Culture

Via Terry Teachout, the Elegant Variation republishes a list of books written between 1945 and 1985 that James Wood recommends you read. What's notable is not so much the list itself as the extent to which it contradicts the view that Wood takes a particularly docrtinaire view of fiction. True, he may be most famous for his critique of "hysterical-realism" but there's more to him than that and, as the list makes clear, there are some novelists after Flaubert and James that he likes. Wood's detractors  - of whom there are many - might be surprised to find Pynchon, Vonnegut, Rushdie et al on the list. For that matter, I'm surprised to see The Satanic Verses make the cut...

The Ends of Life: Roads to Human Fulfilment in Early Modern England, by Keith Thomas The English past is not what it was, for professional historians anyway. The rest of us still talk about the Tudors and the Stuarts, about Renaissance and Reformation and the Augustan Age. But within the academy all these dynasties and eras are now bundled up into what is called the Early Modern period. The inhabitants of this huge stretch of time can only be made sense of, it seems, if we think of them as a rough, awkward prelude to Us. It is startling how rapidly Early Mod has flattened the competition, and flattened our island story into a tale with only two parts, Before and After Modernisation. For it is a quite recent coining.

Love Stories, edited by Diana Secker Tesdell In Bed With: Unashamedly Sexy Stories by Your Favourite Women Novelists, edited by Imogen Edwards-Jones, Jessica Adams, Kathy Lette and Maggie Alderson When Kurt Vonnegut was interviewed by the Paris Review in 1977, he was asked: ‘Let’s talk about the women in your books.’ ‘There aren’t any,’ he replied. ‘No women, no love.’ He described this as ‘a mechanical problem’: I try to keep deep love out of my stories because, once that particular subject comes up, it is almost impossible to talk about anything else. Readers don’t want to hear about anything else. They go gaga about love.

In an admiring review (Spectator, 15 May, 2004) of Peter Parker’s biography of Christopher Isherwood, Philip Hensher conceded, perhaps reluctantly, that ‘Isherwood was not, in the end, a writer of the first rank’. In an admiring review (Spectator, 15 May, 2004) of Peter Parker’s biography of Christopher Isherwood, Philip Hensher conceded, perhaps reluctantly, that ‘Isherwood was not, in the end, a writer of the first rank’. This is probably true. The second half of his career, after his departure to the USA in 1939, was disappointing.

Sweet Water and Bitter: The Ships that Stopped the Slave Trade, by Siân Rees The narratives of slavery have, it’s safe to say, replaced the narratives of imperial adventure in our reading lives, and our moral compasses are orientated by indignation at suffering and exploitation rather than by the contemplation of our ancestors’ achievements. The slave trade, considered ‘relevant’ as well as a gruesome spectacle of human suffering on a colossal scale, is taught in schools and familiar to millions to whom ‘Nelson’ suggests only Mandela. And yet the abolition of the slave trade, over long, difficult decades, was one of the bravest and most serious endeavours of the British in the 19th century.