Reunited with my books

When I moved to London, I arrived with very little of my stuff, as I didn’t have anywhere permanent to live: and as a result my books have been in boxes for a serious while. I’ve just got them back. Here’s a few of the things I’ve been living without:

Steve Bell’s If... from the early and mid-80s. 

Steve Bell needs no introduction, but these early volumes were very influential for me. Do cartoons change politics? Maybe not, but they can certainly turn the unpalatable into genuine entertainment. Didn't you realise how much you’d miss Norman Tebbit once he left the front bench?

Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future: Rogue Planet

These almost cinematographic drawings fascinated me as a child. Frank Hampson’s vision of the future as seen by a 1950s Briton is both retro and compelling. Stunning architecture too.

Egil’s Saga and Njal’s Saga

Iceland is best known for bank failures and fish, and Magnus Magnusson best known for Mastermind; but Magnusson is also a translator of these early medieval sagas. Their form is prose in chapters, much like a novel. The stories are exciting and bloody, yet these fishermen, farmers and raiders are poets and philosophers too.

Caradoc Evans: My People

Dear old Caradoc’s books were burnt by his outraged fellow countrymen for insulting the religious, non-conformist communities of Wales. His portrayal of Welsh-speaking Cardiganshire as vindictive, petty and impoverished with chapels leaching off their congregations is sharp and entertaining.

Montaillou

In 1318, the Inquisition comes to a small French town to rid the locals of the rather sensible-seeming Cathar heresy, in which good and evil are balanced forces. Ambitious inquisitor Jacques Fournier makes an impressive effort to interview everyone to understand their attitudes and beliefs, before executing those who do not repent.

Later, the fellow becomes Pope Benedict XII, and his detailed notes are preserved for posterity. 1970s historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie creates this picture of French peasant life from the notes, including their affairs, alliances, betrayals and beliefs, much of it in the words of the heretics themselves.

Your Money or you life

Jaques Le Goff illustrates the power of ideas to constrain and transform, by detailing the medieval Church’s attitude to usury. As time belonged to God, interest charged on money was theft of that which belongs to God. So usurers were doomed to Hell as thieves. Le Goff argues that the invention of purgatory, as an escape from the inevitability of hell, eased the transition to capitalism, as it allowed userers to hope for something other than eternal damnation.

Don't look to me for elucidation, though, read the books yourself! Ask me if you want to borrow them.