Culture

It is a measure of the hypermnesia of the Nazi period — and of the concomitant amnesia of the history of communism — that Willi M.

When Count Mikl.

When in 1890 Captain A. T. Mahan, United States Navy, produced his book on The Influence of Sea Power on History, 1660-1783, it made a world-wide sensation and had important historical consequences; both Germany and Japan took note, and set out to build great navies. There is now room for a book on the influence of air power on history. It needs to be said early that Mr Budiansky has not written it; he has written instead, as an American journalist should, a collection of gripping anecdotes about the results, largely military, of the Wright brothers’ proof in 1903 that a heavier-than-air machine could fly. He presents a mass of material, unusually well illustrated — both by photographs and by numerous drawings of aircraft profiles — and clearly set down.

This book is an abridged version of one of the great works of modern classical scholarship, Donald Kagan’s four-volume history of the Peloponnesian war, which originally appeared between 1969 and 1987. This crisis in the affairs of the Greek world in the fifth century BC was seen, even at the time, as a turning point in human civilisation. Nearly half a century before, the Greeks had united against the great continental power of Persia. Led by Athens and Sparta, the two principal Greek powers, they had driven the fleets and armies of Xerxes from Europe and recovered control of their colonies on the coast of Asia Minor. Now the Greeks turned against each other. The Persian war had been followed by a period of astonishing literary and artistic achievement.

Tim Guest spent his boyhood in the Rajneesh spiritual communes during their heyday in the 1980s when they caused countless eyebrows to rise, boomed spectacularly and bust luridly in Poona, Oregon, Suffolk, and scores of places in between. So naturally he was dressed in orange from head to toe and inside and out, wore a necklace of mala beads with the Master’s picture in the locket, and was given a Sanskrit name of spiritually encouraging meaning. Deliberately provocative, rebellious, eloquent, erudite and funny, proclaiming inexhaustible sexual freedom as the route to enlightenment, the better to shock those on the outside and to make himself universally known, Bhagwan Rajneesh was not the traditional model of the Eastern mystic.

Film posters are not made to last. They appear on billboards, then they are torn down or pasted over. Sometimes they do not have even that brief visibility. The original 1927 poster for Sergei Eisenstein’s state-sponsored retelling of the 1917 Russian Revolution was dominated by the face of Trotsky. However, just as Eisenstein was getting ready to release October, Trotsky was disgraced. The film had to be cut by a quarter to match a new view of Soviet history; the poster was useless, but it was preserved and is reproduced in Emily King’s book. The odds against the survival of these commercial artworks are reflected in the private market for them. At Sotheby’s New York in 1997, a poster for the 1932 version of The Mummy was auctioned for $453,500.

Irishness is perceptible almost everywhere, if you look with eyes half closed, especially in China, Israel and the Latin Countries of the Mediterranean. Irishness traditionally means, above all, a strong sense of family and its web of interconnections, to furthest cousinhood and tribalism. However, there is not much Irishness in northern Europe, except for the pseudo-Irish pubs, and there is a lot less than there used to be in Ireland itself before the Celtic Tiger’s beguiling introduction of materialistic conformity, and the thraldom of early marriage, easy mortgages and credit consumerism. In the era of television homogenisation, Irish eccentricity no longer flourishes as it did, but is still sentimentally memorialised now and then by those no longer young.

Reviewing this novel in 1946, when it was first published, Rosamond Lehmann described it as ‘a work of great originality … a blend of fantasy, satire and romantic comedy’. Persephone Books — an imprint dedicated to reprinting forgotten classics by 20th- century women writers — have re-issued it in their now characteristic and classy plain grey dust-jacket plus lush end-papers based on fabric designs. Miss Ranskill Comes Home is the 46th title in a list that includes Monica Dickens, Noel Streatfield, Katherine Mansfield and Marghanita Laski. Persephone’s website promises books that are ‘neither too literary nor too commercial’ but are ‘guaranteed to be readable, thought-provoking and impossible to forget’.

It often seems that more rubbish is written about the cinema than about almost any other art form. Since too many films are of questionable quality it is hardly surprising that much of what is printed about them is too. Good films, though, often fall victim to pretentious criticism by poseurs, and the greater a film is (or allegedly is) the worse this risk is, and the less original thought is applied to the received wisdom. Happily, one controversialist recently threw stones at Citizen Kane, which is almost compulsory as the Greatest Film Ever Made in tiresome lists on that subject, saying: yes, maybe it is, but what did it influence and what did it change? Such lists, and indeed most mainstream criticism, regard the English cinema as a poor relation.