Samuel Johnson Prize 2013 The Culture Show

Humans are storytelling animals. We need stories to survive and to make

sense of the nonsense and joy and madness and sadness that is everyday

life. And what I love about books is that

they provide as good a way of enjoying and sharing stories as can

be experienced. The half-dozen titles shortlisted

for this year's Samuel Johnson Prize, Britain's most prestigious

award for non-fiction, exemplify storytelling at its best.

These are books that go from bees to Roman Britain, from the First Afghan

War, to a biography of Thatcher, from a womanising radical poet to

how we commemorate the dead. Whatever your interests are, there's

something in this list, I would argue, for anyone. This is a truly

eclectic list of some of the very best books being published in

Britain today. Here to whet your appetite about

these six fascinating reads are some highly-qualified reviewers, all of

whom have judged the Samuel Johnson Prize in previous years.

It's such a diverse list, it's hard to tell which book is going to win,

but I certainly have my favourites. Whatever my preferences, one thing's

for sure: All six books will take you on rewarding and unexpected

journeys, and broaden your sense of the world.

It's hard to go anywhere these days without hearing how publishing is

dead, how the internet is killing book culture and how threatened

non-fiction is. As a publisher, you won't be surprised to learn that I

think that these concerns are overblown. For whilst the digital

transformation of our lives undeniably presents considerable

challenges, it also offers unprecedented opportunities.

It means the competition for people's time, it means publishers

and writers need to be more experimental, more creative, they

need to think of more new ways to tell stories. We are swamped with

information and what a writer, or the best writers of non-fiction do,

is do that sifting for you. Readers have less patience now to wade

through a huge book - it doesn't mean they won't do it occasionally -

and some books merit that length. But I think there is a tendency for

writers to try and be a little more concise in what they do. I don't

think we've ever been in a more exciting time to be a publisher, or

a reader or, for that matter, a writer.

One short but very powerful book on this year's list is Empires of the

Dead by David Crane, about the creation of the war cemeteries -

here reviewed by historian and former Prize Judge, Stella Tillyard.

Empires of the Dead tells the fascinating but forgotten story

behind British military cemeteries like this one in Brookwood, Surrey.

Cemeteries that today we see all over the world wherever British and

Commonwealth soldiers have fought. This book reveals how these fields

of graves were the vision of one man in the First World War.

His name was Fabian Ware. And he was faced when manning the early

ambulance service in the early battlefields of France with what to

do about the enormous numbers of bodies that very quickly began to

accumulate. He had a vision - an empire of the dead - a place where

the dead could rest in equality and forever in the places where they had

fallen. It's a seemingly small subject but which grows into a very

large history of an idea, really, and that's one of the things that

makes the book so compelling. Today, these cemeteries have become

part of our national consciousness, even identity. So I was fascinated

to learn how contentious they were at the time, with the greatest

opposition coming from relatives of the dead.

One can have every sympathy with the families because of course what

you'd want is to bring the person you loved back, and to have a place

where you could visit them. So Ware faced immense opposition from

families and was pilloried as heartless, as cruel.

I found the detail in Crane's book riveting - and harrowing. It's

staggering to think more than 4,000 headstones had to be shipped over to

the continent a week, while search parties were dispatched to the

battlefields to find bodies, a grim task which Crane describes with

powerful intensity. SHE READS: 'Wooden crosses lurching

drunkenly on the edge of flooded craters, the pathetic scraps of a

body lying beneath a blanket, a fleshless arm jutting out of a

buried dug-out, long lines of searches steadily moving across a

morass of mud with that intent air of a police cordon searching for a

missing child.' In total, more than half a million

dead were buried in Ware's cemeteries, soldiers from all over

the Empire. What remains when Crane describes

these cemeteries is the uniformity and equality amongst the dead, of

all faiths, all countries and all classes and I think that's one thing

that's rather beautiful about the vision and one reason these

cemeteries are so striking today. Equally pithy and moving is A String

in the Tale, the scientist Dave Goulson's book on bees. This time

our reviewer is journalist and former Prize Judge, Sam Leith.

This is a part memoir, part natural history account into the inner world

of the bumblebee. What's special about this book

really is it absolutely seeds with enthusiasm, and that's something

that always sings on the page in nonfiction. His voice comes through

it constantly, it's self-deprecating, it's kind of wry

and he accepts some of the absurdities of what he's doing and

the silliness and he's kind of in love with it. Not only does it tell

you an awful lot about bees you'd have had no idea about but the

closer in you look, the more there is to be fascinated by. Wow, so they

do that?! I've come to meet Dave - and some

bees - for which we need to don some rather fetching protection suits.

Rather surprisingly, we're not in the countryside but on the roof of a

London hotel. Bees here do better than in the countryside. Out in the

countryside there actually aren't that many flowers, and this is true

for if you're a honeybee or a bumblebee.

So, Dave, can you introduce us to your guests?

So, these are the bees, the species of bee that people keep in hives and

that we get honey from. I'm actually a specialist in bumblebees, which

are the wild relatives of bumblebees, if you like, which is a

bit like the difference between a domestic cat and a tiger.

The book charts Dave's attempts to understand and conserve the

endangered wild species. One of the things I absolutely loved

about your book is it tells you a lot about how scientists do science

and it's bonkers, you've got you tying bits of tinsel to bees and

chasing them across gardens or snipping off their feet and

travelling around with pickled bee feet.

It's just about curiosity. About trying to understand the natural

world, the ecology of bees. It's really amazing stuff. You talked

about experiment about how you found out how much energy they actually

burn? To stay in the air, a bumblebee has to flap its wings

about 200 times a second, which is pretty quick. So, it loses loads of

energy. So, they need to feed all the time. When a bumblebee leaves

its nest, even if its stocked up - its tanks are full. If it doesn't

find a flower within 40 minutes, then it's grounded, it can't fly

again and that's the end of it basically. So if there aren't enough

flowers, then bees are in trouble. One of my favourite passages in the

book describes an experiment in which Dave dropped bees out of his

car window to test their navigational skills in returning

home. HE READS: 'Even from two or three kilometres, the bees would

often be back within a few minutes, while I got caught up in the usual

Southampton traffic (bees don't have to worry about such things).The

record distance over which a bee successfully returned to the nest

was 10 kilometres. I was very proud of Blue 36.'

The distances bees regularly go, if you scale up into human terms, it's

absolutely ridiculous, it's like, you know, going to a patch of

flowers and back would be like us going to the moon and back to get

our shopping. The book's clearly got a sort of

campaigning aspect to it? I'm a conservationist really, and

bees are really good things to work on for two reasons - one is that

it's easy to explain to anyone why they should care because without

bees we wouldn't have blueberries, tomatoes, strawberries, runner beans

and chocolate and coffee. So, if we continue losing our bees, we run the

risk of living a much poorer life. And the other thing is people can

actually do something to help - the simplest thing to grow some flowers.

Even in a window box you'll see bees arrive and start feeding and you're

doing something to help. One of the joys of the Samuel

Johnson Prize is its range. And so from the world of bees to that Queen

Bee of a Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, the subject of Charles

Moore's impressive biography. Our reviewer is broadcaster and former

Prize Judge, James Naughtie. In April this year, the death was

announced of one of the most important and controversial figures

of modern politics. 'This morning's headlines:

Preparations are continuing for Lady Thatcher's funeral?'

'There's been further world reaction to the death of Lady Thatcher

reflecting her divisive?' 'MPs and peers are preparing to

discuss her political legacy...' 'The Prime Minister who changed

Britain forever...' With Thatcher's death, it was time

for the biography she didn't want published 'till she was gone. An

authorised account of her life with the first of two volumes spanning

nearly six decades from her childhood to the end of the

Falklands War. I think for all of us, like myself,

who watched her as a reporter or observer, she's not someone you can

pin like a butterfly to the wall and stick in a glass case and say that's

it, that's the whole story. The whole story will be told over

generations. But what this does is to put many more layers of paint,

and warts incidentally, on the portrait. I think it tells us more

about her early life, her motivations, more about the paradox

in her personality between the pragmatist and the idealogue.

Margaret Thatcher herself gave her blessing, and access to all her

papers, to conservative journalist Charles Moore - and left him to it.

What impresses me most about it is that Charles Moore writes from a

very committed point of view, a very conservative point of view. But he

completely resists the temptation to give a head over heels in love

picture of Margaret Thatcher - it's not like that at all.

What's very striking about the book, really from the very beginning, is

the work he's done with unlikely people. I mean, we have the old

boyfriends of whom none of us had ever heard, and the whole story of

the courtship, as it would have been called in those days, with Dennis.

And that's the clue to the rest of the book. Because by the time

Charles Moore gets onto her accession to the leadership, he's

got brilliant control of his sources. He's spoken to everyone. To

my mind, the book gives a razor-sharp insight into what

politics is really like, how it feels.

You get the smell of sawdust in the ring when he's talking about the

leadership contest. A woman trying to command this man-built party and

man-built Whitehall is riveting. He's very good on her flirtatious

personality. I mean, you see something more than a stubborn Iron

Lady knocking everyone aside, refusing to listen to anyone who she

disagreed - and there was a bit of that in her personality as we all

know. But there was also something much much more subtle and it's

caught here. The climax of the book of course is

the Falklands War. There's a very telling moment, the Falklands War

has been won, and Charles Moore ends this book with a lovely picture of a

dinner. HE READS: 'So many people had been

invited to the dinner that there was no room for spouses at the table.

Instead, they were invited for post-dinner drinks in the drawing

rooms. Because all the main players in the Falklands crisis were men -

you can say that again! Mrs Thatcher was the only woman at dinner. After

the toasts, the Prime Minister rose in her seat again and said

"Gentlemen, shall we join the ladies?!" It may well have been the

happiest moment of her life.' And that captures very well the way

in which the Falklands set the seal on the first of her premierships and

the way it turned it around; and also reminds us of the unlikely

nature of her rise to power and the even more unlikely story of how she

got a grip on it. The range of books on the Samuel

Johnson Prize shortlist reveal how non-fiction is diversifying.

There's been an exciting development in non-fiction in that writers don't

feel a book needs to be pigeonholed into a certain type of genre. There

seem to be no rules any more about what's allowable or justifiable for

a writer to do. There's a desire for readers now to have an individual's

take and what that is very overtly an individual's take on a subject

rather than this distant, authoritative third person type of

book. Several of the books on this year's

shortlist reflect this more personal approach and revel in the journey a

book can take you on. Amongst these is William Dalrymple's

Return of a King, his riveting and brilliantly researched account of

the First Afghan War. Critic, author and former Prize Judge, Diana

Athill, has been appraising the book.

Return of a King tells the story of the British invasion of Afghanistan

in 1839 and its disastrous consequences.

I think William Dalrymple has won me over completely because when he

writes history he goes into it through people. And he then gives

you the whole cast. You get the feeling you are actually going into

the past, which is what I love. Things started to unravel for the

British not long after the invasion. The Afghans rebelled, forcing the

British to retreat. And in a last stand, hundreds of foot soldiers

were killed. It was the biggest military

humiliation the British had suffered.

I've come to the Army and Navy club in London to meet William Dalrymple.

Some of the stories in his book are quite hard to take, not least the

story of the British revenge on the Afghans.

One needs a pretty strong stomach to read what happened?

The British behaved in Afghanistan in exactly the way Nazi storm

troopers behaved in the Second World War. Villages are burnt down, men,

women and children of any age are slaughtered on mass. They leave

Kabul, this garden city, the main bazaar city of central Asia, a burnt

ruin. And they withdraw. One feels very ashamed by it.

There are good reasons to feel ashamed.

I know there are tremendous parallels between then and now.

What struck me over the last ten years, when the British and

Americans went back into Afghanistan so foolishly - anyone who knows

there history, knew it was going to end well - was to see history

repeating itself. You have a war based on doctored intelligence,

pushed by a bunch of hawks. As it goes on, the relevance to now

becomes absolutely scorching. You feel you have to write so fast

before it goes up all in smoke in front of you. There were lessons out

there, which you were longing for people to read.

What makes William's work so original is that he tells it from

both sides, travelling to Afghanistan to uncover new sources

and visit locations from the story. You were actually on the ground, you

had to go into the same places - which can't have been too simple

nowadays? Some places are terribly safe. Kabul

itself is like a French finishing school, full of, you know, handsome

Italian archaeologists and gorgeous French girls out digging, and

working in NGOs. But you only have to go five miles outside the city

and it's a very different world, it's the Wild West and you never

know what's going to happen. As we left the airport, I had a sniper

shot in the back window of my car. Immediately behind my head, as we

were leaving the airport, you know within half-an-hour of arriving.

In the book, the characters come under fire too when the British

retreat en masse after the Afghan rebellion.

It's the finest hour for one of my favourite personalities in the

story, Lady Sale, the tough wife of a British General.

Lady Sale... ...is splendid!

If anyone makes a movie of this war, then Lady Sale has to be the

heroine. And she is one of the best eyewitnesses for the terrible

retreat. HE READS: 'We had not proceeded half

a mile before we were fired upon. The pony my daughter rode was

wounded in the ear and in the neck. I fortunately had only one musket

ball in my arm. Three others passed through my coat, near the shoulder,

without doing me any injury.' And these last British women get

taken hostage the following night and are taken off. And Lady Sale

eventually leads a jailbreak of the hostages and none of the men will

help her and she drags the guns and says, "Do I have to do this on my

own?" And she shoots dead the jailer - it's all very dramatic stuff. She

has one of the great epitaphs of imperial history. It simply reads:

'Here lies all that could die of Lady Sale'.

Oh wonderful! From the wilds of Afghanistan, to a

journey closer to home undertaken by Charlotte Higgins, whose outstanding

book Under Another Sky explores our rich relationship with Roman

Britain. Sam Leith is once more our guide.

This is no ordinary book on Roman Britain. It involves a trip in a VW

campervan. It's sort of part travelogue, part

scholarship in which Charlotte Higgins, arts writer for the

Guardian and her boyfriend, sort of schlepp around all over the UK in

search of such Roman remains that there are. It's a kind of road trip,

a Roman road trip. We have this preconceived idea that

there was a point in which the Romans gave up, turned on their

heels and hugged off and that was it. And instead she says there are

all these hangovers from Rome. King Arthur, the Arthurian legend, which

we think of as very English, are actually a folk memory of the Roman

occupation. You could say: what have the Romans ever done for us? And it

answers that question in spades. The book reveals how Roman Britain

has fed our cultural imaginations from medieval writers to war poets

and musicians. But Higgins also attempts to peel

back all these layers of history to find the real Roman voices.

There's a magical moment in the book when she is looking through some

Roman letters - known as the Vindolanda tablets - in the British

Museum. And she comes upon what could be the

very first example of a woman's handwriting in the whole of history

of Roman Empire. HE READS: 'The words Anima Mea

Karissima, my dearest soul, may have been a bland formula but I none the

less felt ambushed by the affection and sweetness in them. The years

seemed to collapse as I read it, picking out the faint, spidery Latin

on the dull wood. I read the words over and over again and thought of

the lost life of the woman who wrote them.'

Like a travel book, the chapters are arranged by region as Higgins

journeys around the bleak, windswept outposts of Roman Britain.

Colchester is a sort of key place in the book, as it's absolutely

surrounded and full of Roman stuff. As she says, there's that sense of

the Romans being here at the beginning and everything else

building on top. It becomes a sort of model for exactly what she

described in cities and towns all over the country.

Every age finds the Rome it looks for in a sense. So to excavate Rome

is to find a strange distorting mirror in which you see yourself.

From ancient Britain we head to 20th Century Italy. Stella Tillyard has

been reading Lucy Hughes-Hallett's The Pike, a brilliant biography of

the controversial poet, Gabriele D'Annunzio.

You can't imagine a more outlandish or multi-faceted character than the

subject of this biography. D'Annunzio was a best-selling poet.

A prolific writer. A dandy and a lothario. But he's also remembered

for his politics of nationalism and blood sacrifice that inspired the

Fascists who followed him. I think in the first place it's a

real rollicking read of a really extravagant character that we

perhaps don't know very much about. D'Annunzio leaps off the page as a

larger-than-life character but she also shows the dark side of the man

- a rabble-rousing, rhetorical figure, who concentrates attention

to himself at times of economic stress - and Italy has thrown these

up through the course of the 20th Century. First, Mussolini, then

Berlusconi, but D'Annunzio was the first - and they're still coming.

In my local Italian, I am meeting author Lucy Hughes-Hallett to talk

about what she makes of her dangerously seductive character.

He may be in many ways deplorable. But he's never dull. I repeatedly

found myself saying - how can you say that? How can you think these

thoughts? And it seems to me perhaps quite an interesting question, it is

quite possible for people who hold abhorrent opinions to be charming.

D'Annunzio was a deeply-cultured, widely-read, brilliant poet and, in

general, he wasn't a brute. Except to women, maybe?

Ah, yes, but women loved him. It takes two.

Of course, there is all the time another side to him, there's a kind

of emptiness, a dark side. Yes, well, D'Annunzio believed that

war was a jolly good thing - it was virile, it was energetic, and a new

nation - and of course Italy at the time was a brand-new nation -

needed, he said, a baptism of blood. That's a very D'Annunzian concept.

One thing you say is D'Annunzio is not a Fascist but Fascism was

D'Annunzian. For one thing, Mussolini comes a

generation after D'Annunzio, but it's not just politics that

Mussolini learned from D'Annunzio, it's a way of doing politics - the

importance of the parade, the spectacle, the songs, the uniforms,

the ritual and ceremony of politics. So he understood politics as

theatre. D'Annunzian politics reached its

peak in 1918 when he took over a city called Fiume, in modern

Croatia, declared it part of Italy and himself its ruler.

SHE READS: 'He was welcomed into the city by rapturous crowds who had

been up all night waiting for him. An officer, passing through the main

square in the early hours of that morning, saw it filled with women,

wearing evening dress and carrying guns. An image that nicely

encapsulates the nature of the place. At once a phantasmogorical

party and a battleground.' Certainly, he used it as a stage on

which to project himself and made himself the star of the show.

Without parallel in European, 20th Century European life.

I think it is. D'Annunzio's influence is still

felt, even here in London, where the local Italian church has a war

memorial inscribed with his words. It says, "Non Invano Moriste - he

didn't die in vain, O sweet sons of noble Latin blood."

Well, this is a very typical D'Annunzian sentiment, combining

blood and the idea of sacrificing yourself for your Fatherland. Here

we are in a sacred setting outside a church so that the combination of

religion, of slaughter and of beauty and poetry is something that

D'Annunzio epitomises. Trying to pick one of these six

books as the winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize is not a task I envy

the judges. Almost impossible to do as they are all, in their own

different ways, remarkable books. But ultimately they have to pick a

winner, and I'm being asked to choose what I think would win this

year and I'd like to pick William Dalrymple's Return of a King.

I think he's managed to do something really extraordinary here. It's a

book that I absolutely raced through, enjoying enormously as well

as being fascinated by the things I was learning along the way. What he

does is not only capture what happened then in a way that no-one

has done previously, but he also reminds us how history repeats

itself. And in that respect, he's written a book that's of its time,

but of our time too, and I think that's a great achievement.

If you're interested in who's won, the winner will be announced next

week on 4th November.