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| Children’s Books: Snow Zone Books about a squirrel waiting for winter; a bunny having a snow day; and Santa getting ready for Christmas. feeds.nytimes.com |
A Gambling Man: Charles II and the Restoration by Jenny Uglow A bravura biography paints a masterly portrait of Charles II, says Geraldine BedellIn May 1660, Charles II disembarked in front of cheering crowds at Dover, following a nine-year exile. He had been invited home by a parliament dismayed at the chaos caused by Oliver Cromwell's death and was warmly welcomed by a country weary of puritanism. He faced many hazards: his nation was divided by religion, its alliances were uneasy, its identity adrift.The most astonishing thing about Charles II's reign was that it lasted a quarter of a century. His father had been beheaded, his brother would flee the country after only three years in power, and the Interregnum had left Britain overtaxed, resentful and exhausted. To maintain his position, he had to balance the interests of a mostly Anglican parliament and sizable minorities of Catholics and Presbyterians. He had to keep the Dutch and the French at bay and stay on top of a court full of intrigue. In his first decade alone, his promise of peace and prosperity was undermined by plague, fire and war.Jenny Uglow made her name with biographies of artists and writers, inventors and scientists, notably The Lunar Men and her life of Thomas Bewick. She claims her sympathies naturally lie with "radicals and artisans protesting against the abuse of power" and acknowledges that, for her, plunging into the heart of the establishment to write about Charles II was disconcerting. But then she poses the question: "What if a person's art is also his life, his role simply 'being the king'?"This seems a more useful way of getting at Charles than her ostensible organising principle, the king as a "gambler". Her chapters are organised under clubs, diamonds, hearts and spades and decorated (beautifully) with contemporary playing cards. But the narrative doesn't bear out the gambling interpretation. The stakes were high, but Charles didn't play them recklessly. He was a master of outward compliance and inward evasion, all coated in charm.The book focuses on the first 10 years of his reign, on the grounds that his options narrowed subsequently. Charles comes across as calculating and pragmatic. He had learnt to dissemble in his years of penniless wandering around Europe's courts and, as one contemporary commented, had developed "the greatest art of concealing himself of any man alive". Amiable and open, yet prepared to be ruthless, this king who loved the theatre was always wearing a mask.In one sense, this is frustrating for a biographer: where is the "real" Charles under all the womanising and sardonic humour? But contemporary readers are quite comfortable with the idea that there is no essentialist, non-performative self, that individuals are made up of the roles they play. And in this case the roles are endlessly fascinating because, to survive, Charles could never stop being the king. There was no such thing as private space.This masterly, wide-ranging biography resists the temptation to take sides on Charles (who has variously been depicted in the past as the "merrie monarch" and a libertine let-down), though it is impossible not to find him appealing. He presided over a time of intellectual ferment and Uglow is at her best when she writes about Charles as the king of the dawning Age of Reason. There was much that was forward-looking and curious about him and she captures vividly the excitement of his arrival as a young, informal leader, European in outlook, fascinated by science, philosophy and women.This period saw the founding of the Royal Society, the start of insurance and shipping in the City, and the tentative beginnings of a publicly voiced opposition that in time would replace court intrigue with party politics. Women could be immensely powerful and the king could father 12 children by different mistresses and go round Whitehall tucking them up at night.Uglow casts her eye over everything in these 10 years, ably supported by the diarists Evelyn and Pepys, who provide her with much scurrilous background. I could have done with a bit more about Charles's latter years, in which he was forced to become more hardline. But this is a bravura biography, which leaves the reader with a vivid sense of what he did, and what he meant to the future.BiographyGeraldine Bedellguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The digested read HarperCollins, £18.99It was the Alaska State Fair, August 2008. I passed the Right to Life stand with my daughter's face on their poster. "That's you, baby-girl," I said to Piper. "There's no member of this family your momma wouldn't sell out to promote her career." As we watched three commy abortionists being burned to death, Senator McCain called my cell phone. Would I like to help him lose the presidential race?My parents moved to Alaska when I was three and I fell in love with the outdoors and killing things. Swearing the Oath of Allegiance in school gave me a sense of civic pride and I vowed to serve America and go to church a lot.After coming runner-up, and last, in the Miss Alaska pageant, I married Todd Palin, a guy with his own snow mobile who blessed me with five children: Track, "we'd have called him hockey if he'd been born in the winter"; Bristol, "Todd said he hoped she'd have a rack like mine"; Willow, "we misspelled pillow"; Piper, "after our light aircraft"; and Trig, "short for the trigger on our AK47"."Dang it," I thought, "this election campaign is getting mighty dirty." But Todd told me God had a purpose for me and after praying for his guidance, I was duly elected mayor of Wasilla by nine votes to six. Various stories have been told about how I dismissed a librarian for stocking anti-American literature on evolution and how I tried to get my brother-in-law fired from his job as a state trooper. Well I don't have space in this 400-page book to go into this in any detail, but if I did I would say that anyone who messes with God or my family has to deal with this pitbull in lipstick!My proudest moment in office was seeing off an attempt by the police chief to introduce gun and alcohol controls. I hate liberals who don't understand how things work in the 49th State. It is a God-given right for any Alaskan to get drunk and take out anything that moves. Why else did God create guns? Would He have made animals out of meat if He had wanted us to be vegetarians?Having served on the Oil Commission, I realised that Alaskan politics was rife with corruption and the waste of public funds, and when I was elected governor in 2006 by 73 votes to 59 I vowed to end pork-barrel politics. Mysteriously, though, I find I have omitted my initial support for the "Bridge to Nowhere, Jobs for the Boys" scheme, a $300m construction project to build a bridge to reach 11 people. I would rather now concentrate on my vice-presidential campaign."Tell me what you know about American foreign policy," McCain said, when we met at his ranch in Arizona."About as much as the average American," I replied. "So that's nothing, then." "Hell, Senator. I don't need to know anything about the history of the Middle East to know the Iraqis are all a bunch of Russian Czechoslovakian Shiites.""Where do you stand on God?""Sarah Palin won't hold back on God, Senator. I'm proud to believe in the book of Genesis that says the Garden of Eden was in Alaska. Jeez, every December I even go out hunting dinosaurs."For some reason I didn't get to see much of Senator McCain after this and although there were great moments, such as talking to President Sarkozy of Paris, Texas on the phone, our campaign never really took off and we were narrowly beaten by 250m votes to 23.The mud-slinging started in earnest once we returned to Alaska. Rumours about my marriage circulated – dang it, why would I want to divorce a man with the biggest skidoo in Anchorage? – but most damaging were the complaints about my ethical conduct, all of which have been dismissed except the ones that haven't. So I won't be standing for governor again. But if the American people are as stupid as I think they are, it's Palin for president in '12!Digested read, digested: Going Rouge, An American Embarrassment.Sarah PalinJohn Craceguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Poem of the week: The Darkling Thrush, by Thomas Hardy The hymn-like metre combines with the Romantic, Keatsian image of the thrush to produce one of Hardy's most lyrical poemsThomas Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush" was originally called "The Century's End, 1900" and was first printed in The Graphic on 29 December of that year. "A deleted 1899 on the manuscript suggested he had written it a year before," Claire Tomalin tells us in her biography, Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man. Earlier in the same book, Tomalin memorably describes Hardy as a child, waiting each evening for the setting sun to light up the red-painted staircase in the family house, at which point he would recite an "evening hymn" by Sir Isaac Watts, beginning "And now another day is gone,/ I'll sing my maker's praise". "The Darkling Thrush" seems oddly to recall that scene.It is one of Hardy's most lyrical poems, musical in execution, metaphor, theme, and even title. The Keatsian word "darkling" simply means "in the dark", but it has the sound of a preludial shimmer of birdsong. Visually, too, it prepares us for the image of the "aged thrush, frail, gaunt and small,/ In blast-beruffled plume … " Another use of the -ling suffix is to produce a diminutive of a noun (as in gosling, duckling, sapling, etc.) and though this isn't what is happening etymologically, in "darkling" we pick up a distant sense of it, and therefore of the bird's littleness and exposedness in his bare tree.The plain, steady rhythm and rhyme-scheme of Hardy's hymn-like metre provide a kind of aural blank canvas, allowing individual words to sound out with particular clarity. Sibilance in the first three lines creates a whispery atmosphere, a touch of wind among the stiffened branches which then fall still with the alliteration-free neutrality of "The weakening eye of day". Then there are the hard 'C' sounds in stanza two: "corpse", "crypt", "cloudy canopy" – which evoke, perhaps, the tread of a funeral march, the dislodged clods of earth, the entombment of the personified century.In the grey scenery of the first two stanzas, the narrator, barely visible, sees only the stasis of deepest winter. That resonating pair of words "leant" and "outleant" impresses on the eye images of disablement, the laying-out of the dead, and, of course, leanness. As in the title, there is a Keatsian echo, this time from "The Eve of St Agnes". Hardy's scene is even more deathly still: it is not only the winter of the year but of a whole century. And then the solo-singer appears, and subtly the music of the diction changes. The beautifully unexpected word, "illimited", is the first we hear, inside the poem, of the singing thrush, the flowing double 'l' conveying the sense and sound of a joy which spills out and cannot be circumscribed or halted. There are further "liquid siftings" in the many l' and 'r' sounds that ensue. It's as if the broken lyre-strings that the tangled stems suggested in stanza one had been mended.Hardy's thrush of course belongs to the Romantic tradition, in which birds seem to express emotion in "songs" that have human significance. Modern readers interpret bird-song differently: we know the "ecstatic carolings" to be territorially possessive; as mundane as estate agents' 'Sold' signs. Today's ornithologically-minded poets content themselves with more descriptive responses, though birds have never yet gone out of poetic fashion.It would no doubt have satisfied the deep pessimist in Hardy to have known this, and one can imagine the negating final stanza he might have added to cancel the magic with gloomy thoughts of territorialism and warfare. But he is still close enough to the 19th century to be able to treat the bird, however warily, as a symbol of hope for the new epoch. And, indeed, to give the word a capital letter, which it shares only with Frost, Winter and Century itself. Later on, Hardy became more, not less, despairing: his philosophy of the "Immanent Will" is laid out in The Dynasts (which I haven't yet read, and really should get round to – New Year Resolutions, how are ye?). The heartlessness of this "Will" is more accessibly expressed in the great poem of 1912 about the sinking of the Titanic, "The Convergence of the Twain." In 1899, however. Hardy was more optimistic. Commentators who consider the thrush to represent the poet himself surely have a good point. He was frail and bird-like in appearance, and he had discovered an abundant poetic inspiration towards the end of his life that must have seemed at times miraculously "illimited".Let the poet-thrush's "happy good night air" sing us out of 2009, with all my thanks and good wishes to friends old and new, on (and behind the scenes of), Poem of the Week.The Darkling ThrushI leant upon a coppice gate When Frost was spectre-grey,And Winter's dregs made desolate   The weakening eye of day.The tangled bine-stems scored the sky   Like strings of broken lyres,And all mankind that haunted nigh   Had sought their household fires.The land's sharp features seemed to be   The Century's corpse outleant,His crypt the cloudy canopy,   The wind his death-lament.The ancient pulse of germ and birth   Was shrunken hard and dry,And every spirit upon earth   Seemed fervourless as I.At once a voice arose among   The bleak twigs overheadIn a full-hearted evensong   Of joy illimited;An aged thrush, frail, gaunt and small,   In blast-beruffled plume,Had chosen thus to fling his soul   Upon the growing gloom.So little cause for carolings   Of such ecstatic soundWas written on terrestrial things   Afar or nigh around,That I could think there trembled through   His happy good-night airSome blessed Hope, whereof he knew   And I was unaware.Thomas HardyPoetryCarol Rumensguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Blue Skies Gregg Easterbrook argues that the financial crisis is just a small cloud over the road to rapid global innovation. feeds.nytimes.com |