Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Steven Berkoff

Needs

Listing page content here Our needs are really very mild,so please don’t be too critical,if we just crave a little seal,to decorate our winter coat.Don’t show those bloody, mashed- up cubs,it spoils our pleasure, gives us guiltto see the virgin snow stained red,and quite distressing for the kids.We love our s.u.v. so much,it’s big and strong and rules the road,don’t tell us how we heat the globe,it spoils the little fun we have.The ice-cap melting’s not our fault,it’s all those planes that stain the sky,of course we like to fly each yearbut global warming’s not our fault,the scientists will find a way,to make those jolly ice-caps stay.I really love my

Jonathan Keates

Those rich little Greeks

Listing page content here Plutarch, in his Life of Alcibiades, captures the fascination of the Greek warrior, politician and glamour boy by quoting a line from a contemporary comedy: ‘They long for him, they hate him, they cannot do without him.’ The same words sum up our ambivalent relationship with the cultural world inhabited by the Boeotian biographer and his illustrious subject. We yearn for ancient Greece as a utopian construct, rich in the purest incarnations of poetry, drama, philosophy, architecture and the elemental outlines of democracy. Yet at the same time we shrink from its fatalism, its brutality and the generally low value it placed on the quality of

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Tales of the unexpected

Listing page content here As the large publishers get fatter, richer and duller, the little ones get nippier, sharper and more vigorous. Roy Kerridge is the author of many books, but none of the grand publishing houses wanted this eccentric and highly personal guide to Britain, presumably because it lacks the amenable and forgettable polish of most travel books. Kerridge is charming,  opinionated and a little bit mad. Excellent company, therefore. A lifelong ‘non- driver’, he strolls the lanes and by-ways of Britain with a stick, ‘cutting the heads off stinging nettles with clever whisks’, and singing ‘Zippety Doodah’, ‘useful for frightening wild creatures out into the open’. His innocence

M R-D-Foot

The Drang nach Osten

Listing page content here Two good books both cover the fighting between Germany and Russia in 1941, a brief historian’s summary of the strategic issues involved and a much longer ex-diplomat’s account of the tactics of the greatest land battle ever fought. Each author is used to explaining himself clearly, one in lectures, the other in dispatches; the reader is never in doubt about what either means. Professor Lukacs’s many books include studies of The Last European War, 1939-1941, now 30 years old, and more recently of the duel between Churchill and Hitler in the summer of 1940. He turns now to examining the motives both of Hitler and of

Lucy Hugheshallett

Sons and discoveries

Listing page content here ‘Who are we? Where are we going? Has public provision been a success?’ These are the kind of ‘weighty, unanswerable’ questions, Jeremy Harding asks himself as he mooches around west London housing estates in search of the mother who gave him up for adoption 50-odd years ago. The questions in Jonathan Maitland’s head are more personal, and considerably more promising as opening lines for a narrative. Was his mother genuinely mistaken when she announced, via the local paper and without preparing her family, that she had inoperable cancer? Or was she brazenly faking to win public sympathy prior to opening England’s first all-gay hotel? Why had

Carole Angier

Grand Guignol grotesquery

Listing page content here Alan Warner’s first novel, Morvern Callar, was macabre, bizarre and brilliant. This, his fifth, is equally macabre and bizarre, but less brilliant. So I first thought. Then I realised that it doesn’t lack heart, but only hides it. That in itself, I suppose, is rather brilliant. The first pages hook us in a simple way: Manolo (Lolo) Follana, aged 40, is told by his doctor and best friend that he is HIV positive. For the next fortnight we follow him while his life replays before him, as for a drowning man. After the opening, however, nothing is simple. Mercifully, Lolo and his friends have names. But

Andrew Barrow

Under the shadow of the Minster

Listing page content here This heavy, clanking, finely wrought adventure story is set mainly on or around York station in the winter of 1906 and washed down with handfuls of soot, clinker, ‘bacon and eggs and related matters’ and, I would estimate,  some 90 pints of Smith’s ale. The Lost Luggage Porter is Andrew Martin’s third novel about a train-spotterish railwayman called Jim Stringer, whom we first met in The Necropolis Railway and then saw struggling on the footplate in The Blackpool Flyer. Stringer, complete with false spectacles, has now become a railway detective and been sent out to penetrate York’s underworld and throw in his lot with the pickpockets,

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Why didn’t we give peace a chance?

Listing page content here Now comes a war and shows that we still haven’t crawled out on all fours from the barbaric stage of our history. We have learned to wear suspenders, to write clever editorials and to make chocolate milk, but when we have to decide seriously a question of the coexistence of a few tribes on the rich peninsula of Europe, we are helpless to find a way other than mutual mass slaughter. If you had to guess the author, what would you say? George Orwell? Isaiah Berlin? Malcolm Muggeridge? Nope. Those words were written by, of all people, Leon Trotsky, which adds a particularly sour irony to

Monday

Ferdinand Mount

Looking back in judgment

Listing page content here The heart starts to sink on the very first page, p. xiii to be precise, because this is still the Preface: ‘When I began work on Osborne’s biography, hoping for the best, I asked his wife Helen, “What does no one know about your husband?” ’Already you can see the gleam in the biographer’s eye, the headline on the review front: Angry Playwright’s Other Life, Secret Shame of John Osborne. By p. xiv we have sunk lower: ‘What caused his depressions would send me in time on an obsessive search for the one explanation of Osborne’s torment and fury that might account for everything — “the

Cressida Connolly

Wives and wallpaper

Listing page content here Anyone baffled by the conundrum of what to read on the beach this summer need look no further than A Much Married Man. This thoroughly good-natured comedy of manners is perfectly pitched so as to provide something for everyone: witty social observation, convincing glimpses into the worlds of high finance and fashion and plenty of lavish weddings. There is some sex, but not enough to offend the more squeamish reader. Like Trollope, Coleridge understands that money is as fascinating as love. The story concerns a banker, Anthony Anscombe, son and soon-to-be squire of a pleasingly ample Oxfordshire estate, which includes the ravishing Elizabethan Winchford Priory. The

Interconnect

Genesis

Listing page content here Sitting at the window shelling peasinto a battered colander between my knees(sweet, pod-swollen peas of early May)till suddenly I find I’ve slipped awaysixty years and vividly recallrough stone on bare legs astride a wallswinging sandalled feet, a summer tanon knees, arms, face and summer in my hair;a cat sprawled in the mint-bed asleep there;and tiny fruit which bud the apple tree.How genes shuck off the pod of memory:battered colander between her knees,the woman sitting shelling May- sweet peaswhere my Mendelian legacy began.

David Prycejones

Captain of a dreadful crew

Listing page content here To meet Oswald Mosley was a most unpleasant experience. You knew at once that you were in the presence of someone who had lost touch with everything except his own ego. So he bullied, so he lied, denying that he had been a willing agent of Hitler, that he would have proved a Quisling in the event of a German invasion in 1940, or that he had ever been an anti-Semite. On a television programme with him once, I read out some of the foul things he had said on platforms in the Thirties; his eyes turned red with rage, and I saw that he would have done

Noble Frankland

No reason to pull down the statue

Listing page content here The title of Gordon Corrigan’s book tells us it is not going to be a Churchillian panegyric, so it comes as almost a disappointment to find no new revelations needful for the dethroning of the former national hero. All we are given is an emphasised reminder that Churchill’s history, The Second World War, was biased, that he was prone to indulge in disastrous expeditions, notably, in the first war, Gallipoli and, in the second, Norway and that he unreasonably pestered his generals to mount offensives before they were ready to do so. But none of this, of course, is news and it certainly gives no ground

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

A philosopher rescued from politicians

Listing page content here In February 2005 the then chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, travelled to Kirkcaldy on the windy shores of the Firth of Forth in the company of our very own Chancellor of the Exchequer, so that both could pay tribute to the town’s most famous son, Adam Smith, in their own distinctive way. For Greenspan, the stability and growth of free-market capitalism as seen in ‘today’s awesome array of international transactions’ could be attributed to a modern version of ‘Smith’s invisible hand’. To Gordon Brown by contrast, Smith was, in James Buchan’s encapsulation, ‘a precocious Leftist’ and the founding patron of the brand of

John Laughland

Giants in petty strife

Listing page content here ‘In London, if a man have the misfortune to attach himself to letters, I know not with whom he is to live, nor how he is to pass his time in suitable society.’ David Hume was notorious for preferring Edinburgh’s intellectual life to London’s, but the city where the philosopher was most successful, at least socially, was Paris. He was sent there in 1763 as secretary to the ambassador, the Earl of Hertford, and was feted as ‘le bon David’. ‘In Paris,’ Hume wrote, ‘a man that distinguishes himself in letters meets immediately with regard and attention.’ Hume’s remark about the anti-intellectualism of the English remains

Digby Durrant

Ghosts from the past

Listing page content here Andrew Taylor has written on a wide range of subjects, but it is for his crime thrillers that he has become famous and won so many awards. By my estimate he’s written 26, which is just under half of the 59 books he’s credited with by Amazon. Until now I have only read one of these and it was excellent. The American Boy is a long, gripping mystery novel of the kind that Wilkie Collins invented to delight the Victorians, and so I looked forward to Taylor’s new one, A Stain on the Silence. When James’s phone rings and he hears a tiny voice say ‘Jamie’

Alistair Irwin

Fighting a war in all but name

Listing page content here There is much in common between a Richard Holmes book and a bottle of the finest Speyside malt. Both look and feel good, full of promise. Extract the stopper from one, open the other and the anticipation quickens. After that it is a question of taste or habit as to whether you gulp them down for maximum intoxication or extend the life of the contents by savouring them gradually. For this latest Holmes volume I recommend a preliminary dram or two as the author sets the scene. Then take a breath of fresh air to absorb the implications of what you have read. Next, swallow the

Friday

Interconnect

Serious but not solemn

Towards the end of the Seventies I was asked to write a short, critical study of Muriel Spark’s novels. I accepted, with some trepidation and misgivings. At least I hope there were misgivings. There should have been, first because nothing equipped me for the task apart from my admiration for her novels and, perhaps, the fact that I had, at long last and after many false starts, written a novel myself and had it published. The second reason to hesitate was more cogent. I had enjoyed her novels from the start. Memento Mori and The Bachelors were as clever and witty and as much fun as pre-Brideshead Waugh; they delighted

Philip Hensher

How writers behave and misbehave

Oxford publishes, or has published, a number of anthologies of anecdotes relating to various professions. There is a very enjoyable one of military anecdotes, edited by Max Hastings, Elizabeth Longford’s of royal anecdotes (competing in a crowded field), and Paul Johnson’s of political anecdotes. Some professions more readily generate anecdotes than others. I could imagine an anthology of anecdotes about philosophers or doctors, but no one is going to buy The Oxford Book of Banking Anecdotes. A lot of serious-minded people probably disapprove greatly of the idea of an anthology of literary anecdotes. After all, full-dress scholarly biographies of writers are, in some circles, not regarded as particularly worthy enterprises.

Andrew Taylor

Infant identity crisis

Listing page content here Women in peril flit through the pages of traditional Gothic fiction, murmuring ‘Had I but known!’ as they fall for the wrong man, open the wrong door or apply for the wrong job. The poet Sophie Hannah takes the trusty formula in both hands, gives it a vigorous shake and uses it to produce something fascinating and original in her first novel. In this case the woman in question is Alice. Still reeling from the death of her parents in a car crash, she has married the dashing David and acquired a new family in the shape of his welcoming (and wealthy) mother Vivienne and his