Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Philip Hensher

Signs and portents of the times

Only a fool would try to explain fashions and tendencies in novel-writing. Everything can change so quickly, and it only takes one really good novel to rescue a genre which we’d all thought consigned to the dustheap. A year ago, I would have laughed drily at the notion that the campus novel still had some life in it; the form seemed as dead as the concerto grosso. But Zadie Smith’s brilliant On Beauty revived it with fizzing energy. On the other hand, a fictional standby which has seemed perfectly serviceable for some years may suddenly start looking creaky. I would say that five years ago, the sort of English magic

Saturday

Frank Johnson

View from the engine room

Most readers probably remember the name Guy Liddell, if at all, as the Fifth Man. Or possibly the Fourth, since we remember the first three, Burgess, Maclean and Philby, but cannot remember the next one, since the name kept on changing between Straight, Hollis and others. Liddell’s death in 1958 was largely un- noticed. He only became better known in the 1980s. David Mure, who in Cairo during the war had organised deception operations across the Middle East (on our side, I emphasise) announced that Liddell deliberately arranged a series of British intelligence failures. To the Cambridge historian John Costello, in his biography of Blunt, Master of Deception, Liddell’s long

Richard Dorment

A dog by the name of Flower

with a foreword by David Hockney and an introduction by Lucinda Lambton It is a well-known fact that artists love dachshunds. Bonnard had Poucette, Picasso Frika, Andy Warhol Archie, and Hockney his Stanley and Boodge. Less often noted is the attraction these adorable creatures have always had for royalty. But simply turn to the magisterial two-volume catalogue of the Victorian Pictures in the Royal Collection by Sir Oliver Millar and there you will find page after scholarly page devoted to portraits of smooth-haired dachshunds belonging to Queen Victoria — the matronly Waldemar, fat little D

David Crane

Grace under pressure

One evening in the Antarctic winter of 1912, some months after all hope of Scott had been given up, the surviving members of his expedition at base camp sat down to vote on their sledging plans for the coming spring. Along the coast to the north of them a party of five men under the command of Victor Campbell might or might not still be alive, while to the south of them, somewhere out on the ice between Hut Point and the Pole itself, 700-odd miles away, lay the bodies of Scott and the four men with whom he had set out on his final journey. ‘The problem was a

Patrick Marnham

A great ‘campaign’ socialist

Paul Foot, the ‘campaigning’ journalist who died last year and whose funeral attracted a crowd of 2,000 mourners, was a Cornish nonconformist who retrained as a Marxist revolutionary. Had he lived a century ago he would have made a stalwart Liberal member for West Cornwall, savaging the tinmasters. But Foot was condemned by the ideology of the 1960s to political obscurity, and to the enclosed, distrustful world of Marxist orthodoxy. When he died, after a lifetime of revolutionary struggle, his political epitaph could have been: Cut his teeth on Harold Wilson, Failed to dent Margaret Thatcher, Died under Tony Blair. But that epitaph would be a little unfair because his

Simon Baker

The character who refused to die

‘You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.’ It could be a fanciful tryst between George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden, but it is something far more auspicious: the first meeting between Sherlock Holmes and his chronicler, John Watson, MD, in 1881. Their friendship spawned many things: worldwide societies, sightseeing tours, commemorative deerstalkers (though Holmes never wore one), theme pubs and comedy sketches are just a few. Amid all that, it’s easy to overlook the four novels and 56 short stories which constitute one of the great contributions to English story-telling. The ‘Canon’ (as Sherlockians call it) was for a long time denied serious appraisal, possibly due to our snobbish

Deborah Devonshire

House-to- house battling

Of all the books on houses and gardens, inside and out, this one takes the cake. Nancy Lancaster was the possessor of those two attributes, difficult to describe but instantly recognisable, of style and charm. Together with her unstoppable energy and plenty of money, she made an indelible impression on one of England’s most envied assets just referred to as the country house. In her long life (she died aged 97 in 1994) she found herself in charge of houses of all sizes from palace to cottage. Her unerring instinct for beauty, originality and comfort resulted in perfection, whatever the scale. After she joined the firm of Colefax & Fowler,

Nicholas Harman

The making of a merry myth

Santa can still be a useful adjunct to the winter solstice. If there is a child whom you especially dislike, just ask it quietly what it hopes will be coming down the chimney and the little beast will cringe away, and stay away, in embarrassment. Otherwise Santa’s time is up. He cannot even safely go home to the United States, where liberals would like him banned for breaching the constitutional divide between church and state, while neo-conservatives find he offends their religious beliefs. Devout Christians may hope that, when the fat old chap in the red rompers quits the scene, he will make room for the Child whose festival it

Alexander Waugh

By guess and by God

It takes pluck to write about the historical Jesus, not just because doing so always stirs the wrath of hot-headed Christians but because there is not a single ‘fact’ relating to Jesus’s life that cannot be fiercely disputed according to any objective interpretation of the available evidence. Take, for instance, the supposed year of his birth. In 525 Pope John I issued a papal bull decreeing that this event had taken place in 1 AD. Matthew, however, stated in his Gospel that Jesus was born during the reign of Herod the Great who is known to have died in 4 BC. If, as Matthew also suggests, Jesus was about two

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 17 December 2005

The Devil’s Own Song and Other Verses (1968) by Quintin Hogg The Devil’s Own Song and Other Verses (1968)by Quintin Hogg Yes, that Quintin Hogg, Lord Hailsham of Woolsack fame. ‘Quite suddenly, during the summer of 1940, my personal and emotional situation was such that I felt an irresistible urge to write short lyrics,’ he says in the introduction. ‘I cannot explain this. I had not then, and have not now, any swollen-headed ideas about my quality as a poet … Somewhere about 1963, whatever little rill of inspiration I had, dried up.’ To say that this was a Good Thing seems a little unfair, but the poems are by

Interconnect

The seven ages

A selection from Keeping My Words: An Anthology from Cradle to Grave by Magnus Magnusson (Hodder & Stoughton, £6.99, pp. 280, ISBN 0340862645) What though his head be empty, provided his commonplace book be full?Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), A Tale of a Tub Lord knows what incommunicable small terrors infants go through, unknown to all. We disregard them, we say they forget, because they have not the words to make us remember … By the time they learn to speak they have forgotten the details of their complaints, and so we never know. They forget so quickly, we say, because we cannot contemplate the fact that they never forget.Margaret Drabble (b.

Candia Mcwilliam

A bumper crop of Bondage

Here is part of an Evening Standard review of Goldfinger, written when it was first published in 1959 under the untentative title ‘The Richest Man in the World’: ‘The things that make Bond attractive: the sex, the sadism, the vulgarity of money for its own sake, the cult of power, the lack of standards.’ Over 50 years later (Casino Royale, the first Bond book, was published in 1953, its author born in 1908) what is the verdict? That highly accessoried and fetishistic sex in the novels is rather unpenetrative by comparison with thriller-sex now; it is too ultra-romantic, of course, in the mean-keen/ luxe-location mode. The sadism is beating away

Saturday

Peter Jones

Ancient & modern – 10 December 2005

The principles behind ‘synthetic phonics’, the latest educational reading nostrum, have been around for thousands of years. Heaps of papyrus exercises, exercise-books (and a primary school textbook) have been found, dating from the Greek world of the 5th century bc. The first thing to be learnt was the Greek alphabet, by means of a metrical, chanted song: est’ alpha, beta, gamma, delta, t’ ei te kai / z

Interconnect

A hedonist of the old school

When the hero of Cyril Connolly’s novel The Rock Pool was asked which modern writers he admired, he replied, ‘Eliot, Joyce and Norman Douglas.’ Eliot and Joyce have held up well enough, but Douglas? ‘I thought he was quite forgotten,’ one well-read friend remarked to me. So perhaps he is. But he loomed quite large between the two world wars, and his reputation was still high for a decade or so after his death in 1952. There were admittedly extra-literary reasons for this. Admiring Douglas marked you out as a free spirit who had broken the bonds of Anglo-Saxon Puritan conformity. Douglas was a rebel, a scoffer, a hedonist, a

John Martin-Robinson

A brace of noble piles

The great houses of England have been singularly blessed in their owners (with one or two exceptions) during the latter decades of the 20th century. None more so than Chatsworth and Holkham where the baton is currently being passed on to the younger generation. Both these volumes therefore have a slight valedictory quality, though they are different in scale and intention. Round About Chatsworth is not concerned with the house itself but with structures and objects in the surrounding estate landscape — pigsties, privies, pubs, pounds, and pavilions. ‘Whether old or new, grand or humble, beautiful or ugly, these kind of man-made architectural oddities give character to a place.’ The

Jonathan Mirsky

How not to lose your shirt in China

Each time I write something about human rights in China, as I did recently in The Spectator, I receive e-mails from men, always men, doing business in China whose message is this: China is becoming a world-class economic power with its own moral standards, so why don’t I shut up and praise it for its tremendous accomplishments? Now comes James McGregor with this simple message: ‘The sad fact is that the Chinese system today is almost incompatible with honesty — almost everybody is at least a little bit dirty.’ And since McGregor’s book is a guide to doing business in China, here is some of his advice: ‘Once you get

Frederic Raphael

Floundering in the shallows

This is a slim two-in-one offer of a pair of previously undisclosed ‘novellas’ (actually film treatments) by Graham Greene. In 1949, when they were written, The Third Man had just been a prodigious hit for the author, Carol Reed and Orson Welles. No Man’s Land — the sole complete piece on parade here — was an attempt to take another bite from much the same cherry (or a squeeze from the same Lime). This time, Richard Brown, a British agent with a ‘neutral name’, crosses into the Soviet zone, in the Harz mountains, in order to find what Hitchcock called ‘the McGuffin’, that vital doesn’t-matter-much-what which serves to prime a

David Ekserdjian

Christmas art books

The only halfway festive offering in this year’s crop of art books is Laurence Kanter and Pia Palladino’s Fra Angelico. Even in these secularised times, Angelico is still a favourite in the Christmas card stakes. First and foremost, however, this is a major scholarly reassessment of the artist’s career, but it also doubles as the catalogue of an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which closes at the end of January. For all that it is lavishly illustrated and gorgeously produced, it makes few concessions to non-specialists, but that does not mean it is not worth persevering with. A generation ago, Angelico’s oeuvre had been pared down by an

Sarah Burton

Challenged at the top level

Coming as I do from a long line of hairless wonders, baldness has fascinated me since childhood. One of my earliest memories is of my father harvesting and boiling nettles to produce a concoction which he then spread on his pate in the hope of checking the premature departure of his hair. What was more memorable was the following morning when, despite repeated shampooing, he appeared at the breakfast table with a bright green head. Memorable too, no doubt, to the 600 boys to whom he was headmaster and who he would shortly have to face in assembly. My father subsequently abandoned any attempt to interfere with nature’s plans for

Caroline Moore

Nearly a burnt-out case

Would-be artists clinging to the belief that they are in possession of strangely unrecognised genius draw comfort from the thought of Van Gogh. For struggling writers, the biography of Herman Melville is almost equally potent. In some ways, indeed, it is even more poignant, for it is one of early success; early glamour, after the publication of Typee in 1846, as ‘the man who lived among cannibals’; abundant early promise that, in the eyes of contemporaries, merely fizzled out. He wrote published fiction for only 12 years of his 72 years, to increasingly bad reviews and poor sales: when he died, his last work, Billy Budd: Foretopman, was an unpublished