There were times while reading Count Down that I felt I was going to skip to the final part. Not because I wasn’t gripped – I was – but because I needed a dose of the optimism Shanna Swan wisely promises her readers will be coming at the end. For this is a story of potential apocalypse: the demise of human fertility at worst, the emergence of an unsustainable society of oldies at best. We assume procreation is a choice. We rest easy, believing we can utilise this natural
Carson McCullers (1917–67) grew up in Columbus, Georgia, lived mainly in New York and wrote dazzling stories about misfits in the American South. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) made her famous at the age of twenty-three. She married the same violent man twice and, as Jenn Shapland several times notes, a straight narrative […]
When Julia Parry’s aunt died, she inherited a stash of letters that had been stored in her attic. Books that kick off with letters in attics generally contain some big revelations, but although this book is in some ways almost voyeuristically revealing of the letter writers, I think the revelations may not be entirely the […]
Twenty years ago, I introduced an American acquaintance to the novels of Barbara Pym. Last autumn, I received a letter from her executors saying that the acquaintance, with whom I’d barely communicated in the interim, had left me her edition of Pym’s collected work. I mention this to indicate the profound affection that Pym inspires […]
The Bloomsbury industry is not as hectic as it once was, but it continues every now and then to deliver a really interesting book. This one offers a missing piece in the familiar Bloomsbury jigsaw. Today it can be assumed that readers do not need to be told that Vanessa Bell was Virginia Woolf’s sister […]
Thank the deities, it is spring. The almost-forgotten poet Charlotte Mew wrote a beautiful poem about spring called ‘May, 1915’. It includes the devastating lines ‘Let us remember Spring will come again/To the scorched, blackened woods, where all the wounded trees/Wait, with their old wise patience for the heavenly rain.’ Mew wrote many beautiful and devastating poems. She has her admirers, but
Recently, while I was sitting at my desk at home, a ten-foot-long reticulated python fell past the window. I first saw it reaching out from above the eaves of the house in an attempt to get to a nearby champac tree. It overextended itself and slid off the roof, tumbling inelegantly into the tree’s lower […]
Dylanology has always been a dirty business, right back to when Dylan creepophile A J Weberman was literally going through the singer’s trash for clues and meanings. But Clinton Heylin brings the beef like no other. His run of books about Bob Dylan – there are another eight – is characterised by mean-spirited put-downs of fellow Dylanologists
When I was ten or eleven years old, my father began to take me to concerts of Hindustani classical music. His own family was happily unmusical; he had been introduced to Hindustani music as an undergraduate and it has been his greatest source of joy and refuge ever since. He would sit in the front […]
Cremona is one of northern Italy’s less interesting cities. It has a dull aircraft hangar of a Romanesque cathedral and its enormous civic art gallery is noteworthy only for the sheer volume of undistinguished crusts stacked on the endless walls. The place, however, had its moment, ‘one far fierce hour and sweet’, when, during the […]
The first note known to have sounded on earth was an E natural. It was produced some 165 million years ago by a katydid (a kind of cricket) rubbing its wings together, a fact deduced by scientists from the remains of one of these insects, preserved in amber. Consider, too, the love life of the mosquito. When a male mosquito wishes to attract a mate, his wings buzz at a frequency of 600Hz, which is the equivalent of D natural. The normal pitch of the female’s wings is 400Hz, or G natural. Just prior to sex, however, male and female harmonise at 1200Hz, which is, as Michael Spitzer notes in his extraordinary new book, The Musical Human, ‘an ecstatic octave above the male’s D’. ‘Everything we sing’, Spitzer adds, ‘is just a footnote to that.’ Humans may be the supremely musical animal, but, with or without us, this is a musical planet. What makes us special? The answer is complex. It is partly down to physiological factors, such as
There are many ways to measure fairness in a society. Social mobility – the movement of groups or individuals in a social hierarchy – is one. The concept is as old as Dick Whittington, but has its intellectual origins in Pitirim Sorokin’s Social Mobility (1927), and came alive in Britain during the 1950s, first in […]
When Neil Woodford’s fund management group collapsed in October 2019, it sent shock waves through the investment world. But it barely registered with the wider British public. This was perhaps because most of the 400,000 victims were well heeled and perhaps also because the questions the scandal raised – about whether the UK’s system for […]
Bookshelves creak with memoirs and biographies of prime ministers. Even the dullest occupant of Number 10 becomes the subject of many studies. There are far fewer books, however, on the nature of the office and its freakish demands. This is an unfortunate imbalance. Each incumbent fascinates, but what about the qualifications for leading the UK? […]
The age of the celebrity central banker began in the United States with Paul Volcker, who tamed inflation in the early 1980s with eye-watering interest rates. It was taken to a new level by Alan Greenspan, who bestrode the financial world like a colossus as chair of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006. Barely […]
It has been open season on Stalin for some time now. The limited view of the Soviet leader available before 1990 has given way to a fuller image of a cynical, manipulative and cruel despot at the heart of the Soviet Union’s remarkable transformation from a relatively backward, inward-looking and insecure federation in the 1920s […]
My travels through Afghanistan in 1976 took me to Bamiyan. As evening was coming on, the bus from Kabul descended into the valley and dropped us at an inn. Early the following morning, I headed out to see the cliff face where two giant Buddhas stood until Taliban demolitionists dynamited them in 2001. Later that […]
It is hard to imagine the coast below the attractive Sussex town of Winchelsea as the site of a fierce naval battle, yet that is exactly what it was at the halfway point of the 14th century. On 29 August 1350, just as Europe was beginning to recover from the ravages of the Black Death, […]
One of the many intriguing things about the storming of the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 was the way in which many of the misnamed ‘patriots’ who invaded the building tried to legitimise their alarming actions. Their cry was that they were only seeking to uphold the constitution by preventing Congress from certifying the […]
This 5 May will mark the bicentenary of Napoleon’s death on St Helena. The occasion will no doubt be marked, as was the bicentenary of the Battle of Waterloo six years ago, by a flood of new books about the emperor, adding yet more to the estimated 200,000 already written. Given this saturation, one wonders if there is anything left to say. This fascinating book proves that there is. It does so by focusing on
for the new(ish) April issue of @Lit_Review I commissioned a number of pieces, including Deborah Levy on Bowie, Rosa Lyster on creative non-fiction, @JonSavage1966 on Pulp, @mjohnharrison on Oyamada, @rwilliams1947 on Kind of Blue, @chris_power on HGarner
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The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act by Fredric Jameson - review by Terry Eagleton via @Lit_Review
for the new(ish) April issue of @Lit_Review I commissioned a number of pieces, including Deborah Levy on Bowie, Rosa Lyster on creative non-fiction, @JonSavage1966 on Pulp, @mjohnharrison on Oyamada, @rwilliams1947 on Kind of Blue, @chris_power on HGarner