Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

William Leith

Man’s craving for spirits

When I finished this book I asked myself why, considering its undoubted qualities, I found it so difficult and strenuous. Reading it, I felt like a man inching up a sheer rock-face. Sometimes I would get to the top and take a peek at the view. But then I’d come crashing down again, and wonder what it was I’d actually seen. But I didn’t give up. I got to the end, and lay down on my bed, and began to wonder what it was all about. There were times when, briefly, I believed I had grasped what Marina Warner, the exceptionally well-informed author, was trying to tell me. But her

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Looking at language

No civilised person knows who John Humphrys is. I’ve looked into it and I discover he’s rather a sad case — an insomniac who telephones politicians at dawn and interrupts them while they’re still half asleep. This strange career has won him celebrity among the restless multitude who, like him, insist on getting up in the middle of the night. It has also won him a book contract. His last work was about sloppy English. So is the new one, but as he unfurls his endless series of hastily written gibberish it becomes clear that he’s less interested in inarticulacy than he is in his jumble sale of parochial antipathies.

Jonathan Mirsky

The time of the hedgehog

As I read this big, enthralling book I often wrote the words ‘muddle,’ ‘misunderstanding,’ and ‘the brink’ in the margins. From 1955, when Nikita Khrushchev came to power in the Soviet Union, until his dismissal, sudden, unexpected and brutal (but not violent) by his comrades and ex-protégés in 1964, the world teetered several times on the edge of nuclear war, most notably during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Khrushchev, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson were men of substance, imagination, even some genius — and yet they blundered through upheavals in Iraq (yes, then too), the Congo, Laos, Berlin and Egypt, threatening, feinting, risking and daring, usually with little reliable knowledge

Geoffrey Owen

Tycoons of our times

How should the lives of business tycoons be judged — by their personal wealth, by the size of the companies they created, or by how long their business survives after their death? If the last of these criteria is chosen, then the record of recent British business leaders is not impressive. A good many of the men and women who figure in this collection of business obituaries — mainly covering people who died in the last ten years — were shooting stars; they had brief moments of glory but no staying power. Freddie Laker pioneered low-cost air travel; Joe Hyman saw how polyester and other new fibres would transform the

Allan Mallinson

Apportioning the honours

Who, in the end, defeated Napoleon Bonaparte? This is the question that Robert Harvey, journalist and former MP, asks at the end of his most comprehensive account of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. It is pertinent, as he points out, since all the coalition members at one time or another lay claim to the honours: Dogged Austria deserves a large share of the credit for rising from defeat again and again. Prussia, after its lamentable initial performance, renewed some of its national pride at the end. Russia can claim credit for the 1812 campaign, in which although there was no great feat of Russian arms, the French were completely routed.

Gerard Noel

Bursting out of the closet

Born in 1947, Jeremy Norman belongs to the first generation of homosexual Englishmen able to express their sexuality openly and without fear of prosecution, courtesy of the Sexual Offences Act of 1967. As his entertaining memoir attests, Norman has certainly made the most of his freedom. Not only has his life been ‘a frenzied dance and feast of pleasure’ but, as an astute businessman, he has plundered the pink pound in a succession of enterprises including Heaven, the world’s most famous gay nightclub. And, perhaps most remarkably of all, he has lived to tell the tale. The 1967 Act did not change the world overnight. In Norman’s view, it took

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 25 November 2006

Action Cook Book (1965) by Len Deighton The fact that the cover of this book by Len Deighton shows a chap cooking spaghetti while wearing a gun lends itself to many interpretations. Was spaghetti so expensive in 1965 that it needed an armed guard? Will someone be paying the ultimate price for overcooking it? Is she checking him for nits? Was Deighton’s sense of his own masculinity so fragile that he needed a shoulder- holster and bird in a negligée to write about cooking? Is that an insufferably solemn question? But these are matters perhaps for the cultural historian. I will confine myself to saying that Action Cook Book was

Jane Gardam

The uninteresting survivor

C. K. Stead was Professor of English literature in the University of Auckland and is a highly esteemed literary critic and author. He is not, to my knowledge, a theologian but was urged to write this novel about the life of Judas Iscariot by the professor of religious studies at Victoria University because, ‘These are our stories. They must be constantly retold.’ Stead has, I would guess, used his recent awards to visit the Holy Land, for the beauty of Galilee, its atmosphere and light, and the looming presence of Jerusalem are some of the best things in the book. The novel itself is oddly disappointing. It is based on

Saturday

The Spectator

Christmas Books 1

Rupert Christiansen Recently I’ve had the good fortune to review three works of magisterial scholarship in these pages — John Haffenden’s William Empson: Among the Mandarins (OUP, £30), Philip Gossett’s Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera (Chicago University Press, £22.50) and Patrick Carnegy’s Wagner and the Art of the Theatre (Yale, £29.95). Because they run in total for over 1,500 pages, I haven’t had time for much else. But I hugely enjoyed John Bridcut’s sensitive study of boy-love, Britten’s Children (Faber, £18.99), and the narrative fluency and psychological acuity of Michael Arditti’s elegant novel A Sea Change (Maia, £8.99). Otherwise, I’ve been obsessively reading the poetry and prose of Elizabeth

Philip Ziegler

A sharp-eyed, realistic royalist

He was visited only by his children and grandchildren and one or two very old friends, complained Tommy Lascelles a few years before he died; apart from that, ‘I only see some of the young scribes, who, poor boys, think my opinion of their writing is worth getting, e.g. Philip Ziegler and C. Douglas-Home.’ Lascelles delighted in tantalising this now elderly scribe by extracting from a locked chest a volume of his diaries, reading a few sentences aloud, and then returning it to its repository. ‘That won’t be seen by anyone for 50 years,’ he would pronounce with some relish. ‘It is the duty of the private secretary to be

Ed Smith

Why it’s more than just a game

Simon Barnes, the brilliant writer about sport and nature, would never claim he has had much influence. No, he would say with a journalistic shrug, influence? Me? Of course not: I merely describe, amuse and draw attention to significant events. But his sportswriting, some of it for The Spectator, has been so original and insightful that he has redefined the genre. In doing so, by showing that sportswriting can reveal profound truths about human nature, he has also changed the way many of us look at sport itself. Appropriately, his new book, The Meaning of Sport, has a dual nature. It is about journalism, what life is like as a

Paul Johnson

Far from Holy Fathers

It is curious that despite Spain’s immense services to the Roman Church — expelling Islam from Western Europe over half a millennium of hard fighting, then opening up the Western hemisphere to Catholicism — only two Spaniards have become pope, and both were Borgias (Alfonso de Borja, who reigned as Pope Calixtus III, 1455-8, spelt his family name the Spanish way). The year after his election, Calixtus gave his nephew Rodrigo Borgia, then aged 24, a cardinal’s hat and in 1457 made him vice-chancellor of the Holy See. As such, he played an important role in the election of four popes, Pius II, Paul II, Sixtus IV and Innocent VIII,

John Bercow

The poisoned olive branch

On paper, Adam LeBor boasts excellent credentials for writing about what is at best the spine- chilling failure of the United Nations to prevent modern genocide and at worst its active complicity with evil. He reported on the Yugoslav wars for both the Times and the Independent, his empathy with the victims of slaughter leaps off virtually every page and the man has certainly done his research. No one could accuse LeBor of underselling himself. In his own words, ‘This is intended to be much more than a historical study… by recounting at length the reasons for, and results of, the catastrophe at Srebrenica, I hope to provide a detailed

Alan Coren

The pleasures of peripolitania

Were you to look up the word ‘peripolitan’ in the Oxford English Dictionary, you would not find it. Though the thing weighs three tons and preens itself on containing every word jotted in English since the language first dragged itself out of the primordial alphabet soup, peripolitan is not there. This irritates me no end, because I coined it, 20 years ago. I have, furthermore, deployed it at every subsequent opportunity, often in bold or italic the better to catch the lexicographic eye; but whenever I ring the OED to ask them when it’s going in, some snooty philological time-server tells me that they already have a perfectly good word

Nicholas Haslam

Around the world in 80 years

Two summers ago at La Rondinaia, during one of those last evenings before he flew from his sky-high eyrie for the last time, Gore Vidal advised me to read the 19th-century memoirist Augustus Hare’s The Story of my Life, an author with whom he felt great affinity. ‘And read all six volumes, too’, he added. Within a fortnight John Saumarez Smith had produced a set, and within moments I was hooked on Hare. Where but in Hare could one learn that Queen Victoria was in fact christened Victorina, but, in the trial of Queen Caroline, a little girl of that name ‘played a most unpleasant part’, so the Duchess of

Simon Heffer

A greedy, randy idealist

Rosemary Ashton has rather cornered the market in dissecting the lives of the intellectual movers and shakers of early Victorian England. She has already written well about the Carlyles, and about George Eliot and her lover G. H. Lewes. Now, all these and more have walk-on parts (rather more than that in Miss Eliot’s case) in this new account of life at 142 Strand, where between 1847 and 1854 the radical publisher John Chapman ran his business. Chapman was chaotic, often unscrupulous in both his business and his private dealings, but there is no doubt that he was an important piece of the jigsaw that made up the picture of

Michael Henderson

Worshipping at the shrines

So far as Robert Craft is concerned, Stravinsky represents a mine of limitless resource. Having spent the last 23 years of the composer’s life serving him as fan, friend, conductor, associate and general reviver of spirits, virtually as a member of the family, he remains the most loyal of servants, righting every wrong, fighting every battle and keeping the flame aglow. He has even arranged to be buried alongside Stravinsky and his second wife, Vera, in Venice, for, as the composer told him, ‘we are a trio con brio’. So the question must be asked: is the old boy worth it? When he died in 1971 Stravinsky was widely considered

Allan Massie

Papa rises again

We were in a Béarnais restaurant in Montmartre and a young Canadian novelist and short story writer, Bill Prendiville, was speaking admiringly about Hemingway. This was pleasing, because you don’t often hear him being praised now. It was also appropriate, because most of the good early Hemingway was written in Paris, and the best of his later books is his memoir of Paris in the Twenties. Admittedly his Paris was the Left Bank — rue Cardinal Lemoine, Boulevard Saint-Germain, rue Mouffetard, Montparnasse — rather than up in the 18th, and some of the books Bill spoke warmly of are not among those I like. Still, it was good to hear

Saturday

Ferdinand Mount

The monster we hate to love

What is it about fruit? There is no more searing passage in the memoirs of Auberon Waugh than the bit when three bananas reach the Waugh household in the worst days of postwar austerity and Evelyn Waugh places all three on his own plate, then before the anguished eyes of his three children ladles on cream, which was almost unprocurable, and sugar, which was heavily rationed, and scoffs the lot. So in all the 900-odd pages of this marvellous Life of Kingsley Amis there is nothing that chills the blood more than the moment when Hilly Amis’s eight-year-old son Jaime reaches for the one peach in a fruit bowl otherwise

Marcus Berkmann

Making sense of crazy times

This is a huge book. Crikey, it’s a whopper. It’s impossible not to won- der, as you hold it in your hands and try your damnedest not to drop it on your foot, whether its author, for all his fame and eminence, is quite worth all this ink, paper, attention. And this is just the first volume. If, as seems reasonable to assume, several more collections are plan-ned, we could well end up with four such breezeblocks, between them covering 40 years of Michael Palin’s public and private life. It could take nearly as long to read them. Nonetheless, to comedy obsessives of a certain age, Palin remains an intriguing