More from Books

Tuesday

Steven Poole

Why Anaximander deserves to be called ‘the first scientist’

It’s a daring thing to write a whole book about a man while confessing early on that ‘we know almost nothing of his readings, life, character, appearance or voyages’, and of whose writings only a three-line fragment survives. Luckily, as with many ancient authors, the works of the 6th-century BC philosopher Anaximander are described in subsequent treatises, and a resourceful writer can infer much from this evidence about what might have been ‘the first great scientific revolution in human history’.

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

Ghosts of the past: Old God’s Time, by Sebastian Barry, reviewed

Nothing is quite what it seems in Sebastian Barry’s latest novel, and that isn’t meant entirely as a compliment. While Old God’s Time is a powerful story, I will surely not be the only reader who’s occasionally baffled by its cast of ghosts presented initially as living people. After 200 pages, I lost count of the number of times one character explains to another that the person they think they have just seen is actually dead. The protagonist is the recently retired and somewhat haunted policeman Tom Kettle, who feels ‘his pension was his gun, his weapon against work’. He now lives in a lean-to annex of a Victorian castle in Dalkey, overlooking the Irish Sea, where he catches only glimpses of his landlord and neighbours.

Christopher Bray

There’s nothing ‘magical’ about a great theatrical performance

‘Make him read the lines the way they’re written!’ Raymond Massey snarled at Elia Kazan during the East of Eden shoot. Classically trained, Massey was infuriated at the way the movie’s star, the Method instinctive James Dean, never played a scene the same way twice. Kazan, who had refereed similar rows between Jessica Tandy and Marlon Brando on the Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire, did what good directors do with warring actors: play them off against each other the better to boost both performances. Nobody who has watched the picture, especially those scenes in which Massey flinches at Dean’s latest flight of fancy, could doubt the artfulness of Kazan’s technique.

Anthony Sattin

A source of bitter rivalry: Burton and Speke fall out over the Nile

For the 19th-century English adventurer, author, ethnographer, pornographer and all-round maverick Richard Burton, one of life’s happiest moments was ‘the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands’. There would of course be difficulties; but happiness derives from the prospect of overcoming great challenges and in the process achieving fame and perhaps even fortune. By contrast, what delights the reader most is when a traveller, somewhere deep in those unknown lands, faces overwhelming obstacles. What possible interest is there in hearing that they went, they saw and they returned? Few journeys involved more hardship than the one Burton contemplated in the spring of 1855.

Rose George

Women beware women: young feminists are betraying their older sisters

Where are all the father-in-law jokes? You won’t find them, because fathers-in-law are not fair game in the way middle-aged women are. There is no male ‘Karen’. Men are not mocked as wizards, but we are witches. Victoria Smith has subtitled her timely book ‘The Demonisation of Middle-aged Women’, and if you are one of them you will know that is no exaggeration. Witches, crones, hags, scolds, evil mothers-in-law – up here in middle age, we are used to male scorn. But Smith has a different target: ‘I do not wish merely to present the myriad ways in which older women are belittled, undermined or misrepresented.’ We know all that, it’s obvious: ‘Ageist misogyny has always existed.

Tuesday

Richard Baxell

The women who rallied to the Republican cause in Spain

‘We English,’ the prime minister Stanley Baldwin allegedly remarked following the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936, ‘hate fascism, but we loathe bolshevism as much. So if there is somewhere where fascists and bolsheviks can kill each other off, so much the better.’ Initially, many in Britain probably agreed with Baldwin, seeing no reason to be drawn into another country’s civil war. But a sizeable minority thought very differently, believing that the conflict was not just a civil war but part of an ongoing struggle between democracy and fascism. To them, Spain became a rallying cry, and over the course of the war many thousands from around the world volunteered to join it.

Andrew Lycett

Poetry anthologies to treasure

Francis Palgrave, the founder of the Public Record Office, didn’t like having his version of the past parcelled in neat gobbets. In his History of Normandy and England, he described anthologies as ‘sickly things’, adding that ‘cut flowers have no vitality’. His son, Francis Turner Palgrave, differed fundamentally, and, with Alfred Tennyson’s help, gathered what is still the greatest collection of English lyric poetry, The Golden Treasury, which sold 10,000 copies in six months after its publication by Macmillan in 1861 and, according to Clare Bucknell in this delightfully engaging survey of verse anthologies, had shifted 650,000 copies by 1939 and must surely now be hitting the million mark.

Victor Sebestyen

Why is Ukraine honouring the monsters of the past?

The historian Bernard Wasserstein is admired as a rigorous academic. In his monumental work on the Holocaust and his perceptive study of barbarism vs civilisation in the West, he strove for objectivity and maintained a professorial tone, as if writing of the past from an Olympian height. Wasserstein’s grandparents and aunt were forced to dig their own graves, and were then shot Not so in this extraordinarily moving book about Krakowiec, the shtetl 40 miles from Lviv where his forebears lived for generations, and the role his family played there. At various times part of Austria, Poland, Ukraine, Germany and Soviet Russia, it was, he says, ‘a small place you’ve never heard of’. Yet its complex history is relevant today, as war returns to Eastern Europe.

Mark Cocker

Living trees that predate the dinosaurs

It is perhaps easy to understand why some of the Earth’s largest trees, with roots spreading deep into the underworld as their upper limbs ascend to heaven, are charged with symbolic importance. Yet the origins of our fixation are perhaps surprising. To give one example, the Buddha was said to have attained enlightenment beneath the spreading limbs of a bodi, or pipal tree. That same specimen still reputedly flourishes at Bodh Gaya in Nepal. Even earlier, the first temple of Jerusalem was constructed from timbers King Solomon obtained specifically from the cedars of Lebanon, whose own sacred status recedes into the mists of prehistory. Elderflora – a name coined by Jared Farmer for these venerable old masters – suggests that little has changed since Solomon’s time.

Helen Carr

Snapshots of the Middle Ages in the Canterbury pilgrims

What does the term ‘medieval’ mean to you? Most of us have some idea of the Dark Ages, the centuries roughly spanning the departure of the Romans and the early, or indeed late, Middle Ages (which Ian Mortimer extends to the Renaissance). For those brought up on school history, or who revere the nous of the Romans, it was a time when civilisation declined. But the ‘Dark Age’ moniker is increasingly accepted as unfair, with historians arguing hotly and convincingly that the period was anything but dark. Seb Falk’s recent The Light Ages showed that major scientific exploration was under way in the late Middle Ages. Following on from this, Mortimer now explains why the period matters, and why it was once overlooked.

Christopher Shrimpton

Shared secrets: The New Life, by Tom Crewe, reviewed

‘It is shocking to read about. But once you are used to it, it is a little like reading about Ireland, or socialism.’ This is the accepting, if unfeeling, response of John Addington’s undergraduate daughter after reading his recently completed book on homosexuality. ‘It is a very rational argument, Papa.’ The New Life, Tom Crewe’s superb debut novel, is set in fin-de-siècle London and follows Addington and his co-author Henry Ellis (based on John Addington Symonds and Havelock Ellis) as they try to make a rational argument for ‘the impossible subject’. They are respected writers and family men, but each is burdened by an unacceptable private life: Addington has brought a young man to live in his home; Ellis’s wife has moved away to be with another woman.

Stuart Kelly

The idealist vs the entrepreneur: Birnam Wood, by Eleanor Catton, reviewed

I always feel an element of trepidation when approaching a new book by an author whose previous work I have admired. When the novelist in question won the Booker prize in 2013, and I was on the judging panel, the static crackle of anxiety is even more intense. And so the fearful question: is Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood a stinker? No, it isn’t. But will it ‘pull a Mantel’ and win the Booker again? I doubt it, though I would not rule out its appearance on other prize shortlists. It is a subtle, sometimes acerbically comic and ultimately tragic novel of great sensitivity.

Alexandra Coghlan

Why are women composers still disregarded?

Did you know that throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th it was considered a ‘biological impossibility’ for women to sustain the kind of abstract thought required for serious musical composition? Or that in the 1910s women in London could be compelled to sit separately from men in concert halls, sometimes even denied entry if not in academic dress? How about the fact that the Halle Orchestra summarily dismissed all its female members in 1920? Or that from 1952 to 1962 only eight works by women were performed at the Proms? For a bonus point, can you name the year – the decade, the century, even – in which the first opera by a woman was staged at the Vienna State Opera? (The answer is 2019.

Suzi Feay

From man of words to man of action: Hotel Milano, by Tim Parks, reviewed

The global disruption of 2020-21 posed a special challenge to novelists. As a subject it seems irresistible; but how to find order and pattern in a series of seemingly blank, eventless days? Stuck in the pandemic doldrums, Tim Parks’s elderly narrator at least has memories of the past and a richly stocked mind to call upon when lockdown bites. Frank Marriot embarks on an ill-advised trip to Italy at the very start of the pandemic, when he is begged to attend the funeral of an old friend, Dan Sandow. Oddly, Frank has heard nothing about a virus spreading from China. A former cultural commentator and magazine feature writer, he has long undertaken a print and TV detox, so is unaware that he is being flung into the rapidly heating cauldron of Covid. ‘Ben, I don’t do news.

Leaf Arbuthnot

‘It felt like a piece of bad news I should pass on to someone else’ – Robert Douglas-Fairhurst on his MS diagnosis

In October 2017 the academic Robert Douglas-Fairhurst went to see a neurologist in Oxford. A couple of months earlier a weird thing had happened: he’d gone on a long walk and ended it shuffling along, like an old man in slippers. He wasn’t yet 50. Having had a scan, he was looking forward to hearing there was nothing to worry about. ‘I’m going to come right out with it,’ the neurologist said, fixing him in the eye. ‘I think you have multiple sclerosis.’ Contemplating a trip to Dignitas, he wonders if people generally buy a two-way ticket or just the single All of us, Douglas-Fairhurst writes in Metamorphosis, his heartening and unexpectedly gripping memoir, find at one point or other that we are standing on a trap-door.

Tuesday

Hugh Thomson

Pico Iyer finds peace even in lost paradises

We all have our vision of a paradise travel destination. Mine was Tahiti, based on exotic remoteness and those pictures of glorious atolls with their cerulean blue lagoons – until I went there and discovered a severe underlying drugs problem among the island’s youth, and whispering discontent. Herman Melville once talked of how ‘the soul of man was an insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life’. It’s a phrase that gives Pico Iyer his title for this intriguing collage of such places which might, and should, be considered paradise, but that human intervention has spoiled. Like Satan surveying the Garden of Eden, the reader can take a certain mordant pleasure in the process.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

The triumphs and disasters of 1845

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times: not France in 1789, convulsed by revolution, but Britain in 1845, when the period Dickens referred to as ‘the moving age’ was in danger of spinning out of control. It was the year when the SS Great Britain, designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, left Liverpool docks on the first transatlantic crossing by an iron-built steamship; the Hungerford suspension bridge (another Brunel design) opened, and a Birmingham manufacturer obtained a patent ‘for Improvements in Springs to be applied to Girths, Belts and Bandages, and Improvements in the Manufacture of Elastic Bands’: the birth of the modern rubber band.

Sarah Watling

Fragments of a life: Janet Malcolm meditates on old family photographs

Janet Malcolm, who died in 2021, was one of her generation’s great practitioners – one might say agitators – of journalism and biography. She was a master of studies that are ostensibly about one thing, but are actually of a depth and range the reader is never entirely prepared for. Whatever topic she had in hand, you find her nudging at its limits, questioning its practices and accepted norms, turning what could, tediously, be described as a ‘gimlet eye’ on the irrational, emotional investment we have in those norms. A hallmark of her work is an extraordinary ability to (seem to) work her subjects out.

Dennis Duncan

Publisher, translator, novelist, critic and polyglot: the many lives of Italo Calvino

In retrospective mood, just months before the stroke that killed him, Italo Calvino mused on the character of his own writing. ‘The time has come for me to look for an overall definition for my work,’ he wrote. ‘I would suggest this: my working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight.’ Lightness – leggerezza – was the ideal he had striven for. If we think of his best known works in English – the dazzling high-wire acts of Invisible Cities or If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller – it would be hard to begrudge him the satisfaction of considering himself successful in his efforts. But let’s look at that formulation again: the subtraction of weight. Lightness here is not froth or naivety.

Guy Stagg

What’s to become of Wales?

In recent years, more and more nature writers have begun to engage with the climate crisis. On the one hand, they want to raise awareness of the scale of the problem; on the other, they try to make more tangible those apocalyptic visions of the future. In Sarn Helen, Tom Bullough asks how the crisis is affecting Wales, while walking the old Roman road that linked the country’s south coast with the north. As he writes in his prologue, Wales is not the front line of the emergency, but by focusing on the local, he hopes to give meaning to this vast, diffuse and complex threat. Sarn Helen is several books in one. At its simplest, it describes the long walk the author made in sections over several months between the various pandemic lockdowns.