SEPTEMBER 2006 £3.

00

THE AWESOME ANGLOSPHERE

Andrew Roberts’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples
Louis XIV’s Lovers ★ Talleyrand’s Treachery
9 770144 436041

Freud’s Wizard ★ Vermeer’s Forger

Lionheart ★ Lackland ★ LUCIFER
Peter Washington on Leonard Woolf
Carole Angier on Andrew Motion
Francis King on John Betjeman
09

BASTARDS & BARONETS

Gertrude Bell ★ T E Lawrence
Colin Thubron on the Silk Road
SEPTEMBER FICTION: J G Ballard ★ Margaret Atwood ★ Mark Haddon ★ Le Carré
Barry Unsworth ★ Vikram Chandra ★ William Boyd ★ Michel Faber ★ many more...
 FROM THE PULPIT
INDEPENDENT BOOKSELLERS ARE used J OHN DE FALBE
to pundits speaking unasked on their
behalf, but this year has seen an
unusual surge of concern. In a recent
survey, The Guardian took the
Defending the
unprecedented step of actually talking
to some of us. Lately there’s been a lot
of hype about the so-called
Independent
Independent Alliance between a group
of independent publishers, which Andrew Franklin, an
Alliance publisher (Profile), describes as a ‘small but highly couldn’t expect to compete on price, and all efforts in that
significant and controversial change’ that ‘could save small
booksellers’, who (according to an article in The
Bookseller) face ‘extinction within fifteen years’.
The aim of the Independent Alliance is ‘to provide a
range of benefits that will enable you to forcefully [sic]
promote your business, with greater access to the kind of
support the chains take for granted’. More specifically, an
increased discount is offered on selected titles so that
independents can offer three-for-two deals. In addition, a
few posters and other marketing claptrap are being made
available. This makes the publishers concerned feel good,
and look good to the uninitiated, but it makes no difference
to me as an independent bookseller. And recalling how no
publisher lifted a finger to defend the Net Book Agreement,
apart from John Calder, I am inevitably inclined to
interpret it as a marketing ploy oiled by crocodile tears.
For while they are busy patting themselves on the back
for paying attention to independents, they are still trying
to make their job easier by whipping us into line. I had a
circular email yesterday from Canongate, one of the
Alliance members, announcing a book as ‘The Book
Everyone’s Talking About’. Why would I care? I want to
find out if it’s any good, not whether other people are
jumping over a cliff after it. I received a ‘Summer
Reading’ order form ‘to enable you to make up the 3-
for-2 offer’. The Alliance asserts that by offering this it is for the top seller (Russian Conspirators in Siberia, which
‘bringing new life and a fighting spirit to the independent
retail sector’. Perhaps it’s benignly meant, but the implica- It’s not simply a question of vanity: the books we sell
tion that we should be trying to do the same things as the
chains reflects their fixed ideas about bookselling rather
than how independent shops function. No disrespect
intended to Waterstone’s, but why would we want our
shop to look like a puny version of theirs? Our customers
would leave in droves. And if our book lists consisted of
books that publishers wanted us to sell and happened to
be offering cheaply, instead of books chosen by us with
our customers in mind, they would be right to leave us.
It is symptomatic of the ills of the book trade that the
Alliance should flood us with the language of supermar-
kets in their attempt, ostensibly, to help us compete.
They speak as if they are countering a deplorable trend,
but they do more to foster the current climate with their
aggressive policies than to dispel it. Marketing depart-
ments, with their bland and ludicrous language of
1
hyperbole, have scant value for
independents: they grandly assume
they know what we want – namely,
what everybody else wants, which
is perfectly circular, perfectly
absurd and perfectly useless. I need
to know about the books, not the
promotion plans.
Since the collapse of the Net
Book Agreement it has been plain that independents
quarter are misdirected. The reasons for which people still
visit independent shops may be many (efficiency, flexibili-
ty, location, ambience, staff, eccentricity), but the primary
one is taste. By way of example, our second-best-selling
book this year is Written Lives by Javier Marías. Canongate
didn’t tell us about this book: I saw it listed in a catalogue
about three weeks before publication and asked for a copy.
Its success has nothing to do with marketing, everything
to do with reading. There was another Canongate book in
which I was interested and I asked three times for some-
thing to read in advance, in vain: we have sold just one
copy. Another Alliance book we’ll do well with this year is
Andrew O’Hagan’s superb Be Near Me, which Faber
declare that they are promoting through independent
bookshops. But this statement is vacuous unless supported
by proofs. Mine was sent by a periodical (this one), for
review. Ironically, Random House, a large corporation, is
much more responsive. Editors there are relatively accessi-
ble and their natural sense of how the independent sector
operates hasn’t been undermined by marketing clichés.
Looking at a print-out of our twenty bestselling hard-
backs this year, I see that I’ve read eleven of them and
reviewed a further five. The same exercise with our ten
bestselling paperbacks reveals that I have read four,
reviewed two, written one, and written an introduction
has not been reviewed anywhere and is therefore unusual.)
most of are those in which we take an interest.
Nevertheless, the quantities are not vast (250 Written
Lives; 100 Russian Conspirators): we are selling across a
much broader range than most chains, and on any given
day few books sell more than a single copy. It might suit
publishers better if we sold more copies of fewer books
(on the chain model) but it wouldn’t suit our customers.
However pig-headed it may seem, we must insist that we
know more about our customers than publishers do (who
are not noted for their expenditure at bookshops anyway,
and in some cases it is charitable to suppose they ever read
at all). Not that questions of rent, terms, location and so
forth aren’t important, but woe betide us if our selections
are driven by what publishers want us to promote rather
than by our own tastes. And if we have to work hard to
make it succeed, why should we expect it to be otherwise?
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006

THIS MONTH’S PULPIT is written by
John de Falbe. He is the author of two
novels, and reviews regularly. By day
he is a bookseller: he has been at John
Sandoe’s, an independent bookshop in
London, for more than twenty years.
MICHAEL BURLEIGH’s Sacred Causes:
Politics and Religion in Europe from the
European Dictators to Al Qaeda will be
published in October, together with
the paperback of his acclaimed Earthly
Powers, both by Harper Press.
DIANA ATHILL is the author of Stet
and Yesterday Morning: A Very English
Childhood, both published by Granta.
SUDHIR HAZAREESINGH is a Fellow
of Balliol College, Oxford. His
book La Légende de Napoléon was
published by the Editions Tallandier
(Paris) in early 2006, and has just
been awarded the Grand Prix du
Mémorial d’Ajaccio.
E VAN M AWDSLEY is Professor of
International History at the
University of Glasgow. He is the
author of Thunder in the East: The
Nazi-Soviet War, 1941-1945 (2005).
RUTH PADEL’s latest book, Tigers in
Red Weather, is published by Little,
Brown.
A MANDA C RAIG is a novelist and
children’s critic for The Times. Her
fifth novel, Love in Idleness, is
published by Abacus.
ANDREW LYCETT continues on the
trail of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as he
works on his forthcoming biography
of the creator of Sherlock Holmes.
PHILIP MOULD is an art dealer based
in Dover Street, London, as well an
author and broadcaster. He specialises
in tracking down lost British por-
traits and paintings.
Contributing Editors: ALAN RAFFERTY, SEBASTIAN SHAKESPEARE
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
CONTENTS
PULPIT 1 J OHN DE F ALBE
BIOGRAPHY 4 S UDHIR H AZAREESINGH Napoleon’s Master: A Life of
Prince Talleyrand David Lawday
6 J ONATHAN K EATES Love and Louis XIV: The Women in
the Life of the Sun King Antonia Fraser
8 D IANA A THILL Daughter of the Desert: The Remarkable Life
of Gertrude Bell Georgina Howell
9 G R A H A M S T E W A R T Diplomat without Portfolio: Valentine
Chirol - His Life and ‘The Times’ Linda B Fritzinger
10 ANDREW LYCETT Freud’s Wizard: The Enigma of Ernest Jones
Brenda Maddox
12 ALLAN MASSIE Liberty:The Lives and Times of Six Women in
Revolutionary France Lucy Moore
14 ALEXANDER WAUGH Satan: A Biography Henry Ansgar Kelly
HISTORY 16 MICHAEL BURLEIGH A History of the English-Speaking
Peoples Since 1900 Andrew Roberts
17 C HRISTOPHER C OKER War in Human Civilisation Azar Gat
19 NIGEL JONES Lionheart and Lackland: King Richard, King John
and the Wars of Conquest Frank McLynn
20 ROBERT IRWIN Setting the Desert on Fire: T E Lawrence and
Britain’s Secret War in Arabia, 1916–1918 James Barr
22 EVAN MAWDSLEY June 1941: Hitler and Stalin John Lukacs
23 ROY HATTERSLEY White Heat: A History of Britain in the
Swinging Sixties Dominic Sandbrook
FICTION I 25 S AM L EITH Kingdom Come J G Ballard
26 G ILL H ORNBY A Spot of Bother Mark Haddon
27 MARTYN BEDFORD The Apple: New ‘Crimson Petal’ Stories
Michel Faber
28 JOHN DUGDALE Only Revolutions Mark Z Danielewski
29 CHRISTOPHER BRAY So Many Ways to Begin Jon McGregor
29 C HRISTOPHER H ART Imperium: A Novel Robert Harris
30 S EBASTIAN S HAKESPEARE The Mission Song John le Carré
WRITERS 31 P ETER W ASHINGTON Leonard Woolf Victoria Glendinning
32 F RANCIS K ING Betjeman A N Wilson
34 P J KAVANAGH Ireland’s Minstrel: A Life of Tom Moore - Poet,
Patriot and Byron’s Friend Linda Kelly
35 ADAM SISMAN Letters from Oxford: Hugh Trevor-Roper to
Bernard Berenson (Ed) Richard Davenport-Hines
37 ROBERT NYE Collected Poems 1943–93 Martin Seymour-Smith
Editor: NANCY SLADEK
Deputy Editor: TOM FLEMING
Editor-at-Large: JEREMY LEWIS
Editorial Assistant: PHILIP WOMACK
Business Manager: ROBERT POSNER
Advertising Manager: TERRY FINNEGAN
Classified Advertising: DAVID STURGE
Founding Editor: DR ANNE SMITH
Founding Father: AUBERON WAUGH
Cover illustration by Chris Riddell
Issue no. 336
2
 SEPTEMBER 2006

BASTARDS & 38 H UGH M ASSINGBERD Right Royal Bastards: The Fruits of ADAM SISMAN is writing an authorised
BARONETS Passion Peter Beauclerk-Dewar and Roger S Powell biography of Hugh Trevor-Roper.
39 J OHN M ARTIN R OBINSON The Baronets’ Champion: Sir
CAROLE ANGIER is a biographer of
Richard Broun’s Campaigns for the Privileges Jean Rhys and Primo Levi. The
of the Baronetage Double Bond: Primo Levi, A Biography is
available in paperback from Penguin.
MEMOIRS 40 C AROLE A NGIER In the Blood Andrew Motion
P ETER W ASHINGTON is General
41 B RENDAN W ALSH Seminary Boy John Cornwell
Editor of the Everyman’s Library.
42 WILLIAM PALMER The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
Bill Bryson GRAHAM STEWART’s History of The
Times: The Murdoch Years has hit the
GENERAL 43 PAUL JOHNSON The Middle Class: A History Lawrence James stands. Published by Harper Press, it
brings the newspaper’s official history
44 F RANCES W ILSON The Culture of the Europeans: From 1800
up to date. He also writes the paper’s
to the Present Donald Sassoon Past Notes column for those who
46 J U S T I N M A R O Z Z I Pathfinders: A Global History of want the spin on out-of-date news.
Exploration Felipe Fernández-Armesto
47 A C G RAYLING The Human Touch: Our Part in the CHRISTOPHER COKER is Professor of
International Relations at the London
Creation of a Universe Michael Frayn
School of Economics and author of
48 JONATHAN MIRSKY Shadow of the Silk Road Colin Thubron several books on international security.
49 P HILIP M OULD I Was Vermeer: The Legend of the Forger
Who Swindled the Nazis Frank Wynne J ONATHAN K EATES ’s most recent
51 VALERIE GROVE Woman’s Hour: From Joyce Grenfell to book, The Siege of Venice, is pub-
lished by Chatto & Windus.
Sharon Osbourne – Celebrating Sixty Years of Women’s Lives
FRANCES WILSON’s books include
FICTION II 52 RUTH PADEL Moral Disorder Margaret Atwood Literary Seductions and, most recently,
53 M ATT T HORNE Paula Spencer: A Novel Roddy Doyle The Courtesan’s Revenge, available in
53 P HILIP W OMACK The Ruby in Her Navel Barry Unsworth paperback from Faber & Faber.
54 A MANDA C RAIG Restless William Boyd
ROBERT IRWIN’s latest book, For Lust
55 L INDY B URLEIGH The Inheritance of Loss Kiran Desai of Knowing: The Orientalists and their
56 F ARRUKH D HONDY Sacred Games Vikram Chandra Enemies, is published by Allen Lane.
57 L UCY L ETHBRIDGE No! I Don’t Want to Join a Bookclub
Virginia Ironside ALEXANDER WAUGH’s books include
God: A Biography and Fathers and Sons,
which was the subject of a much
CRIME 58 J ESSICA M ANN admired recent documentary. His
SILENCED VOICES 64 L UCY P OPESCU biography of the penis was abandoned.
AUDIOBOOK 63 S USAN C ROSLAND
CLASSIFIEDS 60 BRENDAN WALSH is the editorial direc-
tor of Darton, Longman and Todd.
POETRY COMPETITION 62
LETTERS 57 ROBERT NYE has published seven
LR BOOKSHOP 14 collections of poems, of which the
LR CROSSWORD 25 latest is The Rain and the Glass: 99
Poems, New and Selected, published
by Greenwich Exchange.

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LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
 BIOGRAPHY

S UDHIR H AZAREESINGH Man, promoted full citizenship for the Jews, and cam-
paigned for universal education; he also devised the

The Eyes of break between the French Church and the Vatican in
the early 1790s, which led to the nationalisation of all
Church property and the incorporation of the French
a Dead Fish clergy into the State. At the same time, he had an intu-
itive understanding of the power of sociability. He assid-
uously cultivated all those who exercised political power
N APOLEON ’ S M ASTER : A L IFE OF and social authority, and few could resist his charms: his
P RINCE TALLEYRAND lavish soirées, dazzlingly staged and exquisitely catered by
★ his chef Carême, became the toast of Paris, bringing
By David Lawday together French and European elites in a celebration of
(Jonathan Cape 400pp £20) one of Talleyrand’s most renowned maxims: ‘eating is a
form of government’.
CHARLES-MAURICE DE TALLEYRAND-PÉRIGORD was a Little wonder, given his effortless ease at bridging the
noble grandee who lived through the troubled era of the gap between the ancien régime and the Revolution, that
French Revolution. Yet unlike most of his fellow- Talleyrand caught Napoleon’s eye from early on. Lawday
grandees, for whom the end of the ancien régime was typi- focuses the book on his hero’s ‘perverse and addictive’
cally accompanied by broken careers, financial ruin and relationship with Bonaparte. Talleyrand helped to plan
exile (not to mention the threatening hiss of the guillo- the coup which brought Napoleon to power in 1799,
tine), Talleyrand came through and prospered. It all began and remained his closest diplomatic adviser and agent for
when, as the freshly appointed Bishop of Autun, he most of the imperial era, even when he was not official-
attended the Estates General in 1789 as a representative of ly Foreign Minister. He negotiated the treaties which
his diocese. Realising that the nobility and the clergy sealed Napoleon’s victories on the battlefields of Europe,
were spent forces, he switched sides to the bourgeois and counselled the Emperor against extending his power
Third Estate, a timely move which soon propelled him to too far – a warning which the impetuous conqueror
the presidency of the National Assembly in 1790. This failed to heed. Even though they eventually became
knack for sensing the prevailing direction of the political estranged, there was something special, indeed unique,
winds rarely deserted him thereafter. Whenever and in the rapport between the two men. Talleyrand later
wherever power moved, Talleyrand moved with it as, stated that he had ‘loved’ Napoleon, and the Emperor
from the mid 1790s, governments came and went and showered his chief diplomat with titles and material
France successively experienced revolutionary, consular, rewards (notably the magnificent estate of Valençay in
imperial, provisional, Bourbon and Orleanist rule. The the Loire Valley), and once described him as the most
unsinkable Talleyrand served all these regimes, offering his capable Minister he had ever had. Yet Lawday – no
singular combination of zeal, intelligence, egotism, and doubt by his uncritical reliance on Talleyrand’s highly
ironic detachment (‘this is my thirteenth oath, sire’, he tendentious memoirs – rather overrates the diplomat’s
laconically informed the bemused Louis XVIII as he was influence over Napoleon. To begin with, the book’s title
sworn in as his Foreign Minister). is just silly: Talleyrand was many things to the Emperor,
There was clearly something prodigious about the but hardly his ‘master’ (or if he was, he certainly taught
resilience of ‘Old Talley’, and David Lawday’s biography his pupil very badly). The author also exaggerates
helps to explain how and why this scion of the Napoleon’s fascination with Talleyrand’s noble lineage,
Perigordian aristocracy was which was mostly oppor-
able to make himself indis- tunistic. Napoleon’s dislike
pensable to France’s post- of the traditional French
revolutionary rulers. His ser- nobility is well documented,
vility knew no bounds, and and he often railed against
his cringing expressions of the ‘Faubourg Saint-
devotion to the French lead- MA Degree in Biography Ger main set’ whom he
Starting September 2006
ers he served were obviously believed hostile to his rule.
effective. But he was much Appreciate the art of biography while learning the skill in this one or
two-year taught MA. The Buckingham MA in Biography was the first In his vision of social order,
more than a clever flatterer. postgraduate programme in this field to be offered in the UK. the Emperor remained at
Talleyrand was a real disciple Course director: Jane Ridley heart a revolutionary, and
of the French Revolution, Contact: jane.ridley@buckingham.ac.uk or write to her at only attached value to aris-
The University of Buckingham, Buckingham MK18 1EG
who helped to draft the Tel: 01280 814080
tocratic personnel, practices
Declaration of the Rights of and values in so far as they

4
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
 BIOGRAPHY

could enhance his own power. principle. Talleyrand essentially did it

Most importantly, the book’s claim for the money. His venality was stag-
that Talleyrand played a fundamental gering, even by the standards of the
role in bringing down Napoleon (on a time. He demanded sweeteners
par with Wellington) rests on a double (‘douceurs’) from all foreign coun-
misunderstanding: firstly of the tr ies, great and small; dur ing the
Emperor himself, and secondly of his negotiations of the Vienna Congress
relationship with his chief diplomat. alone, which Lawday describes as his
Napoleon was the main architect of his ‘finest hour’, he pocketed colossal
own downfall, beginning with the disas- sums in bribes (which, incidentally,
trous campaign in Spain (and it is worth also makes a mockery of the book’s
noting that, far from discouraging him, claim that Talleyrand invariably chose
Talleyrand seems to have egged him on French interests over his own when-
in this foolish adventure). Throughout ever the two clashed). His effrontery
his narrative, further more, Lawday extended to asking Tsar Alexander for
depicts Napoleon as a conqueror seek- a kickback of 1.5 million francs, in
ing the aggrandisement of his Empire, return for information he had fed the
and Talleyrand as a peace-loving patriot Russians; and he later astounded the
trying to preserve the European balance Austrians by offering to sell them his
of power. But this is a false opposition. Talleyrand: did it for the money cor respondence with Napoleon,
Talleyrand’s diplomacy was effective which he had carefully weeded out of
only because it had Napoleonic force behind it (and French public archives in the summer of 1814. In hind-
when it did not, as was the case during his tenure of the sight, therefore, Talleyrand’s most accurate prediction
Foreign Ministry under the Directoire and the early came shortly upon his securing his first appointment as
Restoration, Talleyrand was signally ineffectual). Nor was Foreign Minister in July 1797: ‘we shall make an
the suave diplomat averse to behaving like a bully, as immense fortune’.
attested by his critical role in the conception and execu- To order this book at £16, see LR Bookshop on page 14
tion of the plan to kidnap the Bourbon Duc d’Enghien
in 1804 (Napoleon had him summarily executed).
Not many of his contemporaries liked Talleyrand: not
just because he was unprincipled, devious, and calculat-
ing, but because none of them ever quite knew where
they stood with him. Even Madame de Staël, one of his
most talented (and least vindictive) mistresses, found him
‘impenetrable and indecipherable’; or as a less charitable
observer put it, he had ‘the eyes of a dead fish’. Lawday
vigorously defends Talleyrand against the numerous
charges levelled against him during his long career,
notably the accusations that he was both a traitor and a
turncoat. It is true that he was perhaps most hated by
those who shared his social and religious background.
The embittered émigrés who ‘had learnt nothing and
forgotten nothing’ never forgave him for siding with the
Revolution, and later with Napoleon; and the Catholic
diehards in Paris (and Rome) fervently recollected his
critical role in the religious upheavals of the early
Revolutionary years, and the humiliations he later
inflicted upon the Pope, again under instructions from
the Emperor. Yet, here again, Lawday takes his advocacy
too far. Throughout the later years of the Empire,
Talleyrand sold privileged information about Napoleon’s
intentions to his adversaries, notably to the Russians and
the Austrians. It is hard to describe this as anything
other than treachery. Nor was it even the more under-
standable (if not defensible) kind of treachery, based on

5
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
 BIOGRAPHY
J ONATHAN K EATES
MESDEMOISELLES SOLEIL
L OVE AND L OUIS XIV: T HE WOMEN IN THE
L IFE OF THE S UN K ING
★ this first in line of the royal mistresses emerges, in Fraser’s
By Antonia Fraser
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson 388pp £25)
‘NOTHING SUCCEEDS LIKE excess’ should have been the
personal motto of King Louis XIV of France. His long
reign (1643–1715) was a triumph of overstatement in
everything from the flowerbeds at Versailles, whose plants
were changed every day, to the royal breakfasts, where
the monarch gorged on a banquet large enough to have
nourished several families for a week. Flattery, on a scale
undreamt of since the days of Nero or Caligula, sustained
a dual epiphany of the god-king, either as a benign
Apollo charioted amid pasteboard clouds at the climax of
a court ballet, or as warrior Mars astride a caracoling
charger, trampling Flanders and the
Palatinate beneath its hooves.
Splash, dash and panache, however,
were not quite so much Louis’s style
where women were concer ned.
Among several arresting aspects of
Antonia Fraser’s book is the paradox
which reconciles one of history’s most
image-conscious rulers with a more
reserved individual, capable of loyalty
and discretion in affairs of the heart and
not a complete stranger to emotion.
Louis was a tyrant, with all the selfish-
ness intrinsic to his position, but he was
never a monster, and women were
plainly drawn to him by something
stronger than the banal magnetism of
absolute power.
The biggest what-if aspect to Louis’s
personal life lay in the choice of a con-
sort, made for him by his mother, Louise: aspiring nun
Anne of Austria, and her chief minis-
ter, Cardinal Mazarin. Had the Spanish infanta Maria
Teresa been more alluring and sophisticated, Louis,
though hardly the uxorious type, might have felt less
inclined to wander. In fact she seems to have made no
effort, as France’s Queen Marie-Thérèse, either to
assume the less rigid manners of her adopted country or,
more significantly, to support her young husband in his
determination to restore dignity and magnificence to the
French crown. Surrounded by her Spanish entourage of
dwarfs and dogs, she was interested in little beyond gam-
bling and visiting convents. No wonder that, although
6
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
the King spent almost every night of their 23-year mar-
riage in his wife’s bed, he advised his first-born son to
‘ask of God a princess who was agreeable to him’.
Louise de La Vallière, his sister-in-law’s lady-in-waiting,
was a rather tastier prospect. Possessed of what one con-
temporary called ‘the grace more beautiful than beauty’
and referred to by another as ‘a violet hidden in the grass’,
account, as the most attractive, not least because her
intense passion for the King was continually at war with a
sincere Catholic piety. Louise had needed to convince
herself that losing her virginity to her sovereign was a
sacred duty. When at length, after bearing him two chil-
dren, she renounced the office of maîtresse en titre to
become a Carmelite nun, it was through her own long-
meditated resolve. Wearing a hair-shirt, she sought the
Queen’s pardon for her wrongdoing, but though Marie-
Thérèse granted it with surprising magnanimity she was
no doubt delighted to be present when, some days later,
the fair sinner donned the habit of a postulant. Louis
himself had shed bitter tears at their final interview.
By now, however, the King was chasing fresh game in
the shape of Athénaïs de Montespan,
married to an impecunious Gascon
marquis and bent on furthering her own
prospects if not her husband’s. Spirited
and shameless, she held out to Louis
what Fraser calls ‘the great sexual adven-
ture of his life’, jaunting off to Flanders
on campaign with him and dancing in
the ballets at Versailles, where the besot-
ted monarch assigned her a suite of
sumptuously furnished apartments and
showered her with jewels. Louise de La
Vallière’s retreat to the cloister was has-
tened by such a meteoric ascent, which
had already proved too much for
Athénaïs’s cuckolded husband. Planning
the most sordid of revenges on the royal
seducer, the Marquis de Montespan
attempted (unsuccessfully) to rape his
wife, after having paid several visits to
poxed Parisian whores in the hope of
passing his infection to the King.
Nemesis for Athénaïs took a form less grotesque than
syphilis, though just as insidious. As governess to her five
bastard children by Louis she had appointed her friend
Françoise Scarron, a middle-aged widow, companion-
able and resourceful yet always sedulous in preserving
her reputation amid circles where women made losing
theirs a mark of good taste. Fraser aptly describes
Françoise as ‘laminated by her virtue’. Some visceral
grasp on a changing Zeitgeist, in which preachers
became as modish as dancing-masters and the ageing
Louis started to fret over the welfare of his immortal
 BIOGRAPHY

Autumn Highlights
soul, surely pointed out her way. When the King gave from Oxford
her the château of Maintenon near Versailles, with a title
attached, Françoise’s destiny as his second wife, follow-
ing the death in 1683 of dreary Queen Marie-Thérèse, Pathfinders
must have seemed divinely ordained.
Though Louis’s marriage to Madame de Maintenon A Global History of
took place in secret (a nocturnal ceremony in the chapel Exploration
at Versailles with the Archbishop of Paris officiating), Felipe Fernández-Armesto
gossip at once accorded her the status of uncrowned con- The story of humankind’s passion
sort. She was universally seen as A Good Thing and for discovery, and the vain-glory
hailed as ‘the Glorious Protectress of the Realm’, nurtur- and fantasy that motivated the
ing His Most Christian Majesty’s Catholic conscience, world’s explorers and trade-
peacemaking among court factions and encouraging makers.
female education by founding a school for the daughters September | £25.00
of impoverished gentlefolk. The Pope sent her a gold
medal and Louis conferred the inestimable privilege of
sitting down in his presence on the woman he nick- The Fight for English
named, only half in jest, ‘Your Solidity’. How language pundits ate, shot,
The term suggests a comfy old biddy, but Antonia and left
Fraser is at pains to emphasise Françoise de Maintenon’s
subtle and refined deployment of an influence unimag- David Crystal
inable to most of her female contemporaries. When the David Crystal explains why we should
King died in 1715, she received condolence letters from say no to zero tolerance in English
European royalty and tributes from the French clergy, usage.
over whom, after all, Louis had more authority than the September | £9.99
Holy Father in Rome. Only the Duc de Saint-Simon,
mega-bitch memorialist of the monarch’s last decades,
and the irrepressible Liselotte von der Pfalz, second wife
of Louis’s brother Philippe d’Orléans, found anything Oxford Dictionary of Phrase,
mean to say about Françoise. The former called her ‘that Saying and Quotation
witch, forgotten and as good as dead’, while the latter Susan Ratcliffe
dismissed her as ‘die alte Schlump’, ‘the old slut’.
“An instant pearl for every
No serious study of a king’s reign can ignore his mis- occasion” Sunday Telegraph
tresses, but Love and Louis XIV is, so far as I know, the first
to survey this whole era exclusively and convincingly in September | £20.00
terms of the sovereign’s private affairs. Fraser’s perspective
extends well beyond the royal bedchamber, emphasising
Louis’s pleasure in female company with compelling por-
traits of figures such as King Charles II’s enchanting sister
Henrietta Anne (Liselotte’s predecessor in the unenviable The New Oxford Book of Literary
role of Duchesse d’Orléans), the Amazon Grande Anecdotes
Mademoiselle, and Cardinal Mazarin’s predatory gaggle of John Gross
Mancini nieces. Thus the Grand Monarque himself
emerges as affable, courteous and indulgent, in short a “John Gross's enlightening and hugely
enjoyable anthology revivifies the
properly functioning human being, of a kind more com-
literary dust of many centuries with
mon among royalty then than now. both wit and grace”
The book contains a few minor factual errors. Molière,
for example, never wrote a play called ‘Alceste’: the name Peter Parker, Times Literary Supplement
is that of the leading character in his Le Misanthrope. £16.99
There was no such person as ‘the Duke of Hanover’: his-
tory refers to Liselotte’s uncle Ernst August as either the
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Otherwise Fraser’s narrative is balanced, wise and enter- or visit our web-site: www.oup.com/uk
taining. This is clearly the book she was born to write.
To order this book at £20, see LR Bookshop on page 14

LITERARY REVIEW September 2006

 BIOGRAPHY

D IANA ATHILL and history to explore, the techniques of surveying and

navigation, photography and cartography to master.

MAKING THE MIDDLE EAST
DAUGHTER OF THE D ESERT: T HE
R EMARKABLE L IFE OF G ERTRUDE B ELL
★ really knew her stuff. Quite early in her travels she was
By Georgina Howell
(Macmillan 518pp £20)
I CAME TO this book ignorant. Years ago I concluded that
Gertrude Bell was uninteresting compared to Freya Stark,
probably because her role in the Middle East became
official, unlike Stark’s freelance approach, so I never read her knowledge of the tribes and the usefulness of her
anything by or about her. The remarkable qualities of this
biography will, I am sure, impress even the most knowl-
edgeable reader, but to me it has come with the full thrill history of Britain’s military intelligence organisation.
of revelation, leaving me flabbergasted at my own mistake.
In her preface Howell recalls being invited to write an
article entitled ‘My Hero’, and knowing instantly that
hers was Gertrude Bell, and that ‘a reminder of her
glorious life was overdue’. ‘Her glorious life’? Such pre-
liminary enthusiasm arouses suspicion in a cautious reader, Gallipoli. The plunge into a new life of consuming
but what follows justifies it.
Gertrude Bell, a Yorkshirewoman, was
born in 1868. Her adored father, who
had inherited important iron- and steel-
works and a substantial fortune, was not
merely rich but also loving and, for a
Victorian parent, astonishingly liberal.
He, and an equally loving stepmother,
equipped her with a self-confidence equal
to her energy and intelligence, both for-
midable. She became the first woman to
receive a First in Modern History at
Oxford. She was elegant, witty, widely
travelled from early youth, at ease in the
company of distinguished people. She
learnt languages avidly, Arabic being the
most important of them, and excelled at
whatever she undertook, whether it was a
routine task or a daring adventure. Even
if she had never seen a desert she would Gertrude and T E Lawrence, Cairo 1921 convinces even as it astounds. But
have become famous, having taken up
mountain-climbing with terrifying zeal. One year she
climbed seven Swiss peaks in two weeks, all of them new
routes or first attempts, and her favourite guide was
reported as saying that ‘of all the amateurs, men or
women, he had travelled with, he had seen but very few
to surpass her in technical skill and none to equal her in
coolness, bravery and judgement’.
But the challenge which excited her most was desert
travel. There were languages to perfect, customs to
learn, new kinds of human being to plumb, archaeology
There was the risky business of staying alive and reach-
ing her goal, and the intoxication of asserting her own
identity. Each of her journeys was more ambitious than
the last. She wrote about them, and those who read or
listened to her saw at once that here was someone who
asked by the Foreign Office to volunteer information
about Arab affairs, and did so.
During the 1914–18 war an ‘Arab Bureau’ was set up
in Cairo, chiefly concerned with whether the Arabs could
be manoeuvred into revolution against their Turkish mas-
ters (oil was behind this, of course). Gertrude, because of
maps, was summoned to Cairo, to become the first
woman officer (she was given the rank of Major) in the
Her heart had just been broken. She was not a woman
to give it easily, but when she did finally fall in love she
did it utterly – unfortunately with a married man who
couldn’t face leaving his wife. Soon after Gertrude had
been forced to accept this bitter fact he was killed at
interest could not have been more
necessary and welcome.
The story up to this point has been
interesting enough, particularly in its
vivid evocations of Gertrude’s desert
journeys, and the poignancy of her
love affair; but from here on it
becomes even more riveting. Howell’s
mastery of an extremely complex net-
work of events in the Middle East
appears to be effortless; her portraits of
the personalities involved, both British
and Arab, are excellent (and it was a
chapter of history in which the per-
sonality of individuals played a great
part), and her account of the impor-
tance of Gertrude’s role throughout,
presented largely through what was
recorded by various people at the time,
although the extent of Gertrude’s
influence was amazing, there were naturally limits to it.
The British were serving their own purposes by turn-
ing Mesopotamia into Iraq, and building up Ibn Saud –
and what a piece of jerry-building the Iraq part of it
was! A promise had been made that if the region’s tribes
kicked out the Turks they would be given full support as
an independent Arab nation. This had been based on
mistaken assumptions about the tribal nature of the Arab
world, and a feeling that promises made to ‘inferior
beings’ did not necessarily have to be kept. Both

8
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
 BIOGRAPHY
Gertrude and her colleague T E Lawrence did their best
to dispel the first and were shocked by the second, but
they were public servants, powerless against a pig-headed
imperialism that turned a deaf ear to the experts it
employed as soon as they said anything it did not want
to hear. Lawrence pulled out in sick disgust, Gertrude
struggled on, trying to make the best of it, largely
because she was so charmed by Faisal who was crowned
King of Iraq in 1921, and who became her friend, that
she fooled herself into believing that it might work after
all. The fact that since then the West’s bungled dealings
G RAHAM S TEWART
A HACK WITH INFLUENCE
D IPLOMAT W ITHOUT P ORTFOLIO :
VALENTINE CHIROL, HIS LIFE AND T HE T IMES
★ power just after Bismarck had
By Linda B Fritzinger
(I B Tauris 567pp £27.50)
WHY IS THERE a market for biographies of hacks? After
all, relatively little journalism is of sufficient literary merit
to survive beyond the immediate context of the news it
concerns. It being some years since a directive was issued
prohibiting the wrapping of fish and chips in newsprint,
it is surely time a more up-to-date phrase was coined to
describe the fate of newspaper prose; but whatever the
eventual expression, the sentiment will stay the same.
Yet some types of journalist do make good biographical
subject matter. The most obvious are those fearless corre-
spondents who risk life and limb to prevent truth from
becoming the first casualty of war. At a less professional
level, there are also those hacks whose alternative careers as
dissipated philanderers attract a certain curiosity, especially
if elevated by acquaintance with the rich and famous.
There is, however, a third category of journalist whose
career may be deemed worthy of remembrance not
because of the risks taken or the whisky downed but
because of the influence they had on the course of world
events. Such a case can be made for The Times’s Valentine
Chirol, the subject of Linda Fritzinger’s Diplomat Without
Portfolio. As the title makes perfectly clear, it is Chirol’s
political significance, rather than his proficiency in
knocking out copy, that justifies what would otherwise
be a very lengthy book about a long-dead journo.
A proud Englishman of Huguenot descent, Valentine
Chirol had early advantages for a roving reporter. He grew
up abroad and was multilingual. He also had a feel for his-
tory and recognised the duty of writing an honest first draft
of it. He travelled all over the world, including Egypt,
China, India and Japan. But his claim upon our attention
rests primarily with his analysis of German intentions in the
9
with the Middle East have continued to be a lot of the
same, only more so, casts a lurid glow over Howell’s
admirable account. Luckily for Gertrude she died in
1926, while Faisal’s reign still seemed secure.
At the end of the story, does one like her? I don’t quite
dare to: she had an arrogant disdain for women she
thought feeble, and envisaging those Swiss peaks and
those desert wastes, I know what she would have thought
of me. But she does inspire awe. And it’s true that few
women have had a life more worth reading about.
To order this book at £16, see LR Bookshop on page 14
quarter-century before the
outbreak of the First World
War. He was Berlin
Correspondent of The Times
from 1892 to 1896. It was a
plum position reporting on
Europe’s youngest great
been cast aside by the new
Kaiser, Wilhelm II. The prej-
udices Chirol formed were
to influence the manner in
which, as The Times’s Foreign
Editor between 1899 and
1912, he effectively dictated
his paper’s attitude to
Britain’s emerging rival.
Much nonsense is written
about how good The Times
used to be. Compared to
the broader but less focused
paper of today, the one-time Chirol: dangerous
‘paper of record’ viewed the
world through a narrow prism. It frequently got its facts
and their interpretation wrong. What was more, when
Chirol joined The Times, it was a paper in marked
decline and heading towards bankruptcy. It had received
a well-deserved drubbing in the courts for printing
forged documents purporting to show that Charles
Stewart Parnell, the Irish Nationalist leader, was in
cahoots with Fenian terrorists. But it also had redeeming
qualities. The relatively few people who did continue
reading it were the most influential figures in the country
and the Empire. What was more, foreign governments
took it at its own estimation. Not quite grasping the
independence of the press, they assumed that to under-
stand what the British government was up to, it was nec-
essary to read The Times. Influence that newspaper and
you influenced British politics. This suited The Times
very well. What better way was there to get a scoop?
Thus, when Chirol began receiving invitations to the
state offices in Imperial Berlin’s Wilhelmstrasse, the
Kaiser’s officials treated him as if he was a biddable
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
 BIOGRAPHY
plenipotentiary. When in 1896 the Kaiser issued his
famous telegram to the Transvaal’s President Kruger
following Dr Jameson’s ill-conceived raid, most com-
mentators read little into it beyond a clumsy intrusion
into Anglo-Boer relations. But Chirol was summoned by
the German Foreign Secretary and assured that the inter-
vention was intended ‘to give England plain warning that
[Germany] was deeply interested in South African affairs’
and that ‘it was most important that the British public
should not be left under any misapprehension as to the
meaning of what had happened and the unfortunate
consequences that the tendency of British statesmen to
ignore German interest would involve’. Chirol duly
made sure the docile British got the message.
In fact, what Wilhelmite Germany’s officials were suc-
ceeding in doing was giving Chirol the clear impression
that Britain was dealing with a menacing adversary run
by a mentally unhinged Kaiser. Chirol was especially
hurt when the Germans switched from trusting him to
ostracising him. While he endeavoured to maintain a
measured tone both in his reporting and with those over
whom he subsequently exercised departmental control,
he was instrumental in The Times’s adoption of a critical
attitude towards Germany. The paper endorsed the
Entente with France and offered full-throated support
for the declaration of war in August 1914.
How significant was this development? It would be as
difficult to maintain that The Times was the decisive fac-
tor in Britain’s hostility to Germany in 1914 as it would
be to claim that its advocacy of appeasement in the late
1930s determined Neville Chamberlain’s pacific diplo-
macy. Possibly the attitude of the excitable Lord
Northcliffe – owner of The Times after 1908 – helped
concentrate the minds of politicians like Lloyd George
in favour of war, but even here it is not a claim to be
made too boldly. In any case, Northcliffe’s power to
influence was at least as persuasive in his other guise as
proprietor of the Daily Mail.
The most that can be said is that Chirol played a part
in educating a discerning readership about the unstable
and bullying nature of those shaping German ambitions.
Count von Bülow, the German foreign minister in
1899, privately paid Chirol a backhanded compliment
by describing him and his colleague George Saunders as
‘the most dangerous Englishmen for us’ because, while
London’s politicians slept easy, these two Times journal-
ists ‘know from personal observation how sharp and
deep is the German dislike of England’.
In bequeathing us what will certainly be the definitive
life of Chirol, Linda Fritzinger has written a book the
length of which will put off all but the most inquisitive.
But it is a tribute both to her subject matter and to her
own easy writing style – all the more impressive for being
underpinned by a scholarly marshalling of the primary
sources – that Diplomat Without Portfolio is such an engaging
10
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
and illuminating read. Although she follows Chirol on all
his global peregrinations around antiquated courts, king-
doms and empires which have long faded into history, it is
the vivid light her research sheds upon Anglo-German
diplomacy that makes this a significant contribution to the
debate about the origins of the First World War.
For a 20% discount, call I B Tauris on 0207 243 1225
A NDREW LYCETT
ON THE COUCH
F REUD ’ S W IZARD : T HE E NIGMA OF
E RNEST J ONES
★
By Brenda Maddox
(John Murray 368pp £25)
ERNEST JONES WAS not called ‘Freud’s Rottweiler’ for
nothing. In September 1933, when Nazi discrimination
laws were taking their toll and Jewish shrinks were
queuing to leave Germany, Jones, president of the
International Psychoanalytic Association, dared to ask
his mentor Sigmund Freud why members of his profes-
sion were so neurotic. They seemed to spend so much
time squabbling among themselves.
Typically, it was a rhetorical question, which he
answered himself. One reason was that they were neurotic
by definition; otherwise they would not have chosen that
field. In addition, they were overworked and, thirdly, they
had not been sufficiently analysed.
Although Brenda Maddox admits that she spent an
intense period on a psychoanalyst’s couch, thus gaining
insight into her relationship with her young stepchildren,
she does not seem to have been damaged by the experience.
Indeed she has produced a remarkably sane book about
Jones, the randy little Welshman who, as Freud’s biographer
and prophet to the English-speaking world, played such a
central role in the development of psychoanalysis.
She was drawn to him partly because his story
touched on the subjects of her previous biographies.
Like Yeats, Jones was a Celt operating at a tangent to the
Anglo-Saxon norm. D H Lawrence adopted a psycho-
analytical approach, largely through the influence of his
second wife Frieda von Richthofen who, along with her
sister Elsa, had been the lover of the early Freudian and
mor phine addict, Otto Rank. And the scientist
Rosalind Franklin emulated Jones in her efforts to bring
persecuted Jews out of Hitler’s Germany.
Jones was not Jewish, even if he wanted to be. Too sub-
tle to raise the old saw about the Welsh being the lost
tribe of Israel, Maddox draws on her knowledge of Welsh
history to recount Jones’s early days as an accountant’s son
around Swansea and his Anglicised upbringing, particularly
 BIOGRAPHY

at Llandovery, his Welsh public school. His sex drive was Jones’s role in spiriting his
always strong. After first having intercourse at the age of mentor out of Vienna to
six (so he claimed), he was attracted to medicine because London was dramatic. By
it offered easy access to women. After pulling his way then Freud was suffer ing
through the educational system, he qualified as a doctor at from cancer and had only a
London’s University College Hospital in 1900. year to live at his new home
Six years later he began introducing Freudian ideas into in Maresfield Gardens, off
his practice and attending psychoanalytical conferences in what bus conductors used
Europe. Freud, who was still close to Carl Jung, embraced to call Finchleystrasse on
Jones not as a philo-Semite but as a gentile, who might account of its high concen-
bring his ideas to the wider English-speaking world. tration of German refugees.
Jones did not let him down. But his own medical Despite other candidates for
career was damaged by an accusation that he had inde- the job, the Freud family
cently assaulted a young girl in his care. He surmounted then chose Jones to write
that charge, but when a similar incident occurred he was Sigmund’s life, which he did
forced to resign his hospital post and emigrate to Canada quickly and well. Jones: demon lover
with Loe Kann, his rich Jewish girlfriend with a fond- Brenda Maddox tells
ness for morphine. Ernest Jones’s story with economy and verve, mixing
In Toronto, which he loathed, he was again accused of relevant details of his personal life with brilliant insights
seducing a female patient. But he kept up a voluminous into the history of psychoanalysis, from its earliest
correspondence with Freud and, with the help of Loe’s moments as an offshoot of hypnotism with close links to
money, was able to travel regularly to Europe where he the Society for Psychical Research. She admits that, like
attended important psychoanalytic conferences and many females around Jones, she fell for his charms. If
cemented his position as one of the ‘paladins’, as he put it, that means her work lacks a note of detachment, it is
who ‘guard(ed) the kingdom and policy of their master’. nonetheless a fine achievement – clear, informative and
When Loe became depressed, Jones returned perma- very readable.
nently to London in 1912. After analysis with Freud she To order this book at £20, see LR Bookshop on page 14
fell in love with another man, while Jones took up with
the beautiful Welsh singer Morfydd Owen. But little
more than a year after their marriage in 1917 Morfydd
died of a burst appendix, leaving him to suffer the
remorse of having administered the chloroform which
probably killed her.
Maddox skilfully describes the various rifts which
afflicted the psychoanalytic movement after the First
World War – not just between Freudians and Jungians
but, more significantly, between the followers of Freud’s
conventional daughter Anna and Melanie Klein who
thought that children’s neuroses could be interpreted
through play. Freud was furious that Jones, as head of FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE FOR WRITERS
the British Psychoanalytical Society, had let London
become a centre for Kleinian therapy in opposition to Grants and Pensions are available to
his daughter. He thought that Jones was getting his own published authors of several works who
are in financial difficulties due to
back because Anna had rejected him as a suitor. Jones personal or professional setbacks.
told the old boy bluntly that Anna seemed to have been
Applications are considered in confidence by
inadequately analysed – not knowing, it seems, that her the General Committee every month.
father had performed this role for three and a half years. For further details please contact:
But the Welshman had a habit of bouncing back. Eileen Gunn
General Secretary
Despite his dubious reputation with the opposite sex, The Royal Literary Fund
Maddox places him in the feminist avant-garde, taking 3 Johnson’s Court, London EC4A 3EA
Freud to task for his phallocentric presentation of Tel 0207 353 7159
women as disappointed men. Both as an energetic presi- Email: egunnrlf@globalnet.co.uk
dent of the global psychoanalytical movement and as a www.rlf.org.uk
prolific writer and editor, Jones was highly effective in Registered Charity no 219952
bringing Freud’s work to a wider audience.

11
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
 BIOGRAPHY
A LLAN M ASSIE
DRESSED TO BE KILLED
L IBERTY: T HE L IVES AND T IMES OF S IX
WOMEN IN R EVOLUTIONARY F RANCE
★ ‘nobly commuted to Paris’ while she was staying there,
By Lucy Moore
(Harper Press 441pp £20)
I SUPPOSE MANY people if asked to name women who
were prominent during the years of the Revolution in
France might be hard put to come up with more than
Marie Antoinette, Charlotte Corday and Madame
Defarge, a fictional character. Some who read history at
university might add the Girondin, Madame Roland,
who, condemned to the guillotine, said, with much
truth, ‘O Liberté, que de crimes on commet en ton
nom!’; and Madame de Staël, the bluestocking who,
years later, lectured Byron on his treatment of his wife
and kindly offered to act as intermediary in order to
effect a reconciliation – this was somewhat impertinent,
given that she had long discarded her husband, formerly
the Swedish ambassador to France, in favour of a succes-
sion of lovers. And then, I suppose, you might think of
the beautiful Creole who became first Napoleon’s wife
and then his Empress. But that might be about it.
So, in telling the story of six
women caught up one way or another
in the revolutionary fervour, Lucy
Moore has happily hit on a subject
which is not only interesting but will
be – excuse the pun – virgin territory
for most readers. Her six are:
Germaine de Staël; Manon Roland;
Pauline Léon (a poor woman whom
she describes on one occasion, incor-
rectly and surely unintentionally, as ‘a
woman of the streets’; Théroigne de
Méricourt, a peasant girl who became
an actress, courtesan, enthusiastic and
even fervent revolutionary, and was
finally consigned to a lunatic asylum;
Theresia (usually Thérèse) de
Fontenay, an aristocrat who became
the lover, and then wife, of the politi-
cian Tallien, a terrorist who turned
against the Terror and was instrumen-
tal in br inging about the fall of
Robespier re; and finally Juliette
Récamier, who was intelligent, beau-
tiful, virtuous, and, as presented by
Moore, rather a bore. Quite a crew,
nicely varied. Juliette Récamier: virtuous bore
12
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
The book begins badly. This is not solely because it
follows the deplorable modern fashion of giving us a
page of fulsome acknowledgements. If you want to
thank someone for giving you croissants or ‘a lovely
evening’ in Paris, the place to do so is in a private letter.
What’s it to the reader that an author was stuffed with
morning rolls? Nor do we care that the author’s husband
even apart from the fact that spending, one assumes,
weekends in Paris scarcely seems to call for such praise.
The first chapter is pretty dreadful, clumsily written
with ‘might have beens’ and similar suppositions. Verbal
solecisms abound. Mme de Staël is described as ‘peren-
nially dishevelled’; ‘less’ is used where the word should
be ‘fewer’, and we are told that Théroigne always wore
‘a riding-habit of an austerely masculine cut’, which
makes no sense at all. ‘Although she had intended her
trademark costume to compel men to treat her as an
equal rather than as a woman, by wearing it she became
one of the feminine icons of the revolution.’ Oh dear.
(Furthermore, I had to read this book in a proof
copy, which was spattered with irritating little mistakes,
such as having Henry, rather than Charles, Fox as Pitt’s
parliamentary rival; once suggesting that Louis XVI
was the son, rather than grandson, of Louis XV; and
giving people the wrong names or titles – for example
the Marquis de Talleyrand. I trust these have all been
corrected in the finished copy.)
The reader should not, however,
be deterred by all this. Lucy Moore
is, as it were, clearing her throat
before she gets seriously to work and
the book quickly becomes extremely
interesting, even fascinating. Moore
has done a vast amount of research.
She catches the feeling of the turbu-
lent times excellently. She shows us
the idealism of the Revolution as
well as its horrors. She has a fine
sense of drama and never allows us to
forget, as academic historians too
often do, that people in the past were
not abstractions, but men and
women of flesh and blood, passions,
enthusiasms, hopes, and fears. You
get a vivid sense of what it was like
to live in that time, and the narrative
gallops along. She is generous and
fair in her judgements, and all in all
she gives a better and more sympa-
thetic account of the Revolution
than Simon Schama did in his vastly
overpraised Citizens.
Her women were all, except the
virtuous Récamier, at one time or
 BIOGRAPHY

other enthusiasts for some version of the Revolution but
were caught in its paradox: that a movement which
promised Liberty and Equality reserved these for only one
half of the human race – the male half. Though men
were sometimes willing to use female enthusiasm, they
were almost all quick to dismiss political activity under-
taken by women as – surprise, surprise – ‘unwomanly’. ‘It
is not your fault that you are ugly,’ one newspaper told
Mme de Staël, ‘but it is your fault that you are an
intriguer.’ ‘She writes’, another declared, ‘on metaphysics,
which she does not understand; on morality, which she
does not practise; on the virtues of her sex, which she
lacks.’ When she met Napoleon, who detested her, he
‘inspected her ample, generously displayed bosom critically.
“No doubt you have nursed your children yourself?”’ For
once she had no reply.
Moore is superb on the significance of changing fash-
ions in dress and behaviour, and the account of the wild
extravagances that followed the execution of
Robespierre and the end of the Terror is quite excellent.
Take this for example:
The most notorious of these ticketed parties was the
bal des victimes, held on the first floor of the Hôtel
Richelieu, to which only those who had lost a near
THE
relative during the Terror were invited. The room
was draped in black: black ribbons tied on to the
musicians’ violins, black hangings on the walls, black
crepe on the chandeliers. Dancers of both sexes had
their hair cut short at the back, à la victime: women
wore thin shifts like the ones in which their mothers
and sisters had gone to the scaffold, and narrow red
ribbons round their necks, as if to show where the
guillotine’s blade had missed. They greeted each
other with sharp, awkward nods in imitation of the
motion made by severed heads as they dropped into
the basket below.
What a charming occasion.
The book is full of such good stuff, full also of unex-
pected and interesting information. Nevertheless, all
Moore’s enthusiasm and sympathy for her six chosen
women can’t disguise two facts. First that they were
really only on the periphery of events, the Revolution
being made, driven forward, corrupted and destroyed
by men. Second, that the most influential women in
these years were not her glittering cast, but the poor
women of Paris who so often rioted in protest at the
shortage or high price of bread.
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In his newest work Forsythe has taken as his subject the imagery of the
ongoing conflict in Iraq. He tackles the topic head on, creating the most
damning comment on the horror, personal devastation and hypocrisy 0870 737 7737
produced in any artform since the Iraq war began. www.sadlerswells.com
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
 BIOGRAPHY
Literary Review Bookshop
A LEXANDER WAUGH

THE DEVIL YOU DON’T KNOW

S ATAN : A B IOGRAPHY
★
By Henry Ansgar Kelly
(Cambridge University Press 360pp £12.99)

THE PROBLEMS BESETTING a biographer of the Devil are

legion. From the start he will notice that the Devil (like
God) has no proper beginning or end, and even where
he appears to have a middle there are no clearly marked
biographical hooks on which to hang a narrative – no
childhood, no adolescence, no mid-life crisis, no retire-
ment, no senility. Also like God, Satan appears under a
host of confusing names. In Rabbinic scripture he is
called Sammael; in the Qu’ran, Iblis; in various apoca-
lyptic texts he is Sataniel. In the Book of Watchers he
appears as the fallen angel Azaziel; and in the Book of
20% discount on all Jubilees as the chief giant, Mastema. Are all these noises
supposed to refer to just one being? Or are there in fact
meant to be many different satans, just as there are mul-
titles under review tiple gods knocking about in the Bible?
As to the notion that Satan is Lucifer, the Morning Star:
this was a fanciful concoction of Origen, a demented third-
century theologian who castrated himself in the name of
Call our Order Hotline Jesus Christ. He propounded the idea that the Lucifer star,
referred to in Isaiah’s satirical attack on the King of Babylon
(14:11–12), was supposed to mean the Devil: ‘Your pride’,
0870 429 6608 wrote Isaiah, ‘has been flung down to hell with the music
All major credit and debit cards of your lyres; under you a mattress of maggots, over you a
blanket of worms. How did you come to fall from the
heavens, Morning Star, son of Dawn?’ Had Origen both-
By email: ered to read his New Testament properly he would have
send your order to realised that Lucifer, son of Dawn, is not (as Henry Ansgar
Kelly points out) the Devil, but Jesus Christ, son of Mary.
literaryreview@bertrams.com
Perhaps, in the agonies of his castration, Origen was unable
to make it as far as the Bible’s last page, on which Jesus
By post: clearly states: ‘I, Jesus … am the bright Morning Star.’
send your order, enclosing a cheque made payable to The central argument of Ansgar Kelly’s new book is
‘BOOKS BY PHONE’ to: that the Satan of Christianity has really very little to do
Literary Review Bookshop, Bertrams, with the Satan of the Bible. Thus the author has, in what
1 Broadland Business Park, Norwich NR7 0WF he describes as his ‘retro-fitting’, set out to put the Devil
back into his proper Biblical context. ‘My conclusions
By fax: will be very important to all “people of the Book”’, he
send your order, quoting Literary Review, to predicts in his introduction. I had the same high hopes
0870 429 6709 when I published a work on God several years ago. ‘Now
if just 5 per cent of America’s religious-maniac population
buys a copy, that will be, er, 20 million copies, which, at
$18 a shot on a 12 per cent royalty, should net me the
£2.45 P & P princely sum of ... let me see … um, $3.6m? ... No, that
can’t be right. Start again!’ If Ansgar Kelly has been think-
No matter how many books ing along the same lines, he is headed for disappointment.
you order!
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
 BIOGRAPHY

In my experience ‘people of the Book’ are so called

because they only ever read one book – the Book – and
won’t bother with any others, least of all stuff like A
Waugh’s reappraisal of the Almighty or H Ansgar Kelly’s
retro-fitting of Satan. But all is not lost. A few intelligent
people should be curious enough to go for this subtle,
Catholic-slanted portrait of the Christian Satan, created
through an examination of his pure Biblical origins – and
they are unlikely to be disappointed.
The only danger is that the most amusing and readable
aspects of the Satan myth – his dominion in hell, his
innovative torture techniques, his stale, fiery breath, sav-
age horns, slimy, reptilian tail and fantastically deformed
minions – are all details that properly belong elsewhere: to
another book, which the author dismisses as Satan’s ‘New
Biography’. These smutty things have little to do with the
Biblical Satan of the current thesis. While scholars have Satan smiting Job with boils
long accepted a division between the biblical and non-
biblical representations of Satan, they have also been not so black as he is painted,’ back in the early sixteenth
inclined to separate the Satan of the Old Testament from century?) but if his astute and deftly written book
the Satan of the New, regarding each as the product of an inspires just one curious reader to pick up a Bible and
independent religious tradition. But one of the central read it properly from cover to cover (not as sacred text
planks of Ansgar Kelly’s argument is that the Old and but more as literature) then the Emerit Distinguished
New Testament Satans are one and the same. In neither Professor in the Department of English at the University
part of the Bible is the Devil portrayed as a Prince of of California, Los Angeles, will surely (unlike Origen)
Darkness or some invisible personification of evil. He is have earned his place in heaven.
simply a functionary, a divine emissary whose duty it is to To order this book at £10.39, see LR Bookshop on page 14
govern the Earth by testing living beings with traps, pit-
falls, and alluring temptations. As the author puts it,
‘Satan in the New Testament should be regarded as hold-
ing the equivalent of such positions as Prime Minister, or
Attorney General, or Head of MI5, or Director of the
Federal Bureau of Investigation, and as no more evil than
many zealous holders of these positions here on Earth.’
This, as I say, may threaten the expectations of those read-
ers who had hoped to marvel from their armchair at all
the Boschian lewdness of another Satan. ‘Better the Devil
you know than the Devil you don’t!’ But even without all
the filth, there is enough here to stimulate and entertain.
In any case we should not be overly shocked or surprised
at Ansgar Kelly’s ‘new’, non-evil Satan. Squeaky-voiced
Origen, though among the first, was by no means the last
or only person not to have read his Bible properly. The
world’s bestselling book is also sadly, without a question,
the world’s least thoroughly read. Anyone who has taken
the trouble to pick his way through the four gospels will
have realised, straight away, that the furious, passionate Jesus
of these pages bears scant resemblance to the soft-edged,
love-based Jesus of modern pulpit theology; and so it is that
the two Lucifers – Jesus and Satan – have each been
radically reinvented by the collective imagination and
petulant dogma of a 2,000-year Christian tradition: Jesus,
of course, for the better; the Devil for the worse.
Henry Ansgar Kelly’s thesis may not be entirely origi-
nal (did Thomas More not coin the phrase ‘The Devil is

15
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
 HISTORY
M ICHAEL B URLEIGH
A CHURCHILLIAN TASK
A H ISTORY OF THE E NGLISH -S PEAKING
P EOPLES SINCE 1900
★ editorial imagination, since, despite his modest avowals
By Andrew Roberts
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson 691pp £25)
A MONG THE CULTURAL consequences of the danger
symbolised by Al Qaeda has been a growing scepticism
towards the multicultural, ‘black armband’ view of history,
with its instrumental emphasis upon division, grievance
and victimhood rather than the positive values, both past
and present, which shaped our society and which most
immigrants to these shores wish to share. Even that expa-
triated ragamuffin ‘Sheikh’ Omar Bakri Mohammed
thought better of the country he wished to destroy once
he faced the grim alternatives of Israeli shelling or cap-
ture by his Syrian fellow-countrymen in
the Lebanon in addition to separation from
a large family that lives on handouts from
British taxpayers.
Many parents complain that history-
teaching in schools consists of disconnected
bits and pieces, and a lot of the Third
Reich, at the expense of what used to be
called ‘our island story’ – that is, how we
came to be a constitutional monarchy
under the rule of law, with the US repub-
lic as the ultimate guarantor of the wider
Free World, a theme often reduced to
‘American history’ as if the US existed on
another planet.
The commercial success of a self-
published ‘little book of patriotism’ and
the recent decision to include the history
of the Br itish Empire in the national
curriculum as something more than the
history of colonial grievance are symptomatic of the way
things are tending at a time when we are routinely
exposed to finger-stabbing Islamists uttering dire threats
against Western civilisation, sometimes via video trans-
missions from beyond the grave. Even New Labour is
experimenting with what it does not have the guts to
call ‘civil religion’, with Gordon Brown’s professions of
Britishness and the Home Office’s publication Life in the
United Kingdom.
In this climate, Andrew Roberts’s account of the two
successive Anglo-Saxon global powers exchanging the
baton sometime during the Second World War could
not be more timely. A passionate English patriot,
Roberts has produced a brilliant revisionist history of
16
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
the English-speaking peoples which deserves to be put
into the hands of every teenager, but which has so much
detailed substance that any adult not stupefied by Big
Brother will revel in it too, not least the author’s use of
the betting books of the Beefsteak and Brooks’s as a
commentary on how London ‘clubbistas’ viewed world
affairs. Technically speaking, the book is no mean feat of
of arbitrary idiosyncrasy, Roberts provides simultaneous
narratives of the countries where English is the domi-
nant language (Australia, Canada, Great Britain, the
Anglophone Caribbean, New Zealand and the USA) as
well as marvellously provocative accounts of major
events and traits common to their civilisations. A Maori
spokesman expressed this very well in 1918 as he out-
lined why his people had fought so courageously for the
British Crown:
We know of the Samoans, our kin: we know of the
Eastern and Western natives of German Africa, and
we know of the extermination of the Hereros, and
that is enough for us. For seventy-eight years we have
been, not under the rule of the British,
but taking part in the ruling of our-
selves, and we know by experience that
the foundations of British sovereignty
are based upon the eternal principles of
liberty, equity and justice.
Indeed, the alacrity with which people
from around the world rushed to support
Britain in various hours of peril is proba-
bly the most moving theme in the book,
taking all of seventy-five minutes in the
case of Australia’s prime minister Robert
Menzies following intelligence of Neville
Chamberlain’s announcement of war with
Nazi Germany in September 1939. What
they were ready to defend was eloquently
expressed by Churchill three years later:
Law, language, literature – these are
considerable factors. Common con-
ceptions of what is right and decent, a
marked regard for fair play, especially to the weak
and poor, a stern sentiment of impartial justice, and
above all a love of personal freedom … these are the
common conceptions on both sides of the ocean
among the English-speaking peoples.
The book gives a real sense of place, an achievement
realised despite the enormous distance (and size) of
many of the countries Roberts has on his huge canvas.
Having recently been to Newcastle, NSW, I was grateful
to Roberts for an account of that great coal port that
was more vivid than my own photographs. Law and
language receive generous attention; literature and
Christianity (especially in its Anglican forms) are han-
dled more fitfully, although Roberts is excellent on the
 HISTORY
corrosive Anglophobic output of one influential Los
Angeles suburb – Hollywood.
Speaking of Anglophobia, Roberts shows how at
virtually all times English-speaking Ireland has been a
dismally mean-minded and resentful counterpoint to the
general evolution of the ‘Anglosphere’ – one of the many
refreshing and robustly argued opinions with which his
book abounds. These will occasion much incensed scur-
rying in academia, the last demented redoubt for views
not generally held by those without tenure. Of this self-
serving racket Roberts observes: ‘Since the 1960s the
universities across the English-speaking world have seen
department after department captured by the radical Left,
whose grip on appointments and tenured posts has been
near impossible to loosen, even after the collapse of
Communism across Europe in 1989.’
Not much of the left-liberal creed of cultural self-
repudiation remains intact after Roberts has sliced and
slashed his way through. He brings a healthy scepticism
to bear on various supranational endeavours, from the
League of Nations to the UN via the European Union.
From concentration camps in the Boer War to the
‘gulags’ of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, Roberts
soberly rejects all arguments that suggest a moral
equivalence between aberrations and what in the case
of the totalitarian regimes was calculated and systemic,
resulting in the deaths of tens of millions of people
rather than a few naked Iraqis being arranged for the
cameras of Appalachian morons. He is devastating on
the subject of an entire cast of cynically gullible
stooges, including George Ber nard Shaw, Walter
Duranty, Christopher Hill, Jane Fonda, and, inevitably,
Er ic Hobsbawm. He defends the use of atomic
weapons against the Japanese, the Vietnam and
Falklands wars, the state of Israel, and makes one of the
best cases I have read for the second coalition campaign
against Iraq. Roberts even mounts convincing defences
of fast food and handgun ownership.
The book is rich in vivid characterisations of the
major players. Roberts clearly admires three US presi-
dents the Left loves to loathe (Nixon, Reagan and
George W Bush), and is relatively critical of Kennedy
and Clinton, the latter culpably responsible for doing
next to nothing to eradicate Al Qaeda. More locally, he
is comprehensively damning of Mountbatten, Harold
Wilson, Edward Heath and John Major, while recognis-
ing fellow patriots in Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair,
who are, along with Australia’s John Howard, the best
living exponents of the Churchillian creed of sticking
fast to America without forfeiting one’s independence.
This is an exuberant book, by one of the Anglosphere’s
most accomplished historians; that it won’t go down
well with the Guardian, New York Times or Sydney
Morning Herald is all the greater recommendation.
To order this book at £20, see LR Bookshop on page 14
17
C HRISTOPHER C OKER
BELLA, HORRIDA BELLA
WAR IN H UMAN C IVILISATION
★
By Azar Gat
(Oxford University Press 848pp £25)
‘CONSIDER THE CATTLE, grazing as they pass you by,’
Nietzsche asked his readers in his first major essay, ‘On
the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’: ‘they do
not know what is meant by yesterday or today.’ Animals
have no history; they only have evolution. We have a
history, or, what’s more important, historicity. Our
understanding of what it is to be human is tied to our
understanding of what we might yet ‘become’. We are
not finished, or even perfectible beings. Our interest in
ourselves is rooted in our intuitive sense that of all
species on the planet we are the only one whose future
is still open.
If history is humanity, when did humanity begin? In
this monumental study spanning three volumes, Azar
Gat, an Israeli scholar with an established and deserved
reputation, who has been fascinated with war for much
of his life (as every citizen of his country must), takes us
back to what we tend to call ‘pre-history’. It is a mis-
leading term, for as anthropologists tell us, humanity
and history took off together. The presence of hunter-
gatherers accounts for the larger part of the human
story, and during that time were forged nearly all those
characteristics of our existence that are most manifestly
‘human’: the capacity to create new symbols, the
growth of social structures such as sexual taboos, the
increasingly complex use of language, and – no less
important – the invention of war.
Culture, in other words, is necessary for humanity to
function optimally. The anthropologist Clifford Gertz
puts it very well: ‘a culture-less human being would be
“worse” than an intrinsically talented though unfulfilled
ape’. The old anthropological view that human nature
came first and then culture followed has been stood on its
head. Like art and religion, war has moulded humanity
somatically; it was essential not only to our survival but
also to our existential realisation. Human beings acquired
the main facets of their humanity in the process of
constructing new social worlds, as they expanded across
the globe into different environments and habitats and
began to settle and tame the land. The Italian philosopher
Giambattista Vico told us all this three hundred years ago,
but it was only recently that anthropologists and archaeol-
ogists began to accept that pre-history witnessed a unique
development: no less than the emergence and self-realisa-
tion of humanity. No human practice has helped us realise
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
 HISTORY

our humanity more than war, loath though many of us Hideous or not, war was the lot not only of Rome
might be to admit it. but of all Western societies until recently. War was what
Later, with the growth of the first civilisations, we find a they did best. Traditionally, our rulers have only been
new way of thinking about war that we associate with the called great if they have distinguished themselves in
rise of the state, a unit that emancipated itself politically as battle. The high point in a people’s life has been denoted
well as intellectually. God was no longer ‘in’ the world in by its victories in the field: their decline has invariably
the form of kings claiming not the ‘mandate of heaven’ or been measured in terms of defeat in battle. The nation
divine right to rule but to be gods themselves. Sovereigns states to which we still owe primary allegiance were cre-
might still claim divine right, or to be the personified ated in war. War was the Big Bang in which nationalism
union of the visible and invisible worlds, but their role had was conceived. It provided nations with their foundation
changed. They bore witness not to the presence of God so myths and semi-mythical heroes: Dusan, Arthur,
much as his absence: they might be his representatives but Alexander Nevsky. All this required what Nietzsche
they were only that and nothing more. The human com- would have called a kind of ‘eternal recurrence’, because
munity was left entirely to itself. This was the political wars had to be continually fought to sustain the nation
body’s ontological independence: its ability to set its own in its self-belief. In the course of the twentieth century
laws in the form of sovereign powers. Human will was war became more of an existential experience than
translated into legitimate power; the state became the perhaps ever before, because it was judged by some to
source of its own legitimation. And it was the state that be the ultimate expression of a community’s vitality.
sanctioned killing, as it has done ever since. What made the Aryan race superior to all others,
As Gat tells us, there is also an existential dimension to claimed Hitler, was its capacity for sacrifice.
war. Only in death do we reach the realm of necessity. As Gat concludes, our age by contrast is the first in
In life we can choose, including whether to test our human history in which war is not considered the activity
courage in battle. Some of us can even become heroes. most revealing of human nature. Even our bravest warriors
The Greek word for excellence, arete, seems originally remain deeply ambiguous, as do also the qualities that their
to have been associated with valour in battle and may be careers are deemed to represent: heroism, courage, even
derived from Ares, the god of war. When Socrates (who unqualified love of country – what Susan Sontag memo-
was honoured by Athens not only for being a philoso- rably described as ‘the worst form of unrequited love’.
pher but also a brave soldier) came to define virtue, he Most remote of all is the heroic version of history. Classic
thought of courage as one of its prime components and set-piece texts about patriotism, such as the Epitaph for
came up with the proposition that courage as a virtue is the Spartan Dead, or Henry V’s speech before Agincourt,
self-knowledge. We find the epitome of this self-knowl- are no longer taught in schools. We have stripped war of
edge in all the great warriors depicted throughout its ‘glory’, its existential appeal.
human history, but perhaps no more dramatically than in Yet glory is exactly what appeals still to many of today’s
the greatest of all Roman warriors, Aeneas. soldiers, from warlords to terrorists. People still continue
‘Bella, horrida bella’ (wars, hideous wars), the Sibyl to compete vigorously for scarce resources or obscure
tells Aeneas when he questions her on his descent into objects of desire. For us, conditions have changed dramat-
the underworld. War is Rome’s lot. In the underworld ically, and for all those for whom they have changed the
he watches his own posterity file before his eyes, all of violent option, Gat reminds us, has become less practical.
them soldiers: Caesar, Pompey, the Scipios, Fabius There are more peaceful tools which have been growing
Maximus. It’s a long and heroic pageant of the age of in significance for a century or more. At the same time,
warriors. Yet Virgil can observe Rome’s subsequent his- however, most of humanity is still going through the
tory as a long Pyrrhic victo- process of modernisation,
ry of the human spirit. His
hero’s humanity is revealed NEW AUTHORS while some societies have so
far failed in their efforts to
in his understanding of war PUBLISH YOUR BOOK – ALL SUBJECTS INVITED modernise at all. Books pro-
itself as a terrible necessity Have you written a book, and are you looking for a publisher? Athena liferate with titles such as
and a means to its negation, Press is a publisher dedicated to the publishing of books mainly by first
time authors. While we have our criteria for accepting manuscripts, we are ‘The End of History’, ‘The
peace. Through war Aeneas less demanding than the major blockbuster and celebrity driven publishing End of Nature’, ‘The End of
even finds new standards of houses, and we will accept a book if we feel it can reach a readership. Science’. Michel Foucault
humanity in himself . He We welcome submissions in all genres of fiction and non-fiction; literary even once famously predicted
fights without the violence and other novels, biography and autobiography, children’s, academic,
spiritual and religious writing, poetry, and many others.
the ‘End of Man’. No one,
that makes war an end in as yet, has predicted the end
itself; he fights without the Write or send your manuscript to: ATHENA PRESS of war.
furor (or fury) of pre-historic QUEEN’S HOUSE, 2 HOLLY ROAD, TWICKENHAM TW1 4EG, UK. To order this book at £20, see
e-mail: info@athenapress.com www.athenapress.com
or pre-state peoples. LR Bookshop on page 14

18
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
 HISTORY
N IGEL J ONES
Coeur de Lion,
Coeur de Rat
L IONHEART AND L ACKLAND :
K ING R ICHARD, K ING J OHN AND
THE WARS OF C ONQUEST
★ whose undesirable traits of obsessive quarrelsomeness,
By Frank McLynn
(Jonathan Cape 592pp £20)
IN THE LONG-GONE days when they still taught proper
history in schools, one of the key dates that had to be
memorised by children was 1215. This was the year that
a (temporarily) humbled King John was led, one imag-
ines kicking and screaming, to a table at Runnymede on
the Thames. There, teeth grinding in impotent rage, he
affixed his Royal Seal to the Magna Carta, under which
he pledged not only to go easy with the rebellious
Barons who had compelled him to this humiliation, and
patch up his shattered relations with the Church, but
also to grant the first glimmerings of legal rights to his
subjects. Naturally, these forced promises were not
worth the parchment they were written on. Indeed, the
red wax of the seal had hardly set before John was wrig-
gling desperately to get out of them.
It comes as a great relief to learn from Frank McLynn’s
marvellously readable and stridently
opinionated comparative double biog-
raphy of John and his elder brother
Richard that we do not, after all, have
to rethink this traditional jaundiced
view of ‘Bad King John’. Revisionists
who seek to defend arguably
England’s worst monarch have got it
wrong, and the black legend of John is
pretty much the truth. In fact, says
McLynn, it was all accurately attested
by contemporary chroniclers: John
was a murderous, treacherous, para-
noid, grasping, greedy ruler and a
woefully incompetent soldier.
Tyrannical and lecherous, he died as
he had lived: gorging himself into
insensibility and then succumbing to a
thoroughly deserved bout of dysentery
– unless, of course, he was actually
poisoned by his terminally exasperated
servants. Whatever the truth, McLynn
clearly relishes putting the boot into
the villain of his piece. John: on mischief bent
19
By stark contrast, Richard Coeur de Lion is McLynn’s
hero. Like a champion at a medieval tournament, the
author sports Richard’s colours proudly on his lance and
rides fearlessly into combat on his man’s behalf. Where
John is duplicitous, Richard is honest; if Richard has all
the noble qualities of chivalry required of an ideal
medieval king, then John is cowardly and contemptible.
Richard is tall, gold and handsome; John is small, dark
and ill-favoured. Richard is the apple of the eye of his
adoring (and adored) mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine;
John is the favourite of his father, Henry II – all of
manic restlessness, brooding suspicion and ungovernable
rage he has inherited. And, typically, John repaid the old
man’s doting regard with rank ingratitude and betrayal.
So why, given the abundant evidence of John’s fright-
fulness and Richard’s (relative) goodness, has recent
revisionist historiography largely reversed posterity’s
black-and-white verdict on the royal brothers? McLynn
cites various reasons: the twentieth century’s iconoclastic
desire to besmirch heroes and worship the amoral beast
in man; a politically correct reluctance to praise the only
English warrior king to go on crusade against Islam; and
gratitude for John’s meticulous book-keeping, which,
surviving in the archives, has enabled historians to build
an unusually detailed picture of the (mal-)administration
of his reign. For McLynn, this latter point has a sinister
explanation: John kept such records, he suggests, the
better to screw more money from his unfortunate sub-
jects, one art at least in which he was a past master.
(McLynn quotes a case in which John jailed a wealthy
Jew – ordering that one of the man’s
teeth should be extracted each day
until he disgorged his riches.)
Not that Richard was a saint.
As befitted a member of the
Plantagenet family (which contem-
poraries called ‘the Devil’s brood’),
he had his fair share of savagery –
most brutally expressed when he
slaughtered hundreds of captive
Saracens after the fall of Acre.
McLynn excuses this as acceptable
under the medieval rules of war –
pointing out that Richard’s chival-
rous Saracen opponent, the great
Saladin, did much the same to
Crusaders captured after his victory
at Hattin. McLynn is fiercely against
‘hindsight history’: the anachronistic
habit of judging the past by the
more tender – or hypocritical –
standards of the present. John, for
his part, reserved his atrocities for
his own realm – taking a sadistic
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
 HISTORY
delight in a scorched-earth policy of massacres, looting
and burning dur ing his inter minable wars against
the Barons.
McLynn also acquits Richard of the familiar charge of
neglecting England (of his ten-year reign he spent less
than one year on these shores), pointing out that he
ruled the far-flung Angevin Empire, of which England
was still only a minor province. Apart from his cam-
paigns in France, much of the rest of his reign was
devoted to the Third Crusade, and he spent an involun-
tary year as the imprisoned guest of Austrian Archduke
Leopold and the Holy Roman Emperor Henry on his
way home. For McLynn, Richard’s greatness lies in two
fields: his chivalrous regal spirit – he both looked and
acted the part of a king – and his soldiering. Along with
Edward IV he was our greatest warrior king, despite his
failure to capture Jerusalem. Naturally, John was his
polar opposite. He lost Normandy and most of his other
R OBERT I RWIN
RANCOUR AND REVOLT
S ETTING THE D ESERT ON F IRE :
T E L AWRENCE AND B RITAIN ’ S S ECRET
WAR IN A RABIA , 1916–1918
★ was contemptuous of the Arabs: ‘Ten years’ tutelage
By James Barr
(Bloomsbury 364pp £20)
THE ARAB REVOLT was a short-lived and peripheral
sideshow in the First World War. In February 1916
Hussein, the Emir of Mecca, declared his independence
from the Ottoman Empire and by October 1918
Damascus had been occupied by Arab, British and
Australian forces, effectively ending the war in the
Middle East. T E Lawrence’s part in that revolt was
shorter yet, as he arrived in the Hejaz in October 1916
but then went straight back to Cairo to report on the
(unsatisfactory) situation; it was only in December that
he joined Hussein’s son, Feisal, and began to play an
active part in the fighting in Arabia. Together, Lawrence
and the splendidly piratical Auda Abu Tayi captured
Aqaba in July 1917. Later Lawrence took a leading role
in dynamiting sections of the Hejaz Railway that ran
between Medina and Damascus, though the pioneers in
this activity were other British officers, including
Herbert Garland and Stewart Newcombe. The camel-
rearing Bedouin collaborated enthusiastically in this
destructive activity, since the railway, completed in 1908,
had deprived them of their previous role transporting
and protecting goods and people destined for Mecca and
Medina. Besides, the dynamiting of trains offered good
prospects for loot.
20
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
possessions, and allowed Louis, the Dauphin of France,
to invade the sacred soil of England itself as his inglori-
ous reign ended in ignominy.
This is popular history as it should be written: full-
blooded, yet firmly grounded in scholarship. Though a
latecomer to the field, McLynn courageously flays those
pro-John academics whose conclusions displease him.
Rejecting some of the more enduring myths of Richard’s
reign (he doesn’t believe his idol was gay, and he doubts
even the existence of his faithful minstrel Blondel) he is
never afraid of giving us his robust view – even if it is
wrong. He is one of an endangered species: an indepen-
dent historian who refuses to confine himself to the box
of a single period or subject (his prolific output has
ranged from the Wild West to the Battle of Hastings,
with biographies of C G Jung and Richard Burton
thrown in for good measure). We should treasure him.
To order this book at £16, see LR Bookshop on page 14
Loot apart, the Arab Revolt was fuelled by British gold,
much of which was passed by Lawrence to the chiefs of
various Bedouin tribes. On the British side, the struggle
against the Turks in Arabia and later Syria seems to have
been fuelled by individual obsessions, mutual rancour and
racial prejudice. Sir Mark Sykes, the co-signatory of the
notorious Sykes-Picot Agreement, which divided the
Arab world into British and French spheres of influence,
under the Entente and the Arabs will be a nation.
Complete independence means Persia, poverty and
chaos.’ But Sykes was unusual in his enthusiasm for the
Entente with the French, and most of the British power-
brokers in India and Cairo seem to have been in agree-
ment that an important aim of the war was to deny their
allies the French any substantial territorial gains in the
Middle East. Lawrence was keen to get Feisal involved in
the fighting in Syria in order to ‘biff the French out of all
hope’ of gaining a foothold in that country.
Although there was widespread agreement about
preventing the French from taking an active role in spon-
soring and supplying the Arab Revolt, there was hardly
any agreement about anything else. In London, Sir
William Robertson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff,
consistently opposed devoting any resources to Arabs that
could be better spent on the trench warfare on the
Western Front. The Government of India was nervous
that British meddling in the holy territory of the Hejaz
would cause resentment and even spark revolt among
India’s Muslims. Moreover, whereas Cairo favoured the
Hashemite Sherif Hussein, the Indian Government spon-
sored his great enemy in the Muslim Peninsula, the
Wahhabite king, Ibn Saud. Cairo was further riven by
individual clashes. Ronald Storrs, the Oriental Secretary
at the Br itish High Commission, intr igued with
Lawrence against Cyril Wilson, who was the ‘Pilgrimage
 HISTORY
Officer’ in Jeddah and effectively the liaison officer with
Hussein. Storrs wanted Hussein to be given all the
resources he might need to be acclaimed the Caliph once
the war was over, but Wilson was cautious and doubtful
about Hussein’s abilities and trustworthiness.
There were many other points of dispute and at the
end of it all it is remarkable that Lawrence was able to
give to The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, his classic account of
the revolt, the subtitle A Triumph. There is a well-
known phenomenon, related to peripheral vision,
whereby one can see a faint star more distinctly at night
if one avoids gazing directly at it. Something analogous
happens when one reads James Barr’s engrossing and
very readable account of the Arab Revolt and of
Lawrence’s part in it, as one begins to understand much
more clearly what Lawrence was up to when one looks
at what his superiors, rivals and sponsors were doing.
Much of the fighting in the Arab Revolt was overseen
by Colonel Pierce Joyce, an extremely able officer,
though one with a low opinion of his Egyptian regular
troops and Bedouin allies. Lawrence’s main role was to
report on the Bedouin, to work with them and influ-
ence the goals of Feisal and his tribal following.
Lawrence’s account of the fighting in Seven Pillars is
delivered in a beautiful, but somewhat overwrought style
that owed something to Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte
d’Arthur and something also to Charles Doughty’s almost
unreadable classic travel narrative, Arabia Deserta. The war
was presented by Lawrence as a personalised epic of
endurance, and the narrative was complicated by fre-
quent bouts of introspection and by odd reticences.
Barr’s much plainer narrative, which leaves little room for
Lawrence’s anguished meditations, makes the war much
easier to follow and puts it in the broader context of
what was happening on the Western Front, in Iraq,
Russia and elsewhere. Furthermore, Lawrence skilfully
edited his narrative to give most weight to the early
stages of the revolt in the Arab Peninsula, when guerrilla
warfare predominated and hand-to-hand combat was not
uncommon; he rather rushed his account of the last
stages of the fighting, during which Feisal and his by
then swollen following of tribesmen advanced on
Damascus, the prize that he and Lawrence hoped would
ensure independence for Arab Syria. Barr, on the other
hand, working from documents in the Public Record
Office and the memoirs of other British officers, as well
as his own retreading of the ground that was fought over,
gives full weight to the slow, steady slog of the advance
towards Damascus. By then it was no longer a matter of
white-robed Arab marauders appearing seemingly out of
nowhere to wreak mayhem on a surprised Turkish army,
for Allenby presided over a large and mixed army includ-
ing troops of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force, the reg-
ular Camel Corps, Gurkhas, Australians and armoured
cars. The war in Syria had become more a matter of
21
logistics than of paladins clashing in the desert and,
though Allenby and Lawrence both hoped that Feisal and
his turbulent following would be first to enter Damascus
(so that the French could be decisively biffed), in fact
Chauvel’s Australian troops, more by accident than by
design, got there first.
Barr does not linger over the aftermath, which was
indeed depressing. In order to keep going during the
Great War, British policy-makers had given many
undertakings – some covert, like Sykes’s deal with the
French or McMahon’s promises to Hussein, and some
public, like Balfour’s announcement that the British
Government viewed with favour the establishment of a
Jewish national home in Palestine. At the end of the war
no one was satisfied. Feisal was, after all, forced out of
Syria by the French and given turbulent Iraq as a com-
pensation prize. (Iraq, the creation of the post-war set-
tlement, was an artificial nation, created by Britain from
the soldering together of three Ottoman provinces.)
Hussein retained a precarious hold over the Hejaz for a
few years, but Ibn Saud took the region over in 1926. In
the Twenties and Thirties far more Jews started arriving
in Palestine than British officials could have anticipated.
Winding up, James Barr quotes Osama bin Laden on the
fate of the Arabs: ‘Our nation has been tasting humilia-
tion and contempt for more than eighty years.’
To order this book at £16, see LR Bookshop on page 14
The British Academy
British Academy lectures are free and open to the general
public and everyone is welcome.The lectures take place
at 10 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1 and begin at
5.30pm and will be followed by a reception at 6.30pm
Autumn Lectures 2006
5.30pm,Tuesday 19 September 2006
Chatterton Lecture on Poetry
A.E.Housman’s Rejected Addresses
Dr Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
Magdalen College, Oxford
5.30pm,Tuesday 26 September 2006
Elsley Zeitlyn Lecture on Chinese
Archaeology and Culture
Q i a n l o n g ’s P l u r a l i s t A e s t h e t i c s :
Wr i t i n g a H i s t o r y o f B u d d h i s t A r t
in 18th Century China
Professor Patricia Berger
University of California, Berkeley
Further information and abstracts are available at www.britac.ac.uk/events
Meetings Department, The British Academy
Telephone: 020 7969 5246 Fax: 020 7969 5228 Email: lectures@britac.ac.uk
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
 HISTORY
E VAN M AWDSLEY
A MEETING OF TYRANTS
J UNE 1941: H ITLER AND S TALIN
★ … is ruled by vast economic forces and not by individual
By John Lukacs
(Yale University Press 192pp £16.99)
JOHN LUKACS IS a prolific and eminent scholar. He has
taken up a wide range of historical themes and written
many books, including The Last European War,
1939–1941 (1976). His latest book is a gallant attempt
to make sense of the Hitler–Stalin relationship. Lukacs is
only one of several emeriti who have come back to this
theme: other senior scholars are Alan Bullock (Hitler and
Stalin), Albert L Weeks (Stalin’s Other War), Earl Ziemke
(The Red Army, 1918–1941), and David E Murphy
(What Stalin Knew).
Although the publisher’s cover blurb promises ‘a bril-
liant new work’, the scope set out in the preface of this
little book is more measured, ‘less than a monograph and
more than a narrative study’. In any event, historical
works have to be weighed up on the basis of whether
they use new sources and how they reinterpret events. As
to sources, there is some sensitivity to new material, and
the supposed letter from Hitler to Stalin, dated 14 May
1941, is reprinted in an appendix. There seems, however,
little point in doing this. Not only was the letter already
included in – and a central point of – David E Murphy’s
book, What Stalin Knew: The Enigma of Barbarossa (2005),
but Lukacs (surely wisely) concludes that it is not authen-
tic. Lukacs does make use of the important English trans-
lation (2003) of the diary of Georgi Dimitrov, the head of
the Comintern, but he does not take the ‘revolutionary’
side of Stalin too seriously. Otherwise he cannot be said
to have exhausted the new Russian primary material
which became available after the fall of Communism.
June 1941 cites a number of new Western secondary
works, the most important of which is certainly Gabriel
Gorodetsky’s Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion
of Russia (1999) – a work which is solidly based on the new
Russian documentation. Lukacs is at least aware of Russian
historians like M I Mel’tiukhov and VA Nevezhin. But
there are significant gaps. In particular the books and arti-
cles of Geoffrey Roberts, especially The Soviet Union and the
Origins of the Second World War (1995), are left out of the
bibliography; Roberts, using newly available Russian docu-
ments, convincingly – to my mind – corrected the standard
view of the origins of the Nazi–Soviet pact, a view which
is repeated here by Lukacs.
The overall interpretation presented in June 1941 is
conventional. Lukacs does not throw himself into the
‘preventative war’ debate – whether Germany acted in self-
22
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
defence. He hardly mentions the ‘Suvorov controversy’,
about Stalin’s supposed plans for a 1941 Red Army offen-
sive. The core argument, baldly put, is that ‘everything
depended on two men, Hitler and Stalin’. Lukacs is a self-
confessed historical reactionary here, refuting ‘the socio-
scientific and current opinion according to which history
persons’. This is not an uncommon view, although not all
historians are honest enough to admit it. It is true that both
the political system of the Third Reich and that of the
USSR were geared towards the unchallenged power of the
leader, indeed each had a leader cult. The United States,
Britain, France – and Japan – were very different.
Unfortunately Professor Lukacs does not venture
beyond the argument that Stalin and Hitler saw themselves
as ‘statesmen’. He takes a ‘realist’ view which strips both
men of ideological preconceptions. I would not agree
either that ‘Hitler long before 1945 ceased to believe in
“Jewish Bolshevism”’ or that Stalin operated outside the
framework of Marxism-Leninism. There is now a good
literature on Stalin, although this is not cited in June 1941.
Especially important are Erik van Ree, The Political
Thought of Joseph Stalin: A Study in Twentieth-Century
Revolutionary Patriotism (2002), and Silvio Pons, Stalin and
the Inevitable War: 1936–1941 (2002). Moreover, imper-
sonal forces and ideas surely played a part. Hitler was in
1941 a prisoner of the decisions he had made two years
earlier, when he blundered into a general European war.
He may not have attacked Russia just to destroy
Communism, but he was also influenced by assumptions –
based on racist ideology – which led him to underestimate
his Slavic enemy. Stalin, it might be argued, made more
subtle calculations both in 1939 and 1941, when he
weighed up the intentions and capabilities of the various
powers. It is perhaps true that Stalin was not in all senses ‘a
representative of extreme Marxism, a fanatic dogmatist’.
Nevertheless, assumptions – based on class ideology –
about the democratic capitalist states made it easy to turn
from them in 1939, and to ignore their warnings in 1941.
Lukacs’s other big argument is that Hitler was above all
preoccupied with Britain; this fits neatly with his view of
Hitler as a ‘statesman’ more interested in power politics
than in ideas. I have already taken Professor Lukacs to task
for being too much of a realist, but he is probably right
about the centrality of Britain in Hitler’s strategy, even in
June 1941. Britain’s decision to fight on in the summer of
1940, rather than come to an arrangement with the Third
Reich, a decision personified by Winston Churchill, was
indeed of decisive importance. Hitler as a result had little
choice in 1941, given the resources of Germany and the
state of the Wehrmacht; not attacking the USSR would
have left the Third Reich in an even worse position in
1942. Nevertheless, this notion of the centrality of Britain
to Hitler’s strategy is not as original as Professor Lukacs
(and the book’s blurb) seem to suggest.
 HISTORY
One of the attractions of the author’s writing style – at
least to me – is his directness, committing to paper what
others save for conversation over post-seminar coffee.
Lukacs can be vigorously dismissive of other historians:
Alan Bullock’s Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (1992) is
described – not altogether fairly – as ‘useless’, Constantine
Pleshakov’s Stalin’s Folly (2005) ‘is inaccurate throughout’,
and he has his doubts about A J P Taylor as well. He is
merciless, too, about historical characters. Trotsky was ‘a
fool’. Matsuoka, the erstwhile Japanese Foreign Minister,
was ‘a despicable man’. Molotov was ‘a wooden and
unimaginative dolt’, a view which is not 100 per cent
wrong. (Lukacs can be forgiven for not having had the
R OY H ATTERSLEY
‘They Never Swung
For Me’
W HITE H EAT: A H ISTORY OF B RITAIN IN
THE S WINGING S IXTIES
★ weight. Thus, when
By Dominic Sandbrook
(Little, Brown 878pp £22.50)
WHITE HEAT IS not short of detail. Examining the qualities
which made outsider Edward Heath win the race for the
Tory Party leadership, Dominic Sandbrook reveals that
four different newspapers used the word ‘obsessive’ to
describe him, and called him ‘tough’; Sandbrook is as
eclectic in his choice of subject as he is meticulous in pro-
viding every fact about that controversial decade that even
the most demanding reader could possibly desire. When
‘Twiggy’ (or Lesley Hornby as she then was) left school,
‘she weighed just six and a half stones, her shoe size was
four and her dress size was six and her bust, waist and hip
measurements were 30, 22 and 32 respectively.’
Inevitably, White Heat will be judged on the quality of
its treatment of political history. All such books are. At first
I feared that I found the narrative uninspired because I had
lived through the whole decade – cringed at George
Brown’s television broadcast on the night of President
Kennedy’s death, feared that my majority (as well as the
government’s) would slip during the summer of 1964,
pressed in the Parliamentary Labour Party for early devo-
lution. Then I read the chapter ‘Is Britain Civilised?’
The prejudice inherent in Sandbrook’s comments on
what he calls Tony Crosland’s ‘destruction of the grammar
school’ is not a cause for complaint, though the notion
that had Crosland not been a public-school boy ‘he might
have been less keen to abolish an institution which had
manifestly succeeded in propelling bright pupils from
23
benefit of the late Derek Watson’s 2005 work on Stalin’s
Foreign Commissar, Molotov: A Biography).
There is not a great deal that is new here, either in
terms of evidence or interpretation. This is a conventional
short introduction to the subject, without serious errors.
(One detail might be corrected: Stalin became Supreme
C-in-C of the Red Army not on 23 June but only on 10
July, and this was a significant time delay.) The author
brings to the reader’s attention much – if not all – of the
new writing on the subject. June 1941 is vigorously writ-
ten; if it is neither a monograph nor a narrative study it
certainly avoids the blandness of a textbook.
To order this book at £13.59, see LR Bookshop on page 14
modest backgrounds to
the highest places in the
land’ is simply silly. But
the problem with White
Heat is not its bias. Quite
the opposite. The author’s
judgements, such as they
are, are swamped by a
morass of facts – all of
which are given equal
examining the progress of
‘the permissive society’,
he thinks it worthwhile
to record that ‘the com-
mentator Peter Hitchens
even argued that [Roy]
Jenkins revolutionised
British behaviour, “from
where and when we Prime Minister on holiday
drank, to how long we
stayed married [and] who we went to bed with”’.
Sandbrook even thinks it necessary to endorse Hitchens’s
judgement that the abolition of hanging was ‘a victory of
the elite over the people’. By taking Hitchens seriously
Sandbrook comes very close to disqualification as a histo-
rian of judgement. I voted for the abolition of capital
punishment, for divorce-law reform and for the decrimi-
nalisation of homosexuality without a word of complaint
from my inner-city Birmingham constituency.
I am assured – though I am not myself qualified to judge
– that Sandbrook is much better on the subject of pop
music, correctly arguing that the ‘Rolling Stones often had
much more conservative lives than people imagined’. But
then commentary again turns into inventory. On the one
hand William Rees-Mogg in The Times reacted to Jagger’s
indictment for drugs offences with an attack on the ‘puni-
tive attitudes of people who thought, irrespective of the
facts of the case, that he had got what was coming to him’.
On the other, Charles Curran, writing in the Evening
News, ‘spoke to millions of his countrymen’ by insisting
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
 HISTORY
that ‘those who break the law must be punished’.
Incidentally, he also confirmed Rees-Mogg’s fears by
adding, wholly irrelevantly, that the defendant in the trial
had become a millionaire at the age of twenty-three.
To me, at least, by far the most interesting chapter has
the admirably simple title ‘Britain in 1965’. That may be
because it heaps proper praise on Angus Wilson’s novels
in general and Late Call in particular, a forgotten master-
piece. In a sense, the compliments to Wilson and the
praise of Late Call are both parts of a device to introduce
the subject of New Towns, ‘to many commentators the
embodiment of New Jerusalem that Labour promised to
build after the Second World War’. Sandbrook regards
the new towns as emblematic of the decade – alongside
the BMC’s Mini (‘the motoring icon of the sixties’) and
the miniskirt, which it seems Mary Quant regarded as
the manifestation of female sexual liberation. I used to
think of the Sixties with affection, even though they
never swung for me. But when I read of Mary Quant
describing the attitude of young women of the period
(‘you’ve got to excite and you’ve got to be jolly marvel-
lous to attract me. I can’t be bought but if I want you I’ll
have you’), I feel glad to be old. The sentiments are
unexceptional. It is the crude way in which they are
expressed which condemns the era.
1 2 3 4
Sponsored by 7 8
9 10
11
12
13
14 15
19
21 22
23 24
Five winners will be selected from the correct crosswords received by noon on
September 13th. Each will receive a Sheaffer Signature Pen, generously donated
by the Sheaffer Pen Company.
The winners of our August competition are Mrs D Pope of Harrow-on-the-Hill, Roland Hall of York, Mrs L
Shave of Bournemouth, Betty Moore of Leiston in Suffolk and Donald Gillies of Glasgow. Each winner
will receive a Sheaffer Signature Pen.
Answers to the August crossword:
ACROSS: 4 Sandra, 7 Alkali, 8 Jalapeno, 9 Aria, 10 Manna, 12 Lent, 18 Landau, 19 Degree, 20 Goal,
23 Acres, 27 Lamb, 28 Karenina, 29 Castle, 30 Recess.
DOWN: 1 Flora, 2 Madam, 3 Dijon, 4 Salsa, 5 Nepal, 6 Run-in, 11 Adam, 13 Eyre, 14 Teem, 15 Plug,
16 Anna, 17 Bede, 21 Orate, 22 Liege, 23 Aries, 24 Reach, 25 Slush, 26 Ample.
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
Perhaps that is an insight into the decade. But if so it is
a rare example of White Heat’s originality. The paradigm
phrase appears on page 353, though there are dozens of
other examples on dozens of other pages: ‘As Healey
points out in his autobiography…’ The alternative
defining phrases are too numerous to list: ‘As Pinlott
puts it’, on page 402; ‘The historian Robert Murphy
spoke to millions’ (a favourite commendation) on page
201; ‘The News of the World predicted’ (page 613). At
least Dominic Sandbrook cannot be accused of failure to
acknowledge his sources.
Sandbrook implies, but never quite says, that politi-
cians of the Sixties continually ignored the wishes of the
people. Enoch Powell, ‘for millions of white voters,
resentful of the social changes … would forever be a
hero’. Correct. ‘But for millions of Black and Asian
Britons his name would forever live in infamy’. Correct
as well. But what do you think of Powell, Mr
Sandbrook? Historians need to express opinions, pursue
hypotheses of possible alternative causes of everything,
interpret as well as recount what happened. Otherwise
one is left only with a belated alternative to Keesing’s
Contemporary Archives. There are probably a million facts
in White Heat – but there is very little life.
To order this book at £18, see LR Bookshop on page 14
5 6 ACROSS
1 Drive former politician to one party (6)
4 Layabout to tick over and start to run (5)
9 Shakespeare play seen in books needing word of
introduction (7)
10 Plunders musical instrument, we hear (5)
11 Book taken illegally? (9)
12 Sheds insecurely shut (4)
13 Measure of alcohol strength is in the pudding (5)
16 Partly depicted long poem (4)
19 Formidable woman to take to the air after insect (9)
16 17 18 21 Chaplain making adjustment to drape (5)
20 22 Novel love affair (7)
23 Tied up, we hear, in a sort of fund (5)
24 Any heavy weight taken in by Cleopatra’s lover (6)
DOWN
1 A buffoon coming up to hospital with bath sponge (6)
2 Orders he’s set into wager (6)
3 Doctor initially fixed leak for his enemy (5)
5 Spindle concerning women (7)
6 Avoid computer key (6)
7 Limited consolation on Stella’s farm (4,7)
8 Actor’s remark got out of the way (5)
13 Expertise in getting front of vessel in front of
eastern steamship (7)
14 Skilled enough to get a government division
contracted (5)
15 Look at bird (6)
17 Public relations we’re getting onto quickly (6)
18 Arrive having lost contents of diary - that’s funny (6)
20 You old fellows in the country (5)
 FICTION
S AM L EITH
WAKING INTO NIGHTMARE
K INGDOM C OME
★ spent replacing one fridge with
By J G Ballard
(Fourth Estate 280pp £17.99
J G BALLARD is the undisputed laureate of suburban psy-
chosis. He has achieved this, as many have pointed out, by
writing a long run of novels that have been very nearly
exactly the same: the working-out – in his unique, and
uniquely weird, idiom – of a series of preoccupations
bordering on the monomaniacal. There was the one
about the blandly luxurious gated community where,
under the surface, all was madness and murder. Then
there was the other one about the blandly luxurious gated
community where, under the surface, all was madness and
murder. Then there was the other one... and so on.
Kingdom Come is narrated by Richard Pearson, a for-
mer advertising executive who leaves his home in cen-
tral London and drives out to Brooklands, a dormitory
town in the M25 corridor, in the hopes of investigating
the circumstances of his elderly father’s death. Richard’s
father was shot – apparently by a random madman – in
an enormous shopping mall called the Metro-Centre.
In Brooklands, Richard finds something peculiar and
sinister. Armies of sports fans in St George shirts ram-
page through the streets at night, beating up immigrants.
Their presiding deity, watching over them like Dr T J
Eckleburg in The Great Gatsby, is a washed-up TV star
called David Cruise, who hosts the Metro-Centre’s in-
house cable TV channel.
Against them – or apparently against them – are repre-
sentatives of the old Middle England; a provincial solicitor,
a local doctor, a respectable psychiatrist. What’s going on,
it’s suggested, is a new English revolution. The uniformity
of the Metro-Centre and the football terrace is replacing
gin and Jags and the golf club; consumerism replacing
religion and politics. The identity of the real killer –
which Richard pursues in the haphazard manner of a
1940s amateur sleuth – is somehow bound up in all this.
The opening part of the novel, then, feels like a
uniquely bizarre mix of Agatha Christie, Don DeLillo
and John Wyndham. The second half changes gear: with
the rise of a neo-fascist movement dedicated to the
Metro-Centre, the arrival of the army, and a bloody and
protracted siege in the shopping mall, it enters the terri-
tory of Stephen King or Richard Matheson.
One of the problems with Ballard is knowing quite how
to read him. He seems, at first glance, to signal his themes
with absurd clumsiness. His characters don’t speak or
behave like people. They all seem to be participating in
25
the same conversation about the
links between consumer culture
and fascism, the breakdown of old
forms of community, and the vio-
lence that boredom unlocks. The
animal response to a life docilely
another, they take turns to sug-
gest, is the wilful submission to
madness: what one character calls
‘elective psychopathy’. Ballard: uniquely weird
It’s worth, I think, developing
two lines of thought. First, that Ballard – like Don
DeLillo – is far more purely a comic novelist (a very
darkly comic novelist) than is often recognised.
Kingdom Come is extremely funny; and the satirical or
moral lesson it offers on the surface, and telegraphs so
frantically, is being telegraphed that frantically because
it is being burlesqued. Second, is that what looks at
first glance like a piece of pseudo-realism – calmly and
particularly narrated – is actually operating on the
level of a fairy story; or, more specifically, its ancestor
the nightmare.
The clues to this escape in hints. The word ‘night-
mare’ recurs, and the mascots of the Metro-Centre are
three bears, standing in its main courtyard. Likewise, the
moral and motivational logic of the universe is that of
the unconscious, of what Freud called the dream-work.
Everything in the world of Kingdom Come is capable of
standing at once for itself, and for its opposite. The rev-
olution is started by its opponents. Richard is the enemy
and the begetter of the Metro-Centre’s chaos, and in a
carefully paradoxical phrase, he’s warned: ‘Listen,
Richard. You’re waking up into a nightmare you helped
to script.’
That nightmare plays itself out in emotional non-
sequiturs. Taken round the Metro-Centre after his
father’s death, Richard is told by the PR man Carradine
that the bear mascots were damaged by the gunfire.
‘And the bears were hit?’ he says. ‘I’m glad they weren’t
seriously injured.’ ‘It was a close thing,’ says Carradine.
‘Our customers were very upset. They sent in hundreds
of letters, get-well cards.’
There are other curious little slips. After Richard sleeps
with Dr Julia Goodwin, and then starts, curiously, to
woo her, he says, ‘I hoped that one day she would finally
forgive me for whatever she had done to my father in the
past.’ Ballard is a writer whose reasonable-sounding first-
person narrator may, in fact, be the maddest person in
the book.
Ballard apprehends the violence of his suburbia not so
much as a struggle between two groups, but as a sort of
pathology in the body politic; an auto-immune response
with little more moral content than recovering from a
cold. The Metro-Centre creates the conditions that
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
 FICTION
bring about its destruction, and will do so again.
If this is satire, it is not the sort of satire that identifies a
wrong and credits human agency with the capacity to
right it. It is, I think, a brilliant novel – but it’s unlike
almost anything else; except, of course, the rest of Ballard’s
recent output. Kingdom Come is anti-individualist, anti-
Freudian, and pretty nearly anti-human. As in a dream,
G ILL H ORNBY
THE BAWDY BUNCH
A S POT OF B OTHER
★ son Jamie is grown up and open-
By Mark Haddon
(Jonathan Cape 400pp £17.99)
MARK HADDON’S FIRST novel, The Curious Incident of the
Dog in the Night-Time, was, you remember, a publisher’s
dream. Not only did it win pretty much every award
going, it also pulled off that remarkable – and highly lucra-
tive – feat of straddling two markets. A charming insight
into the mind of a fifteen-year-old with Asperger’s
Syndrome, it was a huge hit with both adults and children
alike. So the first question to be asked about his second
novel is: Can he do it again? One has to read less than a
third of A Spot of Bother to answer: He hasn’t even tried.
It will be interesting to see how this book is marketed.
There is a public duty to prevent any twelve-year-old
fans of A Curious Incident… from spending their book-
tokens on this one. If they are not, these days, worried
about a bit of masturbation, they are probably not quite
ready for geriatric adultery (‘that man’s scrotum, her sag-
ging thighs … the grunting’) or the self-service surgery
on a self-diagnosed tumour performed in the bathroom
with the kitchen scissors. (‘His flesh was stretched into a
white peak, like hot cheese on a pizza. He opened the
jaws of the scissors.’) And as for the gay one-night coitus
interrupted by an attack of food-poisoning from a dodgy
prawn… Well, let’s not go there. This is not to say that
there is anything wrong with A Spot of Bother as a novel;
it is indeed oddly enjoyable. But it is fair to point out
that it represents a distinct authorial change of tack.
The four principal members of the Hall family are not
suffering from any particular mental disability, but they are
a seriously dysfunctional bunch. George, a retired busi-
nessman, is convinced that his eczema (the eponymous
‘spot of bother’) is terminal, and is hovering on the brink
of a breakdown. Whilst he would dearly like to be build-
ing a studio in the back garden and taking up water-
colours, he is too busy with his vertigo and his nightmares
and his panic attacks to get much done. So consumed is he
with his hypochondria that he hasn’t noticed that his wife,
Jean, is not quite what she seems. He presumes that she is
26
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
motives are not so much opaque as irrelevant.
After another assassination attempt at the Metro-
Centre, two Bosnian brothers walk into the police station,
hand in the weapon and confess to the crime. ‘No one
needed to question their motives, but whatever their
motives were, they clearly fitted the crime.’
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an excellent middle-class sort
who helps out at a school and
works part-time in a bookshop;
he doesn’t realise that she is shag-
ging an ex-colleague of his in
the afternoon. Although their
ly gay, neither of them has ever
quite faced up to it or attempted
anything like a discussion. But
they do all agree that it is a disas-
ter that their tricky daughter, Haddon: change of tack
Katie, is about to marry her bit
of rough, Ray. She has a 2:1 in Philosophy! He has a
Northern accent and a brother in jail! The narrative
switches from their four points of view, as Katie’s wedding
draws nearer and they all go off their separate rails.
The great strength of Haddon’s first novel was the
hugely winning voice of young Christopher Boone.
Conversely, A Spot of Bother gets off to a slightly grinding
start, as it switches from one character to another, none of
whom is particularly winning. And it deals quite merci-
lessly with the less picturesque side of family life. An
unusual proportion of the action seems to take place in
the lavatorial area. We are informed every time George
‘relieves himself ’. He is generally to be found either on
the toilet or its closed seat. Katie is the single mother of
little Jacob, whose nappies – or lack of – we know all
about, including when the diarrhoea spreads to the sheets.
Indeed, the only time the bathroom door remains shut to
the reader – although it is not, sadly, soundproofed – is
during the unfortunate above-mentioned dodgy prawn
business. And for that we must be grateful.
However, this is not meant to be The Waltons, and
though Haddon’s view of families is not rose-tinted – or
indeed rose-scented – it is wise, acute and often very
funny. Daughter Katie’s indefatigable stroppiness is, for
example, sublime, and her relationship with little Jacob
convincing and touching. George’s attitude to fathering
in his day – ‘You built a tree-house, administered justice
and took control of the kite in strong winds. And that
was it’ – is both recognisable and a decent explanation
for the mess that he is in with his grown-up kids. And
all their different problems unite to turn Katie’s wedding
into a grotesque comic masterpiece that makes the
whole novel worthwhile.
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 FICTION
M ARTYN B EDFORD
BEYOND THE BROTHEL
T HE A PPLE : N EW C RIMSON P ETAL S TORIES
★ although Faber does allow himself to sentimentalise Sugar,
By Michel Faber
(Canongate 199pp £12.99)
MICHEL FABER HAS, so we are told, bowed to popular
demand. The ending of his bestselling novel The Crimson
Petal and the White (2002) prompted hundreds of readers’
letters demanding to know the fate of his protagonists –
Sugar, the Victorian prostitute-turned-nanny, and Sophie,
the little girl with whom she absconds. Letters, too, from
those who loved the novel so much they simply wanted
more. The result is this spin-off collection, and how
Canongate’s publicist must have relished promoting a
book written to please an adoring public. Except that it
isn’t. This is no movie-style sequel: ‘Crimson Petal 2 …
just when you thought it was safe to go back into the
brothel.’ In fairness, the publishers – and Faber himself, in
a foreword – take pains to portray The Apple as a compro-
mise, true to the integrity of the original novel but also to
the aesthetic legitimacy of these stories themselves. Faber
wrote them for himself, as much as for his fans: he had
unfinished business with some of the characters he’d cre-
ated. You don’t need to have read the earlier book, he
argues, to appreciate the stories in this one. Nor is this an
exercise in tying up narrative loose ends; indeed, these
tales invite new speculations to replace the few that are
resolved. Quite right, too. As Faber points out: ‘Isn’t it
fun, at the end of a book ... to construct what happens
next in our imaginations?’
How, then, to assess this collection? The generous
approach would be to take the declared purpose at face
value. Faber has earned the benefit of the doubt by his
track record as a serious, seriously good writer whose
emergence – along with the likes of Ali Smith, Sarah
Waters, David Mitchell, Jon McGregor and Sarah Hall –
has invigorated the British literary scene in recent years.
He is accomplished in the shorter forms of the story and
novella and, in Under the Skin and Crimson Petal, the
imaginative range of his talent is expressed in novels that
are so unalike they could have been produced by differ-
ent authors.
It is hard, though, to shrug off a nagging suspicion
that what we have, here, are the titbits, the leftovers
from the vast and sumptuous banquet that was The
Crimson Petal and the White. Two stories – ‘Christmas in
Silver Street’, and ‘Chocolate Hearts from the New
World’ – were written in 2002 and 2003 respectively
and have been published separately; the remaining five,
we are told, were written in 2005. Even so, some of
27
these tales read like episodes or extended scenes gathered
up from the novel’s cutting-room floor; not quite the
‘little worlds of their own’ the author claims them to be.
This is not to disparage the writing. The evocation of
place, time and character is as potent as in the novel itself,
and the prose is always assured and often sparkling,
and is occasionally clumsy in reminding us where and
how we’ve met these people before. ‘Clara and the Rat
Man’, about the arrangement between a whore and a
client with a penchant for the sport of the rat pit, is
engagingly quirky and holds up as a self-contained story,
while ‘Chocolate Hearts’ is a subtly touching tale of
incipient love-by-correspondence in the era of the slave
trade. And if you want to pay a visit to Crimson Petal’s key
figures before and after the timespan of that narrative,
then these tales provide tantalising glimpses. However,
what ultimately substantiates this book is the final story,
‘A Mighty Horde of Women in Very Big Hats,
Advancing’. At sixty-five pages, it is almost novella-length
and, certainly, has the depth and range of many a novel.
The tale of a small boy – son of Sophie, the little girl in
Crimson Petal – drawn into his parents’ activism in the suf-
fragette movement, it is a wonderful, bravura piece of
writing that elevates the entire collection to a level where
the praise should drown out the sounds of carping.
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LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
 FICTION
J OHN D UGDALE
JOYCE WOULD BE PROUD
O NLY R EVOLUTIONS
★ helping their readers out with tips, comfortingly familiar
By Mark Z Danielewski
(Doubleday 360pp £20)
MARK DANIELEWSKI HAD a promising go at creating
unreadable fiction in his debut, House of Leaves. Crudely
summarisable as a horror story about a house that keeps
alarmingly changing shape, it featured three layered nar-
ratives – records in various media kept by the family
who lived there, the notebooks of a blind man obsessed
with the house and the family’s terrifying experiences,
and the ramblings of a tattooist who discovered these
notebooks after their author’s death.
Readers were also asked to cope with myriad textual
forms and visual materials, a plethora of footnotes, and
typographical antics. The key non-horror influences were
clearly Laurence Sterne and Lewis Carroll, but filtered
through Godardian art cinema and Derrida.
Now Danielewski has raised the ante with a follow-up
which makes House of Leaves seem like child’s play. On the
simplest level, it combines two teenagers’ versions of how
they met, fell in love and journeyed across America. But
Hailey’s account starts from the opposite end of Only
Revolutions to Sam’s and with the book the other way up;
so to compare them entails rotating it 180 degrees. Rather
sweetly, a note on the jacket resembling guidance on tak-
ing medicine states that ‘the publisher suggests alternating
between Hailey and Sam, reading eight pages at a time’.
But that’s only for starters. The two stories are written
in mannered language (Sam’s begins ‘Haloes! Halesgarth!
Contraband!’, Hailey’s ‘Samsara! Samarra! Grand!’) set
out as free verse. The nature of the pair’s journey is hard
to get a handle on; while it is a road trip that takes in
such cities as Washington DC, New Orleans and St
Louis, it also appears to be a traversal of US history since
the Civil War – and may also be a passage through liter-
ary history, as the early sections puzzlingly unfold in a
pastoral setting teeming with wildlife, perhaps intended
to evoke the world of Ovid or of Renaissance romance.
Even these ploys do not exhaust the novel’s resources
for causing vexation. Alongside the Sam or Hailey stories
on each page are other textual strands in different type-
faces, usually making four altogether. One is a listing of
significant dates, events and quotes: in the margin of
Sam’s story this starts in 1863 and ends with Kennedy’s
assassination in 1963, while the digest that accompanies
Hailey’s tale begins in 1963 and provides dates up to
2063, although clairvoyance is not attempted and the
record of events stops in 2005.
28
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
The second extra strand is a continuation of the other
lover’s account (Sam’s where Hailey is the main narrator,
and vice versa), shifting into smaller print after the
novel’s 180-page midpoint; it’s upside down, naturally,
and normally has its own marginal historical log.
Experimental novelists tend to be surprisingly lenient,
genres or ample amounts of undemanding fun. Tristram
Shandy is partly a sex comedy. Joyce provided a crib sheet
showing Ulysses/Odyssey parallels. Alain Robbe-Grillet’s
The Erasers, the best-known nouveau roman, is a detective
story. Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch, though it proposes shuf-
fling the order in which the chapters are read, is essentially
a realist romp about randy Argentinian expats in Paris.
What’s impressive about Danielewski is that he never
weakens and follows suit: there are obvious ways in
which Only Revolutions could be made simpler and even
enjoyable, yet he never resorts to them. The relationship
between the twin storylines, for instance, could be
intriguing and rewarding, but in practice revolving the
book every eight pages as the publisher suggests soon
comes to seem pointless – there’s rarely any extra light
shed by Hailey’s version of a given incident (fight, sexual
encounter, life-threatening collapse, etc) once you’ve
read Sam’s account.
The juxtaposition of the pair’s tales with historical
events similarly threatens to be interesting, but on the
page becomes another source of frustration. While links
between main and marginal text can sometimes be
glimpsed (Gettysburg, the Great War, the Depression
and Vietnam are all discernible in the travellers’ feverish
accounts), how you’re meant to understand these corre-
spondences is never clear.
The most obvious means to accessibility, of course,
would be to have the teenagers talking like ordinary
teenagers. Sam and Hailey, however, share an arcane,
ultra-literary lingo that seems indebted to Whitman,
Kerouac, Beckett and nonsense verse. For example,
more or less at random (from Sam’s story):
Away and free. I’m not weak. / The weak are not
weak. I outdo all weak. / Even the strong.
GrowGrowling, sure hot. / Spin PitiPasPasPutter Pop! /
I’m leaving The Mountain. / East. I am the East. /
Master of the Wheel. All mine. / From Piston to Rod.
/ Rotoring the decline. / No stopping this prime /
plundering speed. / My StevensDuryea Runabout /
freeing up dust. Freeing all ruts. / I am the ruts. And
rush. / There goes I. There goes. Not I. / Allways.
QED: how easy it would have been just to write ‘I
drive off at speed’!
It’s this refusal to compromise, at every level, that
makes Only Revolutions a triumph: quite possibly the
most opaque, preposterous, boring and infuriating novel
since Finnegans Wake.
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 FICTION
C HRISTOPHER B RAY
LEARNING TO LIVE, AGAIN
S O M ANY WAYS TO B EGIN
★ handwritten, 1966–68’ is one chapter title, ‘Girl’s hair-
By Jon McGregor
(Bloomsbury 352pp £14.99)
JON MCGREGOR, WHOSE first novel was the acclaimed
If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (2002), turns thirty
this year, though you wouldn’t know it from So Many
Ways To Begin. Merely at the level of physical descrip-
tion McGregor seems to know what it feels like not just
to be far older than he is but to have become far older.
The action of So Many Ways To Begin takes place over
several decades; characters age, wither, die. Not even
John Updike – whose adjectival roguishness McGregor
shares – can compete. It took him thirty years and more
to anatomise a similar time-span in the life and death of
Rabbit Angstrom.
Not that McGregor’s hero, David Carter, is anything like
Updike’s. For one thing, he’s rather more uxorious. Even
though his wife Eleanor descends into a catatonic with-
drawal after the birth of their daughter Kate, he resists the
blandishments of other women. In one of the novel’s best
scenes he visits a colleague at home, intent on seducing her.
When it comes down to it, though, David can’t go
through with it: the past exerts too strong a pull on him for
him to throw away what passes muster for his future.
The past in question is a great unknown. Not until he
was in his twenties did David find out that the woman
he called his mother had not in fact given birth to him.
C HRISTOPHER H ART
MARK T CHICKPEA
I MPERIUM : A N OVEL
★ the Tiber, and the lamps in the shops along the Argiletum
By Robert Harris
(Hutchinson 403pp £17.99)
ROBERT HARRIS’S NEW historical-fictional foray delves
into the early career and meteoric rise of Marcus Tullius
Cicero, whose surname derives from the Latin for ‘chick-
pea’, as he entertainingly tells us: an oddity of which Cicero
himself, Mark T Chickpea, was always inordinately proud.
Harris’s fiction has many strengths: it is excitingly plot-
ted, deeply researched, wryly amusing, clear-eyed and
flinty on power and politics. But some readers may long
for more emotional pull, and certainly for more colour
and ambience. Not once in over three hundred pages does
29
He was an abandoned child, and though he accepts that
he was brought up wondrously well in postwar
Coventry, he still wants to know whence he hails.
Earning his living as a museum curator, David is chroni-
cally alert to the symbolism of objects, and the book’s
structuring principle is that of the inventory: ‘Letters,
brush, wooden, c1940’ another. ‘These things,’ as David
says to himself, ‘the way they fall into place. The people
we would be if these things were otherwise.’
But while he is struggling to track his family down,
Eleanor is doing her best to wash her hands of hers. Raised
in peasant-stock Scotland, she has been treated as a traitor
by her parents and brothers ever since she passed her exams
and got a place at university. Over the years, dealings with
her folks have fallen more and more into David’s hands –
though anyone in search of the kind of symmetrical pat-
terning you’d find in the Victorian telling of such a
rhyming story is in for a disappointment. McGregor’s basic
material may be the stuff of a thousand fusty melodramas,
but he makes of it a modern novel – a novel devoid of the
curlicues of coincidence and full of uncertainty and chaos.
Which is to say, you have to work at it a bit. The first
few pages can be stiff going, not because McGregor is
obscure but because he eschews the conventional etiquette
of the novel. Not for him quotation marks to indicate
speech, or new paragraphs for when other people enter
the conversation. Nor are all the sentences conventionally
structured. McGregor’s prose isn’t quite poetical, but there
are times when it nudges at the borders of free verse. Stick
with it, though, and it will stick with you. This is one of
those quiet masterpieces that stay with you longer than
many a fictional firework display.
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Harris tell you how anything might have smelt in Ancient
Rome, although we know from Juvenal et al that there
were some pretty whiffy and interesting odours around in
those days. It is all rather austere, which is a shame, for on
the occasions when Harris does allow himself a little lyri-
cism, he does it rather well: ‘There was a mist rising from
shone yellow and gauzy.’ For preference, though, it is the
dry realities of Cicero’s rise to prominence that really
interest him, and the wavering morality that goes with
such a rise. ‘Power brings a man many luxuries, but a
clean pair of hands is seldom among them.’
The narrator of the story is Cicero’s faithful secretary
Tiro, who could indeed, as he says here, ‘modestly claim
to be the man who invented the ampersand’. Otherwise,
in accordance with the form, he is retiring and practically
invisible throughout. Cicero on the other hand is vividly
and brilliantly delineated, witty, eloquent (of course),
hugely self-regarding and yet somehow utterly likeable.
In essence the triumph of Cicero – through early years
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
 FICTION
of hardship and relentless study and some spectacular court
cases, to the apogee of the Consulship at the age of forty-
two, the youngest permissible age – was the triumph of
merit. For Cicero, unlike most prominent figures of the
Republic, had no family, fortune or military might behind
him. Money, especially, was vital, as the Roman Senate
was literally a millionaires’ club, a million sestertii being
the minimum capital wealth required to belong. But the
problem was cunningly solved. ‘Making it would take too
long, and stealing it would be too risky. Accordingly, soon
after our return from Rhodes, he married it.’
The turning point in Cicero’s career was the court
case In Verrem. Verres was the governor of Sicily, and an
outstandingly corrupt one even by the standards of
Roman provincial governors. His rapacities make you
realise that Italy’s tradition of corruption goes back a lot
further than the Mafia. Today Verres would no doubt be
producing ‘organic’ olive oil under generous EU subsi-
dies, or managing an Italian football team.
S EBASTIAN S HAKESPEARE
CORRUPTION IN THE CONGO
T HE M ISSION S ONG
★ and a Congolese tribeswoman, Salvador makes a perfectly
By John le Carré
(Hodder & Stoughton 352pp £17.99)
JOHN LE CARRÉ is enjoying a remarkable Indian summer.
The Mission Song, his twentieth novel, takes us back to
Africa – not the Kenya of The Constant Gardener, but the
Congo of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, from which this
book takes its epigraph. Bruno Salvador is hired as an
interpreter at a secret conference of Eastern Congolese
tribal warlords who are plotting to overthrow the Kinshasa
government with the backing of Western financiers and
with the connivance of British intelligence. The ostensible
purpose of the coup is to restore democracy to the coun-
try. However, when Salvador eavesdrops on a secret con-
versation, he realises there are more sinister plans afoot.
The syndicate wants to carve up Eastern Congo’s mineral
wealth: gold, oil, diamonds, and coltan. In a Machiavellian
twist, it transpires that the Kinshasa government is in on
the deal. It will turn a blind eye to any coup planned in
return for a piece of the action – ‘the People’s Portion’.
The Mission Song is a complex story of political chi-
canery where everybody is double-crossing everybody
else. If, like me, you don’t know your Mai Mai from your
Banyamulenge, you might get lost in the minutiae of trib-
al politics; but that won’t prevent your enjoyment of the
story, which becomes utterly engrossing. The warlords are
all bad eggs. Their footwear seems to serve as a shorthand
for their moral decrepitude. Sorbonne-educated Haj
30
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
After his devastating defeat of Verres in the courts,
Cicero’s rise was assured. He went on to expose the tortu-
ous complexities of the Catiline conspiracy, and finally to
win the Consulship. The novel ends with Cicero basking
in glory. It’s unclear whether Harris intends to continue the
story in a sequel, though I hope he does. Certainly Cicero’s
end, beheaded on the orders of the ghastly Mark Antony,
his severed head and hands displayed in the Forum, and his
tongue pulled out and stabbed with a hairpin by Mark
Antony’s even ghastlier wife Fulvia, makes an instructive
lesson for those harbouring political ambitions. Yet even in
this earlier, all-conquering phase of his protagonist’s career,
Harris offers us intimations of the spectral ephemerality of
worldly power. Thus the Senate House on a winter’s day:
‘It was forbidden to light a lamp or a brazier inside the
chamber. As the gloom deepened, the cold sharpened and
the white shapes of the senators, motionless in the
November dusk, became like a parliament of ghosts.’
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wears ‘pointed slime-green Italian crocodile shoes’;
Chrétien owns ‘Texan boots embroidered with cowboy
hats’. The action oscillates between the North Sea (where
the secret conference takes place), London and Congo,
which doesn’t feature as much other than the backdrop to
the story. The offspring of an Irish Catholic missionary
conflicted narrator (almost too perfect in fact). He is not
only torn between two countries but between two
women. Married to Penelope, a British tabloid journalist,
at the start of the story he embarks on an affair with a
Congolese nurse.
Characterisation has never been Le Carré’s forte and this
novel suffers from the usual weaknesses, especially with
regard to the female protagonists. Salvador’s intelligence-
handler Maxie, who is meant to be in his late thirties,
seems mothballed from another era in his ‘time-yellowed
Oxford University rowing sweater’. What you admire
most about the book is its intricate storytelling and the
tantalising plot. Few authors handle suspense as deftly as
Le Carré. Throughout there runs a rich vein of moral out-
rage. As Maxie says:
‘Congo’s been bleeding to death for five centuries.
Fucked by the Arab slavers, fucked by their fellow
Africans, fucked by the United Nations, the CIA, the
Christians, the Belgians, the French, the Brits, the
diamond companies, the gold companies, the mineral
companies, half the world’s carpet baggers and the
Rwandans, and waiting to be fucked by the oil com-
panies. Fucked by their own government in Kinshasa.’
Admirers of Le Carré feared he might have nothing to
write about after the end of the Cold War, but in Africa
he has found fertile new territory for his tales of human
corruption and corporate greed.
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 WRITERS
P ETER WASHINGTON
THE TIMES OF MR WOOLF
L EONARD WOOLF
★ would be a vital element in his relationship with Virginia.
By Victoria Glendinning
(Simon & Schuster 530pp £25)
SOCIAL SCIENTISTS HAVE recently identified a distinctive
type of modern male they call the Great Woman’s Partner
or GWP, pronounced Gawp. Gawps are on the increase.
Although they occurred in the past – Mark Antony,
Abelard and Prince Albert spring to mind – their num-
bers are now multiplying fast as women become more
prominent in public life. Perhaps surprisingly, given our
reputation for chauvinism, Britain has produced more
than its fair share of Gawps, the
most celebrated twentieth-century
examples being Pr ince Philip,
Prince Charles and Denis Thatcher.
Not far behind them in celebrity
comes Leonard Woolf.
The crucial thing for a successful
Gawp is that he should be well
matched with his spouse. If you
believe Victor ia Glendinning,
Leonard Woolf satisfied this require-
ment. Of the other successful
Gawps living with the strain of
intense public scrutiny, Denis was
(and Philip is) the firm-jawed hus- Woolf: now and then
band of a strong and stable woman
whose absorbing public career provided an outlet for her
fearsome energies. Besieged by depression and what
amounted to bouts of madness, Virginia Woolf, by con-
trast, had no public role. Instead she focused her enormous
intelligence on her own mental life. Though her writing
was, of course, a public activity of sorts, it was primarily an
extension of that life, a startling dissection of the emotional
and psychological struggles which put pressure on all her
relationships. This only added to the strain on Leonard,
who coped with it magnificently.
Although he toyed with the idea of marriage to a
straightforward English girl, Leonard seems to have been
attracted to neurotic women. Life with Virginia was not
easy (she was not slow to point out what an honour she
was bestowing by accepting him), but it was certainly
stimulating and their union was happy, if sexually unful-
filled. With complementary temperaments, they were
well suited. They were also careful to avoid disputes over
their respective literary territories. Despite attempts at fic-
tion and drama, Leonard wisely admitted his wife’s
supremacy as a novelist while she admired his executive
31
capacities and depended heavily on his emotional support.
Unlike many Englishmen – perhaps because he was
Jewish – Leonard loved everything about women: their
minds and their hearts as well as their bodies. As his sister
shrewdly predicted when she warned him against marry-
ing a stupid woman, enjoyment of ‘the female mind’
Glendinning’s book is meant to be about Leonard, not
about Virginia Woolf ’s husband, but this is a difficult stance
to maintain. Would we remember him if it were not for
her? The last hundred pages of this book, which deal with
his life after her death, suggest not: however interesting for
those involved, the events described make dull reading. No
one would deny that Woolf was a distinguished and inter-
esting man in his own right – and in many ways I prefer his
books to Virginia’s – but was he any more distinguished
and interesting than many whose adequate literary memor-
ial is a half-page obituary in the broadsheets?
That said, Victoria Glendinning
has plenty of material to hand.
Leonard lived to a ripe old age and
kept himself busy. He belonged to
the English middle classes in a
period when they had self-confi-
dence, self-control, unlimited
energy and an Imperial role. Some
ran the Empire, others criticised it.
Leonard did both. He was by turns
colonial administrator, wr iter,
publisher, political organiser.
Always left of centre by sympathy
and intellectual conviction, experi-
ence in the colonies strengthened
his views. The most interesting
part of the biography, perhaps because it is the least well-
known, concerns his time as an official in Ceylon. The
milieu is familiar from Maugham and Orwell, and
Victoria Glendinning brings it to life: cool bungalows in
the hills, shacks crawling with insects in the hot season,
both filled with stunted, inarticulate Englishmen whose
frustration was matched only by their amazing powers of
endurance. Here was existence in the raw, far removed
from the Kensington houses where Woolf grew up.
Intimate contact with the workings of Empire cleared his
mind of cant. It also gave him a huge advantage over his
Bloomsbury friends in that he had knocked about a bit
and seen life: he was not precious.
The contrast with home could hardly have been
greater. In Ceylon privilege meant hardship, responsibil-
ity and dreariness. In England it meant not only comfort
but the most exquisite social and intellectual intercourse
on offer, not least in marriage to a woman who was
already acknowledged as a dominant personality in her
formidably talented circle. Here again there is more than
enough material for the biographer. Leonard’s friends
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
 WRITERS
might sometimes have been frustrated but they were the
opposite of inarticulate. Laborare est orare say the
Benedictines. For the Bloomsburys, to work was to
write. The amount of paper they covered is daunting –
not only novels but letters, diaries, memoirs, autobi-
ographies, plays, poems, pamphlets, theses: you name it,
they wrote it. At the wedding reception for Leonard and
Virginia, Clive Bell took time out to compose a letter
explaining that he loved both of them. Ver y
Bloomsbury. Though an unassuming man in many
respects, Leonard happily produced no fewer than five
volumes of autobiography, which one might consider to
be four and a half more than strictly necessary. Unfair
perhaps, as they make pleasant and instructive reading –
but they do suggest that in his own way Leonard was no
less self-absorbed than his wife and her friends.
Glendinning has a problem, in that most of her mater-
ial is already well known – too well known, some would
say. She sensibly turns this problem into an opportunity
by presenting familiar characters and events from a new
angle. By virtue of his marriage, Leonard Woolf was a
central figure in Bloomsbury, yet he was also on the
sidelines. Glendinning suggests that his Jewishness made
him an outsider in the snobbish Stephen clan, though
this can hardly have mattered much in a clique which
consisted of self-proclaimed outsiders. More to the
point, perhaps, Leonard was not ‘creative’ in the narrow
sense that word has taken on (in part due to Bloomsbury
influence). Like Keynes, he was primarily a man of
affairs. Both were good writers but their medium was
expository prose, whereas the Bloomsbury keynote was
poetic, even musical. The group’s tone was intimate,
private, feminine, its natural home the studio-boudoir
rather than the office, its characteristic station the
escritoire. Where the norm was set by Virginia and
Vanessa, Leonard was bound to be some distance from
the centre, however close his marriage.
I am not a fan of routine biographies which tread
evenly through the years, least of all when they concern
Bloomsbury, but this life of Leonard Woolf is a sound
example of the genre. Victoria Glendinning always
writes concisely and her densely peopled narrative is
pointed and easy to follow. She has an eye for detail.
Those who want to know more about English upper-
middle-class life in the first half of the last century will
enjoy her book, even if they no longer care much for
what Saxon said to Thoby about Vanessa’s description of
Duncan’s relationship with Clive. My own favourite
character is Leonard’s dog, Charles, whom he took to
Ceylon. Arriving by boat in Colombo, Charles immedi-
ately peed on a stranger’s clean white sarong, then vom-
ited in the Palm Court of the Grand Oriental Hotel. As
a comment on foreign travel, this can hardly be bettered.
And he didn’t write a word.
To order this book at £20, see LR Bookshop on page 14
32
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
F RANCIS K ING
The Nation’s Favourite
Only Child
B ETJEMAN
★
By A N Wilson
(Hutchinson 375pp £20)
EVEN IN JOHN Betjeman’s centenary year, journalists still
constantly refer to him as ‘the nation’s teddy bear’. But,
as this lively biography demonstrates, a better descrip-
tion would be ‘the nation’s favourite only child’. Like
many an only child, Betjeman throughout his life craved
to be pampered and petted and, above all, noticed. To
achieve the first two of these objectives he deployed an
irresistibly self-mocking charm. To achieve the third he
cultivated the sort of harmless eccentricity that, even in
his adult years, had him carrying around, as his insepara-
ble companion, a teddy bear called Archie.
Betjeman’s family was prosperous. But unfortunately
they were ‘in trade’ – their money coming partly from
the sale of the ‘Betjemann (sic) Patent Tantalus’,
designed to prevent thirsty domestics from slurping their
employers’ sherry or Scotch. At that period to be in
trade was a social stigma. From his early years, with all
the manipulative skills of an only child, Betjeman was
determined to scrub that stigma off. He triumphantly
succeeded – getting himself accepted, while still up at
Oxford, into a largely upper-class set. It is significant
that, after having half-heartedly courted two aristocratic
women, he eventually married the daughter, Penelope,
of Field-Marshal Lord Chetwode; and that when he
acquired a mistress, she was a member of one of the
most august of English families, the Cavendishes.
Wilson is excellent on the manner in which, for most of
his adult life, Betjeman adroitly moved between bachelor-
hood in a small Clerkenwell house, country life with his
wife in Wantage, and the companionship of his mistress,
whether in her own town house or on their travels togeth-
er. Both women fulfilled the role of nanny. Penelope was
the brisk disciplinarian, telling him to pull up his socks,
stop all the whining, and get on with the task, at which he
was hopeless, of helping her bring up their two children.
Elizabeth was the protector and consoler, determined that
her charge should have everything that he wanted, albeit
in exactly the manner that she herself decided. Betjeman
was certainly happier with Elizabeth than with Penelope.
Before they had become a semi-detached couple, the
Betjemans employed a German maid, who laboured under
the misapprehension that the master’s Christian name was
 WRITERS

‘Shutup’. This was because Penelope so certainly survive.

frequently shouted ‘Shut up!’ at him. Inevitably, one must compare
A N Wilson, as one would expect Wilson’s 360 pages with Hillier’s 1,530
from such a talented novelist, is bril- in three hefty volumes. Every literary
liant at evoking even the marginal editor by now knows that if one com-
characters in his story. But oddly, like missions a 1,000-word review from
Betjeman’s earlier biographer Bevis Hillier, then at least 3,000 are likely to
Hillier, he fails to do this in the case arrive. Either the reader is exasperated
both of Elizabeth and of the son, Paul, by this largesse, even though it offers
to whom his parents would refer (even so many highly entertaining diversions,
in his presence) as ‘It’ and who, not or else (like myself) he is grateful for it.
unnaturally, still retains a g rudge For those not inclined to spend as
against his father. When they write of much time on reading Hillier’s mag-
Elizabeth, Lady in Waiting and close num opus as it would take to reread
fr iend to Pr incess Margaret, both War and Peace, La Cousine Bette,
writers seem to be tiptoeing with the Nostromo and The Scarlet Letter all put
caution of burglars who have broken together, Wilson’s book, both sharper
into Chatsworth. and more succinct, must be the choice.
Even more than Hillier, Wilson But for the Betjeman groupie the
brings out a darkness in Betjeman’s choice must be Hillier.
character, unsuspected by those who ‘I hang on to my faith by my eyelids’ Both biographers admirably convey
encountered the benign, giggling pub- not merely Betjeman’s prowess as a
lic persona at social occasions or on television. At one poet, but also his remarkable achievements as a television
point Wilson comments that ‘The large eyes, as well as presenter and personality, and as a crusader, admittedly
being humorous, were also full of fear,’ and at another, not always successful, for the protection of an architec-
‘His vision of life was as bleak as Larkin’s’ – a poet tural heritage that even today is constantly under threat.
whom Betjeman greatly admired and who returned that To order this book at £16, see LR Bookshop on page 14
admiration. Betjeman constantly turned to religion for
consolation and support; but as he once confessed, ‘I
hang on to faith by my eyelids; a lot of the time I think
it all rot.’
About Betjeman’s sexuality there has always been spec-
ulation. His cries of ‘Gosh! Look at that smashing girl!’
or his boast, rather than guilty confession, that at a party
he had slyly pinched a female bottom, tempted people to
decide that he was putting on an act. Certainly many of
his closest friends were homosexual; he would comment
publicly and loudly on the charms of a waiter, hotel
porter or chorister; and often his highest praise for a
woman was that she looked like a boy. Wilson remarks
that Betjeman did not so much fall in love as have crush-
es. ‘Part of his nature was to yearn.’ To have crushes and
to yearn was, of course, common among public-school
boys when Betjeman was at Marlborough.
Along with Kipling, Betjeman was the most popular
English poet of the last century. To call him a minor
poet is as ludicrous as to call Kipling minor. Certainly, as
Poet Laureate, he was impelled by duty, like the present
occupant of the post, to produce some appalling drivel.
Pr ince Charles was, not sur pr isingly, aghast at
Betjeman’s Investiture Ode, and Penelope showed her-
self to be a shrewd critic when she fell asleep while
reading the extremely blank blank verse of the autobio-
graphical Summoned by Bells. But Wilson is right in
claiming that thirty of the two hundred or so poems will

33
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
 WRITERS
P J K AVANAGH
A PASSION TO ENTERTAIN
IRELAND’S MINSTREL: A LIFE OF TOM MOORE:
POET, PATRIOT AND BYRON’S FRIEND
★ ‘Oh yes, my fr iend Mr
By Linda Kelly
(I B Tauris 261pp £20)
NOTHING IS MORE difficult to convey in a biography
than the personal charm of its subject (should he or she
possess that quality, which Thomas Moore did, in buck-
etfuls), and it is greatly to Linda Kelly’s credit that she
triumphantly does so. Her task is made easier because
nearly everyone he met fell, in some sense, in love with
him, even his opponent in an early duel, and they said
so, even the hardest-headed. He could not go on a sea
voyage without making a lifelong friend of the captain,
and Byron, who adored him, confided to his journal
whilst travelling: ‘He has but one fault – and that one I
daily regret – he is not here.’
Born in 1779 in Dublin, the son of a Catholic grocer,
loving and loved by his mother and father, from the
beginning he climbed like a rocket, which of course
aroused suspicion. A recent American commentator dis-
missed him as ‘an endearing little snob’, and his contem-
porary Leigh Hunt sneered that Moore ‘dearly loved a
lord’. We are dangerously attracted to such neat malice. In
fact Leigh Hunt had attacked Byron after his death – hav-
ing sponged on him while he lived – and Moore had gone
fiercely to his friend’s defence. Hunt still smarted at this (in
Bleak House he became Dickens’s ‘Harold Skimpole’).
The truth was, as Kelly points out, that the only way to
‘make your way’ in that society was to attract the attention
of people of influence. This Moore seemed effortlessly
able to do. Also, it has to be said, Moore offended as many
Tory ‘lords’ as he pleased Whig ones, who were in favour
of Irish Catholic Emancipation, and this, for his whole life,
was Moore’s obsession. What is clear is that he had a pas-
sion to entertain: he was a star amateur actor, and in his
heyday he had the semi-sacred special sort of fame since
attained by Noël Coward or Cole Porter – ‘a dull man’,
said Byron, ‘could live for a week on one of Moore’s bons
mots’. His Irish Melodies – words of his own set to tradi-
tional Irish tunes which he sang himself in fashionable
London drawing rooms – did as much for Catholic
Emancipation, by giving abject Ireland a new sense of
itself, as any other single factor. Here was something
Ireland could do – make music – and it was Irish. These
songs swept the world. Pushkin knew them; ‘The Minstrel
Boy’, ‘The Harp that once through Tara’s Halls’, ‘Oft in
the Stilly Night’ and many others are still sung.
Perhaps none of them, smooth, honey-sweet, melancholy,
34
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
can quite stand alone as poems,
but the music makes them mar-
vellous. Kelly quotes an irritating
exchange reported by Edmund
Gosse between Moore and
Wordsworth, from which Moore
emerges so much the better:
Moore has written a great
deal of ag reeable verse,
although we could hardly
call it poetry, could we, Mr Moore: charm
Moore?’ To which the Bard
of Erin, sparkling with good nature, answered, ‘No
indeed, Mr Wordsworth, of course not!’ without
exhibiting the slightest resentment.
(Byron called Wordsworth ‘a pedlar-praising son of a
bitch’.) Moore knew that his ‘little ponies’, as he called
his Melodies, would outlast all the rest of his astonishingly
varied output. Do they now seem sentimental, and
therefore embarrass us? In that case, we are the poorer.
As for the variety of his work, it does indeed astonish:
an epic poem, Lalla Rookh; an outraged account of the
wrongs of Ireland, Captain Rock; a satire on Protestantism,
Travels of an Irish Gentleman in Search of a Religion (based
on Moore’s knowledge of the early Church Fathers); and
a life of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, leader of the 1798
Rising. The publication of this last was a political risk
likely to damage him seriously, but he took the risk
blithely because that indeed was a lord he loved.
Despite international stardom, he remained poor,
unbusinesslike, and refused to take favours. One of these
favours Samuel Rogers (the Banker Poet) counselled
Moore, who was broke, to accept ‘for his wife and chil-
dren’. Moore replied, ‘More mean things have been done
in this world ... under the shelter of “wife and children”
than under any other pretext.’ (It is impossible not to love
Moore, as Linda Kelly intends that we should, and we do.
Besides, as the biographer of Sheridan, which Moore also
was, she knows the period backwards.)
He had five children with his beloved Bessie, an actress
he met in his Kilkenny amateur acting days. They all
died, some of them well grown. When the last two died
close upon each other, sons in their twenties, it was too
much for Moore. Dumbstruck at last, he who had
entertained so much and so many mentally collapsed,
and lingered on for three years, lovingly tended by
Bessie; he died, mute, in 1852, aged seventy-two.
Nearly 150 years later, the Irish poet James Simmons
ends his fine appreciation ‘For Thomas Moore’: ‘when
courage has wisdom / and strength mends our wrongs /
we will sing unembarrassed / your marvellous songs.’ As
this book shows, concerning Moore there is nothing
whatsoever to be embarrassed about.
To order this book at £16, see LR Bookshop on page 14
 WRITERS
LIMITED SEASON
A DAM S ISMAN ‘DEREK JACOBI’S
MASTERFUL
Missives from PERFORMANCE...
ONE OF THE GREAT
a Master EVENTS OF THE YEAR’
SUNDAY TIMES
LETTERS FROM OXFORD:
HUGH TREVOR-ROPER TO BERNARD BERENSON
★
Edited by Richard Davenport-Hines A VOYAGE ROUND
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson 326pp £20)

WE ARE OFTEN told that the art of letter-writing is

MY FATHER
dead. The erosion of high culture, the contraction of
leisure, the evaporation of an intellectual elite and now ‘JOHN MORTIMER’S
the prevalence of email have combined to render the
activity extinct. If it is true that nobody writes good FUNNY, MOVING,
letters any more, this very entertaining volume reminds
us of what we have lost.
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PLAY’
MAIL ON SUNDAY
It consists of letters written by the young Oxford don
Hugh Trevor-Roper to the elderly connoisseur Bernard
Berenson, from 1947 until Berenson’s death in 1959.
Their correspondence began after Trevor-Roper had
called on Berenson in Italy (the first of a dozen visits),
arriving in a new Bentley purchased from the proceeds
of his recently published bestseller The Last Days of
Hitler. He brought with him an introduction from Alys
Russell, Berenson’s sister-in-law and sister of Trevor-
Roper’s former mentor, the eccentric bookman Logan
Pearsall Smith. ‘He was a wicked old man,’ Trevor-
Roper said of Smith; ‘but I like wicked old men.’
Berenson was another such, an art historian who had
become rich by advising American millionaires which
paintings to buy. The son of a pedlar, a Jewish refugee
from the Russian Pale of Settlement whose family had
settled in Boston in 1875, Berenson had employed his
prodigious intellectual gifts to acquire an international
reputation as an expert on Italian art, which under-
pinned his commercial activities. In 1900 he had settled
at the exquisite villa of I Tatti, near Florence, where he
amassed a magnificent art collection and a superb
library. As the years passed he had come to be regarded
as a sort of sage, a worldly oracle, receiving a succession
of fashionable pilgrims to the Berenson shrine.
Trevor-Roper was a young historian with a restless
intelligence, dismissive of cautious colleagues who feared
to commit themselves to print, and contemptuous of TRANSFERS 14 SEPTEMBER
intellectual laziness. He could be devastatingly critical of
sloppiness in others: of Lawrence Stone, for example, FOLLOWING A SELL-OUT
whose reputation never recovered from Trevor-Roper’s DONMAR SEASON
ferocious assault. Other victims of his gleeful attacks
included Arnold Toynbee and A L Rowse. Trevor-
Roper confessed to Berenson that he ‘secretly’ rather WYNDHAM’S THEATRE CHARING CROSS RD
LONDON WC2

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w w w. a v o y a g e r o u n d m y f a t h e r. c o . u k
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
 WRITERS
enjoyed combat. The publisher
Hamish Hamilton wondered whether
‘one so young and so gifted ought to
spend quite so much time hating peo-
ple’. Trevor-Roper’s provocative ref-
erences to Joseph Goebbels’s Jesuit
education in The Last Days of Hitler
had made him a bête noire to English
Catholics and earned him a lifelong
enemy in Evelyn Waugh. This provo-
cation was deliberate. Trevor-Roper
thought that Catholicism implied an
abdication of intellectual responsibili-
ty; he compared Catholic converts to
those who had abandoned the
attempt to dr ive themselves and
employed a chauffeur instead. He dis-
trusted all systems that subordinated
reason to doctrine, and for this reason
he rejected Communism – though he
was by no means a Cold War warrior. Trevor-Roper: restless intelligence
These letters to Berenson reveal
Trevor-Roper’s ideas in the process of formation: for
example, asking himself why there should have been
such an intellectual flowering in eighteenth-century
Scotland, a subject he pursued in later decades.
Though his academic study focused on sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century history, the success of The Last
Days of Hitler made Trevor-Roper a Hitler expert, the
first person consulted when one of the Führer’s
entourage emerged from hiding to sell his story, or
when a piece of Hitleriana required a foreword. He was
much in demand in Fleet Street, and indeed he had
come to Italy, commissioned by The Observer, to report
on the prospects of the Communist Party, then knock-
ing over dominoes throughout central Europe.
Berenson was eighty-two and Trevor-Roper only
thirty-three when they met, but the two were alike in
many ways: both had read widely; both were deeply
interested in European history and politics; both enjoyed
mixing in high society but were easily bored; and both
were avid conversationalists, with a taste for malicious
gossip. Isaiah Berlin, whom Trevor-Roper afterwards
introduced to I Tatti, described Berenson’s conversation
as sharp and interesting. ‘His views were original and
first-hand, and the ration of thought to words was
uncommonly high, so that one’s own mind was made to
race.’ Berlin (himself no mean
talker) wrote later that in his
exper ience only Paster nak,
Keynes and Freud had matched
visit Literary Review online
Berenson in the life-enhancing
effect of their talk. Trevor- www.literaryreview.co.uk
Roper too was witty and lively
company, though his talents
36
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
were best displayed on paper. ‘Hugh
is a good talker, a fine historian, but
above all a superb letter-wr iter,’
Berenson decided. He had extracted a
promise from his young friend to
write to him regularly, and over the
years that followed Trevor-Roper
obliged with the scintillating letters
that make up this volume. These
were spiced with high-class gossip,
often of a very indiscreet nature, and
written with energetic relish in deli-
cious prose. In particular, Trevor-
Roper had perfected the art of the
sustained metaphor, often prolonged
from sentence to sentence until the
reader gasped at his virtuosity in
stretching it so far. In Trevor-Roper’s
hands, even the minutiae of university
politics could be crafted into a mock-
heroic epic.
The letters have been superbly edit-
ed by Richard Davenport-Hines, who has skilfully
joined them with thread extracted from Berenson’s
replies and diary entries, and correspondence with
mutual acquaintances such as Hamish Hamilton. These
suggest that Berenson had some influence on Trevor-
Roper’s historical writing: in introducing him to the
works of the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt, for
example, or in alerting him to the absurdity of Toynbee’s
‘ocean-stream of so-called history’. Davenport-Hines’s
annotation is exemplary; his introduction is illuminating,
and so elegantly written as to be worthy of its subject.
The book’s publisher, Lord Weidenfeld, is often men-
tioned in these letters and not always in a way that he
might have wished, but he has not attempted to censor
them and deserves credit for his restraint.
One feature of Trevor-Roper’s career is that he failed to
write the books that were expected of him. These letters
refer tantalisingly to many unfulfilled projects: among
them a life of the Elizabethan financier Thomas Sutton, a
work on the mind of Hitler, a study of the Roman
Catholic revival in nineteenth-century England, a biogra-
phy of Oliver Cromwell, and a history (in three volumes)
of the English Revolution. Perhaps these unwritten books
were the price he paid for his many distractions. As
Richard Davenport-Hines suggests, Trevor-Roper will
eventually be remembered as a
historical essayist of the highest
quality, as the author of a classic
of contemporary history, and as
one of the finest letter-writers of
the twentieth century.
To order this book at £16, see LR
Bookshop on page 14
 WRITERS
R OBERT N YE
Name: Seemore.
Crime: Extreme.
C OLLECTED P OEMS 1943–1993
★ The distance of love’s act from its intention;
By Martin Seymour-Smith
(Edited by Peter Davies)
(Greenwich Exchange 168pp £9.95)
MARTIN SEYMOUR-SMITH, who died suddenly in 1998,
was best known as a biographer, controversial critic and
compiler of literary reference books. His biographies of
Robert Graves and Thomas Hardy are amongst the best
on their subjects. His Guide to Modern World Literature
(1973, revised 1985) and Who’s Who in Twentieth Century
Literature (1976), both one-man encyclopedic works,
roused the ire of Auberon Waugh by their sheer effron-
tery but caused Anthony Burgess to liken their author to
Samuel Johnson. Seymour-Smith certainly resembles
Johnson both in the breadth of his interests and the pas-
sionate confidence of his judgements. But there was a
quiet side to his scholarship also, most evident in his
indispensable old-spelling edition of Shakespeare’s
Sonnets, first published in 1963 and still in print.
It might seem paradoxical to insist that all this activity
was secondary to Seymour-Smith’s true vocation, but I
think it was. The man was essentially a poet. Poetry was
at the heart of his life. The publication of his Collected
Poems 1943–1993 confirms this.
The earliest poem here was written when the poet
was still a schoolboy. It begins:
He came to visit me, my mortal messenger:
I saw the sorrow stamped upon his face.
He bade me chide at him, for grief. ‘But sir’
I said, ‘you know your dominating place.’
This poem refers obliquely, I think, to Seymour-Smith’s
early friendship with Robert Graves, as does the later
poem ‘The Punishment’, in which Graves is rather more
critically (though still affectionately) presented. The
relationship was not a simple matter of master and disci-
ple. Graves acknowledged the young Seymour-Smith’s
help in the introduction to his extraordinary ‘grammar
of poetic myth’ The White Goddess (1948), and
employed him to act as tutor to his son on Mallorca.
The older poet treated Seymour-Smith as an equal, his
poetic peer, and from the start they shared a passion not
just for poetry but for myth. It is possible that Graves
learned as much from Seymour-Smith as Seymour-
Smith learned from Graves. The figure of the poet-child
Taliesin, in The White Goddess, has struck more than one
37
observer as owing something to the encounter between
Graves and Seymour-Smith at the point where Graves
was beginning work on his study of poetic inspiration.
But if Seymour-Smith’s earliest poems owe a debt to
Graves, this collection shows how quickly the poet out-
grew such influence. By the time we get to ‘The
Northern Monster’, written in the mid-1950s, the voice
is completely his own, and unlike any other:
I had forgotten, in a mortal heat,
That boundless North, which threatens to defeat
Both love’s reality, and its invention…
Such lines pursue and puzzle out the quintessence of sex-
ual despair. The common speech of a most uncommon
mind, they reach forward to the hard-won simplicities of
the verse in the final ‘Wilderness’ section of the book,
where the poet addresses us directly, or (rather) lets us
overhear his own mind in the process of saying things:
Give me the grace at last to understand
The language of God’s creatures at their end.
There’s such divinity within their lack
As could give me my conversation back.
There seems to me, in this, an eloquence which is at
the opposite extreme from easy speaking. Seymour-
Smith wrote few poems, when set beside his multifari-
ous prose works, but that is because he was content to
wait for the ungainsayable moments when experience
demands poetic utterance. The best of his poems put
me in mind of the fact that Coleridge once wrote one
of his own poems on a piece of his own skin and using
his own blood for ink. If there aren’t so very many
poems by Seymour-Smith (or Coleridge) it is because
that kind of self-consuming seriousness is expensive to
the spirit, and besides a man has only so much skin and
so much blood.
I should add what I am proud to acknowledge: Martin
Seymour-Smith was my friend from my own youth, and
I learned from him more about poetry than I have
learned from any other contemporary. This of course
sharpens my reading of his poems – I cannot help hear-
ing his voice in them. Yet that voice is such a distinctive
one, and so much given to letting truth speak for itself,
that I believe the poems collected in this book will speak
equally well to those who never knew him personally.
In short, here is a book of new poetry which is the real
thing. Too much verse in any age expresses nothing
much save the writer’s ambition to write a poem and be
thought clever. None of Seymour-Smith’s poems is like
that. Always in him there is the clear sense of necessity –
the presence of something that had to be said, and which
could have been said in no other way. Many, no doubt,
will find this unforgivable. As he observes himself, in his
poem ‘The Execution’, in a definition which could stand
as his poetic epitaph: Name: Seemore. Crime: Extreme.
For 20% off, call Greenwich Exchange on 01277 627471
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
 BASTARDS & BARONETS
H UGH M ASSINGBERD
O Father,
Where Art Thou?
R IGHT ROYAL B ASTARDS :
T HE F RUITS OF PASSION
★ The authors are particularly strong on the Stuart bas-
By Peter Beauclerk-Dewar and Roger S Powell
(Burke’s Peerage & Gentry 206pp £19.99)
IN THESE MEALY-MOUTHED, politically correct days, the
word ‘bastard’ packs a more powerful punch than one
might suppose – as I discovered not so long ago during a
kiddies’ chat show on regional television presided over
by a green animatronic Martian (don’t ask). Invited to
explain the euphemisms employed in obituaries, I said
that ‘he did not suffer fools gladly’ translated as ‘he was a
complete bastard’. Shock, horror. The recording was
stopped, and high-level conferences held as to whether
such an ‘emotive’ word could be transmitted.
Similarly, as Peter Beauclerk-Dewar says in his intro-
duction to this entertaining and instructive round-up of
‘right royal bastards’, the title of the book caused shock
waves amid the Royal Archives’ machinery. The security
scanning system at Windsor rejected the authors’ email
attachment of the text ‘because it violates our accept-
able-use policy on profanity’.
Anyway, it is a splendid title for an absorbing story,
and I congratulate Beauclerk-Dewar and his co-author,
Roger S Powell, for having the courage to choose it and
the perseverance to see the project through. I confess
that in an earlier incarnation, when I was editing Burke’s
publications back in the early 1970s, I conceived the
same sort of scheme (and even, as I recall, portentously
announced a prospective volume to be entitled Burke’s
Bastards), but failed to get it off the drawing board.
Today, when nearly half of all children in the country
are born out of wedlock and genealogical reference
books include ‘natural children’ as well as legitimate
‘issue’ as a matter of course, it seems eminently sensible
to examine the subject of royal bastardy in such dispas-
sionate, though sympathetic terms.
The most prolific monarch in siring bastards was King
Henry I (1070–1135), who, as Beauclerk-Dewar
remarks, resorted to ‘outsourcing’ so that he could
marry off his numerous offspring into the leading
European dynasties. Henry had twenty or more royal
bastards, but as Chris Given-Wilson and Alice Curteis
covered the early bastards in The Royal Bastards of
Medieval England 1066-1486 (published in 1984), this
book begins with Viscount Lisle, an illegitimate son of
38
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
Edward IV, of whom a chronicler assured us ‘all other
members down to his feet kept just proportion with the
bulk of his body’.
Altogether some forty-four ‘official’ Royal Bastards over
five centuries are detailed here. Of this total, fifteen were
sired by Charles II, the ‘Merry Monarch’ (by seven moth-
ers); six by his not-so-merry brother, James II; and eleven
by the ‘Sailor King’, William IV (as Duke of Clarence),
ten of them with the actress Mrs Jordan – a liaison popu-
larly described as ‘bathing in the River Jordan’.
tards. Beauclerk-Dewar himself is a descendant (along
with Mrs David Cameron) of the union between
Charles II and the nation’s favourite royal mistress, Nell
Gwyn (‘Come hither you little bastard’, she addressed
her elder son in his father’s presence to remind the King
that a title was required); and Powell has made a special
study of this period. The authors have been able to
identify the genetic Y-chromosome of the Stuart kings
which is unique to the male line. This certainly scotches
the claim that Colonel Robert Sidney was the father of
the Duke of Monmouth rather than Charles II.
The scholarly facts of this reference book are
enlivened by well-sourced fruity anecdotes (such as that
of Nell Gwyn lacing her rival Moll Davies’s sweetmeats
with a purgative before she entered the royal bed),
though these are not rendered any funnier by the lavish
use of exclamation marks. In most cases the authors suc-
ceed in putting some flesh and blood on the characters
delineated (the men tend to have gone into the Army or
the Royal Navy, the women into nunneries) but some-
times one longs to know more. Of Lady Augusta
FitzClarence, fourth daughter of Mrs Jordan by the
Duke of Clarence, it is said that ‘very little seems to be
known’, but I managed to throw some light on this pas-
sionate botanist and needlewoman who was chatelaine
of the House of Dun, Angus, in my book Great Houses
of Scotland (1997).
In addition to the forty-four ‘definite’ Royal Bastards,
another twenty-two allegations, fables and ‘might-have-
beens’ are scrutinised in the final section entitled ‘Royal
Loose Ends’. This, of course, is the most spicy and
enjoyable bit of the book. Although the authors take
pains to avoid vulgar sensationalism, I relished the story
of one of Edward VII’s many mistresses, Cora Pearl, ‘who
liked to be dished up on a silver platter à la nue’. Among
the intriguing questions posed are the possible cousin-
ships of Douglas Erskine Crum, racecourse director at
Ascot, to his boss the Queen, and the Duchess of
Cornwall to her husband, the Prince of Wales (could he
really be ‘her half third cousin once removed’ through
‘Tum-Tum’s’ affair with Mrs Keppel?). Then there is the
pathetic story of Clarence Haddon, who claimed to be
the son of Prince Eddy, Duke of Clarence (George V’s
elder brother), and was sent to prison for his pains.
 BASTARDS & BARONETS
Could the exalted position of the 2nd Viscount Furness
(memorably sketched ‘on his stately progresses from
Boodle’s to Overtons in a black suit and a black hat car-
rying a black walking stick and wearing the blackest of
dark glasses’) within the Sovereign Military Order of
Malta possibly have been due to his being a son of
Edward VIII? And could the actor Tim Seely (who
J OHN M ARTIN R OBINSON
Sir Vavasour
Firebrace
T HE B ARONETS ’ C HAMPION : S IR R ICHARD
B ROUN ’ S C AMPAIGNS FOR THE P RIVILEGES
OF THE B ARONETAGE
★ and with large gold rings on
By Ian Anstruther
(Haggerston Press 141pp £18.95)
MANY OF US have a weakness for biographies of the
more eccentric, fantastic or rackety Victorians. Trevor-
Roper’s hilarious account of Sir Edmund Backhouse is a
great favourite. Ian Anstruther’s biography of Oscar
Browning, that naughty public-school master, is another,
while his account of the Eglinton Tournament in The
Knight and the Umbrella has become a cult book. Now he
has produced a biography of the original of Disraeli’s Sir
Vavasour Firebrace in Sybil: Sir Richard Broun, Victorian
champion of the baronets against the plebeians.
Broun makes an ideal subject. His obsessions were
matched by his pretensions, making him deliciously and
unselfconsciously ridiculous. Having encouraged his
father to reclaim and revive the lapsed family baronetcy,
a landless title, he devoted his life to advancing the
unique privileges of the order to which he belonged,
seeking to differentiate its members from mere knights –
cheese merchants and chandlers. His claims included the
right of baronets to use the prefix ‘The Honourable’,
and for their eldest sons the right to become knights and
wear a collar of SS, dark green court dress, golden spurs,
feathered hats and other appurtenances, including the
addition of a coronet and supporters to their arms, and
the right to attend coronations.
There were precedents for some of these suggestions,
but Broun ran into the implacable opposition of the her-
alds and got nowhere, or as he himself put it: ‘We have
seen the Earl Marshal trample under foot the Petition of a
Body next in hereditary rank, and not second in social
importance, to the PEERAGE of the realm.’ The
extremism and flowery romanticism of his claims and lan-
guage made him into an irresistible figure of fun to
39
played a monarch in the film King Ralph and undoubtedly
bears a remarkable resemblance to the Duke of Windsor)
be another one? They are fascinating mysteries.
The wilder shores of speculation prompted by Captain
James Hewitt’s ‘hypnotic ramblings’ are relegated to a
mercifully brief epilogue.
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contemporaries. He was
lampooned in novels and
ridiculed in Punch and in
magazines like
Athenaeum. The latter noted
The
‘it would rather astonish her
Majesty’s lieges to see 400
gentlemen walking about
London with gold collars of
SS, scarfs, girdles, swords,
gilded spurs, gold chains
their thumbs and white hats
and plumes on their heads’. Brown: bemedalled and beribboned
Sir Richard’s case was also
weakened by other bees in his bonnet, for instance his
belief that steam-powered road transport should be
nationalised. The financial failure of some more grandiose
projects also darkened the prospect. An expensive scheme
for emigration from the Scottish Highlands to Canada,
the British American Association, ended in disaster with
all the would-be settlers abandoned penniless in London.
Sir Richard, as well as making an entertainingly good
story, also illustrates a particular aspect of the national
mood in the 1830s and 1840s. Partly in reaction to the
Great Reform Bill and Whig utilitarianism, there was a
strong Romantic and antiquarian backlash which fuelled
the Gothic Revival and led to a popularisation of
medieval heraldry, resuscitation of medieval peerages,
medieval religion (the Oxford Tractarians) and the
rebuilding of the Houses of Parliament as a dream
Gothic palace. Broun’s claims for the baronetage fall into
this movement and explain some of its cultural and
social background, and motivation.
Though he died in December 1858, having achieved
very little except notoriety, Broun had his posthumous
victories. In 1902, the baronets regained their place at
great state occasions when twenty-two were invited to
Edward VII’s coronation. The Roll of Baronets was
established by the Home Office in 1911, and a neck
badge and ribbon was granted to all baronets in 1929.
This is a delightful book which wears its scholarship
and wide research lightly. It has a nice ironic tone which
is neatly underlined by the fact that Sir Ian Anstruther
himself inherited his own three family baronetcies from
a cousin in 2002.
For a 35% discount, call the Barlavington Estate on 01798 869260
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
 MEMOIRS
C AROLE A NGIER
MOURNING FOR HIS MOTHER
IN THE B LOOD
★ She was in hospital then for a
By Andrew Motion
(Faber & Faber 326pp £16.99)
MOST PEOPLE’S CHILDHOODS shade imperceptibly into
their adult lives, writes Andrew Motion. Not his. That
ended abruptly at the age of seventeen, on the day his
mother had a riding accident from which she never
recovered, and of which she slowly died. In the Blood is
Motion’s elegy for his lost childhood and his lost
mother. It is also the portrait of a whole English world
that thought it was finished (but, judging from my
Cotswold village, isn’t). And last but far from least, it’s
the story of the growth of a writer.
Motion’s home was not a natural one for a writer. His
father sounds like Nancy Mitford’s Uncle Matthew, who,
if he catches a child reading, bellows ‘If you have nothing
to do, go and muck out the stables.’ Richard Motion’s pas-
sions are hunting and the army. He cannot talk to his sons
or touch them. He thinks in tribal prejudices (‘Rolling
Stones? Ought to join the Army’). The only time Andrew
can read poetry without raising Richard’s eyebrows is
when he’s ill: ‘As far as [my father] was concerned, books
and invalids went together like horses and carriages.’
Richard Motion had a hard childhood, and typically,
traditionally, he puts his two sons through the same
paces: boarding school at seven, no displays of emotion,
don’t be wet the main rule. He would like to live the life
of a country gentleman, like his father, but has to work
in the city to support his family. He loves them and they
him, but he is an unhappy man; and as Larkin famously
said, he hands his misery on.
In becoming a poet, Andrew was moving from his
father to his mother, but in truth he was moving away
from both of them. Gilly’s father was a GP instead of a
gent; she is known to read and to like ballet; and when
Andrew gives up hunting for reading and even writing,
she supports him, and takes him to see The Nutcracker.
Most importantly, perhaps, for the mother of a budding
writer, she likes good stories, and is regularly accused of
‘exaggeration’.
But Gilly is as county as Richard. She despises suburbia
and non-U: ‘You must never say “toilet”’ is one of her
most serious orders to her sons. She loves big houses,
posh people, and above all hunting. She weeps when she
has to leave the boys at their school, but it would never
occur to her to dissent. No: what makes Andrew love his
mother is her fragility. She is pretty (he tells us often), and
so thin the light shines through her; and she is constantly,
40
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
mysteriously, weak and ill. In
the year before her accident she
gets glandular fever, twice; long
before that, Andrew learns, she
was very ill after the birth of
his brother, and lost a kidney.
year: ‘a whole year!’, as he
writes, when he was between
two and three. He says no
more; but you cannot help
thinking that Andrew Motion Motion: fear of fear
lost his mother not just once
but twice, and that from the age of two he must always
have feared it would happen again.
This explains a great deal about his main subject, him-
self. He doesn’t attempt to explain; he has decided only to
tell, and to tell from the point of view of the child he was,
not of the man looking back. This he does very well,
capturing with quivering clarity his childish bewilder-
ment, his adolescent self-consciousness and – always – the
isolation in his own imagination of the born writer.
This imagination is strikingly physical and pictorial. He
feels his thoughts like lumps; light comes to him like wax,
like waves, in smashed bits and crashing planks. Often he
feels his brain fogged, or bits of it escaping or sliding off –
which is a bit too reminiscent of what will actually happen
to his poor mother, and I hope a subconscious rather than
conscious choice of image. But, as you would expect from
a poet, some of the best things in the book are also images:
his mother moving her thin shoulders ‘as though she’d
once been a bird, and was remembering her wings’; her
dog on the day of the accident, tied to the table-leg and
lunging madly about, ‘taking our food away from us’.
This is a classic portrait of the artist as wimp: the boy
who can’t join in, whose younger brother is braver, who
does ‘girly’ things with his mother, who watches birds,
and prefers to be alone. But Andrew Motion was more
wimpish than most, as he (bravely) lets us see. He still
climbs into his mother’s bed at ten. He longs to live up
to the expectations of his parents and teachers (‘You’re a
goody-goody,’ another boy hisses); he has an over-
whelming need for approval, so that when a friend’s
father says ‘Well done’, he tells us, ‘[I] want to move in
and stay for the rest of my life.’ His title asks what is in
his blood – hunting, as his father hopes, or writing, as
he hopes himself? The answer is writing; but even more,
it’s fear. Fear of disapproval, fear of loss, fear of fear. And
that must surely come from the long year without his
mother; and the terrible confirmation, fifteen years later,
that her absence was definitive. She made him a writer –
her storytelling, her (half)culture, but most of all her
loss. All of Andrew Motion’s writing is a form of
mourning for his mother, and this book shows us why.
To order this book at £13.59, see LR Bookshop on page 14
 MEMOIRS
B RENDAN WALSH
THE SEARCH FOR GRACE
S EMINARY B OY
★ by his parish priest. There is amongst the ‘profs’ one
By John Cornwell
(Fourth Estate 339pp £15.99)
THE MEMOIR OF a Catholic childhood, with its familiar
mix of mumbo-jumbo, deprivation, brutality and idio-
syncratic sexual mores, is one of literature’s most over-
crowded suburbs. I have as much of a weakness for the
bells and the smells – the stockings and suspenders of
spiritual desire – as the next man. But the interesting
thing about Catholicism, beautifully evoked in this rest-
less book, is not the pious paraphernalia but the stubborn
persistence of its hold on the human imagination.
John Cornwell was brought up in Barkingside in the far
east of the East End, the third of five children. His family
belonged to the half-deserving poor. Tea was bread and
marge on a kitchen table covered with newspaper. The
children cleaned their teeth using soot from the chimney.
John and his two brothers shared a bedroom with a silent
Irish lodger, their sleep often disturbed by the sound of
Mum and Dad throwing crockery at each other in the
kitchen downstairs. John was violent and troubled, and at
the age of eleven he was temporarily ‘put away’ for three
months in a special school for disturbed children. On his
return his mother persuaded him to respond to Father
Cooney’s request for new altar servers. To his astonish-
ment John found himself enthralled by the intricate
palaver of the liturgy; his wildness was soothed by the
rhythm and drama and order of the Mass. At thirteen,
after a brief interview with the bishop, he was sent to
cold and bleak Cotton College in Staffordshire, a ‘junior
seminary’ (a sort of prep school for priests) where for five
years he studied Latin and Greek, lost his cockney accent,
and wrestled with the demons of concupiscence.
The dominant tone in modern religious education is
soothing, reassuring; we are encouraged to follow our
instincts, to be ourselves, to seek ‘wholeness’. Young
Cornwell’s confessors took a crusty approach to the
search for personal fulfilment. ‘Practise avoidance of
pleasurable tastes and sights and sounds to build up your
spiritual stamina,’ he is advised. ‘In this way, you will
become an athlete in purity.’ The culture at Cotton is
one of mistrust for the ‘mush’ of feelings. The search for
holiness is an uphill struggle, it goes against the grain, it
demands self-denial: Cotton is a boot camp for the soul.
As a young boy, Cornwell had suffered abuse in a pub-
lic lavatory in South Kensington at the hands of a
stranger in a well-cut tweed suit. Nothing of the kind
happens to him at Cotton. The sexual charge seems
41
rather muted, by the usual, fabulously overheated stan-
dards of single-sex boarding schools. Of course, there
are crushes and special friendships and examples of
‘inappropriate’ behaviour. A boy tweaks John’s nose and
tells him, ‘You’re an absolute poppet.’ The same boy tells
him of his repeated rape before he came to the school
cartoonish predatory priest who smells of aftershave and
exotic cigarettes and displays ‘swarthy Latin features’. He
suggests to Cornwell one evening that he examine his
penis, an invitation that the author declines.
The other priests in Cornwell’s story are a mixture of
the admirable, the strange and the lost: devoted parish
clergy and teachers, some tortured idealists, and one or
two bullies and nutters. And that tends to be the way it is
with Catholic priests. The crotchety but selfless Father
Armishaw, with his motorbike and leather jacket, becomes
something of a father figure to Cornwell. What Armishaw
lacks in emotional range he makes up for in dogged perse-
verance in his faith. Catholic priests have taken a ferocious,
and sometimes well-deserved, hammering in recent years.
Cornwell neither glamorises nor patronises them.
In his final year, he is made school captain, and only a
hot-headed lapse in discipline prevents him from heading
straight off to the English College in Rome on the com-
pletion of his studies. Instead, he moves to the senior
seminary in nearby Oscott, but in his second year there
he decides to leave. His Cotton education has been good
enough to get him into Oxford, where he soon drifts
away from the practice of his religion. Cotton then gets
into financial difficulties and closes in 1987. When
Cornwell returns, after finding his way back to the
Catholic Church again after an interval of twenty years,
the refectory and classrooms have been looted and van-
dalised and the gardens are overrun with weeds.
John Cornwell’s previous book was The Pope in Winter,
in which he described John Paul II’s failing powers with
cruel brio, and took the standard liberal Catholic line that
power and control in the Church have been over-
centralised, doctrinal inventiveness suffocated, women
patronised, and bishops infantilised. Before that, he had
infuriated traditional Catholics with a book fiercely criti-
cal of Pius XII, provocatively entitled Hitler’s Pope. So one
might expect Cornwell to pile in with a crushing exposé
of the wickedness of the Cotton regime. In fact, this is a
subtle and balanced account of seminary life in the 1950s,
recorded with neither bitterness nor sentimentality. The
register sometimes wobbles between the innocent wonder
of the teenager and the wry reminiscence of the old boy,
and he is untrammelled by the inhibiting effect of diaries
or documentary records. Contemporaries will no doubt
be quick to correct his memory on several points. But
Seminary Boy is written with great verve, compassion and
a reluctance to judge.
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LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
 MEMOIRS
W ILLIAM P ALMER
A LOST WORLD
T HE L IFE AND T IMES OF THE
T HUNDERBOLT K ID
★ books, whose characters
By Bill Bryson
(Doubleday 309pp £18.99)
WHAT CAN YOU say about a new Bill Bryson book?
Whether writing about the English language in Mother
Tongue or about popular science in the self-explanatory
A Short History of Nearly Everything, or explaining the
foibles of the English in his adopted land, his style is
always witty and sometimes hilarious.
He is well up to form in his new book, an autobiogra-
phy of his early years in Des Moines, Iowa. The preface
states apologetically that ‘My kid days were pretty good
ones on the whole. My parents … didn’t chain me in
the cellar. They didn’t call me “It”. I was born a boy
and allowed to stay that way. My mother … sent me to
school once in Capri pants, but otherwise there was lit-
tle trauma in my upbringing.’ This is reassuring after the
recent slew of books by people accusing their helpfully
dead parents and other close relatives of incestuous rape,
alcoholism and mental and physical torture, all of which
now come under the rather prissy term of ‘abuse’.
So, no abuse, but this recital of childhood takes place in
1950s America; a world so normal as to seem almost sur-
real today. Bryson was lucky in a number of ways: among
them that he was born in the most prosperous country in
the world, to intelligent and engagingly eccentric parents
who were both well-respected journalists. Bryson liked to
think for some years that he was actually the Thunderbolt
Kid, sent from Planet Electron and lodged with the
unsuspecting Brysons. His chief super-power was that he
‘killed morons. I still do.’ The Kid lived in a world that
now seems as non-existent as Planet Electron.
Des Moines had three large movie theatres, a huge
department store, supermarkets, diners and all sorts of
individual shops, none of which was (yet) part of a national
chain. Much as England used to be, in fact, before the
high streets of all our towns were sold off and cloned by
the likes of Next and W H Smith. There was not much
resemblance otherwise to the England of the 1950s. The
inhabitants of Des Moines were, for the most part, incredi-
bly well off and overfed. They had enormous cars, stainless
steel kitchens, and TV – and America led the way in TV
as an entertainment form. Some things were held in com-
mon with England: model-making, involving the combi-
nation of several thousand tiny components into sticky,
lop-sided, tiny versions of aircraft or battleships; chemistry
sets for the production of explosions and noxious smells;
42
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
the first intimations of the
disturbing effect of the
opposite sex. Other joys of
Bryson’s boyhood remained
unknown to us: the rather
alarmingly named Erector
Sets, and Dick and Jane
talked and acted like the pod
people out of The Invasion of Bryson: sharpshooter
the Body-Snatchers.
His older sister first informed Bryson about sex when
he was six. He remained confused about the actual
details for some time. At the age of nine he caught his
mother and father together in bed. “Ah, Billy, your
mother is just checking my teeth…”, his father said,
‘not altogether convincingly’.
Beneath the happiness there were, of course, worries for
adults: polio, teenagers, the Bomb, and Communism. As
Bryson says, ‘It was an especially wonderful time to be a
noisy moron’, and he cites the case of one Billy James
Hargis. Hargis was an anti-Communist radio broadcaster
who had ‘flunked out of Ozark Bible College – a rare dis-
tinction, one would suppose’. As with most of his sort,
Hargis’s campaign against Red-inspired sexual immorality
foundered when it was discovered that he had had sex
with several of his followers, male and female. ‘One couple
… blushingly confessed the misdeed to each other on
their wedding night.’
The nearest to sex that Bryson came in his adoles-
cence was when he finally managed to enter the strip-
pers’ tent at the State Fair at the age of sixteen, after a
friend bribed the ticket-seller. Another friend in high
school kept half the city’s youth supplied with beer from
his raids on boxcars and brewery warehouses: he ended
up in reform school and later became an alcoholic.
Not all unbridled fun then, and wider and much more
serious concerns are touched on in this book, among them
the contamination of innocents by H-bomb testing in the
Pacific and horrific racial murders in the Southern states
which went unpunished. But, in the end, the book
describes a paradise; one from which age ejects us. As
Bryson says, ‘this is a book about not very much: about
being small and getting larger slowly’. It evokes wonderfully
the timelessness of childhood and the destruction of the
world in which it was passed. One by one the shops and
places Bryson knew as a child disappeared or changed for
the worse. Even the half-million pictures in the photo
library of the local newspaper, which recorded the whole
history of Des Moines in the twentieth century, were ‘recy-
cled for the silver in the paper … So now not only are the
places mostly gone, but there is no record of them either.’
Well, there is now, in some part at least, in Bill
Bryson’s wonderfully funny and touching book.
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 GENERAL
P AUL J OHNSON
THEY KNOW THEIR PLACE
T HE M IDDLE C LASS : A H ISTORY
★ ‘bourgeois’, insisting on ‘middle-class’, and she was
By Lawrence James
(Little, Brown 690pp £25)
FIFTY YEARS AGO, General Franco used to say to English
visitors: ‘What I want to introduce into Spain is what
you already have, a large middle class. Here we have too
little between the landowners on the one side, and the
peasants and workers on the other. Just you wait! We
will create a Spanish version of your middle class!’ The
half-century has passed. The Spanish middle class has
come into being, though whether it has benefited Spain
in all the ways Franco expected is doubtful. But what, in
the meantime, has happened to the English middle class
he so much admired?
What indeed. The answer is not the prime purpose of
Lawrence James’s book, which has a much wider scope:
to survey the origins of the English middle class in the
mid fourteenth century and to trace its development up
to the present. When I was a boy in the 1930s, all
English constitutional histories had to be told in the
form of a success story, including trials and tribulations,
crises, catastrophes and recoveries, but bringing all to a
triumphant conclusion in the present. That applied to
the story of the middle class no less than to that of soci-
ety as a whole, and Franco’s remarks showed that it
remained the general view in the 1950s. But is it still?
Or has the celebrated English middle class somehow
come off the boil?
James chooses his point of departure, 1350, sensibly,
for the following half-century, the age of Chaucer, did
indeed see the birth of a large, fairly coherent body of
people in the middle of society which can fairly be
called a middle class. The pilgrims described in The
Canterbury Tales cover, in
theory, the whole of society,
but they are essentially
drawn from the middle
ranks. Chaucer himself, the
son of a prosperous vintner,
was middle-class, and –
though he rose to important
administrative positions, was
a knight of the shire in
Parliament, and frequented
courts – seems to have
retained his original outlook
and made it the unifying fac-
tor in his pilgrim characters. Clerks at play
43
James examines the various elements which went to
create the middle ranks of society. There were the
yeomen or freehold farmers (people rarely found on the
Continent but important here), who provided a rural
element to the class. Mrs Thatcher always rebuked her
friends, entourage and ministers for using the term
right. In England the urban origin was only one of sev-
eral sources. Of course, it was the most important in
the long run, trade and manufacturing providing the
core. There were, however, other points of entry. If a
poor boy could get to Oxford or Cambr idge, he
inevitably became middle class, indeed by some reckon-
ings a gentleman. Christopher Marlowe made the point
in a couplet from Edward II, which James quotes:
My name is Baldock, and my gentry
I fetch from Oxford, not from heraldry.
Learning (of a sort) was the high road to middle-class sta-
tus for doctors, lawyers and other professionals. Oxbridge
also supplied the clergy, for the Church was another
channel whereby clever sons of the poor climbed into
the middle class and even, as bishops, into the ruling class
and the r ich. The parson’s freehold tenure of his
benefice, a peculiarity of Protestant England, reinforced
the role of the clergy in the middle class, especially
when, in the seventeenth and (still more) the eighteenth
century, the rise in land values and urbanisation raised
clerical incomes. It is impossible to describe the culture,
morale and values of the English middle class as it came
to maturity (and power) in the nineteenth century with-
out according a vital role to the clergy, and perhaps James
does not give enough space to this aspect.
The clergy also betrayed the first signs of weakness in
the twentieth-century middle class. Numbers of clergy
were still expanding in the closing decades of the nine-
teenth century: James gives a table which shows they
rose from 19,200 in 1861 to 25,200 in 1901. But other
professions expanded much faster – the numbers of
teachers, engineers, dentists and accountants more than
doubled, while the ranks of doctors and lawyers rose
by well over one-third.
Moreover, the levelling-out
of clerical incomes in the
nineteenth centur y by a
redistribution of benefices
was followed in the twenti-
eth century by a calamitous
relative decline in incomes,
especially in the higher cler-
gy. The incomes of bishops
declined, in terms of pur-
chasing power, more rapidly
than those of any other
group in the country.
I suspect that the shrinking
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
 GENERAL
of the economic value of clerical careers, followed
inevitably by the failure to recruit the able and ambi-
tious, has done more damage to the self-confidence and
psychological health of the English middle class than any
other factor. Another important change was brought
about by mass immigration in the last half-century.
James has not enough to say on this point and it is a
serious fault in his book. Immigrants, especially from
Asia, have added significantly to the economic power
and size of the middle class, but they have changed its
nature fundamentally. Indian businessmen now form an
important fraction of the super-rich and it is notable
that three out of four men whose names have been
mentioned as recipients of peerages in the current hon-
ours scandal are of Indian origin. Asians also now form a
large and rapidly increasing proportion of the professional
middle class, and of students in traditional boarding
schools and the more highly rated universities.
The middle class, in so far as it is still meaningful to
use such a term, is now changing faster, especially in
cultural terms, than at any time in its history. James
mentions the Swallows and Amazons stories as a striking
middle-class phenomenon of the second quarter of the
twentieth century. That was the middle class of my
childhood, in all its assumptions, codes, and even
vocabulary. But it is now out of date, painfully so. Also
quite outmoded are much more recent phenomena
mentioned by James, such as the middle-class world of
Tony Hancock at 23 Railway Cuttings, Cheam, or the
orbit of Reginald Perrin, along the axis of Coleridge
Close, Tennyson Avenue and Wordsworth Dr ive.
Equally irrelevant now are the foaming rages against the
middle class of John Osborne or Dennis Potter. The
BBC, presented by James as, in its heyday, a reinforce-
ment of middle-class culture and morality, is now
engaged in a deliberate long-term dumbing-down
operation, promoting demotic speech, moral relativism
and social anarchy (except when it comes to collecting
its licence fee, enforced with all the moral fervour the
parson once brought to collecting his tithes). Perhaps
the biggest single example of the triumph of plebeian
values over middle-class certitudes is the way in which
football has replaced cricket.
James rightly points to The Guardian’s Posy Simmonds
and The Telegraph’s Alex as useful guides to where the
middle class is heading. Alex, the cynical city slicker, is a
reminder that finance, undoubtedly a middle-class activity
par excellence, is now Britain’s biggest industry, both in
turnover and in numbers employed. That suggests that
the class is now more powerful and all-pervasive than
ever. All the same, Lawrence James’s book, readable and
full of fascinating quotations and figures as it is, seems
more a record of a phenomenon that is history than the
story of a living institution with firm roots in a long past.
To order this book at £20, see LR Bookshop on page 14
44
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
F RANCES W ILSON
What Earthlings
Get Up To
T HE C ULTURE OF THE E UROPEANS : F ROM
1800 TO THE P RESENT
★
By Donald Sassoon
(Harper Press 1617pp £30)
MANY YEARS AGO, Auberon Waugh passed on a tip.
‘When I’ve not read the book, I always give it a good
review.’ It happens that what I have read so far of
Donald Sassoon’s The Culture of the Europeans: From
1800 to the Present is very good indeed, but it is
nonetheless fair to predict that, based on Waugh’s rule of
thumb, its reviews will be going through the roof.
I still have five of the sixty-two chapters to go: those
on ‘Audiences and Performers’ 1800–1830, ‘Music,
Composers and Virtuosi’ and ‘The Triumph of the
Opera’ 1830–1880, and ‘Comic Str ips’ and ‘Live
Spectacles’ 1920–1960. It’s not that I didn’t try to finish
the book in time; I beat back the clock to expand the
day and sat up half the night, but there is no easy way
round the 1,617 densely printed pages (although, to be
fair, 70 pages contain the index, 100 the bibliography of
works cited, and 100 are the notes). Reading The
Culture of the Europeans is like having Donald Sassoon
move into your house and occupy every corner. As a
guest he is unashamedly demanding and loquacious at
the same time as being convivial, adaptable, and general-
ly stimulating company. He proved surprisingly relaxing
to have around and, although he let no one else get a
word in, I will be sorry to see him go.
It is impossible to avoid mention of the book’s bulk and
the author’s charm because (a) Sassoon would never get
away with a book this size for a trade publisher if he did
not make himself a good companion, and (b) like
Casaubon’s Key to All Mythologies, the extensiveness of
The Culture of the Europeans is, in many ways, its point.
Donald Sassoon likes playing with size and form (his last
book was an elegant micro-history of the Mona Lisa), and
much of his argument about the saturation of culture is
based on replicating for his readers the experience of
drowning in the constant deluge of other people’s words.
He has divided the book into five parts, each covering
forty years of literature, media, art and music (what peo-
ple have read, seen and heard) between 1800 and now, a
200-year span in which massive cultural changes have
taken place, not least of which is the increase in literacy.
He begins with broadsides and ballads and ends with a
 GENERAL
few brief comments on the World
Wide Web: more on the Internet
revolution is badly needed, but pre-
sumably Sassoon’s exhausted editor
told him that enough was enough.
Vertiginous though his subject might
be, Sassoon makes us feel that he has
only just skimmed the surface. This is
partly the result of his entirely ratio-
nal decision to exclude the impact of
the USA (which, typically, keeps
finding its way back in) and partly
the result of his approach, more news ‘It warms up and images begin to flicker...’
bulletin than Grand Narrative.
Before launching into his compendium of cultures and
presenting the dozens of tables he has compiled in order to
show evidence of everything from the annual earnings of
the nineteenth-century playwright Eugene Scribe to the
number of books in public libraries per thousand inhabi-
tants in selected countries, 1991–94 (UK, 271), Sassoon
discusses the term ‘culture’ itself. This madly undefinable
and utterly ubiquitous word can mean anything from what
grows on a Petri dish to something that you try to get a
little of in Paris. Added to this are ‘blame cultures’ and
‘cultures of dependency’, as well as all those pastimes we
file away under the headings of ‘high’, ‘low’, ‘mass’, and
‘popular’. Sassoon argues throughout with the controver-
sial notion put forward by F R Leavis that ‘high’ culture
makes you a better person while ‘low’ culture makes you a
worse one, but he is interested in culture industries rather
than artefacts – ‘culture as a business, a profession; culture
as a set of relationships’, as he puts it, as opposed to culture
as a set of musical notes, an arrangement of colour on a
canvas or of syntax on a white page.
The story of culture, as it is narrated here, is the
story of production for a market. It is the story of
what the passengers on the London underground
and their counterparts in the rest of Europe and in
the preceding two centuries have been doing to
while away the hours during the course of their life.
This includes the birth of the novel as a popular form
and its increasing popularity in the guise of detective
stories, romances, and science fiction. The subject of
genre-formation provides Sassoon with some of his most
interesting comments.
Sassoon writes as if he were introducing a Martian to
our human ways, describing to him the purpose of that
twelve-inch square box which has lived in the corner of
European living rooms since the 1950s – ‘it warms up
and images begin to flicker, formed by the transmission
of a succession of small tonal elements on a screen’ –
and how many minutes a day earthlings spend staring at
it (in Spain 209, the UK 212, Germany 183). Because of
television, he explains, ‘new power relations emerged in
the household. A more or less spontaneous agreement
45
was reached as to where each mem-
ber should sit.’ Before the days of
the remote control, changing chan-
nels had been the task of the ‘weak-
est and most malleable member of
the family’, whereas it is now the
pr ivilege of the most powerful.
Television appears again and again
as the cultural form that has killed
off other forms, such as the cinema,
the theatre, and reading – from
comic books to tragedy – but other
than to register bafflement as to
why anyone would sign themselves
up on a reality TV show, Sassoon does not waste his
time chastising the Philistines. As with all else, he is fas-
cinated by the whole business of television.
Despite its facts and figures and Sassoon’s urge to say
everything, The Culture of the Europeans is neither an
encyclopedia, a cultural census of the last 200 years, nor
an orthodox history, but instead a collection of self-con-
tained essays which can be dipped into for pleasure and
information alike, much in the style of Roland Barthes’s
Mythologies. Donald Sassoon’s style is conversational,
erudite, readable and well crafted to the very last word,
which is quite something in our present literary culture.
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Unputdownable. Frank Keating
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LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
 GENERAL
J USTIN M AROZZI
A WORLD OF WANDERERS
PATHFINDERS : A G LOBAL H ISTORY
OF E XPLORATION
★ culture such as spread farming into new areas from
By Felipe Fernández-Armesto
(Oxford University Press 428pp £25)
F ELIPE F ERNANDEZ -A RMESTO ’ S absorbing history of
exploration – an ambitious history of humankind, in effect
– begins with a premise many will find curious. On the
very first page he posits an extraterrestrial observer charac-
terising the history of Homo sapiens on earth. ‘The cosmic
observer would surely say that our history was, above all,
experience of increasing diversity,’ he suggests. That is not
at all what my putative ET would deduce. He would
define human history as an unbroken narrative of warfare
and might reasonably conclude that we suffer from an
addiction to bloodshed and conquest. Alternatively, he
might consider the spread of humankind across the planet
as akin to that of a particularly contagious virus. Either
way, diversity wouldn’t come into it.
Fernández-Armesto’s point is important because it
helps shape the central, contentious, theory of his book:
our history can be divided into two phases. First, the
story of divergence – of how human cultures parted and
developed. Second, the much shorter story of conver-
gence, how they got back into contact with each other
through the exploration technology allowed, and
became more alike. This seems to be imposing a slightly
too neat, possibly deterministic, template onto the glori-
ously messy story of our time on the planet; there is the
temptation to believe that the second phase occurred in
response to the first.
Enough of such theoretical disputes. One can dis-
agree with Fernández-Armesto’s grand theory and still
derive much pleasure from his book. There is a vaulting
ambition in the task he sets himself which is instantly
appealing: to craft a narrative which begins in the
impossibly murky world of prehistory some 100,000
years ago (making Herodotus, Father of History, look
positively an arriviste) and guide the reader wisely
through the millennia to the heroic age of exploration,
characterised by men like Richard Burton and Captain
Scott, and beyond is an impressive achievement. Those
with an interest in exploration, amateur and professional
alike, will welcome this addition to the field.
The thing about exploration history, from the reader’s
point of view at least, is that it depends, above all, on
personal stories to unlock its page-turning potential.
And the problem with pausing for any length of time in
the inevitably speculative realm of prehistory, however
46
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
fascinating that realm might be, is that this personal ele-
ment is lacking. For instance, in the first chapter,
Fernández-Armesto declares:
So far, our story of reconvergent route finding has
involved relatively short-haul journeys such as linked
the early farming settlements of the Near East, and
long-range but slow and incremental transmissions of
the few scattered centres where agriculture devel-
oped independently.
His seriousness of purpose is never in doubt, but it can
be difficult to sustain the narrative drive without more
colour than is to be found in these early chapters. From
time to time we yearn for the personal, for more charac-
ters like the Egyptian explorer Harkhuf from the third
millennium BC, who made three expeditions into cen-
tral Africa and returned with ‘incense, ebony, oil, tusks,
arms, and all fine produce’. The boy pharaoh Pepi was
particularly taken with the pygmy Harkhuf brought back
– so much so he urged him to take the utmost care with
his novelty and ‘inspect him ten times a night’.
The story comes into its own with the arrival of trail-
blazing monks like the Buddhist Silk Road explorer Fa
Hsien, who set out from China towards India in 399 and
crossed the Gobi desert, flirted with the notorious Desert
of Death (the Taklamakan) and survived the worst danger,
which was getting lost, ‘lured from the path by demon-
spirits’. Another, Hsüan Tsang, set out in 629 on a sixteen-
year journey ‘not for riches or for worldly profit or fame
but only for the sake of religious truth’. Indeed, religion, as
much as commerce, technology, fame and empire, provided
a huge motivating force for exploration. Long-range travel,
Fernández-Armesto writes, became analogous to the soul’s
journey to perfection. The Pax Mongolica of the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries provided a safe envi-
ronment in which trade and exploration could flourish
together, enabling crossings of the whole of Eurasia from
Europe to China. It even had its medieval equivalents
of Baedeker’s and Lonely Planet guides, the Libro del
pratticatura of the 1340s, which offered Italian traders
such priceless advice as, ‘if the merchant likes to take a
woman with him from Tana, he can do so’.
On to the 1490s, the more familiar era of Columbus
and Cabral (‘discoverer’ of Brazil), which Fernández-
Armesto rightly identifies as a defining period in history,
when, for the first time that we know of, Eurasia and
Africa were linked to the Americas, with profound and
far-reaching consequences for trade and empire.
Columbus, the author argues, had no idées fixes when it
came to navigation, exploration or destination. ‘The
tenacious certainty most historians attribute to him was
a myth he created and his earlier biographers enshrined.
The adamantine Columbus of tradition has to be rebuilt
in mercury and opal.’ Vasco da Gama’s incalculably for-
tuitous journey from Portugal to India via the Cape of
 GENERAL
Good Hope was another decisive chapter in the history
of exploration, ranked in importance alongside
Columbus’s discoveries by none other than Adam
Smith. It was a massive fillip to European economies to
play catch-up with their more advanced counterparts on
the rim of the Indian Ocean.
After an era of exploration dominated by Spain and
Portugal, it was Britain’s turn to send her young men in
glory to their deaths. As Fernández-Armesto quips, ‘For
some explorers, the best career move was death.’ Just
think of the reputations of Captain Cook, Mungo Park,
Livingstone, Scott and Captain Oates if you doubt him.
The closer we come to our own era, the larger seem
to loom the egos. Who got where first and fastest
becomes the ultima Thule of exploration. ‘Disputes over
priority are among the most tiresome distractions in the
history of exploration,’ the author concedes. But lest we
write off the contemporary field of exploration as poorly
A C G RAYLING
I, ANTI-REALIST
T HE H UMAN TOUCH : O UR PART IN THE
C REATION OF A U NIVERSE
★ but because of the freshness of its approach and the fact
By Michael Frayn
(Faber & Faber 505pp £20)
MICHAEL FRAYN HAS solved a problem for me. I am often
asked to recommend a book that will get interested par-
ties well into philosophy, and find myself at a stand
because text-book introductions are typically flat-footed
and simplistic, parcelling everything into over-neat isms,
whereas the best introductions – the classics of philosophy
themselves – are typically not approachable without help.
But here is a book by an author who tackles philosophical
problems by thinking them through for himself intelligently
and lucidly, who writes beautifully, and who conveys a liv-
ing sense of the puzzling character of thought and the
world that lies at the root of
all genuine philosophising.
The result is impressive,
and not because it is, like Dr
Johnson’s dog walking on its
hind legs, the effort of a
gifted amateur who deserves
a pat on the head. Far from
it: Frayn studied philosophy
at Cambridge, and in the www.lifelinespress.co.uk
midst of a busily successful Turning your memoirs into family heirlooms
career as novelist and play- “This is a fantastic idea” - Lutyens and Rubinstein, literary agents can be given of it. Such a
wr ight has continued to
think about and occasionally
47
disguised showmanship, he reminds us that:
Explorers have often been oddballs or eccentrics or
visionaries or romancers or social climbers or social
outcasts or escapees from the restrictive and the rou-
tine, with enough distortion of vision to be able to
reimagine reality. The least and most useful of their
common vices has been overambition. The splash,
the scoop, and the sensation have nearly always been
up there among the objectives, alongside knowledge
and the enrichment of culture.
Pathfinders is a significant contribution to our knowledge
of humankind’s restless quest to explore and exploit
Planet Earth. The title, however, is misleading. This is a
conventionally European, as opposed to global, history of
the field. More needs to be said, too, about the cutting
edge of modern exploration which is an unfortunate
lacuna in a book of this quality.
To order this book at £20, see LR Bookshop on page 14
write philosophy seriously. Indeed some of that serious
philosophy has gone into his novels and plays, usually
(in my view) the best places for serious philosophy any-
way. But this book is a philosophical treatise, and it is
better than many (the temptation to say ‘most’ is over-
whelming) produced by salaried university professionals,
not only because it is far better written and organised,
that it genuinely grapples with its motivating dilemmas.
The salaried professionals will notice, and doubtless has-
ten to say as if it were an accusation, that there is nothing
original in Frayn’s book, either in the problems addressed
or the position adopted in response to them – a position
described in the jargon of current philosophical debate as
‘anti-realist’. But if this is a fault, it is one shared by all
philosophers other than the holy trinity of Plato, Aristotle
and Kant, which places Frayn in excellent company.
Frayn begins by reminding us of the fact – one of those
philosophical truisms we always forget until prompted by
reflection – that we cannot experience or think about
the universe other than through the conduits of percep-
tion and thought, which means that consciousness and its
categories constitute an irre-
ducible perspective on the
universe. The ineliminability
of the mind from reality in
this way means that a fully
accurate account of the uni-
verse must always include
reference to the way it is
perceived or known, which
in turn means that no neutral
view-from-nowhere account
view is now known as ‘anti-
realism’, a thesis not to be
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
 GENERAL
confused with ‘idealism’, which is the metaphysical doc-
trine that mind (or even ‘our minds’) creates the universe
by perceiving or conceiving it.
In support of his adherence to this Kantian or anti-
realist view of mind’s unremovable place at the centre of
things, Frayn meditates his way through aspects of the
philosophy of science, the nature of mathematical objects,
the theory of action, the philosophy of language, and the
nature of the self. These are all cruces of contemporary
philosophical debate, but his lucid (and entertaining) way
of pondering them is anything but academic. En route he
offers some striking insights, for example into the sup-
posed contrast between factual and fictional discourse – a
subject on which he speaks with authority, and a problem
he proposes to resolve by suggesting that factual discourse
derives its semantic character from fictional discourse, not
vice versa. Neither is he afraid to rely on the strength of
our intuitions about such central matters as causation, the
will in intention and choice, and the existence of an ‘I’ at
the core of experience, despite the philosophical doubts
that variously undermine confidence in the existence of
all three.
All philosophy is conversation, in the sense that to
adopt a philosophical view is to make a case for a posi-
tion in an array of positions, each with its difficulties and
its supporting considerations. Frayn thus takes his stand
in a recognised quarter of the field, and is aware of the
standard objections to it.
There is a considerable literature he does not cite,
developing considerations he does not canvass, but this
does not matter: from the viewpoint of his own motiva-
tion in writing the book, he has done more than enough
to show why he is tempted to his position; and from the
viewpoint of the book’s serving as a fine introduction to
philosophy (which I think it wonderfully does), any
competent teacher of the subject can point to the further
literature that takes up and advances the debates in which
Frayn engages.
But it is not as an introduction to philosophy that
Frayn’s book principally recommends itself. Until its pro-
fessionalisation as a subject of formal study, philosophy
belonged to everyone, and those who wrote about it –
consider Bacon and Descartes, Locke and Hume – did so
with a general intelligent readership in view. Indeed any
educated person was expected to have an interest in phi-
losophy and to follow its debates; it is only in the course
of the last century that a revived scholasticism, complete
with a rebarbative and obscurantist technical jargon, has
excluded all but initiates from participating in it. Michael
Frayn’s book is accessible to any interested reader, for
whom it will prove a rich and absorbing foray into some
of the deepest, most interesting and most significant
questions facing human contemplation. I shall vigorously
recommend it to all who enquire.
To order this book at £16, see LR Bookshop on page 14
48
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
J ONATHAN M IRSKY
FROM ANTIOCH TO XIAN
S HADOW OF THE S ILK ROAD
★
By Colin Thubron
(Chatto & Windus 363pp £20)
IN 2003/4 – the year is not mentioned in his book – the
renowned travel writer Colin Thubron made a tough,
7,000-mile, eight-month trip from central China to
Turkey. (The Afghan portion, delayed for a year because of
fighting, is included seamlessly here.) Travelling largely by
bus, rickety taxi and train, with stays in bottom-grade hos-
tels and hotels, he ate revolting food and was occasionally
in danger. The SARS epidemic had driven most tourists
away and he was constantly having his temperature taken
by police doctors; at one point he was warned that in two
weeks he might be dead. I have made the same trip up to
the western borderlands of China by the same means, and
remember with a shudder the transport and the places
to stay.
The Silk Road, these days a tourist industry come-on,
is a term, as Thubron says, that was devised by a nine-
teenth-century German geographer. But such a thing did
once exist, meandering for 6,000 years over different
routes from China as far as the eastern Mediterranean.
Chinese silk appeared in Iron Age Germany. Many hands
carried the silk and no one at either end knew much that
was true about the other. Nor was silk all. Oranges, apri-
cots, roses, peaches, rhubarb and peonies came from
China, which in turn received flax, pomegranates, dates
and olives. But it was mostly silk, shimmer ing,
diaphanous, and resilient as steel when woven – in short,
magical and sexy. The Romans tried for a while to ban it
because it revealed what lay and moved beneath – but
gave up when everyone wanted to wear it.
Thubron is accurate and perceptive on travel details
and atmosphere. He visits a Tibetan Buddhist monastery
in West China where the young monks ‘were innocently
boisterous, thumping and tussling together … Outside,
they were snowballing one another.’ Exactly; that’s what
they do. (‘Snowballing’ is one of Thubron’s unfamiliar –
to me – usages, along with ‘[He] gentled a statuette out
of a cardboard box’ and ‘I was inquisitioned’.)
Throughout the tale of his journey Thubron inserts suc-
cinct bits of history. He is usually, but not always, accurate:
Mao never harangued Red Guards in Tiananmen Square,
and there is no Chinese ‘heartland’, near Xian or any-
where else; nowadays it is recognised that however you
define ‘Chinese’, that culture developed in several or even
many centres. One of the author’s endearing habits is to
go to energetic lengths to find what remains of some
 GENERAL
destroyed, hidden, engulfed or
buried palace, mosque or temple,
even digging with his hands to
find a speck of something once
famous throughout the ancient
world. Without making a meal of
it he lets us know how awful
some places were, how dreadful
(and, literally, painful) some of his
encounters. He visits a nightmare
dentist, who treats him for a
Thubron: perceptive spectacular abscess. The ‘stocky
mechanic with a crew cut’, using
no anaesthetic, ‘drilled and dug and chiselled, first at one
tooth, then at its neighbour … From time to time he
realigned my head left or right by pulling my nose’, and
on and terrifyingly on.
In Tehran he attends an illegal rock concert in a hospital.
An outraged hospital administrator appears wearing a
headscarf. She confronts the bandleader about an image
that was projected on the wall. ‘It was a sperm.’ He insists
it was a tadpole. She replies, ‘It was revolting! It was a
sperm. Swimming across my hospital wall!’ ‘No, no. It was
a tadpole. A young frog. And anyway, it was passed by the
censors. The censors recognised a tadpole.’ In an Iranian
mosque he encounters an impenetrable true believer:
‘Your Bible says Adam and Eve were naked in the gar-
den, and God did not see them at first because they
hid. How can that be? God sees everything … The
Bible says that Jacob wrestled with God, and won.
That is absurd.’ A hundred more literalisms, I could
tell, were banking up in his head. I answered wanly
that the Bible was not the verbatim word of God, like
the Koran, but a record of sacred history. Yet I felt vul-
nerable, as if I were talking across centuries.
There is a lot of police hassling in this book, and on one
occasion Thubron notices that his own hands are trem-
bling, a feeling I remember. But in Kyrgyzstan he loses his
temper. A policeman begins to pocket some of Thubron’s
money. ‘I grab his wrist. It’s like seizing a rolling-pin. I
shout: “They’re mine!” I am suddenly furious … He
crumbles strangely in surprise, the face emollient. His vast
fist releases the money back into mine.’
Colin Thubron travels light: a few clothes, a rucksack,
money hidden in a bottle, ever-moving from place to
place, whatever companions he encounters only tempo-
rary. Near the end of his mighty journey he gazes at his
face in a mirror. ‘I feel like a stray animal. The face in the
mirror belongs to someone else. For a sad instant I mistake
it for my father’s … I see features harsher than mine, or his
… I feel surprised that anyone ever talked to me, belatedly
grateful.’ But plenty of people did talk to him and readers
of the Literary Review, most of whom would never endure
such a trip, will be grateful too that they did.
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49
P HILIP M OULD
THE DARK ART OF FAKERY
I WAS V ERMEER : T HE L EGEND OF THE
F ORGER W HO S WINDLED THE N AZIS
★
By Frank Wynne
(Bloomsbury 276pp £14.99)
ART FORGERS HAVE a tendency to present themselves as
bohemian rebels, heroically cocking a snook at an
immoral art market. Scratch a little deeper, however, and
the reality is rather more mundane. Most of them are
embittered or failed artists who behave no differently
from credit-card fraudsters, except that they use rather
more talent to swindle their victims. I met two in my
time: Eric Hebborn and Tom Keating. They both struck
me as disingenuous types, Hebborn particularly so, a
drunk who was happy to wear the mantle of the artistic
rebel to disguise an absence of principle.
But a fortuitous combination of prodigious talent, lurid
personality and historical context makes the story of Han
van Meegeren rather different. The protagonist is appeal-
ing from the outset: a sensitive youth from a
Netherlandish middle-class background, he was bullied by
his father into abandoning his art in favour of a solid pro-
fession (despite the clandestine support of his mother).
Lacking the formal training of his contemporaries, he
doggedly pursued his calling and at the age of twenty-
four, in 1913, won the ultimate award for a promising
young artist in the city of Delft, the Delft Gold Medal,
with an atmospheric painting of a church interior. He
then launched, or lurched, into a career as a classical artist
in a wider art world that was, to his frustration, enthralled
with radical contemporary movements – the antithesis of
Han’s old-fashioned virtuosity. Han, we are led to believe,
was a suave, romantic artist in both manner and appear-
ance, a bon viveur and libertine. When he ran off with the
wife of a critic who supported him, his career began to
go downhill, and thus he adapted his talents to forgery.
So successful was he at this dark art that, within a few
years, he became a multi-millionaire and one of the
country’s largest property owners. The main national
Dutch museums proudly proclaimed his works as seven-
teenth-century masterpieces. The narrative drama of the
book now mushrooms, as Holland is occupied by
Germany. Han succeeds, indirectly, in duping no less a
figure than Hermann Goering with his Vermeer pastich-
es. The final twist commences after the war is over with
our hero’s arrest, vilification and incarceration in a Dutch
jail: not for faking, but for being party to art sales to the
Nazis. Han is finally obliged to own up to his nefarious
craft to disprove the far more heinous allegation of being
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
 GENERAL
a Dutch Nazi, only to find himself being disbelieved by
an acutely embarrassed Dutch art establishment which
had also fallen victim to his fakery, and in whose collec-
tive interest it was to prove his abilities genuine. He was
therefore forced to prove his capacities to the satisfaction
of the Court by recreating one of his Vermeers under
prison guard. Han van Meegeren the Nazi-sympathising
scoundrel was thus reincarnated into a popular Dutch
hero who duped Hitler’s Germany and, well, cocked a
snook at Holland’s major museum directors.
Something fakers normally lack, even if they possess
the technical know-how to reproduce the style of a
great artist, is the empathy and intellectual skill to dream
up a plausible original composition. Tom Keating, for
example, was shown to have taken sections from various
established works by Samuel Palmer and to have sewn
them together like a patchwork rug. Van Meegeren,
however, sufficiently plumbed the psyche of his subject
to create work that, although artistically flawed, fitted
exactly the art historians’ concept of what the young
Vermeer might have been expected to produce during
his early career while under the influence of Caravaggio.
This was a laudable feat of artistic creativity and scholar-
ship, and is one of the attributes that elevates Van
Meegeren above his criminal brethren.
To this Van Meegeren added some truly clever tricks to
throw the growing science of forgery-detection. For the
supports of his paintings, he hunted out favourably priced
50
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
seventeenth-century old masters in antique shops, scraped
off the image (being sure to remove any remnants lest his
work be subsequently X-rayed), and thus ensured his
stretchers and canvases possessed a flawlessly authentic
appearance and structure; he prepared arcane seventeenth-
century pigments and at great expense created Vermeer’s
favoured lapis lazuli blue, which he then applied with
badger brushes (as opposed to the modern sable brushes);
he invented an ingenious Bakelite-based varnish that did
not react to chemical testing as contemporary varnish and
pigments might; and finally, his master stroke, he invented
a large slim oven and a gentle cooking process that gave
his works precisely the right randomly crackled surface of
seventeenth-century Dutch old masters.
However, looking at the (somewhat inadequately
reproduced) illustrations in the book from a twenty-first-
century perspective, Van Meegeren’s Vermeers appear a
little strange, even downright implausible, and this high-
lights an interesting phenomenon inherent in the history
of fakery. Even a great artistic duper like Van Meegeren
could not rid himself entirely of his contemporary visual
conditioning, and with the knowledge of hindsight his
pictures fail fully to conceal their period of creation. In
his Last Supper (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen,
Rotterdam), and more so in the second version he pro-
duced in jail, there is a more than detectable whiff of the
mid twentieth century in the lurid, clammy flesh tones
and romanticised visage of Christ that pays as much
homage to Hollywood as to the youthful Vermeer. This
phenomenon is true of copying and forgery over the last
two thousand years and can be seen in the Romans’ overly
masculine rendering of Greek statues, or in the abundant
faked-up eighteenth-century portraits of Shakespeare
where the physiognomy of the copyist’s contemporary
culture pierces through; and as Van Meegeren proved, even
the critical acuity of highly respected art historians is simi-
larly suspended by this lack of cultural objectivity which
can become risibly apparent in subsequent generations.
The reader is left with the feeling that the author of this
delightfully absorbing book, journalistic in style and filled
with imaginary dialogue, lacks a certain historical rigour.
Owing to the artist’s international fame, much biography
appeared in the generation after his death in 1947. A work
referred to on a number of occasions is a biography by
Lord Kilbracken published in 1967. I was left wondering
how much of the author’s assumption and characterisation
was based on an already purified essence handed down
from earlier hagiographers, and thus lacking the objective
authority that good biography achieves. Van Meegeren
comes over as unsettlingly fictional, portrayed with all the
colour, content and suspensions of disbelief that would do
a novelist proud; the underlying real-life character, howev-
er, remains evasive: a well-deserved fate, you might say, for
one of the century’s boldest fabricators.
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 GENERAL
VALERIE G ROVE
LADIES ON LONGWAVE
WOMAN ’ S H OUR : F ROM J OYCE G RENFELL
TO S HARON O SBOURNE – C ELEBRATING
S IXTY Y EARS OF WOMEN ’ S L IVES
★ children under seven; Iris Murdoch on her regret at never
(John Murray 391pp £20)
WOMAN’S HOUR AND I were born in the same year,
1946, a vintage babyboom crop. When Woman’s Hour
was twenty-five they had a special edition, and I was
invited on it. When they were thirty, I was back to talk
about being thirty. Now we are sixty and here is a dip-
pable bedside book that is rather like the programme
itself under Jenni Murray’s charge: brisk, unsentimental,
well-informed, produced at speed.
Along with Desert Island Discs, Woman’s Hour is one of
the staples of Radio 4: taken for granted, but unearthing
insights and revelations, reflecting fantastic changes in six
decades. It began when housewives had no choice but
to keep the home fires burning until the master returned
from breadwinning. So it was ‘knit your own doormat’
and ‘how to hang your husband’s suit’. In its seventh
decade it’s more ‘don’t be a doormat’ and ‘how to hang
your husband’. When it asked listeners for their
favourite pop song, the winner was Annie Lennox’s
Sisters Are Doin’ It for Themselves.
Yet more than 40 per cent of the listeners are male (‘I
heard it in the car,’ they say, unwilling to admit to tuning in
at home). Woman’s Hour has thrived on its move to the
mornings. It has a website and a podcast. A previous
Woman’s Hour Book, published in 1981, included recipes for
ice-cream and gingerbread men, and ‘how to look after
wooden furniture’. This one ditches domestic stuff and
concentrates on the interviews, the programme’s backbone.
Jenni Murray grew up with Woman’s Hour, then broadcast
at 2pm immediately after Listen With Mother. Born in 1950,
she was an only child (she thinks women of her mother’s
generation were deterred from having subsequent children
after experiencing NHS hospital births), sitting with her
mother on ‘what was called a pouffe – now with rather a
different connotation!’ Martha Kearney, the hard-working
Newsnight journalist who fronts the Friday programme, con-
tributes an excellent essay on the 1950s; Sue MacGregor
does the same for the 1970s. Jenni Murray relates how the
programmes revealed to her, in 1975, that she could get a
mortgage without the signature of a husband or father; she
ends her essay by agreeing with Jean Rook’s assertion that
women over thirty should never raise their skirts more than
an inch above the knee. (Try telling that to Joan Collins!)
Woman’s Hour used to be genteel, apologising for men-
tioning homosexuality, childbirth or the change of life
51
(not called the menopause until 1948). Yet my impression
is that the first half of the book, pre-1970, throws up a
more eccentric cast of assertive and witty individualists.
These were years with real hurdles – equal pay and
opportunities – still to be overcome: women who had to
fight to make something of their lives spoke out with
acerbic wit and spirit. We get Elisabeth Lutyens’ account
of plugging on to earn her living as a composer, with four
having been a teenager; Edith Summerskill on her
Married Women’s Property Act, which only as recently as
1964 gave a divorced woman the right to the marital
home; and the no-nonsense Mary Stocks’s conversation
with Nancy Astor, in which Lady Astor recalls Churchill’s
telling her: ‘When you entered the House of Commons
I felt as if a woman had entered my bathroom and I’d
nothing to protect myself with except a sponge.’
The latter-day interviewees live in an era when women’s
adventurous exploits are commonplace. A doctor who
treated her own breast cancer while holed up at the South
Pole for nine months. Yet somehow Stella Rimington,
Madeleine Albright, etc lack the oomph of their forebears,
and Sharon Osbourne is, in my view, an unworthy hero-
ine on which to end the book. But Jenni Murray is on
scorching form when she challenges Edwina Currie for
telling about her affair with John Major; she also tells
Monica Lewinsky that some think her a shameless hussy,
that keeping the stained dress was ‘yucky’ and that it was
‘surprising’ to learn that Lewinsky got pregnant by some-
one else, and had an abortion, even while flinging herself
at Bill Clinton. Of Clinton, ‘Aren’t you furious with him?’
she asks. ‘Some days he makes me sick to my stomach,’
replies Lewinsky. And there is that memorable confronta-
tion between Germaine Greer and Julie Burchill:
Julie: In my experience men are desperate to get
married. They want to marry you from the moment
they meet you … I bet lots of them wanted to marry
Germaine as well.
Germaine: No, they never did, this was a problem I
did not have. Most men had more self-preservation
than to think marriage to me was a going concern.
Ah yes: what links all generations of women, immutably, is
the way their personal destiny depends to some degree on
their relationships. In 1958 a schoolteacher broadcast a
confession that she was stuck with her dreary, unambitious
husband after a wartime marriage and she wished she were
single. Today she’d be out the door before you could say
domestic goddess. Germaine, incidentally, was sixty in that
interview (1999), and declared: ‘There is no role for a
woman to play who has reached a certain age. She
becomes socially redundant and the terrible thing is, I’ve
got another forty years to live. Forty years of having lost the
plot is not going to be much fun.’ I’d disagree. Germaine is
far from socially redundant. Just like Woman’s Hour.
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LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
 FICTION
R UTH P ADEL
A WOUNDED WORLD
M ORAL D ISORDER
★ ‘prefer to invade on beautiful
By Margaret Atwood
(Bloomsbury 272pp £15.99)
WHAT MAKES READING Margaret Atwood such fun is
her gift for enjoying herself so thoroughly as she
writes. She makes you share her zest for words, people,
jokes, sharp-edged description and endless inventive-
ness. After the dystopic futurism of Oryx and Crake,
Moral Disorder brings back a heroine familiar from pre-
vious novels. She grows up (like Atwood) in Fifties
Canada, experiences childhood in vivid intensity, gets
put upon, survives. But the form we meet her in is
new. Like Carlos Fuentes’s Crystal Frontier (nine stories
which become one story at the end), Moral Disorder
is a novel presented kaleidoscopically, through eleven
discrete short stories.
The first, ‘Bad News’, set in a dystopic future, affects
all the others. The speaker and her partner Tig wake
up (‘For now, night is over’) in an unspecified country
and time. Tig’s real name is Gilbert. (Atwood’s own
partner is the nature writer Graeme Gibson.) But ‘it’s
impossible’, she says, ‘to explain nicknames to speakers
of foreign languages, not that I have to do this much.’
So why mention foreign languages at all? ‘The leader
of the interim governing council’ has just been killed.
Killed ‘by them’. Is their country infiltrated by ‘speakers
of foreign languages’?
We never know. This is simply the future. Here is an
elderly couple in it, facing the ‘silent not yet’ of old age
(itself a disorientating and foreign country). Their senile
cat used to pad round at night, ‘looking for something
she’d lost, though she didn’t know what it was’. The
speaker pictures her future self likewise ‘wandering the
house in the darkness, howling for what I can’t quite
remember I’ve lost’: a vision of the human condition
which also prowls through the whole of Moral Disorder.
This couple could be living anywhere. Their frailty
parallels that of their country (soon she won’t remember
‘which leader, which interim governing council, which
them’) and the whole planet. ‘The leaders of the leading
countries, as they’re called, aren’t really leading any more,
they are flailing around; you can see it in their eyes,
white-rimmed like the eyes of panic-stricken cattle.’
She knows things have been ‘bad news’ before and the
human race got through. But what does ‘get through’
mean? ‘A bearded leader hoisting his standard’ shouting
‘Attack from the flank! Go for the throat! Get the hell
out of Egypt! That sort of thing?’ Suddenly she and Tig
52
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
(now short for Tigris) are a
provincial couple in the later
Roman Empire, facing disaf-
fected Celtic slaves and bar-
barians about to invade. It’s a
lovely day and barbar ians
days’. But they are still far
away. Maybe collapse won’t
come in their lifetime.
This sense of impending
fall, of refusing to entertain
the possibility of immediate
disaster, sets the stage for the Atwood: zest
following stories. While we
read on through snapshots of the speaker’s life, we
almost forget it – till the end.
Her name, we learn, is Nell. She grows up, like the
heroine of Atwood’s earlier novel Cat’s Eye (and Atwood
herself), with a field-biologist father. Wilderness, a
perennial Atwood theme, is the other image for the
environment in which Moral Disorder sees human lives
lived out. Individual ‘disorders’, the pleasures and trau-
mas of every family, take place in the wilder disorder of
the archetypal forest.
Nell moves in with a married man (Tig), struggles
with his kids, his ex-wife, and a rebarbative pony (fea-
tured in the frontispiece black-and-white photograph).
No knights on chargers for the heroine of Moral
Disorder. This white horse is far from the ideal mount (it
has ‘the calculating look of a carnival con artist’) but
Nell rides it herself. Her parents die: her father remem-
bering a story of failed adventure in arctic wilderness,
her mother blanking Nell’s questions about the father’s
male students, including one from India.
Nell imagines this man, cultivated, beautifully
groomed, appalled by ‘barbarian’ conditions (echoing
the Roman fantasies of ‘Bad News’) in the Canadian
forest. We have met this Indian before, in Cat’s Eye: an
‘alien and apprehensive’ student eating Christmas dinner
with the family. Here again he is nervous and in a
strange place. In the last sentence he and the other stu-
dents ‘vanish among the trees’.
Moral Disorder is vintage Atwood, with familiar
themes, settings and deft suggestions of mythic parallels
to domestic events. But after Oryx and Crake, these
ingredients have been fractalled up into the slippery
pixels of a traditional novel. Despite the wit and
warmth, they paint a dark picture – of ageing in a very
wounded world. We go on with our living, loving, and
riding of white horses, but it’s a wilderness out there;
and getting worse. We’re all in a strange place. In the
dark, in the forest. And at the end of all our stories we
vanish among the trees.
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 FICTION
M ATT T HORNE
DRYING OUT
PAULA S PENCER : A N OVEL
★ found taste. Paula also learns to use the Internet,
By Roddy Doyle
(Jonathan Cape 277pp £16.99)
RODDY DOYLE’S LAST two novels, A Star Called Henry
(1999) and Oh, Play That Thing (2004) were part of an
entertaining, if somewhat ramshackle, sequence entitled
The Last Roundup. For the moment at least, that sequence
is on hold, as Doyle instead returns to an earlier novel,
1996’s highly acclaimed The Woman Who Walked Into
Doors. Written at the height of his fame, after winning the
Booker Prize for Paddy Clarke, Ha Ha Ha (1993) and sev-
eral successful film adaptations of his work, including Alan
Parker’s The Commitments, it was regarded at the time as
the best of his novels. The novel followed the adolescence
and young adulthood of Paula O’Leary, an alcoholic
house-cleaner trying to survive in a Dublin suburb after
her marriage to Charles (Charlo) Spencer, a violent crimi-
nal who impressed her by eating chips out of her knickers
before subjecting her to endless physical abuse.
For this sequel, in which Doyle picks up Paula’s story
nine years later, he has switched from first person to third.
It’s possible that this change may be connected with
Doyle’s controversial attack on James Joyce in 2004. The
Los Angeles Times suggested that Paula’s voice owed some-
thing to Molly Bloom, a comparison that seems justified
but presumably rattled Doyle, an author who has prized
commercial success over linguistic complexity. This time,
any Joycean influence seems deliberately erased from the
book. Doyle retains a very staccato, repetitive style, but
this novel is light on lyricism. There’s also a deliberate
joke about pubs named after Finnegans Wake.
Paula lost a baby when her husband punched her in
the stomach in the first book, but her other three chil-
dren, Leanne, John Paul and Jack, have survived. She still
works as a cleaner, but has managed to give up alcohol.
Her desire for a drink is a constant distraction, and she
seeks emotional solace by talking to her fridge. She hasn’t
had sex in thirteen years and can no longer remember
what it feels like, but admires the backsides of the male
contestants on Big Brother and the films of Sean Penn.
She is employed to clean a park after The White Stripes
have played and this gives her an opportunity to talk to
her Eminem-loving son about music. She watches videos
with her daughter and argues about whether it’d be more
fun to have sex with George Clooney or Brad Pitt. The
only drama in the first half of the book concerns Paula’s
fears that her daughter is also an alcoholic, and John
Paul’s heroin addiction, although he only occasionally
53
enters the action. Much of the narrative concerns Paula’s
reignited interest in music and her decision to buy a CD
player. These sections seem particularly unconvincing,
and the music writing seems more like the observations
of a middle-aged male novelist than his protagonist,
although Doyle is careful to give a context for her new-
prompted by her desire to find out about what her sister
will be going through with her breast cancer.
Much of his novel is fairly aimless. It’s what should
essentially be a twenty-page epilogue extended to nearly
three hundred pages. When Doyle is at his best every
detail seems perfectly chosen, his low-key approach
belying the enormous intelligence at work. But Paula
Spencer feels like a desire to return to characters he clear-
ly feels great affection for without giving them anything
to do, and as a result this novel occasionally loses
momentum. It’s understandable that he would want to
save his heroine from the misery she suffered in the ear-
lier novel, but, by the conclusion, instead of feeling
thrilled that she has found apparent happiness with a
new man there is simply a sense of relief that the litany
of misery has come to an end. In this way, the novel
seems to undo much of the purpose of The Woman Who
Walked Into Doors. Hopefully, Doyle will return to the
fertile narrative opportunities of the Last Roundup series.
To order this book at £13.59, see LR Bookshop on page 14
P HILIP W OMACK
TRYST & JOUST
T HE RUBY IN H ER N AVEL
★
By Barry Unsworth
(Hamish Hamilton 327pp £17.99)
BARRY UNSWORTH’S LAST novel, The Songs of the Kings,
was an enchanting and vivid retelling of the myth of
Iphigenia at Aulis, which, as all good refashionings
should, added new layers of understanding. It suggested
a world seething with conspiracy in which everything
was deceptive. Living flesh was added to the bones of
myth, making something startling and convincing.
The Ruby in Her Navel is set in twelfth-century Sicily
during the Crusades. The treachery and lies at the heart
of this novel are revealed in two powerful recurring
images. One is of a pair of swinging mirrors, held by
two brass Saracen dwarfs, that ‘turn earth and sky and
water into a medley of wheeling forms and fleeting
colours’, inverting the order of earth and heaven. The
other is of the King of Sicily, who sits ‘serene’ on a silver
barge ‘enveloped in light’, whilst below ‘the surface of
the dark water’ are ‘creatures feasting and fighting’.
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
 FICTION
In 1149, the relatively new Kingdom of Sicily, a place
of religious and racial diversity, hovers between the two
most powerful men in the world: Conrad Hohenstaufen
and Manuel Comnenus, Christian rulers of the Western
and Eastern Empires. The King of Sicily’s task is to keep
a delicate balance, not only between the two empires
but within his own kingdom, where mistrust is now
breeding between the Norman and Muslim factions.
Thurstan Beauchamp, our protagonist, dandy, singer
and Purveyor of the King’s Pleasures, seems at first to be a
man of certainties – unquestioning fealty to the King and
Sicily. But he is haunted by the sense that he is unfulfilled:
materially, sexually and spiritually. The son of a landless
Norman knight and a Saxon mother, he was trained for
knighthood, and although disinherited when his father
became a monk, his dearest wish is still to serve the King.
He sees an intimation of his own being when he is sent to
buy some cranes for his master: huddled up in cages,
mourning for their freedom, they are as trapped as he is.
Thurstan is an intelligent man, sensitive to his surround-
ings. He sees reflections of his thoughts in shadows, trees
and water; he is less aware of the potentially dangerous
part he can play in world affairs. Being at the heart of the
vast and complex bureaucracy needed to run the king-
dom, he is in close proximity to Muslims. The King has
surrounded himself with educated Saracens, one of whom
is Thurstan’s immediate superior, but there are Norman
elements who see this as treason; in their eyes Thurstan is
perfectly placed to be an engine of subversive workings.
Sent by the plotters on a secret mission abroad, he
bumps into the Lady Alicia, with whom he had fallen in
love when serving in a noble household as a boy. His
trysts with Alicia become tinged with fantasy; he places
enormous significance on them, turning Alicia into the
ideal woman of chivalric romance. So when he comes
across Nesrin, a savage Asian dancer who wears ‘glittering
pebbles’ in her navel, he finds himself torn between them.
Problematically, Nesrin and the Lady Alicia are simply
symbols of lust and noble love. Perhaps this can be for-
given in a book which is set in the time of courtly
paragons of virtuous passions, but given the depth with
which Thurstan is explored, more rounded women
would have been more thought-provoking.
Thurstan and his world are hauntingly evoked, the last
third especially filled with foreboding. The work quivers
with fluid writing, using a series of connected images
including the ‘ruby’ of the title which becomes a symbol
of Thurstan’s final affirmation of identity.
Unsworth tells us that escape is possible: that the
restraints of ritual, of hieratic, conditioned behaviour, are
breakable; that order and redemption can be teased out
of chaos. The Ruby in Her Navel sometimes feels as if it is
losing its way, but as a whole it is an enthralling portrayal
of a man whose final decision will speak to everyone.
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54
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
A MANDA C RAIG
SECRETS AND SPIES
R ESTLESS
★
By William Boyd
(Bloomsbury 336pp £17.99)
SOMEHOW, I DON’T know how, I stopped reading William
Boyd over the past decade. Was it the unappealing
Armadillo, or the tedious Nat Tate, or the self-indulgent
essays in Bamboo? At any rate, Boyd is back with a new
publisher, a new novel and his old form.
Restless is that rare pleasure, a story that grips you from
the first page and doesn’t let go until the last. Ruth, an
irritable single mother and Oxford graduate who is
wasting her life teaching English as a second language,
has always been told by her own mother, Sally, that
‘One day someone will come and kill me and then
you’ll be sorry.’ This threat turns out to be true. Sally is
really Eva Delectorskaya, a Russian recruited as a spy
just before the Second World War by the suave and
rather sinister Lucas Romer. He tells her that if she
works for him, he will get her an English passport.
Beautiful Eva soon turns out to be a dab hand at dissem-
inating disinformation through the press. Taught to lie,
never to trust, always to have a safe house and to memo-
rise whatever she needs to, she does so well that before
long the secret counter-intelligence unit is sent to
America to try and draw it into the War. Eva and Lucas
become lovers, although Ruth knows he is not her
father. So why is it that now, in 1976, she wants her
daughter to find Lucas and confront him?
Ruth, given her mother’s story in alternate chapters, is
at first disbelieving, then suspicious, before being caught
up in a web of intrigue woven by a woman as clever as
Scheherazade. She has her own problems in the shape of
her small son’s German uncle, a ludicrously funny ex
porno actor who turns up in Oxford, on the run as a
suspected Baader-Meinhof terror ist. Ruth’s seedy
Seventies life is beautifully caught, from her aggressive
feminism to her cheesecloth clothes, but it is of course
her mother’s story which compels. What Boyd attempted
in Brazzaville Beach and The Blue Afternoon is at last
achieved in the portrait of a resourceful, dauntless hero-
ine who could eat those of Sebastian Faulks for breakfast.
Despite not being trained in unarmed combat, Eva kills
her would-be murderer with a sharpened pencil in the
blink of an eye, and doesn’t turn a hair. She never does
those things that most male novelists describe when try-
ing to imagine themselves into a woman’s skin: have
periods, run breast checks, or, most commonly, experi-
ence a monumental orgasm simply by looking at an
 FICTION
engorged male member. For this, let us give thanks.
On the run for the rest of her life, delectable Eva is an
apotheosis of Boyd’s twin themes of identity and betray-
al. Spies and novelists have much in common, not least
in being prepared to betray those who fall short of
expectations, and Eva, unlike previous Boyd heroines, is
convincingly cold-hearted and observant, even in her
passion. The natural heir to Graham Greene, Boyd has
that old-fashioned storytelling zest and style that is
always going to make his books the ideal present for the
men in one’s life. He writes beautifully – his description
of a don’s ‘miniature Manhattan’ of bottles is one of many
perfect, witty images – and is effortlessly better than the
kind of thriller writer cited as unfairly neglected by
Booker Prize committees. So what is it that makes him
fall short of the standard reached by, say, Ian McEwan?
I think it is to do with his characters, which feel as if they
belong in a superior film script, not a novel. They have
very little internal dialogue of the kind that illuminates our
L INDY B URLEIGH
LOVE WINS THE DAY
T HE I NHERITANCE OF L OSS
★ ‘extraordinary hatred’ is ‘a commonplace event’ which
By Kiran Desai
(Hamish Hamilton 324pp £16.99)
LIKE MANY YOUNG novelists of Indian or Afro-Caribbean
origin living in the West, Kiran Desai is preoccupied
with themes such as exile, identity, cultural dislocation
and multiculturalism. Her second novel, The Inheritance of
Loss, which focuses on the way in which politics – global
and local – have an impact on people’s lives, covers all of
the above, but if you had to pick a unifying theme it
would be the more universal one of hatred. She explores
hatred both as an impersonal, historical force wreaking
destruction in ordinary lives, and as an emotion which
corrodes the individual soul.
Desai’s story takes place in the 1980s in the north-
eastern Himalayas, when Nepalese separatists on the
Sino-Indian border are taking up arms against the Indian
ruling minority, terrorising the population and ‘swallow-
ing the young into old hate’. A retired Bengali judge, his
orphaned granddaughter, Sai, and their elderly cook (a
surrogate father to Sai) live in genteel poverty at Choy
Oyu, a grandly decaying estate at the foot of Mount
Kanchenjunga. They are part of an isolated community
of exiles and amiable eccentrics until the wider world,
which appears to be passing them by, rudely intrudes
one afternoon. Sai is idly dreaming of her handsome
Maths tutor, and the browbeaten cook is hurrying to get
the irascible judge his tea on time, when an armed gang
55
own lives, and compensate for this by travelling a good
deal (Restless is set in Par is, Oxford, New York,
Washington, Ottawa and London) and by having a lot of
sex. Characters perceive each other with a minimum of
detail – hair ‘severely parted like a schoolboy’s’ or ‘a
trimmed moustache and a nervous manner that was at
once shy and punctilious’. These are Eva’s observations,
and could be taken as a reflection of her lack of emotional
engagement with everyone but Lucas – but her daughter’s
are just as sparse. Boyd is an immensely ambitious writer,
as well as a successful and entertaining one. His true sub-
ject, as we discover both from the Proust quotation that
prefaces the novel and from the concluding pages, is the
way death comes to us all, inexorably and out of the blue.
However, until he can give his characters more than an
outline for actors to flesh out, he will always be no more
and no less than the consummate entertainer and story-
teller that he was from the start.
To order this book at £14.39, see LR Bookshop on page 14
breaks into their home demanding the judge’s rifles. The
terrorists are young enough to scream nervously at
Mutt, the judge’s beloved cocker spaniel, but old
enough to enjoy the exercise of power over the helpless.
The judge and his family are unharmed, but the attack
underlines their powerlessness and from this point on
determines the course of all their lives.
The innocent love between Sai and her tutor, Gyan
(which is ostensibly at the centre of the novel), seemingly
turns to hatred when he embraces the Nepalese cause.
The real narrative force in the novel, however, derives
from the personal journeys of the judge and the cook.
Judge Jemubhai’s past life unfolds as he confronts the vio-
lence directed against him and his community of a rela-
tively privileged elite in a desperately poor country. The
colonial system educated and elevated him, but left him
with a loathing for all things Indian, including himself and
his now dead wife, whom he used to beat. When the
young Jemubhai returns from Cambridge he powders his
skin white and won’t eat his native food. The gentle cook
is similarly a product of the colonial era, but his difficulties
in life stem simply from having been born poor. All his
hopes for the future are channelled into his son Biju, who
has gone to America to make money. Biju’s experience in
America provides a parallel narrative, and the reality of his
‘shadow life’ in New York as an illegal immigrant worker
is very far from his father’s imaginings of his unskilled son’s
new-found wealth and position.
Kiran Desai confidently juggles a large cast of characters
and she is at her best when she doesn’t let her themes
dominate the narrative. Her affectionate and humorous
treatment of minor characters, like the absurdly
Anglophile sisters Lola and Noni, bumbling, gay Uncle
Potty and the well-meaning Belgian priest Father Booty,
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
 FICTION
who are caught up in the maelstrom of violent politics, is a
welcome counterbalance to her tendency to ruminate on
global economics and international relations. For a novel
FARRUKH D HONDY
LISTEN CAREFULLY, GAANDU
S ACRED G AMES
★ He learns how to murder and how to hide, but finally
By Vikram Chandra
(Faber & Faber 900pp £17.99)
LITERARY AGENTS WILL tell you that the only way to get
a collection of short stories published is to do a deal off
the back of a novel. Faber has solved the conundrum for
Vikram Chandra by offering two books in one. Sacred
Games is not only a novel, it’s a selection of short stories
interposed between the chapters of a novel.
Chandra doesn’t strain himself or the reader by making
any tenuous connections between the stories and the
novel. This intercalation (he calls them ‘Insets’) is obvious-
ly a new literary form. The whole edifice, at over 900
pages, is, however, far from ‘literary’. Unlike many con-
temporary Indian efforts, in fact most of the post-Rushdie
stuff that strains to imitate Günter Grass, James Joyce or
Anaïs Nin, Chandra is refreshingly straightforward. There
is no vanity of expression. He is telling us stories.
The novel does the same for Mumbai as Suketu Mehta’s
non-fiction Maximum City did, if not better. Here is a
story of cops and robbers with Dickensian complications
and labyrinthine plots. The central character is a Sikh
police officer who is dragged into the corrupt nexus of
politicians, rival mafia gangs, false and magical gurus,
informers and the street urchins who act as runners for
the super-Fagins of modern Bombay. He also has to cope
with the petty vanities, tragedies, crimes and hazards of
the seemingly ordinary citizens of this extreme city.
A portrait emerges of Mumbai as unmanageable, dan-
gerous, supremely corrupt, dislocated and conceitedly
separate from the rest of India. There are ‘encounters’ in
which petty gang members are shot by the police who
are paid off by rival gangs. Politicians are the lynchpins
of the endless deals and double-crosses. If Chandra has,
like Dickens, a reforming purpose, it is well concealed.
His prose revels in its familiarity with the nasty truth.
The short stories, the ‘insets’, range far beyond Mumbai
and take us on a tour of the Indian diaspora. We go to
rural India where Aadil, a Muslim landowner’s son and a
fugitive from the city’s ambitions, notices that his rich and
powerful Hindu neighbour is encroaching by small
degrees on his land, shifting the boundaries of his fields by
inches. His father begs him not to protest or complain but
a revolutionary of the ‘Naxal’ Maoism-and-murder
56
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
with such a bleak view of the world, its conclusion is curi-
ously upbeat. Love, it seems, does win the day after all.
To order this book at £13.59, see LR Bookshop on page 14
persuasion turns up and persuades him to stand up for
himself. He soon finds his fields starved of water. The
Hindu landlords have sufficient countryside clout to
divert and block his irrigation canals. His hopeless battle
with these powers drives Aadil into the arms of the
Naxals. He becomes ‘Professor’, one of their leaders.
abandons the revolution when he is sickened by the pun-
ishment meted out to an alleged informer, a mistress of a
cadre whom the police have shot. She is accused of
informing on their boy. She is mutilated, her hands and feet
cut off, then thrown into a pit where she crawls about in
her own filth, but fed and kept alive pour encourager les autres.
Aadil, a fugitive now from the police and from revo-
lutionary revenge, takes up with Bangladeshi illegal
immigrants in Mumbai and begins a life of theft.
A similar story has been told by V S Naipaul in Magic
Seeds, in which the central character follows the same
narrative arc of involvement with Naxalism, the discovery
that corruption has seeped into and underpins the ideal, and
so to flight. (Incidentally, Chandra uses the name Prem
Shankar Jha for one of the villains in this story. This happens
to be the not-so-common name of a prominent Indian
journalist. A small literary vendetta? Was Chandra’s last book
badly reviewed? Does Faber not have libel lawyers?)
In ‘Part II’ of the same inset in Sacred Games we are
told a nostalgic story set in Maryland USA, about a
young girl and the mysterious memories of her dying
grandmother. The two parts of this inset have nothing
to do with each other. All one can conclude is that the
editors at Faber do not wish to offend the considerable
talents of Vikram Chandra and are loath to point out
that his jigsaw doesn’t fit together.
If one can overcome the literary bewilderment caused
by this urge to combine several books in one, we have
in Sacred Games a spankingly readable set of narratives.
The characters are real and convincing and, for once in
a contemporary Indian work, the dialogue is accurate
and lively. It may sound like a minimal compliment, but
after the cloth-eared defects of almost all modern Indian
fiction – some of it commended and prize-winning –
Chandra’s ability to turn idiomatic street Hindi into
English dialogue displays a Kiplingesque skill.
That being said, I wonder whether non-Indian readers
will understand some of the Mumbai street idiom. What
will they make of: ‘Listen, gaandu. Listen carefully. You
sing Rafi because otherwise you’ll never get to pelo her
again. Rafi is your royal return road to her chut.’
Perhaps they will figure it out. But will they ever
know that the last word is pronounced ‘chooth’?
To order this book at £14.39, see LR Bookshop on page 14
 FICTION
L UCY L ETHBRIDGE
SHENANIGANS AT SIXTY
N O ! I D ON ’ T WANT TO J OIN A B OOKCLUB
★ with flashes of touching, intimate pleasure, are there any
By Virginia Ironside
(Penguin/Fig Tree 256pp £12.99)
IT’S WALKING ON eggshells reading Virginia Ironside’s
novel of defiance among the sixty-somethings. Her
heroine Marie doesn’t just hate bookclubs, she also hates
counselling, religion, men in suits, people who live in
the country, and people who go to the theatre.
Not that Marie thinks of herself as a bilious reactionary.
On the contrary, she is at pains to establish her liberal cre-
dentials and her open-minded, ever youthful embrace of
the modern world. ‘A peaceable, Anti-War march, water-
ing-dried-up-plants-in-strange-restaurants, picking-up-
wounded-worms-from-roads-and-placing-them-on-cool-
grassy-banks-kind-of-person’, as she smugly describes
herself. She is keen to read novels about Afghan asylum-
seekers and has a Polish, male cleaner whose life she takes
an interest in. As her friends pop off, she wonders: ‘Who
will one be able to talk to who one can assume has read all
the Russians?’ We never learn if Marie herself has read all
the Russians as she is so busy wondering if she will ever
have sex again. What she approves of is culture worn with
LETTERS
THE YOUNG AMBASSADORS
Sir,
I hope you won’t mind if I point out a slip-up in the
review of Craig Murray’s book, Murder in Samarkand
(LR, August). Ever since he resigned from the Foreign
Office, the national press has called Murray Britain’s
youngest ambassador. It’s not true. Vicky Bowman was
appointed ambassador to Burma in 2002 – the very
same year as Murray was appointed ambassador to
Uzbekistan – and she is almost eight years younger than
Murray. I happen to know, because she is my sister!
Yours faithfully,
Andrew Robinson
London N1
DONNE’S CONNECTIONS
Sir,
It is a pity that none of the reviews of John Donne: The
Reformed Soul (Literary Review, The Guardian, The
Independent) appears to have picked up a mistake made by
John Stubbs regarding Donne’s ancestry (LR, August).
The fact is, John Donne was not a descendant of Sir
57
featherlight superiority. ‘Went with Penny to the Estorick
Collection. We discussed how difficult it was to get red-
currant jelly these days.’ Who is Marie trying to fool?
Presumably herself: the book is written in diary form,
though Marie is not given to real self-reflection. Only in
her relationship with her new grandchild Gene, written
moments that hint at something genuinely truthful.
‘Grumpy old women meet Bridget Jones’ is the publish-
ers’ plug, and it is an apt one. Marie doesn’t feel like a
character at all, being really a kind of composite of atti-
tudes and postures. She herself briskly packages people in
boxes: ‘right-wing bores’ or (if they are working-class and
ageing in the time-honoured fashion) ‘old ducks’. She is,
however, a recognisable modern type, and there are several
namechecks which root her in the chattering London
(Kentish Town actually, though it could just as well be
Clapham or Hammersmith) of today. There are references
to the Wolseley, to Starbucks (‘horrible’), Daisy and Toms,
Beyoncé (never heard of her, of course) and Green Baby.
Virginia Ironside writes with pacy verve. The novel
cracks along, fuelled by cosy outrage and a rather
laboured sense of its own daring. But in the end, readers’
enjoyment of the novel will depend entirely, in art as in
life, on what they make of Marie herself. Some will find
her opinions tiresome and her life unutterably melan-
choly; others will hail her as a spirited contemporary
riposte to age and mortality.
To order this book at £10.39, see LR Bookshop on page 14
Thomas More. He was a descendant of Sir Thomas More’s
sister Elizabeth. Sir Thomas More was Donne’s great-great-
uncle. The line goes: Elizabeth More (Sir Thomas’s sister)
married John Rastell. Their daughter Joan Rastell married
John Heywood. Their daughter Elizabeth Heywood
married (first husband) John Donne (the Ironmonger).
They were the parents of John Donne the poet.
Yours faithfully,
Martin Wood
Melton Mowbray
CONSIDER THE LILIES
Sir,
This is probably nit-picking, but please inform Brenda
Maddox, in her review of Words of Love by Pamela
Norris (LR, June), that Lily Bart is not a character in To
the Lighthouse, but is the main character of House of
Mirth, by Edith Wharton.
Yours faithfully,
Jan Goldsmith
Librarian for US Depository and English and American
Literature, UCLA, California
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006

T HE S UMMER S NOW
★ and the ever increasing body count
By Rebecca Pawel
(Soho Crime 320pp £14.99)
SO many new crime novels appear
every month that my reading consists
almost entirely of review copies, but
I’m buying Rebecca Pawel’s previous
publications because this series is a
real find. The Summer Snow is set in
1945, when the Spanish police
detective Lieutenant Tejeda is sum-
moned to his family home in
Granada to investigate the death of
his r ich aunt. The tr iumphant
Falangists are trying to return to nor-
mality after the civil war while
‘Reds’ are still the bogeymen,
although so many are dead or in
prison. Tejeda finds ruin, hunger and
oppression in the streets, and in the
ancestral home mutual disapproval
and suspicion. A clever plot keeps up
interest and tension, but it is the fully
imagined characters, vivid back-
ground and clear, direct writing that
make this book stand out and bring
history to illuminating life.
T HE M AYOR OF
L EXINGTON AVENUE
★ ★
By James Sheehan
(Bantam Press 432pp £14.99)
T HIS courtroom thriller is a good
read, though a shocking and deeply
depressing one; set in small-town
Florida, its purpose is to expose mis-
carriages of justice and the perversion
of the American legal system. Venal
prosecutors and dishonest police cyni-
cally use a ‘retarded’ man to advance
their own careers. He is wrongfully
convicted and sentenced to death. A
crusading lawyer takes on the might
of entrenched corruption and exces-
sive influence, but it’s a David and
Goliath fight. Like Richard North
Patterson’s Conviction, a novel with a
very similar theme, Sheehan’s book is
a powerful polemic against the
American legal system and above all
against the death penalty.
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
CRIME
J ESSICA M ANN
T HE TORSO
★ and the story genuinely exciting.
By Helene Tursten
(Soho Crime 360pp £15.99)
TURSTEN has been called the Swedish
PD James, and this portrait of her
society’s dark underside is almost
enough to make one wonder whether
being a police inspector in the Violent
Crimes unit is (to quote a James title)
‘an unsuitable job for a woman’. Irene
Huss investigates butchery too horri-
ble to describe here, topping even
some of the American path-lab novels,
and I did doubt the realism of any
police officer, male or female, setting
off unprotected to investigate a crimi-
nal with such propensities. However
this multitasking wife, mother, cop,
and judo expert sorts out every prob-
lem that comes her way, from teenage
daughters, an old dog and a new
puppy, an overworked husband, an
alcoholic partner, and the witnesses,
victims and perpetrators themselves.
And she gets her man.
G RAVE D OUBTS
By Elizabeth Corley
(Allison & Busby 288pp £10.99)
A psychopath is on the loose and a
woman police sergeant is stalked and
threatened, not for the first time. She
does not tell her colleagues what’s
happening, rejects help and hides out
in an isolated house in Devon until a
predictably melodramatic finale. But
the story is much more unusual and
intelligent than its plot summary.
Sergeant Louise Nightingale is a fully
rounded and interesting heroine who,
I hope, will appear in many more
books, even if once or twice her
hyper-courage and self-reliance seem
more foolish than admirable and the
obsessive male inspector more
admirable than sensible. There are
elements of the Gothic here, and of
the girl meets/loses/finds boy
58
romance, but both those elements
are described with great subtlety. The
detection element is cleverly done
N EAT VODKA
★
By Anna Blundy
(Time Warner 288pp £10.99)
HARD drinking, effing and blinding
woman reporter called Faith Zanetti
retur ns to Moscow, where, aged
nineteen, she used to live with her
Russian husband. Many years later
she has managed to put out of her
mind both her ex and the couple
she found hacked to death in the
next door flat. Memories flood back
when on day one in her new post-
ing she is arrested and charged with
their murder. Obviously she has to
find out who did it. In many ways
this is a funny, clever thriller, and it
has an original take on a country
the author knows intimately and
evidently loves. But fictional drunks
are no better company than real
ones, and Zanetti spends too much
of this book swallowing or sleeping
off the vodka. Best read with a
drink of one’s own.
H IT PARADE
★
By Lawrence Block
(Orion 304pp £16.99)
AN assassin’s work is never done; a
year in the life of a professional hit-
man shows that his job is as routine
as any other wage slave’s. Keller has
to follow his targets around baseball
games, basketball, golf in Arizona –
what a hardship! One assignment
even allows him to indulge his own
passion for stamp collecting. Keller’s
agent, Dot, fixes up the contracts
and takes her cut after Keller has
‘taken care of business’. As he neat-
ly eliminates such targets as the
jockey in a fixed hor se race, a
Cuban exile, a baseball player and a
fellow stamp collector, even the

reader begins to live in a world
where right and wrong have turned
upside down. For Keller’s profes-
sional ethics are demanding: he
wouldn’t let a client down and we
would be shocked if he did. For the
duration at least, we are on killer
Keller’s side. A dry, wry, easy read
which provokes difficult thoughts.
★
AND DON’T MISS:
T HE R EDBREAST
By Jo Nesbo
(Harvill Secker 522pp £11.99)
ANOTHER melancholy Scandinavian
police inspector who dr inks too
much, disobeys his boss and lives
alone. The setup is becoming a
cliché but the plot and background
(the Second World War, Norwegian
neo-fascism and the mechanics of
memory) are original. Unfamiliar
names, rapid shifts of period and
viewpoint demand concentration,
but it’s worth the effort.
CRIME
T HE T RUDEAU V ECTOR
By Juris Jurjevics
(No Exit Press 416pp £18.99)
SCIENTISTS race against time to iden-
tify a deadly organism after workers at
a research centre in the Arctic are
found dead; simultaneously the
Russians discover that the whole crew
of a nuclear submarine has perished.
A genuinely interesting and exciting
thriller with a fascinating setting.
U NDER O RDERS
By Dick Francis
(Michael Joseph 352pp £18.99)
THE old master back on form in a
character istic racecourse thr iller,
with the welcome retur n of ex-
champion jockey Sid Halley, now a
private eye who has the usual Francis
qualities of courage and insight plus a
private line to the great and good.
The plot is based on an up-to-the-
minute theme: the many criminal
uses or misuses of online betting. All
highly instructive.
59
T HE F OUR C OURTS
M URDER
By Andrew Nugent
(Headline 256pp £19.99)
A judge is found murdered in the
Dublin High Court in this first novel
by an ex-lawyer turned Benedictine
monk. The plot includes stolen
works of art, unacknowledged ille-
gitimate children and a trot through
rural Ireland. Easy reading and you
can almost hear the brogue.
M EDICUS AND THE
D ISAPPEARING DANCING
G IRLS
By R S Downie
(Michael Joseph 480pp £12.99)
A N enjoyable fir st novel set in
Roman Br itain and featur ing a
doctor/detective, various corrupt or
foolish legionaries and some native
slave girls. More description than
action but the discursions are inter-
esting, and it is a good scene-setter
for the promised series.
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
 Literary Review Classifieds
BOOKS & PUBLISHING
SUMMER 1945...
AUTHOR’S SOS...
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LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
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ANDALUCIA
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LITERARY REVIEW September 2006

 N IGHT & DAY G RAND P OETRY P RIZE
T HIS MONTH ’ S POEMS were on R EPORT BY T OM F LEMING
the subject of ‘reflections’. Alison
Prince wins the first prize of £350; D A Prince’s
‘Through the Looking Glass’ wins its author £150, and
all other poets printed win £10.
It’s surprising how many entrants obey two of the three month, therefore, entrants are invited to write their
main rules of this competition - rhyming and making
sense - without respecting the third, that the poem must
scan. Free verse is wonderful, and I myself have been
guilty in the past of writing the odd piece of formless
FIRST PRIZE
ON REFLECTION by Alison Prince
No, it’s ridiculous. She holds the dress
on its plastic hanger close to her, stares
down at its wanton, flowered silkiness.
I couldn’t. It’s not me. Her mother wears
outrageous things and gets away with it –
or used to. Don’t be stupid. Put it back.
She turns away. Probably wouldn’t fit
in any case. She passes rack on rack
of duller clothes – then in a sudden glass
glimpses a gloomy woman who is so
completely undistinguished, she would pass
unnoticed anywhere. I didn’t know
I looked like that. The moment is a shock,
a stranger’s neutral, all-revealing view.
In the shared changing room, she slips the frock
over her head and smoothes it down. ‘Suits you,’
the sales girl says. The mirrored wall reveals
a new, delighted self. The flowered dress swings,
the silken blossoms swirl. I’ll need high heels,
maybe a necklace. Strange excitement brings
a flush to her pale face. My mother said
I was the well-built sort. I grew to be
her useful, bulky shadow. But she’s dead.
And this dress, on reflection, is just – me.
SECOND PRIZE
THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
by D A Prince
What would it feel like, sliding through the glass
like Alice in the mirror’s hazy eyes?
The idlest of reflections let her pass
to find a room identical in size,
and very like the other, more or less,
except for that perplexing game of chess.
That moment when she met herself, so close
one mouth swallowed the other, when her chin
dissolved into itself, and when her nose
twitched at the absorption of its twin –
did she consider, just once, holding back
and staying on the known side of the track?
62
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
garbage, and even submitting it to
reputable magazines, but you
cannot win the extraordinarily generous prizes this
competition offers (courtesy of the Mail on Sunday)
without giving your poem a consistent structure. Next
poems either in Ottava Rima or in the form of a vil-
lanelle. They can be on any subject whatsoever, and must
as usual come in at 24 lines or less. Send them to 44
Lexington Street, London W1F 0LW, by 27 September.
We’re too grown-up: we’ve learned how physics laws
explain reflection, how to calculate
the distances, and angles, how the flaws
distort, or magnify: that there’s no gate
admitting us to other worlds – and yet
this fantasy is one we can’t forget.
The substance of a face stares back, as though
in full control of its more ordered space,
but for an instant different versions show:
was that a game of chess, the faintest trace? –
perhaps the ghost of some unknown ideal
beyond our here-and-now, real and unreal.
REFLECTIONS by Iain Colley
That’s what creation is, so Plato taught,
the tarnished mirror of a higher plane
ruled by the abstract purity of thought.
On Planet Earth – a shoddier domain,
Sensual and gross – we strain to emulate
the values of a noumenal ideal,
but feral passions carry too much weight.
Each close encounter’s a banana peel.
To modern sceptics Plato’s cosmic scheme
Reflects a hope for cosmic guarantees
where nothing is at all – a poet’s dream
sponsored by fear, a recipe to please.
Why not just goggle at the looking-glass
that shows our selfish face, our hairy arse?
REFLECTIONS ON HELVELLYN by Alanna Blake
In Red Tarn the sheep, the cliffs, the grass
are doubly still, until they gently swim
through ripples from a fish whose presence here
at this height mystifies. The water’s cold;
we dip brave toes into a drifting cloud
and watch the solid summit tilt and drown.
Reality: the children racing down
a flinty path, their voices strangely loud
in breathless air. The echo cannot hold
their laughter long; chill shadows soon appear
darkening the surface from the western rim,
shivering our reflections as they pass.
 N IGHT & DAY G RAND P OETRY P RIZE

REFLECTION ON REFLECTIONS HOME THOUGHTS by Frank Mc Donald

by Mary Holtby The window of their winter days
A still and silent pool reflects a world they scarcely know;
Demands inspection, the garden of their home displays
But, traveller, keep your cool: a pond where painted lilies grow.
Only a thoughtless fool They mumble in their evening chair
Seeks his reflection. thoughts lost in time and grey with age;
sighs rise like ghosts to haunt the air,
We who are wiser shun their fingers turn the final page.
Such smooth depiction; Each heart reflects but who can know
To troubled streams we run – what paths their captive spirits find?
All images undone, Their clock ticks on, incessant, slow,
All stories fiction; love lingers only in the mind.

No mirror-face below But is it best, when Charon comes,

To kill illusion. to welcome him with no regret,
Never desire to know to drift away in drowsy dreams
What clarity might show, be deaf to sorrow, and forget;
But choose confusion; and see beyond the window pane
reflections of an age gone by,
Give placid ponds a miss, and walk through summer woods again
Embrace the torrent: where no one hurts, and none can die?
Reflections tell us this – Do we who visit, worry, wait
That ignorance is bliss and speak with pity in our voice
And truth abhorrent. know nothing of their blessed state?
Perhaps they ponder, and rejoice.
AUDIOBOOK
A P ELICAN AT B LANDINGS Voices From Their
★
By P G Wodehouse Ain Countrie
(Read by Martin Jarvis. CSA World Classic. 4 CDs. £15.99)
The Poems of Marion Angus
A Pelican at Blandings is ideally suited for an audiobook, and Violet Jacob
and Martin Jarvis adds immeasurably to the comedy with
his riotous mimicry of English aristocrats. ‘Have you ever Edited by Katherine Gordon
been tarred and feathered?’ ‘Not that I can remember.’ August 2006 £9.95 408 pages
The dotty Clarence, 9th Earl of Emsworth, finds his Pbk ISBN 0 948877 76 6
home, Blandings Castle, overrun by eccentric relations,
including his sister, Lady Constance, who feels ‘as if her 2006 marks the 60th anniversary of the deaths of two
nerve centres had been scrubbed with sandpaper.’ Alaric, significant 20th-century Scottish poets: Marion Angus
Duke of Dunstable, has arrived bearing a painting of a and Violet Jacob. Passionate and radical, lyrical and rich
reclining and fetching nude, which everyone wants to get in human experience, the poems of Marion Angus and
their hands on. Wilbur Trout, an American, will pay any Violet Jacob will delight and captivate. More than 200
price for the picture because it reminds him of his third poems are included in this comprehensive anthology,
ex-wife. A guest who is an imposter wants to steal it. along with an overview of each poet’s life, a short
Lord Emsworth believes the nude bears a certain resem- synopsis of major themes in their poetry, and notes
blance to his prize sow, Empress of Blandings, a compari- on individual poems, providing an invaluable critical
son which he regards as the highest compliment. ‘Dusk background for a full appreciation of their work.
had fallen on Blandings Castle … and the Empress of
ASLS
Blandings withdraws into the shed where she did her
9 University Gardens
sleeping … Only by getting its regular eight hours can
University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QH, UK
a pig preserve that schoolgirl complexion.’ This is my
www.asls.org.uk
first P G Wodehouse novel. Within fifteen minutes I
was hooked. Susan Crosland

63
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
 SILENCED VOICES
SYRIA IS IN the news again. But L UCY P OPESCU
Syria is largely talked about in
terms of its strategic importance D R A REF DALILA
or its strained relations with the
United States, and what is forgotten is that President
Bashar al-Assad’s domestic policy has proved as repressive
as his father’s. Measures are in place to muzzle the press
and silence opponents of the regime, and every year
scores of teachers and students are arbitrarily expelled
from their universities, or arrested, for practising their
right to freedom of expression.
One victim of this hardline approach in academic
institutions is Dr Aref Dalila. The professor was arrested
on 9 September 2001 for a lecture in which he called for
democracy and transparency. His address, entitled ‘The
Syrian Economy: Problems and Solutions’, focused on the
deterioration of his country’s economy and alleged cor-
ruption among economic policy advisers. Dalila was sub-
sequently charged with trying to change the Constitution
by force, through the weakening of national sentiment, by
distributing false news and causing racial and sectarian ten- sentenced to five years’ imprisonment on various charges,
sions. During his interrogation he was reportedly beaten.
Born in Latakia in 1942, Dalila graduated in Economics
from Damascus University in 1965. He then pursued
advanced studies in the Soviet Union, where he received
his doctorate in Economic Science. A contributor to the
banned weekly Al-Doumari and former Professor and
Dean of the Faculty of Economics at Damascus
University, Dalila has written and translated many books
on economics, politics and social history, and taught in
Syrian and other Arabic universities.
Human rights organisations believe that the main rea-
son for Dalila’s detention is his role in the civil society
movement that arose out of the ‘Damascus Spring’, a
short period during which pro-democracy and human
rights activists were allowed a greater degree of freedom.
The ‘Spring’ followed the death of President Hafiz al-
Assad and the ascension to power of his son Dr Bashar
al-Assad in July 2000.
Following the break-up of the Ottoman Empire,
France administered Syria until its independence in
1946. The country experienced a series of military coups
until November 1970, when Hafiz al-Assad, then
Minister of Defence and a member of the Socialist Ba’ath
Party, seized power. Although Assad repaired Syria’s rela-
tions with her neighbours and quickly established a period
of stability, he led one of the most authoritarian regimes
in the Middle East. In the wake of his death, Assad’s son,
a former eye doctor who trained in London, appeared
keen for Syria to modernise and started implementing
the first tentative steps towards economic and social
reform. In his inauguration speech the new President
indicated his desire for increased toleration for free
speech. His press reforms allowed a resurgence of inde-
pendent newspapers and there briefly flowered a greater
64
LITERARY REVIEW September 2006
openness to public debate and
political change.
Against this background, intel-
lectuals and the opposition started
a peaceful movement calling for democracy and greater
freedom in Syria. This led to the establishment of a
number of forums, where public affairs, political reforms
and cultural issues could be discussed, and in January
2001 parliamentarian Riad al-Seif announced his plans
to launch an independent political party.
However, this wave of optimism was short-lived and it
was not long before the authorities started to clamp
down on Syria’s new-found freedoms. A few groups,
like that led by Seif, continued their activities in spite of
the restrictions. This defiance is believed to have trig-
gered the wave of arrests, in August and September
2001, resulting in the imprisonment of various reform
activists including Seif and Dalila.
Seif was arrested on 6 September 2001, the day after he
had hosted a political seminar at his house. He was later
including ‘attempting to change the Constitution by ille-
gal means’ and ‘inciting sectarian strife’. Dalila was also
said to have taken part in the meeting held in Seif ’s house
on 5 September. He was arrested with nine other civil
society activists, most of whom have since been released.
Dalila’s trial took place in the Supreme State Security
Court and on 31 July 2002 he was sentenced to ten years
of hard labour. The court’s procedures do not meet inter-
national fair-trial standards, and no appeals can be made
against its judgments. The professor, who suffers severe ill
health, has spent the past few years in solitary confinement
in the political section of the Adra prison in Damascus,
where conditions are said to be extremely harsh.
Dalila is reported to be suffering from both diabetes and
heart disease, exacerbated by his poor treatment in prison.
According to Amnesty, in April 2002 he was taken to
hospital suffering from deep vein thrombosis. Although
he was in urgent need of medical care and medication he
received neither and was returned to prison. There were
further concerns for his health during the latter part of
2004 when he was suffering from high blood pressure and
an irregular heartbeat. Dalila started a hunger strike on 12
July 2005 in protest at his solitary confinement and ill-
treatment. He recently underwent a heart operation and
apparently needs further surgery.
Readers may like to send appeals calling for the immedi-
ate and unconditional release of Dr Aref Dalila in accor-
dance with Article 19 of the International Covenant on
Civil and Political Rights, to which Syria is a signatory, to:
His Excellency President Bashar al-Assad
President of the Republic
c/o The Embassy of the Syrian Arab Republic
8 Belgrave Square, London SW1X 8PH
Fax: 020 7235 4621