What Are the Odds?

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

Everybody has a luck story. The ones we tend to tell are the good-luck tales, for the simple reason that we can make so much hang on them. The worst form of bad luck is unexpected death; the best form of good luck is unexpected survival. The former serves as a full stop; the latter […]

To Hell in an Electric Handcart

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

What great book has very many authors, runs to thousands of pages, tells of man’s folly and warns of plague, flood and fire? The Bible, of course, but also the new UN report on the impact of climate change. This 3,675-page whopper, snappily titled ‘The Working Group II Contribution to the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report’, […]

What Flesh is Heir To

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

The subtitle of Andrew Doig’s first book, This Mortal Coil: A History of Death, is slightly misleading. Neither a history of Western attitudes to death – Philippe Ariès’s masterpiece of almost fifty years ago, The Hour of Our Death, is the standard work – nor a cultural history of burial or the disposal of mortal […]

Left-Thinking People

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

The sequel to Iain McGilchrist’s much-lauded The Master and His Emissary (2009) occupies two mighty volumes. Nearly 1,600 pages of text are supported by 2,500 references and thousands of footnotes soliciting the reader’s attention from the margins of the pages. The purpose of this magnum opus is to ‘convey a way of looking at the […]

Talk of the Town

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

The British are essentially townies and have been for generations. The movement into towns in mainland Britain was far in advance of that in any of our European neighbours and, indeed, in any other country in the world. More people were living in Britain’s towns in 1851 than in the countryside, a ratio not reached […]

A Few Trowels Short of a Shed

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

This chunkily entertaining compendium of twenty-one stories could easily have been expanded into a sixty-volume encyclopedia, since all garden making is on one level a doomed act of folly and all garden makers therefore eccentrics. One of the strengths of this book is that Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, who is a well-respected garden historian and not a […]

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Liquid Assets

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

Modern Londoners take for granted their ready access to clean water. Their medieval ancestors could obtain water from the Thames and its tributaries, not to mention springs and wells, but they also faced issues with pollution and droughts, and even risk to life and limb: Nick Higham notes that some poor souls drowned while drawing […]

My Grievance is Bigger Than Yours

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

In his whistlestop tour of authoritarian leaders, the Financial Times correspondent Gideon Rachman asks what the world’s strongmen have in common and why so many of them now exist. His archetype is the founding father of modern despotism, Vladimir Putin, in whose wake have come to power a dozen or so cruel, socially conservative nationalists, […]

Anyone for Fraud?

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

With the gradual but remorseless roll-out of sanctions against those ‘oligarchs’ who have enriched themselves over the past decades largely through their political connections to the Kremlin, the scale of their luxury lifestyles has been definitively exposed. Megayachts have been seized, bank accounts frozen and entire football clubs effectively impounded. Roman Abramovich, probably the most […]

Tomorrow Belongs to Us

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

In the introduction to the first volume of Democracy in America (1835), Alexis de Tocqueville famously declared that an ‘irresistible revolution’ was sweeping America and would eventually convulse Europe and the world. That powerful movement had been under way for centuries, he believed, and had as its consequence an ever-expanding ‘equality of conditions’, the progress […]

What Is She Reading?

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

During lockdown, a Twitter account called Bookcase Credibility (bio: ‘What you say is not as important as the bookcase behind you’) gathered a hundred thousand followers for its witty captions attached to screengrabs of pundits and politicians using bookshelves as Zoom backdrops. One memorable tweet diagnosed a Cabinet minister’s upside-down copy of a book called What Works as a cry for help. We all ‘read’ people’s books as part of interpreting them and their self-presentation. Three

Long Lunches & Large Advances

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

It’s no disrespect to John Walsh’s elegant and elegiac memoir to say that forty years ago, during the earlier part of the period it covers, books like this were ten a penny – or at any rate in their remaindered form £2.99 a throw. They had titles like As I Walked Down New Grub Street […]

Life Lessons from the Sinful Greek Girl

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

Here are two books by academics. They are memoirs of reading, or rather they are books about reading, writing and storytelling with sections of autobiography. Both are about death as well as living, and at least in part about how literature can make some consoling sense of the afflictions or demands of the body. Elizabeth […]

My Lovers and Other Animals

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

Norman Scott’s memoirs shame me. I remember a game of charades, played in a Devon country house on Christmas Eve in 1979, and the hilarity that greeted my brother-in-law biting a pillow and shaking it in his teeth like a wild puppy. ‘Norman Scott!’ we shouted in glee, as we remembered Scott’s testimony earlier that […]

Past Masters

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

This folksy and capacious (some might say baggy) trawl through 2,500 years of writing history is an unashamedly personal take on the past. Richard Cohen, a distinguished publisher who has written acclaimed studies of great writers, the sun and swordsmen (he was five times UK sabre champion), begins this book with a biographical chapter about […]

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Salonnières & Encyclopédistes

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

Visiting Paris in the summer of 1770, the English musicologist Charles Burney went to the opera. The experience was disheartening. Not only was the piece performed, Pancrace Royer’s Zaïde, decidedly unmemorable, but Burney remained mystified as to why lyric tragedies of this sort, written in a style essentially unchanged for a hundred years, should go […]

They Courted Trouble

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

As the nine-year-old Edward VI rode through London on the way to his coronation in February 1547, he paused to watch a man perform on a tightrope strung from St Paul’s Cathedral. Perhaps he should have studied the man who rode ahead of him too. That man was Edward’s newly appointed Lord Chamberlain, John Dudley, […]

The House that Cyrus Built

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

Xerxes, the king of Persia who vanquished the Greeks at Thermopylae in 480 BC, is arguably best known today from his colourful portrayal in the Warner Bros film 300 as a ‘menacing despot’ and ‘an eastern malevolence’. As Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones shows in his lively and highly readable revisionist history of the rule of the Persian […]

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Free and in Chains

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

Enslaved or free? As Kris Manjapra relates in this history of slavery and emancipation in the 19th century, the question was never quite as simple as it appears. In Manjapra’s telling, slavery was ‘a centuries-long war against African peoples’ and the various emancipations that occurred in the United States, the Caribbean and Africa were not […]

Drinks with Galtieri

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

A friend of mine who had enjoyed a worm’s-eye view of Britain’s military machine during his two years of national service as a clerical corporal once remarked that nothing struck terror into his heart as much as the words ‘planned like a military operation’. Peacetime soldiering is rarely attractive to the brightest minds, and no one’s intellect is likely to be sharpened by

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