Richard Serra shows off his rings of steel

IT WAS in Borromini’s church, San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, in Rome that Richard Serra first saw the light a decade ago. “I was standing in a side aisle, looking at the oval space on the floor and the same oval on the ceiling, called a Borromini ellipse. I thought they were at right angles to each other. When I moved to the central aisle, I realised I was wrong. But I kept on wondering: how can I create—how can I actually make—my misrepresentation?”

Whether it is his drawings (made with melted paintsticks), his famous Torqued Ellipses or the Torqued Toruses described above, the quest to change procedure and make something unforeseen has been at the heart of much of what the 69-year-old American artist has done. In his early years Mr Serra preferred not to work in steel, which he had known from the second world war when his father worked as a pipefitter in a shipyard. “It was the most traditional material of the 20th century.” Only, he says, when he was able to imagine using steel’s weight, gravity, mass, cantilever and balance did its potential in art begin to interest him. ...

Cross-subsidised subscriptions offer a promising new model—if the sums add up

IT IS a gift that keeps on giving—for a year, at least. Starting in Britain this month, buyers of some handsets made by Nokia will be able to download as much digital music as they like. The handsets, starting with a model costing GBP130 ($230), are bundled with a year’s free online-music subscription, called “Comes With Music” (CWM), launched on October 2nd. You can download music, and listen to it, on both the handset and your PC. Once the subscription expires at the end of the year, you can still listen to the tracks.

Nokia’s new handsets are sure to appear under many Christmas trees this year. The offer of unlimited downloads will appeal to teenagers; and parents will not have to worry about their children getting caught downloading music illegally, or spending a fortune at online music-stores. But CWM and similar subscription services are also being touted as a potentially life-saving gift to the ailing music industry. That is because they cleverly reconcile the demands of teenagers, who think music should be free, with those of record companies, which want to make money. ...

A vindication of war by committee

ONE of the many virtues of Andrew Roberts’s new history of grand strategy during the second world war is to vindicate that much maligned British way of doing things: the committee. The author employs a vast range of contemporary diaries—as well as newly discovered verbatim accounts of cabinet meetings which reveal what was not in the official minutes—to reconstruct the marathon meetings which, no less than the allies’ prodigious resources, ultimately determined the difference between victory and defeat.

Historians of Germany will be struck that there was no equivalent process in Hitler’s headquarters, where every bad idea went unchallenged by generals who knew better but were cowed by a splenetic maniac. Perhaps that bureaucratic deficit explains why Germany’s otherwise superior fighting men (a point Winston Churchill repeatedly acknowledged in private) were defeated by an enemy that was slow to acquire equivalent ferocity and tenacity? ...

The books read (not burned) by one of history's most repellent men

HE WAS better known for burning books than reading them. But surviving portions of Hitler’s private library reveal the German dictator as an ardent bibliophile, owning classics, history, travel writing, biography, studies of the occult and much else.

Timothy Ryback’s main find is the portion of Hitler’s huge book collection that ended up in an obscure section of the Library of Congress. Other books emerged from American officers who took them as souvenirs. The Soviet army had the best pickings: the library in Berlin’s Reichskanzlei, 10,000 volumes, was shipped off to Moscow in 1945 and has not been seen in public since (tantalisingly, it surfaced in the 1990s in an abandoned church but disappeared again). ...

A surprising new book argues that China is becoming less, not more, of a capitalist economy

MOST people, particularly those living outside China, assume that the country’s phenomenal growth and increasing global heft are based on a steady, if not always smooth, transition to capitalism. Thirty years of reforms have freed the economy and it can be only a matter of time until the politics follows.

This gradualist view is wrong, according to an important new book by Yasheng Huang, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Original research on China is rare, largely because statistics, though plentiful, are notoriously unreliable. Mr Huang has gone far beyond the superficial data on gross domestic product (GDP) and foreign direct investment that satisfy most researchers. Instead, he has unearthed thousands of long-forgotten pages of memoranda and policy documents issued by bank chairmen, businessmen and state officials. In the process he has discovered two Chinas: one, from not so long ago, vibrant, entrepreneurial and rural; the other, today’s China, urban and controlled by the state. ...

Separating the nation from its president

WHATEVER you think of George Bush, he has created a lot of work for those who, like this newspaper, believe that America can still be a force for great good despite the terrible errors of his presidency. With just over 100 days of that presidency to go, this is an opportune time for Justin Webb and Bronwen Maddox, respectively of the BBC and the Times, to remind the world that America and its current president are not the same thing.

In many ways the two volumes, both of them quick and enjoyable reads, could hardly be more different. Mr Webb, as befits a television news reporter, writes very much as he speaks, in a slangy and light-hearted tone that will irritate some people. Ms Maddox is careful and scholarly, much like one of her commentary columns. But the analysis the two journalists offer is broadly similar: those who hate America do so because they concentrate on the worst and blind themselves to the country’s great power to correct itself, not to mention the dynamism and opportunity that continue to draw people to it from all over the world. ...

Restarting the cycle of life in the British countryside

READERS of Adam Nicolson’s “Earls of Paradise” about Wilton House in Wiltshire will know how passionately he cares about landscape, or rather about the land. “Landscape” suggests something pictorial. Mr Nicolson is not interested in pictures. For him, beauty is a by-product of the way a landscape works and is worked. The view from the window is dynamic: an organism, a cycle, the antithesis of scenery.

His new book is about all these things at Sissinghurst in Kent, the Elizabethan castle where his grandmother, Vita Sackville-West, created her famous garden in the 1930s. After her death in 1962, her son Nigel escaped death duties by giving the whole estate—castle and garden, with mixed livestock and arable farm—to the National Trust (a conservation charity), devoting the rest of his life to promoting the place as a shrine to his parents. ...

A detailed, if hagiographic, portrait of Saudi Arabia's modernising king

THE Saudi kings have been a mixed bunch, ranging from the savvy to the dissolute. But by common consent the one who set his country on the road to modernity was Faisal, who reigned from 1964 until his assassination by a nephew in 1975. It was Faisal who created a bureaucracy, organised the oil industry and launched a development plan that included the radical innovation of schools for girls.

Joseph Kechichian is an American scholar of Lebanese-Armenian descent. Though no stylist, he knows Arabia and its princes well. His portrait does not dwell on Faisal the man—the frugal figure who lived in a modest house, drove himself to the office and displayed an almost puritan disdain for princely profligacy—but on Faisal the policy practitioner. Hence two episodes dominate the story. ...

SIR – Your otherwise excellent article on water repeated a common misperception about the role of water pricing (“Running dry”, September 20th). You attributed the “wasteful” use of water by farmers to the fact that governments “rarely charge” them a market price for the stuff. However, pricing water does little to stimulate efficiency or ensure best allocation to highest-value uses.

Consider the case of the Murray-Darling Basin. The use of water there is managed through a system of water rights, defined in terms of volumes and security of supply. During the current extensive drought, many water users are receiving only a small fraction of their “normal” entitlement. This is enforced entirely through the water-rights system—not through pricing mechanisms—enabling water to be reallocated from low-value to high-value uses; despite massive reductions in rainfall and river flows, there has been little impact on the value of agricultural production in the Basin. ...

European political leaders should do more to counter the appeal of the far right

THERE was much wailing and gnashing of teeth among liberal commentators after Austria’s election on September 28th. Two far-right parties, led by Heinz-Christian Strache (pictured left) and Jorg Haider (on his right), took 29% of the vote between them. Even more disheartening, a third of the country’s new young voters (the voting age has just been lowered to 16) backed them.

Austria has form. In 1999 Mr Haider’s far-right party won 27% of the vote and entered a coalition government that was briefly boycotted by its European partners. This time, not least because the two far-right leaders hate each other, neither is likely to be invited into the government (see article). But although flavours of the far right vary widely, Austria is by no means alone. The Swiss People’s Party of Christoph Blocher is the biggest party in Switzerland. Belgium’s Vlaams Belang party remains strong in Flanders. Denmark’s government depends on the backing of Pia Kjaersgaard’s anti-immigrant People’s Party. In Italy the Northern League, part of the ruling right-wing coalition, is explicitly xenophobic. ...