Books

“I have been instructed to tell you that what you are proposing is entirely impossible. Nevertheless, in Iran, even the totally impossible becomes possible at times.” Such was the mysterious riddle that confronted the English art dealer Oliver Hoare as he sat across from an Iranian contact in Paris in 1992. He had just presented a madcap plan: to reunite the state of Iran with one of its most prized but long-lost manuscripts.   The Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp is an illustrated epic poem comprising 50,000 rhyming couplets. Completed in the mid-sixteenth century, this “book of Kings” is one of the most exquisite examples of Islamic art and poetry ever to have been produced.

"Woke” is a term much overused by those on both sides of the culture war but — a little like pornography — while it may be difficult to define, you absolutely know it when you see it. The capture of the entertainment industry by an ideology — perhaps more accurately described as a group of roughly consanguineous ideas that seem, superficially, to be the Right, Kind and Thoughtful beliefs to hold — seems now to be absolute. Fiction of all kinds has been affected, but heroic narratives have proved especially vulnerable, perhaps because of the size and dedication of their audiences. You will doubtless know the kind of thing I mean.

What people tend to forget about Jesus Christ is that he killed children. As a five-year-old, Jesus was toddling through a village when a small boy ran past, knocking his shoulder. Taking it like any five-year-old would, Jesus shouted after him "you shall not go further on your way," at which point the boy fell down dead. Later, when the boy’s parents admonished Joseph and Mary for failing to raise their son properly, Jesus blinded them. Something to bear in mind next time you ask yourself: "What would Jesus do?" If this story is unfamiliar, that is because it doesn’t appear in any of the Bible’s traditional Gospels.

An unusual disclaimer greets the reader on the title page of this memoir of an actor chiefly known for starring as the lovable goofball Cosmo Kramer on the hit TV sitcom Seinfeld. “Neither the US Army nor any other component of the Department of Defense has approved, endorsed, or authorized this book,” it notes. But in the event the Pentagon probably needn’t have worried. Drafted into the army in 1970, the actor in question, Michael Richards, seems to have avoided any Sergeant Bilko-like shenanigans and instead separated from the service with a heightened appreciation for the punctuality, discipline and meticulous preparation that characterized his later career.

Commentary on the young Romantics can be curiously puritanical. Not on saintly John Keats, who died too young to cause any trouble. But Byron and Shelley? Beastly to women, negligent as parents, destructive as friends, oblivious to their own privilege. Feminist observers tend to resemble the English visitors to Geneva in 1816 who borrowed telescopes to spy on the renegade inhabitants of the Villa Diodati across the lake, hoping to be scandalized. A central character in the summer that saw the birth of Frankenstein was the only non-writer of the villa’s gathering, Byron’s young lover and Mary Shelley’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont.