Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Richard Shone

The painter properly portrayed

We are continually told that biography is the dominant literary expression of the age, that Britain, in particular, is a nation of biographers, and that the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is the massive climax of this protracted love affair. Even our fiction suppurates with real-life figures both past and present, from Mrs Thrale and Charles Lamb to Henry James, Alma Cogan and Baroness Thatcher. Biographies of politicians and adventurers, duchesses and spies, consorts and comedians hog the limelight on the publishers’ seasonal lists. But artists receive only sporadic attention. It is true that most of the leading British painters and sculptors have been ‘done’, some more than once,

Saturday

Interconnect

He didn’t linger

The Australian Robert Dessaix, a Russian scholar, chooses to regard himself, in relation to Western civilisation, as an ancient Greek might have considered a Phrygian or a Scythian — a barbarian outsider. This, he believes, brings him even closer to his beloved and Russian Turgenev, who spent most of his adult life outside Russia, but whom his lifelong love, the French opera singer Pauline Viardot, always regarded as ‘a barbarian’. This famous love leads Dessaix to speculate about the nature of love itself. It was ‘triangular’, in the sense that Viardot was married, and, in the manner of the 12th-century troubadours, it became a ‘courtly love’. Turgenev more or less

Peter Jay

From heroes to hicks

The flavour of Stephen Graubard’s account of the American presidency in the 20th century may be quickly grasped from his comparison of the only two presidents to follow their fathers into the White House, John Quincy Adams (1825-29) and George W. Bush (2001-?): Adams, fluent in seven languages, accomplished in both science and mathematics, took pride in the cultivation he had acquired through years of living in close proximity to his gifted and influential father, benefitting from his schooling in Paris and service as a very young man as an additional secretary to the American negotiators that ended the war with Britain …. A student at the University of Leiden

Grey Gowrie

A celebration with a warning

Geoffrey Hill publishes books in verse rather than collections of poems. This is admirable but presents a reviewer with problems. You want to recommend him more or less unconditionally as England’s best hope for the Nobel Prize. At the same time, there is the risk that new readers, acquainted with the easy-going chattiness of Betjeman, say, or Larkin, may find this writer too dense and allusive. Scenes from Comus is a case in point. Read it once, by itself, and you may struggle. Read it as the envoi it really is to Hill’s previous books, the last four in particular, and you will discover clarity as well as density, as

Christopher Howse

A tongue that still wags

Among the unexpected pieces of information in this enjoyable ramble among the picturesque ruins of the Latin language is the name of a good restaurant if you should find yourself at Larroque in Tarn. The advice comes under B, for Bonum vinum laetificat cor hominis, ‘good wine cheers the heart of man’, an adage written calligraphically on the wall of the Restaurant Le Roucanel. (The thought comes from Psalm 104, though Mr Gray doesn’t mention that.) No great Latinist myself, I was glad to find Long Live Latin to be the welcoming Hampton Court Flower Show of Latin; Chelsea gold medallists might no longer care to walk among such (to

Andrew Taylor

The case of the missing parrot

At the centre of Michael Chabon’s earlier novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, was a comic book hero known as the Escapist. That book weighed in at a portly 656 pages. The Final Solution revolves around Sherlock Holmes and is a mere stripling by comparison, scarcely more than a novella illustrated with stiff little line drawings. It is a slim novel with a fat one trying in vain to get in. In July 1944, the war is nearing its end and Holmes is teetering on the edge of dotage, a prospect that scares him far more than the Reichenbach Falls. Still keeping bees and smoking foul-smelling shag, he

Saturday

Richard Ollard

From pirate to policeman

The subtitle of this large history, ‘How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World’, is a generous tribute from the American professor who wrote it. Based on very wide reading of secondary sources, the author has little new to say in a book which opens with Drake and closes with the Falklands campaign. He has, however, very much his own point of view and he supports it by notable narrative gifts. Ready always to give individuals credit and to disclose their personal idiosyncrasies, he does not hesitate to record the shortcomings or to criticise the misjudgments of those whom he admires. Thus while Drake is recognised for the bold and

Anita Brookner

A day in the life of a surgeon

As a foreword to this excellent novel Ian McEwan quotes a passage from Saul Bellow’s Herzog, in which the bedevilled protagonist launches a passionate indictment of the moral disorders of his time, extracting from them a small nugget of hope, or rather of value, to set against his justified despair. Bellow or Herzog is explicit: McEwan’s Henry Perowne is more measured, is even mandarin, in his survey of the life he is living. Like Herzog, Perowne lives in interesting times. It is February 2003, and the peace marchers are gathering in Gower Street, near to Perowne’s spacious Bloomsbury house and within walking distance of his hospital, which is presumably in

Eric Christiansen

A continent on a learning curve

Welshmen will know what Le Goff’s name means. To mediaevalists it conveys not only Smith, but all that is gracious, gilt-edged, and grandfatherly among French historians. Or, as one of the blurbs puts it, rather unkindly, ‘He is among France’s “great” historians.’ That means great in the special sense of an institutionally sanctified professor doomed in old age to confer imprimaturs on the work of others, to employ a ‘team’ of research assistants for his own, and to compose ponderous pensées such as ‘Today comes from yesterday and tomorrow emerges out of the past.’ Don’t laugh. He’s 80, and has written three thought-provoking books which shed light on three dark

Philip Ziegler

An endearing underachiever

‘I am beginning to see that brain counts for little but that character counts for everything,’ wrote Harold Nicolson, in one of those flashes of self-perception which from time to time brilliantly illuminated his life. ‘It is not a pleasant thought as my character is weak and easily influenced.’ He was only just 17 when he articulated that particular piece of self-deprecation; he would have said exactly the same 60 years later and been right on both occasions. His ability to diagnose his weaknesses, coupled with a total inability to do anything to rectify them, was one of his most endearing characteristics; it also explained why his various careers, in

Interconnect

Self-exiled by bad dreams

About Grace is about David Winkler, a man crippled and made fearful by the accuracy of his dreamed premonitions — a man who foresees future events and who is then constrained to watch them unfold. He dreams of a man killed in an accident and then witnesses that accident. He dreams of meeting his future wife and then encounters her exactly as foretold. And then he dreams of the death by drowning of their one-year-old daughter, Grace — a death in which David Winkler himself plays a large part. In an effort to forestall this, Winkler decides to leave the only two people he loves, escape to the Caribbean, and

Interconnect

A woman of some importance

The writer William Mayne has said, ‘I don’t know why there are supposed to be only two sexes. I can think of at least eight, even before you get to women.’ Mary Wollstonecraft, though no wit, would have been pleased with this. She saw herself as neither male nor female but ‘a new genus’, one who must always ‘follow her own track’, and be ‘tender’ but intransigent. She could not see herself as of the same species as other girls who seemed to live for marriage — any marriage — to escape the shame of poverty and spinsterhood. She herself had been the child of a terrible marriage; her father

Derek Scott

He was the first to blink

This book illuminates Brown and his circle: they appear paranoid and anyone who challenges them has to be done in. Robert Peston acknowledges some of this, and is occasionally critical of Brown but more often laudatory. It is typical of the Brown camp to co-operate on the book and then dismiss its contents as tittle-tattle. The purported betrayal of Brown by Blair over the leadership is familiar, but the evidence weak. Much of the ‘proof’ is based on unattributed or second-hand comments. Blair is a master of ambiguity and, as Peston points out, Brown’s wishes could sometimes be father to the thought and his reports of conversations with Blair are

Philip Hensher

The weedy wanderer

The biographers, like eager heirs round a deathbed, were amassing by Robert Louis Stevenson’s side while he was still breathing. The story, they could tell, was going to be just too good. The age loved a youthful demise, and anyone could see that Stevenson was not going to make old bones. They were quite right, and the myth of Stevenson has gone on inspiring countless biographers ever since. It’s very surprising that Claire Harman’s publishers claim that ‘no biography has yet done justice’ to Stevenson. This ground has been gone over so many times, and it is a bold biographer who thinks that a small change in circumstances — in

The Questing-Vole

Life and letters | 29 January 2005

In this week’s Cease and Desist Department, it’s Grange Hill. For many tens of thousands of grown men and women worldwide, the names Tucker, Zammo and Mrs McCluskey are enough to induce an instant rapture of nostalgia: the mind’s ear fills with the sardonic, boingy guitar of the theme tune; the mind’s eye with the single sausage of the cartoon title sequence, wobbling forever on the end of its fork. For some time now, this constituency has been catered for by the existence of a non-profit website called www.grangehillfans.co.uk. Now, however, creator Phil Redmond’s Mersey TV, who took over production duties from the Beeb two years ago, are worried about

Saturday

Allan Mallinson

Per ardua ad . . . ?

Seeing from my window the other day a Eurofighter manoeuvring at low level over the Moray glens, I was reminded once more of the Royal Air Force’s certainty when it comes to knowing what it wants. For here is an aircraft superbly optimised for its role: air-to-air combat against the best the Soviet air force could put up. That there is now no need of such a fighter hardly seems important when you see its sheer flying quality. What does it matter that, say, the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment (and others) will be axed to make room for this magnificent cuckoo in the Defence nest when so many jobs at BAE

Miranda France

Sporting in the spa

George Orwell painted an unappetising picture of the typical book reviewer: He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak he will be suffering from a hangover. It is the job of this bedraggled creature to invent reactions towards ‘books about which he has no spontaneous feelings whatever’. I’m not sure why Orwell’s hapless reviewer came to mind while I was reading The Wives of Bath. ‘Chick lit’, a new and popular genre, apparently invented in Britain,

Sarah Burton

Famous for being famous

Mary Robinson: actress, poet, novelist, playwright, feminist and London bus. One could wait over a century for a biography of her and then three come along at once. Had London buses existed in Robinson’s lifetime, contemporary satirists would have leapt at the analogy, as it was widely believed that anyone who could afford the fare could have a ride. Robinson was best known not for her thespian or her literary talents, but for being a grande horizontale, most notably as the first mistress of the Prince of Wales (later George IV). Mary Robinson was born Mary Darby somewhere between 1756 and 1758 (the first of many characteristic obfuscations) and, at

Rodney Leach

The advantages of sweet disorder

This is a distinguished addition to the select company of books that succeed in adding significantly to our understanding of Jean Monnet’s and Jacques Delors’ European project. Each author has adopted a different framework. Larry Siedentop, in Democracy in Europe, a self-conscious re-enactment of de Tocqueville, approached the EU’s problems of structure and democratic legitimacy through the prism of political philosophy. Hugo Young, in This Blessed Plot, an unrelievedly determinist account of what he saw as Britain’s and the Continent’s manifest common destiny, traced Britain’s uncertain march towards European federalism through the stories of individual participants. Christopher Booker and Richard North’s tour de force, The Great Deception, an indispensable counterpoint

Alexander Waugh

To battle with Sir Baldwin

With a little genealogical effort over three million people in this country can trace their ancestry back to a 15th- century hero called Sir Baldwin Fulford, and his luscious wife, Elizabeth Bozom, daughter of Sir John Bozom of Bozom-zeal. According to our old books of blazons Sir Baldwin was ‘a great soldier and a traveller of so undaunted resolution that for the honour and liberty of a royal lady he fought a combat with a Saracen (for bulk and bigness an unequal match) whom yet he vanquished’. In 1461 he was executed at Bristol, but Sir Baldwin’s spirit lives on, a little in all of us, and a great deal