Few sporting rivalries are as intense as the one between Manchester’s two football teams: United and City.  United fans like me, accustomed to decades of comfortable superiority and to sneering at their near neighbors, are now suffering as City dominates English football.  The teams, separated by a few miles and and lifelong allegiances, meet twice every season for the Manchester derby.  Don’t for one moment mistake this for a football match.  This is a confrontation between two warring tribes.  When a friend offered us four tickets to the recent derby, we all hopped on a plane behind enemy lines to City’s Etihad stadium.

The game took place on Armistice Day and the 100th anniversary of the end of the Great War.  A famous coach once said that football isn’t a matter of life and death; it’s far more important than that.  None of the 55,000 supporters in the stadium who fell silent to commemorate the war dead believe that, but you would never have guessed it once the first ball was kicked.

There’s no hiding it.  The game didn’t end well for my team and it was a painful reminder that United’s glory days aren’t coming back anytime soon.  But what a joy it was to watch it through the eyes of my sons.  Their first derby, their first visit to the Etihad’s cauldron of noise and passion, and a useful reminder that in the longest relationships it’s important to know how to handle an occasional disappointment.

London is one of those ancient cities where history seems to intrude at every turn, a place where the membrane between the past and the present seems thin and permeable.  Just take a walk along one of its rivers or canals or wander the streets in almost any neighborhood and you’ll feel the presence of past generations.  Walking in London means walking a few feet above hidden graveyards and buried rivers, past the homes of the famous and the unremembered.  Preservation – always so important to Londoners – is about more than protecting precious buildings and writers like Iain Sinclair, Gillian Tindall, and Peter Ackroyd have taught us brilliantly that the past is never fully past in a great city.  All we have to do is look and listen carefully to see the glimpses and hear the echos everywhere.  T.S. Eliot expressed this perfectly in The Four Quartets

Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

What I feel about London, Sebastian Faulks feels about Paris.  History in a city is “what gives depth to a day.  It’s the silver behind the glass.  Otherwise, life would be like being permanently on the Internet.  Click. Open. Shut. Click.” Hannah, an American historian, is in Paris to study the lives of women during the Nazi occupation, reading transcripts and interviewing survivors.  Her personal past – a bad relationship in Paris several years previously – presses on the present.  Tariq, a young, poor, and illegal immigrant from North Africa, explores a different Paris, its deprived banlieues, far from the tourist sites, in search of traces of the mother he barely knew.  Their individual and shared odysseys see them crisscrossing multiple versions of Paris – ancient and modern, rich and poor, yesterday’s and today’s – its streets and its Métro.  At every turn, images and voices from the past press against and poke through the thin veil separating Hannah and Tariq from the Paris of the 1940s.

But what’s our responsibility to the past?  Do we have a duty to remember?  Or does remembering prevent us living fully in the present?  How much history do you really need to know and is forgetting inevitable?  A Polish writer called Wislawa Szymborska understood this.  Those who knew/what was going on here/must make way for/those who know little./And less than little./And finally as little as nothing./In the grass that has overgrown/causes and effects/someone must be stretched out/blade of grass in his mouth/gazing at the clouds.

Bad news for the young.  Some things are best and most fully enjoyed when one is older.  In fact, let’s go one step further.  Age and experience are essential to appreciate some things.  Malt whisky, for example, and certain Shakespeare plays like King Lear and (one of my favorites) Antony and Cleopatra.  I first read the great Roman play nearly forty years ago but had never seen a production until recently when I headed to The National Theatre in London to watch Ralph Fiennes and Sophie Okenedo take the lead roles.  What a gorgeous piece of work it is, filled with the most beautiful language and poetry, some of which I was surprised to find lodged in my memory since those days at university.

I was a little disappointed by some aspects of the production.  The modern dress staging had a cold, corporate feel to it that blunted the sumptuousness of language and imagery for which the play is famous, and Ms. Okenedo’s Cleopatra could have used a little more grandeur and majesty for my taste.  No matter; this isn’t a theatre review.

Antony and Cleopatra was probably first performed in 1607, part of that extraordinary burst in creativity later in Shakespeare’s life that gave us King Lear, Macbeth, and The Tempest.  The plays of that period are all to some extent meditations on ageing and the conflicts that come with it, the days of waning powers and the realizations that accompany those days.  It’s worth remembering that Shakespeare was in his early forties in 1607, a time when average life expectancy in England was about 35 years, so it’s not surprising his thoughts would have been focused on old age and mortality.  And what a clear eye he had when it came to understanding the transience of power, the fickleness of achievements, careers, and reputations:

Kingdoms are clay; our dungy earth alike
Feeds beast as man. The nobleness of life
Is to do thus; when such a mutual pair
And such a twain can do ‘t, in which I bind,
On pain of punishment, the world to weet
We stand up peerless.

And, yes, it’s difficult to understand that when you’re young.

It was only after I started Andrew Miller’s new novel, set at the time of the Napoleonic Wars, that I realized how little historical fiction I read.  I’m not sure why that is.  Great stories can be set in any context, so there must be some reason why I avoid “period novels”.  In some cases it’s no more complex than being unable to relate to the setting in any meaningful way and that inability impeding my enjoyment. Ishiguro’s last book, The Buried Giant, set in the Dark Ages and a world of ogres, was a perfect example of this.  I enjoyed it less because I couldn’t imagine myself into the setting.

I discovered Now We Shall Be Entirely Free while waiting to see a friend at the publisher’s office.  The opening pages – brilliantly written and as seductive as any detective story – gripped me right away and I had to find out more about the mysterious, sick, and damaged soldier returning home to England from Spain in 1809.  The rest of the novel – part love story, part thriller – lived up to that wonderful first chapter.  Miller writes beautifully, with every word and phrase chosen and weighted with the care of a poet.  That alone would make me recommend this novel, but it’s also a surprisingly topical and resonant book about the cruel injuries of war, the enduring trauma of violence, and the curative powers of love.

How do you select the books you read? For me, reviews certainly influence what I buy, especially those in the weekend edition of the Financial Times or Sunday’s New York Times.  Advertisements on bookselling websites have no sway whatsoever and I’m almost allergic to the clumsy “if you liked this, you’ll love this” trick that the likes of Amazon.com seem to think is so clever and influential.  Serendipity plays an occasional part, as does the guidance of friends, many of whom are voracious readers.  Their tastes and mine don’t seem to overlap very much but I’m always keen to hear what they recommend.  When one of those friends gave me A Town Like Alice for my birthday and said it was one of her all-time favorites, I was intrigued to read it.  Other than a vague awareness of it and its author, Nevil Shute, I knew nothing.

I can see now why my friend thinks so highly of it. The story it tells is a powerful one and its impact is all the greater because Shute’s style is so readable.  In some respects it’s clearly a product of the late 1940s, not least in its uncomfortable descriptions of the Japanese in Malaya during the Second World War and of the Australian aborigines in the years immediately after. But it’s far more than a quaint and entertaining period piece.  The character of Jean Paget, moving as she does from the drudgery of wartime London to the cruelties of detention in occupied Malaya and then to the Australian outback in the years after the conflict, is an extraordinary precursor of the strong, independent women everyone takes for granted in fiction today.

“Accidental incest. It’s a problem here”.  Quite an opening to a conversation, don’t you think?  Sitting at a bar in the center of Reykjavik, I was introduced by a business acquaintance to one of the least expected hazards of living in a country with fewer than 400,000 people and with a long history of isolation from the rest of the world.  Of course, Icelanders, an imaginative and ingenious bunch in my experience, have a solution to the tricky problem of inadvertently propositioning a close relative in a bar: a smartphone app that displays your lineage (back to the 9th century in the case of my acquaintance) and tells you if you’re related to the man or woman to whom you’re attracted.  Clever?  Yes, of course, but Icelanders seem to me like pretty resourceful and pragmatic people, so not a great surprise.

It was De Montherlant who famously wrote “Happiness writes in white ink on a white page“.  He might have said the same thing about beauty because I find it very difficult to describe Iceland. Stunning. Unique. Unforgettable. That just about does it.  Anything more tends to sound trite and unnecessary.  Of all the places I’ve visited, only New Zealand gets close for scenic beauty.  Vivid green, mossy plateaus stretching towards ice-covered mountains, beaches of black sand, stunning waterfalls, and bubbling hot springs: these are the treasures and memories of Iceland.  That app was pretty impressive, too.

Sometimes the pleasure of reading fiction is very simple: immersion in a good story skillfully told.  That was certainly true with Anne Griffin’s debut novel, an advance copy of which I was given by a publisher friend in London recently.  He warned me that the story would grab me and not let go, and he was right.  On the long flight home, I wasn’t tempted for a moment to watch movies or take a nap, engrossed as I was in a tale about family, aging, bereavement and love.

Maurice Hannigan, 84 years old, a wealthy Irish farmer and landowner, sits at a hotel bar reminiscing about his life and the five people who made it meaningful, raising a glass to each of them in turn.  Not long widowed, Maurice has set his affairs in order and it’s time for the final reckoning.  Love, loss, greed, and regret: all loom large in Maurice’s long monologue as his memory stretches back through the years.

This is a very assured first novel by an author who’s a natural storyteller.  It won’t win awards; those tend to be in the gift of judges who admire stylistic tricks or linguistic flair.  It will, however, delight readers who love a good tale about the important things in a life.

Almost thirty years have passed since I was last in Canterbury.  My memories of the city are few and fuzzy and only the magnificent cathedral stands out clearly when I try to recollect my previous visit.  A lovely late summer weekend of blue skies and warm sunshine was the perfect backdrop for my return recently.

The sheer number of buildings of outstanding historical and architectural importance in Canterbury is remarkable.  The cathedral, a World Heritage site and the mother church of Anglicanism, is, of course, a treasure and one of the most important religious buildings in the world.  I’ll be dedicating a future post to this extraordinarily beautiful and impressive work of art and faith.  It’s the appropriate and stunning starting point for anyone who loves historic buildings but the city has so much more to offer.  Medieval parish churches, ancient city walls (parts of which date to Roman times). and an extraordinary richness of vernacular architecture make Canterbury a place in which history lives and breathes very vividly.  I’m likely to visit many times in the years ahead and I’m already looking forward to what I’ll discover.

A recent visit to Dia:Beacon, one of several I’ve made in the past ten years, gave me a new appreciation of the art of the curator.  The sheer size of the space poses difficult questions: how to divide the cavernous interior and how to organize the flow between the spaces to navigate visitors around such a diverse collection.  What struck me during my most recent visit was the agility and intelligence of the curators in their management of the space and the exhibits.

The collection itself continues to be an intriguing one.  A significant number of the pieces displayed feel safe and accessible, almost decorative.  There’s an emphasis on color or its absence, for example in the selection of works by Dan Flavin, Anne Truitt, Blinky Palermo and others.  The whole thing can begin to feel like a monument to the safer end of the 20th century canon until demanding individual pieces by the likes of Bruce Nauman suddenly jolt you out of the comfortable familiarity of Richard Serra and On Kawara.

Every visit to Dia:Beacon reminds me of what a treasure it is: the galleries, the space overall, the grounds, and even the first-rate bookstore.  It’s a place with just enough surprises to never feel completely familiar.

The hordes of young people who still aspire to working in the publishing industry have dreams that look a lot like the professional life lived by Bob Gottlieb.  Over several decades working at Knopf and Simon & Schuster, Gottlieb shaped the books, careers, and occasionally the lives of many writers.  Some, such as Joseph Heller, Toni Morrison, Edna O’Brien, and John Le Carré, were literary heavyweights.  Others were stars of a different kind: Katherine Hepburn, Lauren Bacall, and Bill Clinton, for example.

Avid Reader, Gottlieb’s autobiography, manages to avoid the gossipy character and self-satisfied tone of many memoirs of the publishing industry.  In part, that’s because he realizes how fortunate he was in his choice of career and is endearingly modest about his achievements.  His mantra, that it’s the authors and the books that matter, tends to underplay the real contribution he made to some wonderful books, a contribution most of his admiring authors were more than happy to acknowledge.

I would have liked more detail about the process of editing and Gottlieb’s approach to it.  He was (and still is) an extremely accomplished editor.  Avid Reader, entertaining and informative as it is, never quite explains the “secret sauce”.