More from Books

Long ago, I interviewed Edmund White and found that the photographer assigned to the job was the incomparable Jane Bown — a bit like having Matisse turn up to decorate your kitchen. After we talked, Jane shot. She managed to convert a tiny hotel courtyard into a sort of antique Grecian glade. In her pictures, White peeped through the foliage with the smile of some demonic faun come to spread ribald chaos in the service of the great god Pan. I remembered that look when, in this patchwork of pieces about his life as a reader, he discloses that a heart attack followed by surgery in 2014 had one weird outcome. Temporarily, he felt ‘no desire to read’.

China, wrote Adam Smith, is ‘one of the richest, that is, one of the most fertile, best cultivated, most industrious and most populous countries in the world’. It was an obvious exemplar for a man who was trying to write An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. In the late 18th century, when Smith published his seminal work, Britain had not only already begun to build an empire; it was about to learn from the experience of losing parts of it too, as the colonies in North America detached and went their own way. Despite the shock of the US Declaration of Independence — in the very same year that The Wealth of Nations was published — it was Asia that was much more important, lucrative and interesting than the Americas to the British.

A girl at a window, hidden behind curtains, watches three women in a dimly lit drawing room in the house across the road as they sit silently smoking, hands and faces pale against their dark clothes. She invents identities for the trio: they are criminals or abandoned spinsters. Sinister or pathetic. Curiosity grows into obsession: she imagines them as painted saintly icons, golden against a dark wall, ‘flies crawling across their faces... the first threads of a spider’s web spun from their eyes’. People in the Room is set in the early 20th century in the affluent Buenos Aires neighbourhood of Belgrano, where the author lived as a child.

If you go to the Campo dei Fiori in Rome on 17 February every year, you’ll find yourself surrounded by an eclectic crowd of atheists, free-thinkers, Catholic reformers, anarchists, mystics, students, scientists and poets all jostling to lay tributes before the statue of the hooded Dominican friar whose shadowed face stares inscrutably towards the Vatican. His name is Giordano Bruno and his statue, erected by public subscription in the 19th century, commemorates the site where he was burned for heresy in 1600 at the hands of the Roman Inquisition.

At the beginning of After the Party, Phyllis Forrester tells us she was in prison. While inside, her hair turned yellowy-white, ‘like the mane of an old wooden rocking-horse’, not out of shock, she reassures us, but because ‘one couldn’t get one’s hair dyed’. She thinks she deserved to be there: ‘What I did was terrible. Terrible. The shame of it will never leave me until my dying day.’ For a long time in Cressida Connolly’s chilling new novel, though, it’s not clear what she has done. The year is 1979, and middle-class Phyllis, who is bitter and alone (her family don’t talk to her any more), recounts her story to a voiceless interviewer in mannered, first-person chapters that interject throughout.

So much rubbish has been written over the years by those who feared, revered or pretended to know Nelson Mandela that it is useful, finally, to be able to read about him and the privations of his prison years in his own contemporaneous, understated prose. At more than 600 pages including annotations, The Prison Letters of Nelson Mandela might be regarded as a volume strictly for the liberation struggle obsessive. But this collection tells us more about the man — in his fearlessness, grace and occasional pomposity — than almost all of the good and bad books that have been written about him. The key point about Mandela, often overlooked, is that he was high born, the son of a chief of the Thembus.