Lead book review

The deeper you get into physics, the simpler it becomes. The starting point of this wonderful book about Stephen Hawking’s ‘biggest legacy’ (which no one outside of physics has heard of) is the problem of our insignificance. Make a change in almost any of the slippery, basic physical properties of the universe and we’re toast – life would not be possible. If, for example, the universe had expanded even slightly more slowly than it did after the Big Bang it would have collapsed in on itself. Result? No us. A fraction faster and no galaxies would form, let alone habitable planets. In the incandescent beginning of the universe, each of these basic physical properties was as vacillating as a dream: they could have ended up being pretty much anything.

Civilisation pollutes. Every improvement will bring poison and entropy in its wake. Apparently infinite resources are always finite. Immediate gain is inevitable loss. Lip service to ideals of balance and moderation is as old as humanity and has never been enough. Peter Frankopan’s story of our relationship to the world across all planetary space and human time is necessarily vast – 660 pages of text, with footnotes relegated to 212 pages online – in which the grand cycle is enacted again and again.

‘Asia is one’, wrote Okakura Kakuzo, the Japanese art historian, at the start of his The Ideals of the East in 1901. Nile Green disagrees in this sparky and impressive book. There is no reason why ‘Buddhism, Confucianism or Shinto should be more intelligible to a “fellow Asian” from the Middle East or India than to a European’. For one thing, ‘Asia’ is home to a vast number of language groups, including ‘Sino-Tibetan and Turkic, Indo-European and Semitic, Dravidian and Japonic, Austroasiatic, and others’, as well as ‘to a far wider variety of writing systems than Europe, Africa and the Americas combined’. So how and why, then, did the clumsy label come into being and stick? The blame, argues Green, lies with Europeans.

This year is the Chinese Year of the Rabbit. The spring festival began on 22 January, and in Chinese culture the rabbit represents the moon. Some say it is because the shadows in the moon resemble the animal, but it also reflects its characteristics. The rabbit’s quiet personality hides its confidence and strength: it is moving, steadily moving, towards its goal, whatever the obstacles. Some also say that it lives in fear all the time, finds it difficult to open up to others and often turns to escapism. I never really thought about the meaning of a ‘rabbit’s pure characteristics’ in Chinese daily life until I read these two books about the Cultural Revolution.

If there were ever a Spectator competition for the best pastiche of the opening words of a Salman Rushdie novel, a pretty good entry might be: ‘On the last day of her life, when she was two hundred and forty-seven years old, the blind poet, miracle worker and prophetess Pampa Kampana completed her immense narrative poem about Bisnaga.’ By coincidence, these are also the opening words of Victory City, a book Rushdie finished not long before last summer’s stabbing.

I have to confess that this book sat on my desk for several months. The words ‘Harvard University Press’ cast a strange and unsettling spell which prevented me from even opening it. Let’s be honest: academic presses are not always synonymous with rollicking reads, nor indeed are academics. They can ask an awful lot of the general reader – that would be most of us. Given how short life is, there is no good reason why reading should be more of a pain than a pleasure. Thankfully, the spell finally wore off, which was fortunate, because this book about a book, like the book it describes, is a rare and marvellous thing.

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was the century, as the historian Kevin Sharpe wrote, summing up the Whig view, ‘in which the champions of law and liberty, property and Protestantism triumphed over absolute monarchy and popery and laid the foundations for parliamentary government’. It was a century of recurring plagues and fire and bloody civil war. It saw successive waves of witch hunts, the beginnings of the Enlightenment and the founding of the Royal Society. It saw revolution and regicide followed by restoration and revolution again.

A surprising number of royal personages have published books under their own names, and sometimes they have even been written by the purported authors. The first, I think, was the Eikon Basilike, published shortly after Charles I’s execution and presented as his account of himself and of events. The authorship of this highly effective piece of propaganda has been questioned, but its simple, direct, haughty tone is very similar to the king’s recorded speech at his trial. After Prince Albert’s death, Queen Victoria published two journals of her life in the Highlands. We know that she was an enchantingly vivid writer from her diaries and letters, with a novelist’s ear for dialogue.

A hundred years ago, in a former Carmelite monastery 60 kilometres south of Paris, Katherine Mansfield ran up a flight of stairs to her bedroom and died of a haemorrhage.  She was 34 years old. She had known for five years that she had tuberculosis. After joining the spiritualist therapeutic community at Fontainebleau-Avon in October 1922, under the guidance of the Russian guru George Gurdjieff, she had been careful to avoid stairs, or only to take them very slowly. But on the 9 January 1923, her husband, the writer and editor John Middleton Murry, came to visit and they enjoyed an evening watching other members of the commune dancing.

Why do people collect? Cicero said of the Roman governor of Sicily Gaius Verres that his appetite for Greek sculpture was called a passion by himself but a mental illness by his friends. Freud attributed the collector’s mania to bad toilet training. Others claim to have proved that it is due to abnormalities in the medial prefrontal cortex. Psychologists have filled thousands of pages on the subject in peer-reviewed journals. It is safe to assume that Christopher de Hamel has not read any of them. But in this fascinating book he presents 12 case studies of men and women with just one thing in common. They were all obsessed with acquiring, selling, making or in one case forging medieval manuscripts.

Despite being known as a visually driven town, Hollywood has a rich oral history. This may be due to the fact that it is (like most literary communities) a small, gossipy village in which everybody knows everybody else and what everybody is saying about them. It also testifies to the fact that while Hollywood’s ‘players’ may often produce stupid films, they aren’t actually stupid themselves. Most of the time they know exactly what they’re doing – which is what makes them so perplexing. According to this hefty book, which assembles more than half a century’s worth of interviews conducted by the American Film Institute, Hollywood’s early days weren’t as glamorous as the later ones, but they certainly seemed a lot more fun.

Despite being awarded a Nobel in economics in 1974, Friedrich Hayek was a great thinker rather than a great economist. He called himself a ‘muddler’. His own attempt to build an economic theory floundered. His major contribution was to emphasise the limitations  of economic knowledge, and thus the inevitable frustration of efforts to build economic utopias. His theorising was abstract, but his purpose was practical: to make the case for a liberal economic order which would be proof against the political and economic wickedness and madness through which he lived: the two world wars, the Great Depression and the rise and fall of fascism and communism. Hayek’s was a slow-burning flame.

Craig Brown is responsible for the astonishing late flowering of Anne Glenconner. It was his biography Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret that so enraged her that, in an effort to stick up for her friend, whom she served as a lady-in-waiting for 30 years, Lady Glenconner started writing in her mid-eighties. She hasn’t stopped since. First came an internationally best-selling memoir, Lady in Waiting, then two pacy novels. And now, coinciding with her 90th birthday, as well as (no flies on her) the new season of The Crown, Christmas etc, she publishes this volume of ‘life lessons’ – a catch-all, really, for any other top toff reflections from this most likeable of survivors.

Is Cormac McCarthy among the last generation of novelists to possess a Style? Of course all writers have a characteristic style, however unassuming; but not many these days have a Style in the grand manner, the sort that Kingsley Amis (I think writing about Nabokov) described as a high level of flutter and wow. There are conversations about what I think of as ‘novelists’ science’, not really intended to be understood The great beasts of American literature have often aimed for prose that couldn’t be mistaken for anyone else’s – Hemingway, Faulkner, Bellow, Updike. Though there were always intensely mannered novelists in England, they had less of a heroically manly quality – Firbank, Wodehouse, Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green.

Andrew Lycett Describing how individuals get drawn, often haphazardly, into a bloody conflict such as the English Civil War is not an easy task. But Jessie Childs manages it superbly in The Siege of Loyalty House (Bodley Head, £25), which tingles with a discerning historical imagination. Lily Dunn’s memoir Sins of My Father (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £16.99), about her mixed reactions to her beloved dad’s dive into a religious cult and subsequent alcoholism, is notable for its emotional truthfulness, sure sense of time and place and appealing tone of delivery. The novel which gave me most pleasure was Winchelsea by Alex Preston (Canongate, £14.99), a rip-roaring yarn about smugglers and seafarers in Romney Marsh and its coastal hinterland in the 18th century.

Philip Hensher There were some very good novels this year, but they came from surprising directions. It is astonishing that one as original as Kate Barker-Mawjee’s The Coldest Place on Earth (Conrad Press, £9.99) couldn’t find a major publisher. A friend recommended this wonderfully controlled and evocatively written novel about a heart coming to life in the depths of Siberia.  I always enjoy Mick Herron’s half-arsed spy thrillers, but Bad Actors (Hodder & Stoughton, £18.99) took a big step into literary excellence. The dazzling, Conrad-like structure turned an entertainment into a major literary statement. Sheila Llewellyn’s Winter in Tabriz (Hodder & Stoughton, £8.

These letters between Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby cover 15 years of a remarkable friendship that began at Somerville College, Oxford in 1919 and ended only with Holtby’s premature death from kidney failure in 1935. Brittain went up to Oxford in 1914, but left to serve as a nurse in the first world war. She returned freighted with tragic experience, having lost both her lover and her brother and tended the wounds of horribly injured soldiers close to the front. She disconcerted younger undergraduates with her fiercely competitive and forthright views combined with fragile looks and a general air of suppressed trauma.

In 2015, I had lunch with an old chum of Xi Jinping. He described how China’s most powerful leader since Chairman Mao was born into the Communist party’s ‘red aristocracy’ but had to toughen up fast when his father was jailed in the Cultural Revolution. The young Xi briefly became a street hoodlum who swore like a trooper, smoked like a chimney and drank like a fish. He survived by turning ‘redder than red’, climbing the party ladder from a branch secretary in a lowly village all the way up to the top job in Beijing. ‘I am fond of Xi, but he is isolated from his old friends and there is a danger of emperor syndrome,’ the friend warned me. ‘I think Xi will want to rule for 20 years.

It is often said that the age of letter-writing is past. This forecast seems to me premature. I have edited three volumes of letters, in each case by writers labelled (though not by me) as ‘the last of their kind’. Yet here is another one, and I feel confident that more will follow. Few now write letters, but those who still do tend to take care what they write. And it will be some decades before we have used up the legacy of the living. John le Carré, who died almost two years ago at the age of 89, was one such. His work is likely to be reassessed over the next few years and his place in the canon is not yet secure. But he is undoubtedly the pre-eminent spy writer of modern times, and arguably the definitive chronicler of the Cold War.