Bad Blood by Lorna Sage

Lorna Sage, Professor of English at the university of East Anglia, was just a few years older than me but this is a young woman’s story, the story of her childhood through to her graduation from university. I was telling someone the other day that this book is about the telling of the story rather than the story itself. Her writing is exquisite, not in a poetic languagey way but more in its depth of thought, its word choice, its nuances. The period she’s describing falls into three sectors: the first as a child living with her damaged, flawed grandparents, the second when her father returns from the war and the family is reconstituted in a council house and the third the period of her adolescence and education. She’s an early feminist, an intelligent misfit both in the working class environment and within the family in which she finds herself, like a cuckoo in the wrong nest. A lot of her observations ring so true for women of my generation, who grew up in the fifties against a background of war memories, austerity and a need to shelter within rigorous moral boundaries as a means of survival. It’s an inspiring and moving story of this brilliant young woman’s determination to create a different future for herself. This book won the Whitbread Prize for Biography. It’s utterly wonderful.

I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron

This collection of essays is delightful. Ephron moves from musings about the aging neck – and yes, all of us aging people have it and I reckon most of us hate it – to the troubles of raising teenagers to her divorces and her sadness about the death of her friend and the inevitability of it all. It’s peppered with small witticisms, especially in an essay called Things I Wish I’d Known that’s full of wisdom such as ‘You never know’ and ‘If the shoe doesn’t fit at the shoe store, it’s never going to fit.’ My favourite though is ‘Never let them know’, pertinent for someone who can never keep her mouth shut. There’s a lovely essay about her disillusionment with Bill Clinton and some fascinating insights into her life in New York City. Dip into this book and enjoy it.

The End is Always Near by Dan Carlin

This is going to be a long review because there is so much in this book. And interestingly, I am reading it in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic – not cheering reading at all at the moment, when others are immersed in romances and thrillers! This fascinating book is doing a great job of reminding us that we need to learn from history and that human behaviour doesn’t change all that much. Chapter 1 is about toughness and whether tough times make us tougher people and whether there is actually any value in that. At one point he says it would be obscene to assign a toughness value to a plague event that wiped out half the population. So much for the what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger adage or my favourite, ‘well this is character building.’ I didn’t find this chapter all that interesting, though I’d have enjoyed using it as the basis for discussion with someone else. Chapter 2 is about the treatment of children and more specifically the historical suffering of children and whether this in fact damaged them. He asks that if this was the norm in a particular culture, then would children be traumatised by it? I can see that physical harm would be done, particularly in the cases of physical punishment and sexual use, but he is talking about emotional harm. We’re whole populations emotionally harmed? Did it make them into nations of psychopaths? Chapter 3 is about the fall of the Bronze Age, which I didn’t even know happened. I am so ignorant it hurts. He looks at all the theories: climate change, internecine war, invasion/refugees, volcanic activity, disease etc - and gives a good summary of both sides. Not being a historian, he draws no conclusions. What interested me was that similar threats face us today but he points out that because of our ‘advances’ we would suffer less from them. At the moment a lot of this seems relevant to me. So in the next chapter he talks about the fall of Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian empire. What brutal people the Assyrians were. He says they had a grudging respect for the civilization of the Babylonians, so tended to leave them alone, until they didn’t. And then Bablyon was no more. It happens, he says, and it can happen again. Next we have the fall of Rome. The ‘barbarians’ fought the Romans, over some centuries, but eventually the Romans weakened and the barbarians slipped in as refugees. Badly treated, they rose and overcame their hosts. Over time of course. The interesting bit is the way Rome parcelled out its holdings to various groups who formed the foundation of the cultures that remained when the empire fell - the Visigoths in Spain and the Franks in France for example. He talks about Clovis pulling things together as the first ruler of Europe really, and then the later Carolingian dynasty aka Charlemagne, who was crowned by the pope, possibly unexpectedly, but any way crowned as what later became the holy roman emperor, though not holy, not Roman and with no empire. But it established the grounds for the debate about whether the church was above the emperor since it was the pope that crowned him - a power struggle that continued over centuries. We follow up with a chapter about pandemics. How apt. Mostly he focuses on the Black Death, which I already knew quite a bit about. About how its transmission was accelerated because of great global contact and a lot of other stuff that is truly pertinent to what we’re going through now. Where’s that pop-eyed emoji we use on WhatsApp? But in the light of the virus we have now, the realization that the Black Death wiped out HALF the world’s population, including in China, and that it took three hundred years for Europe to properly recover, is chastening. But looking at how slow governments are to respond, and the way they temper their response with political expediencies, makes you realize they haven’t been reading their history. The next chapter is about nuclear weapons. It contains fascinating detail about the arms race, stuff I’d been vaguely aware of but had never really paid much attention to. Now that’s appalling really because it goes to show just how careless about the past people of my generation have become. This was world ending stuff. He points out that after a major war (WWII) the victors left standing become the only world super powers and then become enemies as they vie to become top dog: Russia and the US. He outlines the horrifying race to develop more powerful weapons and the even more horrifying pressure from the Americans to use them sooner rather than later to wipe out the Russians before they had a chance to develop them for themselves. That attitude continued right through with only the US president standing the way of often unanimous US military support for employment of the weapons. It discusses the Bay of Pigs and the subsequent Cuban Missile Crisis, which really shows what magnificent strength of character and judgment JFK had. I was a child during all of this and have no recollection of any anxiety on my parents’ part at all. Finally he concludes with a chapter called The Rod to Hell. This is such an interesting chapter because it deals with the escalation of war techniques which people believed were necessary to reduce the length and severity of wars and thus save lives. But of course, the lines of limited warfare became stretched and soon we found ourselves justifying killing a hundred thousand people in order to shorten a war and thus save many hundreds of thousands more. This book raises fascinating and often unanswerable ethical questions. They are dark and reading it in these dark times is perhaps not the best advice, but it is nonetheless a pretty stimulating read.