books of cultural history

Many of my readers have indicated an interest in cultural history; I think they'd like these books, particularly the first one.

Kathryn Hughes, Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum (Johns Hopkins Univ Press, 2018)
Victorian writers, Hughes says, tended to avoid describing raw human physicality. So she's going to research the significance of body parts in some well-documented Victorian cases. I got this book for the chapter on Charles Darwin's beard. Darwin didn't grow his famous beard until after he'd written The Origin of Species, and it altered his appearance so much his friends didn't recognize him. (Photos confirm this difference.) He said he grew it because of his eczema, which should but doesn't raise the question of why he waited, since he was a late adopter of the beard. I was hoping that Hughes would say something of why the Wave of Beards arose. She offers a reason I've read before, that the failure of the 1840s revolutionary movements freed the beard from its association with revolutionaries and criminals, and supports this with a reference to a series of 1850s Punch cartoons in which the likes of railway porters, offering to help passengers with their luggage, are taken by the passengers as hold-up men because they have beards; the old image took a while dying. But she also says that the growth of the sedentary middle-class and the fall of outdoorsy he-man occupations made men want to show their he-man credentials with big bushy beards. Also that barbers were scary (ref the legend of Sweeney Todd, which made its first appearance then). Maybe, but it reads as if Hughes is just making all this up.
Darwin is the only male subject. Other chapters discuss the infamous case of Queen Victoria's lady-in-waiting who was taken as pregnant in an unmarried state, a shocking thing at the time, until she died of the tumor that she actually had; the biographical dispute over whether George Eliot worked as a dairymaid in her youth and consequently had a coarse and muscular right hand: some insist she did, some insist she didn't: Hughes comes down on the "didn't" side but has no definitive proof; the disappearance from the historical record of D.G. Rossetti's long-term mistress; and the gruesome case of the murder-dismemberment of an 8-year-old girl whose name, "sweet Fanny Adams," eventually became a slang term indicating meaninglessness.

Jeremy Eichler, Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance (Knopf, 2023)
This is more a continuous narrative than separate accounts, but it describes four WW2 memorial works of music and the events in the composers' lives that led them to it: Richard Strauss's Metamorphosen, Arnold Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw, Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, and Dmitri Shostakovich's Babi Yar Symphony. That Schoenberg's and Shostakovich's works are directly about the Holocaust, while the other two avoid it (Strauss's is purely instrumental anyway: no words) is part of the point, and Eichler explores this thoroughly. He also explores why Britten's requiem, though ostensibly about WW2, winds up being a memorial to WW1 instead. This is, Eichler says, because WW1 in Britain was by far the more searing experience (though Tolkien did not find that in people who were guessing the war relevance of The Lord of the Rings), while in Russia, where Shostakovich was, it was the other way around.
Eichler goes to the places described in the music and tries to evoke what it feels like to be there. He also devotes a lot of awed description to the subtleties and meaningfulness of the music itself. I'll reluctantly go along with this for three of the pieces, though my reaction to them is different than his; but A Survivor from Warsaw, which describes a tale of Nazi brutality that Schoenberg just made up to an accompaniment of the composer's emptiest twelve-tone style, strikes me as a piece of worthless kitsch, and it's embarrassing to see it described in this worshipful tone.

Craig Brown, 150 Glimpses of the Beatles (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2020)
The exact opposite approach: 150 short separate essays, mostly in chronological order, covering the Beatles from their childhoods up to the band's breakup. This allows Brown the opportunity for lots of digressions, but some of these are among the most interesting parts of the book. A chapter on what classical composers (Britten, Copland) and literary critics thought of the Beatles was mostly new to me, and there are a number of other outside views elsewhere in the book. The last chapter is a biography of Brian Epstein told chronologically backwards. Gives a new perspective. Brown also emphasizes how contingent the Beatles' early history was by positing some alternative history. For instance: if Paul McCartney had passed Latin in school, he wouldn't have been held back a year and wouldn't have became close friends with a boy in the next class named George Harrison. An entire chapter guesses what would have happened if Gerry and the Pacemakers had had the big breakthrough instead of the Beatles, and why they could be seen as better qualified to do so.
But I have to approach this book with some caution, because the chapter on the possibility of the Beatles making a movie of The Lord of the Rings doesn't match up with anything else I've read on the topic.