Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Anne Sebba

Kissing and telling with gusto

Harriette Wilson’s Memoirsintroduced by Lesley BlanchPhoenix, £9.99, pp. 471, ISBN 1842126326 What do a modern New York psychoanalyst and a Regency London courtesan have in common? Both offer escape, relaxation and individual attention; both are expensive. ‘In place of the alcove there is the analyst’s office. But basically the functions of both analyst and courtesan have the same principle,’ explains Lesley Blanch in her expansive introduction to the memoirs of the most famous of English courtesans, Harriette Wilson. For some 15 years Harriette Wilson was all the rage in London political society. Men were desperate for her favours, just for a night if they could not be her long-term protector.

Saturday

David Caute

Captain Yossarian rides again

Closing Time by Joseph Heller Scribner, £7.99, pp. 464 ISBN 0743239806 Fortune granted Joseph Heller’s generation, raised during the Depression, not only service in a war whose good intentions were universally applauded but, once in uniform, a standard of living previously unknown to a boy like Heller himself, brought up on Coney Island in a modestly poor immigrant family. Thank you, Hitler and Mussolini. ‘For war there is always enough,’ Heller’s father says. ‘It’s peace that’s too expensive.’ Many young men did not return, but the survivors enjoying the GI Bill of Rights and entry into college felt no guilt about Dresden or Hiroshima — that kind of pain did

Harry Mount

A one-man Dad’s army

It isn’t good manners for somebody to criticise a great-uncle after his death, but I know from first-hand experience that my great-uncle, Lord Longford, either didn’t mind criticism or at least grew so used to it that he looked like he didn’t mind. After he appeared in an Oxford Union debate in the early 1990s attacking the porn industry, I asked him whether he minded the tactics of his opponent, a porn-film director. The director had tried to ridicule him by offering him a part in a film. ‘Oh, I rather enjoyed that,’ he said, ‘Anyway, you must be here because you’re interested in politics. Would you like to be

Matthew Leeming

The horror! The horror!

I have to declare an interest. In the late 1980s, I travelled with the author of this book. After university we went to run the bulls in Pamplona together, while our neighing contemporaries were being strapped into their first pinstriped suits. Then we went to Africa, where his family had lived since the 1930s. That Grand Tour was the beginning of the rape of ideology by reality for both of us, a lurch to the right, an end to half-baked student leftyism. Then our paths diverged and I have not seen him for many years. But Aidan Hartley’s subsequent odyssey is much more frightening. He has continued to use his

Christopher Woodward

More respected than admired

At the Italian seaside last week I flicked through the hotel’s copy of a translation of Gombrich’s Story of Art. The publisher had reproduced Reynolds’s portrait of his friend Giuseppi Baretti to a larger size than any other British picture. ‘Ottimo,’ said the text, and by some odd process of displacement I was all the more happy to read the praise of a favourite picture in Italian. It is a picture of a short-sighted and unhandsome man squinting at a book, his scrunched sleeve rubbing the velvet of the chair. But to me — and many others — it is one of the greatest examples of male character ever captured

Toby Young Toby Young

From one hustler to another

Dear James, Thanks for sending me a copy of your … what shall we call it? Memoir? Novel? Anyway, I really enjoyed it. You’ve completely captured what it was like to be an Oxford undergraduate in the mid-80s — all that Sloane Ranger crap, the Pimms, the seccies. Every time I turned the page I had a horrible jolt of recognition. ‘Oh Christ,’ I kept thinking. ‘Were we really that bad?’ (We were, we were.) The drug stuff, too, is absolutely spot on. I don’t think I’ve ever read such an accurate account of what it’s like to smoke dope. Or drop acid. Or take shrooms. You have this wonderfully

Grey Gowrie

For the union dead

‘When I die,’ Robert Lowell told me, three days before he did die, in 1977, at the age of 60, ‘Elizabeth’s shares will rise and mine will fall. But mine will come back.’ Elizabeth, in this context, was Elizabeth Bishop, who with Randall Jarrell was Lowell’s correspondent and best friend in the art. His temperament at once generous and competitive, Lowell’s prediction was right. Thirty or more years ago he was by some margin the most celebrated poet in the English-speaking world. A blurry impression of his features by Sidney Nolan even appeared on the cover of Time. Today, he seems to be treated as an Old Master, a museum

Philip Mansel

Courtiers and communists

Courts can be a tool for understanding the present as well as the past. The behaviour patterns of courts and courtiers are often a better guide to the workings of modern regimes than constitutions or ideologies. In The Last Days of Hitler, Hugh Trevor-Roper analysed the government of the Third Reich as a ‘cannibal court’. In his spectacular new work Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, Simon Sebag Montefiore does the same for the Soviet Union under Stalin. He analyses the lives and ‘informal power and customs’ of the top 20 men in the Soviet leadership, as well as Stalin himself, in the years from the suicide of Stalin’s

Saturday

James Delingpole James Delingpole

I’m boring, I’m ugly and I can’t write

My new book, Thinly Disguised Autobiography, is not just good. It’s absolutely bloody amazing. The drug scenes make Irvine Welsh look like Mary Poppins; the sex scenes are more realistic than the real thing; it’s the finest dissection of the English class system since Evelyn Waugh; the dialogue rocks; it’s funny and moving, pacy, and lyrical enough when it needs to be but never so purple that you get bogged down in descriptions of trees or furniture; it’s at least as wittily post-modern as Dave Eggers but without the cloying sentimentality; the squalid bits outfoul Martin Amis; it’s better edited than The Corrections; and the ending, when with sorrow you

Saturday

Frank Johnson

Don’t mention that Mussolini saved Jews: it is Politically Inconvenient to do so

Weidenfeld and Nicolson is about to publish a big biography of Mussolini by my friend Nicholas Farrell, which contains the following passage: ‘Just as none of the victorious powers went to war with Germany to save the Jews neither did Mussolini go to war with them to exterminate the Jews. Indeed, once the Holocaust was under way he and his fascists refused to deport Jews to the Nazi death camps thus saving thousands of Jewish lives – far more than Oskar Schindler.’ Mussolini saved more Jews than Schindler! For once, the word ‘controversial’, so often used to describe any old bit of routine leftism, is justified. That Mussolini saved Jews

Saturday

Hugh Massingberd

Among the goys and philistines

For some reason, almost every time I plunge into too hot a bath I find myself thinking of my days as a public schoolboy – presumably a ‘tosh’ must have been one’s principal pleasure at an impressionable age – and more often than not a half-remembered line from Frederic Raphael’s haunting School Play, shown on television many years ago, flickers across my mind. ‘Are you trying to burn my ballocks off?’ (or words to that effect), demands the rather Simon Ravenish senior boy (played by Denholm Elliott) of his junior (Michael Kitchen), who has drawn the bath as part of his fagging duties. As Raphael explains in a terse footnote

David Caute

These foolish things

Perhaps this strange volume is a bang on the nose for political correctness, but one cannot be sure. It could have been written in the 18th century by a deranged sage determined to scotch the more famous Encyclopaedia of the Enlightenment and its absurd faith in progress and human perfectibility. Published on April Fool’s Day, it may have been a hoax of the dwarf variety, like the peas I have been stupidly planting in spring sunshine, observed by their ultimate beneficiaries circling in smug silence overhead. The author is said to be an Amsterdamer, a man of letters who has been researching stupidity for over 20 years, but he may

Robert Macfarlane

The heart of whiteness

Happiness writes white, it’s said: so too, one would think, does Antarctica. How is it possible to describe an environment which tolerates almost no life, which is derived from a single substance, and which is for the most part a single colour? Early explorers were simultaneously horrified and enthralled by the continent’s awesome singularity. Scott wrote of its ‘silent, wind-swept immensity’; Shackleton’s surgeon, Alexander Macklin, of its ‘same unbroken whiteness’. Given Antarctica’s unsurpassed simplicity as a landform, one might expect writers to have shied away from it. And yet this fearsomely meaningless place has, especially in the 20th century, generated an enormous literature. For nearly 200 years, explorers, scientists and

Francis King

Master of the merry-go-round

Sprawling, teeming with people and flooded with an almost malevolent brilliance, this book is the literary equivalent of some vast conurbation. As with a conurbation, it is difficult to identify the heart – and heart here means not merely centre but humanity. Trapped, as in one of Mark Gertler’s most famous pictures, on a constantly accelerating roundabout, the characters all seem to be in imminent danger of being hurled into oblivion by the centrifugal force of a powerfully churning imagination. Two of the most important of these characters are a father and son. Digby, once the heir to a company that rivalled Wedgwood in the manufacture of pottery, is now

Philip Hensher

The best committee that ever sat

There are two literary facts in English which it is almost impossible to examine, to see clearly. They are Shakespeare and the King James Bible. In both cases, the impossibility derives from the same point; that critical standards of what great English writing means stem so completely from Shakespeare’s peculiar virtues and from the values of the prose in the King James Bible that all commentators and, indeed, all English-speakers subsequently have lived within their limits, and have been unable to step outside and discuss their subjects with any clarity, as one can step outside Spenser or Wordsworth, and see their world whole and distant, with an awareness of alternative

Saturday

Sara Wheeler

Serving Christ and colonialism

Fergus Fleming is the author of three volumes of narrative history, the best of which, Barrow’s Boys, gives a rollicking account of 19th-century Arctic exploration. Now he has lighted on the ‘conquest’ of the Sahara, and it is a gripping saga, little known beyond the popular image of a kepi-wearing French officer riding into the desert on a white camel while hordes of Tuareg mass silently on the horizon. The Sword and the Cross begins with a trot through the history of Algeria, or the Barbary Coast as it was known to white men, and of Ottoman North Africa in general. Fleming then focuses on Vicomte Charles de Foucauld, a

Roger Lewis

Still on his feet in the twelfth round

Norman Mailer was 80 years old on 31 January 2003, so let us salute the last of all the knights. He was very famous very quickly, with The Naked and the Dead, and for nearly six decades he has poured forth rich and provocative novels, biographies, non-fiction bouts of reportage – it’s hard to know what they are any more. Fiction as documentary? Concealed memoirs? He’s certainly unstoppable. The accounts of Marilyn Monroe and Picasso show him as the critic-as-artist; the treatise on Vietnam or the moon landings, his history of the CIA and the investigation into the life and death of Lee Harvey Oswald, make him America’s Tolstoy. Mailer’s

Candia Mcwilliam

What voice can do

There was recently, in the serious and excellent Saturday Guardian review, a short piece on Oor Wullie, a small boy whose cartoon adventures divert the readers of the Sunday Post in Scotland. It was written by Ian Jack, distinguished editor of Granta, the influential literary magazine. The article mentioned a number of things that touched dear places for a Scot, and mentioned too that Mr Jack hadn’t a recipe for black bun, a dense cake served at Hogmanay. Along with, it turned out, very many, others, I wrote to him. There is nothing so homesick as a Scot, and nothing, I suspect, as vigilant and quick to take exception. Andrew