Bryan Appleyard

Kissing is a tricky subject. It has a complex, baffling history. The kiss of a baby is one thing; the kiss of lust something quite else. Kings, generals and prelates used to kiss, as did mafiosi – often before killing. The kiss has many meanings, all of which are explored in this informative, if sometimes wearing, book. Finally, a warning: if you’re queasy about arse-kissing, don’t read it. But then you would be missing a lot. Katie Barclay, a diligent Australian academic, has written an ‘overview of the world of the kiss in Europe from medieval times to the present’. Her opening words begin listing the startling variety of the kissing involved: ‘Smooch, snog, pash, smack, peck, canoodle...

I had not thought much about spiders until I read Maria Tatar’s Arachnomania; now I can think of little else. I even watched a film mentioned in the book – Eight-Legged Freaks. It was awful, though it did bring home how very scared people can be of spiders, especially large ones. But, as Tatar shows, spiders are also part of human history and culture; and they really are different. I use fly sprays to get rid of insect intruders. I would never now use them against arachnids as well. Tatar was first drawn to spiders by the Covid pandemic which locked us all down. It was then she discovered that the eight-legged freaks offered the possibility of ‘finding a model for survival and creativity in times of seclusion, darkness and gloom’. They are, as we shall see, paragons of survival.

These two books are about aliens – intelligent beings who may or may not have visited our planet. Jonathan Caplan is a distinguished lawyer and believer; Danny Lavelle is a journalist and sceptic. Aliens have always been with us. For at least 4,000 years there have been reports of strange visitations assumed to come from heaven, hell or simply the universe. Angels and demons were commonplace, but they were eventually replaced by technology-based visions, most often flying saucers. These could be quietly ignored until 1947, when postwar alien fever was sparked in Roswell, New Mexico. Metal and rubber debris were found which the US army initially claimed were parts of a ‘flying disc’.

This book begins strangely. Kathryn Paige Harden and her man Travis go off into the Texas desert to take some LSD in the hope that it will provide a ‘hard serotonergic reboot’. They have not so far had sex, but Travis has plans. ‘You’ll come back with your third eye,’ he says, ‘and then we’ll fuck. You’ll be glad we waited.’ At this point you may be tempted to hurl the book across the room. The self-centredness is oppressive. But persist. It rapidly becomes a very powerful read. Harden is a psychologist and behavioural geneticist, and the primary theme of Original Sin is the way in which science raises questions about morality and the law. For example, is a psychotic man who murders his wife less guilty than a sane man who does so with a clear head?

‘Artisan’ is now a word attached to coffee, candles, paper, clothes, rugs etc. It is used to raise prices by giving consumers a warm feeling of being pampered with the solid, ancient virtues of the handmade. It is, of course, a lie. If you want to know about Britain and yourself, read this book. James Fox is an academic and broadcaster. His book is a history of the true artisans that made Britain – the carpet-weavers of Kidderminster, the hatters of Luton, the Chilterns bodgers with their Windsor chairs, the potters of Stoke and the brewers of Burton. The strong, proud feeling of craft locality meant that every town was different, as opposed to now when, as Fox says, ‘every high street looks alike’.

There are three parties when it comes to global warming. First, the hard right, which says it isn’t happening, and even if it is that we can do nothing about it. Then there are the far leftish Luddites who would smash all power generation systems, allowing only wind turbines, wave power etc. Finally there are the suave centrists who know perfectly well that only nuclear can save us. This book will become their bible. Tim Gregory is a nuclear scientist who works at Sellafield. He has a serious problem defending his conviction that nuclear is the answer: radiophobia, the terror people feel about radioactivity. Superficially, this terror seems well-founded.

‘Christianity,’ writes Bijan Omrani in his opening sentence, ‘is dying in England.’ Does it matter? His next sentence makes it clear that, for him at least, it does. ‘In this generation, the religion that has defined the spiritual life, identity and culture of the country since its origins as a unified state in the 10th century has come into its death agony.’ This, he adds, is ‘far more profound than anything like Brexit.’ The implication is either that we are nothing without our religion or we are becoming something unrecognisable and untested by history, a people without a story, with no tale to tell themselves. This book is a history of what we are losing. It is compendious, well written and alarming because we are evidently in danger of losing everything.

In Paris in 1740 the hangman publicly burned his most famous book. In England some of the best and brightest – Alexander Pope, Henry Fielding, Bishop George Berkeley, Jonathan Swift and John Wesley – queued up to destroy his reputation. The book was The Fable of the Bees (1714) and the author was Bernard Mandeville, popularly known as the Man-Devil. After Mandeville’s death in 1733, Samuel Johnson, perhaps the wisest Englishman who ever drew breath, admitted that the book had ‘opened my views into real life very much’. And David Hume, the great British philosopher, said the Man-Devil was, in fact, one of the most important figures in the development of ‘the science of man’.

The memory of Tsutomu Yamaguchi will be with me for some time. Though wounded, he survived the Hiroshima atom bomb and returned to his home town, Nagasaki. Three days later, he survived another nuclear attack. He died in 2010, aged 93. This fat, complex, good-natured and intriguing book is full of such memorable material. Hanno Sauer is a German philosopher with an all-encompassing mind and a capacity to entertain. His arguments are sometimes clogged and improbable and I don’t find his primary thesis – basically that things can only get better – credible, but then I feel the same about most philosophers. The thesis is based on Sauer’s belief that moral norms are what made us the dominant species and will continue to do so.