COVER Dec/Jan 18/11/05 6:58 pm Page 1

DECEMBER 2005 / JANUARY 2006 £3.50

HENRY VIII: REFORMER OR REPROBATE?

Andrew Roberts examines Chamberlain’s Letters
Norman Stone exposes the Mitrokhin Archive
Stalin’s Secret Dossier ★ Tales of Berchtesgaden
Duff Cooper: Diaries of a Cove
Tracey Emin: Confessions of a Chav
Paul Johnson tackles Boudica
Richard Boston salutes John Wilkes
Peter Washington hails Renegade Writers
Roosevelt Casts Out ★ Melville Reeled In
05 EX

Our Island Story

20 S

Botany ★ Birds ★ Branagh

D
BA

SPECIAL DOUBLE ISSUE

Dec/Jan P1 25/11/05 11:47 am Page 1
FROM THE PULPIT
EDITORS ARE THE rainmakers of publish- I ON T REWIN
ing. Without the books they acquire and
the authors they foster, there would be
no business. If that sounds obvious, then
consider the current state of editors as a
Let’s Hear it
new year approaches. Their position,
their authority, is not what it was.
When, twenty-five years ago, I entered
publishing from journalism as a senior edi-
For the Editors
tor at Hodder & Stoughton, the business was so different
from today as to be hardly recognisable. In 1980 publishing
was mainly the preserve of modestly sized and often fami-
ly-owned firms (Hodder among them). Bookselling, W H
Smith apart, was similar. Tim Waterstone’s revolution in
that industry was a couple of years away. Prices were still
fixed by publishers; discounting only took place each new
year when a National Book Sale offered reduced prices for
what were mainly overstocks.
The editor in 1980 was a power. Every firm was
slightly different from the next in the way it was run:
but the process of appointing someone and giving them
authority to purchase rights in books was not subject to
layers of approval. At Hodder & Stoughton the acquisi-
tion process too was straightforward. Modest purchases
of fiction and non-fiction were made via an editorial
meeting. If the money needed was more substantial, the
company’s paperback arm was asked if it would like to
join in. The final decision was made by one man –
Michael Attenborough, the group’s publishing director
and a Hodder in all but name. He had a nose for the
commercial and he recognised quality.
Thus it was possible to receive a proposal, like it, share
it with colleagues, react to spontaneous enthusiasm and
make an offer in a matter of hours. That was how the
firm acquired its first Booker prizewinner, the book by
the Australian author Thomas Keneally that would
become Schindler’s Ark (or List in the United States). It
was an acquisition based on an enthralling, if sometimes
horrifying synopsis. Keneally, who had been published
elsewhere, moved to Hodder for this book and is still
being published by the firm a quarter of century later.
Today, I suggest, it might not be so easy to make such
an acquisition. It would certainly take more time. The
major firms are mostly owned by international conglom-
erates, which have elaborate procedures for the spending
of their money. Forms have to be filled in, P&L (profit
and loss) forecasts produced. But the major difference in
2005 from 1980 is the involvement of sales departments.
At Hodder, sales teams were not usually consulted on
the purchase of books. No salesman (or woman) attended
an editorial meeting. The view then was that editors and
directors made the decisions as to what would be pub-
lished; sales departments were told what they had to sell.
If the pendulum then was too firmly fixed in the editor-
ial direction, has it today swung too far in the other?
Editors when gathered together will often say they think
1
so. Indeed, Dallas Manderson, group sales
director at Orion, actually made a point at
a recent sales conference of stressing that
the sales department did not decide what
was to be published. This is true in theory,
but only up to a point in practice. As sales
estimates are required for the compilation
of the aforementioned P&Ls, sales depart-
ments are asked what they think a book
might sell. And so, in their turn, they often ask the buyers
at key bookselling chains what they think about a propos-
al. At this stage it is a matter of opinion. Where track
records are available they are consulted; sales of books of a
similar type are quoted. Therefore something original and
different is truly frightening. On what can one base an
estimate? Would Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves – a
book about grammar, for goodness sake! – have got
through this process if it hadn’t been for the faith of her
publisher, Andrew Franklin, at his own, then modestly
sized, Profile Books? Editors often work on a professional
gut instinct. That’s how some of the surprise successes in
publishing actually happen.
From personal experience I remember reading in 1992
the first hundred pages of the Alan Clark Diaries, which
were being offered by his agent, Michael Sissons. I had to
sign a confidentiality letter, I had to read the pages in
Sissons’ office, and I wasn’t allowed to take notes. All
good agency hype, with a touch of theatricality to
heighten the senses. At that stage, who had heard of Alan
Clark? He hadn’t been a Cabinet minister; his earlier
books had mainly been military history. Indeed, at the
Weidenfeld & Nicolson publishing meeting fewer than
half those attending recognised who I was talking about.
I do wonder in these P&L-dominated days whether we
bid at the level we did? I like to think that my passionate
presentation would always win everyone over, but how
could anyone possibly have forecasted sales figures for
those diaries? Yet they went on to spend twenty weeks in
the bestseller lists, and made Clark’s name known across
the nation. To bid for the rights was an editorial decision
based on enthusiasm, a recognition that they were
superbly written and that they told us more about the
Thatcher years than we had known previously, and a
belief that here was a once-in-a-lifetime book.
Editors need encouragement, freedom. They must be
allowed to make mistakes. The ultimate sanction is always
there – the sack. The business of books – like the theatre
and films – is an unholy mix of art and commerce. Like
oil and water they don’t naturally go together. Books
require all the skills of marketing, publicity and sales
departments before they can be put before the public. But
I suggest that first and foremost they need the foresight of
editors who identify quality amidst dross, who can mas-
sage apparent sows’ ears into silk purses. Sales departments
have their vital place in the publishing food chain. But
let’s hear it for the editors – they come first!
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
Dec-Jan PP2-3 25/11/05 12:05 pm
THIS MONTH’S PULPIT is written by
Ion Trewin. He is the Editor-in-
Chief of Weidenfeld & Nicolson
and will be administering the Man
Booker Prize. He is writing the
authorised biography of Alan Clark.
JANE RIDLEY is writing a biography
of King Edward VII, to be published
by Chatto & Windus.
ANDREW ROBERTS’s new book, A
History of the English-Speaking Peoples
since 1900, will be published in
September by Weidenfeld & Nicolson
NORMAN STONE is Director of the
Turkish Russian Institute, Bilkent
Universiry, Ankara.
RICHARD GRAY is a Fellow of the
British Academy. His history of
American literature was published
by Blackwell last year.
E S TURNER’s first article was pub-
lished in 1927. He worked for many
years on newspapers in Glasgow and
was a contributor to Punch for 53
years. His books include the best-
selling Boys Will Be Boys.
ANNE DE COURCY’s Debs at War:
How Wartime Changed Their Lives,
1939–1945 is published by
Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
RICHARD BOSTON worked for the
Guardian and the TLS, and founded the
magazine Quarto. He wrote the biogra-
phy of Osbert Lancaster, who once
asked him, ‘How are you getting on
with the biography of … that chap?’
BERNARD GREEN is a Fellow of St
Benet’s Hall and member of the
Theology Faculty at Oxford, where
he teaches Patristics. He has a book on
Leo the Great coming out next year.
I RVING W ARDLE was the theatre
critic of The Times and the
Independent on Sunday. He has writ-
ten a biography of George Devine.
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
Page 2
CONTENTS
PULPIT 1 I ON T REWIN
WORLD WAR TWO 4 A NDREW R OBERTS The Neville Chamberlain Diary
Letters, Volume IV: The Downing Street Years,
1934–40 (Ed) Robert Self
6 R ICHARD O VERY On Hitler’s Mountain: Overcoming the
Legacy of a Nazi Childhood Irmgard A Hunt
7 S IMON H EFFER ON C HURCHILLIANA
9 E VAN M AWDSLEY The Hitler Book: The Secret Dossier
Prepared for Stalin (Ed) Henrik Eberle and Matthias Uhl
DIARIES & MEMOIRS 11 JANE RIDLEY The Duff Cooper Diaries 1915–1951
(Ed) John Julius Norwich
12 FRANCES WILSON Strangeland Tracey Emin
14 J ESSICA M ANN The Year of Magical Thinking Joan Didion
When I Grow Up Bernice Rubens
15 PHILIP WOMACK Someone Like Me Miles Kington
HISTORY 16 NORMAN STONE The Mitrokhin Archive II: The KGB and the
World Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin
17 BLAIR WORDEN Soldiers and Strangers: An Ethnic History of the
English Civil War Mark Stoyle
19 R OWLAND S MITH The Classical World: An Epic History
from Homer to Hadrian Robin Lane Fox
21 P ETER J ONES The Elgin Marbles: The Story of Archaeology’s
Greatest Controversy Dorothy King
22 E S TURNER Our Island Story H E Marshall
23 MICHAEL BURLEIGH The Dragons of Expectation: Reality and
Delusion in the Course of History Robert Conquest
ROYALTY 25 LUCY WOODING The King’s Reformation: Henry VIII and
the Remaking of the English Church G W Bernard
27 PAUL JOHNSON Boudica: Iron Age Warrior Queen
Richard Hingley and Christina Unwin
29 ANNE DE COURCY Elizabeth the Queen Mother Hugo Vickers
BIOGRAPHY 31 RICHARD BOSTON John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil
Liberty Arthur H Cash
33 RICHARD GRAY Melville: His World and Work Andrew Delbanco
34 ALLAN MASSIE Arthur Hugh Clough: A Poet’s Life Anthony Kenny
35 N IGEL J ONES Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist: The Post-
War Crisis and the Rise of the Swastika Edward Timms
37 B ERNARD G REEN John Marco Allegro: The Maverick of the
Dead Sea Scrolls Judity Anne Brown
38 I RVING W ARDLE Kenneth Branagh Mark White
Editor: NANCY SLADEK
Deputy Editor: TOM FLEMING
Commissioning Editor: JEREMY LEWIS
Editorial Assistants: GEORGE NORTON, PHILIP WOMACK
Contributing Editors: ALAN RAFFERTY
SEBASTIAN SHAKESPEARE
Business Manager: SARAH MAHAFFY
Advertising Manager: TERRY FINNEGAN
Founding Editor: DR ANNE SMITH
Founding Father: AUBERON WAUGH
Cover illustration by Chris Riddell
Issue no. 328
2
Dec-Jan PP2-3 25/11/05 12:05 pm Page 3

DECEMBER 2005 / JANUARY 2006

FOREIGN PARTS 40 R AYMOND S EITZ The River of Doubt Candice Millard P ETER W ASHINGTON is General
41 T O M S T A C E Y The State of Africa Martin Meredith Editor of the Everyman’s Library.
Africa: A Modern History Guy Arnold
MICHAEL BURLEIGH’s Earthly Powers
42 R ICHARD D OWDEN The Chains of Heaven Philip Marsden was published in October by Harper
44 H ARRY M OUNT The Call of the Weird Louis Theroux Collins. He is finishing the sequel,
Sacred Causes.
FLORA & FAUNA 45 C HARLES E LLIOTT The Naming of Names Anna Pavord
L UCY W OODING is a lecturer in
46 J ANE G ARDAM This Other Eden Andrea Wulf and Emma
Early Modern History at King’s
Gieben-Gamal The Riverside Gardens of Thomas More’s College London, and the author of
London C Paul Christianson Rethinking Catholicism in Reformation
48 STEPHEN ANDERTON The Secret Life of Trees Colin Tudge England (OUP).
Oak: The Frame of Civilisation William Bryant Logan
J ONATHAN M IRSKY resigned from
49 PETER DAVIES ON BIRD BOOKS
The Times in early 1998.

EXHIBITION 50 JONATHAN MIRSKY China: The Three Emperors (Ed) Evelyn S RICHARD DOWDEN is Director of
Rawski and Jessica Rawson the Royal African Society.

E VAN M AWDSLEY is Professor of

GENERAL 52 P E T E R W A S H I N G T O N Crusoe’s Secret: The Aesthetics
International History at the University
of Dissent Tom Paulin of Glasgow. His Thunder in the East:
53 A C GRAYLING ON MYTHS The Nazi-Soviet War, 1941-1945 has
54 JONATHAN MIRSKY The History of ‘The Times’ Graham Stewart just been published by Arnolds.
56 VALENTINE CUNNINGHAM Faculty Towers Elaine Showalter
AC GRAYLING’s Descartes: The Life of
58 K ATIE H ICKMAN The Oxford Companion to the Photograph
René Descartes and Its Place in His Times
(Ed) Robin Lenman The Ongoing Moment Geoff Dyer was published in October by Free Press.
59 M ICHAEL P ROWSE The Google Story David A Vise
61 F RANCIS K ING Untold Stories Alan Bennett R ICHARD O VERY ’s The Dictators:
63 C RISPIN J ACKSON The Greatest Fight of our Generation Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia was
awarded the Wolfson Prize for
Lewis A Erenberg Beyond Glory David Margolick
History 2005 and is available in
paperback from Penguin.
FICTION 66 J OHN D UGDALE The March E L Doctorow
67 O PHELIA F IELD Get A Life Nadine Gordimer P ETER J ONES is the founder of
68 S EBASTIAN S HAKESPEARE Nothing That Meets The Eye: Friends of Classics.
The Uncollected Stories of Patricia Highsmith
B LAIR W ORDEN is Research
68 S AM L EITH Memories of My Melancholy Whores Gabriel Professor of History at the University
García Márquez of London. His most recent book,
70 J OANNA K AVENNA Leopard VI: The Norwegian Feeling for Roundhead Reputations: The English
Real (Ed) Harald Baache-Wiig Civil Wars and the Passions of Posterity,
is published by Allen Lane.
BAD SEX REPORT 64 T OM F LEMING FRANCES WILSON’s books include
CRIME 76 P HILIP O AKES Literary Seductions and, most recent-
AUDIOBOOK 75 S USAN C ROSLAND ly, The Courtesan’s Revenge, available
SILENCED VOICES 72 L UCY P OPESCU in paperback from Faber & Faber.
POETRY COMPETITION 74
R AYMOND S EITZ was US
LETTERS 47 Ambassador to the Court of St
SUBSCRIPTION FORM 73 CLASSIFIEDS 79/80 LR CROSSWORD 10 LR BOOKSHOP 78 James from 1991 to 1994.

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LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
Dec-Jan pp4-63 24/11/05 4:35 pm Page 4
WORLD WAR TWO
A NDREW R OBERTS
GUILTY?
T HE N EVILLE C HAMBERLAIN D IARY
L ETTERS, VOLUME IV: T HE D OWNING
S TREET Y EARS, 1934–1940
★ Chamberlain’s personality inevitably comes through
Edited by Robert Self
(Ashgate 588pp £82.50, 4 Vols £250)
NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN WAS nothing if not a diligent
correspondent. Every week he wrote to his sisters Ida and
Hilda letters that were in effect a diary of all that he was
doing politically. They have long been invaluable for his-
torians in archive form, but now they have finally been
published in extenso, along with a scholarly fifty-page
introduction and helpful footnotes by their very diligent
editor, Robert Self. There is also a glossary of nicknames
so that readers will be able to identify ‘The All-Highest’
(Lord Curzon), ‘The Goat’ (Lloyd
George), ‘Our Herb’ (Herbert
Samuel), and so on. Self marks the
triumphant conclusion of a five-year
endeavour with this, the fourth and last
volume, which covers Chamberlain
from January 1934 until his death in
November 1940.
Unfortunately the huge price of this
book will mean that few will be able
to buy a copy. However, anyone visit-
ing a library will now be able to read
the week-by-week testimony of the
man who masterminded much of the
Abdication Cr isis, pursued the
appeasement of Nazi Germany until
the Munich Agreement of September
1938, guaranteed Poland the follow-
ing April, and took Britain to war in
September 1939, only to cede the
premiership to Winston Churchill
after the Norway Debate of May
1940. For all the confidentially frater- Chamberlain: boundlessly self-confident
nal idiom of these letters, the events
they describe are of world-shattering moment.
Readers can at last decide for themselves whether
Chamberlain was a noble striver after peace or, in the
words of one of the bestselling philippics against him,
the leader of ‘The Guilty Men’. Or both. Or neither. I
suspect that after reading these pages, most people will
ag ree with Self ’s own conclusion that ‘Neville
Chamberlain was neither the inspired hero so extrava-
gantly lauded in the immediate aftermath of Munich
nor the foolishly misguided amateur so viciously
4
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
denigrated after his fall.’
After the Cabinet minutes in the National Archives,
these letters are the single most important historical
source for the appeasement per iod. The ultimate
insider’s contemporary account, they are also the most
significant documents to be published on the Second
World War period since the unexpurgated diaries of
Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke.
powerfully in these 588 pages. He was ambitious, keen
to replace Stanley Baldwin as premier long before 1937,
by which time he was sixty-eight years old; comfortable
with power (‘As Chancellor of the Exchequer I could
hardly move a pebble, now I only have to raise a finger
and the whole face of Europe is changed!’); boundlessly
self-confident (he even referred to ‘the Chamberlain
touch’); and occasionally caustic (Clement Davies MP
was ‘that treacherous Welshman’, Wallis Simpson was ‘a
thoroughly selfish and heartless adventuress’, and so on).
Although Chamberlain started off with a credulous
attitude towards Hitler when he flew to Germany for
the first time in September 1938
(writing ‘I got the impression that
here was a man who could be relied
upon when he had given his word’),
he always disliked him personally,
warning the Cabinet after his second
meeting that the Führer ‘had a
narrow mind and was violently preju-
diced on certain subjects’. Although
the Munich Agreement did indeed
buy an extra year for rearmament,
which Britain put to invaluable use
building the Spitfires and Hurricanes
that were to win the Battle of Britain,
that was only a by-product of a deal
which Chamberlain genuinely
believed at the time had won ‘peace
for our time’.
Yet Chamberlain also wrote several
times about the need for air rearma-
ment (as these letters attest), seeing it
primarily as making war less likely
rather than as being necessary for
national survival in the event of cata-
strophe on the Western Front. The collapse of May
1940 surprised him as much as anyone. As Chancellor of
the Exchequer in the Thirties he had been responsible
for lowering defence expenditure, rather as Churchill
had been the previous decade, though with much less of
an excuse.
Chamberlain was no master of the gripping phrase;
there is no Churchillian rhetoric in this volume and no
one will read it for the language so much as for the
fascinating content. A sign of how remote he was, or
Dec-Jan pp4-63 24/11/05 4:35 pm Page 5

WORLD WAR TWO

FAITH
CURRENT
perhaps of how formal was the age in which he lived, is AFFAIRS
his tendency to end every letter with the words: ‘Your
affectionate brother, Neville Chamberlain’.
MODERN
There are a few surprises in these pages: twice as many
soldier MPs (32) voted for Chamberlain in the Norway
CULTURE
Debate as voted against him (16); as late as September
1940 he seriously considered that he might have ‘another
premiership after the war’. A major revelation, though,
is quite how much of a force he – rather than Baldwin –
was behind the Government’s determination that King
Edward VIII must abdicate. ‘The difficulty, as usual, is to
get the Prime Minister to make a move,’ he told his
sisters on 14 November 1936. ‘I have been obliged,
without telling him, to make all the [constitutional and
legal] enquir ies necessar y.’ Two days before the
Abdication he wrote: ‘I have been in the middle of
things all through and responsible nearly always for the
initiative as well as the drafting of all papers.’
It is perhaps a necessary attribute in anyone who wishes
to be Prime Minister to believe unquestioningly in one’s
own brilliance, but how many of them would write –
even to their own sisters – ‘It really seems as if
Providence designed my speeches to be timed at the
right moment to create the effect I want at that point’, Since its foundation in 1840, The Tablet has built up a reputation
as Chamberlain did on 1 April 1939? Yet in the speech as a weekly, unique in the English-speaking world.
referred to he reassured the trade unions that he would
Each week the paper seeks to inform and entertain on religion,
not introduce conscription, only to do exactly that on
politics, society, literature and the arts, considered in the light of
26 April. And only three days later, on 29 April, he was
Christian principles and belief.
writing with equally invincible self-satisfaction: ‘More
and more I am convinced that much of the art of states- The range is both Catholic and catholic, reflecting The Tablet’s
manship lies in accurate timing, as the fisherman knows identity and its concern with faith and culture. No attempt is
when he is trying to get a long cast out.’ (He’d caught a made to find easy answers to the many questions that cause deep
161/2 lb salmon in Hampshire the week before.) It is and honestly held differences amongst Christians today.
hard to warm to Neville Chamberlain, even through his The Tablet approaches those differences in the spirit of openness
correspondence with his closest relatives. and intellectual honesty. It aims to provide a forum for debate,
It also seems incredible that these letters should have but avoids extremes of right and left. At the same time, its own
been sent through the normal GPO mail, since if the opinions are authoritative, and they are frankly expressed.
press had got hold of virtually any of them, Chamberlain Much of the strength of The Tablet lies in the quality of its
would have been deeply compromised, or at the very contributors, some of whom are listed below:
least hugely embarrassed. Others would have been too: Peter Hennessy - John Cornwell - William Dalrymple - Karen
he records how Queen Elizabeth (the late Queen Armstrong - Eamon Duffy - Ann Wroe - Lionel Blue - Mark
Mother) had ‘left him in no doubt’ about Churchill’s Lawson - Tina Beattie - AN Wilson - Conor Gearty - DJ Taylor
unsuitability for inclusion in the Cabinet in July 1939. - Nicholas Boyle - Cherie Booth - Michael Byers - Patrick
In fact it would have been one of the few actions Kavanagh – Libby Purves - John Gray - Anthony Howard -
Chamberlain could have taken that might have given Jonathan Tulloch
Hitler pause for thought that fateful summer.
Imagine if the Germans had somehow intercepted “I read The Tablet weekly for “The Tablet’s arrival each Friday
Chamberlain’s letter to Ida from Chequers of 10 best religious journalism.” remains one of the most luminous
September 1939 – a week after the outbreak of war – in Dr. Rowan Williams moments in the week.”
which he wrote: ‘What I hope for is not a military Professor Henry Chadwick
victory – I very much doubt the possibility of that – but
a collapse of the German home front.’ From that sen- Call 020 8748 8484
tence alone, it is clear that Chamberlain should not have SUBSCRIBE quoting Literary Review
been our wartime leader. £32 for 25 issues
To order this book call Ashgate on 01252 331 551 NOW The Tablet, FREEPOST SW3087
30% OFF London W6 0BR
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LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006

Dec-Jan pp4-63 24/11/05 4:35 pm Page 6
WORLD WAR TWO
R ICHARD O VERY
PETTED BY THE FÜHRER
O N H ITLER ’ S M OUNTAIN : OVERCOMING
THE L EGACY OF A N AZI C HILDHOOD
★ appointed Chancellor, they lived a modest but
By Irmgard A Hunt
(Atlantic Books 288pp £14.99)
T HE YOUNG I RMGARD Paul, out walking with her
mother in their home town of Berchtesgaden in the late
1930s, remembers being told that, thanks to the large
groups of SS men guarding Germany’s messianic leader
in his mountainside retreat above them, they lived ‘on a
mountain free of crime’. This small but horribly ironic
story is just one of many poignant recollections which
make it worth reading this candid memoir of a child-
hood spent, literally, in Hitler’s shadow.
By now it is a brave publisher who ventures to produce
yet another intimate view of the Third Reich. The book-
shops are drenched with them, re-hashed, re-packaged
and increasingly predictable. But this
remarkable book is a little gem. The
picture it gives of a remembered
childhood spent in the town where
Hitler decided to establish his coun-
try base away from the hubbub in
Berlin has its flaws: too much is
clearly embroidered with family folk-
lore and half-remembered images, for
Irmgard Hunt (née Paul) was only
five when war broke out in 1939,
and only eleven when it finished. But
she was evidently a precocious child,
living through extraordinary times.
And the little things she recalls speak Hunt (middle), her mother, and friend
volumes about how German society
adapted to life under dictatorship.
Take for example the story of the Hitler salute. She
remembers when her father, a quiet, kindly man and a
Hitler supporter, taught her at age three to perform the
‘Heil Hitler’ salute. She was made to stand in front of a
small relief portrait of Hitler cast in red wax (a wedding
present for her parents from a thoughtful friend) and
told that in public or in the presence of the swastika flag
she should raise her little right arm and stand up as
straight as she could. Later Irmgard remembers trying to
work out whether or not Hitler ‘hailed himself ’. The
wax portrait was solemnly melted down a few days
before the German surrender in 1945, and Irmgard’s
mother turned the wax into candles, which were used in
the grim, literally powerless days that followed.
The history of the Paul family is the history of millions
6
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
of ordinary Germans. Shocked by defeat, economic
chaos, inflation and the shame of war guilt, Irmgard’s
parents drifted towards support for Hitler and his move-
ment in the hope that they would rescue Germany from
disorder and moral collapse. Her father, Max Paul, was
an artist who decorated pottery with pictures of alpine
flowers. Married in January 1933, just before Hitler was
respectable life in a small house in Berchtesgaden, where
two daughters were born. The life Irmgard recalls was
ordinary enough save for the occasional days when Nazi
bigwigs rode along the road to Hitler’s villa; then crowds
streamed out, cameras clicked and a brief atmosphere of
jamboree suffused the quiet Bavarian town. On one of
these occasions Hitler himself appeared. The young
Irmgard, blue-eyed, blonde, sporting a smart blue dirndl
dress, was spotted by the Führer. Ever alive to the photo
opportunity he pulled her towards him and sat her on his
knee. The family applauded and smiled and Irmgard
briefly entered Hitler’s biography. For years the family
talked about it. At school the young girl who had once
been petted by Hitler himself was something of a star.
Much of the memoir is, indeed, childish. Irmgard
recalls most vividly birthdays,
Christmases, family reunions, who
her best friend was, how badly the
teachers treated their charges. But
among these more banal recollec-
tions are small nuggets. She remem-
bers how easily anti-Semitism was
communicated to German young-
sters. She was lent a book on the
typical Jew and can still remember
being horrified by the stories of
Jewish greed, rapine and dishonesty
– and her surprise when her mother
reproved her and told her to give
the book back. Her greatest child-
hood thrill came one Christmas at
the start of the war when Emmy Göring, wife of the
corpulent commander of the German Air Force, sent a
doll to every child in Berchtesgaden with a father
serving in the forces. The ‘Göring dolls’ were played
with endlessly, even placed under the Christmas tree in
later years as surrogates for the presents that could no
longer be afforded or found.
Irmgard’s cosy life on Hitler’s mountain was rudely
destroyed by Hitler’s war. Her father was old to be draft-
ed, but he was not expected to see actual combat.
Nonetheless the family received the cruel news in the
summer of 1940 that Max Paul had drowned while on a
swimming trip in the Loire in occupied France. Though
he was no victim of combat, the community reacted as
if he had died a hero’s death. The local party leader
called in at the house to tell the widowed Mrs Paul,
Dec-Jan pp4-63 24/11/05 4:35 pm Page 7
WORLD WAR TWO
‘Chin up! He died for the Führer!’ Irmgard herself was
forced the following day by her schoolteacher to stand
in front of the class and declare, ‘My father died in
France for the Führer. Heil Hitler!’
These warped experiences did not reduce Irmgard’s
enthusiasm. She joined the Hitler Youth, sat in air raid
shelters deploring the defeatism around her, and felt
relieved that Hitler survived the bomb plot in 1944. But
at the end of the war her world unravelled, as did those
of millions of other young Germans. The local SS
opened up warehouses and parcelled out bales of cloth
to the local inhabitants. The children all wore identical
blue check dresses and skirts made of military grey for
years after 1945.
Irmgard joined other citizens of Berchtesgaden in loot-
ing trips to the homes of the Nazi bosses on Hitler’s
mountain in the last days of the war. She finally seized a
handsome, red leather-bound book with blank gilt-edged
THE CHURCHILL LITERARY S IMON H EFFER ON A RECENT CLUTCH OF a work about the novelist
industry seems to grind on
unabated. Those of you who C HURCHILLIANA
thought that every last action
of the great man’s life had been recorded, documented,
analysed and inter preted need to think again.
Apparently, the publishers of the English-speaking world
feel that there is still an insatiable demand from readers
to spend armchair time with one of their favourite his-
torical characters: each book is like a chance to ask an
old, familiar friend round again for the evening. Of
course, such people need to remember that too much of
a good thing can make it seem stale and tired: which is
the case with some of the new clutch of Churchilliana.
However, there is still scope – thank heaven – for the
odd bit of gold to turn up in the dross.
Of these five books, only four are really about
Churchill: the fifth, Dennis Wheatley: Churchill’s
Storyteller (Spellmount 308pp £20), Craig Cabell’s inter-
esting account of the war exper iences of Dennis
Wheatley, is a classic case of bandwagon-jumping.
Wheatley, best remembered
these days as a writer of novels
about the occult, spent the war
in intelligence and executed
various schemes and ruses sug-
gested or promoted by
Churchill. Perhaps his best-
known stunt was that later
immortalised in the film I Was
Monty’s Double: he hired a bit-
part actor with a str iking
resemblance to Field Marshal
Montgomer y to put the
enemy off the scent of what
Monty was really up to. This is Churchill: togged out for war
7
pages from the ruins of Albert Speer’s villa. She confesses
with no hint of coyness that her loot was used as the first
visitors’ book in the guest house opened by her mother
and stepfather in Berchtesgaden a few years after the war.
Irmgard herself went to live in the United States in
1958. The epilogue illustrates with disarming clarity how
easily Germans adapted to the democratic and increasingly
prosperous age after the war. The photograph reproduced
in the book of Irmgard’s mother in New York, pushing
her grandchild around in a pram, seems light years away
from the pictures of early-1930s Germany presented at
the start of the book. The Germany of the 1930s cut itself
off from the moder n world outside; Hitler’s new
Germany was self-consciously different. I can recall few
other memoirs of ordinary life lived in extraordinary
times that portray so powerfully and readably the complex
realities of popular dictatorship.
To order this book at £11.99, see order form on page 78
and not the statesman, and
will be of interest mainly to
aficionados of the former, or
those fascinated by the deeds of spies and spymasters.
Having said that, Cabell’s book is a better and more
stimulating read than three of the other four on offer.
Some authors at least subscribe to the school of thought
which holds that if you are going to write a book about
Churchill you had better find, or claim to have found,
something original to say. This is certainly the selling-
point for David J Bercuson and Holger H Herwig’s One
Christmas in Washington: Churchill and Roosevelt Forge the
Grand Alliance (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 352pp £20), an
account of how Churchill visited Roosevelt immediately
after the attack on Pearl Harbor and made the formal
alliance between Britain and America. The authors say
that because neither of the two diar ists closest to
Churchill, Sir Alan Brooke and Jock Colville, attended
these meetings there is no particularly full account of
what happened at them. Churchill’s official biographer,
Sir Martin Gilbert, might dis-
pute that, though he accords
only a chapter, rather than a
whole book, to the proceedings
in the sixth volume of his life.
Mind you, reading Gilbert tells
you what you need to
know about this event from
Churchill’s perspective. What
Bercuson and Herwig give us is
a lot of background, plus a pile
of minutiae about goings-on
in Roosevelt’s White House,
so their work is valuable if
you want to understand the
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
Dec-Jan pp4-63 24/11/05 4:35 pm Page 8
WORLD WAR TWO
American perspective on these events. They also tell us a
great deal about the weather, for some reason. Indeed, the
opening words of the prologue – ‘Christmas Eve 1941
broke cloudy and rainy in Washington DC’ – are almost
an incentive to proceed no further, and the literary style
(if you can call it that) of this book is horrendous. By the
time you get to ‘outside a light dr izzle fell on
Washington’‚ on page 165, you will be screaming for
parole. No doubt someone will take from this a brilliant
idea for a new angle on Churchill, republishing the
weather reports for key days in his life: after all, they
appear to have done almost everything else.
The correspondence between Churchill and Sir
Archibald Sinclair is another lacuna that has been filled,
in Winston and Archie: The Letters of Winston Churchill
and Archibald Sinclair 1915–1960 (Politico’s 530pp £30).
As the editor of their letters, Ian Hunter, points out
with a mixture of amazement and joy, there has never
been an edition of these before. Having read them, it is
easy to understand why: they are fabulously boring.
Even Churchill, who was no slouch with the English
language, appears to have been inspired to hitherto
unknown depths of turgidity by any contact with
Sinclair, whom he knew socially before the Great War,
served with in the trenches, and then later included – as
leader of the Liberal party – in his War Cabinet after
1940. Hunter has done a fine job in editing the letters,
but they are for anoraks only. They appear to have been
collected as an act of homage to Sinclair, who despite
the eminence of his position as party leader is now
almost entirely forgotten. The book will, therefore,
make some people happy, but those people might like to
consider whether or not they should get out more.
As mentioned above, Sir Martin Gilbert is the
acknowledged expert when it comes to Churchill stud-
ies. His eight-volume life (and its attendant, document-
packed companion volumes) will never, for scope, depth
or range of scholarship, be surpassed. However, those of
us who have ploughed through it will, while never
disputing Gilbert’s greatness, know that he has a particu-
lar, insomnia-curing style of writing. His tactic in his
biography was to pile in
THE POETRY
almost every available fact,
relentlessly, with little space
BOOK SOCIETY
for interpretation or analysis;
though, to be fair to him,
had he been more discursive
it might have taken up twice Join the PBS to get the best new poetry books every
as many volumes, and quarter, the Bulletin, our up-to-the-minute review
of what’s being published, and a discount on every
become impossible and poetry book you buy. For your free copy of the
unmanageable. In his work Bulletin email info@poetrybooks.co.uk, call 020 7833 9247
on Churchill’s relations with or write to Freepost RLUG-ESEG-KXUC, Poetry Book Society,
Amer ica and Amer icans, Fourth Floor, 2 Tavistock Place, London WC1H 9RA.
though, he might have A book club for poetry lovers
thought it feasible to adopt
8
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
more the style of an essayist, and to strive to analyse this
unquestionably important aspect of the great man’s life. It
was not just, after all, that the alliance Churchill managed
to forge with Roosevelt in 1941 ultimately helped to
win the Second World War for the forces of light:
Churchill was also the son of an American mother, so
the special relationship was literally in his blood.
Sadly, Gilbert chooses not to take the opportunity for
such reflection. In traditional style, Churchill and America
(Free Press 501pp £25) is little more than a relentless
chronological list of every trip Churchill made to the
USA, and of every important American he knew and
what contact he had with them. Much of it is simply
recycled from the life: none of it is at all illuminating.
Gilbert’s failure of being unable to resist including even
the most banal details – such as yet more fawning birth-
day greetings from FDR, or Ike, or any other of the top
Washington cast list – just serves to emphasise the unam-
bitious, tedious, compendious nature of this book. If all
you seek is the facts, they are here in abundance. If you
seek any interpretation of those facts by an expert, or
any great attempt at thoughtfulness or originality, you
will have come to the wrong place. The polite would
describe this book as a missed opportunity: the impolite
would brand it an absolute stinker.
In that respect it could not be more unlike the fifth and
final work in the Churchill pile, Geoffrey Best’s quite
brilliant account of the relationship between Churchill
and war. Best has already made an impressive contribu-
tion to Churchill studies with his book Churchill: A Study
in Greatness. This sequel, Churchill and War (Hambledon
353pp £19.99), places him in the front rank of scholars
on the subject, and for my money is the most impressive
and intelligent book on Churchill since Robert Rhodes
James’s masterpiece A Study in Failure, published in 1970.
In his approach to Churchill, Best complements a funda-
mental reverence for the man with a full understanding
of his weaknesses and flaws. Coupled with profound
scholarship, this enables him to draw a picture of round-
ed humanity missing from so much else written on the
subject. Also, he is a superb stylist, and is never less than a
pleasure to read.
While broadly chronologi-
cal, Best’s book is really a
series of essays. As well as
descriptions of the First and
Second World Wars, and
what they revealed about
Churchill’s character through
the way he coped with them
as a politician, Best describes
the effect on his subject’s
pbs personality of his early expe-
poetry
book
society riences as a soldier. He also
draws out the theme of
Dec-Jan pp4-63 24/11/05 4:35 pm Page 9
WORLD WAR TWO
Churchill’s regard for the rules of war, and how he defined
those rules. Because warfare was so important a part of his
personality – though Best successfully refutes the notion
that he was a warmonger – we are given numerous
insights into Churchill’s psyche. Best is especially good on
the bombing of Dresden, which he feels was justifiable,
and on the agonies that Churchill went through after it. A
distinct picture of a hero emerges, and also of the nature of
heroism: the massive ego, the single-mindedness, the buc-
caneering humour, the patriotism, the utter determination
and physical courage. Best is strong, too, on Churchill at
peace, notably in his prescience in fathoming the threat
from Hitler in the wilderness years of the 1930s but also in
E VAN M AWDSLEY
From the
Kremlin’s Archives
T HE H ITLER B OOK : T HE S ECRET D OSSIER
P REPARED FOR S TALIN
★ level, is that this 2005 edition is a second-hand translation.
Edited by Henrik Eberle and Matthias Uhl
(John Murray 370pp £20)
INTEREST IN HITLER, and particularly the last days of the
Third Reich, seems inexhaustible, and the flow of publi-
cations endless. The latest offering in the genre is The
Hitler Book, which promises two levels of novelty – as a
‘new’ inside view of the Führer’s everyday life, and as
one formerly hidden away in ‘Stalin’s archives’.
The core of The Hitler Book is a dossier produced with-
in the Soviet secret police in the late 1940s. It was based
on the testimony of unique insiders, two captured SS
men who had served in the closest proximity to Hitler.
Heinz Linge was Hitler’s manservant and Otto Günsche
his personal adjutant. (Both characters lurked prominent-
ly in the background of the superb recent German film
Downfall.) Both were interrogated in Moscow between
1946 and 1949; the present account was produced in the
last two years of their time in the Soviet capital. The
dossier was evidently intended for consultation at the
Kremlin’s highest level, and the final version was sent to
Stalin’s office at the end of 1949. A copy made in the late
1950s was recently discovered by the researcher Matthias
Uhl in the former Communist Party archive, hidden by
sloppy cataloguing. The original typescript, apparently
with an identical text, survives in the Russian
Presidential Archive but is unavailable for consultation by
foreigners. A German edition of the dossier, edited also
by Uhl and Henrik Eberle, appeared earlier this year.
Even without this complex provenance The Hitler Book
9
his reaction to the invention of the atomic bomb and its
place in the stand-off of the first years of the Cold War.
Together with a superb analysis of Churchill as a strategist,
and insights into his subject’s own often partial account in
his memoirs of the conduct of the war, Best presents us
with a most thought-provoking and original consideration
of the role of one of the greatest of the world’s great men.
More to the point, his book is an object lesson to others in
the matter of how Churchill studies should be conducted
at this point in historiography, and it is to be hoped –
probably in vain – that others will not embark down this
well-worn track without following his example.
To order these books, see order form on page 78
is a peculiar artefact. It was written as a complete and flu-
ent narrative, rather than a simple ‘report’ or indictment.
The first sentence gives a sense of the style: ‘Summer
1933 – the sun was shining in Wilhelmsplatz, the location
of the Reich Chancellery’. And yet it was evidently never
intended for publication. It attempted to give an overall
view of Hitler’s time in power, but over a third of the text
is taken up by the last fifteen weeks in Berlin.
The real problem with The Hitler Book is that there are
several levels of distortion. The first, and least necessary
It is admirably readable, but it is an English translation of a
German translation of a Russian text. The second level is
in its imbalance, which makes the reader wonder what
the Soviet police team were trying to do. The dossier
attempts to be both a general account of Hitler’s activities
and one based on what Linge and Günsche saw. The
story goes back to 1933; Linge became Hitler’s manser-
vant only in 1939, and Günsche’s main time with Hitler
was from the beginning of 1943. Linge was only twenty-
six when the war started, and Günsche was twenty-two.
Linge was a high-class orderly. Günsche had more
substance – and was a nastier piece of work – but he was
hardly a figure of any importance in terms of policy.
Beyond the junior status of the two main sources, and
their very tangential involvement in the ‘big’ story, are
the circumstances of their involvement. This is the third
level of distortion. Any interesting historical perceptions
or even anecdotes must be immediately doubted, given
that Linge and Günsche were motivated to minimise fur-
ther punishment and their Soviet police ‘editors’ were
bound to follow the party line. (Indeed, if the dossier has
a special use it is for indicating that party line.) Perhaps,
however, the fact that so little ‘new’ of a personally com-
promising nature is revealed about Hitler is in itself
important. Had there been scandal at the ‘what the but-
ler saw’ level, the Russians would surely have used it.
The end result of all this, unfortunately, is that the
dossier has limited value. It does take the reader through
the history of Hitler’s main activities, especially on the
foreign policy and military side. For Hitler ‘buffs’, however,
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
Dec-Jan pp4-63 24/11/05 4:35 pm Page 10

WORLD WAR TWO

there is little new here. Linge collab-
orated in his own ‘memoirs’ in 1980,
and Günsche was interviewed by
Western researchers; both had been
released from Soviet imprisonment in
the mid 1950s. For novices to the
Third Reich there are fuller, much
more balanced, and less tendentious
sources; this is true even for the ‘last
days’ in the Bunker.
The dossier is packaged well by its
modern publishers. There are useful
maps and photographs and a multi- Heinz Linge and Otto Günsche
plicity of prefaces and postscripts. The
introduction to the English-language edition by Richard
Overy is cautious and authoritative. The explanatory
material – two sets of notes – is full. Given the many name
references in the text, however, the biographical section of
the German edition should have been retained.
Even at the time it was completed, in 1949, the dossier
was of little practical relevance. Hitler was dead; Stalin
would have been more interested in a profile of Harry
Truman. The Soviet leader was probably not able or will-
ing to spend much time on the dossier. It is significant that
there are no marginal comments by him; had there been
such marginalia the current publication would have been
far more valuable (as well as confirming that Stalin both-
ered to read it). As it is, there is no satisfactory study of the
contemporary Soviet view of either
Hitler or of the Nazi system as a whole.
Stalin’s perception of Hitler can never be
laid out with ‘provable’ accuracy, but
speculation about it is possible and desir-
able. The Italian historian Silvio Pons
has perhaps come closest to an under-
standing of the 1939 Stalin; the Soviet
dictator – rather like A J P Taylor – at
that time saw Hitler as a conventional
German nationalist ‘statesman’. As for
the later period, Stalin arguably had a
perception of the Third Reich – and its
policies – in which Hitler’s own position
was more fragile than in reality. For him Hitler was a fig-
ure like Louis Napoleon or Kerensky. Before the 1941
invasion Stalin assumed that there were conflicting cur-
rents in the German leadership – rivals in the Nazi Party,
industrialists, military leaders. After the setback at Moscow
in December 1941 Stalin hoped that the German military
might assert themselves against Hitler. Stillborn attempts to
use captured senior German Army officers in 1943-44
showed that illusions remained. We can only guess what
Stalin thought from the hindsight of the postwar years.
But the basis for an understanding of the Führer and his
Third Reich – for Stalin or for us – would require some-
thing more weighty than The Hitler Book.
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Dec-Jan pp4-63 24/11/05 4:35 pm Page 11
DIARIES & MEMOIRS
J ANE R IDLEY
A FIRST-CLASS PHILANDERER
T HE D UFF C OOPER D IARIES 1915–1951
★ grief like an illness, taking morphia to blunt the pain.
Edited by John Julius Norwich
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson 512pp £20)
DUFF COOPER (1890–1964) is remembered today as the
husband of Lady Diana Cooper. He was a Conservative
politician and ambassador to Paris; he was also a writer
and biographer, and he wrote an enchanting memoir
called Old Men Forget, but he was always overshadowed
by his glamorous and successful wife. These diaries are a
revelation, especially for the light they shed on Duff and
Diana’s remarkable marriage.
In 1915 Duff Cooper made a pact with Cynthia
Asquith to start writing a diary and see who could keep
it up the longest. Cynthia filled
her book much quicker than
Duff did. Hers turned into one of
the g reat diar ies of the First
World War – the brilliant, self-
aware memoir of a brittle society
beauty whose world was torn
apart by loss and grief. Duff ’s
diary is less detailed, less emo-
tional, but equally riveting.
When the diary begins Duff is
twenty-five and a Foreign Office
clerk. Most of his male friends
are away at the war, and he is
bored with the day job, but his Diana dulls Duff
evenings are spent frantically
partying with the gilded youth of the so-called Corrupt
Coter ie. Here are Bongy and Kakoo and Bim,
Raymond and Katherine, Ego and Yvo and, above all,
Diana. Duff had a weakness, rather a large one, for good
champagne, and he could never resist a gambling table,
but his greatest love was for pretty women. He is engag-
ingly frank about all three of these and especially the
women, whom he regularly seduced. ‘It’s an extraordi-
nary thing, but nobody begins to be really fond of me
until ... I cease being quite so fond of them.’ But the
centre of his emotional life was Diana – beautiful, clever,
but above all confident and strong-minded. Unlike the
others she wouldn’t let him get away with bad behav-
iour. She didn’t mind his infidelities (much): or at least,
she thought that she ought not to mind them but she
did. When they rowed she punched him in the face or
refused to see him, and he had to seek forgiveness on
bended knee (this happened quite regularly).
Diana’s real love was not Duff but Raymond Asquith,
11
the glamorous leader of the clique. His death in 1916
was perhaps the most traumatic of all for both Duff and
Diana. ‘When I think of Oxford now I see nothing but
ghosts,’ wrote Duff. He found that the carnage made
him grow callous, but Diana was reduced to a near-
hysterical state of tears and laughter, and she treated her
Raymond’s death meant that Diana liked Duff the best
of the living. He was the only one of his generation still
alive – he had no men friends left.
Duff joined up right at the end of the war. Incredibly,
in spite of the danger, he actually wanted to go to
France because he felt that he had missed out on the
adventure. He was a brave and good soldier, winning
the DSO. Fortunately, the war ended just in time to
stop him from being brave one time too many and
getting killed.
Duff and Diana married after the war, overcoming the
resistance of her parents, the Duke and Duchess of
Rutland, and especially her termagant mother, who
thought that Duff was not nearly
good enough for her. (The
Duke was softer. When he at
last gave his consent, he told
Diana: ‘Don’t go upstairs for a
little as I don’t want your
Mother to think I gave in at
once.’) Diana by now was a
celebr ity, recognised in the
street, a silent star of screen and
stage, and famous for her role as
the Madonna in the mystery
play The Miracle, which took
her to America.
To his credit, Duff was not
jealous of her success. But mar-
riage made no difference to his infidelities; if anything it
gave them an extra edge of excitement. Intrigue, for
Duff, had a fatal fascination. He couldn’t live without it.
However, he insisted: ‘My infidelities are entirely of the
flesh’. Rather like Alan Clark, he always loved his wife
best, and in his own way he was loyal to her. So Duff
pursued Poppy (Baring) and Daisy (Fellowes) and Vita
(Sackville-West) and Dollie (Warrender) and Betty
(Cranborne) and many, many others – the turnover is so
rapid and there are so many that one gets a little muddled
at times about which is which. He seems to have been
completely irresistible, and no one ever said No. Sleeping
with them was OK, he reckoned, and in an odd way it
made him feel less guilty because once he had seduced
them he tired of them; but ‘real love for another is the
only crime against Diana that I could never forgive
myself and that she could never forgive me’.
Diana always got to find out about the mistresses,
though Duff didn’t tell her. She would cry and say he
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
Dec-Jan pp4-63 24/11/05 4:35 pm Page 12
DIARIES & MEMOIRS
didn’t love her, but after a glass of champagne she
cheered up, or so he thought. The humiliation must
have been acute at times – some embarrassing moments
are recorded here, when Diana and the mistresses come
face to face. They were a surprisingly modern couple.
Duff wrote Diana’s newspaper articles, which were very
highly paid, and she used her celebrity to help him get
into Parliament and put him on the social and political
map. He was clever and hard-working and never
scrounged off her rich relations.
Duff entered Parliament in 1924, and after that the
diaries change. Politics kept him so busy that he had less
time for mistresses and even less for writing his diary. He
was right over appeasement, and his diary records the
divisions in the Chamberlain government over Munich.
F RANCES W ILSON
Confessions
of a Chav
S TRANGELAND
★ herself transfor med
By Tracey Emin
(Sceptre 212pp £14.99)
THE PSYCHO-SLUT IS back (‘body from Baywatch, face
from Crimewatch’), and the latest incarnation of ‘Mad
Tracey from Margate’, as she calls herself, comes in the
form of literary, rather than visual, confessions. Strangeland
appears ten years after Emin hit notoriety with another
form of autobiography, ‘Everyone I Have Ever Slept
With, 1963–1995’, the tent on which she sewed the
names of all those who had ever shared her bed, including
members of her family and her aborted foetus.
In the intervening decade Emin’s style has not ‘devel-
oped’ so much as reinforced itself. In ‘My Bed’, a recon-
struction of the unmade bed in which she resided for
three weeks in a suicidal depression, she once again used
herself as her art, presenting us with a crumpled and
stained set of sheets and accompanying debris, a work
which has only as much meaning as we are prepared to
give to the experiences of the artist. Tracey’s bed was
shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1999 and bought for
£150,000 by Charles Saatchi, but still the most memo-
rable introduction for many to Traceyland was her
appearance in December 1997 to discuss ‘The Death of
Painting’ on a late-night Channel 4 chat show. Pissed
out of her tree, Emin had no idea what was going on
(she tells us in Strangeland she thought by the comfy
sofas and soft lighting that she was in someone’s house).
Having been ignored through most of the show she then
12
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
His most fulfilling job was Ambassador to Paris, where
he was posted by Churchill in 1944. Here he and Diana
could operate as a partnership, which is what they did
best. In his diary Duff chronicled the Nancy Mitfordish
Paris of grand and glamorous French aristos whom
Diana and he entertained. Duff had a mistress named
Loulou, but Diana was by now so reconciled to his
unfaithfulness that she happily tucked the ailing Loulou
up in bed when she came down with flu.
The diary is beautifully edited, with notes which
provide just the right amount of information, and John
Julius Norwich has written a perfectly judged introduc-
tion. As a candid record of an extraordinary marriage,
this book is gripping.
To order this book at £16, see order form on page 78
stole it, declaring to the
august company, before
staggering out into the
night, that she wanted
to be with ‘real people’
like her friends and her
mum. Next day she
awoke with a head like
a Chinese burn to find
from one of many art-
world enfants terribles
into a national treasure,
an antetype of Big
Brother’s Jade Goody Emin: the face of modern art
and the hooligan queen
of Chav Art.
While art critics are divided as to whether she is a great
artist or a con artist, literary critics will no doubt unani-
mously agree that, as a writer, Tracey Emin stinks. We’ve
seen her writing before of course; she often suggests that
her visual art is a kind of text, but writing on a tent is
not the same as writing on a page. Coming to such a
sure conclusion about anything produced by Tracey
Emin is dangerous; it could be that the crude naivety of
her book will be seen by some as precisely its brilliance.
But it is easier to sniff out weakness in the literary world
than in the world of contemporary art, and most of those
who can’t tell the difference between a good and a bad
installation can spot the difference between good and bad
prose. What’s interesting is that Emin’s writing stinks in
precisely those areas which make her visual art refreshing.
For example, the persistent belief in romance which rests
so touchingly with the sluttishness of her tent or her bed
is simply mawkish here: ‘This is a love story – a True
love story,’ Emin writes in one chapter – ‘of the deep and
burning passion between me and a man old enough to
be my father: a Turkish man, a fisherman, a mountain
man. It was wrong for us to be lovers.’ And while the
Dec-Jan pp4-63 24/11/05 4:35 pm Page 13

DIARIES & MEMOIRS

>̈œ˜> äÓä Ç{xÓ ÎäääiÜ -i>ܘ œœŽˆ˜}

cynicism of her visual art argues against the easy answers

provided by cliché or the recourse to self-improving
/…i>ÌÀi œ«i˜Ã £ iVi“LiÀ

platitudes, this is the awkward note on which her

book ends: ‘I have found a way to visit without fear,
iVi“LiÀ Óääx q >Þ ÓääÈ
exorcising all ghosts from the past to fill my mind
with something mind-blowing.’
Vœ‡«Àœ`ÕV̈œ˜ LiÌÜii˜
Strangeland splits into three parts: Motherland, ̅i >̈œ˜> /…i>ÌÀi
Fatherland and Traceyland – all variants on a crumbling, >˜`
œ“«ˆVˆÌi
melancholy amusement arcade in Margate called 
-1, Ê",Ê
Dreamland. Each is composed of fragments of memory, 
-1,
dream, and fantasy, plus snatches of exper imental
writing on themes such as what it feels like to be preg- LÞÊ7ˆˆ>“Ê
nant, to get no cards on Valentine’s Day, or to dislike -…>Žiëi>Ài
food. Motherland, in which Emin’s adored mum is an £äÊiLÀÕ>ÀÞÊqÊ
atmosphere rather than anything more solid, begins with £nÊ>ÀV…
Emin’s birth (‘I somehow felt a mistake had been made’)
and goes on to give us the childhood with her twin
brother on the Margate seafront (‘where there was noth-
ing to do but blend in with the general decay: bum
around, fuck, be fucked, bum and wish your life away’),
the fall from riches to poverty (when her Turkish
Cypriot father went bankrupt and the Emins moved
from living in his hotel to living in a dump), her sexual
abuse and rape as a child, and her leaving school at thir-
teen. In Fatherland, the figure who was only an atmos-
phere in her childhood becomes a visceral presence; a
boasting, boozing, womanising bar-room bore. Emin’s
time with him and his family in Turkey is presented in
the sepia that abandoned children sometimes reserve for
the abandoning parent. The final part of the book,
which takes place almost entirely in the bed we know so -"1/7
,Ê
, "
Ê Ê
Ê /
well, gives us other material with which we are also >ʘiÜÊ«>ÞÊLÞÊ LÞÊœÃÃÊ>ÀÌÊ>˜`Ê
familiar, like her abortions, anorexia, boozing and
promiscuity. It is all part of Traceyland, that odd mix of ->“ÕiÊ
`>“Ãœ˜ iœÀ}iÊ-Ê>Õv“>˜
Tory values and tawdry habits which has chiselled its Àœ“Ê£äÊiLÀÕ>ÀÞ 1˜ÌˆÊ££Ê>ÀV…
way into our cultural landscape.
Part of Tracey Emin’s charm is her lack of formal
education, which gives her work a freedom from the
burden of the past. It is the sheer banality of her material,
when in the form of a bed or a tent, that makes it an
original and provocative contribution to the visual arts.
But when she presents her world as a book in a literary
tradition that goes back to Saint Augustine, the force of
her confessions simply fades away. It is not that
Strangeland is insincere in its attempt to deal with an
interesting life in an interesting way; on the contrary, its
appalling sincer ity is what makes it seem so very
uninteresting. With Emin’s visual art there is at least an
element of humour, which gives her some vital distance /7"Ê/"1-
Ê / Ê,"9
Ê1 /Ê
from herself; her writing, whilst having about it the 9
,- "Ê/ Ê-1
same vulnerable appeal, lacks the playfulness of her other
performances. It may be that first editions of Strangeland >ʘiÜÊ«>ÞÊLÞÊ LÞÊ*iÌiÀÊ-…>vviÀ
will sell for £5,000 in ten years’ time. But until then, ˆŽiÊiˆ}… Àœ“ÊÎäÊ>ÀV…
don’t give up the day job, Tracey. Àœ“ÊÓxÊ>ÀV…
To order this book at £11.99, see order form on page 78
˜>̈œ˜>Ì…i>ÌÀi°œÀ}°ÕŽ
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
Dec-Jan pp4-63 24/11/05 4:35 pm Page 14

DIARIES & MEMOIRS

J ESSICA M ANN
‘LIFE CHANGES FAST’
T HE Y EAR OF M AGICAL T HINKING
By Joan Didion
(Fourth Estate 227pp £12.99)
W HEN I G ROW U P
By Bernice Rubens
(Little, Brown 229pp £17.99)
‘ALL MY LIFE I have harboured a sneaking assurance that
God, or whoever is in charge of these things, would not
take me in mid-sentence,’ Bernice Rubens wrote, and
her confidence was justified. When God, or whoever is
in charge of these things, did take a writer in mid-sen-
tence it was not Rubens but John Gregory Dunne. He
was sitting in an armchair by the fire with a drink; his
wife, the writer Joan Didion, was cooking dinner. ‘John
was talking and then he wasn’t.’ Joan saw he was sitting
motionless, his left hand raised. At first she thought he
was joking. Then she realised he was dead. ‘Life changes
fast. Life changes in an instant. You sit down to dinner
and life as you know it ends,’ Didion realised, and the
words became her oft-repeated refrain.
The new way of life begins with the ambulance, hospi-
tal, social worker, telephone calls, friends and eventually
funeral, which had to be delayed because their adopted,
only daughter Quintana was desperately ill in intensive
care. (She died a few months after John.) Those facts
alone are enough to evoke pity and terror in the reader,
and this book is indeed painful to read, the emotions
intensified by the power of the writing. In a direct, unaf-
fected style, Didion describes the ensuing twelve months.
She spent them trying to keep hold of John, which does
not mean that she authorised unusual attempts at resusci-
tation nor that she visited mediums, but that thoughts of
every detail of their life together remained at the centre
of her every moment, waking or asleep. In New York or
Califor nia, each step was
made meaningful by its prox-
imity to where he had
walked, each meal by his
having consumed a similar
one, each moment marked
by the thought ‘This time
last year we...’.
Their marriage had been
long, and closer than most.
They collaborated on screen-
plays, read, commented on
and edited each other’s work,
and, as both worked at home,
spent their days together. Shattered by his death, Didion
followed the well-mapped path from simple grief to
mourning, which, she realises, is the act of dealing with
grief, and as she travelled, she turned her experiences into
a book. It is what widowed writers do – think of Nina
Bawden’s polemic against the privatised railways, or Sheila
Hale’s against the NHS, both reviewed in these pages. But
therapeutic memoirs do not make cheerful or encouraging
reading, and one needs to feel particularly strong to tackle
Didion’s. Anguish so vividly evoked is infectious.
When I Grow Up will make readers sad too because
Bernice Rubens died before it appeared. But it was
written cheerfully and in the deceptively random, spon-
taneous style of all her fiction. According to Beryl
Bainbridge’s introduction, Bernice never knew from one
page to another where the story she was telling would
lead, but in this memoir it travels in a straight line from
birth to the moment when, aged seventy-five, she settles
down to tell the whole, unembellished truth.
Bernice’s grandparents were Jewish immigrants who
settled in Cardiff. Her father was a tallyman, her mother
a teacher, and everyone in the family a professional or
amateur musician. She was born in Splott, which was,
she writes, ‘the unmentionable and undisputable armpit
of Cardiff ’. There are war-child stories of air-raids and
rationing and a German-Jewish refugee foster-brother;
there was Cardiff High School and University. She stud-
ied English – a ‘major folly’. Then Bernice became a
schoolteacher, a film director, a scriptwriter and an
actress. She married, had children, divorced, moved
house every few years – and she became a successful
novelist. ‘My mother said I was over-imaginative, but I
was simply a liar by nature. I was happily at home with
mendacity. It was less boring than the truth. My natural
home lay in fiction.’ Writing had not been her ambi-
tion. ‘My first book just happened.’ After that, she used
her novels ‘to make sense of the past’.
She is self-deprecating about the paraphernalia of a suc-
cessful writer’s life. An author tour, whether for publishers
or the British Council, is ‘whoring’ – ‘the only other
trade in which you sell your goods but you’ve still got
them’. At one literary lunch
Bernice is not asked to sign a
single book, while Edna
O’Brien is besieged by fans.
At another, she is introduced
as ‘Denise Robbins’ and
makes her speech without
correcting the mistake; in
New Zealand she is mistaken
for her fr iend Beryl
Bainbridge. The two women
had met on a writers’ tour in
Israel and after that ‘got into
the habit of doing gigs

14
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
Dec-Jan pp4-63 24/11/05 4:35 pm Page 15
DIARIES & MEMOIRS
together, reading, speaking or teaching on creative writ-
ing courses’. Bernice always gave strictly practical advice:
she taught self-discipline. ‘To write a novel you must sit
down and stay sitting.’ But you need imagination and
lunacy too – both, she says, unteachable.
Beryl Bainbridge believes that if Bernice had been
happier, she would have had no need to write. As it was,
P HILIP W OMACK
DADAIST DOGTRAINING
S OMEONE L IKE M E : TALES FROM A One of these arguments concerns how to train their
B ORROWED C HILDHOOD
★ taught the basic commands – sit, stay and come. But
By Miles Kington
(Hodder Headline 343pp £16.99)
TRUTH AND MEMORY have a shifting relationship. At a
talk about Duff Cooper’s diaries, I asked John Julius
Norwich if there was any truth in a Clive James poem
about his mother. It asserted, among other things, that
Diana Cooper had been escorted into Paris by two
dozen Spitfires, and that she carried a phial of poison
‘Against the day there was nothing left to live for’.
‘Absolute rubbish,’ he thundered from the stage. And
then, ‘Oh no, wait, my daughter is waving her hand.’
She had left London with an aerial bodyguard; but the
poison was a piece of poetic embroidery, his daughter
said. How easily a legend springs up; how quickly the
world re-edits itself as the real and the not-real weave in
and out of each other.
Everybody, consciously or not, retells stories to make
them better. It is a habit which is particularly apparent in
writers, and in none more so than the autobiographer.
Miles Kington has, in this rich, convoluted and humor-
ous set of memoirs, taken it a step further.
Even the title is unreliable. It is not, as one of
Kington’s neighbours suggested, a plea for friendship. It
refers to the subject of the book – a person who is not
quite Miles Kington, in a family not quite like his own.
His family consists of a father who finds the world
constantly surprising, a mother who practises dying, a
theatrical brother called Ralph and the young, observant
Miles. The book begins before Miles is born, and runs
in a series of glorious, glowing vignettes until he rattles
off to university. There is no real sense of the develop-
ment of Miles as a person, since he appears, even in the
womb, to have the same way of looking at the world as
he does when he is grown-up – questioning the absurdity
of life and words. But this does not matter, since each
chapter is a Saki-like snapshot which is whole in itself.
Kington’s satirical eye revels in inversion – anthumous
ceremonies to celebrate people before they die being a
15
her twenty-five novels brought her fame, fortune, films,
the Booker Prize, and an enthusiastic following. She was
beginning to think about her next novel when she had a
stroke and died last October. As Joan Didion says, ‘Life
changes fast. Life changes in an instant. You sit down to
dinner and life as you know it ends.’
To order these books, see order form on page 78
typical example. He delights in the strangeness of everyday
conversation: ‘You shouldn’t use children as shuttlecocks,’
said Father. ‘It’s not cricket. You shouldn’t move the goal-
posts.’ His dialogue is sharp and fast – most of the scenes
revolve around arguments between the family members.
dog, Bonnie. Miles believes that dogs should just be
Ralph, the flamboyant older brother, is all for teaching
him tricks. Their father asks them to demonstrate what
they have taught Bonnie. Miles’s commands go without
a hitch. But when Ralph asks Bonnie to come, she sits;
she stands up when asked to stay, and comes when asked
to sit. ‘A total failure!’ says the father. ‘Not exactly,’
says Ralph. ‘It’s an act of Dadaism ... What I just
demonstrated was an obedience which sounded and
looked like an act of extreme disobedience.’ A wonder-
ful piece of trickery, and there are many more like it.
To order this book at £13.59, see order form on page 78
FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE FOR WRITERS
Grants and Pensions are available to
published authors of several works who
are in financial difficulties due to
personal or professional setbacks.
Applications are considered in confidence by
the General Committee every month.
For further details please contact:
Eileen Gunn
General Secretary
The Royal Literary Fund
3 Johnson’s Court, London EC4A 3EA
Tel 0207 353 7159
Email: egunnrlf@globalnet.co.uk
www.rlf.org.uk
Registered Charity no 219952
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
Dec-Jan pp4-63 24/11/05 4:35 pm Page 16
HISTORY
N ORMAN S TONE
A KGB FIELD DAY
T HE M ITROKHIN A RCHIVE II: T HE KGB
AND THE WORLD
★ Soviet response was to construct an enormous ocean-
By Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin
(Allen Lane 677pp £30)
THE CENTREPIECE OF this large volume lies towards the
end, and it concerns the biggest blunder made by
Moscow, which came towards the end of the existence
of the USSR. At Christmas 1979, the Soviets invaded
Afghanistan. A very small group within the Politburo
decided that it was the right thing to do, and pushed it
past colleagues who were not enthusiastic but who were
compelled to sign up. One Afghan ruler, who had killed
his Soviet-client predecessor, was himself killed, and
another Soviet client was moved in. This solved noth-
ing: on the contrary, the country went to rack and ruin,
maybe half of the population either being killed or
fleeing to Pakistan. The USSR then faced a ten-year
guerrilla war, which it could not win and could also not
abandon. This was surely the biggest ever failure of for-
eign intelligence on the part of a supposed superpower,
and it reinforced the general demoralisation that attended
the last decades of the existence of the USSR. How on
earth did the Soviet machinery of foreign intelligence
fail on this scale?
The Mitrokhin archive is a large collection of docu-
ments that appeared providentially in England in 1992.
The author, Vasili Mitrokhin, was one of those deter-
mined eccentrics whom Russia produces: a KGB man
who had somehow been sidelined into managing collec-
tions of documents, and who copied some of them for
future use. The Soviet system was like that: people
might become ‘unpersons’ and be supposed to
disappear, even from the official record; but someone,
somewhere, would be preserving the documents in the
expectation that they would again be needed. Mitrokhin
claimed, as he approached the British in 1992 for ‘exfil-
tration’ (ie escape from Russia), that he had a consider-
able archive of KGB documents bearing on the Cold
War, and the British looked after him until his recent
death. He was steered by the best-known British expert
on intelligence: Christopher Andrew, with whom these
volumes were written.
This second book concerns what might be loosely
called ‘the Third World’. In the Seventies, as the
Americans licked their wounds from Vietnam and
Watergate, and as Britain herself slid into powerlessness,
Moscow developed enormous ambitions. Khrushchev,
in the Fifties, had expected that ‘the contradictions of
16
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
capitalism’ would finish off the West, and when oil
prices octupled in the Seventies that expectation did not
look stupid. Sir James Goldsmith, for instance, bought a
huge estate on the Pacific coast of Mexico, supposing
that Western civilisation would go under, in a welter of
ecological disaster, political soft-headedness (with Jimmy
Carter in the White House) and perhaps also Aids. The
going fleet – an enterprise that might make you reflect
that crashing empires always build utterly unnecessary
ships, in the manner of the Kaiser’s Ger many or
Ottoman Turkey. That fleet was meant to create a Soviet
empire in Africa, and as this book catalogues, the KGB
sent its emissaries all over ‘the dark continent’.
In the later Fifties and Sixties, newly decolonised
African states, some with enormous mineral resources,
were led by megalomaniacs who thought that they
could ‘industrialise’ just as the USSR was held to have
done. Maybe this was the worst lie ever peddled by
Soviet Moscow: that Stalin had taken a backward, illiter-
ate and peasant country, and, within a generation,
turned it into a superpower, defeating Nazi Germany
and sending people into space. Russia in 1914 had been
among the most go-ahead places in the world, and
Communism lived parasitically off that, as it lived para-
sitically off everything else. However, in the Sixties,
various Third World rulers thought that they, too, could
have planning and one-party states, and make industrial
miracles; Western development economists aided and
abetted. The result was a plethora of Nassers and
Nkrumahs and National Liberation Fronts, providing a
field-day for the KGB. It is something of a miracle that
India did not entirely go under in this period: she
cooperated all over the place with the USSR, but at
least domestic voting went on, and neither Nehru nor
his daughter, Indira Gandhi, ever went in for the one-
party illusion.
The Mitrokhin archive has some interesting details as
to KGB involvement in these matters. Anyone sensible
knew by 1968 at the latest that Communism was an
utter failure, but here was a wonderful world opening up
for cynical careerists. Soviet expansionism offered a
good opportunity for Russians, living in a world of
blunt razors and leaking ballpoints, to go to places
where you could get Western goods – that was even
true of Kabul – and at the same time pass yourself off as
a Soviet patriot. The pabulum of this book consists of
the reports of these agents (all men), solemnly handing
over a few thousand dollars to this or that Third World
jumper up and down – in Angola, Nicaragua, even poor
little Grenada in the Caribbean. There is a considerable
flavour of hidden black humour about the book, but
you are struck all along by forebodings of what is to
come, namely, the disaster of Afghanistan. That country
had been, in the words of Vladimir Bukovsky (whose
Dec-Jan pp4-63 24/11/05 4:35 pm Page 17
HISTORY
Jugement à Moscou, a considerable classic based on
Politburo documents that Bukovsky found in surreal
circumstances, is not in Mitrokhin’s index), a sort of
Asiatic Finland: faithfully helping Moscow, only needing
to be left alone. Her affairs passed into semi-anarchy, and
then the Russians blundered in, meaning to restore
order, and destroyed millions of lives. Another book
which should have been in Mitrokhin’s list of sources is
Christopher Kremmer’s The Carpet Wars. Its author, an
Australian journalist who saw the disintegration of
Afghanistan, understood the consequences of the
Russians’ actions. The West, as in Iraq, has had to pick
up the pieces, and deserves some credit.
All in all, the Mitrokhin volume is an odd book,
which prompts some reflection. In the Thirties and
Forties, Moscow’s foreign intelligence was very good: it
recruited the Cambridge Five, captured the secrets of
the atomic bomb, and had, so far as one can judge, an
important part of the French machine working for it.
B LAIR W ORDEN
FEAR OF FOREIGNERS
S OLDIERS AND S TRANGERS : A N E THNIC
H ISTORY OF THE E NGLISH C IVIL WAR
★
By Mark Stoyle
(Yale University Press 297pp £25)
OVER THE PAST fifty or sixty years, interpretations of the
English Civil War, which have always been controversial,
have become so in a new sense. Previously the disputes
were about the rights and wrongs of the war. Now they
are about the causes of its outbreak and course.
Historians are expected to have, not a preference for one
side, but an analytical line.
The lines, which have had their debts to intellectual
fashion, have often changed. Half a century ago the war
was perceived as a class war, in which an ailing feudal
order succumbed to an emerging bourgeois one, or else
in which prosperous landowners did battle with declin-
ing ones. Next came the war as a conflict between
centre and locality, caused by the determination of
Charles I in the 1630s, and of the Long Parliament in
the 1640s, to impose a national will on the regions. In
the third phase, the struggle became the last of Europe’s
wars of religion, in which material and constitutional
interests counted for less than the confrontation of
Anglican and Puritan. Then came the war as a British
conflict, where events in England were inseparable from
the simultaneous quarrels in Scotland and Ireland.
Mark Stoyle’s excellent book is a variant on the last of
those themes. To him the war was about ethnicity and
17
Parts of that world survive. For instance, the Russians
are much better than anyone else about Turkey (strangely,
not a subject that comes up here, though Istanbul is the
windpipe of their trade), and Prime Minister Primakov
should have been listened to on the subject of Iraq. But
on the whole, there was a dreadful decline in the quality
of Moscow’s understanding of the Third World, or per-
haps just a certain cynicism about the whole business of
‘national liberation fronts’, in which clever young men
spouted the correct platitudes in return for the right to
go to some Mozambique or Grenada and buy ball-
points. In this, there is a non-dit of some significance.
Jews, on the whole, were very important indeed in the
early decades of the USSR. They understood something
about foreign countries. In the later Forties, anti-
Semitism started officially, and foreign intelligence
understood less and less. So what? The unspoken
question in Mitrokhin’s book.
To order this book at £24, see order form on page 78
racial prejudice. He traces the impact on the military
campaigns of English hostility not only to the Irish and
Scots but to the Celtic populations of Wales and Cornwall,
an emotion largely reciprocated – and sometimes also
mirrored in the treatment of those groups by each other.
Since Elizabeth’s reign, Englishness and Protestantism
had grown together, and the hatred and fear of foreigners,
MICHAEL MCKEON
THE SECRET HISTORY OF DOMESTICITY
Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge
“This is a deliciously rich
and generous exploration of
the material and conceptual
separation of the public
from the private, one that
illuminates just about every
aspect of what it means to
be modern: political, sexual,
literary, artistic.”
—THOMAS W. LAQUEUR,
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA–
BERKELEY
THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
Distributed by John Wiley • Tel: 1243 843291 • www.press.jhu.edu
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
Dec-Jan pp4-63 24/11/05 4:35 pm Page 18

HISTORY

or ‘strangers’, was a potent political that proved ‘fatal’ to his cause.

weapon. Yet the English could not Parliament, which in any case had a
sustain the Civil War on their own. They smaller component of foreigners in its
needed the military leadership and exper- own army, cleared them out during the
tise that in recent decades had been reorganisation of its forces in the
gained by the rest of Europe during the winter of 1644-5, after which the New
Thirty Years War. And they needed man- Model triumphed as the champion of
power. Parliament brought in a huge Englishness and as the deliverer of the
Presbyterian army from Scotland, which land from alien incursion.
the Puritans piously called ‘our brethren’, Soldiers and Strangers is boldly and
a phrase soon mocked not only on the imaginatively conceived, and is written
royalist but on the parliamentarian side, with verve and style. Sometimes the
where the Scottish soldiers became argument is over-bold, as indeed Stoyle
equally detested. The king tr ied to seems half-aware. Part of the difficulty is
import armies from Scotland and from his heavy dependence on the evidence
the Continental monarchies. Mercenary Birmingham gets the sack of printed propaganda, which told its
soldiers arrived from France (to find readers what to think but does not
themselves called the ‘beastly and buggerly French’ and necessarily tell us, as one might infer from Stoyle, what
‘barbarous blood-suckers’), the Netherlands, Lorraine, and ‘many English men and women’, or ‘thousands’ of them,
from further afield – even, it seems, from Mesopotamia did think. ‘Ethnicity’, which is not defined, is too loosely
and North Africa. Mercenaries were generally more prone related to the sentiments of class, religion and locality
than native troops to indiscriminate plunder and destruc- with which it interacted. In any case the royalism of
tion. They also allegedly strove to ‘protract and spin out Wales and Cornwall may make at least as much sense
the war’ and so prolong their income from it. when taken together with its non-ethnic counterpart in
Foreign captives suffered some merciless treatment. It the northern counties of England, that other ‘backward
was the Irish who came off worst. Cromwell’s slaughters part of the land’. Stoyle skilfully traces the tendency of
at Drogheda and Wexford in 1649 merely continued the Welsh and Cornish soldiers to lose their royalist enthusi-
earlier policy of Parliament, which in legislation of 1644 asm when their local regiments, having at first been
– that ‘golden ordinance’, as a delighted Puritan divine given local tasks, were broken up and their members
called it – declared that every Irishman captured in absorbed into nationwide English armies. But how much
England must be put to death without quarter. MPs were did ethnic feeling contribute to that change, which was
incredulous when Prince Rupert, the king’s foreign paralleled in most of the counties of England? For if the
nephew and commander, responded to the execution of English could hate foreigners, most of the time they were
thirteen of the king’s Irish soldiers by hanging the same busy enough hating each other.
number of English prisoners, as if Irishmen could some- I suspect, too, that the purging of foreign soldiers by the
how be regarded as ‘equal’ to Englishmen. After the Cromwellian leadership owed more to its will to win the
Roundhead victory at Naseby a huge number of female war than to any xenophobic impulse. Stoyle likes to cite
camp-followers on the king’s side, supposedly from the assertions by Cromwellians of ‘English’ values and
Ireland, were unhesitatingly put to death, as ‘whores’, by birthrights, but those statements were more often than
the Roundheads. not innocent of anti-alien sentiment. They had a long
Actually it seems that they may have been from Wales. pedigree and a long future. When England expected
For the Welsh attracted every man to do his duty,
brutal treatment too, as did Nelson was not inciting his
the Cor nish. Wales and English sailors to turn on the
Cornwall supply the most other Britons at their side.
or ig inal parts of Stoyle’s Yet the boldness that has
book. Though both com- over-propelled Stoyle has also
munities had parliamentarian MA Degree in Biography been a stimulus to discovery
Starting January 2006
enclaves, Wales in the south, and thought. Soldiers and
Appreciate the art of biography while learning the skill in this one or two-year
Cornwall in the east, both taught MA. The Buckingham MA in Biography was the first postgraduate Strangers is one of the most
were overwhelmingly royal- programme in this field to be offered in the UK. rewarding and enjoyable
ist. The king, maintains Course director: Jane Ridley studies of the Civil War to
Contact: jane.ridley@buckingham.ac.uk or write to her at
Stoyle, was ‘ir revocably The University of Buckingham, Buckingham MK18 1EG
have appeared in recent years.
committed’ to ‘ethnic diver- Tel: 01280 814080 To order this book at £20, see
sity’ in his armies, a policy order form on page 78

18
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
Dec-Jan pp4-63 24/11/05 4:35 pm Page 19
HISTORY
R OWLAND S MITH
Leading the Charge
into the Ancient Age
T HE C LASSICAL WORLD : A N E PIC H ISTORY
FROM H OMER TO H ADRIAN
★ engineer a prudent withdrawal of the imperial army
By Robin Lane Fox
(Allen Lane 693pp £25)
CERTAIN PICTURESQUE FEATURES of classical antiquity –
the gladiatorial shows, for instance, or the volcanic
eruption of AD 79 that overwhelmed Pompeii – hold a
perennial popular appeal, which a Hollywood director
or a bestselling novelist can still hope to tap. So do
certain charismatic ancient personalities – Alexander of
Macedon, say, or Queen Cleopatra. But the history of
Greek and Roman antiquity spans a thousand years, and
the study of its political nuts and economic bolts is
nowadays a specialised field in which experts tend to
plough quite narrowly defined furrows. Still, whether or
not modern Europeans and Americans care to notice it,
the brute fact is that many of their core political and
cultural presuppositions are peculiarly linked to Greek
and Roman precedents, and it is tempting in this con-
nection to apply to antiquity Leon Trotsky’s celebrated
dictum about war: you may not be interested in it – but
it is definitely interested in you. An outsider might con-
sider the intricacies of ancient history a matter of no
importance to anyone except a sub-Johnsonian species
of scholarly drudge, but some current practitioners of
the subject take a far more combative view of its con-
temporary relevance – and, more to the point, so did
some of the neo-conservative clique around George
Bush that lately pressed for military intervention and
exemplary ‘regime change’ in an irksome Middle
Eastern state: the portentously named 2000 Project for
the New American Century, a right-wing think-tank
patronised by Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and Cheney, boasted
a bigwig professor of classical Greek history from Yale
among its leading lights.
In 2005, as their dream of a Pax Americana dissolves
in a sea of insurgents’ bombs and threadbare spin,
Washington’s more reflective neo-cons may wish in
hindsight that their professor’s specialist knowledge had
extended beyond Greek warfare to the geopolitics of the
Roman Empire. One instance of gung-ho Roman
adventurism in the early second century could have pro-
vided particular food for thought. In AD 114, the
emperor Trajan decided on a robust solution to the
‘Middle Easter n question’ of his day: invade
19
Mesopotamia, kick out its uppity ruling dynasty, and
reconstitute it as an amenable Roman province. The ini-
tial invasion was easily accomplished and fulsomely cele-
brated. Three years later, the bulk of the native popula-
tion of Iraq was in open revolt, and a fundamentalist
visionary based in its southern marshes was prophesying
an imminent visitation by angels and the triumph of
God’s faithful over all earthly empires. At that point
Trajan obligingly died, or was covertly murdered: it was
left to his successor to ditch the whole enterprise and
back to the old frontier.
The account of Rome’s Mesopotamian fiasco deftly
sketched near the close of Robin Lane Fox’s ‘epic histo-
ry’ is one of many delightful touches in a wide-ranging
book that offers a feast of intriguing insights to anyone
curious about the classical world. The author is an
Oxford don with extensive and long-pondered knowl-
edge of his subject, but is emphatically not a dry-as-dust
bore: a keen horseman outside the lecture-room, he
recently charged across the big screen as a Macedonian
cavalryman in the company of professional stunt-riders
in Oliver Stone’s Alexander the Great (a movie on which
he also served as historical adviser). On the page, he
canters just as sure-footedly through the nine centuries
or so that run ‘from Homer to Hadrian’, writing with a
light touch and displaying a wonderful knack for con-
the royal society
of literature
invites entries for
the v.s. pritchett
memorial prize 2006
A prize of £1,000 will be awarded for an
unpublished short story of between 2,000 and 5,000
words. The closing date is 14 February 2006. Entries
will be judged by Sebastian Barker, editor of The
London Magazine, Candia McWilliam and Piers Paul
Read, and the winning story will be published in The
London Magazine. Entrants must be citizens of the UK
or the Republic of Ireland.
For an entry form please send a self-addressed
envelope (c5) to: The Secretary,
The Royal Society of Literature,
Somerset House, Strand, London wc2r 1la
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
Dec-Jan pp4-63 24/11/05 4:35 pm Page 20
HISTORY
veying the shifting texture of life in Greek and Roman
antiquity to readers for whom it may be wholly unfa-
miliar territory. His wish to share and explain his own
long fascination with the classical world and its literature
is patent, and where he thinks that modern parallels or
comparisons can help he readily draws them. Beyond
that, and in marked contrast to the neo-cons’ professori-
al ally at Yale, he has no political axe to grind – and his
book is much the better for it. It is a generous text, not
just for its amplitude, but for the spirit in which it is
written: its aim is not to win an argument or pretend to
be definitive, but to stimulate and deepen the historical
imagination of its readers.
To write a history of this sort requires artistry as well
as learning. By any definition, ‘the
classical world’ is a for midably
complex subject to take on; poten-
tially, it embraces several distinctive
cultures and languages spread across
Europe, Mediterranean Africa and
the Near East, and the evolution
over at least a millennium of scores
of states and kingdoms. Even an
‘epic’ treatment must be shrewdly
selective, and the topics that it picks
for emphasis must be carefully
orchestrated to point up their rela-
tionships and overall significance.
The tr ick is to highlight and
explain key background themes
without depriving the ancient evi-
dence of its power to speak to the She had a great asp
modern reader in its own terms,
and to cast those themes in a narrative frame that can
illuminate long-term trends and changes without deny-
ing chance and contingency their role in the story.
For Lane Fox, it is above all the range and subtlety of
the ancients’ own texts that gives their history an inex-
haustible interest, and in this book the ‘classical world’
begins in the eighth century BC with the invention and
rapid spread of an alphabetic script for Greek, and the
writing down of the Homeric poems, the earliest sub-
stantial Greek texts that now survive. His preferred end-
ing-point, the Roman Empire under Hadrian in the
mid second century AD, may seem premature, inasmuch
as the empire was to survive for a further three centuries
– but the choice has its logic. The first use of the term
‘classic’ to connote a canon of artistic excellence occurs
around Hadrian’s time, and Hadrian’s own classicising
tastes in literature and architecture arguably mark the
point at which a self-conscious sense began to crystallise
in the ancients’ own minds that they were heirs to a
‘classical’ past – a past whose achievements they could
emulate, but scarcely hope to match. Hadrian’s reign can
thus sometimes figure in this book as a half-way house
20
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
between the ancient and the modern: at various points
on the long road from Homer’s time to his second-cen-
tury closing-point, the author pauses to consider how
the particular subject under discussion might have
appeared to Hadrian’s eye. It is a nice trope: Hadrian’s
tastes were shaped partly by the ‘classic’ buildings and
artworks he encountered on his near-constant tours of
his empire; for him, the Homeric age – along with
many another iconic ‘classical’ episode illuminated in
this book – was already becoming ‘ancient history’.
Theoretically-minded readers might question Lane
Fox’s preference for narrative over thematic analysis in
his history, but he has theoretical reasons of his own for
the choice, and his narrative does not lack a thematic
strand: it highlights three themes
which the ancient writers them-
selves especially liked to emphasise
– freedom, justice and luxury –
and traces their shifts and twists in
practical politics and in the ideolo-
gies of states over the passage of a
thousand years. Freedom and jus-
tice are words with a noble ring
(but which are often used to dis-
guise vested interests), and luxury
is a very elastic concept. If you
have ever wondered what ‘democ-
racy’ or ‘liberty’ really amounted
to in classical Athens or republican
Rome, or what ‘legal r ights’
meant for a Spartan helot or an
Italian freedman, or how Sybarites
became synonymous with luxury,
or why Tacitus called heated bath-houses tools of
‘enslavement’, you will find revealing answers here. And
there is so much else.
Books about particular periods or aspects of classical
antiquity by experts writing for a general readership are
no rarity, but it is a long time since a single author has
attempted an ‘epic’ portrait of the entire age – and cer-
tainly one enlivened by such empathy and wit. Politics
and warfare and their social contexts may be the back-
bone of Lane Fox’s grand narrative, but as it unfolds
there are constant glances down antiquity’s vivid byways.
An Aristotelian philosopher fetches up in a town in
Afghanistan bearing an oracle from Delphi which will
address the place’s Greek inhabitants; a band of female
fire-eaters puts on an impromptu strip show at a wed-
ding-feast; a prostitute named ‘Lioness’ seduces the son
of a one-eyed king. And who could resist a book in
which the owner of a pet piglet sadly recalls how it trot-
ted behind his char iot for a hundred miles from
Thessalonica, only to fall victim to a road-hog on the
crossroads at Edessa?
To order this book at £20, see order form on page 78
Dec-Jan pp4-63 24/11/05 4:35 pm Page 21
HISTORY
P ETER J ONES
MARBALLS
T HE E LGIN M ARBLES : T HE S TORY OF
A RCHAEOLOGY ’ S G REATEST C ONTROVERSY
★ Athens.
By Dorothy King
(Hutchinson 288pp £16.99)
THIS IS THE worst book I have ever reviewed. It reads as
if it has been cut and pasted from a website by a semi-
literate schoolgirl (in my proof copy, King talks of Greek
cities ‘still under the [Persian] yolk’) struggling with her
GCSE coursework. Doubtless a great deal of labour has
gone into it, but to little purpose when the author’s
ignorance on many topics is encyclopedic, her ability to
clarify and marshal arguments based on evidence that
demands careful handling almost non-existent, and her
English style execrable (her favourite conjunction is
‘and so’).
Here, for example, King is struggling to say something
about (i) the Athenian claim that their first king was
born from the earth, and (ii) the absence of mothers
from the Parthenon marbles (‘and so one can read the
Parthenon as a statement of Athenian misogyny’, she
concludes, absurdly):
The Athenians also thought of themselves as superior
to all other Greeks, for they claimed that they had
always inhabited Attica, and had not arrived as
migrants, and so their race was the oldest. Athenian
mythology is confusing, for it emphasises this notion
of autochthony, and the lack of a human mother also
of course emphasises how little the Athenians
thought of women, and so we have not one king
who sprang from the earth, but a whole series of
them, so that a king almost didn’t need a queen, or
to bother himself with such trivial matters as procre-
ation. Autochthony meant that Athenians could
claim they were purer, allowing themselves to see
other Greeks as pseudo-foreigners.
Don’t ask. I haven’t the remotest, either.
Not only is the book unreadable, its title is also
misleading. King begins her story millions of years ago
with the formation of the Mediterranean basin, spends
a hundred pages mangling Athenian histor y and
trying to describe the original Parthenon, and another
hundred pages labouring through Hellenistic, Roman,
Byzantine and Ottoman times, before finally arriving
at the subject of the title, Elgin, two-thirds of the
way through. The subject of the title is then treated to
a royal fifty pages before we turn to the controversy
over the marbles’ subsequent treatment and ownership
(forty-six pages). The word ‘history’ would have been
21
helpful somewhere.
King’s views on this controversy continue to exemplify
the seamless fit between prose style and logic evident
from the rest of the book: she is against returning them,
but then again, she isn’t. The following points pop out
like ping-pong balls from a lottery machine.
Greeks: The marbles can be appreciated only in
King: This is cultural nationalism.
British Museum: We acquired them legally and have
cared for them well.
K: The Greeks have made requests to get the marbles
returned, which have been rejected by various political
and cultural bodies. Christopher Hitchens says that the
Greeks want only the marbles back, but we cannot know
that.
Greeks: We now want you to loan the marbles to us.
K: They would never give them back. Their demand
is cultural nationalism.
BM: The marbles are better seen in the BM, in the
context of other cultures.
K: They have inspired poets and painters, and mil-
lions see them every year here. They are part of our
culture. They have inspired philhellenism and led to the
recognition of Greece as a country. They are part of our
heritage. The city state of Athens no longer exists, but
the marbles have been here for 200 years. Henry Moore
and Selfridges have been influenced by them. Had Elgin
not brought them back, they would not exist.
BM: The trustees are not allowed to make perma-
nent loans. Only an Act of Parliament will allow their
return.
K: States cannot return everything. Should we return
things in chronological order? The marbles belong to
the whole of humanity. To the Greeks they are a symbol
of their imperial past. Should we destroy, for example,
Venetian palazzi which contain bits of the marbles? The
Greek and BM holdings could not be displayed next to
each other because their quality is so different. The BM
gets more visitors than Athens would. When I was
studying Greek art, the Greek authorities would not let
me see material. The BM is open and free to all. The
Parthenon was famous only to Athenians, not all
Greeks. Greeks have not looked after their own material
well, so ours and theirs could not be displayed next to
each other.
And so the little balls continue popping out, some
reappearing two or three times, until she unveils a con-
clusion which she has already explained is constitutionally
excluded, quite apart from contradicting everything she
has said: ‘When the Greeks can demonstrate that
they too have done an admirable job of caring for the
marbles in Athens then, perhaps, we can discuss a loan.’
I love that ‘we’.
To order this book at £13.59, see order form on page 78
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
Dec-Jan pp4-63 24/11/05 4:35 pm Page 22

HISTORY

E S T URNER chronology’s sake, stays close to the throne. Towards the

end there is only passing mention of railways and
ENGLAND AND ALL THAT steamships. Newspapers and the electric telegraph are
ignored. Martyrs abound, but not the Tolpuddle kind.
Marshall has an eye for boy kings, some of whom
O UR I SLAND S TORY were wise and good, but not Ethelred, who was slow,
★ foolish and worse. She also has an eye for young, hand-
By H E Marshall some, merry-making favourites and pretenders, who
(Galore Park 494pp £19.99) were up to no good. At school we sometimes wondered
about those favourites; they seemed not to be in the
THE REISSUE OF Our Island Story, first published in 1905, same harmless class as teachers’ pets. How were they
has brought a dreamy look to many a seasoned face. The able to sow so much mischief at court?
book is affectionately remembered for its bracing stories, Merry-making meant getting drunk, but that word
its sturdy simplicities, its fearless assessments of the never appears. It was upper-class mer r y-makers
mighty as wise or wicked. On the jacket Antonia Fraser who brought disaster to the White Ship, in which
and Andrew Roberts testify to the inspiration it gave Prince William was lost, after which Henry I never
them as historians and the pleasure it afforded their own smiled again.
offspring. The Daily Telegraph’s Education The book is full of clever people. The
Editor, John Clare, says the book chimes Romans were clever but g reedy
with the Prince of Wales’s campaign to (Vortiger n’s nobles were not clever
restore nar rative and chronology to enough). The first Duke of Marlborough
school histor y lessons, instead of was clever but dishonest. Queen Bess was
‘fractured incoherence’. If the authors of clever but ‘had no right’ to behead Mary
1066 and All That, Sellar and Yeatman, Queen of Scots. She was wrong to think
had been available for a jacket quote, she was beautiful; ‘her people loved her so
they would surely have blushingly much that very likely they really thought
acknowledged their debt to H E she was beautiful’. Let that stand for the
Marshall’s best-loved bestseller. ‘nuanced’ treatment so much admired by
All that seems to be known about today’s reviewers.
Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall is that she In a slightly squirm-making address to
used initials to conceal her gender and her young readers Marshall tells them that
that she lived in Melbourne, Australia. when they are older they must not be cross
There is a rumour that she was a home- at finding how much she has left out,
sick governess. Whatever she was, she hit History as we knew it things they would not have understood at
on a good idea, and when Our Island the time (about favour ites, perhaps).
Story prospered she wrote similar books about Scotland Encouraging them to emulate, with paper and scissors, a
and the Empire. She never claimed to be writing serious famous cutting-out trick by Hengist, she says that if they
history, and justified the peddling of fables on the are not allowed to use scissors they should find some
grounds that these were what people believed. kind person to help. This is a touch governessy; one
They’re all here, the familiar whoppers: Neptune almost expects to hear a Grenfellish ‘George – don’t do
handing over his cherished island to his son Albion; that.’ But Marshall, the storyteller, well knows how to
Merlin ‘mag icking’ capture the young imagina-
Stonehenge from Ireland; tion. She also knows the
Arthur pulling the sword Looking to appeal of rousing patriotic
Excalibur from the stone; The answer is here verse, many swatches of
Raleigh, the smoker,
drenched by a housemaid
publish The Better Book which adorn her pages.
There has been some
your book? Company
who thought he was on tweaking of the text. It is
fire… Take away the stories, We offer a complete service to authors Write or phone for our odd to read in a book
and the book becomes a wishing to self-publish their work. FREE Guide to Self-Publishing steeped in the attitudes of a
fairly unremitting recital of We work with our authors honestly Warblington Lodge • The Gardens hundred years ago that
monarchs, battles and and professionally to produce books Havant • Hampshire • PO9 2XH
Tel: 023 9248 1160 Fax: 023 9249 2819
Christ was born in a land
beheadings. The standard of of which both of us can be proud. Email: editors@better-book.co.uk called Israel.
kingship revealed is pretty To order this book at £15.99,
low, but Marshall, for see order form on page 78

22
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
Dec-Jan pp4-63 24/11/05 4:35 pm Page 23

HISTORY

M ICHAEL B URLEIGH Institution at Stanford,

where, now in his late
HE TOLD US SO eighties, he works in an
office whose piles of
books and papers testify
T HE D RAGONS OF E XPECTATION : R EALITY to its occupant’s energy
AND D ELUSION IN THE C OURSE OF H ISTORY and interests.
★ Conquest’s new book
By Robert Conquest contains further tantalis-
(Duckworth 256pp £18) ing snippets of autobio-
graphical detail. There
RECENTLY I HAVE been reading some of the large-scale was a backpacking trip Conquest: sceptical voice
histories of the 1960s. A test of whether they are any around Europe in 1937
good or not as guides to what was lasting and significant with his friend John Blakeway, father of Britain’s leading
in that decade, when the ephemeral became an art form, documentary television producer, and a journey round
has been seeing whether they mention the publication Central Europe in an old truck a year later with John
in 1968 of Robert Conquest’s masterly The Great Terror. Willett, the Brecht expert. It would have been good also
One book does mention Conquest, but in the context to have included his first and, until the 1990s, last visit
of his friendships with Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin. to the Soviet Union, which he mentioned in the TV
Most just drone on about the sexual appetites of juve- series he so brilliantly presented, Red Empire. He was
niles or enthuse over the Beatles and rioting students. filmed in a cell in the Peter and Paul fortress in
In addition to being a poet of some stature and author Leningrad. The guides tut-tutted about the conditions
of works of science fiction, Conquest is the world’s most of the individual prisoners incarcerated there before the
distinguished student of the former Soviet Union. His Revolution. Conquest subsequently learned that fifty
work has a richness of classical and literary allusion people were crammed into such cells after the
which is missing in that of Harvard historian Richard Revolution, and that there were many more prisons
Pipes (like Conquest, a former adviser to Ronald packed to the gunwales in Leningrad during that period.
Reagan), and he has been more prolific than the late
Martin Malia, the Ir ish-Amer ican scholar whose
achievement most resembles Conquest’s own.
Six years ago Conquest published Reflections on a
Oxford University
Ravaged Century, which amply illustrated Czeslaw Continuing Education
Milosz’s astute remark: ‘The achievement of Robert
Conquest becomes more obvious when we view it
together with the behaviour of his contemporaries.’
Although he never made the comparison explicit, MSt in
Conquest included brief flashes of autobiography which Creative
he juxtaposed with the careers of various academic
apologists for Stalinism, whose delusions and lies he Writing
exposed on virtually every page.
The son of an American father, Conquest spent his This
childhood in the South of France and then, after
Winchester and Oxford, volunteered for the Oxford and
two-year
Bucks Light Infantry to fight the Nazis for five years. A part-time
chance offer to learn a new language while stationed in course
Italy in 1944 resulted in his posting as liaison officer to starts in
the Third Ukrainian Front of the Red Ar my in Oct 2006
Bulgaria, where he remained for four years (at the
Br itish Military Mission in Sofia), witnessing the
Communist takeover.
Back in England, he joined the Information Research For details phone 01865 270369
Division at the Foreign Office, became ‘Webb Fellow’ at or email: ppcert@conted.ox.ac.uk
the London School of Economics, and was briefly or see the course website at
literary editor of The Spectator, although not necessarily
in that order. He eventually left England for the Hoover www.conted.ox.ac.uk/ad/pp11

23
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
Dec-Jan pp4-63 24/11/05 4:35 pm Page 24
HISTORY
The author recalls a nasty spat with the economist J K
Galbraith that followed Conquest’s giving evidence to
the US Congress contradicting that great liberal panjan-
drum’s own testimony on the putative robustness of the
Soviet economy. He mentions the little seminar held at
Stanford (which had been recently hit by an earth-
quake), where General Secretary Gorbachev conceded
that, while the USSR had laws to protect buildings in
such disasters, the authorities rarely enforced them – an
anecdote designed to confound alleged comparabilities
between the two societies. He is too modest to elaborate
on his role in advising the then opposition leader
Margaret Thatcher on how to deal with the Russians,
his part in the West’s victory in the Cold War.
Dragons of Expectation – the title alludes to the Poetic
Edda – is another autobiography in fragments, as well as
a development of Conquest’s ongoing exposure of myths
and manias and the degraded state of much of contem-
porary academe. Although the book sometimes becomes
almost epigrammatic, and shifts subjects like a projector
showing slides, it is always beautifully written, and based
firmly on the author’s moral sanity and passionate
common sense.
The most fascinating sections are those that deal with
Communism and the Soviet Union. Conquest applies
the materialist conception of history to the finances of
global Communism. Forty-three foreign Communist
parties received over $8 million in 1959, and eighty-
three were handed $15 million four years later, including
the parties of Réunion and San Mar ino. Foreign
Communist leaders, such as Britain’s Harry Pollit,
trousered royalties on the Soviet editions of books that
did not sell at home, while the collector wife of US
ambassador John Davies, himself an adulator of
Stalinism, was allowed the pick of the artworks at the
Tretyakov Gallery at bargain-basement prices.
There is a chilling illustration of the workings of the
Marxist-Leninist mind in Conquest’s account of the
rehabilitation in the 1960s of people shot after the 1938
Bukharin trial. One of the likely candidates for rehabili-
tation was the Uzbek Communist leader. A local party
history reprinted a photo of
him taken in the 1920s. But Make reading comfortable with the aid of battletanks.
since he had not yet been
formally rehabilitated, they
hedged their bets – not by
airbrushing him out entirely,
or turning him into a jacket contact its inventor, Gary Lancet
on the wall, a stretch of
water, or a bush, as hap-
pened to images of Numerous awards
Kamenev, Yezhov and many 60,000 sold
others, but by obscuring his
Bookchair is recommended by Alexander Technique
face with a huge beard. teachers, physiotherapists and Richard Ingrams
Swathes of academia are
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
treated with contempt throughout the book:
Not only does Marxism, or at any rate a sort of sub-
Marxism, still put out shoots in academic spheres
that have been inadequately unweeded, but even
nonutopian theorizing, attempts to inject rigor into
the political – systems analysis, rational choice theory,
path dependence – all tend to remove realities from
academic work or, in many cases, to make real
research and thought acceptable to academe only if
provided with an attached theoretical view.
Conquest devotes lengthy sections to exposing the
shortcomings of the likes of E H Carr, Galbraith and the
ubiquitous Eric Hobsbawm, whose ‘radically fiction-
alised story’ of the Bolshevik Revolution has had ‘a
broad influence, or at any rate a broad seepage’ through
such homages as that paid by Kirsty Wark, the BBC’s
cultural tsarina, and the award of a Companionship of
Honour to him, presumably not for services to a foreign
tyranny. There is a devastating critique of the sloppily
sinister, relativistic thinking that underpinned the CNN
Cold War series, wherein the sufferings of Hollywood
Communists at the hands of McCarthy were compared
with ‘torture by the Inquisition’. Cut, so to speak, to
Moscow and the dramatist Vsevolod Meyerhold. In his
sixties, the imprisoned Meyerhold wrote a complaint to
the prison authorities, commenting that he could still
write since his interrogator, who had urinated into his
mouth, had only broken his left arm. Later he com-
plained again, about his legs, which had been so badly
beaten that they felt like they had been immersed in
boiling water. Meyerhold was shot a few months later
after an ‘Inquisition’ that Hollywood leftists never expe-
rienced. Moreover, however despicable McCarthy was,
his tactics were never translated to Western Europe, in
the way that the NKVD introduced their habits to their
Eastern European stooges. And so Conquest goes on,
challenging any number of questionable comparisons.
Four students were shot in the 1970s at Kent State
University by nervous national guardsmen; according to
CNN’s Ted Turner, this was comparable to the events at
Tiananmen Square, where regular Chinese troops
mowed down thousands
In person, Robert
with Bookchair! Conquest is so softly spoken
only £20.00 that one can injure one’s
including p&p neck leaning in to hear him;
his books employ another
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see order form on page 78
24
Dec-Jan pp4-63 24/11/05 4:35 pm Page 25
ROYALTY
L UCY W OODING
God’s Lieutenant on
the Road to Reform
T HE K ING ’ S R EFORMATION : H ENRY VIII
AND THE R EMAKING OF THE
E NGLISH C HURCH
★
By G W Bernard
(Yale University Press 736pp £29.95)
THE MOST DECISIVE developments of Henry VIII’s tur-
bulent reign came in the 1530s, when the king denied
the authority of the Pope, asserted his own supposedly
God-given right to control the Church, and set about
redesigning English religion, a process which he was to
continue until the end of his reign. These actions were
to have momentous consequences. Henry effectively
reconfigured English kingship by adding to the crown
the enormous wealth and authority of the Church, yet
at the same time endangered it by creating a basis for
principled religious opposition to royal authority. He
left a legacy of conflict to English Protestants and
Catholics alike, who ever since have been fighting over
quite what the religious ambiguities of his reign should
mean for their separate traditions. He also created a
thorny historical problem. What exactly had the king
intended to achieve with this religious and political
revolution? Was he merely trying to replace his obsti-
nate wife, whose sons had all died, with a more likely
child-bearing contender, and getting carried away? Was
this the beginning of Protestantism in England, as the
institution of an English Bible and the dissolution of
the monaster ies seem to suggest? Or was it
‘Catholicism without the Pope’, as many others have
argued, since Henry always upheld the importance of
the Latin Mass, and refused the central doctrines of
Protestantism? Had Henry been tempted by the possi-
bilities of Continental reform, only to lose his nerve?
Many historians have taken refuge in the argument that
Henry’s apparent inconsistencies can best be explained
by the workings of faction: the picture emerges of a
king who was forceful but wayward, impulsive and
vindictive, swayed by his councillors, courtiers and
wives. In short, we have been led to believe, the
Henrician Reformation was an exercise in incoher-
ence; the alarming vacillations of a king desperately
anxious about the future of his dynasty, and prepared
to countenance any possible way of producing a
legitimate male heir and securing his authority.
George Bernard has set out to prove that the many
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LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
Dec-Jan pp4-63 25/11/05 11:20 am Page 26
ROYALTY
var iations on this view are
wrong. Henry did have a clear
vision of what he wanted, and
pursued it remorselessly, energet-
ically and with conviction. The
same could be said of the author
in pursuit of his thesis. This
book bears all the hallmarks
of Ber nard’s character istic
approach: it is polemical, pas-
sionate, original, often persuasive
and repeatedly contentious. He
cuts impatiently through the
tangles of both complex histori-
cal debate and convoluted his-
tor ical evidence, swiftly and
pithily providing a clear account, Four evangelists stoning the Pope
but racing ahead to the next
conclusion. He has little mercy on the reader who does
not share his compulsive enthusiasm or who lacks the
necessary background knowledge: the wider historical
context is provided by a prologue ten lines long, before
the narrative plunges into the intricacies of the historical
problem. It is a historical tour de force, formidable in its
scholarship, indefatigable in its attempts to convince,
written with an energy at the same time invigorating
and exhausting.
Bernard’s idea is that we have misunderstood Henry,
and his intentions, again and again. He argues that, far
from vacillating over how best to get rid of Catherine of
Aragon, and replace her with Anne Boleyn, the king
pursued a clear and forceful line against the papacy from
the beginning of his campaign in 1527. His appeals to
the Bible, arguing that he had been wrong to marry his
brother’s widow, and that the papacy had been wrong to
let him, indicated his commitment to a reformed view of
Christianity in which papal authority was far from total.
His persistent threats to break with a Pope who refused
to see the justice of his cause indicate that, from the first,
he was determined to challenge a notion of papal
authority which stood in his way. In Bernard’s view, it
was not Anne Boleyn who withheld her sexual favours
in the hope of tantalising the king into making her his
wife; on the contrary, sexual abstinence until success was
in sight was the king’s idea, so determined was he to
secure a legitimate marriage and subsequent heir.
The ‘royal supremacy’, which was effectively the
replacement of the Pope by the King as head of the
English Church, was therefore not a solution arrived at
by trial and error, but the logical conclusion of a series
of policies aimed at advancing a reformed view of
religion in which biblical authority had greater promi-
nence, and corruption and superstition were to be
subdued. The religious changes implemented piece by
piece during the remainder of Henry’s reign were not a
26
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
random selection of doctrines
and ideas, but a concerted
attempt to purge the realm of
all that was fraudulent, unbib-
lical and ignorant, whilst
upholding many traditional
Catholic doctrines in the face
of Protestant doctrinal innova-
tion, which the king always
distrusted. This was a ‘middle
way’ between the extremes of
Rome on the one hand, and
Wittenberg or Zürich on the
other, a reformation unique to
the monarch who created it,
and bear ing eloquent
testimony to the diversity of
religious views available in the
early years of the European Reformation.
The picture of Henry VIII which emerges from this
book is a very different one from the usual picture of a
blustering, bullying, but irresolute monarch.Bernard’s
Henry is a lot cleverer, a lot crueller, a great deal more
impressive but at the same time a lot more frightening, like
any leader with an ideological conviction and an objective
that brooks no opposition. It seems that Henry worked
out for himself a great deal of his complex case against the
papacy, and the religious reformation which followed:
subsequent commentators have had difficulty believing a
king could be this ingenious, but contemporaries appreci-
ated how far the king was in control. Yet if his theological
convictions were essentially moderate, the impact of his
campaign against his Queen, his Pope, his opponents and
the monasteries was devastating. Henry’s religious vision
may have been nuanced, even persuasive, fired by humanist
and biblical scholarship, but his religious policies were
ruthless, vindictive and shattering. He may initially have
intended to reform rather than abolish the monasteries,
but once they were tainted with rebellion, he showed no
mercy. It was little comfort to the many who opposed
him, and who suffered crushing defeat, that the king still
upheld the seven sacraments, or the Catholic Mass, since
he was destroying their conception of a Church, and
effectively shredding the social fabric of religious life in
the provinces. Bernard’s Henry VIII is a tyrant, inspired
but implacable.
The case for consistency can, of course, be overstated,
and many people will argue that this book goes far
too far. Even those who find much of it persuasive might
argue that if Henry was consistent in the pursuit of his
own will, that does not mean he always wanted the same
thing from year to year. Equally, even if
the king was not manipulated, that does not mean that his
councillors did not attempt to pressur ise him;
the case for the acquiescence of Cranmer and Cromwell,
Dec-Jan pp4-63 25/11/05 11:21 am Page 27
ROYALTY
for example, will be hotly contested. Bernard is used to
raising controversy, and no doubt this book will produce a
storm of it among the usual suspects. Partly despite this,
and partly because of it, the book is a superb achievement.
In particular, its recasting of Henry as ‘God’s
lieutenant’ on the road to reform is the most enlivening
P AUL J OHNSON
FIRST AMONG FEMINISTS
B OUDICA : I RON AGE WARRIOR Q UEEN
★ Trinobantes, who had grievances of their own, and other
By Richard Hingley and Christina Unwin
(Hambledon and London 293pp £19.99)
T HERE ARE MANY books about Boudica, and more
continue to appear. Most are bad. This account, by two
archaeologists, is a good one, and gives us all that we
know for sure about this interesting figure, and all the
myths and fantasies which have been built up around
her. She was a contemporary of the emperors Claudius
and Nero, and led a surprisingly suc-
cessful British revolt against Roman
rule in AD 60–61, that is at the time
when St Paul was writing his epistles to
the Corinthians and St Mark composed
his Gospel.
We have three literary sources for
Boudica, two by Tacitus (c AD 56–117).
In Agricola, the life of his father-in-law,
later Governor of Britain, which was
written within living memory of the
revolt, Tacitus says that while the then
Governor, Suetonius Paulinus, was con-
quering Anglesey, the oppressed Britons
(‘the whole island’) rose ‘under the lead-
ership of Boudicca, a lady of royal
descent – for Britons make no distinction
of sex in their leaders’. Tacitus, say the
authors of this book, misspelt her name,
putting two ‘c’s instead of one. In the
Middle Ages, copyists compounded the War-like matron
error when the ‘u’ was replaced by an ‘a’
and the second ‘c’ by an ‘e’. This is how we ended up
with Boadicea, the name by which she was known until
recently. But what’s in a name? We know Tacitus’s middle
name was Cornelius, but his first name may have been
Publius or Gaius. We are unsure both of his birth-date
and his death-date. These are reminders of how many
lacunae there are in our knowledge of such distant times.
Tacitus’s second account of Boudica, in his Annals, is
fuller. It says that Prasutagus, King of the Iceni, a rich
man, had made the emperor Nero co-heir with his two
27
contribution to an ancient debate that has appeared in
years. It advances an extraordinarily skilled understanding
of the intricate relationship of religious belief, religious life,
political necessity and political opposition. It will infuriate
a great many people, but inspire a great many more.
To order this book at £23.95, see order form on page 78
daughters, hoping thereby to preserve his kingdom and
family fortune. But his will was ignored, his widow
Boudicca (again misspelt) flogged and his two daughters
raped. The dead king’s estates were seized by Roman
officers and his family treated like slaves. As a result, says
Tacitus, the Iceni rose in revolt, backed by the
tribes. They destroyed the colony at Colchester, which
was unwalled, annihilated ‘the ninth Roman division’,
which tried to relieve the town, and forced Governor
Suetonius to evacuate London, which was also destroyed.
He adds that ‘Verulamium suffered the same fate’.
Contradicting his account in Agricola, which claims
that the Britons stormed Roman forts, Tacitus says that
‘forts and garrisons were bypassed’, the Britons going
‘for where loot was richest and protection weakest’. He
gives Roman losses of 70,000, explain-
ing: ‘The Britons did not take or sell
prisoners … They could not wait to cut
throats, hang, burn and crucify – as
though avenging, in advance, the retri-
bution that was on its way.’ In reply,
Suetonius collected 10,000 troops and
invited the Britons to a pitched battle at
a place Tacitus does not identify. The
Britons congregated in such numbers,
on foot and on horseback, and ‘their
confidence was such that they brought
their wives with them to see the victory,
installing them in carts stationed at the
edge of the battlefield’. He says that
Boudica ‘drove round all the tribes in a
chariot with her daughters in front of
her’, and addressed to them a fighting
speech with marked feminist overtones,
showing her bruised body and outraged
daughters, and concluding: ‘You will
win this battle or perish. That is what
I, a woman, plan to do. Let the men live in slavery if
they will.’
However, Tacitus writes in the Annals, the outcome
was an easy Roman victory over a British army of
which more than half were women. Some 80,000
Br itons fell, at a cost of 400 Roman dead and ‘a
slightly larger number of wounded’. Boudica, he says,
‘poisoned herself ’. The rebellion ended in a famine
among the Britons.
These accounts are supplemented by Cassius Dio’s
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
Dec-Jan pp4-63 25/11/05 11:25 am Page 28
ROYALTY
report of the invasion and occupation of Britain, written
in Greek about 150 years later, but probably based on
works which have not survived. Dio describes the revolt
as ‘a terrible disaster’ and gives Roman losses as 80,000
dead, two cities sacked, and ‘the island lost’. He adds:
‘Moreover, all this ruin was brought upon the Romans
by a woman, a fact which in itself caused them the
greatest shame.’ One cause of the revolt, he claims, was
the recalling of loans made to the Britons by the emper-
or Claudius and the chief minister and Stoic philosopher
Seneca, a man of enormous wealth who, after Boudica’s
death, was forced to commit suicide (in AD 65) for
political offences. Buduica, as he calls her, was chosen
leader by the tribes and ‘directed the conduct of the
entire war’. He says she had ‘greater intelligence than is
generally found in women’, was ‘very tall, in appearance
most terrifying, in the glance of her eye most fierce, and
her voice was harsh; a great mass of the tawniest hair fell
to her hips; around her neck was a large golden neck-
lace; and she wore a tunic of many colours over which a
thick mantle was fastened by a brooch … [She] grasped
a spear to aid her in terrifying all beholders.’
The speech Dio ascribed to Boudica in spurring on
her followers is much longer than Tacitus’s version but
follows the same lines: freedom or death – better to per-
ish in battle than live under Roman rule as slaves. It
does, however, contain the added note that the Britons
were a special people, separated from the rest of
mankind by a sea, and enjoying, until the Romans
came, a liberty unknown elsewhere. She also, according
to Dio, engaged in divination and magic, concealing a
hare in her garments, which at a key point in her speech
she let escape to see how it would run. Dio also has her
displaying considerable knowledge of Mediterranean
deities, and explaining ‘we have by now gained much
learning from the Romans’.
Much of what Dio writes seems to us fantastic, espe-
cially his description of the obscene cruelties inflicted by
the Britons on Roman captives, and his statement that
Boudica led an army of 230,000 men. His description of
the final battle is more detailed than that of Tacitus, and
he makes it a close-run thing. He says many Britons
escaped and were preparing further resistance, but
‘Buduica fell sick and died’. The Britons ‘mourned
her deeply and gave her a costly burial; but, feeling that
now at last they were really defeated, they scattered to
their homes’.
These foreign accounts are supplemented by a brief
reference made in the sixth century by the British
author Gildas, writing after the Roman withdrawal and
the beginning of the Anglo-Saxon conquest, by which
time the Romans were seen as ‘goodies’. He says: ‘A
treacherous lioness butchered the governors who had
been left to give fuller voice and strength to the efforts
of Roman rule.’ This is clearly a reference to the warrior
28
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
queen and, since Gildas had not read Tacitus or Dio,
suggests that her folklore memory was still strong half a
millennium after her death.
The authors of this book devote a detailed chapter to
the archaeological evidence. They show that it confirms
beyond much doubt that a disaster occur red in
Colchester, London and Verulamium (St Albans) at a
level which fits with the literary evidence showing that
these three towns were burned. It is what archaeologists
call a ‘destruction layer’, thirty to sixty centimetres thick
and black or red in colour, and it shows clearly that
these towns, which were made mostly of wood, were
put to the torch. But specific physical evidence of the
revolt and of Boudica herself does not exist, or has not
so far been found, despite strenuous efforts which still
continue. Hingley and Unwin give a comprehensive and
up-to-date survey of all that has been done, but it does
not tell us very much. Hard facts about the queen are
virtually non-existent.
In their absence, fantasy reigns. There was the belief,
current in the seventeenth century, that Stonehenge was
the burial place. In the years 1609–14 the Jacobean play-
wright John Fletcher wrote a play entitled Bonduca,
which brought in all that was then known about the
ancient Britons, from Caractacus to the Druids, and
which was repeatedly revived in the seventeenth, eigh-
teenth and nineteenth centuries (why not today?). To
please James I, Boudica was presented as a witch and an
anti-heroine, a fashion followed by many authors until
nineteenth-century antiquarianism made a fuss about
the distant origins of England’s ‘unwritten constitution’
and gave Boadicea (thus called) a prominent and praise-
worthy role in it. In the age of Gladstone, the sculptor
Thomas Thornycroft worked on a massive representa-
tion of Boadicea in her chariot, with her two daughters.
He began work in 1856, during the Crimean War, and
followed the advice of the Prince Consort, who urged
him to stress regality and make the chariot ‘a throne
upon wheels’. The work was unfinished at Thornycroft’s
death in 1885, after which it was cast in bronze, present-
ed to the nation in 1896, and finally put in place near
Westminster Bridge in 1902. In my view it is a splendid
piece of work, exactly what monumental sculpture
should be. Children love it and so do feminists. Placed as
it was, it inspired the Suffragettes, always anxious to
engage in highly publicised activities near Parliament. It
is a fitting memorial to a woman, part fact, part fiction,
who has inspired countless drawings and a fair number
of plays and novels.
Boudica was almost certainly illiterate, and a savage in
many ways. Sellar and Yeatman summed it up accurately:
‘The Roman conquest was … a Good Thing, since the
Britons were only natives at that time.’ Today, however,
with opinion turning against immigrants, asylum-seekers
and other foreigners, Boudica may enjoy a popular revival.
Dec-Jan pp4-63 25/11/05 11:26 am Page 29
ROYALTY
A NNE DE C OURCY
A Steel
Marshmallow
E LIZABETH THE Q UEEN M OTHER
★ A Cultural History of Modern Irish Writing
By Hugo Vickers
(Hutchinson 618pp £20)
TO MOST PEOPLE alive today, Queen Elizabeth the
Queen Mother was a diminutive figure in floating
sweet-pea chiffon crowned by a face-framing hat, gloved
hand waving from a Royal Ascot coach or accepting
a birthday bouquet from some adoring member of
the public.
What lay behind that sweet, impenetrable smile? Was
it, as her biographer Hugo Vickers seems to suggest,
emotions baser than the dedication to duty and discre-
tion that had so marked her life?
Vickers is one who should know. Since he was an
Eton schoolboy he has, he tells us, been fascinated by his
subject. Indeed, the expectation in the literary world
was always that the plum job of writing her official
biography would fall to him. His knowledge of her life
was unrivalled, and he had positioned himself nicely
with an admirably restrained yet perfectly truthful life of
Prince Philip’s mother, Princess Andrew of Greece. But
to the astonishment of all, not least that of Vickers
himself, the surprise choice was William Shawcross.
Wisely, Vickers decided not to abandon the task for
which he had so painstakingly made notes and for
which he possessed an extraordinarily comprehensive
archive. Still to come with Shawcross, though, will be
the unrestricted trawling of the Royal Archives plus the
final, inestimable personal touch – ten years’ worth of
taped interviews given by the Queen Mother to Sir
Eric Anderson (Provost of Eton) and destined for her
future biographer.
Born on 4 August 1900 into an ancient Scottish aris-
tocratic family – her father was the 14th Earl of
Strathmore – Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon was to become a
national treasure. As a child in the ancient, menacing
Strathmore castle of Glamis, she seems to have been as
good as she was beguiling. And as a beautiful young
woman with a melting, dark-fringed glance, she was
irresistible to many of the men around her. By the time
she was twenty-one she had garnered numerous suitors
– no small feat in an era when, owing to the huge
slaughter of the 1914–18 war, which had ended only
three years earlier, girls greatly outnumbered men.
Easily leading in the race to capture her heart was the
A Little History
of the World
E.H. Gombrich
“an amazing read…there will be many
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and for truth.”—Lisa Jardine, The Times
“the book charms, amuses and informs
superbly”—Andrew Roberts, Daily Express
304pp. 42 pen and ink drawings £14.99
Light, Freedom and Song
David Pierce
David Pierce considers the hybrid character of
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“Pierce writes with the kind of magnetism one
finds in the words and gestures of a great
storyteller.”—Brendan Kennelly
320pp. 60 b/w + 36 colour illus. £25.00
The Riverside Gardens of
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C. Paul Christianson
Eight historic gardens, one belonging to Sir Thomas
More and the others to politically powerful
friends and acquaintances of his, are recreated
and analysed in this richly illustrated book.
Published for the Paul Mellon Centre
for Studies in British Art
160pp. 80 b/w + 40 colour illus. £25.00
The Parisian Jazz
Chronicles
An Improvisational Memoir
Mike Zwerin
In this engaging personal account of the jazz
scene in Paris in the 1980s and 1990s, music
critic Mike Zwerin writes lovingly—but
unsparingly—about Miles Davis and other jazz
legends he has known and interviewed.
256pp. £15.95
Soldiers and Strangers
An Ethnic History of the
English Civil War
Mark Stoyle
“a distinguished study of the impact of ‘foreign
interventions’ in the English war”—
John Adamson, BBC History Magazine
320pp. 12 b/w illus. £25.00
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
tel: 020 7079 4900 • www.yalebooks.co.uk
Dec-Jan pp4-63 25/11/05 9:56 am Page 30
ROYALTY
glamorous war hero Jamie Stuart, the
younger son of the 17th Earl of Moray
and by an ironic chance equerry to the
man she did eventually marry, Prince
Albert, second son of King George V.
As Stuart’s son once told me, ‘they
were deeply in love’.
Stuart, however, was briskly dealt
with by Queen Mary, who, having
decided after a visit of inspection to
Glamis that Elizabeth was the girl for
her son, managed to have Stuart
despatched to the oilfields of
Oklahoma. The way was clear for the
twice-rebuffed Albert (later Duke
of York), whose third proposal
was accepted.
From then on, the path ahead was
one of duty, dignity and discretion. Pining for a large martini
The famous charm, with its blend of
smiling attention, slightly roguish flirtatiousness and
unhurried courtesy, carried all before it. It was not long
before the adjective ‘gracious’ could be found in any
description of her.
The abdication of her husband’s older brother King
Edward VIII, resulting from his decision to marry Wallis
Simpson, projected the Yorks on to the throne. It is a
safe guess that Elizabeth detested Wallis for her part in
this, but since she believed that royal family matters
should never be discussed outside the royal family, there
is no record of her true emotions over it – yet.
Throughout the war, she was at the King’s side, support-
ing and encouraging him, visiting the bombed areas
with him, always presenting an image of courage and
optimism. For many she set the behavioural style of a
queen consort.
The death of George VI in 1952 turned Elizabeth’s
life upside down. At one stroke she lost loved husband,
home and, if one can so call it, job. As with many wid-
ows, her grief took even her by surprise and for a time it
was thought that she would retire altogether from public
life. But encouraged by friends and by her own steely
determination, she rallied, carving out a role for herself
as well as creating a private life as leisurely and luxurious
as that of her Edwardian childhood, helped by the
devoted staff of courtiers and servants surrounding her.
‘By the time Pr incess Margaret mar r ied [Tony
Armstrong-Jones] in 1960 the Queen Mother’s life was
exactly as she wished it to be,’ writes Vickers.
There was racing, public engagements, reading, letter-
writing and lunches and dinners with friends, where her
sense of enjoyment and fun, as well as her gift for mim-
icry, contributed largely to the success of these gather-
ings. The food, often based on the finest Scottish fare,
was excellent and lavish. There were elevenses,
30
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
afternoon tea, cream, butter, choco-
lates, martinis and champagne – her
fondness for a good drink was leg-
endary and her guests shared in it fully.
Disappointments, turbulent family
affairs such as the unravelling marriage
and later divorce of her grandson the
Prince of Wales were treated the same
way, by ‘ostriching’ – the name given
by her staff to her habit of metaphori-
cally burying her head in the sand at
the prospect of any fearsome tornado
appearing over the gilded horizon. All
unpleasantness was dealt with in the
same way: she did not even visit the
faithful Sir Martin Gilliat in his termi-
nal illness, owing to what Vickers
describes as her ‘ingrained dislike of
visiting dying friends’.
She made few concessions to
advancing years. Still smiling, still clearly enjoying life,
with a blameless reputation and an indomitable spirit,
she remained immensely popular. When she died in
April 2002 over 200,000 people filed past her coffin as
she lay in state in Westminster Hall.
It is difficult to see how anyone could have made a
better job than Vickers of putting together the immense
panorama of a life spanning over a century. His research
is impeccable, his sources are wide and his own notes are
invaluable. These, together with bibliography, family
trees, appendices and a comprehensive index, occupy
100-odd pages at the back of the book.
There are some snappy vignettes: Princess Margaret
throwing a book at her mother’s head during the
Townsend affair, Queen Elizabeth herself giving vent to
her (post-war) dislike of the Japanese by saying: ‘Come
on everybody – Nip on! Nip on!’ when the Japanese
Crown Prince was staying for Royal Ascot and her wish
that the Japanese Sword of Surrender be put on display
was countermanded by the Queen.
There is a plethora of detail – by the end it began to
seem as if there was not a meal I had not shared or a
frock with which I was not familiar – much of it
fascinating but some titbits hardly germane. Cecil
Beaton, for instance, ‘was disappointed that the princesses
did not seem to have had their hair washed in honour of
his visit’.
Yet the private opinions and emotions behind the
public face of the woman once described as ‘a steel
marshmallow’ remain as well hidden as in her lifetime.
For what the last Queen-Empress really thought and felt
about the dramatis personae and events of her long life,
we shall have to wait for the Shawcross biography.
Meanwhile, Vickers has done her proud.
To order this book at £16, see order form on page 78
Dec-Jan pp4-63 25/11/05 9:56 am Page 31

BIOGRAPHY

‘OSBORNE ARRIVES IN
R ICHARD B OSTON
A BLAZE OF PASSION’ GUARDIAN

JOSEPH FRANCESCA
A LIBERTINE & LIBERTY FIENNES ANNIS
‘Excellent’ ‘Splendid’

GEORGE
J OHN W ILKES : T HE S CANDALOUS FATHER TIMES INDEPENDENT
OF C IVIL L IBERTY
★
By Arthur H Cash
(Yale University Press 448pp £20)

DILLON
IN NEWCASTLE ONE day in 1768 forty-five gentlemen
sat down at forty-five minutes past one with forty-five

EPITAPH FOR
gills of wine and forty-five new-laid eggs. At forty-five
minutes past two they began a meal of five courses, each
of which had nine dishes, making forty-five. The sirloin
of beef weighed forty-five pounds… and so on. At the
same time in markets throughout the country the
number forty-five appeared on such objects for sale as
buttons, buckles, brooches, snuff-boxes and mugs. The
cause of all this excitement was No 45 of the North
Briton, the editor and author of which, John Wilkes MP,
had been sent to the Tower.
As celebrated as the number forty-five was the figure
of Wilkes himself. According to his son-in-law, ‘In ‘Anne Reid is
china, in bronze, or in marble, he stood upon the chim- SUPERLATIVE’
ney-piece of half the houses of the metropolis’. It was EVENING STANDARD
just as well that in those days there were no tee-shirts for
his likeness to be printed on, for John Wilkes was not a
pretty sight. He was dreadfully cross-eyed, and his lower ‘Hot-to-the-touch
jaw projected to the point of deformity. His teeth
dropped out before he reached middle age, so that the
performances
tips of chin and nose almost met. His lisp became so … A GREAT NIGHT
pronounced (if that’s the word) that listeners found diffi- AT THE THEATRE’
culty in following what he was saying. This made him a SUNDAY TIMES
poor performer in the House of Commons in an era
that included orators of the stature of Pitt, Burke and
Sheridan. Wilkes got round this by having his speeches ‘Peter Gill’s
printed and distributed outside Parliament. WONDERFUL
He was almost proud of his ugliness. Boswell (a close
friend) found that Italian newspapers called Wilkes Il PRODUCTION
Bruto Inglese, which he interpreted as the English Brutus. ...This might just
Wilkes corrected him: it meant ‘the ugly Englishman’.
Wilkes boasted that he needed only twenty minutes ‘to
be Osborne’s
talk away my face’ (sometimes he reduced the claim to greatest play’
DAILY TELEGRAPH
ten minutes). What he lacked in looks he made up for
abundantly with sheer charm. He was always cheerful,
and he was witty and had impeccable manners – a pow-
erful combination. Boswell engineered a meeting
between Wilkes and Dr Johnson, who was a political
2 TOP PRICE TICKETS
antagonist. After a sticky start, Wilkes (in well under his
self-allotted twenty minutes) had Johnson literally eating
FOR THE PRICE OF 1
out of his hand. Boswell records that Call the Box Office and quote ‘Literary Review offer’
Mon – Sat at 7.30pm • Wed & Sat at 2.30pm. Offer valid to 14/01/06
Mr Wilkes placed himself next to Dr Johnson, and Terms and conditions apply.
behaved to him with so much attention and politeness,
COMEDY THEATRE 0870 060 6637
www.theambassadors.com/georgedillon • www.seegeorgedillon .com
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
Dec-Jan pp4-63 25/11/05 9:56 am Page 32
BIOGRAPHY
that he gained upon him sensibly … Mr
Wilkes was very assiduous in helping
him to some fine veal. ‘Pray give me
leave, Sir: – It is better here – A little of
the brown – Some fat, Sir – A little of
the stuffing – Some gravy – Let me
have the pleasure of giving you some of
the butter – Allow me to recommend a
squeeze of this orange; – or the lemon,
perhaps, may have more zest.’
On a later occasion Boswell comes across
the two old adversaries
reclined upon their chairs, with their
heads leaning almost close to each
other, and talking earnestly, in a kind WIlkes: hell-raiser
of confidential whisper, of the person-
al quarrel between George the Second and the King
of Prussia. Such a scene of perfect sociality between
two such opponents in the war of political contro-
versy, as that which I now beheld, would have been
an excellent subject for a picture. It presented to my
mind the happy days which are foretold in Scripture,
when the lion shall lie down with the kid.
Wilkes made an early marriage to a much older woman,
who was wealthy but otherwise quite unsuitable. He
soon got through the cash and they separated, but not
before they had a daughter, whom Wilkes adored. He
also had at least two other children out of wedlock. His
looks did not prevent innumerable amorous conquests,
but for the most part his vigorous sex life relied less on
his seductive skills than on payment to prostitutes, mis-
tresses, paramours, courtesans and domestic servants.
One of his many lady friends was called, remarkably,
Fanny Perfect.
Wilkes was a member of the Hell-Fire Club, which
met at Medmenham in Buckinghamshire for orgies and
Black Masses. Another member was Lord Sandwich, the
man who was famously so reluctant to leave the gaming
table that he would order his food to be served between
two slices of bread. When Lord Auckland wrote him a
critical letter, Sandwich replied: ‘Sir, Your letter is
before me, and it will presently be behind me. I remain,
sir, your most humble servant.’ Not bad, but Wilkes was
better. When Sandwich told Wilkes he would die either
of the pox or on the gallows, Wilkes slammed back:
‘That depends, my lord, whether I embrace your mis-
tress or your principles.’ Having been Wilkes’s friend,
Sandwich became his persecutor.
Wilkes’s North Briton opened by declaring that a free
press is ‘the firmest bulwark of the liberties of this coun-
try’. He vigorously attacked the ministry of Lord Bute
(another former Hell-Fire raiser), who, he suggested,
was having an affair with George III’s mother. This did
not please the King, who was further enraged by the
famous No 45 of the North Briton. This furiously
32
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
attacked the King’s speech to Parliament,
which, it said quite rightly, was not
written by the King but by his ministers.
A general warrant (a warrant that didn’t
name names) was issued and forty-eight
people were arrested, including Wilkes.
After Wilkes had spent a week in the
Tower, Lord Chief Justice Pratt released
him on the grounds that his arrest (since
he was an MP) was a breach of parlia-
mentary privilege. Wilkes and others
then prosecuted secretar y of state
Halifax, won damages and established
that general warrants were not legal.
This was a real blow to the arrogance of
the state. An astonished Frenchman
asked Wilkes just what limits there were to press free-
dom in England. Wilkes replied that he didn’t know, but
was trying to find out. From being Wilkes the libertine
he had made his name synonymous with liberty. ‘Wilkes
and Liberty’ was the slogan of the day.
Sandwich, now secretary of state, clandestinely
acquired copies of an obscene parody of Pope’s Essay on
Man which Wilkes and a friend had written for the
Hell-Fire Club years before. The Essay on Woman was
indeed extremely obscene. When Sandwich, himself a
notorious rake, read it out and denounced it to the
House of Lords, one of them commented: ‘Never
before heard the devil preach a sermon against sin.’ The
Lords voted it to be a libel, while the Commons voted
No 45 a seditious libel. Wilkes had just been seriously
wounded (by a bullet in the stomach) in a government-
engineered duel. Under the circumstances he found it
prudent to move to Paris, where he spent huge sums of
money that he didn’t have. His debts became so great
that after four years he decided that England was a safer
option, even though he had been outlawed in his
absence. He returned, was elected for Middlesex, waived
his privileges, and was fined and imprisoned. And so it
went on, with Wilkes being repeatedly expelled from
Parliament, imprisoned, released to the acclaim of vast
crowds, re-elected. Eventually he transferred his activi-
ties to the City of London, of which eventually he
became Lord Mayor.
This book is always readable, but really too long. It is
repetitive and so overburdened with detail that you can’t
always see the wood for the trees. Wilkes becomes more
vividly alive in the few lines of Boswell quoted above
than in the whole of the rest of the book put together,
but it is unfair to compare any other biographer with
Boswell. This hefty tome is full of incident and colourful
characters, but what makes it especially welcome is its
sheer timeliness. Under Prime Minister Blair and his
Home Secretaries Blunkett and Clarke our civil liberties
and freedom of expression have been, and are being,
Dec-Jan pp4-63 25/11/05 9:56 am Page 33
BIOGRAPHY
eroded. From freedom of speech to habeas corpus, from
unwarranted arrests to imprisonment without trial, the
issues Wilkes fought over are the ones that concern us
R ICHARD G RAY
A FABULOUS SHADOW
M ELVILLE : H IS WORLD AND WORK
★ tators otherwise as different as Senator Gary Hart and
By Andrew Delbanco
(Picador 415pp £25)
WHEN HERMAN MELVILLE died in New York City in
1891, few people noticed and even fewer cared. One of
the handful of obituaries to appear observed that, such
was the obscurity of his later years, most had thought
him already dead. Melville enjoyed a brief moment of
fame following the publication of his first two novels,
Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), romantic accounts of his
seafaring adventures in the South Seas. But his major
work, Moby-Dick (1851), met with a lukewarm, con-
fused reception; the first edition never came close
to selling out. Later novels then met not so
much with incomprehension as with derision.
One reviewer called Pierre (1852) ‘the crazi-
est fiction extant’; another dismissed The
Confidence-Man (1857) as ‘decidedly the
worst of Melville’s books’. A fellow
writer, William Gilmore Simms, even
saw fit to announce that Melville had
‘gone “clean daft”’, adding, ‘the sooner
this author is put in the ward the better’.
By 1857, Melville’s career as a writer of
prose fiction that actually got published
was over. So was his fame. A British
admirer who came to visit Melville in the
1880s complained that in New York ‘no
one seemed to know anything about him’,
while, looking back on the 1880s from the
1930s, Melville’s literary New York neigh-
bour Edith Wharton confessed that, as a girl, Melville: whale of a time ship with Nathaniel Hawthorne, ‘we do not
she ‘never heard his name mentioned, or saw
one of his books’.
All this changed in the 1920s. Melville was resurrect-
ed, and his literary reputation rehabilitated, so that grad- of manoeuvres. One is to analyse some of the larger
ually he became, in the words of Andrew Delbanco, ‘an
American icon’. His masterwork, Moby-Dick, assumed a
unique status as (to quote one critic) ‘the unavoidable
centrepiece of the American tradition’. And its central
character, the monomaniacal Captain Ahab, was trans-
formed into a cultural touchstone – and a handy tool for
anyone seeking to explain or cr iticise Amer ica.
Immediately after 9/11, for instance, Edward Said
33
today, and it is good to be reminded. John Wilkes, thou
shouldst be living at this hour.
To order this book at £16, see order form on page 78
commented in The Observer, ‘collective passions are
being funnelled into a drive for war that uncannily
resembles Captain Ahab in pursuit of Moby Dick’.
Eighteen months later, with preparations under way for
the invasion of Iraq, Ariel Dorfman echoed that com-
parison – one also made during this period by commen-
the film star Richard Gere – by wondering if President
George W Bush ‘might in fact be an Ahab whose search
for the monster in the oceans of sand and oil could end
up with the ruins, not of the monster, but of those …
bent on its extinction’.
The business of biography is always difficult; it is espe-
cially so when its subject has become, like Melville, both
a mystery and a legend. ‘No material exists for a full
biography of this man,’ Melville observes of one of his
protagonists, Bartleby the Scrivener. The same could be
said of Bartleby’s creator: not least because only about
three hundred of Melville’s letters survive (as opposed to,
say, the twelve thousand of Henry James), most of
the manuscripts have disappeared, and Melville
himself was in the ‘vile habit’ (as he put it) of
burning his papers and correspondence
when they were no longer needed.
Biographers have had to fall back on spec-
ulation, and Melville: His World and Work
is nothing if not speculative. ‘The “black
years” of Melville’s later life’, Delbanco
says, ‘have proven impenetrable to even
the most determined scholar.’ But he says
much the same of the rest of his life.
‘There survives only a single scrap actual-
ly written’ during Melville’s four years at
sea, we are told. Of his mar r iage to
Elizabeth Shaw, ‘there is little on which to
draw for an inner history of the life they
shared for more than forty years’. As for
Melville’s close but gradually cooling friend-
know’, we learn, ‘and are never likely to find
out’ the truth.
Confronted with an enigma, Delbanco tries a number
issues raised by Melville’s enigmatic status. So, the
changing views on the author’s possibly homosexual
inclinations are discussed in relation to developing atti-
tudes on homosexuality. ‘The quest for the private
Melville’, in this as in other areas, ‘has usually led to a
dead end,’ Delbanco admits, but at least we can see how
critics have moved from ignoring this subject to refer-
ring to it in covert, elliptical fashion, and thence to
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
Dec-Jan pp4-63 25/11/05 9:56 am Page 34
BIOGRAPHY
discussing it openly and with candour. Another tactic of
the author’s is not so much to read the work in relation
to the life as to discover the life in the work. Early on in
this biography, Delbanco wonders ‘if we can apply to
Herman the musings’ of one of his protagonists and
then, in effect, answers his own question by doing as
much. The fiction and poetry of Melville are treated like
an archaeological site, from which the bare bones of
their creator’s life can be disinterred and given flesh;
biography becomes inextricable from close, creative
reading. This is a potentially dangerous ploy; the sur-
prise is that it works so well. Delbanco is a keen social
critic and a tactful analyst. Each of Melville’s works is
situated in the feverish cultural debates of its day, each is
then read in such a way as to prise open its secrets –
what it discloses about Melville, his family and friends
and his understanding of his world. The private life is
unearthed from the public text, thanks to Delbanco’s
passionate curiosity. In the process, we witness Melville’s
journey from the young man of boundless energy, who
told a friend he really needed ‘fifty fast-writing youths’
to write down the thoughts racing through his mind
more quickly than he could record them, to the old
man complaining of ‘lassitude’ and ‘a disinclination for
doing anything except the indispensable’.
Delbanco captures perfectly Melville’s involvement in
his times. During Melville’s childhood, as he points out,
‘the rhythm of American life was closer to medieval
than modern’; during his last years, ‘he was living in a
world that had become recognizably our own’. The
work, as Delbanco shows, takes the measure of that
transformation. It is also extraordinarily prophetic.
A LLAN M ASSIE
Accomplished, Witty
& Dandyish
A RTHUR H UGH C LOUGH : A P OET ’ S L IFE
★ Oxford Movement’. A post at last being found in some
By Anthony Kenny
(Continuum 298pp £20)
Thou shalt not kill; but need’st not strive
Officiously to keep alive:
Do not adultery commit;
Advantage rarely comes of it…
Arthur Hugh Clough’s inversion of the Ten
Commandments seemed agreeably witty and up to date
when I first came on it, aged fourteen or so, in Lord
Wavell’s anthology, Other Men’s Flowers. Next I knew of
him as the subject of Matthew Arnold’s beautiful, if
34
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
Moby-Dick, as Delbanco demonstrates at length, fore-
shadows the ruthless fanaticism and demagoguery that
cast its blight over the twentieth century and, arguably,
continues into our own times. And it also anticipates the
inventions of modernism: a dedication to a kind of writ-
ing that captures the ebb and flow of consciousness, as
erratic and self-surprising as the human mind. Melville’s
great contemporary, Walt Whitman, observed of his
own work, ‘Who touches this book, touches a man.’
And that notion seems always to be at the back of what
Delbanco is doing, as he discovers Melville and his
world through his work, showing how each book is
brimming with hitherto undisclosed biography.
‘Any conventional biography of Melville is a business
bound to fail,’ Delbanco suggests at the outset. His biog-
raphy succeeds because it defies convention. Melville: His
World and Work is as aberrant, as alert to the mysteries of
life, and as adventurous in its speculations as its subject
was – and just as inclined to mix an encyclopedic grasp
of apparently extraneous material with sudden, glancing
insights into the heart of things. The poet Hart Crane
called Melville a ‘fabulous shadow’. Delbanco does not
quite succeed in liberating his subject from the shadowy
margins he has tended to occupy as a consequence of
the anonymity into which he sank in his later years, his
own secretiveness, and the myths that have gathered
around him. But he does manage to dispel some of the
clouds, thanks to a mixture of scholarly patience and
inspired guesswork. Now and then, the shadow of
Herman Melville comes into focus here; and that is no
mean achievement.
To order this book at £20, see order form on page 78
swoony, elegy ‘Thyrsis’, which, according to Anthony
Kenny, was dismissed by Dr Jowett, the Master of
Balliol, as ‘a most inadequate tribute’.
Then, in my last year at school, I read Lytton
Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, where one encounters a
feeble Clough who ‘had passed his life in a condition of
uneasiness, which was increased rather than diminished
by the practice of poetry’, this sad state of mind having
been ‘occasioned by his loss of faith at the time of the
government department, ‘he immediately fell under the
influence of Miss Nightingale’, who found a use for
him. ‘For instance, when Miss Nightingale was travel-
ling, there were the railway tickets to be taken; and
there were proof-sheets to be corrected; and then there
were parcels to be done up in brown paper, and carried
to the post.’
How they smiled in Bloomsbury to find the earnest
Victorians being held so amusingly to ridicule. How – I
confess with a certain shame now – I likewise smiled on
coming across the passage. Moreover, for someone in his
last year at a public school which from the day of its
Dec-Jan pp4-63 25/11/05 9:56 am Page 35
BIOGRAPHY
foundation had felt the influence of Dr Arnold’s Rugby,
how much more agreeable still to think that Arthur
Clough, once Arnold’s pet pupil (despite that ‘weakness
in his ankles which prevented him from taking a promi-
nent part in the games of the place’), should have been
reduced to this menial role, conscientiously doing up
brown paper parcels for Florence Nightingale. What fun
Strachey had in drawing this malicious picture – and
how one relished it.
It was of course utterly inadequate. You couldn’t say
Strachey was lying: not outright. There was always some
evidence to justify his sneers. But Clough, as this
admirable and judicious book makes clear, was really
an unsuitable target for Bloomsbury’s mockery. He
was after all the author of Amours de Voyage, an epistolary
novel in verse which is so relaxed, accomplished, witty
and dandyish that one might have expected Strachey to
delight in it.
Am I prepared to lay down my life for the British
female?
Really, who knows? One has bowed and talked, till,
little by little,
All the natural heat has escaped of the chivalrous
spirit.
Oh, one conformed, of course; but one doesn’t die
for good manners …
The novel, at once a love story and a travel book, is full
of good things. The setting is Rome, in the last days of
the short-lived Republic after the revolution of 1848,
and a French army is advancing to restore the Pope. The
narrator, Claude, warns his friend Eustace not to believe
everything he reads in The Times:
… although it was slightly in error
When it proclaimed as a fact the Apollo was sold to a
Yankee,
You may believe when it tells you the French are at
Civita Vecchia.
The French advance comes closer. ‘Claude’s first intima-
tion of battle is that in the Caffè Nuovo in the Via
Condotti he cannot get milk for his coffee.’ So he goes
out as a tourist to view the fighting. For some hours he
watches and wonders, ‘but guessing is tiresome, very’.
That is almost Stendhalian. So, ‘Weary of wondering,
watching, and guessing, and gossiping idly’, he descends
the Pincian, then
After endeavouring idly to minister balm to the trembling
Quinquagenarian fears of two lone British spinsters,
Go to make sure of my dinner before the enemy enter.
The man who could write like that, with such judge-
ment and wit, did not deserve Strachey’s mockery.
Fortunately, here now is Anthony Kenny to do justice to
this remarkable poet and likeable man. This is a very
good critical biography, and an admirable picture of the
intellectual world of early Victorianism.
To order this book at £xx, see order form on page xx
35
N IGEL J ONES
THE TORCH IS QUENCHED
K ARL K RAUS, A POCALYPTIC S ATIRIST:
T HE P OST-WAR C RISIS AND THE R ISE
OF THE S WASTIKA
★
By Edward Timms
(Yale University Press 639pp £35)
TWENTY YEARS AGO, Edward Timms, a British academ-
ic, published a massive half-life of a figure little known
to English readers, but familiar to the inhabitants of his
native Mittel-Europa. Two decades on, Karl Kraus is still
distinguished here by his obscurity, but Timms has com-
pleted his magnum opus – another huge and learned
tome covering the remaining half of his hero’s life and
turbulent times.
Let me reassure Professor Timms at once that his
titanic labours of love have not been in vain. In delineat-
ing Kraus’s world with such masterly care, he has illumi-
nated a whole society – the lost culture of Central
Europe in general, and its centre of excellence, Vienna,
in particular. For Kraus was not just a hugely gifted,
active and fertile author and journalist, he was the very
The British Academy
British Academy lectures are freely open to the general
public and everyone is welcome. The lectures take place
at 10 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1 and begin at
5.30pm and will be followed by a reception at 6.30pm.
Autumn Lectures 2005
5.30pm, Friday 2 December 2005
Useful Knowledge
Dame Marilyn Strathern, DBE, FBA University
of Cambridge
Isaiah Berlin Lecture
5.30pm, Tuesday 6 December 2005
What is Cornwall?
Professor Charles Thomas, CBE, FBA
Sir John Rhys Memorial Lecture
Further information and abstracts are available at
www.britac.ac.uk/events
Meetings Department, The British Academy
10 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1
Telephone: 020 7969 5246 Fax: 020 7969 5228 Email: lectures@britac.ac.uk
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
Dec-Jan pp4-63 25/11/05 9:56 am Page 36
BIOGRAPHY
embodiment of a distinct human type, once ubiquitous,
now practically extinct: the Austrian café intellectual.
Vienna in Kraus’s glory days – roughly the first thirty
years of the twentieth century – was the city where you
could consult Sigmund Freud or Alfred Adler about
your psycholog ical problems; witness Ludwig
Wittgenstein lecturing on philosophy; to a concert
composed – and conducted – by Gustav Mahler (and
sleep with his amorous wife Alma afterwards, as Oskar
Kokoschka, among very many others, was wont to do).
You could watch a play by Arthur Schnitzler; read a
poem by Rilke or Trakl; view a painting by Klimt or
Schiele; enter a building designed by Adolf Loos; hear
an unending work in progress by Robert Musil – and
discuss it all the next day with any or all of these lumi-
naries over a kleiner Brauner in one of Vienna’s many
hundred cafés: the Central, the Gr iensteidl, the
Museum, the Landtmann, or Dehmels. The city was, in
short, the pulse, the beating heart of all that was most
exciting and advanced in
European culture, and much of
that culture was indisputably
Jewish, with Kraus as its quin-
tessential figure.
Less reputably, and some way
down the social scale, Vienna
was the one place, and just
before the First World War the
one time, when you could, just
conceivably, rub shoulders with
Hitler, Stalin and Trotsky on the
same day. You wouldn’t want to
rub up too closely to Hitler, of Kraus, by Kokoschka
course, even before his gory
days – he was a homeless tramp and probably ver-
minous; not to mention the virulently toxic ideas that
were festering beneath his long, threadbare coat. But it
was the abrasive interface between these clashing cul-
tures, and the devastating ultimate effect of the totalitari-
an ideology being incubated by this as yet unknown
trio, that would concern Karl Kraus all his life, and
would eventually engulf his world.
The first volume of Timms’s work concerned the
launching in 1899, as the century turned, of Kraus’s
periodical Die Fackel (‘The Torch’); an idiosyncratic
journal, written, edited and published (at irregular inter-
vals, but roughly once a month) by Kraus alone. Die
Fackel achieved a circulation of 30,000, equivalent to
one of Vienna’s many ordinar y newspapers and
unheard-of for an unapologetically highbrow journal of
politics and culture. Timms’s first volume also covered
the writing of Kraus’s other great project – his sprawl-
ing, marathon, hugely ambitious theatrical extravaganza
(‘play’ is far too pale a word), Die letzte Tage der
Menschheit (‘The Last Days of Mankind’). Written and
36
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
performed at the height of the First World War, the
work was an enormous combustion of scenes, songs and
an army of characters whose message, despite the com-
plexity of its structure, was prophetically stark: the war
was a catastrophe which would destroy not only the
rickety structure of the Austro-Hungarian empire, but
Europe itself. Kraus peered through the fog of war and
saw the abyss that lay ahead. His personification of
the Zeitgeist – and his encapsulation of it in his own
magazine – made him an Austrian Dickens or Orwell –
even a Dostoyevsky.
Volume Two opens with the Apocalypse having
arrived in 1918, and finds Kraus surviving amidst the
ruins – still publishing Die Fackel and still as keen as ever
to swim against the tide of received opinion. His most
consistent posture was that of the contrarian. Born a
Jew, he converted to Catholicism. As most of his fellow
café intellectuals embrace the heady doctr ines of
Socialism and Communism, Kraus begins to espouse a
cautious and essentially conserv-
ative position that leads him – as
social and political tensions rip
the fragile fabr ic of postwar
Austria apart – to support the
‘Austro-Fascist’ clerical dictator-
ship of Engelbert Dollfuss, as
the only available alternative
to Hitler’s Nazis on the one
hand, and Stalin’s Bolsheviks on
the other.
Kraus’s commitment to
Dollfuss’s regime may have been
logical – but it cost him the
friendship of many of his fellow
café intellectuals, outraged by Dollfuss’s destruction of
parliamentary democracy and his ruthless repression
of Socialists and Nazis alike. Kraus took his adoration
to ludicrous extremes; even carrying in his wallet a
picture of the diminutive dictator (Dollfuss’s lack of
stature won him the nickname ‘Mini-Metternich’),
which he was liable to whip out and moon over,
asking companions if the titchy tyrant’s cherubic
features did not resemble those of an angel. Despite
his increasingly conservative stance (essentially a
defensive reaction to the rise of Hitlerism), Kraus
retained the respect of Marxists such as Brecht
and Benjamin, for his spiky individualism and sheer
intellectual integrity.
Kraus’s piercing prophetic powers allowed him to
understand the vile nature of Nazism and the threat it
posed as early as the mid 1920s, when Hitler was still a
ranting street-corner orator in Munich. He also antici-
pated the ideas of a contemporary historian of the
movement, Michael Burleigh, in seeing Nazism as a
political religion: Kraus described it as a modern pagan
Dec-Jan pp4-63 25/11/05 9:56 am Page 37
BIOGRAPHY
‘Wotanism’, and his analysis of the phenomenon was
titled The Third Walpurgisnacht.
In the end, as the brown plague crept nearer, and his
energy began to fail, Kraus lapsed into despairing
silence. The last number of Die Fackel appeared in 1934,
the year that Dollfuss was assassinated in a failed Nazi
putsch, and Kraus himself died in 1936 – which
was perhaps a mercy, since he did not live to see
B ERNARD G REEN
A DIFFERENT SCRIPT
J OHN M ARCO A LLEGRO : T HE M AVERICK OF
THE D EAD S EA S CROLLS
★ were dated to the period 130 BC to AD 50, being thus
By Judith Anne Brown
(Eerdmans 288pp £14.99)
THIS IS A very sad book: sad because it recounts a life of
early brilliance that ended in frustration and disappoint-
ment, and sad because it is the poignant endeavour of a
daughter to rediscover and, in the process, rehabilitate her
father. John Allegro was the first English scholar to study
the Dead Sea Scrolls, joining the international team that
was reconstructing and deciphering them in 1953. He was
the first of the international team working on the scrolls to
publicise and popularise their findings, in a best-selling
paperback of 1956. But in 1970, his notorious The Sacred
Mushroom and the Cross made him a laughing stock and
destroyed his academic reputation. He died on his sixty-
fifth birthday in 1988, and in that early and unexpected
death, as his daughter remarks, ‘All the hopes and endeav-
ors of sixty-five years simply stopped … all stopped.’
Allegro came up the hard way.
Although his father had been commis-
sioned during the First World War, the
family’s fortunes did not prosper and he
had to leave grammar school at sixteen.
It was 1939, and the Second World War
gave him his chance. Service in the
Royal Navy led to a commission and the
discovery of a vocation to the Methodist
ministry. Training for the ministry after
the War revealed an aptitude for biblical
languages and led to a degree in oriental
languages at Manchester funded by the
government’s scheme to further the edu-
cation of ex-servicemen. He was in the
middle of a doctorate at Oxford when
he was recommended, in 1953, to join
the small international team of experts
working on the recently discovered Dead
Sea Scrolls. It was the opportunity of a Allegro: doing the edges first
37
Hitler absorb his Austrian homeland in the Anschluss
two years later.
Not a personal biography so much as a cultural study
(Kraus’s lifelong relationship with a woman is given
short shrift, and his death takes up only half a line),
Timms’s work is a massive and worthy memorial, not
just to a brave and original spirit, but to the way of life
that vanished with him.
lifetime. He was only thirty.
Scrolls had first been found by a shepherd boy in 1947
in a cave overlooking the north-western shore of the
Dead Sea, at a place called Qumran. Eventually eleven
caves were excavated there, yielding the remains of over
750 documents in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. Further
finds were made elsewhere in the Judean desert. They
by far the oldest substantial manuscripts in Hebrew and
Aramaic. Nearly all the books of the Old Testament are
represented among the finds – discoveries of major sig-
nificance in reconstructing the history of the biblical
text. A number of apocryphal and pseudepigraphic
books that were already known were also found.
Furthermore, texts were discovered that appeared to be
unique to the people who had housed their books in
these caves, a group who had their own distinctive,
apocalyptic brand of Judaism. As the caves were on the
hill above the ruins of what appeared to have been a
Jewish community that had existed in the same period as
the manuscripts, it was quickly concluded that the scrolls
were their library.
John Allegro arrived in Jerusalem to work on the scrolls
just as all these new possibilities about understanding the
early text of the Old Testament and the character of
Judaism in the era before and during the lifetime of Jesus
were opening up. He brought to the task
two qualities which made him different
from the other members of the team.
First, whereas the rest of the team were
devout Chr istians, in most cases
Catholic priests, he had lost his faith in
Christianity and had begun to be not
merely sceptical but aggressively anti-
Christian. Secondly, whereas the others
were content to work very slowly in
piecing together what was still being
found, he was avid for publicity and was
more than willing to put into the public
domain conclusions that had not yet
been tested by the academic community.
Allegro always believed he was fighting
clerical obscurantism when he rushed
into print ahead of the others; they
thought he was a maverick self-publicist
unrestrained by due scholarly caution.
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
Dec-Jan pp4-63 25/11/05 9:56 am Page 38
BIOGRAPHY
In 1956, he produced the immensely successful The
Dead Sea Scrolls, in which he not only summarised what
had been found so far but identified the Qumran com-
munity as a Jewish sect called the Essenes and elaborated
their beliefs and religious practices, going on to spell out
the similarities between them and primitive Christianity.
This was bold but har mless. What was far more
provocative to the scholarly community was his gaining
control of the Copper Scroll, two rolls of metal that the
team in Jerusalem could not possibly unfold or read. He
scored a great coup in having it successfully cut open in
Manchester, arousing the envy of more senior col-
leagues, and then brought down a storm of protest on
his head by offering interpretations of the contents of
the scroll which claimed that the Qumran community
had venerated a leader who in many ways prefigured
what had hitherto been regarded as unique to Jesus –
including death by crucifixion. He became embroiled in
controversies about the reading of the scrolls which
became increasingly heated.
Allegro had invested his entire career in the scrolls but
found himself in the 1960s treated as an eccentric outcast
by the academic community. He became bitter, con-
vinced he was the victim of a Catholic plot. It was then
that he convinced himself that he had uncovered the hid-
den meaning of religion, and especially Christianity, as a
drug-induced fertility cult. The whole theory was based
on an analysis of the building-blocks of religious lan-
guage. In Sumerian, U means ‘god’ or ‘seed’, and IA-U
means ‘strong water of fecundity’. This, he claimed, was
the basis of words as diverse as ‘Zeus’ and ‘Yahweh’.
Adding SHU (meaning ‘to save’) to IA-U, Allegro found
I RVING WARDLE
SLAIN FOR HIS AMBITION
K ENNETH B RANAGH
★ out of Rada, to achieve
By Mark White
(Faber & Faber 323pp £17.99)
THE FIRST ACCOUNT of Kenneth Branagh’s life was his
autobiography, Beginning, written at the age of twenty-
eight. The second, marking its subject’s arrival at the
ripe age of forty-five, is the work of a historian of the
Kennedy presidency who has ventured outside his usual
field to r ight what he sees as an injustice to the
Shakespearian star. That is one way of labelling Branagh.
The fact that I could equally have listed him as a film
director, actor manager, fundraiser, playwright, screen-
writer, premature autobiographer and lead player in a
rock band called the Fishmongers suggests one thing
that has fired Mark White to speed to his rescue.
38
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
‘Joshua’ and ‘Jesus’. Adding NU, meaning ‘seed’, he
found ‘Dionysus’. The U building-block was to be found
in biblical words – ‘Elohim’, ‘Hallelujah’, ‘Elijah’ – and
also in the Bacchic cry ‘Eleleu’. These elaborate patterns
of largely fanciful semantic relationships formed the bulk
of his The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross in 1970, which
immediately won him notor iety as the man who
believed that Jesus’s last words on the cross were a paean
of praise to the god of the mushroom.
Allegro never recovered. The scholars lambasted the
book. The press ridiculed him. He could never expect
to be taken seriously again. Gradually his life fell apart,
his marriage collapsed, and his attempt to return to the
g reat questions of the scrolls and the or ig ins of
Christianity in The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian
Myth in 1979 went largely unnoticed. It was a tragedy
for him and for his family.
Why did it all go wrong? First, Allegro showed little
interest in subjecting his ideas to the scholarly appraisal of
more learned, and more staid, colleagues. His thirst for
publicity and for money made him too cocksure and too
glib. Secondly, he convinced himself that he alone was
impartial and objective while his Christian colleagues
were biased, untruthful and in a conspiracy against him.
It never crossed his mind that he might have been every
bit as biased as anyone with his anti-religious zealotry –
more so, as he became so immune to academic scrutiny.
His daughter has written a very moving memoir which
strives hard to rehabilitate her father’s scholarly achieve-
ments, but the reader takes away from this biography not
so much a renewed respect for Allegro’s brilliance as a
profound sadness at its tragic waste.
That thing is the English
disease: the impulse to slap
down ambition and close
ranks against any newcomer
trying to join the club. It
was fine for Branagh, fresh
over night fame in Julian
Mitchell’s Another Country
in 1982. Less than fine
when he failed to show
proper g ratitude to the
RSC for placing his feet on
its bottom rung; he not
only resigned from the out- Branagh: salad days
fit but shafted it in his play
Tell Me Honestly before going off to found a company of
his own. As it turned out, the Renaissance Theatre
Company was a success, as was the 1989 film of Henry V
in which Branagh starred among a cast of leading classi-
cal actors whom he had somehow coaxed into the sup-
porting roles. Nobody could say the work was bad. But
Dec-Jan pp4-63 25/11/05 9:56 am Page 39

BIOGRAPHY

the spectacle of someone getting on too fast and display- such is not on the agenda. Perhaps Branagh got under
ing professional confidence without paying for it the the skin of Heydrich in the television film Conspiracy in
hard way set the derision mechanism in motion. Praise 2001, but from what I recall of his Richard III at
for his ventures became increasingly grudging, and com- Sheffield later that year, it lacked all sense of danger.
ment on his personal life and fondness for employing No doubt there are better ways of joining the dots,
old chums increasingly snide. When he took leave of but they barely join at all in White’s narrative, which
Shakespeare for some less than triumphant work in fanfares Branagh in to an endless chord of C major and
Hollywood, his English critics seized their chance to put amounts less to a story than to a chronological sequence
the boot in. Not so his American critics, who saw of rigidly formulated production notes (first plans,
Branagh not as an overreaching upstart but as a man of fundraising, rehearsal, press response, box-office take),
talent getting on with his career. punctuated with progress reports on the career so far.
The picture of Branagh that emerges from this book is On film, White is well informed and clearly writing
of a working-class Belfast boy who arrived on the scene from personal observation. On the theatre there is no
fully formed as an actor and unshakeably confident of his telling whether he has seen the shows or not; also he has
mission to popularise Shakespeare; a confidence he placed himself in the awkward position of characterising
promptly demonstrated by running an unsubsidised the- the English critics as biased while relying on them to
atre company at a profit, and grasping the art of film- describe what it was like on the night. Frequent allu-
making at the first attempt. Not all his subsequent work sions to ‘booming’ and ‘gushing’, and sentences like ‘the
has measured up to his opening standard, but he has pundits of the Press were no less enthused’, do nothing
never been seriously thrown off course and has already to get him out of this trap. The reader’s trust in his the-
filmed more Shakespeare than any previous director, atrical know-how is further undermined by the refer-
while remaining a freelance actor who will give himself ence to Ian McDiarmid as someone who would ‘help to
body and soul to other people’s projects. White has run’ the Almeida, and to Love’s Labour’s Lost as an
talked to Branagh’s past colleagues, from whom the over- ‘obscure’ comedy whose minor-key ending ‘can sound a
whelming opinion is that he is a nice chap, a magnificent jarring note’. But there I go, falling into the English dis-
leader, and an artist-entrepreneur who has opened many ease. Mr White, you have written an honest book about
new eyes to Shakespeare and given fruitful employment a good man. Welcome to the club.
to many actors. The most revealing comment on the
Anglo-American issue comes from Christopher Godwin:
‘He has a lot of qualities that the Br itish hate in
Americans – his naked ambition, his relentless chirpiness,
his optimism. And people in Britain hate him even more
because he found commercial and critical success in
Hollywood with Shakespeare.’ Even allowing for the par-
tialities of the acting profession, you close this book feel-
ing that White has upheld his case and that it is our
undeserved good luck that its subject is still around.
If the biographer’s role were simply that of a character
witness, then White could be said to have done the job.
If it is to tell the story of a particular individual’s devel-
opment, then he has left it unfinished. The raw materi-
als are there, and if you join the dots what stands out is
the theme of leadership. Branagh figures simultaneously
as a man of innate authority and a specialist in leadership
roles. The pattern runs through his career from the film-
ing of Henry V to his 2002 television appearance in
Charles Sturridge’s Shackleton, where, besides playing the
explorer, he also responded to the hazardous Arctic con-
ditions by becoming a morale-boosting leader to the
whole production team. The other side of the heroic
coin is Branagh’s poor showing as a villain. White
quotes him on Iago (driven by the sense of rejection),
and Richard III (driven by the longing ‘to be like every-
one else’), suggesting that he sees negative characters as
decent people undone by one of life’s dirty deals. Evil as

39
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
Dec-Jan pp4-63 24/11/05 6:43 pm Page 40
FOREIGN PARTS
R AYMOND S EITZ
A PRESIDENTIAL TREK
T HE R IVER OF D OUBT: I NTO THE
U NKNOWN A MAZON
★ exact destination remained undecided. It was another
By Candice Millard
(Little, Brown 430pp £18.99)
ON 27 FEBRUARY, 1914, former president Theodore
Roosevelt and a party of twenty-one set off in canoes
from the headwaters of the Rio da Duvida – the River
of Doubt – in the jungles of the great Amazon Basin.
The waters of the river twist and tumble northwards
from the Brazilian Highlands along a course which
eventually pours into the wester n branch of the
Aripuanã, and then on to the mighty Amazon itself.
In the early part of the twentieth century, the Amazon
Basin was the largest swath of terra incog-
nita on the planet. Africa by comparison
was an open book. The richness and
diversity of Amazonian flora and fauna
had barely been revealed, and Indian
tribes in the dark interior of the jungles
were Stone Age cultures scratching out
a harsh life in virtual isolation. The
‘doubt’ about the Rio da Duvida was
where it flowed and whether it existed
at all. No one had ever travelled its
course from one end to the other.
It’s not the sort of thing that former
American presidents usually do. But
Roosevelt was an exception to almost
ever y rule. The naturalist John Holiday planning
Burroughs once commented that when
Roosevelt came into a room, ‘it was as if a strong wind
had blown the door open’. His forceful, ‘bully’ person-
ality, his energetic and determined character, his bound-
less curiosity and his restless energy regularly sought
adventure as a testing outlet. And it was the pattern of
his life that he coped with bouts of disappointment or
sorrow by stretching his physical endurance to the limit.
In 1914, Roosevelt was indeed disappointed. A year
and a half earlier he had lost his bid for the presidency,
having left it only four years earlier. In the process, he
had bolted from the Republican Party, formed his own
Progressive Party, and skewed the election by splitting
the conservative vote. The result was to open the door
of the White House to the Democratic candidate,
Woodrow Wilson. Many Republicans saw Roosevelt as
a wrecker, and in 1914 the indomitable Rough Rider
was a wounded man. Another adventure was in order.
When Roosevelt and his entourage of friends, associ-
40
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
ates and scientists arrived in Brazil, he had only the
vaguest notion of where an expedition might take him,
and he had paid scant attention to the preparations
(when dockworkers had finished unloading the supplies,
one of them commented, ‘Nothing lacking but the
piano’). The American Museum of Natural History had
endorsed his journey and funded some of it, but the
extraordinary character who excited Roosevelt’s imagi-
nation by proposing an exploration of the River of
Doubt. This was the diminutive Brazilian colonel,
Cândido Rondon.
Rondon had traversed more of the Amazon Basin
than anyone had even dreamed. A stern disciplinarian
and resolute leader who personally exceeded all he asked
of his men, Rondon was in charge of building Brazil’s
‘Strategic Telegraph’ across the vast country (when
completed, this colossal project was immediately over-
taken by wireless communication). In the process he had
filled in many cartographical blanks and come to know
the jungle intimately. He was also
Brazil’s first great advocate for the pro-
tection of his country’s Indian popula-
tion. His men operated under his
strict dictum: ‘Die if you must, but
never kill.’
Concerned for the ex-president’s
welfare, the Brazilian author ities
assigned Rondon to accompany
Roosevelt, and together the two men
became joint leaders of the expedition.
As soon as their trek started across the
Brazilian Highlands, it became obvious
that the procession was much too
unwieldy. Mules and oxen died in their
dozens, and the party g radually
sloughed off provisions, equipment –
including, to their later regret, the sturdy lightweight
Canadian canoes – and people. By the time they reached
the Duvida’s headwaters, the Roosevelt-Rondon subor-
dinates had been cut back to Roosevelt’s son Kermit,
Rondon’s adjutant Lt Lyra, the American ornithologist
George Cherrie, a Brazilian doctor named Cajazeira and
sixteen camaradas – leather-tough porters and paddlers.
From the beginning the journey downriver proved
arduous, hazardous and downright hair-raising. The
seven native dugouts weighed more than a ton each and
barely rose above the water line. Worse, the river threw
up one set of roiling rapids after another, and some form
of portage through the fetid jungle was necessary almost
every day. Three boats were lost against the rocks and
provisions quickly ran low. One camarada drowned in the
tumultuous waters. In the entire month of March, the
party covered a mere sixty-eight miles.
Other threats abounded: venomous snakes, poisonous
Dec-Jan pp4-63 24/11/05 6:43 pm Page 41
FOREIGN PARTS
frogs, alligators and piranha (Rondon had previously lost
a toe to one). And there were human dangers too. One
camarada murdered another, and disappeared into the
jungle and an unknown but surely ghastly fate. The
hostile Cinta Larga Indians lurked in the shadows, seeing
but never seen.
Fevers and illness stalked the party. Roosevelt injured
his leg, the gash festered and his temperature rose to 105
degrees. Delirious and near death, he constantly recited
the opening lines of Coler idge’s ‘Kubla Khan’.
Roosevelt carried a vial containing a lethal dose of mor-
phine, and in a moment of lucidity, he told Cherrie and
Kermit that he refused to burden a party already in peril.
‘I will stop here,’ he declared in high Victoriana. But the
expedition struggled on and finally, in mid-April, dis-
covered a rubber-tapper’s outpost. Two weeks later they
reached the confluence with the Aripuanã and the gate-
T OM S TACEY
A CONTINENT’S CURSE
T HE S TATE OF A FRICA : A H ISTORY OF F IFTY
Y EARS OF I NDEPENDENCE
★ Meredith organises his material better, writes with a
By Martin Meredith
(Free Press 752pp £20)
A FRICA : A M ODERN H ISTORY
★ roles and motives, both of the former masters and of the
By Guy Arnold
(Atlantic Books 1028pp £35)
TWO FORMIDABLE BOOKS, in unwitting rivalry, present
us with the chronicle of Africa’s politics, wars, disease,
and political and tribal violence over the past half-centu-
ry, during which forty-eight of its lands, islands and
archipelagos were released into sovereign statehood from
colonial rule or calved from g reater neighbours
(Namibia from South Africa and Eritrea from Ethiopia),
a further four (Egypt, South Africa, Ethiopia and
Liberia) being already independent.
Both works purport to give us histories. This is true
to the extent that they lay out, with varying clarity,
those events and statistics which provide a frame for the
cascade of rule or misrule and the collapses or reasser-
tions of order such as characterise the period, above all
in the sub-Saharan reach of the continent. Yet neither
writer has anything to tell us about African literature or
music, of the plastic arts or film of the period, or of reli-
gion except in a political context. Michael Meredith has
a cursory line or two on Senghor’s (and Cézaire’s) négri-
tude, and that’s it.
Both books are divided into four sections, each
41
way to survival.
Until Candice Millard’s superior rendition of this tale,
it wasn’t much more than a footnote in American histo-
ry. But the story is gripping (though the book sorely
needs a map), and her prose flows along as swiftly as the
river. Of the human relationships, she subtly treats the
mounting tension between Roosevelt and Rondon (the
first a let’s-forge-ahead Stanley; the second a let’s-mea-
sure-this Livingstone), and her handling of the complex
relationship between Roosevelt and his son Kermit is a
model of restraint and sensitivity. As a further demon-
stration of her prowess, Millard skilfully weaves into the
story many absorbing observations about the phenome-
nal diversity and mystery of the Basin’s breathtaking eco-
system and she thus evokes the wonders of the book’s
principal character: the living Amazon.
To order this book at £15.19, see order form on page 78
covering a successive decade or so. Guy Arnold forces
out sectional headings – ‘The 1960s: Decade of Hope’;
‘The 1970s: Decade of Realism’; ‘The 1980s: Basket
Case?’; ‘The 1990s: New Directions and New
Perceptions’ – which are virtually meaningless. Meredith
wisely eschews them. It is impossible to define passages
of change or evolution in terms of decades.
fine sense of narrative, captures the personalities of the
main players, provides sustained coverage of particular
countries and their particular turmoils, and has a grasp
of colonial inheritance and the varying post-colonial
US and (Communist) Russia. He pulls no punches, for
example, over the culpable flaccidity of Boutros-Ghali,
then Secretary-General of the UN, in his approach to
the predictable and predicted 1994 Rwanda massacre in
which 800,000 children, women and men died in a
month. That entire account is admirable in its clarity
and frankness, as is Meredith’s coverage of all the devas-
tations and conflicts of the period: Somalia, Liberia,
Congo (DRC), Sierra Leone, and so on. He writes
without prejudice or special pleading.
Arnold, by contrast, is pedestrian as a writer, and
chippy, characteristically – in a single passage – blaming
this or that Western power for failing to use its influence
(as aid-provider or ex-colonial mentor) and for using its
influence (in a ‘neo-colonial’ or even ‘new neo-colonial’
manner). Government aid invariably hides its real agen-
da. The Western powers cannot please Guy Arnold
whatever they do; and whatever the whites did in the
colonial role, or have done as settled African communities,
is blight.
Sub-Saharan black Africa, and the black Horn, are the
central concerns of both writers; yet both, in my view,
burden their books by bracketing Mediterranean, Arabic-
speaking Africa with the fundamentally other, sub-Saharan
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
Dec-Jan pp4-63 24/11/05 6:43 pm Page 42
FOREIGN PARTS
world. Ben Bella’s war and
Nasser’s Arab nationalism
had little bearing on black-
African events.
Where both writers fail
fundamentally is in omit-
ting to pause and reflect,
in a little depth, on what
has been happening and
why, and on where the
deepest trends lie in the
engagement and reconcili-
ation of black Africa with
the rest of the world. In
respect of their main
theme, black Africa, they
tell a tragic tale, and admit
as much. ‘After decades of mismanagement and corrup-
tion,’ Meredith writes on his last page, ‘most African
states have become hollowed out. They are no longer
instruments capable of serving the public good.’ He
quotes the Ghanaian Kofi Annan: ‘In reality, fifty years
after the beginning of the independence era, Africa’s
prospects are bleaker then ever before.’ Arnold, among his
other activities a chronicler of aid, seems also to abomi-
nate it. ‘[Africa’s] problems are daunting,’ he concludes,
‘and Africa has fallen into a habit of dependence that
must be broken.’ I do not dissent.
Yet neither writer chooses or dares to confront the
true dilemma of the Dark Continent. Black Africa is
indeed condemned to much suffering. Since indepen-
dence (but not, for the most part, before) it has suffered
on a gargantuan scale. Pandemics ravage the continent;
innocent generations are cursed. Incapable of prepared-
ness, it is a continent vulnerable to the caprice of
climate, to the consequences of drought or flood. For
the most part it is incompetently administered and cor-
ruptly governed. None of this will foreseeably improve.
The incompetence and corruption, and the unprepared-
ness, are the whelps of a despair at a presumed, predes-
tined inability – indeed, a mute unwillingness – to com-
pete either as nations or as folk with a world where
white men’s values, or (prevailingly) white men’s tech-
nocracy, faute de mieux, masquerade as civilisation.
A mute unwillingness? The despair is doubly rooted.
Bantu philosophy, of which these writers appear to know
nothing, imbues the great body of those whose ‘history’
they presume to write. It makes no space for the compet-
itive, atomised, grotesquely self-regarding, reductive exis-
tence of modern Western man, acquisitive of chattels,
wealth, and status, and with his deferred rewards. There
has been negligible osmosis. The tower block had and has
no medium of relation to the mud hut.
There endures, therefore, an African anamnesis – that
half-aware, half-recollected treasure of a previous
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
innocence and truth-in-
life, in the compound, in
the tribe – which haunts
the modern soul and saps
the will to run the race
that inner Afr ica never
sought to enter. This
world of ours and of the
authors of these books,
and the life-denying
motives and legitimate
goals of the black politicos,
generals and ambitious
thugs their histories focus
upon, do not concern, au
Darfur, 2003 fond, black Afr icans or
black Afr ica except in
terms of the suffering and its concomitant despair.
These books have their usefulness. Yet the valuable
history of independent black Africa remains to be writ-
ten. It will be written in the light of that era still to
evolve when the neurosis of the political assertiveness
willed upon black Africa, in its fabricated statehoods,
will have given place to the grace and inspiration of
négritude – a melding Africanness which our Manichean
world can already, just perceptibly, be seen to crave.
To order these books, see order form on page 78
R ICHARD D OWDEN
Over the Mountains
And Far Away
T HE C HAINS OF H EAVEN : A N
E THIOPIAN ROMANCE
★
By Philip Marsden
(HarperCollins 298pp £14.99)
THIS IS THE land where the 1984 famine took place –
the famine ‘of biblical proportions’, the phrase that
Michael Buerk used to jab the suffering into our souls.
It was a resonant allusion. We know this place. Almost
every year since then the television cameras have been
back to remind us, panning across the vast, harsh land-
scape of barren mountains, thatched huts and meagre
fields. And we know Ethiopians too. Wiry little people
dressed in white garments, with wrinkled faces and
dark, patient eyes, tending their goats and sheep and
hacking the soil with mattocks or ploughing with oxen.
That is how Moses, Isaac and Jacob lived, and
Ethiopians knew those names before they were known
42
Dec-Jan pp4-63 24/11/05 6:43 pm Page 43
FOREIGN PARTS
in most of Europe. Biblical is the word.
National Geographic recently produced a map showing
the impact of human beings on Africa. Predictably the
Sahara Desert and the Congo Basin are almost blank.
South Africa and huge conurbations glow with roads
and buildings, mines and factories. And Ethiopia shows
the same intensity of human impact as dense urban
settlement. Yet from an aeroplane window the Ethiopia
highlands can look like the Alps in the sun. You have to
walk the ground to see how crowded the landscape is.
Every tree is known and owned, every rock has been
touched. For centuries Ethiopia has been tilled and
fought over, dug and gouged. Rather than cutting stone
to build churches, the Ethiopians carved them into the
rock, underground or by tunnelling into cliffs, building
in reverse.
In search of these churches, Philip Marsden walked
from Lalibela to Akusm, the Zion of Ethiopia. They are
extraordinary, many of them deliberately cut off from
the earth by sheer cliffs, with trap doors in rock ceilings
that are accessible only by cowhide ropes or rusty chains.
Their inhabitants are enigmatic: astounding in their
discipline, devotion to God and resilience, yet unable to
reach out to outsiders with a biblical message of
universal love for humanity. They seem to be a remnant
of the church of the Dark Ages, where monasteries were
a refuge, an escape to find salvation away from the evil
of the world.
Counter to fashion, Marsden writes sparsely, with
little about himself. His sentences are tiny clear brush
strokes building a picture. His reactions to things are
understated; he feels a little thirst here, momentary awe
there, but I know little about him by the end of the
book. However, I do know a lot more about Ethiopia,
and it feels like the Ethiopia I have glimpsed. Unlike
that of the rest of Africa, Ethiopia’s history – kings and
wars and legends – is its own. The book begins with a
thumbnail history of the country (just 439 words), start-
ing with the founder, descended from Noah, and the
royal family, begotten by the union of the Queen of
Sheba and King Solomon. Ethiopians were already part
of the Judaeo-Christian tra-
dition when the Brits were
running around in woad,
worshipping bits of wood.
Ethiopia is an ancient
civilisation whose Coptic
Christianity goes back to the
fifth century. Protected from
Arab invasions and Western
venturers by its inaccessible
mountains, it developed a
distinct Chr istian and
monastic tradition of its
own. It joined the
43
Europeans in carving up Africa in the nineteenth centu-
ry, and saw off the Italians at the battle of Adwa in 1896,
one of the few clashes with outsiders in the nation’s
history. As Marsden shrewdly points out, however,
the victory ‘sealed Ethiopia again, froze its spectacular
traditions and earned it another glor ious century
of isolation’.
Ethiopia’s seclusion has also left the Jewish, Christian
and Muslim traditions far more entwined and tolerant of
each other than in the rest of the world. I have always
felt that being Christian, Muslim or Falasha Jewish in
Ethiopia was like being Baptist, Methodist or Anglican
in Britain. There are no outside political factions to
exploit religious differences. Indeed, Marsden finds a
Muslim village and reminds us that the Negus, the
Ethiopian ruler, gave sanctuary to Muhammad’s com-
panions when they were persecuted in Medina.
The beauty of this book is that Marsden does not
interpret, he reports. He is eyes and ears, recalling faith-
fully what he is told by the monks and priests in their
own words. So we learn that in the history of one of the
monasteries 150 people once arrived with clubs and
ropes to drive out a holy man, who ‘turned their clubs
into leopards and lions and tigers and their ropes into
snakes. The 150 were killed by those beasts and [the
man] saw them and they were lying on the ground like
dead flies.’ Then there is another holy man, who was so
holy that he prayed for twenty years without sitting
down. His right leg rotted and fell off and is now pre-
served in the monastery of Debra Libanos. Obligingly, as
if writing a tourist guide, Marsden informs us: ‘once a
year on his feast day, it is taken out and pilgrims are per-
mitted to drink the water used to wash it’. Just occasion-
ally he slips in a slice of philosophy or theology from
somewhere else to show that Ethiopian concepts are no
less profound or unique for all the country’s isolation
from the mainstreams of European and Arab theology.
Ethiopia’s isolation has allowed outsiders to build up
myths, such as those of Prester John, the beleaguered
Christian priest king, sought by the Portuguese in the
sixteenth century; and of Emperor Haile Selassie, sought
by Rastafar ians, who
regarded him as divine
(Selassie was amused but
embarrassed by their atten-
tions and gave them land
quite a long way from the
capital). The truth of
Ethiopia is of such mythic
proportions that I am not
sure if this book will add
to outsiders’ understanding
or baffle them even more.
To order this book at £11.99,
see order form on page 78
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
Dec-Jan pp4-63 24/11/05 6:43 pm Page 44
FOREIGN PARTS
H ARRY M OUNT
TV’S SOCRATES
T HE C ALL OF THE W EIRD
★ American life. The California home of the two sixteen-
By Louis Theroux
(Macmillan 289pp £17.99)
I MUST DECLARE my connection to Louis Theroux. I was
in the year below him at school and university. He hasn’t
changed very much. He was just as gentle then – dopey
even – as he was on the telly in Weird Weekends, when he
investigated the strange American sects he writes up in
this book. What is less apparent on telly is his acute intel-
ligence, telegenically veiled by that dopiness. He was so
clever at Westminster that he jumped a year. And he got
a First in Modern History at Magdalen.
But he never had the brittle arrogance that often goes with
that sort of record. To be clever without wanting to glory in
it, put dimmer people down or make an act of covering it
up (viz Boris Johnson) is rare. At school and university and
on the telly, he showed his intelligence in a soft, Socratic way,
asking interconnected questions whose answers gradually
built up until you emerged as a pretty good fool.
This is all a roundabout way of saying how beautifully
suited Theroux is to television. The Socratic technique
worked like a dream in his Louis Meets… series, expos-
ing the vainglor iousness of , among others, Ann
Widdecombe, Neil and Christine Hamilton, and Keith
Harris. In a television world of staged aggression that
lacks focus (Jeremy Paxman, everyone on the Today pro-
gramme) and the staged softness of the celebrity inter-
view (Martin Bashir, Sir Trevor McDonald), Theroux’s
line in ever-so-nice character assassination is a one-off.
Theroux has come less to assassinate than to investi-
gate in this alluring book, where he returns to America
to see his old television interviewees six years after he
last interviewed them – porn stars, gangster rappers,
white supremacists, UFO followers, get-rich-quick
gurus and anti-government fanaticists. His aim is no
longer to skewer his subjects on the contradictory points
of their beliefs. This time, he’s trying to establish what
makes them tick, and whether their different sorts of
weirdness have shared roots.
Paul Theroux’s son writes with just as clear an eye for
character and place as his father. His sensitive ear picks
up useful neologisms: the ‘aborticide’ of 50 million
children since 1970, the horrors of the pair known as
‘Billary’ Clinton, terms coined by anti-government
obsessives who tried to set up their own mini-country,
‘Almost Heaven’, in Northern Idaho in the 1990s.
And he’s funny, particularly with the Reverend Jerry
Gruidl, the Nazi supremacist in Idaho, who admits to
44
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
being an Are You Being Served? fan. Theroux asks Jerry
to repeat the Mr Humphries catchphrase, ‘I’m free.’
Jerry refuses: ‘But I’m not free! Because this country’s in
bondage to the Jews!’
Theroux is alive to the cruel comedy of the nastier sort
of weirdness as it comes up against everyday suburban
year-old sisters in a Nazi singing duet, Prussian Blue, is
entirely normal, except for the two little pairs of skin-
head boots by the front door. The bumper sticker on
their truck reads, ‘My Boss is an Austrian Painter’. The
only computer game the girls are allowed to play is one
devised by white supremacists, where a skinhead goes
through a ghetto shooting Mexicans and blacks who are
perched on basketball hoops making gorilla noises.
Theroux’s final analysis of American weirdness is true
and new. Weirdness is self-sabotaging; that’s why it’s
weird. It goes against your moral, financial or social inter-
est to have sex on camera for a living, to pay to be hyp-
notised into becoming a millionaire, or to prepare for an
apocalypse that never comes. Why do it then? Why don’t
Theroux’s interviewees come to their senses now, years
after he first talked to them on telly? In fact, it doesn’t
much matter to the weirdos if something is true or false.
What matters is how important it makes them feel.
We have all come across the pub conspiracy theorist
who grandly tells you that MI6 killed Princess Diana, or
that the Druids hummed the stones of Stonehenge from
the Preselis to Salisbury Plain. The reason why the pub
bores are so proud is entirely that their theories are so
unlikely. A man in the pub who told you that Princess
Diana died because her chauffeur was drunk, or that the
Stonehenge stones were transported by conventional
means, could hardly claim to be a curiosity.
Once Theroux realised that all his interviewees shared
this desire to impress through fantasy, they lost some of
their nastiness and edge. The white supremacists seemed
more pathetic; the gangster rappers merely irresponsible,
as opposed to poetic; the money-making gurus more
straightforwardly manipulative than odd.
Theroux’s criticisms of the shortcomings of weird
Americans are all the more convincing for his willing-
ness to praise them. It’s that even-handed gentleness
again. He’s perfectly ready to admit that Jerry Gruidl can
also be pretty decent. When Theroux loses his comput-
er, Jerry takes a stack of flyers advertising the lost com-
puter round town and tracks it down for him.
Theroux is then presented with the conundrum: what
do you give a neo-Nazi for a thank-you present? Very
few people know a neo-Nazi. Even fewer know a neo-
Nazi well enough to be done a favour by one. Only
lovely, gentle, clever, unique Louis Theroux bothers to
buy one a present.
He settles for an anti-Bush quiz book.
To order this book at £14.39, see order form on page 78
Dec-Jan pp4-63 24/11/05 6:43 pm Page 45
FLORA & FAUNA
C HARLES E LLIOTT
ELEGANT TAXONOMY
T HE N AMING OF N AMES
★ scholars in the East. Dioscorides, the medicine man (and
By Anna Pavord
(Bloomsbury 471pp £30)
AROUND TWO THOUSAND years ago, a Greek doctor
named Dioscorides described a plant that he considered
to be medically useful. It was called ‘crocodilium’, he
said, and it was supposed to help people who were sple-
netic. When boiled and drunk, it ‘causes copious bleed-
ing at the nose’. Other characteristics, apart from the
shape of its roots and seeds, and the fact that it grew in
‘wooded places’, were unfortunately obscure.
What exactly was crocodilium? And why should anyone
care? As Anna Pavord splendidly makes
plain in this elegant and scholarly history
of taxonomy, a science usually regarded as
even dismaller than economics, such
questions are far from insignificant.
Exactly which plant is which, and what
its relationship is to other plants, are mat-
ters central to our understanding of the
world we live in. Crocodilium is a case in
point, though on the whole a depressing
one. The confusion surrounding it, as
with so many of the plants mentioned by
Dioscorides, lasted for hundreds and hun-
dreds of years. Even when the sixteenth-
century Italian botanist Luca Ghini finally
managed to pin it down as being most
likely a species of Eryngium (at the same
time apologising for not drinking an
infusion to see whether it really did make
his nose bleed), he was taking only a
modest step out of the chaos.
In Pavord’s firmly expressed view, the Flos Africanus
problem started with the ancient assump-
tion that plants should be viewed primarily in terms of
their usefulness. In practice, this meant their use in medi-
cine. Right up until – and during – the Renaissance,
botanical studies concentrated on pharmacology, ignor-
ing what she calls ‘the big picture, the altruistic, intellec-
tual search for the key to the order of the universe’.
What was seen to be interesting about clove pinks was
their efficacy against the plague, not their flowers or the
genus they belonged to.
Yet from the very beginning, in the work of the often
overlooked third-century-BC Greek philosopher and
proto-botanist Theophrastus, another approach could be
discerned. Theophrastus is one of Pavord’s heroes, and
45
rightly so. The first man to write a book about plants,
his ‘complex, quizzical take’ led him beyond mere
recording to think about plant relationships, about
names, about the actual shape of the natural world and
the way living things fit into it. Unfortunately, his works
were lost in the West; they survived only among Arab
far less important figure), held sway in Europe, repeated-
ly translated, the one and greatest authority right up
until the seventeenth century.
So most writing on plants took the form of herbals,
simple lists of plants together with their therapeutic
qualities. Despite advances in technology during the
Renaissance – in engraving, printing, papermaking –
which brought huge improvements in the way plants
could be described, the old-fashioned herbal continued
supreme. Pavord is wonderful on this phenomenon, and
The Naming of Names is beautifully illustrated.
Gradually, however, the constant recourse to classical
authority became harder and harder to
justify. Northern Europe had plants that
the ancient Greeks could not have
known (and vice versa); still more new
species were flooding in from the Near
East and the Americas. Instead of simply
copying precedent, men like Otto
Brunfels, Leonhart Fuchs, Ghini, and
Andrea Cesalpino were inspired to make
their own observations and develop their
own techniques, such as herbaria of dried
specimens. They also began to think
about how plants might be related to
each other. ‘All science’, wrote
Cesalpino, ‘consists in the gathering
together of things that are alike.’ In sup-
port of this thesis, he set out 1,500 plants
in his own 1583 book De Plantis in thir-
ty-two different groups ranging from
Umbelliferae to Compositae.
Cesalpino used similarities between
fruits and seeds to classify his plants;
Lobelius attempted to do the same using
leaf shape in his ‘nieuwe ordeninghe’ of 1581. Neither
worked very well. (Lobelius concluded that there was no
way to distinguish apples from pears.) The Englishman
John Ray, following the fundamental division into trees,
shrubs, sub-shrubs and herbs first employed by
Theophrastus, developed yet another, more sophisticated
classification scheme and got a little further. Yet there were
always ambiguities or plants that didn’t fit. Even today, it
seems, serious classification problems remain.
Pavord writes delightfully about all this. Fine anecdotes
and memorable pocket biographies tumble through what
in lesser hands could be very dry text. Especially affecting
is her account of the sad life of another of her particular
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
Dec-Jan pp4-63 24/11/05 6:43 pm Page 46
FLORA & FAUNA
heroes, the thoroughly forgotten churchman botanist
William Turner. Turner, who seems to have been a sort
of reverse Vicar of Bray, had the misfortune to be a com-
mitted Lutheran during the English Reformation. He
was as bitterly opposed to the corruption of the Church
of England under Henry VIII as he was to Catholicism
under Queen Mary, and consequently spent a good bit
of his life under both regimes in exile. When he was not
abroad, he devoted himself to writing tracts, to securing
a place (he was eventually appointed Dean of Wells, but
couldn’t get his predecessor to vacate the position), and,
above all, to collecting and studying plants. He had a
hard time of it; at one point he pleads that his ‘chylder’
had been ‘fed so long with hope that they ar very leane’.
But he still succeeded in producing what Pavord calls
‘the first decent plant book’ in English, the New Herball
(1551–68). This might have been a triumph, except for
the fact that the first part was banned because of his over-
energetic Protestantism, while the second part was pub-
lished in Germany where nobody could read English.
While Turner’s problem may have been unique, it is
certainly true to say (as Pavord’s title does) that language
has played an extraordinary part in the history of taxon-
omy. Giving distinctive labels to plants has never been a
straightforward matter, because classification and naming
have to go together. Without a system incorporating
relationships – families, genera, species – even binomial
names of the kind established by Linnaeus may be of lit-
tle use, since they would float in a void. There have
been many times in the past when the whole naming
process seemed likely to crash. Common names could
vary from place to place. Or a plant might be lumbered
with half a dozen Latin terms to identify it (in a 1581
picture book, for example, a small daffodil is nailed
down – indeed, squashed – under the title Narcissus mon-
tanus iuncifolius minimus alter flore luteo – that is, ‘small
rush-leaved daffodil with a yellow flower that grows in
the mountains’). And simpler names could be dangerous
or confusing. As Thomas Johnson (c1600–1644), anoth-
er of Pavord’s heroes for his ground-breaking explo-
ration of native British flora, pointed out, herb-women
in London often sold the easy-to-find hemlock water
dropwort in place of water lovage, just by changing the
name. Water dropwort is poisonous.
If I have any complaint to make about The Naming of
Names, it is to wish that it were longer. I would have
liked to hear more about the struggles of scientists since
the eighteenth century to refine the taxonomic structure,
which are apparently still going on. What changes lie in
store? Will chrysanthemums be relegated to outer dark-
ness again on the strength of their DNA? What about
geraniums? In any event, with the case Pavord makes for
Theophrastus, I trust the namers will now memorialise
him, with a genus of his own at the very least.
To order this book at £24, see order form on page 78
46
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
J ANE G ARDAM
LOST ARCADIA
T HIS OTHER E DEN : S EVEN G REAT G ARDENS
AND T HREE H UNDRED Y EARS OF
E NGLISH H ISTORY
★
By Andrea Wulf and Emma Gieben-Gamal
(Little, Brown 414pp £20)
T HE R IVERSIDE G ARDENS OF T HOMAS
M ORE ’ S L ONDON
★
By C Paul Christianson
(Yale University Press 232pp £25)
HERE ARE TWO delectable, serious and beautifully illustrat-
ed books describing between them the history of fourteen
English gardens over nearly four hundred years. In This
Other Eden all seven gardens are still alive and well, some
better than they have ever been and still changing along
with their times and owners. In The Riverside Gardens of
Thomas More’s London every garden except for Hampton
Court is gone. They are ghost-gardens along the river’s
banks from the Southwark gardens of Winchester Palace –
owned by the richest bishop in the land and destroyed by
fire in 1814 – to More’s beloved sixteenth-century gardens
which he created when he moved to rural Chelsea.
Both books are about the interrelation of garden history
and national politics; how the fall of great gardens mirrors
the fall of princes. The first chapter of This Other Eden is
an account of the making of Hatfield House and the years
spent creating its gardens with almost insane passion. Their
creator, Sir Robert Cecil, did not live to see them fin-
ished; he died on the way home from the torture of taking
the waters at Bath. The last chapter of the book is about
Edwardian Hestercombe and the Great Plat – thumbnail
sketches of Miss Jekyll and tiny Edwin Lutyens perched
intensely on a high stool. Hestercombe, like Hatfield, was
planned during a period of political ferment. In the early
1900s the government fell and the middle classes had
begun to strangle the aristocracy. Gentle Hestercombe
became the quintessential English garden marking an era’s
end. In between the two we have Hampton Court, Stowe,
Hawkstone, Sheringham Park and wonderful Chatsworth,
which has ridden out the years almost untroubled.
The Riverside Gardens is by an American professor,
meticulous and detailed but packed with fascinations.
There are dozens of drawings and plates and notes about
the whole paraphernalia of gardening; lists of the names
and duties of centuries-dead gardeners (twopence a week
for a woman weeder) and sketches of artefacts that look
sometimes as ancient as the Pyramids and sometimes
Dec-Jan pp4-63 24/11/05 6:43 pm Page 47
FLORA & FAUNA
exactly what you would go out and
buy now. The rake seems to have
been top tool and is unchanged,
though it has a sort of half-brother
that boasts a spike. Perhaps it came
from Italy, for Christ seems to be car-
rying one at the Resurrection in
Titian’s Noli me tangere, where Mary
takes him for the gardener.
The Riverside Gardens is perhaps the
sadder book. Wonderful prime-site,
status-symbol gardens drifting to the
river from either bank are all now A ha-ha
devoured by concrete. At the Bridge
House on London Bridge, which seems to have housed a
sort of London County Council, there was a kitchen gar-
den that fed a multitude and an annual festival with green
branches and green candles that continued for over two
hundred years. All gone. Across the river was Winchester
Palace with vast ecclesiastical wealth and land. All sold. A
breath of Fulham Palace does still just survive in bewildered
paths and a forlorn gateway. As for Whitehall Palace, we all
know what happened to that. Like what remains of the
gardens of the Tower of London, it is no longer a place of
gillyflowers. Lambeth Palace still has a walled garden to one
side, but the traffic screeches by and it is invisible.
As for More’s own creation, his gardens at Chelsea,
there are only a few patches of rose-red wall left, a queer-
looking stone slab in the Moravian Burial Ground, and a
decrepit-looking mulberry tree said to have been planted
LETTERS
LAST POST
Dear Sir,
Nigel Jones’s disparaging and pretentious review of Max
Arthur’s Last Post (LR, November) does him no credit,
not least because it is riddled with errors.
He writes that, ‘the only common qualifying factor for inclu-
sion in The (sic) Last Post is the random one of having survived
to be a centenarian.’ Not so. The common factor is that those
included were the last remaining British survivors of WW1. He
writes that, ‘there is nothing distinctive about Arthur’s nine.’ As
21 survivors contributed to the book, which nine does Jones
have in mind? His puerile sneer that the book, ‘is not of high
literary distinction’ is a gratuitous insult to the veterans who are
not, they would be the first to admit, literary men, and com-
pletely misses the point which is that theirs are the authentic
voices of that time. He refers to ‘a distasteful element’ of the
book showing ‘signs of haste’. I suggest that tracking down and
interviewing the 21 survivors could hardly have been a rushed
job, as the final publication proves (during the period from the
first interview to publication twelve of them died).
At the book launch at the Army Museum, Major
by More himself, which if he saw it
now he would order to be removed.
More went to Chelsea for seclusion
(despite 100 servants and a large fami-
ly) and to meditate in the garden,
where he had built a private library
for reading and prayer. Christianson
believes that it was in Chelsea that
More’s religious strength deepened,
enabling him to defy the king.
There is a statue to More standing
on the Chelsea Embankment, newly
decked with gold. More made jokes
about contemporaries who flaunted
themselves in scarlet and gold, but there. Way to the north
along the King’s Road is the awkward dog’s leg at the
World’s End which has been annoying town planners for
years. I was once told by an old man who used to shoot
snipe on the Chelsea marshes that this corner marked the
boundary of More’s cornfields. Between the dog’s leg and
the statue now there’s solid masonry: prime-site streets, but
of little beauty.
The maps in this book fetch a sigh too: woodlands,
orchards, vines, fountains, meadows in the heart of cen-
tral London. Behind the Tower rise green hills. Only the
Abbey stands immoveable, and the earth is presumably
still beneath the pavements.
Anybody who cares for gardens or English history will
want both these books for Christmas.
To order these books, see order form on page 78
General Sebastian Roberts said, ‘The remarkable thing
about Max Arthur is that in a country which keeps
covenant with its war dead in a quite exceptional way, he
uniquely and personally, but on all our behalf, has kept
covenant with the living veterans.’
Nigel Jones should be ashamed of himself.
Yours faithfully,
Group Captain Don McClen, CBE, AFC, RAF (ret’d)
Sherborne
LEG-PULL
Dear Sir,
In his review of J M Coetzee’s Slow Man (LR, September),
Anthony Gardner explains: ‘Paul Rayment … has no fami-
ly, so when he returns from hospital with an amputated leg
he requires a nurse-cum-housekeeper to look after him.’
Even with two legs, I can’t follow. Whose leg did
Rayment bring home?
Yours faithfully,
Graham Landon
Newcastle
47
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
Dec-Jan pp4-63 24/11/05 6:43 pm Page 48
FLORA & FAUNA
S TEPHEN A NDERTON
A FOREST OF DELIGHTS
T HE S ECRET L IFE OF T REES : H OW T HEY
L IVE AND W HY T HEY M ATTER
★ to aid fertilisation, how in Canada the jack pine is adapt-
By Colin Tudge
(Allen Lane 451pp £20)
OAK : T HE F RAME OF C IVILIZATION
★ do conifers in high latitudes have downswept branches
By William Bryant Logan
(W W Norton and Co 336pp £16.99)
AT THE TIME I read Stephen Hawking’s Brief History of
Time I understood his explanations of astrophysics, but
was quite unable to repeat them afterwards. Others have
said the same. But physics is not easy – some minds can
do it and others not; and however
good the writer, the substance will
not necessarily stick. Colin Tudge’s
explanation of evolutionary botany,
The Secret Life of Trees, definitely sticks.
Botany and biology, you might say,
are more tangible than physics, more
immediate to the senses, and therefore
easier to assimilate than physics. True
enough, but still they have great com-
plexities, and Tudge can make them
not just understood but compelling
reading too. Tudge sets out his stall as
‘science in the service of appreciation,
and appreciation in the service of rev-
erence which, in the face of wonders
that are not of our making, is our only Balanophage at rest
proper response’.
When writing about the wonders of nature it is hard
to avoid lapsing into the ‘Fancy that!’ style of narrative,
as one fascinating fact succeeds another. Tudge avoids it
no better than anyone else, although he manages not to
make pile-ups of them. Fascinating they certainly are:
sandalwood, for instance, is a parasite of the strychnine
plant which in turn is related to our common buddleia;
a diesel tractor can run perfectly well on oil pressed from
the jatropha; hollow baobab trees are not uncommonly
used as the final resting place for corpses, which mum-
mify there in the dry heat.
But there is much more to the book than tit-bits. It is
in a sense four books. The first – ‘What is a Tree?’ –
deals with the evolution of trees from the primal swamp,
the value of sexual reproduction, and why trees find it
useful simply to be so big. The second – ‘All the Trees
of the World’ – is a heavyweight catalogue of the taxon-
48
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
omy of trees according to modern science and the links
suggested by DNA. Tudge marches through the various
families pointing out species of commercial or pharma-
ceutical significance.
It is the third book – ‘The Life of Trees’ – that most
people will find gripping. Tudge explains in detail how
each of the 750 species of fig has its own dedicated wasp
ed to reproduce in response to forest fires, and how the
great coastal redwoods of California cope with being
smothered every few hundred years by deposits of silt.
He answers questions which you never think to ask: why
while those in tropical latitudes have flatter, tiered
branches, for instance? The answer is, because the trees
must take optimum advantage of the angle of sunlight.
In the fourth book – ‘The Future with Trees’ – Tudge
gets down to the nitty-gritty of climate change and how
thoughtlessly man is treating the planet. He comes to
the conclusion that ‘What matters in the end is politics’.
It’s not comfortable reading, and
Tudge’s occasional touches of jolly
humour evaporate. This is what he has
been dying to say for the past 350
pages; it’s his ‘proper response’ again.
Curious, however, that someone who
has written with such even-handed joy
about evolution should suddenly be
quite so angry at the possibility of fur-
ther extinctions because of climate
change. Where is the book on the
morality of extinctions? In an atheistic
age which gives man no God-given
supremacy on earth, why should he last
for ever? There is a book worth writing.
There is no talk of hugging trees in
the extraordinary little book, Oak: The
Frame of Civilization, but I feel sure that
Logan is a tree-hugger. He offers the exact opposite of
Tudge’s book: a hymn of conversational praise of oak
trees (almost any species, it seems, will do).
Logan, an Amer ican who is confessedly neither
botanist nor historian, touches on many scientific issues
(evolution, the migration of species, reproduction), but
his aim is to persuade the world to love oaks. Logan is
convinced that the acorn was the springboard for all
human civilisation and has proudly coined his own word
for acorn-eaters: balanophages. There is even a sugges-
tion that Adam and Eve were officially permitted to eat
acorns and that only the apple tree was banned.
Some chunks of the book are written as dialogue: for
instance Logan with his oak-felling Jewish neighbour
Mrs Kornbluth, or Logan trying to find acorn flour in a
Korean supermarket without knowing the Korean word
for acorn: ‘Unwilling to go away empty-handed, I rum-
Dec-Jan pp4-63 24/11/05 6:43 pm Page 49
FLORA & FAUNA
maged around in my change pocket, where I usually
keep at least one acorn.’
Other chapters explain in absorbing, practical detail
how oak has been used in shipbuilding by the British
and the Viking navies, in coopering, tanning, construct-
BIRDWATCHING, AND THE accom- P ETER DAVIES ENJOYS BIRDS
panying concern for the conserva-
tion of bird populations, has never
been as popular and widespread in Britain as it is now.
In an age rich in excellent field guides, we have ample
means of familiarising ourselves with the wealth of
species that can be seen in this country.
The magnificent Birds Britannica (Chatto & Windus
528pp £35) by Mark Cocker, its principal author, and
Richard Mabey, whose companion Flora Britannica was
its predecessor but who was prevented by ill-health from
playing the major role in the writing of this book, is not
intended as a work of recognition.
Although its photographs are of superb
quality, the authors’ aim is not identifi-
cation but rather to illustrate moments
and quirks in bird behaviour; they com-
plement a narrative that harnesses myth,
history and folklore to offer a beguiling-
ly discursive approach to its subject. The
book takes us from the nightingale of
myth and reality, whose first notes heard
in an Essex wood are one of the won-
ders of spring, to that ruffianly long-
shoreman among waders, the turnstone,
which, if sandhoppers and molluscs fail
its diet, will happily ingest potato peel,
dogfood, or discarded bars of soap from
holiday caravans.
That dowdy little passerine the dun-
nock, which spends much of its time
skulking no higher than the lower reach-
es of hedgerows (seeming, as Lord Grey A horned screamer
put it ‘to apologize for its presence’),
leads, we learn, the most expansive of sex lives. Not only
does it mate ‘more frequently than has been recorded for
any other small bird’, but male and female vie with each
other in promiscuous infidelity.
The robin was often thought to base its fellowship
with man in these islands on something inherently sym-
pathetic in the Br itish character – while on the
Continent, fearful of Homo sapiens’s intentions towards it,
it sought the shelter of deep thickets. Our authors gently
dispel this self-flattering conceit. The British bird is sim-
ply a separate race, noted for its confiding nature. Its
European counterpart honestly prefers a woodland habi-
tat to the handle of your garden spade.
That master fisher the cormorant is an early acquain-
tance of childhood, thanks to Christopher Isherwood’s
49
ing houses and making ink. Logan rails, too, against steel
battleships, iron nails, the Eiffel Tower, and the awful
cruelties of the modern steel-toothed sawmill, because
for him the oak is and always has been sacred.
To order these books, see order form on page 78
nonsense poem: ‘The common
cormorant (or shag) / Lays eggs
inside a paper bag’. Yet, drying its
outspread wings on tree branches, rocks or fairway buoys,
this bird makes, perhaps, one of the most sinister sights in
nature. It was an act of genius in Milton, as Cocker
reminds us, to have Satan, on a reconnaissance mission to
spy on Adam and Eve, enter Paradise not as the serpent
but in the guise of this darkly resourceful predator.
Birds and literature regularly cross paths in Birds
Britannica. ‘Detested kite!’, the epithet with which an
enraged King Lear castigates his profoundly disagreeable
daughter Goneril, says much about the
low esteem in which this gracious raptor
was held in Shakespearian times. A scav-
enger, a stealer of crusts from the very
paws of impoverished children, it was
apparently fair game for the fate that
overtook it once its function as an air-
borne refuse-disposal system had outlived
its usefulness. Heavily persecuted, the
bird of medieval and Tudor townscape
found itself gradually becoming a denizen
of wild places. Driven into the natural
fastness of the Welsh Plateau, with its
steep-sided valleys and melancholy
humped uplands, the species numbered
by the beginning of the last century just
five breeding pairs.
In the last twenty or so years the kite’s
fortunes have undergone a remarkable
transfor mation, beginning with the
release of birds of Spanish origin in the
Chilterns. It is now a frequent sight,
wheeling aloft, or descending to allow its marvellous
burnished copper plumage to make a contrast with the
fresh green of spring beech woods.
Other colonisations have needed no assistance from
human agency. The population explosion over the last fifty
years of the dainty collared dove, a gentle and welcome
addition to the dominant bullying wood pigeon and the
ubiquitous feral pigeon, is simply an unexplained marvel.
In Germany familiarity has already bred contempt, and its
habit of calling from the aerials on apartment houses has
earned it the nickname Fernsehtaube (‘TV dove’).
The most exciting and recent arrival of all has been
that most elegant of herons, the little egret. Its lacy
plumes, sought as a fashion accessory, led to severe
depredation in Europe in the nineteenth century. But
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
Dec-Jan pp4-63 24/11/05 6:57 pm Page 50
FLORA & FAUNA
the egret has bounced back. An expanding European
population has sent parties of winter visitors to prospect
habitats on Britain’s southern coasts over the past twenty
years, and this has led in turn to pairing and breeding.
Cocker points out that in the very hour of their
destruction, egrets were, paradoxically, sowing the seeds
of a conservation imperative. Their slaughter, and that of
other herons, to ornament ladies’ headgear led to the
founding of the RSPB. In indignant response to such
carnage for purely decorative purposes, in 1889 in
Didsbury a pioneering group of women founded the
Society for the Protection of Birds. Within fifteen years
it gained a royal warrant. Thus was born what is now
the largest non-government wildlife organisation in
Europe, with more than a million members.
Not all tales of visiting species have had such happy
endings. The ruddy duck, an introduced North
American species, is now one of the most pleasant sights
on British lakes with its electric-blue bill, rounded
chestnut body and, seemingly, perpetually cheerful
countenance. Thanks to its interbreeding with the
kindred white-headed duck of Spain, and the resulting
formation of hybrids, it is under sentence of death in
this country. At the request of the Spanish authorities,
the RSPB has undertaken to eliminate the British popu-
lation through a programme of shooting. As Cocker
demonstrates, quoting indignant letters, this is one of
the most fiercely debated ‘conservation’ issues of mod-
ern times. Charges of ethnic cleansing are levelled at the
purists by those who point to frequent interbreeding
between cognate species – tufted duck, scaup, pochard –
in the wild. And the thought of the collateral damage to
other waterfowl, as marksmen blaze away at ruddies on
nature reserves, is one to chill the blood.
A completely different tempo drives To See Every Bird
on Earth, by Dan Koeppel (Michael Joseph 278pp
£14.99). It beats to the pulse of the twitcher (in
America the ‘lister’) – here the author’s father, who in
the wake of his marriage breakdown is helped by his son
to achieve the 7,000 species necessary for qualification as
a ‘high lister’. Birdwatching as neurosis? Certainly this
frenetic search through the continents of the world in
the pursuit of sheer numbers appears to substitute
species-crunching for a genuine love of wild things.
The Bedside Book of Birds by the Canadian Graeme
Gibson (Bloomsbury 384pp £20) is an eclectic miscel-
lany, handsomely illustrated with images ranging from
classic European and American bird paintings to Aztec
ceramics and Assyrian bas-reliefs. It approaches its sub-
ject through literary and scientific extracts from all ages:
quotations from the Venerable Bede and the fourteenth
century Peterborough Bestiary rub shoulders with
Gilbert White of Selborne and Darwin’s Origin of
Species. A book for dipping into.
To order these books, see order form on page 78
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
EXHIBITION
J ONATHAN M IRSKY
Being a Ruler
Is Difficult…
C HINA : T HE T HREE E MPERORS, 1662–1795
★
Edited by Evelyn S Rawski and Jessica Rawson
(Royal Academy of Arts 494pp £25.95)
12 November 2005 – 17 April 2006
CAN THERE HAVE been another emperor during the last
2,500 years of Chinese history who had himself painted
ladling human manure onto a rice paddy? Yongzheng
(1678–1735) did. Most royal portraits, like those in the
Royal Academy’s exhibition ‘The Three Emperors’,
were intended to awe. In more informal pictures the
emperors pursued tigers, galloped horses through the
mountains, and received grovelling subjects. Only
Yongzheng ladled shit.
One of the most eccentric emperors in Chinese history
(he reigned from 1722 to 1735), Yongzheng was sand-
wiched between two of the greatest: his famous father,
Kangxi (reigned 1662–1722 ), and his yet more famous
son, Qianlong (reigned 1736–95). He is described, in
Regina Krahl’s short but informative essay in the exhibi-
tion’s splendid catalogue, as publicly cruel, distant, and
ruthless, although privately humorous, sardonic, and
whimsical. But here is how he revealed himself in a pair
of scrolls. On their green gold-flecked silk, Yongzheng
wrote, in his elegant hand, a poetic couplet, the kind that
makes Chinese connoisseurs sigh: ‘Bamboo shadows
criss-cross the window – the moon must have risen. The
scents of flowers waft indoors – spring must have come.’
It deserves a sigh, not least for the perfectly chosen char-
acters which translation cannot capture. But what reveals
the man is cut into the tiny red seals, pressed precisely
onto the silk with exquisitely cut stones: ‘Being a ruler is
difficult. Perturbed day and night.’
Indeed. In 1728 came news of a challenge to
Yongzheng’s power so alarming that he spent much of
the rest of his life dealing with it. This was an attempted
rebellion, in an empire most of whose 200 million
inhabitants despised and feared the Manchus who had
conquered them in 1644.
Yongzheng put down that rebellion. He then spent a
year writing a refutation of the charges against him con-
tained in rebellious pamphlets, and made hundreds of
copies so that all his subjects, down to ‘the poorest vil-
lages and meanest homes’, could read his judgement and
the revelations of his inner thoughts. He denied he was a
greedy usurper and refuted the accusation (common in
Dec-Jan pp4-63 24/11/05 6:57 pm Page 51
EXHIBITION
China to this day when a high official
comes under attack) that he was licen-
tious: ‘I have often said of myself that
there is no one in the country who
dislikes sex as much as I do.’
I have emphasised Yongzheng and
his scrolls because, like so many of the
400 objects drawn from the palace in
Beijing’s Forbidden City, rather than
relying on our aesthetic senses, as we
do on the art of earlier periods, Qing
art requires explanation. It is the
exclusive subject of the Royal
Academy show, whose date was
advanced by two months to coincide
with the arrival of China’s President
Hu Jintao. London was illuminated in
red for his visit and the Queen
accompanied Mr Hu to the Royal Academy.
In her comments to the press, and on television, Dame
Jessica Rawson, Warden of Merton College and the chief
curator of the exhibition, emphasised the grandeur and
power of the alien Manchus: their longevity, the extent
of their empire, and their conquest of the Han Chinese
and non-Han peoples like the Mongols and Tibetans
who still chafe under Chinese rule.
Dame Jessica was right to underline the power of the
Manchus. As she guided the press through the Royal
Academy she paused here and there to point out details in
some of the enormous horizontal scrolls, teeming with
tiny figures, in which, if you peered closely, one or other
of the three emperors was killing tigers, spurring horses,
receiving subject peoples, or holding an audience. Or, in
the case of Yongzheng, he is seen dressed as a hermit in a
cave. Few of the Qing objects in the exhibition would
attract connoisseurs for their refinement. Most Qing
paintings are crammed with detail. Qing ceramics are
notable for their decoration, and other objects – boxes,
the numerous implements for calligraphy, the imitations
of ancient bronzes – are usually complex, elaborate, and
many-coloured. The Manchus were keen to broadcast
their qualifications not only as awe-inspiring, obedience-
demanding rulers and warriors, but as exemplars and
champions of the highest taste. Hence their vast work-
shops and studios, hence, too, their habit of impressing
their own seals, their comments, and their poems on the
works of the great painters of the past. I have on my wall
a silk-screen of a portrait of the Tang poet Li Bai, painted
by the thirteenth-century Song master Liang Kai; it has
plenty of empty space, on which Qianlong has pressed his
mighty seal. In my judgement, the seal, which is bigger
than Li Bai’s head, balances the painting splendidly, but it
is also a mark of supreme self-confidence and authority.
I somewhat annoyed the curators by mentioning that
much of the palace collection was moved to Taiwan in
1949 and that what remained were
the less beautiful objects. I was
politely informed that I had been
biased by traditional views of what
constituted beauty. Certainly beauty
is a matter of taste in part, but tradi-
tional connoisseurship was also a
value for the Manchu rulers. As
Gerald Holzwarth observes in his
enlightening essay on Qianlong as art
patron, the core of the or ig inal
palace collection – paintings, calligra-
phy, bronzes, jade, and ceramics –
reached back to the eighth century.
‘These objects were admired and
eulogised by the imperial collectors,
Blast off they were not in general intended to
be exhibited and displayed but were
wrapped in silk cloths and kept in boxes.’ The Chinese
term for such a collection is biji, secret book-box. Some
of these boxes were never opened; in the Taiwan
Museum I was allowed, many years ago, to look into
two of their seventy-odd biji, and saw bowls from the
eleventh and twelfth centuries still wrapped in imperial
golden-yellow silk and silk floss. Most other objects in
the Manchu collection, Holzwarth says, were intended
for display or to ‘convey a political message’.
Regina Krahl writes in one of her well-informed
essays that ‘the quality of porcelains in the Forbidden
City has never been matched.’ This cannot be disputed.
Such porcelain is very high-fire and rings clearly when
struck, and the flowers and other subjects on it are
painted with closely observed skill. But if one compares
a Qing vase with its original Ming model, as illustrated
in the catalogue, the ultimate difference is plain: the
pear-shaped Ming vase is subtly curved and balanced
and is painted in slightly faded cobalt blue. The Manchu
copy is stocky, thick-necked and thick-waisted, and the
mustardy colour is slightly unpleasant. Or compare the
tenth-century-BC bronze ritual wine vessel with its
Qianlong-period bamboo copy. As Dame Jessica, an
authority on such bronzes, says, the bronze lent itself to
fine surfaces and sharp profiles. The Qing reproduction
was ‘of necessity softened, on the other hand the bam-
boo piece is a fairly exact copy of the original bronze’.
Just so. I know which one I prefer. I suspect Qianlong
would have admired the bamboo repro, but would have
loved the original of almost three thousand years before.
In the end there can be no final judgement. As was
emphasised to me by the curators, the Royal Academy is
exhibiting art from a particular period of the Qing. It tells
us volumes about those three great rulers. For the beauty
that need not be explained, that moved Qianlong who
kept it just for himself and a few other gentlemen of tradi-
tional taste, visit the museum in Shanghai or go to Taiwan.
51
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
Dec-Jan pp4-63 24/11/05 6:57 pm Page 52
GENERAL
P ETER WASHINGTON
ISLANDS UNTO THEMSELVES
C RUSOE ’ S S ECRET: T HE A ESTHETICS
OF D ISSENT
★ Irishmen. The English in this book often turn out to be
By Tom Paulin
(Faber & Faber 400pp £20)
TOM PAULIN TELLS us in his introduction to Crusoe’s Secret
that the book had its genesis in a desire to write about
Defoe, but many of the essays he reprints here began as
reviews of other writers. This is a louring prospect for
reviewers, not least because it involves them in the post-
modern cliché of reviewing a book of reviews which are
themselves about reviewers reviewing reviews ad infinitum.
Fortunately, a germ of the Defoe book survives in the
theme linking these essays, which explore dissent in
English and Anglo-Irish culture. This is a fascinating,
wide-ranging brief which takes Paulin from seventeenth-
century religion to twenty-first-century politics.
The subtitle derives from the author’s attempt – half-
hearted, it must be said – to formulate a general theory
of art as dissent, not a simple task when you are dealing
with figures as disparate as Emily Dickinson and David
Trimble (who isn’t often mentioned in the same sen-
tence as the word ‘aesthetic’). It can also be difficult to
tell what Paulin means by dissent. At times he narrows it
down to a specific tradition of English political writing;
at others he widens it to include any resistance to an
authority perceived as unjust. The first meaning carries
the embarrassing luggage of Puritan authoritarianism,
while the second makes it too easy to equate serious
rebellion with a five-year-old’s refusal to eat spinach.
Like the good liberal he is, Paulin opts for something in
between, while occasionally flirting with the fun of
putting up two fingers for the sake of it.
Many of Paulin’s subjects – Lawrence, Dickinson,
Hopkins – resist inclusion in any scheme, aesthetic or
otherwise, since they are inclined not so much to dissent
as to bloody-minded individualism or indifference to
prevailing ideologies. Others are members of recognis-
able minorities, and it is really with minorities that
Paulin concerns himself. The problem is that minorities
define themselves as such in relation to the majorities
they wish to change. But how do they achieve their
ends without losing their identity as minorities, or
becoming oppressors in their turn? Perhaps the solution
to this problem is to be an Irishman.
Everyone knows that the English and the Irish are inex-
tricably entangled by history, by blood (in every sense), by
culture and by language. Above all, they are united by
their arguments with and about each other, which are
52
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
now so far advanced that the two peoples have, as it were,
started to exchange identities: more often than not, the
English now find themselves in a minority, both within
the UK and internationally. Paulin claims an interest in
invisible borders, especially in Ireland and Palestine (the
Arab–Israeli conflict being the subtext of this book), and
borders are permeable: Israel is full of Arabs, England of
closet Irishmen (Hazlitt and Tony Blair both had Irish
mothers), while the Irish – Burke, Yeats, even Synge –
could be said to have achieved their fulfilment not only in
the English language but on the hated mainland itself.
Their transformation from dissidents to conformists is
completed when they are translated to the even greater
mainland of America, where the English are outsiders, the
Irish a culturally ascendant minority.
Majority and minority statuses need each other. They
can even be different hats worn by the same person.
Paulin the Oxford don may be in a persecuted minority,
but the wild Irish poet and the media star belong unmis-
takably to fashionable majorities. Such doubleness is
exemplified by the Englishman who haunts every essay
in this book, even when he isn’t mentioned. Milton’s
work and its influence form the basis for Paulin’s shots at
an aesthetic, and it is Milton who strengthens the
author’s thesis while undermining it.
Milton is a notoriously ambivalent figure: hierarchical
libertarian, Puritan aesthete, exquisite turned iconoclast,
uxorious denouncer of female weakness, republican cel-
ebrant of God’s absolute monarchy. Above all, he was an
English patriot of the most uncompromising kind, the
laureate of the new Israel who vindicated Cromwell and
by implication his Irish policy – that bloody crushing of
a Catholic ‘minority’ (a majority, of course, in their own
country) which has stood as a symbol of oppression ever
since. Had the Commonwealth survived in 1660,
Milton would surely have been a pillar of its
Establishment. Thus he might be said to embody in his
own person the problem of formulating a politics and an
aesthetics of dissent. Both involve the dissenter in an
unresolvable contradiction between rebellion and domi-
nation, if only because the very act of positing a theory
implies a will to power which is at odds with the
eternally fugitive, protean nature of dissent.
Paulin would have us believe that the Miltonic contradic-
tion itself can provide the basis of his proposed theory by
making aesthetic virtues of conflict and instability, change,
fluidity and openness. These take the place of what he sees
as the essentially static, backward-looking qualities of estab-
lishment culture exemplified by writers such as Eliot –
though he does scant justice to the revolution in English
poetry effected by this self-proclaimed conservative, Anglo-
Catholic royalist. Paulin’s theory is hardly new (step forward
Heraclitus), but he puts his own spin on it. In one essay he
describes Lawrence as a celebrant of the present, one who
Dec-Jan pp4-63 24/11/05 6:57 pm Page 53

GENERAL

refuses to be pinned down. In another he reveals Hazlitt’s
obsession with plasticity. Elsewhere Seamus Heaney is
shown to be a poet of absences and uncertainties. Even in
Milton himself – that most marmoreal of poets – Paulin
identifies dynamic processes, especially in the texture of the
verse, which undermine its own pretensions to monumen-
tality. Paulin is a good if eccentric guide to literary foibles,
and these are persuasive examples. As such, they might
provide the basis for a general theory though they hardly
constitute one in themselves.
As a card-carrying dissenter himself, Paulin might
assert that the provisional nature of his remarks is pre-
cisely their value, and I would be inclined to agree with
him, though I wish he couched them in less challenging
terms. As befits a poet, his prose frequently moves by
suggestive swoops, spirals, sideways steps, associations,
non sequiturs, elisions and prolations rather than in the
predictable forward march of a tedious Whig or Tory
critic. These movements can be illuminating: they can
also be baffling. There are sections of this book which
strike me as ridiculous: Paulin’s take on ‘Tintern Abbey’,
for example, as a commentary on French party politics.
Others I simply cannot understand. But perhaps this is
what you would expect from an obtuse Anglo-Saxon.
That said, while Crusoe’s Secret is obviously addressed
to leftish intellectuals, it might be hard for conservatives
to resist the old-fashioned charm of the author’s assump-
tion that most dissent comes from the Left, that it is
always a Good Thing, and that every Irishman should be
allowed to have things both ways. If our cousins across
the water have solved the problem of how to remain
rebellious while becoming part of a comfortable majority,
who can blame them?
To order this book at £16, see order form on page 78

T HIS AUTUMN, WITH much A C G RAYLING WELCOMES A Telemachus after Odysseus’s

fanfare, a consortium of thir- return, because they had slept
NEW SERIES ON M YTHS
ty-four publishers around the with the ravening suitors who
world has launched a series of short books each retelling made Penelope’s life a nightmare during the ten years
a myth. The opening salvo, published by Canongate, that Odysseus struggled to return home, baulked by the
consists of Margaret Atwood recounting Penelope’s story curse of Hera, queen of the gods.
as she awaits the homecoming of Odysseus, Jeanette As befits the bride of the cunningly clever Odysseus,
Winterson telling of Atlas, Hercules, and the Apples of Penelope is very smart, and her observations and insights
the Hesperides, and Karen Armstrong providing a gen- are richly penetrating. She recognises Odysseus’s barrel
eral introduction to the series. chest and short legs when he at last arrives home,
The next two volumes in the series, not yet published, disguised as a beggar, but even then keeps her counsel so
show that the retellings will stray beyond Greek mythol- as not to betray him. Although she loves Odysseus she is
ogy; one of them centres on Samson, and the publicity not fooled by him, and Atwood cleverly gives both
blurb for the series says that its participating authors have Penelope and the chorus a chuckle-inducing line in scep-
been invited to choose any myth they like. Given that ticism about Odysseus’s adventures: was Circe a sorceress,
the authors include Natsuo Kirina, Su Tong and Chinua or a brothel-keeper? After all, as Penelope wryly observes,
Achebe, diversity must follow. it was easy enough to turn Odysseus’s men into pigs.
If the level of brilliance displayed by Margaret Atwood The person Penelope likes least is her cousin Helen,
and Jeanette Winterson sets the bar for their fellow whose fatal self-satisfaction and inability to stop flirting
authors in the series, these latter are going to have to sent so many men to their deaths, and kept Odysseus away
jump high indeed. For all their differences of style and from home so long. Even in Hades Helen is still at it,
approach, Atwood and Winterson have produced indi- followed by admiring throngs of ghosts eager to see her
vidually outstanding tours de force, surely among the best bathe nude – and this, as Penelope tries unavailingly to
things they have written. point out, despite her no
Margaret Atwood tells her longer having a body.
story from the point of view JNANE TAMSNA LITERARY SALON Jeanette Winterson’s
of a posthumous Penelope in Marrakech Weight (151pp £12), an
wandering in Hades’ aspho- Four days and three nights of stimulation in a sumptuous account of how Hercules
del meadows. The Penelopiad Moroccan guesthouse. took the cosmos from
(199pp £12) is told in the Join us in welcoming Barbara Trapido (Frankie & Stankie, Atlas’s shoulders so that the
first person, with an inter- The Travelling Hornplayer, Juggling...) from the 19th to the latter could fetch the
mitted commentary in verse nd
22 of January, 2006. Golden Apples of the
and drama by a chorus of Hesperides for him, is a
For further information:
Penelope’s women servants. http://www.jnanetamsna.com/jtlitsal.htm or contact Eleanor remarkable document.
These, the twelve loveliest O’Keeffe at eleanor@jnanetamsna.com or +33 6 88 68 68 98 Hercules is a football hooli-
and youngest of her maids, The Jnane Tamsna Literary Salon is designed to celebrate the achievements of recognised gan writ large, a priapic,
authors while promoting literacy and education in Morocco and beyond.
were hanged by her son restless and incontinent

53
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
Dec-Jan pp4-63 24/11/05 6:57 pm Page 54
GENERAL
thug whose impulses are to shag and kill, and who only
dimly begins to think the unthinkable by questioning the
decrees of the gods when he is temporarily bearing Atlas’s
crushing burden. In Winterson’s vision of the tale Atlas is
gentle and humane – at the end, just before taking a
momentous decision about his fate and that of the cosmos,
he rescues Laika, the dog sent up in Russia’s Sputnik 2 in
1957, and keeps her safe on his shoulders.
Winterson intersperses the tale with snippets of astro-
physics and autobiographical asides very moving in their
frankness. Astrophysics connects Atlas’s story with the
galaxies of the non-mythic universe, reminding us that
we are in plain fact children of the stars, for the chemi-
cals constituting us today were, aeons ago, manufactured
in them. The autobiographical asides liken Winterson’s
own life as a twice-rejected orphan to the Atlas-like
shouldering of an endless burden. Significantly, Hercules
repays Atlas’s favour to him not by risking the duty of
carrying the cosmos on his shoulders again, but by free-
ing Atlas’s brother Prometheus from the torture of hav-
ing his liver eternally gnawed by a vulture. Is Hercules’
club the writer’s pen, which relieves others but not the
weight of the world on one’s own shoulders?
After this, Karen Armstrong’s essay on the nature of
myth is a deep disappointment. A Short History of Myth
(159pp £12) is confused, repetitive, vacuously over-
generalised and platitudinous. She begins by telling us
contradictorily that myths are about another world, and
about this world; are about what is sacred and apart, and
proof that the ancients made no distinction between the
sacred and profane; are about the transcendent and
divine, and about familiar core human psychological
realities. No doubt some will lamely claim that myths
are about all these things at once, but they should be
reminded that whatever is ‘about everything’ is about
nothing, or at least and certainly, nothing useful.
Moreover, she conflates religion and myth, although
with the partial excuse that she seems to think religion is
just myth. In respect of the literal falsity of both, she is
right; but mythologies are so much richer and more
interesting than those few that have ossified into burn-
ing-at-the-stake religions that it does myth a disservice
not to recognise religion as the lesser breed.
She then goes on to generalise mightily about myths in
the hidden depths of prehistory, thereby talking about
what by definition we know nothing of, and then in the
same vastly generalising way skipping through centuries
and cultures in a few pages each before fizzling out in
remarks about the mythopoeic nature of (modern) fiction.
As preface to the series there should have been a more
focused and thoughtful account of myth and mythology
than this. I am sure Karen Armstrong is both well able and
well placed to provide it: but half her mind (and half her
editors’ minds) seems to have been far off duty here.
To order these books, see order form on page 78
54
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
J ONATHAN M IRSKY
READ ALL ABOUT IT
T HE H ISTORY OF ‘T HE T IMES ’, VOLUME VII
1981–2002: T HE M URDOCH Y EARS
★
By Graham Stewart
(HarperCollins 727pp £30)
I MUST DECLARE an interest. I was employed by The
Times between 1993 and 1998, and figured in the crisis
which, in Graham Stewart’s words, ‘was to tarnish the
paper’s reputation across wide sections of the British
public and beyond’. I had charged that from 1996, when
I was its East Asia editor, the paper kowtowed to the
views of the propr ietor, Rupert Murdoch. Peter
Stothard, the editor, denied that Murdoch had ever
given him directions on any subject, including how to
cover China. This disagreement led to my resignation.
Stewart handles this matter fairly, although I don’t agree
with all his conclusions.
Some might suggest that the book is already compro-
mised because it is an official history, and its publisher
is owned by Rupert Murdoch. Stewart tells us that
he has written leaders for The Times: this may account
for some overheated language when praising the paper’s
leader writers.
Stewart’s book should appeal to a wider audience than
journalists. He knows a lot about the various sections of
The Times – Leaders, Foreign, Politics, Drama, Art,
Books, Letters, Chess, Court Page – and describes how,
over the years, sections have expanded, diminished,
shifted from place to place, vanished and reappeared.
Take a terrific emergency or a ‘great story’ of global
scope, like 9/11. Stewart describes in vivid detail how
The Times hit the streets the next morning with a 26-
page extra section. Description, analysis, photographs,
news, commentary, even a cartoon (of the world turned
upside down) had been mobilised.
How Murdoch acquired the paper, after some –
feigned? – reluctance, is riveting, partly because it shows
how flexible journalists can be if the situation changes.
When William Rees-Mogg was editor of The Times he
encouraged an article about Murdoch’s latest foray into
the American press in which Murdoch’s newspapermen
were described as being ‘expert in plumbing the depths
of bad taste which Americans had scarcely guessed at’.
Soon after, Rees-Mogg approached Murdoch to save
the paper from sinking further into the red.
Stewart is very good on long set pieces, including an
account of how, in 1986–87, Murdoch broke the strike
of the print and press unions – though he traduces my
then editor at The Observer, whom he accuses of doing
Dec-Jan pp4-63 25/11/05 4:32 pm Page 55
GENERAL
the union’s ‘dirty work’. I saw the letter which Donald
Trelford wrote to the unions telling them to accept the
new technology or leave the paper.
In the scandal of the fake Hitler diaries in 1983, every-
one comes off badly. Hugh Trevor-Roper, who attested
to the diaries’ authenticity, didn’t have good enough
German to make such a judgement, especially after only
a brief look. The only person who emerges with credit is
the detestable David Irving, who thought the diaries
were bogus. The story is one of stupidity, ignorance,
greed, and incompetence, from the editor, Charles
Douglas-Home, and proprietor down; I am astounded
that elsewhere Stewart is able to praise those who low-
ered themselves into the Hitler quagmire. Did it never
occur to anyone to ask if a Hitler diary, even if authentic,
would be worth millions of pounds? The issue is ably
discussed in Bruce Page’s The Murdoch Archipelago, listed
in Stewart’s bibliography but not cited in his footnotes.
Another big set piece is Stewart’s account of The Times’s
campaign in 1999 to expose the Tories’ treasurer, Michael
Ashcroft, as a crook – a witch-hunt that failed.
Peter Stothard, the editor, imagined that ‘kicking
the [Tory] party when it was down was the best way
to restore it to its feet’. Two Labour supporters drove
the hunt. Stothard denied that The Times had paid some-
one to hack into the Tory bank account. Stewart drily
observes, ‘This was, technically, true’: the paper had hired
private detectives ‘and had not chosen to get involved
in the methods by which they obtained results’. This
‘gave the impression that the hunt was being pursued
with gleeful expectation’. More damningly still,
‘Information has been shared between Tom Baldwin [one
of the lead reporters on the story] and Government and
parliamentary sources in a manner that made The Times
look as if it were in cahoots with a Labour conspiracy
against a Tory treasurer.’
By now, after dozens of stories, The Times was facing a
gigantic libel suit. And here we discover that Stewart’s
oft-repeated assurance, supported by past editors Simon
Jenkins and Peter Stothard, that Rupert Murdoch did
not interfere in the running of The Times, does not stand
up. Alarmed at the prospect of a multimillion-pound
libel penalty, Murdoch – understandably – met Ashcroft.
A front-page ‘Correction’ stated that: ‘The Times is
pleased to confirm that it has no evidence that Mr
Ashcroft or any of his companies has ever been suspect-
ed of money laundering or drug-related crimes.’
Some time later Stothard was named ‘Editor of the
Year’. The citation included praise for the Ashcroft
campaign: ‘having got the story, The Times just wouldn’t
shut up’.
If The Times had gone to court and lost many millions
of pounds in damages and costs, Stewart contends, it
would have ‘ensured not only the abrupt termination of
Stothard’s editorship but, more importantly, it would
55
have inflicted a wound to his paper’s integ r ity’.
Furthermore, ‘Had The Times lost in the High Court,
this [Stothard’s] courage would have been decried as
criminal.’ The Times’s proprietor dismissed the entire
event as ‘a black eye’. Actually, Murdoch had saved
Stothard’s and the paper’s bacon – by decisively interfer-
ing in an editorial matter.
No one on the paper suffered for the Ashcroft near-
debacle; as with the Hitler diaries scandal, there were no
resignations, no sackings – except that in the Ashcroft
affair, it seems, the long-experienced deputy editor, John
Bryant, who disliked this campaign, was possibly dropped
because his views ‘may have rankled with Stothard’.
With perhaps only one exception Stewart speaks
admiringly, occasionally absurdly so, of all the editors,
managers and journalists in the Murdoch years. He is
equally admir ing of Rupert Murdoch, who once
claimed that his greatest achievement as a ‘patron of the
popular arts’ was to save The Times. This is the first time
I have heard The Times described as a ‘popular art’.
The Times’s story is told well here, though there are
plenty of details that many might dispute. Graham
Stewart, who interviewed me at length, gives me my say
over almost ten pages. He only partially accepts it,
which is his right. To say he is fair may sound tepid.
Actually it is high praise.
To order this book at £24, see order form on page 78
UNIVERSITY OF LONDON
SCHOOL OF ADVANCED STUDY
INSTITUTE of ENGLISH STUDIES
Conferences 2006
4 February : Jews and British Romanticism
11 February : ‘This is a monument, if you like’: Celebrating
The Dickensian at 100
17 February : The Mind’s Eye : Perspectives on Word and Image
6 May : Rousseau in England
23 - 24 June : The Verbal and the Visual in Nineteenth-Century
Culture
28 - 29 July : Exile in the English Revolution and its Aftermath
1640-1685
15 - 16 Sept : Ruskin Today
Our eighteen research seminar series, conferences, public lectures
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See http://www2.sas.ac.uk/ies/events/index.htm
Enquiries & Conference Fees and Venue
information:
Tel: 020 7862 8675 Fax: 020 7862 8720
E-mail: ies@sas.ac.uk
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
Dec-Jan pp4-63 24/11/05 6:57 pm Page 56
GENERAL
VALENTINE C UNNINGHAM
PERILOUS PROFESSORS
FACULTY TOWERS : T HE ACADEMIC N OVEL
AND ITS D ISCONTENTS
★ rangle as a home for careerist grasping and bitching, a
By Elaine Showalter
(Oxford University Press 166pp £12.99)
ELAINE SHOWALTER’S SUBJECT isn’t any old campus fic-
tion – novels about universities in general or student life
at large: that mass of fiction beginning, it might be,
when Thomas Hughes’s hero left Rugby and ‘went up’
to Oxford in Tom Brown at Oxford, the genre coming of
age in Evelyn Waugh’s deliciously malicious Decline and
Fall. Professor Showalter’s concern is, rather, that much
smaller corner of this unforeign field which academics
have dubbed the Professorroman – novels about university
teachers, the doings of lecturers and professors in their
departments and faculties, in particular those written
from the Fifties to the present day.
Our very lively and likeable Dante to this educational
Purgatory and Inferno – mapped decade by decade as
the novels appeared – says this is her favourite reading.
Since she’s been a professor of English (at Princeton
most notably) it comes as no surprise that she seems to
like reading most about English departments and their
staffs. Indeed, what’s especially grabbing about her
report is its perpetual air of insider trading. She knows
intimately what the novelists are enthusing about (occa-
sionally) and grousing about (mainly). She knows the
professorial authors who go in for the Professorroman in
such numbers, knows the departments whose power-
plays, careerisms and other misdoings they’re shopping,
knows the villains hidden and hiding behind the fiction-
al masks and the pseudonyms. Her career has been their
career; their distresses and pushinesses, their ideological
manoeuvrings (to do not least with the rise of Theory)
have been hers. This is Elaine Showalter the celebrated
feminist critic and historian speaking. She’s even a
character in some of the novels she has us alight in. No
wonder this is her favourite stuff.
She glances at alleged fictional precursors:
Middlemarch, with dried-up Casaubon cast in the role of
selfishly ambitious, wife-hurting scholar; Barchester
Towers as a model of sort-of learned men’s institutional
infighting; Dorothy Sayers’s Gaudy Night as a case of
donnish bitching with murder in its heart. But the true
instigators, or loud missionary voices, of the mode for
Elaine Showalter are C P Snow in The Masters and
Kingsley Amis in Lucky Jim. And no one, I guess, would
quarrel much with that.
The Masters is clearly a Fifties version (by a devoted
56
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
Trollopean, no less) of the common Thirties academic
plot in which (as in Michael Innes’s Death at the
President’s Lodging) murder takes place in an Oxford or
Cambridge college, except that in this story of the elec-
tion of a new Master for an old-fashioned Cambridge
college it’s ambitions for high office and place that get
murdered. Snow founded a vision of the modern quad-
killing field for academic selfhood and rightful scholarly
ambition. For its part, Lucky Jim – that lovely undoing
romp through the intellectual shallows of an English
provincial university, an academic dump licensing pow-
erful ogres (the grisly madrigal-singing head of depart-
ment Professor Welch), cultural pseudery, intellectual
bad faith and inadequacy – simply kills off the very idea
of the modern university with a set of hollow laughs.
We laugh, of course, at Jim Dixon’s pratfalling struggles
against the Welch regime, his pointless research on ‘this
strangely neglected topic’, his wonderfully hopeless and
drunken ‘Merrie England’ lecture, but as Showalter rightly
insists this comedy is very black indeed. And for her,
Amis’s importance consists precisely in setting going a line
of fictions in which satire and satirists engage with a histo-
ry of steady institutional decline and failure. It’s a
pessimistic business, this late-twentieth-century phase of
university education which Showalter presents her chosen
novels and novelists as marching in step with, decade by
decade right up until now. It’s a scene in which the melan-
choly of teachers and taught mounts steadily. Faith in the
good of the university seeps away. A kind of wholesale
treason of the clerks sets in. The old men thwart and resist
the young, especially the women. The young, and the
women (to Showalter’s feminist dismay), tend to collabo-
rate in the institutional nastiness. You have to get ruthless
in turn or you don’t get tenure. The tenured oppress the
tenure-needy. The most terrible careerists run the show,
get the power, the dollars, the sex. Modern academic poli-
tics are revealed as rather special encouragers of nastiness.
The ivory tower is now a Stasi fiefdom. Forget any idea
you might have had of an academic pastoral, let alone a
utopia. Myopically, these profs get ever more solipsistically
ruthless and power-crazed as the influence of English stud-
ies shrinks within the university and the world. It’s the
perennial tragedy of big fishes – not to say Stanley Fishes –
in ever-diminishing ponds. No wonder the professorial
writers of the Professorroman turn out so many crime sto-
ries: death after death in the English department or at the
academic conference – by the likes of Amanda Cross
(Carolyn Heilbrun), or Joanne Dobson. (Elaine Showalter
particularly likes a sharp feminist-academic sleuth.)
Of course, theory, theorists and anti-theorists –
depending which side of the Theory Wars of the
Seventies and Eighties an author stands on – are espe-
cially lampooned, and charged with causing lots of the
recent trouble. Just in case you were unaware of who the
Dec-Jan pp4-63 24/11/05 6:57 pm Page 57
GENERAL
genre’s destructive ones have been and are, Elaine
Showalter will unlock every roman à clef she can. And
she can open lots. It’s a great part of the pleasure she
affords. There’s Richard Blackmur, for instance, the
‘Arthur Buchanan’ of John Aldridge’s The Party at
Cranton (1960), fabled Princeton biter of faculty wives;
and Allan Bloom, right-wing defender of the canon,
scarcely concealed as the approved-of hero of Saul
Bellow’s Ravelstein; and Stanley Fish, above all the
egregious Stanley Fish, the boastful critical terrorist who
ruined English departments for large sums of money (he
liked reminding the poor saps at Hicksville U that the
Alfa Romeo in the car park was the measure of his well-
merited stardom). He’s happy to be known as the origi-
nal of the go-getting Morris Zapp in David Lodge’s
Changing Places and its successors. He’s obviously the
inspiration for the rabid Zachar y Kurtz in John
L’Heureux’s The Handmaid of Desire (1996), the terroris-
ing theorist who sews up ‘the multicultural bag’ through
his appointments of politically correct minority teachers
and campaigns to oust old farts who teach literature
because they actually love books. As Showalter’s sad
story climaxes at the end of the last century, it’s Political
Correctness that proves to be the ultimate demon in the
machine: novel after novel – Francine Prose’s Blue Angel,
Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, J M Coetzee’s Disgrace,
and so on – has good men brought low on faked-up
charges of sexual or racial harassment. In American
universities you close the tutorial door at your peril.
Oddly enough, though she is happy to note moments
when she features in the fiction as a right-on feminist
critic (in David Lodge’s Nice Work it might be), Professor
Showalter hesitates to assume any responsibility for the
troubles these novels frequently complain of. (She
observes without dwelling on the fact that a lot of the
academic novel’s bad guys are actually named Elaine.)
She also thinks these novels are not serious enough. This
is her main concluding thought. She claims, by way of
illustration, that Nemesis by Rosamond Smith (ie Joyce
Carol Oates), a case of sexual harassment based on
events in the Princeton English Department, lacks the
complexity and force of the realities that she knew at
first hand. The Professorroman, powerful though it can
be, rather fails, she claims, to cope with the actualities of
the awfulness it treats. It trivialises the academic tragedy,
in particular by going in for satire and for the repetitive
ways of low-genre fiction, the crime-story mode.
Which is to miss, I’d say, the real point of Lucky Jim, or
Lodge’s carnivalesque Changing Places, or his academic-
conference celebration Small World; or, for that matter,
of Evelyn Waugh; or, indeed, of David Lodge’s wonder-
ful early novel The British Museum is Falling Down (about
being a hapless graduate student of English), or that
superior black-comic Krimi Death of an Old Goat, by
Robert Barnard (about a visiting lecturer bumped off in
Australia after getting his lecture notes on George Eliot
and Jane Austen hopelessly confused), neither of which
is mentioned by Showalter. The point is that the only
way to cope with such large tragedies is to laugh
at them, laugh them out of court, face them down with
the sick joke and with farce. To laugh – as Sterne’s
Yorick has it – is the only way to prevent yourself
from crying.
To order this book at £10.39, see order form on page 78
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
Dec-Jan pp4-63 24/11/05 6:57 pm Page 58

GENERAL

K ATIE H ICKMAN seminal figure in American art and culture, who in addi-
tion to being himself a master photographer was also the

PICTURE PERFECT founder, in 1905, of one of the first photographic gal-

leries in New York, Gallery 291, which rapidly became
a centre for the avant-garde).
T HE O NGOING M OMENT Noting that they have often photographed the same
★ things (benches, hats, hands, roads, accordionists), Dyer
By Geoff Dyer uses these themes to knit together his narrative: an idio-
(Little Brown 285pp £20) syncratic, discursive (if occasionally rambling) meditation
on the nature of photography and its possibilities.
T HE OXFORD C OMPANION TO THE Although he begins by stating his suspicions that his
P HOTOGRAPH book ‘will be a source of irritation to many people,
★
especially those who know more about photography
Edited by Robin Lenman than I do’, he is in fact both a knowledgeable and an
(Oxford University Press 769pp £40)
engaging companion on the road.
I was particularly fascinated by his musings on the
IN The Ongoing Moment Geoff Dyer recounts an anec- effects of the advent of digital photography, as opposed to
dote about the Hungarian-born American photographer the older, silver-based techniques (inconceivable, he
André Kertész. In Paris, in the 1930s, Kertész pioneered points out, that certain photographs by, say, Walker Evans,
the new style of documentary photography that influ- a photographer much concerned with trying to capture
enced an entire generation of French and émigré pho- memory and the passage of time, could have been taken
tographers, but in later life when he moved to America with a digital camera: for ‘to look at the picture is to share
his career nose-dived, and the man who had formerly the viewpoint of the photographer who saw it come
been one of the masters of photo- gradually into view in the develop-
graphic modernism was almost for- ing tray’). Much earlier and even
gotten. ‘One day an old man with more controversial was the discovery
two shopping bags full of photos of colour process. Although a num-
dropped them off at the Museum of ber of colour processes had come
Modern Art. The curator of photog- and gone as early as the 1890s, why
raphy, John Szarkowski, stuck his was it that black-and-white for so
head out of his office and asked who long retained its pre-eminence in the
it was. “My secretary looked down serious practice of photography as
at the sign-in book and said, ‘André art? Walker Evans famously declared
Kertész.’ Everybody thought he’d that ‘Colour tends to corrupt pho-
been dead for thirty years.”’ tography and absolute colour cor-
What is strange about this story is rupts absolutely’, but then – duly
not that it should have happened, corrupted – went on to acquire a
but that it should have happened in Polaroid and spent the rest of his life
America, where – in marked con- exploring its vulgarities ‘with unfet-
trast to Britain – photography had tered relish’. (‘Paradox’, he later stat-
long been recognised as an art form, ed, ‘is a habit of mine.’)
and photographers acknowledged Best of all, though, reading Dyer’s
as artists. The steps of Wells Cathedral; Frederick Evans, 1903 book made me want to revisit the
Dyer’s book is hard to define. He photographs themselves, and this
himself describes it as a ‘survey of photography’, but autumn has been a particularly good time to do so. Not
although it offers the reader something about the history only are there two major photographic exhibitions
of photography it is more of a sustained mood piece, a showing in London at the time of writing – Diane
personal response to the medium, a ‘way of compre- Arbus’s magnificent retrospective at the V&A, and Jeff
hending’ as he puts it, rather than anything more acade- Wall at Tate Modern – but October also saw the long-
mic. The photographers covered here are almost all awaited publication of the stupendous Oxford Companion
American and twentieth-century; most of them, loosely to the Photograph. Four years in the making, and the first
speaking, documentary photographers in the tradition of Oxford Companion to deal with the subject of photog-
Kertész. In addition to Kertész himself Dyer examines raphy, this is one of the most lavish and exquisitely
the work of Paul Strand, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, printed volumes I think I have ever seen, and practically
Diane Arbus, William Eggleston and Alfred Stieglitz (a a work of art in itself.

58
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
Dec-Jan pp4-63 24/11/05 6:57 pm Page 59

GENERAL

Several things set this Companion apart from other
reference books. The most striking is the sheer breadth
of its range, containing as it does a huge variety of
regional and geographical entries, and contributors have
been found to provide extensive entries for Africa,
Oceania and Scandinavia, areas which are hardly ever
covered in histories or encyclopedias of this kind.
As well as individual biographies, and lucid entries
(even for technophobes such as myself) on every possible
technical aspect of photography, there is also a strong
emphasis on photography as a social practice. There are
entries on the economics of photography (tourism, adver-
tising, fashion, and the news media for example), on pho-
tography’s infrastructure (societies, journals and training
establishments); on the role of photography in politics (see
entries on propaganda, the Civil Rights Movement in the
USA and ‘struggle photography’ in South Africa); and on
the emotive and even magical implications of photogra-
phy, ‘involving questions of power, identity and kinship,
the creation of myths, the shaping (or masking) of memo-
ries, and the invasion of private or sacred spaces’.
Then there are the plates – 48 pages of colour and 250
black-and-white half-tones – many of them reproducing
photographs that have never been published before, all
of them immaculately printed. Opening the pages at
random I come across ‘Marthe in the garden, 1900–1’,
by the painter Pierre Bonnard, who began photograph-
ing in the 1890s; an exquisite 1903 platinum print by
Frederick Evans, showing the steps of Wells Cathedral;
and the luminous and haunting colour print of an
underground river, from the 1999 Tunnel Series taken
by the Japanese photographer Naoya Hatakeyama –
every one of them good enough to eat.
The Ongoing Moment and the Oxford Companion to the
Photograph are wonderful companion pieces, and a wel-
come sign that photography is – at last – achieving its
rightful status as a major art form in this country.
To order these books, see order form on page 78

M ICHAEL P ROWSE The Google phenomenon is an American story. It is

hard to imagine it happening anywhere else, in part
A SITE TO BEHOLD because the young entrepreneurs’ success depended on a
great deal more than their own technical and business
flair. As if to illustrate the importance of education for
T HE G OOGLE S TORY the Internet economy, Brin and Page come from intel-
★ lectually, though not financially, privileged backgrounds.
By David A Vise, with Mark Malseed
(Macmillan 326pp £14.99)

IN 1998, SERGEY Brin and Larry Page dropped out of a

PhD programme at Stanford University to develop the
commercial potential of their Internet search engine,
Google. They had no capital, and no idea how Internet
search could be turned into a profitable business. Six
years later, having seen off competition from the likes of
Yahoo and Microsoft, they floated the company at $85
per share, raising nearly $2bn in the largest ever initial
public offering of a technology company. Today, Google
stock is trading at more than $350 per share. Brin and
Page each have a net worth well in excess of $10bn, and
the company they founded dominates the rapidly grow-
ing global market for Internet search. As an object lesson
in how to translate a technical idea into cash, the
Google story has few, if any, precedents: even Bill Gates
had to work longer and harder for his money.
By the late 1990s, savvy investors were beginning to
grasp the centrality of knowledge or information to the
functioning of the global economy. So the ex-Stanford stu-
dents were clearly doing the right thing at the right time
and in the right place. But even allowing for this, the
Google story has a fairy-tale quality: who could have imag-
ined that the seemingly mundane business of searching for
information by clicking buttons on computers could yield
such fantastic economic rewards, and so quickly?

59
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
Dec-Jan pp4-63 24/11/05 6:57 pm Page 60
GENERAL
Their parents knew nothing about
business but both fathers were uni-
versity professors (in mathematics
and computer science) and both
mothers worked in fields related to
computing and technology. So
while Brin and Page attended ordi-
nary public-sector schools, they
became sophisticated users of com-
puters as young children. And they
shone as underg raduates partly
because their families valued educa-
tional attainment above all else.
Even after Google’s flotation, Brin’s
mother was still urging her billion- Nerds in the foam
aire son to return to Stanford and
complete his PhD.
Once at Stanford, they were beneficiaries of one of
America’s greatest economic strengths: the porous inter-
face that links top-flight academic institutions, the ven-
ture capital industry, and high-tech business. As David
Vise and Mark Malseed explain, Google might not have
achieved so much but for the early backing of two of
Silicon Valley’s leading venture capitalist firms – Sequoia
Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. These
firms took the gamble of investing heavily in Google
even though its headstrong young founders insisted on
maintaining full control of their company – despite their
business illiteracy. Crucially, however, they persuaded
Brin and Page to appoint an experienced chief executive:
Eric Schmidt from the software-maker Novell. Schmidt
proved a perfect foil for Brin and Page: while they
focused on the technical challenges of search, he ensured
that Google acquired the managerial and financial struc-
tures essential in any rapidly growing small business.
Brin and Page were also lucky in the timing of their
launch. When the dotcom bubble burst in 1999, they
were a rare commodity in Silicon Valley: a debt-free
Internet start-up with an apparently limitless potential
for growth. As companies went bust around them, they
were able to hire talented engineers and mathematicians
relatively cheaply – which would not have been easy in
a firmer labour market.
The Stanford drop-outs always insisted that they were
motivated primarily by the intellectual challenge of per-
fecting an Internet search engine, rather than by the
prospect of making money. Yet had their orientation
been academic, they would probably be Stanford profes-
sors today. In the event, the challenge of turning search
into a money-spinner presented an ethical conundrum.
Their competitors were making profits by selling adver-
tising. They used flashy banner ads, and they corrupted
the search process: if businesses were willing to pay
extra, search engines would ensure that their websites
kept popping up in web crawls.
60
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
But Brin and Page were nerdy
idealists. There was a lot about
capitalism they did not like. They
did not want to make money in
this underhand way. They knew
they had to rely on advertising
because it would be uneconomic
to charge users for searches. But
they wanted users to know the
search process was unbiased. The
model they hit on was that pio-
neered by newspapers. Everyone
knows the New York Times sells
advertising but nobody thinks the
editorial copy is tainted by the
ads. Brin and Page wanted a simi-
lar demarcation between advertising and editorial copy
in their business. But it was tricky to achieve because
the ads had to be linked to the search results. The appeal
of the search engines was that they were offering a
sharply focused medium for advertising: they were giv-
ing advertisers a chance to display their wares at the very
moment consumers had signalled their interest by initi-
ating a search. Their solution was a rigid demarcation of
their on-screen pages: ads, described as ‘sponsored links’,
appeared on the right-hand side, in small understated
textboxes, and search results appeared on the left-hand
side. The position of the ads depended on two factors:
how much companies were willing to pay for them, and
how often users clicked on them (this was Brin and
Page’s attempt to democratise advertising). But compa-
nies could not influence the search results on the
left-hand side.
The model worked brilliantly. Indeed, it was a trifle
devious for a pair of idealists: the text-only ‘sponsored
links’ were so understated that many Google users never
even realised that every search produced as much adver-
tising as it did information. And money: whenever
someone anywhere in the world clicks a sponsored link,
50 cents or so flows into Google’s coffers. It may not
sound much, but when you have hundreds of millions of
customers clicking every day, it soon adds up.
Vise and Malseed do not make predictions for Google:
that would be unwise given how fast fortunes can
change in the Internet economy. But Brin and Page
have embarked on two huge projects. They want to
increase massively the store of on-line, and hence
searchable, information by digitalising some 50m books
from the world’s leading academic libraries. And they
want to use Google’s computing power (which exceeds
that available to any government) to help unravel the
secrets of the human genome. The projects illustrate the
heady mix of ambition and idealism that has charac-
terised Google from the start; whether they will prove as
profitable as instant Internet search only time can tell.
Dec-Jan pp4-63 29/11/05 10:37 am Page 61

GENERAL

F RANCIS K ING

A LITERARY BANQUET
U NTOLD S TORIES
★
By Alan Bennett
(Faber & Faber 658pp £20)

I N HIS PREFACE , Alan Bennett asks us to view this

bumper book as one of those once popular but now rare
annuals that at the close of each year would lure readers
through a gallimaufry of stories, reminiscences, pictures
and puzzles. Some of the items in those annuals would
already be familiar to their readers. So will items in this
collection, particularly to those who have already
encountered extensive extracts from Bennett’s diaries in
the London Review of Books.
Fortunately, even already familiar pieces can still
delight; but one suffers an intermittent exasperation
when something already served up in this new literary
banquet then reappears, an unwelcome reflux, many
pages later. So it is with Thurston Hall, a long forgotten
movie actor, of whom we are three times provided with
precisely the same observations. Similarly, in the case of
Judy Holliday one finds oneself wishing that a more
attentive editor had ensured that a star of whom one
could in the old days never see enough had here been
confined to a single appearance.
The title piece comes first, as it deserves to do, since it
is both the longest and the best. Here, brilliant in its
succinctness and eloquence, we have a history of
Bennett’s immediate family. Clinical depression, which
also afflicted Mam, drove his maternal grandfather to a
suicide that remained a secret from his grandson until he
uncovered it late in his life. Mam’s two sisters did not
marry for years; then, when they had at last secured hus-
bands, their prettiness and perkiness began to fade and
both died tragically. Eventually Mam, stricken with
Alzheimer’s, had to be incarcerated in an institution, in
which she remained for fifteen years. To it, with touch-
ing devotion, Dad would motor fifty miles each day, in
order to hold a hand from which he rarely received a
response. The whole landscape of this wintry journey
through the past would be unbearably sad were it not for
the glints of sunlight provided by the author’s wry,
stoical wit and his unquestionable love for parents
who nonetheless often filled him with pent-up rage
and despair.
When I used to visit my cousin, the publisher Colin
Haycraft, and his wife, the novelist Alice Thomas Ellis,
in their house in Camden Town, I used to hear a lot
about ‘that ghastly woman’ (Haycraft’s frequent phrase)
living in a dilapidated and malodorous van on Bennett’s

LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006

Dec-Jan pp4-63 25/11/05 11:11 am Page 62

GENERAL

forecourt the other side of the fence. Vainly, I used to Bennett defines, with his habitual modesty, the kind of
ask them, ‘Why on earth does he put up with her?’ characters that he writes about as ‘denizens of retirement
They had no satisfactory answer. Bennett, they insisted, homes, ageing aunties, old people on their last legs’. But
was a good egg; but how could even a good egg endure despite its narrow range, Untold Stories never for one
a juxtaposition, year in, year out, to such a (literally) moment makes one skip, groan or yawn. One hesitates
stinking bad egg? Bennett’s play about this solipsistic to use the word ‘great’ of its author, since in him there is
monster eventually provided a gleam of enlightenment. so little fever, fervour or determination to climb the
This strengthened when in this book I learned more highest mountain or grab the farthest star. But I myself
about Mam’s last, terrible years. Most people experience put him up there beside such benevolent, wise, unfail-
an often unacknowledged guilt for not having done ingly entertaining writers as Max Beerbohm, Charles
enough for someone close to them during a long, fatal Lamb and Thomas Love Peacock. I suspect that, like
illness. In enduring so much bother and inconvenience them, he will survive after writers who now make far
from Miss Shepherd on his doorstep, Bennett, immersed more clamorous and passionate demands on the atten-
in his metropolitan life, was clearly making unconscious tion of posterity have long been forgotten.
reparation for, in part at least, neglecting his duty to To order this book at £16, see order form on page 78
Mam in a ‘home’ far away.
Bennett writes brilliantly in a section called ‘Cheeky
Chappies’ about such comedians of his childhood as the
two Tommys, Handley and Trinder, Arthur Askey and
Dickie Henderson. Fastidiously he recoils from their
‘Blitz-defeating cheerfulness: all that knees-up, thumbs
in the lapels down at the old Bull and Bush Cockney
sparrerdom’. Far more to his taste is the camp self-
mockery of that great artist Frankie Howerd or the out-
rageous exploits of the burly, booted pantomime dames
of his youth.
Bennett is always excellent on performers, being, in
his shy, gauche way, a marvellous performer himself.
The accuracy, devoid of malevolence, with which he
conveys that Alec Guinness was a far from likeable char-
acter is masterly. Masterly, too, is his portrait, full of
admiration and affection, of the aged Thora Hird. He is
also astute about his fellow writers and intellectuals. I
particularly admired the manner in which, an usher both
polite and firm, he moves Isaiah Berlin from his seat in
the front stalls of fame to the upper circle.
It was in 1987, at a charity concert, that the host of
the occasion, Ian McKellen, publicly asked Bennett if he
were homosexual. Bennett replied that to put that ques-
tion to him was like asking someone who had just
crawled across the Sahara desert whether they preferred
Malvern or Perrier. The big laugh that followed saved
further embarrassment. But Bennett was, in effect, act-
ing like the patient who, told by his dentist ‘I think that STOP PRESS Readers of the
this had better come out’, then timorously responds, Literary Review will be delighted to
‘Oh, couldn’t we save it?’ Here the door of the closet at lear n of the publication of
last swings wide open. There are even two photographs Illustrations to Unwritten Books, a
of Bennett’s partner. collection of Chr is Riddell’s
Some scrappy pieces near the end vary in quality and witty cartoons, all of which
interest. The best of them is an account of Bennett’s appeared in the magazine.
colon cancer, which, despite gloomy prognostications, The retail price is £5.99 but
he has now mercifully survived for more than five years. the book can be ordered at a
In the otherwise entertaining diary entries there may, for 20% discount via the Literary
some people, be far too much about the viewing of art Review Bookshop. See the
and ancient buildings. order form on page 78.

62
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
Dec-Jan pp4-63 25/11/05 11:11 am Page 63
GENERAL
C RISPIN J ACKSON
Striking Blows
For Freedom
T HE G REATEST F IGHT OF O UR
G ENERATION : L OUIS VS S CHMELING
★ the opening bell of the second fight so that Schmeling
By Lewis A Erenberg
(Oxford University Press 320pp £16.99)
B EYOND G LORY: M AX S CHMELING VS J OE
L OUIS, AND A WORLD ON THE B RINK
★ Harbor, Louis volunteered for the infantry as a private
By David Margolick
(Bloomsbury 432pp £18.99)
THE DEFEAT OF heavyweight boxer Joe Louis by Max
Schmeling in 1936 was one of the greatest upsets in
boxing history. It was also an unfortunate one. Louis was
young, black, apparently clean-living and possessed of a
God-given ability to knock out opponents with either
hand. He was widely expected to win the world title
and so end the racial segregation that still blighted the
sport. Though affable and generally liked in the US, the
much older Schmeling had one irredeemable fault: he
was German, and his twelfth-round knockout of Louis
was inevitably seized upon by the Nazis as proof of their
racist theories. ‘The last round is quite wonderful,’
Goebbels noted in his diary after watching the film of
the fight. ‘He really knocks out the nigger.’
Their second meeting in the ring in June 1938 – by
which time Louis had taken the title from the game but
pedestrian James J Braddock – was a contest of colossal
symbolic importance as it forced white America to
choose between a white boxer who, however inadver-
tently, represented a racist regime, and a black fighter
who stood for tolerance and Uncle Sam. It is for this
reason rather than the fight’s merits – it took Louis little
more than two minutes to batter Schmeling into
submission in what was one of the most one-sided
championship fights in history – that the men’s rivalry
is now commemorated in these two momentously
titled studies.
Erenberg’s is much the better book, analysing (there
are over 400 numbered notes) where Margolick’s merely
itemises. There is minimal contradiction between the
two works, although Erenberg implies that Louis’s
demise in the first fight began with his knockdown in
the fourth round, whereas Margolick quotes Louis’s own
testimony that he was effectively out of the fight after
Schmeling caught him with a big right in the second.
63
However, Erenberg does provide the clue as to how
Louis so comprehensively outfought the German in the
rematch. Watching Louis defeat the tough Basque boxer
Paolino Uzcudun in 1935, Schmeling noted a flaw in his
technique: a tendency to drop his left hand after a jab.
This made Louis particularly susceptible to his own spe-
ciality punch: the right cross. In turn, Louis’s canny
trainer Jack Blackburn made a crucial observation of his
own: that Schmeling needed time to line up his right.
Consequently he told Louis to go for all-out attack from
would be unable to launch an effective counter. This
Louis did, with devastating effect.
Erenberg offers a much more detailed account of the
subsequent careers of the two fighters, which contrasted
as sharply as their boxing styles. Shortly after Pearl
soldier. Although he never saw action, he fought tire-
lessly against segregation in the US armed forces.
Schmeling was dragooned into the Parachute Corps and
endured the horror of the bloody Battle of Crete.
Thereafter his main activity seems to have been making
goodwill visits to Br itish and Amer ican POWs.
Erenberg’s book includes a photograph of him peering
nervously out of the side door of a Junkers 88; he looks
more frightened than he ever did facing Louis. Louis
died in 1981, his body wasted by drug and alcohol
addiction; Schmeling died only this year, a few months
short of his hundredth birthday, having eschewed fast
living for regular sessions on his exercise bike.
Both authors agonise over the extent of Schmeling’s
complicity with the Nazis. It is perhaps reprehensible
that he did not, like Dietrich, turn his back on Germany
when the true complexion of Hitler’s regime became
apparent, but it is absurd to suggest that he fought for
the glorification of National Socialism. As one journalist
so neatly put it, Schmeling had ‘a lyrical enthusiasm for
the American dollar’. He fought for gold and personal
glory: nothing else.
Both authors have chosen to rely entirely on
secondary sources, despite the fact that there must still
be plenty of people alive who remember the two bouts
and the men who fought them. Some years ago I met an
elderly, silver-haired Polish aristocrat who recalled how
his German governess had gloated over Schmeling’s
victory but was resolutely silent the morning after the
second bout. Eventually her young charge plucked
up the courage to ask her who had won the fight.
‘Louis,’ she snorted, ‘but it does not count: Schmeling
is a man, and Louis is just an animal.’ I prefer Jesse
Jackson’s judgement, delivered at Louis’s memorial
service, and quoted by Erenberg: ‘He was our Samson,
our David who slew Goliath … a giant who saved us in
time of trouble.’
To order these books, see order form on page 78
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
Dec-Jan pp4-63 25/11/05 11:11 am Page 64
BAD SEX
THIS IS THE thirteenth anniversary of T OM F LEMING
the Bad Sex in Fiction Award. Its pur-
pose is to gently dissuade writers from
filling their novels with redundant, badly
written or embarrassing passages of sex
Oooh-la-jolly
for the purposes of selling more books.
Just as importantly, it aims to dissuade
their publishers from insisting they do
well-la
so. Fittingly, then, one of the first nominations for this
year’s prize was The Olive Readers (Macmillan) by
Christine Aziz, which earlier this year won Richard and
Judy’s ‘How To Get Published’ competition. This is the
scene in which hero and heroine collide:
We made our way to the summerhouse and hid in its
shadows. We lay on the cool floor and I twined my
legs around Homer’s body, g r ipping him like
a hunter hanging on to its prey.
He made love to me with his
fingers and I came in the palm of
his hand. He stroked my breasts
and neck. ‘Don’t wash it away,’
he said. ‘I want to be able to smell
you tonight.’
What kind of hunter twines its legs
round its prey? Bad sex is often recog-
nisable by such misguided attempts to
emphasise protagonists’ animal instincts.
But in terms of abusing the natural
world, Lobster by Guillaume Lescable
(Dedalus) is in a league of its own. The
surrealist tale of a lobster on board the
Titanic which finds itself helplessly
attracted to a human female, the book
hinges on the ‘life-changing orgasm’
the fishy amorist gives Angelina as the
boat sinks into the icy water:
Lobster swam to her purple feet ...
and climbed up the inside of the
leg as far as the clenched knees. He
was amazed at the pleasure he felt
in being held in this way. His pin-
cers slipped between the thighs, prising them gently
apart. His feelers were just able to reach the satin of
the panties. They fluttered, made the labia quiver.
Under the shimmering material a hint of life was
returning. Angelina’s thighs relaxed. Lobster pulled
back his feelers. Tensed and retensed his tail. His
strokes were fast and powerful. He was making head-
way. He sank himself into her warming muscles; his
tail did not falter.
Lescable’s book, however, is an extreme example, and
will perhaps fail to win owing to its consistent – rather
than occasional or egregious – outlandishness. More
culpable with respect to unsuspecting wildlife is John
Updike. Here is Owen, the hero of his latest novel
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LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
Villages (Hamish Hamilton), exposing
himself to local birdlife:
A flock of crows, six or eight,
raucously rasping at one another,
thrashed into the top of an oak on
the edge of the square of sky. The
heavenly invasion made his heart
race; he looked down at his prick,
silently begging it not to be distracted; his mind
fought skidding into crows and woods, babies and
Phyllis, and his prick stared back at him with its one
eye clouded by a single drop of pure seminal yearn-
ing. He felt suspended at the top of an arc. Faye
leaned back on the blanket, arranging her legs in an
M of receptivity, and he knelt between them like the
most abject and craven supplicant who ever exposed
his bare ass to the eagle eyes of a
bunch of crows.
A multitude of dodgy wildlife similes
can also be found in Tarun J Tejpal’s
The Alchemy of Desire (Picador). Phrases
such as ‘I sucked the eagle wings into
my mouth and began to fly’, and ‘she
saw him begin to surge and flare like a
provoked cobra’ come thick and fast in
this, the debut novel from the editor of
the hard-hitting Indian news website
Tehelka. Tejpal’s interest in anatomy
pervades his entertaining novel:
We began to climb peaks and fall
off them. We did old things in
new ways. And new things in old
ways. At times like these we were
the work of surrealist masters. Any
body part could be joined to any
body part. And it would result in a
master piece. Toe and tongue.
Nipple and penis. Finger and the
bud. Armpit and mouth. Nose
and clitoris. Clavicle and gluteus
maximus. Mons venera and
phallus indica.
The Last Tango of Labia Minora. Circa 1987.
The Last Tango brings us to Marlon Brando’s Fan-Tan
(William Heinemann), co-wr itten with Donald
Cammell, which received several nominations. Annie, it
must be noted, is in fact a man, Captain Anatole
Doultry, a South Seas pirate:
In a moment Annie was on his side, Madame Lai was
like a plant growing over him, and her little fist
(holding the biggest black pearl) was up his asshole
planting the pearl in the most appreciated place.
‘Oh, Lord,’ he cried out. ‘I’m a-comin’!’
She could not answer. It is the one drawback of
fellatio as conscientious as hers that it eliminates the
Dec-Jan pp4-63 25/11/05 11:11 am Page 65
BAD SEX
chance for small talk and poetry alike. But nothing is
exactly perfect in this life, and for Annie Doultry the
delicate but firm pressure on his rear parts was in
perfect harmony with the eruption of his cock. He
came and he came – we are dealing with a hero here.
At one point his lover backed away to inspect the
unaltered gush of it, like a plumber saying to a cus-
tomer, ‘Don’t blame me. This water supply will stop
when the dam’s empty.’
In Giles Coren’s Winkler (Jonathan Cape), we are not
dealing with a hero but with Winkler, the novel’s
eponymous anti-hero; however, this frustrated, unpleas-
ant murderer does manage his own moment of swash-
buckling glory:
And he came hard in her mouth and his dick jumped
around and rattled on her teeth and he blacked out
and she took his dick out of her mouth and lifted
herself from his face and whipped the pillow away
and he gasped and glugged at the air, and he came
again so hard that his dick wrenched out of her hand
and a shot of it hit him straight in the eye and stung
like nothing he’d ever had in there, and he yelled
with the pain, but the yell could have been anything,
and as she grabbed at his dick, which was leaping
around like a shower dropped in an empty bath, she
scratched his back deeply with the nails of both
hands and he shot three more times, in thick stripes
on her chest. Like Zorro.
Big names that look like they’ll miss out this year include
Sebastian Faulks, for Human Traces, and Michel
Houellebecq for The Possibility of an Island. Faulks will be
disappointed to learn he has not won it for a second time,
as the long passage of dialogue/foreplay at the end of his
novel is utterly harmless; Houellebecq, although ostensibly
over-qualified for the prize, in fact writes filth too effec-
tively to be considered. A passage from Salman Rushdie’s
Shalimar the Clown (Jonathan Cape) was more promising:
‘Let’s, you know, caress each other in five places and
kiss in seven ways and make out in nine positions, but
let’s not get carried away.’ In reply, Boonyi pulled her
phiran and shirt off over her head and stood before
him naked except for the little pot of fire hanging
low, below her belly, heating further what was already
hot. ‘Don’t you treat me like a child,’ she said in a
throaty voice that proved she had been unsparing in
her drug abuse. ‘You think I went to all this trouble
just for a kiddie-style session of lick and suck?’
In Gabriel García Márquez’s Memories of My Melancholy
Whores (reviewed on page 68), sex with a fourteen-year-
old virgin is in the nonagenarian narrator’s mind but
never comes to fruition:
As I kissed her the heat of her body increased, and it
exhaled a wild, untamed fragrance. She responded
with new vibrations along every inch of her skin,
and on each one I found a distinctive heat, a unique
65
taste, a different moan, and her entire body resonated
inside with an arpeggio, and her nipples opened and
flowered without being touched.
But there’s nothing kiddie-style about perennial Bad Sex
favour ite Paul Theroux’s Blinding Light (Hamish
Hamilton), whose protagonist is writing an erotic novel,
from which comes this:
Her touch was surer and so finely judged that she
seemed to feel in the throb of his cock the spasm of
his juice rising – knew even before he did that he
was about to come. Then he knew, his body began
to convulse, and as he cried ‘No’ – because she had
let go – she pushed him backward onto the seat and
pressed her face down, lapping his cock into her
mouth, curling her tongue around it, and the sud-
denness of it, the snaking of her tongue, the pressure
of her lips, the hot grip of her mouth, triggered his
orgasm, which was not juice at all but a demon eel
thrashing in his loins and swimming swiftly up his
cock, one whole creature of live slime fighting the
stiffness as it rose and bulged at the tip and darted
into her mouth.
Entries are still coming in at this point. The winner will
be announced on 1 December at the Bad Sex Party. Other
writers under consideration are J M Coetzee, André
Brink, David Grossman, and Ben Elton, from whose The
First Casualty (Bantam Press) comes this last passage:
Murray was a nurse and used to undressing men; it
was not long before she had found what she was
looking for and liberated his straining manhood, and
then he gasped out loud. The warmth of her mouth
on him was almost too much to bear.
‘Oh Jesus. Yes!’ he gasped as her lips and teeth
closed savagely around him and he felt the tip of her
tongue poking and probing. Then, just when he was
beginning to think that he must explode, her mouth
was gone and in its place he felt her hands once more
and he smelt the unmistakable smell of oiled rubber.
‘Glad this wasn’t hanging on the line to dry when
you saw my room,’ he heard her say. ‘I think even I
would have been embarrassed.’
She slipped the big thick rubber sheath over him
and then pulled him down to her. Kingsley soon dis-
covered that beneath her skirt she was wearing noth-
ing. He felt the thick, luxuriant bush of soft wet hair
between her legs and in a moment he was buried
inside it.
‘Ooh-la-la!’ she breathed as he smelt the clean
aroma of her short bobbed hair and the rain-sodden
grass around it. ‘Oooh-la-jolly well-la!’
And so they made love together in the pouring
rain, with Nurse Murray emitting a stream of girlish
exclamations which seemed to indicate that she was
enjoying herself. ‘Gosh’, ‘Golly’ and, as things
moved towards a conclusion, even ‘Tally ho!’
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
Dec-Jan pp4-63 25/11/05 11:11 am Page 66
FICTION
J OHN D UGDALE
The First
American Liberator
T HE M ARCH
★ Doctorow depicts the March (just as the earlier author
By E L Doctorow
(Little, Brown 384pp £10.99)
EVIDENCE CONTINUES TO accumulate that America’s
senior novelists have got their hands on some literary
equivalent of Viagra. It’s not just that Messrs Wolfe (b
1931), Updike (b 1932), Roth (b 1933), McCarthy (b
1933) and the late Saul Bellow (b 1915) remain or
remained productive as septuagenarians; but also that
instead of producing the kind of fiction – either pared-
down and wintry, or self-parodically rarefied or woolly –
normally associated with a late phase, they create exact-
ing structures and write vigorous, surging prose. Their
role models are the raging later Yeats, source of the titles
of recent works by Roth and McCarthy, and T S Eliot,
who wrote that old men ought to be explorers.
The phenomenon is illustrated again by this splendid
novel by E L Doctorow (b 1931), which follows the
march to the sea through Georgia of General Sherman’s
Union army after the fall of Atlanta; and then his
northward thrust from Savannah through the Carolinas,
concluding with the Confederate sur render and
Lincoln’s assassination in the spring of 1865.
Other historical figures besides Sherman, including
Lincoln and Grant, are also depicted. But the bulk of the
teeming novel’s fifty-odd characters are imagined –
soldiers on both sides, assorted camp-followers, freed
slaves, and dispossessed southern gentry. Among the
most memorable are Pearl, the sassy pale-skinned daugh-
ter of a landowner and a slave, who becomes a drummer
and later nurse in the Union army (and who can be seen
as the author’s answer to Scarlett O’Hara – bi-racial and
admirably altruistic, but similarly embodying southern
resilience); Arly and Will, rogues first seen in
Confederate uniform who switch sides several times;
and Wrede Sartorius, a pioneering army surgeon.
Doctorow, whose oeuvre includes works set in the
1870s, 1910s, 1930s and 1950s, favours historical fiction
with multiple narrative centres. As in his best-known
novel, Ragtime, the individual stories criss-cross here like
the musical themes of a fugue, though the size of the
cast makes the patterning far more elaborate. He delights
too in making connections between his characters, no
matter how disparate: Sherman, for example, notices
Pearl when the teenager shouts a greeting to the passing
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LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
general; he is nearly murdered by Arly; and he asks
Sartorius to accompany him to a meeting with Lincoln.
The name Sartorius looks like a nod to Faulkner’s
Sartoris family, and other influences are discernible. The
tear-jerking set-piece scenes, as when Pearl witnesses her
white father’s death, seem to be modelled on Uncle Tom’s
Cabin; while the device of giving the main characters
soliloquy-like interior monologues is taken from Moby-
Dick. That’s not the only borrowing from Melville, as
depicted his whaling-ship) as a self-contained world,
exhibiting an almost complete spectrum of human activ-
ity and experience.
There are parallels too between Ahab and Sherman,
with the vengeful ferocity of the hunt for the white
whale mirrored in the campaign’s cruelty. Doctorow
offers a complex portrait of his troubled, restless central
character, focusing on two paradoxes: that the man who
waged vicious war on the South’s civilian population,
burning their cities and looting their food and posses-
sions, was also capable of writing a letter sympathising
with a Confederate general whose son had died in bat-
tle; and that the great freer of black people was capable
of racism, as when, vexed that thousands of freed slaves
had encumbered his army by following it, he told his
officers: ‘we must divest ourselves of surplus horses,
mules, and Negroes’.
While The March mimics nineteenth-century fiction,
its military resonances are modern. After capturing
Savannah, for instance, a relaxed Sherman is described as
‘humming “The Ride of the Valkyries”’. This is surely
an anachronism – Wagner’s composition did not receive
its US premiere until 1872 – but the reference invites
the reader to link 1860s Georgia with 1960s Vietnam,
via the famous helicopter-raid scene in Apocalypse Now.
And it’s not too far a stretch to see the March to the
Sea as also prefiguring the recent US invasion of Iraq,
presumably unfolding while the novel was being writ-
ten. Tellingly, what Doctorow zeroes in on in Sherman
is his frustration when the army is neither marching nor
fighting, and he is reluctantly responsible for the welfare
of former slaves and the administration of captured
cities. He becomes the prototype of the American liber-
ator: expert at destruction, inept at reconstruction.
As politically and psychologically shrewd as Gore
Vidal’s Lincoln, The March would be a remarkable
achievement if it consisted only of this historical portrait
and a vivid evocation of warfare. But it also recounts,
with unflagging energy, a host of other stories, and
hence fills a glaring gap in the American canon. There
are fine fictional studies of the Civil War, notably
Stephen Crane’s novella The Red Badge of Courage; but
no one before has risen to the challenge of producing a
polyphonic novel of almost Tolstoyan ambition.
To order this book at £8.79, see order form on page 78
Dec-Jan pp4-63 25/11/05 11:11 am Page 67

FICTION

O PHELIA F IELD children scavenging on rubbish piles. His medical treat-

ment only exaggerates the general truth that each of our
ECOLOGY AND EXISTENCE contributions to the earth’s pollution does unseen damage.
Before the cancer, Paul had in fact been opposing the
development of a pebble-bed nuclear reactor – a campaign
G ET A L IFE which, like those against a toll road through the
★ Pondoland Wild Coast and the damming of the Okavango
By Nadine Gordimer Delta, has been a real environmental cause in Southern
(Bloomsbury 187pp £16.99) Africa, borrowed by Gordimer for service in this novel.
Another broad question that is implied, if never directly
GET A LIFE is not about one life but four: it examines two asked, is the relative weight of different varieties of disaster.
marriages in South Africa, that of an ecologist named Paul How does the impact of one’s own cancer weigh up against
and his wife Benni/Berenice (alternating names for the environmental destruction, the Aids epidemic, or the list of
alternate ways in which she is viewed from one sentence other problems remaining in post-apartheid South Africa?
to the next) and that of Paul’s parents, Lyndsay and Adrian. Gordimer depicts the black characters – Paul’s parents’
In his thirties, Paul discovers he has thyroid cancer and housekeeper and his colleague Thapelo – as oddly dismis-
may die. It says everything about Gordimer’s talent that the sive of the risk of contagious radiation, as if it does not reg-
scene in which this news is delivered is so throat-tighten- ister on their own Geiger counters of risk and hardship. It
ingly sad even within the first ten pages of the book. Paul’s emerges that Thapelo once spent seventeen months in soli-
treatment is discovered to require doses of radioactive tary confinement under the apartheid regime – a hardship
iodine, which will leave his body radioactive for sixteen which, perhaps even more than the author intends, casts a
days. To avoid exposing his wife and young son, Paul critical light on Paul’s sixteen-day emotional meltdown.
spends this period at his parents’ house, and there he has Paul’s mother, meanwhile, is in the grip of belated guilt
something of an existential crisis. That he has such a reac- about a four-year extra-marital affair. This affair has
tion to a mere sixteen days of quarantine is never entirely become an ‘artefact’ of memory, which she now regrets as
plausible. Gordimer’s verb tenses try hard, in the face of an interruption in the ‘historical continuity of life’, what-
facts, to suggest that he is serving a much longer sentence, ever that may be. What connects her story to her son’s is
and in this way the first half of the novel feels like a short the theme of mortality, the realisation that there is only a
story stretched beyond its natural length. It would be more limited number of choices per lifetime. More, Gordimer’s
plausible, perhaps, to have explained Paul’s crisis as due not four main characters each come to feel that they are fun-
to the stranger-than-fiction ‘emanation’ and the metaphor- damentally alone. Unfortunately, this philosophical reali-
ical apartheid it imposes, but to the fact he may be dying. sation seems to make them all behave rather alike, with an
Gordimer once wrote that ‘a novelist does not give ultra-liberal laissez faire that diffuses any drama.
answers but asks questions’. In this, her fourteenth novel, Gordimer’s prose is becoming both knottier and less mus-
many of the broadest questions are the familiar ones of cular with age. It is sparing with signposts, such as punctua-
her earlier work. How the personal and political coexist, tion, and therefore one can more clearly appreciate the skill
for example, is asked in relation to how Paul’s ecological with which she conveys whose head one is inside in each
activism is compromised by domesticity – in particular, sentence, whether words are thought, spoken or written,
being married to an advertising agent whose company and whether they are meant to be in past or present. There
has contracts with ecology-blind developers. Paul both is also a lyrical circling back to certain words – ‘nuclear’,
questions and tries to explain Berenice’s lack of political ‘avocation’, ‘susurration’, ‘self ’. These stylistic demands on
convictions: ‘What is it? A the reader’s orientation skills
terrible lack. A kind of awful UNIVERSITY OF LONDON would be fine if it were not
pur ity? A virginity; or SCHOOL OF ADVANCED STUDY for the fact that the plot loses
INSTITUTE of ENGLISH STUDIES
underdevelopment.’ its way in the final quarter.
His soul-searching is caused MA in HISTORY OF THE BOOK The environmental issues start
(Ref: HOBLR05)
not only by the quarantine, An unparalleled interdisciplinary opportunity to study the book’s influence on cultural to rise like muddy, ill-
but by the ironies it exposes: and intellectual change, emphasising creation, publication, manufacture, distribution,
reception, and survival.
explained floodwaters and
the fact that radiation is sav- MA in NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL LITERATURES IN
almost submerge the four
ing his life (paid for by his ENGLISH (NILE) main characters, about whom
(Ref: NILELR05)
wife’s advertising salary), This MA applies an historical, interdisciplinary and cross-cultural methodology while
– strangely – one cares more
while it risks polluting others engaging fully with on-going debates about post-colonial and theoretical issues. at the beginning of the book
– the contaminated paper Bursaries available than at the end.
plates he throws out may be Contact: IES, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU
fax: 020 7862 8720; e-mail: ies@sas.ac.uk; web: www.sas.ac.uk/ies
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handled, he fears, by poor see order form on page 78

67
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
Dec-Jan pp4-63 25/11/05 11:11 am Page 68
FICTION
S EBASTIAN S HAKESPEARE
STING IN THE TALE
N OTHING T HAT M EETS THE E YE : T HE
U NCOLLECTED S TORIES OF
PATRICIA H IGHSMITH
★ Door is Always Open and the Welcome Mat is Out’ fea-
(Bloomsbury 464pp £20)
THIS BOOK IS a treat. Most of the twenty-eight stories
here have never been published before. Others have
appeared in a variety of recherché journals, such as
German Playboy. Patricia Highsmith made her name as a
crime novelist with her debut, Strangers on a Train. It was
published when she was twenty-nine and was made into a
film by Alfred Hitchcock. Her five Ripley novels cement-
ed her reputation. However she tended to hide her short
stories under a bushel – her first collection, Eleven, did
not appear until 1970 – and she destroyed many ‘rotten,
old stories’ that did not meet her exacting standards.
When she died in 1995, unappreciated in her native
America, she left behind a huge archive of papers that
stretched 150 feet in length. It is a tribute to the editors of
this volume that they have ploughed diligently through
her files and rescued these tales from oblivion. Two or
three of them stand comparison with her best work.
The fourteen early stories, which date from 1938 to
1949, show she had a remarkable facility for the short-
story form from an early age. They are complex psycho-
logical tales masked by a deceptively simple style.
Graham Greene commended her as a poet of apprehen-
sion rather than fear. This book provides ample proof of
his dictum. She can instil foreboding with just a stroke
of her pen. An empty restaurant is described as ‘a ceme-
tery of white-clothed tables’. A tramp’s ear is ‘a daub of
white flesh like the opening of a balloon tied with
string’. In Highsmith’s fiction the Devil is in the detail.
Her characters are middle-aged men and women who
lead unremarkable lives. They tend to be oppressed by rou-
tine and city life. New York, the backdrop for many tales,
is ‘unfriendly’ and ‘its cramped fury seemed like a disease’.
People are as insignificant kitchen matches or candle wicks.
A post-office employee fantasises about murdering his
fellow workers to escape his daily drudgery. A man
props up a bar day after day waiting for someone to walk
in and rescue him. Hopes are raised and cruelly dashed.
A shopkeeper is left a huge financial bequest and then
loses it all overboard a ship.
The stories are by no means faultless. There are quite a
few duff lines (‘the ponderous sun that staggered throb-
bingly upward’ – have you ever seen the sun stagger?) and
rather too many melodramatic denouements. ‘A Girl like
Phyl’ is about a man who recognises the daughter of an
68
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
old lover on a plane and invites her back to his hotel
room without letting on about his previous dalliance. The
girl ends up propositioning him. It is a wonderful conceit
but the story is marred by its contrived ending. Too often
the tales conclude in murder or suicide. The conventions
of the crime genre were clearly hard to shake off.
Paradoxically, it is the quieter tales that create more of
an impression and linger longer in the mind. ‘Where the
tures a neurotic New Yorker being visited by her sister
in her noisy, confined apartment. Far from being an
occasion of joy, the visit only compounds her sense of
failure. The women in this volume are given more
depth and poignancy than their male counterparts.
Mrs Blynn on her deathbed reflects that life ‘is a long
mistaken shutting of the heart’. The strait-laced Mrs
Robinson looks on at a pair of lovers in the park with a
mix of longing and pride: ‘the blond girl had seen the
glance, seen in it for all its fleetness the ancient and
imperishable look that one woman gives another she
knows is well loved, a look made up of desire, admira-
tion, wistfulness, of envy and vicar ious pleasure,
unveiled for an instant and then veiled again’. It’s the
veiling and unveiling of emotion that Highsmith cap-
tures with such scrupulous accuracy.
In the opening tale, ‘Mightiest Mornings’, ‘the train
crept on northward, carrying into nowhere the prints of
his ten fingers on its gritty sills’. Luckily, the prints
Patricia Highsmith left behind are still with us.
To order this book at £16, see order form on page 78
S AM L EITH
SEX AND SENILITY
M EMORIES OF M Y M ELANCHOLY W HORES
★
By Gabriel García Márquez
(Jonathan Cape 115pp £10)
AS OPENING LINES go, it’s undoubtedly an eyecatcher:
‘The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the
gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.’
Lord alone knows what they put in the water in South
America, but I want some. Consider, though, aside from
the goatish premise and the gentle self-mockery of ‘wild
love’, how that sentence sets out Márquez’s stall. That
phrase: ‘give myself the gift’. It implies, first, that there’s
nobody else to give the narrator a present; and it hints
too at his extraordinary self-absorption. Also, there’s the
suggestion of a transaction – the adolescent virgin’s par-
ticipation in the festivities is, as it were, in the narrator’s
gift. She’s a sure thing. She’s a whore.
Márquez’s nameless narrator – who enjoys the advan-
Dec-Jan pp4-63 25/11/05 11:11 am Page 69

FICTION
LOVE LIES
tage of what is at one point described as ‘the tool of a
galley slave’ and at another a ‘burro’s cock’ – is, in fact,
BLEEDING
an inveterate visitor of brothels: ‘I have never gone to
bed with a woman I didn’t pay, and the few who weren’t by Jeremy Simpson
in the profession I persuaded, by argument or force, to
take money even if they threw it in the trash.’
A veteran Sunday newspaper columnist of, as he
describes it, limited gifts, our narrator sees himself as ‘ugly,
shy and anachronistic ... the end of a line, without merit or
brilliance’. His body is subject to mysterious, shifting pains;
his asshole burns; he has no friends. He has spent his ninety
years ‘without wife or fortune’, living in the same house his
parents inhabited, and both hopes and expects to die alone,
painlessly, in the same bed in which he was born.
Yet, he promises us, this memoir contains the one thing
in his life of unique distinction: the story of his ‘one great
love’. A very odd story it is, too; a very odd sort of love.
What happens is this. The narrator telephones a local ‘A riotously eccentric novel to do with
procuress, who gets hold of an unnamed fourteen-year- lost treasure, the church, miracles and
old girl, virginity guaranteed. The girl is so terrified of
being deflowered – a friend, she heard, bled to death – romantic love’
Dame Beryl Bainbridge
that she has to be heavily sedated. When our gallant turns
up, he finds her naked, coated in make-up, and fast asleep.
He is enraptured. Instead of invading her, he lets her sleep ‘A splendidly entertaining and moving story’
– spending the night beside her and crooning love songs Rowan Williams
in her ear. The non-one-night-stand becomes a non- Archbishop of Canterbury
affair: night after night, he comes back to the girl and
watches her sleep. He decorates her room in the brothel; ‘The relish with which Jeremy Simpson creates a
leaves her gifts. He gives her a name, ‘Delgadina’. seeming impasse and then cavalierly complicates it
Does all this sentimentality redeem the fact of an old with subsidiary twists is admirable. On more than
man’s buying the chance to have sex with a dirt-poor
and heavily drugged child? In our world, I’d incline to one occasion, I found myself saying “He’s over-
think not, but the question feels, weirdly, beside the reached himself this time”, only to find myself
point. Márquez isn’t really interested at all in morality applauding the solution.
here (though he winks at us, I think, when he describes This is an absorbing read: one’s interest never flags
his hero reading the Arabian Nights to the sleeping girl
‘in a version sanitized for children’). This is a fabular, and my concern for the pleasing resolution of the
subtly paradoxical environment. problems lasted until the very end.’
Memories of My Melancholy Whores starts out looking as Henry Hely-Hutchinson The Catholic Herald
if it might be a Lolita story – but it isn’t; Delgadina
never wakes up, so the complex mental entanglement of A cursed Elizabethan manuscript ... untold wealth
a Humbert and Dolores is entirely absent. It looks, at ... a love affair. These are the ingredients of Jeremy
another point, as though it might be a sort of magical- Simpson’s pleasant new novel.The adventurous
realist riff on a Philip Roth theme: sex as part of an old
man’s struggle against death – but it isn’t; there’s no sex. plot carries the reader along happily.
It may in fact, with its whiff of allegory and its under- Philip Womack The Literary Review
tow of creepiness, be closer to The Collector.
This book declares itself a love story, but it presents a very Love Lies Bleeding is published by The Book Guild
skewed understanding of love; or, rather, the narrator does. and is available from Heywood Hill bookshop
Sex and love are understood as opposites: having declared and all leading booksellers.
that ‘sex is the consolation one has for not finding enough
love’, Márquez’s narrator then undergoes a unique romantic Readers can also order copies by telephoning 01825 723398
ecstasy that depends on not having sex. The ‘lovers’ never or by e-mailing sales@vinehouseuk.co.uk
even exchange a word. Delgadina is pure object. Does she ISBN 1-85776-826-4
symbolise the Eternal Feminine, or incarnate the idea of the £17.95 including UK postage and packing
Please quote reference LR when ordering

LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006

Dec-Jan pp4-63 25/11/05 11:11 am Page 70
FICTION
narrator’s own fugitive youth? A bit of both, I think.
At one point, he rejoices: ‘I had her in my memory
with so much clarity that I could do what I wanted with
her. I changed the colour of her eyes according to my
state of mind ... I dressed her according to the age and
condition that suited my changes of mood ...’
Something else, also, stalks the pages. A message appears,
written in lipstick, unexplained: ‘The tiger does not eat
far away.’ The narrator is given a cat for his birthday – a
very elderly cat – and writes a column asking ‘Is the Cat
a Minuscule Salon Tiger?’
Márquez’s first novel in a decade is a very slender book.
But it is seeded with odd little paradoxes; tense, careful,
deadpan; really, often, baffling. If it is, as some have sug-
gested, a five-finger exercise, those fingers – gnarled,
nonagenarian – are much nimbler than they look.
To order this book at £8, see order form on page 78
J OANNA K AVENNA
SCANDINAVIAN SHORTS
L EOPARD VI: T HE N ORWEGIAN F EELING
FOR R EAL
★ More ser ious, it seems, is the contrast between
Edited by Harald Bache-Wiig, Birgit Bjerck and Jan Kjærstad
(The Harvill Press 269pp £16.99)
THIS YEAR, NORWAY is celebrating a century of inde-
pendence since the union with Sweden was dissolved in
1905. As part of the celebrations, and with the endorse-
ment of the Norwegian monarchy, Harvill has published
this intriguing collection of Norwegian short stories. At
the time of independence, Norway was a poor country,
its people barely sustained by coastal industries. The
explorer Fridtjof Nansen, who played a leading part in
independence negotiations, told the Norwegians to look
to the land for consolation: ‘It’s a fine thing for a people
to have a beautiful land, be it never so poor.’ With the
discovery of oil, the land supplied further consolations
for the Norwegians, transforming Nansen’s peasant
nation. Norway remains ill at ease with its new-found
affluence, striving to spend its wealth well. The country
participates eagerly in international development and is a
generous donor to emergency funds – after the Asian
tsunami last year, Norway (population 4 million or so)
gave $182 million, as opposed to Britain’s $96 million
and France’s $66 million.
The stories in The Norwegian Feeling for Real portray a
country in transition, half in love with its simple rustic
past, yet aware of the global responsibilities attendant
upon a rich, liberal country. For these writers, the rural
landscape is the locus for national history, its silent fjords
scattered with ghosts of the dead. The opening story of
70
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
the collection, Hans Herbjør nsrud’s ‘On an Old
Far mstead in Europe’, retraces the histor y of a
Norwegian farm, from the sixteenth-century antics of a
medicine woman who ‘treated the sick with healing
lotions made from bat blood, baby fat, beaver glands,
corpse sweat, ear wax from virgins, semen from swains,
werewolf spittle’ to the more prosaic present. The land
supplies a sense of continuity with this simpler past:
‘Every time I till the fields there in spring, the harrow
clanks against foundation stones forced into the light by
the ground frost.’ Yet in Øystein Lønn’s ‘It’s So Damned
Quiet’, autumn stillness seems like suspense: ‘It’s com-
pletely silent. Not a sound. There’s no way it can last.’
The city and the world are encroaching on these quiet
valleys; in Ragnar Hovland’s ‘The Last Beat Poets in Mid-
Hordland’, the influence of America seeps into an obscure
village, as two country boys drink Cokes and write exe-
crable sub-Ginsberg verse. Yet the transition is played for
laughs; the denizens of the village stamp out the boys’
attempt at counterculture, and normality is resumed. Lars
Saabye Christensen’s piece, ‘The Jealous Barber’, mixes up
the intimacy of a small community with the anonymity of
the city, to equally comic effect. A man changes his barber,
thinking no one will notice; the barber, however, responds
with furious accusations of betrayal and threats of violence.
Norwegian wealth and global poverty. For writers such as
Jan Kjærstad and Per Petterson, Africa is the spectre haunt-
ing Norway, a question demanding an answer. In ‘The
Moon over the Gate’, Petterson’s narrator stands in central
Oslo, thinking of Africa as ‘night’: ‘Others seek change,’
he writes, ‘desire to change themselves completely, and to
achieve that they must go through the night, go into the
desert and perhaps let the burning dry wind of change
blow through their bodies and blow their souls clean; let
the desert re-educate them in elementary things.’ Africa is
a purgatorial place where one confronts reality, away from
the incubating luxuries of the West. Yet for Kjærstad, in
‘Homecoming’, this perspective is denounced as ‘fairy
tales and lies’, spun by those who ‘didn’t want to under-
stand, they only wanted to be seduced’.
In Jostein Gaarder’s ‘The Catalogue,’ a sci-fi tale, a
‘catalogue’ is described, in which every human is
encouraged to write an aphorism next to their name,
expressing their worldview. The idea of the catalogue is
that ‘nobody lives in vain’: ‘Every name appears in the
Catalogue. Everyone gets the chance to say and believe
something that will be preserved for all time.’ The narra-
tor finds this endeavour futile in the end, yet people
commit to it all the same, determined to write some-
thing in the sand. It is a good metaphor for this fine col-
lection, which supplies a compelling glimpse of a nation
that has been forced to redefine itself, trying to forge a
balance between idealism and realism.
To order this book at £13.59, see order form on page 78
Dec-Jan pp4-63 25/11/05 5:30 pm Page 71
Dec-Jan pp4-63 25/11/05 11:11 am Page 72
SILENCED VOICES
IN THE LR of August 2004 I highlight- L UCY P OPESCU
ed the Sandhaanu case in the Maldives,
and also wrote about the writer and M OHAMED N ASHEED
politician Mohamed Nasheed, an
elected member of parliament who was ‘expelled’ while
he was in detention. An advocate of reform, Nasheed
has been harassed and periodically detained since 1990.
Not allowed to earn a living as a journalist or to publish
his work as a historian in his own country, he was subse-
quently granted political asylum in the UK.
On 30 April this year Nasheed decided to return to
the Maldives, in order to further establish the opposi-
tion, Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP), of which he
is a co-founder. He had been creating awareness of the
Party in the international sphere prior to returning to
the Maldives. Nasheed pressed the government to allow
the registration of political parties, and in June parlia-
ment unanimously voted to back plans to give the
nation its first multi-party democracy, allowing political
parties to register and fight elections for the first time.
Nasheed spoke to me before he left and was particu-
larly anxious that human rights organisations remained
alert to his situation, in case he was re-arrested. He had
been tortured during previous detentions and considered
himself a primary target of President Gayoom, who,
having ruled the country for more than twenty-five
years, is Asia’s longest-serving leader. It was not long
before his worst fears were confirmed. On 12 August
Nasheed took part in a peaceful vigil in the central
square of the capital, Malé, in remembrance of the
crackdown on peaceful demonstrations held a year
before, known locally as ‘Black Friday’. The riot police
moved in and the politician and several members of the
MDP were arrested and forcibly removed from the area.
This was followed by demonstrations calling for his
release and the resignation of President Gayoom.
According to BBC reports, officials initially said Nasheed
had been held for his own safety and to help disperse a
600-strong crowd. Around 100 others were also held. But
the politician was charged on 23 August 2005 with ‘terror-
ism’ and ‘sedition’ for a speech he made in July, and faces a
sentence of between two years and life. Nasheed is accused
of saying the President would face ‘a violent overthrow’
unless he held democratic elections or stepped down.
PEN and other human rights organisations consider
that the charges are completely without foundation and
that the opposition leader is being persecuted in order to
curb his legitimate political activities.
The Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs responded to
PEN’s appeals by stating, ‘Mr Nasheed is arrested on sus-
picion of instigating public disorder and violence’. In fact,
his arrest was captured on camera and there is an amateur
video recording available on the Internet showing
Nasheed and three other peaceful protesters sitting on the
ground surrounded by riot police. There are also pho-
72
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
tographs of Nasheed being dragged
along the ground by the riot police.
According to David Hardingham,
founder of the UK-based human
rights campaigners, Friends of Maldives (FoM), Nasheed
has been refused basic safeguards of due process and is
unaware of the specific charges or evidence against him
so is unable to prepare a defence.
Hari Kunzru highlighted Nasheed’s case in a highly
critical article on the Maldives he wrote for the travel
section of The Observer on 16 October 2005. Soon after,
we received details of an angry response apparently pub-
lished in a government newsletter, containing the threat,
‘Kunzru if you need to chill out, I suggest you go to
Michu Bichu [sic]. How do you sign up for this destina-
tion? Meet me in a dark lane and I will tell you how.’ At
the same time, PEN was derided as ‘an organization that
has lost all credibility for entertaining losers and jobless
writers who lament over their own woe tales’.
It becomes more and more apparent that these idyllic
holiday islands harbour a heart of darkness, and that inter-
national pressure is crucial. The British government could
become more active in encouraging the Maldivian govern-
ment to carry through democratic reforms. In the most
recent human rights report, compiled by the Foreign and
Commonwealth Office, the sole caveat mentioned in
respect of the Maldives is that ‘the constitution proclaims
Islam as the only per mitted faith.’ An Amnesty
International delegation visiting the Maldives in October
2004 gathered ‘detailed and consistent testimonies [that]
showed detainees had been … subjected to physical assault,
food deprivation, and in some cases, to sexual violence. No
one has been brought to justice for these abuses.’
Worryingly, Nasheed’s arrest and trial follows a famil-
iar pattern for opponents of the government. Jennifer
Latheef, an outspoken human rights activist, pro-
democracy campaigner and daughter of the co-founder
of the MDP, Mohamed Latheef, was recently given a
ten-year jail sentence for exercising her right to peaceful
protest in 2003. Amnesty deems the sentencing of
Jennifer Latheef to be politically motivated and is con-
cerned that she has not received a fair trial.
Readers may like to send appeals calling for Mohamed
Nasheed’s immediate and unconditional release (in
accordance with Article 19 of the United Nations
Universal Declaration on Human Rights), and seeking
immediate guarantees that Nasheed is being treated
humanely and granted any necessary medical care to:
His Excellency President Maumoon Abdul
Gayoom
The President’s Palace
Maafannu Theemuge
Malé 2002
Republic of Maldives
Fax: 00 960 32 55 00
Dec-Jan pp4-63 25/11/05 11:11 am Page 73

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Dec-Jan pp4-63 25/11/05 11:11 am Page 74
N IGHT & DAY G RAND P OETRY P RIZE
N OEL P ETTY continues his recent R EPORT BY T OM F LEMING
run of form and once more makes
off with first prize, generously provided by the Mail on
Sunday, for his poem on the subject of ‘On the Wing’.
The judges so enjoyed Paul Griffin’s ‘Pantoum’ that it
FIRST PRIZE
COMING BACK TO EARTH by Noel Petty
When I was six, an odd thing puzzled me:
My father sometimes mentioned things he’d seen
When flying missions for the RFC
Back in the old war, nineteenseventeen.
My father? That most scrupulous of men,
Hair brushed, shoes brightly shone, umbrella furled,
Precise and trim? How could I fit him then
Into the growing jigsaw of my world?
For this was nineteenforty, and the sky
Was filled with heroes, children of the gods,
Silkscarfed, blasé, but ready to defy
With careless grace incalculable odds.
Yet it was true, for in the loft one night
I found his flyingcoat, his pilot’s wings
And snapshots of him ready to take flight
In some cat’scradle plane of struts and strings.
It was some years before I learned to square
That strange dichotomy and see him true:
That same precision, sense of order, care
Might be the reason he – and I – came through.
SECOND PRIZE
OVERHEAD by D A Prince
Familiar overhead as vapour trails
dissolving into cloud, the heavy flight
of crows goes unremarked most days their glide
on ragged wings between the pines, the sight
of sentinels on chimney stacks, their call
part of the landscape’s loud indifference.
Their strut and bullywalk defines the streets,
just as the magpies’ squalling preference
spells out in black and white the leafier trees.
The ground’s staked out between them plot by plot,
in various shades of truce; uneasy peace
that flares to battlepitch, that brings a knot
of ugly reinforcements, darkening
the sky like falling angels, the Satanic powers.
Disputed spaces, territorial spats:
we watch their endless wars, as they watch ours.
ON THE WING by J Garth Taylor
Of all the honeybees, a drone
Is hardest done by. He alone
74
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
has been printed, although as a trans-
lation it does not technically qualify.
Next month’s subject is ‘The Modern Gentleman’.
Entries should reach 44 Lexington Street, London W1F
0LW by 24 January.
Is called upon to bear the plight
Of mating with his queen in flight.
Lest you should think this sounds like fun,
Recall that, when the drone is done,
A chunk of his anatomy
Stays lodged within the female bee.
This loss will cause the drone to die
And thus, his triumph in the sky
(One single mating on the wing)
Will cost him both his life and thing.
The way that bees are made to mate
Should worry those who propagate
That pseudo scientific line
They call ‘intelligent design.’
ONE WING by Alanna Blake
Where had the body gone, and the other wing?
This one lay
on the back door step where they left as gifts
their nightly prey:
Various mice, a blankeyed baby shrew,
a bloody rat;
once a woodpigeon, clearly victim of
more than one cat.
Threadlike, those bones with their miniature knots
in a frail fan
sundried to ivory spread on my hand
their twoinch span.
Only a shrivelled scrap of brown at the tip
bleakly referred
my thoughts to feathers on the final flight
of one small bird.
DAEDALUS by D Shepherd
King Minos sat in his palace.
They came to him and said
‘The news we bring, 0 mighty King,
Concerns an act of murdering:
The Minotaur is dead’,
‘What in the labyrinth?’ he cried,
‘Killed in that secret maze?
In its design there’s no straight line,
Dec-Jan pp4-63 25/11/05 11:11 am Page 75
N IGHT & DAY G RAND P OETRY P RIZE
Its passages are serpentine,
Misleading are its ways’.
The messengers stood ill at ease.
‘One name’ they said, ‘occurs to us.
Nobody knows where each path goes
Nor to assassins can expose
But the designer: Daedalus’.
‘This knowledge, then, did he impart
To aid whoever did the deed?
Out! Out! and seek that wily Greek;
We’ve thumbscrews here to make him speak
And bring him hither with all speed’.
They said ‘It seems he has escaped.
The peasants saw it happening:
They say he flew and swear it’s true
And that he waved them all adieu
As he was on the wing’.
PANTOUM by Paul Griffin
On the wing, while the butterflies flutter and tease,
To the rocks in the sea they are taking their flight;
Oh, the heart in my bosom has never known ease
From my earliest days to this moment I write!
AUDIOBOOK
T HE F IRST C ASUALTY
★
By Ben Elton (Abridged)
Read by Jack Davenport
(Random House Audio 3 CDs £13.99)
THIS IS THE versatile Ben Elton’s first historical novel.
Set in 1917, the wrenching horror of the First World
War is haunting. An infantryman carrying a huge roll of
barbed wire strapped to his back slips and disappears into
the mud of Flanders. In an English court, Inspector
Kingsley, one of the Yard’s celebrated detectives, is sen-
tenced to two years in prison as a conscientious objec-
tor. Put in a cell with three vicious prisoners who were
caught by him, he knows he will not survive. Agnes, his
adored wife, shunned by her neighbours, visits him long
enough to return her wedding ring. In London, Captain
the Viscount Abercrombie – poet, soldier and the
nation’s hero – spends his leave in a homosexual club.
When he returns to combat in Flanders, he becomes
shell-shocked. Recuperating in a makeshift hospital
behind the lines, Abercrombie is murdered and scandal
threatens the government. Thus Kingsley, already badly
injured by his cellmates, is reprieved and sent to France
with a new name to find the killer. Jack Davenport’s
reading adds to the macabre excitement. Susan Crosland
75
To the rocks in the sea they are taking their flight,
And the vulture to Bandam is wheeling to fly,
From my earliest days to this moment I write
Young men have attracted my worshipping eye.
And, the vulture to Bandam is wheeling to fly,
At Patani his feathers drift down through the air;
Young men have attracted my worshipping eye,
Yet none with the man of my choice can compare.
At Patani his feathers drift down through the air,
Look, there are a male and a female dove;
Yet none with the man of my choice can compare,
So clever is he at arousing my love.
Look, there are a male and a female dove
On the wing, while the butterflies flutter and tease;
So clever is he at arousing my love
Oh, the heart in my bosom has never known ease!
NOTE: The original of this appears in French in Pierre
Albouy’s notes for the Gallimard edition of Victor Hugo
‘Les Orientales (et) Les Feuilles d’Automne’. The notes
are on Romance Mauresque, but who wrote the
Pantoum? Is it original, or a translation, and if so,
by whom?
DAVID PIPER & VIKTOR WYND
ANNOUNCE
the Hendrick’s Last Tuesday
Society
WITH AN ADDRESS BY THE INAUGURAL
FIRST TUESDAY FELLOW
LORD
D GAWAIN
N DOUGLAS
BOSIE’S GREAT NEPHEW ON THE WILDE AFFAIR
AND THE HISTORY OF THE ‘BLACK’ DOUGLAS
-
É ROYAL, TUESDAY 7TH
DINNER AT CAFÉ
FEBRUARY 2006
Telephone – 07092195874
THE
E LAST
T TUESDAY
Y SOCIETY.ORG
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
Dec-Jan pp4-63 25/11/05 11:11 am Page 76
E NEMY W ITHIN
★ fantasist, busily reinventing her own
By Paul Adam
(TimeWarner 323pp £18.99)
PAUL Adams writes fiercely topical
thrillers which deliver anxiety along
with the excitement. The unsuspect-
ing reader is given good reason to
worry: paranoia is part of the trip. It
is not the panic button that Adam
presses so vehemently, but the one
which announces quite calmly that
the horror which is about to enfold
the action could overtake us all. Tom
Whitehead, hero-victim of Enemy
Within, is a decent, respected, mid-
dle-class academic, Sheffield-based,
fond husband and father of two, with
no hidden hawkish tendencies. In
fact, he’s mildly leftish (loathes fas-
cists, feels sick about Iraq), and is
cur rently wr iting a book about
industrial unrest, which takes him
into the miner’s strike of 1984 and
the still unsolved murder of a striking
miner named Danny Shields. It is the
unsuspected and, as it transpires, false
clue which projects Whitehead into
a state-manufactured frame in which
he is accused of trafficking in inter-
net paedophilia, conveniently found
on his computer and paid for with
his credit card. The evidence against
him seems to be solid. The police
acquired his details from America’s
National Intelligence Service, via the
FBI. Whitehead is suspended from
his job. Rentacrowd thugs attack his
family. He discovers that his house is
bugged, and a mugger who wounds
him with a knife continues the attack
when Whitehead is taken to a pre-
sumably safe hospital. Realising that
he’s regarded as a risk to the state, he
determines to fight back, but his
only help comes from his lawyer and
a private eye named Moran, addicted
to pub quizzes and yearning to find
fame as a contestant on Mastermind.
Moran, in turn, has the help of two
assistants – teenage Annie, a profi-
cient burglar and pickpocket, with
silver studs in her nose and tongue,
and Zac, a technological whizz, fer-
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
CRIME
P HILIP O AKES
vently anti-State and anti-establish-
ment, who takes Whitehead to a
remote safe house in wild Wales,
where the runaway’s lax secur ity
leads the opposition to his door. His
foes, it is established, are killers
working for MI5. Their secret agen-
da is political (big names, it seems,
may have been involved in the death
of Danny Shields). But, ironically –
and wholly by chance – Whitehead
has uncovered another crime which
is bigger and blacker than anything
that has so far been imagined. Adam
writes tellingly of people at odds
with organisations and of a world in
which surveillance is the tool by
which the weight of the state is first
directed against individuals. ‘On a
normal day you’re caught on CCTV
fifty times or more,’ someone
remarks. And that’s only the start of
it. There are hidden cameras in our
banks, our filling stations and our
super markets. They are not yet
linked together. ‘Not yet,’ says the
warning voice. ‘Give them time.’
Enemy Within suggests that real dan-
gers to life and liberty are closer than
you think. It’s just possible that para-
noia could be good for your
health…
O LD F LAMES
★ member of the team investigating an
By Robert Barnard
(Allison & Busby 235pp £18.99)
MODESTLY successful mid-list author,
Graham Broadbent, visiting
Colchester for school reunion din-
ner, is surprised by mystery blonde
who calls unannounced at his hotel
to tell him that she’s his daughter.
Not so, as it turns out. But, pursuing
her story, Broadbent re-encounters
her mother, Peggy Somers, a flirty
star of am-dram productions, about
to top the bill at Romford, with
whom he had the briefest of flings
twenty-five years earlier. Peggy
76
proves to be both a gold-digger and a
present and everyone else’s past. Her
story comes to a brutal end when she
is found strangled on the
Brightlingsea mudflats, the scene of
many of her past amours. Broadbent
seeks her killer by raking over the
embers of their old affair, driven not
so much by any feeling of love, but a
desire for narrative truth and tidiness.
Shrewd portrait of good-time girl
whose ambitions wildly exceed her
abilities, but not over-fond of its sub-
ject and humdrum in the telling.
Barnard is a redoubtable plotter of
whodunits and Dying Flames displays
a full range of his technical skills.
What’s principally lacking (except
when Peggy squirms into action) is
any sense of mischief and sex for the
fun of it, which was surely the main
motive for most of the book’s old
misbehaviour.
E ND IN T EARS
★
By Ruth Rendell
(Hutchinson 328pp £17.99)
CHIEF Inspector Wexford feels the
weight of the years with the presence
of politically correct DS Hannah
Goldsmith who insists on calling him
‘guv’ and who flinches at Wexford’s
non-PC usage – eg ‘people’ rather
than ‘community’ and ‘girl’ rather
than ‘woman’. But she’s still a willing
actual murder, a would-be murder
(concrete boulder dropped on to
approaching car from motorway
bridge) and a surrogate baby racket
which seems to involve Wexford’s
much-loved daughter. Stressful
goings-on for middle-class Sussex
which puts unexpected strain
on Wexford’s marr iage. Super ior
example of one of Rendell’s power-
ful domestic policiers. Excellent
detective work, decently done
husband and wife stuff and sharp
observations on a community in
the process of social transformation.
Altogether alert and engaging.
Dec-Jan pp4-63 25/11/05 4:33 pm Page 77
A B URNABLE TOWN
★ black Gothic script, while the price
By Philip Davison
(Cape 247pp £10.99)
D IRTY work by MI5 with misfit
agent Harry Fielding caught in the
crossfire between his friend and for-
mer apprentice Johnny Weeks, now
targeted by spooks who have him in
their gunsights. Narrative a bit cava-
lier with details as though you’re a
friend of the family, bound to know
what’s really going on, or at least
familiar with the storylines of two or
three previous novels. You may
struggle a bit if you are not properly
br iefed, but Davison wr ites well
about betrayal and loss, and what
matters most in this strain of fiction
is the mood rather than chapter and
verse. Maddening if you feel a bit left
out; but possibly addictive.
T HE T HIRD WOMAN
★ as the best of 2005 arrived on the
By Mark Burnell
(HarperCollins 371pp £12.99)
H ITWOMAN , sometimes known as
Petra Reuter, but with rotating names
and personalities to aid her assign-
ments and speedy exits, flees across
Europe to escape treacherous employ-
ers and their hired assassins who want
her dead. Bleak study of role playing
as essential survival technique with
heroine poised rakishly between
Modesty Blaise and Emma Peel, with
(wouldn’t you know it?) a terrific
dress sense to see her through emer-
gencies. Outfits bought on the run
include ‘a figure-hugging dress, some-
where between dark-grey and brown,
with sleeves to the knuckle’. She also
gets to meet top people including
Scheherezade Zahani (‘she emitted a
kind of sexual confidence … it was
the property of women who’d pros-
pered in a predominantly male envi-
ronment’). All these characters dress
to kill. Very edgy hide-and-seek nar-
rative, with Petra (or whichever iden-
tity she’s using at the time) pursued by
psycho gunman with ‘Born to kill’
CRIME
tattooed across his lower abdomen in
on her head rises daily to a modest
$10m. Well knit, well-kitted out
thriller with violence on the far side
of chic and sexual adventure an ever-
present threat or promise. Excellent
range of heavies (moralists should
note that Brit spymasters have been
one of Petra’s top paymasters) and a
chilly air of reality slicing through the
financial side of things. Some very
complex wheeling and dealing which
you’ll follow more easily if you can do
your sums and follow the finer points
of the oil business.
★
B EST OF THE Y EAR
ANOTHER good year for crime fiction
and an end, one hopes, to that
phoney category known as ‘literary
crime’. None of the six I’d nominate
scene with any literary drum-beating.
But they were all exceptionally well
written, well imagined and blessedly
unpretentious. They stand, I fear, on
layers of lesser work by the competi-
tion. But, at this time of year, let’s be
charitable. Here’s my top half dozen.
T HE L INCOLN L AWYER
By Michael Connolly
(Orion 412pp £17.99)
E XPERT , absorbing thr iller about
shop-soiled defence lawyer fighting
his way back to integrity by acknowl-
edging, then revealing the guilt of a
vile, seemingly innocent client.
BOUDICA AND THE
LOST ROMAN
By Mike Ripley
(Severn House 261pp £18.99)
S TIRRING , sanguinary novel set in
Boudica’s Britain AD 60-61, but
cunningly wired to concerns of now.
Rape, warfare, invaders on the ram-
page. Ripley sets it all down as
instant history.
77
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
L EGENDS
By Robert Littell
(Duckworth 395pp £14.99)
ORIGINAL, audacious rehash of his
career by world-weary sometime
CIA field agent who rakes through
his previous legends – the fabricated
identities created to mask his under-
cover activities – to help solve a
murder and get his head and love life
straight. Painfully exciting, with lots
of black, bracing humour.
T HE M INOTAUR
By Barbara Vine
(Viking 311p £17.99)
OLD crimes with punishment pend-
ing haunt a creeper-shrouded pile in
north Essex where a shar p-eyed
Swedish girl is employed as compan-
ion to the autistic son of the house-
hold. He’s unfairly cast as the
minotaur in a shabby red-brick maze
where deaths occur but justice
tr iumphs. Vine in restrained but
fearsome form.
R ED H OOK
By Reggie Nadelson
(William Heinemann 330pp £12.99)
REQUIEM for post-9/11 New York
where the sound of thunder now
makes people jump and veteran
detective Artie Cohen investigates
murder and over-sharp speculators
slicing themselves a piece of up-for-
grabs Brooklyn.
F IDDLERS
By Ed McBain
(Orion 259pp £12.99)
N OT quite the best ever McBain
novel, but a sad reminder that it’s
probably the last 87th Precinct tale
that you are likely to see. McBain
died in 2005 leaving one book
unfinished. This stylish, witty and
exciting murder story with six vic-
tims and one mysterious killer is a
reminder of a master of his craft,
much admired, now much missed.
Dec-Jan pp4-63 25/11/05 11:11 am Page 78

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Tel: 020 8348 2621
email: tandvgrove@btinternet.com.
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