Culture

E. Nesbit once pointed out that, in order to write good books for the young, it is not necessary to enjoy a close relationship with children in adult life. The essential thing is to retain a true and vivid memory of one’s own childhood; not only of events and people, but of feelings and emotions, sounds and smells and all the minutiae of day-to-day life. Jacqueline Wilson, the enormously popular writer and most borrowed author from British libraries, is certainly a case in point. Her childhood covered much the same period as mine, and this account, written for her younger readers, brings back a host of memories. Many of the best descriptions of childhood are written by people whose own experience of it was miserable: Dickens and Kipling are obvious examples.

Janet seems to have her life neatly organised. She’s hardworking, she has a nice boyfriend, she lives in a comfortable house and she drives a dark-green Golf. Recently, however, she has been receiving messages from her mind. Seizures (which also occurred in her childhood) will strike without warning and leave her humming with nervous tension — a struck tuning fork. Janet disregards this important signal of an imminent decline; in any case, her attention is diverted by a call from a solicitor. She is told that she has inherited, from her mother, a house beside the sea. Janet is puzzled by this news. She had always believed — had been told by her father — that her mother was killed in an accident when Janet was a little girl.

When in November 1975 Franco died, he still possessed the powers granted him by his fellow generals after the outbreak of the Civil War. Such powers, a French general observed, had been enjoyed by no leader since Napoleon. For 36 years, ‘all important decisions’, in John Hooper’s words, ‘were taken by one man’. In the last instance he decided who should govern Spain under his guidance. With the constitution of 1978 Spain became a democratic constitutional monarchy. Governments are the creation of free elctions based on universal suffrage. Elections are a contest betweeen two modern mass parties: the progressive centre left Socialists and the conservative right-of-centre Partido Popular.

Novelists do not always make the best critics, and vice versa. But there are writers — Henry James, Virginia Woolf and John Updike spring to mind — who are similarly gifted in both fields. Such cases are interesting because of the questions they raise about the relationship between the novels and the criticism. How similar are the two stylistically? Can the judgments of the critic ever be independent of the inclinations of the novelist? (Or, to put it another way, are writers likely to favour those novelists who most resemble themselves?) Trickier still is the question of truthfulness: which, out of the fiction or the criticism, can best be said to represent the real author? Fiction’s domain is the imagination, whereas criticism deals with facts.

The 17th century was the heyday of the English ghost. Up and down the kingdom during those ‘distracted times’ of the Gunpowder Plot, Civil War and Commonwealth, spectres, revenants and phantoms were at their most restless and fretful. Church bells rang without human agency, invisible armies clattered to and fro in the darkness, drummers sounded a ghoulish tattoo through midnight bedchambers, a whole menagerie of ectoplasmic beasts terrified kitchenmaids or sent children into hysterics.

Until fairly recently, the name Thyssen-Bornemisza held generally positive associations — with vibrant German industrialism, responsible capitalism, pan-European cosmopolitanism, artistic connoisseurship and philanthropy, all tinged with a pleasant whiff of Hungarian nobility. Just how deeply erroneous these are revealed to have been is staggering. August Thyssen, who created the family fortune in the second half of the 19th century, was neither an inventive manufacturer, nor an adventurous entrepreneur, nor a creative capitalist. He made his money by marrying sensibly, associating with the right people and taking advantage of opportunities. He was a careful, thrifty, cost-cutting, cheese-paring and exploitative industrialist, more of a quartermaster than a captain of industry.