Robert Graves

1929

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The autobiography of one of the four main English-language poets of the First World War (the others being Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Rupert Brooke) offers a fascinating insight into the first-hand experience of war – if a less fascinating insight into the poet's life.

Graves is clear about the trauma, dirt, terror, and suffering of the war. His description of a battle at Loos sums-up the mindlessness of the experience: waiting, anticipation, false starts, screwing-up courage only to be knocked back. It's hard to imagine anyone going through that and not being exhausted by the adrenaline. On the way he meets Sassoon, as well as Thomas Hardy, TE Lawrence, and various other figures of the literary times.

The rest of the book is less satisfying: his boyhood at Charterhouse perhaps prepared him for the capricious nature of war, in a way, while his later experiences at Oxford and elsewhere added little to my appreciation, apart from summoning-up a vague jealousy at some of his descriptions of intellectual society just after the War: it's hard to imagine many of the conversations he describes happening now, with their deep classical allusions and assumptions of erudition on all sides.

Least satisfying is that to autobiography of a poet reveals so little about his poetic frame of mind. Graves doesn't explore the what it means to be a poet, although he alludes to the "poetic tendency" often enough. It's a surprisingly unrevealing book at a personal level: perhaps less intimately revealing than his poetry itself, in fact, but worth reading for its historical context.

3/5. Finished 24 January 2015.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Kai Bird

2005

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Hard to imagine a better scientific and political biography.

I had a rough understanding of Oppenheimer's story: his management of the Manhattan project, his victimisation during the McCarthy witchhunts, and his directorship of the Institute for Advanced Study. What I hadn't realised was his own scientific standing: his association with Born, Bathe, Dirac, Heisenberg, and others, and the fact that his own contributions rank alongside theirs, including his first formulation of the equations describing black holes. Despite not entering at all into the technicalities, the authors make clear how deeply embedded he was into the initial descriptions and elaborations of quantum mechanics.

The book is squally strong when dealing with the development of the bomb and with the aftermath, the lead-up to Oppenheimer's trial as a security risk brought about in part by his principled opposition to the development of the "Super", or hydrogen bomb. The treatment is well-balanced, making no attempt to hide the part Oppenheimer played in his own downfall (although still being somewhat at a loss to describe many elements of his behaviour).

The picture that emerges is of a profound scientist and humanist who was destroyed at least in part by his own fragilities and complexities: aspects of his character that undoubtedly helped in his greatness as we as leading to his downfall. That this element of Greek tragedy would have been deeply appreciated by Oppenheimer himself only adds to the sense of a contribution spoiled by the actions of men who failed to understand what drove him and what he could give.

5/5. Finished 01 January 2015.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Barney Sloane

2011

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A detailed examination of the Plague in London in 1349 and subsequently. Sloane finds a novel way to track the progress of the Black Death, using wills and ecclesiastical replacements to identify "hot spots" that can be tentatively projected out to the rest of the population. While being very careful to recognise the limits of this approach, he arrives at a mortality rate of around 45% of London's population.

One surprising snippet from the book is the surprisingly few children couples were having in the 14th century: not much higher than in modern times in Europe, in essence, whereas I'd expected something closer to rates in modern Africa.

The book has a good bibliography into modern Plague research, which (given I'm reading this for professional purposes as well as just for interest) will come in handy.

4/5. Finished 24 December 2014.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Niall Ferguson

2012

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In a great fan of Niall Ferguson's writing and scholarship, but this isn't one of his better works. It's not that there's anything at all wrong with his central message that many of the institutions that have raised-up western civilisation are being undermined. The problem I have is the fatalism with which he presents these problems, and the notion that it is somehow pre-ordained by historical processes: a view that feels almost Marxist without the positive expected outcome.

I think this is a book that cries out for a longer treatment or a second volume, an analysis and comparison of other approaches to societal problems, or an analysis of the ways in which the tensions that Ferguson sees building up might be released, even if those comparisons and processes would inevitably end in disaster.

2/5. Finished 17 December 2014.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)