The book reviews in this week’s issue of the Spectator is worth the cover price. Here is a selection of quotes from some of them.
The historian Anne Somerset enjoys Leanda de Lisle’s ‘different perspective’ on the Tudor dynasty. She reminds us that these self-invented parvenus had ‘vile and barbarous’ origins.
‘When Henry VII’s surviving son inherited the throne as Henry VIII, he continued his father’s policy of judicially murdering anyone close enough to the throne to imperil the claims of his immediate family. Yet the dynasty’s future remained precarious, for Henry’s six marriages produced only a single male heir. Having disinherited his daughters Mary and Elizabeth, Henry only reinstated them in the succession towards the end of his life. He then decreed that if all his children died childless, the crown should go to the descendants of his younger sister, Mary, rather than those of his elder sibling, Margaret, who had been married to James IV of Scotland.
This overlooked the claims not only of Henry’s nephew, James V of Scotland, but also of Margaret Douglas, Queen Margaret’s daughter by her second husband. Margaret Douglas herself never accepted that she had been rightfully excluded from the succession. Having matured, in de Lisle’s opinion, into as canny an operator as her forebear Margaret Beaufort, in the reign of Elizabeth I she would scheme tirelessly — and ultimately successfully — to ensure that one of her descendants inherited that queen’s crown.’
A.N. Wilson has made Raymond Tallis’ Reflections of a Metaphorical Flâneur and Other Essays his companion for life until death; in whatever form it takes:
‘Apart from these metaphysical speculations, the book also contains excellent essays on medical ethics. The final essay in the book is an impassioned plea for ‘The Right to an Assisted Death’. ‘I believe it is not those who support assisted dying but those who oppose it who have a moral case to answer.’ He quotes, at length, the daughter of Dr Ann McPherson, whose protracted death from cancer — despite palliative care — makes painful reading. Her mother, a supporter of assisted dying, became tolerant of morphine and endured three weeks of torture. ‘There was no Mum; just a wounded animal who needed drips changed.’ ‘It is an honour to care for someone you love, but it no longer felt honourable to try to care for someone who wants to be dead.’ I find that the margins of this essay in my book are already black with ticks and many a sentence is underlined.’
Thomas W. Hodgkinson is an island dweller, splitting his time between Britain and Corfu. Island: How Islands Transform the World by J. Edward Chamberlin is the perfect book for him. Or so it seemed:
‘Chamberlin’s anthropological expertise is not in doubt, and the currents of his prose are lively. Yet if I have to make a criticism (and I sort of feel I do), his concluding chapter on islands in literature struck me as a bit timid — unexpectedly, perhaps, from a professor of comparative literature at Toronto University. Try this instead. Islands provide settings for the second great work of western literature (some would say the second greatest), the Odyssey; for the last great work by the greatest dramatist of all time, The Tempest; and for perhaps the first, or first great, novel ever written, Robinson Crusoe. There’s a few too many greats in that last sentence, but you see where I’m heading with this.
The question is, why?’
Another question: why do writers drink? Ian Thomson reads The Trip to Echo Spring: Why Writers Drink by Olivia Laing in search of answers:
‘Olivia Laing, in her study of six alcoholic American writers, The Trip to Echo Spring (the title is taken from a Tennessee Williams play), demonstrates that one hardly need drink every day to be alcoholic. Those of us who indulge in self-destructive benders with stretches of sobriety in between may not think of ourselves as alcoholic at all. Yet alcohol was the vexing devil that crept up insidiously on F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever and Raymond Carver. The day Hemingway decided to nurse his thumping head with a hair (or a tuft, in Cyril Connolly’s knowing phrase) of the dog that bit him was the day the unvarnished truth had come home: liquor had got him well and truly licked.’
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