Culture

‘Every schoolboy knows who imprisoned Montezuma and who strangled Atahualpa.’ Macaulay, anticipating Gove, was complaining that the schoolboys by contrast did not get enough about Clive and the British conquest of India. Hugh Thomas, in this and in the two previous volumes of his trilogy on the Spanish empire, presumes that we have all forgotten about Montezuma and Atahualpa, and argues that we do not appreciate Spain’s imperial achievements. He is probably right, and he sets one off to speculate why. Take Philip II himself. He was musical, owning ‘ten clavicords, thirteen vihuelas, and sixteen bagpipes’. He had a library of 14,000 books, which we would consider more to his credit than his 6,000 holy relics, and an eye for Titian and Bosch.

Spectator reviewers over the years have had a difficult time with Nadine Gordimer’s books. Gordimer (1923 - 2014), who won the Nobel Prize for literature and was one of the leading campaigners against apartheid, has died at the age of 90. Her books are passionately political and sometimes maddeningly abstract; some found them poetic, others were infuriated. Livingstone’s Companions in 1972 was a great book, Douglas Dunn wrote at the time. 'There is so much intelligence being brought to bear in her work that revulsion or criticism is never pious or direct but almost invisibly balanced by ironies, by the natural moral of fiction itself. Indignation is constantly being toned down by sympathy for the general human condition.

No one owns a Kindle for very long without becoming obsessed by its social highlighting feature: unless you go into the preferences to turn it off, the glibbest and most epigrammatic sentences in any popular book begin to appear with dotted lines underneath them and the words '19 [or however many] people highlighted this'. Our own Mark Mason has written brilliantly and sympathetically  about the consequences. But it is now necessary to admit that he may have missed a trick. It turns out you may be able to use Kindle highlights to make a rough estimate of how many people are actually reading a book, as opposed to just buying it. The technique was described by Jordan Ellenburg in the Wall Street Journal; I saw it on the reliably interesting academic blog Crooked Timber.

Genghis Khan, unlike most Mongols in history, is a household name, regularly misappropriated as a right-wing totem. If we recall the genocidal killing sprees of, say, Stalin and Mao, perhaps it would be more historically accurate to say ‘to the left of Genghis Khan’. In the popular imagination he is the despot’s despot, a one-man killing machine who led his army of mounted archers to triumph after triumph, terrorising and slaughtering by the million to carve out an empire that stretched from the Caspian to the Pacific. His martial conquests place him in the top trio of world conquerors, alongside Alexander the Great and Tamerlane.

The Emperor Waltz is long enough at 600 pages to be divided, in the old-fashioned way, into nine ‘books’. Each book has a date, sliding from 1922 to 1979 to next year to 203 ad to last month. This might suggest an overly systematic novel in the mode of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas or Eleanor Catton’s Booker Prize-winning breezeblock The Luminaries. But Hensher has always been a writer with a wandering, curious eye (on its most exhilarating display in 2011’s King of the Badgers), and The Emperor Waltz is a novel that, despite its superficial restraints, won’t sit still.

Are you the sort of man - or is your man the sort of man - who’s always meaning to read more novels but never gets round to it? Proper novels, I mean, rather than your John Grisham/Andy McNab stuff. Well the book you’ve been waiting for is soon to be published: A Man Called Ove by the Swedish writer Fredrik Backman. Ove (pronounced ‘Oover’) was born on Backman’s blog, whose readers then demanded he write a novel about the character. Backman obliged, the result sold like hot smorgastartas in his native land and now it’s going to conquer the world. The reason it’s the perfect book for weaning men back onto literary fiction is that Ove is just like us. He’s a grumpy old pedant.

Who could possibly choose hay fever, insect bites and heat rash over an open fire, cashmere blanket and hot chocolate laced with brandy? Although I love the bright early mornings and blue sky I can’t bear the heat and all that comes with it. Give me winter over summer any day. But to admit my dislike for the most popular season will bring forth accusations of total madness and misery. The images conjured up by a mention of summer are, for most people, cold beer, ice-cream, gentle boat trips, evenings in the garden twirling the stem of a frosty glass of bone-dry wine, dipping into an outdoor swimming pool and then drying off in the sunshine while reading a best seller. Except that you would be confusing the entire season with a summer holiday, as many of you obviously do.

We all have what Andy Miller calls a 'List of Betterment': 50 or so books that, if read, would surely make us a better person - book clubs, gulp that Pino down, and discuss. Granted, it's tough being a bastard if your nose is always in a book. And from The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books Saved My Life, a memoir of 12 months spent working through a List of Betterment, it’s difficult to picture Andy Miller ever being a bastard. He’s a thoroughly amiable sort. The reasons he decided to take drastic action with said list are simple. He explains: 'We have been working parents for three years. In that time I have read precisely one book.