{review} a week of pineapples

*dusts off blog cobwebs*

'Georgy,' Mr Pasmore asks, 'may we come in?' He was already in. 'I’ve brought you two delightful visitors. They have been exploring the possibility of the pineapple. Do you like that? The possibility of? I mean we all know the positivity of, don't we? What we want, oh, what we all so want want want is the possibility of? Georgy, do you believe in the possibility of the pineapple?' (Thea Astley, Hunting the Wild Pineapple)

Last week I only read books with 'pineapple' in the title. This offered a wider variety than one might expect, and I think I did rather well and read some things I might not otherwise have tackled. So what did I read?

 

M. C. Beaton At the Sign of the Golden Pineapple (1987)

Charlotte Webster awoke during the night and lay shivering under her thin blankets. Food. Mountains of food. That’s what she had been dreaming of. A confectioner’s. She could see it now, the golden pineapple over the door, the piles of oranges and pineapples and dainty cakes. The smells of hot chocolate and coffee. Her stomach growled ferociously.

M. C. Beaton is terrifyingly prolific. This Regency series was originally published under the pen name Marion Chesney. I discovered this series thanks to Another Look Book's review of Beaton/Chesney's Minerva, which I thought could fill a Heyer-sized gap in my reading life. It was less-mannered, more overtly - perhaps one might suggest 'unbelievably' - socially boundary-pushing, and rather more risqué than a Heyer, but a fun - and quick - read. Likewise At the Sign of the Golden Pineapple: our heroine ("We are all kept in chains by the fact that we are genteel women") decides to make her own way by opening a confectionery shop/ices-and-tea-room in London with two lady acquaintances from unhappy homes - but can "ladies" ever resume their previous social and marital ambitions after working in a shop? 

The pineapple connection is that a pineapple was an emblem of the confectionery trade in the Georgian era (lots more on this here and a wonderful recreated pineapple 'ice' here). This is a (hmmm... tries to think of some relevant analogies...) wafer-thin read, stuffed sugarplum-like with sweet historical details, and easily digestible in one sitting. Not sure I'm hungry for more of the genre though, but that might be a result of the sugar overdose of read number two...

Betty Neels Pineapple Girl (1977)

  

And Mrs White, with a swift movement worthy of a magician, heaved at something under the blankets and produced a pineapple. ‘Oh!’ said Eloise, startled, and then: ‘Mrs White, what a simply lovely present—thank you, and your husband. I’ve—I’ve never had such a delightful surprise.’ She clasped the fruit to her person...

I've actually read this Mills & Boon before, and written briefly about it. Nurse falls down steps onto handsome foreign doctor while holding a pineapple; doctor replaces pineapple with THREE from Fortnum & Mason; coincidentally, poor nurse meets handsome doctor in foreign parts while on a job; does he love her or is he a bastard ("How could he talk about kippers when only a moment ago he had been kissing her as though he really enjoyed it?")? Will her clothes be good enough ("an elderly velvet dress the colour of a mole")? ... yada yada yada... You get the picture. I'm here for the pineapples, mostly, I guess. The period details (grimy 70s London) are great, and often rendered rather funny by time-passed:

‘Someone gave me a pineapple,’ she informed the table at large, and added apologetically: ‘I would have brought it down with me, but I thought it would have been nice to take home…’ There was a chorus of assent; everyone there knew that Eloise lived in a poky little flat behind the Imperial War Museum—true, it was on the fringe of a quite respectable middle-class district, but with, as it were, an undesirable neighbourhood breathing down its neck...

My favourite line is when the heroine is tossing and turning at night thinking about the mysterious doctor: "a fruitless exercise". I think NOT!

But I haven't only read pineapple 'fluff':

 

Thea Astley Hunting the Wild Pineapple (1979)

Once in Fixer’s cabin, one hour, one year, Fixer and I worked out the new coat of arms - a beer can rampant on a social security form couchant. Do we make it different, the people up here?

I don't read as much Australian literature as I feel I ought: I think this is a combination of the feeling that I "ought" (which makes me irrationally stubbornly resistant to doing so); a lack of empathy or resonance with the "bush" (I blame family camping holidays and a loathing of tropical weather), and a love of reading about places not as familiar as the home turf. Perhaps there's a bit of a block too because of difficult reading experiences with Australian lit at school and university? But I do keep trying. 

I can't say that I felt any sense of breakthrough after reading Thea Astley's take on Far North Queensland - hot, wet, uncomfortable, primitive, dangerous - a "soft porn" of a landscape - and filled with the lost and those not wanting to be found. This is a land where social boundaries break easily: "Carl’s fingers have been scratching the spines of Mac’s books. He wants to borrow a couple. I explain they’re not mine, but he’s oblivious to the protocol that goes with possession."

Astley's writing is absolutely superb, although sometimes one feels on the verge of drowning in it. (Whispering Gums discusses why Astley's language can also be confronting.) The book is a series of interlinked short stories about the inhabitants of the tropical Far North. Her descriptions of place can be claustrophobia-inducing - small artificially created physical and metaphorical spaces within which we imprison ourselves, and then the equally terrible world without: "a postcard tropadise (the greens are too green! the blues too blue!)". 

Then there are moments of pure comedy (like the 'hunt' for the wild pineapple of the title) or the little vignettes of everyday life such as the blind date: "He was much older than she had expected. So was she." Elsewhere: "She always appeared formidably silked and hatted and her bust was frightening. ‘Breasts’ is somehow too pretty, too delicate a word to describe that shelf of righteousness on which many a local upstart had foundered."

Mr Waterman was, also, a foundation member of the metric society. He was the first in the district to think in millimetres of rain, kilometres of road, kilograms of body fat and the metric statistics of wanted criminals. When he and Mrs Waterman did their biennial culture junket to Europe, he took enormous pleasure in supplying details for his passport. ‘One point eight five four three metres,’ he wrote against ‘height’; ‘eyes’ – ‘blue’. He would chide his wife mildly. ‘No, dear. No, no. You are one point six four one two metres.’ Against ‘colour of eyes’ she wrote ‘glazed’.

A difficult but valuable read.

Kaori O'Connor Pineapple: A Global History (2013)

Pineapple is great. She is almost too transcendent - a delight if not sinful, yet so like sinning that really a tender conscienced person would do well to pause - too ravishing for mortal taste, she woundeth and excoriateth the lips that approach her - like lovers’ kisses she biteth - she is a pleasure bordering on pain, from the fierceness and insanity of her relish. (Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia [1823])

I have a copy of Fran Beauman's The Pineapple on my shelf, but I decided to read this shorter history first. It's part of a series of books devoted to single foodstuffs - nuts, pancakes, pies, soup, offal, etc. (Incidentally, Pie is by the always fascinating blogger Old Foodie.) Pineapple is basically all you need to know about the pineapple in the short form: where it came from, how it got everywhere, its role as a prestige and royal object, the craziness of growing it in England, the popularization of the fruit through canning, and so on.

Indeed, the gulf between the pineapple’s fame and the difficulty in satisfying curiosity as to its taste came to epitomize the nature of knowledge itself for the serious-minded. In his On Human Understanding, published in 1690, the empiricist philosopher John Locke used the pineapple to argue that true knowledge can only be based on experience. In Locke’s words: If you doubt this, see whether you can by words give anyone who has never tasted pineapple an idea of the taste of that fruit. He may approach a grasp of it by being told of its resemblance to other tastes of which he already has the ideas in his memory, imprinted there by things he has taken into his mouth; but this isn’t giving him that idea by a definition, but merely raising up in him other simple ideas that will still be very different from the true taste of pineapple.

I thought this a very readable book, although I think it dealt rather tentatively (but without omission) with some of the unpleasant aspects of the pineapple trade, for instance the connection with the slave trade. It was also weak, I thought, on the place of the pineapple in Australia. I am looking forward to finding out if Fran Beauman's book is better on this. I am also looking forward to an exhibition on the pineapple's importance to Queensland that will open in Brisbane this year. *plans a little holiday*

So, what did I get from my week of 'pineapple' reads? Predictable romance is enhanced by pineapples. Pineapple skin demonstrates the Fibonacci sequence. "In organoleptic terms, the pineapple’s great contribution has been the unique ‘sweet-and-sour’ taste." Pineapples have permeated all levels of society, and now I know why and how. Isn't abacaxi a great word? Pineapples feature in philosophical discourse. I can never holiday anywhere north of Brisbane. I'd really like a pineapple upside-down cake now. Here's one I made earlier...

{review} australian pie

I'm off on a road trip today: Adelaide to, eventually, Dunkeld in Victoria, but via a very roundabout route so that I can tick off as many Big Things of Australia as I can: Big Olive, Big Ram, Big Orange (my favourite, but sadly closed), Giant Koala, etc. I'm also going to revisit a childhood favourite, the terrifying Bunyip of Murray Bridge... 

Source; more on the mythological bunyip.

By way of travel research I have been reading about meat pies, both historical and practical. Turn away now if you don't fancy a pie. 

Robert Macklin The Great Australian Pie: a history and culinary adventure (2012)

Robert Macklin, perhaps better known as a historical and a biographer of prime ministers, Jesus, and Australia at war (versatile guy!), has produced a little account of the meat pie's importance in his life and in Australian culture: "its glowing golden crust, its mouth-watering aroma of baking pastry and rich beef filling drifts across the inner landscape of Australian psyche." 

Allegedly Australians eat 240 million pies a year! 

This is a light read, but contains some meaty observations about the delicacy as well as a bit of pie p*rn:

The object of our desire is round, oval, square or even oblong. The pastry lid is probably a little flaky but not so much that the flakes will break away and stick around the mouth. The base is firm and beautifully smooth to the touch, lighter in colour than the top, the pastry shorter and more solid. The sides rise from a corner curve and the pie sits neatly in the hand snuggled alongside thumb and forefinger, the base resting on the long middle finger to hold it steady. Slowly the true pie lover raises it to the mouth, breathing in that glorious aroma to the trembling taste buds, selecting just the spot to take that first gorgeous bite that will open up the little treasure house of flavour and…oh, the wonder of it, that first taste of luscious minced beef and gravy lapping round the tongue and mixed with the buttery pastry that almost melts in the mouth. Oh heaven…

I feel able to answer any questions put to me about the pie now, and there is even an accompanying phone 'app' so that one can track down the nearest prize-winning Aussie pie on the go. (This book is only available as an ebook, I think)

Tony Clancy & Paul Clancy The Pie Buyer's Guide to Australia (2012) 

Practical research obviously has to be done on the ground. Thankfully these blokes have done the hard yards, and I am hoping that The Pie Buyer's Guide to Australia will direct me to the best pies on my travels. Sometimes one is also recommended another delicacy (I have a keen eye for vanilla slices [a custard filled mille-feuille]), but basically it is pies: "a good meat pie has the 'wolf' factor; a combination of characteristics that make it so irresistible that it is wolfed down immediately, straight from the paper bag on the footpath outside the bakery." 

The authors travelled 1000s of kilometres and ate many, many, many pies in their search for the best. They even resisted the temptations of more gourmet-type pies in their hunt for meat pies and meat pies alone (I'm a bit of a fan of beef and mushroom, myself). Each pie is ranked from one to five 'pies' and photographed. I've already discovered a four-pie ranked pie just down the road from my house that I'd never have known about without this book. 

Let us just say that this book is not going to be good for my waistline, but oh what fun I shall have!

{review} aesop's mirror

Maryalice Huggins Aesop's Mirror (2009)

However wrong, it is always harder to feel sorry for the rich.

 

After my unhappy encounter with object biography in the form of The Hare with Amber Eyes (in sum: not a fan), I was a bit wary of another object bio. However, I wanted to read Aesop's Mirror because I had worked on Aesop as a graduate student. It suffers from rather a lot of the same thing that turned me off The Hare -- namely too much personal voice at the expense of the object, and an overemphasis on the amateur's delight in basic research -- but the story that the voice tells is an interesting one. 

An antique restorer with a special interest in mirrors stumbles on a very large figural mirror at a Rhode Island estate auction. It depicts, in vivid Rococo style, Aesop's fable of the Fox and the Grapes (which I am told by wikipedia is a story illustrative of cognitive dissonance). The mirror's history was murky (oh dear, I sense some mirror puns coming up) but Maryalice Huggins had a feeling that this find was special. At the same sale she also spent US50,000 dollars on a broken down couch which subsequently was on-sold after restoration for US190,000 dollars. One gathers that her eye for antiques is rather good.

Huggins sets out to track down the provenance of her mirror. Could it really be an important lost English piece by eighteenth century master carver Thomas Johnson? Or is it a product of a pattern-book, and nevertheless still - indeed, more - important as a very early piece of homegrown American carving of the 1830-1840s? The experts cannot agree at all, and Huggins has quite a battle on her hands against a number of the prejudices that automatically arise about something that just does not fit into the canon: as a major work on early American (fake) furniture advises, "Rare is an offensive four-letter word. Unique is an abomination." (source) 

Some of the experts she consults truly are beastly, but I felt a little uncomfortable in places with her remarks on the snobbishness of scholars towards her enthusiastic enquiries. (I can certainly sympathise: in the area of antiques, vast sums of money can be made courtesy of a scholarly stamp of authenticity.)

Huggins and her mirror (source - I'll be so pleased if anyone 

can answer the question on this link too)

Huggins' book explores a wide range of interesting topics, which as someone who knows zero about Rococo mirrors and the American antique industry, I found quite fascinating. The mirror itself, somewhat ironically, becomes less and less significant to the story as Huggins explores who might have owned it, and from where it might have come originally. She connects the mirror to the Brown family (of Brown University fame), and her archival research enables her to piece together a remarkable - albeit speculative - history involving furniture, Grand Tours ("The outset of the Franco-Prussian War sorely affected her shopping"), and even Charles Parnell, the Irish nationalist. The theme of the mirror, however, remains relevant:

The antiques business was changing, and I was growing a little tired of the politics and the market in general. The theme of the sour grapes now hit home. I half convinced myself I didn't want the mirror anymore and began not to care if I ever saw it again. The fruits it bore, the allure of its former owners, I believed no longer interested me. There was always something else to fall in love with.

This, for me, was perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book - the object becomes a burden and a responsibility and a cause of some professional ill-feeling, yet it had such an effect on Huggins that, in the end, although she has sent it for auction, she feels only relief that it is passed in and returned to her care:

Despite the use of technology in determining value, art's effect cannot ever be explained factually. It is really very simple. If a piece has life, people respond to it... After years of investigation, there was really nothing to be proved that could enhance the experience of seeing something I found beautiful. Everything I needed to know about the Fox and Grapes mirror, I knew the moment I first saw it.

So...? I liked the bold speculation backed up by historical research, even if it was pretty speculative. I learned a lot about early American furniture, Rhode Island society, mirrors and the dirty side of the antiques trade.

Anyone read any good object biographies lately? I think I'm hooked...

{review} beautiful for ever

Helen Rappaport Beautiful For Ever: Madame Rachel of Bond Street - Cosmetician, Con-Artist and Blackmailer (2010)

  

This is the first book that I've read by Helen Rappaport, but it most certainly will not be the last. It was a thoroughly enjoyable and quick read and - even better - it tied in really nicely with some other reading I've done. It's always good to add a few facts to fiction, I say. 

'How frequently we find that a slight blemish on the face, otherwise divinely beautiful, has occasioned a sad and solitary life of celibacy, unloved, unblessed, and ultimately unwept and unremembered.' [from a Madame Rachel advert, c.1859] 

Madame Rachel was an infamous purveyor of dubious potions and lotions to the well-heeled ladies of London. Her most famous beautification sell was 'enamelling' which involved coating her willing victims in Heaven knows what to make them all whitely stuccoed for - generally - the ball. But Madame Rachel had another lucrative sideline in fleecing sillier sorts of every penny they possessed. Whether she was merely facilitating the meetings of ladies with their paramours, or actually running a knock-shop, isn't entirely clear. Perhaps there are hints that she was helping ladies get rid of other embarrassing problems than just bad skin. Certainly she seemed to making ridiculous amounts of money simply from cosmetics that made one Beautiful For Ever (but, then, what's a pot of Crème de la Mer go for these days to an equally silly market? AUD$250 for 30mL). Oh, and then there was that nice source of income in allowing gentlemen to watch ladies receiving her full body Turkish bath services... 

Madame Rachel and the ‘before and after’ hard sell (source) 

This book is good on the sensational aspects of the various legal trials in which Madame Rachel and her victims became enmeshed. Rappaport also has a good handle on the less savoury aspects of Madame Rachel's own treatment by a anti-Semitic media and establishment. Other interesting themes weave through the biography: contemporary concerns regarding cosmetics and female amorality; debate surrounding the much-delayed Married Women's Property Act (why allow women to control their money when they just spent it running up huge bills at Madame Rachel?); contemporary bias towards women in court for any reason whatsoever. I particular liked Rappaport's use of the 'popular culture' ephemera (racy song, cartoons) surrounding Mme. Rachel's run-ins with the law. Mme. Rachel also featured in Wilkie Collins' Armadale (his 'Mother' Oldershaw is close-to-libellously based on Mme. Rachel) and there is a reference too in Mrs Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (one of my favourite sensational reads).

Rating: a very entertaining historical read, even more so if you love a good legal trial or two.

If you liked this... definitely Armadale. I can't remember why on earth I didn't review it when I read it a few years back, especially since it has the heroine-villain to end all heroine-villains in it. Teresa and Jenny at Shelf Love sum it up nicely.

{review} this republic of suffering

Drew Gilpin Faust This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (2008)

Another soldier, asked by a doctor for his last words to send home, responded by requesting the doctor to provide them. "I do not know what to say. Well, tell them only just such a message as you would like to send if you were dying."

I read this book a long time ago, but it has stuck with me and I would really like to read it again one day. I almost didn't want to share it, I liked it so much. That isn't a great help for a blogger! I was attracted by a review in the LRB (a terrible source of temptation) and sought it out because, first of all, I'm interested in ways of memorializing both the living and the dead in the ancient world; second, I don't know nearly enough about the American Civil War (apart from Gone With The Wind). It seemed a good kill-two-birds choice. And it was: this is an excellent book and I cannot recommend it highly enough. It is an academic book which is also accessible to the lay reader, and this is a rare combination in my opinion: many academic titles are branded in catchy ways to bump up sales, but prove, on exploration, as impenetrable as the Rosetta Stone to a non-specialist. 

This book charts the transition from the individual management of death to what might be termed the professionalization, even the industrialisation, of the management of war dead. Gilpin Faust (incidentally, the first woman president of Harvard) brings her subject to life by threading her historical narrative with extracts from letters and diaries and records of personal - often heartbreaking - experience from the battlefields. The core of the book concerns the ways in which both the military, the soldiers' families and the soldiers themselves dealt with the mammoth task of managing the Civil War's huge death tolls. 

Gilpin Faust explores how this necessity establishes, by trial and error almost, future management of mass war casualties - how the dead are identified (and how the living seek to mark themselves against future misidentification as a consequence); who buries the dead; how the graves are marked; record-keeping; transport of the dead (and innovations in the accoutrements required); repatriation of remains. How do the victors treat the remains of the vanquished? Can the establishment of national organisations to commemorate (and, sadly, just to find) the dead assist in healing the wounds of a country torn apart by civil war? What happens to the families, the widows, the children of soldiers presumed dead? 

The author makes use of a fascinating range of primary sources: diaries and letters as well as some chilling photographs, along with local and national archival sources. One thing I found terribly moving was the presence of members of the family at the scene of battles seeking their dead. One instance is that of Oliver Wendall Holmes Snr., seeking his son's body after the Battle of Antietam (23,000 casualties in one day). Holmes Jnr. had been shot and as he lay wounded he scrawled his name, rank and family on a scrap of paper. He survived and kept the little note, commenting, "I wrote the above when I was lying in a little house on the field of Antietam which was for a while within the enemy's lines, as I thought I might faint & so be unable to tell who I was." Walt Whitman was another visitor to the battlefield whose life (the "very centre, circumference, umbilicus") was changed by his experience in search of his brother George. 

Others were not so fortunate as the younger Holmes or George Whitman, and there are many profoundly moving stories in this book of parents who never gave up the search to find their sons' final resting places. There is a particularly well constructed section on condolence letters and the presentation of the 'Good Death' which "structured the imperatives of Christianity, military courage, and masculinity into a hierarchy of solace." 

Rating: wonderful. Hugely informative and moving. (I've given up numerical ratings)

{review} sisters of sinai

Janet Soskice The Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Discovered the Hidden Gospels (2009)

Then her eye fell on an anonymous volume: ‘It had a forbidding look, for it was very dirty, and its leaves were nearly all stuck together through their having remained unturned probably since the last Syrian monk had died, centuries ago, in the Convent.’ Agnes was struck that the Syriac text she was examining, a collected lives of women saints, seemed to have been written on top of something else. As she looked closer she could see two broad columns of underwriting peeping out from beneath the text and she could make out page headings, also in the Syriac language, that clearly belonged to the earlier text. ‘Of Matthew’, ‘of Luke’, it read. This was a palimpsest. Agnes had never seen one before, but their father ‘had often related to us wonderful stories of how the old monks, when vellum had become scarce and paper was not yet invented, scraped away the writing from the pages of their books and wrote something else new on the top of it; and how, after the lapse of ages, the old ink was revived by the action of common air, and the old words peeped up again; and how a text of Plato had come to light in this curious way’.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Soskice offers a really readable account of how two Victorian sisters not only managed to get themselves to the isolated Monastery of St Catherine's in the Sinai Desert but also possessed the talent to recognise that a palimpsest  manuscript in the monastery library held a lost Syriac version of the Gospels.

Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson (née Smith) had some advantages over other Victorian ladies, being financially independent and, for most of their lives, lacking relatives or husbands (although both were briefly and happily married) who might stand in the way of their unconventional activities. Both were diligent students and scholars, learning an remarkable number of languages between them (an endeavour assisted by their being twins and thus being able to spend days at a time speaking only ancient Greek to each other!). Both were keen to utilise the technology of photography to disseminate their discoveries to the world. Both were snubbed by the university of their adopted home town, Cambridge, where women were not granted degrees until 1948 despite receiving honorary degrees from many other universities. Despite the snub, these ladies went on to found a Presbyterian college in Cambridge, Westminster College.

The twins in 1914 (source)

Soskice's story of their discoveries - and the subsequent academic jealousies that it provoked - is immensely readable, and filled with nice details:

It was reported that they had astonished their neighbours by taking exercise on parallel bars in their back garden – in their bloomers – and that their new house avoided the cause of this distress by incorporating a tower with gymnastic ropes so that the two sisters could exert themselves in privacy.

Or:

Margaret was asked by a young Sunday School teacher to visit a pupil about whom she was anxious. Margaret went at once, and reported back ‘You are quite right. The father does drink. If I lived in a house like theirs, I should drink too.’

Rating: 9/10. Thoroughly enjoyable. I now know how to remove rats from a dahabeeah.

{review} operation mincemeat

Ben Macintyre Operation Mincemeat (2010) 

"The true spy story that changed the course of World War II". 

Ben Macintyre has produced an entertaining and enlightening exploration of a minor espionage project of the Second World War that had major repercussions and - probably - smoothed the path of an easier allied victory in WW2. 

I like the way he goes about this: each participant in or part of the project is explored in detail, usually in a whole chapter. The story of Mincemeat is a small one, but in Macintyre's hands we get to glimpse the big picture - how each little cog in Operation Mincemeat was vitally important to the project as a whole and how Operation Mincemeat was itself a small cog of vital significance for the invasion of Sicily (and, thus, the liberation of Europe). 

Operation Mincemeat was one of those crazy schemes that it is hard to see that anyone could take seriously: 

"The plan was born in the mind of a novelist, and took shape through a most unlikely cast of characters: a brilliant barrister, a family of undertakers, a forensic pathologist, a gold prospector, an inventor, a submarine captain, a transvestite English spy mater, a rally driver, a pretty secretary, a credulous Nazi, and a grumpy admiral who loved fly-fishing." 

Operation Mincemeat was a plan to dump a dead body at sea off the Spanish coast, on which would be found important 'secret' documents designed to mislead the Nazi high command about the site chosen for the invasion of Europe. 

There were many, many things that could go wrong: from making sure a suitable body didn't decompose too much; to inventing a life for the body involving theatre tickets and tailor's receipts; to ensuring that a sympathetic Spaniard did not return the 'top secret' papers to the Brits before the Nazi's had got hold of a copy. If Mincemeat's papers were believed, the result would be a splitting of German forces across the entire Mediterranean, rather than a concentration of forces in Italy/Sicily. Mincemeat's success could prevent a bloodbath on Sicily for the allies: "thousands of Allied soldiers were massing on the coast of North Africa, whose future depended on a ruse that had once seemed like a jolly game, but was now a matter of life and death on a massive scale." 

In practical terms, where the British 8th Army had anticipated "10,000 casualties in the first week of the invasion; just one-seventh of that number were killed or wounded." 

Macintyre does a great job in making Mincemeat come to life. Even Hitler was fooled in the end, and there is a lovely irony in that this deception was planned by a Jew. 

Rating: 8/10. Fascinating popular history. 

If you liked this: I hear that Macintyre's Agent Zigzag is good too.  

{review} until the final hour

Traudl Junge (with Melissa Müller) Until the Final Hour: Hitler's Last Secretary (2003)

Joachim Fest Inside Hitler's Bunker: The Last Days of the Third Reich (2005)

  

Both of these books proclaim on their covers that they were the inspiration for the Oscar-nominated movie Downfall, which I have on whatever is the TBR equivalent of a To-Be-Watched pile. 

Now all the self-delusion is over. Finally, at last, that desperate, seductive voice in me is silenced, the part of me that wouldn't see and know reality, that wanted to believe. At the same time I suddenly feel very sorry for Hitler. A hopelessly disappointed man, toppled from the greatest heights, broken, lonely... I feel guilty all of a sudden. 

Traudl Junge, as the title suggests, was Hitler's last secretary. Junge was only 22 in 1942 when she began this role. This book is structured as a journal (although it was composed in 1947 rather than contemporaneously) of her time with Hitler. It is an extraordinary read, primarily, I think, because it offers such an intimate perspective on day to day life at the highest echelons of power as the Reich and its leader began to crumble. 

Traudl Junge on her wedding day, June 1943 (source)

I approached it with a somewhat cautious eye: after all, this was someone who lived at close quarters with Hitler for three years; who was remarkably lucky to escape with her life when Berlin fell; and who presumably had a vested interest in denazification. Junge, in general, manages to walk a fine line between criticism ("But this time it did disturb me a lot to find someone describing himself as a genius") and enthusiasm (as when Hitler survives the von Stauffenberg - Valkyrie - bombing). Incidentally, she notes "he looked like a hedgehog" post-explosion.

Mostly, however, her memoir captures the viewpoint, concerns and enthusiasms of a young woman and offer rich details about, for instance, Hitler's views on lipstick (negative), smoking (ultra-anti), food preferences (bland and vegetarian), his health fads (many), marriages (a keen matchmaker), fondness for tea-parties, music ("The only pop music he would let us play was the 'Donkey Serenade'"), lederhosen (his knees were too white: see here), and avoiding provincial hotel rooms without en-suites because of the embarrassment of returning from the loo along a corridor lined with saluting yokels. There are also odd insights like Eva Braun's dislike of fat women and her desire to be a "beautiful corpse". As the end draws near, Junge captures moments of great pitifulness: the look on the face of the eldest Goebbels' child, or Frau Goebbels declaration that "Our children have no place in Germany as it will be after the war." The Goebbels will, of course, kill themselves and their six children. 

One cannot help thinking about Arendt on the banality of evil. Junge has stated elsewhere that Hitler was "a pleasant boss". This boss sometimes seems far more like a Chaplinesque Great Dictator than a monstrous psychopath who would refer to his decision not to eliminate "thousands" back in 1934 coup thus: "Afterwards one regrets having been so benevolent."

It was salutary therefore to read Junge's memoir alongside Joachim Fest's account of the last days in the bunker, which retold the entire story from a rather more black-and-white viewpoint. 

The bunker as photographed by William Vandivert, the first American photographer 
to access the bunker after the fall of Berlin (source)

This is a very readable, almost popular, account of the last days, with plenty of structuring of the events within with those outside Berlin to give a broader historical perspective. Fest asks very interesting questions, the most significant (I thought) being - was what happened in Berlin inevitable? Fest's book is nearly as good as Junge's memoir at capturing the claustrophobia of those last days, trapped in a concrete bunker thirty-three feet below ground with a madman and an entourage that veered wildly between sycophantic and downright treacherous: "With treachery all around me, only misfortune has remained faithful to me - misfortune and my shepherd dog Blondi" (Hitler). 

I felt depressed for days after reading these books, but the consequences of evil on this scale must never be allowed to be forgotten. 

Rating: both 4/5.

If you liked this... for me it will be Downfall the movie, and probably The Great Dictator to restore my equilibrium.

source

{wishlist}

I have a bit of a thing about pineapples, so...

Fran Beauman (2005)

The Pineapple: King of Fruits

I'm assuming it does for pineapples 

what Salt and Cod and Nathaniel's Nutmeg 

did for, um... salt, cod and nutmeg.

{review} last curtsey

Fiona MacCarthy Last Curtsey: The End of the Debutantes (2006)

 

'It was such a peculiar thing to have done', as one ex-debutante recently remarked to me. Peculiar indeed: both in terms of the elaborate social rituals that lingered through the post-war years and in the underlying concepts of elegance, good manners, belief in protocol, love and respect for the monarchy, deference towards your betters, courage, kindness and idealism, qualities which before long appeared impossibly old-fashioned.

I made the mistake of taking this book on a 'plane without a pencil. By the time I returned to Adelaide I had almost dog-eared every page. It's that sort of book.

Fiona MacCarthy was a debutante in the final year of the 'presentations' to the Queen at Buckingham Palace in 1958. The world was changing, and the debutante lifestyle - where women were defined by their success in catching a husband during the Season - was on the wane. As the last proper Season, it was a bumper year: 1400 girls curtseying to the Queen over three days, and all presented by a relative who had herself passed through this initiatory ritual (MacCarthy's mother in 1925). It was a combination of the utterly arcane with an "old-time beauty context". MacCarthy notes Jessica Mitford's comment that the procession of [mostly] virgins was "the specific, upper-class version of the puberty rite" (Hons and Rebels).

The decorative elements of the presentation ceremony masked its serious, even ruthless, raison d'être in the stratification of society. By the mid-nineteenth century the annual presentation had gradually become the key event in a formalised connection of the monarch and the court with the Season and society. Presentation acquired an important role in the regulation of society in Britain. It became a kind of bulwark, defending an elite inner circle and securing the channels to power, influence and wealth. To put it at its crudest, the curtseyers were in, the non-curtseyers excluded from the myriad royal enclosures, members' tents and other well-defended spaces in which the well bred were separated from the riff-raff. 

Why did it end? As far back as the 1860s there had been complaints that the ritual was being debased by the presentation of those whom the elite considered vulgar interlopers: new peers with industrial wealth, cashed up Americans, etc. In Princess Margaret's words, "Ever tart in London was getting in." (!) It's a complex question of anthropological interest, to be sure.

This is a fascinating book, and very well written. MacCarthy (whose family, the McAlpines, owned the Dorchester but whose mother was in the uncomfortable situation of being kept on a short financial rope by her trustees) is an insider in this world of curtseying schools, dress-makers, Scottish dance instructors, endless Coronation Chicken lunches, cocktail parties, balls, weekends in decaying country-houses, horse-races in Ireland, and young men classed as "Not Safe In Taxis" (NSIT; or "VVSITPQ: Very Very Safe In Taxis Probably Queer").

I really enjoyed this dip into the end of an era: MacCarthy writes with a nostalgia for a type of society that would be swept away in the 1960s, but she is well aware that nostalgia can cover up many imperfections (in particular, the constrained roles granted to women). 

Rating:  10/10. Gorgeous.

If you liked this... MacCarthy's memories of the decaying country-houses in which she stayed during the Season reminded me of James Lees-Milne's stories of his visits to similar stately homes in the 1940s, in his wonderful Some Country Houses and Their Owners {REVIEW}.

{review} bluestockings

Jane Robinson Bluestockings: The Remarkable Story of the First Women to Fight for an Education (2009)

This is a delightful book of the 'social history-lite' genre. That is not a criticism - books such as this one are a brilliant introduction to a subject and - as this one has a very nice bibliography too - enable one to seek out more information if one so desires. Bluestockings: The Remarkable Story of the First Women to Fight for an Education is written in a lively style and is filled with just enough facts to balance the well-chosen anecdotes and other pertinent authorial observations.

I was drawn to this book because I attended a women's college in England as a graduate student and I was in college in 1998 when Cambridge celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the granting of degrees to women in 1948. Fifty years: that is a shameful fact. SHAMEFUL. Even the 'other place' (Oxford) had cracked by 1920. And, as this admirable book makes clear, women were able to take degrees from many other institutions before this date.

Robinson builds up her picture of the early women's colleges by looking at the precendents for women's education (the bluestocking group around Elizabeth Montagu in the 18th century), the growth of academically-minded girl's schools (such as Cheltenham Ladies) and the remarkably rapid development of the first women's colleges in the later nineteenth century. A girl's teachers remain as important now as they did then in terms of promoting young women's access to higher education. 

What form did the opposition to women's education take? The best known objection is that which suggested that studying atrophied the womb - destroying the "muscles of motherhood". And what use was an educated woman from one of these "petticoteries" anyway? She was a "white elephant" educated beyond (indeed, out of) her natural level for no certain purpose. One is reminded of Samuel Johnson's thoughts on this:

A man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table, than when his wife talks Greek. 

Robinson quotes Ruskin being 'mischievous':

I cannot let the bonnets in, on any condition this term. The three public lectures will be chiefly on angles, degrees of colour-prisms (without any prunes) and other such things of no use to the female mind, and they would occupy the seats in mere disappointed puzzlement.

Robinson draws a lot of material from Oxbridge (this book's purview does not lie beyond Britain) but other far more innovative and welcoming universities and colleges provide much interesting material, particularly in terms of the broader social spectrum encountered outside Oxbridge. Certainly it is the Oxbridge colleges which provide the most eccentric anecdotes. Consider Elizabeth Smedley who came to St Hilda's College (Oxford) for an admission interview to read English:

My interview with Miss Rooke was... agonising. She sat in a dim light, by the fireside, making the shadows of different animals appear on the wall by manipulation of her hands. I was full of carefully prepared brilliant thoughts on Shakespeare etc. and was utterly taken aback on being urged to try and make a rabbit or an elephant appear beside hers.

What happened to these educated women? Robinson offers the thought that one might consider that educating women did lead to sterility, of a sort - since so many of these educated women did not marry and procreate. The stats from an 1895 survey are interesting:

Of the 720 students who attended Newnham College between 1871 and 1893, 16 died, 37 were foreigners who returned to their original countries, 155 married, and 374 (52 per cent) went into teaching. Of the rest, 230 were living at home (of whom 108 were married), five did medical work, two were missionaries, one was a market gardener, one a book-binder, and the remaining handful worked for charities or did secretarial work.

I thought there were a few areas that could have had a bit more work. I would have liked to have known more about the breakdown of subjects undertaken by these pioneering 'undergraduettes'. My own college, for instance, built its own science laboratories on the college grounds since women were not permitted to use the university's facilities. I also thought that Robinson did not really get to grips with the women who went to co-educational institutions rather than the single sex Oxbridge colleges. Did they face a situation like that encountered by Phillipa Fawcett who topped the Cambridge Mathematics Tripos in 1890 but was not granted the honorary title of 'Senior Wrangler' (because only men could hold this) but was listed (on the separate women's results) as 'above the senior wrangler'?  Fawcett had some strong role models in her family: her aunt was Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the first woman to qualify in medicine in Britain. In a way the Oxbridge examples, being so much more extreme in their misogyny, may not necessarily mirror the experience of women elsewhere. They make much better copy though.

One should never take the luxury of education for granted. As Robinson so rightly notes, "University turned villagers into citizens of the world, passivity into proactivity, and predictable little girls into strong, surprising women." My own experience was no different.

Rating: 7/10. I also enjoyed this review.

Best acronym? S.P.E.W. (Society for the Promotion of Employment for Women). 

Worst cocktail? 'The Bluestocking': one tbsp gin, one tbspn blue curaçao, 3 tbsns clear apple juice, a fat blue cherry. A blue cherry?!

If you liked this... Victoria Glendinning's A Suppressed Cry: Life and Death of a Quaker Daughter (1969; reprinted as a Virago): the very sad story of a young woman who goes to Newnham College in an attempt to escape a stifling Victorian home-life. I was surprised not to see this in Robinson's bibliography.