The Guardian's Blog, page 236

Michelle Paver heads for ancient Greece

After the success of Wolf Brother, the children's author Michelle Paver summons up the myths of bronze age Greece in her new series

After a bestselling series of novels for children set in the stone age, Michelle Paver is moving to the bronze age with a new series of books, Gods and Warriors, set in ancient Greece.

As rain pounded the roof of the tent, the author told the Edinburgh International Book Festival that the Mediterranean was full of "uncertainty, because you never knew when a storm was going to flatten your crops".

The five-book series will focus on Hylas, a poor young boy who lives with his sister and who Paver said "lies and cheats and steals if he has to".

Hylas is joined by Pirra, a 12-year-old girl from Crete whom Paver described as "unimaginably rich", and who is fleeing an arranged marriage.

"I've loved this period since I was a kid," Paver explained to a packed audience, holding up two battered Puffin books about ancient Greece which she has owned since childhood. "I loved the myths of ancient Greece and Egypt."

Paver spoke about her extensive research process, which has seen her go swimming with dolphins in the Azores and climb the volcano Stromboli in Sicily. "Mostly," she said, "research is much more fun than the actual writing."

Paver's children's novels are based on historical, rather than fantasy, worlds. The last instalment of her Chronicles of Ancient Darkness series, Ghost Hunter, won the Guardian children's fiction prize in 2010.

"I want to make the world real," she told the audience. "I have to be able to believe that it could happen. I can't put Pegasus in my stories because horses can't fly. It's just a quirk in my brain."

The author was tight-lipped about future plot developments, but revealed that some of her inspiration has come from a little further east. "I've got a really exciting ending for each book and a humdinger of an ending for the last book – which I thought of in my yoga class," she said.

Edinburgh International Book FestivalMichelle PaverChildren and teenagers
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Selina O'Grady: What I'm thinking about ... premature secularisation

'We often tend to underestimate just how much energy and effort our political and cultural leaders devote to disseminating the values of this secularist ideology.'

What's so special about you? Historically, that's a really important question. For centuries it had to do with the God you worshipped and the religion to which you belonged. I'm a follower of Yahweh, of Ahura Mazda, of Isis – that's who I am. But today we live in what we like to call a secular age and the key point about secularism is that it is designed to be the great dissolver of difference. Secularism – which finds its most powerful manifesto in The American Declaration of Independence –

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness"

– is essentially a political solution to the acute problems thrown up in an increasingly multicultural world, a world in which different identities and different cultures have all been thrown into the same tumble dryer. It is an ideology designed to neutralise the differences created by our pre-existing sense of identity and specialness, to universalise ourselves, so to speak, out of the thicket of problems created by globalisation.

In And Man Created God, I argue that the Christian ideology represented a similar attempt to universalise specialness in response to the first phase of globalisation created under the Pax Romana. St Paul turned the small and obscure Jesus cult into a religion fit for viral spreading within that newly globalised world. He did so by making clear that his God would love us as "neither Greek nor Jew". In other words, we were all identically special under His loving gaze. The thousands of people daily crowding into the new cities and leaving behind their village, tribe and customs lapped it up. Empire needed us to forget our differences, and Paul provided the belief system that would do that.

It was bound to fail: you can't really flatten difference – it is our difference from "the others" that defines "us" as a group. In many ways Paul compounded the problem. By making each of us equally special, he also conferred on each of us the moral authority to challenge all other forms of authority and to create opposing groups. West European Christians split into fervent, righteous sects after the Reformation, and the remnants of the old Western Roman empire was torn apart by war. In its place emerged the ideology of secularism. It was born, not out of the re-discovery of Greek reason but from exhaustion with the bloodshed spilt over religious bigotry.

The Peace of Westphalia of 1648 which brought the Thirty Years War to an end is the document that starts to cobble secularism together by getting each sovereign to think of his Christian minorities as having rights which it was the state's duty to protect. It became their rights, not their heretical souls, that were precious. And as God was slowly forced out of his dominant role in our affairs, the sovereign started to fill the space vacated. The secular sovereign seeks to replace our old sense of specialness with a new one. "I am not the purveyor of the one true faith but the protector of all religious traditions," he says. "Each of your groups and identities is protected and special in my eyes." The specialness of each of us, our need to belong, to love and be loved would come through our nation and its glory.

We often tend to underestimate just how much energy and effort our political and cultural leaders devote to disseminating the values of this secularist ideology. Just as Virgil was employed by the Emperor Augustus to create the Aeneid – perhaps the greatest foundation myth an empire has ever self-consciously commissioned – so Hollywood is used to promote the overarching values of secularist America. The Pentagon, for example, loans its astronomically expensive military toys to Hollywood filmmakers in exchange for the right to change scripts, thereby purveying to the world its own glorification of the US military (and by extension, the US empire). The classic example was Top Gun, a film so nakedly dedicated to hymning the wonders of American specialness, that the Pentagon decided to set up recruitment booths in every major cinema.

But it's an uphill struggle. In the first place, the market – the driving force behind globalisation – tends to promote a competing ideology of individual empowerment and choice, offering a rival, if insubstantial, sense of specialness and identity through consumption: you are what brand you buy; you are your mePhone or your mePad. But more fundamentally the secular sovereign is hobbled by the need to achieve two contradictory ambitions: to diffuse the viciousness created by competing notions of "specialness" on the one hand; on the other, to endow members of the group with the "specialness" that the disappearing God no longer provides. Hollywood, the monarchy, national sporting contests – all can do their bit to unite us in love and pride of nation; and so we spend billions on Olympics and jubilees. And it works … for a bit. But by trying to be both purveyor and destroyer of specialness, the secular sovereign is never quite making its demanding subjects special enough, nor eliminating their demand to be special.

After reading my book, Paul Morris, professor of religious studies at Victoria University of Wellington, made an intriguing observation. He felt that St Paul had suffered from "premature universalism" – that he had tried to rush the special relationship of Yaweh to the Jews into a special relationship of God to anyone who had faith. And one is tempted to say that the same is true of our own age – that we, likewise, have been subject to a bout of "premature secularism". Since at least the 1960s, the assumption has been that religion was on its way out, that secular ideology would dissolve all religious attachments. It was an assumption integral to the secular idea of "progress". With what alarm do we now look up to see that modern secular society is host to religious fundamentalism of all varieties.

All of which suggests that if secularism persists in being God-like in its ambitions – if , like St Paul, it insists on the eradication of the identities that have traditionally sustained us, then it is likely to buckle under the weight of its own contradictions.

Selina O'Grady appeared at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 22 August 2012

Edinburgh International Book FestivalReligion
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Edinburgh International Book Festival: day 15 bulletin

Saturday's events include appearances for Zadie Smith, Will Self and Jeremy Paxman

Good morning and welcome to a slightly drizzly last Saturday at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

Last night at Charlotte Square, there were protests at Alistair Darling's event and today's Rethinking Labour debate in the Guardian Spiegeltent looks set to be just as lively.

Other highlights include Zadie Smith, whose new book NW is released in September, and Will Self in conversation with Stuart Kelly. Jeremy Paxman will also be talking about his history of the British Empire.

The poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, will be appearing in two events, and the designer of the Olympic cauldron, Thomas Heatherwick, unveils his new book. Marina Warner will also speak about her new book Stranger Magic.

In the children's programme, Lynn Whitaker, chair of the Tolkien Society, takes us through 75 years of The Hobbit, while Horrid Henry creator Francesca Simon introduces her new book for older readers, The Sleeping Army.

Kathryn Erskine has cancelled today, but Sally Nicholls – with whom she was due to appear – will still attend.

As of 10am, tickets are still available for the following events:

13:30: The Sleeping Army with Francesca Simon
15:30: Carol Ann Duffy
17:00: Marina Warner
16:30: Thomas Heatherwick
19:00: Stuart MacBride
20:30: Jasper Fforde
20:30: Jenni Fagan & Joe Stretch
21:30: Will Self

Tonight at Unbound it's the turn of the Faber Social, featuring readings and music from Teju Cole, Richard Milward and TM Wolf. And Ruth Padel and Jenni Fagan will be reading at this evening's Amnesty International Imprisoned Writers Series.

Can't make it to Edinburgh for the book festival? Relive the highlights through Guardian Books. Our day 15 podcast features interviews with Carlos Gamerro, Sadakat Kadri and Jonathan Steele and the latest in our What I'm thinking about series is from the Guardian's Polly Toynbee.

Edinburgh International Book Festival
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Polly Toynbee: What I am thinking about ... envy

'Long ago I meant to be a real writer. I set out to be Tolstoy ... So where did it all go wrong?'

Envy, that's what I'm thinking about. On a regular circuit of literary festivals I find myself often in green rooms full of other writers I would rather be, living other lives I might have lived, if only, if only … Could I have been a contender, a real writer of novels and poetry? Or a traveller bringing back tales of distant lands, an explorer of other worlds, real or imagined. Or an expert in some erudite field of study who has written about it with enough charm and passion to engage the ordinary reader.

Long ago I meant to be a real writer. I set out to be Tolstoy, when I wrote a not very good novel I was lucky enough to have published when I was at university, a loss leader the publisher hoped was the prelude to something better. But it wasn't. So where did it all go wrong? That's what I'm thinking about, yet again, in the authors' yurt at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, enviously eyeing up the other writers.

Journalism, that's where. It was one of Cyril Connolly's famous Enemies of Promise. Another was the pram in the hall, and I had four of those, but they were not to blame. No, it was the lure of journalism, with the instant gratification of next-day publication – and pay. Instead of the isolated fastness of the writer's tower, the companionship of the office is a temptation. But what grabs you by the neck and grips you for life is addiction to the next new thing unfurling day after day, the thrill of events, a seat in the front row and the chance to imagine you can write that first rough draft of history. Pick up the phone and talk to anyone, ask any question, prod and probe with licensed impertinence, demand the right to know. Once in the blood, how do you retreat to realms of the imagination, close study, private work, communing with the muses?

Politics is a fine profession, if rarely noble: writing about politics, I defend politicians regularly from a general contempt that they are venal, self-interested, unprincipled rogues. Democracy is worshipped, but its practitioners are almost universally despised around the world. But you can't be a political journalist without some respect for the profession you observe, some sympathy with their impossible and unpopular task. All the same, there is an aridity about the life political, a sucking out of the soul, a squeezing out of everything else. Not many politicians have much hinterland, and those that do are over-praised for any passing sign of interest in the arts. We observers of the Westminster village risk the same hollowing out, a life circumscribed by parliamentary timetables, party conferences, re-shuffles, Queen's speeches, March budgets and autumn statements. I am less of a Westminster animal than a follower of policies, chasing up the effects of what they do in the world beyond. Because what they do does matter – from dismantling the NHS to cutting benefits for the disabled, from privatising everything that's not bolted down to choking off demand in an ill-judged extreme austerity. All of that matters, none of it is trivial – and that's what I do.

So my fits of envy when gazing on all these other writers are only a wistfulness that everyone shares, a universal angst about the paths not taken and all the lives we never lived. Meanwhile, in the life I do live, we are launching our new book, Dogma and Disarray – Cameron at Half-Time.

Polly Toynbee appears at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in the Guardian Debate, Rethinking Labour at 7pm on Saturday 25 August, and with David Walker at 3pm on Sunday 26 August

Edinburgh International Book FestivalFictionPoliticsPolly Toynbee
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John Redhead: portrait of a climbing artist

He learned his trade by scaling Hull Royal Infirmary and a power station cooling tower. Now he's skipping climbing and arts festivals to sell his latest book from a burger van. John Appleby meets him

As the year winds down into the autumn,in the world of mountaineering culture,thoughts turn to the Kendal Mountain festival. The largest of its kind in Europe, it is an opportunity for the biggest names in the climbing world to promote their work through the time honored tradition of 'the lecture'.

At these gatherings, rugged outdoor types wearing the apparel of the off piste climber - T-shirts, jeans and expensive approach shoes - hunker down in the auditorium to listen to their heroes expand on their latest expedition or read extracts from their new tome. Dutifully, they laugh and slap their thighs when Benedict Rugrat-Smyth strays into humour territory, gasp on cue when their hero flashes up an image of partner Barnaby's frost bitten toes or waiting patiently at the end of the talk for their signed copy of K2: I did it my way.

For John Redhead, who remains one of the UK's most enigmatic climbers, The 2012 KMF will not be a gathering where he will be seen or heard. And not surprisingly, given that an appearance he made at Kendal in the late 1990s has become almost the stuff of legend. Many of the earnest, muscular climbers who had come to hear of his exploits on rock ended up fighting for the exits like the steerage section on the Titanic, while those who remained witnessed a battle between hecklers and Redhead's volume control. When I asked him about 'the Kendal Gig' he explained:

Oh yes, the 'Kendal Gig'! What is it about the outdoor sector and creativity? Is sport an enemy of art? I guess the punters wanted to hear the big names talk about moves and numbers instead of ideas and possibilities. My show was based on the rites and considerations of the 'hunt', like being in a state of grace where all parties are involved.

I treated the subject very much like the sacred ground before a climb. This is not Pepsi-Max culture, and not something most climbers would want to pay money to hear. But that's what they got, as I turned up the volume to counteract the yells of abuse. Kendal is the epitome of the redneck mainstream climber festival. I gave the same show at Bangor University and stayed for hours afterwards having meaningful dialogue and discussion on the poetry and issues involved.

Born on the flat east coast of Yorkshire, John Redhead began his climbing career in the chalk quarries of Hessle but soon gravitated towards getting his exposure fix by climbing buildings. During one early ascent up the 14-storey Hull Royal Infirmary, the Queen, who happened to be visiting the town that day, had her route diverted by security officials in case the unknown climber was a terrorist. Another early ascent, described by Redhead as 'his scariest climbing experience ever', was a solo ascent of a giant cooling tower in the district.

After studying art and pursuing a career as a multi-media artist, he spent time living and working at the Pig Yard Museum in Settle before moving to the bright lights of the west coast and settling into a warehouse near Liverpool city centre. His artistic career at the time was developing in parallel to his astonishing development as a rock climber. The early 1980s had witnessed a series of breakthrough climbs on North Wales rock which were at the technical limits of the day in the UK. Even top climbers like Yorkshire's Pete Livesey and Ron Fawcett saw such Redhead routes as Margins of the mind, The Bells, the Bells' and 'The Cad' as 'big ticks' on their CV.

However Redhead's rise to the top of the UK climbing tree was always on his own terms and his reputation as an enfant terrible was further cemented by his choice of ribald and pathological route names which by now he was increasing using for his first ascents. Names which climbing poet and intellectual David Craig described as 'horrible to my mind' in a radio programme, given their distance from his view that climbing should be a celebration of nature.

By this time - the late 1980s - Redhead's Welsh excursions were being launched from his Liverpool warehouse set in the decaying, and sometimes crime-blighted inner city heartlands: a dark underbelly where as the workers and industries moved out, prostitutes, drug dealers and junkies moved in. There was a mutual fascination between the bohemian artist and those who inhabited the darker fringes of city life. It was an area, he explained:

where I had no choice but to be associated with some dealers and gangsters operating in the area. My studio was in the most central position in Liverpool, I witnessed the primaeval hunt in the streets below every Saturday night - a special perch for an artist to witness a city life exposed.

It was during this time in Liverpool that he made a celebrated ascent of the tower of the city's Anglican cathedral. A solo ascent which he named 'The Apostles', was carried out as a piece of performance art to complement an exhibition inside the cathedral, Music of Decline, first shown in Liverpool Cathedral for a Granada TV arts show. He says:

The paintings were shown in a circle by the alter and had to be concealed by a plethora of helpers before the filming because of the huge penises being shown.

At the same time, the city's down-and-outs and transgressors had inspired his project Bottles In, Bottles Out described by Redhead as being

based on transcripts of heroine addicts working the street. Making 'art' out of where I find myself meant working with drugs and dealing and prostitution - this was the landscape I painted - I hung out with the girls while they told their story - scoring in Granby Street, injecting etc

By the time of the new century, John Redhead was spending less time on the rock face and more time exploring his visual and audio art projects. For a long time now, he had had a base in the North Wales climbing capital of Llanberis. However, the cultural and meteorological elements of Welsh life saw him pining for the heat of southern France, an area which has always attracted British artists. His experiences during this period are re countered in his latest book Colonists Out, published under his own Serious Clowning label.

Unlike the great and the good of the climbing community who promote their latest books by speaking at lecture halls and theatres around the country, Redhead intends to promote Colonists Out by touring and selling his book from a burger van. Arriving at a pre-arranged destination - details to be given on his website - he will hand out copies of the book with mugs of tea and bacon butties.

Not a promotional technique which I think I'm correct in declaring that Sir Chris Bonington or Bear Grylls have ever employed.

Next year John Redhead returns to Liverpool to hold an exhibition at the Liverpool Academy. In the meantime, look out for a burger van suspiciously loaded with books pulling into a lay by near you.

John Appleby is a Liverpool-born artist and outdoor writer based in north Wales. He writes on art, rock climbing and conservation for the Footless Crow blogazine.

MountaineeringMountainsLiverpoolArt
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Edinburgh International Book festival: day 14 bulletin

The final Friday of the festival is filled with poetry, with appearances from Carol Ann Duffy, Simon Armitage and James Carter, among others

As the festival enters its final weekend, Charlotte Square is gearing up to greet a host of stellar authors, including Zadie Smith, tomorrow.

Today's programme, meanwhile, is poetry-tastic, with appearances from poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy, Simon Armitage and James Carter, with young bards Sean Borodale and William Letford appearing in this evening's Skinny event.

There's a few events on Iran too, culminating in a debate between the Economist's Christopher de Ballaigue and Israeli historian Ilan Pappe in the Guardian Spiegeltent tonight.

Elsewhere, Booker-winner Howard Jacobson will be talking to Rodge Glass and Alistair Darling chatting with James Naughtie. The BBC's Mark Easton is due to discuss ideas of Britishness with Ruth Wishart, and Stefan Collini will be explaining his new book, What Are Universities For?

As of this morning, tickets are still available for:

13.30: Michael Meacher

14.00: Jonathan Fenby & Dilip Hiro

14.00: Susan Fletcher & Liam Hearn

15.00: Howard Jacobson

15.30: Bryan Talbot & Mary M Talbot

16.30: Carol Ann Duffy

18.30: Mark Easton

20.30: Sean Borodale & William Letford

21.30: Mark Billingham & Christopher Brookmyre

Tonight's Unbound promises to be a treat, with Mark Haddon taking centre stage. And the Amnesty International Imprisoned Writers Series will feature readings from Ron Butlin, Emylia Hall and Jane Rogers.

In the signing tent today, you'll find:

You can catch up with all our festival coverage online, featuring interviews with László Krasznahorkai, and Frank Westerman and Vic Armstrong. Look out for new interviews with Claire Kilroy, Junot Diaz and James Gleick throughout the day too.

Edinburgh International Book Festival
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Non-fiction roundup – reviews

Steven Poole on Promiscuous: 'Portnoy's Complaint' and Our Doomed Pursuit of Happiness by Bernard Avishai, Bioethics: All That Matters by Donna Dickenson, The Diary of a Nose: A Year in the Life of a Parfumeur by Jean-Claude Ellena

Promiscuous: 'Portnoy's Complaint' and Our Doomed Pursuit of Happiness by Bernard Avishai (Yale, £18.99)

The celebrated masturbatory burlesque Portnoy's Complaint sold millions, made Philip Roth famous, and blazed a trail for countless gross-out teen comedies. But it also angered a lot of people, and angers some still. Avishai's conversational study mixes memoir, historically contextualised analysis of themes such as Jewish identity and psychoanalysis, and sparely illuminating comments from Roth himself. There are some sneaky lines. Of an extract in which Portnoy argues with his father about the existence of God: "Such tiny cosmological exchanges may be sweet and rushed, but I'm not sure Christopher Hitchens ever really added to them."

Avishai also offers some inventive comparisons of Portnoy with other literature. Svevo's Confessions of Zeno seems a particularly apt identification of what a patent judge would call "prior art"; while an evocative final analysis reads Portnoy as, in a way like Waiting for Godot, a satire on liberal freedom itself. If people felt ambivalent, as Avishai relates, about their "society of choices" in the 1960s, what obscene fury could be mustered to match our own?

Bioethics: All That Matters by Donna Dickenson (Hodder, £7.99)

The God or demon of choice now extends into fields such as reproductive technology and possible biological "enhancements" of human beings. Dickenson's approachable overview of the philosophical debates emphasises different views within bioethics: one thinker argues that we have a moral duty to volunteer for medical trials; another objects that this would unduly benefit pharmaceutical companies, not known to be angels of altruism.

Perhaps in an effort to keep the text light, Dickenson dismisses some writers with superficial gotchas, but she is good on many of the issues: the patenting of DNA, the alarming "outsourcing" of medical trials to subjects in poor countries, and the way that religion-harms-science polemics obscure the fact that commerce, in the shape of large biotech corporations, often really does harm science, hindering criticism and research. The author also offers a tart primer on biomedical Unspeak. An "egg donor" who is being paid, she points out, isn't a donor; and "there is nothing 'surrogate'" about "surrogate motherhood" – "The best term is the one few will tackle: 'baby-selling'."

The Diary of a Nose: A Year in the Life of a Parfumeur by Jean-Claude Ellena, translated by Adriana Hunter (Particular Books, £14.99)

Here is a nicer world, in which chemistry is deployed for pure pleasure. Does one "compose" a scent, or "write" it? Such questions arise in this meditative diary of the French smell-concocter for Hermès, shuttling between Paris and his countryside laboratory. Nearly any passage taken at random could walk into Private Eye's "Pseuds' Corner", but the whole exerts a slow fascination, from his explanation of the difference in "essences" produced at different seasons, to his sketches of chemical recipes that fool the nose. "Perfumers are above all illusionists," he insists, while strictly defining the limits of his trade's synaesthesia. ("Green is the only colour that makes sense as a smell.")

But it's not all wafts of atomised bliss being a perfumer. You envy the "emotion" of amateurs, and are obliged periodically to go for a walk to "air" your nose, which is after all just a "testing tool". And I could not help but feel a collegial empathy when Ellena rhapsodises about his Moleskine notebooks. Unfortunately the brand-name is here printed as "moleskin", which conjured nightmarish visions of thousands of biomedically engineered rodents slaughtered to feed the maître's obsession with his carnets.

Philip RothSteven Poole
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Racism row novel Revealing Eden falls at every hurdle

The Pearls and Coals of Victoria Foyt's YA dystopia are not only deeply suspect, they're also delivered in awful prose with negligible plot

Anyone who's been following books news this week will know that Weird Tales Magazine has just taken an almighty pasting: first for deciding to include an extract from Victoria Foyt's self-published YA dystopia, Revealing Eden: Save The Pearls, in its next issue, and then for reneging when the novel was castigated online as racist enough to appal Lovecraft himself. But publisher John Harlacher's statement made it clear that he hadn't read the book, electing to pull the plug on the basis of promotional video footage and Foyt's extract. This led some readers to worry that this was unjustifiable censorship – that Foyt's use of blackface and descriptions of black men as "beasts", might have been sited in a whole-book context which examined them, inverted them and, having revealed them as diseased faeces, flushed them away with the triumphant sluice of literary prowess. Foyt herself describes the book as ending with a "plea for tolerance". Did Harlacher miss an important trick? Was this just a victory for the professionally offended?

I dearly love a good YA dystopia, and am mixed race myself, so both the book and the brouhaha seemed relevant to me. I sat down to read the whole thing, to ascertain whether Weird Tales' readership was, in fact, short-changed. It was not.

The first section, set in an underground habitat in which humanity hides from the cancer-inducing sun, caused me to utter frequent little "what-? what-?" sounds, like a misfiring motorbike, throughout. From the first page, people of the ruling, dark-skinned race are "Coals", while the pallid underclass are "Pearls". A scrupulous blogger enquires whether, in an unfamiliar and carefully created dystopian context, "Coal" might imply greater value than "Pearl"? Nope. We are not invited to consider "Coals" in any other sense than as dirty, cheap, pollutant, plentiful, and fit only to burn. "Pearls" remain dainty, precious, lustrous, pure and rare. Asians are "Tiger's Eyes". Albinos – detested by all – are "Cottons". I could not find any logic to these names – guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

John Gittings: What I'm thinking about ... peace and war

'Why are there so many books on the art of war and so few about the art of peace?'

Why do we find it easier to say "war and peace" than "peace and war"; and why are there plenty of books on the Art of War but barely a single one in our bookshops on the Art of Peace? Why is history so often taught as a succession of wars punctuated by peace, instead of giving equal weight to both?

Of course wars are dramatic and devastating and we need to analyse properly their causes and effects. They can also have a sort of glamour, though more so when seen at a distance. As Arnold Toynbee once observed, "wars are exhilarating when fought elsewhere and by other people".

But civilisation would not have advanced without long periods of productive peace. As the great humanist and peace thinker Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536) put it, "peace is the mother and nurse of all that is good for humanity". And peace is what most people want most of the time: if war is in our genes then peace is there even more.

When I started work on a study of thought and argument about peace from ancient times to today, I found it surprisingly hard to explain what I was doing. Some people simply did not catch the P-word – I had to gloss it by explaining that I was doing research on "the opposite of war", even though peace is actually a good deal more complex than that. Others wondered if I was wasting my time, commenting only half in jest that "it's going to be a very short book, then".

The view that peace is dull is widespread, often supported by an out-of-context quote from Thomas Hardy that "War makes rattling good history but Peace is poor reading". Hardy put these words in the mouth of the aptly named Spirit Sinister (in The Dynasts) – it was not his opinion at all. Even some scholars in the field of peace studies are defensive about their work. Perhaps that is to be expected in view of their uphill struggle over the past three decades against the academic orthodoxy of "realist" international relations.

During the cold war the very word "peace" was misappropriated by both contesting sides. In its early years the greatest Fighter for Peace, according to Soviet propaganda, was a certain Josef Stalin, and the Soviet Peace Campaign always approved of the Soviet bomb. In the west, those who really worked for peace and against war, particularly against the threat of nuclear war, were denounced as naïve and dupes of communism, while the US Strategic Air Command proclaimed that Peace is Our Profession.

In spite of the continual belittling of the term, peace has now acquired a richer and more ample content than in the past. We now understand much better that peace is indivisible, and that our own security depends upon promoting economic and social well-being across the world – that we need to globalise peace as well as economics.

Yet when it comes to foreign policy, our governments too often default to the war option, and our media don't hold them sufficiently to account. The crisis in Syria today is presented almost entirely as an inevitable armed conflict. The efforts of significant Syrian opposition groups, meeting in Rome at the end of July, to promote a peaceful solution (in the Sant'Egidio statement), were barely reported.

"Hardly any peace is so bad", wrote Erasmus in his Complaint of Peace (1517), "that it isn't preferable to the most justifiable war". With the Iraq war in recent memory, and a re-run over Iran distinctly possible, that is a proposition to ponder. Machiavelli has had too easy a ride for too long: let's give his contemporary Erasmus, and peace, a better chance.

John Gittings will discuss Icons of War and Peace with Martin Kemp at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Sunday August 26 at 8.30pm

Edinburgh International Book FestivalPoliticsSocietyHistoryJohn Gittings
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Edinburgh International Book festival: day 13 bulletin

As the festival approaches its final weekend, there are appearances from Ian McEwan, kate Summerscale and Mark Haddon

After a lively conversation between Ian McEwan and Alex Salmond last night, the book festival enters its 13th day with more of the world's most exciting writers.

This morning, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher author Kate Summerscale talks about her new book, Mrs Robinson's Disgrace. And later, McEwan appears again to talk further about his newest offering, this time with journalist Kirsty Wark.

Later on, Mark Haddon talks about his new book The Red Room – he'll also be appearing at Unbound tomorrow night. Alan Warner discusses The Deadman's Pedal, and Jeremy Vine celebrates 25 years with the BBC in his book, It's All News to Me.

Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz will appear to discuss his latest tome, The One Percent, and AN Wilson talks about his novel about Josiah Wedgwood.

As of this morning, you can still get tickets for:

14.00: Norman Davies & Tom Pow

15.30: Aneurin Wright with Denise Mina

16.30: Mark Haddon

17.00: Paul Broda with Tam Dalyell

19.00: AN Wilson

20.00: Joseph Stiglitz

20.30: Alan Warner

20.30: Alan Gillis, Tony Lopez & Fiona Sampson

20.30: Ian Garden

Tonight's Unbound is courtesy of authors from the Netherlands, who present us with a medley of spoken word, music, literature and poetry.

Appearing in the signing tent today are:

If you missed the Edinburgh World Writers Conference, check out our podcast highlights, and we've also got an interview with Argentine writer and conference delegate Carlos Gamerro.

And there's only five days left to take part in the Guardian Book Swap – leave your books on our shelf in the Guardian Spiegeltent in Charlotte Square and let us know what you've picked up in return.

Edinburgh International Book Festival
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