Culture

I loved this book so much I was appalled. Why, when bookshops are stacked full of memoirs by authors who can’t write, isn’t Alexandra Fuller heaped up in perilous piles so near the till it’s impossible to evade her? This is like one of the most alluring Svetlana Alexievich testimonies, as if it had wandered out of the USSR and got lost in central Africa by way of a hospital in Budapest. It’s packed with exquisite jokes, quotes and details — such as when a doctor appears and ‘his gauzy green scrubs puffed out in great billows, the surgical-garb equivalent of Princess Di’s wedding dress’. Fuller started out trying to write novels before putting her own parents down on paper.

The great bomber pilot Guy Gibson had a black labrador with a racist name. This shouldn’t matter, except Gibson loved the dog, and its name was used as a codeword during the bombing raid which made Gibson famous, upon the Mohne and Eder dams in Germany in May 1943. The 1955 movie The Dam Busters retells the story of the raid in thrilling melodrama, and inevitably includes repeated mentions of the troubling name. Nowadays, when the film is broadcast, it either features a warning about offensive language or is shown in an edited version, with the dog’s name changed to ‘Trigger’. The raid on the German dams is an old and much loved military episode.

Why does a man join the army? The answer was probably more obvious in the 18th century than now, but in 1793 Thomas Graham was 45. The son of a Perthshire laird and of a daughter of the Earl of Hopetoun, and having inherited a good fortune, in 1774, he had married the beautiful Mary Cathcart, daughter of Baron Cathcart and of Jane Hamilton, herself the daughter of Lord Archibald Hamilton, all scions of Scots whiggery. It was evidently a love match. On the same day, Mary’s elder sister, Jane, had wed too. Their father wrote: ‘Jane has married, to please herself, John, Duke of Atholl, a peer of the realm; Mary has married Thomas Graham of Balgowan, the man of her heart, and a peer among princes.’ And so he proved.

Whether we see the primary cause as being postmodernism (for decades we’ve been told that our master narratives no longer connect us to each other) or cultural fragmentation (apart from worldwide phenomena such as Game of Thrones and the World Cup, we possess few shared encounters), the intellectual consensus is that we don’t talk meaningfully to each other because we lack communal stories. Leavers and Remainers, Trumpers and Never Trumpers seem to read the same experiences in entirely different ways. This failure to communicate is what makes Alberto Manguel’s Fabulous Monsters such a charming and essential book.

Broken Ghost begins in the aftermath of a rave on the shores of a mountain lake above Aberystwyth, with three partygoers gathered in the dawn light, waiting for one last buzz off a tab of ecstasy. At that moment a strange glow appears in the morning air, in the middle of which seems to be a shadow in the shape of a woman. A hallucination? Not if all three are seeing the same thing. They barely know each other, but they walk away from that precipice changed by their shared vision. And change is what they need: Adam is a recovering addict trying to piece his life back together; Emma is a single mother living hand to mouth; Cowley is broke and trapped in a cycle of violence by the traumas in his past.

In 1929 in America, Dashiell Hammett published his debut hardboiled novel Red Harvest, over in Paris Buñuel and Dalí began showing their film Un Chien Andalou at a small cinema, while in Britain the fledgling Decca Record Company opened for business. Issued to mark 90 years of the label’s existence, this large format, fully illustrated volume benefits greatly from access to its extensive archive of the days when Billie Holiday, Kathleen Ferrier, Tom Jones, Pavarotti, Bing Crosby, Buddy Holly, Herbert von Karajan, Billy Fury, Marianne Faithfull, George Formby, Slaughter & the Dogs, Georg Solti, Benny Hill, Winston Churchill and even the Playboy Club Bunnies appeared on Decca or its subsidiaries.