Books

In the early years of the English Civil War John Milton turned his mind from the poetic arts and committed himself to writing some of the most searing pamphlet polemics of the 1640s. With the nation convulsed by violence, he set about finding causal explanations for the revolutionary ferment, and saw its roots in the 1530s and the unfinished nature of the Protestant Reformation. Only by completing the work of Reformation, Milton thought, would the English come closer to God and lasting peace. Such arguments had domestic as well as national urgency for Milton, much in need of peace himself, as he tried to extricate himself from his stupendously misguided marriage to Mary Powell, half his age and from a royalist family.

Canada is back, baby. Since Mark Carney’s election as Prime Minister in April last year, he’s projected an image of brawny, swaggering capability – another silverback statesman in a new, multilateral world. He’s tussled with Trump over tariffs; hobnobbed with autocrats including Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi and strongly criticized the US attack on Iran. In fact, the anger that many Canadians seem to feel at their cousins across the border is startling – on a recent trip to the Yukon, I found almost every public toilet tagged with “Trump Tower” graffiti. This newfound assertiveness is surprising. Canada, as the South Park movie astutely pointed out in 1999, is the eternal scapegoat of international politics.

Matthew Sweet’s jaw-dropping life of Barbara Cartland opens with the grande dame reclining on her chaise longue in the library of Camfield Place, her home for 50 years. Here she could be found daily between 1:15 p.m. and 4 p.m., a ghoulish masquerade of femininity in a hot-pink taffeta cocktail gown with a snappy Pekingese nestling by her side. Her face, beneath the halo of Elnett-stiffened yellow hair, bears an inch of white powder. There are two clownish circles of rouge on her cheeks and sticking plasters on her temples to tighten the skin. Gazing into the middle distance through tarantula-sized false eyelashes lathered in black boot polish, she is “talking, talking, talking.” (Boot polish applied with a toothbrush is preferable to mascara because it stays put when you cry.

Anyone proposing to publish a polemic between hard covers about the decline of literacy and reading will, of course, find themselves preaching to the choir. If you read books, you will agree with this one; if you don’t, your negligence will not be touched by its fervor. I won’t say that it is a useless object, merely how unhelpful it would be simply to agree with its main point. The decline of reading practices is quite convincingly demonstrated in surveys. Fewer and fewer people in the US and Britain read habitually, by their own admission. In one celebrated case, an entire cohort of English literature students in America was unable to make anything at all of the first page of Bleak House.

“We can never go back again,” wrote Daphne du Maurier in her bestselling novel Rebecca (1938). “The past is still too close to us.” Yet back she went, in book after book, to the past of her remarkable family. In 1934, six months after the death of her father, the matinée idol Gerald du Maurier, Daphne wrote his biography, portraying him as a spoiled man-baby with a “stable” of mistresses. Gerald’s own father, George du Maurier, was the celebrated book illustrator and Punch cartoonist whose characters such as Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns and Lady Gatheremall skewered the Victorian nouveaux riches.

Kissing is a tricky subject. It has a complex, baffling history. The kiss of a baby is one thing; the kiss of lust something quite else. Kings, generals and prelates used to kiss, as did mafiosi – often before killing. The kiss has many meanings, all of which are explored in this informative, if sometimes wearing, book. Finally, a warning: if you’re queasy about arse-kissing, don’t read it. But then you would be missing a lot. Katie Barclay, a diligent Australian academic, has written an “overview of the world of the kiss in Europe from medieval times to the present.” Her opening words begin listing the startling variety of the kissing involved: “Smooch, snog, pash, smack, peck, canoodle...

Oh Harold. So near and yet so far. So close and yet no cigar. In January 1066, the world (well, England) was at his feet. Two hundred and eighty-two days later he was battle meat. On day one he became the richest ruler Anglo-Saxon England had ever known. In late September, he defeated the hardest bastard in Europe (Harald Hardrada). In mid-October, England was changed forever, but not by him. He had, of course, no right whatsoever to be king. Sure, he was Edward the Confessor’s brother-in-law, but under the sacred rules of hereditary power that gets you zip. He claimed that Edward had promised him the throne (he hadn’t), but, again, that ain’t how the royal circus rolls.