The Hair of the Dog: And Other Scientific Surprises, by Karl Sabbagh

Science is full of surprises: the peculiar peepshow beginnings of baby incubators; the unexpected positive fallout from the H-bomb; the dinosaurs that caused sonic booms; the irrational nature of the number pi; the fifth taste sensation lurking in everyone’s taste buds which nobody knew about (except for the Japanese).

Whilst shedding light on these conundrums, Karl Sabbagh shows that seemingly trivial queries or assumptions lead to a deeper understanding of how science works. Who would have thought that scientists would turn to the hypothesis ‘All swans are white’ to determine the stability of the entire universe? Or that if we choose to spend our hard-earned money on other people it might make us happier than if we spend it on ourselves?

Journeying Boy, by John Evans

Following the premiere of his first operatic masterpiece, Peter Grimes, Benjamin Britten was hailed as the greatest arrival in English music since Purcell. But how did this man from a modest, middle-class Suffolk family, the son of a rural dentist and an amateur musician, acquire a reputation as one of the most significant artists of his generation?

The answers are to be found in his childhood and adolescence, as documented by Britten himself in the daily journal he kept for a decade. From his arrival as a boarder at Gresham’s School and his private lessons in London with Frank Bridge, to his student days at the Royal College of Music and subsequent apprenticeship in London with the GPO Film Unit, the Group Theatre and at the BBC, we trace the progress of this journeying boy through the turbulent 1930s.

Collaborations with Auden, Isherwood, MacNeice and Grierson helped define Britten as an artist, and international acclaim at home and abroad soon followed. But these were difficult times, not least for Britten, who lost both parents within three years, and began to feel an outsider: a young man struggling with his homosexuality and with being a pacifist at a time of imminent war.

This intimate self-portrait of a young boy’s journey to adulthood, and the growth of his creative genius, offers us a fuller understanding of the man and the artist Britten was to become, and of the age in which he lived.

Contact!, by Jan Morris

Jan Morris has been a travel writer for over half a century, known for her ability to capture places and atmospheres. But what about the many people she has encountered along the way?

In Contact! she turns her brilliantly observant eye to the human contacts she made, across the world and through the decades. In a series of vignettes, some only a few lines long, she records hundreds of brief glimpses and fleeting encounters, celebrating the people who helped spark her view of the world and mould her responses. A vast range of human experience is here: most are anonymous, everyday encounters – children playing, a homeless man in Manhattan, a lascivious taxi-driver – but she also remembers celebrated figures, from Yves San Laurent to King Hussein of Jordan, President Truman to Peter O’Toole.

Contact! is a must for any fans of Jan Morris’s writing. Her great sense of amusement, shrewd eye for detail and huge enthusiasm for her contacts make these episodes wonderfully enjoyable – and often profound.

The Paris Review Interviews Vol. 4, edited by Philip Gourevitch

Since The Paris Review was founded in 1953, it has given us invaluable conversations with the greatest writers of our age. Here is the fourth collection of brilliant interviews to be gathered together, ‘a bible both for readers and writers, the insider gossip for those who are truly passionate about their prose.’ (Observer)

This new edition is introduced by Salman Rushdie and includes interviews with: William Styron, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, E.B. White, P.G. Wodehouse, John Ashbery, Philip Roth, Maya Angelou, Orhan Pamuk, V.S. Naipaul, Stephen Sondheim, Haruki Murakami, David Grossman and Marilynne Robinson.

Ship of Fools, by Fintan O’Toole

Between 1995 and 2007, the Republic of Ireland was the worldwide model of successful adaptation to economic globalisation. The success story was phenomenal: a doubling of the workforce; a massive growth in exports; a GDP that was substantially above the EU average. Ireland became the world’s largest exporter of software and manufactured the world’s supply of Viagra.

The factors that made it possible for Ireland to become prosperous – progressive social change, solidarity, major State investment in education, and the critical role of the EU – were largely ignored as too sharply at odds with the dominant free market ideology. The Irish boom was shaped instead into a simplistic moral tale of the little country that discovered low taxes and small government and prospered as a result. There were two big problems. Ireland acquired a hyper-capitalist economy on the back of a corrupt, dysfunctional political system. And the business class saw the influx of wealth as an opportunity to make money out of property. Aided by corrupt planning and funded by poorly regulated banks, an unsustainable property-led boom gradually consumed the Celtic Tiger.

This is, as Fintan O’Toole writes, ‘a good old-fashioned jeremiad about the bastards who got us into this mess’. It is an entertaining, passionate story of one of the most ignominious economic reversals in recent history.

State of the Nation, by Michael Billington

Michael Billington’s new book looks at post-war Britain from a theatrical perspective. It examines the constant interplay between theatre and society from the resurgent optimism of the Attlee years to the satire boom of the sixties and the growth of political theatre under Tony Blair in the post-Iraq period. Written by Britain’s longest-serving theatre critic, the book also offers a passionate defence of the dramatist as the medium’s key creative figure. It provides detailed evaluations of writers from Priestley and Rattigan to Bennett and Hare, questions established myths such as the notion that Look Back in Anger launched an overnight revolution in 1956 and charts the links between Thatcherism and the musical.

Controversial, witty and informed, State of the Nation offers a fresh and challenging look at the vast upheavals that have taken place in Britain and its theatre in the course of sixty turbulent years.

Sex & Violence, Death & Silence, by Gordon Burn

‘Pop art was famously about “liking things”, as Warhol once said. The first American Pop artists, like their English counterparts, were looking outward at the world around them rather than focusing on their emotional reactions to it. They were among the first to understand the desire of consumers to change their lives through the purchase of clean, manufactured commodities. YBA, on the other hand, was more interested in the dirt that accrues beneath the laminate surface of shiny things. Its artists were drawn to abject and degraded materials, to the banal and dejected, to signifiers of death and decay. The trick, though, was to tell it in a jaunty, unportentous, offhand, unliterary – anti-literary – way … And then there were the drugs.’

Spanning nearly thirty-five years, Sex & Violence, Death & Silence is a collection of the best of Gordon Burn’s writing on art. Focusing on two principle generations – the Royal College Pop art of Hockney and his contemporaries, and the YBA sensations of the 1990s – it explores how these artists rose to prominence with their friends and contemporaries, and what happened next.

Burn’s work is fast becoming a kind of chronicle. Its factuality always connects with the broader poetic rhythms of cultural life. Displaying all his customary insight and empathy, his writing adds up to much more than a collection of pieces on art: superbly evocative and engaging, it offers a pathway through two of the most important and vibrant periods in recent art history, and is another compelling and ruminative look at our culture.

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