The age of capital

PD Smith, Jo Littler and Vera Rule on

The age of capital

PD Smith, Jo Littler and Vera Rule on

142 Strand: A Radical Address in Victorian London
by Rosemary Ashton (Vintage, £9.99)

John Chapman was the publisher and owner-editor of the free-thinking journal the Westminster Review. He was a radical in politics, religion, science and relations between the sexes. Like-minded writers looked to Chapman to get published, among them John Stuart Mill, George Henry Lewes and Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose work Chapman introduced to British readers. He also published progressive continental authors such as David Friedrich Strauss (The Life of Jesus) and Ludwig Feuerbach. He gathered about him a shifting group of unorthodox thinkers: exiled foreigners, scientists with a story to tell that contradicted the Bible, earnest dissenters, reformers and "clever women" determined to break the mould society had made for them. From 1847-54, Chapman lived and worked at 142 Strand, a "handsome house on the city's most famous street". It was an address that became synonymous with progressive thinking. Sadly the building was demolished in 1986, but Rosemary Ashton offers a meticulously researched account of this unorthodox Victorian's life and an absorbing slice of London's intellectual history. PD Smith

Sex and the Psyche: The Truth About Our Most Secret Fantasies
by Brett Kahr (Penguin, £12.99)

In Goethe's Elective Affinities, there is a memorable - and remarkable for 1809 - scene where a husband and wife make love while each is secretly imagining their lover. Freud would later argue that the sexual act was indeed "a process in which four persons were involved". For several years, psychotherapist Brett Kahr has been collecting British sexual fantasies through face-to-face interviews and questionnaires, and this is his fascinating analysis of more than 19,000 of them. Kahr found that more than 90% of Britons fantasise regularly, and nearly 90% of men and 60% of women use pornography. In a 25-year career, Kahr has seen how people's fantasies can turn otherwise healthy minds into "dungeons of despair". Indeed, he was surprised that violent fantasies were so common and has even excluded some of the more shocking ones. His perceptive exegesis shows that many fantasies result from deeply traumatic experiences. Nevertheless, though some can cause mental pain, most are "normative activities" and a source of creativity and fun. "My favourite sexual fantasy?" says one respondent. "Wife turning into a six-pack and pizza after sex." PDS

Jungle Capitalists: A Story of Globalisation, Greed and Revolution
by Peter Chapman (Canongate, £8.99)

It is the world's fourth major foodstuff after rice, wheat and milk. It "hasn't had sex for thousands of years" and relies on humans to reproduce. It was once presented as the family-friendly alternative to LSD. It is the butt of Carry On-style jokes. It is Carmen Miranda's headdress. It is . . . the humble banana. Jungle Capitalists deals with all these facts and more in a riveting story of the industrialisation of the yellowest of fruits, focusing on the phenomenal rise to power of the US-based United Fruit Company, which by the early 20th century controlled large swathes of Central America and became known as "El Pulpo" (the octopus). In Guatemala, it monopolised the railways; in Colombia, 1,000 workers were killed when strikes erupted at its neo-imperialist plantations. Later it banded together with the CIA to crush democratic governments that attempted to curtail its feudal monopolies. Jungle Capitalists is therefore more than the tale of a bunch of bananas: it is a gripping story of the ebbs and flows of US capitalism and the recent resurgence of some distinctly ancient models of corporate power. Jo Littler

The Ghost Map: A Street Map, an Epidemic and the Hidden Powers of Urban Networks
by Steven Johnson (Penguin, £8.99)

Who knew the intimate details of disease could be this interesting? Brooklyn-based Steven Johnson, author of Everything Bad is Good For You, directs his attention towards the mean streets of 19th-century London - and in particular, to Soho's 1854 cholera epidemic. The Ghost Map tells how the epidemic emerged and explains the error of the "miasmists", who persistently believed the disease was contracted through "bad air". The book has a number of protagonists: the cholera bacterium itself; doctor John Snow, who discovered that cholera was water-borne; clergyman Henry Whitehead, who watched his flock die out; and London's rising tide of waste, which spread the disease by infecting drinking water. The Ghost Map weaves its dramatic narrative around these different scales and perspectives, combining a fashionable interest in how networks function and in "non-human actors" with what the anthropologist Clifford Geertz once called "thick description" (or the ultra-detailed analysis of a specific moment). All this makes it a mesmerising read, full of both intellectual interest and good old-fashioned 19th-century suspense. JL

Charles Dickens and His Performing Selves: Dickens and the Public Readings
by Malcolm Andrews (Oxford, £16.99)

This is more like a séance than an academic study. Before your very eyes, Dickens walks on stage at some dire venue, stands within his purpose-built arch of gas jets and positions himself at his custom-made reading desk, the volume to be read (abridged in his own ruthless adaptation) in place as a prop rather than a prompt - after 17 years of touring Britain and America he had memorised his scripts. Applause. Silence, but for a hiss of gas. And then - without entirely breaking the rules of decorum that distinguished a venerated author sharing the contents of his fiction from a mere paid actor - he peopled the air with the characters that he had created, impersonating them in look and voice, as he had seen them when inventing their identities in his study. Dickens didn't do it for the money, bankable though that was, nor for the adulation, though he did love to be told his characters were his readers' dearest friends. Andrews understands he struggled (and the effort first drained, then destroyed him) to make his audiences, high and low, as one again in a restored social communion through literature's revival meeting. Vera Rule
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/feb/02/featuresreviews.guardianreview26
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