Byron Rogers | The Spectator columnists & writers

When Mussolini came knocking on Hollywood’s door

John Ford was the first of the five famous Hollywood film directors to go to war. He went expecting to get given a sword, which he could then brandish. After all, he knew about swords; they were things that came out of props baskets in his cavalry epics, but that was in films. Unfortunately in real life he found he had an arthritic thumb, which meant that having once drawn one he needed help to put the sword back in its scabbard. It had not been like that in his films, where he had only to say the word for anything to happen. There he could put a coal mine on top of a mountain in How Green Was My Valley, and farm the desert in his Westerns. But the first film he made in the navy was real life with a vengeance. He obediently made a 26-minute short, with close-ups, on the dangers of VD for sailors, watched it through and threw up.

The man who shared a bed with D.H. Lawrence and Dylan Thomas (though not together)

Rhys Davies was a Welsh writer in English who lived most of his life in London, that Tir na nÓg in the east, the place of eternal youth and beauty to which in the mid-20th century many Welsh writers in English, adulterers and homosexuals ran. There were few chapels in London, but many bedsits. Also publishers. And guardsmen. Here Davies followed a career unique by Welsh standards, for he did not sell milk or teach. For 50 years he just wrote. As Meic Stephens, in the first full-length biography of this remarkable son of a grocer in the industrial valleys, records with awe, Davies wrote over 100 short stories, 20 novels, three novellas, two topographical books (yes, about Wales), two plays and an autobiography in which, ‘obliquely’, for there had been rather too many guardsmen, he set down ‘the little he wanted the world to know about him’.

What happens when journalists take sides

This is a curious book. Its title and the name of its publisher suggest that it is going to be an indictment by two journalists of their old profession. These two are now safe and snug in higher education: Stewart Purvis, a former chief executive of ITN, became Professor of Television Journalism at City University in London, where Jeff Hulbert is an honorary research fellow. For here the roll-call begins: up first is W.N. Ewer, who between the wars wrote for the Daily Herald and is mysteriously thought to have been responsible for the lines ‘How odd/ Of God/To choose/The Jews’, though Purvis and Hulbert do not mention this. Instead, they assemble details of an even more mysterious career, first as a man who ran a Soviet spy network, then became so rabidly anti-communist he was capable of referring to Stalin as a latter-day Genghis Khan.

Boliver, by Marie Arana - review

So here we go again into a heart of darkness: the humbug and horror which is the history of Spanish South America ever since Columbus landed on the island of Hispaniola. Now modern Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the island’s population had within a few decades of Columbus’ arrival, through genocide and disease, been reduced to barely 200. And that was just the beginning. No Christian nation has ever trailed such a shameful colonial past, which is why the colonists must feel the need to assemble what they see as its glories. This, the 2,684th book about Simon Bolívar, is subtitled ‘The Epic Life of the Man Who Liberated South America’. But liberated it for whom? By the beginning of the 19th century only a third of the original inhabitants of the sub-continent, the pure-blooded Indians, had survived.

Michael Wharton: A Peter Simple life

He was fascinated by the Welsh, whom he listed, along with walking and gardening, as one of his three recreations in Who’s Who, something that alarmed those few Welshmen he actually met. One of them, the political columnist Alan Watkins, who had been sturdily on the run from his race for most of his working life, said of him, ‘He’s mad, the man’s quite mad.’ The journalist Peter Simple, who wrote a column for almost 50 years in the Daily Telegraph and the centenary of whose birth is on 19 April, was almost as fascinated by the Tibetans, a people, he told me, who had forever solved the problems of political philosophy by reducing the subject to two propositions, ‘It is the custom’ or ‘It is not the custom’. That he managed to find himself loose, and employed, in the 20th century, which he survived by dying in 2006, is one of the mysteries of our time.

Part of the pantheon

Henry Fonda once said that he had never had any ambition to be a film star. But then how could a man want to become someone who came out of nowhere, had no past, so that even the names we know them by were mostly not ones bestowed on them by their parents and the registrar? An old college football star (John Wayne), a virtual tramp who had served time on a chain gang (Robert Mitchum), circus acrobats (Cary Grant and Burt Lancaster)— each had served no professional apprenticeship, but had become more famous than men had ever been, their subsequent careers a source of wonder not just to the world but to themselves. They were the Hollywood film stars of the mid- 20th century, not actors — actors will come again — but stars.

Now we know what happened

First there was Sir Walter Raleigh, who after ‘getting one of the Mayds of Honour up against a tree in a Wood’ went on to write The Historie of the World. Then there was H.G.Wells, who cut a swathe through the high-minded girl intellectuals of the early 20th century, a new species, before writing The Outline of History. World history and women may sound an odd pairing, but they seem to go together. For now there is Andrew Marr, who, after apologising in the papers for his misdemeanours, has written A History of the World. And when you have stopped sniggering consider this: it is a wonderful book. Forget the series that accompanies it, with the inevitable gory re-enactments on which television insists; also Alexander the Great astride Bucephalus, his stirrups flashing in the sunlight, though it would be 1,000 years before these reached Macedonia.

More vindictive than merry

At first I thought this was going to be a terrible book. It starts like a Hollywood B-movie Western on which Ingmar Bergman has done a quick rewrite. This, for example, is how the authors convey the simple fact that Oliver Cromwell died on 3 September 1658: ‘Death finally caught up with Oliver Cromwell on a muggy summer afternoon in 1658.’ All it needs is the dusty main street of the frontier town with two men, one all in black, facing each other against the sky, with one of Dmitri Tiomkin’s lush orchestral soundtracks gulping away in the background. Another death — that of Charles I by execution on 29 January 1649 in Whitehall: carpenters are putting the finishing touches to his scaffold and, according to the authors, the sound awakens the King.

Out of sight, out of mind

Arthur Newton and Peter Gavuzzi, long-distance interwar runners, are two of the most extraordinary British athletes. They are also the most forgotten. This is because the distances they favoured were too long to be accommodated by any athletics event: to them a marathon would have been a mere warm-up jog, their distances were 100 miles, and, in one case, a run across the whole of the United States, when they completed 40 miles a day for 80 consecutive days. Mark Whitaker has thus set out to write a poignant account of unrecognised achievement. The only thing is, in the process he has written the most bizarre and bleakly humorous book there will probably ever appear on athletics.First there was Arthur, a mild-looking bespectacled bachelor with the sort of moustache favoured by some English murderers in the 1930s.

More sinned against than sinning

When I saw the title of this book, then read that it only covered the period 1600-1800 I hoped this would be a riot of comedy, something along the lines of the most wonderful sentence in the English language. This is in Havelock Ellis’s Psychology of Sex and concerns a discovery made by the doctor Realdus Columbus: in 1593, a century after his namesake discovered the New World, this great man claimed to have discovered the clitoris. But no, there is no comedy, apart from the doings of one Frances, Lady Purbeck, who in 1635, with the son of the Earl of Suffolk, lived happily and ‘adulterously’ in what the author calls ‘the depths of Shropshire’. Unfortunately the couple for some reason decided to visit London, where the prim little meddler Charles I, alerting the Archbishop of Canterbury, got them slapped in gaol.

Nobody turns up

This is not a book likely to figure in the lists of the reading circles of Home Counties England. There is for a start the little problem of a title, which on the spine is How to Disappear but then itself does, for the centre of its frontispiece is A Memoir for Misfits. A dedication follows, ‘To my old friend Pedro Friedeberg whom I’ve never met’. Just three pages in, and every fuse in the brains of the respectable matrons who meet to talk about books will have blown over the Bristol Cream. And that is before they have even started reading.What about? Oh, snobbery and sodomy, erections and drugs, you know the sort of thing, and, inevitably, faded hotels in faded seaside resorts in various parts of the world, all threaded together on quests for three people undertaken by the author who, like Alice, sees them disappear like the White Rabbit.

Scenes from the Mad Hatter’s tea party

I only ever heard my mother admit twice to fancying other men. One, remarkably, was Saddam Hussein, the other was Richard Burton, and of each she said, ‘He’s a good-looking old man.’ She said this the way only a Welsh Baptist matron could: grimly, and because she was secure in the knowledge that she was not likely to meet either in chapel or on the streets of Carmarthen. Richard Burton, once of Port Talbot, later of the Dorchester Hotel, was cat-nip to women. He had a face ravaged by acne and his feet smelt, but he managed to sleep with the most beautiful leading ladies of his time, something his latest biographer quotes Stanley Baker, his fellow thespian and Welshman, as saying was ‘absolutely essential’ for an actor.

A world of her own

This book, written by someone whose husband was for three years prime minister of Britain, is impossible to review. Yes, it is dull, but it is so triumphantly, so ineffably, dull it enters a breezy little monochrome world of its own. There is no characterisation, for no value judgments are passed, except those on Mrs Brown’s husband, who is portrayed as such a force for good he is virtually an extra-terrestrial being intervening in the affairs of men. As for the rest they are ‘charming’ or ‘lovely’.This is Mrs Brown showing HRH Prince Andrew, as she calls him, round Chequers: Without thinking, I open the drawer that holds the wax death mask of Oliver Cromwell. There is a bit of a collective gasp, and I suddenly realise that this might not have been the most diplomatically sensitive gesture on my part: showing the face of the Great Protector and signer of King Charles’s death warrant to a member of the Royal Family.

Nowhere becomes somewhere

There have been quite a few anthologies of British eccentricity. Usually they are roll-calls of the lunatic: a sought-after heiress so snobbish she finally gave her hand in marriage to a man who had managed to convince her he was the Emperor of China; a miser so mean he would sit on fish until he considered them cooked; a man so addicted to cobnuts he would, after any long coach journey, be up to his knees in their shells. Men who refused to get into a bath, others who refused to get out of one, or were so quarrelsome they could spot an insult at 100 yards, others who so loved animals they would bath owls (which died), or founded their own religions so they could copulate with the faithful on the high altar (though I gather this was an ambition of the novelist Graham Greene).

Laughter from the Gallery

This is an amiable book. The parliamentary sketchwriter Simon Hoggart, also the wine correspondent of this magazine, for which he drinks as selflessly as Zorba the Greek, has set out to record anecdotes that have amused and appalled him in the course of his long professional life. He also throws in some, mainly Jewish, jokes whenever the mood takes him, so at times this reads like one of those gag books that professional comedians lose, then loudly appeal in the press for the return of, but it is none the worse for that. This is a book you are meant to read, put down, read, and put down. It is very readable.But one thing it isn’t is an autobiography. Hoggart, on whose own life these stories and personalities are threaded, is little more than a shadowy, often disapproving presence as he watches safely from behind rocks (in his case the Parliamentary Press Gallery) the public figures he has been obliged to write about.

Mountain sheep aren’t sweeter

Anyone who can speak Welsh is going to get a lot of fun from this book. Antony Woodward buys a six-acre smallholding 1200 feet up a mountain near Crickhowell in Wales where he sets about trying to fulfill his dream of creating what may be the highest garden in Britain. The smallholding is called Tair Ffynnon, which, he informs his readers, means Four Wells. Ooops. For this is where the Welsh will start to snigger. Part of his mad project on the mountain is the creation of a pond, which involves diverting water from his four wells into this. Only he has, of course, first to locate them, which proves difficult. Very difficult. And even now an increasingly frantic Woodward may be up there in the clouds trying to locate his lost fourth well.

Holy smoke | 22 May 2010

I have seen the last of the things that are gone, brooded the poet Padraic Colum. But then so have we all. We have seen them clustered outside the plate-glass doors of offices or under the flapping canvas awnings ouside pubs, these last irreconcilables inhaling in the wind and rain. And the crazy thing is that they are acquiring a tattered dignity, which presumably was the last thing the authorities and the doctors thought would result when they got their ban on smoking in enclosed public spaces. But what happens when their ranks thin, when eventually just one is left, as the last old Jacobite was left in some Paris café? Will our descendants need footnotes to appreciate the touching little human drama of the night Princess Margaret stubbed her fag out in the Papal Nuncio’s steak? Will they puzzle over the post-coital smoke (which the American columnist Florence King said was the thing she missed most about sex), or the cigarette denied a Texas prisoner as his last request before execution, as this was considered bad for his health? Will they just accept that or see it as the blackest of black humour? The young already need glossaries to understand coffin nails and gaspers; they need to have the kindness of Woodbine Willy explained, the vicar who moved through the Trenches distributing fags; and as for jokes involving the slogans ‘cool as a mountain stream’ or ‘You’re never alone with a Strand’, a campaign which failed as punters actually came to associate the brand with loneliness, they just look on blankly.

The stuff of legend

This book could have been a classic. It starts as an account of the author’s family, no better, no worse than many such; but then, amongst the grandparents and the uncles, one figure starts to shoulder his way through the rout of characters, slowly at first, but then, perhaps two thirds of the way through, you realise he is dominating everything. Macdonald Hastings, the author’s father, is one of the great comic, and tragic, figures of our time.Without him, the book would have been Henry IV, Parts I and II without Falstaff, a chronicle of events and people doing extraordinary things. With him, the writing quickens, the perception deepens, and you really begin to care about this fascinating, formidable, totally absurd man.

Method in his madness

The car manufacturer Henry Ford dominates this remarkable book, managing, like Falstaff, to be its tragic hero, villain, and comic relief all at the same time. A gaunt, pacing figure, he conducted interviews while standing, believed in the values of small Main Street America (though his methods of industrial mass production destroyed these), and in pacifism, fitting out a ship to sail to Europe in an attempt to stop the Great War (though later he made billions out of armaments, and had machine-guns mounted on his factories while his paid thugs shot down hunger-marchers). He believed in many things, in the soy bean, wholemeal bread and unpolished rice; he hated even more, among them booze, Jews, dairy products (he considered cows to be the most inefficient machines on earth) and trade unions.

Racists, pigs and hysterics

I cannot remember getting so much pleasure from a book. It is not just its beauty, the handmade paper, the quarter leather, the engraving of the Rhaeadr Falls cut in purple into the cover cloth of something the size of an atlas. These are accidental details (as, I note bemusedly, is the fact that it costs £300 more than the current value of my car). For this, quite simply, is the funniest book I have read in years. Its godfather seems to have been Napoleon, whose wars sealed Europe off to the Romantics. In other words, he deprived them of their fixes of the Sublime, the Picturesque, the Prospects of Infinity; the Emperor deprived them of mountains. So where were they to go? ‘Scotland,’ Dr Tegai Hughes observes in an introduction remarkable for its dry humour, ‘might be more familiar and enticing, but Wales was a good deal more accessible.

The myth survived

You may find this book irritating. A complex exposition of 2,000 years of history, it is intended for the general reader, whoever he is (a general reader would surely not attempt it), so its source material is not identified but tidied away into long footnotes, presumably on the principle of pas devant la bonne. Thus the 12th-century historian William of Newburgh is introduced in the main text only as ‘a crusty old scholar’, and the family of Geoffrey of Monmouth as ‘the Monmouths’. All right, so Simon Young thinks he knows his readership. Yet he has this for an epigraph, ‘Ac nyt oed uawr yna y weilgi : y ueis yd aeth ef’, a sentence he attributes, cryptically, to ‘Branwen’. Epigraphs are important; they are what you encounter first, and you look to them for some clue as to what will follow.

But then the snow turned to rain

My daughter when small came home from school one night singing these extraordinary lines: ‘Fortune, my foe, why dost thou frown on me/ And will thy favours never lighter be?’My daughter when small came home from school one night singing these extraordinary lines: ‘Fortune, my foe, why dost thou frown on me/ And will thy favours never lighter be?’ Five hundred years on, this Tudor ballad, said to have been played at hangings, provides the theme, and the structure, of Seasonal Suicide Notes. Only, this being the 21st century after all, it is bawled, not from a cart to Tyburn but from a converted convent in Bromyard, being Roger Lewis’s latest book. Once Professor Lewis had it all, for he was a butcher’s boy from Bedwas, which meant that in Wales he was of the upper class, so his childhood was full of sausages, also cine cameras, puppet theatres and a donkey called Emily.

Horror in the Arctic

Around the middle of the 19th century a new image of horror appeared in Victorian art. In 1864 Edwin Landseer exhibited something the like of which he had never painted before and never would again. In ‘Man Proposes, God Disposes’, the man who had painted ‘Dignity and Impudence’ shows two polar bears, one howling above a human rib-cage, the other tearing at the sails of a ship crushed in the ice, all this in the bleak half light of what passes for a day in the Arctic. The picture is so terrifying that, hanging in the Great Hall of the Royal Holloway College, it is even now covered over when students take their exams.Five years earlier, in his short story ‘The Haunters and the Haunted’, Edward Bulwer-Lytton had described a vision of the fate awaiting his demonic villain, a man who, like Cliff Richard, had arrested the processes of ageing.

Instead of the poem

On this book’s title page its publishers enlarge on Peter Ackroyd’s ‘retelling’: his book, they declare, is at once a translation and — wait for it — an ‘adaptation’ of Chaucer, and from the beginning, you are made aware of what form this adaptation will take.This is how Chaucer introduces his Prioress in the General Prologue, and it is a moment of quiet, if sly, humour as he sketches the prissy little ladylike ways of this Merle Oberon in a wimple: And Frenssh she spak ful faire and fetisly, After the scole of Stratford atte Bowe, For Frenssh of Parys was to hire unknowe.And you don’t need to be a student of 14th-century English language, or history, to get the joke, or to know whether there was a nunnery at Stratford atte Bowe, wherever Stratford atte Bowe is or was.

The romance of the jungle

It is so sad to read about the Mato Grosso now, at least it is for anyone who, like me, was a boy in the 1950s. When the vast rain forest of the Amazon makes the news at all it is in stories about economic predation, logging and genocide. The Mato Grosso has shrunk and become a victim, which for us was the ultimate in adventure, romance, and horror, with all of it so safely far away.For it had everything: lost cities in the jungle, lost treasures, lost wisdoms, as well as savage tribes which could shrink your head to the size of a cricket-ball, snakes as long as streets, pirana fish that in minutes could whittle you down to your wish-bone, and those other, even more terrifying (if intriguing) fish, whose names we could never remember, which, being very small, could leap out of the Amazon along the arc of your pee and straight up your dick.

Boldly for restoration

Wales, by Simon Jenkins Last year, having been to Scotland, I called on the mother of an old friend. Mrs Molly Jones of Carmarthen, I found to my great surprise, was very enthusiastic about Scotland. It was so unlike Wales, she said. All those castles . . . ‘But Mrs Jones, there are castles at six-mile intervals from where you’re sitting.’ ‘Yes, but they’re so . . . well . . . dilapidated.’The first delightful thing about this gazeteer to what his publishers describe as ‘the best Welsh buildings’ is that Simon Jenkins is quietly, and sometimes not quietly at all, of her persuasion. This is Jenkins on Caernarfon, the best preserved (having had a 19th-century makeover) of all Welsh castles. ‘Most of the interior of the castle now has the familiar form of “ruins in a lawn”, round which visitors tend to wander in a daze.

The mannikins don’t walk

All in the Mind, by Alastair Campbell It was a good idea. You start with a psychiatrist, and not any psychiatrist, but a professor of psychiatry, a man ‘widely viewed as one of the best psychiatrists in the business’, specialising in the treatment of depression; then you give him a caseload of depressives, and not any depressives, but a Balkan rape-victim, an alcoholic English Cabinet Minister, an immigrant forced into prostitution, a young woman hideously scarred by fire, a successful barrister caught out in his adulteries; and you see him as they see him, calm, omniscient, dispensing advice and hope. Then you have him crack up. It was a very good idea.Still there must have been some nervousness on the part of the publishers, for they felt obliged to insist on the dust-jacket, ‘A Novel’.

On a wing and a prayer | 27 August 2008

The Balloon Factory by Alexander Frater This is a curiously enjoyable book. Its structure is very odd for it is basically two books bolted together across 100 years: the first is the high drama of the dawn of powered flight in Britain as young men, and some not so young, fall out of the skies; the second is tea time, as Alexander Frater completes a stately trundle, interrupted by his own flying lessons, around the locations, and nearby hotels, where these events took place, but so few remember that they did. The effect is remarkable, for it puts into historical context the story of flight, seven-eighths of the entry about which in the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica is to do with birds. The whole history of powered flight is in the living memory of some people, only, under skies that are now full of planes, they have forgotten this is so.

All you need to know about Wales

There is a moment in the introduction to this book, when, after the grand statement of its aim ‘to encapsulate a country’s material, natural and cultural essence’, you come on this, amongst the usual thanks being extended to archivists and professors: ‘To Roy Morgan of Mertec Evesham Ltd., Swansea, who kindly loaned the project a laptop computer.’ Just that, but from then on you suspect that this is going to be an encapsulation of a country’s material, natural and cultural essence unlike any other you have ever read.For there in a single sentence you have the Welsh, a people little given to airs (their most popular jibe being ‘Who does he think he is?’, one directed at R. S. Thomas in his youth), or reverence (for Norman kings, at the heads of their armies, one of the most disturbing features of invading Wales was that passers-by engaged them in conversation), also a people, who, because of the scarce resources at their disposal, are used to making do.