Culture

These days we are all sophisticates, or so we like to think. Thanks to the media and the internet we can become worldly without leaving home. What’s more, if we stay at home our theoretical broad-mindedness is never put to the test; we can express hip views and appear open to cultural differences whilst remaining comfortable by the fireside. So, asks Matthew Kneale, what happens to that kind of shallow sophistication when it finds itself on foreign ground? What happens to a smug moral code removed from its context? In these 12 short stories Kneale demonstrates the convenient elasticity of moral values.

Most biographies are written against a sketchy background of historical events drawn with just enough broad strokes of the brush to provide context for a life. Martin Crowe’s book, apart from the affecting last chapters on the autumn of Schindler’s life, is just the opposite. The milieu in which Oskar Schindler, the famous saviour of Krakow ghetto Jews during the Holocaust, operated is presented in exhaustive and brightly lit detail, while Schindler himself haunts the pages as a shadowy figure, elusive to the eye. The explanation is twofold. Crowe’s indefatigability as a researcher is beyond question. But Schindler was a minor figure in the great scheme of Nazi things and the evidence on which to build a biography is flimsy and bafflingly inconclusive.

David Thomson is one of a handful of highbrow film critics writing today, along with Ron Rosen- baum and David Lane, whose work will still be read decades from now. He is best known for his amazingly ambitious Dictionary of Film, an ocean of mini-essays about every major figure in international film in the past century, and the best toilet-side reading on earth. Somehow Thomson has come up with an even more daring agenda for his follow-up performance. In Scott Fitzgerald’s final, unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, he writes that Hollywood ‘can be understood, but only dimly and in flashes. Not half a dozen men have ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads.

John Harris, the mop-topped commentator from Manchester, better known as a music journalist (and a very fine one) than a political correspondent, is in a pickle. Having voted Labour his entire adult life, he now finds himself horrified by the New Labour project, and by Blair and Blairism in particular, and wonders whether it isn’t time to swear allegiance to another party. In Harris’s childhood home ‘the Labour Party was like Church’, and that morning in 1985 when, as a 15-year-old, he came down to breakfast to find a Labour party membership form next to his cereal bowl it was the ‘equivalent of Confirmation’. In So Now Who Do We Vote For?

The Australian Robert Dessaix, a Russian scholar, chooses to regard himself, in relation to Western civilisation, as an ancient Greek might have considered a Phrygian or a Scythian — a barbarian outsider. This, he believes, brings him even closer to his beloved and Russian Turgenev, who spent most of his adult life outside Russia, but whom his lifelong love, the French opera singer Pauline Viardot, always regarded as ‘a barbarian’. This famous love leads Dessaix to speculate about the nature of love itself. It was ‘triangular’, in the sense that Viardot was married, and, in the manner of the 12th-century troubadours, it became a ‘courtly love’.