Review of Books ISSUE 30 WINTER 2014
R E V I E W
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What the critics said OVER 50 OF THE BEST BOOKS FROM THE LAST QUARTER INCLUDING: Andrew Roberts, Rachel Cusk, Alan Johnson, Howard Jacobson, Jessie Burton, Grayson Perry, Walter Isaacson, Alison Light, Clare Balding, Eimear McBride, Lena Dunham, Edward Ardizzone, Owen Jones, Dave Goulson, Vladimir Nabokov, Janice Hadlow, David Walliams… and many more.
Awful auntie: children’s books The birds and the bees Waterloo round-up Dusty, Lena and Clare: female icons A ROUND-UP OF REVIEWS • NOT JUST THE BESTSELLERS
CONTENTS
Review of Books
I N T H I S I S S UE 4. CHILDREN Awful Auntie David Walliams; The Parent Agency David Baddiel; Daisy Saves the Day Shirley Hughes; Willie’s Stories Anthony Browne; Space Song Rocket Ride Sunny Scribens; The Time-Travelling Sandwich Bites Back Matt Brown; The Carey Novels Ronald Welch
6. BIOGRAPHY ISSUE 30 WINTER 2014
NOT FORGETTING... IMPORTANT TITLES RECENTLY REVIEWED IN THE OLDIE
• The Mad
Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother and Me by Sofka Zinovieff
• The Longest
Afternoon by Brendan Simms
Augustus Adrian Goldsworthy; Beethoven Jan Swafford; Thomas Cromwell Tracy Borman; Napoleon the Great Andrew Roberts; Young Lawrence Anthony Sattin; Joan of Arc: A History Helen Castor; Peter Levi Brigid Allen; Letters to Véra Vladimir Nabokov; Operation Sealion Leo McKinstry; A Common People Alison Light; Please, Mr Postman Alan Johnson
by Nina Stibbe
• Soviet Space Dogs Extraordinary Life of the 16th Earl of Huntingdon by Selina Hastings
COVER ILLUSTRATION BY ARTHUR ROBINS
Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh by John Lahr
• An Encyclopaedia
of Myself by Jonathan Meades
18. THE STATE OF THE NATION The Establishment Owen Jones; Private Island James Meek
20. FICTION J Howard Jacobson; The Miniaturist Jessie Burton; Outline Rachel Cusk; A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing Eimear McBride; The Narrow Road to the Deep North Richard Flanagan; The Girl Next Door Ruth Rendell
23. BIRDS AND BEES
How We Are Vincent Deary; Happiness by Design Paul Dolan; Sapiens Yuval Noah Harari
• The Red Earl: The
• Tennessee
Walking Home Clare Balding; Not that Kind of Girl Lena Dunham; Dusty Karen Bartlett
25. HAPPINESS
by Olesya Turkina
by Helen Macdonald
16. WOMEN OF THE WORLD
A Buzz in the Meadow Dave Goulson; Bee Time Mark Winston; The Birds of London Andrew Self; Welcome to Subirdia John Marzluff
• Man at the Helm
• H is for Hawk
Peter Finn and Petra Couvée; The Summit Ed Conway; The Making of Home Judith Flanders; The New Yorker Book of the 40s: Story of a Decade
26. MISCELLANEOUS 12. HISTORY Waterloo: A New History of the Battle and its Armies Gordon Corrigan; 24 Hours at Waterloo Robert Kershaw; Waterloo: Four Days which Changed Europe’s Destiny Tim Clayton; The History of Four Days Bernard Cornwell; Waterloo: The Aftermath Paul O’Keeffe; The Hollow Crown Dan Jones; Weimar Michael Kater; The Strangest Family Janice Hadlow; The Zhivago Affair
The Dark Net Jamie Bartlett The Innovators Walter Isaacson; Playing to the Gallery Grayson Perry
30. REPRINTS The Singing Sands Josephine Tey; Red House Murder AA Milne; Medicine and Duty Harold Dearden; The Local Maurice Gorham
Published by The Oldie magazine, 65 Newman Street, London W1T 3EG Editorial panel: Alexander Chancellor, Claudia FitzHerbert, Lucy Lethbridge, Jeremy Lewis, Brian MacArthur, James Pembroke. Reviews Editor: Lucy Lethbridge Design: John Bowling Reviewers: Geraldine Brennan, Jennie Erdal, Julia Hamilton, Sam Leith, Anna Lethbridge, Lucy Lethbridge, Jeremy Lewis, Brian MacArthur, 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
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CHILDREN’S BOOKS
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OR MANY older children, the literary highlight of the year will be the latest book by David Walliams, Awful Auntie (HarperCollins, 416pp HB £12.99 Oldie price £11.69). When Walliams, the comedian well-known for the telly series Little Britain, turned his hand to writing children’s books, he found himself the most popular children’s author in the country, and sales of his darkly comic books, such as Mr Stink and Ratburger, number four million and are still rising. Awful Auntie is the tale of Stella, whose parents, Lord and Lady Saxby, have been killed in a car crash, and of her dreadful Aunt Alberta, who is plotting to trick her out of her inheritance. Patricia Nicol in Metro found it ‘a delightfully funny, fast-moving country house murder mystery caper that has gothic and ghost-story elements.’ With illustrations by Tony Ross, Awful Auntie is ‘a hoot’, according to Philip Ardagh in the Guardian. ‘Walliams and Ross have created something fun, feelgood and very, very silly.’ Another comedian turned author is David Baddiel, who has published his first book for children, The Parent Agency (HarperCollins 383pp HB £12.99 Oldie price £11.69). Nine-yearold Barry wants different parents and tries out some potential replacements, ‘from the posh Lord and Lady RaderWellorff to the chilled-out Cools and the uber-celebrity couple Vlad Mitt and Morrissina Padada to the sporting Fwahms’, Jon Henley explained in the
How to get rid of your parents
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Dreadful Aunt Alberta is plotting to trick Stella out of her inheritance Guardian. Nicholas Tucker in the Independent found the book hard-going: ‘after finishing its 383 pages readers may well have had enough of Barry and his adventure. Jokes about green bogeys or a village called Bottomley Bottom smack more of desperation than inspiration.’ Younger children will be excited by the appearance of a new book by one of our best-loved children’s writers and illustrators, Shirley Hughes, now 87. Generations have grown up with her characters such as Alfie and Dogger and the cosy world she paints – to Alex O’Connell in the Times, reading Hughes is ‘like putting on pyjamas and slippers after wearing a suit and heels all day.’ Hughes’s latest, Daisy Saves the Day (Walker Books 32pp HB £12.99 Oldie price £11.69), is aimed at slightly older children and is set in Victorian times, illustrated with pleasurable detail. ‘It’s not taught in school but looking is a skill. If you can learn to savour pictures, and see things going on in them that aren’t in the text... I think it’s ridiculous to have pictures removed just because you’ve learned to read,’ she told the Daily Mail. Kate Kellaway in the Observer was delighted by the way Hughes ‘draws the reader in immediately to sympathise with little Daisy sent off to be a maid without any natural talent for housework. Daisy is employed by two elderly English ladies who are visited by their dashing American niece. Daisy’s fortunes plummet then prosper, and by the end of the
Daisy is sent into service picture book you will feel as well-fed as if you had finished an entire and enjoyable novel.’ The new book by former Children’s Laureate Anthony Browne is both a visual and literary treat. In Willy’s Stories (Walker Books 32pp HB £12.99 Oldie price £11.69), we meet again Willy the chimp, thirty years after his first appearance, in Brown’s stunning (and dark) illustrations. ‘Still wearing his trademark Fair Isle pullover and corduroys, Willy is on this occasion depicted as walking through a succession of 12 doors, each leading to an adventure deriving from a children’s literary classic’, Robert Dunbar related in the Irish Times. Adults and children reading the book together will enjoy seeing how many stories they can identify. As
CHILDREN’S BOOKS
sing along to. ‘The song descends from the Milky Way to the solar system to its eight planets to the Earth and then back out to the moon and the stars,’ Kirkus Review explained. Endnotes give details about the solar system and life on the International Space Station. Fans of Captain Underpants and Diary of a Wimpy Kid will be delighted by The Time-Travelling Sandwich Bites
Back, Matt Brown’s second book about his time-travelling hero, Compton Valance (Usborne 320pp PB £5.99). Compton’s time-machine (a.k.a. a rotten cheese sandwich) has been stolen by his brother Bravo who is causing chaos through history. ‘Every single page is lavishly littered with toilet humour’, Books for Keeps warned, which will make it a winner in many households.
Willy the Chimp – a classic Browne told the Sun, ‘I created the book so it would encourage discussion between the child and whoever they were reading with — as well as to inspire them to read other books such as Treasure Island, the classics that are in danger of being forgotten.’ For young children interested in the stars, Space Song Rocket Ride (Barefoot Books 32pp PB £6.99) combines bright illustrations with cheery songs with an accompanying CD to
A space story to sing along to (above) and (right) another Compton Valance tale ‘lavishly littered with toilet humour’
SPECIAL
OFFER
The reissue of Ronald Welch’s swashbuckling historical novels about the Carey family is a cause for celebration The reissue by Foxed Quarterly of Ronald Welch’s Carey novels means that new generations can delight in the adventures of the Carey family from the Crusades to the First World War. Ronald Welch was the pen-name of Ronald Oliver Felton, born in 1909, an historian, and headmaster of Okehampton Grammar School. Felton was an inspiring teacher who knew how to bring history alive and his stories are full of authentic detail. Welch’s Carey novels follow a cast of vivid and well-drawn characters, some fictional and some based on historical figures. This first SPECIEARL selection of beautifullyOFFreaders! bound reprints include the for Oldieoff the atmospheric original illustra£12 set complete tions by William Hobbs. We start with Knight Crusader,, in
which young Philip d’Aubigny finds himself caught up in the fight against Saladin. In Bowman of Crécy, Sir John Carey and the outlaw Hugh Fletcher demonstrate their skill as long-bowmen against the French. The Galleon sees Robert Penderyn, a penniless Carey cousin, foiling a Catholic plot to put Mary Queen of Scots on the throne. The Hawk moves between the tough life of an Elizabethan merchant ship and the dangerous world of the Court, while For the King is set during the Civil War and Captain of Foot in the Peninsular War. Collect the full set, as the next volumes to be reissued take the Careys’ story from the Battle of Blenheim to the First World War. The ‘cubs’ cost £16 each and £192 for the set of twelve. Foxed Quarterly offer Oldie readers £1 off each book and the whole set for £180. To order, email all@foxedquarterly.com or telephone 0207 033 0258. Please quote ‘Oldie Cubs offer’.
Winter 2014
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BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR Augustus: From Revolutionary to Emperor Adrian Goldsworthy
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson 598pp £25 Oldie price £22) ‘Caesar Augustus is arguably the most dominant leader the world has seen, far exceeding the personal control, political longevity and lasting historical impact of Napoleon, Hitler or Stalin.’ So Robert Harris in the Sunday Times set the scene. He was, Harris wrote, ‘the effective founder of the Roman Empire and its undisputed master for more than forty years until his death in AD14; the commander of sixty legions; the sponsor of the arts who befriended Horace and rescued Virgil’s Aeneid for posterity; and the urban planner who inherited a Rome of brick and left it (in his words) a city of marble.’ Brendan Boyle in the Wall Street Journal reminded us that Augustus’s life has traditionally been seen as having two distinct parts: ‘The first act took place in the shadow of Julius Caesar’s death, and Octavian was merely one warlord among many, murderously manoeuvring his way through the gladiatorial politics of a bloody Rome;’ the second act, the years of Augustus, ‘was an era of wise, if somewhat moralising, rule that nourished unparalleled achievements in the arts.’ Despite Goldsworthy’s rejection of
this separation as ‘deeply misleading’, Boyle argued that his Augustus is ‘more riven than ever’ and that ‘somehow, after 500 pages and no shortage of evidence, the man remains elusive’. Nicholas Shakespeare in the Daily Telegraph found that, ‘inevitably, much guesswork is involved trying to fit scenarios onto meagre or obscure facts’ but Harris admired the expertise of Goldsworthy the military historian: ‘This is what really gives his biography its strength and bite: his Caesar Augustus, depiction of Augustus’s relationship elusive emperor with his legions is masterly.’ He also enjoyed the detail of ‘the sheer administrative grind that was required of Augustus to hold his new empire together.’ But in the Times, Catherine Nixey was not won over: ‘Such detail may make good history; it does not make a good book.’
Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph Jan Swafford
(Faber 1088pp £30 Oldie price £27) ‘Not many great men have been arrested as a tramp,’ declared Peter Lewis in the Daily Mail, ‘but it happened more than once to Beethoven, because of his slovenly appearance. He would shout down the police cells with rage, “I am Beethoven”, until he was identified and released.’ On that basis, the entire world of pop music today would be behind bars, but, Lewis continued, ‘such stories encapsulate the problem of understanding him: so great a composer, so impossible and so unhappy a man. Beethoven seems to have lived his whole life over the top.’ So much for the man, but for classical musicians, even today, ‘Beethoven is not so much a single mountain, more an entire range. Over the past two centuries thousands have attempted to scale his peaks,’ noted Richard Morrison in the Times, quoting the author of this magisterial new biography, the American musicologist Jan Swafford,
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‘Not so much a single mountain as an entire range’
who writes: ‘The greater the challenge, the more aggressive Beethoven’s response. His outsized reactions made him a chronically difficult man to get on with.’ Then there’s the deafness, which struck him at the early age of 32, and which he wrote of so movingly in the Heiligenstadt Testament, in 1802: ‘With joy I hasten to meet death for would it not free me from a state of
endless suffering? Come when thou wilt, I shall meet thee bravely.’ ‘In the end,’ wrote the Economist reviewer, ‘Beethoven’s life, for all its anguish and triumph, does not explain his genius, as no life of an artist can. But having read this book, next time you listen to “Fidelio” or the Fifth Symphony or the “Pathetique”, you may feel you understand them a little better.’
BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR
Thomas Cromwell
Thomas Cromwell: goodie or baddie?
Tracy Borman (Hodder 464pp £25 Oldie price £22) Tracy Borman is a chief curator of historic royal palaces and author of two other biographies, but Thomas Cromwell is her first major project and, declared Diarmaid MacCulloch in the Guardian, ‘it’s a crowded field.’ Was Cromwell a goodie or a baddie or, like most of us, a bit of both? ‘Thanks to the spectacular success of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, it is now fashionable to rehabilitate Cromwell,’ wrote Dan Jones in the Sunday Times. ‘Mantel’s Cromwell is a hard-nosed pragmatist redeemed by his deep interior life,’ he continues, and ‘Borman’s elegant biography sticks broadly to this line.’ Diarmaid MacCulloch, however, reckoned ‘she has a tin ear for religion, which is fatal in understanding the motives of a man who permanently altered its official expression in this land.’ He added: ‘The book contains far too many little slips or misunderstandings of the period to inspire confidence.’ Lucy Hughes-Hallett in the Observer agreed: ‘Borman’s text is peppered with “perhaps” and “possibly”; the more she writes “almost certainly”, the more uncertain she seems.’ The Economist reviewer declared: ‘Borman concludes that he “wasn’t all bad”, as he loved his wife and children,’ but, to return to Dan Jones, ‘I suppose you could have described Martin Bormann as Hitler’s “most faithful servant”. But you wouldn’t have wanted either to come round for dinner.’
Napoleon the Great Andrew Roberts
(Allen Lane 976pp £30 Oldie price £27) Where Napoleon’s military brilliance is concerned, biographer Andrew Roberts ‘does him proud’, wrote David Crane in the Spectator, noting that Roberts is ‘equally at home in the grubby world of late revolutionary and Directory politics, vivid in his characterisation and his scorn for the men whom Bonaparte swept aside.’ However, ‘that still leaves the character of Napoleon himself — and that is a big leave. Roberts does not duck any of the accusations of Napoleon’s enemies, but, rather like Hazlitt, he seems so enraptured by the magnitude of the life he is dealing with, the inhuman energy and Caesar-like scope of the Napoleonic reach — the battles fought, the armies raised, the miles marched, the 33,000 letters written, the sovereigns defied, the obsessive micro-management of every tiny detail of French national life — that the immense collateral damage of his imperial ambition somehow never quite gets the attention it might.’
Dan Jones, in the Daily Telegraph, thought that Roberts’s title ‘will have many scratching their heads’, so he offered his own answer to the conundrum: ‘To dive into Roberts’s new book is to understand – indeed, to feel – why this peculiarly brilliant Corsican managed for so long to dazzle the world. Roberts’s book is not just another brilliant narrative biography of Napoleon but is also an essay on statesmanship and a meditation on history itself: a defence of the whole idea of the “great man” against what the author calls in his conclusion “determinist analyses of history”.’ For Andrew Hussey in the Observer, Roberts ‘not only brings the Napoleon story up to date but, with new evidence from the archives and an original spin on the present, makes a compelling case for why we should all read anew about the little Corsican in the 21st century’. Napoleon: ‘Inhuman energy’
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BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR
Young Lawrence:
Joan of Arc:
A Portrait of the Legend as a Young Man
A History
Anthony Sattin (Hodder & Stoughton 352pp £25 Oldie price £22 HB)
Helen Castor
‘I DON’T THINK anyone who has tasted the East as I have would give it up half-way, for a seat at high at high table and a chair in the Bodleian,’ wrote the young TE to his mother when she begged him to return from Syria where he was working as an archaeologist before the Great War; and, as Max Liu writes in the Independent, ‘This note captures the occasionally fusty tone of a book, which reveals young Lawrence, “without the distortions of the legend.”’ But legends shift books and, as Matthew Walter declares in the Spectator, characters like Lawrence have ‘an uncanny ability to move copies’. This new biography deals with Lawrence in his twenties, the period he looked back on later as his golden years, ‘and he might have spent his entire life digging had he not been co-opted by military intelligence, a clandestine appointment that paved his way for his career in the army,’ Walter declares.
‘Sattin thinks he was well suited to intelligence work, not only because he was clever but also because his mind was a secretive one,’ and of course he had many secrets to keep, beginning with the mystery of his origins, not to mention his love for Ahmed, whom he nicknamed ‘Dahoum’ (“Darkness”) ‘and to whom, under the initials “S.A” he dedicated Seven Pillars of Wisdom: “I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands and wrote my will across the sky in stars.”’ Does this study of the young TE enlarge our view of the man as a whole? Walter isn’t sure: ‘for all the interesting material Sattin has collated, I don’t feel as if I understand his enigmatic subject any better than I did before opening his book.’ The earliest known image of Lawrence in Arab dress.
Peter Levi: Oxford Romantic Brigid Allen (Signal 300pp £19.99 Oldie price £19.99 HB) POET, TRAVEL WRITER, biographer and all-round literary gent, Peter Levi was the wittiest and most loveable of men, and he led a more varied life than most: his father was a Sephardic Jew who had converted to Catholicism, and Levi himself spent many years as a devout and dutiful Jesuit before becoming a blissfully married man. Brigid Allen’s biography received pitifully few reviews, but A.N. Wilson more than filled the gap in the Spectator. ‘I met Peter Levi SJ in my first term at Oxford,’ he told us. ‘The warden of my college had asked a handful of undergraduates to meet a handful of distinguished grownups. Elizabeth Bowen, Isaiah Berlin and Peter Levi were at the table. I had never encountered anyone like this tall El Greco priest who talked in
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quick-fire excitement about Alexander Pope.’ Wilson got to know him better after Levi had married Cyril Connolly’s widow, Deirdre, ‘whose excellent cooking and warm love transformed the emaciated El Greco into a fat, jolly, tweed-waistcoated country squire in the space of about a year.’ ‘Allen has told the whole story — from the suburban piety of Ruislip, through the priestly life, and into the marriage, with tremendous acuity and perception,’ Wilson continued, and ‘you could not overpraise this book. It is so punctiliously researched, and so well written.’ ‘Levi was a life-enhancer,’ his review concluded. ‘He had what Belloc called “a spouting well of joy within, which never yet was dried”, and this joyous book celebrates and evokes that beautifully.’
(Faber 352pp £20 Oldie price £18 HB) THERE HAVE BEEN more biographies of Joan of Arc than faggots heaped up to burn her, so a new biography needs a distinctive approach. Helen Castor’s places Joan in the context of the Hundred Year’s War, beginning with the French defeat in Agincourt and showing how the parlous position of the French king Charles VII in his redoubt south of the Loire made him so receptive to Joan’s assurances that God had told her of Charles’s ultimate victory against the English and their Burgundian allies. Linda Porter in the Literary Review wrote that ‘Castor has, thankfully, eschewed exploration of Joan’s physical and mental state in 21st-century terms. Her Joan is not a schizophrenic cross-dresser with menstrual problems but firmly set in a distant age, and her depiction is all the more powerful for that.’ Diarmaid MacCulloch in the Daily Telegraph declared this is ‘popular history at its best: pacy, clear and undergirded with a formidable array of scholarly footnotes. ’ Christopher Hart in the Sunday Times adjudged it ‘sober, serious and compelling’ with ‘just enough colourful medieval detail to bring a whole alien world before us: like the huge pie baked for the Duke of Burgundy’s wedding, “out of which burst a live sheep, its wool dyed blue and its horns gilded, along with a man dressed as a wild beast”.’
St Joan, ‘firmly set in a distant age’
BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR
Letters to Véra Vladimir Nabokov, translated by Olga Voronina and Brian Boyd
(Penguin Classics, 796pp £30 Oldie price £27 HB) ‘Vladimir NabOkov’s wife, Véra, was his first reader and his aesthetic barometer, as revealed by his passionate letters to her, published now for the first time,’ wrote Duncan White in the Sunday Telegraph: ‘In early May 1923, the Russian émigré community of Berlin threw a charity ball. The young poet was approached by a woman wearing a black harlequin mask. She tantalised him by reciting his verse from memory. They wandered the streets long into the night, entranced by each other.’ It proved to be an enduring relationship. It was Véra, for instance, who saved the manuscript of Lolita from the flames. According to the Spectator’s Philip Hensher: ‘The letters, like most letters within a marriage were produced under unusual circumstances. Since the Nabokovs were hardly ever apart, and lived in close domestic harmony, the only times Vladimir would write to Véra were when they were separated by professional duty or for reasons of ill health. Between 1945 and 1965, there are all of six letters to Véra, mostly very insubstantial’. Hensher noted, however, that a
Vladimir and Véra Nabokov, Montreux, 1968 period between 2 June and 19 July 1926, when Véra was in a sanatorium, produced over fifty letters, ‘detailed and absorbing, 100 pages in this collection. Most people’s love letters would not be worth reading: love leads to a narrowing of interest and focus. But Nabokov exercises his precise gaze and begins to give Véra the writer he would turn
into.’ Although Véra remains silent and elusive in this correspondence, as Duncan White reminded us, ‘Nabokov himself wrote of his beloved Flaubert, il brille par son absence – he shines by his absence.’ That might just be the best way to think about Véra’s presence in the poems, the novels and these letters: shining by her absence.
Operation Sealion: How Britain Crushed the German War Machine’s Dreams of Invasion in 1940 Leo McKinstry ( John Murray, 496pp £25 Oldie price £22 HB) One of the merits of Leo McKinstry’s account of Operation Sealion, Hitler’s plan to invade Britain after the humiliation of Dunkirk in 1940, is to challenge the myth that the Home Guard – Dad’s Army – were a bunch of well-meaning nincompoops. Apart from Britain’s massive army, with 1,300,000 regular troops, there were 600,000 Local Defence Volunteers – later renamed the Home Guard by Churchill. While there was at least one man as old as Dad’s Army’s Corporal Jones, the average age was actually 35, John Harding noted in the Daily Mail. Rather than being a bunch
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of well-meaning duffers led by pompous twits, most were former servicemen with sound military knowledge. And although they initially had no weapons and trained with broomsticks, they were soon well equipped with 615,000 rifles from the United States. McKinstry portrays Hitler as less the evil genius of other books and more a curiously uncertain figure who dithered until the great advantage that he had obtained in Europe was all but squandered, added Alex Larman in the Daily Express. Then his dream of a 1,000–year Reich was over. His failure to invade meant that Churchill
was able to win the propaganda war, convincing people to rise above the restrictions of rationing and the suspension of civil liberties, making them believe that, had the Nazis invaded, his countrymen would quite literally have fought them on the beaches, on the landing grounds and never have surrendered. In our self-deprecating way, John Harding commented, we rather forget how ruthless and proficient our preparations against invasion actually were and tend to treat this particular chapter of our national story almost as a joke. McKinstry’s ‘admirable’ book sets the record straight.
BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR
Common People: The History of an English Family Alison Light (Fig Tree 352pp £20 Oldie price £18 HB) ‘THERE IS NO CLOSURE in family history, only the reverberation of a life,’ writes Alison Light in Common People, shortlisted for the prestigious Samuel Johnson Prize. By tracing her forebears and the families linked to them by marriage, the author also maps the shift during the 19th century of Britain’s population – most of whom 200 years ago were part of the itinerant poor – from the countryside to towns and cities. The author grew up in the 1950s, a sixth-generation Portsmouth girl, and the initial idea was to clarify some family folklore as a gift for her father’s seventieth birthday. What she found surprised her and became this book. ‘I loved it,’ wrote Melanie Reid in the Times. ‘Common People is part memoir, part thrilling social history of the industrial revolution, but above all a work of quiet poetry and insight into human behaviour.’ Roger Clarke in
the Sunday Independent agreed. ‘The snapshot images of the industries and occupations her bloodline has brushed are excellent – everything from salt-cod making in Newfoundland to bricklaying in Manchester.’ There is only one reservation. ‘Her handicap throughout the book is the absence of personal documents,’ lamented John Carey in the Sunday Times. ‘Five generations of her family vanished without leaving a scrap of writing behind.’ Evelyn, Alison Light’s grandmother The human colour that characterized Light’s previous book is ‘the author’s energy and enthusiasm’ too often replaced by ‘a head spinning shine through and the book’s pages are blizzard of names and dates’. Even so, ‘packed with humanity’.
Please Mr Postman Alan Johnson (Bantam Press 336pp £16.99 Oldie price £15.29 HB) ALAN JOHNSON’S SECOND volume of memoirs follows his award-winning This Boy which recounted the former Home Secretary’s poverty-stricken childhood in the back-streets of ungentrified Notting Hill. It was ‘unvarnished and absolutely un-self-pitying’, according to DJ Taylor in Prospect. Now Johnson takes up the story in 1968, with the 17-year-old Johnson about to marry Judy, and take up a ‘poorly-paid but comfortable berth at the Post Office’, as Taylor put it. Daisy Goodwin in the Sunday Times had to remind herself that he was writing about the latter part of the twentieth century: ‘The world of the Barnes sorting office now seems as remote from our email era as the penny-farthing.’ Alan Johnson: ‘autodidactic forays into literature’
It was, however, a job with promise for clever young men, continued Goodwin.’The Post Office was one of the few employers that taught you to drive for free, and it was a job you could take pride in.’ The family moved to a council house in Slough, which was, wrote Taylor, ‘a kind of Elysian field – full of friendly neighbours, communal weekend entertainment and, you suspect, a vision of life as the future Labour politician imagines it ought
to be lived, where right old knees ups and trips to Loftus Road alternate with autodidactic forays into literature’. The postal workers’ strike of 1971 was Johnson’s political awakening, ‘when he began to take an active role in the Postal Workers’ Union he was to lead more than two decades later’, Andrew Whitaker told us in Scotland on Sunday. Goodwin found ‘the intricacies of his rise to the top of his union occasionally tedious’, and in the Times Ann Treneman agreed: ‘The writing is as clear and lucid as ever but the subject, the goings on of Barnes and then Slough post office, the intricacies of sorting, the details of rounds, the machinations of union negotiations, do not grip.’ Taylor was more forgiving: ‘“I do understand how soporific that must sound,” Johnson notes of a three-day Postal Workers’ Union rules revision conference in Brighton, “but for me it was truly exciting.”’
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HISTORY
Napoleon’s bold advance became a panic-stricken rout
Waterloo:
A New History of the Battle and its Armies Gordon Corrigan (Atlantic Books, 368pp £30 Oldie price £27 HB)
24 Hours at Waterloo: 18 June 1815
Robert Kershaw (W. H. Allen 448pp £25 Oldie price £22 £ HB)
Waterloo:
Four Days which Changed Europe’s Destiny Tim Clayton (Little, Brown, 608pp £25 Oldie price £22 HB)
The History of Four Days Bernard Cornwell (William Collins, 352pp £25 Oldie price £22 HB)
Waterloo: The Aftermath Paul O’Keeffe (Bodley Head, 400pp £25 Oldie price £22 HB)
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It is landmark anniversary time again, with the bicentenary of the Battle of Waterloo next year. Most publishers are getting their books out early. In Waterloo: A New History of the Battle and its Armies, ex-Gurkha officer and acclaimed military historian Gordon Corrigan is at his best, thought David Crane in the Spectator, ‘on the overall picture of the campaign, on the distinctive character of the different armies involved and on the crucial importance of good or sloppy staff work. He also emphasises the key strategic decisions and failures that led to Waterloo being fought on a battlefield that any French general who had faced Wellington in Spain could have told Napoleon — and did tell him — was architect-designed to play to the defensive strengths of the British infantryman.’ 24 Hours at Waterloo: 18 June 1815 by Robert Kershaw is ‘a gripping, anecdote-packed read, and shows that Waterloo certainly was ‘the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life’, according to John Ingham in the Daily Express. ‘Napoleon’s last roll of the dice was to order his Imperial Guard to charge up to the British ridge in the knowledge they had never been defeated. But on this day of carnage they met their match and Kershaw shows how this bold advance was turned into a panic-stricken rout.’ In the Sunday Times, Max Hastings reviewed Tim Clayton’s Waterloo: Four Days which Changed Europe’s Destiny and historical novelist Bernard Cornwell’s The History of Four Days. ‘Waterloo yielded a magnificent harvest of memoirs and anecdotage,’ he wrote, ‘and the authors use these to vivid effect.’ Hastings praised Cornwell’s excellence ‘on the minutiae of tactics
– “the deadly game of scissors, stone, paper”, whereby 19th-century armies manoeuvred infantry, artillery and cavalry.’ Hastings recommended ‘Clayton to the scholarly, though for newcomers Cornwell cannot be bettered: he offers narrative clarity, and a sure grip on personalities and period’. Reviewing Clayton’s book alongside Waterloo: The Aftermath by Paul O’Keeffe in the Daily Telegraph, Ben Wilson argued that ‘one of Clayton’s strengths is that he makes the fog of war central to the narrative; we are pitched into the chaos and din of Waterloo and, crucially, the three days of manoeuvring and fighting that preceded it. We experience it as Wellington or Napoleon or an ordinary soldier would have done: a series of isolated, terrifying events, shrouded in smoke and confusion. The protagonists respond to crises and improvise their way through; rarely are they in control.’ O’Keeffe’s book is full of grisly details, Wilson found. On the night after the battle there was ‘the noise of hammers and chisels wielded by entrepreneurs who had travelled with the armies and waited for the end of hostilities. They were removing the teeth of dead soldiers, which would be sold to London dentists. The rich crop of June 1815 – “Waterloo teeth” – would be in demand for years because they came from the young and healthy rather than the old and diseased.’ Waterloo became ‘a tourist attraction thick with voyeuristic sightseers eager to buy grisly souvenirs from local looters. The more human remains and bloodied weapons these people saw, the happier they seemed.’ Both books contain ‘anecdotes that lodge in the mind. That is what makes them so compelling.’
HISTORY
The Hollow Crown:
Weimar:
The War of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors
From Enlightenment to the Present
Dan Jones (Faber 480pp £20 Oldie price £18 HB) The word ‘Tudor’ used to evoke the gargantuan appetites of Henry VIII and the steely reign of the Virgin Queen. These days, the factional intrigues and betrayals of Game of Thrones have sparked an interest in similar goings-on a century earlier during the War of the Roses, which led the coronation of Henry Tudor as Henry VII. The Hollow Crown, according to Alex Larman in the Daily Express, ‘tells a gripping and bloodthirsty tale of dynastic feuding between the Lancastrians and the Yorkists’, the result of the mad fecklessness of Henry VI (he spent one battle ‘laughing and singing’). Praise for The Hollow Crown was near universal. Leanda de Lisle in Literary Review wrote that ‘Jones navigates the violence and treacheries
that follow in such vivid prose that everything, even a non-battle, seems incredibly dramatic and exciting. The portraits of the leading women are as richly painted as those of the men, and even the people who appear only briefly are memorable.’ Jessie Childs in the Daily Telegraph found that ‘it is quite a task to sift, select, structure and contextualise the information. There is fine scholarly intuition on display here and a mastery of the grand narrative; it is a supremely skilful piece of storytelling.’ There was, perhaps, an implicit note of criticism in Sean McGlynn’s review in the Spectator: ‘Jones specialises in popular, straightforward narrative history, largely eschewing analysis and anything that gets in the way of his telling a rattling good story.’
The Strangest Family: The Private Lives of George III, Queen Charlotte and the Hanoverians Janice Hadlow (William Collins, 704pp £25 Oldie price £22 HB) The Hanoverians were a fabulously dysfunctional dynasty, making today’s royal family look positively tame by comparison. ‘Every British monarch from George II to William IV bore the scars of the dynasty’s bad parenting,’ declared Matthew Dennison in the Sunday Telegraph, and George III, certain that he lived in ‘the wickedest age that ever was seen’, was clear that his role was to ‘lead by example and oversee the moral regeneration of the royal family and nation. He chose as his helpmate a bookish young woman of superficial docility with a talent for needlework and the glockenspiel, Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz.’ Queen Charlotte spent the best part of twenty years almost continually pregnant, bearing her king thirteen children. Jenny Uglow in the Guardian wrote: ‘Hadlow carefully sets Caroline’s maternal role in context,
with discussions of midwives, breast feeding, the influence of Rousseau and the terrible loss of children. The death of their youngest daughter, Amelia, at 21, hastened George’s final tumble into insanity.’ Uglow admired the book’s focus: ‘The social and economic background is deftly sketched in, and although she chronicles the lives of the wayward royal princes, her particular interest is in the lives of the women: the queen and her six daughters.’ Hadlow ‘is an accomplished story-teller,’ declared Lucy Hughes-Hallet in the Times: ‘arguing persuasively that the British monarchy owes its longevity to an inspired conceptual shift whereby the royal family became identified, not as a power-wielding dynasty, but as a model of domestic virtue, a shift originating within the shockingly dysfunctional family of the first four Hanoverian kings.’
Michael H Kater
(Yale, 472pp £25 Oldie price £22 HB) In some five hundred pages of detailed history Michael H Kater chronicles the rise and fall of Germany’s iconic city. Weimar produced Goethe and Schiller, and was the place where Franz Liszt and Richard Strauss made their reputations. The Bauhaus school was also founded there. But from the 1880s onwards the city nurtured a powerful right-wing reactionary movement and was eventually taken over by the Nazis. Hailed for centuries as the home of poetry and music and liberalism, Weimar became famous for the Buchenwald death camp. ‘Kater makes a convincing case that myth and reality don’t quite match up in Weimar,’ according to Marcus Tanner in the Independent. ‘Nevertheless, at times the business of demolishing the mythology that surrounds the town is heavy going.’ Indeed the author attacks Weimar’s status as a temple to liberal values ‘with a sledgehammer’. If Weimar’s dark side deserves to be exposed, ‘Kater has certainly done that.’ Reviewing the book in the Spectator, Philip Hensher was less severe. The book is ‘highly readable, capable of great wryness and, considering the cultural and political ground it covers, mostly very convincing’. Only when it comes to music is Kater out of his depth, thought Hensher, ‘especially in his account of Liszt’s innovations.’ Hensher also noted that it’s usual for reviewers of books about a particular place to end by saying it makes them long to pay a visit. ‘In this case, though I’ve been to Weimar a few times and have always loved it, the author has rather put me off going again.’
Weimar: myth and reality don’t match up
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HISTORY
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The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA and the Battle over a Forbidden Book Peter Finn and Petra Couvée (Harvill Secker 368pp £20 Oldie price £18 HB) THE RUSSIAN POET Boris Pasternak’s novel Dr Zhivago was turned down by Soviet publishers, so he arranged for it to be smuggled to Milan in 1956. When the Soviet authorities found out, they claimed he had changed his mind and tried to stop its publication in translation. Dr Zhivago went on to earn Pasternak the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 (though he refused to accept it) and the book became an international bestseller. ‘The great lacuna at the heart of The Zhivago Affair is the realisation that Dr Zhivago isn’t that great a novel,’ wrote Christopher Bray in the Observer. ‘Dr Zhivago will always be of socio-cultural interest but not one of the approving notices the book received on publication rings true today. Had Finn and Couvée asked whether the wide-eyed approbation that greeted Dr Zhivago in the West was no more
than a mirror of the agitprop attacks it suffered at home, they might have written a better book.’ Robert Chandler, in the Spectator, thought it would ‘prove a valuable resource for scholars, though few more general readers will want to know the story in such detail. Peter Finn and Petra Couvée catalogue every letter, telegram and meeting’. This did not deter John Carey who noted in the Sunday Times that although the book is primarily about the aftermath of publication, it also reaches back to Pasternak’s earlier encounters with the Soviet authorities. ‘This account draws on a swathe of archives and personal papers, many newly released, including the Kremlin’s own files, and the outcome is at once a galloping page-turner and a stark picture of a nation ruled by terror and unreason, which reads like a sinister rewrite of Alice in Wonderland.’
The Summit: The Biggest Battle of the Second World War Ed Conway (Little Brown, 480pp £25 Oldie price £22 HB) THIS IS THE SECOND book in two years about the 1944 international Bretton Woods conference about economic affairs. The earlier book, Benn Steil’s The Battle of Bretton Woods, revealed that the chief US negotiator, originally a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant, had been a Soviet agent of influence. Now Ed Conway, economics editor of Sky News, re-tells the tale. ‘Any assumption that Bretton Woods was a dry-as-dust meeting out of which emerged the post-War International Monetary Fund, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and a foreign exchange system built around the US dollar, is wrong,’ wrote Chris Blackhurst in the Independent. ‘Any thought that the agenda was agreed in advance and the conference was mostly a rubber-stamping exercise is also mistaken. The picture so gloriously painted here is of a three-week, intellect-sapping, emotionally draining
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roller-coaster, involving 700-plus delegates holed up in a hotel in the depths of the New Hampshire countryside. They discussed, argued, manoeuvred, ate and drank; then they discussed, argued, manoeuvred, ate and drank some more.’ Indeed, John Maynard Keynes, the British negotiator, called the conference ‘the most monstrous monkey-house assembled for years’. Tory MP Kwasi Kwarteng, author of the recent War and Gold, gave praise in the Times. ‘Conway handles the niceties of international economics with great skill. He manages to explain global finance in simple terms, while driving a cogent narrative.’ Richard Toye, writing in the Guardian, broadly concurred with this view, praising ‘an accessible and intelligent work, based on substantial archival research’. He concluded: ‘He does not break much new ground, but his analysis is persuasive and his judgments are humane.’
The New Yorker Book of the 40s: Story of a Decade William Heinemann
(695pp £25 Oldie price £ 22 HB) New Yorker writer AJ Liebling was in Paris in May, 1940 I lunched in a little restaurant I frequently went to on the rue SteAnne, and after the meal, M. Bisque, the proprietor, suggested that we go to the Gare du Nord to see the refugees. M. Bisque cried easily. Like most fine cooks, he was emotional and a heavy drinker. He had a long nose like a woodcock and a mustache which had been steamed over cookpots until it hung lifeless from his lip. Since my arrival in France in October he had taken me periodically on his buying trips to the markets so that I could see the Germans weren’t starving Paris. On these trips we would carry a number of baskets and, as we filled one after another with oysters, artichokes, or pheasants, we would leave them at a series of bars where we stopped for a drink of apple brandy. The theory was that when we had completed our round of the markets we would circle back on our course, picking up the baskets, and thus avoid a lot of useless carrying. It worked all right when we could remember the bars where we had left the various things, but sometimes we couldn’t, and on such occasions M. Bisque would cry that restauration was a cursed métier, and that if the government would permit he would take up his old rifle and leave for the front.
AJ Liebling by Henri Cartier-Bresson
HISTORY
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The Making of Home Judith Flanders (Atlantic, 346pp £20 Oldie price £18 HB) FLANDERS’ SURVEY of the domestic ideal through history and the trappings with which we enhance our basic shelters prompted reviewers to contemplate the home comforts that matter most to us today: indoor plumbing and privacy, it seems. For Viv Watts in the Express, recollections of intrepid childhood visits to her aunt’s outhouse led to focusing on Flanders’ emphasis on sanitation and the lack of: ‘a reminder of how recent are most of the comforts we take for granted.’ In the Times, Anne Ashworth found that the Paris student flat in which her bedroom formed a route to the bathroom was a classic example of the enfilade, in which the nobility were approached through a sequence of
ever-grander antechambers. The French remained attached to the enfilade long after the privacy-hungry British, who started building homes with corridors in the late 16th century. As Lucy Lethbridge stated in the Financial Times, ‘Judith Flanders has many interesting, and sometimes startling, things to say about what domesticity means to us, how that meaning has changed – and how it has endured. As she points out, nostalgia is the presiding spirit in the age of consumerism and has been so since the 18th century.’ The Making of Home has ‘ambitious scope’, Lethbridge said, which ‘necessitates a narrative that sometimes whizzes by at breakneck speed. Flanders is an efficient debunker of myths about fam-
ily, poverty and the past.’ Ashworth particularly enjoyed the change in the concept of the quilt as a celebration of pioneer thrift: long before Martha Stewart, home crafters cut corners with factory-made patchwork pieces. ‘This kind of detail makes the book a delicious yet nerdy treat.’ Watts relished Flanders’ revisiting of Dutch still lives as reliable depictions of home life. Cupboards, chairs and mirrors were rare in private homes but understood by contemporaries as symbols: mirrors meant vanity, maps worldly temptation and a woman sewing had sexual implications. ‘A hugely informative book, and worth reading for the feminist chapter on women’s changing roles alone,’ Watts concluded.
The Carved Room at Petworth House in 1865. From Owning the Past: Why the English Collected Antique Sculpture 1640-1840 by Ruth Guilding (Yale £55 Oldie price £50 HB)
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Walking Home: My Family and Other Rambles Clare Balding
Charlotte Murphy
women of the world Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s Learned
(Viking 304pp £20 Oldie price £18 HB) Based on her BBC Radio 4 series Ramblings, Clare Balding offers recollections of her walks along 1,500 miles of arcane trails in the company of amateur historians, poets, vicars, twitchers, botanists and the occasional eccentric. What they disclose in conversation forms a central part of the book. It is also Balding’s personal account of sharing her enthusiasm for walking with her family, in particular tackling the 70-mile Wayfarer’s Walk with her brother. ‘The introduction to Walking Home is unlikely to give adventurous travellers like Colin Thubron and Paul Theroux sleepless nights,’ suggested Rob Crossan in the Sunday Express, ‘as Clare Balding tells us how she battled a bad back, blisters and even a twisted ankle in the making of this book.’ The real interest, he believed, lies in the landscape itself. ‘It is also
Lena Dunham (Fourth Estate 288pp
where Balding’s gossipy, haphazard prose, seemingly written for family and friends in the style of a Christmas round robin letter, morphs into something more nuanced.’ Most reviewers were won over, however. ‘Another welcome second act from a “national treasure”’ was Viv Groskop’s verdict in the Observer. ‘This is a clever take on Balding’s life and career. Her passion and natural congeniality make the book work.’ Iain Finlayson in the Times agreed. While the ‘meat of the book’ is in ‘yomping the length and breadth of the country with frankly off-thewall walkers’, he recognised ‘the joy of this book’ being ‘Balding’s sheer rapture for life, movement and never shutting up about it.’
£16.99 Oldie price £15.29 HB)
Tip Dunham, Lena’s father, is on record as regarding celebrity culture ‘as a fucked up pile of ridiculous crap’, but like it or not, his daughter Lena is now a celeb in her own right, beginning with her film Tiny Furniture and then the global phenomenon of Girls, the HBO hit TV series, which has made her a household name everywhere. In this book, a series of essays, she claims to be ‘a girl with a keen interest in having it all, and wants her essays to be ‘hopeful despatches from the front lines of that struggle.’ As Siobhan Vivian said in the Pittsburgh Gazette, ‘Her best essays hang upon what Ms.Dunham is known to do best – earnestly recalling her most cringeworthy experiences, sparing no gory, unflattering detail. These despatches primarily take place when Ms. Dunham was a young adult herself, vulnerable, needy, obtuse, self-obsessed’ and, in the author’s own words. Vivian found Dunham franker about her early experiences than she is about what’s happening now. Helen Lewis in the New Statesman agreed, sort of: ‘How much of this is sincere navel-gazing, and how much of it is the performance of the same for artistic effect? It’s impossible to tell,’ particularly when the author admits that she is an “unreliable narrator”. As the carapace of fame around her has expanded, she has shrunk within it. Reading this book, you realise that Lena Dunham has been playing Lena Dunham for a long time.’
Dusty: An Intimate Portrait of a Musical Legend This biography relies heavily on interviews with old friends, lovers and confidants of Dusty Springfield. She started life as Mary O’Brien in 1939 in middle-class Hampstead, her childhood home marked by unhappiness. ‘We none of us wanted to be there,’ she later recalled, and her parents ‘were trapped into being suburban without having suburban minds’. Dusty became a star in the late Fifties but her success could not conceal dark moods, heavy drinking and drug dependency. Though she was sober for the last eight years of her life she died of breast cancer aged 59. In the Sunday Telegraph, Helen Brown was struck by Bartlett’s interview with a former backing singer who looked after Dusty in her last years, which were blighted by OCD. ‘She expected him to sit on the floor
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and insisted he tore all her rubbish into identically sized pieces.’ ‘The root of her problem, this compelling biography suggests, was her sexuality,’ explains Ed Power in the Irish Independent. ‘Early in adolescence, O’Brien realized she was drawn to women rather than men.’ In the Spectator Roger Lewis reminds us that ‘the Sixties was not a fraction as liberated and swinging as people now assume’. As Bartlett points out: ‘Being gay was either a pitiable affliction or an actual mental illness.’ ‘Dusty Springfield emerges from this gossipy new biography as the self-destructive diva par excellence,’ writes Daisy Goodwin in the Sunday Times. ‘Despite her enormous talent and huge success, she ended up earning a living miming to her old hits in West Hollywood gay bars.’
Autumn de Wilde
Karen Bartlett (Robson Press 352pp £20 Oldie price £18 HB)
STATE OF THE NATION
The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It Owen Jones
(Allen Lane 368pp £16.99 Oldie price £15.29 HB) The latest broadside from the author of Chavs, now one of the most prominent young voices on the Left, was always likely to divide opinion. Jones regards democracy as having been effectively nobbled by a cabal of self-interested plutocrats who govern for their own advantage, and whose tendrils of influence run through boardrooms, trading floors, newsrooms and the chamber of the House of Commons. In The Times Higher Education Supplement Danny Dorling admired Jones’s research. ‘Jones’s evidence comes most often from obscure reports that he thrusts into the public eye. However, more revealing are the interviews, his main alternative source of information and the backbone of this book.’ Result? ‘From politicians to the police and security services, the media and the mega-rich, he has damning tales to tell across the board.’ Archie Bland in the Independent agreed: ‘The book’s great strength lies in the simple power of accumulation’. Bland went on: ‘His position as the standardbearer of a youthful alternative to Westminster’s suffocating
consensus seems assured.’ David Runciman in the Guardian thought the book a mixed success: ‘Jones’s Establishment stretches far and wide. It includes anyone who stands to benefit from the free hand that the free-market ideology gives them. The capaciousness of Jones’s account is both this book’s strength and its weakness. Although he casts his net wide, he doesn’t go very deep.’ Others were sniffier. ‘As so often in Jones’s writings, the fundamental flaw is quite simple,’ wrote Philip Hensher, also in the Independent. ‘Like his hero Tony Benn, he has very little innate understanding of human nature.’ ‘Workmanlike stuff with scarcely a memorable sentence in it,’ wrote Dominic Lawson in the Sunday Times. ‘Never mind: if this seems unfair, the author’s many admirers can put it down to me being part of the “Establishment”.’
Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs To Someone Else James Meek
(Verso, 240pp £12.99 Oldie price £15.29 PB) The novelist and journalist James Meek’s new book has its origins in a visit to Russia he made in 1991. As he headed east by car, he says, ‘a racing, expanding tide of victorious free marketism flickered at my wheels, a tide that has gone by many names – consumer capitalism, Reaganism, Thatcherism, neoliberalism, the Washington consensus.’ In this book he discusses what that tide swept away, and the flotsam it brought in. He offers case-studies of the privatisation of five of the big planks of the United Kingdom’s economy – rail, water, energy, the post and social housing – showing how companies in New York or Hong Kong end up
Postman Pat: now in private ownership
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owning water companies in Wessex or Northumbria. The philosopher John Gray welcomed it in the Guardian as essential for anyone wishing to ‘find out what has really happened in Britain over the past twenty years’: ‘One of our finest writers, Meek couldn’t produce a dull sentence however hard he tried. Here he adopts a style that mixes personal observation and memory, travel reportage and interviews with historical narrative and rigorous argument. The result is an un-putdownable book that will leave you with a lasting sense of unease.’ In the Financial Times, Emily Cadman admired this ‘energetic and colourfully told polemic’ but warned that it is ‘a book to read if you want vivid details of what went wrong; it is not a manifesto proclaiming how to put things right. A provocative argument is never fully fleshed out: this is a book that prioritises storytelling over a coherent discussion of what could – or should – be done differently.’ In other words, Meek fails to supply much evidence that public ownership would solve our problems. ‘How in heaven’s name did a policy that was supposed to make our state industries efficient, and owned by small shareholders, leave us with broke-back monopolies owned by foreign governments?’ wondered Iain Macwhirter in Scotland’s the Herald. But ‘while privatisation has been a disaster for the UK, it is not at all clear that all the old state industries could have coped with the competitive pressures of the international markets.’
FICTION J Howard Jacobson (Jonathan Cape 336pp £18.99 Oldie price £17.09 HB) HOWARD JACOBSON, usually thought of as a comic novelist, takes a left turn into speculative fiction with J, a love-story set in a Britain of the near future after an unspecified catastrophe which is referred to only as ‘What Happened, If It Happened’. It becomes clear, as the novel goes on, that this catastrophe was a pogrom that took the lives of 200,000 Jews – the subject of an enormous act of willed historical forgetfulness. ‘Coming from a writer who has railed against genre fiction, J looks like a U-turn,’ said Anthony Cummins in the Observer. ‘The real surprise is how much better it is than Jacobson’s recent novels, Zoo Time and The Finkler Question.‘ The judges of the Man Booker Prize, who placed it on this year’s shortlist, seem to have agreed. ‘Jacobson has contrived to write a novel about Jewishness that smuggles Jewishness under our very noses,’ wrote an admiring James Kidd in the Independent, with reference to the titular conceit. In the novel’s dystopia
the very word ‘Jew’ is unsayable, and the narrator’s father draws two fingers across his mouth when he utters a word beginning with the letter J. ‘J, brutally summarised, is a novel about contemporary anti-Semitism,’ wrote John Sutherland in the Times. ‘But the J-word, the H-word (“Holocaust”) and the I-word (“Israel”) are not once mentioned. One thing it’s hard to miss is Jacobson’s grim thesis that British anti-Semitism is distinctively British. Jacobson has written a subtle, topical, thought-provoking and painfully uncomfortable novel.” Were there dissenting voices? Only of the meekest kind. Writing in the Spectator, James Walton said: ‘For the novel to carry the kind of punch he clearly intends, it needs to be at least imaginable that, within the next few years, the British people could rise up against the country’s Jews, who still occupy “a particular, even privileged place in the nation’s taxonomy of fear and loathing”. For all Jacobson’s skill, it isn’t quite.’
The Miniaturist Jessie Burton (Picador, 435pp £12.99 Oldie price £11.69 HB) RUMOURS OF A VAST advance for Jessie Burton’s much-publicised first novel, as well as its translation into 29 languages, had reviewers sharpening their scalpels in anticipation. The general consensus was that this historical fiction set in seventeenth-century Amsterdam was not quite the new Girl with a Pearl Earring. Burton has taken an intricate Dutch miniature house as her central conceit in a plot that concerns Nella, a young bride, her distant and controlling husband, and a mysterious dolls’ house maker. Holly Kyte in the Daily Telegraph found it worked for her: ‘Dolls’ houses are wonderfully creepy, atmospheric curiosities, and Nella’s particularly so.’ Melissa Harrison in the Financial Times thought it ‘an old-fashioned page-turner, with sudden twists, cliffhangers at the close of every chapter, and an absorbingly unfamiliar and rich period setting.’ The stumbling block for all reviewers was the heroine’s impeccably liberal, twenty-first-century take on things. Kyte found that ‘every kind of bigotry is stuffed in for scrutiny – gender, race, sexuality – which makes for overkill’. For Rachel Hore in the Independent, ‘Nella is a heroine to suit a modern readership, but the nature of her tolerance and understanding would have made her highly unusual for her time.’ At the Observer, Rachel Cook agreed: ‘For all its conceits and
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Dolls’ house of Petronella Oortman, Anonymous, c. 1686 – c. 1710 ingenuity, for all the lovely passages to be found among its pages, somehow The Miniaturist fails to convince. Again and again, I found myself thinking: that would not happen.’ Jessie Burton may be destined for great things, but as Jane Shilling put it in the Evening Standard, this is ‘an apprentice work rather than the vaunted masterpiece’.
FICTION CUSK’S NEW NOVEL: UNSPEAKING GREEK
Outline is described as ‘a novel in ten conversations’, and, as Myerson explained, ‘Our narrator engages in a series of conversations which form the substance of the book. Though “conversation” is perhaps optimistic. Mostly, these people simply unload themselves – marriages, families, failed love affairs – and forget to ask our protagonist very much at all about herself.’ To James Lasdun in the Guardian, the stories were ‘by turns touching, grotesque, funny, mundane’, and he argued that ‘the little vignettes have the very natural-seeming
‘The narrator is a near-anonymous and almost un-speaking female writer who goes to Athens to teach a writing course’
Outline Rachel Cusk (Faber 249pp £16.99 Oldie price £15.29 HB) FEW WRITERS DIVIDE OPINIONS as sharply as Rachel Cusk. Her last book, Aftermath, the memoir of the breakdown of her marriage, provoked both outrage and admiration. In her latest, the narrator is a near-anonymous and almost unspeaking female writer who goes to Athens to teach a writing course, and many reviewers were tempted to identify her with Cusk. ‘We gather that she’s divorced, a mother of two boys, but even these facts are drawn in a kind of indeterminate narrative pencil, as if at any moment they might blur or be rubbed out,’ noted Julie Myerson in the Observer.
inconsequentiality of life, while at the same time resonating with the wider preoccupations of the book: intimacy and estrangement, entrapment and self-regeneration, the idea of marriage as “a system of belief, a story”.’ Claire Harman, in the Evening Standard, was full of admiration: ‘The writing is brilliant: you feel you’ve really been in those Athens streets and restaurants because Faye notices everything: the beggars standing like wraiths near the diners, the couple eating in silence with a handbag between them, dogs flattened by the heat “like women in fur coats who had fallen down drunk”.’ But Lucy Scholes, writing in the Independent, maintained that ultimately ‘more than any tendrils of description or character it was a sense of shape and structure that lingered in my mind long after I’d turned the final page, rendering Cusk’s novel something of a visual work of art, as when a sculptor works to slowly chip away at excess stone to reveal the form they know exists within the single block of marble.’
A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing Eimear McBride (Coffee House Press, 227pp £8.99 Oldie price £8.99 PB) THE STORY OF THE PUBLICATION of Irish writer Eimear McBride’s first novel is the stuff of literary fantasy. It took her nine years to get her radically experimental debut fiction published – and eventually it was a tiny firm in Norwich who took the risk. Since then, as Melanie McDonagh in the Evening Standard observed admiringly, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing has ‘carried all before it’, winning numerous prizes, including the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. The Independent quoted McBride’s publisher Henry Layte: ‘One minute we were three people sitting in a pub wondering what to do and within six months we had this on our hands.’ Reviewers were somewhat late to the table. The Guardian’s Anne Enright, however, still loved it, hailing McBride as ‘that old-fashioned thing, a genius, in that she writes truthspilling, uncompromising and brilliant prose that can be, on occasion, quite hard to read.’ The challenges of the novel, which is written in a Joycean stream of consciousness, were
acknowledged by all commentators. McDonagh declared that ‘to call it experimental is hardly to do justice to its disregard for syntax and fully formed sentences.’ But, she went on, ‘for those who have the stomach to stay with it, there are rewards: the shock of discovering something new and real.’ The highest praise, however, came from the New Yorker’s illustrious critic James Wood, who was enraptured by A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing. Wood found the novel ‘blazingly daring’ and thought that McBride’s language ‘justifies its strangeness on every page’.
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FICTION
The Narrow Road to the Deep North Richard Flanagan (Chatto & Windus, 464pp £16.99 Oldie price £15.29 HB) TASMANIAN NOVELIST Richard Flanagan’s most recent book won this year’s Man Booker Prize. The novel is about 1,000 Australian prisoners of war, forced labour on ‘The Line’ (the Thai-Burma death railway), their commanding officer (military surgeon Dorrigo Evans) and their Japanese captors. Flanagan drew on the wartime experiences of his father, but he also explores the peacetime journey of the fictional Dorrigo, a serial adulterer who has never recovered from losing his one true love. As Leyla Sanai said in the Independent: ‘Dorrigo receives adulation for his compassionate heroism but doesn’t feel he deserves this praise. Part of this may be survivor guilt, the rest because he knows that his private life is flawed.’
Forced labour on ‘The Line’ Thomas Keneally in the Guardian admired Flanagan’s skill at playing with time and memory, tracking the fate of Dorrigo and the Japanese commander Nakamura: ‘Flanagan’s novel is a grand examination of what it is to be a good man and a bad man in the one flesh and, above all, of how hard it is to live after survival. The middle-aged rawness of Dorrigo and Nakamura’s lives is nearly
as painful to read about as the bush surgery of the prison camp.’ Catherine Taylor commented in the Sunday Telegraph: ‘Flanagan’s writing courses like a river, sometimes black with mud, sludge and corpses, sometimes bright with moonlight.’ For Alex Preston in the the Observer, Flanagan ‘takes us deep into the secret heart of the war. Evans, his comrades and the Japanese live a kind of half-life in the shadow of their wartime experiences. In less capable hands these scenes might be mawkish; Flanagan imbues them with extraordinary power.’ Preston warned, however that ‘there are scenes of violence so relentless and brutal that they threaten to swamp us. In one of the novel’s central scenes, Evans recognises the serial nature of this violence, and how it has given shape to his life.’
The Girl Next Door Ruth Rendell (Hutchinson 288pp £18.99 Oldie price £17.29 HB) THE MURDERER who killed his wife and her lover in the early stages of the Second World War and buried their severed hands in a biscuit tin is revealed in the first few pages. Rendell’s 66th mystery is the story of the unwitting potential witnesses – the children who played near the scene of the crime – and how they now meet the challenges of growing old. Kate Saunders in the Times was among reviewers who spotted the psychological depth of a Barbara Vine novel. Saunders notes that ‘Rendell doesn’t need the pseudonym any more’ and that the setting in Loughton, Essex, ‘has Rendell’s hallmark sense of place’. The murder investigation seventy years later reunites the childhood gang, their youthful desires and insecurities surfacing with the grisly remains. Alan, about to become a great-grandfather, ditches his safe marriage for Daphne, who bewitched him in his teens. As Claire Hazelton commented in the Observer: ‘Rendell gives an acutely observed portrayal of old age through her characters’ regrets, losses and bewilderment. Her realism renders
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the novel bleak at times but moving too.’ Joan Smith in the Sunday Times admired how ‘Rendell understands the difference between how people appear to outsiders and their turbulent inner worlds; it is this disjunction that leads to so many of the crimes in her fiction.’ Jane Jakeman in the Independent predicted some readers’ discomfort at Daphne’s almost throwaway Ruth Rendell, ‘Where reportage dares not go’
revelation that as a schoolgirl she had had a mutually satisfying affair with her family’s adult neighbour. ‘Freud swept away notions of childhood innocence but our era has rediscovered it as an absolute canon of belief, unquestioned since Lolita. This book is extraordinarily courageous, a demonstration that fiction can take us where reportage dares not go.’
birds and bees A Buzz in the Meadow Dave Goulson (Cape 266pp £16.99 Oldie price £15.29)
Bee Time:
any one time there are an estimated ten million trillion creepy crawlies all around us’. Mark L Winston’s Bee Time: Lessons from the Hive also Lessons from the Hive contains apocalyptic warnings about Honeybee Collapse. In an article in the New York Times, he listed the ‘thousand Mark L Winston (Harvard 283pp £18.95 Oldie price little cuts’ which have contributed to it: ‘Pesticides applied £18.99 HB) to fields, as well as pesticides applied directly into hives to control mites; fungal, bacterial and viral pests and diseases; nutritional deficiencies caused by vast acreages of single-crop fields that lack diverse flowering plants; and, in the United Andrew Self (Bloomsbury 432pp £50 Oldie price £50 HB) States, commercial beekeeping itself, which disrupts colonies by moving most bees around the country multiple times each year to pollinate crops.’ Temma Ehrenfeld in the Weekly Standard, reviewing Bee Time, pointed out that ‘one study found 121 pesticides in a sample of beeswax comb’. It’s not all doom and gloom for birds. Reviewing John Sharing Our Neighbourhood with Wrens, Marzluff’s Subirdia, Steve Donoghue in Open Letters MonthRobins, Woodpeckers and Other Wildlife ly noted that he ‘opens with a scenario that will be familiar to the vast majority of his readers: sitting at some comfortable perch of the house, watching the bustling, hopping, flapJohn Marzluff (Yale 303pp £18.99 Oldie price £18.99) ping, chirping, tweeting world of birds flitting by outside’. The American suburbs, he noted, are ‘a battleground for Biodiversity is as much about the back garden as questions of conservation and preservation’. it is about the rainforest. This is the message from several In London, though many traditional bird varieties are on books concerned with the insects and birdlife to be found the brink of extinction, others are thriving. Andrew Self’s just outside our own door. There is good news and bad news. Birds of London is a feast of avian Londoners. In the EveSuburban back gardens turn out to be havens for wildlife ning Standard, naturalist Stephen Moss observed: ‘incredibly, but bee colonies are in a state of catastrophic decline. As the not far short of 400 different kinds of bird have been rebiologist Dave Goulson put it: ‘at the global level, conservacorded in the London area – defined here as within a 20-mile tion efforts so far have been a dismal failure.’ radius of St Paul’s.’ Moss went on: ‘As this book reveals you Bumblebee authority Goulson, author of the prize-wincan watch great crested grebes perform their famous “penning 2013 A Sting in the Tale (also about bees) has a new guin dance” in Regent’s Park, red kites soaring over Epping book, A Buzz in the Meadow, examining a patch of land outForest, and most exciting of all, peregrines – the fastest living side his home in France. He finds it humming with insect life creature on the planet – hunting over the South Bank.’ and, as John Akeroyd in the Spectator put it, ‘demonstrates But the story is also one of decline. Mark Cocker in the how indispensable these small, often despised creatures are New Statesman, noted how ‘grey partridges were once all to human existence, and its survival.’ Akeroyd thought that over the capital, including areas such as Dulwich, Kew, Goulson presented ‘an inspirational case for awareness and Chiswick and Wormwood Scrubs. appreciation of the teeming diversity Then began the bird’s inexorable of living things that exists even in vanishing act. Self’s last report is our gardens or the local park.’ of just three pairs in west London The Times’s Ian Critchley praised and even these are thought to be the book’s ‘infectious enthusiasm’ individuals released from captivity.’ and Emma Townsend in the IndeReviewing the book in the Express, pendent was entranced by the ‘wild, John Ingham wondered about Longently meandering bumblebee’ in don’s signature bird, the sparrow. Goulson’s depiction, and noted that ‘In 1898 London had three million there are 24 species of bee in Britain house sparrows, sustained by the alone. ‘He demonstrates how indisoats spilled by horses. Now cockney pensable these small, often despised horses and sparrows are much rarer. creatures are to human existence In the autumn of 1925 Kensington and its survival.’ Gardens had 2,603 sparrows. In In the Irish Mail on Sunday, 2000 there were just eight. There are ornithologist Mark Cocker called A various theories why but sparrows Buzz in the Meadow ‘wonderfully are not helped by being the most entertaining’. He was impressed predated bird in London. Even malby the book’s ‘amazing facts about lards have been seen eating them.’ insects’ dominance on earth’. ‘At Resident in suburbia: the robin
The Birds of London
Welcome to Subirdia:
Winter 2014 Review of Books THE OLDIE 23
HOW TO BE H APPY Happiness by Design: Finding Pleasure and Purpose in Everyday Life Paul Dolan (Allen Lane, 230pp, £20 Oldie price £18 HB)
How We Are Vincent Deary (Allen Lane, 272pp, £16.99 Oldie price £15.29 HB) CAN WE LEARN to be happy? Two authors think we can –it’s a question of breaking the habits and routines that keep us stuck in a rut. According to Professor Paul Dolan of LSE, ‘internationally renowned expert on happiness, behaviour and public policy’, and a man, according to Oliver Burkemann in the Guardian, who ‘knows his way around the Nudge Unit’, it’s all about paying attention. Attention, Dolan writes, ‘acts as a production process that converts stimuli into happiness’. Summarised for the layman, attention ‘is a scarce resource: give it to one thing, and by definition you can’t give it to something else. If you’re not as happy as you could be, you must be misallocating your attention.’ In the Daily Telegraph, Rowan Pelling found Dolan’s book ‘jargon-heavy’,
with too many of his solutions coming from the ‘school of the obvious’, but she was intrigued nonetheless, noting that we sometimes assume we’re happy when in fact we’re thoroughly grounddown and miserable. ‘In other words, people tend to say life is great, because they have a high-paying job and drive a smart car, but fail to factor in the fact they hate the daily grind and sit in traffic jams.’ Vincent Deary, a former psycho-
therapist from Northumbria University, is the author of How We Are, the first of a trilogy on the happiness search. He advises readers to start ‘swimming upstream’ against ‘the prevailing forces of habit, inertia and gradual decay.’ Modest expectations are key, Deary counsels. As the Guardian reviewer pointed out, Deary’s publishers are ‘playing with fire’ in their campaign of pre-publication hype for his book (for which they paid a six-figure advance), ‘all of which sounds dauntingly grandiose.’ Deary writes: ‘Here you are, here we all are, semi-automated creatures in our tram-track worlds, running through the paths of least resistance’. His own life has notably perked up. In an interview in the Observer, Deary told Carole Cadwalladr about the change in his fortunes when he pulled a manuscript from a drawer and showed it to a publisher friend. ‘And it does feel like my life is changing, which is funny because the book is about transitioning.’ Cadwalladr found How to Live, which has snippets of Deary’s life running through it, ‘a book about middle age, for the middle aged. Deary is the subject of his own book, man on the cusp of change. Or, for a lot of the book, what looks suspiciously like a midlife crisis.’
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind Yuval Noah Harari (Harvill Secker, 456pp £25 Oldie price £22 HB) ‘SO HOW DID A PUNY APE emerge from Africa to rule the world?’, asked John Lewis-Stempel in the Sunday Express. As Yuval Noah Harari told Chris Moss in the Daily Telegraph, his new book claims to answer this by challenging assumptions about evolution, history and mankind and ‘deciphering the deeper mechanisms of history, to understand how our reality came to be the way it is.’ According to Ben Shephard in the Observer, ‘Harari organises humankind around four different milestones. About 70,000 years ago, the cognitive revolution kick-started our history, and about 12,000 years ago the agricultural revolution speeded it up. Then came a long process of unifying mankind and colonising the Earth until, finally, the
scientific revolution began about 500 years ago. It is still in progress and may yet finish us all off.’ Peter Forbes in the Independent was impressed by Harari’s bravura: ‘He floats the conceit that wheat domesticated us. What was once an undistinguished grass in a small part of the Middle East now covers a global area eight times the size of England. Humans have to slave to serve the wheat god’. Happiness is a major theme. In the Guardian, Harari opined: ‘Even if you don’t buy into this picture of Pleistocene richness replaced by modern poverty, it is clear that the immense rise in human power has not been matched by an equal rise in human happiness. We are a thousand times more powerful than our
hunter-gatherer ancestors, but not even the most optimistic Whig can believe that we are a thousand times happier.’ In the Sunday Times, John Carey thought this was ‘patently daft’: ‘Knowing whether those nearest and dearest to you are happy is difficult enough, without imagining that you can get inside the mind of some anonymous bushman who roamed the earth centuries ago.’ Galen Strawson, in the Guardian, also found that although ‘Harari swashbuckles through these vast and intricate matters in a way that is engaging and informative, there’s a kind of vandalism in his sweeping judgments, his recklessness about causal connections, his hyperProcrustean stretchings and loppings of the data.’
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m iscella neous The Dark Net:
The crypto-war for privacy in cyberspace
Inside the Digital Underworld Jamie Bartlett (William Heinemann, 320pp £20 Oldie price £18 HB) ‘This is a book about porn, drugs and revolution,’ announced the Times’s Hugo Rifkind of Jamie Bartlett’s book about the murkier corners of the Internet. ‘I throw that up top to hook you in,’ he continued, because it’s hard to make writing about technology engaging. But Bartlett manages ‘with aplomb’. Despite working better as a collection of chapters than a whole – ‘this is more a series of portraits than a polemic’ – Bartlett’s omnium gatherum of online grubbiness – from ‘trolls’ who take pleasure in stealing naked pictures of strangers and posting them with identifying information to their friends, to child pornographers, neo-Nazis and anonymous marketplaces for drugs and weapons – is, thought Rifkind, to be welcomed: ‘The simple fact that he’s managed to crunch down this stuff into such a readable book is a hell of an achievement. Buy it and read it, before it goes hopelessly out of date. I reckon you’ve got about six months.’
The book, rejoiced Ian Burrell in the Independent, revealed ‘a murky world beneath the familiar “surface web” of Google, Facebook and Twitter.’ Jamie Bartlett, Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at think tank Demos, is an expert guide. ‘Yet the book is not intended as an expose so much as an exploration of this underworld. At the heart of The Dark Net is the “crypto war” for privacy in cyberspace.’ And though Bartlett hymns the transformative possibilities of the lawless web, for Burell, ‘if there’s
a criticism of The Dark Net it’s that we see scant evidence of that upside.’ The Dark Net’s great revelation, said the Spectator’s Michael Bywater, is ‘just how much of the web is in reality the search engine we use, which means that what we believe is the world wide web is no such thing: it’s a tiny, balkanised and personalised millimetre of one thin strand of the webbing. Bartlett’s trip over the frontiers into the web where the law’s writ does not run is as necessary as a flashlight in a dark, dark cellar.’
The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution Walter Isaacson (Simon & Schuster, 528pp £20 Oldie price £18 HB) Walter Isaacson, biographer of idiosyncratic imaginative geniuses such as Einstein, Benjamin Franklin and, latterly, that iconic misfit Steve Jobs, has turned his attention in this new book to the simultaneous but separate emergence of the personal computer and the networks that became the internet. As Larry Lebowitz put it in the Miami Herald: ‘The world truly changed when those two storylines collided, crossed and merged.’ Byron’s daughter, Ada Lovelace, emerges, as Lebowitz declares, as ‘the spiritual mother of the innovators. She envisioned a future of “poetic science” in which machines could become creative partners in the human imagination.’ Of course it
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was collaboration that did it and this book is what Steven Shapin in the Wall Street Journal described as ‘a serial biography of the large number of ingenious scientists and engineers who looked into the future and saw unimagined possibilities of representing, re-combining and communicating information – and doing so fast, robustly, cheaply and globally. There’s no overestimating the shattering effect of these technologies on our economy, our culture, our forms of interaction and our sense of who we are.’ It could all be terribly dull, but as Matthew Wisnioski declared in the Washington Post: ‘History at this scale tends towards either encyclopaedia or determinist manifesto, a fate Isaacson
avoids by using his talent for stories to shift between romance novel, operating manual, legal briefing, memoir and humanist sermon.’ Summing up in the Financial Times, Richard Waters ruminated: ‘If you’ve found yourself slipping into dark thoughts recently about whether a robot is going to take your job or online monitoring will lead to a surveillance state, then this tour d’horizon of the computer age is for you. It presents a deeply comforting humanistic vision of how a succession of brilliant individuals often working together in mutually supportive groups built on each other’s ideas to create a pervasive digital culture in which man and machine live together in amicable symbiosis.’
MISCELLANEOUS
Playing to the Gallery: Helping Contemporary Art in its Struggle To Be Understood Grayson Perry (Particular Books 144pp £14.99 Oldie price £13.49 HB) THE POTTER GRAYSON PERRY has turned his well-received 2013 Reith Lectures into a friendly, fizzy little book. ‘If there’s one message that I want you to take away,’ he declares, ‘it’s that anybody can enjoy art and anybody can have a life in the arts even me! For even I, an Essex transvestite potter, have been let in by the artworld mafia.’ By and large the critics – artworld mafia or no – have given his book an equally enthusiastic welcome. Lynn Barber, a former Turner Prize judge, was positively rapturous. ‘His book is full of good jokes,’ she wrote in the Sunday Times, ‘full of cartoons, full of memorable epigrams, but above all full of thoughtprovoking ideas that make you want to pause on every page and say: “Discuss”. I have never read such a stimulating short guide to art. It should be issued as a set text in every school.’ The Observer’s Tim Adams described the book as ‘a manifesto’, noting Perry’s ‘commitment to making’ and coolness towards expensive conceptual art ‘that wants to be an asset class, about art that, by default, is made by the 0.01% for the 0.001%.’ He adds that there’s intellectual backbone there too: Perry’s ‘“come on in, the water’s lovely!” spirit is an argument certainly for lightness and for play, but also for a different kind of rigour and commitment.’ In the Independent, Marcus Field also thought that ‘beneath Grayson’s Essex-boy persona is a serious intellectual fighting to get out.’ Other critics were less impressed. In the Spectator, Alastair Smart grumbled that ‘time after time, he chooses a wisecrack over wise counsel.’ ‘All his thoughts head in interesting directions,’ agreed the Telegraph’s Sarah Crompton, ‘but if you break the line of his reasoning down, step by step, it doesn’t take you to a firm conclusion.’ Nevertheless, his is ‘a gentle strain of English eccentricity, a kindly, soft-eyed wandering that doesn’t necessarily require hard-line outcomes.’
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The artist as Dorothy. Grayson Perry’s self-portrait
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Repr int s Our choice of recently reprinted books THE SINGING SANDS by Josephine Tey (Folio Society, £27.95 HB) First published in 1952, Josephine Tey’s thrilling mystery story has weathered the years well, and more than half a century later is still an atmospheric page-turner. Her gentlemanly police officer Alan Grant is in the mould of Buchan’s Richard Hannay with a winning dash of Ngaio Marsh’s handsome detective Roderick Alleyn. Grant is on a sleeper to Inverness when the body of a young man, possibly French, is discovered in his berth, apparently dead from natural causes. Grant, on his way to a fishing holiday, absentlymindedly picks up the man’s newspaper and finds scrawled on it what appears to be a snatch of verse. ‘The beasts that talk/The streams that stand/The stones that walk/The singing sands.’ Who is the man? Was he murdered and why? What’s it all about? The truth turns out to be chilling. Apart from its exciting plot, The Singing Sands is a fascinating portrait of post-war Britain, its privations and social changes, and Mark Smith’s evocative illustrations give some shadowy 1950s noir to this splendid boxed edition. Lucy Lethbridge THE RED HOUSE MYSTERY by A A Milne (Vintage Classics £7.99 PB) A. A. Milne’s only excursion into crime writing is a jolly romp through the English countryside, ‘far away from the gentle slopes of the Hundred Acre Wood.’ His witty introduction considers the structure of good detective stories and demands both the detective and villain to be amateurs, one of ourselves, with whom we rub shoulders at the murder scene. There is none of the blood and gore modern writers make us wade through, and no forensic experts baffling us with science, or heroes beset with personal demons; nor does the Love question unduly hamper proceedings. A good detective story, says Milne, attends strictly to business. The murder that is committed at Mark Ablett’s house party is no more harrowing than Winnie the Pooh finding his last jar of honey missing. Chapter headings are reminiscent of an Enid Blyton adventure and the good-natured detective is a self-styled Sherlock Holmes, mischievously tagging his genial but hapless assistant as Watson. The Red House Mystery was first published in 1922, prior to the adventures of Christopher Robin and Pooh, when Milne was still assistant editor at Punch. He
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dedicated the book to another whodunit devotee, his ‘dear father, with more gratitude and affection than I can well put down here’. P. G. Wodehouse wrote of Milne, ‘I love his writing’ – praise indeed, if praise were needed. Trevor Cooper MEDICINE AND DUTY: THE FIRST WORLD WAR DIARY of Dr Harold Dearden (Richard Dennis £ 15 PB) Memoirs of the First World War abound, but doctors’ accounts of life on the Western Front are rare. Harold Dearden’s Medicine and Duty was first published in 1928: but this well-illustrated reissue includes diary entries and material excluded from the original. In his Foreword, Paul Atterbury writes that Deardon’s diary is ‘extraordinary in the insight it offers into the life of a front-line doctor. The constant ghastliness of his daily, and often nightly, work is balanced by the entertaining and often intimate details of his social life,’ and that ‘its value as an insight into the story of the medical services in the First World War is infinite.’ Deardon was at the battles of Ypres and the Somme: on one day in 1916, for example, he treated an inflamed finger belonging to Lady Dudley – who did invaluable work setting up a hospital in Wimereux – before turning his attention to a young man with ‘half his buttocks blown away’. Oddly enough, this indomitable medic looked back on his two years on the front as ‘the happiest days of my life’. Jeremy Lewis
Edward Ardizzone’s illustration of a public bar in a London pub. According to Maurice Gorham, author of The Local, first published in 1939, public bars had been invaded by darts players and ‘locals sat in hopeless apathy while young women with blood-red fingernails threw doubles with hard-boiled charm.’ The Local, with Ardizzone’s illustrations, is reprinted by Little Toller Books, £15