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| Rewriting the history books David Kynaston's new book, Family Britain, represents a big shift in popular historyJust how upset were the British at King George VI's death in February 1952? Very, the figures suggest. More than 300,000 people came that week to see his tomb in chilly Westminster Hall and the popular press, dutifully grief-stricken, sold millions of extra copies. But others thought the mourning excessive, and were annoyed at the BBC scrapping its schedule for "gut-aching music". Nella Last, a housewife from Barrow-in-Furness, wrote in her diary that her husband "was so 'fidgety' [that he] wouldn't have a game of card patience."Nella is one of the stars of David Kynaston's new book, Family Britain. As a historian, Kynaston doesn't rub shoulders with prime ministers, but records the views of dyspeptic civil servants and, yes, long-suffering housewives. He's not alone: Juliet Gardiner, Martin Pugh and Dominic Sandbrook are all at it, covering the view from the crowd rather than the stage.This is a big shift in popular history, which has long been dominated by books about things, rather than people. We've had microhistories of sugar, cod – even of screwdrivers (titled, inevitably, One Good Turn). Before that came the fad for what-if histories – Tory historians musing over what might have happened if only Lenin had been shot on his return from Finland.Rather than go further down this dead-end, Kynaston and others are returning to history from below. This was best sketched out more than 40 years ago by the great socialist historian EP Thompson, who set out to rescue history's losers from "the enormous condescension of posterity".Thompson wanted to show how the working class made history; not so Kynaston, who believes people at the top shape events and others react. This is history from below without the politics, but it's nonetheless entertaining and sympathetic to its subjects. One of Kynaston's best stories is in an earlier volume, and is about a government minister telling the people of Stevenage that they will soon be living in a New Town. "Gestapo! Dictator!" cry the locals, and the politician beats a hasty retreat – only to find the tyres of his ministerial car have been deflated and that sand has been poured into the petrol tank. PsychologyHistoryAditya Chakraborttyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Four Christmas books that will put stars in children's eyes There are all kinds of Christmas miracles, as USA TODAY's Bob Minzesheimer discovers in four illustrated books for young readers. ... rssfeeds.usatoday.com |
Satyricon by Petronius Nicholas Lezard's choiceWe need regular retranslations of the Satyricon, for two significant reasons: the first is that worthy approximations of the original racy, slangy, deceptively slapdash yet densely allusive Latin are going to need constant updating in order to maintain their freshness. And the second is that it is always going to be a good idea to have the piss taken out of the excesses of the vulgar rich. As Frederic Raphael put it in the introduction to his own excellent 2003 translation (which you won't be able to read unless you join the Folio Society): "His novel reads, at times, like a description, mutatis mutandis, of our own dear nouveaux riches . . . It seems true that, as Jean Genet put it, nous ne sortirons jamais de ce bordel."And what a bordel it is. The picaresque fragments of a much longer narrative, the Satyricon provides us with timeless bawdiness, shockingly rude still, as the narrator Encolpius (whose name roughly translates as "groin" or "crotch") suffers endless mishaps while also under the curse of impotence, as delivered for some unknown past offence against the god Priapus. He is tormented by his love, if that is the word, for his delectable yet fickle slave-boy Giton, and exasperated by his occasional companion Eumolpus, a poet so bad that people start stoning him whenever he recites anything he's composed. And, of course, at the centre of the work, we have the deathless Trimalchio, whose famous feast remains, and always will remain, the locus classicus of tasteless ostentation. (We learn in one of the six useful and/or fascinating appendices that Fellini proposed to cast, in his version of the work, the Beatles, Lyndon Johnson, President de Gaulle and Jerry Lewis; and Boris Karloff as Trimalchio. Why any of these people should have turned him down is, I am sure you will agree, unfathomable.)I use the word "deathless" advisedly, though. One of the many interesting things about Trimalchio, and indeed the work as a whole, is the constant awareness of mortality; death hovers in the wings, as it did throughout Nero's reign. Petronius's own suicide, as demanded by the emperor, haunts our understanding of the work, and adds to its depth and richness. But even that was a piss-take of the Stoic or Socratic ideal: if Tacitus's account is to be believed, he slit his wrists, had them bound up again, invited some friends for dinner and cheerful conversation. He then detailed Nero's debaucheries, "giving the names of the catamites and women involved, and the novel features of each fornication", sending Nero himself the document and breaking his signet ring so no one could use it to falsely denounce anyone under his own name.The more one contemplates Petronius, in fact, the more attractive he becomes. His fans included Nietzsche, Wilde, Huysmans and DH Lawrence, all of whom appreciated his ironic honesty. For despite the straightforwardness of its narrative (it's a romp, and so wonderfully easy to read), the Satyricon is multi-layered. Only the most alert of its contemporary readers would have picked up on every literary reference it packs in. One very brief description of Encolpius's recalcitrant penis manages to pack in, I am told, allusions to the Aeneid (twice), Virgil's Eclogues, the Iliad and Catullus. So if Brown sometimes makes Petronius use proleptic quotation (Raphael's phrase), ie making references in the text to works of literature yet to be composed, then it's because that is the best way to convey the spirit and technique of the original. (Using Beckett's "astride of a grave" at one point during Trimalchio's feast is a very good case in point.)Although I have no way of directly verifying it, my Latin being almost nonexistent, there is every indication that Andrew Brown has captured the vivacious playfulness of the original. As he says in his introduction, "every sentence may be a parody or pastiche" – and note that "may be", as well as the fine distinction between "parody" and "pastiche". Nothing here is to be taken seriously, which is why this work is so attractive. It may be nearly 2,000 years old, but you can't help thinking that this is where modernity starts.ClassicsNicholas Lezardguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
'A bunch of dead muscles, thinking' Motor neurone disease has left the historian Tony Judt quadriplegic and, he tells Ed Pilkington, has forced him to think about what it really means to be human. The result is an astonishing series of essays and a determination to get young people thinking collectively againA few weeks ago the English historian Tony Judt delivered a speech at his home in New York University (NYU). More than 1,000 people turned up, and few left disappointed. What they heard was classic Tony Judt: the lecture, a plea for the positive virtues of social democracy, was as erudite as might be expected from the author of Postwar, his epic portrait of Europe since 1945, and as politically pointed as his controversial writings on the Middle East.The Judt they saw that night, however, was anything but expected. He rolled on to the stage in an electric wheelchair, a blanket wrapped around his body so that all could be seen was his neck and head, to which a breathing tube was attached like a bit of facial Tupperware. "The last time anyone had seen me in public I'd been bouncing around the stage full of fitness and energy," Judt says. "Now they saw this quadriplegic with plastic on his face."He was concerned about how his audience would react to the new-look him, and tried hard to make them feel at ease. It worked, and at the end of the speech he received a standing ovation.It was only afterwards that Judt suffered the intense irritation of being accosted by someone who seemed unaware of the difference between physical and mental incapacity. "I'd just delivered this long lecture completely by memory, no notes, for an hour and 15 minutes. Someone comes up to me and says 'TTTTOOOOOONNNNYYYYY. DOOOOOO YOOUUUUUU REMEEEEMMMMBER MEEEE?'" Judt mimics the person in an exaggerated drawl, as though he were talking to a baby in a buggy. "I thought, 'You stupid bitch! Of course I remember you. I know your name, I know where you teach, I know everything about you!'"Tony Judt may have lost the use of his arms and legs, but he has lost none of his feistiness.We are sitting in his book-lined study in a NYU apartment off Washington Square. The room is swelteringly hot, for reasons that only become clear later. Judt is sitting in the electric wheelchair, dressed in a black T-shirt and loose trousers. He has that plastic tube attached to his face as well as a microphone, which amplifies his voice through a speaker on the book shelf.Eighteen months ago Judt was, by his own description, "a 61-year-old, very healthy, very fit, very independent, travelling sports-playing guy". He had a slight shortness of breath walking up hills and found himself hitting the wrong keys when he typed, nothing more.Then in September 2008 he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease, a progressive degenerative illness that causes the cells which control movement to die. His specific condition is amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), known as Lou Gehrig's disease after the legendary New York Yankees hitter who died of it in 1941.The disease ravaged Judt with astonishing speed. By December he had lost the use of his hands. By March he was in a wheelchair. By May he was wearing the "silly-looking facial tubing" as he puts it, because his diaphragm muscles were no longer strong enough to effect the bellows motion that induces breathing.He gives me a little display. "So I want to move my right arm but nothing happens," he says, with the only visible sign a slight flexing of his right bicep. Then he tries to move his legs and I can see a tiny spasm in both thighs."The leg you will see twitching and that's about it. That takes a huge amount of effort because from the body's point of view it's as if I've just kicked my leg up five times."The suddenness of the catastrophe would leave many people paralysed not just physically but emotionally. Judt has responded differently. He has embarked on a fascinating, albeit involuntary, intellectual journey – a forced march of the mind."I was forced to think very hard about what it meant to be me, what it means to be a person who is only a brain. Pascal's 'thinking reed' really does capture it, because I'm just a bunch of dead muscles thinking."So what does he think about? "I find myself thinking about what is the core me-ness in me. What's the core places, influences, events, pleasures or angers, turning points and so on. I'm trying to work out what it must mean now to be reduced to the essence of who I am."The product of this existential delving is a series of essays that Judt has written – or rather dictated – for the New York Review of Books (NYRB) that will be published over the next three months. One tackles his illness head on. In Night, reproduced here, Judt subjects his own deterioration to the same unsparing scrutiny as he would the Israel-Palestine conflict, say. Its absence of any self-pity makes for harrowing reading.The other eight essays take us back in time to formative aspects of his childhood in England. He was born in 1948 to lower middle-class parents and spent six years living in Putney in south-west London – a location that forms the theme of one of the essays. In others he introduces us to Joe Craddock, his school German teacher, lamenting that Craddock's insistence on excellence ("Yer utterly useless!" he would shout at pupils) is unthinkable in today's pampering education system. He finds meaning in the melange of largely bad food he was served as a child and revels in his love affair with trains that is now deprived him by his immobile condition.Taken together, the essays illuminate the many contradictions in Judt's make-up that give him such a distinctive voice. He is a Jew with no religion who has questioned the legitimacy of the state of Israel; a naturalised American citizen who is a consistent critic of overweening US power; a person of the left who subscribes to no leftist ideology.He is, to use a phrase that Judt applied to Edward Said, a rootless cosmopolitan. "Today I'm regarded outside New York University as a looney tunes leftie self-hating Jewish communist; inside the university I'm regarded as a typical old-fashioned white male liberal elitist. I like that. I'm on the edge of both, it makes me feel comfortable."One of the NYRB essays, Kibbutz, explores his fraught relationship with Israel. Between the ages of 15 to 21 he developed an almost obsessive passion for left-wing Zionism, then fell as abruptly out of love with it. At his parents' suggestion, he spent time on an Israeli kibbutz and embraced its dogma with the zeal of a new convert.But as he grew older he came to resent its restrictions and dislike its conservative smugness, a feeling that intensified when he spent time with the Israeli armed forces on the Golan Heights just after the six-day war in 1967. The whole experience, he says, immunised him against the unthinking ideology of Zionism, a pattern repeated with regard to Marxism. "I remember going through the 1960s watching my friends become Maoists or Althusserian feminists or God knows what else and thinking, this is garbage. So I became post-ideological."His non-conformism has come at a price. His stance in favour of a "one-state solution" to the Israel-Palestine conflict – that is, an end to Israel as a explicitly Jewish state – has landed him in hot water, particularly in New York where he has encountered much less intellectual tolerance on this topic than within Israel itself. He remains unflustered by the flak. "I don't have a bad conscience. I know exactly who I am. I'm Jewish. I've never been conflicted about it, never been religious, never embarrassed about it."He does get flustered, however, by threats made against him and his family. After he wrote a Financial Times article on the Middle East last month he received a letter from Rabbi Kahane – the same name as the violent extremist Zionist who was assassinated in New York in 1990 – saying that Judt was now a "marked man".His current intellectual preoccupation is with the role of the state in western societies – the subject matter of his NYU lecture. His thesis is that over the past 40 years, western democracies have forgotten the positive virtues of collective action. "What has gone catastrophically wrong in England and the States is that for 30 years we've lost the ability to talk about the state in positive terms," he says. "We've raised a generation or two of young people who don't think to ask, what can the state do that is good?"At the end of the lecture he was struck by how many young people came up to him expressing amazement at ideas they had never heard before. "This is the second generation of people who can't imagine change except in their own lives, who have no sense of social collective public goods or services, who are just isolated individuals desperately striving to better themselves above everybody else."Judt now intends, in the time he has left, to devote himself to writing a book to help young people think collectively again. "It could really have an impact if I get it right. Something that will get the next generation to see there is a way to think about politics that is not just the way we've been habituated to do it. I care about that and I think I can do it."Judt is already working on the book, using the same memory technique that he deployed for his NYRB essays. During the night he builds in his mind a Chinese memory palace – or in his case a modest Swiss house – and into each of its rooms he imagines placing a paragraph or theme of the piece he is composing. The next day he recalls each room in sequence, unloading its contents by dictating it to his assistant.Some people have tried to comfort him with the thought that such mental discipline renders Judt's condition bearable. How wrong they are. "There have been people who have said to me, 'Tony, you are so lucky. More than anyone you live the life of the mind. It could have been so much worse.'"To which he replies: "Hello! Are you from Planet Zurg? This is one of the worst diseases on Earth. It is like being in a prison which is shrinking by six inches each day."It is true that he has exceptional mental strength. Against that, there are torments that come with this disease. An intensely independent and proudly autonomous man, he can now never, not for a second, be left alone.The overriding truth, he says, is that "this is just hell. Because there is no hope, no help, and you know what the ending is going to be, each day is going to be like the last day only maybe a little bit worse. Sisyphus-like, you are going to have to roll this bloody rock up the hill tomorrow in exactly the same way."We've been talking now for more than an hour, and Judt asks his assistant to move his legs and arms into a new position. He lets out a faint groan of relief. Being motionless for so long, his body hurts; it also grows cold from lack of blood circulation, which explains the sweltering heat in the room.His ALS has come upon him so swiftly that, under usual expectations, he would be dead within months. But the degeneration of his upper motor neurones, which control his head and voice, appears to be occurring very slowly, raising the hope – or is it fear? – that he may stay as he is for quite a while. Inevitably, though, he will lose all power of communication, bar the ability to wink.So does he think of euthanasia, of putting an end to an existence that he calls "cumulatively intolerable"?"There are times when I say to myself, this is so damn miserable I wish I was dead, in an objective sense of I wish I didn't have to get up this morning and do it all over again. I've thought about euthanasia a lot, not for tomorrow, but one has to plan for it because the likely trajectory is that you lose your capacity to express yourself long before you die."No one wants to live in a wheelchair unable to talk, only winking once for yes and twice for no. It's perfectly reasonable that there will come a point where the balance of judgment of life over death swings the other way." At that point, he says: "The biggest thing to take into account is not your own feelings but your family's."All that lies ahead. For now though there is the daily rock to be rolled up the hill, the Swedish house to be filled with night-time compositions, the book to be completed. Tony Judt is in hell. But he's by no means yet defeated.Motor neurone diseaseHealthHistoryIsraelPalestinian territoriesUnited StatesEd Pilkingtonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Largest book in the world goes on show for the first time Klencke Atlas, which is 350 years old, will be displayed as part of British Library exhibition on mapsIt takes six people to lift it and has been recorded as the largest book in the world, yet the splendid Klencke Atlas, presented to Charles II on his restoration and now 350 years old, has never been publicly displayed with its pages open. That glaring omission is to be rectified, it was announced by the British Library today, when it will be displayed as one of the stars of its big summer exhibition about maps.The summer show will feature about 100 maps, considered some of the greatest in the world, with three-quarters of them going on display for the first time.At the exhibition's core will be wall maps, many of them huge, which tell a story that is much more than geography. Many of them, said the library's head of map collections, Peter Barber: "Hold their own with great works of art."He added: "This is the first map exhibition of its type because, normally, when you think of maps you think of geography, or measurement or accuracy."The exhibition aims to challenge people's assumptions about maps and celebrate their magnificence, as demonstrated by the 37 maps in the Klencke Atlas, which was intended as an encyclopaedic summary of the world.It is almost absurdly huge – 1.75 metres (5ft) tall and 1.9 metres (6ft) wide – and was given to the king by Dutch merchants and placed in his cabinet of curiosities."It is going to be quite a spectacle," said Tom Harper, head of antiquarian maps. "Even standing beside it is quite unnerving."As a contrast, one of the smallest maps in the world, a fingernail-sized German coin from 1773 showing a bird's eye view of Nuremberg, will be exhibited close by.The exhibition will show how great maps could be as important as great art. Before 1800 – "that's when the rot set in," joked Barber – were you to visit palaces or the homes of the wealthy, maps would have been almost as prominent as paintings or sculptures or tapestries.They were an important status symbol. Rich men would have a map of the world to show their worldliness; a map of the Holy Land to show their piety; a map of their estate to show their wealth; and a map of their home county or city to show how loyal a citizen they were.They would also be personalised. For example, a map made in 1582 for Sir Philip Parker of Smallburgh in Norfolk also includes a little Brueghel-esque figure of a man with a monkey on his back: a mocking reference to his recently deceased half-brother Lord Morley, a Catholic and a family embarrassment who "spent his time wandering fairly pointlessly around southern Europe", said Barber. "It is a way of saying 'I'm not like that'."Barber and Harper have chosen to exhibit maps from more than 4.5m held in the library's collection – the second biggest in the world after the Library of Congress.Barber said the maps were all made for adornment but "at a deeper level they were made for propaganda. It's all spin. Every map is an exaggeration because you can never 100% capture reality on a reduced surface."Up until 1800 people expected maps in these contexts and enjoyed them, but in the course of the 18th century you got the growth of the cult of science, the belief that maps were to do with geography and the only thing that was important was its accuracy."Barber believes maps are too neglected, particularly by art historians. "In a way we are trying to redress this. The official credo is the only thing that counts about a map is that they are utilitarian objects not really meant for display and that is not the case."There will also be maps where the propaganda role has been more explicit, such as a Nazi poster produced in Vichy France which shows Churchill as an evil, cigar-chomping sea monster whose attempts to seize Africa and the Middle East were being thwarted by Axis forces, bloodily clipping his tentacles.Then there are political propaganda posters which use maps – one even features a reference to removing troops from Afghanistan. The cartoons on the posters were used in the election campaign of 1880 and one shows Disraeli as a great hero assassinating "the windbag" Gladstone and maintaining the British link with Ireland. A cannon on the map is a mocking reference to Gladstone's call for soldiers to be withdrawn from Afghanistan.A pro-Gladstone poster drawn by the same cartoonist has the Liberal leader killing Disraeli with a pen.Gladstone won the election by a landslide.Magnificent maps: Power, Propaganda and Art is at the British Library from 30 April to 19 September.British LibraryExhibitionsHeritageMark Brownguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |