Abigail Dean was about to turn 30 when she suddenly realised that her job as a lawyer was using up all the oxygen in her life. “If I didn’t make a change,” she says, “I was going to still be there on my 40th birthday.” She took three months off, writing every day at Dulwich library in London, and ended up with the seeds of what would become her debut novel, Girl A.
“You don’t know me,” Lex, or Girl A, tells us as the novel opens, “but you’ll have seen my face. In the earlier pictures, they bludgeoned our features with pixels, right down to our waists; even our hair was too distinctive to disclose. But the story and its protectors grew weary, and in the danker corners of the internet we became easy to find.”
What seems to be emerging from this new census is a picture in which Newton’s great work was actually widely, and immediately, read and discussed, perhaps even enjoyed, by both his intellectual peers and a larger population. It adds a new element to the story of how modern science developed, with more likely to come as the researchers dig deeper.
Yet the idea that some of the central texts in the development of western science were either little distributed, or little read, has a certain strange draw.
In the four decades since, China has moved from being the headquarters of world revolution to being the epicenter of global capitalism. Its leaders can plausibly claim to have engineered the swiftest economic reversal in history: the redemption from extreme poverty of hundreds of millions of people in less than three decades, and the construction of modern infrastructure. Some great enigmas, however, remain unsolved: How did a well-organized, disciplined, and successful political party disembowel itself? How did a tightly centralized state unravel so quickly? How could siblings, neighbors, colleagues, and classmates turn on one another so viciously? And how did victims and persecutors—the roles changing with bewildering speed—live with each other afterward? Full explanations are missing not only because archives are mostly inaccessible to scholars but also because the Cultural Revolution was fundamentally a civil war, implicating almost all of China’s leaders.
Talking about smells can feel a little like talking about dreams—often tedious, rarely satisfying. The olfactory world is more private than we may think: even when we share space, such as a particularly ripe subway car, one commuter may describe eau d’armpit as sweet Gorgonzola cheese, another will detect rotting pumpkin, and a third a barnyardy, cayenne tang. What surprised me is that using phrases like “barnyardy, cayenne tang” is a perfectly valid, even preferred, way to write about nasal experiences. Many of the most seasoned perfume critics incline toward the rhapsodic, as do the would-be critics who gather on the Internet to wax eloquent about the things they’ve smelled. One of my favorite hubs for odor aficionados, the Web site Fragrantica, an online “perfume encyclopedia” that launched in 2007, has the feel of a cacophonous bazaar: on its message boards, users swap perfumed prose back and forth, racking up hundreds of new posts each day.
Jim had operated open-house policy at his home every Sunday evening for more than 40 years. Absolutely anyone was welcome to come for an informal dinner, all you had to do was phone or email and he would add your name to the list. No questions asked. Just put a donation in an envelope when you arrive.
There would be a buzz in the air, as people of various nationalities - locals, immigrants, travellers - milled around the small, open-plan space. A pot of hearty food bubbled on the hob and servings would be dished out on to a trestle table, so you could help yourself and continue to mingle. It was for good reason that Jim was nicknamed the "godfather of social networking". He led the way in connecting strangers, long before we outsourced it all to Silicon Valley.
The tide of “New Journalism” that flooded the late 1960s and ‘70s may have been dominated by the exclamation marks, manic italics and machismo of Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer or Hunter S. Thompson, but the lower-key voice of Joan Didion has outlasted, and outperformed, those swaggering peers. Didion’s latest volume, “Let Me Tell You What I Mean”, makes that case easily with a dozen previously uncollected pieces from 1968 to 2000.
Philosophical as well as confessional, Ho Davies’s autofictional proxy shrewdly dissects the mixed-up emotions of parenthood while speculating on, say, why children love dinosaurs (it’s a way of thinking about adults), or why his distaste for anti-abortion rhetoric leaves him unsure of how best to tell them about “babies in tummies”. Tender yet clear-eyed, this is a thoughtful, consistently intriguing book, covering a lot of ground in a short space.
O grammar-rules, O now your virtues show;
So children still read you with awful eyes,