Culture

The blue-skied, hibiscus-clad ‘postcard’ beauty of Montego Bay, where the seasons shift with the rhythm of the sea breeze, veils the terrifying reality of Safiya Sinclair’s life at home. Until the age of five, Safiya lived in a small Jamaican hamlet on the white sand close to the endless beaches that attract the tourists, many of whose ancestors, ‘the white enslavers’, stole Jamaicans’ freedom and left behind their unforgettable, unforgiveable legacy. But for a while, as music and the sweet scent of ganja fill the salt air, Safiya, born in 1984, remains convinced that her country has given her all the blessings she could ask for.

Despite the subtitle of this fascinating book, it soon turns into an account of how Peter Bellerby’s obsession eventually led to a considerable personal triumph. Unable to find a worthy 80th birthday present for his father, he set out to create a globe himself, which led him to found Bellerby & Co, ‘the only fully bespoke globemakers in the world’. His chatty style sometimes seems at odds with the meticulous professionalism of his work, which in due course led to him selling his car and his share in a house in north London. There was nothing easy about the process of establishing the company. Requirements included ‘knowledge and skill in engineering, geographical knowledge, and artistic ability in painting’, not to mention financial acumen.

There is an ancient comment (on the work of a grammarian with the terrific moniker Dionysius Thrax) that the performers of the Iliad and the Odyssey changed costume according to which poem they were reciting: a dark blue crown for the sea of the Odyssey, red for the blood of the Iliad. Emily Wilson, whose brisk and clear-eyed translation of the Odyssey became a bestseller, has now switched her sea-blue crown for her blood-red one. Even the covers of the two books – the Odyssey had a blue-dominated cover depicting the Minoan fresco of ‘Ladies in Blue’; the Iliad is red and gold, with an image of Thetis giving Achilles his new helmet – reflect the shift.

This is one of those books that may change you when you read it, so be warned –although Jenni Fagan herself warns you in the first lines: ‘Twenty years ago I began writing this memoir as a suicide note.’ Ootlin is about how the care system in Scotland failed the author in every conceivable way. Fagan is only in her forties, so this is not terribly long ago. She has dug up every file, every archive on herself as a baby in care – there are thousands of pages, ‘most redacted in black lest they validate something that would allow me to sue to the social work department’. ‘I’ve never met an abuser who owned what they did, or a system that wanted to be accountable,’ she says, and then asks us to bear witness, which we must.

It’s a convoluted title for a book, but then Lafcadio Hearn – a widely travelled author and journalist who earned his greatest fame as an interpreter of Japanese horror stories – led a convoluted life. Born in 1850 from a difficult marriage between an Irish officer-surgeon and a wildly unpredictable noble-blooded Greek woman (his middle name, Lafcadio, was adopted from Lefkada, the name of the island where he was born), he was quickly abandoned by both. His mother ended her life in an asylum; his father remarried and died young of malaria. Hearn went on to be yet again abandoned by the great-aunt who raised him, and spurned by the impatient Catholic priests to whom he was entrusted for an education.

Michael Peppiatt is an octogenarian English art historian, based in London and Paris, who has met many of the artists he writes about. But, sadly, he never met Alberto Giacometti. He was working as a translator when, in 1966, he applied for a junior editor’s job at Réalités magazine in Paris and, much to his surprise, got it. He went to say goodbye to his friend Francis Bacon,who offered to give him an introduction to Giacometti. Bacon wrote it in felt-tip on a torn-out page of Paris Match and told Peppiatt to take it round to Giacometti’s studio, which he did. But then he stood irresolute at the door, lacking the courage to knock.