Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Ian Mcintyre

The case of the lurking paradigm

The gung-ho photo on the dust jacket — battle fatigues, the red beret of the Paras, eyes narrowed to determined slits — suggests a touch of the Paddy Ashdowns. But that is at odds with the picture of the author that emerges from this his first book: ‘For my part, I do not think I have been in action in the broadest sense for more than about six of my 37 years of commissioned service.’ Yet as military careers go in an age of peace-keeping and humanitarian intervention, General Sir Rupert Smith’s has not been exactly uneventful. As a young company commander in the 1970s he was blown up by

Sandy Balfour

Tips for technique and tactics

In 1994 the membership of the American Contract Bridge League voted S. J. Simon’s 1946 classic, Why You Lose at Bridge, the best bridge book ever. To that extent, all bridge books live in its considerable shadow. According to Simon you lose at bridge for two reasons: lack of skill and losing tactics. He doesn’t plan to do much about the first. ‘You’ve been making the same mistakes for years and you have every intention of going on making them.’ But he thinks he can, perhaps, help with the second. You lose, he says, not because you can’t play difficult hands (of which there are in any case relatively few)

Nicholas Harman

Anyone for dunnocks?

As soon as the British had pretty much done for their larger mammals, they took up birds. The ones you shoot or eat had been protected from time immemorial, and in the 1880s people began to look after the ones that it was just nice to have around. Parliament began passing protective laws, lobbied by the forerunner of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which now claims a million members and owns vast tracts of land. The publishing business followed the action; the shelves in rustic bourgeois households like mine are bent down with bird books, which have to earn their shelf-space. The fattest fledgling in this new

Charlotte Hobson

A cross-cultural crisis

If you were a Martian, whiling away the time on an intergalactic beach holiday by reading an account of the Cuban missile crisis, you could be forgiven for dismissing it as wildly implausible fiction. All the blockbuster ingredients are there: the clash of superpowers, one led by the clean-cut American hero, the other by the fat Ukrainian with bad teeth, the military hardware amassing in the Caribbean (nice location), the split-second timing, not to mention the prospect of the end of the world. As a setting for a novel it’s worthy of a Robert Harris-style humdinger, called, no doubt, Cuba, or Missile, or even just Crisis. Instead, rather surprisingly, here

Jane Ridley

Servants who were masters

It is a remarkable but little known fact that in 1901 the entire Indian subcontinent with a population totalling 300 million was administered by a British ruling elite which consisted of no more than 1,000 men. Still more extraordinary, their rule rested neither on military force nor on terror or corruption. On the contrary, the rulers of the British Raj were renowned for being impartial, high-minded, conscientious and incorruptible. Yet this astonishing British success story has been largely ignored. Historians have got their knickers in such a twist over the whole embarrassing business of imperialism that they have been blind to its strengths. Slaves to political correctness, they are fixated

Anne Chisholm

A bad judge, except of art

According to this new biography by an earnest, academically inclined American, Peggy Guggenheim deserves to be given a respected place in the history of modern art and not dismissed as a poor little rich girl with more money than sense. In fact, Peggy Guggenheim’s reputation was well earned, not to say established early on by her own memoir, Out of This Century, published in 1949, which proudly proclaimed the haphazard nature of her activities, both artistic and sexual. By the time she was in her early twenties Peggy, born in 1898, had abandoned New York, where she was surrounded by stuffy rich Jewish relations, for Paris and the bohemian life,

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures

War With Honour (1940) by A. A. Milne Alan Milne rather resented being known only as the author of Winnie-the-Pooh. As he liked to point out, he had also written plays, novels and non-fiction. Among his works in the latter category was Peace with Honour (1934), which called on Britain to avoid war with Germany at all costs (Milne had first-hand experience of the first world war, having served in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment as a signals officer and seen action on the Somme, so perhaps this was understandable). But War with Honour was his thoroughgoing retraction of Peace with Honour. Piglet had spoken; now it was Eeyore’s turn. ‘If

Saturday

David Gilmour

A small, bespectacled hero

United Italy was reluctant to honour authentic heroes of its national struggle. Apart from Garibaldi, its squares and street-names — as well as its bronze statues and marble plaques — commemorate incompetent generals, duplicitous statesmen, serial conspirators, an oafish monarch (Victor Emmanuel) and a number of crazy young patriots who dashed off to Calabria (or wherever), shouted ‘Viva Italia!’ at a bemused populace, and were quickly shot. One neglected figure was Daniele Manin, the protagonist of Jonathan Keates’s skilful and absorbing account of the Venetian Revolution of 1848-9. Manin did not fit the mould of the Risorgimento romantic. A middle-aged lawyer, he was short and bespectacled, rational and pragmatic, an

Charles Allen

Holding the East in fee

Never a great fan of the British Raj, the maverick ex-ICS historian Sir Penderel Moon judged nevertheless that its establishment was ‘an achievement that ought to excite wonder’. At the heart of that achievement was a paradox: how was it that so few were able to subdue so many, of whom large numbers were warriors by caste and profession? This is the question that our foremost and busiest military historian sets out to answer in Sahib: The British Soldier in India 1750-1914. Having extensively chronicled the two world wars, re-evaluated the achievements of some of our leading military heroes (French, Wellington, Churchill) and explored the lives of the humble footsoldier

Victoria Glendinning

Peace under the Iron Mountain

When he was little, John McGahern’s mother took him with her to the school where she taught, through the lanes with flowering hedges linking the small reedy lakes of Co Leitrim, in the lee of the Iron Mountains. This physical and emotional geography is in his bones, and the source of ‘an extraordinary sense of security, of deep peace’. Over and over, in this memoir as in childhood, he goes up the cinder path to the little iron gate, past Brady’s house and pool and the house where the old Mahon brothers lived, past the dark, deep quarry and across the railway bridge and up the hill past Mahon’s shop.

Zenga Longmore

The distaff side of death

The reason one heads straight for the obituary column when one is confronted by the Daily Telegraph is the abundance of rarefied mischievousness one finds therein. If it is grovelling hero-worship you crave, then Telegraph obituaries will disappoint. In Chin Up, Girls! we delight in a portrait of Dame Barbara Cartland: ‘In her later years, she cut an unmistakeable figure in a froth of pink ball gown with extravagant, almost clown-like make-up — her cheeks pulled back with sadly visible bits of sticking plaster … She was a formidable fairy queen.’ Ah! A morning devoid of sunny Telegraph obituaries is a morning misspent. I was slightly apprehensive about the idea

Sam Leith Sam Leith

The everlasting guessing game

On the very first page of Peter Ackroyd’s biography, you learn something strange and interesting about the first few moments of Shake- speare’s life: ‘A small portion of butter and honey was usually placed in the baby’s mouth. It was the custom in Warwickshire to give the suckling child hare’s brains reduced to jelly.’ Who knew that the first food our greatest dramatist tasted was jellied hare’s brains? Yuck. On page after page that follows, he dishes out similar morsels. At the excavation of the site of the Rose theatre in 1989 he tells us that there were discovered ‘orange pips, Tudor shoes, a human skull, a bear skull, the

Saturday

Caroline Moorehead

Campaigning on the campus

Do campus novels reflect the reality of university life? When I was a Fellow of Peterhouse, back in the Eighties, I was asked with tedious regularity whether the experience resembled Porterhouse Blue, Tom Sharpe’s grotesquely overblown satire. But even as I (truthfully) denied it, a few vignettes would slide past my mind’s eye — such as my very first Governing Body meeting, when, sombrely robed, the Fellows debated, hotly and with manifest ill-will, whether the vomit by the chapel was beer- or claret-based. This was, of course, a matter of college politics. In every faculty or university, you will find the progressives ranged against the traditionalists, the puritans against the

Sarah Burton

Lucky dip for lovers

First published in 1857, The Ladies’ Oracle dates from a period when very little literature of real merit was widely considered appropriate reading material for respectable young women, with the consequence that the presses fairly overran with little books designed to fill, rather than enrich, their idle moments — lest the Devil had plans for them — and otherwise kill the precious hours they had before serving their time as wives. Many of these handy volumes were promoted as instructive or edifying; others had less serious intentions and one suspects that many a hopeful maiden would have hastily shoved her copy of the Oracle into her needlework basket on hearing

Jonathan Cecil

Top marks for charisma

In the delightful correspondence (1944) between the late actress Athene Seyler and the actor Stephen Haggard, she inquires of a potential professional performer: Does he aspire to be a power in the theatre, a leader or more vulgarly a star? Then let him be prepared to devote his entire energies, thoughts and interest to his job. He must breathe, eat and dream the theatre: I have never known a successful actor do less. This will limit him as a person and as a citizen. He must of necessity be an egoist and will probably become a bore. He must give up a wider life and concentrate on his job. This

Andro Linklater

The spacious firmament on high

This is the most dazzling era in astronomy that human history has ever known, but for all the attention it commands it could be the dullest. It seems almost routine, a swiftly forgotten news item at best, to see images of Mars beamed back from the planet’s surface or to have a comet’s content analysed by fragmenting its surface with a rocket. The astonishing construction of a space station circling the earth is of such little interest, it is wholly obscured by anxieties about the Shuttle that serves it. The seven-year, 2.2-billion-mile, inch-perfect flight of the Cassini spacecraft to examine Saturn’s moons registers only slightly more than the discovery this

Anita Brookner

Take-over bid by a stranger

This is a novel on a rebarbative theme: incapacity. Not the sort of incapacity one observes in others; rather, incapacity as a curse one suffers on one’s own. Paul Rayment, a man of 60, is flung off his bicycle by an oncoming car and loses part of his right leg. He recovers, more or less, and is returned home to his solitary flat, in the charge of a nurse, Marijana, a Croatian immigrant. He refuses a prosthesis and is reduced to an even lonelier and more circumscribed existence than he had previously experienced. He becomes acutely aware of his childlessness, which torments him. He also becomes aware of Marijana, yearns

Richard Shone

The calm and solid Cubist

The personalities of only a handful of artists are known to the public at large. Most live on through their work with, perhaps, a ticket of biographical cliché attached to their reputation — Van Gogh’s ear, Lautrec’s legs, Turner lashed to the mast of a ship in a storm. A few are known through the distortions of the biopic — Michelangelo, Gauguin, Pollock. With others, the very sparseness of available human detail — about Piero or Vermeer, for example —becomes their name tag. Of the great names of 20th-century art, Georges Braque is still among the unknown personalities. This problem is addressed in Alex Danchev’s very welcome, readable biography. It

Saturday

Interconnect

Under the volcano again

In 2003, Robert Harris published Pompeii: A Novel, which for vitality and entertainment and the atmosphere of the decadent Roman world around the Bay of Naples in the first century AD can hardly be beaten. The great eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 and the destruction of the playground city of Pompeii is made even more cataclysmic by Harris’s angle on it. Not until nearly the end of the book does he describe the mushroom cloud, the blood-red lightning, the choking ash four feet deep, the terrifying withdrawal of the sea, the darkness and the final silence. Harris concentrates on the early warnings, the disappearance of the drinking water, the

Raymond Carr

Playing the marriage market | 3 September 2005

In November 1895 the most eligible bachelor in London society, the ninth Duke of Marlborough, married Consuelo Vanderbilt, the richest American heiress available. It is sometimes assumed that the British aristocracy crossed the Atlantic en masse in search of heiresses who might replenish fortunes devastated by falling rents during the agricultural depression of the late 19th century. However, most titled aristocrats continued to marry within their class, as did American millionaires. But the Duke of Marlborough, relatively poor as dukes went, was strapped for cash which would enable him to restore the tarnished reputation of his family and the glories of Blenheim Palace. Consuelo’s mother, Alva, who in this book