Reviews and News:
Why do the French love Philip Roth? “This month, the aging titan of American letters won one of this country’s highest literary honors — an exceedingly rare accolade for a living author, especially a foreign one. All of Roth’s fiction will now be available in the famed ‘Pléiade’, a series published by the prestigious Éditions Gallimard with the aim of showcasing the highlights of French and world literature…‘I seem to have found a sizable audience in France and a large rapport with my French readers, though exactly why I can’t say,’ the 84-year-old novelist wrote in an email.”
Evelyn Waugh’s grandson is talking about Shakespeare again. He’s got proof—hard evidence—that Edward de Vere wrote the plays attributed to the (supposed) Bard of Stratford-upon-Avon. What is it, you ask? Well, let me tell you. Edward de Vere died in 1604, you see, and the dedication pages of the 1609 edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets are gibberish. This is because they are encrypted. Turns out you if you rearrange the words of the dedication in just the right way you will discover the message “To the Westminster at South Cross Ile, St Peters, Edward de Vere Lies Here.” Also, if you superimpose the title page of these same sonnets on a ground plan of the Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey, a dot will appear over a monument to Shakespeare that was erected by Alexander Pope and Lord Burlington—“a direct descendant of Oxford’s sister, Mary Vere”—in 1740. Could Edward de Vere be buried under this monument, thus proving beyond any reasonable doubt that De Vere wrote the plays? Yes! Of course, De Vere was buried in East London, but his first cousin claimed he was later buried in Westminster. Mr. Waugh: “I went to the Westminster Abbey archives. They said, if anyone’s reinterred, we don’t have a record of it.” Further evidence, no doubt, of a cover-up. Mr. Waugh also said that he has identified the exact date of the second coming of Christ using the Shroud of Turin and a fragment of St. Peter’s femur. Details to follow.
Joseph Bottum reviews Lindsey Fitzharris’s The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine: “Some people study history to appreciate the conditions of those who lived differently from the way we live now. And some people study history to mock the backward fools who didn’t realize how much they lacked in not being us—wonderful us—today. Lindsey Fitzharris is very much of the camp that sees the past as a chamber of horrors, recountable mostly for the titillation it allows us, wonderful us.”
The case of the Mafia and a stolen Caravaggio: “On October 18, 1969, Caravaggio’s The Adoration was stolen from the Oratorio di San Lorenzo in Palermo, Sicily. It’s a nativity scene in which Caravaggio placed St. Laurence, and more importantly St. Francis, along with Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, a shepherd, an angel and a young man. It’s a huge painting with quite a history. It was stolen by mafiosi at about the same time they tried to steal Caravaggio’s Burial of Santa Lucia from Syracuse. There have been theories galore about what happened to The Adoration. I think that the mafia chief nicknamed Diabolik who is on the run has control over it. It represents his power in Sicily. The intellectual historian Peter Watson wrote a book on Caravaggio, concluding it had been destroyed by an earthquake in Naples, or so he had been told. But who knows?”
A history of Europe’s four winds: “In the Alps blows the Foehn, warm and dry and with a hollow roar – ‘the snow-eater’, ‘the Oldest Man of the Rhine’. It’s a geographically complex wind, which fans through valleys, sometimes with catastrophic results, and is associated with ill health; there is a recognised ‘Foehn-sickness’ and many a wooden village has burned to the ground during the Foehn, just because of a single spark.”
A life of Joan Leigh Fermor: “Joan Leigh Fermor died in 2003, aged 91, after falling in her bathroom in the house on a rocky headland of the Peloponnese which she had financed by selling her jewellery. Afterwards, whenever Joan’s husband and companion of nearly six decades reclined in her place on the sofa to read, eight of her 73 cats would gather round him in a recumbent group — but after a few minutes slope off. Paddy (who died in 2011) wrote: ‘They had realised they were being fobbed off with a fake.’ This biography, by the archivist who went to sort out Paddy Leigh Fermor’s papers before they returned to England, makes a charming case for Joan to be considered the proper foundation of Paddy’s existence; his muse and ‘greatest collaborator’, whose wealth and talent as a sounding board underpinned his career as an author.”
What’s the connection between classical music and soccer? “Unnoticed by many classical music lovers has been the steady ongoing enthusiasm for football among composers of recent times. Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) was a fan of Leningrad Zenith and regularly attended games. His usual demeanour in photographs was the inscrutable death-mask stare, which hid all his turbulent emotions. There is a photograph of him, however, with friends at a game, possibly taken immediately after a Zenith goal, in which he appears deliriously happy. He also wrote football-related articles for the Soviet press. His ballet The Golden Age, a propaganda piece for Soviet Communism, follows the fortunes of a Russian team as they visit the corrupt and decadent West.”
Essay of the Day:
In Aeon, Josie Glausiusz asks if female leaders are less violent than male ones. Not necessarily:
“Between 1950 and 2004, according to data compiled by Katherine W Phillips, professor of leadership and ethics at Columbia Business School, just 48 national leaders across 188 countries – fewer than 4 per cent of all leaders – have been female. They included 18 presidents and 30 prime ministers. Two countries, Ecuador and Madagascar, had a woman leader, each of whom served for a mere two days before being replaced by a man.
“Given the tiny sample size, does it even make sense to ask if, given power, women are more or less likely than men to wage wars? The medical anthropologist Catherine Panter-Brick, who directs the conflict, resilience and health programme at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University, thinks not. ‘It stereotypes gender, and assumes leadership is uncomplicated,’ she told me. Perhaps she had thinkers such as Stephen Pinker in her sights. In The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), his study of violence throughout history, Pinker wrote: ‘women have been, and will be, the pacifying force’. That assumption is not always grounded in reality, says Mary Caprioli, a professor of political science at the University of Minnesota Duluth. Along with Mark A Boyer at the University of Connecticut, she counted 10 military crises in the 20th century involving four female leaders (seven of which were handled by Golda Meir, Israel’s prime minister from 1969 to 1974). To assess the behaviour of women leaders during crises, they say, one needs a large sample – ‘which history cannot provide’.
“Oeindrila Dube, a professor of global conflict studies at the University of Chicago, and S P Harish at New York University – have studied four centuries of European kings and queens. In their as-yet-unpublished working paper, they examined the reigns of 193 monarchs in 18 European polities, or political entities, between the years 1480 to 1913. Although just 18 per cent of the monarchs were queens – making their analysis less statistically reliable – they found that polities ruled by queens were 27 per cent more likely than kings to participate in inter-state conflicts. Unmarried queens were more likely to engage in wars in which their state was attacked, perhaps because they were perceived as weak.”
Photo: St. Thomas Church
Poem: Wm. Walters, “Leo Tolstoy: A Brief Biography”
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