Category Archives: Books

Books History

Tasty morsels

January 19, 2008 – 9:24 pm

Have been snacking my way through the fun The Rituals of Dinner – The Origins, Evolution, Eccentricities and Meaning of Table Manners by Margaret Visser (available for a fiver from Judd Books in Bloomsbury, should you happen to be in the vicinity. It boasts lots of fascinating cross-cultural snippets:

* The original modern spaghetti, in Naples in the 19th century, was eaten with your hands. “You had to raise the strings in your right hand, throw back your head, then lower the strings, dextrously with dispatch, and without slurping with your open mouth.” (p. 17-18)

* Children in Europe often stood at the table to eat – partly for practical reasons, partly to reflect their lower status, but also for “health” reasons: “It was believed eating food while upright facilitated digestion: to this day Scots like eating their porridge standing up.” (p. 49)

*Visiting the Outer Hebrides in the mid-19th century, Osgood Mackenzie reported his hostess “was busy prepar,ing the breakfast, and bade us to sit down on little low stools by the fire, and wait until she could milk the cow. The wife took up an armful of heather and deposited it at the feet of the nearest cow, which was tied up within two or three yards of the fire, to form a drainer. Then, lifting the pot off the fire, she emptied it on to the heather; the hot water disappeared and ran among the cow’s legs but the contents, consisting of potatoes and fish, remained on top of the heather. Then, from a very black-looking bed, three stark-naked boys arose, one by one, aged I should say, from six to ten years, and made for the fish and potatoes, each youngster carrying off as much as both his hands could contain. Back they went to their bed, and started devouring their breakfast with apparent great appetite under the blankets.” (p. 55-56)

* Among the oldest etiquette guides: Hesiod – “at the abundant dinner of the gods, do not sever with bright steel the withered from the quick upon that which has five branches.” (i.e. don’t cut your fingernails at the table. Ptah-Hotep’s Instructions written to his son in c. 2000BC, but copied from one at least 500 years older.

* “The French word for household is a foyer, literally a hearth. (Our theatres have foyers because they once offered their patrons a fire in the vestibule, so people could warm themselves on arrival. (p. 80)

* The words host and guest come from the Indo-European ghostis (stranger), reflecting the bond that unites them. (p. 91)

* A Roman banquet would include parasites . . . clients or retainers, fed at the table of a rich man … they were guests who would never turn into hostss… they were made the but of jokes, and were expected to fawn, flatter and be ridiculed for it. The emperor Augustus had an Etruscan parasite called Gabba, whose wife was as welcome at any dinner as he, for Maecenas, the emperor’s powerful friend and patron of the arts, was fascinated by her.

* Henry II of England gave a sergeantry to a man named Roland “de Pettour” or “le Fartere” and to his heirs, provided they could be counted upon to perform at his annual Christmas Day banquet saltum siffletum et pettum or bumbulum (“a leap, a whistle and a fart”) and a minstrel in Piers Plowman (ca 1380) complains that he lacks the skill to “fart in tune at feasts”. (p. 105)

* 13 has long been an unacceptable number for dinner. “An institution called the quatoriemes existed in 19th-century Paris. These were men who waited at home beetwen 5pm and 9pm every night, all dressed up and ready to step into the breach where any dinner party threatened suddenly the number 13. You could hire a presentable, experienced “fourteenth” whenever you needed one.” (p. 107)

* European medieval ceremony required that in a noble house hand-washing should be followed by an elaborate, often extraordinarily lengthy tasting ritual, where the food for the lord or his high table was “assayed” by officers whose job it was to die if the food should turn out to be poisoned. Tasting was called ‘credence,’ because of the belief or confidence which the ritual was meant to instil; side tables at feasts were known as credence tables” (hence credenzas)… Assaying could be done by touching the food with substances reputed to change colour or bleed if poison should be present. There were serpents’ tongues which specialized in testing salt (these are now said to have been in reality sharks’ teeth), narwhal (“unicorn”) horns, rhinoceros horns pieces of rock crystal, agate, or serpentine, and jewels said to be found in toads’ heads. (p. 139)

* The withdrawing chamber, which split from the great hall for the important people, “eventually split into two. The table, which it now normally contained, moved into a room of its own, which was known first in English as the ‘eating-room’, and then the ‘dining room’, a word which is first found in 1601, and which attained common usage during the 18th century … the diners could sit facing each other, not ranged along one side only, as they were when ‘on display’ in the hall.” (p. 147)

* In the 19th century, “a luncheon tablecloth was allowed to be only a runner, or lacy or pierced, so that the table showed through. … the dining table had become a valuable part of middle-class household furnishings, made of precious wood, polished till it gleamed, and proudly treasured. It became perfectly correct in the late 18th century to show of the table by removing all coverings for the last course, the dessert, of a formal meal, leaving only ‘doilies’, rather substantial flannel squares, in place to protect the wood from being scratched by the plates. These doilies, named after the 17th-century London draper called Mr. D’Oyley were the forerunners of our placemats.” (p. 157)

Permalink | Comments (2)
Books Politics

Why negative politics isn’t always negative

December 11, 2007 – 11:11 pm

There’s an old myth about the nature of human behaviour – the myth of the “rational consumer” – this is a man (and yes it always seems to be a man) who always acts in ways in his own self-interest, driving the “perfect” invisible hand of a market economy. It is a myth that even in economics has disappeared from the all but the wildest fringes of the capitalist apologists, but Drew Westen, in his powerful new The Political Brain shows that it clings on in some areas, including the world of the Democratic Party of the USA.

And, I suspect, further afield. There’s something about left politics that makes it particularly prone to believing that if you just present people with the facts, with a solid rational argument, then of course they’ll see sense. It tends to produce leaflets dense in text and detail, arguments involving complex mathematical formulae, and headline high on accuracy and low on sexiness.

Yet just as the “rational consumer” is a myth, so is the voter. Westen devotes the first part of this book to some detailed, factual studies and arguments rather like those he is suggesting politicians avoid. These are scans of the brains of committed voters as they are faced with political contradictions in the (imaginary) actions of their “own” side. This is what the researchers found:

“A network of neurons becomes active that produces distress. Whether this distress is conscious, unconscious, or some combination of the two we don’t know. The brain registers the conflict between data and desire and begins to search for ways to turn off the spigot of unpleasant emotion. We know that the brain largely succeeded in this effort, as partisans mostly denied that they had perceived any conflict between their candidate’s words and deeds…. And this all seemed to happen with little involvement of the neural circuits normally involved in reasoning.”

Yet this is not new knowledge. Westen reports on a fascinating study from the Seventies, which asked voters about their emotions towards presidential candidates, with a list of 12, from “angry” to “hopeful”. They also asked for links to a list of emotion-laden traits such as “honest”, “smart”, “inspiring” etc. And the result was that “people’s positive and negative associations to a candidate were better predictors of their voting preferences than even their judgements about his personality and competence. Voters may disagree with things a candidate stands for or may dislike aspects of his personality, but when feelings about the candidate and more considered assessments of his strengths and weaknesses differ, feelings tend to trump beliefs.”

Taking this, Westen argues that what adverts and political messages need to deliver are powerful, emotional messages, positive associations with the candidate and negative with the opponent. Two extracts from the book, published here and here. set out examples of this.

But Westen is no fan of the “avoiding negative campaigning” school of thought. He argues that the Democrats in the US have been hugely damaged by the “politics of avoidance”. Issues such as national security, abortion and guns have been seen as “negative” for them, leading to advice to dodge them – which has both left the grounds of defining the debate to the Republicans, while also frequently appearing to be shifting or lacking in moral strength themselves.

Westen looks at the work of John Zaller, who has considered how discourse of “political elites” enters the public discourse and shapes public opinion. If the view is seen as united (as usually at the start of a war), the vast majority of the public will follow the single line. He goes on to Samuel Popkin, who argues this is “a sensible strategy for most voters, who have their own lives to lead and don’t have the time or interest to study all the affairs of state” – this is “low-information rationality”. If opinion in the “elite” is seen to be split, most will follow the line of their favoured party, for the same reasons. But if one party is staying silent, it leaves the defining to the other.

Also, he returns to the structure of the brain to note that positive and negative emotions are not opposites, but “psychologically distinct, mediated by different neural circuits and affecting voting in diffent ways. Focusing primarily on the positive and leaving the negative to chance is simply ceding half the brain to the opposition.” Candidates can’t win afford high negatives, but they usually won’t win with low positives.

So he approves (somewhat unusually) of one common political took, the “message grid”, for four questions to start a campaign: “What will I tell voters about me? What will I say about my opponent? What will my opponent tell voters about himself or herself? What will my opponent say about me?”

Successful campaigns should address all of these, and furthermore tell “good stories”: “association’s don’t ‘stick’ in voters’ minds unless they’re embedded in coherent narratives. And they stick all too well if the other side tells stories that go unanswered.”

And, Westen argues, there are times when politicians should appeal to voters’ conscious, rather than unconscious, thoughts. He uses the US example of race: many voters might hold unconscious racist sentiments – often played on by Reagan with terms such as “welfare queens” – but they will consciously reject obvious racism. He quotes the case of Senator George Allen of Virginia, who in 2006 saw a man of Indian descent in a crowd, who he knew worked for his Democrat challenger, then said “Let’s give a welcome to Macaca, here. Welcome to America and the real world of America.”

His opponent didn’t respond directly, but let the media do it for him. Allen’s 12 point lead dissolved in a week, but in the end his Democrat opponent Jim Webb, only just scraped the seat. Westen argues that this was because the Democrat failed to take and shape the incident, and the constant replaying of the piece may thus have appealed to the nasty unconscious, rather than the well-meaning conscious approach.

But, in the end, Westen comes back to the unconscious, with a look at the importance of the candidate’s “curb appeal”. He quotes a remarkable study of photos of winning and losing candidates shown for 1 second to voters who did not know them. Asked to rank competence, trustworthiness, honesty etc, their judgements that included competence predicted the winner about 70% of the time – in 1 second! So, he comes back to the importance of the minutae of body language – and how voters can interpret odd little “tics” or habits of candidates.

There’s a lot more in this book than I’ve summarised here – essential reading for anyone in the political game, particularly from the left.

Permalink | Comments (3)
Books

Phryne’s back

December 2, 2007 – 2:26 pm

My favourite dashing detective, Kerry Greenwood’s Phryne Fisher, is back in a Christmas short story collection, A Question of Death – and I’m trying very hard to ignore the fact that there’s a “Woman’s Weekly book club choice” sticker on the front – well I suppose that at least lots more people are enjoying her adventures.

Perfect escapism, as I say in the Blogcritics review.

Permalink | Comment (1)
Books

Medieval Africa – the great kingdoms

November 28, 2007 – 11:05 pm

The joys of holiday reading – things that you are interested in for no ulterior process…

The Royal Kingdoms of Ghana, Mali, and Songhay: Life in Medieval Africa is one of those books that does just what it says in the title: this introductory text by Patricia and Frederick McKissack sets out a brief history, a short outline of the life and economies of the kingdoms, and describes the sources on which this information is based – and their contradictions.

That’s great, and is probably all most readers are going to want, since I suspect most will, like I did, come to the subject from the starting point of almost total ignorance. What sparked my interest was a discussion on the Medieval-L listserv, which started with the incidence of the plague in Africa and branched out. I was vaguely aware that there were big and important kingdoms in West Africa at that time, but that knowledge was about as far as it goes.

Royal Kingdoms begins usefully with a map, which places the extent of the medieval kingdoms on a modern map. The first, Ghana (c. 300AD- c.1050AD), was (confusingly) largely in modern-day Mali. The second, Mali (c.1200AD-1500AD), extended beyond that, into the south of what is now Mauritania, most of Senegal and Guinea, and into the western corner of Niger, incorporating the one place name here that almost everyone will know – Timbuktu. Songhay (c.800AD-1580AD) was at its height the largest, extending to cover much of Niger, plus the north of Benin and Nigeria.

The basis of the economy of all of these empires was simple: salt and gold. The latter was so plentiful that it was said in the kingdom of Ghana the value of the two comodities was equivalent, pound for pound. The source of the salt was well-known – the city of Taghaza in the Sahara desert, where the mines were worked by slaves (either captives of war or criminals) whose lives were miserable and short. The city was so miserable that their free overseers worked only on two-month contracts.
read more »

Permalink | Comments (46)
Books

Do you re-read?

November 11, 2007 – 8:10 pm

I’ve got probably a score of books that I fairly frequently re-read (often when I’m ill and looking for the comforting and familiar). Seems lots of others readers – some 77% of them do likewise, even if it’s not exactly overall an inspiring list.

My correspondences are 1984, Black Beauty (well not recently), and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Permalink | Comments (5)
Books Feminism Women's history

Real role models – the women pilots of WWII

October 20, 2007 – 6:29 pm

If a history book is to grab you in the same way as a good thriller, to fit within the impossible-to-put-down category, what it almost certainly needs is characters – interesting characters, sympathetic characters, characters about whom you quickly come to care.

Spitfire Women of World War II is packed with such characters – indeed you can only give a little credit to the writer, Giles Whittell. For who could not be grabbed by a character such as Mary de Bunsen, who had only limited use of her right leg as a result of childhood polio, had been born with a then-unfixable hole in the heart that frequently left her breathless after minimal exertion, who wore bottle-thickness glasses, who in the early stages of the war had worked for a Tiger Moth dealer in Devon as a test pilot before ending up flying a military Spitfire. Or Margot Duhalde, the 19-year-old from Chile, the first woman to get a commercial pilot’s licence there, who left her home in April 1941 speaking no English, with no English relatives, to get to England to fight the Germans.

The “Spitfire Women”, although not all of them got to fly the fighter pilots’ favourite plane, were the 164 female pilots of the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA). Once planes had been built a British factories, or shipped from overseas, or repaired after major damage, or indeed had to be scrapped, they had to be transported to where they were needed. So:

“In all, the ATA delivered 308,567 aircraft, including 57,286 Spitfires, 29,401 Hurricanes, 9,805 Lancasters and 7,039 Barracudas of the type that took Betty Keith-Jopp to the dark floor of the Firth of Forth. In mid-1942, when British aircraft production reached its peak, the ATA was moving more planes each day than British Airways did on a typical day in 2006.”

Those were the main sort of aircraft, but there were many more, and many variations on each type. The pilots were expected to fly pretty well what they were given – sometimes a couple of different types in one day. Of course the pilots couldn’t know the details of every aircraft, so they relied on notes, surely a disquieting experience for passengers to watch their pilot read the “Ferry Pilot Notes” before takeoff and landing.

What was worse, and what killed many pilots, men and women, was that they had no instrument training. This was a deliberate decision by officials – a calculation that the cost in time and resources would not pay off – which meant of course, that some pilots died. Whittell begins the book with the tale of Betty Keith-Jopp, named above, who was flying that “lumpy, underpowered torpedo bomber … with a history of unexplained crashes”, who was trapped in unexpected clouds over Scotland on one flight in 1945, and eventually crashed on to the Firth of Forth.

She told Whittell about how she at first accepted her fate, as the aircraft sank, thinking of the insurance payment that would help her mother care for her disabled brother, and of Amy Johnson, who had died in similar circumstances four years earlier. But then survival instincts took over, she hit the canopy release, and bobbed to the surface, although without life jacket or other survival gear. It was pure, blind luck that a trawler – out still on the water because of earlier engine trouble – heard her shouts. Officials had done nothing to keep her out of the danger of being trapped in that unexpected cloud.

At the start of the war the idea that a woman would be flying a military plane at all would have been anathema. Sure there were daring female pilots from the pioneer age of aviation, but they were by definition celebrity oddities – nothing to do with the serious business of war. Indeed women might never have got to fly military planes at all, on Whittell’s account, were it not for the skilled, patient diplomacy of Pauline Gower, well-connected daughter of a Tory MP, who had actually – astonishingly for her class – flown professionally for her living, running her own taxi service with a plane she’d paid for by hire purchase. She was the world’s third female commercial pilot, and Britain’s first.

Whittell quotes from some of the resistance, such as that of C.G. Grey, editor of Aeroplane magazine, who was jaw-droppingly misogynistic in tone when describing “[t]he menace of a woman who thinks that she ought to be flying a high-speed bomber when she really has not the intelligence to scrub the floor properly, or who wants to nose round as an Air Raid Warden and yet can’t cook her husband’s dinner.”

The women had to begin humbly and (literally) slowly on Tiger Moths, with open cockpits – a start that unfortunately coincided with a record cold spell in January 1940. Luckily the hierarchy had been persuaded that they should not have to fly in the skirts and silk stockings of their dress uniform – the original plan – but they were still sometimes so cold on landing that they had to be lifted from the cockpit by groundcrew. And the women were flying under enormous pressure – there was much popular resistance to their role, and just one crash might have seen it end almost before it began.

The women were all from the upper classes – as Whittell comments, when an hour’s flying instruction cost what an average shop girl earned in a fortnight, they could be no other. Yet the confidence that came – and the contacts – was probably essential in gaining the wary, slow acceptance that gradually came.

Of course, today, we asked the question, why were such clearly superb pilots not flying in combat, instead of many of the half-trained young men sent up to die, particularly during the Battle of Britain? Whittell asked that question of the formidable Lettice Curtis, aged 90, who rolled her eyes and responded: “This is the sort of imagination I am very much against. There was no question of it, and it was not a question you asked. It just never came up.” But he asked a senior male air force officer if they could have, and the officer responds that he’d no doubt at all Curtis would have made a good combat pilot.

There are not a lot of basic facts that were not already known in Spitfire Women, but it is moments like these that make it a fascinating read. Whittell speaks to these now elderly women, in many cases no doubt the last time that their words will be recorded, and he gets many to open up “ on the record” in ways they have never done. They were, by definition, exceptional women. Their tactics and approach to tackling misogyny and mistrust were of their time, but that doesn’t mean we can’t now be inspired by them, to learn from them, and we certainly should continue to celebrate their efforts.

Whittell has also written a newspaper feature about the women.

Permalink | Comments (23)

« Previous Page — Next Page »

« Previous Page — Next Page »