Travels through a mindscape

WHEN Oliver Sacks was asked his profession, he often replied “Explorer”. He did not mean this in the geographical sense. As a boy he had devoured Prescott’s books on the conquests of Mexico and Peru; as a young man he had travelled by foot, train and motorbike the length and breadth of North America. But what became an obsession with him was to climb inside the brains of his patients. He chose specifically those with right-hemisphere disorders; and, having reached those “furthest Arctics and Tropics”, slipping on ice or hacking through the unimaginable, near-impenetrable jungles of the self, he would then describe in extensive and sympathetic detail the world as it appeared from there. So compelling was this urge that even when teaching, as a professor of neurology at Columbia and NYU, and even when in great demand on the lecture circuit, he retained his ordinary medical practice in order to keep exploring.

Over the years he accumulated stacks of clinical records, abundant with every detail of the quirks and tribulations of his patients. He often wrote late into the night, monkish in his solitude. Hundreds of articles and essays, 13 books and (...

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The science of swing

DID Isaac Newton play tennis? He certainly liked to watch it, for as he first observed light rays bending in and out of his prism, in 1666, “I remembered that I had often seen a Tennis ball, struck with an oblique Racket, describe such a curve line.” His three laws of motion, too, as Howard Brody liked to point out, make a pretty good synopsis of a game of tennis: 1, An object in a state of uniform motion will remain in that motion unless it encounters an external force; 2, force equals mass times acceleration; and 3, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction (unless the ball goes out).

Professor Brody’s love of tennis, perhaps like Newton’s, was never quite matched by his skill. From fumbling tournaments in high school (“The coach gave up”), he progressed to four years of varsity play at MIT, and for one heady month coached the men’s team at the University of Pennsylvania where, for almost all his career, he was a physics professor. His original field, though, was particle and nuclear physics, the result of a boyhood fascination with a little book called “Atoms in Action”; and it was only by a fortuitous piece...

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Stone by stone

WHEN the young St Francis knelt in prayer in the filthy, derelict church of San Damiano in Assisi, around 1206, the wide-eyed figure of Christ on the cross asked him to restore it. When Padre Pietro Lavini, already a Capuchin friar walking in Francis’s footsteps, came for the first time to the ruined church of San Leonardo high in the Apennines, his experience was almost the same. The stones seemed to say: “Why don’t you rebuild us?” Pushed by some mysterious force, he found himself answering: “Why not?”

It seemed impossible. What had been a beacon and a refuge on a busy pilgrim and herding route, along the high valleys of the Tiber and the Tenna between the Adriatic and Rome, was now a jumble of masonry overgrown by brambles. Only one half-fallen Romanesque arch gave a clue to its history. The Benedictines had built a monastery on a nearby mountain, surrendering the little church to another order. But after 40 years of privation those monks, too, had abandoned it. The only standing part had been used for centuries as a sheep pen, and a metre of compacted dung now formed the church floor.

Yet Padre Pietro seemed already to smell...

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The deepest dive

IT OFTEN seemed strange to Natalia Molchanova, as she dived down and down through the blue water of the Mediterranean or the Red Sea, that the fish did not notice her. Sharks hovered, but did not approach. Schools of small fish flickered past unconcerned. She noticed one day, however, that a little band was imitating her: swimming not from right to left, but up and down vertically, following (as she was) a long rope let down from the surface.

She did not bother them because her own movements, as she swam, were those of a fish: her arms extended to a point before her, her legs straight, her chest and back sinuously curving, and attached to her feet a tail-fin like a mermaid’s that she flipped to propel her through the water. Her diving suit, her own brand, was a mere 1.5mm thick, thinner than fish-skin. Otherwise, she let the water clothe her.

Such techniques were essential because she was swimming and diving on a single breath, without gas. In this extraordinary sport, free diving, she had 41 world records. She could hold her breath, when floating motionless with her head under water in a pool, for nine minutes and two seconds....

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In the land of the blind

THIS picture is the only one of Mullah Omar that is confirmed as genuine. It was taken in 1993, the year before he founded the Taliban, when he was merely a fighter against the Soviet occupation of his country. He needed it as evidence that he had lost his right eye to enemy shrapnel, so that he could claim compensation. He never knowingly faced the camera again, since it was contrary to Islamic law.

The flyers dropped by American planes over Kandahar later, offering $10m for information about him, showed a photograph; it was not him. Portraits appeared of a man among yellow chrysanthemums, turning his right eye away. It was not him. Even when, as leader of the Taliban, he became emir of Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001, he so seldom left his house in Kandahar that most of his followers had no idea what he looked like. He saw almost no journalists, and hardly talked when he did. Discussion was difficult, and negotiation impossible. After 2001 he was in hiding, flitting between Afghanistan and Pakistan. “Nobody recognises him,” said Hamid Karzai, who led Afghanistan in his turn. “This is a man nobody has seen.”

There was a story...

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A scholar in the desert

ISLAM arose with remarkable speed and mystery. Patricia Crone’s well-stocked mind, clear prose and unflinching intellectual honesty were devoted to explaining why. She had little time for Islam’s own accounts of its origins: “debris” as far as historians were concerned, and hopelessly inconsistent. Far better, she reckoned, to fill the gap with contemporary sources and knowledge of other cultures, from messianic Maoris to Icelanders.

That required both personal and intellectual bravery. The central beliefs of Islam, such as the way the Koran took shape, the life of Muhammad and Islam’s relations with other religions, are sensitive subjects. Outside scrutiny can make tempers flare, especially when the conclusions are expressed in a witty and sardonic style.

That is one reason why copies of “Hagarism”, Ms Crone’s first book, long out of print, now sell for hundreds of dollars. It was published in 1977, the year she whirled like a tornado into Oxford, terrifying the dusty dons. (The Oriental Institute was then a notable source of spies for MI6, despite the fact that the history syllabus for the BA in Arabic ended at 1258, the year the...

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Buzz, buzz

SETTLING back in his rocking chair, feet spread to feel the heat of the stove, Burt Shavitz liked to reflect that he had everything he needed. A piece of land first: 40 acres of it, fields and woods, on which he could watch hawks and pine martens but not be bothered, with luck, by any human soul. Three golden retrievers for company. A fine wooden house, 20 feet wide by 20 feet deep, once a turkey coop but plenty spacious enough for him. From the upper storey he could see glorious sunsets, fire off his rifle at tin cans hanging in a tree, and in winter piss a fine yellow circle down onto the snow, and no one would care.

As the co-founder of Burt’s Bees, he could have been a multimillionaire. He had once held a third of the cosmetic company’s stock, valued in 2003 at $77m; he had surrendered it a decade earlier for property worth $130,000. In 2007 Clorox, a big corporation famous mostly for bleach, bought Burt’s Bees for a sum just shy of $1 billion. A fortune moulded originally from his honey and his beeswax allowed the other co-founder, Roxanne Quimby, once his lover, to purchase 100,000 acres of Maine to return them to their pristine wildness. His...

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A job well done

WHEN the letters and the accolades came thudding through the door of his house in Maidenhead, and the film-makers came calling, Nicholas Winton always protested that he was no hero. Heroes faced danger; he never had. They put their lives on the line; he had just worked at home in Hampstead, after a day being a stockbroker in the City. They dodged bullets and the secret police; he wrote letters, made telephone calls, and composed lists. He liked lists.

The fact that he had rescued 669 children from Czechoslovakia just as the Nazis invaded did not, in his mind, constitute heroism. He hadn’t gone out there in 1938 with any burning urge to do good; just for a holiday, in fact. Nor had he gone looking for children to rescue. Instead they and their parents—if they had any, for many were orphaned or abandoned—had come to him, as soon as word got round that he might be able to help them leave Prague and get to the West. From 6am the knocks would come at the door of his room in the Europa Hotel, and he would open it to find some shivering, starving, desperate figure.

He need not have responded. Many would not have done: his colleagues in...

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The cat’s miaow

AS SOON as she was born, Tama-chan (“Little Treasure”) knew she was divine. Most cats presume it; she was sure of it. Her immediate situation—whelped by a stray in the workers’ waiting room at Kishi station, on a rural railway line in western Japan—did not augur brightly. But as soon as her eyes opened, she saw what she was. Rolling languorously on her back, she admired her white underside; delicately twisting her neck to wash, she noted the black and brown bars on her back. She was a tortoiseshell, or a calico cat to Americans. They had been four in the litter; only she carried the propitious marks.

Tortoiseshells had long been prized in Japan. In another age she would probably have been a temple cat, leading a contemplative life among maple and ginkgo trees, killing mice and, in exchange, earning the regard of monks and pilgrims. Tales were legion of poor priests or shopkeepers who had shared their few scraps with the likes of her and had, in return, found riches. Or she might have been a ship’s cat, since tortoiseshells had the power to keep away the ghosts of the drowned, whose invisible bodies filled the sea and whose flailing, imploring hands...

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From rubbish, beauty

AT PRECISELY 5pm each working day, from 1958 until 1975, Nek Chand, inspector of roads for the Public Works Department of the city of Chandigarh, would climb onto his bicycle. But he did not head for home. Instead he turned north, towards the Shivalik Hills and the damp, mosquito-prickling forest. The road, good at first, soon became a bumpy track and then disappeared completely. Dense brush tangled in his wheels. “There were no roads to come or go,” he remembered. “Who would come here and what for?”

What he went for was to add one more rock, or a few more stones, to the secret world he was building there. The best specimens lay by the Ghaggar river, with strange man-or-woman shapes, and seemed to call out to be rescued. He brought these “individual souls”, at weekends or under cover of darkness, to the space he had cleared with his bare hands in the jungle, and laid them out in patterns in the landscape. A small mud hut, its walls inlaid with perfect fist-sized stones, became his centre of operations.

To the south the great Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier was building a new Chandigarh, a “city beautiful” based on right angles and...

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The stealing time

WHEN the white policeman lifted him up high on to his camel, on that November day in 1938, the laughing little fella thought he was going for a ride. But the journey—sometimes on the camel, sometimes carried on the hip of an aunt—lasted three weeks and covered 300 miles, from Tempe Station in the central Australian desert as far as Alice Springs.

His aunts, and the other adults in the party, were in chains. It was all they wore, being naked. They were suspected of killing and eating a bullock that wasn’t theirs. He, six or seven and with pale-brown skin, because his blood-mother Tanguawa had slept with the white owner of the cattle station where she was a housemaid, was being taken away in accordance with government policy. That policy, in force from 1910 to 1970, decreed that all aboriginal half-castes should be placed in institutions to civilise and Christianise them. His family had usually smeared him with mud to make his skin darker, so he wouldn’t stand out. But on that fateful day of the camel he had taken a dip in a water hole and washed it off.

So began 13 years of incarceration, first at “The Bungalow” in Alice Springs and...

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Making labour joyful

BIRTH is an unpredictable affair. One moment you are contentedly showering your enormous, overstretched self, or lying on a hard hospital bed with nothing much to do; the next all hell is breaking loose, the midwife screaming, rubber gloves flying, monitors beeping, partner fled to the loo, and the Mozart tape you brought to usher the new soul into the world completely beside the point. The only entity in control is Nature, crushing through you with a propulsive force sufficient to dislodge the planet.

Now, said Elisabeth Bing, things should not be like that. Birth would often be surprising, but the prospective mother could also stay in charge: awake, alert, undrugged, and even to some degree enjoying herself. First, she should have spent many weeks on relaxation exercises, learning to let the rest of her body droop pleasantly while the uterus did all the work. Next, she would have practised breathing, greeting each contraction with a “deep cleansing breath” and bidding it farewell with a smile. Even the strongest spasms could be crested with a speedy set of puffings and blowings, while her equally well-instructed partner massaged her back and...

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Lost and found

STUDENTS called him the “phantom”: an elusive, furtive figure who haunted Princeton’s libraries and lecture halls. The garbled formulae he scrawled on blackboards, uninvited and unread, evinced a scholarly background. Other jottings made even less sense: “Mao Tse-Tung’s Bar Mitzvah was 13 years, 13 months and 13 days after Brezhnev’s circumcision.” Sometimes he banged his head in mental agony. Myths abounded. Had maths broken his mind? Or a love affair his heart?

The numerology, conspiracies and supernatural beings arrived in John Nash’s mind with the same sparkling clarity as his insights into the isometric embeddability of abstract Riemannian manifolds in Euclidean spaces. Those thoughts had made him one of America’s most promising young mathematicians. So he took the other ones seriously, too.

His gift was insight, not theory—he solved problems first, finding out how he had done so later. His work on manifolds (crudely: proving that a line drawn on a multidimensional idealised piece of paper remains the same length no matter how tightly it is crumpled) could have won him the greatest mathematical prize, the Fields Medal, had an...

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Who Sloanes Wins

MEMBERS of the tribe had been seen around for a while. Indeed, with their raucous cries (“OK Yah!” “AbsolOOTli!”), they were hard to ignore. Individuals would be spotted in the Fulham Road, in navy Husky and Hermès scarf knotted on the chin, greeting each other with air-kisses on either cheek; or lying blotto on some college lawn the morning after a May Ball, black tie just about together. At sales time at Harvey Nicks or on race days at Ascot they would descend in squawking flocks. Yet the secret rules of this tribe, its rituals and codes, were unanatomised until Ann Barr, as features editor at Harpers & Queen, turned her beady gaze upon them.

From 1975 onwards Miss Barr commissioned and collected in multiple manila envelopes snippets, stories and features relating to Sloanes, and wove them into “The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook”, co-authored with Peter York, in 1982. The typical pair, she surmised, were probably a Henry (Hooray in his wild youth) and a Caroline. He would have a not-too-demanding job in the City to which he commuted daily, wearing his father’s suit, striped shirt (Jermyn Street...

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The pipe-smoking warrior

FOR nearly all the 25 years leading up to the collapse of communism in 1989, two intellects dominated the pages of The Economist. They were Norman Macrae, as deputy editor, and Brian Beedham, as foreign editor. Their marks were influential, enduring—and quite different. Norman, who died in 2010, relished iconoclasm, and original ideas sprang like a fountain from his effervescent mind. Brian, bearded, tweed-jacketed and pipe-smoking (or pipe-poking), held ideas that were more considered. It was he who provided the paper’s attitude to the post-war world.

In that world, nothing was as important as seeing off communism, which in turn could be achieved only by the unyielding exercise of American strength. This view was not in itself unusual. What made it remarkable, and formidable, were the clarity, elegance and intellectual power with which it was propounded.

No issue demanded the exercise of these qualities more than the Vietnam war, and probably none caused Brian more anguish. A man of great kindness, and without a hint of vanity or pretension, he was far from being either a heartless ideologue or a primitive...

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The great survivor

WHEN Hitler’s forces marched into Warsaw in September 1939, Wladyslaw Bartoszewski’s parents told him not to panic. They had experienced German occupation during the last war. There would be inconvenience, disorder and even looting. He should be careful. But it would not be too bad—the Germans were, after all, west Europeans—and by next year, the British and French would arrive.

The Bartoszewskis could hardly have given their teenage son worse advice. The Western allies never came; instead the Soviets joined in the Nazi attack. Hitler not only wiped Poland off the map, but aimed to obliterate its language, culture and people. Wladyslaw, caught in a random round-up, was sent to Auschwitz.

He would have died there, but exceptionally his employer, the Polish Red Cross, managed to get him out by 1941. Freed, he wrote down the first account of the place. When a little girl on the train home offered him some bread and cheese, it was the first touch of humanity since his arrest.

He showed that kindness to Poland’s Jews. Through Zegota, a part of the Polish underground state set up for the purpose, he helped provide them with food,...

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Karachi’s wild child

NOBODY, of course, had anything to do with it, when Sabeen Mahmud’s car was stopped by two men on a motorbike who shot her at point-blank range through the windows. The Pakistani Taliban denied all responsibility. The Inter-Services Intelligence, ISI, promised all possible help to the police. Nawaz Sharif’s government ordered the police to find the perpetrators within three days. The police said they were very busy ascertaining a motive.

Really, it wasn’t hard to spot one. Here in the midst of anarchic, dysfunctional, crammed, crazy, noisy Karachi was a woman who was even more anarchic, crazy, noisy and in-your-face. She was at the heart of every disturbance, from supporting rank outsiders in the local elections to organising flash protests on social media, and spiced up every organisation she belonged to, which was any outfit committed to challenging discrimination or injustice.

No veil or scarf for her; with her short-cropped hair and black-rimmed glasses, she looked like a New York intellectual and felt like a postmodern hippie child. She loved Jimi Hendrix, Bruce Springsteen and the Beat poets. She’d give you a straight, cool...

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The voice of cricket

SURPRISINGLY, there is a French Cricket Association. More surprisingly, its patron until his death was Richie Benaud, captain of Australia’s cricket team from 1958 to 1964 and, for four decades afterwards, the dry, clipped, unflappable voice of cricket on both British and Australian television. Mr Benaud loved the fact that his forebears, back way beyond Parramatta and Jugiong in New South Wales, lent their name to a tiny village somewhere near Clermont-Ferrand. And that French connection explained his liking for Chassagne Montrachet 1981 as well as beer from a green bottle; his bolthole on the Côte d’Azur; and even, perhaps, the dapperness of the cream jackets that marked him out.

Cricket aficionados found much to treasure in him, not least his leg-spin bowling—when, after a short, light run-up, he would uncoil his long body, fling his right arm high and flick his wrist so that the ball, set spinning and drifting towards a right-hand batsman, would fizz left and, with luck, demolish the wicket. He took 248 wickets in Test cricket, batted tenaciously (making more than 2,000 runs), and was a celebrated close fielder, taking 65 Test catches. As...

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Obituary: Richard von Weizsäcker: Germany’s liberator

FORTY years, as the Old Testament shows, marks a psychological threshold. Richard von Weizsäcker observed this on May 8th 1985, as he gave the speech of his presidency and his life. In 40 years, a people could traverse the desert and reach the promised land; but they could also forget old lessons and stray from the path. And so, 40 years after their surrender in the war they had started, the Germans should face their crimes and their own destruction as honestly as they could. Only then—and this was his shocking twist—would they understand that the day of their defeat was the moment of their liberation.Helmut Kohl, then chancellor, had muttered something similar a few weeks earlier, but the public had taken little notice. Now, however, the thought came from the ceremonial head of state, a white-haired and elegant aristocrat, the son of a diplomat, and it was delivered in dialect-free German that resonated with gravitas. Suddenly the sentiment struck with full force, at home and abroad. A few months after the speech, Mr von Weizsäcker became the first German president to visit Israel.By then, Germans had made much progress in confronting their past. But members of...



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Obituary: John Bayley: Of literature and love

WHEN he had tucked his wife, Dame Iris Murdoch, the great novelist, into bed, registering from her expression of sweet content that Dr Alzheimer had been temporarily banished by sleep, John Bayley would go downstairs. There, at the kitchen table, he would pour himself a drink and find a book to read. Among the piles of unwashed plates, papers and pill packets—and, somewhere, a large pork pie which they had put down and never seen again—would be a Jane Austen or a Barbara Pym, well-worn and ever welcome.As he read, though, his thoughts would start to wander, first ambling and then running, like a horse let out in a field. He had held them back all day, of necessity, as Iris had rattled the front door crying to escape, or fought against putting on her shoes. Now he did not resist them. Like the devil Belial in “Paradise Lost”, he surrendered to open-ended daydreaming.For who would loseThough full of pain, this intellectual being,These thoughts that wander through eternity?He was, he supposed, that “intellectual being”, though he made no great play of it. The Warton Professorship of English at Oxford sat on him as lightly as his tattered Oxfam jumpers and caps...



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