Book Reviews Archives

Saturday

11 Dec 2004

Children’s books for Christmas

The word ‘Wahhabi’ entered popular consciousness at the same time as ‘9/11’ and is now about as loaded as the word ‘Nazi’. But whereas ‘Nazi’ is understood by all, ‘Wahhabi’ has crept into the vocabulary of modern global terrorism with little explanation other than that it and ‘Wahhabism’ are considered part of the mindset of men like Osama bin Laden. It goes without saying that the Western world needs to know all there is to know about Wahhabis, so when a book comes along that claims to be the first serious study of the man who gave his name to this particular brand of bigotry we should take it seriously.

The Questing-Vole

Life and letters

Even as the Christmas season draws in upon us, the academy’s best-loved post-foxhunting bloodsport — pointing out scholarly inadequacies in the new Dictionary of National Biography — continues. The latest and most eye-stretchingly savage instance comes from Nikolai Tolstoy, in a letter prominently published in the TLS. He complains that in August 2002 he was contacted for help by an in-house DNB scribe who had been commissioned to write the entry for his stepfather, the historical novelist Patrick O’Brian. Tolstoy — who was working on his own full-length biography, and knew that O’Brian had taken several liberties with the facts of his own life over the years — asked his

Saturday

4 Dec 2004

Raymond Carr

The nature of the beast

Robert Service has set himself a formidable task. He has to explain how the son of a wife- beating, dirt-poor Georgian cobbler, brutalised by drink, became a Russian despot as ruthless as Ivan the Terrible. A master of his sources, which include the partially opened Soviet official archives, Service triumphs in portraying Stalin’s personality in the context of his times. The career of Stalin would have been inconceivable had not his pious mother defied his father in order to give her son an education, including learning Russian, to prepare him for the priesthood. The young Stalin left the Orthodox church seminary at Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, a militant atheist

James Fleming

Goui and phooey

The Wolof call it a goui, the Tswana a moana, the French the calabash tree and all Australia the boab. Welcome to the strange world of the baobab tree, the subject of Thomas Pakenham’s excellent new book. The tree was discovered for Europe in 1749 by a 21-year-old Frenchman, Michel Adanson, after whom it has, taxonomically, been named. He was paddled out to the island of Sor, in Senegal, ‘to hunt antelope’ and instead found the baobab. It’s one of the largest living things in the world, as well as being among the most useful. Its girth is often over 100 feet. The seeds are eaten roasted and their pods

Andrew Barrow

Seeing off six monarchs

This beguiling little book, nostalgically illustrated with faded family snapshots, describes the long and arduous life of a tortoise who died earlier this year at Powderham Castle near Exeter, aged 160. According to the blurb, Timothy survived six monarchs, two world wars and many generations of the family who looked after him. The story that unfolds is one of the most deceptively sentimental and carefully contrived I have ever read. It chiefly concerns not so much the tortoise as the ups and downs of the Earls of Devon, family name Courtenay, and their successful fight to keep Powderham Castle and its estate going through thick and thin. The reptile quietly

Ray Monk

A puzzle without a solution

Jeremy Bernstein is extraordinarily, perhaps uniquely, well qualified to write a biography of Robert Oppenheimer that is both authoritative and extremely readable. In the first place, he is himself an eminent physicist, a professor for nearly 40 years and the author of some 50 technical papers. In the second place, he is an exceptionally gifted writer, the author of several popular books (some on physics, some on physicists and some, believe it or not, on mountain climbing) and a regular contributor to the New Yorker. Finally, he has the advantage of having known Oppenheimer personally and of counting among his friends some of the people who knew and understood Oppenheimer

Brendan O’Neill

Fighting the ‘good’ fight

Millions, perhaps even billions of words have been written about al-Qaida over the past three years. We know of the group’s origins as an Office of Services in Afghanistan in the 1980s, when Osama bin Laden used CIA cash to recruit and train foreign fighters for that last gasp of the Cold War, the jihad against the Soviets. We even know, thanks to the editor of the British-Arab magazine Al-Quds, what Osama likes to have for his dinner (salty cheese and a few fried eggs, since you ask). Yet this, as far as I can tell, is the first book to cover the Islamist venture into the Balkans in the

Carole Angier

Belonging and not belonging

Nicola Lacey wanted to write an ‘intellectual biography’ of Herbert Hart, on the model of Hermione Lee’s Virginia Woolf. It’s a tall order. How to cope with the fact that the philosophy of law is even harder to understand than Virginia Woolf’s novels? And though an academic lawyer like Lacey is the best person to understand Hart’s ideas, is she the best person to explain them to us? Is she the best person, indeed, to write a biography which should be scholarly underneath but ‘accessible’ (Lacey’s academic word for it) on the surface? Since I raise these questions you will guess that I am not about to answer them all

John Jolliffe

The very model of a modern duke

Miles Fitzalan-Howard was one of eight children of a fairly distant cousin of the previous two Dukes of Norfolk, and so grew up in the give and take of life in a large family. Up until the age of about 30, he had no great expectation that he would succeed his predecessor, who was married, with four daughters, and might well have produced a son and heir. He had been a rather average schoolboy at Ampleforth, excelling neither at work nor games, but ‘always cheerful and keen’. He made life-long friends there, including several of the monks. Likewise, when he went on to Oxford, he claimed with typical openness and

Rob White

Shot from an idealist’s angle

A question posed early on in Mark Cousins’s book is bound to spur a reviewer’s pride: ‘Who are Griffith, Dovzhenko, Keaton, Ozu, Riefenstahl, Ford, Toland, Welles, Bergman, Truffaut, Ouedraogo, Cissé, Dulac, Chahine, Imamura, Fassbinder, Akerman, Scorsese, Almod

Jonathan Keates

Cleansing the stables of language

During the mid-17th century the idea gained ground in various parts of Europe that the world was about to come to an end. Bewildered by the effects of widespread war and revolution, bad harvests and a miniature Ice Age taking the form of savage winters, people made ready for the sounding of the Last Trumpet, the arrival of the Four Horsemen and the whole apocalyptic shebang. Mad prophets, false messiahs and a host of other doomsters had a perfect field day proclaiming sinful mankind’s imminent annihilation. Something not altogether dissimilar is now happening in the case of the English language. Following Lynne Truss’s awful warnings (I’m careful to use the

Lloyd Evans

Disguise that hides a hard punch

It is 50 years since Peter Porter arrived in ‘rain-veiled Tilbury’ from his native Australia. ‘I came, I saw, I conjured,’ is how he summarises his career. Death haunts this collection from first to last. The opening poem uses the sea as a metaphor for existence. Its initial line, ‘The engine dies,’ is both a reference to a stalling boat and a symbol of mortality. He approaches the inevitable head-on. ‘Within this calm,’ he muses quietly, ‘something is now to be.’ Directness is only one of Porter’s virtues. ‘Sex and the Over-Seventies’ is a straightforward comic elegy for the wasted energies of youth. Ardour has cooled to the point where

Noble Frankland

Bamboozling the opposition

This book, like so much of the modern western population, is obese. It weighs three pounds one and a half ounces (1.4 kg) and runs to 1,148 pages. I read it in a series of closely connected long sessions, hoping thereby to retain the thread, but unfortunately there is not much of a thread to follow. Instead, a concentrated mass of information, much of it of gripping interest, is presented in a bewildering series of disjointed chronological, geographical and systematical sequences. Sir Michael Howard, himself an expert aficionado in this subject, states in his encomium printed on the dust jacket that the book is ‘definitive’, that the author has ‘trawled

David Ekserdjian

Renaissance man in all his richness

The major challenge faced by biographers of artists is the almost impossible one of dealing with equal authority with their lives and works. It is tempting to wonder whether this is not one of the reasons why so few of them are written by art historians, although there are of course heroic exceptions, of which John Richardson’s ongoing Picasso is perhaps the most illustrious. In the specific case of Leonardo da Vinci, there is the additional problem of the seeming universality of his range of interests, above all in the direction of the sciences. Charles Nicholl’s approach is explicitly to start from Leonardo’s writings, not just about optics, anatomy, and

Jane Gardam

Changing history with a tenpenny knife

This is a strange and wonderful novel that deserves the most serious attention. Whenever Ron- ald Blythe’s name comes up in conversation the next sentence is always going to be, ‘Didn’t he write Akenfield?’ Akenfield is the unclassifiable classic of over 30 years ago, the portrait of Blythe’s birthplace in rural Suffolk and the memories and reflections of its people, and it is probably the first and best of its kind. But since then he has written in a steady stream histories, novels, short stories, literary criticism, studies of poets and diarists and divines (he’s an authority on George Herbert) and books about places, like the stunning Divine Landscapes about

Mary Keen

Recent gardening books

The late Paul Getty has left gardeners a surprising legacy. Gardens of the Roman World by Patrick Bowe was published in America last year by Getty publications and the copyright belongs to the J. Paul Getty Trust. Did our run-of-the-mill publishers miss a trick here? I imagine the proposal for a book about Roman gardens cannot have grabbed many editors. Picture them at the Frankfurt Book Fair muttering, ‘dead language, nothing to see, no stunning perennial borders, just a job lot of broken columns …’ I hope they are all now eating hats and humble pie. The generosity and imagination of Paul Getty and his advisers have enabled Frances Lincoln

Saturday

27 Nov 2004

Graham Stewart

Moore means less

Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 is the most commercially successful documentary film ever made. It received a prolonged standing ovation from critics at the Cannes film festival where it became the first non-fiction film to win the Palme d’Or. If it does not win an Oscar at the next Academy awards, then do not rule out Moore making a documentary about the right-wing conspiracy at the heart of Hollywood. The acclaim, it has to be said, appears to have gone to his head. One can forgive the sort of puff his publishers and publicists put out on his behalf, but a little modesty from the great man himself would have been

William Oddie

They knew they were right

Pope Pius IX, to the ‘liberal’ mind, is the archetypal Catholic reactionary. When the present Pope beatified him, it was seen by his own critics inside the Church (a dwindling but, as John Cornwell’s latest anti-papal offensive demonstrates, increasingly ill-tempered band) as the final proof of their now largely discredited claim that the underlying purpose of John Paul’s pontif-icate has been to reverse the reforms of the second Vatican Council and to ‘restore’ the Church to what the first Vatican Council, the Council of Pio Nono, had made it. The fretful tone of such attacks is conveyed faithfully enough in Cornwell’s The Pope in Winter, which is subtitled ‘The Dark

Philip Ziegler

Some light shone in dark corners

When Lords Hutton and Butler were successively appointed to enquire into aspects of British participation in the invasion of Iraq, the more sensationalist elements of the media each time rejoiced. Incorruptible, fearless, Hutton and Butler would expose the rottenness at the heart of Whitehall and, if not actually bring down the government, at least give it a fearful pasting. When each enquiry in turn did nothing of the sort, the response was equally predictable. ‘We told you so,’ proclaimed the media. ‘Lickspittle, time-serving lackeys of the establishment! What could be expected but a whitewash?’ After such excesses it is a relief to be confronted by this thoughtful and dispassionate analysis

Nicholas Harman

The reign of King Tobacco

It is half a millennium since tobacco was launched upon the world, on 2 November 1492, when Columbus’s men captured their first American and were saddened to find that his most prized possession was not gold but a smelly bunch of herbs. Now that the weed’s reign is almost over it is time for a solemn history of the stuff, whose effects included the prosperity of English settlements in territories claimed by Spain, and eventually the rise of their world-dominating successors. This is not that kind of history. Instead, professors of this and that, from departments of ‘cultural studies’ here and there, contribute theses on the origins and consequences of