Books review: What to read in October

Credit: Unknown via Wikimedia Commons. Nancy Mitford's novels dramatised the same social conventions that defined her own family life

For sheer reading pleasure, I’ve always found Nancy Mitford’s 1945 novel The Pursuit of Love hard to beat. The book, dramatised last year on BBC1, famously draws on Mitford’s own eccentric (or just plain mad) aristocratic upbringing to tell the story of the Radlett sisters as narrated by their cousin Fanny.

Like the Mitfords, the Radlett girls grow up with a ferocious father whose habits include denouncing foreigners and hunting his children with hounds.

In their world, the biggest sin is to be boring—which is why the novel is packed with unforgettable characters and great jokes. And yet, try as everybody does to ignore it, there’s an undertow of melancholy too, as real life fails to match up to romantic girlhood hopes, particularly for the main character Linda.

Given that The Pursuit of Love is pretty much perfect, it may seem—at the very least—a little foolhardy of India Knight to attempt a 21st-century update that retains most of Mitford’s original plot, characters and names (although the narrator understandably prefers to call herself Fran).

Fortunately, the answer to the question “what’s the point?” soon proves a straightforward one: so that we can be lavishly entertained from first page to last.

Granted, the shift to the 21st century isn’t always seamless. Changing Linda’s second husband Christian from a po-faced 1930s Communist to a po-faced modern leftie works beautifully, leading to some of the funniest sections in a very funny book.

Less successful is transforming the Radletts’ patriarch from landowner to former rock star. And quite often the sense is less of genuinely present-day people than of Mitfords’ characters having done a spot of time-travel (“My cousins and I were ridiculously old-fashioned,” acknowledges Fran at one point).

But in the end, none of this really matters. One thing Knight gets absolutely right—and that makes Darling so enjoyable—is how hilariously she applies the same bracing scepticism to the pomposities and social fads of our time as Mitford did to hers.

She also manages the same neat trick of suggesting that while laughter might well be a defence mechanism against darker feelings, it is, as defence mechanisms go, one of the best.

Darling, (Fig Tree, available for £7.49)

Simon Garfield touches on how the rise of Wikipedia made the print encyclopedia obsolete

In 1968, Encyclopædia Britannica hosted a banquet in London’s Guildhall to celebrate its 200th birthday, with Prime Minister Harold Wilson among the 500 guests, and the Queen sending a telegram of congratulations.

Not surprisingly, there was utter confidence that the 300th anniversary would be celebrated just as lavishly in 2068.

But that was only because, as Simon Garfield says in this suitably encyclopaedic book—written with all his usual wit and sharp eye for memorable facts—“the meteorite in the sky was not yet visible”.

In the event, within 45 years, the Britannica presses had rolled for the last time, as knowledge moved online. No longer would people want 30-volume books containing articles by the likes of Alfred Hitchcock (Motion Pictures), J B Priestley (English Literature) and J Edgar Hoover (FBI).

These days, in fact, you almost literally can’t give them away, with full sets available for 1p, and many charity shops rejecting them as too bulky.

Garfield sorrowfully points out that not so long ago these abandoned encyclopaedias “did more than any single thing to shape our understanding of the world”.

Yet this is not a sentimental book. In tracing their history, he pays heartfelt tribute to the high-mindedness and commitment involved. But he’s aware of their shortcomings too—not least that any mistakes couldn’t be corrected for years, even decades—as well as having fun with their outdated attitudes (the first Britannica entry for “Woman” reads, in full, “The female of man. See Homo”).

To the possible dismay of encyclopaedia purists, he’s also a big fan of Wikipedia—which is, after all, rather high-minded itself: resisting all pressure to accept advertising, sell on information or set up a paywall…

"The very first home page, composed at 19.27 GMT on 15 January 2001, stated: ‘This is the new WikiPedia!’ Its creator, Office.bomis.com, made the first edit 23 minutes later, adding a list of subjects WikiPedia should contain.

The following day at 19.00, Office.bomis.com created a mission statement: ‘The idea here is to write a complete encyclopedia from scratch, without peer review process, etc. Some people think that this may be a hopeless endeavor, that the result will necessarily suck. We aren’t so sure. So, let’s get to work!’

By the end of its first year, Wikipedia had approximately 20,000 articles, including many that would not have been included in more traditional encyclopaedias.

Some of the earliest took for their subject matter the American philosopher William Alston, the singer Fiona Apple, the civil rights activist Rosa Parks, a list of the amendments in the US Constitution, a full list of the characters and locations in the novel Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, details about the number of people in the Algerian military, and a list of female tennis players.

There were also articles on the meaning of the word Machiavellian, the postage stamp, a track listing of the album Horses by Patti Smith, a description of uric acid, and a brief biography of the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.

The randomness reflected the joy of the blank page: ‘We’re tiny and new, so Just Write anything!’ Twenty years later it has become very difficult to find anything that doesn’t have an entry.

And then Wikipedia got bigger.

By the end of 2003, it had more than 100,000 articles in English, and in 2005 the figure exceeded 750,000. By October 2021 the figure was 6.39 million.

The total number of words has increased from 4.8 million at the beginning of 2002 to 3.98 billion by 20 October 2021. The number of people who had used Wikipedia up to that date came to 42,410,237.

Wikipedia has an obvious and magnificent advantage over the print stores it supplanted: incredible speed.

Britannica in particular had the habit of being published in the same month as calamitous events. (A new printing of the 14th edition arrived just three weeks before Germany invaded Poland; another in July 1945 narrowly managed to miss the dropping of the first atomic bomb.)

These days, when someone notable dies, the cause of death is on Wikipedia before the funeral.

Similarly, the prevalence of what may best be described as dubiousness in print might have a pernicious effect for decades, much to our amusement today.

How best to treat tuberculosis, for example? ‘The most sovereign remedy,’ Britannica’s first edition assured, ‘is to get on horseback everyday.’ Childhood teething could be treated by the placing of leeches beneath the ears.

The ninth edition, published between 1875 and 1889, advised its readers on how to become a vampire (get a cat to jump over your corpse), while 30 years later the 11th found werewolves ‘in leopard form’ among ‘the people of Banana (Congo)’."

All the Knowledge in the World: The Extraordinary History of the Encyclopaedia (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, available for £8.49)

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