OFF THE SHELF: JULY 2025

Splendours of Japan: Highlights from the Bodleian Library (Bodleian Library Publishing, 3 July 2025)

The occasion for this landmark book is that it is 400 years since the first Japanese treasures entered the Bodleian Library, not exactly traceable to a particular day or even year, but the fact that the very first items came to Oxford in the early 1600s, more so in the 1620s. This is a beautifully wrought volume by Bodleian Library Publishing, produced in wide format, copiously illustrated with a lustrous red, braided bookmarker, a treasure in its own right. It comprises a series of essays by world authorities and begins with Bodley Librarian Richard Ovenden noting how Oxford has one of the oldest institutional collections of Japanese rare books and manuscripts in Europe. The collection, he reminds us, ranges from exquisitely illustrated poetry anthologies and handscrolls, to woodblock printing and art, and then European artefacts such as Jesuit missionary press items, plus numerous books, many of them very rare or unique.

The broader historical significance of some of the items is huge, but the understanding of why has only been in recent decades. Ovenden draws our attention to a Shuinjo dated 1613, ‘a charter that marked the earliest trading agreement between England and Japan.’ Yet apparently this wasn’t really understood until 1985. The initial collection of items in the seventeenth century wasn’t really understood because, as the contributor Peter Kornicki says, ‘there was not one person in England who could read them.’

The trading charter from 1613 is particularly fascinating because very few people acquainted with the broad bones of Japanese history will be aware of it. Europeans first travelled to Japan in 1543, and the Jesuit missionaries set about converting the Japanese to Christianity, the majority of them Portuguese or Spanish. The first Englishman arrived only in 1600, William Adams (1564-1620), but he had great success, first helping the Dutch East India Company to gain permission to trade with Japan, and subsequently the English East India Company. Both negotiations were through the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu. Adams’ logbooks, as the captain of a Dutch ship, eventually fell into the hands of Sir Henry Savile (1549-1622), the Warden of Merton College, who promptly gave them to Thomas Bodley. They are among the earliest Japan-related accessions to the Bodleian Library collection. English trading with Japan then proceeded poorly, and permission to renew trade was denied by Japan in 1673. Thus began a great closed phase of Japanese history during which the missionaries were banished or executed, followed by a slower opening up to the West that really gathered pace only at the end of the nineteenth century, the Meiji period. By then the Oxford collection grows fantastically and the amount of art and painted scrolls goes up too as various dons travelled to Japan and acquired collections of printed materials from booksellers in centres of learning such as Kyoto. One example of many is the Dante scholar Paget Jackson Toynbee (1855-1932), an alumnus of Balliol College, who donated many items between 1912-23. In a postcard written during a sojourn at Mount Koya, he writes: ‘I am writing this in a Buddhist priest house at the top of a mountain…Japan is a fine country and the people are delightful, most hospitable, kindly, and good humoured.’

Peter Kornicki writes about these encounters, and a rich cast emerges, some of them Oxford dons or Oxford alumni. Another essay by Melissa McCormick considers whether a particularly lavish manuscript may have been part of a bridal dowry, while other contributions offer up insights concerning the Japanese publishing trade, brushwork and the hand-making of paper in Japan, colour pigments and ink. The book is full of transliterations that betoken specialised linguistic familiarity with Japan; it seems marvellous that such a wealth of knowledge exists now knowing that it didn’t in the fairly recent past. Long may that continue.

The Colonialist: The Vision of Cecil Rhodes by William Kelleher Storey (Oxford University Press, 24 July 2025)

The first scholarly biography of Cecil Rhodes (Oriel, 1873) in a generation, this one by US-based historian William Kelleher Storey, took 15 years to research and write and runs to 500 pages, a mere pamphlet by the Victorian standard of multi-volume hagiography but by no means a short book in the age of TikTok.

The author is Professor of History and Sanderson Chair of Arts and Sciences at Millsaps College, a liberal arts college in Jackson, Mississippi. He begins by wondering how a man so far away in time (Rhodes was born in Bishop’s Stortford in 1853, died in South Africa in 1902) could have ignited so much recent controversy, citing the Rhodes Must Fall campaign. He ends his elegant volume, ‘It will be much easier to remove a few statues than to reverse the legacy of Cecil Rhodes. Understanding what he did is a first step to freedom.’

‘Understanding what he did’ takes up the intervening book, a reminder that irrespective of whether we love or loathe Rhodes, his was an extraordinary tale. In a life of just 48 years, foreshortened by heart failure, Rhodes expanded the British Empire into a vast additional namesake territory, Rhodesia, today Zambia and Zimbabwe, while building an extraordinary fortune from mining interests in an age of monopoly capitalism. Besides all this he was a ruthlessly agile politician, ceaselessly building extraordinary personal networks, manipulating politicians and investors to his will and at all points maintaining a close grasp of technical matters.

Overarching everything, Kelleher Storey demonstrates, was a loftier goal, of pursuing imperial expansion, bringing ‘civilization’ to the ‘dark continent.’

That is of course where everything gets complex, because we have to make deductions for prevailing Victorian ideologies of race and ethnicity. However, while there may be certain carefully weighed grains of truth in defending Rhodes, Kelleher Storey’s meticulous narrative makes plain that Rhodes’ vision of empire was premised on a particularly harsh form of racism even by the standards of his own time. The degree to which Rhodes divided opinion during his own life is made plain by the fact that when he came to collect his honorary Doctor of Civil Letters from Oxford in 1899, ‘dozens of Oxford professors, including some of the university’s most prominent leaders, protested in speeches and writing.’

When Rhodes first went to hunt diamonds as a teenager on the Cape Colony, British colonial law demanded that all subjects of the empire be treated equally, irrespective of race. Rhodes chafed against that his whole life, siding with the Africaner Bond and the two Boer Republics, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, where racially discriminatory laws were already in place.

‘The Idea’, as Rhodes came to think of his vision for imperial expansion, would be led and owned by white settlers. The only role Rhodes considered for indigenous Africans was as the cheapest possible labour to work in the mines, and once he had consolidated his De Beers Mining Company (a truly remarkable feat, well told here) the workforce was locked into compounds for six-month rotations and twelve-hour shifts in dangerous conditions, with no ability to leave.

The broader backdrop of his age matters too, says Kelleher Storey. The fervent anti-slavery vibe of the earlier nineteenth century in England waned in the face of pernicious ideologies of race, fuelled by ideas of evolution and Social Darwinism from the 1860s onwards. The discovery of diamonds around Kimberly and then gold in Witwatersrand fuelled an explosion of mining technology. Partly on account of these very discoveries, different European countries raced to secure more territory. Kelleher Storey shows that there were successive Colonial Office officials who were irritated by Rhodes and wanted to restrain him, but as soon as there was a whiff of competition from Germany, or Belgium, or Portugal, London tended to cave in and give Rhodes a looser rein. Rhodes was exceptionally gifted in exploiting this unseemly ‘scramble for Africa,’ whether for his own commercial ends or the greater idea of imperial expansion. Looking back, Europe seems to have shadow boxed with itself ahead of the bloodletting of the Western Front.

Rhodes never achieved his dream of a railway from Cape Town to Cairo, and Kelleher Storey enumerates the collapse of white rule (empire and apartheid), and thus much of his intended legacy. A pertinent sidenote just as this biography is published in late July 2025, is that mining conglomerate Anglo American is attempting to sell De Beers at the very moment when China is rapidly gaining market share with synthetic diamonds.

Nonetheless Kelleher Storey says that Rhodes’ legacy is more fundamental and emphatic than this list of failure, citing ‘material and geographical constraints placed on freedoms.’ That might sound a bit academic but he means artificial land borders that have become permanent, plus the entire machinery of forcibly implementing a wage economy along Western, capitalistic lines that before the 1850s had had limited expression on the Cape and elsewhere, despite the depredations of slavery. Throughout the book the author deploys the idea of a ‘disassembly line’, which is how Rhodes himself saw mining – not building a product so much as unbuilding the earth, crushing a vast pile to rock into constituent parts, one of them diamonds. He did the same to whole societies, says the author, with consequences that remain very live today. No wonder then that Rhodes’ legacy continues to be forcefully scrutinised.

Strait Lace by Rosemary Hayward (Loxley Hall, 2025)

The story begins in 1905, with the talking out of a bill to extend the suffrage to women. Harriet Loxley, the daughter of a vicar and a member of a prominent Nottingham lace-making family, is outraged when she witnesses the bill's death from the ladies' gallery of the House of Commons. When Harriet's uncle provides the money to study biology at Bedford College, London, Harriet splits her time between her studies, her romance with young doctor Tom Bardhill, and activism with the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), the party founded by the Pankhurst women.

From chalking pavements to marching in the street, from throwing stones through windows to going on hunger strike, Harriet is drawn deeper and deeper into WSPU militancy.

In 1913, as suffragettes set fire to buildings and destroy works of art, Harriet undertakes one last dangerous act for the cause before deciding she is putting too much at risk. 
Participating in the funeral march for Emily Davison is her final public appearance with the union. With the mobilisation of troops in 1914, Tom's pacifist ideals and Harriet's yearning for a productive life see them leave Nottingham and embark on the last ship to take passengers across the Atlantic to Canada.

The author (Hertford, 1975) adds in a separate note, ‘In Strait Lace I seek to tell the story of the fight for the vote while sticking closely to the historical facts and avoiding making my main character a modern superwoman. I also want to avoid some of the clichéd conceptions of the Edwardian era, such as all men being against women voting and all women being ignorant of the nature of sexuality. Harriet's family is, for the most part, supportive of her activities and her pre-marital relationship with Tom includes a healthy participation in the physical. I set the novel partly in Nottingham in order to counterbalance the over dominance of London in historical narrative, and because I lived in Nottingham for a few years and fell in love with its industrial past.’

Symbolically, the book was published on 8 March 2025 (International Women’s Day).

The Boyhood of Cain by Michael Amherst (Faber & Faber, 2025)

The author (Exeter, 2003) has already received fine praise for this debut novel about the coming of age of a sensitive boy named Danny.

John Self in The Times, headlined his review, ‘Most debut novels are ho-hum, but this one is gosh-wow’.

Danny is on the precipice of adulthood, struggling to understand how he might give and deserve love. His family live in a large house close to the school where his father is headmaster. At school, his father's importance gives Danny certain privileges, but it also sets him apart from his classmates. When a new boy Philip, for whom everything seems easy, arrives, he surprises Danny by wanting to be friends. So when he and Philip are invited to work after school with inspiring, artistic teacher Mr Miller, Danny believes he has found somewhere he can shine.
Until Danny's world tilts: his father loses his job, and their house. And then Danny finds himself shut out from Mr Miller and Philip's world too. Desperate to make amends, he keeps trying to find a way back in, but will Danny's efforts send things spinning beyond everyone's control?