Book Reviews

Ian Davidson begins his book by telling us that Voltaire is a famous writer but that his work is largely unknown. True, his plays are no longer performed and his poems are no longer read. But when he tells us that his historical works are also ignored, those of us for whom Siècle de Louis Quatorze and Essai sur les moeurs are outstanding must surely protest. That said, however, the section in which we are told what is still important in Voltaire is more acceptable. Firstly, he mentions Candide. This philosophical tale is singled out for praise, described as the author’s greatest and most enduring masterpiece. Then there are his

Having just, laboriously, finished a book of my own (with a subtitle remarkably similar to Ian’s), it was with a sinking heart that I opened Making the Running. All too often in the past, the name I. Balding on the same race card, playing field, cricket pitch, or other competitive sporting arena has been, unless of course we were on the same side, an ominous sign for Oaksey, Lawrence, Marlborough, Audax, or whatever flimsy alias I happened to be using. Apart possibly from J. Francome, Ian is the closest to a genuine ‘all-rounder’ it has ever been my pleasure to encounter. I am told that if you put a pair

Tom Perrotta’s fourth novel, Little Children, is a book one should read for its last 50 pages, but that means having to read the 300 before to make sense of it. In a book that primarily takes place in a suburban playground, it ends, naturally enough, at the playground, although at a worrisomely late hour, when half the book’s protagonists converge, one by one, as if it were a Midsummer Night’s dream. For some of them it is: a heady, steamy dream of a life elsewhere, with different partners; and part of Perrotta’s irony is that rather than the garden or the wood his idyll is in the endless American

Welcome a volume that in all ways lives up to its title, even at a pinch a comparison with John Aubrey. The 18 characters who receive at the hands of this gentleman of the press a good-natured hearing make a great celebrity list for a party. As guests we the readers are no longer bored by Rhodesia’s Ian Smith; he springs alive in light prose. Mary Whitehouse has hidden depths. The Deedes version of Montgomery’s table talk makes the mouth water for more of the ‘idiosyncratic, dogmatic, tactless, quarrelsome’ Field Marshal. Lord Hartwell, Deedes’s former boss at the Daily Telegraph, might also be quite fun. Of Lord Spencer’s speech at

Rob Roy (1671-1734) is one of the most famous of Scotsmen. Whiskies, hotels, pubs, and junior football teams have been named after him. He has been portrayed on stage and screen. The 1994 Hollywood film, written by Alan Sharp, is a fine western set in 18th-century Scotland. He was already famous in 1817 ‘when’, as David Stevenson writes, ‘Walter Scott decided that Rob Roy would be a good title for his latest novel, even though Rob was a fairly minor character in the book. Scott’s motive was simple: marketing … The novel launched Rob as a great Romantic hero, persecuted but surviving against all the odds…’ Rob indeed is Scotland’s

Softback edition – £29.95 ISBN 1904537111 Self-portraiture is akin to what used to be called self-abuse: often done for want of anyone else at hand. Artists’ models cost money and, with the invention of colour photography, the demand for oil portraits declined. But, just as every autobiographer is the world authority on his or her subject, so the artist has maximum familiarity with the face in the mirror. Self-portraits give much the same chances as memoirs: they can be vain or modest, revealing or concealing, superficial or deeply introspective. So, when a mass of self-portraits is set before you, as in this finely produced book, you soon begin to work