Culture

Julia Margaret Cameron is hip. This would not have astonished her - she had every confidence in her vision as a photographer - but for many decades she has been regarded merely as the female face of the male act, someone who created pretty-pretty photographs of allegorical or religious scenes, with the odd Great Man thrown in as a make-weight. This may be changing. A Cameron exhibition opens at the National Portrait Gallery this week which will give an opportunity to reassess the work; with From Life Victoria Olsen gives a look at the life. The life was, in many ways, separate from the art. Cameron worked on photography intensively from 1864 to 1875. She lived, however, from 1815 to 1879, and From Life does not scant on the other 54 years.

For the last few years Ruth Rendell has used her Chief Inspector Wexford detective novels to explore social issues that have been much in the papers. This has unfortunately made for unoriginal story lines with obvious villains in an all too familiar terrain. It is a pleasure therefore to be able to report that The Babes in the Wood (Hutchinson, £16.99) returns to more traditional territory. The novel is set during the perpetual rain that we suffered last year. Kingsmarkham, the Sussex town where Wexford bestrides the police force, is in danger of flooding. The river having broken through its banks is threatening the environs of the town, which includes Wexford's home. From his sitting-room Wexford can see the creeping tide inching up the garden.

In this book Russell Martin seeks to explain to the common reader how Picasso's largest canvas, measuring 11' 6” high and 25' 8” long, came to be called 'Guernica', after a small Basque market town of some 7,000 inhabitants and how it became the painter's best known work as an icon of the radical Left throughout the world. He achieves this by putting both the painting of the picture and its subsequent fate in their historical contexts. In 1937 Picasso had been living in France for 30 years. Yet he did not take out French nationality. Martin argues that in Paris he had become 'more Spanish than less so'.

I have an unusually vivid recollection of the first time I met John Hall. I went to his flat in Chelsea to be interviewed - as I thought - to establish whether I might make a suitable lecturer for his Pre-University Course in Venice. However, when I arrived, he got straight down to the nitty- gritty of how many lectures I would be giving, what titles I had in mind, and so on. I must have been all of 25, and had never given a proper lecture - by which I mean one without a written text - in my life. In retrospect, it strikes me that John must have been mad, or at least that if his trust did not lead to total disaster, then that only proves that he is one of those truly rare people whose guardian angel puts in a lot of overtime.

In 1926 Simon Marks, head of a little-known chain of penny bazaars called Marks & Spencer, placed an order for men's socks with Corahs, a Leicester knitwear manufacturer. The order was kept secret - the Corah brothers did not want to offend the wholesalers, who forbade their suppliers from selling direct to retailers - but it proved to be the start of a beautiful friendship. The cost to Marks & Spencer was 8s 6d for a dozen pairs of socks, a shilling less than a wholesaler would have charged. But Simon Marks was not just interested in lower prices. He wanted to distinguish M&S from Woolworths by upgrading quality and giving consumers real value for money. Hence he entered into a dialogue with Corahs on how the shilling saved could be spent on producing a better garment.

In 1909, in a late letter to his brother, Henry James bemoaned the fact that the 'novel of ideas' - the novel 'built on the momentum and inspiration found in a solid, sustainable and infinitely expandable idea' - was finally dead, and that it had died from 'lack of want or appetite in the reading public'. He complained that the modern novel was too often concerned only with the 'circumstance of character and enforced narrative', that 'novelty and fantasy and the banality of everyday ordinariness' now held sway. Nicholas Mosley has written a novel of which James would have wholeheartedly approved. Inventing God is an unfashionable, unpredictable novel in which the characters and their interactions are wholly dependent on and sustained by the exploration of the ideas at their centre.