Book Reviews

You know the famous story about Freud and Einstein? Freud writes to Einstein, sending him one of his books and asking for his opinion of it. Einstein writes back, saying he enjoyed the book very much, that he thought it was outstanding, exemplary even, but that, alas, he was in no position to judge its scientific merits. To which Freud replied, if Einstein couldn’t judge its scientific merits, then the book could hardly be judged exemplary. About this, Freud, as in a number of other things, was gloriously and absolutely wrong. Greil Marcus is no scientist, but we shouldn’t hold that against him. Books like Mystery Train (1975), Lipstick Traces

Europe thinks ‘that to achieve peace no price is too high: not appeasement, not massacres on its own soil, not even surrender to terrorists… Europe is impotent. A foul wind is blowing through [it]… the idea that we can afford to be lenient even with people who threaten us… This same wind blew through Munich in 1938… It could turn out to be the death rattle of a continent that no longer understands what principles to believe.’ This is not Michael Gove but Marcello Pera, President of the Italian Senate. But in fact the views of the three authors fit remarkably well. Celsius 7/7 is centrally about the political response

Even though Rudyard Kipling died 70 years ago, listeners to Plain Tales from the Hills are sure to gain the beloved storyteller some new followers. I’m certainly joining the fan club. Never engrossed by ‘Gunga Din’, ‘If’ or ‘the great grey-green greasy Limpopo River’, I was astounded how quickly I became hooked on these stories — I’ve listened to the majority more than once. This is early Kipling — he was only 23 when commissioned to write them for the Civil and Military Gazette, a local English-language newspaper for the British in northern India. He certainly evokes the full spectrum of emotions — laughter in ‘False Dawn’ when Saumerez (‘a

‘Do you pronounce it Sowthy or Suthy?’ asked a friend when I mentioned I was reviewing this book. Today, that small controversy probably marks the limit of public curiosity as to this remarkably prolific but not otherwise exceptional poet, novelist, historian, critic and political commentator, who flourished as a radical alongside his friend Coleridge in the early stages of the French Revolution, and later retreated to the Lake District where he became a diehard Tory and Poet Laureate, earning himself the contempt of Shelley, Byron and Hazlitt. This new biography follows relatively recent volumes by Geoffrey Carnall and Mark Storey; it adds little of significance to them. Professor Speck is,

Glorious, bloodless, last, perhaps all of those things, but the revolution of 1688 was hardly a revolution at all. It was the neat solution to a succession crisis: how to keep the throne of England secure against a Roman Catholic successor to the Roman Catholic James II. The essential ingredients were the resolve of James’s Protestant son-in-law, William of Orange, to bring Great Britain into permanent alliance with the Netherlands against France and, in the face of that resolve, James’s timidity and eventual flight. The underlying reason that explains how, in the end, James managed to make enemies of the Tories and Whigs, Anglicans and Protestant Dissenters was the long-fermented,

Ah Oxford! Welcome to the City of Dreadful Spite, otherwise known as Malice Springs, the permanent Number One on the Bitch List. Not since the vituperative pamphleteers of the English Civil War has there been a community so dedicated to character assassination as the dons of Oxford. Living on the same staircase, dining side by side, night after night, term after term, dries up the milk of human kindness. Here is Hugh Trevor-Roper, Regius Professor of Modern History for 23 years, describing C.S. Lewis, a Fellow of Magdalen College for nearly 30: Envisage (if you can) a man who combines the face and figure of a hog-reeve or earth-stopper with