Culture

Isn’t it irritating when your ancestral manuscript collection gets in the way of your ping-pong tournament? That was Colonel Butler-Bowden’s predicament in the early 1930s. He was so peeved by the heap of rubbishy papers cluttering up his games cupboard that he declared his intention to burn the lot. Luckily, his ping-pong companion that day happened to be a curator at the V&A, so the colonel was dissuaded from book- burning and his manuscripts were shipped instead to the museum’s London archives. Among the collection was the unique edition of the Book of Margery Kempe, often described as the first autobiography in English, a sensational account of a woman’s mystical visions, travels and tribulations.

There is a concept in tech and innovation – branded by an expensive consultancy company, naturally – known as the Gartner Hype Cycle. Any innovation, be it NFTs (a means of owning ‘unique’ digital art), blockchains (the technology powering crypto-currencies like bitcoin), self-driving cars or wearable tech, will go through distinct (buzzword-heavy) stages before it is adopted by the mainstream. First, it will head to a ‘peak of inflated expectations’, before entering the ‘trough of disillusionment’. As people then work out what the tech might actually deliver it climbs the ‘slope of enlightenment’ to the ‘plateau of productivity’.

Shunned by his father and his peers because of his homosexuality, Édouard Louis (born Eddy Bellegueule in 1992) left his village in rural Normandy and moved to Paris, becoming the first member of his family to attend university. By his mid-twenties he had published three well-received autobiographical novels: about working-class machismo (The End of Eddy), his experience of sexual assault (A History of Violence) and the condition of the French welfare state (Who Killed My Father). In his latest book he turns the spotlight on his mother, revisiting ‘the succession of accidents that made up her life’. Monique Bellegueule had ambitions to train as a chef, but was derailed by teenage pregnancies and terrible relationships.

The concept of vaccination evolved from 18th-century inoculation practices and many people contributed to the accretion of knowledge. This book focuses on two individuals: the Quaker doctor Thomas Dimsdale, who, from his small Hertfordshire surgery, pioneered a simple smallpox immunisation; and Catherine the Great, who summoned him all the way to St Petersburg to inoculate her and the teenage Grand Duke Paul. Despite success all round, though, it turns out that anti-vaxxers are nothing new. After revealing the destructive force of smallpox – in one period of the 18th century, 400,000 perished annually in Europe – Lucy Ward, a journalist and former lobby correspondent, recapitulates the history of inoculation against the disease.

The moment before the fall of women’s football can be precisely dated. On Boxing Day 1920, Dick, Kerr Ladies FC beat St Helens 4-0 at Everton’s Goodison Park in front of 53,000 paying spectators, a sellout crowd. That was too much for the men at the Football Association. Hysterical at the sight of women running about as they liked and scared of competition from the female game, they banned it a year later. ‘The game of football is quite unsuitable for females,’ its ruling explained. From then on, the FA barred men’s clubs from letting women use their fields. Female players were condemned to jumpers for goalposts in parks. In the following years, many of the world’s other leading football associations followed the FA’s ban.

Margo Jefferson’s Constructing a Nervous System compresses memoir and cultural criticism into one slim, explosive volume, and in doing so the Pulitzer Prize-winning author makes both forms new. Hers is a wry, intimate portrayal of a passionate and intellectual woman coming to maturity: ‘Older women’s tales... are hard to pull off,’ she writes: ‘They risk being arch.’ But Jefferson is never arch. Her eye is too keen and her aim too true. She turns her clear gaze and razor-sharp intellect on America past and present, where freedoms are skewed and limited by race and gender.

A Little Hope, Ethan Joella’s debut novel, is about the lives of a dozen or so ordinary people who live in smalltown East Coast America. By helicopter over Connecticut ‘you wouldn’t notice Wharton right away’. Yet the problems its inhabitants face are universal. There is the seemingly American Dream family – Greg, Freddie, Addie the daughter and Wizard the dog. In line with the novel’s themes of ‘hurt’ and ‘hope’, Greg develops an aggressive blood cancer and is fighting for his life. Chemo and radiotherapy weaken him; ginger ale tastes like metallic fizz and the side-effects diminish his resolve. Freddie helps out as a seamstress at Crowley Cleaners, which Darcy Crowley established after her husband Van’s death.