Book Reviews

At the centre of James Meek’s new novel — a fine successor to The People’s Act of Love — there is a brilliant scene in which Adam Kellas, a war correspondent, is watching two Taliban lorries driving along a ridge. In the no-man’s-land between is an ancient Soviet tank occupied by Astrid, an American correspondent with whom Kellas has just spent the night, and an Afghan. She is not concerned with the lorries: she has just challenged the man to hit a tree stump in the distance. Kellas asks the Afghan commander beside him, who is infuriated by the tomfoolery, why he doesn’t instruct the tank to fire at the

A. N. Wilson commemorates the life of the great journalist Hugh Massingberd  The following is the address given at his funeral at Kensal Green Crematorium on 2 January We were all so lucky to bask in Hugh’s generous friendship. He included in this friendship his family, his children, Harriet and Luke, Gareth, the father of Hugh’s grandson Jack, whose arrival on this planet caused him such immense joy, Christine and of course Ripples, his wife, friend for life and ministering angel, as well as dozens of happy men and women, boys and girls, all of them cheered up by his mere appearance, or by one of his frequent, semi-legible post-cards written

Tugging the review copy of Granta 100 out of its jiffy bag, I decided to conduct a little experiment. I would write down the names of the writers whom I expected to find in it and award myself marks out of ten. Two minutes’ thought produced the following: Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Alan Hollinghurst, Hanif Kureishi, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jay McInerney, Jonathan Safran Foer and Zadie Smith. Two more minutes with the contents table, scrupulously ignoring Zadie Smith who doesn’t contribute a piece but takes part in one of the features, produced a score of six. Successful literary magazines play to their strengths, of course: anyone who

In 1999, Rosalind Bleach, whose mother had just died, opened for the first time her rosewood bureau with a swivel top and four drawers. She discovered 41 letters written between 1907 and 1915 by the Master — Henry James — to Mrs Ford, a now nearly forgotten upper-middle-class woman who lived at Budds, a country house six miles from James’s house at Rye. Everything about these letters breathes another age. James wrote, with a Harrods stylograph pen, or dictated, up to 40,000 letters, which eventually will be published in perhaps 140 volumes. These letters to Mrs Ford have never been seen before. Rosalind Bleach doesn’t know how her mother —

The century or so before the Civil War, the era of the Tudors and early Stuarts, did not think well of itself. Contemporaries lamented the decline of social responsibility in the nobility and gentry, the erosion of honour and virtue, the spread of enclosures, the parasitism and arrivisme of wealth, and the emptiness and falsity of its display. The picture has often been endorsed in later generations, from both the traditionalist Right and the anti-aristocratic Left, but Adam Nicolson has an altogether happier image of the period. There flourished, he tells us, a ‘communal wisdom’, ‘in which principles of hierarchy and of mutuality were deeply embedded’. Its ‘heart’ or ‘heartland’

Patrick Modiano is a nostalgic novelist who has consistently shown courage in investigating the boundaries between duty and loyalty. This ambiguity has featured in all his novels and seems to have had its roots in the character of his own father, whose activities in the troubled era of wartime and post-war Paris have left their mark on his writing. Conscious of his flawed moral inheritance, Modiano has applied himself to testing the limits of his own freedom and has found that shame is not so easily dispersed. It is a quality that inhabits all his elegantly written novels and is equally present in Dans le Café de la Jeunesse Perdue