Tim HealdCritiques

Anecdotally, Denis Compton gave more pleasure to the spectators than any other cricketer. He was the hero and idol of almost every fan who was young in the 1940s and 1950s. He wrote several autobiographical works but Heald's 'authorised' biography was one of the first of its kind when originally published in 1994 when Compton was still alive. This edition is an updated one that came out a decade after Compton's death.

It is a fairly simple, straightforward biography of a person who Heald reckons to be a simple, straightforward person. It follows two parallel threads - of Compton's career on the cricket field in parallel with the memories of those who he knew him and those who he inspired and entertained. Both threads are fairly superficial. Heald knew and was close to Compton for many years. His view, that is probably shared by most who knew Compton, either personally or as a cricketer, is that he was an overgrown schoolboy. Heald doesn't try to overanalyze this premise and try to fit his behaviour in all circumstances to this. This is not always satisfactory, as when Compton sided with South African government and pro-apartheid lobby in the several clashes through the 1960s to 1980s. The excuse of naivety is also a little disingenuous because Compton held several important positions including the Presidency of Middlesex CCC for many years.

The remembrances of those who were young when Compton was his best is scattered around the book and are some of the best parts. Many of these people have since died. What they said will provide some explanations for why Compton was as important as he was.

The cricketing side of Compton involves many match descriptions and scores but comes up short. One need lots of prior knowledge and imagination to get enthused even by 1947. Describing Compton satisfactorily is not an easy task and this is not the book to get inspired about Compton's batting.

Considering the personal nature of parts of the book, one will probably learn things that are not found elsewhere. But one interesting what if, that is probably documented by others, involved John Arlott and Compton's fastest triple hundred. While Compton was blazing away in Benoni, Arlott was in (iirc) Bloemfontein. While idling on the streets, he saw a black man walking along, minding his business. A white man who came in the opposite direction, for no reason, kicked the black man into a roadside gutter. The black man climbed up and instead of retaliating, apologised and stuttered along. This incident was Arlott's first encounter with apartheid and profoundly influenced his later actions. Had Arlott watched Compton's triple hundred, it is conceivable that Basil D'Oliveira (the black South African cricketer who Arlott helped to move to England) stayed home and South Africa played Tests well into the 1970s and possibly never expelled.

Witty thriller

I chose the second story To Be Taken With a Grain of Salt by Charles Dickens. Don’t ask me why, because, with the exception of A Christmas Carol I can’t tolerate Dickens’ paid-by-the-word writing style. Maybe I felt the need to torture myself with mind-numbing prose?

If I did, I failed, because this story was delightful! Written with an economy of style I can hardly credit to Dickens, but fully fleshed out and wonderfully creepy. At 10 pages long it’s a compact ghost story about a man who sits on the jury of a murder trial, and how the victim sees to it that justice is done. It’s an unconventional follow-up to the conventional starter, and it makes me eager to find out what’s to follow. I doubt I’ll follow them in strict order, but I have high hopes that they’ll all be wroth reading, and I look forward to filling up my index card.

It has left me feeling completely flummoxed by Charles Dickens though.½

I'm calling this finished, even though technically I haven't read it cover to cover. In part because it's really not meant to be read cover to cover, but dipped into now and again more or less randomly and in part because it's making me itch to see it squatting on my Currently Reading list.

The Best of the Raconteurs is a rather large collection of anecdotes, bits from speeches and other odds and ends - some seem almost to be snippets of conversation - collected from an incredibly varied cast of wits including Nora Ephron, William Churchill, Oscar Wilde, and David Niven, to touch upon just a very few.

The quality of the entries is all over the place; as some of them aren't more than a paragraph, while others are 2 or 3 pages long, odds were always long that every entry was going to be a winner. Nora Ephron's entry had me laughing out loud, while Ogden Nash's poem charmed me until the very end, where it promptly made my hair stand on end (which is exactly the effect Nash would have wanted). Those that fell flat were the definition of unmemorable.

Generally, a good collection, if you like anecdotes, and very likely to have something for everyone.

Light and fluffy. A nice bedside book.

I don't usually read short stories but this seemed appropriate for the time of year. It's a mixed bag with some stories very good while others make you wonder why they were even included. All in all a good way to pass the time/

It's the usual complaint about books of short stories: a mixed bunch, some better than others. This collection is based around a Christmas theme, so quite nice to read in December. There's a PD James in there, which is probably the best of the bunch, and I'll probably take a note of one or two other authors that I've not read in the past & maybe give some of their other work a go. Overall tho... nothing to write home about, but passed a few happy hours without over-taxing the brain.

A mildly amusing but ultimately tedious jaunt through Fleet Street. I enjoyed some of the early sections - particularly trying to guess which real newspaper was represented by which fictional newspaper - and the papers' differing approaches to a news story about the PM being bisexual. The trouble was, much of the book seemed to be given over to in-jokes and lectures given to other characters which were really just lectures to the reader. What was the point of the section on newspaper cooks, for example, except perhaps to show off some of the author's knowledge?

A reference early on to the demise of the sub-editor made me smile. Most journalists had their own computers and did their own editing, we were told, which led to mistakes in print. I suspect the same thing happened with this book - a glaring factual error on the back cover, no less, when the character Fisher is said to be fired from "The Intelligence" (Daily Mail? Telegraph?) and in the very first chapter ends up being fired from "The Conscience" (Guardian would be my guess). Tut tut. And the text was littered with editing howlers . Perhaps it was itself an elaborate in-joke, who knows.

My copy was an ex-library book from which some helpful patron had ripped out the copyright page with the date on. I approached the reading of it as a guessing game: could I guess the year it was written from the cultural references? It certainly beat the plot for enjoyment. Let's see...vague nods to the internet and mobile phone use, but nothing overpowering. References to Tony Blair would put it in the 1990s, but no mention of 9/11 narrowed it down. My guess of 1999 turned out to be spot on (modest cough) but what I found particularly striking about that was the relative innocence of that age, and the way it was still OK to stereotype female characters - bimbo/harridan etc. The blokes came off badly too, but they seemed to cover a broader spectrum. At the same time, there was that feeling of 1990s political correctness creeping in - how desperately the book seemed to want to tell us that the Women's Rugby Team were all lesbians, and yet it knew that wouldn't be right so it was reduced to hinting in the broadest possible terms.

Entertaining in parts but one I could have lived without reading.

better than one might expect.½

Like the other Folio Society anthologies I have read, this is a book that you can dip in and out of quite easily. Whilst there is nothing riveting in its pages, and the occasional dull excerpt, the book is still worth picking up. A light read to pass away a few hours, without demanding your undivided attention.

Very variable - some of the items are excellent, others quite dull. Worth a read, but nothing sparkling.

This biography doesn't work. I spent some considerable time trying to work out the reason and, the best with which I can come up, follows;
Brian Johnston was one of those chaps who were bigger than his achievements. To hear him broadcast was to discover a lost but much loved uncle. This book suffers from being rather too rosy a picture but, at the same time, if it had gainsaid the legend, I shouldn't have enjoyed that!
The second problem with this work is linked to the first, the author was not aquainted with Johnston and so, relies heavily upon other people's stories. They too did not wish to 'dish the dirt' upon a national institution and so, there was little but a eulogy and very little that one did not know before starting the book.
Having bben so negative, it was still pleasant to revel in the remembered joy of a Brian Johnston commentary.½

A once over lightly account of the life of the Queen's younger sister. Long on trivialities and short on insight, I got the impression the author, Tim Heald, was really only scratching the surface of this often controversial figure. For committed royal bio readers only.