Culture

I was bemused by this novel — a first from Katherine Bucknell, better known as an editor of Isherwood’s diaries and of Auden studies. In its concentration on houses (in London and Virginia) and their furnishings, I kept thinking of Henry James and such novels as Portrait of a Lady and The Spoils of Poynton and this had me holding my breath, hoping for more psychological complexity and characters changed by experience. In opposition to this, I sometimes had the exasperated feeling that I was reading Interiors magazine with a rather thin story attached. What is of interest in Canarino is that it is not so much a portrait of a lady as a portrait of a neurotic monster.

Said Aburish, a Palestinian with excellent English who worked for years in Iraq, wrote a very good biography of Saddam four years ago. He brought out the full horror of the regime, and showed how Saddam’s hero was Stalin, even to the point that Stalin’s works were Saddam’s bedtime reading (such, at any rate, was the theory: porn magazines were probably the reality). Killing off Shias, clearing the Kurds out of the oil towns in northern Iraq, and launching himself as hero of the down-trodden Arabs, Saddam clearly had Stalin in mind. Aburish’s book was a good one, but it was also inspired by animosity — ‘from vigilance of grief compell’d/ To hate from having loved too well’, in the words of the old song.

One of the chief characteristics of New Labour, Blairism or the Project — they amount to the same phenomenon — is that many of the cheer-leaders began their careers not just on the far left of the Labour Party but so far to the left as to be outside the party completely. Peter Mandelson and John Reid belonged to the latter group; Charles Clarke, Patricia Hewitt and Jack Straw to the former. They then went on to serve Neil Kinnock with varying degrees of devotion. By and large, they had an unhappy time under John Smith, who tended to prefer old-fashioned Croslandite revisionists. But they return- ed to prosper under Tony Blair, whose most forceful critics were themselves in- clined to be old revisionists such as Roy Hattersley.

James Surowiecki is a Martian. True, he doesn’t have pointy ears and he writes a financial column for the New Yorker. But only someone fallen to Earth would celebrate the obvious as much as he does. When he ventures out into a city, he marvels at the fact that fast-walking pedestrians don’t bump into each other on a crowded pavement. He calls it ‘the beauty of a well- co-ordinated crowd’. When he goes into a supermarket in search of orange juice, there’s the juice carton ready and waiting for him! How did the grocer know he was coming? And how does he know he’ll want some more juice tomorrow? He compares supermarket supply chains to the spontaneous movements of a flock of starlings.

Lawyers meet lawyers, historians and economists meet their colleagues. They have a defined profession. Creative writers have no defined profession: their concern is human nature in all its complexity. Yet they do bump into each other and are often obsessively interested in each other’s works and lives. Rachel Cohen is concerned with the way their lives become intertwined as a result of ‘a chance meeting’. James Baldwin reluctantly goes to a Paris party of the Marxist writer Jean Malaquais where Norman Mailer, glass in hand, is doing his loud-voiced party piece. It is the point de départ of a friendship based on mutual admiration. Is this first chance meeting significant? They would inevitably have met, since they moved in the same radical circles in New York.

The saga of the First Afghan War, one of the greatest disasters ever met by the British army, has been told many times before, and I had vowed to throw any book that told it again away in the bin. But Ben Macintyre has found a wholly original angle on it by turning the spotlight on a mysterious American, Josiah Harlan, whose story briefly crosses other accounts of this period. In doing so, he has produced a riveting book and a valuable contribution to Great Game literature. It is the story of the American adventurer who has passed into the folklore of the North-West Frontier and was almost certainly Kipling’s inspiration for ‘The Man Who Would Be King’. Some of the story has been told before in the comparatively obscure journal Afghanistan (July-September 1947).

Britannia’s Children: Emigration from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland since 1600by Eric RichardsHambledon & London, £19.95, pp. 388, ISBN 1852854413 In the middle of the 19th century, Londoners grumbled about the number of Italian urchins grinding barrel organs on street corners. Criminals and people-traffickers had brought many of them to Britain and their melody- making was becoming a nuisance. Charles Babbage complained that their racket was disrupting his concentration while he was trying to build his calculating machine. The Times got equally huffy. With a change to the law making life more difficult for the grinders, the money, such as it was, fell out of the barrel-organ market. The boys grew up and went into the next big thing — ice cream-vending.

All Archbishops of Canterbury fail. Dr Carey quotes Archbishop Cosmo Gordon Lang’s famous dictum: ‘The post is impossible for one man to do, but only one man can do it.’ It is not simply that there is too much for one man to do. The real problem is that the internal contradictions of Anglicanism have become impossible to resolve. What do Anglicans believe? Archbishop Lang could have referred an enquirer to the catechism of the Book of Common Prayer. But that shiny little black volume is no longer to be found in most churches today, and the possibilities for schism and chaos have multiplied. Poor Dr Carey. He cannot be accused of ever having wanted this poisoned chalice; his appointment was as much a shock to him as it was to everyone else.

Philanthropists are a boring lot these days. Your modern seven-figure donor is either resolutely anonymous or else determined to be seen as approachable Mr Average, quiet and unassuming, who just happened to have the chequebook handy. Gone for ever, it seems, is the splashy, domineering article familiar to our great-grandparents, combining a certain Dickensian whiff of Bounderby and Pecksniff with an innocent delight in showmanship, exercising his benevolence as a kind of pantomime ‘Grand Transformation Scene’, ending in paeans of praise from a grateful proletariat. William Hesketh Lever never wanted to be seen as philanthropic, and was always at pains to emphasise the self-interest of any step he might take towards improving other people’s lives.