Maurice Baring is one of those writers of whom it is periodically said that he is unjustly forgotten and ripe for reappraisal. In his own lifetime, he was a prolific and popular author: a uniform edition of his work published by Heinemann in 1925 lists over 50 works — novels, plays, anthologies, poetry, memoirs and
A couple of weeks ago I was at the Wigtown Book festival where I had been invited to give the first Magnus Magnusson Memorial Lecture. Magnus had been a great supporter of this festival — and no wonder, for it is quite charming — ever since it began when Wigtown was chosen as Scotland’s official
It’s a dangerous business, oral history, at least when you try it in Russia. Without oral history a complete history of the Soviet Union is almost impossible to write. Archival documents are dry, containing only the official point of view; memoirs, often written years later, are unreliable and frequently slide over important details. In an
Attempts to anatomise the Bright Young People of the 1920s have included Beverley Nichols’s The Sweet and Twenties (1958), Martin Green’s Children of the Sun (1977) and Humphey Carpenter’s The Brideshead Generation (1989). Osbert Sitwell called Nichols the first of the Bright Young People and Nichols claimed to be the last of them. D. J.
In May this year Scotland had an election for its parliament. I was in London a couple of months earlier and was surprised by the blank stares with which some of my English friends greeted my remark that we were facing a very interesting political situation north of the Border. Some people, it seemed, did
It is a commonplace to say that novelists should be judged by their work rather than their private lives or their publicly expressed views. And writers, of course, subscribe enthusiastically to this idea. It is true that it is usually for their books that novelists reserve their most considered and ordered thoughts; but the fact
In her introduction to this extraordinary memoir, Etti Plesch warns the reader that the life she is about to describe will seem unfashionable as it contains no ‘stories of great suffering’. True enough. As recounted in Horses & Husbands, Etti’s 99 years seemed to have been passed at a level of luxury and self-indulgence almost
Jennifer Johnston is adept at economy. Here is a short novel in which the eight characters are introduced one by one, with minimum fuss — some dialogue, a brief reference by someone else — and their complex relationships obliquely revealed. Complex indeed are these connections. ‘I am gay, bent, queer, homosexual, call it what you
Piers Brendon does not much like the British empire. In over 650 pages of closely researched, patronising disdain he uses his Stakhanovite labour to perform a smug hatchet job on empire- builders, administrators and the British military. He warns us in his introduction what to expect: ‘Less emphasis is placed here on triumphs than on
This could have been a wonderful book. Take a scene from it which could so easily have been the start of a film. It is the 1920s, and in the garage of a large stockbroker’s mansion in the Home Counties two youths, the spoilt and jobless sons of a rich man, are noisily tuning a
The Christmas book market is about to be flooded, if that’s the word for these somewhat juiceless jottings, by not one but two biographies of the actress Coral Browne. This dual assessment is perhaps just as well, as quite clearly there were two Coral Brownes, one a witheringly witty, ravishing (in the early 1960s she
In this his latest book Max Hastings aims not so much to write another history of the war in the Pacific but to describe ‘a massive and terrible experience, set in a chronological framework’. It is a companion volume to his Armageddon which did much the same for the last phase of the war in
A poem Inheritance It glinted on your finger all my life, Clicked on your whisky glass or the steering wheel. You used to twist it off to wash your face In restaurant Gents before we had a meal. The seal’s a warlike claymore in a fist — Though you were the most peaceable of men,
I share with Richard Mabey a love of trees. Beechcombings begins with the great storm of 1987, although Mabey’s love of trees has its origins in his childhood in the Chilterns. The childhood romance shines through. Trees were family. When I had the privilege of being Member of Parliament for Henley, and so the Stonor
Some writers have the ability to poison one’s daily existence. James Salter, I have discovered, is one of them. To read him is to be painfully reminded of how mundane, how blurry, how fatally lacking in glamour one’s own life is. Still, if you can hold such feelings at bay, reading him is also an
The following extracts are from The Blind Eye: A Book of Late Advice: Please don’t be misled by the apparent self-certainty of these utterances; be assured that after each one I nervously delete the words but that’s probably just me, right . . . I can see exactly what not to do at the moment.
A Journey into God is one of four books by Delia Smith on the subject of Christian spirituality, the others being A Journey into Prayer, A Feast for Lent and A Feast for Advent. Delia journeys into God painfully aware of her own lack of recipes. She takes the apophatic approach, describing God as what
The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau While my mother chokes on a fishbone, I am shuffled into another room to watch The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau. Bubbles rush upwards from a diver’s mouthpiece as my mother coughs up blood. Beyond the window, snowflakes rim the leafless trees. The deep teems with presences. My mother’s
There’s a wonderful story in this book, told by the biologist Lewis Wolpert, about a vistor to the office of the physicist Niels Bohr. The visitor, a fellow scientist, was astonished to see a horseshoe nailed above the Nobel laureate’s desk. ‘Surely you don’t believe that horseshoe will bring you luck?’ he said. ‘I believe
The first thing to be said about this combination of history, autobiography and polemic is how heavy it is — not in the literary sense, though it is by no means light reading, but in the literal sense that it is a surprising weight in the hand. Befitting its title, it is printed on unusually