Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

John De-Falbe

When someone has blundered

As a former second lieutenant leading a rifle platoon in France in 1945, Paul Fussell may be supposed to have an intense personal interest in posterity’s understanding of military combat. He is the author of The Great War and Modern Memory and several other related books, so this theme is certainly one of profound intellectual interest for him too. His latest book, The Boys’ Crusade, is short and anecdotal, manifestly not the product of great research. For an author of such experience, one feels, it could almost have been written off the cuff. So what is Fussell’s purpose? Far from being suave professionals who mopped up the war for the

John Laughland

The faulty French connection

In his magnificent funeral oration for Charles I’s queen, Henriette-Marie of France, the 17th-century French cleric Bossuet contrasted the stately continuity of French history with the turbulence and violence of English. France — of whose crown Pope St Gregory the Great had proclaimed, already by the end of the sixth century, that it outshone all the others — was ‘the only nation in the universe whose kings have embraced Christianity for nearly 12 centuries’. England, by contrast, was ‘more agitated … than the sea which surrounds her’. Within 150 years, the tables were turned, and the prosperous and stable English became whiggishly dismissive of their unruly and strife-riven neighbours, believing

Daniel Neill

Finding faces for Boz

Hablot Knight Browne worked as Dickens’s principal illustrator for more than 20 years, from the publication of The Pickwick Papers (1836-7) to A Tale of Two Cities (1859). He signed his first illustrations for Pickwick ‘N.E.M.O.’, but thereafter adopted the sobriquet ‘Phiz’, short for ‘physiognomy’, the popular pseudo-science of inferring character from facial features. ‘Phiz’, he decided, chimed better with Dickens’s ‘Boz’. Phiz and Boz certainly did chime well together. Though Browne worked with many authors and publications, including Charles Lever, Anthony Trollope and Punch, he was and remains best known for his collaborations with Dickens. Author and illustrator worked closely on the novels. For each monthly instalment, Dickens would

William Feaver

A true poet of war

‘On a hazy day Jerry comes droning over, three miles up.’ May sound Biggles-ish now, but it was OK for then, November 1940, in the commentary for Humphrey Jennings’s brief film Heart of Britain. Nine minutes is all it takes to cover the Lakes, Lancashire, the Pennines and Sheffield, homing in on aircraft spotters, air-raid wardens, mill hands and Sir Malcolm Sargent and then panning around the blitzed centre of Coventry to the sound of Beethoven’s Fifth. The action ends at full throttle with a Hallelujah Chorus from the Huddersfield Choral Society as a newly built Whitley takes off in freezing mist to give Jerry hell. Where ordinary documentary film-makers

Robert Cooper

Recent audio books

Aclogged up motorway can provide the ideal conditions to play the balloon game; re-routed angst and venom will guarantee the ultimate cathartic experience. Raise your eyes to the heavens. The dot in the azure sky is a hot-air balloon heading earthwards at a disturbing rate. The basket dangling beneath the shrinking sac is crammed with every cad and rotter your imagination can concoct. There is panic on board. To maintain altitude human ballast is the only solution. Three passengers must be thrust overboard — quite possibly more. There are stacks of candidates in Julian Fellowes’ Snobs (Orion Audio Books. Abridged. 5 hours 20 minutes. CD £19.99. Tape £12.99). Fellowes is

The Spectator

Books of the Year II

Philip Hensher The two books I enjoyed most this year were both out of the usual run. Who was the last person to publish a book of aphorisms? No idea, but Don Paterson’s splendid The Book of Shadows (Picador, £12.99) will probably discourage anyone from entering into rivalry for a good time to come. Startlingly insightful, funny, exotic and, of course, from the finest poet of his generation, irreducibly well-put, this was a book everyone should read. Simon Gray’s The Smoking Diaries (Granta, £12.99) was difficult to categorise; a ragbag of stories and reminiscences, it must be one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. The best biography of the

Paul Johnson

It’s not what you put in but what you leave out that matters

In the art of writing, one of the central problems is what to put in and what to leave out. In the past, I have always been one for putting in. I felt myself full of good things I did not want the reader to miss. So my books got longer and longer. This gigantism spent itself, and from the gross satisfaction of putting everything in I turned to the more delicate pleasure of deciding what to leave out. I discovered I could write down everything a reasonable person needed to know about the Renaissance in 40,000 words, and I have since done Napoleon and Washington at the same length.

Saturday

John De-Falbe

Where Vlad once impaled

If the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu, the Romanian dictator, is one of those world events that many people remember very vividly, it may be because of its inherent drama, or it may be because it happened at Christmas, when we were all at home and ready to enjoy the heady voyeurism it offered on television. Since 1989, international attention has moved along a bit. Dimly, perhaps, we recall in our self-righteous, warmongering times that this monster was toppled without outside intervention. Our masters in Washington and Downing Street would probably regard this as irrelevant, but then no foreign power ever had much of an interest in Ceausescu’s fall. There is

Matthew Dennison

After the fall

There is nothing new about the ‘had-it-all, lost-it-all’ plot. It provides common ground for the story of Adam and Eve and the labyrinthine ramifications of any high-gloss American soap opera. It is also the stuff of Lady Rose and Mrs Memmary, a fairytale for adult readers with a sting in its tail, a bite in the telling. Ruby Ferguson’s novel was first published in 1937. It is the story of Lady Victoria Elspeth Rose Grahame-Rooth-Targenet, ‘the happiest little girl in Scotland’ and also its most materially blessed, heir to the ‘dream mansion’ of Keepsfield on the shores of Fife and its park stretching ‘as far as the eye could see,

Hugh Massingberd

Living with the Inspector

In this ingenious ‘double biography’, which covers not only her own life and that of her late husband, the peerless television actor John Thaw, but also their life together, the actress Sheila Hancock has achieved an impressive and affecting work of art. Unfort- unately, though, it is flawed by the author’s self-indulgence in ranting on about her tiresome Bel Littlejohnish political views by way of furnishing what her publishers (who really should have told her to chuck it) quaintly call ‘a study of Britain from the 1930s to the present’. It is as if a subtle and beautifully executed painting has been spoilt by being daubed with cheap political slogans.

David Edelsten

The bad old times recorded

The inconsistency between how they lived their own lives — the sort of people that they seemed to be — and the virtues they championed in their heroes and heroines, so much greater in male than in female authors (from which category I exclude George Eliot) is possibly nowhere more marked than in the case of Thomas Hardy. The creator of Marty South, Giles Winterborne and Gabriel Oak was himself a stinker. ‘ ’E didn’t ’ave nothing to say to the likes o’ we,’ our old gardener used to say. Born in Bockhampton, and familiar in his boyhood with the presence of the great man if not his notice, he

Ian Garrick-Mason

The doubtful eye of the beholder

In this historic moment of struggle between freedom and tyranny, with the destinies of entire nations hanging in the balance, the question of what ‘beauty’ is might seem a frivolous one, best put off until happier times. Until, that is, one remembers that now is always a historic moment, that the destinies of nations are always hanging in the balance. Given this, the contemplation of beauty seems like a perfectly reasonable way to pass an afternoon. Umberto Eco has kindly laid it all out for us in On Beauty, an illustrated sourcebook of ideas about the nature of Beauty (that’s his capital ‘B’) throughout the ages. Proceeding deliberately from theme

Christopher Howse

Heroes of the world of words

I should like to claim the credit for the Bloomsbury English Dictionary’s inclusion of the word carminative. It did not appear in the dictionary’s previous incarnation as the Encarta World English Dictionary in 1999, and I pointed out the omission at the time. Perhaps finding that the words Encarta and World English did not sell dictionaries, the publishers are now selling a second edition in Britain under this nice new name, with ENGLISH in big capitals on the spine instead of ENCARTA. Unfortunately, many of its absurdities and errors have been retained. I wasn’t the only one who laughed at the first edition. The reviewer for the TLS mocked its

Byron Rogers

The sea that retreated

The most startling historical fact I have come upon in recent years is on page 62 of this book. In 1882 an attempt was made to evict three crofters on the Isle of Skye. These were humble men pursuing a way of life little changed in recorded time, in a place which to them would have seemed like all the world. The eviction failed, so do you know what the British government did? It did what British governments had always done when there was trouble in the colonies, it sent a gunboat. Only this was no colony. This was part of Great Britain, and it occurred as Queen Victoria was

Sarah Bradford

A typically Tuscan joke

There is something irresistible about forgers, cocking a snook as they do at their target establishments — in this case the formidable intellectual and historical talents of Baroque (hardly Renaissance as the title claims) Rome, a circle which included the towering figure of the polymath Athanasius Kircher. What makes this case even more piquant is that the forger was a 19-year-old Tuscan nobleman, Curzio Inghirami, and the forged manuscripts posing as important Etruscan relics were wrapped in his 13-year-old sister’s hair. The discovery in November 1634 of these odd capsules known as scarith, scaritti, allegedly took place on a fishing expedition by the Inghiramis on the river below their villa

Philip Hensher

Very down under

One of the things which drew Nicholas Shakespeare to Tas- mania was that it was one of the few remote places that Bruce Chatwin, whom he’d spent seven years writing a biography about, had never been to. But Shakespeare has written a wonderfully Chatwinesque book about a place, in which individual historical narratives are woven in with the writer’s own research and encounters. Shakespeare doesn’t have the faint smugness of Chatwin, and the book, though containing a good deal of his own family history, is much more self-effacing; but it is just as inquisitive, and has the same energetic enjoyment of fantastically abstruse local detail, and a sheer love of

Harriet Waugh

Recent crime novels

Rumpole is back with us. In Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders by John Mortimer (Viking, £16.99) Rumpole is writing his memoirs and looks back on his first murder case when, as a pupil in a lazy barristers’ chambers, he takes over the defence of a young man accused of murdering his father and his father’s closest wartime friend. The chambers are lead by C. H. Wystan, QC, the father of Hilda (She Who Must Be Obeyed), and the reader learns for the first time how Rumpole succumbs to her demands and marries her. Very funny it is too. Henning Mankell appears to be getting bored with his policeman hero,

Elfreda Pownall

Around the world in 18 cookery books

Long before she became a finger- lickin’ television star Nigella Lawson’s ability to conjure tastes in vivid prose and her celebration of the pleasures of eating were known to readers of The Spectator as she was this magazine’s first restaurant reviewer. And it was the writing in her first book, How to Eat, with its confidential tone of voice, her larky attitude to cooking and eating, as well as brilliant, original recipes that brought her legions of fans. To them she became what Elizabeth David had been to their grandmothers. Nigella’s latest book, Feast (Chatto, £25), which arrives without benefit of a television boost, is another big, comprehensive book, its

The Spectator

Books of the Year

A selection of the best and worst books of the year, chosen by some of our regular contributors Jonathan Sumption There is no point in mincing words about the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (60 volumes, £6,500 until 30 November). It is the one of the greatest feats of scholarly publishing ever. Forget the on-line edition. You will miss the special pleasure of straying into the article next door. No, take out a second mortgage, call in the cabinet-maker and buy the volumes. Another book well worth going to moneylenders for is Margaret Smith’s superb edition of The Letters of Charlotte Bront