BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
A CERTAIN IDEA OF FRANCE THE LIFE OF CHARLES DE GAULLE JULIAN JACKSON Allen Lane, 927pp, £35, Oldie price £22.71 inc p&p
The target of about 30 assassination attempts, Charles de Gaulle was ‘the most revered figure of modern French history – and the most hated… reviled and idealised, loathed and adored, in equal measure’, according to Jackson, a professor of modern French history at Queen Mary, University of London. Given that there have been hundreds of biographies of de Gaulle since the first one appeared in 1941, Richard Vinen, in the Literary Review, wondered if there is there anything new to say. ‘As it turns out, there is,’ he wrote, arguing that Jackson’s book has three great qualities. First, ‘he builds and comments on earlier works’ and often ‘weighs up different accounts of the same incident’; second, he is ‘good on those Englishmen – Churchill, Duff Cooper, Harold Macmillan and others – who were so important to de Gaulle in the Second World War’; and third, ‘this biography succeeds by focusing on de Gaulle’s extraordinary character’. It penetrates to the Charles behind the public persona of de Gaulle, and ‘shows how the flaws of the former (petulance, a raging temper and bouts of almost suicidal depression) went, in a curious way, with the epic achievements of the latter’.
In his review for the Times, Lewis Jones declared the book to be ‘full of fascinating detail and anecdote, not only about politics, but also about de Gaulle’s private life – his arranged marriage to Yvonne Vendroux, for example, and their habit when travelling of picnicking by the side of the road to avoid recognition in restaurants. It is a suitably monumental achievement.’ For Max Hastings in the Sunday
Times, Jackson’s new biography of de Gaulle ‘makes our modern politicians appear pygmies… Jackson cherishes no illusions about his subject’s inconsistencies and limitations, but he leaves not a scintilla of doubt about his greatness. This biography is a triumph, and hugely readable for all its bulk.’
REVOLUTION FRANÇAISE EMMANUEL MACRON AND THE QUEST TO REINVENT A NATION SOPHIE PEDDER Bloomsbury, 297pp, £25, Oldie price £16.48 inc p&p
He has brought the centre-left storming back to the heart of French politics, he took a brand new political party to power in just 13 months, he can hold a handshake for longer than Donald Trump, and he has dreamy hair. But who is Emmanuel Macron really? As Agnès Poirier reported in the Times, ‘most people in France and beyond are still puzzled about who Macron is and what he stands for’. This book may be a start in helping them understand. It is ‘informative without drowning in the minutiae of French politics, quickpaced, witty and elegantly written’.
Macron’s self-belief and determination are part of the picture: here was a man who announced at 16 that he’d marry his schoolteacher 25 years his senior… and did. He enjoyed an elite education and worked as a Rothschilds banker; yet he’s a bookish child of the provincial middle classes. And he has been lucky in his enemies. Writing in the
FT, Jonathan Derbyshire applauded ‘an illuminating book about a highly unusual politician’, saying Pedder, Paris Bureau Chief for the Economist, offers an ‘excellent and lavishly sourced account of Macron’s “quest to reinvent a nation”’ which is all the better for not being blind to its subject’s faults.
Nor was Literary Review’s Jonathan Meades blind to Macron’s faults. ‘Sophie Pedder’s Macron is a complicated gamut of contradictions whose obsessions include being taken for a statesman, spending almost €9,000 a month on a make-up consultant’ [and offering a] ‘cravenly bathetic performance at Johnny Hallyday’s funeral – several minutes of high-octane drivel that caused the insentient to weep and the sentient to wince’. Pedder, come to that, was ‘formidably knowledgeable’ but prone to ‘pitch-perfect journalese and novelettish description’.
ADAM SMITH WHAT HE THOUGHT AND WHY IT MATTERS JESSE NORMAN Allen Lane, 382pp, £25, Oldie price £17.08 inc p&p
Widely acknowledged as the father of modern economics, Adam Smith is quoted and misquoted all over the place – claimed as an ancestor by such diverse figures as Margaret Thatcher, Gordon Brown and Milton Friedman. For some he’s the prophet of devil-take-the-hindmost laissez-
faire capitalism (not a word he ever used; it was minted later); for others a considerate and subtle thinker about human mutuality who’d have been aghast at the monopolistic excesses perpetrated in his name.
Writing with the 2008 crash in the rear-view mirror, the Conservative party in crisis and liberal economics under attack worldwide, the Tory MP Jesse Norman sets out to look afresh at Smith’s life and thinking.
As the Spectator’s Simon Heffer noted, Norman debunks the idea there was ‘a Smith motivated by altruism (as in The Theory of Moral
Sentiments) and a Smith who elevates selfishness and greed ( The
Wealth of Nations). Norman says the two works fit together, and he is right: one is the necessary prelude to the other, not least because it sets out the ground rules of the sort of society in which Smith’s economic inquiries take place.’ Of this ‘well-written, well-argued and intensely thoughtprovoking’ book, Heffer said in conclusion: ‘I hope some of the author’s parliamentary colleagues summon up the moral and intellectual strength to read it.’ Julian Glover, in the Evening
Standard, was likewise enthusiastic about a ‘compelling, original and well-judged exploration of the great thinker’s life and ideas… This would be an impressive book from an academic, which [Norman] once was. It is all the more joyous to see it come from a serving MP and Government minister.’ The book, he said, is not a straight biography. ‘First you learn about the man and what he did. Then you discover more about what he meant and why it matters. At the end you emerge as if from a university course. I now feel I need to revise again, before taking an exam.’
ANTS AMONG ELEPHANTS AN UNTOUCHABLE FAMILY AND THE MAKING OF MODERN INDIA SUJATHA GIDLA Daunt Books, 341pp, £14.99,
Sujatha Gidla grew up in in a slum in Andhra Pradesh, India, as a member of the Dalit, or ‘untouchable’ caste, and what the New York Times’s Michiko Kakutani called her ‘unsentimental, deeply poignant’ memoir gives readers ‘an unsettling and visceral understanding of how discrimination, segregation and stereotypes have endured throughout the second half of the 20th century and today’. Gidla, who moved to America when she was 26, was only then able to see that what she’d regarded as normal life was deeply unjust. In an admiring review in the New
York Review of Books Pankaj Mishra described how Dalits had been more or less invisible when he’d been a child: ‘If any of the students at my schools were Dalits, I did not know – such obliviousness about a hierarchy that benefited me was part of my upper-caste privilege,’ and said that Gidla’s work ‘significantly enriches the new Dalit literature in English... and is outstanding in the intensity and scale of its revelations’.
The FT’S Nilanjana Roy applauded how this ‘gripping, often wrenching memoir’ – which trawls Gidla’s own family for stories – shows how ‘discrimination, exclusion and shaming are normalised, even today, by ritual practices that massage caste distinctions into every aspect of living. These rules governed what Gidla’s family and other untouchables could eat, where and how they could live, what work they would do, whom they could marry, befriend or speak to.’ It is ‘one of the most significant, and haunting, books about India you’ll read’.
BIBI THE TURBULENT LIFE AND TIMES OF BENJAMIN NETANYAHU ANSHEL PFEFFER Hurst, 256pp, £20, Oldie price £18.01 inc p&p
‘Israelis are divided over whether Netanyahu is a bastard or a necessary bastard,’ declared Stephen Daisley in his review for the Spectator. ‘Anshel Pfeffer belongs to the former camp. His new biography… is a forensic character study of Israel’s first native-born prime minister and of the Israel he has birthed across 12 years in power. Pfeffer sees a country that mirrors its leader: flabby, self-satisfied and shirking fundamental moral dilemmas.’ Despite Pfeffer being a columnist for
Haaretz, the left-wing daily, ‘ Bibi is no polemic. It is a work of searing insight that persuades with research rather than rhetoric.’ Although it has ‘the quality of aliveness that makes living history so compelling and reminds us that events, though in hindsight they may appear to, do not come in sweeps but are the consequences of moral choices made by leaders.’
For New York Times reviewer Ian Black, Pfeffer ‘fleshes out a superficially familiar and invariably
‘It is all the more joyous to see the book come from a serving MP’
quotable figure with a wealth of background information and analysis that provide necessary and, of course, often highly critical context’. In his review for the Sunday Times, Josh Glancy found that ‘the Netanyahu who emerges from this book is a bundle of contradictions. The insider who always feels like an outsider. A child of the elites with a populist base. The master of media politics who is also a technophobe. The strongman who doesn’t like fighting wars.’ While Pfeffer is ‘undoubtedly critical of his subject... this book is anything but a caricature. It is a sober and erudite profile of a man who has made himself necessary to his country through sheer force of will.’
THE UNPUNISHED VICE A LIFE OF READING EDMUND WHITE Bloomsbury, 225pp, £18.99, Oldie price £12 inc p&p
Memoirs of lives in books and reading are all the rage at the moment. Edmund White, novelist and man of letters, has now added his own to the pile on the bedside table. Rachel Cooke, reviewing The
Unpunished Vice in the Observer, described the allure of a conversation between book lovers: ‘It is a powerful thing to know that someone likes, perhaps even loves, the same books as you. You share a certain sensibility, and that is abidingly important.’ White, Cook thought, was speaking directly to her in this book, in a tone that ‘quite often resembles the gentle whisper of a sweetheart’. Mark Sanderson in the Evening
Standard, however, was not so smitten. He liked some of the memoirs mentioned by White but ‘the rest is rather dry fare: student guides to Melville, Tolstoy and Cervantes that are only occasionally leavened with asides about his famous friends. Peter Carey is “outrageous”; Joyce Carol Oates “surprisingly competitive”.’
White made no mention of his fellow novelist Jane Smiley – and, in the New York Times, Smiley, after drawing attention to this fact in her opening paragraph, was merciful while thoroughly putting the boot in. ‘When I read the preface, I was annoyed/hurt (you decide) that my own works went unmentioned while those of so many others (Lorrie Moore, Richard Ford) were, but after the introduction, as White writes about his heart attack, subsequent surgery and the days of hallucinations that followed, my attitude softened.’
THE BOOTLE BOY AN UNTIDY LIFE IN NEWS LES HINTON Scribe, 445pp, £20, Oldie price £14.44 inc p&p THE MURDOCH METHOD NOTES ON RUNNING A MEDIA EMPIRE IRWIN STELZER Atlantic, 320pp, £20, Oldie price £13.60 inc p&p
Two books offer rare glimpses into what makes Rupert Murdoch tick. He is the world’s most controversial media baron but Murdoch insiders rarely spill any beans — which is why Hinton and Stelzer survived for decades, Hinton rising from copy boy to CEO of Dow Jones.
According to Daniel Johnson in the Times, Murdoch emerges from Hinton’s revealing memoir as a far bigger man than his critics. ‘At times, he has deserved a kicking,’ Hinton says. However, he considers Murdoch the last and greatest newspaper man. ‘Rupert really did know more about the [newspaper] business than anyone else.’ And he earned the lifelong loyalty of Hinton: ‘For all the occasional anguish, my travels with Rupert were priceless.’ The Dirty Digger and the Bootle Boy made a great team.
In the Daily Mail, James Macmanus pointed out that ‘you can get anything done as long as you don’t care who gets the credit’. Hinton made sure that Murdoch always got the credit. Editors and executives in the Murdoch empire who promoted their own success above his did not last long. Hinton came to understand Murdoch better than those around him, perhaps including his own family. He saw that Murdoch relished being the outsider, the new man in town dismissed by rivals because of age and inexperience. ‘Despite the close relationship between the men, Murdoch is not spared: he could be unfair, capricious and exasperating. This is hardly surprising. The pressures of a global media company do not make for saintly leadership. And Hinton is candid about the brutal firings he himself carried out in the companies he ran in the US.’
Stelzer who has advised Murdoch for 35 years. seeks to identify the ‘Murdoch Method’.
‘It is a method that has created an empire with more than 100,000 employees and annual revenue of $36 billion (in 2017),’ said Stephen Pollard in the Jewish Chronicle… while the caricature Murdoch induces apoplexy in so many minds, the real Murdoch is a man who has done more to democratise news, sport and leisure than any of his opponents.
Take Sky News, which was revolutionary when it started but has transformed how every news organisation operates. Indeed, take Sky itself, which changed the broadcasting landscape, not least in how sport moved from being an occasional treat, confined mainly to
Grandstand, World of Sport and some recorded evening highlights, to full and constant coverage of almost every conceivable sporting activity…
Murdoch might be regarded as the devil incarnate to some, but to anyone with an open mind he is one
‘Les Hinton saw that Murdoch relished being the outsider’
of the most compelling and fascinating figures of our time.
‘One of the causes of the hatred for Murdoch,’ Pollard added, ‘is his role in breaking the print unions in the Wapping dispute. But their corrupt and damaging grip on Fleet Street had to be broken if newspapers were to have a future.
‘Murdoch, in other words, saved not only his own papers but an entire industry. I, for one, am grateful.’
HOUSE OF NUTTER THE REBEL TAILOR OF SAVILE ROW LANCE RICHARDSON Chatto & Windus, 380pp, £25, Oldie price £16.55 inc p&p
Hardy Amies named Tommy Nutter ‘the most exciting tailor on Savile Row in decades’. Assisted by a brilliant cutter, Edward Sexton, he created a signature look that appealed to London’s pop music celebrities of the 1960s: wide shoulders and lapels, boldly flared trousers, and exotic fabrics and combinations of fabrics.
‘ House of Nutter is a tale that is quintessentially of its era, told by a biographer who combines pace and exhaustiveness,’ wrote Anna Murphy in the Times. ‘Tommy, along with his brother David, a photographer who snapped his way through the same worlds of fashion and celebrity, were a pair of blue-collar-boys-made-good in the class crucible of Sixties London.’ But this is ‘also the story of two brothers finding their way out of the closet’. For Anthony Quinn in the
Guardian, Richardson’s ‘lively, affectionate, occasionally breathless book is a double narrative’ of two brothers who were ‘gay, restless, in love with glamour’. While Tommy stayed in London, ‘gregarious but needy’ David ‘decamped to New York at the beginning of the 1970s and became court photographer to Lennon and later to Elton John’. The problem for Tommy was that ‘his dreaminess had always outpaced his business sense… caught between being a star and a Savile Row eminence, he didn’t quite fulfil himself as either’. As Alexander Larman noted in his Observer review, Richardson ‘writes with flair and erudition, making extensive use of interviews with David, and bringing something new to the evocation of an era that might seem overfamiliar and clichéd to many’.
THE ART OF NOT FALLING APART CHRISTINA PATTERSON Atlantic, 344pp, £14.99, Oldie price £11.77 inc p&p
When Christina Patterson was abruptly fired from her job at a newspaper she got angry. What followed was a series of conversations with acquaintances who had suffered similar painful unexpected turns of bad luck. Her perceptive empathy for their hardship made them open up to her. Patterson collected her conversations with them into a book and used them as the scaffolding for her own story about how she stopped herself from falling apart. Liz Jones, in her column in the
Mail on Sunday, recommended the book for anyone who is ‘50 and feeling a failure’. It is a ‘very different kind of self-help book: witty, wise and wonderfully relatable’, said Sarah Hughes in the i. ‘There is an overwhelmingly positive message in the book’
The book contained ‘startling insights’, said one reader on Mumsnet. What Patterson shows the reader is that, in adversity, the art of happiness depends on ‘good friends (friendship needs to be worked at), appreciating small pleasures, love and kindness and finding fulfilling work to finance our real passions’.
Patterson ‘invests her case histories with such intelligent passion and cracking candour’, said Kathryn Hughes in the Mail on Sunday, ‘you feel as if you’re listening to your cleverest, funniest and above all, kindest friend’. For Jackie Annesley in the Sunday Times, there was an overwhelmingly positive message in the book, written by a ‘passionate, funny woman who simply refuses to struggle on. She believes in living.’
The author Robert Harris perceived bravery in her writing; ‘A kind of war reporter’s dispatches from the barricades of modern life.’
THE LIFE OF STUFF A MEMOIR ABOUT THE MESS WE LEAVE BEHIND SUSANNAH WALKER Doubleday, 384pp, £14.99, Oldie price £10.05 inc p&p
When Susannah Walker forced open the door of her estranged and recently deceased mother’s dilapidated house, she found it filled to the brim with rubbish and objects which, as she disentangled the mess, led her to piece together her mother’s story and to begin to make sense of their troubled relationship. As she herself explained in the Telegraph, ‘In writing a book about sorting through my mother’s life and possessions... I’ve had a lot of conversations with friends and acquaintances, and even people I’ve met on the train, about their similar experiences. Almost every single one of them has vowed, like me, not to leave such a burden behind.’ Clover Stroud, author of The Wild
Other, was profoundly moved. Walker ‘addresses big questions about what it means to be both a
mother and a daughter, the power of memory and the devastating loss all of us feel with the passing of time.’ Cathy Rentzenbrink, writing in the
Times, felt that for Susannah Walker, who once worked as a curator, ‘objects speak to her and she likes hearing what they have to say’. Out of the chaos and with her background in history Walker formed a narrative which makes sense of her mother’s disintegrating life and which resolves their broken relationship with a ‘measure of peace’. For Ruth Hogan, author of The Keeper of Lost Things, it was a ‘brave testament to an imperfect but precious relationship.’ Rentzenbrink concluded, ‘No life is ordinary; there is always treasure hidden in the rubbish if we look for it.’
PAUL SIMON THE LIFE ROBERT HILBURN Simon & Schuster, 439pp, £20, Oldie price £12.98 inc p&p
Reviewers of veteran music critic Robert Hilburn’s biography of Paul Simon found the most cacophonous silence in the book emanates from Art Garfunkel. One half of the 20th century’s most celebrated musical duo is conspicuous by his absence. In the
Times, Will Hodginson was unconvinced: ‘Working your way through this exhaustive portrait, you are likely to come to a conclusion: Paul Simon is a really great guy. Not only did this childhood baseball whizz and preternaturally gifted musician write some of the greatest songs of the 20th century, he also contributed to the end of apartheid, did wonders for the environment, treated everyone he worked with very fairly indeed and even spent a lifetime tolerating the whims of that wicked angel-voiced sprite Art Garfunkel.’
In the Spectator, Dylan biographer Clinton Heylin reflected that 78-year-old Hilburn ‘has been obliged to write a biography of a 60-year career with one hand tied behind his back’. He has confined himself to the ‘ “Simon Says” version of events regarding Art, acting at times more like a ghost-writer than a biographer. Paul the put-upon also seems to have succeeded in cowing his first and third wives – only the first of whom Hilburn got to interview – into avoiding some thorny questions.’
On Slate, David Yaffe was disappointed by ‘a prosaic account of success and failure and celebrity and money and accolades and breaking up with Art Garfunkel and having a midlife comeback while dodging charges of colonialism and, you know, being short and wishing he had more hair’.
‘One half of the musical duo is conspicuous by his absence’