Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Ministry of fear

Just because you’re paranoid, as the cliché runs, it doesn’t mean that they aren’t out to get you. They certainly were out to get Queen Elizabeth I — and how. Her situation was strange and dangerous. She was a Protestant queen ruling a country the majority of whose citizens remained Catholic. ‘The ancient faith still lay like lees at the bottoms of men’s hearts,’ as Sir Ralph Sadler, a member of her Privy Council quoted here, put it, ‘and if the vessel were ever so little stirred, comes to the top.’ She was obliged to harbour the main Catholic hope for succession, Mary, Queen of Scots, in her own kingdom,

Saturday

Christopher Woodward

Posh versus popular

On 12 November 1759 London’s leading artists assembled at the Turk’s Head pub on Gerrard Street and decided to put on the first ever exhibition of contemporary art in Britain. They became the Society of Artists, and Matthew Hargreaves is the first scholar to tell their story. The Society tends to be written up as an amateur dress rehearsal for the Royal Academy, but what this excellent book shows us is that in its short life — little more than a decade — it transformed the British art scene for ever. The Society printed 1,000 catalogues for its first exhibition in 1760. In the end, it sold six times as

Jonathan Sumption

Sages of the world, unite!

Karen Armstrong likes to take on large subjects, and they don’t come much larger than this. Her latest book is nothing less than an attempt to describe the historical origins of all the great world religions. The nearest analogy is The Key to All Mythologies, the grandiloquently named tome which George Eliot’s Mr Casaubon never got round to finishing. But it would be unkind to press the analogy too far. Armstrong is not a pedant, and whatever else may be said about this book she has certainly finished it. Its focus is what she calls the ‘Axial Age’. The phrase was coined by the German philosopher Karl Jaspers to describe

Judith Flanders

The Goddams and the snail-eaters

A French journalist writing in 1999 was succinct: ‘The English hate the French. Who reciprocate … A purée of prejudice on a bed of inherited loathing. The French consider the English to be arrogant islanders, eating boiled lamb with mint, and not knowing how to be seductive. The English consider us talkative, arrogant, dirty, smelling of sweat and garlic, flighty, cheating and corrupt.’ ‘Inherited’ may be the most telling word in that outburst, and it is Robert and Isabelle Tombs’ keynote in this magisterial study of the on-going love-hate relationship between the British and the French over three centuries. The relationship, as they point out, is unique: it has lasted

Lee Langley

Bright light at the end of the tunnel

Christine Brooke-Rose is not an easy read. She is a sublime roller- coaster: hold on and hurtle with her — the ride will be exhilarating. She is dark, despairing, but her bleakness is Beckettian, the laughs never far away. Now 83, she lives in France, near Avignon. Born in Geneva (British father), she has written 12 novels (four of which are collected in the Christine Brooke-Rose Omnibus), worked as a critic and academic, teaching English language and literature in Paris, been claimed by the French as a nouveau-romancier, a membership she rejects like all other memberships. Perhaps her staunch stand-alone path has led to her status as both eminent and

Saturday

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

An illness or an excuse?

How many times have you heard someone say ‘I am so stressed’? I say it at least ten times a day. I said it to myself when the books editor of this magazine asked if I might turn this review around in two days flat instead of taking the usual, more leisurely week or so to file my thoughts. Which is ironic because the book I’m reviewing is about the myth of stress. Angela Patmore, having spent a good 20 years researching the uses and abuses of the S-word, arrives at the conclusion that it is such an ill-defined and contentious category as to be meaningless, and argues that our

Anne Applebaum

Short-listing doomed intellectuals

So powerful was the image of Russia created by the extraordinary group of writers, artists and philosophers who dominated their country’s intellectual life at the beginning of the 20th century that it persists even today. Much of our admiration for Russian ballet, art and literature dates from that era, when the achievements of Russia’s creative class first became widely known abroad. Tragically, that image, and the accompanying admiration, are long out of date. Not only did the Bolsheviks comprehensively destroy Russia’s creative class, for 75 subsequent years they did their best to prevent its re-emergence. Lesley Chamberlain’s latest book on Russia relates one of the lesser-known chapters of that story.

Peter Jones

The best-Loebed hits

Before the dramatic expansion of Penguin Classics, it was almost impossible to find a translation of anything in Latin or Greek. Schoolboys were reduced to furtively ordering Brodies or Kelly’s Keys from the local bookshop. The great exception was the Loeb Classical Library. This was a series sponsored by James Loeb, a Harvard-educated American banker who loved classics and the arts and had amassed a fortune before retiring to Munich in 1905 to seek relief from his continuing psychiatric problems. He was persuaded to endow a foundation to publish the surviving texts of all Greek and Latin, with translation. The first volumes appeared in autumn 1912. Loeb died in 1933,

Diana Hendry

Laughter in the howling wilderness

Hot on the heels of The Penelopiad, Margaret Atwood’s retelling of the story of Penelope and Odysseus, comes The Tent, a neat, must-have little volume with scarlet endpapers, a silky marker and Atwood’s own illustrations — devilish red dogs and Egyptian-looking ladies. And inside The Tent? A splendid mix of tales, retellings of myths, fables and fairy stories, a couple of poems and what the blurb describes as ‘fictional essays’. Come inside. Meet Philomela retelling Ovid’s horror story of bigamy and her metamorphosis into a nightingale, Salome wooing the religious studies teacher (they both lose their heads) and Horatio trying to obey Hamlet’s request to tell his story only to

Leo McKinstry

High priestess of Tory sleaze

‘She can’t stand that woman,’ an aide of Mrs Thatcher once said of Dame Shirley Porter, the notorious, scandal-prone leader of Westminster City Council during the 1980s. Such contempt was perhaps surprising, for Lady Porter was seen by many as the mirror image of Mrs Thatcher both in her outspoken character and in the aggressive way she ran her municipal fiefdom. Domineering, energetic and impatient, she liked to pose as the champion of business and the ratepayer against sclerotic civic bureaucracy. Like Mrs Thatcher, she was ferociously partisan, relishing battles with her opponents, while she could also be brutally intimidating to her own senior officials. Yet, as the BBC journalist

Saturday

Justin Marozzi

A diplomat with a difference

Senior diplomats may be a charming bunch, but as a rule they are not known for their modesty. Years of rubbing shoulders with world leaders, however inconsequential, tend to go to their heads. Taking themselves too seriously is an occupational hazard. When it comes to publishing their memoirs, such arrogance and pomposity are not necessarily a bad thing. A diplomat’s inflated sense of his own importance can be hilariously, unintentionally entertaining. What more wonderful example of the genre than DC Confidential: The Controversial Memoirs of Britain’s Ambassador to the US at the Time of 9/11 and the Iraq War, Sir Christopher Meyer’s gloriously self-regarding tome of last year? A monument

Jonathan Mirsky

Softly, softly, catchee English

Hooray for Signal Books, publishers of the ‘Lost and Found’ series of classic travel writing. Not long ago I reviewed in these pages The Ford of Heaven by Brian Power, a memoir, first published in 1984, of Power’s childhood in north China. The notable thing about Power was how deeply embedded he was in the city of his childhood, how much more he was a Chinese boy than the child of Westerners who much of the time had no idea what their son was up to. Now Signal revives Chiang Yee (1903-1977), who tells an opposite story, of a stranger in a strange land. A gentleman from a rich, artistic

Alistair Irwin

From cornet to colonel

Sometime in 1995 Colonel Allan Mallinson came, somewhat sheepishly I thought, into my office. He was clutching a sheaf of papers that I feared would be another piece of heavyweight Ministry of Defence bureaucracy. But no, it was instead the first chapter of his first Hervey novel, A Close Run Thing. He asked if I would read it and say whether I thought it worth his while writing the rest of the book. Having rattled through it, I recommended that he forthwith abandon his military career and concentrate on converting Hervey into bank- notes. Luckily for the Army the Colonel stuck to his soldiering duties by day and, luckily for

John McEwen

The Knight’s noble rescue

This handsome and scholarly book is a catalogue of a selection of pictures of Ireland, all, remarkably, collected over the past 30 years by Desmond Fitzgerald, 29th Knight of Glin, for his famous country seat in west Limerick, where his family have held sway since 1350. It whets the appetite for the next major publication by the Knight (with James Peill), a history of Irish furniture. Forty years ago, when the Knight first made his scholarly mark as a collaborator with Desmond Guinness and others on the pioneering exhibition ‘Irish Houses and Landscapes’, Ireland was an economic and cultural backwater. Today, as 250,000 people annually up sticks to escape the

Saturday

Judith Flanders

Lust for life

I must declare an interest. At my solitary meeting with Maggi Hambling, she suddenly barked, ‘Would you like to see my hysterectomy scar?’ (She was dissuaded by the rather nervous men present.) I had been ‘Maggi-ed’: hit with a piece of confrontational behaviour, simply to see what the response would be. Andrew Lambirth had a similar introduction: he first saw her as, fishnet stockings waving in the air, she performed at a cabaret for a friend’s birthday; she then announced he must be gay because the friend who introduced them was. Despite the terrible drawback of being hetero, he was permitted to stick with her, recording conversations over the next

Sebastian Smee

The fine art of appreciation | 4 March 2006

John Updike is, among one or two other things, a model art critic. Observant, sympathetic and knowledgeable, he also writes at a useful remove from the polemics that rack today’s art world. His status as an honorary non-combatant in the contemporary art wars owes something to his literary fame, to be sure. But it is also the result of a mildly disingenuous decision on his part to maintain an amateur’s attitude in a world beset by experts. Unlike most jobbing art critics, who are inclined to carve out partisan stances, Updike is content to appreciate both the painted, atmospheric delicacy of Hopper or Whistler and the nihilistic wit of Warhol

David Gilmour

The resurgence of the puritan element

The words ‘fanatic’ and ‘Arabia’ are placed together so often that they almost seem designed for each other. A Syrian friend once asked Charles Doughty, the Victorian explorer, how he could abandon the orchards of Damascus, ‘full of the sweet spring as the garden of God’, and ‘take such journeys into the fanatic Arabia?’ Doughty did not really know the answer. He had passed ‘one good day in Arabia’, he recalled, but ‘all the rest were evil because of the people’s fanaticism’. In the late 1870s Doughty travelled to Nejd, the desert birthplace of the Wahhabi sect, an intolerant, puritanical and — to its adherents — very pure form of

Hugh Massingberd

The country of Sir Walter

Although the Scottish Borders contain some of the most picturesque and unspoilt scenery in the British Isles, with the country houses along the Tweed putting up a fair show to rival the ch

Sandy Balfour

Watching the human comedy unfold

I remember once swimming in the Batha river in central Chad. Despite recent rains the river was sluggish, warm and muddy, so much so that it was not immediately clear what was the point. I was uncertain of which way to go. I could not see my feet. I was covered in mud. And yet I emerged strangely relaxed. Easing your way into Cees Nooteboom’s remarkable new collection of travel pieces, you may have the same experience. Ignore, for the moment, the fact that you cannot see your feet and that you are not sure why it is interesting to read an account of a journey to Mali in 1971.

Harriet Sergeant

Much possessed by death

On the 25 November, 1970 after a failed coup d’état, the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima stuck a knife into his belly, then had his head cut off with his own sword. Twenty years later I enjoyed a brief flirtation with a member of Mishima’s private militia, the Tate no Kai or Shield Society. Matsumura, like Mishima, proved a series of contradictions. A right-wing nationalist who owned a coffee shop in the centre of Tokyo, he had spent the 1960s cracking left-wing students over the head with a drain- pipe. His best friend, Morita, Mishima’s second-in-command, had beheaded the writer before killing himself. But Matsumura also spoke fluent English, enjoyed arguing