“England’s Thousand Best Churches”, by Simon Jenkins

896 pages, Allen Lane, ISBN-13: 978-0713992816

England’s Thousand Best Churches by Simon Jenkins doesn’t lie: there are, indeed, a thousand churches featured in this book, and if they aren’t the best to be found in England, well then brother I defy you to come up with a better list. After a short introduction on the evolution of architectural styles, sources and thoughtful comments on why the author sees the churches as important national treasures, the book begins with a county-by-county list and descriptions. The photos are excellent, and while I lament that there are not more, at more than 800 pages it’s already a heavy tome. But really, it’s the descriptions that are so tantalizing, like this one: “In the centre of the chancel lies the star of the show, an effigy of a medieval knight. His legs are crossed and there is a dog at his feet...He lies with light shining on him from the chancel windows. Winter evening services must be eerie events, as if the congregation were summoned to await the knight’s resurrection and admonition…” (from St Michael and All Angels, pg. 273). Dang. As a wannabe historian and an Anglophile to boot, this book was appealing enough as it is, but it’s in the execution that it shines. The thought given to the thousand descriptions is careful, and Jenkins highlights so many areas of interest: stone carvings, stained glass, painted murals, furnishings, churchyards, tombs, effigies and more.

There’s also local folklore, along with other things that make the subject so unique (great English villages like Much Marcle, or Garton on the Wolds) and seemingly obscure saints that are important to English heritage. Jenkins has created a masterful examination of these jewels of English legacy, and the book’s authoritative tone stems from his comprehensive descriptions of each church’s distinguishing features. His eye for detail enables the reader to appreciate the styles that link each church together, as well as the individual features that make each church distinct. England’s Thousand Best Churches could have been a dry, lifeless study; instead, thanks to Jenkins’ penchant for casually slipping his opinions on various matters into a church’s description, it feels like a personal, one-on-one guided tour, an example of which can be found in the discussion of the St Mary’s Church at Honeychurch (another one!) in which he notes: “The sign on the door says simply, ‘This door is never locked’. It should be the motto of the Church of England”. Understated opinions on matters as diverse as church restoration and Victorian stained glass give the book a casualness that most scholarly studies don’t possess. Any reader will find the book to be an invaluable guide for understanding the significance of these English cultural treasures.

“The Last Chancers”, by Gav Thorpe

768 pages, Games Workshop, ISBN-13: 978-1844163007

I love the Warhammer 40K universe – Space Marines! – but The Last Chancers omnibus by Gav Thorpe showed me a fresh perspective to it. The stories contained within, while slightly predictable (40K being 40K, there is only so much wiggle room), have more than enough action, violence and twists to satisfy the average SciFi addict. The tales were as cold, hard and dark as the 40K universe is intended to be, a universe wherein Mankind is at war with everything and everything is out to exterminate Mankind. The pacing of the stories did slow down in a couple of spots, but overall was just right to keep you wanting to finish just one page more. Before continuing, some background: The Last Chancers are in fact The 13^th Penal Legion of the Imperial Guard, a special regiment composed of Imperial criminals and convicts who were hand-picked by the fiercely uncompromising Colonel Schaeffer, usually because of some natural talent they displayed or because they possessed an uncanny instinct for survival so that they could serve as part of an elite ad hoc military team intended to achieve some difficult, usually borderline insane military mission objective of the Imperium. The convicts are given a “last chance” by Schaeffer to be forgiven their crimes in the eyes of the Emperor of Mankind through an Imperial pardon from the Colonel, said pardons awarded only to those members of the regiment who survive a number of military operations as determined by Schaeffer. The Last Chancers, then, is a kind of Dirty Dozen in space, and since they appear to be the most notorious of the Imperium’s many Penal Legions, the whole “grim darkness of the far future” thing is cranked up to 11.

“Vienna’s Golden Autumn: From the Watershed Year 1866 to Hitler’s Anschluss 1938”, by Hilde Spiel

247 pages, Grove Press, ISBN-13: 978-1555841362

Vienna’s Golden Autumn: From the Watershed Year 1866 to Hitler’s Anschluss 1938 by Hilde Spiel was first published in 1987, and maybe that’s why I have a warm and fuzzy feeling about this book because it looks and feels like an 80’s product: the glossy pages, the typesetting, the page format…it all feels like Morning in America. So, with that out of the way…the timespan covered in this book was the epoch of the Jugendstil (literally “Youth Style”), known better in the English-speaking world as Art Nouveau (literally “New Art”), and was inspired by natural forms and structures as a reaction to the academic art, eclecticism and historicism of 19^th Century architecture and decoration. Suffice to say, the Viennese went mad for it, and Spiel describes in chatty detail just how their city, a European crossroads with a plethora of races, creeds and cults jostling cheek-by-jowl, was forever changed, not only by the stylistic aspects of this new art, but by its cultural inflections, as well. This is important for, as has been remarked upon by other writers – think Frederic Morton in A Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888/1889 (reviewed on March 26, 2012) and again in Thunder at Twilight: Vienna, 1913-1914 (reviewed on March 27, 2012), or Schnitzler's Century: The Making of Middle-Class Culture 1815-1914 by Peter Gay (reviewed on April 25, 2012), or Good Living Street: Portrait of a Patron Family, Vienna 1900 by Tim Bonyhady (reviewed on September 25, 2014) and even Hitler’s Vienna: a Portrait of the Tyrant as a Young Man by Brigitte Hamann (reviewed on September 23, 2017) – there was a kind of Weltschmerz (literally “World Pain”) suffusing everything. Everyone had the blues but didn’t know why, and it showed.

Spiel argues that Vienna’s gestalt psyche was rather schizophrenic in that the polyglot, multiethnic mix of the Viennese people themselves contributed to the extreme complexity of the place. This is no small boast, as Vienna was the capital and crossroads of the Habsburg Monarchy, a multistate conglomerate that, at its height, consisted of almost forty-or-more distinct states, covered nearly 240,000 square miles, represented seventeen nations and minority groups, spoke somewhere in the region of sixteen different languages, sheltered well-over a dozen religions and contained upwards of 53 million people at the time of its dissolution in 1918. That such a hodge-podge empire should have a capital that equaled it in complexity and ethnic diversity should come as no surprise. That this diverse population should have an equally diverse intelligentsia, congregating at the famous Viennese coffee houses that seemed to serve as a wellspring of ideas, is, again, hardly shocking, and we find such luminaries as: Johann Strauss the Younger, Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler, Arthur Schnitzler, Gustav Klimt, Richard Strauss, Adolf Loos, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arnold Schoenberg, Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, Anton Webern, Alban Berg, Oskar Kokoschka, Ludwig Wittgenstein…okay, better stop there.

To view an era of great aesthetic refinement and artistic achievement in isolation is a fool’s errand; thus, attempting to describe the magical seven decades in Vienna between 1866 and 1938, one may well wonder how that seemingly sudden flowering of talent came about during such a tumultuous period, especially in the fields of literature and philosophy, which had lain barren or borne little crop in previous centuries (or maybe not: as Harry Lime said in Graham Greene’s The Third Man: “You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock”.) Austria’s cultural revolution really began with the year 1866 and ended with the German annexation of the First Austrian Republic in 1938. Henry James said “[i]t takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature”, and in Vienna, for so long the center of Europe, a surfeit of history rather prevented the spread of poetic invention and contemplative thought. Until, that is, everything hit the fan, and the intellectual promise of the place at last bloomed for one brief, shining moment, before being snuffed out by Nazi Terror and bureaucratic nonsense. Vienna’s Golden Autumn, while brief, shown golden, and lives on into our blighted technocratic age.