A New Start

FT: Figure of speech

But he always recognises JFK's primacy in both domains: "I never confused which of us was the elected leader and which was the assistant."

The president who appears in Sorensen's stories is rigorous, curious and aware of his own frailties - dissimilar in most respects, then, from the current incumbent. The world's opinion of America's leader was also strikingly different at that time. When a US emissary briefed French President Charles de Gaulle on the Soviet missile sites in Cuba in October 1962, de Gaulle brushed aside an offer to review the CIA's aerial photography. "No," he said, "the word of the President of the United States is good enough for me."

Counselor is a wise and handsomely written memoir which reveals the uncommon attributes of its author. Somehow Sorensen has dodged the pomposity which attaches to so many important men in their advanced years. He recognises his failures and limitations; he cites the charges levelled by his critics, to whom he is generous; he enumerates regrets which he might easily have concealed. He has even forgotten his Secret Service code name, which others display as a badge of honour.

According to this book, John Kennedy was "a good and decent man". My first thought was that this is too sentimental a judgment. But he must have been, to have attracted so fine an associate as Ted Sorensen.

==

Figure of speech

By Michael Fullilove

Published: June 21 2008 03:00 | Last updated: June 21 2008 03:00

I once attended a talk given by President John F Kennedy's speechwriter, adviser and "intellectual blood bank", Ted Sorensen. He was asked who had written the most famous line in Kennedy's inaugural address, "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." Was it JFK's work, or his speechwriter's? Sorensen's answer was magnificent: "Ask not!"

The speechwriter's code of silence requires that a discreet veil be drawn over the drafting process. Adherence to this code is rare these days, however. Speechwriters routinely brief friends and journalists about their authorship of some golden phrase or other. Occasionally they even scrap publicly for credit.

Sorensen is different. For more than four decades, he minimised his role in the drafting of the speeches delivered on the New Frontier. Only now, in this new memoir, with the other parties dead and the archives open, does Sorensen pull back the veil - a little.

Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History throws new light on Sorensen's central role in both the speechwriting and policy processes in the Kennedy White House ("I was too busy ever [?] to smell the flowers in the White House Rose Garden," he notes). But he always recognises JFK's primacy in both domains: "I never confused which of us was the elected leader and which was the assistant."

The president who appears in Sorensen's stories is rigorous, curious and aware of his own frailties - dissimilar in most respects, then, from the current incumbent. The world's opinion of America's leader was also strikingly different at that time. When a US emissary briefed French President Charles de Gaulle on the Soviet missile sites in Cuba in October 1962, de Gaulle brushed aside an offer to review the CIA's aerial photography. "No," he said, "the word of the President of the United States is good enough for me."

Sorensen admits JFK's flaws: his faint-heartedness in ducking a 1954 vote to censure Senator Joe McCarthy, his "blind spot on Cuba" and his "deaf ear on China". And he acknowledges the president's philandering: "He should have known that ultimately the inevitable disclosure of his misconduct could diminish the moral force and credibility of all the good he was doing," Sorensen writes. On the other hand, Sorensen refuses to provide succour to Kennedy's enemies, stating, "I know of no occasion where his private life interfered with the fulfillment of his public duties."

In other words, Sorensen keeps faith with Kennedy. Though a conscientious obj-ector in his youth, Sorensen is a good soldier. Here, too, there is a stark contemporary comparison in the former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan. McClellan would not, I suspect, have even become an intern in Sorensen's day. But the real difference between the two men lies in the measure of their loyalty. Within two years of leaving the Bush administration, McClellan has a book in the stores dumping on the man who made him. Nearly half a century after JFK's assassination, on the other hand, Sorensen still feels what he calls "the obligations of loyalty, which for me outweigh all pressures to cast prudence, privacy, discretion, and the secrets of others aside".

Counselor is a wise and handsomely written memoir which reveals the uncommon attributes of its author. Somehow Sorensen has dodged the pomposity which attaches to so many important men in their advanced years. He recognises his failures and limitations; he cites the charges levelled by his critics, to whom he is generous; he enumerates regrets which he might easily have concealed. He has even forgotten his Secret Service code name, which others display as a badge of honour.

According to this book, John Kennedy was "a good and decent man". My first thought was that this is too sentimental a judgment. But he must have been, to have attracted so fine an associate as Ted Sorensen.

Michael Fullilove is director of the global issues program at the Lowy Institute in Sydney, Australia and a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

FT: Withdrawal symptoms

Withdrawal symptoms

By Clive Cookson

Published: May 31 2008 03:00 | Last updated: May 31 2008 03:00

All credit to Matthew Connelly for making his position clear on the first page of this sweeping history of the global population control movement. It is dedicated "to my parents, for having so many children".

The author, associate professor of history at Columbia University, is the youngest of eight siblings in an extended - and evidently happy and high-achieving - American Catholic family. Although Connelly is no fan of the patriarchal pro-life policies of the Roman Catholic church, his own background has clearly given him a horror of enforced restraints on population growth. He focuses on the cruelty and arrogance of the movement, which culminated during the 1970s and 1980s in India's sterilisation camps and China's one-child policy, downplaying the huge achievements of family planning in giving people control of their own fertility.

The resulting book is a strange combination of personal passion and exhaustive academic inquiry. Connelly spent several years interviewing people and scouring the archives of organisations ranging from the Vatican to the Eugenics Society. The notes and references at the back of the book fill more than 100 pages.

Unfortunately, the underlying story behind Fatal Misconception is often lost in the depths of the scholarship. Like many academic authors, Connelly loves to demonstrate the extent of his research by going into excessive detail about who said what to whom. The endless manoeuvrings of the many ideological and national interest groups at world population conferences in the mid- and late-20th century are particularly tedious. A better writer than Connelly might have brought them to life through a more vivid portrayal of the personalities involved.

The theme that most caught my imagination was the waxing and waning of the role of women in the population movement. The book starts with the trial in 1870s London of Annie Besant ( pictured right ). Besant was charged with publishing an obscene pamphlet advising readers how to have sex without conceiving. Initially found guilty, she won her appeal and went on to publish another pamphlet advocating population control on essentially Malthusian grounds. The Law of Population sold hundreds of thousands of copies in English and translation.

Besant was the forerunner of a formidable female group, including Margaret Sanger in the US, Marie Stopes in the UK, Elise Ottesen-Jensen in Norway, Shidzue Ishimoto in Japan and Rama Rau in India, who worked indefatigably on the international stage during the early 20th century to promote population control - essentially as a means of emancipating women. After the second world war, though, men took charge, propelled by vast grants from the US government and foundations such as Ford and Rockefeller. These professionals of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s were - according to Connelly's unsympathetic account - self-seeking sexists with no understanding of the lives of women in poor countries, the main targets of their activity. It wasn't until the last decade of the 20th century that feminism finally reclaimed the movement, bringing the emphasis back to education and family planning.

Despite its apparently comprehensive nature, much is missing from Fatal Misconception . Connelly hardly mentions the essential science behind population control - the research funded by governments and industry to develop better contraceptives. His analysis of what motivated the movement is poor, too. Beyond eugenics and racism, beyond Malthusian concerns about feeding the world, there has long been a passionate environmental strand to population control. This receives little recognition.

But I do not want to be too negative. The subject of population control - perhaps the most ambitious social engineering project of the 20th century - has been somewhat neglected by historians. For all of its flaws, Fatal Misconception is a welcome contribution to the field, original and thoughtprovoking.

Clive Cookson is the FT's science edito

FT: The Penguin History of Modern China

The Penguin History of Modern China

Review by Rana Mitter

Published: May 31 2008 01:23 | Last updated: May 31 2008 01:23

The Penguin History of Modern China: The Fall and Rise of a Great Power, 1850-2008
By Jonathan Fenby
Allen Lane £30, 816 pages
FT bookshop price: £24

“Oppose one-bookism,” Chairman Mao once demanded of writers in socialist China. The task of revolution, he argued, was too urgent to indulge artists who wanted to spend years on just one volume, however finely crafted. Fortunately, writers in the bourgeois capitalist world are still allowed to nurture such a book, and in the case of Jonathan Fenby’s new History of Modern China, we should be grateful for that. His book is a powerful revisionist account of a country whose history needs to be understood if the west is to comprehend China’s role in the present and the future.

The wider story of China’s “fall and rise”, as the subtitle puts it, is well known. The last emperor abdicated in 1912. He was replaced by an unstable republic, and then a communist state led by Mao Zedong. This in turn has given way to the current era of “opening-up and reform”, which has left China neither truly communist nor capitalist. Fenby’s reading of these events draws on the latest academic scholarship, visible in the 52 pages of bibliography and notes.

Up to now, books on China meant for a general readership have tended to make the victory of Mao in 1949, and his subsequent years in power, the pivotal point of modern Chinese history. Events before 1949 are treated as milestones on the road to communist victory; China’s development since 1978 is interpreted largely as a contrast to the high socialism of Mao. Even today, the so-called Great Helmsman is probably the Chinese figure best known to westerners. But more than three decades after Mao’s death, should our understanding of China’s modern history still concentrate on this one figure, however powerful?

Fenby showed some years ago that he was not content with received wisdom about modern Chinese history. Rather than writing yet another life of Mao (I can think of 10 biographies in English off the top of my head), in 2004 the former Observer editor and historian instead undertook the first comprehensive assessment of Mao’s great rival Chiang Kai-shek, a figure almost ignored by English language biographers. Fenby’s thoughtful, post-cold war interpretation saw Chiang neither as an incipient democrat, as his defenders such as Henry Luce of Time would have it, nor a demonic figure who cared nothing for his own people’s suffering. Instead, Fenby drew on the words of a young Chinese he met to describe Chiang as “a major figure who made major mistakes. Like Chairman Mao.”

In this new book, Fenby brings that same critical eye to the wider sweep of Chinese history. He gives more weight than usual to the positive side of the pre-1949 governments in China, showing for example that the Nationalists also carried out major reforms in preparation for a war with Japan, including “fortifications … constructing arsenals, development of the air force, and preparations for chemical warfare”. The Communists are portrayed not as inevitable victors, but one of a range of contenders for power in a China trying to find its way in the modern world.

Fenby draws strong pen-pictures of the personalities who had such sway in China’s turbulent modern era, such as the late 19th-century foreign minister Li Hongzhang, the “Bismarck of China,” who tried to play western powers off against each other as they struggled, in the phrase of the time, to “slice China like a melon”. He places Mao in context, but also offers a full portrait of the figure who most readers still want to know about. The Chairman comes over as a brutal and self-obsessed figure, and the savagery of his Cultural Revolution in particular is explained in horrific detail, drawing on the superb and authoritative recent account by Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution (2006). But Fenby also understands that Mao’s charisma was real: after half a century of war and failed leadership, the population genuinely welcomed a strong leader. Mao’s crimes came not from a cynical lack of ideological conviction but, rather, from a chilling excess of it. The book is not afraid of directness: the Great Leap Forward, the agricultural collectivisation in 1958-62 in which tens of millions of peasants starved to death, is described not by academic euphemisms such as “misguided” or “ill-judged,” but as plain “mad”. Sometimes bluntness is best.

There are also echoes of the violence of the Cultural Revolution in the four chapters devoted to one event: the Tiananmen Square killings of 1989. Nearly two decades on, many in the west, particularly some business interests, regard the confrontation of that year as a minor hiccup which should no longer impede Sino-western relations. Fenby’s account reminds us how crucial the misjudgment was by that supposedly reformist leadership: the killing of unarmed protesters, for whatever reason, tells us something fundamental and disturbing about any regime.

I would argue with some of the author’s interpretations. Chiang Kai-shek’s wartime performance against the Japanese is rightly criticised for its weak points. But the sheer ferocity of Japan’s attacks on the Nationalist regime in 1937-45 would have defeated many a stronger government. It is also perhaps too harsh to suggest, as the book does, that the last imperial dynasty, the Qing, was purely cynical in establishing elected local assemblies; there is evidence of real enthusiasm for reform in the years before the 1911 revolution. The latter question has a parallel today, as analysts try to determine quite how genuine are the political reforms undertaken by today’s Communist party.

What kind of China does Fenby’s account paint? In some ways, the picture is depressing, with a constant recourse to violence by successive regimes. Yet it is also a story of genuine modernisation and unprecedented economic and social progress. The book also follows Chinese custom by “using the past to illuminate the present”. A century ago, it suggests, China was opening up to the outside world, torn between willingness to participate in the international system, and fear that greater openness would undermine the regime. That century-old dilemma of how to create a strong China in a world buffeted by global forces is painfully relevant today. Jonathan Fenby’s account of how China has coped with that dilemma makes his illuminating book the first major history that looks at the country with the eyes of the 21st century rather than the 20th.

Rana Mitter teaches modern Chinese history at Oxford University and is the author of ‘Modern China: A Very Short Introduction’ (Oxford University Press)

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

FT Book Review: Where Underpants Come From

Where Underpants Come From

Review by Chaz Folkes

Published: May 24 2008 01:38 | Last updated: May 24 2008 01:38

Where Underpants Come From
By Joe Bennett
Simon & Schuster £11.99, 272 pages
FT bookshop price: £9.59

Amazed that anyone can sell a five-pack of underpants in a New Zealand supermarket for less than $10 and make a profit, Joe Bennett follows his purchase back to its source: China, in the midst of an economic boom.

After posing as a buyer in Shanghai and touring the factories in Quanzhou where his pants were made, he tracks down the raw material itself in the cotton fields around Urumqi, thousands of miles away in western China. At every step, Bennett discovers large-scale industry powered by cheap labour and an insatiable thirst for commerce.

He admits that he initially knew nothing about China, arguing that the west is generally ignorant of the country that now provides so many of its clothes.

As much a piece of travel writing as it is an overview of the political and economic climate in China, Where Underpants Come From is a fascinating and personal account of a country undergoing rapid change.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

FT: Time in our hands

Time in our hands

By Steven Cave

Published: May 23 2008 21:30 | Last updated: May 23 2008 21:30

Discretionary Time: A New Measure of Freedom
By Robert E Goodin, James Mahmud Rice, Antti Parpo and Lina Eriksson
CUP £17.99, 462 pages
FT bookshop price: £14.39

Time: A User’s Guide
By Stefan Klein
Translated by Shelley Frisch
Penguin £8.99, 342 pages
FT Bookshop price: £7.19

Making Time: Why Time Seems to Pass at Different Speeds and How to Control It
By Steve Taylor
Icon Books £12.99, 288 pages
FT Bookshop price: £10.39

It is a paradox that we, who have never had it so good, should feel so harried. Whereas our great-grandparents worked 14-hour shifts on steam-filled factory floors just to keep themselves in gruel, we clock off when we fancy and still afford the finest foods on our well-stocked supermarket shelves. We don’t know what it is to sweat over the washboard and mangle: our many and various machines wash, launder and dry while we put our feet up for a leisurely evening planning our next trip to Thailand. And to top it all, we can expect 80 years of this easeful existence, nearly twice as many as only a century ago. We should be swimming in an abundance of time.

But instead we are drowning. Despite our alleged lives of leisure, we are still slaves to the clock and the calendar. Seventy per cent of organisations in the UK report that work-place stress is rife – an astonishing 88 per cent of these are in the public sector. One recent study estimated that 10m working days a year were lost to stress-related health problems at a cost to the UK’s gross national product of £26bn.

How is it we have such a wealth of time, yet never enough? How can it be that our supposed lives of privilege feel so pressured? Three recent books tackle this paradox from different perspectives and come to surprisingly similar conclusions on how we can become masters of our own days: by reclaiming control of our calendars and by appreciating the value of the moments that make up our lives.

The first part of the answer is to recognise that we are not so time rich compared to our ancestors as we think. Working hours may be shorter than during those dark days of the 19th century’s satanic mills but the industrial era was an anomaly. In the Middle Ages, many Europeans enjoyed more than 100 holidays a year, plus Sundays. At the height of Rome’s decadence, more than 200 days were reserved for public merry-making. As the team of social scientists from Sweden, Finland and Australia write in Discretionary Time: A New Measure of Freedom , if existing tribal peoples are anything to go by, our hunter-gatherer ancestors could meet their needs with only a few hours graft a day. “If the Kapauku of Papua work one day, they do no labour on the next. Kung bushmen put in only two and a half days a week.”

So maybe we shouldn’t be beating ourselves up about our supposed lives of leisure after all. Taking the long view, our lives are still a slog compared to those of our ancestors. But this does not explain why we feel more stressed than our parents or grandparents. They did not have the kind of statutory holidays and labour-saving devices that we enjoy.

Perversely, our wealth is part of the problem. Although more prosperous societies are on average more leisured, as the authors of Discretionary Time report, the richer the individual, the more he or she reports feeling stressed. This runs contrary to our expectations that the affluent can afford the help that makes life a little bit easier. The well-to-do might believe they are simply harder working. Sometimes this is the case but that in itself is paradoxical – surely they should not need to work as much the rest of us.

Their very prosperity, however, is their undoing, as Discretionary Time explains. To take an example, if a City banker chooses not to work, then for each hour of leisure he must forgo the £200 that he could have earned at his desk. Taking account of this opportunity cost, that makes going to the cinema seem an expensive indulgence. His cleaner, on the other hand, forgoes only a tenner when she decides to go home and watch TV. Put this way, the banker’s decision to work on seems rational. But the reality is that he is already vastly better off than his cleaner and the extra £200 will make little difference to his life. In other words, we work harder as we get richer because we are too greedy and short-sighted to realise when our coffers are already full.

But this is only half the story. In Time: A User’s Guide, the German science writer Stefan Klein cites a study showing that the wealthy experience more time pressure even when they do not work harder – indeed even when they do not work at all. “The richest housewives, with cleaning women and gardeners at their beck and call, feel that they are in a constant state of stress.” The reason, he suggests, is they have more options that need sorting, prioritising and reconciling. Unlike the City banker’s wife, the cleaner is unlikely to be worrying about where to build the swimming pool, whether the yacht is ship-shape and where to go skiing this year. For those for whom money is no object, the only limit is time.

Underlying all this is a culture of time that a few largely Protestant European and American nations have spread throughout the western world and increasingly beyond. Our work ethic teaches us that time is money, and to waste either is a sin. In a capitalist economy, labour is measured by the hour, rather than by the task. And, we all could have retired long ago if we would be happy with the simple pleasures enjoyed by our ancestors. But instead, our consumer society depends upon the creation of new needs, for televisions that are even flatter, computers that are even faster. As these three books suggest, we have created a culture wherein success and status depend upon being ever richer and ever busier.

The conclusion of Discretionary Time, an academic text based on a wealth of data from OECD countries, is that most of us have no one but ourselves to blame for our time-scarce predicament. Time pressure, they argue, suggests compulsion. But are we really forced to work so hard, take the kids to hockey, and redo the patio? No: these are our choices. If we see “free time” as the hour at the end of the day to read the paper once the children are in bed and the chores are done, then we never seem to have enough. But the authors suggest it would be more accurate to measure the amount of time we have left once we have met life’s necessities – what they call “discretionary time”. We could, after all, just work enough to feed ourselves, clothe the kids in hand-me-downs and wash only once a week. We would then have a lot more time on our hands: indeed, around 80 hours a week, or almost 12 hours a day, even accounting for sleep.

If we are not content to live on the poverty line, we might – and usually do – choose to spend a good many of these 80 hours further lining our pockets. But then, the book argues, we should not complain about our choice afterwards. We are, in fact, time-rich but profligate spendthrifts. For us to complain about not having enough time is like our banker claiming to be poor because he regularly splashes out his vast income on lavish dinners and fine wines.

But does it help the stressed executive to know that his packed diary is all his own doing? According to Stefan Klein, yes. He suggests that it is not lack of time per se that causes stress but lack of control. He cites the classic “Whitehall Study” of more than 10,000 British civil servants begun in 1967 and still on-going. This demonstrates a direct correlation between stress and feelings of powerlessness.

Those who felt their time was regulated by others “were up to two and a half times more likely to die from a heart attack or stroke than were colleagues who considered themselves to have control of their time”. Whereas there was no such link between long hours alone and stress. Recognising that we are choosing to stay late in the office than rush home to take little Olivia to her violin lesson is the first step to regaining control of our time. And that is the first step to low-stress living.

The second step is to understand better how we perceive time and what it means to spend it well or badly. Both Klein and Steve Taylor, author of Making Time, note that there is more to an hour than just 60 minutes: our own sense of time passing is only loosely linked to the ticking of the clock. Taylor asks us to imagine twins, one of whom spends an adventure-packed year travelling, the other a year of workaday routine. For the first, the year is full of stimulation that enriches each moment and stays in his memory. For the second, each month passes all but unnoticed. The first “experiences more time in that one year than his brother does, he lives through more time, so in a sense, he has now actually lived for longer than his brother”.

We all know that two weeks of a holiday in a new country add more to our lives than, say, the following two weeks back at work. Which is why many of us have become novelty-junkies, seeking ever more exotic destinations or more extreme adventures. This is certainly to be recommended over sitting in front of the television, that great thief of time. But for those not inclined to bungee jump from the Eiffel Tower, Klein and Taylor point to a gentler way of expanding our days: simply by paying more attention to the here and now. Learning to focus on the present, for example through meditation, can help us to concentrate, beat stress and appreciate each moment.

Time: A User’s Guide, an international bestseller first published in Germany and now released in an excellent English translation in the UK, presents a rich landscape, full of interesting detail you will be talking about later in the pub or round the dinner table. Making Time, by contrast, is like a trip through suburbia: banal and repetitive. Both books purport to explain to the general reader how and why we perceive time the way we do, and they come to many of the same conclusions, but Taylor’s book has neither the scientific grounding nor the charm of Klein’s. It is as empty of insights as Discretionary Time and Time: A User’s Guide are full of them; and whereas they are based respectively on the latest sociological and neurological findings, Taylor bases his claims on a shallow trawl through the mystic’s book of common codswallop.

In one of many diverting asides, Klein explains the biological inheritance behind the stress-reaction. Our brains evolved to aid survival on the African plains, where “new stimuli were infrequent, and those that did appear could be of vital importance”. Our adrenalin-fuelled reaction made the difference between catching the evening’s meal or becoming someone else’s. But now we are bombarded with new stimuli – texts, e-mails, adverts – and though we “know full well that most of the messages we receive are pointless,” reminds Klein “we cannot help reacting with a level of intensity appropriate to a person on the savanna who hears rustling in the leaves.”

The problem, therefore, is not that we have too much to do and too little time but that we are too easily distracted and do not focus on making the most of the days we have. The solution: unplug the TV, switch off the mobile phone and do something that will stand the test of time.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

Telegraph: Book Shelves

Interiors:  Rooms that lose none of their shelf life

Last Updated: 12:01am BST 15/04/2008

In this digital age, it may surprise you to read that more people want libraries than cinemas in their homes. Sarah Lonsdale reports

There is something distinctly elegant about the library in Jeffery Bates's Georgian house in Leeds. Light streams through the tall windows illuminating oriental carpets, plaster busts, ancient leather club sofas and wicker plantation chairs, and of course, the hundreds of books that line its faded terracotta walls.

	Escapism: Jeffery Bates gets away from it all in the library of his home in Leeds

Jeffery, an auctioneer and historian, admits to being a "bit of an obsessive" about his shelves of antiquarian books - many of them charting the history of India and the East India Company, as well as volumes on English country houses and art. "I like to come here on my own, put on some classical music, spread out an old map on my desk and escape from the busy world outside," he says. "My books are part of who I am, I can't imagine living in a house without them."

In this age of digital information, books have lost none of their appeal, with many people carrying "old friends" they have loved reading from house to house.

"People feel a unique attachment to the books they own," says Joel Rickett, deputy editor of The Bookseller magazine. "From that highlighted copy of The Great Gatsby we read at the age of 13 to the tattered, almost spineless edition of Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy that has been round all our friends, books remind us of pivotal times of our lives. To have a place in the home with no television, phone, computer or Blackberry - where we don't need to be in continuous 'response' mode - just shelves of old friends around the walls, is a wonderful thing."

So it comes as no surprise that according to a new report - The Changing Face of British Homes, compiled by insurers Legal & General - more people would like a library or reading room in their home than either a home cinema, gym or music studio. In the survey of 4,000 people, 15 per cent said they would like a library compared to 13 per cent wanting a gym, 9 per cent a music studio and just 8 per cent a home cinema. Although "library" is not usually on the list of requirements for home buyers, a room with plenty of bookshelves is always a plus, says Mario Volpi of agents Jackson-Stops & Staff.

If short on space opt for bookshelves lining the walls in a sitting room or playroom, which also act as an insulator

"Sadly, often when we move house, a lack of shelves in the new home means heart-breaking trips to the charity book shop. 'Where am I going to put all my books?' is a surprising concern for many home buyers." It is just this concern that is troubling Maureen Metzger, who is looking to downsize from her large home in East Sheen, south-west London, now that her children have grown up. "I love my books and have kept all of them since childhood, plus ones I have inherited from my grandparents. I have a book-lined reading room where the telephone is banned and although I am downsizing I still need a house with enough shelves for my books."

Richard Brooks of agents Strutt & Parker says that "as well as furnishing a room, books confer a certain elegant ambience on a property".

He adds: "However the room is actually used, its very existence suggests a manner of life more spacious and leisured than our own, of bridge and backgammon rather than laptops and DVDs."

Installing libraries and reading rooms in homes does not belong to yesteryear either. The British Interior Design Association reports many of its members converting second sitting rooms into libraries. Robert Carslaw, a designer, is currently installing 50 metres of mahogany bookshelves plus silk-shaded reading lights and antique brass "library lights" into a house in Sevenoaks, Kent, for his lawyer client.

advertisement

"I get asked to install libraries quite a lot," he says. "With everyone so busy and hectic at work, it's nice to have a haven of calm at home."

In today's environment-conscious world, they also have another valuable function. "Books are the original insulator. A shelf of books along an outside wall works well to prevent heat escaping," says Joel Rickett. "If all the books were removed from the homes in Britain, our energy bills would rocket."

Top tips on installing a library

You need plenty of natural light, but avoid sunlight falling directly on to your books as this can damage them. Either have closed curtains or shutters on your windows for when you are not using your library, or don't install bookshelves directly opposite a south or west facing window.   Well-directed reading lights are essential, with an adjustable arm over a favourite chair. On the shelves themselves, well-shaded barshaped library lights will help you find your chosen volume.   Books and paper are prone to decay and mould in the wrong conditions, with excess warmth and damp and too much dust the main culprits. Keep your library cool and dry and dust books regularly, from the spine outwards using a soft brush. When installing shelves, use natural wood, simply waxed, or if painted, use organic paints to minimise chemical damage. Cooking fumes are not good for books so, if you can, use a room far away from the kitchen. You don't have to have a dedicated library. Install bookshelves in a room such as a playroom or small sitting room. Use this room for music practice or board and card games, to encourage children to have a room where television and computer games are banned. Depending on the wood you use and the finish, installing a bay of books costs from £400 for a plain pine bookcase to several thousand pounds for mahogany. Ensure the shelves are at least an inch thick and no more than four feet long otherwise they will bow under the weight of books. Taller shelves for heavier books should be along the bottom, with paperbacks at the top. Useful contacts Installers: The British Association of Interior Designers (www.bida.org) can find a designer with experience of fitting entire libraries. Fitted furniture maker Neville Johnson (www.nevillejohnson.co.uk, 0161 873 8333) crafts bespoke shelving units. For fitted shelving try Hammonds (www.hammonds-uk.com, 0800 251505). If you only require a few bookcases, use a local cabinet maker or joiner. Joiners: Yarra Valley, www.yarravalley.co.uk, 0870 770 8313; JK Evans & Sons, www.jkevansandsons.co.uk, 0151 342 1801; Canterbury Joinery, 01227 700011. Antique book ends and slips: www.buycollectableantiques.com Book binders: www.societyofbookbinders.com. Library steps: Lavender Blue, www.lavenderbluelondon.co.uk, 02920 860 325

FT: The Frenchman who funded US start-ups

The Frenchman who funded US start-ups

By Martin Arnold

Published: April 17 2008 03:00 | Last updated: April 17 2008 03:00

French politicians often look enviously across the Atlantic at the entrepreneurial successes of the US economy, such as Google, Apple, Intel and Microsoft. So it is a heavy irony that the man who founded the US venture capital industry, helping to create many multibillion-dollar companies, came from France.

In Creative Capital , Spencer Ante, a Business Week journalist, recounts the life of a true 20th- century Renaissance man, Georges Doriot, pictured below.

Aged 21, Doriot sailed by steamship to the US from his native France and went on to become a brigadier general in the second world war, one of the most influential professors at Harvard Business School and founder of Insead, Europe's first business school.

But his main achievement was to pioneer the US venture capital industry in 1946 by setting up American Research & Development (ARD), which backed one of the first blockbuster technology start-ups, Digital Equipment Corporation.

Born in Paris in 1899, Doriot was the only son of a promising industrialist at the Peugeot car company and his schoolteacher wife.

The book charts Doriot's early years in minute detail. This makes the first chapters heavy going, especially after Doriot's arrival in the US as he graduates from Harvard and starts work at Kuhn, Loeb & Company on Wall Street before returning to Harvard as a professor. It takes almost half the book for ARD to appear.

Yet it unearths some interesting anecdotes, such as how Doriot received the Distinguished Service Medal, the highest military award for a non-combatant, for running the army's resources division. His unit developed many innovative pieces of military equipment, including the "Doron" plastic flak jacket, named after him.

The book chronicles how "the war was a watershed for entrepreneurialism" as high levels of military research spending created a fertile climate for high- tech start-ups. Doriot, with backing from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, formed ARD as the first professional venture capital firm to raise money from non-family sources.

After a frantic struggle, the Boston-based firm raised $3.5m, well below its $5m target, by selling shares to a small group of investors. Its early years were marked by several misses, such as an investment in a Fiji tuna fishing company that went bust.

The book seeks to explain why Doriot and ARD were successful. His strategy relied on backing talent, not technology. "An average idea in the hands of an able man is worth much more than an outstanding idea in the possession of a person with only average ability," he said.

By far his biggest success was to back Kenneth Olsen and Harlan Anderson, two young engineers at MIT, as they started Digital to produce the first transistor-based computer in a challenge to IBM's dominance. Doriot showed his thoroughness by insisting on meeting both men's wives before investing.

For years, Doriot resisted calls to make a quick buck on Digital, asking: "When a man has a stable of horses and one wins the Grand Prix, do people say 'what a good stable this man has?' Or do they say 'you should get rid of your winner and develop the others'?"

Its initial $70,000 investment in Digital in 1957 returned shares worth $400m to ARD's investors 15 years later. Digital was eventually sold for almost $10bn to Compaq in 1998 and is now part of Hewlett-Packard.

Doriot's life had frustrations as well as triumphs. One was his attempt to repeat the success of ARD in Europe by creating the European Enterprise Development Company in 1963, only for it to fold a decade later, burdened with debt and struggling with a fragmented European market.

A disciplinarian, dubbed "the general" by students and colleagues, Doriot had a maniacal work ethic and a fiercely stubborn streak. He failed to groom a successor at ARD and stayed too long at the helm.

Nonetheless, people who worked at ARD later set up many of Silicon Valley's best-known venture capital firms. His manufacturing course at Harvard made a lasting impact on many of today's US corporate leaders.

This book will appeal to anyone interested in the origins of venture capital, why its centre of gravity moved from the Boston area to the west coast, or what it takes to succeed as a VC investor.

But, amid today's financial turmoil, in which venture capital has been relegated to almost a footnote in the alphabet soup of global finance, the tale of Doriot's life is also a timely testament to the courage and determination of an investment pioneer.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

Excerpt

(Source: Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi)

Why did I stop teaching so suddenly? I had asked myself this question many times. Was it the declining quality of the university? The ever-increasing indifference among the remaining faculty and students? The daily struggle against arbitrary rules and restrictions?

....

For a long time I had dreamt of creating a special class, one that would give me the freedoms denied me in the classes I taught... I wanted to teach a handful of selected students wholly committed to the study of literature, students who were not handpicked by the government, who had not chosen English literature simply because they had not been accepted in other fields or because they thought an English degree would be a good career move.

.....

I was reminded of a painter friend who had started her career by depicting scenes from life, mainly deserted rooms, abandoned houses and discarded photographs of women. Gradually, her work became more abstract, and in her last exhibition, her paintings were splashes of rebellious color, like the two in my living room, dark patches with little droplets of blue. I asked about her progress from modern realism to abstraction. Reality has become so intolerable, she said, so bleak, that all I can paint now are the colors of my dreams.

The colors of my dreams, I repeated to myself, stepping out of the shower and onto the cool tiles. I liked that. How many people get a chance to paint the colors of their dreams? I put on my oversize bathrobe-it felt good to move from the security of the embracing water to the protective cover of a bathrobe wrapped around my body. I walked barefoot into the kitchen, poured some coffee into my favorite mug, the one with red strawberries, and sat down forgetfully on the divan in the hall.

This class was the color of my dreams. It entailed an active withdrawal from a reality that had turned hostile. I wanted very badly to hold on to my rare mood of jubilance and optimism. For in the back of my mind, I didn\'t know what awaited me at the end of this project. You are aware, a friend had said, that you are more and more withdrawing into yourself, and now that you have cut your relations with the university, your whole contact with the outside world will be mainly restricted to one room. Where will you go from here? he had asked. Withdrawal into one\'s dreams could be dangerous, I reflected, padding into the bedroom to change; this I had learned from Nabokov\'s crazy dreamers, like Kinbote and Humbert.

In selecting my students, I did not take into consideration their ideological or religious backgrounds. Later, I would count it as the class\'s great achievement that such a mixed group, with different and at times conflicting backgrounds, personal as well as religious and social, remained so loyal to its goals and ideals.

One reason for my choice of these particular girls was the peculiar mixture of fragility and courage I sensed in them. They were what you would call loners, who did not belong to any particular group or sect. I admired their ability to survive not despite but in some ways because of their solitary lives. We can call the class "a space of our own," Manna had suggested, a sort of communal version of Virginia Woolf\'s room of her own.

I spent longer than usual choosing my clothes that first morning, trying on different outfits, until I finally settled on a red-striped shirt and black corduroy jeans. I applied my makeup with care and put on bright red lipstick. As I fastened my small gold earrings, I suddenly panicked. What if it doesn\'t work? What if they won\'t come?

Don\'t, don\'t do that! Suspend all fears for the next five or six hours at least. Please, please, I pleaded with myself, putting on my shoes and going into the kitchen.

....

Looking back, I am amazed at how much we learned without even noticing it. We were, to borrow from Nabokov, to experience how the ordinary pebble of ordinary life could be transformed into a jewel through the magic eye of fiction.
= =

FT: The age of seance

The age of seance

By James Lovegrove

Published: March 8 2008 00:22 | Last updated: March 8 2008 00:22

Servants of the Supernatural: The Night Side of the Victorian Mind
By Antonio Melechi
William Heinemann £20, 276 pages
FT bookshop price: £16

Ghost Hunters: The Victorians and the Hunt for Proof of Life after Death
By Deborah Blum
Arrow £8.99, 370 pages
FT bookshop price: £7.19

Conan Doyle: The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes
By Andrew Lycett
Weidenfeld and Nicolson £20, 527 pages
FT bookshop price: £16

Conversations with Eternity
By Victor Hugo, translated and with a commentary by John Chambers
New Paradigm $13.95, 260 pages

In 1848, a series of mysterious knocks and bangs began resounding through the timber walls and floors of a farmhouse in Hydesville, New York. The two daughters of the Fox family who owned the reputedly haunted house began addressing the unseen source of the noise. The girls identified it as the spirit of a dead man and gave him the somewhat unnerving name Mr Splitfoot. Through a simple code – two knocks for yes, silence for no – they were able to engage in conversation with him. Word soon spread. People came from far and wide to talk to Mr Splitfoot and pose questions about the afterlife. They inquired about loved ones who were dead. His replies convinced. The spiritualist movement had begun.

A fascination with communicating with the dead continues to grip us today. Television shows such as Most Haunted and Crossing Over With John Edward, both hosted by mediums, get good ratings. Stage mediums remain a box-office draw in provincial theatres. Ours is an age that is pleased with its own rationality, yet we have retained an appetite for messages from the great beyond.

Two recently published books cast an eye over the early years of spiritualism and explore how the phenomenon was regarded in its infancy. Antonio Melechi’s Servants of the Supernatural and Deborah Blum’s Ghost Hunters both show how Victorian intellectuals were at pains to consider spiritualism from a scientific standpoint and use it to form a bridge between fact and religious faith.

Melechi is a visiting fellow at the University of York whose previous book, Fugitive Minds, explored mental disturbances such as deja-vu and sleep paralysis. Servants of the Supernatural delves into what its author winningly calls “the golden age of the Victorian seance”. The opening sections of the book are concerned with mesmerism (a forerunner of modern-day hypnotherapy), which in the first half of the 19th century evolved into a powerful medical tool that could help the mind restore itself to health. It could even be harnessed in surgery. Operations were carried out successfully on patients under “mesmeric sleep”, a far better method of anaesthetisation than ether. For the public, however, mesmerism was best known in its bastardised form, stage hypnotism, and its association with low entertainment meant the high-minded medical establishment would not take it seriously.

The controversy over mesmerism set the pattern for the problems that attended spiritualism. During the latter half of the century, table-turning, inspired by the Fox sisters, became a widespread parlour fad. Sitters would gather around a small tripod table and hold it down with their fingers while invoking the spirits of the dead. One leg of a small tripod table would rap against a larger table below, counting through the letters of the alphabet to form words.

“Mediums” soon emerged. These were people who were especially “sensitive” to the presence of the spirits and who found that they could charge money for their services. They devised a less labour-intensive method of communing with the other side, by going into a trance and speaking in the voices of the dead. The pronouncements they relayed were cryptic and often bizarre, but usually carried a reassuring message to the living. To enhance the effect, mediums would manifest a whole array of remarkable physical phenomena: glowing hands that danced in the air, extrusions of ectoplasm from various orifices, musical instruments played by unseen beings, and so on.

Investigation by scientists, among them Michael Faraday and Charles Darwin, failed to prove conclusively whether any of these miraculous feats were genuine. While some clergymen condemned spiritualism as heretical, there was a general feeling that it was a harmless pastime for the middle and lower classes. Establishment figures were welcome to treat it with a level of seriousness, but they risked their reputations if they dared to give it full credence. This was the fate of the great naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who would not admit that some mediums were flagrant fakers, even when they were taken to court and exposed as such.

Servants of the Supernatural picks its way through the history of spiritualism in the Victorian era carefully and with an understated wit. If there’s a flaw, it’s that Melechi’s tone is austere, at times sober verging on the teetotal. That isn’t a criticism that can be levelled at Deborah Blum’s Ghost Hunters, which brings a zesty transatlantic flavour to the material.

Blum, a professor of science journalism at the University of Wisconsin who has won a Pulitzer for her writings on primate research, chooses as her chief focus William James, older brother of Henry the novelist. The senior James sibling, though American-born, was an early member of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in the UK, and later its president, and as a psychologist spent much of his life applying empirical scientific methodology to spiritualism.

If a doubter at first, James became a convert to spiritualism after the death of his infant son Herman. The prospect that the dead did live on came in the form of Leonora Piper, whom James reckoned to be the one genuine medium in a field littered with impostors. “If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black,” he wrote, “you mustn’t seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove a single crow to be white.”

Piper was his white crow. Years of repeated and intensive testing by the SPR and its American offshoot failed to find fault with her talents. Even when being subjected to all manner of undignified probings and jabbings while in her trance, this Bostonian shopkeeper’s wife was calmly able to furnish information she could not have come by through normal means, facts known only to the investigators or the impartial witnesses they brought with them. For example, Frederick Myers, a founder of the SPR, was utterly convinced that Piper had been in contact with the love of his life, Annie Marshall, who had committed suicide. As Myers put it in a letter to a fellow SPR member, Oliver Lodge: “I do not say that facts unknown to myself were given but facts unknown to Mrs P were recombined in a manner & with an earnestness which … left little doubt – no doubt – that we were in the presence of an authentic utterance from a soul beyond the tomb.”

The portly figure of Arthur Conan Doyle makes brief cameos in both Blum and Melechi’s books. It’s hard to discuss Victorian spiritualism without mentioning the creator of Sherlock Holmes, since he was one of the movement’s most ardent believers and staunchest advocates.

Andrew Lycett’s new biography, Conan Doyle, isn’t solely concerned with showing how the man who dreamed up the most rational character in all literature was himself fascinated by supernatural phenomena. However, it is a major strand running through the book. Lycett, who has penned the lives of other eminent literary figures including Ian Fleming and Rudyard Kipling, depicts a man committed, from a young age, to the pursuit of reason and materialism while “maintaining an essential belief in a higher being”. Conan Doyle’s great hope was to achieve a satisfactory synthesis of the two.

It was while establishing himself as a GP in Southsea, before his literary career took flight, that Conan Doyle first began attending seances. Not until much later, though, did he openly declare his belief that spiritualism was genuine, and that came after his son Kingsley died during the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918. As with William James and Frederick Myers, the unbearable sense of loss caused Conan Doyle to lower his scepticism threshold. He began regularly receiving communications from Kingsley – most of which may be characterised as “You were right all along, Dad, there is life after death.” He found himself able to pardon even the crudest physical effects on the grounds that what they represented was more important than what they were: “The levitation of a tambourine or the moving of furniture may seem humble and even ludicrous … the real question has to do with the force that moves it.”

Conan Doyle ploughed a great deal of his wealth into supporting low-circulation spiritualist periodicals and establishing his Psychic Bookshop and Museum on Victoria Street. With his unswerving and unquestioning acceptance of all things spiritualist, not to mention his belief in the existence of fairies, he squandered his fame too, losing the approval of a public that adored his detective stories. One of the great ironies of Conan Doyle’s life, as Lycett’s compendious, meticulously detailed tome makes clear, is that the world wanted him to be Holmes. He, on the other hand, wanted to be anything but.

Another great Victorian-epoch writer was less public in his espousal of spiritualism but no less fervent. Conversations With Eternity is a distillation of transcripts of table-turning sessions carried out by Victor Hugo and family while in exile on Jersey. The notes were lost in various archives until 1923, when they were collated and published in French. This is their first publication in English.

The Hugos fled the tyrannical regime of Napoleon III in 1851, and having arrived in Jersey, set about holding seances. It seems likely that Hugo’s interest in this activity was precipitated by the death, nine years earlier, of his daughter Leopoldine. Equally, boredom may have played a part. For two years the family were in nightly contact with the ethereal realm, and Conversations With Eternity details the results of their sessions.

Anyone wishing to see the problems that researchers such as William James were up against need look no further than this book. Various spirits, including the shades of such luminaries as Hannibal and Shakespeare, visited the Hugos to convey statements of either mind-numbing banality or bewildering obscurity, sometimes both at once. The one, just-about-coherent theme that emerges from this book is the notion of the world as a prison for human souls, who become reincarnated as lesser organisms if their owners were insufficiently well-behaved during their lives. This leads to a lot of high-flown, repetitious gobbledygook and amusing assertions such as: “The plant is the grimmest of the soul’s prisons. The lily is sheer hell.”

What Conversations With Eternity does well, with its Channel Island channellings, is reinforce the frustrating truth about seances and mediumship. Believers will find much to convince them in the evidence it presents. Unbelievers will not.

Nowadays spiritualism has become part of the paranormal subculture. It and all its New Age-y and Fortean ilk are tolerated but not subjected to any great level of scrutiny. Perhaps that is because, despite our rationalist era, many of us remain in thrall to the hope that deceased loved ones are waiting for us in the next world. We find it hard to accept that life reaches a full stop; we feel there must be, at the very least, a coda, if not a whole new open-ended sentence …

James Lovegrove’s forthcoming book is ‘The Wingless Boy’ (Gollancz)

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

By James Lovegrove

Published: March 8 2008 00:22 | Last updated: March 8 2008 00:22

Servants of the Supernatural: The Night Side of the Victorian Mind
By Antonio Melechi
William Heinemann £20, 276 pages
FT bookshop price: £16

Ghost Hunters: The Victorians and the Hunt for Proof of Life after Death
By Deborah Blum
Arrow £8.99, 370 pages
FT bookshop price: £7.19

Conan Doyle: The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes
By Andrew Lycett
Weidenfeld and Nicolson £20, 527 pages
FT bookshop price: £16

Conversations with Eternity
By Victor Hugo, translated and with a commentary by John Chambers
New Paradigm $13.95, 260 pages

In 1848, a series of mysterious knocks and bangs began resounding through the timber walls and floors of a farmhouse in Hydesville, New York. The two daughters of the Fox family who owned the reputedly haunted house began addressing the unseen source of the noise. The girls identified it as the spirit of a dead man and gave him the somewhat unnerving name Mr Splitfoot. Through a simple code – two knocks for yes, silence for no – they were able to engage in conversation with him. Word soon spread. People came from far and wide to talk to Mr Splitfoot and pose questions about the afterlife. They inquired about loved ones who were dead. His replies convinced. The spiritualist movement had begun.

A fascination with communicating with the dead continues to grip us today. Television shows such as Most Haunted and Crossing Over With John Edward, both hosted by mediums, get good ratings. Stage mediums remain a box-office draw in provincial theatres. Ours is an age that is pleased with its own rationality, yet we have retained an appetite for messages from the great beyond.

Two recently published books cast an eye over the early years of spiritualism and explore how the phenomenon was regarded in its infancy. Antonio Melechi’s Servants of the Supernatural and Deborah Blum’s Ghost Hunters both show how Victorian intellectuals were at pains to consider spiritualism from a scientific standpoint and use it to form a bridge between fact and religious faith.

Melechi is a visiting fellow at the University of York whose previous book, Fugitive Minds, explored mental disturbances such as deja-vu and sleep paralysis. Servants of the Supernatural delves into what its author winningly calls “the golden age of the Victorian seance”. The opening sections of the book are concerned with mesmerism (a forerunner of modern-day hypnotherapy), which in the first half of the 19th century evolved into a powerful medical tool that could help the mind restore itself to health. It could even be harnessed in surgery. Operations were carried out successfully on patients under “mesmeric sleep”, a far better method of anaesthetisation than ether. For the public, however, mesmerism was best known in its bastardised form, stage hypnotism, and its association with low entertainment meant the high-minded medical establishment would not take it seriously.

The controversy over mesmerism set the pattern for the problems that attended spiritualism. During the latter half of the century, table-turning, inspired by the Fox sisters, became a widespread parlour fad. Sitters would gather around a small tripod table and hold it down with their fingers while invoking the spirits of the dead. One leg of a small tripod table would rap against a larger table below, counting through the letters of the alphabet to form words.

“Mediums” soon emerged. These were people who were especially “sensitive” to the presence of the spirits and who found that they could charge money for their services. They devised a less labour-intensive method of communing with the other side, by going into a trance and speaking in the voices of the dead. The pronouncements they relayed were cryptic and often bizarre, but usually carried a reassuring message to the living. To enhance the effect, mediums would manifest a whole array of remarkable physical phenomena: glowing hands that danced in the air, extrusions of ectoplasm from various orifices, musical instruments played by unseen beings, and so on.

Investigation by scientists, among them Michael Faraday and Charles Darwin, failed to prove conclusively whether any of these miraculous feats were genuine. While some clergymen condemned spiritualism as heretical, there was a general feeling that it was a harmless pastime for the middle and lower classes. Establishment figures were welcome to treat it with a level of seriousness, but they risked their reputations if they dared to give it full credence. This was the fate of the great naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who would not admit that some mediums were flagrant fakers, even when they were taken to court and exposed as such.

Servants of the Supernatural picks its way through the history of spiritualism in the Victorian era carefully and with an understated wit. If there’s a flaw, it’s that Melechi’s tone is austere, at times sober verging on the teetotal. That isn’t a criticism that can be levelled at Deborah Blum’s Ghost Hunters, which brings a zesty transatlantic flavour to the material.

Blum, a professor of science journalism at the University of Wisconsin who has won a Pulitzer for her writings on primate research, chooses as her chief focus William James, older brother of Henry the novelist. The senior James sibling, though American-born, was an early member of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in the UK, and later its president, and as a psychologist spent much of his life applying empirical scientific methodology to spiritualism.

If a doubter at first, James became a convert to spiritualism after the death of his infant son Herman. The prospect that the dead did live on came in the form of Leonora Piper, whom James reckoned to be the one genuine medium in a field littered with impostors. “If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black,” he wrote, “you mustn’t seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove a single crow to be white.”

Piper was his white crow. Years of repeated and intensive testing by the SPR and its American offshoot failed to find fault with her talents. Even when being subjected to all manner of undignified probings and jabbings while in her trance, this Bostonian shopkeeper’s wife was calmly able to furnish information she could not have come by through normal means, facts known only to the investigators or the impartial witnesses they brought with them. For example, Frederick Myers, a founder of the SPR, was utterly convinced that Piper had been in contact with the love of his life, Annie Marshall, who had committed suicide. As Myers put it in a letter to a fellow SPR member, Oliver Lodge: “I do not say that facts unknown to myself were given but facts unknown to Mrs P were recombined in a manner & with an earnestness which … left little doubt – no doubt – that we were in the presence of an authentic utterance from a soul beyond the tomb.”

The portly figure of Arthur Conan Doyle makes brief cameos in both Blum and Melechi’s books. It’s hard to discuss Victorian spiritualism without mentioning the creator of Sherlock Holmes, since he was one of the movement’s most ardent believers and staunchest advocates.

Andrew Lycett’s new biography, Conan Doyle, isn’t solely concerned with showing how the man who dreamed up the most rational character in all literature was himself fascinated by supernatural phenomena. However, it is a major strand running through the book. Lycett, who has penned the lives of other eminent literary figures including Ian Fleming and Rudyard Kipling, depicts a man committed, from a young age, to the pursuit of reason and materialism while “maintaining an essential belief in a higher being”. Conan Doyle’s great hope was to achieve a satisfactory synthesis of the two.

It was while establishing himself as a GP in Southsea, before his literary career took flight, that Conan Doyle first began attending seances. Not until much later, though, did he openly declare his belief that spiritualism was genuine, and that came after his son Kingsley died during the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918. As with William James and Frederick Myers, the unbearable sense of loss caused Conan Doyle to lower his scepticism threshold. He began regularly receiving communications from Kingsley – most of which may be characterised as “You were right all along, Dad, there is life after death.” He found himself able to pardon even the crudest physical effects on the grounds that what they represented was more important than what they were: “The levitation of a tambourine or the moving of furniture may seem humble and even ludicrous … the real question has to do with the force that moves it.”

Conan Doyle ploughed a great deal of his wealth into supporting low-circulation spiritualist periodicals and establishing his Psychic Bookshop and Museum on Victoria Street. With his unswerving and unquestioning acceptance of all things spiritualist, not to mention his belief in the existence of fairies, he squandered his fame too, losing the approval of a public that adored his detective stories. One of the great ironies of Conan Doyle’s life, as Lycett’s compendious, meticulously detailed tome makes clear, is that the world wanted him to be Holmes. He, on the other hand, wanted to be anything but.

Another great Victorian-epoch writer was less public in his espousal of spiritualism but no less fervent. Conversations With Eternity is a distillation of transcripts of table-turning sessions carried out by Victor Hugo and family while in exile on Jersey. The notes were lost in various archives until 1923, when they were collated and published in French. This is their first publication in English.

The Hugos fled the tyrannical regime of Napoleon III in 1851, and having arrived in Jersey, set about holding seances. It seems likely that Hugo’s interest in this activity was precipitated by the death, nine years earlier, of his daughter Leopoldine. Equally, boredom may have played a part. For two years the family were in nightly contact with the ethereal realm, and Conversations With Eternity details the results of their sessions.

Anyone wishing to see the problems that researchers such as William James were up against need look no further than this book. Various spirits, including the shades of such luminaries as Hannibal and Shakespeare, visited the Hugos to convey statements of either mind-numbing banality or bewildering obscurity, sometimes both at once. The one, just-about-coherent theme that emerges from this book is the notion of the world as a prison for human souls, who become reincarnated as lesser organisms if their owners were insufficiently well-behaved during their lives. This leads to a lot of high-flown, repetitious gobbledygook and amusing assertions such as: “The plant is the grimmest of the soul’s prisons. The lily is sheer hell.”

What Conversations With Eternity does well, with its Channel Island channellings, is reinforce the frustrating truth about seances and mediumship. Believers will find much to convince them in the evidence it presents. Unbelievers will not.

Nowadays spiritualism has become part of the paranormal subculture. It and all its New Age-y and Fortean ilk are tolerated but not subjected to any great level of scrutiny. Perhaps that is because, despite our rationalist era, many of us remain in thrall to the hope that deceased loved ones are waiting for us in the next world. We find it hard to accept that life reaches a full stop; we feel there must be, at the very least, a coda, if not a whole new open-ended sentence …

James Lovegrove’s forthcoming book is ‘The Wingless Boy’ (Gollancz)

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

FT: Counterknowledge

Counterknowledge

Review by Michael Skapinker

Published: March 8 2008 00:33 | Last updated: March 8 2008 00:33

Counterknowledge: How We Surrendered to Conspiracy Theories, Quack Medicine, Bogus Science and Fake History
By Damian Thompson
Atlantic Books £12.99, 162 pages
FT bookshop price: £10.39

At Ohio’s Creation Museum, the displays show children and dinosaurs frolicking in the Garden of Eden. Dinosaurs survived Noah’s flood and roamed the earth until quite recently, the museum says. How did they fit into Noah’s ark? “They only took young dinosaurs on board,” a guide explains.

Here is something else you may not know: the Chinese discovered America before Christopher Columbus, at least according to 1421: The Year China Discovered the World, a bestseller by Gavin Menzies. Menzies does not tell us that Israel’s northern border was determined by Freemasons. That is in Talisman: Sacred Cities, Secret Faith, by Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval.

All this shows we are living through a “golden age” of bogus science, history and archaeology, Damian Thompson, a leader writer on The Daily Telegraph, says in his bracing polemic Counterknowledge.

He piles on the evidence. About 45 per cent of Americans think God created humans 10,000 years ago, according to a 2004 Gallup poll. British readers can stop smirking. Homeopathy, for which there is little scientific evidence, is available on the National Health Service, as well as being taught in some of the country’s universities.

Counterknowledge’s essential characteristic, Thompson says, is that it purports to be knowledge, but can either be disproved or has no evidence to support it. There is no evidence, for example, that federal officials assisted in the September 11 attacks or did nothing to stop them, but 36 per cent of adult Americans believe one of these propositions. (Thompson, who is also editor-in-chief of The Catholic Herald, concedes that the story of “a Palestinian carpenter coming back to life” is equally implausible, but argues there is a difference “between declaring one’s belief in isolated supernatural events such as the Resurrection, which is what ordinary churchgoers do, and making falsifiable statements about the world around us, which is what faith healers do”.)

There are two particularly worrying aspects about counterknowledge today, Thompson writes. The first is that people who should know better are helping to promulgate it. 1421 and Talisman were published by reputable companies – the former by Transworld, the latter by Penguin, which, like the FT, is owned by Pearson.

Second, Thompson says counterknowledge is spreading to countries where scientific traditions are thin and untruths find a ready anti-western audience. In northern Nigeria and Pakistan, Islamic leaders have told parents that polio vaccines are an American plot to sterilise them.

The deluge of “counterknowledge” is bigger now than it has been for decades and threatens to sweep away one of the Enlightenment’s greatest legacies – “a scientific methodology that allows us to make increasingly accurate observations about the world around us”.

The internet has made the spread of counterknowledge easier. But the web, argues Thompson, is also the way to strike back – which makes it a pity that his own sourcing can be slapdash. An allegation that Muslim students at Guy’s Hospital distributed leaflets attacking Darwinism is unsourced, as is the (easily verifiable) assertion that measles increased in London after unwarranted doubts about the MMR vaccine. In the battle against lies, it is important to buttress the truth.

Michael Skapinker is an FT columnist

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008