It used to take Four Horsemen in their day

How does one take tragic loss, personal loneliness, financial hardship and social disorientation, and turn them into success and fulfilment? Simple: ask the “Surplus Women” of interwar Britain. Here they are, clutching their umbrellas, redoubtable in their well-worn tweeds, cats curled on their laps, or standing with a foot on the shovel of their allotment garden, arm in arm with their best friend; on the catwalk, on the stage, on the radio, in the nursery, at work on the ward, in the office, and down at the pub.

Smoking is a source of shame in our era, with workers expelled from their glass towers to puff furtively in the street, and party guests sent to smoke outside. How different it all was, just a few decades ago, when smoking and sophistication went hand in hand, when the heroines of screwball comedies flicked ash as nonchalantly as they dispensed wisecracks.

I bought discarded love for fifty cents:

An art book in a pile, Toulouse-Lautrec

 We have made ourselves shelters, deep underground shelters

Dear Matchmaking Powers up above,

The poet is a faker. And aren’t you,

pretending you have no hand in this verse?

Forget about the cash. It’s all been spent,

Squirrelled away or scattered to the wide.

No evil so extreme, no act so dire

but it makes our commentator’s day.

A sudden sea of flags and faces.

Who called out and dressed these ranks

This slim catalogue of pieties—a deontology, the French would call it—will come as a surprise to admirers of Ryszard Kapuscinski’s taut and vivid accounts of some of the globe’s major wars, coups and revolutions of the last forty years. The Other is a collection of three lectures delivered four years ago at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna, rounded off with three addresses, all on the subject of what is rebarbatively called in academic circles “alterity”. Except for one short address, “My Other” (1990), the entire book dates from the time when he was working on his last major work, Travels with Herodotus, itself a rather mellow and reflective book on his life as a conscientious reporter. Herodotus, it ought to be remembered, although the “father of history”, was also accused in his day of being a terrible fibber.

That little house is the madman’s house

Most days I don’t quite

Our honourable forebears lived in shacks

And would find it hard to comprehend a time

An earlier pitch of light

If I get lost someone will pick me up and post me.

I am already licked and stamped on my green lapel.

Rain and dark roads brew a black-tea storm:

On Saturdays I breathe my losses

Claude Monet has been around for too long for us to expect any aesthetic surprises—those little shocks to the ocular engine were all absorbed, and rapidly enough, by the salon habitués of the 1860s and beyond. But one must not look a gift horse in the mouth. Some twenty-nine works by the master and his contemporaries—Manet, Renoir, Pissarro, Cézanne, Degas and Sisley among others—have arrived in Sydney.

This short book, from the fertile pen of Jeremy Black, Professor of History at the University of Exeter, is about historical counterfactuals, in other words about the philosophy of history. A counterfactual is a proposition running counter to, or substantively “replacing”, in our imagination or investigations, what is in fact the case. The philosophy underlying the views of those who find historical counterfactuals—what did not happen—crucial in the understanding of the actual record—what did happen—is “radical indeterminacy”, the view, roughly speaking, that history is an open question because human beings are free.