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The UK’s most widely distributed literary journal

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29 March 2020

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Page 11

WORLD HISTORY

The motivation of soldiers in the Second World War is still poorly understood. Those who fought were often more concerned about their own wellbeing and those of their families than with the “war effort”; many were disenchanted with British imperialism. In a global trawl of untapped censor-ship and intelligence reports, Jonathan Fennell shows what really mattered to domestic and colonial conscripts, how their conduct can be traced to the preceding years of peace, and how their performance in the war influenced the domestic order that followed. CLICK TO READ MORE

Page 9

EARLY MODERN DESIGN

Henry van de Velde was a hugely inventive all-round artist who in the 1900s started the School of Applied Arts in Weimar that later spawned the Bauhaus. He was also active in the Deutsche Werkbund, campaigning for artists’ rights at that very point in history when design was starting to emerge as a separate discipline. In his new study, Richard Hollis retraces the entire course of van de Velde’s career to show how he helped to inspire Art Nouveau’s evolution into Modernism. CLICK TO READ MORE

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Page 19

ENGLISH HYMNODY

The John Betjeman Hymnbook is both a collection of over 200 hymns that can be used in church services today and a series of entertaining essays by Betjeman on the history of hymn-writing. The essays were originally broadcast on the radio in the 1970s and proved enormously popular. Produced in what had been an unhappy time in Betjeman’s life, they were ambitious in their grasp of the Church’s capacity to absorb from numerous sources creatively and to present sometimes contradictory ideas harmoniously on the pages of its books. CLICK TO READ MORE

Page 5

GENDER STUDIES

What does it mean for a woman to wear high heels? For many feminists, the high heel is a symbol of complicity with male sexual predation, not only limiting a woman’s mobility and rendering her vulnerable but fetishising her as an object of male desire. In the latest in Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series on everyday things, Summer Brennan reconsiders fashion’s most troublesome accessory, relocating the act of betrayal from those who wear high heels to those who abuse those wearers. CLICK TO READ MORE

Page 3

MODERN PHILOSOPHY

However pervasive Cute may be,
it isn’t as cute as it likes to appear, argues Simon May. From Hello Kitty and Pokémon to the works of artists Takashi Murakami and Jeff Koons, Cute’s infantile fluff has a darker side, oscillating between sentimental vulnerability and an addictive escape route from the menace of our no longer knowing who calls the shots in our world or what meaning we have, other than as perpetual consumers. CLICK TO READ MORE

Page 4

NATURAL HISTORY

When Ruth Pavey bought four acres of woodland in Somerset she was quite sure why she had done it but could not have put her reasons into words. Writing A Wood of One’s Own was one way of discovering and teasing out those words. Her initial explanations—quoted here— take her back to her family’s origins in the West of England, but the backbone of the book is a meditation on the pleasures of working without a strict plan. CLICK TO READ MORE

Page 6

ROCK MUSIC HISTORY

A chronological record of all Bruce Springsteen’s recordings, album by album, by Brian Hiatt, a senior writer on Rolling Stone since 2004. The book is based on Hiatt’s five interviews with Springsteen over those 15 years, together with newly gathered anecdotes from band members and other material. It sets out to reveal the facts behind how the songs were written and recorded as well as their lyrical meaning and, where appropriate, their historical context. CLICK TO READ MORE

Page 7

ROCK MUSIC HISTORY

Duane Tudahl, a former editor on multiple Emmy-nominated television programmes, has been writing about Prince and the Minneapolis music scene for two decades. In this expanded version of his best-selling 2017 study, Tudahl charts the moment in Prince’s career when he went from being a cult favourite performing largely for a local black audience to a mainstream success with a world following and strong corporate interest. CLICK TO READ MORE

Page 8

ANGLO-GERMAN RELATIONS

In 1911 Robert Best spent a year at the School of Applied Art in Düsseldorf in preparation for a career at his father’s light-fittings factory in Birmingham. The Düsseldorf school had been headed by Peter Behrens and attracted impor tant new teaching methods, but Best found it eccentric and no more appealing than German secondar y education, which he deplored. He warmed more to Germany’s musical culture and quickly befriended the family with whom he lodged, but his affection for Germany evaporated when war broke out three years later. CLICK TO READ MORE

Page 10

SECOND WORLD WAR

In the 18 months from the autumn of 1940, Marie Bader sent 154 letters from her tiny flat in Prague to her second cousin Ernst Löwy, hundreds of miles away. Bader, born 1886, had lived mostly in Karlsbad but had fled following Hitler’s invasion of the Sudetenland in 1938. Her letters speak of an intense but late-flowering love affair, and of the trauma shared by Jewish people all over Europe at that time. The flow of letters ends abruptly in April 1942. Marie was deported to Theresienstadt and then murdered in Poland. CLICK TO READ MORE

Page 12

TOPOGRAPHICAL ART

Royal Academician Emma Stibbon’s fascination with environments in flux has taken her to some of the most vulnerable parts of the world, including the Antarctic and High Arctic and volcanic areas in Hawaii and Stromboli. Her travel sketchbooks show her working at speed in often inhospitable conditions, where snowflakes can spot the page and ice crystals freeze the edge of ink washes. The original drawings can be seen alongside other works by Stibbon at Alan Cristea Gallery from 3 July. CLICK TO READ MORE

Page 13

WRITING THEORY

Trevor Pateman taught for twenty years at the University of Sussex, contributing to courses in philosophy, linguistics, critical theory and creative writing. In Prose Improvements he develops a contextualist approach, allowing the author back into the discussion of the text and, for example, arguing for context-dependent punctuation. One essay includes John le Carré’s response to Pateman’s observations about a crucial line in A Perfect Spy. CLICK TO READ MORE

Page 16

CRITICAL THEORY

Having promoted him as a social theorist in Frankfurt in the early 1930s, Max Horkheimer worked closely with Theodor Adorno in America, where the soporific ef fects of capitalism, as they saw it, helped inspire a shared pessimism about mass culture. In 1956, twelve years after their Dialectic of Enlightenment came out, they spent three weeks discussing the idea of a new Communist Manifesto and exploring Marxist themes of theory and practice, labour and leisure, and domination and freedom. This transcript of their talks was compiled by Adorno’s wife Gretel. CLICK TO READ MORE

Page 17

MODERN PHILOSOPHY

Western culture has periodically valued reason above superstition but for better or worse, the greater part of our history has been dominated by the irrational. One gives birth to the other in an endless cycle, and our best efforts to set things straight sooner or later go into reverse. In this extract from his new book, Justin E.H. Smith takes the example of the joke to show how a defender of the Enlightenment might account for the hypocrisy and limitations innate in Enlightenment discourse. CLICK TO READ MORE

Page 18

WILDLIFE PHOTOGRAPHY

Unforgettable Portraits is a compilation of award-winning images from the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition, an international showcase for the very best photography featuring natural subjects. The best of these are selected by a panel of experts and then make up an exhibition that the Natural History Museum tours worldwide each year for twelve months. Rosamund Kidman Cox, the editor of the book that accompanies the exhibition, was previously editor ofBBC Wildlife Magazine for 23 years and has co-edited books including Frozen Planet, Life and Planet Earth. CLICK TO READ MORE

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Page 22-23

CUBAN ADVENTURE

Looking for a publisher: rights available

With Fidel Castro’s presidency winding down and Cuba struggling to confront the 21st century, Chris Hilton embarks on a two-year adventure in Havana, making friends and enemies, travelling extensively, and facing life-and-death challenges. With the spirit of Hemingway always present, he befriends an ex-military fixer whom he helps and is helped by, gets involved in drugs, drink and crime, and falls in love with a tempestuous street girl from the country who shows him a dangerous Cuba that tourists never see. CLICK TO READ MORE

Page 14

BIBLICAL THEORY

Looking for a publisher: rights available

Biblical criticism used to attribute authorship of the Pentateuch to four sources. This view has long been seen as too neat, and theorising is now as split as the material under observation. The Tribal Bible enters this troubled ground tentatively by focusing on just one aspect: the numerous repetitions and redundancies. It argues that the Pentateuch text can no longer be seen as linear. Israel’s folk memory was originally tribal, and what we are left with are tribal inconsistencies that are best presented side by side. CLICK TO READ MORE

Page 20

SOCIAL HISTORY

In 1905 the English Egyptologist who later invented the mythical curse of Tutankhamun married the daughter of a German immigrant financier from Chicago. Drawing on the letters they left behind, Julie Hankey explores their lives and those of their families in the context of the times. In particular, she reveals first-hand accounts of Christian missionary work aimed at “rescuing” prostitutes in English cities and sea ports during the late 19th century, and gives evidence of the same tensions that fascinated Henry James and Edith Wharton in how nouveau-riche America related to Europe in the early 1900s. CLICK TO READ MORE

Page 15

ARABIC HISTORY

Editor's choice

Tim Mackintosh-Smith’s readable, sharp-witted analysis of Arab people and tribes has the Arabic language at its core. From pre-Islamic poetry to the growth of writing and the problems of print, he shows how linguistic developments have helped and hindered the progress of Arab history, and how language still unites and disunites in the politically fractured aftermath of the Arab Spring. CLICK TO READ MORE

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Tim Mackintosh-Smith