In Writing Home (Faber #163;7.99), Alan Bennett explains why he could never direct a film. He would ask everyone if they possibly wouldn’t mind, if it was really all right with them. He could never bring himself to shout “Action!” This collection of prefaces to plays, journalism and diaries will delight and sustain everyone who has difficulty in shouting “Action!”
He quietly accepts the essentials of modern life (hotel toilet rolls with plaited ends) but is agreeably angry at Thatcher’s jingoism after the Falklands and tabloid intrusions into Russell Harty’s death. He also admits to reading biographies backwards, beginning with the death. “If that takes my fancy, I go through the rest. Childhood seldom interests me at all.”
Even Alan Bennett might find some interest in Michael Rosen’s The Penguin Book of Childhood (Penguin #163;6.99), a treasure trove drawn from bizarre and diverse sources ranging from Ancient Egypt and China to present day news reports and transcripts of children talking. The trick he so successfully pulls off is to make the ancients sound contemporary and the moderns significant.
Socrates, for example, could be moaning today: “Children . . . have execrable manners, flaunt authority . . . no longer rise when their parents or teachers enter the room.” I also liked the 1894 agony aunt in Girl’s Own Paper who was asked by a 12-year-old reader how to tell if a boy loved her. “A rag-doll is the best love for such a silly little girl as you seem to be.”
Older children are witnessed at play in The Oxbridge Conspiracy by Walter Ellis (Penguin #163;6.99). This polemic will delight anyone who believes the country is run by a freemasonry formed in the two universities and will be dismissed by everyone who enjoyed their time there. Like all good polemics, it is partial and sometimes splenetic, but Ellis notes the universities’ increasingly democratic intake. However, his general case seems proven by the howls with which Oxbridge reviewers greeted the original hardback.
The poet Craig Raine gets a mention in The Oxbridge Conspiracy and the paperback of his History: The Home Movie (Penguin #163;6.99) comes decorated with enough praise from the literary in-crowd also to justify William Ellis. It is part biography, part fiction and written in three-line stanzas (300 pages of them). It tells of two families: the Raines (who are psychotherapists, professional boxers, that sort of thing) and the Pasternaks (Raine is married to Pasternak’s niece) and forms an eccentric history of the byways of 20th century history. One to savour, slowly.
A more traditional history of the century (albeit told in a distinctive voice) is Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes (Abacus #163;9.99). Subtitled “The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991”, it views the three phases of this period: the Age of Catastrophes (up till 1945), the Golden Age (25 years of economic growth and social change) followed by “The Landslide”. For, with the demise of communism and the decline or disappearance of the world powers, Hobsbawm sees the century ending in global disorder.
His account is given breadth by his studies of scientific and artistic progress and decline (something not every historian attends to) and, though detailed and lengthy, it is not “difficult”.
Finally, if you really want to frighten yourself or the children, try Hellholes by Brian Bailey (Orion #163;5.99). It offers gruesomely depressing pictures of Newgate, Alcatraz, the Bastille, Spandau, the Maze .. .
