Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Roger Lewis

The man in the iron mask

Isn’t it peculiar when people change their name? John Wilson becoming Anthony Burgess, Peggy Hookham being borne aloft as Margot Fonteyn, or Richard Jenkins leaving Port Talbot as Richard Burton. When a person insists on being called somebody else we are witnessing an identity crisis. (Frank Skinner was Chris Collins until 1987. It is rumoured that as Chris Collins he still attends Johnson and Boswell conferences in Lichfield and presents academic papers.) The cocktail of vanity and self-loathing involved in renaming yourself is pungent and extreme — and helps to explain the career of Sir Michael Caine CBE, who was born in 1933 as Maurice Micklewhite, the son of a

Oliver Gilmour

Ten men went to mow

Sitting at Stamford Bridge at the weekend, Chelsea trailing Bolton 0-1, I reflected on the nature of 11 brilliant players and their manager. After Mourinho’s half-time talk, Chelsea scored four goals in 10 minutes. There are inspiring and uninspiring gaffers. If he were a conductor, José Mourinho would be a virtuoso, but what does this imply? Passion, charisma, sensitivity, psychological insight and a spiritual dimension are all vital, but perhaps Otto Klemperer, one of the subjects of this impressive book, succeeded in subsuming all this into a simple phrase, ‘the power of suggestion’, in a 1969 interview: ‘The art of conducting lies, in my opinion, in the power of suggestion

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

The perils of peace

In 1945, Europe lay prostrate after the greatest and most terrible war in history. More than 35 million people had been killed, Tony Judt says (other estimates are even higher), with combatant deaths easily outnumbered by civilian; whole countries were starving, scores of cities were razed. That was not what optimistic souls — or maybe anyone — had foreseen in the first decade of the century, when Europe seemed to be living through an age of peace, rising prosperity and increasing freedom which promised to last for ever. That happy century from Waterloo to the Marne had ended literally with a bang in August 1914. Three decades thereafter saw a

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 5 November 2005

Lecherous Limericks (1975) by Isaac Asimov Isaac Asimov’s ambition was to have a book in every one of the major Dewey Decimal categories. This one fits in the category labelled ‘dirty poems’. It’s a collection of 100 original limericks dealing with what Asimov called ‘actions and words concerning which society pretends nonexistence — reproduction, excretion, and so on’. They are accompanied by prim exegeses on metrical structure and rhyme-scheme, which at least have the virtue of making the book a lot longer than it would otherwise have been. Perhaps surprisingly, given the possibilities of ‘young women from Venus’ and ‘old men from Uranus’, none of the limericks have extraterrestrial themes.

Saturday

Brian Masters

How to ruin a good story

Buried within the pages of this book there lies an extraordinary story worth the telling, the bald facts of which require none of the elaboration to which they are here subjected. In 1896 a certain Anna Maria Druce, of 68 Baker Street in London, petitioned the home secretary to have her late husband’s coffin opened, on the grounds that his funeral in 1864 had been a purposeful sham devoted to ceremonial disposal of an empty box. Mr Druce had not died at all; he had simply wanted to revert to his other identity as the 5th Duke of Portland, of Welbeck Abbey near Worksop. The duke had grown tired of

Andro Linklater

The art of limiting distortion

He had bought a large map representing the sea, Without the least vestige of land: And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be A map they could all understand. ‘What’s the good of Mercator’s North Poles and Equators, Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?’ So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply, ‘They are merely conventional signs!’ As The Hunting of the Snark suggests, what gives rise to a map is an absurd logic best appreciated by a mathematician like Lewis Carroll. The problem that cartography seeks to solve is also the one that drove painters to experiment with perspective and cubism: how best to

Selina Hastings

Unfaltering to the end

While staying at Chatsworth for Christmas 1994, James Lees-Milne records an exchange with his old friend, Patrick Leigh Fermor, on the subject of keeping a diary. Leigh Fermor regrets not having done so: ‘It might have helped him pick up the threads … so difficult for horny old fingers to feel. Yes, I said, a diary does keep the fingers flexed.’ So it would seem. This is the 12th and final volume of Lees-Milne’s incomparable journal, which he continued to write until a few weeks before his death in December 1997. He was in his 90th year when he died, and in this latest instalment, The Milk of Paradise, one

Ronald Segal

North, south, east and west

Among my earliest recollections is that of wandering into my mother’s bathroom and watching her, toenails incarnadine with polish like pillars above the foam, as she addressed herself sternly along the lines of: ‘I should have covered the jack. Then they could never have made the contract.’ Except for my brother Maurice, who played the piano, we all played bridge in the family, and we continued this in my own home, though my son came to be so much better than all of us that I refused to play with him. Impeccable kindness in criticism is especially hard to take. I had read and enjoyed Sandy Balfour’s previous book, Pretty

John Martin-Robinson

From Edgar all the way to Elizabeth

Once upon a time, the young Roy Strong spent many hours, with the encouragement of Sir Anthony Wagner, researching the records of the College of Arms in connection with his interest in Elizabethan and Stuart portraits and pageantry. This resulted in what many regard as his best work, Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals. Now, 50 years and 24 books later, he has trawled the heralds’ records again, this time for a history of the English coronation service from its Saxon origins to Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. The result is a well organised, sympathetic and fascinating account of the central ritual of the English people. This is a serious book

Simon Courtauld

The joys of rod and gun

The farmer and writer, A. G. Street, who in the 1950s co- edited with Max Hastings’s father a magazine which gives this book its title, wrote before the war: When the countryman turns his cows out to grass in the spring, he also gets out his rod and net ready for the fishing. The turning colour of the wheat makes the countryman think of both harvest and duck-shooting. In September he will thatch his ricks and shoot his partridges. He must wait until the leaf is off the tree before he can drive his pheasants. And when winter arrives he ploughs his land, feeds his stock, and goes hunting. Though

Raymond Carr

A short life and a shady one

Scholars face a formidable task when they set out to write the lives of the playwrights and poets of the Elizabethan age. They do not possess the personal revelations, say, of Byron’s letters. They must piece together scraps of information contained in the lawsuits of an astonishingly litigious population; the comments of friends and enemies in the literary world. They must then fit all this together with the supposed personal references in their subject’s works. Park Honan does this admirably in his life of Marlowe from his birth in Canterbury in 1564 to his death aged 29 in widow Bull’s house in Deptford. It is an ingenious piece of informed

Diana Hendry

Growing up through grief

I’d like to defend Joyce Carol Oates —she’s had so many rotten reviews of this, her latest novel. Reviewers, I reason, must get tired of a writer who publishes a novel a year (Mother, Missing is Oates’s 44th) and seek something snide to say like ‘time to slow down’ (the Guardian) or ask, like Patrick Ness in the Daily Telegraph, how this esteemed author can produce ‘a novel of such careless mediocrity?’ But, alas, I think Ness is right and the best I can do is to say that I found the autobiographical origin of the book more interesting than the novel itself, raising questions about where fiction and memoir

Cressida Connolly

Empty house blues

‘People who have recently lost someone have a certain look . . . one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness,’ observes Joan Didion in this painful memoir, which describes the first year of her widowhood after 40-odd years of marriage. She should know: the merest glance at her photograph confirms what the mirror must tell her, every day. Didion looks haunted, as indeed she is; haunted by grief, regret and longing. Mourners generally retreat behind closed doors, observed only by their closest family and friends. It is difficult not to feel slightly guilty for seeing her in this state. But any such reservations are out of place here, for Didion is

Philip Hensher

‘I am a most superior person’

There’s an old definition of a gentleman: that he is someone who is never rude unintentionally. Rudeness, since then, has spread and spread, and 20 times a day we probably ask ourselves the same question which underlies these two books about contemporary manners. Do they mean to do it? Are they just bleeding ignorant, or does their rudeness reflect some kind of ethical conviction? One example. At my local branch of Sainsbury’s, you approach the check-out, and the operator says nothing, and does not meet your eye. If you say ‘Hello’, there is usually no response. He or she passes the goods over the scanner, ignoring you. At the end,

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 29 October 2005

Trilogy(1978) by Leonid Brezhnev Leonid Brezhnev produced the standard documents for a Soviet leader: speeches, articles and Leninophiliac tracts. In 1978 he added three books of jaunty memoirs: Little Land, Rebirth and The Virgin Lands, which told of his part in the Great Patriotic War and its immediate aftermath. Sample scenes include him single-handedly repelling a Nazi attack, then leading the way across a mined potato field. Since he had spent the war as a political commissar rather than a military officer, these were not regarded by everyone at the time as exhibiting the most complete veracity. Little Land in particular is notable for a photo of Brezhnev relaxing with

Saturday

Francis King

A stranger to the truth

Anthony Burgess was someone whose accomplishment as a fibber far surpassed even that of such formidable rivals as Laurens van der Post, Lilian Hellman and Patrick O’Brian. What made fibbing particularly perilous for Burgess, as for most fibbers, was that he rarely remembered his fibs. In consequence they varied widely from telling to telling. The best example of this is the case of the son, Paolo Andrea, of the Italian woman, Liana, whom Burgess precipitately took as his second wife within five or six weeks of the death of his first wife, Lynne. In a 1968 Spectator essay, ‘Thoughts of a Belated Father’, Burgess announced that, having just remarried (in

Robin Hanburytenison

A good and faithful but critical servant

As one who has always been a bit afraid of Virginia Woolf and daunted by heavy tomes on the Bloomsbury group, I opened this book cautiously. I soon found that I was wrong to be nervous as I became caught up in a fascinating story. Leonard Woolf was Virginia’s husband and his life was far more interesting than hers. The author, Sir Christopher Ondaatje, is one of the most remarkable men of our times. Now one of Britain’s leading philanthropists, his life, as he says himself, has been in some ways an echo of Woolf’s. Skilfully, he interweaves his own childhood memories and experiences of the Ceylon of 50 years

M R-D-Foot

A woman in a million

Of all the extraordinary secret careers that have gone public since the end of the world war against Hitler, one of the most dashing and farthest out of the ordinary was that of the woman the SOE called Christine Granville. Her father, the Polish Count Jerzy Skarbek, died when she was a child; her mother was the daughter of a Jewish banker. Krystyna grew up an unmanageable tomboy. She had been born in 1915, and spent her babyhood under German occupation; that did not make her pro-German. She adored skiing and knew well most of the skiing instructors on the mountainous Hungarian border, with whose help she organised several astounding

Ian Thomson

The days of Hitler’s jackal

When Benito Mussolini invaded Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) in 1935, Italians were filled with jingoist pride. The dictator triumphantly announced the conquest of the promised sub-Saharan kingdom. ‘He’s like a god,’ marvelled one Fascist. ‘Like a god?’ returned another. ‘He is a god.’ Mussolini was part demagogue, part buffoon; on occasion he wore a tasselled fez and thrust out his chin pugnaciously for the world’s cameras. His cult of imperial Rome considered the handshake fey and unhygienic, so the stiff-armed salute was introduced. As the regime strengthened, the high priests of Fascism hailed Mussolini as ‘divine Caesar’, and called for an embargo on all foreign locutions and non-Latin terms. Thus Italians

John De-Falbe

Broadening the mind without moving

The phrase ‘armchair travel’ sounds quaint; suggestive of austerity at home and anarchy abroad; an era of currency restrictions and mustachioed bandits, when it was altogether more advisable to stay at home and read some daredevil’s account of the Damascene soukhs or the Grand Canal than risk venturing into such places yourself. But travel is now so easy that settling for its sedentary reflection looks like admitting to rather withered aspirations: so it is a surprise to see four attractively packaged books from Haus in a new series cheerfully called ‘Armchair Travellers’. Among them is one for which I can think of no precedent, a travel book written by someone