Culture

Culture

The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.

Michael J. Barany

The vexing problem of ancient Greek mathematics

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The most important thing to know about ancient Greek mathematics is how little anyone knows about it. The scant evidence available today is tremendously indirect: reconstructions from unrepresentative survivals of fragments of translations of transcriptions of commentaries on compilations of summaries of allusions to refutations of excerpts of documents produced as part of an oral culture of learning in which the original writing may never have been expected to encapsulate what really mattered. Many centuries separate the people we want to know about and even the oldest materials we have to know them with, and most of what they did and thought is simply and definitively lost. But that is only the start of the difficulty.

Oliver Balch

Cold-blooded murder in Amazonia

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Around dinner time on 21 November 2000, a nervous 19-year-old man knocked on the door of Maria Joel Dias da Costa’s house, located in the backcountry Amazonian town of Vila Rondon. The unknown man asked to see her husband Dezinho, a union leader, but he was out. She invited the visitor to wait, which he did for a while, but then he got up to go. As he was leaving, Dezinho was just arriving home. Seconds later, Maria Joel’s husband was lying dead in a ditch, the life blasted out of him by a .38-caliber revolver. So runs the centrepiece of Masters of the Lost Land, a compelling and forensically researched piece of investigative reporting by the Spanish journalist Heriberto Araujo.

Maggie Fergusson

The stone boats of Celtic saints inspire a bizarre pilgrimage

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‘Islands of stone’ would have been a good name for the Orkney archipelago, George Mackay Brown once wrote. The salt Atlantic winds mean that very few trees grow there, so stone provides for the dead – in the burial chamber at Maeshowe, for example – and the living. Less than a century ago, there were Orcadians sleeping in stone box beds. For Beatrice Searle, one Orkney stone proved life-changing. While still a teenager, she felt the stirrings of a vocation to work with stone. It spoke to her, almost literally: ‘There is information to be found in the sound of the stone, just-audible messages from the deep past to be drawn out.’ She attempted to eat it (but ‘nothing about stone eating is instinctive’).

Laurel Berger

The lost world of Jewish Rhodes

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Janet Malcolm’s formulation that a ‘journalist is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse’ comes to mind on page two of the darkly refulgent One Hundred Saturdays. That’s when the author Michael Frank mentions it was his idea to accompany his new friend, Stella Levi, on a journey back to her native Rhodes. Readers feel protective of old women, and all the more so if, like Levi, they are Holocaust survivors. As if to allay readers’ apprehensions, Frank writes: ‘Later she will tell me this was one of the reasons why she decided to trust me with her story. Later I will understand that I went, in part, to earn her trust.

Mark Bostridge

Nursing grievances in the Crimean War

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Most people know something about Florence Nightingale’s nursing expedition to Scutari and the Crimea during the Crimean War, and the ‘kingdom of horror’ that she and her nurses found there: unsanitary conditions in the hospitals, a broken-down supply system and British soldiers dropping like flies from disease rather than battle wounds. However, as Terry Tastard points out, one aspect of Nightingale’s Crimean nursing that is often overlooked is its reliance on the nuns who responded to the national outcry at the negligent care of the sick and dying.

Mia Levitin

How the Muppets went to Moscow as ambassadors for democracy

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In this engaging memoir, Natasha Lance Rogoff recounts the experience of bringing Sesame Street to Yeltsin’s Russia. A Russo-phile who changed her name from Susan to Natasha as a teenager, Lance Rogoff had been working in Moscow for more than a decade as a reporter and documentary filmmaker when she was approached to be the executive producer of Ulitsa Sezam in 1993. ‘No one can say no to Elmo,’ a Sesame/Children’s Television Workshop executive insisted. Launched in 1969 to bridge the socio-economic gap in education among American pre-schoolers, by the early 1990s Sesame Street had created nearly two dozen foreign co-productions, with programming adapted for cultural differences.

Andrew Taylor

The Scarlet Pimpernel of the Vatican: My Father’s House, by Joseph O’Connor, reviewed

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One of Joseph O’Connor’s strengths is his magpie-like approach to history: he plunders it for stories that he can rework as fiction. His new novel is based on the exploits of Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, a senior official at the Vatican, who, together with colleagues, was responsible for saving the lives of 6,500 Allied soldiers and Jews after the Nazis occupied Rome in 1943. It is by any standards an extraordinary tale. O Flaherty’s organisation called itself the Choir; the prisoners it sheltered were known as Books, and their hiding places, scattered across Rome, as Shelves.

Daisy Dunn

Butchered to make a Roman holiday: cruelty to animals in and out of the Colosseum

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Did you know that the elephant was the most written about animal in the Roman world? Pyrrhus of Epirus, of victory fame, was the first to introduce it to Italy as an engine of war when he invaded in 280 BC. Roman soldiers could not decide whether it was an animal or a machine. Eventually they plumped for luca bos (‘Lucanian cow’), though the creatures came from India rather than Italian Lucania and were more inclined to trumpet than moo. And did you know that the people of Roman Cyrene in Libya were legally obliged to declare war on locusts three times a year? The swarms were so deadly that inhabitants had to employ a three-staged attack. The eggs were killed first, then the grubs, and finally the mature insects.

24 January 2023

Alex Preston

A bleak vision of adolescence: The Shards, by Bret Easton Ellis, reviewed

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Bret Easton Ellis’s novels were my literary gateway drug when I was young, the stylised bleakness of his debut Less Than Zero a model for my own writerly aspirations. He was a wunderkind. The fact that he’d written his first novel while still a teenager seemed incredible to me as I read and re-read it: a book with little plot but with so much life. The Shards can be usefully thought of as both a prequel to Less Than Zero and a presentation of the atmosphere and circumstances that brought that novel into being. Ellis has spent much of his career exploring the territory between fiction and autobiography. Lunar Park (2005) was a kind of faux autobiography, while Imperial Bedrooms (2010) followed the semi-autobiographical protagonist from Less Than Zero into middle age.

Nicholas Lezard

If Lady Mendl didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent her

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It is Hollywood, in perpetual summer, and Ludwig Bemelmans has driven past some unusually well-groomed eucalyptus trees for a meeting with Elsie de Wolfe, Lady Mendl, interior decorator to the stars. In her salon is a footstool that once belonged to Madame de Pompadour. Lady Mendl’s husband comes into the room and trips over the stool. ‘My God, he’s dead,’ says Lady Mendl. He isn’t, of course. He’s the classic English booby beloved by Hollywood, so is immortal. Death hangs over this book in a way I’ll return to later, but at this point it’s mainly because Lady Mendl is old, old. 80? 90? No one knows for certain. But she has a force for life which is close to insanity. Everyone here is mad in one way or another.

Gillian Kenny

What the Wife of Bath teaches us about misogyny

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Marion Turner has written a superb biography of a woman who never lived. Alison, the Wife of Bath in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, is one of the most famous of all medieval women, even though she has only ever existed on the page. But Turner’s beautifully written, rewarding and thought-provoking book about this imaginary woman shows how much her literary existence has to say about actual women’s lives.   The book is divided into two main sections. In the first, Turner examines four different aspects of Alison – the worker, married woman, storyteller and traveller – and expertly conceptualises the late medieval English world and its attitudes to, and treatment of, women.

George Cochrane

Vanity Fair updated: Becky, by Sarah May, reviewed

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Insofar as every reading of a book is a retelling of it, a writer needs a very good reason for doing a ‘contemporary retelling’ of a classic. In giving Becky Sharp the fleshed-out backstory denied her in Vanity Fair, Sarah May more than meets that requirement, though her novel still suffers by its proximity to Thackeray’s original. That shadow is particularly occluding in Becky’s early chapters, when the reader’s instinct is to look for what they know, not what is new. To speak only of the unmissable differences, then, May’s Becky is a Gen Xer, not a Georgian, an aspiring journalist, not a socialite, and her story is told in the first person, not the third, a choice that puts her at the centre of the narrative in a way she never is in Vanity Fair.

Daniel Rey

Mario Vargas Llosa’s Damascene conversion to liberalism

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Mario Vargas Llosa wasn’t always a liberal. From his youth until his early thirties the Peruvian writer, born in 1936, was enthused by the utopian promises of socialism. He joined a communist cell at university, and in the 1950s spent half his salary on a subscription to Les Temps Modernes, the leftist journal founded by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Vargas Llosa’s world view changed radically in the late 1960s, as he watched the Cuban revolution silence local writers and put homosexuals in forced labour camps. During a visit to the USSR in 1968, he realised that had he been a Soviet citizen his disregard for authority would have condemned him to the gulag.

Ian Thomson

Henri Christophe, King of Haiti, was not such a ridiculous figure

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In January 1804 the West Indian island of Saint-Domingue became the world’s first black republic after the slaves toiling in the sugar fields rose up against their French masters and, at the end of a 13-year insurgency, proclaimed independence. Saint-Domingue was renamed Haiti (an aboriginal Taino-Arawak Indian word meaning ‘mountainous land’) and the Haitian flag created when the white band was solemnly removed from the French tricolore. Haiti’s is the only successful slave revolt in recorded human history. It was led by Toussaint Louverture, a Haitian former slave himself and emblem of slavery’s hoped-for abolition throughout the Americas. Thousands of French settler colonists were massacred during the Louverturian struggle.

Lee Langley

A gripping psychological thriller: The Birthday Party, by Laurent Mauvignier, reviewed

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Imagine a Stephen King thriller hijacked by Proust. Clammy-handed suspense, nerve-shredding tension, but related in serpentine, elegant prose, each climax held suspended – deferred gratification. What Javier Marías did for the spy story, Laurent Mauvignier does for terror. It begins quietly, with an ominous sense of something waiting to happen. An isolated hamlet in deep rural France; just three houses, one empty, one occupied by a family – Patrice, a farmer, his wife Marion and ten-year-old daughter Ida. In the third, Christine, an elderly bohemian artist, enjoys the seclusion with her dog for company. Each of these characters in turn will take up the narrative in a tortuous relay race.

R. W. Johnson

How Hitler benefited from the Allies’ mutual distrust

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In February 1939 Edouard Daladier, the French premier, told the US ambassador William Bullitt that ‘he fully expected to be betrayed by the British’, whose prime minister was ‘a desiccated stick, the King a moron and the Queen an excessively ambitious woman’. The British had become so feeble, he said, that they would betray all their friends rather than stand up to Germany and Italy. The British harboured similar views of France. Even when it came to declaring war in 1939, Chamberlain had to wait many hours for Daladier to follow his lead. Daladier then merely said: ‘We are waging war because it has been thrust on us.’ R.T.

Justin Marozzi

Here be dragons, dog-headed men and women growing on trees

Lead book review

I have to confess that this book sat on my desk for several months. The words ‘Harvard University Press’ cast a strange and unsettling spell which prevented me from even opening it. Let’s be honest: academic presses are not always synonymous with rollicking reads, nor indeed are academics. They can ask an awful lot of the general reader – that would be most of us. Given how short life is, there is no good reason why reading should be more of a pain than a pleasure. Thankfully, the spell finally wore off, which was fortunate, because this book about a book, like the book it describes, is a rare and marvellous thing.

19 January 2023

Annie Gray

English food has always been a moveable feast

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There is a lot to like about Diane Purkiss’s English Food. It’s a hefty thing, packed full of titbits to trot out down the pub, but also a serious consideration of how English food has changed over time, and of the perils of assuming there has ever been a golden age, or even a very stable one. The layout is good, organised thematically rather than a chronologically, which saves the book from getting bogged down in repetition, and avoids the common trap of listing endless menus and foodstuffs. The best chapters are often the shortest. The one on apples includes a fascinating collection of facts, folklore and recipes, as well as a consideration of just how difficult it is to work with historic definitions. The section on codlins – a big or small apple? One that cooks to a foam?

18 January 2023

David Kynaston

Was the closure of the grammar schools really such a tragedy?

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In 1959, the public (i.e. private) schools were responsible for 55 per cent of the Oxbridge intake. By 1967 they were down to 38 per cent, with the majority of places going instead to the grammar schools. Four years later Anthony Sampson welcomed how ‘the trickle of grammar school boys to Oxbridge has turned into a flood’, adding that ‘both in intelligence and ambition they compete strongly with the public school boys’. In short, a new, largely state-funded elite was now emerging to rival the familiar products of Eton, Winchester et al.

17 January 2023

Christopher Priest

Victorian science fiction soon ceased to be fanciful

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One of the more daft but enduring spin-offs of the science fiction genre is steampunk – fiction fashioned with a retrofuturistic love of 19th-century industrial technology. Think of an ironclad of the air, shaped like a fantasy submarine, with six or more propeller engines powered by cogs and levers, funnels pumping out coal smoke from the steam turbines, windows replaced by watch dials, and hundreds of rivets holding the whole thing together. Inside would be a palm court saloon hosting a tea dance. Many of the gentlemen are garbed in comic-book versions of the army officer and entrepreneur style of British imperialism, the ladies in dark velvet, veils and stays, and an orchestra in evening dress and moustachios. Weird eyepieces, top hats and ancient firearms are omnipresent.

Susie Mesure

Women keep disappearing: A Dangerous Business, by Jane Smiley, reviewed

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Jane Smiley has form with mining classics for plots. Her 1991 Pulitzer winner A Thousand Acres was based on King Lear. Boccaccio’s The Decameron and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn also inspired two of her previous 15 novels. In A Dangerous Business, which is set in a brothel in lawless 1850s California, she does something slightly different, using Edgar Allan Poe’s fictional detective C. Auguste Dupin to prompt her protagonist Eliza Cargill into action when women start disappearing from Monterrey. No one cares enough about the missing women – who, like Eliza, are prostitutes – to investigate. Monterrey has no constables, only vigilantes, who are more interested in money and feuds.

Felipe Fernández-Armesto

What did indigenous Americans make of Europe?

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The most influential Native American visitor to Europe in colonial times was a fiction. The protagonist of L’Ingénu, Voltaire’s novel of 1767, and of a dramatisation by the sage’s acolyte Jean-François Marmontel, was the very model of a noble Huron. He fought the British with distinction, fell in love with an imprisoned French lady and assaulted the Bastille to liberate her. The strikingly prescient central event makes his story excel even the Great Cat Massacre as a prefiguration of the French Revolution. Indeed, the discovery of the natural wisdom of the savage facilitated the philosophes’ esteem for the common man. By empowering the massesthey imperilled themselves – but that is another story.

Jude Cook

A treasury of wisdom about the writing life

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In the penultimate entry of Toby Litt’s A Writer’s Diary, an autofictional daily record of a writer named Toby Litt (which first appeared from Substack), he admits he began the project wanting to write ‘the best book that has ever been written about writing – about the physical act of writing, and the metaphysical act’. He may not have succeeded (Norman Mailer’s The Spooky Art might fit this description), but substitute the word ‘living’ for ‘writing’ and he might be closer to an apt summary. It’s an extraordinary record of life’s minutiae, oscillating from the trivial to the transcendent, often on the same page. Which isn’t to say the book doesn’t contain a treasury of wisdom about the writing life.

Emma Beddington

Tears and laughter: We All Want Impossible Things, by Catherine Newman, reviewed

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Edi is dying of ovarian cancer and she’s craving the lemon cake she once got from Dean & Deluca deli in New York in the mid-1990s. Her forever best friend Ash is keeping vigil by Eli’s bedside in the Graceful Shepherd Hospice in western Massachusetts, trying to track down that elusive cake and keep Edi happy and comfortable with juice, lip balm and company. She’s also ‘whoring around’ (Ash’s words) with a variety of inappropriate people: the palliative care doctor, a substitute teacher from her daughters’ old school, and Edi’s brother. Then there’s her own not-quite-ex-husband, Honey… That’s the set up for the US memoirist and journalist Catherine Newman’s first adult novel.

Clare Mulley

Sidney Reilly, Ace of Spies, remains an enigma

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‘James Bond is just a piece of nonsense I dreamt up,’ the former naval intelligence officer Ian Fleming once said. ‘He’s nota Sidney Reilly you know.’ Sidney Reilly was not really Sidney Reilly either; but he was certainly a James Bond. Born Sigmund or Schlomo Rosenblum (this is a book full of caveats), he spoke possibly six languages and identified at different times as an Englishman, an Irishman, a Greek or Turkish merchant, a German machine-tool operator and a Tsarist officer. In fact he came from a Ukrainian Jewish family, but ignored his heritage as much as prevailing anti-Semitism would permit, and devoted his life to making love and money and, with only slightly greater dedication, fighting Bolshevism as an MI6 spy.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett

The radicals of 17th-century England began to think the unthinkable

Lead book review

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was the century, as the historian Kevin Sharpe wrote, summing up the Whig view, ‘in which the champions of law and liberty, property and Protestantism triumphed over absolute monarchy and popery and laid the foundations for parliamentary government’. It was a century of recurring plagues and fire and bloody civil war. It saw successive waves of witch hunts, the beginnings of the Enlightenment and the founding of the Royal Society. It saw revolution and regicide followed by restoration and revolution again.

12 January 2023

Olivia Potts

When street hawkers were a vital part of London life

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If you read only the title of Charlie Taverner’s book Street Food you could be forgiven for assuming it was an exploration of the stalls that line the trendier streets of our cities, offering bibimbap and bao, jerk chicken and jian bing. But the author’s focus predates brightly coloured gazebo hoardings and polystyrene packaging and looks instead at the working lives of the itinerant traders who populated London before 1900, touting everything from oysters to milk, and what their work meant for a changing capital city. By placing these vendors at the centre of the story rather than as faintly comic support acts, Tavener provides something that goes beyond individual characters.

11 January 2023

John Maier

The films of Quentin Tarantino’s childhood

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Explaining how she managed to kick her cocaine habit, the singer Fiona Apple recalled ‘one excruciating night’ she spent trapped in Quentin Tarantino’s home cinema with Paul Thomas Anderson listening to the two Hollywood directors brag competitively, and apparently indefatigably, about their professional achievements. ‘Every addict should just get locked in a private movie theatre with QT and PTA on coke, and they’ll never want to do it again,’ she informed the New Yorker some years later. I suppose that’s one accolade the pair will have to agree to share: conversation so unstimulating it undoes all the good effects of hard drugs.