Book Reviews

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.

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

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

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

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

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