Culture

Great novelists come in all shapes and sizes, but one thing they all share is a status of half-belonging. If they had no foot in the world at all, they could hardly understand it; if they completely belonged, they could hardly understand what was distinctive. One of the pleasures of this excellent biography is fully appreciating the peculiar, liminal, not-quite-successful position Powell wrote from, and described with great exactness. In half a dozen social and professional milieux, he was a tolerated, perhaps useful minor presence, like a spare man at dinner. From the standpoint of a rather failed editor, screenwriter, soldier, socialite, he stood by and watched the world. In each case, one suspects, the subjects hardly realised they were being observed.

One of the great achievements of science is that so many of its branches, from astronomy to zoology, have been blessed by such great popularisers — your Attenboroughs, your Sagans, your Dawkinses. Alas, there is one inglorious exception to this marvellous rule — linguistics. A discipline that has produced enormous and enormously important advances over the last century — but not one linguist who has managed to tell the rest of the world about them. Steven Pinker did have a bestseller with The Language Instinct, but he was moonlighting from his day job in neuropsychology.

Elmet by Fiona Mozley John Murray, £10.99, pp. 311 Daniel and his big sister, Cathy, do not go to school. They live with their father, a gargantuan former prizefighter, eking out an autarkic existence as squatters on land belonging to the unscrupulous Mr Price; on a typical day they are engaged in woodwork, plucking mallards or tickling trout. Price’s personal fiefdom operates outside the law of the land, with violent henchmen enforcing his will. The children’s father had once worked as a fixer for him before turning renegade, rallying Price’s exploited workers and tenants into collective action to improve their lot.

The Baillie Gifford longlist – consisting of contenders for the country’s most prestigious nonfiction prize – is out today. A very good list it is, too. For readers’ ease, I’m affixing some links here to the Spectator’s reviews of the longlisted titles. We missed Souad Mekhennet (sorry); and a couple of them – Applebaum, Schama and Uglow – are forthcoming so will be reviewed in the next few weeks. Expect a review of Allan Jenkins’s allotment memoir when we consider gardening books at Christmas.

A N Wilson’s new biography of Darwin was acclaimed in these pages by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst for having a 'scientist’s forensic skill and a novelist’s imaginative touch'; but, he warned, it was likely to 'put the felis catus among the columbidae' with its portrait of the great man as a publicity-hungry plagiarist who got the science wrong. It certainly has done that.    In this week’s podcast I talk to Andrew Wilson about Darwin’s feet of clay — and the way in which, as Wilson sees it, the theory of evolution was used to license everything from the cruellest excesses of Victorian capitalism to the eugenics programmes of the mid-20th century.