Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Wednesday

Jonathan Sumption

The Christian Drang nach Osten

We are still living with the images and legends of the crusades. Were they, as the 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote, ‘the most signal and durable monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation’? Were they, as muscular Christians and imperialists suggested in the 19th century, a matchless epic of human heroism, in which the defeat of the ‘right’ side had been happily reversed in their own age? Were they an immoral act of unprovoked aggression for which western Christians should apologise to the Muslim world, as the last Pope has rather absurdly purported to do on their behalf? Moral judgments, it is said,

Byron Rogers

A sort of decade

The Sixties are there in the first sentence of the first chapter of this social, political and cultural history of the decade: On the first day of October 1963, as the earliest whispers of dawn were edging across the cliff tops of the Yorkshire resort of Scarborough, the new leader of the Labour party nervously paced up and down the carpet of his hotel suite. They are there in the first sentence of the second chapter: Shortly after four o’clock on the afternoon of Friday, 16 October, a sleek black Daimler eased through the rain into the forecourt of Buckingham Palace. And in the first sentence of the third chapter:

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

The primrose path to holiness

‘No thanks. Too much sex.’ Thus an elderly friend dismissed my offer to lend him John Stubbs’s compendious biography of John Donne. His fears are groundless. Stubbs tells us virtually nothing about the paramours who inspired Donne’s youthful poems, partly because no new information is available and partly because the poet’s exquisite testimony on the subject renders further details superfluous. Instead he focuses on Donne’s struggle with his religious conscience, a conflict which typifies the difficulties faced by England’s religious communities in the early 17th century. Donne was born a Catholic during the reign of Elizabeth I (he was the great-great-grandson of Sir Thomas More) and he was sent to

Alexander Waugh

An exception to most rules

Waiting for the second volume of a good biography is a painful process. I feel very sorry for anyone who read Brian McGuinness’s excellent Young Ludwig (part one of the life of Wittgenstein) when it was published in 1988. The philosopher’s exciting story broke off in 1921 and fans have been left dangling ever since in an 18-year state of suspended expectation of a sequel. As far as I know Dr McGuinness is alive and kicking and still regarded as the world’s greatest expert on Wittgenstein, but too much time has passed and slowly we must adjust our sights to the sordid possibility that there may never be a second

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

A not so cuddly teddy bear

Only if you have spent the last few months living in a remote corner of Chad will you not have noticed that this year marks the centenary of Sir John Betjeman’s birth. We have already seen telly programmes, church restoration appeals, commemorative CDs of his readings, Cornish cliff walks and special outings on West Country railways in honour of a man whose genius consisted, as the late Sir Peter Parker put it, in ‘an infinite capacity for taking trains’. Now come two new lives: A. N. Wilson’s snappy and stylish short biography, and a still hefty one-volume boiling-down of Bevis Hillier’s socking three-volume authorised life. Though it’s a matter for

Matthew Dennison

Double rescue from the cold

‘I am entirely against the promotion of a sense of humour as a philosophy of life,’ wrote Kate O’Brien, with just that chilling aloofness that marks out her two heroines in The Land of Spices. Mère Marie-Hélène, Reverend Mother of the convent school of La Compagnie de la Sainte Famille in Mellick (a fictionalised Limerick), and Anna Murphy, her youngest pupil, each form a single deep emotional attachment — Reverend Mother to her father, Anna to her brother Charlie. Both attachments fall victim to human frailty (sexual transgression on Reverend Mother’s father’s part, the physical weakness of the human body when pitted against the elements in Charlie’s case), and nun

Digby Durrant

A small stir of Scots

I wonder how much my enthusiasm for Alexander McCall Smith’s stories about Precious Ramotswe, the founder of The Ladies No. 1 Detective Agency, came from reading them while in a French hospital recovering from an emergency operation?  Grateful to be transported from my hospital bed to Botswana and find myself in her company I wouldn’t have heard a word against her. And when his first Edinburgh book came out called 44 Scotland Street, where years ago I once had digs, did I allow a nostalgic bias to creep in? But here’s Love Over Scotland, and I have no excuse for any bias, nostalgic or otherwise. Many of the original cast reappear.

Lee Langley

A thousand bottles of Mumm

The front cover shows a mature English beauty in an Oriental doorway, elegant in a turban, with twinset and pearls. On the back is a Country Life portrait of a radiant English rose. Both are Ann Allestree, who for 30 years supped at the high table of grand society, travelled, and set down her impressions. Seize the Day is an insider’s view of the wilder reaches of privilege. She met ambassadors, Eastern potentates, and enduring stars — Freya Stark, Harold Acton, Rebecca West. English eccentrics wander through her pages — barmy lords, batty old ladies, posh grotesques to set a Marxist drooling. Lord Binning invites her to dinner, and waves

Robert Salisbury

Hoping against hope

Professor Kennedy is a decent liberal who hopes for the victory of the brotherhood of man. He begins this study of the UN, its history, successes, failings and prospects for reform by quoting Tennyson’s ‘Locksley Hall’: Till the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle-flags were furl’dIn the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law. In his Afterword, he does remind us that Tennyson revised his optimism 60 years later: Chaos, Cosmos! Cosmos, Chaos! Who can tell how all will end?…When was age so crammed with menace? madness?

Caroline Moorehead

Papa on the warpath

In 1961, when he was 62, Ernest Hemingway shot himself. Almost half a century later, this bombastic, vainglorious, paranoid man, whose writing captured the minds not only of his own generation but of all subsequent ones, still exercises a powerful attraction for biographers. Though no one has yet written a better account of Hemingway’s unhappy and driven life than Carlos Baker, whose 700-page volume appeared in the late 1960s, scholars, historians, journalists and biographers continue to tease out little known aspects of it, chipping at fragments of the past, rearranging them into new patterns and mosaics. In The Breaking Point, Stephen Koch has turned to the Spanish civil war, following

Simon Baker

Getting the maximum pleasure

The premise of John Sutherland’s new book is that many people wrongly think of reading as an all-or-nothing ability, like, say, tying one’s shoes: either you can do it or you can’t. Such people would no doubt consider a book about how to read a novel as irrelevant as one titled How to Eat Crisps — and yet, Sutherland maintains, reading a novel well is almost as difficult as writing one well. Perhaps the word ‘reading’ itself is the problem. Strictly speaking, reading is something you can either do or not do, and it’s not terribly difficult. We say that novels by Proust or Pynchon are ‘difficult reads’, but in

Kieron Winn

Unforgetting

The arc and light and breadth and nothing kempt,Flat shining fields of sand, the shallow-carvingTigris and Euphrates of the beach streamsWhere individual flying grains are seen,The wet compactions out of which grew keepsI slopped moat water on at the end of the day,Playing decay and knowing I was loved,Coves where my face would drop past the waterlineInto the wallowing playfully-deadly force,Blue-black rock, its surface softened by water,Broad outcrops, models of a savage planet,Clammy caves whose ground no man had trod—A language I absorbed, forgot I knew,Restarting after a sleepy train’s long snaking.

Christopher Woodward

The master left without masterpieces

Sir John Soane is London’s lost architect. You can visit his museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and the picture gallery he designed at Dulwich. But since his death in 1837 his greatest masterpieces have gone. The Victorians demolished the law courts at Westminster, and the glittering royal entrance to the House of Lords. The RAC club-house stands on the site of the Marquis of Buckingham’s palace on Pall Mall. His Bank of England was demolished in the 1920s —– to Nikolaus Pevsner the city’s greatest loss of the 20th century. Happily, this book by the architect Ptolemy Dean brings into the balance a multiplicity of new discoveries. It is the

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 16 August 2006

Cry Shame (1950) by Katherine Everard Cry Shame! is the torrid tale of a 13-year- old girl who leaves home to become a dancer: in her brief career she learns things she is too young to know, runs off with a man four times her age, assiduously breaks the seventh commandment, has an affair with an ‘ambisextrous’ Hollywood screen idol and ends her harlot’s progress in a seedy hotel room with sleeping pills and bourbon. ‘Definitely adult reading!’ bawled the Cincinnati Enquirer. ‘Frank and revealing!’ ululated the Dayton Daily News. What no one knew at the time was that Katherine Everard was a fresh-faced young man called Gore Vidal. Short

Wednesday

Philip Mansel

The Prince and the F

Anyone interested in the history of Germany, of nationalism or of dynasties will be gripped by this book. Born at the start of the 20th century, heirs of an ancient German dynasty, Princes Philipp and Christopher of Hesse-Kassel were good-looking, modern young men. English was their second language, Queen Victoria’s liberal daughter the Empress Frederick their grandmother. No other German princes, however, rose so high in the Nazi party. Prince Philipp became a member of the Nazi party and the SA in 1930. Prince Christopher joined the SS in 1932. The timing of their adhesion, before Hitler came to power, proves its sincerity. Their mother ‘Mossy’ invited Hitler to tea

Paul Binding

A member of the awkward squad

On an autumn Saturday in 1944 Private Robert Prentice, an 18-year-old rifleman trainee, makes a long journey from his camp in Virginia to New York City, to see his mother. He is soon to be sent abroad, France most likely, and there he’ll see action, which will at least be a change from tedious, thankless camp duties. ‘Oh, Bobby!’ exclaims his ageing mother as she greets him. ‘My soldier! My big, wonderful soldier!’ A touching tableau, one would think, except that it’s riddled with falsity. Alice Prentice is a self-centred, self-indulgent, attitudinising spendthrift, who will occupy herself during Bobby’s long and endangered absence with plans for him to rescue her

Andrew Taylor

Meandering with a mazy motion

Kate Atkinson’s previous novel, Case Histories, was a successful experiment in crime fiction. One Good Turn is its sequel. In the first book, which was set in Cambridge, Brodie Jackson was a standard-issue private eye — ex-army, ex-police, with a broken marriage and a penchant for country music. Now, thanks to a £2 million inheritance from a grateful client, he’s an ex-private eye with a house in France and a swimming pool. Another legacy from Case Histories is his lover Julia, an actress in the Nell Gwyn mould, both physically and emotionally. Brodie and Julia are in Edinburgh, where Julia has a role in a doomed Fringe production, largely funded

Charlotte Moore

The past is always present

‘Nothing was over. Nothing is ever over.’ Thus muses Humphrey Clark as he travels towards the small windswept northern port of Finsterness, scene of formative childhood holidays. Humphrey, a reclusive marine biologist, is on his way to collect an honorary degree. Much more significantly, at Finsterness he will re-encounter Ailsa Kelman, his childhood companion and later — secretly, briefly — his wife. The idea that ‘nothing is ever over’ provides the momentum for this, Margaret Drabble’s 17th novel. As young adults, Humphrey and Ailsa believed that they had found a perfect, time-cheating happiness together. This failed; now, in their sixties, they try to protect themselves from emotional pain, Humphrey by

Peter Jm-Wayne

The most famous, if not the tallest

Before the fire, before the ash, before theBodies tumbling solitary through space, oneThin skin of glass and metal met another….Two man-made behemoths joined in a       fatal kiss. Although this poetic and deeply philosophical expression of the author’s love (no other word will suffice) for the Empire State Building ostensibly celebrates the 75th anniversary of the great American icon, it has been thrown into more poignant relief, indeed could never have been written at all in its present form, without the sudden and awful twin demise of another icon just a few hundred yards downtown. Tragic irony, dramatic paradox, narrative necessity, call it what you will, it is solely on account

Hugh Massingberd

On the Wight track

In one of P. G. Wodehouse’s stories the attempts made by Oliver Sipperley, editor of the Mayfair Gazette, to inject some pep into the mag are hampered by poor old Sippy’s inability to ward off unwelcome contributions from his formidable prep school headmaster on recondite classical topics. I experienced not dissimilar difficulties when editing the Telegraph’s obituaries page as I was constantly being assured by the 2nd Viscount Camrose, the paper’s erstwhile deputy chairman, that one of his old sailing chums would make ‘a jolly good obit’ (though his brother, Lord Hartwell, always maintained that obits were a waste of news space). I came to dread the phrase ‘he was