More from Books

Tuesday

David Honigmann

An AI visionary looks forward to the best of all possible worlds

In 1993 Vernor Vinge popularised the notion of the Singularity – the point at which exponentially accelerating trends in multiple technologies move out of control in an endless positive feedback loop. Vinge was a science fiction writer; Ray Kurzweil is not. In 1993 he had already pioneered optical character recognition and synthesisers that could precisely mimic real instruments. His mission crystallised into making Vinge’s conceit a reality. He is principal researcher and ‘AI visionary’ at Google – and principal proselytiser, too, through any number of portentously titled books. The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999) set out his stall; The Singularity is Near (2005) staked a claim for human-level intelligence in computers by 2029 and a generalised apotheosis in 2045.

Ruth Scurr

Snobbery in the garden: U and non-U borders

Richard Sudell is the forgotten hero of the gardening revolution in Britain between the first and second world wars. A Quaker, born in Lancashire in 1892, the son of a straw and hay dealer, he left school at 14 and became a gardener, worked at Kew, then went to prison as a conscientious objector in 1916. On furlough from his first prison sentence, he worked with the Vacant Land Cultivation Society to help create allotments for London’s poor. When the first world war ended, he moved to Roehampton with his first wife. There he began writing a monthly gardening column in the Roehampton Estate Gazette advising his neighbours, most of whom had never had a garden before, on how to ‘beautify’ the debris-strewn patches of mud outside their new front and back doors.

Robin Ashenden

The rape of Ukraine continues while the world’s sympathies move on

‘Write and record’ was the dying instruction of the historian Simon Dubnow – shot by Nazis in the Riga ghetto – and two books recently emerging from Ukraine embody this spirit in spades. Now that the world’s anger and sympathies have largely moved on to the Middle East, they may do something to rekindle that earlier sense of outrage and remind the ‘caring’ classes of atrocities closer to home. ‘My hatred flows from thesmall things to the big things. Every fibre is filled with it’ The first, Our Daily War, comes from Andrey Kurkov, the celebrated Russo-Ukrainian novelist and author of 2022’s Invasion Diary, a detailed on-the-ground account of Putin’s attack on his country.

Michael Beloff

Will the Olympics ever be politics-free?

The modern Olympics, first held in Athens in 1896 in a genuflection to their Grecian predecessors, was the creation of Pierre de Coubertin, a French aristocrat. As this septet of books shows from allusive angles, Coubertin’s best known quotation – ‘the most important thing in the Olympic Games is not winning but taking part’ – must rank as a paradigm example of a precept more honoured in the breach than the observance. It is rivalled only by his anticipation that the Games would be ‘a vehicle for increasing friendly understanding among nations’. In an elegant series of vignettes entitled Aux Armes! Sport and the French: An English Perspective (Fairfield Books, £9.

Tuesday

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

How cartomania captivated even Queen Victoria

The wife of the Victorian photography pioneer Henry Fox Talbot called his first cameras ‘mousetraps’: little wooden boxes that were designed to capture anything placed before them. Yet most of Fox Talbot’s earliest photographs do not show living bodies at all. Long exposure times meant that the faintest twitch on a sitter’s face would dissolve it into a foggy blur, so instead he trained his lens on objects like shells and books, creating whole new collections he could reproduce in ghostly black and white. Preserving the images of dead children in an album, like dried flowers, meant that they could remain little forever Within a few years numerous other photography enthusiasts would follow his lead.

Emily Rhodes

Notes on the natural world: an exquisite collection from Kathleen Jamie

‘Let me leave Cairn here as a trail marker, a moment noted, a view from the strange here-and-now,’ Kathleen Jamie states towards the end of the prologue to her exquisite new collection of writings. In more than 40 micro-essays and poems, her keen-eyed view encompasses both an uninhabited island far out at sea and a piece of flint in her hand; it accommodates surfacing memories and also peers into the uncertain future awaiting the next generation. A balanced tower of ultra-short pieces is a new form for Jamie, the Scottish makar (or national poet), who also pens longer pieces of nature writing, collected into the genre-expanding works: Findings, Sightlines and Surfacing.

Francis Beckett

Why state bureaucracy is crucial to our happiness

Most days, outside the local courtroom where I live in Finchley Central, a man holds up a placard that says in big black capitals: ALL OUR BRAINS ARE MICROCHIPPED BY THE SECURITY SERVICES. It’s a foolish conspiracy theory, of course, but it’s also a symptom of the fear and loathing of the state which has grown in recent years and which, according to this lucid and persuasive book, threatens to return us to a time when we were governed by the whims of a monarch whose wishes were implemented arbitrarily by his family, friends and flatterers. The problem, say Stephen E. Hanson and Jeffrey S. Kopstein, is not that this presages an end to democracy.

Iona Mclaren

Could anyone be trusted in Tudor and Stuart England?

‘Spies, you are lights in state, but of base stuff,/ Who, when you’ve burnt yourselves down to the snuff,/ Stink, and are thrown away.’ Ben Jonson likened his fellow secret agents to a tallow candle: a grotty necessity, to be discarded without regret. Who now remembers Arthur Gregory, and his ‘admirable art of forcing the seal of a letter; yet so invisibly, that it still appeared a virgin to the exactest beholder’? Or the scrivener Peter Bales, so dainty with his quill that he could forge any handwriting, and who touted at Elizabeth I’s court the Renaissance equivalent of microfilm, a script so minuscule that he could fit the Lord’s Prayer, the Credo, the Ten Commandments, two short Latin prayers, his name, motto, and the date ‘within the circle of a single penny...

Leyla Sanai

The downside to being rich: Long Island Compromise, by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, reviewed

Fleishman is in Trouble was one of the funniest novels of 2020, and it catapulted Taffy Brodesser-Akner, a New York Times journalist, into the spotlight with a US TV series two years later. Long Island Compromise is a rollicking family saga written with the same sardonic wit. It is centred around a wealthy family living in a suburb of Long Island, who owe their fortune to the late patriarch, a Jewish European émigré who set up a successful factory making polystyrene foam moulds. There’s a backstory to this, which we learn later, but his indomitable widow and his son Carl’s wife Ruth rule the roost. At the beginning, Carl is kidnapped, then returned traumatised, and the implications of this violent act affect Ruth and their children Nathan, Beamer and Jenny.

Travis Elborough

At last, a private education that wasn’t unmitigated misery

There has been a spate of books recently about private education, ranging from academic denouncements of their malign effects on society, such as Francis Green and David Kynaston’s Engines of Privilege, to Charles Spencer’s grim chronicle of neglect and abuse, A Very Private School. Though technically falling within this genre, 1967, the singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock’s diverting account of his formative spell at Winchester College, seems to hail from a rosier era. It is one where matron’s buttered crumpets rather than bullying were the chief topics of Billy Bunter-esque reminiscences that proclaimed schooldays the happiest of one’s life.

Andrew Rosenheim

A haunting apparition: Bonehead, by Mo Hayder, reviewed

It is well established that women are happy to read novels written by men but that male readers rarely extend a reciprocal courtesy. The late Mo Hayder is a case in point, since despite the extraordinary sales of the novels she wrote before her premature death in 2021, her fan base remains overwhelmingly female. It may be that the extreme violence often found in her books (‘lurid’ would not be unfair) strikes men as a trespass on what has traditionally been a male preserve. Whatever the reason, male reviewers tended to shy away – I know that, since I was one of them. Yet just ten pages into Bonehead, her posthumously published novel, I found myself completely drawn into Hayder’s story and the haunted creepy world it depicts.

A.S.H. Smyth

Richard Flanagan rails against wrongs ‘too vast to have a name’

‘Is it because we see our world only darkly that we surround ourselves with lies we call time, history, reality, memory, detail, facts?’ Richard Flanagan’s memoir opens at the Ohama coal mine in Japan, once home to his father and a host of other POW slave labourers. It then spirals outwards via his childhood (in a remote Tasmanian settlement), his much-put-upon mother (who hoped Richard would become a plumber), his semi-present, kindly, traumatised father Archie (enshrined in The Narrow Road to the Deep North) and on through all the now-familiar Flanagan themes.

Victor Sebestyen

The rewards of being the ‘asylum capital of the world’

They came on a small, crowded, leaky boat from Calais towards Dover in seas that could turn from placid to treacherous in an instant, around 30 people seeking sanctuary from persecution, unsure of the welcome they would receive. ‘We were seized by horrible vomitings and most of the party became so dreadfully ill they thought they were dying,’ one of the group, a young mother accompanied by her two children, wrote later. The year was 1620 and quite possibly among the refugees might have been a forebear of Nigel Farage. This small boat, one of many hundreds that crossed the Channel in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, was full of Huguenot asylum seekers fleeing Catholic France and the Lowlands.

Tuesday

Philip Hensher

The clue to Shakespeare’s sexuality lies in the sonnets

The question ‘Was Shakespeare gay?’ is not very rational. It might be a little like asking ‘Was Shakespeare a Tory?’. Some of his scenarios might coincide with later developments – Jaques trying to pick up Ganymede in As You Like It (gay), or Ulysses’s speech on degree in Troilus and Cressida (Tory). But the historical conditions are not there. No doubt there have been people keen on same-sex relations since the dawn of time. But the possibilities of a social identity embedded in the word ‘gay’ didn’t exist in the 16th century, nor the medical diagnosis from which the word ‘homosexual’ arose. Nor will ‘sodomite’ do. That describes some very different sexual tastes and practices through history.

Genevieve Gaunt

Echoes of Tom Brown’s School Days: Rabbits, by Hugo Rifkind, reviewed

The year is 1993 and 16-year-old Tommo has been moved from a day state school of 2,000 pupils in brown blazers that ‘when it rained… smelled of shit’ to Eskmount, an elite Scottish boarding school, where boys wear kilts and put their ‘cocks on your shoulder’ when you’re working in the library (easier in a kilt) and routinely hang ‘smaller kids in duvets... out the window’. The horseshoe effect in schooling terms: the more expensive, the more savage. Hugo Rifkind’s Rabbits opens with a bang: ‘When the shotgun went off under Johnnie Burchill’s brother’s chin, word had it, the top of his head came off like the top of a turnip lantern.’ It is reminiscent of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.

Tom Hodgkinson

The important business of idle loafing

In our godless, post-industrial, hyper-competitive world, rest is seen merely as recuperation: it’s when we man-machines ‘recharge our batteries’, as the cliché goes, before dashing back to the factory or work-station. It’s a negative concept. You rest for a reason, which is to avoid burnout. All you should really do to be happy is read light novels or self-help books, advises Montaigne But as this charming and subtle meditation on the subject from a grand French historian shows, rest used to be far more than just taking time off. It is a religious concept. Take the rest enjoyed by Adam and Eve in Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Paul Levy

Nothing rivals a traditional Chinese banquet for opulence

In February 1985 I had the good fortune to be a guest in Hong Kong at the Mandarin hotel’s 21st birthday celebration, a lavish three-day reconstruction of the sort of imperial banquet given during the Qing dynasty by the Kangxi emperor (1654-1722) and his grandson the Qianlong emperor (1711-1799). Kangxi started the custom of banqueting during his tours of southern China – he made six between 1684 and 1707. These provincial feasts were relatively informal affairs, often held in a tent, quite different to the stifling protocol of the imperial court at Beijing, and combined some aspects of the ruling Manchu ‘Man banquet’ with the native Han Chinese ‘Han banquet.’ The full three-day Manchu-Han feast was mostly restricted to Beijing.

Charlotte Hobson

Imprisoned for years on Putin’s whim

Imagine: it’s 16 December 2004 and you are a middle-ranking banker living in Moscow – prosperous but ordinary, a long way below oligarch level. You are looking forward to a New Year’s trip with your family to Prague – the hotel is booked; your young son is excited. Your phone rings while you are at lunch: an investigator whom you’ve never heard of asks you to come and answer a few questions. You ask if tomorrow will do. ‘No, you must come today,’ insists the caller. ‘It’ll take around 20 minutes.’ What do you do? If this were the beginning of a thriller, Vladimir Pereverzin would have instantly made his way to the secret lock-up with the false identity documents and gone on the run.

Felipe Fernández-Armesto

Why would anyone choose to live in Puerto Rico?

From the eastern Atlantic, the US looks boringly uniform. Yet Alaska is almost as different from Alabama as Turku is from Turkey. If you travel the length of the Mississippi, food, laws, customs and lingo change as surprisingly as along the Danube. Particularism is rife. In two counties in Vermont, there are warrants for the arrest of George W. Bush. In some parts of the South, you must step across a county line to evade laws against alcohol. In Indiana, where I live, every county sets its own time zone and you have to keep adjusting your watch on your way to Chicago. In this land of anomalies, nowhere is odder than Puerto Rico. It is an ‘associated’ state, but not a state of the union.

Mark Cocker

The Karakachan sheepdog is a match for any bear – but not for modern society

Kapka Kassabova is celebrated for her poetic accounts of rural communities dwelling at the margins of modernity, but also along a border zone in the southern extremity of her native Bulgaria. In her previous book, Elixir, her chosen people were the Muslim Pomaks of the Rhodope Mountains, with their ancient herbalist traditions. In Anima, she explores the world of transhumance pastoralists, known in Bulgarian as the Karakachan and in Greek as the Sarakatsani. It is not so long ago that the Greek component of this extraordinary sheep-herding tribe acquired cultural cachet in this country. American and English anthropologists hurried off to study and write about them (notably J.K. Campbell in Honour, Family and Patronage, 1964).