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| Free Radical by Vince Cable Vince Cable's memoirs may be hubristic, but Roy Hattersley is happy to forgive himThere is much to like about Vince Cable and much to admire. But nothing reveals the secret of his success as graphically as his persona. While Nick Clegg, his party leader, subscribes to the David Cameron theory that successful politicians ought to look and sound like Rolls-Royce salesmen, Cable has the demeanour of a Yorkshire undertaker on a day trip to Bridlington. His willingness to answer to the name of "Vince" is more proof of disdain for fashion. He is the politics of substance made flesh. His popularity is a vindication of those of us who argue that ideas are more important than image. If he had not stooped to make that Cambridge Union joke about the prime minister evolving from Stalin into Mr Bean, he might have achieved parliamentary sanctification ahead of Frank Field. As it is, he will have to be satisfied with his memoirs being received with applause that few other politicians, writing in such an inhibited style, could expect. "Vince" can describe personal tragedy without being mawkish and revisit party rivalries without being suspected of repaying old debts because he is "genuine" – not bogus genuine, but genuine genuine.There are, however, character weaknesses associated with the Cable virtues. Vince – as they say in Yorkshire, home to us both – "thinks a lot of himself". One of his chapters is entitled "Fame, Fortune and Notoriety" and includes the announcement, "I am often asked why I am not party leader . . ." During the Lib Dem interregnum between Menzies Campbell and Clegg, he satisfied himself "and surprised others" by demonstrating that he could "handle competently or better the role our leader has to perform in Parliament" and was "flattered and encouraged by favourable reviews". When Charles Kennedy "didn't turn up" to speak in the 2004 budget debate, Vince, "with an hour's notice . . . responded confidently and with spontaneity". There was much "speculation among colleagues and the press as to the cause of Charles's absence, and the version which included alcohol featured on the charge sheet during the leadership crisis". Vince was "happy to accept the official explanation" and is clearly equally relaxed about disinterring the alternative theory. He is far too genuine to deceive the general public about his colleagues' failings. "After 20 years of being listened to with deference and respect," Campbell "was not psychologically equipped to deal with the noisy hostility and mockery of the Commons." Virtue is sometimes more difficult to forgive than vice.Political autobiographies should either be funny (ideally at the author's expense) or an account of great events, preceded by no more explanation of the formative years than is absolutely necessary. When Cable reveals that "Within a week or so of becoming an MP, I had my first queue at a constituency surgery", he does not add a great deal to the sum of human understanding. However, he has a moving story to tell – courtship, marriage and the death of his first wife – which would be compelling reading if he had remained an obscure academic. Olympia Cable was a Kenyan Asian whose family originated in Catholic Goa. Both families were prejudiced against what, in their unenlightened communities, was called a mixed marriage. Strength of character as well as love saw them through until Olympia died of cancer. It would be a harder heart than mine that did not rejoice to read of Cable's second marriage to a long-divorced old friend. I have yet to decide if his renewed interest in ballroom dancing is entirely within character or a complete aberration.Cable is probably the most popular politician in Britain. That is the direct result of his straight talking about the depression – its causes, extent and remedies. He has already written about the crisis and clearly feels no need to deal with it in any great detail in this memoir. But it is the period of his life which, as far as the public is concerned, defines him, and many general readers will be disappointed not to read more about it here. He is admirably frank in his assent that before the international bank collapse, economic management "was the most successful and enduring policy of New Labour's years in office". That is typical of the Cable style – honest as well as authoritative. He manages, more than any other contemporary politician, to enhance his party's reputation because he is not partisan. That is because he realises that apparent contempt for image building is the best image of all. He is interested in real issues. And because of that he should be forgiven for all the hubris that his memoir reveals.Roy Hattersley's collection of essays, In Search of England, is published by Little, Brown.Vince CablePoliticsBiographyRoy Hattersleyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Museums: For Poe, This Has Been the Year to Die For Celebrations have been widespread and plentiful in the bicentennial of his birth, including two exhibits in Richmond, Va., where Poe spent nearly a third of his life. feeds.nytimes.com |
Linklog: Meaningful gifts, Karl Marx on Ayn Rand, and more • If you're giving books as gifts, do you have to play nice?• The novels of Ayn Rand as a fulfilment the predictions of the Communist Manifesto.• The bonkbuster bounces back.• How TS Eliot snapped up Ted Hughes.• And finally, a question: I'm pretty sure that the name of the baddie in Avatar, Colonel Miles Quaritch, has a literary inspiration. But is James Cameron paying tribute to H Rider Haggard, or taking revenge for a particularly expensive antiquarian buy?Peter Robinsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
TLS presents awards for translation Anthea Bell and Margaret Jull Costa are among the winners at the Times Literary Supplement's honoursAfter landing an OBE in the New Year honours for "services to literature and to literary translations" Anthea Bell has notched up another award just eight days into 2010, winning the Times Literary Supplement's prize for translation from the German for her work on Stefan Zweig's novella Burning Secret.Set in an off-season Austrian resort, Burning Secret tells the story of the tensions between a 12-year-old boy and "the Baron", who is trying to seduce his mother. "The boy is used as a go-between but then wakes up and tries to thwart him at every turn," said Bell, who has won a succession of awards and honours over the years for her translations from French and German. "It's full of human interest, and you feel something for all three protagonists. It's moving, with a certain wryness – I'm very fond of it."Winning the TLS's Schlegel-Tieck prize for German translation was "a great pleasure, particularly for something by Stefan Zweig who's a very favourite author of mine", she said. She and publisher Pushkin Press have been trying to revive interest in Zweig, an Austrian Jew who committed suicide in 1942, recently releasing a new translation of his memoir The World of Yesterday. Adrian Tahourdin at the TLS called Burning Secret "a small masterpiece, beautifully rendered in Anthea Bell's translation".Fiction dominates the TLS's translation prizes this year, with Tove Jansson's translator Thomas Teal taking the Bernard Shaw prize for Swedish translation for Jansson's Fair Play, a portrait of two women praised by Tahourdin for its "Nordic lyricism". An "unflinching and fluent" translation from the French wins Polly McLean the Scott Moncrieff prize for Laurent Quintreau's novel Gross Margin; Samah Selim takes the Saif Ghobash-Banipal Prize for translation from the Arabic for Yahya Taher Abdullah's story collection The Collar and the Bracelet; and the biennial Calouste-Gulbenkian Foundation prize for translation from the Portuguese goes to Peter Bush for his work on Miguel Sousa Tavares's novel Equator, partly set on a Portuguese island colony in 1905.Her translation of a book described as "the first great Basque novel" wins Margaret Jull Costa the Premio Valle Inclán award. The Accordionist's Son by Bernardo Atxaga is a portrait of the Basque country after the Spanish civil war; Costa called it "Atxaga's farewell to the fictional village of Obaba and to the very Basque-centred stories of his previous books"."It describes how the Spanish civil war continued to poison lives long after it was over, and describes, too, the beginnings of an initially idealistic separatist movement in Euzkadi, the Spanish Basque country. Atxaga shows us what a frail and easily corruptible vessel ideology is – at both ends of the political spectrum," she said, adding that she was "thrilled to have won ... although there is, I suppose, a certain irony about a book originally written in Basque winning a Spanish translation prize". The novel "is not a book solely about politics and history, but, perhaps more importantly, about love and friendship and about paradises lost and found", she continued. "What I love about Atxaga's books and stories is his profound humanity and his rather English sense of the absurd."Just one work of non-fiction takes an award this year, with Sam Garrett's translation from the Dutch of Frank Westerman's Ararat, a history of Mount Ararat, winning him the biennial Vondel prize.The awards will be presented on 11 January by TLS editor Sir Peter Stothard.Awards and prizesFictionAlison Floodguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The New Old World by Perry Anderson Andy Beckett is impressed by a study of the European Union's past, present and futureThis is a hugely ambitious and panoramic political book, of a sort rarely attempted in our era of quick leader Âbiographies and reheated histories of the second world war. Perry Anderson's stated subject is the past, present and future of the European Union; but his restless chapters keep roaming beyond this already vast territory to trace out a broader history of Europe, taking in everything from architecture under Mussolini to the decline of the Ottoman empire.And yet, on the second page, he emphasises that there is one subject he will not be covering. "I do not regret the omission of Britain," he writes, "whose history since the fall of Thatcher has been of little moment." Thus, in a single elegantly dismissive sentence, 20 years of history – the rise and fall of Blair, the great British boom and bust, the return of London as a world city – that most observers would consider pretty central to the story of modern Europe are declared not worthy of the author's attention.It is a characteristic Anderson judgment. For half a century, as an editor and writer at the influential New Left Review, as professor of history at the University of California and as one of the few left-associated academics still with a global following, he has summed up centuries and continents in books and essays that read like the loftiest end-of-term reports.Anderson comes from a prosperous Anglo-Irish family and went to Eton, as his many enemies on the right and the left rarely tire of pointing out, and has an impregnable smoothness and confidence on the page. He writes mostly about high politics: international organisations and treaties, the strengths and weaknesses of leaders, how power shifts and is wielded. He writes for grown-ups with patience – the chapters here are long and intricate; the book comes without an explanatory subtitle – but he is never dry or dull.His account of the EU has little time for the standard depiction, almost as common on the left as on the right, of it as a bland, bureaucratic conspiracy. Instead Anderson provocatively describes the organisation's creation as "the last great world-historical achievement of the bourgeoisie", an unprecedented piece of international cooperation to which radicals and idealists made a substantial contribution. He cites the involvement of Altiero Spinelli, a former member of the Italian Communist party interned by Mussolini on the island of Ventotene, who during his captivity secretly co-wrote a manifesto calling for a united Europe to replace the old one of competing nation states. The document was written in 1941, with the second world war raging, and had to be smuggled off the island. Anderson notes the path its co-author subsequently followed: "Forty years later, Spinelli ended his career . . . a member of the European commission and father of the European parliament, whose principal building in Brussels bears his name."Anderson is much less approving of how the EU has generally developed since. But his criticisms are typically counterintuitive and original: "Today's EU, with its pinched spending (just over 1% of GDP), minuscule bureaucracy (around 16,000 officials, excluding translators), absence of independent taxation, and lack of any means of administrative enforcement, could in many ways be regarded as . . . a minimal state, beyond the most drastic imaginings of classical liberalism." The EU is too pro-business, expansionist territorially and yet too vague and diffident in its underlying mission and, above all, too pro-American. During the war on terror, Anderson continues scathingly, EU countries have "surrendered" to the demands of the United States: "Ireland furnished Shannon [airport] to the CIA for so many flights that locals dubbed it Guantánamo Express . . . Italy helped a large CIA team to kidnap . . . Poland . . . [had] torture-chambers constructed for 'high value detainees' – facilities unknown in the time of [the Soviet-backed] Jaruzelski's martial law."In such passages Anderson's unusual combination of mandarin foreign affairs knowledge and leftist sympathies gives the book a fierceness and a revelatory quality comparable to the best political works of Noam Chomsky. Yet Anderson deploys his anger sparingly. Most of the time he is content to coolly analyse and synthesise, tracking the rise and fall of the EU's principal actors and guiding ideas, and quietly but often lethally critiquing other writers who have attempted to make sense of the whole sprawling edifice. Generally, he scorns the rosy picture of the modern EU put about by liberals and social democrats. This is not a great surprise: New Left Review writers, in the way of the radical left, have often reserved their sharpest barbs for the fainthearts and compromisers of the centre-left.Yet Anderson goes further, by praising rightwing thinkers on Europe, such as the American neoconservative Robert Kagan and the critic of multiculturalism Christopher Caldwell for being "lucid" and "hard-headed" about the EU's inconsistencies over immigration and transatlantic relations. I don't think Anderson is about to turn into a neocon – he is much too nuanced to accept their broad-brush ideas, and his residual leftism is probably too strong – but he shares with them a relish for depicting the world as it is, brutalities and all, which sometimes makes the reader wonder whether he is condemning the hard men or grudgingly impressed by them. Perhaps the fact that such a leftwinger has sustained a thriving career in socialism-free America is not such a surprise after all.For the middle section of the book, he turns from the EU itself to the countries he considers its "core": France, Germany and Italy. Each is awarded an extended essay, including a glide through its postwar political history, a consideration of its intellectual life and culture, and an assessment of its prospects. These essays have momentum and clarity – Anderson is good at both very short and very long sentences, and is averse to jargon – which makes them weirdly addictive. Who knew that the long retreat of the French left could be made so compelling?Sometimes Anderson gives flesh to his political characters with a novelist's eye: the former German chancellor Helmut Kohl has a "heavy bonhomous jaw and sharp feral eyes". And yet, at times his yardsticks for measuring a country – the health of its journals of ideas, the quality of its art-house cinema, the seriousness or otherwise of its major newspapers – can seem a little elitist and old-fashioned: as if he is some mid-20th-century man of letters, cosmopolitan and urbane but still a believer in a strict cultural and political canon. This book has been more than a decade in the making; but that does not fully explain why some key elements of contemporary European life, such as terrorism and the internet, scarcely feature. The absence of Britain also sometimes strains the book. Anderson portrays the recent Europe-wide financial crisis and bank bailouts as a sign of EU economic fragility, while avoiding mentioning the country in which both phenomena have arguably been most important and dramatic.The book is much more interested in Charles De Gaulle than in Alistair Darling. For British readers, increasingly lacking serious news coverage of their European neighbours, Anderson's continental bias is mostly a valuable corrective. An extensive section on Turkey, Cyprus and the EU's eastward expansion reinforces the sense of the non-Anglo-Saxon world being expertly explained to rather under-informed pupils. The pivotal 20th-century Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, like De Gaulle, is treated with a degree of admiration that suggests Anderson likes tough, wily politicians, even if they have conservative leanings, just as he likes tough, conservative writers. Sometimes, he concludes, paraphrasing a view of Trotsky's, "Reaction [can] solve . . . tasks the revolution [has] failed to acquit."Anderson sees today's EU in those terms: essentially a rightwing project but retaining radical potential. Until the European left revives – and he is bleak about the chances of that – the EU may be the realistic leftist's only practical vehicle. Its unfinished, messy quality, he writes, "might . . . [given] the unintended consequences that have tracked integration from the start . . . yield further, better surprises". And if the revolution never comes? I suspect Anderson's services will still be very much in demand.Andy Beckett's When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies is published by Faber.European UnionAndy Beckettguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |