Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Mary Norris’s book about her love affair with Greece and the Greek language starts with a terrific chapter about alphabets. That may sound like an oxymoron, but I was fascinated to learn why the Y and the Z come at the end of our alphabet. When the Romans were adapting the Greek alphabet, they ditched these letters because they didn’t need them. Later, when they started using Greek words, they wanted them back, so they tacked them on at the end. Equally, it’s nice to know how it comes about that, in England, we pronounce the letter Z as Zed — unlike in America, where Zed’s dead (and they say Zee, baby). It’s a throwback to a time we would have called it Zeta, after the Greek letter. Obvious, once you know.

The journalist Auberon Waugh, in whose time-capsule of a flat I briefly lived in 2000, once summed up what he took to be the primary motivations for writing books. ‘With women, there is this tremendous desire to expose themselves. With men, it is more often an obscure form of revenge.’ In the case of the clinical neuropsychologist Dr A.K. Benjamin, both of these seem to apply. He is impelled by the desire for revenge, mainly on his own self-important profession, but also on women for being nuts. Or perhaps, because he’s scrupulously fair about this, that should be ‘nuts in a different way from the way men are’. As for Benjamin’s self-exposure, it’s a striptease.

In his robust new biography of Alcibiades, David Stuttard describes how the mercurial Greek general shocked his contemporaries by adopting Persian customs: Certainly, he embraced their lifestyle, tying his hair up in a bun, curling his well-oiled beard (a symbol of machismo in the Persian court), dousing himself in the perfumes for which Sardis was so famous, and dressing not just in sumptuous robes and beautifully fringed tunics of linen, wool and mohair (deep-dyed in vibrant reds and vivid yellows, and adorned with ornaments in glittering gold foil), but in those other garments so associated by Athenians with decadent, eastern effeminacy: trousers. I’ll be honest.

Reading The Mind is Flat is like watching The Truman Show and realising, while you’re watching it, that you are Truman. For anyone who hasn’t seen the movie, this is Peter Weir’s 1998 fable in which Jim Carrey discovers he is unwittingly the star of the most successful reality-TV show on the planet. His world is a film set and everything that happens to him has been plotted by a brilliant if somewhat pretentious director named Christof. Truman has this thunderbolt moment. It’s part Aristotelian anagnorisis, which is to say the realisation of something horrific, and part Camusian absurdity. But at the same time, it’s incredibly liberating. He sees that he can do whatever he wants.

Some oleaginous interviewer once suggested to Winston Churchill that he was the greatest Briton who ever lived. The grand old man considered the matter gravely. ‘No,’ he replied at length. ‘That was Alfred the Great.’ In his hefty, hard-to-pick-up History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Churchill expatiated on King Alfred’s foremost quality: it was his ‘sublime power to rise above the whole force of circumstances, to remain unbiased by the extremes of victory or defeat, to persevere in the teeth of disaster, to greet returning fortune with a cool eye, to have faith in men after repeated betrayals’. Remind you of anyone?

In the late years of Empire, and early days of Christianity, there were monks who didn’t wash for fear of being overcome by lust at the sight of their own bodies. Some concealed their nakedness in outfits woven from palm fronds. One designed a leather suit that also covered his head. There were holes for his mouth and nose, but not, apparently, his eyes. There was a monk who spent three years with a stone in his mouth to remind him not to speak. Another wept so hard, his tears dug a hollow in his chest. There were those who went about on all fours. St Anthony, one of the founders of monasticism, chose to make his home in a pigsty. St Simeon Stylites stood on a pillar for 37 years until his feet burst open. What are we to take away from all this?

I used to worry that I would never be a good writer because my childhood wasn’t interesting enough. I now think there must be some other explanation. Because the truth is that, when I was still pretty young, my parents banished me to an isolated community where for years on end I was compelled to dress in heritage costume, endure the uncanny absence of women and participate in ritualistic group activities, often of a physical or religious nature. That’s right. I am an Old Harrovian. On the face of it, this seems like an odd choice for my parents to have made for me — although it isn’t as bat-cave crazy as Alex Renton tries to suggest in Stiff Upper Lip, his rich, righteous diatribe against the public school system.

A woman birthing bloated speckled eggs from her supernaturally swollen womb. Sushi screaming and squirming. A skull-shaped sweet, bearing the message, ‘I was you.’ Doubting yourself. Knowing you don’t love your girlfriend. Waking beside someone beautiful and new, only to notice a filigree of knife-scars etched across her breasts. If, sensitive reader, these ingredients make you inclined to do a runner (your finger already hooked around the next, less distressing page), then go right ahead. Because Charles Burns’s Last Look (illustrated above) clearly isn’t your kind of book. But if you’re in two or three minds about this, then please hesitate, because I’m not 100 per cent sure, but I think it may be a masterpiece.

Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, & the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright (Vintage). Originally published in the US, this history of scientology isn’t available in UK bookshops. Buy it online. Hilarious, hair-raising and amazingly evenhanded, given the subject matter, it describes how the science fiction author L. Ron Hubbard turned his toxic neuroses into the basis for an utterly bogus belief system designed to extract money from dupes. This is the guy who punched his wife for smiling in her sleep. This is the guy Tom Cruise refers to, with reverential affection, as ‘LRH’.

Having rattled and routed Mark Antony and his bewitching Egyptian at the battle of Actium in 31 BC, Octavian was on his way home to Rome when he was confronted by some punter. The man produced a talking raven, which obligingly squawked, ‘Greetings, Caesar, our victorious commander!’ Octavian was delighted at this evidence of loyalty, and rewarded the bird-trainer accordingly. However, it later emerged that the man had had another raven in reserve, which he had taught to croak, ‘Greetings, Antony, our victorious commander!’ He hadn’t been taking any chances. Nor, in a sense, does Mary Beard in her ambidextrous history of Ancient Rome, whose title proclaims her bifurcated programme.

The last time I cried was September 1989. That was my first week at public school. The reason I cried was that my allocated room-mate, a malevolent pixie named Toby Cox who later became one of my closest friends, had informed me that he ‘knew a lot of people’ at Harrow and he was going to tell them all that I was ‘a total dick’. I bawled. I blubbered, and a cord of saliva swung from my lower lip, as I begged for mercy. He refused. And I haven’t cried since. Not at the deaths of pets or relatives. Not at the break-ups of relationships. There’s something satisfying, I suppose, in fulfilling so completely a national stereotype.

Is it true that, having lost an empire, we reinvented ourselves as an island of entertainers? Do we channel the same rigour and vigour into film and music and literature as once went into conquering continents? Is there a residual colonialist bias in our arts, seen, for instance, in our cinematic penchant for creating patriotic period dramas such as Henry V or The King’s Speech? How much of our cultural success depends on the US market and the accident of a shared language? To what extent does our cultural expression reflect not our idea of ourselves but an American distortion?

It was a certain unforgettable ex-girlfriend, Harry Mount confesses — named only as ‘S’ in his dedication — who came up with the idea for this new book, which he has therefore written to honour her, or in the hope of winning her back, or possibly, in some obscure way, to annoy her. Whichever it is, S must surely share some blame for its misleading subtitle. You can’t follow in the ‘footsteps’ of mythology’s greatest sailor. As Homer repeatedly says in the Odyssey, ‘No one travels on foot to Ithaca.’ OK, this is pedantic, but the author doesn’t really follow in Odysseus’s wake either. If that’s the book you want, try Tim Severin, or, better, Beaty Rubens and Oliver Taplin.

Why do people talk about ‘experimenting’ with drugs when mostly they just mean that they’re doing them? Perhaps, as I write this, I should experiment with a glass of beer. In any case, one day back in the 1970s — when rock stars were particularly prone to experimentation — Bob Dylan dropped in on Neil Young, who played him a song detailing his extensive drug-related experiments (with grass, cocaine and amphetamines). At the end of the performance, Dylan remarked drily, ‘That’s honest.’ Young still laughs when he remembers this. Partly it was because Dylan, who had done some experimenting himself back in the day, knew where Young was coming from. Also, though, what makes it funny is that all artists are in the business of revelation.

Inside the Dream Palace by Sherill Tippins (Simon & Schuster, £20). We’ve had biographies of great artists and writers, their spouses and children and their children’s pets. Here’s one about the place where most of them, from Jack Kerouac to Sid Vicious, seem to have hung out: the glamorously seedy Chelsea Hotel in New York. Not just a biography of a building, it amounts to an alternative history of 20th-century culture. How To Be a Husband by Tim Dowling (4th Estate, £12.99). Less a self-help than a self-hinder book, the Guardian columnist’s account of how he has coped with the challenges of matrimony (answer: badly) should really be called How Not To Be a Husband. It only makes one joke, but it makes it extremely well.