Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Grey Gowrie

Grand, ritzy and splendid

A consolation of being an international foot-in-the-door man in the 1970s, albeit one selling Monets and Moores, not Hoovers, was arriving from JFK at the Hotel Carlyle in Manhattan. You reached the superlative place at about 10 in the evening, and even though flesh complained that it was the middle of the night, spirit insisted on a Martini before bedtime in the Bemelmans Bar. Bobby Short would play a few Bogartish tunes on the piano, Ludwig’s own murals soothed the eye and the America you entered seemed a throwback: older and more elegant than still trendy London, or the rest of busy neurotic New York fighting off its post-Vietnam blues.

Juliet Townsend

A choice of children’s books

This year my village school, like hundreds of others, is scrimping and saving to afford that Holy Grail of modern education – the Computer Suite. Of course computers are an essential part of every child’s world, and will presumably be even more so in the future. Yet there is something rather soulless about the rows of mesmerised little figures staring into their screens while skilfully manipulating an army of mice. Somehow that world needs to be balanced by introducing children to the very different pleasures of the book, and there has never been a time when children’s books were so varied, well-produced and such good value as today. Probably the

Interconnect

Uncle to the nation

It was only when David Attenborough’s autobiography arrived for review that I realised I had been dodging his television programmes for years. Nothing personal; it was just that a pigeon on the pavement is more interesting to me than a bird of paradise on a television screen, a peep-show, that seems to push me further from ‘nature’, not nearer. This perhaps snooty self-revelation is only intended to highlight the way, when I came to open his book, I found myself laughing delightedly, and greatly warming to him. He is just a jobbing tellyman after all, a ‘programme-maker’, with all the compromises that entails, and he fell into it by accident.

James Delingpole James Delingpole

The penis mightier than the sword

Next time you’re stuck for conversation at a dinner party, why not use one of these fascinating facts to break the ice? 1. In mammalian terms the male of Homo sapiens is spectacularly endowed – his penis, when erect, being roughly three times larger than a 400lb gorilla’s. 2. In Pharaonic Egypt, Egyptian men were so fearful of vaginal blood that they would hire Aethiops (famed for the blackness of their skin and the enormousness of their members) to deflower their brides. 3. The biblical ‘sin of Onan’ had nothing to do with every teenager’s favourite pastime but in fact referred originally to ‘coitus interruptus’. The reason onanism has for

Nicholas Harman

A fine solo performance

The sort of young person who once drifted into publishing now fiddles about with computers instead. The trade has been transformed both by its wretched economics and by the wretched spirit of the times. Solo publishing in particular, an eccentric business or a business for eccentrics, should have died out many years ago. Michael Russell didn’t. He is vague about dates but seems to have been at it for about 35 years and is still going, perhaps even going strong. He puts it perfectly: ‘In publishing terms I know I’m largely out of touch, but I seem to keep in touch all right with that part of the book-buying market

M R-D-Foot

Valuable second opinions

Professor Roger Louis’s own expertise is in British imperial history; he edited the three-volume Oxford History of the British Empire. For years past, he has run seminars at the Harry Ransome Humanities Research Center at Austin, Texas, which holds ample stores of British literary and historical manuscripts; he invites leading dons and critics from Great Britain to discuss their current work, and has secured some unusually fine papers. This is his third collection of their essays; it covers many aspects of the history of this country during the 20th century. Old-fashioned, party-centred, parliamentary history hardly appears. David Butler gives an account of how studies of general elections have developed, and

Digby Durrant

The doubting priest

As Schindler’s Ark shows, Thomas Keneally is at his best bringing the past to life undaunted either by the importance of the events or by the famous names at the centre of them. Two of his other novels that lie to hand, A Family Madness and Gossip from the Forest, confirm that he wastes no time in throwing the reader in at the deep end and keeping him there. In the first one it’s Belorussia scrabbling to preserve its identity as Germany, Russia and Poland fight over it during the last war; in the other we eavesdrop on the private conversations between the French, British and German delegates when they

Jonathan Sumption

The last brick put in place

The publication of this volume marks the completion of Joseph Frank’s enormous biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky, a work which he has spent half a lifetime in writing. ‘Monumental’ is the standard clichZ for such an enterprise, and Frank’s is certainly that. The scale of the work is due mainly to the fact that it sets out to be not just a biography, but a work of literary criticism and a social and intellectual history of 19th-century Russia. This would be a marvellous achievement if it could be done. Dostoevsky’s world is not easily accessible even to those who have read widely in its literature, and his ideas are certainly not

Christopher Howse

Dogs in Greece, a nuisance

In ‘The Sussex Vampires’, Watson takes down from the shelf the great index volume for V; Holmes balances it on his knee and reads: Voyage of the Gloria Scott. Victor Lynch, the forger. Venomous lizard or gila … Vittoria, the circus belle. Vanderbilt and the Yeggman … Vipers. Vigor, the Hammersmith wonder… And then he gets to ‘Vampires’. The entries give some of that mysterious country outside the stories which, as with the nonsense verse of Edward Lear, make the oeuvre so compelling. As an index they are lacking. For a start they aren’t in strict alphabetical order, and if it was a ‘great volume’ it might take some time

David Trimble

Opportunists and tacticians, but poor strategists

On the back of the dust cover there proudly appears the following quote from the Sunday Times towards the end of last year: ‘Ed Moloney’s authoritative and devastating Penguin History of the IRA is just around the corner.’ Well, up to a point. Ed Moloney is a well respected journalist writing for a Dublin newspaper who, for many years, has specialised in making a close study of Irish republicanism. As far as I can tell he is a reliable guide to the machinations within the republican movement. These apparently different organisations respond to a single leadership group of about a score of persons, many of whom appear in various positions

Philip Hensher

The music of the language

Wodehouse, all in all, is lasting astonishingly well. His world is dated, but then it was always dated; it is basically Edwardian, and went on, barely changed, into the 1960s and 1970s. But his appeal is not the period charm of a Diary of a Nobody or a Saki; it is much more alive than that. By now we should probably start suspecting that he will prove one of the great novelists. Apart from England, I think the only country in the world which truly loves and understands Wodehouse is India. It seems bizarre, but there’s something illuminating in that. Indian English is passionately in love with English grammar at

Saturday

Jonathan Cecil

Pure and impure genius

As Hamlet said, ‘Look here upon this picture and on this.’ Early this year Garry O’Connor produced a book about Paul Scofield. The actor’s personal life being famously uneventful, there is little there for lovers of theatre gossip. It is, despite a few pretentious notions about Scofield’s psyche, an admirably thoughtful book on the player’s art, combining a thorough knowledge of Scofield’s roles with a generous admiration for the man. Now O’Connor has written Alec Guinness’s biography, and a much less respectful piece of work it turns out to be. Having already written one study of Guinness during the actor’s lifetime with, it seems, minimal co-operation from his subject, O’Connor

Hugh Massingberd

A choice of funny books

‘I don’t know if it is a sign of old age,’ wrote P. G. Wodehouse in the mid-1950s, ‘but I find I hate Christmas more every year.’ Another marked change that the Master noticed in ‘the senile Wodehouse’ was that he no longer had the party spirit and preferred to stay at home with a good book. Both these observations are quoted in a pleasantly discursive set of reflections on old age, The Time of Your Life, compiled and illustrated by John Burningham (Bloomsbury, £14.99, pp. 288, ISBN 0747560854), which would certainly tempt one not to venture out. The principal themes are how quickly time passes for the old (as

Tam Dalyell

The price of admission

I first met Tim Slessor when we were contemporary undergraduates at Cambridge, half a century ago. Etched into my memory are Slessor’s pride in and sadness about his naval officer dad, whom he had adored, and whom he had lost as an eight-year-old. Becoming a successful TV producer and journalist, Slessor worked in the United States and Britain, being for many years a senior editor of the BBC’s documentary department. In recent years, Slessor has used this considerable and relevant probing experience to try to ascertain the truth behind his father’s death, on the carrier, HMS Glorious on 8 June 1940, during the evacuation from Norway. His devastating chapter, ‘An

Richard Ollard

Not rushing to judgment

It is hard to overpraise this admirable – indeed one would have thought impossible – account of the history of England, Scotland and Ireland from the accession of Charles I to the restoration of his son Charles II. The great masters of English 17th-century historiography, S. R. Gardiner and Sir Charles Firth, between them took nearly 30 volumes and even then did not quite make it to the finish. But this even-paced, readable, good-natured and wise volume not only tells the reader what happened and when but gives him a clear impression of the individual actors, large-minded and generous, without being blind to weakness, folly or vindictiveness and above all

Jonathan Keates

Smoothing the rough edges

Much is made by writers these days of the need for ‘getting distance’, for putting frontiers, oceans, whole continents between themselves and the sources of their inspiration. A spell on a Mediterranean island, a prolonged residence in some foreign capital or a creative writing fellowship at an American university are all supposed to do the trick. To advertise the whole business more effectively, you can always engineer a noisy parting of the ways with the British reading public, so unforgiving of your success, so philistine and parochial, and flounce off to New York, where your genius will be properly nurtured and cosseted. For Brian Moore, the necessary distance was acquired

David Ekserdjian

A selection of art books

I cannot think of many less festive offerings than Richard Avedon Portraits (Abrams, £24.95), but it has to be admitted that his merciless exposure of such grotesques as a blood-and-guts-spattered rattlesnake-skinner and a Duncan Goodhew-lookalike beekeeper, whose naked body is swarming with the six-legged tools of his trade, makes one sit up and take note. One of the minor pleasures of this collection is that literary and artistic celebrities have the same unflinching treatment meted out to them as drifters, and unless one happens to recognise the likes of William Burroughs, it is hard to tell which is which. After Avedon, the images in Richard Calvocoressi’s Lee Miller: Portraits from

Alan Judd

Playing with Henry James

The theme of Henry James’s The Aspern Papers is well known: an unscrupulous biographer seeks the unpublished papers of his subject, a long-dead poet, through the cultivation of the poet’s former mistress, a forgotten old lady living with her spinster niece in Venice. He insinuates himself into the household, leading the niece to hope for marriage, until his real intentions are revealed. It is also well known that James’s story was inspired by his discovery that, living in reduced circumstances in Florence with her niece during the 1870s, was Claire Clairmont, one-time mistress of Byron (whose child she bore) and perhaps also of Shelley. A predatory biographical collector, a Massachusetts

Frederic Raphael

What will the oracle answer?

THE WEST AND THE RESTby Roger ScrutonContinuum, £12.99, pp. 196, ISBN 0826464963 Two reincarnations of the Old Oligarch – alike in deploring The Way We Live Now, different in emphasis and style – jostle for the moral high ground. Gore Vidal’s diagnosis of global schism centres on the US and its (mal)administration. Like a liberal, Enlightened mutation of bin Laden, Vidal doubles for Coriolanus and tribune of the put-upon plebs. Exiled from what he takes to be his patrimony – the good, old US, based on the Bill of Rights – he points out that bin Laden was first a CIA protZgZ (but never the first) in Afghanistan, the recent

Jane Gardam

Found and lost

Byron Rogers for years wrote the ‘Village Voice’ column in the Daily Telegraph, and this collection of articles on his life over the past 22 years in an English village is published because of the continued weekly requests of his readers. Blakesley is not a picture-book village. Rogers found ‘a lost triangle of land where Oxfordshire, Warwickshire and Northamptonshire meet, which the main roads circle and where no tourists come’; not at all unlike Ronald Blythe’s ‘Akenfield’ in Suffolk in the early Sixties. By leaving the city for the country in the Eighties, Rogers was ahead of his time. It was rare then to settle in the dead centre of