Iconoclasm in Glasgow

Picture: Glasgow Life

Last week a museum curator in Glasgow said that if five ancient Egyptian effigies are destroyed when they're sent on an outreach tour for children to play with it won't matter because they have more of the dusty old things. The curator, William Docherty, works for Glasgow Life, which is the body that was responsible for the work that was completely destroyed by a faulty humidification plant recently. It is also responsible for the Burrell Collection, which is about to be rented out on a world tour to raise money. Docherty has no known links with ISIS.

Docherty is talking about objects that have survived literally thousands of years, and which have been selected for the permanent collection of a major museum. He is not only sanguine about the loss of five Egyptian effigies each year; putting them at risk of damage is a point of pride. They can congratulate themselves on their bravery in loaning objects despite the risks involved, because they seem to think art and history has no value beyond the uses that they, the curators, make of them. 

Docherty's LinkedIn profile is revealing. He says that he is "passionate about connecting people through exciting museum experiences which enrich lives. Engaging communities in critical dialogue validating their right to 'have a voice' by determining content development". Nothing about art. And actually it's not really about audiences either. It's about putting the work of the curator at the centre. The choice of words is meaningful; he does not talk about the right to free speech (a real right, enshrining freedom to speak out and freedom to hear ideas unfiltered), but the 'right to have a voice' (which is a bullshit right to join a facilitated workshop and be patronised by a civil servant). 

I don't think Docherty even understands the ideas he espouses. He says that "Participants are given agency to co-create their own narratives which reflect new insight from personal lived experience". Agency isn't given; it is taken. Agency is not a gift bestowed upon is, it is inherent in our humanity. But again Docherty elevates his own role, assuming that agency is something that he can provide. And note that they are not creating narratives; they are co-creating narratives. Again it is Docherty's role that is key. This isn't really about validating community voices. It's about validating William Docherty.

Glasgow has done some fine work refurbishing old galleries and winning funding and support for its museums. But its globally important collections are at risk of being reduced to mere tools for community outreach, and commodities that can be rented out to fund the salaries of the social workers in charge. That's a degrading fate to museums that were once the pride of a great city. But for worse for posterity is that Docherty's gang will cheerfully facilitate their physical destruction in pursuit of their trivial mission.

Updated 13/3. My original correspondent writes:

Docherty's remarks were not picked up from thin air. I was at the lecture and 'reported' them to Michael. The lecture was given at the Museum of the Macedonian Struggle For Sovereignty and Independence in Skopje, Macedonia on the 6th of March 2015.

A few tempestuous days are behind me, so I can't quote Mr. Docherty word for word, but his statement went something like this: The museum has 150 ancient Egyptian artifacts, effigies. If five are destroyed, it is not a big deal, the museum has more. It is not the end of the world.

What I could gather from the lecture is that this was not a decision made by Mr Docherty, but rather that this is the philosophy of the museum (Glasgow Life) which he apparently is enthusiastically supporting. It was a semi crowded room and couldn't not see his face, but the expression of the translator (the lecture was in English and the organizers provided simultaneous translation) mirrored my own, it was one of shock.

The problem here isn't that one individual in a museum values interaction over the preservation of the artefacts in his care, but rather that this has become official museum policy. There were a number of images during the lecture but I will leave it to you to try to imagine a five year old handling a 2000 year old artifact (fortunately, only one of 150 in the museums collection).

One final note, one of the images Mr Docherty showed in his lecture was of a youth of perhaps 15 handling a claymore. The sword was almost as big as he was. The photo was taken in another museum 'managed' (?) by Glasgow Life. He was obviously having loads of fun. Who wouldn't? You went to a museum and somebody just handed you a CLAYMORE. I know I would start screaming FREEDOM, FREEDOM instantly. The thing is... the sword was a replica.

Sargent at the National Portrait Gallery

Picture: Des Moines Art Center

Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends National Portrait Gallery London to 25 May

Marie-Louise Pailleron stares straight out at us in this arresting portrait, sitting rigidly with her legs pointed straight out at us. Or does she? If you can get to see the original, currently in the Sargent show in London, try standing to the side. Wherever you stand, she seems to be pointed towards you and staring at you, as if every vantage point is the 'right' vantage point. It's an astonishing feat of illusionism, and it's surely deliberate. Sargent took over eighty sittings to paint Marie-Louise, and we know he ardently studied old masters who captured similar effects.

Once you notice the effect, you start to see ambiguity in the way the dress is draped over her knees, adding to the uncanny overall effect. It adds a note of dynamism to a picture that at first glance seems rigidly static. The expressions are also ambiguous: sullen, bored, menacing? Or just resigned to their fate of dozens and dozens of sittings with Mr Sargent? The picture reproduces badly, losing not only dynamism but also colour. The reds in the background are much richer in the original, and the rug more legible.

We're more accustomed to seeing pictures reproduced in a book or on a screen than in real life, and it influences the way we look at paintings. In museums, people tend to stand directly in front of each picture; few move around to see it from different angles. Some pictures were meant to be seen from below: grand still lifes of hunting trophies meant to be hung above other pictures, and pictures intended for particular positions in churches or civic buildings. Tour guides direct everyone to the anamorphic skull in Holbein's Ambassadors, but it's a notable exception. I'm convinced that some artists thought carefully about how pictures would appear from the side, Rembrandt in particular, but we're no longer attuned to look for it because we look at pictures as if they're illustrations in a book rather than objects hung on walls. It's clear to me that Sargent is drawing on this tradition, and succeeding brilliantly. 

It's especially hard to appreciate in this exhibition, because they've hung it in a corner, so you have to strain to see it from the left. I find it hard to understand why they'd make such a weird choice, concealing one of the most striking and impressive features of this picture. Here are some speculative explanations:

• Like the 'white/gold dress', I'm seeing something others can't. I think it's unlikely, because when I've pointed this feature to others they've been able to see what I'm describing. Unless they're just humouring me; that happens a lot.
• The curators haven't noticed, in which case they've misunderstood this picture.
• The curators have noticed, but don't think it's important enough to mention in the catalogue or allow people to see. The exhibition emphasises his modernity, so maybe they want to downplay art historical continuity.
• Perhaps they anticipate that the exhibition will be too crowded for people to move around the picture, so they are encouraging people to take a snapshot view and move on rather than try to negotiate the crowds to see the different aspects of this picture.

Unless the first explanation holds, the hanging reflects badly on the curators.

I'd been warned that this exhibition is overcrowded even by the claustrophobic standards of London blockbusters, but I wanted to go specifically to see this portrait, the only major Sargent in the show that I haven' seen before, and one I'm unlikely to see outside an exhibition as it's owned by the Des Moines Art Center in Idaho. You can only see it if you go at opening time, but it's worth it. I was also impressed by the small, informal portraits of Robert Louis Stevenson. But overall I came away appreciating Sargent less. He created some consummate masterpieces, especially early in his career. His later work is consistently good, but rarely great; it doesn't excite me like the Pailleron children, or the splendid Dr Pozzi at Home, hung in the same room. Many Sargent portraits don't stand out from those of his good contemporaries who are less known and less shown.

Sargent is a crowd-pleaser, so he gets exhibited again and again. The pretext for this show is that his portraits of artists and friends give a different perspective on his art. I didn't see that, and the catalogue entries sometimes strain to justify the connection. Some are rich commissioners who happen to have a personal connection to Sargent, others are not really 'artists' (Wertheimer was a wealthy dealer, for example, though he commissioned Sargent prolifically). I couldn't see a common theme in the pictures selected for this exhibition that you wouldn't see in a broader retrospective of Sargent. Some of his portraits of artists and friends are dashing and original, but so are some of his portraits of strangers outside the art world. And not everything in this show is original or great.

The catalogue claims that the exhibition "challenges the conventional view of John Singer Sargent as a bravura painter of the old school, of limited imagination and originality". But it's utter nonsense to claim that as the 'conventional view', and in seeking to distance itself from that straw man they're in danger of overlooking points of continuity - as with the Pailleron child portrait I discuss above. They're so keen to emphasise a story that they lose balance and nuance. Sargent was both a bravura painter of the old school who appreciated and learned from the old masters, and he was an imaginative and original painter in the milieu of modernists. You don't have to choose between tradition and imagination.

It's sad that museums keep re-doing the same stable of predictable popular artists, each time pretending they've found a new angle. There are so many excellent portraitists of the period who are relatively neglected. How about a Boldini show instead, for example? It's the people who organise exhibitions in major museums who really show limited imagination and originality.

Art destroyed in Glasgow

Picture: Herald

A work of art on loan in Glasgow has been destroyed by a faulty humidification plant that was provided by a third party contractor. It was on loan from the National Galleries of Scotland, which perpetually rents out large parts of its collection on global tours with no larger scholarly or aesthetic purpose beyond raising cash. It was on loan to 'Glasgow Life', the group of apparatchiks responsible for Glasgow's museums, who recently rubbished NG director Nicholas Penny's concerns about loan risks when they got Sir William Burrell's will overturned so they can rent out his collection on a grand global tour too. 

This tragic story is full of lessons: lessons about the risks to works of art on loan, the risk of trusting Glasgow Life with anything and the dangers of using third party contractors. But the National Galleries of Scotland have responded with a big shoulder-shrug. 'Shit happens', seems to be the message. They acknowledge that works of art are vulnerable, but underline the importance of sharing and confirm that they'll continue merrily lending to Glasgow Life, before they can even have had the opportunity to investigate what went wrong and identified lessons to be learned. The unseemly haste with which the confirmed business-as-usual suggests a cavalier attitude to risk assessment, and a view that loans will continue irrespective of risk. It's as if a bank that lost its shirt in sub-prime mortgages were to react with a press statement underlining above all its firm ongoing commitment to issuing more sub-prime mortgages, or the passport office reacted to complaints of delays by confirming that they won't be changing any of their working practices. 

Accidents do happen, and maybe no one can reasonably be held responsible for the damage in Glasgow. But let us not overlook the enormity of this. The first and most vital job of any museum is to ensure it protects the works of art in its custody. They have failed catastrophically: a work of art has been completely destroyed, and no one seems to think any investigation is needed, or anyone needs to be held to account, or anything needs to change. That attitude is culpable. I do not trust a museum that can be so blasé, and people should be held accountable for that failure. New leadership is obviously needed, and the trustees have a responsibility to take action if existing management won't.  

There is a currently fashionable fanaticism about lending that holds it is always good and always safe to lend. What began as a reasonable and sensible attempt to assess risk and promote access to art has become atrophied into an unshakable belief in the moral rightness of always lending. The fanatics take a ferociously defensive stance against any who question their ideology. This creates its own risks, because they come to believe that any damage that does happen must be hidden or minimised lest it gives succor to their misguided critics. It's rare for news of damage to reach the public, but I've heard confidentially of other examples hushed up, and of museums lying to lenders about the protection that will be given. The lending fanatics believe original works of art are important enough that they must be transported around the world to get maximum exposure. But do they care enough to preserve them?

Strikes at the National Gallery

Picture: BBC

The National Gallery's guards are striking against plans to outsource their jobs. People are understandably annoyed at disrupted visits, and my first instinct is to back the NG on this one. The guards' case has not been well made. The boorish fool trolling Bendor Grosvenor's blog does their side no favours, and Polly Toynbee's support almost guarantees that I'll take the other side (an unworthy prejudice, but I find it an effective heuristic). Hackneyed arguments against evil outsourcing are often a plea for special treatment rather than a principled case for a public service ethos. Sometimes outsourcing is just a cheaper and more efficient way of delivering a service, and I'm all for that. 

 

But this time I'm with the union. Their fight for the best terms for their members coincides with the public interest, and they're doing a better job of safeguarding the gallery than the trustees and managers. The NG is pursuing outsourcing for the wrong reasons and it won't work. 

 

First some background. Outsourcing requires an explicit contract defining the services to be delivered and how delivery will be monitored and assessed. Contractors need to bid on a level playing field, so they need precise definition. Contracts are then won primarily on price - the cheapest tender generally wins. So the contractors are acting predictably and rationally when they seek to provide the barest minimum service consistent with the service level agreement. That's not a problem when services can be defined precisely. If the job is patrolling a goods yard, outsourcing might make sense. You want people on the ground as a deterrent, with an easily defined and easily assessed role. The contractor needs to hire a rota of staff, give them a defined patrol route, then monitor with GPS and CCTV. Contractors' cost cutting benefits consumers and taxpayers, but only if they continue to provide an appropriate level of service - which has to be definable in a service level agreement.

 

The National Gallery's guards don't just patrol the galleries. Theirs is a more complex and more important job, which in my experience they do very well. They have to balance an enforcement function with a public service function. They must be courteous, professional and helpful, and also sometimes assertive in protecting pictures from visitors who may be quite inadvertently putting them at risk. How do you write that down in a contract? Guards are always in the public eye, and I've seen laziness and incompetence from time to time. But I'm mostly struck by their professionalism and efficiency and helpfulness, enlivened by occasional quirkiness, humour and passion. Assessing guards' performance involves a degree of subjective judgment, as does hiring the right people in the first place. That kind of assessment can't be contracted out.

 

I suspect outsourced guards will be less knowledgeable, less helpful and more boring, which is a great shame. But the thing that worries me most is that they will resolve the balancing act between protecting pictures and keeping visitors happy by ignoring protection entirely and ducking any potential conflict. They will have no incentive to intervene if people poke at the pictures (happens more often than you'd think), because there's unlikely to be immediately visible damage, and if there is it's unlikely to be traced back to a guard failing in their duty. But every time somebody complains that a guard has told them to step back, it will reflect badly on the contractor. The guards' incentive will be to sit back and smile and the visitors. 

 

As former trustee Jon Snow tweeted, protecting the art is the gallery's key duty. It's not a cost-effective way of securing a service. It's a devious way of evading responsibility. If something goes wrong, they can blame the contractor. The NG's own story is that they need a more flexible workforce to cope with private evening events. I wonder if part of the issue is that they need more supine guards for private hire. The great irony is that they're criticising the union for causing closures, but museums that host private evening events are notorious for closing early and arbitrarily to set up for paid functions; it happens all the time at the V&A, especially. Paying guests take priority. And for all the pious criticism of the effect of strikes on visitors, I've more often been inconvenienced by rooms that are closed because they haven't had enough staff - which is a management and budget problem. The Poussin and Claude rooms seem to be closed half the times I go, and sometimes entire enfilades of the Sainsbury Wing are out of bounds.  

It's all a sad reflection on the new corporate National Gallery. Once the contract is signed they will lose control of the must fundamental function of any gallery. They're putting the collection at risk and harming the visitor experience. And they are evading their own direct and primary responsibility to protect their pictures. Good luck the strikers, I say.

 

Visitor numbers and Faustian bargains

Picture: Trip Advisor

England's top museums had nearly two million more visits this year, according to the latest 'performance indicators', with nearly seven million visits to the British Museum and almost six million to the National Gallery. 

The BBC frets that the rise is driven by foreign visitors; UK visits are down significantly (a fifth since 2008/9 at the NG and Tate). I think the decline in domestic visits is partly a corollary of increased absolute numbers. As museums get more overcrowded, the experience gets worse. Major museums are no longer places to return again and again for pleasure; they are places where you must push through a scrum to get a quick glance at the obligatory '20 masterpieces' so you can tick it off the list of sights and move on. It's become a pretty miserable experience, so I can see why people put off visiting and return less often. I used to go the NG every couple of weeks, but I've only been twice in the months since photography has been permitted. 

As the world's population grows and gets richer, the problem is getting worse. Dozens of the greatest masterpieces are now almost impossible to see. But visitor numbers are an easily quantified 'performance indicator',  and everyone pays obeisance to the gods of access and inclusion, so no one wants to talk about it. The global population is about seven billion. If we assume seventy sentient years and one visit per person per lifetime, that implies visits to the world's greatest museums will rise to a hundred million (about a fifteen fold increase for the busiest English museums). However you play with the numbers, a bigger and richer population with increased leisure time and disposable income will mean increased museum visits. And it will be simply impossible for everyone to enjoy equal access. 

No one wants to confront the problem directly, because none of the solutions are palatable. But solutions are being developed by default, and without debate, and they are often the least palatable. In Italy many attractions are now time-limited. You can have just fifteen minutes in the Brancacci Chapel, one of the greatest masterpieces that inaugurated Renaissance painting. Close and careful study will be prohibited; you can only have a quick glance.  

In the UK and the US the solution is that only those who can afford to pay can see the art. In the UK it looks like the opposite - admission remains free. But museums are bifurcating visits between a mass-market 'experience' where visitor numbers are pursued above all else, and a luxury experience for the elite. We can see it most clearly at the National Gallery. They have worsened the mass experience, permitting photography and promoting selfies. The model is a once-only box ticking experience, quick snap in front of Sunflowers and move along for the next person. But at the same time, they have made the gallery available for evening hire for the first time. Precisely because the mass experience is getting worse, the elite private views become a more valuable commodity, and only the very rich get to see anything. There was rightly an outcry when Sistine Chapel was rented out for a private porsche tour, but the NG's change has gone largely unremarked and even welcomed in some quarters.

I don't have a good answer to the problem of overcrowding, but if we continue to ignore it and hope it goes away we will be letting great art become the exclusive property of the very rich. Fewer people will develop a serious interest in art because it will be harder and harder to see it, and the experience will be worse and worse - as we're seeing at the NG and Tate. Answers on a postcard please. 

On Blogging

Apologies for the break in service. I'd planned to take a few days off to catch up on reading, but reading is moreish. And the art world has been more than usually frustrating recently. 

I try to avoid introspective posts like this, because they're a bit self-indulgent. But my blogging is almost pure self-indulgence, so why hold back. I find blogging cathartic, a chance to express frustration - and sometimes delight. I'm inordinately flattered that others read my posts, and I've relished responses received and connections made, but I try not to think too much about who I'm writing for or how to boost pageviews. What I hope I can do is give voice to a particular species that I think is neglected: the 'serious amateur'. There are lots of us out there, and we're a diverse bunch. We can be found staring at pictures or poring over books in the library. Some of us will be growling at the barbarians rustling crisp packets and playing with their phones, but we're not all grumpy. Some of us might even take selfies. 

'Serious amateur' is an ugly term, but I think you know who I mean. We're not professionals or experts, but we have more than a casual interest. We read academic books on subjects we neither teach nor formally study. We're the people who keep academic publishers afloat, and we're the tenacious museum-goers who return again and again to see the same things, the determined few who support the more arcane exhibitions that aren't about impressionism or Leonardo da Vinci.  

There are plenty of people who claim to speak for the 'average' visitor or reader, and everyone wants to reach out to the 'socially excluded'. It's relatively easy to assess success in the mass market. Just look at sales and attendance levels. And at the other extreme, professionals by definition are engaged in a process of mutual assessment and validation. There are fewer independent scholars today, and professional networks are more institutionalised with special privileges like private views, opening up a bigger gap between scholars and their readers, curators and museum goers. 

The people in the middle are left out. We have no direct voice and few advocates.We are the group that no one knows what to do with, taken for granted because we'll keep coming back whatever indignities the force upon us. Ironically people perceive that museums are designed solely for serious amateurs like me, and they must be dumbed down and popularised by force. In reality they're already speeding ahead of their supposed 'critics'. Wall text is often dumbed down so far as to be meaningless and museums' 'public engagement' departments find it odd that anyone would want to look art art rather than play interactive games and take selfies. Mark Greif has written a perceptive essay addressing parallel concerns in academic writing, noting how academics today struggle as public intellectuals not because they are obscure, but because when they're addressing a wider audience they feel the need to dumb it down too much. It's a brilliant essay that addresses many points that concern me too; do read it.

I hope my modest little blog is a window on the world of one of 'us'. I don't claim to speak for all, but I suspect some of my gripes and frustrations are common to many who don't have professional privileges but want a deeper engagement than is often on offer. My views are likely more trenchant, my expression more forthright and my outlook  more grumpy than others'. But in this, my modest little blog, let me give voice to a little squeak of protest from one of the maligned middling minds. 

Ideas have been backing up and I have some rants to get off my chest, so I should be able to resume more frequent service. It was good to take a break and indulge in some more sustained thinking, which I hope will be fodder for future posts.

New Year Reading

Brian Sewell's annual 'books of the year' list is reliably excellent. I agree with most of his judgments about the year's major publications, but he's spotted some lesser gems too. He's quite right to praise Ashgate, publisher of expensive hardbacks for the academic library market. They have an undeserved reputation as publisher of last resort when you can't find a university press, but in recent years they've published a lot of the most interesting art books, at a time when some of the great university presses are dumbing down. Brian no longer writes regularly for the Evening Standard, which isn't the paper it once was. But how wonderful that a local newspaper can still publish a list like that, heavy on academic books and full of insight and surprise. 

Brian's aside, I've found the plethora of 'books of the year' lists disappointing. Many seem to be complied by people who don't read much, populated by the predictable and the mediocre. Even its critics make obeisance to Thomas Piketty's Capital, which I found superficial. It's well written and the use of historic and literary evidence is interesting, but it's more instructive to read the critical debate than the book itself. I doubt it will become a classic. Francis Fukuyama's Political Order and Political Decay seemed to make fewer 'best of' lists, but it's a far superior book and perhaps the book from 2014 that will have most staying power. It's too wide ranging easily to review. It analyses the dialectical processes that give shape to particular forms of political order and how they come under pressure and fail. Fukuyama manages at once to be both sophisticated and colloquial, advancing his argument by vignette and case study. A great read and by far the best take on America's political ills. The other great book of the year is Jürgen Osterhammel's masterful The Transformation of the World: A Global history of the nineteenth century, which avoid the European bias of most global histories. Osterhammel is particularly strong on Asian history, but he gives a lively sense of the forces that were reshaping the world. Those are some of the books I failed to review last year; here's some more detail on some that I read over the holidays.

Picture: Amazon

Ruth Guilding Owning the Past: Why the English collected antique sculpture, 1640-1840 Yale University Press 2014 £55

Historical scholarship in all disciplines tends to focus on what's important or valued today, so our understanding of the history of collecting and connoisseurship is skewed by our contemporary concerns. Far more is written about paintings than sculptures. Britain's country house picture collections have been celebrated for centuries, commemorated in catalogues and guidebooks, studied by connoisseurs and picked over by dealers and collectors. But ancient sculpture was also collected ardently. Today it's too often regarded as mere bric-à-brac. 

Recently two major ancient sculptures have been sold that are not only important as works of art, but were integral to two of the greatest Robert Adam interiors in England - the Jenkins Venus from Newby Hall's great sculpture gallery, sold in 2002 for £8m, and a Roman Aphrodite from Syon House sold for £9.5m in 2014 and currently export stopped though with little hope of retaining it. Future generation will look back in horror that we let these go, denuding incomparable and irreplaceable rooms of great works of art essential to their unity, whilst saving mere scraps and daubs by British artists already too well represented in national collections and which would be better appreciated abroad. The disinterest in their loss reflects the subservient status of sculpture today.

Ruth Guilding's magnificent book redresses the balance and shows us how sculptures were appreciated in England. It is erudite and wide-ranging, considering collecting, dealing, connoisseurship and reception of ancient sculpture in England. The illustrations are especially praiseworthy; well chosen and well reproduced. We see historic interiors (often wonderful vintage photographs) as well as details of sculptures, together with paintings, prints and books that interpreted and reproduced them. 

The danger in reviewing a book like this is the halo effect. Its considerable merits dazzle us, and make it hard to find fault. But finding fault is a vital duty, because this is a groundbreaking book that one hopes will open up new avenues of research and debate. Most of my criticisms are of areas that Guilding only touched on, but which demand more scholarly attention. For example, I thought her discussion of the connoisseurship of ancient sculpture insufficiently linked to wider eighteenth century debates on connoisseurship, when connoisseurs were figures of fun as well as pillars of respectability. And I can't agree with her that taste is the outward expression of connoisseurship. I think they are quite different things that deserve separate consideration; one can have taste without being a connoisseur, surely. The question of taste takes us towards questions of the wider reception of ancient sculpture by the widening museum-going public. Guilding mentions 'debased mass-produced reproductions' (p. 148), but it is regrettably little more than a mention. Her book focuses on elite reception rather than wider diffusion of taste. 

Guilding's discussion of the market can be rather superficial, taking at face value the idea that connoisseurship is dirtied by the market: "[the] commodification of antique sculpture threatened to destabliize the way in which 'virtu' was understood". Trendy terms like 'commodification' (usually means 'selling') and 'destabilize' (doesn't mean much at all) always raise my hackles. Ancient sculpture was not 'commodified' in the eighteenth century; it had always been traded, as she makes clear in her own book. Guilding refers specifically to collectors who dealt on the side, muddying the connoisseur/dealer distinction. But I'm not convinced that distinction was ever as strong as she implies; in an earlier period Sir Dudley Carleton traded ancient marbles with Rubens, getting some of his paintings in return.  

Guilding is often critical of collectors and their motives, but in the concluding section on contemporary collecting the book descends into the kind of hagiography too common in studies of collecting. It's an ignominious conclusion to such a fine study.

Picture: Amazon

John C. Rule and Ben S. Trotter A World of Paper: Louis XIV, Colbert de Torcy, and the Rise of the Information State McGill-Queen's University Press 2014 £35

As an omnivorous but amateur reader I'm especially drawn to specialist books that introduce a corner of a bigger picture. They're often more illuminating than general books written for a popular audience. This meaty study looks at Louis XIV's foreign policy bureaucracy and I found it utterly fascinating. 

In this period diplomacy was becoming more professional and diplomats were more highly trained. They were also more likely to be drawn from the aristocracy rather than selected from a wider population. We might think that paradoxical, because we are accustomed to seeing merit separately from position. But both reflect the higher status that was being accorded diplomacy, and the authors explain the difficulty of appointing on merit in the absence of universal education or reliable sorting mechanisms. Appointing relatives to the administration and giving them an apprenticeship was the most reliable way of ensuring competence.

This book is full of oblique insights into absolutism, Louis XIV's France and early modern administration and diplomacy. The Sun King himself appears ain this study as a monarch more of the conference chamber than the bedchamber, contra popular perception. And the bureaucratic apparatus struck me rather more modern than I'd imagined (though depending on your prior views, you might draw the opposite conclusion). It's an excellent study, historically sensitive and also attuned to bureaucratic practicalities. 

Picture: Amazon

William Boyd Solo Jonathan Cape 2013 £7.99

The Bond novels are dreadful literature, but wholly redeemed by their glamour and pace. It's a measure of Fleming's rare talent that no one else - even good writers - has been able to capture the élan of the originals. Boyd comes close, and Solo was fun to read. The punchy prose is better than the original, but true to its style. The luxuriant descriptions of cars and guns and girls and breakfasts comes close to caricature, but so frankly does Fleming's. But the plot was too convoluted for my taste, and the explanation via a dialogue with Felix Leiter at the end was clunky and unsatisfactory.

The mission was too grubby - securing oil resources rather than defeating cartoonish villains or wicked communists. And Bond himself was rather flatter than the original, less witty, less ironic, less  glamourous.  

Anachronisms are not always mistakes; a degree of self-conscious updating is necessary for the movies and the books. Overt and unthinking racism and sexism were rightly jettisoned, not for political correctness but because it would make it hard to identify with Bond's character. Scenes of sadistic violence were common in Fleming's novel, but in this one it is perpetrated by Bond himself. I hope the decision was conscious; I thought it worked in context, though it reworks Bond's character.

Other anachronisms were less deft, or else were mistakes ("Don't go there" is a phrase so much of our time). The acquisition of a fake passport is carefully described, but he has no problem changing a 'brick of notes' despite currency restrictions. And his writing about smoking was too conspicuous. It can't be handled unselfconsciously today; it's like high Victorians trying to write about sex. Like the TV show Mad Men, we are able vicariously to enjoy smoking and drinking innocently, without the healthist moralising that spoils so much of life today.

I've come late to Richard House's widely-praised The Kills (Picador 2013 £7.99), a big quartet of related novels set around the Iraq war, and supplemented with online video and audio. I found the supplementary material contrived and unhelpful, but the book is compelling. The characterisation and quality of writing is far above the norm for thrillers, and its diffuse focus on characters at the periphery is suspenseful and brings the narrative to life. Recommended. 

I followed up a recent biography of Queen Victoria with Jane Ridley's Bertie: A life of Edward VII, which was widely praised at the time. It's superb. Ridley has a rare combination of penetrating intellect and narrative gift, dealing equally deftly with the gossip and intrigue surrounding the playboy prince and the great affairs of state and dynastic politics of fin-de-siècle Europe.