{"id":725,"date":"2018-11-26T14:47:37","date_gmt":"2018-11-26T14:47:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gallerynews.com\/current\/?p=725"},"modified":"2019-01-27T01:47:13","modified_gmt":"2019-01-27T01:47:13","slug":"perused-pleasure-2018-top-5-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gallerynews.com\/current\/perused-pleasure-2018-top-5-books\/","title":{"rendered":"Perused with Pleasure in 2018: My Top 5 Books"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was using my Spectator<\/em>-co-uk digital subscription to search for odds and ends in its wonky archive. What<\/em>, I wondered, did the Speccy have to say about the Angry Young Men<\/em> in the late 1950s? Better yet, what\u00a0did they have on Colin Wilson and his friend, the ever-elusive\u00a0Bill Hopkins?<\/p>\n

Not an awful lot, as it turns out. But I did find a hilarious 1958 column by Bernard Levin,\u00a0talking about end-of-year book-review roundups, and\u00a0how\u00a0preposterous they usually are (or were). Colin and Bill appear only as a kind of punchline; by this point they were rumored to be\u00a0fascist fellow-travelers,\u00a0\u00a0and thus deserving of a sneer and a raspberry from all good-thinking hacks.<\/p>\n

Here’s the actual passage. It gives some idea of where the column is going:<\/p>\n

\n

The Literary Editor suggested that I take half a dozen books that would not normally have been reviewed at all, put them together and write round them a parody of all those dreary pieces that fill the Sunday Times<\/em> and the Observer<\/em> around Christmas-time in which T. S. Eliot says that the best book of the year, as far as he is concerned, was the sixteenth volume of Gschwandkopf’s Geschichte der Norddeutschen Wurstfabriken im Mittelalter<\/em> and Colin Wilson says his favourites were Stuart Holroyd’s Shaw’s Mysticism as Exemplified in ‘You Never Can Tell’<\/em> and Bash ‘Em in the Teeth<\/em>, the new (and as yet unpublished) novel by Bill Hopkins, whoever he may be. I thought this was rather a’ good idea, and said so.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"

Mr Hopkins<\/p><\/div>\n

You’ll notice this also takes a swipe at T.S. Eliot (I see what you did there, Bernard Levin). So Colin Wilson, Bill Hopkins and their\u00a0mate Stuart Holroyd are at least in\u00a0excellent company.<\/p>\n

Cultural bias\u00a0notwithstanding, the rest of Levin’s piece is a scream. One of his unlikely choices for review is a book on Nigerian cookery. Levin\u00a0deadpans that the cookbook\u00a0is “described by [the] publishers as ‘a book for every Nigerian woman’: It is a commonly made claim; but I think in this instance it is fully justified . . .\u00a0“<\/p>\n

The\u00a0real fun\u00a0starts when\u00a0he gets letters from authors and readers who take the\u00a0reviews seriously. One of them is Barbara Cartland, all chuffed and\u00a0fluffed to be praised by\u00a0that nice Mr. Levin.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Mr Wilson<\/p><\/div>\n

I’m put in mind of\u00a0this\u00a01958\u00a0Spectator<\/em> column as I assemble five titles I have read\u00a0<\/span>this year. Half the books I’ve read or thumbed through in 2018 were really wretched,\u00a0in particular those that\u00a0fill\u00a0a specialty\u00a0niche. Books about Harper Lee and To Kill a Mockingbird<\/em> are\u00a0hotter\u00a0than ever,\u00a0with\u00a0each new title even more jejune and clich\u00e9-ridden than the last. Another big\u00a0genre of bad books is what you might call Jewish Paranoia Nonfiction. 2018 brought us Fascism<\/em>, by Madeline Albright (or rather, her ghostwriter), Tailspin<\/em> by Steven Brill, The Suicide of the West<\/em> by Jonah Goldberg, Can It Happen Here?<\/em> by Cass Sunstein, The Corrosion of Conservatism<\/em>, by Max Boot, and\u00a0many, many more, I am certain.\u00a0These are just the ones I actually slogged through on Kindle or deep-skimmed during my visits to Barnes & Noble and the Amazon bookshop.<\/p>\n

Of course\u00a0I’m not going recommend any of the foregoing. And to narrow\u00a0my\u00a0selection, I’m not going to list anything that I’ve previously reviewed or discussed in these enlightened pages.<\/p>\n

And so, in no particular order:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. De Gaulle<\/em>, by Julian Jackson\u00a0<\/em>(2018).\u00a0In most histories of WW2 and the postwar period, Charles De Gaulle is little more than a name\u00a0and\u00a0a (mostly) offstage presence. He sticks his head in briefly during the 1940 Fall of France, when he was junior cabinet member, and then spends most of the next four years sulking in London. But now we cover this familiar ground with the General as the central character, and it’s refreshing and enlightening. He’s not quite as querulous and unpleasant as he’s usually depicted in popular histories . . .\u00a0although he gets pretty close.<\/li>\n
  2. The Spy and the Traitor,<\/em> by Ben Macintyre\u00a0<\/em>(2018).<\/em>\u00a0I loved Macintyre’s book on Kim Philby and his\u00a0circle a few years ago (A Spy Among Friends<\/em>), but I hesitated to look at this one because it’s about a KGB double-agent I’d never heard of, and takes place in the 1970s and 80s, which don’t much interest me. But I am here to report that this book is a real honey, at least as good as the Philby one. It paints a detailed background picture\u00a0of KGB operations during the Cold War’s final blaze, when Yuri Andropov seriously believed Ronald Reagan was\u00a0planning to level Moscow with Pershing II missiles.\u00a0Our main hero is a KGB lifer named Oleg, who rises to the head of the London station\u00a0right about\u00a0the same time that\u2014far away in Langley, Virginia\u2014a CIA officer named Aldrich Ames decides he needs a lot of money. Ames sells a list of CIA\/MI6 assets and double-agents to the Russkies for\u2014one million dollars!\u00a0Shortly afterwards, Oleg is suddenly and mysteriously summoned back to Moscow, where he’s subjected to interrogation, truth serum, and most likely faces eventual torture and death. This book has a happy, but white-knuckle ending: our spook gets smuggled out of the USSR via Finland in the trunk of a car. For years his British friends in Moscow have practiced an escape scenario, against the remote possibility that they’ll have to “exfiltrate” Oleg. The plan involves signaling with candy-bar wrappers, shopping bags, and funny hats; and a dirty disposable baby diaper figures prominently in the escape. If you saw all this in a Hollywood film you\u00a0might sneer at it as hokum. But it’s all true.<\/li>\n
  3. Rendezvous at the Russian Tea Rooms<\/em>, by Paul Willetts (2015). This is the story of Tyler Kent, Anna Wolkoff, Captain Ramsay and the others in the Right Club circle, in the months leading up to their arrests in London in May 1940. It’s strung along in novelistic fashion, which would probably be useful if you were trying to write a screenplay and needed a ready-built straightforward narrative, but I often found the character descriptions\u00a0unconvincing and the “plot” a little contrived (even though, as I say, it’s a true story).\u00a0 I know Willetts has some basic facts wrong, but if I go into them here I’ll bore you to tears and sound like a conspiracy theorist.\u00a0<\/span>I read this in conjunction some other books pertaining to the Kent\/Wolkoff story, just after I’d been reading a lot about Louis-Ferdinand C\u00e9line in the 1930s,\u00a0including his ridiculous\u00a0voyage to Hollywood to retrieve a girlfriend and get a\u00a0movie made\u00a0from his first novel.\u00a0 <\/span>In this book it turns out that Anna Wolkoff\u00a0and\u00a0C\u00e9line were pen-pals (something I’d never come across before) and in fact the latter was planning to visit her on an upcoming trip to London. That trip to London was going to be in April 1940. What with one thing and another, it never came off.\u00a0 <\/span>But it’s delightful to discover that Anna was corresponding with him right around the same time she and her crew were sending coded messages to William Joyce in Berlin.\u00a0 <\/span>Just one big happy family!<\/li>\n
  4. The Fifties<\/em>, by David Halberstam (2018). Highly readable, not-too-breezy dissection of American political, social, and technological history from the latter 1940s to about 1960. This book bears very close comparison with William Manchester’s somewhat similar The Glory and the Dream<\/em> (1973), but Manchester’s book was more concerned with fads, celebrities and nuances of etiquette (e.g., the\u00a0artificial\u00a0familiarity that became de rigueur<\/em> after World War Two, so that you’d address near-total strangers by their Christian names). Halberstam here\u00a0prefers to delve into\u00a0such minutiae as the\u00a0gossip and office politics that surrounded the development of the H-bomb. If that sounds dreary, and sometimes it is, it’s necessary background to the J. Robert Oppenheimer investigation, an early-50s milestone that has always eluded me. Likewise Halberstam is very good at the describing the backwardness of American rocketry and the space program in the 1950s (we had the German rocket scientists, but didn’t do much with them till the Sputnik era).<\/li>\n
  5. Railroaded<\/em>, by Richard White (2011). I was completely oblivious to this book’s existence until this year, but have listened to it now, several times, on Audible. It deals with the real “robber barons” of the post-Civil War era: not oil and steel monopolists, but railway investors who connived endlessly to get Federal money to build western railroads that were completely unneeded, as well as largely unused and often shoddily built.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I was using my Spectator-co-uk digital subscription to search for odds and ends in its wonky archive. What, I wondered, did the Speccy have to say about the Angry Young Men in the late 1950s? Better yet, what\u00a0did they have on Colin Wilson and his friend, the ever-elusive\u00a0Bill Hopkins? Not an awful lot, as it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[174],"tags":[179,177,175,182,176,180,181,183,184,178],"class_list":{"0":"post-725","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-books","7":"tag-angry-young-men","8":"tag-bernard-levin","9":"tag-bill-hopkins","10":"tag-charles-degaulle","11":"tag-colin-wilson","12":"tag-david-halberstam","13":"tag-julian-jackson","14":"tag-paul-willetts","15":"tag-richard-white","16":"tag-the-spectator"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nPerused with Pleasure in 2018: My Top 5 Books - gallerynews.com<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.gallerynews.com\/current\/perused-pleasure-2018-top-5-books\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Perused with Pleasure in 2018: My Top 5 Books - gallerynews.com\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I was using my Spectator-co-uk digital subscription to search for odds and ends in its wonky archive. 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