Secrets and pies

The Improbability of Love. By Hannah Rothschild. Bloomsbury; 404 pages; £14.99.

HANNAH ROTHSCHILD’S romp through the art world is peopled by some horrible characters: venal art dealers, self-important experts, political windbags, lonely Russian oligarchs exiled to London, greedy sheikhs wanting to make their mark on the world and auctioneers so oozing with unctuousness you want to wipe your hands on a clean handkerchief after being introduced.

But at the heart of the novel are two entrancing figures. One is Annie McDee, the middle-aged daughter of a crazy alcoholic mother, now on her own after the collapse of a long-term relationship, but blessed with a heart of gold and a gift for cooking that is so entrancing she recalls the heroine of Isak Dinesen’s “Babette’s Feast”.

The other is the painting Annie discovers in a junk shop while seeking a gift for an unsuitable lover. Now marked down in condescending art-expert tones as “School of…”, Annie’s painting had, in fact, spent three centuries travelling across Europe from castle to chateau and back again, owned by queen and potentate. A fictional work by the French saviour of the Baroque, Antoine Watteau, after he was spurned by the love of his life, “The Improbability of Love” possesses the appeal of a great piece of art that is universal though never quite explicable....

from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1H3wO0h

A searing split

Bound for Pakistan

Midnight’s Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India’s Partition. By Nisid Hajari. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 328 pages; $28.

PARTITION, the bloody division of the Indian subcontinent into two countries in 1947, was a tragedy. The merits of the outcome—the creation of a Muslim-majority Pakistan separate from a secular but Hindu-majority India—have long been debated. But the botched and violent process of splitting up was undeniably catastrophic.

British colonial rulers who had long refused to discuss full independence, suddenly made for the exit with unseemly haste. The dividing line was drawn in weeks by an unqualified official, leaving a messy and dangerous legacy. Several rival leaders—Sikh, Muslim and Hindu—then scrambled for advantage, encouraging supporters to murder and rape as they sought to get control of land.

In “Midnight’s Furies”, Nisid Hajari, a journalist with Bloomberg, does a good job of recounting the horrors that unfolded, especially in Punjab. At least 14m people were displaced—“the biggest forced migration in history”—and hundreds of...

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Documenting history

TWO thousand Neolithic axe-heads have been arranged with patient precision. An exploration of China’s heritage by Ai Weiwei, the work is the dramatic centrepiece of an exhibition of Chinese art of the last four decades at the Whitworth museum in Manchester, which was named British Museum of the Year 2015 on July 1st. It is indicative of the show’s appeal, though, that the axe-heads are less arresting than a small paintbox, shown next door, which an artist would have slipped into his satchel to avoid detection during the Cultural Revolution.

The works come from the collection of Uli Sigg, a Swiss businessman and later diplomat who began visiting China in 1979 and became involved in the nascent contemporary art scene. Having amassed what is now widely considered to be the world’s most comprehensive collection of Chinese contemporary art, in 2012 Mr Sigg gave the greater part of it—donating almost 1,500 works and selling 47 more—to the M+ museum of visual culture, which is due to open in Hong Kong in 2019.

Mr Sigg cultivated friendships with artists, but felt no inclination to buy their experiments with European forms. The Cynical...

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Letter of despair

Between the World and Me. By Ta-Nehisi Coates. Random House; 176 pages; $24. To be published in Britain by Text Publishing in November.

A MASSACRE at a black church in Charleston, the choking of a black man by a New York police officer for the crime of selling untaxed cigarettes, the shootings of unarmed black men by several other police forces, unrest in Baltimore and in Ferguson, Missouri, after the death of young black men at the hands of police: all these things have booked America in for an intensive session of racial self-analysis. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s contribution last year, in an Atlantic essay called “The Case for Reparations”, was to describe how northern cities, to which African-Americans escaped during the great migration from the south, dreamed up rules to disadvantage their new arrivals. He has followed it up with “Between the World and Me”, a letter to his teenage son on what it is to be black in America in 2015.

The epistolary form is not the only archaic thing about Mr Coates’s book. He writes with the torrential outrage of a campaigning Victorian. The prose is...

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Weird science

The Adventures of Sir Thomas Browne in the 21st Century: The Life and Afterlife of the Seventeenth Century’s Most Inquiring Mind. By Hugh Aldersey-Williams. W.W. Norton; 330 pages; $26.95. Granta; £20.

THOMAS BROWNE was a 17th-century Norwich doctor who wrote mysterious-sounding books such as “Religio Medici” and “Pseudodoxia Epidemica”. Few read him now, but some will know of him from “The Rings of Saturn”, a novel by W.G. Sebald, a German author who died in 2001. Browne has long been a writer’s writer, and Sebald is one of a line to be stirred by the “ceremonial lavishness”, as he put it, of Browne’s “labyrinthine sentences”.

Hugh Aldersey-Williams also admires Browne’s labyrinths, but as a science writer himself he is particularly interested in Browne’s understanding of science. Browne was a medical man, but he was also, in an age before specialisms, a naturalist, an archaeologist, an anthropologist, a linguist and an inventor of words—“medical” itself being among the 784 he coined.

“The Adventures of Sir Thomas Browne in the 21st Century” is not a conventional biography. It is more a conversation with an old friend. In one of the best chapters in this engaging and often funny book, the author imagines the statue of Browne climbing off its plinth in Norwich and walking with him through the city as they discuss the...

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Diamond ring, iron fist

Stately pleasure domes, by decree

CHECHNYA and Dagestan are both nominally inside Russia, but the road between the two features a checkpoint as elaborate as a border crossing. On the Chechen side, the roads get better and the drivers more nervous. Under Ramzan Kadyrov, its strongman president, Chechnya has become visibly richer and less free than Dagestan. It also feels distinctly separate from the rest of Russia.

Chechnya’s capital of Grozny, once a bombed-out ruin, today boasts not only the largest mosque in Europe but Dubai-style skyscrapers and a five-star hotel (rarely more than a quarter full). The main drag, Putin Prospect, is lined with glitzy restaurants frequented by Grozny’s golden youth. Behind the facades lies a republic steeped in fear, corruption and poverty. Chechnya has become a mini-totalitarian state, in many ways a caricature of today’s Russia.

Mr Kadyrov, who spends millions of dollars sponsoring appearances by Western pop singers and celebrities, has developed a personality cult inside Chechnya and celebrity status outside it. (His Instagram account has a wide following.) Always...

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The end of fudge

ANDREAS PAPANDREOU, a proud Greek socialist who stood up to his country’s coup-mongering generals in the 1960s, won an election in October 1981 by fulminating against the European Economic Community (as it was then known) and vowing to lead Greece out of NATO. But in office he executed a graceful kolotoumba (somersault), discovering a taste for European subsidies that could be used to expand his crony state and turning himself into an engaged, if awkward, NATO partner. Greece’s interests, Papandreou determined, were best served by exploiting the rules of the clubs it belonged to, not by tearing them up.

The ties that bind Europe’s political elites have often turned out to be extraordinarily strong. Sometimes they oblige weak leaders to jettison election pledges. Take François Hollande, who took office in 2012 promising to end European austerity but instead finds himself battling to please Germany by reforming France’s sclerotic economy. When referendums go the “wrong” way, as with Ireland’s rejection of the Lisbon treaty in 2009, leaders tweak the text and ask citizens to vote again. The serial bail-outs of the past five...

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Dutch Quixote

DURING its 17th-century golden age, the Netherlands was the world’s most enthusiastic exploiter of wind technology. Over 10,000 windmills dotted the landscape; the city walls of Amsterdam were crowned with a row of them. Today many Dutch find the stereotype of their country as the land of windmills irritating—and inaccurate. Wind turbines supplied just 5.2% of the Netherlands’ electricity in 2014, far behind Germany, Spain or Denmark. Renewable sources as a whole make up 4.2% of the country’s energy mix, putting the Netherlands 26th in the European Union, ahead only of Malta and Luxembourg.

That leaves the government in a fix. It has five years to meet an EU-wide mandate to generate 14% of energy from renewable sources. Among other things, it plans to build a lot of new wind turbines. This, however, runs up against the reason why the Netherlands has so few of them: a severe case of not-in-my-backyard syndrome. Almost everywhere new turbines are mooted, locals howl that they will be ugly and noisy. One proposed wind park prompted a group calling itself the Don Quixote Foundation to block a drawbridge on the 32km dike connecting North...

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Caucasian jihad

IN OCTOBER 1832 Russian soldiers besieged the village of Gimry (pictured) in the mountains of Dagestan in an effort to capture Gazi-Muhammad, the first imam of the Caucasus Imamate, who had defied their rule. He was killed, but his follower, Imam Shamil, jumped over the line of Russian bayonets and escaped. Ever since then, Gimry has been a symbol of defiance and a stronghold of Islamic rule.

In the autumn of 2014 Russian soldiers again besieged the village. They were trying to capture Magomed Suleimanov, a native of Gimry who had been proclaimed emir of the Emirate Caucasus, an al-Qaeda-linked insurgency launched in 2007. The soldiers sacked a neighbouring settlement, forced out its population of 1,000 and looted their houses. Mr Suleimanov escaped, but Gimry remains surrounded by Russian soldiers; only residents are allowed in.

Yet the Russian army, it seems, is fighting yesterday’s war. While it is still trying to catch Mr Suleimanov, his insurgency seems to be on its way out. “The Emirate Caucasus is dead,” says Abdurakhim Magomedov, an aged leader of the puritanical Salafi movement from the village of Novosasitli. “It has not...

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On home soil

Horror close to home

HE STRANGLED his employer in the back of a van, hacked off his head with a kitchen knife and attached it to the gates of the chemicals factory where he worked, next to two Islamic banners. Yassin Salhi, a French citizen, confessed this week to a grisly murder on June 26th, at Saint-Quentin-Fallavier near Lyon, that shook France. Four days later, the public prosecutor concluded that Mr Salhi had acted with a “terrorist motive”.

The French have become grimly accustomed to news of beheadings by jihadists in far-flung places. Last year a French mountain guide was decapitated in Algeria by a group linked to Islamic State (IS). But such a horror on French soil was a far greater shock. After displaying the severed head, Mr Salhi rammed his van, loaded with gas canisters, into the chemical plant, in what appeared to be a failed attempt at a suicide attack.

Although no group has claimed responsibility, the public prosecutor said that the aim was clearly to terrorise with “maximum publicity”. Mr Salhi sent two photos of the severed head, one of them a selfie, to a French convert in Syria,...

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Los indignados in power

Colau: begone, housing shortage

AIDA DEL VALLE lives in a block of new flats owned by Spain’s “bad” bank, Sareb, with big windows overlooking a small Barcelona square. The 34-year-old former schoolteacher, who receives unemployment benefits of €300 ($331) a month, pays no rent or utility bills. She owes her tenancy to a housing-activism group that broke into the unfinished building and took it over. One of the group’s founders is Ada Colau, who on June 13th became Barcelona’s mayor.

Ms Colau is one of a number of candidates who have infused the Spanish left with fresh vigour. Her rainbow coalition of activists and parties, including the insurgent party Podemos, narrowly beat the incumbent Catalan nationalist Convergence and Union coalition (CiU). Podemos-backed candidates also took control of Madrid and other major cities. Ms Colau’s first moves included slashing her salary by three-quarters to €2,200 per month and dropping prosecution of student activists accused of vandalism. Her counterpart in Madrid, the 71-year-old Manuela Carmena, met the heads of Spain’s mighty Santander and BBVA banks to discuss the...

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Coalition of one

THE anti-immigrant Danish People’s Party (DPP) has been in the vanguard of Europe’s populist right for a decade and a half. It scored huge gains in elections on June 18th, coming second with 21% of the vote. But the DPP will not be joining the centre-right government announced last week by Lars Lokke Rasmussen of the Liberal Party. Indeed, no other parties will. Unable to form a coalition due to policy divisions, Mr Rasmussen will lead a single-party minority government, with tacit parliamentary backing from the DPP and two other right-leaning parties. Together they have a fragile one-vote majority in Denmark’s 179-seat parliament. And with 37 seats to the Liberals’ 34, the DPP is already starting to show its power.

Mr Rasmussen’s defeat of Helle Thorning-Schmidt’s Social Democrat-led administration was far from definitive. The Social Democrats remain the largest party in parliament with 47 seats. While no left-leaning coalition was possible, the so-called “blue bloc” is deeply split too. The Liberals and the DPP disagree on taxes, social spending and the European Union, leading the DPP to turn down Mr Rasmussen’s offer of cabinet seats.

Denmark’s multiparty political system frequently produces minority governments, but this one seems unusually tricky. The surge in support for the DPP has it brimming with confidence and determined to drive hard...

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There will be blood

WALL STREET loves a good scrap almost as much as the wildcatters who drill for oil do. No wonder that the fight over the finances of America’s shale-oil industry has turned nasty. In one corner are shortsellers, including David Einhorn, a hedge-fund manager whose scalps include Lehman Brothers. They argue that “fracking”—the business of blasting oil out of rocks using water, sand and chemicals—is a bottomless pit into which too much cash has been thrown.

In the other corner are America’s oil pioneers, who say that shale can thrive even though the benchmark American oil price has dropped from over $100 a barrel last year to $57 today. The oilmen are backed by plenty of other investors who are still pumping money into shale firms: some $35 billion of equity and bonds has been raised since December.

Both sides have a point. It makes sense to be cheery about the long-term prospects for shale energy—and to be queasy about today’s bunch of fracking firms (see article).

...

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Now get on with it

FOR over 40 years British politicians have squabbled about where to build runways in south-east England. They have commissioned reports, ordered public inquiries and submitted to judicial reviews. For as long as the paperwork has helped them avoid local protesters, not a shovel has bitten into the ground. No full-length runway has been built to serve Britain’s economic powerhouse since the second world war.

In 2012 David Cameron, Britain’s prime minister, dodged the issue again, asking a commission under Sir Howard Davies, an economist, to look into airport expansion. On July 1st Sir Howard published his final report, backing a new runway at Heathrow, Britain’s busiest airport (see article). There are worrying signs that Mr Cameron will be tempted to join the long line of paper-pushers.

Jet-lagged

Britain’s delays have been costly. While Sir Howard and his pals have been pondering where to put a strip of concrete just 3.5km (2.2 miles) long, China has built...

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Lost, but now found

“FEARLESS” is how Barack Obama now describes his mood. A series of triumphs has suddenly given him a second wind. On June 29th he at last won “fast-track” authority to negotiate foreign-trade deals, paving the way for deeper economic engagement with Asia and Europe. On June 25th the Supreme Court rejected a conservative attempt to disembowel the Affordable Care Act, Mr Obama’s flagship health-care law. A day later the justices declared gay marriage a fundamental right in all 50 states, and the White House spent the next night bathed in rainbow lights (see article).

Mr Obama cannot claim all the credit. The Supreme Court is not part of his administration, though he nominated two of its nine justices. And his free-trade victory owed much to Republicans in Congress, who beat back a revolt by populist Democrats intent on blocking the Democrat in the White House. But a win is a win, and the president now has momentum to deal with another cause close to his heart: racial justice.

After a racist...

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Strike out

CHECKING an airliner’s wings and fuselage for damage after it has been hit by lightning or suffered a bird strike is more than just a time-consuming nuisance. In the cut-throat world of commercial aviation, time is money, and a plane in a hangar is a plane not earning its keep. At the moment, conducting such an inspection means employing engineers to stand on elevated mobile platforms so that they can pore over an affected aeroplane’s surface seeking out dents, holes or high-voltage skin burns which might be in need of repair. For an average plane, this takes about ten hours.

But that may soon change. In recent tests at Luton Airport, near London, a drone called Riser—the brainchild of Blue Bear Research Systems, a drone-builder based near the airport, and Createc, a sensing-and-imaging company in Cockermouth, in the north of England—completed equivalent surveys of an Airbus A320 belonging to EasyJet, a budget airline, in a mere 20 minutes.

Using a drone to look into a plane’s nooks and crannies makes sense, but there is a wrinkle. For obvious reasons, the authorities do not like robot aircraft flying around airports. Drones can therefore operate only inside hangars, and only when the doors are shut. Most drones, though, rely on the satellites of the Global Positioning System to know where they are, and GPS does not work well indoors.

Riser gets...

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Rapid unplanned disassembly

FEW things are as spectacular as a successful rocket launch, but a failed one comes close. On June 28th SpaceX, an upstart rocketry firm founded by Elon Musk, an adventurous technology billionaire (see article), began what was to be its seventh uncrewed cargo flight to the International Space Station (ISS). The success of the first such flight, in May 2012, was big news. It was a vindication of NASA’s decision to rely on the ingenuity of the private sector and the discipline of fixed-price contracts to provide cheap access to orbit. As subsequent lift-offs passed without a hitch, press interest faded, and what had been extraordinary quickly became routine.

All again seemed well as the Falcon 9 rocket roared away from its launch pad this week. But two minutes and 19 seconds into the flight one of its oxygen tanks sprang a leak. The rocket powered on for a few more seconds before disintegrating into a shower of glowing debris (see picture). It is unclear, yet, exactly what went wrong. Mr Musk would...

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The Cambrian explosion

Modern lobopodians are rarely seen forest dwellers called velvet worms. Their ancient relatives, though, were pioneers of the Cambrian explosion, a time when Earth experienced an unprecedented surge in biodiversity. As they report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Zhang Xiguang of Yunnan University, in China, and his colleagues have found a previously unknown species (pictured), some 520m years old, in rocks from Yunnan province. Collinsium ciliosum, as they dub it, could grow to be more than 8cm long, was eyeless and had frontal appendages that were developed into sieving baskets, to filter food from the ocean floor. A tasty morsel, then, for the numerous predators which the Cambrian explosion generated. As a consequence the creature was, in Dr Zhang’s phrase, “superarmoured”, with five spines of varying length protecting each of the 14 rear segments of its hardened exterior.

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Sounds bad

CLINICAL depression is, simply put, a dreadful disease. Diagnosing it is anything but simple, however. Its symptoms vary, can shift with the ups and downs of everyday life, and sometimes overlap with those of other diseases. For these reasons, it is common for depression to go unidentified for months, or even to be missed altogether.

Stefan Scherer of the University of Southern California and Louis-Philippe Morency of Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, hope to change this. They are trying to develop a reliable way of diagnosing depression by using a computer to record and analyse aspects of a putative sufferer’s behaviour. They are, they think, 85% of the way there.

Their latest research, just published in IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, is an analysis of depressed people’s speech. It follows up on analyses of facial expressions and eye movements carried out by tracking cameras while the subject of a diagnosis is having a conversation. These used things like the length (or, rather, shortness) of people’s smiles and the frequency with which they looked at the ground in order to develop an algorithm that was 75% effective in diagnosing depression.

The extra 10% of reliability has come from quantifying what was previously a qualitative observation, which is that depressed people tend to run their vowels...

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Knowing the drill

A future fossil?

ANIMALS and plants are not the only things that form fossils. Tsunamis—the huge waves created by some submarine earthquakes—do so, too. A tsunami generated in January 1700, off the Pacific coast of North America, for example, has left abundant traces in local rocks, as well as in the art of Japan (it was the inspiration for Katsushika Hokusai’s woodcut, “The Great Wave of Kanagawa”). That should give pause to coastal dwellers in what is now Oregon, Washington state and British Columbia. They might reasonably wonder when the next big wave will arrive—as might residents of other earthquake-prone coastlines around the world.

Harvey Kelsey, of Humboldt State University, in California, has done more than wonder. He and his team have been looking at the Indian Ocean coast of Aceh province, in northern Sumatra. This was the origin, in December 2004, of a powerful submarine earthquake and subsequent tsunami that killed around 230,000 people. The quake in question, as is commonly the case for quakes of this magnitude, was caused by one of the Earth’s crustal plates sliding under another. Plate movement at...

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