The Great Siege of Malta by Marcus Bull
The long conflict between Christendom and the Ottomans had any number of set pieces – the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, the siege of Vienna in 1683. One of the most consequential, however, is also one of the least known. For four months from May 1565, troops and sailors loyal to the sultan Suleiman the Magnificent besieged the Maltese stronghold of the Knights Hospitaller in an attempt to wrest control of the Mediterranean at its centrepoint.
In his thorough and propulsive narrative of the siege, the American crusader historian Marcus Bull describes every attack and rebuff in detail – the mechanics of attritional warfare as well as its unimaginable brutality and the personalities of the commanders on both sides. At the heart of it all was the fort of St Elmo and its resistance. Its defenders knew, as did their 6,000 comrades facing more than six times that number of attackers, that no quarter would be given. That they prevailed was, as Bull makes clear, less to do with the salvation of Christianity and the West than self-preservation against blood-curdling odds.
By Michael Prodger
Allen Lane, 352pp, £30. Buy the book
The Grammar of Angels: A Search for the Magical Powers of Language by Edward Wilson-Lee
In 1486, the 23-year-old Italian philosopher Pico della Mirandola travelled to Rome to present his universal philosophy: 900 propositions that he believed together explained “all knowable things”. (Among them were his thoughts on the saltiness of the sea and “the causes of pallor and corpulence in Germans”.) All 900 were, in the end, condemned by the pope, and 900 Theses became the first printed book to be banned by the Church.
The Grammar of the Angels by Edward Wilson-Lee, a professor of literature at Cambridge, is a challenging but rich book, at once a biography of a man and of thought. Wilson-Lee traces not only Pico’s life but the history of the ideas that engaged him, from Plato and Aristotle to Avicenna and Averroes. Pico’s approach was one of syncretism, attempting not to prove one school of thought and in doing so disprove all others, but to bring together ideas from East and West. His untimely death was a turning-point in European thought: soon, says Wilson-Lee, it “increasingly defined itself by how it differed from that of other cultures, rather than on the basis of what it shared”.
By Pippa Bailey
William Collins, 336pp, £25
The Shape of Things Unseen: A New Science of Imagination by Adam Zeman
Imagination, contends the neurologist Adam Zeman, is not a separate faculty distinct from everyday life and reserved solely for creative or escapist endeavours but integral to the here and now. “It pervades our waking and, indeed, our sleeping lives,” he says, and is perhaps “our most distinctively human capacity”. Imagine yourself on a beach, he invites, and almost certainly you will do just that: no other creature, as far as we know, has this ability.
In his wide-ranging examination of the faculty, Zeman touches on innumerable facets – inner voices and hallucinations, how we learn to imagine, brain science and imaging, art and music – and offers up examples of imagination’s omnipresence. (Imagine inhaling, for example, and the airflow through your nose will increase, or when wondering where you left the door key and you immediately picture the table in the hallway.) Imagination, he shows, takes knowledge and uses it to build models through which we navigate life. While we spend the majority of our time inside our own head, imagination is nevertheless not just vital in expanding our personal worlds but in navigating the quotidian one. Zeman’s absorbing book is itself another example of the power of the imagination.
By Michael Prodger
Bloomsbury Circus, 367pp, £25. Buy the book
Feeling at Home: Transforming the Politics of Housing by Alva Gotby
There is a well-worn acceptance today that we are in the midst of a terrible housing crisis. News of unaffordable rents, growing rates of homelessness and poor-quality properties stalks the headlines. If you’re under 40 with dreams of home ownership, you can probably forget about it. But what if the UK’s want of adequate, affordable housing is actually just the way things are, and perhaps have always been?
In her new book, Alva Gotby makes the case for doing away with framing the UK’s dire housing landscape as a “crisis”. Doing so obscures the deep impacts of the modern housing system as temporary anomalies. But the precarity of renting and poor-quality properties have always endured. In Feeling at Home, Gotby explores the idea that the modern housing system is a means of capitalist reproduction, and that current system isn’t working. For example, championing home ownership as the pinnacle of aspiration helps sustain the private housing market. This is a calmly radical book, which draws on Gotby’s experiences as an organiser for the London Renters Union. It is a worthy handbook for those looking to, as the book’s subtitle says, “transform the politics of housing”.
By Megan Kenyon
Verso, 192pp, £14.99. Buy the book
[See also: Rewriting the story of Gisèle Pelicot]
This post was originally published on here
