Non-fiction

Tuesday

George Osborne

Lincoln’s legacy

Every so often American Presidents let people know that they are reading a book. When George W. Bush was seen clutching a copy of Andrew Roberts’s History of the English Speaking People, acres of newsprint appeared on this elegant apologia for neo-conservatism. Now his successor in the White House wants us to know that he has a well-thumbed copy of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals; and just in case you missed that, the publishers have helpfully emblazoned the front of the UK paperback edition with the headline ‘The Book that Inspired Barack Obama’. He could have done much worse. For Team of Rivals is one of the best biographical

Bevis Hillier

Shrine of a connoisseur

Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, by Tim Knox, photographs by Derry Moore Sir John Soane’s Museum is very nearly a folly — a mad grotto in the midst of Georgian London. It is clearly the monument of someone both eccentric and egocentric. What saves it from being Hearst Castle, Liberace’s palace or Michael Jackson’s Neverland, is that its creator was a great architect — the Bank of England was his masterpiece. In the early 1790s Soane and his rich wife bought No. 12 Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The house was rebuilt to Soane’s designs, and they moved there in 1794. This book, with its fine, atmospheric photographs by Derry Moore and

Jonathan Sumption

Doomed to despotism

Khomeini’s Ghost, by Con Coughlin The Life and Death of the Shah, by Gholam Reza Afkhami The fall of the Shah of Iran at the beginning of 1979 took the world by surprise. A self-confident autocrat, supported by a large, American trained and equipped army and a ubiquitous and powerful security service, he was driven from power in less than six months by a motley alliance of middle-class liberals, clerical fanatics and student demonstrators, without a blow being struck in his defence. The impression of sudden cataclysm was accentuated by the character of the Shah’s successor: a bearded Islamic ideologue, who flew in from Paris after 15 years in exile.

Cressida Connolly

A thoroughly good egg

A friend who belongs to an old-fashioned London club tells me that all anecdotes related within its walls are met with one of only three accepted responses: Great Fun, Rather Fun and Shame. Stanley I Presume is rather fun. It would have been great fun if the author was less discreet and less loyal and less scrupulous, because his life story — the first 40 years of which makes up the present volume — has been crammed with incident. Stanley Johnson has worked as a spy, a pioneering environmentalist and a Member of the European Parliament. As a youth he rode from London to Afghanistan on a motorcycle, hitch-hiked across

Alberto Manguel

Reading between the lines

‘Voltaire and the Sun King rolled into one’ is how Elizabeth Longford has described her Oxford tutor Maurice Bowra. If the promoters of the e-book have their way, personal libraries of the future will consist of intricate cyber-memories holding thousands of volumes conjured up at the touch of a finger, while the reader, bounded in an electronic nutshell, will count himself a king of infinite space. Gone will be the pleasures of sitting in a book-lined room watched by the ghosts of the garrulous dead, gone the unique feeling of companionship and awe that the accumulation of books over a lifetime can inspire. Gone too the harmless and prurient delight

Hugh Cecil

In a class of his own

‘Voltaire and the Sun King rolled into one’ is how Elizabeth Longford has described her Oxford tutor Maurice Bowra. As Fellow and then Warden of Wadham College from 1922 to 1970 and successively Professor of Poetry, Vice Chancellor of the University and President of the British Academy, this short, powerfully built, unbeautiful, but magnetic man for years gave the tone to the university. He was a brilliant wit and a challenging and imaginative college tutor. Late in his career, he fought an intelligent rearguard defence of the University’s independence. His biographer, Leslie Mitchell, well-known for his works on Whig history, has drawn on years of local Oxford knowledge and unpublished

Saturday

Philip Hensher

Now universally acknowledged

Jane’s Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World, by Claire Harman What does Mr Darcy look like? Anyone who has read Pride and Prejudice will be able to give an answer. I believe that he is tall, square-jawed, beetle-browed, slightly weather-beaten and dark-haired. Is any of that at all controversial? But on returning to the novel, we find a strange thing. The one feature in that list which I would have thought beyond dispute is that he has dark hair. This, however, is what Jane Austen has to say about his personal appearance. On his first entry, he is said to have a fine, tall person, handsome features, noble mien

Maggie Fergusson

The world of big brother

If the past is a foreign country, who governs it? Who has the right, particularly in dealing with his parents and siblings, to patent very private memories, and sell them to the public? These are questions that generally nag at the readers of family memoirs, and it is a measure of the quality of The Music Room that it does not provoke them. William Fiennes is driven neither by self-indulgence nor a desire to rub salt into old wounds, but by an urge to comprehend and dignify the past, in its joys and its sorrows; to give it shape and meaning. This is, essentially, a prequel to The Snow Geese,

Francis King

Opposites attracted

Privately printed books are now all too often castigated as ‘vanity publishing.’ But at a time when publishers pay vast advances for the ghosted memoirs of people ‘celebrated’ for kicking balls around or howling into microphones but refuse to take a minuscule financial risk on one as elegantly written and entertaining as this one, that old pejorative must surely be abandoned. Lord (Anthony) Quinton is a distinguished academic, the breadth of whose interests is indicated by the title of a previous book of his, From Wodehouse to Wittgenstein. His American wife Marcelle is a talented painter. In this collaborative work they each give accounts of their lives before they met

Jonathan Keates

Darwin — from worms to collops

By all accounts a modest and retiring example of his species, Charles Darwin would surely have been more astonished than flattered by the honours done him during this year’s bicentennial celebrations. By all accounts a modest and retiring example of his species, Charles Darwin would surely have been more astonished than flattered by the honours done him during this year’s bicentennial celebrations. An avalanche of major exhibitions, international conferences, TV and radio series — everything, indeed, short of a movie starring Brad and Angelina — is accompanied by a perfect tsunami of books made saleable by association with the bald, bearded sage of Down House. In the unfavourable climate of

Saturday

Sam Leith

All in good faith

The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia, by Andrew Lih Who would have known that mixed into the aggregate at the foundations of what by now must be the most consulted encyclopedia in the history of the world would be Ayn Rand, options-pricing theory, Kropotkin, table napkins, soft porn and a Hawaiian airport shuttle-bus? This being the internet, you might have guessed at soft porn — a sometime minor business interest of its founder Jimmy ‘Jimbo’ Wales. But the rest? These are interesting times for the culture of knowledge, and the story of the evolution of Wikipedia, with its utopian belief in collective good

Adam Zamoyski

The end of the affair | 28 March 2009

Given the anti-Americanism displayed on every possible occasion by the French since the days of De Gaulle, and the crudely expressed contempt with which Americans have responded, particularly over the past decade, it is easy to forget that the two nations once enjoyed a relationship even more ‘special’ than the supposedly exclusive one between Britain and the United States. That relationship, which began with Benjamin Franklin’s seduction of French society and Lafayette’s participation in the American revolution, blossomed into a love affair in the two decades following the Great War. Many Americans who had fought in it stayed behind. The comparatively low cost of living permitted penniless writers and artists,

Byron Rogers

The romance of the jungle

It is so sad to read about the Mato Grosso now, at least it is for anyone who, like me, was a boy in the 1950s. When the vast rain forest of the Amazon makes the news at all it is in stories about economic predation, logging and genocide. The Mato Grosso has shrunk and become a victim, which for us was the ultimate in adventure, romance, and horror, with all of it so safely far away. For it had everything: lost cities in the jungle, lost treasures, lost wisdoms, as well as savage tribes which could shrink your head to the size of a cricket-ball, snakes as long as

Max Egremont

Old gipsy-man

Who reads Ralph Hodgson’s poetry today? Probably few people under the age of 40 have even heard of this strange Englishman who died in 1961 in a small town in the American mid-west. His most famous poems are those once learnt by schoolchildren like ‘Time you old Gypsy Man’ or ‘The Bells of Heaven’, both little more than pleasant rhymes. But in his day Hodgson was admired by (among others) Robert Lowell, Siegfried Sassoon, Stephen Spender and T. S. Eliot, who wanted him to illustrate the book that he had partly inspired — Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats; the lazy Hodgson could have made a fortune from the project

James Buchan

The man for the hour

At the turn of 2007, the United States was facing defeat in Baghdad. Shia and Sunni were on killing sprees, the supply line from Kuwait was under constant attack, and F-16s were in action on Haifa Street, less than a mile from the fortified US embassy. Yet commanders in Iraq, and civilians from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld downwards, clung to a bankrupt strategy: withdraw US forces to colossal operating bases outside town — Camp Victory, Camp Liberty — and leave the streets to an untrained Iraqi army, the sectarian national police and to the thieves and murderers. Meanwhile, success was measured in body count whatever the cost to the population,

Saturday

Frederic Raphael

Rome on the skids

The Fall of the West: The Death of the Roman Superpower, by Adrian Goldsworthy The Ruin of the Roman Empire, by James O’Donnell These two fat, well-sourced books about the decline of ancient Rome run, until they limp, in relay. Adrian Goldsworthy begins his leg from the end of the second century AD, the term of the Antonines (under whom Edward Gibbon could imagine himself happy, so long as he was a patrician), through the nervous three centuries which ended with the incursions — here seen more as forceful immigrations — of the Huns and the Goths. After Alaric’s irruption in 410 into Italy, the rulers of the once-master Latin

John Michell

Barking up the wrong tree?

The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning, by James Lovelock He Knew He Was Right: The Irrepressible Life of James Lovelock and Gaia, by John Gribbin and Mary Gribbin James Lovelock is an English scientist, recip- ient of many awards, and he is a pleasant writer, moderate in tone and conciliatory towards his critics. In the late 1960s he became famous in New Age circles for his Gaia theory. The name, which is that of the old Greek goddess of Earth, was suggested to him by William Golding, his neighbour and pub companion in their Wiltshire village. It was immediately popular, and so was the image that Lovelock attached

Anthony Daniels

Whistling in the dark | 21 March 2009

It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistleblower, by Michela Wrong Once, when I was crossing Mali by bus, it took three days to go 100 yards. This was not because of the condition of the road, but because three sets of officials — the army, the police and the douaniers — insisted upon extracting their pound of flesh from the passengers (except for me), and would not let them go until they had duly paid up. The passengers took it all with a good-humoured resignation that both surprised and moved me. Perhaps their resignation derived from an understanding that, had the boot been upon the other

John Adamson

Order out of chaos

What got into them? For two decades in the middle of the 17th century, English- men transformed their world, overthrowing and eventually executing their king, abolishing bishops and the House of Lords, and incidentally slaughtering each other — and from time to time their Scottish and Irish neighbours — on a scale that approached the carnage of the first world war. Explaining these ‘English civil wars’ — the term Blair Worden gives to the sequence of conflicts that afflicted the country between 1640 and the Restoration in 1660 — has always been tricky. How does one make sense of the multifarious possible causes, or the bewildering, Russian-novel-like profusion of characters;

Claudia FitzHerbert

The mother’s tale

‘I’m sick of this story of yours, this idea that it’s about drugs. If you want that to be the story then go away and write one of your f***ing novels about it, OK?’ says the angry son towards the end of The Lost Child, which goes nowhere slowly, despite the rollercoaster ride of publicity it has received. It is hard not to think that the boy has a point. Why didn’t Myerson do the decently indecent thing and write a novel? Plenty of writers — good writers — make little up, but nontheless deploy the mask of fiction which also provides protection for traduced parents, children, lovers and friends