Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Wednesday

Allan Massie

A late beginner

Sometimes at book festivals I am asked which historical novelists I most admire and enjoy. ‘Alfred Duggan,’ I say first, and am usually met with a blank response. This is not entirely surprising. Duggan died in 1964 and most of his books are out of print. Some will know of him as a friend of Evelyn Waugh from Oxford days. ‘A full-blooded rake … we were often drunk … Alfred almost always.’ He remained in this condition for some 20 years, Waugh himself eventually doing much to rescue him from alcoholism. So there was an unusual pattern to his career, as Waugh remarked in an article published in The Spectator

M R-D-Foot

One who got away

Listing page content here Rather late, we have here the recollections of a then young German army staff officer, who saw Hitler almost daily for the last nine months of the second world war. As Guderian’s ADC, it was Freytag von Loringhoven’s duty to attend the daily Leader’s Conferences at which Hitler continued to direct his war in minute detail, shifting flags on maps without taking in that the flags stood for formations that had long dwindled in reality almost to nothingness. Having only set eyes on the Führer once before, at a big army review some years earlier, the ADC was shocked when confronted in late July 1944 at

Thursday

James Buchan

Geography is destiny

Listing page content here Charles Glass, an American reporter for many years based in Lebanon, in 1987 set off to portray what used to be called the Levant, starting in Iskenderun in what is now Turkey and ending in Aqaba in what is now Jordan. This project, which sought to tell the political story of the Middle East through its cramped topography, was disrupted when Glass was kidnapped by Hezbollah in Beirut. He wrote a book out of it called Tribes with Flags (1990). It was another 14 years, and that ominous September of 2001, before Glass picked up the thread of his interrupted journey. Great changes had taken place,

Graham Stewart

Flocking to the standard

Listing page content here Only in the last few years  have major memorials to  the wartime sacrifices of  the British Dominions and Colonies taken their place in the ceremonial plots of central London. They are a welcome if belated tribute. Yet, following the second world war’s end, the government made a more practical gesture. The 1948 British Nationality Act confirmed that passports would be granted not only to all Commonwealth peoples regardless of creed or colour but even to those in India, Pakistan and beyond who opted no longer to be the King’s subjects. It was a generous offer. Only the great take-up rate from so many of non-British stock

Jane Ridley

Send her victorious

Listing page content here The Iraq war has shed a whole new light on the wars fought by the British during the reign of Queen Victoria. War was more or less continuous during the first half of Victoria’s reign, and very few of these imperial wars were actually provoked. The UN would not have approved of the wars in the Punjab or Burma, Persia or China which the British waged in the 1840s and 1850s. As Saul David shows in this new book, the Victorians routinely fought wars of aggression. Some were for reasons of regime change, to replace an unfriendly ruler by a puppet. Others were naked acts of

Hugh Massingberd

Master of the picturesque

Listing page content here William Kent (1685-1748) was a Bridlington boy whose training as an artist in Italy was sponsored by squires from both sides of the River Humber including my kinsman Burrell Massingberd of Ormsby, Lincs. Kent’s correspondence with Massingberd is a significant source for any study of ‘the Signior’ and Timothy Mowl has made good use of it in this entertaining, provocative and stimulating biography which might be said to take the Cant (the architect’s real name) out of Kent. From the correspondence Massingberd comes across as a moaning minnie and fusspot (doubtless a family failing) and I fear Mowl has got his number. ‘Poor Massingberd,’ he writes,

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