Non-fiction

Saturday

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,

Saturday

Francis King

Morality tales

Francis King celebrates Margaret Drabble’s distinguished career and vividly recalls their first meeting I first met a youthful Margaret Drabble when, already myself an established author, I was working at Weidenfeld and Nicolson as a literary adviser. The editorial director was an Australian woman called Barley Allison, sister of an MP, who constantly boasted of having ‘grabbed’ (her word) yet another new author for her distinguished list. Her latest ‘grab’ was a sometimes pensively grave and sometimes energetically argumentative woman, an admired actress when up at Cambridge, with the totally unsuitable surname Drabble. ‘You must meet her,’ Allison told me. ‘Quite remarkable.’ When the three of us sat down to

Bevis Hillier

1951 and all that

The author of this book and I both visited the 1951 Festival of Britain on London’s South Bank as schoolboys. The author of this book and I both visited the 1951 Festival of Britain on London’s South Bank as schoolboys. He was 13, I was 11. We were both old enough to remember the war. We were both enduring the post-war austerity. Much was still rationed. Everywhere there were bombsites. From his generally commendable account, I know we both had a similar reaction to the Dome of Discovery, the Skylon and all the other attractions: there was a sense of renewal, lightness, colour, modernity and excess, in contrast to the

Carey Schofield

Clashing by night

Cables from Kabul is Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles’s valedictory account of his years as ambassador to Kabul (2007-9) and as this country’s Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan (2009-10). Cables from Kabul is Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles’s valedictory account of his years as ambassador to Kabul (2007-9) and as this country’s Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan (2009-10). A long telegram reporting on the ramp ceremony for a fallen soldier, Corporal Damian Stephen Lawrence of the 2nd Battalion, the Yorkshire Regiment, opens the book. It is a beautiful piece, describing the service — ‘in the best traditions of lapidary Anglicanism. Plenty of dignity but not too much religion’ — and the military

Andro Linklater

Patience v. panache

The square jaw and steely gaze are deceptive. In reality, next to a prima donna on the slide, no one is more vain and temperamental than a general on the climb. So much at least is clear from Peter Caddick-Adams’s intriguing study of generals Bernard Montgomery and Erwin Rommel. Each was assiduous in the celebrity skills of image-making and audience massage, and none more adept at stabbing rivals in the ribs and ascribing good luck to talent. Yet for all the froth, both succeeded in a trade whose yardstick of success, crushing an opponent to death or submission, cannot be faked. In popular terms, it is the great confrontation in

Saturday

Jonathan Sumption

The problems of PR

Two centuries ago, Edmund Burke famously mocked the intellectuals of revolutionary France for trying to devise a perfectly rational constitution for their country. The Abbé Sieyès, he wrote, had whole nests of pigeon-holes full of constitutions, ready made, ticketed, sorted and numbered, suited to every season and every fancy . . . so that no constitution-fancier may go unsuited from his shop. The Abbé Sieyès has had his imitators in England lately. The last government devoted much intellectual energy and parliamentary time to producing a theoretical separation of the judiciary from the legislature and the executive, when a practical separation had existed for years. The current coalition has devoted at

Philip Ziegler

Neither Greek nor German

Prince Philip’s childhood was such that he had every right to be emotionally repressed and psychologically disturbed. Prince Philip’s childhood was such that he had every right to be emotionally repressed and psychologically disturbed. Born sixth in line to the Greek throne, at the age of 18 months he was hounded from what, in name at least, was his homeland. His father came within an ace of being executed for high treason. When he was only eight his mother suffered a devastating nervous breakdown; in 1930 she was drugged into placidity, bundled into a car and consigned to a sanatorium-cum-prison. His father shrugged off his responsibilities towards his children, of

Michael Henderson

The great game

Some of the best writing about sport in recent years has been done by journalists who tend their soil, so to speak, in another parish. Peter Oborne’s biography of the Cape Town-born England cricketer Basil D’Oliveira was a deserved prize-winner, and another political scribe, Leo McKinstry, has done justice to Geoffrey Boycott, the Charlton brothers and Sir Alf Ramsey. Now he has turned his attention to a batsman whose career, measured in statistics, goes a long way to justifying the subtitle of this latest book, ‘England’s Greatest Cricketer’. Born in a modest Cambridge home, admired by all who played with him for his decency as well as his skill at

Saturday

Philip Hensher

Honour the most exalted poet

What’s your punishment going to be, when you get to Hell? At least as envisaged by Dante, you might be somewhat surprised. Hitler (mass murderer) is in the outer ring of the seventh circle, up to his eyebrows in a river of blood and fire. Still, that’s a little better than the innocent manager of your local HSBC (banker), who is in the inner ring, running perpetually on burning sand. Both get off much lighter than the poor lady who, the other day, told me how much she’d enjoyed something or other I’d written (flatterer). She’s a whole circle lower down in the second bolgia, or pit, sitting in excrement

Rupert Christiansen

Hall of mirrors

After the Nazi occupation of Paris was over, Sartre famously said — somewhat hypocritically, given his own slippery behaviour — that the only possibilities had been collaboration or resistance. After the Nazi occupation of Paris was over, Sartre famously said — somewhat hypocritically, given his own slippery behaviour — that the only possibilities had been collaboration or resistance. Alan Riding’s new study of the episode forcefully reminds one that it was never that simple: objectively researched and soberly balanced though the book is, navigating its moral maze leaves one queasy with mixed feelings. Where should the line be drawn, what constitutes collaboration or resistance, were the Pétainistes craven defeatists or

Ian Thomson

Deep, dark mysteries

For Peter Ackroyd, the subterranean world holds a potent allure. London Under, his brief account of the capital’s catacombs and other murky zones, manages to radiate a dark mystery and sulphur reek. ‘There is no darkness like the darkness under the ground’, Ackroyd announces, like a Victorian raree-show merchant. This is an entertaining if slightly daft book, that reveals what a weird world lies beneath our feet. Whether Ackroyd has actually been to all the places he describes is uncertain. Journalists have contorted themselves through narrow, stinking cave-galleries and risked leptospirosis from rat urine in their quest for London subterranea. But the stately Ackroyd? The London sewers are vividly described

Andro Linklater

‘I told them’

No messenger bearing bad news can expect to be popular. But to be dis- believed as well adds a particularly bitter twist, since the messenger’s character can only be vindicated by proving the truth of his horrific message. That was Jan Karski’s fate. He was the Polish resistance fighter sent to London in 1942 to tell the world that the Jews in Poland were being exterminated. Not in their hundreds, not in their thousands, but in their millions.There would be none left, Karski reported, unless the Allies publicly promised a retaliation sufficiently terrible to halt the Nazis in their tracks. ‘I had this feeling’, Karski confessed after giving his information

James Hamilton

A catastrophe waiting to happen

Gillian Darley’s book has the pace, colour and deliberation of a Vesuvian eruption, which is fitting; for we must get used to the fact that sooner or later the volcano will erupt again with a devastating power. Gillian Darley’s book has the pace, colour and deliberation of a Vesuvian eruption, which is fitting; for we must get used to the fact that sooner or later the volcano will erupt again with a devastating power. The subtitle of the book is quite accurate. Vesuvius probably is the most famous volcano in the world, because unlike all others it has attracted for some 2,000 years multifarious extraordinary people to study it. Darley

William Leith

Speak, Memory

One day, the American journalist Joshua Foer is surfing the net, trying to find the answer to a specific question: who is the most intelligent person in the world? He can’t find a definitive answer. One day, the American journalist Joshua Foer is surfing the net, trying to find the answer to a specific question: who is the most intelligent person in the world? He can’t find a definitive answer. But he sees that a man called Ben Pridmore is the world’s ‘memory champion’. Foer is instantly intrigued. He himself has, he says, an average memory. He forgets lots of things — where he put his keys, for instance. And

Ferdinand Mount

Elegy for wild Wales

If you drive West out of Carmarthen on the A40, you pass through a landscape of dimpled hills and lonely chapels and little rivers full of salmon trout. This is Byron’s Country, the place where Byron Rogers was brought up in the late Forties, not knowing a word of English, until at the age of five he made the momentous journey a few miles east into Carmarthen town. It is a very odd place. In the graveyard at Cana, just beside the road, you will find the grave of Group Captain Ira Jones DSO, MC, DFC and bar, MM, one of Wales’s greatest war heroes. He was famous for killing

Saturday

Peter Parker

Goodbye to Berlin

Peter Parker is beguiled by a novel approach to the lives of Europe’s intellectual elite in flight from Nazi Germany In his time, Heinrich Mann was considered one of Germany’s leading writers and intellectuals. Unlike his rivalrous younger brother Thomas, who always put his literary career before any other consideration, Heinrich was an early and outspoken critic of the Nazis, and so forced to leave Germany in February 1933. He was based for several years in the south of France, while travelling around the world to denounce the regime he had left behind, and he eventually emigrated to America in 1940, settling in Los Angeles. Unlike many European emigrants who

Anthony Daniels

The mind’s I

The quasi-religious zeal with which certain popularising neuroscientists claim that man is no different, essentially, from the animals, and that consciousness is but an epiphenomenon, strikes me as distinctly odd. The popularisers seem to take a sado-masochistic delight in it, in the way that some people get a thrill from envisaging the end of the world. They also seem to imply that we now understand almost everything about ourselves, apart from a few odd details to be filled in by ever-more-sophisticated scanners. In other words, man has finally come to understand himself. Here is an addition to the fast-growing genre of books that claim scientific authority for the idea that

Anne Chisholm

What did you do in the war, Mummy?

By tradition, ‘What did you do in the war?’ is a question children address to Daddy, not to Mummy. By tradition, ‘What did you do in the war?’ is a question children address to Daddy, not to Mummy. In this ambitious, humane and absorbing book Virginia Nicholson moves Mummy firmly to the centre of the stage as she chronicles, largely in their own words, the lives of British women during the second world war. It is dedicated to one of them, her own mother, Anne Popham, later Anne Olivier Bell, who as a young woman suffered agonising wartime loss but went on to marry and become one of the great

Anthony Sattin

Sixties mystic

The misery memoir is the fad of the moment. We seem to have a limitless desire to delve into other people’s hardships. Robert Irwin has gladly shown the way to a more enlightening type of memoir, that of the spiritual quest. But surely, I hear you say, the spiritual quest is nothing new? Think of Dante, half way along life’s path, looking for the right turning. For Dante, read the young Irwin, still a teenager, up at Merton College to read History and very much in need of direction. The year was 1965. But while others were tuning in and turning on, Irwin, as he confides in his first sentence,

Douglas Hurd

Backs to the wall

Susan Gibbs begins her book by describing the death from cancer of her first husband after 13 years of happy marriage. She ends with her farewell to Africa and her journey to Britain in 1983 with her second husband, Tim, and four children. Between these events she led a tense life farming in Zimbabwe, watching her children grow up, relishing the beauty of her surroundings and the company of friends, but always conscious that time was closing in and that one day they would be forced to leave the country they loved. They grew tired of the tension under which they lived, tired of the uncertainty, of wearing side arms,