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 Hamilton; A Message From Martha: Reviewers: Michael Barber, Geraldine Brennan, Tom Fleming, Sam Leith, Anna The Extinction of the Passenger Pigeon 28. ART Lethbridge, Lucy Lethbridge, Brian and its Relevance Today Mark Everything is Happening: Journey into MacArthur, Christopher Silvester Avery; Yes! I Can Manage, a Painting Michael Jacobs; The Publisher: James Pembroke Thank You Virginia Ironside Face of Britain: The Nation Advertising: Lisa Martin, Paul Pryde, Through its Portraits Simon tio n b Y o wil s Monique Cherry 17. NATURE Schama For advertising enquiries, call Lisa Martin The Company of Trees: on 020 7079 9361 A Year in a Lifetime’s 30. OBITUARIES For editorial enquiries, call 020 7436 8801 Quest Thomas Pakenham; Oliver Sacks; PJ Kavanagh or email [email protected] Cove r ill us t ra

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. ‘Loathed by Austra- as ‘C L R James put it in one of the best of humiliation and lians with a vigour that makes Stuart books written about the game, Grace Broad look like an honorary Ocker’, “incorporated” cricket “into the life of compulsion’ Grace’s career was ‘soundtracked by a the nation”.’

Robert Roper has diligently followed the Nabokovs’ long trips (notching up 20,000 miles) round their adopted country, following his thesis that it was in America that Nabokov wrote his greatest books. Roger Lewis in the Times noted that Lolita was not the only book in which Nabokov examined paedo- philia. ‘He was drawn again and again to tales “of the forbidden, of humiliation and compulsion”.’ While noting that ‘no one has ever found evidence of the proclivity in the novelist’s own life’, Lewis wondered at Nabokov’s ‘creepy diligence as a lepidopterist’. Lewis found that Nabokov comes across in Roper’s biography as ‘an ugly customer. He had no friends and poor old Vera was his devoted slave, his chauffeur, amanuensis, secre- tary, cook and no doubt manicurist and bodyguard.’ Nevertheless, he concluded, ‘he was a prose stylist of genius, if that counts for anything any more.’

Winter 2015 Review of Books THE OLDIE 5 BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR

Frost That Was the Life That Was: The Authorised Biography

Neil Hegarty (W H Allen, 464pp £25, Oldie price £20)

Sir David Frost, raconteur, satirist, broadcaster, interviewer and writer, died suddenly on the Queen Elizabeth cruise liner in 2013, aged 74. This autho- rised biography of Frost by writer Neil Hegarty received cautious plaudits from those who had known him. And Frost’s friends were legion: one of them, Sir Terry Wogan, noted in the Irish Times, ‘The list of the great and good of British life takes up a page and a half of the bi- ography, but it could have filled a book on its own.’ ‘What did he really to pin down either his politics or what Frost’s upbringing as the only child made him tick.’ of a Methodist minister could not have believe in, other than Neil Midgley in the Sunday Tele- been more different from his later career. himself and the power graph found the book too deferential, He was a famous womaniser (before set- especially on the subject of Frost’s fam- tling down in middle age) and a trans- of television?’ ily life: ‘A close and loyal family is one atlantic party-goer. The gregarious thing, but a flawless one is quite another. charm that wheedled secrets out of found Frost still eluded the reader. ‘As I was left wishing that Hegarty would the world’s most powerful politicians, Hegarty acknowledges, behind the say more. But, as he reveals, Frost’s along with an insatiable drive for fame, gregariousness the real Frost remained “personal issues could, generally speak- kept him, as Paul Callan put it in the puzzlingly opaque. What did he really ing, not be dragged out of him, even by Express, ‘at the top for 50 years in a believe in, other than himself and the his small circle of very close friends”. profession where failure always hovers’. power of television? His Methodism cer- Perhaps it is not surprising that this In the Sunday Times, Mark Edmonds tainly influenced him. But it was difficult book suffers the same limitation.’

But suppose ‘the others’ didn’t want to play with him? Going Up: To Cambridge ‘There were no hurdles like English hurdles,’ the Times’s Roger Lewis quotes him as saying, a reference to the anti- and Beyond Semitism Raphael detects ‘in the very ideas, attitudes and textures of English life’. This so poisoned A Writer’s Memoir his schooldays at Charterhouse that despite his atheism he once fantasised about Frederic Raphael (Robson Press, 413pp, £25, making provision in his will for a Oldie price £20) synagogue there. Anti-Semitism also permeates his epic, quasi-fictional ‘PEOPLE RESENT articulacy,’ Frederic television series The Glittering Raphael has written, ‘as if articulacy were a Prizes, so it is odd to find Alan form of vice.’ If it is a vice then it is one that Massie in the Telegraph describing has paid off handsomely for Raphael, a witty, Raphael’s experience of this as ‘little pungent, versatile and highly intelligent writer more than an irritant’. who for 60 years has made a very good living Though Massie found something from his pen. Why then is he so disobliging about ‘to delight and savour on almost every almost everybody who has crossed his path? As page of this rich memoir’, he was not the Anthony Quinn noted in the Guardian, paraphrasing only reviewer to query the apparently ‘total Gore Vidal: ‘It is not enough for him to assert his own pre- recall’ Raphael has of ‘60-year-old conversations eminence; his contemporaries — friends as well as enemies — and how almost everyone he met was dressed’. Asked about must eat dust in his majestic wake.’ Raphael, he concludes, this by Rosie Kinchin in the Sunday Times, Raphael gave has always been a loner: ‘the only child who never learned to a rather oblique reply: ‘Yes, unfortunately with age you do play with the others.’ forget things — you also have many more to remember.’

6 THE OLDIE Review of Books Winter 2015 BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR

Brief Candle in the Dark My Life in Science

Richard Dawkins (Bantam Press, 464pp, £20, Oldie price £16.50)

Does the Devil have all the best tunes? The success of Richard Dawk- ins — ‘the Dirty Harry of science’ — is a strong argument in favour. His magisterial polemic, The God Delu- sion, sold more than three million copies, and this, his second volume of memoirs, includes what James McConnachie in the Sunday Times called a ‘superb’ P G Wodehouse pas- tiche, ‘in which Jeeves and Wooster debate the doctrine of salvation’. Since Dawkins doesn’t believe in salvation — ‘Eternity Leave’ is all that awaits us, he says — he can perhaps be forgiven for eschewing false modesty. It’s thanks to lucid advocates like him that science now has the same intellectual status as the experience. ‘His grouchy, loner’s tone humanities. But McConnachie was Island of strikes the perfect register for a book not alone in objecting to Dawkins’s made in the footsteps of Maxwell. To ‘name-dropping’. Both he and the Dreams describe his world-view, or perhaps Financial Times’s Clive Cookson his human-view, as jaundiced would ‘lost count’ at the number of times A Personal History of a be a gentle understatement,’ he Dawkins refers to his ‘distinguished’ wrote. When it comes to the magnetic friends. So what? responded Dawk- Remarkable Place ‘bleak glamour’ of Maxwell’s life and ins on Twitter. ‘Autobiographies Dan Boothby (Picador, 320pp, personality, Boothby finds among include stories about friends/acquain- £14.99, Oldie price £12.99) those Skye locals who remember him tances. If some happen to be famous, that ‘opinions are mostly negative’. should an author CUT them to avoid TRAVEL WRITER Dan Boothby was But the island pulls him in and, wrote “name-dropping”?’ gripped by the work of Gavin Maxwell Well, you wouldn’t expect Dawk- when he first pulled down from a ‘To describe his ins to turn the other cheek. In the library shelf Raven Seek Thy Brother, Guardian, Steven Shapin reminded the third volume in Maxwell’s famous world-view, or perhaps people ‘what it means to be “Dawki- otter trilogy that began with Ring his human-view, as nised”: Not just to be dressed down of Bright Water. Twenty years later, or duffed up, it is to be squelched, Boothby was offered his ‘dream job’ as jaundiced would be a pulverised, annihilated, rendered into caretaker at Kyleakin lighthouse on the gentle understatement’ suitably primordial paste.’ But, said Isle of Skye, where Maxwell had once Shapin, Brief Candle is not Dawkins lived in a lighthouse cottage. at his best. ‘It adds only a little to The resulting book is, wrote Ariane Nick Rennison in the Daily Mail, ‘his the science lessons and, compared Bankes in the Literary Review, the book is a lively, often funny tribute to with the first volume of the memoirs ‘story of an obsession’. Boothby’s the place and the people he meets (which was itself a guarded perfor- childhood was spent in a hippie there’. In the end, noted Rennison, ‘he mance), it’s stingy with insights into commune in Norfolk in the 1970s and, seems to be rather less of a Maxwell his personal life.’ thought Bankes, ‘for a boy brought nut but, at the very least, Oliver Moody in the Times deliv- up on the fringes of society, it is not he has gained a new perspective on ered an even harsher verdict: ‘Sadly, hard to see why Maxwell was the his obsession. Island of Dreams this is a rambling, unenlightening quintessential outsider’. shows him emerging from the and largely unnecessary book from a In the Scotsman, Brian Morton shadow of his hero to become a great thinker and writer who would enjoyed Boothby’s take on the gifted writer himself.’ really have done better to rest on his laurels.’

Winter 2015 Review of Books THE OLDIE 7 BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR

CHRISSIE HYNDE, the lead singer of before both Honeyman-Scott and the the early 1980s group The Pretenders, bassist, Pete Farndon, died from drug has provoked controversy in her mem- overdoses. oir by explicitly taking full responsi- Reviews of Reckless were mixed. bility for her gang-rape by a group of Meghan O’Rourke, writing for the Ob- bikers when she was young. Her casual server, felt Hynde had held something regard for her rights as a woman aside, the story reveals a lot about the kind of ‘Despite vivid details and lifestyle she led. Born in 1951, Hynde her gift for great one-liners grew up in Ohio, the child of very Hynde’s life feels oddly conservative parents. Seduced by rock music’s ‘British invasion’, she rebelled mediated’ young and moved to London in 1973. back: ‘Despite vivid details and her gift Once there she got hooked on vari- for great one-liners Hynde’s life feels ous kinds of drugs and lived the punk oddly mediated, like a story someone rocker’s life, writing scathing reviews else is telling. Hynde is dry, funny and for NME and working in Malcolm sharp, but not always as exploratory McLaren’s and Vivienne Westwood’s on the page as she was on stage.’ Some, shop. It was only when she met the such as Jude Rodgers in the Guardian, guitarist James Honeyman-Scott, who were less exacting, and enjoyed Reck- harnessed her musical talent in sophis- Reckless less as a typically juicy rock memoir ticated arrangements, that she formed that will fly off the shelves: ‘There are The Pretenders and made her name. Chrissie Hynde (Ebury Press, 320pp, £20, enough eyebrow-raising anecdotes here They made two bestselling albums Oldie price £16.50) to give a publisher multiple orgasms.’

one of the most important gay novels of the 20th century while living in an old convent in Guatemala.’ John Carey, in the Sunday Times, found the book ‘compelling’ reading with ‘gem-like vignettes recalling mo- ments in their friendship, some tragic, some comic’. Carey thought Parini did justice to Vidal’s literary legacy but Daisy Goodwin in the Times wondered if his work would mean anything to anyone under 40: ‘It is unfortunate that his last appearance on television was as one of Ali G’s spoof interviews. After the show was broadcast, Vidal told Parini that “British television was finished, completely finished.” He didn’t get it that, after a lifetime of provocation and satire, the joke was now on him.’ Rachel Cooke in the Observer didn’t think Parini dug out anything new, was Every Time a Friend Succeeds, too ‘awed’ even to fall out with Vidal (something of an achievement). ‘His Something Inside Me Dies talk of his closeness to Vidal soon starts to seem like something of an The Life of Gore Vidal exaggeration. By his own telling, Parini played a rather courtly role in Vidal’s Jay Parini (Little, Brown, 480pp, £25, Oldie price £20) glorious realm.’ In the Evening Standard, Mark Jay Parini’S memoir of Gore Vidal of 25, Vidal had written five novels, Sanderson thought him a ‘bargain-base- received mixed reviews: no one seemed bought a huge pile on the Hudson ment Boswell’ but, like most reviewers, sure if it was a hatchet job or a hagi- River and claimed to have had more he still enjoyed the ride: ‘Parini has ography. Certainly, the waspish and than a thousand sexual partners. He painted a portrait (with rectal polyps egotistic Vidal lived a life that could run had served on a transport ship in the and all) that is by turns shocking, witty into many volumes. Duncan White in Aleutian Islands during the war and and very funny — just like the much- the Daily Telegraph noted: ‘By the age then, in The City and the Pillar, written missed man himself.’

8 THE OLDIE Review of Books Winter 2015

HISTORY The Great British Dream Factory The Strange History of Our National Imagination

Dominic Sandbrook (Allen Lane, 688pp, £25, Oldie price £20)

THE AUTHOR of and well’. He also gives John Lennon and Yoko a series of books Ono ‘a righteous kicking’. But ‘any book of such about massive sweep is doomed to be at best a partial postwar failure, however witty and well researched’. Most British critics agreed. social history, The Spectator’s reviewer, Thomas W Hodgkinson, Sandbrook is started with three paragraphs of questions Sand- ‘a fogey with an brook ‘fails to raise, or raises but fails to answer, or excellent feel for the con- at least fails to answer properly in his otherwise very temporary pulse and the pleasant and intelligent tour of recent popular cul- surprising killer detail’, who ‘often argues ture’. In the Sunday Times, Daisy Goodwin thought that supposedly radical shifts in British that ‘while his scope is catholic, it is a stretch to call culture mask a deep conservatism, and it British: the subject matter of his book is almost that we remain heavily in debt to the exclusively English, and middle English at that.’ And Victorians’. So wrote Nick Curtis Ekow Eshun, in the Independent, noted that the in the Evening Standard. In his latest identity of modern Britain ‘is shaped as much by the book, Curtis noted, Sandbrook ‘in- margins as the mainstream’ and ‘by the contribution dulges some wonderfully counterintuitive of the children of empire’, although ‘you wouldn’t preferences — for Black Sabbath, Grand know it from reading The Great British Dream Fac- Theft Auto (the most successful entertain- tory’, because ‘in Sandbrook’s formulation, the his- ment product ever, sales-wise), John Wyndham, tory of our national culture is a linear one that runs the Flashman novels, The Avengers and The in a straight line from imperial past to a curiously Prisoner, all of which he writes about lovingly homogeneous present’. A counterintuitive preference for Diana Rigg in The Avengers

‘THE REFRIGERATOR has become torians discovered how to manufacture our hearth. More than fire, cold is now Chilled ice instead of harvesting it and suddenly what we build our lives around.’ So be- Argentinian beef and New Zealand gins the Wall Street Journal’s Bee Wilson How Refrigeration Changed lamb were on sale in British butchers. in her review of Chilled, Tom Jackson’s In the 1920s Clarence Birdseye (his real entertaining and informative history of the World, and Might Do name) invented flash-freezing, but as yet refrigeration. Thanks to refrigeration So Again there was no inexpensive domestic alter- our diets are no longer controlled by native to the pantry, the meat-safe or the the seasons or the tyranny of distance. Tom Jackson (Bloomsbury, 272pp, window ledge. Even Einstein, who tried, And that’s not all. ‘Chilling things,’ £16.99, Oldie price £14.99) couldn’t patent an appliance that the said James McConnachie in the Sunday average family could afford. Times, ‘has given us space rockets, air Jackson calls the fridge ‘humanity’s conditioning, MRI scanners and in vitro greatest achievement’. But there’s a snag. fertilisation.’ One day it may even be Chilling makes the air warmer. As Bee possible to revive people who have been Wilson noted: ‘A third of all energy cryogenically frozen. How chastening, consumption in the American home then, to be reminded by Rachel Cooke goes to refrigeration.’ It’s all a question in the Guardian that as recently as 1965 of thermodynamics, ‘the laws of which’, only a third of British households pos- said Michael Bywater in the Spectator, sessed a fridge (as a student she used the ‘are the most important laws that most window ledge). people haven’t heard about’. In the Jackson’s departure point is the an- Scotsman Lori Anderson quotes a chem- cient Assyrians, one of whose kings built ist who says that thermodynamics is the the first recorded ice house. By the 18th science that links how a fridge works century these huge insulated dug-outs with the fate of the universe. ‘So when had become an aristocratic status sym- I peer into my fridge I’m really peering bol like the massive basements bespoke into the fate of the universe. Now that is by the super-rich today. Then the Vic- a chilling thought.’

10 THE OLDIE Review of Books Winter 2015 HISTORY

Resistance’, says Gildea, but of ‘resis- Dynasty Fighters in the tance in France’. ‘What Gildea has done is to step The Rise and Fall of the Shadows back and look at the wider picture, House of Caesar thereby providing a context for the A New History of the individual acts of courage, which he Tom Holland (Little, Brown, 512pp, celebrates in moving detail,’ wrote £25, Oldie price £20) French Resistance Caroline Moorehead in the Guardian. Robert Gildea (Faber & Faber, ‘He gives recognition to the widest ‘Insatiable emperors, performing 608pp, £20, Oldie price £16.50) range of participants, many of them dwarves, suicidal poets and self-castrat- little known, and to the categories ing priests — they’re all here,’ wrote When General de Gaulle who did not fit well into the postwar Daisy Dunn in the Evening Standard. addressed the crowds outside the myth of heroism, and that is perhaps ‘If Tom Holland's Rubicon was the Hotel de Ville on 25th August 1944, his most important contribution to the story of what it took to gain power in he set the tone for how the French field.’M ichael O’Loughlin, writing in late republican Rome, then Dynasty, would come to memorialise the end the Irish Times, agreed that Gildea’s the thrilling follow-up, is the history of Nazi occupation. ‘Paris liberated!’ use of first-person accounts gave the of what happened when power was he said. ‘Liberated by its own efforts, book ‘a rare freshness and raw emo- entrusted to men who never quite got liberated by its people with the help tion’, and called the work ‘vivid and over their mothers.’ of the armies of France, with the help convincing’. The Julio-Claudian dynasty that of all of France.’ In the postwar years, stretched from Augustus to the French took refuge in this myth ‘He gives recognition Nero was obsessed with in which national resistance to succession, as Peter the Germans had been continu- to the widest range of Jones explained in his ous and widespread, with only participants, many of review for the Times. a handful of rotten apples Indeed, ‘it was only collaborating. Yet, as Robert them little known’ as a result of forced Gildea shows in his panoramic marriages, divorce and new history of the French Nicholas Shakespeare, writing in adoption that the line Resistance, most of the popula- the Telegraph, lamented that Gildea kept going at all’. This is tion had chosen attentisme — ‘wait failed to capture the laughter or ca- ‘a narrative of families and and see’ — over defiance. Those who maraderie recalled by many resisters, factions battling for supremacy did resist constituted a minority made ‘preferring in his dispassionate way to over an empire controlling the lives of up not only of single-minded patriotic dwell on the intricacies of communist 50 million people, and coming inevita- men, as per de Gaulle, but also of committees’. Nonetheless Shakespeare bly to sticky, or at best unsatisfactory, communists, Spanish, Jews and, above called the overall result ‘a serious book ends. The TV series Dynasty (which all, women, almost all of whom were that deserves to be taken seriously, took its inspiration from I, Claudius) brushed aside in the later narrative. both here and, more importantly, by did family conflict rather well. The Ro- We should not speak of the ‘French historians across the Channel’. mans, and Holland, do it far better.’ For Adam Nicolson, in the Sunday Times, in Holland’s ‘masterly account the dynasty remains in the foreground throughout’, and ‘the story he tells strides onwards across the landscape of grief and horror without pause or stut- ter’. He is ‘unshockable as he proceeds with breezy, clear-eyed analysis from one degrading display of cruelty and paranoia to the next’. John Lewis- Stempel, in the Sunday Express, found ‘the weird cruelties, bloody intrigues and eye-popping depravities queasily fascinating’, and concluded that ‘far from being the exemplar of civilisation, there lurks the suspicion that the society on the Tiber was the drawing board for all dictatorships since’. However, as Nigel Jones pointed out in the Specta- tor, ‘beneath the obscene cavortings of their rulers, Holland never lets us forget Members of the that decent Romans thrived and Rome French Resistance in Paris, August 1944 was built in all its gory glory.’

Winter 2015 Review of Books THE OLDIE 11 HISTORY

Conquerors How Portugal Seized the Indian Ocean and Forged the First Global Empire

Roger Crowley (Faber & Faber, 432pp, £20, Oldie price £16.50)

ACCLAIMED FOR his earlier books about the Ottoman and Venetian em- pires, Crowley now turns his attention to the Portuguese and their short-lived imperial domination of the Indian Ocean. ‘Though its supremacy lasted little more than a century,’ Crowley concludes, ‘Portugal’s achievement was to create a prototype for new and flex- Vasco da Gama's departure to India in 1497 ible forms of empire, based on mobile sea power, and the paradigm for Euro- When the explorer Vasco da Gama nic Sandbrook, writing in the Sunday pean expansion. Where it led, the Dutch captured a dhow carrying a party of Times, agreed that it was a ‘magnifi- and the English followed.’ wealthy Calicut merchants and their cently rip-roaring history’. This was not simply an empire based families, he refused their offer of wealth Reviewing it for Abu Dhabi news- on trade in spices; it was also an empire in exchange for their freedom and in- paper the National, Matthew Price inspired by ruthless crusading zeal. ‘The stead sank their vessel. ‘The Portuguese called it ‘something of an old-fashioned Portuguese came to the Indian coast with were not after short-term plunder, the page-turning history. . . Crowley’s pages their visors lowered,’ writes Crowley. incident made loud and clear, but total burst with action; he is a fine writer of ‘Hardened by decades of holy war in domination,’ wrote Ben Wilson in the kinetic set pieces. If the succession of north Africa, their default strategies were Times. ‘Their methods went beyond blood, guts and battles gets a bit repeti- suspicion, aggressive hostage-taking, the mere piracy; this was unrestrained ter- tive, he opens the reader’s eyes to a now half-drawn sword and a simple binary rorism.’ Wilson praised the book for lost chapter in the Western encounter choice between Christian and Muslim.’ its ‘pulsating narrative’, while Domi- with the lands of the East.’

RED HAIR occurs in around 2 per Europe was often manifested in cent of the population, rising as high Red antipathy towards red-heads. An art as 13 per cent in northern countries historian by background, Colliss Har- such as Ireland, Iceland and Scot- A Natural History of the Redhead vey is especially informative on red land, where pale skin helps with the hair in painting, from erotic Renais- absorption of vitamin D. Those who Jacky Colliss Harvey (Allen and Unwin, 240pp, sance depictions of Mary Magdalene have red hair are more likely to be £16.99, Oldie price £14.99) to the use of red hair in the late 19th stung by bees; they feel pain more century as a signifier for all kinds of severely and require 20 per cent more passion and desire. One of her driving anaesthetic to be knocked out; they feel the cold more but themes is that red-headedness represents a classic ‘otherness’ can also tolerate spicier foods; their bodies produce more in European history, inciting the kind of discrimination — adrenaline than non-redheads and can access it quicker. witness the recent ‘Kick a Ginger Day’ at a school in Rother- Jacky Colliss Harvey peppers her new study of red-head- ham — that would be unacceptable if it were a matter of edness through history with such morsels of infor- religion or skin colour. mation. And she is as comfortable with science All reviewers found something to enjoy as she is with cultural history. In the ancient in the book. Red is both a ‘considerable world the Thracians were known for piece of scholarship’ and an ‘absorbing their warrior nature and red hair; yet read’, effused Grace McCleen in the the Greeks also imported them as Independent: Colliss Harvey ‘writes slaves, and in the plays of Aris- eloquently, sometimes humorously, tophanes, where actors playing often rousingly’. Robert Douglas- Thracians wore red wigs and were Fairhurst, in the Telegraph, called caricatured as comically lazy and it ‘bright and breezy’, with some inept, we see the genesis of the ‘fascinating’ discussions, while red-headed comic buffoon. Amber Pearson called it ‘engaging- Anti-Semitism in medieval ly informative’ in the Daily Mail.

12 THE OLDIE Review of Books Winter 2015 HISTORYhistory

The Maisky Diaries Red Ambassador to the Court of St James’s 1932–1943

Edited by Gabriel Gorodetsky (Yale University Press, 624pp, £25, Oldie price £20)

MAISKY’S DIARIES, discovered by Gorodetsky in a Russian archive in 1993, ‘constitute easily the most important diary of the Second World War period since Fringes of Power, Jock Colville’s record of working for Winston Churchill, were published more than 30 years ago,’ wrote Andrew Roberts in the Evening Standard. ‘Like Colville, Maisky had genuine literary talent as well as the ability constantly to be at the right place at the right time... entirely false. The land was fertile, The book is 561 pages long and not one Willoughbyland the natives friendly (particularly their of them is dull.’ women), and jungle fevers no worse The diaries offer ‘a frank and beauti- England’s Lost Colony than pestilence at home. And with fully written account of his London Willoughby absent much of the time years’, wrote Andy McSmith in the In- Matthew Parker (Hutchinson, 288pp. some sort of a commonwealth was es- dependent. ‘Speaking flawless English, £16.99, Oldie price £14.99) tablished in which, surprisingly, Jews, he glided through the drawing rooms non-conformists and other refugees of London’s élite, impressing everyone COLONIAL HISTORY is full of cau- flourished. But it was too good to last. with his acute intelligence and adroit tionary tales, but few are as stark — or In 1663 slavery was introduced and public relations patter.’ Maisky ‘under- indeed as unheralded — as that of Wil- with it came cruelty, decadence and stood Britain better than most British’ loughbyland, the subject of Matthew fear. and had ‘an uncanny ability to predict Parker’s extraordinary saga. Why is it A witness to this degradation was the course of British diplomacy and its unheralded? Because Willoughbyland the poet and dramatist Aphra Behn, disastrous consequences’, explained lasted a mere sixteen years before it sent out from London as a spy. Hor- Gerard DeGroot in the Times. ‘Sprin- became the Dutch colony of Suriname, rified by what she saw, Behn wrote kled amid his fascinating observations which even today, as John Gimlette Oronooko, a lurid account of the of momentous developments is some reminded readers in the Spectator, sufferings endured on a plantation by delightful gossip, to which Maisky was remains one of the most ‘obscure and a saintly Ghanaian prince. ‘In doing addicted,’ such as, for example, when exotic’ countries on earth. so,’ said Catherine Nixey, ‘she pipped Beatrice Webb told him that Churchill The genesis of Willoughbyland, Harriet Beecher Stowe to the post by was ‘not a true Englishman’ and had said Catherine Nixey in the Times, 150 years. Her contribution to the ‘negro blood’. His ‘painfully accurate lay in Sir Walter Raleigh’s specious abolitionist movement can scarcely be reflections on the British character description of El Dorado, the golden exaggerated.’ remind one of Samuel Pepys or Dr city situated deep in the ‘Large, Rich In 1666 Lord Willoughby drowned Johnson’. and Bewtiful Empire of Guiana’. This during an expedition against the For John Jolliffe in the Specta- mirage allured not only Shakespeare French, following which Willoughby- tor, it is the vignettes that ‘add such and Milton, but also an unscrupulous land was ceded to the Dutch in return exceptional interest to the old story’ of Cromwellian turncoat called Lord for an unpromising slab of North appeasement and wartime diplomacy. Willoughby. In 1651, frustrated in his America called New Amsterdam. For example, Lloyd George is described attempts to govern the recalcitrant Parker has done us a great favour, as ‘a man of the highest calibre, a cut planters of Barbados, he founded the said Dan Jones in the Sunday Times. above all around him . . . like Kreisler settlement and invoked El Dorado Though his account might seem like compared with a violinist from a as an enticement. Oppressed by civil little more than a footnote to the provincial orchestra’. Jolliffe concluded and religious turmoil at home — to history of colonialism, it is in fact ‘a that ‘despite occasional longueurs, this say nothing of the English climate — tantalising microcosm — a parable is an exceptionally readable as well as enough suckers took the bait. even — for empire’s decay from hope important story’. Willoughby’s prospectus was not into misery. Paradise lost indeed.’

Winter 2015 Review of Books THE OLDIE 13 HISTORY

ost book-loving oldies target of 2020 to complete the work. will have at least one A book on the Isle of Man is a distinct Mvolume of ‘Pevsner’ at Pevsner’s possibility. home. The name is shorthand for the All this means that Pevsner’s own founder of the Buildings of England words make up less and less of the series guidebook series, Sir Nikolaus Pevsner legacy published under his name. A few purists (1902–83). Arriving in England as may chafe at this, but Pevsner was no a refugee from Hitler in the 1930s, SIMON BRADLEY on the purist. His mission was to open the eyes Pevsner subsequently made no small architectural guides of the English to their own architecture, mark on national life — shelfloads of not to have the last word. books, masses of other writings on Meanwhile the well-thumbed art and architecture, professorships at old Penguin editions endure on the Cambridge and London, co- shelves, but the England founder of the Victorian they describe can be Society, regular BBC hard to recognise broadcasts — but the now, especially its eponymous guides are his towns and cities. greatest single legacy. At More remote still is least half a million have been the limited research on sold since Penguin published which the books were the debut volume, Cornwall, based. Local architects in 1951. and craftsmen, regional ‘Pevsner’ is, however, a styles in architecture, flexible term. Fearing that he industrial monuments wouldn’t cover all the English and transport buildings counties in his own lifetime, — to choose three Pevsner recruited younger themes among many — writers as authors or co-authors are covered scantily, if for twelve of the original 46 at all. Any errors of fact volumes. When the first printings or description must be sold out, other writers took identified and set right too. on the job of revising and So the revising authors find updating them. plenty to keep them busy. Pevsner’s last volume as sole author Pevsner’s successors also devote was Staffordshire (1974), in which he more time to the task. He typically looked forward to a full complement had to cram each county tour into of these new editions. ‘The publisher is a single month during university ready for them, an excellent reviser is vacations, but authors can now busy. The more of these revised editions expect their fieldwork to extend over I shall still see the happier I shall be.’ three years or more — long enough to The ‘excellent reviser’ was Bridget arrange entry to locked churches and Cherry, joined shortly afterwards at chapels, and to cajole wary house- Penguin by Elizabeth Williamson. Other owners into allowing a visit. Intimate hands had already been identified by portraits rather than brilliant outlines, Pevsner to produce founding volumes of the new editions have something in series on Ireland, Scotland and Wales. common with old-fashioned county The first book in an expanded format, histories like Hasted’s Kent or Bridget Cherry’s London 2: South, was and an American; Pevsner, with his Ormerod’s Cheshire. Yet they are still published in September 1983, a few international scholarly connections, written very much as guidebooks, with weeks after Pevsner’s death. Another would surely have been pleased). That a paramount sense of each building as a 26 new or revised volumes appeared will leave just one instalment pending fresh encounter for the visitor’s eye and under the Penguin imprint up to 2002, north of the Border, covering the understanding. when the undertaking moved to Yale counties of Lanark and Renfrew. Wales The next revised English volume on University Press. Since then there have is now fully surveyed, in seven large- the slipway is Derbyshire, due in June been fifty more. These new arrivals format volumes. Ireland has further to 2016. In Pevsner’s own words, ‘Don’t be include colour photographs, with go: four books so far published, another deceived, gentle reader, the first editions several all-colour paperback guides two close to completion, leaving about are only ballons d’essai; it is the second to English cities. half the country still to do. editions which count.’ November brings the 51st Yale As for England, revised large-format volume, Aberdeenshire: South and books now cover several entire regions, Simon Bradley’s latest book The Aberdeen, by Joseph Sharples, David W including London, East Anglia and the Railways: Nation, Network and People is Walker and Matthew Woodworth (as North-West. Authors are busy filling the published by Profile at £25; his guide to it happens, an Englishman, a Scotsman gaps among the other counties, with the Cambridgeshire was published last year.

14 THE OLDIE Review of Books Winter 2015

Paperbacks

Hild Nicola Griffith (Blackfriars, 640pp, £9.99, Oldie price £9.49) A Strange Business Making Art and Money in Nineteenth-Century Britain James Hamilton (Atlantic, 400pp, £12.99, Oldie price £11.69) A Message From ‘in vivid and credible detail’, said Nick ing out the sun. ‘Reports talked of col- Martha Rennison in the Sunday Times, and umns up to three miles wide, the birds Michael Robbins in the Chicago Tri- tightly packed, flying overhead for hours The Extinction of the bune particularly admired the way that at a time. One nesting site, in Michigan Griffith represents ‘the complexity of in the 1870s, was 28 miles long and Passenger Pigeon and its the worlds of medieval women — dyers five miles wide, the animals jammed on Relevance Today and weavers and cooks but also doctors to any tree they could find,’ marvelled and queens’. Andrew Holgate in the Sunday Times. Mark Avery (Bloomsbury, 304pp, James Hamilton’s A Strange The total population was put at ten £9.99, Oldie price £9.49) Business: Making Art and Money billion. Yet, less than forty years later, in Nineteenth-Century Britain is a on 1st September 1914, the last of the richly detailed study of the art world in species, a female named Martha, died in Victorian Britain, and tells how ‘artists Cincinnati Zoo. The passenger pigeon Yes! I Can and a small army of opportunists, art had been hunted in vast numbers, but lovers, collectors and businessmen of Avery concludes that it was the destruc- Manage, Thank all sorts used their ingenuity to turn the tion of the great forests of the eastern visual arts into money’, Philip Hensher United States that finally sounded its You explained in the Spectator. Rich in death knell. ‘He ends by pointing to a anecdotes about artists from Turner to British parallel — the much-loved turtle Virginia Ironside (Quercus, Landseer, the book ‘is most interesting dove, which itself appears to be heading 368pp, £7.99, Oldie price £7.59) when it deals with less-known figures for extinction here,’ warned Michael such as the colourmen, whose new, McCarthy in the Independent. bright pigments changed the appear- Yes! I Can Manage, Thank you, by NICOLA GRIFFITH’S Hild tells the ance of 19th-century painting’, thought The Oldie’s own Virginia Ironside, is story of St Hilda of Whitby, the bare Martin Gayford in the Guardian. the latest instalment in her series of bones of whose life are known through ‘Hamilton writes beautifully,’ extolled novels about London granny Marie Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the Lucy Hughes Hallett in the Times. ‘He Sharp which chart the trials and tribula- English Nation. Born around AD makes large points succinctly — his tions of ageing, to hilarious effect. Her 614 and brought up in the court of passage on the Napoleonic wars, the adventures in this new novel include a Edwin, King of Northumbria, Hilda subsequent deaths of young men, and handsome lodger, a nightmare neigh- was baptised together with Edwin’s the boom in demand for funerary bour and a kidnapped dog. Marie’s entire court, and went on to found the monuments is masterly. Seldom have life is further complicated by her close abbey at Whitby (see picture above), I learnt so much from a single book circle of eccentric friends and family. presiding over the synonymous Synod. while simultaneously being so excel- ‘As ever, Marie is the voice of reason in Renowned for her wisdom, she was lently entertained.’ an insane world,’ according to Sarah influential in encouraging Caedmon, In A Message From Martha, Mark Lawrence in the Irish Daily Mail, and the monastery’s young herder, who Avery, former conservation director Wendy Holden in the Daily Mail loved was inspired in a dream to sing verses at the RSPB, recounts the cautionary this ‘wonderful’ novel, which ‘abounds in praise of God. Nicola Griffith’s tale of the passenger pigeon, once the with metropolitan flavour and is full of Hild is ‘utterly absorbing’, according world’s most common bird, and its hilarious truths. Marie’s take on Face- to Alison Flood in the Guardian, who precipitous slide into extinction. In the book in particular will ring bells with called it ‘a magnificent and convincing 19th century, flocks numbering into the anyone who hates pictures of dogs on portrayal of a strange, wild, beautiful hundreds of millions swarmed across the skateboards and homilies about learn- world’. Anglo-Saxon life is depicted eastern half of the United States, block- ing to dance in the rain.’

16 THE OLDIE Review of Books Winter 2015 nature NATURE

the Cornish castle of Caerhays, and The Company of the Holfords of Westonbirt in Glouces- tershire,’ explained Hilary Spurling in Trees the Guardian. She relished Pakenham’s adventures — how he explored the ‘high A Year in a Lifetime’s Quest Andes where the monkey puzzles grow on top of a Patagonian cliff structured Thomas Pakenham (Weiden- in a series of vertical folds the shape and feld, 224pp, £30, Oldie price £25) colour of a bundle of cigars’. And his expeditions to ‘Sikkim and to the moun- ‘No one can have envied Thomas tains of Tibet, edging along fallen tree Pakenham when, in 1961, he unex- trunks across ravines with roaring rivers pectedly inherited Tullynally Castle in far below, dodging bears, snow leopards County Westmeath in central Ireland, and Chinese government restrictions, with its 1,500-acre “demesne” — a returning each time with prodigious third of it park and garden,’ observed quantities of seed to be reared in the Ursula Buchan in the Spectator. Pak- greenhouses and finally let loose on the enham, brother of Antonia Fraser, was grounds of Tullynally’. heavily burdened with death duties and ‘The privilege of having the means it ‘took nearly 30 years to pay off the to follow a passion will not be lost on debts before he could begin to concen- readers,’ said Valerie Shanley in the Irish trate on the delight of his heart, which Acer palmatum ‘Osakasuki’, Mail on Sunday; ‘but good-humoured is planting, caring for and observing the Forest Walk, Tullynally revelations of triumphs that sometimes ways of trees as well as travelling the end in failure contribute to an engaging world to look at them’. His new book ‘chronicles a year in openness. For example, when Paken- Pakenham, now 81, has already Pakenham’s life of planning, plant- ham’s own giant Campbell’s Magnolia published three books on trees — trees ing and travelling in pursuit of the first burst into long-awaited blooms “the that were outstanding for their height, great plant-hunters, Joseph Hooker, size of soup plates” on the estate years girth, longevity or picturesque his- George Forrest and Ernest Wilson, who previously, the said flowers were not the tory. Meetings with Remarkable Trees, scoured the world for 19th-century desired snowy-white but a shade he de- published in 1996, is the best known. garden-builders like the Williamses at scribes with disgust as “knicker-pink”.’

Paradise and Plenty: A Rothschild Family Garden by Mary Keen, with photographs by Tom Hatton, documents the extensive walled garden at Eythrope in Buckinghamshire, which she designed. The walls and the courtyard buildings were built in the late 19th century by Alice Rothschild; and all the fruit, vegetables and flowers were grown for the Rothschild family (as now) in the enclosed kitchen garden. Keen explains in her introduction that the book is intended to be a ‘record of the way things have been done at this unique place for almost a quarter of a century under the present management, and a way of sharing the knowledge that has been passed down from Miss Alice’s gardeners to the modern team’. Alongside Keen’s hugely informative text, there are beautiful photographs, including one of the white nerine ‘Virgo’ with pink nerines (right). Eythrope has ‘always been kept intensely private’, so this book gives a rare opportunity to look over the walls and learn about this secret garden.

Paradise and Plenty is published by Pimpernel Press at £50 (Oldie price £45)

Winter 2015 Review of Books THE OLDIE 17

Current affairsCURRENT AFFAIRS

Cameron at 10 The Inside Story 2010–2015

Anthony Seldon and Peter Snowdon (William Collins, 624pp, £20, Oldie price £16.50) Call Me Dave The Unauthorised Biography of David Cameron Michael Ashcroft and Isabel Oakeshott (Biteback, 608pp, £20, Oldie price £16.50)

This autumn has seen two biogra- of the first Cameron administration’. Its ‘thought it reflected on the prime min- phies of our prime minister come along ‘judgements are on the whole balanced ister. To have ditched Ashcroft suggests at once. Cameron at 10 was written and the narrative compelling’. Despite sound judgement, and to have done with Downing Street’s co-operation the lurid serialisation of Call Me Dave so with such light collateral damage and confines itself to Cameron’s first in the Daily Mail, which indicated that required some political skill.’ While term as prime minister, while Call Me Ashcroft was out for revenge, Mullin Cameron at 10 is ‘a serious work of Dave, a renegade operation, is a more concluded that ‘remarkably, and despite ultra-contemporary history, historians conventional biography covering its the nonsense about a pig’s head, this is a will notice Ashcroft’s book only as an subject’s entire life. ‘While each section biography almost entirely free of malice. example of how Cameron extricated of Cameron at 10 is filled with analy- Indeed, apart from a brief introduction himself from an entanglement that sis,’ explained Charlotte Henry in the and a lengthy appendix summarising the could have caused much more trouble Independent, ‘its non-linear nature gives conclusions of his regular opinion polls, than it did’. a reduced sense of a narrative arc, of which he publishes on his own website, The ‘abiding impression’ left on Cameron’s premiership developing over Lord Ashcroft’s fingerprints are largely Daily Telegraph reviewer Robert time. However, the authors do manage absent.’ With regard to Cameron’s Ox- Colville by Cameron at 10 was ‘of to tie together the moments that will ford years, ‘there is much talk of drugs, the headmaster that Seldon used to be define his legacy.’ On the other hand, but no smoking gun’. peering over his spectacles at the pupil Call Me Dave is ‘much more successful before him as he leafs through each in portraying Cameron’s development report’. It will ‘probably be read out as an individual, as it runs from child- ‘Remarkably, and despite of duty rather than for pleasure’ since hood to Downing Street, and there are the nonsense about ‘there is none of the journalistic eye for some fascinating anecdotes’. Nonethe- gossip found in Matthew d’Ancona’s In less, ‘much of the early-years reporting, a pig’s head, this is a It Together, nor the verbal flair’. David while humorous, seems entirely ephem- biography almost entirely Aaronovitch in the Times was equally eral to our perception of Cameron the appalled by the ‘penny dreadful writing’ PM’. Although Call Me Dave ‘should free of malice’ of Call Me Dave, which he described by no means be simply dismissed, as an attempted murder of its subject’s ultimately the offering from Seldon and For the Independent on Sunday’s reputation, albeit ‘murder by trainspot- Snowdon feels a far more substantial political commentator John Rentoul, ters’. The ‘main murder weapon turns look at an intriguing political leader’. Call Me Dave contains many ‘lurid and out to be faint praise. Every good thing Former Labour MP Chris Mullin, re- seemingly implausible stories, often he’s done was someone else’s idea, every viewing the two books for the Observer, described as untrue or unverifiable by bad thing was his own fault.’ Ashcroft was even-handed in his judgement. The the authors and yet included regardless. and Oakeshott ‘are detained entirely on Seldon–Snowdon book is ‘a substantial I have never seen anything like it in a the surface of his existence and fail to piece of work — a blow-by-blow ac- book purporting to be a serious account excavate, in any proper or interesting count, impeccably researched and care- of an important political leader’s life.’ way, into the psychology of the man fully documented, of the highs and lows Yet the more he read it, the better he himself’.

Winter 2015 Review of Books THE OLDIE 19 current affairs

developing fully rounded human beings. An Intelligent Nourishing individuality is vital, but so too is learning to be ‘part of the tribe’. Person’s Guide ‘I could happily spend an evening drink- ing claret with this man whose values I to Education find myself unexpectedly sharing,’ said Pope. Tony Little (Bloomsbury, 270pp, In the New Statesman, another £16.99, Oldie price £14.99) initial sceptic, Tristram Hunt, then La- bour’s education spokesman, described NO PARENT of teenage boys should the book as a ‘work of reflection, be without this ‘hugely reassuring, humility and insight’ which read both common-sense guide’ by the former as ‘pathfinder for helicopter parents and Eton headmaster Tony Little, said Sian a heartfelt contribution to England’s de- Griffiths in the Sunday Times. She pressingly binary debate on education’. particularly admired his chapter on Sex, For Carey Schofield in the Spectator, Drugs and Rock’n’Roll, which covered Little captured ‘the magic, the surprising everything from his reading list for alchemy that makes things work in an sixteen-year-olds — he sets the bar high outstanding school, and offers hope and with titles including Gulliver's Travels inspiration to people elsewhere who are and The Bonfire of the Vanities — to battling lethargy and low standards’. his gentle attack on Velcro Mums (hov- Little’s story of workmen at Eton ering and interfering, inflicting damage uncovering fragments of a wall painting without even realising the effects of under some wood panelling was en- their intrusive behaviour). joyed by Roy Blatchford in the Guard- Even critics who itched to sneer Eton College: making education work ian. The images, from around 1520, are at the privileges of Eton were won believed to be the earliest representation over by Little’s vision of the qualities parents who would value his advice on of a school scene in England. A banner required of good schools. In the Times navigating these turbulent years, and headline from Roman scholar Quintil- Educational Supplement, the principal many teachers who could learn from his ian crowns the scene ‘Virtuo preceptoris of Kingsbridge Community College wise, balanced approach to discipline.’ est ingeniorum notare discrimina,’ in Devon, Roger Pope, thought that The real joy of the book was its vision meaning ‘The excellence of the teacher Little’s understanding of the adolescent of education: academic attainment is is to identify the difference in talents mind was superb. ‘I know of many never enough, schools must be about of students.’

Capitalism to a credit crunch. A veteran financial the living standards of billions of people journalist, a Financial Times columnist, since the 18th century and improved Money, Morals and a pension-fund trustee, and a former their life expectancy’, nonetheless he company chairman, Plender ‘has continues to be sharply critical of bank- Markets written incisively for decades on the ers who he considers ‘have undoubtedly John Plender (Biteback, 320pp, £20, excitements, oddities and disasters of done their best to give capitalism a bad Oldie price £16.50) financial markets’, wrote the Econo- name’. His book is ‘a superbly eru- mist’s anonymous reviewer, and in his dite excursion through the theory and latest book, Capitalism, he ‘approaches practice of market economies down the Something Will the quandaries of capital- ages’, declared Dominic Law- ism with a shrewd eye son in the Sunday Times. Turn Up for detail. The reader ‘This is a book much more discovers, for example, of diagnosis than offered Britain’s Economy, Past, that Voltaire turned up treatments,’ he continued, at the court of Frederick but still Plender argues Present and Future the Great as a pet Enlight- that ‘the post-credit- David Smith (Profile Books, 288pp, enment intellectual, only crunch reforms to the £14.99, Oldie price £12.99) to run a bond-market banking sector are in- scam that could have adequate’, believing that BACK IN THE early Noughties, John bankrupted the Prussian ‘the big banks’ specula- Plender published a book called Going exchequer.’ tive trading in financial Off the Rails: Global Capital and the Although Plender is derivatives’ should be Crisis of Legitimacy, which warned that ‘wise enough to realise ‘dramatically reduced’. the reckless behaviour of banks and the that, for all its faults, For TLS reviewer Paul boom in shadow banking would lead capitalism has raised Collier, ‘Plender’s

20 THE OLDIE Review of Books Winter 2015 CURRENT AFFAIRS

account of the modern City is at the core of Capitalism’ but it is ‘consid- erably enhanced by being placed in the much wider historical context of moralising about markets: in Capital- ism, Aristotle and Marx rub shoulders with the recent bank CEOs. His book is balanced, well written and not self- aggrandising.’ In his review for the Times, Tim Montgomerie suggested that the reason why it is ‘such a delight to read’ is ‘because Plender is as likely to quote Dickens, Goethe and Blake as Green- span, Carney and Schäuble. His analysis of capitalism’s strengths and weaknesses is rooted in how markets and commerce have been seen throughout history and in great works of literature.’ It attempts to ‘understand why, despite the prosper- ity it has delivered and its superiority to all other forms of economic organi- sation, most of us struggle to accept capitalism, let alone admire it’. bia is an informative albeit tedious David Smith, economics editor of the Cyberphobia read’. Sunday Times, is another experienced Hugo Rifkind, writing in the commentator. Something Will Turn Up Identity, Trust, Security and Times, agreed that Cyberphobia con- is ‘his often very personal look at our sists of two books, but preferred the economic performance over the past 60 the Internet second one: ‘It’s just a bit more inter- years and the issues we now face’, ex- Edward Lucas (Bloomsbury, 336pp, esting once we get to the second half plained Gerard Lyons, economics adviser £20, Oldie price £16.50) of this book, when Lucas starts to to the London Mayor, in a review for focus on corporations, governments Smith’s own paper. ‘Despite the setbacks, In a book intended to make our and militaries.’ However, Rifkind was he retains a positive view, both of the flesh creep, Edward Lucas, a senior past and our likely future direction.’ editor at the Economist, claims that ‘We are told that Smith ‘peppers the book with recol- ‘our dependence on computers is lections of meetings with the country’s growing faster than our ability to Chinese and Russian most powerful economic politicians forestall attackers’. At the same time hacking is dangerous, and policymakers’ (rating the late Sir he argues that ‘in all other walks of Geoffrey Howe as the best chancellor), life we trade off freedom, security and while American and but ‘for all the battles played out in convenience’ and therefore ‘our deal- British hacking is the past few decades between monetar- ings with computers and networks ists and Keynesians’ Smith’s analysis should be no different’. benevolent’ ‘doesn’t fit neatly into any one camp’, Adarsh Matham of the Sunday and ‘though he gained a good univer- Standard (Kenya) felt that Cyberpho- disappointed that he did not ‘enter- sity grounding in economic theory, he bia is really two books in one. ‘The tain the suggestion that all of this remains a pragmatist, his analysis based first book is an extensive, fairly well- broad, tumbling chaos and vulner- also on what he observes and what the researched horror tome that justifies ability might actually be good for us’. data shows’. the title and introduces the readers to It seemed to Rifkind that ‘whether However, Tim Montgomerie, in his the kinds of dangers that individuals, we are states, hackers, scammers, or review for the Times, found the book corporations and countries face from simply angry people with social me- contained ‘few insights’. Buried in it increasing intrusion of the internet dia accounts, we’ll all be able to do were ‘important issues such as the inac- into our everyday lives.’ The second each other a hell of a lot of damage. curacy of government statistics and how book, on the other hand, is ‘a very Perhaps we’ll just have to learn to they have repeatedly misled policy- political tome’ and ‘in trying to find treat each other a little better.’ makers or the dangerously misplaced solutions for the problems in the first Sunday Times reviewer Oliver enthusiasm of the British governing book, Mr Lucas risks getting his book Thring said that the book ‘will delight classes for the European project. But labelled as propaganda’. For example, the intelligence agencies, plaudits Smith never develops these themes. The ‘we are told that Chinese and Russian from whom bedeck the jacket’, book’s title is Something Will Turn Up hacking is dangerous, while American but that ‘those who champion the and I kept turning the pages in the hope and British hacking is benevolent.’ internet’s lawlessness, for noble or that some grand new thought would. It Matham concluded that ‘if you can nefarious purposes, will not relish its didn’t.’ tune out this second book, Cyberpho- call for constraint’.

Winter 2015 Review of Books THE OLDIE 21 current affairs

Unsung heroes of indexing SAM LEITH on this underrated art

straight-faced reference to something silly, or a concatenation of improbable neighbours. I’ve always been fond of ‘elephants, as example of conjugal virtue, 17’ in the index to volume two of Fou- cault’s History of Sexuality. And it seems to me that perhaps the greatest aspect of Fantagraphics’s mammoth sequential republication of the complete Peanuts is that it comes with an index. You can track the first appearance of Charlie Brown’s zig-zag sweater (23rd December 1950), Snoopy’s thought bubble, or discover ‘Lucy — googly eyes, first strip without...’ One of the things that can go wrong in an index is a circular reference: and that can, of course, be used as a gag. Stan Kelly-Bootle’s 1995 The Computer Contradictionary gives us: ‘Endless loop: see “loop, endless”.’ ‘Loop, endless: see “endless loop”.’ Douglas Hofstadter in- cluded under ‘I’ in one of his self-indexed books: ‘index: challenges of, 598; as reve- ag, tote.’ This is what I Indexes are vital: a latory of book’s nature, 598; typo in, 631; carried over my shoulder as work of art, 598.’ Then under ‘T’: ‘typo when, early this autumn, sort of X-ray of the in index, 633’. (The index ends at p632.) ‘BI found myself stumping text, a map for ready Contrary to what many people assume, around the labyrinthine brutalist campus indexing is not a job that can be done of York University. I had inherited from reference, something by computers. Computers help — when John Sutherland the very great privilege slightly different to some indexers still working started out, of serving as Honorary President of the the primary technology was cards and Society of Indexers, whose joint annual either contents page or shoeboxes — but they do not do the work conference with the Society for Editors concordance and more for you. Computers can’t parse abstract and Proofreaders was taking place there. valuable than both nouns, figure out what might qualify as Meeting indexers in the flesh was a examples of ‘Rowse, Alfred Leslie: cyni- good reminder that the index of your cism of’, or make judgements about what book is not delivered by a stork. Profes- memoirs of their colleagues — riffling an does or does not merit an entry. Indexing sional indexers — often retired librarians, index in search of your own name is the is a craft and it is also an art. as it happens — are many, and their work analogue precursor of self-Googling — Yet in straitened times in the publish- is scholarly, ingenious, fastidious, little were it not for indexers? ing world, the index is under threat: pub- paid and less recognised. They also, often, offer a sly commen- lishers increasingly choose to do without, The Society of Indexers goes back to tary on the work. As none other than or demand that authors make their own 1957; the index itself — though the origins Harold Macmillan (‘Mac, Super’) wrote: or pay for the service of a professional, are murky — as far as the 15th century, ‘A good index can be much more than if they want one, out of their usually very though a scholarly article in the Indexer a guide to the contents of a book. It can modest advances. has claimed the I-Ching, up to a millen- often give a far clearer glimpse of its spirit I’d beseech all Oldie readers who value nium before Christ, is a proto-index. Yet than the blurb-writers or critics are able to indexers, then, to show them some sup- indexes are seldom remarked or admired: do.’ The index to Richard Ollard’s 1999 life port. I do not propose, necessarily, that you far more often notice them when they of AL Rowse, for instance, gave a perfect you install an indexer in your spare room are absent or inadequate, and the indexer sense of the cut of this cantankerous old as Bob Geldof does with Syrian refugees. is seldom if ever credited by name. don’s jib: ‘contempt’; ‘censoriousness and But follow @indexers on Twitter. Visit the Yet they are vital: a sort of X-ray of the resentments’; ‘sense of rejection’; ‘solip- website www.indexers.org.uk. If you’re text, a map for ready reference, some- sism’; ‘cynicism’; ‘vindictiveness’; ‘blind reviewing a book on Amazon whose thing slightly different to either contents spots and prejudices’; ‘egotism’; ‘fond- index does it credit, for instance, say so. page or concordance and more valu- ness for money’; ‘liking for celebrities’. And if you’re irked by a book without an able than both. How would scholars do Almost everybody who takes an inter- index, why not write to the publisher to their work were it not for indexers? How est in these things will have a favourite complain? That would be a ‘deed, good’ would politicians avoid having to buy the entry, or entries — a cherished joke, a in a ‘world, wicked’.

22 THE OLDIE Review of Books Winter 2015

FICTION FICTION

David Sexton, also writing Purity in the Standard, found Purity ‘makes the most compelling Jonathan Franzen (4th Estate, 576pp, reading’. However, in the £20, Oldie price £16.50) New Statesman Lionel Shriver was ambivalent. Franzen’s DEPENDING ON where you’re coming prose was ‘inviting, accessible, from, Jonathan Franzen is either the clear and well crafted’, but latest Great American Novelist, or a ultimately the novel was ‘a sexist white male dinosaur, according skilful execution of a weak to reviewers of his latest novel, Purity. idea’. ‘Franzen has become a difficult writer to Jenni Russell in the Times, review,’ reflected Benjamin Markovits however, found no redeeming in the Independent. ‘The praise and the features: the novel was ‘tripe’. reaction against the praise have become runs the Sunlight Project, a non-profit ‘His characters remain obstinately so extreme that you end up bouncing [organisation] that exposes political and flat and implausible. Franzen keeps back and forth between them.’ social misdeeds.’ Many other reviewers inventing marriages where dutiful men ‘The novel follows a now-familiar were struck by the Dickensian parallels, subsume their own wishes to those of formula, tracing the interlocking lives of Sarah Sands in the Evening Standard their neurotic partners before finally a cast of broken characters,’ according seeing the novel as ‘a kind of Netflix walking out.’ to the Economist’s reviewer. ‘The version of Great Expectations’. Curtis Sittenfeld in the Guardian protagonist Pip, whose real name is ‘Franzen’s large theme is the summed up the critics’ mixed reactions: Purity, is a lost young woman searching impossibility of living a life of ‘On the one hand, I’m disinclined to for the identity of her father. Like Pip ideological purity,’ explained Elaine recommend this book to my female in Dickens’s Great Expectations, she Showalter in Prospect. ‘He examines friends; on the other hand, if I’d been evolves from innocent to worldly-wise the conflicts between philosophic told Purity was a first novel by an through a novel full of twists and ideals and human nature, between the unknown writer I’d be dazzled by its unlikely coincidences. Pip moves to contemporary gathering and dumping of rich scenes and crackling dialogue, Bolivia to be an intern for Andreas unmediated secret information online, its delicious observations about Wolf, a German internet activist who and principled investigative journalism.’ contemporary life.’

Sweet Caress The Many Lives of Amory Clay

William Boyd (Bloomsbury, 464pp, £18.99, Oldie price £15.99)

‘SWEET CARESS belongs to a genre that William Boyd has made his own: a novel which traces from birth to death the life of an artistic main character who experiences at first-hand several of the 20th century's defining events,’ explained James Walton in the Daily Telegraph. ‘The book's narrator, Amory Clay, is a photographer,’ Jon Michaud told the Washington Post. ‘Born in 1908, her life is The general election results show a Conservative majority. set on its course when her uncle gives Amory her first camera. Miliband, Clegg and Farage resign as party leaders. While she is at boarding school, Amory's father, suffering from Ed Balls loses his seat (9th May 2015) “shell shock”, attempts to kill her.’ ‘Thereafter her saga encompasses events such as a The above cartoon is taken from a new collection of Blackshirt rally in London in the 1930s, several visits to sketches of contemporary political life by the Times’s New York and a love affair with an American publisher and satirist Peter Brookes (Robson Press, £18.99, Oldie a French writer,’ related Charlotte Heathcote in the Daily price £16.99). In the introduction to Testing Times Express. ‘There are also visits to Vietnam and Weimar Berlin, Brookes reveals that Miliband (Wallace), Balls (Gromit) and a doomed marriage to a Scottish aristocrat.’ and ‘Cleggers’ (fag to Cameron, Westminster Academy’s ‘Yet her episodic adventures do not amount to a plot,’ head boy) were ‘wonderful’ to draw and that he will miss complained Amanda Craig in the Independent. ‘Her attributes them all. Included in the book are more than a hundred seem less like those of a fully imagined character than those of illustrations, which chart the major stories and topics of a shell waiting for a great actress to breathe life into her in the the past couple of years. TV serialisation that will no doubt follow.’ Sheena Joughin in the TLS agreed: ‘Amory is not really a

24 THE OLDIE Review of Books Autumn 2015 FICTION CLASSIC READ character. She's a plot device, whose ragged adventures leave Rough seas her as bewildered as we are,’ and Peter Kemp, in the Sunday Ferdinand Mount wrestles Times, also lamented ‘the slackness of its characterisation’. with Moby-Dick. Who will win? Several critics were unconvinced by Boyd’s attempt to write as a woman: Sarah Churchwell in the New Statesman was amused by ‘Amory’s habit of comparing, decades later, each of her lovers’ penises in great anatomical detail which will make most women hoot with laughter’. By contrast, Elizabeth Day, in the Observer, found that ‘Amory’s fictional voice never wavers. She can be tricky, contradictory and impulsive, but this only serves to emphasise her realness.’ And Caroline Moore in the Spectator found the book ‘a masterly portrait’.

Where My Heart Used to Beat Sebastian Faulks (Hutchinson, 336pp, £20, Oldie price £16.50)

‘SEBASTIAN FAULKS has been turning war into slickly serious The Great White Whale had been dodging me for years, fiction for decades now,’ James Kidd reminded readers of the decades even. Many a time had I launched an expedition South China Morning Post. In Where My Heart Used to Beat against the heaving monster only to see my puny harpoon Faulks addresses its psychological aftermath. Robert Hendricks, ping off its rugged flanks. The pages of my Folio Society a psychiatrist, is ‘determined not to be defined by the years edition, forty years old now, have gone yellow with neglect. he spent as a young man during the Second World War “in Time for one last voyage. I would equal Captain Ahab uniform, in foreign countries, killing men I didn’t know”, and in my determination not to be bested by the denizen of the has shut himself off from his past’, according to Alexandra pitiless deeps. And I did it gritting my teeth, keeping my Frean in the Times. Robbie Millen, also in the Times, revealed head to the wind and lashing myself to the creaking mast. I that Hendricks ‘is asked to become a literary executor to an got to the end and staggered back on to dry land, resolved elderly neuroscientist, Alexander Pereira, who never to take ship again. we discover knows a lot about Hendricks What an awful book it is, and I don’t mean awe-inspiring. and his father’. To start with, nothing prepares you for the huge amount In the Evening Standard David of unwanted information about the whaling industry it Sexton explained how ‘over the contains. It’s like an Economist supplement folded in with course of their discussions we the Book of Jonah. Some readers love being drenched by learn both of the horrors of the spray of Herman Melville’s Biblical-Shakespearean- the trenches in the First World Homeric prose. But to me it all smells of cod: cod Bible, cod War that killed his father and of Shakespeare, cod Homer. There is more cod in the book Hendricks’s traumatic experiences than there ever was in the North Sea. As for the characters: in the Second World War. A vivid all those one-legged pirates and Red Indians speaking in wartime romance with an Italian stilted pidgin are about as believable as the supporting cast woman, inexplicably suddenly broken in Tin-Tin’s adventures, Captain Ahab’s quest rather less off by her, hasn’t helped either.’ plausible than Captain Haddock’s. ‘Where My Heart Used to Beat is subtle Most off-putting of all is the arch, high-flown tone of the in its treatment of memory and madness, and compelling as a would-be epic. It is this, I fear, which has secured Moby-Dick study of a man floundering in love and war in “a century of squatting rights on the title of the Great American Novel, psychosis”,’ according to Malcolm Forbes in the Australian. and it accounts, in large measure, for the hollow-bombastic Toby Clements, in the Sunday Telegraph, also applauded sound of so much male American fiction that aspires to the ‘this terrific novel, humming with ideas, shouts of laughter and same eminence: Steinbeck, Bellow, Mailer, Hemingway — moments of almost unbearable tragedy’. oh almost any of them preoccupied with masculinity, their But Cressida Connolly in the Spectator was disappointed: chest hair blowing in the breeze and their style done up to ‘I was never able to form a convincing picture of the narrator, the nines. less still of his enigmatic lover, while the older physician was There may be women who are bowled over by Moby-Dick, almost absurdly under-realised.’ Elias O’Hanlon, in the Irish but I haven’t met any. Which may be why all my favourite Independent, was similarly frustrated, finding it ‘a story North American writers happen to be women. All in all, I that often seems to be made up of scraps of other possible want to echo Starbuck’s lament: ‘Oh God! To sail with such narratives. Characters come and go. Things happen, but are a heathen crew that have small touch of human mothers not necessarily related to any of the other things that happen.’ in them!’

Winter 2015 Review of Books THE OLDIE 25 Winter 2015 Review of Books THE OLDIE 25 SpYING

The late summer this year I spy Daniel Craig produced more spooks than as James Bond Hallowe’en: spies, spying, spymasters and spycraft were amply represented from the Second World War to present day. In the how-to category fell Brian Stewart’s memoir-cum-reflection on his trade Why Spy? The Art of Intelligence, co-authored with the academic Samantha Newbery. Stewart, a Chinese-speaking 70-year veteran of the secret world and one-time secretary of the Joint Intelligence Committee, has produced a ‘fascinating’ book, thought the Scotsman’s Vin Arthey: a collection of 13 essays whose insights ‘on types of intelligence, how intelligence is (or should be) assessed and deception operations are riveting, full of illuminating detail’. Alan Judd is a realist; not a single sentimental in the Spectator agreed, finding his whimper slinks into these 600 pages. musings had ‘the aroma of a good Why Spy? His measure of military intelligence is whisky, well-distilled’. He was amused how far it influences outcomes on the too by Stewart’s rueful observation The Art of Intelligence battlefield. And it is through this prism that customers (i.e. politicians) Brian Stewart and Samantha that he retells the history of the Second ‘sometimes use intelligence as a drunk World War.’ The view through the Newbery (Hurst, 288pp, £25, Oldie uses a lamppost: for support, not prism isn’t always flattering: many of price £20) illumination’. our spies, though brave, were ‘duffers’, Where Stewart stresses the value of the famous Agent Zig-Zag was more HUMINT (aka Human Intelligence), Intercept interested in ‘girls and shoe-leather’ the BBC’s security correspondent and tales of the SOE are as often as not Gordon Corera’s latest book Intercept: The Secret History of ‘romantic twaddle’. The Secret History of Computers and Michael Burleigh, in the Evening Spies takes a long look at the way Computers and Spies Standard, saluted ‘vintage Hastings’: a technology has changed the face of Gordon Corera (Weidenfeld, 320pp, book which debunkingly argues that espionage. It goes back a good deal £20, Oldie price £16.50) secret intelligence influenced ‘perhaps further than Edward Snowden, as it one-thousandth of one per cent’ of turns out: Corera begins his book with battlefield outcomes during the war. an account of the British dredger Alert The Secret War ‘Given the national fixation with spies severing Germany’s undersea telegraph and special forces, Hastings’s book is cables early in the First World War, Spies, Codes and Guerrillas a very necessary corrective,’ thought meaning that German communications Burleigh, ‘though one doubts whether would have to be sent by radio and 1939–1945 his astringent medicine will cure the would be vulnerable to interception. Max Hastings (William Collins, patient.’ Corera’s account takes in everything 640pp, £30, Oldie price £25) Finally Frederick Forsyth, whose from that period, via (inevitably) work on fictional espionage is well Bletchley Park and Enigma to the NSA known, has come clean about his and GCHQ’s bulk interception of data The Outsider real-life experiences working for MI6 and an age where ‘all you need is to in the Sixties. Outsider: My Life in persuade someone unwittingly to click My Life in Intrigue Intrigue disappointed the Observer’s on an email and you have the access Ben East, however: ‘It’s so matter of Frederick Forsyth (Bantam, 368pp, you require’. fact, it has the air of a ghostwritten £20, Oldie price £16.50) The Economist noted that ‘Mr sports autobiography,’ he complained, Corera has been given plenty of access unmoved even by Forsyth’s account of to western intelligence agencies, and intercepted’ throughout the last losing his virginity to a German countess he describes their dilemmas with century, said the Guardian’s Richard who had ‘the quaint habit of singing the sympathy. The book’s main message, Norton-Taylor, ‘this is it.’ “Horst Wessel” during coitus’. though, is that computers have The prolific historian and journalist Forsyth isn’t the only old spy to automated espionage, and made it Max Hastings turns his attention to sing, incidentally. Next year, it has just cheap and easy.’ ‘If you are looking Second World War espionage in The been announced, John le Carré will be for a clear and comprehensive guide Secret War, admiringly reviewed by publishing his first nonfiction book, a to how communications have been Roger Boyes in the Times: ‘Hastings memoir called The Pigeon Tunnel.

26 THE OLDIE Review of Books Winter 2015 children HISTORY

ANNA LETHBRIDGE recommends books for all ages — from toddlers to teenagers

Fairytales for Mr Barker arrives, Ben and Fee are invited (Walker Books £10, Oldie to be extras. But their suspi- price £9.50, baby and toddler) cions are aroused — is the film provides just the right mix of crew up to something sinister? cosiness and humour to enchant The Wild Swans by Jackie a toddler. Written and illustrat- Morris (Frances Lincoln ed by Jessica Ahlberg, daughter £10.99, Oldie price £9.99, nine of Allan and Janet Ahlberg of plus) is a lyrical, stunningly Peepo! and Each Peach Pear illustrated retelling of Hans Plum fame, this gentle tale Christian Andersen’s magi- contains plenty of references cal tale of the princess who is to familiar fairy tales, which struck dumb when her brothers toddlers will enjoy spotting, as are turned into swans. She must well as detailed domestic scenes weave shirts out of nettles to — small children will love opening the gain their freedom and find her little doors to peep inside. own voice. The inimitable Judith Kerr, author National Theatre: All About Theatre of The Tiger Who Came to Tea, has re- (Walker Books £14.99, Oldie price cently celebrated her 92nd birthday and £12.99, nine plus) comes with a puff on is still going strong. Her latest book, the cover from Benedict Cumberbatch, Mister Cleghorn’s Seal (HarperCollins no less, and will inspire aspiring actors £12.99, Oldie price £11.69, four plus), of nine plus, as well as those with an tells the tale of the eponymous hero interest in what goes on behind the who, on a visit to the seaside, rescues a scenes. The book covers everything seal pup named Charlie. A beauti- from script to opening night, fully illustrated chaotic adventure taking in rehearsals, set-making, ensues, told with warmth, wit and make-up, lighting, sound and mu- an eye for the ridiculous. sic, explaining how their different Imaginary Fred, by Artemis roles combine to create a unique Fowl author Eoin Colfer (Har- theatrical experience. perCollins £12.99, Oldie price In Railhead (OUP £9.99, £11.69, four plus), illustrated by Oldie price £9.49, young adult), Oliver Jeffers of Lost and Found, the masterly writer and illustra- combines the talents of two stars tor Philip Reeve (whose Goblins of the children’s book world to trilogy is highly recommended to create a dazzling, touching and hi- younger readers, eight upwards) larious tale of an imaginary friend creates another of his extraordi- called Fred, who floats in the wind nary imaginary worlds, this time until a lonely little boy wishes for for teenagers. The Great Network him and finds a very particular is a place of maintenance spiders kind of friendship. and station angels, where sentient trains For the child who can’t resist tak- criss-cross the galaxy. Zen Starling is a ing things to pieces to see how they petty thief, a street urchin, who is sent work, Stuff You Should Know! by John on a mission to infiltrate the Emperor’s Farndon and Rob Beattie (QED £9.99, train. He jumps at the chance to tra- Oldie price £9.49, seven plus) is a 21st- verse the Great Network — and to steal century version of the Seventies classic more stuff. What Makes It Go?. It tells the story And, finally, a stocking-filler for all behind the daily activities we take for ages: Chris Riddell’s Doodle a Day granted. What exactly happens when (Macmillan £9.99, Oldie price £9.49). you turn on the tap, send a message The children’s laureate has made it the on the internet, or telephone a friend? Illustrations from (top down) ‘The Wild mission of his laureateship to inspire Swans’; ‘Mister Cleghorn’s Seal’; ‘School How do machines and gadgets, from Ship Tobermory’; and ‘Imaginary Fred’ children to draw more; here he gives microwave ovens to jet aircraft, actually 366 illustration prompts and ideas, work? All is explained with the help new series of children’s books from the which will have children (and adults) of colourful cross-sections and comical creator of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective doodling daily for a year. There are little cartoon figures. Agency, featuring a colourful cast of patterns to finish, places to draw your School Ship Tobermory by Alexan- characters who live on board a sailing lunch, pets, family and friends, big der McCall Smith (Birlinn £9.99, Oldie ship based in Tobermory, on the Scot- drawings and tiny pictures, and invita- price £9.49, seven plus) is the first in a tish island of Mull. When a film crew tions to draw what you are listening to.

Winter 2015 Review of Books THE OLDIE 27 HISTORY art

Everything is ‘Las Meninas’ by Velázquez the painting and also, in tantalis- Happening ing facets, his own’. He endorsed the view of Vulliamy’s ‘intimate, Journey into a Painting learned, discursive’ prefatory essay and coda that Jacobs has Michael Jacobs (Granta, 240pp, delivered ‘a heartfelt manifesto for £15.99, Oldie price £13.99) the liberation of how we look at painting’. Michael Jacobs’s personal medita- As ‘Las Meninas’ is celebrated tion on Velázquez’s enigmatic master- for its ‘self-reflexive modernity’, piece of the Spanish Golden Age, ‘Las said James McConnachie in the Meninas’, was also a journey into the Sunday Times, Jacobs himself author’s lifelong love affair with Spain, plays with the reader, offering ‘a travel and painting, and in particular glimpse of the author himself, with the scene in Velázquez’s studio in reflected in the painting he de- 1656 as he painted himself painting the scribes’. The tales of the painting’s Infanta Margarita, or perhaps the king almost-catastrophic adventures and queen, depending on whom you in the Spanish Civil War, McCon- talk to. nachie discovered, ‘form a coun- As Ian Thomson pointed out in the it was by chance that Jacobs found a terpoint to a darker theme’: the figure Sunday Telegraph, this ‘mirror-game of literary soulmate in Ed Vulliamy, who representing Death at the open doorway truth and illusion has been more fre- shared in the process of the memoir of the painter’s studio. ‘He emerges quently analysed than almost any work and completed it after Jacobs’s death as the key to the painting and also to of western art’. He appreciated Jacobs’s in 2014. Jacobs’s book.’ McConnachie stated ‘vigorously plain prose’, a challenge to Boyd Tonkin in the Independent that: ‘If Jacobs had finished it, this book the ‘abstruse and highfalutin’ analysis recognised Jacobs, a devoted pupil surely would have been the culmination of modern critics. of Anthony Blunt at the Courtauld of his writing career. As it stands, it is In the way that chance meetings Institute, as a ‘supremely life-affirming open-minded, fragmentary and full of and coincidences pepper the narrative, writer’ who ‘tells Spain’s history through curiosity, which rather fits its subject.’

Sargent and John Everett Millais (‘a far The Face of greater portraitist than Rossetti’). But overall, Carey said, ‘resent- Britain ment is soon quelled by the vitality of Schama’s writing. He is a matchless The Nation Through its raconteur, and his book is really a series of self-contained stories.’ Portraits Michael Prodger in the Times agreed Simon Schama (Viking, 632pp, £30, that ‘Schama’s pick and mix approach Oldie price £25) to artists and themes may not be sys- tematic but it is wonderfully compel- THE FACE of Britain is part of a pack- ling’ and appreciated Schama’s depar- age including an exhibition curated by ture from the expected and the familiar. the historian Simon Schama at the Na- ‘Because the British, he thinks, have tional Portrait Gallery and an accom- Portrait as a hedge against time: always had a “suspicion of the self- ‘Venetia, Lady Digby’ by Van Dyck panying BBC series. Schama’s approach preening of the great” he selects for his is thematic rather than chronological was also frequently cited as an example case studies instances where the artists and he has charmed reviewers with his of what Gayford identifies as ‘pitfalls didn’t let the great preen or where they storytelling. for painters of people’: ‘Everybody has helped give common folk their moment Several reviewers settled on the ac- strong ideas about how they look; so in the sun.’ count of Van Dyck’s ‘deathbed’ image too do their friends, loved ones, So less of Gainsborough for Schama of Venetia, Lady Digby, to reveal, as and — if they are famous — adoring and more of Augustin Edouart, who Martin Gayford in the Daily Telegraph public.’ made likenesses in hair and, later, paper said, ‘One function of the portrait: as a John Carey in the Sunday Times silhouettes. hedge against time, a way of preserving found ‘a work of dazzling panache’ and For Ekow Eshun in the Independent, at least the appearance of a person who ‘a book to devour’ but complained that Schama shared the ‘transforming empa- is lost.’ ‘its structure is a mess’. He was niggled thy’ he attributes to Thomas Lawrence’s Graham Sutherland’s doomed 80th by ‘disjointedness’, ‘unsettling jumps’ sketch of William Wilberforce, revealing birthday portrait of Winston Churchill and omissions, including John Singer ‘the man rather than the reputation’.

28 THE OLDIE Review of Books Winter 2015 Books & publishing

C.L.Hawley Academic Books Bought and Sold Literary criticism, History Politics, etc Browse and buy online or contact us with books for sale. www.clhawley.co.uk Tel: 01756-792380 Obituaries

The neurologist and writer Oli- try at Columbia. His many bestselling ver Sacks died in New York at the age books, including Awakenings and The of 82. As befits the life of such a prodi- Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, gious polymath, the obituaries celebrat- showed his interest in using case studies ed Sacks’s remarkable spirit of scientific of neurological disorders to illuminate and human curiosity. The New York wider questions about the human con- Times hailed his ability to look beyond dition. The Economist obituarist wrote the mere medical symptoms of his pa- that Sacks’s obsession was to ‘climb tients. ‘The animating theme of Sacks’s inside the brains of his patients’. Adam work is the importance of individuality Zeman in the Guardian described his in medicine. He quoted Sir William work as ‘absorbing and accessible yet Osler with approval — “Ask not what profound’. disease the person has, but rather what The Economist obituary noted that person the disease has” — and wrote Sacks, who found romantic love only in Awakenings: “There is nothing alive in his late seventies, often wrote ‘late which is not individual: our health is into the night, monkish in his solitude’. ours; our diseases are ours; our reac- From his home in the Bronx, he took tions are ours — no less than our minds a daily swim in Long Island Sound up or our faces.”’ until the last months of his life. The Sacks was born in north London in Economist concluded: ‘Some medical 1933, to a general practitioner father peers thought his work overdramatic, Samuel, and a mother Muriel, who even exploitative; his books had at was a surgeon and pathologist. ‘His first been ignored in America. He re- future interests and talents were shaped Oliver Sacks gretted this not just for selfish reasons, and nurtured by his large, rumbus- Born 9th July 1933 but because his wider agenda was tious, cultivated, polymathic Jewish Died 30th August 2015 to bring back from the strangest fron- family,’ wrote the New York Times. tiers of individual struggling and expe- After studying medicine at The Queen’s rience some further indications, some College, Oxford, Sacks moved to the Professor of Neurology at New York extraordinary hints, of the immense United States — where he was to live University School of Medicine, then mystery of what it means to for the rest of his life — and became Professor of Neurology and Psychia- be human.’

PJ Kavanagh, the poet, novelist, Sally, daughter of the novelist Rosa- broadcaster, actor and columnist, died mond Lehmann; they married in 1956. in August at the age of 84. The sudden She died of polio a year later. death of his first wife Sally when he was He settled with Kate, a translator, just 27 was the defining moment of his in Elkstone, Gloucestershire, in 1965, life and work. As Brendan Walsh in his where he worked every day in a tiny obituary of Kavanagh in the Tablet put ruined cottage from 10 till 6, then went it: ‘He felt that having been dealt this to the village pub for an hour. Sup- devastating blow the rest of his life had ported by his acting and journalism, he been a series of compensations. He was published several volumes of poetry, to find happiness in a second marriage, including Life Before Death (1979), An raising two sons with his wife Kate and Enchantment (1991) and Something clawing his way back to a wry sort of About (2004). Michael Caines in the joy through the camaraderie of acting Guardian wrote: ‘Mysticism and the and the solitary search for the right natural world were among this Ro- word as a poet and writer.’ Kavanagh’s man Catholic countryman’s abiding memoir of Sally, The Perfect Stranger, concerns.’ was turned down by five publishers but The Daily Telegraph obituarist became a classic, described by Richard found Kavanagh ‘chose the country in Ingrams as ‘one of the best memoirs I which to do his poetic work, but was have read’. no facile nature poet. Equally, he was a Patrick Joseph Kavanagh was born P J Kavanagh convinced Catholic but his religion was in 1931 in Worthing, Sussex. His Born 6th January 1931 not easy. He demonstrated in his poems father was Ted Kavanagh the creator of Died 26th August 2015 that, by looking intently, the unseen ITMA, the hugely popular radio com- becomes more obviously real: “There is edy starring Tommy Handley. It was something about. It would be treason a rackety upbringing and, in a poem, He went to Douai, the Benedictine to deny it. Not something religious, Kavanagh recalled his father’s world as public school, then studied English at that is a slippery word. Or spiritual. a ‘vast/Gillray cartoon (only kinder)’. Merton College, Oxford, where he met There is joy or hope. I think it’s joy.”’

30 THE OLDIE Review of Books Winter 2015