How Words Get Good

Rebecca Lee                                                                                 Profile Books £14.99

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In her chapter on marginalia, Rebecca Lee notes that Nabokov’s 1964 translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin ran to four volumes and 2,000 pages, of which only 228 featured the actual poem.

‘In art as in science,’ Nabokov wrote, ‘there is no delight without the detail, and it is on detail that I have tried to fix the reader’s attention.’

The same could be said for the considerably more succinct How Words Get Good.

A long-time editorial manager at Penguin Press, Lee knows better than most how words make their long and sometimes painful odyssey from an author’s original manuscript into the reader’s hands.

From ghost writers to grammar, from translation to typesetting, she proves a lively and engaging guide to the long process of making a book, tracing its history from the ancient world to the modern day.

Her investigations encompass everything from the fine art of indexes (for which authors these days are apparently expected to pay) and the unexpected joy of printing errors (the ‘yawning abyss’ that somehow became a ‘yawning abbess’) to the science of storytelling in graphs (Kafka’s story arc is a particular treat).

While Lee cheerfully acknowledges the tensions inherent in the publishing process (according to Martin Amis, every one of the commas added to his proofs by an overzealous American copy editor was ‘a paper cut to my soul’), she remains a passionate advocate of its systems, and of the many, often unseen, specialists whose job it is to make sure that by the time it finally makes it to the shelves, a book is the best possible version of itself.

She is also a master (and enthusiastic champion) of the well-placed footnote.

A funny and illuminating peek into publishing below stairs. 

When The Dust Settles: Stories Of Love, Loss And Hope From An Expert In Disaster

Lucy Easthope                                                                  Hodder & Stoughton £20

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The 2004 Boxing Day tsunami. 9/11. 7/7. Fukushima, 2011. The 2015 shooting of 38, mainly British, tourists in Tunisia. The Christchurch earthquake. Grenfell.

A litany of destruction and devastation, an unending roll-call of death and human tragedy, events that dominate the headlines and then fade into memory as other disasters intervene.

Disasters, it seems, are happening all the time.

The author of this remarkable account of these appalling catastrophes has been to all of them, and many others besides.

She is a professor in the practice of risk and hazard at Durham University and the UK’s – if not the world’s – leading authority on recovering from disaster, in which capacity she advises the Government, writes the plans, supervises the responses, builds mortuaries, liaises with families, arranges identification and repatriation of bodies and organises burials.

The smell of decomposing human bodies in a disaster mortuary has put her off mushrooms for life.

This should be a dark and depressing read; that it isn’t, that it is ultimately hopeful and uplifting, is down to the utter human decency that the author represents.

Raised in post-Hillsborough Liverpool, she displays a deeply engrained humanity and compassion when describing the unthinkable horrors that she encounters.

She is generous to her colleagues, and her primary concern is always that matters are handled with dignity for the dead and understanding of those who grieve for them.

She is critical of the Government cuts during the coalition years, which resulted in adverse changes to disaster management, replacing action with ‘behavioural insights’ teams and concern about ‘optics’.

Her assessment of everything that went wrong with Grenfell is damning, and in her brief final chapter she is highly critical of the Government’s woeful response to the coronavirus pandemic, an ‘overdue’ event that had seemingly been expected for years.

Despite the grim subject matter, there is some wry humour and the occasional smile in this moving and humbling memoir. It does not feel prurient.

You will finish it amazed at what some people do for a living but thankful, at least, that we’ve got Lucy Easthope on our side.

Simon Humphreys