Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Evelyn Fitzherbert

A short-lived royal adventure

Jason Tomes’ excellent book charts the rise and fall of Albania’s only king. Of perhaps greater interest is the story it tells of this Ottoman outpost’s late essay into statehood. Overrun by seven foreign armies during the first world war, Albania was always under threat of being carved up among it neighbours. Ahmed Zogu can be credited with successfully manipulating Italian-Serbian rivalry, and earning Albania 20 years’ independence, of a sort. Zogu began his career as a hereditary chieftain with no more than a few thousand clansmen to his name. His rise to power was inevitably opportunistic and as such involved a bewildering succession of alliances both with local tribes

James Buchan

Different heavens, same hells

Now in his late eighties, Bernard Lewis is one of the last representatives of a once venerable scholarly type, the Orientalist. Born and brought up in a Jewish family in London, Lewis effortlessly mastered Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish and Persian, wrote his doctoral thesis on the mediaeval Muslim sect known as the Assassins and taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London before being lured over to Princeton as Professor of Near Eastern Studies in 1974. In 1978, he was one of the chief targets of Edward Said’s truculent essay Orientalism. Said proclaimed that Western scholars of Islam such as Lewis were not selfless searchers after truth but

Interconnect

When Auntie was young and carefree

Stephen Potter, author, radio writer and producer (1900-69, floruit 1940s and 1950s), is an instantly recognisable name, as his son Julian ruefully remarks, ‘to those over 70’. He belonged to the particularly English genus of the highly professional amateur. Cantankerous J. B. Priestley — whom Potter revered and loved working with — had Potter’s number. ‘Mary asks when I’m coming back [after illness] and I say Tuesday. J. B. says, “Well, that’s the start of the week really. And then why not slog straight through to the finish, till Thursday?”’ That comes from Potter’s diaries, which his son has been burrowing into, photocopies sent from Texas. The entry begins revealingly.

John Martin-Robinson

The last of a noble line

The new, 107th edition of Burke’s Peerage comes in three massive volumes. It is likely to be the last in printed book format. The previous, 106th edition (1999) was in two volumes, and all the Burke’s Peerages before that were single volumes back to No. 1 in 1826. There seems to be a touch of Parkinson’s Law in this; the increasing scale and grandeur of the book counter- balancing the decline in the power and prestige of the peerage. The publishers’ preface has an elegiac tone. ‘This 107th is likely to be the Final Edition in the form as we have known it.’ Burke’s genealogical future will lie in digitalised

Saturday

Robert Salisbury

The changing of the old guard

Sir Peregrine is a romantic. He has drawn his sword from its scabbard in defence of aristocracy in a self-conscious act of courage which defies the pressures of self-censorship. We should admire his intention and welcome an essay whose style is so reminiscent of the man with its echoes of the dégagé elegance of corduroy suits, casually knotted scarves and agreeable luncheons in the Beefsteak Club. Every successful polity is run by an élite. They lay down the rules, written and, even more important, unwritten. Their manners become the aspiration of the majority and in consequence civility and social coherence trickle down the social scale. Public service then becomes the

Jonathan Sumption

Sworn enemy of the Gradgrinds

To become a famous philosopher, as the French have discovered, you need an all-embracing theory. It does not have to be right, or even particularly well thought out, provided that it is interesting and admits of no exceptions. Michael Oakeshott, who died in 1990, was an academic political philosopher who passed much of his life repudiating all-embracing theories. As a result his fame was confined to a small number of admirers, and to those who attended his lectures at the London School of Economics, where he was for many years Professor of Political Science. If Oakeshott is coming back into fashion now, it is because he rejected two fundamental nostrums

Theo Richmond

Trading on a famous name

Was Hitler’s favourite actress a Russian spy? asks the publisher’s ‘shout line’ on the book-jacket, positioned to look like the author’s subtitle, suggesting that we are to be plunged into the world of a latterday Mata Hari. Readers hoping to have the curtain lifted on boudoir vamping, messages in invisible ink, or le Carré intrigue will be disappointed. Hitler, the film buff, admired some of Olga Chekhova’s German-made movies, but nowhere does Antony Beevor claim that she was his favourite actress. The cover photograph, showing dictator and actress seated side by side, could also suggest a closer relationship than in fact existed. As Beevor makes plain, she met him only

Peter Porter

Truly heroic couplets

Amid the enmities of contemporary letters, it’s salutary to recognise that for most of us allegiances go farther back, and are just as partisan. Neill Powell’s excellent evaluation of Crabbe delights me not just because Crabbe has always been one of my favourite poets but because this study of a writer usually held to be unrepresentative of his time calls into question received literary history. Powell demonstrates that Crabbe’s best poetry, couched almost invariably in heroic couplets, is as tinged with Romanticism as Wordsworth’s or Coleridge’s. Where, to my mind, it is superior is in its avoidance of the limp diction and wayward syntax of almost all Romantics, apart from

Jonathan Bate

The cloak-and-dagger poet

It is almost impossible to write a good biography of Shakespeare. His plays contain at once too much and too little for the biographer; his extraordinary impersonality means that he hardly ever reveals his hand. Every voice has its counter-voice; no single character speaks on behalf of the author. Christopher Marlowe, by contrast, is a biographer’s dream. Whereas Shakespeare vanished into each of his characters, Marlowe stamped his trademark onto his singular anti-heroes: Tamburlaine the Great rising from Scythian shepherd to conqueror of the world, Dr Faustus making his contract with Mephistopheles, King Edward II putting his desires above his crown (with Piers Gaveston in the role of Mrs Simpson).

Sebastian Smee

The Man of Feeling

Can a writer be guilty of an excess of sympathy for his characters? Sympathy, we are forever being reminded (Tolstoy and Chekhov being the great exemplars), is the hallmark of great fiction. But unless it is combined with a touch of icy objectivity, it can come to cloy, honeying the sensibility rather than truly taxing it. William Trevor, in all other ways a marvellous writer, rains sympathy down on his characters until they are drenched in the stuff. More than half the stories in this new collection are excellent. But, cumulatively, they suffer from an excess of sentiment which leaves you yearning for a burst of nastiness or an inexplicable

Bevis Hillier

Green fairy liquid

A gushy woman told Whistler that she thought he was the greatest artist since Velazquez. ‘Why drag in Velazquez?’ Whistler drawled. One of the bonuses of any book on absinthe is that it drags in — corrals — more or less all the great French artists and writers from the 1860s to the early 1900s, and a few English ones too, such as Beardsley and Wilde. But it also brings in less celebrated figures, like Charles Cros, who died from his 20-glasses-a-day absinthe habit in 1888. The son of a French doctor of law and philosophy, Cros was a poet. Adams devotes an appendix to Cros’ poem ‘Lendemain’, about the

Michael Carlson

A second, darker diagnosis

In 1976 Godfrey Hodgson published In Our Time, a portrait of America in the years from ‘World War II to Watergate’. To this American, newly arrived in Britain, it seemed remarkable that the best social history of my country during my then brief lifetime should have been written by an Englishman. His sharp eye captured both a society in turmoil and one imbued with immense postwar promise. He combined critical distance with an innate, almost American optimism. Nearly three decades later this sequel, as its title implies, is far less optimistic. Hodgson would certainly agree with Richard Nixon’s campaign manager and Attorney-General, John Mitchell, who said, on his way to

Colin Wilson

The persistence of magic

W.B. Yeats became a member of the magical Order of the Golden Dawn on 7 March 1890. According to its founder, W. W. Wescott, the Order was based on certain magical manuscripts written in code, and discovered on a book barrow in the Farringdon Road. Subsequent research proved this to be an invention, so everyone concluded that the Golden Dawn was a fraud. When I was doing a night class on Yeats in Leicester in 1948, I remember our professor, Philip Collins, explaining that we simply had to accept that the great poet was also a credulous idiot, the only extenuating circumstance being that he wanted to believe such rubbish

Philip Hensher

Christopher and his kind

It’s not often that one can recommend a biography of a writer as long as this, particularly since Isherwood was not, in the end, a writer of the first rank. But in this case there is no doubt: this is a book which simply must be read, a triumph which produces from years of dense research a marvellous, immense narrative. Its ultimately stupendous effect is down to the fact that Isherwood, whatever his failings and limitations, was simply there when it counted; old enough to understand the Great War, there at the Opernplatz when the Nazis burnt Heinrich Heine’s work, and there in San Francisco for the summer of love

Saturday

Richard West

James Joyce and the genesis of Ulysses

James Joyce scholars and the Irish tourist industry are both gearing up for 16 June, the centenary of the day on which Leopold Bloom, the hero of Ulysses, set out on his odyssey through the bars and brothels of Dublin. We can expect a deluge of new books and monographs to explain or ‘deconstruct’ Joyce’s abstruse version of the Homeric legend, told in a stream of consciousness babble of ancient and modern languages — which, as he rightly foresaw, would ‘keep the professors busy for centuries’. The modern celebration of ‘Bloomsday’ started in the late 1940s with convivial Dublin literary men who wanted to honour a book still virtually prohibited

Henry Hobhouse

A beauty of many names and places

Do not be put off by the silly sub-title: this is an admirable book on several levels. Botanical origins; plant-hunting; the arrival of plants in England; hybridisation, and the American connections. There is much history, including that of great gardens like Exbury. All is here, plus some gorgeous illustrations, including one of Marion Dorn, designer of rhododendron-inspired fabrics, doing her bit to mitigate the rigours of postwar Crippsean austerity in 1947. Rhododendrons (now including azaleas) are calcifuge plants, happy in lime-free soil; hence keen cultivation in the Surrey Alps, in sour patches elsewhere and in peat and sand in the Celtic fringe. In nature, rhododendrons range from huge trees or

John De-Falbe

Rather cold Turkey

In 1919 my grandfather was in Kars, near what is now Turkey’s north-eastern frontier, as part of a British occupation force connected with what might be regarded as the first oil war. Kars had recently been abandoned by the Russians after nearly a century (Pushkin stayed there) and was soon to be handed over to the Turks. Twenty years ago I happened to visit this dilapidated town myself; the colonial buildings still endowed it with pathetic grandeur. The Russians and Armenians who once lived here hover like shadows behind the modern Turks of Snow, and the prejudices and politics that bedevil the characters of this remarkable novel echo the forces

Interconnect

Reasonable, readable rambles

The subtitle, ‘On Settling’, is apt; the book is about the author’s settling in (you could nearly say ‘into’) what he calls ‘the claylands’, near Malmesbury in Gloucester-shire, and about the ‘settled’ nature of that place, the threats it has survived, the way it has adapted and, by extension, the manner in which England and ‘Englishness’ have evolved. Concerning ‘Englishness’: today happens to be St George’s Day in brilliant sunshine. Earlier this morning there was a radio phone-in and people complaining that St George wasn’t even English, his flag has been hijacked by football hooligans, and so on. (Phone-ins are un-settling.) ‘English’ is a difficult word for someone with my

Kate Hoey

The sunset glory of the amateurs

3:59:4: The Quest to Break the Four-Minute Mileby John BryantHutchinson, £14.99, pp. 310, ISBN 0091800331 Fifty years ago, on 6 May 1954, it was a blustery evening in Oxford. On the Iffley Road cinder track an event took place which has since become synonymous with everything that was good about sport. To run a mile in under four minutes had been seen by many as a feat beyond the limits of human endeavour. But Roger Bannister did so that night in front of a crowd of 1,200. His photograph appeared on the front page of newspapers all over the world and he became a British hero for the rest of

Elisa Segrave

Scared of Christmas presents

In this fascinating book about her two autistic sons Charlotte Moore describes what would be a nightmare life for most of us. I’d like to be able to have a bath without anybody else joining me in it … to open my handbag without finding a bitten-off lipstick or a capless, leaking pen … to leave a pot boiling on the stove while I answer the door, without finding that an ingredient I hadn’t bargained for has been added in my absence … to be able to watch television; usually I can’t, because the boys go to bed late. I’d love to be . . . secure in the knowledge