Culture

Fool’s Gold, by Gillian Tett Millions of words and scores of official reports on the credit crisis have poured out. There has been no shortage of criticism, especially from political leaders eager to deflect responsibility from themselves. The catastrophe is a man-made disaster, and in years to come historians will ask how it could possibly have been allowed to happen. Gillian Tett’s Fool’s Gold is the book they will turn to. The story she tells reveals in painful detail how credit derivatives came to be invented and then misused on an unimaginable scale. It is a thriller. The idea emerged from a wild weekend party of J. P. Morgan ‘rocket scientists’ (as they used to be called) in 1994 at Boca Raton, a Florida resort.

Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo, by Michael McCarthy Wings and Rings: A History of Bird Migration Studies in Europe, by Richard Vaughan On a May night in 1967, walking home down a Dorset farm track, I counted the song of 13 nightingales. Today in those woods no nightingale is heard. For 40 years I visited a bridge on the Dorset Stour to watch sand martins nesting in the riverbank. Since 1984 they have vanished. In 2002 I wrote a letter to the Times, headed ‘The last cuckoo’, to note that for the first time in decades I had not heard the cuckoo arriving on the button (17 April in Dorset, 18 April in Somerset), My letter was not printed.

It was probably a mistake for Monica Ali to call the hero of her third novel Gabriel Lightfoot. The reader thinks of Hardy’s bucolic swains and the reddle-man’s cart disappearing over Egdon Heath, whereas instead there lumbers into view a 42-year-old hotel chef with an incipient bald spot and inadequate leisure. On the other hand, Hardy would doubtless have cocked a knowing eye at the complexities of Gabe’s personal-cum-professional life, the fading nightclub singer avid to marry him and bear his children, and the pair of business associates keen to bankroll a swish Pimlico restaurant with his name above the door.

The Children’s Book, by A. S. Byatt I should declare an interest. Nineteen years ago, I believe that A. S. Byatt saved the lives of my unborn twins. When I went into premature labour at 22 weeks, I was rushed into hospital, put on a drip, and told it was absolutely vital Not to Panic. Useless advice. So I took to fiction, as narcotics for the unquiet heart and brain. On that first long night, day and night, I read Possession, at a single sitting, or rather lying; and it worked, magnificently. The twins were not born until eight weeks later, and survived. The point of this confession is to remind readers that Byatt’s novels, at their best, are tremendous page-turners. Few other modern novelists could have absorbed me in such circumstances.

To some it might seem unbelievable that a goal scored at a football match at Anfield between Arsenal and Liverpool 20 years ago could be the event around which anyone could write an entire book. But this is exactly what Jason Cowley has done. Despite a childhood spent in the East End, and with a West Ham- supporting father, the author has been, from an early age, an avid Arsenal fan and wears his Arsenal shirt under his jacket when standing with his father at Upton Park. This book is certainly not just for Arsenal or Liverpool fans but for all who want to reflect on the huge changes which have taken place in the culture of football over the past 20 years. The watershed year was 1989.

For years an intimate friend of my mother Rachel Cecil, Frances Partridge inhabits my memory from early childhood. Before she reached 50, her dark, delicate skin was already seamed with a thousand wrinkles like a very old woman’s, although she remained youthful all her prodigiously long life, retaining an acute power of sympathy. She would ask one searching personal questions and loved arguing, but good-humouredly, despite her strong pacifist and anti-religious convictions which were hotly contested in my home. Her youthfulness showed also in her birdlike gaze and musical, emphatic voice, the hallmark of the Bloomsbury circle with which she was so long associated.

Alain de Botton recently said that he’d been congratulated on his prescience for writing a book about the nature of work in these times of economic woe. But he wasn’t prescient, he said — just interested in the subject. He has been pondering it for several years now, in his specific, de Botton-esque style, which is calm and leisurely, and sometimes faux-naif; a killer combination when it works. Here it works; he has pretty much got to the bottom of the subject. In his time, Alain has got to the bottom — or close to the bottom — of several subjects. Love, travel, Marcel Proust, and happiness, to name a few. As a writer, he can be attracted to the paradoxical and the counter-intuitive.

Translated to Borsetshire, John Constable’s courtship of Maria Bicknell would provide more material than any script editor could handle without straining audience impatience beyond endurance. Nine years it took, from initial yearnings and tacit engagement to get them to the altar at St Martin-in-the-Fields and even then, in October 1816, it was the quietest of weddings. Over those years Constable’s ardour was divided. ‘Deplorable as our case is, I would not be without it for the world’, he wrote to his beloved early on when she was at her most inaccessible. That left him plenty of time in which to obsess over his art. Martin Gayford has an eye for emotionally-charged episodes or ‘detailed microbiography’, as he puts it, set in and around art history.

Ask Alice combines two narratives, one beginning in 1904 in the emptiness of the American Midwest, the other in the muffled stasis of Edwardian rural England. The first follows the swift trajectory of Alice, a pretty orphan from Kansas who thinks ‘it must be fun to go places’. Alice, on the train shuttling between one set of backwoods relations and another, is waylaid by a predatory travelling salesman named Drouett; before long she really is ‘going places’. Alice is an adventuress, a red-haired opportunist, a Becky Sharp without the wit.