Culture

They don’t make anti-Semites like they used to. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not complaining. But you’d think people who pride themselves on their metaphysical superiority would have more self-respect. Apart from the Nation of Islam, who remain true to the faith by dressing in the suit and bowtie of lower middle-class, small-town European Judenhass circa 1920, American anti-Semites are a sorry mess: a master race of of online mouth-breathers, hiding in their parents’ basements. The Islamists, given their numbers and technological arsenals, are underachieving too. Hassan Nasrallah, the flower of the resistance, is afraid to come out in case the Jews drop a bomb on his sweaty head.

This unusual book begins with an account of the author’s ten-year love affair with dairy farming and an attempt ‘to give a flavour of what our cattle do for us’. It then turns into a survey of the various British breeds of cattle. After poor A-levels, Philip Walling took odd jobs in his native Cumbria, such as building dry-stone walls, until he managed to acquire a small farm of his own. With great determination, he ran this single-handed, keeping both beef and dairy animals and raising poultry and a couple of pigs. They were, in retrospect at least, ‘ten years of almost undimmed joy’. But aged 30, discouraged by the daily grind, which included a milk round, and feeling he had missed out on a proper education, he gave it all up.

John Lilburne was only 43 when he died in 1657, an early death even for the time. But in many ways it was remarkable that he lived so long. He not only dodged Royalist bullets when fighting for Parliament in the civil war as Lieutenant Colonel Lilburne, but managed to avoid the noose or firing squad on three occasions, each time trusting his own principled legal dexterity (and a slice of luck that he would have seen as the hand of Providence) to cheat his would-be executioners. This was an age, of course, when men of far more elevated status than this member of the minor gentry from the north east did not manage the same feat.

Translators are like bumblebees. In 1934, the French entomologist August Magnan pronounced the flight of the bumblebee to be aerodynamically impossible, and though long since scientifically disproved, this factoid is still routinely trotted out. Similar pronouncements about the impossibility of translation have dogged practitioners since Leonardo Bruni’s De interpretatione recta, published in 1424. Meanwhile, bees, unaware of these deliberations, have continued to flit from flower to flower, and translators continue to translate.

For the latest competition you were invited to imagine a well-known author who doesn’t normally write in the genre trying their hand at science fiction. In a 2015 interview, the wonderful Ursula K. Le Guin, always a staunch and eloquent defender of the genre, took a pop at writers of literary fiction who move into sci-fi and simply think that ‘they can use some of the images and tropes and so on from science-fiction and stick them in their book and put it on another planet or in a spaceship or something…’ A fair few entries this week fell into that category, but they managed to be witty and smart all the same.

Despite his having one of the most famous names in the world, we know maddeningly little about William Shakespeare. His private life was lost in the swirling debris of the early modern world. Buildings such as the Globe or New Place (the house he retired to in Stratford) were demolished in the centuries after his death. Not a single letter survives, no first drafts of the plays have surfaced and it is disputed whether his portraits even look like him. Scholars are forced to find other ways of peering into his soul. Some look to the plays and sonnets, boldly presenting fictional and contradictory poetry as concrete evidence. Others examine the objects he may have owned, but the results are hardly the stuff dreams are made on.