Book review

Most crime novels offer a curious kind of escape, to places that jag the nerves and worry the mind. Their rides of suspense give a good thrill, but it’s rarely a comfortable one. If it’s cosy detection we’re after, we usually look to the past, as Dylan Thomas clearly did: ‘Poetry is not the most important thing in life… I’d much rather lie in a hot bath reading Agatha Christie and sucking sweets.’  Rennie Airth, with his series of John Madden mysteries, provides a middle way, and one that in many ways feels altogether nobler. The Reckoning is the fourth of Madden’s cases. It sees our man in retirement from

The Yale Center for British Art holds the largest collection of British art outside the UK. An impressive collection it is too, largely bequeathed by Paul Mellon of the American banking dynasty. He holidayed in England as a child before the first world war and, having developed a taste for ‘dappled tan cows in soft green fields’, began acquiring British works on natural history as a young man. In this book, Elisabeth R. Fairman, a curator of rare books at Yale, has gathered images, largely from the collection, of all that the British countryside has to offer, recorded by artists and naturalists from the 16th century to the present day.

This has all the appearance of a book invented by a publisher. Two years ago W. Sydney Robinson published an excellent biography of the Victorian newspaperman W.T. Stead. How best to follow this? No attractive subject for another full-scale biography suggested itself. Why not therefore fill in time by writing long essays on four worthies from the generation that followed Stead? And so we have: ‘A Daring Reassessment of Four Twentieth Century Eccentrics: Sir William Joynson-Hicks, Dean Inge, Lord Reith and Sir Arthur Bryant.’ The only trouble is that the reassessment is not particularly daring and the characters hardly at all eccentric. Joynson-Hicks — ‘Jix’ as he was usually referred

‘Every schoolboy knows who imprisoned Montezuma and who strangled Atahualpa.’ Macaulay, anticipating Gove, was complaining that the schoolboys by contrast did not get enough about Clive and the British conquest of India. Hugh Thomas, in this and in the two previous volumes of his trilogy on the Spanish empire, presumes that we have all forgotten about Montezuma and Atahualpa, and argues that we do not appreciate Spain’s imperial achievements. He is probably right, and he sets one off to speculate why. Take Philip II himself. He was musical, owning ‘ten clavicords, thirteen vihuelas, and sixteen bagpipes’. He had a library of 14,000 books, which we would consider more to his

Before writing this review I spent an hour looking for my original Pevsner paperback on Cornwall, published in 1951 (the first in the ‘Buildings of England’ series). It was falling apart, but I always took it with me on an architectural jaunt, together with my father John Betjeman’s Shell Guide to Cornwall, of course. The two books were good companions. The Pevsner was littered with notes in the margin, made by my dad, like ‘absolute balls,’ ‘what?’ or ‘wrong’ underlined. (I did not find the tattered book and can only conclude that some light-fingered book dealer has stolen it within the last year.) Admittedly there were inaccuracies but with no

John Gerard, a Jesuit priest immured in the Tower of London in 1597, and tortured by being hung from manacles until he temporarily lost the use of his arms, was a resourceful as well as courageous fellow. Dependent on the kindness of his jailer, a warder named Bonner, for such intimacies as washing, dressing and shaving, Gerard also persuaded the turnkey to bring him a bag of oranges. Regaining the use of his hands, he employed the fruit for two purposes: to fashion crosses and rosaries from the discarded peel, and to make invisible ink from the juice. Using this secret script, and writing with a toothpick, Gerard made contact