Books

Don't Mention the War

Frances Weaver — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 12:54:31 +0000

Author:Noel Malcolm

Secret scribe: Hugh Trevor-Roper in 1940

Hugh Trevor-Roper had a remarkably Good War, though it cannot have seemed very good to begin with. Recruited into a minor branch of military intelligence, he found himself working in a poky commandeered cell in Wormwood Scrubs, combing intercepted radio signals for evidence of German spies in England. This, in itself, was a complete waste of time; but it led him to the radio transmissions of the Abwehr (the German secret service), whose codes he managed to break.

It Was All Rot About All Souls

Frances Weaver — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 12:49:14 +0000

Author:Andrew Roberts

War and peace: Winston Churchill and Lord Halifax differed on appeasement but All Souls played no part

In 1955 the Tory politician Bob Boothby denounced All Souls College, Oxford, for having been "the intellectual HQ of appeasement", saying: "It would be difficult to overstate the damage done to this country at that disastrous dining table." This view might have been shrugged off by the college as the ignorant rant of an outsider had not its ultimate insider, Dr A.L. Rowse, who had dined at that same table more than almost any other fellow in the Thirties, published a book in 1961 entitled All Souls and Appeasement that substantiated Boothby's accusations.

Mart's Art is Not Just Smart

Frances Weaver — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 12:43:53 +0000

Author:George Walden

Martin Amis: A British author who matches up to some of the American giants (Isabel Fonesca)

What's in a first name? If you're writing a literary biography of Martin Amis and call him Martin throughout, quite a lot. Assumptions of intimacy negate critical distance, the whole point of the book. Bradford's excuse — that he has to distinguish between Amis senior and junior, and that he'd seen a fair bit of junior when compiling his biography — might just wash, were it not that Amis the younger comes out of it embarrassingly well. Embarrassing, that is, for Martin.

Clive's Indian Summer

Frances Weaver — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 12:39:39 +0000

Author:David Barrett

His masterly voice: Clive James at work

On YouTube there's a clip of Clive James and Robert Hughes being interviewed for Australian television in 1959. The programme is about Beat culture and James reads from Jack Kerouac's On the Road. When he's finished the presenter asks him: "Well, what do you think of it? What do you think of the formless prose?" James taps a pen on the page and replies: "It's overrated." That was half a century ago, and half a world away. And while I suspect James's criticism of Kerouac's prose hasn't changed — time has proven it to be pretty solid — the man who once practised lighting cigarettes with his head tilted to look like Albert Camus certainly has.

A Wee Dram of History

Frances Weaver — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 12:33:55 +0000

Author:Eric Ormsby

In her new collection, The Bees (Picador, £14.99), her first since becoming Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy is unabashedly bibulous, and all the better for it. She is tipsy not only on "John Barleycorn", the title of a rollicking ballade (one of her finest), but on words themselves. She celebrates bees, those emblematic insects, but her bees are also words themselves, "brazen, blurs on paper,/besotted". Names too enchant her, as "John Barleycorn" makes plain in its loving litany of pubs: