DECEMBER 2006 / JANUARY 2007 £3.

50

THE PROPHET OF DEMOCRACY

John Gray on Alexis de Tocqueville
Daniel Johnson on Perfidious France
Andrew Roberts on Bellicose America
9 770144 436959

The War on White Slavery

The Tale of Beatrix Potter
Prokofiev’s Passion ★ Pope’s Nemesis
Janacek ★ Jelinek
12

MAGGIE GEE SHORT STORY

Paul Johnson reveres Andrew Mellon
06 X

Raleigh Trevelyan revisits Anzio

20 SE

Stalin’s Wars ★ Alfred’s Cakes ★ Assorted Aunts

D
BA

SPECIAL DOUBLE ISSUE

 FROM THE PULPIT

T HERE IS A long custom of K ATHRYN H UGHES now free to pop in and go ‘boo’
telling tales of the uncanny at whenever they feel like it.
Christmas. When Dickens spun
his classic yarn about four ghosts
trooping through Scrooge’s front
FESTIVE SPIRITS All this is a shame. For it seems
to me that we have never needed
our ghost stories more than now.
room, he wasn’t creating a tradi- Literary theorists will tell you that
tion so much as putting a particularly bright, shining star the genre has always flourished just at those moments
atop one that had existed for centuries. But he did it so when the known world feels as if it were slipping out of
brilliantly – that is, commercially – that at a single stroke control. In the 1860s writers including Wilkie Collins,
Christmas and Mystery, two nouns which had been Sheridan LeFanu, Ellen Wood and Mary Braddon
floating near each other for as long as anyone could produced a stream of narratives positively thrumming
remember, now started to do a more formal dance. with unhallowed doubles and vengeful revenants. Even
From then on, and right through the nineteenth century, the normally sedate Mrs Gaskell and George Eliot were
no December issue of any periodical was complete with- happy to produce short stories that shivered with uncer-
out a tale of ghostly haunting. In women’s magazines, the tainty. And all because beneath the apparently placid sur-
plot usually involved a long-deceased former lover who face of High Victorianism things were much less stable
insisted on turning up in church just as the heroine was than they seemed. The economy was about to stall
about to say ‘I do’. In boys’ magazines there were whole before going into free fall, while middle-class women
cohorts of wispy pirates or headless Cavaliers barging were calling for social and political changes that would
noisily through the frenetic plot. In those publications recalibrate relations between the sexes for ever. And it
aimed at gentlemen, meanwhile, the setting for a seasonal was this sense of dark things bubbling under that led
haunting was more likely to be a club library or ruined directly to all those tales of ghostly hands plucking at the
abbey. This tone of antiquarian connoisseurship was in heroine’s skirt or a wild shriek at midnight presaging the
turn brought to exquisite perfection by the Cambridge collapse of family and fortune.
scholar M R James, whose early ghost stories were read at Decades later, the principle held good for M R James
the Christmas gathering of King’s College in 1903. too. Written at a time of shrivelling Empire, James’s
Exactly how this association of Christmas with all things stories of ghostly abbots and cursed crowns allowed
spooky sprang up is probably lost for ever. It seems to have readers to experience a world that was infinitely bigger
something to do with the idea that around the time of the than the one they could reach out and touch. This
winter solstice the family ancestors return to share the fes- expanded realm might be threatening in the way that it
tival with their earthly relatives. In Scandinavia the shades flouted the rules of normal time and space. However,
would rattle the windows vigorously, while in Brittany by connecting readers with the possibility that their
people put out food that the ghosts would eat while the ancestors were watching over them, ready to warn of
living family attended church; tweak the custom a little coming terrors, James’s ghost stories also offered a
and you have the origin of leaving mince pies for Santa. thoughtful comfort in stormy times.
Whatever the exact form their teasing takes, the point It is exactly this sense of depth and mystery that we
these revenants are trying to make by their presence is that need so badly now. Our contemporary Christmases are
beyond this complacent corporeal world of mince pies and devoid of anything that speaks of the unknown or the
eggnog there lies a realm of infinite depth and boundless infinite. Presents come branded, experiences pre-pack-
space whose dimensions can never be fully known. The aged. Advent calendars tell the story of the Simpsons,
ghost is terrifying not because it means us any harm (it while little girls long for a Bratz doll. Adults, in turn,
doesn’t, usually) but because it jolts us out of any lulling hope to find under the Christmas tree not a new piece
sense that we are the masters of our own universe. of sheet music but a replacement iPod nano for the one
Recently, though, we seem to have lost this relationship they left on the train only last month. And if the story of
between Christmas and tales of the supernatural. Perhaps the Christ child gets told at all, it is with anything likely
it’s something to do with the way that Hallowe’en has been to unsettle left out (primary schools now routinely omit
boosted by cultural borrowings from the States, to the any references to Herod’s slaughter of the Innocents on
point where it has become a swollen celebration of plastic the grounds that it might disturb worried little boys).
terror, less about the undead walking the streets than about Against this landscape of flat surfaces and primary
children high on sugar playing noisily in their neighbours’ colours we need the depth and drama of the ghost story.
gardens. Perhaps, too, the commodification of the super- The clutching hand, the light brush against our hair, the
natural in the form of the Harry Potter multi-platform mysterious guide who vanishes with the daylight – these
franchise has deadened us to any sense that it is specifically are more than leftover fragments from a dried-up tradi-
in midwinter that ghosts and ghoulies take up temporary tion. They are, rather, reminders that we are still living
residence on earth. Unanchored from both the pagan and in a world which is infinitely less singular than we care
the Christian calendar, the denizens of the nether world are to imagine.

1
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007

THIS MONTH’S PULPIT is written by
Kathryn Hughes, author of George
Eliot: The Last Victorian and The
Victorian Governess. Her most recent
book, The Short Life and Long Times of
Mrs Beeton, is published by 4th Estate.
J OHN G RAY is Professor of
European Thought at the London
School of Economics.
A NDREW R OBERTS ’s most recent
book, A History of the English-Speaking
Peoples Since 1900, was published in
September by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Asked by George Stephanapoulos on
ABC’s This Week programme what
was the latest book that he’d read,
President George W Bush said: ‘I’m
reading A History of the English-Speaking
Peoples Since 1900. It’s a great book.’
DIANA ATHILL is the author of Stet
and Yesterday Morning: A Very English
Childhood, both published by Granta.
J OHN B REWER teaches in the
Humanities and Social Sciences at the
California Institute of Technology.
CHRISTOPHER COKER is Professor of
International Relations at the London
School of Economics and author of
several books on international security.
R ICHARD O VERY ’s The Dictators:
Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia was
awarded the Wolfson Prize for
History 2005 (Penguin).
D AVID P ROFUMO ’s Bringing the
House Down: A Family Memoir is
published by John Murray.
JAMES DELINGPOLE spent the Eighties
wishing he could be the next Rupert
Everett. Sadly being neither beautiful
enough nor sufficiently gay, he had
to become a hack instead. His next
book, a compendium of rants called
How To Be Right, is published in
March by Headline.
BLAIR WORDEN is Research Professor
of History at the University of London.
ELISABETH LUARD has been writing
about food for twenty years. Her
latest book, Truffles, is published by
Frances Lincoln.
Contributing Editors: ALAN RAFFERTY, SEBASTIAN SHAKESPEARE
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
CONTENTS
PULPIT 1 K ATHRYN H UGHES
FOREIGN PARTS 4 D ANIEL J OHNSON Betrayal: France, the Arabs, and the Jews
David Pryce-Jones
6 A NDREW R OBERTS Dangerous Nation: America and the World
1600–1898 Robert Kagan
8 J ONATHAN M IRSKY The Story of Tibet: Conversations with
the Dalai Lama Thomas Laird Beyond Seven Years in Tibet:
My Life Before, During, and After Heinrich Harrer
9 V I C T O R S E B E S T Y E N Revolution in Hungary: The 1956
Budapest Uprising Erich Lessing A Good Comrade: János
Kádar, Communism and Hungary Roger Gough
11 JUSTIN CARTWRIGHT Portrait with Keys: The City of
Johannesburg Unlocked IvanVladislavic
12 HAZHIR TEIMOURIAN The End of Iraq: How American
Incompetence Created a War Without End Peter W Galbraith
BIOGRAPHY 14 JOHN GRAY Alexis de Tocqueville: Prophet of Democracy in the Age
of Revolution Hugh Brogan
15 P AUL J OHNSON Mellon: An American Life David Cannadine
17 DIANA ATHILL Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature Linda Lear
18 JOHN BREWER Edmund Curll, Bookseller Paul Baines & Pat Rogers
20 CHRISTOPHER COKER Dean Acheson Robert L Beisner
21 PAUL ADDISON Churchill’s Man of Mystery: Desmond Morton
and the World of Intelligence Gill Bennett
23 A NDREW T AYLOR Amerigo: The Man Who Gave His
Name to America Felipe Fernández-Armesto
SHORT STORY 24 MAGGIE GEE Ring-barking
HISTORY 28 RICHARD OVERY Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold
War, 1939–1953 Geoffrey Roberts
30 RALEIGH TREVELYAN Anzio: The Friction of War – Italy and
the Battle for Rome 1944 Lloyd Clark
32 G ILES M ILTON Breaking the Chains: The Royal Navy’s War
Against White Slavery Tom Pocock
33 F RANK M C L YNN Why Alfred Burned the Cakes: A King and
his Eleven-Hundred-Year Afterlife David Horspool
35 P IERS B RENDON Ends of British Imperialism: The Scramble for
Empire, Suez and Decolonisation Wm Roger Louis
36 BLAIR WORDEN The Last Revolution: 1688 amd the Creation of
the Modern World Patrick Dillon
37 JONATHAN KEATES The War of Wars: The Epic Struggle
between Britain and France, 1793–1815 Robert Harvey
MEMOIRS & DIARIES 39 MICHAEL BARBER Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir Gore Vidal
Editor: NANCY SLADEK
Deputy Editor: TOM FLEMING
Editor-at-Large: JEREMY LEWIS
Editorial Assistant: PHILIP WOMACK
Business Manager: ROBERT POSNER
Advertising Manager: TERRY FINNEGAN
Classified Advertising: DAVID STURGE
Founding Editor: DR ANNE SMITH
Founding Father: AUBERON WAUGH
Cover illustration by Chris Riddell
Issue no. 339
2
 DECEMBER 2006 / JANUARY 2007

40 JOHN ADAMSON Things I Didn’t Know Robert Hughes J OHN A DAMSON is a Fellow of
41 MICHAEL BLOCH King’s Counsellor: Abdication and War – the Peterhouse, Cambridge. His new
book, The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow
Diaries of Sir Alan Lascelles (Ed) Duff Hart-Davis of Charles I, is published by Weidenfeld
43 H UGH M ASSINGBERD The Great War Diaries of Georgina & Nicolson early in the New Year.
Lee: Home Fires Burning (Ed) Gavin Roynon
PIERS BRENDON’s The Decline and Fall
44 J AMES D ELINGPOLE Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins of the British Empire will be published
Rupert Everett next autumn by Jonathan Cape.

CAROLE ANGIER is a biographer of

MUSIC & ART 45 S IMON H EFFER Janacek: Years of a Life – Volume 1 John Tyrrell Jean Rhys and Primo Levi. The
46 J OHN M C E WEN Francis Bacon in the 1950s Michael Pepiatt Double Bond: Primo Levi, A Biography is
47 ALEXANDER WAUGH Diaries 1907–1914 Sergey Prokofiev available in paperback from Penguin.

J ONATHAN K EATES ’s most recent

GENERAL 49 R ICHARD G REENE A Study in Greene Bernard Bergonzi book, The Siege of Venice, is pub-
Articles of Faith (Ed) Ian Thomson lished by Chatto & Windus.
50 A L L A N M A S S I E King Arthur’s Enchantresses Carolyne Larrington MICHAEL BLOCH’s work includes six
51 R AYMOND E DWARDS The History of Britain Revealed M J Harper books on the Duke of Windsor. He
52 BEN MORGAN Amo, Amas, Amat... and All That Harry Mount is currently writing James Lees-
53 D ENNIS S EWELL Big Babies Michael Bywater Milne’s biography, having edited the
last five volumes of his diary.
54 JOHN BATCHELOR A Very British Family: The Trevelyans
and Their World Laura Trevelyan JOHN BATCHELOR’s Lady Trevelyan
55 and the PreRaphaelite Brotherhood,
PEYTON SKIPWITH The Modernist Textile Virginia
was recently published by Chatto
Gardner Troy Soviet Textiles Pamela Jill Kachurin & Windus.
57 WILLIAM PACKER The English Year Steve Roud
RICHARD GREENE is a poet and an
58 G EORDIE G REIG The Complete Book of Aunts Rupert Christiansen
associate professor of English in the
58 P HILIP W OMACK Little Money Street Fernanda Eberstadt University of Toronto. He has edit-
59 J AMES O WEN The Dead Beat Marilyn Johnson ed Graham Greene: A Life in Letters,
60 E LISABETH L UARD The Taste of Britain (Edd) Laura which will be published by Little,
Brown in September.
Mason & Catherine Brown
61 MATT EDMONDS The Penguin Guide to Blues Recording RALEIGH TREVELYAN’s The Fortress
Tony Russell & Chris Smith is the classic account of the Anzio
offensive; he also described his
61 WILLIAM PALMER Reporting David Remnick wartime experiences in Rome ’44
and A Clear Premonition.
FICTION 63 CAROLE ANGIER Greed Elfriede Jelinek
GEORDIE GREIG is Editor of Tatler.
64 FRANCIS KING Every Move You Make David Malouf
65 TRISTAN QUINN Winterwood Patrick McCabe A LEXANDER W AUGH is currently
66 working on a biography of the one-
JOHN DUGDALE The Echo Maker Richard Powers
armed pianist Paul Wittgenstein.
67 JOHN DE FALBE Everything Passes Gabriel Josipovici
67 MARTYN BEDFORD Creatures of the Earth John McGahern P AUL A DDISON is an Honorary
Fellow of the School of History and
68 CHARLIE CAMPBELL Amazing Disgrace James Hamilton-Paterson
Classics at the University of
69 RICHARD GODWIN Thirteen Moons Charles Frazier Edinburgh. His most recent book is
70 DAVID PROFUMO The Poison Diaries The Duchess of Northumberland Churchill: The Unexpected Hero (OUP).
71 WILL BRETT Half of a Yellow Sun Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie JESSICA MANN’s latest crime novel,
BAD SEX REPORT 72 TOM FLEMING The Mystery Writer, was recently
CRIME 74 JESSICA MANN published by Allison & Busby. It is
SILENCED VOICES 76 LUCY POPESCU based on her book Out of Harm’s
Way, a history of overseas evacua-
LETTERS 62 LR CROSSWORD 29 LR BOOKSHOP 27 LR SUBSCRIPTION 80
tion in the Second World War.

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3
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
 FOREIGN PARTS

D ANIEL J OHNSON France as une puissance musulmane, ‘a Muslim power’ – a

phrase that has a new and sinister echo now.
J’ACCUSE French diplomats, determined to outdo their British
and German rivals in great-power politics, were also
convinced that France had a special mission civilisatrice in
BETRAYAL: FRANCE, THE ARABS, AND THE JEWS the Islamic world. Yet their sentimental orientalism was
★ entirely compatible with an institutional anti-Semitism
By David Pryce-Jones that is documented in shocking detail by Pryce-Jones.
(Encounter Books 171pp £20.99) The rise of Zionism transformed this anti-Semitism
from a mere prejudice, odious perhaps but peripheral to
AS I WRITE, it is exactly a year since the desolate banlieues foreign policy, into a distorting mirror which motivated
of France erupted in an orgy of violence, on a scale and reinforced the fatal misjudgements that have led
which had not been seen for generations. At the time, France to its present predicament.
these riots were blamed on social exclusion. Since then, The French had pretensions to be the protecting
it has become clear that the rioters are not just ‘immi- power for all Catholics in the Middle East, and they saw
grants’ or ‘youths’, but are first and foremost Muslims. Zionism as a competitor – one, moreover, that was
When they set light to a car, their cry is often: ‘Allahu associated in their eyes first with German and then with
akhbar!’ (‘Allah is great!’) British interests. In response to what it saw as an impu-
The violence, moreover, is endemic and ubiquitous. dent demand for a Jewish homeland, the Quai d’Orsay
In 2005, there were 110,000 incidents of urban vio- ‘effectively launched the Arab nationalist movement’ on
lence, including 45,000 vehicles burnt out. This year, the eve of the First World War.
there has been an average of over 100 incidents a day. Some of this book makes uncomfortable reading for
Since the riots supposedly subsided last January, some Catholics, because several of the most outré orientalists
3,000 police officers are reported to have been injured. who have controlled French policy in the last century
France is quite deliberately being made ungovernable. turn out to have been Tartuffes of the worst kind.
This ‘French intifada’ was merely the culmination of a Pryce-Jones devotes a whole chapter to the curious
process that has turned many suburbs into no-go areas case of Louis Massignon, who was the Arabist guru of
for the police and increasingly for non-Muslims too. In the Quai d’Orsay both before and after World War II.
particular, the Islamist rabble-rousers who are behind Massignon’s faith was a bizarre confection of Catholic
the insurgency have incited their followers to attack and Islamic mysticism, and he ended up as a Melkite
Jews, who are now outnumbered by Muslims in France priest. Though he was married, it was the homoerotic
by at least ten to one. attractions of Arab boys that evidently drew him to
How has it come to this? In this devastating indict- the East. He enjoyed cloak-and-dagger espionage,
ment, the cri de coeur of an Englishman who loves France alter nating between the robe and turban of an
but is exasperated by the French, the background to this Egyptian imam and the habit of a Franciscan. He liked
breakdown of civil society gradually emerges. David Lawrence of Arabia – as Pryce-Jones comments, ‘they
Pryce-Jones has discovered the explanation in the were two of a kind’ – but enjoyed correcting the
archives of the French foreign ministry, known after Englishman’s Arabic grammar.
its imposing headquarters, the Quai d’Orsay. The corps Massignon’s influence was similarly pernicious. Put in
diplomatique who have run this institution like a private charge of French propaganda to the Muslim world, he
club – known to initiates simply as ‘la carrière’ – are dedicated himself to building a Franco-Islamic ‘bloc’ or
responsible not only for the ‘entente’ and worked hard
decline of French prestige to scupper the Zionist pro-
abroad, but also for creating ject. His conversation and
the conditions for the unfold- writings are riddled with
ing catastrophe at home. rage against ‘the ignominy
Like so many misfortunes, of the Jews’, and he even
this one has its origins in MA Degree in Biography had the temer ity to tell
Starting January 2007
the megalomania of the Appreciate the art of biography while learning the skill in this one or Martin Buber that Israel
Bonaparte clan. For more two-year taught MA. The Buckingham MA in Biography was the first must stop ‘Atlantic specula-
than two centur ies, since postgraduate programme in this field to be offered in the UK. tors’ from exploiting Arab
Napoleon’s expedition to Course director: Jane Ridley oil. Though he died in
Egypt, French diplomacy Contact: jane.ridley@buckingham.ac.uk or write to her at 1963, Massignon anticipat-
The University of Buckingham, Buckingham MK18 1EG
has been gripped by a delu- Tel: 01280 814080 ed much of the contempo-
sion of grandeur: the idea of rary French critique of the

4
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
 FOREIGN PARTS

r8MZNMK\Ta XQ\KPML IVL QV\MV[MTa

M^WKI\Q^Ms ?QTTQIU *WaL
Zionist–Anglo-Saxon alliance. r0MIZ\ZMVLQVO IVL I\ \PM [IUM
Other pre-war intellectuals played an equally nefarious
role in this episode of the betrayal of French rationalism \QUM PMIZ\_IZUQVOs ,I^I ;WJMT
– what Julien Benda called ‘la trahison des clercs’.
Pryce-Jones singles out Paul Morand, Jean Giraudoux r7VM WN \PM UW[\ \ITMV\ML _ZQ\MZ[
and Paul Claudel: all writers, all senior officials at the WN PQ[ OMVMZI\QWVs 4M 5WVLM
Quai d’Orsay, all virulent anti-Semites. It is hard not to
see the present prime minister and littérateur, Dominique
de Villepin, as their spiritual descendant, when he )TT_IZ[IZMITQSM?PI\1M`XMZQMVKMLQV
describes Israel as ‘a parenthesis in history’. 4MJIVWVW\PMZ[M`XMZQMVKMLQV.ZIVKM
The one brief phase of rapprochement between post-war QV;XIQVQVA]OW[TI^QIWZMT[M_PMZMAM[
France and Israel, during the mid-1950s, took place
ITT_IZ[IZMITQSMJMKI][M_PQTM_MIXWV[
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despite the Quai d’Orsay, which was kept in the dark []JRMK\ML\W_IZLWVW\QV\PMTMI[\
about defence and nuclear co-operation. The Suez
operation was doomed partly because the ministry had
to be kept out of the loop. Even the then foreign minis-
ter, Christian Pineau, had to tell colleagues: ‘Above all,
not a word to the Quai d’Orsay!’
Under General de Gaulle, France reverted to its tradi-
tional ‘Muslim policy’ and imposed an arms embargo on
Israel. After the Six Day War in 1967, de Gaulle set the
tone for future French statesmen by calling the Jews ‘an
elite people, self-assured and domineering’ with ‘a burn-
ing ambition for conquest’. He ignored Raymond Aron, <0- ;+0774 7. ?):
who warned that de Gaulle had opened ‘a new era in … )4-@)6,:- 6)22):
anti-Semitic history’, and instead echoed the old Quai
d’Orsay motto of France as a ‘Muslim power’.
Thereafter, Israel looked to America, while France
recklessly encouraged a succession of Muslim leaders
who proved to be implacably hostile to the West, from
Gaddafi to Saddam Hussein. It was the French who
turned Yasser Arafat into a figure on the world stage and
tolerated his terrorists in their midst. And it was the
French who enabled Ayatollah Khomeini to launch his
Islamic revolution from a suburb of Paris.
The cynicism, corruption and arrogance of all four
presidents since de Gaulle – Pompidou, Giscard,
Mitterrand and Chirac – have reinforced the déformation
professionnelle of the Quai d’Orsay. Far from buying
France influence in the Muslim world, the ‘Arab policy’
has merely imported the conflicts of the Middle East
onto the streets of Paris.
Only now, when the country is in the grip of an
Islamist jihad, has Chirac acknowledged that anti-
Semitism – the existence of which in France he had
long denied – is so serious that ‘an attack against a
French Jew is an attack against France’. It is David
Pryce-Jones’s great merit to have documented the .:-- 87;<)/- )6, 8)+3)/16/
conflict between this affirmation of the rights of French <W WZLMZ <PM ;KPWWT WN ?IZ NWZ ‚!!
Jews at home and their denial abroad by French foreign XTMI[M KITT    !  WZ
policy. Whether the French public will heed this English MUIQT WZLMZ[(IT[IYQJWWS[PWXKWU
indictment of their political class is more than doubtful,
but Betrayal should resonate among those for whom
Zola is still not a footballer but the author of J’accuse.
To order this book at £16.99, see LR Bookshop on page 27
___\MTMOZIUJWWS[KWU

LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007

 FOREIGN PARTS
A NDREW R OBERTS
From the Mayflower
to Bush
DANGEROUS N ATION : A MERICA AND THE
WORLD 1600–1898
★ work bringing us up to the present day, he dispatches
By Robert Kagan
(Atlantic Books 527pp £25)
THIS WELL-RESEARCHED, well-written and hard-hitting
history book ends at the outbreak of the Spanish-
American War in 1898, yet it addresses one of the most
important questions of our time: what truly drives the
United States of America? Is there something about the
pathology or psychology or birthright of the USA that
makes her naturally expansionist, and desirous of
spreading her way of government around the world? Is
she – au fond – a neo-conservative power?
The generally accepted historical narrative is that mod-
ern America began in the early seventeenth century as a
rejection of evil outside (ie European) influences, and that
the Pilgrim Fathers were happy in their isolation. The
War of Independence was further evidence of American
unwillingness to be connected with the corruption of the
anciens régimes of the Old World. George Washington’s
Farewell Address on leaving the presidency in 1796 laid
down a ‘great rule’ to avoid ‘entangling alliances’ at all
costs, a directive their leaders acceded to resolutely.
According to this beguiling thesis, the American Civil
War and westward expansionism showed that the United
States were essentially inward-looking, until a near-lunatic
neo-con movement led by Presidents William McKinley
and Theodore Roosevelt professing Manifest Destiny
lured the virginal republic into the evil ways of Western
imperialism in the Philippines and elsewhere. Afterwards
she was laid prey to involvement in world wars that had
little to do with her, until this essentially alien neo-con
impulse inveigled her into mad adventures such as the
invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan in 2003. Neo-conserva-
tive interventionism is thus presented as deeply foreign to
America’s traditional and natural preferences.
This might be thought of as the Pat Buchanan school
of American history, and Robert Kagan shows it to be
perniciously false right from pretty much the moment
the Mayflower docked. For him, America was a ‘danger-
ous nation’ from the very start. This book will appeal
to neo-cons as proving that their theories of global
enlightenment have antecedents going back centuries,
and that they are thus in the mainstream of American
historical tradition and practice rather than the wild,
6
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
fringe moon-barkers of popular demonology. Yet it will
also appeal to anti-Amer icans, showing that this
‘dangerous nation’ has always harboured hopes of reshap-
ing the world in its own image, and therefore will
probably not stop until it is either successful or it destroys
itself (and possibly also the world) in the process.
As Kagan, author of the highly influential Paradise and
Power, takes his reader chronologically through nearly
three centuries of American history from the Puritans to
McKinley, in the first of what will be a two-volume
the Buchanan thesis with superb aplomb backed up by
first-rate scholarship.
The Puritans were not hoping to set up ‘a city upon
a hill’ in America, cut off from the world; rather, they
were global revolutionaries who saw the New World as
a temporary refuge before they returned to force their
theology upon the Old. By the 1776 schism, Kagan
argues convincingly, ‘the ambitions driving Americans
towards their future overwhelming global power were
already in place’. Revolutionary statesmen such as
George Washington and Alexander Hamilton were
perfectly comfortable with the word ‘empire’ as a
description for a future United States, and the universal
ideology that their revolution spawned impelled them
towards connections with the rest of the world. Phrases
like ‘All men are created equal’ could not be confined
solely to the American continent, after all; the natural
rights of Man could not logically extend simply to the
English-speaking New England gentlemen-farmers and
lawyers who spearheaded what turned out to be the
greatest revolt in human history.
Kagan shows how the Founding Fathers understood
that America needed to be independent in order to have
a legitimate government that could make treaties and
alliances with powers – primarily France – that in turn
could help her assert her independence. It was a curi-
ously circular argument, but one which made perfect
sense to the men of 1776. ‘We are pointing out the way
to struggling nations who wish, like us, to emerge from
their tyrannies’ was not said by some neo-con from the
Bush Administration, but by Thomas Jefferson.
For generations it has been assumed that Washington’s
Farewell Address – which was read out in Congress in its
entirety every February until the 1970s – formed the
isolationist basis of American foreign policy until the
Spanish-American War. Not so, argues Kagan in a mas-
terful analysis of the political situation pertaining in
1796: in fact, all that the first president was hoping to do
was warn Jefferson and the Republicans off a French
alliance. Rather than intending the message of the
Address to stand for all time, Washington and Hamilton’s
‘chief purpose was immediate and political’.
When in October 1783 the Marquis de Lafayette
proposed a visit by Washington to Europe, he replied
 FOREIGN PARTS
THE NATIONAL THEATRE’S SMASH HIT PRODUCTION

Alan Bennett’s
that he would sooner tour what he called ‘the New
Empire’ from Detroit via the Mississippi to the
Carolinas. The primary reason that the Federalists
opposed ‘entangling alliances’ in the 1790s, Kagan
thehistoryboys
believes, is that they wanted to get on with their west-
ward imperialism. He backs up this thesis with a welter
of apposite contemporary documents.
The ever-present American ambition to hegemonise
‘A class act’
MAIL ON SUNDAY
the Western Hemisphere took a leap with the Monroe
Doctrine of December 1823, which excluded European
powers from interfering in the politics of any American
republic and closed further colonisation there. ‘As
American power and influence grew,’ comments Kagan,
‘so did Americans’ tendency to press their own principles
on the world around them.’
The Manifest Destiny concept has its origins in the
1840s, especially during the presidency of James A
Polk, who added over one million square miles to the
territory of the USA and laid claim to the entire conti-
nent bound by the Atlantic, Pacific, 49th Parallel and
Rio Grande. The annexation of Texas, war with
Mexico and pacification of the Wild West were all a
part of this great imperial mission, which astonishingly
was not even derailed by a most debilitating Civil War
two decades later.
Even then, as Kagan points out, the centrality of
America’s foreign-policy destiny infused the North in its
struggle with the Confederacy. For men like Lincoln’s
secretary of state William Seward, the Civil War was
needed to ‘qualify ourselves for our mission’. The essen-
tial contradiction of a nation born in liberty that
nonetheless kept slaves had to be ended, thereby legit-
imising America’s dreams of liberating the rest of the
globe. As Kagan puts it, Seward and other Republicans’
vision of an empire of freedom depended on a
consolidated, prosperous, continental Union,
cleansed of the stain of slavery, which would form
the essential base from which America’s global
hegemony would emanate. In the end, therefore, ‘Brilliantly funny’
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 FOREIGN PARTS

J ONATHAN M IRSKY hate.’ What impression did he form of Mao at his first and
only meetings with him, in 1954, when the Lama himself
TOP LIVING HUMAN was not quite twenty? ‘I thought he was great and powerful
and revolutionary. And I still feel that the early part of his
life was really dedicated to the people.’ Laird, a doughty
T HE S TORY OF T IBET: C ONVERSATIONS interviewer, challenges him: ‘This man you sat with is one
WITH THE DALAI L AMA of the greatest murderers in human history. And when you
★ saw him, he seemed like a nice man.’ The Dalai Lama, the
By Thomas Laird supreme champion of non-violence, then muses: ‘To
(Atlantic Books 470pp £19.99) change the world. To bring some kind of equality and
prosperity with less exploitation. For such a goal you can
B EYOND S EVEN Y EARS IN T IBET: M Y L IFE perhaps justify some of these negative activities.’ When
B EFORE , D URING, AND A FTER Laird presses further, asking the Lama how 25 million
★ people can be killed justifiably, the Lama concedes. ‘That is
By Heinrich Harrer true. Too extreme the methods.’
(Labyrinth Press 550pp £25) There is a more striking contradiction. During the
Dalai Lama’s final meeting with Mao the Chairman told
ONLY NELSON MANDELA rivals the Dalai Lama as Top him, ‘religion is poison. I think he told me this sincerely’.
Living Human. Both men deserve all the admiration – But in his autobiography, Freedom in Exile (the usually
reverence, really – showered on them; what keeps them well-informed Laird misses this), the Dalai Lama recalls
from 100 per cent perfection is their capacity for contra- that when Mao said those words to him,
diction. In 1991 I heard Mandela say that human rights I felt a violent burning sensation all over my face and
were indivisible and must always be championed loudly I was suddenly very afraid. ‘So,’ I thought, ‘you are
and in public. He was on his way to Beijing so I asked the destroyer of the Dharma [the teachings of the
him if he would raise the plight of political prisoners Buddha] after all.’
with his Chinese hosts. Without For many years the Dalai Lama
missing a beat, he assured me he has had to conciliate Beijing.
would not. ‘In our darkest hour,’ There was a time when the Dalai
he explained, ‘the Chinese helped Lama insisted that histor ically
us with money and weapons.’ Tibet was independent. When
Since then, more than once, he Laird reminds the Dalai Lama of
has said that paths to democracy this, the Lama can only say: ‘If
vary and China has its own. the Chinese government put a
China has exercised a greater condition on me that I should
contradictory power on the mind accept that Tibet has historically
of the Dalai Lama – who, unlike always been an inalienable part of
Mandela, has suffered at Beijing’s China, if I say yes, history will
hands – since the Chinese army not change because of that, history
crossed into Tibet in 1950. The will remain as histor y.’ When
years of trauma have taught the Laird presses again, asking if the
Lama caution, and this stands out Laughing at eighty: Harrer with the Dalai Lama Lama is willing to say ‘Tibet is
in Thomas Laird’s account of his not part of the People’s Republic
remarkable fifty hours of conversation with Tibet’s spiri- of China’, the Lama replies, ‘No. I have not done that,
tual leader. The Lama has to confront a deadly problem: and I think we need to face the current reality.’ He
how to secure, through his emissaries to Beijing, a sig- wants a settlement, ‘within a framework of the
nificant measure of internal autonomy for Tibetans Chinese constitution: with Tibet as a part of the
without giving the Chinese cause to continue accusing People’s Republic’. His remarks about the cynicism of
him of ‘splittism’ – that is, working to achieve full the US – which has blown hot and cold on Tibet for
Tibetan independence. fifty years, always in direct proportion to the tenor of
In the past the Dalai Lama has said many times to visitors its relations with China – are scathing.
that he admires certain aspects of Marxism. He says this The Dalai Lama’s tortuous negotiations with Beijing
again to Laird: ‘The idea of taking care of the less-privi- take up only a small part of this big book. Much of the
leged people, of working-class people, this is wonderful.’ rest is occupied with Tibetan history since earliest times.
But unlike Buddhism, he adds, ‘What is lacking in New readers can learn a lot. There is a good discussion
Marxism is compassion ... and they deliberately promote of Mongol and Manchu relations with Tibet, which

8
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
 FOREIGN PARTS
Beijing uses as proof that Tibet was Chinese from at least
the thirteenth century – although in other contexts the
Chinese regard Mongols and Manchus as ‘barbarians’.
Laird is extremely knowledgeable on the subject; but the
Dalai Lama is not especially interested in history, though
he adds little snippets of information here and there,
usually being careful to distinguish myth from fact.
What really interests the Dalai Lama is the special nature
of Tibetans, whom he believes have a unique relationship
with the greatest bodhisattvas, semi-divine beings who
have delayed full entry into Nirvana to aid humanity. Much
of this part of the discussion is concerned with difficult
concepts that Laird struggles to unravel: incarnation and
reincarnation and – this astounds Laird – how the present
and future affect the past. The Dalai Lama politely lets him
know that the very deepest spiritual matters are not to be
revealed to the uninitiated. The Dalai Lama emerges from
this book more fully and, if I may say, more as a human
being than from most of the dozens of other books in
which he appears.
A niggle: I think Laird smears most American historians
and political scientists who work on China, whom he
accuses of self-censoring to gain access to China. I don’t
doubt he met some who were afraid to criticise Beijing;
but, speaking as someone who has been banned from
China since 1991 (partly for going often to Tibet), this is
not true of the majority of the experts.
Heinrich Harrer is justifiably well known for Seven
Years in Tibet, an account of his escape from a German
POW camp in India, his arduous trek across the
Himalayas and his arrival in Tibet, where he became an
intimate of the little Dalai Lama. If you haven’t read it,
do so at once. This new book is a re-warmed version of
Seven Years, with a great deal of extra autobiographical
material, rather vain much of it, detailing Harrer’s years
before and after Lhasa. Harrer was a terrific skier, climber
and explorer all his life and the book tells us about those
exploits; but the Lhasa passages here have none of the
charm or energy of the previous book. Harrer, not for
the first time, takes up his Nazi past (he got married in
his SS uniform), which he doesn’t excuse, though he says
he regrets it; but he does say that applying to become a
Nazi was just a way to get on with his real interests.
Harrer and the Dalai Lama remain close and I can see
why. Those seven years meant a lot to both of them. But
in Laird’s book the Dalai Lama mentions Harrer exactly
once in over 450 pages. He says that during the Second
World War, because Germany and Italy were small, he
thought they were being bullied and ‘my sympathy was
with Germany’. Only after the war, when the Dalai
Lama was ten, did he learn what the Germans had done.
The Dalai Lama observes that his tutors knew next to
nothing about the outside world. Heinrich Harrer did,
but neglected to tell his little friend.
To order these books, see LR Bookshop on page 27
9
V ICTOR S EBESTYEN
SNAPSHOTS FROM HUNGARY
R EVOLUTION IN H UNGARY: T HE 1956
B UDAPEST U PRISING
★
By Erich Lessing
(Thames & Hudson 249pp £35)
A G OOD C OMRADE : J ANOS K ADAR ,
C OMMUNISM AND H UNGARY
★
By Roger Gough
(I B Tauris 323pp £24.50)
THE VIOLENCE ON the streets of Budapest over recent
weeks sent a rush of commentators to the editorial pages
and the broadcast studios comparing the new wave of
Hungarian riots to the bloody Revolution of 1956.
Superficially, in today’s continuing protests, there are
some echoes of the tragic failure fifty years ago which
became the defining moment of the Cold War.
The streets where the demonstrators have clashed with
riot police are familiar – flashier now, the shop windows
filled with luxury items from Fifth Avenue and the rue
Saint-Honoré, but still recognisably and eternally
Mitteleuropa. The tricolour with a hole in its heart, which
the present protestors held aloft at all available opportuni-
ties, has resonant symbolism. It is the flag under which
2,700 Hungarians died in 1956 in their doomed struggle
against the overwhelming force of the Soviet Union.
Yet that is where the comparisons end. The protesters
who, on the anniversary date of 23 October, disrupted
what was supposed to be a solemn commemoration of
the Uprising do not seem, as they claim to be, the heirs
of ’56. It is not their uniform of shaven heads and heavy
boots that raises doubts. It is their look of anger and rage
at the world, rather than the hope that inspired the
students and young workers who led the Revolution.
And who now plays the part of the Soviets, whose
troops left Hungary in 1990? The 1956 Revolt was far
more a national struggle for independence against for-
eign occupation than a battle against Communism. The
present rioting, on the other hand, was sparked by an
admission from the Prime Minister, Ferenc Gyurcsany,
that he lied about the parlous state of the Hungarian
economy in order to win an election last spring.
It is true that the Socialist government today was reborn
from the ashes of the old Hungarian Communist Party
after 1989. Gyurcsany himself was head of the Communist
youth wing, which used to refer to the Uprising of 1956 as
a ‘counter-revolution’, but that was before he became a
multi-millionaire and one of the richest men in Hungary.
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
 FOREIGN PARTS
There are a few older apparatchiks in
the governing Party with unsavoury
pasts. But Hungary’s Socialist Party is
about as left-wing as New Labour is in
Britain. The unrest now is an extension
of party politics, and the divisions, such
as they are, have to do with what hap-
pened in the past, not policy today. The
betting in Budapest is that Gyurcsany
will survive, probably for rather longer
than his chum Tony Blair, with whom
he is reportedly on very good terms.
The two have apparently become close
over the last couple of years and are
allies on var ious European issues,
though it is not known whether they
have had any conversations about the
nature of truth in politics.
Another vast difference between the
unrest now and fifty years ago is in tex-
ture and atmosphere. The abiding Insurgents take down Lenin’s portrait, 1956
images of 1956 – from the Russian
tanks on the streets of Budapest to street-fighters, often as boss and betrayed the Revolution after ten days. He
young as twelve or thirteen, throwing Molotov cocktails –
were captured in black and white. The best were by the
German-born Magnum photographer Erich Lessing, who
knew Hungary from many visits in the 1950s and under-
stood the place well. His latest photo-essay contains some
well-known pictures that have rightly become classics and
many ‘lost’ images that are shown here for the first time.
Lessing is a master at evoking the frenetic pace of the
revolutionary moment, the breathless excitement and
heroism as well as the blood and gore. He is a good
writer, too. His memoir of being a journo/photograph-
er in a conflict zone – now a genre of hack literature – is
full of life and colour, far less self-referential than most. Hungary was still a basket case. Kadar’s ‘new economic
He tells of covering a shootout in the morning before
returning to the Duna Hotel to see what was for lunch
in the packed dining room. ‘A waiter said “Mr Lessing,
our gulyas is delicious today.” I ate it with gusto, then got collapsed in 1989, Hungary turned out to be the most
in the car and drove back to the revolution.’
This book also contains excellent essays by the
French/Hungarian academic François Fejto outlining
the story of the Uprising and its meaning now, and a
brilliant memoir by the Hungarian novelist Gyorgy
Konrad, who was a student in Budapest in 1956 and a
reluctant revolutionary who seemed to carry a gun more
as a fashion statement than a political one. ‘I had a
machine gun … the way a citizen carries an umbrella,
sensing it might be of use; after all safe is safe.’
One of the best portraits in Lessing’s collection is of
Janos Kadar, the dominant figure in Hungary’s post-war
history. He is shown with an earnest look, his intense
gaze fixed on an interlocutor as he rams home a point
with all the appearance of sincerity. This is the Kadar
10
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
that also emerges from Roger
Gough’s excellent, scholarly biogra-
phy of the enigmatic man who led
Hungary for thirty-two years after the
failed revolution.
Kadar was the illegitimate son of a
washerwoman, and unlike so many of
the Communist leaders in the Soviet
bloc he came from the working class
whose interests the Party was supposed
to represent. This meant he had no
illusions about the workers. He had
a hard life, even before he was jailed
by the fascists and then by the
Communists in the Stalinist purges of
the early 1950s. Kadar never showed
his true feelings, a quality which, as
Gough explains, helped him navigate
his decades in power under the aegis of
his masters in the Kremlin.
Kadar originally backed the 1956
Uprising, became Communist Party
defected to Moscow, and was installed by the Russians as
the puppet leader who would pacify the country after
Soviet troops brutally crushed the revolt. Gough’s tireless
archive work has unearthed fascinating new material that
establishes beyond doubt that it was Kadar rather than
the Russians who insisted that Imre Nagy, figurehead of
the Revolution and a potential rival, was hanged.
After five years of brutal reprisals he liberalised the
regime. Hungary became ‘the merriest barracks in the
camp’ and Kadar was the father of ‘gulyas Communism’
(a term he never used himself), which abandoned the
worst excesses of Soviet-style totalitarianism. But
model’ that was supposed to bring fresh inspiration to
Communist rule was a smoke-and-mirrors act, per-
formed with a Platinum credit card. When Communism
indebted nation in Eastern Europe.
Gough’s account of his last years is painful to read, as
Kadar grows senile and sclerotic but is still bent on cling-
ing to power as long as possible – tracking in so many
ironic ways the death throes of Communism itself.
Yet in Hungary now Kadar is remembered with affec-
tion and respect as Uncle Janos, the kindly old man who
protected Hungary from the Soviet Union after the heroic
failure of ’56. A recent opinion poll suggested that he was
one of the most popular Hungarian leaders ever and
would walk to victory if somehow he could be brought
back to life. Maybe. But it is unlikely that those anti-
Socialist protesters in Budapest who still show themselves
outside Parliament each day would be voting for him.
To order these books, see LR Bookshop on page 27
 FOREIGN PARTS
J USTIN C ARTWRIGHT
LOVE LETTER TO JO’BURG
P ORTRAIT WITH K EYS : T HE C ITY OF
J OHANNESBURG U NLOCKED
★ seized Constable Robert Tshabalala and bit him on
By Ivan Vladislavic
(Portobello Books 199pp £12.99)
I SOMETIMES THINK that book and play reviews are really
only truly interesting after you have seen the play or
read the book for yourself. The South African writer
and publisher’s editor, Ivan Vladislavic, has written a
wonderful book about Johannesburg. For me it has been
like reading an exceptionally perceptive reviewer on a
play or book I have loved, a reviewer who articulates
brilliantly what I have only half perceived.
Johannesburg is a city which many people find hard to
like, but those of us who were brought up there find it
endlessly fascinating and lively, even as it metamorphoses
into an African city after its first hundred years as the
standard-bearer of white capitalist enterprise in Africa.
Vladislavic has lived in Johannesburg since the early
Seventies, more or less coinciding with the period in
which I have not lived there, although I have been back
many, many times and indeed was involved over three
years in a film charting the social and cultural dilemmas of
the place after the release of Nelson Mandela. During that
time change has been both psychological and physical.
What Vladislavic’s book has done is to touch minutely,
sensuously, poetically, ironically and exactly on this
strange, utilitarian town, from descriptions of advertising
signs, to the habits of his new neighbours, from the quality
of light, to the feel of a winter’s day, and he has also
recorded the astonishing variety of people whose lives
have been transformed, not always happily, by the changes
of the last fifteen years.
The book is written as a series of observations or pen-
sées, often ironic. Sometimes these snippets are drawn
from the newspapers, sometimes they are the product of
walks around town, sometimes they are the result of
conversations. Take Vladislavic’s account of how an
armed man, fleeing from the police, jumped into the
enclosure at the Zoo inhabited by Max, a huge lowland
gorilla. As it happens, I was in Johannesburg at the time
and was struck by the ironies of the situation.
This is Vladislavic’s account of this event:
Perceiving his partner Lisa to be under threat, Max
grabbed hold of the robber and bit him, whereupon
the man fired three shots from a .38 special, hitting
Max in the shoulder and neck. The police, who had
gathered on the viewing platform, returned fire,
hitting the suspect in the groin.
11
Four policemen and two zookeepers then entered
the night enclosure in an effort to evacuate the
wounded man. Sergeant Percy Alberts managed to
handcuff him – he was still full of fight – but as he
and his men were withdrawing, the enraged gorilla
attacked them. He threw Constable Amos Simelane
on the ground and roughed him up a bit. Then he
the upper arm and buttocks. Finally, he dislocated
Sergeant ‘Rassie’ Rasenele’s arm. At this point one
of the zookeepers managed to drive Max off by
turning a fire extinguisher on him, and the men
made good their escape.
The injured policemen and the suspect were taken
to the Garden City Clinic. The Zoo’s own veterinari-
ans sedated Max and tried to treat him on the spot,
but their X-ray equipment proved inadequate for the
bulky frame of a Western Lowland gorilla and so he
was conveyed under police escort to the Milpark
Hospital. ‘There were emotional scenes as the uncon-
scious primate was gently placed on the back of the
bakkie’, one paper reported. Indeed, there was an
outpouring of tender concern from all quarters.
Pictures showed Max lying on a stretcher under a
blanket, with his head thrown back and his teeth
bared, while a veterinarian tended to a drip. Another
burly vet cradled Max’s head, the fingers of one hand
shielding his eyes, the others cupped under his chin.
Perhaps it was this man who held Max’s hand during
the surgery to locate and remove the bullets. Some of
Johannesburg’s finest surgeons assisted in the proce-
dure at no cost. On the admission form, Max’s
profession was given as ‘Gorilla’ and his employer as
the Johannesburg Zoo.
I have quoted at length because for a Jo’burger this piece
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LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
 FOREIGN PARTS
is loaded with signs and symbols, as deconstructionists
might say. The fact, later revealed, that the robber
turned out to have been a violent rapist as well, and is
now serving forty-five years, is also highly significant in
this violent, racially tense and vibrant place. But the lit-
tle details, like the full names of the African policemen,
on the side of a gorilla in a gunbattle, the use of the
word ‘bakkie’ – a small pick-up truck – and the eager-
ness of the (white) surgeons to operate on a gorilla, are
all charged with meaning for those of us who know the
place. Later, rather mischievously, Vladislavic tells us that
the police commissioner, Jackie Selebi, is in trouble for
calling a black employee a chimpanzee.
This is a love letter to Johannesburg, to its surface tex-
tures and rough beauty, and to some of the writers,
H AZHIR T EIMOURIAN
CATASTROPHIC SUCCESS
THE END OF IRAQ: HOW AMERICAN
INCOMPETENCE CREATED A WAR WITHOUT END
★ and Kurds, for despite the Anglo-American ‘safe haven’
By Peter W Galbraith
(Simon & Schuster 260pp £17.99)
ON 16 MARCH, 1988, the man who is now President of
Iraq telephoned The Times in London to say that the
Iraqi Government had just gassed a whole Kurdish
town, Halabja, and that thousands of people lay dead on
the streets or in their homes. He was using a captured
Iraqi ar my radio and I could hardly hear him.
Nevertheless, I put together a short report, hedged with
such journalistic staples as ‘he claimed’ and ‘he alleged’.
We all knew that Saddam Hussein was a most wicked
man, but would even he dare to mount a gas attack on a
town? It would be a major war crime.
I told my colleagues that Jalal Talabani had been a
friend of mine for years and would not lie to me, at least
not on such a large scale. But my editor decided to be
extra cautious. He sat on the report for several days until
we lost what would have been a world exclusive. Film of
the massacre later led Western television news bulletins
for three nights, though not a single frame was shown in
the Arab world.
I recall this memory for two reasons. First, to say that
although Saddam and a few of his apparatchiks are now
on trial for the crime, hundreds of the pilots, soldiers,
technicians and bureaucrats who were immediately
responsible for the gassing of Halabja and 180 other
Kurdish villages in 1988 and 1989 have set themselves
up as ‘the Iraqi Resistance’ and pose as guardians of
Arab honour. Secondly, if the regime had not been
overthrown, it would still be using all the resources of a
12
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
photographers and painters who have tried to do justice to
this unique place: as he is sitting on his stoep with some
friends, drinking beer, after returning home from a brief
and presumably unhappy emigration, Vladislavic reflects:
This is our climate. We have grown up in this air,
this light, and we grasp it on the skin, where it grasps
us. We know this earth, this grass, this polished red
stone with the soles of our feet. We will never be
ourselves anywhere else. Happier, perhaps, healthier,
less burdened, more secure. But we will never be
closer to who we are than this.
This is a truly marvellous piece of work, and my only
fear is that it may not mean much to people who don’t
know Johannesburg. I read it and I was deeply moved.
To order this book at £10.39, see LR Bookshop on page 27
state to murder even more people. Their indirect
method of killing in the later years was to manipulate
the sanctions imposed on their government by the
United Nations. Though up to $13bn dollars of ‘oil for
food’ revenue gathered dust in UN bank accounts, the
regime imported Dutch goose eggs and Scotch whisky
for the Sunni minority while starving millions of Shias
over northern Iraq, the largely Kurdish province of
Kirkuk remained under them. Some others of their
methods were almost worse than killing. Special rape
squads in the Iraqi army openly arrested young women
from Kurdish homes and then dumped their bloodied
bodies on the streets if their fathers would not declare
themselves to be Arabs and join the Arab Socialist
Renaissance Party (the Ba’ath).
In The End of Iraq, Peter Galbraith – a long-time
supporter of the Kurds, an ambitious Democrat and the
son of the late John Kenneth Galbraith – suggests safe-
guarding the Kurds against future abuse by giving them
a country of their own. ‘Churchill considered the forced
incorporation of the Kurds in Iraq as one of his biggest
mistakes,’ he writes, ‘and it is perhaps fitting that the
mistake has been undone by an American president who
keeps a bust of Churchill in the Oval Office’.
In the weeks leading up to the war of 2003, I was on a
small committee of Middle East ‘experts’ at King’s College
London, who advised the Ministry of Defence on how to
prepare for what the generals called ‘catastrophic success’:
arriving in Iraq to find that all the authorities, from police
to schoolteachers, had fled for fear of lynch mobs. This
was indeed what happened, and Galbraith regards the
inadequate planning for it as one of America’s biggest mis-
takes. But I cannot see how much difference better plan-
ning would have made. Given the hatred of the Ba’athists
and the fractious and backward nature of Iraqi ‘society’, it
was always on the cards that British and American soldiers
would end up on the streets directing traffic and being
shot at by Saddam’s embittered men – common criminals
 FOREIGN PARTS

and extremist Muslims. But to his credit, Galbraith does

not for a moment regret that Saddam and his two equally
psychopathic sons have been toppled. Furthermore, to
have left Saddam in place, but still under sanctions, would
no longer have been tenable. He had promised the French
and the Russians huge new oil concessions and they want-
ed to sell him more arms, while the Turks itched to revoke
the licence they had given America and Britain to patrol
the skies of Kurdistan from eastern Turkey. If Saddam,
Uday and Qusay had survived, ‘ethnocide’ would have
been the final fate of the Kurds, and even though – as we
now know – Saddam had destroyed his stockpiles of
chemical weapons, his technicians would soon have pro-
duced new batches, for he had unfinished business in Iran
and Kuwait and Kurdistan.
The Americans have, of course, committed many
mistakes over the past three years – which invader does
not? In my opinion, not crushing the Shia militia of the
psychopathic little ‘Mahdi’, Muqtada al-Sadr, was one
such mistake; but disbanding Saddam’s army was not.
The Shias and the Kurds – some 80 per cent of the pop-
ulation – are unhappy that the new army wears the
uniform of the old one. Imagine their interpretation of
the long-term intentions of America and Britain if those
uniforms were still filled by the men who had killed
their relatives under Saddam. A great disappointment has
been the inability of the Shias to appreciate the great gift
that the sacrifice of America and Britain has offered
them. Irrational expectations were one reason for that
failure, immaturity another. One parliamentary deputy
said recently: ‘We are like a bird born in a cage.
Suddenly we are told to fly.’ Yet another reason has surely
been the inability of many Sunni Arabs to accept that
minority rule was wrong. They have been joined by
thousands of surplus, ill-educated, young Arab Sunni
males from abroad who would have fought America
somewhere, anyway. Together, they have blocked recon-
struction wherever the Sunnis have a sizable presence.
In a highly readable and personal story, Galbraith
applauds the liberation of the Shia majority in Iraq from
centuries of oppression and celebrates that the Kurds are
‘on the cusp of achieving their own state’. But he
believes that the main error has been ‘unrealistic and
futile commitment to preserving the unity of a state that
was never a voluntary creation of its people, and that has
been held together by force’.
Here in Britain and America, most of the writers who
comment on Iraq opposed the war from the start. For
them, leaving Saddam in place was a lesser evil than see-
ing Bush and Blair triumph. Now that the aftermath of
the war has proved more difficult than expected, they
sneer knowingly and produce journalism that succours
the Ba’athists and the Islamists. It is particularly sad for me
to see my former editor Simon Jenkins leading their pack.
To order this book at £14.39, see LR Bookshop on page 27
 BIOGRAPHY
J OHN G RAY
AN AMBIVALENT AUTHORITY
A LEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE : P ROPHET OF
D EMOCRACY IN THE AGE OF R EVOLUTION
★ gives a vivid account of the ambivalent responses
By Hugh Brogan
(Profile Books 724pp £30)
IN 1927 PAUL VALÉRY wrote that Europe dreams of
being ruled by an American Commission, and for many
Europeans America is still seen as having an enviable
freedom from the burdens of the past. There may be few
who would now want to be subject to American rule
but there are still many who see America as standing for
a kind of freedom and equality to which Europeans can
still only aspire. It is a view as common on the left of
politics as on the right. There seem
to be plenty of ex-communists and
former Trotskyites who regard the
United States with a loyalty and rever-
ence of a sort they once reserved for
the Soviet Union, and who round on
critics of US policies as enemies of
progress. Right across the spectrum of
opinion Amer ica is seen as the
supreme modern society, which more
than any other embodies the future.
If any one writer can be said to be
responsible for this view, it must be
Alexis de Tocqueville. This acutely
observant, high-strung French noble-
man has been hugely influential in
disseminating the idea that America is
the country in whose path all others
are bound – sooner or later, one way
or another – to follow. Tocqueville’s
Democracy in America is a classic not
only on account of its insights into De Tocqueville: oui, the people
American life but because it suggests
that the dilemmas faced by America are those that will
confront European countries in future. Chief among
these is reconciling personal liberty with democracy.
Tocqueville understood democracy as being at bottom
the acceptance of human equality rather than any one
type of government. He was afraid that in breaking with
the complex hierarchies of Europe America could fall
into a type of mass conformism, and he feared the same
could happen in Europe itself as it shook off its feudal
inheritance. The trend towards democracy was benign
and irreversible, even providentially ordained, but it
carried with it a threat to freedom of mind and action.
Toqueville’s classic relies for much of its interest on his
14
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
view that America is not a singularity but an exemplar
of the main trends of modern development. He presents
this view without much in the way of argument, and in
fact many of the experiences he reports testify to
America’s abiding difference from other countries – he
was as dumbfounded by America’s intense religiosity as
most Europeans are today, for example. Hugh Brogan
America evoked in Tocqueville when – for reasons that
are still not entirely clear – he made his celebrated tour
in 1831–32. Brogan shows how often the sometimes
clairvoyantly far-seeing French aristocrat viewed the
country through the prejudices of his class and time. It
might be thought that Tocqueville is by now a rather
familiar figure, but he emerges anew from Brogan’s
consummately skilful presentation as an intricate and in
some ways contradictory personality. Blessed with a nat-
urally inquiring turn of mind, he was also plagued by
doubt, and struggled almost to the end of his life to
sustain his Catholic faith. A sensitive
man, Tocqueville was also capable of
a harshness that grates on our ears
nowadays. One of his aims on his
American tour was to investigate the
prison system – then as now a core
American institution – with the help
of his friend, Gustave de Beaumont.
Writing of a prisoner in solitary con-
finement in Philadelphia, he notes
that the man was healthy, well
clothed, well fed, well bedded.
‘However, he is deeply unhappy; the
wholly mental punishment inflicted
on him fills his soul with a fear far
deeper than that of whips and chains.
Is it not thus that an enlightened and
humane society should punish?’ Here
Tocqueville was not harking back to
feudal cruelty. He was writing as one
of the progressive thinkers of the
time – as he did when he wrote
condoning the savagery that accom-
panied the conquest of Algeria. As Brogan notes,
Tocqueville may never have been able to shake off a
certain nostalgia for the ancien régime. He was always
caught between a past that never wholly lost the quali-
ties of an idyll and a revolutionary present whose upshot
was uncertain. But he was the reverse of a reactionary,
and embraced what he believed to be enlightened and
modern with a righteous enthusiasm.
It is hard to do justice to the artistry with which
Brogan renders this complicated character. Tocqueville’s
friendships and ambitions, his passionate and anxious
marriage, his restless cyclothymic personality as a result of
which he passed regularly through moods of melancholy
 BIOGRAPHY
and elation – all this is beautifully brought out. His life-
long attachment to his devoted friend Beaumont, to
whom he wrote begging him to visit when he was dying
in Cannes, is charted with great subtlety. Brogan’s
delicate touch does not desert him when he recounts
Tocqueville’s exchanges with Arthur Gobineau, the
intellectually gifted but repulsive author of the two-
volume Essay on the Inequality of Man, which was to
have a baleful influence in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century as a kind of encylopedia of racism.
The book is also rich in delightful vignettes, as when
Tocqueville is described drinking in the Gothic scene
of Oxford at night. Though I have read Tocqueville on
and off over many years, I felt as if I knew the man
behind the writings for the first time. Brogan has given
us a masterly reconstruction of the European milieu by
which Tocqueville was formed, and the definitive
biography of one of the nineteenth century’s most
representative thinkers.
It is a study of the life not the work, but Hugh
P AUL J OHNSON
The Man with the
Midas Touch
M ELLON : A N A MERICAN L IFE
★ proved, at any rate in his own case, that a good business-
By David Cannadine
(Allen Lane / The Penguin Press 779pp £30)
DAVID CANNADINE HAS written a large-scale life of one
of America’s greatest business leaders, Andrew Mellon
(1855–1937). He has had full cooperation from the
Andrew W Mellon Foundation, to whom the book is
dedicated, and so this is effectively an official life. As such
it is overdue and will, I imagine, be widely welcomed
and read. Mellon was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,
heartland of US heavy industry. He inherited from his
father a bank, T Mellon & Sons, and expanded it. From
1902 it became the Mellon National Bank, one of the
great names in US banking. But Mellon was far from
being merely a banker. Some would call him the leading
venture capitalist of his day. He created, among other
companies, the great aluminium corporation, Alcoa, and
Gulf Oil.
It was a shrewd move of War ren Harding, the
Republican President who followed Woodrow Wilson,
to make Mellon Secretary to the Treasury in 1921. He
served in this post under not only Harding but his two
successors, Coolidge and Hoover, over a matter of
eleven years in all. He has been described as the greatest
15
Brogan’s book leaves the reader with some fascinating
questions about Tocqueville’s view of America. Would
he not be appalled by the power of fundamentalism in
the US today? Tocqueville seems, at the end, to have
been a believer; but like most European intellectuals at
the time he aspired to be reasonable, and believed being
modern went with growing rationality. It is hard to
imagine him being other than horrified by the spectacle
of a country a quarter of whose population rejects
Darwinism and lives in expectation of Armageddon. If
he were confronted with it as it is at the start of the
twenty-first century, would Tocqueville change his view
of America? Or would he revise his beliefs about what it
means to be modern? It is impossible to tell. Still, it is
not difficult to envisage this inquiring thinker conclud-
ing that America is not the paradigm of modernity he
imagined it to be but a one-off experiment, which
seems destined to remain different from Europe and the
rest of the world.
To order this book at £24, see LR Bookshop on page 27
Treasury Secretary since Alexander Hamilton. His
achievements were considerable. He redesigned and
improved the currency. He invented the modern budget
machinery. He extricated the country from its wartime
system of ‘progressive’ taxation, cut taxes, and at the
same time improved revenue returns and reduced the
national debt by a third. His was the principle – since
successfully applied by Reagan and Bush – that tax cuts
can actually increase yields from high earners. He
man can also run a country’s finances with notable
success. His slogan was ‘More business in government,
less government in business’. The trouble was, his advice
was not always taken. Though he got on well with
Coolidge (the two were both taciturn and conversation
between them was ‘a succession of pauses’), Hoover, an
interventionist and social engineer, was almost his
antithesis. Mellon regarded the Wall Street Crash of 1929
as an overdue corrective. His advice was to abandon
Hoover’s fiddling with the economy and return to strict
laissez-faire: ‘Liquidate labour, liquidate stocks, liquidate
the farmers, liquidate real estate … and so purge the
rottenness out of the economy.’ It was the only sensible
advice Hoover received throughout his presidency. He
not only ignored it but did the opposite, beginning the
process of government intervention which, greatly aug-
mented under F D Roosevelt, deepened the recession
into the Great Depression and prolonged it, in effect, up
to the outbreak of the Second World War.
Mellon also had a third career as an art collector and
philanthropist, who almost single-handedly created one
of the world’s great museums, the National Gallery of
Art in Washington, endowing it and stocking it with his
pictures. These included the little portrait I would most
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
 BIOGRAPHY

like to own in all the world, used for instance by the Nazis. It
Vermeer’s Girl in a Red Hat, which had also been used in the US to
he had bought for the modest sum put into prison gangsters who
of $125,000. Mellon did not have could not be convicted of any
the superlative eye of the coke- charge other than tax evasion.
man, Fr ick, but he bought This in itself was a dubious strat-
shrewdly on the whole, especially egy, but it is significant that
from the Hermitage, which Stalin Elmer Ivey, who was head of the
was disgorging in return for hard Treasury’s Intelligence Unit and
currency. He dealt chiefly with had been the nemesis of Al
Duveen, often out-manoeuvring Capone, thought there was no
the old rogue and getting him to case against Mellon. Indeed he
reduce his pr ices. Cannadine had already survived two thor-
describes his acquisitive career in ough investigations by the IRS,
detail, quoting prices, but giving which were perfectly proper, and
few clues to Mellon’s philosophy another by the Justice
of art, if he had one. The trouble Department, which was less so,
is, he was an inarticulate man who before FDR got going and egged
could not put into words his on the Attorney General to pros-
feelings, either about art or his ecution. Cannadine shows
often difficult relationships with beyond any possible doubt that
his children. He is the kind of sub- Mellon: lost for words the President was personally and
ject who is no help at all to his deeply involved in the vendetta.
biographer, and Cannadine cannot bring him to life. It was accompanied by prejudicial leaks, hostile com-
Given his services to the country, and the munificence ment by Mellon’s critics and enemies in Congress, and
of his benefaction, Mellon’s old age in the 1930s should by venomous books and articles by writers in some cases
have been serene and dignified. In fact it was a long briefed by the administration. Despite all the carefully
agony of persecution, almost entirely due to the malig- worked-up prejudice, Mellon (and his companies)
nity of FDR. The new President in 1933 was, by survived everything FDR could throw at him, and he
American standards, ‘old money’, with all the patina of was triumphantly acquitted by a grand jury. But the final
wisdom, statesmanship and gentility which (in his view) vindication did not come until after his death, and
long-inherited wealth acquired. He adopted from his despite his acquittal, the impression was left in many
Republican cousin Theodore a policy of denouncing American minds that there was no smoke without
‘new money’ titans as ‘malefactors of great wealth’. fire. Mellon’s reputation as an honest man and a
Indeed, in 1926 he had himself identified Mellon as ‘the distinguished public servant was permanently damaged.
master mind’ of such malefactors. Soon after taking Cannadine’s account should go a long way to setting
office, and after a personal meeting with Mellon at things right.
which he was, to put it mildly, duplicitous and deceitful, I have always thought that Roosevelt’s persecution of
FDR authorised and directed a campaign to convict Mellon is the worst single thing on his entire record,
Mellon of tax evasion in his 1930–32 tax returns. The showing both his personal vindictiveness and his
campaign, or persecution (it was nothing less), went on contempt for the law. It amazes me that so many people
for the rest of the old man’s still consider him a great
life, and poisoned it. president. But his reputation
Cannadine descr ibes all is gradually being chipped
the devious, and sometimes away. Amity Schlaes’s long-
unlawful and unconstitu- awaited demolition of the
tional, moves by FDR in New Deal, due next year,
this infamous business in will be a big step forward
considerable detail, and it to establishing the truth.
makes the best part of the In the meantime, David
book. Perverting the www.lifelinespress.co.uk Cannadine’s account of old
income-tax system, for the Turning your memoirs into family heirlooms Mellon’s sufferings is another
purpose of pursuing a politi- “This is a fantastic idea” - Lutyens and Rubinstein, literary agents act of justice.
cal vendetta, is the hallmark To order this book at £24, see
of low-grade regimes. It was LR Bookshop on page 27

16
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
 BIOGRAPHY
D IANA ATHILL
NATURAL INCLINATIONS
B EATRIX P OTTER : A L IFE IN N ATURE
★ woman into whose life no man had intruded, whose
By Linda Lear
(Allen Lane / The Penguin Press 584pp £25)
DESCRIBING IN AN American publication her puritan,
nonconformist family, Beatrix Potter wrote: ‘I am
descended from generations of Lancashire yeomen and
weavers, hard-headed, matter of fact folk … Your
Mayflower ancestors sailed to America; mine at the same
date were sticking it out at home, probably rather enjoy-
ing persecution.’ And later: ‘I am a believer in “breed”; I
hold that a strongly marked personality can influence
descendants for generations. In the same way that we
farmers know that certain sires – bulls – stallions – rams
– have been “prepotent” in forming
breeds of shorthorns, thoroughbreds,
and the numerous varieties of sheep.’
There speaks the sturdy, humorous
daughter of those Lancastrians, and
the dedicated farmer she so proudly
became. Much later she added a very
significant touch to her self-portrait:
‘I have just made stories to please
myself because I never grew up.’
Linda Lear’s biography, after which
no one in their senses, in the foresee-
able future, will ever presume to pen
another word about Potter, displays in
full the complexity of this apparently
simple woman’s life. She almost let it
be blighted by her parents, yet it is
clear that in childhood she was
allowed – even encouraged – to fol-
low her own bent to a degree unusual
in Victorian households. Few posh
London nurser ies hosted rabbits,
frogs, newts, tortoises, mice, rats, Ready for the pot?
snakes, bats, wild ducks, snails,
guinea-pigs, even ‘a kestrel and a mean-tempered jay’.
And few little girls, when their animals died, boiled
them and kept their skeletons to be ‘articulated, mea-
sured, drawn, labelled’. It was Papa who fostered this
scientific turn of mind. Mama seems to have given the
nursery a wide berth. Her Lancastrian good sense
appears to have curdled, on migration to Kensington,
into a deplorable snobbishness, regardless of the fact that
because of their Unitarianism and their Lancashire
accents the Potters, for all their considerable wealth,
never made it into full social acceptance. This caused her
17
eventually to lead poor Beatrix a far from merry dance.
By the time she was twenty-eight she was referring
to Mama as ‘the enemy’, though not rebelling (the
power of parents until well into the twentieth century
astounds). After her teens had been mostly lost to her
through ill-health, Beatr ix became a shy young
energies were directed towards art and science, the
latter approached through the former. She was partic-
ularly dedicated to drawing fungi, becoming a good
mycologist, but was also tempted to some extent by
botany, ornithology, geology and entomology. The
natural sciences and a passion for countr y life,
indulged during the family’s long annual holidays,
were her raison d’être, and she had written herself off as
a sexual being, though not in bitterness. ‘Latter day
fate’, she was to say, ‘ordains that many women shall
be unmarried and self-contained, nor should I dream
to complain, but I hold an old fashioned notion that a
happy marriage is the crown of a woman’s life’. These
years, certainly an important part of
her life, are chronicled by Lear in
such detail that I have to confess to
becoming bored.
However, Peter Rabbit was lurking.
Not content with fungi, Beatrix’s
pencil was constantly skipping off to
Christmas cards, place cards (tucked
under mats on dinner tables) and pic-
ture-letters to the children of friends.
When someone suggested that her
work was worthy of reproduction it
occurred to her that she might make
a little money, thus achieving a
measure of independence from her
parents. Which led, after much to-ing
and fro-ing, to Frederick Warne’s
signing up the first of her ‘little
books’ in 1902, when she was thirty-
six. And happiness began.
All the books are about animals she
had owned (even horrible Samuel
Whiskers!) and places she knew inti-
mately, and all gave her pleasure in
the writing, which is the secret of their charm. So did
promoting and marketing them, at which she was far
better than her publisher. The money poured in – and
so did love. She never met her editor, Norman Warne,
without a chaperone, but they became engaged – to
Mama’s horror: he was in trade! How was making books
inferior to weaving cotton, asked Beatrix, but still she
didn’t think they could marry unless her mother could
be won over. Norman died of leukaemia before the
matter was resolved, and her grief was real: she told his
sister that she had been comparing her belated happiness
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
 BIOGRAPHY
to Anne Elliot’s in Persuasion.
By then, however, she was launched into self-confi-
dence, and the adventure of buying Hill Top Farm in the
Lake District had started her new life. It was not long
before her second love, William Heelis, joined her in it,
becoming indeed the ‘crown’ of her life. Again there was
trouble with Mama, perhaps this time chiefly an attempt
to keep a very useful daughter under her thumb, but
now Beatrix had become stronger. William was to prove
a devoted partner throughout her development as
landowner and farmer, and in her immense contribution,
in collaboration with the National Trust, towards the
preservation of large parts of the Lake District.
All of this makes a happy, enjoyable story which adds a
great deal to one’s knowledge of this simultaneously
down-to-earth and fanciful, wise and childlike person.
There is one comic moment at which loyal Linda Lear
has rather evidently to grit her teeth before admitting
that Beatrix misbehaved, being really quite horrid to a
man who took over the administration of some National
Trust property she had been running. (His sin was that
he didn’t do things exactly as she would have done.) But
one can understand any degree of loyalty to a woman
who ‘found herself ’ as triumphantly as Beatrix did. And
to give so much pleasure to so many millions of people
in the process – what an achievement!
To order this book at £20, see LR Bookshop on page 27
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
18
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
J OHN B REWER
Publish and
Be Damned
E DMUND C URLL , B OOKSELLER
★
By Paul Baines and Pat Rogers
(Oxford University Press 400pp £30)
YOU MAY NOT have heard of Edmund Curll but, if you
have, it is almost certainly as one of the chief victims of
Alexander Pope’s Dunciad, the famous attack of 1728 on
the horrors of Grub Street and the booksellers whose
tawdry stratagems reduced literature to a wearisome
commodity. As Paul Baines and Pat Rogers remind us in
their astonishingly erudite Edmund Curll, Bookseller,
Curll is the star in Pope’s grotesque pageant of publishing
turpitude, hogging the show. ‘Obscene with filth’, he is
the hapless victor of the pissing contest for the favours of
the novelist Eliza Haywood, and a man bedaubed with
filthy lucre, prepared to adopt any ploy to get what he
wants. Pope’s satire had many individual targets, as well
as the corrupt literary system itself, but no figure
embodied so well as Curll the restless, unruly, illicit,
rambunctious business of publishing in the early eigh-
teenth century, a world that Pope viewed with a peculiar
mixture of distaste and desire.
Curll and Pope were cast as polar opposites – the
bookseller a happy hooker who would do anything for
money, the poet a high-minded author who set himself
above commerce. But they thrived and fed off each
other: Curll turned the enmity of Pope (as he turned
almost everything in his life) into a vehicle of self-
promotion, while Pope used Curll to position himself in
the literary marketplace in ways that would (he hoped)
avoid accusations of self-promotion and venality. The
struggle between the two men, an attraction of oppo-
sites, continues to fascinate because it laid bare the
power struggles, posturing and compromises that are
familiar to authors and publishers today. As Baines and
Rogers point out, in the Dunciad ‘we witness something
which had never happened before, as a major work
allotted a key role in the drama of authorship to the
commercial underpinnings of the [literary] system’.
Pope lifted the lid, and we’ve never really been able to
put it back on again.
We can imagine Pope without Curll, but can we
imagine Curll without Pope? Perhaps we don’t want to,
but Baines and Rogers’ grand opus enables us to see the
miscreant bookseller as far more than a grotesque
footnote in the history of English literature. They lay
 BIOGRAPHY

out the career of an industri- calling. He was poisoned

ous, opportunistic man
whose chequered career,
they suggest in a brief aside,
marked a particular ‘histori-
cal moment at the gradual
handover between the age of
literary patronage and the
dominance of respected
booksellers such as Dodsley
and Millar’. This is no easy
task, as much of Curll’s
career remains obscure, some
of it deliberately hidden from
view. But Paul Baines, an
expert in eighteenth-century
forgery, and Pat Rogers, the
author of a wonderful book on Grub Street, are the sort
of sleuths who are not frightened by Curll’s obfuscations
and succeed in casting light on the many byways, alleys
and doors he darkened. Their aim is neither to disparage
nor praise Curll, to treat him as a villain or a loveable
rogue, but to place him within the history of publishing.
So what, apart from pissing off Pope and a lot of other
authors, did Curll do? He published books – according
to Baines and Rogers more than a thousand titles, which
will be the subject of an analytic bibliography that is
planned as a companion to this biography. These fall
into three categories – the good, the bad and the ugly.
Among the first was a large list of antiquarian works,
histories and translations of modern and classical litera-
ture, some plays, poetry and scientific writing. The sec-
ond included re-published and pirated works with new
title pages, and biographical pastiches of documents,
some fictional and some purloined, interlarded with
advertisements for other Curll productions. Finally, there
was the porn: books on rape, sodomy, masturbation,
impotence, eunuchs, flagellation and erotic auto-asphyxia
– prurient works thinly cloaked by moral and medical
justification; and the bestselling Merryland ser ies
of books that lasciviously explored the female body
under the sober guise of an
with an emetic by Pope,
tossed in a blanket and
beaten by the scholars at
Westminster School,
brought before the House
of Lords on more than one
occasion, prosecuted in the
Court of Kings Bench and
in Chancer y (at Pope’s
instigation), and jailed and
made to stand in the public
pillory. One of the remark-
able features of this
resilient man was his aston-
Publisher receives his due ishing ability to use the
story of these misfortunes
to sell more books. For Curll everything – every story,
tale or incident – was valuable, as long as it could be
printed between covers.
Despite his conviction for obscene libel, it was his
techniques of publication rather than the content of his
books that provoked indignation. When Curll
approached, you nailed everything to the floor. He
would steal anything for a Curll imprint: a literary
manuscript, your private letters, a copyright, an author’s
identity, an out-of-print edition, the printed sheets of an
incomplete volume, a reputation or a signature. Yet he
was only the most enterprising and unscrupulous of
many ‘rogue’ booksellers at a time when publishing was
weakly regulated and undergoing enormous expansion.
When Baines and Rogers stand back from their
meticulously constructed, dense chronology of Curll’s
publishing activities, they are forced to concede that he
was not much of an innovator. He did not raise the
status of the publishing profession, nor did he introduce
new ways of selling books. At bottom, ‘all his major
innovations lay in the field of promotion and publicity’.
A title page, newspaper paragraph, even the footnotes of
his own publications were all seen as vehicles of publicity
rather than sources of information. This biography, with
its meticulous account of

NEW AUTHORS
anatomical survey. Curll’s everyday activities,
If some of Curll’s makes – as its authors ‘ruefully
impr ints seem safe and PUBLISH YOUR BOOK – ALL SUBJECTS INVITED acknowledge’ – less exciting
conventional, it’s pretty Have you written a book, and are you looking for a publisher? Athena reading than the story of
clear that much of his out- Press is a publisher dedicated to the publishing of books mainly by first Pope’s literary monster. But
put involved high risks in time authors. While we have our criteria for accepting manuscripts, we are
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19
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
 BIOGRAPHY
C HRISTOPHER C OKER
A RELUCTANT WARRIOR
D EAN ACHESON : A L IFE IN THE C OLD WAR
★ end was ‘the small potatoes of the Channel Command’.
By Robert L Beisner
(Oxford University Press 800pp £19.99)
IN THE 1960S, when Dean Acheson had become some-
what dyspeptic in his old age, he used to goad the
British government on its treatment of white Rhodesia.
So did many other Amer icans, including George
Kennan (another veteran of the early years of the Cold
War). Asked during Prime Minister’s Question Time
what he made of Acheson’s charge that his policy
towards Rhodesia was based more on malice than prin-
ciple, Harold Wilson replied: ‘Mr Acheson was a fine
Secretary of State. Alas, having lost a State Department,
he has not yet found a role.’
This anecdote does not appear in
Robert Beisner’s comprehensive and
excellent new biography, but it sums
up one of the sub-themes of his
book: the troubled relationship
between the United States and
Br itain. Wilson was as good as
Harold Macmillan at one-liners,
though he had less opportunity to
employ them – his was the
Roundhead party, not the Cavalier,
even in the permissive 1960s. His
riposte, of course, was a reference to
Acheson’s most famous claim that
having lost an Empire, Britain had
not yet found a role. Instead, it had
chosen to tie itself to the United
States in a ‘special relationship’ which
Acheson, like many Americans, was
prepared to indulge – on occasion.
Not that the terms of engagement
(that of a junior partner constantly Acheson: eagle eye
seeking the approval of the senior)
were unanimously liked by the British. Only two weeks
after the 1945 General Election, The Economist opined
that Churchill’s past policy of deference towards the US
had hindered any efforts to evolve a special ‘British
approach’ to world affairs. In 1952 – recently returned
to Downing Street – Churchill sailed to New York on
the Queen Mary. There Acheson made it perfectly plain
that Britain was playing second fiddle, though both he
and Truman paid deference to the wartime leader.
Sixteen times over nine days Acheson met with
Churchill, Anthony Eden, or both. It all ended with a
20
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
tearful tirade by the Prime Minister at America’s insis-
tence of its possession of the North Atlantic Naval
Command. Dur ing a meeting in the Oval Office
Churchill even tore to ribbons a supposedly agreed-on
draft. His temper tantrum didn’t impress his hosts. As
Beisner adds, all they were prepared to concede in the
Tony Blair might have gained from reading this
book, but then as Prime Minister he would have been
fortunate indeed to have had Truman in the White
House and Acheson at State. He might even have kept
his job until 2008.
The British journalist Alistair Cooke once described
Acheson as ‘a six-foot-two Velásquez grandee [who had]
submitted to his reincarnation in fine tweeds as a
Connecticut Yankee’. He certainly had a personal pres-
ence which impressed most who met him, including
Ernest Bevin who called him ‘my dear’, and Eden who
called him ‘dear boy’. He preferred the latter. He remains
the towering figure of the post-war years that shaped a
world many of whose features, such
as Nato, survive the Cold War.
Present at the Creation was the title of
his memoirs. The title might sound
hubristic but it was not. ‘In a sense
the post-war years were a period of
creation for the ordering of which I
shared with others some responsibil-
ity.’ Chief among the latter was
Truman himself. No pair seemed so
poorly matched – one a bourbon-
dr inking Midwester ner with a
homespun disposition, the other a
moustachioed Connecticut dandy
who preferred perfect martinis. Yet
it proved a winning team, which set
out not only to outmatch Stalin’s
Soviet Union but also to outwit it
at every turn – aims in which it
largely succeeded.
Even so, Acheson only became a
Cold War warrior slowly, and reluc-
tantly. By 1947 he was making bare-
ly disguised public attacks on the
USSR. By then he had become the very model of a
‘hawk’ (a term not then in use, of course), and never
budged from that outlook for the rest of his life. But he
had a fine eye for the dynamics of the Cold War – for
the limits of the possible. The Truman Doctrine, of
which he was the prime architect, involved drawing
lines in the sand, not rolling back communism.
When and why the Cold War broke out is still
difficult to say. Certainly it was not during the Second
World War, in which the United States deferred to
Stalin (much to Churchill’s dismay). The years 1943–5
 BIOGRAPHY
even saw a certain friendliness develop, fuelled by hopes
of a new post-war order. The impulse to compete did
not then exist. It came some years later during the
Berlin Crisis in 1948. The Cold War crept up upon a
world unprepared for it. It took the Truman Doctrine to
turn a crusading impulse into action; Truman’s words
would have achieved nothing, however, if the impulse
had not originally been there.
In the event, the struggle was a patchy affair, a case of
chipping away at the edges. It was no crusade. The
Russians were contained and deterred but there were no
grand-scale designs. The idea of using military force never
drew support from Acheson despite Bevin’s urging that
the US use its atomic monopoly to shape the post-war
world, as he argued even at the height of the Berlin Crisis.
The United States went to war as the French and
British had done between September 1939 and April
1940. It engaged in a ‘phoney war’, a war of propaganda
and subversion, without military force. This was the
pr ice the Amer icans paid for being realistic. The
conflict, of course, far from being ‘phoney’, was
appallingly real for its victims, the people of Eastern
Europe and the Third World in whose name the United
States found itself engaged in a long and debilitating,
though ultimately successful, contest which was to last
for the next forty years. As Beisner makes clear, it would
not have been won without Acheson.
Today the War on Terror has once again fundamentally
transformed the security landscape. It is interesting to
speculate on what Acheson would make of the present.
The fact is, writes Beisner, his personality was so enor-
mous it is nearly impossible to imagine his being appointed
to high office today. Could we imagine any Secretary of
State capable of defending himself (or herself) as adroitly
as Acheson did during the MacArthur hearings in the
Senate in 1951? MacArthur’s dismissal at the height of the
Korean War precipitated a political crisis which seriously
threatened the administration. That it weathered the
storm was due in no small measure to Acheson’s brilliant
performance. In all, his testimony came to 400,000
words, and filled 624 pages of the published hearings. It is
also clear that Acheson would have had little time for the
present administration’s evangelical zeal. He never
invoked God in his speeches or private conversations. He
lived by a code, not a theology, the Stoic code of such
great American figures as Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Stoicism these days is not much in fashion.
One suspects he might even have been disappointed
that the US finds itself in the early twenty-first century on
the defensive – a country which through its failures in the
Middle East may even retreat into neo-isolationism, no
longer daring to dream for the rest of us. Battered in Iraq,
America seems to have lost the bearings that Acheson
gave it. He died, as do many old men, believing that the
future was grim, that optimism was at best misplaced, if
21
not entirely self-deceiving. He was wrong then. But he
might have no reason to change his opinion today. What
he would find so tragic is that with terrorism still unde-
feated, and China on the rise, and the Western alliance
deeply divided, the nation, far from being present at the
creation, seems to be cooling its heels in the antechamber
of history, anxiously awaiting the Fall.
To order this book at £16, see LR Bookshop on page 27
P AUL A DDISON
THE MISTS OF ESPIONAGE
C HURCHILL’ S M AN OF M YSTERY: D ESMOND
M ORTON AND THE WORLD OF I NTELLIGENCE
★
By Gill Bennett
(Routledge 404pp £49.95)
SOME BIOGRAPHERS WRITE with warmth and admiration
of their subjects, others with antipathy and a desire to
debunk. Gill Bennett’s life of Desmond Morton falls into
a different category. She is a historian in search of a char-
acter who constantly tries to give her the slip. Her book
is a fascinating battle of wits between a scholar whose
aim is to reveal and a secret intelligence officer for whom
concealment was a way of life.
Desmond John Falkiner Morton (1891–1971) is
mainly remembered today for his long association with
Winston Churchill. In the 1920s he worked for the
Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) in the front line of the
original Cold War against Bolshevism. In the 1930s he
ran the Industrial Intelligence Centre, a unit which
provided the Committee of Imperial Defence with
alarming reports on the progress of German rearma-
ment. He also supplied the same infor mation to
Churchill, the government’s most vociferous critic.
When Churchill formed his government in 1940 he
rewarded Morton with the roles of intelligence adviser
and liaison officer with allied resistance movements.
Morton deserves a biography and Bennett brings for-
midable resources to the task. Until recently Chief
Historian at the Foreign Office, she has enjoyed full
access to the files of the Secret Intelligence Service,
which have never been in the public domain. A fine
scholar, with a mastery of the organisational history of
the intelligence services, she has probably read every
scrap of paper with a bearing on Morton in every
archive, but is keenly aware of the limitations of the
sources. Time and again she remarks on Morton’s ability
to cover his tracks, to leave on record misleading
accounts of events in which he was involved, to create
around himself an aura of mystery. She cannot prove that
in the Zinoviev affair he leaked what he knew to be a
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
 BIOGRAPHY
forged document to the Daily Mail in order to desta-
bilise the first Labour government, but she suspects it.
Though Morton was secretive, he comes across in
Bennett’s account as a forceful and quick-witted character, if
also an abrasive one. His most original contribution was
the development of commercial and industrial espionage.
The service chiefs were only interested in the comparative
strength of the armed forces ranged against them. Morton
recognised that the true measure of a potential enemy lay
in its economic and industrial resources and its capacity to
mobilise them in a long war. The Industrial Intelligence
Centre, which was very much his own creation,
employed a network of business contacts to gather infor-
mation about factories, plants and scientific processes.
While other intelligence officers were still preoccupied
with the Soviet threat, Morton was persuaded even before
the rise of Hitler that Germany was the greater menace.
When the government proved slow to respond to his
warnings he turned with impatience to Churchill.
The rest is television history: clandestine meetings in
which Morton passed on top secret data to Churchill in
defiance of the authorities. Not so, according to Bennett.
Morton was acting within the conventions of the
Establishment in allowing an ex-minister and Privy
Counsellor to see government papers, and he never
handed over secret service material. Perhaps: but this was
a grey area, and Morton was surely pushing his luck by
22
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
giving so much support to a campaign directed against
his own employers. In retirement he claimed that he had
obtained written permission from Ramsay MacDonald
and Baldwin to brief Churchill, but his biographer is
sceptical: ‘It is quite in character for Morton to have
invented its existence after the event, in a typical exercise
of self-exculpation and to deflect attention from his own
role.’ Churchill, of course, had his own network of
contacts. Indeed Bennett concludes that Morton probably
learned as much from Churchill as Churchill did from
Morton – a very nice twist in the story.
If Morton’s working life is something of a riddle for
biographers, his private life is almost a void. Anecdotes
about his schooldays at Eton or his experiences as an officer
cadet at Woolwich are notable by their absence. We know
that he converted in 1916 to Roman Catholicism, but
apart from this his emotional history is a blank. He never
married. As a man in his forties with a successful career in
Whitehall he continued to live during the week with his
mother in Chelsea and never acquired a key to the door.
‘Not a whiff of dalliance, sexual intrigue or passion has
been detected in a close study of Morton’s life’, Bennett
writes, nor is she willing to speculate on the reasons why.
In the decades after 1945 almost everyone with a claim
to have contributed to victory sought to put their story
on record. Morton, by contrast, wrote no memoirs,
urged others to leave him out of their own accounts, and
even threatened legal action if he was mentioned. All this
was characteristic, but accompanied late in life by a sense
of disappointment. Having introduced Morton into his
inner circle in 1940, Churchill soon discovered that he
could deal directly with Stewart Menzies, the head of SIS,
and no longer needed Morton’s advice on intelligence.
Many tasks of secondary importance were entrusted
to him, but Morton was gradually sidelined, a demotion
that probably accounts for some of the bitter remarks
he made about Churchill in letters to the journalist
R W Thompson. Morton, however, had a more funda-
mental reason for talking about Churchill. It distracted
attention from the topic he wished to avoid – himself.
No scholar could have done more than Gill Bennett to
expose him to the light of day. The archives, critically
handled, are surprisingly rich and enable her to draw
much of his working life out of the shadows. Of course it
is possible that he carried a host of dark secrets with him
to the grave, but more likely that his passion for conceal-
ment was no more than a neurotic version of the repres-
sion and self-control instilled into most young men of his
era and background. Morton had a lively sense of sin but
it could well have been triggered by transgressions that
would strike us as commonplace. Take away the air of
mystery he cultivated, and we find a hard-working official
with conservative opinions, administrative flair, and a pas-
sion for intrigue. In Bennett he has met his match at last.
To order this book at £39.96, see LR Bookshop on page 27
 BIOGRAPHY
A NDREW TAYLOR
ON THE MAKE
A MERIGO : T HE M AN W HO G AVE H IS N AME
TO A MERICA
★ written by him, one rule of thumb is to go for the ones
By Felipe Fernández-Armesto
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson 248pp £16.99)
THE STORY OF the early navigators is notoriously difficult
to tell: they all had too many reasons to exaggerate and
lie, and when they wanted to tell the truth, they lacked
the instruments to measure exactly where they had been.
Their royal sponsors were anxious to keep much of what
they learned secret so that they could gain as much exclu-
sive profit as possible from the new lands and new routes
that were discovered. Apart from Columbus, who seemed
almost pathologically anxious to get down as much as
possible about himself on paper, little is known for sure
about the lives of the great explorers of the age.
Amerigo Vespucci – the Florentine adventurer who
crossed the Atlantic a good seven years after Columbus,
but still managed to win the big prize of having the New
World named after him – is no exception. Felipe
Fernández-Armesto has to make what he can of the
sketchy knowledge that exists about Vespucci’s early life,
and he does so scrupulously, weighing the different
stories and the various scraps of evidence judiciously –
there are necessarily a lot of ‘probablys’ and ‘may-have-
beens’ in this book. Depending on how charitable we
want to be, Vespucci seems to have started out as either a
pimp and small-time con man, or an ambitious salesman
on the make. There was certainly no sign when he was a
young man that he would ever become a famous
mariner. Even later on, after he had moved as a merchant
and agent first to Seville and then to Portugal, and rein-
vented himself as a navigator and cosmographer, there are
few undisputed facts.
We know, for instance, that he joined an expedition
led by Alonso de Hojeda, a veteran of Columbus’s
voyages, which left Seville in 1499 – but what his role
was, how far he travelled and what he actually saw are all
uncertain. His letters – or at least, letters later copied in
his name – give the impression that he was in charge,
but Hojeda himself simply lists Vespucci among the vari-
ous pilots on the expedition. For all his sneers at the
‘grossness’ of the experienced mariners who had no
understanding of the new skills of navigation, his own
estimates of the length of the journey seem to be about
twice those of his commander. ‘Vespucci’s imagination
was fecund,’ says Fernández-Armesto tartly.
Why was he taken at all, when he had no seafaring
experience? Almost certainly, the book concludes,
23
because he had picked up knowledge of jewellery in
general, and pearls in particular, during his earlier career
as a merchant, and the Hojeda expedition was setting
out to seek for pearls in the New World. But that rather
questionable qualification was incidental to his irrepress-
ible self-belief – and when sorting out which of the
documents bearing Vespucci’s name were actually
containing the most egregious self-promotion.
‘If my companions had not heeded me, who had
knowledge of cosmography, there would have been no
ship-master, nay, not the leader of our expedition
himself, who would have known where we were within
five hundred leagues,’ he wr ites in the pamphlet
‘Mundus Novus’, or New World. It was that title, not
the journey, and still less the navigation skills, that guar-
anteed Vespucci’s immortality.
‘Mundus Novus’ caught the mood of the times, and fed
an insatiable hunger across Europe for news – the more
salacious and shocking the better – about the discoveries on
the other side of the Atlantic. Within two years, it appeared
in Florence, Augsburg, Cologne, Nuremberg, Strasbourg,
Milan, Rome, and Rostok. The book and the phrase came
to the notice of the cartographer Martin Waldseemüller as
he prepared a new map of the world that would demon-
strate how knowledge had advanced since the days of the
ancient Greeks. ‘I see no reason why anyone could properly
disapprove of a name derived from that of Amerigo, the
discoverer, a man of sagacious genius,’ Waldseemüller
declared on his map – and the name was settled.
Columbus, of course, not Vespucci, was the real
‘discoverer’ – and in fact, Columbus had talked of
‘another world’ six years before him, so Vespucci was
not even the first to realise that the Americas were new
continents, and not simply outlying regions of Asia; the
Italian-born historian Peter Martyr had also used the
phrase ‘mundus novus’. Waldseemüller realised his mis-
take later, and tried to correct it – but when Gerard
Mercator accepted the name on his own world map of
1538, Vespucci’s fame was assured. Max Clifford could
not have done better.
There are so few facts about Vespucci’s life that this
could have been a most frustrating book – we don’t even
know for sure how many times he crossed the Atlantic.
But Fernández-Armesto makes a virtue of the lack of
hard information, tracing the various scraps of evidence
like a detective, and weighing his tentative conclusions
like a judge. He also writes cogently and with insight
about the world in which Vespucci lived, and about the
effect that the discoveries in the West had upon it. It’s
the mark of a good biography that, however little we
may know for certain about what happened to Vespucci
or what he did, when we put this book down, we feel
that we understand him.
To order this book at £13.59, see LR Bookshop on page 27
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
 SHORT STORY
shadow passed the end of the garden.
A A flicker of movement, a blur of black.
M AGGIE G EE
Una never complained, she never
cried. This was the thing she tried to
Ring-barking
hold on to: her loss was not special, nor was she: she
would ask no favours, bother no neighbours: no, she
was English, she would be stoic. After all, the British
had lost an empire. But her road, Woodbine Road
where they had lived forever (although she had never
liked the name, and had got up, two years ago, a com-
mittee of residents who tried to persuade the council to
change it, to Vine Avenue or Flowerfall lane) – the road
where they bought their first house together, not
dreaming that it would be their last, the road where they
lived was no longer British, she thought, grimly staring
out of the window at the place where once she would
have seen him digging, his fair thinning hair, his old
pullover. Now there was nothing. The cold blue yew.
Then a shadow passed the end of their garden. A
flicker of movement, a blur of black.
She could not quite define what had happened. Behind
the yew, by the sycamore tree. Blacker than the still, sod-
den yew tree, blacker than the poisoned ground beneath.
But darkly fluid, live as a breath. A kind shadow. A friend,
Una thought, and her spirits lifted. Something alive.
Since her husband died, aged forty-four, stupidly young,
though he was older than her, she had stayed inside, out
of the light, hardly able to walk, unable to talk, paralysed
by the blow that had fallen. Sawing and hacking her
world to nothing, leaving her in a cast of pain. Her
whole body was immobilised, her face heavy, like a
mask of wood. After all, they had been married for two
decades. Two decades of waking and sleeping together.
She had lost her job five years ago, when the bank
closed down their local branch, and George had been a
rock to her, telling her he liked to have her at home,
after all he earned enough for two of them, and for
children too, for at the time they were still hoping …
Her new blank days had been bright with hope, hospital
visits, tests, hormones, a flurry of buds and leaves and
sunlight, imagined faces, the sweetness of names, doo-
dled pet names for those faint dream-children.
Well, in the end, they never came, and five years later,
George had gone. Half a lifetime of loving plans; some-
how it left her here with nothing. What could she do with
the life that remained? Every day she woke slowed and
deadened, clinging to her thin wedding ring for comfort.
Last night, though, she had dreamed of flying. There
was light, and ease, and kind unknown hands waving
her off into warm blue air. Una woke knowing that
something had changed.
Autumn was coming. Apples, berries. She actually
24
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
made herself a bowl of por r idge.
Adding dried berries, which plumped
and moistened. The packet promised
her a long healthy life. Oats were
good for arter ies. She had often
offered to make him porridge, but George was obsti-
nate, and liked fried eggs, and, every so often, a smoke
in the garden, although she had always told him not to.
Did she feel better because she had tried? She thought
she might put the radio on, and was shocked to find that
the switch had grown dusty. Yes, she would have the
Today programme. It was comforting hearing the raised
male voices. Men, she thought, I always liked them.
She felt much better until the post came, a furious ram-
ming of dull thick letters through the narrow letterbox he
never replaced, though he had promised to often enough.
She tore the mail open, irritably: more calculations of
possible refunds she knew she would never bother to
claim, though she heard George’s voice whisper urgently
‘Take it, Una love. Go for it.’
They made her sad: they were the wrong letters. Not
enough people, she felt, had been sorry. He was a good
man who had died too young. Not enough people who
loved him had written. Other people’s sorrow might
lessen her own. Besides, he had not been … celebrated.
Some ceremony had been omitted.
So she crouched like a crab, splayed over the computer,
pointlessly searching through the bars of e-mails for
something with love, kindness, humour. She clicked on
George’s old messages. He was always so funny, so alive in
e-mail, writing from the office when he shouldn’t have
done. But they had grown threadbare, reread too often.
It was then that she sensed that tremor of life, that
quiver of thrill from the dank autumn garden.
She looked: there was nothing, but the sun came out and
lit up the amazing, viviparous belly of white Russian vine
swelling over the wall, crawling up through the yew,
abseiling across on to the sycamore, blazing in a crest of
vivid white tendrils at the free blue sky, forty feet up, a wild
gipsy climber on the rackety tree that made the lawn dark
and her plants thin and sickly. George had promised to cut
the sycamore down, but now she was left with it, out of
control. She turned back inwards, away from the window.
Life would have been different if there had been chil-
dren. Her tests were normal, so she’d always wondered
… Might I have had them with another man? The thought
still felt like disloyalty. It must be too late for her, now, at
forty. She didn’t blame him. They had given up hope.
Then it flickered again, very fast, by the wall.
She made a decision. She would go upstairs and finally
turn out her husband’s wardrobe. Shirts which had held
his dear body, jackets which had tried to keep him
warm, socks that curved round his feet like caresses. Take
 SHORT STORY

them all to the charity shop. Others could use what he ing and fixing his gaze upon her, and suddenly nimble, he
could not. And then perhaps she would call the council scooped up his saw, a murderous thing like a crocodile, and
and get them to remove the bed, for she wouldn’t need with a galvanic leap and scurry, his little feet scrabbling on
a double bed again. She would buy herself a new single damp brickwork, he was over the wall, he had disappeared.
life, half as wide, but no longer half-empty.
The bed they had shared for twenty years. She went Una went on shouting in her violated garden. ‘How
upstairs, sat down to rest on the rose-red bedspread with dare you! This is an absolute outrage! This is my property!
its two gentle dips, lay back for a moment, feeling her It is monstrous!’ She did not have to think what to say:
wedding ring, till her fingers relaxed and she fell asleep. the words poured out, the barriers yielded, a lifetime’s
And once again, she dreamed of flying. sense of entitlement flooded her with furious energy.
But shouting on her own was unrewarding. Una climbed
When she woke, she felt happy for the first time since the onto a pile of wood so she could see over the wall. As her
day George had his heart attack. She opened the head rose above the parapet, women were streaming out of
cupboard: a pale moth flew out, and she shuddered and the house. Now there were four figures gazing at her,
drew her cardigan around her. Then she thought, maybe framed by a lawn and a vegetable patch, all four faces
it was his soul. Maybe I needed to let him out, and she frozen with fear. She instantly recognised the wife: Mrs
started dragging out hanger after hanger, pulling the Patel from the Indian shop. She had never realised they
clothes to her, stroking them, breathing in deep George’s were living there. The daughters were barely teenagers, not
faint male smell with the bitter little lingering of cigarette that she was good at guessing ages. Sweet little things, slen-
smoke, then flinging them, lightly, untidily, into two piles, der and golden. Round open mouths, tiny dark circles.
one to send to the shop, one to throw out as no use to ‘Daddy! Daddy!’ Both of them were squealing.
anyone. She worked speedily, and heard herself singing. ‘You have committed a crime,’ she said, absurdly, hear-
Perhaps it was because she was singing that she didn’t, ing that she was ridiculous. ‘I am going to the police.
at first, hear the sound of the chain-saw. Until it became You will be in trouble!’ A wail rose from the three
so loud and insistent that she stopped mid-beat and females. Feeling exposed, sticking up over their wall,
cocked her head. A pair of cream socks she had bought Una climbed back down again as gracefully as possible,
him for summer, nested together like pale newborn but turned her ankle as a branch gave way, and shouted
puppies, skipped from her hand to the floor, forgotten. ‘Fuck, shit, fuck.’ Had she lost moral authority?
The saw whined and roared like an army of hornets. Looking around her, she was half-relieved to see the
Next door, of course, to the left of her, they were damage was worse than she expected. It looked as if
building an extension, had been for weeks. The couple
hardly talked to her; they were too busy, with their small
children. She didn’t usually much notice the noise. And
yet, this time it sounded nearer than usual. It almost
seemed to come from her garden.
And because she was bored, and on her own, and
wanted a break from sorting George’s clothes, she
slipped downstairs, unlocked the back door and stepped
out, dazzled, into the morning.
There was a small dark man. A man in her garden. And
everything looked different. She tried to understand. A
blaze of sunlight, strange piles of hacked jungle, white
flowers foaming round his feet like the sea, pale green
wounds on grey pillars of wood, glistening sap breaking out
like sweat. But the noise had stopped. He held a chain-saw,
trembling. He was short, Indian. Faintly familiar.
His mouth hung open, but he said nothing. ‘What are
you doing?’ she said, slowly, then louder, gathering force
and fury, ‘What are you doing? I don’t believe it! This is
my garden! What have you done?’
He was backing away now, mumbling something. ‘The
tree was too tall. Too tall, isn’t it. Always dropping leaves on
roof of my shed. Stopping the sunlight off my tomatoes.
Just a small cut, love, just, maybe –’ He tailed off, looking
as appalled as she was, the realisation of cosmic guilt darken-

25
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
 SHORT STORY
wild beasts had been mating. This thought made her
violently angry. Yes, she decided, she would go to the
police. She would photograph the evidence and call the
police. ‘I am a widow!’ she called, in valediction, to the
unseen choir of female voices.
Coming back with a camera and moving in close, her
body began to do something so strange and unfamiliar that
she thought she was dying. She saw he had scored right
round the trunk with the terrible rapacious teeth of the
chain-saw, a livid circle where the bark was gone, a ring-
shaped wound that would steal the tree’s life, watering,
weeping in the acid air, and a wave of pain shot behind
her eyeballs, vivid as salt on freshly torn skin. Some kind
of convulsion, some fit of grief, and then she realised that
she was crying. Tears rose to her eyes in a steady stream.
He had ring-barked her tree, with its crown of white
creeper. There was no future. It would never recover.
As she went into the house, she could still hear them
moaning. The daughters were telling their father off.
‘Daddy, you know you must not cut down trees. They
told us at school, do not cut down trees.’ Behind them
was the plaint of Mrs Patel: ‘My God, Pranay, what have
you done? You get a new machine, you go crazy! I leave
you for an hour and you commit crimes!’
Her doorbell trilled at eight that evening, too late, in
these new widowed days, for anyone to call on her, so
she kept the chain on, and peered through the crack,
and was happy to see blue serge, silver buttons, the
pomegranate face of a middle-aged policeman.
‘I’m amazed you’ve come,’ she told him, bluntly. ‘I
thought you’d be too busy with crack in Harlesden.’
‘We try to represent all communities, Madam,’ he said,
with a touch of asperity, but over a cup of tea he relaxed,
and gave a low whistle when she showed him her photos.
‘With this kind of dispute,’ the policeman opined, ‘it’s
usually better to avoid the courts. If you like, I’ll have a
talk with the other parties. A word in their ear. First
thing tomorrow.’
‘Does talking, you know, do the trick?’
‘Some people are pig-headed,’ he said, sagely. ‘But
what do you lose if we go for it?’
Next day she woke an hour earlier than usual. Since George
had died she had been sleeping late, because there was
nothing to get up for, no one to bring her a cup of tea. She
would lie till ten in the dark bedroom. This morning,
though, something was different. Her cheek was touched
by a blade of light, a wand that delicately lifted her eyelids.
She lay there for a second, wondering, then realised, Yes, it’s
lighter than usual. Because the mad Indian attacked our tree.
At ten there was a faint ring at the door. She opened it
to find them both on the doorstep, the coloured couple,
26
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
looking tired and small, both of them clutching carrier-
bags, their eyes fixed timidly on the hall floor.
‘Apologise,’ Mrs Patel hissed, audibly, poking her
husband in the ribs. Una noticed the little man’s thick
black hair, a pelt of fur the comb had not repressed.
‘Come in,’ said Una. ‘You had better come in.’ She
turned her back so they could follow her. ‘Apologise,
idiot,’ the wife’s voice whispered.
‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ Una heard herself ask, then
added, to establish her role as victim, ‘While we look at
the damage in the garden. It’s very bad. I was very upset.’
‘Terrible, terrible,’ groaned Mrs Patel in her husband’s
ear as she saw the wreckage. ‘He is going mad, you know,’
she confided in Una. ‘It is men, you know. Just because
he is buying this new machine ... I went out for an hour,
I knew nothing about it, then when I came back, he has
done this thing. We don’t want trouble. We have never
had trouble. We have been here thirteen years, and never
any trouble. Then this morning the police come and ring
on our door. There was a police car parked outside.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Una, automatically. ‘Well, not exactly
sorry, of course,’ she said quickly. But then she saw Mrs
Patel was crying, two tears running down her lined olive
cheeks, narrow and direct, two shining paths.
‘Now my husband will apologise,’ Mrs Patel said
through her tears. ‘He will clear everything up. He will
do anything, no problem. But please do not send the
police to our house.’
Una found she was holding the woman’s hand. ‘The
daughters were crying,’ added Mrs Patel. ‘You under-
stand how it is with children. My younger daughters.
Their sisters are all married.’ She squeezed Una’s fingers.
‘You also have children?’
‘I was crying yesterday,’ Una parried loudly, feeling the
balance was getting skewed. ‘You see, my husband died
this summer.’
‘I am sorry, very sorry,’ said Mrs Patel, yielding her
position instantly. ‘Oh, very sorry. It is very sad.’ She
gave her husband a small, savage kick. Up to this point
he had been totally silent. There were dark circles under
his eyes. As boot struck bone, he jerked into motion.
‘Very sorry, love. Very, very sorry,’ he said. ‘My new
shed, you see. It was a bloody ballsup. The leaves from
your tree got in the gutters –’ He stopped with a gasp that
told Una his wife had landed another kick. Mrs Patel cut
in, briskly. ‘Tell the lady you will sort it all out. He knows
what he is doing, though he seems like moron.’
‘The kettle will have boiled,’ Una told them. When she
came back with the tea, they were sitting on the bench,
showing her the contents of their plastic bags. He had
been to B&Q already that morning, and bought some
liquid to protect the cut bark. ‘I paint it on straightaway,
no messing.’ His lips were as red as her unpruned rose
hips. Una found herself smiling at him. His eyes were
black and berry-bright. Mrs Patel had baked some honey
 SHORT STORY
Literary Review Bookshop
pastries. She held them out, a supplicant. Her husband
tried to take one, but she smacked his hand away.
The two women sat in the sun and ate cakes, dipping
the spiced sweetmeats in milky tea, while Una talked
haltingly about her husband (‘George and I never had a
cross word’). Mrs Patel looked surprised, but agreed
(‘Pranay is too timid to quarrel with me’), and Mr Patel
rushed around in circles. Though he acted like a clown,
he was sturdy and nimble, and soon made the garden look
much better, throwing most of the lopped branches over
the wall, flourishing his brush over the wounded surfaces.
Mr Patel was the last to go. As he was skipping down
the hallway with his tools, avoiding the piles of George’s
old books which Una in that instant thought of selling,
the post arrived. There was the usual dry straining, the
sound of something tearing, the abortive stump of post
stuck halfway in, waggling dully like a Manx cat’s tail,
until with the usual brutal shove the postman managed to
drive it through, a damaged flurry of dead brown mail.
‘Hopeless,’ said Una to Mr Patel. ‘It’s nothing new. It’s
always been hopeless.’
Inspiration struck him. His eyes glowed with joy.
‘It is too small,’ he said. ‘I know, I know everything. I 20% discount on all
am a carpenter. I will make a new one, a bigger one, for
you. My friend have the bloody metal bit, no problem.
No fee, of course. So all the mail can come in. I will sort titles under review
you out. I know what I am doing. I am family man, I have
a damn good business. The sons, they help me. Three
sons, five daughters.’ He swelled visibly, his pride restored. Call our Order Hotline
‘That would be wonderful,’ said Una. ‘Thank you,
really. That would be great. You see, my husband –’ And
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‘It must mean something.’ She took it, gratefully, and
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mopped her tears, which went on flowing.
‘Actually, dear, Pranay means love,’ he said, standing
on the doorstep, looking full into her eyes as she held By post:
the door open. She stood there thanking him, smiling send your order, enclosing a cheque made payable to
and crying, and he said sorry, again and again, and waves ‘BOOKS BY PHONE’ to:
of feeling coursed over her features like bright leaves Literary Review Bookshop, Bertrams,
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 HISTORY
R ICHARD O VERY
KOBA’S COLD WAR
S TALIN ’ S WARS : F ROM WORLD WAR TO
C OLD WAR , 1939–1953
★ He signed the pact with Hitler in 1939 to stay out of
By Geoffrey Roberts
(Yale University Press 468pp £25)
NEW BOOKS ON Stalin and the Soviet–German war are
now legion. What was once a neglected though vital
element in the story of Axis defeat is threatened with
historical overkill. So why another book? This is a ques-
tion that Geoffrey Roberts has anticipated. His book
reaches the parts that other books don’t reach. Stalin is
assessed here as the Soviet war leader not only in the
four-year struggle with the German invaders but in the
growing confrontation with the West that developed
into the Cold War.
This is a fresh perspective chiefly because Roberts
dares to cross the dividing line of 1945 which so often
separates off the first half of the century from its
sequel. By doing so he is able to focus much more on
the continuities in Stalin’s thinking and behaviour on
issues to do with grand strategy and war-making. The
war with Germany is in fact only a fraction (around
one third) of the time Stalin spent acting on the stage
of world politics. By looking at the whole period from
1939, when Stalin broke Soviet isolation and signed an
accord with Hitler, to Stalin’s death in 1953 and the
end of the Korean War, it is possible to assess the qual-
ities of Stalin’s leadership and the nature of his strate-
gic outlook with greater certainty.
For Roberts, Stalin is the centre of the story. There
are plenty of worthy subordinates who acted for him
when he needed them: Marshal Zhukov, victor of
Moscow, conqueror of Berlin (whose independence of
mind finally brought him disgrace and an insulting
posting to the Caucasus in 1946); Vyacheslav Molotov,
his foreign-policy fixer; Andrei Zhdanov, who ran the
propaganda and culture apparatus of the post-1945
Soviet Union. But all these men played second fiddle to
Stalin, whose reputation blossomed with the war and
remained untouchable through the messy years of the
early Cold War.
Roberts bravely states his conclusions on page one of
the book. The principal of them is the insistence that
Stalin was a wartime leader of exceptional stature.
Unkind critics might think that Roberts himself has
been seduced by the cult of Stalin’s manufactured larger-
than-life personality, but the detailed reconstruction of
Stalin’s long foreign-policy and military career gives
solid substance to his claim. This is not a crude revisionist
28
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
history but an up-to-date, informed and intelligent
assessment of what we now know about the last decade
or so of Stalin’s dictatorship.
One thread runs through the whole story: Stalin did
not want war and preferred peace. This does not
reveal him at last as a closet pacifist, but merely con-
firms what much recent scholarship has made clear.
war; he did everything he could to prevent war in
1941 when the reality was staring him in the face;
after 1945 he wanted to sustain the Grand Alliance
and entered the Cold War confrontation only with
reluctance, and largely because of the intransigent
anti-communism of his erstwhile wartime partners.
His priority throughout was securing the survival of
the first communist state and its revolutionary her-
itage. He was right to believe that war was dangerous
to its survival. Hitler’s invasion brought the Soviet
Union to the very brink of disaster.
A second strand in Roberts’s account is the extent to
which Stalin controlled the apparatus of decision-making
to ensure that Soviet survival would be possible. This he
did, not by the exercise of some abstract ‘totalitarian
power’ but by solid work in committee, late-night discus-
sions with the general staff, carefully thought-out briefing
sessions, and (not always) clever politics. The great merit
of Roberts’s approach is his capacity to reconstruct the
pattern of Stalin’s governance convincingly. There is not
much on the wars themselves, which have by now been
covered remorselessly by military historians, but the
framework within which wars were conducted, both hot
and cold, is at last clear. In the process Roberts shows that
Stalin got things wrong as well as right. The fixed belief
that Hitler would not invade in 1941 he attributes not
only to Stalin’s very strong desire to avert war that year,
but to Stalin’s belief that the Red Army was just too
strong for Hitler to risk confronting it. This is an unusual
emphasis, though it is surely overshadowed by Stalin’s
other conviction that the crisis was all part of a plot by the
British to get the Soviet Union involved and so get them
off the hook.
There were post-war misjudgements as well, not least
the failure to realise that the West had no intention of
creating a pro-Soviet, disarmed and unified Germany.
This was a failure that troubled Stalin a great deal.
Roberts shows that the greatest fear for a state invaded
and occupied twice in a generation by the German
army, was the revival of German economic and military
power. The outcome should not have surprised him.
Though Roberts paints a picture of Soviet restraint and
reasonableness, Western suspicion that such a weakened
Germany would be forced to gravitate into the Soviet
orbit was not misplaced. He cites Stalin’s naïve faith that
presenting a thoroughly ‘democratic’ constitution for a
united Germany (‘All the people must be drawn into
 HISTORY

the discussion’) would appeal to the West, when it was
clear that the Soviet Constitution of 1936 – hailed as the
most democratic in the world – offered no prospect of
popular power or protection for civil rights. There were
other failures – the Berlin blockade, which simply high-
lighted the growing gap between the two sides and was
seen as a ‘Western’ victory; and the Korean War, which
Stalin at first did not want and then approved because he
thought the United States would be caught off guard.
Indeed, whenever Stalin took initiatives in war they
went wrong. The real basis for Roberts’s conclusion that
Stalin was a war leader of stature comes in fact only
from his capacity to rally the Soviet people for a war of
defence against aggression in 1941 and 1942 and to lead
them to victory.
Roberts adds a postscript on ‘Stalin in the Court of
History’. It is not clear whether he is defendant or plain-
tiff. He insists that the view of Stalin as a successful war
leader – current in 1945 and attested by a glittering tally
of foreign politicians and soldiers – is substantially the
right one. The Cold War could have been averted,
Roberts thinks, if his former Western partners had really
understood Stalin. This is surely to attribute too much to
the role of one man. Many in the West had disliked
communism intensely before 1939; they had no reason
to like it more when the Red Army was straddled across
half of Europe. The war-time coalition was always one of
expediency and both sides knew that. Stalin may have
been more prudent and less bellicose than traditional
Cold War historiography has made him, but in the end
he was not prepared to withdraw back to the position the
Soviet Union had been in in 1939, and the West was not
able to force him, however much they would have liked
to. The idea that a Grand Alliance could have survived to
broker a more secure post-war world still appears as
implausible historically as the idea that a Grand Alliance
could have been built before 1939 to stop Hitler.
There will no doubt be a good deal of Cold War
hangover in response to Stalin’s Wars. Here are areas of
history still alive with unresolved controversy. Geoffrey
Roberts has produced a robust defence of Stalin as
wartime dictator and post-war generalissimo, but also
one of the best narrative accounts we have of the real
Stalin and his retinue. It would be a pity if the current
wave of unreserved hostility towards Stalin-as-monster
were to wash away an honest attempt to grapple with
Stalin the man.
To order this book at £20, see LR Bookshop on page 27

P R I Z E C R O S S W O R D
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ACROSS
1 The man leading young bear to a Queen of Troy (6)
8
4 Yours truly in back lane finds hard substance (6)
9 9 Musical bishop leading lively dance (9)
10 Pedal around with petition (5)
10
11 Goya confused by spiritual discipline (4)
11 12 Genuine coverage for note relating to kidneys (5)
12 13 14 14 Partners cover court and pass out (5)
15 Fun to be had cavorting in bed (5)
17 Metal rod for prodding game (5)
15 16 17 18 19 Anomaly on radar screen? (4)
21 Garden plant almost resembling a wolf (5)
19
23 Recollected in camera, a collection of New World
20 21 22 artefacts (9)
24 Cowardly blond (6)
23
25 School member might be grouped in this? (6)
DOWN
24 25 1 One tripping between islands in grain container (6)
2 Garment covering shoulders and head (4)
Pan Macmillan have generously decided to sponsor the prizes for this 3 Haircut given to Welsh poet by Zimmerman (3,5)
month’s crossword. Five winners will be selected from the correct puzzles 5 Bovine animal without water? (4)
received by noon on January 1st 2007. Each will receive a copy of the 6 Upland male bird described by sci-fi author (8)
20th Anniversary Edition of the indispensible Writer’s Handbook 2007, 7 Capital author (6)
edited by Barry Turner. 8 Noise made by game and wild dog (5)
The winners of our November competition are Kate Billimore of Great Milton, Mrs L Smith of Beverley, 13 Succinctly put in this cover for colonel, we hear (8)
Neill Roberts of Whaley Bridge, Cathy Prewitt of Bitterne and Michael Locke of Paignton. 14 Substitute for mostly flexible worker (8)
Each will receive a copy the Oxford Thesaurus of English, published by Oxford University Press. 15 Circulating air taken in by playwright in monastery (6)
16 Offer company shares on stock market for amount of
Answers to the November crossword: petty cash? (5)
ACROSS: 1 Arsenic, 5 Dacha, 8 Ravel, 9 Viola, 10 Eerie, 14 Decline, 16 Aloha, 17 Beach, 18 Dowager,
22 Doric, 25 Theta, 26 Aioli, 27 Basil, 28 Needles. 18 Children’s author has not finished with release money (6)
DOWN: 1 Abroad, 2 Save, 3 Nile, 4 Charles Darwin, 5 Dove, 6 Chop, 7 Agar, 11 Alice, 12 Bleak, 13 20 Carthaginian queen was idle? (4)
Shoe, 15 Ever, 19 Remiss, 20 Stub, 21 Mess, 22 Dahl, 23 Cafe, 24 Bowl. 22 Fish in diving position (4)
 HISTORY

R ALEIGH T REVELYAN about using up too many resources ahead of the

Normandy landings proposed for May or June. This hos-

TO CAPTURE THE CAPITOL tility is best explained in Clark’s quotation from the
memoirs of that fine American general, Lucian Truscott:
British commanders and staff officers impressed
A NZIO : T HE F RICTION OF WAR – I TALY Americans as being supercilious, conceited, and arro-
AND THE B ATTLE FOR ROME 1944 gant. British officers considered the Americans to be
★ loud, boastful and inexperienced. … One could sym-
By Lloyd Clark pathise with the lack of understanding and mutual
(Headline Review 392pp £20) respect between British and American commanders,
however one might deplore it. But the bitterness,
THE TRENCH WARFARE at Anzio in the months from personal and professional jealousy … and even hatred,
March to May 1944 is sometimes compared to that which existed among some of the American com-
during the First World War in France. This is a little far- manders and staff, I could never condone.
fetched, the brevity of the Anzio conflict being one of All this was epitomised in the personalities of Alexander
the main differences. Casualties were, however, high – a (Commander-in-Chief in Italy), who was urbane, gen-
platoon might be expected to lose a third of its men in a tlemanly and certainly no ‘pusher’, and General Mark
couple of weeks. More precisely, the series of ferocious Clark, Commander under Alexander of the American
battles during the previous weeks, often fought hand-to- Fifth Army and thus of Operation Shingle, a prima
hand, has been likened to Verdun. Take the Queen’s donna with a high reputation who was obsessed with
Regiment, for example: in mid-February, it lost 362 self-publicity. American scepticism and worries about
officers and men (85 per cent of its strength) in two days resources resulted in a landing force that turned out to
of freezing weather, with minimal food supplies. The be inadequate for the objective, which was to advance to
ordinary soldier of that period had to assume that higher the Alban Hills and cut the road known as Route 7
command knew what it was doing in matters of strategy. leading to Cassino and the South (the German ‘Gustav
He would be ignorant of the waywardness of his leaders’ Line’). The eventual landings, however, took the
personalities and prejudices. Years later books would Germans totally by surprise, and the town of Anzio was
appear, and survivors would be glad that their experi- found to be undefended. In theory it would have been
ences had at least been recorded. But they would also easy to drive to Rome itself. Unfortunately Mark
read, with a great deal of bitterness, about bungles and Clark’s choice for Commander, General John Lucas (a
rivalries in the upper echelons. ‘safe pair of hands’), was far from the ‘wild cat’ that
Lloyd Clark is billed as the first British author in a Churchill had hoped for: cautious and pessimistic, a
generation to tell the full story of Anzio, including the slow-moving, drawling Southerner nicknamed Foxy
strategic background. He is very well qualified to do Grandpa, he was soon to be the despair of those under
this, as he is a senior lecturer at Sandhurst. Anzio veter- him, both British and American.
ans will be grateful for such a balanced, sensitive account The Germans reacted with speed, rushing down
and assessment. Clark also includes many first-hand troops from the North. Excellent maps in the book
reminiscences, some of them from Germans. accompany Lloyd Clark’s vivid descriptions of the savage
The landings at Anzio, twenty-five miles south of and grisly tussles over the subsequent weeks. In the first
Rome, took place on 22 January 1944. With the Allies phase the British drove north towards the Alban Hills,
bogged down around Cassino, it had been realised for finding themselves in a dangerous salient, spearheaded
some time that an amphibi- by the Sherwood Foresters
ous landing up the coast was and the Irish and Grenadier
becoming essential. The
or iginal plan to aim for the deceivers Guards, battling from farm-
house to farmhouse, artillery
Anzio, Clark tells us, was not
Churchill’s, as is generally a n o v e l b y d r e w s a v a g e fire from both sides shriek-
ing overhead. The American
supposed: it had first been sector was mostly in drained
James Dunlevy is an audacious flyer who
agreed by Eisenhower and smuggles works of art for unscrupulous marshland, the old Pontine
Alexander. Churchill seized collectors. Women adore him. The bad Marshes, where Ger man
upon ‘Operation Shingle’ guys abhor him, but can’t ignore him... Tiger tanks could operate
with enthusiasm though, with devastating effect – 743
urging it on in face of subse- ‘a sizzling stocking filler’ - PublishAmerica Rangers were captured
quent Amer ican doubts, Available at all good book stores or visit the author at www.drewsavage.com within days. Gradually the
even hostility, and alar m British were pushed back.

30
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
 HISTORY

Some of the bloodiest fighting was in Alexander was in despair but sent only a
the so-called wadis, a network of deep mild rebuke. As Lloyd Clark writes: ‘It
shrubby valleys and caves. Here a VC was not tacit approval, it was impotence.
was won by Major W P Sidney, later It was too late to influence events. He
Lord De L’Isle. Lucas was at last had his chance to reprimand Mark Clark
replaced by General Truscott, to uni- a few days earlier, and elected not to
versal relief. But the situation was still take it. Now he was paying the price.’
desperate, and if the Germans had not So the Amer icans were first into
also reached the limit of their Rome, on 4 June, and the German Tenth
endurance, it could have meant disaster. Army got away to the north to fight
As it was, by early March the much- again. Another grim winter lay ahead, in
reduced beachhead had become ‘static’ the mountains above Florence, and more
– the British remaining stuck in trenches would die. But Mark Clark was the great
in the wadi country, the Americans victor; with all due modesty, he arranged
among the canals in the marshes. But another press conference on the
attacks on a smaller scale did continue. Capitoline Hill. For the outside world the
Life in the wadis was troglodytic and excitement over the capture of Rome
squalid, not to mention extremely was eclipsed on the next day by the
muddy in the early stages. Enemy Raleigh Trevelyan as a young soldier Normandy landings.
trenches were a matter of yards away, As Lloyd Clark says, Anzio joined the
just out of grenade-throwing distance but close enough ‘pantheon of audacious military schemes that failed’. How
to receive mortar fire. The most feared wadis were much was the ‘leaden-footed’ Lucas to blame? Mark
known as the Lobster Claw and the Boot. Casualties Clark? Alexander? Churchill? Was too much attempted
mostly occurred at night. I do not believe the Irish with too little? As an Anzio veteran myself (a platoon
Guards historian’s story about Germans coming over to commander responsible for the lives of twenty men), I
swap cognac for bully beef. remember my own mistakes, and they haunt me still.
The great offensive from Cassino, ‘Diadem’, began on To order this book at £16, see LR Bookshop on page 27
11 May after further Anglo-American arguments related
to the imminent Normandy landings (‘Overlord’). Novel Theatre presents
Churchill had written to Roosevelt: ‘I do not consider
that the objective of the forthcoming battle in Italy
called Diadem is the taking of Rome, good though that
would be, or even the joining of the bridgehead, which
is indispensable. Its prime purpose is the destruction of
the armed forces of the enemy.’ Route 6 on the other
Nina Bawden’s classic
side of the Alban Hills was the main escape road for the story of child evacuees.
German Tenth Army at the Gustav Line. Alexander’s For adults and
plan, the linking with Anzio on Route 7 having been children
achieved, was for the American Fifth Army to strike
north-east under the Alban Hills to block the Germans.
This was by no means what Mark Clark had in mind.
He was determined to capture Rome, come what may,
and to be the first in fifteen centuries to do so from the
south. He was deeply suspicious about what he believed
were Alexander’s real intentions: that the British should
get there first. There was a confrontation with
Alexander, who tried to be conciliatory. Clark, still sens-
ing a plot, was ‘disgusted’. He announced afterwards: ‘I
intend to take Rome, and to take it soon – nothing will
stand in my way.’ He felt the Fifth Army deserved it and 23 Nov - 6 Jan “SUP LLING
ERB..
.
threatened to shoot any British that thwarted him. YTE
The link-up with Anzio took place on 25 May. Mark STOR S BEST” l
AT I T ove
wing N
Clark held a press conference, Hollywood style. Truscott, 0870 737 7737 n revie
a t’s O W en
o m
preparing to strike north-east, was horrified when firm www.sadlerswells.com Wh ’s Little
Theatre
orders came through from Clark to drive on to Rome.

31
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
 HISTORY
G ILES M ILTON
A LOATHSOME TRADE
B REAKING THE C HAINS : T HE ROYAL N AVY ’ S
WAR AGAINST W HITE S LAVERY
★ dey. Women were forcibly converted to Islam and sent to
By Tom Pocock
(Chatham Publishing 216pp £19.99)
OF ALL THE jobs open to aspiring civil servants in the
early nineteenth century, the consulship of Algiers had
to be one of the worst. The ruling deys had no time for
diplomatic niceties. Consuls were routinely abused,
insulted, arrested and occasionally killed in spectacularly
gruesome fashion. And even if they were fortunate
enough to escape such cruelties, they rarely got to enjoy
the perks of their profession. No dinner
dances or elegant soirées; no croquet
matches on the consulate lawn. Much
of their time was spent trying to negoti-
ate the freedom of the thousands of
British slaves held in ‘bagnios’ or under-
ground pens.
Tom Pocock’s new book, Breaking the
Chains: The Royal Navy’s War on White
Slavery, is a timely account of how suc-
cessive British governments attempted to
deal with Islamic regimes that specialised
in terror. The coastal regencies of North
Africa were nominally under the rule of
the sultan in Istanbul. But as the Ottoman
Empire began to implode, the deys of
Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli found that they
had free rein to act as they chose.
Their absolute disdain for the rule of
law was particularly wor r ying to
Britain, a country whose prosperity was
dependent upon the freedom of the
seas. Gover nment ministers in Smith: watch out girls, here he comes
Whitehall could not decide whether to
negotiate with these truculent rulers, introduce sanc-
tions, or simply bombard them into submission.
It was this last choice that was to prove the most
effective. As Pocock reveals, the deys of North Africa
only capitulated when their slave-filled capitals had
been reduced to rubble.
The book opens with a character who has long been
one of my favourite ‘forgottens’ of history – Admiral
Sir Sidney Smith. Eccentric, dazzlingly charismatic and
a man of action, Smith made it his personal quest to
end the loathsome trade in white slaves.
It was a trade that had already cost countless lives. For
more than three centuries, Europeans had been seized
32
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
from ships – and sometimes from shores – and sold into
slavery in North Africa. The scale of the problem is
hotly disputed: recent research suggests that as many as
one million white captives may have passed through the
slave auctions of North Africa. (The black slave trade
accounted for up to fifteen million.)
Once sold, the slaves were at the whim of the ruling
the harem; men were used for hard labour. Only those in
possession of large fortunes could hope to be ransomed.
Sir Sidney Smith was dismayed to discover that the
British government – which had taken the initiative to
abolish the black slave trade – was wholly indifferent to
the plight of white captives. Determined to become a
second Wilberforce, Smith founded an organisation –
the Knights Liberators of the Slaves in Africa – and
travelled to the Congress of Vienna in order to lobby
anyone who cared to listen. His charisma was such that
he soon gained the ear of kings, dukes
and ministers, and in August 1816 the
Br itish government sent the bullish
Admiral Lord Exmouth to Alg iers
with orders to secure the release of all
British slaves.
The ruling dey, Omar Pasha, treated
Exmouth with contempt. He locked up
the British consul, insulted the admiral’s
interpreters and refused to release his
white slaves. When a shore battery fired
a shot at the British fleet – almost cer-
tainly by accident – Exmouth responded
with an all-out attack on the city. For
the next seven hours, his squadron
pulverised Algiers.
Some 8,000 of the dey’s subjects were
killed, and the city’s once feared corsair-
ing fleet was sunk or burnt. The dey had
very little option but to sue for peace
and for ever renounce slaver y.
Exmouth’s exercise in gunboat diploma-
cy had proved a triumphant success.
Pocock is at his best when recounting
such bloody clashes between Britain and the regencies
of North Africa. He has drawn on eyewitness accounts
(among them several unpublished manuscripts) penned
by those who took part in the battles. Many of them are
so graphic that the stench of cordite, burning timbers
and festering wounds hangs over the page.
The book is also filled with intriguing snippets of
information. We learn how one of the deys of Algiers
was an early exponent of biological terrorism. He would
release plague-infected slaves in order to spread death
and disease among their Christian compatriots. The dey
was eventually hoisted by his own petard: he accidentally
infected himself during his dabbling in germ warfare.
 HISTORY
Exmouth’s bombardment of Algiers did not end white
slavery but it did chasten the deys of North Africa. They
could no longer act with impunity, for the Royal Navy
had by now become a formidable fighting force.
Pocock’s narrative runs for several more decades as he
follows the navy through dozens of skirmishes and bat-
tles in the Mediterranean. It’s all heady stuff and his
account of the Battle of Navarino – in which Admiral
Codrington shattered the Turkish–Egyptian navy –
makes gripping reading. Yet I could not help feeling that
this was a sideshow to the war on slavery.
Pocock justifies his theme by arguing that the Greeks
were ‘enslaved’ under the Turkish yoke and that the
Greek War of Independence was therefore a fight
against slavery. It is an interesting idea but not entirely
convincing. The Ottoman system of gover nment
granted the Greeks considerable freedoms and they
were certainly not kept in the same pitiful conditions
as the slaves in North Africa.
The other (minor) shortcoming to this excellent
F RANK M C LYNN
RISING TO THE OCCASION
W HY A LFRED BURNED THE C AKES : A K ING
AND HIS E LEVEN -H UNDRED -Y EAR A FTERLIFE
★ ‘dialectic’ between history and legend, David Horspool
By David Horspool
(Profile Books 228pp £15.99)
K ING A LFRED (849–99), the Anglo-Saxon king of
Wessex also known as ‘the Great’, got himself into the
top twenty in a 2002 BBC Television poll of ‘Greatest
Britons’ – no mean feat, given both the historical igno-
rance of the general public and its predilection for
celebrities. The youngest son of King Ethelwulf, Alfred
travelled as a child to Rome and to the Frankish court
of Charles the Bald. When, at twenty-two, he succeeded
his brother Ethelred I as King of Wessex, he faced the
full onslaught of the Viking invasion of Britain, though
the Norsemen were then concentrating on northern and
easter n England. In 878 the Danish ar my under
Guthrun invaded Wessex in winter, an unexpected
season for campaign. Taken by surprise, Alfred was badly
defeated and sought refuge, incognito, in a cowherd’s
hovel in Athelney, Somerset. Asked by the cowherd’s
wife to mind the cakes baking in the ashes of the bothy
fire, Alfred botched the job and allowed the cakes to
burn. Not knowing he was the King, the woman berated
him for incompetence, pointing out that he was unable
to watch the food but would doubtless be ready enough
to scoff it when it was ready.
Such is the famous story of Alfred and the cakes
33
book is the lack of any description of life as a slave.
This is a strange omission, for there are numerous
surviving accounts written by slaves who managed to
escape from captivity in the eighteenth century, when
slavery was at its height.
Indeed, I could not help wondering why Pocock
chose to start his narrative in 1815. Why not 1715 or
even 1615? After all, the most devastating slave-raid on
the British coastline took place in 1625. Hundreds of
Cornish fishermen were seized and sold into slavery,
thereby demonstrating the absolute impotence of the
British government.
By 1815, the year in which Sir Sidney Smith took
himself to the Congress of Vienna, the British govern-
ment was already starting to get a grip on the situation.
Guns, bombs and fireships had replaced diplomacy as the
most effective tool for dealing with wayward Islamic
regimes. It is a depressing conclusion and one that has
many modern resonances.
To order this book at £15.99, see LR Bookshop on page 27
which every schoolboy was supposed to know from
Macaulay. Nowadays schoolchildren know about the
years 1933–45 in Germany and nothing else. From the
viewpoint of strict history, the story is apocryphal and is
in the same league as that of Bruce and the spider, or
Drake and the bowls on Plymouth Hoe. But in this bril-
liant little volume, an exemplary demonstration of the
teases out the multiple meanings of Alfred and the cakes.
He is on the side of those, myself included, who believe
that the honest historian cannot simply deal with histor-
ical myth de haut en bas – as most strait-laced academics
do – but should ask: why this particular myth, at this
particular time, about this particular person? The classic
statement of the Horspool position is this, by G K
Chesterton: ‘It [the story of the cakes] has been disputed
by grave historians, who were, I think, a little too grave
to be good judges of it.’
Horspool starts by asking what we can know with
certainty about Alfred. He argues convincingly for his
argument that our solid view of Alfred has a threefold
basis: the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, whose production the
king inspired; his own will, law codes, charters and trans-
lations from the Latin, especially Pope Gregory I’s Pastoral
Care, Boethius’s The Consolations of Philosophy, and the
works of St Augustine, Bede and Orosius; and the chron-
icles, most controversially the Life of St Neot, which
appeared one hundred years after his death and were the
first narratives to mention the cakes story. Careful and
dispassionate, Horspool spends a good deal of time on
the disputed question of whether the biography of Alfred
by Bishop Asser (our principal source for the personal
Alfred) is a forgery, and the associated scholarly contro-
versies, before concluding that it probably provides us
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
 HISTORY
with an accurate picture.
It does not of course follow that the
cakes story is historical fact: on the
contrary, it is a certainty that it is not.
But the multiple meanings of the
legend are more than just interesting.
The problems begin with the Life of St
Neot, since we cannot be sure that a
real St Neot ever existed. As for
Winchester, with its famous Alfred
statue, the historical record shows no
connection whatever between
monarch and city. But, most of all, the
myth, legend, ideology and iconography
of Alfred the Great bear on the
impact of a single personality on a
heterogeneous range of other people.
The reasons for the appeal of the Hemmings: does anyone smell burning?
archetypal tale of the cakes are fairly
clear. The motif of a king going unrecognised among
his people can be traced in the Bible through King
David, in Shakespeare in, say, the case of the duke in
Measure for Measure, in the story of the Frog Prince in
Grimm’s fairy tales, and in the saga of Rama in forest
exile in the Ramayana. The topos of a dedicated enemy
– in Alfred’s case Guthrun the Viking – is paralleled in
the stories of Hector and Achilles, or Arjun and Karna
in the Mahabharatha. Moreover, Alfred was that rare
monarch who could read as well as fight, thus aligning
himself with figures like Marcus Aurelius and St Louis.
Finally, the ordeal of Athelney is part of the British
regard for turning disaster into triumph, as with Sir John
Moore at Corunna, Captain Scott’s failure in Antarctica,
Dunkirk, etc.
Horspool shows how many different Alfreds have
emerged down the centuries. Alfred’s ‘greatness’ is a
later construction, for his contemporaries did not view
him as anything special. After the hagiography of Bishop
Asser his reputation did well, but his fame was soon
overtaken by that of King Arthur, all the rage from the
middle of the twelfth century. It was only in the seven-
teenth century that Alfred became a historical superstar.
Thereafter he was held to be responsible for just about
everything, from the birth of the Royal Navy to the rise
of the British Empire. In the eighteenth century he was
claimed as the champion of the ‘Country’ party oppos-
ing Walpole and his corruption, while later in the same
era George Washington co-opted him as a symbol of
‘freedom’ against British ‘tyranny’. In the nineteenth
century he was seen as the locus classicus of constitutional
monarchy and popular ised by Sir Walter Scott,
E A Freeman and others as a champion of ancient liber-
ties smothered by the ‘Norman yoke’ after 1066. The
Victorian epoch, the high noon of the cakes story, saw a
determined attempt to sanitise and desexualise Alfred, so
34
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
that a neutral king could emerge as the
perfect role model in children’s stories.
It was only in the twentieth century
that discussion about Alfred’s personality
and psychology became the dominant
theme. Some said Alfred suffered acutely
from piles; others pointed to the
copious evidence suggesting satyriasis
and sexual disease. Alfred as ‘neurotic
king’ became the orthodoxy. A recent
variant on the psychosexual motif is
that Alfred may have suffered from
Crohn’s disease – a chronic inflammation
of the small intestine.
Nowadays it is the inherent buffoonery
of the situation in the Athelney hovel
that tends to impress us, and we view
Alfred’s feeble efforts as sardonically as
those of Richard Coeur de Lion when
roasting meat in a Vienna kitchen just before being
apprehended by Duke Leopold’s police. Among
Horspool’s manifold merits are an abundant sense of
humour, especially when the attempts to transfer Alfred
and the Vikings to the silver screen are concerned. He is
particularly savage about the 1969 movie Alfred the Great
with David Hemmings as Alfred and Michael York as
Guthrun. ‘The West Saxons are shown performing a
series of manoeuvres that combine elements of Trooping
the Colour and a Broadway chorus line ... This late
1960s version of the 870s – a combination of a ninth-
century Barbarella with, in the battle scenes, the Benny
Hill Show…’
Yet, although the humour is abundant, Horspool’s
marvellous book is not played only for laughs. He takes
us through Alfred’s later life – the battles of Edington,
the repulse of the 885 Viking invasion and the capture
of London the year after, as well as the treaties with the
Norsemen that partitioned England and placed the
Danelaw under Viking rule. Modelling his kingship on
Charlemagne’s, Alfred created a cordon of fortified
strongholds around Wessex and built a fleet. He promoted
education and a legal system, and his strategy enabled his
successors to reconquer the Danelaw.
Intellectually sophisticated as well as entertaining,
Horspool is well aware of all the main currents in recent
historical scholarship, especially the revisionism on the
Vikings. Most of all, he knocks on the head the powerful
prejudice among professional historians against ‘anecdo-
tage’. Such historians use the word ‘anecdotalism’ to
attempt to rebut devastating empirical objections to their
neat ‘systems’ or a priori models and fabrications. In his
contempt for cant and humbug as much as in his lucidity
and delightful humour, David Horspool reveals himself
as ‘one to note’, as they say in racing parlance.
To order this book at £12.97, see LR Bookshop on page 27
 HISTORY
P IERS B RENDON
THE CRUMBS OF EMPIRE
E NDS OF B RITISH I MPERIALISM
★ Second World War, as Louis has shown elsewhere, the
By Wm Roger Louis
(I B Tauris 1065pp £24.50)
THE DUST-JACKET OF this magisterial collection of essays
about the British Empire reproduces a dramatic mural
in the Foreign Office. Completed just after the Great
War, it is the last in a series of allegorical panels painted
by Sigismund Goetze and had originally been intended
to portray Britain’s friendship with Germany. Instead it
celebrated the triumph of Britannia Pacificatrix, a mag-
nificently helmeted and robed figure, flanked by her
white dominions and other allies, who shakes hands
with red-capped America over the ruins of Teutonic
militarism. Interestingly, Niall Ferguson used the same
picture in his book on Empire (2003), though he got its
title wrong, mistook Italy (despite her Roman axe and
fasces) for Greece, and described prostrate Belgium,
Serbia and Montenegro as the repentant ‘children of the
vanquished enemy’. Needless to say, Wm Roger Louis
is guilty of no such confusion.
He has chosen, moreover, a central image which repre-
sents his work in several ways. First, it symbolises the fact
that an anglophile American is the doyen of historians of
the British Empire. Professor Louis, Director of British
Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, has probably
accumulated more knowledge about our colonial past
than anyone at any time. Certainly his range is prodi-
gious. He says that this is his forty-sixth summer spent at
the Public Record Office (now the National Archives at
Kew). And he seems to have visited every other relevant
repository of original papers in the world. Printed matter
he eats for breakfast, and his footnotes (here placed at the
bottom of the page) are a monument to scholarship. No
one was better qualified to be editor-in-chief of the
recent five-volume Oxford History of the British Empire.
The scope of Louis’s achievement can be gauged by the
diversity of the subjects he covers in these essays, nearly all
of which have been previously published. He examines
the scramble for Africa and the exposure by Sir Roger
Casement and E D Morel of the atrocities perpetrated in
the Congo when it was the private fiefdom of King
Leopold of the Belgians. Ranging from the Mediterranean
to the Pacific, he explores the origins of the mandates
system whereby Germany’s colonies were entrusted to
other empires after the First World War. He considers the
fall of Singapore in 1942 and the survival of Hong Kong
after 1945. He assesses the partitions of India and Palestine.
He discusses what Tom Mboya called Britain’s ‘scram out
35
of Africa’ and the end of its empire in the Middle East,
with special reference to the Suez crisis. Finally, he adds a
good measure of biography and historiography.
If there is a theme running through these various
studies, it has to do with Anglo-American accord –
echoing the key motif in the cover picture. After the
Cold War modified the visceral anti-colonialism of the
United States. American leaders saw the British Empire
as a bastion against surging tides of Communism and
propped it up with dollars and diplomacy. As early as
March 1946 Clement Attlee said that Britain might
well have to consider itself as an easterly extension of
a strategic arc, the centre of which was the American
continent, rather than as a Power looking ‘through the
Mediterranean to India and the East’.
What happened subsequently, says Louis, is that the
imperial state did not cave in ‘at the centre like Gibbon’s
Rome’. It survived as part of an Anglo-American coali-
tion and its former colonies became a kind of invisible
empire of dependencies. They were thus subject to
informal influence and indirect control, like national
subsidiaries of a multi-national company. Sometimes, of
course, there were strains in the alliance. British recogni-
tion of ‘Red’ China (to protect Hong Kong) provoked
anger in the White House. The Foreign Office bitterly
resented the crucial part President Truman played in the
creation of Israel – a gangster state, said officials, headed
by ‘an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders’. Vietnam was
also a bone of contention. But though Harold Wilson
refused to contribute troops he would not condemn the
war because ‘we can’t kick our creditors in the balls’.
This was nothing compared to the discord over Suez.
Eden’s collusive attack on Egypt offended Eisenhower,
stirred up Arab nationalism, ended British aspirations to
dominate the Middle East, delayed Britain’s entry into
the European Community by alienating France, and
shattered any reputation for morality that Albion might
still have possessed. It also exposed Britain’s crippling
military and financial weakness. Macmillan had to go
cap in hand to Ike in Bermuda, where he conceded that
Britain was America’s junior partner. However, as Louis
demonstrates, the partnership could embark on ruinous
neo-imperial adventures.
Bridging officially-made gaps in the British documen-
tary record, Louis gives a circumstantial account of the
covert operation by which the CIA, with help from the
SIS, toppled Mohammed Mossadiq. The Iranian leader
was a shrewd, civilised nationalist with a penchant for
fainting-fits and for wearing his pyjamas in public. His
sin in British eyes was to have nationalised his country’s
oil resources – with overwhelming popular support.
Americans saw him as a pro-Communist dictator, which
was about as far from the truth as their view that Saddam
Hussein was in league with al-Qaeda. Employing
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
 HISTORY
Iranian reactionar ies who br ibed the mob with
American cash, the CIA replaced Mussadiq with a royal
despotism and, not incidentally, won a major stake in
Iranian oil for the United States.
Eisenhower and Churchill rejoiced in the success of
this coup, while John Foster Dulles appeared to purr
‘like a giant cat’. But, as Louis points out, the action was
ultimately ‘disastrous, since it strengthened the Shah and
led to dictatorship and revolution’. Even more cata-
strophic, of course, has been the Anglo-American
partnership’s most recent act of post-colonial aggression.
George Bush and Tony Blair have not only precipitated
the current bloodshed in Iraq but, like empire-builders
of yore, they have sown dragon’s teeth that will spring
up as armed men for generations to come.
Aware of this as he is, Roger Louis seems to take quite a
B LAIR W ORDEN
LESS THAN GLORIOUS
T HE L AST R EVOLUTION : 1688 AND THE
C REATION OF THE M ODERN WORLD
★ see what he got wrong or left unexplored. But there is no
by Patrick Dillon
(Jonathan Cape 450pp £20)
EVER SINCE IT was written in the mid nineteenth century,
there has been only one place to be introduced to the
Revolution of 1688 – the History of England from the
Accession of James II by Thomas Babington Macaulay.
Patrick Dillon takes his title from Macaulay’s book, but
otherwise does not mention it. Most modern historians
look askance at it. Yet Macaulay’s name barely appears in
Patrick Dillon’s book, and most modern historians look
askance at it. His prejudices are obvious enough. He wrote
as the hardship of the 1840s was yielding to the prosperity
of the high Victorian age. While Continental lands
plunged into the revolutions of 1848, England preserved
its constitutional continuity. Macaulay congratulated his
country on that achievement, which he attributed to two
bold and courageous acts of national decision: the defeat of
James II, then the passage of the Reform Act of 1832. A
Whig politician, Macaulay is usually regarded as the quin-
tessential Whig historian, who celebrated the progress of
freedom and the erosion of political and religious con-
straints on individual belief and action. Yet he liked to
think of 1688 as the triumph not of partisanship but of
consensus, when the best of the Whigs and Tories sank
party differences and created an enlightened national will.
Macaulay’s dogmatism can be irritating, his judgements
on the enemies of progress unjust, his rhetorical confi-
dence wearisome. Yet in sweep and power and life his
work has had few rivals on any historical subject. Once
36
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
positive view of the British Empire. He is too kind about
Robert Rhodes James’s tortuous and defensive biography
of Eden, describing it as a ‘rounded and perceptive narra-
tive’ and ‘his best book yet’. He is too generous towards
Mountbatten, calling him ‘a consummate practitioner of
disengagement’ – though Louis has changed his mind
somewhat as a result of recent evidence which indicates
that the Viceroy’s haste to quit India led to ‘chaos, confu-
sion and shambles’. Perhaps the very fact that he is
American inclines Louis to stick to his wonderful academic
last and to soften criticisms of his transatlantic cousins.
Otherwise he might have chosen to epitomise a book
about the British Empire with one of the neighbouring
murals painted by Goetze in the Foreign Office. A vast,
violent, colourful mélange, it appears to depict a rape.
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one has read his great narrative, with its atmospheric
set-pieces, its vivid images of court intr igue and
parliamentary debate and crowd emotion, its skilfully
managed shifts from Whitehall and Westminster to the
regions and to the battles for supremacy in Ireland and
Scotland – once all that has been absorbed, one can turn
to the more dispassionate findings of modern research and
subsequent narrative of the Revolution that, in compari-
son, does not seem bloodless and to lack edge of mind.
Patrick Dillon, who is not a professional historian, is an
accomplished writer, as not all professional historians are.
His prose is accessible, his material well arranged, his reading
wide and observant. But this is one of those volumes that
give the impression of having been written not because
there is something that their author needs to say, but
because he or she likes the idea of writing a book. His
capable narrative of the Revolution is interspersed with
social description: with adroit mini-essays on music and the-
atre and architecture and the position of women. Yet their
function is essentially decorative. By contrast the famous
third chapter of Macaulay’s History, a portrait of English
society which brought a social dimension to the writing of
political narrative for the first time, was integral to his story.
When Macaulay wrote, the importance of 1688 was in
need of reassertion. To the Hanoverian oligarchy of the
eighteenth century, the merit of the Revolution was to
have drawn a line under the instability of the rule of the
Stuarts and to have taught kings their place. But by the
later eighteenth century that comfortable vision had
been undermined from right and left. From the right,
the Tory revival under George III had been given (inad-
vertent) historiographical aid by David Hume’s History of
England, which mocked the certainties of Whig history
and punctured the notion that rule by barons is freer
than government by strong kings. The same point was
made, from a different angle, by Tom Paine, who main-
tained that the king and the landowners had subsequently
 HISTORY

ganged up on the dispossessed. J ONATHAN K EATES

Others complained that the Revolution had not gone
nearly far enough: that the Bill of Rights, a missed oppor-
tunity, had left constitutional problems unaddressed. From
the later eighteenth century the advocates of electoral
Giving Napoleon
reform regretted that the revolutionaries had done nothing
to make Parliament more accountable or representative.
The great constitutional issue of the seventeenth century
the Boot
had been the conflict between King and Parliament. On T HE WAR OF WARS : T HE E PIC S TRUGGLE
the face of it, 1688 resolved that conflict in favour of BETWEEN B RITAIN AND F RANCE , 1793–1815
Parliament, which has subsequently sat every year and ★
which soon acquired the power to topple ministries. Yet if By Robert Harvey
the Revolution weakened the powers of the Crown, it (Constable 804pp £25)
enhanced those of the state. In fighting the war with
France by which William secured his throne against the IN ITS WAR against the French from 1793 to 1815, Great
Jacobites, the executive created new forms of government Britain was committed to one of the longest armed strug-
funding which swelled the state’s coffers. Parliament – or so gles of its modern history. The briefest lull in hostilities was
the regime’s critics claimed – was bought off. MPs, who offered by the Treaty of Amiens, concluded in 1802. This
ought to have been protecting their constituencies from the phoney peace, however, lasted only so long as First Consul
executive, were absorbed within it by the distribution of Napoleon Bonaparte (having crowned himself Emperor of
offices and bribes. If absolute or arbitrary government had France in the presence of Pope Pius VII, who had been
been the bogey of seventeenth-century political life, its expressly imported from Rome for the occasion) needed
place was taken in the eighteenth century by time to restore his prestige, battered by the failure of his
corruption. It was Macaulay’s achievement to rescue the Egyptian campaign three years earlier. Otherwise the two
Revolution from those imputations. Its glory, in his eyes, nations, with a dogged singleness of purpose, slogged it
was to have prepared the way not for Walpole but for the out until the Emperor was decisively crushed at Waterloo.
social and material advances of the nineteenth century. Yet why had we gone to war in the first place? No
Nowadays 1688 seems less than glorious. In Ireland it
secured the Protestant ascendancy. It reduced Scotland
to the Union. In assessing its impact in England, historians Oxford University
emphasise its hesitant and conservative aspects and the
reluctance of all but a radical minority to embrace full- Continuing Education
blooded arguments for the accountability of kings or for
religious toleration. Most contemporaries preferred the Master's
fiction that James had abdicated, and had thus left a
vacancy on the throne which his subjects had had to fill. Degree in
The Toleration Act was restricted to Protestants, and
even they acquired only liberty of worship, not the civic
Creative
and political rights that came only in Macaulay’s era. Writing
Yet suppose that the Revolution had not occurred.
There was nothing inherently flawed in James II’s bid for Part-time
absolutism. In 1684 Charles II had ignored, with impunity, from Oct 2007
his statutory obligation to call Parliament. The monarchy
had never looked more powerful than on James’s accession Summer School
the next year. Had he aimed merely at extending his pre-
rogatives, and not at the promotion of Catholicism, he one week courses
could have commanded an obedience as firm as that in Literature and
achieved by Louis XIV in France. The Revolution bucked Creative Writing
a European trend towards absolutism. Whether or not we 7 July - 4 August
warm to it, the episode is a fundamental one not only in 2007
our history but in the world which post-Revolutionary Tel: 01865 270369
Britain would do so much to shape. Patrick Dillon is right
to complain that the English know so little about 1688, and email: ppcert@conted.ox.ac.uk
right to insist, in measured and sensible terms, on its legacy. www.conted.ox.ac.uk/ad/pp11
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37
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
 HISTORY
treaty obligations bound us to either Austria or Prussia,
the principal nations in arms against the French revolu-
tionary government, which was poised to guillotine the
deposed King Louis XVI and his queen Mar ie
Antoinette. Nor, despite the success of Edmund Burke’s
Reflections on the Revolution in France, that brilliantly
effective combination of Hibernian rhodomontade and
English Tory sentimentality, were we ready to be pan-
icked into fighting on behalf of a regime which, only a
few years previously, had helped the American colonies
to secure their freedom.
What ultimately drove Britain to take up arms was
not sympathy for the Bourbons or their suddenly
displaced aristocracy, but the far more prosaic question
of who would ultimately control a vital trade route
into continental Europe via the Scheldt estuary and the
port of Antwerp. Pitt the Younger, as prime minister,
was under the impression that the whole business of
clearing the French out of the Low Countries would
take little more than a year. Like the gung-ho politi-
cians of the Great War promising that our boys would
be ‘home before the leaves fall’, the premier was jolted
out of his complacency as much by the unpreparedness
of British troops as by any particular military talent dis-
played by enemy commanders. After a humiliating
sequence of bungled invasion attempts, such as the
expedition led by the Duke of York, whose failure to
capture Dunkirk led to the derisive nursery rhyme
which is almost his only memorial, the naval victories
of the Glorious First of June and Cape St Vincent
turned the whole conflict into a patriotic struggle to
protect Old England’s honour.
Soon enough, in that era of ‘the egotistical sublime’,
the war would become dominated, and its course deter-
mined, by a single personality whose presence
mesmerised an entire nation and whose myth continues,
nearly two centuries later, to exert its dubious allure.
Robert Harvey is, thank heavens, no worshipper of the
Corsican parvenu. Napoleon Bonaparte emerges here as
a figure hardly more admirable than the posturing tyrant
caricatured by contemporary cartoonists. For all his
idealism, embodied by the legal code which bears his
name, the man himself was morally contemptible, a bru-
tal opportunist ruthless in isolating others’ weaknesses
and exploiting them to the utmost. It says something
profound as to an inherent vileness in human nature that
so many thousands of otherwise intelligent individuals
should have gloried in their abasement before him.
The War of Wars, for all its hard-nosed reluctance to be
blinded by imperial gloire, at least takes Napoleon seri-
ously as a strategist and leader of men. The dazzling
invasion of Italy in 1796 is given its due, and so too is
the battle of Wagram, that textbook demonstration of
victory snatched from the jaws of defeat. Pride of place
is justly g iven to Austerlitz as a touchstone of
38
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
Bonaparte’s genius, whether in the precision of his
timing of manoeuvres, resourcefulness in exploiting the
physical layout of the battlefield, or sheer inspiration in
controlling the action’s key phases.
Harvey pulls few punches, however, when it comes to
evaluating either the grotesquely wasteful Egyptian
campaign of 1799 or the 1811 invasion of Russia
(though rightly pointing out that this retributive expedi-
tion was no more than Tsar Alexander deserved as
France’s slipperiest ally). The former revealed Napoleon
as an impetuous fantasist, easily defeated at Acre by Sir
Sidney Smith, and the depth of his cynical expediency
in preferring to have his invalid soldiers poisoned rather
than having to provide for them during an ignominious
retreat. As for the Russian campaign, Bonaparte’s sheer
profligacy in terms of expendable human lives remains
breathtaking. The hubris of Borodino, with its 100,000
dead, was followed by the spectacular nemesis of burn-
ing Moscow and the epic horrors of the retreat, which
the Emperor, speeding back to Paris to secure his
throne, managed to avoid witnessing.
His two chief British adversaries are, as we might
expect, more gently handled. Harvey excuses Nelson’s
vanity – disastrously flattered by the sleazy Neapolitan
Bourbons with whom Emma Hamilton was such a
favourite – as merely the naïveté of the overgrown child
he remained when off the quarterdeck. Wellington,
despite his selfish readiness to airbrush subordinates out
of his despatches, is rightly praised for his ‘scientific,
forensic brilliance’ during the Peninsular campaign –
not the sideshow some historians would have us believe,
but a major f actor in destroying the myth of
Napoleonic invincibility. The revisionist claim that the
allied triumph at Waterloo was chiefly due to Blücher
and his Prussians is here roundly rejected. Whatever the
psychological impact of their last-minute arrival, the
contribution to victory was negligible, and though the
action was hardly Wellington’s finest, the glory of the
achievement belongs to him.
Was the whole blood-spattered game, played out over
twenty-two years, worth the candle? Napoleon’s drivel-
ling self-pity while in exile on St Helena encouraged the
view, still widely held in France, that Nelson and
Wellington had somehow been unsporting in the
soundness of the defeats they inflicted, and that Britain
would have done better to lie down alongside all the
other European nations as the tubby little Corsican trod
them underfoot. This book, an exhilarating sequence of
dramatic set-pieces in narrative history’s best traditions,
sees nothing glorious in such submission. In a few years’
time there will be an opportunity to celebrate the 200th
anniversary of Waterloo. Will it find us rejoicing in our
age-old capacity to rescue Europe from her tyrants? I
doubt it somehow.
To order this book at £20, see LR Bookshop on page 27
 MEMOIRS & DIARIES
M ICHAEL B ARBER
LAST RITES
P OINT TO P OINT N AVIGATION : A M EMOIR
★ from Screening History. Once I twigged this I began to
By Gore Vidal
(Little, Brown 277pp £17.99)
OSCAR WILDE SAID that criticism is the record of one’s
soul, the only civilised form of autobiography. For most
of his working life Gore Vidal endorsed this. ‘I shall never
write a formal memoir,’ he declared in 1987, ‘[but] as I
write of politics, literature, aviation and my father, I do,
occasionally, strike a personal note.’ A few years later,
however, he began to have second thoughts and the result
was, first, Screening History, an autobiographical essay on
his long love affair with film, and secondly, Palimpsest, an
impressionistic memoir of his first thirty-nine years.
In Palimpsest, much to everyone’s surprise, the glacial
Vidal revealed that he did, after all, have a heart, on which
were carved the initials J T. His beloved was a schoolmate
called Jimmie Trimble, eviscerated by a Japanese grenade
in 1945. Vidal and Trimble, a brilliant baseball prospect,
were pubescent contemporaries at St Alban’s, a boys’
boarding school in Washington. Within a few weeks of
their first meeting they had become lovers, ‘yet sexual
pleasure could hardly account for the huge delight we
took in one another’s company’, wrote Vidal in imitation
of Plato. Aged thirteen he had not yet read the Symposium;
but when, years later, he did, he realised that in Jimmie he
had met, all too briefly, his other half. Convinced that this
‘happy accident’ would not recur, he settled, instead, for
daily helpings of anonymous sex, preferably at teatime
because ‘if you worry about whether you’re going to get
laid after dinner it ruins conversations’.
Significantly, the one other relationship that mattered
to Vidal involved no sex at all. For fifty-three years he
shared his life with Howard Austen, a Jew from the
Bronx. An aspiring professional singer fatally handi-
capped by stage-fright, Austen described himself as a
‘permanent playmate, Greek chorus and Jewish mother’.
He was also Vidal’s major-domo, ensuring that ‘all Gore
has to do is write. Everything else is taken care of ’. Vidal
gave early notice of how much his companion meant to
him when it became clear that Nina, his snobbish,
shrewish mother, was determined to separate them. He
told her he would never see her again, and kept his word.
In 1999 Fred Kaplan’s door-stopping biography of Vidal
was published. Though Vidal cooperated fully, he calls
Kaplan to order here and insists that what little of the biog-
raphy he has read bears out the headline above the Times
Literary Supplement review: ‘On Misreading Gore Vidal’.
We learn this from Point to Point Navigation, purportedly a
39
memoir of his life since 1964. I say ‘purportedly’ because
this is more a miscellany than a memoir, and a curiously ill-
edited miscellany at that. For instance he apologises for
recycling an obscure anecdote about Jane Bowles from
Palimpsest, yet nowhere does he or his publisher let on that
his first thirty pages have been lifted, almost word for word,
suspect that much else had been recycled, eg what Nina
said about the diminishing number of her husbands’ balls.
Vidal also repeats himself. I lost count of how often he tells
us that he writes in longhand on yellow legal pads. And, a
detail that escaped the blurb-writer, Austen reverts to
Auster, the patronymic he jettisoned on Vidal’s advice.
Against these blemishes there are, as you’d expect,
some delights. I particularly enjoyed the story of how
Chumbhot, the Crown Princess of Thailand, squelched
Barbara Cartland at a luncheon party. Mrs Cartland was
complaining about the shabby treatment Prince Charles
and Lady Diana, her step-granddaughter, had received in
the American press. It all started, she said, ‘from that
glorious moment in the Abbey’ – she meant, of course,
the Cathedral – ‘when they were pronounced man and
wife’. Tipped off by Vidal, who was told by his chum,
Princess Margaret, that Mrs Cartland had been barred
from the service at the insistence of the Spencers, the
Crown Princess struck:
‘How lovely the Abbey must have been. We saw it
only on television, of course, but you were there.’ She
smiled her gentle tiger smile. Cartland stammered
‘Yes yes yes … then to read in the dreadful press –’
‘Do tell us what the Abbey was like, with the
divine music, the service …’
Mrs Cartland was having trouble with a quail’s egg.
She coughed and cleared her throat. Chumbhot
looked at me. I nodded. ‘Go!’
‘You were there?’
‘Well, it was for young people, really. So I gave away
my tickets –’
‘Surely,’ said Chumbhot, ‘the revered Queen
Mother is hardly in her first youth …’
Neither, of course, is Vidal, who since 2003 has been on
his own. A lifelong heavy smoker, Howard Austen paid
dearly for his habit. His last two years were anything but
easeful, so that death, when eventually it came, was a
release. Throughout his companion’s long decline Vidal,
not known for his compassion, was a true Samaritan,
chartering hospital planes, corralling doctors, holding
Howard’s hand. At one point, towards the end, Howard
turned to him and said: ‘Didn’t it go by awfully fast?’ Of
course it did, was Gore’s response. ‘We had been too
happy and the gods cannot bear the happiness of mortals.’
So, carpe diem. As Vidal himself moves ‘toward the door
marked Exit’, he can console himself with the thought
that, more than most of us, he has lived by this maxim.
To order this book at £14.39, see LR Bookshop on page 27
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
 MEMOIRS & DIARIES
J OHN A DAMSON
The Gracious
Curmudgeon
T HINGS I D IDN ’ T K NOW
★ further volume.
By Robert Hughes
(Harvill Secker 395pp £25)
For almost forty years, Robert Hughes has turned his
shrewd and perspicacious gaze to the world of the visual
arts. Through television, most famously his vigorous
defence of modernism in 1980, The Shock of the New;
through a series of impressive monographs, not least a
masterly study of Goya; and through his prolific contri-
butions to Time magazine, where he has been resident art
critic since the 1970s, Hughes has not only illuminated
the art of the past, but undertaken a brave, counter-cul-
tural and – some would say – entirely foolhardy mission:
to bring qualitative discernment to the cosy, faux-radical,
anything-goes world of the contemporary visual arts. His
belief in such intellectually elusive criteria as quality, skill,
and creative genius could easily have led him to be
dismissed by his critics as a nostalgic harking back to the
days of connoisseurship, were it not for the fact that he is
usually at least twice as clever, and far more nimble in his
rhetoric, than the slickest of his assailants.
Though based in New York since 1970, Hughes is the
product of that once flourishing but now almost van-
ished country, Anglostralia: a territory of the mind,
quaint and incomprehensible to native-born Britons, in
which a section of the Melbourne and Sydney elites (no
others) thought of their worlds as being almost as
English as Surrey – except with rather better weather.
They sent their children to English-style Public Schools,
usually with English headmasters; belonged to English-
style gentlemen’s clubs; and came to see local universities
as merely a prelude to further study in Oxford or
Cambridge. Ontological fantasy that it was, the fact that
so many quite intelligent people inhabited this world
invested it with a form of brittle reality all its own. In a
country that could seem remote, provincial and often
philistine, life in Anglostralia afforded mental citizenship
– for the likes of Hughes, Germaine Greer, Barry
Humphries, and even, growing up in the 1970s, for me
as well – of a more formal, cosmopolitan, and intellectually
rigorous world. Little wonder that so many grown-up
Anglostralians live as exiles, never entirely at ease in the
real Australia, yet never quite recognised by the Mother
Country as true occupants of the nest.
Hughes’s memoir relates his own geographical and
40
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
intellectual relocation: from an
affluent, piously Catholic boy-
hood in the Sydney of the 1940s
and 1950s to the Bohemian, lit-
erar y and artistic worlds of
London in the 1960s, before his
escape to a new life in
Manhattan in 1970. The post-
1970 Hughes clearly demands a
The starting point of this
account is nevertheless Hughes’s
near-fatal road accident in 1999
on a remote outback road in Hughes: ferociously articulate
Western Australia, for which a
hostile local media and a dubiously-motivated prosecution
squarely blamed Hughes. The opening chapter presents
his apologia, and, like all self-justifications, never quite
escapes the tedium of special pleading. Once he leaves
this West Australian highway, however, for the remoter
back lanes of memory, a far more congenial Hughes
emerges: a natural raconteur, whose emotional and intel-
lectual engagement with art is so compelling that any
subject he touches upon – from the sublimities of
Velázquez to the drug-induced daubs of some long-for-
gotten painter of the 1960s counter-culture – becomes a
subject of immediate interest. His taut prose gleams with
brightly polished, sharp-edged mots, and he has the ability
to skewer the objects of his disfavour with a well-turned
phrase: the ‘haughty boys at Sotheby’s with their faces like
silver teapots’; ‘ankle-biters (Australian for small children)’
have all the ‘solipsism … [of] needy, unfulfilled tyrants’;
artistically witless plutocrats own a Jeff Koons, but ‘think
that Parmigianino is a sort of Italian cheese’. His throw-
away lines also invariably carry a live grenade – as in
‘marital love, the great stupefacient’.
Once the bright, well-read ex-Catholic boy from
Sydney University had hit London in his twenties, it is
unsurprising that he quickly made his mark in the
capital’s raffish 1960s beau monde. He was soon appear-
ing on BBC TV, writing for the press, and assuming
the role of a cultural pundit. Anecdotes of these years
abound – of the reclusive Sidney Nolan (another
Anglostralian exile); of his ‘hero’, the ‘portly and irri-
table’ Cyril Connolly (whose sardonic take on life has
clearly left its mark on Hughes); of the generosity of
(the then Sir) George Weidenfeld, who spotted
Hughes’s youthful talent and commissioned him to
write a book (never finished) on Leonardo; and of
almost every significant painter, dealer and patron in
the world of post-war art.
Amid this flotsam of memory – the Rowlandsonian
pen-portraits, the vivid vignettes of places and people
known and loved – there also emerge from time to time
the main planks of Hughes’s understanding of art. At
 MEMOIRS & DIARIES
the centre of this structure is a passionate belief in the
inestimable value (and alarming fragility) of ‘the past’ –
what has been inherited, both as objects and as thought,
from those who have gone before us: ‘so delicate, so
vulnerable, so dreadfully easy to erase’ (comments
prompted by his first-hand obser vation of the
Florentine floods of 1966). He argues vigorously against
the fashionable nostrum that the modern exists in rela-
tion to the past in a state of parricidal hostility – that
there is ‘something inherently repressive about old art’
and Old Masters; and against the militant strand of
modernism which is ‘committed to the Oedipal project
of killing the father’. This is a timely message; for such
M ICHAEL B LOCH
THE COURTIER’S CRAFT
K ING ’ S C OUNSELLOR : A BDICATION
AND WAR – THE D IARIES OF
S IR A LAN L ASCELLES
★ with precedence or decorations, or whether Lord Louis
(Edited by Duff Hart-Davis)
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson 462pp £25)
SIR ALAN LASCELLES, known to his friends as ‘Tommy’,
was a courtier. He served as Principal Private Secretary
to King George VI from 1943 until his death, and to the
Queen for the first two years of her reign. From 1935 to
1943, he had been Assistant Private Secretary to three
sovereigns, and during the 1920s, on the staff of Edward,
Prince of Wales. He was in many ways superbly qualified
for his job. He was loyal, meticulous, wily and resource-
ful. He was an exceptionally cultivated man, whose
exquisitely written memoranda are a joy to read. Unlike
his predecessor as Pr incipal Pr ivate Secretary, Sir
Alexander Hardinge, he had much personal charm and
seems to have got on well with everyone; he also had a
considerable talent for dissimulation, and was perfectly
able to conceal, when necessary, his true motives in any
matter or his true feelings for his interlocutor. He was
thus able to fulfil to perfection his task of ensuring that
no friction developed between the sovereign and his
ministers, that the post-war Labour government devel-
oped no republican tinge, that the royal prerogatives
were respected and the constitutional niceties preserved.
Unfortunately for historians, Lascelles also possessed
another quality thought desirable in courtiers – he was
pathologically discreet. The bulk of this volume consists
of a diary which he kept for four of his ten years as
Principal Private Secretary, from 1942 to 1946. It is of
negligible value as a historical source, containing little
which gives the slightest clue as to the personality or the
preferences of the diarist, the sovereign, or for that
41
ideas are now pervasive among many practitioners and
purchasers of contemporary art. Indeed, the supposed
repressiveness and irrelevancy of the past has now
become an all-purpose plenary indulgence, allowing
both artists and purchasers to be deeply historically
ignorant and yet somehow free from sin.
This memoir of Hughes’s early life holds up a mirror
to a complex man who is gracious, curmudgeonly, and
ferociously articulate – yes; but also possessed of a
humanity, informed by a deep love for the studia human-
itatis, that makes his company in these pages a consistent
source of pleasure and – dare one say it – wisdom.
To order this book at £20, see LR Bookshop on page 27
matter any of the sovereign’s family or ministers. The
nearest we get to a ‘revelation’ regarding the King’s likes
and dislikes is that he did not care for the Labour minis-
ter Dr Dalton (whose father, Canon Dalton, had been a
royal tutor), which was common knowledge at the time.
Nor does Lascelles say anything about the business he
transacted on the King’s behalf, except in trivial matters
(admittedly of absorbing interest to George VI) to do
Mountbatten should be offered a barony or a viscountcy
(he successfully held out for the latter), or the desirability
of the King and Mr Churchill being present during the
Normandy landings. The diary essentially consists of a
L ubricate your
L exicon
“This is just
what’s needed:
tricky words
with witty
definitions.”
John Humphrys
BBC Radio 4
Available from all good bookshops
£7.99
Ergo Press 0-9552758-4-9
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
 MEMOIRS & DIARIES
collection of harmless and insipid anecdotes concerning
the dignitaries Lascelles met who came to have audiences
with the King, unrevealing repartee between the King
and his wartime premier, and his own doings off-duty,
such as attending concerts.
If the histor ian wishes to get a flavour of what
Lascelles was really like, of his pungent views on various
subjects, of the extent to which he manipulated the
policy of both the government and the court, he will
read not this diary but that of his close friend Harold
Nicolson, to whom, in the course of innumerable din-
ners at the Travellers Club, he revealed much. To be
sure, he will not go to the published volumes of
Nicolson’s diary which appeared in the 1960s but to the
originals which are available for consultation by scholars
at Balliol College, Oxford. For in editing these diaries,
Harold’s son Nigel was scrupulous in submitting to any
living person what they were reported to have said; and
Lascelles, we may be sure, would have blue-pencilled
any such indiscretions. Indeed, included in this volume
are two letters from Lascelles to Nigel which indicate
the extent of his terror of revelations. Lascelles was
responsible for Harold writing the official biography of
King George V; and he tried (unsuccessfully) to get
Nigel to remove various diary references which showed
that Harold, while aware of the King’s virtues, found
him exceedingly dull as a man. And Lascelles was also
bitterly opposed to Nigel publishing his book Portrait
of a Marriage (1973), which revealed that both of his
parents had been homosexual.
Of course, Sir Alan Lascelles resembled Sir Harold
Nicolson in that he too, though happily married with
children, was secretly homosexual, another common
characteristic at that time of courtiers which chimed
with the dissimulative and seductive qualities they were
often called upon to display. The great passion of his life
was James Pope-Hennessy, a great charmer and brilliant
writer though a raffish, amoral character who ended up
being murdered by rough trade in 1974. Pope-Hennessy
boasted to Harold Nicolson that he could twist the royal
private secretary round his little finger. In the end, he
exploited the situation to have himself appointed Queen
Mary’s official biographer – a happy result, for the book
(which appeared in 1960) was perhaps the greatest royal
biography of the century, albeit a masterpiece which
subtly sends up the subject from the first page to the last.
One might conclude that Lascelles was something of a
hypocrite who, while indulging clandestinely in an illegal
sex life, came down heavily on anyone who did not
observe the outward conventional proprieties. In particular,
two individuals who might be considered to have broken
the rules of the game regarded him as the author of their
misfortunes – the Duke of Windsor, and Princess
Margaret. Lascelles had served the Duke as Prince of Wales
during his great imperial tours of the 1920s, and had come
42
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
to detest him for his
fecklessness and above
all for the fact that he
sought to seduce the
pretty wives of district
commissioners. (He
might have been more
sympathetic, albeit
appalled at the r isks
involved, had the
Prince’s amorous atten-
tions been concentrated Lascelles: wily
on handsome district
commissioners.) He played no discernible role in the abdi-
cation itself; but afterwards (as shown in Philip Ziegler’s
biography of Edward VIII) he sided resolutely with Queen
Elizabeth in her determination that the Duke of Windsor
should never be allowed to return to England, receive any
recognition for his wife, or be given any role.
This volume includes an account of an interview
between Lascelles and the Duke of Windsor in 1945
about the latter’s future, and some letters from Lascelles
to authors who were writing about the abdication in the
1960s, designed to show that he bore the ex-King no ill
will but genuinely believed, as a loyal servant of the
crown, that his return to the fold would be in no one’s
interests. Lascelles’ conversations with Nicolson give the
lie to this and show that he regarded his ex-master with
passionate loathing. He was the inspiration behind
Frances Donaldson’s damning biography of Edward VIII,
a book which includes a flagrant untruth which is
repeated in these pages – that the abdicating sovereign
forced his successor to buy Balmoral and Sandringham
from him for a huge fortune, and went into exile an
exceedingly rich man. In fact, he gave up everything he
had inherited for a pension of £21,000 a year, which was
barely enough to live on in royal style in 1936 and cer-
tainly did not go far by the time of his death in 1972.
This volume also includes a memorandum by Lascelles
on his role in preventing the marriage of Princess
Margaret and Peter Townsend, suggesting that there too
he did no more than his objective duty in pointing out
the danger to the monarchy of the proposed course. It is,
however, probable that Lascelles conceived a gut dislike
of the nymphomaniac Princess and was motivated by the
realisation that it would have been difficult to permit her
to marry a divorced man while keeping at bay the Duke
of Windsor and his previously divorced wife.
A biography of Sir Alan Lascelles, crafty manipulator
and clandestine homosexual, would be a fascinating book,
reminiscent of James Lees-Milne’s brilliant biography of
Reginald, Viscount Esher, who played a similar dual role
during the reign of King Edward VII. If one day it is
written, this volume will be of limited use to its author.
To order this book at £20, see LR Bookshop on page 27
 MEMOIRS & DIARIES
H UGH M ASSINGBERD
ZEPPELINS AND JAM
T HE G REAT WAR D IARIES OF
G EORGINA L EE : H OME F IRES B URNING
★ of jam; and American women police ‘safeguarding the
Edited by Gavin Roynon
(Sutton Publishing 307pp £19.99)
THERE IS A twist in the title of this eye-opening account
of the Home Front during the First World War. The
allusion to the sentimental song ‘Keep the Home Fires
Burning’, with its lyrical melody by Ivor Novello con-
juring up cosy images of British womenfolk knitting by
the hearth while their boys were far away fighting the
beastly Hun, is turned on its head. For, as witnessed by
Georgina Lee (a dedicated worker for the Belgian Red
Cross in London), who chronicled the conflict from
start to finish, there were indeed ‘Home Fires Burning’
on an alarming scale.
I confess that in my ignorance I had hitherto only the
haziest notion of the odd Zeppelin humming in the sky – I
remember my old friend Jim Lees-Milne telling me that he
prayed one would crash on the house of his prep school
headmaster. But Lee’s first-hand descriptions are as chilling
as her editor Gavin Roynon’s statistics are startling. In fact,
1,413 people were killed and 3,408 injured as a result of air
raids. Of these casualties, more than half were Londoners.
In the first daylight raid on London in June 1917, seventy-
two bombs fell within a radius of a mile from Liverpool
Street Station: 162 people were killed and 432 injured.
The eldest daughter of H W B Davis, a Welsh painter
based in Boulogne, Georgina was born in 1869 and ran
her widowed father’s house on the River Wye when he
returned to Wales. In 1910 she married Charles Lee, a
solicitor in a family firm next door to Westminster
Abbey (where it still flourishes), and three years later –
at the advanced age of forty-four – she gave birth to her
only child, Harry.
It was to young Harry, nine months old when the war
broke out in 1914, that Mrs Lee addressed her diaries,
which are a remarkable find. As Hew Strachan, Chichele
Professor of the History of War at Oxford, says in his
foreword: ‘Maternal love gives her entries the warmth
and humanity which engage the reader’s emotions.’
Terrible national disasters are juxtaposed with everyday
domestic details which give the diaries an extraordinary
immediacy. For example, during a visit to the seaside at
Brighton in 1916 with Harry, his mother records ‘a great
naval battle in the North Sea … a far bigger affair than
anything we dreamt of ’. Then, after this reference to the
Pyrrhic victory of Jutland, she turns to her boy: ‘You are
thoroughly enjoying Brighton, you love the sea, the big
43
waves which fascinate you and you have an enormous
appetite. You are full of mischief and high spirits.’
As in all good diaries, the trivial and the profound jos-
tle for one’s attention. On the same page in 1917, for
instance, you will find Foch’s counter-offensive; the
butcher y of the Russian Imper ial Family by the
Bolsheviks; young Harry’s return to Wales; the shortage
morals of the young women’. The reader is carried
through cataclysmic events at a tremendous pace. It’s all
here – from the first Battle of Ypres to the Christmas
Truce (‘I think they mean to play the game’, observes
one British officer of the Germans); from Neuve-
Chapelle (double the losses at Waterloo) to the
Dardanelles; from the sinking of the Lusitania (in the
wake of which anti-German riots in the East End
prompt the diarist’s comment, ‘Even your peaceful
Mummy cries hurrah!’) to the shooting of Nurse Cavell.
With her indefatigable curiosity, Georgina Lee saw an
astonishing amount with her own eyes, including the
historic procession of 50,000 women through London
(‘a very inspiriting sight’), petitioning to be allowed to
work for munitions (‘MEN MUST FIGHT AND
WOMEN MUST WORK’). She had a well-connected
network of family and friends to supply diverting ‘copy’
– such as a Cavalryman cousin, Charlie Romer-
Williams, who took a pack of beagles over to Belgium
in order to enjoy good sport at the Front.
Mrs Lee’s reactions and prejudices serve as an instruc-
tive barometer of contemporary feelings. When Sir
Roger Casement is apprehended on a German boat
car r ying ar ms for the Ir ish rebels, she remarks:
‘Everybody is hoping that he will be shot summarily.’
Yet by the time he is sentenced to be hanged, she has
changed her tune: ‘I can’t help hoping that he may get a
reprieve. He was evidently under the impression that
here was a chance of liberating Ireland from her wrongs.’
Much of the material has a haunting quality. When
talking to wounded soldiers about their appalling expe-
riences (so much for the myth that the gentler sex were
kept in ignorance about what really went on), Mrs Lee
was struck by ‘the silence in which the infantry attacks
were carried out. The men go about their business of
killing without speaking.’
As for Armistice Day in 1918, how could one forget
this tailpiece related to Mrs Lee by Florence
Younghusband, who was on the top of a bus:
In front of her were two soldiers, one with his face
horribly scarred. He looked straight ahead and
remained silent; the other just bowed his head and
burst out crying. The omnibus conductress dropped
into the vacant seat by Florence, leant her head on
her shoulder and cried too. ‘I lost my man two
months ago, I can’t be happy today’, she murmured.
To order this book at £15.99, see LR Bookshop on page 27
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
 MEMOIRS & DIARIES
J AMES D ELINGPOLE
RUPERT BARE
R ED C ARPETS AND OTHER B ANANA S KINS
★ himself huddled in
By Rupert Everett
(Little, Brown 406pp £18.99)
Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins is a rubbish title for a
showbiz autobiography: coy, lame, not even a clever
pun. It’s the sort of thing a publisher dreams up after
deciding that the author’s preferred choice – Travels
with My Arse, say – is a bit too full-on for the vast,
across-the-board readership you need to attract when
you’ve forked out a rumoured advance of £1 million
and are maybe terrified that no one is going to be all
that interested in the life of a gay English actor most of
whose movies have been total flops.
Really, his publishers should have had more confi-
dence in their author. For one thing, Rupert Everett
writes quite brilliantly – probably a lot better than he
acts, if truth be told. For another, the fact that he’s gay
and the fact that he has experienced so much failure are
precisely what make the book so interesting. When his
contemporary Hugh Grant gets round to writing his
autobiography he won’t be able to say anything remotely
revealing because it might jeopardise his career. Everett,
on the other hand, can say more or less what he wants
because he hasn’t got a career.
This doesn’t mean he hasn’t had his moments, starting
with the huge break he got shortly after leaving
Ampleforth, a starring role as the languid, pouting Guy
Burgess figure in the enormous West End hit Another
Country. For a time this made him the most talked-about
young English actor of his generation (way more so, for a
period, than Colin Firth or Kenneth Branagh), a public-
school pin-up (for girls and boys), and gained him an entrée
into the starriest of circles and the weirdest situations.
He was adopted by Andy Warhol and Bianca Jagger,
he got chummy with Gordon Jackson (and his ‘painfully
shy’ best friend Kenneth Williams), he pursued and had
a fling with Ian McKellen, then, most bizarrely, ended
up having an affair with the then Mrs Bob Geldof, Paula
Yates. ‘She was married. I was gay,’ he writes. ‘We were
both narcissists. We both loved to act up, and we adored
being looked at. Our secret was safe with everyone.’
Everett’s descriptions of Yates are among the best
things in the book – tender, exquisitely drawn and psy-
chologically acute, as indeed are his accounts of all the
other female stars he has worked with (Madonna, Julia
Roberts, Sharon Stone) or slept with (Beatrice Dalle,
Susan Sarandon). Here again, his gayness is his secret
weapon, granting him both the feminine intuition and
44
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
the privileged access.
Would Julia Roberts
have allowed a
straight man to get so
close to her? Everett
thinks not, describing
the back of her limo
‘chatting intensely on
subjects that a g irl Monkey: made its excuses and left
could only discuss
with a man who was not nursing a hidden erection’.
It was with Roberts, of course, that Everett enjoyed
his other enormous success in My Best Friend’s Wedding.
‘There is nothing like the head-trip when Hollywood’s
giant eye turns its attention on you. When the movie hit
$100 million at the box office I was summoned to meet
the heads of all the studios on a kind of Evita victory
tour. Being a complete slut, I loved these meetings.’
These rare highs add an even greater comical piquancy
to Everett’s spectacular lows, such as the moment when
to pay off his mortgage on a hideous house he shouldn’t
have bought in the South of France he spends a year
exiled in communist Russia starring as a Cossack in And
Quiet Flows the Don. By the end, five crew members
have died, including the operator of the wind machine
(an old aeroplane propeller), who ends up being decapi-
tated. ‘We watched his head fly across the sky and land
in the snow, which turned crimson around it.’
The reason Everett doesn’t get the best roles (unless
they’re cartoon ones like Prince Charming in Shrek 2), he
claims, is because Hollywood can’t handle openly gay
leading men. While this may be true, Everett surely
doesn’t much help his cause by being such a self-confessed
‘cunt’ to work with. While filming Dance with a Stranger
he drives over the director’s foot, then – not on purpose –
reverses and does it again, and is overheard laughing about
it afterwards. When at the end of a play Maria Aitken
calls for three minutes’ silence to mark the death of
Laurence Olivier, he gets the giggles. When a play-going
couple write to criticise his inaudible performance, he
sends them a tussock of his pubic hair.
In the flesh he’s probably a complete nightmare, but
on the page he’s delectable. His monstrousness makes
him the perfect insider guide to celebr ity mores
(‘Madonna was approaching the dizzy pinnacle of fame,
and at those heights you don’t bother to disguise your
feelings … Manners were something she had discarded
at base camp’) and gives him a deliciously cynical
perspective and a delightfully catty turn of phrase (eg his
description of Hollywood as the ‘lubed desert’). The
book could have done with some pruning but it’s defi-
nitely one of the showbiz greats – as much as anything
because its author isn’t.
To order this book at £15.19, see LR Bookshop on page 27
 MUSIC & ART
S IMON H EFFER
PRELUDE TO SUCCESS
J ANACEK : Y EARS OF A L IFE – VOLUME 1
(1854–1914), T HE L ONELY B LACKBIRD
★ His deep unhappiness and isolation there were compounded
By John Tyrrell
(Faber & Faber 971pp £60)
IT IS A brave author who will write a book that appears
to be almost entirely about failure: especially when that
book runs to 840 pages before one even reaches the end-
notes and index. But it is perhaps because John Tyrrell’s
work is only the first volume of a two-part life that he
can get away with it. Tyrrell is Professor of Music at
Cardiff University and a world authority on Czech music
in general and the works of Leos Janacek in particular.
He ends this first volume on the day of Austr ia-
Hungary’s declaration of war against
Serbia on 28 July 1914, a little over
three weeks after Janacek’s sixtieth
birthday. In one respect that is a con-
venient moment, but it still leaves the
reader with a picture of a man who
has dramatically underachieved. It
was not until 1916 that Janacek
suddenly achieved wide recognition,
when the National Theatre in Brno
at last gave a performance of his
fourth and greatest opera, Jenufa,
which had been completed more
than a decade earlier. There followed
a creative spurt in the last twelve Janacek: Moravian boy
years of the composer’s life that
included many of the works for which he is now best
known – the Glagolitic Mass, The Cunning Little Vixen,
Taras Bulba, and the stunningly innovative Sinfonietta.
It required the recognition of Jenufa to give Janacek the
confidence to make those works; and therefore Tyrrell’s
first volume is, essentially, a study in failure. Leo Janacek
was born to an impoverished household of schoolteachers
in the small town of Hukvaldy in Moravia, in the far east
of what is now the Czech Republic and near the border
with Poland, on 3 July 1854. (He did not become Leos, in
an aggressively Czech statement about himself, until he
was in his twenties; and before that, in a moment of pan-
Slavic Russophilia, he had for a time been ‘Lev’). The
boy’s strong emotional and cultural association with the
province of his birth was the first and, in some respects,
major retardant on his progress as a composer. His music,
from the moment he started to write it in his teens and
early twenties, was distinctly Moravian. It set him against
the Czech mainstream personified by Smetana, though
45
would not prevent him later on from being befriended
and admired by Dvorak. Leo was the tenth of fourteen
children born over a twenty-five-year period to Jiri
Janacek and Amalie Janackova, only eight of whom
reached adulthood. That he showed early promise in
music is attested by the fact that, at eleven, he won a
choral scholarship to an Augustinian monastery in Brno.
by the death, when he was still a new boy, of his father.
He was adopted by an uncle, whom he often refers to in
letters as ‘grandfather’. At the age of just fifteen he went to
teacher-training college. In 1872 he qualified as a general
teacher, but sought as soon as he could to specialise in
music. By his late teens he was not only an accomplished
chorister, but a gifted pianist and organist too. Despite a
constant battle against poverty he went to Prague for some
dedicated musical training, and passed his organ examina-
tions. It was also at this time that he began a long career
that was to be important not merely for his earning poten-
tial, but for establishing him as a name on the Czech
musical scene, in writing learned
articles about music and musical life.
He was a natural controversialist,
which again helped make him ene-
mies who succeeded in blocking his
recognition as a composer.
Brno remained his home in his
early twenties, and it was where he
pursued a busy routine of organising
and conducting performances: this
was also the basis of his relationship
with Dvorak, whose music he
frequently programmed. In 1877 he
began to give piano lessons to
a twelve-year-old girl, Zdenka
Schulzova, the daughter of his superi-
or at the Brno Teachers’ Institute; and married her four
years later. It is at this stage in the narrative that some of
the difficulties with Janacek start to become apparent.
When Zdenka became pregnant in her late teens Janacek
was at best disinterested, and this turned to uninterest
when she was delivered of a daughter. He soon embarked
on a long career of sporadic and not always successful
womanising, and for some time the Janaceks were separat-
ed. Relations with his in-laws at one point became so bad
that his father-in-law attempted, or so Janacek claimed, to
throttle him. Eventually the couple were reunited, though
they led largely separate lives for much of the rest of their
long marriage. Zdenka was always attracted by the
Germanocentric aspects of Austria-Hungary; Janacek
hated them so much that he refused even to ride on the
trams in Brno, for, being in German ownership, they
carried their destinations in German. So, in summer, she
would go to Vienna, and he would head towards
his Slavic birthplace and, on occasions, deep into Russia.
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
 MUSIC & ART
The thirty years between the mid 1880s and the out-
break of the Great War were ones of enormous frustration
and unhappiness for Janacek. Zdenka gave him a son
who died in childhood. He came to dote on their
daughter, but she died on the brink of womanhood. He
started to write music in considerable quantities, but
could only command local and amateur performances.
When he first tried to have Jenufa performed in the Brno
National Theatre in 1904 it was curtly dismissed. His
health suffered, and he became a martyr to his sinuses in
particular, having a nervous collapse in his late fifties. He
attained a greater degree of happiness shortly after the
turn of the century, when he finally left the Teachers’
Institute and became director of Brno Organ School. His
determination to work as a musical ethnographer,
promoting Moravian folksong and using it as the basis of
his own work, continued however to find him enemies.
The most poisonous was Zdenek Nejedly, whose version
of Czech nationalism, derived from Smetana, made the
Moravian Janacek a sworn opponent. As Tyrrell points
out, Nejedly’s critiques of Janacek’s operas are all similar,
suggesting he was not remotely concerned with the
subject matter but merely with the ideology behind
them. Nejedly was a much younger man who lived until
the 1960s, and who found a comfortable berth in the
post-war Communist Czechoslovak government as an
obedient tool of his Soviet masters.
Tyrrell’s monumental first volume ends with Janacek still
battling against obscurity, but with the long fight barely
two years from its end. It is a cliché, but it is hard to
believe that, once the second volume is published, there
will ever need to be another book on Janacek. Tyrrell’s
scholarship is profound and exemplary. The style is some-
times peculiar – subjects as diverse as Janacek’s illnesses, the
comparable earnings of professional people in Brno, his
attendance at or study of opera by other composers, and
the architectural development of Brno are set out here and
there in tabular form – but we soon realise we are being
given not merely the history of Janacek, but the history of
a culture and an aesthetic. The book also has an unusual
structure: the simply biographical chapters are interspersed
with musical analyses, but also with disquisitions on
Janacek’s health, finances, critics, rivals, and almost every
other remotely relevant detail of Moravian life in the belle
époque. The author, with rather too much modesty,
suggests that some of these might well be missed out, and
the biographical chapters alone consulted. Yet such are the
encyclopedic knowledge and sheer enthusiasm that Tyrrell
brings to his subject that it is hard to resist ploughing
straight on. This book is a magnificent achievement, indis-
pensable not merely to anyone interested in Janacek but to
anyone who wishes to have a broad view of Eastern
European culture before the break-up of the Habsburg
Empire. Volume 2 cannot come soon enough.
To order this book at £48, see LR Bookshop on page 27
46
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
J OHN M C E WEN
AN OLD MAN’S METIER
F RANCIS B ACON IN THE 1950 S
★
By Michael Peppiatt
(Yale University Press 200pp £25)
THIS IS A glorified catalogue for a touring exhibition
arranged by the author and initiated by the Sainsbury
Centre in Norwich (where it can be seen until 10
December), based on the thirteen Bacon paintings col-
lected by Robert and Lisa Sainsbury which are now part
of the Centre’s permanent collection. It is a handsome
book, which concentrates, although not exclusively, on
what Peppiatt argues is ‘the most fertile single decade of
Bacon’s career’.
Bacon, who continued to paint until his death at
eighty-two in 1992, did not agree with this fashionable
view (as Peppiatt acknowledges): ‘Painting is an old man’s
métier,’ was one of his favourite refrains; and David
Sylvester’s memorial exhibition of the diptychs and trip-
tychs bore him out.
A book in format, this new publication remains a
catalogue in content, with introductory essay, two docu-
mentary gobbets of previously unpublished letters,
chronology, etc, and a lavish array of colour plates – a
pleasing specialist addition to the fifty-two Bacon mono-
graphs already published, four of them by the author.
Old Mr Ryder in Brideshead Revisited warns young
Charles against ‘critics with their horrible jargon’. Bacon
deplored it no less. What he required of art was excite-
ment. Peppiatt steers clear of jargon but his attempts to
raise a lather are only marginally preferable. In particular
one could do without his prologue (an essay lifted from a
previous catalogue, so he obviously rates it) on ‘Bacon’s
Eyes’: ‘his normally genial gaze took on a cold, piercing
intensity, like a bird suddenly spotting its prey’, etc.
What we want is the chronicler, and here he has the
disadvantage of not being an eye-witness, having first
met Bacon in 1963. Even as a chronicler Peppiatt can be
leaden. There are, for example, two forensic descriptions
of Bacon’s garbage heap of a studio, one by young
Peppiatt and the other by old Cecil Beaton – both
redundant now that the thing itself is enshrined in
Dublin. And when he refers to the artist’s ‘exuberant
Edwardian toasts’ (plural), we only get ‘Champagne for
my real friends, real pain for my sham friends,’ yet again.
Things liven up when Peppiatt enlists the aid of wit-
nesses with sharper pens and earlier memories: Michael
Wishart, Colin MacIness, Ginsberg, Burroughs. ‘Bacon
and I are at opposite ends of the spectrum,’ Burroughs
corrected Ginsberg. ‘He likes middle-aged truck drivers
 MUSIC & ART
and I like young boys. He sneers at immortality and I
think it is the only thing of importance. Of course,
we’re associated because of our morbid subject-matter.’
Peppiatt gives us a potted version of the oft-told life:
the asthmatic childhood; the horse-whipping father; the
uncle who was charged to take the apparently useless
and girlish schoolboy to make a man of him in seedy
Berlin – which he did but not in the way intended,
sodomising his nephew and then leaving him to fend for
himself. Out of this came Bacon’s artistic mantra: ‘You
have to go too far to go far enough – only then can you
hope to break the mould and make something new.’
It was not just novelty that Bacon sought but truth,
the instinctual animal revealed when no holds are barred
and all disguises stripped away: at the point of a gun, the
mercy of a lover or the throw of a dice. As he said to
Sylvester: ‘We nearly always live through screens – a
screened existence. And I sometimes think, when peo-
ple say my work looks violent, that perhaps I have from
time to time been able to clear away one or two of the
veils or screens.’ Hence the caged and screaming Pope,
the image which symbolised his work in the 1950s; and
the animals, some derived from photographs taken in
the bush on a visit to South Africa to see his mother.
Bacon was not given to ‘indiscretions about his sexual
modus operandi’, but Peppiatt has no doubt that the alco-
holic ex-fighterpilot Peter Lacy, the artist’s supreme 1950s
obsession, was the love of Bacon’s life. Bacon told Peppiatt
that the four on-and-off years spent with Lacy in a country
cottage were ones of ‘continuous horror’. Lacy had Bacon
senior’s taste for whips, and also liked to subject a lover to a
bovine existence, chained to the wall and sleeping on straw.
It is hard not to turn any discussion of Bacon’s art into
a sleazy biographical investigation, and Peppiatt is right
to insist that his ‘way of making art always remained as
A LEXANDER WAUGH
Like a Fly on
A Summer’s Day
D IARIES 1907–1914: P RODIGIOUS YOUTH
★ If ever there is going to be a time when even a halfway
By Sergey Prokofiev
Translated and annotated by Anthony Phillips
(Faber & Faber 835pp £25)
NEITHER PROKOFIEV THE man, nor his music, has ever
been easy to assess. Both are enigmatic in the extreme
and a description of either is most summarily (if not
very satisfactorily) discharged with the single adjective
‘infuriating’. The problem, at least in relation to the
47
essential as its content’; or,
as Bacon once wrote, that
ultimately ‘idea and tech-
nique’ should be ‘insepa-
rable’. Perhaps that
explains the insistence that
art was an old man’s métier
– form getting the better
of content with age, as
technique became more
instinctive and passions
channelled. He had an air
of total ease with himself
(albeit he regarded homo- A nice side of Bacon
sexuality as an ‘affliction’),
doubtless not least because art was the priority.
Peppiatt writes also of Bacon’s gentler side: his undying
affection for his Nanny, Jessie Lightfoot, whom he kept
with him through thick and mostly thin, until her death in
1951. There is even the proposal that she may have been the
artist’s natural mother. Bacon was devastated to have been
absent gambling in Monte Carlo at the time of Nanny
Lightfoot’s death, a reminder that his taste for polished metal
rails in his pictures derived from those surrounding roulette
tables. Such insights and stories – the unforgettable vignette
of a man at the Colony Club decorously vomiting into his
hat before donning it to leave – are the pick of Peppiatt’s
text, illuminating it like silver coins in a Christmas pudding.
The letters to the Sainsburys and the dealer Erica
Brausen are dully dutiful; but Peppiatt’s essay footnotes,
which include reprints of such recommended texts as
Wyndham Lewis’s groundbreaking review and Bacon’s
self-revealing essay on Matthew Smith, more than com-
pensate as documentation.
To order this book at £23.99, see LR Bookshop on page 27
music, is that it wears many masks and bestrides many
styles. Who would ever guess that the tone poem
Dreams, the Scythian Suite, Peter and the Wolf, the Second
Symphony and the Fourth Piano Concerto were all
composed by the same man? As one of his recent biog-
raphers, Thomas Schipperges, commented: ‘A complete
picture of Prokofiev from a single perspective is not to
be attained. His personality is evidently too complex
and the tensions that typify his work too fundamental.’
picture might be possible, that time is coming up with the
present publication of the first of a projected three volumes
of his diary in English translation. One small section, the
Soviet Diary, 1927, which somehow got detached from the
main manuscript, was first published in English with other
writings back in 1991, but the rest, that is to say the com-
plete script covering the years 1907–1933 (excluding 1927
and, for some reason, 1931), has been obscured from the
light of day by curious events. Not wanting his diaries to
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
 MUSIC & ART
fall into Soviet hands, Prokofiev delib-
erately left them in an American bank
safe. After his death, however, and
somehow without his heirs’ knowledge
or permission, they were transferred to
the Board of Foreign Jurisprudence of
the USSR and from there to the
Central State Archive of Literary Art in
Moscow, where they were held under
the terms of an expedited Act which
refused access to everyone except his
sons Sviatoslav and Oleg Prokofiev and
their stepmother, Mira Prokofieva, for a
period of fifty years. This all happened
in 1955, which is why none of the
composer’s many biographers have yet
managed to draw on this staggering
1,500 pages of detailed information
relating to the composer’s movements,
thoughts, relationships and career and
mapping in full his bumptious rise from
son of an agricultural engineer and pre- Prokofiev: hyperactive
cocious student at the St Petersburg
Conservatory to family man in Paris and composer of
international renown.
The first reaction on seeing such a large tome (800
pages covering seven student years) is one of astonish-
ment that the young man could possibly have had such
phenomenal energy. That he composed during this
short period so many formidable works (including two
piano concertos, two piano sonatas, an opera, and three
pieces for orchestra), that he courted girls, made and
broke friendships, studied and performed both as con-
ductor and concert pianist, proved himself no mean
champion at the chess board, and, on top of all this, still
managed to find the time to dedicate himself to such a
colossal diary, is truly remarkable.
To prevent his energy from flagging and on his mother’s
advice, Prokofiev enrolled, in the summer of 1910, at
the Sokol Gymnastic Club. His entry about it is revealing
of his driven personality:
This was timely advice, because I detest feeling miser-
able or in low spirits, which sometimes happens to
me, perhaps because I have been growing very quickly
in the last few years, or for some other reason. In any
case I cannot bear not feeling on top form; the more
vigorous I am, the happier I feel generally. My ideal of
physical energy is a fly on a summer’s day. Ridiculous
it may be but I often think of this when I watch them
in summer: there is the pure undiluted life-force, free
from the merest hint of listless inertia.
And how far is this from the spirit that jotted in English
these mystifying lines into his Paris notebook a quarter
of a century later?
I am the expression of Life, ie of divine activity … I
48
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
am spiritual, consequently vigor-
ous … Infinite Life is the source
of my vitality … I am eager to
work, because action is the
expression of life.
In the sense that nobody can ever
be said to understand anyone else
perfectly, these diaries will, as I say,
bring us as close to an understanding
of Prokofiev as we shall doubtless
ever get. Anthony Phillips’s clean
translation makes them a joy to read
as he and the composer cut a jaunty
path through a gallery of minutely
observed and absorbing portraits
including, best of all, those of his
one-time best friend Boris Zakharov,
his teacher Anna Yesipova, and
his two g reat mentors Nikolay
Tcherepnin and Nikolay Myaskovsky.
Also of great interest are the cameo
appearances of the famous composers
Scriabin, Lyadov and Glazounov as
well as a revisionist portrait of the composer’s mother:
This morning, while I was at work on the Piano
Concerto, Mama said, ‘How horrible that sounds,
just as if you had no ear at all.’ My answer was to
shut the door. She has no understanding of my
music whatsoever.
In the end it is the portrait of Prokofiev himself that is
the most arresting and stimulating aspect of this book,
for he emerges, even through all this mass of new detail,
and though more likeable than he ever was, no less enig-
matic. He is still a morass of puzzles and contradictions:
detached and warm, lightweight and deep, conceited
and insecure, relaxed and tense. You can never second-
guess him but nor could he second-guess himself, as he
was constantly surprised by his own reactions: his hatred
of, and then fascination with, the Schoenberg piece that
he premiered in St Petersburg, for example, or his
sudden switch from dry to romantic after sitting through
a concert of Tchaikovsky at Pavlosk in August 1913:
Revelled in Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony and went
into ecstasies over its closing pages, their sonority
and the expressivity of their mood. I issued a procla-
mation: ‘Down with dryness in music!’
Whatever we make of Prokofiev’s bizarre, intangible
character after all this, whether it helps or hinders us in
our understanding of his music this superb volume will
undoubtedly establish itself as a unique resource and an
indispensable companion to the history of that most
fertile and fascinating period in Russian music. We have
reached only as far as the outbreak of war in 1914 and I
look forward, impatiently, to the sequel.
To order this book at £20, see LR Bookshop on page 27
 GENERAL
R ICHARD G REENE
A VERY ODD CATHOLIC
A S TUDY IN G REENE
★ dramatists. At the end, he tells us that he expects to be
By Bernard Bergonzi
(Oxford University Press 208pp £16.99)
ARTICLES OF FAITH: THE COLLECTED TABLET
JOURNALISM OF GRAHAM GREENE, 1936–1987
★ Graham Greene was a very odd Catholic: according to
Edited by Ian Thomson
(Signal Books 208pp £12.99)
BERNARD BERGONZI IS bored by gossip about Graham
Greene and by the antics of Greene’s biographers; he
wants people to talk about the novels again. In A Study in
Greene, Bergonzi adjusts his own estimate of the novelist
downward – not great but still very good. Fairly quickly,
we see that he is not much interested here in Greene’s
accomplishments as scriptwriter, essayist, dramatist, auto-
biographer, short-story writer, or journalist. He admires
Brighton Rock more than any other work, thinks highly of
The Power and the Glory and The End of the Affair, but sees
The Heart of the Matter as overrated. He generally views
the subsequent novels, apart from Our Man in Havana, as
vehicles for ‘the Greene man’, a depressed character of
about the novelist’s age giving bleak performances in
politically charged settings. Bergonzi likes few of Greene’s
female characters other than Sarah Miles and is irritated
by Greene’s habit of ending his plots in a heap of corpses.
Bergonzi claims that The Lawless Roads, a resentful
account of martyrdom and the discomforts of mule-riding
south of the Rio Grande, is among Greene’s best books,
while The Comedians is not. Indeed, I prefer the judge-
ment of the younger Bergonzi who described the Haitian
story as ‘undoubtedly one of his finest novels’. And surely
few readers will share his opinion that Aunt Augusta is
‘unutterably tedious’. His complaint against ‘the Greene
man’ holds little water, as the four later novels in which
such a character appears – The Quiet American, A Burnt-out
Case, The Comedians, and The Honorary Consul – amount
to roughly nine hundred pages, about the length of
Waugh’s Sword of Honour, Updike’s Rabbit novels, or just
one of the fat books that Norman Mailer tosses off at close
intervals. Surely Greene has allowed himself too little
room to become seriously repetitive. In any event, in those
novels Greene has produced a secular quartet that stands in
contrast to the four major Catholic works. The closing
brilliance of The Human Factor, Monsignor Quixote and,
above all, The Captain and the Enemy makes little impres-
sion on Bergonzi, who likes best the Graham Greene who
worried about Hell.
49
While I disagree with many of Bergonzi’s aesthetic
judgments, I have to say that this is, at moments, an
impressive and provocative book. Bergonzi assaults with
vigour and erudition the claim that Greene’s narrative
method is cinematic, and demonstrates the influence on
Greene’s novels of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
accused of attacking Greene. Hardly – Bergonzi comes
across rather as an expert too long devoted to his
subject; after sixty years of reading and re-reading this
novelist, he can no longer articulate wonder, so
thoughtful regard will have to do.
his daughter, he died intensely curious about what
might happen next. Articles of Faith, Ian Thomson’s
collection of Greene’s writing for The Tablet, offers the
best map we have of the borderland between belief and
unbelief that he inhabited. In Greene’s lexicon doubt is
not the same as unbelief – his mind gnawed at any kind
of certainty, including atheism. He claims, for example,
that his encounter with the stigmatic Padre Pio in 1949
‘introduced a doubt in my disbelief’.
Greene’s relationship with The Tablet and its publisher
Tom Burns spanned five decades. In the 1930s he
reviewed fiction in its pages, and portions of The Lawless
Roads appeared there as a work in progress. Later, he con-
tributed major articles on the doctrine of the Assumption
and another on the lot of Catholics in Vietnam. In the
1970s the magazine published early chapters from
Monsignor Quixote. Articles of Faith repr ints John
Cornwell’s famous 1989 interview with Greene, ‘Why I
Am Still a Catholic’ – a demonstration of all the dangers
of interviewing an ironist. Greene debunks Eucharistic
doctrine and natural law, compares Gorbachev to John
XXIII and the Curia to the Politburo, and talks about the
taste of Trappists for gossip. He also hints that he only
receives the sacraments to make his fr iend Father
Leopoldo Durán happy. Guarding his estranged wife’s
privacy, he hints that he was never really interested in a
divorce – Greene had actually obtained advice on canon
law relating to annulments in the early 1950s, and there is
very strong evidence that Vivien had rejected a request
for a divorce as late as 1956. However, Cornwell’s inter-
view will have permanent value if only for the description
of Greene pulling from his wallet photographs of Padre
Pio he had been carrying about for forty years.
Articles of Faith includes an important discussion of
Greene’s religious views by the American Jesuit Alberto
Huerta, who was a close friend of the novelist at the end of
his life and who advised him on his reading of Liberation
Theology. He reminds us that Greene made a firm distinc-
tion between believing (intellectual affirmation of various
propositions) and having faith, which is an emotional, per-
haps mystical, condition. Greene felt that he could main-
tain faith even when he could make no sense of doctrine.
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
 GENERAL
Thomson’s introduction and notes are learned and often
amusing. He includes as an appendix ‘Our Man in Tallinn’
– his own account of Greene’s visit to the spy-infested
capital of Estonia in 1934, an episode that later influenced
the writing of Our Man in Havana. In Tallinn, Greene
became friends with Peter Leslie, a British vice-consul and
A LLAN M ASSIE
MAGICAL MAIDENS
K ING A RTHUR ’ S E NCHANTRESSES
★ It’s fair to say that very few of the mediaeval versions of
By Carolyne Larrington
(I B Tauris 264pp £17.99)
THE ARTHURIAN LEGENDS – the Matter of Britain – are
part of our common culture, new versions appearing
even today, some serious and ambitious, some comic,
some jejune. Most scholars accept that there is a basis of
historical truth, and the consensus of opinion is that the
historical Arthur was a Romanised Briton, leader of a
warrior band that resisted the invading Saxons. He may
have been a king, but probably wasn’t. Support for the
theory that he was the commander of an itinerant cavalry
force is provided by the geographical spread of locations
that claim to have some association with him. The idea
of Arthur as the ‘once and future’ king probably derives
from his status as a hero of the British Resistance.
Yet what we think of as the Arthurian story – the tale of
Camelot and the Round Table, the quest for the Holy
Grail, with the king as the pattern of chivalry and so on,
has next to nothing to do with whatever may have been
the historical Arthur. The role of Merlin and the parts
played by those whom Carolyne Larrington calls the king’s
‘enchantresses’ – Morgan le Fay, her sister Morgause,
Queen of Orkney, and the Lady of the Lake,
Vivien/Nimue, who imprisons Merlin – these are all liter-
ary creations, the invention of poets and romancers, and of
course pseudo-historians like Geoffrey of Monmouth.
Arthur may have lived in what we used to know as the
Dark Ages, but it was in the early Middle Ages that he was
resurrected and made into the Arthur we recognise. For the
common reader, the essence of Arthur is to be found in
Malory, but Malory, a writer of genius certainly, was also a
magpie picking and choosing from among the abundant
Arthurian material to produce his version. We may think
of Malory as the fount; but in reality he was a latecomer.
Larrington focuses on one, often neglected, area of the
Arthur ian corpus: these women whom she calls
‘enchantresses’. It’s a fair enough description, for in most
versions of the stories they do engage in magic, often unsuc-
cessfully as Larrington shows. She has ranged over the vast
literature, following the story up to its recent versions, and,
50
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
a Henry James enthusiast: he had given up the Anglican
ministry to become a Catholic, an arms trader and a spy –
as presumably these things were nearer heaven. It is hard
not to think that in Peter Leslie, Greene had found just
what he wanted in a fellow Catholic.
To order these books, see LR Bookshop on page 27
though this is a work of admirable scholarship, it is also light-
ly and often entertainingly written. We may be grateful to
Larrington for the synthesis she offers of the material, if only
because few of us are ever likely to read most of the texts she
quotes. This is not surprising, and, to be frank, no great loss.
Many are silly, some turgid, others boring to all but scholars.
the story before Malory can be read for pleasure now.
Larrington sees her enchantresses as more than ‘purely
functional figures, straightforwardly embodying the
good or evil woman in a fundamentally uninteresting
way’ – the role to which they have been consigned by
‘some critics’. Instead,
the tradition of the enchantress is as dynamic as ever: in
mediaeval and modern incarnations Arthur’s
enchantresses embody complex and individualised sig-
nificances within the texts in which they act, and in
the larger Arthurian universe. Their access to a source
of power largely independent of men, the uses to
which they put that power, and the price they pay for
it grant us a perspective from which we can think criti-
cally and productively about chivalry, about gender,
and, above all, about the uses to which we put the past.
In a sense the enchantresses are the opposition in an
Arthurian world that Larrington calls ‘homosocial’. That’s
to say, it was a masculine world in which bonds between
men, between king and knights, between knight and
knight, and between brothers were usually more important
than those between men and women, husband and wife.
The code of chivalry might have demanded that women
were honoured and treated with respect, but when they
were ‘good’ their role was essentially decorative. In opposi-
tion to this, the enchantresses advance the claims of love,
and love is always something which may distract the
warrior-man from his duty. Therefore the demanding
woman comes to be seen as evil, a seductive temptress.
Naturally she will employ the wiles of magic to achieve
her end. How else to explain any success that she may
have? If she steps out of her role as a prize, as a loyal wife
and caring mother, and interferes in what is properly the
male domain, she is seen as both dangerous and wicked.
By concentrating on the women and by offering a
feminist examination of the Arthurian legends, Carolyne
Larrington presents them in a new and challenging
light. Her book offers evidence of the enduring vitality
of the Matter of Britain, its ability to be open always to
new readings, new departures.
To order this book at £14.39, see LR Bookshop on page 27
 GENERAL
R AYMOND E DWARDS
DESPERANTO
THE HISTORY OF BRITAIN REVEALED: THE
SHOCKING TRUTH ABOUT THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
★ after them, may have imposed a transitory linguistic
By M J Harper
(Icon Books 224pp £9.99)
IT IS A curious fact that, after the end of direct Roman
rule in Britain, and its replacement by Anglo-Saxon
kingdoms, the language of what became England was
not (except in Wales, Cornwall, and other marginal
areas) a version of the historical vernacular of pre-
Roman times. Nor (as in France, Italy, Spain, and the
majority of the Romanised West) was it a debased but
recognisable form of Latin, the Imperial lingua franca.
Instead, the language of the Germanic successors –
English – became that of the majority of the people.
M J Harper has seized on this fact. As he rightly
points out, it is anomalous compared to the experience
of Continental Europe, where rule by Franks, Vandals or
Goths did not so change the majority language. He is
right, too, in observing that the older models of popula-
tion replacement or extermination are implausible, not
least economically (who would till the fields?). There is
much that is both obscure and intriguing in the transi-
tion from Roman Britannia to Anglo-Saxon England,
not least linguistically, and historians have yet to provide
a wholly satisfying narrative. Nevertheless, we have con-
siderable and ancient records written in Old English,
straightforwardly identifiable as the language of the
Germanic incomers and, according to well-established
principles of comparative philology, the direct ancestor
of modern English. Exactly how Old English came to
replace whatever amalgam of Celtic and soldier’s Latin
was spoken across Britain in Roman times is unclear;
but that it did so seems indisputable.
Harper does not agree. For him, the solution is simple:
Old English literature (which he supposes is just Beowulf
‘and a few other poem fragments’) is a sixteenth-century
forgery, confected by ‘newly unemployed monks’ with
long practice in manufacturing historical documents. I
assume he means all of it: not just Beowulf and the contents
of the six weighty volumes of the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records,
but the Chronicle, King Alfred’s great translations, and the
mass of charters, deeds, riddles, saints’ lives, homilies and so
on, which all, in various rhetorical registers, exhibit both
internal linguistic consistency and an uncanny coherence
with the suppositions of comparative philology and
Anglo-Saxon archaeology. Clearly, these Tudor monks
were clever fellows.
The real story, Harper reveals, is much simpler: every-
51
one in England was speaking (modern) English all the
time, way back to the mysterious figures who built
Stonehenge. All these Celts aren’t on our Western
seaboards because they have, over centuries, been driven
there, but because that is where they landed when they
arrived from (he never quite says) some vanished oceanic
homeland. They, like the Anglo-Saxons and Normans
veneer, but all the time the mass of the people were
speaking honest-to-goodness English just as we do today.
Nor is this the end of it: not only is Old English a cod,
but so is Middle English (which Harper thinks exists only
in ‘wisps’, which may surprise those familiar with the
three hundred-odd volumes published by the Early
English Text Society), and indeed the whole architecture
of Indo-European philology. Latin is not an ancestor of
French or Italian; no, its ‘simplified grammar’ (yes, I
wondered at that too) shows it is in fact an artificial and
learned construct based on English. And so, wearily, on.
How does Harper know all this? By applying what he
grandly calls the principles of ‘Applied Epistemology’, the
most cogent of which seems to be ‘what is, is what was,
unless there is good evidence to the contrary’. ‘Applied
Epistemology’ is apparently shorthand for the doctrines of
one or more cranks with a (rather disappointing) website
of the same name. Harper drops dark hints at a theory of
Atlantean origins – hoary pseudo-gnostic twaddle from
Guido von List, the Thule Society, and Madame
Blavatsky: the raw material, in fact, of Heinrich Himmler’s
bizarre private mythology of ancient Aryan civilisations.
Fortunately, further details of all this are safely locked away
in the ‘subscribers only’ section of his website, so there is
little chance of coming across it even by accident.
Central to Harper’s thesis is his claim that there is no
continuity between Old English and modern English. He
adduces the famously simplified spellings in the twelfth-
century continuations to the Peterborough Chronicle.
Previously written in ‘standard’ Old English spellings, the
post-Conquest annals adopt instead forms much closer to
modern written English (such as ‘king’ for Old English
‘cyning’). Harper sees this as definitive evidence of two
distinct and parallel languages: ‘Anglo-Saxon’, spoken by a
caste of warrior overlords, and English, the language of the
people. It does less violence to the facts to see this instead
as evidence of the collapse of a centrally regulated system
of (by then archaic) spelling conventions, allowing scribal
usage to leap closer to actual current pronunciation. A
moment’s glance at modern English spelling gives an exact
analogy. Suppose Britain was invaded by a non-English-
speaking group, whose language (like French in the
eleventh century) was adopted for official texts and procla-
mations. How long before the elaborate and archaic con-
ventions of English spelling were replaced by something –
perhaps not unlike the horrible jargon of text messaging –
more crudely phonetic? As for the post-Roman shift in
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
 GENERAL
language, a good analogy might be the Rhineland: this
was thoroughly Roman in built physical culture (as anyone
visiting Trier, Cologne or Koblenz can testify), and yet
now only German is spoken there. Obviously here, as in
Britannia, the linguistic overlay was displaceable.
But it would be futile to tackle Harper’s arguments
point by point. He belongs to the Graham
Hancock–Baigent and Leigh school of historiography,
where a possibility becomes an assertion and then an
unchallengeable fact within a couple of pages and with-
out any additional evidence or argument. Unlike his
predecessors, however, he is by turns arrogant, glib and
B EN M ORGAN
ADESTE, FIDELES!
A MO, A MAS, A MAT … AND A LL T HAT:
H OW TO BECOME A L ATIN L OVER
★ The characteristic public-school patina (or patter) is
By Harry Mount
(Short Books 269pp £12.99)
IT IS A strange fact about the English that, having shaped
over centuries the world’s richest language, we are appar-
ently so keen to misuse and misunderstand it. Nobody in
the Tesco marketing department seems to have flinched at
their recent ‘less bags’ TV campaign, presumably because
none had an English degree (or, worse, because they all
had). Indifferent to our language most of the time, we
sometimes exert a perverse effort in transcribing our more
obvious slips of the tongue.
This is why the appearance
of Harry Mount’s book should
be greeted with delighted fan-
fare. It claims to be about
Latin, but really it is about
English, and Englishness. It
shows us why English is the
way it is, and why people who
think talking and writing it
correctly makes you a snob are
speaking from prejudice (pre-
judice, judgement before the
fact) and ignorance (ignarus,
unknown). On the positive side, it is a record of the love-
ly combination of intuition, association and clean logic
which makes the language work. This makes it a book
with a message, at times an explicitly political one. As
Mount points out, ‘One of the most useful things about
learning Latin is that it introduces you to … grammar and
syntax – something that is almost completely absent these
days from the teaching of English.’
One of the book’s pleasures is its honesty, and curiosity,
52
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
dismissive; and much less entertaining. It is fun to read
lavishly illustrated musings about the proto-cosmological
functions of the Great Pyramid, Stonehenge, Machu
Picchu or wherever; it is not fun to put up with pages of
Harper’s aggrieved rantings about the iniquities of uni-
versity English departments in the fading hope he’ll
finally reveal the Secret of the Atlantean Ancients, lost
since the burning of the Great Library in Alexandria (he
doesn’t). The actual history of English is far more divert-
ing than this sorry effort at ‘controversy’, too feeble to
be serious, too angry even to be funny.
To order this book at £7.99, see LR Bookshop on page 27
about roots: the roots of English words, and Mount’s
own evident roots in the public-school system. As far as
the first goes, the book is clear, readable, engaging and
enriching. It is a relief to hear the subjunctive boiled
down to ‘shoulda, woulda, coulda’, or to recognise an
ablative absolute in a sentence about kissing Cameron
Diaz. But the second is its more interesting subtext.
everywhere in the book: ‘Phew. That was quite heavy
going, so I think it’s time for a brief digression on Roman
emperors’; ‘Under Cicero in the first century BC, Latin hit
top form.’ There’s even a section on The Life of Brian. Some
readers will be annoyed, but those who listen without prej-
udice will enjoy themselves. Mount’s narrator, chatty and
irreverent, is a kind of grown-up Molesworth. And, like
Molesworth, he acts as a vehicle for the affectionate redis-
covery of a cast of characters that has become unfashion-
able. He writes of ‘the romance that passes through the dry
veins of … devoted Classics masters’, for whom the learn-
ing of Classics means ‘inhaling
the bloody, erotic, tragic, funny,
distinctly unclinical taste of the
ancient world’, without discard-
ing rigour or scholarship. In one
delightful passage, he makes us
appreciate the playfulness and
dignity of the kind of old
women, generally Edwardian
throwbacks, who know all about
botany: ‘Gently pointing out the
plant, they start to make a very
particular tr ibal cry, distin-
guished by … a lot of Latin.’
Mount’s tone is light, but his intent throughout is
serious, even polemical. Under the banner of old-style
English eccentricity, he asks us not to forget that intellec-
tual curiosity is a worthwhile, even vital, passion. David
Beckham’s Latin tattoos, which he deliciously mocks,
come to embody the skin-deep appreciation of language
which Mount’s peeling back of its layers is designed to
put paid to, once and for all. Good luck to him.
To order this book at £10.39, see LR Bookshop on page 27
 GENERAL
D ENNIS S EWELL
ZOMBIE NATION
B IG B ABIES : O R , W HY C AN ’ T W E J UST
G ROW U P ?
★ previous generation of grown-ups have stood for being
By Michael Bywater
(Granta Books 262pp £14.99)
THANK HEAVENS PEOPLE have finally stopped calling
Michael Bywater ‘the great undiscovered comic genius
of our times’. With a shelf-ful of books to his name, a
column in the Independent on Sunday, a cult following on
the Internet and his contact numbers in every broadcaster’s
electronic organiser, Bywater’s comic genius isn’t just
discovered; it’s laid bare.
But not content with being the funniest man in
England, some years ago Bywater set
about becoming one of the cleverest
too. Now, as writer-in-residence at a
Cambridge college, teaching the
Tragedy paper to undergraduates
and hired by some of our great insti-
tutions as a ‘cultural analyst’, he’s a
walking rebuttal to French snobs
who claim there’s no such thing as
an intellectual in Albion. And I
haven’t mentioned the organ recitals,
the pilot’s licence or the rare gift of
understanding quite what goes on
inside an Apple Mac. Suck on that,
Bernard Henri Levy.
Yet now this new book is pub-
lished we are going to have to find
a fresh category for Mr Bywater:
philosopher. Not the modern sort
of philosopher, and certainly not Arrested development
the French sort, but one of the kind
that flourished before they invented academic tenure,
black roll-necks or shirts that only button up to the
navel: someone who tells you what’s wrong with the way
you are living your life and how to live it better. With
the arrival of Big Babies, it is as if Diogenes of Sinope has
been reborn among us.
Bywater’s analysis of the contemporary condition
leads him to conclude that it is infantilising. All kinds of
forces – social, economic, media and political – collab-
orate to make babies of us all. And we collaborate too.
Perhaps we should have noticed. Bywater points to
clues all around. ‘There’s a notice at Paddington station
which says “Please be ready to move away with your
luggage when you reach the top of the escalator”.’
Once someone points this sort of thing out, you begin
53
to see it everywhere. I unpacked my new toaster a few
days after reading this book and a small slip fell out bear-
ing the rubric: ‘remember: never leave your toaster
unattended when in use’. My local Indian take-away
now warns anyone contemplating a dish of ‘Pasanda
Lamb cooked in a creamy Almond Sauce’ that it may be
‘unsuitable for people with nut allergies’. Would any
patronised in this way?
Among the underlying assumptions that those in
power (in boardrooms as well as in Whitehall) make
about us are, Bywater claims:
We are unable to control our appetites; we cannot
postpone gratification; we have little sense of self,
and what we do have is deformed; we have no
articulable inner life; we are pre- or sub-literate;
we are solipsistic; we do not have the ability to
exercise responsible autonomy; we require constant
surveillance and constant admonition; we are
potentially, if not actually,
violent; we have no social sen-
sibilities beyond the tribal; we
have no discrimination.
Not so very long ago, Bywater
reminds us, people lived lives
rather than had lifestyles. Clothes
were for wearing, as opposed to
making statements about oneself.
And furniture just got on with
furnishing a room. Nowadays we
need all our decisions – even,
perhaps especially, our purchasing
decisions – validated by the media
or sanctioned by authority. As a
result we are constantly self-con-
scious. And this over-examined
life, Bywater concludes, is not
worth living.
What has got us into this pickle?
The Baby-Boomer creed of indi-
vidualism, relativism and voluntarism. How do we get
out of it? Well, that would be telling. This is, in its own
special way, a ‘how to’ book and vouchsafes its secrets
only to those who pay full whack. Just as Bywater’s
diagnosis of our current ills defies glib synopsis, so too
does his prescription require lengthy elaboration. Like
Diogenes, his targets are the follies and vanities of
human society; and again like Diogenes, he finds the
answer in the idea of autonomy. But it will not be
enough simply to read this book. The important thing is
to evangelise. Buy a dozen to give to friends. If you
don’t have a dozen friends, give it away to strangers in
the street. If enough people take up the proposals in this
book, our babies will thank us when they grow up.
To order this book at £11.99, see LR Bookshop on page 27
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
 GENERAL
J OHN B ATCHELOR
FAMILY FORTUNES
A V ERY B RITISH FAMILY: T HE T REVELYANS
AND T HEIR WORLD
★ ments. The suggestions of the Northcote–Trevelyan
By Laura Trevelyan
(I B Tauris 264pp £18.99)
A S A CHILD Laura Trevelyan knew little about her
famous forebears. In history lessons at school it was
assumed that she would have read G M Trevelyan’s
books, and she wondered why her great-grandfather’s
fame had hardly been mentioned at home. Her grandfa-
ther (Humphry, son of G M Trevelyan) wanted to
protect his children from the burden of the past. ‘He
wanted to be ordinary rather than Olympian,’ Laura
Trevelyan recalls. ‘His oldest son Tom remembers
Humphry asking if he would like to be apprenticed to a
garage, instead of going to university to learn Latin or
Greek’ (in fact he became a doctor). ‘My father,
George, was encouraged to go to sea in the merchant
navy, rather than study at Oxford, no doubt for the same
reasons’ (but he did go to Oxford, and became a distin-
guished civil servant). As a BBC journalist in Ireland
Laura learnt that the Trevelyan name was regarded with
horror because of its associations with the famine of the
1840s, and this set her on the path to learn more about
her family and to write this book. The product is an
engaging and well-paced account of the prominent male
members of a family of intellectuals and public servants
who were at the centre of British Establishment life for
much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The story begins with a decision taken by Sir Walter
Trevelyan, 6th Baronet of Wallington and Nettlecombe
(1797–1879). Sir Walter and his brilliant wife Pauline
(who transformed Wallington into the house that the
National Trust owns today) had no children. Walter
thought it wrong for one person to own huge wealth so
in his will he divided the Trevelyan estates. Nettlecombe,
in Somerset, was entailed and went to his nephew Sir
Alfred, 7th Baronet of Nettlecombe (who was a Roman
Catholic, brought up in Ireland by his widowed mother,
and therefore something of an outsider in the Trevelyan
world). Walter left Wallington and his Northumberland
estates to a cousin, Sir Charles Edward Trevelyan, the
Treasury official widely regarded as responsible for the
deaths in the Irish famine of the 1840s. (This view of
him has been effectively challenged recently.) In the
1850s Sir Charles Edward transformed the Civil Service
with the brief and influential Northcote-Trevelyan
Report (which recommended that entry to the career
should be by competitive examination), and went on to a
54
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
controversial career as Governor of Madras and subse-
quently Finance Minister for India.
Charles Edward’s son, George Otto, was an historian
like his uncle Macaulay and a politician and public
servant like his father. He followed his father in a career
in India and subsequently, as a Liberal MP, served as a
Cabinet Minister in two separate Gladstone govern-
Report did not apply to George Otto – he got his first
Indian job because he was his father’s son, not because
he passed an examination (he went out as his father’s
pr ivate secretar y). One of his early books, The
Competition Wallah, is a satire of the less privileged
young Englishmen in India who were now obliged to
pass examinations. He was a sharp-tongued political
radical; his celebrated and punchy pamphlet What does
she do with it? attacked the tax protection enjoyed by the
Queen. Later George Otto almost wrecked his political
career by resigning over the role of the Church in the
new state schools provided by the 1870 Education Act:
‘Gladstone was not at all impressed by this show of
principle, and left George out in the cold for a decade.’
He was lucky to get back into government after 1880,
where he survived further sharp disagreements: Home
Rule for Ireland was a particularly sticky issue, and
George sat in the long Cabinet debates in a minority of
one, ‘like a melancholy owl’. He retired from politics in
1897 and for the last thirty years or so of his life he set-
tled at Wallington as a squire and family man. There he
developed a surprising reputation for meanness – he
amassed wealth by neglecting his estates so that
Wallington and its lands and farms became seriously run
down, and when George Otto died his son, Sir Charles
Philips Trevelyan, inherited a house parts of which
were in danger of collapse, and estates which urgently
needed expenditure.
Like his father, Sir Charles Philips was strong-willed,
obstinate, and prone to premature resignation from high
office. His brother G M Trevelyan advised him, ‘It is a
rule that no Trevelyan ever sucks up either to the press,
or the chiefs, or the “right people”.’ He resigned from
the Asquith Government in 1914 in opposition to the
war with Germany (‘We have gone to war from a senti-
mental attachment to the French,’ he wrote despairingly
to his wife). Subsequently he became a Labour MP, a
supporter of Communist Russia and a member of the
first Labour Government. He was a successful and effec-
tive Education Minister until he resigned following a
disag reement with Ramsay MacDonald over an
Education Bill in 1931, and settled into local affairs. The
inherited problems of Wallington continued to haunt
him, and he went for a radical solution: he gave
Wallington to the National Trust. But much as George
Otto had pulled rank to get into India, Sir Charles
Philips clung to privilege in opposition to his stated
 GENERAL
principles: he had gifted Wallington to the nation but
reserved the right to live in it for his own lifetime.
There was a streak of ruthlessness in these high-
minded men. Neither Sir Walter nor Sir Charles Philips
made it sufficiently clear to their respective heirs that
Wallington would be denied to them, with consequent
bitterness which lasted for years in both cases. And Sir
Charles Philips was an insensitive husband: Lady Molly,
who could have been a considerable political force in
her own right, devoted much of her married life to the
making of a tapestry because she was allowed nothing
else to do, and when he was of advanced years he
caused her further pain by taking a mistress and father-
ing an illegitimate son.
The late, great Humphrey Carpenter, biographer,
broadcaster and celebrated writer of children’s books,
inherited the Trevelyan nose from his mother, Urith
Trevelyan (a direct descendant of one of Sir Charles
Edward’s brothers), and he could have earned a place in
P EYTON S KIPWITH
THE RAG TRADE UNCOVERED
T HE M ODERNIST T EXTILE : E UROPE AND
A MERICA , 1890–1940
★ zeal of Morris, Owen Jones and Voysey but, curiously,
By Virginia Gardner Troy
(Lund Humphries 192pp £35)
S OVIET T EXTILES : D ESIGNING THE
M ODERN U TOPIA
★ the index to seek for such key figures as Paul Nash,
By Pamela Jill Kachurin
(Lund Humphries 96pp £14.99)
E VER SINCE MANKIND exchanged skins for crudely
woven cloth, textiles have played an important role in
charting the development of civilisation, providing not
only cover and protection, but also acting as overt sym-
bols of wealth and status. For specialists also (such as the
late Stella Newton) with an acute awareness of changing
styles and fashions, the study of textiles is almost as accu-
rate a way of pinpointing in time particular historical
events as carbon-dating or dendrochronology. For
centuries, rich and luxurious fabrics have been the stuff
of international trade; the Silk Route connected China
and India, whilst the or nately patter ned silks of
Damascus were as highly prized in the West as that city’s
finest steel. The portraits of Titian, Holbein and Ingres
proclaimed the greatness – or at least the self-importance
– of their sitters through the elaboration of dress, and
even the journeymen painters of the eighteenth century
rated the ability to capture the sheen of satin and silk
55
this book. The fresh memory of Carpenter prompts one
to remark that the literary and creative inheritance of the
Trevelyans remains strong in the Wordsworth scholar
Mary Moorman (G M Trevelyan’s daughter), the biogra-
pher and historian Raleigh Trevelyan and, clearly, Laura
Trevelyan herself. In a curious way the publication of this
present book is in tension with the view she takes of her
own family. In a section on the ‘Epigone’ (the dimin-
ished descendant of great ancestors) she is inclined to say
that in recent years the story of the Trevelyans has been
one of decline. There is a sense in which this is a myth
created by Humphry Trevelyan (her grandfather and a
Fellow of King’s, Cambridge), who felt overshadowed
much of his life by his famous historian father – the
Master of Trinity just down the road. The creativeness
and energy of the Trevelyans have mutated rather than
diminished, and the Trevelyan name continues to be
more than just a memory of a remarkable dynasty.
To order this book at £15.19, see LR Bookshop on page 27
more highly than the rendering of a likeness. Long after
the sitter’s death, their features forgotten, the fabrics
would continue to proclaim their status.
By the mid nineteenth century, artists were involved
not just in rendering the patterns and textures of fabrics
but in creating them. Professor Virginia Troy ranges over
the field, paying tribute to the example and proselytising
omitting mention of Pugin, whose involvement with
textiles, both ecclesiastical and domestic, was a primary
impetus to the Arts and Crafts movement. Given my
own interest in British design and designers, particularly
of the early twentieth century, I turned immediately to
Phyllis Barron, Dorothy Larcher and Enid Marx, none
of whom, to my disappointment, merits a mention.
However, I was quickly seduced by the scope of the
book and the author’s modest admission that the subject
of the modernist textile, from Art Nouveau through the
revivalist and nationalist 1930s, is so vast that her book
could only serve as an introduction. And a very good
introduction it is, viewing the different nations in parallel
as well as engaging with the complexities of production,
especially in the manner in which weaving developed at
the hand of the artist during the inter-war years. She is
at her best and most authoritative when dealing with
Germany of the Bauhaus era and America, which is not
surprising given the subject of her previous publication
(Anni Albers and Ancient American Textiles: From Bauhaus
to Black Mountain, Ashgate, 2002) and her special interest
in the work of Albers, who formed a crucial link
between the two.
Despite her wide interpretation, the term ‘Modernist’
is usually applied to a period roughly defined as span-
ning the years that separated the Bolshevik Revolution
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
 GENERAL
from the Second World War. The
Russian Constructivists were very
much in the vanguard, exploiting
a formal vocabulary of ‘angles,
silhouettes, text and collage-like
shapes’ in order to imbue their
images with contemporary visual
references. The euphoria of the
immediate post-Revolution peri-
od was dampened when Lenin
nationalised the manufactories;
that this was reflected in the
products is clearly demonstrated
in Soviet Textiles: Designing
the Moder n Utopia. Var vara
Stepanova’s stunning 1924 design
in green, white and orange, made Locomotives, 1920–30, by Sergei Burylin
up of interlocking quadrants with
their simultaneous suggestion of flower-forms and
propellers, is the starting point for this well-illustrated,
but modest book, designed to accompany an exhibition
of textiles from the Lloyd Cotsen Collection at the
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. As Pamela Kachurin
points out in her introductory essay: ‘Stepanova and
[Lyubov] Popova believed, rather idealistically, that
purely geometric designs were most appropriate for the
emerging egalitarian and classless society, since these
designs were without particular class associations.’
However, these pioneering designs, at once abstract and
architectural, were soon sidelined as elitist and incom-
prehensible, and once the All-Union Textile Syndicate
was created in 1922 the initiative passed to a group of
younger artists committed to the belief that thematic
designs on clothing, curtains and bed sheets could play
a major role in refashioning people into model Soviet
citizens. It is these later textiles, part folk-art and part
propaganda, with their emphasis on the geometric pos-
sibilities of cogs, aeroplanes, propellers, wheels, tractors,
and even children exercising, which show the core
designs for the Modern Utopia of Kachurin’s subtitle.
Contemporaneously in England, Paul Nash was
producing comparable designs, but without the propa-
ganda element.
Rather than Soviet textiles, which were basically
block-printed flat pattern, Virginia Troy is particularly
interested in the textural quality of artists’ textiles, often
hand-woven as unique examples. Although it is
nowhere stated, I imagine from the eloquence of her
text when describing different forms of weaving that
Professor Troy is herself a practitioner, and she quotes
with approval Albers’s 1937 essay, ‘Work with Materials’:
If we want to get from materials the sense of direct-
ness, the adventure of being close to the stuff the
world is made of, we have to go back to the material
itself, to its original state, and from there partake in
56
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
its states of change. We use
mater ials to satisfy our
practical needs and our
spiritual ones as well.
Albers, like her Californian
contemporar ies Dorothy
Liebes and Mar i Kipp,
explored the use of uncon-
ventional mater ials such
as cellophane, wood splits,
metallic yarns and other syn-
thetic and natural materials,
‘in a broad range of weave
str uctures and textures to
create new types of woven
textiles for modern needs’.
Ethel Mairet, the English
weaver and sometime wife of
the Sinhalese philosopher Ananda Coomaraswamy,
shared many of Albers’s ideals, as did Eileen Gray,
experimenting with a variety of weave constructions
that emphasised the textures and hues of the fibre. But
Mairet was also outspoken, abhorring the fact that
hand-weaving had ‘set itself on a pedestal as “art”’
rather than recognising its social responsibilities and the
needs of the machine.
In a book which runs the gamut from William Morris
through Art Nouveau, the Wiener Werkstatte, Russian
Constructivism, the Bauhaus and Amer ican
Regionalism, Troy gives a much needed overview, and is
prepared to confront the enduring dichotomy between
man-made and machine-made, luxury and utility – the
dichotomy that provoked Morris’s ill-tempered outburst
to his patron, Sir Lowthian Bell, that he was forced to
spend his time ‘catering for the swinish luxury of the
rich’. She suggests it is possible that the members of the
Bauhaus weaving workshop, through their writings and
experiments with dyes and weaves, and their collabora-
tions with industry, went as far as anybody ever has in
breaking down this division. By 1928 they were focus-
ing almost entirely on producing prototype samples
rather than fully finished pieces, because these samples
were conceived as upholstery, drapery and wall-coverings
for industrial production. Many bear no artist’s or
designer’s name, they are just products of the Bauhaus.
She credits the workshop with ‘changing the way
textiles were conceived of, perceived and practised after
1920’. If there is one flaw in this otherwise exemplary
book, it is the subtext of gender politics. It is a distor-
tion to assert that throughout history ‘textiles have been
inextricably associated with women’s work’. This may
be true of lace-making and embroidery, but is certainly
not true of the weaving trade. Has she never heard Burl
Ives sing ‘The Foggy, Foggy Dew’?
To order these books, see LR Bookshop on page 27
 GENERAL
W ILLIAM P ACKER
From May Day
To Mischief Night
T HE E NGLISH Y EAR
★ intended to represent Judas Iscariot. A dirty, slovenly
By Steve Roud
(Penguin Reference 467pp £30)
AN ALMANAC, SAYS the dictionary (SOED), is ‘an annual
table, or book of tables, containing a calendar of months
and days, with astronomical data and calculations, eccle-
siastical and other anniversaries etc, and, in former days,
astrological and astrometeorological forecasts’. So this,
The English Year, by an established scholar of folklore
and superstition, glossed on its title page as ‘a month-by-
month guide to the Nation’s customs and festivals, from
May Day to Mischief Night’, is true enough an almanac,
and a very good and useful one too.
But does its emphatic, albeit inevitable preoccupation
with the very idea of ‘Englishness’ give us pause? These,
after all, are contentious, controversial times for England
and the question of what it is to be English. We feel
ourselves beset, subverted on every side – while wryly
noting the Scotch, the Welsh, the Irish have no such
self-doubt or inhibition. Old customs wither and die
before our eyes. Health and Safety is everywhere:
conkers are dangerous; run down a hill after a cheese
and you might break a leg. Where are the once universal
bonfires of Bonfire Night? And when last did you see
children pleading ‘penny for the guy’, their creature
leaking straw beside them on the pavement?
Yet it was perhaps often thus. As Queen Titania her-
self lamented long ago, ‘The nine men’s morris is fill’d
up with mud, / And the quaint mazes in the wanton
green / For lack of tread are undistinguishable: / The
human mortals want their winter here: / … And thor-
ough this distemperature we see / The seasons alter…’
So do we even want, let alone need another sentimental
wallow in the past, trivialising even as it seeks to
remember and preserve, making historical tourists of us
all? When it is as unsentimental and straightforward in
its glossiness (for this is quite as sleek as it is heavy) as
this, why ever not?
An admirably succinct introduction and statement of
intent, along with a brief history of the calendar, leads
straight into the body of the book, set out month by
month, day by day, with particular sections for the major
festivals and moveable feasts. It is a book, therefore, not
to be read through but rather to be consulted in particular
or indulged at random.
57
So opened at random, in the entr y for Ash
Wednesday, under the sub-heading ‘Jack-a-Lent’, Roud
gives a memoir of 1871 of a Cornish custom going back
at least to the sixteenth century:
A figure made up of straw and cast-off clothes was
drawn or carried round the town, amid much noise
and merriment, after which it was either burnt, shot
at, or brought to some other ignominious end. The
image was called Jack-a-Lent, and was, doubtless,
fellow is often termed Jack-a-Lent.
Under 1 May comes ‘May Dew’, supposedly an excel-
lent specific for the female complexion, for which Roud
quotes Pepys twice, the second entry thus:
[10 May 1669] Troubled, about 3 in the morning,
with my wife’s calling her maid up, and rising
herself, to go with her coach abroad to gather May-
dew – which she did; and I troubled for it, for fear of
any hurt, going abroad betimes, happening to her.
‘But she returned safely before he was up … 1 May
was most definitely the norm in later years.’
2 October has ‘Braughing Old Man’s Day’:
Matthew Wall was in his coffin, on his way to being
buried in St Mary the Virgin’s churchyard in the
Hertfordshire town of Braughing, when one of the
pall-bearers slipped, dropped the coffin, and jolted
him awake. Matthew was naturally rather pleased
with this outcome, and in his will, dated 1595, he
left money to commemorate the event. Among
other stipulations, he requested that the church bells
be rung on 2 October (the day of his lucky escape).
One could go on for ever, with customs immemorial,
newfangled, long forgotten, public, official, fiercely
individual. Inevitably, in such books, one looks for
entries on things one has some personal interest in, or
knowledge of, and of course that is when a gap always
appears. In connection with the modern Cheese-
Rolling festival at Cooper’s Hill in Gloucestershire every
Spring Bank Holiday, Roud does at least mention in
passing the former Scouring of the White Horse at
Uffington in Berkshire, which came round every seven
years and last took place in 1857 – ‘The owld White
Harse wants zettin to rights / And the Squire hev
promised good cheer’, as a rhyme in local dialect had it.
There too cheeses were chased down the precipitous
‘Manger’ beneath the Horse itself, but there was much
more to it than that. Apart from the scouring, ‘to kip un
in zhape’, races and competitions of all kinds –
backsword and cudgel-play until the blood ran, and
chasing a greased pig too – were all part of the fun. It
clearly had ritual purposes, in that ancient country, lost
in antiquity.
But then, to be fair, a labour such as Roud’s is nothing
if not endless.
To order this book at £24, see LR Bookshop on page 27
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
 GENERAL
G EORDIE G REIG
RELATIVE VALUES
T HE C OMPLETE B OOK OF AUNTS
★
By Rupert Christiansen
(Faber & Faber 266pp £12.99)
PRINCE CHARLES USED to refer to Kensington Palace as the
‘aunt heap’ because so many of his aunts lived there. It is
about the only reference to aunts, in fiction or real life, left
out of Rupert Christiansen’s The Complete Book of Aunts.
The book begins with a touching tr ibute to
Christiansen’s favourite aunt Janet and broadens into a
quirky, encyclopaedic compendium from porno aunts and
dotty stage aunts to John Lennon’s mother-substitute
Aunt Mimi, to whom her Beatle nephew spoke every
week on the phone right up to his assassination. On hear-
ing of his death she cut off her hair and declared her life
was as good as over.
There are kind aunts, heroic aunts, rude aunts, and
cool aunts. And it was tempting to hope that some great
common truth would be garnered about the perfect way
to deal with a sibling’s son or daughter. But Christiansen
is too clever, candid and clear-headed for any saccharin
truisms. What he has produced, with considerable
elegance and concision, is a gargantuan trawl through all
things auntly. Reading it feels somewhat like taking a
train journey during which a disarming cast of women
enter your carriage and engage you in conversation,
each leaving just as the next comes in. It goes from Enid
Blyton aunts to extreme twenty-first-century ones who
donate eggs to a sister and so become mother and aunt
in one techno-fertilisation.
While the book is a celebration of the aunt as a species
it also tolls the death knell on aunts as a nomenclature.
Christiansen rightly points out that fewer and fewer
people today like being called aunt. It sounds too
grown-up, spinsterly or even Wodehousian. ‘Young
women no longer want to be called aunt,’ he declares.
The greatest period for aunts was the last 200 years.
Before the eighteenth century there is barely a mention
of an aunt in literature. The Bible virtually ignores aunts,
as does Homer. Nero hideously murdered his great-aunt
with an overdose of laxatives and then there is a 1,700-
year gap without any meaningful mention of aunts till
Samuel Richardson and Fanny Burney bring them into
their fiction as more than just passing characters.
The research for this book has been prodigious. We
learn that tante in French is a taunt for being gay, while
in Japanese the word for mother’s sister is the same as
that for father’s concubine. And while sex between aunt
and nephew is generally seen as incestuous, the
58
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
Auntie always made a scene at Christmas
Trobriand Islands – where sex with your father’s sister is
apparently OK – are the exception to the rule. The
islanders clearly have never read Leviticus 18:12, which
records God saying very explicitly to Moses: ‘Thou shalt
not uncover the nakedness of thy father’s sister: she is thy
father’s near kinswoman.’ But then neither have the
authors of the ‘thousands of true life confessions on
many repellent websites’ in which aunts run from domi-
natrixes to more straightforward seductresses.
No stone has been left unturned in this aunt hunt
and sometimes things are revealed that Ruper t
Christiansen’s dead Aunt Janet would have preferred
not to see the light of day. Irritatingly, there is no index
and no captions to any of the photographs or drawings;
but nevertheless many an aunt, or even uncle, will be
extremely pleased to find this pocket-sized book in
their Christmas stocking.
To order this book at £10.39, see LR Bookshop on page 27
P HILIP W OMACK
AN AESTHETIC OF RUIN
L ITTLE M ONEY S TREET: I N S EARCH OF
G YPSIES AND THEIR M USIC IN THE S OUTH
OF F RANCE
★
By Fernanda Eberstadt
(Alfred A Knopf 242pp $24.95)
MY TWENTY-FIRST BIRTHDAY party, held in a cobwebby,
timbered building with horsey pictures on the walls, had a
gypsy theme: most boys turned up in beautiful waistcoats
and bandanas, most girls in embroidered floaty dresses; but
two or three people turned up wearing Adidas tracksuit
bottoms. Gypsies have always aroused strong emotions –
on the one hand, they are the mysterious, hot-blooded
Other, whose wild violins and raucous voices bring goose-
bumps to the necks of comfortable Westerners; on the
other hand, they are thieving, ragged wastrels.
 GENERAL
Fernanda Eberstadt investigates this dichotomy in
Little Money Street, a compelling study of a closed,
in-bred society in Perpignan. The author of four novels
and a Manhattanite through and through, Eberstadt was
dragged kicking and screaming to the South of France
when her husband decided to write a book on the
decline of religion in Europe. ‘Nothing much has
happened here since 1300, she muses.
Exploring the area, she comes across the raw, haunting
music of the gypsies, with its aesthetic of ruin and its
hymns in praise of the love of God. In particular, she is
intrigued by a group called Tekameli – posters of whom
are plastered all over New York and London music
stores. Her search for them proves initially fruitless:
phone numbers mysteriously become defunct, doors are
shut, people vanish. This is ‘an older, shabbier, weirder
Europe’; the gypsies live their strange lives in their
enclaves, seemingly unwilling to be found. ‘Their sense
of reality is not very strong,’ says one of Tekameli’s pro-
moters. They live in a world run by paternalistic
Pentecostal preachers, where severe restrictions are
placed upon women, and where ‘l’enfant est roi’.
Eventually, with the help of a travelling salesman,
Eberstadt finds Moïse, the singer, and his wife Diane,
and is drawn into their bizarre lives. Her novels are char-
acterised by a rich use of language, and she is equally
inventive here: a CD, for example, is ‘a cultic vessel,
ultraslim, microcondensed, encoding image, text, sound,
on a winged silver wafer. It is a portable shrine’. She
brings into bumbling life the gap-toothed Diane, her
statuesque, forward-thinking sister Linda, and the ‘gypsy
who hates gypsies’, Moïse. She becomes trusted enough
to be taken to a cock-fight, which provides one of the
best scenes in the book. Its effect epitomises her compli-
cated relationship with the gypsies:
He asks me if I enjoyed it, and I, sifting through the
layers of interest, boredom, exquisite discomfort,
squeamishness, and self-disgust I’d felt at this specta-
cle, which seemed closer to a flea circus than a bull-
fight, lie and say yes.
Some of their traditions – like the Novia, which involves
an old woman testing a young bride’s hymen in front of
the groom’s family to prove she is a virgin – cause her to
shudder. The gypsies ignore any attempt made by French
officialdom to integrate them, preferring to take their
children out of school. When Eberstadt expresses shock
at a girl’s getting married at thirteen, the mother tells her
not to be ridiculous: she’s getting married next year, at
fourteen. But it is the women who will force the changes:
the strong women like Linda who push their children
into school and college, and pull themselves into the
French middle class.
This observant, intriguing book brings to exacting
light both attractive and appalling aspects of an ambiva-
lent people.
59
J AMES O WEN
HACK IN BLACK
T HE D EAD B EAT: T HE P ERVERSE
P LEASURES OF O BITUARIES
★
By Marilyn Johnson
(Souvenir Press 244pp £15)
I’LL LET YOU into a trade secret. Although I write for
newspapers for a living, most of the time I don’t know
much about what I’m saying. This is more common in
journalism than you might suspect, but in my case it
comes with the territory, because I am an obituarist.
Most of Mar ilyn Johnson’s book deals with the
American way of death, which as she correctly points
out tends to be more newslike (‘Man You’ve Not Heard
of is Dead, at 86’), more sentimental and, I would say,
more boring. The world she celebrates only strikes a
chord with my experience when The Guardian’s Obits
Editor tells her that, though most British hacks consider
the job to be rather dull, in fact it’s one of the most
terrifying in the profession.
On a quiet day, it demands instant mastery of every
possible walk of life, from astrophysics to the aristocracy,
and the ability to present that often new-found knowl-
edge cogently, concisely and entertainingly while doing
justice to someone’s time on this earth.
On bad days – at about six in the morning if I remember
rightly – your editor phones you to say that there’s a
report that the Princess of Wales has been involved in an
incident in Paris and that the advance obit seems to end
at her engagement. Eight thousand words ought to do
the trick, and the presses roll at lunchtime.
What gets you through, by and large, is chutzpah and
skill. Obit writers are the Spitfire pilots of Fleet Street;
yet they are usually shamefully treated by the top brass,
their ability to produce some of the most creative
writing in newspapers rewarded with anonymous bylines
and disgracefully low rates of pay. In case you’ve ever
been tempted to join our ranks, you might want to note
that a 1,000-word obituary in a broadsheet that takes
two days to research and write will earn you five times
less than a shorter opinion piece in the same paper
knocked off in two hours.
When I worked on the Daily Telegraph in the late
1990s, on some days the Obit desk was staffed not only
entirely by Oxbridge graduates, but also solely by
former barristers. It was not by chance that the section
gained the reputation of producing the most readable
copy in any newspaper: where else would you find the
ringside matrons who urged on wrestler Big Daddy
likened to the tricoteuses gathered around the guillotine?
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
 GENERAL
(That almost none of those talents still works at the
Telegraph tells you not a little about the former manage-
ment’s lack of strategic thinking.)
There is a deep strain of eccentricity – lunacy at times
– within British obituary writing which gives it its
distinctive flavour, ambling hand in hand as it does with
the dilettante tradition of scholarship that marks out
most of the trade’s leading practitioners. Mar ilyn
Johnson, who writes obituaries for American publica-
tions and even attends an annual obituarists’ convention,
is an avowed Brit obit groupie, but like many a fan she
hasn’t got much to say beyond how really great they are.
E LISABETH L UARD
THE DOMESDAY COOKBOOK
T HE TASTE OF B RITAIN
★ context, providing, where appropriate, enough practical
Edited and translated by Laura Mason and Catherine Brown
(HarperPress 495pp £25)
BRITISHNESS IS BACK – things have changed in the national
kitchen. The evidence is all around us: consider the pop-
ularity of farmers’ markets, the growing membership of
lobby groups such as Slow Food, the recent listing of
some forty British foodstuffs of protected origin under
EU rules (most famously, the pies of Melton Mowbray).
And if you think that’s all just a load of Spotted Dick,
read the drop-ins contributed by our sharp-end chefs to
The Taste of Britain, a smart new edition of a compendium
of traditional British foodstuffs first published in 1999:
consider Bruce Poole on the butter y glor ies of
Lancashire cheese, Gordon Ramsay on Scotland’s
superlative raw materials, Mark Hix on laverbread,
Fergus Henderson on the joys of grouse. Fabulous stuff
– and all available on our own doorstep.
The book, as it happened, first appeared under the
imprint of Prospect Books, a small specialist press run by
the foresighted Tom Jaine, and it quickly achieved cult
status among food-writers and producers concerned with
preserving (or resurrecting) the traditional foods of
Britain. Had it not been for Jaine, the material on which
the compendium was based – funded by Brussels, pre-
pared in Paris, available only in French – would probably
have vanished into the depths of an EC filing cabinet,
unseen and unlamented. At the time of completion,
1997, Westminster didn’t consider the work of sufficient
national importance to fund a translation, and no main-
stream publisher thought the game worth the candle.
Happily, Jaine had the good sense to commission two
eminent scholar-cooks, Laura Mason and Catherine
Brown, to make the whole thing readable. The result is
elegantly written, breathtakingly erudite and stylish
60
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
Their cult status, like most modern celebrity, in fact says
something about the parlous state of their rivals for
attention, the rest of Fleet Street’s output.
Obits have their merits, most notably in covering
areas of life overlooked by the contemporary press, but
they are usually a long way from a reliable first draft of
history or the subtle portrait Johnson believes them to
be. The truth is that it’s easiest to divert your reader
from discerning the ordinariness of the subject you’re
writing about if you treat it largely as an excuse for an
entertaining gossip.
To order this book at £12, see LR Bookshop on page 27
enough to be read for the pleasure of the prose alone. As a
source book it’ll more than earn its keep, not least for the
appendix listing artisan suppliers and their Web addresses.
In the body of the book – beautifully illustrated in this
edition – the author-translators have placed some 400
artisanal products firmly in their historical and geographical
instruction for the competent cook to use as a source of
recipes. The underlying message is that geography mat-
ters, and that time and tide are not all it takes to pot a
shrimp: for authenticity, you need the tiny brown crus-
taceans caught along the broad sands of Morecambe Bay.
And did you know that Stilton took its name from the
place in which it was sold rather than its area of produc-
tion? Among products considered worthy of inclusion
are Patum Peperium, Kendal Mintcake, Blackpool Rock.
Among recipes and basic foodstuffs, Pease Pudding (with
recipe), Arbroath smokies, Dittisham plums, Clyde Valley
tomatoes. Under Red Deer Venison you’ll find details of
the shooting season as well as the political and economic
consequences of deer-stalking in the Highlands, with a
separate entry on the process of smoking wild meat. In
the West Midlands, try for a slab of Fidget Pie (pork,
apple, potatoes – a harvest special) or sink your teeth into
well-marbled steaks from Old Horned Herefords. South-
East Englanders can roast a leg of mutton from Romney
Marsh to eat with Mushroom Ketchup, while the Scots
can feast on Clootie Dumpling washed down with
Heather Ale.
By which you will realise that the criteria for inclusion
in what effectively is our very own gastronomic
Domesday Book – all EC member states received their
own – are regional as well as traditional. To be eligible,
foodstuffs (a category which includes drink) must have
been produced and have remained on sale in one region
or town for more than three generations. For the sake of
our culinary souls, it’s to be hoped this handsome new
hardback will sell a million – not least because, if this
summer was any indication of things to come, we’ll all be
taking our holidays at home soon. Rush out and buy it,
dip into it daily and never leave the motorway without it.
To order this book at £20, see LR Bookshop on page 27
 GENERAL
M ATT E DMONDS
A LOWDOWN ON BLUES
T HE P ENGUIN G UIDE TO B LUES R ECORDINGS
★ being just some of the details that appear, alongside a
By Tony Russell and Chris Smith
(Penguin Reference 923pp £30)
THE TASK OF producing a comprehensive survey of the
recordings of any musical tradition is no mean feat.
Involved are the theoretical problems of how to define
the parameters of the genre, and the practical problems
of how to listen attentively to the turkeys as well as the
triumphs. Luckily, in Tony Russell and Chris Smith we
find two patient curators honest enough to acknowledge
the subjectivity of their conclusions, and calm enough to
make each entry light and informative.
The Penguin Guide’s door policy is that an artist must
make ‘a serious claim to a blues enthusiast’s attention’
and have recorded predominantly on a blues label to be
deemed worthy of entry. Over 1,000 artists pass muster.
Refreshingly, the recordings of often neglected artists
like Josh White and contemporary bluesmen like
Michael Roach are given due attention alongside those
of the well-known blues giants: Leadbelly, Bessie Smith,
W ILLIAM P ALMER
THE FRONT PAGE
R EPORTING : W RITINGS FROM
THE ‘N EW YORKER ’
★ at greatest length. ‘The Translation Wars’ is a brief history
By David Remnick
(Picador 483pp £18.99)
I ONCE EARNED the withering scorn of the novelist Jim
Crace when I said something along the lines of ‘Oh, he’s
only a journalist’. Jim said ‘Only a journalist?’ Well,
there have been journos who have outlasted many of
their poet and novelist contemporaries: Defoe, Swift,
Hazlitt, Dickens (with one of his many hats on), Orwell,
Joseph Mitchell, and a host of others who can still be
read for pleasure and instruction.
The last of these, Joseph Mitchell, was famous as a
writer for the New Yorker, one of the very few journals
willing to give space to long and far-ranging essays. The
tradition is continued healthily by David Remnick,
editor of the New Yorker, in his new collection of pieces
written between 1994 and 2006.
Remnick came up the hard and traditional way for a
reporter, first covering the night police-beat for the
61
B B King. Each artist is given a brief and well-written
biographical note, but it’s their discographies rather than
their lives that serve as the main focus of attention.
Each record has been expertly researched, the label on
which it was released, the name of each musician playing
on it and the month and year in which it was recorded
rating out of five stars. But this is no mere inventory; the
majority of records featured in the book receive a good-
length and often entertainingly opinionated review. For
instance, it seems I am not alone in regarding Nineties
smooth-man Kenny Neal’s What You Got as monotonous
and insipid – its review here beginning, ‘Perhaps now is
the time to admit it: Kenny Neal makes nice records.’
The Penguin Guide to Blues Recordings is perfect for that
blues collector who knows which artist’s repertoire he
wants to get into, but not which that artist’s key records
are. Unfortunately, for the blues newcomer there is no
easy way in. Considering Russell and Smith’s good
judgement throughout, it’s a little surprising they didn’t
think to include a more commercial flourish to the
guide. The addition of a substantial preface on the 100
essential records for any blues collection, or a rundown
of the top fifty blues records of the last 100 years, would
have made the work more enticing to the uninitiated
and the expert alike.
To order this book at £24, see LR Bookshop on page 27
Washington Post, then most other sections of that paper
(Style, Sport and Boxing – not always the same thing),
and ending up as Moscow correspondent until the fall of
Communism in 1991. The pieces in his new book range
widely through politics and literature, inextricably
mixed in the portraits of Solzhenitsyn, Havel, and Amos
Oz. Russia and the Middle East are the subjects covered
of translation into English of the great Russian writers,
and an introduction to the couple Richard Pevear and
Larissa Volokhonsky who are the latest to grapple with
Tolstoy. The problem of translating Russia as well as
Russians is tackled in two fascinating interviews with
Solzhenitsyn, conducted ten years apart, first in his
American home and then after his return to Russia. The
unremitting labours of Solzhenitsyn, particularly in the
assembly of material and the writing of The Gulag
Archipelago, have done incalculable service to the
Russian people; his present reward is to be regarded as
an outmoded crank by most Russians and many in the
West. It is amusing to see an American critic, Jonathan
Yardley, calling Solzhenitsyn a ‘not-very-thinly-disguised
Czarist’. All those who are still a tiny bit nostalgic for
what succeeded the Czars might care to read the passage
from Solzhenitsyn on pages 159–160 of this book.
The Israeli politician Natan Sharansky, one of nearly a
million Russian émigrés settled in Israel, leads us on to a
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
 GENERAL
series of essays on the politics of the Israel–Palestine
conflict. The efforts and initiatives of people of genuine
goodwill on both sides, those who desire a peace settle-
ment, have been constantly undermined by such men as
the dying Sharon and the late and unlamented Arafat. At
times, reading about the lumbering and murderous
posturings of Israeli tanks in Ramallah, or of an Arab
called Eichmann Abu Atwa, named by his father after
the most famous murderer of Jews, one imagines the
peoples of the Middle East must feel like asking for a
little respite from their leaders.
The essays dealing with Western politicians and writ-
ers are comparatively muted after this. Tony Blair, on
the campaign trail in 2005, floats as usual between
evanescence and substance, by turns a formidable inter-
LETTERS
SOMETHING AMIS?
Sir,
As someone who knew Kingsley Amis well and loved
him, I suggest that the reason Leader never ‘gets to the
bottom of Amis’ deep unpleasantness or his neuroses’
might be because Amis was not deeply unpleasant
(LR, November).
There is nothing remarkable about Leader’s favourable
view of my sister. Perhaps more remarkable is that Frank
McLynn should undertake to review a 900-page book
on a subject he considers not worth it.
McLynn’s bile-laden comments about a recently dead
person with many living relatives and friends is perhaps
deeply unpleasant, but probably not worth getting to the
bottom of.
Yours faithfully,
Colin Howard
London N19
LAURELS FOR POSTERITY
Sir,
Adam Sisman can surely not be serious (LR, August)
that ‘few of us can recall a single line of [Robert
Southey’s] poetry.’
‘It was a famous victory’?
Yours faithfully,
Michael Grosvenor Myer
Haddenham, Cambridge
BALKAN TROUBLES
Sir,
Generally your reviews strike me as exemplary: infor-
mative and well-informed, written by professionals.
But what has happened in the case of John Laughland
and the UN, in your November edition? No CV is
provided, so it is not possible to judge the credentials;
62
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
national figure and a wry, endlessly biddable ghost. Al
Gore introduces himself to audiences as ‘Hi, I’m Al
Gore. I used to be next President of the United States’ –
a joke that must become more painful with the passage
of time. There are two interviews with American novel-
ists: the one with Philip Roth contains some cheering
sideswipes at literary ‘theory’, that graveyard of the
semi-literate; the other is with Don DeLillo, and it is
easier to read than his novels.
Reporting is a valuable book, full of insight and written
with elegance and great intelligence. Remnick fulfils the
first duty of the reporter – to bring us news, but also to
remind us of the past that spawned today’s headlines, and
to attempt to guess the future they foretell.
To order this book at £15.19, see LR Bookshop on page 27
but there is no doubting the bias. For example, he dubs
Bosnia a ‘bogus and unwanted administrative unit’. In
fact Bosnia and Herzegovina, to give it its proper title,
has existed for centuries. Any present artificiality lies in
the entities created by Dayton, for reasons which
seemed, and almost certainly were, good at the time.
He adds that, without the West’s policy, ‘the war could
have been over in months’. Was this the war unleashed
by Milosevic, Mladic and Karadzic, all subsequently
indicted for war crimes?
Yours faithfully,
Sir David Madden
Political Advisor to Commander EUFOR, 2004–2005
BELL’S LETTRES
Sir,
From time to time I have the pleasure to see your
paper, and enjoy every line of the history and biography
section. In your September issue I was pleased to see a
review of a new biography of Gertrude Bell and espe-
cially by the first few lines, when the reviewer relates
how she became captivated by her personality.
I am one of the very early Gertrude Bell fans, back in
the early 30s of the last century, when I came across her
name in a book about the Middle East and then read her
books and especially her letters.
On the following page in your September issue you
bring a review of a biography of Sir Valentine Chirol. I
wonder whether the authors of both biographies, or
their reviewers, know that Valentine Chirol was one of
the closest friends of Gertrude Bell. She used to call him
DOMNUL in her letters to him.
Yours faithfully,
Lillian Klein
Jerusalem
 FICTION
C AROLE A NGIER
A Joker in
The Dark
G REED
★ gle between a controlling
By Elfriede Jelinek
(Translated by Martin Chalmers)
(Serpent’s Tail 340pp £15)
IF YOU HAVE read Elfriede Jelinek’s most famous novel,
The Piano Teacher, you’ll know what to expect from
Greed. First of all, pathological characters, rendered
with glassy fury: traditional Austrian self-hatred, like
that of Kraus, Canetti and Bernhard, but – I know it’s
hard to imagine – even more hateful. Second, some-
thing you don’t find even in them: a great deal of
violent, sado-masochistic, four-letter sex. In sum, a
horrifying vision of human nature (‘friends, that is,
greedy beasts’) and nature itself (‘fundamentally evil’),
in which human beings are objects, and objects are
human – days stretch their limbs, valleys grin, handker-
chiefs ‘are quite stiff from everything they’ve had to
swallow in their lives’.
Get the flavour? (Sorry, the rub-it-in style is catch-
ing.) Disgusting, despairing, but undeniably intriguing,
and not just because of the porn. That last quote is a
clue: Jelinek’s pages pullulate with weird but wonderful
lines that only she could have written. So, time ‘runs
off as soon as it sees us’, wind is ‘this nothing in the
air’, and a person is ‘this living human shaft … this
breathing pit’. Sometimes her aperçus are so odd you
don’t know what they mean; sometimes they’re almost
normal (single people’s faces ‘are like unentered rooms,
which are waiting for someone to switch on the light,
so that they don’t have to do it themselves any more’).
And often – no, almost always – they are funny. Only
Jelinek-funny, of course, ie grotesque, or cruel; funny
because they’re grotesque and cruel, like Swift’s A
Modest Proposal. For example, a man shoots his family
in the face, ‘but they didn’t need their faces after that
anyway’; or (my favourite) ‘Your figure has problems
with its figure. Look at
your hips, they shouldn’t be
there, they should be closer
to you, they could easily visit Literary Review online
www.literaryreview.co.uk
come two inches closer
together.’ Jelinek is famous
for her seriousness, meta-
physical, political, ecologi-
cal. But she is really a
63
comic writer, like Beckett:
a joker in the dark.
Greed is funnier than The
Piano Teacher, and in that
way it is greater Jelinek.
But it is also much more
obscure. The Piano Teacher’s
nar rative was mad but
clear: a perverse love trian-
mother, a crazed daughter
and her callow young stu-
dent. In Greed the clarity
has gone and only the
madness remains. It is the Jelinek: glassy fury
stream of consciousness of
an unidentified narrator, who alternates her obsessive
theme (women want love, men want property) with
other obsessive riffs, eg dozens of pages about a ghastly
artificial lake, a plant grave, and soon a human one;
who constantly breaks off to address us riskily about her
writing (‘You can complain all you like about boredom,
while you’re reading this, but please not to me’); who
above all surgically exposes her characters’ solipsism,
but never lets them escape her own, as though she were
the controlling mother of The Piano Teacher.
There is a story, not unlike the story of The Piano
Teacher, in fact: a last attempt at love by an ageing
woman with the wrong man, a handsome sporty type
rather like the piano teacher’s student, a decade or two
on. But it’s later now (‘One day it will be too late, how
often have I written this sentence, and it’s still good,’
says the narrator), and everything is worse. Kurt only
wants Gerti’s house. Really he hates and fears women,
and lusts after young men. He beats and buggers Gerti
(often), then betrays her with a young girl, Gabi,
whom finally he murders. Gerti returns to Vienna and
commits suicide. Probably, then, Kurt gets away with
murder – with two murders, in effect; and there’ve
been other dead women before. I wasn’t sure if Kurt
killed them, or some other man, but the message is
clear: women want love, marriage and punishment,
from any man at all, by the end; and the only one
of these they are certain to get is punishment. ‘Silly
cows, women,’ the narrator says, ‘especially educated
ones.’ This is an old story to have to excavate from
her ramblings, but it’s true
enough. So is it worth it,
and is Jelinek wor th her
Nobel Prize? Yes: for those
weird and wonderful lines,
and for those jokes in the
dark. Just.
To order this book at £12, see
LR Bookshop on page 27
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
 FICTION
F RANCIS K ING
LOVE AND LONELINESS
E VERY M OVE YOU M AKE
★ should have been a sym-
By David Malouf
(Chatto & Windus 244pp £14.99)
THE FIRST AND the longest of the seven stories that
make up this collection is also the finest. Set in a small
town in a remote corner of Australia, ‘The Valley of the
Lagoons’ describes how each August three or four hunt-
ing parties embark on the five-hour journey by dirt
highway to the virgin area where the river systems of
the county rise.
The narrator, Angus, bookish son of the town doctor
and therefore socially and culturally a small but signifi-
cant cut above his classmates, has never participated in
this annual ritual. But at long last his father agrees that
he may go. He travels in a truck with the menfolk of a
family to which his own has always been close. Among
them is a handsome, wild, moody youth, Stuart, who
has fallen in love with Angus’s sister but whom, after
some flirtatious dilly-dallying, she has eventually jetti-
soned. Desperate, Stuart now appeals to Angus to act as
his go-between. Angus refuses. Soon after, Stuart suffers
what everyone else accepts as an accident, seriously but
not fatally wounding himself with his gun; but Angus
surmises that the shot was deliberate, expressive of the
intensity of his frustrated desire, rage and humiliation.
The uneasy relationship between the sensitive, self-
protective boy and the rough, reckless youth, is of a kind
that Malouf has handled in masterly fashion in other of
his works. Once again, too, he evokes with extraordi-
nary clarity both the day-to-day grind of rural life in a
small, ingrown community, and the awesome beauty of
the Australian countryside. That countryside, now scrub,
now marsh and now precipitous crags, with vast,
ever-changing skies, constantly acts as a physical mani-
festation of the characters’ aspirations, joys and griefs.
The last story, ‘The Domestic Cantata’, is also
fascinating; but it is flawed by being too crowded with
incidents and cramped with characters. At its centre is a
famous Australian composer, Sam McCall, who strug-
gles to complete his compositions in a house ‘abandoned
to mayhem and din’. There are obstreperous children
and a sequence of demanding visitors. On the day of the
story these visitors include an American poet named
Diane, one of whose poems, come on by chance in an
anthology, inspired Sam to embark on settings both of it
and of other of her works. Another is the sister of Sam’s
wife, a once distinguished opera singer who, on her
marriage, gave up her career to become a successful
64
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
travel agent.
These and the other peo-
ple in the story all excite
one’s interest. But when
one wants to learn more
about them, it is as if what
phony has been reduced to
the narrower dimensions of
a sonata. One visitor, a
young girl, who is supposed
to have been abused by an Malouf: haunting
uncle when only seven and
to have been recently raped by three ethnic youths in
the shack that she shared with them, suddenly disrupts
the gathering by rolling and writhing on the floor and
screaming incoherently. Hysteria? A panic attack? Some
sort of fit? Malouf does not give us enough data to
decide what has been the cause.
Fortunately the beautiful close of this story redeems its
fragilities. Alone together, their guests having gone, the
wife, a singer like her sister but a less famous one,
embarks on a try-out of the latest of Sam’s settings.
Suddenly, at one point in the composition, he had
found himself unable to continue. Now, in perfect
unison of spirit with him, she carries on from that point
and so provides him with the key to unlock the closed
door barring his progress. Malouf clearly loves music.
He brilliantly conveys, in these few poignant paragraphs,
how it can explain and reconcile people and so bring
them healing and even joy.
In ‘Mrs Porter and the Rock’ a brittle, sophisticated
young man called Donald decides on a treat for the
mother who so much exasperates him but to whom he
is so much attached. He will take her to Ayers Rock.
But Mrs Porter fails to see the point of the excursion.
Once he wanted her to take an interest in Proust, of all
people. Now it’s this ‘great slab of purple-brown liver
going off in the sun’. Bored with the Rock and bored
with her luxury hotel, with its far too many drawers for
her far too few possessions, she obsessively toys with
disconnected memories of her childhood or of travels in
Europe with her long-dead husband.
Eventually, early one morning, she wanders out of the
hotel and off into the bush, to be found, thirsty, hungry
and half-demented, by a group of aborigine children,
who squat around her in a circle, waiting for her to die.
This is a profoundly disturbing story, for all its occasional
funniness. Unfortunately, when one has finished it, one
asks oneself ‘What was that all about?’ with a feeling of
bewildered dissatisfaction. One suspects that even
Malouf might be unable to answer that question.
A faultless but less substantial story is ‘Elsewhere’, in
which the father and the brother-in-law of a recently
dead young woman disrupt the even tenor of their country
 FICTION
lives to trek to Sydney to attend her funeral. During the
ceremony and at the wake that follows, they feel increas-
ingly alienated from the people – metropolitan, modish
and seemingly untouched by the tragedy – gathered
around them. Slowly they realise that the young woman,
absorbed in the frenetic and to them incomprehensible
T RISTAN Q UINN
COLD COMFORT
W INTERWOOD
★ stony ground.’ Redmond sinks into desperate loneliness.
By Patrick McCabe
(Bloomsbury 242pp £12.99)
THIS IS A bleak and relentless novel, a numbing portrait
of utter darkness – the total disintegration of a man’s life.
In 1993 Patrick McCabe explained to the New York
Times how his fiction had been influenced by the work
of James Joyce: ‘The sheer hunger in everything Joyce
has written, the straining toward the light, that keeps
you honest in the business of writing.’ McCabe certainly
strains toward the depths of the human condition, imbu-
ing with a searching, brutal honesty his story of an Irish
journalist whose return to his back-country home town
tr iggers the unravelling of all his certainties. But
Winterwood is a difficult book to get to grips with; it
lacks the exuberance and invention of his earlier work
and often seems to keep the reader at arm’s length.
Winterwood spans twenty-five years in the life of
Redmond Hatch, the novel’s narrator, from the early
1980s to the present day. It begins with his arrival in
Slievenageeha, his ‘old mountain home’, after many
years away researching an article about folklore and
changing ways in Ireland. Unexpectedly Hatch runs into
a ‘whiskery old-timer’, an ageing fiddle player known as
both Auld Pappie and Ned Strange, with whom he
becomes friends after a long night of heavy drinking.
Strange talks vividly of the history of the valley and of
Redmond’s family, recounting old memories of violence
– his father beating his mother – that shock and shake
the younger man. Despite misgivings, Redmond is
drawn to Strange, seeing him as a ‘magisterial mountain,
which seemed to have existed, literally for centuries’, a
living link back into a rich past, rapidly disappearing as
Ireland embraces modernity. But their encounters also
evoke an undefined menace: ‘We sat there surrounded
by swarming shadows, which seemed to lunge forward
before retreating once more, as if in the throes of some
netherworldly game.’
McCabe weaves this netherworldly strand into the
fabric of Redmond’s life. Redmond lives happily in
Dublin and then north London with his wife and
65
life of the big city, in effect died for them long before her
actual death from a bungled abortion.
Malouf, always so precise in his characterisation, so poetic
in his evocations of nature and so haunting in his insight
into loneliness and frustrated love, is a writer to treasure.
To order this book at £11.99, see LR Bookshop on page 27
daughter, until his marriage abruptly falls apart. He is
expelled from an existence of ‘bounteous, unmitigated
good fortune’. He becomes a denizen of anonymous
Kilburn pubs, populated by old Irishmen who represent
his destiny: ‘A facsimile of the past the old men were
drowning in – an outlands waste where all hope falls on
All the while the figure of Strange dogs him, a gnawing,
nocturnal bedsit apparition. The haunting takes on a
horrific edge after Redmond comes across a newspaper
report of Strange’s suicide in prison, where he was
incarcerated for the sexual abuse and murder of a young
boy. Redmond has a terrible breakdown imagining
Strange forcing himself upon him, unlocking the secret
history of abuse he himself suffered as a child.
McCabe has written about child abuse before. In his
celebrated 1992 novel The Butcher Boy, the delinquent
Francie Brady is sent to ‘the house of a hundred
windows’, a correctional school where he is abused by a
priest. It is a brief episode in Francie’s entropic slide.
Here, though, Redmond is compelled to re-live the mis-
ery of decades before – his uncle Florian regularly abus-
ing him at the orphanage where he grew up, while the
nuns turned a blind eye. Florian made Redmond dance
hornpipes while he took photographs. ‘He’d kept one all
his life. The only one which hadn’t been vile. But he’d
destroyed it in the end, torn it in pieces, one night he’d
got drunk.’ For Redmond, family is an endless agony.
Winterwood is ultimately an exploration of the persis-
tence of the past and its violent power to disrupt the
present. Ned Strange is an elemental force from what
McCabe calls ‘the outlands’ – a harsh world of deep time
outside the rush of modern life that has transformed
Ireland over the last two decades. Even as Redmond
reinvents himself as a television producer called Dominic,
telling himself that the essence of being human is change,
his painful history forces him back to the outlands. He is
gripped by the need to see his daughter again, obsessed
with the idea of taking her to Winterwood, the enchanted
kingdom home of her childhood My Little Pony toys.
But in his mind this promised land becomes distorted,
fused with Strange’s killing ground, an emblem of the
insanity into which he has fallen. McCabe’s publisher is
keen – but wrong – to suggest there is black humour at
work here. In reality McCabe’s savage vision is deadly
serious. His writing has a cold intensity which is distinc-
tive, but pretty much unbearable to read.
To order this book at £10.39, see LR Bookshop on page 27
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
 FICTION
J OHN D UGDALE
SYSTEMS OF SURVIVAL
T HE E CHO M AKER
★ and March half a million cranes gather on its sand flats, a
By Richard Powers
(Heinemann 451pp £17.99)
HOW DO YOU follow The Time of Our Singing, a 640-
page polyphonic novel which was set in Europe as well
as America, and combined the theme of race in the US
since World War II with a history of western music and
an examination of the issue of genius?
Richard Powers’s answer is to revert to a more charac-
teristic form of fiction: ample but not monstrous size; a
return to the present day and highly topical themes –
ecology and neuroscience – instead of long backward
vistas; and, after the atypical New York, Washington DC
and California of The Time of Our Singing, a Midwest
setting. Among the virtues of Powers (who comes from
Illinois) is that he’s one of the few literary authors whose
novels regularly unfold in so-called ‘flyover country’
rather than the east or west coast states.
Mark Schluter, who works as a packer and driver at a
slaughterhouse in Kearney, Nebraska, is seriously injured
when his truck flips over during a routine journey down
a country road. Kar in, his older sister, returns to
Kearney on learning he has been hospitalised, and finds
him in a coma and suffering from brain damage.
Giving up her job as a firm’s customer relations
officer, she remains in her home town, spending most of
her time at the hospital. When Mark emerges from the
coma, he has a psychological condition resembling para-
noia in which he believes Karin is an impostor posing as
his sister, having somehow kidnapped or hidden the real
one. Friends and even his dog are also viewed as part of
a fake world put together by enemies in league against
him; and this belief is fuelled by a suspicion that no-one
is telling him the truth about the accident. A strange
note left by his bed about it (‘GOD led me to you/so
You could Live/and bring back someone else’) adds to a
conviction that there was another vehicle, or person or
presence, on the road that caused him to skid.
Desperate, Karin contacts Gerald Weber, a celebrated
clinical neurologist and the author of three Oliver Sacks-
like books telling the stories of patients with bizarre
mental abnormalities. He flies from New England to
Kearney to assess Mark, who mocks him as ‘Shrinky’
but also accepts him as real, unlike Karin. Between trips
to Nebraska, however, Weber undergoes a cr isis.
Reviewers of his latest book attack him as a violator of
his patients’ privacy, and he comes to feel they’re right;
promoting it and lecturing are increasingly an ordeal,
66
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
and depression jeopardises his hitherto secure marriage.
Treating Mark becomes for him a test of whether he’s
more than a stealer of stories.
Mark, Karin and Weber – the novel’s narrative centres –
are in different ways entangled in a subplot that involves the
only reason Kearney is nationally famous: each February
stop-over on their northward migration from Mexico to
Alaska. Karin, for example, moves in with Daniel, a con-
servationist battling against a corporation whose plans
threaten the sand flats and hence the cranes, but later begins
an affair with an executive from the company.
The Echo Maker is slow to exert a grip on the reader, per-
haps because Karin, who (as Mark is still silent, Weber yet
to make his bow) has the first 100 pages to herself, is the
least sharply defined of this trio. Only when the troubled
scientist/author appears at the start of the second section
does it fully come together. A brilliantly observed charac-
ter, Weber serves both to leaven a largely earnest novel
with academic and literary comedy, and to introduce its
key ideas naturally through his lectures and private musings.
His research on the brain suggests ‘we [are] not one,
continuous, indivisible whole, but instead, hundreds of
separate subsystems, with changes in any one sufficient
to disperse the provisional confederation into unrecog-
nizable new countries’.
In different ways, Powers’s three focal figures all
undergo this blurring or crumbling of identity. Mark is
an example of a patient ‘changed so profoundly by acci-
dent or injury [as to] call into question the solidity of
the self ’. Karin gives up one identity for another as
carer, only to find herself viewed by the object of her
care as ‘Kopy Karin’, the possibly android agent of some
evil power. Weber himself disintegrates under pressure of
professional ridicule and disorienting passion.
This would be compelling enough in itself, but at the
heart of The Echo Maker is the relationship between the
massed birds – excellently evoked in passages describing
their flight, mating dances and collective song, ‘a single,
splintering tone-deaf chorus stretching miles in every
direction and back to the Pleistocene’ – and its handful
of characters. In the novel’s most striking moments they
become a kind of gigantic question-mark inducing a
sense of guilt or relative impotence.
Daniel the conservationist, for instance, despairs because
‘he needed humans to rise to their station: conscious and
godlike, nature’s one shot at knowing and preserving itself.
Instead, the one aware animal in creation had torched the
place.’ For Weber, the question the cranes pose is whether
consciousness is a fallen, lesser state: ‘The larger of the pair
[of cranes] turns and fixes him. Something looks out from
the prehistoric bird, a secret about him, but not his. A
look of pure wildness, all the hard intelligence of simply
being that Weber has forgotten.’
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 FICTION
J OHN DE FALBE
ELUSIVE CONSCIOUSNESS
E VERYTHING PASSES
★ he reminds us that memory makes us experience life in
By Gabriel Josipovici
(Carcanet 60pp £9.95)
GABRIEL JOSIPOVICI IS sometimes referred to as the only
true experimentalist in modern English fiction. Besides
unfairly denigrating many other novelists, this epithet
sidelines him, just as describing an aunt as tremendously
clever might also imply that no-one in their right minds
would choose to talk to her. As the author of Touch, a
work of great but unsung br illiance on the most
neglected of senses, and several other books of what
might be described as literary criticism, as well as novels
and other volumes, it may at least be assumed that
Josipovici knows exactly what he is doing, and why.
The unnamed protagonist of this work ‘stands at the
window. / Cracked pane. / His face at the window. /
Greyness. Silence.’ Behind him is an empty room. As he
stares out without seeing, fragments of conversation ping
into his head from two marriages, from his children and
from friends. He appears to be ill, but his affliction looks
like grief, both at the death of his second wife and at the
remembered departure of his first wife whom he bullied
but loved. But he is probably also unwell himself, for it
appears that before his wife’s death he had a heart attack.
One way or another, he doesn’t sound like a man with a
long and happy future.
The narrative flits back and forth in terms of both
time and people. This is faithful to the random direc-
tions that consciousness takes, and it is done with such
sleight of hand that the reader doesn’t feel lost. Josipovici
is also adept at using silence and repetition in ways that
might be described as poetic, but more because we
aren’t used to seeing them in prose than because there is
anything inherently poetic about them. They have the
cumulative effect of generating mood and allowing the
author to switch neatly from the mood of a memory
itself to the mood of the remembering. There is an
exquisitely rendered, discrete account of an argument
between the protagonist and his wife, and another
vignette of his bullying her: like the memories, the
moments vanish and are taken over by the harsh preoc-
cupations of his present mood.
Besides the theme inherent in its title, Everything Passes
is sustained by the notion that art – writing, in particular,
for the protagonist – can help us approach complexities
in the world if it represents them faithfully (even if the
creations dreamed in the artist’s head may seem to be
very different from the result). It is characteristic of
67
Josipovici that his own book should enact this formally.
He does not give us a linear narrative because that’s not
how humans think and remember. Instead he gives us
glimpses through artfully crafted moods and windows,
and this endows his writing with a suggestiveness that is
indeed poetic. Like Mandelstam in The Egyptian Stamp,
a way that is not really linear; that the boundaries
between prose and poetry are not so clear as we might
sometimes suppose, and that language can achieve its
effects also by absences.
Describing his writing as experimental invites blind-
ness to his discipline, economy and clarity. If at times the
narrative doesn’t seem clear, it’s not because the author is
not clear but because it’s part of his intention to portray
the elusiveness of consciousness. And if at first you don’t
get the hang of what’s happening in Everything Passes, it
only takes thirty minutes to read so you can cheerfully
go back and read it again. It’s worth it: it’s shrewd,
instructive and affecting.
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M ARTYN B EDFORD
THROUGH A GLASS, DARKLY
C REATURES OF THE E ARTH : N EW AND
S ELECTED S TORIES
★
By John McGahern
(Faber & Faber 408pp £16.99)
MANY YEARS AGO, when I lived in a shared house, the
tenants played a drinking game – we would gather in
front of the television for the weekly episode of Dallas
and match the cast glass for glass. Invariably, we were
drunk by the end of the programme. Reading these
stories by John McGahern, it struck me that you could
adapt the game to works of literature. To be sure, if you
had a sup each time a character in this volume raised a
pint of stout or a tumbler of whiskey to his lips, you
would slump to the floor in a stupor within the first
hundred pages. Whether in bars or pubs, at funeral
wakes or in the pr ivacy of their own homes,
McGahern’s menfolk are never slow to take a drop.
Drink is by no means the only recurrent theme in these
tales of Irish life: love, sex, sport, manual labour, mar-
riage, religion and fiddle-playing all feature from time to
time. Not to mention priests, father-son relationships
(usually dysfunctional), farming, teaching and, of course,
death. The narrator of the opening story encounters a
man going home to bury his brother, while the last story
has three brothers laying their uncle to rest.
This is not altogether inappropriate, given that the
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
 FICTION
collection has been issued in the after math of
McGahern’s own recent death. Reissued, to be more
accurate. Twenty-seven of these pieces appeared in The
Collected Stories (1992); seven of the original thirty-four
have been removed from that edition and just two new
ones have been added: the title story, and ‘Love of the
World’. In describing this as a volume of ‘new and
selected stories’, then, the publishers have been simulta-
neously truthful and misleading.
To be fair, many of the old stories are well worth a
revisit. Among them, ‘The Recruiting Officer’, about
a disaffected teacher; ‘All Sorts of Impossible Things’,
in which death casts a poignant shadow over the
friendship between two hare-coursing enthusiasts;
‘Gold Watch’, where a father spurns his son’s attempt
at reconciliation; and the companion pieces ‘Eddie
Mac’ and ‘The Conversion of William Kirkwood’,
about a pregnant housemaid’s abandonment by her
lover and the loyalty she is shown, years later, by her
employer. These are not merely classic McGahern, but
classics of the short-story form.
But let us turn to the two new stories. ‘Creatures of
the Earth’ centres on a widow, Mrs Waldron, moving to
the coast with her much-loved cat after the death of her
husband. On her solitary walks along the seashore, she
befriends an old shepherd who is training a collie to
work his sheep. But the tentative connection with him
may not bring the comfort Mrs Waldron would have
wished, and her loneliness is made the more acute with
the mysterious disappearance of her cat. Meanwhile, in
‘Love of the World’, the marriage of a young couple
turns sour when the husband, Harkin, a football-playing
policeman, is relocated to a remote station after his part
in the death of an itinerant during a police visit to a
travellers’ camp. When a heart attack causes him to leave
the Gardai altogether, his wife’s taking of an office job at
the local cattle mart provokes a shocking reaction from
the emasculated Harkin.
Seen in conjunction, these are two bleak stories, redo-
lent of loss and failures of communication, that evoke a
deeply melancholic tone characteristic of much of the
collection. McGahern, in his novels as well as his short
fiction, could be a miserable bugger. What redeems this
luminously crafted collection from a tendency towards
the pessimistic or depressive is the conversational pulse
of humanity that reverberates through the stories. Even
in their direst moments, the people of McGahern’s
fictional composite of Ireland never cease talking to one
another, or to themselves, in the search for a life-affirming
purpose; or, at least, for a way of being. If all else fails,
there is always the drink. And, despite the reissuing of
an old book under a new guise, who can begrudge
McGahern’s publishers the right to raise a glass to the
old feller now that he’s gone?
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68
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
C HARLIE C AMPBELL
SAMPER IDEM
A MAZING D ISGRACE
★
By James Hamilton-Paterson
(Faber & Faber 320pp £12.99)
G OD KNOWS THE average sporting autobiography is
painful enough to read – a thin life story, stretched on
the rack, until the requisite 250 pages have been filled.
But how much more painful must it be to write one? No
one knows this better than Gerald Samper, the hero of
James Hamilton-Paterson’s new novel, which continues
where the hilarious Cooking with Fernet Branca left off.
Samper is a ghostwriter to the stars – or ‘temporarily
famous idiots’, as he prefers to call them. He would rather
write the biography of the celebrated composer Max
Christ, but earns his keep instead with books on skiers
(Downhill All the Way!) and racing drivers (Hot Seat!). He
broods on his Tuscan mountain top, preoccupied (in no
particular order) with his digestive system, the size of his
penis, the state of the modern world, and the fearless,
one-armed round-the-world sailor, Millie Cleat.
Millie is the subject of his latest book. She captures the
popular imagination with her endless solo nautical feats –
sailing around Australia, then back to Britain, then around
the globe, always in record time. After each expedition, her
long-suffering husband is only too happy for her to attempt
another. The public and press love her. Only Samper and a
few oceanographers – whose survey she had expensively
disrupted through her reckless sailing – remain unmoved.
When Millie joins an ‘envirospiritual’ movement ‘whose
approach to the oceans is more mystical than scientific’,
Samper spots an excellent opportunity to discredit her.
Millie is convinced she has seen the face of Neptune in
the depths and that sounds emanating from the bottom of
the sea are from an unknown language, uttered by undis-
covered life forms. Needless to say it is nothing of the sort,
but, as George Orwell put it, there are some ideas so stu-
pid that only an intellectual could believe them, and it is
not long before Millie has academic endorsement of her
findings, and the game’s afoot.
The other woman in Samper’s life is his neighbour
Marta, a frizzy-haired composer with a familyful of
criminals and a houseful of junk. After she mysteriously
disappears, he keeps an eye on her house in her absence.
This leads to a wonderful scene in which he manages to
lock himself in and urinate from an upstairs window
onto a peeing policeman.
There are plenty of mishaps like this. But Samper’s
innate sense of his superiority shines through regardless.
The targets of his bile are numerous and widespread.
 FICTION
Turkey is described as a country that ‘only recently
abjured torture and honour killing in order to qualify for
EU membership, not because it thought them wrong’.
Nor can we relax. ‘The whole of Western culture [is]
drifting inexorably towards a generalized state of pornog-
raphy’ – a young violinist being ‘good enough not to
have to pose in a wet T-shirt on the front of her first CD’.
But there’s a contrasting tone here too, of concern
about the damage man is doing to the oceans. The
marine scientists have an affinity with the sea that Millie
could never understand; her relationship with it is all
about personal achievement.
R ICHARD G ODWIN
TRAIL OF TEARS
T HIRTEEN M OONS
★ sent by his aunt and uncle, map in hand, to find and man
By Charles Frazier
(Sceptre 432pp £17.99)
EARLY ON IN Charles Frazier’s grand historical novel of
the Cherokee Removal, the narrator, Will Cooper,
standing in his tenth decade at the dawn of the twenti-
eth century, wonders ‘whether it is an illness or a sin,
the need to write things down and fix the flowing world
in one rigid form’.
Will’s adoptive father, a Cherokee chief named Bear,
believes that words, ‘when they’ve been captured and
imprisoned on paper, become a barrier against the
world. Everything that happens is fluid, changeable’.
Will, of European blood, is intoxicated by writing. He
reads the Aeneid and the Morte d’Arthur, ensures that the
latest literary periodicals reach his wet, rugged corner
of North Carolina and sees that turkey quills are pre-
served from hunting trips for him to write with. He is
compelled to put his life on paper.
It is this meeting of two conflicting ideas of personal
and social history – as either mutable or irrevocable – that
gives Thirteen Moons its great wisdom. It also sows the
seeds of its failure as a novel: incoherent by nature, it lacks
the unity of Frazier’s huge-selling debut, the American
Civil War odyssey Cold Mountain. However, certain
inconsistencies of narrative and characterisation must be
set against the rich rewards of Frazier’s meditations on the
nature of a life, the passage of time, and America itself.
Frazier is capable, too, of beautiful prose, though we
must excuse the overreaching opening: ‘There is no
scatheless rapture. Love and time put me in this condition.
I am leaving soon for the Nightland, where all the ghosts
of men and animals yearn to travel.’ (A beautiful descrip-
tion of Will coming to terms with an Edison phonograph
a page later redeems him.) As America stands on the brink
69
If James Hamilton-Paterson isn’t as well known as he
should be, it is partly as a result of never having written
successive books in the same vein. Well, now he has
done so, and with tremendous verve. The author’s
intelligence and scepticism add bite to the comedy, and
make this book a joy to read. Cooking with Fernet Branca
was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won
Bookered Out, the BBC’s alternative award, but it is
rare for a comic novel to be taken seriously by judging
panels. As Samper himself says, however, ‘There are
more ways of being serious than by being serious.’
To order this book at £10.39, see LR Bookshop on page 27
of modernity, Will reflects on his long, strange life, aware
that, like Davy Crockett or Natty Bumppo, he is an
emblem of another age when America ‘was no more than
a strip of land stretching a couple of hundred miles west of
the Atlantic and the rest was just a very compelling idea’.
Orphaned at an early age, the twelve-year-old Will is
an obscure trading post. The westerly part of the map is a
fascinating blank, marked INDIAN TERRITORY; for
Will, ‘the lesson the map taught was that knowledge has
strict limits, and beyond that verge the world itself might
become equally unspecified and provisional’.
Bookish yet intrepid, Will has some growing up to do
en route, in scenes which seem designed with half an eye
on a Hollywood film, to match Anthony Minghella’s
2003 adaptation of Cold Mountain. Will encounters a
snake, a bear and an insane gambler named Featherstone,
whose beautiful daughter, Claire, Will briefly wins in a
poker game. He just about escapes with his colt, Waverley
(after Walter Scott), and once stationed in his post
befriends the Tennessee whiskey-slugging chief Bear.
His life proceeds episodically. He earns enough to buy
his trading post, and later, more land; he is adopted by
Bear; he befr iends the gambler Featherstone, the
Cherokee owner of a huge plantation who has adopted
the ways of the white man, and falls in lifelong love with
Claire, a cipher who drifts in and out of the narrative.
Will is both cultured and wild. He becomes the con-
duit between the Indians and the US Administration,
learning advocacy and journeying to Washington to plead
for his people’s rights with the maddening, borderline
psychopath President Jackson (contemporary allusions
very subtly worked in). As the government forces the
Cherokee people to resettle in Oklahoma (travelling what
became known as the Trail of Tears), Will’s role becomes
more complex. Does his veneration of the Noble Savages
come to any good? He tries to buy as much land as he
can for them to live on. He also becomes involved with
the soldiers trying to oust the Indians, and must track
down one clan member who has resisted removal – an act
which haunts him for the rest of his life.
The central narrative arc collapses at this point; as Will
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
 FICTION
becomes disillusioned and aimless, so too does Frazier.
Will’s role in leading the Indians into the Civil War is
brushed over: ‘as a subject, the entire period bores me
senseless’, he says, as if Frazier himself is exhausted at the
prospect of writing about the war again.
Nonetheless, it would be foolish to let these disap-
pointments override Frazier’s achievements. The opening
two thirds of the book are alive with wonder and adven-
ture. Frazier is a wonderfully sensual writer, with a deep
kinship to the damp Appalachian terrain on which he
lives. The changing of the Indian moons of the title are
beautifully evoked; if he ever wishes to write a frontier
cookbook, it will sell. A strong impression remains of a
marginal, remote and violent place, a new land where
‘getting what you wanted was largely a matter of claim-
ing what you wanted’.
Frazier is at his most effective as a novelist when he
subscribes to the Tolstoyan view of history as a grand
old mess, pushed forward by the fumbling of millions of
individuals. As Will acknowledges: ‘almost nothing in
life is epic or tragic at the moment of its enactment.
History in the making, at least on a personal level, is
almost exclusively pathetic. People suffer and die in
ignorance and delusion’. In such ignorance and delusion
old nations die – and new ones are born.
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D AVID P ROFUMO
HERBAL HORROR STORY
T HE P OISON D IARIES
★ tee it will scare them clean out of their little woollies.
By the Duchess of Northumberland
Illustrated by Colin Stimpson
(Pavilion Books 80pp £14.99)
GOSSIP AND POISON have much in common, being ubiq-
uitous, fascinating, and the kiss of death to some but a
substance on which others positively thrive. Belladonna, for
instance, has medicinal properties as well as fatal ones, and
there used to be Austrian forest folk who regularly swal-
lowed arsenic to improve their complexion. The notion of
what constitutes a poison is therefore indefinite: toxic
reactions differ between species and individuals (one man’s
meat, and all that) and so classification is relative rather than
absolute. In his seminal work The Boke of Venoms (1424),
Magister Santes de Ardoynis included sea hare, leopard’s
gall, cat’s brains and menstrual blood – along with a cure-all
antidote named the Confection of Cleopatra, a maceration
of scorpions and musk in wine. Until the scientific era, our
world went in terror of venom (‘the coward’s weapon’),
and convicted poisoners were often boiled alive. Yet who
can honestly claim never to have felt towards someone –
70
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
not necessarily a spouse, perhaps – as Dylan Thomas’s poor
Mr Pugh did to his hated wife, mixing in ‘the hissing
laboratory of his wishes’ a ‘venomous porridge unknown
to toxicologists which will scald and viper through her
until her ears fall off like figs, her toes grow big and black as
balloons, and steam comes screaming out of her navel’?
Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?
Last year there was considerable excitement (to say
nothing of gossip) when, as part of a £40 million horticul-
tural extravaganza at Alnwick Castle, the Duchess of
Northumberland opened a Poison Garden. This throwback
to mediaeval times was designed as an educational showcase
to the darker aspect of the apothecary’s craft, and included
opium poppies, cannabis, coca and hemlock. The negotia-
tions with police and public health inspectors for licences
to cultivate these species were complex, and some of them
are actually behind bars (the plants, not the inspectors). The
result was a spectacular success – Jane Northumberland is a
fairly spectacular Duchess, but I do wonder whether, were
she bound hand and foot and cast into one of the salmon
beats of the Tyne, she might not be seen to float.
I only ask because now comes a book, The Poison
Diaries, that purports to be from a manuscript discovered
in the castle grounds ‘relating to “Weed”, the great poi-
soner whose existence has been a state secret for 150
years’. There is even a letter tipped into the flyleaf from
Her Grace to ‘The Department of Toxicology’, expressing
her displeasure at the confiscation of the original and flatly
denying that the family is in possession of any further such
material (though I sense a sequel in the wind). The book
is highly entertaining – part herbal and part horror tale,
illustrated in true Grand Guignol style by Colin Stimpson
– and if you give it to the kiddies this Christmas I guaran-
The journal is written in the hand of young Weed, a
tousle-haired orphan resembling Sir Simon Rattle, who is
apprenticed to a cruel apothecary, whom he cordially
loathes (he describes his master as ‘a ripe pig fart’, and that’s
just the first paragraph of this delightfully uncouth narra-
tive). In classic mode, the youth finds a secret walled garden
filled with poisonous plants, and begins to hear them speak.
He makes a study of drawing and classifying them, and thus
the young weeder will receive some serious botanical infor-
mation, positive properties being noted as well as the more
gruesome symptoms, including convulsions, hallucinations,
frenzy, ‘horrible diarrhoea’, madness and paralysis. (There is
nothing quite as nasty as my favourite description of the
effects of cicutoxin after ingesting water hemlock, which
appears in the 1956 classic The Book of Poisons by Gustav
Schenk.) Weed becomes enthralled by these plants: ‘All of
us here love you and wish to set you free,’ say their Siren
voices. A Herculean struggle ensues for the direction in
which he will apply his new-found knowledge.
As well as the deadly Nightshade, we meet along the
way some mischievous Lords and Ladies – a bunch of
 FICTION
deranged toffs who delight in luring children to their
doom (‘We don’t like ’em, we hunt ’em’) – plus the allur-
ing Nicotinia, a seductive Southern belle with a nasty
cough (‘I don’t mind takin’ it slow’), and the diminutive
Ergot, a vengeful general with a lamentable Napoleonic
accent and an army of ants. My favourite illustrations were
of the soporific Mandrake – perhaps mention could be
made in any future editions of the myth that they sprouted
below gallows, engendered by the final ejaculations of
hanged men? – and Nux Vomica, a glasshouse dominatrix
aka Strict Nina. In a Perfume-like process, the boy becomes
progressively deranged by his arcane experiences, and the
pages of his journal are blotched, spattered and blood-
stained as the saga becomes more ominous, and the desire
for revenge curdles his thoughts.
There’s a weedy little love interest, too: ‘Dear Marigold,
she always knows how to make me feel better,’ writes the
swain, but naturally he keeps his feelings to himself, as he
W ILLIAM B RETT
EATING MISERY
H ALF OF A Y ELLOW S UN
★ spectives is a bold move by a young novelist, and she pulls it
By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
(Fourth Estate 433pp £14.99)
UGWU IS A teenager from a village in Nigeria who goes
to work as a houseboy for a university lecturer,
Odenigbo. His aunt tells him that if he works hard, he
will eat well. ‘You will even eat meat every day,’ she says.
Food is everywhere and everything in Half of a Yellow
Sun. Ugwu becomes a talented cook, while Harrison,
the neighbouring houseboy, takes a snobbish pleasure
from his knowledge of obscure European dishes like
stuffed garden eggs and lemon meringue pie. Odenigbo
cheats on his girlfriend, Olanna, after his mother feeds
him witch-doctored rice. And a priest asks Olanna, who
is unable to forgive her lover, ‘What will you do with
the misery you have chosen? Will you eat misery?’
Food is a versatile metaphor in Chimamanda Ngozi
Adichie’s second novel, set before and during the Nigerian
civil conflict of 1967–70. When the eastern provinces of
Nigeria declared independence, the new state – Biafra –
was starved into submission by the central government.
The values and associations attached to different types of
food, as well as its simple necessity, give Adichie a wide
scope in which to work. Her talent is now beyond doubt,
judging by this moving and accomplished follow-up to
Purple Hibiscus, her enormously successful debut.
Purple Hibiscus was a coming-of-age story. But it also
began to explain Nigeria, and to tell the country’s history.
Half of a Yellow Sun continues this project explicitly.
71
is not worthy of her affections. Covertly, he distils some
belladonna for her to use to cure poor old Nanny
Gregson, but Marigold – in an ill-starred attempt to open
Weed’s eyes to her own secret love for him – takes a fatal
overdose. The apprentice, his mind finally turned, con-
cocts a cocktail of all the plants, slips it to his master at
breakfast (it is disguised by the rum that he habitually
takes in his tea: I wonder if that is a Percy family special?),
and then gloats over him as he dashes to the outhouse.
We are not spared the particulars of ‘agonised gurgles of
heaving sickness and the splashes of fountains of vomit
hitting the walls and floor’, and the – postlapsarian? –
detail as ‘wafts of the most vile smells came through the
little apple-shaped hole that was cut in the door’, as the
apothecary expires. Weed gleefully sketches him, steals his
gold, and sallies forth into our wide world. Bill and Ben
this certainly is not. Sleep tight, my little ones.
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Focusing on the 1960s, it describes the arc of post-inde-
pendence politics and post-colonial thought through tribal
coups and massacres to civil war. Adichie tells the story by
turns through the eyes of Ugwu, the impoverished house-
boy, Richard, a nervous British ex-pat, and Olanna, the
daughter of a chieftain. Writing from three disparate per-
off with remarkable savvy and confidence. She did not live
through this period herself, but as a Nigerian is naturally
interested. So she employs similarly marginalised but
nevertheless involved voices. Ugwu serves the rich and
famous, gaining glimpses of the political and ideological
turmoil of the times and providing his own insight based
on the animistic traditions of his rural upbringing. Richard
is naturally excluded by his race, but also symbolises the
involvement of whites in Africa. He represents the colo-
nialism of the past, combined with the humanitarian com-
passion of the future. Olanna, an intricate and exquisitely
drawn character, is sophisticated yet primitive, snobbish yet
empathetic, confident yet painfully withdrawn. She seems
loath to belong to any tribal, ethnic, social or intellectual
grouping. She is at times completely removed from reality,
but at other times seems the very essence of life in Nigeria.
This combination of detachment and involvement in the
voices of the narrators complements Adichie’s narrative
style. Despite describing grotesque murders and passionate
love affairs, she never overdoes it. For instance, the brutal
rape and murder of one character is alluded to first, ellipti-
cally, in a news broadcast, and then assumed (but not
mentioned) for twenty pages. Adichie lets the suspicion of
horror take root first, and then allows it to sink in gradually.
This kind of subtlety makes reading her an extraordinary,
unsettling but ultimately satisfying experience.
Adichie is already the new voice of her country, and
looks set to become the voice of Africa entire.
To order this book at £11.99, see LR Bookshop on page 27
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
 BAD SEX
T HE BAD S EX in Fiction Awards T OM F LEMING
were founded in 1993 in an attempt
to gently dissuade authors from
including unconvincing, perfunctory,
embar rassing or redundant sex
A Tide of Words
scenes in otherwise sound literary
novels. To qualify, therefore, a cer-
tain standard must have been met in
Leaps High and Free
the first place, and with several first-
rate authors having already been put
forward for this year’s title (David Mitchell, Thomas
Pynchon, Irvine Welsh and Iain Hollingshead to name
but a few), the standard is undoubtedly as high as ever.
David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green (Sceptre) includes
a scene in which the young narrator witnesses an al
fresco tryst. Mitchell succeeds, here, in comparing every
stage of the sexual act to something relating to an early
1980s childhood:
If Dawn Madden’s breasts were a pair of Danishes,
Debbie Crombie’s got two Space Hoppers. Each
armed with a gribbly nipple. Tom Yew kissed them
in turn and his saliva glistened in the April sun. I
know watching was wrong but I couldn’t not. Tom
Yew slipped off her red panties and stroked the cressy
hair there ...
Tom Yew got on her and sort of jiggled there and
she gasped like he was giving her a Chinese burn and
wrapped her legs round him, froggily. Now he
moved up and down, Man-from-Atlantisly. His silver
chain jiggled on his neck.
Now her grubby soles met like they were praying.
Now his skin was glazed in a roast pork sweat.
Now she made a noise like a tortured Moomintroll.
Now Tom Yew’s body jerkjerked judderily jack-
knifed and a noise like a ripping cable tore out of
him. Once more, like he’d been booted in the balls.
Her fingernails’d sunk salmony welts into his arse.
Debbie Crombie’s mouth made a perfect O.
This deserves an award of some kind, if only for bring-
ing the concept of a Chinese burn into a sex scene. But
it suffers from being too expertly stuffed with references
and similes to be credible, and for that it qualifies.
Mitchell’s ‘cressy hair’ is good, but it’s nothing com-
pared to the sex–food analogy found in Irvine Welsh’s
Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs (Jonathan Cape). From
one scene comes this tasty set-piece, in which a man has
been persuaded to service an obese, older woman in
exchange for undoing a spell:
Ah’ve nae cream tae lubricate this. Ye’ll have tae use
spit. Howk it up, she commanded ...
Work it in, Mary urged, as Skinner took his thick
green slime and spread it like a chef might glaze some
pastry, at the same time slowly breaching and explor-
ing. A ludicrously distended clitoris popped out from
nowhere like a jack-in-the-box, the size of a small
72
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
boy’s penis, and disconcertingly
strangulated groans coming
from the bed told Skinner that
he was hitting the spot.
This is only the half of it. It is both
Bad in the sense that it qualifies for
this prize and ‘bad’ in the sense of
being genuinely unpleasant. Welsh
has always succeeded in making the
grisly readable, but this passage is
sufficiently gratuitous to make the shortlist.
In contrast to the fruits of Welsh’s sturdy imagination,
however, the majority of this year’s nominations are
characterised by how overwhelmingly ‘good’ the bad
sex is. This is perhaps unsurprising, as good sex leads to
gushing writing, often from authors who are otherwise
the very models of articulate self-control. Lachlan’s War
by Michael Cannon (Jonathan Cape), for example:
He remains erect, rhythmically pumping. His explo-
sive climax deferred, she feels herself float. Her
hanging breasts bob slackly, rocking with expanding
waves that radiate out from between her legs. She
climaxes before he does, the snort from her nostrils
dispersing grit. He continues. With surprise she cli-
maxes again, and moments later feels herself rising
once more on the upward slope. Young men are
better, this one better still. His pubes and thighs are
slick with her juice, she, his marvellous ripe, ripe
fruit. She pants, exhaling words between thrusts,
‘Don’t … stop …let’s go … for the … hat-trick,’
and gives a strangled laugh at her own humour.
The words ‘pumping’ and ‘explosive’ are classic Bad
Sex, ranking up there with ‘member’ and ‘throbbing’;
though ‘hat-trick’ deserves praise. Most impressive is
that the woman climaxes ‘with surprise’. But there’s no
surprise where Jack Lancaster, the virile hero of Iain
Hollingshead’s excellent Twentysomething (Duckworth), is
concerned, and he too gets in a decent explosion:
Oh Jack, she was moaning now, her curves pushed up
against me, her crotch taut against my bulging trousers,
her hands gripping fistfuls of my hair. She reaches for
my belt. I groan too, in expectation. And then I’m
inside her, and everything is pure white as we’re lost in
a commotion of grunts and squeaks, flashing images
and explosions of a million little particles.
Yet another explosion, this time resulting in a sort of
semi-apotheosis, from The Religion by Tim Willocks
(Jonathan Cape):
She was, in all things, true. He slid his hands on to
her breasts, moisture lingering in the creases beneath
them, and his memory of their magnificence was
shamed by the beauty they embodied now. Love and
desire became one, each as overmastering as the
other … He turned her about, her eyes bedazed and
rolling with transport, and he bent her across the
 BAD SEX

cold steel face of the anvil. He unfastened his flies authors whose books were put forward this year included
and unlimbered himself and she rose up on tiptoe to Sarah Waters and Will Self, both ex-shortlistees, but
receive him. He bent his knees to get beneath her they failed to deliver. Self ’s The Book of Dave (Viking)
and entered her from behind and her feet left the might still scrape onto the longlist, though, with an
floor and she called out to God and convulsed with excellent scene in which his pragmatic, cab-driving hero
each slow stroke, her head thrown back and her eye- approaches lovemaking ‘as he would call over a run:
lids aflutter, and her cries filled the forge until she leave on left tit, comply throat, comply mouth, left shoulder,
squeezed him from inside and he exploded to a right hip, forward cunt … The junctions of her body were
prayer of his own within her body. well signed’.
If it’s not explosions of some sort then it’s water imagery. Entries are still flooding in. We can end the round-up
Mark Haddon’s A Spot of Bother (once more, Jonathan of the current nominations with a passage from Thomas
Cape) contains a scene in which there are both: Pynchon’s eagerly awaited Against the Day (Jonathan
And she realised that it was going to happen and she Cape). Last year there was inter-species sex involving a
heard herself saying, ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ and even hearing woman and a lobster. This year, thanks to Pynchon,
the sound of her own voice didn’t break the spell. there is love – almost – between a man and a spaniel
And it swept over (though whether it
her like surf sweep- qualifies as bad, rather
ing over sand then than simply over-the-
falling back and top and very funny, sex,
sweeping up over remains to be seen).
the sand again and ‘A – you say,’ gears in
falling back. his mind beginning
Images went off to crank, ‘“lap” –
in her head like lit- French … lap-dog?’
tle fireworks. The Somehow gathering
smell of coconut. that Ruperta had
Brass firedogs. trained her toy
By far the most fulfill- spaniel to provide
ing exper ience of all intimate ‘French’
these passages, however, caresses of the
is had by the heroine tongue for the plea-
of Julia Glass’s The sure of its mistress ...
Whole World Over The dog, it
(Hutchinson); and she too is swept away by water seemed to Reef, was giving him sidewise looks
metaphors, an ocean of vocabulary in fact: which if they’d come from a woman you would
And then before her inner eye, a tide of words have had to call flirtatious. Finally after an extended
leaped high and free, a chaotic joy like frothing farewell notable for its amount of saliva exchange,
rapids: truncate, adjudicate, fornicate, frivolous, rivulet, Mouffette slowly padded over to the divan where
violet, oriole, orifice, conifer, aquifer, allegiance, alacrity … Reef was sitting and jumped up to sit next to him
all the words this time not a crowding but a heavenly …
chain, an ostrich fan, a vision as much as an orgasm, ‘Oboy, oboy.’ He stroked the diminutive spaniel for a
a release of something deep in the core of her while until, with no warning, she jumped off the couch
altered brain, words she thought she’d lost for good. and slowly went into the bedroom, looking back now
It nearly deafened her (but not quite) to the other, and then over her shoulder. Reef followed, taking out
more alarming wave – the groaning and happy curs- his penis, breathing heavily through his mouth. ‘Here,
ing that came from Stan. Mouffie, nice big dog bone for you right here, lookit this,
This heady brew of mixed metaphor (a deafening vision yeah, seen many of these lately? come on, smells good
of words?) and tautology (‘nearly … (but not quite)’), not don’t it, mmm, yum!’ and so forth, Mouffette mean-
to mention the purple prose and time angling her head, edging
the presumption that the word closer, sniffing with curiosity.
‘orifice’ is worth remembering at visit Literary Review online ‘That’s right, now, o-o-open
all, let alone during sex, puts up… good girl, good
Glass among the frontrunners www.literaryreview.co.uk Mouffette now let’s just put
this year. this – yaahhgghh!’
Some prominent Br itish Reader, she bit him.

73
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007

T HE M URMUR OF S TONES
★ C ORRESPONDENT
By Thomas H Cook
(Quercus 304pp £12.99)
S CHIZOPHRENIA evokes pity and
concern, but also, in the sufferer’s
blood relations, terror of a condition
that seems to be genetic. In this scary
portrait of what happens to one
American family after the death of
the narrator’s father and the drown-
ing of his nephew, we are drawn into
a world where people hear voices
and see actions that others do not
recognise – which is not to say they
don’t exist, for our conception of
reality is rocked by Cook’s remark-
able writing. Is the drowned boy’s
brilliant, unstable mother right to
suspect her husband of murder? Is
her brother right to suspect her too
of murders past and planned?
Although the story is based on an
unnatural death and there is a jolt of
surprise on the last page, this subtle,
suspenseful tragedy is as much a literary
novel as a mystery story.
S HARP O BJECTS
★ ★
By Gillian Flynn
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson 336pp £12.99)
CAMILLE Preaker is a self-harming
journo with words scored like an
autobiography on her own flesh –
wicked, nasty, babydoll, whore. Her
editor sends her back to her home
town in Missouri where a serial mur-
derer is killing teenage girls. Camille
must confront her neurotic self-
absorbed mother and precocious
teenage half-sister, who both seem to
be key players in the g ruesome
events. Camille’s precarious mental
balance teeters as she gets involved
with suspects, witnesses and the out-
of-town voice of sanity, the police
detective. This is a stylish chiller
about housewives who don’t recog-
nise their own desperation, while the
reader recognises with fascinated
clarity the nastiness and vacuity of
life in an updated Stepford.
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
CRIME
J ESSICA M ANN
IN THE E VIL DAY
★ (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 288pp £12.99)
By Peter Temple
(Quercus 432pp £12.99)
IT only takes a Google-click to show
that we all have many namesakes; my
full name is shared by (among others)
an actor, a lawyer and a good many
schoolgirls. All the same, it’s discon-
certing to find it used for a character
in a thriller. I read on tenterhooks in
case she met a sticky end, since this
book has a violent death on every
other page. The first few take place
in a lawless African state; the rest in
Europe in converging stories about
the two main characters, one a for-
mer mercenar y calling himself
Niemand (ie Mr Nobody), the other
having returned to his own identity
as the heir to a large property in
Germany. Both live in the world of
surveillance and suspicion. This is an
exciting, well-written story and a
frightening demonstration that in the
computer age there are no secrets.
S KIN AND B LISTER
★ (Little, Brown 352pp £12.99)
By Victoria Blake
(Orion 320pp £18.99)
AN interesting addition to the over-
flowing shelf of Oxford crime novels,
complete with literary quotations,
the Radcliffe Camera on the cover,
and an inside view of college life, this
is the third novel featuring neurotic,
alcoholic ex-world-class-athlete Sam
Falconer. To rescue her own kid-
napped brother, Sam has to unearth
the buried memories of a traumatic
childhood, because the crime turns
out to be connected with their
estranged father, who committed
numerous murders in Norther n
Ireland in the 1970s. The combina-
tion of well-observed family life,
academia and political violence work
well, and so does this convincingly
crazy, mixed-up private eye.
74
T HE F OREIGN
★
By Alan Furst
BEGINNING with the tragic vicious-
ness of the Spanish Civil War, the
story moves on to Berlin and Paris. It
is 1938 and an expatr iate Italian
journalist is fighting Mussolini in his
own way by writing for an under-
ground newspaper, but when its edi-
tor is murdered by Italian secret
police, words are inadequate and
resistance requires deeds and daring.
This espionage novel is by an author
whose fans liken his style to Graham
Greene’s and his themes to Patrick
O’Brian’s. It’s certainly true that
Furst writes with controlled power
about pre-war anti-fascism and the
war itself. He lays out the human
(usually male) condition for inspec-
tion in a series of chronicles of the
per iod that seem outstandingly
atmospheric and well-informed. I
find them admirable but unlovable.
H OLLYWOOD S TATION
By Joseph Wambaugh
WAMBAUGH began the fashion for
describing police officers corrupted
or defiled by immersion in humani-
ty’s filth. Set in Hollywood’s under-
world, flawed cops deal with violent,
broke and stoned characters. The
style is witty, the plot suspenseful and
the message grim.
S PECIAL A SSIGNMENTS
★
By Boris Akunin
(Weidenfeld &Nicolson 352pp £12.99)
C OURT Counsellor Fandor in, a
younger, posher and more debonair
version of Sherlock Holmes, comes
up against an uglier and more outra-
geous version of Raffles in nine-
teenth-century Russia. Intr icate,
incredible, pleasurable.

O BJECTS OF D ESIRE
★ ring the dividing line between fact
By C J Emerson
(Allison & Busby 304pp £18.99)
A twenty-first-century Gothic-style
shocker set in the Welsh countryside.
Jess is a social worker leading a glam-
ourless life, but sixteen years ago she
had been a pop star, who became
pregnant and gave her baby up for
adoption. She has never been able to
forgive herself and now, single and
childless as a result of her own choic-
es, is expiating her own guilt. Her
work is sickening to do and equally
sickening to read about, as she deals
with cases of sexual abuse and mur-
dered children, molested babies, tor-
ture and trafficking. This first novel is
assured, densely plotted, heartfelt and
regrettably credible.
S ECRET S ERVANT
★ plot to nuke Los Angeles, thereby
By Kate Westbrook
(John Murray 320pp £16.99)
THIS highly enjoyable Bond spin-off
is narrated by ‘Miss Moneypenny’,
CRIME
with historical events cleverly blur-
and fiction. Westbrook (aka
Samantha Weinberg) beats previous
pretend-Flemings hands down.
B LOOD DANCING
★ Nefertiti by Nick Drake (Bantam
By Jonathan Gash
(Allison & Busby 288pp £18.99)
UNLOVABLE rogues in Manchester’s
underworld, with quirky action,
impenetrable vernacular and explicit
viciousness making this series very
different in tone from this author’s
more accessible Lovejoy.
W ILD F IRE
★
By Nelson de Mille
(Time Warner 528pp £14.99)
MEGALOMANIAC plutocrats concoct a
provoking Amer ica to nuke the
Middle East. No James Bond to the
rescue, just a wisecracking New York
cop. A good read, as long as you
don’t stop and think.
Having received about 250 crime novels
this year and read some of all and all of
some, those I liked best were:
The Dead Hour (Bantam Press 352pp
£12.99) by Denise Mina, a brilliant
portrayal of Glasgow’s underside.
Press 352pp £12.99), a traditional
whodunit in an original setting.
The Summer Snow by Rebecca Pawel
(Soho Press 320pp £14.99), the
fourth in a series based in mid twen-
tieth-century Spain.
Sovereign by C J Sansom (Macmillan
380pp £16.99), a brilliant evocation
of tyranny in Tudor England.
Wash This Blood Clean from my Hand
by Fred Vargas (Harvill Secker 400pp
£11.99), featuring a sensitive, intel-
lectual Parisian policeman.
And finally, Blood and Honey (320pp
£6.99) and One Under (352pp £9.99),
annual instalments of the most sensi-
ble, sensitive and subtle police-proce-
durals of all, by Graham Hurley.
 N IGHT & DAY G RAND P OETRY P RIZE
THIS month’s poems were on the R EPORT BY T OM F LEMING
subject of fame. Frank Mc Donald
wins first prize and £350, Dorothy
Pope second and £150; all others printed receive £10, Parodies cannot win first place, but may be eligible for
(kindly sponsored by the Mail on Sunday). D Shepherd
came very close to winning but his poem was let down
by a muddled final verse.
Next month’s subject is ‘mosaic’, and entries should
reach these offices (44 Lexington Street, London W1F
FIRST PRIZE
CAESAR CONTEMPLATES HIS FAME
by Frank Mc Donald
To think I envied Alexander when
fame was a laurel I was keen to wear;
here I am shunning the accursed stare
of slaves and sycophants. Tell me what men
will speak my name a thousand years from now;
will Rome with all her bustle, power and charms
still send her ships, her legions and her arms
to the limits of the universe? And how
will my Gaul be governed in those distant years?
Here I survey the forum with its trade
and weigh the contribution I have made
to human worth. Tomorrow my plans, my fears,
my very grasp on life will at a stroke
be dust with Alexander. Who will praise
the prose I laboured on? What poems or plays
will honour Julius Caesar? Triumphal smoke
holds people’s notice for the briefest time
and then they move to worship something else.
But for the moment my ambitious pulse
beats strongly, and the clamour of my fame
deafens my ears to the murmurings of fate,
letting me ponder immortality.
On the eve of the Ides, here on Rome’s balcony,
I gaze on a city that whispers: ‘I am great.’
SECOND PRIZE
GRACE
by Dorothy Pope
A starlit, lamplit balcony of stone
and you and I some yards apart – your son,
my husband, off somewhere – and you, alone
in shadowed alcove drinking wine – what fun
it would have been to talk to you, I thought.
I had real things to say, a few in fact,
not just fan’s gush. I longed to speak. You caught
me looking at you twice, was glad of tact,
enjoyed your solitary drink but when
the bell for Hamlet’s final act recalled
us all and people bottlenecked back in,
you joined me, strolled me in as my reward.
‘Bit parky,’ you invited. To this day,
your charm’s what I remember, not the play.
76
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
0LW) by 31 January. As always
poems should rhyme, scan and
make sense, all in under 24 lines.
second or subsequent prizes.
It was sad to hear that Griselda Scott, a stalwart of the
Literary Review poetry competition, has passed away at
the age of 102. She was a favourite of Auberon Waugh,
and her poems will be much missed in these pages.
FAME by D Shepherd
You venturesome misses whose hope is that kisses
Will lead to becoming a satisfied wife
Must take care to reject as a husband elect
A person who leads a celebrity’s life.
It may seem that acclaim confers permanent fame,
That always the rivers of money will flow,
But the twink of an eye and that river runs dry
When someone arrives and is stealing the show.
However one scans it fame’s mostly sic transit.
Footballers, guitarists, soap actresses, cooks,
Just a moment of fame and it’s ‘What was her name?
I can’t quite remember – she’s losing her looks’.
She should find, if she can, a professional man.
No glory, no glamour, no fame, no renown,
But he beavers away and, unceasing, his pay
Keeps on going up while a celeb’s goes down.
If she’s rich she may think there’s a chance here for mink;
In Government service a husband she sought
Who might in reward be upraised to a Lord
And getting for nothing what others have bought.
MEETING THE FAMOUS by J M Harvey
My expectations proved a flight of fancy
that swiftly drained of colour, plumage shed
as I waited to be moved – by awe transported
but found myself indifferent instead.
His words – whole lines – flew past like flocks of sparrows
a-twitter in the twilight glow of fame
but not one perched, no wing tip brushed to thrill me
no sudden flood of insight filled my brain.
In vain I listened, hoping for an echo –
one drifting feather, brilliant, from a bird
less brown and altogether more exotic
than his ordinary voice so glumly heard.
I queued to buy his book – a slim collection
to roost with several others on my shelf
he signed it with a biro – I just thanked him
and kept the disappointment to myself.
FAME by Colin Pearson
Shakespeare didn’t seek for it. He just learned how to write
What would bring the mysteries of life most artfully to light.

Mozart was another not at all obsessed by fame.

Bach and Bruegel. Alan Bennett. No Publicity’s their game.

The best have better things to do than shout ‘Look, this

is me!
I’m famous, rich, and sexy and forever on TV!’

(Likewise for this reason I could never give the nod

To the many who declare themselves to be The Son of God.)

On the bad side, names proliferate. I’d mention one or two

Of the modern ‘poets’ and ‘artists’ if I could remember who.

I dismiss all politicians after Pericles (perhaps).

They’re the most self-seeking, arrogant, despicable of chaps.

In short I favour those who aren’t celebrity-obsessed

And whose lust for fame, if any, is with modesty suppressed.

My team against the universe? Selection isn’t hard.

For openers – get your pads on Amadeus and The Bard.

If I have to choose a modern poet (it goes against the grain)

It must be one who scans and rhymes and isn’t ‘cool’ or vain.

Pam Ayres ticks all the boxes. Well, I met her once or twice.
And she isn’t Donne or Marvell but she’s really very nice.

LET’S HEAR IT FOR FAME!

by Bill Webster
Fame is the spur. Be glad, old Milt,
That you’re not living at this hour:
What glitters now is seen as gilt,
And sweet success will soon turn sour.
No sooner have you made your name
Than someone’s hired to write your life,
Debunking where he daren’t defame
To play his part as Hack the Knife.
You’ve risen high above the crowd
And for that sin he’ll make you pay;
His aim’s to make your shoulders bowed,
Your height so many feet of clay.
And when you die, that final breath
Will see you prey to carrion culture:
The Life that follows after death
Will be like droppings from a vulture.

Fame is the spur, the goad that pricks

And fools resent for not being theirs;
Though few stay on from those it picks,
What they have won the whole world shares.
 SILENCED VOICES
T HE LARGEST STATE in West L UCY P OPESCU
Africa, Niger lies on the edge of
the Sahara and shares borders with MAMANE ABOU AND OUMAROU KEITA
seven countries including Algeria,
Chad, Libya and Nigeria. The country came under
French rule in the late 1890s. Since its independence in
1960, Niger has grappled with political instability and is
frequently ravaged by drought. It is rated as one of the
world’s poorest countries by the United Nations.
Niger’s first elected president, Hamani Diori, intro-
duced a one-party state which survived until a military
coup in 1974. For the next twenty-six years Niger was
ruled mainly by the military, except for a brief period
between 1993 and 1996. Multi-party elections were
held in autumn 1999. A former member of the military,
Tandja Mamadou, won in the second round with nearly
60 per cent of the vote in an election judged by
observers to have been free and fair. He had taken part
in the coup which overthrew Hamani Diori, in 1974,
and subsequently served as interior minister. The new
civilian government was inaugurated in January 2000.
Tandja was re-elected in December 2004 for a second
term with 65 per cent of the vote.
Niger has one of the lowest literacy rates in the world, violates Niger law, which states that detainees should be
so radio is the most important outlet for news and infor-
mation. Although independent radio stations have prolif-
erated in recent years, the state controls much of the
nation’s broadcasting. There is also a government-run
daily newspaper and a handful of privately owned papers.
Although our Foreign Office reports that since the
return to civilian rule the human rights situation has
improved in Niger, with an active civil society and an
independent press, recently there has been a crackdown
on journalists. Human rights organisations condemned
the sentencing of Mamane Abou and Oumarou Keita,
managing editor and editor of the weekly Le Républicain
newspaper respectively. The two journalists were arrested
on 4 August and sentenced on charges of ‘publishing
false information’ and ‘defaming the state of Niger’ on 1
September. Although the legality of the trial was con-
tested by the journalists’ lawyers, Justice Chaibou
Moussa allegedly disregarded this protest. An appeals
court in Niger upheld the eighteen-month jail sentences
for the two journalists on 25 September.
Abou and Keita were arrested following the publication
of an article in July by Le Républicain which suggested that Abou and Oumarou Keita, and to adopt a law decrimi-
the government’s strengthening of diplomatic relations
with Iran and Venezuela was happening at the expense of
its relations with Western countries. Prime Minister
Hama Amadou was accused in the article of ‘wooing the
Iranians’, and he allegedly lodged a complaint against the
two journalists which resulted in their arrest. They were
given a one-day trial on 14 August, where defence
lawyers walked out in protest at the handling of the case.
In addition to their imprisonment, Abou and Keita have
78
LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2006 / Jan 2007
been ordered to pay a fine of 5
million CFA Francs (approximately
7,670 Euros) each.
Mamane Abou has been arrested
several times following the publication of articles in his
newspaper. He was sentenced to six months in prison in
November 2004 for libel, but was released on probation
in January 2005.
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists
(CPJ), the defendants claim that the government is also
punishing them for a series of articles, dating back to
April, that alleged government corruption in primary-
education financing.
‘This outrageous verdict punishes Mamane Abou and
Oumarou Keita for doing their job of scrutinising gov-
ernment actions,’ CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon
said. ‘We call on the authorities to release Mamane
Abou and Oumarou Keita immediately, and to stop
using criminal laws to punish journalists for their work.’
The journalists are being detained in separate prisons,
some distance from Niamey, which gives their lawyers,
family and friends, who are all based in the capital, limited
access to them. Their lawyers have claimed that this
kept in a detention facility within the court’s jurisdiction.
On 28 August, a third journalist was jailed in Niger in
connection with his work. Salif Dago, a reporter for the
privately owned newspaper L’Enquêteur, was tried on 31
August, also on charges of publishing false information,
in connection with a story headlined ‘Black mass in
Niamey cemetery’. The article apparently recounted a
macabre ritual involving the killing of a baby by an
unidentified man. On 15 September, Dago was sen-
tenced to six months in prison.
Responding to the arrest of a third journalist in less
than a month, Simon added: ‘We are deeply troubled by
the current crackdown against the private press in Niger
… the authorities must stop using outdated criminal
laws to harass and jail jour nalists.’ According to
Boubacar Diallo, President of the Niger Association of
Independent Press Editors, on 23 September in Niamey
local journalists’ and civil society organisations demon-
strated against government persecution of the press.
Readers may like to send appeals calling upon the
Niger authorities to release unconditionally Mamane
nalising press offences in accordance with the public
commitment made by President Mamadou Tandja
during the 2004 presidential campaign, to:
His Excellency Monsieur Mamadou Tandja
Président de la République
Présidence de la République
Palais de la République
Niamey, Niger
Fax: 00 227 20 73 34 30
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