Take two: Look Again, David Bailey

I got this the other day when I was in town, popping into Abbeys Bookshop to browse.

In the background for this photo of the cover of David Bailey’s autobiography I included photos my mother’s uncle took when he was alive. Noel entered some photos in competitions but I think he’s worth a lot more than the small acclaim those prizes garnered him. His sister also took photos, and I have her slides in my archives. 

David Bailey is referred to in this book as “Bailey” and I noted my brother sent a photo of his dogs using DropBox, probably to get me acquainted with the service (I had to log on using Google, which took some time). I don’t know if Bailey, his Labrador, is named after the photographer but it might be so as I’ve been writing about my own practice on the blog, something that probably sparked my brother’s action.

Take two: Marcel Proust: A Life, Edmund White (1999)

I don’t know when this was bought but it was at some point after 2009, when this edition appeared in print. The book was bought used but there is no sticker on any part of it to indicate where this occurred. 

Pairing the cover with a photo of my maternal grandparents on their wedding day was intentional. This picture – blown up by my mother and framed when we lived in SE Queensland – sits on xthe staircase among drawings my daughter made when she was small. Some of the drawings were also framed by mum, who enjoyed going to the shop to choose something fitting, this creative activity adding diversion to her mostly utilitarian days. Full review on Patreon. 

Take two: The Dating Game: One Man’s Search for the Age of the Earth, Cherry Lewis

I bought this book from the Co-Op Bookshop in 2008 or thereabouts for 90 cents. What a cracking price! Less than a measly dollar for a woman’s study of the life of the man who worked out how old our Earth is. 

I chose for the background in this photo a satellite photo of Sydney I got out of a Sydney Morning Herald in 2002. What think you? Does it make sense to use a satellite photo for a background? This book is a biography (see my Patreon for full review) but the subject is geology. For those out there who are, like me, interested in science, it might make sense to use this photograph for decoration of this post. I like surprises, and this book contains a good number of ‘em. 

Take two: Hostage to Fortune: The Troubled Life of Francis Bacon, Lisa Jardine and Alan Stewart (1998)

For a full review see my Patreon. I will fully compensate for subscriptions made using the interface found at this link: regular review of books in my library will go up every month. There were eight reviews in September and another six in August, so money will be well spent.

Costing me $11.65 on the Co-Op Bookshop’s remainder table in the autumn of 2008, this book was another bargain. In the past few months on my wanderings around my house searching for material to keep me entertained I’ve encountered a lot of books bought from the tertiary education book retailer. This one’s a bit dry and a little hard to follow at times, but if you want to know more about it you can subscribe. You’ll see that I give this book a “mixed” rating – neither wholly positive nor damningly negative.

I chose miniature floral watercolours as the background for my shot of the book’s cover because miniatures were a way for people in the Renaissance to get likenesses of others. In fact, during his time with the English ambassador to France Bacon knew a miniaturist, and kept in touch with him all his life.

Take two: The Life of Kingsley Amis, Zachary Leader

For a full review, see my Patreon. 

This book was bought in early 2007 at the Co-Op Bookshop. On the back cover is a sticker with the price ($6.75 marked down from RRP of $75) and the sticker has the date of January 2007 printed on it to indicate when the sale started. I’ve had this in my collection unread since those days.

Movie review: Val, dirs Ting Poo and Leo Scott (2021)

This gentle and elegiac Amazon original production poses certain questions about identity and how to live a good life by examining that of Val Kilmer, the movie actor. Not too long ago Kilmer was diagnosed with throat cancer and after an operation he was able to retain his existence but his ability to speak – something that, for an actor, is of cardinal importance – was curtailed. To speak now Kilmer must use his finger to close a hole in his throat while he moves his lips and tongue and expels air through his mouth. Even if he does all these things in concert, however, his voice is hard to understand and his diction is cramped.

Kilmer’s financial situation is precarious. He underwrote some of his father’s property speculations so lost a good deal of money that way. Then there was his divorce. Because he declined a second ‘Batman’ movie he never entered the lists of mega-rich movie stars, and the culmination of the years has left the man with two children who love him (he lives next-door to his daughter) and a warehouse full of video tapes.

Here the directors had a treasure trove of material to draw on as they constructed a portrait of the man, and they took advantage of all of it when putting together this movie. What’s most decisive about it is the man himself, a kind of resigned jester who ekes out a living signing autographs at Comic Con and similar events held around the United States from time to time. These gatherings take their toll on a frail body and the pathos of Kilmer is striking, like Mickey Rourke in 2008’s ‘The Wrestler’, which chronicles the life of an ageing fighter. A singular difference divides the two portraits because Kilmer is close to his children whereas Randy "The Ram" Robinson doesn’t get along with his daughter. 

Kilmer’s son voiced the narration for Poo and Scott’s film, which I strongly recommend for your viewing hours. It runs to just over 90 minutes.

Take two: John Keats, Nicholas Roe

For a full review, see my Patreon. 

I bought this at Kinokuniya about eight years back and never read it, but now, in July, I tried another Keats biography and had given up. Roe’s version of history is more satisfactory. My intensive reading of the period of history the Romantics occupy happened twenty years ago after I got back from my disastrous sojourn in Japan as Jane Austen drew the sting out of signal failure. Impressed as I was by her achievement – it seemed strange that her books could be so good despite having been written two centuries back – I embarked on an intensive survey of the history and literature of the revolutionary era that Keats belongs to.

Take two: Franz Liszt, Oliver Hilmes

For a full review, see my Patreon. 

I chose to include this monotype I made when I was the age Liszt had been a performer already for half a decade. The monotype shows a young women or a girl in profile. A monotype is special because it is made by painting directly on glass, whereupon you place a sheet of paper over the wet paint to make a print. Liszt is special for many reasons, but this book was chosen because I wanted to know more about the “classical” music composers dad loved. In fact, it was me who preferred the Romantics like Liszt. Still, dad’s example drove me when I’d gone to Abbey’s Bookshop not long ago to buy the new Wagner study (see earlier review). Liszt’s daughter married Wagner – though I didn’t know this fact when I picked this book off the shelf.

Take two: Chanel’s Riviera, Anne de Courcy

For a full review, see my Patreon. 

I bought this at Dymocks in Broadway Shopping Centre while out in that part of town on Friday to get my second Covid vaccination jab and to see my psychiatrist. I’d had problems with panic attacks while driving and had wanted to combine a number of errands in one trip. In the event, the drive out was uneventful even though, before starting and while I was just going downstairs to the car, my heart rate went up in anticipation of an adverse event. My method to stop the symptom is to drive slowly and ordinarily, not try to compete with other drivers, and to tell myself to “chill”.

Take two: Genet: A Biography, Edmund White

For a full review, see my Patreon. 

This funny-looking edition has an odd cover that appears to have been reproduced from an official published original and then used to reprint a pirate copy. It has about it the air of an undergraduate spoof. How it got into my collection – and exactly how long ago – are both complete mysteries, but it has sat unread since then. A long time ago I was intrigued by people like the subject of this book. That was in another life, and in the years since I’ve become more conservative and a good deal more crusty though, like Genet, there have always been things far more important to me than mere politics. I thought it was time for me to revisit old haunts and to take a step back from my current life to try and image what made Genet compelling for me when I was young.

Take two: Augustus: From Revolutionary to Emperor, Adrian Goldsworthy

For a full review, see my Patreon. 

I got this paperback at Abbey’s Book Store in the central business district recently. The Wagner book was bought at the same time. I’d enjoyed reading about ancient Rome on other occasions – see earlier in this blog for reviews of some of those books – and had got into the habit of using Abbey’s excellent classical history section to guide my adventures.

Take two: ‘Virginia Woolf,’ Hermione Lee

For full review, see my Patreon.

A competent and entertaining account of the life of a celebrated author whose legacy I’m still coming to terms with, Lee’s study is evidence of a failing of the public sphere. To what extent are the facts of an author’s life important, compared to the beauties – or otherwise – of their writings? In Woolf’s case the legend speaks to us perhaps a bit too strongly, making it hard to judge the value of the novels themselves. So, worth reading. I won’t be selling this biography.

Take two: ‘Life in a Cold Climate: Nancy Mitford,’ Laura Thompson

The original book review is found on my Patreon site. I’m posting this sequel to that article for friends who won’t subscribe or for those who cannot. 

In the main review I talk about what kind of book this biography is, and how it fits in with many other, similar works. The Mitfords never seem to get old. And there’s something nice about reading the lives of the dead when you’re – like me – past your prime. It is like Nancy Mitford – the subject of this book – and her decision, following the release of the two novels for which she is most famous, to gravitate to biography as a form of expression. As she wrote to one of her correspondents, one of the most difficult things about writing novels is inventing plots. With biography she could still express herself but the story was already laid out by time and circumstance. As for this book, the autumnal triumphalism of the ending will warm many cockles.

Book review: Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life, Hermione Lee (2013)

I bought second-hand, in November, this interesting account of a late bloomer who’s been abandoned by convention these days but who, in her hey-day – the 1990s – was widely read.

Like a lot of biographies, Lee’s book is possibly more interesting on account of what it says about the country of residence of its subject than on account of the subject herself. Fitzgerald is not an author who has ever been on my radar and a lot of what serves as material for Lee’s study is highly insular – you get the usual list of names of notable people (eg Lytton Strachey), of places (eg Bloomsbury) – but the portrait it gives of England at war is gripping. 

The book might not suit everyone. For those who prefer reading with the grain of history, Lee provides timely input regarding the status of women a century ago. Such things require statement again and again as, for each generation, the same lessons need to be learned anew in order to overcome the biological imperative as much as cultural inertia. 

Just when you think that this biography will be run-of-the-mill things turn south as a result of Penelope’s husband Desmond’s war experiences. In the years immediately after that conflict, Desmond was drinking heavily and regularly and money was tight, so tight in fact that the family – Penelope, Desmond and two of their children (one was at boarding school) – had to move suddenly to London to live on a canal barge. 

This wouldn’t be the final humiliation but to compensate for Fitzgerald’s trials Lee takes sides, finding reason to applaud her subject’s determination and grit, or her perspicacity when, working as a teacher, Fitzgerald found things to celebrate in the authors whose works had been set for her students. This time was, in Lee’s estimation, a kind of training ground for Fitzgerald’s later role as novelist, and so Lee is able to reprise an earlier theme – of economy – in the telling.

As a writer, Fitzgerald seems to have done best when drawing on her own experiences or when choosing biography as a medium for her expression. It’s premature to say more than this because I’ve never read any of her books but from what Lee writes about the Italian book – titled ‘Innocence’ – a complete absence of any reference to the mafia makes it an unlikely place for anyone to go to seek the truth about that country. It seems as though Fitzgerald simply drew on commonplaces in an effort to furnish her narrative with plot devices. I was reminded of these parts of Lee’s book when, at around 5.40pm on the last day of 2020, I saw a photo posted on Twitter (see below).

Novelists have always gone elsewhere to find inspiration for their plots, just look at the way the Gothic novelists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries plundered Italy and Germany for ideas in order to create settings and characters for their immensely popular novels. And today historical novelists do the same. Fitzgerald set some of her books overseas – in Italy and Russia and Germany.

Others were set in England at an earlier epoch than hers: she seems to’ve been particularly interested in the period just prior to WWI – what was known at the time as the Great War for Civilisation – because of a sense of optimism that then was rife in Europe. Finding a relief from the pressing disappointments of the present – she wasn’t happy with her financial situation nor with her son’s marriage, and her husband was a drunkard – Fitzgerald was able to fashion short novels that drew critical praise. 

Her books were popular as literature, so in a limited sense she was read in the Anglosphere but since her death in 2000 her fame hasn’t risen and, in fact, I’d never heard of her when I saw this book sitting on a shelf in a second-hand bookshop in regional NSW.  The book can be read not only for information about WWII and the generation that spawned the counterculture but also for background on publishing in the UK in the 1980s and 90s. This was in itself an interesting time due to the rise of democracy globally as well as the reactionary backlash of neoliberalism. History buffs can draw a good deal of sustenance from this book.

Another theme that emerged while reading was that of old age, and especially what it can do for an artist. This is particularly the case with regard to Fitzgerald as she didn’t start publishing until her 60s but I think also of the late paintings of the Boyds – explosions of colour that take your breath away with their intensity. In Fitzgerald’s case there is an awareness of the things that cannot be said in any way other than through art. I touched on this theme in a review of a book last year, a book by New Zealand author Janet Frame. Fitzgerald’s enigmas in her final published works – a novel and a book of short stories – stand out in relief against a background familiar to my generation because it was lived. 

This was an era when Rushdie and Naipaul were household names. I’m drawn to lost causes as much as Fitzgerald was, to those things that evade capture by convention and that are able to express things that commonplace objects and narrative cannot. In this sense it was a fatal attraction that drew my eyes to Lee’s book and that allowed me to commit a number of days’ leisure time to reading it.

Book review: Reprobates: The Cavaliers of the English Civil War, John Stubbs (2011)

I bought this wonderful and instructive volume on sale at Gleebooks in November: it was on a table on the pavement outside the store, and I picked it up as soon as I read the title. Good decision ..

Stubbs thought the royalists (loyalists) of the English Civil War deserved a fresh take, hence this examination of the lives of a number of men – and a few women (but not many) – who lived in the first half of the 17th century, a time of inequality and inequity but also of rising incomes and standard of living. The cavaliers deserve our regard also for the reason that ideas they embodied remain attractive to us, now, especially in popular culture. The brooding artist, the sulky pop star, the rebel without a cause – all of these belong in the same broad basket of enterprise as the men described in Stubbs’ book.

That’s not to take away from the importance, as an element forging our contemporary polities (in the Anglosphere and beyond) of the English Civil War. Due to the increase in the discretion given to Parliament as a result of those events, we have a higher standard of living today. Not just in Australia but everywhere, though the Enlightenment project hasn’t yet finished.

But that sequence of events mustn’t be considered as a phenomenon apart from Continental history. The decision of Charles I to avoid entanglement in the religious wars that had raged in Europe for 100 years was critical to the emergence of a disaffected element in English society. There were scores to be settled, accounts to be balanced. Charles’ decision to add uniformity to the forms of worship in two of his kingdoms – England and Scotland – served to profoundly irritate many people. Thirdly, his decision to rule without Parliament added to instability as it removed one forum in which legitimate community grievances could be aired, and the emotions linked with them resolved through means other than military ones. By the time he called for a Parliament, the demands that were put to him were so intolerable that he preferred to die than compromise his prerogatives.

The book looks in some detail at Charles’ own efforts to refine society. Sometimes this took the form of dramatic performances – something that he, like his father, enjoyed – and hence Stubbs is able to examine in some detail the ideas of men who wrote poetry and plays either for private circulation, performance, or publication. The idea of the dilettante – which we’ve regrettably jettisoned today – lived strongly in the minds of the cavaliers who, while they sought out a way of being that we’d describe today as “middle class”, who also rejected the puritanical obsessions of certain parts of the community, people for whom “popish” forms of religious service – which the Scots so passionately rejected – were anathema. Nowadays, we must admit to enjoying ceremony for its own sake – be it the telecast of a royal wedding or the annual Academy Awards. Ritual helps to organise society and is instinctively embraced, but for Puritans in the 17th century it stood as a manifestation of evil.

Stubbs shows that the received idea that is concentrated in the word “cavalier” is not quite apt when you look at its origins through a strong lens, one that can sufficiently magnify the features and the minds entombed by time – this is the job of history – so that each of the men examined becomes an individual, though general patterns of conduct can be discerned. They are often attractive subjects – despite the excess when it came to romance, elaborate jokes, and wine – but their stoicism and their love of art shine like beacons in the distance.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this entertaining book. Stubbs uses a subtle form of humour in his narrative in order to castigate, judge, and understand the motives of people long dead. The reader can join with him, diverge in his or her views, or skip to another point of focus without effort. 

I was however disappointed, but in a good way. Not enough attention given to Puritan writers means you get a slightly one-sided viewpoint. Not that this defeats Stubbs’ purpose: quite the opposite – the book’s title signals his intentions clearly – but once the king is dead Stubbs turns his focus to one Commonwealthman who wrote – Andrew Marvell. This part of the book lets you see the heritage of Cavalier wits influencing the politically opposite camp. 

The Cavaliers unquestionably represented more than just the commonplace rogue, and in fact defeat almost completes the model, as Stubbs shows by examining parts of the lives of several notable men, including some who, like Charles himself, spent time in prison. The resort of the unfree body being places visited by the free mind. 

What is inescapable is how modern the Cavaliers seem in contrast to their religious peers. Puritans hated frivolity and feared losing God’s grace if they indulged in it, so it’s a happy fact that most of the writers Stubbs deals with were royalists. Stubbs takes a slightly longer look at another Puritan of note – Sir Archibald Johnston (Lord Wariston) – a Scots lawyer who rose to prominence from humble origins, but Milton is only touched on.

Book review: Guy de Maupassant, Christopher Lloyd (2020)

I bought this book for the RRP at Gleebooks when I was on the hunt for things to read during a period of uncertainty as I swapped homes.

The main reason for my choice was because I’d started – for the first time in about 35 years – to listen to Wagner and, as readers of this blog should not be surprised to learn, was for the first time blown away by the richness and variety of the artistic vision I found in his work. I’d recently bought albums with, on them, the music of other late-19th century composers – for example, Janacek, Bruckner, Rachmaninov, and Liszt – and while these functioned well enough as pastimes nothing equalled in my mind Wagner’s accomplishment with his magnum opus, the ‘Ring’ cycle. Fantastic tunes, fast pacing (interest never flags), extraordinary variety, a wall-of-sound technique in the days before electric music arrived, and an awe-inspiring ambition to transcend the mundane and to reach millennial heights.

This illustrated Reaktion Books ”critical lives” series biography of the famous French writer is brief and the subject was no saint but it serves to give you some idea of the nature of the times de Maupassant lived in, years when Wagner, also, was active, but across a contested border, producing work. 

Maupassant started out as a journalist writing occasional pieces and gravitated toward short fiction, and then to novels. His trajectory was steep but, according to Lloyd, he worked very hard to achieve a goal: to live by his writing. Initially employed as a state functionary, he aspired to something more meaningful. According to his biographer, Maupassant is still voluntarily read today, especially by young people (though I don’t have the figures on-hand and they are anyway hard to find because the author’s copyright has expired). The creative genius employed in drudge-work is a common theme in the annals of history: viz Pessoa and Kafka, among others.

Dying from disease contracted as a result of a louche lifestyle, Maupassant literally fucked up his body. Aside from this objection to his character and a dismaying degree of anti-Semitism, Lloyd’s de Maupassant raises many ideas that are still relevant today, especially relating to the place of the individual in art and, hence, in society. Maupassant belonged to the post-Romantic era when Modernism was emerging along with working-class consciousness and industrial technology. Other major shifts in the late 19th century involved humanity’s idea of itself, especially as this was affected by the writings of Charles Darwin. Following on from the advances forged by the generation of Jane Austen and William Wordsworth, Maupassant’s coevals, and the writer himself, tried to come to grips with a new type of reality. 

Today we are also faced with an almost insupportable degree of social and technological change so Lloyd’s effort has to be of interest to a general reader. Striking for me is Maupassant’s focus on the human, and on manners and sentiment as it was expressed by ordinary people, though sometimes, in his stories, the circumstances they find themselves in are anything but ordinary. Maupassant is not only known for his portraits of mid-19th-century society but also for his speculative fiction.

In a book like this you have to survey what other people have written about the author in question, and Lloyd does this but he also inserts his own views about his subject, who was only active for a period of about 20 years though he published hundreds of short stories, a handful of (admittedly short) novels, as well as novellas, plays, poetry and journalism. Illness cut short his productive years.

Maupassant was both a man of affairs – a successful writer able to afford luxuries – and a man of letters. In this book the age-old rivalry between France and Germany enters into the frame as a result of war, and certainly it’s possible to also view Wagner’s efforts in the context of a cultural divide that was at least 2000 years old by the time he sat down for the first time to mark his scores and to write his libretti.

Expect more reviews of the same type as this as I try to come to terms with Wagner. As succinctly put by Peter Nicholson, an Australian poet and acquaintance, in commenting on Facebook in response to a post I made about this book (before I’d started reading it): the ”Wagner meme” is evidence of the way the composer enticed many other artists to copy and pillage his work. 

It is capacious, transcendent, enigmatic. Yes, he had difficulties, but are we likely to leave a Tristan as our calling card to humanity? 

I couldn’t agree more. Janacek and Bruckner are mere shadows, though contemporary with Wagner, and while Liszt and Rachmaninov entertain, once you have sampled the ‘Ring’ you may find it hard to go elsewhere.

Book review: Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History, Eric J Evans (2019)

On a whim I bought this book in Glebe one day in the middle of September. I had gone to the shop to pick up an order and saw Evans’ book and thought of a friend who reads a lot of history, and thought to myself: “This looks interesting ..”

In the event I turned out to have been right in my assumption, which is remarkable as a biography about a dead historian might not, to most people, seem like fertile ground for analysis of larger themes. But born in 1917 (a little after my grandmother) Hobsbawm was part of a generation that saw the major events of the 20th century at first hand, including WWII, the aftermath of the October Revolution, and the Cold War.

He subsequently wrote at length about a range of eras, though he concentrated on the period extending from about 1750 to 1900. Evans asserts rather glibly, at the end of the book, that Hobsbawm “was never a Stalinist” and flirts with irrelevancy by using the ridiculous term “Hobsbawmian”. He never seems to address the problem of categories – something that must be, for any historian, a central issue – and accepts the prima facie importance of terms such as “Marxism” in a way that Hobsbawm must’ve been unable to do – if he was honest (though I’ve never read any of his books).

Evans makes the point well that Communism was a way for Hobsbawm to find community – something he needed early on as both his parents died before he reached his majority. In his youth he was a dedicated Communist. His parents were British subjects of Polish Jewish extraction. 

He was bookish and aspired to write – it’s evident from surviving sallies he penned as an adolescent – so drew inspiration from others, such as Shakespeare, Shelley, Coleridge, and Rimbaud. Which is a good place to go to look for such things (you can easily do a lot worse). Evans keeps the ball rolling – by about page 100 you’re at the time Hobsbawm went up to Cambridge – and as, himself, an authority on Germany in the 20th century, he is well-placed to make cogent observations about the environment in which his subject lived and learned though there’s a lack of information about Eric’s sources and curricula for these years, which isn’t remedied until Evans starts talking about books Eric wrote in the 1960s and 70. And I wasn’t sure that Evans grasped the significance of sentiments Eric expressed in his early writings; I often felt a good deal of boyish innocence behind strongly worded statements, a strong hint of uncertainty lying behind the bravado, but Evans seems not to have seen such things. 

What’s remarkable however is the fact that so much material survives for historians to ponder. Such a trove of riches enabled by the subject’s scribbling propensity. He was also hypercritical, with an opinion about everything – often, as it turns out, wrong, as when he predicted the demise of pop music – complementing a keen eye for the telling detail. His biographer’s equally quick condemnation of poetry – which Hobsbawm tried on various occasions, including when he was in the Army – is regrettably of the same stripe as his subject’s incisive discernment though considering the number of things Hobsbawm got wrong, perhaps a bit more reflection might’ve leavened the mix. On the other hand, you want someone to make people think, someone with a solid commitment to a particular line of reasoning is probably more likely to deliver pithy, memorable phrases than someone who goes the more round-about way to arriving at his or her goal or who is liable to qualify everything with reservations. In any case, being right all the time is probably not as important as regularly participating in public debates. So, for example, Hobsbawm’s dismissal of the environment and nationalism in favour of economic factors as explanations for specific phenomena that everyone agreed had become manifest in different places at different time. So what if Eric’s approach was contradicted by later scholars? 

If you demand 100% correctness all the time you’re going to end up with such stupidities as Stalinism specialised in. Other people on the left have expressed a similar kind of abhorrence of dogma and conformity, notably the Australian novelist Vance Palmer (one of whose books I reviewed recently). Hobsbawm solved the problem by being successful in a way that allowed him to survive on the proceeds of his own labours – he taught at a tertiary education institution for most of his adult life at the same time as he wrote and published books. 

Mao was equally pithy in terms of his written output, so Hobsbawm was following in the footsteps of greatness. An intelligent youth who wants to overturn all old institutions and structures and uses his natural abilities toward achieving that aim: the world has paid a high price for this characteristic of the species where still, today, we live with the consequences of the mistakes of past generations. When are the old going to be allowed to set the tone? Perhaps never. So we must fix problems that endure due to the triumph of the young by using patience in a way that Hobsbawm – soon tiring of the discipline that poetry needs in order to produce quality verses – was able to do only by dint of consistency. In the end, Eric prevailed in his chosen profession due to the fact that, over the course of many decades, he remained true to a single political line. His political views were cemented in the 1930s but financial security didn’t arrive until the 1970s.

It’s just disappointing that Evans’ loyalty to his subject allowed him to unthinkingly take sides in a contest that Hobsbawm refused to enter into all those years ago. It seems strange that Evans would reward Hobsbawm for a signal failure, but Eric’s other failures of the period in question – he was refused access to the cypher program due to that fact that his mother was not English – seem to have made Evans lose control of his critical faculties at an important moment in his narrative. English chauvinism is, to be sure, a poisonous elixir and Hobsbawm was right to have felt aggrieved (though he didn’t express such feelings to the officer who informed him of the decision), but surely it’s not necessary to forgive him everything (including his failure to persist with poetry, regardless the low quality of his youthful productions) just because you’re studying his life in exhaustive detail. 

It seems that familiarity doesn’t always breed contempt. In fact it’s astonishing that Evans neglects Hobsbawm’s German-language poetry considering how liable the young man was to start writing at the slightest pretext, since he wrote reviews of films and other cultural products, and since he clearly considered himself to be educated. Hobsbawm’s reception among peers – visible in the critiques offered by people who were sent his essays and theses for comment – reveal that he was happy to accept others’ reviews as valid, but Evans seems to think that Hobsbawm’s poetry is exempt from the same kind of scrutiny his academic work received.

While pretending to offer a comprehensive view of the historian’s life, Evans still leaves out critical clues to his subject’s approach to the world in terms that a reader could easily grasp. I find this failure a severe one, and deeply regret it. 

It’s possible to see Hobsbawm’s reluctance to use poetry to achieve agency as a reflection of his disenchantment with the creative arts in the light of the economic burdens society places on the proletariat. Artists had been writing, painting, and composing for generations but things were still bad (notably after 1929) so: what’s the point? The failure of the mainstream to take the hint might be seen as having convinced people like Hobsbawm that art wasn’t the best way to achieve their goals. Linked to this feeling of ennui was Hobsbawm’s need to get involved in committees and to run educational activities for students; in other words, to belong. The dream of finding a place for himself that would both satisfy strict ideas about relevancy as well as his appetite for sophisticated thinking drove him to participate in activities that brought him into contact with others. Once his writing and publishing led to financial security and acclaim from peers, however, Hobsbawm was happy to accept sinecures and memberships that had previously been withheld from him. He became a notable part of the same Establishment that he had, in his youth, rejected outright.

A shortcoming of Evans’ book is the absence, for most of the first 300 or so pages, of any indication for the layman of how Hobsbawm’s scholarship fit into contemporary society. What kind of academic was he? Was he fashionable? Unnecessarily biased (considering his Marxist leanings)? Good? Bad? Indifferent? The contents of the curriculum during his BA are also not detailed very comprehensively, so it’s hard to understand formative influences leading to choices later made.

Until things became clearer at about page 350 I felt that Evans considered the average reader able to know such things – unlikely unless they were a truly committed history buff (and even if that was the case, they might know little about Hobsbawm) – or else likely go and find out for him- or herself. Fortunately, once Eric travels to Russia and once he starts becoming involved in the journal ‘Past and Present’ – and especially once the USSR invaded Hungary – it became easier to see how his ideas fit into the magazine of global Marxism and into broader debates about values, economics, and politics. He was less a doctrinaire Communist – though he tried to stay active in bodies affiliated with the Party – than a fellow traveller; ideologically sound rather than slavishly toeing the Party line.

Evans is right to criticise the intelligence services on account of the scorn they expressed, in reports, with regard to Hobsbawm’s political allegiances, especially after WWII. During the war, young Eric was clearly unsuited to secret work – in fact he abused his privileges on several occasions when given freedom to use his discretion, compromising the war effort for ideological reasons – but if anything their alarm grew once hostilities had ended in 1945. Hobsbawm had predicted that this would happen. Again, we must be grateful that so much survived to furnish material for a book such as this.

Book review: The Husband Hunters, Anne de Courcy (2017)

I bought this entertaining study at Gleebooks one weekend earlier this month after a ramble in the sun across Wentworth Park. My mobile phone’s activity tracker said I’d been more sedentary this year and, in response to this information, I decided to take countervailing measures.

The body wasn’t the only thing exercised in the event; the mind was also. Sometimes with this book it’s hard to keep abreast of outcomes as the intricacies of people’s relationships can force meaning out the window if you don’t pay attention though what it has in abundance – these are all true stories despite the soap-opera tone – is pathos. 

Often modulated by irony: the book mainly deals with New York society as the endless search for social cachet therein was the driver of female ambition fuelling interest among patrician and arriviste mothers, from Stateside, in titled families resident in the archipelago. 

These are basically American stories although there’s no doubt that England also benefited from the transaction, especially in terms of human rights. What young Americans were used to in terms of property law and civil rights differed from what was normal for their counterparts on the other side of the Atlantic. The ethos of the frontier – where men outnumbered women, and where women’s contributions to domestic economy were more highly prized – impacted on the ethics and morals of the community in London and rural England. 

In the light of such revelations it’s easy to see how reading this book can help to constitute a kind of study of the education of manners, with a bias toward the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. 

What happened at the end of this era – by the first years of the new century the traffic of young women and their mothers to London had slowed – was that people became grossed out by the level of expenditure. The dramas played themselves out in the newspapers, so they were public events. With the push for female electoral franchise heating up and the pushback against sickening levels of spending by the one percent, instead of social advancement the fashionable world became more focused on other things. 

Charity and human rights became popular all of a sudden. The new century was also when technology began to forcefully change Western economies and political settlements, and so de Courcy’s book can have broad appeal if you are interested in learning about how science can affect both finance and morals. The ability to cross an ocean in a matter of days rather than weeks must count as an improvement, regardless of the impact on the global environment, and other novelties (refrigeration, telephony) also made the world a smaller place than it had previously seemed.

Subtitled ‘Social climbing in London and New York’, this multi-subject biography is very readable and is lots of fun especially if you’re energised by descriptions of sumptuous gatherings of people. The lists of costumes for parties, the descriptions of the preparations made by the organisers, and the lists of names of invitees contribute toward making a kind of catalogue of excess in which other objects are ignored – apart from art, which is included only because of the money involved in the purchase thereof. The only thing missing here are details of the catering (today food is of supreme importance in most developed countries, so this is actually a distinct shortcoming). 

Definitely one to keep an eye out for!

Book review: The Six: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters, Laura Thompson (2015)

I was bored out of my brain watching TV, since my home contents has been packed up due to the fact that I’m moving house, and so I walked to Glebe and bought some books, this being one of them. It turned out to be a good choice as my state of mind – feeling a little vulnerable and uncertain due to the change underway – consoned with traces of anxiety the book communicates.

It’s difficult to write a biography about six women like the Mitford sisters because of their connections with Nazism, but Thompson has done us a great service by indulging in her personal fascination with her subjects. This is a magnificent biography.

It’s a thorough exposé of a period of time so different from today but, also, so similar in many respects, not the least of which is the reason for notoriety of the women under examination. The fact that so much is known about them, due to the survival of a large number of private letters and also due to the existence of published works of fiction (and memoir), adds richness to Thompson’s account.

She had to become acquainted with some of the darkest parts of history in order to write it. I applaud her gumption and recognise the worth of her approach, which mingles the personal with the public in a thrilling manner. The way the sisters related to their parents, to each other, to significant others, and to the public provides a view that is at the same time microscopic and broad. 

The title is stripped back and modern, matching the subject matter. Reading the book it’s actually easy to see why some of the Mitford sisters responded to the call of the siren, but I wonder if Thompson might not have realised how nihilism made them liable to succumb to fascism and Communism in the absence of other, equally rewarding, inputs. Nancy, who went on to become a successful novelist, seems to have remained least liable to respond positively to the lure of the political extremism that animated the era, though even she did so at some points. 

Jessica went the other way from Unity and Diana, and became a Communist. And while Thompson remarks from time to time how difficult it is, now, for us to understand people living then – almost a century ago now – she is reticent about going the next step and making proclamations that might explain why some of these youthful sisters (and, indeed, their parents) cleaved so strongly to fascism. In my mind it certainly had something to do with youth, but it was more complex than that, and I alluded to some of the things that were in action at the time in a review of another book, which I read in May. 

Again, it’s germane for me to say that Thompson has done us all a favour at the same time as she indulged her own fascination with these women. I strongly recommend this book to people who are curious about the 1930s or to people who want to understand more about our own times, with its violent public sphere and extreme views.

Book review: Coxinga and the Fall of the Ming Dynasty, Jonathan Clements (2004)

I’ve lost all recollection of how this book came to be in my collection, but it’s been there for a good long while – from memory, at least 10 years. It came out of a small UK press and seems not to have been talked about much, which strikes me as like a wasted opportunity. This is not only a thrilling (though, like most nonfiction, complex) work of history, it’s also topical.

Complexity can of course put some people off though what might attract readers are the pirates and the smugglers. The story is set on the coast of China, in Taiwan, and in Japan in the 17th century. Dutch traders headquartered at Batavia (now Jakarta) engineered deals through their operatives in northeast Asia and often these turned into skirmishes with Coxinga’s father, a pirate-turned-admiral named Iquan. Coxinga’s mother was a Japanese woman but Iquan later married a Chinese woman who lived at his base in Amoy (Xiamen).

If this sounds complicated it’s not surprising as you are dealing with four cultures (counting the Taiwanese, closely related to Pacific islanders) each with different histories and priorities. It’s however rarely daunting as the style used for the conveyance is at the same time flexible and robust, though at points in the narrative you feel things get a little slippery – which seems fitting given the nature of the story being told.

Since derring-do is so popular these days, perhaps over-the-top TV viewers might want to sample real stories of sorties and escapades, of fortunes stolen and kidnappings, of epic battles and men clad in iron. On top of this kind of relatively predictable scenario – predictable at least in terms of the prosaic motives that seem to drive people, in a way that is much the same as in narco-thrillers – you also get access to solid history.

Here things are fortunately less predictable – depending on your personality, of course; some people like things black-and-white, others prefer greys of different shades (the story of Coxinga’s life is most definitely of the latter brand) – but I’m not sure Clements always makes the most of his material. Perhaps he could have used more that can be found in ancillary records, such as those belonging to the Dutch East India Company, or in China’s or Taiwan’s historical archives.

Why you might want to read Clement’s book, if you are not all that interested in history, would rest with the fact of China’s current standing in the world and the way it positions itself vis-à-vis the West. As Taiwan forms a prominent element in the drama, too, the story of Coxinga has contemporary echoes; it was only with the Qing that Taiwan was brought politically into China’s orbit, so its being considered by some to be “part of” China is a relatively recent innovation.

As for Iquan, how he earned his commission from Beijing might furnish material for a TV drama, but it’s all true (as Shakespeare said of his play ‘Henry VIII’). While the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) did have a naval presence for part of its reign, it shut down trade apart from Macao, so Iquan’s position as admiral was complicated, as he had financial interests, prior to accepting the posting, that depended on overseas trade. He also kept up good relations with men employed by the Dutch East India Company. If you were to write Iquan’s story today you would have a drug dealer turn into a narcotics policeman.

The Manchus would restrict trade even more radically once they took control. Coxinga, raised in early childhood in Japan, was a very different kind of man from his father. He was educated, steadfast, and loyal to the Ming Dynasty, embodying the Confucian ideal in a way that the arriviste Iquan couldn’t manage to do. The two men expressed their patriotism in different ways.

This difference providing a dramatic hinge upon which the story, to a degree, depends, but the interest inherent in the book isn’t limited to armed conflict alone. It’s actually quite a complex story about the nature of good governance. Cruelty appears often, allied with such ideas as patrimony and justice, but there is little space given to other ideas – love or beauty are absent beyond possessiveness – and so while it is comprehensive as far as the records consulted allow, in a sense the book has a limited scope. Justice without love or beauty is a fragile thing.