'The ice-pick man cometh'

By ADRIAN TAHOURDIN

This was the heading John Sturrock gave to a
TLS review of a biography of Leon Trotsky in the TLS some twenty years ago. The
heading was so good that I think he may have used it more than once -
perfectly reasonably; after all, if you've got a winner make the most of it.

I'm not sure how much readers of the TLS notice our headlines: their
eyes will be drawn to see what's being reviewed, and then to the first (or
last?) sentence. The headline is there, ostensibly to help of course, but it's also
an optional item. That said, a really good heading can steer the reader, or
encapsulate the reviewer's assessment of the book in a few words. Or it
can intrigue – and, on rare occasions, even amuse. But above all it shouldn't
mislead the reader (something of which I feel I’ve been occasionally guilty in giving
headings to letters published in the TLS).

I had a quick look at the first issues of the paper
(1902) to see how TLS editors approached headlining then – fairly austerely I’d
say: “The Duke of Devonshire’s pictures”, “Railway reading”, “Ecclesiastical
reprints”, “Mr Henry James’s new book”, “Automobilism and its literature” and
so on. “A German defence of British policy in South Africa” is particularly
snappy. Ditto “Sidelights on the Persian question”. But they’re certainly not
uninformative.  

Skipping to the TLS for 1939, I see that quite a lot
of agricultural titles were reviewed, giving rise to headings such as “”A plan
for British agriculture” (Jan 39), “Towards better farming” and “British
farming” (July), as well as “Cameos from the farm” (Oct). As the book reviewed
under that last heading, Teamsman by Crichton Porteous, suggests, these publications
weren’t about making contingency plans for the coming crisis: “to avoid the
ruts Mr. Porteous seeks lodging away from the farm, studies in bed, reads
Thoreau behind his ploughing team, contributes fragments to country papers . .
.”.

But the global situation certainly wasn’t ignored elsewhere in the paper, and it’s gratifying to see, among the slew of reviews of books
on the Nazi threat (and a sober editorial in the issue of Sept 9 on the
importance of publishing books at such a time), a piece on October 14 headed “Why Nazi
Germany can’t win”. The book being reviewed, by the way, was Nazi Germany Can’t
Win by Dr Wilhelm Necker (see below). 

A few decades on, in 1982, the TLS reviewed Jean-Jacques Beineix’s film
Diva, about a Paris dispatch rider on a moped who is obsessed with the diva
of the title. Lindsay Duguid, who was in charge of the Arts pages at the
time, headed the piece "La donna et Mobylette" - a
heading so good it has passed into what passes for TLS legend. (On the
same page there’s “Dearth of a salesman”.)

But generally I sense that giving headings to reviews unavoidably
involves a good deal of recycling. I wonder how many times we’ve used “Command
performances”, “Natural causes”, “Parallel perceptions”, “Exotic excursions”,
or “Selective affinities”. Maybe not as often as I suspect. Or, in a slightly
different mode, “Writing against oblivion”? 
. . . Having said that, “Writing to hounds” for a review of a hunting
and shooting anthology of R. S. Surtees is very good.  

The Letters page doesn’t give much scope for facetious heading
(thankfully), but a couple of years ago we published a review by David
Gallagher of Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel about the Irish nationalist Roger
Casement who, in Gallagher’s words, “served the British crown with loyalty, was
knighted in 1911, then hanged for treason five years later . . .”. There was
discussion of the Black Diaries, in which Casement is said to have kept a
detailed record of his homosexual activities in sub-Saharan Africa and South
America. We then ran a letter from Casement’s biographer Angus Mitchell
(January 14, 2011) in which he referred to the post-mortem carried out on
Casement’s body - the letter contained the unimprovable sentence “Fortunately,
a brief history of Casement’s anus can be collated from various medical records
and correspondences”.  It was only after the issue had gone
to press that I thought of heading the letter "Riddle of the
sphincter". But I’m not sure it would have met with general approval.