Culture

When she was a little girl, playing in the countryside around her missionary parents’ home in China, Pearl Buck used to come across the scattered body parts of babies abandoned for animals to devour. She would bury them, and tell no one. When she was a little girl, playing in the countryside around her missionary parents’ home in China, Pearl Buck used to come across the scattered body parts of babies abandoned for animals to devour. She would bury them, and tell no one. Born in 1892, she buried painful experiences all her life, telling no one, apparently forgetting — but they came out in her stories and novels. Her most famous novel, The Good Earth, has never been out of print and has sold millions of copies in many countries.

Not only Webster but most of us are much possessed by death. Even if we don’t see the skull beneath the skin, we enjoy the thought that it’s there and look forward to the day when it will turn to dust so that we can sing its bygone glories. Notoriously, the ancient Anglo-Saxons allowed their Roman buildings to fall into ruin and then wrote elegies to mourn their passing. The rise of Greek cities left the countryside to languish outside its walls and gave birth to bucolic poetry. Trains and planes proclaimed the end of parochialism and allowed for the rebirth of patriotism. Likewise with new technologies. Photography proclaimed the death of painting, before the birth of Picasso and Jackson Pollock.

Philip Pullman’s trilogy, His Dark Materials, is one the best works written in English in my lifetime. Philip Pullman’s trilogy, His Dark Materials, is one the best works written in English in my lifetime. He is a truly great storyteller, and the details of his myth, as well as the rich gallery of characters, live forever in the reader’s memory. It upset many religious readers, especially in America, because of the fact that the central villainy of the Gobblers, child-stealers controlled by the Magisterium, are a Blake-inspired vision of Church Christians. (And rather a prophetic picture of what is now revealed on a daily basis in the papers about the activities of the Roman Catholic clergy).

If it wasn’t for the sheer misery of most of its luckless inhabitants, wouldn’t the world be a duller place without North Korea? If it wasn’t for the sheer misery of most of its luckless inhabitants, wouldn’t the world be a duller place without North Korea? There really is no place quite like it, a surreal time capsule largely devoid of mobile phones, cars and electric light; a land presided over by the world’s first hereditary Communist, Dear Leader Kim Jong-Il, whose deceased father remains Eternal President of the place I like to call the ‘Land of Eternal Happiness’.

When the Kenyan human rights campaigner, Maina Kiai, recently addressed the House of Commons, his list of policy recommendations probably surprised many MPs. Be tough on Kenya’s fractious government, he urged. Crack down on British companies which bribe African politicians. And it was well past time, he added, that Britain made a formal apology for Mau Mau. A chasm yawns between the soft-focus memories of a former colonial master and the less happy recollections of the colonised. Never more so than with Mau Mau, the 1950s uprising against white rule which traumatised the Kikuyu community, the country’s biggest tribe, eventually paving the way for independence.