Book Reviews

This book falls into two parts. The first is a brisk account of Britain’s involvement with India and of the backgrounds of those people who were principally responsible for unscrambling that relationship. It contains most of the facts that matter, if rather too much social trivia that does not, and is generally fair. Where it is unfair is in its dismissal of Mountbatten as a trivial playboy. It is permissible to make fun of some of the wilder schemes which he championed during his time at Combined Operations — notably the iceberg-aircraft carrier Habbakuk — but unreasonable to dismiss the ingenuity, energy and formidable organising powers which created the machine

In Grand Canal, Great River we enter a world that makes the moon seem familiar. It is also one of the most beautiful books I’ve handled and is a screaming bargain. Philip Watson read Chinese at Oxford and spent most of his working life in the Foreign Office, with postings in Hong Kong and Beijing. In his retirement he sharpened up his skills in that endlessly difficult subject, classical Chinese. He has firm control of a slightly old-fashioned narrative style, in which he apologises for raising arcane matters of Chinese style, geography, military matters, history, poetry, painting and mandarin manners, which he then lays elegantly before you. This is a

Connoisseurs of the short story will welcome this new collection by William Trevor, his first since 2004. Trevor has been compared with Chekhov, not without justification. He works by indirection, avoiding judgment, his sense of tragedy well concealed by a partiality for unfulfilled lives left free to exist on the page without the author’s intervention. Here destinies may be thwarted but the process will be a reflective one, mercifully free of irony. It is the absence of irony that gives these stories their pre- as opposed to post-modern stamp, and the scrupulous neutrality that refuses to pander to the reader’s expectations. Certainly his characters lack ardour, but that is the

‘Give me the cheque, you look like a decaying oyster’ — thus Roger Hilton accepting the John Moores First Prize in 1963, at the height of his career. At the dinner afterwards, very drunk, he was so rude to an alderman sitting next to him that the poor man had a heart attack and died at the table. It beats Tracey Emin’s ‘I want my mum’ by a country mile, and, although for British artists in recent years the reverse may have seemed to be the case, Andrew Lambirth believes that Hilton’s standing as a painter has been affected by such outrageous episodes, there being ‘a lingering belief in the