Book review

Saturday

Marcus Berkmann

Bookends: The showbiz Boris Johnson

Amiability can take you a long way in British public life. James Corden is no fool: he co-wrote and co-starred in three series of Gavin and Stacey, and wowed the National Theatre this summer with a barnstorming performance in One Man, Two Guvnors. But there’s no doubt that his Fat Lad Made Good persona, and his almost puppyish desire to please, have contributed to a popularity that other, more guarded performers can only envy. His memoir, May I Have Your Attention, Please? (Century, £18.99), has barrelled straight into the top ten bestsellers list. It has loads of energy and some good stories. But Corden is only 33. He simply hasn’t

Michela Wrong

Who Killed Hammarskjöld? by Susan Williams

When I was a Reuters trainee, long hours were spent in Fleet Street pubs absorbing the folklore of journalism from seasoned veterans. One popular story concerned the hapless correspondent sent to verify that Dag Hammarskjöld, head of the United Nations, had safely landed at Ndola airport in Northern Rhodesia on his way to talks with separatist Congolese leader Moise Tshombe. A plane landed, the police confirmed it was the UN secretary general, the hack duly filed his story. Trouble was, the disembarking white man was someone else. Hammarskjöld was dead, killed as his DC-6 crashed on night-time approach to Ndola. Rival reporters, drinking at a nearby hotel, heard the news

Ferdinand Mount

The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume II, 1941-56, edited by George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck

The die was miscast from the start, more’s the pity. As we reach the halfway point in this massy four-volume edition of the letters of Samuel Beckett, I cannot stifle a small sigh or whimper, of the type exhaled by one of those Beckett characters buried up to their necks. And there is no one to blame but the author of the letters. For it was Beckett himself who in his letter of 18 March, 1985, gave his blessing to Martha Fehsenfeld ‘to edit my correspondence in the sense agreed on, i.e. its reduction to those passages only having bearing on my work’. So the tussle began and continued long

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

The Golden Hour by William Nicholson

He’s got a winning formula, this writer, and he’s sticking to it. Set the action over seven days, in and around the Sussex town of Lewes, with occasional day trips to London; write about what you know (Sussex, script-writing, being 54, long marriages, worrying about your post-university children as well as your aged parents with Alzheimer’s, career anxiety, dinner-party anxiety); keep the chapters short (never more than ten pages) and avoid slabs of prose, so the pages are broken up into highly readable short paragraphs and dialogue; write in the present tense; and, within each chapter, keep a strict observance of the Unity of Person, so that the reader steps

Nicholas Lezard

Low Life: One Middle-Aged Man in Search of the Point by Jeremy Clarke

Some may question whether a review of a columnist’s work in the magazine in which that columnist’s work appears can ever be impartial. It can, and not just because this particular magazine is, as far as I recall, honest about this kind of thing. It’s because it’s in my interests to be hard on Jeremy Clarke. I write what you may describe as the equivalent column for your anti-matter counterpart, the New Statesman; moreover, I am engaged in the business of bunching my selected columns into a book, rather as he has done here. One does not want to encourage the competition. Furthermore, I knew Clarke’s predecessor, the late Jeffrey

Juliet Townsend

Georgette Heyer: Biography of a Bestseller by Jennifer Kloester

Those of us who have spent an embarrassing number of hours immersed in the Regency novels of Georgette Heyer have learned to live dangerously. We have been overturned in high perch phaetons, held up innumerable times by highwaymen, been kidnapped and spirited across the Channel, lost several fortunes at Faro or Bassett and have even witnessed and survived every moment of the Battle of Waterloo. The same cannot be said of the author, whose life was somewhat less eventful. Heyer was a creature of habit and for many years followed a regular annual routine: two novels published, one detective story and one Regency romance, a summer holiday in the same

Carey Schofield

Pakistan: A Personal History by Imran Khan

Imran Khan’s Pakistan: A Personal History describes his journey from playboy cricketer through believer and charity worker to politician. His story is interwoven with highlights from Pakistan’s history. At times he seems to conflate his own destiny with that of Pakistan, and at others to be writing a beguilingly honest personal account. Khan describes how youthful hedonism eventually gave way to faith. His cricketing life led him to realise that talent and dedication were no guarantee of success. In the end, he says, it comes down to luck. ‘Over the years I began to ask myself the question — could what we call luck actually be the will of God?’

Daisy Dunn

The Thread by Victoria Hislop

Oh what a tangled web she weaves! Victoria Hislop’s third novel, the appropriately titled The Thread, is pleasingly complex. The story traces several generations of a fictional Greek family called Komninos against the historical backdrop of the rise and fall of Greece’s second city, Thessaloniki, in the 20th century. To make things even knottier, most of the characters have some connection to the textile industry, and while for some this is booming, for others it remains a labour of love. The most fascinating element of the book develops out of the history of Thessaloniki itself. Historically, the city has an impressive heritage at stake. Tracing her foundation back to the

Grey Gowrie

A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney by Martin Gayford

Like his contemporary and fellow Yorkshireman, Alan Bennett, whom he slightly resembles physically, David Hockney has been loved and admired throughout his lifetime. He painted one of his greatest works, ‘A Grand Procession of Dignitaries in the Semi-Egyptian Style’ in 1961 while still at the Royal College of Art. He has dazzled, surprised and often upset the world of art ever since. Picasso aside, he is the wittiest modern painter, in the sense not just of being funny, but intelligent; a whole history of Western art is both contained and extended by his originality. For example, it was both funny, and in the 1960s brave, to apply Boucher’s soft pornography

Peter Jay

The Price of Civilization by Jeffrey Sachs

Half a century ago J.K. Galbraith’s The Affluent Society changed the political consciousness of a generation in the English- speaking world and beyond. It vividly re-established in the minds of civilised men and women the paradox of private affluence in a sea of public neediness — for which, as Matthew Arnold reminds us, Cato reported by Sallust had a name in his description of ancient Rome: ‘publice egestas, privatim opulentia’ (public poverty, private opulence). From this premise he made the case for the mixed economy, one in which the genius and power of market forces is balanced and harnessed by effective government in promoting public goods and correcting market failures

David Crane

An intemperate zone

Two years before the outbreak of the first world war, a Royal Navy officer, addressing an Admiralty enquiry into the disturbing question of lower-deck commissions, ventured the cautionary opinion that it took three generations to make a gentleman. It is hard to know exactly what he meant by that endlessly morphing concept, but if it bore any resemblance to the historical compound of avarice, bad faith, dynastic ambition and family selfishness that dominates the pages of Adam Nicolson’s dazzling narrative, then the one consoling mercy is that it has always taken a good deal less than three to unmake one. There are gleams of humanity, courage and honour to be

Saturday

Philip Hensher

Day of reckoning | 3 September 2011

No one could say that we didn’t have warning of these events in the most specific terms. A month before 11 September 2001, the President’s daily intelligence brief was headed ‘Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.’ Other official warnings from this time and earlier were so specific, and so specifically ignored, that a former National Security Adviser at the White House, Sandy Berger, would on four separate occasions in 2002 and 2003 abstract official top secret documents from the National Archives by stuffing them in his socks. (Because of Berger, we now don’t know what these warnings consisted of). There were any number of commentators, too, who saw exactly

Ian Thomson

A dancer’s progress

In 1971, at the height of the Indo-Pakistan war, my parents took me with them to Bombay. I was ten and it was my first trip abroad. My father worked for Brooke Bond, and had ‘tea business’ to attend downtown. First we checked into the Taj Hotel. On the waterfront, beggar children with lurid wounds and deformities were shaking tins at passers-by. The poverty unsettled me. The Taj was swank, I could see that, but outside all was dirt and destitution. (At a cinema nearby, jarringly, Carry on Loving was being advertised as the comedy ‘fillum’ sensation of the year.) Over dinner, my parents explained that Bangladesh, formerly East Pakistan,

Simon Baker

Friendships resurrected

A fact which often surprises those who pick up the Bible in adulthood, having not looked at it for years, is how very short the stories are. Adam and Eve, Noah’s Ark, the Feeding of the Five Thousand — in spite of their familiarity they are raced through in just a few lines. It is, however, perhaps the very terseness of the Bible that has caused at least as much ink as blood to be spilled in its cause; had it spelled the answer out, for instance, medieval scholars could never have whiled away so many jaw-droppingly fatuous hours in wondering how many angels could dance on the head of

Anne Applebaum

Thus do empires end

‘This book is a chronicle of one day in the history of one city.’ As first sentences go, that one is hard to beat — particularly given that the ‘one day’ is the last day of the Soviet Union, the city is Moscow and the author, an Irish journalist, was there and knew most of the principal actors. ‘This book is a chronicle of one day in the history of one city.’ As first sentences go, that one is hard to beat — particularly given that the ‘one day’ is the last day of the Soviet Union, the city is Moscow and the author, an Irish journalist, was there and

Peter Oborne

The enemy within | 3 September 2011

The most telling figure in Carey Schofield’s book on the Pakistan army is Faisal Alavi, a major general who was murdered in November 2008. The most telling figure in Carey Schofield’s book on the Pakistan army is Faisal Alavi, a major general who was murdered in November 2008. As head of Pakistan’s special forces, Alavi found himself in a bitter struggle against influential military opponents in the Pakistan army. They favoured secret deals, paying large sums to the Taleban leader Baitullah Mehsud so that his supporters should not target the army. Alavi was by contrast desperate to attack the Taleban, and made no secret of this when on a visit

Dot Wordsworth

Little lists for word lovers

In his Modern English Usage, Henry Fowler used the term Wardour Street for ‘a selection of oddments calculated to establish (in the eyes of some readers) their claim to be persons of taste and writers of beautiful English’. In his Modern English Usage, Henry Fowler used the term Wardour Street for ‘a selection of oddments calculated to establish (in the eyes of some readers) their claim to be persons of taste and writers of beautiful English’. The metaphor was taken from the street in Soho, later occupied by the film industry, once the place for dealers in antique, or imitation-antique furniture. Among Fowler’s examples of Wardour Street English were anent,

Mark Mason

Music, moonlight and dahlias

The words that echoed constantly in the back of my mind as I read this book were from Paul Simon’s song ‘Train in the Distance’: ‘the thought that life could be better is woven indelibly into our hearts and our brains’. The words that echoed constantly in the back of my mind as I read this book were from Paul Simon’s song ‘Train in the Distance’: ‘the thought that life could be better is woven indelibly into our hearts and our brains’. Paul Hollander’s thesis is that modern America’s ultra-individualism has led its citizens to expect perfection in every aspect of life, relationships included. Which means that Uncle Sam and

John Preston

Bookends | 3 September 2011

Dr Temperance Brenner, like her creator, Kathy Reichs, is a forensic anthropologist. She works in North Carolina, specialising in ‘decomps and floaters’. This ensures that in Flesh and Bones (Heinemann, £18.99) you get plenty of authentic sounding detail with your gore. So when a human hand is found sticking out of a drum full of asphalt at the local speedway track, Reichs carefully includes plenty of stuff about how to extract the body — start with a power saw, then move on to an air hammer — and about the drum itself: ‘the size of the drum suggested a 35-gallon capacity.’ But there’s plenty more to Reichs than just insider

Saturday

A.N. Wilson

In a class of his own | 27 August 2011

Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s Mr Tibbits’s Catholic School captures the hilarity and pathos of an eccentric headmaster and the unusual establishment he founded in Kensington in the Thirties. A.N.Wilson introduces us to his funny, peculiar world There are two sorts of school stories. Much the most popular, of course, are those that observe the drama of school life through the prism of the pupils’ imagination. Malory Towers, the Chalet School adventures, Jennings and Darbishire, Harry Potter, Billy Bunter all belong to this addictive genre. My father, who was born in 1902, used to say that the essential thing to realise about such books is that they are really about class; that