Princeton University Press

Simonides of Ceos is said to have declared that ‘Painting is mute poetry, poetry a speaking picture.’ All of us know something of what he means, about our thirst for information from the arts: and, if you like, our scrabbling for the visible within a text. One half of his mirrored pronouncement is verified by those people who, in an art museum, hurry to the curatorial information alongside a picture. They want to discover what the painting is about. But the sought-after ‘aboutness’ keeps slipping away from the viewer, much as the point – but is it a point? – of a poem does.

In a famous essay on poetry, English philosopher Michael Oakeshott evoked the metaphor of conversation to describe how people share and discuss ideas. A conversation, suggested Oakeshott, allows a continuous discussion between past and present, between the thought of earlier generations and the pressing needs of the present. A conversation is not a search for truth or even facts, but an endless dialogue among diverse voices.

In 1956, when this fourth volume of his collected prose begins, W.H. Auden (1907–73) was forty-nine and widely recognised as one of the most important English-language poets. He had been in the United States for seventeen years, having left, or, as some back home had seen it, abandoned England shortly before the outbreak of World War II; and he had been an American citizen since 1946. To me, he always remained an English poet, and the lexical flourishes such as ‘dives’ and ‘congress’ found in the second half of his oeuvre do little to hide a European sensibility.

Like all of his earlier books, Raymond Roussel’s final work, New Impressions of Africa, published in 1932, was printed at his personal expense, and only after he was satisfied that the poem was as good as possible. He claimed that each line took fifteen hours to compose. Roussel wanted his work to have enduring importance, and wrote a book entitled How I Wrote Certain of My Books to help readers who might otherwise misunderstand his method (it appeared in 1935, two years after his suicide). Roussel, thanks to his vast inherited wealth, was a writer who answered to no one and nothing, except his own inimitable vision.

This mammoth book, first published in Italy in 2006, now appears in an English translation. It consists of some four hundred entries on communism as a world movement. The entries cover aspects of communist theory and practice, organisations and institutions, historical events, leading figures, and key concepts. They range in length from less than a thousand to four thousand words.

The terrorist attacks of 9/11, and the loosely related jihadi Islamist terrorist attacks that followed in a dozen countries, have left the world more afraid than ever of Islam. Modern terrorism is not the only factor. The West has long had a problem with Islam. This perception dates back a full millennium to a time when Europe was in its dark ages and Islamic civilisation was blossoming. From the beginning, Western anxiety about Islam has been based on almost total ignorance. Well before there was any substantial contact between Europeans and Muslims, Islam was an imagined ‘other’ automatically cast as the opposite of everything that the ‘Christian West’ claimed as its legacy.

Robert L. Park is an American professor of physics who has taken up the sword against superstition and wobbly science. In an earlier book, Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud (2000), he assailed pseudoscientific delinquents and pretenders, and some of its themes reappear in Superstition. But the majority of the new book’s bogeys are generally acknowledged to be remote from science: religion, creationism or intelligent design, vitalism and the soul, reincarnation, the power of prayer, divine agency in cataclysms, New Age mysticism, homeopathy, and a host of related things. A few of the targets, such as acupuncture, space colonisation and the ‘quantum mysticism’ conjured from alleged mind-involvement in quantum phenomena, may be thought by some to border on (good) science, but not by Park.

In his final, unfinished opus, the German writer Max Weber presented his exemplar of irrational, arbitrary law-making by describing an image of a Muslim qadi, or judge, sitting beneath a palm tree, dispensing justice as he saw fit. Later, as scholars began to examine Western portraits of the east – particularly in the wake of Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism – Weber’s description was itself held up as an example of unthinking and condescending Western judgement. More recently, as the Western and Islamic worlds have meshed and clashed – over oil, land, beliefs and geopolitics – the stereotypical image of the Muslim religious leader has been assigned a whole new set of connotations, involving fanaticism, violence and doom: the qadi remains charmingly austere, but no longer benign.

There must be some part of the human psyche which secretly thrills at the idea of inflicting unbearable pain on others. How else to explain the fact that torture has been practised in every civilisation in every age? How else to explain the desperate cruelty and awesome ingenuity of the torturer’s craft?