Ready for battle? | The Spectator

Radical in the Rotunda

In a recent Saturday Night Live sketch, comedian Nate Bargatze portrayed General George Washington addressing his troops around a campfire in 1777, as they ask themselves what the Revolution is for. Washington shares some of his dreams for the new American republic — though he dodges difficult questions about slavery — in an effort to inspire his men to fight on. The writers take full advantage of the fact that a number of peculiarly American things, such as our version of football (in which feet rarely figure) or our complicated system of weights and measures, seem rather odd to the rest of the world. “We will be free to measure liquids in liters and milliliters, but not all liquids,” the general explains. “Only soda, wine and alcohol.

Alexander Larman

The bold new vision for Edinburgh’s National Galleries of Scotland

What do you generally think of when you hear the words “Scottish art”? There are the usual clichés of course, of large-scale landscape paintings depicting gorse and heather and startled-looking wildlife, or alternatively there are the portraits of various noblemen and worthies, many of whom have the well-fed hue that living high on the hog imbues. If you head to Edinburgh’s National Galleries of Scotland — often simply known as “the National” — and visit the traditional collection in the neoclassical building right in the center of the city, near the castle and major shopping streets, you won’t be disappointed by the eclectic selection of Old Masters and Scottish masterpieces alike.

Christopher Sandford

Jerry Miller’s tale

One of the saddest things about popular music is the talents it can’t accommodate. Robbie Robertson, of the Band and much else besides, died in August at the age of eighty, and never found a proper home for his gifts after that great initial burst of late-1960s creativity. But at least Robertson was widely recognized by his peers as one of the outstanding electric guitar players of his time, although the contemporary guitarist he most admired himself was Jerry Miller, of the group Moby Grape. Unlike Robertson, Miller, who’s happily still with us today, hasn’t as yet won a Grammy, or been inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. But he did play a starring part in what’s surely one of the great show business morality tales of its time.

Laura Thompson

Will ‘accessibility’ ruin ballet?

When it comes to the arts, I have an allergy to the concept of “relevance.” Yet this tired term continues to exert its power over the creative industries — and one art form, in particular, has scant defense against it. I mean the one whose most familiar symbol is a near-weightless woman with switchblade limbs, poised impossibly on the tiny blocks encasing her toes, wearing a white circle of tulle around her minimal hips and pretending to be a swan. Ballet. Is ballet relevant? Do sylphides and sleeping beauties have anything to say to a twenty-first-century audience? Do princes in tights?

Harry Mount

A definitive biography of Liz and Dick, Hollywood’s most controversial and glamorous couple

What is it about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor that still hooks us in, thirty-nine years after his death and twelve years after hers? In his magnificent, definitive double biography, Roger Lewis nails down the answer. Liz Taylor was the last great Hollywood movie star, starting in the golden age in National Velvet (1944), aged twelve. As Lewis puts it, her origins were in the magazines and movies of the Forties: “the era of Bing and Bob, Big Bands, such as Glenn Miller, Bogie...Tom and Jerry, Disney.

Philip Womack

Wolves of Winter focuses on the brutality of the past

Dan Jones’s Wolves of Winter follows from his first novel, Essex Dogs, which tracked the vicissitudes of the titular Dogs, a group of English blokes rampaging around France during the reign of King Edward III. Jones is a historian by trade, and so the setting and context are meticulously researched. If you want to know how to load an early form of cannon, you’ll find out here. Peering into the past is a complicated business, especially far into the pre-modern era, although we do have lots of documentary evidence. It can be hard to remember that those knights and ladies were people just like us, with tempers, frailties and habits.

Michael M. Rosen

A vigorous and persuasive defense of capitalism

“Under capitalism,” John Kenneth Galbraith once quipped, “man exploits man. Under communism, it’s just the opposite.” For a left-wing economist such as Galbraith, this was about as close as one might get to exalting capitalism — damning by faint praise. But in The Capitalist Manifesto, a lively, closely argued polemic by the Swedish historian Johan Norberg, we find a much more vigorous and persuasive defense of the most successful economic system the world has ever seen, a mechanism for sowing widespread abundance and lifting billions out of penury. “The argument for capitalism,” Norberg boldly declares in his preface, “is not that capitalists always behave well... but that they often do not behave well unless they have to.

Amanda Craig

The heart of Maria Callas’s genius

For much of the last century, a young woman’s concept of artistic vocation was forged by the ballet. The dream of being fêted for a body that was drilled, starved and exercised into a perfect instrument was preeminent — until Maria Callas came along. Daisy Goodwin’s fourth novel, Diva, is based on the life of Callas, whose affair with the other most famous Greek in the world, Aristotle Onassis, made her a worldwide celebrity. Her glamour and genius made her a superstar, but her life was crosshatched with tragedy. A singer’s voice, as her teacher told her, is like an amphora filled with golden coins: each time she sings, she is giving one gold coin away. Singing too much, too young, hastens destitution.

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The marvelous Montalbano

I visited Sicily in May 2005, when the airlines were still requiring all checked luggage to be left unlocked. After the flight from Paris touched down at Palermo, my wife and I went to collect our luggage at an apparently quiet and unrushed airport to discover my suitcase opened partway and an expensive dressing gown missing. Eighteen years ago, il Commissario Salvatore Montalbano was quite unknown to me. Otherwise, I should have immediately thought of the Sinagra family at the eastern end of the island, though the word “mafia” did come to mind as I rezipped the bag.

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