Patrick Wright

Six years in the making, Blechman’s Encyclopedia is itself a camouflaged object. At first glance, it looks as if it comes straight out of a military glove compartment. Indeed, it could be a military glove compartment. The two volumes are contained in a large, shadow-casting khaki box, covered with black stencilled numbers that suggest ordnance but turn out to be nothing more explosive than the ISBN. Both are covered in disruptive pattern material, but the larger one, which contains the main analysis of camouflage as it travels from ‘nature’ to ‘military’ and then ‘culture’, is banded in bright orange. This reflects Blechman’s design strategy of ‘negating the practicality of camouflage by combining it with high-visibility fabrics’. The choice of orange may also be connected to his interest in Eastern spiritual traditions, and perhaps even to the way in which the sales and press person at Maharishi, identified only as ‘Suzie’, signs off her emails with the word ‘peace’.

‘I cannot recall taking a single piss during my childhood, whether outside or at home in the outhouse, when I didn’t choose a target and bomb it. At five years of age I was already a seasoned bombardier.’ This is an unusual way of embarking on an analysis of modern warfare and its technologies, but then Sven Lindqvist has long been writing history in his own way. Oral...

Reading the Faber Book of English History in Verse in East London was like trying to hold Radio 3 on the FM band. The wavelength was under fire from all sides, and its measured strains kept giving way to the outlandish rapping and toasting of the local pirate stations. Closing the minister’s volume in dismay, I noticed an image of Nelson dying at Trafalgar on the cover and set off in search of a place where I might try again.

Witold Rybczynski introduces his book with a telling anecdote. During the six years of his architectural education, ‘the subject of comfort’ was only mentioned once. He finds this ‘a curious omission’, since comfort should surely be central to architecture – like justice to law or health to medicine. The point is a strong one, and Professor Rybczynski duly piles it on. Bitterly deprived by his own education, he can only write from a position of ‘ignorance’. As he sets out to discover the ‘meaning of comfort’, he is at pains to differentiate his own ecological approach from the high-rise proclamatory style, full of arrogant expertise and alienated technique, with which his profession still tries to hide the ‘fundamental poverty’ of its modern ideas. Here, then, is another architect going all human on us, eating humble pie and sending himself on a remedial course to find out what everyone else has always known.’