Lead book review

The Italian writer Roberto Calasso, who died in July at the age of 80, was an anomalous and fascinating figure on the international literary scene. In his early twenties he began working for the prestigious publishers Adelfi Edizioni and stayed with them his whole life, eventually becoming editorial director and, when the firm was threatened with a takeover, purchasing it. In his thirties he began writing a series of idiosyncratic books. The second of these, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, established his reputation and was translated into many languages. Something should be said about it because the project it enacts is related to this last of his books.

Perhaps the funniest of the many funny jokes in Sue Townsend’s The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾ is its protagonist’s struggle with Enid Blyton. Having turned the corner into adolescence, Adrian is mortified by the Blyton characters on the wallpaper in his childhood bedroom and sets about repainting the room in black, the better to represent his turbulent soul. And yet, though he slaps on coat after coat of black paint, the shiny yellow bells on Noddy’s cap continue to show through. He’s reduced to colouring them in one by one. (‘Went over hat bells with black felt-tip pen, did 69 tonight, only 124 to go.

There are three ways of knowing Patricia Highsmith. First, of course, she was the author of 22 novels and several story collections published between 1950 and 1995, the year of her death. Then the woman herself: Mary Patricia Plangman, born in Dallas in 1921, long-term resident of New York City, when young a socially and sexually active lesbian, later in life a mostly solitary literary figure in almost constant movement around Europe. Much biographical work has been written about her. And, finally, a revelation: she was the keeper of not only an intimate diary for most of those years, but also workbooks she called ‘cahiers’, all now published in a single volume.

We live at a time in which we could (until recently) travel without difficulty and take for granted access to cultural treasures. It’s easy to forget that this wasn’t always the case, and minds were shaped by what possibilities were available. The Belgian painter René Magritte is a good example of huge talent pushed through a very narrow opening. His art has now become an exemplar of the striking image that commerce can feature. Advertising regularly uses his paradoxical visual combinations of faces replaced by apples, of skies in the shape of doves, of roses filling rooms and, supremely, the conundrum of the pipe demurely labelled ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’.

Jonathan Sumption The reputation of Sir Edward Grey, Britain’s foreign secretary from 1905 to 1916, has never recovered from the pasting he received in Lloyd George’s war memoirs. Lloyd George thought that his deliberate ambiguity about Britain’s intentions led us into the first world war. If you read just one book of history this Christmas, it should be T.G. Otte’s re-evaluation in Statesman of Europe: A Life of Sir Edward Grey (Allen Lane, £35). This beautifully written biography of one of the most humane, perceptive and intelligent diplomats is a wistful reminder of what Britain might have been like if Lloyd George had not destroyed the Liberal party. If one is not enough, try Ambrogio A.

Anna Aslanyan A decade after Londoners, we have another wonderful work of oral history from Craig Taylor. New Yorkers: A City and its People in Our Time (John Murray, £16.99) is a collection of monologues that makes you feel as if you are there, listening to these people. A nurse, an activist, a nanny, a car thief, a personal injury lawyer, a lice consultant, a philanthropic foundation officer, a meditation teacher and dozens of others tell their stories of a place that ‘meant more of everything’ to them and to their interlocutor. Even before finishing the book, I began imagining what Taylor’s next destination might be. I also kept wondering how he infallibly manages to draw so much from his urban encounters.

The Young H.G. Wells is a biography that takes biology seriously. This is partly because H.G. Wells was a biologist before he became a writer of science fiction (his first publication was A Text Book on Biology, which he illustrated himself), but also because Claire Tomalin is alert to the life of the body as well as the mind. In her hands, Wells’s youth was less about his rise from the lower classes to become the wealthy socialist who predicted the aeroplane, the tank and the atomic bomb than about the rise of his weight. There is never a point in these pages when we are not told what numbers Wells saw when he stood on the bathroom scales, or reminded of the connection between his physical evolution and his evolution as a writer.

In the 1920s the linocut broke out of the schoolroom and on to gallery walls. Here was a democratic new art form, perfect for the times with its lowly materials — a piece of old linoleum flooring for the block, while the best tools, according to the artist Claude Flight, were an old umbrella spoke for cutting and a toothbrush to rub the back of the paper. The finished prints, Flight hoped, would be cheap enough for working-class pockets. Above all, the bright, dynamic images themselves, often depicting scenes of contemporary life — busy streets, the London Underground, skating, the first motor races — captured the mood of the age.

Every British historian has a story about the witlessness of Americans when it comes to our Georgian kings. The fate of Alan Bennett’s play The Madness of George III is notorious — Hollywood turned it into a film entitled The Madness of King George, in part lest American audiences assume it a tertiary sequel to The Madness of George I. A few years ago I encountered a highly educated editor at a reputable American news outlet who was under the impression that George V and George VI were ‘Hanoverian’ sovereigns, for surely they had been the son and grandson of George IV. I have deep sympathy, therefore, with the impulse behind Andrew Roberts’s biography of George III.

The Booker used to be more enthusiastic about the historical novel than it now is. Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle (Doubleday, £16.99) is about an imagined woman pilot who makes her way in the first years of aviation and is thought to have died in a daring feat of navigation from Pole to Pole in 1950. It’s an enjoy-able example of a genre that was popular in the 1990s: the historical novel interspersed with a present-day story — this one about a film star who has made a PR mess, loses her role in a series of teen movies and tries for redemption through a film about the aviator. The best of those novels tended to show events of the past reaching out and shaping present lives.

It would seem, if recent publications are anything to go by, that we have an insatiable appetite for this subject. A quick search of books on colour throws up six titles in just the past three years, a further half dozen published as a set in February this year, another volume in a series by the Sorbonne academic Michel Pastoureau and now these two. For James Fox, Cambridge academic and television art historian, a fascination with colour came when, as a six-year-old, he saw a squashed iridescent insect, and one gets the feeling that this book has been quietly simmering at the back of his mind ever since. ‘Read it, if you like,’ the author enjoins us at the outset, ‘as a cultural history of colour; though I think of it as a history of the world, according to colour.

Manuscripts have something of the appeal of drawings. They bring you closer to the creative process. Even a copy adds something special to the text: an editorial twist, a decorated initial, a margin full of beasts or just a beautiful script in which every letter is fashioned by hand like no other. Manuscripts do more than convey information. Their creation calls for imagination, physical effort, a love of meaning and beauty. They are works of art in their own right. I specialise in the most unpoetic kind of manuscript: administrative records of military and political history. But even they speak to us directly.

When two post-Soviet supermodels committed suicide in the noughties, both throwing themselves off high buildings in New York and Kiev, the trail into what made them so depressed led to a ‘personality development’ organisation in Moscow that offered ‘trainings’ that would help ‘find your truer self’. The moment you entered the dark Stalinist gothic theatre, filled with dozens of other ‘students’, you were under the control of the ‘life coach’. Drawing confusing pictures on a whiteboard, he would talk quickly and loudly about ‘transformation’. Then came days of non-stop psychiatric-style exercises. People went on stage and were instructed to recite their most traumatic past experiences.

Ever since a consensus emerged that trees and, by extension, their ecosystems, were both vastly interesting and badly threatened, great tottering logpiles of books about woods or individual tree species have seen the light of day. Of these books, one of the most influential has been The Hidden Life of Trees (2018), written by Peter Wohlleben, who for many years has looked after a forest in the Eifel mountains in Germany. I read that book with interest, and needed no persuading that woodland trees form, in effect, a community, both as a result of the scents they give off and the interactions between their roots underground.

The Caucasus, a popular saying goes, is a ‘mountain of tongues’. Describing this region requires a strong constitution, determination and brilliance because, as Christoph Baumer writes in this magnificent book, ‘in many ways, the Caucasus region is a puzzle’. That is something of an understatement. For one thing, the mountains usually referred to as the Caucasus are in fact part of two geologically distinct ranges: the Greater Caucasus that is around 100 kilometres wide and ten times the length, spans the land between the Black and Caspian Seas and acts as a climatic valve, blocking off like a plug cold Arctic air from passing south; and the Lesser Caucasus, that is considerably lower, easier to pass and about half the length of the range to the north.

Like department stores, empires and encyclopaedias, the multi-volume narrative national history is an invention of the later 18th century. It reaches its apogee, promising to bring everything important within a single enclosure, in the 19th and early 20th century. After that, ambitious examples appear to be fighting against a general lack of enthusiasm. Most of these works are little read now, from David Hume’s 1750s The History of England all the way through to Winston Churchill’s idiosyncratic A History of the English-Speaking Peoples in the 1950s. The grand sweep has a tendency to define the significant in advance.

And so the reckoning begins. As frantic Afghans wrestle with the agonising, life-and-death choice between staying in Kabul and risking execution by the Taliban or running the gauntlet of checkpoints around the airport in search of freedom overseas, it’s noises off in the West. Pundits and policy- makers pontificate, grizzled generals rue another foreign adventure ending in defeat and the media provide a live stream of grief and anguish. ‘I’m terrified,’ an Afghan friend and former colleague in the Ghani government WhatsApped me as Kabul fell. The Taliban had already killed two of his close colleagues and were searching for him. ‘I need to get out. Now it is time that our international friends do something to support me.

W.G. Sebald is the modern master of the uncanny — or perhaps that should be ‘was’, as he died in a car crash near Norwich in 2001 at the age of 57. Deciding which tense to use depends on whether you mean ‘W.G. Sebald’ as a shorthand for his body of work, which outlives him, or to refer to the man who wrote it, known to his acquaintances as Max. The question poses its own Sebaldian conundrum, reflecting his strange crepuscular writings with their meditations on the dead and the living, past and present, culture and identity. His ghost lives on in the flickering half-light, the most enigmatic, perhaps, of his characters.

The veteran journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft claims in his prologue to Churchill’s Shadow that: ‘This is not a hostile account, or not by intention, nor consciously “revisionist”, or contrarian,’ before launching into a long book that is virtually uninterrupted in its hostility to Winston Churchill, his memory and especially anyone who has had the temerity to admire Churchill or learn lessons from his life and career. Churchill revisionism is hardly new.

If you crush the right testicle of a wolf and administer it in oil or rose water it will induce a loathing for sex. The Turks have a drink called coffee (for they use no wine). The Chinese have no nobility, or only those philosophers and doctors who have raised themselves by their worth. If you allowed a human being 25 square feet each, the Earth could bear 148,456,800,000,000 people. The Persian kings trained sparrows to hunt butterflies, inspired by hunting with hawks. Speaking of sparrows, the reason they are so short-lived is because of their salacity, which is very frequent.