Daily Mail, Friday, August 30, 2019 Page 55BOOKS
21 LESSONS
FOR THE 21st
CENTURY
by Yuval
Noah Harari
(Vintage
£9.99, 432 pp)
Not many academics have
their books namechecked
on tV’s Love Island, but
Professor Yuval Noah
Harari’s bestsellers, Sapiens
and Homo Deus, sold even
better after they were
mentioned by Camilla and
Jamie in a cosy chat about
literature back in 2017.
In his latest book, Harari
considers some of the most
pressing issues facing the
world and argues that ‘the
unstoppable march of
progress’ envisaged in the
aftermath of World War II
has stalled.
He examines possible
responses to this unsettling
new world order, exploring
ideas of globalisation, post-
truth and how we might find
the skills to emerge from our
age of bewilderment.
Vividly written and spiked
with references to Monty
Python and the Lion King,
Harari’s essays are thought-
provoking and accessible.
‘Leave all your illusions
behind,’ he suggests. ‘they
are very heavy.’FROM THE
CORNER OF
THE OVAL
OFFICE
by Beck
Dorey-Stein
(Black Swan
£8.99, 352 pp)
IN oCtober 2011, beck
Dorey-Stein was living in
Washington and holding
down five part-time jobs
when she answered a
Craigslist advertisement
for a stenographer.
the job turned out to
be at the White House,
recording and transcribing
U.S. President obama’sspeeches and travelling
with him on domestic and
international trips.
Her memoir of six high-
octane years working with
obama has been optioned
by Universal Pictures, and
no wonder. It is a close-up,
often breathless, behind-
the-scenes account of how
a naive political outsider
became part of the elite
team that accompanied the
President wherever he went.
Dorey-Stein even finds
herself running on a tread-
mill next to him at the gym.
‘I thought you were faster
than that,’ he teased.
Gossipy, starstruck and
enthralling, this is an
irresistible binge-read of a
political memoir.THE GARDEN
OF LOST
AND FOUND
by Harriet
Evans
(Headline
£7.99, 496 pp)
IN MaY 2014, a rare sketch
of a lost edwardian master-
piece goes up for sale at a
top London auction house.
the original painting, the
Garden of Lost and Found,
was a sensation in its time,
but it was destroyed by its
painter, edward Horner, who
died soon afterwards.
His great-granddaughter,
Juliet, is an expert in
Victorian and edwardian
painting at Dawnay’s, but
her job there comes to
a sudden end when her
unpleasant boss blames
her for accidental damage
to the sketch.
Juliet’s family life is
equally fragile: her eldest
daughter is being bullied at
school, and her husband is
having an affair. When Juliet
unexpectedly inherits her
grandmother’s ramshackle
country house, it seems like
a new beginning. but, along
with the house, Juliet has
inherited its dark secrets.
Harriet evans’s family
saga is a poignant story
of love and loss across
three generations.
JANESHILLINGmud, glorious mud
reign of Honorius (393-423), a
rather useless Roman Emperor
whose greatest concern, as his
Empire began to totter and fall,
was the wellbeing of his chickens.
You learn a lot of fascinating stuff
about the history of the Thames
itself along the way, including the
enjoyable factoid that, in 1814, the
river froze so hard that someone
led an elephant across it.
From more recent times, Maiklem
once found an object she thought
looked like ‘a large bullet’, so
innocently took it home to add to
her collection. Later, she showed it
to a neighbour who knew about
military matters ‘and he took a
very big step away from me’.
It turned out she was nursing
an unexploded hand grenade —and old ones can be ‘extremely
unstable’. She disposed of it fast.
It’s sad to learn that you now
need a licence to mudlark: the
river is eroding and destroying all
the possible finds anyway, so why
shouldn’t people be allowed to find
them first? Alas for elf ’n’ safety.
This is a quirky and delightful
read, wonderfully evocative of
London’s gloopy, ghost-haunted
river, like ‘a great khaki dragon
snake’, which she pictures flowing
on an incoming tide, winding past
Greenwich, ‘to sort the remains of
Tudor feasts’, past Cuckold’s Point,
‘where it will play with the bones
of abandoned warships’, and on
westward, ‘to swirl around the
Buried treasure: Lara Maiklem prehistoric remains at Vauxhall.. .’PICTURETHIS
JUDITH KERR: THE ILLUSTRATORS
(Thames and Hudson £18.95)
THERE probably isn’t a household in Britain without a
dog-eared Judith Kerr book under its roof. Who can’t recite
a line from Mog or The Tiger Who Came To Tea? This
brilliant collection is a celebration of Kerr’s classic work
(she died in May aged 95), giving us a glimpse into her
studio, sketches and reflections. From her childhood
drawings as a refugee of Nazi Germany, right up to her
most recent artwork, this lovely book is an absolute
delight, and the ravishing cover is the colour of a
pink sugared almond. KATYAEDWARDSPICTURETHIS
MUSTREADS
Out now in paperbackevents in 20th-century history. What
altered their lives irrevocably was
the coming of World War II. It would
prove to be the making of both of
them. edwina, putting the years
of frivolity behind her and threw
herself into humanitarian work.
Dickie, who had always treated his
naval career with great seriousness,was given new opportunities. His
command of HMS Kelly during its
difficult journey back to port after an
e-boat attack turned him into a war
hero. Noel Coward’s film In Which
We Serve was based on the incident,
although there were those who
thought it was Mountbatten’s
stupidity in needlessly advertising
his position that had caused Kelly to
be attacked in the first place. (the
ship was later sunk off Crete.)
It scarcely seemed to matter. Hewas made the head of Combined
operations and, later, Supreme
Commander Se asia. In the latter
role, he accepted the surrender of
hundreds of thousands of Japanese
troops at the end of the war. at the
time, he described it as ‘the greatest
day of my life’. but there was more
to come.
With the war over, India demanded
independence. a new viceroy, the
last ever, was needed. Who better
than Mountbatten, with his royal
connections? ‘We shall be incredibly
unpopular and the odds are we shall
end up with bullets in our backs,’ he
predicted. but he took the job and
edwina accompanied him.E
DWINa’S war work had
not put an end to her
infidelities. (one of her new
loves was the conductor
Malcolm Sargent.) In India, she
embarked on the most significant
extramarital relationship, both
personally and politically, of her life.
She and the politician Jawaharlal
Nehru, soon to be the first prime
minister of a newly independent
India, became lovers. (edwina was
later to write of ‘the strange relation-
ship — most of it spiritual — which
exists between us’, but it seems
unlikely it wasn’t physical as well.)
Lownie’s account of the Mount-
battens after Indian independence
can seem a little anticlimactic.
edwina died in her sleep in February
1960 on a tour of Malaysia. She was
only 59. Dickie lived on for another
20 years, until his own terrible end,
killed by an Ira bomb in 1979, 40
years ago this week.
Stories that he was gay or bisexual
have long been floated. according
to one witness, in the years after
edwina’s death, his London mews
house ‘seemed awash with young,
muscular and suspiciously good-
looking naval ratings bustling about
the place’. a wartime FbI report
even suggested he had a ‘perversion
for young boys’. Quite rightly, Lownie
places all these stories in a separate
chapter entitled ‘rumours’.
Lownie has written a very enjoy-
able biography of two remarkable
people and their even more remark-
able marriage. edwina transformed
herself from a poor little rich girl into
a dedicated worker for charity. Dickie
could be infuriating and monstrously
self-centred.
a tV series about his life was shown
the year after his death, presented by
Ludovic Kennedy, who later wrote: ‘a
working title for it might have been
“How I Got My Way and Was Proved
right In everything I Did.” ’
but, as Lownie demonstrates so
well, Mountbatten was a man of
genuine gifts and high achievements.Well-suited: Edwina and
(inset) Louis MountbattenPicture: EYEVINE Picture: JUDITH KERRPictures: CONDE NAST / GETTY