Lewis Jones

Thursday

29 Nov 2018

In 2016, inspired by reports that Donald Trump’s butler had recommended the assassination of Barack Obama, Ben Schott wrote a scintillating squib, published in these pages, about Trump meeting Bertie Wooster. As he later noted in a diary column, it gave him the idea of writing a new Jeeves and Wooster novel. Predictably, reassuringly, soothingly, Jeeves and the King of Clubs returns us to such idyllic haunts as Bertie’s flat in Berkeley Mansions, the Drones Club and Brinkley Court, Aunt Dahlia’s pile in Worcestershire, and to the company of the furious Sir Watkyn Bassett and his whimsical daughter Madeline, who is yet again engaged to Roderick Spode, 7th Earl of Sidcup. It would appear to be the summer of 1939.

Thursday

15 Jun 2017

Three for the road

One of the great challenges in life, writes Richard Ford in Between Them, ‘is to know our parents fully — assuming they survive long enough, are worth knowing and it is physically possible’. Leaving aside the question of whether we can ever know anyone fully, Ford’s knowledge of his parents, Parker and Edna, was limited. They did not survive long enough, or at least his father didn’t. Soon after Ford’s 16th birthday, his father ‘came awake in his bed on a Saturday morning and died’, aged 55, of a heart attack, as Richard administered CPR. Nor were they particularly worth knowing, whatever that means; his description of them as ‘country people and insufficiently educated’ gives some idea. They were ‘ordinary’, the sort of people who feature in Ford’s novels.

Saturday

31 Dec 2016

Spectator Books of the Year: The biography of a man who prayed he’d never have one

‘I pray I shall not find a biographer,’ said Steven Runciman, eminent historian of Byzantium and the Crusades, Grand Orator to the Patriarch of Constantinople, Astrologer Royal to King George II of the Hellenes, Laird of Eigg, screaming queen, howling snob and honorary whirling dervish. His prayer has been denied, but he could not have found a better biographer than Minoo Dinshaw, whose Outlandish Knight (Allen Lane, £30) is monumentally impressive: scholarly, witty and gorgeously written. When Runciman was in charge of the British Council in Athens after the war he dismissed Patrick Leigh Fermor from the only job he ever had, having tired of ‘Paddy’s little irregularities’, such as drinking too much and not paying his debts.

Thursday

1 Sep 2016

In the gutter, insulting the stars

John McEntee — ‘the Chancer from Cavan’, as he bills himself — has enjoyed a long career as a gossip columnist on various national newspapers. Gossip is thirsty work, and in the anecdotes that comprise the bulk of his memoirs he is almost invariably ‘well-refreshed’. That can also be dangerous. He recalls, for example, attempting to introduce himself to Eve Pollard, who was then editor of the Sunday Mirror, in the bar of the Grand Hotel at the 1989 Labour party conference in Brighton. Pollard was talking at the time to Bruce Anderson, who told him, ‘Fuck off, potato head.’ McEntee responded by whipping off Anderson’s spectacles, and Anderson took a blind swing at him, which landed on Pollard’s bosom. This woke up Anthony Bevins, the political editor of the Independent, who threw a punch at Anderson which also landed on Pollard’s bosom, and began a mêlée involving Keith Waterhouse and a drunken Alastair Campbell, who had until then been playing the bagpipes.

Thursday

2 Jun 2016

Bohemian life Down Under

Here’s a pair of little books — one even littler than the other — by Robin Dalton (née Eakin), a celebrated Australian literary agent and film producer, now aged 92, who has lived in London for the past 70 years. As she explains in a prefatory note, Aunts Up the Cross was written as ‘a diary for my children should I, too, die young’, her husband having died at 33. Years later, when the publisher Anthony Blond complained that she never sent him anything, she reluctantly gave him the 22,000-word manuscript, telling him it was by a mad schoolfriend of hers. Blond had some success with it, as did Macmillan with a later edition, and on its 50th anniversary it has been reissued by the admirable Australian firm Text, with an adulatory introduction by Clive James.

Wednesday

23 Mar 2016

Disgusted of X-ville

Eileen is an accomplished, disturbing and creepily funny first novel by Ottessa Moshfegh, the latest darling of the Paris Review, which has published her stories and given her a prize. It recalls, half a century later, a week in the life of Eileen Dunlop, leading up to Christmas 1964. Her mother, whom she loathed, has died some years ago, and at the age of 24 Eileen is living in a dreary New England town she calls ‘X-ville’ with her father. He’s a demented, gin-sodden retired cop whom she also loathes, and whom she is supposedly looking after, though her care is limited to shouting at him, maintaining his gin supply and hiding his shoes to prevent him from terrorising X-ville in his pursuit of imaginary ‘hoodlums’.

Thursday

7 Jan 2016

A posh Del Boy

The Art of Smuggling comes garlanded with fraternal encomia from Howard ‘Mr Nice’ Marks, Phil Sparrowhawk (author of Grass) and Maurice O’Connor (author of The Dealer), but it seems the author was hardly a master of his chosen art. As Eddie the Eagle was to skiing, so was Francis Morland to drug trafficking. Spectacularly unsuccessful but heroically persistent, he was busted six times and spent more than 15 years in jail. A better title might have been How Not to Smuggle. I was more than once reminded of an Only Fools and Horses Christmas special, featuring a tall Del Boy with a posh accent. By the time of his last ‘operation’, undertaken in his seventh decade, Morland’s reputation in the trade had fallen so low that none of his usual associates would work with him, and he had to rely on a young man called Edna, a small-time dealer who turned out to be a junkie.

Thursday

26 Nov 2015

Jack the Ripper unmasked again

The Whitechapel Fiend is a psychic conduit for the vilest aspects of Victorian sex and class, and a creature mainly of the imagination. In 1888, the year of the murders, John Francis Brewer published The Curse Upon Mitre Square, and novels have followed from such writers as Edgar Lustgarten, Colin Wilson and Iain Sinclair. Many are Ripper mash-ups in the style of Robert Louis Stevenson or Arthur Conan Doyle, as in the Holmes capers of Ellery Queen and Michael Dibdin. Marie Belloc Lowndes’s The Lodger was made into a film by Alfred Hitchcock, A Story of the London Fog (1927), starring Ivor Novello as a sympathetic Ripper; and he features in many other films — in This is Spinal Tap (1984), for example, as the subject of Saucy Jack, a projected rock opera.

Thursday

3 Sep 2015

The history man

History for Gore Vidal was a vehicle to be ridden in triumph, perhaps as in an out-take from Ben-Hur, which he worked on during one of his stints as a Hollywood hack, camping up the script to annoy Charlton Heston. Not only did he ride the Vehicle of History, but as its amanuensis and avatar, born and raised to the purple, in his mind he somehow was History, and of his many achievements the greatest was to persuade others to share that belief. His career presents the realised fantasy of the charismatic narcissist, which is to be taken at one’s own estimation. The American writer and academic Jay Parini, who was a friend of his from the 1980s, remembers him saying, ‘I might have been president’, but the presidency would not have been enough.

Thursday

2 Jul 2015

The raffish toff with a winning Formula

Max Mosley’s autobiography has been much anticipated: by the motor racing world, by the writers and readers of tabloid newspapers, by social historians, and by lawyers, whom one imagines perusing it with nods, frowns and the occasional wince. Mosley is a barrister of Gray’s Inn, and it was as a lawyer that, with his friend Bernie Ecclestone, he came to dominate motor racing. Their association began in 1964, when Mosley was a pupil in Lord Hailsham’s chambers and Ecclestone was the country’s top used-car dealer, said to be able to value an entire showroom at a glance. Ten years later, when they had both made the transition from driving to manufacturing — Mosley with March, Ecclestone with Brabham — they founded the Formula One Constructors’ Association, which, with Ecclestone as its CEO and Mosley as its lawyer, went on to outmanoeuvre the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA, equivalent to Fifa) for the television rights to the sport.

Thursday

14 May 2015

Not a patch on our own Dear Mary

As Dear Mary so wittily demonstrates, our need for advice is perennial. But fashions change. Mary would probably take issue with The Handbook of the Toilette (1839), which advises that one should take a weekly bath whether one needs to or not, and also with the recommendation of Cassell’s Home Encyclopedia (1934) that ‘bloater cream’ makes excellent cocktail canapés. She would surely concur, though, with an observation from All About Etiquette (1879) that ‘a social party is not intended as a school for reform, or a pulpit to denounce sin’. To compile How to Skin a Lion Claire Cock-Starkey has consulted the British Library. She promises ‘medieval manuscripts’, but her selection is mostly from Victorian sources. She has resisted the temptation to write a history of advice and self-help, which would have made for a much longer and more interesting work.

Thursday

1 Jan 2015

Touring America in Steinbeck’s footsteps

In 1960 John Steinbeck set off with his poodle Charley to drive around the United States in a truck equipped with a bed, a desk, a stove and a fridge. To renew his acquaintance with that ‘monster of a land’, he planned to cross the northern states from the east coast to the west, then drive down the Pacific and across the southern states. He was 58, and recovering from a mild stroke. Having recently abandoned his attempt to write an American Don Quixote, he called his project ‘Operation Windmills’, cast Charley as his Sancho Panza, and named his truck Rocinante. Travels with Charley was published in 1962. It was a great success, and his last major work. Four months later he won the Nobel Prize. In 2010 Geert Mak, a Dutch journalist and historian, approximated Steinbeck’s itinerary in a rented silver Jeep.

Sunday

23 Nov 2014

Spectator books of the year: Lewis Jones on Ian McEwan and narrow boats

Music Night at the Apollo: A Memoir of Drifting (Bloomsbury, £14.99) describes the year Lilian Pizzichini spent with her cats on the Adam Bonny, a narrowboat moored on the Grand Union Canal amid the factories and sink estates of Southall. The boat stays moored but, on a tide of cider and cheap vodka, and fuelled by skunk, cocaine and heroin, Pizzichini takes a wild and perilous voyage, encountering not only the local Punjabi and Somalian lowlife but also her own ‘white underclass ancestors’. It sounds grim, but it’s actually rhapsodic, funny and weirdly hopeful. Ian McEwan is usually impressive, and The Children Act (Cape, £16.99) is especially so. A subtly musical arrangement of urgently topical issues — legal, medical, religious and, as always, erotic — it may be read at a sitting, but resonates for much longer.

Thursday

13 Nov 2014

From head-shrinking to skull-seeking: a history of the severed head

A severed head, argues Frances Larson in her sprightly new book, is ‘simultaneously a person and a thing… an apparently impossible duality… an intense incongruity’. History is ‘littered’ with such heads. Pilgrims visit them: the heads of St Peter and St Paul, for example, are thought to be in the high altar of the Basilica of St John Lateran. Artists are inspired by them, especially the erotically charged ones in the stories of Salome and Judith. Medical students dissect them, thereby acquiring the ‘necessary inhumanity’ of their profession. And Americans pay $50,000 to have their own heads cut off — cryonicists prefer the term ‘cephalic isolation’ — and preserved in thermos flasks of liquid nitrogen. ‘Could decapitation,’ asks Larson, ‘be just another stage in a person’s life?’ She begins her story at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford (of which she has co-written a history), where shrunken heads — tsantsas — are displayed in the ‘treatment of dead enemies’ section.

Thursday

30 Oct 2014

Was John Cleese ever funny?

Like many of my generation I was enchanted by the surrealistic irreverence of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, until I overheard other boys — it was never girls — excitedly murdering the Parrot Sketch: ‘Ah yes, the Norwegian Blue — lovely plumage…’ This was not out of a snobbish disdain for popularity; I still loved the Beatles, after all. What made me wince was that the boys in question obviously lacked any sense of humour, and had adopted the show as a kind of prosthesis — which would explain its huge success in Germany. This planted in me the appalling suspicion that Monty Python wasn’t really funny at all, and earlier this year, as the humourless boys held mass rallies at the O2 Arena, that suspicion was confirmed when I watched some old clips on YouTube.

Thursday

4 Sep 2014

Enjoy gin but don’t read books? Or read them only while drinking gin? This is the book for you

Gin Glorious Gin: How Mother’s Ruin Became the Spirit of London is a jaunty and diverting history of ‘a wonderful drink that embodies the best of London’, which is a judgment that would raise eyebrows even at closing time in Soho. It is not a remotely scholarly book. There are no notes or index, and on the second page Olivia Williams informs us that the first citation for gin in the OED is from 1714, as ‘an infamous liquor’. It’s actually from 1723, as ‘the infamous liquor’ — mere details, but still. I stopped checking things after that. It’s essentially a book for people who enjoy gin but don’t necessarily read books, or read them only while drinking gin; the sort of book Gilbert and George might have liked to have handy in their celebrated video installation, as they looked out of their window in Spitalfields, listening to ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ in their suits, drinking gin and repeating, ‘Gordon’s makes us very, very drunk.

Thursday

7 Aug 2014

James Bond’s secret: he’s Jamaican

Ian Fleming’s first visit to Jamaica was pure James Bond. In 1943, as assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence, he flew from Miami to Kingston to attend an Anglo-American naval conference and to investigate the rumour that Axel Wenner-Gren, a rich Swede and supposed Nazi, had built a secret submarine base at Hog Island, near Nassau. He was accompanied by his old friend Ivar Bryce, who was also in intelligence, and who put him up at a house his wife had recently bought. As they left the island, Fleming told Bryce, ‘When we have won this blasted war, I am going to live in Jamaica… swim in the sea and write books.’ Three years later he duly bought 14 acres in the parish of St Mary on the north coast, with a beach and a coral reef, for £2,000 and spent the same again on building a primitive house, which he called Goldeneye.

Thursday

8 May 2014

Wealth is no guarantee of happiness. Look at the Sackville-Wests

When Robert Sackville-West was writing Inheritance (2010), his history of Knole and the Sackvilles, he was ‘struck’, as he recalls in his new book, by the way that Sackvilles have ‘tended to take Italian or Spanish dancers as mistresses’. The most notable of these was Josefa Duran, the flamenco dancer known as ‘Pepita’. A barber’s daughter, she was born in 1830 in the backstreets of Málaga — ‘Oh such a slum it is!’ observed her grand-daughter Vita Sackville-West, who wrote a biography of her, Pepita (1937). By the 1850s she was the toast of Europe, and in 1852 she began a liaison with Lionel Sackville-West, later the 2nd Lord Sackville, which lasted until her death in 1871. He bought her a house at Arcachon (‘one of Arcachon’s exclusive 19th-century villas’, as Robert Sackville-West puts it), and she bore him seven children, of whom five — Max, Victoria, Flora, Amalia and Henry — survived into adulthood.

Thursday

13 Mar 2014

Lost Kerouac that should have stayed lost

In 1944, when he was 22, Jack Kerouac lost a manuscript — in a taxi, as he thought, but probably in Allen Ginsberg’s room at Columbia University — and it stayed lost until 2002, when it was auctioned at Sotheby’s. Now it has been published, all 70 pages of it, together with some youthful sketches and some letters between Kerouac and his father, in an edition by a professor at Lowell, Massachusetts, Kerouac’s home town. The Haunted Life is billed as a novella, but turns out to be the first part — ‘Home’ — of a projected novel, to be completed by ‘War’ and ‘Change’. Set in 1941, it is a coming-of-age story. Like Kerouac, the story’s hero Peter Martin is of French ancestry and has grown up in a Massachusetts town (‘Galloway’) to become a college athlete of literary inclination.

Friday

3 Jan 2014

Finally, a celebrity memoir worth reading

Unlike many celebrity memoirs, Anjelica Huston’s is worth reading. In her Prologue she writes that as a child she modeled herself on Morticia Addams, and where a lesser celebrity memoirist would go on to say that she eventually played Morticia in a film of The Addams Family, Huston is generous enough not to labour the point. Instead of the usual ghosted drivel, she offers — as she does in her acting — a quirky charm and a reckless honesty. Her story is an interesting one, and is generally well written, sometimes even beautifully so. Her father was the great film director John Huston. Her mother ‘Ricki’, an ex-ballerina and his fourth wife, taught her to shine her own shoes and iron her shirts: ‘Mum said you had to be able to do these things in case you grew up to be poor and couldn’t have servants.

Thursday

21 Nov 2013

‘A little bit of rape is good for a man’s soul’: the outrageous life of Norman Mailer

Heroically brave and mad, prodigious in his industry and appetites, Norman Mailer was an altogether excessive figure. Since his death in 2007 there have been several biographies, but this is the big one — big enough to accommodate a triple or quadruple life, let alone a double. It is also the official one, written at Mailer’s request by J. Michael Lennon, his friend, collaborator and literary executor, who is respectful and affectionate but not hagiographic. He calls Mailer a ‘genius’, which in some ways he was, but does not claim that any of his novels were ‘great’, which is just as well. He never glosses over Mailer’s habitually appalling behaviour, and though he has the right he never calls him ‘Norman’. A Double Life is a judicious and comprehensive portrait of one of the more entertaining monsters of our times.

Thursday

26 Sep 2013

When Britain Burned the White House, by Peter Snow - review

Peter Snow explains that he decided to look into this extraordinary story when he realised how few people knew about it, and was inspired to write a book by the wealth and quality of eyewitness accounts from both sides. The result is superb. When Britain Burned the White House is an exemplary work of history — lucid, witty and humane, with terrific pace, and so even-handed that it will surely be received as well in America as here. Annoyed by what he regarded as the excesses of the British empire — its fight with Napoleon interfered with America’s trade, it was in the habit of pressing American citizens into the Royal Navy, and it supported the Indian tribes who stood in the way of American settlers — President James Madison had declared war in June 1812.

Thursday

11 Jul 2013

The Unwinding, by George Packer - review

The Unwinding is a rather classy addition to the thriving genre of American apocalypse porn. The basic thesis can be found online in Jim Kunstler’s The Clusterfuck Nation Manifesto, which runs to a few thousand words, but over hundreds of pages George Packer gives it the full literary treatment. He signals his ambition by taking as his model the USA trilogy of John Dos Passos, which spliced mash-ups of newspaper cuttings and pop lyrics, brief lives of public figures and longer episodic biographies of obscure ones, into an indignant portrait of America in the first three decades of the 20th century. Packer’s book is non-fiction, and his ‘obscure Americans’ are real people — Tammy Thomas, a laid-off factory worker in the Midwest; Dean Price, a doomed entrepreneur in the rural South; Jeff Connaughton, a disappointed apparatchik in DC — but he has adapted Dos Passos’s method to portray the past 30 years, during which ‘the coil that held Americans together in its secure and sometimes stifling grip… gave way’, and the country was utterly changed.

Thursday

6 Jun 2013

The Frontman, by Harry Browne - review

According to a story which Harry Browne accepts is surely apocryphal, but which he includes in his book anyway, at a U2 gig in Glasgow the band’s singer silenced the audience and started to clap his hands slowly, whispering as he did so: ‘Every time I clap my hands a child in Africa dies.’ Someone in the audience shouted: ‘Well fuckin’ stop doin’ it then!’ The story is worth repeating because it reflects the way many people, even charitably disposed rock fans, feel about Bono. They think his name — born Paul David Hewson, he appropriated the stage name from a Dublin hearing-aid shop that advertised devices called ‘Bono Vox’ — is ineffably silly, and join Sinead O’Connor in preferring to call him Bozo. They object to his wraparound shades, leather trousers and designer stubble, and possibly to his diminutive stature and huge wealth (half a billion dollars or so).

Thursday

2 May 2013

Eleven Days in August, by Matthew Cobb - review

It is fair to assume that Professor Matthew Cobb has often been asked if he is related to Professor Richard Cobb since he begins the acknowledgements of his new book by announcing that he is not. Richard Cobb wrote books about France — where he was known as l’étonnant Cobb and, according to his obituary in the Independent, ‘once greeted the dawn nude, in the company of a dozen similarly unattired men and women, in the fountains of the Place de la Concorde’ — and he had a son called Matthew; and Matthew Cobb’s father was called Richard, so the question is understandable. It must also be annoying, though, because Richard Cobb was such a stylish writer, while Matthew Cobb is less so. Still, Eleven Days in August provides the fullest account imaginable of the Battle for Paris, which not only liberated the city but also determined the political future of France.

Thursday

21 Feb 2013

The boys’ brigade

British schoolboys doubtless have quite different fantasies nowadays, but for much of the last century most of them liked to imagine themselves leading their friends in guerrilla warfare against the German army. Stephen Grady is probably unique in having lived the fantasy, an experience he recalls in Gardens of Stone. Born in 1925, in the French village of Nieppe, just over the border with Belgium, he was the elder son of a Royal Artillery corporal who married a Frenchwoman and was a gardener for the Imperial War Graves Commission. In the first world war the district had been a battlefield, and the infant Stephen played marbles with shrapnel, in a house built from rubble and in gardens pegged out with bayonets.

Thursday

3 Jan 2013

Dirty tricks campaigns

There are already two excellent books about the Profumo Affair — An Affair of State (1987) by Phillip Knightley and Caroline Kennedy, and Bringing the House Down (2007) by David Profumo — as well as five not-so-excellent ones by poor old Christine Keeler. Now Richard Davenport-Hines has marked the scandal’s 50th anniversary with An English Affair, which is set to become the standard work. He has found new material — the police files on Perec Rachman and Charles Clore, for example — and, as his subtitle suggests, he is big on historical context. His book is elegantly arranged in two parts, the first and longer of which is devoted to setting the scene and introducing the cast (‘Good-Time Girls’, ‘Hacks’, ‘Spies’ and so on), before the curtain goes up on the drama itself, which he calls a ‘corrupt, contemptible sequence of events’, involving prurience and snobbery, ‘insolence, envy and the politics of revenge’.

Friday

28 Dec 2012

The Wiggins streak

As the first British winner of the Tour de France and a gold medalist at London 2012, Bradley Wiggins is a national hero, and though he insists he is an ordinary Kilburn lad he keeps dropping hints about a knighthood. So it is only fitting that, at the age of 32 and with the help of William Fotheringham, he has written My Time (Yellow Jersey Press, £20). Beneath the dustjacket its covers are the dashing yellow of the maillot jaune, with portraits of our hero front and back and ‘WIGGO’ on the spine, the ‘O’ shaped as a Mod roundel. Inside are more than 40 photographic plates, most of which show him looking pained and moody on bicycles; there is one of him shaving, but only his face, as he sculpts those celebrated sideburns.

Thursday

6 Dec 2012

Agonies and ecstasies

William James considered an hallucination to be ‘as good and true a sensation as if there were a real object there’, except that the ‘object happens to be not there, that is all’ — an admirable definition, and a favourite of Oliver Sacks, the eminent neurologist, who has written what he calls ‘a sort of natural history or anthology of hallucinations’, which he thinks are an essential part of the human condition. He excludes schizophrenic hallucinations, on the grounds that they demand separate consideration, but includes every other kind. Some are induced by sensory deprivation, such as isolation and darkness — ‘the prisoner’s cinema’ — or visual monotony, as experienced by sailors gazing on a becalmed sea, or by travellers in deserts or polar regions.