Culture

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.

The Ancient Olympicsby Nigel SpiveyOUP, £17.99, pp. 264, ISBN 0192804332Olympics in Athens 1896: The Invention of the Modern Olympic Gamesby Michael Llewellyn SmithProfile, £16.99, pp. 290, ISBN 186197342X So politics should be kept out of sports? Tell that to the Greeks. Two absorbing new books about the ancient Olympic Games, each crammed with information about the sporting events themselves, abundantly demonstrate that the athletic contexts represented far more than sporting prowess. Stephen Miller’s richly detailed study, beautifully illustrated, is an examination of the whole of Greek culture and the role that athletics, games and festivals played in the moulding of Greek literature, vase painting, democracy and politics.

When I married Tony Parsons in the late 1970s, he immediately took me to live in a town called Billericay in Essex — his ‘calf country’, I suppose, in a Spam sort of way. To say it was a one-horse town would be to insult horses, any one of which with reasonable social aspirations would have turned back to Brentwood the minute he realised that there wasn’t even so much as a teashop in the high street. The reason Mr Parsons took me to live there, I can’t help but think, is that I was at the height of my pallid, livid beauty and he figured that before long I’d be off with someone a bit cuter, smarter — better in every way, basically. I do remember the time I looked at him and said, ‘Didn’t you used to be taller?

John Bierman, the co-author of a recent book on Alamein, had doubts about writing this biography of Lazlo Almasy, the Hungarian-born explorer of the Libyan desert, whose exploits were ‘immortalised’ in Michael Ondaatje’s Booker Prize-winning novel, The English Patient, and the subsequent Oscar-winning film by Anthony Minghella. Bierman did not want to be seen to be taking ‘a ride on the coat-tails’ of the novel and the film (in which case a change of subtitle might have been advisable). He was also, rather puzzlingly, concerned that he might find ‘something nasty in the woodshed’ with regard to Almasy’s alleged Nazi past.

Richard Holmes wrote this book 20 years ago when he was a humble lecturer at Sandhurst, long before his splendid television performances had made him a national figure. He has not had to do much to update it. In a useful foreword he describes the progress made since he wrote it in the historiography of the war — the Lions v. Donkeys debate, the research into both the operational doctrine and the social background of the British army, developments on the home front — but the focus of this biography is too limited for him to have felt it necessary to modify his original text. He might have reconsidered what he has to say about the Schlieffen Plan in the light of the recent controversy as to whether it existed at all, but this is nit-picking.