Non-fiction

Book of Barely Imagined Beasts… takes the bestiaries of the Middle Ages and uses them as the model for an attempt to tease out the way animals (and the ways we choose to think about them) are integral to our understanding of ourselves and our place in the world.

The finest travel narrative of the twentieth century can at last be read in full in the second decade of the twenty-first, some 80 years after the events it describes and two after its author, Patrick Leigh Fermor, died at the splendid age of 96. These temporal perspectives are worth noting at the outset because time – its passing and loss, its magical recuperation and crystallisation through the white magic of narrative – is at the heart of Leigh Fermor’s enchanting trilogy.

Night Games is not simply an exploration of a particular case. It lays bare football’s problematic sexual culture, which treats women as objects for men’s sexual use. It also highlights flaws within the legal processes that are in place to deal with rape cases. In a non-judgemental and engaging style, Krien presents her book as a consideration of the wider issues of rape, sex, sport and law.

His Stupid Boyhood is a memoir of the first eighteen years of Goldsworthy’s life and it shares several characteristics of his fiction. It also incorporates some striking poems, perhaps the best writing the book has to offer.

According to Rancière, modern democratic politics and modern non-classical arts are two manifestations of the same new, revolutionary social space. In this space, sensibility or sense perception (aisthesis in Greek: the origin of the word aesthetics) is shared and distributed across social divides, providing the impetus for both a new egalitarian politics and a new democratic regime of artistic appreciation and practice, which Rancière has called the aesthetic regime of art.

In earlier times, the sciences were studied in close relation to one another. Although we have been assiduously separating scientific fields… their links are more important now than ever before. And those who observe these links – Rachel Carson and Penny Olsen, the Cayleys, Mueller and the botanical artists of his time – are becoming as interesting to us as the birds and plants and environmental issues that have focussed their attention. What draws them and us to nature?

The vacillation between genius and madness characterises the tragic life story of Vaslav Nijinsky, undisputed star danseur of the twentieth century Russian Ballet… Nijinsky pushed the dramatic and athletic possibilities of classical ballet to a new level and rehabilitated the historically negative image of the dancing male through a highly charged sensuality.

In its six essays on five writers and a painter, his gaze operates like a form of scansion, picking up the long and short sounds (moments musicaux as Sebald calls them, via Schubert) in order to get behind the art in all its grief and consolation, to discover the differentiation between the life and the work.

The central concept of Against World Literature is the ‘Untranslatable’: a word or other semantic unit that cannot easily be rendered from one language to another, an ‘intransigent nub of meaning that triggers endless translating in response to its resistant singularity’.

The authors specifically exclude ‘culture’ from their account of ‘how universities can be useful to individuals and societies’ because they are trying to take a pragmatic view of the situation. This certainly presents a simpler view of the situation universities face – a less confusing view – but it is not pragmatic, because the benefits universities provide to individuals, communities and nations are civic as well as economic, and these two are related to each other.