Culture

It is questionable whether psychiatry as a whole does, or has done throughout its history, more good than harm. Certainly there are some patients who benefit from its ministrations; but there are many others who have been harmed by the wrongful administration of noxious drugs or other therapies. A less tangible, but nevertheless potentially serious, harm is that it persuades people with the difficulties in living that are inseparable from human existence that they are ill, and therefore disguises from them that the best remedy, if one there be, lies in their own hands. Indeed, psychiatry seems to have persuaded whole societies that all forms of mental distress are illnesses, for which there is a technical medical solution.

November I suggested that Hillary Clinton's own autobiography provides no evidence to support her on-the-trail assertions that she was a foreign policy player during her husband's administration: The book is not a policy manifesto of course. But even making that allowance it is striking how much of Hillary's memoir is taken up with fluff - "I had given a lot of thought to how Chelsea and I should dress on the trip. We wanted to be comfortable, and under the sun's heat, I was glad for the hats and cotton clothes I had packed" - and how little is concerned with affairs of state... Perhaps it's unfair to judge Hillary by the evidence published in a book she didn't write.

Samantha Power is currently in the UK, promoting her new book. Somehow I don't think this is quite the sort of message the Obama campaign is likely to find especially helpful: Ms Power told The Scotsman Mrs Clinton was stopping at nothing to try to seize the lead from Mr Obama. "We f***** up in Ohio," she admitted. "In Ohio, they are obsessed and Hillary is going to town on it, because she knows Ohio's the only place they can win. "She is a monster, too – that is off the record* – she is stooping to anything," Ms Power said, hastily trying to withdraw her remark... "Interestingly, the people in her innermost circle seem to not mind her; I think they really love her." But she added: "There is this middle circle – they are really on the warpath.

Did you know that the first person to cage a budgerigar was John Gould, the 19th-century English artist/naturalist? Or that the word ‘penguin’ is derived from the Welsh words ‘pen’ (white) and ‘gwyn’ (head)? Or that there is no scientific (in other words fossil) evidence that the dodo ever existed? These are just three informative nuggets from Katrina Cook’s entertaining text for her sumptuously illustrated elephant-folio-size history of bird art.

Another sad tale of a writer essentially making up a memoir: In “Love and Consequences,” a critically acclaimed memoir published last week, Margaret B. Jones wrote about her life as a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child among gang-bangers, running drugs for the Bloods. The problem is that none of it is true. Margaret B. Jones is a pseudonym for Margaret Seltzer, who is all white and grew up in the well-to-do Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles, in the San Fernando Valley, with her biological family. She graduated from the Campbell Hall School, a private Episcopal day school in the North Hollywood neighborhood. She has never lived with a foster family, nor did she run drugs for any gang members.

Wise old man* says: In the forthcoming volume of his Smoking Diaries (not out till April, but I’ve been reading a proof copy) my old friend Simon Gray makes a brave admission. Well, he makes a number of these, but this particular one struck me. ‘I haven’t read him [Henry James] for years. I don’t believe I have the powers of concentration any more, at least for the late ones, The Golden Bowl, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors.’ ‘Something in that’ was my immediate response, though actually I haven’t read The Ambassadors since I was 17, and persuaded myself, though frequently bored, that it was a masterpiece.

This is a lively contribution to that mound of books — now approximately the height of Skiddaw — about Wordsworth and Coleridge and their ladies in the Lake District. Frances Wilson has found a niche, basing her book on Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journals, written during the two and a half years at the opening of the 19th century when Dorothy and her brother lived at Dove Cottage. Dorothy was just 28 when they arrived, and Wordsworth a rather middle-aged 32, his impassioned revolutionary days left behind. Also left behind was Annette Vallon, the mistress he had abandoned in France pregnant by him. The marriage of William to Mary Hutchinson was on the cards from the time these journals begin.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (MacLehose Press, £14.99, translated from the Swedish by Stephen Murray) is the first volume of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy. Larsson was a journalist who sadly died of a heart attack before publication. But the books are selling in their millions across Europe and, once you read the first of them, it’s not hard to see why. The central character, Blomkvist, works for a hard-hitting magazine named Millennium. An attack on a corrupt Swedish billionaire has backfired, leaving him on the brink of financial and professional ruin. He accepts a lifeline in the form of a commission to investigate the disappearance of a teenage girl nearly 40 years earlier in an island variant of the classic locked-room mystery.

Another splendid obituary from The Daily Telegraph that offers a splendid view of a rather different, if also gruesome, world than with which most of us are familiar. Funny too, of course, in the way in which the sadnesses of ghastly people often can be. (I also liked the understatement here: "Like his father, however, Alec Wildenstein could become somewhat disagreeable when things did not go his way.