Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

James Delingpole James Delingpole

I’m boring, I’m ugly and I can’t write

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

Saturday

Frank Johnson

Don’t mention that Mussolini saved Jews: it is Politically Inconvenient to do so

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

Saturday

Hugh Massingberd

Among the goys and philistines

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

David Caute

These foolish things

Perhaps this strange volume is a bang on the nose for political correctness, but one cannot be sure. It could have been written in the 18th century by a deranged sage determined to scotch the more famous Encyclopaedia of the Enlightenment and its absurd faith in progress and human perfectibility. Published on April Fool’s Day, it may have been a hoax of the dwarf variety, like the peas I have been stupidly planting in spring sunshine, observed by their ultimate beneficiaries circling in smug silence overhead. The author is said to be an Amsterdamer, a man of letters who has been researching stupidity for over 20 years, but he may

Robert Macfarlane

The heart of whiteness

Happiness writes white, it’s said: so too, one would think, does Antarctica. How is it possible to describe an environment which tolerates almost no life, which is derived from a single substance, and which is for the most part a single colour? Early explorers were simultaneously horrified and enthralled by the continent’s awesome singularity. Scott wrote of its ‘silent, wind-swept immensity’; Shackleton’s surgeon, Alexander Macklin, of its ‘same unbroken whiteness’. Given Antarctica’s unsurpassed simplicity as a landform, one might expect writers to have shied away from it. And yet this fearsomely meaningless place has, especially in the 20th century, generated an enormous literature. For nearly 200 years, explorers, scientists and

Francis King

Master of the merry-go-round

Sprawling, teeming with people and flooded with an almost malevolent brilliance, this book is the literary equivalent of some vast conurbation. As with a conurbation, it is difficult to identify the heart – and heart here means not merely centre but humanity. Trapped, as in one of Mark Gertler’s most famous pictures, on a constantly accelerating roundabout, the characters all seem to be in imminent danger of being hurled into oblivion by the centrifugal force of a powerfully churning imagination. Two of the most important of these characters are a father and son. Digby, once the heir to a company that rivalled Wedgwood in the manufacture of pottery, is now

Philip Hensher

The best committee that ever sat

There are two literary facts in English which it is almost impossible to examine, to see clearly. They are Shakespeare and the King James Bible. In both cases, the impossibility derives from the same point; that critical standards of what great English writing means stem so completely from Shakespeare’s peculiar virtues and from the values of the prose in the King James Bible that all commentators and, indeed, all English-speakers subsequently have lived within their limits, and have been unable to step outside and discuss their subjects with any clarity, as one can step outside Spenser or Wordsworth, and see their world whole and distant, with an awareness of alternative

Saturday

Sara Wheeler

Serving Christ and colonialism

Fergus Fleming is the author of three volumes of narrative history, the best of which, Barrow’s Boys, gives a rollicking account of 19th-century Arctic exploration. Now he has lighted on the ‘conquest’ of the Sahara, and it is a gripping saga, little known beyond the popular image of a kepi-wearing French officer riding into the desert on a white camel while hordes of Tuareg mass silently on the horizon. The Sword and the Cross begins with a trot through the history of Algeria, or the Barbary Coast as it was known to white men, and of Ottoman North Africa in general. Fleming then focuses on Vicomte Charles de Foucauld, a

Roger Lewis

Still on his feet in the twelfth round

Norman Mailer was 80 years old on 31 January 2003, so let us salute the last of all the knights. He was very famous very quickly, with The Naked and the Dead, and for nearly six decades he has poured forth rich and provocative novels, biographies, non-fiction bouts of reportage – it’s hard to know what they are any more. Fiction as documentary? Concealed memoirs? He’s certainly unstoppable. The accounts of Marilyn Monroe and Picasso show him as the critic-as-artist; the treatise on Vietnam or the moon landings, his history of the CIA and the investigation into the life and death of Lee Harvey Oswald, make him America’s Tolstoy. Mailer’s

Candia Mcwilliam

What voice can do

There was recently, in the serious and excellent Saturday Guardian review, a short piece on Oor Wullie, a small boy whose cartoon adventures divert the readers of the Sunday Post in Scotland. It was written by Ian Jack, distinguished editor of Granta, the influential literary magazine. The article mentioned a number of things that touched dear places for a Scot, and mentioned too that Mr Jack hadn’t a recipe for black bun, a dense cake served at Hogmanay. Along with, it turned out, very many, others, I wrote to him. There is nothing so homesick as a Scot, and nothing, I suspect, as vigilant and quick to take exception. Andrew

Harry Mount

Old Wasp with a weak sting

The pleasure boat captains who ply the coast of the Gulf of Salerno beneath Gore Vidal’s Ravello flat are inconsolable at the thought that the grand old man of American letters is returning to his homeland. The round trip that departs from Capri, and chugs past Positano and Amalfi, finishes with a flourish, as the captains point up the cliff to the Vidal residence – it perches so precariously over the bay that the 77-year-old can no longer negotiate the steep steps out of town. His fingers, though, are as nimble as ever. So many articles have been fluttering out of the Italian eyrie that this is his second collection

Byron Rogers

The young, red-haired man in the cupboard

If this had a third act it would make a superb film, for the cast list is virtually a re-run of Front Page, with Richard Addis, formerly of the Daily Express, now, magically, of the Canadian Globe and Mail, as the hard-bitten editor Walter Burns, and Stephanie Nolen, a young and eager reporter on the paper, as Hildy Johnson. It starts with an editorial conference, which, if you are unfamiliar with such things, is a sort of daily re-enactment of a high command meeting underground with tanks in the suburbs of their capital. In our time it is a scene made for black comedy. With faltering advertising revenues and failing

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Tales of the unexpected

How’s this for a good opening? ‘I took out a gun and painted the bullets gold.’ If that were a novel the author would win prizes; but he isn’t a novelist, he’s a nutcase. Let’s call him ‘J’. J was convinced that his wheelchair-bound grandmother was a vampire. He visited her one morning, did her laundry and asked if there was anything else he could help her with. She said ‘No’. So I put on my suit and shot her in the heart. She was wiggling and screaming at me. Then I shot her three more times real fast. After this he laid her body on the bed, drank some

A.N. Wilson

The fatal Dogberry tendency

In June 1959, A. L. Rowse was sitting on a train in the United States, writing up his journal. He was in the middle of describing an enjoyable encounter with Elizabeth Bowen in New York. Unfortunately, he was interrupted by a young woman asking if the seat beside him was vacant. Rowse indicated with his pencil that ‘There is a vacant seat, across the gangway.’ ‘But I want the one by the window.’ ‘I am sitting by the window,’ I replied, still not looking up. ‘Oh, I see’, she said, and moved on. A trivial incident, and you might have wondered why the great Elizabethan historian, autobiographer and Cornish poet

Saturday

James Delingpole James Delingpole

DIY down the ages

One balmy summer afternoon in my final year at prep school, a group of my fellow-prefects and I gathered under the apple trees on the slope by the croquet lawn where only prefects were allowed, and reminisced about the five years we’d spent together. ‘Do you know, Delingpole,’ said one of them, ‘it was you who taught us all how to wank.’ This is possibly the nicest compliment anyone has ever paid to me and even though it was completely unwarranted – branleur? moi? – I have endeavoured to live up to it ever since by broaching the subject with friends, acquaintances and strangers as often as decently possible; by

Jonathan Sumption

The first iron curtain

Religious tradition has defined human societies and shaped their habits of mind more strongly than any other factor. It still does, even in communities which have lost their collective belief in God. Indifference to formal creeds may be common to the governing elites of most countries, and in Europe to their electorates as well. Yet the world is still living with the consequences of centuries of mutual hostility and incomprehension among the three great monotheistic religions of the Mediterranean. The sudden birth of Islam and its rapid and violent spread through North Africa and the Middle East in the seventh century shattered the political and intellectual certainties of Europe more

Jonathan Mirsky

What it’s really like

In a recent column in the Telegraph (8 March) headed ‘How I long for the bombs to start falling,’ Mark Steyn wrote, ‘This interminable non-rush to non-war is like a long, languorous, humid summer, where everyone’s sweaty and cranky and longing for the clouds to break and the cool refreshing rain to fall. Bring it on, please.’ I don’t know whether the Telegraph or The Spectator will be sending Steyn to Iraq, but this is what he may find. The description, in Jarhead, is by Anthony Swofford, a US Marine Corps sniper in the last Gulf war. Marching across the desert he comes on what is left of an Iraqi

Jane Ridley

Not great but definitely good

Who was Hannah More? William Cobbett called her an old bishop in petticoats, and she was the subject of a hefty, pious Victorian biography, since when she has been pretty much forgotten. The Edwardian wit Augustine Birrell buried 19 volumes of her collected works in his garden for compost. She owes her disinterment to the fashion for writing the lives of women, the more obscure the better. Is she interesting enough to merit a book of nearly 400 pages? Almost certainly, the answer is yes. She was born near Bristol, the daughter of an impoverished charity school master, in 1745. Her older sisters ran a successful school for young ladies.