Review of Books ISSUE 28 SUMMER 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
Robert Sackville-West Helen Rappaport Paul Bailey James Lovelock Edward St Aubyn Terry Eagleton Mikey Cuddihy John Cornwell Mark Ellen Laura Bates Jerry White Kwasi Kwarteng Joël Dicker Patrick Bishop Thomas Piketty Sebastian Barry Barbara Taylor Michael Lewis Edward Bawden …and many more
Children’s corner: pick of the best books Pelican is back! Richard Hoggart remembered Far out: hippy memoirs A ROUND-UP OF REVIEWS • NOT JUST THE BESTSELLERS
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CONTENTS
Review of Books
ISSUE 28 SUMMER 2014
I N T H I S I S S UE 4. BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
20. FICTION
The House is Full of Yogis Will Hodgkinson; Hippy Dinners Abbie Ross; A Conversation About Happiness Mikey Cuddihy; Little Failure Gary Shteyngart; Updike Adam Begley; Those Wild Wyndhams Claudia Renton; The Disinherited Robert Sackville-West; The Valley Richard Benson; Men We Reaped Jesmyn Ward; The Last Asylum Barbara Taylor; Four Sisters Helen Rappaport
The Truth About The Harry Quebert Affair Joël Dicker; The Temporary Gentleman Sebastian Barry; The Prince’s Boy Paul Bailey; Lost for Words Edward St Aubyn
8. RELIGION NOT FORGETTING... IMPORTANT TITLES RECENTLY REVIEWED IN THE OLDIE
• Angela Merkel: The Chancellor and her World by Stefan Kornelius
• The Fateful Year: England 1914 by Mark Bostridge
• Lives in Writing by David Lodge • Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit,
Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East by Scott Anderson
• White Beech: The Rainforest Years by Germaine Greer
• Elk Stopped Play – And Other Tales from Wisden’s ‘Cricket Round the World’ edited by Charlie Connelly
• The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe by David I Kertzer
• Dreams of the Good Life: The Life of Flora Thompson and the Creation of Lark Rise to Candleford by Richard Mabey
COVER ILLUSTRATION BY ALAN DE LA NOUGEREDE
• A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal by Ben Macintyre
• Charlie Chaplin by Peter Ackroyd • Packing Up by Brigid Keenan • Roy Jenkins: A Well-Rounded Life
22. MUSIC & ENTERTAINMENT Furious Cool: Richard Pryor David and Joe Henry; Sexplosion Robert Hofler; Five Came Back Mark Harris; Rock Stars Stole My Life! Mark Ellen
Culture and the Death of God Terry Eagleton; The Dark Box John Cornwell
23. PICK OF THE PAPERBACKS 25. FOREIGN PARTS
10. HISTORY Zeppelin Nights Jerry White; The Northmen’s Fury Philip Parker; War and Gold Kwasi Kwarteng; The Trigger Tim Butcher; When the Lamps Went Out edited by Nigel Fountain; The Reckoning Patrick Bishop; I Met Lucky People Yaron Matras; Target: Italy Roderick Bailey; Franco’s Crypt Jeremy Treglown; The Ariadne Objective by Wes David
The Galapagos Henry Nicholls; The French Intifada Andrew Hussey
26. MISCELLANEOUS The Man Who Couldn’t Stop David Adam; A Rough Ride to the Future James Lovelock; The Self-Portrait James Hall
26. HOW TO ORDER
15. CHILDREN’S BOOKS
27. OBITUARY
Children’s books critic Amanda Craig rounds up the best recent offerings
Richard Hoggart, 1918–2014
16. CURRENT AFFAIRS
Edward Bawden’s Kew Gardens Peyton Skipwith and Brian Webb; Wild Wood Jan Needle and Willie Rushton; Bare-Faced Messiah Russell Miller
Capital in the Twenty-First Century Thomas Piketty; Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism David Harvey; A Quiet Word Tamasin Cave and Andy Rowell; Flash Boys Michael Lewis; Everyday Sexism by Laura Bates; War: What is it Good For? Ian Morris
30. REPRINTS
17. THE PELICAN IS BACK Jeremy Lewis on the happy revival of the Pelican imprint
by John Campbell
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, Lucy Lethbridge Reviews Editor: Sonali Chapman Design: Joseph Buckley, John Bowling Reviewers: Jonathan Beckman, Sonali Chapman, Jennie Erdal, Tom Fleming, Sam Leith, Lucy Lethbridge, Jeremy Lewis, Brian MacArthur, Samira Shackle, Christopher Silvester 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
Summer 2014
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BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR HIPPY CORNER The House is Full of Yogis Will Hodgkinson (HarperCollins 336pp £12.99 Oldie price £11.69 HB)
Hippy Dinners:
A Memoir of a Rural Childhood Abbie Ross (Doubleday 320pp £12.99 Oldie price £11.69 HB)
A Conversation About Happiness: The Story of a Lost Childhood
Mikey Cuddihy (Atlantic 272pp £14.99 Oldie price £13.49 PB) THE UNCONVENTIONAL life holds a strong appeal for those who long to escape the stifling bounds of bourgeois society. Some actually do it. What happens, though, when the children are forced to go with them? This trio of new memoirs form the testimonies of three people who, through no doing of their own, were thrust into unorthodox situations when they were young, and had to learn to survive them. The most revelatory of them is A Conversation about Happiness, Mikey Cuddihy’s memoir of her years at Summerhill, the notorious ‘free’ school founded in 1921 by A S Neill. He hoped to raise children free of sexual repression, which he believed was the primary destructive force in society. One of five orphaned children from a wealthy American family, Cuddihy was sent to the school by her English uncle. She started in 1962, at the age of ten, and stayed for six years. One of the first things anyone said to her was, ‘Do you know how to play f***-chase?’
Pupils held weekly meetings at which they set rules. Locals knew Summerhill pupils as the ‘do-what-yer-like kids’. ‘Although much written about in novels, few first-hand accounts exist of actually attending a progressive school,’ wrote Nicholas Tucker in the Independent. Cuddihy’s ‘well-written and moving memoir’ helps ‘rectify this imbalance’. Helen Brown, in the Telegraph, called it ‘a thoughtful and nuanced’ account in which Cuddihy speaks frankly of ‘the pressures and abuses of permissive education’ while also acknowledging that ‘she found a “home” in a place that forced her to develop a hardy self-reliance.’ What’s more, added Brown, ‘none of this is written with any apparent need for revenge on an institution that appears to have changed a lot and is currently rated “outstanding” by Ofsted.’ In his early years, Will Hodgkinson’s family lived in reassuring middle-class normality in a four-bed suburban semi in south London. But after suffering a near-death bout of salmonella poisoning, Top: Abbie Ross and her sister. Left: Summerhill days from the book Neill & Summerhill (1969). Below: a typical afternoon in the Hodgkinson household
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his father Nev changed his lifestyle dramatically, gaining a new-found zeal for meditation and alternative medicine and joining an Indian sect called the Braham Kumaris. Will and his brother Tom were pressed into joining their parents in meditation sessions that involved staring at a red plastic egg which emanated a small pinprick of light; conventional meals at home were replaced with nut roasts and daal. While Nev’s conversion forms the ‘backbone of the book,’ said Mick Brown in the Telegraph, The House is also ‘an affecting, and very funny, evocation of adolescence’, from Will’s ‘fractious’ relationship with his brother Tom (now editor of the Idler magazine) to the broadening of his horizons and his liberation through music (he is a long-serving music critic at the Times). Abbie Ross’s parents experienced a less dramatic conversion than Hodgkinson’s father. In the mid-Seventies they decided to get out of London, relocating from Islington to a farmhouse at the top of a hill in rural Wales in order to lead ‘the good life’. Abbie and her sister felt the change keenly: they were now outsiders, and this strange new place contained none of the glamorous sophistication they longed for as young girls. ‘Ross’s vivid evocation of a Seventies childhood is stronger on atmosphere and description than incident,’ wrote Jane Shilling in the Daily Mail, ‘but it has great charm.’ Good Housekeeping’s Joanne Finney recommended the book highly, calling it ‘warm, laugh-out-loud and enchanting’, an ‘irresistible childhood memoir’, and a ‘brilliant evocation of a particular period in the early Seventies.’
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BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR
Little Failure:
Updike
A Memoir
Adam Begley
(Harper 576pp £25 Oldie price £20 HB)
Gary Shteyngart
(Hamish Hamilton 368pp £16.99 Oldie price £14.99 HB) GARY SHTEYNGART is the author of three comic novels and teaches at Columbia. He was born Igor Shteyngart in Leningrad in 1972 and only took the name Gary when his Jewish family emigrated to New York. He grew up in Queens where he was nicknamed ‘Failurchka’ – ‘Little Failure’ – by his overbearing parents. Not having been circumcised in the Soviet Union, he undergoes the procedure in the USA only to see it botched: ‘My mother has cut a hole in my underwear… so that my broken penis will not have to touch polyester.’ His literary bent was revealed early on – his first attempt at a novel, at the age of five, was about a statue of Lenin who falls in with an enormous talking goose; together they invade Finland. After much goofing around at school and psychoanalysis, Gary grew up to be a well-respected writer, known for his novels Absurdistan (2006) and Super Sad True Love Story (2010). Praise for Little Failure was near unanimous: ‘By turns naive and cynical, hyper-intelligent and comically immature, empathetic on the page and unfeeling off it, his self-portrait of a Soviet Jew transplanted aged seven from Leningrad to Eighties America is a masterpiece of comic deprecation,’ said David Annand in the Daily Telegraph. Erica Wagner in the New Statesman wrote: ‘This is one of those rare books. It is suffused not only with the author’s trademark wit but also with raking honesty.’ Randy Boyagoda in the Financial Times was the exception: ‘It’s fine stuff, but because of how frequently, and finally tiresomely, Shteyngart bends the serious into the satirical and silly elsewhere in the book, you find yourself waiting for the literary equivalent of a whoopee cushion to go off.’ Gary Shteyngart as a boy
BEFORE HIS death in 2009, John Updike had published over twenty novels and more than a dozen short story collections, as well as poetry, art criticism, literary criticism and children’s books. From 1954 hundreds of his stories, reviews and poems appeared in the New Yorker. He described his subject as ‘the American small town, Protestant middle class.’ Adam Begley’s new biography, written with the cooperation of Updike’s first wife, though not his second, throws light on a life that was repeatedly recycled in fiction. It began in small-town Pennsylvania in 1932, whence Updike proceeded to Harvard, where he aspired to become a cartoonist, and to the New Yorker. At the age of only 25, he escaped to small-town Massachusetts, where his liberal indulgence in adultery would find its way into his fiction: Couples, the Rabbit tetralogy and the Maple Stories.
A young Updike John Walsh in the Sunday Times was fulsome in his praise of Begley’s work: ‘Begley has written an exemplary biography, oceanically researched, full of insights, patiently relating every twist of Updike’s tormented emotional life to his stories and novels. He is even-handed in his judgments and is a fine writer himself.’ Ian Sansom in the Literary Review was more stinting: ‘This is Begley’s first biography and, not surprisingly, he is slightly in awe of Updike, a rare, almost mythological creature who seemed to spring fully formed and who never failed or faltered on the path to greatness.’ Sam Tanenhouse in Prospect also had his qualms: ‘The close-range psychological portrait and thoughtful close readings don’t crack the code of Updike’s authentic and original vision.’
Those Wild Wyndhams: Three Sisters at the Heart of Power Claudia Renton (William Collins 512pp £25 Oldie price £21.25 HB)
THE COVER of Those Wild Wyndhams shows John Singer Sargent’s famous group portrait of the Wyndham sisters, dressed in yards of white silk and draped on a white sofa. The painting was the sensation of the Royal Academy’s 1900 exhibition and came to epitomise a vanishing world: the leisured, gilded life of fin-de-siècle aristocracy that came to an end with the First World War. The historian Claudia Renton tells of the turbulent lives and loves of Mary (1862–1937), Madeline (1869–1941) and Pamela (1871–1928), who were at the centre of cultural and political life in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. ‘Though all three sisters married well, Pamela’s proved the most financially robust match,’ wrote Simon Blow in the Spectator, ‘except that her heart lay with the politician, editor and notorious womaniser Harry Cust. She, and her eldest sister Mary, are the two who prove the most fascinating in Claudia Renton’s lucid and superbly researched book. Mary was to marry Lord Elcho, the heir of the Earl of Wemyss. She bore him seven children, while also conducting extra marital affairs with Arthur Balfour, the prime minister – who enjoyed a good whipping – and her cousin Wilfred Scawen Blunt.’ ‘The result is an impeccably researched, beautifully written and compellingly readable biography,’ wrote Jane Shilling in the Mail. ‘With their aristocratic sense of entitlement, their vast wealth, their nursery nicknames, in-jokes and slang’, the sisters can seem impossibly remote from our own experience, ‘but Claudia Renton never loses sight of the bigger historical picture’.
John Singer Sargent, The Wyndham Sisters, 1899
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BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR Jesmyn Ward
The Disinherited: A Story of Family, Love and Betrayal Robert Sackville-West (Bloomsbury 320pp £20 Oldie price £16.50 HB) ROBERT SACKVILLE-WEST has already written, in Inherited, about his forbears and Knole Park, their huge and extraordinary house in Kent. Here he turns his attention to the shadow side of the past when a beautiful Spanish dancer, Pepita, ‘famous for her waistlength black hair and tiny feet’, became the mistress of Lionel Sackville-West, later the second Lord Sackville, and bore him five children. ‘The family was established in a comfortable house in the new spa town of Arcachon in south-west France,’ wrote Lucy Lethbridge in the Observer – but ‘illegitimacy was a stain.’ After Pepita’s death in childbirth in 1871, events ‘unravelled’: Lionel left his children ‘in the care of guardians in Paris and legged it to Argentina.’ The only child he showed any real affection for was Victoria. In 1890 Victoria married her first cousin Lionel, her father’s
heir, ‘becoming Lady Sackville and chatelaine of Knole.’ The mother of Vita Sackville-West, she was ‘charming but manipulative and “greedy for gold”’ and ‘perpetually at war with her family in the fight for Knole and the Sackville legacy.’ Many reviewers were struck by the unhappiness of what Lucy HughesHallett in the Sunday Times called ‘a tangled and unedifying tale’ of ‘envy and resentment and pathetic self-delusion’. In the Evening Standard Miranda Seymour called Victoria a ‘monster’ but conceded that as ‘Sackville-West makes crystal clear in this entertaining study, she was also the saviour of an extraordinary and troubled house’. ‘For Vita who loved the place,’ wrote the Economist, ‘Knole represented the essence of Englishness, of tolerance and humour. For her descendant, who also loves it, nothing about that Englishness is so simple.’
The Valley: A Hundred Years in the Life of a Family Richard Benson (Bloomsbury 544pp £25 Oldie price £20 HB) RICHARD BENSON’S previous book, The Farm, was a widely acclaimed account of his father’s family who worked the land in Yorkshire. In The Valley, which has been ten years in the making, he draws a remarkable portrait of his maternal legacy, generations of the Hollingsworth family who were miners from the Dearne Valley near Doncaster. Blending fact with imagined dialogue and description is a difficult literary trick to pull off – but reviewers loved the book. In the Sunday Express Jeffrey Taylor described it as having ‘the epic sweep of Gone with the Wind with the microscopic intensity of Tolstoy’, while Frances Wilson in the Daily Telegraph called it ‘an extraordinary book about hidden lives’ and admired the way that Benson ‘allows himself the omniscience of a novelist’. In the Financial Times Lucy Lethbridge was bowled over by Benson’s writing, finding it ‘entirely without sentimentality and written with exquisite tenderness’. John Carey loved the homely details of
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working-class life in the early twentieth century: ‘The immaculate sideboard in the sitting room like a domestic altar, decked with fancy glassware, or the hunks of bread, slathered with pork dripping and salty brown jelly, that were packed in Harry’s snap when he went off to the pit.’ In the Observer Rachel Cook was enthused and moved: ‘The Valley is often upsetting – Benson makes you care about his characters and you long for them to sort their muddles and misunderstandings out. I can’t remember the last time I read a book that delineates quotidian poverty so plainly, or that captures so deftly the cadences of the Yorkshire dialect in all their contradictory glory – defensiveness, mithering and taciturnity concealing abiding love and, on occasion, troubling passion.’
Men We Reaped: A Memoir Jesmyn Ward (Bloomsbury 272pp £16.99 Oldie price £13.99 HB)
AMERICAN NOVELIST Jesmyn Ward won the US National Book Award for her 2011 novel about Hurricane Katrina, Salvage the Bones. ‘In her first work of non-fiction,’ wrote Claire Lowdon in the Sunday Times, ‘she tells the stories of five young black men she grew up with, who all died “violently, in seemingly unrelated deaths”’ in the space of four years. The first was her brother Joshua, who was killed at nineteen in a car crash with a drunk driver (‘a white man in his forties’). ‘The book is not for the light-hearted,’ said Gary Younge in the Guardian. ‘There’s a suicide, two car accidents, a drug overdose and a shooting: tragic tales of young people’s lives cut short are interwoven with the disintegration of Ward’s parents’ marriage and her own sense of isolation.’ Almost one in ten young black men is in jail in the US, and murder is the greatest killer of black men under the age of 24. ‘It is to these statistics that Ward attempts to give both humanity and context in her memoir,’ observed Younge. ‘By all official records,’ Ward writes, ‘here at the confluence of history, of racism, of poverty, and economic power, this is what our lives are worth: nothing.’ Her memoir is ‘electric’, wrote Dwight Garner in the New York Times, while Antwaun Sargent in the Chicago Tribune called it a ‘forceful narrative’ which challenges the reader to consider ‘what is the value of black life?’ The only dissenting voice was that of Claire Lowdon: ‘Ward’s stated mission, to give voice to “our subsumed rage, our accumulated grief”, is problematic. She spotlights her own pain, obscuring the men she writes about...’ But Younge concluded that ‘anyone who emerges from America’s black working-class youth with words as fine as Ward’s deserves a hearing. Men We Reaped is an eloquent account of a psychological, sociological and political condition all too often dismissed as an enduring pathology.’
Pitmen: Harry Hollingsworth, far right, in 1948, with colliery workmates 12/6/14 16:27:54
BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR
The Last Asylum:
A Memoir of Madness in Our Times
Barbara Taylor (Hamish Hamilton 320pp £18.99 Oldie price £15.99 HB) IN 1985 HISTORIAN Barbara Taylor, now 63, spent time in Friern hospital in north London. Formerly Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum, Friern was the grand relic of the asylum age, Europe’s largest such institution with a corridor a third of a mile long. The Last Asylum is an account of Taylor’s breakdown – ‘she details her progress through a series of treatments that included 21 years of intense psychoanalysis and periods in a therapeutic day community and community care as well as her time in the asylum’ – but it also tells several other stories, explained Tina Jackson in Metro. One is ‘her family background in Canada as the child of two self-important, self-involved campaigning socialist parents that gave rise to an inbuilt sense that she was unable to measure up and be loved. And as a framework, she recounts the history of mental health care in Britain, putting her own personal story into a historical context, where approaches and treatments that were outmoded were removed to make way for more modern, enlightened ways of treating mental illness.’ Colney Hatch was shut down in the 1990s, so Taylor was one of the asylum’s last patients: ‘I had found myself,’ she says, ‘a witness as well as a participant in a really major historic shift in mental health provision.’ As Cole Moreton described in the Telegraph, Taylor calls the asylum a ‘stone mother’: ‘People find themselves in an environment that nurtures them but which is, at the same time, highly regimented and lacking in flexibility.’ According to Daisy Goodwin in the
Barbara Taylor in 1982 Sunday Times, ‘Taylor is clear that the asylums were places of terrible abuse as well as “havens” but she is worried that the end of the “age of asylum” has also seen the demise of effective and humane mental health care.’ ‘This is an impressive book,’ concluded John Clay in the Literary Review, ‘strong on narrative, deeply felt and measured in tone. Taylor is an accomplished writer… Essential reading for anyone interested in the intricacies of psychoanalysis or keen to get a picture of what life in the lost age of the asylum was like.’
Four Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Romanov Grand Duchesses Helen Rappaport (Macmillan 512pp £20 Oldie price £18 HB) THE FOUR young daughters of Tsar Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra, along with their parents and brother, were murdered by guns and bayonets in a bloodbath in Ekaterinburg in 1918; their bodies were then thrown down a mineshaft. In her new book, historian Helen Rappaport tells the story of the short lives of these four grand duchesses – lives that were, on the whole, poignant in their ordinariness and domesticity. She set the scene in an article in the Daily Mail: ‘At home the sisters grew up like any other happy, normal girls, prone to the same fights and squabbles and hair pulling (Anastasia in particular being fond of the latter). They might have been cosseted with extravagant gifts from royal relatives and eminent statesmen, but their mother – in the tradition of her own mother Alice and her much-loved grandmother Queen Victoria – imposed a rigorous English regime of frugality, hand-me-down clothes, iron bedsteads, plain nursery food and cold baths.’ In the Observer Lara Feigel was surprised by ‘quite how unsuited the family is to power. They all live chiefly for
each other. Alexandra finds the business of state a “horrid bore” that keeps her husband away from her. Nicholas comes home for the children’s bathtime every night and records episodes of teething and weaning in his diary. When he abdicates in 1917, his first thought is that now he can “fulfill my life’s desire – to have a farm somewhere in England”.’ In the Daily Telegraph Matthew Dennison wanted a wider historical context: ‘Rappaport brings an encyclopedic knowledge of the minutiae of Nicholas and Alexandra’s family life, but it does not challenge the view of the grand duchess’s contemporaries that these were lives of limited significance.’ Andre Van Loon in the Oxford Times took the view that ‘although slightly overlong and curiously disengaged from Russia’s revolutionary forces, Four Sisters shows the warmth and spirit of a much pilloried family… In the end, they appear as dignified in death as they were ill-prepared for life.’ The Russian Imperial Family
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RELIGION Culture and the Death of God Terry Eagleton (Yale 264pp £18.99 Oldie price 16.99 HB) IS GOD DEAD? Terry Eagleton doesn’t think so. The critic and cultural theorist’s new book is a survey of the various failed attempts over the last three hundred years to push God to one side and reform society based on alternative, secular ideals. From the Enlightenment and romanticism through to modernism and postmodernism, we have set up a series of ‘surrogates’ for God, Eagleton claims: putatively secular, they are in fact mere replacements in name for the transcendence we cannot do without. As Eagleton writes: ‘The Almighty has proved mighty difficult to dispose of.’ Although the book displays ‘wellknown verve and cogency,’ wrote Jonathan Rée in the Guardian, Eagleton ‘seems to have turned himself into the Jeremy Clarkson of philosophy, giving high-performance ideas a quick spin, but making a point of not taking anything very seriously.’ Like a ‘puppeteer’
Terry Eagleton: can’t dispose of God
who ‘refuses to appear before his audience in person’, he gives us a fluent survey of multiple thinkers but no real personality of his own. ‘His books would be very different if he was prepared to let us know what questions really keep him awake at night.’ John Gray, writing in the New Statesman, made a similar point when he wrote that Eagleton ‘fails to come up with anything resembling serious politics’. But Gray was more admiring of Eagleton’s basic intellectual capabilities; overall, he said, Culture and the Death of God is ‘an account of the continuing power of religion that is rich and compelling. Open this book at random, and you will find on a single page more thought-stirring argument than can be gleaned from a dozen ponderous treatises on philosophy or sociology.’
The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession John Cornwell (Profile 320pp £16.99 Oldie price £14.99 HB) JOHN CORNWELL is a respected writer on matters Catholic – with a record of taking the Church to task (most notably in Hitler’s Pope, his biography of Pope Pius XII). The Dark Box is both a polemic and a cultural history of the sacrament of
PHOTO: JOHN BOWLING
Your stomach will churn as you read of the miserable, twisted layers of abuse, fear, shame and sexual exploitation inflicted on children Confession. It starts with Cornwell’s own traumatic childhood memory of being propositioned by a priest in the confessional and goes on to argue that confession plays a major part in clerical sexual abuse. In the Irish Times Anananka Schofield issued a content warning: ‘I highly recommend a stable position, with back support, when reading this book, as your stomach will churn as you read of the miserable, twisted layers of abuse, fear, shame and sexual exploitation inflicted on innocent children, who through the confession box became easy targets for paedophiles.’ Other writers were more cautious in their appraisal: Libby Purves in her Times column asked: ‘Is confession itself potentially abusive? Not in my memory, but it’s a question worth asking after recent clerical scandals.’ Catholic historian Eamon Duffy in the Observer found that ‘anyone who experienced a pre-conciliar
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Catholic upbringing will recognise the force of Cornwell’s case’ but thought that the author ‘at times lays it on with a trowel’. This was a view shared by The Oldie’s ’s own Melanie McDonagh who wrote in the Evening Standard that the book was ‘sex saturated’: ‘As an audit of the gains and drawbacks of confession, this account is wildly skewed on the debit side.’ And in the American Catholic journal Commonweal, Leslie Woodcock Tentler thought it ‘so suffused with anger that the author, for all his intelligence, is seldom capable of balanced historical analysis.’ ‘Rollicking and sensationalist’ was how Frank Cottrell Boyce in the New Statesman saw it: ‘He tells us more than we will ever need to know about clerical masturbation.’
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HISTORY Zeppelin Nights: London in the First World War Jerry White (Bodley Head 368pp £25 Oldie price £21 HB) ‘Jerry White’s name on a title page is a guarantee of a lively, compassionate book full of striking incidents and memorable images,’ wrote Richard Davenport-Hines in the Guardian. ‘He is the social historian whose three volumes on 18th-, 19th- and 20th-century London won plaudits for their fresh approach to familiar subjects.’ German airships and Gotha bombers with vast wingspans began bombing London
Zeppelin Nights is social history at its best – no dreary data sets of overbearing opining. Instead it is crammed with anecdote in 1915 and although the death toll of 668 was tiny compared to that of 30,000 in the Blitz of 1940, the raids ‘permanently destroyed Londoners’ sense of inviolability’ and ‘changed the capital’s psyche as profoundly as 9/11 in New York’. Pub opening hours were reduced, beer was weakened, there was no opera at Covent Garden, the museums were closed, and sports fixtures were cancelled. White’s book ‘is written with a painterly eye, so that time and again his descriptions conjure people and places as if one were in a gallery of portraits and townscapes.’
Xxxxx xxxx xxx xxx xxxx xxxx xxx xxxx xxx xxxxx
Thousands of Germans were interned, as Robbie Millen pointed out in the Times: ‘White reminds us that in 1914 the German waiter and butcher was as common as today’s Polish plumber. One camp in Islington was big enough – it had 700 inmates, many of whom had British wives and children – to have a newspaper. Zeppelin Nights is social history at its best – no dreary data sets or overbearing opining. Instead it is crammed with anecdote.’ For instance, the Muffin Man disappeared from London streets when the manufacture of ‘light pastries, muffins, crumpets and tea-cakes’ was prohibited in 1917, and a bus shortage caused Londoners to start queuing for buses. ‘It’s with these telling details that White creates a vivid picture of a city changed for ever by war.’
The Northmen’s Fury: A History of the Viking World Philip Parker (Jonathan Cape 450pp £25 Oldie price £20 HB) Parker’s viking history spans a period from the 790s until the 15th century, although it concentrates on the years between 800 and the 1260s, and ranges from Europe to Asia Minor and North America. ‘It is quite a feat,’ wrote Dan Jones in the Sunday Times, ‘to write history this good involving so many disparate peoples in so many places over such a long period of time, sifting evidence from such a huge range of historical and archaeological sources to form a gripping narrative.’ Anyone who enjoyed reading about Vikings during their childhood, wrote a spellbound A N Wilson in the Daily Telegraph, ‘will devour Philip Parker’s Viking history with enormous enthusiasm. He takes you through the whole history with the speed of a dragon-prowed raiding-vessel foaming through cold seas… The most gripping chapter of the book is about the settlement of Iceland, late in the
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ninth century. The piratical Norwegian women and men who pioneered this development are surely among the most interesting human beings who ever trod the planet. Years before any other Europeans, they forged a roughand-ready republic based upon the rule of law...’ Acknowledging that there is a crowded marketplace when it comes to books about the Vikings, Tom Holland noted in the Times that Parker ‘has a proven track record when it comes to providing an unexpected perspective on the past’, citing his earlier The Empire Stops Here about the fringes of the Roman Empire. Holland savoured the gory detail as much as the ‘nuanced analysis’ – for example the description of
the ‘blood-eagle’ execution of an Anglo-Saxon king, whereby his lungs were extracted and spread across his cleaved chest like the wings of an eagle. The Vikings, wrote Ronald Hutton in his New Statesman review, ‘could be greedy, violent and brutal – but also creative, adventurous, generous and accepting of new ideas and cultures… Parker has a traveller’s eye for landscape and a storyteller’s sense of events and character; The Northmen’s Fury is probably the most lively and well-informed introduction to the subject available today.’ Hilt of a Viking sword found at Hedeby, Denmark
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EXTRACT
War and Gold: A Five-Hundred-Year History of Empires, Adventures and Debt Kwasi Kwarteng (Bloomsbury 432pp £25 Oldie price £20 HB) ‘THE NEED to pay for wars was the principal engine of modern finance,’ declares the historian and Tory MP Kwasi Kwarteng. He starts his history of money and war with the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V declaring bankruptcy in 1557, which is soon followed by Spain’s plunder of Aztec and Inca gold in order to finance Charles’s wars in Europe. The next four centuries are covered in 70 pages, with Britain at war with France for 29 out of the 66 years between 1688 and 1756, not to mention the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. ‘War and Gold takes off when the narrative reaches 1914, a time when most major economies were still tied to a “gold standard”, their currencies in some way pegged to the amount of gold held in national reserves,’ wrote Anthony Sattin in the Guardian. ‘This exhaustive and convincingly argued history of money comes from an author whose day job is to sit in the House of Commons.
Kwarteng might not know how to stabilise a financial system that floats on credit, but he certainly understands the forces and the mistakes that have led to that destabilisation.’ Lawrence Freedman in the Financial Times considered it ‘a complicated story well told, from which financial lessons emerge naturally without Kwarteng finding it necessary to bludgeon the reader with his message.’ According to Kwarteng, ‘the genius of Victorian Britain was not about playing “globocop” but carefully managing the nation’s finances with balanced budgets… Kwarteng urges balanced budgets. He accepts that there will be no return to the gold standard, although one senses that he wishes it could be so.’ According to James Ashton in the Evening Standard, Kwarteng’s ‘insightful’ narrative ‘transports the reader convincingly through time and place’ and ‘points out that victory has just as much financial cost as defeat.’
The Trigger: Hunting the Assassin who Brought the World to War Tim Butcher (Chatto 326pp £18.99 Oldie price £15.99 HB) BOSNIAN SERB Gavrilo Princip was the 19-year-old assassin who killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28th 1914. Tim Butcher, an old hand at reporting from the Balkans during the last three decades, undertakes the same journey Princip made from his impoverished village in Herzegovina to Sarajevo in 1907 in the hope of obtaining an education, then follows in his footsteps to Belgrade, where Princip became radicalised. ‘By treading this same minefield-littered path Butcher hopes to better understand the views that turned a villager’s son, who always had his nose in a book, into a political assassin,’ wrote Sophie Donnelly in the Daily Express. For Christopher Clark in the Guardian, ‘the fascination of this book lies in the way Butcher’s quest for Princip unearths so many other memories’ and it ‘is wonderfully attentive to the strategies of remembering and forgetting by which
Bosnians manage their relationship with the past.’ In the Daily Telegraph Misha Glenny, another old Balkans hand, noted that Butcher’s ‘discovery of Princip’s early school reports after trawling through several archives is a moment of genuine excitement and surprise because they suggest that his politicisation and his disillusion with the Habsburg administration started earlier than was previously thought.’ Far from being a Serb nationalist, as he is often described, Princip belonged to a proto-Yugoslav organisation which, Glenny explained, ‘wanted the liberation of all South Serbs from Habsburg domination – and not only the Serbs.’ The Evening Standard’s Robert Fox called it ‘the most imaginative and singular book on the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War to date’, adding that ‘it is a piece of expeditionary journalism, an investigation in time, place and spirit of the highest order.’
When the Lamps Went Out: From Home Front to Battle Front, Reporting the Great War 1914–1918 Edited by Nigel Fountain (Faber 340pp £17.99 Oldie price £15.99 HB)
Extracts and stories from the Guardian newspaper archive, 1914–18. On 5th August 1914 the German siege of Liège and its 12 forts began. 11th August: Bombardment of Liège by moonlight The following letter is the first narrative of the events of Liège sent by an English correspondent from his own personal observations. Mr Granville Fortescue was in Liège during the first two days of the German attacks: ‘My own adventures were many and varied. The most stirring was when I was held up by a lancer, who kept his revolver pointed at the pit of my stomach while I explained that I was not a German. Four times I was arrested and brought before the authorities. When I got back into town the crowd that swarmed on the street would one minute surround me and threaten me as a German and the next loudly acclaim me as the first of the arriving English. ‘That was the question in every mouth – “When would the English come?” The whereabouts of the French was another topic eagerly discussed by the mob. ‘Panic-stricken refugees came hurrying in during the morning and continued throughout the day to flood the city. Wherever they could find listeners, which was easy, they would tell the story of their night’s experience. One woman, with her two daughters, had spent the whole night in the cellar of their home. A shell had exploded in the kitchen. Had any of her family been injured? “Yes monsieur, the poor cat was dead.”’
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HISTORY
The Reckoning: How the Killing of One Man Changed the Fate of the Promised Land Patrick Bishop
(William Collins 320pp £20 Oldie price £17 HB) ‘Like a classic detective story,’ wrote Philip Jacobson in the Daily Mail, ‘Patrick Bishop’s engrossing new book opens with a killing, before spooling back to examine the twists and turns of the events that left 34-year-old Avraham Stern on the floor of a dingy attic in Tel Aviv with three bullets in his chest.’ Stern was the Polish Jew who led the terrorist Stern Gang, a militant Zionist group founded in 1940 during the British Mandate of Palestine. Its avowed aim was forcibly evicting the British authorities from Palestine, allowing unrestricted immigration of Jews and the formation of a Jewish state. Stern is described by Bishop as ‘a dandy aesthete with visions of sacrificial violence’. Was he the victim of an extra-judicial killing by Assistant Superintendent Geoffrey Morton, a former London milkman who Avraham Stern became chief of the Tel Aviv CID during British rule in Palestine? Or did he attempt to jump out of a window or appear to be about to detonate a bomb, as Morton claimed? In this ‘vivid portrait of the fraught,
doomed world of the Palestine Mandate,’ wrote Ed O’Loughlin in the Daily Telegraph, ‘the evidence, although never quite conclusive, suggests strongly that Morton’s account – which he successfully defended three times in the London libel courts – was a lie.’ Tobias Grey in the Spectator thought that, while ‘gripping’, the book fell down somewhat because ‘whereas Stern himself is rendered flesh and blood by numerous telling details (his inclination for silk socks, for instance, or how on the run he carried around a large suitcase containing a collapsible bed), we are told that Morton was a musiclover – but what sort of music the devil knows. Even when we learn something seemingly important about him he remains as enigmatic as a matinee cowboy wearing a white hat.’ Times reviewer David Aaronovitch praised Bishop as ‘a fine and economical teller of complicated stories’ and stated that ‘though the bloody end is never in doubt the chase itself is exciting.’
I Met Lucky People: The Story of the Romani Gypsies Yaron Matras (Allen Lane 288pp £20 Oldie price £17 HB) The Romani people have no written record of their history and, unlike other nations, they have no homeland, living in countries as far flung as Australia and Brazil, as well as the UK. Yaron Matras, a professor of linguistics and activist for civil rights for the ‘Rom’, as they call themselves, examines the history and diversity of their culture, together with the numerous myths surrounding their way of life. ‘Yaron Matras has spent many years getting to know inward-looking Roma communities across Europe,’ explained Peter Stanford in the Observer. The result is ‘an immaculately researched, warm and comprehensive study.’ Sukhdev Sandhu in the Guardian describes the author’s approach as ‘expository’, looking at the Roma ‘in almost anthropological terms’. The author also reminds us of ‘a shameful history of persecution,’ wrote Katharine Quarmby in the Telegraph. From as early as the 14th century, Roma were ‘expelled and banished from European cities and kingdoms, subjected to mass executions and, later, became victims of horrible medical experiments before being murdered during the Holocaust.’ ‘Matras has little time for the exotic, nor for the fiction and fantasy that have “dominated the depiction of Gypsies in the arts and literatures for many centuries”,’ noted David
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Morley in the Independent. In so doing he ‘raises fascinating questions’. Isabelle Fraser in the Financial Times, while designating the tone ‘rather academic’, said the book ‘should nonetheless be required reading for anyone who presumes to have views on Romani Gypsies.’
Camping gypsies near Düsseldorf, Germany, c.1905, by Emil Volkers
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HISTORY
Target: Italy The Secret War Against Mussolini, 1940–43 Roderick Bailey (Faber 464pp £20 Oldie price £17 HB) ‘TARGET: ITALY chronicles the British government’s role in fomenting anti-Fascist activity in wartime Italy,’ according to the Observer. ‘Agents were trained in counter-subversion and behind-the-lines sabotage by Britain’s Special Operations Executive. Recruits were taken from among Italian prisoners of war captured in Egypt and Libya, and from Italian immigrant communities in Britain and the United States.’ SOE may have provided ‘symbolic hope and moral support to Italian patriots in their struggle,’ but the Times took a dim view of its efforts. ‘Celebrated for its derring-do in German-occupied Europe, SOE made an extraordinary hash out of subverting fascist Italy. Roderick Bailey mines British and Italian archives in a dogged attempt to unearth war-changing acts of bravery inside Mussolini’s regime but instead comes up with hare-brained
schemes, duped intelligence chiefs and muddled agents.’ It was far harder to operate in an enemy country like Italy than in enemy-occupied countries like France or Holland, where the local people were generally well-disposed; nor could the powers-that-be take the Italians seriously enough. Brave as they undoubtedly were, SOE’s agents were a pretty mixed bag, including a former head waiter at the Savoy, and more often than not they ended up being executed by Mussolini’s secret police. But Roderick Bailey has written, in the Observer’s words, ‘a readable, fastpaced narrative’: the Daily Telegraph described Target: Italy as ‘an inspiring study about the courage of undercover wartime operatives’, while noting that ‘its great skill is to demonstrate that war is both brutal and dizzyingly unpredictable’.
Franco’s Crypt: Spanish Culture and Memory Since 1936 Jeremy Treglown (Chatto 336pp £25 Oldie price £21 HB) THE TITLE refers to the grotesque mausoleum built on a mountain outside Madrid by forced labour to commemorate Franco’s Nationalist victory in the Spanish Civil War of 1936–39, but Treglown’s wider subject in this mixture of travelogue and cultural analysis is how culture and memory were preserved or repressed in the years that followed the war. In the Guardian Helen Graham had expected an indepth survey, but found the book to be ‘really a compendium of freestanding reviews, in which Treglown summarises individual films, novels and occasionally art produced in Spain under the dictatorship and since’ – including the work of artists Salvador Dalí and Joan Miró and the surrealist film director Luis Buñuel. Although Treglown ‘writes elegantly and often perceptively, there is a deep problem with his method: he presents his comments as if delivering an authoritative dispatch on the culture and collective memory of an entire
population, yet he tells us nothing about who, and how many, read the books or saw the (often art-house) films he reviews, nor about their response.’ In the Times Higher Education Supplement Mercedes Camino, a professor of history at Lancaster University, praised ‘Treglown’s interplay of history with personal narratives’ as ‘skilful and incisive’, but pointed out that his attempt to recuperate Spanish culture under Franco ‘is somewhat undermined by the small proportion of right-wing artists and writers he considers’. Treglown argues that the period from 1939 until Franco’s death in 1975 was by no means as repressive as outsiders may think. ‘Any notion that Franco’s Spain was an artistic desert is the opposite of the truth,’ he declares. But ‘is anyone seriously saying it was?’ asked Dominic Sandbrook in the Sunday Times. ‘If so, it’s an obviously lazy argument and not worth Treglown getting so fired up about.’
The Ariadne Objective: Patrick Leigh Fermor and the Underground War to Rescue Crete from the Nazis Wes Davies (Bantam 352pp £20 Oldie price £17 HB) PATRICK LEIGH Fermor’s kidnapping of a German general in Crete in the summer of 1944 was one of the most dashing exploits of World War Two. Ill Met by Moonlight, written by his co-conspirator Stanley Moss, was filmed some ten years later, with Dirk Bogarde improbably cast as the hero. Leigh Fermor was reticent about the whole escapade, though he wrote of how, overlooking the snow-capped peak of Mount Ida, General Kreipe muttered some lines of Horace: Leigh Fermor completed the quatrain, and it was ‘as though, for a long moment, the war had ceased to exist. We had both drunk at the same fountains long before.’ A fluent Greek-speaker, much given to the Byronic wearing of turbans, sashes and embroidered waistcoats, Leigh Fermor had fought with the andartes of Crete since shortly after the German invasion of the island in 1941, and Wes Davies has set out to describe the role played by British officers in the resistance, with Leigh Fermor as the central figure. Jeremy Lewis in the Literary Review found his book ‘an exciting, fastPatrick Leigh Fermor moving and crisply written adventure story’, but David Crane in the Spectator wasn’t convinced. He recalled an old Cretan telling him that, in terms of the reprisals exacted by the Germans, Leigh Fermor and his fellow romantics hadn’t done the Cretans a good turn: the author fails to explain the bitter political rivalries of wartime Greece, and ‘for all its skill this is essentially a book made out of other books’ and a ‘reworked account of a familiar story’.
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Review of Books THE OLDIE 13
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CH ILDREN’S BOOKS Children’s books critic AMANDA CRAIG rounds up the best recent offerings
H
undreds of children’s books are published each month, yet almost four million children own no books, and few genuinely good ones ever get reviewed. Those with grandchildren want more than their own recycled classics: but how to find them? Steve Antony’s The Queen’s Hat is a timely picture-book treasure (Hodder £11.99). Its exuberant illustrations of soldiers pursuing the Queen as she chases her hat before returning to a certain baby make this a rare joy for 3+ among a pile of opportunistic Royal rot. It’s the best guide to London since Ludwig Bemelmans’s Madeline in London, too. Alternatively, the A-Maze-Ing Minotaur by Juliet Rix and Juliet Snape (Frances Lincoln £11.99) encourages a child of 5+ to help Theseus through the maze and learn some Greek myth, and ensures a good half hour of peace from 4+. Tiny: The Invisible World of Microbes (Walker £11.99) is an enchanting book about microbiology for 5+. Nicola Davies’s prose is imaginative and lucid, Emily Sutton’s glorious illustrations awaken a sense of wonder and, as Lorna Bradbury said in the Telegraph, it’s ‘both elegant and informative, getting the science across to the youngest of readers.’ It’s a great gift for any child who neglects to wash – and for hygiene-obsessed parents. Jamie Buxton’s Temple Boys (Egmont £6.99) starts as a crime caper for 10+ but becomes something deeper once a ‘magician’ comes to town. Is Jerusalem being conned or are Yeshua’s miracles real? Buxton writes beautifully; as Sally Morris said in the Daily Mail, ‘The book relies on a certain understanding of the Christian story to appreciate all the reworking and reversals… but the endearing character of Flea shines out like a star.’ Increasingly children’s books
are tied in with big public events. Francesca Simon’s The Lost Gods (Faber £6.99) is tied to the Vikings exhibition at the British Museum but is, as S F Said said in the Guardian, ‘a brilliant, thought-provoking collision of ancient Norse myth with contemporary celebrity culture’, and very exciting it is, too, once Frost Giants are unleashed on London. Would that the plethora of World War One spin-offs were as inspired; wait for Kate Saunders’s E Nesbit sequel, Five Children on the Western Front from Faber this autumn.
Illustration from Tiny: The Invisible World of Microbes Fans of The Hunger Games should enjoy Moira Young’s Dustlands Trilogy, a Mad Max-style dystopian Western which began with Blood Red Road (‘the perfect apocalypse for pre-teens,’ said Anthony McGowan in the Guardian). It now concludes in Raging Star (Scholastic £6.99) with our savage young heroine Saba saving the world’s remaining people from a dictator. Romantic and powerful, the first novel won the Costa Children’s Prize; there’s a minimum of soppiness for 11+ here. Boys of 11+ may prefer Jennifer
A-Maze-Ing Minotaur encourages a child of 5+ to help Theseus through the maze, learn some Greek myth and ensures a half hour of peace
Theseus and the Minotaur: illustration from A-Maze-Ing Minotaur
A Nielsen’s irresistible Ascendance Trilogy (Scholastic £6.99) – ‘Game of Thrones for younger readers,’ the Times said of The False Prince – in which our hero Prince Jaron outmanoeuvres his enemies in a fantasy with lots of fighting, but no rude bits. The best of all for 12+ is Sally Green’s dark and gripping debut, Half Bad (Penguin £7.99). Like J K Rowling, this imagines a world of Black and White Witches hidden among mortals. Our tormented hero Nathan, son of the worst Black Witch of all, must escape from a cage and discover his magical powers before he turns 17, or die. ‘Like a chase movie in fiction form,’ Martin Chilton thought in the Telegraph, though Philip Womack in the Guardian found it ‘decidedly creaky’. My view is that even reluctant readers will not put it down.
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Review of Books THE OLDIE 15
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CURRENT A FFA IRS Capital in the Twenty-First Century Thomas Piketty (Harvard University Press 696pp £29.95 Oldie price £28.95 HB)
Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism David Harvey (Profile Books 336pp £14.99 Oldie price £13.49 HB) FRENCH ECONOMIST Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century has rapidly achieved cult academic bestseller status and has been widely reviewed. The central argument of his nearly 700-page book is that capitalism leads to ever greater inequality because the rate of return on capital exceeds the growth rate, and that such inequality must be curbed through punitive progressive taxation. ‘Piketty has emerged as a rock star of the policy-intellectual world,’ wrote former US Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers in the American magazine Atlantic Monthly. His ‘tome seems to be drawn on by pundits a dozen times for every time it is read.’ Nonetheless, it is ‘deeply grounded in painstaking empirical research’ and Piketty ‘writes in the epic philosophical mode of Keynes, Marx or Adam Smith rather than in the dry, technocratic prose of most contemporary academic economists. His pages are littered with asides referencing Jane Austen, the works of Balzac, and many other literary figures.’ Summers was sceptical of Piketty’s conclusions and prescriptions, but welcomed it as a ‘profound’ contribution to the inequality debate. Former Bank of England Governor Mervyn King was less welcoming. ‘In essence, the principal weakness of the book is that the carefully assembled data do not live up to Piketty’s rhetoric about the nature of capitalism,’ he wrote in the Daily Telegraph. And while Ferdinand Mount, himself a critic of inequality, praised
Piketty in the Spectator as ‘an urbane and relaxed companion, more Alain Delon than Jean-Paul Sartre’, he felt the book could have been half the length and that Piketty ‘leaves us with a disorderly heap of ideas, each of which threatens to upset the whole as soon as he touches it’. The American Marxist anthropologist David Harvey, author of a much slimmer book on the same subject, might be forgiven for feeling rather unlucky that he has been wholly overshadowed by Piketty and consequently little reviewed. In Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism Harvey argues that capitalism is doomed because of its paradoxical tendency to accumulate capital beyond its means of investing it. Not only does this lead to appalling inequality, but it also threatens to exploit nature to the point of extinction. ‘In spurts, Harvey seems inspired, fired by his erudite disgust,’ wrote David Wilson in the South China Morning Post. ‘If only his writing had the sharp, smart charm of his lectures. Harvey can be painfully ponderous and cryptic: prone towards bracketed digressions. His style feels more suited to academics than the average reader.’
A Quiet Word: Lobbying, Crony Capitalism and Broken Politics in Britain Tamasin Cave and Andy Rowell (Bodley Head 400pp £20 Oldie price £16 HB) HAS BRITISH politics been corrupted by lobbyists? That is the contention of Tamasin Cave, director of SpinWatch, and her colleague Andy Rowell, an investigative journalist. Corporations spend £2 billion on lobbying, the heaviest investors being the food and pharmaceutical industries, and the makers of cigarettes and booze, who try to persuade the government that drinking, smoking and gorging ought not to be regulated. Many MPs on both sides of the aisle accept money and benefits from companies with the tacit assumption that the favour will at some point be repaid, as do civil servants. Dave Hartnett, the former head of the Inland Revenue, accepted hospitality from banks, law firms and accountants 107 times in two years. Cave and Rowell believe that the Lobbying Bill, currently under discussion by Parliament, adds a cosmetic level of transparency, but does not address the fundamental problems.
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Mary Riddell in the Daily Telegraph felt that ‘Cave and Rowell provide some useful examples, but their account is short on depth and detail. Partly, the problem is the ambitious task they have set themselves. The pharmaceutical industry alone would merit a book of exploration, as would the petroleum multinationals.’ John Kampfner in the Observer also found the book unsatisfactory: ‘The roots of the lamentable state of British politics go far deeper than this. Why do so few people of talent and experience of the wider world bother trying to get elected to parliament?’ But in the Evening Standard Andrew Neather agreed that the authors’ findings were ‘unsavoury’, writing, ‘Cave and Rowell conclude that the most damaging effect is on democracy itself – excluding the public and keeping many decision-making processes closed. The occasionally exhausting mountain of detail that they have uncovered here is a small step toward correcting that state of affairs.’
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PUBLISHING
Flash Boys: Cracking the Money Code Michael Lewis
The Pelican is back! JEREMY LEWIS on the happy revival of the most knowledgeable imprint around
(Allen Lane 288pp £20 Oldie price £17 HB) HIGH-FREQUENCY trading (HFT) on Wall Street does not sound like a promising subject for a bestseller, but in the hands of Michael Lewis, who wrote the 1989 Wall Street classic Liar’s Poker, it has proved publishing gold. Lewis tells how new technology has enabled high-frequency traders to ‘front-run’ the market, i.e. whenever a broker places a buy or sell order, computer programmes pick up on it and automatically push the price up or down before the deal can be executed. Speed of transmission gives these traders an edge over everyone else, effectively rigging the market. Lewis follows the efforts of one banker, Brad Katsuyama of the Royal Bank of Canada, to outwit them and to restore some fairness to the system, first by devising a programme called Thor and later by launching a new exchange called IEX. ‘Michael Lewis has a spellbinding talent for finding emotional dramas in complex, highly technical subjects,’
Traders can ‘front-run’: speed of transmission gives these traders an edge over everyone else, effectively rigging the market wrote John Gapper in the Financial Times. ‘Anyone with a vague interest will get a lot out of Lewis’s journey through the world of HFT, featuring fibre optic cables in New Jersey, Russian software engineers and the off-exchange trading venues known as “dark pools”. Above all, Lewis has a gift for narrative.’ While every reviewer praised Lewis’s storytelling technique, a few questioned his ultimate analysis. ‘Lewis has written an effective exposé,’ wrote Andrew Ross in the Guardian, ‘but in arguing for the “commercial heroism” of IEX’s founders, he ends up polishing the myth of the market as a self-correcting mechanism.’ Similarly Philip Delves Broughton in the Wall Street Journal admired it as ‘a polemic, and a very well-written one’, but concluded that ‘behind its outrage, however, lies nostalgia for a prelapsarian Wall Street of trust and plain dealing, which is a total mirage.’
TOON
‘Turgid? What does that mean?’
FOR THOSE OF US who grew up in the thirty years after the end of the war, Pelican Books were our first port of call if we wanted to learn about the Tudors, Marx, Mao Tse Tung, mushrooms, the Hittites or the weather. Pocket-sized paperbacks, instantly recognisable by their pale blue covers, they were written by experts who could write for the man in the street without a hint of dumbing down, and embodied Allen Lane’s ambition to make the very best writing available for the price of a packet of fags. Lane founded Penguin Books in 1935: two years later Bernard Shaw’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism was published as the first Pelican, and was soon joined by works by Freud, H G Wells, Virginia Woolf and R H Tawney.
Good news from the publishing world is hard to come by, so celebrations are in order Two of Lane’s colleagues claimed to have dreamed up Pelican Books: Krishna Menon, a dapper but penniless political agitator who drank up to 150 cups of tea a day and later became the Indian Foreign Minister; and W E Williams, a hard-drinking pillar of the WEA and busy cultural bureaucrat who combined working for Penguin with spells at Unesco and the Arts Council. Some Pelicans were bought in from other publishers, among them such influential works as J K Galbraith’s The Affluent Society, Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy, Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders, Lewis Mumford’s The City in History and R D Laing’s The Divided Self; others were Pelican originals, including the eight-volume History of England and such evergreens as Peter Heaton’s manual Sailing and H R F Kitto’s The Greeks, which sold 1.3 million copies. In the early Eighties Penguin closed down Pelican in what seemed to outsiders to be both a self-inflicted wound and a piece of cultural vandalism. Thirty years on, the list is being revived in their familiar blue livery: the first four titles are Orlando Figes’s Revolutionary Russia 1891–1991, Melissa Lane’s Greek and Roman Political Ideas, Bruce Hood’s The Domesticated Brain and Robin Dunbar’s Human Evolution. Good news from the publishing world is hard to come by, so celebrations are in order: still more so since the new Pelicans are being produced in the old A-format – i.e. paperbacks which fit in a jacket pocket or a handbag – rather than the cumbersome B-format The new Pelican book – which has, maddeningly, held still instantly recognisable sway for the last forty years.
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Review of Books THE OLDIE 17
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CURRENT AFFAIRS
Everyday Sexism Laura Bates (Simon & Schuster 384pp £14.99 Oldie price £11.99 PB) TWO YEARS AGO journalist Laura Bates set up a website to record the sexist abuse she received on a day-to-day basis, and invited others to do the same. Eighteen months later, some 50,000 contributions had been sent in from nineteen countries. Bates has now collated some of the stories in a book, documenting sexism in all aspects of life, from childhood to the workplace, from motherhood to the media. In an article in the New Statesman, Bates recounted some of the stories: ‘We heard from a schoolgirl who was so young when she first experienced serious sexual harassment, that when the men who shouted at her referred to her genitalia, she didn’t even know what they meant. From a female engineer who was dismissed in the Laura Bates workplace as a “cute little girl”. A designer whose boss told her he would never employ an unattractive woman. A doctor who was told by a senior consultant to sit on his lap if she wanted his help interpreting an X-ray. A man who was ridiculed by his colleagues for wanting to share parental leave with his partner...’ ‘The message we’re trying to send is that these things are all connected,’ Bates wrote in the Irish Times. ‘This is a spectrum and the way we treat women in one sphere has a direct impact on the way we treat them in another. So
it doesn’t work to tackle the issue of under-representation of women in business and politics without acknowledging that the media depiction of women as dehumanised sex objects has a big impact on the way the public sees politicians and decides who to vote for.’ ‘This is an important book not only for the victims of sexism,’ wrote Fiona Sturges in the Independent, ‘but for parents, siblings, partners and friends, allowing them to understand what today’s women are up against.’ Eleanor Mills in the Sunday Times called it ‘a passionate tome’ in which Bates ‘writes a decent sentence and the posts on the website are so forceful that they tell the story for her’. As a male reviewer, Chris Moss in the Telegraph admitted that men would recognise ‘the worst aspects of their own nature’ in the book, and concluded that ‘a scourging is what our sneaky, sniggering, simian sex needs’. But Rachel Cooke in the Observer felt that the book was a wasted opportunity, ‘little more than another repository for anger and frustration’. The chapter on the workplace, for example, ‘includes no advice on the law as it relates to discrimination, and no suggestions of how it might be made more effective in future’.
War: What is it Good For? The Role of Conflict in Civilisation, from Primates to Robots Ian Morris (Profile 448pp £25 Oldie price £20 HB) IAN MORRIS is Willard Professor of Classics, Professor of History, and a fellow of the Archaeology Center at Stanford University – and the bestselling author of Why the West Rules – For Now. His new book is founded on the startling premise that war is good for us. Only through violence, or its threat, have we evolved complex civilisations. You might think that the 20th century was the most bloody in history; for Morris, however, it was evidence of our growing peace and prosperity, with a huge leap in living standards and life expectancy. It’s a far cry from the Stone Age, in which humans had a ten to twenty per cent chance of meeting a violent death. ‘This is an astonishing book,’ wrote Keith Lowe in the Telegraph. While Lowe could not quite bring himself to agree with its conclusion – the European Union, for instance, is a powerful government brought about ‘by negotiation, not conflict’ – he nonetheless found it ‘full of controversy, brilliantly researched and thoughtfully argued.’ As an archaeologist, said Ben Shephard in the Guardian, Morris ‘takes the long view and a rigorously quantitative approach’, which means he can dismiss Hitler and Stalin as ‘minor blips’ in the upwards trajectory of the 20th century.
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Some might think, said Shepard, that this ‘only goes to show that the quantitative approach is intellectually worthless’. But he admired the author’s vigour: ‘Morris combines extraordinary erudition with light, manageable prose. He bestrides the oceans and continents, leaps nimbly across the disciplines, and works hard to keep the reader engaged.’ David Crane, writing in the Spectator, called it ‘an exuberant and wonderfully entertaining tour de force of history, archaeology, anthropology, geography, evolutionary biology and technological and military speculation that improbably combines a hardcore intellectual seriousness with a larky, almost blokeish note.’
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FICTION The Truth About The Harry Quebert Affair Joël Dicker (MacLehose Press 615pp £20 Oldie price £16.50 HB) The young Swiss novelist Joël Dicker’s literary thriller, originally published in French, has been a worldwide phenomenon. Two million copies have been sold, a Hollywood film announced and translation rights sold into 32 languages. Is Dicker the new Stieg Larsson? His publishers hope so. The Truth About The Harry Quebert Affair tells the story of a spoiled young American writer called Marcus Goldman who – after scoring a spectacular success with his first novel and becoming the toast of the New York literary scene – suffers
writer’s block. Marcus retreats to small-town New Hampshire to visit his mentor Harry Quebert. Not long afterwards the body of a dead girl is dug up on the grounds of Quebert’s property. The girl was Quebert’s lover thirty-odd years ago and, it emerges, the secret inspiration for his most Joël Dicker: the new Stieg Larsson? famous book; the writer is now prime suspect in her murder. Marcus starts to conduct his own investigation into the long-ago killing, and soon the sky over Somerset, New Hampshire is dark with chickens coming home to roost. This twisty tale was hailed in some quarters as Switzerland’s first candidate for the Great American Novel. British reviewers were harder to impress. While Gaby Wood, in the Telegraph, thought it ‘a cleverly constructed literary novel that is also a thriller’, the Sunday Times’s Joan Smith saw a ‘spectacularly awful novel’ depending on ‘increasingly incredible plot twists’. Sam Leith in the Guardian called it ‘very enjoyable cobblers, but cobblers nonetheless.’ The Express’s Jake Kerridge, however, paid tribute to Dicker’s plotting: ‘He pulled the rug out from under me so many times that I could sue him for damage to my coccyx.’
The Temporary Gentleman Sebastian Barry (Faber 288pp £17.99 Oldie price £14.99 HB) The titular ‘temporary gentleman’ is Jack McNulty, an Irishman whose commission as an officer in the Second World War was never made permanent. The novel is set on the Gold Coast in the late 1950s, shortly after Ghana has gained its independence. There is little to indicate why McNulty has ended up here, following stints as an engineer, a UN observer and a gunrunner. In Accra, where the unstinting rain reminds him of his home town of Ballymena, he whiles away his days writing about his marriage to Mai, a beautiful woman he married without his father’s approval, though long-term alcohol abuse makes recollecting the details arduous. Eventually, through the act of remembering, it becomes clear why McNulty has become so drunk and purposeless. Kate Kellaway in the Observer wrote that ‘The prose has the black-bordered elegance of a Victorian mourning letter, yet it is at the same time a restless recollection of the life of a couple – animated but doomed. It is written with
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a redeeming artistry.’ Simon Baker in the Literary Review felt that ‘the main joy, notwithstanding the pageby-page entertainment offered by the fine writing, is in the slowly built, fully human characters.’ David Grylls in the Sunday Times was less impressed: ‘Barry’s pumped-up prose seems designed to inflate the importance of his themes, a mixture of Joycean stream-ofconsciousness, sub-Dylan Thomas phrasing (“the night-filthied coast of Africa”) and Barry’s own blend of obscurity (“blankening stars”) and repetition (“and then nothing, nothing, nothing”).’ But in the Times Ann Treneman declared: ‘I loved Jack and Mai’s story, which oozes panache. As a young couple of the 1920s, they are rakish and alluring. There is a real jauntiness that, at its best, snares the reader like a lasso. Barry is brilliant on the ways of marriage, how communication can descend into something quite close to semaphore, baffling to everyone else and yet, still, of course, intimate.’
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FICTION
The Prince’s Boy Paul Bailey (Bloomsbury 160pp £16.99 Oldie price £13.99 HB) The Prince’s Boy is the first-person narrative of nineteen-year-old Dinu Grigorescu, dispatched by his rich father to Paris in 1927 to experience bohemian decadence. Dinu is drawn to the Bains du Ballon d’Alsace, a secretive establishment that caters for the unusual tastes of Parisian men. Here he meets a fellow Romanian, ‘the Prince’s boy’ of the title, with whom he embarks on one of those rapturous affairs that can happen only in 1920s Paris. In the New Statesman Leo Robson observed that the mood of Dinu’s reminiscences, from the vantage point of the 1960s, ‘is one of rapture shot through with loss’.
‘Characters are vividly evoked in cameo. Bailey writes with lyrical beauty. This novel is a charming, poignant little wisp of a thing’ Will Gore in the Independent on Sunday was impressed by the quality of Bailey’s writing. ‘He has the same ability as Graham Greene to craft remarkable emotion and beauty from words that on the face of it are prosaic.’ Bailey’s prose is ‘spare and taut’, agreed Ruth Scurr in the Telegraph. ‘He compresses whole scenes into a single sentence, and characters are vividly, fleetingly evoked in cameo: “Her laugh was surprisingly deep for such a frail, even skeletal, woman.”’ Kate Saunders in the Times took a similar view. ‘Bailey writes with lyrical beauty,’ she said. ‘This novel is a charming, poignant little wisp of a thing.’
But David Collard in the TLS was less convinced. ‘Bailey opts throughout for a style both formal and florid in which flourishes such as “indubitably” and “exceedingly” appear often, and friends address one another with an elaborately jocular formality.’ While this might work well on the stage, ‘it wears thin on the page’.
Lost for Words Literary awards are capricious beasts but, even so, Edward St Aubyn can feel hard done by. In 2006 Mother’s Milk, the fourth volume in his autobiograhical saga of child abuse, drug addiction and recovery among the privileged
Edward St Aubyn: takes a dig at the Booker Prize
classes, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize but was pipped at the post by The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai. In 2011, At Last, the final Patrick Melrose book, did not even make the longlist. His new novel casts a jaundiced eye at the Elysium Prize, an award for fiction that bears a marked resemblance to the Booker. The judges – an MP, a controversial columnist, a fly-by-night actor, a harried academic and a hack thriller-writer – assess the books on criteria that are not primarily aesthetic: relevance, readability and Scottishness are more important. The writers hoping to win also come in a variety of flavours of awfulness. One is a tortured neoBeckettian; another a self-published Indian maharaja. Jonathan Beckman in the Literary Review wrote that Lost for Words was ‘a distinctly minor addition to St Aubyn’s oeuvre’ and ‘too often it is crocked by lame jokes and the farce, when attempted, is half-arsed.’ Leo Robson in the Guardian was even more scathing: ‘The problem isn’t that the book’s evocation of cynicism – itself a kind of cynicism – is so unremitting, but that it is so lacklustre.’ But Henry Hitchings in the Financial Times believed ‘St Aubyn’s powers of observation are as sharp as ever… He also has a lot of fun pastiching various kinds of bad writing as he presents extracts from the shortlisted novels.’
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PHOTO: TIMOTHY ALLEN
Edward St Aubyn (Picador 272pp £12.99 Oldie price £11.69 HB)
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MUSIC & ENTERTAINMENT Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him David Henry and Joe Henry
(Algonquin Books 400pp £17.99 Oldie price £16.19 HB) RICHARD PRYOR (1940–2005) is among the all-time greats of stand-up comedy, performing in clubs and on television. Born in Illinois, the son of an abusive father and a prostitute mother who left the family when he was ten, Pryor was brought up largely by his grandmother in the brothels she ran. After a short-lived stint in the army, he began his comedy career by telling jokes at local nightclubs, which led to an act as a stand-up comic. He at first pursued a conventional show business career in New York, before being radicalised in the 1960s, and re-inventing himself as an edgier, selflacerating character study in the 1970s. His film debut was in The Busy Body (1967). Pryor became one of the USA’s most popular live entertainers, known for his savage wit and shockingly profane social commentary.
He broke the mould for AfricanAmerican comedians, embracing the N-word. In ‘commentaries penned by scolds and advocates alike,’ declare the authors, ‘the N-word’s prevalence in contemporary popular culture is traced back to Richard Pryor.’ Pryor’s personal life was a helterskelter trail of self-destruction. Brothers David and Joe Henry, two fans of his comedy, originally wanted to write a movie screenplay about him but have produced this book instead. It ‘falls somewhere between a biography and a treatise on Pryor’s cultural impact, and the Henrys have covered both topics solidly,’ wrote Hayley Riggs McGhee in the Oklahoman. In the Irish Times Paul Howard described it as ‘part memoir, part paean and part social history, a beautifully rendered portrait that celebrates Pryor’s extraordinary
Richard Pryor in 1986 genius, even as it exposes his terrible failings: his abandonment of his children, his brutality towards women, his marriages that were measured in weeks and, in 1980, his self-immolation while freebasing cocaine… David and Joe Henry make plain their love for their subject without ever drifting into hagiography.’
Sexplosion: From Andy Warhol to A Clockwork Orange – How a Generation of Pop Rebels Broke All the Taboos Robert Hofler
(IT Books 320pp £17.99 Oldie price £15.99 HB) ROBERT HOFLER ‘captures an era in all its demented glory,’ said Clive Davis in the Independent. ‘Sexplosion deftly weaves a path through the friendships and collaborations which created common ground between the nude stage revue Oh Calcutta!, Philip Roth’s novel about masturbation, Portnoy’s Complaint, and Gore Vidal’s transsexual extravaganza, Myra Breckinridge.’ He amasses one unforgettable vignette after another. Marlon Brando frets about his shrivelling manhood on the set of Last Tango in Paris. Princess Margaret is horrified by the film about a freespirited bisexual, Sunday Bloody Sunday: ‘Men in bed kissing!’ In the Wall Street Journal John Heilpern thought that ‘Sexplosion reminds us that in the late Fifties the battles over publishing D H
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Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and William S Burroughs’s Naked Lunch were still being fought in the courts (with eventual success). The sexual permissiveness of the 1960s, however, enabled John Updike to write Couples, a sexually explicit portrait of middleclass wife-swapping amid the quiet felicities of New England Protestant angst. Couples, like Portnoy’s Complaint, shot to the top of the best-seller lists and put Updike on the cover of Time magazine (along with an earnest essay titled “The Adulterous Society”).’ But ‘to anyone under the age of, say, 45, this book will seem like a dispatch from prehistory, though admittedly a very entertaining one,’ declared Jennifer Selway in the Daily Express.
Warhol and A Clockwork Orange: breaking taboos
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PICK OF THE PAPERBACKS
Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War Mark Harris (Canongate 512pp £30 Oldie price £26 HB) AMONG THE Hollywood figures who joined the war effort after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 there were five successful directors: John Ford, John Huston, Frank Capra, George Stevens and William Wyler. Mark Harris ‘is interested in the ways the lives of these men intersected and intertwined during the war years,’ wrote Paul Cantor in the Wall Street Journal. ‘Accordingly, he tells the whole saga from start to finish, drawing parallels and contrasts among his subjects’ experiences. He has a huge story to tell, and he does so brilliantly, maintaining suspense in a narrative whose basic outcome will be known ahead of time.’ Capra remained in Washington and made morale-boosting army training films, Ford, Wyler and Huston made documentaries about combat, and Stevens depicted the liberation of the death camps on film.
The five directors were certainly brave, but they were not averse to re-enacting scenes of combat and passing them off as authentic. They found themselves clashing with high-ranking officers and bureaucrats as much as they had with Hollywood moguls before the war. Although it ‘at first seems to be chronicling a collective enterprise,’ Cantor concluded, ‘it turns out to be an inspirational, if cautionary, tale of the triumph of the individual over the collective, of personal vision over groupthink, and ultimately of art over propaganda.’ One Pentagon official, Mark Harris notes, ‘increasingly found himself outmanoeuvered by directors who had years of experience at doing whatever it took to protect their work from interference.’ The five directors ‘accomplished their goals despite their involvement with the federal government, not because of it.’
Rock Stars Stole My Life! A Big Bad Love Affair with Music Mark Ellen (Hodder & Stoughton 320pp £18.99 Oldie price £15.99 HB) INSPIRED TO become a rock journalist when he noticed that the press compound at a squalid festival had ‘facilities’, Mark Ellen started out as a freelance at NME, then went on to edit Smash Hits and Q as well as to present the BBC’s telecast of Bob Geldof’s Live Aid concert and a revived version of BBC2’s The Old Grey Whistle Test. Before that, however, he had time to be part of an Oxford student band called Ugly Rumours featuring a guitarist-singer named Tony Blair, whose style of performance he describes thus: ‘Low-slung flares, bare midriff, one hand on a hip, the other wagging a cautionary finger, elbows flapping like a chicken.’ This book of memoirs is ‘knowingly ridiculous and very funny,’ wrote Steve Jelbert in the Independent. ‘Ellen, an instinctive master of English middle-class self-deprecation, has always had an eye for the absurd.’ Fellow rock journalist Richard Williams, writing in the Guardian,
found it to be ‘full of engaging asides and deft, sometimes unsparing pen-portraits’, but he also admired some ‘passages of unexpectedly disturbing power, in which Ellen glimpses the fate of a form of entertainment that has lost all sense of purpose and proportion’. Along the way Ellen describes bizarre encounters with Meat Loaf (the interview came to an abrupt end when the singer chased after a process-server with a baseball bat), and Lady Gaga, who stripped naked and told him that she maintained her energy levels with ‘orgasms and spinach’. Praising it as ‘a riotous, wildly enthusiastic look back over a constantly changing industry and the larger-thanlife characters who have dominated it,’ Sunday Express reviewer Charlotte Heathcote felt that ‘Ellen’s experiences make him one of the few who can pull back the curtain to expose the smoke and mirrors of this most glamorous, exciting and tawdry of industries.’
Tudor: The Family Story by Leanda de Lisle (Vintage, Oldie price £9.99) Historian Leanda de Lisle tells the Tudor family story – beginning in 1437, before the Wars of the Roses, and ending in 1603 with the death of Elizabeth I – presenting the full family line in remarkable depth. The Tudor story is one of a family struggling at every turn to establish their right to the throne, and is dominated by remarkable women, from Margaret Beaufort to Mary and Elizabeth Tudor. ‘A gripping account of a family riven by passionate jealousies, murderous ambitions and crippling tragedies. Leanda de Lisle is a master storyteller, and this is her greatest work yet. Immersive and exhaustively researched, Tudor is a triumph,’ said Amanda Foreman. Deserter: A Hidden History of the Second World War by Charles Glass (William Collins, £10.99, Oldie price £9.89) Veteran reporter and historian Charles Glass’s study of an underexplored area of the Second World War gives voice to the powerful stories of three soldiers, two American and one British, who all chose to desert and met with very different fates. He explores the pressures that informed their decisions and examines the lasting impact of their choices. ‘Sensitive and thought-provoking. As this compelling and well-researched book shows, the battlefield was not a place for heroes, but a place where young men were dehumanised and killed. Given such conditions who among us would not also have considered walking away?’ said the Sunday Telegraph. Handsome Brute: The True Story of a Ladykiller by Sean O’Connor (Simon & Schuster, Oldie price £7.99) In 1946 Neville Heath was hanged for the brutal and savage murders of two women. During his trial, two Heaths were revealed: the suave, charming, ex-RAF playboy, and the sadistic, violent sexual deviant who lured two women to their deaths. Sean O’Connor examines the complex motivations behind the murders through the prism of the grim post-war period. ‘A fine, balanced book, a fascinating portrait of a dreary, uncertain post-war world of drinking dens, cruddy hotels and hopes unfulfilled,’ wrote Ben Macintyre in the Times.
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photo from the book cover
FOREIGN PARTS The Galapagos: A Natural History Henry Nicholls
(Profile 195pp £15.99 Oldie price £14.39 HB) ‘AS EDITOR of the Galapagos Conservation Trust’s magazine, Henry Nicholls is well suited to the task of telling the story of the Galapagos islands,’ said Caspar Henderson in the Guardian. ‘The islands are a carnival of amazing beings that somehow thrive in a place that has reminded visitors (from a 15th-century Spanish bishop to Herman Melville) of a slag heap or the gates of hell.’ What really put them on the map was the visit of Charles Darwin on HMS Beagle in 1835. He noticed astonishing variations between closely related plant and animal species on islands separated by just a few miles of sea and ‘this set his thinking on the path that led to the theory of natural selection, perhaps the most important single scientific idea anyone has ever had’. Nicholls, a broadcaster and writer on animal matters for the Guardian, has produced ‘a must-pack book’ if you intend to be one of the 175,000 people who visit these extraordinary islands each year, added Angus Clark in the Times. As Nicholls showed, every Eden has its serpent: wherever it goes ‘humanity trashes the place’. Two hundred thousand giant tortoises were slaughtered by explorers and whalers in the 19th century. So why do conservationists bother? ‘Why the scientists, the Darwin industry; why spend the Unesco money and all those tourist dollars on conservation? Nicholls is clear: “The Galapagos really matters because what happens in these islands is an honest, unfalsifiable look at the future that faces our children, our grandchildren and our species.”’
The warbler finch and male vermilion flycatcher from Charles Darwin’s Zoology of the Voyage of HMS Beagle by illustrator John Gould
The French Intifada: The Long War Between France and its Arabs Andrew Hussey (Granta 382pp £25 Oldie price £20 HB) FRANCE PREFERS not to discuss ethnic tension – but its existence is undeniable. The last ten years have seen a series of riots by the country’s large North African population, who mostly live in the banlieues – sprawling, dystopian estates on the peripheries of France’s cities. In his provocatively titled book, The French Intifada: The Long War Between France and Its Arabs, Andrew Hussey (Dean of the University of London Institute in Paris) examines the problems. The book ‘mixes lively street reportage with the history of two brutal centuries in France’s former Maghreb territories,’ wrote Charles Bremner in the New Statesman. Hussey traces France’s occupation of – and bloody withdrawal from – Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, vividly describing the nightmarish violence. Relating modern alienation to this violent history, Hussey argues that
‘this war is not just a conflict between Islam and the west or the rich north and the globalised south, but a conflict between two very different experiences of the world – the colonisers and the colonised.’ In the Daily Telegraph Robert Edis argued that the issue is of concern to ‘all western European countries, with their growing but poorly integrated and often dysfunctional nonEuropean diasporas.’ However, Graeme Wood suggested in the Wall Street Journal that although it offers a good introduction to the history of French colonialism, the book ‘suffers from shallowness’ and ‘relies too much on secondary sources and too little on the voices of North Africans themselves’. Others went further – in the Independent Farah Nayeri complained that ‘the book ends up reinforcing widespread British prejudices (including the author’s own) about France as a lousy place for immigrants.’
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M ISCELLA NEOUS The Man Who Couldn’t Stop: OCD and the True Story of a Life Lost in Thought David Adam (Picador 336pp £16.99 Oldie price £15.29 HB) ‘WHAT CONNECTS the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen with the MP Gerald Kaufman and an Ethiopian schoolgirl called Bira?’ asked Jane Shilling in the Telegraph. ‘All three are described as suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder in this study of the condition by the science journalist David Adam.’ OCD involves frequent irrational, intrusive thoughts which cause distress, and rituals or fixations: ‘Life with OCD becomes governed by these thoughts and the associated compulsions.’ Hans Christian Andersen was obsessed with the idea that the building he was sleeping in might catch fire, and he also suffered from a crippling fear of being buried alive. Kaufman claimed during the 2009 expenses scandal that it was OCD which caused him to claim £220 for the purchase of two crystal grapefruit bowls; while Bira suffered from a powerful
‘In pencil, please, I may need to rub it out later’
BOOKSHOP
urge to consume the mud wall of her home, and by the time she was 17 she had eaten eight square metres of mud bricks. Author David Adam has suffered from the condition for 20 years. ‘His own OCD centres around an irrational fear of contracting HIV,’ explained Leyla Sanai in the Independent. ‘In this book, he covers the history and aetiology of OCD, the various treatments that have been tried without success – such as Freudian analysis or behavioural aversion therapy – and his experience of cognitive behavioural therapy, CBT, which was greatly helpful.’
Author David Adam has suffered from the condition for 20 years. His own OCD centres around an irrational fear of contracting HIV In the Guardian Jenny Turner felt that ‘a general audience book about this distressing and debilitating condition is obviously an excellent thing to have, and Adam is a punchy writer’ – but ‘he tends to conceptualise the problem as essentially mechanical, awaiting only the right screwdriver and a spot of oil.’ She complained that he misses the ‘subtleties’: his fear of catching HIV ‘seems to be some sort of deathfear, associated with blood and sex and other usual suspects, triggered perhaps by his misfortune in having reached sexual maturity just as an emerging disease became the focus for a massive moral panic. So Adam’s Aids fear makes most sense when looked at sensitively and symbolically, as a story. But that doesn’t seem to be the sort of story that he wants to tell.’ In the Times Robert Crampton disagreed: ‘I salute Adam’s courage… For writing about his condition as honestly and entertainingly as he does, he should be congratulated. This account is a brave and helpful contribution to deepening our understanding of the intricate complexities of mental ill-health.’
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OBITUARY
A Rough Ride to the Future James Lovelock
(Allen Lane 208pp £16.99 Oldie price £13.99 HB)
Richard Hoggart 1918–2014
‘Are these the ramblings of a crazy old man? Probably not. Lovelock has not lost his eloquence, wit or passionate anger’ dream. Our best chance, he thinks, contrary to the Greenpeace purists, is to make use of nuclear power and accelerate the agglomeration of people in cities, where they will be safe from rural drought and rising sea waters. ‘Are these the ramblings of a crazy old man?’ asked Camilla Cavendish in the Sunday Times. ‘Probably not. Lovelock has not lost his eloquence, wit or passionate anger at the failure of governments and people to tackle climate change effectively.’ David Sexton in the Evening Standard remarked: ‘Nobody else writes quite like Lovelock. He freely combines specific scientific observation with the most far-reaching speculation about the future, delivered with equal confidence and charm. That is to say, he is as much an imaginative writer, a philosopher and prophet as he is a scientific reporter.’ But Colin Tudge in the Literary Review declared that ‘Radical and significant thinker though he is, Lovelock’s immediate solutions to the world’s ills are remarkably conventional.’
Richard Hoggart often proved himself to be a ‘more responsive and warmer essayist than George Orwell’ itself as a seminal work, selling in huge numbers after it had been reissued in paperback by Pelican Books. Interlacing angry polemic with cultural diagnosis, it described how, in the Telegraph’s words, ‘the old, tightly-knit working-class culture of his boyhood – of stuffy front rooms, allotments, back-to-back housing and charabanc trips – was breaking up in the face of an Americanised mass culture of tabloid newspapers, advertising, juke-boxes and Hollywood.’ His reputation established, Hoggart was made the Professor of English at Birmingham University, where he set up the Centre for Cultural Studies with Stuart Hall. He was the star witness for the defence when Penguin Books was put on trial in 1960 for publishing Lady Chatterley’s Lover; he served time at the Arts Council and Unesco before ending his career as Warden of Goldsmith’s College. After he retired he published three volumes of autobiography which, according to the Independent, ‘bear witness to a life which itself was a work of art and, as such, imaginatively powerful, morally uplifting, politically self-reliant, humanly vivid, crowded and affectionate’. Writing in what the Telegraph described as ‘the nineteenth-century tradition of radical idealism, with its strong sense of moral values,’ Hoggart disapproved of public schools, commercial broadcasting and modish cultural relativism: those who claimed that the Beatles were as good as Beethoven represented the ‘loony terminus’ of such ideas. He thought culture and the profit motive incompatible, leading to the triumph of the ‘lowest denominator’, but this didn’t prevent his being published by commercial practitioners. The journalist Simon Hoggart, one of his three children, predeceased him by three months.
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PHOTO: REX/RICHARD GARDNER
JAMES LOVELOCK is one of Britain’s most creative and nonconformist scientists. In the 1960s, while working for Nasa, he developed the concept of Gaia: the idea that Planet Earth is a self-regulating system that contains feedback loops to maintain an optimal equilibrium for the maintenance of life. At the age of 95, his inquisitiveness has not dimmed and in his new book he addresses the problem of man-made climate change. Lovelock believes that global warming will reach a level that will seriously discomfort human life. He considers fields covered in wind turbines ‘satanic’; geo-engineering is a pipe
RICHARD HOGGART, who died in April at the age of 95, is best remembered as the author of The Uses of Literacy – a work which, according to his obituarist in the Guardian, is ‘firm in its place among the great books of the twentieth century’ as well as being, in the words of the Daily Telegraph ,‘one of the most influential books of the immediate postwar era’. Hoggart himself was, for the Independent, ‘a remarkable analyst of his country’s culture’ and ‘one of the most upright, principled, intelligent and effective of its public administrators, adviser-bureaucrats and makers of its civic institutions’: he warned against the horrors of ‘cultural debasement’, often proving himself to be a ‘more responsive and warmer essayist than George Orwell’. Hoggart was born in Leeds in 1918; both parents died when he was very young, and he was brought up in poverty. After attending Leeds University, where he took a first in English, he did war service before climbing the academic ladder. Published in 1957, The Uses of Literacy quickly established
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The Self-Portrait: A Cultural History James Hall (Thames & Hudson 288pp £19.95 Oldie price £16.95 HB)
Albrecht Dürer as Jesus in Self-Portrait, 1500
Frida Kahlo, The Two Fridas, 1939
Giorgione, Self-Portrait as David, c.1505–10
Jan van Eyck, The Arnolfini Portrait, 1434
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JAMES HALL’S new history of the self-portrait takes in all the well-known examples: van Eyck painting his reflection in the mirror of The Arnolfini Portrait; Albrecht Dürer envisaging himself as Jesus Christ. But it also traces the genre further into the past, taking in less familiar classical and medieval instances. Hall sees the selfportrait as the moment when a painter can fashion his identity, whether it is Giorgione as David overcoming Goliath or Artemisia Gentilsechi who, almost godlike, separates darkness from light. In the twentieth century the preoccupations of the artist are seen through their self-portraits as perverse or harmful. Egon Schiele paints himself masturbating; Frida Kahlo rips open her chest to reveal her bleeding heart. Peter Conrad in the Observer declared the self-portrait to be an ‘enthralling book… Scattering insights on all sides, Hall’s narrative advances through the centuries with masterly vigour.’ Frances Spalding in the Guardian wrote that ‘There is never
a dull passage in this book: the detail is crisply imparted; the content richly arcane at times, but more usually profoundly human; the ideas come freshly coined. Hall manages to retain
Hall sees the self-portrait as the moment when a painter can fashion his identity, like Giorgione as David overcoming the Goliath the intellectual high ground while writing with verve and enthusiasm.’ Michael Prodger in the Sunday Times was similarly captivated: ‘Fascinating, erudite and beautifully produced… The point that Hall reinforces throughout this elegant study is that, for all its mutability, the self-portrait has rarely been simply a depiction of the artist who painted it. In holding up a mirror to themselves artists have held one up, too, to the human condition.’
Summer 2014
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Repr int s Our choice of recently reprinted books WILD WOOD by Jan Needle, illustrated by Willie Rushton (Golden Duck Oldie price £9.99 PB) First published in 1981, Wild Wood is writer Jan Needle’s comic re-telling of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, accompanied by Willie Rushton’s brilliant, idiosyncratic illustrations. Aimed at both adults and children, Wild Wood is witty political satire: the rich River Bankers, who can afford a life of luxury, pitted against the Wild Wooders, who have to work hard, long hours to feed their families. ‘Much as I had always loved Toad,’ writes Needle, ‘it occurred to me one Sunday afternoon that if you looked at him through jaundiced left-wing eyes he might turn out somewhat less lovable. I did, and he did too. A fat and jolly plutocrat, more money than sense, with friends who lived lives of BARE-FACED MESSIAH: THE TRUE idleness and eternal pleasure. STORY OF L RON HUBBARD From there, it was a small by Russell Miller step to redreaming the (Silvertail Oldie price £14.99 HB) villains of the Wild Wood JOHN BRAY WRITES: This excellent Edward Bawden’s The Pagoda at Kew, colour linocut (1963) as sturdy, starving heroes biography of the greatest confidence of the rural proletariat.’ An entertaining, lively read, and a trickster of the twentieth century was originally published in splendidly funny take on a much-loved classic. 1987 and now comes with a seven-page introduction which reveals that in 1989 it was discovered that £100,000 had been spent by ‘The Church’ in an unsuccessful attempt to stop publication. The author, a Sunday Times journalist, visited twelve states and interviewed over forty past and present members of Hubbard’s organisation. What they told him revealed a shocking catalogue of ill treatment and gratuitous mind control. This reviewer remembers counting 24 statements Hubbard wrote, only to find 21 of them to be demonstrably untrue. It is a very great pity that so little notice was taken of the danger posed by ‘The Church’ all those years ago. After all, the UK government and those of South Africa, New Zealand, Australia and France had taken action, so Willie Rushton illustration from Wild Wood why not the United States? EDWARD BAWDEN’S KEW GARDENS by Peyton Skipwith and Brian Webb (V&A Publishing £20 Oldie price £18 HB) The artist and designer Edward Bawden (1903–1989) is well known for his prints, book covers and posters – and for his lifelong fascination with Kew Gardens. This book, beautifully designed by Brian Webb, reproduces Bawden’s illustrations, posters and linocuts of Kew, which he made over sixty years. These are accompanied by a light-hearted social history of Kew by Peyton Skipwith (a fine art consultant formerly of the Fine Art Society). The first part of the book is devoted to Bawden’s ‘General Guide to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew’, a mock-up guide book for the gardens which he wrote in 1923 and gave to Eric Ravilious, inscribing it ‘my first book’: a full facsimile edition is reproduced. Alongside Bawden’s work, the book is illustrated with the contemporary caricatures of Rowlandson and Gillray and botanical illustrations by Franz Bauer and others.
30 THE OLDIE Review of Books
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Summer 2014
12/6/14 17:42:20