Julian Caldecott's 3 favorite reads in 2024

• 2023
• 2024

Snyder explains how each powerful cultural system maintains itself with pervasive stories of why it is inevitable. Values, traditions, technologies and philosophies all support the feeling that it is the only possible beneficial outcome of past events and 'human nature'. In its prime, what Snyder calls the 'politics of inevitability' prevail - the sense that the laws of progress are known, and that there is no alternative. But a failure to renew itself, to deliver utopia, or to protect its people from environmental degradation can undermine the system. Then a new politics arise, in which practitioners exploit fear, manufacture crisis and manipulate emotion. Those who do this most effectively become oligarchs, who specialise in spinning lies that terrify some and reassure others. Snyder observes that "in the 2010s, one such person, Vladimir Putin, escorted another, Donald Trump, from fiction to power.” If the 2020s are not to end the American republic, it will be because Snyder's warnings have helped the system find a way to renew itself based on joy and bravery rather than doom and fear.

Adam Nicolson is an astonishing polymath who writes like an angel. In How to Be, he resurrects the lives of key actors in the first flowering of ancient Greek thought. These were people of a complex geography of islands, ports and trade routes in the eastern Mediterranean, from coastal Turkey to southern Italy and Sicily. He shows how this geography shaped their mindsets and ideas on existence (ontology), experience (phenomenology), the afterlife (eschatology), ethics (axiology), and much else. In Nicolson's hands their ideas feel fresh again, and the individuals as startling as they must have been in life. First up are Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes, each with their own 'everything': water, apeiron, or air. Then there are Sappho with her message of love and courage, Archilochus the freelance warrior-poet, and Xenophanes the first anti-romantic. Heraclitus offers us life as 'transforming blaze', Pythagoras leads his cult as a trouser-wearing guru, social reformer and conman, and eventually we reach a safe harbour, the 'warm sun' of Empedocles. Summing up, Nicolson shares his imagination of what they would have been like at a dinner party, from the worst (Heraclitus) to the best (Sappho). And he explains the nine lessons that we might have taken from a symposium involving all of them. A book of wonders.

This is a series of detailed, magical, emotionally-potent stories from the life and afterlife of Cuthbert, unofficial patron saint of northern England, and Cuddy to his followers. Born in about 634, within 30 years he was known throughout the Scottish Borders and Northumbria as a traveller, preacher and nature-lover. Joining the community at Lindisfarne, Cuddy served there for more than a decade before retreating to offshore islands where he died in 687. A century later the Vikings came and the monks of Lindisfarne fled, taking Cuddy's uncorrupted, sainted corpse with them. In dialogue with Cuddy's spirit, a 200-year vision quest leads the monks to Durham, where they found a magnificent cathedral to house his relics. Every step of the quest, every stone of the building, and every great event around and within Durham Cathedral, offers a way for Myers to tell a story of wonder and subtle redemption. Likewise for the occasions, every few generations, when someone had the idea of digging Cuddy up to see for themselves. So his bones are scattered and lost, but the ghost of the ideal challenges and transforms each intruder, even into our own trivial and polluted times.