Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

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

D J-Taylor

The fading of the Cambridge dawn

An exhausting life it must be, being the hero of a Frederic Raphael novel. There you are, writing your bestselling books, finessing those Hollywood film scripts that pile up on your doorstep like fallen leaves, pondering those offers to sit on the boards of TV companies and wondering all the while what the nasty man in the Times Literary Supplement is going to say about you, and then alongside floats a whole convoy of merely human dilemmas craving resolution. The sister of your dead college chum wants a saucy threesome, the admiring fan met in Venice murmurs, ‘I would do anything to spend time with you’, while the wife of

Marcus Berkmann

Rock’n’roll, drugs and a good roast

Eric Clapton lost his virginity to ‘a girl called Lucy who was older than me, and whose boyfriend was out of town’. Lucky chap, you immediately think, and indeed, he seems to have lived a charmed life, which he hasn’t enjoyed one bit. ‘Something more profound also happened when I got this guitar. As soon as I got it, I suddenly didn’t want it any more. This was a phenomenon which was to rear its head throughout my life, and cause many difficulties in the future.’ He first saw the Beatles in the audience at the Crawdaddy club in Richmond: ‘I suppose that it was only natural that I would

Ian Thomson

Cargoes of despair

Not long ago, I was invited to lunch at a plantation home in Jamaica. The sound of cocktail-making (a clinking of crushed ice against glass) greeted me at Worthy Park as bow-tied waiters served the guests at a long table draped in linen. The top brass of Jamaica’s sugar industry was there, enjoying the French wine and the chilled soursop juice. The waiters, with their plantation-bred obsequiousness, hurried to whisk flies away from our plates. For nearly three centuries the slave-grown sugar of Worthy Park has satisfied the British craving for tea (that ‘blood-sweetened beverage’, the abolitionist poet Southey called it), as well as for coffee, cakes and other confections.

John De-Falbe

Once happy havens

Leon Sciaky was born in Salonica in 1893, when the city was still a provincial Ottoman town. His family were grain merchants, Sephardic Jews who had been settled there for 400 years and still spoke Ladino at home. In concise, elegant prose, he describes in this memoir a childhood of Oriental pace and comforts, surrounded by Muslims and Christians, in which Turks, Macedonians, Bulgarians, Serbs and Greeks appeared to live in harmony. Among many beautiful passages about how life once was in the region, there is one of a visit with his grandfather to an outlying village which seems to belong to the Middle Ages, or Eden; at any rate,

Amanda Herries

Caroline’s back in town

The Sloane is dead — but long live the Sloane. Her mother, Caroline, and father, Henry — the original Hooray — may be in their natural retirement homes in the Shires or Scotland along with the family dog snug by the Aga in the cosy kitchen, but she, we now know, using her native skills, has burst out of her famous 1980s stereotype to adapt to the new order. It’s an amusing conceit, with enough truth for 20-year-olds to have a wry laugh at themselves. Twenty-five years ago, a series of articles written by that grandee of social observation Peter York, in the then vital directory of upper-middle-class social mores

Alistair Irwin

Causes and consequences

Despite its puzzlingly hideous appearance, this is an excellent book. Subtitled ‘Reflections on the History of the Twentieth Century’, it consists of 18 chapters being, with one exception, the texts of lectures given by Professor Howard between 1991 and 2003. It is not easy to craft a good lecture that reads well on the page, or vice versa for that matter; it is a trick that Sir Michael brings off brilliantly. The introductory section gives us a lucid reminder of how the process of Enlightenment that began in the 18th century created freedoms, admittedly, but uncertainties too, uncertainties that created the conditions for a century of conflict. Later sections cover

John Michell

Spirits, shamans and sceptics

When Professor Braude, a philosophy lecturer at the University of Maryland, told colleagues about his interest in psychical research, he was shocked and astonished by their reactions. They were angry and scornful and accused him of pandering to unreason. It would be the ruin of his career, they threatened. What is wrong with these people? he asks. Is it cowardice and fear of the unknown, or are they wilfully dishonest in ignoring his findings and persecuting him for drawing attention to things they do not want to hear about? That is the first of the mysteries displayed in this book. The others are centered upon notable characters in the history

Jonathan Cecil

Big is beautiful | 10 November 2007

It is odd to think that fatness — now known as obesity and apparently a serious problem — was not so long ago a subject for ribald hilarity. The disgraced clown Fatty Arbuckle was once considered funny simply because of his size. The fictional schoolboy Billy Bunter and his sister Bessie were icons of greedy grotesquerie, and real-life overweight girls and boys — rarer than nowadays — had to endure much unkind teasing at school. Hattie Jacques’s schooldays were no exception, and in her career as an actress her avoirdupois, while good for business, limited her choice of roles. She was by no means an unattractive woman; looking at the

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Dignity at all costs

If George W. Bush goes down in history as the most disastrous US president since Herbert Hoover, it will be because of his foreign policy mistakes. Yet the person who tutored candidate Bush on foreign policy, co-ordinated it in his first term and was its public face in his second term is probably the most respected member of the Bush administration both at home and abroad. This is the paradox that Marcus Mabry sets out to explain in Condoleezza Rice: Naked Ambition. Throughout the Bush administration, Rice has been the most effective emissary for the President’s foreign policy because she doesn’t fit the stereotype. Rather than being a shoot-first-ask-questions-later wannabe