Non-fiction

Saturday

Alan Judd

Ways of making men talk

Eric Rosenbach is a former academic who is now deputy assistant secretary of defence in Washington. Aki Peritz used to work for the CIA and now advises the Third Way think tank. Their book, therefore, is not a breathless account of terrorist-hunting nor the sensational inside story of how, in Obama’s words, ‘We got him’ (bin Laden). Rather, it is an exposition of legal, bureaucratic, political and military developments within the US following 9/11, illustrated by summaries of how various terrorists were killed or captured. If you want thrills and spills, go elsewhere, but if you are a student of counter-terrorism or are interested in the legal limbo of rendition,

Masha Karp

Siege mentality

The mirrored sunglasses worn by Putin on the cover of Angus Roxburgh’s The Strongman give the Russian president the look of a crude mafia boss, while the half-face photo on the cover of Masha Gessen’s book makes him appear both more ordinary and more sinister. This hints at the difference of the authors’ approach. Gessen focuses on the trajectory of a postwar Soviet boy growing up in a shabby communal flat, fierce and vengeful in street fights, who dreams of joining the KGB. This dream was fulfilled: Putin got a boring job as an agent in East Germany, and ten years after returning home he surprisingly became the most powerful

Graham Stewart

Bookends: A matter of opinion

In an age when the merely mildly curious believe they can get all they really need to know from Wikipedia for free, A. N. Wilson’s fellow literary professionals must take heart from his expectation that there is still possibl to charge for a work of such succinctness that it is essentially an extended Wikipedia entry enlivened by some opinions. Wilson’s Hitler: A Short Biography (Harper Press, £14.99)certainly trumps Wiki for stylistic brio and brims with the author’s customary zip and zing. Inevitably few of the insights are especially original, but they are punchily delivered, particularly regarding Hitler’s early bone idleness and his modish, rather than outlandish, belief that science had

Saturday

Sam Leith

Hero of his own drama

Sam Leith is enthralled by the larger-than-life genius, August Strindberg — playwright, horticulturalist, painter, alchemist and father of modern literature When I’m reading a book for review, it’s my habit to jot an exclamation mark in the margin alongside anything that strikes me as particularly unexpected, funny or alarming. I embarked on Strindberg: A Life with — I’m ashamed to confess — the expectation of a weary plod through 400-odd pages of lowering Scandinavian neurosis, auguring a low exclamation-mark count and a high number of triple zeds. But by the end, there was an exclamation mark beside almost every paragraph. If it hadn’t been for the occasional ‘hahaha’ and ‘bonkers’,

Caroline Moorehead

Lest we forget | 17 March 2012

It was not possible, as Primo Levi memorably wrote, to convey the full horror of the Nazi extermination camps because no one had survived to describe death in the gas chambers. There were no ‘sommersi’ (drowned) left alive to speak for the men, women and children driven in naked to die.  Apart from Levi himself, one of the very few people to have got close is Claude Lanzmann, whose nine-and-a-half-hour film on the deaths camps, Shoah, transformed the way successive postwar generations have come to remember and perceive the Nazi killings. In his autobiography, The Patagonian Hare, Lanzmann provides much interesting material on the 13 years spent filming and editing,

Joanna Kavenna

Inflated dreams

When almost every tale about the Arctic has been told, when the major explorers have been assessed and re-assessed, when even the most obscure bit-players have been drawn into the light, what is a polar-minded author to do? Publishers can be such tiresome sticklers for novelty, always hankering after books to fire off into some perceived gap in the market. Failing that, they often insist on reputational piggy-backing — the author following in the footsteps of a legendary explorer, urgently intuiting the past, like a cross between a hiking holiday and a séance. Alec Wilkinson ignores the fashionable justifications. His book does not blare out new revelations and he distinctly

Philip Ziegler

Agreeing to differ

‘Frankie and Johnny were sweethearts; Lordie, how they could love.’ The ballad has many variant versions but the denouement is always the same; he was her man and he did her wrong. Rooty-toot-toot three times she shoot, and Johnny ended up in a coffin. Thatcher and Reagan were sweethearts; Lordie, how they could love. But Reagan did her wrong: over Grenada, over nuclear disarmament, as near as nothing over the Falklands. The relationship was to end in ostentatious affection, but if Mrs Thatcher had had a gun in that celebrated handbag, it might have been a case of rooty-toot-toot all over again. Richard Aldous claims, or, at least, lets the

Charles Saumarez-Smith

Last of the swagmen

I have hitherto resisted my wife’s frequent recommendations that I should read a daily blog about the life of the denizens of Spitalfields, but, now that they have been published in book form, I can see why she is such an enthusiast. The Gentle Author is deliberately anonymous and bases his style on a combination of John Gay and Henry Mayhew, a pseudo-18th-century faux naïf, who wanders round his local neighbourhood collecting the tales of ordinary folk, including the last of the so-called swagmen who has a market stall in Spitalfields, the waiter in an Indian restaurant just off Brick Lane, Fred, who sells chestnuts at the corner of Bell

Cressida Connolly

Here be monsters | 17 March 2012

The lovely title of this book comes from the philosopher David Hume. The question he posed was this: if a man grew up familiar with every shade of blue but one, would he be able to recognise the hue in a chart of blues, or would it register only as a blank? In other words, can the intellect supply information, or may we know things only through the senses? Dwelling too long on this sort of problem famously sends people mad. Hume himself suffered a breakdown, after which he sensibly made it his business to get out more. In this novel, two of the three people central to the story

Paul Binding

Abiding inspiration

In 1971 looking back over his life, Lionel Trilling (1905-1975) declared himself surprised at being referred to as a critic. Certainly his plan when young had been the pursuit of the literary life, ‘but what it envisaged was the career of the novelist. To this intention, criticism, when eventually I began to practise it, was always secondary, an afterthought: in short, not a vocation but an avocation.’ As Adam Kirsch comments, in his timely, incisive, succinct study, this admission was made when Trilling was ‘the most famous and authoritative literary critic in the English-speaking world.’ His volumes of critical essays, beginning with The Liberal Imagination (1950) — which sold 70,000

John Preston

Africa’s excesses

There are an awful lot of prostitutes in Africa and most of them seem to pass through the pages of Richard Grant’s book at one time or another. All this puts him in a terrible lather — ‘I had been so long without a woman’, he moans at one point, this while weighing up the attractions of a woman called Felicia ‘with extraordinary skin’ in the Rwandan capital, Kigali. But Grant also has a girlfriend back home who he’s determined to remain faithful to, and a mind set on higher things. He wants to become the first person to navigate the second longest river in Tanzania, the Malagarasi. The reason

Marcus Berkmann

Bookends: A life of gay abandon

Sometimes, only the purest smut will do. Scotty Bowers’s memoir, Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars (Grove Press, £16.99) is 24 carat, 100 per cent proof. Now rising 89, Scotty (pictured above in his youth) was for years the go-to guy in Tinseltown for sexual favours. Black, white, short, tall, same sex, opposite sex: he could supply it all. But this was no prostitution ring he was running, good lord no. He didn’t charge for his services. He just liked ‘to help folks out’. And he was winningly discreet — until now, that is. His book is Hollywood Babylon and then some,

Saturday

David Gilmour

‘Viva la muerte!’

The Spanish Holocaust is a book that will give readers nightmares: it gave me two in a single night. Even people who think they have read enough about the Spanish Civil War to feel inured to its horrors will still be appalled by the intensity of the cruelty and repression here revealed. ‘Of the folly and wickedness of the military rising’, wrote Gerald Brenan in The Spanish Labyrinth, ‘there can today be no two opinions.’ Nor today, more than 60 years after he wrote those words, can there be two opinions about the sadistic and merciless repression planned and perpetrated by General Franco and his conspirators.  Reading Paul Preston’s narrative

Robert Stewart

Patriot or traitor?

The mighty convulsion that was the French Revolution has stirred the blood of historians from Thomas Carlyle to Simon Schama and consideration of it still inflames opinions. At its centre stood Maximilien Robespierre — 5’ 3”, stern, unaffacted in manner or dress, Spartan in his domestic habits — deified by his followers as the ‘Incorruptible’ and vilified by his opponents as a traitor to the ideals of 1789, bent on dictatorship. Peter McPhee spares us speculation (Robespierre left no memoirs or diaries) on his subject’s ‘inner life’. Relying chiefly on Robespierre’s voluminous speeches and articles for the press, he calmly follows his progress, from crisis to crisis, in an austere

Hunter Davies

The triumph of failure

In l958, my hero in life, the person I most wanted to be, was Keith Dewhurst. I had arrived on the Manchester Evening Chronicle straight from Durham as a graduate trainee reporter, which was a laugh, as they did no training. Keith was the paper’s Manchester United reporter, knew all the players, went to all the games, and he wore a white raincoat with the collar turned up. Rapture. I don’t think I exchanged more than a few words with him, just ogled his raincoat from afar. Have never met him since. If I were to, I am sure he would deny he ever wore a white raincoat. It was

Sara Wheeler

A paralysed landscape

‘Very, very, very sexy’, a field-researcher scratches in his Antarctic notebook. He is describing a meteorite the size of a £1 coin that he has just picked up off the ice. The episode, recounted in Gabrielle Walker’s hugely informative book, reveals the passion of intrepid polar scientists. From the enthusiasm and diligence on display in these pages, one senses that the author shares their feelings. With a PhD in natural sciences and a solid career in science journalism, Walker is well placed to tackle the wide range of polar disciplines. She calls the Antarctic a ‘science playground’, and has visited five times, kneeling over holes in the ice with many

Lewis Jones

The end of the affair?

Of those caught up in the 1963 Profumo affair, the only winner seems to have been that blithe spirit Mandy Rice-Davies. Everyone else lost. Profumo’s family bore the brunt, of course, especially his son David, archetype of the boy sent crying home from school, who wrote a brilliant book about it, Bringing the House Down (2006). Harold Macmillan and the Conservative party were driven from office. Yevgeny Ivanov was recalled to Russia. Stephen Ward was hounded to death. And poor Christine Keeler… In that mesmerising scene in the film Scandal (1989), where Mandy (played by Bridget Fonda) and Christine (Joanne Whalley-Kilmer, as she then was) are getting dressed, to the

Philip Mansel

Charming, cold-eyed cosmopolitan

At last a diary as penetrating on Berlin as the Goncourt brothers’ on Paris has been translated into English. The author, Count Harry Kessler, resembled a character from Sybille Bedford’s masterpiece, A Legacy. Born in Paris in 1868, he was educated in England, France and Germany. His father was a Hamburg banker; his mother was an Irish-Scottish beauty called Alice Blosse Lynch, admired by the Emperor Wilhelm I. At once German and European, Kessler rotated, as freely as some do today, between London, Paris and Berlin. After a year in the army, and a voyage round the world, Kessler devoted himself to the arts. Exhibitions and parties, and  long descriptions

Saturday

John Sutherland

Man of mysteries

It was always William Wilkie Collins’s good luck — though in later life something of a humiliation — that he was dragged along on Dickens’s coat-tails — not least in this bicentennial ‘year of Dickens’. In December, the BBC will be showing a dramatisation of The Moonstone. T. S. Eliot (no less) called that tale of theft, somnambulism, Scotland Yard, opium and wily Indian thugs ‘the first and best of detective novels’. That, one imagines, would have elicited a snort of contradiction from the author of Bleak House, but the compliment is not far off the mark. Andrew Lycett is currently at work on a full-length biography and, in the

Jonathan Bate

Fatal impact theory 

As schools are for education, so universities are for higher education. In a civilised society, children should leave school literate, numerate and with some knowledge of science, history and culture. But society also needs an elite educated to a higher level. Universities are for the preparation of the next generation of doctors, United Nations interpreters, lawyers, structural engineers, archaeologists, nuclear-weapon designers, literary critics, astronomers, economists and so forth. That’s the short answer. The long answer would require a great deal more than is found in Stefan Collini’s brisk and very witty book. It would need to range far and wide both historically and geographically, to tell us about the centrality