Passing The Bucks

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

I had expected to be disappointed by Michael Lewis’s latest book on the madness, deceptions and absurdities of Wall Street. This was partly because I’m close to the limits of my appetite for credit crunch books. There are now literally hundreds to choose from, of all genres. We already get the general picture: bankers take […]

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Hastening Ills

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

Ill Fares the Land must surely be one of the most remarkable books on politics to have appeared for a very long time. A part of the book’s compelling interest comes from the circumstances in which it was written. Diagnosed not much more than eighteen months ago as suffering from a variant of amyotropic lateral […]

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Bacchae

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

When the Trojan shore sank below the horizon I thought about what to do next. There was a sentiment that we should go straight back to Ithaca but I decided we would take the long way back and turn raider till we saw our own harbour – we had a fleet of five ships, every […]

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Humboldt’s Gifts

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

This is a hefty book – I hold it partly responsible for tendonitis in my left thumb. But that’s a small aggravation when set in the context of Michael Jacobs’s epic journey along the Andes – itself filled with aggravations and exhilaration – through seven countries, from the Caribbean to the Straits of Magellan.

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Burning Cedars

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

David Hirst has written a carefully documented, clearly argued and elegant book that deserves to become the standard reference work on Lebanon and its neighbours for years to come. That does not mean that all readers will like what they find; in fact, it will challenge many of their assumptions.  For Hirst, The Guardian’s veteran […]

Home Security

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

There is something very odd, disturbing even, about the appetite for memoirs written by whites who either grew up in Rhodesia or whose parents still live in what is now independent Zimbabwe. What explains the sustained fascination with the lives of barely a quarter of a million settlers, of whom perhaps 10 per cent still […]

Still Making Our Day

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

He rides into town on a mule and the local heavies start poking fun at him. He asks them to be nice, but they start shooting. So he puts them right. He’s dining out when a bunch of hoodlums burst in to the restaurant and start demanding money. He offers some polite advice about their […]

A Kind Of Blues

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

Veils of cigarette smoke frequently cloud the faces of the jazz musicians framed by Herman Leonard’s camera. A dozen of Leonard’s celebrated photographs appear in the pages of Jazz, a new history by Gary Giddins and Scott DeVeaux, yet the task these authors have set themselves is precisely to demystify a musical genre seen by […]

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Brodsky Before Brodsky

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

Joseph Brodsky was generous in his praise of those poets he saw as predecessors – most notably, Donne, Pushkin and Auden (‘the greatest mind of the twentieth century’). And in the fourteen years since his death, aged fifty-five, he has received grateful tribute in his turn. A varied group of poets, including Derek Walcott, Adam […]

Once More, With Feeling

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

Anyone who has been fortunate enough to spend even a little time in Charles Rosen’s company will know that he is a formidable companion, who can weave several learned and profound streams of reflection in elegant patterns, strongly preferring to impart information rather than to receive it. Indeed, he soon makes you wonder whether you […]

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Experiments In Living

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

In her ambitious and enthralling first book, Daisy Hay takes the dynamics of friendship among the second-generation Romantics as her unifying theme. She explodes the myth of the isolated, autophagous poet, showing how these predominantly urban writers (scornfully dismissed by a destructive article in Blackwood’s as ‘the Cockney School’, though they were not Cockneys and […]

Taking Care Of Keats

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

The story of Joseph Severn’s association with John Keats has often been told. The promising young artist to whom the Royal Academy gave a grant to study the old masters in Italy; his decision to accompany the sick Keats, who had been medically advised that warm Italy might alleviate his tuberculosis; Severn’s care of his […]

Five Fateful Months

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

In the summer of 1940, Britain was staring down the barrel of a gun. Defeated by the Germany Army on land and besieged by U-boats at sea, the nation was forced to rely on its last defence against invasion – the Royal Air Force. But the RAF had fewer pilots, inferior planes and less experience […]

We Shall Fight On The Tennis Courts

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

The Battle of Kohima was fought as part of the Japanese attempt to cut off the British base at Imphal and drive the British out of Assam. To this day historians disagree over whether or not the Japanese would have invaded India had they been victorious. But it is clear that a British defeat at […]

Force For The Good

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

As one of the first American journalists to arrive in Berlin after the end of the Second World War, John Dos Passos was embarrassed by the devastation the American B29s had inflicted. At Stettiner Station he saw large crowds of bewildered people, their skin hanging on their bones ‘like candle drippings’. Berlin, he recalled, was […]

Was It All Worth It?

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

Fatima Bhutto’s Songs of Blood and Sword is a lament for her dead father, Murtaza Bhutto, and an attempt to resurrect his political reputation. It is also a moving memoir of a troubled childhood with him in exile. At the same time, however, it is a dubious attempt to rewrite Pakistan’s recent history in the […]

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Broken India

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

Mohammad Ali Jinnah (1876–1948), the founder of Pakistan, has long been a favourite villain of the Indian Right, reviled as the prime architect of the Partition of India in 1947. Jinnah: India – Partition – Independence dares to question this orthodoxy, and its publication in August 2009 caused a political sensation in India. Its author, […]

Prankster’s Progress

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

Horace de Vere Cole is not a name that many people are likely to recognise, but nor was John Harrison before Dava Sobel’s biography, Longitude, brought the eighteenth-century horologist to worldwide attention. So it can be done, and it looks very much as though Martyn Downer and the Black Spring Press are trying to rekindle […]

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Young At Heart

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

The title of Valerie Grove’s enchanting and fast-flowing biography of Kaye Webb is entirely apt – So Much to Tell. Even those of us who came to know Kaye in the 1960s and 1970s had little idea of how colourful her life had been before she became ‘Fat Puffin’, the dynamic editor of Puffin Story […]

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Hitting The Wall

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

In the contemporary imagination kindness is a puzzle requiring a solution. Looking after Number One makes sense: looking after everybody else for anything other than purely selfish gain is unimaginable. To the cynic, altruism must be just one more move in the great game of life. There is a fine line between cynicism and neo-Darwinism. […]

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