Culture

The early 1970s was a good time for heavyweight boxing. Indeed, it was probably the last truly great age for the sport. Flamboyant fighters contested brutal matches in exotic locations, from the Philippines to the Caribbean. The world watched open-mouthed. The marketing slogans attached to some of those fights remain instantly recognisable: who has not heard of the Rumble in the Jungle or the Thrilla in Manila? During these years boxing, and particularly American heavyweight boxing, was the most prominent and glamorous sport on the planet. Boxing in the early Seventies was also culturally important in a way that it is not any more. The sport was briefly about more than money and pain. It spoke to the politics of war, race, religion and international diplomacy.

Over the summer I read Vilhelm Moberg’s The Emigrants, a documentary novel about the Swedes who emigrated to America in the 18th century. It powerfully describes what drove illiterate peasants to take such an extraordinary gamble on a country about which they knew almost nothing. The story, of course, could have been written about migrants from many European countries, and particularly those (including some of by relatives) from the Scottish Highlands. Moberg tells how some fled starvation, some religious persecution; some sought economic and political freedom. And they all risked a voyage which they might not survive: Moberg's ship’s captain would take a clump of earth with him to scatter on corpses in the funerals he knew he’d be presiding over.

When Napoleon Bonaparte captured Venice in 1797, he extinguished what had been the most successful regime in the history of the western world. The Venetian Republic had lasted over 1,000 years — longer than ancient Rome — without a revolution, a coup d’état or a successful foreign invasion.  Yet after 1797 it was never to be independent again: it was given to Austria, taken back by France, allotted once more to Austria and finally, in 1866, handed over to the young Kingdom of Italy.

Calling in a favour from a comrade to help flog your new book is hardly a new trick, but Mr S wonders if Owen Jones really thought this one through: Thankfully, Russell ‘the revolution is coming’ Brand is not known for his outrageous hyperbole.

I was prompted to ask for short odes on the death of a pet in unusual circumstances by Thomas Gray’s poem ‘Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes’. Gray wrote this charming and witty cautionary tale in 1747 in memory of Horace Walpole’s beloved tabby Selima, whose desire leads her to a watery demise. ‘She stretched in vain to reach the prize./ What female heart can gold despise?/ What cat’s averse to fish?’ D.A. Prince’s winning composition below has strong echoes of Gray and there was plenty of wit and charm on display elsewhere in the entry. Commendations to Poppy McLean, John-Paul Marney, Martin Parker and Anita Howard. The odes printed below earn their authors £25 each.

In Britain we seem to be obsessed by what our politicians are reading this summer. It tells us, so we think, about the way they’re thinking or perhaps just what they want us to think they’re thinking. Why don’t we study what other political leaders are interested in? Lebanon’s Daily Star offered us a revealing vision of one regional actor, Hezbollah’s Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah. Sitting with Lebanon’s veteran Druze leader, Walid Jumblatt, in late July, Nasrallah has a copy of James Barr’s A Line in the Sand in front of him. The book, one of the best researched and most readable studies of the making of the modern near east (read The Spectator’s review here), offers a tantalising glimpse of what might have been.

The TV chat show, if not actually dead, has been in intensive care for a while now, hooked up to machines that go bleep. But the long-form interview, as pioneered by John Freeman’s Face to Face in the 1960s, is a tougher customer. Laurie Taylor’s In Confidence series on Sky Arts has featured the great and the good, the less great and the really quite bad, all of them attracted by the professor’s gentle sociological probing and the show’s reliably modest viewing figures, which suggest that no one will notice if it all goes terribly wrong. This book is Taylor’s artful distillation of more than 60 interviews, shaped according to his own tastes and preferences. Cleo Laine was his teenage crush, Alan Ayckbourn is a friend from way back, E.L.