Autobiography by Bertrand Russell

I actually finished this book almost two months ago, but tackling the review for it was more difficult than I thought it would be. Partly because of the book’s length and scope, but also because it’s tricky to review an autobiography without simply summarising the author’s life. I think I’ve done well enough out of this one, for the most part.

Autobiography by Bertrand Russell

Mathematician, philosopher, social reformer, conscientious objector, writer, lecturer, anti-nuclear protestor — Bertrand Russell’s life is remarkably difficult to summarise in a few words, not least because it spanned nearly a century of constant political and social change. His grandfather was Lord John Russell, later the first Earl Russell, two-time Whig prime minister in the mid-nineteenth century and a son of one of the most well-connected aristocratic families in Britain. His parents, Lord and Lady Amberley, held radical views on atheism, birth control, and other moral values which were not far short of a scandal in the socially conservative late Victorian era. This mixture of orthodox and unorthodox influences formed the background of young Bertrand Russell’s life, and at times appeared to surface in the few scandals he managed to produce alongside his publications and lecture tours.

Russell’s parents died early in his childhood, and he and his older brother Frank were raised at their grandparents’ estate in Richmond Park. Like many well-to-do young men of his age, he was educated at home by a series of tutors, who encouraged his natural aptitude for the study of mathematics. Yet Russell also spent much of his adolescence fighting off depression, worries about his sexual desires and the loss of his religious faith, and suicidal thoughts — indeed, he admits that the thought of not being able to learn more mathematics was one of the few things that kept him from taking his own life. He passed the entrance examinations for Cambridge and began to work on mathematics at Trinity College, soon expanding his work into philosophy and eventually taking a philosophy fellowship at Trinity shortly after he graduated. The connections between mathematics, logic, and philosophy formed the basis of much of Russell’s work for the rest of his life, and his influence appears in the writings of later logicians, mathematicians, and philosophers such as Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Even after he became the third Earl Russell upon the death of his elder brother in the early 1930s, he carried on much as before, though he wryly notes in the autobiography that he found the title occasionally useful for securing hotel rooms. He published numerous essays, articles, and works of short fiction; worked on sweeping surveys of the history of social thought and Western philosophy; and maintained an exhausting lecture circuit. And in 1950, his contributions to ‘humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought’ were considered of sufficient merit to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Apart from his academic career, Russell became more and more involved in political and social causes as he grew older. He was an active participant in the markedly unpopular pacifist and conscientious objection movement during World War I, a cause that alienated him from formerly close friends and colleagues and eventually ended in a six-month stretch of imprisonment in 1918. He was interested in the mechanics of socialism and communism, though he became one of the more strident critics of the Soviet Union, something which did not endear him to other left-leaning associates like Sidney and Beatrice Webb. He was an advocate of women’s suffrage, contraception, sex education, and homosexuality and divorce law reform, all of which feature prominently in the pages of his autobiography — particularly in the sections in which he frankly and unashamedly describes the ups and downs of his various marriages (a total of four, of which three ended in separation and divorce) and occasional affairs with other women. After World War II, he became associated with the world government and nuclear disarmament movements. In 1957, at the age of 85, he served as the first president of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and participated in marches and demonstrations for several years afterwards. Well into his 90s, he worked on his autobiography, and continued to write public letters and editorials almost up until the day of his death in early February 1970, at age 98.

Covering more than 700 pages, Bertrand Russell’s Autobiography is an expansive text that is as much a work of social history as it is an individual’s life story. Each chapter contains a selection of personal letters, notes, and short articles that round out the written recollections. Although Russell writes engagingly of his adventures and travels, and is willing to admit his own faults and failings in retrospect, he does not always come across as an easy person to know or to live with — as a friend and colleague, he could be warm and disapproving, generous and chill, caring and frustrating by turns. Yet the book quite clearly presents the human being behind the careful mathematician, introspective philosopher, and active elder statesman, a life lived fully and as best as anyone might be able to live. In the end, it is unsurprising that Russell would preface the account of his life by saying, ‘This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.‘

Orwell in Spain and Orwell and the Dispossessed (edited by Peter Davison)

A few years ago, Penguin Press released a series of four books that each take one of George Orwell’s works and place it in the context of selected letters, articles, essays written by Orwell which relate to the subject of the book. I’ve split this review of the four books into two parts, with this one focusing on Orwell in Spain and Orwell and the Dispossessed.

Orwell in Spain

The central text in Orwell in Spain is Homage to Catalonia, Orwell’s account of his time as a volunteer soldier in Barcelona and the Catalan area of Spain during the Spanish Civil War. Orwell joined the Independent Labour Party’s contingent, a group of two dozen or so British volunteers who were allied with the Workers’ Part of Marxism Unification (given as POUM, the Spanish-language abbreviation, in the text). Orwell sent several months in the front line and was finally invalided away from the front when he was shot in the neck — the bullet just barely missed his carotid artery, and the only lasting effect of the wound was a paralysis of one of his vocal cords. (People often told him how lucky he was to have survived, but Orwell usually responded by saying something to the effect of how it would have been even luckier not to have been shot in the first place.) Even after being invalided away from the front, Orwell’s troubles were merely beginning. He was very nearly arrested for being part of a militia that had been declared ‘illegal’ by the anti-Franco forces — the Spanish Communist Party was in the sway of the Soviet Union and was attempting to eradicate rival communist and anarchist groups — and he and his wife Eileen (who had accompanied him) had to flee Spain only a few steps ahead of the Spanish police.

The Spanish Civil War is a very confusing period of 20th-century history, and Orwell was writing for an audience which often had only the most general knowledge of what was going on in Spain at the time. But as the letters and articles emphasise, Orwell’s intent in writing Homage to Catalonia was not merely to denounce Franco and the Fascists, but to criticise the Communist forces in Spain for what he saw as their betrayal of the working classes AND to castigate the press (particularly the English leftist press) for its refusal to entertain any possibility that the Spanish Communists and their Soviet allies could be just as guilty of betrayal and deceit as the monarchists and the Fascists. Orwell’s experiences in Spain also had a direct influence on the writing of 1984. On a personal level he was very concerned with the case of Georges Kopp, a fellow soldier and friend who had been imprisoned by the Spanish police, tortured in an attempt to get him to sign a false confession, and subjected to a special type of punishment which involved being locked in a confined space with a horde of large rats. On a literary level, Orwell’s writings on the Spanish Civil War reveal some of the ideas that would later end up in books like 1984 — one example being the famous ‘two and two are five’ equation that would become so crucial to Winston Smith’s fate in that particular book.

Orwell and the Dispossessed

The central story in this collection is Down and Out in Paris and London, a predominantly autobiographical account of Orwell’s time ’slumming it’ as a restaurant dishwasher (plongeur) in Paris and a tramp in London in the mid-1930s. The book is a grim account of a grim life, as Orwell describes in great detail the backbreaking labour and low wages of the staff at a fashionable hotel and his struggles in a small cafe — and includes stomach-turning accounts of the utter filthiness of the kitchens in which he worked. The writings that deal with his time in as a tramp in London and the Home Counties are equally grim, presenting a grinding, depressing life of poverty and homelessness in the capital city that still bears a strong resemblance to conditions that exist today. His criticisms of charitable organisations and city-run lodging houses for the poor and indigent are particularly trenchant, and remain so 70 years later.

Down and Out in Paris and London is a fascinating read in its own right, but this volume also contains some of Orwell’s articles, essays, and reviews on popular subjects of the time. He analysed boys’ school stories (such as the Greyfriairs stories that feature Billy Bunter), compared British detective fiction to American ‘pulp mags’, and examined the political leanings of the serial novels published in women’s magazines. There are also a few essays about Orwell’s other ’slumming journeys’, including one where he joined a group of East End residents who travelled out of London to pick hops for a fortnight and another where he attempted to get himself sentenced to prison for drunk and disorderly conduct. In general, the material collected in Orwell and the Dispossessed focuses on the author’s observations of those who for one reason or another are deprived of choices in their own lives and societies — with subjects as diverse as the poor of India and Morocco, British schoolchildren, and the unfairly persecuted P.G. Wodehouse. And although the theme of this volume is not quite as solid and unified as that of Orwell and Spain, the compilation is a good collection of some of Orwell’s nonfiction writing.

Dare to Be a Daniel by Tony Benn

Been quite a while since my last update — I’m finally back from travelling and I’m still attempting to sort out my research notes from the trip. I’ll start up my reviews once more, and possibly start adding more information about the various directions my research may be taking in the near future.

Dare to Be a Daniel by Tony Benn

Tony Benn is and was a prolific diarist — eight volumes in total, I believe. But a diary can only tell so much, and in this instance Dare to Be a Daniel is less of a diary and more of a series of collected thoughts on his life. Benn divides this particular book into three sections: one where he considers the values that have shaped his religious beliefs, one where he reminisces about his young life and his relationships with his family and his late wife Caroline, and one where he recounts some of his thoughts on political and social themes and connects them to the influence that his family had has on him through the years.

The first two parts of Dare to Be a Daniel are reflective, almost conversational in tone. He sticks to more of a memoir style, though it often has a pace that feels more like a transcript of something said to a live audience. The third section, a group of essays and speeches, have quite a different tone to them. It would be easy to gloss over the ideas he sets out by saying ‘Yes, well, he’s just an unreconstructed Old Labourite who never got over the entirety of the 1980s’. It is true that his particular political opinions come out very strongly in the text: anti-EU (though to be fair, not entirely anti-European), anti-New Labour, anti-WTO and IMF and multinational corporations…and so on, in much the same fashion. But he puts his views forward in such a way that only an exceptionally lazy critic could simply dismiss them offhand without actually wanting to get up and try to refute him point by point.

I suppose that those who do not happen to share Mr Benn’s personal political views are not likely to find Dare to Be a Daniel worthy of reading. That’s much the case for most any politician’s collected writings, really. But Mr Benn’s longstanding place in the history of postwar British politics makes him one of those individuals who ought to be read more widely, in my opinion.

In conclusion, a personal story about this book: When Dare to Be a Daniel first came out, I went to Hatchards during a book signing session to pick up a copy. As I was standing in the queue, Mr Benn was talking with a woman who was browsing nearby, both of them commenting on whatever Tony Blair had been up to most recently. He signed a book without entirely paying attention to it and handed it to his publicist. She looked down at it, blinked, and handed it back to him with an uncertain look on her face. It turned out that instead of signing the book ‘Tony Benn’, he had written ‘Tony Blair‘. Benn made a mock-horrified face at first, but soon started laughing at the mix-up — he even mentioned that he occasionally gets mail forwarded from Number 10 Downing Street that has been addressed to him as ‘Prime Minister Tony Benn’. (Readers of this post will be allowed to make up their own minds about whether that thought is cheering or terrifying.) That said, I collected my copy, got his signature, and carried off my prize. I do wonder what happened to that mis-signed book, though — if I’d had an ounce of sense at the time, I should’ve offered money for it on the spot. It would’ve been quite a collector’s item.

Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books by Maureen Corrigan

I may be able to move back up to three review posts per week fairly soon, depending on how the backlog looks. Right now I have several reviews waiting to go, so it’ll be a matter of spreading them out and pacing them accordingly.

Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books by Maureen Corrigan

Maureen Corrigan, book critic for National Public Radio’s Fresh Air and mystery columnist for the Washington Post, knows the importance of examining and evaluating the books that she has read over the years. Books have been the centre of her life for a number of years now, so perhaps it is only natural that she would write a book that looks at her life as a reader and how certain books and genres have shaped her reading experience and her approach to life. And in Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading, Corrigan attempts to explore her longstanding and complex relationship to the books in her life, from her early childhood favourites to the books she comes back to time and again as a adult. As she says in her oft-quoted introduction: ‘It’s not that I don’t like people. It’s just that when I’m in the company of others –- even my nearest and dearest -– there always comes a moment when I’d rather be reading a book.‘ It’s a sentiment that a number of readers share, certainly.

Quite possibly the best section in the book is her paean to hard-boiled detective novels, a genre that she believes has been overlooked and underappreciated by critics and academics. Corrigan delves into the world of noir, the stories of Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler, and provides some interesting insights into how the traditional detective novel’s perspective on class and society makes it a quintessentially American work of fiction. She also has a few words to say about what she calls the female version of the ‘extreme-adventure story’ — where the gruelling experiences and hardships of a man climbing a mountain or facing death on a battlefield are mirrored by a those of a woman fighting to escape an abusive husband or devoting her energies to caring for an elderly relative on her own. (I’m not quite sure that I agree with all of her thoughts on this subject, but I’m still attempting to figure out where my reservations come from.)

That said, it should be noted that Corrigan’s attempt to describe her passion for books and illustrate the influence of literature on her everyday life becomes increasingly strained the farther away she goes from the books. As the distance from the literary analysis increases, the more her prose starts to drag and the less careful her word choices become. In one section, the term ‘WASP’ — with all its vaguely perjorative connotations and its feel of inverted snobbery — shows up four or five times in about as many pages as Corrigan talks about her Irish-Polish Catholic childhood and heritage. I ended up barely skimming Corrigan’s account of her travels to China to meet and bring back her adopted daughter, and the section in which she recalls her feelings of disenchantment and isolation during graduate school had me biting my lip in exasperation by the end of it. I won’t go quite as far as Corrigan herself does by summing up her book with her suggestion for a one-word negative review if Leave Me Along, I’m Reading — ‘Gladly’ — but I do think that some book-centric memoirs such as Corrigan’s have a tendency to blur the line between the books and the memoirs a little too much for my liking at times.

How to Be a Minister by Gerald Kaufman

In lieu of a rambling, disjointed post about the things that I find wrong or misleading with Jenni Russell’s recent Guardian.co.uk article about the deteriorating relationships between ministers and civil servants, here’s a review of a fairly light-hearted but meaningful book about the difficulties involved in being a member of any particular Government.

How to Be a Minister by Gerald Kaufman

Labour MP Gerald Kaufman (Manchester Gorton) worked as a press advisor to Harold Wilson and later became a junior Minister under Wilson and then under Jim Callaghan. Today, he is probably best known to the general public for his description of the 1983 Labour election manifesto as ‘the longest suicide note in history’. But one of the other things he is known for is his book How to Be a Minister, written and published shortly after Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister. Presumably, Kaufman wanted to write about his experiences as a Minister when his memories (and perhaps his wounds) were still fresh, and that’s essentially what he does — he gives advice on how to be a Minister, drawing on personal experiences and observations of the foibles of the 1970s Labour Governments.

The book’s chapters cover a wide range of Ministerial topics, touching on everything from working with trade unions to running (and not being run by) your Department to not getting in trouble with your Prime Minister. One thing that Kaufman does emphasise — understandably, considering his situation — is the fact that every Minister is an ex-Minister waiting to happen, and that one of the worst things you can do as a Minister is to fall under the impression that you will be in office forever. The entire last chapter of the book is devoted to the tricky task of leaving office gracefully, if you can help it, and how this difficult task can be managed with a minimum of pain and suffering. The book is liberally sprinkled with examples of ‘how to do’ and ‘how not to do’ things as a Minister, and fortunately Kaufman is willing to put up his own failures, as well as his successes, for the readers’ examination.

All in all, How to Be a Minister a nice, quick read, and it’s sitting on my bookshelf with my other ministerial diaries and memoirs as a sort of meta-piece about life in government. Kaufman is able to look back on his tenure as Minister with irony and general good humour…two things that are not always part of a politician’s retrospective on his or her career.

Geisha of Gion by Mineko Iwasaki

I borrowed this book from a friend during a trip to Japan a few years ago, primarily because my friend swore up and down that it was far and away the best and most truthful book about geisha life in Japan. I’d certainly have to agree with that assessment.

Geisha of Gion by Mineko Iwasaki

Geisha of Gion (the UK edition title; the US edition is titled Geisha: A Life) is by Mineko Iwasaki, who for many years was the preeminent geiko (’woman of art’, the preferred term for geisha in the Japanese city of Kyoto) in Japan. Having left her birth family at a very young age to train for her calling, Iwasaki devoted her life to the study of her art and worked her way to incredible success — only to retire at the very height of her fame when she realised that she could not tolerate the strictures placed upon her and her fellow geiko by the obsessively tradition-bound ways of her profession. Iwasaki wrote the book as a response to the publication of the highly fictionalised Memoirs of a Geisha, intending to give a more credible and truthful account of her life as the successor to her adopted family’s prominent okiya, or geisha house, in the Gion district of Kyoto.

The life of a geiko of Iwasaki’s stature was nothing short of gruelling, and Geisha of Gion gives as much detail about the geiko lifestyle as one might conceivably wish to know. Long hours and late nights, rigorous classes in dance and poise and fine arts, countless hours spent applying and removing layers of makeup and heavy silk clothing, and above all the constant knowledge that a geiko is always on display from the moment she leaves the house and goes out in public until the moment she steps back inside the relative sanctuary of the okiya. The book takes care to dispel many of the stereotypes of geisha life, particularly the belief that a geisha is little more than a cultured, high-class prostitute for the rich and powerful. Yet Iwasaki also criticises her former profession, pointing out that most girls who became geiko in her day left school at the age of fourteen, the minimum standard required by law, and that all of their training and hard work left them with few truly marketable skills to support them if they chose to retire or were compelled to stop working due to ill-health or other troubles. In her opinion, the ‘flower and willow world’ (as the geisha life is often called) did not do enough to adapt to changes in society, and one of her main fears was that the very rigidity that was meant to protect the practice of traditional arts in Japan would only end up leading to their permanent disappearance.

Having skimmed through bits and pieces of Memoirs of a Geisha, I have to agree that Geisha of Gion is most definitely the better book. Far less sensationalism, far more real story. And I think that this truthfulness also makes Iwasaki’s story that much more memorable, because you can tell that she really did love what she did as a geiko, and that leaving her profession, her beloved calling, was probably as difficult a decision as anyone can make.

The Loss of the Wager by John Bulkeley and John Byron

When I first told some friends about this book, I joked that the best way to describe was ‘Horatio Hornblower in Hell’, if only for the fact that you almost can’t turn a page without reading about someone freezing to death or falling overboard or dying of hunger or getting shot in the face by an increasingly fearful captain. I still think it’s quite an apt description.

The Loss of the Wager by John Bulkeley and John Byron

In 1740, Commodore George Anson set out on a long voyage to the Pacific with a small fleet of eight English ships. His mission was to harry the Spanish military and civilian naval traffic off the coast of Chile, but getting there meant that Anson’s fleet would have to navigate the cold and dangerous waters of the Strait of Magellan at the southernmost tip of South America. One ship, a transport and supply ship called the Wager, became separated from the company in a particularly nasty bout of squalls during the attempt to navigate the Strait, and was essentially driven onto the rocks in an inhospitable part of southern Patagonia. Of the scores of men who had made up the Wager’s crew, only a handful made it back to England alive. The rest died of disease, drowning, exposure, starvation…and one or two nasty incidents that gave rise to claims of mutiny and insubordination, and the possibility that the survivors of the wreck might well face a court-martial and death on the gallows.

The Loss of the Wager combines two stories of the shipwreck, written by crewmen who returned to England and published accounts of what had happened — mostly in an attempt to clear their respective names of the charges of mutiny. John Bulkeley was the ship’s gunner, and his account is in the form of a nearly daily diary he kept before and after the wreck of the Wager. The Hon. John Byron would become a vice-admiral in the Royal Navy, but he is perhaps better known as the grandfather of the poet Lord Byron. Byron’s account of the wreck, ‘The Narrative of the Honourable John Byron’, became the basis for Patrick O’Brian novel The Unknown Shore (and showed up in fragments in O’Brian’s later Aubrey-Maturin novels). Both accounts sold well in England, appealing to a public that enjoyed the dramatic narrative styles and the harrowing escapes from death that both sailors faced during their time in the wilds of South America.

One of the interesting historical facts about the Wager is that before Anson’s voyage, men who were serving aboard ships that wrecked were not paid for their time shipwrecked, and as a result many men took the opportunity to declare that they were no longer bound under military discipline and were not required to obey the orders of senior officers. The incident with the Wager prompted the Royal Navy to revise procedures, ordering that men were to be under military discipline even after a shipwreck and therefore liable to court-martial if they rebelled against their officers. Both Bulkeley and Byron’s accounts are written to exonerate their authors and attempt to restore their respective reputations, as well as to make a bit of money while the Admiralty tried to figure out how to hold hearings when neither Commodore Anson nor the Wager’s Captain Cheap had yet returned to England — and as such, there’s quite a bit of pushing the blame onto other people in these narratives, though no more than one might reasonably expect to find. Fans of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series and C. S. Forester’s Hornblower books might find The Loss of the Wager a diverting read, if only to see that even if Jack Aubrey and Horatio Hornblower faced some perilous waters on occasion, the real-life experience was often far worse.

Forgotten Voices of the Second World War by Max Arthur

An appropriate choice for Remembrance Sunday, I think.

Forgotten Voices of the Second World War by Max Arthur

This book is something of a sequel to Max Arthur’s Forgotten Voices of the Great War, and both books have a similar backstory. Arthur went to the Imperial War Museum’s Sound Archive, a repository for recorded interviews, broadcasts, speeches, and sounds that capture in audio format the experience of wartime. Soldiers and civilians alike had their stories recorded by interviewers and kept by the IWM, and for this book Arthur went deep into the archives and pulled together a truly remarkable collection of narratives that present World War II from an eyewitness perspective.

The selections are short, most under a page long and some only a few sentences in length. The majority of the snippets come from British people (and of those, mainly men), though voices from other nations are scattered through the book to provide a little contrast or alternate colour. But naturally, each story is different, and it’s truly fascinating to hear an Australian soldier talk about what it was like in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, or read what an evacuated schoolgirl felt when she boarded the train and left her parents behind in London shortly before the Blitz. These personal stories bring the war to life in a way that a book of purely military, social, or political history couldn’t duplicate.

Reading this book does make me wonder what Arthur had to leave out, though, whether for reasons of space or other reasons. The selections in a book are on the whole very Anglo-centric, which is hardly surprising considering the source of the material and the book’s target audience. And the story of the war is certainly told through the British perspective, leaving out much of the war in Russia, China, and the South Pacific in order to focus on the fall of Singapore and the battles for control of Burma and Egypt and other colonial areas invaded by the Axis powers. But there’s enough of a narrative thread to make the book a fascinating work of ‘living history’, even though I hardly dare to think that a quarter of those interviewed in these pages are still alive today to read this book. If ‘living history’ or World War II history interest you, you’d be well-placed to enjoy the fruits of Arthur’s extensive work.

In the Heat of the Kitchen by Bernard Donoughue

Gearing up for another set of book reviews for the month of November. I may be able to post some more recently written ones very soon, once I sort through a few older ones that I haven’t yet had a chance to go back and edit.

In the Heat of the Kitchen by Bernard Donoughue

Bernard (now Lord) Donoughue served as a political advisor for Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan from 1974 to 1979, and in that time he was in a perfect position to observe the workings of government and the ways in which individual personalities clashed over different issues. It’s something of a shame that this book doesn’t exactly do justice to either Labour Party history or Labour Party gossip.

Admittedly, it is an autobiography, and as such it is not meant to be a purely academic analysis of the author’s time in politics and public life. But the autobiographical sections veer sharply toward the mawkish, with a tendency to harp on about his own beliefs and political prejudices, and it is more than a little tiresome to be jerked out of what promises to be an interesting narrative by snide little side commentaries that are wholly unnecessary. A good (or bad) example of the narrative problems:

Of the half a dozen books in which I have been involved, Herbert Morrison: Portrait of a Politician is the one of which I am most proud. Morrison had of course been a great political figure during my childhood, one of my earliest heroes….But he was not a wholly attractive personality and his reputation dimmed after his defeat in 1965. Fortunately, interest in him revived somewhat in the early glow of achievement of his grandson Peter Mandelson, and the book achieved a reprint in 2001 with a fascinating foreword by Peter. But its sales were never great. Since it contains little ‘psychobabble’ or speculation about Morrison’s (undoubtedly thin) sex life, it might anyway be unsuited to the modern literary market.

(You need to imagine my raised eyebrow here.)

One of the more detailed chapters in Donoughue’s book relates how thoroughly Harold Wilson was cowed by his personal secretary Marcia Williams (later Lady Falkender). Although the tales that Donoughue tells are worthy of note in terms of understanding the power dynamics inside Number 10, the overall effect is to turn Marcia Williams into some sort of malicious, predatory she-demon and Harold Wilson into Richard Bucket from Keeping Up Appearances. Donoughue’s negative perspective is understandable, considering that Marcia Williams absolutely could not stand the fact that he was able to take a political policy line independent of hers and attempted to limit her influence over Wilson. But Donoughue unfortunately doesn’t make enough of an attempt to look back on events with a more detached eye, something that would have improved the quality of the writing and the substance of the text.

In the Heat of the Kitchen generally wavers between readable and unreadable, though I was able to plough through it and reach some sort of muddled understanding of Donoughue’s perspective on the high politics and various intrigues that characterised the Labour governments of the 1970s. I haven’t yet had a chance to read his Downing Street Diary, but I do wonder if that book will be even more tainted by the personal prejudices of its author. It’s rather a shame, really — for someone who had quite a few interesting political ideas and helped at least two prime ministers reach a better understanding of key policy issues, Donoughue does not really convey a good sense of his overall intelligence and scope of political awareness in this autobiography.

Chance Witness: An Outsider’s Life in Politics by Matthew Parris

Another quasi-politician’s memoirs? Don’t worry — I’ll run out of them one of these days.

Chance Witness: An Outsider’s Life in Politics by Matthew Parris

The subtitle of Chance Witness is a very good indication of former MP and newspaper columnist Matthew Parris’s approach to his autobiography. He never claims to be one of the in-crowd in the political circles in which he moved for a time. Most of the time, he claims, it was only through chance that he ended up where he was — for example, he attributes his selection as a Conservative MP in the 1980s primarily to the fact that he once leapt into the freezing waters of Thames to save a drowning dog. (It apparently swung the vote of the selection committee, which was wavering only slightly in his favour.) Yet a fair number of key events in his life weren’t entirely left to chance…unless you consider that there was an element of chance in the fact that at a fairly young age he realised he was homosexual.

The trouble with most autobiographies I’ve read usually revolves around the fact that quite a lot of people simply haven’t led lives which really lend themselves to the kind of prolonged navel-gazing that autobiographies demand. More often than not, what starts out interesting and full of vivid detail can often devolve into a virtual laundry list of ‘people I have known’ and ‘places I have been’ and ‘what it all means to me’. Or conversely, an autobiography which becomes quite fascinating in the later chapters devoted to adulthood requires a long and arduous slog through page after page of the author’s reminiscences of memorable bowel movements from his/her childhood. (Or something along those lines.) But as far as autobiographies go, Chance Witness generally doesn’t suffer much from the occasional tedious bits that tend to pepper the pages of similar stories. Put it down to Parris’s long stint as parliamentary sketch writer for the Times, a job that requires the writer to be succinct and clever with words and ruthless about fitting as much information as possible into a restricted space. If anything, there are places where the narrative seems to have been cut short, though in such a way that the marks of the authorial scissors aren’t readily apparent.

Chance Witness has much to recommend it, not least of which is Parris’s thought-provoking account of his time as a MP in the 1980s, when his sexuality wasn’t so much an open secret as it was a carefully-circumvented predicament. He talks quite frankly about his experiences ‘cruising’ on Clapham Common in the days before London’s gay community truly existed, including a horrific account of a incident where he was savagely beaten by two men while crossing the Common one evening…and the shame he felt when he lied to the police and to the press about where and why he was attacked. Yet Parris manages to strike a decent balance when discussing his sexual orientation in relation to his life: he doesn’t try to pretend that it has overshadowed or affected everything he’s ever done. Chance Witness is quite interesting to read almost for that reason alone, even if there’s much else to recommend it.