Book Reviews Archives

Saturday

9 Jul 2005

From faintly weird to fiercely eccentric

HERMIT WANTEDFree meals and accommodation.Situated on grand estate.Would suit the quiet type. When Giles and Ginny married ‘it was like a great clanging-together of bank vaults that rang out across the land’. Now Ginny demanded a savage. She had discovered an empty cave in the woods, and it needed to be occupied. The applicant to her ‘Situation Vacant’ notice in the local paper must not shave, cut his hair, trim his fingernails — do anything but look rough; in particular, he must not speak. Then she and her guests could ride out after supper to spy on him. At first, all went well with the successful unsavoury applicant, until they

William Reesmogg

Friends, rivals and countrymen

This is an ideal John Murray book, dealing with historic personalities, with a narrative reinforced by family papers and an understanding deepened by family connection. Robert Lloyd George, the author, is the great-grandson of David Lloyd George, the prime minister. I hope it will be a best- seller, and can imagine it being un- wrapped, with real pleasure, from parcels beneath half the Christmas trees of Old England. What is surprising is that a book on this friendship has never been written before. David Lloyd George was the prime minister who won the first world war; Winston Churchill was the prime minister who won the second. They served together in

Sam Leith

Mad, good and dangerous to know

‘Tomorrow morning some poet may, like Byron, wake up to find himself famous,’ wrote Randall Jarrell, ‘for having written a novel, for having killed his wife; it will not be for having written a poem.’ Jarrell’s cynicism is too slick, too rueful; but it does snag something in Robert Lowell, as it does in several of the American poets of his generation. Lowell was, at his best, a towering poet, but his public fame often rested on other things: that he was Boston posh; that he publicly thumbed his nose at the government; that he was, above all, mad. He was all these things, and a great poet, too. It’s

Saturday

2 Jul 2005

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 2 July 2005

The renewed interest in Our Island Story on its centenary takes me back to the first history book I read. It is called A Nursery History of England, by one Elizabeth O’Neill who was, I now see but did not notice at the time, covertly sympathetic to Catholicism (Mary, Queen of Scots was ‘not vain like Elizabeth, and she was very kind’, Guy Fawkes was ‘brave in his way’). The book has two colour illustrations filling each left page and two corresponding stories on the right. We used to pore over the nastier scenes like the burning of Cranmer and people clamping handkerchiefs to their faces during the Great Plague,

Robert Salisbury

That colossal wreck

There is a delightful tradition among the English of writing guide books to inaccessible parts of the world. Nowhere has inspired us more than South and Central Asia, seat of the Raj and the theatre that staged the Great Game. Contrary to what one might suppose, it is not a tradition that died with the last King-Emperor. Among the most useful in the genre is, for instance, A Traveller’s Guide to Pakistan, published in 1981 and compiled by Hilary Adams and Isobel Shaw, two diplomatic wives who thus rendered at least as great service as their husbands. Their efforts would have been justified by one entry alone. They record that

Michael Beloff

Sharing the pinnacle

One-to-one conflict injects adren- alin into sport. For a period, inevitably finite, a pair of rivals will elevate themselves above their contemporaries, and produce contests which will divide not only cognoscenti, but also the community at large, into two camps. This book is about one of the most magnetic of such contests for primacy waged over a decade and a half, between Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova for the unofficial title, Queen of Women’s Tennis. What makes such a rivalry truly memorable? The talents of the pair must be equal but separate — equal because otherwise the outcome would be predictable; separate because even if unpredictable it would be tedious.

Alexander Chancellor

A cruel twist of fate

This, as its title suggests, is a poignant book. In his account of the world’s last great polio epidemic in Cork, to which he fell victim at the age of six, nearly 50 years ago, Patrick Cockburn is neither self-centred nor self-pitying. He shows journalistic detachment in discussing the history and character of this terrifying disease, and as much, if not more, sympathy for its other victims as for himself. But he does at one point allow himself to say — and it is a most convincing claim — that he was perhaps ‘uniquely unlucky’. His famous parents, Claud and Patricia Cockburn, were largely responsible for his crippling. They decided

Anne Applebaum

A truly Russian icon

For far too long, the history of 20th- century Russia has been understood almost exclusively through the prism of politics, as if it were about nothing more than Marxism and Leninism, revolution and totalitarianism, war and famine. But in fact the history of Russia over the past 100 years is not only one of multiple political crises, but of an unprecedented cultural catastrophe. Between 1917 and 1937, the Bolsheviks destroyed not just the Russian political system, but an entire civilisation, everything from its manners and its habits to its stamp-collecting clubs and its fashion designers. A generation of cultural and social leaders died or emigrated. Most of those who stayed

Saturday

25 Jun 2005

Alberto Manguel

Tricks played by memory

In a learned essay on semiotics (and here, I imagine, the chaste Spectator reader will blanch but, steeling himself for the worst, bravely carry on reading) published in 1979, Umberto Eco explored the role of the reader in the construction of a text. The essay, ‘Lector in fabula’ — punning on the Latin tag, ‘lupus in fabula’, ‘the wolf in the story’ or, as we would say, ‘talk of the devil’ — invited us to consider how a text is transformed, completed and appropriated by a ‘naive’ reader willing to play the game of fiction. Twenty-six years later, Eco has decided to grant that naive reader a book of his

Zoe Williams

Low-level challenge and response

Steven Johnson has written a bold little book that very nearly undermines the only moral precept of my adult life: thou shalt not get into video games, since then thou really won’t, ever, get any work done. Thank heavens, his argument wasn’t quite that good; but it came extremely close. His key thesis is this: ‘popular culture has been growing increasingly complex over the past few decades, exercising our minds in powerful new ways.’ He economically dispatches the notion that culture has anything to tell us about moral right- eousness, which is a blessing, since I (racistly) never quite trust Americans to know the difference between proselytising and educating. It

Byron Rogers

The Doctor’s dilemma

With this book, character assassination reaches a level not known since William Shake-speare did the business with the Macbeths, another family with political interests. First there was Michael Crick with Jeffrey Archer, Stranger than Fiction. Now there is Crick’s ex-wife Margaret with Mary Archer. I see from the blurb that there is a daughter, who presumably even now is amassing files on William and James Archer. For the Cricks, nemesis has become a cottage industry. Lady — no, Doctor — Archer (‘call yourself “Lady” and they think you haven’t got your O levels’) did her best to stop the book being written. Photographers were asked not to let their pictures

Andro Linklater

A hard act well followed

The names reverberate like a sustained drumroll — Victory, Royal Sovereign, Téméraire, Colossus, Mars, Bellerophon — an overture heralding the violence that will erupt when the warships drifting slowly downwind finally break into the crescent line of the French and Spanish fleet. At midday on the 21 October, the first massive broadsides are fired, smoke obscures the scene, and, when it clears three hours later, 19 enemy ships have struck their colours, another six will shortly be taken or wrecked, and Admiral Lord Nelson lies dead. In the two centuries since, it is less the strategic significance of Trafalgar that guarantees its fame than the operatic tragedy of the hero

Adam Zamoyski

Grande horizontale et verticale

One of those little footnotes to history that has always intrigued me is that the Bolsheviks planned and carried out the October Revolution in the palace of the Tsar’s mistress. The idea of Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky and the rest of them strutting about the marble-clad halls and damask-swathed boudoirs of the great courtesan’s mansion in their cloth caps, smoking and plotting bloody mayhem, is grotesque but also somehow fitting when one considers the moral squalor and the shoddy grandeur of their political enterprise. I longed to know more about this Bolshevik Bethlehem. This book has done more than satisfy my curiosity. The story it tells is an extraordinary one in

Hugh Massingberd

Sweet Lady of Misrule

To my shame, back in the 1980s, I wrote a less than charitable obituary for the Daily Telegraph of the 13th Duke of St Albans, which dwelt unnecessarily on his unfortunate City directorships. This provoked a volley of letters from his grandson, Lord Vere of Hanworth, couched in intemperate terms. I seem to recall demands of satisfaction, challenges to a duel and the ominous question of whether my club had steps. Later this remarkable young man, by then styling himself Earl of Burford, caused a memorable scene in the House of Lords when he bounced on the Woolsack as if it were a trampoline — or, as he puts it

Martin Vander Weyer

The unacceptable face of capitalism

Philip Augar has found a snappy title for this forensic examination of the sins of the investment banking fraternity, and a startling figure: $180 billion. That is the amount he reckons the big hitters of Wall Street and the City harvested in the 1980s and ’90s in the form of excessive profits for their firms and excessive remuneration for themselves. They did not make this fortune as more admirable entrepreneurs do, by creating value that would not otherwise have existed or providing goods and services that improved their customers’ lives. They did it by skimming fees and commissions and trading profits out of corporate clients, retirement funds and individual investors

Ian Thomson

Viragos on the march

Lucrezia Borgia was not the fiend history made her out to be. According to Gaia Servadio, she was a radiant symbol of Renaissance woman and, moreover, a judicious administrator of her husband the Duke of Ferrara’s realm. Lucrezia’s ethereal blonde looks had so captivated Lord Byron that, in 1816, he stole a strand of her hair from a cabinet in Milan. Lucrezia’s 16-year correspondence with the Venetian poet and future cardinal Pietro Bembo moved Byron almost to tears: ‘The prettiest love letters in the world,’ he declared. Unusually, Servadio ascribes the birth of the Renaissance to the invention of the printing press in 1456. As a result, books and new

James Buchan

Before and after Babel

The origin of language is one of the riddles of mankind. History begins with languages already formed, the intricate relics of vanished civilisations. As history progresses, so languages deteriorate. Latin and Sanscrit are richer and more expressive than any of their living successors. As Adam Smith wrote in his beautiful essay of 1761, Considerations concerning the first Formation of Languages, the breakdown of the Latin inflexions left Romance languages that were wordy, unpleasing to the ear and rigid in their word order. Amaveram decayed into ego habebam amatum and then io aveva amato. The God of Genesis created different languages to thwart the insolence of humanity. As an explanation of

Interconnect

An odd couple

When the poems of Philip Larkin came to the fore in the late Fifties, I admired his graceful colloquialism but was dismayed by his almost proselytising gloom; life wasn’t given much of a chance. So I decided that he was a great Comic poet — stretching the idea of Comedy to almost Renaissance widths and depths — that he was the Les Dawson of the anthologies. This wasn’t good enough as a formula, it left too much out; but it was a way of admiring while keeping at a distance. When, three decades later, Westminster Abbey was found crammed to the walls for his memorial service, it was clear that

Saturday

18 Jun 2005

Nicholas Harman

The frogman who failed

Ian Fleming pretended they were glamorous, John le Carré claimed they were brainy and unscrupulous. Commander Crabb, in real-life 1956, made Britain’s spies into the figures of fun they went on being until the Iraq fiasco showed they could be dangerous, too. He was the middle-aged chap, tripping over his flippers in a baggy wet-suit, who vanished into Portsmouth harbour near a Soviet warship, just when Anthony Eden’s government was vainly hoping to do some deal with the Bulganin-Khrushchev double act. If anybody knows what really happened, they have not yet told the rest of us. Tim Binding has embroidered a tale on to the bones of Crabb’s bizarre escapade.

Mark Archer

A century of riding high

When banking families fell out in Renaissance Florence, disputes tended not to be settled by the financial regulator. In April 1478 in Florence cathedral, members of the Pazzi family murdered Giuliano Medici and came close to killing Lorenzo the Magnificent himself. Several of the Pazzi conspirators were hanged and left to dangle from the windows of the Palazzo della Signoria, the seat of Florentine government. Ever the art patron, Lorenzo commissioned Botticelli, the Florentine master, to depict the hanged conspirators in lifelike frescoes on a government building. The paintings were only removed after the expulsion of the Medici from Florence in 1494. The origin of the dispute arose when the