Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Diana Hendry

Two very different islands

Reviewing this novel in 1946, when it was first published, Rosamond Lehmann described it as ‘a work of great originality … a blend of fantasy, satire and romantic comedy’. Persephone Books — an imprint dedicated to reprinting forgotten classics by 20th- century women writers — have re-issued it in their now characteristic and classy plain grey dust-jacket plus lush end-papers based on fabric designs. Miss Ranskill Comes Home is the 46th title in a list that includes Monica Dickens, Noel Streatfield, Katherine Mansfield and Marghanita Laski. Persephone’s website promises books that are ‘neither too literary nor too commercial’ but are ‘guaranteed to be readable, thought-provoking and impossible to forget’. All

Simon Heffer

The gentle art of murder

It often seems that more rubbish is written about the cinema than about almost any other art form. Since too many films are of questionable quality it is hardly surprising that much of what is printed about them is too. Good films, though, often fall victim to pretentious criticism by poseurs, and the greater a film is (or allegedly is) the worse this risk is, and the less original thought is applied to the received wisdom. Happily, one controversialist recently threw stones at Citizen Kane, which is almost compulsory as the Greatest Film Ever Made in tiresome lists on that subject, saying: yes, maybe it is, but what did it

Graham Stewart

Rivals at the court of King Adolf

One of the Great War’s consequences may have been the dethronement of the Romanovs, Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns but — as a new generation of scholars are attempting to show — court politics proved far more enduring. Although the costumes may have been cut from coarser cloth and the manners far cruder, the centres of power in totalitarian regimes continued to provide all the old opportunities for positional jostling that had been commonplace in the audience chambers and ante-rooms of the old dynasties. In his recent book, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, Simon Sebag Montefiore proffered a fascinating whiff of the atmosphere surrounding Stalin and his associates. Now, with

Rupert Christiansen

The best band in the land

Being of the same age and provenance as Richard Morrison, I was intrigued to note that he honours the London Symphony Orchestra of the late 1960s as the band that turned him on to classical music — it even made it seem ‘a bit groovy’, he remarks wryly. My own memory is different. Aged 14, I remember the LSO as being rather naff — after all, ‘they had a man from Hollywood as their conductor,’ as Morrison puts it, and ‘they sometimes wore polo-necked sweaters’. The Philharmonia, on the other hand, boasted the gravitas of Klemperer as well as the youthful eclat of Barenboim and Muti, while the BBC Symphony

Saturday

Benjamin Davis

A lighter shade of genius

Anyone who has ever had a duff interview will feel for James Kennaway, the screenwriter who met with Hitchcock in 1962 to discuss the possibility of his scripting the director’s next venture about a flock of birds attacking a Bodega Bay community. ‘I see this film done only one way,’ declared the cocksure scribe: ‘You should never see a bird’. Poor Kennaway, with his subtle Greek notions of drama in absentia. He should have realised that Hitchcock held affinities with the science fiction directors of the late Fifties, who made films with titles like The Blob, which, lo and behold, featured a giant jelly on the rampage. The Birds would

Philip Hensher

After the War was over . . .

The spy novel is an essential literary genre of our present imagination. Like other popular forms at different times, it seems to sum up more of our anxieties than it quite admits. The ghost story in Edwardian England was popular because it focussed a strain of passionate morbidity; the detective story is essentially a 1930s genre, entertainment for a time in search of solutions. Spy novels continue their obsessive grip on our imagination, even after the end of the Cold War, because they demonstrate, like a formal dance, some of the most haunting philosophies of indeterminacy and mutually shifting positions. They are dramas of philosophical and scientific ideas; dramatisations of

Saturday

John McEwen

Pets’ corner in the studio

This pleasant book, easy on the eye and (as importantly with art books) the thigh, has a pretty picture containing a dog or cat on virtually every page, so the fact that its extended essay of a text is disappointing hardly matters. To give Professor Rubin his due he tries to descend from his academic rostrum and treat the subject as a pet-lover as much as an art historian. That the book is dedicated to a couple of cats, Coco and Girlfriend, carries coochy-coo too far; but it is refreshing these deconstructive days to hear he ‘adores Impressionist paintings and quotidian quadrupeds’ — even if one could do without the

Juliet Townsend

Action man and teller of tales

The other day I came on an old exercise book dating from the early 1940s in which my brother, then aged nine, had embarked on one of his many unfinished novels. The missionary looked out of the window of his little hut deep in the African jungle. ‘The savidges are attacking, Mary,’ he cried. ‘Quick, pass me the Martini Henry rifle and then the elephant gun. I will show them what happens when they attack the servant of the true God!’ Ever the muscular Christian, he then pumps the advancing hordes full of lead, but he and his wife are eventually slaughtered and their baby son taken to be raised

Raymond Carr

Only one factor among many

This is a fascinating book on a fascinating subject, written by a master of his craft as a military historian. Sir John Keegan’s declared purpose is to answer a simple question: ‘How useful is intelligence in war?’ The answer he gives is that, however useful intelligence is in disclosing the enemy’s intentions, strengths and weaknesses, wars are won not by knowledge but by brute force in battle. The modern fad to give primacy to knowledge he rejects as misleading. Addicts of spy fiction will be disappointed. Spies rarely supply relevant information in time for it to be of use. This book is not cloak and dagger stuff but a superbly

Alberto Manguel

The precious core of civilisation

In 1989, two years before the Gulf war, I travelled to Baghdad to write an article on the Hanging Gardens of Babylon which the Iraqi Ministry of Culture then planned to have rebuilt. The project never materialised, but instead I was able to explore Baghdad and its intricate labyrinth. One experience was memorable above all: the discovery, in the National Museum, of two small clay tablets which had recently been unearthed in Syria, and dated back to the fourth millennium BC. Each tablet was the size of the palm of my hand and bore a few simple marks: a small indentation near the top, as if a finger had been

Peter Mckay

Animal funny farm

Working in the Washington DC of 1982, I noticed that friends and colleagues cut Gary Larson’s drawings from the Washington Post and stuck them on their fridges or office walls. On 28 October of that year, they were perplexed. Larson’s drawing featured a cow (standing human-style on its hind legs) behind odd-looking objects, bones of some kind, resting on a trestle table. The caption said, ‘Cow tools’. What did it mean? Next day, there were stories on the wire services saying Larson fans nationwide were in crisis. No one got the joke in ‘Cow tools’. There were discussions on university campuses and on TV and radio shows. A reader in

Fiona Maddocks

How to shut up and listen

Stuck for the bumper Christmas gift? Try Robin Holloway’s collected essays of music criticism. It is impressively big and will take about five years to read if you listen to the music discussed at the same time. Since that includes most of Wagner and Strauss and plenty of Brahms, Bruckner and Mahler, you will have little time left over to indulge in snooker or bridge. No thanks, you smirk. A brick would do better as a door-stop. That was certainly the attitude of at least two major publishing houses, including Faber, when they turned the manuscript down. Fools. They should have known better. This outstanding book, gathered to mark Holloway’s

Jane Gardam

Bloody-minded and unbowed

The head of history at a well-known English girls’ school was wont to say that she had learned nothing at Cambridge and all her history had been set in place at the age of ten by The Children’s Encyclopaedia. Rebecca Fraser will know exactly what she meant. Massively informed, she is as unstuffy as the rest of the Fraser historians. On page one of her introduction she mentions ‘the immortal words of 1066 and All That’. She has written this splendid history of Britain — 800-odd pages from the arrival of the Romans to Queen Elizabeth II’s Golden Jubilee — because she could find nothing like it for her own

Andrew Lambirth

Doing the state some service

At university I had a tutor who would announce once a year, when the subject duly came round, ‘I’m too emotionally involved with Simone Martini. I can’t lecture on him. I’m now going to the Buttery. Any or all of you are welcome to join me there.’ And he would depart, trailing clouds of glory for the more romantically minded, but furthering my education in Sienese painting not a jot. I could have done with this book then. For Simone Martini is one of the key figures discussed in this excellent new study, an early Sienese master along with the Lorenzetti brothers, Pietro and Ambrogio. The book’s subtitle is ‘The

A.N. Wilson

The elusive face of God

The biographical note on the jacket of this magisterial book tells us that Professor Geza Vermes was born in Hungary in 1924 and that from 1957 to 1991 he taught at the universities of Newcastle and Oxford. It also tells us that ‘his pioneering work on the Dead Sea Scrolls and the historical figure of Jesus led to his appointment as the first Professor of Jewish Studies at Oxford’. His moving autobiography Providential Accidents, which is not mentioned in this short blurb, tells us how he was caught up at the most painful imaginable level in the central drama of 20th-century history in Europe, namely in the culmination of centuries

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

A ruthless ally

One of the paradoxes of our age is that the hereditary principle is in eclipse everywhere except the first great republican democracy. With all our faults, we love our house of peers no more, and there are no longer any political dynasties in England (unless you count Benn) or elsewhere in Europe. But the last American presidential election was contested between the son of a former president and the son of a former senator; while the most famous American president of what one of his vice- presidents called the century of the common man was a rich patrician who grew up as far as could be imagined from the proverbial

Saturday

Anne Chisholm

Granny takes several trips

Why, oh why, would a pleasant-looking, intelligent woman of 66, a retired English teacher with a grown-up son living in California, place an ad in the New York Review of Books announcing her age and inviting men to approach her for sex and then publish an account of the gruesome encounters that followed? A profound desire to be noticed as a writer seems a more likely answer than a need for erotic adventure; this is a book which takes the literature of exhibitionism to new heights. Ostensibly, it was an Eric Rohmer film in which a woman of fortysomething advertises for a lover on behalf of a friend that gave

Justin Marozzi

Beholding sundry places

Here’s a Christmas present for anyone with a serious interest in travel. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an armchair aficionado or grizzled explorer. There’s something for everyone, as they say. Eric Newby, the octogenarian doyen of the travel-writing genre, has put together a wonderful literary journey through the centuries and across the seven continents. Where to begin? How about Herodotus, Father of History, affable Greek aristocrat and probably the world’s first travel writer to boot? Here we find him musing on the unfathomable geography of Europe, ending his erudite aside with the splendidly modern conclusion, ‘But that is quite enough on this subject.’ In a very entertaining introductory section, ‘Notes

Harry Mount

Sexing up American history

This lovely little bluffers’ guide to the founders of the American Republic came out of a chat Gore Vidal had in 1961 with his old friend, John F. Kennedy. There they were, Jack, Bobby and Gore, lounging around the Kennedy holiday compound in Hyannis Port after a vigorous game of backgammon — Gore won. Jack — ‘dear Jack’ — and Gore fell into conversation, although it was less of a conversation than a question-and-answer session. Need you ask who was doing the questioning and who was giving the answers? The President of the United States was the pupil, Vidal his master. What the pupil wanted to know is why he

Stephen Abell

Making it a just so story

This new collection is, surprisingly for a little black book, decidedly unsexy. In fact, A. S. Byatt — unsurprisingly, perhaps, for those readers who persisted through the Victorian mumblings and fumblings of Possession — does bad, awkward sex rather well. Here is a gynaecologist and an art student getting together (note especially the prophylactic double negative of the last sentence): She put cold fingers on his lips, and then on his sex, which stirred. He touched her, with a gynaecologist’s fingers, gently and found the scars of the ovarectomy, a ring pierced into her navel, little breasts with rings in the left nipple … She began, not inexpertly, to caress