Lead book review

The word ‘jewel’ makes the heart beat a little faster. Great jewels have always epitomised beauty, love — illicit or sanctified —romance, danger and mystery. And no one knew better how to cash in on this mystique than the firm of Cartier, for years the go-to jewellers for discreet, elegant razzle-dazzle. Its customers were kings, princes, maharajas and the whole of ‘society’. The iconic panther brooch it created for the Duchess of Windsor sold for $7 million (in 2010). When Francesca Cartier Brickell, searching for a special bottle of champagne in her Cartier grandfather’s cellar, spotted a battered leather trunk in one corner, she opened it to find bundles of letters, each tied and neatly labelled.

It is almost five years since two trained jihadists went into the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris and killed 12 people. Philippe Lançon survived the editorial meeting that was taking place as the gunmen burst in. Published to huge acclaim in France last year, Disturbance is his account of events. It is long, perhaps too long, with numerous discursions. But who would edit such painful, painstaking testimony? On the morning of the attack, Lançon had been weighing up whether to go to Charlie or to Libération, where he also worked. He chose to go to Charlie, whose difficult, brilliant, brave team had kept producing the magazine, despite a decade of growing attention from Europe’s modern-day blasphemy police.

Richard Ingrams A book that gave me great enjoyment (for all the wrong reasons) was Harvest Bells: New and Uncollected Poems by John Betjeman (Bloomsbury Continuum, £16.99). The compiler, Kevin J. Gardner, professor of English at Baylor University, Texas, claimed that all the poems in the book had been subjected to his ‘rigorous scrutiny’; yet somehow a spoof Betjeman poem, published in Private Eye after the exposure of Anthony Blunt as a Russian agent in 1979 (for which I was partly responsible), had found its way into the professor’s ragbag of a compendium: Who’d have guessed it? Blunt a traitor And a homosexualist, Carrying on with tar and waiter — There’s a sight I’m glad I missed.

Philip Hensher The best novels of the year were Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys (Fleet, £16.99) and James Meek’s To Calais, In Ordinary Time (Canongate, £17.99). These days, novels are often praised for the gravity of their subjects, but what elevates Whitehead’s treatment of race and American brutality is the elegance of its style and the satisfying inventiveness of its form. Meek’s book is an astounding linguistic fantasy about the advent of the Black Death. French, Anglo-Saxon and Latin collide in a world of fake news, uncertain sexual borders and the dread of a catastrophe which looks in some ways very much like our own.

Do not google Samuel Jean Pozzi. If you want to enjoy Julian Barnes’s The Man in the Red Coat — and believe me, it’s teeming with delights — stay away from search engines and trust the author to tell the story in his own way. But just to get you started: Pozzi (1846–1918), the man John Singer Sargent painted, gloriously, in sumptuous red, was a Frenchman, a prominent, pioneering doctor in Belle Epoque Paris, and a charming, ubiquitous, infallibly seductive socialite. (‘Disgustingly handsome’ is how the Princess of Monaco described him.) He was Sarah Bernhardt’s doctor and also her lover; she called him ‘Docteur Dieu’. (His other nickname was ‘L’Amour médecin’, which Barnes translates as Dr Love.

More than 20 years ago, George Steiner, meditating on 2,000 years of persecution and suffering, posed the ‘taboo’ question that no one dared ask: ‘Has the survival of the Jew been worth the appalling cost?’  It was not just the horrors of the pogroms or of Auschwitz that ‘enforced’ the question for Steiner, nor the centuries of exclusion and violence but — equally destructive — ‘the fear, the degradation, the miasma of contempt, latent or explicit,’ which has been the hereditary birthright of every Jewish child ‘across the millennia’. ‘Would it not be preferable, on the balance sheet of human mercies,’ Steiner asked, ‘if he was to ebb into assimilation and the common seas?

Paul Hendrickson’s previous (and very fine) book was Hemingway’s Boat, published in Britain in 2012. It was a nice conceit to see the writer’s life through his singular obsession with Pilar, the boat he commissioned from a Brooklyn shipyard, which remained the steadiest companion in his choppy voyage. The enormous life of Frank Lloyd Wright — the architect who was born two years after the Civil War, and died in 1959 when Bobby Darin’s ‘Mack the Knife’ was a hit — offers no such straightforward device. With more than 500 completed designs, splendid eccentricities and a well-developed taste for confrontation, every single Wright building could have become a novella.

In their lifetime, and afterwards, the Soong sisters from Shanghai seemed like figures from a Chinese fairy tale. There were three of them: ‘One loved money, one loved power and one loved her country.’ They came from a family of prosperous Methodist converts and, for almost 100 years, one or other of them presided at or near the centre of power in China. The middle sister, Chingling, married Sun Yatsen, the founding Father of the Republic, transferring her allegiance after his death to the small group of bandits, led by Mao Zedong, who formed the nucleus of the Chinese Communist party. To this day Chingling enjoys something like mythical status in the People’s Republic of China.

Travelling the Indus valley late in the third millennium BC you would have been awed by two Bronze Age megacities, 320 miles apart, ‘massive and tightly planned, very similar in layout’, their bricks and measures standardised, evidence of rigid authority. Their trade goods included Afghan lapis lazuli, Omani vases, legal seals from Sumeria, carnelian beads, packed for dispatch to Sumer — and that is almost all that is left of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, and more than we know of them. Their names are modern labels. This section of The Boundless Sea, David Abulafia’s fascinating ‘human history of the oceans’, is one of many moments of thrilling implication. (Do not assume anyone will know the name of London in 5,000 years’ time.

This impressively clever, careful, and often beautiful book is the best sort of journey. It takes us through 15 cities that represent Islamic civilisation, but also through 15 centuries of Islamic history. Our voyage takes us through the core of the Middle East, but also to Fez in what is now Morocco and to Samarkand, in what is now Uzbekistan. We are introduced to very attractive characters such as Akbar, the tolerant and cultured warrior-poet who was Mughal emperor in the 16th century, and Harun al-Rashid, who turned Baghdad into a cultural and commercial centre so rich and powerful that its fame resonates more than a millennium later.

Towards the end of this tale of imperial intellectual expansion, Susan Sontag’s publicist goes to visit his shrink and, dealing with some appalling professional trauma or other, mentions her name. The psychiatrist bursts out laughing. The publicist asks what is so funny and is told: ‘You can’t imagine how many people have sat on that couch over the years and talked about Susan Sontag.’ Benjamin Moser’s very substantial life of the cultural critic and writer is capable of detached bemusement at its subject’s unstoppable advance. She took herself extremely seriously. (‘On 3 October, the Nobel Prize was awarded to J.M. Coetzee. The award depressed Susan.

Amedeo Modigliani thought Nina Hamnett, muse, painter, memoirist, had ‘the best tits in Europe’. She fell 40 feet from a window and was impaled on the basement railings. Not suicide. She was peeing out of the window, the shared lodging-house lavatory being too distant. On her deathbed, her breathing was like a harmonica. The collector Roland Penrose liked being tied up by a dominatrix, a woman wrestler, whom he and his photographer wife, Lee Miller, brought to England and shared. The busy philosopher A. J. Ayer was known as Juan Don. When Isabel Rawsthorne finally had sex with the persistent, overweight sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi, she reported that it was ‘exhausting’. She had to do all the work.

Nobody can accuse Tom Holland of shying away from big subjects. Dominion is nothing less than a history of Christianity with an underlying theme. The subtitle says it all. It is dedicated to the idea that Christianity has formed the western mind, not just in its moral and intellectual conventions but in their opposites, such as atheism or the natural sciences. An argument so paradoxical provokes thought, whether one agrees with it or not. This one is sustained with all the breadth, originality and erudition that we have come to associate with Holland’s writing. The technique is a sort of literary pointillism. An incident, an image, an individual, a place are presented as capturing the spirit of an epoch.

One autumn night in 1991, I stood on the rooftop terrace of a tacky villa in Saranda once owned by Albania’s Stalinist dictator Enver Hoxha, beside three elderly former SOE officers who were returning to Albania for the first time since 1945. In an image that summed up the waste and the horror of the Cold War, David Smiley stared out over the dark water at the lights of Corfu, from where, on a similar night in October 1949, he had sent a group of dissidents, code-named the ‘Pixies’, to launch an insurgency — and wiped his eye in silence. Smiley’s men had been ambushed as they landed, and then killed, on the tip-off from Kim Philby, the highest Russian agent to infiltrate British Intelligence, and in charge of anti-communist espionage.