For many in Britain the Algerian War is a distant memory, remembered, if at all, for Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film, The Battle of Algiers.

As an 18-year-old I was staying with my aunt in Paris, and together we went along to the Place de la Concorde to hear De Gaulle speak. The crowd was enormous and it was memorable for me because, apart from the orderly and peaceful Aldermaston Marches, it was the first political demonstration I had been to.

De Gaulle was impressive, and it never occured to me that there were rocks under the benign surface, that behind his rhetoric was a war of terrible atrocities in which hundreds of thousands of Algerians were tortured and killed. This is the background to Lucy Beckett’s novel, which has chilling relevance to what is happening in the Middle East today. It is seen through the eyes of someone who is determinedly agnostic. We are invited to see all this in the light of Catholicism, specifically through the Confessions of St Augustine, and Pascal’s Pensées.

The Year of Thamar’s Book opens with Jamila, a librarian in Paris, married to a history teacher at a lycée, with two children: Bernard, recently graduated from university in Nantes, and Josephine, about to sit her baccalaureat.

Jamila’s mother was Algerian. She is dying and asks Jamila to find someone called Jacques Thomas, last heard of in a village in Burgundy, and to give him a wrapped box.Jamila travels down to Burgundy but at first no one knows of Jacques Thomas, until the owner of the café in which she is staying remembers an old woman called Thomas whose son, Thamar, a recluse with a badly disfigured face, still lives there. He turns out to be Jamila’s father. She gains his confidence and gets him to talk.

He begins to tell her the story of his life. He has written 400 pages of it in note form. Jamila’s son, Bernard, wants to be a writer and she suggests that he might come down and and look at them. From here, the novel tells the two stories in parallel: Jacques’ life and his growing friendship with Bernard as he tries to piece his grandfather’s story together.

Jacques/Thamar had been conscripted into the army and sent to Algeria. It is traumatic. Every night he can hear FLN prisoners being tortured, and every morning he has to bury the tortured bodies.

One night his lorry is ambushed by the FLN. He is badly wounded and thrown out of the lorry, presumed dead. He is saved by an Arab who, with his daughter, nurses him back to health. When he can walk again he has to be returned to the army, where he is disciplined as a deserter. When he finally manages to get back to Burgundy after the war he joins the Augustinian White Fathers and becomes a devout Christian.

Thamar tries to interest Bernard in Christianity, introducing him to the beauties of Romanesque architecture, in Cluny, and to the wonders of the desert in Algeria. Lucy Beckett’s writing is magical, as Bernard discovers the complexities of the Eucharist and the Catholic faith.

But Thamar’s Christianity has a cloud over it because he has fallen in love with a young Arab boy. He feels unable to take Holy Communion. One day Islamist terrorists come to his village, Thamar is clubbed down and shot — his jaw broken and his eye socket and cheek bone smashed, his face hideously scarred and twisted.

Bernard becomes increasing committed to finishing Thamar’s book, despite his father’s determination that he should return to Paris and seek properly paid employment. As he struggles with Thamar’s muddled memory, Bernard begins to see that, as Augustine said, only in God, and by God, is a man truly known. Cautiously he begins to go to Mass with Thamar.

Meanwhile his sister Josephine has run away with a North African jihadist, frightened by the prospect of her father’s likely anger at her poor baccalaureat results. She is untraceable for a year, during which time she makes no attempt to contact her parents, although she is living in Paris.  She ends up in prison.

Lucy Beckett’s novel begins and ends with Jamila. It takes you on a remarkable journey through memory, politics and faith. Novels which explore and describe the seeds and nature of Catholicism today are rare, and although I am an agnostic/atheist, this one moved me considerably. Read it: it will open your eyes to what is happening in the Middle East, and make you think again about faith.

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Death is a taboo. For those born in the Second World War, if you lived longer than 70 you were considered to be old, to be in death’s waiting room. Now many live on into their nineties. Jeremy Hutchinson, the great barrister, hero of the Lady Chatterley trial, was 102 when he died recently.

Medical science is beginning to defeat many cancers. As a consequence we choose not to talk about death. Robert McCrum’s new book dares to do so. (The title is from Prospero’s speech in The Tempest). He is a distinguished literary editor of the Observer, and former editor-in-chief of Faber & Faber. His last book, My Year Off, chronicled his recovery from a major stroke and considered the Ars Vivendi (the art of living well). This book turns to the Ars Moriendi (the art of dying).

Our quotidian fears are now dementia and Alzheimer’s. With Lear we cry “O let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven!” Death is, in Auden’s words, “the rumble of distant thunder at a picnic”. McCrum is a wise and compassionate guide through this territory. He asks, “How, When and Where am I going?”

Alice B. Toklas asked Gertrude Stein, as Stein was dying, “What is the answer?” Stein’s gnomic reply was, “What is the question?” McCrum looks death in the face, with a level stare, quoting Montaigne: “Let us disarm Death of his novelty and strangeness.” Indeed he finds optimism.

With Dr Henry Marsh, he believes that “as I get older, I derive a certain spiritual consolation from this ‘profound mystery’”, as he calls consciousness. He agrees with his friend Carol that “being unwell teaches you to value things . . . I’ve had moments of great joy. I feel fortunate.” Like Robert Bellarmine, an Italian Jesuit contemporary of Shakespeare, he believes that “he who lives well, dies well.”

He is not alone in hoping for a death free of pain, surrounded by his family, but like David Hume, an atheist, he doesn’t believe in an afterlife. When Hume was asked on his deathbed to renounce the Devil, he declined to do so, declaring: “Now is not the time to be making new enemies.”

McCrum considers the many contemporaries and friends who died while he was writing this book — Lisa Jardine, Alan Rickman, Zaha Hadid, Anita Brookner and Geoffrey Hill, as well as Clive James, who has predicted his death year after year. James, like Charles II, has been “an unconscionable time to die”. While doing so he has written a book, Sentenced To Life, and some of his very best poetry, such as “Japanese Maple”. In the process he has fallen in love again with his wife, after a period of unfaithfulness.

McCrum writes movingly about the death of his parents. Like him I was fortunate to be holding the hand of both my parents when they died, for which I will always be grateful.

He considers whether we should have the right to choose. Like his friend, the writer Salley Vickers, he explores assisted dying. It’s an odd right, she argues, because “we don’t have the right to be born. So maybe we don’t have the right to die.”

This is a remarkable and moving book that everyone who is thinking about dying should read.

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He was born and brought up in Sudbury, Suffolk, with a father who became bankrupt. His uncle, also Thomas, died in 1738, leaving him £10 plus a further £20 a year for three years “to enable him to set out into the world”. With it, aged 13, Thomas set off for London to become an artist. He found work with Francis Hayman doing designs and views for Vauxhall Gardens, plus some instruction in the St Martin’s Lane Academy and with the French engraver, Gravelot.

Thomas was handsome and charming. Hamilton is good on the background — Hogarth, Thomas Coram and his Foundation, and the art world in which Thomas now moved (Rysback, Roubiliac, Alan Ramsay from Edinburgh and John Boydell, the dealer and printmaker). But although he sold occasional landscapes, he couldn’t make a living, so he returned to Sudbury.

He married an attractive Suffolk girl, Margaret Burr, the illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Beaufort, who had settled £200 a year on her. Landscapes were what Gainsborough loved but portraits were what people wanted, so he started to paint people in landscapes, notably a rich young local landowner, Robert Andrews, and his new wife. He used lay figures (doll-like mannequins) so the figures are stiff, but Hamilton is excellent on why this painting is so revolutionary; indeed, he suggests, it is implicitly sexual (though it was not until the 1960s that this was fully appreciated).

In search of more patrons he and Margaret moved to Ipswich and the patrons came — local clergymen and politicians, and friends and family. The portraits grew in size and cost (five guineas for a head and shoulders; 15 for a full-length). But he was still earning no more than £100 a year and his daughters were growing up. So, both his parents having died in 1755 and no longer having ties in Suffolk, he decided to move to Bath, where there were plenty of potential clients — musicians (Johann Christian Bach), actors (Garrick, Sarah Siddons), writers (Sheridan), doctors and scientists such as William Herschel.

Over the next 15 years he painted more than 300 portraits, including 140 full-lengths. Hamilton picks out his portrait of the lute-playing singer Ann Ford, five foot by seven: voluptuous, bold, her legs crossed provocatively, it caused a sensation. He quadrupled his prices.

Gainsborough was now a celebrity. When he came up to London, it was to lunch in Soho with Dr Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, Sheridan and Garrick — “the Blue Stocking Fraternity”. But he was overworking and became critically ill: only the ministrations of his wife saved his life.

He was now painting better than ever, portraits and big, ambitious landscapes, and was financially secure. Throughout the 1760s he had shown his work in London with the Society of Artists but, following Hogarth’s death, the Society collapsed. So Reynolds engineered the creation of the Royal Academy in 1768, with Gainsborough as a founding member.

All went well in the beginning. He showed The Blue Boy, his portraits of Garrick and of his great friend, William Jackson and a landscape in 1769. But in 1772 the Academy refused to show his portrait of Lady Waldegrave, the mistress of the Prince of Wales, for fear of offending the King.

This caused a major rift with the Academy: what Gainsborough described as his “implacable resentment”. Zoffany omitted Gainsborough from the group portrait he made of the RA’s founding members.

Gainsborough was not interested in committees and so, unlike Reynolds, was not an asset to the Academy. But, again in contrast to Reynolds, he established an easy relationship with both George III and Queen Charlotte. Their official portraits by Reynolds and Ramsay are stiff compared to Gainsborough’s “charming and romantic” portrait of Queen Charlotte. He became their friend and gave them both painting lessons, but it was Reynolds who was knighted and made the King’s Painter in Ordinary when Ramsay died.

Hamilton is judicious about the relationship between Gainsborough and Reynolds. Their characters and ambitions were so dissimilar that they were never going to be close, but Reynolds admired Gainsborough, bought his landscape, Girl with Pigs, and visited him as he lay dying.

Gainsborough loved women, as his paintings of them show — Perdita Robinson, the actress and lover of the Prince of Wales; Giovanni Bacelli; Sarah Siddons, the actress; the beautiful Mary Graham; Ann Ford; and the several paintings of his daughters and of his wife.

As he lay dying he told William Jackson: “We are all going to heaven, and Van Dyck is of the company.” Indeed, his last words were “Van Dyck”.

This is a masterly book, all the more so considering the scant material that Gainsborough left (no schedules of sittings, no invoices, few letters). Despite this it is even better than his life of Turner. It is to be hoped that he might now turn his talents to Constable and Lawrence.

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Ledbury has always featured overseas poets. There are 40 in this anthology, from Africa, Asia, the Middle and Far East as well as Europe and North America. Anedda is joined by Reza Mohammadi and Azita Ghahremen, who also write about the traumas of being a refugee. Ledbury demonstrates that poetry is very much alive and well, and addressing today’s most important issues.

In its 20 years 550 poets have read there, including the festival’s lead patron, Carol Ann Duffy; Gillian Clarke, the Laureate of Wales; and Liz Lochhead and Jackie Kay, the two most recent Scottish makars (national poets). Hwaet! includes more than 80 women, such as Sarah Howe, the winner of this year’s T.S. Eliot prize.

Poetry has not been in such good shape for 20 years. We have, in Carol Ann Duffy, an outstanding Poet Laureate who not only promotes poetry ceaselessly in schools and events, and edits a stream of anthologies, but doesn’t seem to find the “official” poems a chore. Instead she makes them memorable (“The Crown”). And there are no signs that being Laureate has inhibited her own poetry, as can be seen in her latest collection, The Bees. Her poetry is humorous (‘The World’s Wife”), sensual (“Rapture”), political and personal. In the words of Coleridge, she “keeps the heart awake to Truth and Beauty”.

In those last 20 years Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney have died, as have Adrian Mitchell and Adrian Henri, the Scots Norman MacCaig and Edwin Morgan, and earlier this year, Geoffrey Hill, but there is a new generation of poets who perform as well as they write. Among them are Hannah Lowe, Kate Tempest, Hollie McNish and the Jamaican, Claudia Rankine, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, all of whom challenge such established male poets as Don Paterson, Paul Muldoon, James Fenton, Owen Sheers and Christopher Reid.

Sales of poetry are up: Bloodaxe sold an extraordinary 250,000 copies worldwide of the first volume of its Being Human trilogy. There are new imprints competing with the well-established Faber, Carcanet, Bloodaxe and Penguin; and more children are writing poetry in schools (Ledbury worked with almost 3,000 last year).This is, indeed, an exciting time to be a poet, and a lover of poetry. It is baffling that the media, as yet, don’t seem to have woken up to this new world.

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Paula Bartley approaches her through the letters she wrote, mainly to her ministers, and the journals that she kept daily throughout her life, from the age of 13. In doing so she questions many of the assumptions and myths that have built up around Victoria, not least about her withdrawal from public life and politics after the death of Prince Albert, and about her character.

The picture that emerges is of a surprising, somewhat contradictiory figure: obstinate and wilful; sexual and sentimental; self-indulgent, but hard-working; reactionary but, on some issues, liberal; not racist; sometimes a grump, sometimes susceptible to flirtation and flattery.

She emerges as a monarch with strong prejudices (against Roman Catholicism, against Ireland), but also as someone capable of occasional, surprising pragmatism.

She was brought up by her mother as a fervent Whig, and her first Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, became a father figure: they rode together every day and discussed everything.

Her journals show that she dismissed the Chartists’ case for electoral reform, although she was not unsympathetic to reforms of industry — despite Melbourne’s belief that the conditions in factories were “greatly exaggerated . . . it’s better children should work,” he maintained, “than be idle and starve”.

In foreign affairs she never found it possible to distinguish between the interests of her family and those of the country — she was related to the royal families of France, Belgium, Portugal, Spain, Austria and Hungary, Mexico, Russia and Germany. “The idea of my country being at war with that of my dearest relations and friends would be a terrible grief to me,” she wrote in 1844.

But family considerations didn’t arise in the case of Ireland where she found the rise of Daniel O’Connell “very alarming” and she deplored the reduction of his prison sentence for leading the campaign for Irish independence as “too bad!”. Nevertheless she saw that “governing Ireland by Troops” would be “dreadful and cannot last”.

She identified the influence of the Catholic clergy as being at the root of the problem and supported, and financed, a better educated and informed clergy. Not that such prescience could prevent her being dubbed “The Famine Queen” before she, belatedly, supported Peel’s reform of the Corn Laws that were keeping the price of corn artificially high.

Gradually she learned to interfere less with ministers, although that didn’t apply to Palmerston. She feared revolutions and, despite her Whig instincts, was essentially an autocrat. “Obedience to the laws and to the Sovereign is obedience to a Higher Power,” she wrote in 1848. “Divinely instituted for the good of the people, not of the Sovereign who has equally duties and obligations.”
She deplored Palmerston’s “blustering” and considered his successor as Prime Minister, Russell, “weak and miserable”. But  she ended by recognising that Palmerston’s handling of the Crimean War had been effective. She was very proud of “Her Navy” and reviewed her returning, victorious troops majestically, in a scarlet jacket with gold braid, in Bartley’s words, with “pomp and splendour”. She initiated the Victoria Cross, giving it to 47 men, and, never one to bear grudges, gave Palmerston the Order of the Garter.

But Albert’s death in December 1861 changed everything. Without his support and guidance she fell back into what was dubbed the “luxury of woe”. She refused to appear in public, wouldn’t open Parliament and insisted on wearing black at all times, losing the sympathy of the public.

She had relied on strong influences — first Melbourne, then Albert. Now, after 1861, she was alone, the Great Matriarch.

Initially she disliked Disraeli, considering him obnoxious and detestable, “thoroughly Jewish”. Yet he befriended her, indeed flirted with her. She found his parliamentary reports gossipy, “his curious notes were just like his novels, highly coloured”. Her dislike she kept for Gladstone who treated her as an intellectual equal, “lost [her] in the fog of [his] long and far from lucid sentences” and so failed to gain her support on the Irish Question or on many of his radical reforms.

Bartley’s book is far from being a hagiography. It provides a frank and refreshing view of Victoria. By allowing her to speak for herself through her letters and journals she confirms many of the criticisms expressed by Dilke and later by Charles Trevelyan. But it is hard not to be charmed by her vulnerability and impressed by the way she applied herself to her role as monarch for 60 years, steering Britain through a century in which it could easily have fallen apart.

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While in our culture white is bridal, virginal, the colour of innocence and simplicity, for Herman Melville in Moby Dick white was the colour of danger and for the Chinese it is the colour of loss, of mourning, a sign that the world should keep away. It is minatory, white. When the Emperor Zhu De built the great White Pagoda in the 15th century he ordered the execution of 2,800 women in his household (concubines and servants) after rumours of a plot.

De Waal travels to Jingdezhen to find the source of porcelain, a mountain outside the city called Kao-lin. He describes how it came to Europe, and follows its trail to Versailles and Meissen, telling the story of how the secrets of its ingredients (petunse) and the making of porcelain — both the theory (the young mathematician, Tschirnhaus) and the practice (the brilliant and tenacious Johann Friedrich Böttger) — were gradually discovered.

He relates how in Cornwall the non-conformist chemist William Cookworthy mastered its secrets, taking advantage of a rich local source of fine white clay. De Waal tells this rich and complex narrative well, and intercuts it with the story of his own life with porcelain. He writes about how working with clay feels on the hand, about the qualities of porcelain — “thin as paper, resonant as a musical stone”; about cobalt — “an exalted material”, “a blue as clean and lambent as midday”. 

He is good on the collective nature of making porcelain, how it goes through as many as 70 hands at the wheel, trimming pots, drying, glazing, packing pots into saggars, saggars into kilns: processes that haven’t changed in 300 years. In doing so he casts light on his own work, the sequences of his pots: “sets are a way of controlling the world,” to quote the 11th-century Zhou Ding. “The ten thousand things are produced and reproduced/so that variation and transformation have no end” — endless iteration. This leads him to interesting observations on copying, authenticity and frauds: “Copying is a valued pathway of respect, a way of learning skills.”

At times his writing sags under the weight of detail, and adjectives, but then he delights with such observations: the “softness of surface of a winter apple”. He brings the story of porcelain into the 20th century and tells how the Allach fact-ory produced porcelain figurines of SS troopers, much to the delight of Himmler, and how the Chinese made plaques of Mao in the Cultural Revolution. But he leaves you with the desire to go back and gaze at porcelain, and to look afresh at his own work. His pilgrimage ends with “white is a way of starting again — finding your way”. For those who love his pots The White Road’s closing sentence is optimistic: “ And I am making again.”

The post Where The White Stuff Came From appeared first on Standpoint.

They were soon joined by David Garrick and James Boswell, and later by Charles James Fox, Edward Gibbon and Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

The French Revolution exposed fault lines in The Club: Boswell was opposed, Fox in favour, and by the end of the 18th century this crucible of the Enlightenment (Adam Smith was also a member, though not a popular one) became gradually more political and more Establishment, electing aristocrats  like the Irish Lord Charlemont, a member of the Society of Dilettanti and friend of Robert Adam and David Hume.

In New Annals of The Club (Modern Art Press, limited edition) Charles Saumarez Smith (1764–1814), David Cannadine (1814–1914) and Peter Hennessy (1914–1984) tell the story of The Club and its membership well. In the 19th century members included nine Prime Ministers, from Lord Liverpool to Asquith (five Conservatives, five Whigs/Liberals) and the membership became wider (Walter Scott, T.H. Huxley, Lord Kelvin) but it was never a Lunar Society, electing very few scientists, or physicians or manufacturers, and it never formed policies or acted executively. Meeting once a month, The Club was concerned solely with conversation (recorded in its early years by Boswell, and later by Carlisle and Grant-Duff) and conviviality.  

If in the 18th century it embodied the Enlightenment, in the 19th century it became more Establishment: a bastion of Church, State, the Law and Parliament (more Lords than Commons). 

When in 1911 it didn’t elect Winston Churchill and F.E. Smith, the two of them formed The Other Club (with Bob Boothby, Max Beaverbrook and Gordon Selfridge). It was less staid: “a rival body of political bounders” in Anthony Sampson’s words. Churchill maintained that election to it was “superior to any honour, short of the Garter” but it has never matched The Club’s remarkable roll call of historians (Macaulay, Trevelyan, H.A.L. Fisher), Archbishops of Canterbury (every one in the 20th century except Donald Coggan, who declined membership, as did Ramsay MacDonald and Jeremy Thorpe) or private secretaries to the monarch (nearly all of them). Both are very English institutions, maintaining continuity and change. Both draw almost exclusively from Oxford and Cambridge.

Prime Ministers like Baldwin came to The Club to escape the pressures of office. Journalists have rarely been elected (the late Charles Douglas-Home, Editor of The Times, was an exception), and records have not been kept, so the reader is left to imagine what Gladstone or Acton or Kenneth Clark might have said. 

But we are given occasional glimpses of how members behaved. When in 1944 the Algerian red wine supplied by Brown’s Hotel was considered unsatisfactory, Clark supplied bottles of claret from his own cellar.

The Left has seldom featured. Gaitskell failed by one vote to be elected, though Roy Jenkins, the ideal clubman, biographer as well as politician, was successful.  The Club’s literary taste has always been catholic: Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Kipling, Buchan, Galsworthy, T.S. Eliot, Cecil Day-Lewis, John Betjeman.

These Annals bring The Club and its membership up to 1984—its own 30-year rule? In recent years it has admitted women but the authors are discreet as to their identities. Perhaps such discretion is the secret of its longevity—that and the belief that Montaigne was right to consider conversation “the most fruitful and most natural exercise of our minds.”

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