MUST READS
RASPUTIN by Douglas Smith (Pan £12.99)
RASPUTIN
by Douglas Smith (Pan £12.99)
The reputation of Grigori Rasputin, the Mad Monk who exercised a hypnotic influence over the last Russian Tsar, his wife and sickly son, could hardly be more sulphurous.
But Douglas Smith’s minutely researched and luminously readable biography, which was shortlisted for the James Tait Black prize, strips away the accretions of myth to reveal a portrait of the real Rasputin that is no less dramatic and compelling.
Born in 1869, the son of a drunken Siberian peasant, Rasputin was illiterate until early adulthood. Yet in his late 20s he became a religious pilgrim whose wanderings led him to the Romanov court, where the weakness, arrogance and credulity of Tsar Nicholas II and his wife would prove a fatal combination.
By the time of Rasputin’s murder, many Russians believed that he must die for Russia to survive.
Smith concludes: ‘They would soon realise how mistaken they had been.’
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WEEPING BRITANNIA by Thomas Dixon (OUP £12.99)
WEEPING BRITANNIA
by Thomas Dixon (OUP £12.99)
‘I grew up in Britain after the age of the stiff upper lip had ended — an era of nearly 100 years, running roughly from the death of Charles Dickens in 1870 to the death of Winston Churchill in 1965,’ writes the historian Thomas Dixon. He argues that our island story has been drenched in tears: from the noisy religious wailing of the lachrymose 14th-century mystic Margery Kempe, to the 21st-century vogue for triumphant sports stars to blub on the podium.
We could more truthfully describe ourselves as the nation of the sodden hanky than the champions of suppressed emotion.
‘A tear,’ said William Blake, ‘is an intellectual thing’ — and Dixon’s lively and entertaining history traces the shifting social attitudes to tears across the centuries, from admiration to shame and back again.
OUT OF TIME by Miranda Sawyer (4th Estate £8.99)
OUT OF TIME
by Miranda Sawyer (4th Estate £8.99)
Despite any evidence to the contrary, each generation remains convinced that it is never going to get old, regarding the inexorable onset of middle-age as an outrage.
For the journalist and broadcaster Miranda Sawyer, the mid-life crisis began when she was 44.
Soon after the birth of her second child she looked at the gurgling baby and thought: ‘By the time you’re 18, I will be over 60.’
She had an image of herself, standing in a river, trying to hold on to the fast-flowing water.
‘I wonder if we messed it up for ourselves, by having such a good time when we were young,’ she asks.
Her funny and reflective exploration of the mysterious terrain of mid-life offers some sensible ideas for making peace with lost dreams, and discovering some new ones.
