Culture

‘This happens to other people.’ The Guardian journalist Decca Aitkenhead says she had heard the phrase countless times, interviewing the survivors of random disasters, and the idea had always puzzled her: ‘Why would they think other people are any different from them?’ But when her partner of ten years drowned while rescuing their small son from the Jamaican sea on a family holiday in May 2014, she was startled to catch herself feeling exactly the same thing. She unpicks the emotion in her piercing account of his death and the strange series of events surrounding it: We read about freak disasters every day, knowing perfectly well that the news is not fiction. And yet, deep down, what we are reading must feel to us made up.

Military history is more popular than respected. It is not hard to see why. It is masculine history, a trifecta of logistical planning, technical detail and violent death. It shows the value of hierarchy and duty, sacrifice and patriotism — disgraceful notions which the young and impressionable might be inspired to emulate. And,with its sudden twists from tedium to danger and its tidily destructive conclusions, it has tight plots. One way to make civilian history as exciting is, as Eric Hobsbawm showed, to turn it into a false kind of fiction, true neither to the facts nor the life. Another, as N.A.M. Rodger did in The Wooden World, his ‘anatomy’ of the Georgian navy, is to integrate military history with political and social history.

Is there anything new to be said about T.E. Lawrence? I mean, really. In the century since his stirring exploits in the Arabian desert we have had all manner of biographies, from simpering hagiography to heartless hatchet job. We have had Lawrence the colonial hero and faithful imperial servant; Lawrence the linguist, explorer and spy, pioneer of guerrilla warfare; Lawrence the Machiavellian betrayer of the Arabs; Lawrence the preening, self-mythologising sado-masochist. Each generation projects its own prejudices and visions, fears and fantasies upon this unusual man. Even now, 80 years after his death, the torrent of biographies shows little sign of abating.

Every second novel is fated to be measured against its predecessor; and that comparison is particularly hard when the debut in question was acclaimed (Jenni Fagan’s The Panopticon was shortlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize) or held to exemplify some modish literary sub-genre. Fagan’s style was tagged as ‘gritty Scottish realism’, and ill-served by comparisons to Irvine Welsh, which made much of her use of profanity and dialect. But where Welsh’s style has long since descended into shtick, Fagan’s coarseness of language was never more than surface detail. It was clearly in the service of authenticity of voice, and Anais Hendricks, the disturbed but resilient protagonist of The Panopticon, is memorable for much more than her readiness with swear-words.

His professional achievements aside, Quentin Blake’s life has been rather short on biographical event, so this book is not a biography. (That gets dispatched briefly in a six-page timeline.) Rather, it’s a grateful appreciation — partisan, certainly, but well argued — of all that this remarkable artist has given us. Through his books, his pictures on hospital walls and his support for a variety of campaigns, Blake has brought joy, laughter and solace. The pictures in this book will make you smile.

Spectator readers know Andrew Taylor from his reviews of crime fiction. Many will also know him as an admirable writer of the stuff. In a recent issue, however, he remarked that there are fewer murders now, and added that this made things difficult for crime novelists. Detection has been taken over by the scientists, DNA providing the solution more reliably than Hercule Poirot’s little grey cells. Find a suspect and DNA will tell you if he dunnit. This is boring. So it’s not surprising that for crime writers the future looks to be the past, where science is primitive and the police have no computer database — where indeed there may be no regular police force at all. London is burning. It’s 1666, not 1940; it’s the Great Fire, and St Paul’s is ablaze.