Culture

To write, and indeed to read, a history of considerable range, both in terms of chronology and of subject matter, is a profound challenge. The fourth volume in Peter Ackroyd’s History of England starts with the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and ends with Waterloo in 1815. It was a period that laid the foundations of the modern British state and created the basis of its prosperity, and of its status as the world’s greatest power later in the 19th century. During the 130 years Ackroyd covers there were revolutions in attitudes too: though when he writes of the coarse humour of cartoonists such as Gillray, and the aggressive expressions of public opinion in incidents such as the Gordon Riots, one wonders whether the temper of the English people is so very different today.

Ali Smith is that rare thing in Britain: a much-beloved experimental writer. Part of her attraction for readers is that she continually connects formal innovation and the freedom to reinvent a story with the freedom to reinvent the self. It’s a beguiling proposition that can make liberation seem like a matter of style. Following the success last year of How To Be Both, the most dazzling and accomplished of her novels, Smith planned to write a long-gestated novel quartet, its four volumes reflecting successive seasons — an idea that would allow her to pursue her fascination with what is perhaps the novel’s greatest subject: time.

The gift books come in all shapes and sizes this year: big, little, tiny, huge, long, short, fat and thin, rather like their writers, I would guess. Biggest and fattest of them all is The Art of Aardman (Simon & Schuster, £16.99). This is a coffee-table book, pure and simple, that celebrates 40 years of animation at Aardman Studios, who make Wallace & Gromit, Shaun the Sheep and others, and I would suggest that you have known since the beginning of this sentence whether or not you want this book for Christmas. It’s everything you would wish for from such a volume, featuring stills from the films, drawings from the animators’ sketchbooks, portraits of sets, technical drawings for props, manifold character studies and very, very few words indeed.

You learn startling things about the long entanglement of the British with Spain on every page of Simon Courtauld’s absorbing and enjoyable new book, which is not a travelogue but a collection of historical vignettes arranged geographically. Did you know, for instance, that the first Spanish football team was founded by two Scottish doctors working for Rio Tinto in Huelva, and that in 1907 a team of seminarians from the English College in Valladolid defeated one representing Real Madrid? Or that the first visit by a reigning British monarch to Spain occurred when Queen Victoria went to have lunch with Queen Maria Cristina at the Aiete Palace in San Sebastián, travelling by train from Biarritz and returning the same afternoon?

The California novelist T.C. Boyle has often taken true stories and created alternative histories, from John Harvey Kellog and the birth of the breakfast cereal in The Road to Wellville to Alfred Kinsey and the creation of sexology in The Inner Circle. This might draw comparisons with James Ellroy, Boyle’s exact contemporary, except that where Ellroy aims at the very darkest version of a tabloid reality, Boyle takes a New Age perspective conveyed though whimsy and surrealism. Ellroy, of course, was born in California while Boyle chose to live there. He is a native of the culture rather than the territory. This is a problem in The Terranauts, where the assumptions and aspirations of a group of scientists inside a giant geo-desic dome are left unexplained.

The Un-Discovered Islands could not be more different in substance — though it is similar in style — to Malachy Tallack’s debut, Sixty Degrees North. In that he book he took a revealing pilgrimage around the places which lay, like his home of Shetland, on the 60th parallel, and found a range of concerns about ecology, land ownership, both solitude and community, and what it means to be considered peripheral. This book is an account of 24 non-existent islands, yet is suffused with the same elegiac frostiness as before. Tallack’s style is precise without being perjink, and the overwhelming feeling is of something lost, or disappearing. It’s just this time, what is lost never was.