Marcus Aurelius: Meditations

January 23, 2026

       I promised myself for many years I’d read Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations; I finally finished and it’s been a hard slog. I think partly I’ve been hampered by a poor and rather old translation, where there have clearly been some axes to grind, but also by the utterly different mindset of someone who lived two millennia ago and was an emperor, as well as how he wrote and set down his thoughts on paper.

He’s focused on what I would call general principles for right living, and he starts from a stoic position, which is very self-centred. He accepts a human’s physical limitations (which even an emperor has) and seeks contentment, as well as to make the best use of the life he has, so at that level he’s not so different from the rest of us. It’s hard to tell (again, maybe because of the translation) whether he is addressing others, or talking to himself, thinking aloud…

He begins with gratitude and detailed recognition of what he has learned from others who have helped, taught and influenced him in many ways from his earliest days; he recognises, too, the existence of gods or superior essences outside his world (again the translation isn’t helpful here), and he focuses on the simplicity of the life he leads. Again, it’s perhaps easy for an emperor to praise that, given that every choice is obviously available to him, but, to be fair, he does return to the notion over and again, and genuinely seems to find no attraction or satisfaction in the trappings of power and wealth.

Everything is transient, but we can be self-sufficient if we try, and if we focus on being a good person, aware that death comes to us all in the end. Real peace and contentment is available to everyone. There is a harmony in nature and we are part of the natural world: every person, creature, thing, has a duty or a function to perform, if we can only see it.

I found a number of the notions he espouses to be close to what I understand of the Buddhist approach to being in the moment, and to seeing; equally, when he was dismissive of the false lures of the world, I was reminded of Ecclesiastes and his ‘vanity of vanities, all is vanity’. At some level, these deep and basic truths are known or revealed across the world, in different ways, to different peoples.

I was also reminded, very powerfully, of Marguerite Yourcenar’s astonishing novel Memoirs of Hadrian, in which she gives a voice to the dying emperor whose thoughts and reflections often seem to resemble those of Marcus Aurelius himself. Clearly she had read him.

I think I’m glad I’ve read it; I’m not sure how much I got from it in the end. Many sorts of wisdom are available and some are more accessible than others…

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Maggie O’Farrell: The Marriage Portrait

January 20, 2026

       I’m very familiar with Robert Browning’s disturbing poem My Last Duchess from years of teaching it as part of a GCSE poetry anthology; Maggie O’Farrell has elaborated and developed on the story in this novel, partly using available historical sources, and though there were times as I read that I felt she was making rather too much from too little, the feeling did not last.

Apparently it’s not certain if the actual Duchess in the poem was murdered by her husband or died of illness, which allows for a surprising and very effective twist at the end of the novel.

Her master-stroke, I think, is making the young woman — the subject of the painting in the poem, the eventual Duchess of the title — an accomplished miniaturist artist herself, with a great sensitivity to the natural world.

Given the thinness of the source material, I frequently found myself thinking about, and marvelling at, what O’Farrell adds to the story. The oppressive court atmosphere is skilfully created and sustained, as is the young woman’s naïveté about the world she must live in, which is contrasted with her understanding of, and relationship to nature. O’Farrell’s use of the future tense in narrative is interesting, and surprisingly effective: I’ve often found the unnecessary use of present tense narrative in fiction annoying, so this provoked some thought. It seems to allow for a more leisurely story-telling, and a sharpened focus on the developing thoughts and moods of characters. The literary equivalent of slow-motion cinematography?

Lucrezia’s character develops slowly, and separately from the others; she is a very curious child, and her powers of description come across though evocative language and very vivid emotional responses to all sorts of things and experiences. I often found myself in awe of the effort of the imagination required to develop character, feelings and emotions from so little raw material. Images of imprisonment, entrapment abound, but subtly.

Women and men in Renaissance Italy lived in clearly separate spheres, and the Duke and Duchess are evidently ill-suited to each other in what is a political and dynastic match more than anything else; a young woman gradually understanding, rejecting and even only privately rebelling against that other world is not going to survive in it. A particularly twenty-first century notion which O’Farrell introduces carefully and very powerfully is that of male infertility…

If you know the poem, and Browning’s approach to his characters has ever intrigued you, I think you will enjoy this novel.

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Benjamin Labatut: When We Cease to Understand the World

January 15, 2026

       Here is one of the most annoying an irritating books I’ve read for a long while; I certainly didn’t agree with any of the paeans in the blurb.

The notion itself is quite interesting, that there are aspects of current knowledge, particularly in mathematics and physics, that it’s almost impossible for a human mind — even one of the very cleverest — actually to understand. As someone who does struggle quite a bit with both science and maths, this made a lot of sense, and Labatut certainly demonstrated to this reader his inability either to explain a  range of concepts, or to make them interesting to the lay reader.

What disturbed me most was his method: he blends fact and fiction in recounting the lives and actions of various scientists — Schrödinger, Heisenberg and others, in a way where we cannot separate the fact from the fiction, and the whole is made even more complicated by the abstruse science involved. It may go some way to bringing certain things to life, but I couldn’t accept the deceit involved, particularly in the current climate where it’s becoming harder and harder to separate truth from lies deliberately peddled by people of no morality or scruples…

I found myself awash in sweeping statements, and unable to separate truth from invention, at a point where I felt that might actually have been helpful.

So in the end, what is the point of such a book? To make us admire brilliant minds? But that does not need a whole book. To befuddle and amuse? I got bored rather quickly. I was underwhelmed by Labatut’s style, and the increasingly random series of events and encounters involving various scientists, without any clear sense of structure. Where was the editor?

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Jesse Sheidlower: The F— Word

January 15, 2026

Warning: strong language

A very brief one here, because there’s not a lot I can really say in a blog post! I’ve always been interested in swearing, and swear a lot (not that I’m particularly proud of that fact) in a number of languages. That last is particularly useful when in the presence of young and impressionable minds… And how people swear in their different languages, the words, actions and body parts that form part of a vocabulary of obscenity are not always the same in every language. Just look up French Canadian swears, for instance.

Anyway, I’ve been aware of this particular book for quite a while and finally acquired it; it’s not a read every page sequentially book, as it’s basically a dictionary of how the f-word has been used over the centuries, and in various different countries, with copious examples of usage culled from a wide range of sources. I found it interesting noting the many specifically British usages, and recalling a few I had come across and used in the past which are not recorded in the book, probably because they do not appear in print anywhere. We are very inventive, though, but the best new phrase I discovered was from down under, used to suggest that one ought to be getting on with doing something useful rather than just sitting around, ‘We’re not here to fuck spiders!’ Sorry.

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Richard Holloway: Looking in the Distance

January 11, 2026

        Ever since I read his autobiography Leaving Alexandria, I have found Richard Holloway’s books interesting and thought-provoking, and this short and eminently sensible little tome is no exception. Holloway was ordained a priest in the Episcopalian Church of Scotland, became a bishop and eventually primate of that church, until he lost his faith, and laid down his office. So, there is enough interesting in that life-story alone to be going on with.

As he ages, he reflects on the meaning of life from a non-believer’s perspective, aware that not everyone can ‘do’ organised religion; he talks of being in a permanent state of unknowing, a phrase and idea which certainly speaks to me, and is very aware that we create our god(s) in our own image.

He draws widely on literature, especially poetry, to illustrate and develop the four progressive chapters through which he leads us; it was interesting to learn that he replaced the lifelong practice of lectio divina with reading poetry when he left the church.

I found the chapter on morality, how it develops and necessarily changes, very interesting and very sound, and imagined that a great many people might benefit from considering it. As someone who was, but now isn’t within an established (Christian) religion, he explores and explains in a very thoughtful and balanced way.

The final section of the book is on facing the inevitable approach of death and the difficulty of responding to it. Thanksgiving for what we have done well in our lives, rather than concentrating on our failures and mistakes was a very useful take-away.

I think, in the end, the book was helpful in that it provoked new lines of reflection for me, but the greatest reassurance came from knowing that there are others like me.

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Günter Grass: The Tin Drum

January 1, 2026

       I’ve been gripped by The Tin Drum ever since I came across it as a school student; this must be the sixth or seventh time I’ve read it, and I will confess to feeling a little guilty about sentencing our book group to read it (though they do get to watch the film as well), having forgotten just how complex, experimental, and above all, dark, it is. It’s on my list of best novels of the twentieth century; after this re-read I still put it on a par with novels like Ulysses, and One Hundred Years of Solitude.

My question for the book group was, how is this a novel of Germans beginning to come to terms with their part in the horrendous events of 1933-1945? Our hero begins his story as a patient in a mental asylum, fleeing the world; he sees himself as free and those outside as prisoners. He demands blank, ‘virgin’ paper on which to express himself. Germany Year Zero? Is Oskar sane or not? His picture of people and events is an incredibly solipsistic one. And then there’s Kurt — is he Oskar’s son or not? Certainly even more deranged.

The atmosphere in the relationships — between parents, siblings, sexual partners — feels generally unhealthy, verging on the toxic, throughout the novel. There are numerous sexual triangles, infidelities, there is paedophilia, perversion, no examples of happy/healthy relationships at all. Wherever you look, there are temptations to sin, crime, evil. In the Niobe episode, there is seduction, and it leads to disaster. Are the parallels with Germans’ embracing of Nazism subtle or glaringly obvious? This is a novel that demands serious thought from its readers.

Those associated with Oskar tend to meet disastrous ends… Are we meant to like and trust him, or find him repellent? He is more or less of an age with the author: does he represent Günter Grass? Is the tin drum a symbol of Poland? It’s red and white, after all. These were some of the questions I found myself contemplating, not necessarily answering, as I read. The Nazis and the war at some level seem like a sideline, in the background, yet also ever-present, inescapable, as I imagine the National Socialist regime must have been to Germans during those years.

I had not fully taken in, or remembered, the pressure from the Nazi authorities to allow Oskar to be taken into care, which would have meant his being killed as part of their euthanasia programme.

It is a difficult book, in a number of ways. Each reading brings new revelations. I’ve never forgotten the sense of place; the Free City of Danzig surely fulfils a similar role to that of Dublin in Joyce’s masterpiece, and today the Polish city of Gdansk has marked Grass’ birthplace, there are various monuments around the city and even a Tin Drum restaurant. It’s a serious novel about serious times, deserving of respect and engagement. I have never forgotten a graffito, in Polish, I saw painted on the riverside in the city more than half a century ago, which I asked my father to translate: “We have not forgotten: nor will we forgive.” At fifteen I was shocked; now I think I understand…

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2025: My Year of Reading

December 28, 2025

It’s time to reflect on what I’ve spent my eyeball time on this year, and mention a few favourites. According to my reading log (which goes back over half a century now) I’ve read 60 books this year, divided roughly evenly between reading books I hadn’t read before, and re-reading old favourites. And I’ve managed to buy only 17 books, and there are several boxes containing far more than that, waiting to go to charity: the clear-out continues…

Book of the year: given that I’d waited several years for Philip Pullman’s final volume of the Book of Dust trilogy, The Rose Field, you might expect that to be a contender , and it is. Although overall, as time passes, I’m coming to realise that the second trilogy is nowhere near as brilliant, conceptually, as the first. My grandson lent me Katherine Rundell’s fantasy Impossible Creatures, and I was very impressed and am looking forward to the next volume. And finally, there was a book which had intrigued me in bookshops but I hadn’t bought, until someone picked it as a choice for our book group: Jacqueline Harpmann’s stark and bewildering tale, I Who Have Never Known Men. On reflection, I think that’s my book of the year, for originality as well as vision, and sheer weirdness.

Best non-fiction: I read a certain amount of theology and history of religion, and probably have my Catholic upbringing to thank for this rather recherché interest; I have always found Diarmaid MacCulloch’s books very interesting and thought-provoking, because of the breadth of his knowledge and his ability to explain complex ideas. And so, I give my award this year to his latest, Lower Than The Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity, which explores the weirdness of religious attitudes about what is an essential part of the human condition, and how they were shaped by weird men many centuries ago.

Best re-read: I’ve spent a fair bit of time with Soviet science fiction this year, and it’s a completely different beast from the Western (or capitalist?) variety. In particular, I have enjoyed revisiting some of the novels of the brothers Strugatsky. However, one of my resolutions this year was to re-read Katherine Burdekin’s powerful and prophetic vision of a world where Hitler’s Reich survives more than twelve years, Swastika Night. It’s a chilling picture of Europe after 800 years of Nazism, all the more so because it was published two years before the Second World War broke out. That’s my choice in this category.

Best travel writing: This category is extremely thin this year, as I haven’t done much reading in one of my favourite genres this year, a few re-reads mainly. But my one discovery, which I did enjoy, was Stefan Zweig’s Magellan, an account of the voyage of discovery in the early sixteenth century, which astonished me most in terms of how much was achieved by such a small expedition, under appalling conditions, and how Magellan himself did not make it back alive.

Resolution for next year: I’m conscious of a rather large collection of unread books on my shelves, those bought under the heading ‘I really need to read that one day!’ And it’s time that day came round for those books, so I am starting off 2026 with the intention of sticking with unread books for as long as I can. I’m wondering how long that resolution will last. It’s under my control, apart from book group choices made by others. Happy reading to all my readers and followers!

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Ursula K Le Guin: Words Are My Matter

December 17, 2025

       Once a writer has died, all their published and unpublished work is pored over, and often published; sometimes it’s worth the effort, sometimes not. This collection of pieces by the late and great SF writer Ursula Le Guin was definitely worth waiting for. A great feminist, for whom the personal was alway political, her convictions are nailed firmly to the mast with possibly the most powerful pro-choice piece I’ve ever come across…

For Le Guin, the imagination and fantasy were always important, so I found myself firmly disagreeing with her somewhat dismissive comments on Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, which will not surprise any reader of this blog, since I find Pullman masterly in both fields.

The book is a collection of pieces from the last two decades of Le Guin’s life, many of them on the craft of the writer and their use of language. There are also some interesting ruminations on the notion that people read less, or don’t read at all any more.

And there are several essays in which she considers the contrast between literary fiction and genre fiction, a distinction or contrast I hadn’t really come across before, so  I assume it must be a particularly US one. A serious point to ponder is the one she makes a number of times, that people who read have always been in a minority. I found myself agreeing with her. She tears into where she feels the publishing industry has lost its way, chasing ever greater and quicker profits… but then, this is capitalism, isn’t it? I recalled a statistic I came across in a French magazine recently which said that most new books have about six weeks max in a bookshop display before being remaindered and pulped.

It’s an extraordinarily diverse anthology, with a range of her introductions to books as well as her commentaries on various writers; I noted down a number of books to read and to re-read. She’s fascinating on Philip Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, and a great fan of the Portuguese novelist José Saramago, who I’ve enjoyed in the past, though I was horrified by his picture of human behaviour in Blindness.

Her knowledge and understanding of the SF genre is obviously immense, and it shows in this collection. She’s very interesting to read on writers she doesn’t like, offering a lucid and personal response. At the end of the book — which I thoroughly recommend to anyone who wants a different picture of this amazing writer — I asked myself why, exactly, I was so astonished at how widely read she was, and I was reminded of how good book reviews used to be, once…

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Jan Morris: Last Letters From Hav

December 17, 2025

       This travel book, about an invented place, is by a seasoned travel writer, and was a bit of a curiosity when I first acquired and read it some forty years ago; I can’t now recall what it was, a few weeks ago, that prompted me top revisit it.

Hav is supposed to be somewhere on the coast of Asia Minor, it seems, and Morris creates it with Swiftian detail and determination, in a bid to convince the reader that it’s a real place. Unfortunately, with today’s general knowledge and advanced cartography, that doesn’t work, so I was constantly asking myself, why is she doing this? It often felt like a very contrived intellectual exercise, although extremely well-executed. There is a sense that she is trying to create a positive impression of a vanished world.

The whole feels dated, too, although there is at the same time a sense of mystery in the gaps between travel journal and novel, which is ultimately what the book is.

There is an Eastern, exotic feel to Hav, a little enhanced by several references to Alexander Kinglake, the nineteenth century traveller in Egypt, supposedly having been there. And the list of real people who have supposedly travelled to or sojourned in the little enclave grows as the novel progresses: the poet C F Cavafy, T E Lawrence, Sigmund Freud…there are lots of them.

Supposed customs of the place are described, as one would expect in a travelogue, and as the book progresses more and more unexplained mysteries about Hav appear, and are only ever partially unravelled, in preparation for the mysterious ending.

Is the book a metaphor, a non-existent place anyone can run away to if they like, an aspect of our own hidden desires for wish-fulfilment?Our traveller/guide has to decamp pretty rapidly as it seems a military takeover is in progress. I persevered to the end, but finished the book with a sense of being taken for a ride in the other sense of the phrase, sadly…

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On Philip Pullman’s trilogies (part 5)

November 16, 2025

Pullman’s focus changes in the second and third novels of The Secret Commonwealth trilogy. In recent interviews he has specifically pointed up and reflected on changes in our world over the last generation or so, which he feels have created a society where people care less about each other, where relationships between people are less important, and where the overall driving factor seems to be purely economic. Truthful information is less available and people seem less interested in it, and the world itself is physically deteriorating and degenerating as a result of human activity. To this reader he is describing the long-lasting and pernicious effects of Thatcherism, neoliberalism and the ‘free market’, or whatever term you prefer at this point…

However, in the novels, his focus is necessarily far more subtle, and centres around what Lyra’s daemon Pan sees as her loss of imagination. If humans have lost their imagination, their ability to think creatively outside the box, to visualise how things might be different and better, then we are limiting and endangering ourselves and our world, which is the only one we have. And Pullman is suggesting that this has an effect on the way in which we relate to other people and to the world that we live in and that this is not a good thing.

We see, in Lyra’s world, creeping totalitarianism, rising state violence and repression, increasing power of multinational corporations and the dissolving of the bonds which knit people together; these visions in a parallel universe inevitably cause us to reflect on our own world. In Margaret Thatcher’s words, “there is no such thing as society.”

Pullman’s fiction is entertaining, exciting, challenging. But as with all really good literature, it is inevitably political, it inevitably raises questions about, and reflects on, our own world. Personally, I like the idea of the Republic of Heaven.

ends

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