Culture

Mary Beard opens this book with a recollection of her first meaningful encounter with the ancient world. It was 1960, and she was five years old, visiting the British Museum with her mother. Peering into one of the glass cases, she spotted an unassuming, oddly triangular loaf of bread from ancient Egypt. Seeing her struggle to obtain a better view, a curator lifted the object out. ‘Never under-estimate how powerful the simple act of unlocking a museum case can be,’ Beard reflects 66 years on. She describes Talking Classics as ‘more a memoir than a thesis’, but it is also a thought-provoking meditation on wonder. It was thauma, she reflects, that Aristotle held responsible for sparking philosophical thought to begin with.

If you’ve ever strolled to the Wallace Collection or hurried to an appointment in Harley Street, fled an overcrowded Selfridges or sat on a sunny bench in Cavendish Square Gardens, you’ll probably have walked past the Wigmore Hall. It’s easy to miss – a wrought-iron canopy and a small mosaic embedded in the pavement the only signage. But this ‘modest building tucked away behind a busy London shopping street’ contains multitudes. Now celebrating its 125th birthday, it has been variously described as ‘London’s most sumptuous temple of music’ and the symptom of a ‘faded, bombed-out world’; ‘a place where it was possible to experience the exotic, unfamiliar and bizarre’ and one filled with ‘too many dull concerts and too many indifferent debut pianists’.

George Forster (1754-94), the German-Polish polymath, was in every sense a late Enlightenment prodigy. He was just ten years old when he accompanied his father, Johann Reinhold, on a scientific expedition to Russia and still in his teens when he sailed with him on Captain Cook’s epic three-year voyage to Antarctica and the Pacific islands. The ensuing book, A Voyage Round the World (1777), largely written by George, became a classic. It established him as one of the most significant naturalists and travel writers of the age, leading to him being elected a Fellow of the Royal Society aged just 22. He was also a very young polyglot, having learnt German, French, English and Russian by the age of 12. (He later added Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Swedish, as well as Latin.

In July 2000, Rupert Murdoch’s Sky acquired an obscure online gambling brand called Surrey Sports. It was little remarked upon at the time but this deal would change football forever. Two years later, Surrey Sports had become Sky Bet and, by 2004, people watching football on Sky Sports could bet on the game via their remote. And why not? After all, as the Sky Bet tagline reminded viewers: ‘It matters more when there’s money on it.’ For football fans, nothing was ever quite the same again. ‘It’s difficult to overstate what the slogan did for the normalisation of gambling in football,’ writes Darragh McGee in his impressive study of how our national sport, seduced by profit, surrendered to the gambling industry.

At the turn of the 20th century, no woman was in government anywhere in the world. Change began with Finland in 1907, which elected 19 women to its parliament. Hilda Kakikoski was one of those women. She was a conservative candidate – a nationalist who was also a lesbian and a vegetarian. Paula Bartley’s Trailblazers spans the century, following the story of female politicians as they emerged. From Finland we move to Russia, where the revolution provided opportunities for the likes of the socialist feminist Alexandra Kolontai, the first woman to join a government cabinet and become a global diplomat. Constance Markievicz was the first woman to be elected to the British parliament, during her imprisonment for her role in the Easter Rising, but did not take her seat.

The title of this book takes the adage about ‘thinking outside the box’ and inverts it. Instead of thinking outside the box, we should think inside the box, David Epstein argues. Which box? How big is this box? Whose box? He discusses these questions as well. The phrase ‘thinking outside the box’ emerges from the nine dots puzzle devised by psychologists before the first world war. There are nine dots on a page, evenly spaced, three on each line. You must connect all nine using four lines without removing your pen from the paper. A common response is to imagine that the dots form a box and to confine your work accordingly. This makes the puzzle impossible to solve; you have to think outside the box. Or not think of a box in the first place.