Book reviews in brief: Colour Me English | Rebels | Oxford Companion to Classical Literature

by Caryl Phillips

Harvill Secker, 352pp, £14.99

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When a reading of Chinese-American novelist Ha Jin reminds him “how much energy the risk of what feels like candid self-revelation provides”, it’s a moment of revelation for Phillips’ reader. That’s what gives these essays their special quality: their super-scrupulous Oxford-educated distancing-devices and qualifications (“risk”, “what feels like”) forever interrupted by sudden surges of confessional intensity. Even the more formal lit-crit is filtered through autobiographical reflection, much of it on the tensions involved in being Black and British. Phillips’ has been a literary life from his Blyton-reading boyhood on. Now he lives largely in the United States but entirely in the Republic of Letters.

REBELS

BY Fearghal McGarry

Penguin, 400pp, £20

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“As Connolly shook hands with Pearse, I heard him say, ‘Thank God … we have lived to see this day’ ” That’s the way first-hand memories of Easter 1916 are supposed to be. Michael Cremen’s are the exception, though: McGarry’s oral history brings the Boys (and occasional Girl) of the Old Brigade out in impressive force, but few have anything half so momentous to recall. What they do offer, collectively, in a kaleidoscope of discreetly marshalled snatches, is a thrillingly immediate sense of the Rising in the round. By turns exciting, bathetic, shocking, boring, quirky, disturbing and downright banal: this really is how history was made.

Oxford Companion to Classical Literature

EDITED BY MC Howatson

oup, 640PP, £40 HHHH

Juvenal’s satires summarised; Plato unpacked; the career and key works of Cicero outlined and evaluated; Lycophron and Lucretius considered in the context of their times. The contribution of the clock; the implications of calendrical reform; the significance of sexuality and the Septuagint; the functions of pastoral, prosody and prostitution … Every aspect of Greek and Roman literary culture is covered, crisply and clearly, in this invaluable companion, for instant reference or for browsing by the hour. Which was which of Lucan and Lucian? Of the maenads and the manes? What were the spolia opima? What was the Roman take on biography?