Culture

In 1951, the American author Peter Matthiessen moved to Paris. The scion of a wealthy Wasp family, he had studied at Yale and served in the navy, narrowly missing the second world war. He was then recruited to the CIA by James Jesus Angleton and sent to Paris, where he kept tabs on left-wing French intellectuals and expat Americans. As he later explained in a letter to a friend: When you’re 23, it seems pretty romantic to go to Paris with your beautiful young wife to serve as an intelligence agent and write the Great American Novel into the bargain. Weren’t you ever as young and dumb as that? While in Paris, Matthiessen helped to found the Paris Review with funding from CIA sources.

Thomas Pynchon is so well known for being out of the public eye that he often seems to be hiding in plain sight, much like Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘purloined letter’. He is famous for avoiding the camera and the few extant photos of him – especially one from his high school yearbook – are paraded at every mention of his name or one of his books, usually accompanied by a rude remark about his ‘rabbity front teeth’. Many of his efforts to escape the limelight, such as sending the rumpled ‘Professor’ Irwin Corey to accept on his behalf the 1974 National Book Award for Gravity’s Rainbow gained him more renown than if he had just shown up and shuffled off with the damn thing himself.

In 2022, at the age of 58, Justin Currie – singer, bass-player and main songwriter with the Scottish rock band Del Amitri – faced what might be mildly termed a series of setbacks. In short order his mother died, his long-term partner suffered a catastrophic stroke, leaving her requiring constant care, and he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. About the first two there was not much to be done but weep. When it came to the third, Currie decided he would manage the ‘Ghastly Affliction’ (the ‘GA’ as he calls it) as best he could with medication and keep playing music as long as he was able to. The following year his band undertook a mammoth 52-day trek across North America as support act to the 1990s Canadian rockers the Barenaked Ladies.

World Cup fever is a strange affliction. It’s more contagious and unavoidable than Covid, and more widespread too: each new World Cup, as Simon Kuper writes, ‘becomes the biggest media event in history’, which ‘occupies the thoughts of billions of people’. It also produces a cluster of sometimes contradictory symptoms, physical as well as mental. Kuper quotes a study that found an increase of 25 per cent in hospital admissions for heart attacks in England on 30 June 1998, when England played Argentina (David Beckham, Michael Owen and all that). Later, he describes the moment when the American journalist Grant Wahl died of an aortic aneurysm in the media stand during the Netherlands vs Argentina match at the Qatar World Cup in 2022.

No one who flies into Afghanistan’s capital is left indifferent. In one of the many deftly drawn scenes in The Finest Hotel in Kabul, Lyse Doucet describes a snowy Hindu Kush on the skyline, the packed homes of the poor on the brown hills, a steep corkscrew descent carried out while firing flares, ‘bursting outward with white-hot fire’ to avoid missiles. Once safely on the ground, she decides to make her way to Kabul’s Intercontinental Hotel, drawn by ‘better telephone and telex links, food worth eating and a certain faded splendour’.

Valentine Low is an old-school royal journalist; less muckraking reporter, more Establishment eye (the Times for 15 years) across our nation’s oldest institution. It is his disarming charm (I’ve had the pleasure of televised royal parley with him) that has guaranteed him access to the great and occasionally ghastly in the higher echelons of British society. His previous book, the innocuously titled Courtiers, published just at the point of the Sussexes’ scandal-ridden departure, skipped nimbly over accusations of bullying and impropriety and became a bestseller. Expectations were high for Power and the Palace. The publisher insisted on an NDA. I waded through tranches of 19th-century history in the knowledge that Low’s gilt-edged gossip would not eventually disappoint.