Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Vicki Woods

Going behind the Bushes

Kitty Kelley is the Heat maga- zine of celebrity biographers. Spectator readers who may not be familiar with this unpleasant (but very popular) weekly should know that public taste has moved on from Hello!. Heat doesn’t do airbrushed celebrities looking gorgeous in their celebrity homes. Heat gives you the celeb ‘as she [or he] really is’ i. e. preferably sweaty, hag-ridden and running to fat, or displaying signs of a) extensive rehab, b) a coup de vieux or c) recent arrest. Heat is a ‘post-celebrity’ celeb mag, which aims to show that despite all their fame and money celebs are sad losers just like the rest of us. Before The

David Willetts

The world we have lost

The Whig interpretation of history, a relentlessly progressive account of the emergence of our parliamentary system, has long been out of fashion when it comes to politics. But histories of social policy are all too often complacent accounts of ‘the development’ or ‘evolution’ of state provision. This excellent book breaks with that tradition by reminding us of what was lost as the conventional welfare state expanded. A vigorous network of working-class institutions ranging from friendly societies to dissenting chapels was bulldozed out of the way as the state moved in. E. G. West powerfully showed how much schooling there was before Foster’s Education Act of 1870. David Green showed the

Interconnect

Patriot and appeaser

Since appeasement is in the air again, this is a timely book. It tells the story of how Lord Londonderry, secretary of state for air in the National government of 1931-5, sought to avert what would be the second world war by befriending the Nazi leaders. Londonderry, 7th Marquis and directly descended from Lord Castlereagh of the conference of Vienna, was one of the grandest and richest men in Britain. He owned several country houses, London-derry House in Park Lane and 50,000 acres in Ireland and England, including large parts of the Durham coalfields. He was educated at Eton and Sandhurst and commissioned into the Blues, which he commanded during

Byron Rogers

Saved by comic relief

There is one glorious surrealistic sentence on page 6. Describing Clarissa Eden’s early adventures in magazine journalism, the authors write, ‘Her first published article, in 1944, was a dispatch from Berlin for Horizon.’ Eh? Only it gets stranger: ‘…reporting on what remained of theatre and cultured life in the devastated city’. I knew things were pretty bizarre in Berlin towards the end, with the Nazis legalising nudism and stores holding spring sales as the Russian tanks rolled in, but for Cyril Connolly to have had a cultural correspondent in the enemy capital at the end of a world war would have been the supernova of aestheticism. And a very catastrophic

Francis King

Morality and mortality

At the start of this sixth and final volume of Ferdinand Mount’s novel sequence A Chronicle of Modern Twilight, the narrator Aldous (Gus) Cotton is about to take premature retirement from the Civil Service, having found, to his chagrin, that he has been passed over for the promotion that he thought to be his due. His raffish old comrade in asthma Joe Follows, a financier with a ‘colourful’ past — already met in the second volume, Of Love and Asthma — then persuades him to join in the flotation of a business called Heads You Win. This, at first dedicated merely to headhunting, soon extends to the hectic takeover of

Peter Jm-Wayne

Porridge and privilege

A Prison Diary, Volume II: Purgatoryby Jeffrey ArcherPan, £6.99, pp. 310, ISBN 0330426370 A Prison Diary, Volume III: Heavenby Jeffrey ArcherMacmillan, £18.99, pp. 478, ISBN 1405032626 In an extraordinary fax to the Director-General of the Prison Service, Martin Narey, the Home Secretary David Blunkett set down his feelings in an unequivocally forthright manner: I am sick and tired of reading Jeffrey Archer stories about the cushy conditions in which he was placed, the freedom he has been given, the opportunity to do anything he likes, and the snook he is cocking at all of us. News had just reached him (via a highly coloured account in the Sun) that whilst

Frank Field

Doctors’ dilemma unsolved

This is a brilliant tract against the times. Tallis records how the traditional vocation in medicine is ceasing to be renewed. What he says has a wider application to all professions and, indeed, to work generally. How can Britain sit casually by as a profession which, under oath, brings a lifetime of learning and dedication to our care is replaced by the highly paid medical salesman? Tallis locates a number of destructive forces at work. Changes in the practice of medicine reflect changes in the wider society. The idea of vocation is increasingly no longer strong enough to determine what role people wish to play in life. A number now

Sandra Howard

An exercise with jerks

Reviewers coming to this book, the second volume of Roddy Doyle’s The Last Roundup trilogy without having read the first, must be a frustration for the author. I had a struggle connecting with Doyle’s character, Henry Smart. The first volume might have endeared him to me and set him in context — it followed his hard hit-man life in his Irish homeland, his troubles with Republican paymasters — but a second volume should cater for newcomers. Pick up any random volume of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time and you care about the characters right away. It is 1924. Henry has taken flight and gone west to

Jonathan Sumption

A prodigy of a politician

William Pitt the Younger always was the politician’s politician: an MP at 21, prime minister at 24 and dead at 46, with only two years out of office in between. Pitt dominated British politics for his entire adult life. He lived for the House of Commons and for the daily grind of government service. He was the greatest political orator of his day. Yet he had few recreations, and virtually no experience of the world. His friendships were distant. He wrote no intimate letters. He read little. He knew nothing of music or painting. He never loved any one. His was a life at once unfulfilled in private and triumphantly

Theodore Dalrymple

Descending and condescending

When asked to name a British prime minister other than the present one or Mrs Thatcher, my young adult patients are inclined to reply, ‘I don’t know, I wasn’t born then.’ Such an answer would not surprise Frank Furedi, the author of this attack on cultural populism; it is the natural consequence of an educational theory that makes relevance to pupils’ pre-existing personal experience the touchstone of the curriculum. That this theory serves to enclose pupils permanently in whatever little (and unpleasant) world they might find themselves so little bothers the educational theorists that one might easily conclude that the consequence is an intended one. That is to say, it

Digby Anderson

Somewhat concerning food

Alice Thomas Ellis is not a person to be trusted — in the kitchen. I am surprised to find this. I have always admired her elsewhere, in her novels for instance. But there is no doubt that when it comes to food she is simply left-wing. She makes steak and kidney pudding without the kidney. That’s bad enough, but the reason is worse: the first she had smelt (unsurprisingly) of urine. Adult cooks should have got over childish impressions. She does not care for pesto: it smells of silage. She draws woodcock. She finds gazpacho, of all things, ‘a nuisance to prepare’. And she ‘could not get hold of asafoetida’,

Frank Kermode

Gravity, mischief and variety

Muriel Spark rightly insists that she is a poet who, as it happens, writes novels, and that she writes novels without ceasing to be a poet. Being a poet means having the ability to recognise that the world can announce more interesting inter- relationships than common sense chooses to notice — unforeseeable collocations, intrusions into the ordinary of aspects of reality ordinarily ignored, simply because the extraordinary is what ordinary minds prefer to dismiss from their attention. One should ‘see life as a whole,’ says Dame Muriel, ‘rather than as a series of disconnected happenings’. Poetry connects them. Its unusual ability to do so can sometimes be akin to madness,

Ian Thomson

A time of zero tolerance

Born in 1956, Ronan Bennett is a Belfast writer of great gifts. His last novel, The Catastrophist, was a tense parable of conscience set in the Belgian Congo at the time of independence in 1960. Havoc, his fourth book, unfolds in 1630s England in the years prior to the Civil War. While Graham Greene is clearly an influence (notably his portrayal of Catholic martyrdom in 1930s Mexico in The Power and the Glory), Bennett is his own man. No one today writes with such sombre clarity of divided loyalties and shifting political allegiances. A small town in northern England is menaced by Irish vagrants and other imagined ‘Romish’ undesirables. In

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Sob sisters and scolders

Without meaning to come the Big I-Am, I’ve got issues with the whole premise of this book, which probably stem from my very healthy level of self-esteem. I mean, once we’re out of our teens (when admittedly I spent rather too many nights pining after a dreamy 19-year-old Oxbridge undergraduate called Max, of all the naff admissions) is there really any sentient female who genuinely whips herself into a lather when Whatsisname bails out, and before Thingy appears? To paraphrase some smug old sod, a man is only a man — whereas a gram of coke is a kick. Of course, I know that a lot of adult women seem

Victoria Glendinning

The fine art of appreciation

A Fine Brush on Ivory: An Appreciation of Jane Austen by Richard Jenkyns OUP, £12.99, pp. 200, ISBN 0199276617 ‘Each of us has a private Austen’ is the first line of Karen Joy Fowler’s readable and ingenious novel. This sentence, and her title, encapsulate her theme. The West Coast book club in question consists of five women, all steeped in the Austen oeuvre, and a single man with long eyelashes called Grigg who has never read any Jane Austen at all. Their ages range from the mid-sixties to the late twenties. In their discussions, as we gradually realise, they project on to Jane Austen’s plots and characters their own experiences

Philip Hensher

Professional to his fingertips

Perhaps not uniquely, I was discouraged from reading V. S. Pritchett by nothing more than the old Penguin cover of his 1982 Collected Stories. It was simply a photograph of the author, wearing a suit, holding a pipe, with an expression of mild elderly benevolence. To callow youth, that was not what genius was supposed to look like, and I didn’t get round to him for years. Big mistake. Pritchett is a writer who delineates a unique world, and the vivid genius of his voice, encompassing so many other voices, seedy, lush, excitable, takes only a line or two to make itself felt. August’s? On the Bath road? Twice-five August

Saturday

Sarah Burton

Birds in a gilded cage

George III freely acknowledged he was in no hurry to see his daughters married: ‘I am happy in their company, and do not in the least want a separation.’ As a consequence, three of them (Augusta, Sophia and Amelia) never married; the others did so late: Charlotte at 31, Mary at 40 and Elizabeth at 48. Meticulously detailed and deeply researched, Princesses chronicles their bids to achieve a balance between personal fulfilment and filial duty. The princesses’ early lives were employed almost exclusively in lessons and ‘work’ — an endless round of drawing and sewing imposed upon them by their mother which, then and later, often filled the space where

Mark Ridley

The pilgrims’ progress

A hundred million years ago, our ancestors were nocturnal mouse-like creatures, living in the shadows of the dinosaurs. Five hundred million years ago, our ancestors were fish, living near (or even in) the sea bottom. Two thousand million years ago, they were single-celled microbes, floating in the sea. Almost 4,000 million years ago, they were replicating molecules, lacking almost every feature that we expect in something that is live — except reproduction. The evolutionary history of life is one of science’s great stories — a story that educated people like to know at least in outline, along with the history of European civilisation and the political history of their own

Bevis Hillier

Losing your heart — or your nose

If a car is travelling behind a tractor for five miles on a narrow road, and at last the tractor turns off down a side street, often you will see that car, from its driver’s pent-up frustration, suddenly shoot forward, trashing the speed limit. Something similar happened to writing about sex after the Lady Chatterley case of the early 1960s and the subsequent relaxation of censorship. Novelists felt that, because they could now cram their books full of eroticism, they must. Eventually things settled down and the writers just brought in sex where, as they say, the plot required it — where poor Thomas Hardy would have liked to deploy

Interconnect

It really was a knockout

On 25 June 2003, the day on which Alastair Campbell declar- ed all-out war against the BBC in his evidence to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee (FAC), the BBC’s Director-General, Greg Dyke, was engaged in country dancing in Surrey. He and other top BBC executives were attending one of their regular strategy conferences at which ‘as usual, we had some bonding activity, in which members of the Executive did silly things to make them feel more of a team’. Their very silly thing on this occasion was an It’s a Knockout competition, which was interrupted by a telephone call reporting that Mr Campbell had ‘gone ballistic’ before the