Summer with the NYRB

Just about finished with their summer edition now. Just over 80 pages with one third advertisements, one third stuff which did not interest me and one third which did; I get my monies worth.

Amongst the stuff which did, there was an interesting article about Oman, which turns out to be rather an odd place, with lots of the inhabitants speaking Swahili or Gujerati rather than Arabic, the result of Oman's days of glory in the Indian Ocean slave trade. One consequence of which was that for quite a long time the Sultan found it more convenient to live in Zanzibar than in Oman.

There was another article in the series about CIA and DoD matters, including the interesting snippet included left. I had not realised that the US deliberately provoked the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan by stirring up the fundamentalists, a wheeze to give the Soviets their Vietnam, to discourage them from crowing about the US one.

And another about Kenneth Clark (Kenneth McKenzie Clark, Baron Clark OM CH KCB FBA (13 July 1903 – 21 May 1983)), to whom the Tate Britain had devoted an exhibition, further evidence of the worrying trend of museums to worry about themselves, rather than about what it says on the box. The same chap who wrote the fat book about nudes which it was very cool to possess when I was in the sixth form of my secondary school.

And then, nicely timed for today's 2000th anniversary of the death of Caesar Augustus, the first and most successful of a long line of Roman emperors, an introduction to two famous epistolary novels about those times. 'The Ides of March' by Thornton Wilder and 'Augustus' by John Williams. I had not previously heard of either novelist, although we did once own by inheritance, unread, what I now know to be the most famous of Wilder's books, 'The Bridge of San Luis Rey'. The start was not promising with neither epistolary nor historical novels being my thing, but both turned out to be easy and interesting reads, with my only qualification being the large number of participants with funny foreign names - a bit like 'War and Peace' in that respect. Recommended to anyone with an interest in the end of the Roman republic. Entirely suitable as aids to the study of either history or politics in schools. I now move on to two other novels by John Williams, my having been enticed by some Amazon deal for all three at once. And after that, onto a second copy of the bridge, courtesy AbeBooks (for a change from Amazon) and illustrated by no less an eminence than Clare Leighton.

Last but not least, yet another piece about the strange workings of the US Supreme Court, a place in the which the NYRB takes a keen interest. Can't see the LRB taking the same kind of interest in our Supreme Court.

PS: I have also learned about frankincense from Oman. Wikipedia tells me that you get the stuff by tapping the tree, as one does for maple syrup or rubber, but does not confirm my theory that it was mainly used to cover the very unpleasant smell of the outdoor cremations once common in that part of the world.