Book Reviews Archives

Saturday

22 Nov 2003

Hitler’s unbalanced Orangeman

Lord Haw-Haw: The English Voice of Nazi Germanyby Peter MartlandThe National Archives, £19.99, pp. 308, ISBN 1903365171 Although I yield to no one in my admiration of Mary Kenny as a journalist, an uncomfortable doubt arose in my mind as I read the lengthy acknowledgments with which she prefaces her biography of Lord Haw-Haw. I feared she might be too kind and generous a person to get the measure of William Joyce, the cruel, brutal, vulgar, hate-filled propaganda director of the British Union of Fascists from 1934-37, who during the second world war became, as Lord Haw-Haw, the outstanding exponent of the Nazi cause in the English language. Kenny expresses

Some of our Regular Contributors

CHRISTMAS BOOKS 2

Hugh Massingberd Surrounded by spin, mealy-mouthed political correctness and Orwellian ‘newspeak’, I longed for the absolute frankness demanded by the Memoir Club of Old Bloomsubry — and found it in A. N. Wilson’s joyfully funny Iris Murdoch As I Knew Her (Hutchinson, £18.99); the tenth volume of James Lees-Milne’s addictive diaries, Beneath a Waning Moon (John Murray, £22.50); Beaton in the Sixties: More Unexpurgated Diaries edited by Hugo Vickers (Weidenfeld, £25); and James Delingpole’s Thinly Disguised Autobiogra- phy (Picador, £12.99), which contains the most truthful descriptions of sex from the male point of view that I have ever read. Full marks for candour also to Simon Jenkins’s guidebook to England’s

Saturday

15 Nov 2003

Anita Brookner

Travelling far without finding home

This unusual and nostalgic novel comes from a writer whose last work, The Transit of Venus, remains as startling and effective today as it did when it was published in 1980. The Transit of Venus was an open-ended love story whose development could only be pieced together from clues dropped unobtrusively in the text and which had to be assembled by the reader after some cogitation. Like Nabokov, Shirley Hazzard clearly believes that Fate has the best plots. The lovers, brought together at the close, are divided for ever by an accident barely signalled but as conclusive as death. Both had followed parallel paths but were distracted by other alliances,

Douglas Johnson

The grand passion of a philosopher

Abelard has been made to play many roles in French history. In 1796 Alexandre Lenoir created the first museum of French national monuments. The French Revolution had abolished the past, but they thought that the French people should know about it. So the tombs of the French kings illustrated the continuity of French history, and alongside their magnificence the pathetic remains of Abelard and Heloise demonstrated the wickedness of the Ancien Régime. Those who visited the museum showed their sympathy for these victims of fanaticism and intolerance. In the 1850s we find the name of Abelard linked to the emergence of a wealthy class which is spending fortunes on collecting

Caroline Moorehead

A new breed of heroes

When aid workers, battling in distant places to bring some kind of comfort and safety to displaced and miserable people, are asked why they do what they do, many reply that it all comes down to the immediate and very simple satisfaction of giving a hungry person something to eat. ‘There are,’ notes David Snyder, a young American whose chapter on Sierra Leone appears in a new anthology of pieces by humanitarian workers, ‘few such pure exchanges in life.’ Something of this unaffected matter-of-factness marks much of Another Day in Paradise, the ironic title Carol Bergman has chosen for her collection of front-line stories from the aid world. If one

Elfreda Pownall

Receipts and recipes

The Pedant in the Kitchenby Julian BarnesGuardian Books, £9.99, pp. 96, ISBN 1843542390 ‘I haven’t cooked since the War,’ proclaims the Duchess of Devon- shire in the introduction to her Chatsworth Cookery Book. Though it was put to her that writing a cookery book was, in that case, ‘like a blind woman driving down the M1’, she went ahead with blithe self-confidence. It is audacious for someone who has not cooked in 58 years to collect together her favourite dishes, but not absurd. Dr Johnson said, ‘You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table’, and some of the finest food

Stoker Hartington

A charming toff of the turf

John Oaksey is the archetypal English gentleman. He is a sweetheart, a star, the bravest of the brave, funny and kind: the only person who will disagree with this is himself. His modesty is complete, his successes are never his, the credit always goes elsewhere, to the horses mostly, or to his friends, his colleagues, his wives, his parents, his opponents, to luck. Wherever, but never to him. Through these lenses so tinted with generosity as to make them sometimes almost opaque, we are treated to an account of his life, which has been a series of successes, triumphs over adversity and victories in many fields. He tries to pretend

Andrew Roberts

A continuation of empire by other means

Melvyn Bragg’s superb new history of the English language is told as an adventure story, and rightly so. Brought to the British Isles in the 5th century AD by Germanic warriors, ‘this hungry creature, English, demanded more and more subjects’, until today, with 1.5 billion speakers, it is poised for global domination. Nearly strangled first by the Danes and then by the Normans, its special genius is for morphing its enemies into itself, like some monstrous sci-fi extra-terrestrial growing ever stronger by gobbling up its opponents’ tongues. As in any great adventure story there are nail-biting moments, such as King Alfred saving the language by beating the Norsemen, or the

Hugh Massingberd

It’s being so cheerful that keeps me going

When asked why he was always so incredibly cheerful, David Niven (Stowe, Sandhurst and the Silver Screen) used to reply, ‘Well, old bean, life is really so bloody awful that I feel it’s my absolute duty to be chirpy and try and make everybody else happy too.’ Niven’s extraordinary charm and delightfully light touch made him the perfect choice for Bertie Wooster in Thank You, Jeeves (1936), his first leading role in Hollywood after he had risen from the ranks of Central Casting (‘Anglo-Saxon Type No. 2008’). John Mortimer, who gave the address at the actor’s memorial service 20 years ago, nicely summed up Niven’s life as ‘Wodehouse with tears’.

Digby Durrant

Always her own woman

The Grandmothers consists of four novellas, very different from The Golden Notebook, that sprawling, seemingly unedited, over-talkative, rather wonderful book that made Doris Lessing famous and became as stirring a call to arms for the swelling ranks of the feminist movement as Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch. Lessing disliked being pigeon-holed like this, insisting it was the whole of the human condition not just a part that fired her imagination. In 1971 she wrote, ‘The whole world is being shaken into a new pattern by the cataclysms we are living through … if we do get through … the aims of Women’s Liberation will look very small and quaint.’ None

Jane Ridley

The theatre of the globe

Atlases are things that one takes for granted, but they have an interesting history. This book tells the story of the world’s first atlas, which was published in Antwerp in 1570. It was the brainchild of a Dutchman named Ortelius. Of course, maps had existed for many centuries. Ptolemy put together a Geographia in Roman Alexandria in the 2nd century AD. But mediaeval men weren’t really interested in maps which were topographically accurate. For them maps were conceptual — a sign language about Christendom, centring on Jerusalem. This all changed during the Renaissance. Explorers such as Magellan logged their voyages, and the first recognisable world map appeared in 1507. Merchants

Bevis Hillier

Gallery crawl with a guiding star

In the ancien régime of John Murray (before the publishing firm was taken over by Hodder Headline) it used to be joked that their typical book title would be Sideways Through Abyssinia by Freya Stark. Rupert Hart-Davis suggested as a characteristic Faber title How to Grow Grass on an En Tout Cas Court. In the 1960s, when George Weidenfeld was in his dynamic prime, the idea of an Ur Weidenfeld title was Great Thimbles of the World, with countless co-editions in foreign languages — Les Plus Beaux Dés à Coudre du Monde; Wichtige Fingerh

Some of our Regular Contributors

CHRISTMAS BOOKS 1

Clive James Three books of non-fictional prose kept me awake like thrillers. Frederic Raphael’s The Benefits of Doubt (Carcanet, £14.95) is an exemplary book of humanist essays, although I would hate to have him doubting me, because he makes me laugh too hard when he doubts Heidegger. Published posthumously, D. J. Enright’s Injury Time (Pimlico, £12.50) is only part of his memorial: the full set of his volumes of casual reflections distills the civilised views of an era. Richard Eyre’s National Service (Bloomsbury, £18.99), subtitled ‘The Diary of a Decade’, inhabits two different political worlds. ‘Terrifying events in Yugo- slavia,’ he notes on 18 April 1993, ‘and we’re helpless. Why

Saturday

8 Nov 2003

Nicholas Fearn

Airbrushing out and filling in

If one ever wonders just how important memory is to our selfhood, consider patients in the later stages of Alzheimer’s disease. The condition as good as demonstrates that there is no afterlife, because if you can be dead when you are alive, then you can certainly be dead when you are dead. Without memory our minds are nothing, which should have made the cynical among us realise long ago that something so important could not possibly be fully under our control. According to the research psychologist Daniel Schacter, memory is far from the passive aide we imagine — the dutiful if fallible servant who hopefully brings us what we need,

Olivia Glazebrook

A girl’s own adventure

Olivia Joules is born Rachel Pixley, a ‘normal schoolgirl, living with two parents in Worksop’. But after she is cruelly orphaned, sent to live with a batty aunt, and then abandoned by her boyfriend she takes ‘a long hard look at life’ and decides to ‘search this shitty world for some beauty and excitement’. She reinvents herself and arrives in London as Olivia Joules: thin, clever, fanciable, quick-witted and well-dressed. In fact, she is damn near perfect — the kind of girl other girls might resent — but of course no one knows girls better than Helen Fielding, so Olivia has a touch of daffiness. Now we like her after

Murray Sayle

The Marxist and the Methodist

Even in his glory days Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, durable president of the Republic of China, had his critics. American liberals derided him as ‘Cash-my-cheque’ in acknowledgment of the monstrous corruption of his in-laws, although not of the abstemious Gimo, as his grandiose rank was usually abbreviated, himself. General Joseph ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell, the American chief of staff forced on him by President Roosevelt, referred to him as ‘The Peanut’ because of his short stature and shiny bald head, and described him to a journalist as ‘an ignorant, illiterate, superstitious, peasant son-of-a-bitch’. No respecter of persons, Vinegar Joe in the privacy of his diary called Chiang’s great rival Mouse Tongue (Patrick

Interconnect

Plumbing the freezing depths

Pretty soon after beginning his two-week descent into the Dantean world of the modern deep-sea North Atlantic trawler, Redmond O’Hanlon, far too old to be anywhere near one of these boats, let alone in January, let alone with a Force 12 Category One hurricane in the offing, not to speak of the burden of being ‘Worzel Gummidge’ or ‘Mister Writer-Man’, as the trawlermen call him, with his incomprehensibly expensive camera equipment and his vast literary-cultural-natural-historical baggage, lies in the cramped coffin of his bunk and starts to feel sick: My gullet and stomach rose out of my body. Up above the trawlermen they flapped right and left, like fish-tails; still

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