer says, many (perhaps even most) journalists would secretly rather be a Hollywood screenwriter than a beat reporter or pundit. There’s a fine New Yorker cartoon in which one journo wearliy says to his drinking partner – all such conversations must

Monday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Literary Oneupmanship Cont.

In the comments to this post on Bookmanship I’m delighted to see commenter Jim make excellent use of what one would term the Foreign Poet Gambit: Personally I’d swing for the fences with: “A shame to devote so much time and money to yet another translation of a writer who does not wholly merit his reputation when the great Gaglyarev remains unknown outside his native tongue.”  I would respond to all inquiries about Gaglyarev with an archly raised eyebrow, and go get another drink.

Saturday

Theodore Dalrymple

If music be the food of health…

Oliver Sacks is a famed neurologist whose books of case studies combine the latest neuroscience with deep humanistic learning. He not only describes his patients with great precision, but also seeks to enter empathically into their experience and then, by means of limpid prose, to communicate it to the general reader. Ever since the publication of his book Awakenings, about patients with encephalitis lethargica who were recalled to life by the drug levodopa after decades of immobility, he has deservedly found a large and appreciative audience. He has had many imitators but no equals. Case studies are not favoured in contemporary medical literature as they once were. True, medical journals

Digby Durrant

Pity the oppressed; fear the oppressed

The fight to abolish slavery and its consequences is an immense subject so it’s not surprising that the Nigerian Simi Bedford’s new book could be likened to the kind of film once made famous by Cecil B De Mille with a cast of thousands and dramatic events at every turn. There are no quiet pages here. We start in Oyo, the capital of a West African tribe for whom a constant state of tribal war is an economic necessity and the internal struggles for power inevitable and deadly. All smiles are lies and hidden threats; here are screams in the night. Abiola is being trained as a warrior. The least

Tom Holland

A tale of two timeless epics

It is oddly moving, at a time when mention of the name ‘Homer’ invariably conjures up thoughts of donuts, to know that the author of the Odyssey remains the first classical author to whom most children are introduced. At my daughters’ primary school, for instance, they are told the story of the Cyclops in Year One. The thread of continuity that this represents reaches back ultimately all the way to archaic Greece. Homer’s epics, wrote Alexander Pope, are ‘like a copious nursery, which contains the seeds and first productions of every kind’. The metaphor is doubly effective: for Homer stands at the beginning both of the Western literary tradition and

Olivia Cole

Monsters and others

Olivia Cole ‘Make somebody up’ was the instruction to the 23 contributors to Zadie Smith’s short-story anthology The Book of Other People, published to benefit the Brooklyn children’s writing charity, 826 NYC, founded by Dave Eggers. While that might seem about as radical a command as telling screenwriters to use dialogue, the only rule being that each story should take its title from the central character, none reads as though pinched and twisted to fit the theme. That said, of course, there are those that feel they must wriggle in the opposite direction. ‘Monster’, by Toby Litt, threatens for a moment to become some sort of Bildungsroman for monsters: ‘One

Stanley Johnson

Some like it cold

I first went to Antarctica in the (Antarctic) summer of 1984 on board the John Biscoe, a research and supply ship belonging to the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). Over a period of several weeks we visited various BAS stations on the Antarctic peninsula, including a small station known as Faraday at which vital measurements of the Earth’s ozone layer were being conducted. I remember climbing up into the loft with my fellow-passenger and now good friend Adrian Berry, science correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, past piles of cornflake packets, Bovril jars and tins of Horlicks which were stored for convenience in the roof, to see the Dobson’s photo-spectrometer at work.

Andrew Roberts

Talking it over

‘It is not easy to see how things could be worsened by a parley at the summit,’ said Winston Churchill in a speech on foreign policy in Edinburgh in February 1950, thus coining a phrase for meetings of international leaders that has stuck, and indeed spawned further ones, such as ‘summitry’ and ‘summiteer’. Churchill’s hope for a parley with Truman and Stalin failed in 1950, but his general concept is still with us. Of course, as David Reynolds points out in this fine and thoughtful book, summitry had been around since Babylonian times, and on occasions, like Henry VIII’s parley with François I on the Field of the Cloth of