Book Reviews

The stone called sardonyx looks a lot more fragile than it actually is. It’s luminous like glass, but hard like steel, which explains why so much of it has survived from ancient times. Fame being a relative word, one might describe Medusa’s Gaze: The Extraordinary Journey of the Tazza Farnese by Marina Belozerskaya as a biography of the most famous sardonyx object in the world, the Tazza Farnese, an ancient libation bowl made to hold offerings to the gods. At least one of the many people who inherited it aimed to change that function. Around the time Romanos II, son of Constantine VII, was ruler over Byzantium, someone drilled through

For the first time in years, I thought of Tony Hancock. In the ‘Blood Donor’ episode of Hancock’s Half Hour, Hancock exits a doctors’ surgery singing the words ‘coughs and sneezes spread diseases, catch the germs in your handkerchief’ to the tune of Deutschland, Deutschland Ueber Alles. I have only seen this clip once or twice, but evidently it made a lasting impression because there it was, in my mind’s ear, on being confronted by a 1940s anti-flu poster at the British Library’s propaganda exhibition. Propaganda: Power and Persuasion features more persuasion than power. Goebbels and Uncle Sam are represented, but do not dominate. Indeed, the curators challenge the notion that propaganda

Elmore Leonard has died aged 87. Leonard began his career as a hack and ended it as a modern master. His rule was: ‘if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it’. His writing became sparer over the years, perhaps reaching its purest form in Get Shorty, his best known work. His total war on adverbs and adjectives placed all the reader’s focus on his dialogue. Luckily, Leonard understood how speech worked both on the page and in the ear, and he grasped how characters could be developed through dialogue rather than description. This might explain why so many of his stories have been successfully adapted for big and small screens. The Spectator has not reviewed all that many of Leonard’s recent books;

From ‘Wonder’, by Thomas Traherne How like an angel came I down! How bright are all things here! When first among his works I did appear O how their glory me did crown? The world resembled his eternity In which my soul did walk; And every thing that I did see Did with me talk. The skies in their magnificence The lively, lovely air; Oh how divine, how soft, how sweet, how fair! The stars did entertain my sense And all the works of GOD so bright and pure, So rich and great did seem, As if they ever must endure In my esteem. A native health and innocence Within

The forecast is bad. Football is back. Gloom strikes. Cure the malaise by reading the book reviews in this week’s Spectator. Here’s a selection: Richard Davenport-Hines introduces the celebrated American novelist and businesswoman Willa Cather to a British audience: ‘Cather was a pioneering career woman who in the late 1890s supported herself as a magazine editor and then as newseditor at the Pittsburgh Leader — an unprecedented post for a woman. She was later a successful managing director ofMcClure’s Magazine. With her gumption and vitality, she was a stalwart among women facing the ‘rough-and-tumble’ of competitive work. It is regrettable that her book Office Wives — a collection of stories about women in business —

The Coronation Chair currently stands all spruced up, following last year’s conservation, under a crimson canopy, by the west entrance to Westminster Abbey. The sovereign has used this throne during the actual ceremony almost continuously since the coronation of Henry IV (1399). The oldest dated piece of English furniture (1297-1300) made by a known artist (Walter of Durham) to survive has been given the comprehensive study it deserves by Warwick Rodwell, with supplementary chapters on its most recent conservation by Marie Louise Sauerberg and its current display by Ptolemy Dean. Not only does the book cover the design, construction and decoration of the chair, but also the subsequent adaptations and