Books in brief: Anglo-Saxon Art | The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After | Photography

Michael Kerrigan offers his view on recent books

Anglo-Saxon Art

By Leslie Webster

(British Museum, £18.99) Rating: ***** ‘Wondrous is this world, incomparable/Its trappings and adornments…’ wrote the poet Anonymous, as they almost always were. There are any number of wondrous trappings and adornments to be seen in this gloriously-illustrated book, products of what was overwhelmingly an aesthetic of ornamentation. Illuminated manuscripts, prayer-books; extravagantly-wrought weaponry, buckles and brooches; carved-wood caskets, whalebone boxes, gold drinking horns and ivory altar screens… Their creators too are nameless now, the idea of the capital-A Artist as unimaginable in the Anglo-Saxon scheme as the idea of art-for-art’s own sake would have been. As Dumfriesshire’s rune-bedecked Ruthwell Cross reminds us, Anglo-Saxon influence extended well beyond what we now call England: it’s time we gave it the recognition it deserves.

The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After

By Elizabeth Kantor

(Regnery, £16.99)

Rating: *** Why do Jane Austen heroines always get their men? And how come her heroes are such great guys? Well, their being fictional characters must help. As does the fact that they lived (in so far as they lived at all) two centuries ago so couldn’t make present-day mistakes. No Jane Bennet sex tape out there on the net, then; no Elinor Dashwood dash for the morning-after pill. But then neither were there careers; no occupation except ‘accomplishments’ and social calls; and precious little emotional autonomy or choice. Elizabeth Kantor doesn’t want to wind the clock back 200 years and shafts of sense pervade the conservative sensibility in this reactionary polemic-cum self-help guide. Kantor’s surely right in suggesting that today’s liberated women enslave themselves too readily to myths of fulfilment and end up settling for far too little in their men.

Photography

By Graham Diprose and Jeff Robins

(Thames and Hudson, £22.50)

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Rating: **** It’s just over 20 years since the first digital cameras became commercially available: in that time photography has reinvented itself as both technology and art. So it doesn’t seem overly portentous for a book like this one to present itself as a guide to ‘the new basics’. The ease with which you can point-and-press – and get good results – is admittedly beguiling, but good results can be so much better with the resources now to hand. Diprose and Robins are full of practical advice; particularly on how the camera is complemented by the home computer