Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Elisa Segrave

Angels and ministers of grace

Despite its provocative title, this is not a salacious book. Any reader hoping for disclosures about Woolf’s lesbian love affairs will be disappointed. But do we really need another book on Virginia Woolf when there are already two excellent biographies, by Quentin Bell and Hermione Lee, and numerous essays – such as Helen Dunmore’s perceptive Virginia Woolf and her Relationships with Women in Issue 23 of the Charleston Magazine? Wouldn’t we do better to reread Woolf’s own extraordinary prose in, say, The Waves, which I am now doing, encouraged, I admit, by reviewing the above? Vanessa Curtis is co-founder of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain and editor of

Patrick Skene-Catling

Putting the ha back in Ithaca

‘Yes,’ writes the eponymous narrator of this exceptionally clever, vivacious account of sibling rivalry, ‘there are many wax dolls on the shelves of my memory and I make sure I still twist the pins now and again, in passing.’ The dolls most vindictively pierced are those representing her twin sister and her mother. There are intimations of grandfatherly child abuse and a hint of Electra complex. The family’s exotic and rancorous family history is recorded, not altogether veritably, on her laptop by Cassandra at the age of 39, a cosmopolitan, embittered Englishwoman dying of cancer in a mental asylum on Ithaca. Sounds a bit grim? Strangely, it isn’t. Shrewd psychological

Byron Rogers

Falling among fans

I remember the day, the time, the place. Discussing the world’s news with the village butcher, I brought up the perjury trial, and he said, ‘Who?’ Silent among the sausages in Greens Norton, I looked at him with a wild surmise. Remember this: in July 2001, it was still possible to meet an Englishman who had not heard of Jeffrey Archer. Never glad confident morning again. It is Michael Crick I feel most sorry for. When you appoint yourself a man’s personal nemesis you do not expect to find that in the process you are obliged to be a biographer to all of central casting. One by one they pop

Lucy Hugheshallett

Voices in the next room

After his father died Blake Morrison wrote an emotive and bravely candid book about him, from which Morrison pŒre emerges as an ebulliently attractive man, but also as a domineering father and an unfaithful husband. Morrison showed the manuscript to his mother. She made no objections, and only one request – that he omit the fact that she had grown up a Roman Catholic. There were people who didn’t know, she said, who might be ‘shocked’. Morrison made the change, privately wondering why she thought it necessary. It was only when she, in turn, died and he read the letters his parents wrote each other during their wartime courtship that

Graham Stewart

Faithful after his fashion

There is doubtless some passing pleasure to be had in making it into the Royal Enclosure or, failing that, the ‘Sunday Times Rich List’. But for those in political and media circles the last opportunity has passed for gaining immortality in the pages of the Pepys of our times now that the final volume of the Alan Clark diaries has been published. Part of the pleasure was the risk that inclusion entailed. A mention in the Alan Clark diaries is like playing Russian roulette with posterity. One need only think of the late Peter Morrison who, thanks to Clark’s account, is now remembered as the man who slept when he

Saturday

Alan Watkins

Coming from the wars of words

It was 1971, at the Dudley Hotel, Hove, late at night during a Tory conference, and Sir (as he then wasn’t) Max Hastings and I were discussing editorship. He was then working for the BBC. Specifically, we were talking about the editorship of the New Statesman. There was discontent there about the tenure of R. H. S. Crossman. It was felt he could not last much longer (he was to depart next year). Max thought Anthony Howard would be an excellent successor, as, indeed, he turned out to be. For himself, he was uninterested in such baubles. ‘What I really like doing,’ he said – I remember his words exactly

Raymond Carr

History from below

Professor Linda Colley is a distinguished historian. In her Britons, published in 1992, she proved that good, imaginative professional history could attract a wide public. Captives is a more complex book that demands close reading, as she unravels the ambiguities that challenge customary certainties of imperial history. The empire celebrated at Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee was ‘reimagined as inexorable and inevitable’. No one could have imagined this in the period she examines from 1600 to 1850. Time and time again, it was an empire challenged by its ‘smallness’, the incapacity of a small island to provide the manpower to run an empire. It was, as a perceptive analyst wrote in

Alan Judd

Nasty questions that need asking

Prominent in any contemporary dictionary of received opinion should be the assumption that all terrorism has ‘root causes’ that render violence ‘understandable’ because the aggrieved have ‘no alternative’. It comes with all the shock and invigoration of a cold bath to find someone arguing against this contemporary shibboleth. Alan Dershowitz believes that the assumption of ‘root causes’ smacks more of after-the-fact political justification than inductive scientific inquiry

Michael Wharton

Light from eastern windows

If the popular idea of the men who founded the British Raj as a lot of brutish pig-stickers and greedy nabobs who despised the Indians they exploited and thought their civilisation of no account still persists, this fascinating, well-researched book should be enough to dispel it. At the end of the 18th century, when the East India Company was consolidating its power and extending its possessions, a number of its officials, civil and military, struck by the splendours and mysteries about them, impressive even in their day, began to seek for knowledge of India’s past. One of the first and most notable of these ‘Orientalists’ (the word had not acquired

Timothy Mo

The spider spied ‘er

Sarah Waters is a rarity – an up and coming writer in this age of hype who actually deserves the prizes and plaudits bestowed on her, and then some more. She is not a literary dot.com but a true novelist, with strengths that are fundamental to the form rather than traditional, although all kinds of interesting experiments with language and content are bubbling through the retorts of her fiction. Whilst idiosyncratic, Fingersmith is in the tradition of The Wide Sargasso Sea, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and even of a work of drama, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Whilst Waters lives and breathes Victorian fiction, particularly the works of Dickens and

Dot Wordsworth

Master and mistress of ambiguity

Charlotte Bach was unusual even in those who stood by her: Don Smith, a gay sado-masochist with whom she was collaborating on a book called Sex, Sin and Evolution; Bob Mellors, a founder of the Gay Liberation Front, who had custody of her papers until he was murdered in his Warsaw flat; a man whose name she never knew who met her every Wednesday for several years for a meal at a Wimpy bar and a trip to the cinema, where she would play with his ‘thing’ during the trailers – although this regular engagement came to an end in 1979 when she bought a colour television and forsook the

Michael Beloff

Justice changing gear to keep up

Fifty-one years ago no one would have written this book, and, if someone had, no one would have read it. The constitution was not changing; and the judges’ role as the third arm of government would have been of interest, if at all, to lawyers only. It was minimal and marginal. Judges still proclaimed themselves as not creating law but discovering it. Their approach to statutory construction was literal, not purposive; indeed some tended to regard legislation with the disdain of a supercilious examiner for the work of an under-educated schoolboy. The concept of public law had not yet permeated the judicial mind: the courts even held that natural justice

David Caute

Great helmsman or mad wrecker

KOBA THE DREAD: LAUGHTER AND TWENTY MILLIONby Martin AmisCape, £16.99, pp. 306, ISBN 0224063030 Eric Hobsbawm is arguably our greatest living historian – not only Britain’s, but the world’s (as the torrential translation of his oeuvre tends to confirm). The global reach of his knowledge and culture, his formidable linguistic armoury, his love of jazz (although the saxophone was banished by Stalin), and his acute readings of personalities (though not Stalin’s) are invariably conveyed in a prose measured yet fluent. Perhaps there is no substitute for an ZmigrZ background, for schooling in Vienna and Berlin before arriving at Marylebone Grammar School and King’s College, Cambridge. Even the drawback of having

Hugh Massingberd

Lord of loony laughter

Of all my heroes whom I have been fortunate enough to encounter in the flesh, none was more friendly and relaxed than Peter Cook. Unlike some previously worshipped from afar, he was completely lacking in self-importance and had an almost puppyish desire to amuse – as well as a generous readiness to be amused. As he wove surreal fantasies about odd items he had spotted in the pile of newspapers he was clutching or cheerfully elaborated upon snippets he had picked up from watching trashy daytime television programmes, Cook still – not long before his death in 1995 – seemed more like an unaffected undergraduate than ‘The Comic Legend Gone

Natasha Mann

Punjabi moon

The 2002 Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize winner. There were more than 100 entries from a total of eight countries. The runners-up were Clementine Cecil, Gregory Lascelles, Jonathan Ledgard, Rory Stewart and Ben Yarde-Buller. Just below us we could hear the chowkidar tut-tut-tutting his disapproval on the ground with his stick, pacing up and down, tut, tut, tut, while we two sat together on the flat-topped roof above, our backs to the Lahore skyline. Behind us the plains of the Punjab had been swallowed whole by a syrupy blackness, the villages, the wheat fields and beyond that the border with India. We were sitting in darkness. Tut. Tut. Tut. The chowkidar

Saturday

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Sins against theology and haberdashery

From the time I was a little girl, long before I knew I wanted to be a writer, I had three ambitions which I felt that I must achieve in order fully to realise my potential as an adult. And they were: to take drugs, to sleep with Jews and to be notorious. In short, I wanted to be a bohemian, even though I had never heard the word. Well, I certainly did what I set out to do, but by the age of 35 the idea of the bohemian life held a beat too long fair turned my stomach, and I embraced Hove, the Church of England and strict

Beryl Bainbridge

A whodunnit below zero

The more one reads about polar exploration in previous centuries, the more one comes to the conclusion that men were different in times gone by, stronger, wilder, possessed of an almost perverse capacity to withstand cold and hunger. They travelled without the benefit of radios, thermal underwear or light-weight sledges; when things went wrong no aeroplanes would zoom in to rescue those in danger. Captain Scott and three of the four men who accompanied him on the final slog to the South Pole were well on their way to the grave by the time the return journey began. Oates and Scott had gangrene from frostbite, and Taff Evans was losing

Paul Fox

A window on the world

It is two years since Panorama was shunted out of peak time on BBC1 into exile late on Sunday night. There were one or two protests, but the BBC reassured its critics that ‘we will strengthen the News’. Two years on, the Six o’Clock News has the agenda of a second-rate tabloid newspaper and the Ten o’Clock News is about to be decimated by the departure of its heavyweights, Michael Burck and Peter Sissons. Allegedly ‘too old’ (i.e. wise and worldly), they will be replaced by a presenter who calls in a figure called Fergus to explain the significance of the news. The current BBC regime ignores such a lowering

Ronald Mutebi

A very African story

The voices we rarely hear in literature are those of the children of the men and women who have shaped modern Africa. The parents leave behind fulsome, instructive, self-justifying autobiographies as a matter of routine, but little is ever known of the plight of their offspring. Conditioned by the knock-on effects of their parents’ actions and causes, their careers are often made or destroyed by the way they carry that legacy, especially if that legacy includes personal tragedy. A notable exception was In the Shadow of the Saint, Ken Wiwa’s remarkably frank book published a few years ago. The world had come to know his father, Ken Saro Wiwa, as

Oliver Rackham

Trees with personality

The English have loved ancient trees for centuries, have celebrated them in story and poetry, have given them names, sung songs and danced dances in their honour, have invested them with railings, plaques and chains. Artists and photographers have tried to portray special trees, along with special horses, people and pigs: notably Strutt in 1822 with his Sylva Britannica, or portraits of Forest Trees distinguished for their Antiquity, or Menzies in 1864 with early photographs of the remarkable trees of Windsor Great Park. Today most professional photographers are ill at ease with trees of character. Many tree books, even those concerned with identification, are illustrated with boring, straight foresters’ trees,