Book Reviews Archives

Saturday

18 Oct 2003

A regiment to reckon with

In the spring of 1990, at the age of 21, I found myself sitting on an English hillside in the sun as one member of a brand-new training platoon of British squaddies. Having been marched up hill and down dale for a couple of hours that afternoon, we were handed large cans of beer by the corporals and told to stand up one by one — in front of the platoon, its NCOs, and its lieutenant — to explain what motivated us to join the Light Division. As a university-educated Canadian, my own reasons were odd-sounding and faintly naive, while the other soldiers’ reasons had an enviable clarity: ‘I got

James Delingpole

Ideas received or rejected

Until I read his enthralling account of what it’s like to be a middle-class sixtysomething crack addict, I’d never quite appreciated the genius of William Donaldson. I know his Henry Root letters are supposed to be very satirical but I found them a bit hard going myself — like a complex in-joke that you really need to have been somewhere weird like Harrow to understand. Initially, I felt the same way about I’m Leaving You Simon, You Disgust Me. Like Root, it’s sure to be found in every middle-class downstairs loo everywhere by the time Christmas is over, but on my first flick-through it seemed to me to fail in

Sebastian Smee

A great painter’s likeness perfectly caught

Robert Hughes has suffered no shortage of appalling things over the past five years. He has experienced deep depression and a second divorce; he suffered atrocious injuries in a car crash which came within inches of killing him, and has had to undergo 12 operations to piece his body back together again; a feeble attempt was made to blackmail him; he was tried for reckless driving; a scathing attack on his character was conducted in the Australian media on account of his perceived arrogance; he became an unwelcome figure of contempt in his own country, and his estranged only son committed suicide. From an outside perspective, all this has been

Saturday

11 Oct 2003

Simon Jenkins

Speaking of God

Where is England’s smallest church? The question must have preoccupied nerdish retired vicars for centuries and is probably best answered then forgotten. Despite the title of this survey, John Kinross fails to give a clear answer. ‘Smaller’ churches would have been fine, but smallest raises expectations. The apparent shortlist is Culbone (Somerset), Dale (Derbyshire), Wide- mouth Bay (Cornwall) and Lullington (Sussex), though readers may devastate me with alternatives. Culbone is a delicious place nestling above the Bristol Channel beneath Exmoor, accessible only on foot a mile through the forest. On a sunny day with birdsong in the trees and sea glinting through the leaves, it is as sublime as any

Interconnect

The other island

This massive volume weighs in at seven pounds on the bathroom scales and cost The Spectator £14.50 in stamps to send out for review. If it is difficult to write about, this is not because of its size and weight but because the eye is constantly caught and distracted by fascinating pieces of information, so that a reviewer reads on and postpones writing about it. (Which is, I suppose, the best mini-review such a compilation can hope for.) The general editor, Brian Lalor, says in his preface that ‘16 senior consultant editors and 50 consultant contributors have guided a standing army of 950 writers in four continents…’ and that the

Kate Chisholm

Rebellion in the suburbs

First published in 1914, two years after he had married Virginia, Leonard Woolf’s second novel The Wise Virgins must have shocked its readers with its tale of an unfortunate coupling and hasty marriage. Now the romance/sex all seems rather tame, and this fiction startles for a very different reason: its harsh caricature of Jewishness (Woolf himself was Jewish) and its tart comments on suburban life. From the first page, Woolf reveals himself as an astute observer of social undercurrents: The thin brick walls and the manners of civilisation divide the stockbrokers, the lawyers, the merchants, the rich and the poor into families, as effectually as the jungle and ferocity divided

I K-Gricer

The beauty of signal-boxes

The Duke of Bedford insisted that railway stations built on his estate had to be picturesque. He chose a half-timbered design based on Loudon’s Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm and Railway Architecture. His stations can still be seen from that improbable survival, the slow train from Bletchley to Ridgmont, Millbrook, Fenny Stratford and Woburn Sands. Future dukes in search of ideas can now thank Gordon Biddle for a new encyclopaedia. In Britain’s Historic Railway Buildings they can look up stations, tunnels, viaducts and signal-boxes all the way from Penzance — where Brunel’s original station was described as a large dog’s house of the nastiest and draughtiest kind — to the king-post

Graham Stewart

Northward and upward

This first volume of Bill Clinton’s biography, taking the story as far as his presidential election victory in 1992, comes at a peculiar time. Unlike many of the hasty invectives pronounced upon the 42nd president, Nigel Hamilton’s study is written on the grand scale, drawing on much of the published record and delving further with interviews and insights. Yet it has been published too late to take account of what Hillary Clinton has to say in her recent chart-topping memoirs (soon to be a staple of second-hand bookshops). And it has been published prior to Bill Clinton’s autobiography and the release of his archives. Nigel Hamilton has put in an

Byron Rogers

All knickers and knockers

Whatever else this is, an intimate portrait of Mrs Parker Bowles it is not, or at least not one written by the author. This is a scissors-and-paste job, the bones of earlier would-be biographers whitening in every chapter, which gives it an air of California or Bust. Clearly done at speed, there are many errors of punctuation and of typography (Welsh has a lower-case throughout), and one can almost hear the prayer, ‘Lord, there be 2,000 words by lunchtime, and nothing decent on TV this afternoon. Oh dear, why ever did I sign that contract? Ah well, that’s paid the nanny for another six months.’ Because, with the exception of

Philip Ziegler

Sounding the last post

The work of the obituarist is not unlike that of the book reviewer. Both have to tell their reader what the subject of their piece is all about; both have to pass judgment on its merits and demerits; both have to provide something which will be entertaining as well as informative. Under the direction of Hugh Massingberd and with the encouragement of the editor, Max Hastings, the Daily Telegraph made obituaries a leading feature of the paper — a fashion which has been followed by most of London’s broadsheets. This book assembles 100 of them, dealing with soldiers who died between 1987 and 2002. Where obituaries and book reviews differ

Harry Mount

Hobbling the sacred cows

Here’s a real cure for anyone with a bad case of things-are-getting-worse-itis. Written in 1962 principally for the American market, London Perceived has now been republished over here for the first time in 40 years, which seems staggering. I’ve never read a better summary of London or Londoners. And it has hardly dated at all. The sombre — and beautiful — black and white photographs are so elegiac that you’re conned into thinking that here is a sombre — and beautiful — but long-vanished city. The differences between London then and London now, though, are surprisingly few. I suffered a particularly acute bout of things-are-getting-worse-itis when I looked at one

Eric Anderson

The old order changeth

As a historical novel Thomas Gage is more Hardy than Tolstoy. The classic historical novel — as concocted by Walter Scott and perfected by Tolstoy — gives the reader an unexpected viewpoint from which to witness a great historical moment. Fictional characters with fictional relationships are the centre of attention, but they weave in and out of the company of historical figures and take part in great events. Thackeray leaves Dobbin dead on the field of Waterloo beside the genuine casualties of the day; Scott removes Waverley from Prince Charles’s army to spare him a similar fate at Culloden. The success of Patrick O’Brian, of Allan Mallinson’s Close Run Thing

Philip Hensher

Native wood-notes wild

This is an exceptional biography, which is just as well, since I don’t think one could bear to have the heartbreaking story it tells recounted carelessly. John Clare is one of the great Romantic poets, but his history and origins have always meant that he was either treated with neglect or used by his admirers for their own ends. This unusually tactful and sympathetic book tries, for once, not to claim Clare for any particular cause, but to see what he was trying to do in his own terms. Clare came from the poorest of the agricultural classes, and indeed continued working as a labourer even when he had attained

Saturday

4 Oct 2003

Nigel Nicolson

Spillikins of wisdom

This is not exactly an autobiography — John Mortimer has written three already, one about old age — but more like a collection of reminiscences designed to inspire and warn his grandchildren of the delights and pitfalls of life. It is a testament, the ‘Will’ of his title, in which he bequeaths to them the experience of a long life. There is not much about what he will leave to them in tangible goods, though a house, its furniture, art and garden, and a bit of cash, are not to be sneezed at. What he leaves them is his wisdom, and this he conveys in a loose, anecdotal, joky, non-preachy

Victoria Glendinning

For ever taking leave

Martha Gellhorn, an American who lost faith in America, was one of the most important war-reporters of the 20th century. She was not interested in briefings from the top brass, though she sometimes used her blonde charm to get the top brass to fly her where she needed to go. What she did, in her own words, was to ‘bear witness’ to what war did to innocent people, especially children. She found her stories on the street and in the orphanages. Her style was pared-down and succinct, powered by outrage. She believed in the ultimate supremacy of goodness and justice until she went into Dachau. Then, seeing what she saw,

Tim Congdon

Not such a low and dishonest decade

If it is to be interesting, contemporary history has to be a battle between good guys and bad guys. In his The Roaring Nineties Professor Joseph Stiglitz lets the reader know at an early stage in the proceedings that he is a good guy. As he says in the preface, when he first fell in love with economics, I wanted to understand what caused the poverty, unemployment and discrimination that I had seen all around me growing up, and I wanted to do something about these problems. Stiglitz spent much of his early career in universities and made important advances in such highly theoretical areas of economics as the understanding

William Trevor

The making of a professional

All the clichés are true: travel refreshes the taste for living; it brightens the jaded mind, it stimulates and deludes. The border that is crossed in leaving the familiar behind is the same one whether the journey is travel at its most serious — on perhaps the Terra Nova or the Endurance — or a cut-price trek to the fun palaces of Florida or the Costa del Sol. And equally for the heroic explorer and the three-week tripper there is the risk that escape may turn out to be the worst journey in the world — a hazard that is not, for either, an element in adventure’s allure. But when

Eric Christiansen

The love that dared to speak its name

As you went into the tower door of the church at Marsh Baldon (Oxon), there used to be two wall-tablets. One was to the relations of Sir Christopher Willoughby, who died in 1808, and the other was To the Memory of Friends, listed as John Lane, Elizabeth Lane, Phanuel Bacon, Margaret Bacon and Ann Barton. About which, 30 years ago, there seemed to be little to note, except that it was ‘unusual’. But why? Given the high value we still set on friendship and the tendency of some Britons to advertise themselves through their connections, such mementoes ought to be quite usual; if not in churches, then in fields and

Grey Gowrie

Zimmerman bound or unbound?

What is going on here? What on earth is going on here? Christopher Ricks, the world’s leading critic of poetry in English, Frank Kermode and the American Helen Vendler his only rivals, has devoted, has lavished 500 pages of hard-core, hardback, exegetical analysis to the words which propel Bob Dylan’s songs. The issue is not proving a point about Dylan’s poetic talent. That could be achieved in an essay. Indeed Ricks has already written one, in the Listener, as long ago as 1972 when Ricks was 39 and Dylan 31. Now Ricks is 70 and Dylan in his early sixties and Ricks has decided to throw neither flowers nor tomatoes

Pn Furbank

Battle versus work

The great popular success of Forster’s Howards End, published in 1910, meant that he was under pressure to set to work on a new novel, and in the following year he did so, but in a mood of self-doubt. He told himself it was wrong to force oneself to write; that before attempting a new work he always felt he needed to reappraise his own existence; that (as he noted in his diary) he was weary of ‘the only subject that I both can and may treat — the love of men for women and vice-versa’. He was suffering moreover from a superstitious sense that success didn’t suit him and