Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Harry Mount

Top dog and dogfights

The big idea behind this little book has been touted as ‘Americans are from Mars; Europeans are from Venus’. That’s not quite right. The real thesis is not that Americans are war-hungry and Europeans peace-loving, but that Americans deal with problems, and Europeans avoid them. If anything, Americans are from the planet Can-do, and Europeans from Can’t-face-doing. Try conducting practically any transaction in America and compare it to the way you’re treated in Britain and you get the measure of what Robert Kagan, a Washington Post columnist and veteran of the State Department, is driving at. An American working in a deli, or shining your shoes, wants to make sure

Simon Jenkins

Famous and forgotten faces

Paperback edition £29.95 I was much attached to Kaled. She stood at the corner of Fleet Street and Chancery Lane, pert, stylish, mocking the scribes and hacks scurrying round her feet. She was faintly androgenous, a pageboy Tiresias who saw and knew all that passed along that street of shame. She is there today, much battered but still with her swagger. Nothing peoples a city as do statues. The more inhumane the architecture the more desperately we cling to relics of humanity, even if they are in stone and metal. Nobody seems to notice them. How many Fleet Street hands salute as they pass effigies to King Lud, Elizabeth I,

Graham Stewart

Life on board the pirate ship

When, in 1825, Harriette Wilson began her Memoirs with ‘I shall not say why and how I became, at the age of 15, the mistress of the Earl of Craven’ an avid readership settled down to revel in what was clearly going to be the work of an old pro. So perhaps it is as well for Eleanor Berry’s personal reputation that at the end of Cap’n Bob and Me the reader feels somewhat short-changed. Many, of course, taken aback that the ‘Bouncing Czech’ could be an object of wild sexual desire to anyone, will be relieved that the wilful Miss Berry spares us the details – if details there

Tom Pocock

The anatomy of a hero

The first word of Edgar Vincent’s biography of Nelson is not encouraging. It is ‘Jump!’, which is what a sailor is supposed to have shouted to young Horatio as he boarded the boat that was to take him out to his first ship. How does Mr Vincent know that the sailor shouted that? He might have said, ‘Mind the gap.’ Happily this is the only invented dialogue and only occasionally does the author let his imagination loose in describing how somebody walked, or seabirds wheeled, or what a gun-deck looked like after receiving a broadside. He uses colloquialisms, too: spin, networking and icon, but, in the context, these are appropriate.

Diana Hendry

His own worst enemy

My partner wanted to leave the dustwrapper of this book at home. He denied my suggestion that he didn’t want to be seen reading it on the train, claiming it was just his natural care for books. Anyway, he’s been quoting from it ever since, though his choice of quotes and mine are possibly Mars and Venus apart. Him: ‘It must have occurred to most men at some time or other that women get furious for no apparent reason.’ Me: (loftily) ‘

David Prycejones

Where all parties are guilty

Algeria is one of the most pitiful of failed Arab states. For ten years and more, the news has been coming in regularly that people somewhere in that country have been butchered. Qui tue qui? is the question Algerians themselves ask. Here is a civil war, all the more sinister for being undeclared and undefined. The ruling elite control the Front de LibZration National, the FLN, and the army, and they say that the killers are Islamists, extremists from the Front Islamique du Salut, the FIS. The Islamists counter-claim that the FLN and the army are responsible for atrocities. The truth is unobtainable, but seemingly all parties are guilty. There

Inigo Thomas

Public relations disaster

Private lives of the rich or celebrated or infamous kinds in New York often resemble one of those inside-out buildings designed by the architect Richard Rogers in the 1970s; like the Pompidou Centre in Paris, with its exterior escalators and air-conditioning ducts, or the Lloyd’s building in London, where lifts and pipes are part of the facade, what one expects to be private in New York is public discourse. An entire book could be written on the spectacle and politics of emotional display in New York, and if Tom Barbash’s On Top of the World is not that volume, it is an addition to the extensive raw material, as well

Tony Gould

Fruits of empire

Since Henry Hobhouse wrote his story of five plants that changed the world, Seeds of Change, nearly 20 years ago, the history of commodities has become a fashionable literary genre. So he must rate as one of its pioneers. But unlike many of his imitators, he has not been content to make a whole book out of a single commodity, such as nutmeg or indigo. In the present work, which is a kind of long-delayed sequel to Seeds of Change, he deals with four – timber, wine, rubber and tobacco – thus giving value for money at least. Or it may be that by writing an essay rather than a

Andrew Gimson

Heavy losses on the cultural front

The start of this book is extremely annoying. On page three there is an inept echo of Gibbon, which has the effect of making us observe that Elon’s style is greatly inferior to the high culture which he sets out to describe. On page four there is a patronising remark about Moses Mendelssohn, the first great German Jewish man of letters, who, we are told, was passionate about social justice ‘for a man of his time and place’. None of those benighted men of the Enlightenment could be expected, of course, to attain the degree of passion about social justice that moves us now. We begin to fear we are

Zenga Longmore

Intruder in the dust

The Emma of the title was an intrepid young woman who journeyed to the Sudan in search of exotic adventure. Owing to an ill-chosen marriage she found herself at the centre of a bloody civil war. A few years later she met with an early death. One’s loins need to be well girded before embarking on this book. Emma’s Sudan, portrayed by Deborah Scroggins, is a nightmarish, Goyaesque picture. During the 1980s, Emma McCune left her dreary Yorkshire village to work as an aid worker in the Sudan in search of thrills, romance and Sudanese men. She found an abundance of all three, although her job with the British Voluntary

Jonathan Sumption

A square peg

In life, it helps to be called Rothschild. Victor Rothschild discovered this well before he became associated in the public mind with think tanks and spycatchers. Visiting the United States as a 29-year-old Cambridge academic in 1939, he was received by President Roosevelt, as well as by the Secretary of State, the Treasury Secretary and the Director of the FBI. Although an MI5 officer of only middling rank, he entertained the prime minister to dinner in wartime in a private room at the Savoy Hotel. At a humbler level than this, he made it his business to know an astonishing range of civil servants and politicians, artists and writers, journalists,

Saturday

Interconnect

Own goals galore

FOOTBALL CONFIDENTIAL: SCAMS, SCANDALS AND SCREW-UPSby David Conn, Chris Green, Richard McIlroy and Kevin MousleyBBC, £6.99, pp. 256, ISBN 0563488581 By chance I picked up Tom Bower’s Broken Dreams shortly after putting down a paperback reissue of Selina Hastings’ biography of Nancy Mitford. Curiously there was a solitary point of contact. This was the description applied by Lady Redesdale, Nancy’s mother, to the collection of preening Oxford aesthetes that her daughter invited to the house for weekends: ‘What a set!’ Invited to meet the 20 chairmen of the Premiership, bidden to dine with the Football Association or inspect the assorted riff-raff operating as ‘agents’, Lady Redesdale, you fear, would have

Robert Macfarlane

Eureka proclaimed too loudly

James Watson has all the makings of a great biographical subject. He is notoriously volatile, splenetic, and aggressive. During his career he has not fought shy of public controversy. And of course he is globally famous for a single achievement: having been one of the two men who, in 1953, ‘discovered’ the double-helix structure of DNA. The discovery was, as one peer put it, ‘a scientist’s dream: simple, elegant, and universal for all organisms’. It brought the pathologically ambitious Watson a Nobel Prize at the age of 34, and ‘triggered and sustained a revolution in science that affects us all’. The story of how that discovery occurred, like that of

Charlotte Mitchell

Hacking a path through the jungle

Jonathan Bate, the general editor of this series, which replaces the Oxford History of English Literature, announces in a preface how exceptionally difficult it is to write literary history at all in modern times. As the slightly awkward new title of the series suggests, there is all that American, Scots, Welsh and Irish stuff now. They need more than the odd chapter, so away with them. Hundreds of dead women writers are now actually in print who were formerly unheard of. Distinctions between high and low culture have collapsed. Competing theoretical approaches raise terrible anxieties. Evaluation itself is under threat. So the task of writing the history of Eng. Lit.,

Jonathan Cecil

He who would be king

Asked who was the greatest French poet AndrZ Gide famously replied, ‘Victor Hugo, hZlas!’ I confess to having had similar feelings about King Lear. Of Shakespeare’s four great tragedies I find it the bleakest and least sympathetic, with the most exasperating protagonist and the most preposterous sub-plot. The naivety and perverse behaviour of young Edgar are hard to credit. Wrongfully estranged from his father Gloucester through a blatant trick played by his bastard brother – something a moment’s explanation could have put right – he hastily flees and takes on the disguise of a garrulous, mud-caked lunatic. Gloucester’s later on-stage blinding often cited by defenders of video nasties – ‘Shakespeare

Tom Pocock

Hervey remounts his horse

Those who prefer their history straight may look askance at the historical novel, particularly if it is military. Accuracy is all. Surely it was the 31st Foot rather than the 38th and was the rifle yet in service and when did the Iron Duke say that it had been a really, really close-run thing? But Alan Mallinson’s reputation rests on authenticity, for he is a serving soldier who has commanded a cavalry regiment. It is cavalry of the four-legged, rather than the tracked, sort that he has made his own in fiction and soon one has settled into regimental life, albeit in the early 19th century and, in this case,

Alan Wall

Spreading the good word

This is a remarkable novel. Written in a beautifully crafted prose, its theme is the resistance of China to Christianity. Missionaries, one of them of mixed blood, make their way into the mind and heartland of China, seeking to bring the good news of the crucified and resurrected Lord to those who are still devoted to other, older, powers. For the river people worship a river god; he after all is responsible for providing their livelihood. The fish are his soldiers. The villagers know they must propitiate him. When they catch a particularly large specimen they lay it on his altar all night, in sorrow at the possibility of his

Sebastian Shakespeare

Why did she do it?

We have had to wait seven years for Graham Swift’s latest novel. Was it worth it? The hero of The Light of Day might think so. George Webb shares the patience of Job. He is prepared to wait eight or nine years until the woman he loves is let out of prison and re-emerges into the light of day. It is hard to understand the nature of his obsession. Firstly, he has only met Sarah a couple of times before she is jailed for murdering her husband. Secondly, his fixation seems to revolve around her knees. Am I alone in thinking knees are the most unerogenous part of the body?

Gabriele Annan

Drifting out of court

Judge Savage is a dashing mixture of thriller, social comedy and dysfunctional family saga. The dust-cover is misleading. It shows a very black black in a judge’s wig, looking thoughtful and gleaming with sweat. Judge Savage is not like that at all. He is ‘almond-coloured’ (Parks doesn’t say whether with or without the shell), of mixed race, and was adopted by an English colonel and his wife who already had a son. They send both boys to Rugby and Oxford. Taxi-drivers recognise Daniel as a toff. He is as humane and good as he is clever and sceptical. His two strongest impulses are for ‘helping and leching’. The second is

Philip Hensher

A nasty old person from Persia

I have to register a strong complaint about the misleading and opportunistic title of this book; it is not about ‘the Great Game’ as the phrase is usually understood. Various interesting and valuable attempts, such as the studies by Peter Hopkirk, have made the case that the British/Russian rivalry for control over Central Asia not only continued into the Soviet era, but is plausibly still going on. But no one will expect a book with this title to be about 20th-century Iran. Nor is it as general as the title implies; I would love to read a dashing book which deserves this title. There are excellent English books on Persia