Books
Flight from Egypt
Comedy is easy, tragedy easier still. A narrative that ends with the good happily rewarded and the bad satisfactorily punished satisfies one of our instincts. A story that ends with the utter bleakness of nobility crushed chimes with another of our appetites - the need to be put through the emotional wringer.
What is altogether harder is to sustain a story that is closer to the reality of our lives - a tangle of disappointments, disenchantments, fugitive moments of happiness and hope found in humour and resilience.
Chicago
Alaa al Aswany, translated by Farouk Abdel Wahab
Pulling Punches
There are books you look forward to reading, enjoy at least in parts, then settle down to reviewing - and find that hard going. This is one such, partly because it is all over the place, a real ragbag of a book. A learned ragbag certainly, stuffed with the results of wide research, and with lots of interesting observations; nevertheless a mess.
It's quite clear what it's not, and that's a history of boxing. Vast, interesting areas of the sport's history are ignored. After the early chapters on the old, pre-Queensberry Rules prize-fighting, British boxing disappears almost completely. French boxing is touched on, but only just. The rest of Europe is almost entirely missing. There is nothing on Mexico and Latin America, though boxing there may be held to be of -cultural significance. Divisions other than the heavyweight receive -little attention. The boxing fan will be at a loss, and disappointed.
Boxing, A Cultural History
Kasia Boddy; Reaktion Books, 478 pp, £25
It's Better in Latin
Translating the Latin of Virgil's Aeneid into English verse requires first a Trojan war of interpretation, and then an odyssey of re-encryption. The density of meaning in the poem is prodigious: ambiguities, allusions and many-faced images are built into the original with the free word order and syllabic economy of an inflected language that can't be recreated in English. Doing justice to what Tennyson called the "stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man" - the rhythm of the Virgilian hexameters - is another challenge. These are lines of six feet and between 13 and 17 syllables, in a metre based on syllable length, which produces, in interplay with the stress accents, effects that are alien to English.
The Aeneid
Vergil, translated by Sarah Ruden; Yale University Press, 308 pp, £18.50
Power Behind the Throne
Any list of great English statesmen would be incomplete without William Cecil, Baron of Burghley. He served Queen Elizabeth, first as principal secretary and then Lord Treasurer, for 40 years. He may not have been as romantic as Leicester, as dashing as Drake or as glamorous as Essex, but he was no dull bureaucrat. One of the many virtues of Stephen Alford's biography is his refusal to fall for Burghley's faux humility.
The man who built three magnificent mansions (only Burghley House near Stamford survives and it was not a patch on Theobalds in Hertfordshire) was hardly "the poorest Lord in England". Nor was he Elizabeth's yes-man. Burghley cultivated the language of service to his divinely ordained mistress, but there was always a tension for him between the sovereign's personal interests and those of the Commonwealth.
Burghley: William Cecil at the Court of Elizabeth I
Stephen Alford; Yale University Press, 432pp, £25
Hypocrites are not What They Seem
In modern politics, humbug is the most conspicuous vice.
Political Hypocrisy: The Mask of Power, from Hobbes to Orwell and Beyond
David Runciman; Princeton University Press, 272 pp, £17.95
Most forwarded
Most commented
