Book Beginnings on Friday

Posted on November 25, 2011 by Margaret

This morning I finished reading Faulks on Fiction by Sebastian Faulks, a book I’ve been reading slowly for a few weeks (my review coming soon). It’s time to choose another non-fiction book to take its place. It’s got to be a book I can read in small bites and not lose the thread, maybe a biography/autobiography, or a diary, collection of letters, or a history book.

I’ve looked at a few and have decided on this one:

The half-timbered mansion disappeared long ago, and the paved thoroughfare lies buried beneath the dust of centuries. The Great Fire tore the heart out of this corner of Elizabethan London, devouring books, buildings and streets. One of the few things that survived is a small and insignificant-looking map – crinkled, faded, but still bearing the proud name of its owner. (page 1)

This is the beginning of Giles Milton’s about the first English settlement in the New World in the sixteenth century. It’s Big Chief Elizabeth: how England’s Adventurers gambled and won the New World. I’ve read his earlier book Nathaniel’s Nutmeg, which is a fascinating tale of the ‘competition between England and Holland for possession of the spice- producing islands of South-East Asia throughout the 17th century.’

I like the beginning of Big Chief Elizabeth, which within a few words captures the mystery and appeal of history for me. I’m looking forward to discovering more about the map and its owner.

Blurb from the back cover:

Big Chief Elizabeth has it all: gallant English seadogs, coiffured courtiers, exotic locations and lots of fights with pirates, Spaniards and Indians. (Sunday Telegraph)

Plus I’m interested to read Giles Milton’s newest book, Wolfram: the Boy who Went to War.

Book Beginnings on Friday is hosted by Katy at A Few More Pages.

Operation Mincemeat by Ben Macintyre: a Book Review

Posted on October 27, 2011 by Margaret

Subtitled The True Spy Story that Changed the Course of World War II, Operation Mincemeat is about the Allies’ deception plan codenamed Operation Mincemeat in 1943, which underpinned the invasion of Sicily. It was framed around a man who never was.

The success of the Sicilian invasion depended on overwhelming strength, logistics, secrecy and surprise. But it also relied on a wide web of deception, and one deceit in particular: a spectacular con trick dreamed up by a team of spies led by an English lawyer. (page xi)

At first I found this book a little confusing and far too detailed, but as I read on I became absolutely fascinated and amazed at what had actually happened. The plan was to take a dead body, equipped with false documents, deposit it on a beach in Spain, so that it would be passed over to the Germans and divert them from the real target into believing that the preparations to invade Sicily were a bluff.

Operation Mincemeat would feed them both a false real plan, and a false cover plan – which would actually be the real plan (page 58)

The corpse was a Welsh tramp who had committed suicide. His body was clothed in the uniform of an Royal Marine with documents identifying him as Major William Martin and letters about the top-secret Allied invasion plans. This involved creating a fictional character, a whole host of imaginary agents and sub-agents all with their own characteristics and imaginary lives – just as in a novel. The details of the deception were dreamt up by Ewan Montagu, a barrister and Charles Cholmondeley (pronounced Chumley), a flight-lieutenant in the RAF seconded to MI5, the Security Service. Both were enthusiastic readers, which stood them in good stead:

For the task of the spy is not so very different from that of the novellist: to create an imaginary credible world, and then to lure others into it, by words and artifice. (page 62)

The plan was not without its faults and and indeed it contained some potentially fatal flaws, but incredibly it succeeded.

Operation Mincemeat was pure make-believe; and it made Hitler believe something that changed the course of history. (page 307)

This is a book, totally outside my usual range of reading. I wasn’t expecting to enjoy it as much as I did and I think I did enjoy it because it was so far-fetched to be almost like reading a fictional spy story. I marvelled at the ingenuity of the minds of the plans’ originators and the daring it took to carry it out.

Book Notes

Posted on April 1, 2011 by Margaret

I’ve recently finished reading two books:

Climbing the Bookshelves - Shirley Williams’s autobiography
Eden’s Outcasts: the Story of Lousia May Alcott and Her Father by John Matteson

It’s taken me several weeks to read Eden’s Outcasts and at one point I nearly abandoned it because I thought it was too much about Louisa May Alcott’s father. I’m glad I persevered because the second half of the book concentrates much more on Louisa and I realised that the title does convey the subject matter very well as it reveals the relationship between them. Bronson Alcott was a complicated person who appeared to have mellowed as he grew older. Louisa, well known and loved for her children’s books never achieved her ambition to write serious books for mature readers, enduring debilitating illness in her later years.

I learnt a lot from this book about their lives and their relationships with other writers such as Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne. It’s a very detailed book and there is no way I can summarise their lives in a few words and a double biography is even more difficult to deal with. In the final paragraph Matteson sums this up very well:

To the extent that a written page permits knowledge of a different time and departed souls, this book has tried to reveal them. However, as Bronson Alcott learned to his amusement, the life written is never the same as the life lived. Journals and letters tell much. Biographers can sift the sands as they think wisest. But the bonds that two persons share consist also of encouraging words, a reassuring hand on a tired shoulder, fleeting smiles, and soon-forgotten quarrels. These contracts, so indispensable to existence, leave no durable trace. As writers, as reformers, and as inspirations, Bronson and Louisa still exist for us. Yet this existence, on whatever terms we may experience it, is no more than a shadow when measured against the way they existed for each other. (page 428)

Turning to Climbing the Bookshelves by Shirley Williams, I thought an autobiography would maybe include more personal recollections and descriptions of events. It starts off very well with her descriptions of her early childhood – her earliest memory from 1933 when she was three and fell on her head from a swing at the Chelsea Babies’ playground. I was very impressed by her memories of the time she spent in America as a young girl during the Second World War and her self-reliance and independence.

However, much of the book consists of her accounts of her political life, making it very much a political history of Britain, rather than a personal account of her life. There are some personal memories and I particularly liked her descriptions of her fellow politicians – Harold Wilson, Jim Callaghan, Roy Jenkins and so one – very little about Margaret Thatcher and a few pertinent comments about Tony Blair. Having said that she comes over as a very honest, genuine person who cares deeply about being a good politician. And maybe it is more personal than I originally thought because in the last chapter she writes these words:

Being an MP is like being a member of an extended family. You learn to love your family with all its knobbliness, perversity, courage and complexity. You learn respect and build up trust. …

To be a good politician in a democracy you have to care for people and be fascinated by what makes them tick. … The politician whose eyes shift constantly to his watch, or to the apparently most important person in the room, feeds the distrust felt by the electorate. It is a distrust born of being manipulated, conned, even decieved and it is fed by a relentlessly cynical national press. (page 389)

A side effect of reading this book is that I’m going to read her mother’s book, a best seller published in 1933 – Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain. Shirley describes it as

… an autobiography of her wartime experience as a nurse and her personal agony in losing all the young men she most loved … (page 13)

In the preface to Testimony of Youth she wrote:

Testimony of Youth is, I think, the only book about the First World War written by a woman, and indeed a woman whose childhood had been a very sheltered one. It is an autobiography and also an elegy for a generation. For many men and women, it described movingly how they themselves felt.

This looks like a much more personal autobiography.

Weekly Geeks – The books you’ve waited too long to read

Posted on October 31, 2010 by Margaret

This weekend, Weekly Geeks host EH asks about books we have waited too long to read.

Is there a book that has been hanging around your reading pile for far too long before you got to it. A book that probably got packed away until you accidentally got to it or a book that you read a few pages in and never got back to.

There are quite a few books over the last few years that I have started to read and not finished. I don’t mean the ones that I don’t intend to finish. Rather these are books I would like to read all the way through but have not so far got round to it. They are mainly non-fiction and the reason I’ve not finished them is usually that they take more time to read than fiction and so I slot other books in between reading sessions and sometimes just don’t get back to the non-fiction.

These are some of them – all books I do intend to finish:

Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man by Claire Tomalin – I stopped reading this partway in as I decided I needed to read more of Hardy’s own books before going further. I’ve read a few more of his books, but have never got back to this biography.
A Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela – I must have read about half of this book before I stopped. It was so long ago that I can’t remember why I didn’t finish it.
A Dead Language by Peter Rushforth – this one is fiction. I loved Pinkerton’s Sister by Rushforth. I found A Dead Language hard-going, but I will get back to it one day. The downside is that I’ll have to start it again as I’ve forgotten who all the characters are.
1599: a Year in the Life of William Shakespeare by James Shapiro – I can’t remember any specific reason I haven’t finished this book.
Body Parts: Essays on Life Writing by Hermione Lee. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed each essay that I’ve read so far. As the essays are self-contained there is no problem in reading it in instalments.

Flodden: the Scottish Invasion of Henry VIII’s England

Posted on October 4, 2010 by Margaret

Flodden by Niall Barr is an account of the Battle of Flodden between the English and the Scots in 1513, which challenges the traditional view of the battle. In 1512 James IV, Henry VIII’s brother-in-law, had renewed the ‘Auld Alliance’ with France, promising mutual support should England attack either country. So when Henry made war on France, James had no alternative and he crossed the River Tweed into England with about 40,000 men.

The weather that September was much like it’s been this September – wet and stormy. The battle field was at Branxton, then just a few houses surrounded by bog and woodland. The two armies came face to face separated by a small valley with the English at the bottom of Flodden Hill. The Scots attacked down the hill and were chopped to pieces by the English and James himself was killed. Barr shows how, contrary to the traditional view, James led a well organised and prepared army and considers that it was using new, continental weapons and military tactics in the wrong situation that led to his defeat.

There is a bit too much detail about the weapons used and military history for my liking and I scan read the chapters dealing with that. But the book as a whole gives a real flavour of the times, the diplomacy, the main protagonists and the battle. I found it interesting, maybe because I live in the area where it all took place. I’ve been to the battle field, which today is so peaceful and tranquil, but I could imagine the terrible carnage that took place there nearly 500 years ago.

Map on the notice board in the car park below Flodden Field

Friday Finds – Books and a Bookshop

Posted on July 9, 2010 by Margaret

New-to-me books this week are Naming the Bones by Louise Welsh, and The Sisters who would be Queen by Leanda de Lisle.

Louise Welsh is the author of The Cutting Room, a dark mystery, which I read several years ago and thought was good, if rather scary. Naming the Bones looks promising:

Knee-deep in the mud of an ancient burial ground, a winter storm raging around him, and at least one person intent on his death: how did Murray Watson end up here? (Blurb on the back cover)

Dipping into the book I see that the story moves from Edinborough and Glaslow to the Isle of Lismore a small island off the west coast of Scotland. I’m tempted to start reading at once and as I’m nearing the end of Barbara Vine’s A Dark Adapted Eye I think this will be my next book.

I seem to be drawn these last few months to the Tudor period. Having read fiction - Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (Thomas Cromwell) and currently reading Portrait of an Unknown Woman (Thomas More’s family) I also bought a book of non-fiction, namely The Sisters who would be Queen: the tragedy of Mary, Katherine and Lady Jane Grey by Leanda de Lisle. This is the story of the tumultuous lives of Lady Jane Grey, known as the “Nine-Day Queen”, and her sisters. I nearly didn’t buy this book as I don’t like pictures of headless women on book covers! But the blurb by Julian Fellowes attracted my attention:

An enthralling story of tyranny and betrayal … meticulous history that reads like a bestselling novel.

I bought these books in a real bookshop – Main Street Books in St Boswell’s. I first found out about this shop from Cornflower’s blog (where she has lovely photos of the shop) and it is a real find – not only books, but a cafe and gift shop and they also sell antiques. We’d been to Melrose and stopped in Main Street Books on the way home (just a short detour), where we browsed and had lunch.

Friday Finds is hosted by Should Be Reading.

The Perfect Summer by Juliet Nicolson

Posted on October 29, 2009 by Margaret

The Perfect Summer: Dancing into Shadow in 1911 by Juliet Nicolson is a fascinating look at life in Britain during the summer of George V’s Coronation year, 1911.

When I finished reading this book I decided that the summer of 1911 was not “the perfect summer”. It was one of the hottest years of the twentieth century, making life most uncomfortable at a time when most people had no means of getting out of the sweltering heat. Even a trip to the seaside for working class people meant they donned their Sunday best clothes and spent the day standing because they couldn’t afford to hire deck chairs!

Men rarely removed their hats, and the poorer female holidaymaker, possessing neither a special holiday outfit nor light-weight summer clothes, was constrained by the weight of her ‘Sunday best’ – since women dressed for a holiday as they did for a strike – from scrambling over the rocks. These women made an arresting sight against the backdrop of a sparkling blue sea in their artificial-flower-laden hats, their long black skirts brushing the sand as they stood, stifling, in their sturdy black shoes. (page 224)

It was also a summer of discontent as the country was almost brought to a standstill by industrial strikes and the enormous gap between the privileged and the poor was becoming more and more obvious.

Focussing on just the period from May to September this book covers a wide spectrum – from King George’s accession to the throne, Queen Mary’s anxiety over the Coronation and worries about their visit to India (what could she wear?) to debutantes, politicians, poets, factory workers, writers, and women trade unionists. There is little about the suffragettes – they agreed a summer truce for the Coronation. With the benefit of hindsight the threat of the First World War is evident, with the new German warship Panther on its way to Morroco, feared by Winston Churchill (then Home Secretary) and Sir Edward Grey (Foreign Secretary) to be an excuse for territorial aggression.

For me this book was at its best in describing the minutiae of everyday life of both the rich and the poor. One character that sticks in my mind is Eric Horne, a butler. He kept a secret diary:

Not quite the faithful servant he was assumed to be by the deluded individuals who employed him, Eric’s was an increasingly cynical view of the changing world. Some of the noblemen and women he worked for had what seemed to him ‘a kink in the brain’. … Eric bridged the gap between the servers and the served. The evolving memoir, written in his idiosyncratic and uncorrected style, recorded what life was like not only in his pantry below-stairs but in the drawing rooms and bedrooms above. It was incriminating and explosive stuff. Eric knew too much; in fact he knew the truth. (page 149)

He later published two volumes of his memoirs: What the Butler Winked At (1923) and More Winks (1932).

I borrowed The Perfect Summer from the library but there is so much in it that I think I may buy a copy for myself. All the time I was reading it I was thinking this was the world when my grandmother was a young woman and I wondered what it was like for her – how she felt and how much she knew of the national events, living as she did in Wales. The Royal Pageant was at Caernarfon Castle on 13 July that year for the Investiture of the Prince of Wales where ten thousand people attended – I doubt very much she was there!

There is a helpful Dramatis Personnae, a bibliography and useful index. Although the bibliography is extensive, I think I prefer non-fiction to have footnotes, even though they can be a bit distracting, because I like to see the source of the information.

Flodden Field

Posted on September 15, 2009 by Margaret

Whilst searching for a house D and I were near Flodden Field, so of course we just had to go and have a look at it. Flodden Field is near the village of Branxton in Northumberland, a peaceful setting now, but nearly five hundred years ago this was the site of the most famous battles in the borders between the kings of England and Scotland – the Battle of Flodden Field in 1513. It was disastrous for the Scots when their King, James IV was killed.

An information board in the little car park next to the field gives many details of the battle.

The field is on a hill overlooking Branxton and there is a steep climb up to the monument. In 1513 the battleground was an undrained boggy morass in which the Scottish troops were knee-deep in mud with more troops coming down the hill behind them, whereas the English troops were on the higher ground with room to manoeuvre.

At the top of the hill there is a monument and wonderful views of the surrounding countryside.

Below is the village of Branxton.

The wider scene

FF view from monument2

I haven’t read Flodden 1513: Scotland’s Greatest Defeat Campaign by John Sadler and Stephen Walsh but I think it looks interesting. If you look at it on Amazon you can read a few pages of the opening chapter: The Origins of the Campaign.

Seventy Years Ago Today …

Posted on September 3, 2009 by Margaret

… Neville Chamberlain broadcast that Britain was at war with Germany. In Wartime Britain 1939-1945 by Juliet Gardiner she quotes from the diary of a twenty-four year old civil servant living in Croydon on 3 September 1939:

The sun is shining, the garden never looked lovelier – everything is in bloom. Tiger [the cat] lies there in the sun; all looks happy and peaceful. But it’s not. War has broken out between England and Germany, beastly, beastly war.

Winston Churchill’s frame of mind was rather different. He wrote in his memoirs, The Second World War Volume 1: The Gathering Storm, that he knew if war came a major burden would fall on him. On 3 September 1939 he wrote

As I sat in my place [in the House of Commons], listening to the speeches, a very strong sense of calm came over me, after the intense passions and excitements of the last few days. I felt a serenity of mind and was conscious of a kind of uplifted detachment from human and personal affairs. The glory of Old England, peace-loving and ill-prepared as she was, but instant and fearless at the call of honour, thrilled my being and seemed to lift our fate to those spheres far removed from earthly facts and physical sensation.

And so it began …

The Sunday Salon – After the Victorians

Posted on July 12, 2009 by Margaret

In my last Sunday Salon post I mentioned I was reading about the 1920s in A N Wilson’s After the Victorians. This week I’ve moved on to the 1930s – today’s chapter is called “Puzzles and Pastorals” and I enjoyed it immensely.

I like word puzzles and most days do one or more Alphapuzzles, also known as Codewords. I also like doing crosswords, although I’m not very good at the cryptic puzzles. The Times Crossword became a regular feature dating from 1930. It soon became competitive with letters to the editor boasting of how quickly the writers could solve the puzzle, culminating in the account of M R James, the Provost of Eton and ghost-story writer who could complete the crossword in the time it took to boil an egg ‘and he hates a hard-boiled egg.’ The editorial crowed about the evidence that ‘the best brains in the country’ were viying with each other to complete the puzzle whilst Britain was lagging behind in solving the unemployment crisis or reviving British Industry.

From crosswords Wilson then moves on to discussing the ‘whodunnit mystery story’, another product involving solving a puzzle. Amongst others, he mentions Ellery Queen, Agatha Christie, and Ronald Knox who wrote six detective stories between 1926 and 1937. The appeal of the mystery genre during the 1930s is not simple to explain as it falls into many different categories – the ‘locked room’ mysteries, books based on deductive reasoning, mysteries that rely more on their settings than on plots and the enclosed world of the country house. Wilson sums up the Thirties in this little paragraph:

The 1930s turn into a murder story on a grand scale. Old scores will be settled. Old injustices avenged, new resentments expressed in murder. Of the dominant figures who cross the pages in the early years – Hitler, Laval, Mussolini, Ribbentrop – very many, like characters in Cluedo were headed for violent ends.

In writers of the 1930s a sense of ’Englishness’ developed – such as in the mysteries of John Dickson Carr, ‘Michael Innes’, Somerset Maugham and John Cowper Powys. Reading about these writers makes me want to read their books, particularly the four Wessex novels of Powys – Wolf Solent, A Glastonbury Romance, Maiden Castle, Weymouth Sands and his Autobiography .

Wilson ends this chapter by describing the work of Stanley Spencer, whose return to his childhood village of Cookham, is emblematic of Britain’s retreat into itself after the First World War. Wilson writes:

British Elegy, and most specifically English Elegy, is the overriding note of serious art and literature for the next twenty years. So much had been lost and destroyed in the war that it is as though the creative intelligences in Britain wanted to recover Eden, not to chart new lands.

I’ve passed the Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham many times but I’ve never gone in; I’ve only seen reproductions of his work. Stanley Spencer’s paintings are according to Wilson ‘stylishly executed landscapes of a highly traditional style’. There are religious pictures – the villagers of Cookham experiencing a General Resurrection in Cookham Churchyard, scenes of life and death during the war, and his lowlife paintings of ‘overweight women and randy, bewildered little men like himself.’ Maybe next time I’m in Cookham I’ll stop and have a look for myself.

Wilson concludes that in all this Britain turned its back on the rest of the world and pulled up the shutters:

The troops had come back from the war. The politicians and the businessmen had conned everyone into thinking that life would be different. It wasn’t a land fit for heroes. It was still as unfair and as class-riven and silly as before, simply less rich, and less certain of itself.

There is so much in this book – more than a history of the period, encompassing literature, politics, economics and culture, ranging from ephemera to character sketches and anecdotes. It’s entertaining – popular history rather than the standard historical account of events.