Power of the pen

Spring has not started well: news from Ukraine continues to be overwhelming and utterly heartbreaking… In a recent article in the Times, AN Wilson wrote that ‘some of the greatest salvoes fired against the Soviet system were not fired from guns but from the pens of novelists’. He went on to describe how by their fiction Boris Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn did ‘more damage to the Soviet system than any amount of non-fictional argument’. Wilson concluded: ‘Napoleon, like Putin, subscribed to the “Great Man” view of history. Tolstoy [in War and Peace] showed that the mysterious Fate which moves events and human beings is bigger than a tyrant’s vanity, and it always wins in the end.’

Others, of course, have written about the power of the pen: George Whetstone in his Heptameron of Civil Discourses, 1582, wrote: ‘The dashe of a Pen is more greeuous [grievous] than the counterbuse [counter use] of a Launce; Rosencrantz, in Hamlet, says that ‘many wearing rapiers are afraid of goose quills and dare scarce come thither’; while in 1621 Robert Burton wrote in his The Anatomy of Melancholy ‘…how much the pen is worse than the sword’. And a few centuries later the novelist and playwright Edward Bulwer-lytton has Cardinal Richelieu saying:

‘True, This! – Beneath the rule of men entirely great, The pen is mightier than the sword. Behold The arch-enchanters wand! – itself a nothing! – But taking sorcery from the master-hand To paralyse the Caesars, and to strike The loud earth breathless! – Take away the sword – States can be saved without it!’

Let’s hope so. And during those times when the news just gets too much, why not look inside this supplement … there are plenty of books to explore as a brief respite from the horrors of the present.