By Richard Moore

Let’s return to 1988. That year was the middle of my seven long years in Manchester, the one that I spent doing physiology. Elsewhere on the planet, the internet inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, was flogging his plans for a world wide web; the climate scientist Jim Henson was issuing humanity with a famous warning; and little Estonia was in the grip of the Singing Revolution that climaxed in its break with Moscow. In Seoul, meanwhile, it was almost time for South Korea to host the 24^th Olympics!

Seoul was a chance for the Olympic movement (as it always seems to be known) to make a fresh start. The previous Olympiads, in Moscow (1980) and Los Angeles (1984), had run into major trouble: first the USA had boycotted Moscow, then the Eastern Bloc had boycotted Los Angeles. It was tit for tat. But the only boycotters in 1988 were North Korea, Albania and Cuba and so the International Olympic Committee (IOC), under Juan Antonio Samaranch, was looking forward to a big success.

The IOC under Samaranch needed a big success. They had a rival now, the International Amateur Athletics Federation (IAAF), whose leader, the flamboyant Primo Nebiolo, had inaugurated the World Athletics Championships in Helsinki (1983) and then continued them in Rome (1987). These had proved a worthy alternative to the Olympics. They weren’t boycotted by anybody – and they weren’t bloated with Mickey Mouse events. They were a line of pure athletic cocaine.

In Manchester I was enlisted to several research projects. One looked at NMDA receptors (for glutamate and aspartate) and involved measuring action potentials in thin slices of mouse brain tissue. Another was about the applications of a novel alpha-adrenoceptor agonist (because you really want to know, right?) called clenbuterol that had been found to have anabolic (muscle building) powers. We tested clenbuterol on a colony of dystrophic mice. And it worked. Kind of. In later years, I was often proud to read about athletes messing with clenbuterol – seeing that our prodigal son had made the leap from disabled mouse to Olympian.

Athletes using drugs was a big issue coming into Seoul in 1988. And it wasn’t a new issue. By the 1970s the use of anabolic steroids was rife. Athletes were also using erythropoietin (to make more red blood cells) and human growth factor. But drug testing was a vexed business. The USA and its friends pretended that most drug abuse was in communist countries. But it wasn’t as simple as that. There was no testing outside of competitions. There was only erratic testing within competitions. Put it this way: If you were the organiser of a major athletics championship, the last thing you wanted was a load of positive tests. It’s like the mayor of a seaside town doesn’t want a shark attack. At the Los Angeles Olympics (1984), a safe was stolen and a whole batch of (probably positive) blood samples were lost. For every positive test, there were a hundred unproven suspicions. As I say, drug abuse was rife.

All this is addressed in Richard Moore’s fabulous sports book, The Dirtiest Race in History (published 2012) which focusses on the 100 metres showdown in Seoul between Ben Johnson and Carl Lewis, one of the most dramatic in the history of sport. Like Ali vs Frazier (1973), or Borg vs. McEnroe (1981), the memory of this contest invites the question, “Hey, where were you watching?”

Since you ask, I was watching in a council flat in the Hulme district of Manchester with my friends Gill and Errol at four o’clock in the morning. We’d been building up to this. It was late September, the new term barely started. Gill and Errol were rooting for Johnson – because he was born in Jamaica, because he was rough and ready, and because they always rooted for the same causes. I was with Lewis – because he ran with amazing grace, because he was handsome, articulate, because I disagreed with Gill and Errol. And the race? That mind-blowing race? Richard Moore describes the minutes afterward:

“Johnson’s run had been scintillating, no matter how it had been achieved. In some, a head versus heart struggle played out: the head said that everything about Johnson and his run invited suspicion, the heart thrilled at what it had just witnessed. It was the heart that governed the emotional response, which was the only response in the aftermath of the race. And it could be summed up in one, three letter exclamation: Wow!”

Question:  Why did Ben Johnson take anabolic steroids?

Answer: Because his coach – the brilliant Charlie Francis in Toronto – happened to believe in them. If you didn’t use drugs, Francis argued, the other guy would, and he didn’t want his athletes at a disadvantage. The drugs gave you at most a 1% edge – but in a 100 meters race that was a whole meter!

Johnson, interviewed by Moore at age 50, said the only point of his taking steroids was to train harder. Steroids help you recover quickly. Johnson was a quiet man with a stutter who was adept at putting worries out his mind. The book is ambiguous about his psychology: Yes, he probably was putty in the hands of others. Yes, he surely also knew the score and didn’t sweat it over.

Question:  Why wasn’t Carl Lewis more popular?

Answer:  It’s often said that America loves winners, but Lewis won 4 gold medals at Los Angeles (100m, 200m, long jump, 100m relay) and was slaughtered in the American press. How so? Well, for one thing, Lewis came across as conceited. In Los Angeles he walked aloof during the opening ceremony, managed his press conferences slickly, and made no secret of wanting to transcend athletics – to become another Ali or OJ Simpson. Then there was his sexuality. The possibility that Lewis might be gay was hard for some folks. Another suggestion came from the English sportswriter Simon Barnes: that Lewis was simply the victim of racism – because he wouldn’t conform to type. Whenever there is an issue with a black athlete, Barnes argued, even when that athlete is very popular, you’ll find racism at the root of it.

There was racism too at the root of my rivalry with Errol – a rivalry that came to its own dramatic denouement just a few weeks later. But now it was 4-30 am and Johnson had blasted Lewis off the track and we were collecting ourselves with a spliff. ‘Raatid!’ exclaimed Errol, wiping his eloquent hand across his face as if to reset himself – and dropping his jaw to show his disbelief and admiration as we watched the replays. ‘Man-a-bullet!’ The cover of Moore’s book shows Johnson’s victory salute – two meters ahead of Lewis, breaking the world record – but inside is an equally telling picture: The start of the race, Johnson in mid-air as he jumps out his blocks, already going at full pelt.

Raatid! The temptation was to go down the stairwell to race across the estate. But instead we resumed next day – at the McDougall Centre – where Errol and I played our increasingly furious games of squash. Raatid!

It took about three days before Johnson’s positive drug test was announced – the biggest Olympic scandal ever – and for Johnson to be disqualified, his record annulled, and his plane to leave for Toronto.

He was of course in disgrace – but he faced it with dignity. His first concern was for his mother and his sister. “It’s okay,” he told them. “Everything’s alright. Nobody died.” In the centre of the frenzy he was amazingly calm.

Other athletes were not surprised that Johnson was on drugs. They’d noticed the rheumy eyes, the slight jaundice, the variable performances. Athletes had a pretty good idea of which athletes were on drugs. But there was surprise that Johnson got caught. The system usually excelled at not catching big fish.

And why did he test positive, anyway? Well that was down to a bit of desperation on Johnson’s part (he hadn’t been running well) and to lousy communication between his doctor and his trainer. Bottom line, he didn’t taper off the drugs soon enough and they were still in his system.

Yes, Johnson took the full weight of the shaming – particularly in Canada where he’d been a favourite son. But some of the public were less pious and more pragmatic than their leaders. They realized there was a pervasive issue in athletics – for which Johnson was paying the price. And in fact, Canada’s subsequent enquiry into the affair was a humane and level-headed exercise – one that identified the hypocrisies in the system and found in Johnson a polite, intelligent witness.

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The recipe for a sporting rivalry is two athletes, evenly matched but of quite contrasting temperaments, set in competition for several years – first one guy on top, then the other guy on top – and with a pinch of animosity thrown in. The two great rivalries of recent years have been low in animosity. Ronaldo vs. Messi (soccer) and Federer vs. Nadal (tennis) have both been rather courteous affairs. Boxing rivalries, on the other hand, – say Leonard vs. Duran – usually do have the animosity, but they tend to be short-lived. The classic rivalry in middle-distance running, between Coe and Ovett, had everything, including animosity, but the two protagonists avoided each other for too long. When they finally did consummate their rivalry, at the Moscow Olympics in 1980, each won the wrong race.

Johnson vs. Lewis had plenty animosity by the time it pulled into South Korea. Yup, the two guys definitely disliked each other. Moore doesn’t go into it enough, but the key things were that Lewis reckoned Johnson was using drugs, and therefore regarded him as a fraud; and that Johnson wasn’t getting the respect he felt he deserved from Lewis, and therefore came to hate him. By the time of the Seoul final their showdown had generated a huge amount of interest. And the 100 meters had become the alpha-spectacle it still is now: the undisputed King of the Olympics.

The weird thing about my rivalry with Errol was I didn’t see it coming. But when it did, the question that bubbled to the surface was the same one that irrigated the Lewis-Johnson affair: Who’s the fraud? Naturally I thought it was him and he thought it was me. But that was the busted that followed the bromance. In the beginning it was Huckleberry Finn type late boyhood friendship.

Because Errol at the start was fresh, hilarious and available – and that meant a lot to me in a town where I’d been so lonely. I’d return from a day of mouse experiments to find him lounging in the sun-lit, cockroach-infested flat, laughing with Gill, or singing along to the Hulme soundtrack – Yellowman, Tippa Irie, Eek-a-Mouse, Dennis Brown – or laying out his philosophical discoveries to the audience-of-the day. That audience might be some wide-eyed medical student that Gill had brought home, or a deejay from Manchester’s hip-hop scene, or an alternative healer with a special line in foot massages. The discoveries were invariably to do with power relations – Errol’s cosmology began with his youth as a black kid in 1970s Camberwell, and spiralled outwards, and as each new star came into view, he’d stretch out those eloquent hands and gasp – “Raatid!” – as Gill chuckled complaisantly on the sofa. That was alright by me, though I was never a fellow astronaut. And off we’d go to play squash, or push some weights, or score some dope, or pick up a chicken curry, or hit the PSV club where Moss Side folk danced and stretched and mingled in an atmosphere of happily stoned bonhomie. Yeah, it was fun. It was even meaningful.

A postcard from then: Errol and I go down to the laundrette that serves the block, each carrying a bag of laundry. As we walk in, without missing a step, Errol points at the young laundry lady – she must be 23 or so, the same as us – and bursts into song: “I know you want to leave me, but I refuse to let you go!” Errol has a beautiful, baritone voice. Being with him was living a musical – always on the brink of a song. The laundry lady is made up. I’m made up. There’s glamour here. Errol is an actor. But he no longer acts. Or rather his stage is the world now. There’s no limit.

Another postcard: I’m with Errol and David Rubin and we’re driving up Moss Lane East towards Rusholme. Errol is sermonising about blackness, and the ways of the world, and casting me and David as the white unenlightened. I’m wondering whether our ancestry gives us a get-out clause. David and I combined are 75% Hebrew, 12.5% Nigerian and 12.5% Irish. But David’s mind reaches for the heart of the matter. “Hey, Errol,” he asks, drawing on a spliff, “Is your sperm black?” And in saying this David so catches himself by surprise that he turns into his own audience – and soon he is laughing so much that tears are rolling down his face to join some snot from his nose – as a halo of cannabis smoke wobbles gently over his head. Whether it’s the image of jet-coloured jism sailing through the air, a pornographic, photographic negative of the real stuff of life, as it were, or whether it’s the peeling back of a section of Errol’s vanity, to reveal the inevitable being, is really hard to say. It’s both! And it’s really funny! ‘You white boys are sick!’ grumbles Errol, shaking his head with comic disapproval. But he’s laughing too, that’s what’s nice, he can’t help himself – for the moment.

And then it was autumn, and Ben Johnson was yesterday’s man, and I was a student at the Manchester Royal Infirmary. I probably felt as out of place as ever, but what was worse, an edge of discord had set into the flat. Was I a gooseberry to Gill and Errol? I don’t think it was that. But when he finally beat me at squash, Errol, being a prophet, turned it into a morality tale – a tale of his gathering virtue. And when he stole my red glittery shirt, I shouted at him, one brother shouting at another, and he didn’t like it. ‘No man, that’s fighting talk!’ he told me.

Errol took to calling me “a liberal” – a term he used in the negative sense but with certain extra meanings he’d invented. He was basing it on my demeanour and on some meetings with my South African family. I wasn’t too bothered. For one thing, he was right. I wasn’t the type to stick out my neck. But it encouraged me when Errol started applying the same disparaging label to other local guys – one of whom, Geoff, was a kind of hero to me. To be put in Geoff’s category made me feel proud. But I had questions for Errol too, some that I asked, like “Why don’t you ever clean the kitchen?’ and others that I didn’t ask, like ‘If you’re so free, how come you’re so kept?’ or ‘What do the sisters think of your white girlfriend?’

Things come to a head before Christmas. Errol and I are bickering about something and I notice he’s talking down to me.

‘What’s with the condescending tone?’ I ask.

He sticks out his chin and says, ‘I’m better than you!’

I’m genuinely nonplussed.

‘What do you mean? Better at squash? Better at 100 metres? Better at mouse experiments?’

‘No. Just better!’

He’s standing on the landing looking very smug.

But my pulse has slowed right down. There’s suddenly and absolutely not a single thing left to say.

Next day I call my friend Annabel in London. Her old council flat in Charles Barry Crescent, deep in the heart of Hulme, is lying vacant. ‘Sure, you can live there,’ she says, ‘I’d be pleased if you did – you can pick up the keys from Eric.’ And that’s how easy it was to get a flat in central Manchester in 1988. And boy was I grateful. I took all my stuff – the squash racket, the stethoscope, the poster of the liberation of Milan in 1945 – and piled it into the Mini Metro and transported it down the road into the concrete bunker that was my snug new home. Raatid!

Giorgio Bassani

(Translated by Isabel Quigly)

It’s the last night of January, 2016. I’m at The Lamb with Vieri and Micòl his older daughter.

Vieri, named after a figure in Dante, is over from Parma on business. Micòl, now aged 20, is studying at the London College of Fashion. What’s nice about Micòl is her ease and openness. What’s amazing is the way she has left Italy: she has figured out her passions and followed them. Not such an easy thing to do.

When I think of myself at that age!

We’re sitting in The Lamb’s central cubicle, a kind of oak-paneled cockpit that adds to the sense of occasion. Micòl with her extravert gaze is telling us stories of the London she encounters – London, an open city – and one is held by her picturesque views and a sense of the life cycle progressing.

Around the corner, La La Land is playing at The Curzon. Have Vieri and Micòl seen it yet? I saw it right here in Bloomsbury, with Millie and Alice. It was fabulous, it was everything people said, it deserved that standing ovation at Cannes, but I especially loved watching it in a small-screen cinema in the heart of London on a blustery Saturday, one arm round each daughter.

As I think I mentioned, this is the Lamb’s central cubicle, with the buffer of the actual pub around us, and beyond the pub’s walls the beacons of the Children’s Hospital and the Foundling Museum and the Curzon Cinema, three institutions to believe in, and around that all Bloomsbury, and the West End sloping down through Covent Garden to the river, and the whole enterprise now seen through the eyes of Micòl and imbued with the spirit of a great old friendship.

Vieri asks if I still write. Do I? Eventually I find the way to my book reviews. ‘They’re a kind of hybrid,’ I explain, ‘they’re a record of what I’ve been reading but also a journal.’ To my surprise, this account stands up. ‘Like if you recommended a book, I might use it as a launch pad for talking about you.’ A couple of days later there’s a parcel: ‘The Big Short’ by Michael Lewis. It’s the best-selling story of some investor dudes who banked on the financial crash.

But the book I’m reviewing today is more important than The Big Short and quite a bit more moving. It’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, a novel by Giorgio Bassani, published by Einaudi in 1962 and featuring a main character by the name of Micòl. To be precise, this is Micòl Finzi-Contini, a young woman who in 1938 (when the novel is set) was just two years older than Micòl-in-the-Lamb. Come to think of it, Micòl Finzi-Contini, were she with us tonight, would have been exactly 100 years old.

Let’s get this straight: Micòl is named after Micòl Finzi-Contini, a fictional character in Giorgio Bassani’s famous novel.

And this too: Bassani’s novel is dedicated “To Micòl” which makes it clear  that Bassani’s Micòl was a real-life, flesh-and-blood human being.

This is bewildering in a way. If Bassani wanted to tell the story of how, as a youth, he fell madly into unrequited love with an aristocratic young Jewish woman in his hometown of Ferrara, then why didn’t he just write a memoir? Like Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie for example? The prosaic answer must be that he wanted more leeway to invent bits and perfect the story. But the deeper answer may be that he was still so freaked out, by what eventually happened to the Finzi-Continis, that he couldn’t face telling the story straight – and so he hid behind a literary curtain.

In 1938 Micòl Finzi-Contini was 22 years old and moving between Ferrara, where her family lived (in a tremendous pile of a mansion) and Venice, which wasn’t far away, where she was completing her degree in literature at the university. She was blue-eyed, razor-sharp and hilarious – and to the narrator a breathtaking figure. But what was she actually like? Well, she played a mean game of tennis. She knew every tree in the grounds of the manor (which was practically a botanical gardens). She had a phone in her own bedroom (an unheard of luxury then). She collected Venetian glass trinkets. And so on. She was sophisticated. And during the autumn of 1938 she led the callow, young Bassani – if that’s who the narrator is – on a full tour of the manor and right up the garden path.

The Finzi-Continis were an oddity within the small Jewish community (300 people) of Ferrara (to which the Bassanis too belonged). Not only were they fabulously wealthy but also they were reclusive. Their property, which must have taken up a quarter of the town, was surrounded by high walls and grassy banks, from which the family didn’t frequently emerge. Micòl and her brother Alberto were home schooled. Only on Jewish high holidays or at school exam times did the little Bassani get the chance to gawp at them. And when the Finzi-Continis got permission to start their own synagogue, it only confirmed the impression of their aloofness.

Micòl and Alberto’s father was Professór Ermanno, a kind of gentleman scholar who distinguished himself by not becoming a member of the fascist party. Amazingly, most Italian Jews had supported the fascists. That was until 1938 when Mussolini suddenly passed ‘the racial laws’ (what was known as the great betrayal) to prove himself to Hitler. And at that point the Finzi-Continis mysteriously opened their gates, inviting a number of Jewish kids, who’d been thrown out of the Ferrara tennis club, to come and play tennis on their private court. So it went: In the long Indian summer of 1938 a group of young people congregated each day to play tennis, and Bassani fell in love with Micòl, as fascism lapped at the garden’s high walls.

As I was saying, Professór Ermanno, was a kind, courteous man, devoted to his rather vague studies, his family and his pet Great Dane. In all of this he greatly resembles another Italian literary figure: the aristocrat named The Prince in Tomasi di Lampedusa’s historical novel The Leopard. How to explain such a strange coincidence? Well, perhaps all Italian aristocrats have Great Danes and do amateur research? Or else perhaps Bassani and Di Lampedusa (who knew each other) sometimes shared their paintbrushes?

In response to the invasion of Sicily by Garibaldi and his revolutionaries, The Prince makes a famous pronouncement: ‘In order for things to stay the same, everything will have to change.’ He’s willing to go against what seem to be his own interests in the expectation that he’ll get to keep his properties and telescopes. Prof. Ermanno, on the other hand, is shrewd enough to reject the Italian fascists from the outset, but not shrewd enough to see how badly it’s going to end. At one point, in a riveting monologue, Bassani’s father questions why the Finzi-Continis haven’t gone to live to Israel if they hate the fascists so much. Bassani’s father dislikes the Finzi-Continis – this family that his son finds so alluring. His ranting about them is all too credible: Jewish kitchen chatter from 1938 Ferrara.

What I’m trying to say: The situation with the Nazis was one where the Prince’s famous dictum was not applicable.

The key moment in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis comes at Pésach 1939, when the narrator – on a cold, clear night – leaves a gloomy family supper and cycles along the snowy roads to the magna domus.

The Pésach supper is gloomy because the Bassanis and their friends have all lost their jobs and positions. The narrator finds their moaning hard to bear and recalls them as ghosts – with hindsight.

At the magna domus, Micòl has just returned from a long stint in Venice and Bassani has missed her. Their relationship is still unresolved. When he asks why she has dallied in Venice so long, Micòl gives him “a sidelong glance” that does not bode well. Then he kisses her – but with a feeling that it’s all too late – and she pointedly doesn’t kiss him back.

Thus Micòl breaks Bassani’s heart, though it takes a while to play out.

Near the end of the novel, in a stunning scene, Bassani’s father talks him through the broken heart. After slagging off the Finzi-Continis (as usual) and pointing out that, really, they’re from another planet (“they don’t even seem like judîm”) he gets into something more universal: “Of course I’m sorry; I can imagine what you’re feeling just now. But d’you know, I envy you just a little bit as well? If you want to understand, really understand the way things are in this world, you’ve got to die at least once. And as that’s the law, it’s better to die while you’re young, while you’ve still got time to pull yourself up and start again… Understanding when you’re old is ugly, very much uglier.’ And what moves the reader here is that the broken-hearted young Bassani chooses to accept this advice – this very good advice – from the same ailing father whom in previous chapters he has rejected.

It must have been a turning point for Bassani. He did manage to move on. It’s only alluded to in the novel, but he joined the resistance, was caught and jailed, and survived the war. He spent the rest of his life in Rome.

His work as a writer was a remembrance of the Ferrara community he’d come from. The Garden of the Finzi-Continis was his famous book and a movie version of it (Dir. Vittorio de Sica) won the 1970 academy award for Best International Film. I can definitely recall the hype when that movie was first screened on British TV.

I email Vieri to ask why he named his daughter Micòl and he replies as follows:

“You know that I always had some jew-ish inclinations, so maybe that’s one of the reasons I loved the book so much. Also, Micol’s character is so impressive I am surprised we don’t have more women name that way.

Are you reading it in English or Italian?”

In English!  Life is too short. Then he adds this:

“Actually, it happened that “Il Giardino dei Finzi-Contini” is a book I read almost 35 years ago and I loved it.

Then, when me and Federica met, well before getting married, we learnt that we also both loved the movie (you should watch it after you finished the book), where Micol’s character is played by a very young Dominique Sanda. So, we decided that if we ever had a daughter we would have called her Micol or, better, Micòl, as she states 😉

And that’s it.”

Yes, that’s it.

How great to be named after a literary character!

Katie Daynes

The Vietnam War is written by Katie Daynes – with designs by Karen Tomlins,  illustrations by Emmanuel Cerisier, photo research by Ruth King and history consultancy from Professor O.A. Westhad. It’s a group effort. A successful one!

In this regard, it stands in contrast to the United States’ collective failure in Vietnam.

It’s an Usborne book, so it’s aimed at kids and teenagers – but nowhere on the cover does it actually say that. My copy was supposed to be donated to Alice’s school library, but then I held it: ‘Guess what? I’ll keep you!’ It is in fact a beautiful book: small, hard-backed, durable, 64 pages in length, nicely written and packed with artfully-arranged photos, maps, and cartoon strips.

It’s an overview of a subject – Nam – that one ought to know already, given that the war was (i) so recent and (ii) so important to the way we see ourselves.  And then one finds one doesn’t! One doesn’t even know the basics. For example, I didn’t know, or scarcely remembered, that the Vietnamese had already fought and won an anti-colonial war against the French from 1945 to 1954 – or that the Japanese previously had overrun those same French during WW2.

In praise of overviews! Those marvelous things! Why always the rush to zoom in? When I went to medical school, for example, the branches of the vagus nerve, or the relations of the carotid artery, were all recounted in a litany of excruciating detail. Boy, did I hate it! The wider issues – how to be healthy, say, or why humans stood up on two legs – were rarely meant for us. I ended up in psychiatry, the last refuge of the fuzzy-minded type of doctor.

So yes, amigo, by all means enjoy a 700-page volume on the Vietnam War, especially if it’s set in sparkling prose by a fine historian, but before lighting out you might start with the Usborne roadmap.

To recap, Vietnam was a French colony from the mid-19^thcentury – and by the 1920s and 1930s was throbbing with resentment. The future leaders Ho Chi Mihn and Vo Nguyen Giap were in exile in China, exploring the ideas of the Indochina Communist Party (ICP). In the hubbub of WW2, during the Japanese occupation, they snuck back into the country to set up an ICP headquarters and the League for the Independence of Vietnam (Viet Minh). This was a military group that fought the Japanese with weapons from China and America.

After WW2 the Viet Minh fought the French, initially lost, and eventually prevailed, and in 1954 a peace conference in Switzerland led to the temporary splitting of the country into North and South Vietnam. This is where things get tricky. Not all the Vietnamese were gung-ho for communism. The North, under Ho Chi Minh, did go that way – but the South fell under the leadership of a certain Ngo Dihn Diem who was fervently anti-communist. The Americans supported him. Diem began arresting and killing suspected communists while the communists, under the direction of Ho Chi Minh in North Vietnam, responded by assassinating Diem’s officials.

So it was a state of civil war in South Vietnam. In 1961 President Kennedy sent 400 Special Forces troops to act as advisors to Diem’s army. US warships were also operating in the area. And from 1962 US airplanes were spraying the jungle with Agent Orange.

In 1963 Kennedy went on television to criticize Diem’s leadership of South Vietnam. He turned on his ally! Diem was then overthrown and executed by his own army. Kennedy was assassinated 3 weeks later. And if he hadn’t have been? Well that is a matter of counterfactuals.

My parents, Ted and Gill, immigrated to the United States in 1964, entering the country in early summer by the port of Hawaii. Aged 24 and 25, recently married, they were heading to New York City. In Honolulu they were issued with Form I-151 cards (already known colloquially as green cards). From Hawaii they flew to California, where they purchased a car and drove east.

The US war in Vietnam – little did they know – was about to get serious.

Ted had a job waiting at the Albert Einstein Hospital in the Bronx. He was starting on a training program for obstetricians – a program he would come to passionately hate. The problem was a crazy work schedule (one-in-two nights on call) and frenzied competition among the trainees. Gill, on the other hand, was pregnant, so she concentrated on settling. She liked being in America. It wasn’t South Africa! They lived north of the city in a block of modern flats in New Rochelle.

In August, as Ted took post, the North Vietnamese reportedly fired at US war ships in the Gulf of Tonkin. The new president, Lyndon B. Johnson, was given powers to fight back. But he hesitated. He cautioned his people (and himself presumably) against recklessness. In November he was reelected president, but it took several more attacks on American troops before he committed to fighting. It was the bombardment of a US airbase in February 1965 that finally made up his mind.

Around this time, Ted got summonsed for a US army medical. He was told to report to the military induction center at 39 Whitehall Street. This was located at the southern tip of Manhattan – from where one can look to Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty.

Ted reported for the medical – and it’s a day he still often recalls. The other young men were scrawny and unsure of themselves with a poor grasp of English. Ted, who was skinny as a rake, ended up performing like a super-athlete. He won the 100 yards race!

During his medical, Ted mentioned to the army physician that he’d previously had a severe tropical fever, possibly malaria, back in South Africa. ‘Excellent!’ replied the physician, ‘We need men with immunity!’

The physician was pleased to gossip with a fellow doctor. Ted liked him. And he told Ted two important things. Firstly, Vietnam was going to get very big. Secondly, new immigrants were going to be drafted early.

Back at the hospital, there was plenty of talk about the nascent war. The young obstetricians went through the options. One alternative to being drafted was to volunteer under what they called the Berry Plan. You went to the army and offered to interrupt your residency – and as a result you might get a better deal. You could be a doctor on one of the bases in Germany or Texas.

‘But I’d never have gone,’ says Ted laconically. We’re sitting in the Coffee Cup in Hampstead, 54 years after his US Army medical. I try to imagine Ted skipping the country. It might have been difficult. When Uncle Sam wants you! I imagine Ted as a young doctor in Vietnam. He was always good in emergencies. I say, ‘Ted, you might have done well in Nam!’ I picture him as Alan Alda in MASH. Come to think of it, Alan Alda would be the perfect actor to play my dad in a movie. They look similar. They’re both doctors. They’re both jokers. Yes, that’s it!

But it wasn’t Vietnam that ended my parents’ time in America – it was the Obstetrics program. After a year they cut their losses. They went back to South Africa, had two more children, Nicki and John, and then emigrated again – this time to Britain that they both liked.

America refused to cut its losses. By the end of 1967 there were half a million US troops in Vietnam. In 1968 the Vietcong (a general term for Vietnamese communists) launched the Tet offensive to mark the Vietnamese New Year. Americans watched on TV as their embassy in Saigon was stormed and briefly overrun. Talks began in Paris and stretched over several years. But the war continued.

In 1972 Nixon ordered a massive bombing campaign on Hanoi. A peace agreement was signed in January 1973. But that still wasn’t the end. In March 1975 the North Vietnamese launched an offensive to take over the whole country. They soon succeeded. This is the bit of Vietnam I remember from my own TV life: those famous shots of US administrators and their friends waiting to be evacuated.

Gill and Ted’s stint in America was one of the founding stories of our family. Ted always professed to hate everything about America. Gill once told me that she’d gladly have stayed. But some things they both loved. When Sesame Street first aired in Britain it was a big deal in our family. Sesame Street had really blown them away in America. And when the early Woody Allen movies came through – “Take the Money and Run” and “Bananas” and “Play it Again, Sam” and “Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex” and “Sleeper” and “Love and Death” and “The Front” – we seemed to be represented. I mean, a lot of Jewish people might have felt a bit like that, but I can remember Gill and Ted really laughing their heads off.

As for overviews, let Woody Allen have the last word. In Love and Death, Boris Grushenko (Woody Allen) gets drafted into the Russian Army to fight the French invasion. The Russian army is a parody of the US army. (“Hey you! You da worst soldier I ever seen!”) Boris becomes a war hero. Later, his impossible wife Sonja (Diane Keaton) sets him the task of assassinating Napoleon. ‘Don’t worry,’ he tells her, when she checks on his progress, ‘I’ve got all the details worked out. Now… if I could just come up with the basic plan, I’d really be onto something.’

Norman Mailer

It’s the first week of June 2016: The week Muhammad Ali dies. I avoid the newspapers, the television, all the tributes and obituaries as best I can. But I notice a copy of Mailer’s The Fight on my shelf and pull it out.

On the day of the news, a question from my partner Anna: ‘But what did he actually do, apart from being a good boxer?’ Wow! Think carefully before you answer! ‘Boxing was the least of it,’ I say. ‘And he was the greatest boxer.’

I might have advised her to read The Fight, a book that examines how far Ali transcended his sport. My copy is a tiny little paperback (published in 1977), with a great picture of Ali on the cover – not boxing but lecturing, with his index finger pointing skyward. The book is about the famous Ali-Foreman fight in 1974 – the Rumble in the Jungle – a fight that took place in Zaire. Mailer was one of many journalists and musicians who were there for the preceding weeks.

Ali’s career was in four phases. The first was from age 12, when he took up the sport, to age 25, when he was banned from boxing in the United States. By the end of this phase he was world heavyweight champion: supreme and unbeatable. The second phase, lasting over three years, was his exile from the ring, when he was active as a Civil Rights leader. The third phase was his comeback (1971-1974), which included titanic bouts against Ken Norton, Joe Frazier and George Foreman, from whom he regained the heavyweight crown. During the last phase he fought a lot, mostly won – and got badly hurt.

I first read The Fight as a teenager, along with other Ali books. I am King was a splendid photo-biography, but the one I really fell for was Sting Like a Bee by Jose Torres. The thing about that book was that the author was a boxer – Torres was an ex-light heavyweight champ from Puerto Rico. The book covers the period when Ali was returning from his exile – bigger, slower, no longer able to dance all night. Torres is at ringside, trying to figure out Ali’s responses to that loss.

Torres wrote Sting Like a Bee in the Catskill Mountains in the summer of 1972 and his neighbour that summer was Norman Mailer, who seems to have taken a lively interest in the act of creation down the road. Mailer wrote the fascinating preface to Sting Like a Bee.

However The Fight itself is not easy on a teenager. It does have a story – the two months in Kinshasa building up to the bout – but it’s a book of ideas and metaphysics. Some have called it an ego trip – all about Norman Mailer – but that seems a dated criticism. Somehow Mailer’s writing has to absorb and reflect the brilliance of Ali’s personality. It does.

Take this in a chapter called Our Black Kissinger:

“He could not, however, stay away from his mission. ‘Nobody is ready to know what I’m up to,’ he said. ‘People in America just find it hard to take a fighter seriously. They don’t know that I’m using boxing for the sake of getting over certain points you couldn’t get over without it. Being a fighter enables me to attain certain ends. I’m not doing this,’ he muttered at last, ‘for the glory of fighting, but to change a lot of things.’

It was clear what Ali was saying. One had only to open to the possibility that Ali had a large mind rather than a repetitive mind and was ready for the oncoming chaos, ready for the volcanic disruptions that would boil through the world in the coming years of pollution, malfunction and economic disaster. Who knew what camps the world would yet see? Here was this tall pale Negro from Louisville, born to be some modern species of flunky to some bourbon-minted redolent white voice, and instead he was living with a vision of himself as a world leader, president not of America or even of a United Africa, but leader of half the Western world, leader doubtless of future Black and Arab republics. Had Muhammad Mobutu Napoleon Ali come for an instant face to face with the differences between Islam and Bantu?”

My sister Nicki calls from Philadelphia, down the road from Ali’s old training camp in the Pennsylvanian mountains. ‘Sad about Ali,’ she says. ‘I’ve been watching the coverage.’ We talk about Ali.

I say, ‘Yeah. If only I had some of what he had!’

And yet the phrase – ‘If only I had some of what he had’ – is one I’ve nicked from my best friend, David Rubin. Ever since I met David, age 12, Muhammad Ali has been a kind of touchstone between us.

And David is one person who does have lots of Ali’s spirit. David’s got the quality of universality. You could drop him in Timbuktu or Ulan Bator (or Kinshasa for that matter) and he’d soon have a bunch of friends.

There’s a movie about the Ali-Foreman fight called When We Were Kings in which Norman Mailer and George Plimpton are among the talking heads. The most amazing bit of the film – enhanced by the very amazement of Plimpton and Mailer – is after the fight when Ali heads onto the early morning streets of Kinshasa to meet his people. The footage is astonishing. It’s not just his hugging children – it’s the tender way he lifts them up. It’s the way people responded to him. Mailer is in raptures at this point: ‘My God! On top of it all he’s a politician.’

At work there’s this black guy, Kevin, exactly my age, an education welfare officer, relaxed and easy to like. He’s a sports fan, a Leicester City supporter, and his team has just won the league. (They started the season at 5000 to 1, so it’s a major turn-up for the books.) After Ali dies we reminisce. We were both aged 10 when Ali fought Foreman. We both revelled in Ali’s fights – in all the talking and joking and teaching that went with them. ‘One thing I can’t understand,’ says Kevin, ‘is all the young guys at the gym – all their interest in Ali. They weren’t even born when he was fighting.’ I know just what he means: Ali was mine, yours, ours. And yet like the Big Bang, Muhammad Ali will reverberate and his feats will be re-told.

Mailer was 51 years old in Kinshasa, the same age I am now, he was playing, inventing, exploring the limits of his genius. How I wish I had a bit of that. Oh, to have a large and not a repetitive mind!

Maya Jasanoff

This was a Christmas present I’d requested – a gorgeous new book, still in hardback, and not too long, on the subject of Joseph Conrad and his ongoing relevance.

The author, Maya Jasanoff, is a historian rather than a literary critic and her aim was not to study Conrad’s literary achievements so much as put them into historical context. She argues that few other authors have been so prescient about the world: Conrad saw into the Belgian atrocities of the Congo before they’d really taken shape. He understood the rise of the United States and the coming of globalisation. He wrote about bomb-plots in London. Conrad was a visionary, runs the argument.

The amazing thing about Conrad was that he came to English as a second language (third language if you count French). Polish-born, he’d never set foot in Britain before the age of about 23. At that point, he arrived as a sailor to join the British merchant navy. Years at sea followed – a life that he loved. But being foreign, he didn’t get the advancement he deserved. Only in his forties did he establish himself as a writer. He made a late, happy marriage to a working-class English girl; he settled in Sussex, then Kent; he had two fine sons; and he was a point in a writer’s circle that included Ford Maddox Ford, TS Elliot, Roger Casement and Henry James. Late in his life he made an unexpected trip to America where he was received with great fanfare.

Conrad’s origins in 19^th Century Poland were extraordinary. He came from a family of minor nobles – at a time when Poland was under the oppressive control of Tsarist Russia. The country was trying to establish its nationhood – and Conrad’s parents were a pair of revolutionaries. His father, a poet, lived for the day of reckoning. But it never came. There were arrests, imprisonments, exiles, privations and ruined health. His mother died when he was eleven. His father died a few years later. At fifteen Conrad was an orphan in the care of his maternal uncle.

And it was in this context, seeing the annihilation of his parents’ lives, that Conrad formed his own adolescent dream – one that never really died – of taking to the sea. Perhaps the underlying wish was just to get as far away from Poland as possible.

The maternal uncle, Teodor, was a man who saw life very differently to Conrad’s parents. Unlike them, he saw no point in fighting the Russians. It simply wasn’t going to work. The sensible thing, in his view, was to stay out of trouble, conduct one’s business affairs, and wait for the world to turn. He regarded Conrad’s father as a great, irresponsible fool. But to Conrad he offered a great deal of emotional support, and bailed him out, time and again (though with much chastising) after Conrad left Poland. In the end it was this man, and not his revolutionary parents, that provided Conrad with a model. In all his life, whatever he made of the world, Conrad never gave his name to any cause or joined a political organisation.

Uncle Teodor reminded me of my mother Gill, who grew up in Johannesburg. Her memory of the South African system is that ‘There was no point in trying to do anything. They’d just put you in prison! And then what use were you?’ Her brother, Rick, saw things differently. He was an activist – and at twenty (circa 1960) was arrested at a protest march. His father, Mike, got wind of the arrest. ‘Have you got any idea what this will do to my business interests?’ he asked furiously – a question Rick recalls with outrage. Rick was banned from South Africa for many years and transferred his activism to other left wing causes based in London.

Like Conrad, my mother wanted to get as faraway as possible. ‘It’s like a hornet’s nest to me,’ she’d say of South Africa – and shudder. She was flabbergasted when my sister Nicki and I went back to South Africa (for a few years) in the 1990s. ‘Are you a missionary?’ she asked me. I said I didn’t think so. ‘Well in that case, why are you there?’ I said I was helping to build up the country. ‘Give it a hundred years!’ she advised. ‘Then go and build it up! Africa is for the Blacks. They’ll need at least a century to recover.’ Such advice might seem a bit exaggerated, but it’s the kind of thing I can imagine Joseph Conrad saying.

Conrad doesn’t seem to have set out to become a writer. He really wanted a life at sea. However he loved England – and though he hated imperialism he seemed to believe that Britain’s empire and its people and its manners were better than any other. He believed that barbarism was always a possibility, just below the surface, in any society. He misled people about the circumstances of his life and was vague about the meaning of his art – it’s all ambiguous, all open to interpretation. He died suddenly, quite peacefully, in a cottage near Canterbury.

In her afterword, Jasanoff describes her own trip up the Congo River, which was pleasant and sociable and inspiring. She concludes times must have changed. Then she mentions Geoff Dyer and William Dalrymple among her favorite writers. Dalrymple I’ve not read but I know him as an offbeat historian. Dyer is one of my favourites, a comically brilliant English writer, though sometimes a bit of a nerd. For her part, Jasanoff is a wonderfully straightforward writer of intelligent ideas. The Dawn Watch was a total pleasure from first to last.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark has been remembered lately: She was born in 1918 so this is her centenary. She ended her life in Tuscany, a grand old lady, having grown up in Edinburgh – and she has a gang of  massive fans, the leader of whom is William Boyd. I’d never read her stuff, but I was affected by the outpouring, so I stopped at the library and picked up this – The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – published in 1961 and supposedly a masterpiece.

And it was a masterpiece. It was the kind of book that lights up a room with an aura. It was only short, but every perfect sentence needed close attention. From the opening scene, where the schoolgirls are flirting with a bunch of boys at the school gates, a row of bicycles separating them, to the tragic unraveling of Jean Brodie, the story reads like it could only be one way – the exact way Spark wrote it – unfolding like a protein crystal or a developing blue whale embryo. It was an amazing creation.

The eponymous Jean Brodie is a very unusual schoolteacher at a rather wonderful Edinburgh girls’ school in the 1930s. The school is quite conventional, dedicated to giving young women a solid, well-rounded education in Arts and Sciences and Sports, but Miss Brodie is a maverick who takes a small group of chosen girls under her wing and tries to broaden their minds. This involves walking them round Edinburgh, serving them tea at her flat, and regaling them with stories of her love affairs and European travels. She also earnestly discusses with them her conflict with the school itself – which she realizes is keen to oust her. The girls, 11 years old at the beginning, are thrilled to be taken into the adult world in this way and made party to such previously unimagined, adult disagreements. They form ‘The Brodie set’ and are loyal to Miss Brodie and snooty to everyone else.

As the novel points out, there were at this time in Edinburgh many women just like Miss Brodie – unmarried women who’d lost their sweethearts in the Great War and yet were confident, worldly, full of ideas. It’s just that most of them weren’t schoolteachers. Miss Brodie, as she herself repeatedly, proudly states, is in the prime of her life – and she will dedicate that prime, she says, entirely to her girls. Yet the way she subverts their education is troublesome, she’s often scornful, she’s suspicious and sometimes, at least to one of the girls, Mary, she’s unkind. By type she is a self-appointed prophet.

How all this is revealed is a matter of great art. One way is that the girls begin to see past Miss Brodie – they get older and begin to recognize her obsessions. Another is Spark’s projecting into the future, so that we learn how the girls discuss Miss Brodie years later, when, grown up, they reminisce about their schooldays. Lastly, as Miss Brodie’s fears of betrayal deepen, her actions become more extreme – to the point that she manoeuvers one girl into a love affair with the art master.

By this point we’ve come a long way. We no longer view Miss Brodie as just an inspirational teacher.

Suspiciousness is the chief characteristic of a prophet. That’s an axiom. One of my favorite books, as a boy, was a sports novel by Brian Glanville called The Olympian that covered this brilliantly. The story begins with this 19-year-old club runner named Ike Low on the running track at Gospel Oak in North London. As Low comes round the bend, this old man in a grey sweater is shouting at him, ‘Keep your head up! Use your arms!’ Low thinks, ‘Oh sod off, you daft old cunt!’ but later the man appears in the changing rooms. Now it’s different. The old man stands with blazing blue eyes, and starts talking at Low about what makes a great athlete and a million other things. There’s something compelling about his crazy patter and Low realizes – it doesn’t need to be said – that the old man is going to train him.

Now, the old man, Sam Dee, is a maverick athletic coach with strong philosophical ideas about how to train (on Hampstead Heath), what to eat (no meat) and how to prepare for races (learn to go through the pain barrier). The trouble is, the athletics establishment hates Dee – they’re always trying to banish him – and so he demands total loyalty from his runners, and of course at some point, perhaps when they lose form, those same runners are going to question his methods and Dee will feel betrayed. This is exactly what happens after Ike becomes the world’s greatest miler (long before Coe and Steve Ovett and Cram did in real life). The novel then intensely examines the coach-athlete relationship.

I once worked for an Argentinean psychiatrist named Freddie G who was another prophet in the same mold. Freddie had a small hospital for adolescents that he ran on the lines of a therapeutic community. He was a maverick genius, adored by his flock of patients and acolytes, with a huge capacity to surprise people and create suspense and get through to teenagers. However he also did nutty things, like chain smoking cigarettes in front of the kids, and he wouldn’t bow to the authorities when they told him to modernize the unit. In the end they just wanted to close it down – close him down – and this must have fed into his suspiciousness. At my first community meeting (a daily ritual in the hospital) I made the grave error of taking notes. Freddie’s eyes fell on me, a silence descended, and then, in heavily accentuated words, came the Argentinian’s verdict: “I feel as if we’re under… police surveillance! Anything I say may be taken down and used in evidence against me!” Well, I felt like a bastard, like a collaborator after the liberation, like the subject of a public denunciation. And I thought: “You could have just fucking asked me to stop making notes!”

So who betrays Miss Jean Brodie? It’s one of her own girls, Sandy – the last one she suspects – the one who in later life becomes a nun in a convent, who at age 18 sleeps with the art master, and who at 17 has had enough of “that tiresome woman” and supplies the headmistress with the means to crucify her. Poor old Jean Brodie! She is forced to retire in 1939 to spend her last few years working out the betrayal. As to the reader’s feelings, they’re complex, because as the girls will all remember, later in their lives, Miss Brodie has been their mentor and their hero and their inspiration.

Edited by Amy Stewart

This is a book that comes out annually – being a digest of the previous year’s popular science writing. My review is a digest of that digest, so I guess it’s a kind of rumination.

I’d previously read the 2012 and 2013 publications. They’re good. Some of the stuff is by scientists and some by journalists, but either way it’s often very interesting. At times the journalism can be too formulaic. To frame her subject (most of the articles are by women) the journalist will often tell you what people were wearing, if the sun was shining, and how she had to drive down a long, dirt road to get there. That’s how they frame the story. The scientists are different: they can start digging right away.

Standing out was Rotten Ice by Gretel Ehrlich, published in Harper’s Magazine, about the melting of the Greenland ice cap. The author is someone who has spent a lot of time in Greenland over 25 years and made Inuit friends and loves its wilderness. Firstly she spoke about the sea ice, which is a seasonal thing, and for the Inuit and their dogs a ‘super-highway’ up and down the coastline. Due to global warming, this sea ice is now completely unreliable. Secondly she spoke about the inland ice, the glaciers, which were melting in front of her eyes. The whole article was shot through with disappointment – the reality of global warming.

Part of my reaction to Rotten Ice was regret: that I personally hadn’t travelled more of the world’s wild places. Greenland, man! When I was younger and did have more chance to travel, I was stuck on a loop of Manchester, London, New York and Johannesburg, anywhere that might have a Benetton, trying to decide which of those mothers owned me. What I yearn for now – now I’m fifty-three – is to escape seven billion great apes and their non-stop racket and put foot to the planet’s quiet places.

The Siege Of Miami by Elizabeth Kolbert (The New Yorker) was another report from the front line of global warming. Kolbert is the author of The Sixth Extinction – about the ‘anthropocene’ era in which, to our horror, we’re now living. This piece was about the weird happenings in Miami Beach, Florida, where the rising sea level means that floods are now a fact of daily life – the salty water mostly bubbling up from below. Most people, although a little disconcerted, tend to deny the problem, believing there must be a technical fix. Property prices are still buoyant.

The last time I came across Miami Beach was viewing Flip Schulke’s great photographs of Cassius Clay, 1961-1964, when the boxer was young, beautiful and unmarked – metamorphosing into Muhammad Ali. Then the beach was the chrysalis of champions. Now the beach reclaims the town.

The False Gospel of Alcoholic Anonymous by Gabrielle Glaser was another good one, published in The Atlantic. It exposes the fact that the main treatment on offer for alcoholism – joining Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) – has little evidence base, low success rates and an antiquated dogma. The author explains that Naltrexone, the opiate antagonist, can alter drinking habits – yet few patients get the offer. Likewise controlled drinking is not on the table – not at AA. Then there’s the cult to which you have to submit. Failure? That’s because you’ve not accepted the program. So while alcoholism is called a disease, it’s treated as a moral problem. In Sweden, however – where Glaser travels on her researches – Naltrexone is available, controlled drinking is allowed as a treatment goal, and patients have far more individualized programs.

Some of my friends have been to either NA or AA. John went to NA for a while, but now says, ‘It doesn’t work for everybody’. I think he baulked at the social requirements. Gail goes to NA for her drinking – she says because it’s a “stronger fellowship” than AA. In Johannesburg last year she took me to a meeting – in a beautiful church on a starry night, where the atmosphere was easy, supportive, religious. I thought, Oh lucky guys! But what about the rest of us? David, on the other hand, has been attending NA for his cannabis issues. He’s been gripped by the drama of the meetings – and impressed by the wisdom and serenity that many members attain.

The Bed Rest Hoax by Alexandra Kleeman (Harper’s Magazine) was useful. It explained that bed rest is a disaster for the human body. The muscle wasting it causes is terrible – it’s worse than space travel – and there really are very few indications. Yet somehow it is deeply embedded in our culture, especially in obstetrics. People want bed rest! They like the idea of being told to stay in bed.

I enjoyed Telescope Wars by Katie Worth, published in the Scientific American. In the world today, there are not one but three giant telescopes under construction, two American, one European, all exorbitantly expensive and all in real danger of incompletion. If ever there was a case for cooperation! In other fields of big science – take particle physics – there is cooperation. But these telescope ventures are in competition, and as the author explains, that competition goes back an awfully long way – and specifically to the early C20 rivalry between (I think) the Rockerfeller (East Coast/Harvard) and the Carnegie (West Coast/CalTech) institutes. It’s all very stupid.

My Periodic Table, by Oliver Sacks (The New York Times), was something Sacks wrote at the end of his life. There’s something about Sacks that always got on my nerves. Not only was he a doctor – bad enough – but also a weirdo. In this pre-mortal piece (which was very good) he confesses to finding material sciences more interesting than psychology – and avidly consuming the Scientific American every time it arrived. To be honest, I’m getting to be the same. I’ve started buying the Scientific American as I pass through Euston Station. Seems like science is the only real news. Everything else just goes and round. Recently Oliver Sacks’ partner brought out a memoir of the life they had together – and there was a review in the Guardian by Edmund White. It was brilliant – the review I mean – very simple, personal and lightly mocking – just what a review ought to be.

Frans de Waal

Sunday evening. The first episode of Blue Planet 2 has started. Alice and I are settling down. It’s the television event of the week. The BBC has filmed the creatures of the deep again – and we’re about to enter their worlds with Sir David Attenborough.

Watch this! A tropical fish is heading across a coral reef, making its way, purposefully, to the reef’s edge. The fish is about a foot long with a bright-blue front, speckled face, white flanks and yellow fins that somehow go together perfectly. It’s a tusk fish – with protruding teeth. Every morning this busy creature makes the very same excursion to the edge of the reef. What is it doing?

The tusk fish rummages in the rocks and sand. It dislodges some rocks and finds a clam. Aha! It picks up the clam in its mouth and swims back, purposefully, to the middle of the reef, where it stops at a bowl-shaped rock that Attenborough terms its kitchen. Workshop might be a better word. The bowl-shaped rock contains a sharp edge on which the tusk fish bashes the clam. Eventually the clam busts open. “A fish!” exclaims Attenborough in his most wonderful voice: “A fish that uses tools!”

Tool use is the hallmark of the human being. Or at least it used to be! Then it was noticed that chimpanzees use tools, and then other primates, and then parrots and now… a tusk fish. As the crows in Dumbo would put it: now you’ve seen jus’ ‘bout everything.

Other marks of human uniqueness, de Waal explains in this lovely, short book, have gone the same way: Language; Empathy; Altruism; Planning for the future; Play; Laughter; Postponement of pleasure; Self-recognition. In the end they always pitch up somewhere else.

My favorite is the moral sense – the sense of fairness – that occurs in both apes and monkeys. De Waal cites a very informative experiment in which a chimpanzee is happily rolling tires in return for pieces of cucumber. When a second chimpanzee is allowed to join in – and rewarded with bananas for doing the exact same work – the first chimpanzee is indignant. Chimps prefer bananas to cucumbers. The first chimpanzee has a major tantrum and refuses to take any further part.

The perplexing issue, for de Waal, is why human beings are so obsessed with proving their uniqueness in the first place.

De Waal is the people’s primatologist. He’s like the Desmond Morris for our age. Two other books by him I’ve read are The Age of Empathy (2009) (about empathy in non-human species) and the astonishing Chimpanzee Politics. (1982). The latter chronicles several years in the life of the chimpanzee colony at Arnhem Zoo. It’s extremely dramatic – particularly the group’s nail-biting leadership struggles. Chimps use complex social strategies and often are willing to play a long, long game. Dominance turns not on physical strength but on getting the backing of the group.

A change of scene: I’m at the Southbank Centre with David Landau and two of his PhD chums. We’ve come to a literary event – to listen to the novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard. It’s great! We’re here! Knausgaard talks about his use of landscape – the skies and fjords and forests of his novels. The land has its own kind of consciousness, he says. He talks also about the worlds of animals: the toad, the jellyfish and the adder. What is the world of the adder like, he asks, if it perceives that world through its sense of vibration?

The same question runs through ‘Are We Smart Enough to Know?’ What’s it like to be a bat or a bee? The idea is designated by the German word Umwelt, which means an animal’s unique surrounding world. Every species has its own Umweld, based on how it perceives the world, and de Waal insists you should judge the species only in its Umweld.

The ways we look at animals! De Waal identifies a horrible scientific attitude that took root during the twentieth century: Behaviourism. This hinged on the idea that animals were unconscious and automatic – and shared few of our emotions or capacities. How very wrong! But de Waal reports that a massive reevaluation is underway. Every day come new reports. Even Knausgaard is chipping in. We’re returning to an older, less condescending view.

De Waal harks back to scientists such as Charles Darwin who looked at animals from the inside out. Another he mentions – but only in passing – is the South African Eugene Marais. This was interesting. I wanted de Waal to say much more. Marais was the man who studied baboons in the wild – in the Waterberg part of the Transvaal – starting around 1903 – simply decades ahead of his time. The books that stemmed from his years there include The Soul of the Ape – that considers how the human psyche might have evolved. It’s a thing of beauty, written in English. His other classic, The Soul of the White Ant, was translated from Afrikaans.

Marais was also a famous journalist and one of South Africa’s most beloved poets. When I worked in South Africa I had a friend, Fiona de Villiers, who turned out to be Marais’s great granddaughter. She was a hoot – smart and sassy – a teacher. After we spoke about Marais she gave me a copy of his personal bookmark – which I’m including here.

Esther Hautzig

It’s Sasha’s cousin Suzy who recommends The Endless Steppe. ‘We enjoyed it a lot!’ she tells us, arms round her 12-year-old twin sons. Suzy and her husband, George, an artist, and their boys, live on the picturesque curve of the Regents Park Road, a neighborhood that especially at night looks like a film-set. It’s the quaint London of movies like The Lady in the Van or Paddington Bear 2. I stroll down with the girls on a lovely day, during our summer in Belsize Park, and everybody gets on well. Suzy is warm, quick and zany, and I’d forgotten how funny. What books has she read with her kids?

I order an old copy of The Endless Steppe and put it aside and eventually try it with Millie. It’s a paperback in the Puffin Plus series – a ‘young adult’ book in other words – the series that includes the superb A Parcel of Patterns by Jill Paton Walsh. Reading these books with Mill has not gone well. What I’ve realized, quite late, is the key word is not young but adult. These are actually sophisticated, literary books that expect a lot of the reader.

The result: Just as with A Parcel of Patterns we soon jumped wagon – in this case to The Boy in Striped Pajamas by John Boyne (which went extremely well). However I decided to go on alone. The Endless Steppe was just too interesting to put down.

It’s a Second World War memoir, the true story of a Polish Jewish girl, Esther Rudomin, who in 1941 was deported with her family to Siberia. This was after Russia occupied East Poland. Esther narrates the story, which ends in 1946, when she was fifteen.

Before the Russians come, Esther’s childhood is idyllic. She lives in a beautiful city, in a beautiful compound, in the warm glow of her parents’ and her grandparents’ love. She goes to the local Polish school, where she’s thriving. Her life is full of good things – books, cooking, walks across town, family occasions. The end is abrupt. One summer’s morning she wakes up planning to water her grandfather’s rose garden. Out of the blue arrive the Russian soldiers. By late afternoon the family is assembling at the train station with just a few possessions.

The reasons for their deportation from Poland (Vilna) are confusing to the family. Officially it’s because they are “capitalists” – and in fact they were factory owners with a prosperous life – but on the train to Siberia they find themselves among not only their own kind but also gypsies and peasants. It’s never quite clear what the Russians are thinking.

After many weeks on the train, in dreadful conditions, no idea where they’re heading, the deportees are disembarked at a small outpost in the Siberian wilderness. The light is dazzling. Soon they are put to work in a gypsum-mine. In Esther’s account, their prison life is not without sweet moments, but very, very tough. Many of the deportees die, mostly of typhus. However the Russian planning is unpredictable. At some point in the war, the deportees are simply released into the local town.

The town, going by the name of Rubtsovsk, is no than a mining village on the edge of the giant steppe, but it develops during their time there. Esther takes a kind of strange pride in the way her family helped to build it. Despite all the hardship, too, the lodging with hard-bitten locals, the scrapping for food, and the bargaining for winter boots, such is the wish to fit in with her peers, once she starts attending school, that Esther becomes an adoptive Siberian girl. And the Steppe, with its wolves, its waving grasses and its tremendous storms, becomes almost a character in its own right and takes her under its spell.

In this way the book is like a cross between The Diary of Anne Frank and Little House on the Prairie – a common link being the young female adolescent narrator. Come to think of it, there is a whole genre of books narrated by young women of this age – girls full of life and emotional intelligence, trying to flourish in adversity. Often in these books, it seems to me, the narrator, like Esther, has a wonderful father.

Esther has a great capacity for life – an ability to connect and be grateful. Take this description of her first pair of decent Siberian boots: “The shoes worked; merely possessing them made me feel rich, elegant, and the equal of anyone in the village. As for wearing them, this I did only rarely, on very special occasions. When one owned such beautiful shoes, one could afford to go barefoot. But when I did wear them, as I walked the dusty roads I stopped every other step to wipe them with the edge of my dress. I used to come home from these walks with a dusty hem, but shining shoes.”

The great irony of the story: their deportation from Poland meant that Esther and her family survived the war. In the final pages the family return to Poland, only to find their home stolen, and the indigenous Poles bristling with anti-Semitism. It seems unlikely that they stayed. However that’s where the story ends – with their return from exile.

The book was first published in the USA in 1968, when Esther would have been aged 37. By then her surname was Hautzig. If she were still alive now she’d be aged 85 – not even that old. Since the book is not translated, Esther must have learnt English. How so? My fantasy is from Poland the family found their way to America, ideally to Nebraska or Iowa – somewhere on the Great Plains. Should I click to find out? That’s just what I’m not going to do.

Helen Garner

I’d already read a novel by Helen Garner, The Spare Room, which was excellent, so I was interested also to read this non-fiction book, The House of Grief, about a criminal trial that took place in Melbourne, Australia.

Garner, a Melbourne local, attended the trial and wrote about it. A recently divorced man had driven his car into a dam – killing his three young sons. The man survived. He claimed to have lost consciousness at the wheel after suffering a coughing fit. The trial was a big deal in Australia. It lasted many weeks and two years later was heard again at the Court of Appeals.

But the man was convicted of murder.

Garner never explains why she attended the trial. All she says is that like everybody else in Melbourne she was shocked by the news of what had happened. ‘Oh Lord, let this be an accident,’ she thinks. That is the emotion that carries us through, but it always seems an unlikely verdict. More likely it was the man’s revenge against the ex-wife who’d thrown him out – a kind of attempted homicide-suicide in which the suicide bit was a failure.

Garner describes the barristers and the witnesses, and the moods of the courtroom, with infectious curiosity. But one soon grasps the tedium of a long trial: the misery of days and days of technical details. The jurors would love to get back to their own lives. So would the judge, it often seems. But Garner never asks the question that’s hanging in the air: Is the whole production worth it? The barristers are so nasty as they twist the story, attack the characters of obviously decent people, and try to sway the emotions of the jury. If this is justice, it seems twisted.

Garner’s writing is never tedious. She sure is an interesting writer. Nonetheless it is strange that she never bothers to give an alibi for all her weeks in the courtroom. She could easily say that a newspaper had dispatched her. But she doesn’t. The reader is the judge of that.

Indeed Garner’s position is quite weird. She heads to the trial with an old friend whom she describes as follows: “Her hair was dyed a defiant red, but she had that racked look, hollow with sadness. We were women in our sixties. Each of us had found it in herself to endure – but also to inflict – the pain and humiliation of divorce.” She soon acquires a more uplifting companion, a 16-year-old girl on some kind of gap year, extremely sophisticated and precocious, in whom she takes great delight. The two of them, the old hack and the sparkling novice, are always heading to the coffee stand, mingling with the witnesses, and sharing quick, breathless opinions. There’s a kind of romance in the air. Garner’s other contacts are lawyers and journalists – old Melbourne chums. She fawns to some, snipes at others, but generally she is enamoured with the rhythms of the courtroom.

There’s something fascinating about Garner’s mix of ruthlessness and vanity – and in the simple fact that she’s a writer. I wasn’t at all surprised either when she mentioned Janet Malcom’s The Journalist and the Murderer. Garner and Malcom have some similarities. I’ve read several of Malcom’s books, including one about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, and another about psychoanalysis in New York, and they are always brilliant. They are also demolition jobs – in the end really high-class tittle-tattle.

The other person Garner began to resemble, in the murkiness of my mind, was a child psychiatrist – I’ll call her Dr. S. – for whom I was once a trainee. This was in 2001 at a time of personal stress. At my interview for the job, to which I’d cycled across town in an old shirt and an unfocussed mood, they’d asked me the simple question, ‘Why do you want to be a child psychiatrist?’ and I’d been flummoxed. Nonetheless they gave me the job – on a kind of trial basis – and that sense of being on trial set the tone.

Now this Dr. S. was a renowned child psychiatrist who lived and breathed her chosen discipline. She was a tough old lady. Yet her feelings were easily hurt. Her special interest was court work. Like Helen Garner she loved the aura of the courtroom. Like Garner too, she loved to take young women under her wing. She must have wanted a trainee who admired her, who shared her enthusiasm for the work – someone with all the right intuitions. That wasn’t me. No, way! I was grumpy. I was bogged down with not knowing anything, with babysitting my nieces for long stints every weekend, with cycling miles and miles round London, with a crazy girlfriend (temporarily) and with smoking weed in a special pipe. About child psychiatry I was confused and skeptical. Dr S. and I disliked each other from the outset and had a year of bust-ups. At one point I even handed in a resignation letter.

As I read This House of Grief, I found myself running a kind of kangaroo court for Helen Garner, in which I threw in her guilt-by-association with Dr S. This, I hasten to admit, is an unfair and emotional way to respond to literature. And yet there it is! The author is to some extent on trial and all kinds of ridiculous half-baked evidence will be be thrown before the jury.

One day in September, during my annus horribilis with Dr S., an amazing thing happened. I was alone in the department, working on a pile of reports, when the secretary, a young, English, normally phlegmatic woman knocked on the door. Her face was ash-white. ‘Have you heard the news?’ she asked. No, I hadn’t. ‘America is under terrorist attack,’ she said. ‘They’re bombing the American cities.’ Now don’t ask me why – maybe it was the heat of the moment – but what I heard was this: ‘America is under a nuclear attack. They’re bombing the American cities.’ We walked to her office to listen to the radio. Magic FM was playing ‘The Long and Winding Road’ – the only Beatles song it ever played. We waited. I was calm. I was ready for the very, very worst. Eventually we learned that a couple of airliners had flown into the twin towers.

I was left with my relief that America had not been nuked. I went back to my office to complete my reports. Then I cycled home in a mood of tremendous elation. Instead of 3 million dead and 30 million seriously irradiated – not to mention the destruction of Western civilisation and everything that I loved and believed in – there was the relatively trivial matter of 2996 people killed and a tiny bit of collapsed infrastructure. Forgive me but I was in a damn good mood. And yet I quickly learned to (mostly) keep that mood to myself.

I’ve just looked up some figures in the archives. In 2001 in the USA there were 42,000 road traffic fatalities, 11,000 firearm homicides and 22,000 firearm suicides. But the Twin Towers was different, right? The attacks were pinned on Al-Qaeda. Afghanistan was attacked in revenge. Soon afterwards Iraq was attacked in revenge. (Everyone knew Iraq had no connection.) And less serious thinking went into that act of retribution than into the murder trial of one man in Melbourne.