Culture

The game of golf developed in Scotland in the 15th century. This trio of books chronicles the life, times and competition records (blow by blow and, occasionally, hole by hole) of three golfers who on any reckoning rank among its ten greatest exponents of all time. They cover three distinct periods of the 20th century and open windows on social as well as sporting history. The career of Bobby Jones climaxed in 1929 when he won the then Grand Slam of US and British Open and Amateur Championships in an era when (which would be inconceivable today) an amateur could match strokes with the professionals; and the professionals used the tradesmen’s entrance in club houses.

Life in Iraq may not be half as apocalyptic as the media would suggest, but it is still sufficiently turbulent to welcome the reissue of Victor Winstone’s classic biography of Gertrude Bell, Arabist, explorer, archaeologist, snob and co-founder of the Iraqi state. Originally published in 1978, it has been updated to include the most recent conflict in the Middle East. This is a shame and disappointment, because much of Winstone’s revised introduction reads like a teenage diatribe against Israel and America. It is not worthy of his fine study of this remarkable woman’s life.

The Pentateuch belongs to all sorts of different people and I cannot speak for them and their needs, so I’ll stick with what I know. Most of my church friends rarely read the first five books of the Bible because they rarely read the Bible. They own Bibles, of course, several, maybe a Vulgate, a King James, a Revised Standard or even one of the more modern ones such as the Jerusalem. But they seldom open them; for a very good reason. They think it wiser to take their Scripture in short chunks edited and organised for them by authority. So they read it as presented in the Breviary or Prayer Book, in the various readings at Mass or in extracts followed by commentaries. They like their gin with plenty of ice and lots of tonic.

The word ‘Wahhabi’ entered popular consciousness at the same time as ‘9/11’ and is now about as loaded as the word ‘Nazi’. But whereas ‘Nazi’ is understood by all, ‘Wahhabi’ has crept into the vocabulary of modern global terrorism with little explanation other than that it and ‘Wahhabism’ are considered part of the mindset of men like Osama bin Laden. It goes without saying that the Western world needs to know all there is to know about Wahhabis, so when a book comes along that claims to be the first serious study of the man who gave his name to this particular brand of bigotry we should take it seriously.

Opinion polls, it could be said, are the descendants of Mass Observation. This was a non-academic social survey started in 1936 by three people. Tom Harrisson was an anthropologist who had turned his attention from the tribes of the South Pacific to the habits of the people at home. He employed investigators to observe the citizens of Bolton as they went about their daily business. Charles Madge, a radical poet, and Humphrey Jennings, the film-maker, at about the same time and unknown to Harrisson were planning a scientific survey of ordinary people’s lives. This was to be conducted by means of sending out detailed questionnaires to a host of volunteers about their habits and possessions, their attitudes and opinions.

One of the more amusing characteristics of the English upper classes is their habit of going around disclaiming their upper-classness. Just as Anthony Powell, a lieutenant-colonel’s son educated at Eton and Balliol and married to an earl’s daughter, used quite seriously to maintain that he was ‘a poor boy made good’, so Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, an earl’s grandson whose father was a Harley Street physician in the inter-war era, spends a large part of this highly entertaining memoir explaining that he is actually deeply middle-class. The general effect is rather like an Edwardian stage play in which the dinner-jacketed exquisite turns out to be a cockney burglar in disguise.