Book reviews

Saturday

Joanna Kavenna

The trail goes cold

For centuries, the history of the far North was a tapestry of controversies and mis- understandings, misspellings, dubious arrivals and equally dubious departures. Pytheas the Greek sailed north from Britain in the 4th century BC, found a place where the sea, land and sky seemed to merge, and was trounced by later scholars as a terrible charlatan. The Vikings mingled cartographical details with stories of trolls and hauntings. During the reign of Elizabeth I, Martin Frobisher went north and (mistakenly) thought he’d found gold. Undeterred, successive explorers and treasure hunters ventured into the Arctic wastes, many of them vanishing among the floes. Frederick Cook claimed to have reached the North

Ian Thomson

Haitian horrors

Twenty years ago, in 1991, I was shown round the National Palace in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince. A government official led me through long rococo halls crammed with oriental rugs, gilded boule clocks and vases of deep pink roses. Little had changed since Jean-Claude ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier had fled Haiti in 1986. The Hall of Busts was lined with bronze heads of other Haitian presidents up to Elie Lescot in 1946. However, the bust of Jean-Claude’s dictator father ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier had been removed to the ‘Dépot de Débris’, where it lay covered in dust. On 12 January 2010, the National Palace was turned to dust in an earthquake.

Byron Rogers

A world of her own

This book, written by someone whose husband was for three years prime minister of Britain, is impossible to review. Yes, it is dull, but it is so triumphantly, so ineffably, dull it enters a breezy little monochrome world of its own. There is no characterisation, for no value judgments are passed, except those on Mrs Brown’s husband, who is portrayed as such a force for good he is virtually an extra-terrestrial being intervening in the affairs of men. As for the rest they are ‘charming’ or ‘lovely’. This is Mrs Brown showing HRH Prince Andrew, as she calls him, round Chequers: Without thinking, I open the drawer that holds the

Saturday

Mark Mason

Bookends: Capital rewards

London has been the subject of more anthologies than Samuel Pepys had hot chambermaids. This is fitting, as an anthology’s appeal — unexpected juxtaposition — matches that of the capital itself. But it does mean that any new contender has to work hard to justify its publication. London has been the subject of more anthologies than Samuel Pepys had hot chambermaids. This is fitting, as an anthology’s appeal — unexpected juxtaposition — matches that of the capital itself. But it does mean that any new contender has to work hard to justify its publication. Irreverence is one possible route, and here the Blue Guide Literary Companion: London (Somerset Books, £7.95)

Paul Johnson

Sins of the fathers | 26 March 2011

The trouble about writing a history of the popes is that there are so many of them. Usually elderly when elected, most of them have only lasted a few years. The longest reign was that of the mid-19th-century pope, Pius IX, Pio Nono, who clung on for 31 years. In our own times, Pius XII did 19 years, Paul VI 15 and John Paul II 18. But all were unusual. Closer to the average was poor John Paul I, who lasted 34 days. As a result there have been 264 popes. About some we know nothing and one or two may have been fictitious. ‘Pope Joan’ certainly was. So taking

Anne Chisholm

A grief ago

The cautionary slogan ‘less is more’ has never been the American writer Joyce Carol Oates’ watchword. The cautionary slogan ‘less is more’ has never been the American writer Joyce Carol Oates’ watchword. Over the last 40 years she has written a torrent of books — 115 at last count. Her prose is torrential too, and while several of her novels — Foxfire, Blonde and The Gravedigger’s Daughter among them — have been well-received, and she has a considerable following, especially in the United States, the sheer volume and intensity of her work has put some of us off. The fact that this memoir, recounting the death of her husband and

Michael Jacobs

Glutton for punishment

With its vast areas of barely explored wilderness, and its heady mix of the sublime, the bizarre and the lushly seductive, South America would appear to have all the ingredients to attract the travel writer. Yet the recent travel literature on the continent has been surprisingly scant and taken up by lightweight, gung-ho tales of not especially remarkable adventures. Fortunately there is John Gimlette, whose first South American travel book, At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig, captured with great wit and learning the quirkiness of Paraguay. He has now produced a no less remarkable portrait of the highly idiosyncratic countries known collectively as Guiana, the ‘Land of Many Waters’.

Margaret Macmillan

Iron in the blood

How curious that such an outsize man, in physique as well as personality, should be remembered today mainly for giving his name to a small fish. For the 19th century, Bismarck was no herring but a leviathan. Between 1862 and 1890 he created Germany, seeing off first the Austrian empire and then France. He dominated Prussian and then German politics and played a central role in the international relations of Europe. He also created the German problem which has been with us in one form or another ever since: his new country which sat at the heart of Europe was already a great military power and in the years after

Fay Maschler

A clash of commerce and culture

Other People’s Money — and How the Bankers Use It by Louis D. Brandeis was a collection of articles about the predatory practices of big banks, published in book form in 1914. Nearly a century later, it remains in print. In 1991 Danny de Vito starred as ‘Larry the Liquidator’ in the film Other People’s Money. The wanton boys of banking sport with us in life and art and in Justin Cartwright’s latest novel. Other People’s Money — and How the Bankers Use It by Louis D. Brandeis was a collection of articles about the predatory practices of big banks, published in book form in 1914. Nearly a century later,

Jeremy Treglown

The masters in miniature

Jeremy Treglown finds something for everyone in Penguin’s new Mini Modern series It’s a cool silver-grey in colour, weighs two and a half ounces and fits flexibly into your pocket. It opens easily to reveal words imaginatively chosen and arranged in sequences so absorbing and surprising that they can make you miss your bus stop. It costs £3. Penguin’s Mini Moderns — there are 50 of them, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Penguin Modern Classics — include a story in which a boy uses something very like Skype to call his mother and tell her he would like her to come and see him. She protests: ‘But I can

Saturday

Andrew Petrie

A chorus of disapproval

At more than 700 pages including appendices, Guardian writer Dorian Lynskey’s 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs (Faber & Faber, £17.99) certainly can’t be accused of skimping on the details. Adherence to the pun of the title has resulted in a thorough if necessarily left-wing history of political dissent since the Thirties, but don’t expect much emphasis on the music. There’s a reason polemical songs are the ones you admire for their commitment rather than sing in the shower. But it’s precisely because there’s more protest here than song that the book does such a good job of exposing the poseurs. John Lennon, for example, stands revealed

Victor Sebestyen

The missing millions

The collapse of the Soviet Union spawned an entire genre of literature: the Gulag memoir, produced by victims of the USSR’s concentration camps. A few masterpieces were published in the West, or in samizdat, before the 1980s, for example Evgenia Ginzburg’s renowned Into the Whirlwind and the works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.But as Soviet-style communism fell apart, the long-suffering voices were allowed to speak, and in Russia an enormous number of first-person books and articles began appearing. In her brilliant 2004 Gulag, Anne Applebaum wrote the best history of the Soviet camps to appear outside of what was once referred to as the Eastern bloc. That was a monumental achievement. But

Jonathan Cecil

Rogues’ gallery

The distinguished writer Brian Masters in his handsomely produced book on the actors of the Garrick Club has set himself a formidable task. Not only, until he reaches the mid-20th century, does he have to assess the art of long-dead actors from contemporary accounts; he is also writing a history of the theatrical profession from the time when actors were actually designated, in an 1822 Act of Parliament, ‘Rogues and Vagabonds’, until their gradual edging into respectability. This was symbolised by two events: the founding of the Garrick Club in 1831 and Henry Irving’s knighthood in 1895. Later, Masters enumerates 20th- century Garrick actors, many of whom he has known,

Frederic Raphael

‘We’ll always have Paris’

The long war between France and the US has its liveliest consequence in the world of film: Hollywood does movies, the French do cinema. In terms of equipment, the Yanks were the pioneers, but France’s Charles Pathé was the first tycoon and — more importantly — George Méliès was the inventor, by accident, of the method of cutting from scene to scene which has become the signal contribution of cinema to narrative. After the invention of talkies, Hollywood pulled out of sight and sound of its panting pursuers, but the French have remained obstinately inventive and creatively resentful: they harbour an abiding sense of having been robbed of an art

Jonathan Sumption

Design for living

The first thing to be said about this remarkable book is that it has nothing to do with animal rights. The title is borrowed from the archaic Greek poet Archilochus, who is known mainly for a single aphorism: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’ Isaiah Berlin borrowed this gnomic utterance for the title of his essay on Tolstoy, using it to illustrate his idea that great thinkers can be divided into two categories, the more focussed spirits who bring insights to a single great idea and the versatile universal men who skate over the whole surface of human knowledge. Ronald Dworkin is a self-proclaimed

Ian Thomson

Nostalgie de la boue

In the late 1960s I grew up in the London borough of Greenwich, which in those days had a shabby, post-industrial edge. Behind our house on Crooms Hill stood a disused London Electricity Board sub-station. Broken glass crunched underfoot and buddleia grew amid the fly-tipped junk. I went there chiefly to shoot at pigeons and set fire to things. Tea chests went up in a satisfying orange whoosh; I was mesmerised. One day, dreadfully, the LEB building burned down after I neglected to extinguish embers. The fire-fighters flashed a spectral white and blue, I remember, from the fire-engine’s beacon. I could no longer go there unnoticed. I was reminded of

Claudia FitzHerbert

Triumph and disaster

The title of this first novel refers to a version of childhood as a magical kingdom where evil can be overturned and heaven and earth remade at the whim of a power-crazed infant. In fact our narrator’s world has already been darkened by the time she is presented by her beloved elder brother with the rabbit she insists on calling God. She has been sexually abused by an elderly neighbour, a Jewish musician who fascinates her with tales of the concentration camp in which he was never interned. The brother discovers the betrayal, promises to keep it a secret and — this all happens in the first 30 pages —

Saturday

Patrick Skene-Catling

Bookends | 12 March 2011

About 80 per cent of books sold in this country are said to be bought by women, none more eagerly than Joanna Trollope’s anatomies of English middle-class family life. Her 16th novel, Daughters-in-Law (Cape, £18.99), is sociologically and psychologically as observant as ever, showing how not to be a suffocatingly possessive mother-in-law. About 80 per cent of books sold in this country are said to be bought by women, none more eagerly than Joanna Trollope’s anatomies of English middle-class family life. Her 16th novel, Daughters-in-Law (Cape, £18.99), is sociologically and psychologically as observant as ever, showing how not to be a suffocatingly possessive mother-in-law. Men, too, should benefit from this

Philip Hensher

‘This time it will be different’

There used to be two rules of successful imperialism. First, don’t invade Russia. Second, don’t invade Afghanistan. As Rodric Braithwaite points out, invading the latter country itself offers no real difficulties. The Afghans abandon their strongholds and take to the hills, allowing the invader to enjoy the illusion of power in Kabul, with a puppet leader installed in the Bala Hissar, the old palace fortress. The problems come later, as a long war of attrition achieves little and finally obliges the invader to cut his losses and run. Anyone can see that this is what is happening at present to the British and American forces. And it has happened before.

Max Mosley

A bit of a softie

Tom Bower’s fearsome reputation as a biographer preceded him in the Formula One paddock. Tom Bower’s fearsome reputation as a biographer preceded him in the Formula One paddock. His devastating treatment of subjects such as Conrad Black, Mohamed Al-Fayed and Richard Branson was well known. So here, at last, was a writer who would unravel the mystery of Bernie Ecclestone and explain how he progressed from selling buns in his school playground to wielding great power over a major world sport, trousering billions of pounds on the way. We all suspected that much of the mystery was created by Bernie himself. He loved to give the impression of a ruthless,