Book Reviews

Yeats was a great poet who was also the industrious adept of a batso mystical philosophy. Do we have to absorb the philosophy before we can appreciate the poetry? If we are lucky enough to be in a state of ignorance, the question won’t come up. The poetry will get to us first. Suppose you’ve heard this much: that Yeats’s best stuff came late. So you pick up the 1950 edition of the Collected Poems and start from the back. The last few lines in the book are the first you see. And now my utmost mystery is out:A woman’s beauty is a storm-tossed banner:Under it wisdom stands, and I

‘You’re not losing; we don’t care for that type of play here. Just cash in your chips and collect your check.’ Thus the Caesar’s Palace pit boss to your reviewer in the Sixties when in fact, contrary to what the author says, the casinos did already know about, and object to, players counting the cards at blackjack. Even if bits in the blurb such as ‘utterly gripping’ (of the book), ‘utterly corrupt’ (of Las Vegas) and especially ‘rich, sharp’ (of the dialogue) are something of an exaggeration, the story of how a group of young, highly intelligent MIT boys and girls took on Las Vegas, and beat them for millions

Closing Time by Joseph Heller Scribner, £7.99, pp. 464 ISBN 0743239806 Fortune granted Joseph Heller’s generation, raised during the Depression, not only service in a war whose good intentions were universally applauded but, once in uniform, a standard of living previously unknown to a boy like Heller himself, brought up on Coney Island in a modestly poor immigrant family. Thank you, Hitler and Mussolini. ‘For war there is always enough,’ Heller’s father says. ‘It’s peace that’s too expensive.’ Many young men did not return, but the survivors enjoying the GI Bill of Rights and entry into college felt no guilt about Dresden or Hiroshima — that kind of pain did

My new book, Thinly Disguised Autobiography, is not just good. It’s absolutely bloody amazing. The drug scenes make Irvine Welsh look like Mary Poppins; the sex scenes are more realistic than the real thing; it’s the finest dissection of the English class system since Evelyn Waugh; the dialogue rocks; it’s funny and moving, pacy, and lyrical enough when it needs to be but never so purple that you get bogged down in descriptions of trees or furniture; it’s at least as wittily post-modern as Dave Eggers but without the cloying sentimentality; the squalid bits outfoul Martin Amis; it’s better edited than The Corrections; and the ending, when with sorrow you

Weidenfeld and Nicolson is about to publish a big biography of Mussolini by my friend Nicholas Farrell, which contains the following passage: ‘Just as none of the victorious powers went to war with Germany to save the Jews neither did Mussolini go to war with them to exterminate the Jews. Indeed, once the Holocaust was under way he and his fascists refused to deport Jews to the Nazi death camps thus saving thousands of Jewish lives – far more than Oskar Schindler.’ Mussolini saved more Jews than Schindler! For once, the word ‘controversial’, so often used to describe any old bit of routine leftism, is justified. That Mussolini saved Jews

For some reason, almost every time I plunge into too hot a bath I find myself thinking of my days as a public schoolboy – presumably a ‘tosh’ must have been one’s principal pleasure at an impressionable age – and more often than not a half-remembered line from Frederic Raphael’s haunting School Play, shown on television many years ago, flickers across my mind. ‘Are you trying to burn my ballocks off?’ (or words to that effect), demands the rather Simon Ravenish senior boy (played by Denholm Elliott) of his junior (Michael Kitchen), who has drawn the bath as part of his fagging duties. As Raphael explains in a terse footnote