21. Ariel - A Literary Life of Jan Morris, Derek Johns (2016)
Jan Morris's books are often found in the travel section of libraries but she wrote a range of books - from history (The Hashemite Kings, 1959), biography (Fisher's Face, 1995), to travel and places, Hong Kong (1988), as well as many essays. This book focuses on Jan Morris's literary rather than personal life, which is fairly well-known, especially through her own memoirs, such as "Herstory" (1999). The book is written in an unexciting way but had the effect of sending me back to Morris's own writing, which I've always found inspiring in its style. My favourite work by Jan Morris is Fisher's Face.
22. Jesus before the Gospels - Bart D. Ehrman (2016)
The author of How Jesus Became God and Misquoting Jesus, who had an evangelical background before being affected deeply by critical scholarship, including his own, now writes as one who asserts that the stories about Jesus are largely invented. In Ehrman's view, the accounts of Jesus' life, death and resurrection are based on powerful but fallible collective memories in the pre-Gospel period. The book wasn't as exciting as I hoped it would be. After surveying the nature of memories, especially their fallibility, he goes on to apply the insights of psychology, concluding (reasonably) that stories arose about Jesus are based on fallible memories and creative imagination. He concludes, however, that the stories about the life, status and uniqueness of Jesus are not therefore to be discarded but have a role in forming Christian identity and life today.
23. The White Darkness - David Grann (2018)
A short (160pp.), well-written account of the polar journeys of British army officer, Henry Worsley, ending with his death in the Antarctic in January, 2016, and a family memorial service at South Georgia Island in 2017. Worsley revered the memory of Sir Ernest Shackleton - Shackleton's The Heart of the Antarctic was a favourite boyhood book - and consciously set out to retrace Shackleton's steps. During the final leg of his solo journey he muttered to himself the lines from Tennyson's poem, 'Ulysses' - 'To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield'.
24. The Looming Tower - Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 - Lawrence Wright (2006)
This is the best book I've read on this topic. It begins with with chapters on the person of Sayyid Qutb in Egypt and traces the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood and other movements to 2001. The role of Osama Ben Laden is outlined in detail, as well as that of FBI veteran, Dan Coleman, and other key figures in US intelligence.
25. But you did not come back - Marceline Loridan-Ivens (2015)
A beautifully written book of just 100 pages in which the author writes a letter to her father after their time in separate concentration camps in World War II. There are harrowing details about the sufferings and cruelty, as well as reflections on love and memory. Marceline Loridan-Ivens (1928-2018) became a film director, making many documentaries with her husband, Joris Ivens, including 'How Yukong moved the mountains' (1976) and 'A tale of the wind' (1988).
26. Mutiny on the Bounty - Peter FitzSimons
Former Australian rugby player, Peter FitzSimons is a journalist and prolific author. This is a colourful book, based on research but incorporating some imaginative fiction, especially when he writes about the mutineers on Pitcairn Island. As a boy I went to the 1962 film of The Mutiny on the Bounty, starring Trevor Howard as Captain Bligh and Marlon Brando as Fletcher Christian. So I knew the outline of the story. It was not until we travelled to Norfolk Island in 2007, where my father had served in the army during WW2, that I started to be more interested in the details. On Norfolk Island today it's impossible not to notice the "Bounty mutineer' family names - Adams, Christian, McCoy, Quintal - especially in graveyards. FitzSimons' book is not as scholarly as some (cf. Mutiny, Mayhem, Mythology: Bounty's Enigmatic Voyage, by historian, Alan Frost); however, it is an excellent, rollicking read. I learned a lot about both Bligh and Fletcher Christian, including, for example, the fact that Fletcher Christian's older brother, Edward Christian, was a professor of law at Cambridge and worked tirelessly to focus public attention on the shortcomings of William Bligh and to clear his brother's name.
It's fascinating I think to see that the mutiny on the Bounty and subsequent events influenced Wordsworth (The Prelude), Coleridge (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner), Tennyson (The Captain), Byron (The Island) and even Jules Verne (The Mutineers of the Bounty).
27. The Spy and the Traitor - Ben Macintyre (2018)
I've rarely read a book as quickly and with such enjoyment in recent years. Ben Macintyre (author of Operation Mincemeat - also excellent) recounts the story of Russian Colonel Oleg Antonyevich Gordievsky of the KGB. Gordievsky spied for UK for many years and, amazingly, was briefing both Margaret Thatcher (indirectly, through MI6) and President Mikhail Gorbachev at the same time during their talks. The account of Gordievsky's 'exfiltration' by MI6 agents from Moscow to Finland to UK (where he still lives in a safe house in London) is extraordinary. One of the KGB officers whose work was to make sure he wouldn't escape was a young Vladimir Putin. A great read.
28. Break, Blow, Burn - Camille Paglia (2005)
Paglia reads and comments on 43 well-known poems, from Shakespeare to Joni Mitchell. I remember particularly the comments on George Herbert - Love, Shelley - Ozymandias, S.T. Coleridge - Kubla Khan, Yeats - Leda and the Swan, William Carlos Williams - The Red Wheelbarrow, and, most disturbingly, Sylvia Plath - Daddy. New insights, fire and freshness in this book on poems.
29. The World beyond your Head - Matthew B. Crawford (2015)
This is an enquiry into the nature of 'attention'. Crawford assumes (rightly, no doubt) that we all feel beset by outside forces that disrupt our calm and distract us. He examines that nature of concentration and explores the way that, though we pursue individualism and seek recognition, those are possible only in relation to connection to others. 'Skilled practices' have significance in our efforts to be recognized. We live, he says, 'under a public doctrine of individualism that systematically dismantles shared frameworks of meaning' (p.16).
"It seems appropriate that a book ostensibly about attention should require so much of it, and Crawford’s taut scholarly prose is perhaps best read in a soundproof chamber with an absence of visual stimuli. That is far from a criticism, however. Although its title is suggestive of the breezily written self-help guide, the text transcends this genre to evoke a full-blown philosophical inquiry. Like the Enlightenment philosophers he rebukes, Crawford makes deductions that stretch commonsense logic to its maximum extent and may have readers performing intellectual somersaults over his reasoning. For those who persevere, the experience should be rich and rewarding" (Iain Morris in The Guardian, 4 May 2015).
30. Patrick Leigh Fermor - An adventure - Artemis Cooper (2012)
At the age of 18, Patrick Leigh Fermor decided to walk across Europe. Many years later he wrote in amazing detail two books (which I loved reading) - A time of gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986), with descriptions and anecdotes from the walk many years earlier. He also wrote a book that I think is the best on monastic life - A Time to Keep Silence (1957). In this substantial biography, Artemis Cooper outlines the whole course of Leigh Fermor's life and adventures. I was particularly interested in his part in the abduction of the German Commander n Crete, Major General Heinrich Kreiper. There are stories within stories; one of them relates to Major 'Paddy' Fermor's and Major General Kreiper's shared knowledge of the Odes of Horace, especially 'To Thaliarchus'. Another part of the book I was interested in is the account of the friendship between Leigh Fermor and the writer, Bruce Chatwin (author of In Patagonia, On the Black Hill, The Songlines, Utz, and The Viceroy of Ouidah.) One day I will get round to watching the movie, 'Ill Met by Moonlight', by Stanley Moss, based on the abduction of Major General Kreiper. ('Ill met by moonlight' is a line from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.) * see my book review #1.