Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Jane Gardam

Dirty hands with green fingers

The unpretentious title of this excellent, delicious book is clever. Does it mean ‘a modicum of garden history’ or, in a Victorian sort of way, ‘a little volume’ of it? Either, for it is beautifully produced, would make you want to buy it but neither would prepare you for nearly 350 pages of entertaining, scholarly riches; fine type, fine text, colour plates, MS reproductions from Aelfric to The Ladies’ Flower Garden, illustrations, drawings, cartoons and photographs. British gardens began early BC, with nomadic clearings in the wilderness and thorn hedges to keep out wild animals. The book ends with 2003 AD and the children’s Mughal Garden in Bradford and the

Digby Anderson

The crushing burden of proof

Anthony Kenny does not believe in the existence of God, but his disbelief is qualified and complex. He does not believe that the existence of God can be proved through something like the five Thomist ‘proofs’: they depend too much on ‘outdated Aristotelian cosmology’. Further, he thinks that the traditional attributes of God such as omniscience, omnipotence and benevolence are incompatible. He implies that there is also a traditional attribution to God of (total?) ineffability and this, too, damages proof of existence. I don’t quite understand his emphasis on the un-utterability of God. It’s true there is a strand of ineffability-thinking in the Church, but there are even stronger strands

Rachel Johnson

The mating game in Manhattan

A publishing friend arrived with an armful of new books as a cadeau maison. I have to confess I picked up Plum Sykes’s Bergdorf Blondes with a groan, expecting it to be bad, on the grounds that the young author was thin, beautiful, had an irritating name and should therefore be doomed to fail. A few minutes later I had decided that her sparkling effort represented an important milestone in the history of the genre of book best read as a teenager at boarding school under the duvet in the dorm, whilst pretending to Matron to be racked by terrible curse-pains. It is a romantic rollercoaster starring a fashion moppet

Sam Leith Sam Leith

The neocon’s imperial burden

‘They can’t like us a whole lot,’ was the report of one American soldier. ‘If we came into a village there was no flag-waving, no pretty young girls coming out to give us kisses as we march through victorious. ‘Oh, here come the fucking Americans again. Jesus, when are they going to learn?’ That was Vietnam. Even the well-intentioned imperialist, as Niall Ferguson puts it, is ‘seldom loved’. Ferguson is both a lucid and prolific newspaper commentator and a historian whose book-length specialisms have been money, and empire. So he is well-positioned to consider the place of the United States in the world just now — a time when it

Saturday

Judith Flanders

Dark deeds on the District Line

In 1863, the London underworld was revolutionised — not the crime statistics, but the literal underworld, when the first underground railway opened, with trains running, unimaginably, beneath the surface of the earth. This was, as the Times had pointed out when plans were first mooted, as silly as thinking of machines that could fly through the air, or of battles that could be fought in the sky, or trains running in tunnels under the Channel. By 1865, it was possible to travel between Farringdon Street and Padding- ton without seeing daylight; within a decade areas as far north as Swiss Cottage, as far west as Kensington and Hammersmith, as far

Stephen Abell

A failed kiss of life

For a writer or critic to describe something as ‘interesting’ is, of course, neither revealing nor interesting. Which is a shame, for Peter Ackroyd is rather fond of this sort of information underload: Richard II is ‘perhaps the most interesting and mysterious of English sovereigns’; the putative affair between Chaucer’s wife and John of Gaunt ‘would throw an interesting light upon his characteristic irony and detachment’; the actual affair between her sister and John of Gaunt ‘throws an interesting light upon the nature of the royal household’, and so on. Ackroyd is at least right to have an interest in Chaucer, whose well-documented professional and personal history provides plenty of

Peter Clark

A roving ambassador for culture

‘The pay was good, you had a nice house and you met some interesting people.’ Thus the late John F. Kennedy on the US presidency. Something of the same could be said of an overseas British Council career a generation ago, it would appear, from these engaging memoirs by Stephen Alexander who held a succession of different overseas postings in three continents between 1946 and 1979, promoting British culture. Life was great, with few demands and plenty of opportunity to indulge in travel, friendships and cultural pursuits. Stephen Alexander had his first extended taste of overseas life as a prisoner of war in a Japanese camp. Conditions became far better

Byron Rogers

A tale of suspense

This account of a public execution in Wales is a delightful book. Beautifully designed, it is by that rare bird, an academic who not only can write but also seems to have had in mind what the French historian meant, if I remember the quote, when he mourned, ‘My book is long because I have neither the time nor the wit to make it short.’ Professor Bartlett’s 168 pages are thus more readable than most thrillers. But its most extraordinary feature is something no one ever thought to encounter until some kind of time travel was invented: in The Hanged Man men and women long dead (and, in one case,

Noble Frankland

A hiding to nothing

The story of Hitler’s last days in his bunker has been told and retold many times, perhaps most famously and certainly first by Hugh Trevor-Roper, an elegant writer and witty satirist but not really much of a historian. No doubt it will continue to be told again and again for many generations to come. The sheer frightfulness of his power and the devastating effect that Hitler personally had upon the course of history marks him out as unique in modern times and the whiff of mystery that envelops his demise excites a still incompletely quenched curiosity. So there was certainly room for a pulling together of the available evidence about,

Matthew Spencer

Rock and soul

If you were a poet returning from war-ravaged Yugoslavia with a marriage on the rocks and credit-card companies after you, where would you go to get away from it all? Christopher Merrill’s choice, several times between 1998 and the millennium’s eve, was Mount Athos. The only women to have entered this thousand-year-old monastic republic in northern Greece — a watchtower for Byzantium, he calls it — have been halted by guards as they stepped from the boat or warned off by the voice of the Virgin Mary. Some of Merrill’s experiences on Athos are equally forbidding. He arrives at the Serbian monastery, to be asked ‘You like racquet ball?’ and,

Jeremy Treglown

A voracious collector

‘The only novelist now writing in English whose works are likely to stand as literary classics…who has the power, range, knowledge, and wisdom of a Tolstoy or James.’ Verdicts like this American one on John Fowles were a lot more common in the 1960s and 1970s than they have been since, and in the USA more than the UK. Fortunately, you don’t have to agree with them to be absorbed by Eileen Warburton’s well-written, thoroughly researched and even-handed biography — her first book, and evidently a labour, if not of love, then of the queasy fascination which will also be most readers’ main response. ‘The truth about any artist, however

Anne Applebaum

Poets under surveillance

Without a doubt, Moscow Memoirs is an extraordinary book, one of those literary memoirs that comes along once a decade. Emma Gerstein, in her nineties when she published it, has shed completely new light on some of the most important poets and writers of the 20th century, providing previously unknown biographical details, some of which will lead to new interpretations of their work. The book has been beautifully translated, introduced and annotated by John Crowfoot, one of the great translators of Russian to English. Having said that, I would caution readers: the poets and writers in question were Russians living in Stalin’s Soviet Union, a civilisation as remote from ours

Saturday

Eric Christiansen

A rather ferocious person

Christina became queen of Sweden because her heroic father Gustavus Adolphus had been killed in battle, winning glory in Germany but having sired no legitimate sons. She was not quite six at the time, and they were not sure whether to call her king or queen; an ambiguity of roles, not of sex, which lasted a long time. Her armies went on fighting all comers in Germany for another 16 years, until everyone else was sick of war, and unable to prevent the Swedes from pulling off one last gigantic heist: the removal of the great imperial collection of books, art and curiosities from Prague. It was the biggest art-theft

Byron Rogers

Led by donkeys

The National Army Museum of the Crimean Warby Alastair MassieSidgwick & Jackson, £25, pp. 379, ISBN 070113904 The most extraordinary single detail about the Crimean war occurs in Alastair Massie’s book. It is this: the dim lordlings who commanded on the British side had forgotten to impose censorship on private mail, just as they had forgotten other things, like supplies, equipment and medical care. The difference was that the one efficient agency was a cheap and quick postal service collecting mail by steamship. Out of the Crimea the letters poured. The result was that more was known about conditions at the front, not afterwards but at the time, than in

Philip Ziegler

The foundering ship of state

Henry Fairlie may have coined the phrase ‘The Establishment’ but it was Anthony Sampson who gave it flesh and blood. His Anatomy of Britain, first published in 1962 and revised at intervals over the years, sought to explain how Britain worked, where the power really lay, what covert networks underlay the at first impenetrable surface of society. Now the Sampsonian bear has emerged once more from its lair, sniffing the air uneasily, looking around for landmarks, rootling up the occasional corpse to see what is left upon its bones. The view is dramatically different; even what is superficially unchanged has in fact been profoundly modified. In his first Anatomy Sampson

Sebastian Smee

His cup runneth over

Nick, the central character in Alan Hollinghurst’s wonderful new novel, is a young, alert middle-class boy with precociously refined aesthetic sensibilities and a gift for endearing himself to others. ‘He liked to be charming, and hardly noticed when he drifted excitedly into insincerity.’ He has come out as gay shortly before the novel’s opening, but lacks — at least until chapter two — any actual experience. His friendship with the straight son of a junior minister in the Thatcher government — actually a longstanding erotic infatuation kept painfully under wraps — has led to a successful wooing of the friend’s entire family. This has earned him his own room in

Mary Furness

What makes us unique?

What does it mean to be human? The many possible answers to this question and their rejection form the cornucopian content of this book. Is language, for example, a defining characteristic of being human? It can’t be because other species have forms of communication which qualify as a sort of language; dolphins whistle, bees dance, ants squeak, apes can learn human sign language and there are many well-attested cases of parrots understanding what they are saying. Are humans part of the animal continuum and if, as seems probable, they are, then what is it that singles humans out as unique? Is there a particular non-animal quality that only humans have?

Saturday

John Bayley

One of the great Russians

The Priest Who was Never Baptisedby Nikolai Leskov, translated by James MuckleBramcote Press, 81 Rayneham Road, Ilkeston, Derbyshire, DE7 8RJ, £13.95, pp. 216, ISBN 1900405121 In 1936 Stalin walked out of the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk which for two years had been performing with great success in Moscow and Leningrad. He objected that it was ‘modernist’, vulgarly sensational that is to say, as well as disgustingly pornographic. In fact altogether nekulturny. It was very nearly the end of poor young Shostakovich’s career; he had been just 26 when he completed the opera. With one or two alterations it was based on Leskov’s powerful sketch of 1865 with the same

Allan Mallinson

A well-calculated risk

Sir John Keegan’s account of the origins and conduct of the war in Iraq is at once striking for its succinctness. In a comfortable but pacey afternoon and evening’s read we have the long cultural and historical background to the region’s instability, the course and legacy of the 1991 Gulf war, the diplomatic build-up to war last year, the campaign itself, and the aftermath. It is a remarkable achievement, and one that the author himself at first doubted was possible in the timeframe. But Keegan’s editor at Hutchinson, Anthony Whittome, persuaded him that, once begun, the difficulties would dissolve. This conviction, that the story is essentially straightforward, before the fighting,