Culture

Gangs, suicide bombers, paedophiles, Somali pirates: the world is swarming with people who want to hurt us. And yet Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist, thinks we’ve never been safer. In The Better Angels of Our Nature, he argues that violence has actually declined from prehistory to today, due to a combination of progressive thinking and neurological evolution. What are the critics saying? Most reviews have been ecstatic. The Economist called it ‘magisterial’, the New York Times thought it ‘supremely important’, while David Runciman told Guardian readers it was a ‘brilliant, mind-altering book’.

Picasso once told Roland Penrose, his friend and biographer, that he left Barcelona in 1900 to go to England, the home of his idols Edward Burne-Jones and Aubrey Beardsley. It took Picasso 19 years to get here, when the Ballet Russes took him to London to design its production of Le Tricorne. In honour of that history, next year Tate Britain and the English National Ballet will collaborate on a Picasso exhibition, examining his influence on British artists and his relationship with the British public. Judging by the preview, which was held this morning in the studio Picasso used on Floral Street in Covent Garden, the show merits a visit.

There was no catch because no one wanted out. The late Joseph Heller has been in the news today. The auction of letters he wrote to an American academic in the ‘70s has revealed that he “enjoyed” the war, which may come as a surprise to those who thought Yossarian, the US Army Air Force bombardier who served in Italy, was a proxy for Heller, the US Army Air Force bombardier who served in Italy. This story raises an old contention: that characters can be engendered simply in a writer’s mind's eye and are not necessarily derived from either the quick or the dead. This was a major bugbear of Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, who both contested the facile belief that every character has one ultimate source in reality.

This is one hell of a statistic: In Britain, taxes on all types of alcohol contributed 36 percent of national revenue in 1898-99, but they were also 19 percent in France (1898), 18 percent in Germany (1897-98), and 28 percent in the United States (1897-98). That's from a new book by James Simpson Creating Wine, the Emergence of a World Industry 1840-1914. This seems hard to believe until one recalls how little governments spent on anything back in the late-Victorian era. Nevertheless, there you have it: boozers kept Britain afloat then just as drinkers and smokers do more than their bit to fund the government these days. Even so: 36%! There's something almost heroic about that.

It’s a shame The Sense of an Ending won the Booker. Not because the prize wasn’t deserved — based on that shortlist, I’m sure the judges made the right decision — but because I don’t think it shows its author in his best light. In time, probably around now, people will forget the hoo-ha over the 2011 Man Booker Prize. No one will remember that X said her five-year-old could have come up with a better shortlist, or that Y told X to stop being such an elitist snob. And I worry that readers coming to Barnes afresh, assuming The Sense of an Ending to be his best book, will be disappointed. Which would be sad because he’s a brilliant writer, the first modern grown-up novelist I really fell in love with.

It's hard to stop quoting Flann O'Brien, once you start. The Irish man of letters was born a hundred years ago and to celebrate the centenary there are at least three conferences in his honour, the latest of which takes place this weekend at the Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith, with another in the Irish club in Birmingham. For those of us who are obsessed by Flann O’Brien — otherwise known as Myles na Gcopaleen, or by his own name of Brian O’Nolan or assorted other pseudonyms — this is not an entirely welcome phenomenon. You know what happens when the lit-crit community get hold of an author, don't you?

The news from Libya is bound to spark a flood of literature about Gaddafi, Libya and the Arab Spring in general. Here is a selection of published books and forthcoming releases on the subject: Gaddafi’s most famous work is The Green Book, which details his political philosophy. Its subjects range from breastfeeding to racial supremacy, and it has been variously described as “insane” and “surreal gibberish”. It may appear to be a psychotic symphony, but, as Andrew Roberts has noted in the Daily Beast, irrationality was Gaddafi’s leitmotif and it became an agency of his power. Christopher Hitchens touches on this theme when discussing the unstable nature of tyranny in his autobiography Hitch-22.