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What the Critics Said ISSUE 34 Review of BooksWINTER 2015 REVIEW OF THE REVIEWS What the critics said MORE THAN 40 OF the BEST BooKS From the LAST QUarter INCLUDING: Niall Ferguson Robert Roper Richard Tomlinson Frederic Raphael Richard Dawkins James Hamilton Virginia Ironside Thomas Pakenham Jonathan Franzen William Boyd Sebastian Faulks Dominic Sandbrook Robert Gildea Simon Schama Chrissie Hynde Edward Lucas …and many more Ferdinand Mount v. Moby-Dick Books for children Guide to Pevsner Sam Leith on the art of indexing A ROUND-UP OF REVIEWS • NOT JUST THE BESTSELLERS CONTENTS Review of Books IN THIS ISSUE ISSUE 34 WINTER 2015 4. BIOGRAPHY Paradise and Plenty: A Rothschild Kissinger: 1923–1968: The Idealist Niall Family Garden Mary Keen Ferguson; Nabokov in America: On the NOT FORGETTING... Road to Lolita Robert Roper; Amazing 19. CURRENT AFFAIRS IMPORTANT TITLES RECENTLY Grace: The Man Who Was WG Richard Cameron at 10: The Inside Story: REVIEWED IN THE OLDIE Tomlinson; Frost: That Was the Life That 2010–2015 Anthony Seldon and Was: The Authorised Biography Peter Snowdon; Call Me Dave: The • Cursed Kings: The Hundred Years War Vol. 4 by Jonathan Sumption Neil Hegarty; Going Up: To Unauthorised Biography of David Cambridge and Beyond: Cameron Michael Ashcroft and • Gothic for the Steam Age: An A Writer’s Memoir Isabel Oakeshott; An Intelligent Illustrated Biography of George Frederic Raphael; Brief Person’s Guide to Education Tony Gilbert Scott by Gavin Stamp Candle in the Dark: Little; Capitalism: Money, Morals My Life in Science and Markets John Plender; Something • Weatherland: Writers and Artists Under English Skies by Alexandra Richard Dawkins; Island Will Turn Up: Britain’s Economy, Harris of Dreams: A Personal Past, Present and Future David Smith; History of a Remarkable Cyberphobia: Identity Trust, Security • Stalin’s Englishman: The Lives of Guy Place Dan Boothby; Reckless Chrissie and the Internet Edward Lucas Burgess by Andrew Lownie Hynde; Every Time a Friend Succeeds, Something Inside Me Dies: The Life of 22. INDEXING • Harry Mount’s Odyssey: Ancient Gore Vidal Jay Parini Sam Leith Greece in the Footsteps of Odysseus by Harry Mount 10. HISTORY 24. FICTION • The German War: A Nation Under The Great British Dream Factory: Purity Jonathan Franzen; Sweet Caress: Arms 1939–1945 by Nicholas The Strange History of Our National The Many Lives of Amory Clay Stargardt Imagination Dominic Sandbrook; William Boyd; Where My Heart Used Chilled: How Refrigeration Changed to Beat Sebastian Faulks The White Road: A Pilgrimage of • the World, and Might Do So Again Tom Sorts by Edmund de Waal Jackson; Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar Tom Holland; Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance Robert Gildea; Conquerors: How Portugal Seized the Indian Ocean and Forged the First BOOKSHOP Global Empire Roger Crowley; Red: A 25. CLASSIC READ Natural History of the Redhead Jacky Moby-Dick Herman Melville — TO ORDER THE Colliss Harvey; The Maisky Diaries: Ferdinand Mount BOOKS IN THIS ISSUE Red Ambassador to the Court of St James’s 1932–1943 edited by Gabriel 26. SPYING Just call 01326 555 762 Gorodetsky; Willoughbyland: England’s Why Spy? The Art of Intelligence UK P+P IS £1.10 ON EVERY ORDER Lost Colony Matthew Parker Brian Stewart and Samantha Newbery; Intercept: The Secret History of Published by The Oldie magazine, 65 14. PEVSNER Computers and Spies Gordon Corera; Newman Street, London W1T 3EG ARCHITECTURAL GUIDES The Secret War: Spies, Codes and Editorial panel: Alexander Chancellor, Liz Simon Bradley Guerrillas 1939–1945 Max Hastings; Anderson, Claudia FitzHerbert, Sam The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue Leith, Anna Lethbridge, Lucy Lethbridge, 16. PAPERBACKS Frederick Forsyth Jeremy Lewis, Brian MacArthur, James Hild Nicola Griffith; A Strange Pembroke. Business: Making Art and Money in 27. CHILDREN’S BOOKS Editor: Liz Anderson Nineteenth-Century Britain James For young and old alike Design: Lawrence Bogle N Hamilton; A Message From Martha: O S Reviewers: Michael Barber, Geraldine Brennan, Tom Fleming, Sam Leith, Anna The Extinction of the Passenger Pigeon 28. ART WIL B Lethbridge, Lucy Lethbridge, Brian and its Relevance Today Mark Everything is Happening: Journey into O B MacArthur, Christopher Silvester Avery; Yes! I Can Manage, a Painting Michael Jacobs; The Y Publisher: James Pembroke Thank You Virginia Ironside Face of Britain: The Nation N B Advertising: Lisa Martin, Paul Pryde, Through its Portraits Simon TIO Monique Cherry 17. NATURE Schama RA T For advertising enquiries, call Lisa Martin The Company of Trees: US on 020 7079 9361 A Year in a Lifetime’s ILL 30. OBITUARIES R For editorial enquiries, call 020 7436 8801 Quest Thomas Pakenham; Oliver Sacks; PJ Kavanagh or email [email protected] COVE Winter 2015 Review of Books THE OLDIE 3 BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR IS HENRY KISSINGER, US Secretary intellectual roots shows Kissinger was of State under presidents Nixon and Kissinger indeed an idealist in the Kantian sense, Ford, an amoral Machiavellian realist, rather than in its modern American as his critics have traditionally argued, 1923–1968: The Idealist political version,’ he explained. ‘This is or is he a frustrated and misunderstood an admiring portrait rather than a par- idealist, as the Harvard-based British Niall Ferguson (Allen Lane, 1,008pp, ticularly affectionate one. If Kissinger’s historian Ferguson claims in this, the £35, Oldie price £30) official biographer cannot be accused of first volume of the official biography? falling for his subject’s justifiably famed The conventional image of Kissinger acute sense of self, who have treated charm, he certainly gives the reader has been dominated by charges in him, however disapprovingly, as a fully enough evidence to conclude that earlier books by William Shawcross dimensional individual with a churning, Henry Kissinger is one of the greatest and Christopher Hitchens that he is complex psyche. In contrast, Ferguson, Americans in the history of the Repub- a war criminal. One critical Kissinger tone-deaf to Kissinger’s darker notes, lic,’ and if the next volume ‘is anywhere biographer, Greg Grandin, reviewing condemns him to a literary fate worse near as comprehensive, well written the book for the Guardian, highlighted than anything that Hitchens could have and riveting as the first, this will be his Ferguson’s defensiveness. ‘He wants to meted out: Kissinger, in this book, is masterpiece’. Saul David, too, in the rescue Kissinger from history’s dock… boring.’ Evening Standard, found no evidence the tone is litigious, setting the biog- Andrew Roberts, another British of flattery. ‘The finely nuanced portrait rapher up as barrister.’ Grandin felt historian based in America, reviewed of Kissinger that emerges from this that ‘it has been Kissinger’s sharpest the book for the New York Times. exhaustively detailed book is unlikely critics who have most appreciated his ‘Ferguson’s investigation of Kissinger’s to be bettered,’ he concluded. ‘HOW DID a Russian-born novelist nature reserves, diners and cowboy- Nabokov in with such Fabergé-egg-like refinements themed motels’. produce a rapturous hymn to American Nabokov, who was exiled from his America roadside culture?’ asked Ian Thom- Russian homeland by the revolution, son in the Independent. Besides being was exiled again when he left France On the Road to Lolita an account of illicit sexual obsession, with his Jewish wife Vera and their son Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 best-known Dmitri for New York on one of the last Robert Roper and most notorious novel, Lolita, is, ships out before the Nazis arrived. As (Bloomsbury, 354pp, £20, Oldie price wrote Thomson, ‘a Walt Whitman-like Duncan White in the Daily Telegraph £16.50) celebration of New World canyons, put it: ‘In America he found not only 4 THE OLDIE Review of Books Winter 2015 BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR sanctuary after two decades of noisy score of controversy and predic- uncertainty but also a place in which Amazing Grace tions of imminent catastrophe. At a time to reinvent himself: he arrived an when everyone was accusing everyone obscure Russian writer and left The Man Who Was WG else of money-grabbing, match-fixing the most famous literary novelist and failure to adhere to the basic tenets in the world.’ Richard Tomlinson (Little, Brown, of the game, Grace was a one-man 432pp, £25, Oldie price £20) headline generator. If there was a fight to be had, WG was up for it.’ HE WAS SPORT’S first global super- Yet as the son of a provincial doctor star. Everywhere he went he drew large he was the victim of staggering snobbery. crowds. He made a hundred first-class In spite of the fact that he was easily the centuries. No one was more famous in most gifted cricketer to have yet raised Victorian England than W G Grace. It is a bat, he was long considered ‘not the now a hundred years since he died but right sort for membership of MCC’. But ‘those of us who follow cricket with an he became acutely aware of his value in enthusiasm that verges on mental illness later life and extracted a huge £3,000 fee are still fascinated by the old goat’, to participate in one tour of Australia. Marcus Berkmann confessed in the ‘Without Grace’s star quality, rivalled Daily Mail. ‘Was he as good a player as everyone said he was? Was he as much Was he as good a player of a monster? What was the real story?’ So it was ‘a pleasure to read a biography as everyone said he was? as thoughtful and assiduous as Tomlin- Was he as much of a son’s. As well as reassessing Grace, who he thinks has long been hard done by, monster? What was the Tomlinson has worked hard to distin- real story? guish between stories we are told and what actually happened.’ in Victorian England only by that of ‘He was drawn again Reading Amazing Grace was to be Charles Dickens,’ said Peter Wilby in and again to tales struck by how in cricket ‘so little has the Guardian, cricket might never have changed’, commented Jim White in the become England’s main summer game: of the forbidden, Daily Telegraph.
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