Books do furnish a TV series

Bevis Hillier

12 BOOKS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD by Melvyn Bragg Hodder, £20, pp. 372, ISBN 0340839805 ✆ £16 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 When I was younger, I used to think, ‘If ever you become famous, on no account agree to be interviewed by Lynn (“Demon”) Barber.’ The call never came; but, if it had, I hope my resolve would have remained adamantine, whatever her blandishments.

You can see what she made of her victims in her collected profiles, Mostly Men (1991). Richard Harris has ‘a very surprising habit’: he ‘plays pocket billiards’ throughout the interview. ‘He puts his hand down inside his tracksuit and sort of rearranges things.’ Richard Adams, author of Watership Down, is in floods of tears most of the time, even blubbing into his meat pie at lunch. Most savage of all — one can only gasp at the woman’s originality — is her taking the cutthroat razor to Melvyn Bragg:

Melvyn Bragg has an awful lot of friends, and I seemed to bump into dozens of them while writing this article. One after another, they all said the same thing: ‘I hear you’re doing Melvyn. You’ve got to like him, haven’t you?’ I found myself asking, ‘Why? Why has everyone got to like Melvyn?’ Smiling, simpering, giggling, looking down at his nails when he is supposed to be asking questions, exuding his awful smug, matey blokiness (‘Look! I have the common touch!’), he makes me almost weak with longing for Russell Harty.

(In case there are readers who don’t remember him, Harty was a somewhat unctuous chat-show host, at his most watchable when being slapped round the chops by the Bond girl Grace Jones.) Bragg is nobody’s patsy, as he proved on the Parkinson show in mid-April. Parky, interviewing him about this book, caustically challenged his view that football had helped to reduce racism and said it certainly hadn’t worked in Barnsley. Bragg shot back, with menacing geniality, ‘12 Books that Changed the World — and it comes down to Barnsley!’ So no one was very surprised when Crystal Rooms (1992), the next novel Bragg wrote after the Barber attack, contained an unlovable character widely thought to be based on her. In one scene she was depicted enthroned on a lavatory, revealing ‘much too much tile-white bum’.

As not everything I have to say about Lord Bragg’s new book is favourable, I want to make it clear that I do not share Barber’s view of him. I concede that his ineradicable boyish grin would make the Cheshire Cat look surly; that his Cumbrian murmur is filtered through the best-known adenoids in Christendom; and that his Pompadour coiffure may owe as much to art as to nature. But The South Bank Show — though some think it too often panders to the demotic — has been a cultural beacon; Bragg’s interview with the dying, drugged Dennis Potter was one of the supreme feats of television (Potter, of course, gets some of the credit for that); and Bragg has written some really estimable novels. After reading the most recent one, Crossing the Lines, I sent him a fan letter because his description of an Oxford history tutorial of the early 1960s was so brilliantly evocative and I knew I could not have conjured the experience half as vividly.

As some of the things I have to comment about the new book are equally favourable I had better say (‘declaring an interest’) that I have been on friendly terms with Bragg for over 45 years. I possess a letter he sent me at Oxford in 1961, inviting me to become film critic of the university newspaper Cherwell. We were both elected to the Garrick Club in 1972, the year Bernard Levin was blackballed (not through antiSemitism, as some thought, but because immediately after Lord Goddard’s death Levin had written a merciless article about the Lord Chief Justice, whose son-in-law and grandson were both members of the club). Bragg and I had shoulder-length hair at that time and were about 30 years younger than most of the other members. The club’s old porter, Barker (seen dancing in his red coat on Derby Day in a painting by John Gilroy, who designed the Guinness toucan posters) always used to think I was Bragg and vice versa. This was rather flattering to me: even Lynn Barber described him as ‘the thinking woman’s crumpet’. ‘Mornin’, Mr Bragg,’ Barker would say to me; ‘Mornin’, Mr ’illier,’ to Bragg. One day we cornered him together. He never made the mistake again.

From its title, I thought this book might be a brazen pot-boiler, that the publisher had had the bright idea and had offered Bragg an advance that even he couldn’t refuse. Alternatively, I thought Bragg had devised an entertaining party game or simply a blueprint for the television series he has recently presented with his usual professionalism. But I was doing him an injustice. The genesis of the book was worthier, and quite moving. He explains:

The idea for this book came from a single image. About nine years ago, when I was reading about Isaac Newton, I imagined this awkward, unhappy, driven young man, sitting alone and in silence in his home, a farmhouse, forcing his mind to construct theories which eventually changed the world ... the juxtaposition of the solitary figure working to produce such a modest and harmless-looking object as a book and the explosion this caused in the minds of men and women then and since led me to look for others whose intense preoccupation posted in placid pages had seized the story of our species. That a mere book should have such power!

No one could quarrel with that; but I almost have to slip into Lynn Barber mode to chide Bragg for the central flaw of this collection: all 12 of the world-changing books he has chosen are British! I would think that if you were going to choose 12 books that changed the world, you would first ask yourself: what have been the great changes in the world since books began? The Enlightenment and the French Revolution might be good candidates; and if you looked for books that inspired them, you could light on Diderot’s Encyclopédie or the writings of Rousseau, whose Confessions also gave us the let-it-all hang-out trait of self-revelation, and whose Emile foreshadowed the sort of school where you call the headmaster Jim and throw an inkpot at him if you feel like it.

Then there’s the Russian Revolution. Whatever you think of Marx, it is insane to omit Das Kapital. I even think a case could be made for Hitler’s Mein Kampf, in terms of its having encouraged (disastrous) changes in the world. Again, Bragg gives us the King James Bible, but no Koran. And the invention of printing itself must be counted one of the great world-changes: if he had included the Gutenberg Bible, that would have covered both Christianity and printing.

But all right, let us assume that he only ever intended to select British books (perhaps because it is easier to get a television crew to Newton’s Lincolnshire than to Gutenberg’s Mainz), and that the word ‘British’ was just left out to achieve a sexier, more selling title. Within those limits he has made excellent choices. Among them, Newton’s Principia Mathematica, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species would surely have to appear on anybody’s list, even if the names of all the authors in the world were in the hat; and they nicely represent the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. For the 20th century, Married Love (1918) by Marie Stopes is an inspired choice. Stopes would have changed the world a sight more than she did if successive popes had taken a different view of birth control.

There have been quibbles by a few critics as to whether some of the works Bragg includes can be counted as books at all — for example Magna Carta or William Wilberforce’s 1789 speech on the abolition of the slave trade, which only became a book after it was delivered in the House of Commons. I am not fussed by Bragg’s casting his net so wide. I see why he has included something else that is not strictly a book: Richard Arkwright’s Patent Specification of 1769 for his spinning machine. Bragg’s thinking must have been: ‘I have got to find a book to represent the Industrial Revolution, one of the hugest changes the world ever underwent.’ If he had been forced to choose a book proper, Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help (1859) might possibly have served, though that was retrospective rather than innovative. Feminist issues are more orthodoxly represented by Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792).

In his chapter on Newton, Bragg writes: Through the Principia, people came to see the cosmos as an enormous machine, a colossal clock with God — if you followed Newton down that particular path — as the invisible clockmaker.

Maybe they did; but Newton’s book appeared in 1687, while Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, published in 1651, begins with a very similar idea: Nature, the art whereby God hath made and governs the world, is by the art of man, as in many other things, so in this imitated, that it can make an artificial animal. For seeing life is but a motion of limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principal part within; why may we not say, that all automata (engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life? For what is the heart, but a spring; and the nerves, but so many strings; and the joints, but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body, such as was intended by the artificer?

I feel disappointed that Leviathan is not in Bragg’s selection. Hobbes saw with such marvellous forensic clarity that the natural condition of mankind was a war of man against man (as we might put it, genes and the male hormone testosterone ensure an aggressive instinct that both perpetuates the species and leads to unending conflicts). He wrongly suggested absolutism as the remedy — wrongly, because the absolute monarch was also programmed to be aggressive — but even in that he was perhaps simply being realistic, for both the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution led to absolutism (Napoleon, Stalin).

Is Bragg justified in excluding Leviathan from his little list? For an answer we can turn to a book of 1962 by Samuel I. Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan, which astutely analyses the shortand long-term repercussions of Hobbes’s book. On the one hand, he writes:

Hobbes’s influence on his countrymen during his own lifetime and for almost a century after was negative. He left no disciples. He founded no school. He made no such impact on English thought as Bacon, whose memory was revered by the Royal Society, or as did Newton and Locke, whose influence was felt throughout the 18th century.

But Mintz also observes that Hobbes imposed on his critics ‘his own strict, rational standards of argument’. They were obliged ‘to combat him with his own weapons of logical exactitude and severe reasoning’. He attributes to Hobbes’s philosophical rigour ‘the spread of rationalism’. Possibly, then, Hobbes deserved a niche in Bragg’s pantheon, but his inclusion would have added an unlucky 13th book.

As always, Bragg is lucid and entertaining. He is a born populist. Adam Smith’s theories are simplified for us, not without some Old Labour reservations about them. In the chapter on Mary Wollstonecraft, Bragg quotes Horace Walpole on her: ‘a hyena in petticoats’. In the one on Marie Stopes he can’t resist reciting a children’s skipping song about her:

Jeanie, Jeanie, full of hopes, Read a book by Marie Stopes But to judge from her condition She must have read the wrong edition.

And he reminds us of Tony Hancock’s classic cri de coeur, ‘Does Magna Carta mean nothing to you? Did she die in vain?’ The most controversial chapter is on The Rule Book of Association Football, drawn up by a group of public-school men in a pub in 1863. Compiling a book of the kind Bragg has created is rather like choosing one’s records for Desert Island Discs: alongside the Mozart and Prokofiev there will be a pop song or two, partly to show that one is not an old stuffy. Is Bragg just playing to the gallery with the soccer rule book? I don’t think so. He makes a strong case for football as ‘a form of universal language’. He sketches in the history of the game: ‘The Anglo-Saxons played a sort of football with the heads of the conquered Danes.’ (There’s nothing like dribbling with a Viking — though if the invaders had been from France, one could have scored an own Gaul.) Inevitably, one of the books in Bragg’s selection is the First Folio of Shakespeare. How do you reconcile that with the rules of football? Tottenham Harry Hotspur?