Category Archives: Literature

Arts, Literature

Secrets of the heart

YOU MAY KNOW NOT

HE was a deeply unpleasant man. He brought out the worst in many people. It was clear to see.

One day I asked him to tell me about his childhood and he ridiculed the idea that there was anything to be learned that way. Then he agreed to tell me one story of no importance or significance.

While emphasising its irrelevance, he told me the one thing that explained everything about him. My heart still breaks when I think of the loss he so flippantly described.

It reminded me of the words Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote in “Hyperion: A Romance”:

“Every heart has its secret sorrows, which the world knows not, and oftentimes we call a man cold, when he is only sad.”

UNCREDITED WORDS OF WISDOM

“Some stranger somewhere still remembers you were kind to them when no-one else was.”

Those are uncredited words of wisdom read on the internet.

The sentence will probably mean different things to different people in circumstances known to them. But it reminds me of a man I met in a church café. He insisted we’d met before, even though I had no recollection of it. He told me he was doing well, working, of good health, and much happier. It was good to hear, but I was still wary.

“That was a powerful talk we had back then. Those words made the difference,” he told me.

“Remind me,” I prompted, still unsure of him.

“You said, ‘Just because you’re down doesn’t mean you’re out’. I remembered those words and built on them over the years. You gave me hope.”

Not such profound words that they actually stayed with me, but they would have been honestly meant. Whatever kindness was contained in them meant they could go on and do their work after I had left.

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Arts, Books, History, Literature, Poetry

Book Club: Butler To The World

SYNOPSIS

SCATHINGLY, Oliver Bullough compares the UK to Wodehouse’s inscrutable butler, Jeeves.

Just as Jeeves tirelessly helped the “quarter-witted Bertie Wooster evade the consequences of [his] misbehaviour, Britain helps the world’s financial criminals and tax dodgers . . . enjoy the fruits of their crimes free of scrutiny”.

In January 2022, Lord Agnew of Oulton, the minister in charge of combating fraud, resigned, citing “arrogance, indolence and ignorance” within government.

Just a few weeks later, Russia’s invasion meant that political promises to deal with oligarchs were hastily remembered.

Yet, underfunded and demoralised law enforcement agencies face an unequal battle. Bullough’s highly readable account of the UK’s role in facilitating global financial wrongdoing is a call to action.

– Butler To The World by Oliver Bullough is published by Profile, 304pp

Isabella Whitney,

the pioneering poet

Isabella Whitney is not a name that is well known, yet she many have been the UK’s first female professional poet. She published two books of poetry (in 1567 and 1573) and, from the way she described herself, it seems that she was single, poor and suffering from ill health. Some of this may have represented an attempt to inspire sympathy in her readers. However, judging by her writing, it appears that she knew what it was to be living on the margins, plagued by anxiety and insecurity.

Whitney wrote of London’s beauties and riches, but also of its “stynking streetes”, its “lothsome Lanes” and its many prisons, including those that incarcerated debtors. Her depiction of the capital showed a city humming with mercantile activity and crammed with expensive goods for sale. Yet her verses also sketched out the damage that the pursuit of wealth had done to society as a whole.

As a poet and writer, she took inspiration from her male counterparts – but she wrote as a woman, painfully aware of the difficulties that women in London might encounter. She warned readers against flattery and deceit, and against those who shed “crocodile tears”; in particular, she advised young women never to trust a man at first sight. On this subject she made it clear that she was writing from her own personal experience of duplicity, describing herself as one “who was deceived”.

Whitney may not have been a poet to rank among the greatest names of the Elizabethan age but her voice was distinctive, eloquent, ironic and powerfully evocative of a woman’s experience.

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Books, Literature, Science

Book Club: How To Solve A Crime

SYNOPSIS

FORENSIC SCIENCE has long exerted a fascination on TV audiences in shows like CSI and Silent Witness, but Angela Gallop’s book reveals that the facts are even more interesting than the fiction.

With a career spanning more than four decades, which includes involvement in high-profile murders like those of Stephen Lawrence and Rachel Nickell, she has much experience on which to draw.

Bite marks, fingerprints and even ear prints can identify the perpetrators of crimes. And who knew there were such people as forensic knot experts? A platoon of pundits with unlikely knowledge assist in bringing criminals to justice.

Dr Gallop provides eye-opening insights into what she modestly calls a ‘strange but important little corner of scientific endeavour’.

– How To Solve A Crime by Dr Angela Gallop is published by Hodder, 272pp

. Recommended reading Gaby Hinsliff: Ignore the purists – listening to a book instead of reading it isn’t skiving or cheating

The Guardian columnist writes: “From audiobooks to podcasts and voice notes, there’s a steady generational shift in the way we understand the world.”

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