Book review

James Shapiro, a distinguished Shakespeare scholar, has turned his attention to the seeds of today’s culture wars in this fascinating, timely and deeply researched book. He unearths them in the demise of the New Deal’s Federal Theatre Project, brought down by a Red-hunting congressional committee. Shapiro’s is an unexpectedly gripping tale, as he exposes the “playbook” of the Texas Democratic congressman Martin Dies, a white supremacist and glory hound who seems to have settled on destroying the Federal Theatre simply as a means of boosting his profile, while also exploring the relationships between politics, plays and propaganda. The Federal Theatre was a utopian project of galactic size, of a kind which, in these days of funding cuts, now seems impossible.

Liberal democracy is endangered more by its friends than by its enemies. Neither Moscow nor Beijing lured the United States into strategic humiliations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nor was the rise of China to the rank of a great power brought about by Westerners sympathetic to Beijing’s communist system. If liberal parties and movements in the United States and Europe seem to be losing ground to populists, this is not thanks to Facebook ads purchased by Vladimir Putin in support of Donald Trump or Brexit. Liberals themselves sabotaged liberal democracy by prioritizing liberalism over democratic legitimacy for three decades after the Cold War — on fundamental issues ranging from trade and foreign policy to immigration and national values. Anne Applebaum’s latest book, Autocracy, Inc.

The St. Brice’s Day Massacre? I must admit I hadn’t heard of this “most just extermination” of Danes in Oxford at the instigation of King Aethelred the Unready in 1002, perhaps because the teaching of history in Britain tends to kick off in 1066. You certainly don’t think of Oxford as a place that pioneered techniques of ethnic cleansing. Crypt is a collection of seven essays that unearth details about how certain people lived and died in the past. If you didn’t already know Alice Roberts’s background as an anatomist and biological anthropologist, you’d have a good chance of deducing it from this book.

Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, the immaculately Brylcreemed megastar of the golden age of Catholic television and radio evangelism in the United States, famously hated hearing the confessions of nuns. Doing so, Sheen is reported to have said, was “like being stoned to death with popcorn.” Despite this, Sheen — at one point broadcasting to over 30 million Americans — found himself hearing a lot of nuns’ confessions in his later career. He was reduced to this, alongside what was rather euphemistically referred to as his “international cassette tape ministry,” having fallen foul of the archbishop of New York, the doughty Cardinal Spellman.

Call it a prejudice if you like. Living in Japan in the 1970s, I had a slight aversion to a particular type of westerner. He — for it was mostly a he — usually lived in Kyoto, sometimes wore a kimono and liked to sit in ancient temples chasing after that presumably blissful moment of enlightenment, awakening, satori, or whatever one wishes to call it. These seekers were less interested in Japan as a society of human beings. They wanted to float in higher spheres. As Christopher Harding explains in The Light of Asia, the Zen adepts, the Buddhist chanters, the rock-garden worshippers, the kimonoed fools (in my no doubt blinkered eyes) were part of a long western tradition.

A good place to start with The Blues Brothers, Daniel de Visé’s engaging account of the John Belushi-Dan Aykroyd comedy classic, is in the spring preceding the movie’s summer 1980 release. By this stage, the production was mired in controversy and a martyr to industry scuttlebutt. Press reports put the expenditure at anywhere between $35 million and $40 million (in fact it sailed home at a mere $27.5 million) — and this at a time when over-subsidized box office calamities such as Steven Spielberg’s 1941 and Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate had prompted many a lament about Hollywood hubris. The rough cut came in at a mammoth three hours, at a time when two were reckoned excessive.