More from Books

A war of words

Resistance: Memoirs of Occupied France, by Agnès Humbert Paradoxically, wrote Jean Paul Sartre, never had French intellectuals been so free as they were under the German occupation, for having lost all normal rights to speak out, each was forced to question every thought and ask himself: ‘Rather than death…?’ In practice, most of the writers

A crisis of confidence

The Believers, by Zoë Heller Zoë Heller’s Notes on a Scandal won wide publicity and was deservedly praised for its depiction of female malice and the unhappiness that fosters it. Her present novel is so markedly different that it might have been written by another hand. This is no mean feat, but the effect is

No love lost

It has been famously written, and often observed, that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Never was this truer than in the case of the Wittgensteins, who were also, some of them, crazy. I take notes in books for review and in this one I wrote ‘nuts’ 23 times. Ludwig, the famous

Going the distance

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, by Haruki Murakami There’s nothing tremendous, startling, or even revelatory about Haruki Murakami’s latest book. The whole exercise is too pointedly modest for that. But it’s a likeable and often rewarding excursion into the writer’s experiences as a runner. It’s also, perhaps inevitably, about Murakami’s life

A passage from India

Sea of Poppies, by Amitav Ghosh, read by Lyndham Gregory Ever been called a ‘dung-brained gubberhead’ or had your face compared to ‘a bandar’s bunghole’? Welcome aboard the Ibis, a rancid former slaving schooner now transporting migrants, coolies, criminals and opium from Calcutta to China. Here amidst the pounding seas we have the perfect backcloth

More nattering please

There are writers so prolific that one wants to shout, ‘Oh, do give it a rest!’ There are others so costive that one wants to shout, ‘Oh, do get a move on!’ It is into the second of these categories that Francis Wyndham falls. This 403-page volume contains all the fiction, three books in total,

Perhaps the greatest?

Alasdair Gray: A Secretary’s Biography, by Rodge Glass It would be easier to write a biography of Alasdair Gray if he were Chinese. There would be no need to divide image from word, myth-making from realism, truth from ideology. He would be reverentially portrayed as a master of pictography conveying the struggle for harmony between

Stepping-stones of his past self

Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, by Paul Theroux When Paul Theroux set off from Victoria Station in 1973 his plan was to cross Europe and Asia, taking as many trains as he needed to get him to Tokyo, returning on the Trans-Siberian Express. From the four-month journey came a travel book that was not

Of zyzzyva and syzygy

Letterati: An Unauthorised Look at Scrabble and the People Who Play it, by Paul McCarthy Make no mistake: Scrabble is a brutal game. Given a chance to foil an opponent, the dearest friend will turn sly and dogmatic. No surprise then to discover that in North America Scrabble is a cut-throat business, in which computer-generated

When we lost our mojo

Eden, the only male British prime minister known to have varnished his fingernails, was easily the best-looking individual, of either sex, to occupy that office in the 20th century. With Our Times, A. N. Wilson concludes the sequence of British history books he started in The Victorians, and the sentence that opens his chapter on

All things to all men

Michael X: A Life in Black and White, by John Williams Poor Michael. His life became a complete mess and in 1975, aged 41, he was hanged for murder in the prison in Port of Spain, Trinidad. One of the victims was his young cousin, Skerritt, a local barber; the other, more sensationally, was an

Adventures of a lost soul

Ettie: The Intimate Life and Dauntless Spirit of Lady Desborough, by Richard Davenport-Hines There was something not quite right about Lady Desborough. Richard Davenport-Hines, in this intelligent and well-written book, extols her charm, her wit, her courage, her vitality, her infinite capacity to convince any man that he was uniquely talented and the only person

A city frozen in time

Pompeii, by Mary Beard In the early morning of 25 August AD 79 Mount Vesuvius blew its top. First came a rain of pumice stones; the roofs of Pompeii collapsed under their weight. Worse was to come: a burning lava, flowing at great speed against which no living being could survive. Pompeii was a city

Surprising literary ventures | 10 September 2008

Ruth Rendell, it turns out, as well as being the queen of ‘adventure sex’, is a furious decentraliser. In this small book of 1989 she argues not only for devolution for Scotland and Wales but autonomy for the English regions and a ‘cantonisation’ of the UK along Swiss lines. Undermining the Central Line is nothing

Bright sparks of the Dark Ages

Travelling Heroes: Greeks and Their Myths in the Epic Age of Homer, by Robin Lane Fox In Book II of the Iliad, Homer describes for the first time a Greek advance across the plain of Troy. Various similes are deployed to convey its impact, most of them precise and vivid, as Homer’s similes invariably are.

A far cry from Paradise

This strange novel is described as a ghost story, although it reads like a nervous breakdown in which both writer and reader are embedded. So constricted is the narrative that the central figure, Jim Smith, delivers no opinion of his own, although his past life appears to have been full of incident: extensive travel, a

Life and Letters | 6 September 2008

‘The result is a minor masterpiece, so good that one can even forgive the author’s affected forays into demotic English (‘don’t’ and ‘wouldn’t’ for ‘did not’ and ‘would not’, etc.).’ Setting aside the writer’s mistake — ‘don’t’ being the contraction of “do not” rather than ‘did not’ — this sentence brought me up sharp ,

A chilly professional

The Forgotten Prime Minister: The 14th Earl of Derby, by Angus Hawkins Who was the 14th Earl of Derby? He was three times Conservative prime minister, but few people have heard of him today. He became leader of the Tory rump after Peel smashed the Conservative party in 1846, and he remained leader until ill