Culture

In 2014, in the course of his inquiry into shamanism, the anthropologist Manvir Singh spent time with the Mentawai people on the Indonesian island of Siberut. He estimated that among the 265 residents he managed to interview, 24 were male shamans, or sikerei. These ‘specialists’, as he puts it, were uniquely empowered to commune with spirits and provide a range of services which included healing, divination and raining down afflictions on enemies. Over the course of two extended visits, living on a diet of fried grubs, boiled pangolin and pigs’ testicles, Singh witnessed ceremonies characterised by ‘turmeric coated sikerei decked out in leaves and beads... the dissonant clanging of bells and the hellish squeals of sacrificed pigs’.

Any consideration of Stefan Collini’s subject has surely to address a major recent issue. The academic study of English, both at school and university, has fallen away significantly, with the numbers opting for it greatly diminishing. Anecdotal evidence from even the most serious institutions suggests that many students are now finding previously accessible texts impossible to read or understand – because of their length (Charles Dickens), their complexity of meaning (Alexander Pope) or remote sensibility or politics (Joseph Conrad). Collini has been given a generous amount of space to write his history. Despite this, he has chosen to end it more than 50 years ago. His subtitle is quite misleading.

Girl, 1983, a fusion of novel and memoir, tantalises with what we already know of its author. Linn Ullmann is the daughter of the Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann and the much older Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman. Their relationship was probed in her previous work, Unquiet. Here the parents are more distant figures, as the adult Linn attempts to reconstruct her headstrong 16-year-old self and recover a disturbing interlude spent in Paris as a would-be model. In 2019, Ullmann is struggling to write when her younger self materialises like an imaginary friend with a message that demands to be heard. Ullmann has a daughter now, which makes the quest to understand the events of decades ago all the more urgent.

‘Tawny owls,’ I tell friends and family, ‘can’t see in the dark any better than we can. So they memorise the whole wood! But they may be able to see sound,’ I burble. ‘And the Latin name for a blue tit is Cyanistes caeruleus obscurus: Heavenly hidden blue one!’ In Bird School, Adam Nicolson rejoices in the detailed stories of some of the birds on his farm in Sussex. Its precursor, The Seabird’s Cry, a love letter to a dozen species, soared over the coasts of Scotland, ablaze with sea light. The Sussex Weald on a dull spring dawn offers a claggier setting. Puffins seem more interesting than marsh tits. But in fact Bird School is even better. Nicolson makes like the bowerbird, which constructs elaborate artistic temples of seduction.

You can learn a lot about a winemaker by tasting his wine. In The Accidental Connoisseur, Lawrence Osborne wrote of one wine that smelt of ‘simmering insanity’, reflecting the angry Italian who made it. I didn’t have quite such an extreme reaction to Peter Hahn’s Clos de la Meslerie Vouvray, but I did deduce that he was idealistic, determined, romantic, perhaps a little dogmatic, and given to certain esoteric beliefs. Having now read his book Angels in the Cellar, I can say that my deductions were mostly right. Hahn is an American whose career as an investment banker came to an end when he suffered a breakdown in the back of a London taxi. He decided to give up the rat race and bought a neglected Vouvray domaine, where he moved with his family to live la belle vie.

On the morning of 7 May 1821 an urgent task was performed at Longwood House on St Helena. A day and a half previously, the celebrated prisoner for whom this dwelling had been built had died. Obviously it was necessary to make his death mask, and fortunately a British military doctor, expert in such matters, was at hand to do so. So it was that in times to come every bourgeois home in France ‘had its plaster Napoleon’, as Alain Corbin writes in this brief but highly original book. The proliferation of such casts was a feature of the age. Some homes became ‘virtual museums of the dead’. Artists’ sitting rooms and studios frequently contained a moulding of the emaciated features of Théodore Géricault; musical households would naturally have one of Beethoven.