Review of Books issue 31 spring 2015
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What the critics said More than 50 of the best books from the last 5 months including: Jenny Uglow, Neil MacGregor, Robert MacFarlane, Alexandra Fuller, Marina Warner, Nick Hornby, C J Sansom, Marilynne Robinson, Tim Bell, John Berger, William Waldegrave, Richard Coles, P D James, John Bayley, Jeffrey Archer Kika Markham … and many more
Latest Jeffrey Archer in 500 words Thatcher’s Boys The Fairy-tale Industry Classic Crime Reprints A ROUND-UP OF REVIEWS • NOT JUST THE BESTSELLERS
CONTENTS
Review of Books
I N T H I S I S S UE
Issue 31 spring 2015
Rendall; The Game of Our Lives: The Meaning and Making of English Football David Goldblatt
NOT FORGETTING... important titles recently REVIEWED IN THE OLDIE
17. MODERN TIMES
• John Aubrey: My Own Life by Ruth Scurr
• Young Eliot: from St Louis to the Waste Land by Robert Crawford
• Universal Man: The
Seven Lives of John Maynard Keynes by Richard Davenport-Hines
• Chasing
the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs by Johann Hari
• Jeremy Thorpe by Michael Bloch • Went the Day Well? Witnessing Waterloo by David Crane
• Let Me Play the Lion Too: How to
be an Actor by Michael Pennington
• Quite a Good Time to be Born: A
Memoir, 1935–1975 by David Lodge
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Published by The Oldie magazine, 65 Newman Street, London W1T 3EG Editorial panel: Alexander Chancellor, Claudia FitzHerbert, Sam Leith, Anna Lethbridge, Lucy Lethbridge, Jeremy Lewis, James Pembroke. Editor: Anna Lethbridge Design: John Bowling Reviewers: Sam Leith, Jennie Erdal, Julia Hamilton, Lucy Lethbridge, Jeremy Lewis, Christopher Silvester Publisher: James Pembroke Advertising: Lisa Martin, Paula-Jayne Mitchell, Monique Cherry For advertising enquiries, call Lisa Martin on 020 7079 9361 For editorial enquiries, call 020 7436 8801 or email editorial@theoldie.co.uk
4. BIOGRAPHY George Frederic Handel: A Life With Friends Ellen T. Harris; Schubert’s Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession Ian Bostridge; Our Time of Day: My Life with Corin Redgrave Kika Markham; A Fortunate Man John Berger; Fathomless Riches: Or How I Went from Pop to Pulpit Richard Coles; Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer Bettina Stangneth
10. HISTORY In These Times: Living in Britain Through Napoleon’s Wars, 1793–1815 Jenny Uglow; 1815: Regency Britain in the Year of Waterloo Stephen Bates; The Poet’s Tale: Chaucer and The Year That Made The Canterbury Tales Paul Strohm; Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland R F Foster; High Command: British Military Leadership in the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars Christopher Elliott; Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Found Frances Larson; The English and Their History Robert Tombs; Germany: Memories of a Nation Neil MacGregor; After Hitler: The Last Days of the Second World War in Europe Michael Jones; The Bletchley Girls Tessa Dunlop; The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories Michael Smith; Swansong 1945 Walter Kempowski
15. BOOKS ON BOOKS Where I’m Reading From: The Changing World of Books Tim Parks; Where Have You Been? Michael Hofmann; Dear Reader Paul Fournel
16. SPORT Scream: The Tyson Tapes Jonathan
Nothing is True and Everything is Possible Peter Pomerantsev; How the World Was Won: The Americanisation of Everywhere Peter Conrad; The Internet is Not The Answer Andrew Keen
18. THATCHERITE TIMES Mad Men and Bad Men: What Happened When British Politics Met Advertising Sam Delaney; Right or Wrong: The Memoir of Lord Bell Tim Bell; A Different Kind of Weather William Waldegrave
19. NATURE The Cultural Life of Whales and Dolphins Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell; Landmarks Robert Macfarlane
21. RAPID READ Mightier Than the Sword Jeffrey Archer
22. FICTION Honeydew Edith Pearlman; Lila Marilynne Robinson; Some Luck Jane Smiley; A Spool of Blue Thread Anne Tyler; Lamentation C J Sansom; Funny Girl Nick Hornby; Wrinkles Paco Roca
25. FAIRY-TALE INDUSTRY Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale Marina Warner; The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm Jack Zipes; Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange Malcolm C Lyons; Grimm Legacies: The Magic Spell of the Grimm Folk and Fairy Tales Jack Zipes
26. REPRINTS A Scream in Soho John G Brandon; The Sussex Downs Murders John Bude; Mystery in White J. Jefferson Farjeon; Capital Crimes: London Mysteries Martin Edwards; The Female Detective Andrew Forrester
27. OBITUARIES P D James and John Bayley
30. EXTRACT Dictators Dinners: a Bad Taste Guide to Entertaining Tyrants Victoria Clark and Melissa Scott
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BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR The Great Reformer Francis and the Making of a Radical Papacy Austen Ivereigh (Allen & Unwin, 464pp, £20, Oldie price £18) Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the Argentinian cardinal elected Pope two years ago, has been a surprise to many both inside and outside the Catholic Church. Pope Francis’s informal style is refreshing after his predecessor, Pope Benedict II. As Daniel Johnson, reviewing Austen Ivereigh’s new biography of Francis in the Times, put it, he has a ‘winning combination of tough love and charisma’: ‘That cheerful “Buona sera” with which the new Pope greeted the crowds in March 2013 came in startling contrast to the mysterious process by which he had emerged from the conclave. But he has gone on to challenge the siege mentality of the Vatican establishment and overturn the dreary narrative of Catholic decline, bringing a refreshing nonconformity to his dealings with the laity.’ Johnson, who thought The Great Reformer ‘the most substantial biography so far’, was among many reviewers
Leaving Before the Rains Come Alexandra Fuller (Harvill Secker, 272pp, £16.99, Oldie price £14.99)
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who praised the book. Ivereigh also garnered plaudits from theologian John Cavadini. Writing in Commonweal, the American Catholic journal, Cavadini thought it a ‘magnificent book’ and ‘a tour de force of biographical research and good judgment.’ In the Sunday Telegraph, Nicholas Blincoe also found it ‘invaluable’, pointing out that Ivereigh, an expert on the Catholic Church in Latin America, argues that the Jesuit Francis, forged in the fiery religious politics of the region, is a ‘more revolutionary choice than his supporters among the riformisti know. The Pope comes ready-made as a radical, shaped by the experiences of living as a Jesuit through one of the bloodiest times in Argentina’s history.’ The Washington Post’s reviewer,
Elizabeth Tenety, admired the way that Ivereigh explores how the Pope’s personal evolution is so crucial to an understanding of his attitude to the modern Church. ‘After experiencing years of political upheaval and violence in Argentina, Francis grew to distrust ideologies that, as an associate put it, “seek a kind of total explanation of reality”.’
‘Fourteen years ago,’ wrote Jenni Russell in the Sunday Times, ‘Alexandra Fuller’s luminously honest memoir of her chaotic, frequently impoverished rural childhood in war-torn Rhodesia became a worldwide success. Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight pitched us into a family where a fiveyear-old learns not to go into her parents’ room at night because she might be mistaken for a terrorist and shot.’ In between that book and this came Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness in 2011, a warts and all memoir of her boozy, dysfunctional parents (in which her mother is described as the ‘Leaning Tower of Pissed’). Dogs ends with a glimpse of Fuller, aged 22, on the day of her wedding to an American called Charlie Ross, a memorable occasion culminating in the bride’s father setting himself on fire, only to have the flames extinguished by an alarmed guest. ‘I couldn’t,’ said Fuller, ‘be more thoroughly married.’ Sadly, this turns out not to be true. As Elizabeth Lowry put it in
the Guardian: ‘Her hope is that she and Charlie will find safety in each other, but in spite of their sincerity and idealism, the problems of culture and belonging that they face prove insurmountable.’ This latest memoir is the sequel to Dogs but, as Jenni Russell found, ‘its opening chapters lack the drive and stylistic confidence of its predecessor. Fuller is oddly uncertain about what story she wants to tell. It is two decades on and she is living in Wyoming with her husband, Charlie, and their three children, but she shies away from taking us into that present. Then, a third of the way through, just as one begins to wonder whether the author has lost her ability to talk to us in a voice that feels urgent and true, the book transforms itself into a riveting account of the disintegration of a marriage.’ As Elisa Segrave declared in the Spectator: ‘Fuller is currently in America, living in a yurt with a new man. But I long for her to return to Africa, or, if not, simply to write about it again and again.’
BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR
Not My Father’s Son
Elsa Schiaparelli
Alan Cumming
Schiaparelli became an overnight sensation as a young designer when a ballgown she’d made from four yards of navy crepe de chine and two yards of orange silk fell apart ‘during a particularly lively tango.’ With her hat resembling a lamb cutlet, it’s a pity she wasn’t around to clothe Lady Gaga. It was quite a life but, like her great rival, Coco Chanel, Schiap’s story is veiled in mystery, as Rachel Cooke revealed in the Guardian: ‘Hers is a narrative that requires the biographer, metaphorically speaking, to wear flat shoes rather than stilettos, and to carry not some darling little clutch, but a large and sturdy tote. The cast list is thrilling (Dali, Cocteau, Man Ray, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor) and the locations are glamorous (Paris, Biarritz, New York).’ Cooke continued: ‘Her career, moreover, comes with a charlatan edge that renders the joining of dots, especially regarding her business, somewhat hazardous. Self-invention can be a fine thing in a designer; if you’ve never learned the rules, what’s to stop you from putting shoes on heads, lobsters on evening
(Canongate, 304pp, £16.99, Oldie price £8.54) ‘Alan Cumming,’ proclaimed Richard Ferguson in the Sydney Morning Herald, ‘is one of Scotland’s greatest acting exports. His versatility and charm have made him an audience favourite.’ But Ferguson is here ‘telling a very different story. Not My Father’s Son is no gossip-filled sex diary, no insider’s look at the business of fame. Instead, Cumming explores his relationships with two men – one a mysterious grandfather missing for decades, the other the tyrant of a father he just couldn’t shake off.’ As Daisy Wyatt declared in the Independent, ‘The story is intertwined with his experience of taking part in the TV genealogy programme, Who Do You Think You Are?, where he comes to unravel another family secret about the real cause of his grandfather’s death. Written with a beautiful economy of prose, it reads like a thriller – with only a smattering of anecdotes about enjoying first class lounges and partying with Patti Smith.’ The book is divided into four parts, a neat device, as Damian Barr opined in the Guardian, ‘which enables him to delve into his family history and travel around the world in an attempt to discover the fate of his maternal grandfather, Tommy Darling, killed in a “shooting accident” in Malaya in 1951. At the same time, and very much off-camera, he’s forced into a quest to find his father and to rethink his whole childhood,’ when ‘the unrepentant bully he grew up calling Dad’ is proven by a DNA test undertaken by Alan and his brother, Tom, not to be their biological father. ‘I was so happy not to be his son,’ Alan told Tom, ‘But at least now I know I’m your full brother.’ As Caroline Howe summed up in the Daily Mail, ‘Alan has learned ‘the frailty of life, the importance of family and the power of love.’
Meryle Secrest (Fig Tree, 400pp, £25, Oldie price £20) dresses, and perfume in Mae Westshaped bottles? But it also makes people shifty, prone to exaggeration, reluctant to look back.’ Reviewing the biography in the Independent, Alexander Fury stressed Schiap’s close relationship with Dali: ‘The two collaborated on everything from shop décor to dresses, inventing the notion of the “conceptual” clothing boutique in Schiap’s surreal couture house (a birdcage as a roof, a giant teddy-bear with drawers in its stomach as storage) in Rue de la Paix.’ And, he added, ‘Schiap would be pleased to see her work placed in the context of contemporary artists rather than fashion designers, as she was disparaging of the ephemeral world of haute couture. This biography paints a compelling picture of a shrewd businesswoman gussying up her product as art, and making a killing.’ Two years ago Schiap was the subject of a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, coinciding with the relaunch of the fashion house she founded, and, as Fury concluded, somewhat ironically, ‘Schiap proves as persuasive today as she was eighty years ago. She seems to have Secrest entirely convinced.’
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BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR
George Frederic Handel A Life with Friends Ellen T. Harris (W W Norton, 496pp, £25, Oldie price £22.50) Harris’s aim in this new biography is to get a handle on Handel, to uncover the private man behind the public persona. David J. Baker in Opera News queried whether this is a realistic aim: ‘Handel as a human being? The trail is more littered with clues than ever, but they all prove to be cold.’ He went on: ‘A previous work by Harris, Handel as Orpheus: Voice and Desire in the Chamber Cantatas (2001) considered the homoerotic milieu of patrons of the younger Handel (in the period up to 1723) and discovered covert themes and code names in the works but produced no direct evidence as to the composer’s own sexuality.’ The problem here is that, as Harris herself says, ‘it seems as if Handel made a deliberate attempt to keep his personal life private,’ and this, of course, presents the biographer with
Schubert’s Winter Journey Anatomy of an Obsession Ian Bostridge (Faber & Faber, 528pp, £20, Oldie price £16.50)
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Handel’s private life eludes biographers
in the biography, but by and large, these details come from observations made by his public and his friends’. Ergo, to understand Handel it is important to understand his ‘less famous’ friends, who act as mirrors to this enigmatic composer’s greatness, hence the title of the book. But to return to David J. Baker: ‘The private Handel will probably continue to elude biographers. But Harris’s deep understanding of the scores, her accessible commentary and descriptive gift still manage to enhance readers’ appreciation of the music.’
Classical tenor and academic historian Ian Bostridge has been singing Winterreise, Schubert’s cycle of 28 songs (based on poems by Wilhelm Müller), for more than 30 years and has performed it more than 100 times, so who better to ruminate on its place in our cultural canon? Bostridge ‘has turned his obsession with Schubert into an exquisite memoir’, wrote Rebecca K. Harrison in the Independent. ‘Taking each song as a chapter and springboard, he explores the context and times Müller and Schubert were working in, unearthing remarkable details along the way, from a cultural history of tears, to early photographs of snowflakes, the last days of charcoal-burning as a profession, to 19th-century understanding of natural phenomena such as Ignis fatuus (will-o’-the-wisp) and “mock suns”.’
Alexandra Coghlan, in the Spectator, found that Bostridge ‘covers a lot of ground, at speed, but the artlessness of his prose (conversational, without ever feeling contrived) carries the reader along with inquisitive, interrogative force.’ She picked up on a ‘sense that the book itself is an act and process of discovery, crystallising the thoughts, instinctive responses and research of decades into text. It wanders, like Schubert’s hero, drifting and alighting in unexpected places.’ Coghlan also praised Bostridge’s ‘appealingly democratic approach to knowledge that places the history of Napoleon and Metternich on equal footing with concert-hall anecdotes and analysis of the genius of Bob Dylan.’ Daily Telegraph reviewer Ivan Hewett admired the way in which Bostridge’s allusive text is ‘contained in a glossily produced and suggestively small volume which sits snugly in the hand, like a 19th-century poetry or commonplace book’, with the chapters ‘lavishly illustrated in all kinds of apt and unexpected ways. All this has the effect of isolating each song in its own little jewel-box of prose and image.’
certain problems. The book is structured to emulate a fugue, a trendy habit these days in art galleries too, where the life and work is the guiding principle to the narrative, but is ultimately to be seen as only a part of a historical continuum. ‘This is not to say,’ according to Weston Williams in the Christian Science Monitor, ‘that Handel’s life is a complete blank. There are several personal details of his life that are presented
BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR
Our Time of Day My Life with Corin Redgrave Kika Markham (Oberon Books, 206pp, £16.99, Oldie price £14.99) CORIN redgrave ‘fell in love with his second wife, Kika Markham, during a lecture at the Derbyshire College of Marxist Education. They spent their honeymoon thinking up ways of fighting Thatcher, unemployment and racism’, reported Roger Lewis in the Daily Mail. The Redgraves weren’t an easy family to marry into. As Joanna Moorehead related in the Guardian, ‘although Corin’s family were just as radically socialist as the Markhams, Rachel Kempson (Redgrave’s mother) seemed to blame Kika for encouraging her son’s membership of the Workers Revolutionary Party. Kika remembers Rachel’s response to seeing her demonstrating in favour of union rights. “She spotted me from afar and shouted, ‘There’s that dreadful woman! She’s mad and sees a shrink every week (I did) and she’s in that awful party’.”’
In 1999, Corin was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and Kika was by his side throughout the lengthy treatment. ‘So by 2005, I was looking forward to an easier life,’ says Kika. However, in that year Redgrave had a heart attack, resulting in Kika Markham with Corin Redgrave in Paris, 1993 brain damage. Lewis related how ‘The ensuing five years, their life together should have been.’ which are recorded here in a completely For Alan Strachan in the Spectator, engrossing and harrowing mix of dia‘Our Time of Day is stamped by an ries, memos, scraps, letters and heartunflinching and humane candour. breaking reminiscence, were hell on Markham defiantly avoids sentimenearth for Kika – because, when Corin tality and misery-memoir gloom. regained consciousness, he had clean Throughout this portrait of a marriage forgotten who she was.’ Moorehead and the stresses of acute illness, the again: ‘Kika remembers the devastation pieces of Markham’s jigsaw come to she felt on the day Corin admitted that shape an affecting evocation of love as his heart attack had left her husband well as of loss.’ with a big black hole where the story of
In 1966, the novelist and art critic John Berger spent three months shadowing John Sassall, a country GP, together with the photographer Jean Mohr. The result was A Fortunate Man, first published in 1967 and now brought out in a new edition by Canongate (£14.99, Oldie price £13.49). Fiona Wilson, writing in the Times, called it ‘a moving portrait of a selfless individual devoted to his profession, and of the community that depends on him for more than medical advice’, while Gavin Francis in the Guardian dubbed it ‘a masterpiece of witness: a moving meditation on humanity, society and the value of healing’.
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BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR
Eichmann Before Jerusalem The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer Bettina Stangneth (Bodley Head, 608pp, £25, Oldie price £21.50)
Fathomless Riches Or How I Went from Pop to Pulpit Richard Coles (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 278pp, £20, Oldie price £16) The Reverend Richard Coles is the nation’s favourite gay vicar: a stalwart of Radio 4s Saturday Live; a serial sharer of arcana from the lives of the saints on Twitter; and, of course, immortally, the bloke who played the clarinet in The Communards. Not since Alex James embarked on his journey from rock guitarist to artisan cheese-maker has there been a transformation like it. Fathomless Riches is the story of that transformation, and as the Guardian’s reviewer Chris Bryant declared: ‘Sex, drugs, death, religion, more sex, many more deaths – it’s got it all. Like an old Spanish fiddle-back chasuble, it is encrusted with sparklers and glitter balls and it’s difficult to ignore.’ It is a story that takes its protagonist from childhood as a clever, sheltered boy from a wealthy family in Northamptonshire, via a stint as ‘a camp Bolshevik on a moped’, failure alike at O-levels and suicide, pop stardom, the 1980s gay and drug scenes, to eventual ordination as a Church of England vicar and subsequent media apotheosis. Bryant, above all, applauded Coles’s candour.
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He shares his experience of depression, does not censor his years of debauchery, and ‘sometimes he lets us see him as utterly odious.’ The Independent’s Katy Guest found the book ‘full of wit and humour about finding God, and Jimmy Somerville’, while the Times’s Iain Finlayson applauded ‘a memorably frank, worldly-wise, bleakly comic memoir’. Writing in the Sunday Times, Helen Davies complained: ‘It is difficult to know where to start with the Rev Richard Coles. I mean, really difficult. Is he a saint? A sinner? A super-star? One thing for certain is that Coles is a real out-and-out show-off with a genuine God complex. He is also an extraordinary man who has enjoyed an extraordinary life.’ But she conceded that Coles has ‘a welcome turn of phrase’ and ‘only occasionally does he stray into the rehearsed authenticity that dogs those who preach from a pulpit. For the most part, his book is an engaging account of eccentricity, curiosity and a profound spiritual journey. I give it a screamingly camp, happy-clappy thumbs up.’
Kidnapped by Mossad in Buenos Aires in 1960, Adolph Eichmann stood trial for his complicity in the Holocaust and was executed in 1962. The philosopher Hannah Arendt’s famous book Eichmann in Jerusalem portrayed him as a non-ideological bureaucrat executing a policy of extermination laid down by others rather than as a sadistic psychopath, coining the phrase ‘the banality of evil’ to capture this paradox. Political philosopher Stangneth’s book, which first came out in German in 2011, challenges Arendt’s thesis. ‘Instead of the reclusive, taciturn and boring war criminal on the run,’ related Saul David in the Daily Telegraph, ‘she reveals a skilled social manipulator with a pronounced ability to reinvent himself, an ideological warrior unrepentant about the past and eager to continue the racial war against the Jews.’ Stangneth is able to draw on sources that were not available to Arendt, including a series of taped interviews Eichmann gave to a sympathetic listener, Willem Sassen, a Dutch former SS journalist, during the 1950s. At his trial, Eichmann gave a very different account of his motives, but ‘thanks to this brilliant book, exhaustively researched and convincingly argued, the veil has at last been lifted’. In his Guardian review, Richard Evans, Cambridge history professor and Third Reich expert, found that ‘the cynicism, inhumanity, lack of pity and moral self‑deception of the conversations with Sassen are breathtaking. This is a very disturbing book, and every now and then, as you read it, you have to pause in disbelief.’ In the Australian, Anna Heyward concluded that ‘the image Stangneth constructs leaves very little room for banality, and none for denial.’ Eichmann: ‘an ideological warrior unrepentant about the past’.
HISTORY In These Times
1815
Living in Britain Through Napoleon’s Wars, 1793–1815
Regency Britain in the Year of Waterloo
Jenny Uglow
Stephen Bates (Head of Zeus, 352pp, £25, Oldie price £22.50)
(Faber & Faber, 752pp, £25, Oldie price £22.50) The home front during the more-than two decades of the Napoleonic wars is ‘gloriously captured by an author who never tries to simplify the complexity of the past,’ extolled Karin Altenberg in the Wall Street Journal. Jenny Uglow’s book is ‘a remarkable distillation of hundreds of letters, diary entries and other documents produced by people from varying walks of life.’ Susan Elkin noted in the Independent that Uglow ‘gives us the voices of sailors, soldiers, brewers, factory boys, bankers, gunsmiths and aristocrats’. ‘Constant war is the condition under-lying all sectors of society that Uglow visits,’ according to Nigel Jones in the Spectator. ‘Two of Jane Austen’s brothers, Francis and Charles, became admirals in the navy (and another, Henry, joined the voluntary militia). Timber merchants grew fat and rich supplying the hearts of oak for the fleet. Any young man taking a stroll in any coastal town was in great danger of being
kidnapped by the licensed thugs of the press gang and turned into a not-so-jolly Jack Tar. The original Dad’s Army were the volunteers and yeomanry who manned the cliffs of England and the newly built martello towers ready to repel Boney.’ In his Guardian review, Cambridge historian Vic Gatrell admired Uglow’s ‘excavation of a thousand forgotten incidents and observations, beautifully organised around a timeline of world-shaking events’, and considered it ‘erudite and imaginationstretching.’ However, he longed for ‘more reflection’ and wondered whether ‘her title in its vast ambition promises more than her method can deliver.’ The New York Times’s reviewer, Leo Damrosch, complained that ‘the torrent of names and facts grows exhausting’, but Nicholas Shakespeare in the Daily Telegraph approved, seeing Uglow as ‘a generous hostess’, and finding the book to be ‘as crowded and bustling as a Gillray drawing’.
William Pitt and Napoleon caricatured in James Gillray’s ‘The Plumb-Pudding in Danger’
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The ‘Year In’ series is designed to get to the heart of the social and cultural life of Britain at key points in its history, but, as Lewis Jones stated in the Telegraph, ‘Of the making of books about Waterloo there is no end. At least five were published last year, in anticipation of the bicentenary that is now upon us, and we may be sure they will keep on coming. The epic battle in the vicinity of a hamlet near Brussels on June 18th, 1815 is militarily fascinating – “the nearest-run thing you ever saw in your life,” as the Duke of Wellington called it; hugely important historically, marking the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the beginning of a long peace; and crucial, even today, to Britain’s idea of itself.’ Bates begins his narrative with Britain’s disastrous defeat in a muddy field outside New Orleans in January 1815 as a counterpoint to the glory that was to come. He then turns to the Congress of Vienna, which was interrupted by Boney’s inconvenient and embarrassing escape from Elba. The sovereigns of Europe denounced the Emperor as ‘the enemy and disturber of the peace of the world’, and Tsar Alexander put his hand on Wellington’s shoulder and said: ‘It’s for you to save the world again.’ The bulk of the book describes the ‘fearful interval’ before Waterloo. According to the author, the book is ‘a much more general picture of Britain in that year and only incidentally about the battle. There were lots of other things happening that year: Jane Austen busy on Mansfield Park, Walter Scott embarking on the Waverley novels, John Nash designing Regent Street and, up in St John’s Wood, Lord’s cricket ground’s first match.’ Lewis Jones found ‘many fascinating nuggets of information, such as that William Cobbett objected to the abolition of slavery and bear-baiting, and that William Hazlitt was so upset by Napoleon’s defeat that he tied a mourning band around his hat and got drunk for several weeks.’ Then, as now, great events provoke very different responses.
HISTORY
The Poet’s Tale Chaucer and the Year that Made the Canterbury Tales Paul Strohm (Profile Books, 304pp, £15.99, Oldie price £13.99) According to Paul Strohm, Professor of English at Columbia University, the year that ‘made the Canterbury Tales’ was 1386. This was the year when, as Sam Leith in the Spectator put it, ‘everything went south’ for Chaucer: his short-lived career as a shire knight in Richard II’s parliament had ended in ignominy, and by the end of 1386, his marriage had failed; he was living apart from his family and was squeezed into a cramped room in the tower above Aldgate, working as a collector of wool duties. It was here, above the stench and squalor of the London streets, that he wrote The Canterbury Tales. Leith was one of many reviewers who praised Strohm’s ‘constantly evolving, frequently fun and sometimes moving little book’. Toby Lichtig, pointing out that we know ‘a relative amount about Chaucer the bureaucrat
and next to nothing about the poet,’ enjoyed the ‘local flavour’ in the book, the ‘sheer racket’ of London street life. Nicola Shulman in the Evening Standard found it ‘gripping and persuasive’, enjoying particularly the way that Strohm explains ‘in clear and definite terms exactly what it meant to be a shire knight, an MP, a controller of the wool custom, a lodger over Aldgate and a great many other similar terms, the significance of which is lost to today’s reader.’ Stevie Davies in the New Statesman admired this ‘superb’ book, pointing out that although Chaucer left almost nothing about himself for future biographers, ‘no private diaries, personal letters or portraits’, open The Canterbury Tales ‘and Chaucer comes alive. Lovable, laugh-aloud funny, wise, sceptical, tolerant, the poet brings his age to breathing life’.
Vivid Faces The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890–1923 R F Foster (Allen Lane, 496pp, £20, Oldie price £9.89) In this ‘group portrait’ of Ireland, Roy Foster, Oxford’s professor of Irish History, shows how varied were the approaches to Irish culture and identity of those who were seeking to extricate their country from British rule. ‘The result of this mixture of debate, dreaming and planning was a rich stew of confusion, a clash of many conflicting visions of where Ireland should be, and how it should get there,’ explained Neil Hegarty in the Daily Telegraph. ‘Thus we trace the activities of socialists, Quakers and feminists, fervent, mystical Roman Catholics, homosexual men and women, and the gentry, all engaged in – as Foster’s thematic chapter headings indicate – learning, playing, loving, writing and fighting, and a good deal more.’ Boyd Tonkin, in the Independent, saw Foster as ‘more myth-buster than mythbuilder’ and thought his book ‘shows how the independence movement drew
its ideas, tactics and personnel not from peasant outsiders but from metropolitan, middle-class insiders’. The first half of the book deals with the period leading up to the Easter Rising of 1916, while the second half takes the story up to the creation of the Irish Free State in 1923. ‘As Foster capably shows,’ wrote John Kerrigan in his Guardian review, ‘the Rising generation was lit up by republican ardour, feminism, anti-vivisectionism, religious intensity and sexual dissent.’ The book ‘reaches a climax in the chapter about the Rising, which is depicted with masterly economy in all its brutality, confusion and courage. Yet the real point of the book comes in the anticlimax that follows, as new, more orthodox people came into the national struggle. Patient, analytical, articulate, this is a book that counts because it avoids the Irish vice of replacing history with commemoration.’
High Command British Military Leadership in the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars Christopher Elliott
(C. Hurst & Co., 288pp, £25, Oldie price £20) Major-General Christopher Elliott retired from the army in 2002 after thirty years as a Royal Engineer, brigade commander and director of military operations. In 2011, he became a research fellow at Oxford University and spent three years researching this book, interviewing senior British generals about the deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq. ‘Elliott believes he has identified what went wrong,’ revealed Josh Glancey in the Sunday Times. ‘The problem is twofold. First, the men at the top were able and diligent, but they did not have a proper understanding of strategy. Second, they were too supine in front of demanding politicians and hampered by the Byzantine structure of the MoD.’ According to ex-soldier and military historian Alan Mallinson, reviewing High Command in the Spectator, ‘the first part is about how the MoD “works”. Christopher Elliott, who was a cerebral officer possessed also of military nous, begins by recounting his own experience of being posted to “Main Building” as director of military operations, despite never having worked there before. He does so in terms that Evelyn Waugh could not have bettered. His first morning in perhaps the most important onestar job in the MoD is pure Sword of Honour.’ Beyond that, ‘what emerges in Elliott’s study is the astonishing lack of collegiality at the top of the MoD, the lack of record of decision-making, and the sheer evasion – or, at best, lack of clear lines of authority and accountability.’ Indeed, concluded Mallinson, High Command ‘provides probably the best basis for reform that the MoD is likely to see for some time’.
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HISTORY
Severed A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found
The English and their History
Frances Larson
Robert Tombs (Allen Lane, 1024pp, £35, Oldie price £28)
(Granta, 336pp, £20, Oldie price £16) Frances Larson is an anthropologist at Durham University and formerly a historian at Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, famous for its shrunken heads. Her book illustrates that decapitation has always been about the projection of power, an act that is ‘the ultimate tyranny’, given that everything we associate with being human is in a person’s head. For centuries decapitation was also a popular spectacle for the residents of major European cities. The book opens with a description of the journey of Oliver Cromwell’s head from a spike at Tyburn to a secret burial place in his old Cambridge college. ‘Larson writes in the style of a flaneur,’ Marcus Tanner noted in the Independent. ‘She wanders among the skulls with assurance and not a
hint of a shiver, alighting on those that most interest her and arranging them in themes.’ Corinne Jones in the Observer felt that the book ‘is published at a particularly poignant time when beheadings as strategic symbols of power are yet again in our midst.’ She admired its ‘very human account of an inhumane act’, while Andrew Harrison in the New Statesman saw it as ‘an eloquent and provocative exploration of what the detached head means, one that reaches into the core of human culture’. ‘A challengingly gruesome read,’ was how James McConnachie summed it up in the Spectator. ‘But once the nightmares have subsided I know its curiosity and intellectual energy will haunt me – in a good way – for a long time.’
Germany Memories of a Nation Neil MacGregor
(Allen Lane, 640pp, £30, Oldie price £24) ADAPTED FROM Neil MacGregor’s 2014 Radio 4 series, Germany relates the history of Germanic Europe via 100 objects from the collections of the British Museum (of which he is Director), exploring how Germans have shaped and reshaped their identity out of materials from history. ‘This is primarily a book about the things most Britons don’t know about the Germans, rather than the things we do,’ explained William Cook in the Spectator. ‘MacGregor doesn’t shirk the darkest chapter of German history, but he doesn’t let it overwhelm his narrative.’ ‘What emerges is a knotty portrait of a country sometimes undermined by its clashing values, yet just as often elevated by them,’ said Ed Power in the Irish Times. He praised MacGregor’s ‘pithy prose style’ and the matter-of-fact way in which some
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of the most profound insights are delivered. For example: ‘In German public spaces there are virtually no security cameras. Having lived with the Stasi and the Gestapo, Germans understand better than anyone that privacy is the ultimate signifier of a free society.’ ‘Different readers will regret the absence of one thing or another,’ observed David Blackbourn in the Guardian. But there are ‘brilliant vignettes’, too many to mention, and ‘MacGregor is an engaging guide who never talks down to readers’. In the Times Literary Supplement Richard J Evans makes it his Book of the Year. ‘Sumptuously illustrated, it is unfailingly interesting and stimulating,’ he wrote. ‘There is nobody better than MacGregor at getting the maximum meaning out of a cultural object.’
‘By the standards of humanity as a whole,’ Tombs argues, ‘England over the centuries has been among the richest, safest and best governed places on earth, as periodical influxes of people testify.’ This is the first singlevolume narrative history of the English for many years and it repudiates the tendency among historians to subsume English history into British history. ‘In this vigorous, subtle and penetrating book, Tombs defies the proprieties of our politically motivated national history curriculum to rethink and revise notions of national identity,’ applauded Richard Davenport-Hines in the Observer. He ‘gives an even-handed, openeyed defence of the British empire from the attacks of anti-capitalist historians and anti-colonial nationalists. Although he is a historian of the grand sweep, his book is full of arresting details, quirky sidelights, telling quotes and delightful laconic humour. In a literal sense it is definitive, for there is never a flash of ambiguity in any sentence. It is rare to find a book of such lucidity and authority that does not hector its readers.’ Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan, reviewing it for the Spectator, congratulated Tombs for playing a straight bat. ‘He isn’t trying to make his name with a clever-dick new thesis. Rather, he draws on the latest research to give us something close to a comprehensive picture. The civil war was neither a social revolution nor a Whig triumph, but an avoidable breakdown. As for the declinism which dominated our post-war thinking, a few well-chosen economic statistics show how utterly misplaced it was.’ This was a point echoed by Christopher Silvester in the Financial Times, who praised Tombs for delivering ‘robust judgements in hearty and sonorous prose’.
HISTORY
After Hitler
The Bletchley Girls
The Last Days of The Second World War in Europe
Tessa Dunlop (Hodder & Stoughton, 352pp, £20, Oldie price £16)
Michael Jones (John Murray 400pp, £25, Oldie price £20)
The military historian Michael Jones’s new book takes, as is the fashion, a small chronological slice and goes into it deeply. His territory: the desperate ten days between Hitler’s suicide and the final collapse of the Third Reich. Jones goes day by day, pulling together threads including the fate of the continuity German ‘government’ headed by Admiral Dönitz, the growing mistrust among the Allied powers as their troops raced to implement the Yalta carve-up, the vicious fighting against pockets of German resistance, the displaced people all over Europe, and, of course, the humanitarian crises around the liberation of the camps. ‘The stories have long been told,’ acknowledged the Spectator’s Allan Mallinson, ‘but this ambitious book attempts to tell the story, drawing together the many threads during the period of the empty tomb. Jones wishes to show why there are two VE Days, and their significance – the divisions which nearly caused a fatal rift between the allies, a “crisis largely hidden from public view and, in the event, successfully mastered.”’ He judged the book a success: ‘Michael Jones weaves together the many stories of those terrible ten days in a most compelling way.’ ‘The collapse of empires has always been a painful and messy business,’ agreed Lawrence James in the Times. ‘The Third Reich was no exception: it came clattering down in a welter of havoc and human misery. Michael Jones has described the death agonies of Nazism in an excellent, vivid and often moving narrative.’ The Aberdeen Press and Journal’s reviewer Alex Saril commended a ‘wealth of intriguing detail’: ‘Admiral Dönitz, Hitler’s appointed successor, is normally a footnote; Jones’ attentions reveal a devious figure, as sinister as he was ridiculous.’ Mallinson was plainer: ‘On the evidence Jones cites, not least the orders to the armed forces to continue fighting, Dönitz was lucky to escape the noose at Nuremberg.’
The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories Michael Smith (Aurum, 304pp, £20, Oldie price £16) These two new books on the women who worked at Bletchley Park, where from 1941 three-quarters of the 8,000 employees were women, were mostly reviewed in tandem. The books were marked by a difference of approach: as Frances Wilson put it in the Sunday Telegraph: ‘Smith places his machine operators, indexers, filing clerks and chauffeurs against a landscape of the war in general, while Dunlop has tracked down fifteen former employees whose memories of Bletchley form the backbone of her narrative.’ Ian Finlayson, in the Times, relished the voices in Dunlop’s book: ‘For all the nostalgic perception that life at Bletchley was much like a gritty spy novel by John le Carré rewritten as a giddy romance by Nancy
Mitford, the élite veterans are candid about the hardships and heartaches of their secret wartime work.’ In the Observer, Lucy Lethbridge enjoyed Smith’s nuggets on daily life but found that ‘Dunlop’s tone jars. There is too much of her and not enough of her interviewees.’ Bel Mooney in the Daily Mail disagreed: ‘Her obvious feminine empathy with the venerable ladies she spoke to gives her book an immediacy and intimacy Michael Smith lacks.’ Frances Wilson wondered how the women kept silent for all those decades: ‘What comes across in these two books is not that our grandparents did not show off, but that they lived beyond the confines of the self, seeing themselves as cogs in a giant machine.’
Swansong 1945 A Collective Diary from Hitler’s Last Birthday to VE Day Walter Kempowski (Granta, 384pp, £25, Oldie price £10.99) Kempowski was one of the postwar generation of German writers, including Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass, whose works addressed the nation’s Nazi past. ‘Kempowski advertised across Germany for texts of all kinds concerned with the experiences of ordinary people during and after the Nazi era’, said his 2007 Guardian obituary. ‘He received thousands of letters, diaries, memoirs, souvenirs, song lyrics, posters and the like,’ which he used to created a collage of real German experience. This was published as Echolot in 2005. Swansong 1945, translated into English by Shaun Whiteside, represents a small section of Echolot. ‘From the absurd to the sublime, and everywhere heartbreaking,’ wrote the anonymous
reviewer for Kirkus Reviews, it is ‘a collage of voices from the tail end of the world’s conflagration.’ In the Independent, Daniel Hahn noted that ‘ordinary people speak alongside heads of state; military men alongside poets; bystanders and perpetrators alongside victims.’ For Hahn, it was the cumulative effect ‘that makes the book so remarkable, because even if the quoted extracts are not all artful, their selection and meticulously considered arrangement certainly is.’ The best history writing, he argued, ‘adds layers, draws out contradictions and sharpens them, digs down into complexity, presenting a narrative that is rich and not simple at all. Swansong 1945 does all these things supremely well.’
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Books on books Where I’m Reading From The Changing World of Books
Where Have You Been?
Tim Parks (Harvill Secker, 256pp, £12.99, Oldie price £11.69)
Michael Hofmann
The short essays in this book began life as blogs on the modern literary climate for the New York Review of Books: Why finish books? Can novelists change the kind of stories they write? ‘One of the myths about creative writing courses,’ writes Parks, ‘is that students go there to learn how to write. Such learning, if and when it takes place, is a felicitous by-product.’ In the Herald, Alan Taylor concluded that ‘throughout the 20th century the trend has been away from writing as a creative act to that of a fame and fortune-seeking business’. The Guardian critic John Mullan noted that the sceptical author ‘likes to throw questions into the air, as if enacting the new uncertainties about all literary values.’ In the Independent, Sam Jordison, irritated by ‘the deluge
of self-congratulatory books about the act of reading itself’, was initially unimpressed, yet conceded that ‘the awful title and frontloading of poor stuff about e-readers belies some fine essays’. Rona Cran, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, remained unconvinced. ‘Parks clearly intends to be polemical, but instead sounds petulant, largely due to a number of unforgiveable generalisations and the prevailing inconsistency in his arguments.’ But ‘the great thing about this book,’ according to Tim Adams in the Observer, ‘is that, for all its accurate sniping, Parks never once gives up on the truths that the best writing can communicate.’
Dear Reader Paul Fournel, tr by David Bellos (Pushkin Press, 160pp, £10, Oldie price £9) The French novelist and poet Paul Fournel is the President and Provisionally Definitive Secretary of the Oulipo group. Who-lipo? That’s the collective of experimental French writers – living and dead – that most famously gave us George Perec’s La Disparation, a novel written entirely without using the letter ‘e’. Fournel’s short novel Dear Reader also takes on a formal challenge: it’s written in a prose approximation of the sestina form, and it is composed of precisely ‘180,000 signs (including spaces)’. Sounds ghastly and pretentious, you say? You’d be surprised. The ‘reader’ of the title, by the way, is an ‘e-reader’. The novel, originally published in French, follows a world-weary middleaged publisher adrift in the world of Amazon and Kindle, watching, as he sees it, the slow waning of the printed book and of a readership with the attention span to handle it. Andy Miller in the Spectator found this ‘the most truthful account of literary ennui I have ever read, a quietly remarkable
little book’ which is ‘frequently very funny’. He noted approvingly that Waterstones’s MD James Daunt makes a cameo appearance on page 123. Others seemed to agree. The French press hailed it as ‘a delight’ (Figaro) and ‘the ultimate celebration of printed books’ (Le Monde). Over here the online Huffington Post and the rather less online The Lady were alike charmed, the former calling it ‘a joyously satirical, affectionate novel’ and the latter applauding a ‘wry but affectionate look at today’s publishing world’. Writing in the Guardian, Nicholas Lezard wondered: ‘Could this be any more French?’ But he did not mean that necessarily as dispraise. Fournel, he wrote, ‘has been a publisher, and so knows a lot about elements of the trade that escape the general reader (and the critic): the physical business of paper, its weight and quality, even its soundabsorbing properties. Dear Reader pays respect to these, and to other quietly essential aspects of the publishing world, such as a decent lunch.’
(Faber & Faber, 304pp, £30, Oldie price £25) The poet, critic and translator Michael Hofmann – often found writing in the London Review of Books – is a feared force in the higher reaches of the literary landscape. When he drops the hammer on a reputation – as last year’s Man Booker Prize winner Richard Flanagan discovered – it stays dropped: Hofmann’s recent LRB dismissal of The Narrow Road To The Deep North was so vicious that the Chair of the judges, A C Grayling, wrote to the magazine to complain that his review must have been ‘written on a bad haemorrhoid day’. Hofmann, though, is a critic of passionate enthusiasms as well as of haemorrhoidal asperity. The thirty essays in this collection include rapturous appreciations of the poets Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman and Robert Lowell; positive reappraisals of Basil Bunting and Gottfried Benn; and a few in the negative direction. Stefan Zweig is ‘an absolutely dreadful writer’. ‘A good critic, like a good editor, is rarer on these shores than an osprey,’ said Nicholas Shakespeare in the Daily Telegraph. ‘That’s why the uplifting sight of Michael Hofmann gliding across our horizon – magisterial, languid (pre-swoop), unpredictable – is so welcome. Where Have You Been? flashes with a sea-eagle’s eye, at the same time spreading the sort of shadow that can be guaranteed to send a preening/bloated author lurching for cover.’ Continuing his line of nature imagery, Shakespeare added: ‘Once he has sniffed out his author, Hofmann behaves more like a Tasmanian devil, clamping his teeth into the chosen rump with an almost devotional ferocity.’ Shakespeare’s was the only review of the book – literary criticism is a hard sell, evidently – in a UK newspaper, but he had an ally in Kirkus Reviews in the US. ‘In this vibrant collection, Hofmann elevates criticism to an art.’
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sport Scream
Mike Tyson: his ‘words are streaked with the salty sweat of the boxing gym’
The Tyson Tapes Jonathan Rendall
(Short Books, 208pp, £14.99, Oldie price £13.49) Jonathan Rendall ‘wrote intermittently and with a jaundiced but knowing eye about boxing, drinking, gambling and life,’ explained his friend Kevin Mitchell in an obituary for the Guardian in January 2013. Rendall died having published three books and failed to deliver a fourth. The first book, This Bloody Mary is the Last Thing I Own, won the Somerset Maugham Prize and was praised by Tom Wolfe and Tom Stoppard. The second, Twelve Grand, for Rachel Cugnoni at Yellow Jersey, was so called because he squandered his advance on gambling (as instructed). The third, Garden Hopping, was the story of his quest to find the mother who had given him up for adoption. Now, two years
after Rendall’s death, Short Books have published his fourth book (though not as Rendall had originally intended). Rendall had covered Mike Tyson’s boxing career for the Sunday Correspondent and the Independent on Sunday, and in 2005 he was commissioned to write Scream: The Real Mike Tyson.
The interviews for that abortive book were discovered in a bin bag after his funeral and have been edited by Richard Williams into ‘an oral history of Tyson’s rise, interspersed with passages in the voice of the boxer, as imagined by the author’. Introducing it in the Guardian, Williams compared it to ‘a piece of chamber music, its individual voices exposed in the often discordant testimony of a small group of men – and one woman – competing to claim credit for their contribution to the saga. Their words are streaked with the salty sweat of the boxing gym.’ Indeed, Williams was ‘struck by how cleverly’ Rendall ‘had interleaved the various testimonies, and how convincingly he had empathised with his subject’.
The Game of Our Lives The Meaning and Making of English Football David Goldblatt (Penguin, 400pp, £9.99, Oldie price £9.49) Goldblatt ‘has written not just the best soccer book in many years but an exemplary account of the changing character of British society in the post-Thatcher era,’ declared David Runciman in the Wall Street Journal. ‘Soccer is a much more universal sport than cricket, even in England: more people play it, more people watch it, more people care about it. For that reason, it offers a far better insight into the state of the nation. Soccer is nothing without the passion of its traditional fans, but that’s not where the important revenue streams are. In this tension lies a confusion that marks not just the entire sport but in many ways the entire country.’ The book contains chapters about the changing National icon: the original Slazenger Challenge, the 1966 FIFA World Cup ball that was used in the final game between England and West Germany.
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nature of the match day experience, the varied urban identities of particular teams, the eradication of hooliganism
at stadiums, the efforts to eliminate racism and the globalisation of the game. ‘Altogether, this is an exceptional book that just falls short of greatness, for two reasons,’ wrote David Kynaston in the Guardian. ‘The first is a Hamletwithout-the-Prince problem: in other words, not enough about the football itself.’ The second is that Goldblatt ‘is not quite willing to come to grips with the disturbing possibility that the ever more central place of football in what passes for our national conversation in fact reflects a degree of escapism, even infantilisation, that may have profound and negative consequences as our mainstream democratic process hollows out.’ The author’s goal, according to Mihir Bose in the Independent, is ‘to link football to the wider story of English society and he pulls off this difficult feat backed by prodigious research’.
modern times Nothing is True and Everything is Possible
How the World was Won
Peter Pomerantsev (Faber & Faber, 304pp, £14.99, Oldie price £12.99)
The Tasmanian-born writer Peter Conrad was one of the golden generation of Australian émigrés to these shores, along with Clive James, Germaine Greer and Robert Hughes. In his new book he turns his attention to a country whose influence saturates both Australia and the UK: the United States of America. Conrad, who first encountered America through Hollywood movies, offers here a sweeping survey of the US’s cultural influence, suggesting that globalism itself may well add up simply to the ‘universalisation of the US’. But Conrad does not approach his subject splenetically. Rather, he hymns his love of American movies and fiction (both highbrow and low) and traces America’s culture, counterculture and its roots in ‘the egalitarian influences of mass culture’. Even Brits who cracked America – such as the Beatles – were ‘cultural copycats’.
Peter Pomerantsev’s account of the terrifying ways in which Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin exercises power in Russia and outside its borders could scarcely have been more timely. A few weeks after it came out, the opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was shot dead outside the Kremlin – and the possibility of getting to the culprit seemed to vanish in a swirl of state-sponsored conspiracy theories. Pomerantsev argues that Russia has become a PR state – in the sense of public relations. Here is the first ‘post-modern dictatorship’, one in which the manipulation of perception is everything. ‘TV is the only force that can unify and rule and bind this country,’ says Pomerantsev. ‘It’s the central mechanism of a new type of authoritarianism far subtler than 20th-century strains.’ The Independent’s Lucy Popescu noticed that as a former television maker ‘Pomerantsev is particularly entertaining when observing the changing fads of the television industry, but for the most part he focuses on the sad, sometimes surreal, form corruption takes today.’ The Guardian’s Tony Wood found the book ‘an entertaining if bleak chronicle of these years, depicting a world “where gangsters become artists, gold‑diggers quote Pushkin, Hells Angels hallucinate themselves as saints”.’ Though he found room for ‘minor quibbles about accuracy here and there’, to Ben Hoyle in the Times ‘Pomerantsev is one of the most perceptive, imaginative and entertaining commentators writing on Russia today and, much like the country itself, his first book is seductive and terrifying in equal measure. It suggests that the Kremlin is a kind of cult, brilliantly exploiting 140 million Russians by keeping them “entertained, distracted, constantly exposed to geopolitical nightmares that if repeated enough times can become infectious”, a cynical fusion of “reality TV and authoritarianism”.’
The Americanisation of Everywhere Peter Conrad (Thames & Hudson, 336pp, £19.95, Oldie price 17.95) Chris Blackhurst in the Independent applauded ‘a work sparkling with arresting vignettes’, but one which didn’t shy from the dark stuff. ‘Conrad describes to chilling effect how this was the land of the free, created by explorers and business pioneers; but it also slipped into the paranoia of McCarthyism and the CIA.’ The Sunday Times’s Ian Critchley was less smitten: ‘Despite its claim to be about “the Americanisation of everywhere”, it doesn’t venture much beyond Europe and North America.’ ‘America can’t help but affect us all. We cannot not be affected by America,’ is how the Guardian’s Nick Fraser summed up his thesis. ‘In conclusion, wrestling with symptoms of decline, Conrad reaffirms his obsession. “I am not ready to be cured,” he says. “A world without America would be a dull, constricted place, hardly worth living in.”’
The Internet is Not The Answer Andrew Keen (Atlantic Books, 288pp, £16.99, Oldie price £14.99) Latest in a mini-vogue of books from Internet nay-sayers – the prime mover, probably, being Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows, which argued that the web is making us all stupid – is Andrew Keen’s The Internet Is Not The Answer. Keen argues that it’s not just making us stupid; tech companies, with their vast wealth and Utopian PR blether, are a threat both to the social fabric and to the proper functioning of democracy. Far from empowering the ordinary man, the digital revolution has made a handful of tech oligarchs unimaginably wealthy, while driving wages down in a whole wealth of other industries. In the Sunday Times, Bryan Appleyard was spooked by Keen’s ‘pacey and chilling book’: ‘beneath the public facade, there is a local Silicon Valley ideology that is right-wing, libertarian and brutally elitist.’ This is odd, because ‘as Keen shows, the Inter-
net began as a collective enterprise, entirely created by public money,’ yet ‘on the large scale at least, the net has become a gigantic, Bond-villain version of rapacious late capitalism.’ Steven Poole in the Guardian wasn’t persuaded. ‘The Internet is not the answer. But who said it was? And hang on, what was the question again? Even if it makes sense to consider “the Internet” as a single entity, it’s not clear that it deserves the blame for the cultural and industrial changes that Keen laments.’ In the Telegraph, Duncan White was similarly lukewarm. ‘To blame the Internet for the damage wrought by neo-liberalism is a bit like blaming 19th-century laissez faire capitalism on the spinning jenny. Keen should be applauded for rowing against the tide of veneration for technological innovation. His book, however, cannot quite live with its own ambition.’
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ex tr
Thatcherite Times
ac t
Mad Men and Bad Men What Happened when British Politics Met Advertising Sam Delaney (Faber & Faber, 320pp, £14.99, Oldie price £13.49) ‘The most famous British political poster, the one credited for sweeping Margaret Thatcher to victory in 1979, almost ended up in the dustbin twice,’ according to Patrick Kidd in the Times. ‘Labour Isn’t Working’ was created by a young copywriter at Saatchi and Saatchi and showed a queue snaking out of the dole office to reflect unemployment under James Callaghan. Nobody, including Mrs Thatcher, thought much of it to start with. When Tim Bell, the Saatchi executive, explained the joke, Mrs Thatcher sniffed: ‘It can’t be very good because I don’t get it.’ But everyone else did. ‘Elections are the sexy part of politics and the ads are the sexiest part of elections,’ writes Delaney, who has worked for both parties, in this new book. ‘Delaney,’ Peter Preston recounted in the Observer, ‘seeks to reveal how a new breed of loud, louche, distinctly non-posh lads
from the agencies took over and shaped politics in the ’70s and ’80s. Not a case that stands up to much scrutiny, but that’s not what gives his enquiries their fascination. For here are some excoriating vignettes of the panic and incompetence that grips our once and future leaders when democratic decision time comes around. They aspire to run the country, but whelk stalls would probably be beyond them.’ Nicholas Blincoe in the Daily Telegraph was less forgiving: ‘The narrative is often confusing: unlike Thatcher, Delaney is all for U-turning when he feels like it.’ Blincoe concedes that the book ends with a serious argument and that putting the ad men centre stage ‘makes for a compelling perspective – and a timely one as the impact of social media and the absence of trust in any party threatens to make the 2015 election the flappiest yet.’
Right or Wrong The Memoirs of Lord Bell Tim Bell (Bloomsbury Continuum, 288pp, £25, Oldie price £21.50) Bell was the adman who became a confidant of Mrs Thatcher and later worked as a senior PR adviser to such wealthy clients as Rupert Murdoch and General Pinochet. In this autobiography, wrote Roger Boyes in the Times, his task is ‘to rescue his own battered reputation and he is doing it exactly as he would counsel his own clients: with carefully dosed candour, a bit of panache and a determination never to be boring. What did Lord Bell learn from half a century of spinning? How to get politicians and tycoons to identify their weaknesses, take responsibility for them and play to their strengths. Now he has applied the same techniques to his own life.’ Social historian Dominic Sandbrook, in the Sunday Times, welcomed Bell’s robust attitude and forthright opinions. ‘With its workmanlike prose and frequent excursions into saloon-bar political theorising, Bell’s
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ghost-written book is unlikely to win any awards for literary elegance,’ he declared. ‘Yet it is nevertheless a pacy and enjoyable read. He is utterly unapologetic about his PR work for some of the world’s most reviled characters, from the Syrian first lady Asma al-Assad to the Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko, though he does insist that he would never have worked for Hitler.’ According to Craig Brown in the Mail on Sunday, the book ‘reads as though dictated through a megaphone’. But Brown had a more fundamental complaint. ‘Half the time, Bell is bragging about preferring lying to telling the truth,’ he lamented. ‘The other half, he is standing on his high horse, setting the world to rights, declaring: “I’ve never tried to cheat anybody.” Sometimes, in the very same paragraph, the liar and the moralist collide, resulting in a horrid mess.’
A Different Kind of Weather William Waldegrave
(Constable & Robinson, 297pp, £20, Oldie price £16) In 1975, Margaret Thatcher challenged Ted Heath for the leadership of the Conservative Party Tom Kitson brought the result of the leadership ballot into the big Commons office where some of us had gathered, and handed Heath the piece of paper showing that Thatcher had won the first round. There are two versions of what Heath said next: Kenneth Baker’s, ‘So we got it all wrong then’; and mine, ‘It has all gone wrong, then.’ The version I remember is subtly but importantly different from Baker’s. His means ‘we’, and indeed ‘you – the staff’, have messed up the election. Mine means that he was still thinking with the clarity that made him nearly great: that everything he had inherited, from Churchill, Macmillan, Butler and the other architects of post-war British Conservatism, was about to end. I know that he was so stubborn, and so ungracious and sour in defeat because he understood that the contest was not a matter of personalities, nor even of superficial policy differences. He realised that his defeat meant that a sea change was coming over the British right. It would be the end of the attempt to maintain the social contract and a reversion to far freer economics in which the government would not regard full employment as a possible – or even legitimate – object of policy. And it would begin the inexorable rise of anti-Europeanism in the party, which had the potential to undo what Heath regarded as his greatest achievement.
Margaret Thatcher said ‘there will not be a woman prime minister in my lifetime,’ when she entered Heath’s Cabinet in 1970
nature The Cultural Life of Whales and Dolphins Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell (University of Chicago Press, 408pp, £24.50, Oldie price £22.50)
Do porpoises listen to Radio 3? Are southern right whales keen on the late works of Eudora Welty? Do sperm whales regard Moby Dick as a torture-porn horror novel? None of these questions are addressed directly by biologists Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell in their scholarly investigation into the social behaviour and mental lives of cetaceans. Their definition of culture, rather, is ‘a flow of information moving from animal to animal’. And within it they have some remarkable things to report about these complex animals. Perhaps because of its scholarly heft, most mainstream newspapers didn’t review the book. It appears they missed a trick. As Publishers Weekly reported, ‘Humans, though arguably the masters of culture, are not the only species that have it. Dolphins, as the authors reveal, create signature whistles and can mimic and remember those of others, even twenty years later. They can also learn tail-walking in captivity and then teach it in the wild. Whales possess dialects that change in a way that can only be explained as the result of learning. And both whales and dolphins behave in “obviously altruistic” ways.’ In Psychology Today, evolutionary biologist Marc Bekoff raved that it had taken him less than 24 hours to devour the book, and ‘I look forward to rereading it many times, for it is that good.’ The Guardian’s Philip Hoare, too, adored it. ‘The final chapters of this groundbreaking and beautifully produced book pose stunning questions, and tease out outrageous answers. If culture exists in cetaceans, have they developed an equivalent moral sense of right and wrong? Yes, say the authors. Whales and dolphins observe rituals of the dead and exhibit grief. Could they, then, express spiritual sentiment, founded on values and belief – even a sense of religion? Perhaps. All this only underlines a pressing need to address the notion of non-human rights for such animals.’
Landmarks Robert Macfarlane (Hamish Hamilton, 400pp, £20, Oldie price £16) Robert Macfarlane is a oneman rebuke to the idea that sensitive literary scholars are not the sort of boys who play outdoors. Macfarlane combines his life as a Cambridge don and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature with the sort of outwardbound shenanigans that would earn the approval of Bear Grylls. His trilogy of books about his adventures – Mountains of the Mind, The Wild Places and The Old Ways – are justly regarded as setting the benchmark for a new generation of literary naturecum-travel writing. In Landmarks, Macfarlane digs into the traditional language, now in eclipse, which our ancestors used to describe nature itself, presenting a 2,000-odd-strong ‘word-hoard’ of arcane terms lost to common speech, and threading through it an appreciation of nature writers he himself has loved, from Nan Shepherd to Peter Davidson, J A Baker to Gerard Manley Hopkins. As he laments, at the more bathetic end of the scale, the new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary has deleted acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, pasture and willow to make way for attachment, block-graph, blog, broadband, bullet-point, celebrity,
chatroom, committee, cut-and-paste, MP3 player and voicemail. For Adam Nicolson in the Spectator Macfarlane’s book showed how ‘fineness, subtlety and perceptiveness do not belong exclusively to the poets; they are our common inheritance. But we scarcely know it. Robert Macfarlane has over many years been gathering and hoarding these verbal touchstones, instinctively recognising that they are a way of re-animating our connections with the natural world.’ The Guardian’s Kirsty Gunn was equally admiring, discerning a tone that is ‘generous, sensitive, yielding always to the words of others, even while Macfarlane’s own exquisite feel for language and its inferences carry us along.’ Landmarks, thought the Telegraph’s Horatio Clare, ‘is a bigger book than it first appears. There is a manifesto quality to it, a more urgent beat than in his previous work. Through language and shared pursuit, some sort of karma of correspondences begins to jump like St Elmo’s fire between living and dead writers, between the wordworkers and the land. We must hope and expect that Landmarks will be influential. As for Macfarlane, every movement needs stars. In him we surely have one, burning brighter with each book.’
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rapid read
Mightier Than the Sword Jeffrey Archer (as re-imagined by Mark Crick) ‘Do you think they were really sent by the Queen Mother?’ said Harry Clifton, looking at the lilies on display in the stateroom. ‘Her name’s on the card?’ replied his wife, Emma, sleepily. ‘Then why is it smoking?’ ‘Box blight, probably.’ ‘That peat-free Semtex can’t be helping. I’ll get your brother, Giles. He’s good with plants.’ ‘He’s an MP and you’re a successful novelist. Get back into bed. We’ll be docking in New York tomorrow and your publisher’s prepared a ticker-tape welcome.’ * ‘Three Irish coffees it is, sir,’ said the steward, surprised to see passengers in the first class lounge wearing full face balaclavas and life jackets. It was 1964; standards were falling. The two men on deck in pyjamas throwing a potted lily overboard were a case in point. * ‘I hope you won’t be wearing those pyjamas when you take on Major Fisher in the election, Uncle Giles?’ said Harry’s son Seb at breakfast the next morning. ‘Where are the sleeves?’ ‘Brilliant Seb,’ responded Emma. ‘Just the sort of insight our shareholders could use on the board of Barrington Shipping.’ ‘Sign him up,’ ordered Giles. ‘I resign.’ * Shareholder Lady Virginia Creeper looked into the mirror. ‘Barringtons, Barringtons everywhere, how can I force a crash in their shares?’ As if by magic, her evil henchman, Major Fisher, appeared. ‘For each button on my blazer,’ intoned the major, ‘I will give you one evil wish.’ ‘It had better be double-breasted,’ she replied. * ‘Now the IRA are safely behind bars, Harry,’ said the Cabinet Secretary, ‘The PM would like you to take on the Soviet Union. We need a man with a photographic memory and you’ve been selected. While you’re in
Leningrad next week we’d like you to memorise the telephone directory. It’s vitally important.’ ‘You’re on,’ said Harry. ‘Provided you back my campaign to release Stalin biographer, Anatoly Babablakshipov.’ * The chairman of Hogwarts Bank checked his heart rate and picked up the telephone. ‘Seb, send in that fraudster, Draco Sloane.’ ‘Sloane you’re fired,’ said Dumbledore. ‘And you’re dead,’ laughed Sloane, unplugging Dumbledore’s pacemaker before he could inform HR. * ‘Banking’s changed you, Seb,’ complained his fiancée, Sam. ‘I’m leaving you, taking with me the daughter you don’t know I’m carrying. Only when she wins the Turner Prize will you recognise her unmistakable genius.’ *
‘For possession of biographical substances,’ said the prosecutor, ‘I sentence Mr Clifton to four days in literary confinement.’ ‘You speaky Russky?’, asked Harry’s cellmate. ‘Yes, I learnt on the plane. Have we been introduced?’ ‘I am dissident Babacough. I will recite for you my suppressed novel which you will memorise and carry to the West.’ Only once the plane had left Russian airspace did Harry dare to speak. ‘Do you have any more of these wet wipes?’ he asked. ‘I’ve got a novel to write.’ * Emma looked up from the witness box and beamed as Harry came through the doors of the courtroom. ‘Good has triumphed over evil,’ he proclaimed. ‘Not so fast,’ said Lady Virginia. ‘The jury’s still out.’
Spring 2015 Review of Books THE OLDIE 21
american FICTION
Honeydew
Lila
Edith Pearlman
Marilynne Robinson
A new collection of short stories by Edith Pearlman is a cause for excitement in the literary world. The 78-year-old American author’s last collection, Binocular Vision, her British publishing debut two years ago, sent reviewers and readers into rhapsodies. Her latest collection, Honeydew, has also received a rapturous reception. The novelist Susan Hill, writing in the Times, was one of several reviewers who compared Pearlman’s work to that of Nobel laureate Alice Munro. But Hill struck out further, contending that ‘Pearlman is the finer writer. She is sharper, harder-hitting, odder, her prose and above all her imagery more vivid and memorable’. Over at the Sunday Times, Peter Kemp found that Honeydew further revealed ‘an extraordinary talent’, remarking that the stories were set almost entirely in Godolphin, a fictional New England town. ‘But as with Pearlman’s earlier collection, the overriding impression is of teeming variety.’ These are tales, wrote Vanessa Berridge in the Sunday Express, ‘of suburban existence, of love and longing, of loss, failure and often of isolation.’ In the Spectator, Philip Hensher exhorted readers not to be ‘put off by the atrocious whimsy of Pearlman’s titles: she is somewhat tougher than they suggest. Some of the stories here are restricted vignettes, glimpses of lives as if seen through the window of a moving vehicle. Others pass over years, in the Munro manner.’ Only James Lasdun in the Guardian was not won over, wondering if there will be readers who, like him, will suspect that ‘you have just received a massive and brazen insult to your intelligence.’ Lasdun found himself ‘seriously out of sympathy with these stories’ with their ‘totemic objects and mythic archetypes (a wounded healer of some kind, or a witchily wise old grandmother, or a trio of clever young princesses)’.
Lila is the third of Marilynne Robinson’s novels set in the same small Iowa town. The first, Gilead, was, as Gerard Windsor put it in the Canberra Times, ‘a testamentary message from a dying Ames to his son, the still-small child of his old age. The boy’s mother hovers in the background.’ He went on to explain that, with Robinson’s latest novel, ‘now she has a name, Lila, and this novel is the story of her coming into the life of Gilead.’ ‘Home is a concept that intrigues Robinson,’ according to Sue de Groot in the Sunday Times, and ‘Lila, after much resistance, finds her emotional home in the eyes of the kindly old preacher, Ames. Robinson says she believes in the idea of twinned souls, or what some might call love at first sight.’ However, as Joan Acocella wrote in the New Yorker, ‘Lila tells us that, as Ames’s wife, she was just as lonely as she had been before she married him. This is an unflinching book.’ Sarah Churchwell in the Guardian saw this new novel as reversing the trajectory of Housekeeping, Robinson’s debut novel, as ‘Lila, a drifter her entire life, tries to keep house, learning to balance her untamed sense of herself with her growing fidelity to Ames. There is less social complexity in Lila than in Robinson’s other novels – but there is more exploration of the intractability of individuality.’
(John Murray, 288pp, £16.99, Oldie price £13.99)
22 THE OLDIE Review of Books Spring 2015
(Virago, 272pp, £16.99, Oldie price £14.99)
FICTION
Some Luck
A Spool of Blue Thread
Jane Smiley
Anne Tyler
Some Luck is the first part of a new trilogy, The Last Hundred Years, spanning the years 1920 to 1953. The novel ‘explores the fortunes of the Langdon family, living on their farm in the Iowa prairies, surrounded by wind-lashed locals of German and Scandinavian descent. The narrator is omniscient and vaguely agitated, fluttering constantly from one mind to another’, Joanna Kavenna told us in the Spectator. Frank, the first-born, appears centre-stage at eleven months, trying to get a spoon into his mouth, a moment described in detail by Smiley, whose ‘cumulative power lies in the acute depiction of everyday moments’, according to Sophie Ratcliffe in the Times Literary Supplement. Such detail, Smiley says, helps readers understand the world inhabited by her characters. Rebecca Abrams complained in the Financial Times that ‘the cast list is long, but the characters are not much given to introspection. Instead of becoming steadily more involved in their experiences, we are relegated to the sidelines.’ However, writing in the Washington Post, Valerie Sayers praised the novel, declaring that Smiley ‘delivers a straightforward, old-fashioned tale of rural family life in changing times. Her nomuss, no-fuss storytelling, if unsurprising, is also frequently subtle, wry and moving.’
Anne Tyler’s latest novel ‘dwells on the uncomfortable shift grown children make as their parents decline’, Ellen Gamerman told readers in the Wall Street Journal. ‘The book follows three generations of the Whitshank family. The clan of strivers is ruled by jealousy and secrets, set in motion a century ago by a 13-year-old girl who sleeps with a man twice her age and calls it love.’ Classic Tyler territory you might say. David Robinson, a Tyler fan, praised it in the Scotsman, ‘Nobody – or nobody I have read anyway – writes about family life like Tyler. The slow compromises of parenthood, the gradual reconciliation of emotional opposites in the course of a long marriage, the way in which ambition might pall or fail to live up to expectations – this is hard territory for the novelist: many attempt to cross it but few succeed. But it is precisely where Tyler excels, finding quiet drama in ordinary life in a way that catches both its profundity and its transience.’ But there are Tyler apostates out there, James Walton in the Telegraph for one: ‘According to Tyler’s doubters, the similarities shared by her novels are damagingly close, going far deeper than just location and basic subject matter. And, although few people deny the deftness of her individual observations or her enormous sympathy for all concerned, some maintain that this sympathy can often curdle into overfondness and sentimentality.’ In the Times, however, John Sutherland disagreed: ‘Her work consistently eschews any Brady Bunch cosiness. The siblings just don’t get along. Siblings never do in her fiction.’ Like most of Tyler’s novels, this latest is set in Baltimore, and Mary Carole McCauley of the Baltimore Sun admired it: ‘This is not a writer who averts her glance or who brushes aside life’s difficulties with a cliché.’
(Mantle, 400pp, £7.99, Oldie price £7.59)
(Chatto & Windus, 368pp, £18.99, Oldie price £15.99)
Spring 2015 Review of Books THE OLDIE 23
FICTION
Lamentation
Funny Girl
C J Sansom (Mantle, 615pp, £20, Oldie price £11.69)
Nick Hornby (Viking, 352pp,
Lamentation is the sixth book in Sansom’s series about Matthew Shardlake, the Tudor lawyer-sleuth. ‘There is little doubt,’ proclaimed Alfred Hickling in the Guardian, ‘that the popularity of the Shardlake series is partly due to the fact that the books fulfil the morbid function of Horrible Histories for grown-ups. Yet Sansom, who trained both as a historian and a solicitor, is no mere blood-and-guts entertainer. The early novels in the series, in which Shardlake acted on behalf of his patron, Thomas Cromwell, painted a darker, more vindictive but no less valid portrait of Henry VIII’s chief minister than Mantel’s in Wolf Hall.’ Amanda Craig in the Independent was equally impressed: ‘Lamentation, like its predecessors, is a triumph both as detective fiction and as a novel, and its 615 pages never drag. Sansom’s deep feeling for the psychology of religious faith, and for the lives of the defenceless, makes him, in my view, superior to Hilary
Mantel. People in his books survive by desperate intelligence and luck; his apprehension of Henry’s court gives us both its fairy-tale beauty and its nightmarishly factional politics.’ Allan Massie in the Wall Street Journal was also a fan: ‘Mr Sansom is, I should say, a late disciple of Walter Scott, who asked what the plot was for “but to bring in fine things”. Fine things are here abundantly, and the evocation of Tudor London is utterly convincing. Moreover, Mr Sansom has learned from Scott that real historical personages like Henry and Cromwell may be most effectively, credibly and convincingly presented to the reader through the eyes of an invented fictional character. This sequence of novels is a fine example of the intelligent imagination playing on history. Most importantly, it shows what the reader of history may often tend to forget: that events now safely in the past were once uncertainly and dangerously in the future.’
£18.99, Oldie price £7.59)
Sophie Straw, the protagonist of Nick Hornby’s latest novel, is the vivacious and much-loved star of a popular – and entirely fictitious – BBC situation comedy. ‘The imaginative kernel of Nick Hornby’s new novel,’ explained Andy Miller in the Spectator, ‘is a classic Sixties British sitcom somewhere between Marriage Lines and Till Death Us Do Part, starring the sort of person who rarely received top billing in such shows at that time.’ When we first meet the funny girl of the title she is about to be named Miss Blackpool 1964. But she renounces her crown and heads to London to follow her dream. ‘In a grimmer novel,’ James Walton speculated in the Telegraph, ‘this would presumably be the cue for an unsparing depiction of dashed hopes, loneliness and despair.’ Not so here. Aidan Smith in the Scotsman was won over by the novel: ‘Some may find the story a little too cute, but I loved this hymn to the 1960s.’
Paco Roca’s graphic novel Wrinkles (Knockabout, 100pp, £12.99) tells the story of Ernest, who is admitted to a home ‘following a number of “senior moments”’, as Julius Purcell explained in the Guardian. Roca depicts the home’s community as like a library populated by yellowing pages of dreams and fantasies. Some see the writing of their pages disappear, sheet after sheet, until they become almost completely blank. According to Publishing News, ‘Memories are all that we are, and as Ernest leans out of a train carriage window on the cover, snapshots of his life fly from his open head, lost forever to the winds of time.’ Purcell applauded Roca’s courage: ‘A stranger to cynicism, Roca portrays the world through a kind of tough sweetness, which is possibly the best way to contemplate the degradations of Alzheimer’s, and not look away.’ The reviewer in Publishing News agreed: ‘Wrinkles doesn’t shy away from the sad and painful, but neither is it sentimental.’
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THE FAIRY-TALE INDUSTRY
Once Upon a Time A Short History of Fairy Tale Marina Warner (Oxford University Press, 232pp, £10.99, Oldie price £9.89)
The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm Translated by Jack Zipes (Princeton University Press, 555pp, £24.95, Oldie price £22.95)
Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange Translated by Malcolm C Lyons; introduction by Robert Irwin (Penguin Classics, 496pp, £25, Oldie price
£20)
Grimm Legacies The Magic Spell of the Grimm Folk and Fairy Tales Jack Zipes (Princeton University Press, 288pp, £24.95, Oldie price £22.95) The writers and academics of the modern fairy-tale industry have had much to chew on recently when it comes to popular culture. First, there is Frozen, the all-timebox-office-busting Disney film inspired (loosely) by Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen. Then there is the star-studded cinematic version of Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods, which throws together a winning collection of the darker characters from the tales of the Brothers Grimm. Marina Warner, writing in the Guardian, found the Snow Queen in Frozen a far cry from the ‘icy enchantress’ of Andersen’s original. ‘She has been utterly transfigured – softened, redeemed.’ Professor Jack Zipes, the doyen of fairy-tale scholarship, has published a small collection of his lectures at Princeton. Don’t get him started on Disney princesses. According to Roger Clarke in the Independent, Zipes is ‘waging a one-man war against infantilism’. Into the Woods, however, as William Gray pointed out in the Telegraph, has restored the darkness of the traditional Grimm tales for an adult audience. There are few happy ever afters in Sondheim’s wood: ‘For many of the characters, things do not end happily at all.’ Zipes’s translation of the first edition of the Brothers Grimm, with illustrations by Andrea Dezsö (above), restores the harshness and violence of stories that have been polishedup or edited out altogether. ‘How The Children Played at Slaughtering’ is certainly a far cry from Frozen. Zipes’s book,
said Rowan Williams in the New Statesman, is a ‘wonderful addition to the material already available in English’, and he noted that previous translations have worked only with later editions that smoothed out uncomfortable details such as Cinderella’s sisters slicing bits off their feet in order to get the glass slipper to fit. Melanie McDonagh in the Spectator also enjoyed the uncensored versions: ‘When the Grimm brothers billed them as Kinder Und Hausmärchen, children’s and household tales, it’s plain that families were made of stronger stuff than we are.’ Marina Warner’s Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale is a slender volume that packs a lot in. As Aimee Bender put it in the New York Times, ‘More than any other genre, fairy tales travel and transform – they are rewritten, remade, recollected and retold. Warner has been studying them for decades, across continents and millenniums, and she tracks their evolution with relish.’ Rowan Williams agreed that what Warner calls ‘honest harshness’ cannot be wished away from fairy tales but he wished that she had discussed pantomime at more length ‘which surely is the most widespread form of contact with fairytales’. Writing in the Washington Post, Michael Dirda admired Warner’s range: ‘She examines, for example, how social realities such as arranged marriages and peasant starvation might have given rise to Beauty and the Beast and Hansel and Gretel.’ The rediscovery of the eighteen 10th-century Arabic stories that comprise Tales of The Marvellous and News of the Strange is a tale of wonder in itself. The manuscript from which Malcolm Lyons’ new translation is taken, the first into English, dates from the 14th century. Over the years, it found its way to the library of Hagia Sophia where it lay forgotten until 1933, when Hellmut Ritter discovered it and translated it into German. The Arabist Robert Irwin realised that this was a collection, older than The Thousand and One Nights, of enormous significance. The book has been greeted with acclaim. Irwin’s introduction to this volume is ‘masterful’, wrote Anthony Sattin in the Spectator. Sattin loved Lyons’ ‘brilliant’ translation’ and ‘the pleasure and surprises of its wonder-filled stories’. In the Times Literary Supplement, Patricia Storace found that for the anonymous medieval storytellers, these tales are ‘a homage to the mind of the ultimate narrator, the creator of destinies and weaver of fates, whose divine stories are written in human lives and deaths.’
Spring 2015 Review of Books THE OLDIE 25
repr i nts A Scream in Soho John G. Brandon, British Library, 256pp, £8.99
The Sussex Downs Murder John Bude, British Library, 288pp, £8.99
Mystery in White J. Jefferson Farjeon, British Library, 256pp, £8.99
Capital Crimes: London Mysteries Ed. Martin Edwards, British Library, 320pp, £9.99
The Female Detective Andrew Forrester, British Library, 328pp, £8.99 ten de-picted colourful The British Library’s excelLondon settings. lent Crime Classics reprints series has Head south for The Sussex Downs seen unprecedented sales of the fifteen Murder by John Bude, which features titles so far produced. The list features another crime without a body. Signs of Victorian tales, full of period flavour, a struggle and a blood-soaked cap point and books from between the Wars, to a murder or possible kidnap. Supercommonly considered the golden age of intendent Meredith isn’t sure, until hucrime writing. Many of the paperback man bones are found in unlikely locareprints, with their vibrant new covers, tions. The victim’s younger sibling is a are available for the first time since their suspect, especially as the housekeeper original publication. thinks his new bride married the wrong A Scream in Soho is set in 1940s brother, ‘what with husband and wife black-out London, where a terrifyno longer sharing the same bedroom.’ ing cry brings the police running to John Bude also wrote murder stories a gory murder scene. But there is no set in the Lake District and on the victim, and that’s not the only surprise. Cornish coast (available as part of the So begins an intricately-woven tale of British Library murder, espionage Crime Classics An intricately-woven tale and extortion in series). He was a fashionable but of murder, espionage and co-founder of the sinister Soho, where aristocrats and com- extortion in fashionable Soho Crime Writers’ Association, with moners share the a reputation for sound research, and his company of gangsters and spies. protagonist, Meredith, is also thorough The story soon develops pace, like about details (‘finicky and pig-headed’, a black cab chase through the back according to Meredith’s Chief streets of W1. Detective Inspector ‘Mac’ Constable). Bude supplies not McCarthy likes to act on a hunch and only a map in The uses methods ‘as illegal as anything the Sussex Downs Murder criminals may have done’. Mysteri(in good who-dunnit ous characters keep Mac guessing and tradition) but also a test his resolve up to the last page of footnote explaining this tense thriller, one of more than that an existing railway a hundred detective novels by the line had been deliberAustralian-born crime writer John G. ately omitted from the Brandon, who lived in England and of-
26 THE OLDIE Review of Books Spring 2015
landscape for simplification. Mystery in White, by J. Jefferson Farjeon, is an old-fashioned Christmas thriller that became a surprise bestseller when it was reprinted at the end of 2014. The story is reassuringly familiar yet animated and engaging, with lively characters defined in a crisp style. ‘Do you feel the horror in this house?’ is a question posed on Christmas Eve when refuge from a snowstorm is taken in a remote country pile. The fires are already lit, high tea is prepared and a kettle boiling, but not another soul can be found. Murder and the paranormal quicken the suspense as the snow drifts deepen. Can the staring portrait of a reproachful man twenty years dead really reveal the truth? Head back into London for Capital Crimes: London Mysteries, a collection of seventeen short stories beginning with a masterly tale of deception by Arthur Conan Doyle, followed later by a short and sweet story by Margery Allingham, featuring her sleuth Albert Campion. ‘A Mystery of the Underground’ by John Oxenham is an abridged version of a magazine serial that told of a tube-travelling serial killer. A slump in passenger numbers followed each instalment and brought official protests to the editor, Jerome K. Jerome. The Female Detective by Andrew Forrester was originally published in 1864 and is the first novel in British fiction to feature a female detective. This forerunner to Miss Marple and Lisbeth Salander takes the form of a memoir and introduces Miss Gladdon, who maintains a confidential persona and adopts the guise of a dressmaker as a front for her eccentric investigations. Blood and gore do not faze Miss G. as she dissects the clues in a methodical manner. This edition includes a foreword by Alexander McCall Smith, author of the No 1 Ladies Detective Agency books, who makes some shrewd comments on the qualities of female detectives. Trevor Cooper The Crimes Classics books are available directly from the British Library at www.bl.uk/shop, with every purchase supporting the British Library.
Obituar ies P D James
the demands of an outside job’, and her experiences provided invaluable background knowledge for her novels. She started writing in her late thirties: her first novel, Cover Her Face, was snapped up by Faber in 1962. A country house murder, it introduced
her long-serving poet-policeman Adam Dalgliesh. ‘Her books showed an elegance of characterisation and an aptitude for capturing atmosphere that blurred distinctions between classic detective stories and the conventional novel,’ according to the Daily Telegraph; writing in the Scotsman, Alan Massie noted that her novels were usually set in self-contained communities, and that ‘the characters are apparently respectable, educated and well-to-do.’ Described by the Telegraph as ‘a vigorous, beaming woman’, P D James ‘had a frank and sociable exterior that belied a fascination with pain and death’. After retiring from the civil service in 1969, she served as a magistrate, as a Governor of the BBC, and as a Booker Prize judge; she was elevated to the House of Lords as Baroness James of Holland Park. She was a popular speaker at Oldie Literary Lunches, and in her nineties she performed her celebrated double act with Ruth Rendell at the Soho Literary Festival. Jeremy Lewis
In 1956 two academic letters were published simultaneously in the press discussing the Suez invasion by the British – one for, one against. Bayley was a signatory to both.’ In 1956, Bayley married Iris Murdoch, then a philosophy don at St Anne’s. ‘They agreed never to have children,’ according to the Telegraph. ‘Rather, they were, he recalled, “very childlike together”, speaking their own language and sharing practical jokes.’ He tolerated her extra-marital affairs and looked after her tenderly after she contracted Alzheimer’s disease, cook-
ing up what Cunningham described as ‘the schoolboy tuck the pair lived on, the baked beans and fishcakes, in their chaotic north Oxford kitchen.’ Iris: A Memoir, the first volume of an autobiographical trilogy, was published in 1998, the year before her death: some readers found it touching and affectionate, but others were shocked by the frank descriptions of his wife’s deterioration. ‘An unlikely Lothario, with his balding pate, Oxfam sweaters and high-pitched giggle,’ he remarried shortly after Iris’s death. Jeremy Lewis
Born 3rd August 1920, died 27th November 2014 Described by her Guardian obituarist as ‘the grande dame of mystery, a link with the golden age of detective writing that flourished between the wars,’ Phyllis Dorothy James died last November at the age of 94. She grew up in Cambridge; her father, a poorly paid tax inspector, disapproved of girls going to university, and at the age of seventeen she started work in a tax office in Ely. In 1941, she married Connor White, a doctor, who was later diagnosed with schizophrenia: he was in and out of hospital, and P D James was left to earn a living and bring up their two daughters. In 1949, she joined the NHS as a hospital administrator, later moving to the Home Office, where she worked closely with police forensic experts and juvenile delinquents: she once described herself as ‘a writer who needs
John Bayley Born 27th March 1925, died 12th January 2015 Best remembered as the husband of Iris Murdoch, John Bayley, who died in January aged 89, was, according to Valentine Cunningham in the Guardian, ‘one of the best-loved and most inspiring of Oxford’s teachers’. A scholar of Eton – where, according to the Economist, ‘he rejected any book that was either on a syllabus or recommended by a teacher’ – he went up to New College, Oxford, in 1953, and was appointed Warton Professor of English in 1974. ‘Bayley always enjoyed casting himself in the role of the holy fool, dumped bemusedly amid the dangerous courses of the world,’ Cunningham recalled. His ‘dilettantish behaviour could be irritating, both as an examiner (losing scripts) and lecturer (moving rooms, changing topic without notice).’ The Daily Telegraph obituarist noted that ‘if Bayley was a brilliant interpreter of the ideas of others, he was always notoriously vague when it came to his own.
Spring 2015 Review of Books THE OLDIE 27
Books & publishing
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Books & publishing
Dictators’ Dinners A Bad Taste Guide to Entertaining Tyrants Victoria Clark and Melissa Scott Cuba’s erstwhile dictator, Fidel Castro, was passionate about food. In this extract from the book Dictators’ Dinners: A Bad Taste Guide to Entertaining Tyrants (Gilgamesh, 190pp, £14.95, Oldie price £12.95), the authors explain how Castro’s tastes informed his life and give a recipe for one of his favourite dishes, turtle soup. The Bourgeois son of a Spanish immigrant, Fidel Castro ruled Cuba from 1959 until 2008 when, aged 84, he handed Fidel Castro: ‘Good food over to his brother Raul. The is simple food.’ leader of the only MarxistLeninist state in the western hemisphere, Castro was an irritatingly charismatic thorn in the side of generations of American presidents. All efforts to assassinate him – from trying to poison one of his cigars to filling a biro with poison – failed. ‘If surviving assassination attempts were an Olympic event, I would win the gold medal,’ Castro boasted. Decades of economic blockade, counter-revolutionary agitation and even invasion in the famously failed Bay of Pigs operation did not dislodge, let alone kill him. But the demise of the USSR in 1991 spelt the end of Soviet subsidies for Cuba and in 2009 President Obama lifted restrictions on travel and émigré Cubans were permitted to send remittances home. Long before Jamie Oliver, a youthful Fidel Castro was extolling the virtues of plain, fresh ingredients and invading outraged women in their kitchens to instruct them in the proper art of cooking lamb cutlets, salted cod, spaghetti or fried bananas: ‘The best thing is not to boil the shrimp or lobster. Lobster takes eleven minutes to bake or six minutes on a skewer over hot coals. Baste only with butter, garlic and lemon. Good food is simple food.’ Food and drink was a passion for the western world’s leading Communist, with a lot of effort and money wasted on pet projects like setting up enterprises to produce French cheese, foie gras and whisky. Even his daughter recalls that some of the little time he spent with her was spent explaining how to roast pumpkin seeds by grilling them ‘on a slow flame until the shells almost come off by themselves’. He would drop by her mother’s home unannounced bearing black market delicacies at a time when grim jokes about starvation were in vogue: ‘What’s the difference between a Cuban fridge and a coconut? Nothing, they both contain water.’
30 THE OLDIE Review of Books Spring 2015
Cuban state media was publicising some innovative serving suggestions to ease the situation. One recipe featured mashed potatoes and onions, garnished with pork fat and orange juice. Another recommended a pudding of potatoes, sugar and orange peel. Aged 78 in 2004, Castro was still meddling in kitchen affairs, urging every Cuban woman to invest in a Chinese pressure cooker at the cost of approximately half the average monthly household income. His loyal comrade in the struggle and possibly one-time lover, Celia Sanchez, has revealed that a much younger Castro was particularly fond of a soup made from an endangered and now internationally protected species – the turtle.
Turtle soup Serves 4–6
• 250g/ 9oz unsalted butter • 75g/ 3oz of plain flour • 1.4kg/ 3lbs turtle meat, or substitute • 4 celery stalks • 2 minced onions • 1 tsp minced garlic • 3 bay leaves • 1 tsp oregano • 1/2 tsp thyme • 1/2 tsp fresh ground black pepper • 300g/ 10oz of tomato puree • 1l/ 340fl.oz beef stock • 120ml/ 4fl.oz lemon juice • 5 hard-boiled eggs • parsley • 6 tsp of dry sherry • salt and pepper The freshwater snapper turtle is a viable alternative to the protected sea turtle, but veal or beef are also substitutes. Thoroughly wash the meat under cold running water and drain. Remove any bones and cut into half-inch cubes. Melt 200g butter in a heavy casserole. Add the flour and cook over medium heat, stirring frequently, until the roux is light brown, and then set aside. In a large saucepan melt 50g of butter. Add the meat and cook over high heat until browned. Add celery, onions, garlic and seasonings and cook until the vegetables are transparent. Add tomato purée. Lower heat and simmer for 30 minutes. Add the roux and cook over low heat until the soup is smooth and thickened. Season with salt and pepper. Add the lemon juice, sliced eggs and parsley. Remove from heat and serve, adding 1tsp of sherry to each plate.