Non Fiction

Here is a joke that used to do the rounds during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. A plane was about to land in Belfast. During its descent, the pilot’s voice came over the announcement system: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, we are now approaching Belfast International Airport. Welcome to Ulster. Please set your watches back four hundred years.’

Hans Kundnani, a British citizen, began working at the European Council on Foreign Relations in 2009. He considered himself a ‘pro-European’ supporter of European integration and regarded the European Union as a force for good. He came to realise that much of what he thought he knew about the EU and its history were self-idealising myths that had been created by the EU about itself. Eurowhiteness: Culture, empire and race in the European project debunks these myths and offers a penetrating analysis of how the EU has evolved.

Wolfram Eilenberger’s previous book, the bestselling Time of the Magicians (2020), explored the four Germans – Ernst Cassirer, Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, and Ludwig Wittgenstein – who ‘invented modern thought’. The Visionaries keeps to the formula, this time with women in the lead roles. It is described as a group biography, but Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Ayn Rand, and Simone Weil were very much not a group. Nor is it a biography: there is scant biographical information and no analysis of why they lived as they did. Apart from being born at the same time, writing books, and sharing what Eilenberger calls an ‘honest bafflement that other people live as they do’, the quartet have nothing in common: Arendt was a German Jew escaping the Gestapo; Beauvoir a French intellectual on a mission to enjoy herself; Rand a Russian émigré refashioned as an American neoliberal; and Weil a latter-day Joan of Arc. The closest any of them came to meeting was when Beauvoir, for whom the existence of others was ‘a danger to me’, was introduced to Weil, who had wept at the news of famine in China. It did not go well. The only thing that mattered, Weil announced, was a revolution to feed the world’s starving, to which Beauvoir ‘retorted that the problem was not to make men happy but to find the reason for their existence. She looked me up and down. “It’s easy to see you’ve never been hungry”, she snapped. Our relations ended right there.’

Bernard Cohen’s satirical novel The Antibiography of Robert F. Menzies (2013) begins shortly before the 1996 election with the titular character stepping ‘through a breach in time’ to help his successors win government. But while John Howard’s double-breasted jackets and headland speeches initially soothe this ‘large and benevolent plasmic entity’, the revenant Menzies soon becomes frustrated by the emptiness and the clichés of 1990s politics. He breaks out of the parliamentary corridors to lumber across an Australia he barely recognises, becoming ever more gigantic and spectral – pursued all the way by a writer trying to wrestle him onto the page.

The recent past is replete with instances of sovereign states doing penance for wrongdoing. The Berlin Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), and Kevin Rudd’s apology to the Stolen Generations are just three examples that receive extended analysis in Paul Muldoon’s The Penitent State. On Muldoon’s telling, the concept of ‘biopolitics’ is central to explaining why these ‘penitent states’ work so hard to press our physical and emotional buttons, not just our intellectual or cognitive ones. Through institutions of atonement, the state is trying to clear a perceived blockage in perpetrators’ collective emotional system. It is trying to make us cry.

Already it has been a big year for fascists. On Australia Day, a handful of neo-Nazis from across Australia assembled in Sydney. Dwarfed by tens of thousands of protesters at Invasion Day rallies, the fascist stunt still generated the desired confrontation with the state and response from journalists drawn into the spectacle. Two weeks earlier, German investigative journalists published details of a late-2023 meeting in Potsdam, outside Berlin. At a neo-baroque lakeside hotel, an assortment of old money, political chancers, and neo-fascist intellectuals discussed a proposal for ‘remigration’. Among the retired dentists, bakery franchisers, and parliamentary staffers was Martin Sellner, the one-time, hot-young-Austrian-face of the European identitarian movement – a man so reactionary that even post-Brexit Britain denied him a visa.

Arnold Schoenberg rarely missed a punch. Whether in music theory, composition, or the fraught polemics of his age, he communicated with a clarity of purpose verging on the tyrannical. Visiting Schoenberg in California during his last years, the conductor Robert Craft commented on ‘the danger of crossing the circle of his pride, for though his humility is fathomless it is also plated all the way down with a hubris of stainless steel’. Harvey Sachs is worried that music lovers of the twenty-first century are failing to appreciate the continuing significance of the composer despite, or perhaps because of, this armour-plating. Addressed to the musical ‘layman’, Sachs’s ‘interpretive study’ is a passionate, occasionally self-doubting essay intended to demonstrate why Schoenberg still matters. Schoenberg’s five chapters follow a chronological track, attempting to account for most of the fifty-odd opuses of Schoenberg’s oeuvre, within a rich context of his life’s turbulent course. His chapter titles dramatically reflect the struggle – battle lines, war, breakthrough, and breakaway – of both his life and his works. Sachs popularises, refreshes, and sometimes refutes the stainless-steel images passed down in the sanctioned texts of musicology, many written by Schoenberg’s acolytes.

In the film Almost Famous (2000), director Cameron Crowe’s alter ego, fifteen-year-old William Miller, doggedly pursues his dream of breaking into rock journalism. He cold-calls legendary music journalist Lester Bangs (marvellously played by a dishevelled Philip Seymour Hoffman). Next thing we know, he is commissioned by Rolling Stone editor Ben Fong-Torres to head out on the road with fictitious band Stillwater to write a story that ends up on the cover of Rolling Stone. If only it were that easy.

In 2023, a broken engagement might be followed by tears, the division of possessions, and a reliance on family and friends. It might even involve a few trips to the therapist. But up until the mid-to-late twentieth century, Australian men and women’s heartbreaks could also see them take a trip to court to charge their partner with breach of promise of marriage.

In 2019, Smithsonian magazine published a profile of an American inventor, entrepreneur, and undersea explorer named Stockton Rush. Rush and his company, OceanGate, had recently celebrated the successful descent of their experimental manned submersible Titan to the extraordinary depth of 4,000 metres. Titan’s design was innovative in two important ways: its body was composed centrally of carbon fibre, which made it light and comparatively inexpensive to operate, and it was a cylinder. A spherical sub might have had ‘the best geometry for pressure’, observed Rush, ‘but not for occupation’ – and this represented an unpalatable check on OceanGate’s plans to deliver groups of high-paying tourists to the wreck of the Titanic. ‘I had come across this business anomaly I couldn’t explain,’ Rush reflected: ‘If three-quarters of the planet is water, how come you can’t access it?’