Culture

This is a remarkable novel. Written in a beautifully crafted prose, its theme is the resistance of China to Christianity. Missionaries, one of them of mixed blood, make their way into the mind and heartland of China, seeking to bring the good news of the crucified and resurrected Lord to those who are still devoted to other, older, powers. For the river people worship a river god; he after all is responsible for providing their livelihood. The fish are his soldiers. The villagers know they must propitiate him. When they catch a particularly large specimen they lay it on his altar all night, in sorrow at the possibility of his anger, for when he grows angry he swallows men.

Assuming that a biography is worth writing in the first place, it is often asserted that after 20 years or so another look at the same subject is justified. It is nearly 20 years now since Selina Hastings's subtle and perceptive account of Nancy Mitford appeared; and so even if the heart sank at the thought of revisiting Mitford country - the Hons' cupboard, the 'sewers', the shrieks, 'do tell' - it seemed only fair to approach this new book about her in a positive, hopeful spirit. After all, it was possible, if not very likely given the assiduous cultivation in recent years of the Mitford literary estate, that Laura Thompson had found some new material, or at least scanned the old material with fresh eyes. Unfortunately, the heart sinks further within the first two or three pages.

Short stories are best read one a night just before you go to sleep, and this collection by Angela Huth, which brings together work from the last 30 years, would keep you going for nearly a month.

'The Age of Russia,' according to the doom-fraught speculations Oswald Spengler published in 1918, would succeed 'the Decline of the West'. For a while, it looked as if he was right. Russia's non-western credentials became part of the rhetoric of Soviet foreign policy. Hailed as 'the future which works', Russia was earnestly copied by escapers from colonialism, who wanted their newly independent countries to break with the West and bask in the 'white heat' of red technology. It was all illusory. Russia never offered an antidote to western-style modernity, just a variant of it. Now Russians sheepishly avow that they never really left the western fold.

Cocoa beans were 'found' by Europeans on Columbus's fourth, final and failed voyage (1502). The beans were sufficiently rare to be used as currency and the beverage made from them was called 'Food of the Gods' and only served to Amerindian grandees like Montezuma - in his case, in gold cups. The liquid was laced, not with sugar, then unknown in the New World, but with capsicum and vanilla, both unknown in Europe, but Europeans soon preferred to make the drink with sugar, and, after a century, with Eastern spices, including cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg. In the early White's, then a Whig club, the drink was made with milk and eggs, beaten into a froth. Dr (later a baronet) Hans Sloane was a collector whose treasures were left to the nation and became the British Museum.