Constellation of Genius by Kevin Jackson: review A new age dawned on October 30 1921, said Ezra Pound, who claimed that the Christian Era ended on the day that James Joyce finished the final paragraph of Ulysses. Three months later Joyce's book was published on the palindromic date of 2/2/22 - his 40th birthday. Kevin Jackson - following the example of Pound's hero Mussolini, who after his coup d"état in October 1922 imposed a new Fascist calendar on Italy to commemorate the rebirth of an imperial nation - sees 1922 as "Year One of Modernism." It saw, after all, in addition to Ulysses, the first publication of TS Eliot's The Waste Land, Proust's Sodome et Gomorrhe II, and Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Drawing on diaries, letters and other snippets, Jackson composes a day-by-day account of his chosen year. He tries to evoke the creative ferment of actors, authors, dancers, film-makers, painters, scientists and politicians during this turbulent, enriching post-war epoch. Nor does he forget that 1922 was the publication year of PG Wodehouse's The Clicking of Cuthbert, the foundation year of the BBC and of the Reader's Digest, and saw the inaugural cartoon films from the Laugh-a-Gram company (proprietor Walt Disney). Popular and high culture are equally celebrated in this Barnum's Circus of a book. The volume is beautifully produced, with the main text printed in an elegant black font above footnotes tinted purplish mauve. These high production values only highlight the fact that Constellation of Genius does not really work as a book, but would make a brilliant website. It chops and changes like the different frames of a film being fast-forwarded (Jackson is an eminent writer on film): the overall effect is an exciting but jerky blur. Readers with the attention span of a spaniel puppy, or the memory span of goldfish, will find the book, as Will Self has described it, "insanely readable." But it is cultural history for the cut-and-paste generation. It reads like quick downloads of ephemera that can soon be consigned to the recycle bin. Readers of Jackson's book who are familiar with the chief sources on which it is based will sometimes feel they are in an echo-chamber - so faithfully does he repeat other people's research and memoirs. Some of the entries in Jackson's calendar are trite. The entry for June 23 1922 reads in entirety: "Eliot wrote a bread-and-butter note to Mary Hutchinson, thanking her for an evening with Massine; he said that he liked Massine very much indeed. He also reported having sat for a portrait for Wyndham Lewis. Some of Jackson's critical assessments are callow: his estimates of Edith Wharton's worst novel, The Buccaneers, and one of its precursors, Glimpses of the Moon, seem to be based on book club sales and film rights rather than proper reading. Yet there are many sharp quotations, quirky details and bits of fun in Jackson's hodgepodge. Often the titbits are at the top end of Christmas quiz level. Did you know that the young Madrid student Luis Buñuel used to flirt with other men, and lure them to remote spots where he and other youngsters queer-bashed them? Or that the nerves doctor André Breton was smitten during 1922 by a craze for séances, which led him to the foundation of Surrealism - "pure psychic automatism," he called it. When Eric Blair - the future George Orwell - sat his Indian Civil Service entry examination in July 1922, he was required (Jackson tells us) to draw a chair, bucket or hut, and to write a character sketch of either an old gamekeeper or a retired colonel. Later, in October, Blair caught the quartermaster on the ship that took him to Rangoon stealing custard puddings. Meanwhile, in Blackpool, on September 4, the Swallow Sidecar Company was founded. It was universally known by its initials SS (when the business diversified into making motor cars they were known as SS Jaguars) until events in Germany made these too notorious. Curiously, the abiding images of Constellation of Genius have little to do with artistic creativity and most to do with individual aggression and political violence. Jackson recounts the near-death of the Commissioner of Metropolitan Police after gobbling a Walnut Whip chocolate laced with arsenic sent to him by a Londoner with a grudge. He evokes an untalented young playwright flourishing a white glove as he steps into the teeming traffic around Eros at Piccadilly, and shooting himself behind the right ear as a taxi careens to an emergency halt. Most memorably of all he quotes WB Yeats writing from Dublin of the bloody climax of the Irish Civil War: "In my own neighbourhood the Black and Tans dragged two young men tied alive to a lorry by their heels, till their bodies were rent in pieces. There was nothing for the mother but a head," said a countryman, and the head he spoke of was found on the roadside." Constellation of Genius 1922: Modernism Year One Kevin Jackson Hutchinson, £20, 536pp Read on 1 À la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust (1913-1927). Naxos Audiobooks has just issued the first unabridged recording of Remembrance of Things Past - heartily recommended for the long haul. 2 Modernism: the Lure of Heresy by Peter Gay (2007). A suitably exciting but perverse general survey. 3 Brian Howard: Portrait of a Failure by Marie-Jacqueline Lancaster (1968). A captivating study of a burnt-out Modernist.