Yale University Press

‘Civilization’, a seemingly tranquil notion, has always somehow managed to start quarrels and divide the room. In the classical world, where the concept was largely shaped, it managed, more startlingly, to divide the human race itself. On the one hand, so the notion appeared to imply, were people whose speech you could more or less understand ...

The Old English Beowulf, the most important poem in English before Chaucer, was probably composed in the eighth century. The poem traces Beowulf’s three fights against the monster Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and the dragon. The dragon is defeated, but Beowulf also dies in the battle. The poem ends with an elegiac lament ...

It is now more than six years since the Global Financial Crisis threatened to topple the banking systems of the Western world. Although a complete breakdown in the financial system was ultimately avoided, one consequence of the events of 2008 has been the biggest slump in economic activity since the Great Depression. Australia was, in the main, spared the economic damage that ravaged large parts of Europe, and there has been little discussion in these parts of the causes and social effects of what the authors refer to as the ‘Great Recession’. Somewhat surprisingly, on the evidence presented in this book (and despite both the United States and the United Kingdom being severely affected) it would seem that the Anglosphere at large is guilty of what the authors call the ‘veil of complacency’. The book asserts that in those countries there is little concern for either the financial consequences or the victims of the crisis. Why should this be the case? Perhaps the Great Recession was not as bad as the headlines have suggested.

When St Paul’s burned down in 1561, no one was in any doubt that it was the work of God. The debate – and it was a furious one in the press of the time – concerned what this said about His views on the abolition of the mass. Contemporary press reports of the Battle of Lepanto, the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, and the Spanish Armada show how reporting of even the most important events was subject to wide variations in timeliness and accuracy. The church, with its networks of pilgrims and crusaders, played an important role in gathering and disseminating news in the late Middle Ages, but it was often merchants who were behind major advances, sometimes setting up their own networks. When the noise of conflicting reports became overwhelming, they tended to share information and to let everyone work out for themselves, or with friends, what they wanted to believe.

The Bard Graduate Center, long known for its ground-breaking studies in the decorative arts, has taken the ambitious leap of presenting a comprehensive history of decorative arts and design from 1400 to 2000, covering Asia, the Islamic world, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. (Coverage of Australia and Oceania is planned for future editions.) At over 700 pages, this is a most impressive achievement. For once, instead of being relegated to occasional paragraphs in major survey texts of art history, the decorative arts are presented centre stage. I wish it had been around when I was a student. Weber has assembled a team of scholars to cover this vast territory and it is not surprising to read that the book was almost ten years in the making. This volume does for the decorative arts what those standard university textbooks, Gardner’s Art through the Ages and Janson’s History of Art, did for the fine arts.

How a writer bears witness to his age is necessarily the expression of many things, not least the possibly quite peculiar nature of an author’s life. Literary works often emerge from complex upbringings, from periods of youthful isolation spent reading and writing. More still seem to have been written as a result of the fraught relationships that befall authors, perhaps because authors so often view their relationships with a degree of creative and critical distance. And yet, if a writer’s output evidences an unusual life, it also witnesses broader questions being asked by a community as a whole. At some level, even the most remarkable figures are typical of their age, and reflections of it. By the close of Paul Binding’s study of the life and works of Hans Christian Andersen (1805–75), we are reminded that extraordinary feats of originality and imagination are often the result of how unique minds enter wider discourses.

Science may well have revolutionised our world, but David Knight finds ‘revolution’ to be an inexact metaphor for the ‘chancy, many stranded story’ he describes. He explores models from biography, with associated concepts of infancy, adolescence, and maturity, before settling on voyages of exploration and discovery. This choice is inspired in part by Newton’s self-portrait of playing on the shore before a great ocean of undiscovered truth, and Wordsworth’s subsequent poetic expansion of Newton ‘Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone’ for all eternity. Indeed, voyaging in strange seas provides a much more resonant and nuanced metaphor than the more common (and perhaps more marketable) revolutionary subtitle.

On the rear jacket of this fascinating and important book is a picture of Winston Churchill at his desk at Chartwell, his house in Kent, just a few months before the outbreak of World War II. Apparently caught in the moment of literary creation, cigar in mouth and concentrating on his papers, the photo credit – to a Picture Post photographer – leads to the obvious suspicion that this was actually a staged shot. For Churchill, his country home was not merely a place of repose but a writing factory, the output of which would earn him the large sums of money necessary for its upkeep. At the same time, his image as a man of letters served to advertise the product as well as to suggest the existence of a non-political ‘hinterland’ of the kind appropriate to a statesman of fertile brain and broad views.

Twelve years after Swift’s death, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu showed a visitor to her house in Venice a commode lined with books by Pope, Bolingbroke, and Swift. This, she explained, ‘gave her the satisfaction of shitting on them every day’. We still don’t know exactly what it was that caused her to fall out with Swift, Pope, and their friends in the 1720s, but there’s no questioning the enduring passions involved. The clichéd ‘men in powdered wigs’ image of the eighteenth century tells only a small part of the story. The violent intensities of the satirists are really much more interesting. We read Swift still for the visionary moments of humour, indignation, disgust, and existential terror sometimes hard to distinguish from tragedy; oh, and also for the deadly poise of his prose. Wortley Montagu was right thus to line her commode. Satire in her day was a visceral business.

When the intellectuals, writers, and artists of the Renaissance sought a theoretical basis for the new styles they were developing – at a time when the new meant all’antica and the term modern was still coloured by associations with the Middle Ages – they found that ancient sources were relatively abundant in some areas and scarce or non-existent in others. Poets could find inspiration in Horace’s Ars Poetica, and later in Aristotle’s Poetics. And there was a wealth of material on rhetoric – Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, Tacitus – in fact an abundance out of all proportion to the practice of the art in an age when public speaking was represented by sermons and university lectures rather than by the deliberative and forensic oratory that were the lifeblood of Greece and Rome.