Books and Arts

Saturday

Lara Prendergast

How Boston became the cradle of American children’s literature

It was Labor Day in Boston and the bronze ducklings in the city’s Public Garden were each wearing a fluffy autumnal scarf. Nobody seems quite sure who dresses them, but at various points they have worn party hats, festive knitwear and hot pink. When the Tartan Army arrived for the World Cup earlier this year, Mrs. Mallard and her ducklings – Jack, Kack, Lack, Mack, Nack, Ouack, Pack and Quack – were forced to endure miniature traffic cones and saltires. The sculpture was created by Nancy Schön in 1987 to celebrate Robert McCloskey’s 1941 children’s book, Make Way for Ducklings. In 1990, former Soviet first lady Raisa Gorbachev visited Boston and admired the statue.

boston

Friday

Stuart Jeffries

‘I think the best revenge is indifference’: Salman Rushdie interviewed

“I probably got one or two seconds look at him before he delivered the first blow,” recalls Sir Salman Rushdie. For the next 27 seconds, on August 12, 2022, the man whom Rushdie will refer to only as A. (“for asinine,” he explains) tried to kill the writer on the stage of the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York. A. slashed through the tendons of Rushdie’s right hand, cut his thigh, stomach and chest, incised a gaping wound in his neck and finally stabbed him in the right eye.

Graham Robb

Around Britain with a theodolite: a celebration of the Ordnance Survey maps

It took six years, starting in the summer of 1784, for the Board of Ordnance to establish the baseline of its triangulation of Great Britain. First they used wooden poles, then glass tubes. After much clearing of furze bushes and anthills, the baseline ran for more than five miles from Hounslow Heath to Hampton Poor House. The maps of England and Wales were complete by 1870. Scotland had to wait until 1887. The delay was rumored to have been caused by the superintendent’s concern that surveyors would get in the way of the late summer deerstalking. As a wing of the military, the Ordnance Survey had extraordinary powers. The Surveyors’ Act of 1841 allowed it to trudge, clamber, squelch, measure and interrogate wherever necessary.

Marcus Nevitt

United by ambition: the ruthless rapacity of England’s two famous Cromwells

In the early years of the English Civil War John Milton turned his mind from the poetic arts and committed himself to writing some of the most searing pamphlet polemics of the 1640s. With the nation convulsed by violence, he set about finding causal explanations for the revolutionary ferment, and saw its roots in the 1530s and the unfinished nature of the Protestant Reformation. Only by completing the work of Reformation, Milton thought, would the English come closer to God and lasting peace. Such arguments had domestic as well as national urgency for Milton, much in need of peace himself, as he tried to extricate himself from his stupendously misguided marriage to Mary Powell, half his age and from a royalist family.

canadian literature
Alex Diggins

How progressive politics ruined Canadian literature

Canada is back, baby. Since Mark Carney’s election as Prime Minister in April last year, he’s projected an image of brawny, swaggering capability – another silverback statesman in a new, multilateral world. He’s tussled with Trump over tariffs; hobnobbed with autocrats including Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi and strongly criticized the US attack on Iran. In fact, the anger that many Canadians seem to feel at their cousins across the border is startling – on a recent trip to the Yukon, I found almost every public toilet tagged with “Trump Tower” graffiti. This newfound assertiveness is surprising. Canada, as the South Park movie astutely pointed out in 1999, is the eternal scapegoat of international politics.

Damian Thompson

The genius of Sherlock & Co.

The podcast audio-drama Sherlock & Co. is an updated version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories in which the great detective is neurodivergent and gay, Dr. Watson is a millennial who preaches against ethnic stereotyping, Lestrade is a woman who speaks with a Caribbean twang, and the society gossip Langdale Pike has morphed into a drag queen. Throw in the fact that it’s produced by Gary Lineker’s Goalhanger and you might imagine that we’re talking about a woke brew designed to repel conservative Holmesians like me. Actually, Sherlock & Co. is my favorite podcast ever. I love it almost as much as Conan Doyle’s ur-text and infinitely more than the BBC’s Sherlock, which began well but then disappeared up its smug backside.

Thursday

Richard Bratby

When will I see a Carmen set in 19th-century Seville?

No critic sets out to be a reactionary, even though it’s much easier that way. There’s no real satisfaction in rejecting novelty on sight; no joy in measuring a living performance against your record collection and coming down, every time, in favor of the dead Nazi. I get that. Still, it’s a plain fact that in three decades of regular opera-going, I have never – not once – seen a live production of Carmen that locates the action in 19th-century Seville. Or one that centers the visual elements – mantillas, sunshine, picture-postcard Spanishness – that directors tell us (and how they tell us!) have become such clichés.

carmen

Wednesday

Mark Piesing

Madness, mutiny and murder in the Canadian Arctic

The elegant, charismatic and narcissistic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson wasn’t the average adventurer that Alaska attracted in 1912. When he arrived in Seattle from the Gold Rush port of Nome, he told journalists that he had discovered “a lost tribe of whites” in the uncharted High Arctic. He also sold politicians the vision of an undiscovered land rich in gold, raw metals and oil that, only nine years after the Wright Brothers’ first flight, would soon be covered with airfields. The Canadian government quickly offered Stefansson unlimited resources to lead an expedition back to the High Arctic. His objective was to claim what may have been the greatest geopolitical prize for Canada and the British Empire: the mysterious continent at the top of the world.

Friday

Graeme Thomson

Billy Strings’s extraordinary and exhilarating new album

It’s easy to get the wrong idea about bluegrass – to imagine that this flinty shard of American traditional music is baked centuries deep into the soil of Appalachia. In fact it developed in the 1940s, pioneered by Kentucky maestro Bill Monroe, and only truly flourished during the American folk revival of the 1960s. Bluegrass was one of the few places where the hippies and good ol’ boys found communion; the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia was a devotee. The style has evolved, generation upon generation, via exponents such as Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs and Del McCoury. The latest bluegrass star is William Lee Apostol, aka Billy Strings, a 33-year-old guitarist, singer and songwriter from Michigan, whose backstory reads like some grisly American gothic melodrama.

Richard Bratby

Words are the most important part of any opera

The long days wane, summer fades and sure enough, the big international guest orchestras land at the BBC Proms. A rare catch this year was the Proms debut of the orchestra of the New York Metropolitan Opera, under its music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Debut? No, I couldn’t quite believe it either. What with the regular Radio 3 broadcasts from the Met, and all those live cinema relays, the Met Orchestra almost feels like part of the family. There must be few overseas orchestras whose live performances are more familiar to British audiences. No question, though, there’s always something rather festive about hearing a great opera orchestra in concert.

James Delingpole

The Grand Tour is the perfect TV to pass out to

The Grand Tour – aka Amazon does Top Gear – is back with a new trio of presenters. Whether you care will largely depend on your general attitude to television. If you think its purpose is to push boundaries, entertain, inform and edify, you may as well stop reading now. If, on the other hand, you treat TV like soma, then the lightly revamped show is probably worth your consideration. I’m in the soma category. The only job of TV, as far as I’m concerned, is to relieve me of having to make conversation with the Fawn while I’m having my supper, and then to distract me long enough for me to be able to half-digest my food so that I’m ready to have my bath and go to bed.

Alex Burghart

The wonder of the Bayeux Tapestry

How the Froggies must be laughing. Such a gracious loan. So kind. Like England lending Henry V’s longbows to the Louvre – or sailing HMS Victory up the Seine. Well, let them titter. The Tapestry is home. Nothing else matters. Likely sewed in Canterbury in the 1070s, before being sent across the Channel, it has only ever left Bayeux twice before. In 1803, when Boney was contemplating a pop at the White Cliffs, he displayed it in Paris. (After Trafalgar, it was quietly returned to Normandy.) Then, as the Nazis were retreating from Operation Overlord, it was taken for safe-keeping to the cellars of the Louvre and, in late 1944, only weeks after Paris’s liberation, placed on public view. Today’s minibreak from Bayeux comes in rather happier times.

leader
Lionel Barber

First among equals: what makes a great leader and does it matter?

Almost two decades ago, Jared Diamond cemented his international reputation with Guns, Germs, and Steel, which argued that geography and environment rather than racial differences shaped the rise and conquest of nations. Still going strong at 89, he has now written a book on leadership. This is a crowded literary space, but Diamond offers a distinctive approach. A distinguished biologist and polymath, he has little time for the Great Man theory of history popularized by the 19th-century essayist Thomas Carlyle. Altogether too subjective, he says, never mind the absence of women. Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace is no better a guide, since it casts individuals as constrained by circumstance, with scant influence over events.

smell
Rose George

The history and importance of smell for our antiseptic age

For smell historians and experts, of whom there are gratifyingly more than you’d think, a standard assumption to be skewered is that olden ages stank; the modern world doesn’t because hygiene and chemicals have banished stinks in the name of progress. According to this reading of history, banishing odors is a sign of progress. Civilization doesn’t smell. Neither Bjørn Berge nor William Tullett stand for this. For them, older times may have been smellier, but people were comfortable with living alongside middens, rotting corpses and foul tanneries. Smell in the modern age is now under threat and at risk of extinction or of being even more marginalized – Tullett uses the word “ephemeralized” – than it already is in this age of visual primacy and screens.

Frances Wilson

She lived frantically ever after: the jaw-dropping life of Barbara Cartland

Matthew Sweet’s jaw-dropping life of Barbara Cartland opens with the grande dame reclining on her chaise longue in the library of Camfield Place, her home for 50 years. Here she could be found daily between 1:15 p.m. and 4 p.m., a ghoulish masquerade of femininity in a hot-pink taffeta cocktail gown with a snappy Pekingese nestling by her side. Her face, beneath the halo of Elnett-stiffened yellow hair, bears an inch of white powder. There are two clownish circles of rouge on her cheeks and sticking plasters on her temples to tighten the skin. Gazing into the middle distance through tarantula-sized false eyelashes lathered in black boot polish, she is “talking, talking, talking.” (Boot polish applied with a toothbrush is preferable to mascara because it stays put when you cry.

Thursday

Alexander Larman

Will Anna Wintour survive the Galliano debacle?

In this summer’s couture blockbuster The Devil Wears Prada 2, the moment of greatest humiliation for Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestley comes about halfway through the film. With her Vogue-adjacent fashion magazine Runway imperiled by budget cuts and its philistine new owner, Miranda is not spared the hair-shirt treatment the rest of her staff endure. In a scene that is supposed to be funny but ends up being almost tragic, this ice-hearted doyenne of the fashion world is compelled to travel from New York to Milan Fashion Week in coach class, among hoi polloi. As the usually excellent Streep is forced to mug and gurn at the humiliation that she endures, I found myself mouthing “The horror! The horror!” – but for altogether different reasons.

Peter Hoskin

Will the real B. Traven please stand up?

One hesitates to describe The Treasure of the Sierra Madre – perhaps now best known for its 1948 film adaptation starring Humphrey Bogart – as the great American novel, or even a great American novel. Its prose is too unwieldy, its structure too ungainly. While you, the reader, wish it spent more time with its characters – a trio of beat-up prospectors called Dobbs, Curtin and Howard – it is given to flights of economic theory about labor relations in 1920s Mexico, a setting great American novels don’t tend to trouble themselves with. Besides, its author, B. Traven, was almost certainly German and may never have spent time in the United States. Hang on. Almost certainly? May never?

Friday

Philip Clark

How Miles Davis and John Coltrane changed jazz forever

Why does the jazz world still feel so bedazzled by trumpeter Miles Davis and saxophonist John Coltrane? This year marks the centenary of their births, and even those who consider jazz marginal to their interests are likely to know Davis classics such as Sketches of Spain and Kind Of Blue, while Coltrane has almost become deified: there’s even a fully functioning Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church in San Francisco. The jazz industry, meanwhile, is gorging on their centenaries with recordings, new and reissued, and books, new and repackaged.

Travis Aaroe

Where is liberalism heading?

“The Republic divides us least.” So said Adolphe Thiers, a shapeshifter of 19th-century French politics in the Marco Rubio mold. By the early 1870s, the various factions in French society had exhausted themselves fighting. Since 1814 there had been two restorations of the Bourbon dynasty, a liberal Orléans dynasty, a socialist commune, waves of clericalism and anti-clericalism, two periods of military dictatorship and a second Bonaparte. Out of this exhaustion came the Third Republic, the creation of Thiers and Léon Gambetta. The Third Republic was a triumph of liberalism: the recognition that France was now a plural society over which no one social force could gain a permanent mastery.

Thursday

Sam Leith

An agreeable new 2D fighter

Grade: B The final boss of Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls, called the Champion (they could have tried harder), is up front about his philosophy. “Actions are worth more than any word,” he says. “And the greatest action is... to fight!” Well, that’s Proust told, the big biscuit-dunking jessie. Here’s a very competently made, agreeably hectic new entry in the lineage of that most apparently basic of computer games, the 2D fighter. Ever since the heady days of Yie Ar Kung-Fu, gamers have known there’s fun to be had in having a couple of cartoon characters square off and slap each other upside the face. This one is an anime-style battler featuring an initial roster of 20 well-beloved Marvel superheroes (Wolverine, Deadpool, Captain America, etc.