Review of Books ISSUE 29 AUTUMN 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
Nicholas Winton Adam Thorpe Pamela Cox Paddy Ashdown Caroline Moorehead Justin Marozzi John Sutherland Jane Gardam Philip Hensher Robert Galbraith Linda Grant J R R Tolkein Hugh Thomas Viv Albertine Rod Liddle H E Bates Marion Coutts Linda Grant Adam Nicolson …and many more
The people’s war Life mathematical Nadine Gordimer remembered Let them eat beans: impoverished writers A ROUND-UP OF REVIEWS • NOT JUST THE BESTSELLERS
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CONTENTS
Review of Books
I N T H I S I S S UE 4. FIRST WORLD WAR
16. MODERN LIFE
A Broken World: Letters, Diaries and Memories of the Great War Sebastian Faulks and Hope Wolf; The Great War: The People’s Story Isobel Charman Margot Asquith’s Great War Diary Michael and Eleanor Brock; Soldiers’ Songs and Slang of the Great Martin Pegler
Cubed Nikil Saval; The Shape We’re In Sarah Boseley; Hack Attack Nick Davies; How Not to be Wrong Jordan Ellenberg; Infinitesimal Amir Alexander; Selfish Whining Monkeys Rod Liddle
17. BAKED BEANS IN A GARRET Jeremy Lewis on the lot of the imporverished modern author
6. BIOGRAPHY ISSUE 29 AUTUMN 2014
NOT FORGETTING... IMPORTANT TITLES RECENTLY REVIEWED IN THE OLDIE
• The Highlights: The Best of Frank Keating edited by Matthew Engel
• Coming Up Trumps by Baroness Trumpington • An Unexpected Professor by John Carey
• The Gardens of the British Working
The Burning of the World Béla Zombory-Moldován; Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys Viv Albertine; Divided Lives Lyndall Gordon; Empty Mansions Bill Dedman; If It’s Not Impossible: The Life of Nicholas Winton Barbara Winton; The Iceberg Marion Coutts; The Last Victorians W Sydney Robinson; Warsaw Boy Andrew Borowiec; Lillian Hellman Dorothy Gallagher
Class by Margaret Willes
20. RURAL LIFE Meadowland: The Private Life of an English Field John Lewis Stempel; The Hunt for the Golden Mole Richard Girling; Silbury Hill Adam Thorpe
21. FICTION How to be Well Read John Sutherland; The Stories Jane Gardam; The Silkworm Robert Galbraith; The Emperor Waltz Philip Hensher; Upstairs at The Party Linda Grant; Beowulf J R R Tolkien
25. MISCELLANEOUS
• Insufficiently Welsh by • National Service: Conscription in
Why Homer Matters Adam Nicolson; Atheists Nick Spencer; Goldeneye Matthew Parker
• Enemy on the Euphrates
Nadine Gordimer, 1923–2014
• Something of Myself and Others
28. HOW TO ORDER
Griff Rhys Jones
Britain 1945-1963’ by Richard Vinen
27. OBITUARY
by Ian Rutledge
by Mary Kenny
• A Curious Careerl by Lynn Barber • The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters • A Dog’s Life by Michael Holroyd • My Salinger Year by Joanna Rakoff • Inside Enemy by Alan Judd • Berlin: Imagine a City by Rory Maclean
• Scaranomics by Justin Baldwin
12. HISTORY The Cruel Victory Paddy Ashdown; How to Ruin a Queen Jonathan Beckman; Shopgirls Pamela Cox and Annabel Hobley; Hotel Florida Amanda Vaill; In Montmartre by Sue Roe; Lady Chatterley’s Villa Richard Owen; Baghdad Justin Marozzi; Village of Secrets Caroline Moorhead; Women of the World Helen McCarthy; World Without End by Hugh Thomas
30. REPRINTS Down the River H E Bates;; Bhowani Junction John Masters; Old Friends and New Fancies Sybil Brinton
Published by The Oldie magazine, 65 Newman Street, London W1T 3EG Editorial panel: Claudia Fitzherbert, James Pembroke, Jeremy Lewis, Brian MacArthur, Lucy Lethbridge, John Walsh Reviews Editor: Lucy Lethbridge Design: John Bowling Reviewers: Geraldine Brennan, Jennie Erdal, Julia Hamilton, Sam Leith, Anna Lethbridge, Lucy Lethbridge, Jeremy Lewis, Brian MacArthur, John Walsh Publisher: James Pembroke Advertising: Lisa Martin, Azmi Elkholy, Jack Watts For advertising enquiries, call Lisa Martin on 020 7079 9361 For editorial enquiries, call 020 7436 8801 or email editorial@theoldie.co.uk
Autumn 2014
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Review of Books THE OLDIE 3
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first world war A Broken World: Letters, Diaries and Memories of the Great War Ed Sebastian Faulks and Hope Wolf (Hutchinson 308pp £20 Oldie price £18 HB)
The Great War: The People’s Story Ed Isobel Charman (RH Books 515pp £20 Oldie price £18 HB) anthology has no answers to the horror, wrote Faulks, it is merely a demonstration of how witnesses responded to it. As Libby Purves noted in the Times, ‘the detail of small lives needs no adorning’ and the voices of ordinary people are most vivid: ‘The anthology’s cover — for obvious commercial reasons — puts the author of Birdsong first, and much bigger, than the name of his collaborator Dr Hope Wolf of Girton College, Cambridge. Her area of research in war writing includes “miniature narratives and popular form (anecdotes, jokes, clichés, memes)” and the book’s merits are largely due to her search for the oblique, the overlooked and the international.’ The breadth of the collection impressed Gerard Henderson in the Daily Express, among others. ‘This was the first truly global conflict and the collection includes stories from Russians, Germans, Indians and Americans. Many are set against a backdrop of far-away places, hospitals, railway stations, refugee camps, factories and prison cells.’ Henderson went on: ‘But it is the pain, the suffering and the confusion that dominate this impressive work – the awful reality of warfare summed up by Private Frank Cocker, who wrote from the front in 1915, following the loss of his brother: “My heart is so stunned I don’t know whether it is broken or not.”’ For war reporter Robert Fox, writing in the Evening Standard, ‘Through the tales of mud, confusion, slaughter and pathos, the big questions remain. Why did so many young men go on fighting for so long — and why in the British forces was mutiny almost non-existent and refusals of orders so comparatively rare? Though there are a few foreign voices, collections such as this risk seeming parochial in their Britishness.’ For historians of the First World War there are mountains of material. In The Great War: The People’s Story, editor Isobel Charman has found ‘an elegant solution’, according to Jonathan Wright in the Scottish Herald’. Wright was particularly struck by the Rev Andrew Clark, a vicar in Essex, who kept a diary of the war that ran to 92 volumes and three million words. Everything he saw he recorded, from ‘the sadness of conscripts being packed off to France to locals complaining of the lack of white bread.’ Wright concluded with high praise: ‘A handful of people dominate this wonderful book. They are not French soldiers gather at a newspaper stand near Dunkirk, 1917. From The special or famous but their stories will haunt you for a very long time’. First World War in Colour by Peter Walther (Taschen 384pp £34.99) After 1918, Mrs S E Chessum sent to the Imperial War Museum a package of letters, memoirs and recollections, some written on scraps of paper. In her touchingly ungrammatical letter, Mrs Chessum wrote, ‘some of the incidents of my dear Son’s life have no relics. You may find a use for them.’ She had sent flower seeds to her son, Clarence, killed in action in 1917: ‘It maybe some other lonely soldier, will see something of them, & be a voice to him. Cheers he wrote saying. I have put them in but do not suppose shall see them grow up but some other sore head may be cheered.’ This letter moved many reviewers of A Broken World, a new collection of writing by those who experienced the Great War. It was a conflict, in the words of co-editor Sebastian Faulks, ‘which brought down three empires and revised our idea of what kind of creatures human beings really are’. This
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Autumn 2014
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First World War
Margot Asquith’s Great War Diary 1914–16: The View from Downing Street Ed Michael Brock and Eleanor Brock (Oxford University Press 417pp £30 Oldie price £27 HB)
Margot Asquith, ‘unspeakably, delectably, impenitently frank’ Margot Asquith, the beaky-nosed, formidable wife of H H Asquith, had, as Simon Heffer put it in the New Statesman, ‘something of a chequered reputation as a public figure and prime ministerial spouse’. For Miranda Seymour in the Sunday Telegraph she was ‘garrulous, insensitive, articulate and fiercely loyal to the negligent husband whom she chided and adored’, while for Johnny Grimond in the Spectator she
was ‘quick of mind, though uneducated, candid to a fault, extravagant, astringent, egotistical and tactless.’ Margot Asquith’s put-downs were legendary, as was her taste for score-settling. Her wartime diaries of 1914–16, published in full for the first time, do not in this regard disappoint. As Heffer notes, they ‘are laced with her verbatim exchanges with the great and the good … and often involve taking her husband’s critics down a peg or two’. Of Winston Churchill in 1915 she wrote ‘[his] vanity is septic … he is a dangerous maniac, so poor in character and judgment, so insolent and childish, I hardly even think him a danger’. The same year she described Lord Londonderry, the former Conservative cabinet member, as ‘a stupid, courteous man of no education, pushed into the highest places by a vulgar, courageous, arrogant wife of — at one time — great beauty and audacity’. Of the Unionist leader Bonar Law she wrote: ‘He invests everything with dullness.’ As Seymour observed: ‘Likeable people seldom write good diaries. Alan Clark was close to being a monster and Margot Asquith comes near to being another. Both belong to that select little group of adept writers whose private records are all the better for being unspeakably, delectably, impenitently frank.’ Reviewers were united in their admiration of the diaries’ two editors. ‘The Brocks have edited it superbly’, wrote Heffer, and Seymour praised ‘a beautiful work of conjugal editorship by Eleanor Brock and her late husband.’ In a mass of new volumes on the First World War, Margot Asquith’s diaries stand out. As Max Hastings put it in the Sunday Times, they are a ‘rollicking read’. He went on: ‘They may not constitute the most important historical work published in this centenary year, but by a country mile they are the most entertaining.’
Soldiers’ Songs and Slang of the Great War Martin Pegler (Osprey 381pp £6.99 Oldie price £ 6.29 PB) An ‘Alleyman’ was a German rather than a denizen of Tin Pan Alley, a ‘castor oil merchant’ was a doctor, ‘flaming onions’ were fast-firing enemy guns, and a ‘toasting fork’ was a bayonet: slang was a vibrant and often comical by-product of the hellish life in the trenches in the First World War. Many familiar words and phrases first came into circulation on the Western Front, among them ‘as you were’, ‘chew the fat’, ‘cop it’ and ‘dumb insolence’, along with the comforting ‘British warm’ overcoat and ‘skive’, ‘hooch’, ‘civvy’, ‘mucker’, ‘shirty’ and ‘binge’. It’s good to learn that ‘nix’ (nicht) and ‘ersatz’ were swiped from the enemy, and have been earning their keep ever since.
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BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR H
DEN The Burning of the World: GIEDM !
A Memoir of 1914
Béla Zombory-Moldován (New York Review Books 155pp £8.99 Oldie price £8.09 PB) THE HUNGARIAN ARTIST Béla Zombory-Moldován died nearly fifty years ago and never saw the publication in any language of his memoir of the First World War. Translated into English by his grandson Peter, who discovered the manuscript in 2013, it is a vivid portrait not only of the horror of the conflict from the perspective of a young combatant – but also of the dying days of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The sepia photograph on the cover of the book shows a group of smiling friends in 1914, 29-year-old ZomboryMoldován among them, in the Croatian resort of Novi. Three days later, war was declared and the artist ‘whose prewar existence has been that of the carefree boulevardier, had to report for duty’. Zombory-Moldován was shelled a few days after he first saw action: ‘As though the earth has collided with another planet, and I am caught between the two.’ In the Wall Street Journal, Henrik Bering thought the memoir stood out because of ‘the author’s painterly eye for detail, his ability to evoke a vanished way of life, and his tone of voice – gentle and civilised but perfectly capable of the occasional sardonic flash’. For Charles Moore in the Daily Telegraph ‘The strength of this book is not as an account of combat – though the few pages devoted to the subject are brilliant – but to the effect of war on one sensitive young man and on everything and
A picnic at Novi, Croatia,in 1914 everybody. There is a freshness and strangeness to the book …’ Zombory-Moldován died in 1967, his final years spent quietly painting in the Hungarian countryside. His last words were ‘Get down! Get down! They’re shooting from there too.’
Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys Viv Albertine
(Faber & Faber, 304pp £14.99 Oldie price £13.49 PB AT 21, VIV ALBERTINE bought an electric guitar with £200 inherited from her grandmother and joined the all-girl band The Slits, who flourished from 1977 to 1981. But her autobiography isn’t just about the punk era, said Leyla Sanai in the Independent. ‘It follows Viv’s life from childhood through to the present, taking in her youthful passion for music, wild teenage years, discovery of boys and sex, the punk years, the break-up of The Slits, the wilderness years, a reprieve at film school and her new career as a director, desperate attempts to have a baby, illness, survival, and resurrection as a singer.’ Albertine escaped a painful adolescence by becoming ‘punk royalty’ as girlfriend of The
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Clash’s Mick Jones. She met the Sex Pistols and joined a band with Sid Vicious. When he threw her out, she turned to heroin – but survived to join The Slits. ‘I’ve honestly never read a bloodier autobiography,’ reported fellow ex-punk Tracey Thorn in the New Statesman. ‘Unsparing in its detail, it charts every ebb and flow of a woman’s life from puberty onwards. Periods and the stains they leave. Miscarriages and the scars they leave.’ According to Suzanne Moore in the Guardian, Albertine ‘is very funny and self-lacerating about her sexual prowess’. Sanai found the book ‘pithy, hilarious and smart,’ but Tracey Thorn was less enchanted: ‘Viv seems to crawl on all fours through side two of the book, like a wounded animal,’ she wrote. ‘At the end, what I most wanted to do was make her a cup of tea and hug her.’
Autumn 2014
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BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR
Divided Lives: Dreams of a Mother and Daughter Lyndall Gordon (Virago 336pp £20 Oldie price £18 HB) Lyndall Gordon, the renowned academic and award-winning biographer of Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, Charlotte Brontë and Mary Wollstonecraft among others, has now turned her spotlight on her relationship with her mother: ‘As a child, I’m to be my mother’s “sister” because she wants one so. My part is to be there if she’s ill. At four years old, it’s a privilege to have this responsibility instead of trotting off to nursery school like other children.’ So begins the author on the subject of her own life (she was born in 1941 in Cape Town) and Lyndall Gordon and her mother her relationship to her mother whose mysterious illness confined her for years to a life indoors. As Claudia Fitzherbert wrote in the Daily Telegraph: ‘In this memoir she comes up with a version of a motherdaughter relationship that has all the ingredients of a misery memoir, but has been cooked into something quite different.’ And astoundingly different it is. Rhoda, the mother, takes
her daughter into the Movement of Jews to Israel, ‘attempting’ as Fitzherbert wrote ‘to push her daughter into an exile that is presented as a homecoming,’ but Gordon returns to Cape Town and, as Claire Harman wrote in the Guardian, ‘unspoken tensions mount as Gordon’s narrative moves rapidly from college to marriage to emigration (connected with her husband’s career in medicine in New York) to pregnancy, motherhood and breakdown. This shocking episode draws out a harsher, terser voice and acute analysis (of the treatment she received, in particular) that is rarely unleashed elsewhere.’ Susie Orbach summed it up in the Observer: ‘In this fascinating mix between memoir and biography we see the struggle of a daughter to keep an attachment with her mother that is both close and yet boundaried, separate and connected, an attachment in which each can live their dreams. This is the struggle of daughters and mothers today.’
Empty Mansions Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell Jr
(Atlantic 456pp £16.99 Oldie price £15.29 HB) On a spring morning in 1991, a young doctor made an emergency visit to a house on New York’s Upper East Side. He was admitted to a murky forty-foot hallway on the eighth floor where paintings by Renoir, Degas, Manet and Monet were lit by a single candle, and came face-to-face with a frightened woman. Untreated cancers had eaten away the left part of her lower lip and right cheek. Deep ulcers beneath her right eye exposed her orbital bone. In her review of Empty Mansions in the Daily Mail, Helen Brown continued the story: aged 85, Huguette, youngest of the nine children of W A Clark, who founded Las Vegas and once rivalled John D Rockefeller as America’s wealthiest man, had outlived her favourite doctors and hadn’t dared trust anybody new until she felt close to death. The doctor sent her straight to hospital and though she made an excellent recovery, she never returned to her regal quarters – or to her lavish mansions
in Connecticut and California – preferring to spend the next twenty years and two months in a cell-like room overlooking the hospital’s industrial air-conditioning unit, meanwhile giving away more than $30 million in bonuses to her favourite nurse and the nurse’s family. The book, a huge bestseller in the United States, is ‘property porn’, wrote Christopher Bray in the Observer. It was a ghastly story, summed up by its co-author, Pulitzer-winning journalist Bill Dedman, as ‘a classic folk tale ‑ except told in reverse, with the bags full of gold arriving at the beginning, the handsome prince fleeing, and the king’s daughter locking herself away in the tower.’ It’s also, thought Bray, an American morality tale which tells the story of the desperate isolation wealth can bring. ‘What was Huguette’s hospital fastness (which cost $560,000 a month) but Citizen Kane’s Xanadu, the castle in which Charles Foster Kane holes up?’
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BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR
If It’s Not Impossible: The Life of Sir Nicholas Winton Barbara Winton (Matador 288pp £12.99 Oldie price £11.69 PB) Sir Nicholas Winton WAS 105 this year and his daughter Barbara has published this biography to mark the life and remarkable legacy of a modest man. Sir Nicholas created Kindertransport, the eight trains which in the months before war evacuated Jewish refugee children to Britain from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. In doing so he saved nearly 700 lives. As Emma Howard put it in the Guardian, ‘Nearly 6,000 people in the world today are alive because Winton responded to a phone call from Prague in December 1938.’ Winton, then a stockbroker, wasted no time: he went to Prague, set up an office, liaised with German authorities to ensure a number of children would be permitted to leave and arranged foster families to take the children in on arrival in this country. The book’s title is a nod to his motto: ‘If not impossible there must be a way to do it.’ Children arriving in London from occupied Europe Barbara Winton’s book fills in some of been largely forgotten until in 1988 he was reunited with many the details in Winton’s life: covering the years he spent serving of the children he had rescued in an episode of That’s Life! He with the Red Cross during the war and his post-war work with was knighted in 2003 and this year received the Order of the the UN international refugee organisation and with the terrible White Lion, the Czech Republic’s highest honour. President aftermath of the concentration camps. ‘Like her father’, writes Milos Zeman told him ‘Your life is an example of humanity, Howard, ‘Barbara Winton is not sentimental, she lets the story selflessness, personal courage and modesty.’ tell itself.’ Winton rarely spoke of Kindertransport and he had
The Iceberg Marion Coutts
(Atlantic 304pp £14.99 Oldie price £13.49 HB) ‘There is going to be destruction: the obliteration of a person, his intellect, his experience, his agency. I am to watch it. This is my part,’ writes Marion Coutts in this extraordinary book. Coutts, an artist, was married to Tom Lubbock, the Independent’s art critic who, in 2008, was diagnosed with a brain tumour and given two years to live. Coutts’s record of the time between the diagnosis and Lubbock’s death in 2011 is, according to Helen Davies in the Sunday Times, ‘a memoir quite unlike any other. It has the strength of an arrow: taut, spiked, quivering, working to its fatal conclusion.’ Lubbock’s tumour resulted in a loss of language, just when the couple’s son Ev, 18-months-old in 2008, was starting to acquire it. Fiona Sturges in the Independent on Sunday admired how the couple’s ‘oddball methods of communication towards the end bring a remarkable romance and Marion Coutts
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togetherness to this otherwise desperate narrative.’ Marcus Field, writing in the Independent, thought The Iceberg ‘a kind of prose poem. The writing is lyrical, textured, perfectly paced; the sentences short so that we feel Coutts’s moments of panic, her quickened heartbeat.’ In the Telegraph, Diana Athill found it at times an almost unbearably hard read: ‘Grief at loss is not beautiful… It is like a cataract, sweeping the victim over boulders of rage, despair, lumpy humps of “what-about-me”… Readers should be warned that sharing such a grief as closely as this marvellous book compels one to do is painful. But I urge the alarmed not to give up.’ For Tessa Hadley in the Guardian, ‘the account of the hour of death itself is intimate and unflinching, magnificent. Coutts has found her way, in writing, back to her work again, building a bridge out of life into art.’
Autumn 2014
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BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR
The Last Victorians: A Daring Reassessment of Four Twentieth–Century Eccentrics W Sydney Robinson
(The Robson Press 320pp £20 Oldie price £18 HB) DESCRIBED AS ‘a group biography’, and planned as an antidote to Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, this book explores the lives of four men: William Joynson-Hicks, ‘the Puritan Home Secretary’, who ordered police searches of London shrubberies for illicit sexual activity; W R Inge, Dean of St Paul’s and incorrigible misogynist; son of the manse and founder of the BBC, Lord Reith, who denounced one of its governors as the ‘whore of Babylon’; and the popular historian Arthur Bryant, who preached Victorian values while failing to practice them. ‘Four crusty men’, declared Iain Finlayson in the Times. ‘who came to prominence in the twentieth century but had ‘the manners and attitudes of the nineteenth.’ Jane Ridley in the Sunday Telegraph found it ‘a cracking good read’. True, ‘Robinson can’t resist doing a Strachey and exposing the double standards of his heroes and poking fun at their absurdities’ – which she thought counter to his argument – but ‘the book is all the more enjoyable as a result.’ ‘The thesis of this book is highly dubious,’ wrote Piers Brendon in the Independent, but Robinson had an excellent eye for detail. ‘His cameo of Lord Reith, ravaged in old age by frustrated megalomania, is unforgettable.’ ‘This has all the appearance of a book invented by a publisher,’ observed Philip Ziegler in the Spectator. ‘It hardly achieves Robinson’s aim of “giving a portrait of an age”, but it is scrupulously researched, intelligent and uncommonly well written.’
Dean Inge, ‘incorrigible misogynist’
Warsaw Boy: A Memoir of a Wartime Childhood Andrew Borowiec
(Viking 384pp £16.99 Oldie price £15.99 HB) THE WARSAW UPRISING of August 1944 was both heroic and terrible: outraged by the audacity of the Poles, Hitler took a hideous revenge, reducing the city to rubble in an orgy of revenge, while the rapidly advancing Russian army sat on the far side of the Vistula, under strict orders from Stalin not to intervene in support of the pro-Western Home Army. ‘By the time he joined the uprising as a tender 15-year-old, Andrew Borowiec had already experienced much; from the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland in 1939, to life in the German-occupied west, to his induction into the clandestine work of the Polish underground, through which he came to participate in the fight for Warsaw,’ wrote Roger Moorhouse in the Financial Times, adding that ‘His account of the uprising is hugely engaging. Armed with little more than his youthful enthusiasm for the fray, he traded his short trousers for a looted German battledress and joined a combat platoon.’ Warsaw Boy is ‘a surprisingly subtle, well-observed
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autobiography, beautifully paced’, according to the Times, but it includes some ‘fierce, stomach-curdling stuff’– not least when describing the ‘face of evil’ in Oscar Dirlewanger, ‘the SS killer with a skull like head and ankle-length leather coat’ whose men ‘rampage through four Warsaw hospitals raping nurses and cancer patients, hanging medical staff, gulping back the rubbing alcohol’. ‘Borowiec has a good ear for the killer anecdote, whether it is arrest by the Gestapo or an amorous liaison with his French teacher,’ Moorhouse concludes. ‘For all the horrors that he describes, his is an affectionate, wryly amusing account punctuated by episodes of warmth and humanity, including the author’s seemingly perennial efforts to be – as he put it – “relieved of his virginity”.’ And it amounts to ‘a highly readable and engaging first-hand account of the tribulations of a country for which Britain went to war in 1939, and about which most of us still know far too little.’
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BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR
Lillian Hellman: An Imperious Life Dorothy Gallagher (Yale University Press 224pp £18.99 Oldie price £18.99 HB) There have already been four full-length biographies and several shared biographies, not to mention a series of memoirs devoted to the life of Lillian Hellman (1905-1984), so the world hardly needs another account, as the author gamely tells us in her prologue. Instead, as Bettina Berch wrote in Jewish Book World Magazine, ‘Gallagher focuses on the thornier aspects of Hellman’s story: how could Hellman have supported Stalin, knowing how many millions he was murdering? Did she really confront the House Committee on Un-American activities in a uniquely principled fashion, as she argued? If she was really so fond of Dashiell Hammett and Dorothy Parker, why, after they died, did she try and pry their estates away from their intended heirs? Did she fabricate the character of “Julia”, the basis of the Oscarwinning film, and then lie about it?’ Indeed were most of her accounts of her own principled stances lies? Mary McCarthy
certainly thought so remarking that ‘every word she writes is a lie, including “and” and “the”’. Hellmann was one of America’s most successful playwrights and the long-term lover of the ghastly Dashiell Hammett, but as Molly Guinness declared in the Spectator, ‘By Gallagher’s reckoning, she was a disloyal friend, a co-dependent writer and an out-and-out Stalinist. This whistle-stop biography focuses on the controversies of Hellmann’s life, and she does not come out well from any of them.’ Is Gallagher too tough on Hellman? Molly Guinness thought not: ‘Gallagher had to wade through a lot of Hellman’s nonsense to get anywhere close to an accurate picture of what actually happened. This snappy biography is full of piquant details and entertaining quotations, and it’s perhaps understandable that its author was ready to stick the knife in.’
JP Donleavy, author and playwright, Soho 1950s, taken from Under the Influence - John Deakin, Photography and the lure of Soho by Robin Muir (Art Books 162pp £50)
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HISTORY The Cruel Victory: The French Resistance and the Battle for the Vercors 1944 Paddy Ashdown
(William Collins 474pp £25 Oldie price £22.50 HB) Vercors, a sheer limestone plateau rising 1,000 feet above Grenoble, was the scene in June 1944 of the Battle of Vercors, and ‘has all the mythic power for the French that the Battle of Britain has for the British’, as Edward Stourton wrote in his review of Paddy Ashdown’s new book in the Times. Vercors was the natural hiding place for the men of the Maquis. When the call came for the French to rise in support of the Allied invasion on D-Day, the 4,000 Vercors resisters faced suicidal odds. Nigel Jones in the Telegraph wrote that Ashdown blames the Maquis leader, François Huet, for imitating a conventional army, adopting fixed positions instead of running away and living to fight another day. The Resistance held out for five weeks before the German troops swamped the plateau. Marco Giananngeli described in the Daily Express how they ‘raped, plundered and executed, killing 840 French men and women and destroying 500 houses.’ Mixed messages from London made the Vercors Resistance mobilise too soon. Its desperate pleas for heavy weapons and paratroopers went largely unheeded, wrote Stourton, partly because the Allied leaders were too busy arguing about politics, and Churchill and de Gaulle had their own agendas.
Young fighters of the Vercors Resistance Ashdown calls it ‘a powerful example of... the consequences for those on the front lines of conflict when those at the top know too little about the harsh realities of war, or think too little about what their decisions mean on the ground.’
How To Ruin A Queen: Marie Antoinette, the Stolen Diamonds and the Scandal That Shook the French Throne Jonathan Beckman
(John Murray 386pp £20 Oldie price £18 HB) John Preston in the Spectator relished this account of ‘one of the most audacious cons ever perpetrated’, a ripping yarn spun from forged love letters, a gullible aristocrat, a brazen schemer and a piece of rococo bling. Jeanne de la Motte, penniless but extravagant descendant of the Valois King Henry II, persuaded her former lover, Cardinal Louis de Rohan, that Queen Marie Antoinette was smitten with him and wanted him to help her acquire the most expensive piece of jewellery in Europe: a 2,800-carat necklace containing 647 diamonds. Neither the necklace nor Rohan’s letters ever reached Marie Antoinette and the queen’s letters to him were forged. A gleeful public picked the correspondence apart when Rohan and Jeanne stood trial in 1785. The royal
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reputations were shredded eight years before Louis XVI and his queen’s death in the Place de la Concorde. Preston wrote: ‘It’s a hell of a tale and Beckman gives it all the verve and swagger it deserves . . . I read it with fascination, delight and frequent snorts of incredulity.’ The Economist also appreciated the storytelling: ‘The account is fast-paced, colourful and rich with insights’ while introducing ‘a minor quibble that Mr Beckman’s desire to entertain the reader leads to some distracting lapses in tone.’ But overall, Sara Wheeler wrote in the Observer, this is ‘narrative history at its best... A populous cast of minor characters (including a hapless jeweller who had spent years trying to flog the necklace to the queen) is entertaining and well drawn.’
Marie Antoinette: a reputation shredded
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HISTORY
Shopgirls:
In Montmartre:
The True Story of Life Behind The Counter
Picasso, Matisse and Modernism in Paris 1900-1910
Pamela Cox and Annabel Hobley
(Hutchinson 302pp £16.99 Oldie price £15.29 HB) The 19th–century founders of Selfridges, Harrods and Whiteleys made shopping an event in itself, creating an army of workers just as the 1851 census had revealed half a million ‘spare’ women. Pamela Cox, social historian and presenter of the BBC documentary series, Shopgirls, and Annabel Hobley, the series’ producer, ‘demonstrate how women – as workers as well as consumers – were central to this extraordinary transformation of everyday life’, as Lucy Lethbridge noted in the Observer. Lethbridge wrote: ‘Sex and consumerism were mixed up in the public mind from the beginning. Shopgirls became a byword for the dangers of social aspirations as tawdry as the wares they sold.’ With their punishing working conditions, she added, they ‘were in the vanguard of progressive labour movements’. As Frances Wilson in the Daily Telegraph remarked, ‘The story is one of entrenched sexism, brutal hours ...
appalling pay, and the enforcement of ceaseless punitive measures’.
‘Stand and smile’: the shopgirls’ lot
Hotel Florida: Truth, Love and Death in the Spanish Civil War Amanda Vaill (Bloomsbury 464pp £25 Oldie price £22.50 HB) Hotel Florida, marble-clad, with 200 rooms and a glass-roofed atrium, opened in Madrid in 1924. During the ensuing Spanish civil war, the hotel became a meeting place for romantics, eccentrics, opportunists and others who had come to observe the fighting. ‘Six of its visitors form the basis of Amanda Vaill’s new account of the war’, explained Caroline Moorehead in the Spectator, ‘brought to the Florida by a shared commitment to the cause and their own particular ambitions and dreams.’ They included writers Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn, photographers Robert Capa and Gerda Taro, and journalists Arturo Barea and Ilsa Kulcsar. ‘Because Vaill is so scrupulously loyal to her sources, she tells instead of shows,’ complained Jethro Soutar
in the Independent on Sunday, ‘The protagonists remain rather wooden as a consequence, with the possible exception of Hemingway, who breaks through by sheer force of personality.’ Paul Preston in the Guardian disagreed. ‘Vaill is excellent on her six protagonists,’ and ‘portrays them beautifully’. The author has also marshalled ‘an impressive array of sources’, according to Lewis Jones in the Sunday Telegraph. ‘She copes skillfully with a fascinating cast and gives a lucid account of a horribly confusing war.’ It would be easy to dismiss Hotel Florida as ‘magazine history’, wroteJeremy Treglown in the Times Literary Supplement, on account of its brand names and celebrity gossip. ‘Yet it is well researched, strongly paced and vividly placed.’
Sue Roe (Fig Tree 384pp £20 Oldie price £18 HB)
Sue Roe has written a book about the Impressionists, so she is used to the technical vicissitudes of describing a sprawling, interlinked, back-biting group of artists. Her starting point here, 1900, was the year of Picasso’s first visit to Paris, aged 19. It was in this decade, as Michael Prodger put it in the New Statesman, ‘that Montmartre rose to its rickety peak. Almost every avant-garde artist of significance could at some point be found between the two moulins.’ Picasso, Matisse, Derain, Brancusi, Gris, Modigliani were among them, not to mention those two American weirdos Alice B Toklas and Gertrude Stein. Roe covers this scintillating decade year by year but, as Alistair Sooke declared in the Sunday Telegraph, the book ‘does not pretend to be a work of fresh scholarship. As an elegant synthesis of complex material, though, it excels. Roe is a skilled and graceful writer ....’ In the Daily Mail, Craig Brown disagreed: ‘Roe has an annoying habit of clogging her sentences with so many adverbs and double-negatives that you often have to read a sentence two or three times to find out what it means.’ By 1908 the party was over. ‘Something had died,’ wrote Lucy HughesHallett in the Sunday Times, ‘but in her entertaining, ingenuously structured account Roe brings Montmartre’s heyday back to life.’
Montmartre at its ‘rickety peak’
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HISTORY
Lady Chatterley’s Villa: DH Lawrence on the Italian Riviera Richard Owen
(Haus Armchair Traveller 240pp £12.99 Oldie price £11.69 HB) The former Times correspondent in Rome, Richard Owen, was lured back to the Italian Riviera by the story of D H Lawrence and the siren who was reputed to be the ‘real Lady Chatterley’. In this book, Owen investigates the rumour that Lawrence’s best-known fictional character was inspired by Rina Secker, his publisher’s wife. The Lawrences spent six months with Rina at the hotel owned by her father in Spotorno and Frieda Lawrence was even reputed to have declared: ‘Rina my dear, Lady Chatterley is you.’ Italian passions According to Iain Finlayson in the Times, Owen was lucky enough to ‘find a cache of lively, unpublished letters’. In an interview in the Daily Mail Owen said: ‘Lawrence was very perceptive and used people he met all the time in his ficton. There is no evidence that he used Rina for the sex scenes in Lady Chatterley
but her character contributed to it.’ The tubercular Lawrence found in Italy ‘an archaic world not overwhelmed by the turmoil of modern life.’ There he wrote some of his finest short stories. In the Times Literary Supplement, Caroline Moorehead observed: ‘He had loved Italy from the first, writing to friends about the sun, the freedom from class distinctions, the inexpensive food and wine and the sense of spontaneity.’ Michael Kerr in the Sunday Telegraph enjoyed how Owen ‘reconstructs the drama leading to one of history’s most controversial novels and explores Lawrence’s passion for all things Italian.’ It was a passion, as it turned out, that was shared by Frieda Lawrence – in Spotorno, noted Moorehead, she ‘embarked on an affair with their landlord, the good-looking Bersagliere captain Angelo Ravagli, who would eventually become her third husband.’
Baghdad: City of Peace, City of Blood Justin Marozzi
(Allen Lane 512pp £25 Oldie price £22.50 HB) A city now riven by sectarian violence, Baghdad was once, wrote Antony Loyd in the Times, ‘seen in the West as the setting of ‘“A Thousand And One Nights”, a mystical city that evoked adventure, glamour, unimaginable riches and sensual intrigue.’ As Anthony Sattin pointed out in the
‘Capital to a vast and wealthy empire that rivaled Byzantium in art, architecture, mathematics, medicine and literature’ Observer, Baghdad has always been a place of extremes, a ‘city of peace, and love, and blood, and spilled guts’. Under the 8th-century caliphate of Harun al-Rashid, the city became the apogee of Islamic civilisation at a time when Europe was still in the Dark Ages. Baghdad was capital to a vast and wealthy empire that rivaled Byzantium in art, architecture, mathematics, medicine, literature and military might. The travel writer and historian Justin Marozzi knows his subject well and, according to Ali Allawi in the Spectator, he has ‘trudged the streets and visited the monuments and landmarks even where they have been reduced to rubble.’ The result, wrote Allawi, ‘is a brilliant, evocative and erudite retelling of the history of this most intriguing of cities.’ Marozzi worked in the city after the fall of Saddam, helping to establish a centre for war-hit Iraqis. His chapters
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Baghdad: city of extremes on modern Baghdad are wrote Sattin, ‘Condensed, intense and fascinating’. Centuries after Harun al-Rashid, Saddam Hussein’s professionally-trained torturers maintained order through the use of hooks, acid, electric shocks, saws, and skewers. ‘The US-led invasion may have been a disaster, but anyone still advocating Saddam as a viable alternative for Iraq needs to read Marozzi’s description of Saddam’s tenure just to be reminded at what price Baathist “order” came’, Loyd concluded.
Autumn 2014
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HISTORY
Village of Secrets:
Defying the Nazis in Vichy France Caroline Moorehead
(Chatto & Windus 374pp £20 Oldie price £18 HB) EDWARD STOURTON described in the Times the ‘village of secrets’ that is at the centre of Caroline Moorehead’s new book: ‘Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, lies in one of France’s most forbidding landscapes where winter lasts from October to April.’ Stourton, himself the author of a recent book on the wartime refugees who escaped across the Pyrenees, noted that Albert Camus arrived in the village in 1942, hoping to cure his tuberculosis, and worked there on his famous novel The Plague. ‘It was this inhospitable terrain, paradoxically, that made it possible for its inhabitants to offer hospitality to so many refugees from the Germans and Vichy France.’ There are claims that 3,000 Jews and others were hidden in Le Chambon and other local villages; Moorehead believes the figure is closer to 800, but that another 3,000 may have been helped on their way to safety. There were many heart-in-mouth efforts to get groups of refugees across the heavily guarded border to Switzerland. Some villagers paid a heavy price; Marianne Cohn, caught smuggling 28 children across the border, was tortured and beaten to death with a shovel. For Stourton the emotional heart of the book beats in the children’s stories. Moorehead draws vivid portraits of those who helped to spirit hundreds of children off to the plateau’s farms and hostels. ‘They would frequently have to be hidden in barns, in cupboards, out in the snowy woods’, wrote Sinclair McKay in the Daily Telegraph. And in the Spectator, novelist and biographer Alan Judd had a discomfiting question for those who were spared the trials of occupation. ‘Would you risk your own children’s lives to save a stranger’s children? Perhaps the most honest answer is silence. We may feel we need no reminders of that prolonged awfulness, but we need books like this to make it impossible for us to forget.’
Women of the World: The Rise of the Female Diplomat Helen McCarthy (Bloomsbury 416pp £25 Oldie price £22.50 HB) WOMEN’S INVOLVEMENT in global politics is hardly new. ‘Women served with distinction in diplomatic roles during the two World Wars, and the Foreign Office was happy to make use of the talents of mavericks such as intrepid travellers Gertrude Bell and Freya Stark,’ Jane Shilling reminded us in the Daily Mail. But it was not until 1946 that women’s entry into the diplomatic service was approved – with, as Eliza Manningham-Buller, former Director-General of MI5, pointed out in the Spectator, the ‘cruel condition which lasted for another 27 years. If they had the temerity to marry, they would have to resign.’ In a story told, according to Susan Pedersen in the Guardian, with ‘nicely restrained outrage’, Helen McCarthy
gives an account of what Catherine Philp in the Times called ‘the often jawdropping machinations of the British establishment and the Foreign Office to keep women out of the ultimate boys’ club’. One male diplomat in the 1930s complained that ‘since on theoretical grounds it may be easy to justify the admission of women, it is becoming clear that we must stress the practical objections’. McCarthy’s book covers the ground exhaustively but Manningham-Buller found herself ‘getting scratchy at minor errors — titles and the like’, which Miranda Seymour in the Sunday Times also found irritating: ‘A persistent disregard for these diplomatic niceties mars what remains otherwise an admirable if slightly tedious book.’
World Without End: The Global Empire of Philip II Hugh Thomas (Yale University Press 464pp £30 Oldie price £27 HB) THE THIRD VOLUME of Hugh Thomas’s 2,000-page history of imperial Spain is a colossal work of synthesis. It has to be. Philip II was a ruler who thought big: king of Spain, the Netherlands, Portugal, South America and Jerusalem, he was briefly king of England (through his marriage to Mary I) and also had designs on China. Did Thomas bring his literary armada safely into port? Reviews were respectful but cautious. ‘Hugh Thomas can seem dazzled by it all, too, as well as slightly overwhelmed by how much he has to tell us,’ warned Jeremy Treglown in the Telegraph. In the Guardian, though, Anthony Pagden thought Thomas ‘has a very good story to tell about the exciting, often atrocious story of what enlightened Spaniards in the 18th century looked on as their compatriots’ insatiable passion for conquest.’ The Spectator’s Malcolm Deas noted archly that Thomas ‘dearly loves a conquistador’ and is ‘also partial to grandees’, but admitted that ‘his concluding argu-
ments are well-made’: in many respects, with regard to Empire, the Anglo-Saxons were the Spaniards’ inferiors. More wholehearted was Christopher Silvester in the Financial Times: ‘Literary power is a vital part of a great historian’s armoury. As in his earlier books, Thomas demonstrates here that he has this in abundance’, he purred.
Philip II: large horizons
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MODERN LIFE Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace Nikil Saval
Nikil Saval’s hipsterish social history takes an interest in what it claims is the under-explored genealogy of whitecollar life: from the rise of the clerkocracy in the 19th century to the company man of the 21st century, ‘meerkatting’ up from his Dilbert-decorated workstation in an air-conditioned cubicle-farm. From Melville’s Bartleby to Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs, Saval looks at the architectural styles, political movements and management theories that nourished and/or starved the office worker throughout his (and her) history. Sam Leith in the Guardian admired Saval’s ‘debunking temper’, ‘well-marshalled statistics’ and ‘line in aphoristic character sketches’, noting with dismay that ‘the concurrent inventions of air-conditioning, the fluorescent lightbulb and the suspended ceiling are to office life what barbed wire and the machine gun were to trench warfare’. Richard Sennett in the New York Times found the book ‘a pleasure to read: beautifully written and clearly organised. Since many Americans now, women as well as men, spend more than half their waking hours at work, it’s also an important exploration.’ The Financial Times’s Lucy Kellaway was a little less impressed with Saval’s anti-corporate schtick. ‘The trouble with so much negativity is not just that it is relentless but one doesn’t necessarily feel inclined to take Saval’s word for it’, she wrote. ‘Scott Adams, that better-known cubicle-hater and
PHOTO: Templeton Elliot/Flickr
(Doubleday 288pp £20 Oldie price £18 HB)
‘A workstation in an air-conditioned cubicle-farm’ creator of the Dilbert comic strip, worked for many years in a big company and once said: “Me, I’ve gnawed an ankle or two.” Saval, whose day job is at n+1, a small literary magazine, simply hasn’t gnawed enough ankles.’
The Shape We’re In: How Junk Food And Diets Are Shortening Our Lives Sarah Boseley
(Guardian Faber, 310pp £12.99, Oldie price £11.69 PB) The Guardian’s health editor investigates why we are becoming an obese nation and what can be done about it. As Joanna Blythman wrote in the Observer: ‘Boseley’s disturbing book will leave you in no doubt that the gloomiest predictions of a massive, looming obesity epidemic have been realised: sixty percent of people in the UK are overweight; a quarter of us are obese.’ Arifa Akbar in the Independent recognised that Boseley ‘efficiently summarises the main debates, from
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obesity’s connection to poverty/wealth to the political rhetoric around “fat tax” and fad dieting.’ Boseley’s case is that the high-calorie culprits – sugary soft drinks, fast food and convenience meals – are most accessible to the poor and are often aggressively sold to children. Her solutions include whole-community efforts to promote healthy eating and exercise, with subsidies on fresh vegetables alongside health warnings on sugar-laden cereals and biscuits. As Akbar stated: ‘She also draws our eye to powerful market forces that lure us to overeat.’ Boseley’s villains include advertising that promotes all-day snacking over regular family meals and buffet-style restaurants (fewer staff, bigger servings). But Blythman argued that Boseley ‘weakens her attack by choosing worst-case examples’ and by lack of distinction. ‘“Fat is a problem”, she tells us bluntly, damning the lamb chop from grass-fed sheep along with the KFC chicken nugget. It is a pity that Boseley did not consult a broader range of health commentators.’
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Book world
Hack Attack: How the Truth Caught Up With Rupert Murdoch Nick Davies (Chatto & Windus, 448pp £20 Oldie price £18 PB)
‘IT IS AN ODD THING about newspapers, that they live by exposure, yet they keep their own worlds concealed,’ Guardian journalist Nick Davies pointed out in his account of the phone hacking scandal. It was Davies who first exposed the pivotal stories in the scandal, including that of the hacking of Milly Dowler’s mobile phone. This revelation prompted the Leveson Inquiry that finally ended with Andy Coulson, former editor of the News of the World, being given a prison sentence of eighteen months. Davies’s Hack Attack is ‘a 400-page inventory of journalistic criminality and official complicity at the heart of power in Britain’, as Erik Wemple described it in the Washington Post. Reviews of the book, notably absent from Murdoch publications, detailed the ‘heartlessness with which the News of the World and the Sun broke people’s lives to push newspaper sales and enforce Rupert Murdoch’s writ’, in the words of Henry Porter in the Observer. As the story unfolded it became ‘less about the hackers, and their victims, and more about the power elite and their arrogance’, according to Edel Coffey in the Irish Indepen-
‘Fear of being “monstered” by the News International press kept many of the Establishment at Murdoch’s beck and call’ dent. Peter Oborne in the Daily Telegraph called the affair ‘a horrifying portrait of the media/political class that has governed Britain in recent years’ and Will Gore in the Independent was depressed by Davies’s ‘blistering account of how Murdoch and his dysfunctional lieutenants ensnared, enslaved, and frightened generations of politicians. His unpicking of Scotland Yard’s early failure properly to investigate phone-hacking is terrific.’ A fear of being ‘monstered’ by the News International press kept many in the Establishment at Murdoch’s beck and call. Dan Kennedy in the Boston Globe noted how fear ‘had an enormously deleterious effect on public policy. Tony Blair, Davies tells us, may have supported the war in Iraq in order to appease Murdoch. It was Cameron, though, who went all in, not only hiring Coulson, but also befriending Brooks and supporting Murdoch’s quest to raise his stake in BSkyB’. Several reviewers, however, charged Davies with being as ideologically driven as those he despises. Gore thought that ‘his real target is neo-liberalism’ and Wemple found that ‘At the tail end, Davies evolves from gumshoe to ideologue, lamenting that his work didn’t reverse the drift toward neoliberal laissez-faire governance, as if he expected it would. “For a while, we snatched a handful of power away from one man. We did nothing to change the power of the elite,” Davies writes, in what may stand as the phone-hacking scandal’s foremost humblebrag.’
Baked beans in a garret JEREMY LEWIS on the writer’s life WE’RE ALL WRITERS nowadays, or so they say – with an army of bloggers, citizen journalists and self-publishers unloading millions of words into the blogosphere every day, one can’t help feeling that writing has become such a humdrum activity that the word ‘writer’ is becoming meaningless. But earning a living as a writer is harder than ever. According to a recent survey, the average earnings of professional full-time writers in this country have declined to around £11,000 a year – a reduction of thirty per cent since the last survey in 2005. There are various reasons for this. Traditional book publishers are more reluctant than ever to take risks with books that may sell only a handful of copies, and although they still lash out (often to no avail) on celebrity memoirs and a tiny group of successful novelists, advances are a tithe of what they were. In the old days, when publishers were cheese-paring but solvent, advances represented a modest proportion of what a book was likely to earn in royalties, but in the 1980s publishers started paying huge advances that bore no relation to sales – which was marvellous for writers, but no good for balance sheets. Ten years ago publishers realised their mistake: the advance for the biography I’m currently writing is a fifth of what I was offered for a comparable book in 1992. Quite right too, the old publisher in me pipes up, but I’m luckier than most: I’m well past retirement age, my mortgage is paid off, and my daughters left home long ago, but if I was in my forties, with children and a mortgage, I could never keep afloat. Nor is the blogosphere paved with gold. One reads occasionally of a self-published author who has sold hundreds of thousands on the internet being snapped up by a conventional publisher, but these are rare exceptions, and most self-published books earn peanuts. The same applies to e-books: Amazon pride themselves on offering those who write for Kindles a royalty of seventy per cent – as opposed to the niggardly 25 per cent paid by most publishers on sales of e-books – but they keep the price down to 99p or £1.99 and, as a reviewer sourly observed recently, ’seventy per cent of nothing is nothing, and most Amazon Kindles don’t sell enough for an author to feed a cat.’ As if that weren’t bad enough, many newspapers have not only cut their rates of pay but have sacked some of their best columnists and replaced them with bloggers, who cost much less and are thrilled to earn a crust at last. The Oldie is a shining exception to the rule, but for many writers baked beans in a garret, washed down with a glass of water, represent the future of the literary life.
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MODERN LIFE
How Not To Be Wrong: The Hidden Maths of Everyday Life Jordan Ellenberg
(Allen Lane, 480pp £20 Oldie price £18 HB)
Infinitesimal: How A Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped The Modern World Amir Alexander
(Oneworld, 340pp £20 Oldie price £18 HB) Latest in the line of books intended to show that maths is All Around Us and, what’s more, surprisingly understandable and also super-fun is American maths professor Jordan Ellenberg’s How Not To Be Wrong. Ellenberg’s jocular real-world examples, hand-drawn diagrams and slangy style seemed to captivate reviewers. Ellenberg’s rival populariser Alex Bellos, writing in the Guardian, generously called his prose ‘a delight – informal and robust, irreverent yet serious’, though he found the humorous footnotes annoying. The Financial Times’s Orlando Bird thought the book ‘strikes a particularly fine balance between rigour and accessibility’. Manil Suri in the Washington Post reported: ‘Part of the sheer intellectual joy of the book is watching the author leap nimbly from topic to topic, comparing slime molds to the Bush-Gore Florida vote, criminology to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The final effect is of one enormous mosaic unified by mathematics.’ The Sunday Times’s James McConnachie saw more than just a pretty mosaic, though: ‘Underlying the playful stories that make this book so gloriously, surprisingly readable,’ he wrote, ‘is a passionate argument for the core
discipline of managing uncertainty in decision-making. Ellenberg’s message is not so much “how not to be wrong” as “how to know how wrong you might be”.’ If Ellenberg asks us to consider how important maths is to everyday life, Amir Alexander looks at how politically and ideologically explosive it could be in the past, tracing the fierce resistance of the Catholic Church in the 1640s to the idea that a smooth line might be composed of distinct but extremely tiny parts. His case in Infinitesimal is that the emergence of the calculus (as that idea became) touched on a whole set of ideas about the relation of Church to state and the legitimacy of political power. ‘Alexander pulls off the impressive feat of putting a subtle mathematical concept centre stage in a ripping historical narrative,’ said Robyn Arianrhod in the Times Higher Education Supplement. Alan Hirshfeld in the Wall Street Journal thought it ‘a vibrant account of a disputatious era of human thought’. The – ahem – infinitesimal number of reviews in British newspapers seems, pleasingly, to suggest that these ideas may still be too hot for the mainstream media to handle.
Selfish Whining Monkeys: How We Ended Up Greedy, Narcissistic and Unhappy Rod Liddle
(4th Estate, 245pp £14.99, Oldie price £13.49 PB) Professional contrarian, bellicose columnist and former editor of Radio 4’s Today, Rod Liddle puzzled critics with this lengthy polemic. He complains that ‘we’ have lost a world – his parents’ world – of moral decency, restraint, hard work and community spirit, and become ‘feckless and irresponsible, endlessly selfish, whining, avaricious, self-deluding, self-obsessed, spoilt and corrupt and ill.’ Does he mean us? ‘The best way to read this book,’ wrote Julie Burchill in the Spectator, ‘is as a self-loathing joke, otherwise the sheer level of sumptuous hypocrisy may choke you: this is, after all, a book bewailing modern-day selfishness by the man who left the mother of his children months after their wedding in order to be with his young mistress.’ David Aaronovitch in the Times disliked the way Liddle ‘buries his responsibility for his own mistakes under a mound
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of accusations piled upon “baby boomers” in general, and upon metropolitan liberals (i.e. people like me.)’ Aaronovitch found he was ‘disinclined, even generationally, to take the rap for Rod Liddle’s adultery.’ Many reviews adopted this ad hominem approach. In the Guardian, Will Self assured readers he’d liked meeting Liddle down the years but found here ‘a man condemned out of his own mouth … Throughout the book he notes people’s ethnicity or religion or sexuality where it isn’t necessary, and he uses descriptors that verge on the pejorative: “hardfaced post-Soviet babe”, “spastically useless”, “tribe” (with reference to the Muslim community), which he presumably imagines can be passed off as some sort of jeu d’esprit.’ Still, Self sententiously concludes, ‘I can’t find it in my heart to dislike the man. I think there’s good in him.’
Autumn 2014
5/9/14 14:30:00
RURAL LIFE Meadowland:
On Silbury Hill
The Private Life of an English Field
Adam Thorpe
John Lewis-Stempel (Doubleday 294pp £14.99 Oldie price £13.49 HB) JOHN LEWIS-STEMPEL charted a year in the life of a field on his farm in Herefordshire. He found it seething with activity. As Tom Cox in the Observer put it: ‘Books have been written about entire countries that contain a less interesting cast of characters than in LewisStempel’s account of one field.’ Cox went on: ‘Not every English meadow contains such a vast variety of wildlife as Lewis-Stempel’s, and he’s lucky to live somewhere so unspoilt, but his immense, patient powers of observation – along with a flair for the anthropomorphic – mean he is able to offer a portrait of animal life that’s rare in its colour and drama.’ Bel Mooney in the Daily Mail thrilled to Stempel’s depiction of nature’s
tooth and claw, gushing: ‘The cow’s foot tramples the newborn young of a tiny rodent, badger and fox prey on ducklings and baby hedgehogs alike, magpies are always in search of eggs to stab with pitiless beaks.’ Many reviewers pointed out that Lewis-Stempel dislikes modernity with its distracting technologies. Angus Clarke in the Times found Meadowland ‘generously studded with raisins of curious information, but ultimately it is an elegy’. In the Spectator, John Akeroyd found the author ‘didactic but gently so’, but in the Guardian, Tim Dee, author of Four Fields, was irked by the ‘abrasive jibes about the modern world’: ‘As though he is auditioning to be agricultural story editor on The Archers.’
The Hunt for the Golden Mole: All Creatures Great and Small and Why They Matter
(Little Toller Books 227pp, £15 Oldie price £15 HB) ‘Silbury Hill must have been unimaginably colossal, since nothing else man-made came anywhere near. She was probably as white, when completed, as the dome of the Taj Mahal – not with marble, but with ungrassed chalk. To visitors seeing her for the first time, she would have seemed otherworldly, miraculous, impossibly smooth and asymmetrical: like a vast upturned bowl. It is probable that the scooped-out ditch left around her by the construction was naturally flooded, like a moat, giving her a mirroring surround. Oddly, almost incredibly given our surfeited imagination, our overloaded Dubai-busy cortex – her heap of grassy chalk still seems otherworldly. She rears up quite abruptly as you drive westward on the A4 (or the ‘Bath Road’) from Marlborough, slightly sunken beyond the spur that the road has followed for at least 2,000 years, and always surprising.’
How Many Camels Are There in Holland?
Richard Girling (Chatto & Windus. 320pp £16.99 Oldie price £15.29 HB) AFTER HE READ ABOUT the tiny Somali golden mole, former Times feature writer Richard Girling, determined to track it down. The resulting book is a ‘rousing, fascinating’ study that bursts into life from the first page, said Camilla Cavendish in the Sunday Times. Though his book is framed by his efforts to track down this little creature, his account is in fact much more than that: ‘it is a paean to the wonders of the natural world, to the vibrant complexity of all living things and their intimate dependence upon one another.’
The Siberian Golden Mole
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In the New Scientist, Anthony Barnett thought that the golden mole served for Girling as a ‘fragile, bony compass, guiding his journey of discovery from a chance encounter in a Cambridge library to his final destination at a museum in Florence, where he meets Alberto Simonetta, who made the discovery, and finally views the specimen.’ For Girling, the golden mole became ‘a talismanic ambassador for every small, underreported and under-researched species that was not charismatic, photogenic or camera-worthy.’ Caspar Henderson’s verdict in the Telegraph was that ‘although there is much whimsy in this book, there is far more to it than that’. He went on to say that by exploring the changes in our attitudes to exotic animals over the past 200 years, and surveying the current scene – notably the mass slaughter of elephants in Africa, Girling’s passion may move at least a few readers to action. ‘Even in the face of epic tragedies, the smallest things still matter.’
Fosse cutting at Avebury, on a
ley line from Silbury (1922) Dementia, MaHill and Me
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FICTION How to be Well Read: A Guide to 500 Great Novels and a Handful of Literary Curiosities John Sutherland (Random House 528pp £20 Oldie price £18 HB) has the marvellous randomness of a lucky dip.’ In the Observer, Robert McCrum admired Sutherland’s ‘generous and capacious mind. He welcomes into his catalogue EL James (Fifty Shades of Grey), Dennis Wheatley (The Devil Rides Out) and JK Rowling (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hal-
For John Sutherland, Dear Cert by Dick Francis nestles happily next to Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
‘WHAT THE TITLE PROMISES IS NOT found inside,’ warned Christopher Howse in the Spectator. ‘It is a tease.’ John Sutherland, despite being Emeritus Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London, does not regard himself as ‘well read.’ He writes in his introduction: ‘In my view, literature is a library, not a curriculum or a canon.’ His intention is to celebrate the ‘common reader’ and help him or her ‘think big’ about novels. Sue Magee on The Bookbag website was delighted to find that ‘the entries are listed alphabetically by title. The result
lows)… His critical judgments are not bad, either. Reducing If This is a Man or Moby-Dick to a few hundred words is no picnic, and his pithy summaries are generally on target.’ Howse also liked Sutherland’s unconcern about ‘the highbrow/lowbrow division’ and enjoyed the way that ‘Dead Cert (1962) by Dick Francis nestles happily next to Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol.’ He thought that Sutherland invites disagreement: ‘He is right to warn against allegorising The Hobbit, but who would call the story “intensely enjoyable”? Its merit surely lies in its myth-making. Then, although he acknowledges that humour, “like milk, goes off very quickly”, he calls the 500 words on Jim Dixon’s hangover in Lucky Jim “the funniest thing ever written in British fiction”. Is it?’ Ultimately, though, Howse was a fan. ‘Damn the canon, says Sutherland, enjoy a wider vision. The reward is not to find out how to be well read, but how to read well.’
The Stories Jane Gardam (Little Brown 480pp £20 Oldie price £18 HB) ‘STORIES OF ALL LENGTHS AND DEPTHS come from different parts of the cave,’ writes Jane Gardam in her introduction to her own selection of thirty stories spanning as many years. ‘For a novel you must lay in mental, physical and spiritual provision as for a siege or for a time of hectic explosions, while a short story is, or can be, a steady, timed flame like the lighting of a blow lamp on a building site full of dry tinder.’ Reviewing The Stories in the Times Literary Supplement, Sam Byers observed: ‘The template is instantly recognisable: small moments sharply, often painfully noted; swelling emotions quietly, Britishly, muffled.’ Many of the characters are ‘seeing out their days in some poverty and solitude’, wrote Cressida Connolly in the Spectator, ‘occasionally visited but seldom comforted by their resentful grown-up children’. In the Guardian Christobel Kent praised Gardam for her ‘economic vividness’. She also has a gift ‘for placing beauty
on the page and imbuing it with emotion.’ Diana Athill in the Telegraph was impressed by the author’s very wide range. ‘Gardam could indeed write well about linoleum if she wanted to, but what she excels at is writing about the human heart and mind.’ Amanda Criag in the Independent was equally enthusiastic. ‘These are, above all, stories of the kind that one has almost given up hope of encountering in the twenty-first century – funny, affecting, beautiful and with a twist at the end that makes them powerful cocktails in the literary cabinet.’
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FICTION
The Silkworm Robert Galbraith (464pp Sphere £20 Oldie price £18 HB) JK Rowling’s tenth novel is the second published under her crime-fiction nom de plume, Robert Galbraith. Unmasked shortly after the publication of her first Galbraith novel, The Cuckoo Calling, Rowling said it had been ‘wonderful to publish without hype or expectation’. In the Times, Marcel Berlins applauded her: ‘[Galbraith] deserves success in his own right, without help from his alter ego.’ The Silkworm sees the second appearance of the one-legged army veteran turned private-eye, Cormoran Strike, a ‘peculiarly loveable protagonist’ according to the Independent’s Charlotte Philby. He is hired to investigate the murder of a writer whose unpublished manuscript reveals the dark secrets of his agent, editor and publisher, amongst others. The search takes him into ‘a maze of sexual jealousy and literary envy tangled with betrayal, repressed homosexuality and festering ferocities’, as Peter Kemp put it in the Sunday Times. The novel’s setting in the world of publishing gives the author the chance to ‘make hay with the viciousness of the literary world’, as Jake Kerridge observed in the Telegraph, while Harlan Coben in the New York Times enjoyed the way that ‘you turn the pages for the whodunnit, but you never lose sight that these observations on the publishing world come from the very top’. Most reviewers agreed that The Silkworm is a page-turner: ‘almost preposterously compulsive’ for Kemp, and for Val McDermid in the Guardian ‘a calling card for a series that has legs.’ Berlins found that it ‘teems with sly humour, witty asides and intelligence.’ The only discordant note was cast by Robert McCrum in the Observer for whom it is a story ‘that does not merely suspend disbelief but hoists it like an escape artist over an abyss of improbabilities.’
The dark secrets of the publishing world
The Emperor Waltz Philip Hensher (4th Estate 624pp £18.99 Oldie price £17.09 HB) disapproving father to open the city’s first gay According to Leo Hobson, bookshop in the teeth of opposition. reviewing Philip Hensher’s tenth novel Antony Cummins in the Observer was in the Guardian: ‘If Philip Hensher’s equally full of praise for what he describes as latest novel only equalled the sum Hensher’s ‘portmanteau novel’: ‘Does it add up? of its parts, it would still be a cause Some peculiar motifs – blackbirds, parsnips, for celebration. As it is, the five more women baring their necks – tantalise us that it or less discrete narratives, while might,’ adding later that a mark of Hensher’s varying in standard from spectacular success ‘is that you may not care about any to so-so, conduct a mutual running pattern pulsing beneath the surface.’ Hensher commentary, multiplying dynamics, has always been a writer with a magpie’s eye, bridging millennia and resulting in a curious about the world, trying things on this novel that’s almost fizzy to the touch.’ way and that, but Jon Day, in the Financial Hensher’s narrative ranges from Times, was not sure he had entirely succeeded a third-century desert settlement on with the structure of The Emperor Waltz: ‘The the fringes of the Roman Empire to organising principle, loose as it is, depends on 1922, when the ironically-named Philip Hensher, ‘fizzy to the touch’ leitmotif, but Strauss’s “Kaiser-Walzer” which Christian, a young artist, travels to echoes throughout the book, doesn’t quite do enough to tie it Weimar to begin his studies at the Bauhaus, and onwards to all together.’ 1970s London, where Duncan swipes some capital from his
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J R R TOLKIEN
Upstairs at the Party
Beowulf:
Linda Grant (Virago 320pp £14.99 Oldie price £13.49 HB)
A Translation and Commentary (together with Sellic Spell)
‘LINDA GRANT’S PREVIOUS novel We Had it So Good followed a group of friends from their student years at Oxford in the 1960s to the present day, a structure she returns to in her sixth novel, Upstairs at the Party, though this time her characters meet in the “playpen” of a new 1970s university, (never explicitly named as, but understood to be York, the author’s own alma mater).’ So wrote Lucy Scholes in the Independent. At the heart of the novel lies the narrator, Adele’s, fascination with Evie, one half of a gender-
(Profi le 448pp £20 Oldie price £18 HB)
‘In spite of having everything paid for, it seemed their futures were not in such good hands after all’ bending couple known as ‘Evie/Stevie’ by whom everyone is captivated, ‘walking around with an impermeable sheen of charisma’ as Tom Cox memorably described them in the Observer. Later, Adele realizes that ‘she has become a lab rat in a giant social experiment’ in spite of having everything paid for and that their futures were not in such good hands after all, especially after what happened at her twentieth birthday party, the tragic central event to which the title of the book alludes. ‘The trouble is’ summed up James Walton in the Spectator, ‘that this emphasis, while bracing in itself, means that much of the best and most heartfelt writing comes in the first section and that despite its moments of sharp social history and personal melancholy, Upstairs at the Party ends up seeming like a work in which Grant never quite manages to shape the material that really engages her (and us)... into a properly satisfying novel.’
THE HOBBIT-AND-ELF MAN’S literary estate continues to belch out treasures like his dragon Smaug after a good lunch. The latest production from J R R’s Tolkien’s son and literary executor Christopher has edited the great man’s translation of Beowulf -a poem on which Tolkien was an undisputed scholarly authority -- together with an extended commentary on the poem and a couple of fictions inspired by it. There was quite some anticipation ahead of the launch. The poet Simon Armitage said he was intrigued on the basis of Tolkien’s translation of Sir Gawayne, which he described as ‘a masterclass in linguistic chicanery -- Middle English meets Middle Earth’. ‘It is quite something for a son to publish his father’s work in the son’s 90th year,’ was the view of Michael Alexander in the
‘Beowulf is at the root of the romances that have brought Tolkien his following’ Guardian. ‘So this volume is itself extraordinary, but even if it wasn’t, it would be an object of curiosity to Tolkien fans, since Beowulf is at the root of the romances that have brought him his following.’ He warned, though, of a curate’s egg: ‘All parts of this book are good, but some are drier than others’, and of the translation he remarked that the ‘felicities of Tolkien’s version will be evident only to readers familiar with the Anglo-Saxon original’. The New Yorker’s review was unequivocal: ‘It is a thrill’, it said, describing the text as ‘beautiful’ and though ‘not necessarily more accessible to the modern reader than Seamus Heaney’s free translation’, ‘what is won by the archaism — or just by the willingness to sound strange — is a rare immediacy’. The ‘playpen of a new 1970s university’
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M ISCELLA NEOUS The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters Adam Nicolson (Collins 314pp £25 Oldie price £22.50 HB) ‘I SUDDENLY SAW THAT THIS was not a poem about then and there, but now and here.’ Adam Nicolson, who first encountered Homer at school, ‘when his fumbling knowledge of Greek meant that “it was as if the poems were written in maths”’, as Robert DouglasFairhurst told us in the Daily Telegraph, experienced an epiphany in middle-age while sailing off the coast of Ireland. Ian Thomson in the Observer recounted how, ‘he found himself electrified by Robert Fagles’s verse translation of the Odyssey,, whose images of dripping oarblades and pitchers of shining wine seemed as real to Nicolson in 2004 as they must have done to Homer’s own audience.’ In what Thomson describes as ‘a hosanna to Homeric wandering and wanderlust’, Nicolson travelled from Athens to Crete to the Hebrides, pursuing his theories with ‘a swashbuckling,
pedant-prodding vigour’, enjoyed by Boyd Tonkin in the Independent. Christopher Hart in the Sunday Times was thrilled by an ensuing detec-
tive story ‘using for forensics the latest archeology, DNA analysis and paleolinguistics’, to argue that the poems are much older than commonly thought – maybe even 4,000 years old. ‘They represent an anguished communal memory of the period when shaggy, semi-nomadic horsemen arrived in the refined Mediterranean south and subjected it to years of plunder’, as DouglasFairhurst put it. Oliver Moody in the Times found the theory ‘not very convincing’, and Barbara Graziozi in the Times Literary Supplement was not persuaded either: ‘His attempts to trace the poems further back in time are tenuous: he suggests, for example, that the spirals of thought in the speeches of Nestor correspond to the spirals of Mycenaean decorations.’ However, most critics agreed with Hart that this is a ‘brilliant, passionate, world-wandering love letter to Homer.’
Atheists: The Origin of the Species Nick Spencer (Bloomsbury 320pp £16.99 Oldie price £15.29 HB) THE AUTHOR OF THIS HISTORY of non-belief is the research director of the Christian think tank Theos, and one of his purposes is to challenge conventional notions of how religion was undermined by rationalism. ‘Nick Spencer begins his spirited history of atheism with a fairy tale,’ wrote Michael Robbins on the website Slate. ‘Once upon a time, people lived in ignorant superstition, offering sacrifices to monsters in the sky. Then some clever folks used special weapons called “science” and “reason” to show that the monsters had never really existed in the first place. Some of these clever folks were killed for daring to say this, but they persevered, and now only really stupid people believe in the monsters. Spencer’s point, of course, is that this received wisdom is naive nonsense…’ ‘Far from being enemies of religion’, philosopher Julian Baggini wrote in the Guardian, ‘science and rationality were often most enthusiastically championed by men and women of faith.’ Spencer’s book set out three arguments: that there were several atheisms not just one; that atheism was often aimed at enlightenment rather than destruction. For Baggini, the history of atheism ‘is best seen as a series of disagreements about authority. To deny God was not simply to deny
God. It was to deny the emperor or the king who ruled you, the social structures that ordered your life, the ethical ties that regulated it, the hopes it inspired and the judgment that reassured it.’ But Baggini was sceptical: ‘It is a false choice to say that the battles must “really” be political or metaphysical; the messy reality is that they are a jumble of both.’ The name of Richard Dawkins inevitably came up in reviews. Michael Robbins took a swipe at the ‘slapdash knownothingism of today’s modish atheism.’ And Charles Moore in the Daily Telegraph opined that the New Atheists ‘believe they have brilliantly proved religion to be a load of hogwash. In their minds, it seems an advantage that their creed does not appeal as much to women or the poor and ignorant.’
August 2014
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OBITUARY
Goldeneye: Where Bond was Born Matthew Parker (Hutchinson 388pp £20 Oldie price £18 HB)
JUST WHEN WE THOUGHT the James Bond publishing machine could spew out no more books, here is one about Ian Fleming’s magnificent home in Jamaica – Goldeneye, which gave its name to the Bond film of 1995. Fleming loved Jamaica – ‘it cast its spell over him as soon as he arrived
‘Ian Fleming’s house in Jamaica offered guests an alluring combination of British empire order and exotic excitements’ there in 1943 as a dashing young naval commander,’ according to Robert McCrum in the Observer, The island was, for Fleming, an alluring combination of British empire order and exotic excitements. The house was not as luxurious as one might imagine, wrote Ian Thomson in the Financial Times – ‘Goldeneye, nose and throat’, as Noel Coward put it, and the food ‘tasted of armpits’. But it was nonetheless a change from drab wartime Britain and illustrious guests flocked there to enjoy the ‘voluptuous lifestyle’ and nude sunbathing encouraged by the Flemings. Parker’s book details the excesses and analyses the Bond novels. This is, wrote Damian Whitworth in the Times,, ‘an enjoyable, sun-soaked, alcohol-sodden addition to the ever-rising pile of Bond literature.’
Nadine Gordimer 1923-2014
SHE STOOD ONLY five-feet-one but as a writer and a political fighter she was Amazonian. When Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer died on 13 July, aged ninety, obituarists praised both her literary achievements and her tireless fight for the liberation of black people in her native South Africa. Many reached for images from the natural world. ‘She was ageless,’ wrote Margaret Atwood in the Guardian, ‘like one of those very old, tiny trees in the Arctic, gnarled and tough as a nut, but nonetheless evergreen.’ To the Economist obituarist. ‘She looked beady. Like a bird, a starling perhaps. Or a puffback from the South African veldt.’ She wasn’t in fact, of South African stock. Her father was a Latvian immigrant watchmaker, her mother English bourgeoisie. The young Nadine was home-schooled from the age of ten because of a suspected heart condition, in an atmosphere ‘oppressed by secrets and unspoken longings’ and made bearable only by what she called ‘a certain dour tact.’ As Atwood observed, ‘books became her friends.’ In her twenties, at the University of Witwatersrand, Gordimer met black people for the first time, and linked up with two students who became Nelson Mandela’s lawyers. She became a lifelong friend of Mandela and helped write his defence speech at his 1964 trial. In Gordimer’s first novel,
‘She was like one of those very old, tiny trees in the Arctic, gnarled and tough as a nut, but nonetheless evergreen’
Under the bougainvillea: Goldeneye
The Lying Days, young, white Helen Shaw encounters the hovels of the Johannesburg poor in a time of riot. The book revealed a major Gordimer theme – how private lives are bent out of shape by political forces. The New York Times called it ‘longer, richer and intellectually more exciting’ than Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country. She joined the ANC (then illegal) and she and her second husband sheltered its president, Albert Lithuli, in their house. She spoke out against censorship and three of her books were banned. After apartheid ended, Gordimer went on writing against political injustice – especially the treatment of women – into her seventies and eighties. But she turned down the Orange Prize because it excluded men. Gordimer won many prizes, including the Booker in 1974 for The Conservationist. Part of her Nobel money went to fund the Congress of South African Writers, which she co-founded. Atwood praised her ‘talent, her dedication, her fearlessness, her ferocity’, She concluded, ‘What a large presence she has been, for almost a century, and how her brave, incisive voice will be missed.’
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MISCELLANEOUS
Everyman’s Castle: The story of our Cottages, Country Houses, Terraces, Flats, Semis and Bungalows Philippa Lewis (Frances Lincoln 264pp £20 Oldie price £18 HB) ‘OUR HOMES DEFINE US’, A N Wilson opined in the Daily Telegraph. In Everyman’s Castle, Philippa Lewis has written the story ‘how the British psyche can be read through our buildings’, as Michael Prodger put it in the Guardian. The British obsession with housing is well-documented, and Lewis’s book is, as Amanda Herries wrote in the Spectator, ‘a paean to the British passion for their very own “castle”.’ Herries admired this ‘stream of commentary culled from an astonishing range of literary references interwoven with hard facts’, and the way that ‘one paragraph can range from the desirability of the inglenook as central to cottage life through the Grand Tour to the welcome introduction of plumbing in a great house, commenting, in passing, on the reckless extravagance of the “mansion” builder.’ Prodger found it interesting ‘just how quickly attitudes to different building types changed’, and saw the book as ‘a story of attitudes as much as architecture’. He took as an example the cottage. ‘In the 16th century Francis Bacon described cottagers as simply “housed beggars”’, while by 1904 ‘today’s cottage weekenders were already an established caste … when Modern Cottage Architecture offered designs for buildings that could be run “with just one servant”.’ Wilson delighted in ‘a glorious chapter’ on bungalows, and related how the first bungalows, built on the Kent coast in the late 19th century, were seen as radical. ‘The one-storey dwelling attracted the sort of women who would join the Rational Dress Society, discarding the burdens of patriarchal attitudes together with corsets, high heels and religion.’ Indeed, to Wilson, ‘every word of this chapter, which draws on a rich miscellany of novels, old photographs, letters and newspapers, made me want to live in a bungalow: above all in a prefab.’
BOOKSHOP
‘A paean to the British passion for their own castle’
HOW TO ORDER THE BOOKS IN THIS ISSUE **Please note new details** By telephone: just call 01326 555 762 By post: please send a cheque payable to ‘The Oldie Bookshop’ to the following address: The Oldie Bookshop, PO BOX 60, Helston TR13 0TP Don’t forget to include your full contact details and the list of books you would like Prices do not include postage and packaging UK p+p is £1.10 on every order
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Repr int s Our choice of recently reprinted books BHOWANI JUNCTION by John Masters (Souvenir Press £9.99 Oldie price £8.99 PB) John Masters was a retired general whose family had lived and worked in India for five generations, and after the war he embarked on a new career as a best-selling novelist, becoming a huge name in the 1950s with his fast-moving accounts of life in the Raj. He is an almost forgotten figure, but the ever-enterprising Ernest Hecht of the Souvenir Press has reissued four of his novels in paperback. Bhowani Junction, published in 1954, is set in a railway town in the turbulent months leading up to independence. Its heroine is a beautiful Anglo-Indian girl, born and brought up in India and, like so many of her kind, inhabiting an uneasy limbo between the Indian subjects and their British rulers; and the social, sexual and political tensions implicit in her condition are brilliantly and sympathetically evoked as she struggles to decide where her loyalties lie. The Nightrunners of Bengal, The Lotus and the Wind and The Deceivers are also available from Souvenir at £9.99 each.
DOWN THE RIVER by HE Bates (Little Toller Books £10 Oldie price £10 PB) Master storyteller H E Bates, who died in 1974, was born at the beginning of the twentieth century in Northamptonshire. His childhood home was within reach of two rivers: the Nene and the Ouse. ‘I could almost reach out with my two hands’, he writes in Down the River, ‘ and touch those twin but quite dissimilar streams’. First published in 1937, this is Bates’ lyrical tribute to river life (specifically its animal and plant life: he is notably unimpressed by the human beings he meets along the way). Although, in the words of Charles RangeleyWilson, who has written the introduction to this beautifully produced reprint, it is ‘lightly dusted with romantic pastoral’, H E Bates is a close observer of nature. And he does write so evocatively: here he is on swans: ‘And in these floods of ours, on the grey acres of water under the wintry skies, it was in its element. It had space, background. It gave them a final touch of permanency. Its air of superb tradition was transposed to the waters themselves, until it seemed as though both swans and floods had been there forever’. The original woodcuts by Agnes Miller Parker, reproduced in this new edition, are lovely too.
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OLD FRIENDS AND NEW FANCIES by Sybil Brinton (Hesperus £8.99 Oldie price £8.09 PB) Imagine every character in Jane Austen’s novels rushing about with matchmaking on their minds and you’ll have some idea of the plot of Old Friends and New Fancies. First published in 1914, Sybil Brinton’s was the first attempt at a sequel to a Jane Austen novel – and she has hurled everything and everyone into a sparkling mix. The plot involves the attempts by Elizabeth Darcy (née Bennet) to find a wife for her husband’s cousin, Matchmaking on their minds the taciturn but honourable Colonel Fitzwilliam, but the chief pleasure of the book is the reappearance of Austen’s least likeable characters, all throwing obstacles in the path of true love – including Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Sir Walter Eliot and the simpering Lucy Steele. A collector’s piece for Austen-bibbers and a contender surely for a Boxing Day telly extravaganza.
Autumn 2014
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