Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Murdering for diamonds

It was at Freetown Airport, which even before the civil war could be reached only with some difficulty, that I learnt that there was such a product as Johnny Walker Blue Label, about ten times as expensive as the Black Label variety. Since Sierra Leone was conspicuously impoverished and broken-down, I would have guessed from the offer for sale of this ostentatiously expensive luxury (if I hadn’t already known it by other experiences) that the country was in the hands of a rapacious and vulgar elite. The civil war broke out soon afterwards. It seemed that the participants were determined to prove that Gerard Manley Hopkins’ line,’ No worse, there

Ornery and extraordinary

Decayed gentility and a feckless father. These make the springiest springboard for the angry artist. Dickens, Picasso, Joyce, Shaw, Francis Bacon all enjoyed these unsung advantages in life. So did Samuel Langhorne Clemens who called himself Mark Twain, after the cry of the leadsmen sounding the depths in the treacherous waters of the Mississippi (twain=two fathoms, or 12 feet). The Clemenses had come west from Virginia by way of Kentucky with half a dozen slaves and irrepressible dreams of remaking their fortune. In this sloppy, imaginative, wandering hulk of a biography Ron Powers never bothers to chart the family’s history, so that you are surprised when every now and then

The Timon of Lyme Regis

Dr Johnson talks somewhere of a Reverend Dr Campbell whom he calls the ‘richest man ever to graze the pasture of literature’. If his riches derived from his books, he was surely outgrossed by John Fowles, whose novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman topped all the bestseller lists, and remained on the New York Times list for a full year. Fowles’s advances reached $250,000. Even The Ebony Tower, a soft-porn novella, and a clutch of short stories made him a small fortune. Hollywood films were made of FLW (as he refers to it) and of his earlier novels The Collector and The Magus, though none was worth seeing. The movies are

Brendan O’Neill

Pressuring the press

I feel I ought to start this review by letting the authors know that I will not enter into correspondence with them. However much they might loathe what I am about to say and wish to bombard me with emails ridiculing my reasoning, I regret to tell them that I will be far too busy to respond. That might look like a weird intro to a review, until you realise that the authors being reviewed — David Edwards and David Cromwell — run a pressure group called Medialens which is in the business of berating journalists (and encouraging others to do likewise) for their perceived prejudices. Medialens is like a

The return of the native

Brian Power’s book, like the best Chinese paintings, contains a lot of empty space. You can either concentrate on what you see, or you can let your mind and imagination glide over into what might have been there. I have a silk-screen of a painting by the Song dynasty master Liang Kai (13th century) on my wall; Li Bai, the great Tang dynasty poet (8th century), probably drunk and standing on tip-toe, is gazing up at the moon. There is no moon in the picture, only the empty, not blank, space. I know the moon is there because in one of his poems Li Bai describes looking up at it.

Not to the manor born

Six years ago I embarked on a little redecoration of my husband’s family house, over 200 years old in south- west Scotland. ‘Ah’, said a knowing friend from the Highlands, now a neighbour, who would soon embrace the same task, as we ripped up floorboards, struggled with ancient heating systems and filled skips; ‘ah’ she said, ‘the generational refit.’ It is the same exercise which lies at the heart of Belinda Rathbone’s well-observed description of ten years of similar effort near Arbroath in the Scottish Highlands, at her new husband’s ancestral home, a Georgian mansion called the Guynd. ‘Mansion’ is a word not much used in the description of country

Post-war feuds and dilemmas

Albert Camus was an exceptional man who lived in interest- ing times. His parents were pieds-noirs — French settlers in Algeria. His father died at the battle of the Marne and he was raised by his mother, an illiterate cleaning lady. Encouraged by inspired teachers, he won scholarships to a lycée and then university in Algiers. He published his first book at the age of 24, and worked as a journalist, first in Algiers and later in Paris. At the outbreak of the second world war, ill-health exempted him from military service. He worked as a reader for Gallimard, and wrote a classic novel of existentialism, L’Etranger, and a philosophical

Blaming the wicked West

An unkind thought keeps coming to mind as you read this book: perhaps Henry Ford was right, after all. It is unkind because so much of Guy Arnold’s great opus is admirable. As an account of the main political events that have taken place in Africa since 1960, it is awe-inspiring, some might even say awesome. Arnold’s ability to assemble facts, everywhere from the Cape to Cairo, from Dakar to Djibouti, is as commendable as his clear, jargon-free style. Yet, if his history is not bunk, it is certainly deeply unsatisfying. It contains hardly an original observation and provides no clear answers to the difficult questions about Africa, in particular,

Sam Leith

The Luther of medicine?

The man christened Philip Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim, in a mining town in Switzerland in the last decade of the 15th century, has been more mythologised than described: as a Faust, a Prometheus, a holy fool, a eunuch, a necromancer. It is not hard to see why he was attractive to the Romantic poets and remains — even in the works of J. K. Rowling — shorthand for a whiff of brimstone. He’s a myth. But, like most myths, he’s also an idea, and an interesting one. Paracelsus himself was a stocky, odd little bloke. Contemporaries attest that he was often drunk and seldom changed his clothes. He seemed, much

After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

Most of this powerful book was written nearly 60 years ago. It was then rejected by two London publishers as too anti-Soviet in tone, and a few years later by two more as too anti-German. It consists of the war recollections of a Polish countess of notable ancestry and equally notable courage, who describes exactly what it felt like to live under Soviet and then under German military occupation. Ostensibly, she co-operated with the occupiers, in the task of feeding prisoners, denying (under oath, to the Germans) that she was working against them; in fact she was also an invaluable source of intelligence for the Polish Home Army, till she

All gas and gaiters

It’s irrelevant, I know, but I can’t help wondering what it was like living with D. J. Taylor while he was writing this opus. It’s so steeped in Victoriana and (as Taylor acknowledges) in the fictional worlds of Dickens, George Eliot, Thackeray, Trollope and co. and it’s so big that I picture him emerging into the 21st century maybe just once a week, on a Sunday. If you want to opt out of the 2lst century and hark back (oh, it’s catching!) to an era of gas lamps and legal clerks scuttling about the grimy streets of London, while the squire sits in his country estate with a stuffed bear

All roots and branches

This book covers all the trees that now live or have ever lived: what they are, how they function, how they grow, their relation to environment, plants, animals, and the human species. It is full of curious information, traditional and recent: there are fascinating new developments in long-familiar stories, such as the part played by parasitic worms in the symbiosis between figs and fig-wasps. The author is a distinguished journalist and scientist. His book is a brave attempt to boil down a huge amount of detail for the general reader. I am reminded of Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us, which inspired my youth. However, like all tree writers, he

Progressive up to a point

Henry Cockburn (1779-1854) was a Scots advocate, Solicitor-General in the reforming Whig government of 1832-41, later a judge, contributor to the Edinburgh Review and author of delightful, posthumously published memoirs and journals. A considerable figure in the Edinburgh of his time, he is commemorated in the Cockburn Association, one of the earliest conservation societies, founded in 1875. He has been the subject of an admirable biography by Karl Miller, while his impersonation by the actor Russell Hunter in a one-man play, Cocky, revived interest in him 30 years ago. But I suppose he is little known in England, though a few will know of him as the great-great-grandfather of both

The Thirty Years Slaughter

Of the many obscure conflicts of the ancient world, the Pelo- ponnesian war is perhaps the least obscure to us, thanks to Thucydides’ carefully written, if unfinished, account of it. Despite the enormous influence it grew to have on the practice of history itself, Thucydides’ achievement did not prevent future historians from tackling the same subject — of whom Victor Davis Hanson, a prolific author of books on classical Greece and ‘the Western way of war’, is only the most recent. Hanson’s approach is not simply to recount the war’s events or its campaign strategies, but to describe how the war was actually fought, and thus ‘to flesh out this

Change and decay

The prizewinning novelist Sarah Waters enjoys subverting our expectations, telling tales of the illicit, stripping away our veneers of polite respectability. In Fingersmith and Tipping the Velvet she laid bare a Victorian world of lesbian love, titillating her readers with the scurrilous idea that women could have had a good time without those bewhiskered men of empire. For her latest book, she has moved centuries, swapping bodices and ankle boots for slacks and silk pyjamas. The Night Watch is set in 1940s London — rubble-strewn, cheerless, unrecognisable without its bustling crowds, street signs, railings. But this is not a novel about plucky heroines and the cheery community spirit which is

What should not be known

This elegantly argued, amusing and acute book has been put together, in the end, for a single overdue purpose: to piss all over Edward W. Said’s ludicrous 1978 polemical work, Orientalism. It may look, for most of the journey, like a scrupulous history of the academic study of Arabic cultures, and the steady growth in understanding, as well as some deft character sketches of the necessarily rather eccentric figures in the field. Don’t be misled: Robert Irwin has Said perpetually in his sights. It is quite incredible to conceive the influence Said’s Orientalism has had, within and outside academia. Said’s point was not just that the ‘orientalist’ styles of European

A man in a million

Of the making of books about Churchill there seems to be no end. His own output was large, and largely self-centred. We already have an official life in eight volumes, with several volumes of supplementary papers, a number of single-volume lives, long and short, books by supporters, books by opponents, books by those interested in Churchill’s attachment to their own special subject, books by his personal attendants, books by those who never saw him. Here are two more: a study by a notable historian, who has applied his scholarship to one important corner of Churchill’s life as an imperial statesman, and one by a cousin, who has written a lavish

Manners elevated to a high art

No society has ever thought about itself more intensely, or spent more time considering how best to present itself, than the ancien régime in France for the 150 years or so which led up to the revolution. As Benedetta Craveri demonstrates in her excellent and extremely readable The Art of Conversation, this ideal of living well, with elegance, courtesy and exquisite manners, giving pleasure to others and to oneself, became not only an art but an end in itself. And where this complex web of influence, etiquette and enjoyment reached its peak was not at the court of Versailles, but in the salons of Paris. The start of the French