Culture

We financial hacks have been encouraged, indoctrinated perhaps, to think that London’s Big Bang was a Very Good Thing. That moment in October 1986 when the City threw off old shackles and embraced global finance, ditched boozy lunches and chased money like never before was a result for us all — so we’ve been led to understand. My word is my bond went out. In came computerised trading, and the notion that greed was good. If you could monetise a thing, turn it into something tradeable, why wouldn’t you? In Crash Bang Wallop, published 30 years after the historic event, Iain Martin starts out sceptical but in the end doesn’t depart much from the script.

Richard Francis’s new novel covers ostensibly familiar ground. Set in and around Boston in the 1690s, it tells the story of the Salem trials, which resulted in the execution of 20 people (14 of them women), and which are sometimes regarded as a hinge event in the evolution of American secularism. As the historian George Lincoln Burr put it in 1914: ‘Salem witchcraft was the rock on which the theocracy shattered.’ This seismic moment was last visited by Francis in his 2005 biography of Samuel Sewall, the judge who presided over the trials. And it is to Sewall’s life that Francis returns in Crane Pond. He opens his story in January 1690, at which time Sewall is engaged in trying a handful of men for piracy.

A preoccupation with death is felt from the start of Margaret Drabble’s new novel, which opens with Francesca Stubbs, in her seventies, considering whether her last words will be ‘you bloody old fool’ or ‘you fucking idiot’. Fran is central to the web of characters that populate the book, linked by varying degrees of friendship and kinship, but tied more firmly together by the approach of death. Drabble squares up to old age with pragmatism: she shows us its terrible physical pain, loneliness and expense, but lightens what could threaten to be a grim read with observational humour, delighting in her characters’ eccentric pleasures.

Shades of The Master and Margarita haunt Rabih Alameddine’s sixth book, in which Jacob, a Yemeni-born poet with a day job in IT, battles with drugs, insanity, visions of the Devil and a variety of Christian saints while trying to come to terms with the fallout from the Aids crisis. As that crisis wore on, ignored by the powers-that-be, Jacob’s lover and all of his closest friends died, leaving him with an apartment full of ashes and an eye-watering variety of instructions for their disposal. Yet, while echoes of Bulgakov’s masterpiece inform The Angel of History from first to last (there is even a cat named Behemoth), Alameddine has created a scintillating, original work whose moral complexity and detail of observation are wholly contemporary and entirely his own.

Steven Runciman, the historian of Byzantium, is a puzzling figure. He was an outrageous snob, once remarking that he would have enjoyed being the widower of a Spanish duchess, which would have made him a dowager duke in Castile. He particularly relished the company of queens (of the female variety), and he took the Queen Mother out to lunch once a year at the Athenaeum. But as Minoo Dinshaw shows in this richly original life, the snobbery was a subtle pose. Runciman was a tease who liked to play games with people, and he made a career out of being enigmatic. His family were wealthy shipbuilders in Northumberland. His parents were both dedicated public servants — his father was a minister in the last Liberal governments.

Apple Day, on 21 October, is a newish festival, created in 1990, by the venerable organisation, Common Ground. Intended to be a celebration of the apple, its purpose is also to raise awareness of the importance of apples in landscape, ecology and culture. All over the country there will be many revels where you can taste apple varieties, jellies, chutneys and drinks; try apple-bobbing, take apples from your own garden for identification by experts, buy apple trees and all sorts. These are charming festivities, much better behaved than the ancient cider-makers’ ritual, wassailing.