Culture

If you’re looking for a towering intellect to dispense guidance and illumination on current events, particularly one from Central Europe, the hearth of gravitas, piano sonatas, polyglotism, the reading of Hegel etc, Milan Kundera, in A Kidnapped West, will be a bit of a disappointment. This isn’t Kundera’s fault. The volume contains a short speech from 1967 and an essay from 1983. It’s a pleasure to see a publisher giving oxygen to learned discourse, and while both texts are as urbane and erudite as you would expect, we have moved on a great deal. A Kidnapped West needs to be filed under intellectual history. Not that everything has changed, how-ever.

Shy concludes Max Porter’s informal trilogy of short, poetic novels powered by pain and polyphony. First, in 2015, came Grief is the Thing with Feathers, in which a widowed Ted Hughes scholar is both shocked and comforted by the arrival of a croaking, crouching crow. Then, four years later, Lanny, which followed a young boy through village life, with appearances by the ancient spirit of Dead Papa Toothwort, and explored issues of alienation and isolation. Both were works of multiple voices, not always human; and both introduced Porter as a writer meticulously interested in rhythm, compression and the profoundly generative process of conveying the intersection between individual consciousness and collective identity.

As this country stumbles towards a Labour victory at the next election, the mood on the left remains subdued. The problem is not Keir Starmer’s personal charisma, achingly absent though that may be. No, it lies much deeper than that, in what Tony Benn liked to call the ishoos. The cry goes up from focus groups across the land: what does Labour really stand for? What are its Big Ideas? Does anyone know? Well, perhaps they will quite soon. Step forward Daniel Chandler, a Cambridge-educated policy adviser and think-tanker who is now completing a doctorate at the LSE.

Those of us who have never endured occupation can find it difficult to judge the behaviour of some who have. The lines between survival, passive cooperation and active collaboration are not always clear. Following the second world war, the myths of resistance, especially in France, were deliberately inflated in order to hide the humiliation and deep wounds occasioned by collaboration, which was far more widespread. Understandably sometimes; you may take risks for yourself, but when it’s your family who may be butchered, decisions are harder. It’s not only the unoccupied who find judgments difficult. As Ian Buruma demonstrates in his informed and perceptive commentary, it can be equally difficult for those who were there.

Experts in urban fauna have apparently discovered a ‘sacred triangle’ between the Parc Monceau and Neuilly in the west of Paris. A short distance from the wind-blasted northern arrondissements with their ‘robust but primitive population’, the leafy avenues and eco-landscaped gardens of private mansions on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne have created a special microclimate. Here, a protected human species has found its natural habitat and breeding ground. Avaricious, nepotistic and practically inexterminable, it has caused death and suffering on an unimaginable scale while amassing wealth which far exceeds its natural needs.

Jane Fonda’s telephone manner was nothing if not imperious. ‘This is Jane Fonda herself,’ she said one spring morning in 1982, in a transatlantic call from Hollywood to Cannes. The German film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder was so tickled that for days afterwards he took to answering every phone call in English with: ‘This is Fassbinder himself.’ ‘Fassbinder wanted to be Marilyn Monroe. He wanted to walk down a staircase wearing feathers and a gown’ It was the meeting of opposites. She was Hollywood royalty, Henry’s daughter, sexy star of Barbarella and double Oscar winner, poised to release the first of her series of workout videos that would in the next 13 years sell 17 million copies. By contrast, Fassbinder probably didn’t even own a pair of leg-warmers.