Shorter notices
Randolph Chuurchill: The Young Pretender Compiled by Kay Halle (Heinemann £3.50) A very diverting collection of anecdotage and reminiscence about one of the most brutally rude, drunken, companionable and outsized noble failures of the present century. Sir Roy Harrod defeats Sir John Betjeman in recalling Randolph's Oxford visitations. A tribe of friends, and of acquaintances masquerading as friends, defends him mercilessly and unnecessarily. Randolph knew himself. This knowledge made the rest of him not only tolerable but substantial. The house he lived in, and loved, in the Constable country at East Bergholt, is now a 'Garden Centre,' a piece of sacrilege if ever. Young Winston presumably sold the place after his father died, or someone else did. This is both a waste and a pity, as, tragically and splendidly, was Randolph himself.
G.G.
Giorgione Terisio Pignatti (Phaidon £10.00) Giorgione is in some ways the most fascinating of the Venetian painters. He died young, little is known about his life, and the majority of his paintings have disappeared. And yet the handful that remain show him to be not only a painter of remarkably beautiful and colourful pictures, but also an innovator of significance. He was one of the first Italian artists to learn effectively from Flemish painting, and Vasari hails him as an originator of the modern style' along with Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo. His introduction of tonal gradations, his realistic settings and the strangely literary, Arcadian spirit of the paintings leads us on to Titian, his pupil, and away from the dry, formal configurations of Giovanni Bellini, his master. Very little has been published in this country on Giorgione, and Terisio Pignatti's perceptive, exhaustively documented study is exactly what is needed. It includes a complete critical catalogue, a bibliography with all relevant source material, and over three hundred plates, twenty-four of them in colour.
C.H.
The Four Suns Jacques Soustelle (Andre Deutsch £2.75) The four suns are the four cycles or universes which, the Aztecs believed, preceded our own. Each ended in disaster. We are now living in the fifth cycle, and Jacques Soustelle, a celebrated French ethnologist who has written extensively on Mexican tribes, darkly predicts that we may be going the same way. In a Mexican version of Tristes Tropiques, he uses a sociological study of two ' primitive ' tribes, the Lacandones and the Otomi, as the starting-point for a discussion of the inevitable decay of civilisations: although he is considerably less romantic about his chosen races than Levi-Strauss. It can be read as a charming Gallic mixture of philosophy, reminiscence and scientific field-work; but it is chiefly fascinating for the moving comparisons between the silent testimonials of the great Mayan civilisation — at Palenque for example — and the inarticulate rituals of their descendants, unable to grasp the notion of writing let alone decipher the symbols on their mined monuments.
C.H.
George Dance: Architect, 1741-1825 Dorothy Stroud (Faber £12.00) A well-informed and detailed chronological account of the works of one of the greatest English neo-classical architects and his father. There follows a complete list of the works of father and son and 150 illustrations of their plans and elevations including a sketch of a hideous monument (mercifully unexecuted) to General George Washington. Only for the ardent enthusiast, as Fabers have bound it cheaply and charge the outrageous sum of £12.
J.B.
Referendum .Philip Goodhart, MP (Tom Stacey £1.80) A cleverly deployed argument in favour of the highly democratic, not to say populist, procedure of consulting the public on matters of huge public interest, like the Common Market. The Tory member for Beckenham thinks that a referendum would effectively act as an entrenchment of the constitution. He points out that The Spectator in the ' glorious ' days when St Loe Strachey edited it was a vociferous supporter of the referendum idea.
It isn't now. Referenda have the habit of destroying constitutions as much as, if not more than, entrenching them. The British constitution depends upon two major parties each whipping its supporters into line, one of them governing and the other expecting to govern. Mr Goodhart quotes Dicey to the effect that: "The Referendum is the People's Veto; the nation is sovereign and may well decree that the constitution shall not be changed without the direct sanction of the nation." But the nation does not decree; the nation suffers, tolerates, rejects. Our government, in the last resort, is parliamentary and not populist — although if we join the Common Market it will certainly cease to be parliamentary. Mr Goodhart is to be congratulated upon the motives which urged him to write this most useful small book; but not upon his constitutional understanding.
G.G.
A Gazetteer of British Ghosts Peter Underwood (Souvenir Press £2.00) A guide to 236 haunted sites in Britain, guaranteed to set the reader running his finger down the index, fearing the worst about some of the buildings he knows and frequents. After an account of the various ' appearances' at each site and the history behind them, the author recommends a local hotel for those who want to make a personal examination.
Nobody at The Spectator however claims to have seen the ghost at University College, even though it is just up the road from us in Gower Street.
J.B.
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