Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, by Robert Pogue Harrison When I was a student, my Cambridge supervisor said, in the Olympian tone characteristic of his kind, that the only living literary critics for whom he would sell his shirt were William Empson and G. Wilson Knight. Having spent the subsequent 30 years in
Cartoons and Coronets: The Genius of Osbert Lancaster, introduced and selected by James Knox It is a cliché of book-reviewing to write, of a humorous book, ‘I began reading it on a train. It made me laugh out loud several times, to my embarrassment in the crowded carriage.’ Well, it happened to me recently with
A Most Wanted Man, by John le Carré Location, location, location is as much the mantra of espionage fiction as it is of another profession’s literature celebrated for making things seem what they are not. And location, not just in the sense of topographical reality, but of mood, atmosphere and the specifics of time and
A Political Suicide: The Conservatives’ Voyage into the Wilderness, by Norman Fowler To write a political memoir is difficult. Too bland, too afraid to be rude about former colleagues, you risk boring the general reader while disappointing your publisher. Too critical, you lose the few friends among your former colleagues you have left, while appearing
One Fifth Avenue, by Candace Bushnell One of life’s intriguing mysteries was how Carrie Bradshaw managed to fund a rapacious Manolo Blahnik habit whilst spending her entire working life sitting in her knickers and vest in front of a laptop in her bedroom typing drivel about men. This was skilfully glossed over, and my enjoyment
If as a child you found your parents embarrassing then this hiss-and-tell memoir will make you feel a lot better, as Cosmo Landesman had parents who were off the Richter scale of embarrassment. Jay and Fran were two wacky, middle-aged American egotists who arrived in ‘the land of the stiff upper lip’ and caused mayhem.
Bernard Donoughue has produced several valuable books, one of them a biography of Herbert Morrison (written with George Jones) and another an account of No. 10 under the Labour governments of the 1970s, which contains the often quoted, though rarely acknowledged, observation of James Callaghan just before the 1970 election, to the effect that there
Mlinaric on Decorating, by Mirabel Cecil and David Mlinaric I wish this book weren’t so heavy. It is full of such good things that I wanted to carry it around so that at every spare moment I could have another wallow in David Mlinaric’s beautiful world. In the end I compromised and spent hours with
Churchill’s Wizards, by Nicholas Rankin Deception plays a large part in war, just as feinting plays a large part in sport. The British excel at it, and used it with much success in both the 20th century’s world wars, particularly in the second. That war’s conspiracy theorists are fond of suggesting even more deceptions than
Indignation, by Philip Roth Indignation, Philip Roth’s 29th book, is about the sophomore year of its narrator, Marcus Messner, who attends college in 1951, a time when the Korean War hangs in the background, waiting to devour America’s youth. Marcus is a brilliant student, the first of his family to enter university, but he has
Stranger in the House: Women’s Stories of Men Returning from the Second World War, by Julie Summers The second world war is big business. Television, film, novels — whole industries have evolved to bring home to us the images of a ‘just’ war. Then there are the thousands of books, on politics, economics, Hitler and
Just Me, by Sheila Hancock My Word is My Bond, by Roger Moore Me Cheeta, by Cheeta Everyone knows what the Hollywood autobiography is like. It contains the assurance that the author has been made to feel exceptionally ‘humble’ exactly at those points where someone ordinary might expect to feel smug and triumphant — a
Munich, by David Faber David Faber’s account of the Munich crisis has been published to mark the 70th anniversary of the four-power conference that made appeasement a dirty word. But it is timely as well as commemorative. True, the recent comparisons drawn between Hitler and Putin are dangerously misplaced. Nonetheless, Western politicians are finding themselves
The Stepmother’s Diary, by Fay Weldon ‘These modern, all-inclusive families of ours, created by the passing sexual interest of a couple in each other … can give birth to chaos’, observes Emily, a promiscuous north London Freud- ian analyst and mother of Sappho, the stepmother of the title. The novel begins when pregnant Sappho, on
The Act of Love, by Howard Jacobson From ‘Readers’ Wives’ to Molly Bloom, the idea of a man somehow sharing his loved one sexually is a common and complex one. ‘No man has ever loved a woman and not imagined her in the arms of someone else’, asserts Felix Quinn, the pompous narrator of Howard
Italy’s participation in the first world war was so far from being inevitable that it took nearly nine months for the country’s government to decide on which side they should fight. In the first week of August 1914, Italian troops were massed close to the French border, ready to invade, and General Cadorna was drawing
Using the Oxford Junior Dictionary (1979), by Philip Pullman Before Lyra, before polar bears and His Dark Materials, and before his first children’s book, Count Karlstein, in 1982, Philip Pullman was a lowly drudge in the very humblest halls of lexicography. Pullman in fact spent his earliest career in teaching, working at various Oxford middle
No life of quiet desperation for Ansel Adams (1902-84). He was at his happiest tramping around the sublime countryside of the American West, with a camera and tripod strapped to his back, taking photographs of the mountains, canyons, rivers, forests and clouds he met along the way. And what photographs they are! Their warmth and
Allan Massie on Life & Letters ‘Reviewing two books about Hemingway in The Spectator (19 August 2006) Caroline Moorehead asked: ‘How far is it right for biographers to write about subjects they so patently dislike? Hemingway is portrayed as bullying, narcissistic, foul-tempered, slovenly and miserly.’ No doubt he was all these things, some of the
Leviathan or, The Whale, by Philip Hoare On the beautiful jacket of this book, a whale disappears from view. Its blue flukes are all that are left behind as its body slips away unseen. That tail-only view has become what we know of the whale. It is the picture of our ignorance. We don’t know