Library Corner
What Rowan Davies has read this month
A Reluctant Spy (David Goodman, 2025)
A wonderfully wry, gently smart spy thriller. Glaswegian misfit Jamie Tulloch is recruited out of Cambridge into SIS’s ‘Legends’ programme, in which real-life people lead real-life lives in order to establish cast-iron ‘legends’ that can be handed over to real spies when the situation demands it. When Tulloch’s handover goes to pot, he decides to just go with it, stepping into a field agent role with no training, no briefing and no clue what he’s doing.
Two things I really enjoyed about this: the first was the invocation of Zanzibar, which sounds absolutely delightful. An odd side-effect of reading thrillers is that you are introduced to parts of the world you’ll almost certainly never see; over the past year or so I’ve vicariously visited Tehran, Damascus, Moscow and the Florida Everglades. Something about the dictates of the genre – describing the location of a dead drop, narrating the experience of cleaning your tail – incentivises wonderfully evocative descriptions. But they’re always in the service of a plot, which stops them from becoming tedious drones about landscapes.
And the second highly enjoyable thing was Goodman’s quietly intelligent refusal to impose stereotypes on his characters. Tulloch feels like a real person, as does his unwilling field colleague. Sure, there are a few Russian goons and one or two Deeply Nasty Super-Spies, but most of the characters – up to and including the slightly bewildered public school boys at SIS headquarters – are just ordinary, flawed people who are trying their best. If you’re getting a bit bored with the thudding cynicism of all the British Slow Horses impersonators – endless books in which every single senior intelligence officer has the brain of a spaniel and the morals of a Roman consul – it’s a lovely little palate-cleanser.
The Anglo-Saxons (Marc Morris, 2021)/Millennium (Tom Holland, 2008)
The Anglo-Saxons was on a 99p deal on Kindle last month (sorry if this info comes too late to be of any use) so I took a punt, and was very glad I did. Morris has a wonderfully conversational style; thoughtful and interesting but utterly clear and comprehensible for the beginner.
He opens with a brilliant anecdote about a Suffolk farmer called Peter Whatling who lost his hammer in a field in 1992 and, in the course of searching for it, made a discovery ‘so startling that he immediately contacted both the police and the local authorities’; a hoard of Roman treasure, ‘one of the most spectacular ever unearthed in Britain’, that is now known as the Hoxne Hoard and can be seen in the British Museum. The team from the Suffolk Archaeological Unit, Morris notes, ‘also found Mr Whatling’s hammer’.
This is a great way to start a book about the Dark Ages (as we’re now not supposed to call them); but opening with a good anecdote is a relatively easy trick. What grips you is where Morris goes next: why was this hoard buried in the first place? The answer, he says, lies in one of history’s iron laws. ‘There is one paramount factor that consistently prompted people in all periods to conceal their valuables in the ground: fear.’ Fear of what, in this instance? Well, you should read The Anglo-Saxons to find out.
The book ends with the Norman invasion of 1066, so after finishing it I went back to Tom Holland’s Millennium, a survey of Western Europe before and after the year 1000CE. Reading these two back to back helped me to finally understand why I really struggle with Millennium: its narrative relies far too much on the ‘Peter Whatling’s hammer’ trick, but Holland doesn’t go anywhere comprehensible with his evocative openings. Again and again he drops you very effectively into some epochal moment (he opens with the Road to Canossa), and then just gets distracted by a now-occult aspect of Medieval theology, warbling on about it in increasingly strained language. ‘Not everything is to do with god, Tom!’ you cry, desperately turning the pages trying to find the bit where he presses a cold flannel to his forehead and remembers that he’s writing a history book. How this for a sentence: ‘To those who had imagined that the convulsions of the age might spell the imminence of the end days, and who had laboured mightily in the expectation of their coming, the failure of the New Jerusalem to descend could hardly be regarded as a cause for unconfined rejoicing.’ I understand it, Holland, but I don’t have to like it.
I have a lot of time for Holland (the co-host of the all-conquering Rest is History podcast and an extremely well-regarded popular historian). In a popular culture that is terrified of intellect and formal academic accomplishment, his success is one of the bright spots. So I shouldn’t complain; I’ve really enjoyed some of his other books. But there’s something about the way he writes about Christianity that just jangles my nerves. He’s a bit like someone who’s just given up smoking and can’t talk about anything else. Perhaps it’s just no use attempting him on this subject if you’re a lifelong atheist.
Letterboxd Diary
What Tobias Sturt has enjoyed watching this month.
Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde is, of course, usually seen as marking the beginning of ‘the New Hollywood’, introducing Nouvelle Vague film-making techniques and a stylised grit to American cinema. At first glance it seems terribly of its time, but it remains remarkably relevant. With its meandering plot, stylised and stylish characters and frank violence and dialogue, it comes across as a ‘60s Quentin Tarantino film. Or, more accurately, the kind of ‘60s/‘70s film that Tarantino is constantly remaking. Its position now, as a work of more historical than artistic interest, is perhaps an indication of how Tarantino will be remembered, too.
As you would expect, I would also recommend watching it just to see the outfit C. W. Moss (Michael J. Pollard) is wearing when he first meets Bonnie and Clyde. Absolute perfection.
Speed (1994)
Speaking of Tarantino, here’s a film – one that’s the antithesis of New Hollywood – that he was originally approached to direct. Apparently he also likes it, despite calling it a ‘situation’ movie: a film that’s all about one high concept and nothing else. But that concept is a banger, literally: a bus has been rigged with a bomb (built around a wristwatch) that will explode if the bus’s speed falls below 50mph. The set-up is full of metaphors for the film itself: relentless movement, a clockwork-driven Hollywood plot mechanism, an object engineered to deliver nothing but pyrotechnics. The casting of Dennis Hopper, the enfant terrible and prime mover of New Hollywood, as a cackling one-note villain, emphasises that this is very much not a New Hollywood movie. It is slick, propulsive, precision-made entertainment. The setting is entirely hermetic, all enclosed spaces (lifts, buses, trains) and enclosed situations (the passengers and the police); the plot is a thing happening entirely within a movie, containing no reality whatsoever.
And, for once, Tarantino is right: it’s one of the better examples of its kind, and a terrific ride.
Das Boot (1981) / Greyhound (2020)
Another episode in the ongoing ‘finding something to watch with Rowan’s Dad’ project: this month, we fought the Battle of the Atlantic from above and below (and from either side).
First of all, we managed to find the 1984 full-length German-language version of Das Boot, which meant hours trapped in the stifling confines of U-96 with Karleun Jurgen Prochnow and his sweaty, bearded crew. Das Boot was made at the height of the Cold War, when West Germany was a key ally for the West; as with many war films of the time, it portrays most German combatants as anti-Nazi, as suspicious of the party members in their midst as they are of the British. On the other hand, it is rigorous in showing the crew of the U-Boat as fiercely dedicated to blowing up Allied convoys and fighting Royal Navy destroyers. While it is anxious to show them aghast when they discover they have torpedoed a burning Allied transport with crew still aboard, it is also careful to mete out justice at the close, with [spoilers] most of the crew killed in an RAF raid on the submarine pens. By this point it has managed to make the crew and their tribulations convincing and sympathetic enough that the moment is heart-breaking, even as it is reassuring that the war will be won by democracy in the end.
Greyhound (2020), part of Tom Hanks’s apparent mission to document every theatre of the Second World War, quite understandably does not feel the need to humanise the enemy. The view from the bridge of an escort destroyer is that the U Boat Wolf Pack is an insidious and ruthless danger. What Greyhound does have in common with Das Boot, though, is that it is very good at the business of the battles. Both also convey an acute sense of desperation and panicked struggle; not just for the survival of the crews, but for the survival of a political and civilisational idea.
Sadly, though, being an American film about an American ship, Greyhound is unnecessarily snide about the British. Das Boot, on the other hand, is commendably respectful about being hunted down and depth charged by the Brits, even if they are on a ship called something like HMS Tiggywinkle and crewed by John Mills and Richard Attenborough.
The Fabelmans (2022)
Greyhound led, inevitably, to Saving Private Ryan (1998). Rowan is never happier than when watching Tom Hanks win the Second World War, but that wasn’t the only reason; we’d just watched The Fabelmans, and were on something of a Spielberg jag.
The Fabelmans is a lightly fictionalised autobiography of Spielberg’s childhood and teenage years, and is one of the best things he has done in years. It is an example of what he is best at: films about middle class suburbia. I do not mean to damn with faint praise, being a middle class suburbanite myself.
It is customary to see Spielberg as lacking the ‘grit’ of the other New Hollywood tyros, but this is only true if you define ‘grit’ as ‘tormented, inarticulate men being dysfunctional at each other with guns and swearwords’. There’s a sequence [spoiler] in which Mitzi Fabelman (Michelle Williams) watches footage of her extra-marital affair that her son has accidentally recorded; I defy anyone to watch it and then argue that Spielberg films don’t contain grit.
It is also a perfect example of just how good Spielberg is as a director. He doesn’t try anything fancy; he just rests the camera on Williams’s face and trusts the actor to do their job. Williams absolutely does, in spades: joy at the memory of a family holiday, pride in her son’s film, and then a mounting horror, shame, anger and fear.
Also, you get David Lynch (looking very like my old friend Ben Wallers in his military surplus jacket) as John Ford, delivering some of the best visual storytelling advice I’ve ever heard.
Playlist
Tobias Sturt: Here’s my favourite ten tracks for this month.
Nothing From Nothing - Billy Preston. The weather has turned cold again in the UK, but this is a joyous slice of ‘70s soul pop to cheer us all up.
Mystery - Boxed In. Very taken with the way the almost rave piano resolves into a lovely upbeat indie chorus here.
Golden Meadow - Ancient Infinity Orchestra. This is possibly a little too much of a sleepy, summery sort of jazz for the time of year, but it’s splendidly dreamy.
Every Beat That Passed - Lost Horizons feat. Kavi Kwai. Something about this track immediately made me sit up and take notice, and then I discovered a member of the Cocteau Twins was involved. I am nothing if not predictable.
Plate - Genevieve Artadi. Even more predictably, I just discovered that this lovely bit of wonky funk (possibly funky wonk) was featured on the soundtrack of The Bear.
Katachi - Shugo Tokumaru. This is a great bit of upbeat Japanese pop which I picked before I knew it also had an amazing video.
EXPRESS YOURSELF - Kahil El’Zabar. This is a delightful jazz reworking of the Charles Wright track, somehow managing to be both hot and cool at the same time.
Laid - The Pains of Being Pure at Heart. I was never a James fan at the time, but being the age I am, this song is a powerful inducer of nostalgia, and I think I prefer this version to the original.
Happy Djong - Twelve Point Buck. Speaking of nostalgia, this has a splendid lo-fi fuzz to it that is deeply reminiscent of all the pre-grunge bands I listened to in the late ‘80s.
Echo Beach - Martha & The Muffins. It’s not nostalgia if you still listen to it regularly because it’s still great. I don’t know why this suddenly appeared in rotation this week, but it always makes me happy. Here’s the performance on Top of the Pops from 1980, introduced by the gruesome Dave Lee Travis, not (yet) an accused sex offender (rare among that generation of Radio 1 DJs) but I warn you to never look at his book of celebrity photographs.
The whole playlist is on Spotify as usual:
Speaking of Hanks, Spielberg and World War II:
I love The Fabelmans so much. It’s a beautiful film. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. And Michelle Williams is incredible, as always.