Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Michael Beaumont

The young woman and the sea

When Ellen Macarthur was nine she saved her pocket money, by eating less, to buy her first little boat and slept on the floor of her bedroom so as to store the boat’s mast and sails. At 18 she decided that sailing round Britain alone ‘seemed to be the most natural thing to do’. At 24 she raced alone single-handed around the world, was the fastest woman ever to do so and was only just beaten into second place in the race. Taking on the World is her autobiography. She is 26. The book is a thrilling adventure story, more interesting perhaps if you know a little of sailing and

The Spectator

Christmas Books II

Hugh Massingberd ‘It is difficult’, writes A. N. Wilson in The Victorians (Hutchinson, £25), ‘for me to conceive of a more agreeable life than that of a Victorian country parson.’ Reading his brilliantly panoramic, constantly stimulating and humanely wise portrait of an age and the characters who created it left me longing to have been one of the Reverend Wilson’s parishioners – well, all right, the squire. Country-house owners ignorant of architectural history (one Irish ch

Saturday

Theo Richmond

Growing up the hard way

You don’t have to be Jewish to find this book rewarding, but you do need to be interested in humanity: every page seethes with it. There are no gruesome Holocaust testimonies: the youthful authors of these autobiographies, written in Poland in the years leading up to the second world war, had no premonition of the horrors to come. Standing on the threshold of life, they could not know how few of their generation would live to cross it. These writings emerged from three literary contests held in Poland during the 1930s. The organisers invited Jews between the ages of 16 and 22 to write about their everyday lives, their memories

Helen Osborne

Heroes, villains and bugbears

Unlike most journalistic cobble jobs, this collection of Nigel Farndale’s interviews from the Sunday Telegraph has a real sparkle: intelligent, irreverent and often unexpectedly kindly. It makes you laugh and, occasionally, it makes you gasp. Over the past five years he has quietly garnered a reputation as one of the best inquisitors, up there with Lynn Barber if not yet so fearsome. After absorbing all that holy writ from rampant egos, most interviewers end up feeling like a piece of old blotting-paper and pull out of the game. Farndale is still resilient. Flirtation, Seduction, Betrayal – for him the weekly confrontation is an encapsulated love affair. He does his homework

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Simple, spray-painted slogans

An awful lot has happened since the Canadian journalist Naomi Klein shot to radical prominence with the publication of No Logo, the first sacred text of the anti-globalisation movement, shortly after her co-religionists besieged the 1999 world trade talks in Seattle. They went on to wreck the World Bank/IMF meeting in Prague and, less successfully, to try to disrupt the G7 Genoa summit in July 2001, though we now know that the extraordinarily heavy security which thwarted them at Genoa was primarily designed to ward off murderous Al-Qaeda terrorists, rather than paint-spraying, slogan-chanting anti-globalisers. Two months later, anarchic protests against the symbols of world trade suddenly looked out of place,

Sam Phipps

A damned dark dozen

Indelible Acts is A. L. Kennedy’s first book of fiction since Everything You Need, which was followed by a spell of suicidal desperation. We know all about that from On Bullfighting, her patchily received foray into the world of the matador which was only partly about matadors and partly about herself and her suicidal desperation. With fiction it’s different, of course; you’re not supposed to confuse author and content or to assume any link. Still, whatever the state of Kennedy’s mind and emotions now, the predominant quality of these 12 stories – the common denominator – is, sad to say, gloom. And not always an interesting gloom at that. The

Mary Keen

. . . and truncheons and snowdrops

Alistair McAlpine, one-time treasurer of the Tory party, is not a conventional fellow. A picker up of unconsidered trifles, he has in his time collected truncheons, chickens and snowdrops. He gets crazes and then he moves on: whole collections go under the hammer. ‘No object or painting has such beauty that I could not bear to part with it,’ he writes. Eclecticism is his game. In his houses, the beautiful and the strange come and go, but in Lord McAlpine’s head he keeps the oddities that have appealed to his mind. Rich men can go anywhere, whenever they like, and the insatiable curiosity of this one has taken him all

Patrick Skene-Catling

Skeletons of mermaids . . .

Private collections of miscellaneous oddities, valuable works of art and all sorts of objects, animal, vegetable and mineral, of little if any apparent intrinsic value, are collectors’ emblems of the world in miniature, microcosmic claims to the whole macrocosm. This splendid book, elegantly analytical and lavishly illustrated, makes the collectors’ obsession understandable to the point of envy. How convenient it would be if all possible books could be comprehended in that hypothetical single Borgesian volume, and how gratifying it would be to own it. The truly dedicated proprietors of cabinets of curiosities seemed to aspire to nothing less, as Patrick MauriŒs demonstrates with fond sympathy. For them, the specimens secreted

Philip Mansel

Who wore the royal trousers?

Revolutions no longer seem so inevitable, nor the overthrown governments so hopeless, since the failure of the greatest of all European revolutionary regimes, the Soviet Union. In The Fall of the French Monarchy Munro Price analyses, with skill and a light touch, the policies of two celebrated royal failures, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and of some of their ZmigrZ advisers, during the first years of the French revolution. The central figure is the Baron de Breteuil, an energetic former ambassador and minister, chosen by Louis XVI to co-ordinate resistance to the revolution, both from Versailles during his brief ministry of 12-15 July 1789 and, in the opinion of Munro

Byron Rogers

Some very cross references

Mr William Donaldson, the most subversive and mischievous Englishman since Titus Oates, started his literary career with Both the Ladies and the Gentlemen, a DIY guide to brothel-keeping and the choreography of orgies. He extended it with the Henry Root Letters, in which, posing as a demented if upwardly mobile fishmonger, he entered into a correspondence with the great, the good and the gullible in public life, flattering them outrageously, even trying to slip them the odd fiver. And they, Mrs Thatcher (who kept her fiver), Esther Rantzen, and President Zia-al-Haq, innocents undented by humour, wrote back. Donaldson published the lot and held them up to ridicule. But why? What

Judith Keppel

Beating the Wet Blanket

I am not an avid television watcher, so I did not tune into Who Wants to be a Millionaire? for about a year, but when I finally did, like nearly half the nation (19 million viewers at its peak) I was gripped. At the time I was also rather poor and thinking of going to live in France. Night after night, in an atmosphere vibrating with tension, huge sums of money were being won on questions that were no harder than Trivial Pursuit, and the germ of the idea of trying to get on began to lodge in my mind. ‘How vulgar!’ said my inner Aunt Agatha. And I would

John Keegan

Servant of a theory

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy read Barbara Tuchman’s August 1914. As President George W. Bush prepares for a second Gulf war, he apparently is reading Eliot Cohen’s Supreme Command. Kennedy would have had more fun. Tuchman is a better read than Cohen. She also advances what proved in the circumstances to be important advice: leave the subordinates to deal with the telegrams while the boss keeps a clear head to decide for peace or war. Curiously, the episode itself produced a book still eminently valuable to a statesman in crisis, Robert Kennedy’s Thirteen Days. It tells how Bobby, as chairman of the Executive Committee, spared his brother Jack

A.N. Wilson

Overdone and undercooked

This is a hopeless mishmash of a book. It is over 600 pages (736 with the notes), and it only covers a mere 24 years of its subject’s life. Some reviewers would say that it was badly written, but the trouble is, it isn’t really written at all. It is hurled together, without any apparent distinction between what might or might not interest the reader. Episodes of supreme importance in the subject’s life are given less space than such things as the film reviews he dashed off (with increasing distaste for the task) for the Evening Standard. One does not mean to be unkind about the author, who has devoted

John McEwen

The gate lodge to the big house

This book succeeds The Painters of Ireland, published in 1978, which established the Knight of Glin and Anne Crookshank as supreme authorities on the subject. The update adds a further 20 years and takes account of an abundance of new research; but it remains what they describe as ‘a general survey on traditional lines’, a simple, chronological, account in what some critics of their first collaboration disapprovingly called ‘a conversational style’. What a relief, will surely be most readers’ reaction. The authors have no delusions of grandeur. They quote the artist and critic, Brian O’Doherty, who has described Irish art as ‘the gate lodge beside the big house of Irish

Michael Vestey

The reign of King John

When, in these pages, John Birt expresses wonderment at how the boy from Bootle went on to become the 12th director general of the BBC, to enter the House of Lords and be an adviser to the prime minister it is a sentiment shared by many. The clue probably lies in the brutal Irish Christian Brothers school he went to, St Mary’s in Liverpool, where beatings with the strap were carried out sadistically every day. The boys even had a name for it: Strapology. A fellow pupil at the school has since said that as a result it tended to produce authoritarian figures who also knew how to be submissive

Alan Coren

So near and yet so far from the target

High on the teetering list of all the things that, down the long arches of the hacking years, have dissuaded me from trying to cobble a novel is the dreary business of describing how the characters look. You have a picture of this person or that in your head, and your reader, having coughed up his £15.99, has every right to know what so-and-so looks like when he or she walks into a room, feels cheery or glum, gets on top or underneath this or that other person, eats his dinner, rides a horse, lands a fish, strangles his landlady, or any of the hundred-and-one things a character has to

The Spectator

Christmas Books I

Rupert Christiansen How embarrassing. The authors of the four books I have most relished this year – Nicola Shulman’s elegant monograph A Rage for Rock Gardening (Short Books, £9.99), Virginia Nicholson’s exuberant Among the Bohemians (Viking, £20), Giles Waterfield’s brilliant satire The Hound in the Left-Hand Corner (Review, £14.99) and Selina Hastings’ fascinating biography of Rosamond Lehmann (Chatto, £25) – are all friends of mine, and the etiquette of this exercise therefore inhibits me from nominating them. So I turn instead to three books which in their different ways prove profoundly illuminating of the dilemmas of 20th-century Mitteleuropa: Eric Hobsbawm’s dodgy but enthralling autobiography Interesting Times (Allen Lane, £20), Sandor

Saturday

Richard Shone

Verdict as open as ever

Readers of the thrillers of the American writer Patricia Cornwell will find elements of her new book familiar but others oddly different. Her novels are fiction closely based on fact; Portrait of a Killer purports to be a work of fact but is founded on fiction. It supposedly unravels the mystery of Jack the Ripper, a name given by the press to the most notorious serial murderer in Britain, about whom virtually nothing is known. Cornwell squarely lays these atrocious murders of East End women in 1888 at the door of the painter Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942). When this story first broke on US television late last year, Cornwell said

Charles Kennedy

The great little Welsh conjuror

It is a discomforting thought that, had the present fashion for kiss-and-tell memoirs, or the intense media scrutiny of politicians’ private lives, been in place a century ago, David Lloyd George might never have become prime minister. Yet, as this masterly fourth volume in John Grigg’s biography proves, he was a towering figure in exceptional times. Grigg picks up his story with Lloyd George’s arrival in office in December 1916. Things were at a very low ebb in the war – the troops mired in Flanders, the Somme a dreadful and present memory, and Britain’s very existence threatened by the submarine war being launched by Germany to cut our oceanic