I'M GINGER: I HATE beaches. Summer days spent hiding in holiday cottages,
suffering the double humiliation of being both puce with sunburn and ginger
in the first place, with the company only of unloved paperbacks and
after-sun balm, may indeed be the origins of my careers: writing imagined
lives from history, and for that matter acting them on stage.
Better a darkened rehearsal room in August, a library or the cloud-flecked
sunshine of the imagination. But when I travel a biography often becomes the
favoured companion; a personable guide to the place I am in or an
imaginative journey that can be as adventurous and rejuvenating as travel
itself. Just don't ask me for a beach read.
It all began for me with Mary
Queen of Scots by Antonia Fraser (Phoenix, £9.99/offer £9.49). This was
a gift from Great Aunt Celia, who seemed to think that this tale of guilt,
lust, imprisonment and Reformation politics was all a ten-year-old would be
looking for on holiday. Still exemplary of its genre.
From
the Times Archive: 1976 letter from Antonia Fraser, author of Mary Queen of
Scots
From
the Times Archive: 1976 letter in reply to Anotonia Fraser's letter on Mary
Queen of Scots
David Niven was one of those actors who seemed to have an effortless ease with
prose. Bring
on the Empty Horses (Hodder, £7.99/£7.59) offers a laugh on every page
and an engaging side-angle on Hollywood in its heyday. It makes for the
perfect Brit-in-California read.
From
the Times Archive: 1975 review of Bring on the Empty Horses by David Niven
The ultimate insider's guide to Hollywood is William Goldman's Adventures
in the Screen Trade (Abacus, £10.99/£9.89). It reads now almost as a
parody of show business, perhaps because so much that he writes about has
since become part of our collective consciousness. Even so, an education and
a pleasure in movie egos lost and sold.
While we were watching Nelson Mandela's 90th birthday concert, my son asked me
which hit song he was famous for. Long
Walk to Freedom (Abacus, £12.99/£11.69) is the song itself: a hymn to
forgiveness and dignity in the face of state oppression that gives you faith
in humanity and in Africa's future.
I nearly suggested the memoirs of Catherine the Great, a rewarding but
tendentious romp that I read on a beach in Greece. But sand and sun lotion
ruined my copy, and more widely available anyway is Simon Sebag Montefiore's
paperback Catherine
the Great and Potemkin (Phoenix, £10.99/ £9.89). It fills in all the
gaps that the tsarina's memoirs left and supplies psychological and
political insights that cannot fail to engage. A real political page-turner
and epic romance.
This is the summer to read Barack Obama's Dreams
from my Father (Canongate, £8.99/£8.54). The only politician's life I
have read that made me cry, it ranges from Chicago to Kenya to Hawaii but
also across all the geography of American politics and the challenges of the
early 21st century. Written years before Obama's bid for the presidency, it
remains elegant and surprising prose as well as a solid personal statement.
The finest insight I know into the real world of working in a kitchen is
Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen
Confidential (Bloomsbury, £7.99/£7.59). Searingly honest and scabrous,
it's a bar-brawl of a book that is a workout for the belly, not just for its
many laughs but for its frequent descent into the nauseous underworld of
catering. Bourdain's A Cook's Tour is also fine for travelling with; no
restaurant will ever feel quite the same again.
Stephen Fry's Moab
is My Washpot (Arrow, £8.99/£8.54) is the author's wry reminiscence on
his first 20 years. Having never been fortunate enough to go on holiday with
the man himself, let's settle for this unexpected tour of suburbia, prison
and adolescence: every mum with a troubled teen should read this.
I am very taken with northern France, which most Brits motor past on the way
south, and A
Very Unimportant Officer: Life and Death of the Somme and at Passchendale
, edited by Cameron Stewart (Hodder, £18.99/£17.09), is something unusual
and fresh on the subject of the Great War; the written testimony of one of
the men who survived. Edited sympathetically and unobtrusively by his
grandson.
Though I would be torn between Thomas
Hardy: The Time-Torn Man by Claire Tomalin (Penguin, £8.99/£8.54) and
her Samuel Pepys, the Unequalled Self, there is no denying that Dorset
remains a more attractive summer destination than Fleet Street. There could
be no better West Country companion than Hardy in Tomalin's assured and
compassionate hands.
For a writer who has spent so much of her time in the company of 19th-century
courtesans, in The
Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth (Faber, £18.99/£17.09) Frances Wilson
breathes unexpected warmth into the life of that patron saint of spinsters,
the Wordsworth sister whom I had always suspected of being bored, bitter or
both. It turns out that Dorothy is maybe the finer guide to the times and
place than William. One for the Lakes, or anywhere.
I have longed to go to China since reading Wild
Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang (HarperPerennial,
£9.99/£9.49). It is one of the most exotic and extraordinary and
life-affirming journeys of the mind that I have ever been taken on. As much
a tour, for a man, of the foreign landscape of mothers-and-daughters as the
equally far-flung horizons of the Cultural Revolution.
Closer to home although equally exotic is An
Aristocratic Affair: The life of Georgiana's sister, Harriet Spencer,
Countess of Bessborough by Janet Gleeson (Bantam, £8.99/£8.54). With
Keira Knightley soon to appear in the film The Duchess, be ahead of the
crowd with this vivid portrait. Illegitimacy, bizarre ménages, scandal and
debauchery; how unlike the home life of our own dear Queen.
Ian Kelly is the author of Casanova
and returns to the National Theatre in The Pitmen Painters this winter.
