Culture

According to the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), people prefer reading books about great thinkers rather than by the thinkers themselves because ‘like is attracted to like and the shallow, tasteless gossip of a contemporary pinhead is more agreeable and convenient to them than the thoughts of great minds’. Thankfully, this contemptuous attitude towards biographers has not deterred David Bather Woods, a professor at Warwick University, from taking a fresh look at one of the most influential yet misunderstood figures in western philosophy. Woods’s prose is clear and compelling, though the book’s thematic structure is confusing. He argues that the defining event in Schopenhauer’s life was the suspected suicide of his father, Heinrich Floris.

A foul-mouthed fantasist with a chin like an ironing board starts a wild conspiracy theory about the King’s brother. An alcoholic racing fanatic turns his gambler’s eye to the ballot box. A maniacal preacher gives such a polarising sermon that he paints himself as a second Christ and tours the country as a sex symbol. These are not the inventions of William Hogarth or Jonathan Swift; they are the figures who divided our political system in two, as George Owers tells us in his delightful new history of the birth of party politics. The Rage of Party traces the fevered rise of Whigs and Tories during the reigns of William III and Queen Anne.

According to the literary critic Harold Bloom, male writers have daddy issues. So keenly do they feel the oppressive influence of their forefathers that when they take up the pen it is to use it as a sword. To produce something new, they must engage their predecessors in a writerly duel to the death. Bloom’s examples are all very highbrow – Blake vs Milton, Keats vs Shakespeare – but the theory applies across the literary spectrum. When William Boyd sits down to write a new spy novel and, removing his pen from its sheath, looks up to assess the field, it is (among others) the faces of Ian Fleming and John le Carré who stare back. What better way to deal with the anxiety of their influence than to create a spy who is not only reluctant but practically monogamous too.

We are familiar with the myths and realities of French resistance and German occupation, but less so with the story of Belgian resistance. It was highly creditable, spanning both world wars, and has long deserved to be better known. This book should help ensure that it is. The title refers to the legend of the White Lady – la Dame Blanche – whose appearance was said to herald the downfall of the Hohenzollerns, the Kaiser’s dynasty. The name was adopted by a network of 1,084 Belgians who spied for MI6 against the country’s German occupiers during the first world war. According to MI6’s authorised history, this ‘became the most successful single British human intelligence operation’ of that war.

The Delft painter Johannes Vermeer, now probably the most beloved artist of the Dutch Golden Age, had an unusual career. His reputation in his lifetime was small. For some reason he painted almost exclusively for the van Ruijvens, so only those who knew the family would have been able to view much of the work. One foreign observer who did see a painting owned by a baker (probably handed over in security for a large overdue account) was incredulous at what the owner claimed was the value of a small picture by an unknown artist. After Vermeer’s death, and the sale of the collection for very little on the death of his patrons’ son-in-law, his name disappeared. He is hardly ever mentioned in any of the exhaustive and insightful 18th-century histories of Dutch painting.

December 1917. For years the Ottoman Turks have been trying to spark a jihad of the world’s Sunni Muslims, hoping that Muslim subjects of the British Empire in India will rise in revolt. Now that Tsarist power in Russia has collapsed, the roads through central Asia are open and the war-weary British have virtually no resources left to prevent the Turkish empire from expanding into India.  Edward Noel, an aristocratic Catholic political officer who is supposed to be in Persia, sends a telegram to his betters from the city of Baku, perched on the western shore of the Caspian Sea and the source of half the world’s oil. He wants to plug the strategic gap in central Asia by raising a force of local troops.