Official secrets kept that way

Steven Poole and Vera Rule on Open Secret | Feeding Frenzy | Shakespeare Is Hard, But So Is Life | Mathematics: A Very Short Introduction | This Thing of Ours | Your Face Here

Open Secret, by Stella Rimington (Arrow, £7.99)
No secrets in here, of course, since Rimington, the former head of MI5, emphasises that she has written her memoir without reference to diaries or official documents, and it subsequently went through Whitehall for vetting. This, then, is the rather dull story of how a junior agent-runner rose in 11 years to become director general of the Secret Service, with much inane material on babysitting problems, how to lose a hat box, and what sort of wine to drink on Sundays. Rimington eagerly relates Whitehall backchat and office politics, but her descriptions of what actually goes on within her organisation are hilariously bland. "To eavesdrop effectively it is obviously important to plant the microphones where they will have the best chance of picking up the targeted conversations ... where they will not be discovered, and that is usually somewhere inside the premises where you expect the conversations to take place." You don't say, Mrs Pooter? SP

Feeding Frenzy, by Will Self (Penguin, £7.99)
This swollen collection of Self's reviews and journalism from 1995 to 2000 constitutes a treasurably self-deconstructive volume whose crowning glory is its index: as well as the usual subject references, you will be able to hunt down with glee the author's two uses of the phrase "the fateful snicker-snack of psychosis", plus the four typings of "sylph-like" and the two occasions on which rooms were described as "shoebox-shaped". Self's restaurant reviews, conducted as splenetic, improvised theatre criticism, are marvels of the form in their heroic resistance to discussing the comestibles: a savage rant about the clientele of Conran's Bluebird says only: "The food was all right." Other subjects savaged include voyeur TV, Britart and the royals, and, with obsessive passion, the prime minister: "Tony Blair has always been the air guitarist of political rhetoric, standing in front of the mirror of publicity while aping the convictions of others." Not to be consumed at a single sitting. SP

Shakespeare Is Hard, But So Is Life, by Fintan O'Toole (Granta, £6.99)
There's a title you can't argue with, and a useful corrective to the philistine notion that Shakespeare must be simplified and domesticated so that people can understand him. In this guide for students, O'Toole adopts the personality of an outrageously sweatered, and perhaps earringed, English teacher, laying waste to wrong-headed Bardic pedagogy in rebelliously demotic tones. "What doesn't make any sense is the idea that Shakespeare is trying to demonstrate moral ideas to us, that he's a kind of excruciatingly long-winded head nun." Indeed. He is perhaps over-vigorous in deciding that any relation of Aristotelian ideas to Shakespeare's tragedy is just "tedious" and wrong, but he goes on to give readings of Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear and Othello that pay refreshing attention to actual dramatic practice over the centuries. The relentless punning and youth-friendly japery can get wearing, but it's all in a good cause. SP

Mathematics: A Very Short Introduction, by Timothy Gowers (Oxford, £6.99)
There are those, one assumes, for whom even a very short intro- duction to maths can never be short enough - and indeed why, in this age of the wrist-calculator, the currency-converting mobile phone, and the Mandelbrot set-drawing pocket PC, should we care? Gowers wants to show the unbelievers that mathematics quickly breaks free of the dirty realm of practical arithmetic and becomes a realm of abstract beauty, and he proposes a mind-trick for the reader's comfort. Rather than unquestioningly believing in the existence of worrisome things like infinity, he cleverly suggests that we merely should adopt the "attitude" that such phenomena might be useful, which idea seems to slay a lot of epistemological dragons. From discussing square roots, circles and the like, Gowers smoothly shifts gear into higher-dimensional geometry, prime numbers and the shape of spacetime, while an interesting appendix considers the place of maths in society. Mind-enhancing. SP

This Thing of Ours, ed David Lavery (Wallflower, £19.99)
Academics investigate The Sopranos in essays with language too often encoded to match their culture studies titles ("The 18th Brumaire of Tony Soprano"; "The Brutality of Meat and the Abruptness of Seafood": enough with the Baudrillard, OK?). A few entries have fresh things to say and say them crisply, especially Lavery's own too-short piece on writer David Chase's dissident three decades of non-success in US television. There's a neat navigation by Lance Strate of the overlap between New Jersey on the ground and NJ of the Bada-Bing and Satriale's Pork Store as seen on the show - he's on to truths about how being a location for fiction enhances the reality of a place. And one is grateful for the complete words of Core 'Ngrato (Ungrateful Heart), as sung by Uncle Junior after the funeral of a whacked mobster. But a Canadian view of the show, or an analysis of its narratological processes? Guys, just eat the cannoli and shut up. VR

Your Face Here, by Ali Catterall and Simon Wells (Fourth Estate, £7.99)
This tribute to 12 Britfilms its writers classify as "cult", from Hard Day's Night to Lock, Stock etc by way of Withnail is, alas, written in geekspeak, snapped together from TV presenter clichés, fantalk, and movie buff factoids. It is also, in its curiosity and enthusiasm, irresistible - when geeks attack! - especially when the boys tramp the land to locate favourite scenes. They are due a fan Oscar for time endured in pedestrian tunnels and Thamesmead tracking A Clockwork Orange; and they have properly understood the powerful weirdness of Maryon Park in South London, where the murder may not have happened in Blow Up. They're less inspired with people (everybody is introduced with a mini-biography that reads like an obituary) but they have hung around patiently enough for directors and actors to talk to them very well; great quotes. They clearly loved doing this book, and love is never wasted. It shows on every page. VR

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