Culture

Kathleen Kennedy and her elder brother JFK were the grandchildren of upwardly mobile Irish Catholic immigrants. John F. Fitzgerald, ‘Honey Fitz’, became mayor of Boston, and Patrick J. Kennedy was a saloon-keeper and failed senatorial candidate who sent his sons to Harvard. ‘Kick’ was the fourth child, nicknamed for her ebullient personality, but born just as her mother, Rose, was thinking of leaving her serially unfaithful husband, Joe Kennedy Snr, who made his huge fortune from Hollywood studios and booze. Kick spent her early years schooled at, and confined to, convents, except when the whole family escaped to Hyannis Port or Palm Beach.

‘The only use of a gentleman in travelling,’ Emmeline Lowe wrote in 1857, ‘is to take care of the luggage.’ My sentiments entirely. The extract from Unprotected Females in Norway reprinted in this book recounts Lowe’s travels with her mother round the Dovrefjeld in the centre of the long country. Tramping through the valleys wearing mosquito veils, ‘solid plaid skirts’ and hobnail shoes, the pair reckoned that the only essentials were a driving whip and a fishing rod. Lowe (who published anonymously) is a spirited companion on the verdant plains and the snowy peaks, and her pleasure in the long boreal gloaming leaps infectiously from the page.

Many years ago, working on a project in Tel Aviv, I had a meeting-free weekend. I know, I thought, I’ll call my friend Brigid Keenan — at that time en poste to Syria with her ambassadorial husband — and nip up to Damascus — so close, only that smidgen of Lebanon in the way. I dialled Brigid’s number. There were many odd whirrs and pings and beeps, and then, ‘Don’t ever call me’. Slam! It was an unexpected reaction from a voice I’m accustomed to hear burble merrily on about how last night their diplomatic reception was brouhaha’d because the dog puked on the First Lady of Baku’s shoes, or the joy of discovering a pink sandstone temple half buried in some hidden Kazakhstan valley, or tracking down Marmite in Outer Mongolia.

King Kong, the story of a violently amorous gorilla, Me Cheeta, the autobiography of a slanderous Hollywood chimpanzee, and now this, a benign biological, psychological and cultural survey, comes in further recognition of the versatility of our primate cousins. Both collateral branches of our family seem doomed (too many humans, too few apes), unless. . . Chris Herzfeld, a philosopher of science, an artist and a founder of the Great Apes Enrichment Project, has written a movingly tragic study in praise of Wattana, a Bornean orangutan. Even the restrained academic publisher calls it ‘poignant’. Commercial depredations are spoiling Wattana’s ancestral forest habitat at such a rate that the orangutans of Borneo will probably be extinct by 2030.

Patricia Highsmith was an accretion of oddities — a woman who doted on her pet snails and carried a selection of them in her handbag, who abandoned her native America for a restless life in Europe, and who turned a habitual paranoia into literature. Now, 20 years after her death, her reputation has been substantially increased by film versions of her Ripley novels and, most recently, Carol (an adaptation of The Price of Salt, her extraordinarily bold novel of a lesbian love affair). For all that, she is generally classed as a crime writer, albeit a very superior one. As one contemporary reviewer commented, ‘Patricia Highsmith is often called a mystery or crime writer, which is a bit like calling Picasso a draftsman.

Contrary to popular myth, the exuberant flame of life in the English country house was not extinguished by tears at the end of the Great War. And in his deliciously jaunty and wonderfully knowledgeable book, Adrian Tinniswood, social historian and country house authority, also upturns the story that huge numbers of Britain’s loveliest houses disappeared in the 1920s and 1930s, either through lack of heirs, despair, neglect or the stranglehold of taxation. He describes how instead, with ‘new aesthetics and new social structures’, the clubby, elitist, joyful prewar way of life adapted and became even more vibrant after the Armistice. In part, the yearning for a sense of rootedness had become more urgent than ever.