Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Victor Sebestyen

The man who plans to run and run

Putin’s Progressby Peter TruscottSimon & Schuster, £17.99, pp. 370, ISBN 0743240057 Vladimir Putin will be re-elected President of Russia on Sunday with a thumping majority. This is the safest prediction it is possible to make in the New World Order where the word democracy can have many different definitions. In Russia the word means whatever President Putin chooses it to mean, as these two admirable books point out. Putin has spent his first four years in power destroying his opponents, either in the media, which has been cowed into Soviet-era submission, or in the political process itself. The parliamentary elections three months ago were won by the President’s party in

Ray Monk

A Light Blue victory

‘SCIENCE’S GREATEST DISCOVERY.’ So ran the front-page headline of the Reynolds’ Illustrated News on 1 May, 1932, the article underneath reporting that: ‘A dream of scientists has been realised. The atom has been split, and the limitless energy thus released may transform civilisation.’ The Sunday Express struck a more sombre note: ‘The Atom Split. But World Still Safe.’ For a few days after this announcement, the two scientists responsible for the breakthrough, John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton, were besieged by journalists and photographers and became rather reluctant celebrities. They had another brief spell of fame nearly 20 years later when, somewhat belatedly, they were awarded the Nobel Prize for their

Jane Gardam

Autumnal northern lights

Where are the songs of Spring? Well, certainly not in these short stories about people in crabbed old age or looking hard at death. Only in the last one, ‘The Silence’, where an ancient composer who believes that ‘the logic of music is eventually silence’, is any longing expressed to see ‘the cranes fly south again’ towards the wine-growing countries that nourished Beethoven, not these where ‘soured milk rules the roost’. Most of the collection is set in soured milk countries: pale, Nordic places. Yet in the title Barnes uses the symbol of a lemon. But the lemon, he says, has nothing to do with sunshine. It is the Chinese

Robert Stewart

Soldiering on in Spain

‘For his part, she filled a significant void in his human intercourse (he had been happy when he found the intimacy of their letters was at once transferred to the vocal).’ Further down the page: ‘He had had Emma Lucie promise to keep watch on her … and to take whatever measures were necessary, in his name, should there be the slightest sign of indigency.’ ‘He’ is cavalryman Matthew Hervey, now starring in his sixth Allan Mallinson novel, and he ought to speak better. He is given, after all, to quoting from Shakespeare and Scriptures. Hervey, as the hero of adventure romances is supposed to be, is virtuous, brave, sensitive

Toby Young Toby Young

Dishing only some of the dirt

This book, which presents itself as a no-holds-barred account of Joe Eszterhas’s reign as the toughest and most highly-paid screenwriter in Hollywood, is doubly misleading. To begin with, it’s heavily censored; and, secondly, he isn’t the fierce defender of his work that he purports to be, at least not judging from the way he’s allowed the lawyers to decimate this book. Eszterhas revels in his image as a Hollywood bad boy. When a lowly grip on the set of Betrayed, his 1988 film starring Debra Winger and Tom Berenger, suggests how the film’s ending might be improved, the warrior-screenwriter punches him in the stomach. The director of another of his

Harry Mount

From Wickquasgeck to Broadway

I have a fantasy of returning to ancient London and finding the way to my Camden home, just using the Thames and various hills and hollows for navigation. What fun it would be to track down the hunting grounds of Wardour Street ringing to the cry of ‘Soho!’, the exclamation used by hare coursers that lent its name to the area. How moving to dip your feet in the river Fleet, now running under Fleet Street, or swim in the Westbourne along West- bourne Grove. You get the same sort of kick out of Russell Shorto’s heavy-going but authoritative account of the Dutch discovery of Manhattan (from the Indian word,

Saturday

Graham Stewart

The lure of the far horizon

In 1795, John Evans, the son of a Methodist preacher, set out from St Louis across the unchartered plains of North America in search of a lost tribe of ‘Welsh Indians.’ He had heard reports of a pale-skinned people speaking a language that sounded like Welsh inhabiting the area that is now North Dakota. Rumour had it that they were the descendants of Madoc, a 12th- century Welsh prince and his retinue who had supposedly made it to America 300 years before Columbus stood before the mast. After 1,800 miles, Evans discovered the tribe. He was welcomed into their huts and swapped pleasantries with their two chiefs, Big White and

Raymond Carr

Spain through true blue eyes

Richard Ford is now a forgotten figure and we must be grateful to Ian Robertson for bringing him to life in this scholarly biography. His Handbook for Travellers in Spain was published in 1845 by John Murray as one of his guides for the middle-class tourists who had replaced the aristocrats of the Grand Tour. It must count as the most learned, long and lively guidebook ever published: a monster of 1,064 pages. But his interests extended beyond his hispano- phile concerns and expertise on Spanish painting, making him a much respected figure in London literary and artistic circles in the early years of Queen Victoria. Ford early made picture-buying

John McEwen

No tendency to corrupt here

Two things about this book — the first on the artist for over a century — are immediately off-putting: intermittent mustard-coloured pages, which make it look like a magazine, and the insistence of Robyn Asleson, a fledgling American historian, that Albert Moore’s paintings transcend words. Nonetheless she manages to hold the reader’s attention, despite the additional disadvantage that her subject had an uneventful life. Albert Moore (1841-93) was an important figure in the Victorian neo-classical revival, which in painting meant endless pictures of nude or draped beauties in a style derived from ancient Greece and Rome — none of it looking in the least classical, usually because the subject matter

Philip French

When Hollywood trembled

In its brief, action-filled history of 109 years the cinema has recapitulated the history of art from cave painting to Picasso, and conveniently for historians each decade has had a distinctive character. After the primitive but increasingly sophisticated fumblings of the first decade of the 20th century, the teen years saw the dominance of Chaplin and Griffith (respectively the great comedian who became the most famous man of all time, and the major pioneer of the popular feature film), and the creation of what were to be the great Hollywood studios. The Golden Age of the silent cinema came in the Twenties when Germany for a while challenged Hollywood and

Mark Archer

Patent medicine for mankind

Judging from his publications, since semi-retiring from his hedge fund empire George Soros has sorted out the world’s problems at the rate of about one a year: George Soros on Globalisation, Soros on Global Capitalism, Soros on Democracy, Soros on the Soviet System. Does the man have hobbies? Can we expect Soros on Pigeon-fancying, or Soros on Creating Small Formal Gardens? Hardly. Soros is on a mission. He helped topple John Major’s government when his hedge fund activity sent Sterling crashing out of the ERM. Now he is after bigger game. ‘I have made it my primary objective to persuade the American public to reject President Bush in the forthcoming

Salley Vickers

The pardoner’s tale

Books about wartime experiences are thick enough on the ground to make one wonder if it is really worth the trauma of reading yet another, but Adriaan Van Dis’s book, translated, a little clumsily, from the Dutch, offers a fresh angle. Set in Holland, it tells in retrospect the story of an illegitimate boy, born to a Dutch mother whose first husband was executed by the Japanese, while she is interned with her three half-Indonesian daughters. The fractured family return to Holland, acquiring on the way a new father, who — bizarrely but convincingly — shares the same name as the dead one, and who, like the mother, is Dutch

Allan Mallinson

Full, frank and fraternal

The Army Records Society was founded 20 years ago in order to publish original documents describing the operations and development of the British army. Each year, in conjunction with Sutton Publishing, the society produces a meticulously edited volume printed on high-quality paper. Occasionally the subject matter, though important, is arcane and a shade dry: volume VIII, for instance, The British Army and Signals Intelligence in the Great War, still brings a knowing sigh from members. Usually, however, they are fascinating — in more recent years Lord Roberts and the War in South Africa, Rawlinson in India, and Amherst and the Conquest of Canada. And from time to time they are

Clemency Burtonhill

Fame was the spur

Larry Wyler is a man in conflict. He knows what makes him happy — the St Matthew Passion, sex, a beef sirloin ‘slightly charred on the outside and reddish pink in the middle, nicely peppered, with mustard aioli’. But he has all these things in his little Minnesotan life: he met his wife singing Bach; they have great sex; they eat good steak. It is not enough. Aspiring writer Larry wants more. He wants New York. His dream, in fact, is ‘to work at the New Yorker and go to lunch at the Algonquin with Mr Shawn’. Well Larry gets his ‘dream’, or something like it, and Love Me is

Jane Rye

From education to catastrophe

‘I do feel the strongest urge to talk,’ confides the narrator when a chance meeting with the beautiful Olivia after more than 30 years brings back disturbing memories of what she tells us is ‘a terrible story’. The encounter takes place in Bordeaux where Kate, American, is sightseeing while her English husband attends a conference, and for reasons which we shall eventually learn it threatens to shatter her orderly life. What she wants is an impartial ‘stranger on a train’ to tell her story to, and we are it — sitting, in Kate’s imagination, in a warm carriage crossing the Russian steppes, waiting for the approach of the samovar and

Alan Wall

Glories of the silver screen

The anchoring memories of this novel go back to the second world war. That is where crucial people in the plot received their opportunities and their wounds. Less easy to fathom, for this reviewer anyway, was why most of the book seems to take place in the 1970s. Nothing much was done with this egregious decade: it was a given fact, an inexplicable datum of the plotting. I later discovered that the novel was begun at that time, which explains the matter externally, if not as it were from the inside out. Storey’s own journey was famously from Wakefield to London, the rugby-playing, Slade-attending writer, composing books on the train

Ian Thomson

God’s expeditionary force

In the 16th century Montaigne voiced the fear that missionary endeavour — the white man’s ‘contagion’ — would hasten the ruin of the New World. Though Jesuits played their part in the spoliation of the Americas, only the most romantic could claim that Indian tribes there lived in a state of prelapsarian grace, so artless, happy and free. Brian Moore, in his marvellous novel Black Robe, portrayed 1640s Canada as a Huron backwater, where French Jesuits were in danger of being scalped and fur-trappers disembowelled. As Jonathan Wright makes clear in this informative history of the Society of Jesus, the earliest Jesuits were regarded as not quite regular clergy. Refusing

Hilary Spurling

An enchanted forest of family trees

Michael Holroyd describes the first copy of his last book of memoirs plopping through the letterbox, the kind of moment that might have called for champagne anywhere but in the Holroyd household, which celebrated the book’s arrival with macabre revulsion: ‘I seemed to see, clambering through its pages, a troupe of ungainly, poignant, gesticulating clowns (my own relations) whose griefs and disappointments, as they tumbled over one another, rang out in sidesplitting farce.’ Holroyd shuddered and shut the book, which was Basil Street Blues, shortly afterwards hailed in three continents as an autobiographical masterpiece. With Mosaic he is back again wandering through the same thickets in pursuit of more or

Rachel Johnson

You have been warned, Mr Blair

Rachel Johnson talks to Vernon Coleman, the one-man publishing sensation who has now turned his sights on the ‘lying little warmonger’ in Downing Street If you’re a Telegraph reader — as I do hope you are — you too will have seen those ads placed by a Dr Vernon Coleman, MB. Not the ones that ask ‘Does Your Memory Fail You?’ above the ink drawing of the man in a suit and specs, but the ones that ask, even more worryingly, ‘Looking for a Present?’ Turns out, Dr Coleman has got the perfect present for just about everybody. For a golf lover, we have The Man Who Inherited a Golf

Saturday

John Jolliffe

‘The only man in Paris’

Eugenia de Montijo was born in a tent, during an earthquake, in Granada in 1826. Her father, a Liberal minor grandee, had joined the French army, been wounded at Trafalgar, and welcomed the replacement of the Bourbons by the mediocre Joseph Bonaparte in 1808. Threatened by the Carlist wars, in 1833 he sent his wife and two daughters to Paris, where Eugénie, as she became, grew up in the world of Stendhal and Mérimée (both of whom became close family friends), Balzac and Chopin. Her ambitious mother sent her to learn English at a school in Bristol, which she disliked so much that she and another girl tried to stow