Culture

George Packer is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of The Assassins Gate: America in Iraq, a book that received several prizes. Packer’s other non-fiction books include, The Village of Waiting and Blood of the Liberals, the latter winning the 2001 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. He is also the author of two novels, The Half Man and Central Square.  Packer’s latest book, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, is a work of non-fiction that attempts to document the massive political and economic changes that have taken place in the last three decades in the United States.

Recent convulsions in China’s banks will not, I suspect, have surprised Timothy Beardson, a sinophile, veteran Hong Kong financier and author of Stumbling Giant: The Threats to China’s Future. He argues that China’s extraordinary growth over the last 30 years has come in spite of its banking system. A dinner party might speculate where China would be if not for Mao; but a more immediate question is: where would China be if its banking system supported the private sector? “If the economy has grown by 10 per cent for 30 years, as is reported (and I think that the data in China is very frail – it probably hasn’t grown at 10 per cent a year – but it’s clearly grown at a very high rate and that’s all that matters).

Tate Modern promises that its forthcoming retrospective will showcase ‘the full scope of Roy Lichtenstein’s artistic explorations’, to which Spectator art critic Andrew Lambirth responded acidly: ‘I look forward to being pleasantly surprised.’ And it’s true that once Lichtenstein perfected his dot patterning technique in the mid-Sixties, he stuck with it until his death more than 30 years later. Alastair Sooke’s How Modern Art Was Saved By Donald Duck is available as a Penguin Specials paperback from Tate Modern; elsewhere, it’s in eBook format only. It won’t convince any sceptics of Lichtenstein’s infinite versatility, but it does make a case for him as a supreme examiner of style.

Which words in current use would you ban? Lake Superior State University answers this question each year, with its famous ‘List of Words to be Banished from the Queen’s English for Misuse, Overuse and General Uselessness’. Words are recommended by members of the English speaking world, and then selected by the university. Top of the list is ‘fiscal cliff’: the catchall phrase for the various political (and cultural) difficulties that have arisen from America’s fiscal and economic crises. Opinion is split on which of ‘fiscal’ or ‘cliff’ is the greater offence. Other irate correspondents object to the vague metaphor: is America trying to scale the cliff or trying not to fall off it?

Just as the classical world was built around the Mediterranean, the modern world was built around the Atlantic. The Romans called the Med ‘Mare Nostrum’ – Our Sea. The Atlantic, on the other hand, was a place of contest for centuries. European nations fought for supremacy and plunder upon it, traded for wealth across it, and scrambled for territory around it. According to John K. Thornton, author of A Cultural History of the Atlantic World 1250-1820, the creation of an ‘Atlantic World’ was driven by the hunger of European states for hard cash. Money was needed to support the fantastically expensive armies which, from the late Middle Ages onwards, European nations were obliged to maintain as they engaged in a prolonged arms race.

The real shock of the new came in 1991. It was sobering, and it was reverent, which aren’t exactly the first words one would associate with The Shock of the New art critic Robert Hughes. No wonder it went largely unacknowledged when he passed away last month. While Hughes’ seminal art history series continues to re-run on BBC4, it’s not without irony that one recalls that in ’91, 11 years after it originally aired, Hughes panned the whole concept of the art documentary. Admittedly, he’d always been slightly sceptical. He opened the first edition of his book (originally a mere spin-off of the series; ultimately, as Hughes himself said, something that far outlived it) with the confession that television can be no substitute for the true experience of art.

‘In a relationship, when does the art of compromise become compromising?’ Thus spoke Carrie Bradshaw. Such knowledge suggests that I have passed her tipping point; my compromises have compromised me. But, then again, one can’t dissent from Robert Louis Stevenson’s view that ‘compromise is the best and cheapest lawyer’, especially when it comes to relationships. There are worse fates than having to do the washing-up occasionally to a backing of unwanted telly. Yesterday evening, I had hoped to watch highlights of England’s humiliation at the hands of the South African cricket team, but, alas, was forced to settle for Eastenders. Such is life. In fact, Eastenders wasn’t all that bad. It certainly wasn’t dull.

The subject here is colossal, covering a substantial stretch of the later Roman empire, the last years of the Persian empire, the conversion of the Arabs, the spread of Christianity and what happened to Judaism. The time span runs, effectively, from the death of Jesus to the moment in the eighth century when the Abbasids acquired through violence the vast empire of the Umayyads, stretching from the Loire to the Hindu Kush, and founded Baghdad. The title of Tom Holland’s book is rather studiously general, but his central topic is unmistakable: the founding and establishment of Islam and its political and martial setting. If Holland didn’t want to make a point of this in his title, one couldn’t blame him.