Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Anne Chisholm

The butler’s done it now

In all the uproar of indignation surrounding the publication of this book, Paul Burrell’s riveting, hilarious and ultimately rather touching account of his time as a royal servant in general and butler to Diana, Princess of Wales, in particular, one curious fact has been obscured. He was, and appears to remain, so far, the most tremendous monarchist. Just as his late employer convinced herself that she could, if only she was permitted, be a shining force for good in the royal family and indeed the whole world, so Burrell believes that by breaking all the rules of loyalty and confidentiality he is actually doing his victims a service. Both of

Raymond Carr

Battling for Britain Prussian style

During my first term at Oxford in 1938, when walking down the south side of the Christ Church quad, I passed a large man in a bowler hat and a smart London suit. The only persons in the college who wore bowlers were the porters and most dons followed David Cecil’s advice to dress in Oxford as if staying in a modest country house. The large man was clearly a man of importance but he seemed out of place. I was no wiser when told that he was Professor Lindemann, the owner of a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce and a private bathroom in his college rooms, both unheard of luxuries for a

Montagu Curzon

Backing into the limelight

The traditional boffin, as is well known, wore round specs and a white coat, tended to be rather bald, and was soft of speech and mild of manner whilst devising the destruction of thousands. Hammed up, he became the figure of Q, indispensable component of James Bond films; older black and whites show the genuine article. Alas, he is gone, his devices scrapped or obsolete, along with the concept of the Britain that he served. Francis Spufford has, and gives, a lot of fun arguing that a neo-boffin has appeared to take his place, following the painful demise of the manufacturing economy and the rise of what he tactfully calls

Philip Hensher

It’s the same the whole world over

One has to ask the question: is this, intrinsically, an interesting subject? Personally, I would say not. Homosexual-ity, fairly clearly, is a genetic or innate human variation, comparable to left-handedness and probably occurring, like left-handedness, in about 5-10 per cent of humanity. That is, rationally speaking, about the limit of its intellectual interest: and who on earth, even left-handed people, would read a history of left-handedness? Of course, for various other reasons, homosexuality does acquire a sort of social history, because it was rarely allowed to rest as simply a biological variation, but was turned into a sin, a disease or a crime by society at large. Now that nobody

Saturday

George Osborne

A soldier breaks ranks

Here’s a good rule of thumb: never read a book by a politician running for office. Whether it is George W. Bush’s folksy evangelism in A Charge to Keep or the then Opposition Leader Tony Blair’s toe-curdlingly awful New Britain: My Vision of a Young Country, they are all the same. Safe, saccharine, ghost-written by some aide, full of ‘let me tell you about the wonderful lady I met helping inner city kids’, they are little more than political manifestos with a dust jacket. However, every rule has its exception. General Wesley Clark’s Winning Modern Wars is just such an exception. Perhaps that is because Clark says he wrote the

Andrew Gimson

Getting both socks on

Children, like dogs, need to be trained. After this promising start, Cassandra Jardine sets out to offer parents some practical advice on how to teach children ‘good habits from an early age’. Heaven knows such advice is needed, not least because, as Jardine remarks, ‘Many is the time when the children of delightful parents have left me speechless with irritation as they behave boorishly around our house.’ I had hoped, after reading her opening remarks, that Jardine was going to come down like a ton of bricks on modern parents and belabour us for spoiling our children rotten. She has it in her, I believe, to produce a reactionary masterpiece,

Tom Stacey

Shooting lions and lines

It’s not fair to blame a book for its subject — a book by a decent fellow who delights in Africa in the wild, a book of charm and perception, thoughtfully put together on fine paper with pictures in sepia which make you see and smell the African bundu where the author followed loyally in Hemingway’s footsteps or vehicle tracks or light aircraft hops. Moreover Christopher Ondaatje deserves honour for admitting that on safari even he would have ‘felt uncomfortable’ with one ‘who always needed to be the centre of attention’, and for quoting the fourth Mrs (Mary Welsh) Heming- way’s complaint about her husband’s ‘unseemly egotism’ in sitting up

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Rocks and guts and bullocks

Ted Hughes was the first living poet I loved. The same is probably true for countless kids who went to school in the 1960s and 70s. The general rule that classroom study engenders a lifelong dislike of poetry must make an exception of Hughes. Only a teacher of chart-topping ineptitude could prevent a child from enjoying those magical early portraits of animals. I still remember the sensational shudder that ran through me at the opening of ‘The Jaguar’: ‘The apes yawn and adore their fleas in the sun.’ It was ‘adore’ that got me. Pluck or pick or squash or sift, yes, I was ready for those, but ‘adore’. It

Byron Rogers

From the sublime to the ridiculous

Hah, that’s had you fumbling with your bi-focals, but no, there is no printing error. It is £375. The Gregynog Press, which in 1923 started its eventful history with a volume of poems by George Herbert, has now 80 years later published a selection chosen by his kinsman the Earl of Powis, with engravings by Sarah van Nierkerk. This appears on the eve of the UK Fine Press Book Fair in the Oxford Brookes University on 1 November and it would require a battalion of the British Army to prise its purple quarter leather and gold lettering from hands which have never held anything like this before. My hands. And

Jonathan Mirsky

More honest than most

It is a mark of the excellence of this memoir by the highest-ranking woman in American history, ex-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, that it could not have been written by a man. Imagine Douglas Hurd saying that the happiest years of his life were with a spouse who dumped him for a younger woman and that if he could have kept his wife he would have given up a public career. In his recent memoir, in fact, Mr Hurd skates past his divorce, while the serialisation of her book and recent interviews with Ms Albright have mentioned barely anything else. Or imagine a male foreign minister saying, after days and

Adam Zamoyski

Solving the Polish conundrum

The Warsaw uprising of August 1944 was one of the most tragic episodes of the second world war, resulting in the destruction of the city and some 200,000 of its inhabitants. It is also one of the least well known. The fact that the Red Army had stood by while the city was pounded to rubble by the Germans meant that the subject was a touchy one in postwar communist Poland. And it was no less embarrassing to Poland’s wartime allies in the West, who had also failed to help. It was avoided by historians, as it aroused unease in those who liked to see the war as a straight-

Saturday

Lucy Moore

From chrysalis to butterfly

John Fowles’s diaries — or ‘disjoints’, as he calls them — are evidence of his own theory that while some writers have a genius for a specific genre, others ‘have merely a universal mind’. ‘I’m a mind-writer … I feel master of none, yet at home in all,’ he wrote in 1954, about halfway through this first volume which runs from his student days in 1949 until 1965. And why not present all one’s work — if one is a mind-writer (much more occupied with ideas than with words) — as it comes out; in years, or periods of time; short stories, fragments of plays, poems, essays, notes, criticisms, journals;

Jonathan Sumption

Politically almost too correct

Douglas Hurd’s political career ended only eight years ago, but it already seems to belong to another world. When he entered the House of Commons in 1974, at the age of 44, after a career in the diplomatic service, politics was still available as a second career. It had not yet been wholly professionalised. Overpowering ambition was not necessarily a qualification for the job. There was still a handful of fine political orators in the House, but Hurd felt no pressing need to add to their number. He was thoughtful without being original. He founded no movements. He joined no factions. He broke no moulds. Douglas Hurd built a distinguished

John Martin-Robinson

The stateliest and the starriest

This elegant synthesis (you can tell immediately that Simon Jenkins is an Oxford man and not a product of the other place) is intended to complement the author’s successful Thousand Best Churches. It could be argued that England’s houses are much better known than its churches and that this sister volume is hardly essential. ‘Not another book on country houses!’ Such an attitude would be graceless. For those who do not know their houses, this is an excellent general guide: it is impressively comprehensive in its coverage, and the entries are clearly written. For those who are already house buffs, Jenkins’s Best Houses should be regarded as an intelligent conversation

Jonathan Keates

Tidings of comfort and joy

He was born to a virgin honoured with the attentions of the most high god. He assumed human form and gathered disciples around him who were derided for their adoration. Having performed a variety of miracles and made a journey to the underworld, he ascended to heaven, where he joined his father, president of the immortals, as the latest manifestation of personified divinity. In some versions of the story he took his mother with him. Was it embarrassment at the uncanny similarities between the myth of Dionysus (a.k.a. Bacchus) and the life of Jesus which caused early Christian writers to anathematise the cult of the pagan deity so vigorously? In

David Crane

The sea monster that never was

It is never easy to tell a story that everyone knows and still harder to tell one that everybody thinks he knows. For more than 200 years the mutiny on the Bounty has been part of British folklore, and its main protagonists — William Bligh and Fletcher Christian — enshrined in myth as types of brutal oppression and romantic defiance. The interesting thing about the Bounty story, too, is just how early this popular caricature of events succeeded in passing itself off as history. For a brief period on his return to England Bligh found himself widely feted, but even before he had completed his second journey in search of

Robert Edric

Tales of the expected

Introducing the first true Dave Eggers’ McSweeney production (and it is a production — jacket, binding, illustrations, chapter headings and all) to be published here, Michael Chabon explains that the starting point for this eclectic collection is the notion that all the short genre fiction which once supported American magazines of the Fifties should be considered no less valid a part of the present literary landscape as the ‘sparkling, plotless and epiphanic’ stories of which it is all too often currently comprised. Where today, he asks — and here one has to wonder how hard he actually looked — is the ghost story, the horror story, the detective story, the

Roger Lewis

A clump of plinths

The joke surely with Monty Python is that these trainee doctors, accountants, solicitors and bank managers, who met at college when they were reading law or medicine, never really stopped being those respect- able middle-class things. There’s an air of put-on daftness about the Pythons; this is an end-of-term cabaret by the chumps from Management and Personnel. They remind me of those prats in the front row of the last night of the Proms who think it wildly funny to bob up and down in time to Henry Wood’s ‘Fantasia on British Sea Songs’; or they are the committee of the Goon Show Preservation Society, eating damp sandwiches and ordering

Matthew Dennison

A group of noble dames

‘Lucy could have wished that Florence were not quite so ingenuous. One should not seize on a delicate implication and put a pin through it,’ writes Frances Towers in ‘The Chosen and the Rejected’, one of ten short stories published in 1949, the year after the author’s death, as Tea with Mr Rochester, here reprinted by Persephone. Frances Towers’s writing is full of delicate implications; happily for the reader, each is neatly pinned. Such is the deftness of her touch, her elegant leger- demain, that she conceals the building blocks of her artistry, simply nudging the reader towards recognition of that implication that repeatedly in her stories provides the denouement.

James Richard-Palmer

Lonely confessions

The 2003 Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize winner.There were more than 100 entries from a total of seven countries. The runners-up were Henry John Elsby Sanderson, Enrico Boerger, Gregory Lourens, Matthew Lawrence Holmes, Simon Rew, Kevin Barry and Joanna Elizabeth Streetly. Harry was eight, and he bore the mark of a victim. It wasn’t that he was especially stupid or clumsy or weak; it was a perpetual feeling of shame. His walk was slow and slightly stuttering, as though he was trespassing somewhere far above his station and expected to be exposed at any minute. He’d chosen his English name in imitation of the wizard hero, and found that every third