Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2022 i The Critic

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Chasing the dragon In his devastating account of how the principal of Edinburgh University, Peter Mathieson, has done little to protect some of his most distinguished academic colleagues from the reputational lynching meted out to them by highly politicised activists, Ben Sixsmith (“SLAVES TO BAD HISTORY”, MARCH) drily notes that in Mathieson’s previous role running Hong Kong University, he “faced criticism for not doing more to defend student protestors against the Beijing authorities”. Perhaps I may be permitted to add something more about how, under Professor Mathieson’s leadership, Edinburgh University has prostrated itself to Chinese money? There are now almost 7,600 Chinese students at Edinburgh University (and a further 450 from Hong Kong). Their numbers are rapidly catching up with the number of Scottish and English students at the university,…

“Pass me that cigar, will you?” Bozza is rummaging in the dressing-up wardrobe, and the room is a tip. On the floor is a made-to-measure hi-vis jacket that used to belong to someone called Osborne. Rishi next door gave it to us because it was “very much last decade’s cut” and also too big. There’s a pair of brown leather trousers that Cazza called “too awful for Oxfam”. Bozza got quite excited when he found a big box labelled “Dave: Manly War Leader”, full of khaki trousers and dark tops, but nothing fitted. “I can see why he left them behind,” Bozza said, as he struggled to get out of a black polo shirt. “He’s never getting into these again, the lardy biffer.” “You can talk,” said Cazza. “What happened…

Colin Godley’s extra-curricular career began in a small way with an invitation to contribute a weekly column entitled “View from the Pew” to his local newspaper. His parish lies in one of the remoter parts of Norfolk. Deducing that a rural theme would be appropriate, Colin used this newfound platform to address such topics as “God in the hedgerows”, the condition of the church belfry and his wife’s chances in the village pancake race. There were a few letters from readers, but not many. The pace of his hitherto sedate and unremarkable life moved up a gear when he discovered that St Wedekind’s had been chosen to stage the BBC Songs of Praise Nativity service. Two hundred people attended — ten times the usual congregation for Evensong — and Colin,…

A friend of mine recently drew my attention to the 50 pence coin struck to celebrate the advent of Brexit in 2016. It was inscribed with the words Peace, prosperity and friendship with all nations. I immediately felt, if not quite sick when I saw it, at least queasy, and remembered the winking neon sign over Asunción in Paraguay when I arrived there years ago: Paz, trabajo y bienestar con Stroessner (Peace, work and well-being with Stroessner). The coin’s slogan didn’t seem much better to me — or, in the event, superior as a prediction of the near future. One expects such slogans from dubious regimes, which always proclaim three great goals or virtues: Travail, famille, patrie, for example, in the case of Vichy. I suppose it is for reasons…

AT THE HEART OF VALENCIA’S MARCH FERIA are the “fallas”: fantastical painted dioramas, made of wood and papier-mâché, standing as high as houses and depicting allegorical themes. Hundreds of guilds, representing different districts of the town, spend all year labouring over them. For a week, they are displayed on street corners, rated and judged. Then, on the night of 19 March, to mark the feast of St Joseph — the ultimate carpenter — they are put to the torch (the cremà). As the effigies turn to ash, Valencians are reminded of the grimmest of truths: “For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” Valencia’s bullfights are integral to the festival of the fallas, and they, too, are based – as perhaps all great art is – on a sense…

‘‘MISTRESS BARTOSCH’S TEMPLE OF SCROTUM SQUASHING” was a fantasy that didn’t come to fruition. The idea came to me about ten years ago when I was working in a miserable job for a pittance. I began wondering how I could monetise my tendency toward misandry; stamping on testicles seemed an appealing option. But it wasn’t shame or fears about my safety that stopped me from lacing up my ball-stamping boots, it was the fact that I didn’t want to add legitimacy to an industry that destroys women and girls with fewer choices than me. The Ethical Stripper Stacey Clare (Unbound, £20) Stacey Clare, author of The Ethical Stripper, has no such qualms. In a bastardised Marxist take, she argues “sex workers” of the world must unite, and that all they have…

Truly Madly: Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier and the Romance of the Century Stephen Galloway (Sphere, £25) “AN EXPRESS LIFT SKYING ME up-wards and throwing me downwards in insanely non-stop fashion.” Thus Laurence Olivier on his relationship with his second wife, Vivien Leigh. It’s a lovely image, with something Shakespearean about that “skying”. But as Stephen Galloway’s Truly Madly makes plain, it hardly does Olivier’s and Leigh’s deranged romance justice. Forget love in an elevator. This amour fou was a whole fairground’s worth of tummy-turning, ticker-torturing rides. Anyone who has ever doubted Sophocles’s suggestion that possessing a male libido is like “being chained to a lunatic” will think again after reading this book. Hamlet was “but mad north-northwest”. Olivier’s lust — what he later called his “cretinous romanticism” — for Leigh…

These Days Lucy Caldwell (Faber, £12.99) Homesickness Colin Barrett (Jonathan Cape, £14.99) The Geometer Lobachevsky Adrian Duncan (Tuskar Rock, £14.99) THE STUFFY OLD WORLD of publishing is no more immune to neophilia than the rest of our society and culture. In the UK there are numerous awards for first novels (Authors’ Club, Betty Trask, Costa, Desmond Elliott, to sample just the first four letters of the alphabet), but only one (Encore) for a second book. Two years ago, the great grandaddy of prizes, the Booker, confidently declared with its shortlist that of the six greatest novels written in English that year, four were debuts. Publishers, when they circulate lists of forthcoming titles to the spavined nags of the literary world like yours truly, often highlight debuts, as though they are…

THE FIRST TIME I met Gidon Kremer, for an interview in a London hotel lobby, he broke in after a few minutes to say: “My wife has left me for Barenboim. Do you know anyone for me?” This was so far outside the normal encounter, where an artist plugs a project and the journalist creates an angle, that I have no further recollection of the interview and probably made a complete hash of it. What endures is an impression of raw honesty and searing pain, twin drivers I came to recognise as the keys to Kremer’s impressive courage and idealism. Gidon Kremer turned 75 last month without much fuss. Though he is one of the world’s most admired violinists and ensemble leaders, there was barely a birthday card from the…

AT THE END OF HIS LIFE, the painter Ilya Repin was living in Finland, his home of 30 years. He was just an hour by train from St Petersburg, but Russia was closed to him. Stalin was nevertheless a great admirer and in 1925 sent a delegation to persuade the artist to resume citizenship of the motherland. Although Repin had been a supporter of the revolution, he was appalled at the turn it had taken, and citing age and ill health, refused. He never set foot in Russia again. Indeed, at his death in 1930, aged 86, it was not Russia that was in his heart but the place of his birth, Ukraine. In one of his last letters, written in response to an invitation from the Ukrainian intelligentsia, he…

AMONG MY MOST TREASURED possessions is my passport from the early 1990s when I was a foreign correspondent in Budapest. Its worn pages, filled with faded stamps, are a mini-chronicle of lost empires, permitting me entry to states that no longer exist such as Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the German Democratic Republic. My favourite was issued on 2 April 1992: visa number three from the first post-Soviet Ukrainian embassy, located in the Hungarian capital. The visa and accompanying stamps take up most of a page. I travelled with Nick Thorpe, the BBC correspondent. Once we entered Ukraine at Uzhgorod it was clear that nobody was really in control. The Soviet Union no longer existed and Ukraine had declared independence, but as history shows, it takes more than words to make a…

IN THE SHADOW of a thin hawthorn hedge, the old keeper and I crept slowly through the watermeadow. The shooting season had just come to an end and Simon was in a reflective mood. “Thing is,” he whispered, “I’m too fat to run these days and I’m too old to fight.” He stopped, glanced through his binoculars at the tangle of scrub in front of us, and then went back to telling me about how much things have changed in the past 30 years. When he was a younger man, poaching was a weekly occurrence and being handy with your fists was almost part of a gamekeeper’s job description, but Simon reckons it happens less these days and when it does, the police would rather you gave them a ring.…

THE SCOURGE OF ALL antique dealers is to hear something described as “boring brown”, or “a bit Granny-ish”. Now, brown is not all boring and Grannies (especially my brace) are often individual, stimulating and not old-fashioned. Why has the image of second-hand furniture become so abused and tarnished? In the antiques world of circa 1960, dealers only sold pieces made before 1830 — subsequent work was not even described as antique. The Victorian age was decried as being a sort of dark age where nothing of any quality was produced (the advent of mass production), and the designs were hybridised, confused and compounded. A Victorian sideboard would therefore be understood to be poorly made and embellished with an incomprehensible mishmash of decoration and carved ornament from all and any epoch.…

WHO KNEW THAT WHEN A BESIEGED city bravely refuses to surrender, its assailants don’t just go “oh” and back off? Instead, they carry on with ever- greater brutality. There is nothing new in the manner of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must” was the realism that Athens supposedly offered Melos — an independent state destroyed chiefly because, Thucydides suggested, the Athenian empire could not be seen to be weak. The Melians resisted, and died. Is this not Ukraine and Russia today? Is not brutal realism all on Moscow’s side? It is not. But to see that clearly it is necessary to recognise what has already happened in this war. Here, the media, the BBC not least, has felt able…

IN MY COLUMN FOR The Critic last month, I argued that the post of attorney general should no longer be held by a party politician. After I had filed my piece but before it was published, the House of Lords constitution committee said it would consider that very question as part of a wide-ranging inquiry. The attorney general for England and Wales is one of the UK government’s three law officers. The solicitor general acts as the attorney’s deputy. The third law officer is the advocate general for Scotland. The attorney general also holds the separate office of advocate general for Northern Ireland. “Is it appropriate or helpful,” the Lords committee wants to know, “for the law officers, as government legal advisers, to be politicians serving in government?” It may be…

Russia has repeatedly denounced RUBIS, sneeringly describing it as “some kind of ‘rules-based order’… [as] our creative Western friends call it” HAD YOU HEARD OF RUBIS? I confess I hadn’t until the accident of a media appearance compelled me to listen to the tripartite Downing Street press conference in which Boris Johnson and Mark Rutte, the prime minister of the Netherlands, appeared as a warm-up act for the gorgeous, pouting, perma-coiffed Canadian premier, Justin Trudeau. Anyway, it turns out that RUBIS was not one of the lustable Justin’s many former girlfriends, but is an acronym for the Rules-Based System of International Relations. Justin was huskily enthusiastic about rubis, since it was rubis, he claimed, which, ever since the foundation of the United Nations, 75 years ago, had kept the world…

THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY faculty’s library is called “the Seeley”. It has been in its current, James Stirling-designed building since 1968, and named after the eponymous Sir John (an eminent Victorian) since 1897. You will not be surprised to learn that these facts, which somehow left people in my time unbothered, are now distressing the current crop of undergraduates. We all know the drill by now: STEP 1: Activists discover that Famous Historical Figure After Whom Something Is Named (in this case, John Robert Seeley) held views that they do not agree with (to wit, the value of then-thing, the British Empire) STEP 2: Cue outrage, and loud displays about having Strong Feelings About Bad Things STEP 3: Initiate patently implausible claims about how the names of old buildings are causally…

There has been much chatter recently, both in the media and online, about the possibility that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will lead to a nuclear holocaust. As annoying as this would be, has anyone stopped to consider how the wholesale elimination of life on earth will affect minority groups? Studies show that at least 73 per cent of the world’s population is non-white. This means that the majority of people are minorities. Therefore, destroying the planet would be an act of white supremacy. QED. This is hardly surprising, given that the inventor of the atom bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, was a straight white male. So too is Vladimir Putin. One cannot help but think that if only Putin had signed up to Stonewall’s Diversity Champions scheme, all of this could…

RICHMOND, VIRGINIA, IS ALMOST AN English town. A settlement older than the United States itself, it is perhaps the perfectly preserved symbol of the deep roots and common ties of its country with the greater Anglosphere; to use the former Senator and Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III’s phrase, a reminder of the “Anglo-American heritage”. Walking through Sulgrave Road — after you drive through a couple of cross-sections named Dover, Canterbury, Cambridge and Exeter roads — one can find a Tudor-era manor house with wooden beams transported and shipped from Lancashire. A British and an American flag flutter side by side at the entrance. Next door is a sixteenth-century priory house that is currently a museum, a chapter of the Virginia historical society and a wedding venue, once again shipped…

Super-Infinite: the Transformations of John Donne Katherine Rundell (Faber & Faber, £16.99) ON 25 FEBRUARY 1601, the head of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, was severed from his body. The execution took place in private, as a last request: the small number of witnesses who gathered in a stone courtyard of the Tower of London is not recorded. Could a poet have been among them? John Donne had become one of the men who knew Essex best, watching him across the table at the house of Lord Keeper Thomas Egerton, where Donne served as secretary. Egerton had entertained Essex first as a concerned mentor, trying to calm his rebellious excesses towards the ageing Elizabeth I; then as a permanent and reluctant host when charged with keeping him under house…

Constable: A Portrait James Hamilton (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25) CONSTABLE’S CHARACTER HAS always presented a problem to his biographers. On the one hand we know he was kind, compassionate, sensitive and loving, yet we also know he could be spiteful, sarcastic, bitter and rude. The problem has been to bring these two sides of his character together to give a sense of a whole personality. It is not an easy job. James Hamilton’s approach is different; he doesn’t try to explain the diverse faces of Constable: he shows them to his readers and lets us make up our own minds. Instead of trying to excavate a nugget of pure Constable, he goes in the opposite direction and shows us the world in which he lived and moved, which he brings…

The Layman’s Guide to Classical Architecture Quinlan Terry, edited by Clive Aslet and with an introduction by HRH the Prince of Wales (Stolpe, £30) TRAINED IN THE BLEAKLY GREY era of the late 1950’s, the classical architect Quinlan Terry has achieved a remarkable legacy. At the time he embarked on his architectural career, the profession was locked firmly in the postwar austerity of flat-roofed perfunctory modernism, with planar walls of exposed aggregate concrete or unadorned “stretcher bond” brickwork. This was the “machine age” of mass production of buildings, and it is sometimes hard to remember how restrictive this period must once have been, as so much has happened since. To the more hard-line practitioners of those times, any suggestion of creating buildings with ornament was considered at best eccentric but…

HERE IS AN INSTRUCTIVE little tale from the publishing world of 90 years ago. By the early 1930s the young Graham Greene’s career was in lowish water. His first work of fiction, The Man Within (1929) had been a resounding success. In its roseate aftermath he gave up his job on The Times and signed a contract with messrs Heinemann for a further three novels. The first two sank without trace. Everything hung on the reception of the third, Stamboul Train, set for publication in the autumn of 1932. At first the news was encouraging: Stamboul Train had been chosen by the Book Society, which in those days meant a guaranteed sale of 10,000 copies. Then came disaster. J.B. Priestley had decided that the character of “Mr Savory”, a pipe-toting,…

SAY WHAT YOU LIKE, the opera gang was out of the traps like greased pigs with their Dutch auction of cheap gestures. Once they’d detailed some intern to find Ukraine on the map, it was all go: playing the Ukie anthem before shows, lighting up the theatre in blue and yellow … and then they went all imaginative: in Madrid, they wrapped Siegfried’s corpse in the flag; and top of the twats was Mariusz Trelinski of the Polish National Opera, announcing they were cancelling Modest Mussorgsky’s opera Boris Godunov. “At times like this,” he intoned — having, like everyone else, suddenly turned into the Archbishop of Canterbury — “opera is silent.” Well, silent-ish: they’re still doing Carmen. And why Boris? I can understand the Albert Hall thinking maybe this isn’t…

IT SAYS SOMETHING about the plight of Europe in 2022 that the play and company which seems most relevant to all our concerns is an exiled experimental theatre troupe from Minsk, with a dystopian play, set in the middle of the twenty-first century and featuring a chaotic cast of humans (and a saggy stuffed goose) under the heel of an authoritarian regime which has conquered large parts of Europe and Asia by force. The Belarus Free Theatre company has long been a beacon of the bravery of the arts — an experimental company tireless in its challenge to tightening autocracy in its homeland under the Kremlin-satrapy of Alexander Lukashenko. It has moved productions underground, built a support network via social media and used digital performances to keep its flame alive…

FUTURE HISTORIANS of post-war Britain, thought Auberon Waugh, will ponder an overwhelming question: why did the middle class have such a death wish? Social demarcation, true, is a minefield which can imperil the most careful sapper. It’s usually wise to plot another course. Yet the great provocateur’s point stands: why are so many middle class people eager to be punished? Waugh’s question has acquired greater force in the two decades since his death. A certain kind of person can barely last a week without expressing shame at the life of privilege into which he or she has been born. All cultures and beliefs, they tell us, ignoring the lessons of history, have equal merit. We should not be judgmental, even though observation and experience reveal that without the capacity for…

THERE’S A MOMENT in the Netflix series The Crown where Princess Margaret, played by Vanessa Kirby, recites John Betjeman’s Blitz-time poem, In Westminster Abbey: Think of what our Nation stands for,Books from Boots and country lanes,Free speech, free passes, class distinction,Democracy and proper drains. In the film, the quote figures as a wry tribute from privilege to provincialism, but the whole poem is a scathing condemnation of smugness, selfishness and cowardice. Its lady speaker prays for all the proper things she ought to pray for, but most of all for her own safety. She concludes: And now, dear Lord, I cannot waitBecause I have a luncheon date. So just write the restaurant review. Something suitably light, bright and sparkling, a quirky fact here, a snarky comment there. Don’t add to…

In February 2011, suddenly and without warning, Robert Döry died. Robert was a wonderful man, patient, unassuming and kind. He radiated optimism with an understated yet infectious humour. A stalwart of the Travellers Club, and a fixture of the club’s bar “Josie’s”, with his gold watch chain and his silver tongue, Robert projected the image of an Englishman with every natural fibre of his Savile Row suits. What therefore could be more natural but that Robert Döry was Hungarian. Only the umlaut gave him away. Well, the umlaut and his abiding love for and great knowledge of Tokaji sweet wine. Indeed, for a period he was the proud owner of an Hungarian winery and an importer of his wine to the Travellers’ cellars. We, Robert’s friends, were his fortunate beneficiaries.…

ON MARCH 1, EIGHT WEEKS fast-fashion clean, I smugly concluded that 2022 would be my first Zara-free year. “I’m just not feeling it,” I breezed. “That thrill-seeking, irresponsible part of me is dead.” I went online to confirm this and was instantly mainlining £59.99 bouclé like the crack whore we know me to be. “You’re better than that,” my proper fashion editor pal decreed. Am I though? Am I really? I tried it on — a double-breasted blazer, sharp-shouldered, in grassy emerald — and it was so jolly, such a riposte to the Prevailing Drabness, that I kept it. Besides, Zara had taken the trouble of green-washing it for me with phrases such as “Join Life”, “At least 25% recycled cotton” and something about an “outer shell”. Small consolation for…

IT DOESN’T MATTER HOW catastrophic, how terrible, how morally squalid, how globally imperilling the circumstances, there is nothing that cannot be shamelessly exploited by the descendants of Stanley Baldwin’s “hard-faced men who look as if they had done very well out of the war”. David Frost — the one Peter Cook called “the bubonic plagiarist” — once pronounced that “life is a theme of opportunity”. The language may be approximate but the sentiment is clear, and it’s one which hard-faced men and their apprentices like to hear. It is after all among their valued maxims along with “Look, if I wasn’t at it someone else would be.” The pandemic remains a reliable earner for crocuses, spivs, windsor knots, wideboys and widegirls. Or, as they would prefer: for donors, philanthropists and…

Maxxed out A SLIGHT MOMENT of imposter syndrome as I, your woman about town, remember that my idea of “town” is the habitation of 11,000 people near to the village where I grew up. Town, to me, is the place where the shops close at lunchtime on market day, rather than the home of sparkling cultural delights readers are perhaps hoping to hear about. Luckily, as a sophisticated adult, I now live in Bath, where it’s possible to buy almost anything up to as late as 6pm. Oh brave new world that has such retail in it! Although given the dire mutterings from my political friends about inflation, I’m trying to be prudent. Which is how, while poking around discount department store TK Maxx, I discover that the book of my…

I WAS BORN IN THE Middle East. I was brought up in the Middle East (apart from three years spent in Moscow). My father was a foreign correspondent for The Times and “home” has always been rather difficult to name or define. When I see buses and restaurants in Jerusalem blown up, or buildings in Gaza hollowed out by shells, or cities in Syria devastated by bombs, these are not faraway places of which I know little. These are places I either did or could easily have called “home”, their residents people whom I wouldn’t have thought to call “foreign”. Casual British indifference to war and terrorism in distant lands depresses me. We have an unhappy tendency either to see them as places we intervene in or take no interest…

DOUBLE-DIGIT INFLATION is now inevitable this year in the United States; it is also very likely in most European nations, including the United Kingdom. In the twelve months to January the increase in consumer prices was 7.5 per cent in the USA, 5.1 per cent in the Eurozone and 5.5 per cent in the UK. Even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the forecasting consensus was that these numbers would rise sharply in the early months of 2022 because of price increases already in the pipeline. Now, as sanctions on Russia become effective and the supply of wheat from Ukraine is disrupted, further and yet larger increases in energy and food prices are in prospect. For example, in the UK price caps on retail gas and electricity will be raised by…

I OFTEN SAY THAT when I grow up I want to own a bank. I can even understand the business — sell money and secure the risk against your customers’ assets; use other customers’ money as assets to lend out; pay a pittance as interest; do not get out of balance with the proportions. Also, wear chalk-stripes and smoke cigars. I manage some of these already. The buying of money and its opposite, the custody services, are essentially commercial commodities using what should be simple business models. This should lead to continual competitive stress. Personal attention in private banking is expensive and rightly costs more for good service, but it frequently surprises me how poor the banking relationship is in corporate affairs, especially with smes where one might expect similar…

NOW THAT NOTHING is much fun any more, what better moment for a proper revival of the “English malady”? No, not sodomy, flagellation, or any of those traditional pastimes, I mean the inclination to melancholy which for centuries was the thing that foreigners most noticed about us. The past couple of years should have been perfect for a rebirth of this rather attractive, contemplative, withdrawn, studious and grave state, but naturally everyone squandered the chance, steadfastly persevering with the kind of vain, exhibitionist hysterics that now exemplify the national character, shown by everyone from politicians, royals, clerics, to the clowns of telly and media and the millions of soc-med morons clamouring to outdo them in displays of ignorance, crassness and vulgarity. The middle of Lent seems a good moment to…

Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century Helen Thompson (Oxford University Press, £20) ALL WRITERS AND THEIR publishers aim for relevance, but the timing of this book is uncanny even so. Dis order, which aims to explain today’s instability through three intertwined stories about oil, money and power, was published on the day that Russia launched its new offensive in Ukraine. The author, Helen Thompson, a professor of politics at Cambridge, is more widely known as a New Statesman columnist and for her aphoristic, dispassionate contributions to Talking Politics podcast. She argues convincingly that world history since the end of the nineteenth century hinges on the pursuit, and price, of oil. The competition, wealth and dependency that oil and gas have generated have not only supercharged inter-state rivalry: they are…

SOMETHING VERY EXCITING is happening in the world of Civil War and Cromwellian studies. At long last the mid-seventeenth century is getting a measure of the public attention it deserves. Recently, readers have enjoyed Paul Lay’s Providence Lost (2020) and Ronald Hutton’s The Making of Oliver Cromwell (2021) while blockbuster novelists including Robert Harris and Philippa Gregory are moving into this fertile period. Historians have long appreciated the unique fascination of this “Age of Conscience”, where centuries-old norms were overturned overnight, ordinary people were forced to make extraordinary choices each day, and the whole thing was captured by the first newspapers. However, the complicated Civil Wars of the 1640s, and the 11 years of constitutional experiments that followed, have struggled to capture the attention of a wider public living happily…

Going to Church in Medieval England Nicholas Orme (Yale University Press, £20) The Dissolution of the Monasteries: A New History James G. Clark (Yale University Press, £25) THE FALLOUT OVER THE CHURCH of England’s response to Covid-19 is still with us, although from its toxic half-life the Archbishop of Canterbury now seems to have moved on to the damnatio memoriæ of long-dead sinners of whom he has decided to disapprove. A suspicion in some quarters that the closure of churches and the legally dubious strictures issued to the clergy during lockdown were little more than a ruse by which the traditional parish model might finally be swept away has produced a groundswell of discontent. No stranger to these pages, the Rev Marcus Walker now chairs “Save the Parish”, and has…

IS JEEN-YUHS, THE FOUR-AND-A-half hour Netflix documentary about Kanye West, a tragedy or a vindication? For Coodie and Chike, the two filmmakers who tracked West across two decades to make the series, it’s the latter. For them, West’s progress from his Chicago origins to his triumph as a producer and rapper is an example of God’s plan in action: West has a genius (hence the title — say it out loud), and his purpose in life is to express that genius. And it’s true that the documentary serves as a powerful reminder that West is actually good. It’s a revelation to revisit the early days of his career and see, not just the raw talent behind songs such as “All Falls Down”, but also the unguarded delight on his…

ONE OF THE FEW PEOPLE to criticise Putin’s war against Ukraine on Russian state TV — though he supported the 2014 invasion of Crimea — is Karen Shakhnazarov, chairman of one of the oldest Russian studios, Mosfilm. “I have a hard time imagining taking cities such as Kyiv,” he told a Putin fan-boy host. “I can’t imagine how that would look.” He has since been branded a traitor by outraged viewers. When many people hear mention of Russian cinema, they immediately think of the famous scene in Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin when ranks of Cossacks descend the Odessa steps firing rifle volleys towards the civilians gathered below and a woman loses control of a perambulator which starts its rickety downward journey. The scene makes for powerful drama but it is…

WHEN THE BURRELL COLLECTION opened in a park just south of Glasgow on 21 October 1983, it made a big impact. Here was a collection of a private individual equivalent in its scope to some of the great collections in the United States — not quite at the level of the Frick Collection or the Morgan Library, but all of it of the highest quality: tapestries equal to those of the V&A; Persian carpets; eighteenth-century paintings; some antiquities; and a wonderfully wide-ranging collection of work by Degas, which was recently shown in an exhibition at the National Gallery. Sir William Burrell had donated his collection to Glasgow City Council in March 1944, with stringent conditions as to how, and most especially where, it was to be displayed. It had to…

EVERYONE HAS THEIR OWN favourite first sign of spring, whether it’s golden daffs bobbing by the roadside, frolicking lambs or the evocative scent that accompanies the drone of a lawn mower waking from hibernation. Mine has to be glimpsing that first flash of impossibly bright pink in the rhubarb bed. As colour pops go, it’s hard to beat, but it also stirs a greedy longing for tangy crumbles and compotes, chutneys and fools. There’s a reason American homesteaders named it the pie plant. Surprisingly — or not, if you’re among those who can’t stand it, though really, you don’t know what you’re missing — rhubarb’s culinary history stretches back only to the nineteenth century. Originating in Asia, it was traded along the Silk Route and first arrived here as a…

OBVIOUSLY, THE FACT THAT half the parents at Lyra’s prep are Russian oligarchs has suddenly come into rather sharp relief. My friend Jemima — she who randomly sends her kids to a state primary — was crowing about this at lunch the other day. Apparently loads of private schools are struggling to keep afloat because donations from oligarchs have been sanctioned. I said Lyra’s prep would be OK because of all the shipping magnates and she looked appalled, and said I needed to check my privilege. In other oligarch news, the sodding Year 6 residential trip to Flatford Mill is looming. Which would be delightfully bucolic, if it weren’t for the fact that half of Lyra’s classmates have never spent a night away from their various fully staffed mansions —…