Category Archives: books

arts, books, people

Book Review

Michael Barber
Brief Lives: Evelyn Waugh
(Hesperus; 2013)

When Michael Barber first told me he had a biography of Evelyn Waugh being published, my first reaction was “Why?”. Why do we need another biography of Waugh?

But then when I got a copy I realised this isn’t really a biography but more a dozen or so quick sketches of the man, for what Hesperus are doing is creating a series of “short, authoritative biographies of the greatest figures in literary history; written by experts in their fields to appeal to general readers and academics alike”.

Given that this is the aim, then Barber and Hesperus have largely succeeded. This is a short work which is well and amusingly written, while remaining interesting, light, accessible and, I found, quite hard to put down.

Yes, the book lacks detail — but what does one really expect in 120 pages? However, although I am no expert on Waugh, it did seem to encapsulate the essence of the man and his life: idiosyncratic, snob, arriviste, poseur, spendthrift, drunk, intransigent bore and grumpy old man (even when quite young); but also both an excellent novelist (I’ll except Brideshead Revisited which never worked for me) and often highly amusing.

As a bonus, at least for me, Anthony Powell gets quite a few mentions. Powell and Waugh, although in some ways rival writers, were friends and admired each others’ work — both publicly and privately — often writing to say how much they had enjoyed the other’s latest volume. Waugh always wanted to live to see Powell complete Dance, but sadly he died halfway through. Wouldn’t it have been interesting to have heard his views on the second half of Dance? How the war trilogy compared with his Sword of Honour? And what would he have made of the denouements of Temporary Kings and Hearing Secret Harmonies?

As Anthony Powell so often did I shall conclude this review with two gripes. While understanding that publishers need to keep costs down, such awful cheap paper is horrid to handle and isn’t going to stand the rigours of time; I would happy to pay an extra 50p to £1 on the price of a book if it meant more aesthetically pleasing paper.

Finally I deplore the lack of an index. I know this is a short work, but any non-fiction book without an index becomes unusable as a reference source. And that, to my mind, is inexcusable in an environment where we must do everything we can to encourage the use of books as a resource. Again I have to lay the blame on cost-cutting publishers, rather than the authors, most of whom I suspect would (privately, at least) agree.

An excellent introduction to the man and a highly enjoyable and interesting read.

Overall rating: ★★★★☆

books, medical, science

Book Review

Mary Roach
Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

If there is one thing Mary Roach does well it is write. Her style is light, airy and humorous while being informative. It needs to be because she has made her stock in trade writing about taboo subjects like sex (Bonk), death (Stiff) and now our guts. For instance in writing about the biblical story of Jonah and the whale she says:

While a seaman might survive the suction and swallow, his arrival in a sperm whale’s stomach would seem to present a new set of problems. (I challenge you to find a more innocuous sentence containing the words sperm, suction, swallow and any homophone of seaman.)

She takes us on a journey through the gut — from top to bottom. Well, except that she doesn’t; it’s a journey through the top half, as far as the stomach. There’s a black hole of the small intestine should be. And a fast water chute through the colon. So despite the good writing I felt short changed by Gulp. I wanted more, and I wanted a bit more in depth science.

Sure, Roach talked to all the right scientists and medics. But this wasn’t as in depth as either Stiff or Bonk — at least it didn’t feel that way. And as I say the really interesting bits (well, to me, at least) beyond the stomach were too quickly glossed over.

So I was left feeling as though I’d had a decent starter, followed by some sorbet and coffee, but without a main course. Which is a shame because Roach writes too well for this.

Overall rating: ★★☆☆☆

books, science

Book Review

Dr Geoffrey Garrett and Andrew Nott
Cause of Death: Memoirs of a Home Office Pathologist

For over 30 years Geoffrey Garrett was the senior Home Office pathologist for NW England. This means he got all the juicy jobs, like working out how some notorious murders (like one of the Moors Murders) were committed and the actual cause of death.

Most of it would have hardly been routine, even for an experienced pathologist, but you would never think so from reading this book. Garrett makes the job sound absolutely mundane and boring most of the time. And that’s a reflection on the book, because clearly the job wasn’t at all routine on the ground and Garret says this in a few places.

But I found the book dull. So dull I almost gave up reading it. The style is to me very flat and lifeless — like the corpses Garrett is so often examining. Not that we get much detail of those examinations, beyond a few bare medical facts: so many wounds, such and such internal damage, a few broken ribs and skulls. And a lot of it obfuscated in medical terminology which is hardly ever explained.

Indeed the book is so bland it is not at all gruesome. Surely it should be gruesome? OK we don’t need great detail of the basic autopsy method every time (Garrett covers that once in the introduction, though even that is a bit sketchy) but we would benefit from more on the methods specific to the cases. For instance, what is the test done on blood to determine the level of carbon monoxide present; and how is it done? We’re never told. As a scientist, I wanted to know.

Yes, I wanted a lot more. More on the tests which are done, but also more on the forensic investigative process; more interesting puzzles to solve and how they were solved. I had expected this and that I didn’t get it left me feeling somewhat short-changed.

This should have been an interesting book, illuminating a world which, thankfully, most of us are never involved with. But sadly for me it failed.

Overall rating: ★★☆☆☆

books

World Book Day

Today is apparently World Book Day — but only in the UK and Ireland.

I have just two observations:

  1. If it is only in the UK and Ireland it isn’t WORLD Book Day is it!
    Apparently the rest of the world celebrates World Book Day on 23 April — which is Shakespeare’s birthday, and hence a much more appropriate day. But of course we can’t do that because (a) it might clash with Easter holidays when children (at whom this is largely aimed) aren’t in school and (b) it is St George’s Day (which never mattered to the English before).
  2. And anyway, who knew? I’m a book-o-phile, and I didn’t know. Which shows just how well publicised it has been.

Come on guys: must do better! Let’s get this together. It’s especially important that we engage kids in reading — reading anything will do! So let’s get together with the rest of the world, celebrate a single day and get the publicity working.

books

Book Reviews

I don’t actually get through many books these days. When I get to read — usually in bed — I usually find I need something lighter or shorter to read, or at least a book I can dip into at random; something to sample for amusement and interest. So reading a book from cover to cover is relatively are for me these days. This has never been helped by the fact that my natural reading speed is that of a snail, and have never properly mastered the art of speed reading. Given that my spelling is also fairly crummy I wonder if I may be, say, 10% dyslexic. Or, as my handwriting is also abysmal, maybe it is something to do with eye, brain and hand coordination.

Anyway I’ve decided that when I do finish a book, or have sampled a major part of one, I’ll write a quick review note here. So we’ll start with the book I finished a couple of days ago …

Peter Silverton
Filthy English: The How, Why, When and What of Everyday Swearing

Peter Silverton is a journalist who cut his hacking teeth on writing about punk music and interviewing the likes of the Sex Pistols. So he’s in a good position to know something about foul language. He takes us on a journey through the development and use of the whole gamut of swearing: what the words are, what they actually mean, where they come from, when did they arrive and how has their meaning changed over time.

We’re taken on various journeys. Not just that of language used on the street or in the pub; nor just that written (or more usually not written) in the papers, dictionaries and books, but right across the spectrum of language use including pop music, TV and radio.

Having said that the book is a bit of a mix. Some chapters approach the subject from the point of view of the content: sex, genitals, excretion, family relations, sexuality. But others approach it from the direction of the medium: music, newspapers, football etc. I found this split approach rather unnecessary and repetitive. Intertwined with this there are, however, some interesting diversions into the relationship of our swearwords with those of other languages.

Despite my interest in language I have to admit I found the book slightly tedious going. Yes, for someone interested in language, it was interesting in parts. But I found Silverton’s style somewhat pedestrian, stodgy and very “same-y”. I also wanted more detail; greater depth.

This is a book to interest the averagely intelligent reader, which is actually no bad thing. It is not a book for someone with a deep interest the English language and a thirst for esoteric knowledge.

Overall rating: ★★★☆☆

books, personal

Books that Changed My Life

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Really major life-changing events (marriage, an influential chance meeting) aren’t common but we all have them and usually several in a lifetime.

What I suspect is more common, at least of those of us who read, is to realise that one has a series of books which have been sufficiently influential that they’ve significantly changed the tone or direction of one’s life.

And reading Mrs Worthington’s entry “Books that shaped my life” in Tara’s Gallery this week I realised that I too had such a list. So I thought I’d document it. Here are some of them in roughly chronological order; I’m sure there are others.

Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland and Alice through the Looking Glass. I remember these from an early age. They started me thinking about language. Later re-reading it as a student I saw and became fascinated by the unexpected logic, something which has stayed with me. This was later enhanced by Martin Gardner’s The Annotated Alice.

TS Eliot, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. This is something my father used to read to me at bedtime when I was probably about 7 or 8. I especially remember, and still love, Skimbleshanks: The Railway Cat. I knew it off by heart and I still remember chunks of it. This was in the late 1950s, long before Cats, the musical. To this day I love cats and I love railways.

WE Johns, Biggles books. I read as many of these as I could get my hands on, probably from the time I was about 9 or so right into my teens. Yes, they were fantasy adventure, but they were also a world into which a repressed (even depressed) child could retreat from the world.

Boy Scout Association, The Chief Scouts’ Advance Party Report. This was the 1966 set of proposals for modernising the scouting movement at the time I was transitioning from Scouts to Senior Scouts. I realised it was important and read it. I didn’t agree with it. I saw it for what it turned out to be: the beginning of the emasculation of the Scout Movement as I knew it and as I believed then, and still believe, it should be. It was thus one of the 3 or 4 straws which directly led to me leaving Scouting; somewhere I would have liked to remain.

John Betjeman, High and Low. I don’t recall what impelled me to buy Betjeman’s latest slim volume of verse in 1966, but it soon became a firm favourite. As a late teenager it lived by my bed and if I awoke, sleepless, I would dip into it until sliding into slumber again. Why would a teenage boy in the late ’60s find a volume of poetry comforting? Isn’t that rather worrying? It didn’t so much kindle in me a love of poetry but an awareness of the changing world of architecture and railways.

Havelock Ellis, The Psychology of Sex. My parents had a copy of this and it was openly available to me on the shelves from a very early age. I read it, and learnt a lot from it, as a teenager. It kept me one step ahead of my girlfriend in our joint exploration and development of our sexuality.

Florence Greenberg, Jewish Cookery. No I’m not Jewish. I picked this up as a student because it is such a great cookery book. It covers all the basics and provides a wealth of interesting recipes. It wasn’t the only cookery book I had as a student, but probably the one I used most often. And I still have it and use it!

David Hockney, Photography. I’m unable to remember now which of Hockney’s books on photography it was that I recall seeing, but it was one of the early ones where he was experimenting with “joiners”. The book was probably his Photographs (1982) or just possibly Cameraworks (1984) although I had thought it was a late-70s book. But whichever it was I found the “joiner” technique fascinating and it is still something I experiment with from time to time. It has definitely been a factor in the development of my photography.


Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time. If there’s one work (it’s actually a series of 12 novels) that changed my life this is it. There are comments elsewhere herein (for instance here) about how I was recommended to read Dance by our friend Jilly, and how that simple recommendation led to what is now the Anthony Powell Society and such a large part of my life.

amusements, books, history

Thoughts on England

Despite all the business, I have found some time for reading. One of these indulgences has been Letters from England by Karel Čapek, first published in Prague in 1924. Against my expectations it is a delight and pretty nearly a laugh a page — which is likely what was intended. All interspersed with Čapek’s curious little drawings.

Čapek is best known for writing, with his brother Josef, two almost iconic plays: R.U.R. (1920) and The Insect Play (1921). I know the latter as the short scenes were a staple of my school’s “house plays” and we even did a complete staging in my final year at school as that year’s school play. Ants running amok in the auditorium! Dark and malevolent; but great fun.

But Letters from England is Čapek’s reportage on a visit he paid to Britain. First he sojourns in London:

[S]ince I have already been on this Babylonian island ten days, I have lost the beginning. With what should I begin now? With grilled bacon or the exhibition at Wembley? With Mr Shaw or London policemen? I see that I am beginning very confusedly; but as for those policemen, I must say that they are recruited according to their beauty and size: they are like gods, a head above mortal men, and their power is unlimited. When one of those two-metre Bobbies at Piccadilly raises his arm, all vehicles come to a halt, Saturn becomes fixed and Uranus stands still on his heavenly orbit, waiting until Bobby lowers his arm again. I have never seen anything so superhuman.
…
[A]t night the cats make love as wildly as on the roofs of Palermo, despite all tales of English puritanism. Only the people are quieter here than elsewhere.
…
But not as long as I live will I become reconciled to what is known here as ‘traffic’, that is, to the volume of traffic in the streets. I remember with horror the day when they first brought me to London. First, they took me by train, then they ran through some huge, glass halls and pushed me into a barred cage which looked like a scales for weighing cattle. This was ‘a lift’ and it descended through an armour-plated well, whereupon they hauled me out and slid away through serpentine, underground corridors. It was like a horrible dream. Then there was a sort of tunnel or sewer with rails, and a buzzing train flew in. They threw me into it and the train flew on and it was very musty and oppressive in there, obviously because of the proximity to hell. Whereupon they took me out again and ran through new catacombs to an escalator which rattles like a mill and hurtles to the top with people on it. I tell you, it is like a fever. Then there were several more corridors and stairways and despite my resistance they led me out into the street, where my heart sank. A fourfold line of vehicles shunts along without end or interruption; buses, chugging mastodons tearing along in herds with bevies of little people on their backs, delivery vans, lorries, a flying pack of cars, steam engines, people running, tractors, ambulances, people climbing up onto the roofs of buses like squirrels, a new herd of motorised elephants; there, and now everything stands still, a muttering and rattling stream, and it can’t go any further …

Amongst Capek’s perambulations of the country he visits the Lake District and makes this note on the sheep:

Pilgrimage to the Sheep. It is true that there are sheep everywhere in England but lake sheep are particularly curly, graze on silken lawns and remind one of the souls of the blessed in heaven. No-one tends them and they spend their time in feeding, dreaming and pious contemplation.

He also makes numerous observations on the English themselves, including thes delights:

I wouldn’t like to make overly bold hypotheses, but it seems to me that the black and white stripes on English policemen’s sleeves have their direct origin in this striped style of old English houses.
…
Most beautiful in England though are the trees, the herds and the people; and then the ships. Old England also means those pink old gentlemen who with the advent of spring wear grey top hats and in summer chase small balls over golf courses and look so hearty and amiable that if I were eight years old I would want to play with them and old ladies who always have knitting in their hands and are pink, beautiful and kind, drink hot water and never tell you about their illnesses.
…
Every Englishman has a raincoat or an umbrella, a flat cap and a newspaper in his hand. If it is an Englishwoman, she has a raincoat or a tennis racket. Nature has a predilection here for unusual shagginess, overgrowth, bushiness, woolliness, bristliness and all types of hair. So, for example, English horses have whole tufts and tassels of hair on their legs, and English dogs are nothing but ridiculous bundles of locks. Only the English lawn and the English gentleman are shaved every day.

It’s real reportage of the hastily concocted letter home variety. A sort of semi-structured stream of consciousness. And none the worse for that. As I say it is pretty much an amusement a page. A couple of evening’s bedtime reading or something to while away a train journey.

books

Desert Island Discs

News for those of you who are Anthony Powell aficionados …

At long last the recording of Powell’s 1976 BBC Radio 4 appearance on Desert Island Discs is available on the BBC website.

You can find it at www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/desert-island-discs/castaway/20d4d62a.

It is well worth a listen!

books

Literary Styling

There’s an interesting short article in New Scientist of 5 May 2012 by Sara Reardon. It seems mathematicians have worked out why/how authors have distinctively different styles. Apparently it’s all down to all the small, meaningless words they use. The article is behind a paywall but I hope I might be excused for reproducing it here for the benefit of my friends in the literary community.

Writing style relies on words with no meaning

Few novelists today would have a character say, “It is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.” That is not only because few modern characters ponder death by guillotine, but also because writing styles have changed dramatically since Charles Dickens wrote A Tale of Two Cities in 1859. So how does literary style evolve? Surprisingly, clues lie in words with seemingly little meaning, such as “to” and “that”.

By analysing how writers use such “content-free” words, mathematician Daniel Rockmore and colleagues at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, were able to conduct the first, large-scale “stylometric” analysis of literature (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.l073/pnas.lll5407109).

Content-free words are indicative of writing style, Rockmore says. While two authors might use the same words to describe a similar event, they will use content-free “syntactic glue” to link their words in a different way.

Using the Project Gutenberg digital library, Rockmore’s team analysed 7733 English language works written since 1550, tracking how often and in what context content-free words appeared. As you might expect, they found that writers were strongly influenced by their predecessors.

They also found that as the canon of literature grew, the reach of older works shrank. Authors in the earliest periods wrote in a very similar way to one another, the researchers found, probably because they all read the same small body of literature. But approaching the modern era, when more people were writing and more works were available from many eras and numerous styles, authors’ styles were still very similar to those of their immediate contemporaries. “It’s as if they find dialects in time,” says Alex Bentley of the University of Bristol, UK, who was not involved in the study. “Content is what makes us distinctive, but content-free words put us in different groups.”

That writers should be most influenced by their contemporaries rather than the great works of the past is interesting, Rockmore says, because it challenges the reach of “classic” literature. When it comes to style at least, perhaps we aren’t so strongly influenced by the classics after all.