Culture

For a country often conceived of only in terms of its troubles with terrorism, extremists and bombs, you could easily be forgiven for thinking that, in Pakistan, all forms of cultural expression have long ceased. But, in the latest edition of Time, there's an interesting piece by Omar Waraich about the cultural flipside of Pakistan that caught my eye. As the world’s attention has been drawn to Pakistan’s problems with Islamist militancy in recent years, a flurry of exciting new voices have stepped forward to share with their readers a more intimate and rounded look at the country and its people — winning many plaudits along the way.

It's tempting to reduce the Roman Empire to a roll call of famous men and their infamous deeds. The Republic toppled with Caesar on the steps of the senate; freedom of speech was curtailed as brutally as Cicero's tongue; democracy became an act on Octavian assuming his stage name. However Robert Knapp, Professor Emeritus at the University of California, isn't interested in that version of history. Like Mary Beard, who pottered around Rome deciphering inscriptions for the BBC, he’s concerned with ordinary folk. His Invisible Romans range ‘from fairly wealthy to modestly well-off and downright poor, male and female, slave and free, law-abiding and outlaw’.

from Delia When winter snows upon thy golden hairs, And frost of age hath nipped thy flowers near; When dark shall seem thy day that never clears, And all lies withered that was held so dear;    Then take this picture which I here present thee, Limned with a pencil not all unworthy; Here see the gifts that God and Nature lent thee; Here read thyself, and what I suffered for thee.    This may remain thy lasting monument, Which happily posterity may cherish; These colours with thy fading are not spent; These may remain, when thou and I shall perish.    If they remain, then thou shalt live thereby;    They will remain, and so thou canst not die. Nicholas Hilliard’s miniature portraits are bewitchingly beautiful.

Nick de Bois is the Conservative MP for Enfield North, and is part of the Tory Class of 2010. He talks spies, Eurovision and Machiavelli as he tells us about his favourite books. 1) Which book is on your bedside table at the moment? Lyndon Johnson, The Passage of Power 2) Which book would you read to your children? Harry Potter, good to read and good to listen too - win, win. 3) Which literary character would you most like to be? George Smiley - Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy 4) Which book do you think best sums up ‘now’? Joseph Heller's Catch 22 5) What was the last novel you read? The Governor's Wife - Mark Gimenez 6) Which book would you most recommend? The Help by Kathryn Stockett 7) Given enough time, which book would you like to study deeply?

In his latest book The World Until Yesterday, Jared Diamond analyses the behavioral differences between human beings in tribal stateless-societies and those living in bureaucratic nation states. Diamond says that if states only came into existence 5,400 years ago, and agriculture in the last 11,000, human beings have been wandering nomads for most of history. Therefore, if modern nations are relatively new concepts, we have much to learn from traditional cultures. Drawing on his experience of 50 years of field research in New Guinea, Diamond attempts to prove his thesis with a mixture of personal anecdotes and academic research.

For the last 40 years it’s been impossible to interview Anthony Hopkins without him doing his Tommy Cooper impression. He’s obsessed with the bloke, constantly interrupting Silence of the Lambs anecdotes to do Cooper’s chuckle and hand flicking and patter. He was, therefore, the absolutely perfect choice to play Alfred Hitchcock. Actually, the new film’s not that bad. It tells a good yarn about the director’s wife Alma rescuing both him and Psycho, not to mention the 800 grand of their own money they’d sunk into the movie. The other actors are so good that most of the time you can almost forget Anthony Hopkins is wandering around in the middle of it all wearing a ridiculous fat-suit, itching to throw in a ‘just like that’.

Rumer Godden’s prose tugs two ways at once. It is subtle, descriptive, and light, but also direct and unashamed of being turned inside out until darkness consumes it, rendering what was beautiful irrelevant and suddenly opaque. There is also a lot of it. Rumer Godden OBE (1907-1998) wrote over sixty works of fiction and non-fiction over a lifetime divided between England, where she was born, India, where she spent much of her young adulthood, and Scotland, where she lived for the last twenty years of her life. Godden’s three best-known novels, Black Narcissus, Breakfast with the Nikolides, and Kingfishers Catch Fire are set in India.

Tate Modern promises that its forthcoming retrospective will showcase ‘the full scope of Roy Lichtenstein’s artistic explorations’, to which Spectator art critic Andrew Lambirth responded acidly: ‘I look forward to being pleasantly surprised.’ And it’s true that once Lichtenstein perfected his dot patterning technique in the mid-Sixties, he stuck with it until his death more than 30 years later. Alastair Sooke’s How Modern Art Was Saved By Donald Duck is available as a Penguin Specials paperback from Tate Modern; elsewhere, it’s in eBook format only. It won’t convince any sceptics of Lichtenstein’s infinite versatility, but it does make a case for him as a supreme examiner of style.

In June 1981, the United States' Centers  for Disease Control noted in its weekly report that five 'previously healthy' young men in Los Angeles had been treated for pneumonia. Two of them had died. On the other side of the country lived soon-to-be third grader Marco Roth, the son of a doctor and musician. Receiving an 'experiment in nineteenth-century "middle-class" European education', he was surrounded by classical concerts, classic literature and medicine in Manhattan. Oblivious to the fact that that summer's bulletin included some of the first officially recognized deaths brought about by the AIDS epidemic, Roth was also unaware that his own father had been infected by the HIV virus at around the same time.

In his new book The Silence of Animals, the philosopher John Gray explores why human beings continue to use myth to give purpose to their lives. Drawing from the material of writers such as J.G. Ballard, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, John Ashbery, Wallace Stevens and others, Gray looks at how we can reinvent meaning in our lives through a variety of myths and different moments in history. Gray refutes that humanity is marching forward to progress, where utopian ideals of civilisation and enlightenment are the end goals. He sees human beings as incapable of moving beyond their primordial, animalistic, selfish instincts, particularly when factors beyond their control make them more fearful.

‘Where have all the great French writers gone?’ the people cry. Or at least they would if anyone was interested in French books. Translated literature claims just 3 per cent of the UK literary market. This number, according to The Economist, is the lowest in the Western world. It is a sign of Britain’s often parochial literary culture, made even more glaring by statistics from France. The French translate a great deal; indeed, according to The New Yorker, many foreign books come to us in English by way of France. Do these facts imply that France is more outward looking? Is French culture being consumed by the American-led Anglosphere? Or does it suggest that France simply lacks major writers? Probably all of the above.