Edinburgh Book Festival round-up: Tom Holland | Alexander McCall Smith | John Kampfner
Our latest report from the Edinburgh International Book Festival features an obsession with Proust and Roman history, some thoughts on dry cleaning and quiet coaches, and the merits of Japan’s multigenerational public housing.
Bloodthirsty lot, the Romans. But as a child, Tom Holland said, you could enjoy all the things about them that made them frightening without being frightened yourself. “Like dinosaurs really,” he added. “The Roman Empire is the tyrannosaur of history, the apex predator of the ancient world.”
That’s why, he said, he switched to the Romans from his early obsession with the Mesozoic’s monster reptiles. The rest, as they say, is history - or almost ... because, first he had to scratch an hubristic itch to write a novel that would be a Dickensian version of Proust - two novelists who also obsessed him.
Then he wrote a series of novels imagining Lord Byron as a vampire, switched to writing narrative history, and taught himself ancient Greek to write a translation of Herodotus. Only then did he get around to setting up The Rest is History podcast with his friend Dominic Sandbrook.
“The first podcast to be awarded the President’s medal by the British Academy,” said festival director Jenny Niven in her introduction, “with 11 million downloads a month.”
“It’s 30 million actually,” Holland murmured.
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I have already used the o-word twice, but it’s fair enough. The way Holland tells it, his life really has been a series of obsessions. The Proust one meant he took his wife to a series of Proustian sites on their first holiday together. The Roman history one provided his favourite family photograph - “my wife and two daughters on a rainswept concrete car park on the outskirts of Newcastle, embarking on a six-day trek across Hadrian’s Wall. You’ve never seen anyone look more miserable.”
Obsessions, however, when allied to real storytelling ability and bit of banter, can be rather magnificent, and some of that came through in his talk about translating Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars. Augustus, he insists, is “the greatest political genius in European history”, and while Caligula was an obvous bad egg, he was only joking when he made a horse a consul. Demeaning the previous elites like that, he said, is a technique straight out of the Trumpian handbook.
Few people are less like Caligula than Alexander McCall Smith, whose impromptu wit is never knowingly cruel, even though he admits that Edinburgh - Morningside in particular - can be a rather disapproving place.
His whole life changed, he noted, when he wrote a four-page short story about a woman in Botswana called Precious Ramotswe and found he couldn't resist writing more about her No1 Ladies Detective Agency.
“Had I chosen another business for her to start - a dry cleaning business rather than a detective agency - my life would have been different, because dry cleaning novels are generally less popular than detective novels. There’s no reason for that: a lot of interesting things happen in the world of dry cleaning and I think it’s only a matter of time before we see dry cleaning novels developing.”
Another idea he would like to see catch on is a variant on the quiet coach on trains. “Instead, there should be a coach where you are required to plug your phone into the public address system so the whole coach can enjoy whatever dilemma it is.”
Earlier, John Kampfner came up with a host of ideas from other countries we could perhaps more usefully employ. My own favourite? Japan’s multigenerational public housing, with students living above the elderly and calling in on them every day on their way to and from their studies.
The trade-off is that they then pay a massively reduced rent. Result? Less loneliness among the old, more social responsibility among the young. It’s not a substitute for social care - Japanese start paying for this aged 40 and can start claiming aged 65 - but is far more imaginative than anything we’ve got. Why not give it a try? David Robinson
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