2024 was a relatively quiet writing year. My book about Oxford philosophy in the mid-century went into paperback this year, and I’m now at work on a follow-up. My energies have gone instead into running the monthly Minor Books podcast with Raph Cormack. We aim to be a sort of ‘Backlisted for translations’, discussing pairs of thematically related books, most of which have fallen out of favour. We’re twelve episodes in and going strong. Do subscribe, and recommend the podcast to others if you enjoy it!
A list of my reviews from this year below (* indicates a paywall):
[February] Paul Theroux, Burma Sahib (Telegraph)*
‘Paul Theroux’s 30th novel, about George Orwell’s years as a policeman in Burma, is part of a well-populated genre […] Admirers of Theroux’s travel writing will find many […] examples of his old capacity for precise lyricism – restrained, no doubt, by Orwell’s own stern example.’
[March] Andrew O’Hagan, Caledonian Road (Telegraph)*
‘Caledonian Road, with its up-to-the-minute contemporaneity, makes for a welcome update to a genre that Martin Amis once made his own. In fact, the 1980s – anxious though they were, what with the threat of nuclear holocaust and everyone addled on cocaine – are nothing on the present. “For my parents,” says one character, “it was the Holocaust. For my generation, it was nuclear war and Aids. We only come together as human beings when we realise how eradicable we are.”’
[April] Stefanos Geroulanos, The Invention of Prehistory (Foreign Policy)
… why can’t there be a more innocent motivation for research into human origins? Might our interest in the distant past of our species simply be part of a more general human curiosity about the origins of everything? Is there something equally suspect about physicists researching the so-called Big Bang just because that question is weighted with religious significance? Or about paleontologists wondering about how the dinosaurs died out? Can’t our claims about human origins be as careful, restrained and, indeed, objective, as these other inquiries can be at their best? Geroulanos evidently believes not, but he says far too little to persuade anyone who doesn’t already share his skepticism.
[August] Richard Davenport-Hines, History in the House (Spectator)
My own favourite anecdote features a little initiation ritual perpetrated by the historian Robin Dundas against a refugee philosopher about to start a teaching job at the college [sc. Christ Church, Oxford]. Was he a Jew, the philosopher was asked. He admitted that he was. But was he a bugger? ‘I’m afraid not,’ he replied. Dundas reassured him: ‘Oh, here again we are quite tolerant.’
[September] William Dalrymple, The Golden Road (Telegraph)*
… the idea of “spread” suggests a quiescent, passive world, waiting to be moulded by Indian ideas. In fact, as Dalrymple vividly shows, the real interest in his story lies not in the mere fact that Indian ideas reached foreign shores, but in what the avid Indophiles of south-east Asia and the Middle East did with the ideas they borrowed. The Indonesian shadow puppets that purport to tell the stories of the Sanskrit epics, or the Khmer bas-reliefs in Cambodia that purport to depict scenes from legends of the Hindu gods, transform their sources beyond easy recognition.
[September] Sue Prideaux, Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin (Telegraph)*
The Gauguin of Prideaux’s book was a philosophical painter whose great works still evoke awe and mystery. It’s tempting, today, to think his work dated; the room at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris that’s dedicated to him is nearly empty when compared to the jostling crowds with selfie-sticks in the van Gogh and Monet rooms nearby. But Wild Thing comes only a few years after the National Gallery’s exhibition of his portraits, which suggests that Gauguin retains a loyal band of admirers.
[September] Alan Hollinghurst, Our Evenings (Telegraph)*
The reader willing to slow down will find gems of observation and insight on every page. The valedictory title and autumnal tone make one fear that this book will be Hollinghurst’s last. May it not be so.
[December] Hanno Sauer, The Invention of Good and Evil (New Yorker)
For Sauer, the story of the invention of morality is really the story of the evolution of humanity. The processes that produced our morality are simply the processes that produced us, produced us as beings who have this morality—rather than, say, the norms that govern ants in their caste-bound colonies, or wolves in their packs, or the snow leopard in its solitude. To understand ourselves as moral creatures, we have to understand that we’re built that way.