BOOK REVIEWS By Ed Needham www.strong-words.co.uk
NON-FICTION
Brigade in 1854. Being a little skittish, it required a slug of laudanum to help it lead the Earl’s funeral procession in 1868. And not forgetting Whistlejacket, subject of the 1762 George Stubbs masterpiece. The catalogue for a 1985 Tate exhibition claimed that Stubbs, having almost completed the painting in a yard where a stable lad was leading the horse up and down, took the picture off the easel and leant it against a wall to “view the effect of it.” On seeing its own oversized image, Whistlejacket began to “stare and look wildly at the picture” then tried to attack it, at which point Stubbs had to beat it off with his palette. A whistlejacket, Magee helpfully informs, is also a cold treatment made of gin and treacle.
IN PRAISE OF FAMOUS HORSES By Sean Magee (W&N, £9.99)
T
his is a compendium of equine celebrity from track, history and fable, arranged in classic A-Z format, from ‘Aaron’ to Zippy Chippy’. Aaron was a horse that once belonged to DH Lawrence, and although the novelist was not much known for his elegance in the saddle, he was supposedly so fond of Aaron that on the horse’s death he had its hide crafted into a duffel bag. Zippy Chippy was a “famous loser” on American tracks: 100 races, no wins. In between, one might find the hapless Mister Chippendale, which failed to win a walkover (a one-horse race) when his jockey forgot to weigh in; Hercules, winner of Carthorse of the Year at the fictional 1937 Acton Gymkhana and which provided the locomotion for the Steptoe’s rag and bone cart; Apocalypse, Four Horsemen of the; and Occident, the horse captured for all eternity in the famous Edweard Muybridge photograph. This was the image that proved the assertion of Leland Stanford, the eighth governor of California and founder of Stanford University, that at one point in the stride of a galloping horse all four hooves are off the ground, thus demonstrating that generations of equine artists, unable to imagine such defiance of gravity, were mistaken. Among the more detailed entries are a biography of Ronald, the horse that carried the Earl of Cardigan in the Charge of the Light
AFTERMATH By Harald Jahner (WH Allen, £9.99)
B
efore the Second World War, Germany laid claim to being the planet’s most cultured nation. After, it found itself back in the Stone Age. Or at least, the rubble age. The fighting left 500 million cubic metres of debris, among which “over half the population of Germany were neither where they belonged nor wanted to be, including 9 million bombed out people and evacuees, 14 million refugees and exiles, 10 million released forced labourers and prisoners, and countless millions of slowly returning prisoners of war.” How were they even to make it to the next day, let alone “become ordinary citizens again”? It became known as “no man’s time, laws had been overruled, yet no one was responsible for anything. Nothing belonged to anyone any more, unless they were sitting on it. No one was responsible, no one
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