PD Smith

Lives of Houses

28 March 2020 | Guardian, photography, Reviewing, Writers in Sussex | Post a comment

I've written a piece for today's Guardian Review on our enduring fascination with the homes and haunts of our creative heroes. It's partly a review of Lives of Houses, a wonderful collection of essays edited by Kate Kennedy and Hermione Lee. But it also draws on my experience of working with my father in the 1980s on our book Writers in Sussex.

Christopher Fry, who lived at East Dean in the Sussex Downs, was kind enough to write a personal and evocative foreword to our book (which you can read here). It was clear from talking to Christopher Fry that he was delighted to discover a literary dimension to some of his favourite landscapes. In 1936 he and his wife had lived in an old mill-house at Coleman's Hatch: “We knew that not far away were the AA Milnes at Cotchford Farm. What we didn’t know was that twenty-three years earlier W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound had rented a cottage even nearer to where we were living. Every time we had driven to Forest Row we had passed the end of the lane which would have led us to Stone Cottage.”

You can see some of my photos for the book on Flickr. There's also a piece I wrote about Writers in Sussex here.

Asheham House

Happy New Year!

01 January 2020 | Detectives, Guardian, Reviewing | Post a comment

It's 2020 already and I realise I haven't posted here for ages. I blame Twitter. And the number of reviews I'm writing now (thanks Guardian!)...

But 2019 was certainly a great year for books - or rather, for other people's books, as the amount of reviewing I'm doing has rather delayed my own book on detectives, which I am still writing, thanks to the patience of my editor...

Anyway, just in case you missed any of my reviews, here are some of the best ones from 2019:

A Month in Siena by Hisham Matar

Where Shall We Run to? by Alan Garner

Outpost by Dan Richards

Excellent Essex by Gillian Darley

The Garden Jungle by Dave Goulson

An Economic History of the English Garden by Roderick Floud

And here are some of my favourite detective reads this year:

Black Money by Ross MacDonald (1965)

Total Chaos by Jean-Claude Izzo (1995) 

Gnomon by Nick Harkaway (2017)

1974 by David Peace (1999)

Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke (2017)

Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd (1985)

And, to finish, some great lines from those books:

“Just a banal gangster story. One more story and surely not the last. Money and power. The story of mankind. With hatred of the world as the only scenario.” (Total Chaos)

“The human condition is most accurately chronicled in pulp, I think." (Gnomon)

“He had forgotten that the most elemental instinct in human nature is not hate but love, the former inextricably linked to the latter.” (Bluebird, Bluebird)

Travellers in relativity & the Anthropocene

15 December 2018 | Anthropocene, Einstein, Guardian, Hermann Hesse, Nabokov, Science, TLS | Post a comment

I was delighted to be offered the opportunity to review two books about people whose lives and work have fascinated me for a long time. Strangely, both were born within a few years of each other and in the same region of Germany – Swabia.

Albert Einstein was born in 1879 in the city of Ulm, which that other son of Swabia, Herman Hesse, described as an “extremely beautiful and unusual city”. Hesse was born just two years before Einstein, in the Black Forest town of Calw. It’s a beautiful part of Germany. The 15th-century astrologer and alchemist Johannes Faust also came from this region, as well as GWF Hegel and Friedrich Hölderlin.

In the autumn of 1922, Einstein travelled with his second wife, Elsa, to Japan to give a series of lectures at the invitation of the head of the Kaizo-Sha publishing house in Tokyo, Sanehiko Yamamoto. Apparently, Yamamoto had asked Betrand Russell to name the three greatest people in the world at the time. The philosopher replied: “First Einstein, then Lenin. There is nobody else.”

Einstein spent five and a half months travelling, also briefly visiting Hong Kong, Singapore, Colombo and Shanghai (he cancelled a planned lecture series in Beijing at the last moment). On the return leg of his journey he spent twelve days in Palestine and three weeks in Spain.

During his travels, he kept a personal diary. Although it was private, it has now been published as The Travel Diaries of Albert Einstein: The Far East, Palestine & Spain 1922-1923, edited by Einstein scholar Ze’ev Rosenkranz.

The diary begins on 6 October 1922 with a typically laconic remark: “Lost wife at border.” Fortunately Einstein was soon reunited with Elsa and they departed for Japan two days later on board the SS Kitano Maru. At Port Said the ship was greeted by “a swarm of rowing boats” filled with “bandit-like filthy Levantines, handsome and graceful to look at”.

At the other end of the Suez Canal he speaks rather more kindly of the Arab merchants, describing them as “handsome sons of the desert”. He enjoys views of the night sky from the ship: “Have never seen the Milky Way so beautiful”. He is somewhat less pleased by his newfound celebrity status: “On the ship I am frequently photographed, with and without people, mainly by Japanese”.

Einstein referred to himself as a “traveller in relativity” and in Japan he delivered a series of lectures on the theory many still regarded as incomprehensible. Einstein’s typically forthright and sometimes rather offensive language in the diary has caused some controversy. For instance, he describes the Chinese as “a peculiar herd-like nation…often resembling automatons more than humans”. By contrast, he enthused about the Japanese: “pure souls as nowhere else among people. One has to love and admire this country.”

Rosenkranz concludes that Einstein’s journey to the Far East “forced him to confront his own multiple identities: “ethnically as a Jew, nationally as a German and a Swiss, continentally as a European and hemispherically as a Westerner”. In this travel journal, clearly written for his eyes only, we see Einstein at his most human, capable of making boorish, unthinking and even racist remarks.

Indeed, it shows that Einstein was first and foremost a brilliant scientist and that though he undoubtedly had an unequalled insight into the laws of physics, his understanding of human nature and of other cultures was very far from profound. It seems that even a genius is, in the end, only human.

It was my love of Hermann Hesse’s novels that prompted me to study German literature at university. I was blown away by works like Demian, Narzissus and Goldmund and his classic novel The Glass Bead Game. His use of Chinese and Indian religious and philosophical ideas seemed to offer insights into individuation and an alternative to the crass materialism of modernity, a theme I explored in an undergraduate dissertation. So I was delighted to be asked to review Hesse: The Wanderer and His Shadow, by Gunnar Decker.

Decker notes that Hesse was “a notoriously irritable loner, who could tolerate other people – even his own wives – only at a suitable distance”. From adolescence he was a figure “on the verge of psychopathology” and the inner harmony that he sought throughout his life proved elusive. Indeed, it was something he only achieved in the pages of his writing: “he was and remains an author of crisis”.

Hesse was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946. After his death in 1962, he became “the most successful German author bar none worldwide”. His collected works now extend to twenty volumes, some 15,000 pages. His writings were translated into 34 languages during his lifetime. Hesse noted wrly: “the Japanese understand me best and the Americans the least.”

Ironically, it was in the United States that he enjoyed a Renaissance in the 1960s among young, liberated readers. Timothy Leary described Steppenwolf as a “master guide to the psychedelic experience” and the rock group Steppenwolf had a single called “Born to Be Wild”. As Der Spiegel observed in 1968, “it was the hippies who dragged Hesse out of the doldrums”.

Hesse has always had a mixed reputation among English-speaking critics, with some detecting a “faint whiff of metaphysical Lederhosen” about his work. His star has certainly waned in recent years.

Nevertheless, Decker’s wonderfully rich and insightful biography reveals the true depth of vision in this “meticulous fabricator of dreams”. I believe it is destined to become the standard work on this difficult, reclusive and often self-destructive writer who “concealed himself within his contradictions”.

Lolita is a complex and often misunderstood novel, one in which Vladimir Nabokov “gave fictional authority to a pedophile and charmed and revolted millions of readers in the process”. Sarah Weinman’s The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel that Scandalized the World brilliantly reminds readers of the true crime behind the fiction and “the darkness of real life”.

An authority on crime fiction, Weinman has painstakingly researched the tragic case of Sally Horner, abducted aged eleven in 1948 by Frank La Salle. On the notecards which Nabokov used to record details of American life for his fiction, he wrote that Sally had spent “21 months as the cross-country slave” of “a middle-aged morals offender”. These were phrases that would appear in his 1955 novel, Lolita, proof, as Weinman says, that Sally’s story “captured his attention and that her real-life ordeal was inspiration for Dolores Haze’s fictional plight”.

Indeed, Weinman makes a compelling case (despite the absence of hard evidence) that Nabokov was aware of the case from an early stage in the novel’s composition, and that it is “seeded” throughout the narrative which he began writing at about the time Sally had been abducted, even referring to her by name at one point.

Though he later denied that the book was inspired by the case, Weinman argues it did indeed provide a vital impetus “to transform a partial manuscript primed for failure into the eventual, unlikely, staggering success of Lolita.” Weinman offers a timely corrective to Nabokov’s attempt to deny the roots of his fiction in reality, showing that he “pilfered from a true story”: “what Humbert Humbert did to Dolores Haze is, in fact, what Frank La Salle did to Sally Horner in 1948.”

Like one of Nabokov’s butterflies, Weinman’s compassionate and gripping book allows Sally to “emerge from the cage of both fiction and fact, ready to fly free”.

Although I have to admit I’m no ornithologist, I’ve been enthralled by two recent books on birds I reviewed for the Guardian.

Christopher Skaife has what he himself describes as “the oddest job in Britain”. His official title is Yeoman Warder of Her Majesty’s Royal Palace and Fortress the Tower of London. He is one of the former soldiers who are the ceremonial guardians of the Tower and custodians of its ancient rituals.

As if that isn’t Gormenghastian enough, Skaife is also the Tower’s Ravenmaster, responsible for the safety and welfare of the seven black-as-night corvids on whose continued residence at the Tower the fate of the nation depends, at least according to legend.

His book – The Ravenmaster: My Life with the Ravens at the Tower of London – is not a natural history, although along the way you do pick up some fascinating facts about ravens, as well as their place in myth. Rather he describes his unique job and how he has come to love and respect the ravens he cares for: “In learning about the ravens, I have discovered a lot about what it means to be a human: I’ve learned to listen, to observe, and to be still. The ravens have been my teachers and I have been their pupil.”

These are truly fearsome birds. Apparently ravens are particularly fond of dog biscuits soaked in blood. They are also partial to a juicy, fat rat which they tackle thus: “foot on, claws in, beak engaged, guts first, then the rest stripped bare, leaving just the skin”. Skaife collects the remains to feed to the local foxes.

They also attack pigeons, often working in pairs using a “simple pincer movement” to trap them. Once Skaife was summoned by sounds of screaming from tourists standing in a queue at the Tower: a raven had caught a pigeon and was eating it “from the inside out while it was still alive”.

Ravens are also remarkably intelligent and pair for life, living for some twenty years. When their partner dies, Skaife has observed how the remaining raven is distraught: “it was heartbreaking to watch”. Skaife’s book is a wonderfully personal and authentic account of life with the Tower of London’s ravens.

Britain’s large gulls are divided into two separate populations of rural and urban birds. There are thought to be more than 100,000 urban pairs of gulls. Bristol’s rooftops have been colonised by these “canny opportunists” since at least the 1980s: “the city that brought the Atlantic to Britain – slaves, sugar and tobacco – has drawn seabirds into its heart.”

In Landfill, Tim Dee goes “gulling” with gull enthusiasts, or “larophiles”, a word derived from the Latin name for the gull family: Laridae.

Dee is less interested in writing a conventional natural history of Britain’s gulls than in “watching the watchers and the watched”. These sea birds – “tokens of the far-from-home and the storm-tossed” – are increasingly infiltrating our urban worlds and, as they do so, our view of them is evolving.

Picking up scraps of discarded fast food from gutters, snatching chips from the fingers of tourists, picking over rubbish dumps for food waste – gulls are scorned as “bin chickens” and “the subnatural inhabitants of drosscapes”. But they are becoming part of our everyday lives.

Dee’s task is subtle and almost philosophical. His beautifully written book is as much about us as it is about the gulls. In the Anthropocene, as we increasingly dominate and alter the natural world, animals are changing their behaviour in order to survive.

From conversations at rubbish dumps to Chekhov’s seagull (probably a black-headed gull) and gulls in Beckett’s plays (“there is no green; there aren’t even any gulls”), Dee’s book is a memorable meditation on gulls and our evolving relationship with nature in the Anthropocene.

Another book that focuses on life in the Anthropocene is Primate Change: How the World We Made is Remaking Us, by Vybarr Cregan-Reid. According to Cregan-Reid our urban, technological world is slowly killing us.

British children now spend less time outdoors than prison inmates. A fifth of 5- to 12-year-olds don’t go outside at all on an average day and more than one in nine do not go to a park, beach, forest or any natural environment in a year.

Bad backs (from which the author himself suffers – as does this reviewer) rarely appear in fiction before the nineteenth century. One of the first examples is that of Jenny Wren in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend. Today 80% of adults in the US will suffer from it at some point.

Today most of us work sitting down, an extremely unnatural posture – chairs were not a common feature of homes until the Early Modern period. Sitting for long periods weakens the musculature in the back and eventually throughout the body: “sitting is a major cause of a sackful of diseases”. We spend 70-100 hours a week sitting, or four to six years of every decade, which is longer than we spend sleeping: “the human body was never meant to physically experience modern life in this way”.

The result is that in the Anthropocene, our current geological epoch, most people now die of a “mismatch disease” caused by the friction between our bodies and an unfamiliar environment: “the Anthropocene human is one whose body has changed – not as a result of evolution but in response to the environment we have created.” Examples of these diseases include myopia, allergies, tooth decay, type 2 diabetes and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

The way we live today is killing us. Although he adds: “still, modern life does have its benefits; in a busy metropolitan centre you are significantly less likely to be eaten by a dinosaur.”

In a work of remarkable synthesis and scope, Cregan-Reid ranges across ancient history, science and literature to explore the long history of human evolution and adaptation to our environment. He offers helpful advice, informed by current research, on how to avoid the mismatch between our bodies – designed for walking in the grassland – and the urban, sedentary lives we now lead.

His main point in this witty, informative and potentially life-changing book is that we should all get out of our chairs and start moving: “in order for our feet and our bodies to stay healthy, they need movement in the way that stomachs need food and skin needs sunlight”.

It’s a shocking fact that if you’re aged 45-64 and do sedentary work, you are 40% more likely to end up in a nursing home. Today, “if movement were a diet in modern life, we would all be starving”.

And with that in mind, I’ve been sitting down for long enough writing this, so I’m off for a walk.

Catch you later!

 

Links to the books & the reviews:

Ze’ev Rosenkranz, ed, The Travel Diaries of Albert Einstein: The Far East, Palestine & Spain 1922-1923 (Princeton University Press, £29.95) – Times Literary Supplement (£)

Gunnar Decker, Hesse: The Wanderer and His Shadow, translated by Peter Lewis (Harvard UP, £30) – Guardian

Sarah Weinman, The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel that Scandalized the World (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £16.99) – Guardian

Christopher Skaife, The Ravenmaster: My Life with the Ravens at the Tower of London (4th Estate, £14.99) – Guardian

Tim Dee, Landfill (Little Toller Books, £16) – Guardian

Vybarr Cregan-Reid, Primate Change: How the World We Made is Remaking Us (Octopus, £16.99) – Guardian

Book addiction

08 September 2018 | cities, Detectives, Guardian, Kyoto, Reviewing | Post a comment

Since my last post, the rather sad saga of my addiction to books has continued unabated. I was unable to say no to four new nonfiction books that the Guardian offered me, as well as several paperbacks.

Ground Work: Writings on Places and People, edited by Tim Dee (Jonathan Cape, £16.99), is a remarkable collection of specially commissioned work by academics, poets, biographers, artists, naturalists, novelists and historians about the importance of place. “Place-making is a signal of our species”, says Dee: “anywhere can be a somewhere”.

These pieces illustrate how the slow but constant accretion of experiences and sensations turn the way-stations of our humdrum lives – whether in cities, suburbia, or rural – into dense sites of memory and significance. It’s a wonderful mix of scholarship, history and acute observation, touching on themes that are at once intensely personal and universal. There are stand-out essays by Philip Hoare, Mark Cocker and Ken Worpole.

All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire by Jonathan Abrams (No Exit Press, £12.99) is a superb collection of interviews about the making of The Wire, one of my favourite television series.

The sixty episodes of The Wire from 2002 to 2008 were initially largely ignored by critics and award-givers alike. Now the series is widely regarded as one of the greatest television shows ever made. Its creator was the former Baltimore crime journalist David Simon. Together with his co-creator Ed Burns, who had spent twenty years in the Baltimore police, and a team of writers which included the novelists Dennis Lehane, Richard Price and George Pelecanos, Simon crafted an immensely powerful series that was characterised by its remarkable realism, its humanity and outstanding writing.

The initial wiretap storyline was based on a 1984 investigation into the drug kingpin Melvin “Little” Williams, led by Burns and covered by Simons in the Baltimore Sun.

Despite its naturalism, none of the dialogue was improvised. According to Wendell Pierce (Detective William “Bunk” Moreland), “they were on us about the words, man. Every piece is important. ‘All the pieces matter’. That was the mantra.”

Complex, novelistic and profoundly moving, in The Wire Simon took the police drama to a whole new level. Essential reading for anyone who loved the series.

Room to Dream, by David Lynch and Kristine McKenna (Canongate, £25), features an approach to life writing “that some might find strange”. This hybrid form combines memoir and biography: each of McKenna’s chapters is followed by one by Lynch on the same period, “having a conversation with his own biography”. The result is a remarkable portrait of one of cinema’s great auteurs. And Twin Peaks also happens to be another of my other favourite TV series.

Those who have collaborated with Lynch in front and behind the camera have found the experience immensely rewarding. According to Sissy Spacek: “once people work with David they want to work with him again and get near the flame”.

His surreal and often dark vision of modern American life always offers the possibility of redemption and enlightenment. Lynch is a fervent believer in the power of meditation to change lives and for Robert Forster – who plays Sheriff Frank Truman in Twin Peaks – there is a transcendental quality in his films: “he asks us to find that connection to the eternal in ourselves”.

At times Room to Dream feels a bit like a valedictory Festschrift, but it undoubtedly offers a memorable insight into Lynch’s intense creativity, from his painting and music to furniture designing (“I just don’t see a lot of furniture that thrills my soul”). As McKenna says, “to a remarkable degree his life is an exercise in pure creativity”.

A part of me (the part that writes reviews) thinks that 900-page books should be banned. I’d make an exception though for A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle, by Julian Jackson (Allen Lane, £35).

To tell the life of de Gaulle is also to chart the history of modern France and in this suitably monumental biography, Jackson portrays his subject as a complex and contradictory character. According to Jackson, “he was a soldier who spent most of his career fighting the army; a conservative who often talked like a revolutionary; a man of passion who found it almost impossible to express emotions”.

He distrusted both Britain (“perfidious”) and America (“it has no depth nor roots”). He once quipped that during the Second World War the British based the Free French in Carlton Gardens because it is “a dead end, with the only way out through Waterloo Place”. Throughout de Gaulle’s life, in his writings and in his actions, his belief in the uniqueness of his nation remained undimmed: “France is the light of the world, her genius is to light up the universe.”

Last week I had the pleasure of reading Letters to Change the World: From Pankhurst to Orwell, edited by Travis Elborough (Ebury, £14.99). This is an inspiring collection of more than sixty letters, from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present day, which expose injustice, challenge pernicious ideas or celebrate the idealism which is our species’ unique quality.

Many are humbling. They include Ron Ridenhour’s 1969 letter to members of Congress and to President Nixon exposing the My Lai massacre that had occurred the year before. A helicopter gunner in Vietnam, Ridenhour had heard rumours about the massacre from fellow soldiers who had witnessed it, convincing him that “something rather dark and bloody” took place.

This “conscientious citizen” was so appalled by accounts of hundreds of men, women and children being shot in cold blood that he could not remain silent. In his letter he quoted Winston Churchill: “A country without a conscience is a country without a soul and a country without a soul is a country that cannot survive.”

Written with deep emotion and measured reason, these eloquent, powerful and courageous letters speak to essential themes of humanity and justice. At a time of great political uncertainty and indeed when letter writing is almost a forgotten art, this collection – which should have pride of place in every library – demonstrates the vital and enduring importance of speaking truth to power.

Among the best paperbacks I’ve read recently are these three gems:

Another Kyoto, by Alex Kerr with Kathy Arlyn Sokol (Penguin, £9.99)
Filled with memorable insights into Japan (from the city’s ubiquitous gates to the soft tatami mats found in nearly every home), Kerr and Sokol’s book – beautifully illustrated by Tetsuji Fujihara – provides an excellent introduction to the sublime city of Kyoto.

Applied Ballardianism: Memoir from a Parallel Universe, by Simon Sellars (Urbanomic, £18.99)
This brilliantly written autofiction is ostensibly a memoir of the author’s obsession with JG Ballard and his attempt to write a doctoral thesis on the subject. The thesis remains unwritten. Instead we have Applied Ballardianism – a wonderfully original mix of cultural theory, literary exegesis, travelogue and psychopathological memoir. As Ballard said, “Dangerous bends ahead. Slow down.”

The Epic City: The World on the Streets of Calcutta, by Kushanava Choudhury (Bloomsbury, £8.99)
Choudhury’s memorably evocative book reveals the rich culture of this teeming and troubled community, offering a wonderfully vivid and personal account of life in Calcutta, from adda (“the sweet Bengali pastime of aimless digressive conversation”) and its addictive street food, to the bibliophile delights of College Street, “not just a street but a labyrinth made of books”. A classic urban read.

Happy reading, fellow book addicts...

Three New Books

29 May 2018 | cities, cold war, Japan, photography, Reviewing, Science, scientists, Tokyo | Post a comment

Sue Black has one of the most extraordinary and – it has to be said – unenviable jobs. She’s a professor of anatomy and forensic anthropology. The task of the forensic anthropologist is to read the narrative written into the body or skeleton in order to reconstruct “the story of the life lived”. Her work takes her to war zones and to the aftermath of disasters. She also helps the police identify bodies. It goes without saying that what she has to witness is traumatic and Black admits she has seen colleagues “haunted” by their experiences: “it has destroyed lives, relationships and careers”.

At the scene of a massacre in Kosovo, where she was assisting in the identification of bodies and the collection of evidence of war crimes, a policeman broke down at the sight of a two-year-old girl who had been shot in cold blood. Professor Black – “the mother on the team” – hugged him: “having chinks in your armour isn’t always a sign of weakness. It is often a sign of humanity.”

Black is often asked how she copes with the appalling things she has to witness. “I have never been spooked by the dead,” she replies. “It is the living who terrify me.” She says she’s “hard as nails” and I believe her, although she does admit to being scared of rats. But despite its often grim content, Black’s remarkable and utterly gripping account of her life and work – All That Remains: A Life in Death – manages to be surprisingly life-affirming.

It is also a thoughtful yet down-to-earth meditation on our attitudes to death in the modern world. Unlike most of us, Black doesn’t fear death: “thanks to her, I have enjoyed a long, productive and interesting career”. In fact she regards her own death as a “final adventure”, one she wants to experience and understand “as completely as is humanly possible”.

Unsurprisingly, she intends to bequeath her body to a Scottish anatomy department, like the one in which she herself has spent her working life, and she writes with real passion about “the mesmerising beauty of human anatomy”. She even hopes to end up as an articulated teaching skeleton: “as bones have a very long shelf life, I could be hanging around for centuries, whether my students like it or not.”

In The Lost Boys, Gina Perry explores what the sociologist of science Bruno Latour calls the “Janus face” of science: the contrast between the shiny public relations image of white coats and hard facts, and the behind-the-scenes details of how science is made which, as Perry says, is “messier, sometimes ugly, but always more interesting”.

Her subject is the social psychological experiments which Muzafer Sherif conducted in American summer camps during the Cold War, using groups of eleven-year-old boys. Although they were the “cream of the crop” in their communities, Sherif showed in his 1954 experiment at Robbers Cave State Park, Oklahoma, how quickly these boys could degenerate into “disturbed, vicious…wicked youngsters”.

Sherif spent his career studying the role of groups in directing our behaviour. He was fascinated by “the power of tribal loyalty, in-groups and out-groups, to shape our worlds”. Unlike earlier attempts, his now-classic 1954 experiment ran according to plan, with the two groups behaving like warring nation states and then being brought together to face a common threat when the camp’s water supply was cut off by a rock fall. Perry shows how everything was carefully stage-managed by Sherif and his team, with observers secretly recording the boys, photographing them and taking handwritten notes of their behaviour, like some early version of TV’s Big Brother.

Perry has previously written a study of Stanley Milgram’s controversial obedience experiments and sees in Sherif’s work a similar lack of interest in the potential harm inflicted on his experimental subjects. The way the boys’ emotions and behaviour was manipulated by the adults is undoubtedly disturbing.

She contrasts the published results of the experiment at Robbers Cave with the raw data collected at the three summer camps used by Sherif and his teams. She also tracks down some of the participants – “the lost boys” – who had no idea of the important role they played in the history of social psychology. Today some of the subjects feel used. “It was a crazy situation run by crazy people,” says one. But Sherif’s assistant remains idealistic: “We were fighting prejudice.” Sherif later boasted of “laboratory-like” conditions. But Perry’s account amounts to a devastating critique of this seminal experiment, casting doubt on how it was conducted and the objectivity of the researchers.

In the end, however, she offers a sympathetic portrait of Sherif – a driven, temperamental man – finding answers to his “lack of compassion” for the boys in his own troubled youth in Turkey. Flawed though it may be, Perry finds in his research an admirable desire to create a world in which “wounds were healed and what was lost was restored”, at a time when the only future was one of war and conflict.

The writer and editor of the New York Review of Books, Ian Buruma, “grew up with two cultures”. His father was a lapsed Dutch Protestant and his mother British, from an Anglo-German-Jewish family: “My destiny was to be half in, half out – of almost anything.” He always dreamed of escaping from the safe and dull cocoon of his upper-middle-class childhood in The Hague, “a world of garden sprinklers, club ties, bridge parties and the sound of tennis balls in summer”.

The opportunity to study in Tokyo on a scholarship at the film department of Nihon University College of Art provided the perfect way out, though Buruma admits that “Asia meant very little” to him beyond falling in love with the Japanese character Kyoko in Truffaut’s film Bed and Board (Domicile Conjugal).

Buruma arrived in Tokyo in 1975, aged 23. Although he quickly tired of his film course, Buruma immersed himself in the Japanese imagination and in this memoir of his six years in Japan he writes with real passion for both Japanese movies and the avant-garde theatre of the time. A Tokyo Romance is a wonderfully evocative account of cultural life in Tokyo in the 1970s, rich with anecdotes about the people he met and illustrated with his own striking photography, “the perfect art for a voyeur dancing he explores the around the fringes”. In particular, he explores the flight of his younger self from bourgeois respectability to the mysterious Other of Japanese culture with dry humour and real insight.

After six years in the country, Buruma was forced to acknowledge that even though he spoke the language and followed the local customs, he would always be an outsider, or gaijin (literally, an “outside person”): “every gaijin in Japan must realize that a gaijin he or she will always remain”. Some people, who had grown to love the country, found this difficult to accept. But Buruma – who grew up with a sense of being caught between worlds – found it liberating: as a stranger in a strange land, he no longer felt the need to conform or even belong. When he eventually returned to Europe, he brought this “radical autonomy” with him and he realises now that “Japan shaped me”.

I particularly enjoyed Buruma’s memorable study and it made me want to immediately book a flight to Tokyo, a city I fell in love with when I visited a few years ago. The details of all three books, which I strongly recommend, are below, together with links to my reviews in the Guardian.

All That Remains: A Life in Death, by Sue Black (Doubleday, £16.99) - Guardian review

The Lost Boys: Inside Muzafer Sherif’s Robbers Cave Experiment, by Gina Perry (Scribe, £14.99) - Guardian review

A Tokyo Romance: A Memoir, by Ian Buruma (Atlantic, £16.99) - Guardian review