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Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

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

Vicki Woods

Putting bezazz into Bazaar

Carmel Snow, routinely called ‘the legendary Mrs Snow’ by news- papers in her lifetime, edited the most perfect fashion magazine in the history of glossies, American Harper’s Bazaar, for 25 years from 1933 to 1957. It’s probably a fashion statement in itself (‘Sooooo yesterday’) that her legend has almost entirely faded from public memory. Having spent long years toiling as a professional mag-hag myself, I knew the mythopoeic bits already. It was Snow, at Christian Dior’s first Paris show in 1947, who told son cher Tian that ‘your dresses have such a new look’, thereby ensuring a) his name and thunderous fortune, and b) the triumphant return of postwar Paris

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Doing nothing in particular very well

‘We are here on earth to fart around,’ that wise man Kurt Vonne- gut once wrote. ‘And don’t let anybody tell you different.’ Denys Finch Hatton — who was born into the English aristocracy in 1887, and died in a plane crash in Africa not long after his 44th birthday — was one of the great farters-around of all time. That we know of him now is largely down to his long and tortured love affair with the ill-starred Danish coffee-farmer Karen Blixen, who under the pen name of Isak Dinesen described their relationship in Out of Africa. The image most of us have of him, then, is of a

Saturday

Simon Courtauld

Peter and friends

It is some years since I saw, in a Paris bookshop, a translated copy of Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit, but I still enjoy recalling the French names given for the four members of the rabbit family: Flopson, Mopson, Queue-de-coton et Pierre. Cottontail is the species of rabbit which is found all over the United States; an amphibious swamp rabbit inhabits the bayous of Louisiana, and a rare marsh cottontail, which lives in Florida, has been given the name sylvilagus palustris hefneris, apparently in honour of the founder of Playboy magazine and its ‘bunnies’. Rabbits are also commonly found in central America, as I learnt while in Mexico

Salley Vickers

The discreet shape of tears

Mothers and memoirs are fashionable at the moment. We’ve had Edward St Aubyn’s novel Mother’s Milk and few respectable books’ pages appear without a brand-new set of tragic, comic or tragi- comic reminiscences, leaving us grateful, if apologetic, for our own drearily staid lives. Yet it is a fact that a really good memoir usually owes less to life than to the author’s shaping imagination. Indeed, the best are often largely fantasy (Trollope’s captivating autobiography is a case in point). Rarely does a completely authentic recollection make compelling reading. Too often, as Henry James’s great short story on this theme reminds us, compared to art the ‘real thing’ disappoints and

Jonathan Sumption

A glorious road to ruin

We know very little about the ‘good’ kings of medieval England. Weakness makes better copy. Gossip and laughter leave more traces than dumb admiration. Contemporaries, fascinated and appalled by their complex and unstable personalities, have left us vivid accounts of Edward II and Richard II, whose reigns both ended in deposition and murder. By comparison, Edward III is an icon. He lived his life in the manner that medieval men expected of a king. He looked the part. He won his battles. He made the right sort of people rich. In the chronicles of his time, his character is completely concealed behind a mask of conventional praise. Picking up a

Simon Courtauld

A far from plodding pedestrian

How much more do we need to know about Sir Wilfred Thesiger? Alexander Maitland, his literary executor and friend for the last 40 years of his life, collaborated with Thesiger on six books of his travels, and we have Thesiger’s first two classics, Arabian Sands and The Marsh Arabs, not to mention two other mainly photographic books. Then there is his autobiography and an excellent biography by Michael Asher published in 1994. One of the merits of Asher’s book was that he retraced, by camel and donkey, several of Thesiger’s journeys. It was also informed by anecdotes, some of which Maitland has overlooked or chosen to omit. Maitland makes only

Clive Aslet

Ups and downs of Bankside

Walk over Lord Foster’s wobbly bridge from St Paul’s and you will see, squashed between Tate Modern and the reconstructed Globe Theatre, a three-storey house that, according to an inscription, is where Sir Christopher Wren stayed while building the cathedral. Alas, the legend, acceptable in the 1940s when the words were put up, no longer holds water. The house was not built until 1710, long after Wren had a use for it. But the story that Gillian Tindall weaves in this book is no less fascinating for an absence of grand characters — in many ways it is the better for it. The house becomes a window through which the