Culture

The idea for a mechanical cock was never going to work. In 1595 the English ambassador to Constantinople, Edward Barton, advised Queen Elizabeth I that the surest way for her to impress Sultan Mehmed III, the new leader of the formidable Ottoman empire, was to send him a ‘clock in the form of a cock’. Knowing that Mehmed had a growing reputation for psychopathy rather than ornithology — he had his 19 brothers circumcised and then strangled to death — Elizabeth demurred and eventually sent him an elaborate clockwork organ instead. The organ was accompanied by its maker, Thomas Dallam, who spent his first month in Constantinople fixing the damage it had suffered in transit before eventually playing it for the Sultan and his retinue at the Topkapi palace.

The author of this jam-packed treasure trove has been a film critic at the New York Times since 2000 and is also professor of film criticism at Wesleyan University. As if these platforms weren’t enough, he’s now written a book about the tangled worlds of films, books, music, paintings and criticism, dragging in Aristotle, Pope, Plato, Matthew Arnold, Isaiah Berlin and millions of others — but not, alas, my former next-door neighbour, the wonderfully controversial Brian Sewell. Crammed in alongside George Orwell’s ‘All writers are vain, selfish and lazy’ and H. L. Mencken’s ‘Literature always thrives best in an atmosphere of hearty strife,’ the author’s own views often hit hardest.

The latest competition marked the tercentenary of Thomas Gray’s birth with an invitation to submit an ‘Elegy on a Country Churchyard’ written in the metre of his famous and enduringly popular poem. General Wolfe was a such a fan of Gray’s meditation on death and remembrance that in 1759, on the eve of the attack on Quebec, he is said to have read the poem to his officers, declaring, ‘I would rather have been the author of that piece than beat the French tomorrow.’ It obviously struck a chord with you too, and there were stellar performances all round. Congratulations and commiserations to the following, who fell victim to a lack of space but are worthy runners-up: John Beaton, John Priestland, Katie Mallett, George Simmers, T.J.

‘China is a sleeping lion,’ Napoleon reportedly remarked. ‘When it wakes, the world will tremble.’ There is no need to fear China, its current leaders are quick to stress — with President Xi Jinping claiming that the country’s rise will be ‘peaceful, pleasant and civilised’. Such words are of little comfort to hawks in the United States who watch the Asia-Pacific region with a growing sense of alarm — even if the Chinese economic slowdown of recent months has made it more likely that we will hear a growl rather than a blood-curdling roar as the lion awakes. This interesting new book asks why it is that China has been sleeping for so long.