Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Wynn Wheldon

Narrative drive

Michael Holroyd describes this tiny, charmingly pointless publication (On Wheels, Chatto, £9.99) not as a book but as an example of ‘nostalgic intertextuality’, which is a grand way of saying that it is a bit of this and a bit of that. The this is the part cars have played in his family’s history and the that is the part they have played in the lives of the famous biographer’s famous subjects. We learn that Holroyd’s father liked to drive his Zodiac with his miniature German police dog on his lap, and that the author’s wife Margaret Drabble ‘plumbed a special telephone into her car’.Lytton Strachey bought a car for

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

He knows it teases

Simon Hoggart has spent 20 years going to Westminster to annoy people. He entertains no high-minded delusions about politics and he writes his Guardian sketches in a state of amused bewilderment by the sheer barminess and abnormality of most parliamentarians. This collection reads like the diary of an intelligent, mild-mannered child whose parents happen to own a knocking-shop. He makes enemies along the way. John Prescott has several times threatened to kill Hoggart, even though he directs very few explicit barbs at the former deputy prime minister. What he does is to quote him at length and with terrible accuracy. And because Prescott’s brain is like a wrecking-ball to his

Paul Johnson

Apologia pro vita sua

Any fair-minded person who has looked into the matter knows that Conrad Black was wrongly convicted. Indeed under English law he would not have been prosecuted at all, I believe, and had he been so, the judge would have thrown the case out on the first day on the grounds that the pre-trial publicity had hopelessly prejudiced the case. He would then have jailed some of the hostile commentators until they had purged their contempt. However, it is just as well that Black has decided to describe exactly how and why he was wrongly convicted. He does so in fascinating detail, and in language which is always lively and sometimes

Digby Anderson

Give me stress

Christmas is one of the few remaining occasions when the English feel obliged to cook a proper meal at home. To help them, in the autumn, kind publishers bring out lots of huge, glossy books. The idea, or collusive polite fiction, is that the cooks read the books carefully, plan their meals, buy ingredients and any necessary equipment — Jamie Oliver lists a vast amount — and then successfully cook a whole delicious meal. I have long suspected that in reality, the purchase of the book, its subsequent prominent display and discussion are acts of propitiation that take the place of actually cooking and excuse the cook from her obligations.

Blair Worden

A cavalier attitude to monarchy

Historians have long been more interested in the Roundheads than in the Cavaliers. It was the parliamentarians who achieved England’s revolution, or the nearest thing the country has come to one. It was they who overthrew the monarchy, the House of Lords and the bishops, they whose insistence on parliamentary rights, and whose attainment of a measure of religious toleration under Cromwell, apparently pointed ahead to modern values. Now the balance is changing. Historians have become less ardent for progress. Under their increasingly sceptical gaze the gap between parliamentarian thinking and the outlook of its later congratulators seems ever wider. Besides, over-population has driven students of the parliamentarian cause into

David Gilmour

Fun and games — except with mother

The Duke of Edinburgh, a New Zealand typist claimed in 1954, was ‘the best investment that the royal family has made in all its history’. But would she have thought so had she seen him a few days earlier at a ‘crazy’ party where, according to his first cousin Pamela Hicks, he ‘excelled himself, managing to use three cracker blowers at once — one in his mouth and one up each nostril, the shiny rolls unravelling simultaneously’? Anecdotes like that are, I imagine, the chief reason why people buy books like this. Lady Pamela tells them well, especially those about her ancestors. The best-crafted character in the tale is her

Lewis Jones

Living on the brink

To write this book Aman Sethi, a journalist for the Hindu, spent five years hanging out with the casual labourers of Bara Tooti Chowk in Delhi’s Sadar Bazaar, who live and die on the streets. ‘Why,’ asks one of them, ‘are you spending all this time and money getting drunk with lafunters like us? What can we teach you?’ He explains that he is trying to write a book. Who would want to read it? ‘I don’t know. I suppose my friends will buy it and maybe a few people interested in Delhi.’ But the lafunters have taught him a lot, and for its observation, sympathy and humour A Free

Jonathan Mirsky

All in the telling

I like Jewish jokes. I begin every conversation with the literary editor of The Spectator with one or two, do the same with the judge across the road, and tell my newest joke to the lifeguards at the local swimming pool. The key to a good one is gentle self-mockery. But I dislike reading jokes and listening to them from non-Jews, who invariably tell them badly. But if you like Jewish jokes written down, dozens and dozens of them, and you think Michael Winner a witty fellow, then this is the book for you. Better skip the introduction, though, because in it Winner reveals what he thinks is really funny.

Richard Davenporthines

The French connection | 15 November 2012

When novelists write essays, they often boom through megaphones, aggrandise the importance of their views and inflate their stature.  Julian Barnes, however, seems to be a novelist who enjoyed feeling special when young, but now finds increasing rueful comfort in reminders of his own insignificance.  Certainly there is no swagger in his 17 essays about truth and fiction collected in Through the Window. The book relies on stylish intelligence and cool calm to accomplish its mastery. Barnes sees novelists as solitary truth-seekers and public truth-tellers. ‘The best fiction rarely provides answers; but it does formulate the questions exceptionally well,’ he writes. Novels inquire about the purpose, discipline, pleasures and value

Stephen Bayley

A global hegemony of clean lines

Phaidon Press invented the art book. It was in 1930s Vienna that Bela Horovitz and Ludwig Goldscheider established the format of the illustrated monograph: a short essay by an expert, usually an Austrian art historian hired for a modest fee, followed by a sumptuous range of high-quality repro. They left before the Anschluss and arrived in London, bringing their distinguished backlist with them. Effete British art history was immediately fortified by stern German-language methodology.  After several changes of ownership, direction and fortune, not all of them good, Phaidon is now perhaps the outstanding international publisher of illustrated books. Production values have always been a Phaidon priority, but the comfortable, formulaic

Amanda Herries

Scotland’s top ten

It is no mean feat to produce a publication of the type that used to be described as ‘a coffee-table book’, devoted to the subject of great Scottish houses, and manage to find a fresh slant on a genre that has illustrated and described country houses for decades.  James Knox and his photographer, James Fennell, have succeeded in doing just that. Whilst I might wonder if the coffee-table is still a must-have piece of furniture there is no doubt that this book is a feast for the eyes. Images shot in natural light provide luscious accompaniment to the text which achieves an easy harmony of informative history with light-hearted family

The Spectator

Books of the year

A.N.Wilson Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death by James Runcie (Bloomsbury, £14.99). At last, an Anglican Father Brown. Runcie has sensibly set his detective stories in the 1950s, before the boring era when DNA and science spoilt the poetry of crime investigation. Canon Chambers, a self-effacing, clever clergyman with a taste for pubs and shove-halfpenny, and an agonised capacity to fall in love with women, is surely a bit as Archbishop Runcie must have been when he came out of the Guards and took orders?  Each tale is beautifully crafted and surprising. I hope for many more volumes. How England Made the English: From Hedgerows to Heathrow by Harry Mount

Wednesday

Alistair Horne

Picking sides in Syria, the Algerian experience

Some thirty-five years ago, in 1977 to be exact, I first published A Savage War of Peace, a definitive history of France’s war in Algeria. The war dragged on from 1954 to 1962, torpedoed six French governments, and the Fourth Republic itself, bringing de Gaulle to power. It also introduced a new meaning to the word ‘insurgence.’ Thanks to the indolence of my publishers, the book was allowed to go out of print. When the Iraq War began, to my fury I learned that it was changing hands on the free market in Washington at over $200 a copy, with quantities being bought by the Pentagon. Then, out of the

Tuesday

Jonathan Mcaloon

John Keats by Nicholas Roe – review

The joke has been made by Jack Stillinger, an American editor of Keats, that there have been so many treatments of the poet’s life that we know him better than his contemporaries did, and better than most people we see every day. This brilliant new biography by eminent Keatsian Nicholas Roe has caused controversy with the claim that Keats was an opium addict. The book’s blurb is certainly angled to capitalise on this, and states that it will ‘[explode] entrenched conceptions of [Keats] as a delicate, overly sensitive, tragic figure.’ But surely, one would think, Keats being a drug addict on top of the tuberculosis and early death should enlarge

Monday

George Chamier

The Great Irish Famine revisited

The bare statistics of the Great Irish Famine are chilling enough: in 1845-55 more than a million people died of starvation and disease and a further two million emigrated. Ireland’s population fell by more than a third. John Kelly does an excellent job of sketching the background in The Graves are Walking: massive population growth (the Irish population doubled in the second half of the eighteenth century and almost doubled again in the first four decades of the nineteenth), division of land into ever smaller plots and consequent dependence on the potato, exploitative landlords, resentment at rule by London. When blight struck the potato crop in 1845, it was not

Saturday

David Blackburn

Philip Roth retires

Philip Roth has retired. He told a French magazine that, at 79, he was ‘done’. There will be no more books. For the little it is worth, I think he ought to be a Nobel Laureate – American Pastoral stands as one of the best books written since the war about, among other things, the failings and failure of the post-war era, and The Human Stain and Portnoy’s Complaint aren’t too bad either. Roth is an obvious choice for the Nobel committee; but it is simply perverse of them to be scared of his renown, or even to mistrust it. Roth’s retirement recalls Martin Amis’ view that writers die twice:

Friday

Douglas Murray

The importance of truth

The words ‘Saville’ and ‘Inquiry’ have taken on a somewhat different meaning in recent weeks. But this is just to tell interested readers that my book on the original Saville Inquiry, Bloody Sunday: Truths, Lies and the Saville Inquiry is out now in paperback. If you can still find a bookshop then you might find it there. Otherwise it is of course available on Amazon etc. Priced at £12.99, it includes updated material on the recently-announced police investigation. The book has been described by the Spectator magazine, no less, as ‘a real-life whodunit’, by the New Statesman as ‘compelling’, by the Literary Review as ‘indispensable’, by the Irish Independent as

J P O'Malley

Sharon Olds’ fear and self-loathing

Since the publication of her debut collection, Satan Says in 1980, which was awarded the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award, Sharon Olds has become a prominent – and controversial – voice in American poetry. Olds’ work has been given many unflattering adjectives from her harshest critics: self-indulgent, sensationalist, solipsistic, and pornographic, to name a few. While her confessional, and overtly autobiographical style, may not be to every critics’ taste, Olds’ candid voice, describing her own troubled childhood; the human body; and a world which very often displays fear, violence, love and kindness, in equal measure, has seen her become one of the most widely read poets of her generation.

Thursday

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Keeping calm and carrying on

An ordinary woman, rather like yourself.’ These were Peter Fleming’s words when he commissioned Jan Struther to write what became her ‘Mrs Miniver’ columns for the Times. Critics complained then, and have complained ever since, that Mrs Miniver is no ‘ordinary woman’. She rings the bell for tea, takes taxis everywhere, and has a second home in Kent. As I read These Wonderful Rumours, the 1938-1945 diaries of a Derbyshire schoolteacher in her twenties called May Smith, I kept thinking, ‘Here is your perfect ordinary woman.’ And I was not being pejorative. Ordinary does not mean dull. It means unpretentious and normal. Through the seven years covered by the diaries,

John Sutherland

The most inscrutable of poets

Where our great Victorian writers are concerned we live in an age of rolling biography and contradictory interpretation. I’ve read half a dozen lives of the poet since picking up, as a schoolboy, the Penguin paperback of Harold Nicolson’s Tennyson: Aspects of his Life, Character and Poetry, with its diagnosis of a crippling case of Victorian timidity: ‘Tennyson was afraid of death and sex and God.’ I got the point, and read In Memoriam with knowing condescension. Case settled. But not for long. Since then there have been biographies which have focused, by way of explanation, on the ‘black blood’ running through the Tennyson family; the traumatic domestic regime imposed