The Literary Club, known simply as “The Club,” was established in early 1764 after the portrait painter Joshua Reynolds became worried about his friend Samuel Johnson, who was sinking into a black depression. An old Oxford friend, William Adams, had visited Johnson the previous autumn and “found him in a deplorable state, sighing, groaning, talking to himself, and restlessly walking from room to room.” Johnson told Adams, “I would consent to have a limb amputated to recover my spirits.” An evening of talk with friends, Reynolds suggested, was a less drastic remedy.
This was an age of clubs, when men met in inns, coffeehouses, and homes, sharing interests ranging from scientific experiments to glee singing—and drink, which played an important part in the Club’s weekly meetings. These took place every Friday in a private room at the Turk’s Head Tavern in Gerrard Street, in Soho. In addition to Johnson and Reynolds, the nine founding members of the new Literary Club included Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith, and the magistrate and historian of music Sir John Hawkins (who left after a quarrel with Burke), as well as Burke’s father-in-law, Christopher Nugent, a stockbroker, Anthony Chamier, and two other friends, Topham Beauclerk and Bennet Langton.
What year is it? It’s 2019, obviously. An easy question. Last year was 2018. Next year will be 2020. We are confident that a century ago it was 1919, and in 1,000 years it will be 3019, if there is anyone left to name it. All of us are fluent with these years; we, and most of the world, use them without thinking. They are ubiquitous. As a child I used to line up my pennies by year of minting, and now I carefully note dates of publication in my scholarly articles.
Now, imagine inhabiting a world without such a numbered timeline for ordering current events, memories and future hopes. For from earliest recorded history right up to the years after Alexander the Great’s conquests in the late 4th century BCE, historical time – the public and annual marking of the passage of years – could be measured only in three ways: by unique events, by annual offices, or by royal lifecycles.
There is something both nihilistic and deeply hopeful in Drager's looping novel. Nihilistic, because in so many ways it indicates that as parts of a continuum of human storytelling, life, love, and hate, none of us matter; but hopeful because that continuum means our stories are related, our narratives interlocking, and so while we may be insignificant, we are also never alone.
The Farm might serve only as an echo-chamber treatment of The Handmaid's Tale, were it not for author Joanne Ramos's deft way of creating characters. She peoples her book with figures who are appealingly engaging — or, at times, engagingly repellent.
Caro is, of course, a pillar of the Old Media: a Princeton-educated New Yorker who worked at Long Island’s Newsday (“a real crusading paper then,” Caro tells us), was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, and then left journalism to write giant tomes about Important Men that won Impressive Awards (two Pulitzer Prizes, two National Book Awards, et cetera). So one might expect his memoir ought to be a staid and stuffy recollection of the media’s halcyon days.
But his book is deceptively modern. In part, this is due to Caro’s oft-repeated clarification, which he sticks right on the first page of the new book: “I never had the slightest interest in writing the life of a great man. […] I thought of writing biographies as a means of illuminating the […] force that is political power.” And political power is an evergreen subject, particularly political power as it relates to subjects like civil rights, urban development, and partisan upheaval. Since much of Working has been previously published over the last 25 years, the book gives a sense of how coverage of those subjects has evolved over time.
Mackinder’s vision stood at odds with the political map of his times. Britain, notably, did not control the heartland; nor did the next biggest territorial empire, that of the French; nor did the emerging rivals Britons were worried about, Germany and the US. A century later, Mackinder has enjoyed a revival for his apparently prescient insights into today’s power politics.
Peter Frankopan doesn’t mention Mackinder, but this was the terrain he chronicled in his sweeping 2015 history The Silk Roads. In The New Silk Roads, he offers an extended epilogue that argues for the heartland’s continuing centrality to 21st-century trade and security. It cannot be a surprise to many readers that the balance of economic power today is tilting east – or that relative decline is having disruptive, polarising effects on the west. (Though just in case you have missed the news for the last couple of years, Frankopan quotes liberally from Donald Trump to make the point.) What The New Silk Roads contributes is a concise illustration of this shift from a Eurasian vantage point. Breezy and accessible, it seems perfectly pitched for a young student curious about globalisation, or for a passenger flying to China for the first time on business.
Now that, at best, we’d rowed halfway across the woods
that we mostly thought of our lives as—despite the fact