The early morning ferry from Circular Quay to Manly was almost empty.  It edged its way slowly between the opera house and a visiting cruise ship and picked up speed as it found more open water.  Although the sky was blue and cloudless, it was a chilly early spring morning in Sydney and I wasn’t prepared to brave the ferry’s top deck.  By the time I stepped off the boat and walked to Manly Beach, the day was starting to warm, but it was still a shock to see so many hardy surfers in what must have been freezing Pacific waters.  I got a window table at The Pantry overlooking the beach and whiled away half an hour watching the dog-walkers and swimmers while I waited for my friends. On days like these it’s easy to see the appeal of Sydney’s lifestyle.

Later that day I took a bus to Bondi beach, the starting point for a coastal walk that took me to Tamarama, Mackenzies Bay, and Bronte. The beaches along the route are picture perfect.  Wide stretches of clean, white sand pounded by white-fringed waves are a magnet for surfers and sun worshipers, both locals and visitors from around the world. Winter had loosened its grip on the southern hemisphere and given us warm sunshine, and people could start to imagine the summer ahead.

Later, back in Sydney’s central business district, it’s easy enough to forget that this is a city deeply connected to water, a place for open air living.  Away from its harbor, wharves, and beaches, Sydney is a pretty but unexceptional place.  Turns towards its water and face the immensity and beauty of the Pacific and it immediately becomes one of the most seductive and beautiful cities the world has to offer.

Isn’t it strange that independent investigative journalism is flourishing? After all, weren’t we told not that long ago by the self-appointed pundits that the internet and social media spelled the death of journalism?  And yet here we are with The Panama Papers, the Theranos scandal, and countless other stories uncovering the misdeeds of the rich, powerful, and famous. Turns out the demagogues, the technologists, the money men, and the powerful in general often have a lot of nasty secrets that they want to hide from everyone else.  And we know about those nasty secrets because of investigative reporters.

Nasty doesn’t get close to describing the behavior of Harvey Weinstein, the movie producer brought down by a team from The New York Times led by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey.  His relentless and reckless abuse of women over decades is a shocking story. No less shocking were the efforts made by a cadre of lawyers and advisors to cover up his misdeeds and to put pressure on those who threatened to reveal them.  It’s a great credit to the reporters and leadership of the NYT that they stuck to their task of exposing this dangerous, powerful man despite a barrage of intimidation.

She Said is the account of the reporters’ work.  In parts it reads like a thriller. Victims, some of them famous actors, others vulnerable colleagues of Weinstein, are encouraged to go on the record to tell their stories, sometimes at great risk. A dangerous cat-and-mouse game is played with Weinstein and his advisors in the run-up to publication. It’s tense and compelling stuff.

The final section of She Said shifts the focus away from Harvey Weinstein and on to Justice Kavanaugh.  I think that was a mistake.  The Kavanaugh scandal – and I’m in no doubt it is a scandal – deserves its own full account and shouldn’t have been tacked on here almost as an appendix.  It’s a small quibble.  Kantor and Twohey have written a necessary and vivid history of the Weinstein affair and have reminded us, if reminders were needed, that investigative reporting will be essential if basic freedoms are going to be preserved and abusers of all kinds are going to be held to account.

The world of the 21st century would have disgusted George Orwell.  He would have been appalled that we allow billions of people to live in poverty and squalor while a comparatively tiny number has inexcusable wealth and wields incalculable power. He would have been angry that inequality is now part of every society in every country, the largest and smallest, those at the top of the GDP league table and those at the bottom.  He would have said it directly: huge gaps between the richest and the poorest aren’t unfortunate consequences of an otherwise well-functioning system.  They are a fundamental part of that system, built in to its design and necessary to its operation. Orwell not only saw and understood the world clearly. He also described it clearly with a prose so precise, so brilliant, and so lucid that he has become an exemplar for anyone who wants to write well.

It has been many years, possibly decades, since I read any Orwell.  The faded paperback copy of The Road to Wigan Pier on my bookshelves was one I bought in 1977, but even at that great distance, and with much of its details forgotten, I can remember the effect the book first had on me. Re-reading it now, its power has grown with the passage of time.  The conditions Orwell  described in working class England in the 1930s (within my own parents’ lifetimes) were not significantly different from those that Engels and Mayhew saw in Victorian England.  That’s damning enough, but what really shocks and scandalizes is the realization that similar poverty persists today in the cities of the US and UK, not to mention in so many countries in the “developing” world.

The Road to Wigan Pier is divided into two connected essays. The first and most successful part is a brilliantly written account of the living and working conditions in English mining communities in the 1930s. The second part is a disquisition on socialism.  It’s interesting as a “period piece”, but is much less compelling and hasn’t aged well.

The popularity of Orwell’s novels, especially 1984 and Animal Farm, practically guarantees that successive generations discover his genius. I hope readers move beyond those stories and experience his extraordinary documentary non-fiction.

Colson Whitehead was a new name to me when The Underground Railroad won a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. I still haven’t read what everyone tells me is a wonderful novel, but I picked up his newest book for a long flight I was taking recently. What a great choice it proved to be.

The NIckel Boys is the story of Elwood Curtis, a black boy from Florida about to launch into life when a terrible yet common miscarriage of justice propels him into the Nickel Academy, a segregated “reform school”.  The central part of the novel recounts Curtis’s efforts to survive the institution’s brutal regime and his attempt to live up to Martin Luther King’s call, “Throw us in jail, and we will still love you”.

Those of us who have never experienced the cruelties and injustices, large and small, of persistent racism, can only read a novel like this in a state of rage and sadness. Colson Whitehead’s calm, measured prose – never exaggerated, never overstated – only makes those feelings more intense. Part of the deep resonance of The Nickel Boys is the terrible recognition it evokes of how little has changed in America in recent decades.

I find it puzzling that I can’t remember which of Britain’s cathedrals was the first I visited.  I was born and raised in London, so commonsense tells me it ought to have been St. Paul’s, Westminster Abbey, or Westminster Cathedral, yet it’s a visit to Wells that’s lodged in my mind as my oldest “cathedral memory”.  But what was I doing in Somerset as a child?  I have no idea, but since that time I’ve spent countless hours exploring many (but not all) of these magnificent buildings.  I’m not alone.  Cathedrals such as Salisbury, Canterbury, and York are among the most visited attractions in the country.  Hundreds of guides to them have been written and published over centuries.  Some celebrate the architecture, others the history and spirituality of these ancient monuments to faith, community, and power.

With his Ships of Heaven, Christopher Somerville has added to the pile a very personal reflection on what some of these cathedrals mean to him and an affectionate book that celebrates some of the people who built them and those who maintain them today. He selects seventeen of the hundred-plus cathedrals in the UK and offers a vivid account of how they were built and what it takes to ensure their survival.  It’s not a book for anyone looking for the minutiae of religious or architectural history but it’s certainly an accessible introduction for those who want to learn more about these buildings that seem to grip people’s imaginations, delight the senses, and inspire affection, faith, and wonder. Most of my favorites are here, with one exception (Winchester – a cathedral I grew to love in the years I lived nearby), plus a few I’ve never seen such as remote Kirkwall.  I can’t think of a better way of saying how much I enjoyed Somerville’s book than it made me want to visit all of them.

Cathedrals project permanence and solidity with their overwhelming weight of ancient stone and wood, but their true story is a more surprising one of vulnerability and change.  All were built on fragile and decaying foundations.  Time and weather have been unkind to the structures, as have men determined to rob, spoil, and vandalize them.  In truth Britain’s cathedrals are marvels of evolution and survival, living structures protected, nurtured, and shaped by generations of faithful custodians determined that the buildings and their treasures, like the faith they represent, should be handed on to those that come after.