Non-fiction

Literary pseudonyms have been on my mind lately, for a couple of reasons. The first is Salman Rushdie’s revelation that he chose ‘Joseph Anton’ as his cover name when in hiding during his fatwa, in tribute to Messrs Conrad and Chekhov. The second (and brace yourself, because this is going to hurt like pluggery) is that my own literary alter ego, Charlie Croker, has a new book out. Why do writers use pseudonyms, and how does it feel to see a book you’ve written get published with someone else’s name on the cover? Strictly speaking this isn’t what happened to Rushdie. Joseph Anton was his actual pseudonym rather than his

When Dan Hannan’s book, A Doomed Marriage: Britain and Europe, arrived through the post I was alarmed to see that it was shrink wrapped in the same way as top shelf pornographic material. For those of you Europhiles who rather warm to the idea of a federal Europe and look forward to the day when we join the Single Currency, this will not be a happy read. But if you are of the Amish wing of the Conservative Party (or even a Kipper), convinced that it won’t be too long before the clank of jackboots will be heard on the Mall and that her Majesty will be evicted from Buckingham

A few surprising revelations from this week’s esteemed Shelf Lifer, as Roger Moore tells us which literary character he’d sleep with, what he doesn’t like doing in his spare time and who would be his author of choice during a year’s solitary confinement. His new book, Bond on Bond: The Ultimate Book on 50 Years of Bond Movies, is published by Michael O’Mara Books 1). What are you reading at the moment? The Fishing Fleet: Husband-Hunting in the Raj by Anne de Courcy 2). As a child, what did you read under the covers? Hotspur, The Wizard and The Rover 3). Has a book ever made you cry, and if so

Edwina Currie is very much an acquired taste and I am very happy that I acquired it in 1983 when we were both first elected to Parliament. Sassy, saucy, fiendishly bright, burning with drive and ambition, yet with a heart, she was head and shoulders above most of her male contemporaries and they hated her for it. People forget just how far Cameron has detoxified the Conservative party. Women, gays (only tolerated in the research department), blacks and Asians had a very steep if not impossible mountain to climb just to get on the candidates list, let alone have a chance of obtaining a winnable seat. Currie tells one tale

“It always struck me that it was a much easier war to support the closer you got to it,” says Patrick Hennessey of the war in Afghanistan. Hennessey, who served in Helmand with the Grenadier Guards in 2007, continues: “It was so obvious that we were making the country better and that we were broadly supported by the locals, certainly in a way that we weren’t in Iraq in 2006. I know that most Guardsmen preferred Afghanistan to Iraq in that respect because they felt they were doing something tangible and positive and that it was being appreciated by the people in the country, if not necessarily the people at

The question of how Europe stumbled into the horrific abyss of  the First World War, the catastrophe which The Economist once called ‘the greatest tragedy in human history’ is obviously of much more than purely academic interest. (Though it is chiefly academics who have been arguing about it ever since). As we approach the centenary of the conflict’s outbreak, one of them, Christopher Clark, Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University, has written a magnificently detailed study of the diplomatic dance that led the continent up to and over the edge. The Sleepwalkers should be required reading for politicians and decision-makers fumblingly steering the world in our own age, an epoch perhaps

Among the new words which entered the English Dictionary last year was ‘overshare’, def: ‘to reveal an inappropriate amount of detail about one’s personal life’. If that detail pertains to common experience, though, is it inappropriate to share it, or just unnecessary? Unmastered, I think, will divide on that question. It will divide readers, in fact, quite generally. It presents itself as something more than a book, as a corporeal embodiment of an experience that, while common to most, is presented as peculiarly the author’s own. Katherine Angel essentially seeks to re-create in book form the sex she shared with a lover (‘The Man’). In it, she also discusses the

Everyone knows something of what happened the night American Navy Seals killed Osama bin Laden in the Pakistani garrison town of Abbottabad. Frenzied reports followed the news of his death as information, much of it erroneous, flooded the public domain. Bin Laden was armed and engaged the Seals in a fire fight; he was cowering behind his wife when Seals stormed his room and pushed her towards them; there was a stand-off where he looked into the Seals’ eyes before they shot him. The New Yorker published a controversial account of events by Nicholas Schmidle where some of those untruths were advanced. Schmidle’s piece is so thick with atmospheric actualities

Funny the ways you can learn about a book. Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones alerted me to one recently, 43 years after his death. I was at Somerset House for the exhibition of photos marking the band’s half-century, and one shot saw them leaving Heathrow Airport in 1966, bound for America. Brian, in a blazer whose stripes were quite shockingly vibrant (ten years later it would have felt perfectly at home on Ronnie Barker as he read the news), was carrying a book. A small, slim volume, its title was hidden away in a tiny font, but the photo had been blown up so large you could just make

When Barack Obama entered the White House in January 2009, millions of citizens across the United States believed it was a new dawn for the American political system. Obama promised a presidency that would tear up the rulebook when it came to party loyalty; campaign fundraising, corruption; and the petty issues of partisan politics. But he would soon learn that attempting to transform the money machine and vested interest groups that run Washington would be near impossible. First released in September 2008, John R. MacArthur’s ‘You Can’t Be President: The Outrageous Barriers To Democracy in America’ is a book that openly criticizes Obama from the liberal left. MacArthur argues that

The real shock of the new came in 1991. It was sobering, and it was reverent, which aren’t exactly the first words one would associate with The Shock of the New art critic Robert Hughes. No wonder it went largely unacknowledged when he passed away last month. While Hughes’ seminal art history series continues to re-run on BBC4, it’s not without irony that one recalls that in ’91, 11 years after it originally aired, Hughes panned the whole concept of the art documentary. Admittedly, he’d always been slightly sceptical. He opened the first edition of his book (originally a mere spin-off of the series; ultimately, as Hughes himself said, something

‘How the War Began’ by Thomas Jordan, 1663. ‘I’ll tell you how the war began: The holy ones assembled (For so they called their party then Whose consciences so trembled). They pulled the bishops from their seats, And set up every widgeon; The Scotch were sent for to do feats With oat-cakes and religion. They plucked communion-tables down, And broke our painted glasses; They threw our altars to the ground, And tumbled down the crosses; They set up Cromwell and his heir, The Lord and Lady Claypole; Because they hated Common Prayer, The organ and the maypole.’ Three-hundred and fifty years ago, in September 1662, congregations in churches all over

When South African police opened fire on striking miners at Lonmin’s Marikana platinum mine, it had all of the hallmarks of the bad old days of the continent – the tangled and violent business of pulling metal from the ground in the “Dark Continent”. The events at Marikana were symptomatic of the fractious politics of labour in South Africa, the uncomfortable alliances forged in the anti-apartheid struggle that have not resolved themselves in peacetime. However, at their root they have the simmering tension caused by the unequal distribution of economic opportunity that is not restricted to South Africa. The mining sector there, and elsewhere in the developing world, is nearly

It is lit-fiction season: that time of the year of when the premier novelists of the age dominate the market. Ian McEwan, Pat Barker, Zadie Smith, Sebastian Faulks and Rose Tremain all have new books out, and Salman Rushdie’s much anticipated memoirs are to be launched this week, so many newspapers are devoting themselves to regurgitating stale observations about The Satanic Verses ahead of the main and keenly guarded event. Of the new books, Zadie Smith’s NW is garnering the most plaudits, or at least that seems to be the case. Philip Hensher awarded the ‘rich and varied’ book 5 stars in his Telegraph review, marking the ‘virtuosity of Smith’s technique’

Like the deserts of the Middle East, the barren islands of the South China Sea now loom as a new theatre of war.  Asian countries, indeed America, too, are at odds over how to deal with this power-play by a rising China — if that’s what it is; or scramble for maritime minerals; or as recently witnessed in Chinese cities a resurgence of nationalism and loathing of Japan. The South China Sea brings in China, Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, little Brunei and unrecognized Taiwan. They represent the glittering success story of the developing world, the Tiger economies, the shared goal of wealth and education, the peaceful transitions to democracy

Somehow, sex is less appealing when it’s characterised as ‘equitable return’. Though I’ve heard the phrase used in a similar context a dozen times since, I wasn’t quite sure what it meant when I first encountered it three years ago. I’d been drafted in to persuade a wealthy businessman at an art auction that taxidermy was a foolproof investment when I was informed that he wanted to invest in something a little livelier, in me. The intervener in this matter explained, with all the flamboyance of a Plautan pimp, that his client was willing to whisk me away to dinner and even pay my doctoral fees, but that after a

‘This man makes a pseudonym and crawls behind it like a worm,’ wrote Sylvia Plath in The Fearful. The weekend’s literary pages were gripped by a story of pseudonyms. R.J. Ellory, the well-regarded and critically acclaimed crime writer, has been caught penning rave reviews of his own work, and damning that of his rivals, under various pseudonyms on Amazon. Ellory ‘wholeheartedly’ regrets the ‘lapse of judgment’. The story recalls Orlando Figes’s dishonesty with Amazon reviews. Now as then, I’m at loss to understand why someone of Ellory’s reputation felt compelled to dive to this kind of petty chicanery. The additional sales garnered by positive Amazon reviews must only be a