History

In the expensive realm of musical comedy, it’s impossible to predict what will take off and what will crash and burn. Oliver! ran for 2,618 performances, but no other Dickens adaptation has succeeded— and Oliver! had to overcome a reluctant producer who’d suggested it could be much improved with an ‘all-black cast’. And would Lionel Bart’s plan to cast Elizabeth Taylor as Nancy, Richard Burton as Bill Sikes, and Spike Milligan as Fagin have helped or hindered the longevity of his show?

It’s odd, when you think about it, that mathematics ever got going. We have no innate genius for numbers. Drop five stones on the ground, and most of us will see five stones without counting. Six stones are a challenge. Presented with seven stones, we will have to start grouping, tallying and making patterns. This is arithmetic, ‘a kind of “symbol knitting”’ according to the maths researcher and sometime teacher Paul Lockhart, whose Arithmetic explains how counting systems evolved to facilitate communication and trade, and ended up watering (by no very obvious route) the metaphysical gardens of mathematics. Lockhart shamelessly (and successfully) supplements the archeological record with invented number systems of his own.

If you were to compare Mozart to a bird it wouldn’t be the starling. Possibly the wood thrush or nightingale, with their beautiful, haunting songs; or maybe the lyrebird with its astonishing ear for imitation; or perhaps the composer would find his match in the exotic rarity of the ivory-billed woodpecker or giant ibis. But the common starling? More pest than pet in its adoptive North American home, this ‘ubiquitous, non-native, invasive species’ seems an unlikely fit for a singular prodigy. So thought the ecophilosopher and naturalist Lyanda Lynn Haupt, when she started work on this book, exploring the composer’s relationship with the bird he bought after hearing it singing one of his piano concertos, and kept as a pet until its death.

‘New York stories in a way are always real estate stories,’ says the journalist Alan Light in Lizzy Goodman’s bustling oral history of the city’s music scene at the dawn of the century. The same goes for all music scenes. Talent clusters and thrives only where there are cheap places to live, hang out, play shows and, crucially, fail. New York in 2001 was such a location. The Lower East Side was still affordably sketchy and Brooklyn far from hip. When Dave Sitek from TV on the Radio moved to Williamsburg and invited his Manhattan friends to visit, ‘It was like I was asking them to go to China on a single--engine prop plane.’ Now Williamsburg, like Manhattan, belongs to the well-heeled.

We don’t usually think of Hitler’s hated henchman Heinrich Himmler, architect of the Holocaust of European Jewry, as a comic turn, but the diary of Admiral Sir Barry Domvile, a former chief of British Naval Intelligence and fanatical admirer of Nazi Germany, proves otherwise. Domvile’s description of his visit to Himmler’s ‘hunting box’ high in the Bavarian Alps in 1935, reproduced in Julia Boyd’s fascinating book, is a treasury of thigh-slapping humour, including hearing Himmler wake him at 3.20 a.m. with his rendition of ‘God Save the King’; complaints about the Reichsführer’s primitive ‘bog’ — a deep hole in the ground; and finishing with a ‘regular Bavarian evening...

The Enigma of Kidson is a quintessentially Etonian book: narcissistic, complacent, a bit silly and ultimately beguiling. It is the story of Michael George MacDonald Kidson (MGMK, as he was known), who taught history at Eton from 1965 to 1994 and was an influential tutor to hundreds of boys, often the wayward and the damaged. Jamie Blackett, who was taught by him there, has collected Kidsoniana from former pupils, colleagues, friends and acquaintances. What emerges is a portrait of a colourful maverick who bullied and consoled generations of schoolboys into success and happiness.

It is conventional wisdom in the publishing industry that, despite the old adage, readers do indeed judge books by their covers. So, it seems, do passengers on the No. 29 bus. For a middle-aged man reading Clare Mulley’s The Women Who Flew for Hitler, some of the looks I got made me so uncomfortable that I took to hiding the cover behind a newspaper. So let’s get one thing straight from the beginning: this is not a niche book for Third Reich enthusiasts, nor a seedy excuse to fantasise about women in Nazi uniforms. Do not be put off by the awful title: it is in fact a serious double biography of two of the most remarkable women in the history of aviation. The first of Mulley’s subjects, and the more famous of the two, is Hanna Reitsch.

Arundhati Roy has published only one previous novel, but that one, The God of Small Things, won the Booker Prize. That was 20 years ago. Early success did not, however, block Roy into neurotic silence: instead, it offered her a platform for verbally intemperate political activism. She is an impassioned campaigner against globalisation, industrialisation and all forms of the arch-enemy capitalism, and a critic of US foreign policy, Israel and the government of Sri Lanka. Her Booker prize money was donated to the campaign against the Narmada Dam project. To Indian critics who condemn her hyperbole as ‘hysterical’ she retorted: ‘I am hysterical, I’m screaming from the bloody roof tops.

Somewhere around the middle of the 17th century our modern concept of the museum began to take shape. Until then the cabinet of curiosities formed by a prince or a dilettante was on show solely to his friends or to scholars deemed worthy of having it unlocked. Nothing in the way of a systematic catalogue existed to help them navigate the gallimaufry of odd objects filling its shelves and cupboards. A Japanese netsuke button, an Arawak headdress and a handkerchief soaked in the blood of Charles I could be found nestling beside a stuffed alligator or a bezoar stone, calculus from an animal’s stomach held to possess magical curative powers.

Of the many books published this year to mark the centenary of the Russian revolution, this is perhaps the most curious. China Miéville is best known as an imaginative and entertaining writer of ‘weird’ (his word) science fiction and magic realism. October is a narrative history of the two 1917 revolutions in Russia, written from an ultra-left perspective — with a novelist’s eye for a good story and colourful characters. So it’s an examination of why the communist experiment failed miserably — at the cost of much blood — that is also wonderfully well written: smart, witty and full of fresh insight. But it can also read like an A-level essay, regurgitated from textbooks. Weird indeed.

On 27 May 1939, the German liner St Louis docked in Havana with 937 passengers on board: all but a handful of them were Jews in flight from the Third Reich. After a dismal farrago of diplomatic obstruction, bare-faced corruption among local officials and the incitement by Nazi propaganda of anti-Semitic prejudice ‘even’ (as Leonardo Padura sorrowfully puts it) ‘among the open and happy Cubans’, only a score of refugees could disembark. The US refused entry to the rest. Their ship of despair sailed back to Europe.