Lindsay Johns

For modern America, Harlem is a once maligned, now much vaunted literary totem, which continues to occupy a gargantuan place both in the psychogeography of New York and the soul of the nation. Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, James Baldwin and Chester Himes are just a few of the writers whose names are associated with the 50-odd blocks heading uptown from 110th Street at the northern end of Manhattan. Their echoes, traces and spirits can all be discerned in Colson Whitehead’s outstanding new novel Harlem Shuffle — a genre-defying blast from a bygone era, set between 1959 and 1964, yet one which urgently speaks to the present.

The author of the bestseller Between the World and Me and recipient of a MacArthur ‘Genius Grant’ last year, Ta-Nehisi Coates is a much-lauded African-American journalist on the Atlantic, best know for his trenchant 2014 essay making the case for reparations for black Americans. A bona fide heir to the mantle of ‘hip-hop intellectual’ (last claimed with any credibility by Michael Eric Dyson), Coates is a rara avis, able to move with ease between Rakim, Q-Tip, W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. The Beautiful Struggle, written in 2008 but only now published in the UK, is a memoir of the writer’s perilous journey from boyhood to manhood in inner-city Baltimore in the late 1980s and early 1990s — when it was ravaged by crack cocaine and gang warfare.

This month sees the Swiss alpine resort of Davos play host to the annual World Economic Forum summit, but it also marks the centenary of the death of one of England’s greatest Edwardian poets. The worship of Mammon and the ascent of Parnassus are traditionally not easy bedfellows, but the two are linked by the Swiss town. It was here that this now little known poet succumbed to tuberculosis at the age of thirty. James Elroy Flecker (1884-1915) deserves far greater acclaim and public recognition for his poetic accomplishments. A prodigious linguist, fluent in French, German, Italian, Spanish and modern Greek, he read Classics at Oxford and took a further degree in Modern Languages at Cambridge, all with a view to entering the diplomatic service.