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thug whose impulses are to shag and kill, and who only dimly begins to think the unthinkable by questioning the decrees of the gods when he is temporarily bearing Atlas’s crushing burden. In Winterson’s vision of the tale Atlas is gentle and humane – at the end, just before taking a momentous decision about his fate and that of the cosmos, he rescues Laika, the dog sent up in Russia’s Sputnik 2 in 1957, and keeps her safe on his shoulders. Winterson intersperses the tale with snippets of astrophysics and autobiographical asides very moving in their frankness. Astrophysics connects Atlas’s story with the galaxies of the non-mythic universe, reminding us that we are in plain fact children of the stars, for the chemicals constituting us today were, aeons ago, manufactured in them. The autobiographical asides liken Winterson’s own life as a twice-rejected orphan to the Atlas-like shouldering of an endless burden. Significantly, Hercules repays Atlas’s favour to him not by risking the duty of carrying the cosmos on his shoulders again, but by freeing Atlas’s brother Prometheus from the torture of having his liver eternally gnawed by a vulture. Is Hercules’ club the writer’s pen, which relieves others but not the weight of the world on one’s own shoulders? After this, Karen Armstrong’s essay on the nature of myth is a deep disappointment. A Short History of Myth (159pp £12) is confused, repetitive, vacuously overgeneralised and platitudinous. She begins by telling us contradictorily that myths are about another world, and about this world; are about what is sacred and apart, and proof that the ancients made no distinction between the sacred and profane; are about the transcendent and divine, and about familiar core human psychological realities. No doubt some will lamely claim that myths are about all these things at once, but they should be reminded that whatever is ‘about everything’ is about nothing, or at least and certainly, nothing useful. Moreover, she conflates religion and myth, although with the partial excuse that she seems to think religion is just myth. In respect of the literal falsity of both, she is right; but mythologies are so much richer and more interesting than those few that have ossified into burning-at-the-stake religions that it does myth a disservice not to recognise religion as the lesser breed. She then goes on to generalise mightily about myths in the hidden depths of prehistory, thereby talking about what by definition we know nothing of, and then in the same vastly generalising way skipping through centuries and cultures in a few pages each before fizzling out in remarks about the mythopoeic nature of (modern) fiction. As preface to the series there should have been a more focused and thoughtful account of myth and mythology than this. I am sure Karen Armstrong is both well able and well placed to provide it: but half her mind (and half her editors’ minds) seems to have been far off duty here. To order these books, see order form on page 78

J ONATHAN M IRSKY READ ALL ABOUT IT

T HE H ISTORYOF ‘T HE T IMES ’, V OLUME VII 1981–2002: T HE M URDOCH Y EARS

★By Graham Stewart (HarperCollins 727pp £30)

I MUSTDECLARE an interest. I was employed by The Times between 1993 and 1998, and figured in the crisis which, in Graham Stewart’s words, ‘was to tarnish the paper’s reputation across wide sections of the British public and beyond’. I had charged that from 1996, when I was its East Asia editor, the paper kowtowed to the views of the proprietor, Rupert Murdoch. Peter Stothard, the editor, denied that Murdoch had ever given him directions on any subject, including how to cover China. This disagreement led to my resignation. Stewart handles this matter fairly, although I don’t agree with all his conclusions. Some might suggest that the book is already compromised because it is an official history, and its publisher is owned by Rupert Murdoch. Stewart tells us that he has written leaders for The Times: this may account for some overheated language when praising the paper’s leader writers. Stewart’s book should appeal to a wider audience than journalists. He knows a lot about the various sections of The Times – Leaders, Foreign, Politics, Drama, Art, Books, Letters, Chess, Court Page – and describes how, over the years, sections have expanded, diminished, shifted from place to place, vanished and reappeared. Take a terrific emergency or a ‘great story’ of global scope, like 9/11. Stewart describes in vivid detail how The Times hit the streets the next morning with a 26page extra section. Description, analysis, photographs, news, commentary, even a cartoon (of the world turned upside down) had been mobilised. How Murdoch acquired the paper, after some – feigned? – reluctance, is riveting, partly because it shows how flexible journalists can be if the situation changes. When William Rees-Mogg was editor of The Times he encouraged an article about Murdoch’s latest foray into the American press in which Murdoch’s newspapermen were described as being ‘expert in plumbing the depths of bad taste which Americans had scarcely guessed at’. Soon after, Rees-Mogg approached Murdoch to save the paper from sinking further into the red. Stewart is very good on long set pieces, including an account of how, in 1986–87, Murdoch broke the strike of the print and press unions – though he traduces my then editor at The Observer, whom he accuses of doing

LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006

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