Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Allan Massie

When the going was better

In January 1923 Aldous Huxley signed a contract with Chatto & Windus, which would guarantee him a regular income for three years. He would be paid £500 per annum and in return agreed to ‘supply the publishers with two new works of fiction a year, one of them to be a full-length novel’—an onerous undertaking. The royalty rate was to start at 15 per cent, rising to 20 per cent after the first 2,000 copies sold, and to 25 per cent after 8,000. This contract was regularly renewed over the years, with some emendations (one non-fiction book being substituted for one of the works of fiction) while by the second

Anthony Daniels

Kicking a man when he’s down

The desire to wage war as if it were keyhole surgery is, after a certain fashion, a laudable one. It indicates that a government can no longer afford to treat its own population, if not that of the enemy, as mere cannon fodder. Each soldier killed is ten, a hundred, votes lost. But the new-found tenderness towards the lives of soldiers has two inconveniences. The first is that keyhole-surgery war is a chimera, and what is impossible cannot be desirable. The second is that the decline of what one might call the cannon-fodder spirit makes the prosecution of long-drawn out wars and military occupations very difficult. Keyhole surgery is limited

Patrick Skene-Catling

A rector wrecked

John Walsh’s new novel is a paradoxically enjoyable account of the decline and fall of an Exeter College student of theology who becomes for a short time a performer in vaudeville and then an evangelist of Longford innocence and charity who believes he can perceive potential good in even the most depraved young women. Walsh frames this moral tale in the few known facts of the real life of the Reverend Harold Davidson (1875-1937), for a quarter of a century the rector of the country parish of Stiffkey and Morston in Norfolk, who spent most of every week in London in the 1920s and early 1930s, trying to save girls

David Gilmour

The lion or the donkey?

Giuseppe Garibaldi must be among the most commemorated secular figures in history. Italian towns invariably have a square or a street named after him, and many contain statues, stations and other sites as well. In Genoa Garibaldi is represented not only by a vast equestrian bronze in front of the Opera but also, in diverse and equally inappropriate ways, by a Via Garibaldi (a street of Renaissance palaces), a Piazza Garibaldi (a tiny space with a shop selling motorbikes), a Vico Garibaldi (a dingy cul-de-sac) and the Galleria Garibaldi (not an art gallery in this instance but a tunnel for motorcars — useful in a city which tried to solve

James Joll

Myth and minstrelsy

Winston Churchill once famously declared, ‘this pudding has no theme’. Michael Alexander’s book, subtitled ‘The Middle Ages in Modern England’ — a period which in his view stretches from well before the Industrial Revolution virtually to contemporary culture — has far too many. His contention is that medievalism sprang from two main impulses: the rise of antiquarianism in the second half of the 18th century, studying the material evidence of the Middle Ages, on one hand, and the imaginative adoption of what were conceived to be the ideals of that era, on the other. As a word, it is surprisingly recent with the first recorded use in the Gentleman’s Magazine

Edward Norman

The saviour of the world

In Britain public money is being allocated to identify and promote ‘moderate’ Islam, in the hope of discouraging the ‘extremists’ and ‘fundamentalists’ whose supposed misunderstanding of the Faith is, in fact, the version most practised in those societies where it is the majority religion. The result is not likely to be much more than the detachment of a favoured westernised coterie of leaders from the main body of believers. The effects on the State are much more serious: the British government, after two centuries of receding Christian confessionalism, is beginning to endorse a particular interpretation of religious teaching — in the form of ‘moderate’ Islam — and even to offer

Byron Rogers

Agony rather than ecstasy

One of the most interesting conversations I have ever had took place in a Carmarthen pub. There were three of us, the others a builder and a policeman. At one point the policeman told us the weight of a severed human head: it was 14 pounds, and he should know, he went on, having had to carry one in a hat-box. The conversation then turned, somehow, to impotence, which we agreed was something all sensible men should welcome. ‘Be a chance to talk to the wife,’ said the builder. Unfortunately not every man can be a philosopher king in the Black Horse. Professor Angus McLaren’s book sets out to be

Jonathan Mirsky

A monster in the making

One day in 1915, when Stalin was in exile in Siberia, he was eating dinner with a few other revolutionaries. Everyone had to say what his greatest pleasure was. Some said women, others — can this be true? — ‘earnestly replied that it was the progress of dialectical materialism towards the workers’ paradise’. Stalin, known then as ‘Soso’ or ‘Koba’, replied, ‘My greatest pleasure is to choose one’s victim, prepare one’s plans minutely, slake an implacable vengeance, and then go to bed. There’s nothing sweeter in the world.’ In Number 10 and the White House there may be those who would like to slake their implacable vengeances, but — and

Tom Fleming

Delicately exposing the past

John Preston’s fourth novel is a quiet dramatisation of the famous Sutton Hoo dig of 1939. Known as ‘the British Tutankhamun’, the excavation in Suffolk uncovered several Anglo-Saxon cemeteries, including one magnificent royal ship burial, and was thrown into relief in September that year by the outbreak of the second world war. The author exploits his setting subtly, as his fragile characters contemplate their lives in the face of history. It’s all a far cry from the mischievous humour of his last novel, Kings of the Roundhouse. Preston approaches the drama of the excavation, as it develops over the summer months, through the eyes of three of the people involved:

Justin Marozzi

Brushes with strangers

There are probably better ways to welcome tourists to your country than with the words, ‘Go home England. Bastards.’ To their credit, Henry Hemming and his travelling companion Al, both suspected by the Slovak border guards of being Islamic extremists and denied entry, do not go home. With a retaliatory cry of, ‘Go home Slovakia. Bastards,’ they drive away in their beloved truck Yasmine and the journey continues. And it is quite a journey. Fresh from university, the two fledgling artists travel through Turkey, Iran, Oman, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Israel and Iraq. Their mission: ‘an artistic expedition to the heart of the Islamic world in order to

Saturday

Philip Hensher

A change of weather

One day in July 1945, a public schoolboy with a straw hat on stood with his trunk on Bishop’s Stortford station, and called out ‘My man’ to the porter. ‘No,’ the porter said, ‘that sort of thing is all over now.’ Whether it was or not, the Attlee period, 1945-51, is the most decisive and dramatic of our peacetime history. Society had utterly changed, and a government of extraordinary ambition set an agenda which was to go unchallenged until 1979. It was a period of great deprivation — rationing not only continued, but tightened after the war — and memory tended for decades afterwards to dredge up the horrible occasion

Andrew Taylor

Challenging the Kremlin

Death puts a different value on a person, usually a smaller one than in life. Sometimes, how- ever, the opposite happens. For instance, how many medieval Archbishops of Canterbury can most of us name off-hand apart from St Thomas Becket? In some cases, death makes the man. It is likely that Alexander Litvinenko will be another example. He died in London on 23 November 2006, poisoned slowly and painfully with polonium-210 radiation. His murder, in circumstances recalling some of the fruitier episodes of Cold War espionage, brought him instant global celebrity. During his life, he and his fellow author, the historian Yuri Felshtinsky, had found it impossible to find a

Leanda De-Lisle

The plot thickens

John Adamson’s The Noble Revolt asserts the crucial role of political ideas in the coming cataclysm of the English civil war. His focus is close: the 18 months before the final breach between Charles I and Parliament, but it is as scholarly in depth as it is cinematic in scope. Here is a dramatic retelling of a story we thought we knew well. The old Marxist interpretation of class struggle is put to rest and so is the revisionist view that the civil war was brought about by unfortunate conjunctions of personalities and events. Instead we discover how a small group of ideologically motivated noblemen came to dominate the state

William Brett

At the feast

In 2003, two days after his now infamous interview with Phil Spector was published in the Daily Telegraph, Mick Brown heard that a woman had been shot and killed in the legendary pop producer’s mansion. Most journalists in his position would be exhilarated by their good fortune — the interview was the first that Spector had given in decades, and he had spoken openly about his unstable mental condition. But Brown’s reaction wasn’t to call up his agent and start cashing in. Instead, he panicked that Spector had read the interview and murdered the personal assistant that had organised it. Although he had no hesitation in suspecting the notorious gun-lover

James Buchan

How the catastrophe happened

Ali A. Allawi has spent much of his life in exile from his native Iraq. Born into a family that had served the royal family that came to grief in 1958, he spent his childhood at schools in England and his career abroad as an academic, engineer and banker. Active among the émigré anti-Baathists in the 1990s, he returned in September 2003 to find his unfortunate country disintegrating into civil war with Britain and America and a troupe of home-grown adventurers and crooks hurrying it on. After brief and frustrating stints as Trade and Defence Ministers in 2003 and 2004, Allawi was elected to the Transitional National Assembly for the

Robert Stewart

The unkindest cut

From the day in 1513 that Balboa stared at the Pacific from a peak in Darien men dreamed of cutting a path from the Atlantic to the Pacific through the ‘Golden Isthmus’ of Panama. Not until the 19th century did the dream become a realistic engineering possibility. We have become blasé about scientific breakthroughs and technological innovation, but men and women of that age marvelled at the broad prospect opened up to humanity by the application of science, which would increase trade and wealth and, in their wake, foster international co-operation and lead humanity to ever-higher levels of civilisation. Ironic it was that the Panama Canal, the crowning achievement of

Stuart Wheeler

Only obeying orders

Would you ever torture somebody? ‘Of course not’, you say. The author, Professor (of psychology) Philip Zimbardo, disagrees. His view is ‘any deed that any human being has ever committed, however horrible, is possible for any of us — under the right or wrong situational forces’. The evidence he adduces for this shocking proposition is formidable. Take two pieces of research, starting with the Stanford Prison Experiment. Twenty young male volunteers in Palo Alto, California, most of them undergraduates, none with psychological abnormalities, were divided at random in 1971 into ten ‘prisoners’ and ten ‘guards’. The guards were instructed to be tough. Within hours they had turned into sadistic bullies

Blair Worden

The end of merriment

‘Political correctness’, which divides and galls our society, is a modern manifestation of an old impulse which periodically demands, in the cause of social improvement, the curtailment of pleasure and the inhibition of language and thought. It happened with the rise of Puritanism midway through the reign of Elizabeth I, when stage-plays and popular enjoyments came under fire. Something like it occurred a century or so later, in the wake of the Glorious Revolution, with the cult of ‘politeness’. Ben Wilson’s subject is the emergence of what contemporaries called ‘cant’ over (roughly) the first three decades of the 19th century, when the preconditions of Victorian propriety and conformity were established.

Andro Linklater

Notes from the Underground

Armadillos dig, that’s what they do best, but the three-banded variety from South America — and anyone brought up on the Just So stories will know this already — can also curl up like a hedgehog, and protect its back with layers of leather armour- plating. So the heroes of Malvinas Requiem, a band of Argentine deserters who dig themselves an underground hiding-place from the horrors of the Falklands war, are bound to call themselves ‘dillos’. To convey the flavour of their fight for survival, as Brits grapple with Argies for control of the islands, there is one other fact, or fiction, about the armadillo that needs to be known.

Saturday

Anne Applebaum

Extraordinary champion of ordinary people

Some years ago, I went to visit the offices of a small Moscow newspaper, Novaya Gazeta.   Novaya Gazeta has always led a precarious existence — it is one of the few publications that has consistently opposed the Kremlin — and that day the editor was particularly distracted. While I was talking to him, the telephone kept ringing: one of his reporters had been arrested in Chechnya. Since another Novaya Gazeta reporter had recently died in mysterious circumstances, and since yet another had been beaten up quite badly, he was worried. The Russian authorities, he said, were capable of anything. That reporter, Anna Politkovskaya, was later released. But as it