Book review

Saturday

Michela Wrong

Lucky miss

In Dreams From My Father, his exploration of race and roots, Barack Obama recalled the tales heard in childhood about the man who gave him his name. His father, they said, was a brilliant economist who grew up herding goats in western Kenya, then won a scholarship to the University of Hawaii, where he fell in love with a white woman. ‘There was only one problem: my father was missing. Nothing my mother or grandparents told me could obviate that single, unassailable fact.’ My boy, I thought on finishing this book, you have no idea how lucky you were. Sociologists may worry about the impact absent fathers are having on

Simon Baker

The man who came to dinner

Each year Genevieve Lee holds an ‘alternative’ dinner party, to which she invites, along with her friends, a couple of people she wouldn’t ordinarily mix with — a Muslim, say, or homosexual. Each year Genevieve Lee holds an ‘alternative’ dinner party, to which she invites, along with her friends, a couple of people she wouldn’t ordinarily mix with — a Muslim, say, or homosexual. At her latest party a guest named Miles, whom she’s never met before, locks himself in the spare room, and refuses come out. In the first of the novel’s four sections, Genevieve contacts Anna, who had met Miles during a holiday in 1980, hoping that a

Hywel Williams

Ghosts of the Teutonic Knights

Do the trees of East Prussia still whisper in German when the wind blows in from the Baltic and across the featureless plain? The Russian poet Joseph Brodsky thought so when he visited in the 1960s. But keen ears, and a very long historical reach, are surely now needed in order to detect that particular susurration. A little over two million Germans lived here in 1940. Now there are just 10,000 ‘of German descent’. Eight centuries ago members of the Order of the Teutonic Knights, snobbish and aristocratic virgins almost to a man, arrived here from Acre to start that great Crusade of the North which was the counterpart to

Justin Marozzi

Ways of escape

When I compiled a list of the top dozen travel writers of the past century for an American magazine the other day, it required some effort not to come up with an entirely British cast. Freya Stark, Norman Lewis, Patrick Leigh Fermor and Jan Morris were musts. So too were V. S. Naipaul and Colin Thubron, still writing up a storm, and the Ibn-Battutah-mad Tim Mackintosh-Smith for a younger generation. Although there was no space for Byron, Bell, Thesiger or Chatwin, no great legerdemain was needed to squeeze in the brilliant Dutchman Cees Nooteboom, Ryszard Kapuscinski, the Polish master of literary reportage, the Irishwoman Dervla Murphy and Martha Gellhorn from

Alexander Larman

The other man’s grass . . .

Hundreds of thousands of hardy souls are preparing for a few nights under canvas this summer, often facing sunburn or trench foot while giddily jumping up and down in a muddy field as bands maul their better-known hits. And yet, for most of these people, camping is something that they wouldn’t dream of doing except at music festivals, despite its convenience, lack of cost, green credentials and genuine sense of excitement and adventure. This dichotomy, among many others, is explored with intelligence and wit in Matthew de Abaitua’s treatise on the values and social impact of camping. Subtitled ‘the history and practice of sleeping under the stars’, the book is

Saturday

Sam Leith

Golden lads and girls | 2 July 2011

Sam Leith tracks the careers of Alan Hollinghurst’s captivating new characters through youthful exuberance to old age, dust and a literary afterlife It’s quite hard to know where to begin, reviewing The Stranger’s Child. As I finished it, and was heard making bloody-hell-this-is-good noises, two people asked me: ‘What’s it about?’ That, as it turns out, is a very good question. Ostensibly, it’s about a fictional poet called Cecil Valance, a diffusion-line Rupert Brooke described years after his death in the first world war as ‘a first-rate example of the second-rate poet who enters into common consciousness more deeply than many greater masters’. Cecil is a Ripping Yarns toff, complete

Byron Rogers

Scenes from the Mad Hatter’s tea party

I only ever heard my mother admit twice to fancying other men. One, remarkably, was Saddam Hussein, the other was Richard Burton, and of each she said, ‘He’s a good-looking old man.’ She said this the way only a Welsh Baptist matron could: grimly, and because she was secure in the knowledge that she was not likely to meet either in chapel or on the streets of Carmarthen. Richard Burton, once of Port Talbot, later of the Dorchester Hotel, was cat-nip to women. He had a face ravaged by acne and his feet smelt, but he managed to sleep with the most beautiful leading ladies of his time, something his

Andrew Rosenheim

A far cry from Dr Finlay

If he is remembered at all, A.J. Cronin is known now for Dr Finlay’s Casebook, which ran for many years on both BBC television and radio, and today resonates with the glow of a gentler past — when a GP happily made house calls, delivered babies, and served as shaman, shrink and confessor to his rural community. If he is remembered at all, A.J. Cronin is known now for Dr Finlay’s Casebook, which ran for many years on both BBC television and radio, and today resonates with the glow of a gentler past — when a GP happily made house calls, delivered babies, and served as shaman, shrink and confessor

Cressida Connolly

The worst crime was to be a bore

Gully Wells is a spirited and amusing writer, the daughter of the American journalist Dee Wells and the stepdaughter of the famous philosopher Freddie Ayer. While an undergraduate at Oxford she had an affair with Martin Amis and travelled to Italy with him, a trip fictionalised in his recent novel, The Pregnant Widow (conveniently out in paperback at just the same moment as this memoir appears, for ease of cross-referencing). Wells worked for the publisher George Weidenfeld before marrying and moving to New York, where today she’s the features editor of a travel magazine. Christopher Hitchens and Anna Wintour are among her pals. Her parents divorced when Gully was tiny.

James Grande

Chinese whispers

River of Smoke begins with the storm that struck the convict ship the Ibis at the end of Amitav Ghosh’s 2008 Man Booker-shortlisted Sea of Poppies. River of Smoke begins with the storm that struck the convict ship the Ibis at the end of Amitav Ghosh’s 2008 Man Booker-shortlisted Sea of Poppies. Redruth, the vessel of a Cornish plant-hunter, Frederick ‘Fitcher’ Penrose, sails in to Port Louis, Mauritius, two days after the Ibis, while the Anahita, belonging to Bahram Modi, a Bombay opium merchant, encounters the same storm on the other side of the Indian Ocean. Counting the cost of their voyages, characters from all three ships make their way

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Damned either way

As someone who was born ‘the other side of the tracks’, I really wanted to like Owen Jones’s book, which sets out to expose how in recent years the working classes have become ‘objects of fear and ridicule’. It’s true; they have. The problem is, however, that he implores us to pity them rather than fear them. And as the proverb goes: ‘Friends help; others pity.’ Jones catalogues media and political assaults on ‘chavs’ — those fake-Burberry-clad no-marks covered in bling, who hang around street corners with scary-looking dogs and bottles of alcopops. They are now wearily familiar symbols in the Daily Mail and on Channel 4 of all that

Dan Jones

Sad, not mad

The Catholic Monarchs — Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile — had five children together. The Catholic Monarchs — Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile — had five children together. Each child was married off to a promising European neighbour, thereby acting as a diplomatic tool in the Monarchs’ reassertion of royal authority over Spain. Two of those children remain famous today, chiefly for their reputation as the 16th century’s most wretched doormats. Katherine of Aragon was the youngest child. As we know, her first marriage was to Henry VII of England’s eldest son, Prince Arthur. When he died, her second marriage was to

Simon Heffer

The biography of a nobody

A biography of Ed Miliband has to try hard not to be the sort of thing one buys as a present for someone one avidly dislikes. This effort, the first in what its authors seem (perhaps optimistically) to imagine may be a long series of accounts of their subject’s life, does not try hard enough. It has detail — Messrs Hasan and Macintyre boast of a million words of interview transcripts — but in the end it is, plainly and simply, stultifyingly boring. I am not sure this is entirely the writers’ faults. Before reading their book, I thought Mr Miliband was simply oversold, a man born to disappoint. Now

Saturday

Edward King

Empty lines on a CV

The intern is everywhere, slowly but surely, infiltrating every office on the planet. But while the internship is now ubiquitous, having become the standard first rung on most career ladders and the most frequent stepping stone between education and a career, it remains a largely unexamined and unregulated sector. Somewhere between an apprenticeship and a temp job, the internship resists easy definition and is understood more in terms of social cachet than actual responsibilities. Having had his fair share of directionless and underpaid internships between various degrees at Stanford and Cambridge, Ross Perlin, a researcher in linguistics, decided that the phenomenon deserved closer scrutiny. The result is Intern Nation, an

Simon Courtauld

Art and the raging bull

In these days of growing concern at the methods of factory farming and the welfare of the animals which are raised and killed for our consumption, it is instructive to compare the life of domestic beef cattle with that of a Spanish fighting bull. The cattle may have less than two years of life in cramped conditions, while the toro bravo roams free and unmolested on pasture for five years. Alexander Fiske- Harrison makes the comparison succinctly: ‘Five years on free-release and then the arena, or 18 months in prison and then the electric chair’. He maintains (there is some evidence for this, to do with beta-endorphins) that the fighting

Justin Cartwright

Mumbai and Mammon

This is a state of the nation novel or more accurately a state of Mumbai novel. Behind the tale of a struggle by a developer to acquire, for flashy redevelopment,  the three towers of the lower-middle-class, crumbling Vishram Co-operative Housing Society, lies a colourful and ambitious novel about the changing standards and habits of the citizens of Mumbai, poisoned as much by the rocketing wealth all around, as by the foul air and excrement-laden byways. (Adiga mentions shit and its stench time and again.) On the one side of the divide is a group of friends and neighbours who live in Tower A of the Society. The most respected of

Paul Johnson

Heroic long-suffering

English patriotism was still a force in 1914. On the first day of the war, my mother’s three brothers, and my father and his two brothers, all joined up together, in the Artists’ Rifles. On the first day of the second world war, which I remember well, there were some similarities, but they were superficial. Again, my elder brother joined immediately. But the mood was resignation, not enthusiasm. There was no rejoicing, no talk of a new and better world: just a despairing attempt to preserve what was left of an unsatisfactory old one. The truth is, the Great War knocked the stuffing out of the British. They have never

James Walton

When more is less

If you know anything at all about Cynthia Ozick — an officially accredited grande dame in America, less famous in Britain — you won’t be surprised to hear that her new novel is influenced by Henry James. If you know anything at all about Cynthia Ozick — an officially accredited grande dame in America, less famous in Britain — you won’t be surprised to hear that her new novel is influenced by Henry James. Throughout Ozick’s career, James has hovered over her fiction and featured heavily in her essays. Now, in Foreign Bodies, she goes for, among other things, a full-scale recasting of The Ambassadors. In James’s novel, the middle-aged

William Feaver

The English El Greco

Talk about ‘enemies of promise’. Talk about ‘enemies of promise’. In the March 1942 number of Horizon magazine there appeared what could be a heartfelt illustration of the whinger’s conceit propagated by Horizon’s editor, Cyril Connolly, to the effect that life stifles artistic ambitions. Plate 2, ‘Dreamer in Landscape’ by John Craxton, is a pen-and-wash drawing of horny plants breathing down the neck of a dozing boy. How very Craxton. Not yet 20 and already well-versed in overgrown styling and poetic self-pity. For decades Craxton lived with the fact that early promise guarantees nothing. What in his salad days denoted a growing confidence — the tidied airs, the recurrence of

Richard Davenporthines

A haze of artifice

Auden said: ‘The ideal audience the poet imagines consists of the beautiful who go to bed with him, the powerful who invite him to dinner and tell him secrets of state, and his fellow-poets. Auden said: ‘The ideal audience the poet imagines consists of the beautiful who go to bed with him, the powerful who invite him to dinner and tell him secrets of state, and his fellow-poets. The actual audience he gets consists of myopic schoolteachers, pimply young men who eat in cafeterias, and his fellow poets. This means, in fact, he writes for his fellow poets.’ Certainly Auden’s The Age of Anxiety, which was first published in 1947,