HOWZAT

Take a guided tour through Portland, Oregon (pronounced “OR-a-gen” by locals), among folks who may be down but are still fighting it, may be up but are still wearing rubber heels, guys (and gals) who can still give you a fat lip and kick the barstool out from under your butt, right after turning confidential over a coupla free beers. Meet “a lot of friendly, fascinating people who maybe should have kept their mouths shut”. Ronald Reagan called Portland “Little Beirut”, and the way Chuck (Fight Club) Palahniuk tells it, the place is still one of America’s finest combat zones. This is a city guide to the wild side of Portland/ Mahagonny and, not at all incidentally, to Chuck’s life there in the 1980s, described in a series of postcard reports from the edge where things start to unravel. He’s writing a novelist’s autobiography: he shows us where he and his novels have come from, and that the art of fiction is just as much the organisation of experience and observation as invention of character and plot. The style is modern nihilism decorated with icons of modern urban kitsch: Palahniuk is a true inheritor of Runyon and Lardner.

BEEF AND LIBERTY
By Ben Rogers
Vintage, £7.99
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Piquancy is added to this savoury history of “Roast Beef, John Bull and the English Nation” by constant comparison of Protestant values with the corrupt manners, effete foods and perverse principles not merely of the French but of Catholic Europe in general. The theme, the arguments, the iconic nature of the subject and the apt illustrations combine as an original dish — and Rogers explains convincingly why the French ban on British beef so angered British patriots.

A FURY FOR GOD
By Malise Ruthven
Granta, £9.99
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In the ocean of books about the rise of militant Islam, Malise Ruthven’s clear- headed primer is a Pharos lit to steer us between the Scylla of radical Islamist thought and the Charybdis of modernist Western thinking. It is a piece of incisive journalism that rigorously analyses modern religious differences and political ambiguities. This updated edition includes a valuable “Afterword” on the crucial Saudi connection — international tolerance of an authoritarian tribal regime.

ON BLONDES
By Joanna Pitman
Bloomsbury, £8.99
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Blonde is an aspirational state of being — Miss Clairol can tell you that. The golden ideal is Aphrodite rising from the waves. A blonde is iconic — mostly female, though Alexander the Great was notably blond — for better or for worse. Worse is the blonde as ditziness incarnate: better is blonde as personification of innocence. Pitman drops more bombshells into her pages than Hollywood put up on the screen. You don’t need to be blonde to have fun reading this.

500 SELF-PORTRAITS
Introduced by Julian Bell
Phaidon, £9.95
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“Tae see ourselves as ithers see us” is hardly possible, but the pictorial artist almost uniquely can present a self-image that provides some insight into the work of that artist. Rembrandt would be less famous had he not constantly portrayed himself; Van Dyck is as much a dandy as those he painted; Frida Kahlo’s moustache has become iconic. This collection of self-portraits is a fat, endlessly fascinating portrait gallery of artists’ faces from medieval to modern.

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