For anyone who wants to know more about the spirit of the Russian Orthodox faith, Everyday Saints and Other Stories by Archimandrite Tikhon (Pokrov Publications, £20) provides a wonderful introduction. Written by a monk from the Pskov Caves Monastery near the Russian-Estonian border, it is a charming mixture of miraculous events, lives of holy monks and incidents of religious persecution, providing an inimitable glimpse of the supernatural.
Many travel books are published these days. Jim Malia’s In Belloc’s Steps (New Millennium, £8) is, however, different. It’s his account of following Hilaire Belloc’s classic story, The Path to Rome (1902), 100 years later, with all the humour and challenges such a walking pilgrimage involves. For those who want to learn more of the faith and Europe’s Christian culture, this book will provide a refreshing companion. Malia even discusses the merits of the local wines.
Any recommendation of Catholic reading should include the story of a saint such as Pier Giorgio Frassati: a Hero for Our Times (Ignatius Press, £16). Frassati, who died in 1925 aged 24, provides a wonderful example to young people today, especially those of no faith, of what an exuberant and joyful life you can lead when you place Christ at the centre. Like the rich young man in the Gospel, the young Frassati, son of a wealthy Turin family, wanted to “inherit eternal life”. Unlike the unnamed man in the Gospel story, he did renounce his wealth in an interior act of poverty, though it did not curtail his love of his friends, cigars, mountaineering and joining societies of Christian action.
Hillary Clinton, a well-known feminist, who wanted people to vote for her in the American presidential election because, among other things, she was determined to break the political “glass ceiling”, should have read Thérèse Vanier: Pioneer of L’Arche, Palliative Care and Spiritual Unity by Ann Shearer (DLT, £12.99). Clinton would have found the life of this unmarried, Catholic woman doctor who died in 2014 highly instructive. How did Thérèse Vanier, sister of the founder of the L’Arche communities, Jean Vanier, come to be so loved and valued by so many people and to exert such a great (if quiet) influence within the three spheres of life that she chose as her vocation?
Sister Theresa Aletheia Noble, the author of The Prodigal You Love: Inviting Loved Ones Back to the Church (Pauline Books and Media, £11), who writes a popular blog, Pursued by Truth, relates her own story of having abandoned her faith for 10 years and then, after a series of experiences and encounters, returning to it. Her book is full of hope and good advice and it will put heart into those whose own loved ones have left the faith. Prayer is the key, followed by example and obeying the promptings of the Spirit in our conversations with others.
It has been an excellent year for big history. William Leuchtenburg’s The American President: From Teddy Roosevelt to Bill Clinton (Oxford University Press, £25) contains an extraordinary number of fascinating tales and provides frank, but always measured, assessments of the occupants of the Oval Office. Truman and the two Roosevelts fare very well; Reagan and Kennedy less so.
Peter McPhee’s Liberty or Death: the French Revolution (Yale University Press, £25) transforms our understanding of this epochal event, focusing squarely on the importance of developments in the provinces while offering a fluent and compelling narrative of the whole catastrophe.
The impact on daily life is a central theme, which also holds true of Daniel Todman’s Britain’s War: Into Battle 1937-1941 (Allen Lane, £30). Todman captures the uneasy mood of the late 1930s with great skill and takes us on a series of phenomenally well-researched journeys through the first years of the war.
I was greatly impressed by Tiffany Jenkins’s Keeping Their Marbles (Oxford University Press, £25). The assessment of who should have charge of precious artefacts sometimes seemed to lack much of a sense of natural justice, but in many ways the book transformed my previously rather simplistic thinking about historical claims of ownership.
In terms of learning new facts and stories, meanwhile, I gobbled up Incarnations: India in Fifty Lives by Sunil Khilnani (Allen Lane, £30). Witty and frequently provocative sketches of historical figures (many neglected) almost convinced me that the present can learn straightforward lessons from the past.
This optimistic mood was soon shattered by The Making of India: the Untold Story of British Enterprise by Kartar Lalvani (Bloomsbury, £25), an equally wonderful and thought-provoking book that drips with complexity.
As the Reformation bandwagon gathers steam, I heartily commend Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet by Lyndal Roper (The Bodley Head, £25). It is simply the best English-language biography of Luther I’ve read and I’d be amazed if its combination of rigorous scholarship and approachable tone is bettered next year when Luther bios will no doubt be flooding the market.
The other biographical study I’d suggest is Brothers of the Quill: Oliver Goldsmith in Grub Street by Norma Clarke (Harvard University Press, £25). The book portrays an extraordinary period in literary history and captures the puzzling blend of principle and opportunism that defined Goldsmith’s career.
Finally, some light relief was provided by Simon Horobin’s marvellous How English Became English: A Short History of a Global Language (Oxford University Press, £10.99), which should be handed to every pedant you know.
I almost convinced myself that I had a vague understanding of the dizzying world of digital technology after reading Douglas Rushkoff’s excellent Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity (Portfolio Penguin, £14.99). Sadly, the delusion that I had mastered the jargon lasted for roughly a week, but Rushkoff’s call for a fairer, better economic future will stay with me for a good deal longer.
Housman Country: Into the Heart of England by Peter Parker (Little, Brown, £25) is a magnificent demonstration of the truth of Edmund Wilson’s remark that the poems of A Shropshire Lad “went on vibrating for decades” after their publication in 1896, and of the fact that they continue to do so. Peter Parker has traced these vibrations with great tact and care as they have rippled through the literature, landscape, music, wars and soul of England.
Densely packed but never turgid; admiring but without a hint of gush; avoiding casual assumptions about the reader’s knowledge but with no spoon-feeding: this is a triumph of cultural analysis mixed with literary biography. There is no biographer showboating or axe-grinding: what matters is Housman and his influence. The poet’s stick-dry sense of humour is well represented and had me snorting with laughter in places, but this is also a somewhat sad portrait of a brilliant man trapped by fatalism, nostalgia and unrequited love, by the enforced denial of his sexuality, his own quite epic pedanticism and a virtually unbreachable reserve.
1956: The World in Revolt by Simon Hall (Faber & Faber, £11), on the other hand, is a kind of exhilarating but disturbing magic-carpet ride around the hotspots of a troubled world in a year of political turmoil. There are landings in, for example, Algeria, South Africa, Suez, and Moscow, where Khrushchev is delivering his speech denouncing Stalin.
Hall’s statistics make the mind reel: 700,000 of the 1.9 million citizens arrested for anti-Soviet activity between 1935 and 1940 were shot. Some of this blood was on Khrushchev’s own hands, and when the uprising happened in Hungary, his response was “liquidation”.
Christian leaders push, or get pushed, to the fore in different conflicts. Hall reminds us of Martin Luther King’s ability to rouse the human conscience, sometimes with soaring rhetoric, but other times with a simplicity that can be the mark of genius: “Don’t worry about segregation. It will die because God is against it.”
Meanwhile, in Poznań, priests bless the marchers who, while demanding bread, also appeal for the release of Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński. The Poznań revolt “tore the mask off the party which is supposed to be our friend,” as one protester put it.
By 1956, the American writer Joy Davidman had abandoned that same party, but she had been a hard-boiled communist in her time, as detailed in Don King’s Yet One More Spring: a Critical Study of Joy Davidman (Eerdmans. £16.99). When she actually got round to reading Lenin, she found him “repetitious to idiocy”. Right now Davidman’s place in literary history is mostly owing to her marriage to CS Lewis and to being the subject, after her death, of Lewis’s A Grief Observed. But she deserves more.
King meticulously traces every step of Davidman’s career: as a novelist, a lacerating film critic (when she wasn’t giving a pass to Soviet dross) and, above all, a fine poet. Her love sonnets to Lewis, also published this year, will knock you sideways.
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