Culture

Snails are supposed to hate eggshells. Not the ones in Ruth Brooks’s garden. They clamber over the barrier as though it’s ‘a new extreme sport’. Ditto hair. And grit. She tries beer, but her young son drinks it. As for coffee grounds (normally a failsafe), the pests just eat them, then attack the flowers with even more vigour, off their snaily little boxes on caffeine. But A Slow Passion (Bloomsbury, £12.99) is more than just an account of Brooks’s battles to save her delphiniums. Her relationship with snails is love-hate, has been ever since she discovered a colony of them in the air-raid shelter in her childhood garden.

Zero Six Bravo tells of 60 Special Forces operators forced to remain silent in the face of accusations of ‘cowardice’ and ‘running away from the Iraqis’ in the 2003 war. In the face of such savage media criticism, and being branded as ‘incompetent cowards’ who ran an ‘operation cluster f___’ in Iraq, the men who served in this epic mission had no way to tell their own side of the story and clear their names. Why? For two main reasons. First, because the MOD operates a policy of ‘neither confirm nor deny’ anything regarding UK Special Forces. This extends to neither confirming nor denying the very existence of such elite units, let alone giving any details of operations.

‘To Oliver Cromwell’ Cromwell, our chief of men, who through a cloud Not of war only, but detractions rude, Guided by faith and matchless fortitude To peace and truth thy glorious way hast ploughed, And on the neck of crowned fortune proud Hast reared God's trophies and his work pursued While Darwen streams with blood of Scots imbrued, And Dunbar field resounds thy praises loud, And Worcester's laureate wreath; yet much remains To conquer still; peace hath her victories No less than those of war; new foes arise Threatening to bind our souls in secular chains: Help us to save free conscience from the paw Of hireling wolves whose gospel is their maw. This sonnet was written in 1652 when Milton was part of Oliver Cromwell’s civil service.

If you thought that winter in Britain had gone on long enough this year, then spare a thought for the Norwegians. Winters in Norway are famously long, dark and bitter, and – for those who experience them year upon year – can be incredibly boring. During one such winter, in February 1923, two Norwegians called Nordahl Grieg and Nils Lie decided to alleviate their boredom by writing a book. The theme? A train robbery; or more specifically, a looting of the train to Bergen. The title of the book? The Bergen train was robbed in the night (or, in its original Norwegian: Bergenstoget plyndret i natt). Having written the book, the next step was to convince people to buy it, and here the authors came up with a very cunning plan indeed.

Sometimes, in the joyous lotteries we call ‘secondhand bookshops’, you find a volume that takes you back to a different era because of its physical appearance. Sometimes you find one that adds to the effect by its content – a book about Victorian cricket, perhaps, or 1950s industrial policy. But sometimes you find one that goes beyond even that: it shows you a world where books mattered in a way they simply can’t today, and indeed never will again. That’s what happened to me recently, when I bumped into a copy of the sublimely archaic How To Pronounce It by Alan S.C. Ross. Published in 1970, it has a dust-jacket whose shades of green, blue and grey evoke the cardigans of Open University presenters from the time. The price is printed as ‘1.

Final proof - if any were needed - that Englishmen are not made of the same mettle as their rough, tough ancestors is provided on the website of the Towton Battlefield Society, who have cancelled their annual re-enactment of England's bloodiest battle this Sunday 'for safety's sake...' on the grounds that the battlefield has been waterlogged by this year's unremitting wet weather. This is an irony of ironies. For those who fought the original battle on the high Yorkshire plateau of Towton on Palm Sunday, March 28th 1461, during the Wars of the Roses, were not constrained by the same health and safety fears. Instead, between 50-80,000 men stood toe to ironclad toe for around ten hours in a driving snowstorm, shooting, hacking, stabbing and clubbing each other down.

This post is the second half of a list of 21 books that a man might give to his godson on the occasion of his twenty-first birthday.That is novels done. The bespoke bookcase is more than half loaded; 12 slots are full, nine remain. I conceive the selection of other titles as a complement to the novels we have already chosen – an acknowledgement too, if you like, that the novel is the highest of all art, let alone book, forms and other texts should therefore pay homage to it. Having ended prose fiction with a novel that pretended to be a long poem we will now begin the best of the rest with a long poem that pretends to be a novel. Byron’s Don Juan (1819 onwards) is lengthy, unfinished, sprawling and utterly hilarious.

There is much to be said for godfathers. They offer the wisdom of maturity without the complications of direct filial ties. Likewise there is much to be said for 21st birthday celebrations, the last relic in our ossified, post-industrial society of the adulthood rituals of traditional peoples. However, it is the fusion of these two noble quantities that gives the most pleasing outcome. The godfather’s 21st birthday present to his godson marks a notable point in the annals of gift giving, unmatched since the general demise of dowries and Danegeld.  The occasion suggests gifts with an Edwardian tone, badger hair and ivory shaving tackle or rawhide hand luggage; stout apparatus that will last a lifetime of abuse and eventually be passed on to the next generation.

In his new book, Who Owns The Future?, computer scientist, Jaron Lanier, argues that as technology has become more advanced, so too has our dependency on information tools. Lanier believes that if we continue on our present path, where we think of computers as passive tools, instead of machines that real people create, our myopia will result in less understanding of both computers and human beings, which could cause the demise of democracy, mass unemployment, the erosion of the middle class, and social chaos. Lanier encourages human beings to take back control of their own economic destiny by creating a society that values the work of all industries, and not just those with the fastest networks.

‘What is your idea about Iran?’ friendly Iranians are heard to ask the few foreign visitors who still come their way. One is never quite sure whether by ‘idea’ they mean ‘impression’, ‘opinion’ or ‘theory’. Inspiring landscapes, fine cuisine and a tradition of hospitality make the first category easy ground. The second pertains to politics, and may lead the traveller into the most illuminating, entertaining and disturbing conversations he has ever had. The third, be warned, is dragon country. British theories are infamous. A 1951 Foreign Office document identified Iranians as a people keen on poetry and abstract ideas, but emotional and lacking common sense.