Culture

This intriguing novella tells the story of a drop of oil from its earlier form as the heart of a prehistoric horse to its combustion in the engine of a Ford, where it intersects with the lives of two humans. On one of these, ‘the soot particles of the ex-heart of the horse’ operate as a lethal carcinogenic agent. Related in brisk, incisive prose, the narrative consists of complex mechanistic chains that zoom from macro to micro, with chunks of technical detail that are more usually found in textbooks, or on helpful university websites, than in a novel.

In this book John K. Cooley, who has spent a lifetime writing about international intrigue, investigates the subject of forgery. More specifically, he looks at the way people have tried to use forgery as a way of waging war or seizing power. It seems like a terribly dry subject at first — lots of stuff about currency and exchange rates and the gold standard. You need to concentrate. But it’s a fascinating subject, and by the end, this book really made me think. First of all, I had the impression that counterfeit money is quite a rare thing. Not so, says Cooley. As long as currency has existed, people have been forging it. For instance, early pilgrim settlers in America traded with native Americans in their currency of seashells.

As I intend to dispute the entire thesis on which this little book rests, I should say at the outset that it is one of the best short contributions to an important argument I have ever read. Cleanly and crisply written, entertaining and clear, and packed with factual ammunition, Counterknowledge makes the ideal companion for any huntsman minded to go shooting down silly ideas. And Damian Thompson bags a whole cartload of them. Idiotic 9/11 theories, religious nuttery and creationism, Da Vinci Code-style false history, and homeopathy and ‘alternative’ medicine of every sort, fall flapping to the ground: victims of Thompson’s arsenal of information, unsparing logic and clear aim.

Early on the morning of 21 September 1809 two ministers of the crown in the Duke of Portland’s cabinet met to fight a duel on Putney Heath: they were George Canning the Foreign Secretary and Lord Castlereagh who was what we would now call Minister of War. Castlereagh the challenger was a crack shot; Canning had never handled a pistol in his life. As his letter to his wife settling his affairs makes clear, he believed he stood a good chance of being killed. Giles Hunt extends his account of the duel to embrace the study of the personalities of the two combatants and the political system within which they operated.

Norman Mailer spent his life hunting for a subject big enough to suit or satisfy his titanic ego. The post- humous On God suggests he finally hit the spot. The Almighty is made to come across as an embattled novelist — as a version of Norman Mailer himself in fact — ‘a mighty source of creative energy,’ whose most developed works are human beings, though ‘think of the excitement of God when the dinosaur came into being’. Yes indeed — the mighty brontosaurus can readily be seen as Mailer’s evolutionary ancestor. Earlier in his career, however, God wasn’t quite so competent and went through a long apprentice phase marred by failures — fish ‘with hideous eyes’ and ‘worm life, frog life, vermin life’.

‘You can tell a river-lover. They cannot help but pause on a bridge to investigate what lies beneath.’ It is hard to imagine anyone not doing that, but our author is a generous soul and wishes to include us all in his passion. I wanted to celebrate the ways in which rivers stirred spirits and set imaginations alight; to learn how they were worshipped, and then abused and overlooked … I needed to make a river journey; the question was, which river? He chooses the River Trent, which cuts across England from west to east, more or less dividing south from north, 170 miles of it before it disappears into the Humber; but he chose it, surely, because he knew nothing about it and wanted to find out.

I was astonished by the huge success of Louis de Bernières’ Captain Correlli’s Mandolin which I staggered through back in 1994. Many separate passages were colourfully and beguilingly written, but the book as a whole was confusing and over- written, as if the author couldn’t bear to stop. I haven’t read any others since, and didn’t relish reading his latest, though I was encouraged to find it a mere slip of a volume compared to Captain Correlli’s’ adventures — and Christian a very different kind of hero. A medical salesman, he believes that marriage turns wives into sisters and sex soon dies out, a painless castration.

In the midst of a passage devoted to the transcendent qualities of Henry V — ‘a true hero [with] a strong claim to be rated the greatest of all English monarchs’ — Paul Johnson abruptly drops in an aside that begins: Once when I was giving a history lesson to the late Princess Diana, we discussed the predicament of a person born to be king. She said she had found [her husband] utterly selfish and self-centred because he had been spoiled from the cradle on. I pointed out that this was the common fate of heirs apparent. Having blithely swung an axe-blow to the character of the Prince of Wales, the institution of royalty, and his own pretensions to modesty, he lurches back to an extravagant encomium of Henry’s kingly virtues.

Although there have been many architectural books featuring the works of Geoffrey Bawa, the Sri Lankan born architect, most notably a first monograph authored by David Robson a year before Bawa died in 2003, a second book, Beyond Bawa, also by Robson, is a biographical and artistic revelation.