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Articles & Extracts

Prince Not-So-Charming

Because I write about monarchs, people have sometimes asked me whether I’ve read Frances Donaldson’s Edward VIII. ‘Not my period,’ I would stupidly reply, but the historian’s get-out-of-jail card was a ruse: the fact was I doubted whether a book on the Abdication written back in the 1970s could still be of interest. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Elizabeth Longford once observed that Frances Donaldson’s biography of Edward VIII had more effect than any other book on the future of the monarchy. Edward VIII was explosive: it shattered the romantic myth of the golden prince who abdicated because he was unable to rule without the ‘help and support of the woman I love’. By revealing the real man as shallow and fickle, it demonstrated the worth of sterling work and devotion to duty. The book is also a tract for our times today. Watching the play Charles III – which hinges on the scenario of the abdication of a future King Charles – I was struck by the relevance of Frances Donaldson’s story. The king comes to the throne, stubbornly resolved on a fatal course of action, is betrayed (as he sees it) by his family, and his support melts away: it’s all here in Edward VIII, which should be required reading for anyone interested in the monarchy’s future.

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The Black Mask

The Black Mask

The Thin Man was Hammett’s last book, and rather different from his others – it’s both thriller and sly sexual farce, the dialogue full of the slick one-liners which instantly became the markers for smart Hollywood dialogue right up to and including All about Eve. It’s a fine book – but it doesn’t compare with The Maltese Falcon. This is a detective story, but not about a particular murder – though it starts with one, the result of a treasure hunt. The eponymous falcon is an immeasurably precious relic originally given by the Knights of Malta to the King of Spain. Covered in black paint, it has knocked about for a century and more, unrecognized for what it is. But now Casper Gutman, the ‘fat man’, is on its trail, and Hammett’s detective, Sam Spade, is drawn into a violent tussle between thieves determined to get their hands on it.

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A Glimpse of the Moon

A Glimpse of the Moon

Then, last year, I heard an interview with Jack on the BBC, talking about his memoir of life as a political prisoner in Malawi from 1987 to 1991. Its title, And Crocodiles Are Hungry at Night, refers to one of the methods used to dispose of the bodies of prisoners of the Banda regime – by tipping them into crocodile-infested waters.

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Hunt the Biographer

Hunt the Biographer

Michael Holroyd is the most distinguished biographer of his generation, chiefly on the strength of three monumental works – Lytton Strachey, Augustus John and Bernard Shaw, published between 1967 and 1992. The first two were each published in two volumes, and Bernard Shaw in four volumes.

The Call of the Sea

The Call of the Sea

It’s a wonderful thing when a book so fires the imagination that it becomes more real than the world around you, when the mind is totally absorbed, the page dissolves, and you begin to exist differently. It was mainly a thing of long childhood summers, when I was a musketeer, then a Viking, a wizard, a centaur – once even a quickfooted warrior mouse. Sadly it stopped in adolescence, when these things weren’t done . . .

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Falling in Love Again . . .

Joan Wyndham was not about to let such a disagreeable thing as a world war get in the way of having a jolly time. It is not that she didn’t take the war seriously – after art school she volunteered as an auxiliary nurse and then served as a WAAF officer – just that she was determined to get on with the things she enjoyed: shopping, dancing, learning to sculpt, curling her hair in pipe cleaners, swimming in the Serpentine and lying in bed all morning in a silk kimono with her feet on a hot-water bottle. She was certainly not going to let anything interfere with the important business of falling in love. Over the course of the war, recorded in two volumes of diaries published when Joan was in her sixties as Love Lessons (1985) and Love Is Blue (1986), she falls in love – madly, passionately, all-consumingly, but often for not much more than a week – with a succession of ever more unsuitable men.

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Healing Laughter

Rereading can be exhilarating or disappointing: it is rarely neutral. For me, revisiting P. J. Kavanagh’s account of his first thirty or so years, The Perfect Stranger, has been enjoyable as well as enlightening. Of course, even the first time round any book is edited as we go along by personal preference and perception. And when, as in this case, nearly half a century has passed, it’s likely that the reader’s perspectives have been modified by personal experience, and that some of the detail will have been forgotten.

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Marching with Marlborough

Published in 1956, Captain of Dragoons is set in the reign of Queen Anne, during the early years of the War of the Spanish Succession, and the relevant member of the family is Charles Carey, ‘a tall, lean young officer of Dragoons, with a crop of black hair cut short for comfort under his wig, and a pair of inky black brows that were convenient warning signals that his quick temper was rising’; he is also one of the most brilliant swordsmen in the Duke of Marlborough’s army, and is given ample opportunities to display his prowess.

The Passing of Old Europe

It was a passing reference in Robert Musil’s novel The Man without Qualities to ‘the oracular casting of lead that fate performs with us’ that jogged my memory. When I was a child, on New Year’s Eve, we would melt small lead ingots in a spoon over a candle flame, and drop the silvery liquid into a jug of water. The shape it assumed as it fell, hissing and steaming into the future, was said to predict what the coming year held in store. It is an old German tradition that my father, a refugee from the Third Reich, upheld.

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Last of the Pagans

Last of the Pagans

Vidal explores this confrontation between old and new in a fictive autobiography drawing on three surviving volumes of Julian’s letters and essays, and contemporary recollections. In doing so, he paints a sympathetic portrait of an individual gullible and pragmatic, sensitive and stubborn. Julian was a skilful military commander, a talented administrator and a concerned social reformer. But he was driven by contempt for Christians who he saw bowing to an authority they regarded as greater than Rome. He mocked them as Galileans, and their churches packed with relics he called charnel houses.

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Dear Jansson San

In the 1960s, long before J. K. Rowling showed the world how literary fame might be managed, Tove Jansson, pursued by her own creations the Moomins – white hippopotamus-shaped trolls with tails but no mouths – thought there was only one solution: to buy her own island with the proceeds and escape, if not permanently, at least for several months at a time. Who needed a postman when this was the kind of letter he brought?

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Auburn in Wartime

I had heard of Margery Allingham, of course, and had read The Tiger in the Smoke as a teenager, but I had no idea that she had written an account of her life in the Essex village of Tolleshunt D’Arcy between July 1938 and May 1941. This was a stroke of luck: to find a proper writer (with a large garden and a gardener) who could honestly and clear-sightedly anatomize her feelings and sensations, and quote those of her neighbours, during the Munich crisis, the great evacuation of children and mothers to the country when war broke out, the retreat from Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain and the London Blitz.

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The Temptation of Mrs Harris

It was astonishing to me that a grown-up could cry, and more than astonishing that anyone should cry for joy. The memory came back to me a few weeks ago, as I reread, with my 9-year-old daughter, Paul Gallico’s Flowers for Mrs Harris. For Gallico, most fondly remembered as the author of The Snow Goose, was a master of the bittersweet, of the mysterious kinship between suffering and joy. He knew how to fold together humour and poignant detail in just the right proportions to prevent his prose from curdling into mawkishness and sentimentality.

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A Spiritual Affinity

I don’t know about you, but I have a number of books on the go at any one time. There’s one in the downstairs loo, one in the bathroom, a couple by my armchair in the living-room, and two or three by the bed. But one book has been permanently by my bed since my wife gave it me for Christmas in 2000, and I turn to it more or less every night for the crisp good sense which is guaranteed wherever I open it, and perhaps a laugh as well.

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Growing up American

Birds of America is supposed to be Mary McCarthy’s weakest novel, though it was her own favourite. Yet it is a fine book – a brilliant study of a clever, odd teenager growing into a man. And like all good books it seems to get better each time I read it.

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Cambridge Canvas

Cambridge Canvas

For almost a decade there’s been one particular book we’ve been longing to reissue. Now at last, as we reach our tenth anniversary, we’ve got the opportunity to do so. When I wrote about it in one of our very early issues, I said that for me a home without a copy of Gwen Raverat’s Period Piece (1952) was like a home without a cat – lacking an essential cheering and comfortable element – and for me that still holds true.

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