Non-fiction

Saturday

Oliver Rackham

Seeing the wood from the trees

This book is a work of art by an artistic photographer. It deals mainly with a large minority of the world’s trees whose bark, as the trunk expands, peels off in pretty patterns: snake-bark maples, arbutuses and the like, as well as the familiar London plane. The author has travelled all over the world to photograph these wondrous barks. He also includes some trees whose bark stretches, like white poplar, as well as palms whose trunks are covered in leaf-bases rather than bark, bamboos which are really giant grasses, banana-plants which are not trees, and tree-ferns. He even has one example of that mysterious hard layer that does the duty

Saturday

Philip Hensher

Young man on the make

We are not going to agree about Bruce Chatwin. The five books he published in his lifetime are, to some readers, magnificent works of art, setting out grand ideas about the human condition with reference to a closely observed local type — a Czech porcelain collector, Australian nomads, a displaced slave-king, taciturn British farmers and the communities of remotest Patagonia. In other eyes, he was an absurd pseud and show-off, whose work never extended much beyond a tremulous aesthete’s gush over exotic objects, half-digested history and anthropology. It is fair to say that the latter view has gain- ed ground since his death, and even his most passionate defenders would

Patrick Marnham

Kin, but less than kind

About 100 years ago two brothers settled in the same small English town and raised 12 children. Charles Greene was a scholar, destined for the Bar, who blundered into schoolmastering while eating his dinners at the Inner Temple and later became headmaster of Berkhamsted School. His younger brother, Edward (known as ‘Eppy’), declined to go to university and blundered into the coffee trade in Brazil. Having made a fortune, he returned to England and bought a large house in the same town. Shades of Greene is the story of those two families and of what happened to eight of the more interesting children. They included the novelist Graham Greene, whose

Allan Massie

The laird and his legend

‘Stuart Kelly’ the author’s note declares, ‘was born and brought up in the Scottish Borders.’ Not so, as he tells us; he was born in Falkirk, which is in central Scotland, and came to the Borders as a child. ‘Stuart Kelly’ the author’s note declares, ‘was born and brought up in the Scottish Borders.’ Not so, as he tells us; he was born in Falkirk, which is in central Scotland, and came to the Borders as a child. The publisher’s mistake is appropriate. Kelly’s Walter Scott himself is a man who was never just what he seemed to be, and who invented an idea of a country and nation we

Ian Thomson

Tangerine dreams | 28 August 2010

Before tourism came travel; and before travel, exploration. A sense of wonder had accompanied journeys along the lip of the unknown, as the Victorian pathfinder was often an amateur scientist, required to bring home a trunkful of fossils. Today, of course, travel is merely an extension of the leisure industry. The first thing we see as we embark on our holidays is a filth of our own making (resort hotel seepage, takeaway detritus). Paul Bowles, himself no armchair excursionist, bemoaned the creeping industrialisation of travel — its translation into tourism — and what he called ‘the 20th century’s gangrene’, by which he meant, broadly, modernity. This superb collection of his

Jonathan Sumption

Mawkish charades

This book is an engaging rant against the folly, claptrap, self-indulgence and hypocrisy of mankind, written in the brisk and trenchant style which readers of the author’s Spectator articles will recognise. This book is an engaging rant against the folly, claptrap, self-indulgence and hypocrisy of mankind, written in the brisk and trenchant style which readers of the author’s Spectator articles will recognise. Theodore Dalrymple has chosen a large target, which yields plenty of choice material. The more revered the individual and the more widespread the sentiment, the more acerbic the language in which Dalrymple mocks and reviles it. Not since Christopher Hitchens launched his assault on Mother Teresa have so

Saturday

Robert Chandler

Out of the woods

These two memoirs by ladies born into the Russian elite in the 1880s have both had to wait many decades before publication in English. The Green Snake, however, has gone through eight editions in its original German, whereas The Russian Countess has never been published before. No one was in the least interested in a Russia that no longer existed. Margarita Woloschin was a painter and her husband was a well-known poet. She knew most of the key figures in the Russian Symbolist movement, and she became a disciple of Rudolf Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy. From 1924 to her death in 1973 she lived in Stuttgart and devoted herself

Hugh Cecil

From void to void, with time to kill

Just as the slaughter in the trenches of Flanders and northern France gave birth to the tragic verses of Wilfred Owen, so the experience of bombing and being bombed between 1940 and 1945 generated its own major poetry in Britain and the USA. The scale of the catastrophe was vast: 55,000 of British Bomber Command aircrew, with an average age of 22, lost their lives, as did 60,000 British civilians roasted, suffocated, buried alive or blown to bits. German civilian deaths far exceeded this and have been estimated at around 580,000 (of these victims, more were women than men, and many were children), not to mention the millions of homes,

William Leith

Don’t sleep on blocks of ice

I’ve only ever read one other book about sleep — the brilliant Counting Sheep, by Paul Martin, which collates and describes everything we know about sleep in a way that is succinct and peerless. I’ve only ever read one other book about sleep — the brilliant Counting Sheep, by Paul Martin, which collates and describes everything we know about sleep in a way that is succinct and peerless. So this book is up against stiff opposition. Patricia Morrisroe, who has trouble sleeping, examines the science of sleep in the course of trying to find a cure. She goes to doctor after doctor. She tries everything — this drug and that

Sara Wheeler

Way out west

This year America celebrates the cent-enary of Mark Twain’s death. This year America celebrates the cent-enary of Mark Twain’s death. He is the nearest that country gets to a national treasure, with a hefty bibliography to show it: the University of California Press’s 70-volume Works and Papers represents but a fragment, and in June Penguin published an entire book on the food Twain ate. Now here comes Roy Morris Jr with a contribution covering Twain’s pre-fame journeys among the mines and saloons of the western frontier. What does it add? Samuel Clemens (as Twain was born) worked as an itinerant printer and a Mississippi riverboat pilot before a reluctant stint

Saturday

Jane Ridley

Girls from the golden West

Who was the first American to marry an English duke? Most students of the peerage would say it was Consuelo Yzagna who married the eldest son of the Duke of Manchester in 1876. But the banjo-strumming Cuban American Consuelo was not the first Yankee duchess. As early as 1828 the American Louisa Caton married the eldest son of the Duke of Leeds. This was half a century before the dollar princesses, trading titles for cash, played havoc with Burke’s Peerage. Louisa and her sisters were the pioneers of the American invasion of London society. Their conquest was so successful, and they became so assimilated, that they left barely a ripple.

Jonathan Sumption

All eyes and ears

Both of these books aim, in their different ways, to cater for Britain’s long-standing obsession with espionage and other forms of political and military intelligence. Both of these books aim, in their different ways, to cater for Britain’s long-standing obsession with espion- age and other forms of political and military intelligence. But they have virtually nothing else in common. Sinclair McKay’s The Secret Life of Bletchley Park is about daily life at the famous wartime headquarters of the Government Code and Cipher School. There is very little new material to be mined about the work done at Bletchley Park. Its contribution to the course of the second world war has

Richard Ormrod

Dramatic asides

‘I Scribble, therefore I am’: this Cartesian quip is typical of Simon Schama, as is the comprehensive subtitle: ‘Writings on Ice Cream, Obama, Churchill and My Mother,’ among other topics, of course. ‘I Scribble, therefore I am’: this Cartesian quip is typical of Simon Schama, as is the comprehensive subtitle: ‘Writings on Ice Cream, Obama, Churchill and My Mother,’ among other topics, of course. This gives the flavour of the delights on offer: a miscellany of observations, reviews, mini-lectures and reminiscences written between 1979 and 2010. Schama and Starkey, TV’s duo of history gurus, have helped to re-popularise a subject often dismissed as irrelevant; but whereas Starkey can come across

Raymond Carr

Built for eternity

The Escorial, as a monastery and a royal palace, was the brain child of Philip II of Spain. Built in the latter half of the 16th century, about 30 miles north-west of Madrid, the huge granite complex with 4,000 rooms, 16 courtyards, a basilica, a library and picture gallery as well as the king’s private apartments, came to be regarded as the creation of a cold-hearted despot cut off from the outside world. For Richard Ford, whose 1850 Handbook for Travellers in Spain is the most learned guidebook ever written, the Escorial ‘was as cold as the grey eye and granite heart of its founder’. For the 19th-century conservative Spanish

Montagu Curzon

A dream to fly

Undeniably the Hawker Hurricane has suffered the fate of the less pretty sister. It is the Spitfire, at once beautiful and deadly, that is forever the star of 1940, firmly lodged in the British military pantheon, beside the longbow and HMS Victory, and the Hurricane is in the shadow. Yet it did more of the work, in greater numbers, and with more victories in the Battles of France and Britain. It too was loved and admired. Leo McKinstry, after his definitive books on the Spitfire and the Lancaster, sets out to repair this reputational injustice. His subtitle, ‘Victor of the Battle of Britain’, states the claim clearly. Hurricanes made up

Lewis Jones

Doing what it says on the tin

If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface: of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it. Much the same thing has been said by many artists and writers, but seldom has this proposition been so tested as it is by ‘32 Campbell’s Soup Cans’. In the Factory, as he called his atelier, Warhol made paintings of photographs, casually silk-screened prints of blown-up acetates of blow-ups from contact sheets of original negatives, copies of copies, images of images. He inverted high and low culture. He expressed something, defined something, about our psychic relationship to the stuff that surrounds

Christopher Howse

Jail birds

Next to his photographs of 40 women who have spent time in Low Newton prison, Adrian Clarke has juxtaposed short accounts from each of how she got there. Low Newton, near Durham, built in the 1960s and 1970s, holds 360 women, including lifers. Of the 85,000 in prison, 4,400 are women. Is there a face you can call a prison face, as some see in a single mother a pram face? Most look puffy, pale, older than their years and above all tired. Some look scared, a few defiant, none happy. Dazed and confused would cover them. Some are pictured with china figurines, cherubs embracing, or one of those dancing

Saturday

Sam Leith

The dying of the light | 7 August 2010

The phrasing of the subtitle is exact: a memoir in blindness, not of blind- ness. Like a portrait in oils — blindness being not just the subject, but the stuff of which this painfully stumbling, uncertainly reaching book is made. And not of, because it’s not something looked back on, like the memoir of a childhood: the blindness is still there waiting. ‘In’ acknowledges that, the way those even decades in recovery say ‘I am an alcoholic.’ And that, of course, heartbreakingly, is there too. In 2006 the novelist Candia McWilliam started to lose her sight, and to lose it in an unusual and tormenting way. She suffers from something

James Buchan

A foot in both camps

As a five-year-old in the Arab quarter of Jerusalem in the 1950s, Kai Bird overheard an elderly American heiress offering $1 million to anyone who could solve the Arab-Israeli conflict. Tugging on his father’s sleeve, he said: ‘Daddy, we have to win this prize.’ Crossing Mandelbaum Gate, Bird’s memoir of growing up in the Middle East, is full of such generosity and innocence. In 1956, Kai’s father, Eugene Bird, moved his young family from Oregon to East Jerusalem, where he was to serve as American vice-consul in a city divided in two by the 1949 armistice line. Kai grew up in a rented villa half a mile from the lovely

Inigo Thomas

A smooth passage

Jonathan Raban left Britain and moved to Seattle in 1990, when he was 47. He sold his Volkswagen on his way to Heathrow airport. He bought a Dodge with Washington state plates the next day, and in this second-hand car he would, over the years, travel through and write about his new country. ‘The Pacific Northwest continues to be a magnet — the strongest regional magnet in the country, I would guess — for hopefuls and newlifers of every imaginable cast,’ Raban wrote in the summer of 1993, in a piece that’s now republished in Driving Home: It feels like the last surviving corner of the United States to be