There is much more attention these days on how to save the car industry than on how to save the lives destroyed by cars. The first is much the easier problem. However complex are the mechanisms for protecting Ford and General Motors, the arguments there are simple compared to those about how we drive, why we drive the way we do, and why we give the name “accidents” to some of the most predictable cases of human error. If the supply of expensive new roads merely increases demand and extends the stationary lines of traffic, an Obama “New Deal” to repair infrastructure may help the car-makers more than protectionism can. The evidence in a striking new book by Tom Vanderbilt suggests a benefit to all from smaller roads, fewer road signs and more punitive laws: but, as our reviewer Jon Garvie discovers, the real doubt is whether humanity’s highway nature can ever truly be improved.

If the satirist Juvenal were able to see the roads of Rome today, his rage would doubtless be greater even than it was in the second century ad. Scholars have for some years argued whether “the anger that makes me write” (as he put it) led to a satire targeted against women, traffic and the city’s noise, or against the enraged grumbler himself. The classicist Michael Silk considers what happens when the subject of a Juvenalian satire today is inside Ten Downing Street.

The “howl of impotent rage” has a prominent place too in the work of Francis Bacon, much discussed in this year of the major Tate retrospective. In the words of our critic Alan Jenkins, the paintings are a record not of how Bacon saw the world but of the only way that, “human meat and a carcass-in-waiting as he was”, he “could yet feel himself to be truly alive”.

A more decorous – but no less critical – debate is to be had in the Commentary section, about the prayers and horse-racing poetry which may, or may not, have been written by Jane Austen.

Peter Stothard

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