Book reviews: Cheek by Jowl | The Healing Presence of Art | Shakespeare

michael Kerrigan reviews the latest offerings from the book world

Cheek by Jowl

by Emily Cockayne

(Bodley Head, £20)

Rating: ****

Everybody needs good neighbours, the TV theme said, but all too often we don’t get them. Instead, we get rows and resentment, envy and contempt, over anything from parking spaces to nude sunbathing. Yet there are any number of more positive images: popping in for a cup of sugar; babysitting; bereavement-support; or just the chat over the fence. This curtain-twitching account is bottom-up history at its breezy best. There might have been more about Scotland: tenements presented the problem of good-neighbourliness in a peculiarly intimate (at times oppressive) form, but there’s any amount of interesting material to be had here.

The Healing Presence of Art

by Richard Cork

(Yale, £50)

Rating: ****

Holistic healing is relatively new but it’s been understood implicitly for hundreds of years. As early as the 15th century, Piero della Francesca’s Mary, Mother of Mercy was spreading the feelgood factor from the wall of the chapel in his local hospital in Sansepolcro, Italy. Since that time, great artists have not only been providing a visual record of sickness and its treatment but offering aesthetic comfort to those in the sorest need. Moreover, the work of the early anatomists was as important to painters and sculptors as it was to doctors and surgeons. Cork keeps close to his art historian past. Some will be disappointed that he doesn’t get deeper into the theories of those who argue (roughly) that beauty boosts the immune system; that its contemplation helps the “healing brain”. Altogether, though, this stunningly illustrated book is just what the doctor ordered.

Shakespeare

by Jonathan Bate and Dora Thornton

(British Museum, £25)

Rating: *****

“A pox on ye,” says the message carved into the stem of the so-called ‘Clifford Chambers Chalice’ … An anti-Catholic curse? A swipe at the new religion? Sheer malevolence? Or something else? This enthralling book re-problematises it all, investigating the world revealed in Shakespeare’s work whilst examining it in the light of what we know of Shakespeare’s world. There are big themes – religion, love, family life and race-relations – but the emphasis is always on the specifically textual and the concretely precise, a telling line or image tied in tightly to a hat or hornbook, a witch’s collar or a water-jug: this book gets into the very fabric of both literature and life.