Peggy Guggenheim began to exhibit her celebrated art collection to the public as early as 1951, but initially only on a seasonal basis.  It wasn’t until after she died in 1979 that her home in Venice, the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, was opened full-time to visitors.  I hadn’t realized until very recently that she had tried on previous occasions to open galleries but with limited success.  A small exhibition currently in London at Ordovas tells the story of a gallery she opened in Cork Street, Guggenheim Jeune, in 1938.  The venture survived only eighteen months, closing in December 1939.  It’s easy enough to understand the reasons why it failed.  Art lovers in London had more pressing concerns in those early days of the war. It’s also possible that the artists that Guggenheim patronized and promoted in those days were simply too radical for the collectors of the time.  Cocteau, Brancusi, Calder, Schwitters and the like must have seemed shockingly avant-garde in the late 1930s.

The Ordovas exhibition in London displays some of the Guggenheim Jeune catalogs from the period alongside a small number of paintings and sculptures by two artists loved and exhibited by Peggy Guggenheim in those early days, Jean Arp and Yves Tanguy.  I’m no great admirer of either, but even eighty years on it’s hard not to be impressed by Guggenheim’s vision and courage.  She wasn’t daunted by the failure of the London gallery. She decamped first to Paris and then to the south of France, buying vast quantities of contemporary art with her inheritance.  Her purchases, works by Picasso, Matisse, Dali, Klee, Magritte and other modern masters, became the core of the collection that eventually opened decades later in Venice and the permanent monument to an extraordinary collector and patron.

I had been wading slowly and somewhat joylessly through a complex and dense novel (more about that later) when I decided I needed something different to read. Something lighter and more accessible, something that felt less like duty.  Nicci French (the husband and wife team responsible for, among other things, the Frieda Klein series of mystery novels) had just published a standalone story called The Lying Room.  That would do nicely, I thought, and I was right.

Neve Connolly shows up at her lover’s apartment in London only to find him brutally and recently murdered. She sets about cleaning and tidying the place with no other thought than to remove evidence of the affair, fearing what it would do to her family if it’s exposed. But Neve isn’t the only one with something to hide ….

Good mystery writers are no different from good writers working in any other genre. The best share a fascination with human behavior and motivation and are skilled at creating a fictional world in which to study such things.  Nicci French is especially good at ordinary relationships – spouses, partners, friends, siblings, and colleagues – and at understanding the tensions, complexities, loyalties and falsehoods that hold them together, whether out in the open or hidden below the surface. S/he is also exceptionally good at domestic detail; the family dinners and outings, the work meetings, and the college reunions. In other words, the commonplace. Parts of the plot of The Lying Room might stretch credulity, but never the characters.  They’re very well drawn and are entirely believable. The novel overall was a delight. Now it’s time to get back to the other one.

Just like tens of millions of other Britons, Ian McEwan is angry about Brexit. Anger, controlled and focused, is a necessary ingredient for good satire.  Neatly reversing Kafka’s famous story, McEwan’s latest book opens with a cockroach waking from sleep to discover it has been transformed into a man. And not just any man, but the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland tasked with delivering “Reversalism”.

Early reviews of the novella, many of them po-faced, seem to me to have missed the point entirely.  The Cockroach is satire, suffused with anger and hot from McEwan’s keyboard. It’s not subtle, but it’s not supposed to be. It’s occasionally very funny, but its purpose isn’t to make us laugh. It’s not “balanced”; it has no interest in demonstrating any understanding of, or sympathy for, the motives of those who support leaving the EU. McEwan’s fictional cockroaches are ruthless, cruel, vindictive and, most of all, completely without principle.  Any resemblance to actual cockroaches, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Very few tourists go to Lebanon, so it was hardly surprising that I was one of only a handful of visitors to Jeita Grotto recently.  The grotto (Jeita means “roaring water” in Aramaic) is on the outskirts of Beirut and comprises two separate but interconnected limestone caves. Access to the upper chamber is via a short cable car ride after which a specially constructed pedestrian walkway takes you to the cave. The lower chamber can only be explored by boat (and is sometimes inaccessible when the water levels rise).

I had read nothing about the grotto before my visit, so I was unprepared for its beauty and grandeur. Nature and time have crafted a unique monument, a vast limestone artwork, a living sculpture of fantastical shapes – all illuminated to show it at its finest. No pictures are allowed (cell phones and cameras have to be deposited at the entrance); a sensible policy that somehow enhances the natural silence of the place and deepens a visitor’s sense of wonder. (Other attractions ought to adopt this approach).

Jeita is a hidden, subterranean jewel, a place made all the more remote by Lebanon’s troubled recent history.  Don’t miss it if you find yourself in that part of the world.

I have wanted to see Beirut for a very long time.  It always seemed to me to be one of those places people told stories about.  Stories of a lost golden age when it was “the Paris of the Middle East”, a city where French and Arab cultures met and mixed. In recent years people have told less glamorous stories about Beirut. The civil war that ravaged Lebanon from 1975 to 1990 and the city’s past association with violent extremism gave (and still give) to Beirut a whiff of danger that it finds hard to eradicate. Perhaps it was no surprise that I felt both excited and anxious when I boarded the short flight from Amman recently.

After crisscrossing Beirut for two days, I left feeling overwhelmed by its contrasts. There’s certainly no shortage of sophistication and chic. The downtown souks, the luxury car showrooms, the fancy restaurants at Raouché, speak of an affluence that only a tiny number of Beirutis can enjoy.  The refugee camp in Chatila, not far from the airport, tells a different story. The city’s Armenian neighborhood, Bourj Hammoud, with its narrow, crowded streets lined with jewellery stores are a short drive from Verdun and its American-style malls. Checkpoints that slow the traffic to a crawl alert you as you enter areas controlled by Hezbollah. Buildings hollowed out by war, their masonry pitted by bullets, can be seen everywhere, reminders of not-so-distant conflict and symbols of what could happen again all too easily.

The Beirutis I met, so generous and welcoming, so delighted to see foreigners in their city, wanted to talk about things that matter. Memories of the civil war, fears of future conflict in the region, the co-existence of Druze, Shia, Sunni, and Christians in their small, crowded country: these were the topics of conversation as they loaded my plate with the wonderful dishes for which Lebanon is famous. The Lebanese I met, many with deep connections to far-off places such as France and Canada, all spoke of a deep love of their homeland and of a real sadness about what it has suffered in recent times.

I’m told visitors are coming back to Lebanon, drawn by the same stories I’d heard and by the chance to see wonders such as Jeita grotto, Baalbek and the Cedars of God. The numbers are small, most likely because of the savage conflict in neighboring Syria and the political tension that never seems to loosen its grip on the region. I can’t wait to return for a longer stay.

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.