Non-fiction

Wednesday

Juliet Townsend

Acute observations

In the 1950s, when I was 14, I spent a winter fortnight with my parents at the Villa Mauresque, which Somerset Maugham had lent to them to entertain the recently widowed Rab Butler and his daughter, Sarah. It was an uneasy holiday setting for two teenage girls. As I wrote a little apprehensively in my diary, ‘this house is lovely, but rather fragile,’ a concern which was borne out the next day when, during a pillow fight, I knocked over a full jug of orange juice with disastrous results for the immaculate upholstery. Never was a house more thoroughly permeated by the spirit of its absent owner, who looked down

William Leith

Gut instincts

Julie Powell wrote Julie and Julia, a book (and now a film) in which she described her attempts to cook a huge number of recipes by the cookery writer Julia Child. I haven’t read that book, but I get the impression that Powell, 30-ish and married to her childhood sweetheart, was going nuts, and used the cooking as a sort of therapy. Well, here she’s going nuts again, and it’s pretty serious. This time, she decides to become a butcher. At the start of the book, we find her slicing up a piece of liver and getting blood on her face. She tells us her troubles, which amount to the

Rupert Christiansen

Dancing in the dark

Kenneth MacMillan was once described as ‘the Francis Bacon of ballet’ — not an analogy that gets one very far, but there’s something in it. Kenneth MacMillan was once described as ‘the Francis Bacon of ballet’ — not an analogy that gets one very far, but there’s something in it. His obsession with victims, outsiders and extreme psychological states reflects the panic in his own tortured and alienated psyche. His choreography contains a lot of silent screaming: it brutalises the human body as much as it beautifies it. Sex in his work is presented as a violent compulsion — often a rape — rather than an ecstatic release or an

Jonathan Keates

Not so serene

Is there anything original left to say about Venice? Probably not, but that doesn’t stop the books from coming, tied in, as they mostly now are, with a television series. Is there anything original left to say about Venice? Probably not, but that doesn’t stop the books from coming, tied in, as they mostly now are, with a television series. In this context I dream of programme-makers courageous enough to eschew tacky carnival masks or mood-shots of gondola beaks reflected in muddy ripples, with Vivaldi mandolins wittering cosily over the soundtrack, but it aint gonna happen, alas. How about the areas of La Bella Dominante most visitors are too rushed

Michael Beloff

One to admire

The English Bar is no longer immune to the celebrity culture. There are lawyers’ equivalents to Hello! magazine and the Oscars ceremony; lists of the 100 most, top ten, five to follow, proliferate. But peer and public recognition do not always coincide. To that rule Michael (or more usually Mike) Mansfield is a notable exception. He is indisputably the most high- profile barrister of his generation, both within and beyond the profession, and for that reason alone his memoirs, published to celebrate what he claims to be his retirement from practice, were always likely to be of interest. Expectations are amply fulfilled. This is essentially a fascinating and passionate record

Wednesday

Margaret Macmillan

In the hands of fools

Miranda Carter certainly has a penchant for awkward, often impossible characters. Her fascinating biography of Anthony Blunt explained, as well as anyone could, that strange mixture of aesthete, snob, revolutionary and traitor. Now she turns to the three monarchs who ruled Russia, Germany and Great Britain at the outbreak of the first world war. Nicholas II, Wilhelm II and George V are not as intelligent or as interesting as Blunt but they sat at the centre of great powers and great affairs. What a strange and sad collection they were. Nicholas hated being Tsar and did his best to avoid difficult decisions. Even as Russia stumbled towards revolution he refused

Philip Hensher

Reviving a reputation

At the end of his thorough and considered life of William Golding, John Carey remarks that ‘nowadays mention of Lord of the Flies sparks recognition in a way that Golding’s own name does not, or so my admittedly limited market research has indicated.’ Can this really be true? Has Golding’s immense reputation diminished, in the 16 years since his death, to the authorship of that first novel? Carey refers elsewhere to a book signing in Oxford in 1984. In the wake of the Nobel Prize and the celebrated Booker of 1980, when Golding was thought to have won over Anthony Burgess’s magnificent Earthly Powers with Rites of Passage, the queue

Selina Hastings

House of memories

Selina Hastings recalls her visit in 1989 to Lady Beauchamp, mistress of Madresfield Madresfield: the name is now almost as lustrous with literary association as Little Gidding or Adlestrop. To the admirers of Evelyn Waugh, Madresfield is hallowed ground: ‘It’s where Waugh stayed, you know, when he was writing Brideshead Revisited. In fact Madresfield is Brideshead, and the Lygon family is the absolute model for the Flytes, for Sebastian and Bridie and Julia and so on. I mean, look at Lord Marchmain living in exile abroad with his mistress: exactly the same as Lord Beauchamp — only it wasn’t a mistress in his case, of course.’ Well, yes and no.

Wednesday

Selina Hastings

Mixing memory with desire

Rick Gekoski is an expatriate American, long established as one of the leading antiquarian book-dealers in Britain. As one might expect, books have been his passion for as long as he can remember, his reading as integral a part of his development as anything experienced in the world outside. ‘Every reading experience vibrates subtly across the jelly of being,’ he writes. ‘We are made and continually transformed by what, and how, we read.’ This autobiography, Outside of a Dog, described as a ‘bibliomemoir’, is extravagantly enjoyable, lively, candid, and wonderfully well-written. Gekoski’s first literary love affair was with Horton Hatches the Egg by Dr Seuss (‘Then they cheered and they

Raymond Carr

From Russia with love

In the last couple of decades or so, a plenitude of biographers have provided us with studies of 20th-century literary celebrities, from Thomas Hardy and George Bernard Shaw to Evelyn Waugh and T. S. Eliot. Roland Chambers now treats the life and works of Arthur Ransome, a lesser mortal than these grandees. Ransome was born in 1884, the son of a professor at what would become Leeds University. Chambers gives a clear account of Ransome’s driving ambition to be a writer. After leaving Rugby he took a job as an office boy in a publishing house at eight shillings a week. Within a few years he had become a figure

Wednesday

Molly Guinness

Missed opportunity

A World According to Women: An End to Thinking, by Jane McLoughlin The Noughtie Girl’s Guide to Feminism, by Ellie Levenson Jane McLoughlin is furious with women. We have let the feminists down and turned off the rational sides of our brains in favour of the thrilling emotional life that popular culture provides. The feminists were too intellectual and too angry with men to win the sympathy of most ordinary women, who generally liked their husbands and fathers. Instead, popular culture took possession of female psyches and has left us unthinking, disunited and unable to cope with, or even identify, reality. A lot of the time McLoughlin is convincing. Soap

Miles Johnson

The great Russian takeaway

That the rise of a powerful coterie of Russian billionaires overlapped with Britain’s transformation into an offshore tax-haven is unlikely to escape the notice of both countries’ future historians. Indeed it is entirely plausible that had successive British governments in the 1990s been less amenable to foreign wealth, this book would have been entitled Genevagrad rather than Londongrad. Mark Hollingsworth and Stewart Lansley raise interesting questions about how the rocketing price of property, contemporary art and even private school fees of early Noughties Britain, fuelled by a steady supply of roubles, contributed to the bubble preceding the bust. While there are several excellent studies of the impact of the oligarchs

Wednesday

Andro Linklater

Darkness at dawn

D-Day: The Battle for Normandy, by Anthony Beevor The Forgotten Voices of D-Day, by Roderick Bailey, in association with the Imperial War Museum Sixty-five years ago the largest seaborne assault force in history was put ashore on the beaches of Normandy. Memory of the day is now confined to a diminishing number of great-grandfathers, but the sheer scale of the landing, its drama, and its pivotal importance in the war guarantee its enduring grip on people’s imaginations. Two generations have grown up with their own versions of what happened. The first learned about it, either directly from participants or through a cascade of memoirs from ageing commanders who portrayed it

Carey Schofield

You can go home again

Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands, by Aatish Taseer The publication of Stranger to History is likely to be turned into a fiery political event in Pakistan. The author is the half-Indian son of Salman Taseer, the glamorous and controversial Governor of the Punjab and one of Pakistan’s most important newspaper proprietors.The work is a heartfelt cry for attention from the old mogul, and with its talk of alcohol and of illicit liaisons it provides plenty of fuel for the Governor’s enemies. But it will be a pity if Aatish’s first book — part family memoir, part an account of his journey through the heart of the

Jeremy Treglown

Lost and found | 20 May 2009

‘Book for book,’ John Banville is quoted as saying on the cover of this one, ‘[Graham] Swift is surely one of England’s finest novelists.’ This may be Irish for ‘but of course he hasn’t written all that much’, though eight novels and a collection of short stories isn’t bad going and it would be odd if work so ruminative and elegiac came out more quickly. If Swift seems costive by comparison with some of his contemporaries, in fact, it’s not that he has produced fewer novels but that he does very little other writing: hardly any journalism or criticism, no polemics. In this as in other respects he resembles his

Lucy Beresford

Ways of escape

At a time in modern, secular Britain when religion is seen not as the saviour but as the cause of many of society’s problems, we have become skilled not so much at turning the other cheek as turning a blind eye. Thank God (maybe literally) for writers like Michael Arditti, whose invigorating novels dare to shake us out of our complacency. Arditti returns to the ecclesiastical territory he charted in previous works, in particular the award-winning novel Easter. As well as examining Christianity as seen through the lives of several members of the Church of England, Arditti’s nuanced cartography now extends to Islam, Judaism, and, briefly, Buddhism and Paganism —

Saturday

Adam Nicolson

Behind the wit

Home to Roost and Other Peckings by Deborah Devonshire, edited by Charlotte Mosley As Alan Bennett says in his introduction, ‘Deborah Devonshire is not someone to whom one can say “Joking apart . . .” Jok- ing never is apart: with her it’s of the essence, even at the most serious and indeed saddest moments.’ And so, of course, this book is full of jokes: the Chatsworth gamekeeper who used to refer to the Duke of Portland as ‘His Other Grace’; the agent at Bolton Abbey who every year used to put a final item on their bill for the unconscionably expensive August grouse shooting: ‘Mousetraps — 9d’; the ladies

Wednesday

Alan Judd

At sixes and fives

A passage in that most insidiously influential of histories, 1066 And All That, tries to explain who the Scots, Irish and Picts really were: The Scots (originally Irish, but by now Scotch) were at this time inhabiting Ireland, having driven the Irish (Picts) out of Scotland; while the Picts (originally Scots) were now Irish (living in brackets) and vice versa. Gordon Thomas’s account of MI5 and MI6 could lead to similar confusion. He correctly says they were founded in 1909 with Vernon Kell heading MI5, responsible for counter-espionage, and Mansfield Cumming MI6, responsible for espionage. Subsequently he says they both ‘emerged’ two years later out of the 1911 Official Secrets

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

More than politics

Every so often one reads in the Times or the Daily Telegraph an obituary of an old warrior that simply leaps from the page. A heroic rescue mission in the second world war, an escape by tunnelling, Burma, Kenya, Aden, a secret journey to Lhasa disguised as a yak-herder, and that’s just the military stuff. Then there’s the extra-curricular life — the gliding accident, the false start as a trapeze artist at 17, chairmanship of the Benevolent Fund for Abandoned Zoo Animals, the notorious fling with the Foreign Secretary’s wife, the deep love of Shelley, the book on Indian Railways and the passion for rare cyclamen. Crikey, you think, let’s

Michela Wrong

When hopes were high

Dons don’t usually appear to much advantage in fiction. For those who follow African affairs, these are not happy times. Once regarded as passé, the military coup is enjoying something of a come- back. Men formerly hailed as Renaissance leaders seem bent on being crowned presidents-for-life. From Sudan to Kenya, Somalia to Zimbabwe, carefully negotiated peace deals and coalition governments have either already foundered or quiver on the brink of collapse. So this book possesses a terrible poignancy. The years it covers — a time when black nationalists in the territories that went on to become today’s Zimbabwe, Malawi and Zambia campaigned to shrug off white rule — are still