Philip Hensher

The making of films is a process often on an industrial scale, and among the thousands of professionals contributing there are dozens whose practice might constitute a solid history of the artform. The great stars and directors are the usual routes into the history of film; but the roles of studio executives, producers, costume designers (Edith Head! Givenchy!), composers of scores, cinematographers and editors would make compelling narratives, too. A history of cinema audiences could also be interesting – ranging from those who are supposed to have fled in terror as a filmed express train came hurtling towards them in the 1890s; to the yobs who slashed the seats in cinemas showing 1950s rock’n’roll movies (but why?

Hélène von Bismarck twice quotes (in an officiously corrected version) Robert Burns’s lines: ‘O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us/To see oursels as ithers see us!’ She is congratulating herself on assuming this role in writing a book about Britain as a German. There is no doubt that out of a mixture of self-regard, curiosity about other people’s points of view and the occasional outburst of ribald mockery, the British have long enjoyed accounts of themselves by visitors. Whether these narratives possess any accuracy or unusual perception is another question, but there seems no doubt that a British audience exists even for ones of the utmost mediocrity and banality.

This story is little more than a brutal anecdote, which Patrick Radden Keefe has chosen to tell at excessive length. It has the kind of fact-checked gravity that indicates a star American journalist bent on perpetrating an entire book. (‘Built in 1923 and originally known as the Empire Stadium, Wembley was the most iconic sporting ground in Britain.’) But it occurred to me more than once as I read it that it has the hallmarks of a particularly black London comedy by Dickens or Ben Jonson or Joe Orton. A violent knave, his activities previously limited to cheating the police, murdering his equally appalling criminal rivals, doing underhand deals and ripping off the rich, acquires an associate.

It is a curious literary form, the published diary. A surprising number of the classic diarists did write for eventual, usually posthumous, publication – Chips Channon under a 60-year embargo, A.C. Benson, Samuel Butler, in his wonderful notebooks, and surely the possibility was in the minds of Samuel Pepys and the Duc de Saint-Simon. More recently, great diaries have been published within the author’s lifetime. James Lees-Milne’s first instalment came out 30 years after the period it described. Alan Clark’s initial offering, covering 1983-92, appeared in 1993. Tony Benn’s hilariously tedious volumes emerged on a rolling programme which slowly caught up with the events they described.

If you read books for a living, the calling probably started with a moment of utter entrancement: a novel you couldn’t bear to set down; a few unforgettable days, as Bleak House, Earthly Powers, The Woman in White or Titus Groan worked its unsuspected magic on its millionth reader. Such books are rarer these days, but they do still happen, and Francis Spufford’s Nonesuch is an absolute corker. Randall Jarrell once wistfully imagined a novel that would ‘bear up under the weight of hundreds of thousands of readers a plot that higher critics could call crude and that bewitched families could pad over in house slippers’. Nonesuch does the trick, and I won’t be the only reader whom it keeps up until 3 a.m. It’s a novel of immense confidence.

Simon Winchester has found an excellent subject. While invisible, wind makes itself apparent through its effect on other things. This may mean flying detritus, scudding clouds and the rustle of foliage; or it may mean the ways in which it irresistibly alters and directs larger movements in society and culture. Much of the history of global capitalist exchange was driven by the trade winds, forcing the direction of money and goods into particular cross-continental patterns of advantage and disadvantage. Over the centuries, we have discovered more and more, understanding the westerlies and those high, savage rivers of air, the jet streams. Many significant events have been settled by wind.

The Delft painter Johannes Vermeer, now probably the most beloved artist of the Dutch Golden Age, had an unusual career. His reputation in his lifetime was small. For some reason he painted almost exclusively for the van Ruijvens, so only those who knew the family would have been able to view much of the work. One foreign observer who did see a painting owned by a baker (probably handed over in security for a large overdue account) was incredulous at what the owner claimed was the value of a small picture by an unknown artist. After Vermeer’s death, and the sale of the collection for very little on the death of his patrons’ son-in-law, his name disappeared. He is hardly ever mentioned in any of the exhaustive and insightful 18th-century histories of Dutch painting.

This is a treasure house of a book, filled with curiosities and evidence of a rare breadth of patient investigation. Anyone who has read one of Graham Robb’s books, from his early biographies of classic French writers, through a wonderfully amusing study of 19th-century homosexuals, to a series of historical and geographical studies of France and Britain, will not be surprised at that. What is new in this idiosyncratic history of the British Isles is Robb shifting some of his own encounters to the foreground. In previous books, the experience of bicycling has been fruitfully used.