Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Interconnect

How the eagles were tamed

In AD 9 the Roman general Varus at the head of three legions was surprised by German forces in the Teutoburg forest, and utterly defeated. It was one of the greatest disasters ever suffered by a Roman army, even if not on a scale comparable to Cannae. This defeat marked the end of any serious attempt by Rome to conquer Germany as Julius Caesar had conquered Gaul and incorporated it into the empire. How serious that attempt had been is a matter of dispute. Nevertheless subsequently that frontier of the empire was fixed on the Rhine. In northern Europe the god’s promise to Aeneas of ‘empire without limits’, recorded by

Frederic Raphael

Sorry symptoms trendily diagnosed

It’s no surprise that one of Alain de Botton’s favoured sources, in a text well-sprigged with neat citations, should be Matthew Arnold: sweetness and enlightenment are their common contributions to a culture in which anarchy is the liveliest art form. What can Arnold have been complaining about in Victorian England, as compared with what we applaud in multicultural, populist Tony Blairville? Public loutishness is echoed in the decline of grammar and of civility, the collapse of common reference points, and hence of wit and allusion. Literature is bestsellers and sport is watching Becks bend it. De Botton is a cut, and occasional thrust, above the usual social diagnostics. David Dimbleby

Andrew Lambirth

A loner with panache and presence

This is the first book about the Scottish artist William Gear (1915-97), an abstract painter of international standing with an emphatic style and bold sense of colour. The son of a miner, Gear was born in Fife and studied painting at the liberal and francophile Edinburgh College of Art. From the start he was marked out as a man of panache and presence, of inner certainty. The art he was making (after a brief Surrealist phase in the Thirties) was abstract and experimental, and looked to Europe rather than London. He was a good organiser and even managed to continue painting and exhibiting his work during the war though he

Jonathan Mirsky

Led by the nose

In the spring of 1972 I met what I still think was the bravest man in China. An ordinary factory hand, he told me that the officially invited American China academics, of whom I was one, who the previous day had been brought to his ‘typical workers’ house’ in Canton, had been told a pack of lies by him and his family. In essence it was a Potemkin flat in which none of the new-looking things — TV, bicycles, kettles, even the bedding — belonged to the family. They lived near by in typical squalor. I had re-met him by chance very early the next morning and this daring Chinese

David Hughes

The box in the attic

As with the opposite sex, there are few books you fall for and want for life, even fewer with which you can find little fault. Here is a right stunner, if it happens to be your type — a secret family history, hitherto interred by the accidents of time, across the events of which the author stumbled by luck. A drawing on the wall at home caught Josceline’s adolescent eye. It was by Burne-Jones. Other clues to her prenatal past turned up. A relative found a japanned Victorian box in, guess where, an attic. A boring soldier or two surfaced from the bog of the Boer war. Her brother produced

Jane Ridley

The royal road to ruin

The old Oxford Histories of England were trusty bestsellers bound in pale blue wrappers. Hugely authoritative but often dull, they provided confident narratives of kings and governments, together with a chapter or so on culture and economics. The Clarendon Press has begun to update the series, and several volumes of a New Oxford History have so far been published. Geoffrey Searle has spent a lifetime working on Edwardian England, and he is well qualified to provide a new overview. This is no easy task. Searle’s massive book, over 900 pages long, is ambitious but uneven. For a start, there’s the problem whether a history which is really about Britain can

Saturday

Montagu Curzon

The year of the comet

The Battle of Hastings, 1066by M. K. Lawson Tempus, £25, pp. 252, ISBN 0752426893 The Bayeux Tapestry, nearly 75 yards long, the mother of all newsreels and the father of all strip cartoons, was embroidered at Canterbury (most probably) some years after the Conquest. With ‘626 human figures, 202 horses, 55 dogs, 505 other animals, 49 trees, 37 buildings and 41 ships’, plus as many corpses, some stripped, some in bits, as any self-respecting modern movie, and two sex scenes, it is one of the world’s great historical documents and its survival is a minor miracle. Its vivid images are stamped on our views of 1066, and on a great

Interconnect

Ungumming the ‘papist’ label

This book is so important and good it deserves a more crowd-pulling title. Besides, is ‘Revival’ the right word? True, after a silence of 300 years some authors began to write from the Catholic point of view, but this has gathered no popular momentum. Also the word ‘Catholic’ in a title is likely to put people off. Speaking as a Catholic myself (an interest to be declared at once), I know well the kinds of expression a reluctant confession of my allegiance provokes: incredulity, or suspicion or, worse, a sort of loopy awe, as though a Catholic must be privy to other crackpot mysteries, such as the magical properties of

Jonathan Sumption

Behaving badly abroad

The First Crusade is one of the great historical adventures. Whatever one may think of the consequences or the moral issues, the migration of perhaps 100,000 people across Europe and Asia Minor, and the conquest of a large part of the Middle East by the 20,000 or 30,000 survivors, all over the space of three years from 1096 to 1099, was an astonishing feat of endurance and martial skill. In their own time, the armies of the First Crusade created an ideology of holy warfare which retained its hold on European minds until the end of the 14th century, and arguably for 200 years beyond that. It also set standards

Piers Paul-Read

From negative to positive

The late J. G. Farrell, author of Troubles and The Siege of Krishnapur, used to say that he never read novels by contemporaries: the bad ones bored him while the good ones upset him because they had been written by someone else. I do not know what he would have made of William Nicholson’s The Society of Others, but for me it is a novel that I would dearly love to have written yet one whose message is an antidote to envy. It is exciting, funny, wise and beautifully written. The hero is a young man of 22 who, having graduated from university, remains shut up in his bedroom paralysed

Hermione Hobhouse

The greatest show on earth

This generously illustrated book serves two purposes. First of all, it celebrates the centenary of the reopening of the Crystal Palace which housed the 1851 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations in Hyde Park, at Sydenham in June 1854. In this role it traces the history of the build- ing reopened as a venue for Londoners. Secondly, it focuses attention on a very comprehensive and magnificent exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery, which covers both its brief period of glory in Hyde Park, and its longer, more problematic, existence in South London. The exhibition contains some well-known images, including the famous ‘blotting-paper’ drawing in which Paxton sketched

Claudia FitzHerbert

Doing something about your mind

Peter Conradi is a retired academic best known for his critical work on Iris Murdoch and, more recently, as her authorised biographer. The biography, though painstaking and full of interesting material, exemplified the difficulty of constricting a linear portrait of a thinker who not only wrote obsessively about mages and the electric currents — for both good and ill — around them but also herself occupied that territory in her relations with friends, lovers, acolytes, pupils and biographers. Going Buddhist turns this difficulty to triumphant advantage. Conradi’s friendship with Murdoch and their long conversation about matters of religion are one of several connecting threads in what is in effect a

Philip Mansel

Overbearing and undermining

A hundred and twenty years ago, the global hyper-power invaded a strategic Middle Eastern country. It talked of self-government but imposed its own rule. Other powers were excluded. Despite repeated promises to leave, its troops did not finally do so until 74 years later. Egypt under British occupation at the end of the 19th century has many parallels with Iraq under American occupation at the beginning of the 21st. The Bremer of the British occupation, the subject of this biography, was Evelyn Baring (from 1892 Lord Cromer). Younger son of a banking dynasty, he had spent his youth helping to administer Corfu, Malta and India, where he was known as

Andrew Gilligan

An inspector recalls

When Hans Blix first became the UN’s chief Iraqi weapons inspector, journalists joked that his name made him sound like one of those sinister baddies who lurked in elaborate underground headquarters in Seventies James Bond films. (‘Choose your next witticism carefully, Mr Hussein. It may be your last.’) Much to the frustration of the British and American governments, however, Blix never employed seven-foot enforcers with steel teeth, or threw anyone into a piranha pool, and the 007 echo of his name was about as exciting as he ever got. On the road to war, what London and Washington needed was a Judge Jeffreys, armed with a rhetorical smoking gun. What

Charlotte Moore

That was the week that was

Autism is in the air. Newspaper articles, television programmes and new books abound. It was not always thus; when Liam Nolan’s son, also called Liam, was diagnosed in the mid-Sixties, the term was almost unheard of by the general public. The condition was only identified at all in 1943. During Liam’s childhood, his behaviour was profoundly misunderstood. This book consists of the diary Liam senior kept for one week in August 1968, with an updated introduction and epilogue. ‘Liamy’ was ten. He was home for a holiday; he had already lived in an institution for some time, and still does. A social worker had insisted that his mother couldn’t or

Douglas Murray

Neither short nor sharp nor shocking

To be fair to him, George C. Schoolfield, of Yale University, does admit in his opening sentence that ‘movement’ may be too strong a word to describe the collection of writers on whom his Baedeker focuses. So, I think, may ‘fashion’. Links between authors in these 23 cross-global chapters are certainly thin — here an admiring letter, there a nabbed theme — and with some it is hard to see any link other than date and drivel. Each country has a chapter, and for that chapter they are allowed usually no more than one representative entry. Thus we get chapters on the decadent movement of Wales (entry: Arthur Machen) as

Gerard Noel

Watching the ranks closing

William Russell was a young American who worked as a clerk in the US embassy in Berlin at the time of the German invasion of Poland in September 1939. When Berlin Embassy, his account of those epic times appeared in 1941, it was acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic. Little is known of what became of Russell after his return to America in 1940 and his book has been out of print for over 40 years. But thanks to the enterprise of the London-based publishers Elliott & Thompson, we can once again hear the cool, almost laconic, voice of the fun- loving 24-year-old as he calmly elucidates the horror

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