Issue 43

Small is Beautiful

Small is Beautiful

Recently, ailing and housebound, I looked for succour in a book by a contemporary French novelist, one I remembered hugely enjoying when it first appeared. A good read has to be high on the list of restoratives, and I reckoned that Philippe Delerm’s La Première gorgée de bière (The First Swig of Beer) might be just the ticket. Not because it’s all about beer – in fact the title is rather randomly lifted from one of the book’s thirty-four essays – but because I recalled it included some cheering pages on illness.
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Written on the Heart

Written on the Heart

My mother used to read to us on the battered old couch. As the light faded, we would snuggle up and read along with her pointing finger. It was magic; it was spells; it was home. Her glasses slightly askew on her thin, eager face, ‘Come hither,’ she would urge. Come Hither was the title of the orange-covered anthology from which she read. Sometimes she might break off to impress on us: ‘A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master-spirit. Milton.’ We always got quotations in that form. ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day. Shakespeare,’ she would pronounce, crossly plugging in the Hoover. Or ‘If at first you don’t succeed, Try, try again. Proverb’ – tartly, when we complained about homework.
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He Did His Duty

I have read most of C. S. Forester’s books, but had never come across The General until I found a copy last year in a second-hand shop. It nestled next to a biography of Winston Churchill written in 1940 (which was also fascinating). This was something of a coincidence, because in 1941, as he crossed the Atlantic in the battleship Prince of Wales for his first meeting with Roosevelt, Churchill read three of Forester’s Hornblower novels. Hornblower – hardworking, audacious, full of initiative, demanding but careful of his men – would have been for Churchill the perfect model of what a military man should be.
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The Flight in the Heather

The Flight in the Heather

I saw the set of books through the window of a second-hand furniture shop in Oxford a couple of years ago. Each with a dark-blue spine stamped with a gilt palm tree, they ran across the top of one of those ‘modern’ sideboards from which Nigel Patrick and Laurence Harvey used to help themselves to drinks in 1950s films. I went in at once and found a complete set of the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, in thirty-five volumes, printed in 1924, bound in soft leather and in superb condition. I bought them for money I couldn’t afford and carried them triumphantly away in a variety of wrinkled carrier bags that the owner pulled out from under his counter.
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Rhubarb!

Any student of nineteenth-century Chinese history is familiar with Commissioner Lin Zexu (1785–1850), the epitome of the upright Confucian official who, in his moral and well-meaning efforts to stem the flow of opium into China, provoked the British military interventions that started the Opium War. Appointed by the Emperor to suppress the opium trade which was threatening the health of the nation and causing a disastrous outflow of silver, he arrived in Canton in March 1839 and issued orders threatening heavy punishment of Chinese opium-smokers and traffickers. He then turned his attention to the suppliers of Indian opium and drafted a letter to Queen Victoria. Though the letter was apparently never sent, he pointed out that Chinese rhubarb, tea and silk were ‘valuable products without which foreigners could not live’ and he demanded that the Queen personally seek out and destroy the opium carried on British ships and report back to him.
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Grandma’s Footsteps

Grandma’s Footsteps

The first thing that strikes one about the Conway family is the noise. The air is filled with Father’s sudden roars of rage, the slaps he lands on his son Howard, and his two other children, the flying plates, the slamming doors. Then there’s Grandma with her noisy coos and kisses, her cries of ecstasy one moment and shrieks of woe the next. It’s no wonder Grandpa is always going off for a little lie-down. And, of course, behind all this hubbub there are family secrets.
On Man, the Human Heart and Human Life

On Man, the Human Heart and Human Life

One of my favourite novelists, now largely forgotten, is Stanley Middleton (1919–2009). He wrote 45 novels, the last published posthumously. I thought I had them all, but when reorganizing my shelves I found I was missing two, which I’ve now bought secondhand for all of £5.80. That’s probably less than I’d pay for petrol to go to the nearest library, although I shall have to deal with the usual complaint from my wife about the lack of space in our cottage.
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Growing Up with Winston

Growing Up with Winston

Born in 1874, the son of a Chancellor of the Exchequer contemporary with Gladstone and Disraeli, he made his name as a journalist covering the Boer War, became an MP at 26, President of the Board of Trade, Home Secretary, First Lord of the Admiralty, and the scapegoat of the catastrophe at Gallipoli in 1915. He was rehabilitated in his father Lord Randolph’s old post in 1924, but by 1930 – with the Conservatives in Opposition – he was in the wilderness. There he might well have stayed. On 13 December 1931 when visiting New York, he looked right rather than left crossing Fifth Avenue and was hit by a cab. He nearly died. His autobiographical My Early Life (1929) would have been his epitaph. What a farewell it would have made to one of the nearly men of the twentieth century!
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