This year's books, part 1

Short reviews of the 35 books I read in the first half of 2025

I enjoyed doing this last year, but the list was a little long, so this year I have decided to split it up into two six-month lists. Writing these mini-reviews was also good motivation to actually read even when I was busy at work. As before, I didn’t always read every page of every book, and some of those listed below are re-reads, but still I feel happy with my coverage.

There are fewer big ‘themes’ jumping out at me in my reading when compared to last year, though maybe those will emerge by the end of the year. But all the time I spent on the first part of R. F. Foster’s immense Yeats biography exerted an inevitable gravitational pull on my reading; I almost certainly read more of Yeats than any other author this year, and much of my other reading was done ‘against’ or ‘with’ Yeats, even where it might not seem obvious. (I have learned more about Neoplatonism this year than I ever thought I would know, and you can blame Yeats for that.) But I didn’t list Yeats himself among my books because he was on my list last year; even if re-reads are allowed, I thought that would be taking the hand.

Objectively speaking, the title of ‘best book I have read so far this year’ must go to Shakespeare’s sonnets. I cannot award it to anything else, that would be a denial of a basic truth. But that’s boring, you knew that already; a more interesting question is which book most exceeded my expectations. On this metric, it’s a tie between Gerard Manley Hopkins and Plotinus: both are writers who, if you’d asked me even two or three years ago, I would have sworn up and down I had no interest in ever reading; yet I loved both. Take what you will from that.

• Poetry and drama

  • W. H. Auden – The English Auden

  • Elizabeth Bishop – Poems

  • Anne Carson – Glass and God

  • T. S. Eliot – The Waste Land and other poems

  • Seamus Heaney – North

  • Seamus Heaney – Station Island

  • Gerard Manley Hopkins – The major works

  • Nick Laird – Feel Free

  • Hugh MacDiarmid – Selected poems

  • William Shakespeare – The Merchant of Venice

  • William Shakespeare – Sonnets

• Novels

  • Emily Brontë – Wuthering Heights

  • Jilly Cooper – Rivals

  • Daphne du Maurier – Rule Britannia

  • Barbara Kingsolver – Demon Copperhead

  • John le Carré – A Perfect Spy

• Biography, criticism and letters

  • Peter Abelard and Heloise – Letters

  • R. F. Foster – The Apprentice Mage

  • R. F. Foster – On Seamus Heaney

  • John Keats – The major works

  • Stephen MacKenna – Journal and letters

  • Katherine Rundell – Super-Infinite

• History

  • Ronan Fanning – Fatal Path

  • Malcolm Gaskill – Hellish Nell

  • Helen Graham – The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction

  • William Selinger – Parliamentarism

  • E. S. Turner – Roads to Ruin

  • Mark Williams – Ireland’s Immortals

  • Mark Williams – The Celtic Myths that Shape the Way We Think

• Philosophy

  • Plato – Phaedrus

  • Plato – Parmenides

  • Plotinus – Enneads

• Miscellaneous

  • Elizabeth David – English Bread and Yeast Cookery

  • Carl E. Linderholm – Mathematics Made Difficult

  • Hugh Thomas (ed.) – Madrid: A Travellers’ Companion

Poetry and drama

W. H. Auden – The English Auden (originally published 1927–1939)

I really like Auden’s sudden adjectives (‘nondescript’, ‘appalling’, ‘public’); I like his too-often sing-song-y rhythms less. But what I like most is that he is one of the few poets I’ve ever read who could use the words ‘free’ and ‘freedom’ to convey something like what I take the word to mean: a thick and deep and powerful idea, something that could plausibly be considered the chief virtue of human life. Precisely because this view of freedom is pretty close to the truth, and the truth is inevitably messy and ugly, it is much harder to fashion it into successful poetry than the cleanness—even cosiness—of both radicalism and reaction. And so it is a great achievement that Auden managed for a time to be, not just a poet who happened to be a (political) liberal, but a (comprehensive) liberal poet. This out-of-print volume is excellent, really worth seeking out on Abebooks in preference to the ‘collected’ or any of the currently-in-print ‘selecteds’, and it has a nice amount of Auden’s prose and criticism too; but it doesn’t reproduce Another Time in full, and if you’ve not already read that you should start there.

Elizabeth Bishop – Poems (originally published 1946–1976)

She is obviously one of the twentieth century’s most talented writers in English. But her aestheticism very often feels a bit for-itself. When she creates enough alienness in her scene, then she can grab me, but a non-negligible number of her poems leave me somewhat cold. I think of comparisons like ‘a foreign language film about migrant experience that got four stars from the Guardian’: perhaps abstractly impressive, but not concretely interesting. She gets to be a ‘poet’s poet’ because poets can learn from her craft even if the rest of us aren’t excited by the ends she applies that craft to. But I don’t want to act more down on Bishop than I actually am, though, and when she is good she is very good. I am thinking especially of ‘The Mothman’, ‘Crusoe in England’, and ‘In the Waiting Room’—which, incidentally, can be sung pretty well to the tune of ‘She’s in Broadstairs’ by Half Man Half Biscuit. I learned this year from watching Kevin Can Fuck Himself what the Worcester, MA accent sounds like, and even though Bishop obviously didn’t sound like that, it’s immense fun to read her poems with the accent (in the same manner as doing a Michael Caine to read Keats).

Anne Carson – Glass and God (originally published 1992–1995)

Like Wuthering Heights (below), in ‘The Glass Essay’ timings are (relatively) precise and they matter, in spite of the fact that the author does not explicitly signal this to her readers—in both cases, the author believed including timings at all to be signal enough. The tenses of Carson’s verbs, in turn, mean less than you might naïvely assume them to. Nothing else in this British-market collection is comparable to ‘The Glass Essay’, unfortunately. When Emily Wilson says that Carson’s best form is the paragraph, that she flourishes in disconnected, ‘wrong’ contrasts, I cannot but disagree. Carson writes brilliant disconnected paragraphs effortlessly, but her genuinely great work (and there is far too little of it) comes when she finds a way to synthesise and integrate her disparate ideas at length. Her integration is often surprising, ‘wrong’; but this ‘wrongness’ is exactly the source of the unpredictability, creativity, and brilliance of her best work. It’s disappointing, then, when Carson rests content with ‘wrongness’ that takes the form of not integrating disparate elements, letting them just stand beside each other with nothing deeper going on than the juxtaposition.

T. S. Eliot – The Waste Land and other poems (originally published 1915–1934)

There is a claim to be made that Frazer’s Golden Bough and Eliot’s Waste Land are together a perfect example of the two eternal moments of the ‘Western esoteric tradition’, (respectively) initiatory explanation and re-enchantment. Certainly, that is the tradition within which they fit, no matter awkward attempts by embarrassed anthropologists to make Frazer stand for ‘colonial Enlightenment rationalism’, and (more relevantly) no matter Eliot’s later attempts to escape the weight of this heritage by sublimating it into fusty Anglo-Catholicism. As intellectual history this is all very interesting, but I must admit my view that as poetry Eliot’s work never measured up to the promise of ‘Prufrock’: perhaps he was born in the wrong generation (though not in the way he came to think), because in his cultural moment, he could not be content with mastery at the level of the line; he had to explore grand free-verse structures, which—hot take—he did not have the discipline to master. (If you want to read something that is simultaneously funny and incredibly impressive, try Wendy Cope’s five-limerick imitation of The Waste Land.)

Seamus Heaney – North (1975)

‘Tribalism’ and ‘ethnic tension’ in Northern Ireland are phenomena to be explained, not themselves explanations. Yet it is far too easy to act as if our tribalism can be ‘chalked up’, taken for granted even by those who—like Heaney—maintain an ironic distance from it. North succeeds where its bog body and Viking analogies reveal deep emotional familiarity with ethnic attachment (‘Punishment’), but fails where Heaney mistakes this familiarity for analytic understanding (‘Act of Union’). His tendency to view ethnic violence in NI as cyclical and atavistic stems from Conor Cruise O’Brien and (indirectly, through Eliot, Yeats, and Graves-via-Hughes) Frazer’s Golden Bough.¹ And when Heaney name-drops the Cruiser in the later-excised Part II of ‘Whatever You Say, Say Nothing’, he reveals the inflated conception of poetry he drew from these ideas: if it all came down to tribal psychology, then poetry could ‘draw the line right through bigotry’. North’s self-deprecation stems not from a sense of poetry’s powerlessness, but from Heaney’s perceived failure to harness its (supposed) power. The shades of Station Island would help exorcise this idea, but Heaney wasn’t there yet in 1975.

Seamus Heaney – Station Island (1984)

In ‘The First Kingdom’ (a great example of the subtle depths that Heaney’s political thought reached), the poet has the mad king Sweeney ask: ‘And if my rights to it all came only | by their acclamation, what was it worth?’ This is the question for Station Island, but does not receive a straight answer. While the Purgatorio is the obvious point of comparison for the title poem, Heaney’s Lough Derg is more like Nighttown, for the shades are parts of his own mind telling him ‘nothing I had not known | already’. Their ideas are his ideas, and (in Yeatsian terms) their rhetoric is his poetry. No quarrel is resolved in Station Island, no solution uncovered to the problems of what Heaney elsewhere called ‘the government of the tongue’. Yet: Socrates in the Republic does not know the Good, but is enabled by his faith in it to make daring intellectual leaps; likewise, Heaney doesn’t learn knowledge of God, or of the good of poetry, at Lough Derg, but the dialectic of uncertainty (incertus) dazzles. The pinnacle of Heaney’s career, and a plausible candidate for the pinnacle of postwar English poetry.

Gerard Manley Hopkins – The major works (originally published 1918)

I had never read Hopkins before, because I thought I could guess from his nationality and profession exactly what he would be like—nostalgic, softly reactionary, countryside-Tory, Romantic in the worst way, and filled with patronising disgust towards the Irish who were the only reason he had a job at all. All of these guesses were correct, and also there’s a factor specific to Hopkins personally that put me off him: namely, that he might as well have been the house poet for the CPRE. But our prejudices often lead us astray even when they are rooted in truth, and it has been my immense pleasure to learn this year that Hopkins is the real fucking deal. If anything, he is underrated: for linguistic creativity and sheer poetic craft, I am not sure who matches him in English bar Shakespeare and maybe Yeats. Read him aloud and pay attention to how your mouth moves to make the words: ‘the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!’

Nick Laird – Feel Free (2019)

In place of a review I ask a question: what does Laird’s accent sound like to you? (You can listen to Laird here reading the excellent title poem from this collection and chatting to a fellow-countryman with a much less ‘degraded’ accent.) He has, from his time in England and presumably from his English wife, taken to dropping his R’s, and that combination of Northern Irish vowels and non-rhoticity makes my brain think ‘Scouse’. But obviously he doesn’t actually sound Scouse, that’s just my brain taking a shortcut, he actually sounds much weirder: if you hear him say his own name, the vowel sound in his surname might genuinely be unique among all the English speakers I have ever heard (?). Anyway: if I care this much about his accent, you can probably conclude that I think his poetry is worth looking at; the quality in this collection fluctuates (it’s a modern poetry collection, after all) but its peaks are really very very good. In particular, I am happy to rave about the title poem, any time.

Hugh MacDiarmid – Selected poems (originally published 1925–1957)

Sangschaw and Penny Wheep are very good—I love the astronomical imagery—but in many ways they should be seen as trial runs for A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. And after A Drunk Man MacDiarmid never again used his considerable talent productively enough: a combination of isolation, stubbornness, and insufficient self-criticism meant that subsequently he produced a few lines worth reading but not anything bigger that ought to have lasted. I fear that it has lasted only for crudely political reasons: Scottish (nationalist) critics badly want the ‘great Scottish (nationalist) poet’ to have actually been great, not merely good-with-squandered-potential. And while Sorley MacLean actually was great, most people can’t read him, so MacDiarmid gets slotted into the role.

William Shakespeare – The Merchant of Venice (c. 1597)

I think the only reading that makes sense of the seemingly disparate elements of this play is to interpret the Shylock plot as a fantasy of victory, that was very much meant to be enjoyed as a full part of the comedy. I read this alongside a performance in Edinburgh this year that, as is common, attempted to turn the happy ending into a more-than-ambiguous one; the attempt was (as always) fascinating, but ultimately undermined by the bawdy text, underlining that you need to see Shylock’s total disempowerment and humiliation as comedy. Portia reminds me of Athena in the Eumenides, and the resulting trial-scene parallels are very productive.

William Shakespeare – Sonnets (originally published 1609)

To my great surprise, my impulse in reviewing the Sonnets is to repurpose Basil Bunting’s great description of Pound’s Cantos, which (shockingly?) seems equally if not more apposite here:

There are the Alps. What is there to say about them?
They don't make sense. Fatal glaciers, crags cranks climb,
jumbled boulder and weed, pasture and boulder, scree,
et l’on entend, maybe, le refrain joyeux et léger.
Who knows what the ice will have scraped on the rock it is smoothing?

There they are, you will have to go a long way round
if you want to avoid them.
It takes some getting used to. There are the Alps,
fools! Sit down and wait for them to crumble!

Novels

Emily Brontë – Wuthering Heights (1847)

With apologies to Mark Corrigan (and no apologies to Ben ‘the shit’), it is neither a fucking love story nor a fucking fuck story. The whole ‘Heathcliff and Cathy off on the moors’ thing is literally a single paragraph; hell, Cathy is married within the first quarter of the book, the part of the story that people know is essentially just the setup. It is, I guess, a horror story? certainly I sympathise with Charlotte’s famous ‘I scarcely think it is’ comment more than most people seemingly do. In particular, I do not think we are supposed to find any happy resolution, even an imperfect or childish one, in Catherine junior teaching Hareton to read (note that she positions her hand to make him anticipate physical abuse); and Heathcliff’s death is as viscerally frightening as anything else in the novel. More complicated than I could ever have imagined, but if Victorian England produced a better novel, I do not know of it.²

Jilly Cooper – Rivals (1988)

It is, even for what it is, absurdly long and badly paced; and it is, even for when it was written, remarkably homophobic. But it’s worth looking into because Cooper enjoyed writing about upper-class status-entrenchment and yet (crucially!) didn’t expect a critically-engaged readership, so is able to frankly describe patterns of classism in a level of detail that similarly-posh but higher-brow writers tend to strategically avoid. In particular, Rivals is one of the most instructive books I’ve read about the sudden end to the century-long ‘othering’ of nth gen Irish Catholics (Ɐn≥1) in England, because Cooper feels no need to dissemble and can bluntly describe the calculation from English poshos in the 80s and 90s. Roughly: ‘However much I and the anti-Thatcher Yeats-quoting Irishman might instinctively despise each other, on reflection, the end of continual mass migration from Ireland means he no longer has the social infrastructure to be a threat to my status: his daughters will go to boarding school and learn to drop their R’s. And: he could be a useful ally against the nouveau riche English who are a threat.’ It’s interesting no matter that Cooper herself basically endorses this calculation.³

Daphne du Maurier – Rule Britannia (1972)

Alt-history where Britain crashes out of the EEC after only a few years, mumble mumble economic crisis, and then submits to a ‘union’ with the US that is more of a military occupation; it falls to an aging cultural icon living in Cornwall to lead the resistance against the Yanks. Such transparent self-insert wish-fulfilment ought to have been beneath a writer of du Maurier’s skill, and as a novel it’s pure shite, but her politics are so outlandish they provide the interest. The Matthew Arnold of it all, the Celtic fringe saving Saxon Britain from itself, is the opposite of subtle. But it takes our non-Cornish protagonist ‘Mad’, who is repeatedly and unsubtly compared to a Roman legionary, to whip the natives into shape and get the resistance going, as they are all too acclimated to subjugation. Thus, rather than Arnold’s balance between Saxon and Celt or a trad-nationalist full embrace of the Celt, du Maurier proposes synthesising Celtic spirit with continental Roman discipline—a statement on Cornwall’s place in Europe, or a somewhat awkward attempt to justify du Maurier’s own place in the Cornish nationalist movement?

Barbara Kingsolver – Demon Copperhead (2022)

Like its Dickensian source material both in its virtues and in its vices. It’s a page-turning easy read with compelling and larger-than-life characters; it’s also a work of moralising where the author is unanalytical and fundamentally confused about the object of their moralising. Just as Dickens excelled at the level of the brief vignette but had nothing to glue them together with except empty religiosity, so too does Kingsolver glue together successful vignettes with nothing more than progressive vibes. The narrative that emerges, in its lack of structure, undermines the themes Kingsolver wants to explore: she hopes to write a ‘critique of institutional poverty’, yet it is actually remarkably easy to pinpoint the single moment where the protagonist’s trajectory swerves towards addiction, and it has nothing to do with poverty.

John le Carré – A Perfect Spy (1986)

Allow me a meme:

Biography, criticism and letters

Peter Abelard and Heloise – Letters (c. 1132–1138)

If you are going to read these letters then you need to guard yourself against cope. I refer in the first instance to interpreters who refuse to believe that Heloise and Abelard really endured such irredeemable and immense psychological suffering, and so read the letters (in defiance of the clear evidence of the text) as some kind of pious post facto literary construction, rather than as a sincere and honest record of the actual emotions of two historical people; but also to those who grant that the letters are honest and authentic, but want to look past the suffering and read them as romantic in a small-r sense and ultimately uplifting. Some of this is Catholic cope or mediaevalist cope, but much of it is just human-all-too-human cope, human beings’ inability to reliably and accurately confront the reality of suffering. I wrote about Abelard and Heloise here.

R. F. Foster – W. B. Yeats: A Life, volume 1: The Apprentice Mage, 1865–1914 (1997)

It’s always very hard to explain to others what is good about biography, when it is good. While there’s lots here you might not know, nothing is individually mindblowing, there’s no revelation that Maud Gonne was on the grassy knoll or whatever. But just as you kind of have to take people on trust when they tell you to read a thousand pages on LBJ’s early life, so too I ask you to take me (and, to be fair, basically every major Irish cultural figure from the 1990s) on trust when I tell you: wow, this is fucking good.⁴

R. F. Foster – On Seamus Heaney (2020)

And part of why it’s so hard to explain to others what is so good about biography is that, like much historical writing, it rarely has ‘flashes of brilliance’: it is successful, when it is, as the result of long exposure, slowly turning a growing mass of assembled facts round your head until the Archimedean property kicks in. And so, while the historian Foster produced a work of brilliance when he wrote at length about one poet (Yeats), his very brief book about another poet (Heaney) feels muted: there is just not enough stuff here for the biographical method to issue in an increased understanding. Read Stepping Stones instead.

John Keats – The major works (originally published 1817–1820)

Look, you know the poems, I know the poems, we all know the poems: you’ve travelled in the realms of gold, you’ve experienced the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, you’ve wondered who’s coming to the sacrifice, I have nothing much to add on the poems. But I will actually try to sell you on the letters. You, like me, may not have much interest in writers’ correspondence, finding much of it (at best) of historical interest and (at worst) self-indulgent and boring. But think of Keats like Paul: a truly, unambiguously great mind who sadly did not produce the quantity of public writing we might hope. Like with Paul, we turn to Keats’ letters for evidence of the mind at work, and the mind is great enough that the letters are of much more than merely historical interest. Try his letter to Reynolds of 3rd May 1818 on for size, and I hope you’ll want to read more.

Stephen MacKenna – Journal and letters (1936)

The main source for my Stephen MacKenna facts. Maybe you wouldn’t find this journal as interesting as I did if you’re not, like me, currently caught between a Platonism ‘phase’ and an Irish cultural history ‘phase’, but I found it fantastic fun. MacKenna’s life’s work, the translation of Plotinus (below), really is very good. MacKenna manages a great degree of faithfulness to Plotinus’ thought, maybe the most faithfulness you could achieve while making sense to a reader who doesn’t have the Greek beside them. MacKenna does not give any sense of Plotinus’ style, and the translation’s literary brilliance is all MacKenna’s doing; and yet the style somehow fits with the content of Plotinus’ thought perfectly, better than Plotty’s own (very bad) Greek style. This is the result, I can only assume, of a translator who genuinely understood the mind of his subject, in all its depths.

Katherine Rundell – Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne (2022)

Couldn’t finish it. Rundell clearly knows her Donne, but there is a limit to how much I can take of constant effusive praise, especially when the object of the praise was actually a shit. There is, at least, a chapter on Donne’s misogyny, but (a) one chapter is hardly enough for a theme that runs through his entire body of work, and (b) the chapter is weirdly apologetic and (more importantly) not properly critical, not willing to see the misogyny as a part of the love poetry on any kind of deep level. Likewise, the religious elements of the poetry receive incredibly cursory treatment: I know it’s hard to know when Donne switched from Catholic to Protestant, but you could read this book (at least to where I got, around the two-thirds mark) without realising that he was devout at all. Given that misogyny and religion together make up, like, 80% of Donne’s poetry, I struggle to understand the hype Rundell got. But keep in mind I’m not a Donne guy: I’m really only strongly taken by ‘The Good-Morrow’, and even then that’s mostly for the verb ‘snorted’.

History

Ronan Fanning – Fatal Path: British Government and Irish Revolution 1910–1922 (2013)

Marketed as a book of Irish history, but it’s really a book of British history, and specifically British political history, focussed on Westminster and not Dublin or Belfast. And yet the author is still himself an Irish historian (in both senses), and this background might be part of why this is an oddly Dangerfieldian book, as Fanning depicts complacent Liberals unwilling or (in Asquith’s case) unable to deal head on with the nation’s problems, obsessed with parliamentary politics, continuing to politely drink and dine with opponents who were whipping up armed rebellion. There are differences, to be sure, and Fanning doesn’t follow Dangerfield’s causal claim that these phenomena led to the destruction of the Liberal Party (he has his own causal claim to make, equally spurious); but the similarities are as striking as the differences. Read it, then, if you want a well-argued modern Dangerfieldism; but, with apologies for the two-way anachronism, my respect for Burke and for Trimble makes me more sympathetic towards Liberal parliamentarism than Fanning.

Malcolm Gaskill – Hellish Nell: The Curious Case of Britain’s Last Witch Trial (2001)

Last year, reviewing another one of Gaskill’s books, I observed that he made a number of errors about the intellectual-history aspect of his story. Having now read another one of his books, I no longer have any interest in being polite about it: Gaskill is a philosophical incompetent, incapable of any subtlety in interpreting concepts and arguments (no matter how important they are to his narrative), and not even able to consistently identify intellectual ‘vibes’. He even misses the significance of such an obvious ‘tell’ as Helen Duncan’s favourite poet being William McGonagall. In terms of the object-level, I’m exceedingly proud of this nation that we sent Helen Duncan to prison, and I only wish we had done the same with more of the people around her.

Helen Graham – The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction (2005)

One of the better VSIs, and a useful reminder of the key facts after our visit to Madrid early this year. Graham’s politics—the politics of most English-language historians of the conflict—are not hidden here, and they have the usual virtues and vices. She has no interest in downplaying or qualifying the brutality of the rebels, and indeed she can perceive some interesting aspects of that brutality; e.g., how attitudes learned by army officers in North Africa were carried into Spain itself. But her approach to economic and organisational issues is relatively poor, and the same is true (more surprisingly, since it is her specialty) with regards to some aspects of Republican politics. The prose is alright but seasoned with clichés of historical writing (plus a repeated metaphorical use of the word ‘cupola’ that was never explained and made no sense to me—maybe it’s a calque of a Spanish metaphor?).

William Selinger – Parliamentarism: from Burke to Weber (2019)

Two suggested ways to read this book. (1) It is a prehistory of Weberianism. Given that all modern political and social thought consists merely of a series of footnotes to Weber, this is quite important, but you should probably read Weber first if you haven’t already. (2) It is an attempt to stake out an understanding of nineteenth-century liberalism that operates at a middle level, more concrete than abstract principles but more general than specific political disputes. Given that nineteenth-century liberalism was excellent and influential, this is quite important, but ultimately the higher and lower levels are together more important, and anyway you should probably read Constant and Mill first if you haven’t already. I worry (based solely on vibes), though, that Selinger himself was hoping to write (3) a somewhat-tragic but ultimately largely vindicatory genealogy for the (for lack of a better term) Diceyan mainstream of British constitutionalism, against a certain kind of reformist bogeyman. Book (1) succeeds, book (2) is interesting but somewhat disappointing, book (3) fails. (But then, I would say that.)

E. S. Turner – Roads to Ruin: The Shocking History of Social Reform (1950)

This was recommended to me as containing the best short historical account of the dead wife’s sister debacle, and I think that’s right, but it didn’t help me understand it that much more (maybe because the dead wife’s sister thing can never be explained). Turner is particularly interested in exploring a particular political archetype, the people he calls the ‘Colonel Blimps’ of the world: ‘Gad, sir, reforms are all right as long as they don’t change anything’. But while he succeeds in identifying similarities in anti-reform arguments, it’s not like the arguments were always wielded by the same group of implacable reactionaries; each proposed reform had its own set of opponents. So it’s not a matter of archetypal reactionary people so much as archetypal reactionary arguments, and why particular individuals were compelled by these arguments in some cases and not others is still unclear. To put it more concretely: why was Matthew Arnold so anti–dead wife’s sister? But Turner has picked fun case studies that you probably don’t know much about, and it’s a quick read, so overall a recommendation.

Mark Williams – Ireland’s Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth (2016)

Two books in one: a literary history of the mediaeval Irish ‘Mythological cycle’ (and a few related works), followed by a mostly-separate history of how the Gaelic Revival repurposed the material. The first half comes highly recommended to anyone who—like me—knew a lot of ‘Irish myth’ from childhood but grew sceptical of its provenance in adulthood; I only wish there was a book this good about the Ulster or Fenian cycles. In the second half, Williams (fascinatingly) credits Yeats with formulating the threefold identity of the Tuatha Dé Danann of mediaeval literature, the fairies of folklore, and the deities of pre-Christian religion. This was fundamentally correct, and represented a major historical insight (albeit one in need of qualifications that were quickly buried under Revivalist twaddle). But Williams tiptoes around the implications, scared of being accused of the sin of ‘pagan survivalism’. He grants that the Tuatha Dé are based on literary memory of pagan gods (he couldn’t have written the book without this premise!), but the exact same reasoning tells us that fairy-stories are linked to folk memory of pagan gods. By leaving them out, Williams leaves out half of the history of ‘the gods of Irish myth’.

Mark Williams – The Celtic Myths that Shape the Way We Think (2021)

Aaaaand… the reason Williams leaves out fairy-stories is because he is really only interested in medieval literature, as is clear in this book, where the author has a broader ‘brief’ that exposes his limitations. When it comes to folktales, for example, Williams has to explicitly admit that the oral-tale afterlife of Fionn and the fianna is incredibly rich; but he then proceeds to tell us almost nothing about this oral material, except to mention the Giant’s Causeway story that everyone already knows—no matter that this oral material really did ‘shape the way we think’. I take it that Williams, a scholar of literature, just doesn’t know enough about the oral tradition to write about it. But, worse, his narrow expertise in medieval literature leaves him on unsure ground when it comes to modern Irish culture, which he does try to write about. He discusses Fionn’s cultural afterlife without mentioning nineteenth-century Fenianism, and acts as if the most important modern work adapting the character of Suibhne is Neil Gaiman’s American Gods: is it possible he just doesn’t know that At Swim-Two-Birds exists? What I worry is that he’s maybe similarly shaky on analogous aspects of the Welsh stuff he discusses, but I, not being Welsh, can’t tell.⁵

Philosophy

Plato – Phaedrus (c. 365 B. C. E.)

The most important thing about the Phaedrus is that Socrates’ first speech is immensely Platonic, in the specific sense of fitting in with what ‘everyone knows’, ‘what Plato would say’: you should moderate your soul, be guided by reason rather than manic passion, etc. And then, suddenly, dramatically, Socrates is struck with fear of being blinded by the gods for having made the speech, which is revealed to be a falsehood (and a blasphemous falsehood at that). If you don’t see how deeply ‘Platonic’ the first speech is and just treat it as a prelude to the arguments, you’ll miss how fundamental the subsequent recantation is to properly understanding what Plato means by ‘reason’, the role played in his thought by concepts of luck and the divine, the nature of philosophy (which is an attempt to succeed in the goals that rhetoric and poetry aimed for yet failed to achieve—an attempt that might yet fail itself), and Plato’s whole un-Platonic worldview. Also, this is a ‘hidden’ source for Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red (see not only the obvious 243a–b but also especially 251b–252b), and worth your attention for that reason alone.

Plato – Parmenides (c. 365 B. C. E.)

The thing is, obviously I don’t believe in the Neoplatonic view of this dialogue, whereon the confusing and seemingly-contradictory ‘Deductions’ are actually supposed to contain the secret to understanding the hierarchical nature of being and moving towards union with ‘the One’. But no other approach even comes close to explaining or even just capturing how weird the Deductions are (even—especially!—in light of Republic 510–511). Plato was a genius, one of the greatest writers and thinkers in human history, and so it’s not a case of a bad writer struggling to be clear. Yet no non-Neoplatonic interpreter has a good answer for why Plato wrote the Deductions like he did; they just get on with trying to figure out what they mean. There must be a reason why the Deductions seem genuinely incoherent—and if that reason isn’t ‘he was trying to bring on a mystical experience in his readers’, we may never know what it is. This is one that you really want to be able to read Greek for; indeed, I’m not sure my mostly-Greekless approach was of much value.

Plotinus – Enneads (c. 270)

My approach to Plotinus (via MacKenna, above) has been somewhat unscholarly. But honestly, I’m really happy with having read him just for the vibes, just to behold that great Plotinus swim: if you’re self-aware about the limitations of the approach, you still get much of value. In particular, I think all we naturalists should read Plotinus, and notice how bizarrely Dennettian he often is about mind and self and world, how many lines from Ennead 1 especially could have been lifted straight from Consciousness Explained. I don’t mean to downplay or ignore Plotty’s mystical experiences, or his maximally un-Quinean view of metaphysics—on the contrary, the most remarkable thing is just how closely connected the mystical and the Dennettian are in his thought! I have my own guess at what is going on here, but you should try him for yourself to puzzle this over. The other obvious comparison is Aquinas, two geniuses convinced that they could make logical sense out of ultimately incoherent systems of mythical belief; only the fact that Catholicism still exists, and Gnostic-inflected middle-Platonist paganism doesn’t, stops people from realising that Plotinus is in fact greater than Aquinas.

Miscellaneous

Elizabeth David – English Bread and Yeast Cookery (1977)

I wanted to confirm some historical facts about yeast, and expand my understanding of a subtopic. And, in what is surely an example of a bigger lesson, reading this historically important book by a highly respected and influential author turned out to be substantially less useful than watching about three videos by historical re-enactors on Youtube. And also less accurate! the most notable example coming when David at one point calls yeast a ‘fungus-like plant’, which is one of those mistakes that just doesn’t make sense. I could understand thinking yeast was a plant in the 1970s, the distinction between fungi and plants is relatively new; but how could you know what a fungus was, enough to know that yeasts are ‘fungus-like’, and yet still think they’re plants?

Carl E. Linderholm – Mathematics Made Difficult (1971)

The most important work of philosophy of mathematics of the twentieth century? No, I’m serious. Yes, it’s a comedy book, but Linderholm took great pains to ensure that the jokes were true. All of the ‘serious’ problems of philosophy of mathematics and most of the ‘serious’ problems of the early twentieth-century foundational crisis appear here, and not under any disguise: e.g., a fully transparent and rigourous presentation of Frege’s ‘Julius Caesar problem’ is given at pp. 25–26. But Linderholm’s philosophical genius was to see just how obviously crazy this way of thinking about maths would be in a vacuum, even if it is all technically correct; and his stylistic genius was to conduct an extended theoretical argument by means of comedy. The key task in foundations ought to be trying to extend existing foundational ideas in ways that are not susceptible to Linderholmisation; but comedy is not taken seriously enough by mathematicians and philosophers, so they aren’t working on it. Alas. It is very funny.

Hugh Thomas (ed.) – Madrid: A Travellers’ Companion (1988)

The premise is excellent: extracts from letters, diaries, novels, etc. giving you a series of historical views on Madrid from the perspective of a wide range of historical figures, including but not limited to many of the most famous visitors (Trotsky, Napoleon, etc.). If it were a different European city, I imagine that having this at our side would have been an amazing companion for our visit. But it was Madrid in particular that we visited, a city with many virtues, but a particularly scary and even inhuman—at the very least, unhumanistic—relationship to its own history. Our historical experience of Madrid was dominated by a growing awareness of ‘gappiness’, noticing all the ways that the city physically embeds a ‘jump’ in time from the late 1920s to the late 1970s with nothing in between,⁶ leaving less cognitive space for appreciating the perspective of earlier periods.

1. As Ciaran Carson doesn’t get enough credit for recognising.

2. This is not as great a compliment as it sounds: my incredibly controversial take is that Victorian England actually had a pretty bad track-record when it came to novels.

Robin McKenna

actually beat me to the punch on this, expressing basically the same view as me on Wuthering Heights in his own 2025 Reading (Part 1): the classic English Victorian novels are actually by and large pretty deficient, especially when compared to the classic novels of Russia or Ireland or the US etc., and what makes Wuthering Heights so excellent is precisely how little it resembles anything published in the same time and place. Where I disagree with McKenna is that he drops the qualifier ‘Victorian’ and takes himself to be criticising English novels tout court, including (he explicitly mentions) Austen. For one thing I think Austen is exempt from this charge and deserves the hype she gets; for another, while Wuthering Heights is certainly un-Victorian, that does not make it un-English, and indeed I think it has some very clear analogues in English literature, like Frankenstein.

3. And no matter that Cooper at one point says Declan is Protestant—which doesn’t make sense, not because he’s called ‘Declan O’Hara’, but because he seems to be the child of a mixed marriage born after Ne temere and indeed plausibly after the Tilson case. If you interpret the portrayal of Declan as reflecting posh English perceptions, then mistakes like this one are ‘portals of discovery’ (to use the words of another emigrant Irish Catholic).

4. I want to explicitly mention one takeaway that, as I say, is not mindblowing but is certainly noteworthy: Æ comes out as an unambiguous good guy on almost every page where he appears, reliable and modest and kind and—shockingly—equipped with good sense and judgment. (The exception is his siding with John MacBride in the divorce case; but then, it’s not like those who sided with Maud Gonne did so for the right reasons.) A vital corrective to the portrait of a laconically snobbish Platonist found in ‘Scylla and Charybdis’.

5. I mean: maybe he is Welsh? I can’t find any details of his background online, but he is called ‘Williams’, which is certainly evidence in the Bayesian sense. I found clips of him speaking, and his accent is pure SSB, but that obviously doesn’t rule out being Welsh in today’s day and age. If he is Welsh, I would obviously trust him to handle modern Welsh culture more than I would if he were English.

6. This was obviously going to be true of Madrid’s public space, even if the experience made it more salient; but the real shock was that private spaces embody this ‘gappiness’ as well. (The only exception is Catholic churches, a fact that itself is of some importance.) One of the scariest places I went in Madrid was the toilets in a lefty taverna. Every square centimeter of surface was covered in stickers, many of them proclaiming some variant of ‘Madrid es antifascista’. Madrid, of course, is one of a vanishingly small number of cities that you could actually reasonably say has really earned this title, that actually did resist fascism physically at great cost. But there was literally no allusion that history: no photos from the siege, no Republican propaganda imagery, not even a single use of the phrase ‘no pasarán’ (which would be de rigueur on lefty stickers in the UK). Maybe it’s harder to forget in Spain that Franco did, in the end, pasó, but still: even in explicitly lefty spaces, it was as if the Civil War was phantom time. It freaked me the fuck out.