Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Simon Courtauld

Magnificent joint venture

One might think that Henry Kamen, having written books on Spain in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, on the Inquisition, on Philip II and on the War of the Spanish Succession, had just about done, not to say saturated, the period. But no – he has apparently not covered the Spanish empire to his satisfaction; and so we have the present volume, spanning the years 1492-1763. There is no doubting Kamen’s scholarship, much of it drawn from Spanish texts, as he moves magisterially over the centuries: from his setting of the 16th-century European scene under Charles V, to the conquests of the New World, to the sea-change in Spain’s

Sebastian Smee

Naughty but nice

The first story in this very fine collection takes the most risks, not unlike its protagonist. Ariel, a sophisticated, self-aware, American wife pays for two high-class prostitutes to entertain her wealthy Italian husband: ‘It’s a birthday present,’ she explains over the phone, trying hard to picture the girl on the other end of the line as she speaks. The idea is the suggestion of her husband’s provocative friend, Flavio, for whom Ariel has come to feel affection. Five or six years ago, Flavio ‘gave up trying to seduce Ariel, and settled for the alternative intimacy of tormenting her subtly whenever they meet’. But to this particularly intimate taunt Ariel has

Mary Keen

Finding Paradise in your own back garden

Gardening is the nation’s hobby. It is worth around £3 billion in annual business, much of it generated by television makeovers. No one is letting on that what keeps us spending is the pursuit of a dream. Makeovers are showbiz, brilliant marketing tools, but Eldorado will never be found at B & Q or the garden centre. Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall’s new book, The Garden: An English Love Affair (Weidenfeld, £25) takes a beguiling look at what gardens have meant to us over the last 1,000 years. Garden histories, for the general reader, tend to employ recycled facts to demonstrate a bewildering number of trends, but recent books have tried different perspectives.

Graham Stewart

New figures in our national story

In the first two volumes accompanying his History of Britain television series, Simon Schama had a clear framework in which to work. Essentially he told of the dynastic struggles of kings, queens and pretenders, adding a little bit of plague here and a touch of religious fervour there as and when it became necessary to discuss lesser mortals. In Professor Schama’s hands, the technique worked well, but there was no prospect that he could sustain such an approach in this third and final volume, covering the period between the dawn of an independent America and midnight’s false bonhomie on the Greenwich peninsula. Instead, Schama had a few options. He could

Andrew Roberts

A good tale spoilt in the telling

Michael Dobbs is a charming, intelligent and self-effacing man, but you would not have guessed it from the blurb on the dust-jacket of his latest political thriller. ‘Michael Dobbs always makes an impact,’ it tells us. He has worked with prime ministers, written about kings, and always seems to be in the right spot at vital moments in history. His experiences have led him to be described as a man who, in Latin America, would have been shot. How can he possibly have approved this guff? Winston’s War has an intriguing plot, based on the real-life meeting between Guy Burgess and Winston Churchill at Chartwell at the time of the

Henry Hobhouse

Can you spot the difference?

FAUNA BRITANNICAby Duff Hart-DavisWeidenfeld, £30, pp. 415, ISBN 0297825321 Time was that this sort of confusion did not occur. In the days when ‘publishing was a business for gentlemen’, the aforesaid gents would meet for luncheon (‘Your Club or mine?’); they would agree that they would not each publish a book with the same title at the same time. If unable to agree as to who would concede, they would probably toss a coin, winner to have the title. In these more commercial days, with plenty of regulations against collusion and combination, we have two apparently similar books with the same title purporting to meet the same demand. And do

Jane Ridley

The self-promoting recluse

‘If Charles Darwin had spent the first half of his life in the world of Jane Austen, he now stepped forward into the pages of Anthony Trollope.’ Thus Janet Browne begins what must at times have seemed an almost impossible task: how to write an interesting book about the second half of Darwin’s life. When this book opens, Charles Darwin is 49. On his desk sits an unwieldy pile of papers, the unfinished manuscript of the interminable book on the origin of species which he has been working on for longer than he cares to admit. At Down House in Kent, Darwin lives comfortably on a private income, but this

Jane Gardam

The lines are immaterial

I once met a thoroughly heterosexual old naval officer who had been a midshipman on the ship that sailed to Gallipoli with Rupert Brooke on board, the voyage during which Brooke died. I asked him what Brooke had been like. He said at once, ‘He was a god. Extraordinary beauty, law to himself. Like Lord Byron, I expect. There are these people.’ Fiona MacCarthy says towards the end of her thoroughly researched and very readable 600-page biography of Byron, the first to come from John Murray, keeper of the Byron flame, for nearly half a century, that ‘there are always private reasons behind the choice of a biographical subject’. She

Philip Hensher

Master of the shrug

Long long ago, they used to say that the difference between the Hohenzollerns and the Habsburgs was this. In Berlin, the situation was always serious, but not hopeless. In Vienna, on the other hand, the situation was invariably hopeless, but not serious. It should never be forgotten that Billy Wilder, that most adorable of film directors, was in origin, and at heart always remained, Viennese. That is the case, despite his long and wonderful career in America, and despite the fact that what, for me, is his best film, One, Two, Three, is a Berlin movie. The subject of the ZmigrZs from Germany and Austria to Hollywood is a fascinating

Saturday

Emma Tennant

People + places = life

You may never have heard of David Gentleman, because, unlike so many of the over-publicised charlatans who call themselves artists nowadays, he does not believe in personality cults. He is as modest as he is talented, which is saying something. But, even if you do not know his name, you will almost certainly have licked hundreds of stamps that he has designed, walked past his mural on Charing Cross Underground station, seen his National Trust acorn logo, read a Penguin book adorned with one of his drawings, or been influenced by a hard-hitting Gentleman poster. His work is a force for good. It celebrates the beauty of the world. It

Charles Allen

The banditry plays on

Forty years ago V. S. Naipaul enraged Indians by describing India as ‘an area of darkness’. He also upset a great many Western liberals who were then discovering in India a land of all-pervading spirituality. Later, he returned to India to write more kindly about ‘a wounded civilisation’ undergoing a liberation of spirit through ‘rage and revolt’. Which leads me to Kevin Rushby’s new travel book, subtitled ‘Through India in Search of Bandits, the Thug Cult and the British Raj’, which takes India’s liberation through rage and revolt as its central theme. It deals chiefly with the phenomenon and subsequent legacy of India’s notorious cult of the Thug or ‘deceiver’,

Eric Christiansen

When the consumer was king

Books as glossy as this are seldom as good as this. It is a sort of economic miracle in itself: fat, quarto-size, packed with illustrations, maps and plans, wide-margined, legibly typeset, efficiently proof-read, Hong Kong printed and priced under £25 hardback. It would almost be worth buying if it were a politician’s memoirs or a cookery book. The difficulty is to explain that late mediaeval commercial history can be worth reading about at any price, even with the assurance that this is the distillation of a life’s work by a much-admired master of the subject. Professor Spufford is the currency pundit. Should you ever wish to know how many stivers

John Colvin

A country to die for

Finland declared independence from Russia in 1917 during the Bolshevik revolution. The subsequent civil war ended in victory by the White forces under Marshal Baron Gustav Mannerheim, a former officer in the uniform of the Tsar, later to become commander-in-chief of the Finnish army in the Winter War of 1939/40. Mannerheim had been a chevalier garde to the Romanov royal court in St Petersburg. Passionate about baroque ceremony, he yet fought well in the savage Russo-Japanese war of 1904-05, travelled for the Tsar for over five years in wild Central Asia, including Tibet, and served with distinction under Bushilov in the first world war, before the imperial defeat by the

Alan Wall

Falstaff in a wig and gown

Rumpole is Falstaff on the right side of the law. He is rumbustious, shrewdly distrustful of authority and filled with substantial appetites others find gross. Leo McKern’s television incarnation was unforgettable; his face had been hardened by confronting the world’s absurdities and mangled by the rigorous pursuit of his own pleasure. One was reminded of Evelyn Waugh: ‘The heavy port drinker must be prepared to make some sacrifice of personal beauty and agility.’ One must substitute claret for port, of course, the Ch

Philip Ziegler

An eye for the unexpected

After his mountainous Gladstone and Churchill and barely less substantial study of the post-1886 chancellors of the exchequer, Roy Jenkins here enjoys himself in what by his standards is a mere jeu d’esprit. His new book is a collection of essays on 12 cities which he has lived in or often visited and which are in some way intertwined with his life. It is not, he emphasises, a disguised second shot at an autobiography: ‘One navel-gazing is wholly permissible,’ he writes. ‘Two would point to self-obsession.’ But the essays are intensely personal: this is Jenkins’s Paris, Jenkins’s Bonn, seen through his eyes and lit by recollections of his visits. There

Angela Huth

The snake in paradise

The title is a slight puzzle, a tease. But quickly all becomes clear. Here is a book of painful but fictional recollections recounted by fictional novelist Imogen Bailey, which in turn become a real novel of both power and delicacy. Imogen, a young woman of great sensibility, was traumatised by the loss of her beloved brother Johnny, who swam out to sea when Imogen was in her late teens, and never returned. Rendered speechless by this tragedy, Imogen was sent by her parents to a nursing home to recover from her breakdown. Thirty years after her brother’s death, looking back, remembering, she tries to sort out the truth from the

William Feaver

Very trying indeed

Ralph Steadman has always employed graphic spatter. The pen jabs, the ink spurts and – yoiks! – how the victims suffer. Eyes popping, they retch, they convulse, they become pinstriped roadkill. The projectile handling has extended from cartoons to illustrations (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) to caricature-biographies of Sigmund Freud and Leonardo da Vinci. In Doodaaa the spatter hits the fan. A ‘Triography’ he calls it, meaning, I guess, a ‘Try-anything-once’. My, how he tries. He begins with drinks-all-round acknowledgments and several preambles before introducing the reader to his alter ego ‘Gavin Twinge’, a name with a Goon Show ring to it, a narrative conceit that one might have

Interconnect

Bruiser, cruiser but no boozer

The subject of this intelligent biography was among the founders of the Modern movement in British art before the first world war, and a leading formulator of what he considered to be its principles. A philosopher/aesthetician, he was a friend of Epstein, Wyndham Lewis, Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska, and was thought a great poet by the young T. S. Eliot. Ezra Pound published Hulme’s five short poems at the end of one of his own books, entitling them The Collected Poetical Works of T. E. Hulme. A joke, of course, but they consist of the pictorial, of images; publicist Pound borrowed a word from the French and founded the Imagist school. Hulme

Allan Mallinson

Waiting for the Bogeyman

On 19 August 1805, two months before his death at Trafalgar, Vice-Admiral Lord Nelson rejoined Emma Hamilton at their home in Merton after an absence of almost two and a half years. During that time, he had been continuously at sea, at first in the Mediterranean watching for Admiral Villeneuve to break out of Toulon to join the squadrons from the Atlantic ports, and then in the Atlantic itself, where the French tried to lure him into the Caribbean before dashing back to concentrate in the Channel to cover the invasion of England and Ireland. Meanwhile the people of the eastern and southern counties especially lived in fear of the

Lee Langley

Accentuating the positive

There was a time when our man at the BBC was the most famous foreign correspondent in India, his broadcasts reaching one fifth of the world’s population. Road-blocks and armed insurgents tended to melt when confronted by Tully-sahib, the man to trust, who understood the problems. For 30 years he trawled the sub-continent, covering its social, political, personal and religious upheavals, but his career with the BBC ended in 1994 after a doomed attempt to point out to John Birt, in a public forum, the error of his broadcasting ways. There have been many journeys in Mark Tully’s life, the first from India, where he was born in 1936, going