Book Reviews

Thirteen years ago, I was driving with a German friend through the Russian city of Kaliningrad (until 1945 the east Prussian city of Königsberg) when my friend said, ‘There’s the old German army barracks.’ As we stared glumly at the bleak building, darkness settled on me, brought on by three words, each — on its own — innocuous: German, army, barracks. The old clichés rose again: discipline, efficiency, inhumanity, conquest — images, I realised, not of Germany but of Prussia. There is, however, another view: that the austere but enlightened Prussian ethos — that of an impartial civil service, a liberal penal code, an excellent education system — was, under

In The Master, a fictional portrait of Henry James, Colm Tóibín constructed a convincing and ultimately moving account of a man who craved — albeit ambiguously — emotional distance. His life is shown as balancing between a yearning for and shrinking from personal intimacy; involving what can be seen as a ‘betrayal’ of the world, ostensibly at least for the sake of his art. In Mothers and Sons, Tóibín returns to the theme of the deep need for, and painful cost of, emotional withdrawal, this time concentrating upon the maternal bond. All of the short stories in this collection are about separation, which is felt as both necessary and a

It’s that time of year again, the last week of August, and people are already jockeying in order to cash in a year from now,  the tenth anniversary of Diana’s death.  Tina Brown, a lady who would dumb down Big Brother, was first out of the blocks, her book promising to reveal unheard-of-before secrets. Incidentally, Tina Brown never met Diana and does not know many people who did, but is nevertheless considered a Diana expert. As far as I’m concerned, the only person outside Di’s family who is qualified to write about her is Rosa Monckton, Dominic Lawson’s wife, who not only was a good friend to the tragic one, she also knew about

When people use the word ‘journalese’, they always do so pejoratively. They are not thinking of James Cameron, Bernard Levin or Walter Winchell. They mean a style that traffics in clichés. The poet B. I. Isherville has derided that kind of writing: Where every heresy is rankAnd every rank is serried;Where every crook is hatchet-faced,And every hatchet buried. There are cliché headlines, too, and for some reason articles on food seem specially to attract them. Any novice sub-editor thinks he or she is being wildly or Wildely witty in heading a piece on puddings ‘Just desserts’. And was there ever a curry recipe that was not headed ‘Some like it

Veiled roman-à-clef novels of this kind are routinely hyped by their publishers as being certain to cause uproar and mayhem. Often they do nothing of the kind and pass almost unnoticed. Rachel Johnson’s acerbic and well-observed bitch-up of life on a Notting Hill communal garden justifies the copious pre-publicity, and I can report that early copies are already playing very badly in the yoga and pilates classes of W. 11, and in the numerous organic food shops and boutiques where the real-life counterparts of her characters assemble. By the time the schools go back in September, and the full Notting Hill brigade has remarshalled in the hood after the summer,

Only if you have spent the last few months living in a remote corner of Chad will you not have noticed that this year marks the centenary of Sir John Betjeman’s birth. We have already seen telly programmes, church restoration appeals, commemorative CDs of his readings, Cornish cliff walks and special outings on West Country railways in honour of a man whose genius consisted, as the late Sir Peter Parker put it, in ‘an infinite capacity for taking trains’. Now come two new lives: A. N. Wilson’s snappy and stylish short biography, and a still hefty one-volume boiling-down of Bevis Hillier’s socking three-volume authorised life. Though it’s a matter for