Making notes on my reading of the issue as I go along: work in progress.
Letters
Mike Dodds, Howard Medwell, Sue Lieberman, Dennis Lack, Irene Makaryk, Ed McNally, Allen Schill, C.J. Woods, Dan Stowell, Rob Wills
Colin Burrow
"The BFG (Big Friendly Giant) of 1982 is by some distance his best book.
"But beneath the crowd-pleasing surface the mythmaking of The BFG comes from areas of Dahl’s experience that he would never have wanted to acknowledge. The BFG himself suffers from a creative dysphasia which biographers including Dennison have connected with Neal’s [his wife] struggle to recover the ability to speak after her stroke: ‘Please understand that I cannot be helping it if I sometimes is saying things a little squiggly ... Words,’ the BFG says, ‘is oh such a twitch-tickling problem to me all my life.’
"In 1960 their baby son Theo was taken out for a walk in New York by his nurse, and the pram was hit by a speeding taxi. Theo suffered serious head injuries. Dahl’s scientism kicked in, as it often did at times of disaster. He spent time and money helping to design a shunt which could relieve the cerebrospinal fluid pressing on Theo’s brain (before it was superseded, the Wade-Dahl-Till valve was used to treat three thousand children). Then in 1962 their daughter Olivia contracted measles and died suddenly of encephalitis at the same age – just seven – at which Dahl’s sister had died. Dahl never talked about his grief for his daughter, though he kept a notebook in his desk drawer headed ‘Olivia’, which wasn’t discovered until after his death.
Jeremy Harding
"Latour’s first resounding success, co-authored with the British sociologist Steve Woolgar, was Laboratory Life (1979), a close-up study of applied science.
"...Actor Network Theory (ANT), an open-ended way of thinking that redistributes agency to all the players in the drama of the sciences. As well as the people conducting the study, this includes the disciplines involved (e.g. sociology, biology, ethnology) and the more or less complex technologies to hand (from scribbled field notes to intricate laboratory equipment). All are bound in a skein of relations that we may as well regard as social, except that the social is no longer the proprietary realm of human beings. Crucially, the objects of study themselves must be seen as actors. ANT envisaged interactive networks, in which humans and other creatures – or ‘critters’, as Haraway calls them – were on something like an equal footing.
"But in the ANT model there are so many feet for a dialectic to stand on that it could easily trip over itself. Or run amok. I think next of the sorcerer’s apprentice scene in Disney’s Fantasia (1940), where ‘things’, animated by the science of magic, rapidly get out of control.
Andrew O’Hagan
Short Cuts: I Think We’re Alone Now
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Laleh Khalili
When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World’s Most Powerful Consulting Firm by Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe
"Bogdanich and Forsythe’s book is a damning account of the way McKinsey has made workplaces unsafe, ditched consumer protections, disembowelled regulatory agencies, ravaged health and social care organisations, plundered public institutions, hugely reduced workforces and increased worker exploitation."McKinsey and Company, KPMG, Deloitte, Andersen Consulting, Booz Allen Hamilton. They're all on the make and toxic!
Michael Hofmann
Poem: ‘For Adam Zagajewski’
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Brigid von Preussen
The Radical Potter: Josiah Wedgwood and the Transformation of Britain by Tristram Hunt
Wedgwood was 38 years old and had suffered decades of pain precipitated by a childhood smallpox infection. His leg was sawn off without anaesthetic [in 1768]. The book ... presents Wedgwood as a ‘radical potter’, not just in his ceramic innovations but also in his politics. It’s true that Wedgwood was a religious non-conformist, a Dissenter who supported the American and French Revolutions, was committed to the abolition of slavery, and believed in both parliamentary reform and the education of women.
David Trotter
DeWitt’s abiding interest in the practicalities of communication. She’s always been eager to explore the further reaches not just of well-established fields such as linguistics and classical scholarship, but of the digital-age specialism of ‘information theory’: the science of the organisation and retrieval of data. Her long-standing regard for the ‘beautiful, intransigent books’ published by the statistician and political scientist Edward Tufte. ‘Clutter and confusion are failures of design, not attributes of information,’ Tufte writes in Envisioning Information (1990).
Data is of no use unless it can be communicated. The origin of contemporary theories of information lies in Claude Shannon’s seminal ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’, first published in the Bell System Technical Journal in 1948. Shannon’s focus was on the signal-to-noise ratio that determines whether or not a particular message will get through. The message’s ‘semantic aspects’ were irrelevant, he thought, to the ‘engineering problem’ presented by the establishment and maintenance of a channel of communication. The engineering problem at issue has of course been around for a very long time. A solution often found to work in contexts which don’t make it easy to establish and maintain a channel of communication – battlefields, for instance – is terseness. Xenophon records in his Hellenica a dispatch sent by the second-in-command of the Spartan fleet after the disastrous sea battle of Cyzicus that roughly translates as ‘ships sunk, admiral dead, survivors starving, no idea what to do next’. Similarly, Red Devlin’s trademark ‘Oh go on’ and ‘Sure you can’ are utterances incorporating minimal semantic content, the main purpose of which is to establish and maintain a channel of communication someone else would very much prefer to close. DeWitt is the sort of writer to whom engineering – the right mark in the right place, getting the message through – matters as much as exposition.
Bee Wilson
Maria Montessori didn't approve of toys and playing. It should all be real for children - giving them proper respect. But she was dictatorial and offended lots of people. She was Roman Catholic and tried to the church on board, but with mixed success since they didn't like her opposition to punishment.
Neal Ascherson
Pretty Young Rebel: The Life of Flora MacDonald by Flora Fraser
Flora had to be persuaded to help Bonny Prince Charlie in the famous escape from Benbecula to Skye.
Though she was captured and other conspirators executed, the public and authorities were sympathetic to the romantic story, and she was spared. Later in life she and her husband joined the exodus of Islanders to America, arriving at the wrong time in the war of independence. Despite their support for the Jacobites in Scotland they were willing to join the forces of the British (Hanovarians) in America.
Peter Howarth
The chief obstacle to Chesterton’s canonisation, and to his reputation as a Christian was the antisemitism evident in his journalism. Despite his support for Zionism – in fact, thanks to it – Chesterton thought Jews would always be foreigners and honour-bound to have allegiances other than to Britain.
GK was heavily influenced by his brother, Cecil ("Cecil was a stinker by all accounts") and by Hilaire Belloc who were antisemitic. It seems he should have paid more attention to H. G. Wells
Elisa Tamarkin
At the National Gallery: Winslow Homer
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Peter Phillips
The Requiem of Tomás Luis de Victoria (1603) by Owen Rees
The fact that Victoria was a priest affects his composition. "Rees is .. is so keen to downplay the fact that Victoria was a priest (often made too much of in commentaries on his music) that he misse the special message that Victoria has embedded in the work. Throughout his setting the dominant force is light, and wherever ‘lux’ is mentioned the music takes on a new expression.""Since the start of the new millennium, recordings of the Victoria Requiem have appeared at the rate of approximately one a year."
"As part of his recitation of the piece’s success as a concert item, he mentions that between 1986 and 2015, I [Peter Phillips] performed it 86 times, never liturgically though sometimes in a church. (That number now stands at 137.)"
Here's one of them: The Tallis Scholars directed by Peter Phillips
Sharon Olds
Poem: ‘My Head and My Mother’s Breast in Quarantine Together’
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Helen Pfeifer
As Night Falls: 18th-Century Ottoman Cities after Dark by Avner Wishnitzer
For most of the Ottoman Empire’s existence, the crossing from day into night was unmistakeable, as it was in much of the world. ... Ottoman nights were dark.
In the 1660s, starting with Paris, major Western European cities began installing street lighting. ... In the Ottoman Empire, street lighting wasn’t introduced until the 1840s ... Wishnitzer, for whom the Ottomans’ modernity is not on trial, is unperturbed. Although his book isn’t structured around the question ‘why not?’, it tentatively offers an answer: turning on the lights would have extinguished the productive ambiguity that night brought with it
Lili Owen Rowlands
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Erin Maglaque
Dante’s Little Book
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Marina Warner
Diary: Carmen Callil’s Causes
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