More from Books

Last year was the 200th anniversary of the outbreak of the war of Greek independence in March 1821. It has been celebrated by a flood of books and events, a particularly instructive exhibition at the Benaki Museum in Athens and this gruesome page-turner. Mark Mazower, professor of history at Columbia University and the author of many books on modern Greece, stresses the passion for freedom, exceptional stamina and heroism which helped Greeks establish an independent state between 1821 and 1830. Greeks had long felt oppressed as subjects of the Ottoman empire. One of them called it ‘a tyranny so frightful... neither equal nor comparable to any other and so unjust’.

In the world of books, a modern classic is an altogether more slippery thing than a classic: it must walk a line between freshness and durability; reflect the current age but hope to outlast it. For individual publishers, given many 20th-century writers are still in copyright, a modern classics list will necessarily be partial. However, few such partial lists are as complete as Penguin Modern Classics (PMCs), founded in 1961 four years after Penguin’s general editor A.S.B. Glover said: ‘We don’t want — without outstandingly good reasons — to start any new series such as “Modern Classics”.

It could be said that the power of a horror story depends on the possibility, however minute, of it being true. This is partly why so many masters of the genre, from Bram Stoker to Robert Louis Stevenson, have given their narratives the semblance of believability by including epistolary passages, ‘found’ documents and the commentaries of ‘editors’ in their books. In The Runes Have Been Cast, Robert Irwin takes the opposite approach, writing in a prologue: Should any of my readers incline to a serious study of the subject of this book, it is only right to urge them most strongly to refrain from being drawn into the practice of the Secret Art... My own observations have led me to an absolute conviction that to do so would be a complete waste of time.

Unusually for a book about nature, the species in question, in this lucid story of the relationship between birds and humans, is ours. Why catch six million ibises, attractive water birds with curved beaks, plunge them into vats of liquid resin, wrap them in bandages and bury them in vast cemeteries in Middle Egypt in 650 BC? When There Were Birds explains that these ibises were offerings to Thoth, god of knowledge and wisdom. Throughout this story, faith, cash and custom drive humans to behave in astonishing ways towards birds. From the early 15th century we were moving canaries to the Swiss Alps and southern Germany, where breeders might raise 50,000 birds a year, which were then transported and sold across the world. In 1871 America alone bought 48,000 as pets.

‘I went into show business to make a noise, to pronounce myself,’ Mel Brooks told Kenneth Tynan in 1977, in a New Yorker profile entitled, with appalling relish, ‘Detours and Frolics of a Short Hebrew’. ‘I want to go on making the loudest noise to the most people.’ His memoir All About Me! may be his final act of this pronunciation. He is 95. His real name is Melvin Kaminsky but that wouldn’t fit on a drum — a drum is his natural instrument — and he shortened it to Brooks. He was the youngest of four boys of Max and Kate. His father died when he was two, and Mel created Maxes wherever he could — Max Bialystock in The Producers, a man too vivid to be forgotten; and a son with Anne Bancroft, Max Brooks.

From Ladybird’s The Story of Music (a dinky 50 pages, generously illustrated) to Richard Taruskin’s five-volume epic The Oxford History of Western Music, the history of classical music has been sliced and stretched in print to fit every possible length, format and agenda. Andrew Gant’s Five Straight Lines joins the cluster of works jostling and elbowing at the midpoint of these extremes. The Oxford-based academic (whose previous books on carols and hymns have introduced us to a genial, approachable narrator, with a welcome glint in his eye), shouts no provocative argument or USP from his cover, makes no novel claims for his survey. This is, quite simply, a narrative of music from the beginning to the now.