Who hasn’t, at some time or another, studied a portrait in a gallery and wanted to know more about the subject? That multitude of mostly anonymous faces stares down at us, not just from the wall but down through the ages, and in most cases we know nothing about them. What made them pose for the artist, what were they feeling during the sittings, what did they think of the final result? In his latest book Julian Barnes uses Sargent’s famous portrait, Dr. Pozzi at home, as a jumping-off point to learn more about the extraordinary life of Samuel Pozzi, renowned French gynecologist, medical innovator, politician, and socialite. What a story it is. Pozzi seemed to know everyone in the Belle Epoque and was the trusted confidante of many of the leading figures of the day. Wealth, celebrity, and honors followed, but personal happiness in his family life eluded him. He died in 1918, struck down by four bullets fired by a disgruntled patient.

As fascinating as the story is in itself, Barnes has bigger ambitions: to give us a colorful portrait of a fascinating time in French history, to illuminate the French character, and to give us an explicit and necessary reminder in these insular, xenophobic times of how important and rewarding it is to immerse ourselves in the lives, language, and culture of other nations.  Brexit and its evangelists would have appalled Dr. Pozzi, just as they do a shrewd, urbane Francophile like Barnes.

“Think of them as medieval trade associations”. That’s what I tend to say to American friends when I’m trying to explain what livery companies are. If that piques their interest, I tell them about the charitable focus of the 110 companies still thriving in the UK and the role they play in the governance of the City of London (aka the city’s financial center and powerhouse). Many of the companies represent professions and trades still thriving and still familiar in modern times. Goldsmiths, clock makers, distillers, butchers, and so on. Some take a little more explanation. Loriners (makers and suppliers of equestrian equipment), broderers (embroiderers), and cordwainers (fine leather workers) – those and others aren’t immediately obvious. The oldest company is The Worshipful Company of Mercers, established in 1394 and thriving still today.

The livery company for publishers, booksellers, and those in the wider content and communications industries is The Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers. It was set up in 1403 and its home is the magnificent Stationers Hall close to St. Paul’s Cathedral. I was recently admitted as a Freeman of the Company at a picturesque and touching ceremony at the Hall in the presence of the wardens, a beadle, and much antique paraphernalia.  Great fun, but with a serious purpose: to help educate a future generation of professionals in the content industries.

At some point in the second half of the 1980s, John Minihan’s famous portrait of Samuel Beckett first appeared in one of London’s Sunday newspapers. I tracked John down – no easy feat in those pre-Google days – and met him over drinks one evening. He very kindly gave me some pictures, told me about his friendship with Beckett, and about the circumstances in which that extraordinary image of the writer was taken. It was 1985 and Beckett and Minihan were meeting across the street from Beckett’s apartment on the Boulevard St. Jacques in Paris, in Le Petit Café of the PLM Hotel.

Last week I checked into the Marriott Rive Gauche and discovered quite by chance that the PLM Hotel had morphed into a Marriott at some point in the intervening years and that my room looked out onto Beckett’s modest apartment on the 6th floor of 38 Boulevard St. Jacques. On heading to the lobby it was easy to find the spot Beckett and Minihan had sat that day more than 30 years ago. I strolled over to the apartment block, marveling that it bore no sign or plaque recording the years spent there by a great writer, and then went around the corner to Le Tiers Temps, the nursing home where Beckett died in December 1989.  Time pressures prevented me from completing this mini pilgrimage with a short stroll to the great writer’s resting place in the nearby Montparnasse Cemetery and, as many do, leaving a small pebble on his gravestone as a small mark of honor. Next time, for sure.

If we give any thought at all to who we are, I suspect most of us think of our identity as something fixed and permanent. We’re born who we are and we stay that way until we die, with our fundamental essence, much like our eye color, unchanged. Graham Swift, I think, sees things differently and knows that identity is much more slippery and a lot less permanent than most of us realize. Living is a process of subtly shifting and evolving identities. The unique core of every individual changes shape over a lifetime, often unconsciously but sometimes willfully and abruptly. We’re mostly careful to hide the process from others, preferring the illusion of constancy.

Illusion is the key word here because Swift’s latest novel is set in the late 1950s among the popular entertainers – magicians, novelty acts, and comedians – that were the fodder for UK theatergoers in those days. A type of entertainment that today seems archaic was even then beginning to feel old fashioned as it gave way to television and cinema. Ronnie Deane (aka The Great Pablo), along with his assistant, Eve, is the triumph of the summer season in Brighton, delighting crowds with his illusions and magic tricks. When the season ends with the final show, Ronnie has one final trick up his sleeve …

Here We Are is about secrets, memories, and the common and not-so-common illusions of ordinary lives. In the brilliance of its storytelling Graham Swift reminds us again what a magical artist he is.

Anyone interested in listening to the acceptance speech that Kazuo Ishiguro gave after being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017 can find it here. Having listened to it some time ago, I hadn’t planned to read it until, browsing in one of my favorite bookshops, Tsutaya in Daikanyama, I spotted it on one of the few shelves that the shop sets aside for English translations. Why would anyone read a lecture when it’s just as easy to watch it? Or to pay for it when it’s available for free? Because in this instance the Laureate is a writer and a writer’s written words are different from his spoken words, even when they are identical.

Ishiguro’s lecture is about remembering and forgetting and about how those two things are done differently by individuals and by societies. Memories are fragile and elusive things. Writing them down preserves them but in the process of remembering we all deceive, deny, and distort. How should nations remember? Should everything be remembered or is wilful amnesia sometimes the only way to move forward? Should the ruins of Auschwitz be preserved under a Perspex dome or allowed to crumble slowly until they disappear from view?

Ishiguro closes his lecture with a sombre reminder of the political events of 2016 and being forced by them “to acknowledge that the unstoppable advance of liberal-humanist values taken for granted since childhood may have been an illusion“. His hope is that good writing and good reading will help to break down barriers and find “a great humane vision” around which we can all rally.

Books about books are some of my favorite books and reading about reading is something I love to do, so when browsing in Hatchards in Piccadilly recently I was delighted to come across a book by Susan Hill first published in 2009. Its premise is simple. We all have books in our collections that we haven’t read or would love to read again, so why not dedicate a year to reading nothing other than what we own already? Hill’s idea, not likely to appeal to booksellers and publishers, of course, is in truth just a jumping-off point for her to write about her favorite authors, her love of books, reading, publishing, bindings, typography and pretty much anything else that catches the eye of a sensitive, intelligent bibliophile. And, because it’s written by Susan Hill, such an accomplished novelist herself, it’s all done with passion, fun, and insight.

Needless to say, I loved it. I learned a lot, too. It encouraged me to try writers I’ve overlooked so far (John Wain, for example) and to give another try to novelists I’ve found difficult or intimidating (such as Virginia Woolf). It made me think about books and reading in a new way. What more can I ask from a book than that?

On Monday afternoon I took the train from London to Brussels. The following day I flew from Brussels to Rome and the day after that flew back to London. Nothing special about that you might think, but yet a unique and emotional experience for me because most likely it’s the last time I’ll do it all as a citizen of the European Union.  Although I’m too young to remember much about the UK’s entry in 1973 into what everyone then called the EEC, I grew up believing in the “European ideal” and still do to this day.  Today is Brexit Day and, more than ever, I regret deeply the outcome of the referendum in 2016 and will never forgive David Cameron and his cabal for the stupidity, fear-mongering, and lies that led to it.

Sure it was easy to poke fun at the Brussels bureaucrats, to sneer at their occasionally ludicrous regulations and directives, and to complain about the tax burden. But the heart of the EU for me was always a treasured principle: the idea that removing barriers and encouraging easy movement across borders promoted understanding and peace. That idea is too strong to be broken by the idiocy of British politicians but it’s certainly vulnerable to ugly nationalism and xenophobia, signs of which can be found in so many European countries right now.

In practical terms Brexit means minor inconveniences for me and my generation. A different passport, or maybe more bureaucracy when I travel around the continent. It’s much more serious for my children. It’s my hope that over time their generation’s elected leaders will re-discover the high ideals that drove the formation of the EU.

I love to walk but I don’t walk to relax. Wherever I walk – along city streets or in the countryside – I find my mind races more than usual, bombarded by what I see and by the memories, speculations, and questions that the act of putting one foot in front of the other seems to stimulate.  Physical wandering provokes mental wandering. “While walking, the brain rages” as Werner Herzog puts it.

In the hard winter of 1974, Herzog walked from Munich to Paris to see his mentor Lotte Eisner, believing that Eisner, dangerously ill at the time, wouldn’t or couldn’t die if he set out to see her on foot. Strange? Yes, of course, but if you know Herzog’s films you’ll know he’s no stranger to strangeness. Even the title is puzzling. Who walks in ice (instead of on it)?

It’s not easy to classify this short book. Journal, travelog, fairy tale, and meditation all wrapped together in one remarkable, engrossing package. It’s presented in the form of a diary but it’s a diary in which observations are entwined with fantasies and imaginings. It is, above all, an exercise in magical thinking and perhaps a very successful one. Lotte Eisner lived for nine years after Herzog’s pilgrimage.

For anyone familiar with French’s earlier novels set in and around the Dublin murder squad, The Wych Elm (or The Witch Elm if you’re reading the American edition) may come as a surprise, welcome or otherwise. At 500 pages, it’s a wordier, baggier book than what came before. More ambitious, more obviously “literary”, it’s a novel in which French liberates herself from the constraints normally imposed by the traditional “police procedural”.

Her preoccupations here are trauma and recovery and the relationship between memory and identity. But above all this is a novel about families. Their secrets, lies and betrayals, but also their power to heal and repair.  If all this sounds dry, it isn’t. French, like all good novelists, knows about pace, plot, and tension and how to work them all to avoid her narrator’s slightly self-obsessed musings becoming dull. Having said that, French’s editor ought to have told her to prune the manuscript hard. It’s far too long and midway through it I found myself longing for her to move things along a little more quickly.

There’s something very compelling about reading a contemporaneous account of an historical event. I still remember how much I enjoyed dipping into The Faber Book of Reportage when I first bought it more than thirty years ago and reading eyewitness accounts of events like the funeral of Queen Victoria or the assassination of Gandhi. It felt like raw history with all its immediacy and urgency and with none of the layers of explanation, interpretation, and analysis. In Travelers in the Third Reich, Julia Boyd had the simple but brilliant idea of telling the story of Germany between 1919 and 1945 exclusively through the experiences of visitors: foreign eyewitnesses to the events of those momentous years.  Tourists, exchange students, diplomats, journalists, and many others give us, through their letters, postcards, reports and articles, firsthand accounts of what it was like to be in Germany during the fall of the Weimar Republic, the ascent of Hitler, and the Second World War.

The virulent antisemitism that found its most grotesque and tragic expression in the death camps started to appear in Germany almost before the ink was dry on the Treaty of Versailles.  From the moment people started to express hateful anti-Jewish propaganda, others (Germans and foreigners) began to look the other way or find excuses. At every stage – from the appearance of antisemitic posters in 1919 to the boycotting and destruction of Jewish-owned stores in the early 1930s to the forcible removal of Jews from their homes and to their systematic murder – ordinary witnesses found ways to exonerate the guilty and to explain their hideous ideology.  What made it possible for so many to be so complicit? Fear of communism. Ancient, deeply buried and hideous anti-Jewish tropes. Guilt about how the allies had punished the German nation at the end of the First World War. Wilful naivety. The superficial glamor of the Nazis with their choreographed festivals, uniforms and music. The willingness to excuse anything as long as economic growth was achieved and sustained.

It’s all complicated but some simple things became shockingly clear as I read all these accounts. Some people don’t or can’t see what’s right in front of them. Some people always want to believe that decency will prevail. Some people care only about themselves. Some people are frightened to speak up. Some people support disgusting ideologies.  Edmund Burke summed it up as long ago as the 1770s. “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing“.

Compelling stories of the past ought to make us think about the present. We live in a time when political leaders feel no hesitation about spreading horrible lies about ethnic and religious groups. Attacks against Jews and Muslims are on the rise almost everywhere. Recent research showed that 55% of Americans don’t know how many perished in the Holocaust. Anyone who thinks that what happened in Germany eighty years ago couldn’t be repeated isn’t really much different from those who strolled around Munich and Berlin in the 1930s and 1940s admiring the pretty window boxes and smart uniforms.