Review of Books ISSUE 27 SPRING 2014
R E V I E W
O F
T H E
R E V I E W S
What the critics said OVER 50 OF THE BEST BOOKS FROM THE LAST QUARTER INCLUDING
Hanif Kureishi Norman Mailer Alison Weir Nicholas Shakespeare Susan Hill Mike Tyson Johnny Cash John Williams Peter Conradi Alex Ferguson Jonathan Swift Penelope Lively John Julius Norwich Simon Garfield Patrick Marnham Spike Milligan Princess Michael of Kent Paul Hoggart …and many more
Sam Leith on a new generation of Wodehouse and Austen Farewell Doris Lessing The best jazz books Technology A ROUND-UP OF REVIEWS • NOT JUST THE BESTSELLERS
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CONTENTS
Review of Books
I N T H I S I S S UE 4. BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR Norman Mailer J Michael Lennon; Love, Nina Nina Stibbe; Jonathan Swift Leo Damrosch; Priscilla Nicholas Shakespeare; I am Malala Malala Yousafzai with Christina Lamb; Josephine Kate Williams
8. HISTORY
ISSUE 27 SPRING 2014
NOT FORGETTING... IMPORTANT TITLES RECENTLY REVIEWED IN THE OLDIE
• One Leg Too Few: Peter Cook and Dudley Moore by William Cook
• The Complete Smoking Diaries by Simon Gray
• Olivier by Philip Ziegler • As Green as Grass by Emma Smith • The Beatles, Volume One: Tune In by Mark Lewisohn
• A Blaze of Autumn Sunshine by Tony Benn
12. FICTION The Last Word Hanif Kureishi; A Man Against a Background of Flames Paul Hoggart; Black Sheep Susan Hill
13. OLD DOGS, NEW TRICKS? Sam Leith ponders a new generation of literary resurrections
• Walking Wounded: Vernon Scannell
14. CURRENT AFFAIRS
• High Minds by Simon Heffer
The Frackers Gregory Zuckerman; The Siege Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark
by James Andrew Taylor
• Her Brilliant Career
20. HOW TO ORDER 21. OBITUARY Doris Lessing, 1919–2013
22. MUSIC AND ENTERTAINMENT Johnny Cash Robert Hilburn; Verve Richard Havers; Duke Terry Teachout; The Greatest Movies You’ll Never See edited by Simon Braund; Difficult Men Brett Martin
25. SPORT My Autobiography Alex Ferguson; Undisputed Truth Mike Tyson, with Larry Sloman
26. FOREIGN PARTS The Democratic Republic of Congo Michael Deibert; Man Belong Mrs Queen Matthew Baylis; On the Trail of Genghis Khan Tim Cope; The Ministry of Guidance Invites You To Not Stay Hooman Majd
15. TECHNOLOGY
27. PICK OF THE PAPERBACKS
• Marriage of Inconvenience
Hatching Twitter Nick Bilton; The Everything Store Brad Stone
30. REPRINTS
• All Change
16. LETTERS
by Rachel Cooke
by Robert Brownell
by Elizabeth Jane Howard
• One Hundred Letters from Hugh
Trevor-Roper by Richard Davenport-Hines and Adam Sisman
COVER ILLUSTRATION BY BOB WILSON
Rebellion Tim Harris; Red Fortress Catherine Merridale; Hot Dogs and Cocktails Peter Conradi; The Mystery of Princess Louise Lucinda Hawksley; No Ordinary Men Elisabeth Sifton and Fritz Stern; Empires of the Dead David Crane; The Confidence Trap David Runciman; Elizabeth of York Alison Weir; The Queen of Four Kingdoms HRH Princess Michael of Kent
The Seasons Nick Groom; Concretopia John Grindrod; Ammonites and Leaping Fish Penelope Lively; Snake Dance Patrick Marnham
• Rose Kennedy by Barbara A Perry • The Great Rivalry: Gladstone and Disraeli by Dick Leonard
Darling Monster Diana Cooper, edited by John Julius Norwich; Letters of Note compiled by Shaun Usher; Spike Milligan: Man of Letters edited by Norma Farnes; To the Letter Simon Garfield
19. MISCELLANEOUS
Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour R S Surtees; Period Piece Gwen Raverat; Butcher’s Crossing John Williams
Inside the Dream Palace Sherill Tippins;
Published by The Oldie magazine, 65 Newman Street, London W1T 3EG Editorial panel: Richard Ingrams, Sonali Chapman, James Pembroke, Jeremy Lewis, Brian MacArthur, Christopher Silvester Reviews Editor: Sonali Chapman Design: Joseph Buckley, John Bowling Reviewers: Jonathan Beckman, Sonali Chapman, Jennie Erdal, Tom Fleming, Lucy Lethbridge, Jeremy Lewis, Robert Low, Brian MacArthur, Samira Shackle, Christopher Silvester, John Walsh Publisher: James Pembroke Advertising: Lisa Martin, Azmi Elkholy, Jack Watts For advertising enquiries, call Lisa Martin on 020 7079 9361 For editorial enquiries, call 020 7436 8801 or email editorial@theoldie.co.uk
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BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR Norman Mailer: A Double Life J Michael Lennon (Simon & Schuster 960pp £30 Oldie price £25.50 HB) ‘MAILER’S TRANSGRESSIVE attitude towards boundaries makes him a biographer’s dream,’ wrote Duncan White in the Daily Telegraph. ‘He fought in the war and he fought in bars. He had six wives and stabbed one of them. He drank heavily, took drugs, slept with anyone he could and stood for New York mayor. He fell out with everyone who picked up a pen.’ Many reviewers of this vast, 900-page biography adopted a similar tone of awed respect about the late US writer’s violent, swaggering career.
Lennon unearths amusingly bathetic details: how Mailer once got into a fight with a New York gang after they insulted his pet poodles
ILLUSTRATION BY ROBERT GEARY
Mailer was the author of forty books, widely considered to be the chronicler of the American Century, and co-founder of the New York magazine The Village Voice. His first novel, The Naked and the Dead, based on his experiences in the Second World War, made his reputation in 1948, and in 1980 The Executioner’s Song, the novelisation of the life and death of murderer Gary Gilmore, won the second of two Pulitzer Prizes (the first was won in 1968 for his ‘nonfiction novel’ The Armies of the Night). In the Observer Philip French called Lennon’s
book ‘a blow-by-blow account of a vigorous life… The blows ranged through the metaphorical ones Mailer handed out to presidents whose performances offended him (most particularly Eisenhower, Johnson and Nixon) and the actual ones inflicted on various wives… to the notorious blowjob in the 1955 novel The Deer Park, something of a first in mainstream fiction.’ Writing at Mailer-ish length in the London Review of Books, Andrew O’Hagan, a lifelong fan who interviewed Mailer for the Paris Review, said: ‘Lennon is Mailer’s official biographer and he is good at catching the ways in which Mailer dramatised his own moral inclinations. He captures the young Mailer drinking gin to be more like Hemingway. He sees him smarting at his father’s addiction to gambling and shadow-boxing around Brooklyn impersonating Rocky Graziano.’ Elsewhere, however, Lennon unearths amusingly bathetic details: how Mailer once got into a fight with a New York gang after they insulted his pet poodles; how his father Barney was a dapper figure with an English accent and a taste for three-piece suits. In an introduction to Mind of an Outlaw, a collection of Mailer’s essays, Jonathan Lethem called him ‘a self-appointed great novelist with no definitively great novels to his credit.’ Most reviewers agreed that his life was one long desperate need for attention. When he heard that Hemingway had shot himself, was Mailer upset? Not really – but he felt a ‘heart-clot of outraged vanity’ that the New York Times hadn’t rung him for a statement.
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BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR
Love, Nina: Despatches from Family Life
EXTRACT
Nina Stibbe
(Viking 336pp £12.99 Oldie price £11 HB) IN 1982, at the age of twenty, Nina Stibbe (right) moved from Leicestershire to London to become a nanny to Sam, aged ten, and Will, aged nine, the two sons of Mary-Kay Wilmers, deputy editor of the London Review of Books. They lived in Primrose Hill; Alan Bennett lived across the street ‘and often appeared at suppertime’. Love, Nina is a collection of Nina’s detailed letters from 1982–7 to her sister Victoria. Dear Vic, Had smoked salmon with bread and butter (and lemon and pepper) at supper followed by my veg soup. The salmon was too nice to have anything after, esp. veg soup. Should have done it the other way round. Mary-Kay (MK) made the good point that starters always seem nicer due to you being hungry… Alan Bennett (AB) disagreed with MK and said starters are always nicer. He sometimes orders two starters (instead of a main course) in a café, partly to get the nicest things and partly not to get over-stuffed. I’d done a fruit pie for pudding (blackberry and apple) using a tin of Morton’s pie-filler. I admitted it was out of a tin but didn’t say it was blackberry and apple. AB likes real blackberries but they make him nostalgic about blackberrying in the lanes. So, to avoid a whole lot of disappointment (and his blackberrying
anecdotes), I said the pie was apple and raspberry… Anyway, AB said it wasn’t bad for a tinned pie-filler but said it tasted more like blackberry, which I thought was quite impressive. AB did his chicken curry and rice round here the other day (he had a load of cooked chicken to get rid of). I have to admit, it was very nice and only used one pan. I gave a couple of pages of my semi-autobiographical novel to him. Me: Did you read my thing? AB: Yes, it was funny. MK: What’s it about? AB: I’m not sure. Me: Are you being discreet? AB: No, I just can’t quite describe it. Me: So you didn’t read it? AB: I did. I’m not sure what it’s about. A bunch of literary types doing laundry and making salad – or something. Me: I think I’ve given you a letter to my sister by mistake.
Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World Leo Damrosch (Yale 512pp £25 Oldie price £21.50 HB) ‘DESPITE HIS fame, Swift is a biographer’s nightmare,’ John Carey cautioned in the Sunday Times. ‘He was obsessively secretive, and most of what has come down to us about him is gossip or hearsay.’ Especially, it seems, about women. What were his relations with Hester Johnson (‘Stella’) whom he met when he was 22, working for a retired diplomat, and she was nine, the housekeeper’s daughter? ‘They met almost every day for 30 years, and her death in 1728 devastated him,’ wrote Carey. ‘Yet no one knows whether they were lovers or not.’ Their letters were written in a kind of baby-talk in which ‘ourrichar gangridge’ meant ‘our little language’. ‘Depending on your viewpoint,’ wrote Carey waspishly, ‘that might imply a lover’s intimacy or regression from adult sexuality.’ The uncertainty surrounding Swift has never, however, stopped the biography industry. Many reviewers mentioned Irvin Ehrenpreis’s vast, three-volume life published in 1983, which seemed definitive. But the new biography brings the writer, satirist, pamphleteer, Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral and author of Gulliver’s Travels to rich and amusing life. ‘Damrosch’s Swift,’ wrote Jonathan Bate in the New Statesman, ‘emerges as both Londoner and Dubliner, as friend
and friendly critic, much more than as bitter satirist and twisted misanthropist. This is a man who, when the Dean of St Patrick’s, Dublin, preferred a compact movable pulpit on wheels to “the remote and massive one at the east end of the cathedral” because it brought him closer to his congregation.’ In the Tablet, A N Wilson called the biography ‘magisterial’, a reminder of ‘how much in Swift’s writings there is to relish’, and quoted the Swifitian aphorism, ‘We have just religion enough to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.’ ‘Damrosch adds to our understanding and deepens our sympathy in a host of different ways,’ wrote Bruce Arnold, a Swift scholar, in the Irish Independent, regretting that the author stops short of revealing that Swift was illegitimate – a favourite theory of Arnold’s own. John Carey was less entranced, noting that Swift disliked children, music and love. ‘The things other people valued,’ he wrote, ‘were suspect to him because they roused passions and emotions and suppressed reason, so were on a par with lust, greed, religious fanaticism and the carnage of warfare.’ Bust of Swift in St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin
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BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR
Priscilla:
Josephine:
The Hidden Life of an Englishwoman
Desire, Ambition, Napoleon
in Wartime France
(Ebury Press 368pp £20 Oldie price £17 HB)
Nicholas Shakespeare (Harvill Secker 425pp £18.99 Oldie price £16.50 HB) FOR THE YOUNG Nicholas Shakespeare his aunt Priscilla (above) was a glamorous yet shadowy figure who would sunbathe naked and whose time in wartime France – she was one of the few English people to live there throughout the Nazi occupation – was the most mysterious part of her exotic early life. Was she a heroine, or something altogether darker? ‘Given a box containing Priscilla’s papers – many of them love letters from men identified only by their Christian names – he embarked on a detective quest,’ wrote Allan Massie in the Wall Street Journal. ‘The story that unfolded was remarkable, and his account of it is riveting... There was only one rule of life in occupied Paris: survival. Priscilla’s only weapons of defence were her beauty and charm. There were a
succession of lovers, sometimes more than one at a time.’ Some were decent Frenchmen, others black marketeers. ‘There were at least a couple of Germans too, one engaged in buying paintings for Göring.’ Francesca Angelini in the Sunday Times noted: ‘Priscilla’s circumstances forced her to be ruthless, Shakespeare argues, and to do things she wouldn’t have done otherwise. But there is also a more troubling interpretation – that she was a collaborator who dispensed altogether with morality and simply enjoyed herself.’ Lucy Lethbridge in the Observer summed up succinctly: ‘Priscilla brilliantly exposes the tangled complexities behind that question so easily asked from the comfort of a peacetime armchair: “What would I have done?”’
I am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban Malala Yousafzai with Christina Lamb
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson 288pp £18.99 Oldie price £16.50 HB) ‘LIKE MALALA, Pakistan is relatively young, but it has suffered a great deal in a short time,’ opined Sayeeda Warsi in the Daily Telegraph. When she was fifteen, Malala Yousafzai was shot in the head by the Taliban while sitting on her school bus because she had been campaigning for rights to education for women. She survived. Her memoir, I Am Malala, is co-written with veteran foreign correspondent Christina Lamb. ‘The teenager’s voice is never lost,’ stated Yvonne Roberts in the Observer. Yousafzai worked on the book while recovering from her injuries in Birmingham. It describes her childhood in Pakistan’s Swat Valley, the nightmarish period of Taliban rule in the region in 2009, and the events around the shooting in October 2012. Yousafzai stresses the influence of her father, Ziauddin: ‘He believed that
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lack of education was the root of all of Pakistan’s problems.’ Yousafzai has become a global icon for girls’ education, giving a keynote speech at the UN and becoming the youngest ever Nobel Peace Prize nominee. But the response in her home country has been mixed. The book was banned in Pakistan’s public schools, and she has been criticised as an agent of the West. ‘Amid the bile, there is a genuine concern that this extraordinary girl’s courageous and articulate message will be colonised by one power or other for its own insidious agendas,’ explained Fatima Bhutto in the Guardian. ‘She is young and the forces around her are strong and often sinister when it comes to their designs on the global south.’ But Yousafzai is not deterred: ‘We realise the importance of our voices only when we are silenced,’ she writes.
Kate Williams
THE WOMAN WHO became known as ‘Not Tonight, Josephine’ (Napoleon’s supposed response to her advances) was born Marie-Josèphe-Rose Tascher de la Pagerie in 1763 to a sugar-planting family in Martinque. During the rule of the Directory, the French Revolutionary government which followed the fall of Robespierre in 1794, she became one of the most lusted after women in Paris. She captivated Napoleon, still a largely unproven soldier, and their correspondence thrums with passion. ‘Your image, and the intoxicating pleasures of last night, allow my senses no rest,’ he wrote to her. She married him and was crowned his empress in 1804, but diplomatic necessity lead to their divorce in 1810, as Napoleon wed Marie-Louise of Austria so he could produce a male heir. Josephine died four years later, in despair at her ex-husband’s defeat. Kate Williams’s new book presents Josephine as not just a diamond-crazy fashionista but a woman who used ‘soft power’ to further her ambitions and maintain her influence. In the Literary Review Lucy Moore said, ‘In this fast-moving account of her life, Kate Williams introduces us to yet another Josephine, a woman altogether flintier than any of these earlier incarnations: Becky Sharp in an Empireline dress.’ Jane Shilling in the Daily Mail wrote that ‘Williams’s entrancing biography of Josephine is a sparkling account of this most fallible and endearing of women.’ And Virginia Rounding in the Daily Telegraph remarked that ‘if the breathless pace of the writing does not entirely lend itself to in-depth analysis, it does suit the heroine of the tale.’
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HISTORY Rebellion: Britain’s First Stuart Kings Tim Harris (OUP 608pp £30 Oldie price £25.50 Hb) TIm HARRIS’s ‘magisterial study of the rule of James VI and I and his son Charles I is so good that, although it does not set out to explain the origins of the conflict, he has written one of the best accounts available of what led to civil war,’ said Jerry brotton in the Sunday Times. An American professor of european history, Harris has written earlier books about the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution. With Rebellion he has ‘produced a remarkable balancing act not dissimilar to the one he identifies in his two kings, though his manages to be more convincing than theirs. What Harris does brilliantly is assess all the great shibboleths (religion, constitutionalism, sectarianism, finance) and give them their due without identifying one as ultimately responsible for the descent into war.
Tim Harris has produced a remarkable balancing act not dissimilar to the one he identifies in his two kings, James I and Charles I ‘Time and again he shows that these competing structural problems were always likely to end in conflict and rebellion, but exactly when and where were contingent on the policies pursued by the two Stuart rulers.’ Contrary to most interpretations, Harris does not see Charles I as an arrogant, bumbling incompetent, but as ‘the man who could not stop the three kingdoms of england, Scotland and Ireland plunging into crisis’, though ‘this is not quite the same as saying that the fail-
Charles I in Three Positions by Anthony van Dyck, 1635–36 ings of the Stuart monarchy were personal’. According to the Independent’s anonymous reviewer, Harris ‘writes very clearly but in long 19th-century-style paragraphs, takes a commendably measured approach and scrupulously weighs up all angles before reaching his tentative conclusions – frequently supplying strings of examples to support his points and detailing unfolding events day by day. It’s a good – if very large – read and a useful addition to commentaries on this complex period.’
Red Fortress: The Secret Heart of Russia’s History Catherine Merridale (Allen Lane 528pp £30 Oldie price £25.50 Hb THe KRemLIn, moscow’s great fortress settlement, contains five palaces and four cathedrals within its wall and towers, and is the official residence of the President. Catherine merridale, a history professor at Queen mary, University of London, traces the history of the Kremlin through the ages – but concentrates on two key phases: the frenzied construction of the 16th and 17th centuries, and the Soviet-era destruction of church buildings and addition of such excrescences as the Lenin mausoleum and, later, the Palace of Congresses. She argues that the Kremlin ‘stood above the confusion of real life, cut off from its messy hubbub, defended, certainly, but also locked in. It was a metaphor for a good deal of Russia’s subsequent history.’ Catriona Kelly in the Guardian welcomed ‘a book of detail and imagination, in which the precise size and composition of the bricks used to make Aristotele fioravanti’s Cathedral of the Dormition on Cathedral Square in the Kremlin occupy as important a place as diplomatic history or palace strife (though these are given their due). The result is something one could call a neohistorical account of the Russian past.’ In the english-language magazine, Russian
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Life, Paul e Richardson found that merridale ‘skillfully leads us through eight centuries that have been storied and bloody, pestilential and glorious... Whether evoking the muddy, firescorched founding centuries or the scandal-ridden days under Yeltsin, she tells this complex, fascinating history in a personal, approachable style.’ Tony brenton, a former UK Ambassador to Russia, noted in his Times review that merridale ‘is in
The Kremlin stood above the confusion of real life, but was also locked in. It was a metaphor for a good deal of Russia’s subsequent history love with her subject and has more appetite than I have for obscure architects and building plans but she writes superbly.’ He also thought the book captured ‘two deep truths about Russia’, namely that it has always struggled to keep chaos at bay, and that there is a ‘deep fissure’ between the ‘traditional, communal, almost folkloric’ moscow and the ‘coldly utilitarian’, West-facing St Petersburg.
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HISTORY
Hot Dogs and Cocktails: When FDR Met King George VI at Hyde Park on Hudson Peter Conradi (Alma books 300pp £20 Oldie price £17 Hb) SUNDAY TIMES journalist Peter Conradi did well with his best-selling book The King’s Speech, published following the film of the same name, about George VI’s efforts to overcome his stammer. In his new book, he examines another episode in the life of George VI, which was also the subject of a recent biopic, Hyde Park on Hudson. In the summer of 1939, on the eve of World War Two, King George VI and Queen elizabeth paid an official visit to the United States, which lasted for three weeks and culminated in a picnic with fDR at which hot dogs were served. Observer reviewer Anthony Cummins was resoundingly underwhelmed. ‘Roosevelt’s wife, eleanor, wrote that “there are few individuals in any walk of life who are not thinking and wondering about the King and Queen of england”, and you have to share that goggle-eyed view – widespread in the diaries and newspapers that Conradi fillets – to get much out of this book,’ he wrote. ‘How important is it to know that on a given day George wore “a blue-grey lounge suit” before changing into
Franklin D Roosevelt (right) and King George VI (where’s the flannel suit?) “a grey flannel suit” and later wearing “a double-breasted dinner jacket”?’ Less dismissive was the Spectator’s reviewer and Oldie film critic marcus berkmann, who noted that the visit ‘charmed a continent, impressed the Roosevelts and contributed more to the “special relationship” (then struggling somewhat) than any amount of careful diplomacy could have done.’ Conradi’s book, berkmann concluded, ‘is a bit of a shaggy dog story – nothing much happens for 200 pages, then it’s all over in a trice – but the curious innocence of the times is delightfully evoked.’
The Mystery of Princess Louise: Queen Victoria’s Rebellious Daughter Lucinda Hawksley (Chatto & Windus 400pp £25 Oldie price £21.50 Hb) PRInCeSS LOUISe can justly claim to be the raciest of Queen Victoria’s daughters – though the competition is not great. Artistic (she sculpted the statue of her mother outside buckingham Palace), cigarette-smoking, bohemian, fashionably dressed – a cloud of scandal hung about Louise. Lucinda Hawksley was determined to find out the truth about the princess’s rumoured love affairs, about her husband the marquess of Lorne’s nighttime cruising – to say nothing of the allegation that she had borne an illegitimate child by her brother’s tutor (she was even said to have been crushed beneath her sculptor teacher when he died while they made love in his studio). Hawksley’s research for the book was beset with difficulty: not only had Queen Victoria’s starchier daughter Princess beatrice cut out references to Louise from her mother’s diaries, but the royal archives proved resistant to Hawksley’s investigations. ‘I can only conclude people want to whitewash what happened and to prevent facts getting out,’ she told the Sunday Times. In the Daily Telegraph Queen Victoria’s biographer
matthew Dennison found that the ‘wall of silence’ that Hawksley reported meant that the mystery of Louise remains mysterious: ‘Perhaps in time her full story will be told. In the meantime Hawksley’s book does little to ameliorate the wait.’ In the Observer, however, Rachel Cooke was agog: Hawksley ‘puts her facts at the service of her hunches with aplomb… and the book is satisfyingly replete with eye-popping stories of life at the various palaces’. In the Sunday Express historian and television presenter Lucy Worsley was more cautious: ‘The conclusion
Louise was even said to have been crushed beneath her sculptor teacher when he died while they made love in his studio that Louise’s life history has been “bowdlerised and shrouded in secrecy” seems to be argued more from the fact that no new documentary evidence has emerged to give substance to scandal rather than from new evidence of an active campaign of suppression.’ The ‘scandalous’ Princess Louise?
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HISTORY
No Ordinary Men: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi: Resisters Against Hitler in Church and State Elisabeth Sifton and Fritz Stern (New York Review Books Collection 160pp £12.99 Oldie price £11 HB) A month before Germany surrendered in 1945, two resisters of Nazism, Hans von Dohnanyi and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, were hanged in separate concentration camps, a day apart. No Ordinary Men, which has been expanded to 150 pages from an article that appeared in the New York Review of Books, tells their story. Von Dohnanyi, a lawyer who served in the Abwehr (German military intelligence) and the son of composer Erno Dohnanyi, and Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor whose older sister Christine married von Dohnanyi, were both active in opposing the regime. Von Dohnanyi was involved in one of the abortive assassination plots against Hitler, while Bonhoeffer lectured against Nazification of the churches. Both men joined the resistance network and both helped more than a dozen Jews to escape to Switzerland using false papers. Once captured and imprisoned by the Gestapo, they maintained their dignified resistance until the last. ‘Among the books and films this story has inspired, Ms Sifton’s and Mr Stern’s narrative stands out for its elegance, brevity and measured tone: exciting but not sensational, moving but not sentimental, erudite but not academic,’ wrote Alexander Kazam in the Wall Street Journal. ‘It is also enriched by the authors’ connections to some of its central figures and events. Ms Sifton is the daughter of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and Mr Stern fled Nazi Germany as a child in the 1930s.’ In the Daily Telegraph Sameer Rahim praised the book for its ‘graceful power’ and for recognising that ‘what made them
resist while others crumpled is the question. Neither man – pastor or lawyer – was perfect: the single-mindedness required for their sacrifice caused their families real suffering... They did not regard their actions as saintly, but simply the path a decent person must walk.’ Hans von Dohnanyi (left) and Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Nazi resisters
Empires of the Dead: How One Man’s Vision Led to the Creation of WWI’s War Graves David Crane (William Collins 304pp £16.99 Oldie price £14.50 HB) ‘Of the avalanche of books to commemorate the centennial of the start of the Great War, David Crane’s Empires of the Dead, shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, is the most original, best written and most challenging so far,’ wrote Robert Fox in the Evening Standard. ‘Mercifully, it is also one of the shortest.’
Crane has done his subject proud in a clearly and beautifully written narrative which, frankly, makes one gasp at the enormity of the task Its subject concerns a former Tory journalist and apostle of empire, Fabian Ware, who established the War Graves Registration unit (later the Imperial War Graves Commission). Not only did he persuade the French legislature in 1915 to grant ‘perpetuity of sepulture’ on land acquired for the purpose, but he ensured that the war dead should be buried near where they fell, all ranks together, with headstones that were uniform and not specific to any particular religion, and alongside collective memorials that were rendered in a restrained and classical style.
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Susan Welsh, writing in the Aberdeen Press and Journal, was full of admiration for Ware, who ‘had to contend with warring architects, stubborn bureaucrats, dithering clergymen and, most touching of all, the heartfelt cries of the bereaved and anguished next of kin’. She thought that Crane ‘has done his subject proud in a clearly and beautifully written narrative which, frankly, makes one gasp at the enormity of the task faced, and ultimately accomplished by Ware.’ What struck Robert Fox most of all was that Empires of the Dead ‘offers extraordinary insights into the prejudices, fears, griefs and hang-ups of official and unofficial Britain of the times’. Indeed, explained Crane himself in the Guardian, ‘Nothing now seems so utterly “British” as our war cemeteries but it was not always so... The battles fought in parliament and the press over these principles – battles over repatriation and choice, over the rights of the individual and the state – go right to the heart of questions about commemoration, identity and history.’ For architectural expert Gavin Stamp in the Spectator, Crane ‘brings out the paradoxes in Ware’s achievement: that his concern with individual casualties and democratic, nonsectarian equality of treatment required the assistance of the state that had been so cavalier with their lives.’
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HISTORY
The Confidence Trap:
Elizabeth of York: The Queen of The First Tudor Queen Four Kingdoms
A History of Democracy in Crisis from World War I to the Present
Alison Weir (Jonathan Cape 576pp £20 Oldie price £17 Hb)
David Runciman
(Princeton University Press 408pp £19.95 Oldie price £16.95 Hb) THe nATURAL CYCLe of a modern democracy, argues Cambridge politics professor David Runciman, is for it to become over-confident about its stability, with complacency leading to a crisis, which is followed by adaptation, accommodation of discontents, and renewed confidence. In this book he examines a series of episodes in which over-confidence led to crisis: 1918, 1933, 1947, 1962, 1974, 1989 and 2008. ‘All this is presented with a bracing intellectual confidence,’ wrote Jonathan freedland in the Guardian. ‘Runciman roams across the century, drawing evidence from US, french, british, Italian and German history with equal brio. There is no havering, none of the anxious qualifying of every assertion that impedes so much academic writing. There are no graphs or conventional data. It is written colloquially – democracies don’t “get hung up on tradition”; a democracy has “to suck up its mistakes” – and does not shy away from the sweeping generalisation.’ In the New Statesman Vernon bogdanor, another politics professor, was not so ready with praise. The chapters on the seven crises of democracy ‘amount to little more than a dusting over of fairly familiar episodes from 20th-century history and on occasion lack perception,’ bogdanor declared. Runciman’s book ‘is less a work of research or scholarship than a commentary on events, strong on paradox and epigram rather than analysis and written in a somewhat rhapsodic style, which occasionally becomes wearisome.’ but for Downing Street insider ferdinand mount in Prospect, The Confidence Trap ‘is an exhilaratingly different type of political essay from the usual diet of modern political science. It has a whiff of the ancients about it. And it is disturbing in the same way that the political writings of Plato and Aristotle are disturbing. for they too challenge our conventional expectations of how a certain type of regime may turn out in practice.’
Elizabeth of York as Queen, holding the white rose of the House of York 8-11_HISTORY_ORB27 v2.indd 11
ALISOn WeIR’S popular historical biographies sell on a scale that most historians can only dream of. True to form, her most recent book, on elizabeth of York, niece of Richard III, wife of Henry VII and mother of Henry VIII, shot straight into the New York Times bestseller lists. Dan Jones in the Sunday Times thought elizabeth a ‘promising canvas for an enterprising biographer’, observing that ‘she lived through four depositions, countless bloody executions and more state pageantry than you could shake a sceptre at. And all this before dying on her 37th birthday in 1503.’ In the New York Times historical novelist Roger boylan praised a ‘meticulous scholar’ and Christina Hardyment observed in the Independent: ‘Weir has a shrewd sense of what will seize the imagination of the keen historical amateur. The feasts and pageants that mark coronations, births, marriages and deaths are good for juicy details. And when we do read about the minutiae of royal daily life in the single surviving set of accounts, we sense a living, breathing personality: fond of playing cards and the clavichord, generous to her family and random supplicants, well-read and pious.’ Jones agreed: ‘Weir writes knowledgeably on everything from the decorations in the sanctuary apartments at Westminster Abbey to the sort of underpants a 15th-century noblewoman might have worn.’ Though, as Hardyment pointed out, much of the biography has to be ‘guesswork’, Weir has shed some light on a forgotten queen. As Weir herself writes: ‘elizabeth is often unfairly overshadowed by her successors, the wives of Henry VIII, but she was more successful as queen than any of them. for this, and for her integrity and her many kindnesses, her memory deserves to be celebrated.’
HRH Princess Michael of Kent
(Constable 384pp £18.99 Oldie price £16.50 Hb) SeT In THe 15th century, The Queen of Four Kingdoms tells the story of Yolande d’Aragon, who married Louis II, Duke d’Anjou, becoming Queen of naples, Sicily, Cyprus and Jerusalem. Spending a lot of time alone with their five children while Louis was away fighting, Yolande played a crucial role in the struggles between france and england, and was a strong supporter of Joan of Arc, financing her army in 1429. HRH Princess michael of Kent has written three previous histories, including The Serpent and the Moon (about the rivalry between Catherine de medici and Diane de Poitiers for the love of Henri II of france). This book is her first attempt at historical fiction and is part of a planned trilogy, with further instalments due in 2014 and 2015. Inevitably, reviews of the book were scarce, focusing more on Princess michael’s private life than her literary ability. In an interview with Jane Gordon in the Daily Mail, Princess michael revealed that ‘she was initially reluctant to write historical fiction rather than historical fact, but was persuaded to do so by her friend Philippa Gregory, author of The Other Boleyn Girl and The White Queen. “I have always rather snootily scorned historical novels – I am a historian; I am not going to invent anything.” but Philippa said, “You write with a narrative style, like a novelist. You ought to be doing historical fiction.”’ Princess michael spent years researching the book, and ‘the result offers the reader a great deal more than the usual chronology of history,’ wrote Gordon. ‘I like to know things such as what underwear they had,’ Princess michael told her. ‘It’s interesting for us girls today. for example, I discovered that it was the fashion of the time to be slender but to have a rounded tummy.’ In the Times Janice Turner was scornful: ‘The life of Yolande of Aragon could be quite a tale. but in the Princess’s mechanical prose, it reads like a scion of the Almanach de Gotha and a baedeker guide had a bastard child with mills & boon.’ The Mail on Sunday disagreed, calling it ‘a jewel of a book, frequently hilarious and constantly surprising.’
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FICTION The Last Word
PHOTO: BRETT WEINSTEIN
Hanif Kureishi (Faber 304pp £18.99 Oldie price £16.50 HB) As David Sexton wrote in the Evening Standard, ‘Kureishi IT HAS BEEN SIX years since Hanif Kureishi’s last novel, himself has flatly denied that it is based on anybody at all’ Something to Tell You. He first came to prominence in 1985 but, Ben Lawrence stated in the Spectator, it is ‘hard to think with his screenplay for My Beautiful Laundrette, followed of the novel on its own terms as Harry unearths various by his landmark novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, in 1990. accounts of a priapic sage whose relationships with women The Last Word tells the story of a young biographer, Harry teeter on the edge of sexual sadism.’ Johnson, appointed to tell the life of Mamoon Azam, Critics were divided as to the book’s literary merits: though Britain’s greatest living novelist and a giant of post-colonial ‘Mamoon’s titanic ego is deployed to considerable effect,’ literature who, after the death of his first wife, now lives in said D J Taylor in the Literary Review, Somerset with Liana, his striking younger ‘none of this can disguise a slight air of wife. ‘From the moment that news of the contrivance.’ In the Sunday Times Peter plot got out,’ wrote Mark Lawson in the Kemp agreed: ‘“The best stories are Guardian, ‘literary whispers and gossip the open ones,” Mamoon tells Harry. columnists suggested the book as a roman But, branching out bewilderingly in all à clef about V S Naipaul, a glamorously directions, The Last Word leaves you remarried Nobel Laureate who invited yearning for more authorial control.’ But to his Wiltshire retreat Patrick French, Mark Lawson called it ‘enjoyably erratic’: whose resulting biography (The World ‘Around the diverting games of I-spyIs What It Is, 2008), though apparently Naipaul, the novel also contains deeper approved by Naipaul, presented him reflections on the businesses of writing, as a snob, bigot, adulterer and user of reading and biography, and their fate prostitutes.’ ‘The physical description in what may be a post-literary culture’, given of Mamoon is Naipaul to a “T”,’ while John Sutherland thought it ‘a wrote John Sutherland in the Times. major work, founded on a major literary ‘There are some superficial differences – problem, set by a master of his craft’. In precautionary one suspects. Mamoon is the Independent Boyd Tonkin concluded Muslim (lapsed) not Hindu (lapsed). He that, ‘A comic but not a cynic, Kureishi was born in India, not, like Naipaul, in mocks the man but salutes the writer.’ the West Indies.’ I-Spy-Naipaul? Hanif Kureishi
A Man Against a Background of Flames Paul Hoggart (Pighog 480pp £9.99 Oldie price £8.49 PB) JOURNALIST PAUL Hoggart (brother of the late Simon Hoggart) ‘has suggested that this book, his first novel, was written partly in irritation at The Da Vinci Code,’ wrote Lynn Roberts in the Tablet. ‘Certainly, if Dan Brown knew any factual history, were able to conceive rounded, realistic characters who develop and grow, and could vary his tone from comic to chilling, via satirical, poignant and profound – in short, if he were able to write, he might possibly have come up with a pale shadow of this book.’
‘A breath-stoppingly exciting story, the hints of a possible sequel are especially welcome’ Hoggart’s novel is a historical-religious thriller that moves between the near-present day and the 16th century and explores the discovery of the existence of a secret heretical sect in Elizabethan times that has extraordinary repercussions 400 years later, explained the Salisbury Journal. Its hero is Dr James Appleby, an obscure academic, unhappily juggling a wife and a girlfriend. ‘He gets a phone call from a Dutch archivist,’ said Kate Saunders in the Times, ‘who has found some ancient documents relating to a mysterious Elizabethan nobleman, Sir
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Nicholas Harker. Six years and as many pages later, Appleby’s a bestselling writer on a tour of the States and the two FBI agents assigned to him are murdered. Violent Christian fundamentalists want him dead – and gradually we’re shown what he has learned about Harker.’ ‘It’s extremely refreshing to read a novel which encompasses this wide range of tone and characterisation within such a densely plotted, violent and breathstoppingly exciting story,’ said Lynn Roberts, ‘so that the hints here and there of a possible sequel are especially welcome.’ ‘Elizabethan history isn’t normally this exciting,’ agreed Kate Saunders, while in the Daily Mail Kathy Stevenson concluded: ‘The novel is bound to attract comparison with Dan Brown. But this is far better: intelligent, moving, funny and compelling.’
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FICTION
Black Sheep:
Old dogs, new tricks?
Susan Hill (Chatto 144pp £10.99
SAM LEITH ponders a new generation of Wodehouse and Austen
SUSAN HILL IS known for ghost stories such as The Woman in Black and the Simon Serrailler series of psychological crime fiction. Her latest book is a departure, a novella which focuses on a single family. The plot ‘turns on the rotten lives of the men and women of Mount of Zeal, a blackened and grimy coal-mining village, and two of its children, Ted and Rose Howker, both of whom suffer tragedy,’ wrote M J Hyland in the Guardian. The Howker family’s world is ‘one of confinement. Their village lies trapped in a natural depression in the landscape; their lives are curtailed by
THE WORD ‘NOVEL’, as we oldies all know, has a definite connotation of newness. So is it quite in the spirit of the thing that the front tables of today’s bookshops have been overrun by literary resurrection men? We’ve seen the best-loved characters of dead authors reanimated; sequels written; franchises extended; whole novels redone plotpoint-by-plot-point. In the last few years new James Bond novels have appeared from Sebastian Faulks, Jeffery Deaver and William Boyd, to say nothing of Charlie Higson’s series starring a teenage 007. Eric van Lustbader has written Jason Bourne novels with the blessing of Robert Ludlum’s estate. Wilbur Smith’s estate hasn’t even waited until he’s dead: a deal has been announced for a series of ghostwriters to write novels based on plot sketches supplied by the great man... roughly the arrangement that Naomi Campbell came to when she ‘wrote’ her novel. Jeeves and Wooster have been given another outing (Sebastian Faulks again), while Sophie Hannah has resurrected Hercule Poirot’s little grey cells with her own. P D James gave Pride and Prejudice a murder mystery sequel in Death Comes To Pemberley. The Jane Austen project has gone further – setting a different author to the task of rewriting each of the six finished novels in the Austen canon. Joanna Trollope has modernised Sense and Sensibility, while Val McDermid’s Northanger Abbey has one Cat Morland yearning for a bit of excitement to come to her quiet teenagerhood in the Piddle Valley. All this new wine in old bottles! A couple of thoughts. In publishing terms, it certainly suggests an industry looking for safe bets
Oldie price £9.50 HB)
The language is simple, almost childlike, as though Hill means to soften the blows the pit, which shapes their experience and circumscribes their outlook,’ said Matthew Dennison in the Times. The family, their neighbours and friends, all endure unending ‘punishments’, Hyland summarised: ‘cancer, domestic abuse, a missing child, an explosion in the coalmine and murder.’ All reviewers noted the deliberate simplicity of Hill’s language: ‘She is a writer of great versatility,’ wrote Allan Massie in the Scotsman. ‘Everything is pared to the bone. The first sentence sets the tone: “On Mondays, the village, which was called Mount of Zeal, smelled of washing as well as of coal dust.” Place and time are immediately established as we are invited into a narrow world in which there are no modern conveniences and life is hard.’ ‘In spite of the darkness of the subject matter,’ wrote Hyland, ‘the storytelling voice is coy and restrained, and the language is simple, almost childlike, as though Hill means to soften the ceaseless blows.’ This is a ‘taut, tense story,’ said Dennison, while the Irish Examiner’s reviewer concluded: ‘In a literary career spanning more than 50 years Susan Hill has proven herself not only a masterful storyteller with an immaculate sense of narrative and pacing, but also a writer possessed of a deep understanding of human nature.’
in uncertain times. In terms of the wider culture, it swims alongside the online burgeoning of ‘fan fiction’ and ‘mashups’. The biggest bestseller of recent times, Fifty Shades of Grey, began life as an amateur ‘fan fiction’ tribute to Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series of vampire novels. But in literary terms none of this stuff is all that new. August Derleth extended H P Lovecraft; Robert B Parker inked in an unfinished Chandler; Christopher Tolkien tidied up the Silmarillion; and Emma Tennant was logging Austen sequels back in the early 90s. Long before that there was Jean Rhys’s extraordinary spin-off from Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea.
To write in another’s idiom is in fact to take on a demanding task Some were good, some bad, and a handful – such as Rhys – created something with a vigorous artistic life of its own. All writing, it has been said, is rewriting; originality in the broad strokes is a very marginal virtue. Nobody thought the less of Francis Bacon because he reworked Velasquez; or Shakespeare because he nicked his plots from Holinshed. To write in another’s idiom, to borrow characters or a plot, is in fact to take on a demanding task both as a writer and a reader: here is literary performance as literary criticism. Best of all, many of these writers have succeeded. Faulks’s Wodehouse is wonderfully enjoyable to read, and Trollope’s Austen is craftily planned and energised by the brio of the original. To hell with the curmudgeons. If a cat may look at a king, a Boyd may rewrite a Bond.
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CURRENT A FFA IRS The Frackers: The Outrageous Inside Story of the New Energy Revolution
Meet the frackers: a Halliburton frack job in America Middle England may have its doubts about fracking – extracting gas and oil from shale rock by hydraulic fracturing – but it has transformed the American energy scene, offering the US the prospect of oil self-sufficiency with massive global strategic consequences. Gregory Zuckerman has written the
story of the hard-bitten adventurers who have made this particular American dream possible. Danny Fortson in the Sunday Times called it ‘a fascinating inside story of the closest thing you can get to a modern-day gold rush’. As Dwight Garner noted in the New York Times, ‘The Frackers offers adulatory profiles of a half-dozen or so men, the raw-boned new Rockefellers, who have led the fracking revolution.’ Garner was unimpressed by Zuckerman’s prose style – ‘he has never met a cliché he did not like’ – but added: ‘If there is any joy to be had from reading about these men (and they are all men), it comes from watching them sticking it to the energy world’s complacent established players.’ Climate change expert Bill McKibben, writing in the Los Angeles Times, thought it ‘a relief to have accounts of American businessmen who actually do something besides develop new financial derivatives or invent new iPhone apps’. But he went on: ‘The trouble is, fracking, and the energy boom it’s set off, are likely to have disastrous long-term consequences for the planet, a subject Zuckerman barely acknowledges. ‘The wealth it creates for a few billionaires – and the shot in the arm for the nation’s economy – must be judged against the chaos that warming temperatures will cause as the century, and the millenniums, stretch on.’
PHOTO: Joshua Doubek
Gregory Zuckerman (Penguin 404pp £14.99 Oldie price £12.75 PB)
The Siege: Three Days of Terror Inside the Taj Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark (Viking 352pp £18.99 Oldie price £16.50 HB) The Siege is the first detailed account of the terrorist attack on the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in the city of Mumbai in November 2008. Orchestrated by the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), with the aid of that country’s intelligence services, the ISI, the terror attacks in Mumbai were carried out by ten young men from poor villages in Pakistan and took place in five locations across the city – Leopold Café, a railway station, the Jewish centre and two luxury hotels, of which the Taj was one. 166 people were killed. Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark’s book focuses on the guests and staff trapped inside the hotel, one of India’s grandest, during the 58 hours of its siege. The result, wrote foreign correspondent Christina Lamb in the Sunday Times, is ‘absolutely spinechilling’. The authors’ writing may verge on the ‘breathless’, but the book is ‘as action-packed as any thriller’. Dwight Garner, in the New York Times, agreed. For Garner the wealth of ‘clichés, dangling modifiers and awkward phrases’ did not ultimately detract from what he called ‘a propulsive and exceedingly well-reported book’. The story ‘steamrolls finicky objections. It’s a tragedy and a thriller with concussive human and political resonance. I read it in what felt like three blinks.’ This is a ‘pacey, unsettling story,’ wrote the Economist’s
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reviewer, told through an ‘impressive range of interviews with surviving victims, officials, relatives of assailants, and other sources both in Pakistan and India.’ Although ‘fuller accounts’ are needed, The Siege is compelling both ‘for the quality of its research’ and for its ‘human stories’.
The Taj Hotel burns during the siege, November 2008
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TECHNOLOGY Hatching Twitter: How a Fledgling Start-up became a Multibillion Dollar business and Accidentally Changed the World Nick bilton (Sceptre 304pp £14.99 Oldie price £12.75 PB) aCCORding TO the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, Twitter is ‘an online social networking and microblogging service that enables users to send and read “tweets”, which are text messages limited to 140 characters.’ Created in March 2006 by four young americans, the service rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with 500 million registered users in 2012, posting 340 million tweets a day. When it floated on the stock market last year, Twitter was valued at $25 billion dollars – but the path to such eyepopping wealth was neither smooth nor happy. Two of the company’s founders, Jack dorsey and evan Williams, have been given the boot (though dorsey returned as executive chairman), and even noah glass, the man who came up with the company’s name, was slung out. no one comes out well from nick Bilton’s behind-the-scenes account of Twitter’s growth. glass is moody, drunk and erratic; Williams idealistic about free speech yet hopelessly ineffective as a business leader; and dorsey is portrayed as self-centred, Machiavellian and incompetent.
The economist’s reviewer thought ‘the only thing that mars hatching Twitter is the hatchet job it does on Mr dorsey. Mr Bilton’s sympathies clearly lie with Mr Williams, who is portrayed as a much-loved boss whose vision of Twitter as a tool for talking about what is happening in the world spurs it to greatness. Mr dorsey, on the other hand, comes across as an embittered soul who unjustly claims credit for the company’s success.’ Timothy Wu in the Washington Post wrote that ‘the strength of his book is that it does an excellent job of depicting the emotional atmosphere at West Coast start-ups: a cycle of exhilaration and hopelessness shadowed by the persistent fear of missing out.’ and Oliver Burkeman in the guardian wrote that ‘Bilton tells the story with verve. But the most interesting thing about all this bickering is how irrelevant it seems to have been to Twitter as a cultural phenomenon. While dorsey and Williams fought, it was Twitter’s users who were busy creating retweets, @ replies and hashtags, the three conventions that give the system its unique depth and versatility.’
The Everything Store: Jeff bezos and the Age of Amazon aS niCK Clee pointed out in the New Statesman, most of us are fearful humbugs about amazon, which Jeff Bezos set up in a Seattle garage in 1994 to sell books online, and has gone on to become a retail giant, selling everything that can be sold at the lowest possible prices, and dominating the e-book market with its Kindle. We thrill with indignation
As for its bald-headed, pixie-like founder, a former Wall Street trader, ‘he’s a driven man, harsh on subordinates who under-perform’ when told about zero contracts in its vast warehouses or its tax avoidance schemes, but we cheerfully click away, relishing the cheapness and the speed of delivery. Martin Vander Weyer in the Spectator couldn’t hide his admiration, ‘yet i can see what a monster amazon has become. not only has it undermined the high-street book trade and brutalised the publishing industry, but in its urge to be the “everything store”, it has meted out the same treatment and worse on the supply chain of every other sector it has touched.’ as for its bald-headed, pixie-like founder, a former Wall Street trader, ‘he’s a driven man: harsh on subordinates who
under-perform, not noticeably generous to those who are loyal and effective, he positively encourages internal conflict rather than complacent “social cohesion”. He’s prone to temper tantrums – and when he’s in a Jeff Bezos: short of a few hairs, good mood his most though not short of a few bob distinctive characteristic is a huge, honking laugh.’ His story is ‘diligently explored by Stone, who even tracks down Bezos’s long-lost natural father running a bike shop in arizona.’ The Sydney Morning herald reckoned that ‘the achievements of amazon come at a cost, as Stone’s fascinating account makes clear. it’s not merely that Bezos’s personal fortune – some $25 billion – rests on an army of nonunionised packers working in atrocious conditions. it’s also that never in human history has a single company exerted so much control over the publication, distribution and sale of books.’ What on earth will he do with the Washington Post?
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PHOTO: JuRVETSON
brad Stone (Bantam 384pp £18.99 Oldie price £16.50 HB)
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LETTERS A selection of extracts from some recent collections of correspondence
EXTRACT
S
Darling Monster: The Letters of Lady Diana Cooper to her son John Julius Norwich, 1939–1952 Diana Cooper, edited by John Julius Norwich (Chatto 528pp £25 Oldie price £21.50 HB) SEPTEMBER 29TH 1940 I couldn’t keep up my daily letter this week. Things have been too disturbed – too many sirens, too much noise, no possibility of concentration. Now I’m relatively out of harm’s way and will try to remember what happened. We were anxious and fretful about Dakar [Senegal]. It was a big failure and we must make the best of it. Poor de Gaulle is a smirched flag but perhaps we can hoist him again. If you look from my top window at the Dorchester you can’t see anything wrong with our London but walking in the streets is more melancholy. 90 Gower Street is no more. Papa says it’s thoroughly gutted. I won’t go and look. It would make me too sad. Buck’s Club also was said to have ‘gone’ but is mendable. John Lewis and D H Evans and Peter Robinson are burnt out. There’s a big gap in Dover Street through to
Lady Diana Cooper with her son, John Julius Norwich Albemarle Street. The East End is beyond anything – quite demolished. A good thing if it wasn’t for the sad inhabitants. We are getting basements going in the West End for them and the people in the ministries now sleep where they work – three nights a week they work almost double hours and after three days go home for three workless ones. This means less danger for them getting to and fro, fewer hours wasted in shelters and less congestion on the buses and undergrounds which are now public shelters at night. Families go in at about five with bedding, babies, buns and bottles and settle down to community singing, gossip, making new friends, exchanging bomb stories. I should rather like it together, but can you imagine Papa’s reaction if he had to join the party?
Letters of Note: Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience Compiled by Shaun Usher (Canongate/Unbound 368pp £30 Oldie price £25.50 HB) A collection of over 100 letters, a celebration of the power of correspondence. This extract is taken from Clementine Churchill’s letter to Winston Churchill, June 27th 1940 My Darling, I hope you will forgive me if I tell you something that I feel you ought to know. One of the men in your entourage (a devoted friend) has been to me and told me that there is a danger of your being generally disliked by your colleagues and subordinates because of your rough, sarcastic and overbearing manner. It seems your Private Secretaries have agreed to behave like schoolboys and ‘take what’s coming to them’ and then escape out of your presence shrugging their shoulders. Higher up, if an idea is suggested (say at a conference) you are supposed to be so contemptuous that presently no ideas, good or bad, will be forthcoming. I was astonished and upset because in all these years I have been accustomed to all those who have worked with and under you, loving you – I said this and I was told ‘No doubt it’s the strain’ – My darling Winston, I must confess that I have noticed a deterioration in your manner; and you are not so kind as you used to be.
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It is for you to give the orders and if they are bungled – except for the King, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Speaker – you can sack anyone and everyone. Therefore with this terrific power you must combine urbanity, kindness and if possible Olympic calm… Besides you won’t get the best results by irascibility and rudeness. They will breed either dislike or a slave mentality (rebellion in war time being out of the question!) Please forgive your loving, devoted and watchful, Clemmie
Above: another letter of note. Annie Oakley to US President William McKinley, April 5th 1898. Oakley was a celebrity sharpshooter who, with the Spanish–American War looming, wrote to the President offering to donate ‘fifty lady sharpshooters’ to the war effort. The President declined
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TS
LETTERS
Spike Milligan:
To the Letter:
Man of Letters
A Journey Through a Vanishing World
Edited by Norma Farnes (Viking 383pp £25 Oldie price £21.50 HB) A selection of Spike Milligan’s correspondence with politicians, actors, celebrities and rock stars, as well as producers, publishers, editors and his manager-agent Norma Farnes FOREWORD (Spike’s original foreword to the first volume of his letters, published 1977) I’ve always wished to be a man of letters. Well apparently this book does it for me. Unbeknown to me, my manager, under my very nose (in a crouching position), has all these years been secretly compiling a book from my correspondence. I often wondered what she was doing in my office. She never did a stroke of work for me. All the time I have been working for her. Time and time again she would come into my office when I was concentrating on a TV show, or a book and she would say ‘You must rest, relax, why not write a letter to the Times or someone?’, anything to stop me working. I would do her bidding. On the basis of this she is about to become rich. However, I forgive her, and I will be back in the office next Monday morning working for her as usual.
Man of letters: Spike Milligan
The Editor, The Times 15 January 1999 Sir: The Pope says God has no beard. If he knows that would he tell us what the rest of him looks like. Spike Milligan Mrs Kathryn Colvin Foreign and Commonwealth Office 4 July 2000 Dear Mrs Colvin: Would you thank The Queen for appointing me a KBE. Can you tell me what shape it is and what it is made of – leather, cardboard or metal? Do you carry it in your pocket and wear it around your neck with a piece of string? Anyway, I think the reason she gave it to me was that they looked in the Obituary Column and saw that I was not in it and thought it was time to give it to me. Thank you for sending it to me, but only just in time. Yours most sincerely, Love, Light and peace, Spike Milligan
Simon Garfield (Canongate 464pp £16.99 Oldie price £14.50 HB)
SIMON GARFIELD has found a niche for himself writing popular books on esoteric subjects. Just My Type, a guide to typography, was a surprise bestseller when it came out in 2010; elsewhere Garfield has focused on stamps, maps and British wrestling. In To the Letter, his latest book, he charts the history of the written letter, from the slivers of birch used by Roman soldiers, found beneath Hadrian’s wall, to the letter-writing manuals of the 16th century, all the way to the arrival of email. The letters of famous correspondents – Cicero, Madame de Sévigné, Virginia Woolf and many others – are interspersed with the affecting exchanges shared by a soldier fighting in World War Two and a woman back home in Britain as they gradually fall in love through their letters. Ultimately Garfield pays tribute to the physical power of the letter compared to the email: ‘This is not a letter but my arms around you for a brief moment,’ wrote Katherine Mansfield. ‘No email will ever be able to say that,’ wrote John Carey in the Sunday Times. ‘Garfield’s book is stuffed with marvellous anecdotes, fascinating historical tidbits and excerpts from epistolary masters,’ wrote Carmela Ciuraru in the New York Times; yet she also found it ‘nostalgic and fretful’, with a few ‘weird rhetorical turns’. In the Scotsman David Robinson was more damning, calling Garfield’s list of exemplars ‘predictable’, and concluding that the book ‘fails to engage at any deeper level than a competently executed commission.’ A more positive voice was that of John Carey, who declared that, in everything that mattered, Garfield’s book was a ‘shining success’. ‘Garfield being Garfield, there’s a rich cull of curiosities. Who wrote the world’s shortest letter? Emily Dickinson is a contender, writing to her cousins just before her death, “Little Cousins, / Called back. / Emily.” She is outdone, though, by Victor Hugo, who, worried about the success of Les Misérables, wrote to his publisher: “?” His publisher, delighted with the sales figures, replied “!”’
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M ISCELLA NEOUS Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York’s Legendary Chelsea Hotel Sherill Tippins (Simon & Schuster 480pp £14.99 Oldie price £12.75 HB) IT’S RARE TO FIND a whole book devoted to a single building, but the Chelsea Hotel was no ordinary dwelling. ‘Alcoholic writers, suicidal artists, Trotskyites, drag queens, punk rockers – the Chelsea has been home to them all,’ wrote Mick Brown in the Daily Telegraph, ‘and that’s before we even begin to consider the magnificent George Kleinsinger, who transformed his room into a tropical rainforest, with twelve-foot trees imported from Borneo and Madagascar and a menagerie of exotic birds, a monkey, a pet skunk and a five-foot iguana.’ The hotel was built in 1884 by Philip Hubert as a ‘co-operative club’ where people of congenial tastes might live in harmony and unfettered sexuality. After it went bankrupt in 1905, its 80 flats were subdivided into 300 rooms, thrown open to the wild, the bohemian and the degenerate. Sherill Tippins’s book, said Mick Brown, is ‘a vivid, informed and entertaining ramble through the history of New York’s nonconformist and artistic classes.’ Thomas Wolfe lived in squalor, wrote You Can’t Go Home Again, and died here. Dylan Thomas drank himself to death, while, according to the Daily Mail, Brendan Behan became ‘so notorious for chasing the Chelsea’s chambermaids that none would enter his room until he was fully dressed’. Arthur Miller, who stayed there after his wife Marilyn Monroe died, complained that Andy Warhol’s gang of washed-up superstars made the place ‘wild and unmanageable’. Jackson Pollock was sick on the dining-room carpet when Peggy Guggenheim brought potential collectors to meet him, Gore Vidal went to Jack Kerouac’s room to have sex with him (‘We owed it to literary history to couple,’ he said later). The hotel’s low point, it’s generally agreed, was when Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols allegedly stabbed his New Jersey groupie-girlfriend Nancy Spungen to death under the bathroom sink. Some reviewers seized the chance to reminisce about their
The Seasons: An Elegy for the Passing of the Year
stay at the Chelsea. Peter Conrad in the Observer recalled: ‘Pimps and pushers loitered in the lobby; a transvestite dispensed room keys behind a shield of bulletproof glass; a trip upstairs in the elevator could get you high in more ways than one, given the captive cloud of pot fumes in the clanking box. The marble stairwell resounded to the ululations of resident rock bands, and once in a corridor Punk rocker Dee Dee Ramone on the I collided with shaggy balcony of the Chelsea Hotel Janis Joplin, awash in a swill of Librium, tranquillisers and heroin topped up by Southern Comfort. I had never felt so grubby, so at risk, or so excited.’ In the Independent Charlotte Raven recalled her stay there in the late 1960s in the style of TripAdvisor (‘far from salubrious: stained carpets, coughing pipes, but a sanctuary nonetheless’) and called the hotel ‘a haven for narcissists as well as utopians,’ before concluding, ‘Tippins tries to distinguish fact from fiction, but happily her history still reads like a tall tale; as gossipy as any of the Chelsea denizens.’
Leading the flock: scenes of pastoral English life
Nick Groom (Atlantic 400pp £22 Oldie price £18.99 HB) THE ENGLISH SEASONS used to be very distinctive but as the differences between them become increasingly blurred, so the country’s very identity is threatened. That is Nick Groom’s thesis in his entertaining study of each English (not British) season. ‘Groom’s enthusiasm is hard to resist,’ thought John Carey in the Sunday Times, ‘and his garnering of the folklore and the customs that, for centuries, guided life through the changing seasons bulges with fascination.’ In the Evening Standard David Sexton considered it ‘a curious hodge-podge of a book’ by ‘a deeply nostalgic ruralist lamenting the way the countryside “has become something to be consumed”.’ Agreement came from Melanie McDonagh in the Spectator, but she also found it ‘unexpectedly fascinating’,
adding: ‘There is indeed an elegiac quality to this book. It summons up the ghosts of a vanished world, though as the author points out, some aspects of that world show unexpected signs of vitality, and he himself does his bit by playing the part of St George in his village’s annual festival.’ Bel Mooney in the Daily Mail outdid them all in her enthusiasm, declaring it ‘a volume I have been waiting for all my life. I love Nick Groom’s passionate plea for us to be aware of traditional connections between human lives, the seasons and the natural world. He provides a cornucopia of knowledge, and an inspirational call to awareness... This is a rich celebration of traditions and an urgent plea for them not to be forgotten.’
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MISCELLANEOUS
Concretopia: A Journey around the Rebuilding of Postwar Britain John Grindrod (Old Street 474pp £25 Oldie price £21.50 HB) PUBLIC OPINION has swung violently against the postwar redevelopment of Britain, with its tower blocks and brutalist city centres. John Grindrod, a child of such an urban wasteland, New Addington, an outpost of the equally unfashionable Croydon, takes a more nuanced view in this survey. ‘Grindrod sets out to do justice to the people who changed the British landscape so radically after 1945,’ said Sam Jordison in the Guardian. In 1943, for example, ‘architect-turnedplanning-supremo Patrick Abercrombie was asked by the new Ministry for Town and Country Planning to draw up a scheme for the postwar rebuilding of London and Plymouth,’ Philippa Stockley wrote in the Telegraph. ‘But Abercrombie’s recommendations went much further than his brief, and in 1946 the New Towns Act designated 20 new towns, for which land was compulsorily purchased at agricultural value.’ Concretopia ‘is a fascinating story,’ said Jordison, ‘and Grindrod tells it well.’ Alain de Botton in the Times, identifying himself as an opponent of the way Britain was redeveloped, commented: ‘His book is structured as a series of journeys to the places in Britain most affected by postwar Modernism: in particular, the new town of Cumbernauld in Scotland, the rebuilt parts of Plymouth and Coventry, Milton Keynes, Swindon, and the office blocks of Croydon. Like most things that seem simply horrific from a distance, under Grindrod’s gentle eye one starts to forgive a lot. For a start, almost all the Modernist projects would have
BOOKSHOP
looked a lot better if there had been more money.’ Rebecca Armstrong in the Independent enjoyed the author’s sharp eye. ‘Grindrod never forgets the human details, from perfectly preserved doorbells on a postwar estate to architects’ now quaintly comical obsessions with sketching in helipads in their designs. ‘If you’ve ever wondered who gave planning permission for the serried ranks of concrete blocks you pass on the way to work, read Concretopia and lay the foundations of a new way of looking at modern Britain.’
Tower blocks mingle with low rise flats in New Addington
HOW TO ORDER THE BOOKS IN THIS ISSUE By telephone: just call 01603 648 140 By post: please send a cheque payable to ‘Books by Phone’ to the following address: FOA Oldie Books, 1 Broadland Business Park, Norwich NR7 0WF Don’t forget to include your full contact details and the list of books you would like Prices do not include postage and packaging UK p+p is £1.10 on every order
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OBITUARY
Ammonites and Leaping Fish: A Life in Time Penelope Lively (Fig Tree 234pp £14.99 Oldie price £12.75 HB) Received opinion, observed Rachel Cooke in the Observer, has it that the old don’t need things; we expect them to move into ever smaller rooms, and their possessions to disappear to charity shops. All of us dread a disease such as Alzheimer’s and worry that our eyes will turn milky and useless. ‘But beyond illness, there are other, more existential anxieties. We fear losing interest. No one wants to think of their last days as something only to be got through.’ So, Cooke concluded, ‘Ammonites and Leaping Fish is powerfully consoling: Lively is certainly sagacious, her words careful and freighted. But there is girlishness here, too. Things still catch her eye, her attention. New books. Old stories. Another day for the taking.’
Snake Dance: Journeys Beneath a Nuclear Sky Patrick Marnham (Chatto 352pp £18.99 Oldie price £16.50 HB) SNAKE DANCE is a composite book: part history, part biography, part travelogue. Patrick Marnham tells the story of the nuclear age through a series of journeys. He goes to the Congo, where the uranium used for the Manhattan Project was mined; he trails to New Mexico, where the first atomic bomb was developed and tested; and to Fukushima in the aftermath of the tsunami, which showed the dangers of the civilian development of nuclear technology. At the same time, he tells the story of three characters indelibly associated with these places: Joseph Conrad, who worked for the same company that extracted the uranium for the bomb; Aby Warburg, who saw in the snake dance of the Hopi Indians of New Mexico the origins of speculative science; and Robert Oppenheimer, the guiding spirit of the American nuclear program.
Matthew Green in the Literary Review called the book ‘magisterial’. Marnham’s ‘mastery of a vast trove of material makes him an erudite travel companion, one who is perennially eager to poke about in radiation zones armed with only a wonky Geiger counter and a paper mask.’ Lara Feigel in the Observer wrote, ‘It is a book that proceeds not through logic or through narrative but through a series of juxtapositions and coincidences... It can be helpfully compared with the work of W G Sebald, and as with Sebald there are moments of dazzling brilliance and moments of maddening circuitousness.’ Melanie McGrath in the Telegraph also compared Marnham to Sebald but admitted that he ‘doesn’t quite pull it off. Indeed, his slightly frantic attempt to impose thematic, historic and geographic coherence on his eclectic material can have the opposite effect: the book never really hangs together.’
Doris Lessing 1919–2013
DORIS LESSING, who died in November aged 94, was one of the towering figures of modern literature, producing on average one book a year for nearly sixty years. She spent her formative years in southern Africa, ‘dropping out of school at 13,’ as Adam Withnall noted in his obituary in the Sunday Independent, ‘and fleeing from home and a turbulent relationship with her mother at the age of 15.’ In 1949, with two marriages behind her, she arrived in London with her young son and no money. Her first novel, The Grass is Singing, caused a sensation when it appeared in 1950. It told the story of Mary, a white Southern Rhodesian woman married to a farmer but driven by loneliness to embark on an obsessive and finally fatal affair with her black houseboy. A shocking truth had been exposed: white women could desire black men. Lorna Sage in the Guardian declared that ‘Lessing’s oeuvre remained riveting.’ ‘She was, at various stages of her life, a communist, socialist, feminist, atheist, Laingian and finally a Sufi,’ said the Telegraph. ‘Every ideology collapsed into something else,’ echoed the Economist, ‘just as her frail family farmhouse of mud and thatch would fade back into the bush in time.’ According to the Times, her radicalism meant that she was regarded with caution by the literary establishment, ‘for which, it should be said, she had little respect’. Lessing herself believed her quarrel with authority could be traced to her father. ‘It came from that whole generation of men who had lived through the slaughter in the trenches and had a profound contempt for the incompetence of the government.’ For thirty years, by Lessing’s own reckoning, people had been expecting her to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. She felt the burden of expectation keenly, but when in 2007 a reporter informed her the Nobel was hers, she said: ‘Oh, Christ!’ followed by: ‘I suppose you want some uplifting remarks.’ In her acceptance speech she denounced the internet and lamented the lost art of reading. The Guardian characterised her as ‘a nomad’ and ‘a tent-dweller’, who dared to be inconsistent, as well as ‘obsessive, humble, brilliant, banal, serene, truthful, teasing by turns.’
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PHOTO: ELKE WETZIG
AT 80, as Helen Dunmore observed in the Times, the writer Penelope Lively is ‘now a native of that country to which no one ever plans to travel, and it is hard to conceive of a more truthful reporter: Lively knows about pain, loss and enduring love; about fear of falling and an intense, almost meditative, love of the present moment. She writes about the shifts in her own life as age takes hold. The woman who once went eagerly all over the world has now lost all desire for travel; the body that once ran, jumped, climbed, lifted, gardened, swam in a Maine pond or expertly steered a pram now struggles with arthritis… Lively’s analysis of these changes is searching, surprising, and often lit with humour.’
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MUSIC & ENTERTAINMENT Johnny Cash: The Life Robert Hilburn (Weidenfeld 688pp £20 Oldie price £17 HB) of the Times, in an admiring review of this biography. ‘Hilburn’s empathy for his subject shines through, turning Cash into a man we want to spend time with. For a biography of this size and scope, that’s essential.’ Hilburn, who worked as a critic and a music editor at the Los Angeles Times from 1966 to 2005, was the only music journalist to attend Cash’s legendary Folsom Prison concert in 1968. ‘That familiarity – coupled with decades of keen observation and extensive interviews with Cash, his family and his colleagues – allows for a remarkable vantage from which to recount a life,’ wrote Amanda Petrusich in the LA Times. Indeed, Hilburn ‘does an artful, enviable job of reconciling all the facets – the man Johnny Cash in later years Cash wanted
johnny cash (1932–2003), the phenomenally popular American country music singer-songwriter, was born in Arkansas into a cotton farming family. He became the best-known country performer in the 1950s and helped spread the genre to a huge new audience. ‘Nobody could express pain like Johnny Cash,’ declared Will Hodgkinson, chief rock critic
to be (a pious, steadfast, fearless figure) and who he more often was (a loving prankster with a weakness for women and pills). The former characterisation is so entrenched and so appealing, it’s easy to see why Cash and his many chroniclers were seduced by it... But Hilburn writes with a remarkably steady hand, and Cash’s weaknesses are neither ignored nor romanticised.’ If Hilburn and Cash ‘had a friendship of sorts,’ wrote Tom Peck in the Independent, ‘Hilburn keeps a reasonably scholarly distance here... Life is longer than a country song, and more complicated. Those who love Cash’s music might not like the man they meet here. The facts, many of them new, are too loud to speak quietly. That he betrayed his wife for her sister, or that he violently pursued his dead friend’s widow. Whatever is said or written about him, Cash’s spell will last a long time yet, but this illuminating book leaves things lighter, if not brighter, for the Man in Black.’
Verve: The Sound of America Richard Havers (Thames & Hudson 400pp £45 Oldie price £38.50 HB) Record label Verve was founded in 1956 by jazz impresario Norman Granz, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants. Granz’s stated and fulfilled ambition was to take jazz out of dingy, smoke-filled clubs and into concert halls around the world. Starting with a concert at the Los Angeles Philharmonic Auditorium in 1944, Granz organised a series of ‘Jazz at the Philharmonic’ international tours featuring such artists as Ella Fitzgerald and Dizzy Gillespie. He founded Verve as a showcase for Fitzgerald, and all eight of her legendary songbooks, concentrating on individual composers, were recorded with the label. Granz also initiated a series of eight Oscar Peterson songbook albums before selling the label to MGM in 1960. Under the direction of Creed Taylor,
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Verve went on to release numerous albums by great jazz artists. ‘Richard Havers does an excellent job of contextualising the story of Verve within the broader development of jazz, from its birthplace in the bordellos of New Orleans’s Storyville to its place on the world stage,’ wrote Mick Brown in the Daily Telegraph. ‘The assemblage of glorious archive photographs, tour posters, album sleeves and ephemera is eye-poppingly beautiful, incidentally reminding you of two cardinal rules about jazz musicians in the Thirties, Forties and Fifties. Everybody looked ineffably cool, and everybody smoked. The plume of smoke curling up into the spotlight, as a symbol of the transporting evanescence of the music, is the great motif of the golden age of jazz.’
Smokin’ jazz: Jimmy Smith in 1968 Choosing it as one of his books of the year, Observer critic Peter Conrad noted that it ‘turns the story of a record label into a gloriously lively history of jazz; the book’s design almost makes you hear the music as you read.’
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Duke:
Difficult Men:
The Life of Duke Ellington
From The Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad
Terry Teachout (Robson Press 496pp £25 oldie price £21.50 hB) ‘I’M easy to please,’ wrote duke ellington in a note discovered by his son after his death. ‘I just want to have everybody in the palm of my hand.’ Most of the time, he managed it. a giant of 20th-century jazz, ellington was a charismatic bandleader and, even into his 70s, a relentless womaniser. Born in 1899 into a middle-class family in Washington, dc, ellington was leading a band in new york by 1924; in 1927 the band began their long residence in the famous cotton club in harlem. There he developed the ‘ellington effect’, a combination of improvisational spontaneity and planned composition. Though a musical legend when he died in 1974, he had struggled for respect in the face of discrimination against both his colour and jazz. Terry Teachout, drama critic of the Wall Street Journal, is a trained
Duke Ellington with his piano at the KFG Radio Studio, November 1954
Brett Martin (Faber 303pp £14.99 oldie price £12.75 PB)
musician whose previous book was an acclaimed biography of Louis armstrong. Reviewers appreciated his ability to convey the power of ellington’s music. Teachout both ‘clearly elucidates ellington’s mastery as a composer’ and also provides an ‘impressively lucid, compact narrative,’ effused jon Garelick in the Boston Globe. In the New York Times james Gavin, the biographer of Lena horne, called the book a ‘clear-eyed reassessment of a man regarded in godlike terms’, written in an ‘earthbound style marked by sound scholarship and easy readability’. This book ‘humanises a man whom history has kept on a pedestal.’
The dIFFIcULT Men of the title are not only the flawed anti-heroes of 21st-century american cable television dramas – Tony soprano, Mad Men’s don draper, and Breaking Bad’s Walter White – but also the irascible, tortured show-runners (writer-producers) who created them. ‘embittered and paranoid from years of hackwork and thwarted ambition,’ explained andrew Billen in the Times, ‘they found themselves in a commercial environment where channels were so desperate for distinction that they let the writer off the leash.’ cable channels, hard-drive recorders such as TiVo (in the Us) and dVd box sets have changed our viewing habits, but they have also changed the nature of TV drama, which, so Martin argues, is now ‘the signature american art form’. ‘Difficult Men is convincing as a discussion of the relationship between the economics of television and its creativity,’ said Billen, but its core ‘pulsates with some of the most entertaining profiles of writers since dr johnson’s Lives of the Poets.’ While cable ‘could feature levels of nudity, violence and profanity the networks couldn’t match,’ explained colin Walters in the Glasgow Sunday Herald, the vision of david chase, creator of The Sopranos, ‘was literate, cinematic and mature. Martin likens chase’s gangster protagonist Tony soprano to Updike’s Rabbit angstrom in his moods, suburban malaise and woundedness.’ For Theo Tait in the Guardian, ‘the main pleasure’ of the book was its ‘detailed descriptions of the creation of each show, particularly The Sopranos and The Wire’. Martin’s book ‘does for the outstanding american TV dramas of recent years what Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls did for the great Us movies of the 1970s: it’s an entertaining and insightful history of how they came to be made.’
The Greatest Movies You’ll Never See: Unseen Masterpieces by the World’s Greatest Directors Edited by Simon Braund (aurum 256pp £20 oldie price £17 hB) ‘ThIs Is sUch an intriguing book, you wonder why it hasn’t been compiled before,’ wrote jonathan dean in the Sunday Times. ‘Featuring many of the world’s most celebrated directors – david Lean, orson Welles, david Lynch among them – it is an exhaustive account of stifled ambition that reads like an alternative history of cinema; a tantalising line-up of what-ifs and if onlys.’ simon Braund, a journalist with movie magazine Empire, has edited a fascinating collection of essays (by various contributors) about movies that were planned, in some cases in meticulous detail, and yet never made it to the screen, for whatever reason. did you know, for example, that Warner Brothers planned a sequel to Casablanca that was to be called Brazzaville, after the capital of the Belgian congo, in which Bogart’s Rick was to be revealed as an undercover agent? or that director Ridley scott collaborated with screenwriter nick cave on a sequel to
Gladiator in which Maximus became a time-travelling warrior who fought in both World War one and the Bosnian civil war of the 1990s? For once, it sounds as if the studio concerned, Warner Brothers again, was right to stymie the artistic ambitions of a director. ‘overstuffed with fascinating trivia, gossip and “what happened next” sidebars, this book provides insights on why hitchcock never made No Bail for the Judge staring audrey hepburn; uncovers stanley Kubrick’s cross-indexed gallery of 15,000 images for his uncompleted Napoleon;; and tells of the mouth-watering prospect of a Marx Brothers/ salvador dali collaboration,’ explained Publishers Weekly’s reviewer. ‘The production sketches for david Lean’s illfated Nostromo are dazzling, as are the dozens of remarkable imagined posters specifically created for the book.’
The film that never was: poster for a Marx Brothers/Dali collaboration
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SPORT My Autobiography Alex Ferguson (Hodder & Stoughton 416pp £25 Oldie price £21.50 HB) SIR ALEX FERGUSON’S second autobiography became the fastest-selling non-fiction book on record last year with sales of 647,000. Most newspapers reviewed its revelations about David Beckham and Roy Keane or the managers Arsène Wenger and Rafa Benitez on their sports pages. Other reviewers tended to concentrate on Ferguson’s belief
Ferguson: ‘intellectually curious’
in ‘control’ – the control, as Jim White said in the Daily Telegraph, that transformed Manchester United from a provincial football club into a worldwide business brand: every page was packed with detail, insight and observation. Control was the key word in Ferguson’s philosophy of management, observed the Observer’s Julian Coman: but there was something ‘unseemly’ in his desire to have the last withering word on Keane and Beckham. They are given ‘harsh treatment: the first for challenging Ferguson’s authority; the second for allegedly “making it his mission to be known outside the game” and losing his focus on the pitch as a result. This was control exerted well after the final whistle has been blown.’ Yet ‘Ferguson’s real achievement,’ observed David Goldblatt in the Guardian, ‘seems to have been to create a dressing-room where loyalty and solidarity trumped greed and self-interest.’ In the New Statesman John Bew noted Ferguson’s hinterland. Aside from a passion for horse racing and vineyards, the catholicity of his reading tastes confirmed the picture of an intellectually curious man: in addition to books about dictators, he has a library of works on ‘great men’: Mandela, Churchill, Mountbatten. Above all, American history dominates his intellectual interests. Muhammad Ali is his sporting hero; John F Kennedy is the politician who most fascinates him, closely followed by Abraham Lincoln.
Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography Mike Tyson, with Larry Sloman (HarperSport 564pp £20 Oldie price £17 HB) MIKE TYSON has had a turbulent life, marrying three times, fathering eight children and, at just twenty, becoming the youngest heavyweight champion the world had ever seen. His autobiography is a ‘mind-boggler’, said Dan Jones in the Sunday Times, careering between ‘self-loathing confessional and profane gangster-rap braggadocio’. If only a tenth of its content was plain fact, said Jones, this was the most ‘insane and astonishing’ sports book he had read for years. According
Reading Tyson was like ‘watching a car wreck in high definition slow motion’ to Jones, Tyson was the demon black man who got rich: ‘A violent ghetto-born, sexually predatory, animalistic street thug who was nevertheless capable of blowing almost a million dollars on bitches and cars and legal fees.’ In 1992 Tyson was sentenced to six years for the rape of eighteen-year-old Desiree Washington, a contestant in the Miss Black America pageant. He was released in 1995 after three years. Reading Tyson was like ‘watching a car wreck in high definition slow motion,’ added Mick Brown in the Telegraph – the ‘car in question being a custom-made Rolls-Royce refurbished in Gucci fabrics, driven by a man in a white mink coat, on his way home from a $100,000 spending spree at
Versace, out of his mind on cocaine and Dom Pérignon. As Tyson writes, “It’s amazing how a low self-esteem and a huge ego can give you delusions of grandeur.”’ But Hector Tobar in the Los Angeles Times thought that Undisputed Truth was about redemption, though it takes many years and Tyson’s own physical and financial collapse before he makes his first attempts at recovery. ‘His final confession is a deeply moving, human moment: “I desperately want to get well,” Tyson says. And after 580 pages in which he’s pummelled his reader with accounts of his self-destruction, you can’t help but believe him.’
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FOREIGN PARTS The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair Michael Deibert (Zed Books 280pp £12.99 Oldie price £11 PB)
Hapless protagonists: a UN vehicle in Congo ‘Though far from a paradise before the advent of Europe’s colonial adventure there, Congo became a place as deeply scarred and deformed by colonialism as any in Africa,’ writes Michael Deibert in The Democratic Republic of Congo. The early chapters of his book briefly detail the history of Portuguese
slave-traders and violent Belgian colonisers, before focusing on what has happened since 1994, when the Rwandan genocide spilled over the border to Congo. The chaos has cost, by some estimates, 5.4 million lives, and continues to climb. Deibert, a freelance American journalist who specialises in development issues in Africa, South America and the Caribbean, sets out to explain these traumas and explore how they came to pass. ‘Deibert’s book is a scrupulously researched reminder of how this corner of the world became so wretched, and of the multiple actors responsible: Congolese politicians and warlords, predatory neighbours, hypocritical Western governments and a hapless UN,’ declared Rory Carroll in the Guardian. This detailed account is established through hundreds of interviews with Congolese and experts, and travel across huge expanses of the country. Writing in clear, unpretentious prose, Deibert breaks with the tradition of lyrical accounts of Congo’s horrors that started with Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. But, according to Kris Berwouts in All Africa, Deibert’s efficient style has not rendered the book devoid of feeling: ‘His heart is with the communities and his book blames the world leaders who’ve either turned a blind eye to or directly fomented the misery of the Congolese people.’
Man Belong Mrs Queen: Adventures with the Philip Worshippers Matthew Baylis (Old Street 288pp £10.99 Oldie price £9.50 PB) Growing up in Southport in the 1980s, Matthew Baylis felt an unusual kinship with Prince Philip, who was, like him, ‘unpopular, posh, mocked and misunderstood’. Baylis went to Cambridge to study anthropology and is now a novelist and TV critic, but when he heard about the Melanesian island of Tanna, where the population were said to worship Prince Philip, he decided to investigate. The result of his trip is this fascinating book. ‘The cult began when the Royal yacht sailed around Tanna about 40 years ago,’ explained an amused Roger Lewis in the Daily Mail. The natives admired this man of mixed descent, seeing him as a ‘foundling or changeling out of mythology, a baby who’d been taken from Corfu in 1922 in “his orange-crate bed”, distinguished himself as a fighting hero, married a princess and lived in a castle.’ Philip has reciprocated
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by sending ceremonial clay pipes and signed photographs, ‘veritable icons’ kept in a hut on stilts. ‘This engaging travelogue strikes just the right tone,’ wrote David Evans in the Independent. ‘Baylis evokes the ironies of Philip worship without simply dismissing it as a wacky cult; he argues that from the islanders’ point of view, Philippism is a more or less rational attempt to forge cultural contacts with the outside world.’ The best part, wrote William Leith in the Spectator, is ‘the way he describes his day-to-day life on Tanna’. He reports on the natives’ pidgin dialect – in which ‘bugerup’ means ‘broken’ and a condom is ‘rubba belong fuk-fuk’ – with a ‘perfectly tuned wit, one part dry to one part gentle,’ reminiscent of Michael Palin. ‘In this book Baylis makes us think about faraway places, world history and the nature of belief – and most entertainingly too.’
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photo from the book cover
The Ministry of Guidance Invites You To Not Stay: An American Family in Tehran Hooman Majd (allen Lane 253pp £20 oldie price £17 hB)
On the Trail of Genghis Khan: An Epic Journey Through the Land of the Nomads Tim Cope (Bloomsbury 528pp £20 oldie price £17 hB) ‘gENghiS KhaN, the fearsome warrior who in the 12th and 13th centuries was responsible for extending the Mongol empire into Europe, still forms a huge part of the mindset in Mongolia, a country in which horseback and archery are still prized skills – and where a very large number are said to be his descendants,’ wrote adrian Bridge in the Daily Telegraph. in On the Trail of Genghis Khan, australian adventurer Tim Cope sets out to retrace Khan’s footsteps across the Eurasian steppe. it is part travelogue, part historical account of a small nomadic tribe creating the largest contiguous land empire ever, and part psychological exploration of man’s relationship to terrain. ‘it is the ultimate boy’s own adventure,’ concluded Dalya alberge in the Sunday Times. ‘in an epic 6,000-mile journey on horseback, lasting for more than three gruelling years, Tim Cope braved dangers, scorching deserts, subzero mountain temperatures, and some of the world’s most inhospitable terrain.’ The journey undertaken by Cope – from Karakorum, the ancient capital of Mongolia, through Kazakhstan, russia, Crimea and the ukraine to the Danube river in hungary – has not been completed since the 13th century. ‘Cope vividly evokes the liminal zone of the solitary traveller, where much that happens seems dreamlike and improbable,’ wrote Joanna Kavenna in the Spectator, adding that Cope is ‘one of the most vibrant and engaging narrators you might find.’
iraNiaN-aMEriCaN journalist hooman Majd was born in Tehran in 1957 but lived abroad from infancy. ‘When the mullahs seized power in Tehran in 1979,’ amir Taheri explained in the Times, ‘Majd happened to be in the uS, where he remained and became a citizen. in 2010 he decided to test his iranian-ness by spending a year living in Tehran. By then he was in his late fifties, had just married a blonde vegetarian from Wisconsin and become the father of a boy, Khash.’ This book is a vivid account of their time in iran, ‘of the charms, horrors and many exasperations of living in this little understood country,’ as andrzej Lukowski put it in Metro. ‘Even simple matters such as renting a flat become complicated and dangerous in Tehran,’ wrote Taheri. ‘Majd lives with the constant fear of being charged with spying and held hostage.’ ‘i found myself engrossed,’ said David Shariatmadari in the Guardian, citing Majd’s description of a ‘hair-raising weekend in Tehran, when, having been pulled aside at immigration, he was given instructions to attend the Ministry of Culture and islamic guidance a day or two later. What awaited him was a classic entanglement with the iranian state: an experience that would have been funny if it hadn’t been so laden with menace. he had to wait, sweating, and then spent three hours with a couple of goons who seemed to have read everything he’d ever written. ‘Majd’s relationship with his iranian past is the real subject of the book. he writes from the point of view of someone whose “home” is an unfamiliar place.’ Taheri agreed: ‘Though presented as travelogue, it is, in fact, an account of one man’s identity crisis.’ But Majd comes to a conclusion: ‘The last chapter in the book has the title hoME. That is New York: Majd has made his choice.’
PICK OF THE PAPERBACKS Fast Eddie by Mark Bulstrode and Grant Sherlock (John Blake £7.99, Oldie price £6.79) Securicor employee Eddie Maher looked after cargoes of cash on a daily basis, but one day in 1993 the temptation became too much and he stole £1.2 million in cash from the back of a security van. He fled the country and remained wanted and on the run in the USA for the next twenty years, even marrying an air hostess in Las Vegas. But his luck soon ran out, and the reason behind his mysterious wealth was discovered. Maher was arrested and jailed for five years in March 2013. A gripping read, this paperback original tells his thrilling story. Fractured Times: Culture and Society in the Twentieth Century by Eric Hobsbawm (Little, Brown, £10.99, Oldie price £9.50) The historian Eric Hobsbawm died in 2012 at the age of 95. This collection of essays was published posthumously; they span fifty years and embrace such topics as globalisation and its impact on art, high culture’s debt to the Jews since 1800, Art Nouveau, the politicisation of religion in a secular age and how the American cowboy captured our imagination. ‘As Hobsbawm admitted in his memoirs, “the dream of the October Revolution is still there somewhere inside me”,’ wrote Michael Barber in The Oldie. ‘But however subversive his loyalties, there is no denying the scope of his learning: he was not only polylingual but also instinctively cosmopolitan in his references.’ Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan by William Dalrymple (Bloomsbury, £9.99, Oldie price £8.49) Prize-winning historian William Dalrymple’s definitive analysis of the first Afghan War, a powerful parable of colonial ambition. The British invasion of Afghanistan in 1839 was ostensibly to prevent Russia from gaining any territory in the area – but the effect was devastating. The British army laid waste to the country, raping, killing and destroying agriculture. This is Dalrymple’s ‘most magnificent’ book, said Diana Athill in the Guardian. ‘His account is so perceptive and so warmly humane, and Dalrymple has uncovered sources never used before.’
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Repr int s Our choice of recently reprinted books undergraduates swimming in the river. Her world abounded in eccentric aunts and heavily bearded uncles. The uncles were kind and clever, but ‘quite unable to understand the minds of the poor, the wicked or the religious’; Gwen grew up believing that God had ‘a smooth oval face, with no hair and no beard and no ears. I imagine that He was not descended, as most Gods are, from Father Christmas, but from the Sun Insurance sign.’ An endearing philistinism prevailed: Aunt Bessy thought that ‘Henry IV would be such a good play without Falstaff’, while Grandma found Tennyson’s Queen Mary ‘not nearly so tiresome as Shakespeare’. Stout and bespectacled, Gwen loathed parties, dancing and smart clothes (stays were ‘instruments of torture’). ‘Oh dear, how horrid it was being young,’ she concludes, ‘and how nice it is being old and not having to mind what people think.’ Contact foxedquarterly.com MR SPONGE’S SPORTING TOUR by R S Surtees (Surtees Society £45 HB) Rightly admired by George Orwell, V S Pritchett, Siegfried Sassoon and (improbably) Virginia Woolf, but ignored by the Eng Lit fraternity, R S Surtees was a contemporary of Dickens: he is best known as a hunting novelist, but his boisterous, coarse-grained and hard-boiled novels can easily be enjoyed by those whose knowledge of hunting is restricted to the place mats of country hotels. Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour, first published in 1852, is his masterpiece, once likened by Joyce Cary to Gogol’s Dead Souls. ‘Soapey’ Sponge is the mid-Victorian equivalent of a used-car salesman, and specialises in flogging off spavined, worn-out nags to gullible country gents. He spends his days touring draughty, wind-swept country houses, raiding the owners’ wine cellars, pretending to flirt with their dowdy daughters, and hunting on the side – sometimes in the company of Lucy Glitters, a cigar-puffing, champagne-swigging, hardriding demi-mondaine, and the polar opposite of Dickens’s saccharine heroines. The colour plates from John Leech’s watercolours perfectly complement the text. The Surtees Society exists to keep the great man’s novels in print, in cloth-bound facsimile editions, and this reprint of Sponge is imminent. Contact www.rssurtees.com PERIOD PIECE Gwen Raverat (Slightly Foxed £16 HB) Gwen Raverat is best remembered for her wood engravings, and for Period Piece, her shrewd and comical evocation of growing up in the donnish world of late-Victorian Cambridge. Charles Darwin was her grandfather, and her father was the Professor of Astronomy; raw sewage still flowed into the Cam, and Gwen and her sister were taught to open their parasols when confronted by naked
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Illustration from Period Piece
BUTCHER’S CROSSING by John Williams (Vintage Classics £8.99 Oldie price £7.50 PB) In 2013 the hitherto little-known American novelist John Williams (1922–1994) enjoyed something of a revival after Vintage Classics reprinted his novel, Stoner. The story of William Stoner, an unassuming academic whose life is full of disappointments, was an unexpected bestseller, its success due in large part to word-of-mouth recommendations. Butcher’s Crossing, Williams’s second novel, was first published in 1960 (five years before Stoner), and reissued by Vintage in January. It is a ‘wild west’ novel centred around the hunt for a lost herd of buffalo in a remote Colorado valley in the early 1870s. Will Andrews has left Harvard, drawn to the west on the search for adventure and freedom. He volunteers to join a team of men looking for the lost buffalo – and the journey he endures tests his mind and body to its limits. Williams is a versatile writer: the story of Will Andrews couldn’t be more different to the tale of William Stoner – and his depiction of the behaviour of men in extreme situations is masterful.
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