Ian Thomson

The word ‘obscene’, according to the dictionary, refers to anything ‘offensively or grossly indecent, lewd’. By the standards of the day, the Little Review was a borderline obscene, certainly at times salacious, literary journal. For the crime of serialising Ulysses – James Joyce’s then unpublished steamy masterwork – it was made to face obscenity charges. Operating out of Chicago and New York from 1914 to 1929, the journal introduced American readers to such modernist heavyweights as Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis and Gertrude Stein. It was not just a platform for bookish shock effects; it altered the course of American literary culture. James Joyce, who relished litigation, dreamed of a trial of Ulysses as clamorous as that of Madame Bovary Margaret C.

The word ‘ghetto’ is said to derive from the Venetian dialect term for ‘foundry’: ghèto. In the early 16th century, on the orders of the Doge, Jews were herded en masse from the centre of Venice to the Ghetto Nuovo, or New Foundry district, where metal workers had long cast cannon for the Venetian fleet. The Ghetto – the first of its kind on the Italian peninsula and anywhere in the world – became a model for segregated Jewish quarters throughout Europe. It was soon blighted by poverty, malnutrition and disease. The Ghetto Nuovo was a landmark in the history of Jewish persecution. In this fascinating history of the New Foundry and its inhabitants, Alexander Lee conjures the Adriatic seaport in all its strange glory.

Michael Moritz, one of Silicon Valley’s most successful venture capitalists, really has got it in for Donald Trump. America is currently in a ‘dark age’ of authoritarian governance, he claims, which spurns legality and liberal do-gooders everywhere. As a lifelong Democrat, Moritz was appalled when, in 2017, Trump failed to denounce the alt-right protestors who chanted ‘Jews will not replace us!’ at a torchlit rally in Virginia. Understandably, Moritz is alarmed by the tide of anti-Semitism today. His Jewish parents narrowly escaped death in Hitler’s Germany when they came to the UK on the Kindertransport. The 71-year-old Moritz now asks the question: how long before the iron-studded jackboot returns to Europe?

Northern Italians sometimes speak of Sicily as the place where Europe finally ends. The island was conquered in the 9th century by Arab forces from north Africa, who left behind mosques and orchards of pistachio and almond. The Arab influence remains strongest in the Mafia-dominated west of Sicily where the sirocco blows in hot from Tunisia. Leonardo Sciascia, the Italian detective novelist and essayist, was born in Racalmuto in western Sicily in 1921. The town takes its name from the Arabic rahal maut, ‘dead village’, after Arab settlers found the area devastated by plague. It appears thinly disguised as Regalpetra in Sciascia’s work. For years the Mafia infiltrated the town’s sulphur industry, but the mines are derelict now and the landscape looks denuded.

Zadie Smith was born in 1975 in the UK to a Jamaican mother and a British father, and grew up in the ethnically multi-shaded London borough of Brent. Her novels and essays often conjure the polyglot confusion and vibrant streetscapes of Willesden in north-west London where she went to school. Dead and Alive takes us from her beloved Kilburn High Road (Afro-wig emporia, pound shops) to an appreciation of a Stormzy concert at Glastonbury. This fourth essay collection is unfailingly interesting: Smith is uniquely placed to chart the vagaries of life in mixed-up, mixed-race Britain. Some of the greatest essayists of the 20th century were American. (Only a wordy journal such as the New Yorker could accommodate the long stroll, as perfected by Gore Vidal.

Israel would not have been born when it was – 1948 – without Hitler’s genocidal war on European Jewry. Dispossessed Jews had to be provided with a home. In the rush to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, safeguarding Arab nationalism was not the most pressing concern. Israel’s foundation thus marked a turning point in the fortunes of the world more grievous than anyone could have anticipated. Most European nations supported Israel during the Arab-Israeli war of June 1967, when President Nasser of Egypt moved his troops into Sinai on the Israeli border and, as part of a violent pan-Arabist ideology, vowed to eliminate Jews (and Christians).

One of the great works of journalism to have come out of the Jamaican-British encounter is Journey to an Illusion by the late Donald Hinds. Published in London in 1966, the book is made up of a series of interviews with Commonwealth citizens who had settled hopefully on these shores after the war. Hinds, who was born in Jamaica in 1934 and worked in London as a bus conductor, was disappointed to find that the British were not only unmindful of the Commonwealth, but disinclined to help African-Caribbean immigrants. (Gallingly for him, Italians in the Soho confectionary business were extended a warmer welcome, even though they had fought on Hitler’s side.) Inevitably as a ‘clippie’ on double-deckers, Hinds was exposed to racism.

Stephen King, 77, is a writer of towering brilliance whose fiction appeals to a reading public both popular and serious. His 60th novel, Never Flinch, unfolds in Buckeye City, Ohio, where a serial murderer is on the loose under the alias of Bill Wilson – the name of the man who co-founded Alcoholics Anonymous. Wilson has sworn to kill 14 people in revenge for the death of a friend and former alcoholic who was framed and convicted for child pornography offences. The plot is steeped in AA lore (‘Honesty in all our affairs’) and an awareness of the deleterious effects of drinking to excess. It’s no secret that King is himself a recovering alcoholic.

Olivier Messiaen was a French composer steeped in the solitude and ecstasy of Catholic mysticism: everything he wrote was dedicated to the greater glory of God. He was in thrall to the liturgical works of Stravinsky, but also to the percussive cling-clang of Javanese gamelan music and other eastern sonorities. His thirst for ‘un-French’ music sometimes put him at loggerheads with the Paris old guard who found him as fandangled and foreign as a pagoda. His ability to create new possibilities in sound was of course what made him modern. Messiaen was scarcely 20 when he wrote his hauntingly strange Préludes for piano in 1929 and the no less mysterious orchestral suite Les offrandes oubliées (Forgotten Offerings).

The travel writer Norman Lewis, the son of a Welsh psychic medium, died in Essex in 2003 at the age of 94. In his darkly comic autobiography, Jackdaw Cake, he relates how, in 1937, his mother built a spiritualist church in the north London suburb of Enfield as a sort of Taj Mahal memorial to her late husband (who was a retail pharmacist as well as a psychic). Enfield is not a likely pocket of the paranormal, but the Enfield Beacon of Light is still going strong. During its table-rapping and other spook-dabbling sessions no one is allowed to make jokes about striking a happy medium. Spiritualism is dead serious. Lewis’s humdrum upbringing in Edwardian Enfield – aspidistras, astral-planing – was far removed from the social privilege of most literary travellers.

Naples is ‘certainly the most disgusting place in Europe’, judged John Ruskin. The boisterous yelling in the corridor-like streets and beetling humanity filled the Victorian sage with loathing. (‘See Naples and die’ became for Ruskin ‘See Naples and run away’.) In the city’s obscure exuberance of life he could see only a great sleaze. Naples still has a bad name. Tourists tend to hurry on through to visit the dead cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, or jet-set Capri, renowned for the debauched excesses of Tiberius. Naples may lack the monumental grandeur of Rome, but visiting it constituted the gracious end to the Grand Tour during the 17th and 18th centuries. Naples, one-time Arcady of Bourbon kings and queens, has seen better days.