Austen Saunders

Luxurious Man, to bring his Vice in use, Did after him the World seduce: And from the fields the Flow'rs and Plants allure, Where Nature was most plain and pure. He first enclos'd within the Gardens square A dead and standing pool of Air: And a more luscious Earth for them did knead, Which stupifi'd them while it fed. The Pink grew then as double as his Mind; The nutriment did change the kind. With strange perfumes he did the Roses taint. And Flow'rs themselves were taught to paint. [...] ‘Tis all enforc'd; the Fountain and the Grot; While the sweet Fields do lye forgot: Where willing Nature does to all dispence A wild and fragrant Innocence: And Fauns and Faryes do the Meadows till, More by their presence then their skill.

Warfare was the fact of life in Britain from the reign of Henry VII to that of George II. Nobody who lived on these islands could escape it. It is estimated that, between the battles of Bosworth Field in 1485 and Culloden in 1746, 1.2 million people died as a direct result of warfare in Britain and Ireland. During the sequence of civil wars that ran from 1638 to 1660, 4.5 per cent of the English population, 9.2 per cent of the Scottish, and 20.6 per cent of the Irish population were killed. These were catastrophes far greater than the First World War (in which 2.61 per cent of the total British population died) and more terrible even than the Great Famine in Ireland in the 1840s.

When I consider how my light is spent Ere half my days in this dark world and wide, And that one talent which is death to hide, Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent To serve therewith my Maker, and present My true account, least he returning chide, Doth God exact day-labour, light denied, I fondly ask; But patience to prevent That murmur, soon replies; God doth not need Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best; his state Is kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed And post o’er land and ocean without rest: They also serve who only stand and wait. This sonnet begins as a private confession.

Cambridge academics spend a lot of time worrying about how to persuade taxpayers to keep them in ivory towers. Perhaps it’s for that reason that, twice a year, Cambridge Wordfest invites the reading public into the lecture theatre to be reminded how pleasant it is to chat about books. David Baddiel was there this weekend to discuss his latest novel. The Death of Eli Gold is about a heroically macho American novelist who finds that death is no respecter even of sexual reputations. Baddiel spoke about his desire to interrogate the fate of the Great Man in the modern world. Gold was one of these men.

This is the story of a book which argues that everything in the world is made of matter; that human flourishing should be the goal of any rational society; and that not only is divine intervention in nature or history a myth, but that all religion is a masochistic self-deception the powerful use to control the credulous. Its author was not Richard Dawkins, Karl Marx, or Voltaire; but a Roman poet called Lucretius who lived in the first century BC. Lucretius was a follower of the Greek philosopher Epicurus. His epic poem De rerum natura is a manifesto of Epicurean philosophy. This was not, as its ancient and Christian enemies said, a philosophy of hedonism. True human happiness for Epicurus was a serene state free from physical appetites and the fear of divine punishment.

Nicholas is a British lawyer working in Russia. It’s sometime around the start of the last decade. Putin is in the full pomp of his first presidential term and it’s the golden age of the Wild East (the days of ‘tits and Kalashnikovs’ as Nicholas puts it). After meeting two young Russian women on the Metro by chance (or is it?) Nicholas finds himself falling in love with one of them. He is introduced to their ‘aunt’, a survivor of the Siege of Leningrad and a living symbol of Russia’s Soviet past (with all its ambiguities). Nicholas is happy, but deep down knows that all is not as it seems... ‘Snowdrops’, by the way, are corpses which emerge, in the spring, from the snow that concealed them through the winter.

Nothing in Stephen Kelman’s Booker-shortlisted novel suggests to me that he is a cynical man (quite the opposite in fact), so it seems churlish to marvel at the perfect timing of this summer’s riots for him and his book. For while Sky News has barely finished rolling the breaking story that we are an island of two nations (the Rich and the Poor), here is a powerful tale of life among that less fortunate tribe.   Pigeon English is narrated by Harri, a ten-year-old who has just moved with his mum and teenage sister from Ghana to England. Harri is a bright, sunny boy from a loving family, but this is scant protection against the petty, meaningless, and murderous chaos of a North London estate.

Shakespeare and Milton: unsurpassable in the English canon. Milton’s mature poetry stands for perfection, Shakespeare’s for a wholeness of vision verging on the truly religious. Their examples cannot be rivalled, only followed. Dickens chose to follow Shakespeare. And now D. J. Taylor trails Dickens. Derby Day is a story about—wait for it—the Derby. A spectacular race-horse by the name of Tiberius has fallen into the hands of Mr Davenant who lives quietly in Lincolnshire. Soon he is not living quite so quietly. A brash young man from London begins to take a professional interest in Mr Davenant’s debts – and an even keener interest in his horse.

Piet Barol is young man contentedly conscious of the fact that he is ‘extremely attractive to most women and to many men’. Lucky Piet. His good looks do him no harm when he arrives in Amsterdam in 1907 to be interviewed for the position of tutor to a rich hotelier’s son. The job is his after a little flirtation with the lady of the house, and throughout the rest of the novel Piet sets to work on using his new position as a first step towards the life of luxury he feels (as most good-looking young people do) is his natural right. One of the other things he has to set to work on is his employer’s wife, who holds him to the promises of his initial sauciness. But Piet likes an older woman, so that’s alright.

Once upon a time there was a future. H.G. Wells had seen it. Apparently it was going to be naked. Well that’s certainly the impression one gets from the dollops of sex folded into David Lodge’s novel on Wells’ life, A Man of Parts. I call the book a novel because it’s called one on the cover. But in reality I think Lodge has managed to out-Hamlet Hamlet and given us a new mixed genre perhaps best described as historico-biographical-novelistic-political-critical-gossip.  ‘Nearly everything that happens in this narrative,’ we are told in a short preface, ‘is based on factual sources’. Once you tuck in, however, it’s left to you to chew over each detail and guess at its reality or otherwise.

It is 82 years since the publication of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. It was an unlikely commercial success.   After James Joyce’s Ulysses, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury might be the most famous unread novel in English. American schoolchildren are forced to plough through it (on the assumption that the Great American Novel must be hiding somewhere). But nine times out of ten, when you see a paperback copy on someone’s bookshelf, the spine is beautifully un-creased.   This doesn’t surprise me. If you or I told a publisher that we’d written a modernist novel about nothing happening over an Easter weekend, of which the first half was told in the disjointed ramblings of an idiot...

Contemporary poetry (to misquote Blackadder), is a lot like sex. Tons of it about, but I just don’t get it. So I was a little nervous when I gave Apocrypha a go. But I’m happy to say I quite liked it (I seem to remember the same thing about sex, come to think of it). Apocrypha is an entertaining collection of poems about those twilit zones of the modern imagination where the sacred meets the mundane. It’s about the experience of living with religious stories we no longer believe in literally, but which we can’t forget.

Tessa Hadley’s The London Train will feel very much at home in the Paddington branch of W.H. Smith. For like almost all of Dickens’ novels, The London Train involves a series of journeys to and from London. Unlike Dickens, however, Tessa Hadley chooses to subject her characters to repeated trips to South Wales - a part of the world that mostly escaped Dickens’ attention (a paucity of urchins, perhaps?). The London Train differs also from Dickens in that all these journeys add up to less than the sum of their parts. If Dickens’ novels weave new mythologies about how people live together in the modern world, Hadley’s loosely connected stories attempt a lower-key exploration of how even people who have shared a home for years can be very much alone.

Pointing you cheerfully in the direction of Thomas Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and Testament might be a bit like suggesting you hold your toddler’s birthday party in a funeral parlour, but do please bear with me on this. Yes, Nashe’s verses are basically about the fact that we’re all going to die – and that even when we’re having the most fun we’re still jigging a danse macarbe to the grim reaper’s jolly tune. But how prettily he says it! Flippancy aside, Nashe’s poem is at heart a cry of carpe diem. It’s from a play he wrote in 1593 to entertain the Archbishop of Canterbury when he was living in Croydon to escape the plague. Tough times, as anyone who’s been to Croydon will easily understand.

Roger Scruton is a man who has found himself condemned for defending the right things in the wrong way. Love, home, happiness and justice are the overriding concerns of his work, but his arguments about how we can achieve them have been repeatedly damned as mad and dangerous by those kind enough to appoint themselves the moral policeman of public thought. Mark Dooley, it is fair to say, is not one of those moral policeman. He is instead a Scrutonian acolyte whose aim in this book, The Philosopher on Dover Beach, is to outline and celebrate what he takes to be Scruton’s “philosophy of love”. Dooley does not try to hide his admiration for Scruton the man and Scruton the thinker.

Until the start of the twentieth century, Thomas Traherne was completely unknown. Very little of his writing had ever been published, and even less had been widely read. Over the last one hundred years, however, several manuscripts of his works have been discovered, often in dramatic circumstances (one was pulled from off a fire and still bears scorch marks). These have transformed our understanding of him. As soon as his first poems were discovered Traherne was grouped with the set of 17th century poets known as the metaphysicals. It’s easy to see why. These lines from ‘The Person’ include paradoxes and strikingly unexpected image very much like the poems of metaphysical poets such as John Donne.

If you are new to Ruskin, this volume from Penguin’s ‘Great Ideas’ series is the perfect place to begin. It contains two self-contained essays, ‘The Nature of Gothic’ (from The Stones of Venice) and ‘The Work of Iron’ (a lecture he delivered at Tunbridge Wells in 1858). The two essays are short enough to be both read over in a couple of hours or so, but they cut right to the heart of Ruskin’s concerns. What do examples of good art have in common, and why should those specific qualities make them better than bad art? What is the connection between beauty and morality, and how should a well-ordered society bring them together? What does it mean to know something?

If I were a contemporary novelist, each day I would pray in thanks for unhappy families. Where would new writing be without them? Bunderlin is another of those novels in which families’ secrets are slowly uncovered by those whose lives have been unwittingly shaped by their consequences. The Bunderlin of Bunderlin, is a rather eccentric type who forces his way into the life of the novel’s protagonist, Martin. Bunderlin is a man whom, if I were given to cliché, I would describe as a ‘gentle giant’. Fond of animals, given to wordplay (of a musical if seemingly meaningless nature), Martin first meets him as a schoolboy.

For two centuries after his death, Andrew Marvell was remembered chiefly as a politician (primarily as a defender of religious toleration). It was only in the 20th century that his reputation as poet grew to such an extent that his political career became a contextual foot-note for his literary creations. Now, however, Marvell the politician is being rediscovered. Nigel Smith’s new biography, Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon, is the latest in a number of attempts to find a new way of balancing the different ideas of Marvell that his complex life (and the various interpretations of it), has left us. Given this history, we should not be surprised that Marvell remains one of the best political poets in English.