Culture

Science is sexy. It always was, as we who were forced to give up biology at the age of 14, for the irrelevant reason that we were quite good at French, have always resentfully suspected. Now, accessible and even inaccessible books on how the physical world ticks become bestsellers. The new president-elect of the Royal Society gets quizzed on BBC 4’s PM programme, and Cheltenham and Edinburgh run festivals of science in addition to their celebrations of literature and music. These happenings no longer represent straws in the wind but great bales of the stuff, and this marvellous Oxford Dictionary of Scientific Quotations is an ornament to the straw-stack.

That most astute of reviewers, Lynn Barber, recently wrote of this curiously bloodless biography that the subject is a minor star, now only remembered for one film, Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat. While this may be true, I imagine none but a dedicated cineaste can now name a film of Gloria Swanson’s apart from Sunset Boulevard, or any of Norma Shearer’s, both huge stars and Tallulah Bankhead’s Hollywood contemporaries. In fact Tallulah made nearly 60 appearances in films and theatre, some of them laughable, some memorable, all of them idiosyncratic because of her unique style. She was also one of the most famous figures of the 20th century.

From the timing of Michael Crick’s book on the Leader of the Opposition we can surmise that the author, like most of the rest of us, has made his mind up already about the result of the imminent election. There will be nothing significant to add after 5 May. The Tory party will not win the coming contest, and Michael Howard will not be prime minister. So best to get this unauthorised biography out on the shelves now, when at least its subject is doing something interesting. Even though the Tories seem placed to do better than in the last two debacles, there is unlikely to be such consistent publicity for this work in a month’s time.

For many people in the West, the Middle East is a source of perplexity and foreboding. Home to morose despotisms, political violence and a thoroughly ruined natural environment, the Middle East now sends us its refugees, headscarves and, most notably since 11 September 2001, violence. The peoples of the Middle East reply that their lives and political arrangements have been mutilated beyond repair by Western exploitation and bullying. This conversation, never very illuminating, has become even less so of late. Western reporters in the Middle East, restricted in their movements but relatively safe in their persons till the early 1980s, now find some stories simply too dangerous to report.

This posthumous book is the summation of a lifetime’s research into aspects of the 18th-century interior in the British Isles by the leading historian of the subject. I say British Isles, for John Cornforth had strong interests in Irish and Scottish Georgian architecture, as well as English. As the former architectural editor of Country Life and co-author, with the decorator John Fowler, of English Decoration in the Eighteenth Century (1974), he had already aired some of the themes developed here, and many of the subjects have appeared in articles in Country Life. It is useful, however, to have them all melded together into a seamless celebration of the golden age of Georgian architectural decoration.

Shakespeare was the great glory of England. So wrote Victor Hugo. But he added that if you went to England to admire the statue of Shakespeare you would find instead the statue of Wellington. The English did not like Shakespeare. His fame came to England from overseas. And Hugo believed that the French played their part in making the English conscious of his greatness. There is a generation of English people to whom this will appeal. Those who went to France after the Liberation found themselves taking part in discussions about Shakespeare such as they never knew in England. Central was Jean-Louis Barrault with his production of Hamlet. Was he a great actor? Was the mis-en-scène appropriate? Were the translations acceptable?