Culture

‘Every poet describes himself, as well as his own life, in his writings,’ observed Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa in one of his lectures on English literature, which he delivered twice a week to an audience of young people in his palazzo in Palermo. ‘Every poet describes himself, as well as his own life, in his writings,’ observed Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa in one of his lectures on English literature, which he delivered twice a week to an audience of young people in his palazzo in Palermo. He was speaking of Shakespeare, whom he adored (he said his mistress, whom everyone considered plain, was Measure for Measure) but he could have been speaking of himself.

God, Sweden sounds gruesome. After the rampaging success of the Steig Larsson thrillers, Henning Mankell, the Godfather of Swedish crime fiction, has written a new book. Kurt Wallander, Mankell’s morose and insomniac homicide detective, makes his first appearance for a decade. It will also be his last. The Troubled Man is familiar ground for Mankell; familiar ground for Wallander. An unsolved disappearance, a savage murder and atmospheric Nordic woods, segueing into the themes of thoughtful detective fiction: friendship, betrayal and Europe’s gangrenous 20th century history. Kurt Wallander and George Smiley are fighting the same war albeit in different eras.

Keats is justly famed for his late odes and their lyrical beauty. What is not so often recognised is that Keats was also a very funny poet, and that a great many of his poems are parodies, pastiches, and sometimes downright dirty. I’m afraid there’s nothing titillating about this poem, but it’s a wonderful example of how Keats used parody to expose the limitations of the famous poets of his day – even those he admired greatly. ‘Oxford’ was included in a letter Keats wrote to a friend in which he had a bit of a moan about Wordsworth (who was, all in all, a hero for Keats). He complained that some of Wordsworth’s lines are, in short, a bit dull, “in”, as Keats put it, “the Style of School exercises”.

A while back, the combined might of Steve Connor, John Mullan and Alex Clark huddled together on the BBC to debate the death of theory. All are veterans of the 1980s: when fiction about writing fiction and ideological subversion were all the rage. Sales and a sizeable readership were old hat. The better you were, the more PhD theses you inspired. However, as the three declared that day, that era seems to be passing. Three-digit sales figures don't make for much of a pension pot. And so rather than letting the James Pattersons of this world have all the fun with story, pace and plot, a new breed of novelist is evolving.   Most noticeably David Nicholls' One Day has been revving up steam recently and reshaping ideas of the literary and the popular.

The Interrogative Mood by Padgett Powell is a compilation of questions strung together without discernible order, importance, or intention. Reading the first paragraph, which includes queries on horses, love, athletic ability, potatoes, and Constantinople, produces an acute sense of confusion but also intrigue. Is this it? Is this the whole book? Well, yes and no. Yes in the sense that all that is on the page is question after question, seemingly unconnected and entirely at random. No in the sense that the reaction to this is incredibly personal. It becomes almost a private psychological study into yourself as you work through questions.

Here is a selection of news from elsewhere on the literary web: A woman in New York is attempting to smell 300,000 books, making notes as she goes. As of 12 December, she was up to 150. It's art. F Scott Fitzgerald, Nathaniel West, John Buchan and Isaac Babel are among the authors who may or may not be going out of copyright this year. The list comes courtesy of 'Public Domain Day', which exists to 'celebrate the role of the public domain in our societies', but also, perhaps inadvertently, highlights the difficulty of knowing the public domain's extent.

To schoolboys of a probably now passed generation, Jack Hobbs was a hero to rank with Biggles; he also had the added bonus of being real. Leo McKinstry has compiled the first major biography of England’s greatest cricketer, an imperious, greedy batsmen still revered by cricket lovers more than fifty years after he died. McKinstry has delved into the archive to revive the human that has been obscured by the weight of timeless statistics. Hobbs’ life began in the grim surroundings of a Victorian slum in Cambridge, bleak origins from which talent and application freed him. His cricketing career began in the Edwardian era and ended with the advent of Bradman, his greatest statistical adversary.

Sir Roy Strong is irrepressible. His latest venture is to ask: ‘What is Englishness?’ England is a nation in search of an identity. For centuries, Strong contends, Englishness was synonymous with what it meant to be British. He cites monarchy, democracy, imperialism, propriety and industry as defining totems of the national psyche. Those parochial facets of British history are moribund and their legacy largely irrelevant. What remains is English culture in the sense of its artistic heritage. England’s rural and artistic traditions, with their aestheticism, simplicity and healthy distrust of authoritarian structures and creeds, have been resurrected out of the listlessness of post-imperial decline and economic uncertainty.

Jeffrey Sachs wants a revolution. The renowned economist has developed a Malthusian touch in The Value of Everything. He is adamant that resource scarcity is upon us and here to stay unless the globe transforms its consumption and production, radically. Beyond the doomsaying, Sachs’ book is a robust critique of the study of economics and the preoccupations of government. Mainstream economics and policy have obsessed about monetarism and fiscal policy since the early 80s, if not back to Keynes himself.

You can see it best through the window of a train, as you shuttle at that suburban-safe pace through the outskirts of major cities. A brown-field hinterland that is neither town nor country, occupied nor deserted, arid nor fertile. These are the Edgelands, the subject of Michael Symmonds Roberts and Paul Farley’s critique of what we term ‘wild’. With romantic attention to place and solitude, Edgelands describes the surreal beauty of disused industrial plants, exhausted mineral pits and landfill sites. First to industrialise and first to fade, Britain possesses the world’s most extensive post-industrial landscape, one which nature is struggling to reclaim. It is an eerie, dilapidated monument to consumption and decline.

Beware prophets and charismatics, warned Machiavelli. And he would know, having watched Savonarola’s brand of ascetic lunacy impede his political career, not to mention Florence’s prosperity and security. In his latest book, Paul Strathern revisits the city’s most effervescent period at the close of the fifteenth century, as princes, prelates and proles vied for its ‘soul’ at one of the ‘most important moments in Western history’. Whether Florence merits such prominence is open to debate, when Spain was acquiring the New World, anti-clericalism and new learning were stirring Reformation and the Ottoman Empire came close to crushing Christian civilisation east of Vienna.

Bethlehem was an odd venue for the birth of Christ; but not as odd as choosing Bedford for the New Jerusalem. Yet, in 1919, a widow named Mabel Baltrop, was declared to be the daughter of God by a group of women styling themselves the Panacea Society. They called her Octavia and she appointed 12 apostles who spread the word from Bedford to the globe’s four corners, founding a utopian communion followed by 130,000 people. The movement was observantly documented by devotees. This is the latest chapter in the history of the neo-spiritual boom that succeeded the slaughter in Flanders.

Can nation building defeat terrorism? Jack Fairweather asks this question at the outset of The Edge of Eden, a history of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Admittedly, the question is rhetorical – having been answered by all too evident failures and the high cost in blood – but that doesn’t lessen Fairweather’s impact.   Fairweather was the Telegraph’s Baghdad correspondent and the Washington Post’s man in Afghanistan; this books commits a decade of strategic and political errors made to posterity's record. The account is high-political: an antidote to the foot soldiers’ memoirs that have emerged in recent years.

The history of British exploration is dominated by heroic failure. Robert Falcon Scott: defeated and died. George Mallory: probably defeated and died. Those two are the greatest, or at least the most famous of our imperial adventurers; the Victorian hero Captain Sir John Franklin is more obscure, though no less heroic. Prior to the construction of the Suez Canal, British seaborne commerce searched for a fast route to the East, preferably through the Arctic Circle. The hunt for the elusive Northwest Passage became a national obsession; the subject, even, of Coleridge’s Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner.  Expeditions became more frequent after the Napoleonic Wars. In 1845, the 59-year-old Franklin led a Royal Navy frigate in the most audicious attempt.

Ferdinand Mount: Mark Girouard’s Elizabethan Architecture is a prodigy book devoted to the Prodigy Houses, those fantastical mega-palaces which reared up out of the placid landscape in the brief, dazzling period of Elizabeth’s ending and James’s beginning: Longleat, Hardwick, Burghley, Castle Ashby, Wollaton and Montacute. The English built nothing so breathtaking before or after. The illustrations are lovely, and so is the text: crisp, authoritative, with a touch of mischief. This is a ripe example of the Girouardesque, a glorious slab of a book. Si monumentum requiris, perlege. Going to very cold places is the idealist’s last resort. David Vann’s losers escape into the snow and solitude without, of course, escaping themselves.

Sam Leith: The book that I’ve found myself telling other people about most has been Through The Language Glass, Guy Deutscher’s gripping pop-science book about linguistics and neuropsychology, describing how language shapes our perception of reality. I also hope people look at the handsomely produced A Hedonist’s Guide to Art. I must confess an interest: I’ve contributed a couple of essays and it’s edited by a friend, Laura K. Jones. But it’s highly original, and stuffed with fascinating gobbets from contributors as diverse as Brian Sewell, Will Self, Gilbert & George and Genesis P. Orridge.

Cressida Connolly: Polly Samson’s new collection of short stories, Perfect Lives is terrific. Funny, beautifully observed and often poignant, they’re the best thing Samson has produced yet. Whether she’s recording the minutiae of modern marriage or the flora and fauna of a riverbank, this is a writer who misses nothing. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis was a revelation. The stories sound ghastly: some of them are less than a page long, few characters are given names and Davis approaches her subjects sideways and in sudden scuttles, crablike. But the effect is quite brilliant — wry, original and wholly unsettling. I can’t think of a book it would be more of a pleasure to be given.

Elizabeth Baines is a novelist, playwright and blogger. Her work can be found at www.elizabethbaines.com, and she blogs at http://elizabethbaines.blogspot.com and at the cutting http://fictionbitch.blogspot.com. Her first novel The Birth Machine has been reissued as it was originally intended; here she relates why. Christmas, a time for dreaming, and here, sure enough, are the Christmas books offering the dream that whatever your beginnings – East End boy selling TV aerials out of a van or anthropomorphized desert meerkat – with talent and determination you’ll succeed.