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22 January 2025

From Andrew Janiak to Alison Wood Brooks: new books reviewed in short

Also featuring The Sound of Utopia by Michel Krielaars and The Secret Painter by Joe Tucker.

By Michael Prodger, Zoë Huxford and Zuzanna Lachendro

The Secret Painter by Joe Tucker

People knew Eric Tucker as many things – boxer, steelworker, building labourer, habitué of working men’s clubs and bookmakers – but few knew this tall, unkempt, heavy-set man as a painter. Shortly before his death at 86 in 2018 he suggested to his brother that it might be nice to hold an exhibition of his work. What the family found in the Warrington council house where Tucker had lived with his mother almost all his life was a cache of 500 paintings filling every room, the garden shed and even the old air-raid shelter. When, after Tucker’s death, the house was opened for two days as a free gallery, thousands queued to get in.

In this gentle memoir, the painter’s nephew Joe Tucker winningly recounts not just the story of Eric’s life and his own interactions with him but the reception of all those paintings over the past few years and what drove their creator to make them. Eric Tucker is routinely described as another Lowry, a northerner who depicted the streets, drinking dens and working-class life of the industrial north. His paintings, however, are far more accomplished – sometimes borderline comic, always teeming, and becoming very expensive indeed.
By Michael Prodger
Canongate, 224pp, £18.99. Buy the book

Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves by Alison Wood Brooks

Despite doing it every day, conversation is surprisingly tricky and high stakes. Although most people try to avoid having difficult ones, we’re not especially great at the easy ones either. An often-spouted analogy compares talking to dancing: its complexity, the ease with which we can fall out of step with our partner(s) and its live nature can easily amplify feelings of anxiety.

But as Alison Wood Brooks posits convincingly, it may be better to think of dialogue as a play of coordination – and if we gamify the process, it becomes both one that is far easier to play and one we can master. Acronyming “TALK”, the Harvard professor offers a blueprint for how to engage with others: choose appropriate topics (planning them pays dividends); ask questions (remember Kant’s dinner-party rule: don’t be a know-it-all); find moments of levity (over 70 per cent of laughter serves purposes other than expressing mirth); and, above all, be kind (duh).

It turns out that good conversation is not about discussing good topics; it’s about making any topic good. If you take nothing else from this book, let it be this: if you really don’t know what to say, just ask a question and let the other person take the reins for a bit.
By Zoë Huxford
Penguin Life, 336pp, £20. Buy the book

The Sound of Utopia: Musicians in the Time of Stalin by Michel Krielaars

Many of Russia’s best-known musicians and vocalists created amid war, unrest and dictatorship. While most enjoyed a reasonable level of immunity in Stalinist Russia, the Soviet leader’s love of music was ultimately their greatest misfortune.

In this compelling and accessible retelling of the stories of ten musicians – from household names such as Dmitri Shostakovich to forgotten composers like Vsevolod Zaderatsky – the Dutch journalist Michel Krielaars presents an account of Stalin’s Russia in which music had to conform to strict social realism. As it was intended for factory workers and rural farmers, it had to be accessible and to advance socialism.

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These performers negotiated a censorious political environment that one day awarded prizes and honours, and the next sentenced them to labour camps. It is no surprise that fear dominated the art scene, seeping into the music that existed to cater to the dictator’s whims. The Sound of Utopia is a fascinating portrait of the musicians’ resilience and defiance of oppression.
By Zuzanna Lachendro
Pushkin Press, 336pp, £25. Buy the book

The Enlightenment’s Most Dangerous Woman by Andrew Janiak

It was both her good fortune and her disadvantage that Émilie du Châtelet fell in with Voltaire. His fame as the pre-eminent figure of the Enlightenment smothered her own renown. They lived together for more than 15 years and collaborated on scientific and philosophical investigations, but while Voltaire acknowledged her achievements, his fellow male thinkers did not. Andrew Janiak, a professor of philosophy and exhumer of female intellectual reputations, suggests she represented a threat to the natural order which even the philosophes believed took free thinking too far.

Du Châtelet’s accomplishments were formidable: her translation of and commentary on Newton’s Principia brought his thought to France; she published on physics, mathematics, kinetic energy, finance, the Bible and the nature of happiness. Many of her ideas found their way, unacknowledged, into Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie. Her peers, says Janiak in his lucid biography, described her as a disciple of others “but denied her the status of ‘modern’ philosopher”. That she died at 42 meant she could not fight back.
By Michael Prodger
Oxford University Press, 304pp, £22.99. Buy the book

[See also: The radical women who made modern dance]

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This article appears in the 22 Jan 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Messiah Complex