Culture

Mr Gladstone’s career in politics was titanic. Mr Gladstone’s career in politics was titanic. He sat for over 60 years in the Commons, was in the cabinet before he was 35, was four times prime minister, almost solved the Irish question, set new standards for the conduct of public business and of foreign policy, and took a leading part in the disruptions both of the Conservative and of the Liberal Party. The post office did get round to issuing a commemorative stamp for his bicentenary, which fell on 29 December; but the press, which used to publish every day in the 1880s a note of his doings, close to the court circular about the Queen’s, has taken it more quietly.

Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, lies on a marshy bay encircled by mountains. It was founded in 1749 by the colonial French and named after a vessel, Le Prince, which anchored there about 1680 (and not, as the dictator ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier apparently liked to believe, after The Prince by Machiavelli). Thousands subsist in shanties built on landfill at the harbour’s edge; even a light rainfall can put their homes under flood. Uptown, an illusion of space prevails. The presidential palace, a vast lair of power, stands at one end of a palm-fringed plaza. On Tuesday, 12 January, Port-au-Prince teemed as usual with cigarette vendors, bootblacks and marchandes. On the Rue du Commerce, office workers were making last-minute purchases before returning home. It was 4.

In November 1660, on a damp night at Gresham College in London, a young shaver named Christopher Wren gave a lecture on astronomy. In the clearly appreciative audience were 12 ‘prominent gentlemen’, who in discussions afterwards, possibly over a drink or two, decided they would meet every week to talk about science and perform experiments. In a flash, this informal gathering coalesced into a society, which they called ‘a Colledge for the Promoting of Physico-Mathematicall Experimentall Learning’. As Bill Bryson writes in his introduction, ‘nobody had ever done anything quite like this before, or would ever do it half as well again.’ In 1662 Charles II granted them a charter, and the society became the Royal Society.

A connection between poetry and blindness is a classical trope. Homer was thought to be blind — if indeed he was one person — and Milton of course suffered torture by going blind. Blindness is also associated with special powers of insight and intuition, very useful attributes for a poet. Blind poets had to develop long memories, too, if they wished to recite their works. The Odyssey is thought to have been the work of Homer’s old age. Homer and Langley is the work of E. L. Doctorow’s old age. There are fewer Homeric references than you might have expected, given that the narrator is called Homer Collyer and is blind, although, like the classical Homer, not born blind.

In this splendid, monumental slab of a book, Desmond Fitzgerald, the 29th Knight of Glin, has made the chronicle of his family epitomise the whole turbulent history of Ireland since the arrival of the Normans. The survey includes chapters by academic genealogists and other historians, with less formal contributions from the Knight himself and his wife, Madam Olda Fitzgerald. The illustrations are comprehensive: ancient maps and land- scapes and portraits ancient and modern. There are a characteristically misty watercolour by Louis le Brocquy and photographs of architectural embellishments, fine furniture and paradisal gardens.

William Trevor’s collected short stories were published in 1992 and brought together seven collections. William Trevor’s collected short stories were published in 1992 and brought together seven collections. But since reaching the standard age for retirement, Trevor has produced four further volumes, and now Penguin has brought out a handsome new edition, in two slipcased volumes. The industry is impressive, but not nearly as impressive as the quality. Trevor is routinely described as the world’s greatest living writer of short stories (I suppose the competition is Alice Munro), which makes the reviewer’s task a little tricky. It boils down to this: is he?

William T. Vollmann ruined my Christmas. But he also made my year. Like a fisherman scared by reports of mysterious beasts and monsters — Here be dragons! Gryphon! Basilisk! Unicorn! Serpent! — I’d been put off for a long time by Vollmann’s reputation as the great white whale of American fiction, the New Maximalists’ Maximalist, a kind of vaster, stodgier, blubberier David Foster Wallace. And Vollmann’s much discussed obsessions with prostitution, destitution, degradation — exhaustingly detailed in his many and often mega-books, from You Bright and Risen Angels (1987) right through to the seven-volume Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom, and Urgent Means (2003) — are not my own. Frankly, I like nice.

Some people say that nothing happens to them, but everything happens to the writer who sees the world around him as material for fiction. Francis King is such a writer, which explains why he has been able to go on writing novels and stories for longer than many of his readers and indeed publishers have been alive. When someone who brought out his first book in 1946 while an Oxford undergraduate publishes a novel as good, fresh, intelligent and moving as Cold Snap more than 60 years later, it is almost inevitable that reviewers should remark on his extraordinary literary longevity and his seemingly inexhaustible vitality. And yet this is, in all ways but one, beside the point. To dwell on his age is invidious and misleading.

Have you ever been on holiday and struggled to choose a guidebook? I mean, where does one start? I imagine in a bookshop. But, if anything, that makes the task even harder. The choice is just too wide. Waterstones sell around 12 guidebooks per major city — far more if you want a whole country (there are a staggering 23 on India, for example). So I asked around. Which guidebook, if any (young travellers are increasingly turning to the web and online travel forums for advice whilst others are too mean to buy a guidebook and rely on friends’ recommendations, a hotel map and a good concièrge), did they choose when heading off on a mini-break? Were they faithful to a particular brand or did they judge a book by its cover? ‘I take the Times World Atlas,’ said one.