Social history

Before I became confined to a wheelchair two years ago after an operation for a spinal abscess, I’d never read a book about disability. More remarkably, considering the tiny amount of time it would have taken, I’d never read a newspaper article about it either. The only media stories about disabled people I’d bothered with concerned famous sufferers, such as Christopher Reeve and Robert Wyatt. I’d also followed with voyeuristic revulsion the 2021 story of Giles Coren celebrating the death of the young, working-class, disabled journalist Dawn Foster after she’d had the temerity to cross him. So there you go. My concern with disability was confined to where it overlapped with showbiz and media.

With his 2012 book, The A303: Highway to the Sun, the author and psychogeographer Tom Fort pulled on his driving gloves, got behind the wheel and took us on a journey down the royal road to the West Country and to la Grande Bretagne profonde. Now, in this highly entertaining, informative new study – observant and lightly nostalgic in a similar way – he guides us round our lidos, the outdoor swimming pools which sprang up all over Britain in the 1920s and 1930s, designed and bankrolled by confident, imaginative local councils in the hardy fresh-air-and-fun enthusiasm of the time.

A few years ago, when ChatGPT and Claude were beginning to take off, some tech leaders seemed to develop a curious interest in oceanography. Consider, for instance, the Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s suggestion in 2023 that AI ought to be compared to a ‘tidal wave’; or Mustafa Suleyman’s book on AI, The Coming Wave (2024), in which the DeepMind co-founder talks urgently about an ‘impending deluge’ (while repeatedly warning us that the ‘wave is coming’, and, even more alarmingly, ‘the coming wave really is coming’). It didn’t take long for the analogy to spread. The IMF’s Kristalina Georgieva would liken the technology to a ‘tsunami hitting the labour market’.

The future of work is increasingly on our minds. Now that AI is coming for our jobs, will we end up supervising or being supervised by it? One way of spending the time freed up by smart tech is to read Control Science, an economic history showing how work rules were established and have since come to dominate our lives. The book’s timeline covers the past 400 years, its settings ranging across the world from North America to Europe to Japan and back to the US. A historian of labour, Henry Snow dissects four entrenched ideas: that society is a mere collection of individuals; that they are solely driven by selfishness; that they are therefore incapable of self-administered planning; and that ‘everything is – and should be – a market’.

It would be easy to dismiss A Hard Day’s Night, the Beatles film made in 1964, as a throwaway period piece. The plot hurls the Fab Four into a meta narrative, playing themselves while a director – a seething Victor Spinetti – panics as the boys are delayed on their way to a televised variety performance by mishaps, distractions and stampeding fans. The film was thrown together to fit the group’s breakneck schedule – scripted over a few weeks in January by Alun Owen, shot by Richard Lester by May and out in cinemas in July. In her absorbing, concise book, Samira Ahmed sees the film not as a cursory promo but as a watershed in British culture – ‘a kind of cinematic big bang’.

When I was in my twenties and giving dinner parties every week, I came up with a couple of money-saving devices. First, no snacks. This also ensures that, by the time dinner is served, your guests are so hungry they’ll mistake almost anything for a masterclass. Second, invite people on a Monday evening, so they won’t stay too late. As my millionaire cousin likes to say: ka-ching! I mention all this because one reason people don’t give more dinner parties is that they think they’re too expensive. Another is that they’re afraid of being judged. I remember being taken aback when a guest of mine said she would never dare to give a dinner party.

I recently arranged to have dinner with my brother and sister. No big occasion. Just a casual pub meal on a normal weeknight. As the eldest, my sister naturally chose the venue. As the youngest, my brother kept us entertained. Me, the middle child, I mostly sat and listened. It was fun. We caught up on news, reminisced, laughed and, true to form, studiously avoided any old hurts. As Catherine Carr reminds me in this lively and revealing book on the ins and outs of siblinghood, these two people have known me longer than almost anyone on the planet. When my parents pass, no one but them will understand what I mean by ‘guggy’ (a ragged baby blanket that never left my side) nor recall the giddy excitement of spending our sweetie money after Sunday morning swimming.

Even if you’ve never seen Adrian Lyne’s 1987 thriller Fatal Attraction, you’ll know what a ‘bunny boiler’ is. When Alex (Glenn Close) slaughters her lover Dan’s family pet and leaves it simmering on the stove, she invented a universal shorthand for the obsessive, unstable woman who can’t take romantic rejection. In the film, Alex is portrayed as the destroyer of domestic happiness: an embittered career woman on the wrong side of 35, who is made literally sick when she spies on the contentment shared by Dan (Michael Douglas), his wife and his daughter. Audiences loathed her. Susan Faludi, in her book Backlash, reported cries of ‘Kill the bitch!’ and ‘Punch the bitch’s face in!’ during the film’s violent climax.

When Samuel Richardson’s Pamela was published in 1740, it unleashed something unprecedented in literary history. This epistolary novel about a virtuous servant girl resisting her predatory master saw new depths of feeling on the printed page, reducing readers across Europe to tears. The revolutionary impact of emotion informs Ferdinand Mount’s ambitious cultural history, Soft. The former TLS editor and one-time head of Margaret Thatcher’s policy unit has crafted what reads like an elegant love letter to the human heart itself. Mount grasps an important truth: emotions do not mean the same thing across time, nor are they consistently valued in the same way. What one era celebrates as virtuous emoting, another dismisses as mawkish excess.

Women and their guilty secrets; women and their innocent secrets; women and men’s secrets; women and state secrets; DNA tests busting women’s secrets – in her enticingly titled The Book of Revelations: Women and their Secrets, Juliet Nicolson comes at her subject from all possible angles. There is also a strongly feminist emphasis on wronged women across generations (Nicolson’s family included) who have somehow been coerced into keeping dark secrets by abusive men – or sometimes by abusive women. One such abusive woman was Phyllis Eliot, the headmistress of West Heath School, near Sevenoaks in Kent, during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Known as ‘P’, she used to kiss every girl goodnight in bed.

Yarnton, Oxfordshire. A teenage girl is dumped face down in a pit, her legs bent and tethered. Around her lie the crania, jawbones and ribs of several children. Taken alone, this scene of 9th-century carnage puzzles as much as it horrifies. When placed in the wider context of a seemingly universal need to ensure that the dead stay in their graves, it’s highly suggestive. The subtitle of the medieval historian John Blair’s Killing the Dead is a tease, since vampire fiction is almost an afterthought. Folklore and imaginative literature are carefully separated from archaeological evidence.

In what may be the only joke in this book – it is hard to tell, because quite often reading it I started to believe the whole thing was an elaborate parody – Samuel Miller McDonald begins his acknowledgements by expressing his ‘infinite thanks’ to his editors (he merits six of them) on the grounds that ‘no work can be good without good editors’. Apparently some works can’t be good even with good editors – unless the author is trying to tell us that his, like his oeuvre, weren’t especially good at all. Progress is a prolix, tendentious book, radiating self-regard, arrogance and flannel.

In the 18th century, the cash-strapped British crown imposed customs duties on tea imports that rose as high as 119 per cent. Unsurprisingly, such huge tariffs sparked a smuggling boom in coastal towns such as Deal, in Kent, where the cliffs were pockmarked with secret tunnels and half the inhabitants lived off profits from such illicit activities. When the government tried to crack down in 1781, it had to send in a 1,000-strong militia, headed by 100 men on horseback. Yet smuggling may have accounted for more than half of England’s trade at the time – and it often involved respected figures in communities who regularly bribed officials. This underlines how the imposition of taxes creates illegal markets that can eat into state revenues and corrupt society.

There is no such thing as a bad friend. The societal expectations and collective imagination of what friendship should look like have, over the past century, set unrealistic expectations, meaning we are all doomed at some point to fail as friends. At least this is what the cultural historian Tiffany Watt Smith argues in her new book. Bad Friend is elegantly written as part memoir, part history, citing multifarious sources, from 12th-century Paris to the American sitcom Friends. The author weaves in her own experiences of female friendships, candid that her research for the book made her reassess the formative and transformative relationships she has cultivated in her life. Reading the book forced my own recollection and reconsideration of friendships.

How did the UK become a place where young people think it’s permissible to record a relative at home and make that recording public? Why has privacy been so easily discarded, and why have people welcomed its demise so they can control the behaviour of others? A few years ago, when I taught at university, a student who lived with their parents told me they had argued with their mother about what they described as ‘queer identity’. The student had secretly recorded the argument and wondered what I thought about them using it for a piece of writing. I think their assumption was that because I’m a journalist I would embrace the idea. I did not.