Culture

Is there anything one can never laugh about? A question inevitably hanging over humour writing, it’s best answered by the masters of the genre who, rather than inventing jokes (a skill many possess), notice life’s winks and chuckles and tease them out of their surrounding matter, even if the latter happens to be of grave concern. Teffi was one of those writers. Born in 1872 in St Petersburg, by her early twenties Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya was a housewife with three children stranded in a provincial town; by her early thirties she was back in the capital, a literary celebrity writing for various publications under a snappy pseudonym, her witticisms quoted ‘in the streets, in trams, in clubs, in living rooms, at student gatherings’.

On 13 August 1977, a demonstration by the National Front was routed in the streets of Lewisham by thousands of anti-fascist activists. The latter’s elation palled, however, when they saw the evening news frame the event as a battle between rival extremists. Among the critical voices were Labour’s deputy leader Michael Foot and the Daily Mirror, which branded the anti-fascists ‘as bad as the National Front’. The NF’s opponents learned a valuable lesson at remarkable speed. Just weeks later, they launched the Anti-Nazi League at the House of Commons, with Neil Kinnock and Peter Hain on the steering committee and a medley of celebrity supporters that included Iris Murdoch, Brian Clough, Melvyn Bragg, Dave Allen, Warren Mitchell and Prunella Scales.

On 22 January last year, the entrance whiteboard at London Underground’s Dollis Hill carried a brief factual statement: On this day in history On the 22–23 January 1879 in Natal, South Africa, a small British garrison named Rorke’s Drift was attacked by 4,000 Zulu warriors. The garrison was successfully defended by just over 150 British and colonial troops. Following the battle, 11 men were awarded the Victoria Cross. A female passenger complained that it was ‘celebrating colonialism’. The board was wiped clean and a suitably opaque quote from Martin Luther King substituted: ‘We are not the makers of history. We are made by history.

In this handsomely illustrated book Tobie Mathew makes a case for the lowly postcard’s role in the politicisation of pre-revolutionary Russia. Cheap to produce, easily transported and hidden, and conveying a simple graphic message, picture postcards were ideally suited to anti-government agitation. Too dangerous to post, these little shots of sedition were preserved and shared for years in the postcard albums that were a feature of any polite drawing-room and increasing numbers of peasant huts and workers’ barracks. Before 1905 revolutionary groups printed postcards abroad and smuggled them into the country, simultaneously spreading their message and raising funds.

As a boy Josh Cohen was passive, dopey and given to daydreaming. Now a practising psychoanalyst and a professor of literature with several books to his name, he retains ‘a long and deep intimacy with lassitude and aimlessness’. Cohen believes the special affection reserved for pop culture’s fictional slackers, slobs and reverists — think Jeff Lebowski, Homer Simpson, Snoopy — suggests that humans are fundamentally inclined towards idleness: people are ‘as much given to saying no as to saying yes, as much to rest as to motion, as much to being as to doing’. Not Working: Why We Have to Stop explores the relationship between inertia and the life of the mind by revisiting the lives and works of several giants from cultural history.

From the very first pages of Among the Lost, we’re engaged, and compromised. Estela and Epitafio are our main anchors, their experiences and relationship driving the story’s developments, but these magnetic central characters are people-traffickers and kidnappers, capable of startling violence and dehumanising cruelty. And truly, they’re very much in love. For most of the novel, Estela and Epitafio are apart, having left the jungle clearing where the book opens to drive their respective consignments of human cargo to their destinations. Theirs is a single story — what happens to one has consequences for the other — told along parallel tracks.