Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

He does not know how much he does not know

There’s a wonderful story in this book, told by the biologist Lewis Wolpert, about a vistor to the office of the physicist Niels Bohr. The visitor, a fellow scientist, was astonished to see a horseshoe nailed above the Nobel laureate’s desk. ‘Surely you don’t believe that horseshoe will bring you luck?’ he said. ‘I believe no such thing, my good friend,’ replied Bohr. ‘Not at all. I am scarcely likely to believe in such foolish nonsense. However, I am told that a horseshoe will bring you good luck whether you believe in it or not.’ As John Humphrys says, that’s ‘funny and profound in the same breath’. I wish the

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Papering over the cracks

The first thing to be said about this combination of history, autobiography and polemic is how heavy it is — not in the literary sense, though it is by no means light reading, but in the literal sense that it is a surprising weight in the hand. Befitting its title, it is printed on unusually thick, glossy paper, the better to carry a set of beautiful illustrations relating to the development of paper money and the follies and manias connected with it. Befitting its multimillionaire publisher-financier-connoisseur author, the book is an idiosyncratic artefact, a craftsman-made container for the distillate of a lifetime’s observation of the interaction of paper and wealth.

Jonathan Mirsky

The very special relationship

‘Here is a hot potato,’ The Spectator’s book review editor wrote in a note accompanying this book. Radioactive, actually. In 2006 Chicago professor John Mearsheimer and Harvard’s Stephen Walt posted a version of an article they had written on the Israel lobby for the London Review of Books on a Harvard faculty website. It was downloaded more than 275,000 times, and provoked what the authors call a firestorm of abuse. Perhaps the most ferocious denunciation, 43 pages long, came from Professor Alan Dershowitz of the Harvard Law School: This study is so filled with distortions, so empty of originality or new evidence, so tendentious in its tone, so lacking in

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Not quite there yet

In political journalism, as in warfare, relish is taken in a parade of defectors. Media neocons will therefore cheer the publication of the very personal tale of one Observer journalist’s journey from the dovecote to the hawks’ nest, not least on the issue of global terrorism and fundamentalist Islam. The author — once what he calls a ‘left-liberal’ — now sees this as the greatest threat facing the West. ‘Wake up, and smell the cordite,’ he writes. Andrew Anthony is an inspired phrasemaker and the phrase will serve for many armchair crusaders as a six-word summary of a 300-page book. Which is a pity, because this is a more interesting

Jonathan Keates

The undiscovered county

Worcestershire is England’s most undervalued county. Sauce, Elgar and cricket, not necessarily in that order, are what most people associate with the name. Otherwise it is that place we cross on our way to Herefordshire, its far smarter western neighbour, or the territory glimpsed on either side of the M5 as we whiz northwards to Birmingham, whose sprawl has chewed up a sizeable part of the ancient shire. Among those small towns which ‘heritage’ enthusiasts like to claim as a distinctive English speciality, Pershore, Upton and Bewdley must be among the most spectacularly unvisited. Georgian canals, failed spas, even urban schadenfreude, have their buffs and adepts, but which of these

Andrew Taylor

No end to hostilities

The war in Iraq cast a long shadow over Minette Walters’ previous novel, The Devil’s Feather, and it also plays a part in her new one. Lieutenant Charles Acland suffers horrific head injuries, including the loss of an eye, when he runs into an ambush while leading a convoy on the Basra-Baghdad highway. The two troopers with him in his Scimitar reconnaissance vehicle are killed. Invalided to the UK, Charles makes a remarkable physical recovery from his injuries in a Birmingham hospital. But he refuses the cosmetic surgery which could have reduced the visible damage on his shattered face, and his emotional state worries his doctors. Churlish and withdrawn, he

Sarah Burton

Nanny comes to the rescue

Footballers’ wives and girlfriends, pop stars’ and politicians’ sons and daughters, are gilded by proximity to the golden ones, often regardless of their own intrinsic talent (or lack of it). It is unusual to find this phenomenon operating upwards through the generations, however. Jennie Churchill, despite her great beauty, charisma, notorious marriages, and reputed 200 lovers, would not merit a page in the history books were it not for the place deservedly reserved there for her son. Anne Sebba dutifully makes a case for Lady Randolph Churchill’s achievements in her own right, but they do not exceed those of a legion of other contemporary politicians’ wives or society hostesses. There

Anthony Howard

A diffident pioneer

Now Saga’s agony aunt, Katharine Whitehorn, has for more than 50 years been a trail-blazer in British journalism. Starting out as a member of the talented writing team on Picture Post, she went on (stopping off only briefly at Woman’s Own) to found the celebrated ‘Roundabout’ column in The Spectator before being scooped up by David Astor’s Observer. There, under one guise or another, she spent a remarkable 36 years until falling foul of some trendy young fly-by-night installed by the Guardian in 1996. If never perhaps the most renowned female journalist of her day, she was arguably the most distinguished — the pioneer who pushed the frontiers of women’s

Raymond Carr

The teddy bares his teeth

Ever since he could read and write John Betjeman felt himself destined to become a poet. Later he wrote, ‘I have always preferred it [poetry], knowing that its composition was my vocation and that anything else I wrote has been primarily a means of earning money in order to write poetry.’ In so doing he wrote a great deal of prose. Stephen Games gives a superb selection of his journalism, his correspondence, the texts of his broadcast talks and the scripts of his television appearances. By the1960s his radio talks and TV appearances had made him a familiar figure. To his fans he was a national treasure rightly created Poet

Allan Massie

The magnum opus of Compton Mackenzie

On Capri in 1925 Scott Fitzgerald met his ‘old idol’ Compton Mackenzie and found him ‘cordial, attractive and pleasantly mundane. You get no sense from him that he feels his work has gone to pieces. He’s not pompous about his present output. I think he’s just tired. The war wrecked him as it did Wells and many of that generation.’ Fitzgerald himself survives, on the strength of two and a half novels and perhaps a dozen short stories, but, except in Scotland, Mackenzie is, I surmise, more or less forgotten, and even in Scotland it’s only Whisky Galore and perhaps his Highland farces which keep his name alive. It will

Friday

Mark Amory

Isn’t saying The Brothers Karamazov rather idiotic?

On holiday I read (not reread I am afraid in my case, as people tend to claim about great classics) The Karamazov Brothers, in a new translation from Penguin. The moment I saw the title I wondered how we had all been persuaded to call it The Brothers Karamazov all these years. Talking about the Brothers Smith sounds very affected. Though the Arts Editor here now informs me that it is acceptable to say The Brothers Grimm.

Saturday

Interconnect

A life in pictures

Jonathan Coe’s gloomy new novel will surprise fans of The Rotters’ Club and What a Carve-Up!, but it need not disappoint them. In taking on the voice of Rosamond, an elderly, suicidal lesbian, Coe shows an admirable refusal to be pigeonholed. Like many contemporary novelists (Penelope Lively, Thomas Keneally, Alan Judd), Coe is concerned with the emotional dislocation caused by the second world war and its impact on succeeding generations. In common with these novelists, he chiefly concerns himself with the lives of women, with the domestic aftermath of the experience of upheaval and loss. Aged eight, Rosamond is evacuated from Birmingham, torn away from her best friend and first-love

Interconnect

Rich man, poor man, communist, facist

At the beginning, it was rather like a bizarre round of ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor’. Decca ran away to the Spanish civil war; Unity went to Munich and made friends with Hitler; Diana bolted with the founder of English Fascism and then went to prison; Pamela stayed at home; Debo ended up with Chatsworth; and Nancy wrote some very good books. The Mitford sisters’ fame originated, mostly, in newspaper scandals of the 1930s, to the horror of their parents, who believed that a gentlewoman’s name should appear in newspapers only twice, on her marriage and on her death. (According to Decca, Lady Redesdale grew to dread the sight of the

Raymond Carr

The enemy within

On the 9 August 378 AD near Adrianople in Thrace the Roman army of the East was massacred and the Emperor Valens left dead on the battlefield by an army of barbarian Goths. It was, as Alessandro Barbero’s title claims, ‘The Day of the Barbarians’. He gives a highly readable account of the campaign and its consequences for an empire that stretched from Hadrian’s Wall to the fortresses on the Rhine, the Danube and the Tigris. It included what is now Turkey and the Middle East, Egypt and a strip of territory along the southern shore of the Mediterranean. Beyond the frontier lay the restive German barbarian tribes and the

Interconnect

How did the Colosseum?

Quid have we here? Nihil less than a smart parody of all the usual travel guides and one that manages to sustain its originality by delivering genuine, if often larky or unashamedly salacious, information about ancient Rome in a handy modern format. Provincial visitors, lugging their impedimenta up the Appian Way might have found it a useful vademecum while the Caesars were on the throne. Today’s 50-euro-a-day tourist will find it hardly less enlightening. Philip Matyszak both knows his stuff and manages to serve it in deliciae-sized portions. His guide honours all the usual categories of sights and pleasures and alerts travellers to the perennial dangers, not forgetting mislaid or

Interconnect

Small Room in a Hotel

Small Room in a Hotel In this cool cube of marble I am valid but invisible As an image caught in a camera But not yet reproduced. My reappearance from confinement Is that of a lavatory Houdini Except that no one notices And the wonder is reduced to a trickle. How many men have died at stool, Bent in that vain rictus of hope That gives to their flushed features The terrifying squint of a Samurai? Between philosophical reflections And the final rebellion of blood Is the same fine line as between shadows And the ignorant earth which casts them. Why are we so eager for shadows? Is reality so

Interconnect

Patterns from the past

Michael Ondaatje’s legion of admirers will not expect a novel constructed around a linear narrative, or even cohering in the developing consciousness of a central character. ‘Everything is collage,’ he tells us in Divisadero, a novel which is perhaps over-full of self-referential pointers. The work, we are led to infer, is like a ‘helicoidal’ spiralling belfry, or ‘like a villanelle … the way the villanelle’s form refuses to move forward in linear development’. It is like a ‘triptych’, offering parallel panels. ‘We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell,’ says one character (it hardly matters which). Narrative in Divisadero splinters, and shards of glass

Interconnect

Return to form

Richard Russo is one of those writers, and they are many — indeed, they are most — whose work you may have read and enjoyed and yet whose name you may not instantly recognise. These are the stalwarts, the broad-shouldered, able-bodied men and women of literature, the workers, who for some reason lack that instant brand recognition that means the next time you’re in a bookshop or a library you’re going to head for their spot on the shelf to see what they’ve been up to lately. With his novel Empire Falls (2001) it looked as though Russo was about to emerge from obscurity into the sunny uplands of bookshop

Vernon Scannell

War Words

War Words I heard the other day of soldiers back from serving in the fighting in Iraq, not wounded bodily but suffering from ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’ — ‘bomb- happy’s’ what they called it in the war on Hitler; ‘shell-shock’ in the one before. And then I thought, Ah yes, I can recall D-Day, June the sixth in forty-four, wading through chest-high waves to reach the shore (the stretch I later learned was called Sword Beach, a place I didn’t really wish to reach). What I that day with many others shared was ‘pre-traumatic stress disorder’, or, as specialists might say, we were ‘shit-scared’. Vernon Scannell

Interconnect

Good account of bad times

Perhaps because he talks so much and has been in politics for so long, Roy Hattersley has the happy knack of making you believe that he was there at the events he describes. And if he wasn’t, he most certainly should have been, to the undeniable advantage of all concerned. For instance, the miners should have not had their war against the coalowners in 1926, precipitating the abortive General Strike, because it was the wrong time. Hattersley could have told them that, had it not happened six years before he was born. But by heavens, he tells them now. ‘It was a bad moment for the miners to choose,’ he