With temperatures in the mid-nineties and humidity close to 100%, my walk from Tanjong Pagar to Little India wasn’t as much fun as it should have been. A cold mango lassi in one of the many restaurants on Sarangoon Road revived me and I carried on my trek around the neighborhood.

It’s not an area bursting with must-see monuments or buildings, though Sri Veeramakaliamman temple, with its facade crowded with colorful statues, is well worth a look. Dedicated to the goddess Kali, the temple has been the heart of Singapore’s Hindu community since the 19th century.  What makes Little India such a fun excursion is its vividness, color, and energy.  Shops selling saris and the bright yellow gold jewellery loved by Indians all over the world line Sarangoon Road, and on the Saturday I visited the pavements were crowded with young families heading out to lunch in the scores of South Indian vegetarian restaurants in the neighborhood.  Visitors to Singapore – myself included – often complain that its urban development has stripped away the traditional ethnic character of the city and leveled its older buildings to make way for bland office and apartment buildings.  Thankfully, that isn’t true of Little India.

Hatchards’ bookstore at St. Pancras station in London is small, but its staff have a talent for displaying lesser-known titles in a way that catches the eye of browsers like me.  They seem especially interested in promoting neglected classics and on more than one occasion I’ve discovered a book I’ve ended up loving and recommending to friends.  Reunion, a slim novella by Fred Uhlman first published in 1971, is one such gem.

The story is set in Germany in 1932. Two teenage schoolboys, innocent and unworldly, become firm friends. One, Hans, is Jewish, the son of a doctor. The other, Konradin, is a Protestant from a distinguished, aristocratic family.  All is innocence and purity. It’s Eden before the fall, the calm before the hurricane that would transform the world. But even in their sheltered, civilized town, disturbing rumors reach them from Berlin that Germany is changing and that it’s no longer safe to be Jewish.

The power of Reunion, a short and simply told story, is very difficult to describe.  All I can say is that in fewer than a hundred pages it speaks of innocence, awakening, horror, and some kind of redemption from a time in our recent history that all of the world’s literature will never explain adequately.  The rest I will leave to Rachel Seiffert’s elegant Afterword to the novel. “It is rare to use the word perfect to describe a book.  I don’t hesitate here”.  Neither do I.

The Louvre Abu Dhabi opened in November 2017 and is situated on Saadiyat Island, a neighborhood in Abu Dhabi that will eventually  house a complex of major cultural institutions, including a new Guggenheim museum.  The building, designed by the French architect Jean Nouvel, is simply wonderful.  A structure of white cubes dazzles the eyes, reflecting (as it inevitably does) the bright Gulf sunshine, and is crowned by an intricate webbed roof that makes you think of palm fronds and Arabic calligraphy.  Inside it’s all cool, white space; a serene setting for a relatively small collection of art treasures from around the world.

The arrangement of the exhibits is loosely chronological, beginning with galleries dedicated to classical antiquity and ending with abstraction and modernism.  It’s easy enough to be snobbish about the “ready made” collection of masterpieces brought together in this extraordinary showcase.  A Leonardo here, a Delacroix there. An exquisite Torah scroll set next to a 14th century bible, and so on.  It feels like the collection of a fabulously wealthy benefactor determined to show off their buying power and the breadth (if not the depth) of their interests.  Museums can’t be hatched, fully formed.  They take decades, sometimes even centuries, to mature and to grow into their surroundings and the riches they display.  But they have to start somewhere.  It will be interesting to see how Louvre Abu Dhabi evolves and finds its natural shape. For now, we have been given a glittering jewel case filled with nothing but exquisite wonders.

David Jones is something of a puzzle.  How is it that a painter, poet, and engraver so deeply admired by the likes of Auden, Eliot, and Heaney remains so little known?  Why didn’t critical acclaim from his peers and contemporaries ever turn into wider recognition and popularity?  Thomas Dilworth’s meticulously researched and perfectly judged account of Jones’s life and work tries to answer those questions and it’s no fault of the biographer’s that he doesn’t quite succeed in doing so.

Born in south London in 1895, Jones concentrated initially on engravings, watercolors, and paintings in the first phase of his career which started when he returned from the trenches in 1918. (No other Great War poet or artist saw as much of the fighting as Jones).  He was associated with Eric Gill in the 1920s, emerging eventually from Gill’s shadow and the narrow and suffocating Catholicism of Gill’s guild of craftsmen. He turned more seriously to writing in the late 1920s, completing In Parenthesis in 1937 in spite of his devastating mental collapse (most likely a delayed reaction to what he saw and suffered in the Great War) in 1932.  A career spanning more than three decades followed, made possible in part by a period of psychotherapy, during which he attracted prestige and honors and built a tight network of close, loving friends. Poverty and the shadow of mental illness were never far away, however.

Dilworth’s slightly tentative conclusion at the end of this long and heavily illustrated biography that Jones “may be the foremost native British modernist” offers a clue to the neglect he has suffered. The fact is – and it’s strange this never seems to occur to his biographer – that Jones’s work is difficult. His most important written works, The Anathemata and In Parenthesis (“the best work on war in English”), are dense and rich in religious, historical, and classical allusions and symbols most likely to be beyond ordinary secular readers.  His paintings and watercolors, though beautiful, can also seem difficult to penetrate beneath their crowded, filigree-like surfaces.  His early engravings and lettering are the most accessible work he did.  David Jones won’t break into the mainstream.  He’ll most likely stay where he has always been: a major figure with a small audience.

No one who grew up in the UK in the 60s, 70s and 80s, as I did, could have been unaware of “the Troubles”, the terrible conflict between Irish Republicans and Loyalists that blighted Northern Ireland and occasionally spilled over to mainland England, claiming more than 3,500 lives.  Bombings, shootings, kidnappings, assassinations – this was the stuff of the nightly TV news in those years, punctuating a civil war that never seemed to end.  Say Nothing, written by an American journalist, approaches the history of the Troubles from an unusual angle by focusing mainly on one of its best known and most shocking incidents, the abduction by the IRA in 1972 of Jean McConville, a widow and mother of ten children. The cold-blooded kidnapping is used as the jumping-off point for a vividly told history of the conflict in which key figures in the Republican movement such as Gerry Adams, Dolours Price, and Brendan Hughes feature prominently.  Readers who know little or nothing about what happened in Ireland in this period couldn’t ask for a better introduction to the politics, important events, and some of the leading personalities, though it concentrates pretty much exclusively on the Republican side of the story.  The gradual move from armed conflict to negotiation and conventional politics – from the bomb to the ballot box – and the tensions that went with the journey from idealism to pragmatism are told very well here.

The carnage of those decades is long behind us. The social inequality that sparked the violence is mostly a thing of the past and Northern Ireland has been enjoying a long period of prosperity and stability.  But talk of introducing a “hard border” between the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland in the wake of Brexit has awoken old fears, not least of the possibility of a slow sliding back to tribalism and conflict.

A new staging of King Lear will open on Broadway shortly.  I saw a preview performance a few days ago.  Productions of this vast, intimidating classic aren’t particularly rare, so why is this new opening causing such a stir?  Partly because one of the greatest actors in modern times is taking on the leading role.  And that’s where things start to get interesting because this actor is a woman and that woman is Glenda Jackson.

I’m no theatre critic.  The cast was uneven and there’s no disguising the fact that King Lear, for all its magnificence and power, is a baggy and unwieldy monster to stage.  But Jackson’s performance was peerless; among the best I’ve ever seen.  Small, wiry, and appropriately ancient, she commands every inch of the stage and every second of the four hours she’s performing.  And not for a single one of those seconds does it seem strange that a woman should be playing the role of Lear.

It’s the summer of 1920 and Tom Birkin, still recovering from the horrors of the Great War and an unhappy marriage, arrives in a small village in the Yorkshire countryside to begin the work of uncovering a medieval wall painting in the local church. Over the course of one summer month, Birkin works hidden from sight on his scaffold, bringing into view inch by inch a masterpiece hidden for centuries. A stranger in a small, tightly knit community, he gradually finds acceptance and begins the process of recovering from brutality and sadness.

First published in 1980, the novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and later adapted as a film. I read it as a student when it first appeared and I was curious to see if I would enjoy it as much the second time around.  Beautiful and truthful, it’s a work of perfection, capturing brilliantly the melancholy of later life like the hint of autumn in a late summer’s day.

It was my local independent bookseller who recommended I read Territory of Light. She knows of my interest in Japan and we’d been talking about Murakami’s novels when she pointed out Yuko Tsushima’s story.  It was initially published in 1979 in twelve monthly installments in a Japanese literary magazine and now appears in a new translation by Geraldine Harcourt.

The short novel is narrated by a young woman who, when her husband walks out, is forced to raise her young daughter alone in Tokyo.  They move to a tiny, light-filled apartment above a shop to begin their new life.  There’s nothing rose-tinted here about the experience. The young mother drinks too much, yells at her daughter, and generally struggles to stop her life unraveling, but somewhere in the telling of this story something heroic emerges from the mundane details of an ordinary life.  Not much happens but there’s truth in the little that does.

Some of the pictures that Don McCullin took in war zones around the world are among the most well-known images of the 20th century.  Who can forget the shell shocked marine in Vietnam, the starving albino child in Biafra, or the grieving widows from the Cyprus civil war?  However familiar those pictures are, fifty years on they have lost none of their power to shock.  Walking around Tate Britain recently, it was deeply moving to see how the crowds of visitors were stunned into total silence by the war photographs. It seemed obvious that many of the visitors, especially the younger ones, had little or no experience of McCullin’s work, and the effect on many of them was clearly profound.  The galleries dedicated to his work in Congo, Vietnam, Cambodia, Nigeria, Northern Ireland, and elsewhere were eerily silent as people gathered around the images, immersed in a suffering most of us will never experience directly.  McCullin’s vocation has been to connect the rest of us to the horrors of the last fifty years, creating a heroic, truthful, and ultimately beautiful body of work that stands as remembrance, testimony, and indictment.

Henry Moore was a regular visitor to The Wallace Collection as a young art student in the 1920s and continued to find inspiration in its exquisite holdings of armour throughout his career. It’s clear in particular that the London museum’s beautiful Italian and German helmets from the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries moved him deeply and were the stimulus to produce the series of Helmet Heads he made between the early 1950s and mid 1970s. For the first and probably the only time, Moore’s work and the armour that inspired it have been exhibited side by side in the museum that clearly captivated him as a young sculptor.

Moore served in the First World War and knew all about the protective qualities of military helmets.  As he developed as an artist he became increasingly interested in the idea of the human head as a protective case for the psyche, strong but vulnerable, an image he appropriated later in his career in the work he did to support political causes such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

This exhibition at The Wallace Collection juxtaposed Moore’s drawings, paintings, maquettes, and models alongside all the finished Helmet Heads and the ancient armour that inspired them.  In doing so, it not only illustrated one of Moore’s lifelong interests and themes, but also the extraordinary beauty of the work that made him perhaps the greatest sculptor of the 20th century.