Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Mick Brown

The great enemy of dogma

Nobody could accuse Pankaj Mishra of lacking ambition. A mixture of memoir, history, political and philosophical treatise, An End to Suffering sets out to tell the historical story of the Buddha and to contextualise his teachings in the development of the Western philosophical tradition. Hindu by birth and rationalist by disposition, Mishra leads us on his own journey from India, to Europe, to America, to the mountains of the Hindu Kush. Descartes, Schopenhauer and Hume jostle for attention, along with pensées on the rise of the nation state, the end of history and Islamic fundamentalism. It sounds an almighty mess. The extraordinary thing is that it works, and triumphantly. The

Byron Rogers

When the laughing had to stop

It has been Sue Townsend’s misfortune to live on into a time of events more fantastic and of public figures wackier than any of her own comic creations. Her method, like that of the authors of The Diary of a Nobody, was to take a credulous nerd, strip him of any sense of the ridiculous, then to loose him on the real world and his own diary. But she, being angrier, always ran more risks than the Grossmith brothers. Unlike them she touched on politics and living people, yet managed deftly to move in and out of her two worlds, the one of reality, the other of fantasy, until now.

David Hughes

When the going was bad

Billed on the cover as ‘The True Story of America’s Greatest Crime Wave’, this blockbuster movie of a volume shoots through the months between 1934 and 1936 when a star was born: the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Enter J. Edgar Hoover, vain and dapper. At first he presides over a ‘group of gentlemen’, unarmed because they were only investigators. So strict was the code that Hoover’s agent in Denver was fired for offering a drink to a visitor. But in 600 days — during which the likes of Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd were bumblingly gunned into legend — Hoover turned from moralist to killer, from

Eric Hobsbawm

From Harlesden to Zaire

The really talented observers are not like travellers or journalists reporting colourfully on the unknown (‘Anyone here been raped and speaks English?’), nor even like the real insiders, who risk taking for granted what strikes us as strange, but somewhere in between. They have to mix perception, curiosity and information. Roy Kerridge demonstrates their ambiguous gift in this misleadingly modest booklet. Like the Alexandrian poet Kavafy (in E.M. Forster’s famous phrase), he ‘stands at a slight angle to the universe’, being both outside and part of the scene on which he comments. Though the title From Blues to Rap suggests that this scene is transatlantic, and Kerridge has made the

Rupert Christiansen

Stooping, but not to conquer

Here is yet another attempt to interest a wider public in classical music, in the form of a book ‘as told to’ Tim Lihoreau by Stephen Fry, based on a show the latter hosted on Classic FM. Falling concert attendances and CD sales, as well as the general downward slide of the culture, means that somebody needs to do mission work in this area, especially among the ear-numbed young. But I’m afraid that this isn’t going to do the trick. I should say at once that I have no doubt that Fry’s passion for the great composers is sincere and that, perfectly honourably, he aims low. Boldly, he traverses the

Saturday

Jane Ridley

A statesman who reinvented himself

Christopher Hibbert is a publishing phenomenon. Now 80 or thereabouts, he has published at least 37 books, mainly on British history. You name it, Hibbert has written a book on it — from Charles I to the Marlboroughs, from Napoleon and his Women to Queen Victoria. Hibbert is rarely interviewed, but his books are always well-received and, to judge from the shelves of W. H. Smith, they certainly sell. How does he do it? Take this latest life of Disraeli. Hibbert has done none of the things that modern biographers are supposed to do. He has not spent time laboriously transcribing documents in the archives, nor has he slogged around

Jonathan Mirsky

A low score in the intelligence test

During an interview with James Naughtie, recorded in his keenly analytical The Accidental American: Tony Blair and the Presidency, the Prime Minister observed, ‘I never quite understood what people mean by this neo-con thing.’ This is not an obscure term. Can Mr Blair really not know that the neo-cons are a small group of like-minded policy-makers, clustered in or around the top layer of the Pentagon, who began agitating for the removal of Saddam Hussein long before George W. Bush became president? When Mr Naughtie mentioned the neo-cons’ uhr-text, The Project for the New American Century, Mr Blair asked, ‘What’s in it?’ What unites Mr Blair and George Bush is

Richard Shone

The girl who played Ophelia

‘A truly extraordinary achievement,’ trumpets A. N. Wilson on the jacket of this book. In a sense, of course, he is right. Lucinda Hawksley deserves praise for making something substantial out of very little. With the addition of some original research, she has synthesised what is known of Elizabeth Siddal (1829-62), the long-suffering model for Millais’ ‘Ophelia’, the muse and wife of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and herself a painter and versifier. Hawksley sifts the evidence, commendably trying to unravel truth from legend in order to bring proportion to her subject’s story, one which, boiled down, is not unfamiliar. Nice but difficult working-girl is plucked from obscurity by rising artist; after

Philip Hensher

The lady’s not for exhuming

It’s curious to reflect that in reviewing Olivia Manning’s biography alone and prominently one is paying her more attention than any of her novels had in her lifetime. They were invariably reviewed as one of a group, rather than stand-alone, and for the general reader she fell into the category of novelists whose name is somehow familiar but whose novels are not familiar at all. After her death, an excellent television adaptation of her Balkan Trilogy and Levant Trilogy starring Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson at the height of their vogue did turn her into a famous name; but during her lifetime she never attained the celebrity which she felt

Deborah Ross

True to herself

I meet Joan Collins at Waterstone’s in Harrods, where she is signing copies of her latest novel, Misfortune’s Daughters. There she is, behind a big table and, although it pains me to say it, she is very much starting to look her age, the poor clapped-out old thing. And her fan base is not what it used to be. Sadly, she signs only one, maybe two novels during the full hour she is there, while the manager and I hop from foot to foot with embarrassment. Believe me, I take no pleasure in saying any of this, especially as Joan is not only a regular Spectator diarist but also an

Saturday

Harriet Waugh

Seven of the best

Call the Dying is the seventh novel in Andrew Taylor’s Lydmouth series. He started it in 1994 and by setting it in the 1950s he recreates the English detective novel in what is perhaps its heyday but with subtle additions. In the first couple of novels the reader is aware of 1950s dress, behaviour and drab, postwar atmosphere far more than in contemporary novels of that time. There is the added realism of frustrated lives and hidden sexuality played out against the background of the moral mores of the era. Now, though, some of the picturesque aspects of the novels have diminished. In Taylor’s last and best Lydmouth novel, Death’s

Jane Gardam

A romantic socialist

There is no introduction to this collection of essays, reviews and ‘think-pieces’ by Doris Lessing, but they are presumably chosen by herself from the quantity of her literary criticism (the hardest work, or so they say) over a long political and literary lifetime. The pieces must have been difficult to assemble, for the acknowledgments in the back of the book include some very obscure sources alongside the blue-ribbon publications where you would expect to find ‘one of the most influential writers of the 20th century’. Some are from the Guardian, the New York Observer, the L. A. Times; more from The Spectator, the Literary Review and the late lamented Books

John McEwen

The hum of special contentment

How welcome it is to find a book published by a small private concern in this age of conglomerates; the more pleasing when one knows that the Perpetua Press is the creation of the poet Anne Ridler’s husband Vivian, former Printer of the Oxford University Press, and that it is still run from their Oxford home, where they raised three children and lived from 1948 until Anne Ridler’s death, aged 89, in 2001. These gentle reminiscences, the final few pages put together by the Ridlers’ son Ben, are of happy industry based on the Affirmative Way, ‘which pursues perfection through delight in/adoration of the created world’. This was the philosophy

John Parfitt

Britannia’s finest years

In 1903, the final volume of Laird Clowes’s seven-part History of the Royal Navy thudded on to Britain’s bookshelves: 4,385 pages of broadside-by-broadside chronology from 55 BC to 1900 AD that were in print for almost a century. Nobody has attempted to follow it on that scale, until Professor Rodger that is. His 1997 volume, Safeguard of the Sea, took us to 1649; this second volume takes us on to 1815. It has been worth the wait. Rodger says he wants to ‘put naval affairs back into the history of Britain’. High time, when too many think that history began in 1914, geography stops somewhere near the Russian border, and

Francis Wyndham

Fear in a handful of dust

Richard Wollheim died last year, aged 80, after a distinguished academic career as a philosopher fascinated by aesthetics and psychoanalysis. He had recently completed this memoir of his childhood. Posthumous publication reveals it to be a masterpiece — an unclassifiable work of startling originality in which the acutely sensual and confusedly cerebral experience of infancy, boyhood and adolescence is brilliantly recreated. Although it carries self-scrutiny to an extreme of scrupulous candour which I believe to be unique, the term ‘confessional’ — with its suggestion of apology and therapeutic exhibitionism — does not apply. There is little sense here of personal secrets being exposed to public view, but rather of the

Andrew Lambirth

Well worth the weight

There is no comfortable way to read or appreciate this vast book without the benefit of a lectern. How many households now possess such a thing? I certainly don’t, and the frustration that this immediately caused — it’s hard enough to pick the book up in one hand, let alone hold it balanced to peruse — almost turned me against what is in fact a well-written and sumptuously illustrated account of one of the best 20th-century British artists. For those of less forbearing a kidney, it might be better to saw the thing in half down the spine and enjoy two (relatively) manageable volumes for the price of one. The

Jonathan Sumption

Mixed mediaeval motives

The crusades have had a bad press lately, for reasons which are not far to seek. They were characterised by the three things that the modern age has found most abhorrent about its own recent past: religious enthusiasm, racism and colonial settlement. More generally, they were inspired by a belief that there is a divine plan for the world, and that some people have been specially charged with executing it. This belief is not widely accepted today, outside the United States and parts of the Islamic Middle East. The 18th-century sceptic David Hume thought that the crusades were ‘the most signal and the most durable monument of human folly that

Peregrine Worsthorne

All human life is here except politics

Unfortunately for this volume commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Daily Telegraph, most people today are keener to read about the paper’s somewhat scandalous recent experiences and mysteriously uncertain future — about which it has nothing to say — than about its long and worthy past. So the timing of this chatty and jolly tome could not be worse. It is rather as if the Cunard company had brought out a comparably lightweight volume shortly after the sinking of the Titanic. That said, the book has much to commend it, in the form of eye-catching extracts from the paper, starting with the Hyde Park riots of 1855 and ending, as

Charlotte Moore

Posh and common

This is one of those lovely Persephone reprints with a pearly grey cover and endpapers like the maids’ bedroom curtains in a Victorian country house. The title, too, suggests that one is in for a soothing read. Marghanita Laski provides a complete dramatis personae, to add to the reader’s comfort. If one were to confuse Miss Porteous with Miss Moodie, or Green the ironmonger with Brotherton the stationer, one could just flip back to the beginning and check. Sure enough, this is a traditionally organised novel of English village life. In Priory Dean, everybody knows everyone else’s business, feathers are ruffled over where the annual fete is to be held,

Zenga Longmore

An uninspired foreign correspondent

What are the essential elements that make a good book of letters? The first is mild spite. Had John Gielgud spared us his catty asides (such as his amusement at Larry’s latest attempt at Iago) his letters would have been horribly dreary. The second is a lively correspondent. Fanny Kemble’s vivid letters describing the horrors of the Deep South will remain an everlasting antidote to the ghastly Gone With the Wind view of the ‘golden age of slavery’. Thirdly, one needs to be interested in the letter-writer. Anyone who would happily wade through Tolstoy’s novels would brave a similar struggle with the great man’s letters. So why would anyone want