How to tell your arts from your elbow
HOW TO SOUND CULTURED by Thomas W. Hodgkinson and Hubert van den Bergh (Icon £12.99)
DO yOu ever get your big cultural n a me s a bit muddled up? If so, the good news is that you’re not alone. during one wartime l unch, Winston Churchill was introduced to Irving Berlin, the composer of White Christmas.
When Churchill asked him how he thought the war was going, Berlin was tickled pink, and replied that he couldn’t wait to tell his grandchildren back home that the great man had wanted his opinions.
sadly, though, this cheerily unhelpful response left Churchill both disappointed and puzzled — because he thought he was talking to the distinguished philosopher Isaiah Berlin.
How To sound Cultured is full of such memorable stories, but it also aims to prevent the rest of us from making the same sort of mistake.
Imagine, f or example, that you’re at a dinner party where the conversation has just turned t o Claude Levi- strauss — admittedly a l ess common occurrence than the au thors seem to think.
Having read their neat summary of the man’s life and work, you’ll now know to throw in a few airy and well-informed remarks about French anthropology, rather than, say, talking about jeans.
The book consists of 250 of these short summaries arranged into dozens of, perhaps slightly arbitrary, categories.
Fortunately, the summaries themselves, each around a page and a half long, are generally terrific. With almost miraculous concision, they c o mbine biographical information and often quite bracing judgments with jokes, some great quotations and lots of arresting little facts.
did you know, for instance, that Igor stravinsky was a big fan of James Bond films?
Or that the famously gloomy German philosopher Arthur schopenhauer had several pet poodles, many called Atman after the Hindu word for the universal soul?
In some countries, the breadth of the knowledge displayed here might lead to the authors being described — or even wanting to describe t hemselves — as
intellectuals. In this country, such a description, with its unmistakeable overtones of Gitanes-smoking poseurs, would clearly be a betrayal of everything they stand for.
Instead, the book takes a classically British attitude of proud scepticism towards all that pseudy nonsense that foreigners so often fall for — especially if they’re French.
Guy Debord, whose radical ideas di d much to i nspire t he 1968 Paris riots, was — more simply — ‘ a bit of a nutter’.
As f or who r epresented ‘ t he definitive French i ntellectual . . . sporting berets and black roll-necks, banging on about socialism and getting his leg over when he could’, that was naturally Jean-Paul Sartre, aka ‘the swivel-eyed midget’.
And yet, anybody tempted to write the book off as philistine (possibly while puffing a Gitanes and wearing a beret) won’t find it as easy as they might hope, for the authors have some fairly high-brow enthusiasms of their own.
Among the works they admire are Laurence Sterne’s ‘playful, experimental and often very funny’ 18th-century novel Tristram Shandy, and Thomas Hobbes’s 17th- century philosophical treatise Leviathan, with its ‘earthbound reasoning in the finest British tradition’.
How To Sound Cultured is probably better suited to dipping into rather than reading from cover to cover: the traditional reviewer’s euphemism, of course, for a loo book.
Even so, anybody who does dip will emerge from wherever they read it with their cultural knowledge vastly and painlessly increased.
They should also have had a few mischievous chuckles — as well as realising, once again, that Britain i s never l i kely to take Europe’s more extravagantly abstract thinkers as seriously as t hose t hinkers took themselves.