Non-fiction

Wednesday

David Crane

The spice of danger

From the Front Line: Family Letters & Diaries, 1900 to the Falklands & Afghanistan, by Hew Pike ‘Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier,’ reckoned Dr Johnson, and certainly every soldier thinks the less of himself for not having seen action. For four generations the extended Pike family has written movingly of the miseries of partings and of the ‘noise, violence indignity and death’ of the battlefield, but give any of them the choice between a cushy command at Catterick and the Normandy beaches and it is no contest. ‘Peace,’ writes the wonderful Reggie Tompson, back in England recovering from a bad wound on 24

Roger Lewis

Gruff Justice

James Robertson Justice: What’s the Bleeding Time? by James Hogg, with Robert Sellers and Howard Watson ‘You — what’s the bleeding time?’ Sir Lancelot Spratt, consultant surgeon at St Swithin’s, barks at Dirk Bogarde’s trainee doctor. ‘Ten past ten, sir’ is the sheepish answer. Another cherishable exchange in the long-running series of medical comedies sees a patient complaining about shrapnel up the — ‘rectum?’ offers Spratt. ‘Well,’ comes the plaintive reply, ‘it didn’t do ’em any good.’ Gruff and domineering, Spratt and the actor who indelibly played him were interchangeable — except that James Robertson Justice wasn’t really an actor. He didn’t have any showbiz friends or interests, and drew

Raymond Carr

Chalk and cheese

The British in France: Visitors and Residents since the Revolution, by Peter Thorold Peter Thorold has not written an orthodox history of French and British political cultural and social relations. He sees them through the eyes of Britons who settled in France or tourists who trod its soil for a brief holiday. French aristocrats who had seen their friends’ and relations’ heads stuck on poles and paraded through the streets of Paris sped to Britain. When the Terror passed, they returned to France and showed little propensity to settle in or revisit a cold climate. Most Britons came to stay. Why did they come? Some were successful economic migrants. Charles

Bevis Hillier

Highs and lows on the laughometer

Just What I Always Wanted: Unwrapping the World’s Most Curious Presents, by Robin Laurance What might seem an obviously Christmassy book is Robin Laurance’s Just What I Always Wanted: Unwrapping the World’s Most Curious Presents (Quercus, £9.99); but it is mainly about birthday presents. One thing that it doesn’t include is a present I saw advertised in Los Angeles when I lived there in the 1980s: a silver dustbin studded with precious stones — ‘for the man who has everything and wants to throw some of it away’. What the book does have is the things given by X to Y on every day of the year. An odd assortment

Margaret Macmillan

The done thing

The Politics of Official Apologies, by Melissa Nobles George W. Bush, judging by his repeated invocations, thinks that time will eventually prove that he was right. He is not alone in putting his faith in the future. We all call a lot on history these days as the impartial tribunal which will eventually dole out the gold stars and the black marks. We also seem to think that we set past wrongs right by making apologies to groups and individuals. A descendant of that Elizabethan freebooter, Jack Hawkins, has apologised for slavery; post-war Germany apologised and made recompense for the Nazi crimes against the Jews; and the Australian and Canadian

Michael Howard

The power of the evasive word

The Economist Book of Obituaries, by Keith Colquhoun and Ann Wroe De mortuis nil nisi bonum, or so it used to be said. That was then. Now, since the late Hugh Montgomery- Massingbird became obituaries editor of the Telegraph, James Fergusson of the Independent, and Keith Colquhoun and Ann Wroe of the Economist, all has changed, changed utterly. Now obituaries are light entertainment. The great and the good can no longer console themselves for mortality with the expectation of unctuous posthumous tributes: the first paragraph of the Economist’s treatment of Edward Heath warns them what to expect: The tributes spoke of his integrity, his long service and the strength of

Saturday

Sam Leith

Love between the lines

Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, edited by Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton Why does this book need to exist? It’s a legitimate question — the correspondence of both these poets has been published in generous selected editions — but an easy one to answer. Quite apart from the fact you’d need prehensile thumbs to follow their exchanges properly through those two fat volumes, the unexpurgated version gives you not only ease but texture: their ‘helter-skelter shop-talk’; gossip about Ezra Pound and Marianne Moore and Randall Jarrell; Lowell ‘exhaustingly’ changing his typewriter ribbons; Bishop getting ‘some of a very old & liquefied jelly bean’

Wednesday

James Delingpole

Extraordinarily ordinary

I see from the cover of this book that at least three reviewers had kind words to say about Gordon Brown’s previous effort. ‘Very moving,’ the Guardian wrote. ‘Readable and intelligent,’ alleged the Sunday Times. ‘Trust me: this is a fine book,’ claimed The Spectator. Perhaps they were being polite because the author is not a professional writer, or because all his royalties will go to charity. Perhaps Courage was a dramatically better book. Wartime Courage, though, is lame. And I’m not just saying that because Gordon Brown’s economic incompetence has caused me such misery. Nor just because as a starving author (late of his publisher, Bloomsbury) I deeply resent