Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Robert Oakeshott

Homage to A. B. Roger

Woodruff, you have not come to Oxford to take examinations, you have come to learn. The whole purpose of Oxford is learning. Buoyed up by the instant success of the first volume of his autobiography, William Woodruff and his English publishers have understandably decided to cash in on the Nab End brand in this, the second. As many readers will remember, The Road to Nab End – about an unusually run-down, and miserably poor neighbourhood in Blackburn – was immediately recognised as a classic account of working-class family life between the wars in what was then a Lancashire cotton town. The author had been born in 1916. The first volume

Emma Tennant

Why is a birch-tree like a melon?

This is the time of year for armchair gardening. The cold, dark days give one the chance to ignore the muddy plot outside and to sit by the fire with a heap of catalogues. As one reads the thrilling descriptions, next summer’s garden comes to life in the mind’s eye. There are no rabbits, mice, moles, whitefly or weeds to spoil the picture. Instead, the most difficult plants flourish under a sunny sky. These two mighty tomes add up to the most inspiring catalogue I have ever read even though, unlike commercial lists, the descriptions do not exaggerate. They are strictly truthful, because they are written by Dr Martyn Rix,

Nicky Haslam

She fashioned her future

Judging by her own ideals of beauty and drama, Diana Dalziel’s arrival in the world must have been a bit of a let-down. That her Scottish father’s lineage merely went back to 834, or that her mother was part of the narrow 1890s New York society, was not half as picturesque as she’d have liked. Her blood, she felt, should be throbbing with the violent purple corpuscles of a Montezuma or Genghis Khan, her skin as palely violet as that of Diane de Poitiers or Liane de Pougy. She would live in lacquer pavilions lapped by lily-scented seas, or a snowbound, bitumen-blackened reindeer yurt

Robert Macfarlane

Articles of faith

Richard Dawkins loves fighting. More precisely, he loves winning. To be Dawkinsed, as this selection from his essays of the past 25 years makes painfully clear, is not just to be dressed down or duffed up: it is to be squelched, pulverised, annihilated, rendered into suitably primordial paste. Those who incur this treatment have one thing in common: all are enemies of truth, Dawkins-style. Which is to say, all are enemies of science. In the current volume, his targets include postmodernists, bishops, religious leaders of other denominations (or ‘cloth-heads’, as he mollifyingly calls them), faith healers and New Ageists. Arch-rationalists will love these essays: others will find them by turns

Saturday

Henry Hobhouse

Liquid and solid satisfaction

Cocoa beans were ‘found’ by Europeans on Columbus’s fourth, final and failed voyage (1502). The beans were sufficiently rare to be used as currency and the beverage made from them was called ‘Food of the Gods’ and only served to Amerindian grandees like Montezuma – in his case, in gold cups. The liquid was laced, not with sugar, then unknown in the New World, but with capsicum and vanilla, both unknown in Europe, but Europeans soon preferred to make the drink with sugar, and, after a century, with Eastern spices, including cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg. In the early White’s, then a Whig club, the drink was made with milk and

Judith Flanders

I was a camera

Julia Margaret Cameron is hip. This would not have astonished her – she had every confidence in her vision as a photographer – but for many decades she has been regarded merely as the female face of the male act, someone who created pretty-pretty photographs of allegorical or religious scenes, with the odd Great Man thrown in as a make-weight. This may be changing. A Cameron exhibition opens at the National Portrait Gallery this week which will give an opportunity to reassess the work; with From Life Victoria Olsen gives a look at the life. The life was, in many ways, separate from the art. Cameron worked on photography intensively

Harriet Waugh

The hunter hunted

Abbie Devereaux, the heroine of Land of the Living, finds herself hooded and bound and a prisoner of a man who is just a whispering voice. She has a violent headache and cannot remember anything about how she has come to be lying on concrete in this damp, smelly place, or even anything leading up to her present situation. The man, who feeds her four spoonfuls of bland gluck daily and pulls down her trousers and puts her shuffling, hand-cuffed body onto a bucket once a day for her to relieve herself, smells of onions and dirt. He makes it plain that once she is sufficiently broken he will kill

Sebastian Smee

Stopping short of omniscience

Although Janet Malcolm has written in depth about an extraordinary range of subjects, from psychoanalysis and photography through to literary criticism, the art world, journalism, biography and the law, in thematic terms she has actually been one of the most consistent non-fiction writers of our time. Certainly, she is one of the most brilliant. I never feel such a keen sense of anticipation – the kind of adrenalised mental anticipation that feels almost luxurious to indulge – as when I start out on a new piece of writing by Malcolm. For some, her thematic doggedness has been a problem: launching into a book about Sylvia Path and Ted Hughes (The

Honor Clerk

A picture that tells a story

Can it be said that anyone is sane, that anyone is healthy – or does all life consist of degrees of illness and madness? Is love a kind of madness? Is grief an illness? Is art whatever we say it is, or are there limits? Can murder be art? These and many other questions hover around Siri Hustvedt’s third novel, a compassionate and gripping drama. The novel tells the story of Leo Hertzberg, an art historian at Columbia University whose life is changed when he buys a painting by Bill Wechsler and is drawn into the contemporary New York art scene. As he and Bill become friends, their histories are

Philip Hensher

A question of upbringing

Superficially, Hitler and Churchill resembled each other, in the way that two very powerful leaders will. In particular, as Andrew Roberts points out, both their careers rested on a particular sort of confidence trick, an ability to misrepresent the facts of the case and thereby inspire their followers into action. In Hitler’s case it was the malign lie that Germany’s difficulties after the Great War, and indeed the fact that they lost that war, were down to the machinations of international Jewry. In Churchill’s case, it was the benign and necessary claim that victory could be achieved by the British will alone; a claim which, throughout the country’s ‘finest hour’

Saturday

Harriet Waugh

Recent crime novels | 1 February 2003

For the last few years Ruth Rendell has used her Chief Inspector Wexford detective novels to explore social issues that have been much in the papers. This has unfortunately made for unoriginal story lines with obvious villains in an all too familiar terrain. It is a pleasure therefore to be able to report that The Babes in the Wood (Hutchinson, £16.99) returns to more traditional territory. The novel is set during the perpetual rain that we suffered last year. Kingsmarkham, the Sussex town where Wexford bestrides the police force, is in danger of flooding. The river having broken through its banks is threatening the environs of the town, which includes

Kevin Jackson

The charm of the commonplace

Where other contemporary American novelists, mandarin or popular, like to write about war in South-east Asia, corruption in the boardroom, organised crime and the alienated condition of the human soul, Nicholson Baker prefers to tackle the truly important issues of our time: how to lift a pair of underpants with your toes, how to make a bar of soap revolve in your hand by strategic squeezing, why it is perfectly permissible, indeed thoughtful, for gentlemen to relieve their bladders in the seated position traditionally favoured by ladies, the demonstrable superiority of the English spelling ‘grey’ to the standard American ‘gray’. For readers who discovered the uniquely beguiling qualities of Baker’s

Andrew Gimson

Every fair from fair sometime declines

Polly Toynbee describes herself as ‘profoundly anti-religious’, but she had the energy and curiosity to accept an ingenious challenge from a group of Christians. Church Action on Poverty wanted her to spend Lent trying to live on the minimum wage of £4.10 an hour. She duly moved out of her comfortable house and into a cheerless flat on a nearby council estate, where she tried to support herself in such badly paid jobs as hospital porter, care assistant, packer of cakes in a bakery, school dinner lady, office cleaner and telesales rep. Her book sheds light on the kind of conditions endured by what she calls ‘the bottom 30 per

Harry Mount

Our longest peace

Has anybody ever struggled for Europe? They might have struggled for British Ulster or Free France or the village green in Moreton-in-Marsh. But Europe? There are supposed to be some people around who, when they’re asked where they’re from, trumpet, ‘I’m European!’; if they really exist, they’re doing a good job of keeping themselves to themselves. Europe is such a bulky ragbag of countries with such wildly different histories, languages and customs, that to say you’re European is about as precise as saying you’re a world citizen or a sentient being or a member of the mammal family. And to try to write a history of Europe as an organic

Frank Johnson

The day I had to pour soup over a fire in Hugh Trevor-Roper’s kitchen

Hugh Trevor-Roper long refused to write his memoirs. Eventually, the firm of Weidenfeld persuaded him, if he was not going to write them, to speak them. The recipient of his reminiscences was to be a tape recorder and I. He agreed to talk to me because – I speculate – I knew him, but not too well. Also, I was not an academic and would therefore not know too much about the donnish politics that consumed him almost as much as any other kind of politics. Furthermore, I made it obvious that I idolised him. This idolising began long before I ever met him, with The Last Days of Hitler

Saturday

Raymond Carr

The triumph of outrage

In this book Russell Martin seeks to explain to the common reader how Picasso’s largest canvas, measuring 11′ 6” high and 25′ 8” long, came to be called ‘Guernica’, after a small Basque market town of some 7,000 inhabitants and how it became the painter’s best known work as an icon of the radical Left throughout the world. He achieves this by putting both the painting of the picture and its subsequent fate in their historical contexts. In 1937 Picasso had been living in France for 30 years. Yet he did not take out French nationality. Martin argues that in Paris he had become ‘more Spanish than less so’. From

Miranda France

The Paraguayan way

John Gimlette and I both won this magazine’s Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize (awarded for unconventional travel writing) and we both got book deals as a result. Winning the prize changed my life and perhaps it changed Gimlette’s, too. We should toast The Spectator regularly for our good luck. I wrote about the inhabitants of Buenos Aires and found them to be sophisticated, intellectual, vain and angry, spluttering with rage in shop queues. Gimlette has written about Paraguayans, who, he says, are surprisingly lacking in anger. They aren’t vain, sophisticated or intellectual, nor do they seem to have any unifying national characteristics. This is partly because the population is sparsely distributed

David Nokes

Classics in the classroom

There comes a time when all professors of literature think of writing a book like this. Elaine Showalter has been professing it for 40 years, and after such a long and varied career what could be more apposite or timely than to share the wisdom of such experience with her younger colleagues? The answer, I fear, is much. She should have been gently dissuaded from writing a book which ranges from the tendentious (‘methods can be overrated’) to the banal (‘the main difference between lectures and seminars was that in seminars the tutor sat down.’). One says ‘writing’, but the word is misapplied; ‘compiling’ would be a better term to

Ian Thomson

Learning the hard way

Joyce Carol Oates is a prolific, even prolix writer, with more than 50 novels and short-story collections to her name. Yet she writes wonderfully of life’s uncertainties and of American reality in the raw. In her latest novel, I’ll Take You There, Oates returns to her old themes of violence, madness and sexual passion. The plot has many devilish twists, lurching along like a gothic raree-show. We are in upstate New York in the early 1960s; a 19-year-old girl, Anellia, is studying philosophy at Syracuse University. Tiny and timorous, she is vulnerable to ridicule, and indeed her sexual and social awakening is to be troubled by bullies. A swot, Anellia

William Feaver

The usual Soho suspects

When John Moynihan was three and living with his painter parents in a flat off Primrose Hill he used to be terrified by nocturnal howls and squeals from the Regent’s Park zoo. Wetting himself, desperate to be ‘rescued from the labyrinths of an unspeakable jungle’, he was soothed by whoever happened to be around, sometimes the young Bill Coldstream, who would stand beside his ‘blabbering urine-moistened form, urging restraint’. Initiated into parental artistic circles which extended, prewar, from St John’s Wood to the New Forest, Bloomsbury and the Euston Road, Moynihan was reared in a ferment of rows and realignments. His father, Rodrigo Moynihan, had an ‘Objective Abstraction’ phase –