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.

Obscure Scribblers: A History of Parliamentary Journalism by Andrew Sparrow

For additional reading that presents a slightly more critical view of today’s book review subject, I recommend John Lanchester’s review of Nick Davies’ Flat Earth News in the 6 March 2008 edition of the London Review of Books (no subscription required).

Obscure Scribblers: A History of Parliamentary Journalism by Andrew Sparrow

Dr Samuel Johnson did it, and towards the end of his life he expressed regret, remorse, and some embarrassment that he had ever tried it in the first place. A little less than a century later, Charles Dickens started to do it, too, and according to his contemporaries he had a very real talent for it. Governments have tried to ban it, or restrict it with tough legislation and harsh criticism of its practices, but as public opinion has become more permissive and social standards are less strictly upheld, its most ardent practitioners are getting away with a lot more than they would have been able to dream of even a generation ago.

The ‘it’ in question, of course, is parliamentary journalism.

Andrew Sparrow is a political correspondent with the Daily Telegraph, and in Obscure Scribblers he has compiled a compact history of political journalism in Britain, from illicitly printed political pamphlets distributed in the days of Oliver Cromwell to the spin doctors and breaking-news approach of the modern newsroom. The book’s title comes from an epithet used by Sir William Meredith, a baronet who sat in Parliament in the mid-1700s. Sir William denounced the ambitious young men who would fight to claim a seat in the public galleries and dash off reports of parliamentary proceedings for the various newspapers and gazettes that were published in London. He claimed that popular reporting of parliamentary debates would sully the quality of debate and lead to inaccurate and contradictory reporting on the substance of the issues being discussed. As Sparrow’s book clearly shows, mutual hostilities between politicians and the press are certainly nothing new — even three centuries ago, MPs and peers seemed to either moan about how the reporters make too much of every trivial thing that happens in Westminster or sulk about how their stunning speeches and thrilling debates are being ignored by the press. Yet the journalists themselves do not always come away from Sparrow’s history covered in glory; the practices of parliamentary journalism, particularly with regard to ‘off the record’ or ‘lobby’ briefings, are often as restrictive, insular, and narrow-minded as those of the politicians who are put on the spot. Unsurprisingly, the ‘obscure scribbers’ who have clawed their way into Westminster are very jealous of their proximity to the people in power. (To take just one example, not all of the protests against the radio broadcasting and later televising of Parliament have come from the politicians.) But as journalism as a profession continues to evolve, political reporting will evolve with it, and traditions that have worked well enough in the past may not be so applicable even in the near future.

The main strength of Obscure Scribblers comes from the fact that Sparrow keeps closely to his subject and resists the temptation to try to broaden his scope too greatly. In some ways, this strength contributes to the book’s only real weakness, in that the reader would definitely benefit from some prior knowledge of modern political history to better understand the importance of some of the less well-known historical incidents Sparrow mentions. The book could be a little longer in some respects, but the pace and tone seldom slacken and the writing, if a little dry, is far from dull. There are plenty of amusing anecdotes, the history writing is solid without ending up bogged down in petty details, and Alastair Campbell gets a thorough kicking by the end of it. Few bad things can be said about that.

The Hands of History: Parliamentary Sketches 1997-2007 by Simon Hoggart

Slipping in an extra review this week to make up for the paucity of postings last month. I have other reviews still to finish, but this one seemed to come out most easily.

The Hands of History: Parliamentary Sketches 1997-2007 by Simon Hoggart

Based on an earlier review of Playing to the Gallery, Simon Hoggart’s collection of Guardian parliamentary sketches from the early Blair years, it may come as little surprise to learn that I eagerly picked up a copy of The Hands of History, Hoggart’s more recently published collection of sketches spanning the Blair decade. The index at the back of the book is not quite as funny as the previous one, but it gives readers a good idea of what to expect within. John Prescott, master of the unintelligible and angry speech for any occasion, from party conferences to PMQs. Sir Peter Tapsell MP (Louth and Horncastle), one of the last of the old Tory knights of the shires, whose oratorical style almost demands that the Hansard editors cast his words in bronze. Michael Fabricant (Lichfield) and his collection of wigs. More inane New Labour jargon, more Conservative party leadership circuses contests, more of Tony Blair’s verb-free sentences…all of the old friends and foes are back.

Much of what I said earlier about the humour of Hoggart’s parliamentary sketch-writing still holds true, though seeing a much broader range of sketches reveals a few small weaknesses that are common to anyone who writes on regular subject on a regular basis. The most notable one is that Hoggart has quite a few standard jokes, several of which are mentioned above, and seeing them repeated in successive sketches grows a little tiring over time. (Though in one of his editorial notes, he mentions that some readers will write in to complain if he hasn’t made one of his usual references in a while.) The Hands of History does manage to catch the highlights of the Blair decade, sticking mostly to the well-known incidents and leaving out much of the day-to-day petty dramas. (I wish he’d included this sketch from mid-February 2006, if only for the amusement value, but space in the book was at a premium and the incident itself has almost certainly been forgotten.) Hoggart often has a fine gift for picking out the metaphors from the reality, as in this description from the time in May 2004 when Fathers4Justice protestors threw flour-filled condoms at Blair during his Question Time:

What an amazing shot by the protestor, throwing from hundreds of feet along a downward trajectory! And how marvellously apt! It had been aimed at Blair but it had exploded all over Brown. The protestors had thrown Britain’s finest political metaphor.

Like Hoggart’s previous book, The Hands of History knows its intended readership. If a collection of parliamentary sketches about the past ten years sounds like it would be entertaining reading, then it is not likely to disappoint — even if the politicians mentioned within do, more often than not.

Playing to the Gallery: Parliamentary Sketches from Blair Year Zero by Simon Hoggart

A quick review this Sunday, since I’m sort of in the middle of travelling at the moment.

Playing to the Gallery: Parliamentary Sketches from Blair Year Zero by Simon Hoggart

The craft of writing parliamentary sketches is a fairly longstanding tradition in the history of modern journalism. Charles Dickens even tried his hand at it, back in the day when several pages of the quality press were devoted to reporting the ins and outs of whatever had happened that day in the Commons and the Lords. But now that Hansard is available online, viewers can watch debates through BBC Parliament, and most newspapers have cut down the column inches devoted to parliamentary coverage, parliamentary sketches might well seem to be on the way out as well. But the art of capturing memorable moments in the alternating frenzy and dullness of the Westminster village is not easily acquired — and it would be a shame if some of the cleverest sketches of the Guardian’s Simon Hoggart were to be lost to the maze of microfilm and Internet archives without being collected somewhere for quick, easy reading.

Playing to the Gallery is a collection of Simon Hoggart’s sketches, a selection of the ‘best bits’ as collected works are so often touted. The sketches are not merely from 1997; the selected sketches begin with the pre-election coverage of April 1997 and run until well into 2002, giving a full range of the first five years of the Blair government. Plenty of familiar faces grace the pages, and some mostly forgotten faces crop up now and then, including perennial stalking horse Michael Heseltine, the ageing and now deceased rake Alan Clark, and the former Madam Speaker Betty Boothroyd. The index, for that matter, is one of the best parts of the book; the entries are pithy summaries that are almost complete sketches in and of themselves. The entries for Tony Blair include ‘helps William Hague into heffalump trap, 169-71‘ and ‘treats Parliament like late-night radio call-in, 107-9‘. Ken Livingstone, as it happens, ‘launches campaign for London mayor with high-pitched whining noise, 154-5‘. One of John Prescott’s many notable moments includes an incident in which he ‘blames Tories for rain, 188-90‘. There’s just enough truth to the exaggerations to make for fine and accurate parody.

Hoggart is quite skilled at deciphering the often unintelligible proclamations of John Prescott, and he takes pleasure in finding and holding up for ridicule some of the most vapid examples of New Labour prose — he actively points out how the New Labour speech style all but abandons verbs in its attempt to make promises without actually promising anything. I spent most of my reading time alternating between chuckling and wincing, for beneath the humour lies a certain amount of wry bitterness, a little voice that says, ‘Is this really what we’ve managed to dig up, push past the post, and stuff into that faux-Gothic monstrosity in SW1A?’ Playing to the Gallery is a collection made for politicos and political junkies, true, but it’s a sad trueism that no history is forgotten quite so easily as that of the recent past. Even those who are less than fond of the state of political reporting in this day and age would be able to spend a few worthwhile moments looking at one or two of the sketches compiled in this book.

Britain Decides: The UK General Election 2005 edited by Andrew Geddes and Jonathan Tonge

I picked up this book from the sale table at The Strand bookshop in New York City a few weeks ago, gleefully carrying it off for nearly a quarter of its regular retail price. An excellent find, I must say.

Britain Decides: The UK General Election 2005 edited by Andrew Geddes and Jonathan Tonge

The UK General Election of May 2005 was, in the observant words of Labour MP Tony Wright (Cannock Chase), ‘the election that nobody really wanted to have — not the politicians, not the media, and certainly not the electorate’. People knew that it was coming, and for the most part there was sense of resignation at what the expected outcome would be. The Labour Party would get a sharp kick in the polls (so to speak), but not really enough to completely wipe out its majority. Some seats would change hands, some MPs (almost certainly including John Prescott) would say or do things that would come back to haunt them at some point down the line, one or two constituencies would have particularly nasty campaign battles that would dominate the national news for the better part of the run-up to the election itself. And though all of these things certainly did happen, the ‘expected events’ seemed to blur together — which meant that some of the more interesting (from a political historian’s perspective) aspects of the 2005 election often happened to be overlooked.

Election synopsis books are becoming increasingly popular in the publishing business; for the 2005 General Election, I can think of at least three books I might turn to for analysis of the parties, the polls, the campaigns, and the final results. Britain Decides: The UK General Election 2005 would probably not have been the first book I’d have thought of, but after reading it there’s no doubt that it is a worthy addition to include with longstanding publications such as Dennis Kavanagh and David Butler’s British General Election series. The contributing authors have provided a set of fine essays on what one might consider the usual topics — the Labour, Conservative, and Liberal Democrat election campaigns; special points of interest regarding the election campaigns and outcomes in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland; and reports on the influence of the Internet and the mainstream media outlets during the campaign. The book also has a dozen tidy and well-laid-out single-page summaries of some of the more notable election results, such as George Galloway’s upset victory over sitting Labour MP Oona King in Bethnal Green and Bow, Ulster Unionist Party leader David Trimble losing his seat in Upper Bann, and the late Peter Law’s protest against Labour’s all-women shortlist in Blaenau Gwent. In addition to the usual facts and figures, the book contains a reflective essay by the abovementioned Labour MP Tony Wright, providing one sitting MP’s thoughts and feelings about what it was like to be on the ground during the campaign.

Having had a little bit of experience on the ground myself at the 2005 General Election (I spent Election Night at the BBC Studios in Shepherd’s Bush, watching the results come in until the wee hours of the morning), I found Geddes and Tonge’s book to be quite fascinating. I’m not really much of a psephologist — statistics aren’t my forte, even when it comes to statistical analysis of elections — but the book is written in such a way as to be accessible to an audience that is interested in elections at a bit of a distance, away from the immediacy of the media hype and the nonstop bickering of the candidates. Even if, as the book suggests, it didn’t entirely seem as if ‘Britain’ collectively decided much of anything in May 2005 (except perhaps that Tony Blair’s days in Downing Street were numbered), this retrospective looks at some of the decisions made during the election and draws some thoughtful conclusions about the state of British politics going into Labour’s historic third term.

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.

The Wilson Plot: How the Spycatchers and Their American Allies Tried to Overthrow the British Government by David Leigh

I’ve acquired a copy of the BBC2 television programme The Plot Against Harold Wilson, in which journalists Roger Courtiour and Barrie Penrose described how Wilson contacted them in the late 1970s to give them information about various plots against him during his premiership. It seems as good a time as any to post this little review.

The Wilson Plot: How the Spycatchers and Their American Allies Tried to Overthrow the British Government by David Leigh

Generally, I am not one for books on conspiracy theories. Most of the time they smack of lone individuals sitting in darkened rooms, meticulously crafting cunning hats out of aluminium foil ‘just in case’. And at times, The Wilson Plot veers into this realm — the full name of the book is overly dramatic, to say the least. But Observer journalist David Leigh’s account, published in 1988 the wake of the debacle over former MI5 officer Peter Wright’s Spycatcher, adds quite a lot of damning evidence to corroborate one of Wright’s more controversial claims: that certain well-placed members of the British (and American) secret services believed that Prime Minister Harold Wilson was an agent of the Soviet Union. Leigh sets out to prove that Wilson was not and could not have been on the Soviet payroll, and at the same time does his best to expose much of the darker side of Cold War espionage…including the often vicious ‘dirty tricks’ carried out against Wilson and many others who were unfortunate enough to fall foul of the Anglo-American ’spycatchers’.

First and foremost, ‘overthrow’ is not the right word at all in this context. British Intelligence’s intereference with Harold Wilson was not some kind of Mossadeq Lite or Nasser Mark II. Granted, some of the same ideas and thought trends that contributed to suspicions surrounding Wilson had roots in the same anti-Communist mania that powered both of the abovementioned incidents. There was a similar streak of paranoia involved as well — most notably concerning the unexpected death of the right-leaning Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell, which some of the more obsessed chose to regard as a KGB-backed assassination that would allow Wilson to succeed to the Labour leadership and thence to the premiership. But none of the plots and plans that Leigh recounts come close to government-toppling. Most never got farther than sordid whispering campaigns, usually hinting that Wilson had been compromised in some nebulous sexual escapade involving either his political advisor Marcia Williams or Cabinet Minister Barbara Castle. The intelligence services’ fascination with sex and its use as a weapon is certainly nothing new, and in the political context it certainly comes across as the product of a number of people with more time on their hands than they really ought to have had.

What is disturbing, in Leigh’s account, are the power games that were rife within MI5 and MI6 during the Cold War — and the near-complete lack of accountability for the resulting damage and repercussions. The defections of Kim Philby and Guy Burgess led to more than a few in-house mole hunts that slandered reputations and destroyed careers. MI5’s decades-long cover-up of Sir Anthony Blunt’s war-time espionage appears to have played a key role in the 1967 suicide of Labour politician Bernard Floud. The testimony of rather suspect defectors like Anatoliy Golitsyn, amongst others, caused Anglo-American as well as inter-departmental strife. The people crafting the cunning aluminium foil hats in those days were wielding an unpleasantly large amount of power to make other people’s lives miserable. The Wilson Plot may be over the top and unnecessarily dramatic at times, but I think that Leigh’s underlying message cannot be overstated: There are those in the intelligence services whose view of the world is (to be frank) utterly divorced from reality, and if there is no sense of accountability for their actions then it is hardly surprising if innocent people are caught in the crossfire.

Letter from America by Alistair Cooke

I thought I’d posted this already, but it seems that I hadn’t yet. I need to start keeping closer track of the reviews I’ve posted compared to the ones I still need to post — now that I’ve cleared out a bit of my backlog, I may soon be able to start posting reviews of books I’ve read more recently.

Letter from America by Alistair Cooke

Depending on which side of the Atlantic Ocean you’re from, the name of Alistair Cooke conjures up a different set of sounds and images. For most people in the States, Cooke was the voice and image of PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre, his plummy tones borne through the television set on the regal trumpet fanfare of Jean-Joseph Mouret’s ‘Rondeau’. And because he hosted Masterpiece Theatre for the better part of two decades, to most Americans Cooke’s name is synonymous with high-brow costume dramas and classic British television imports. But for many British people, Alistair Cooke is best known for his ‘Letters from America’ — his weekly 15-minute broadcasts on Radio 4, a stunning 2,869 broadcasts in total that ran from March 1946 to March 2004. And it is these ‘letters’, or a good selection of them, that make up this book.

Five decades’ worth of broadcasts leaves a lot of material to choose from. Some of his letters had been published earlier, in books that are now out of print, but the letters from the 1990s and 2000-2004 had been uncollected previously. And it’s a sign of the editors’ skill in selection that there’s no sense of repetition in the selected letters, and that some of Cooke’s most powerful letters have their rightful place in this collection. His letters concerning the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy are masterful — particularly the latter, since Cooke was present in the hotel kitchen when the younger Kennedy was shot. He wrote about Vietnam and Watergate, about September 11th and the war in Iraq…but he also wrote about the beauty of Christmas in Vermont, about family holidays on Long Island, about life in America and how it changed in the years he lived there.

Letter from America is probably one of those books that you’d think to buy for someone else, or might see on a table in a bookshop and wonder if it’s worth purchasing or merely flipping through. But I’m glad to have purchased this book, because Alistair Cooke was, if nothing else, a cherished institution for Americans and Britons alike. And a collection of his broadcasts, even a partial one such as this, is fine reading material.

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.

Supping with the Devils: Political Writing From Thatcher to Blair by Hugo Young

I have a few non-politics books that I’ve been meaning to post, but I need to go back and make a few quick edits for clarity and style before I put them up. For now, though, here’s a nice collection of writings that I’m always willing to recommend.

Supping with the Devils: Political Writing From Thatcher to Blair by Hugo Young

Hugo Young was a prolific political journalist, who wrote for the Sunday Times from 1973 to 1984 and for the Guardian from 1984 until his death from cancer in 2003. His twice-weekly column at the Guardian provides the material for Supping with the Devils, a collection of his writings spanning the better part of two decades. And I would place him firmly in the category of writers I admire — because even if you don’t agree with what he says, you can appreciate the clear, lucid, and penetrating way in which he says it.

Supping with the Devils is a good representative mixture of Young’s writing. Most of his essays deal with current political events, but not all of them are focused solely on the doings and deeds in Westminster and Whitehall. Young writes about serving as a juror (‘we English probably make good jurors partly because of the diet of whodunnits that contributes to so much of our television intake’), about the murder of Stephen Lawrence (‘the larger effect is more to be hoped for: that whites get deeper into their heads the belief that racial justice is something rather more seminal than a branch of political correctness’) and the fatwa against Salman Rushdie (‘Perhaps it would be a different matter if all this was happening to Jeffrey Archer’), amongst other things. But the essay that really struck me most was possibly one of his most famous columns, published in September 2003, where he blasted Tony Blair savagely for squandering all of the political capital and promise he had held in his hands back in 1997. Young died barely a week after that column went to press, and there’s something heart-breaking about reading it now…there’s a sense that Young knew his time was running short, and he had to speak his mind before it was too late.

I’ve seen numerous comparisons made between Hugo Young and George Orwell. Both men wrote until the very end of their lives, writing with almost manic desperation as if writing was the only thing keeping them alive under the onslaught of tuberculosis (Orwell) and cancer (Young). I suppose it’s no surprise that I enjoyed reading this collection of Young’s writings almost as much as I enjoy dipping into a volume of Orwell’s essays and letters.