Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Sasthi Brata

Blood at the root

If you were talking to a group of particle physicists and mentioned the word ‘fundamentalism’, they would assume that you were referring to Isaac Newton (who kept his belief in alchemy a well-guarded secret). To stem-cell researchers fundamentalism would mean going back to Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of blood. Post-Darwinians wouldn’t pass the time of day with Creationists. Over six millennia of civilisation, fundamentalism was not only not a dirty word; the concept was the plinth, the fundamental basis, the trunk of the tree on which a system of beliefs was built and from which other branches grew. Saul of Tarsus, post-Damascus, was accused of violating the fundamentals of

Andrew Gimson

King of the charm offensive

There could scarcely be a more delightful way to remind oneself of the British and French statesmen who created the Entente Cordiale, signed on 8 April 1904, than to read this book. Ian Dunlop’s method of composition is unfashionable. It consists largely of the skilful selection of amusing passages from diplomatic memoirs and other works published during the last century, with no preference given to the latest research and certainly no attempt to make daring reassessments. This is history without the idea that we know better than those who made it; history where due respect is paid to the personalities involved, whose lives were set down in the ponderous volumes

Sandra Howard

At sea with oneself

The Voyage Home is the third book I’ve read about Africa recently. Like the others it captures and distills the unique texture and smell of Africa, the touching sense of being a decade or two out of time. Both The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith, so wonderfully tender and funny, and Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller — civil-war-torn Rhodesia seen through the eyes of the author’s childhood self — brilliantly evoked early chapters of my own life in that part of the world. I haven’t lived in Nigeria but I was still transported back five decades by Jane Rogers’s new novel

Francis King

Home town blues

A preliminary riffle through this novel is not all that encouraging. Three pages of spoof Acknow- ledgments (‘some of them are dead; most of them are strangers; the famous are not friends’) range from Graham Swift to Jonathan Swift and from Stevie Wonder to Ralph Vaughan Williams. There is a spoof Preface and a spoof 19-page index of ‘Key Words, Phrases and Concepts’ of absolutely no use even to a reviewer in a hurry. The jacket quotations from reviews of the author’s previous The Truth About Babies are also clearly spoofs (‘A kind of phenomenology of fatherhood’, TLS, ‘It’s cute and it comes with sharp little teeth’, RTE Guide, ‘Just

John Shaw

A backward Nowhere

There are hundreds of references to Molvania on the Web, and one airline shows passengers a video about the place, but it is not on the maps. Michelin does not mention Molvania. However, this book locates it ‘north of Bulgaria and downwind of Chernobyl’. A new Mittel-Europa republic emergent, Slovakia-like, from the fall of the Curtain and the Wall? The first clue to the mystery is the publisher’s logo, Jetlag Travel. The second is the London launch date, which was 1 April. Like Ruritania and Shangri-la, Molvania is on the atlas of imagined countries, not, however, for matinee romance or high adventure, but as the subject of a hilarious spoof

Stuart Wheeler

The general and the particular

‘Gays are cowardly.’ ‘Capricorns are self-confident.’ Both prop- ositions are (pace astrologers) simply untrue or, as the author puts it, spurious. ‘Gays are more likely to get Aids than non-gays.’ There is plenty of evidence for this, although of course not all gays get Aids. So this is what the author calls a non-universal but also non-spurious proposition. What follows? Should gays pay a higher health insurance premium? If not, why not? Would it be discrimination? I found this book fascinating. The author quotes William Blake: ‘To generalise is to be an idiot. To particularise is the alone distinction of merit .…’ Aristotle apparently accepted that laws did have to

Christopher Woodward

To and from Russia without love

My Ladybird book of The Story of Napoleon had two pages to illustrate 1812. Napoleon sits on a white horse and watches Moscow burn, torched by fleeing Russians. Then the Grande Armée retreats, a column winding into a blurry, white oblivion. ‘With the thermometer seventy degrees below freezing’, read the text, ‘few of those who had crossed the river Niemen into Russia in June ever got back to France.’ But for a few images such as this — and War and Peace — not many English people know what actually happened. I didn’t, until I read this magnificent book. Adam Zamoyski is the first writer in English to have properly

Saturday

Andrew Barrow

Heirs and graces

This provocative, titillating and seductive novel is about upper-class affectations and ‘the mystery of unearned greatness’. It focuses on a network of rich, blue-blooded and slightly dim grandees which apparently stretches ‘far beyond national boundaries’. Snobs describes in forensic detail a world where duchesses are ‘taken in’ to dinner and desperate, social-climbing women feel deeply ashamed that they never ‘came out’. Can such people still exist? Can this fascinating story really be set in modern times, or at least in the late 1990s? A few contemporary references to Volvo estates and Partridge’s upmarket food stores are not enough to convince me. Events unfold in an immensely imposing and well-capitalised stately

Tony Geraghty

An unanswered SOS from the SAS

The epic survival story of the SAS patrol known as Bravo Two Zero during the first Gulf war until now, has largely overshadowed a darker story of incompetence and worse on the part of some of those who sent eight brave men into the desert on foot, on a Scud-hunt that was doomed from the start. In 1991, soldiers of the regiment’s B Squadron had been here before. A quixotic proposal to land a raiding party on an Argentine airfield a decade earlier, during the South Atlantic war, prompted a refusal on the part of some of the key players to perform. In cases such as these, a political imperative

Michael Beloff

Some moaning at the Bar

This is a sad little story of the author’s annus horribilis as a pupil barrister in the late Nineties. Today the Bar bends ever deeper before the winds of modernisation — an all-graduate profession which subordinates even the best and brightest to the continuing rigours of further training and examination, piling acronym upon acronym — for those without a law degree the CPE (Common Professional Education) and for those with any degree the BVC (Bar Vocational Course). But the apprentice year as a tutee of a junior barrister remains in the new millennium the Bar’s mummified memorial to its mediaeval origins. Harry Mount assures his readership that, while his gruesome

George St-Andrews

Old Baghdad in Hertfordshire

Who would have thought of Harrow as ‘the heathen temple’ or suburban Penge as Celtic pen ced, ‘head of the wood’? This new dictionary, the better part of 20 years in the making, re-enchants the prosaic and gives historical resonance to the timelessly English. We are reminded of the mixed Celtic, Roman, Scandina- vian, Germanic and other roots of what came to be England, and given Contin- ental and Indo-European parallels for English place-names. It tells the history of the landscape and of those who owned and worked on it, and is an invaluable companion to books like W. G. Hoskins’s classic Making of the English Landscape and Oliver Rackham’s

Isabel Colegate

Sixth son of Himself

Have we had enough Irish childhoods, lackadaisical days remote from English stresses, charming eccentrics, amusing turns of speech, rain, religion, nostalgia? Well, no, not if they are as acute and funny as this tale of a Protestant boyhood in County Meath. Homan Potterton is the youngest of eight children of long-established farming stock. He grew up in the 1950s, in de Valera’s Ireland, insulated by its neutrality in the late war, quiet, poor, safe. The Pottertons had lived for the best part of 300 years at Rathcormick, a plain 18th-century farmhouse only embellished by a portico over the front door added with uncharacteristic grandeur by Old Elliott. Old Elliott was

Noel Malcolm

Taste and passion — with a dash of luck

Available from Heywood Hill, 10 Curzon Street, London W1J 5HH Producers of ‘period dramas’, on film or television, go to tremendous trouble to create the right ‘period look’. In the late Victorian town house, everything is late Victorian; in the Regency rectory, everything is Regency; and so on. All of which is, of course, absurd — not as absurd as having late Victorian things in the Regency house, admittedly, but absurd nonetheless. For most well-stocked houses — except those of the mail-ordering nouveaux riches —have always contained a mixture of styles, an accumulation of objects from earlier periods. If this is true of any house where the contents have been

Antonia Fraser

Swedish exercises in crime

Henning Mankell, the Swedish crimewriter who is the creator of Inspector Kurt Wallender, is being taken increasingly seriously: an international bestseller but also the subject of profiles in literary papers. He has already won the prestigious (British) Crimewriters’ Gold Dagger Award with Sidetracked. It seems the measure of the success of his dour, dispirited and diabetic Inspector that the last Mankell, The Return of the Dancing Master, made a feature of ignoring Wallender altogether — much as Agatha Christie created a middle-aged lady sleuth in Ariadne Oliver, sated perhaps with Poirotmania. However, the latest Mankell offering is right back with Wallender and in my opinion all the better for it.

Piers Paul-Read

The Catholic Cheshire Cat

Yvonne Cloetta, the French wife of a Swiss businessman, was Graham Greene’s mistress for the last 30 or so years of his life. Her husband spent most of the year in Africa; she lived at Juan les Pins with her two daughters, Greene in a flat overlooking the harbour in Antibes. When I first met her with Greene on the C

Jonathan Croall

All his world a stage

As in the theatre, so in his letters: John Gielgud was a man of many parts, and acutely aware of his audience for all of them. In this comprehensive volume of 800 letters spanning nearly 90 years, we see the great actor in a range of roles: loving son, wicked gossip, star actor, indecisive director, anguished lover, brilliant anecdotist. Some parts he plays with style, others with affectionate wit, yet others with sympathy, courage or blazing honesty. One of the many attractions of this absorbing and deliciously entertaining book is Gielgud’s capacity for self-criticism. He was by his own admission vain, impulsive, often selfish, totally impractical in ordinary life, and

Raymond Carr

A leading light amidst the gloom

Isaiah Berlin was a much-loved friend and a dominant influence on my thinking as an historian. His death in 1997 left a void that cannot be filled. I first met him in 1946 playing tiddlywinks on the floor of his room in New College. The letters in this book of some 700 pages, magnificently edited by Henry Hardy, cover his life before that date: at Oxford before the war, his time in wartime New York and Washington and his visit to Russia in 1945. What do the letters tell us of Berlin’s life up to 1946? First of all the central importance of his Jewish family. He was born in

Saturday

Jonathan Keates

A very different sort of Balfour

Everyone — well, almost everyone — knows that in 1895, while The Importance of Being Earnest was packing in the punters at the St James’s Theatre, Oscar Wilde was foolish enough to take the Marquess of Queensberry to court for libelling him as a ‘posing somdomite’. The noble lord’s spelling mistake occasioned history’s most famous ‘[sic]’, and Oscar, subsequently shown to be exactly what his accuser claimed, with or without the redundant ‘m’, went to his martyrdom on the Reading treadmill. While the jury was still stretching its eyes over details such as Bosie’s roseleaf lips, the sexual availability of telegraph boys and the ‘map of Ireland’ on the sheet

Carole Angier

Hands across three centuries

Artemisia Gentileschi (b. 1593) is a feminist icon of such power that she has penetrated even to these islands, for instance in a book by our own feminist icon, Germaine Greer. Not only was Artemisia almost the only woman artist of her age, but while still in her teens she was raped by a fellow-artist, and again did what no woman had done before, standing up in court and testifying against her attacker. Her most famous painting, ‘Judith and Holofernes’, was a sweet revenge: it shows the biblical heroine hacking off the head of the invader as he sleeps, with streams of blood flowing towards our feet. This is not

Dean Godson

Labour’s forgotten army

If Slim’s 14th was the ‘Forgotten Army’ of the second world war, then the trade union Right and its sponsored MPs are surely the ‘Forgotten Army’ of Labour’s civil war of the 1970s and 1980s. They were ‘old Labour’, but not in the sense which the term has taken on in recent years to mean the hard Left: indeed, this largely working-class group constituted the Bennites’ staunchest opponents. The old Labour Right tended to be patriotic and conservative on social issues, whilst remaining firmly wedded to the welfare state. This wing of Labour was allied to (but culturally had little in common with) those middle-class ‘revisionist’ intellectuals who are the