Well into the nineteenth century, most European swimmers were still using the breaststroke and backstroke, and keeping their faces out of the water, even in competition. That is, they swam even less well than the Assyrians, Greeks and Romans had in antiquity, since the ancient swimmers had at least used a crawl stroke. Some Eurasians were aware that Indigenous and Black American swimmers used an overhand stroke, which was much faster than the breaststroke. They saw that these “natural” swimmers used side breathing rather than holding their heads up out of the water. But for decades, swimmers from Britain to China resisted the crawl stroke. They saw the breaststroke as calm and rational, and rejected the crawl as excessively splashy and energetic. As swimming races became more competitive, however, slowly the advantages of the crawl stroke proved irresistible, and more swimmers began to use it.
When we refer to nouns such as ‘bread’ or ‘flower’ we know exactly what they are. These are concrete objects that we can see, touch, taste and smell. But time is an abstract concept, and one that philosophers have long struggled to define. In the 3rd century AD, St Augustine of Hippo (354 AD – 430 AD) made a series of observations about time that went on to influence countless philosophers right into the 19th century. Many of his thoughts on time still ring true with people today.
The American author Jean Hanff Korelitz has a knack for producing smart, psychologically astute page-turners. The Plot, pivoting on a case of identity theft, was 2021’s most entertaining highbrow beach read, while her adaptation of her noirish 2014 thriller You Should Have Known (retitled The Undoing) was HBO’s most watched TV show of 2020. Her new novel, The Latecomer, combines her interests in constructed identities and marital disarray within a mazy, old-fashioned Jonathan Franzen-style family saga.
Ned Beauman was listed on Granta’s once-a-decade list of best young British novelists last time out, in 2013, and his latest novel makes clear that, not yet 40, he’s absolutely worth a nomination next year too. Full of fun and big ideas, his conceptually tricksy novels crackle with comic zip, alive to the past (his debut, Boxer, Beetle, and second novel, The Teleportation Accident, dealt in different ways with the legacies of Nazism) as well as the present (his third novel, Glow, was an ultra-contemporary conspiracy thriller centred in south London). His fifth book, Venomous Lumpsucker, imagines a super-heated, algorithm-driven near future in which guilty hand-wringing about endangered species has led to a global trade in “extinction credits”, awarded by a regulatory body essentially enabling the richest firms and states to kill off all the flora and fauna they can afford – safe in the knowledge that tissue samples and genome data are securely stored in “biobanks” around the planet.
It is almost unthinkable that the now universally acknowledged masterpieces of modern art, such as Pablo Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” or Henri Matisse’s “The Red Studio,” were scorned by American museums and that wealthy patrons refused to buy even a single canvas by either painter. Though it is a truism that innovative art often finds difficulty at first in being accepted, you would think that at a time when the masters of modern painting were already lionized in Europe, Americans would not be so slow in recognizing their significance. Yet such was the case. Even after the 1913 Armory Show, which is usually credited with introducing modern art to this country, it took another several decades before it was possible to mount a full-scale Picasso exhibit, and years to get the Museum of Modern Art off the ground, much less turn it into the formidable institution it is today. “For nearly 30 years, the effort to bring modern art to the United States was continually impeded by war, economic crisis and a deeply skeptical public,” Hugh Eakin writes. “It was a project that might well have foundered, and almost did, but for the fanatical determination of a tiny group of people,” whose story he sets out to tell in this fascinating, immensely readable narrative.
Now the elder trees renew their patience. In the breeze their infant leaves murmur
until the rustle and roar of the Tall Ones shush the buds to sleep.
Their loud lullaby only ceases at dark.