OFF THE SHELF: OCTOBER 2024

Macbeth, The New Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford University Press, 2024)

Oxford University Press is mid-way into a herculean labour, re-issuing Shakespeare’s entire works, with roughly half out already, the rest to follow early in 2025. We were drawn to Macbeth as exemplar, partly because the series editor Emma Smith has also penned the introduction here, gloriously justifying the inter-generational process of revisiting everything. The title page says: ‘William Shakespeare with Thomas Middleton’ and we learn that Macbeth was probably penned in 1606, and adapted a decade later by Middleton, and possibly performed at the court of James I and the Globe. This reviewer doesn’t remember a shred of that from A-Level study of said text, quite apart from the broader context offered by Smith, who is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Oxford and a Fellow of Hertford College. For a start, she directly addresses the cynical position, why bother with another edition, by recognising that this one will not be the last; that any play is a dynamic script, to be re-performed and re-interpreted in different ages. It is not, she argues, a ‘static literary monument’. She notes the recently failed gunpowder plot of 5 November 1605, in whose wake Shakespeare is believed to have penned Macbeth. The broader issue is royal succession and legitimacy, but the novelty of Macbeth is how the audience is taken into the mindset of the assassin, rather than of the Prince or King (such as in Hamlet, Richard II, and others). Soliloquies are used to devastating effect, to engage ‘our judgement with unwilling empathy.’ There’s loads of gender stuff too and the endlessly sprawling discussion of the witches and Lady Macbeth get duly weighed, but for this reviewer’s money Smith’s introduction hits home best when it re-emphasizes the sheer bloodiness and violence of this play, the troubling matter of why we watch it to be entertained, if not amused exactly; and the implication of certain details. In sum, argues Smith, this instance of regicide is intended by Shakespeare not to be seen as an aberration so much as a ‘circular pattern of repeating political violence,’ which very much suits the war-ravaged tenor of the world presenting in 2024.

Einstein in Oxford by Andrew Robinson, Foreword by Silke Ackermann (Bodleian Library Publishing, September 2024)

A slender gem of a volume this one, unintentionally capturing more about Oxford in the early 1930s than it says about Einstein’s ideas, although the author has a gentle stab and it’s just enough. Einstein’s true heir was Cambridge’s Isaac Newton and in that sense the slender thread upon which his visits to Oxford hung was Frederick Lindemann, a German who asserted himself Englishman, the residing physicist at Christ Church and later a confidante of Winston Churchill. That speaks amply to Oxford’s worldliness and its genius at getting the great and good to visit. The rest is less congratulatory. Einstein’s first lecture in Oxford in 1931 was delivered in German to a packed room of non-German speakers, leading the Oxford Times to comment on how many women had attended, and that the University didn’t really go for interpreters. In other words, it was an occasion rather than a lecture in any normal sense, and we can imagine that no one understood the slightest thing yet still warmed to the genial genius. This verdict is tempered by the tiny number in the audience who were observed to furiously take notes as Einstein scribbled formulae across multiple blackboards, one of which is preserved to this day in Oxford’s History of Science. Yet the only person in England who could level with Einstein was Cambridge’s Arthur Eddington, who through observation of the 1919 solar eclipse had proven Einstein’s 1915 general theory of relativity. The only thinker at Oxford who got close was Edward Milne, first Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics from 1929, the novelty of the Chair further evidence for Oxford playing catch-up, and a further reminder that Einstein was first and foremost a mathematician. But Milne tried to overturn Einstein with a contrasting theory and failed, so is essentially forgotten.

What is flabbergasting is how Lindemann had to engage the chairman of the board of the Inland Revenue to hash out whether Einstein’s Christ Church stipend, partly remitted to him in Germany, should be liable for British income tax. It betrays an Oxford – and a country – almost as utterly parochial as had been lamented by the authors of the 1922 Royal Commission into Oxford and Cambridge,– despite all those Balliol fellows running the Empire ‘out there’.

The loveliest run of the book is Chapter 3 where Margaret Deneke of Lady Margaret Hall, also a German émigré and fluent German speaker and renowned musicologist, captured the true Einstein. She invited him to the family home and he enthusiastically played the violin with world class musicians. This was Einstein at his happiest. He lived in a head full of numbers and music was the other expression. The backdrop to these activities mattered less and he spoke little of Oxford when later based in America. There is a lovely Foreword by Silke Ackermann, the current Director of Oxford’s History of Science Museum, who reminds us that the preserved blackboard covered in formulae remains the single most cherished object of the 18,000 in the museum, ‘a unique relic of a genius’.

Second Act, What late bloomers can tell you about reinventing your life by Henry Oliver (John Murray, 2024)

Subject of a lively discussion at the recent Meeting Minds held in Oxford for alumni, Henry’s (LMH, 2005) book is at once a celebration of the midlife crisis – his view is that it is to be embraced – and a reminder that it can strike at other moments in life, and that to the extent that it is horrible, often as not patience is the remedy. And by patience he means action and change – sometimes the most difficult things. The book teems with examples of people, very often women, who succeeded where they were not expected to, a provisional definition of the term ‘late bloomer.’ It starts with Katherine Graham who took over the ownership and CEO role at the Washington Post in 1932, but one suspects that her example is more memorable rather than translatable. At the centre of the book is Samuel Johnson, who remember left Oxford for lack of funding, who then, for want of his BA, was unable to become school master or lawyer. Writing replaced both. He was never untroubled by what might have been, yet would posterity want Samuel Johnson to have been a totally forgotten peer instead of Samuel Johnson? At the heart of the book then is a deeper question about values, conventional success and how you measure it. Oxonians are good at seeing through hype but all of them would still enjoy and learn from this supple volume, which combines many narrative biographies with more targeted insights drawn from network theory.

Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity by Diarmaid MacCulloch (Allen Lane, September 2024)

Going where traditionally even modern angels have feared to tread, MacCulloch, now Emeritus Professor of the History of the Church, has tried to convey the gloriously calamitous and always changing way that theology and doctrine has sought to guide humans on their sexuality, which inevitably means also their family and broader understandings of gender. With 3,000 years of complexity and contradiction, it is left ultimately to us, the readers, to decide from the story told here whether there is a single Christian theology of sex, or many contending voices in a symphony that remains always incomplete. This volume is noteworthy for its extraordinary range, but then the author also wrote A History of Christianity in 2010 as well as a prize-winning biography of Thomas Cranmer (1996) and Reformation: Europe's House Divided 1490-1700 (2004), the latter winning the British Academy Prize.

Mindfulness for Life by Willem Kuyken (22 Oct. 2024, Guilford Press)

Willem, Ritblat Professor of Mindfulness and Psychological Science in Oxford’s Department of Psychiatry, addresses the fact that lots of people have enthusiastically taken up mindfulness, perhaps in the form of an audio class, only to lapse, despite proclaiming its benefits. He argues that to make it stick, mindfulness needs to dwell in daily experience, and become a more sustainable practice. Early on he notes that the soccer player Raheem Sterling meditates, and has said ‘My mind can be my worst enemy or best friend.’ Willem then relays what people say about friendship and its best attributes. He then asks whether we might make a friend of our own mind in a similar way. It’s an encouraging way to approach mental health. At the centre of the book is a focus on how our body-mind is our main resource, and it can be a great strength if nurtured, just as it can become destructive if maltreated. The author previously co-authored with Christina Feldman, well known in the US Insight Meditation scene. Perhaps for the same reasons this new volume has already found success in the US and is published everywhere else later this month.