Book Reviews

Picture this scene: in the delivery room of a Botswana hospital, a woman howls with the pain of childbirth and her midwife becomes increasingly bothered that she is disturbing the other patients. Whatever tension there is in this exchange — a woman suffering labour without drugs, an underpaid, overstretched health worker having a bad day — it is transformed by the fact that the nurse is African, the mother-to-be British. ‘White women,’ the midwife huffs in annoyance and, in the process, identifies the dilemma at the heart of this book. There is a strong tradition of European women writing about their experiences in Africa. What attracts them? The call of

Edward Carson: even today, almost 70 years after his death, the name of the barrister and Unionist leader has the power to inspire hatred or adulation. A short time ago Ian Paisley was photographed at the election count in Belfast City Hall touching a bust of Carson as though it was a sacred relic. To his detractors, Carson stands in the same relation to the rancorous, sectarian creed of Paisleyism as Hitler does to neo-Nazism. Carson has not lacked biographers, notwithstanding the dust-jacket’s puff for this as the first modern biography. The three-volume official biography, started by Edward Marjoribanks, half-brother of the late Lord Hailsham, and completed by Ian Colvin,

To a British reader who knows the subject, 1776 may seem pretty thin. To one who doesn’t, it may be confusing. It is an account of the military history of a single year of the American revolution, so the ambitions of the author are oddly limited. David McCullough doesn’t explain why the revolution began. He doesn’t explain why the Americans won. He doesn’t even delve much into the origins of the Declaration of Independence, which was proclaimed in 1776, or reveal much about the men who signed it. But McCullough nevertheless demonstrates, once again, why he is America’s best-selling historian. For his book does lend colour and interest to events

To anyone who enjoyed Fernand Braudel’s masterly work on the Mediterranean or Neal Ascher- son’s wonderful Black Sea, the idea of a book on the Baltic is an appealing one. It is Europe’s other great inland sea, fed by the snows of Scandinavia and rivers such as the Elbe, the Vistula, the Niemen and the Neva, ringed with cities such as Copenhagen, Stockholm, Helsinki, St Petersburg, Riga, Gdansk and L

In 1991, A.S. Byatt wrote an introduction to a reissue of her first novel, The Shadow of the Sun (1964), in which she recalls that she had: the eternal first novelist’s problem … I didn’t want to write a ‘me-novel’ [but] I didn’t know anything — about life, at least. Highly autobiographical first novels are still out of fashion and even budding writers are expected to cast their eye away from themselves. And yet in our culture of instant gratification and celebrity, a writer’s reputation can depend almost exclusively on the critical reception of a first novel. The eternal problem today, it seems, is twofold: we expect first novels to

In the first century bc, the wrestler Nicophon of Miletus was said to have a physique which would have made Zeus himself tremble. He literally outstripped his rivals at the Olympic Games. Nicophon’s mere name, Victory Voice, announced a champion, just as that of Schwarzenegger did in the Mr Universe — and, more recently, in the Mr Governor of California — contests. He had only to flex himself for the rest of the field to wilt. Fantastic is the lid-off Arnie of Thal, an Austrian village in which his father, once of the Nazi party, was postwar police chief. Laurence Leamer’s low-down becomes a pedestal on which Arnie’s occasionally lovable