Does this sound familiar: an Olympic Games in which a rising authoritarian power seizes the opportunity to take gargantuan global showmanship to a new level, or that serves as a coming-out party for an insular society celebrating a successful process of capitalist development? In fact these are the Games in, respectively, Berlin, 1936 (which provides our cover picture), and Seoul, 1988, as described in one of the books reviewed by David Goldblatt. He ends his survey of Olympic history, and of attempts to read the Games for deeper meanings, by acknowledging the “complex balancing act” the authorities in Beijing undertake this week. Just what will happen no one knows: and this is also the inescapable conclusion the quondam China specialist George Walden comes to in reviewing a selection from the avalanche of books on China’s current, unprecedented “great leap”.

Also getting under way this week, the Edinburgh Festival retains its perennial allure for a fantastic variety of performers and audiences. Quieter but no less inventive pleasures, according to Douglas Dunn, await readers of The Lost Leader, the new collection of poems by the TLS’s poetry editor, Mick Imlah, whose trick in narrating several hundred years of Scottish episodes and characters “is to approach them from an unexpected angle”. It was only to be expected that Hugh Trevor-Roper, “one of the great controversialists”, would be able, five years after his death, to rile his critics among “The Scotch” (as he insisted on calling them); The Invention of Scotland will, says Jenny Wormald, provoke, madden and delight – depending, perhaps, which side of the border you’re from. The emperor Hadrian faced a certain amount of hostility on just this point, and found a novel, and lasting, solution. Tom Holland sees him presented at the British Museum’s current exhibition as an “international man of mystery”, who encourages “pleasurable shivers of melancholy” in the beholder.

Alan Jenkins

Explore The TLS

• TLS Selections

• TLS Archives

• TLS Arguments

• TLS Writers

• TLS Letters

• Poem of the Week

• Then & Now