Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

The man we love to love

The life and death of Nelson grip the imagination, not just because of the bicentenary of Trafalgar but because more is known about him than any other major figure in British history. He was a tireless correspondent, writing for hours with his left hand letters that would be kept in their hundreds because he was famous in his lifetime. These illuminate the complicated, contra- dictory character that continues to entice biographers, whether revisionists, hagio- graphers, bodice-rippers, amateur psychoanalysts, spinners of rattling good yarns, or serious historians, amongst the last being Roger Knight. As the author was for many years deputy director and chief curator of the National Maritime Museum and

The gospel according to Lukes

From: ChristopherBland@bt.comTo: Lit Ed@spectator.co.ukSubject: Book Review Dear Mark, Delighted to review Martin’s book; I seem to remember meeting him with Rupert, Conrad and Bill at the Allen and Co. Sun Valley media bash two years ago. He’s clearly put his learning about my rebranding achievements at BBC and BT into practice at a-b global. Now that you’re taking business books seriously, I’ve asked Canongate to send you an early proof of my latest Degreasing the Pole: 10 Tested Ways to Stay on Top. Although it’s too late for poor Conrad. Perhaps a reciprocal review from Lukes?? Best, Christopher BT: No. 1 Telecommunications Company in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index 2002-03-04-05

Goings-on after sunset

After 20 years of hard labour Professor Ekirch has produced an absorbing social history of nighttime in pre-industrial society from the Balkans to the British colonies of North America. His vast accumulation of quotations from diverse sources — he has employed ‘a legion of translators’ — threatens, at times, to overwhelm the reader, but they are linked together in a narrative of clear prose. Nighttime for our ancestors 300 years ago had a significance and an importance we have lost. ‘Rather than a backdrop to daily existence, or a natural hiatus,’ Ekirch writes, ‘nighttime in the early modern age instead embodies a distinct culture, with many of its own rituals

The fake’s progress

Ever since Dixon’s pie-eyed lecture on Merrie England in Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim there’s been a hunger for more exposures of the pretentious absurdities and backbiting jealousies of academia. Here’s another from a distinguished professor of English at London University who’s presumably seen a great deal of it. Perhaps it’s because of this that David Nokes’s book is much closer to farce than to the reality you find, say, in C. P. Snow’s novels set in a Cambridge college or Malcolm Bradbury’s satires on life at the redbrick and new plate-glass universities. In these books people must have seen glimpses of themselves or at least recognised others, but I can’t

Findings of the Dismal Science

This is the sort of book we can expect to see a great deal more of in the future. After Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point — a study of the way products or ideas move from niche positions to mass markets — economists and journalists have been racking their brains to come up with usefully saleable theories. Each one begins with profiles in New York magazines; the book, largely made up of stories, follows; and then, no doubt, a lucrative career spinning this highly anecdotal material to CEOs. An amusing book, this one, certainly more so than the works of most practitioners of the Dismal Science. It’s best enjoyed, though,

An operation for fistula and its creative aftermath

My book Creators was finished some weeks ago and whizzed off to the publishers without my having fixed on any theory of the creative process. But the problem continues to nag at me. Take this example. In October 1841, Dickens was operated on for fistula. This piece of surgery was then horrific and extremely painful, performed without anaesthetic, of course, and often unsuccessful. Macvey Napier, editor of the Edinburgh Review, told Dickens that he had twice been ‘done’ for fistula but twice ‘bungled’, and only on the third shot had it worked: ‘My flesh still creeps at the recollection.’ Dickens was lucky for his surgeon was the remarkable Frederick Salmon

Of fulmars and fleams

Kathleen Jamie is a poet. This might be described as her occasional book, in the sense of being a record of what she saw, smelt, heard or felt during these various experiences and expeditions. Most are concerned, loosely, with natural history —ospreys, wild salmon, corncrakes, whales; all of them pertain to Scotland (of which she is a fine-voiced native). There is nothing fey or arty about her writing. She has an inquisitive, unpredictable, generous mind that she speaks firmly. In this connection, much of one chapter discusses a pair of peregrines trying to nest nearby. It is notorious that J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine (1967) is the last word on

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

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

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,

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.

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

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

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

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

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