Briefly Noted

Gravity Archives
by andrew motion
faber & faber, 120 pages, $17.13

Sir Andrew Motion is former poet laureate of the United Kingdom and cofounder of the Poetry Archive, which has preserved recordings of thousands of poets reading their own work aloud. He has spent his career building records that resist revision, and his new collection understands this technically and poetically.

Gravity Archives is a book of elegies—for friends who have died, for the English version of himself that Motion left behind upon moving to America, for the friction between what was and what remains. The forms are traditional: measured, weighted, attentive to rhyme and closure. The elegiac mode treats the past as though it must be fixed to be mourned, rooted in the understanding that grief requires something to return to. Motion’s poems insist on this fixedness with the patience of someone who has spent decades preserving voices that will outlast their speakers.

The title carries more argument than the poems themselves. An archive exerts gravity; it pulls you back toward what cannot be edited. In archival science, a record is authentic only when it cannot be altered without leaving a physical mark. Scripture understood this: The stones Joshua set at the Jordan were witnesses against future revision. Gravity Archives is a quiet insistence that each elegy bears the weight of a singular moment, pressed into its form, resisting the convenience of the update.

—J. M. C. Kane

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Stalin’s Apostles:
The Cambridge Five and the Making of the Soviet Empire
by antonia senior
publicaffairs, 480 pages, $35

Stalin’s Apostles is a tremendous new telling of the story of five men who were recruited from Cambridge University in the 1930s to become Soviet spies. These men, the “Cambridge Five,” quickly fanned out across British ministries, intelligence agencies, and journalistic institutions, securing high positions and acquiring secrets that were passed hand over fist to the Russians across three decades. The fact that the hands doing the passing were those of gentlemen, educated at one of England’s oldest and finest universities, shielded them from suspicion and discovery. According to the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, the establishment had underestimated both the strength of communist conviction and “its power to convert English gentlemen.”

The story of the Cambridge Five remains astonishing through to the final unraveling, filled with moments that cause jaws to drop and hearts to sink. Guy Burgess, one of the five, petitioned the Russians to assassinate an old friend; Kim Philby, another of the spies, opined of his Soviet handler: “He was a very, very nice fellow indeed . . . but obviously prepared to torture and slaughter anybody.” What may have inspired them? What kept them going through Stalin’s purges and countless other horrors?

These questions could easily be ignored in recounting their story—so compelling are the characters, the events, the atmosphere. Still, Antonia Senior often slows the pace to peer at the motivations of Burgess, Philby, Maclean, Blunt, and Cairncross. It seems as though these men glimpsed utopia in Karl Marx’s writings, hoped for its realization in a world revolution led by the Soviet Union, and viewed their own destinies as instrumental in bringing this about. With such ideals and a hard, hidden core (which they all appear to have shared), every betrayal was permissible.

—John Duggan

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The Last Riddle
by stephen smith
word on fire, 288 pages, $24.95

It has been almost five hundred years since St. Thomas More refused to take an oath acknowledging Henry VIII’s Act of Succession. More resisted Henry’s pressures with a stoic silence; he did not reveal his reasons for refusing the oath until he had already spent fourteen months in prison and was sentenced to death. Thomas More was considered a fool by friends and family, but history proved him otherwise.

Stephen Smith, coeditor of The Essential Works of Thomas More, explores More’s imprisonment letters in his new book, The Last Riddle. His goal is “to share the imprisoned Thomas More’s mind, heart and vision with readers through an account of [his] last letters and prayers.” The letters and prayers are supplemented by commentary from Smith, who guides readers through primary sources in the original archaic English. He provides necessary historical context, giving special attention to More’s spiritual struggles—his loneliness, his isolation from family and friends who thought him wrong, his loss of position and wealth. Though the average reader is unlikely to face imprisonment and capital punishment, Smith’s clear and insightful prose brings this ordeal vividly to life. 

Thomas More believed that his plight was one “in which a man may lose his head and yet have none harm, but instead of harm inestimable good at the hand of God.” Smith frames this paradox as the last riddle More faces—revealing less of a puzzle than a spiritual mystery. Turning the pages, the reader would be remiss not to contemplate the greatness of the reward for which More surrendered all else. 

—Felipe Trebilcock

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The Subversive Art of a Classical Education
by michael rose
regnery, 336 pages, $32.99

A new iconoclast in modern education has taken up the pen where Augustine, John Henry Newman, Mortimer Adler, and Dorothy Sayers left off. In a society deeply committed to an education focused on technology, novelty, and efficiency, Michael Rose offers a modest proposal to what he calls a “magnificent rebellion”: “a rebellion fought not with swords but with sonnets, not with guns but with geometry, not with shouting but with Socratic questioning.”

The Subversive Art of a Classical Education examines how modern education shortchanges its recipients by prioritizing career readiness, intellectual conformity, and, often, dim screens over a more humane way of learning. The book targets many hot educational topics, ranging from artificial intelligence to credentialism and student-centered learning to cursive instruction. He laments how many graduates of public schools leave filled with facts yet no wisdom, incapable of sustained focus amid distractions, plagued by historical amnesia. 

Compared to modern educational institutions that churn out technologically addicted hyper-specialists, Rose argues that the liberal arts are “radical acts of resistance against the machine of forgetting, against the cult of push-button immediacy, against the slow erosion of everything that makes us fully human.” Rose invokes thinkers from Dante to Neil Postman to remind readers of their intellectually rooted Western heritage. But don’t let the amalgam of historic precedent, literary examples, and scientific studies fool you; Rose’s mordant prose potently wields wit and metaphor to convince the reader of his case. Whether you are friend or foe to the classical movement, this work is certainly a conversational catalyst. 

—Austin Gergens