OFF THE SHELF: APRIL 2025

Alice’s Oxford: People and Places that Inspired Wonderland by Peter Hunt (Bodleian Library Publishing, 24 April 2025)

The author is Professor Emeritus in Children’s Literature at Cardiff University, but the book is all about 19th-century Oxford, and the people and places who inspired Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll. Christ Church is central because it was Dodgson’s college, but in what becomes a rather marvellous tour guide, the author takes us around the city from hatters and marmalade makers on the High Street to the dodo displayed in the University Museum. There is a particularly intriguing section about the illustrator John Tenniel who, it is noted, never appears to have gone to Oxford and ignored the physical appearance of Alice Liddell, thus ‘creating’ an entirely different, blonde-haired ‘Alice’ from the brown-haired muse known by Dodgson. For many critics at the time, it was Tenniel’s illustrations that were seen as the primary success of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass – Tenniel having at the time huge status as chief satirist at magazine Punch. It’s worth being reminded that to the late historian and author Jan Morris Alice was the one great work of art that came out of the donnish jokes and general absurdity of Oxford, and its University; the author is also sensitive to this necessity, that apart from tracking down the many mischievous references to people and places, or jumping railway trains and sky-borne tea trays, it serves to underline the importance of the original work as a work of art, entire unto itself.

The Super Upside Factor by Daniel Shin Un Kang (Wiley, March 2025)

Daniel (Wolfson, 2020) took Oxford’s Master of Public Policy programme but he was also trained as a pilot in Canada. He discusses the reverse-culture shock of a stint in his native Korea (having grown up in Manitoba), and then also his super upside career in venture capital that has ranged from a role at Japanese investment conglomerate Softbank to acceptance onto Y-Combinator, the seed-funder that includes among its offspring AirBnB. At one point, he recalls sipping an espresso having completed crack-of-dawn rowing while at Oxford, enjoying a view of the Cherwell River. ‘A sense of satisfaction washed over me as I read the news on my phone: ‘Auto1 goes public,’ and at a valuation of almost $10 billion. A single outsized return can be life changing, for both investors and for you.’ Well now! Wouldn’t we all envisage ourselves enjoying that moment, which refers to one of the investments made by Softbank, in which Daniel played a direct role. So the book is about whether you can take the principles of venture capital and apply them to your life. He starts by reminding his audience how most of us are raised as children to avoid mistakes, to try and be ‘right’; then he notes that venture capital works to the opposite principle, accepting that most investments will disappoint but that a tiny number will be spectacularly successful – hence the notion of ‘asymmetric principles’. This book is therefore about whether we can all become walking, breathing Nvidias, by capping the many, inevitable failures and dead ends but harvesting the big success when it comes; getting a few big things right is what this is all about. Coincidentally, the book is also a very passable introduction to the world of venture capital and investing, and it will appeal to anyone interested in that world. As such, it goes down a plethora of rabbit holes populated with the vocabulary of scaling, risk, failure, inflection points and dogfooding, the last word a reference to companies that utilise their own products (‘eat their own dogfood’) before launching them in public. The book makes ample reference to Oxford yet also queries the point of universities via the well-rehearsed ‘drop-out’ halo stories, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg et al; some of this is by now a cliché. The book bristles with lively and vibrant ideas. There is a mindset here that is worth exploring, but exactly how you think it applies to you will vary greatly by time and place. The book doesn’t tell you who to marry or whether to have children but were you to do either, they would possibly be among the most ‘asymmetric’ acts in winning or losing life’s lottery; the book does not get into such questions. No, I think the intended audience is very much other would-be ven cappers and investors and entrepreneurs and MBA-ers. It could have used a good copy editor. We would nominate this sentence for a mixed metaphor of the year award: ‘Dogfooding puts rubber to the road and sees how things hold in reality with skin in the game.’ There is a super section on the power and meaning of quitting, not as random walk-out or contractual blow-up but as a strategy in career building. Very few people will be able to equal the author’s own trajectory, one feels, yet the frank discussion about embracing the right sorts of failure and capping the downside, in other words becoming very transparent about risk, is strangely comforting in the world of great shocks that has come to demarcate the current time we are living through.

Displacement: Three Eminent Writers Hunted to Death by Fascism, by Richard Harper (Arrow Gate, March 2025)

The author (Magdalen, 1971) has a terrific career behind him as a barrister and judge, in family law relating to the protection of children. This volume is a complete departure so we asked him how he landed on three renowned, German-language writers of the modernist era, Stefan Zweig (1881-1942), Joseph Roth (1894-1939) and Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). He says that the great connecting theme of his life is ‘examining injustice and how it may be ameliorated.’

In this case he had been struck by how absolutely wonderful Joseph Roth’s 1932 novel The Radetsky March remains, and further reading led to Zweig, a hugely celebrated literary figure in his own life, slightly less so now; and Walter Benjamin, who is a towering but difficult figure in intellectual discussion to this day.

There is no single book about these three writers and they were never together at any one moment but Zweig knew Roth and Roth knew Benjamin. There is a much broader supporting cast of towering names of course – Hannah Arendt, Theodor Herzl, Thomas Mann.

What is brilliant about Richard’s approach is precisely that he does not get hung up on literary or intellectual groupings, but is just as interested in biography and the disintegrating fortune of European Jews as World War One gave way to World War Two. Having been born in the last two decades of the 19th century, all three men had ringside seats at both world wars and ultimately the destruction of an entire culture, ultimately themselves: all three committed suicide.

Underpinning everything was Zweig’s remark in The World of Yesterday, that his life was ‘governed in some odd way by the idea that everything was only temporary.’ That is a classic modernist theme, premised on fragmentation. That’s where The Radetzky March glows, because Roth, a brilliant journalist, who was raised in Brody on the far-flung edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, spent his life mourning the destruction of that empire as a result of World War One. That’s disconcerting to a modern audience raised on the idea of national self-determination, except that his lived reality was that under the tutelage of the Emperor there was relative peace and tolerance, but as soon as the empire collapsed it was replaced with poisonous nationalism and increasingly rabid anti-Semitism. The bitter sweet assessment of empire, Roth expressed it thus: ‘The chilly sun of the Habsburgs was being extinguished, but it had at least been a sun.’

Roth absolutely nailed what the Nazis were about and where it would go, far ahead of almost everyone else. He left Germany forever on the very day Hitler came to power, 30 January 1933.

Who is this book for? By swerving the weightier intellectual debates that swirl around these figures, in particular Benjamin, described by Harper as a ‘genius of all trades and master of none’, he has brought life to life with a notably clear, precise, dare we say it legal mindset, capped off with a nice large font and a page count of 141. The book is for everyone and would make a brilliant introduction to these three writers, and historical themes such as Zionism as it gathered pace, and forced migration which also gathered pace. Their work is increasingly available now in English translation, and not just Roth’s seminal The Radetsky March.

Promised Lands: Hadassah Kaplan and the Legacy of American Jewish Women in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine by Sharon Ann Musher

(NYU Press, 22 April 2025)

Notice of this volume came to us just as the April Off the Shelf was about to be published, but serendipitously given how it traces a different, in some ways more optimistic narrative of Jewish history, compared to Displacement. The author (Oriel, 1996) has written about the lives of American Jewish women in both New York City’s Upper West Side and Palestine during the interwar period. By tracing Hadassah’s journey, the volume offers a sense of what drew this generation of adventurous women to Palestine, and helps us to understand their impact on American Jewry. Drawing on a rich personal archive of diary entries, photographs, and letters (the author is a granddaughter of Hadassah Kaplan Musher), Sharon Ann Musher, currently Professor of History at Stockton University, displays how unconventional women like Hadassah Kaplan were able to challenge cultural norms and experiment with ideological commitments while still remaining ‘good’ daughters, wives and mothers. Their knowledge and experience in volunteering, philanthropy, and education within the United States helped them to build Jewish institutions and communities abroad, and to position Zionism in American Jewish education, institutions and identity. Crafting a compelling portrait of an influential Jewish woman, Promised Lands showcases the legacy of Hadassah Kaplan and her fellow travellers on American Jewish life, while restoring a facet of the historiography of Zionism.