Antonia Fraser
Someone once said, channelling Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “There’s nothing good nor bad, but Christmas makes it worse.” I can only imagine that it came after a bad time Christmas shopping, or forgetting to buy the turkey. For me Christmas is a wonderful time; beginning with Frequent Family Gatherings (FFGs) but including opportunities to read as others open their presents. I plan to educate myself enjoyably by reading The World: A Family History by Simon Sebag Montefiore, which has been hailed as a rollicking tale of the great families of history from all over the globe, told with all of Sebag Montefiore’s accustomed brilliance. Frequent Family Gatherings, indeed! Most appropriate. I shall also allow myself the luxury of rereading a classic: a book first published in 1840, which was re-recommended by an intellectual friend of my grandson: Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time. I haven’t read it for 40 years, and all I can remember about it is that there is a Byronic hero, Grigory Pechorin, and that it is an utterly compelling story. The real motto of Christmas – which I actually adore, with Midnight Mass, FFGs and everything else – is that there’s nothing good nor bad, but reading makes it better.
AN Wilson
Over Christmas I’m looking forward to rereading Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman’s Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life. It is a wonderful slice of Oxford life between the Second World War and the 1950s. It is also the intellectually heroic story of four distinguished female phil-osophers who boldly defied the stultifyingly-boring constraints of “linguistic” philosophy (as practised by chaps) and sailed out into the choppy old waters of what used to make philosophy interesting when it concerned itself with ethics, aesthetics – yes – language, science, and discussions of freedom and goodness in the era of the horrors of Auschwitz and the atomic bomb. Elizabeth Anscombe (Wittgenstein’s representative on earth), Mary Midgley (who held the materialist-Darwinists to account for their simplicit-ies of mind), the great Philippa Foot (who went on to a stellar academic career in the United States) and Iris Murdoch (perhaps these days better known for her novels) were all at Oxford together at a time when most of their male contemporaries were away doing war work of one kind or another. The book is a completely life-enhancing and joyous account of their friendship and their liberation of all our minds by their insights and panache.
Jessie Childs
I really miss John Julius Norwich’s Christmas Cracker. His annual selection of quotes and cuttings was just the thing after a long lunch on Christmas Day. Alas it is no more, having died with him in 2018, but I will dip into some old ones and enjoy instead two tempting proofs: a debut novel, The New Life, by Tom Crewe, an LRB editor who can really write, and Antonia Fraser’s Lady Caroline Lamb: A Free Spirit, which is out next May and can be regarded, as she writes in her Prologue, as “the culmination of an exciting and fulfilling life spent studying History”. The book published this year that I’m most looking forward to curling up with is Anna Keay’s The Restless Republic. It’s about the 11 crownless years between the regicide of Charles I and the restoration of his son Charles II. Keay is a wonderful historian and the reviews suggest that this is a book as electrifying as the decade. I’m also looking forward to reading Helen Rappaport’s After the Romanovs: Russian Exiles in Paris between the Wars. My grandmother was one, for a while, and I’m fascinated to find out what it was like.
Michael Nazir-Ali
Like so many others, I think, I set aside books and articles which I need or want to read during the Christmas season – but the reading is inevitably overtaken by events. This year I have to tackle biographies of AR Cornelius (Pakistan’s only Catholic Chief Justice of the Supreme Court) and of Sir Norman Anderson, the British Anglican scholar of Islamic Law. Both of these have made a significant contribution to the development of law in Muslim countries in ways sympathetic to Islamic tradition and yet determinedly modern in approach and applic-ation. There is also reading to be done on the emergence of thinking on personhood: including Walter Ullmann, Larry Siedentop and Roger Ruston on the role of the Dominicans in the development of the human-rights discourse. For pleasure, I am hoping to return to Rumi’s Divan-i Kebir – sublime poetry, even if I disagree with its apparent pantheism – and to Edmund Crispin’s detective Gervase Fen. I want to read his Holy Disorders, which is about murder in a cathedral: a setting with which I am only too familiar! Finally, PG Wodehouse’s Nothing Serious (I’ve read almost everything else he wrote) – a collection of stories about the most absurd situations imaginable.
Simon Caldwell
A book which I am very much looking forward to reading is Lead Kindly Light: Essays for Ian Ker, which was published by Gracewing earlier this year to celebrate Fr Ker’s 80th birthday at the end of August. It has been made rather poignant by its dedicatee’s sudden death at the start of November. It includes the contributions of 17 distinguished scholars, brought together by Paul Shrimpton for a festschrift in honour of the late author of the definitive biography of Cardinal St John Henry Newman. What a line up it is! Cardinal Gerhard Müller has joined Cardinal Marc Ouellet, Cardinal George Pell and our own Serenhedd James – among many other outstanding contributors – to produce what looks like a terrific volume of essays. I am most looking forward to reading the last of all the contributions, however, which is by Fr Dermot Fenlon; a former priest of the Birmingham Oratory, he also died suddenly this year while serving as chaplain to the Tyburn Nuns at their convent in Cork. This gentle and holy man introduced me to the writings of Cardinal Newman in a way which captured my imagination indelibly. I would have bought this volume for his contribution alone.
Philippa Edwards OSB
By Christmas I expect to be still savouring the Hebrew scholar Robert Alter’s translation and commentary on the first book of the Bible: Genesis: Translation and Commentary. It is rich in insight into the wordplay and literary skill of the ancient auth-ors and consequently a thoroughly good read. I am also enjoying the Dominican poet Fr Paul Murray’s God’s Spies: Michelangelo, Shakespeare and Some Poets of Vision, which has introduced me to many gems of delight and wonder at the natural world. It has also reminded me of many old favourites, such as the early Irish poem about the hermit and his white cat Pangur Ban, and St Francis of Assisi’s “Canticle of the Sun” with its opening line “Laudato si’, mi’ Signore” – from which Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical about the environment and the care of the natural world took its name. I am looking forward to two novels by Amor Towles, a new discovery for me. They are A Gentleman in Moscow and The Lincoln Highway; they promise a feast of wit, wisdom and joy. Finally there is Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell, which explores the multi-faceted and tempestuous life of one of England’s greatest poets.
Gavin Ashenden
I have a pile of books into which to dip when I have a chance, and if Christmas brings some relief of pace. France – An Adventure History by Graham Robb is an idiosyncratic history of France which is telling me much I didn’t know and is a constant refreshing delight. I need to revisit the Spanish Civil War to help me understand some history I long misunderstood; when I became a Catholic I began to see that there are many complex layers: I’m ready to plough through Antony Beevor’s Battle for Spain. Scott Hahn and Benjamin Wiker have written a splendid book I am itching to get into called Politicising the Bible: The Roots of Historical Criticism and the Secularisation of Scripture 1300-1700, which explores how the Protestant experiment went wrong, produced hyper-rationalism and undermined the Church’s relationship with the Bible. It opened the door to the secular assaults we are struggling with today. Finally, as a long time devotee of Padre Pio, Fr Chad Ripperger has written a magisterial book called Dominion: The Nature of Diabolic Warfare. You won’t find many books which handle both psychology and long experience of the Church as well as this one promises to.
Melanie McDonagh
Christmas means being back in my childhood home in Ireland, with a familiar library around me. This year, I’m going to be wallowing in Muriel Spark. Not long ago I came across, to my undiluted joy, Loitering with Intent. It is one of her most brilliant novels, and perhaps one of the most autobiographical, describing the modus operandi of a ruthlessly observant novelist. Set in 1949 and 1950 (it was published in 1981) the protagonist, Fleur Talbot, has taken a job with the Autobiographical Association. Its chairman, the sinister Sir Quentin Oliver, exerts a malign influence on its weak-minded members, who are all eccentrics of one kind or another trying to get their memoirs published. He is only thwarted by his apparently senile mother and Fleur. All the while Fleur is working on a novel of her own, Warrender Chase, which is both appropriated by Sir Quentin and comes to dominate him. What a brilliant storyteller Muriel Spark is. After that, her Memento Mori, with its morbid tally of deaths and reflections on the evening of life. And after that, The Girls of Slender Means, set in London in the interval between VE Day and VJ Day in 1945. Bliss.
Albert Robertson OP
The Octave of Christmas and Easter is an especially pleasant time in Dominican houses, where a much more domestic feel descends on the place. As an order we spend a good amount of our time reading, but Christmas offers a time for a shift in genre to match the shift in pace. I’m looking forward to reading Orhan Pamuk’s Nights of Plague, his latest novel set on a fictional Mediterranean island beset by pestilence. It apparently went through several revisions during the Covid-19 pandemic and emerged as a work not just about the effect of viral disease, but also ethnic and religious conflict and the decline of empire. Meanwhile – thanks to the mixed blessing that is Twitter – I recently discovered a saint I’d never heard of, and also that his writings have just been published by Cistercian Publications. St Rafael Arnáiz Barón was born in Burgos in 1911 and in 1932 left his aristocratic family and unfinished architecture degree to enter the Trappist-Cistercian Abbey of San Isidro de Dueñas. The vicissitudes of war and diabetes curtailed his religious life – he died in 1938, aged 27 – but he has left enough spiritual material to make a 700-page book of Collected Works.
Olenka Hamilton
I shall be reading India Knight’s Darling, a well-recommended retelling of Nancy Mitford’s novels about the adventures of the Radlett family. It’s been favourably reviewed across the board, including in the Catholic Herald. The two great literary moments of my childhood were discovering Harry Potter and then a bit later a well-thumbed copy of Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love in a Cold Climate on my father’s bookshelf. I’m not sure which of us read it more after that, but he died with a copy of it on his bedside table. I’m also looking forward to reading more of the Brambly Hedge stories by Jill Barklem, which were given to one of my daughters for her fourth birthday recently. Although published before I was born, my father – who was my literary curator – can’t have known of them, so I am only discovering them now. He would have loved, as my daughters do, the beautiful illustrations and the adorable tales of Lord and Lady Woodmouse, Clover, Catkin and Primrose, and Mrs Crustybread the palace cook. It’s similar to Beatrix Potter but about mice, who eat a lot of delicious-sounding food, sleep in four-poster beds and organise magnificent parties. Perfect for Christmas, then.
Hugh Somerville Knapman OSB
My intended reading for Christmas is adventurous in its extent, but perhaps not quite as cutting-edge as others. First up is The Primacy of Love by the priest-theologian August Adam. It employs the 1957 English translation of the original German work first published in 1931, with an introduction by theologian Ulrich Lehner. The book was controversial in its day for seeking to rebalance the place of marriage and sexuality within moral theology in light of a broader Catholic tradition; it influenced the teaching of both John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Next is The Heart of James McAuley by Peter Coleman. This Australian poet and convert was involved in lively political and cultural debates in the 1940s and 50s; more importantly for me, he collabor-ated with the composer Richard Connolly to produce vernacular hymnody at the time of the liturgical reform, producing hymns with words and music far superior to most other contemporary efforts. Lastly, for dipping into, are the first three (of the planned six) volumes of Denis the Carthusian: Commentary on the Davidic Psalms. This is the first English translation of this influential and insightful 15th-century monk’s remarkably Christocentric study of the Church’s scriptural hymnbook.
Serenhedd James
So many books; so little time. If only there was some way in which the Christmas octave could be metaphysically stretched into a month – then I could really get stuck into the pile that is taunting me from the bedside table. For beauty, I must take up Antonio Forcinello’s The Sistine Chapel: History of a Masterpiece. Just when you think you know about a subject, Forcinello turns it on its head. Is Michaelangelo’s famous work there for the glory of God, or as power-play for the aggrandisement of the Renaissance papacy, or for the vaunting of the artist’s spectacular talents? Of course, it’s an element of all three. For poetry I have Mark Walton’s Catholic Poems to Uplift the Soul, which the author was kind enough to send me earlier in the year; for history I’m rather taken with Nicholas Boys Smith’s No Free Parking: the Curious History of London’s Monopoly Streets, which thudded onto the doormat recently. Finally, for fiction I have Charles Lambert’s The Bone Flower, published by Gallic Press, a fresh take on Gothic horror which will be perfect on a cold and stormy night with the curtains drawn tight and a fire blazing in the grate.
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