For me there’s one simple and true test of a great literary biography.  Does it lead you (or lead you back) to the subject’s work?  By this test, Jonathan Bate has succeeded in writing an outstanding biography.  Before picking up the book it had been many years since I had read or listened to Ted Hughes, but Bate’s close engagement with the poetry encouraged me to go back to what had once been familiar work.

Bate’s compelling and persuasive account of Hughes’s work and life initially had the support of the poet’s notoriously sensitive estate.  The fact that the support was withdrawn says a great deal more about Hughes’s executors than it does about the book.

Surely they can’t have expected an exclusively “literary” study?   It hardly seems plausible that they didn’t understand the extraordinarily intimate connection between the life and the work.  More likely they were unhappy with some of the “revelations” about Hughes’s personal life.  They shouldn’t have been anxious.  Bate – a renowned literary scholar – is a scrupulously fair biographer and a critical admirer.  Even-handedness was in short supply in some earlier accounts of Hughes’s life, with many biographers (and others) eager to make him “responsible” (whatever that means) for the suicides of Sylvia Plath and Assia Wevill.  Ted Hughes has had to wait a long time for impartiality.

The central premise of the book is that Ted Hughes emerged as a poet of myths and archetypes but very gradually over a period of nearly forty years found a more personal and elegiac voice as he discovered ways to transmute his tragic personal experience – most particularly the suicide of Sylvia Plath – into verse of extraordinary power and appeal.  Bate makes the case persuasively, though I still believe some of the earliest poems are among the best written by Hughes. Whatever one makes of Hughes the man or Hughes the poet, this compelling account of his life and work is going to stand as the authoritative biography – authorized or not – for a very long time.

“It’s my suspicion that no poem can be a poem that is not a statement from the powers in control of our life, the ultimate suffering and decision in us.  It seems to me that this is poetry’s only real distinction from the literary forms that we call “not poetry””.  Ted Hughes.

“I personally couldn’t care less about a bunch of bottles – but I’m sure glad Morandi could”.  Chuck Close.

I once visited Morandi’s small studio in Bologna. It was something of a pilgrimage for me because I had loved his calm, meditative paintings of simple domestic objects for many years.  There can be few painters with such a recognizable style, a style applied to such a narrow range of subjects.

This small exhibition at the Center for Italian Modern Art (CIMA) focused on Morandi’s paintings from the 1930s, a relatively unproductive decade for the painter and one in which he completed fewer than a hundred paintings. Work from that era is mostly held in private collections and only rarely exhibited publicly.  It was wonderful to see these paintings, a reminder of how an artist’s repeated engagement with familiar objects can provoke a much wider and deeper contemplation.

CIMA opened only two years ago and is a great addition to New York’s gallery scene. It’s something of a secret treasure.  It occupies the fourth floor of a nondescript building in SoHo and only visitors with an appointment are admitted.  Once inside, a large, elegant gallery, all clean, white lines provides a lovely setting for paintings and sculpture.

Millions of voices were silenced by the Holocaust, leaving millions of stories untold and millions of memories never shared.  The murdered multitude who will never bear witness speak through the testimonies of those who survived and recorded their experiences.  The literature of the Holocaust speaks, weeps, and remembers for the millions who will never again speak, weep, or remember.  That’s its power.  Every elegy, unique in itself, is sung by millions of voices we will otherwise never hear.  The soloist is a choir.  What’s individual is also communal.

Night is Elie Wiesel’s account of the year he spent as a teenager in Auschwitz-Birkenau and Buchenwald, a year in which he lost his mother, father, and sister to the Nazis’ crematoria.  You may have read, as I have, many accounts of those years – the forced marches, the hunger, the beatings, and the systematic extermination of millions of Jews – but nothing can prepare you for Wiesel’s short memoir.

It’s impossible to find the words to describe how powerful, moving and beautiful Night is.  It’s a work of art, not just of reportage.  It should be read by everyone, preferably in Marion Wiesel’s translation and with Francois Mauriac’s original introduction from 1958.  Books such as these can change lives.  If we let them.  If we reflect and take their message deep inside ourselves.  If we do more than mourn and remember, but also take action in a world that has given us and continues to give us so many new horrors: apartheid, countless wars, genocides, and the forced migration of millions of innocent people.

“For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living.  He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory.  To forget would not only be dangerous but offensive: to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.”

I last read The Bell Jar in February 1980.  I know that because the date is penciled into the faded, yellowed paperback I picked from my bookshelves recently.  I’m not sure why I chose to re-read it now.  It may be because Sylvia Plath has been on my mind recently.  I’m reading and enjoying Jonathan Bate’s biography of her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, in which she features prominently.  (More about that another time).  Or perhaps it was because I realized I couldn’t remember a single thing about a novel that is supposed to be harrowing and unforgettable.  Thirty-six years since my first encounter seemed like as good a time as any to re-engage with it.

Several things surprised me.  I had forgotten the dominant tone – the controlled, but intense bitterness – and how extraordinarily angry a book it is, considering how young Plath was at the time. (She was only 30 years old when it was first published under a pseudonym in 1963). It strikes me now, though it didn’t in 1980, as the work of a very young writer.  I closed the novel for the last time feeling impressed and disappointed at the same time.  There is some wonderful and very unsettling writing in it and beautiful, startling imagery, but it also feels rushed, like something the author needed to excrete urgently.  Her true voice – frenzied and cynical – found its perfect expression in the late poems.  The Bell Jar feels like a dry run, someone testing how their final, prolonged scream might sound.

The depiction of war (and other types of violence) is so casual in our culture that we need to be reminded by artists of all kinds what suffering it inflicts on individual lives and what that suffering really feels like.  War kills and maims individual people. Individuals just like me and just like you. It destroys the homes of individuals, robs individuals of their loved ones, their health, their security, and sometimes their sanity.  War is organized fighting between groups or nations, but what are nations and groups if they’re not collections of individual lives?

War and its scorching impact on the individual is the subject of so much of Pat Barker’s work.  Noonday completes her latest war trilogy, concluding what was started with Life Class and Toby’s Room.  The first two novels were set during The Great War.  Noonday finds the same characters twenty-five years later in London during the Blitz, but the long and dark shadow of The Somme can still be felt.  War in Barker’s novels is a live, looming presence – something hot, fetid, and suffocating.  It insinuates itself into people’s thoughts, feelings, and actions just as devastatingly as it destroys bodies and buildings.  It paralyzes the mind and spirit as well as the body.  Her description of London in 1940 is searing.  Corpses strewn on the rubble after the nighttime air raids.  Orphaned children wandering the streets.  The crowded bomb shelters.  The terror, the resignation, the exhilaration, and the routine heroism of individuals in war.

There’s some unusually powerful writing in Noonday, but it’s a flawed novel.  The plot relies too much on coincidence and Elinor’s and Paul’s characters don’t develop or rise from the page as realistically as they did in the earlier books. The introduction of Bertha adds almost nothing to the story and feels tentative. But Barker’s singular achievement here, just as in her previous Regeneration trilogy, is the truthful and necessary depiction of war and the havoc it wreaks in the lives and loves of real people.

I think it was the very end of 1994 – just weeks before his death – when I met David Kindersley, one of the world’s greatest typographers and letter-cutters, for the one and only time.  I had traveled to Cambridge from London for a job interview.  It had gone well and after my meeting I had spent a little time visiting the Fitzwilliam Museum where I picked up in the gift shop some postcards, one of which was an example of letter cutting by a craftsman called David Kindersley.  I had never heard of him but the typeface reminded me of the great artist and typographer Eric Gill, whose work I had admired for many years.

A short time after leaving the Fitzwilliam, wandering around the streets of Cambridge before catching the train back to London, I stumbled across Kindersley’s workshop on Chesterton Road.  It seemed fateful somehow.  I was standing outside when a strikingly attractive woman came out of the studio to ask if she could help me.  I mumbled something about Eric Gill, buying the postcards, and finding the workshop when she invited me inside.  There, on the ground floor, was all the apparatus of the letter cutter’s craft: tools, preparatory drawings, unfinished work in stone, slate, and glass.  I remarked, as the woman gave me a quick tour of the workshop, about how the work reminded me of Gill.   “Hardly surprising.  David was one of Eric Gill’s apprentices”, said the woman.  It felt like I was touching history.

The woman (Lidia, David’s wife and a very accomplished letter-cutter in her own right) invited me to meet David who lived in the apartment above the workshop.  He was by this time 80 years old, a little frail physically but full of life and conversation.  I remember an enchanted afternoon and extraordinary hospitality.  Reminiscences of Eric Gill, samples of work from David’s apprenticeship, and homemade soup – often interrupted by David’s very young and very noisy sons.  I thought about those boys a few weeks later when I read the obituary for David in The Times.  David’s alphabets, which Lidia gave me on a subsequent meeting, are now framed and hanging in my home.  They’re a constant reminder of a very special afternoon and an unforgettable encounter with a great craftsman.

On a recent flight from Dubai to London I made the mistake of watching a documentary about the Burj Al Arab, one of Dubai’s most costly hotels.  The reverential tone of the commentary was nauseating.  It helped me realize again how all ideologies distort language for their own purposes.  The ideology of Consumerism is no exception.  Like all ideologies it takes words with which we are familiar – words like luxury, opulence, and exclusivity – and gives them a moral gloss.  Needless to say, there’s no place in the lexicon of Consumerism for terms such as vulgarity, decadence, or greed, the words that come to a sane person’s mind when learning you can buy a cappuccino sprinkled with tiny fragments of gold leaf at the Burj Al Arab.  It’s important to stay on message.

Dubai is a relative newcomer to the list of places where the devotees of lavish spending like to congregate, but what it lacks in pedigree it makes up for in commitment to the cause of profligacy.  It makes Monte Carlo look restrained.  There’s something very fitting about the fact that Dubai grew out of the desert.  It remains arid and strangely lifeless in spite of all the effort and money spent to convince us that it’s sophisticated and elegant.

My third book of 2016 proved to be a big disappointment, providing further evidence, if any were needed, that book reviews can’t always be trusted.  I rarely read crime fiction and generally trust only a handful of authors working in the genre who have written books I’ve admired in the past.  Susan Hill, Henning Mankell, and George Pelecanos are good examples.  When I try unfamiliar names, trusting reviews rather than my own judgment, as I did in this case, I find that I’m often disappointed.

The problem here was a simple enough one.  I didn’t care at all about any of Sophie Hannah’s protagonists.  Not a single one of them was likable, interesting, or credible.  For me, no amount of plot trickery can compensate if I don’t care about what happens to the characters.  Whodunnit just isn’t enough.

It’s hard to imagine a better time to see Petra than on an early winter’s morning, as I did recently.  Getting up in Amman at 4am may not be much fun, but seeing the magnificent “red-rose city half as old as time” (and a UNESCO World Heritage site) without summer’s intense heat and suffocating crowds more than compensated for the early start.  I had the site to myself for more than an hour and that made the experience all the more special and memorable.

I eventually met someone who I assumed – wrongly – was a visitor and asked for her advice on which of the many paths to take.  In an unmistakable Australian accent, the woman informed me she was walking to work, had married a Bedouin tribesman, and had lived in a small village near the site for 37 years.  She suggested that I sit and enjoy the silence.  It proved to be great advice.  Later, browsing the bookshop in Amman airport, I found her autobiography.  A strange encounter and even stranger coincidence.

It must have been 1986 or 1987 when I first met the photographer, John Minihan.  It wasn’t a chance encounter.  The truth is I practically stalked him.  I had been completely captivated by a portrait of Samuel Beckett that John had taken in Paris and that had recently appeared in one of the UK’s Sunday newspapers.

I was determined to get a print of the picture, but finding John proved surprisingly difficult.  Let’s not forget this was the pre-Google era.  After weeks of persistent research, I was finally directed to the photo desk of the Evening Standard where John was working at the time.  He couldn’t have been more charming and agreed to meet me in a private club popular with journalists and photographers.  He gave me prints of some of the beautiful pictures he had taken of Beckett and told me lovely stories of their many encounters in Paris and London.

John became very well known for his Beckett portraits, but it’s his famous picture of Diana Spencer, taken many years before she became Princess Di, that is his single best-known work.

Many of John’s portraits of Beckett are masterpieces.  Richard Avedon, Jane Bown, and others took wonderful individual pictures of him, but John’s corpus amounts to a sustained and very intimate insight into the great writer.  It was through the Beckett pictures that I first got to see what I think is John Minihan’s best work, the photographs  he has taken over more than 40 years in Athy, the town in County Kildare in which he was raised.  Stunning images from an outstanding photographer who was gracious, generous, and kind whenever we met.