Phænomena: Doppelmayr’s Celestial Atlas Giles Sparrow, London: Thames & Hudson, 2022, 255pp., £50 Johann Doppelmayr (1677-1750) spent most of his life in Nuremberg, but had a European reputation for his writings on astronomy and mathematics. Nuremberg had long been an intellectual and technical as well as political powerhouse, and as a young man Doppelmayr had… Continue reading
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“Glory of Spayne”
I started awake as the plane came into land. The cactuses along the edges of the runway suggested even to my stupefied senses that we were no longer in Birmingham. Distinctly un-English heat fell heavily on our heads and draped itself around our shoulders as we walked into the terminal below the giant, magic word,… Continue reading
Mountain rescue
James Hilton (1900-1954) was a bestselling novelist, responsible for Goodbye, Mr Chips and Random Harvest – and Lost Horizon (1933), the latter filmed twice, once by Frank Capra. Lost Horizon is little-read today, but is memorialised by Hilton’s place-name ‘Shangri-La’, which has passed into cliché as shorthand for any remote utopia. Tibet, with its awe-inspiring… Continue reading
Soldiers, once and always
Alfred de Vigny’s The Military Condition, first published in France in 1835, is a rare philosophical examination of the military experience. It’s aphoristic, lucid, mordant, and reflective – a tribute to the perennial nature of the professional soldier. Vigny (1797-1863) came from a noble family. His father was crippled by war, but nevertheless instilled in… Continue reading
Alliteration once and always
Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival – A Critical Anthology Dennis Wilson Wise (ed.), Lanham, Maryland: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2023, 407pps., US$65 The phrase ‘alliterative poetry’ immediately connotes archaism, and a literary tradition almost moribund since the mid-fifteenth century. University of Arizona academic Dennis Wilson Wise suggests that the form has been revived… Continue reading
Prince Harming
Spare, Prince Harry, London: Transworld, 2023, hb., 410pps., £28 There are times when English feelings for their royal family come close to obsession. Through all the tumults of England’s trajectory, its monarchy has formed an imaginative bond between Anglo-Saxon origins and today’s Kingdom – celebrated by its greatest writers, and extolled as an exemplar of… Continue reading
Empire state of mind
Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning Nigel Biggar, London: William Collins, 2023, 480pps., $34.99 Ideologues are frequently performative, but sometimes they are simply pantomimic. One of today’s major stock villains is the British Empire – seen in melodramatic minds as a swaggering dastard, slashing through global history like Captain Hook in murderous search of Peter Pan and… Continue reading
From myth to mob-rule, and back
The Prophets of Doom Neema Parvini, Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2023, pb., 227pps., £14.95 The West, it is said, is modernity, but if it is, there is melancholy at its core. Our most confident centuries have subsisted in the shadow of Rome – our Ozymandian awareness that the greatest powers must pass, and all empires will… Continue reading
Writing ruins
Shadowlands: A Journey Through Lost Britain Matthew Green, London: Faber, 2022, hb, 358pps, £20 An unknown Anglo-Saxon wrote The Ruin, a poem about Roman remains, which starts: “This masonry is wondrous; fates broke it / Courtyard pavements were smashed; the work of giants is decaying…” Ethnic inheritors took up this mordant tradition, especially after the… Continue reading
Refracted future
The Mirror, Tim Bragg, Sycamore Dystopia, 2023, pb., 292pps., £10 Ever since the ancients invented automata, writers have wondered about the implications for humanity, and ruminated about the nature of consciousness. The Industrial Revolution would spawn increasing concern about subservience to machines and “Satanic mills.” The Great War and then Karel Čapek’s 1920 play R.U.R…. Continue reading