BooksPodcast Green-Shoot

The origins of modern death













Let’s face it – nobody did death like the Victorians. From Highgate Cemetery to the high drama of seances, from Jack the Ripper to Madame Blavatsky, from Waterloo Station to Brookwood Cemetery (there was an actual train!) the Victorians invented our modern response to death, its iconography and its – yes – romance.







The advent of industrialisation and the explosive expansion of the great cities had created an unprecedented problem – too many corpses, with all the squalor and disease that came with them. But alongside the practical requirements of disposal there was an increasingly sentimental attitude to the dear departed.







For the Victorians, the dead were only just out of reach, and might yet be contactable. The Society for Psychic Research boasted adherents including Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Arthur Balfour, W B Yeats and Arthur Conan-Doyle. These days we tend to think of spiritualism as batshit crazy, but it was, as Adrian Mackinder argues, a modernist response, using the technology and sensibilities of a scientific age to prove the existence of the afterlife and investigate the world beyond the veil.







Death and the Victorians takes a cheerful tour through all the facets of the Victorian approach to death, including resurrection men, ghost hunters, Ouija boards and the strange exhumation of Lizzie Siddal. It is all hugely entertaining.







Adrian Mackinder – Pen Sword Books RRP £25

End of Empire













History sometimes provides us with neat dividing lines. Queen Victoria helpfully died just weeks into the new century, making way for a new era, but the nightmarish Twentieth Century didn’t really get into its stride until the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. Between those landmarks is the Edwardian era.







There is apprehension abroad. The nation is anxious about anarchists and terrorists. There is the looming possibility of war. The complacency of the Conservative hegemony is shattered by the Liberal landslide of 1906, not to mention the rise of the Labour Party, and the hangover of the Boer War has raised a question unfamiliar to the British: “Are we the baddies?” 







Alwyn Turner has a brilliant eye for the emblematic. The cheerful swindler and MP, Horatio Bottomley who “nursed his constituency with a devotion that bordered on bribery.” The creeping respectability of the music-hall (the first ever Royal Command Performance is in 1912). Sherlock Holmes getting mercenary: “I play the game for the game’s own sake”, he said while the old Queen was on the throne, but by 1901 he is accepting payment for his investigations.







Turner turns a powerful spotlight on this neglected decade (and a half.) Our most entertaining historian characteristically finds the mood of the nation in popular songs and novels as much as newspapers and parliamentary debate. In his company the Edwardian era comes alive.







This episode was recorded in front of a live audience at the Dublin Castle Pub in Camden.







Alwyn Turner – Profile Books     £25:00

Being in love is an act of carelessness of your own safety. It’s risk!













Sam and Lily are middle-aged lovers in Howard Jacobson’s new novel and, in bed, they talk as much as anything else. Jacobson is rightly celebrated for his dialogue and, as so often before, it is rich with allusion and steeped in his passion for English literature. The novel is explicitly and unabashedly a love story and love was what Howard most wanted to talk about when we met.







           “The minute you fall deeply in love … melancholy strolls into the garden”.







For Lily and Sam love strikes with a thunderclap. Lily is in love at first sight. Sam takes a couple of days longer. Both in relationships past their sell-by date, they embark upon an extraordinary affair that they are convinced will last forever.







Howard Jacobson seems incapable of writing a bad sentence (although he tells us that it’s just that we don’t get to see them.) His latest book shows him still in full literary flight.







Howard Jacobson Jonathan Cape RRP £18.99

Was George Harrison really the “Economy Beatle”?













Philip Norman wrote Shout!, the first grown-up biography of The Beatles, shortly before John Lennon was murdered. People told him he was crazy, that The Fabs were yesterday’s news, that everybody already knew everything there was to know about the band. He wasn’t crazy. Fifty-three years after they broke up The Beatles are still an industry, or as Philip puts it, practically a religion.







Even today there is passionate disagreement about George Harrison. There are those who point to the triumphant first solo album, All Things Must Pass, as proof that he was always Lennon and McCartney’s equal and was unfairly sidelined in the band. And others will argue that anybody would have been overshadowed by the powerhouse songwriting partnership, and that he doesn’t need to be John or Paul to be an indispensable part of The Greatest Show On Earth.







John Lennon said that Something was the best song on Abbey Road. Here Comes The Sun is the most downloaded Beatles track. On the other hand, you have to be a real George fan to hear anything worthwhile in Only A Northern Song or Blue Jay Way.







So how did the fourteen year old kid who fought for his place in the Quarrymen become the Beatle most resistant to playing live? How did he come to break the First Commandment of the Beatle fraternity? How did he become one of the most important British film producers of the 1980’s? Philip Norman calls him ‘The Economy Beatle’ and he has written a beautiful life of the study in contradictions that was George Harrison.







This episode was recorded in front of a live audience at 21Soho, in association with Walthamstow Rock n Roll Book Club. With help from various parties, including www.meetthebeatlesforreal.com







Philip Norman ‎  Simon & Schuster UK £25.00

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A goldmine of nutters, obsessives, murderers, vicars and, above all, readers!













In a time before the internet, the compilation of the Oxford English Dictionary was the Wickipedia of its day, crowdsourcing its contributions from thousands of readers across the world.







Over decades, millions of slips inscribed with words and quotations poured into a metal shed in an Oxford garden to be assembled into the magnificent, comprehensive, authoritative dictionary that was a wonder of the age.







It is understandable that attention has tended to focus on the principle Editor, James Murray, who devoted thirty-six years to the project (he got it to the letter T), but a chance discovery sent Sarah Ogilvie on a quest for the unpaid contributors to the O.E.D., and it was a gold mine of nutters, obsessives, murderers, vicars, and above all, readers.







Dr Ogilvie fell in love with them and has gleefully made a book packed with more lurid and remarkable stories than you could shake a philologist at.







Sarah Ogilvie             Chatto & Windus          £22:00

Don’t knock it ’till you’ve tried it! 😉













We are familiar with some of the names: William Burroughs in the 1950’s. Timothy Leary in the ‘60’s, Hunter S Thompson in the ‘70’s, those two guys who started the craze for smoking cane-toad venom in ‘90’s. Investigators who became their own guinea pigs.







But “the heroic tradition of discovery”, as Mike Jay puts it, has a much longer and more interesting history. The second half of the Nineteenth Century in particular saw the introduction of most of the substances discussed in this book, and was perhaps the golden age of getting stoned for science.







The problem, of course, is that there is no way of investigating the experiential effects of narcotics, stimulants, analgesics, hallucinogens, etc, except by becoming one’s own subject. Combining introspective investigation with scientific rigour in experiment – what could possibly go wrong? Even Sigmund Freud, who thought that he had discovered a miracle cure-all in cocaine, drifted over from research to recreation, although he never became an addict.







Others were less disciplined.







Yale University Press          £20:00