Culture

The 20th-century painter Balthus once suggested that the author of a book about him began with the words: ‘Balthus is an artist about whom we know nothing; now let’s look at his works.’Actually, there are many important figures about whom we know nothing, or at least very little. Giovanni Bellini is a case in point. Information we don’t have about him includes when he was born, and even whether he was the younger sibling of Gentile Bellini — as is usually assumed — or in fact his uncle. The discovery a while ago of a Latin poem suggesting that in old age this artist of tranquilly thoughtful saints and Madonnas was in the habit of sleeping with a handsome young man has only complicated matters, though it does enliven his image.

On 26 August 1880 Henry Russell consummated his marriage in an unusual way. He was, to his own mind, married to the Vignemale, the highest French peak in the Pyrenees, and, wishing to spend the night with his beloved, he climbed to the 10,820ft summit and got his servants to dig a trench, bury him under earth and stones, wrapped in his sheepskin sleeping-bag, and leave him to the darkness. He survived and wrote of this night: ‘It seemed as though I had left the earth.’ Russell is one of the oddballs with whom Matthew Carr’s book teems. Another is Sabine Baring-Gould, the author of ‘Onward, Christian soldiers’, who in 1848 visited the Algerian emir Abd-el-Kader, imprisoned by the French in the château at Pau.

In 2016, inspired by reports that Donald Trump’s butler had recommended the assassination of Barack Obama, Ben Schott wrote a scintillating squib, published in these pages, about Trump meeting Bertie Wooster. As he later noted in a diary column, it gave him the idea of writing a new Jeeves and Wooster novel. Predictably, reassuringly, soothingly, Jeeves and the King of Clubs returns us to such idyllic haunts as Bertie’s flat in Berkeley Mansions, the Drones Club and Brinkley Court, Aunt Dahlia’s pile in Worcestershire, and to the company of the furious Sir Watkyn Bassett and his whimsical daughter Madeline, who is yet again engaged to Roderick Spode, 7th Earl of Sidcup. It would appear to be the summer of 1939.

Republicans hate to admit it, but the stability brought by the long reign of that most careful of monarchs Elizabeth II has helped Britain manage the decline from empire to middle-ranking power surprisingly well. As the Treason Act of 1351 is no longer in force, and to ‘compass or imagine’ the death of the sovereign no longer carries the death penalty, I can state the obvious. Her Majesty is 92. She is entering her last days as Brexit threatens the peace in Ireland and the union with Scotland, and divides England and Wales into hostile camps. A vigorous PR campaign is underway to persuade us that now is not the worst possible moment for her zealous and under-educated son to succeed. The Prince promised the BBC that he would stop interfering in politics when he became king.

The title of Matthew Dennison’s new biography of the man who wrote The Wind in the Willows appears to nod to another children’s classic of the Edwardian period. J.M. Barrie subtitled Peter Pan — first staged in 1904, four years before the publication of Kenneth Grahame’s book — ‘The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up’, and once declared: ‘Nothing that happens after we are 12 matters very much.’ It is Dennison’s contention that for Grahame the clock stopped even earlier.

Nobody has ever quite known what to do with the German-language novelist Hermann Hesse. Born in 1877 and living until 1962, he rather deliberately refused to experience most of the traumatic events of his culture. His tiny home town was Calw, in the Black Forest, and he lived mostly in backwaters, and latterly for decades in Switzerland. He only visited Berlin once, and hated it. His work strenuously avoided making any comment on the larger events of the time, insisting on a kind of neutrality. Some readers took him for a mystic Nazi; others for an enemy of German culture; others still for a communist. He was a substantial bestseller in his lifetime, though many more elegant writers, such as the Austrian Robert Musil, thought him simply terrible.