Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

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

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

Richard Dowden

Downhill all the way?

Martin Meredith ended his 1984 book on Africa, The First Dance of Freedom, with a quote from a recent report by the Economic Commission for Africa which looked ahead to the continent’s future over the next 25 years. On existing trends, it predicted, poverty in rural areas would reach ‘unimaginable dimensions’, while the towns would suffer increasingly from crime and destitution. ‘The picture that emerges is almost a nightmare.’ Africa has not disappointed Meredith. Twenty years on he is able to conclude this volume on the cheerful note that ‘African governments and the vampire-like politicians who run them are regarded by the populations they rule as yet another burden they

Hilary Mantel

The last of the vintage wine

When Sybille Bedford was born, in Germany in 1911, it was into a world already vanishing: a world where ‘people were ruled by their servants’, lived in opulent houses (fully staffed by their rulers), ate heavy Edwardian-Germanic cuisine at very frequent intervals, took nothing so vulgar as holidays, but went south for their health, or entrained (taking their own monogrammed linen) for the major European spas. Her own family’s values looked back to the 18th century; her father was interested in mesmerism, and knew a man in Grasse who could raise the dead. In this long-awaited memoir, his daughter has performed the same feat. Her autobiographical novel Jigsaw was shortlisted

Harry Mount

Great wheezes of the world

Coleridge was supposed to have been the last person ever to have read everything, and that was in 1834. So Peter Watson, a Cam- bridge archaeology don, is up against it when he tries to squeeze the history of all the clever things that mankind has ever thought into 822 pages. He makes a pretty good fist of it, though, even if he has to rattle through it at 1066 and All That speed. In the space of one page, he jumps from man getting up from all-fours — about 6,000,000 BC — to man making stone tools (2,500,000 BC). Still, as he whips along, Watson gives attractive thumbnail sketches

Jonathan Sumption

Majority rules OK?

It was the second world war Allies, according to John Dunn, who converted ‘democracy’ into a slogan. Their object was innocent enough. They wanted to identify themselves by a word which signified everything that the Axis powers were not. Yet a word that could embrace both Stalin’s Russia and Roosevelt’s United States must have seemed rather elastic even at the time. Honest thinkers have had more difficulty in deciding what it means. At one extreme, it has its literal meaning: a system of government by the people. At the other, it has no meaning at all: just a hurrah word for whatever political arrangements the speaker admires, as in the

Interconnect

The revenge of ‘the Thing’

What is the point of William Cobbett? Richard Ingrams claims that Cobbett was one of the greatest Englishmen who ever lived, yet his life is largely forgotten. He is remembered, if he is known at all, as the author of Rural Rides, a classic account of his travels around the English countryside in the 1820s. Previous biographers have celebrated Cobbett as a Radical politician and man of the people. Ingrams presents him in this admirably concise biography as a great journalist, who fearlessly exposed corruption in high places and championed the freedom of the press. In fact Cobbett in many ways resembles his biographer — the two men even look

Saturday

Tom Pocock

The first great bourgeois victory

The proposal that the English have a long tradition of violence is the opening of Adam Nicolson’s book and he supports his belief by invoking the Book of Revelations, Virgil, Homer, Joanna Southcott, the Methodists, Jane Austen and William Blake to bring this together at Trafalgar. That occasion cannot, of course, be without Nelson, and he writes, ‘The apocalyptic tradition required a conjuring, wise, intuitive, violent and triumphant leader.’ That this is an original and discursive bicentennial contribution is apparent. But, before a peace-loving Englishman can protest, invoking similar, even more violent tendencies among at least a dozen other nationalities, Nicolson has him on the quarterdeck of the Victory at

Olivia Glazebrook

Wearing heavy boots lightly

‘I used to be an atheist,’ says ten-year-old Oskar Schell, ‘which means I didn’t believe in things that couldn’t be observed… It’s not that I believe in things that can’t be observed now, because I don’t. It’s that I believe things are extremely complicated.’ On 11 September 2001, Oskar is sent home from school when the World Trade Center is attacked. He is not anxious for his parents, since neither of them works near the Twin Towers. But when he gets home, he plays the messages on the answering machine, and discovers that his father is trapped at the top of one of the burning towers. Minutes later, the tower

Ian Mcintyre

A death greatly exaggerated

‘Canada,’ wrote the Toronto journalist Michael Valpy, ‘is the only country in the world where you can buy a book on federal-provincial relations at an airport.’ Things are looking up. Travellers eager to broaden their horizons can now curl up with this extended disquisition on globalisation by the consort of Canada’s outgoing Governor-General. His Excellency John Ralston Saul, C.C., son of a Canadian army officer and his English war bride, is a man of parts. Novelist, essayist, historian, philosopher, he has been variously described as ‘an erudite Toronto gadfly’ and, in a delightful oxymoron by Camille Paglia, ‘the intellectual as man of the world’. He got into hot water in

Philip Hensher

The creepiness of Peter Pan

When I was a child, I frankly and thoroughly detested Peter Pan in every single one of its manifestations; horrible Christmas stage spectacular, horrible Disney cartoon, horrible, horrible novel. It was a passionate and immediate hatred, shot through with something very like terror. In part, I guess, it was the idea that someone might come through your bedroom curtains and abduct you; partly the idea, sinister and frightening, of a child prevented from growing up. Childhood has its own helpless fears, and it would be a strange child who found the prospect of never changing an appealing one. Really, the unanalysed dislike I had for Peter Pan was a dislike

Saturday

Lucy Hugheshallett

When men were blokes

Ever since David Steen joined Picture Post at the age of 15 he’s been photographing celebrities. This handsome collection of male portraits shows his range. At one end of the spectrum is the cheesy picture of Steven Spielberg with his foot in the mouth of an inflatable rubber shark. At the other, there is the poignant picture of Augustus John in the year before he died, his head bent over clasped hands as though in prayer, alone in the breakfast room of a provincial hotel, in chilly grey natural light. For the former, Steen flew to Los Angeles (even though Spielberg could only give him an hour) and scouted for

Roy Strong

On the scent of the rose

The Gardens at Hampton Court Palaceby Todd Longstaffe-GowanFrances Lincoln, £25, pp. 208, ISBN 0711223688 The Gardens at Hatfieldby Sue Snell, with an introduction by the Dowager Lady SalisburyFrances Lincoln, £25, pp. 192, ISBN 0711225168 In 1979 the first major exhibition on the history of British gardening was staged at the Victoria & Albert Museum. It was a landmark, signalling the emergence of garden history, already pioneered in part by the young Garden History Society (now in its 40th year), as a serious academic discipline. Since then the subject has become established within the realms of academe and a torrent of literature has followed. That year I produced The Renaissance Garden

Rupert Christiansen

Brillo boxes and marble nudes

Professor John Carey is at his most acerbic, combative and impassioned in this brilliant polemic, developed from lectures he gave at University College London last year. Just don’t expect the question proposed by the title to be satisfactorily answered: Carey doesn’t exactly contradict himself — he’s far too fly for that — but halfway through, he executes an audacious volte-face that makes his arguments even more dizzyingly provocative. Taking positions he established in The Intellectuals and the Masses as his starting-point, Carey lays into the snobs, dilettantes and academics who have busily been carving a religion out of the arts ever since Baumgarten proposed a philosophy of aesthetics in the

Nicolas Barker

Birds in the hand

Penguin By Designby Phil BainesPenguin/Allen Lane, £16.99, pp. 255, ISBN 0713998393 Publishers do not make popular heroes. Who has heard of Humph- rey Moseley, who published the Caroline poets? Or Jacob Tonson, apart from Pope’s patronising verses? Thomas Hughes made Tom Brown’s School Days famous, but could not do the same for Daniel Macmillan. But if there is an exception to the rule, it must be Allen Lane, founder of Penguin Books in 1935. The date, the format and the name have all become famous enough to put Lane in the national pantheon. But few know more than that, so a full-length biography is welcome. It is not the first:

Saturday

A.N. Wilson

A good man up against it

Basil Hume, when a young Benedictine monk from Ample- forth in Yorkshire, was sent to study in Switzerland at the Catholic university of Fribourg. While he was there, two young men, staying at the same college, went mountaineering and got lost. The priest in charge of the seminary told the students that two young Englishmen had gone missing and that there was nothing to do but pray. Basil Hume prayed for a bit. Then the situation became too much for him. He went out, got hold of a car, drove to Gruyère and took charge of the search. Eventually, one man was brought back dead, the other alive. Hume helped