Non-fiction

Saturday

Alexander Starritt

Land of poets and thinkers

The reason Peter Watson gives for writing this long intellectual history of Germany since 1750 is a convincing one: that British obsession with Nazism has blinded many British people to the achievements of German culture. Watson describes the complaints of German commentators about the emphasis on Nazism even in British schooling, which were borne out by the 2005 report of the Qualification and Curriculum Authority: ‘There has been a gradual narrowing and “Hitlerisation” of post-1914 history.’ Watson also discusses the importance of Nazism to America, and his most intriguing point is that interest in the Holocaust is a comparatively recent phenomenon. A study in the 1950s found that the effect

Saturday

Sam Leith

Curiosities of literature

Lordy. It’s another book by Professor John Sutherland, and a fat one at that. What David Crystal is to linguistics and James Patterson to thrillers, John Sutherland is to literary criticism. I’ve more than once been critical about Sutherland in print, having detected — but who am I to talk? — a certain slapdashery in some of his scholarly productions. On the last occasion, I received a very gracious, if somewhat Eeyorish, email conceding the odd point and explaining his pace of output with a poignant allusion to alimony. So I don’t want the old brute to feel I’ve got it in for him. We all gotta eat. This book

Paul Johnson

A race against time

Lord Palmerston poses severe quantitative problems to biographers. His public life covered a huge span. Born in 1784, the year Dr Johnson died, he was nine years younger than Jane Austen and four years Byron’s senior. He died in 1865, the year Kipling, Yeats and Northcliffe were born. To put it another way, when he was a baby Reynolds was painting Mrs Siddons; when he died Manet was showing his ‘Olympia’, and Tolstoy had just published War and Peace. His long life was crowded with incessant political activity. He was on the Board of Admiralty in 1807, aged 23, even before he had a seat in parliament. He was an

Susan Hill Susan Hill

Futile phantoms

But of course this new book is by Peter Ackroyd, celebrated biographer, historian and chronicler, a bit of a polymath, a man who has written wonderfully informative and erudite books about Blake, the river Thames, Venice, and introductions to all the novels of Dickens, so naturally one expects a good deal more from The English Ghost than from any of those other popular titles on the same subject. One does not get it. Whether you believe in ghosts or not, one thing distinguishes the fictional ghost from the ‘real’ and that is Purpose. Read through the several dozen tales of English ghosts here and you will find not a single

Juliet Gardiner

What we did to them . . .

The perception of war changes, remarked the poet Robert Graves, when ‘your Aunt Fanny, the firewatcher, is as likely to be killed as a soldier in battle’. The perception of war changes, remarked the poet Robert Graves, when ‘your Aunt Fanny, the firewatcher, is as likely to be killed as a soldier in battle’. Scrutinising the home front, checking for evidence of low morale, accounting for that of high, measuring the effect of wartime regulations and deprivations, calculating the long-term impact of continuous bombardment and destruction on civilians, in sum, accounting for the implications of the phrase ‘total war’ to describe the second world war, has been an occupation for

Andro Linklater

. . . and they did to us

The craters are all filled in, the ruins replaced, and the last memories retold only in the whispery voices of the old. Apart from celebrating the resilience of our parents and grandparents 70 years ago, why remember the Blitz? It was triggered by the desire to retaliate, either Churchill’s to the random dropping of bombs on London in the summer of 1940 (heightened by the prior example of Nazi bombing of Guernica and Warsaw) or Hitler’s to the subsequent raid on Berlin. ‘This is a game at which two can play,’ he ranted on 4 September. ‘When they declare they will attack our cities in great measure, we will eradicate

Margaret Drabble

Absurdly grandiose – and splendid

The Potteries are one of the strangest regions in the British Isles, and Matthew Rice’s The Lost City of Stoke-on-Trent celebrates their extraordinary oddity. The Potteries are one of the strangest regions in the British Isles, and Matthew Rice’s The Lost City of Stoke-on-Trent celebrates their extraordinary oddity. Much of his text reads more like a diatribe than a celebration, for words like tawdry, grimy, unlovely, brutish and lumpen scatter his pages, and he sometimes soars to the height of invoking the term ‘tragic’. Yet for all that, this generously illustrated book makes you long to revisit this bizarre wonderland of post-industrial dereliction. His sketches and drawings of streets and

Gilbert Adair

Whine, whine, whine

There came a moment, very early in my reading of the latest volume of Christopher Isherwood’s Diaries, when a spell was broken. The relevant entry, written at his beach home in Santa Monica, California, was dated 12 November 1960. And the single, throwaway notation which caused me to re-evaluate, I fear definitively, my admiration for Isherwood ran as follows: ‘Tonight I have to take the Mishimas out to supper.’ There came a moment, very early in my reading of the latest volume of Christopher Isherwood’s Diaries, when a spell was broken. The relevant entry, written at his beach home in Santa Monica, California, was dated 12 November 1960. And the

Bookends

BOOKENDS: The Elephant to Hollywood

The three knights of British cinema have taken disparate routes in their twilight years. Roger Moore jettisoned a hokum career for more worthwhile pursuits as a Unicef ambassador, while Sean Connery settled into his Bahamian golf-resort to champion Scotland’s independence. Michael Caine, however, has added a further veneer to a great body of work. The three knights of British cinema have taken disparate routes in their twilight years. Roger Moore jettisoned a hokum career for more worthwhile pursuits as a Unicef ambassador, while Sean Connery settled into his Bahamian golf-resort to champion Scotland’s independence. Michael Caine, however, has added a further veneer to a great body of work. In the

Interconnect

Prince of Paradox

In the 15th century men cross-examined and tormented a man because he preached some immoral attitude; in the 19th century we feted and flattered Oscar Wilde because he preached such an attitude, and then broke his heart in penal servitude because he carried it out. It is the most sincere compliment to an author to misquote him. It means that his work has become a part of our mind and not merely of our library. Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision; instead we are always changing the vision. [The form GKC filled in to get an American visa] was a little like

Saturday

Patrick Skene-Catling

Nothing like a Dame

Kafka was right: ‘Strange how make-believe, if engaged in systematically enough, can change into reality.’ But Barry Humphries, at the age of 76, manages much of the time to control his vacillating schizoid tendencies in nice equipoise. In his autobiography More Please, he stated that Edna Everage was a figment of his imagination. In this new ‘unauthorised’ biography of Dame Edna there are Kafkaesque indications that he believes she actually ‘has her being’, as he might put it. Like a ventriloquist’s dummy, she has long enabled him publicly to deride others in malicious innuendo that he would not have uttered in his less frivolous role of kindly Barry Humphries. However,

Ferdinand Mount

A time to moan and weep

Ferdinand Mount recalls the crisis years of the early 1970s, when Britain was pronounced ‘ungovernable’ The residents of Flitwick, Bedfordshire, were enjoying a wine-and-cheese party in the village hall when the invasion happened. Five hundred Tottenham Hotspur fans had run amok on the special train bringing them back from Derby, where they had been beaten 5–0. They had smashed everything smashable on the train, pulled the communication cord again and again, forcing the train to a juddering halt, and the driver had had enough. He stopped the engine and summoned the police to force the fans off. They then ran down the street throwing stones and breaking windows and driving

Robert Stewart

Ride on in majesty

Governments in early modern England, having no standing army nor a civil service to speak of, required the consent of the governed. Authority had to be ‘culturally constructed’. That is the starting-point for Kevin Sharpe’s monumental investigation into royal branding in the age of the Tudors and Stuarts. In the first volume of a projected trilogy, Selling the Tudor Monarchy, he argued that the Tudors made the person of the monarch more important than administrative procedures in establishing royal authority. Elizabeth, in particular, fixed in the national memory by her portraits, played down political divisions and ‘privileged her image over actions and events’, making the sovereign the sacred ‘unifying embodiment

Paul Routledge

Straining for effect

A saint of self-deprecation, Chris Mullin closed the first volume of his diaries A View from the Foothills ‘contemplating oblivion’ after his dismissal from ministerial office. A saint of self-deprecation, Chris Mullin closed the first volume of his diaries A View from the Foothills ‘contemplating oblivion’ after his dismissal from ministerial office. This was plainly not the case, as the 443 pages of his second volume, Decline & Fall, demonstrate. Whatever the fate of those he writes about with such sardonic charm, obscurity is unlikely to overtake the former Member for Sunderland South, though he will be better remembered for what he wrote than for what he did. Politicians who

Ian Thomson

In a Greene shade

Some travel writers, in an attempt to simulate the hardship of Victorian journeys, like to impose artificial difficulties on themselves. A glut of memorably foolish yarns with titles like Hang-Gliding to Borneo or To Bognor on a Rhinoceros discredited the genre in the 1980s. In every case it would have been quicker for the authors to take the train. Why wind-surf across the Mojave when there’s a serviceable coach service? Tim Butcher, formerly a Telegraph war correspondent, is biased towards old- fashioned travellers in the Redmond O’Hanlon mould who, with their bushy side-whiskers and squire-naturalist curiosity, continue a tradition of Victorian exploration. His best-selling Africa adventure, Blood River, followed in

Peter Hoskin

Self-awareness

Will Self loves to go a-wandering; this much we know. For the past few years, he has followed the lead of authors such as Iain Sinclair, and undertaken huge, looping walks around city and country, before writing about the experience afterwards — in his case, in a column for the Independent. This ‘psychogeography’ (for such is it called) is meant to be an exercise more for the mind than for the legs. The dedicated psycho- geographer stomps across ground that is soaked in human interaction, history, myth and potential. His pen seeks out the significance in it all, cosmic or otherwise. And so we arrive at Self’s latest book, Walking

Saturday

Christopher Howse

Sweeter than honey

The only thing I can remember about a Tesco advertisement on the television the other night is the line: ‘No rest for the wicked.’ It was meant ironically, of course. The only thing I can remember about a Tesco advertisement on the television the other night is the line: ‘No rest for the wicked.’ It was meant ironically, of course. The suggestion was not that wicked people alone shop at Tesco’s. Nor was the phrase intended as a pious invocation of the Bible, its source, Isaiah, 57:21. An anthropologist describing the clichés, or tropes, of Western cultures might form the idea that biblical religion played a lively part in daily

Simon Heffer

Capturing the last of England

The book is interesting because it has insights and novelty, not least in taking a period and a culture regarded by many as second best compared with what was happening elsewhere at the time, and shows it to have been enlightened, intelligent and full of beauty. However, it infuriates partly because of the author’s occasionally cloying and highly adjectival style, and partly because, for all her scholarship in the subject, one gets the sense that she has spread herself too broadly and lacks a feel for the real popular currents of the Twenties and Thirties. The book is certainly ambitious. Not only does Harris examine the paradoxes of these modernists

Jasper Becker

Systematic genocide

You don’t have to accept the definition of how to do things, and you don’t have to follow other people’s choices and paths, OK? It is about your choices and your path. It is a measure of people’s continuing admiration for Chairman Mao that last year the White House communications director, Anita Dunn, unashamedly described him as a ‘favourite political philosopher’ because, as she told an audience of American high- school graduates, Mao showed that You don’t have to accept the definition of how to do things, and you don’t have to follow other people’s choices and paths, OK? It is about your choices and your path. In a brilliant

Gary Dexter

Alternative reading | 25 September 2010

The cover of On Snooker shows the Queen Mother sizing up a shot, making a passable bridge but rather failing to get behind the cue. The book is by Mordecai Richler, the great Canadian novelist and essayist, author of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and Barney’s Version, who died in 2001. On Snooker takes in all the major figures of the late-20th-century game, and is unafraid to bring out its juicier side, particularly the depredations of its bad boys: Alex Higgins trashing hotel rooms, urinating in plant-pots, whaling his cue at the spectators, ending up broke, drinking from left-over beer glasses; Ronnie O’Sullivan and his dad, Ronnie O’Sullivan Sr., who