Egg and Dart

This is a book out of its time. It was planned between the wars as a project for someone who never did much about it before his death in 1952, and was then taken over as a retirement project by James Sutherland. By the time it appeared in 1975 the world had moved on and it celebrated the literary tastes of a previous generation. Only two of the featured authors (Dylan Thomas and Frank O’Connor) were born in the 20th century.

The anecdotes themselves are often chosen for their relevance to literature – not so much its content (how the life might be reflected in the work) but the actual process of production. So we hear of spats with long-forgotten fellow authors, struggles with publishers and the reception of other people’s plays that have sunk without trace. If literary rivalries and the practicalities of authorship are of particular interest to you, you will find much material of interest here. Otherwise, it is rather like being an onlooker at someone else’s party.

An irritating feature of the book is that the sources of the anecdotes are usually only given in endnotes. Anyone with any sort of historical bent will want to know what these sources were and maybe a bit more context for them. Are they contemporary? Are they from published writings or private ones and what was the intended original readership? How reliable is the source? For earlier authors in particular, much of the material seems to be gossipy and unreliable, often of a bawdy nature though hardly likely to raise an eyebrow now. Of course even fictitious anecdotes give insights, if only into the time in which they originated.

This book was crying out for revision as soon as it was published. In fact, rather than revise it, Oxford commissioned The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes which started afresh, included far more recent authors, included more anecdotes that did not relate to literary production and put sources and annotations alongside the anecdotes rather than at the end. Read that instead!

I made a New Year’s resolution for 2008 to read Miles Kington’s column in the Independent four times a week. Sadly, he was dead by the end of January, something which has put me off such resolutions ever since.

Here is a selection of his humorous writings, both verse and prose, English and Franglais. They are needless to say very amusing (the shorter ones more so). Little has dated, though references to things like early-closing days in the earlier columns may baffle younger readers. My criticism of this book is not related to the quality of the material, but to an unevenness in its selection.

I knew Miles’ work through Let’s Parler Franglais! in Punch and later through his Independent columns. He wrote several thousand of the latter over 20 years, which must be about half of his total output. But there are few of them in this collection, mostly accounts of meetings of the United Deities (I’d like to think he’s taking their minutes up there now) and the ‘History of King Tony’. (There is also only one item from his collection Vicarage Allsorts.)

Reading The Best by Miles, you might think that his later work was less funny. Far from it – he was consistently amusing for several days a week, apart from a few columns which made a serious point without using humour. Many of his later columns were not hopelessly tied to then-current events, or to west Wiltshire. I would guess they are less represented because, unlike his earlier work, they were not assembled into anthologies. It’s clear that the compilers have relied on these anthologies for the most part, rather than the original columns.

So I’d suggest to the Independent that it brings out its own Kington anthology, so that this later phase of his output is not neglected. If you own most of Miles Kington’s anthologies already, The Best by Miles will add little, but if not, read and regret his passing.

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Old Street Publishing (2 Oct 2012)
• ISBN-10: 1908699051
• ISBN-13: 978-1908699053

These ‘encounters with the master’s Composing Houses’ are written by an architect and Mahler enthusiast. Our copy was given to some family members while they were standing in a Prom queue.

It’s a popular cliché now that men like sheds, and Gustav Mahler was fortunate enough to have isolated single-roomed buildings constructed near his summer places of residence, in which he could compose at peace. Clarke has examined these three buildings, considering their materials, construction, location and fittings, and relating them to Mahler’s needs and the music that was composed in them.

The most illuminating part of this analysis is that which is informed by an architect’s knowledge and way of thinking (but not too technical), which finds points of interest the casual visitor would miss. The descriptions of the surroundings of the composing houses tend to get bogged down in detail such as the colour of birds’ beaks. And the opening chapter on ‘Genius Loci’ doesn’t really go very deeply into the question of the relationship between a creative artist and a place, but just piles up a list of examples. There has been a lot of work on this relationship recently, and the book might have benefited by collaboration with someone who had studied it closely. Clarke knows Mahler’s works well, but wisely does not try to suggest many precise connexions between details of the music and landscape or events.

The book is illustrated with careful line drawings of the buildings and their details (sometimes with Mahler drawn in too!) and some slightly blurred photographs. There is a rather amusing table at the end, rating each composing house from 1 to 5 according to various criteria such as ‘Light Intensity Inside’, ‘Proximity to Biting Insects during Summers’ (more of a concern for Berg than Mahler, I’d have thought), ‘View of Sky’, ‘Thermal Mass’, ‘User Satisfaction for Mahler’ and so on.

Not having been to any of these houses, I can’t comment on accuracy of detail, though the low-lying mist 15 m above a lake (p. 36) is presumably a misprint.

I’m not a Mahlerian, but if you are interested in his life and work, it’s worth getting hold of this; it’s an easy and short read. There are an accompanying DVD and CD; I don’t have these, but I notice there is a YouTube lecture by the author.

• 60 pages
• Publisher: Oblique Angle Publishing (1 Nov 2006)
• ISBN-10: 0955408008

N.B. This review is of the 1963 second edition of this work. Some of the defects may have been remedied in more recent editions.

I would guess that this was intended as a source-book to go with the ecclesiastical history course for ordinands to the Church of England ministry. This would explain the rather skewed representation of the Church: very little on post-schism Orthodoxy, or Protestantism outside England. (I really do mean England – the Church of Scotland gets a mere two pages.)

The layout is broadly chronological, with thematically related documents of the same period grouped together, though there are sudden jumps of a few centuries. Most are introduced with a brief note about their context (often making it clear what the compiler’s own ecclesiology is), but these presuppose some knowledge of the subject matter and history, presumably supplied in the course the book would accompany. So you are expected to know what ‘Monophysite’ means, as this term is never explained. More confusingly, kings and emperors come and go, without the reader being told where they were king of.

The reader also has to struggle with artificially archaic language in some of the translations. For example the Didache was only discovered in 1873, so the translation of it cannot be earlier than that, but it is still rendered into pseudo-Authorised Version English. And while the original translators of the AV had the advantage of being native speakers of 17th-century English (and stylistic masters of writing it), the same can’t be said of this 19th-century pastiche.

Very few of the documents collected here would make anyone feel glad to be a Christian, and the overall impression is of a preoccupation for declaring those who don’t agree with you to be anathema. The exceptions include some touching early Christian epitaphs, and a more hopeful concluding section dealing with moves towards church unity.

My edition is a 1963 reprint (although I believe it was purchased new in the 1980’s!), so sadly it misses some of the most significant documents of recent Christian history: those of the Second Vatican Council. More recent editions (with additional sections by Chris Maunder) include this and other 20th and 21st century material.

I must confess to not having read this, just flipped through it for 10 minutes or so on a charity book stall, deciding whether to buy. I didn’t, for the following reason:

I’m a Bathonian (by over a decade’s residence) and I looked in vain for any sort of local colour in the book. All I could find were a few casual references to nice Georgian houses. Not even as much as a street name. Now I realise you don’t want to baffle people who don’t know Bath, but it wouldn’t be very hard (say) to mention a character strolling down Milsom St, commenting on the outfits on display in the shop windows. The reader would quickly pick up that this is one of the main central streets, with lots of clothes shops. Or setting a scene in an identifiable nearby village – we do a great line round here in rather absurd double-barrelled names (someone once remarked that they sound like the names of lawyers in American TV mini-series). It wouldn’t be parochial to do this, but would make the story more realistic by linking it to actual locations.

I may be unfair and have missed details of this kind, but one could be forgiven for thinking that Wendy Holden hasn’t actually been to Bath and just knows that it’s a place with pretty and rather grand houses where lots of middle-class people live. Even in a piece of chick-lit, this seems casual and sloppy. When some inventors of fictional places go to great trouble to give them a geography, surely it can’t be asking too much of an author to do the same for a real one?

This is the script for the great movie where film noir came home to central Europe. But don’t think that you will know what it contains, because you’ve seen the film; it’s far from being simply the soundtrack to it. Being a novelist, Greene frequently goes beyond dialogue and gives expansive descriptions of settings and people, which include characterisation, and insights into characters’ thoughts and feelings, as well as purely visual details.

If you haven’t seen the film, go and see it, and don’t read on as there is some plot spoiling ahead.

The script also documents many differences from the eventual dialogue in the film, most famously the insertion in the film of Harry’s famous contrast of the achievements of Italy and Switzerland. (N.B. these aren’t completely accurately reported. For example, although the detail of the French military policeman’s handing Anna her lipstick with a few words as she is taken away under arrest is said to be cut, it does in fact appear in the film.) Some changes serve to tone down; so the description of the state of the child victims in the film is less brutal and less is made of the fight early on. There are changes to the characters which emphasise the Central European location: Anna becomes Czech, not Estonian, and the Romanian Popescu replaces an American, Tyler. Kurtz in the original script was a fake baron, the son of a butcher. And sometimes we can see Greene’s own particular preoccupations more clearly in the script. For example, more attention is paid to Dr Winkel’s collection of Catholic relics then there is in the film.

You can’t of course capture the atmosphere of the film from reading the script (or why bother making a film out of it?) But for those who know the film, the script documents how it came into existence and provides an interpretation.

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This autobiography describes the author’s Edwardian childhood in Wells and Ely (with summer holidays on her mother’s native Guernsey) and adult life in Oxford and Devon before her eventual return to Oxfordshire.

It is also in part a spiritual autobiography. Goudge’s spirituality is rooted not so much in church liturgy (as the daughter of a priest and theologian she was exposed to much of this) but in religious texts both biblical and non-biblical, and in encounters with the natural world and with people around her. She also devotes a chapter to paranormal events experienced by herself, her family and friends.

A third strand is reflections on her development as a writer, and the inspirations for some of her books are described. It is not necessary to know the books to appreciate the autobiography, but a reader who is not sympathetic to the spiritual elements might find it hard going.

She was a favourite writer of mine when I was a teenager and I had a further personal interest, as several of the places in which she lived are well known to me (though in some cases minus the theological colleges which provided her accommodation). An interesting coincidence was that I marked my place with a souvenir bookmark from Buckler’s Hard, not realising it was a favourite place of hers (though not mentioned directly in the book).

• ISBN 0 350 19915 6 (but currently believed to be out of print)

The book begins with a quick summary of Thesiger’s early life before describing travels he made over several years in the late 1940’s in and around Arabia’s Empty Quarter. These were the final years of much that had been a way of life for centuries: totally nomadic tribes, use of camels and traditional boats for most transport – and of slavery. Already, though, oil companies were drawn to the area by domed hills that would bring wealth and sweep most of this away.

Few would be willing to endure the privations that Thesiger experiences and even welcomes (for example, travelling some 400 miles between wells), and the risks which he assures us were posed by hostile tribes. In the introduction, Rory Stewart claims him as an early hippie rather than a late colonialist, but he is very pragmatic and not in search of spiritual enlightenment. You’ll learn a lot about camels from reading this book. And, unlike certain other travel writers, he doesn’t try to make the reader envious of him for having been denied his experiences.

Thesiger was also a fine photographer and the text is illustrated with several photographs of these journeys.

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Classics; Reissue edition (25 Oct 2007)
• ISBN-10: 0141442077
• ISBN-13: 978-0141442075

This was given to me as a student by an evangelically-minded friend. It’s really ‘Issues facing Christians in the mid-1980’s’. I’m aware that more recent editions have appeared, but there’s some interest in seeing what ethical questions and issues were uppermost in those days.

The date of my edition shows through in the contents of chapters on work and unemployment, industrial relations, the nuclear threat and race relations (in which supposed justifications for apartheid are considered). Stott was prescient in also writing about natural resources and the environment at this time.

The author assumes that the reader is also an evangelical Christian, although Catholic theologians of all periods are approvingly quoted. It’s written for the general reader, though the author occasionally forgets this. (What, for example, is the ‘Anabaptist view … of church-state relations’ referred to on p. 13?) Because of the wide range of the book and the limited space for each topic I found that chapters tended to come to an end just as the discussion was getting interesting. I also found myself wanting more of Stott’s illuminating biblical commentary. But the exposition of relevant Bible passages and the main positions on each topic (at least as they were c. 1984) is fairly done and a useful starting point for further investigation.

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Zondervan; Revised edition (November 30, 1984)
• ISBN-10: 0551011580
• ISBN-13: 978-0551011588

Who might enjoy this book most? I found myself occasionally patronised – I don’t need to be told what ‘euphonious’ means – and some expressions, such as ‘all in the same boat’ and ‘against the grain’ surely need no explanation. Perhaps the ideal reader might be a non-native speaker of British English who is amused and puzzled by some of our idioms – though they would need to be warned not to sprinkle their conversation with them, as many are now quaint and dated.

The explanations are not always accurate either as explanations or in their detail. For instance I don’t believe that toasting ‘Good Health’ refers specifically to the London cholera epidemic of the 1840’s, as such toasts are common in many other languages. Turning to my specialist area, the ancient world, I read that the story of Achilles’ heel is told in the Iliad. No, it isn’t; in fact it is not attested until nearly a millennium later, and magical invulnerability is not a part of the Iliad. In the same poem, Achilles’ companion is Patroklos (Patroclus) not Patrocolos. And ‘at bay’ seems to be nothing to do with the bay tree.

Entertaining but not to be relied on!

# Hardcover: 288 pages
# Publisher: Metro Books,London (8 Oct 2004)
# Language English
# ISBN-10: 1843581299
# ISBN-13: 978-1843581291