A Short History of British Architecture: From Stonehenge to the Shard by Simon Jenkins
In Britain, says the journalist and architectural buff Simon Jenkins, buildings have always been a battleground, where styles have grappled one against one or in a free-for-all: classicism vs gothic vs baroque vs modernism. If building is about structure, then architecture, he says, is about “how we choose to clothe that structure with meaning or delight”.
Jenkins’s punchy book serves as both an overview of the development of our built environment (and in too many instances its obliteration) and a plea for a more profound understanding of its importance. As he narrates our architectural history “from Stonehenge to the Shard”, he stresses how style has always also been a repository for issues such as class, patriotism, psychology and ideology. As such, his frame of reference is wide, encompassing the M8 motorway and Bluewater shopping centre as well as Palladian stately homes and Ely Cathedral. And while describing the planning battles of the postwar years, when swathes of our cities were scheduled for razing, he is at pains to point out that the dangers of widespread destruction may have receded, but they have not gone away.
By Michael Prodger
Viking, 312pp, £26.99
What Nails It by Greil Marcus
Nirvana’s greatness was once credited to their “cryptic ability to nail inarticulate pain”. The rock critic Greil Marcus’s slim new volume, What Nails It, reflects on a career that led him to not only detail rock’s pantheon but to join it himself, and on the years spent “living my life to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan”.
The first chapter describes Marcus’s American studies seminar group at Berkeley, the members of which would hide in the library after lock-up, talk about culture until one or two in the morning, then let themselves down from the window by a rope. The second is on Pauline Kael, the film critic whose writing left Marcus desperate to know “what it would be to feel as alive as the person in these pages had to have been to have written them”. The third chapter discusses art that “moved me from one place to another”, principally “Gimme Shelter”, The Godfather and Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin. Marcus is safely among the first three names a young rock writer will encounter (and pretty likely the first) so it’s interesting to learn what set him off.
By George Monaghan
Yale University Press, 104pp, £12.99
Patria: Lost Countries of South America by Laurence Blair
From Amazonian city-states to modern-day Bolivia’s landlocked navy, the award-winning author and journalist Laurence Blair tells an alternative history of South America as he makes his way across nine countries that vanished from the map. Blair’s vivid record is punctuated by interviews with indigenous descendants and activists across the continent where “the wounds of colonialism, invasion and foreign-backed dictatorship run deep”.
Blair guides the reader through this bloodstained backstory, though many conversations cannot be vetted nor descriptions verified: the 15th-century records were written by the colonisers and there is little acknowledgement of the lack of indigenous writing systems that could be used to chronicle events. The final chapters are more convincing at helping us understand the “650 million souls between the southern US border and the tip of Patagonia [that] have to fight for the world’s attention”. Nonetheless, the book fails to dispel the mystery of the countries that have been lost to South America’s complicated political past.
By Zuzanna Lachendro
Bodley Head, 448pp, £25
The Party by Tessa Hadley
It’s a Saturday night in 1950s Bristol, and sisters Moira and Evelyn venture out to an art students’ party in a dockside pub. There, they meet Paul and Sinden, and, as the night unfolds, the sisters must try to reconcile desire, womanhood and agency.
The novella is a difficult form, and while Hadley’s descriptive prose often shines, it can’t consolidate the reductive brand of feminism the reader is thematically bludgeoned with. Evelyn longs for a lover, burns with the shame of being inexperienced, and is convinced the only way to “become an adult” is to pass through a “revelation of lust”; Moira had “a gift… for cleaning” and views other women as “rivals”; and the only function Mum seems to serve is to reinforce the notion that a woman must endure (unhappy but “meekly devoted and obedient”) the inescapable doom of marital misery.
Their depressingly conformist arc ultimately suggests that women should be submissive, not subversive. In failing to utilise a modern lens to reimagine the past, and the ways in which women can leverage femininity and power, the complexities that arise when lust and youth converge are sadly rendered rather hackneyed.
By Zoë Huxford
Jonathan Cape, 128pp, £12.99
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This article appears in the 07 Nov 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Trump takes America