Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Wednesday

Ferdinand Mount

The Voltaire of St Aldates

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

Alexander Masters

Castrated by a grateful nation

Some people’s lives drive you into a rage. Alan Turing’s is one. In The Man Who Knew Too Much David Leavitt unexpectedly compares him to Alec Guinness playing Sidney Stratton in The Man in the White Suit. Like Stratton, who invented a suit that would never wear out, Turing was a brilliant scientific deviant, interested in ‘welding the theoretical to the practical, approaching mathematics from a perspective that reflected the industrial ethos of the England in which he was raised’. And, like Stratton, he was ‘hounded out of the world’. But Stratton was playing an Ealing comedy. The injustice done to Turing makes you want to spit at someone. Snow

Byron Rogers

A tendency to collect kings

Some day this book may be in the footnotes of all social histories of the early 21st century, not for what it contains but for what it is: 500 pages of not the collected, but the selected letters of one human being. For, sidelined by the telephone and the email, the letter-writer is about to follow the fletcher and the high-street fishmonger into the past. And until they find some way of retrieving the spoken word from space, future historians, with only printed emails to go on, will puzzle over the terseness which at the turn of the century came into human communication. Suddenly we are as tight-lipped and purposeful

Anne Applebaum

Painter, dreamer, governor, spy

Of all the odd, forgotten corners of eastern Europe, the province of Volhynia must be among the oddest and most forgotten. A land of marshes and forests, memorable for its impassable roads and its lonely villages, Volhynia now lies in the north-west corner of Ukraine, along the Polish border. But before the second world war Volhynia was one of the easternmost provinces of Poland — as well as one of the poorest. In 1921, when the Polish state incorporated the province, having fought over it (and often in it) during the Polish–Bolshevik war, no Volhynian town had a regulated street network, only one had a sewage system and only three

D J-Taylor

More than meets the eye — or not

Not long ago I listened to a Radio Two interviewer interrogating Kate Bush about her new album. The particular track that had excited his interest was ‘Mrs Bartolozzi’, a puzzling little number about a woman who sits watching the clothes fly by in her washing machine. What was it all about?, he wondered. Ms Bush, famously Delphic in conversation, gave nothing away. ‘Perhaps,’ she suggested, ‘it’s about Mrs Bartolozzi.’ For some reason I thought about this exchange while working my way through Haruki Murakami’s bumper selection of short stories. A representative offering from Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, a career showcase going back to the early 1980s, might be ‘New York

Anne Chisholm

Rampant fascism near Henley

There can seldom have been a better first sentence in a book by a daughter about her mother: ‘“Heil Hitler!” shouted Mummy as she pushed Daddy down the stairs at Assendon Lodge.’ Even better, the next few lines reveal that the second world war was in progress at the time, Daddy was in uniform, and the author was watching and listening from her hiding place under the said stairs. Alas, the rest of the book fails to live up to its brilliant opening. This is a pity, because Julia Camoys Stonor has a bloodcurdling tale to tell and a monstrous parent to describe; and apart from taking the lid off

Allan Massie

Prince of self-pity

T S. Eliot thought Hamlet an ‘artistic failure’, Shakespeare being unable to reconcile the theme of the old revenge tragedy on which the work is based with the conception of the character of Hamlet himself. One may agree with this while still finding the play compelling; indeed the most puzzling of the tragedies. The revenge theme is admittedly tiresome and the reasons for postponing the act of vengeance both unconvincing and boring. We can accept the ghost only as a convenient theatrical convention. No doubt Elizabethan audiences saw it differently. Belief in ghosts was then common, and one wonders to what extent Shakespeare shared it. Banquo’s ghost appears only to

Wednesday

Paul Johnson

Read any good books lately? Not novels, alas

In one respect I am like Gladstone, of whom a friend said, ‘He reads as other men breathe.’ To me, reading is my most frequent, enjoyable and essential activity. Not that I put myself on a level with Mr G, even in this respect. He read a portion of the Bible and of Homer every day, the former usually, the latter invariably in Greek. His diary, which he kept daily from 1825 (aged 15) to 1895 (85) records the reading of over 20,000 books. There were many more not mentioned. He accumulated 100,000 volumes, which now form the nucleus of the Gladstone Library at his house, Hawarden Castle, near Chester,

Philip Hensher

Showdown and climbdown

Of course, he never did. Margaret Thatcher had more sense than to enter into any kind of discussion with Arthur Scargill — the horror of the beer-and-sandwiches relations between previous governments and the unions was too great. Before the 1984-5 miners’ strike which dominated and defined Thatcher’s second term in office, just as the Falklands war dominated the first, she would not have wanted to be in the same room as Scargill. Afterwards, of course, so comprehensive was the government’s victory over Scargill’s intentions, the question would hardly have arisen. These days, as Patrick Hannan says, hardly one educated person in ten thousand could tell you the name of anyone

Justin Cartwright

Betjeman’s world of trains and buttered toast

I am sitting in the London Library as I write this. I am wearing Rafael Nadal tennis shorts, which come below the knee. Obviously, I look ridiculous. But this is the role of the middle-class, middle-aged English male, to feel slightly out of time, out of kilter, with the world around him. Sometimes down in Rock I see middle-aged Englishmen in their holiday gear, capacious navy-blue shorts or those faded pinkish trousers they wear for golf, always topped with a polo shirt, and it is clear to me that the English seaside has a liberating effect on these people: in a rather crabbed English fashion, they are letting their hair

David Gilmour

Beauty and bigotry

When I was a child in the 1950s, I had a delightful book called The Golden Geography which tried to encapsulate every aspect of the globe — its landscape, its climate, its people and their occupations — in a small sketch with a brief caption. From a section called ‘This is Asia’, I learned that Arabs drank water from goatskins, that Indians usually lived ‘out-of-doors’ (a nice way of putting it) and that the Japanese had weird houses with sliding paper doors. Such apparently timeless images were imprinted on my mind and, without much scope for revising them, remained there a long time. I was reminded of The Golden Geography

Tom Holland

Victims and/or beneficiaries

‘Roman Britain,’ I asked a friend of mine, a committed pacifist and the veteran of endless marches against the war in Iraq, ‘a Good or Bad Thing?’ ‘Oh, good,’ my friend answered, not even deigning to ponder the question. Startled by the knee-jerk speed of her response, I asked her to explain. ‘Well, the roads, of course. And the baths and the central-heating.’ She paused. ‘And the peace.’ I knew exactly where she was coming from. When I pressed her, it turned out that her hazy sense of Roman Britain derived in large part from a Ladybird book that I too had read when I was young. It was the

Ian Dunlop

Where golf is in the blood

Golfers, I have to admit, can be great bores. Just listen to the pros discuss their performance after a round in a major championship or ask a golfing friend about his game and you can be stuck listening to tales of triumph and tribulation with as much chance of escape as the Wedding Guest from the Ancient Mariner. So it was with some misgivings that I began to read John Greig’s reflections about taking up golf again after a gap of many years and a debilitating illness. Would it be all I, I, I — I hit this magnificent drive here, I then sank a monstrous putt 20 feet from

John De-Falbe

The maze of the mind

With the publication last year of Your Face Tomorrow 1: Fever and Spear, the first volume of a trilogy and his eighth translated work of fiction, it was plain that Javier Marías was embarking on a project which required readers to leave behind all conventional ideas of what a novel is. At one point in the book the narrator cleans up a drop of blood. On the last page, someone rings his doorbell. There are no other events. But for patient readers with a speculative cast of mind and a taste for stylistic adventure it seemed to be a work of genius. The second volume, Dance and Dream, confirms this.

William Feaver

Shaggy dog story

Until 1970 when he got his first Weimaraner from a litter in Long Beach, California, William Wegman was just another West Coast conceptual tyro, doing regular doubletake stuff like spelling out the word WOUND in sticking plaster stuck to the face. He loved the way the puppy asleep looked like a dropped sock. That gave him an idea, a juicy bone of an idea, an idea worth fooling around with for years to come. Pausing only to name him Man Ray after the only all-American Surrealist, he began thinking up inappropriate poses. Being a Weimaraner Man Ray could be relied on to look long-suffering no matter what and this was

Wednesday

Paul Johnson

The truth about the crooked timbers of humanity is too painful

Reading the papers, with their unremitting tales of human depravity and cruelty, I sometimes feel that the human race is a failed experiment which ought to be brought to an end as expeditiously as possible. We learn from the Book of Genesis that God had the same idea. He ‘saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repenteth the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of

M R-D-Foot

Triumph and tragedy

The 90th anniversary of the start of the battle of the Somme falls on 1 July. Several books mark it; it made a scar on the nation’s memory that is still severe, and it is still often called the day when the army suffered its worst casualties. Strictly, this is not true, for General Perceval in Singapore surrendered 80,000 men to a smaller force of Japanese on 15 February 1942. But on 1 July 1916 the army did suffer its worst total of dead on a single day: 19,240, and nearly 40,000 more were wounded or went missing. It was the first major action in which Kitchener’s new armies fought;

Olivia Glazebrook

Sex, comics and the Holocaust

Howard Jacobson has called Kalooki Nights ‘the most Jewish novel that has ever been written by anybody, anywhere’. What does this mean? It is a novel whose hero, Max Glickman, is Jewish. It is a history of two Jewish families living in Manchester, the Glickmans and the Washinskys, and a study of the degrees by which successive generations adapt to English society and English culture. It is a book full of Jewish words and phrases, Jewish customs and Jewish friends and relatives. In fact the only non-Jews in the book are either Max’s wives and girlfriends (a plentiful crew), his sister’s boyfriend Mick, and Dorothy, the half-German girlfriend of his

Philip Ziegler

Uneasy biographical bedfellows

The dust jacket of this book shows two heads confronting one another: General MacArthur, aggressive, arrogant, defiantly puffing cigar smoke at the world at large; the Emperor Hirohito, impassive, phlegmatic, quietly obstinate. The subtitle, ‘MacArthur, Hirohito and the American Duel with Japan’, similarly suggests that within the book a double biography will be found. The formula can work effectively. Hitler and Stalin, Wellington and Napoleon, were titanic figures whose careers meshed closely, each having the other frequently in his thoughts, each consciously or unconsciously adjusting his behaviour in reaction to the other. The trouble about this book is that MacArthur and Hirohito do not relate to each other in this

Stephen Abell

Small maelstrom in Yorkshire

An abiding impression of the Victorian period is its mania for being straight-faced to the point of seeming strait-laced, for order and precision, for enumeration and explication. The Times affirmed that ‘just now we are an objective people. We want to place everything we can under glass cases, and stare our fill.’ Gathering the Water tells the story of the 1847 flooding of the Forge Valley in West Yorkshire for a reservoir in a fussy, finicky Victorian way. And the problem is not staring our fill, but finding enough to fill our stare. Charles Weightman, the narrator, is the ‘flooder’ charged with supervising the evacuation of the remaining habitable homes in