Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2022 i The Critic

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IN DEFENCE OF SEELEY Paul Sagar is surely right that renaming the Seeley history library at Cambridge is a distraction from helping current victims of oppression and injustice and benefits no one (“FIGHT THINGS THAT REALLY MATTER, APRIL). It seems to me, however, that more can and should be said in defence of John Richard Seeley. Seeley was Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, and a liberal-minded, erudite, imaginative, and even prescient geopolitical thinker. His goal, set out in his best-selling book The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures (1883), was to create a federal or confederal state that would combine the United Kingdom with other Anglophone countries which by then had nearly achieved de facto independence: mainly Canada, Newfoundland, Australia and New Zealand. Seeley’s geopolitical goal in…

“And with one bound, he was free!” Bozza is telling me how he has beaten everyone again. He is so clever. “They all told me I was done for, but I said, ‘Just wait, something will turn up, the circus will move on,’ and what do you know, Russian invasion, war crimes, stalwart resolve, national hero!” We are at Chequers, which is where Cazza sends us when she needs some peace and quiet. It is a big house with lots of interesting smells and a huge lawn, but the ladies who are in charge here are not much fun. They make me sleep in a cold passage, when there are lots of beds upstairs. Bozza isn’t sure about them either. “They’ve been very offhand with me,” he told Cazza, “ever…

EVIL IS BACK. It hadn’t gone away, of course, but for us living comfortably in the West, evil was something perpetrated by mass murderers or serial sex offenders but not by ordinary people. One of the more common things I’ve heard as a priest is people jokingly telling me that they couldn’t possibly make their confession as they’ve been far too evil, and I wouldn’t have the time. My response, almost invariably, would be to ask when was the last time they’d committed genocide. (And yes, for the uninitiated, Anglicans do do Confession: it’s not only encouraged in the Prayer Book but Queen Elizabeth I famously said, “All may, none must, some should.” If you’re in the “should” category, feel free to get in touch.) But now evil is back.…

Truth is the first casualty of war, no doubt, but so it is also of elections — or perhaps of political life tout court. During elections, though, lying changes from the chronic phase to the acute. Impossible things before breakfast are shamelessly promoted and emotive slogans intoned in the hope and expectation that they will be uncritically accepted. Walking in Paris just before the French election, I was handed some leaflets and stickers by partisans of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the demagogic left-wing candidate. “The rich pollute,” said one of them, “the people pay.” Am I one of the rich, I wonder? Or one of the people? What about the customers chatting over lunch in the nearby café? Are they rich or are they of the people? Mélanchon’s slogan is founded on…

HALF A CENTURY! Can it really be 50 years since six odd-bods without a recording contract booked a studio in Piccadilly to make an LP which still sounds as odd as a cat with two tails? It takes some believing what a thin year 1972 was for pop music. As David Hepworth has written persuasively in Never A Dull Moment, 1971 supplied a veritable harvest. That was the last roar of the Sixties, without the nonsense that accompanied the flower power period. The following year was terrible. Guitar bands, the heavy brigade, prog-rockers, and a flotilla of singer-songwriters cast a long shadow over 1972. Or, to put skin on the bones of this dismal parade, it was the year of Wishbone Ash, Deep Purple, Yes and Cat Stevens. Thank goodness…

I’VE ALWAYS BEEN FASCINATED by synaesthesia — the phenomenon in which some people associate ideas or concepts in their mind with a sense, such as seeing colours as you hear music, or associating smells or sounds with different numbers. I don’t know if it would be a boon or a burden, and I struggle to imagine what it would be like. That said, I have my own prosaic version of it — although as far as I know there is no label or official description for the way I often react to watching football (and it is only football). More often than not, a passage of play will be accompanied in my mind by music, music which is lodged somewhere in my consciousness and which my brain decides to play…

Conspiracy on Cato Street: A Tale of Liberty and Revolution in Regency London Vic Gatrell (Cambridge University Press, £25)  ‘‘WHY DID BRUNT DIE crying ‘long live liberty’?” asked the wife of the Russian ambassador to London on May Day 1820. Dorothea Lieven had just seen five British tradesmen hanged outside Newgate Prison. After the twitching stopped, their bodies hung in the air for half an hour. What kept the crowd from drifting off to the maypoles? The prisoners had been given oranges to suck in their last moments. Was tea served? The hangman cut down one corpse, dragged it through a heap of sawdust, and propped its shoulders on a block. Then another man with handkerchiefs around his face decapitated it with a carving knife. “This is the head of…

Straits: Beyond the Myth of Magellan Felipe Fernández-Armesto (Bloomsbury, £25) FELIPE FERNÁNDEZ-ARMESTO is that rare phenomenon: a genuine polymath who never comes across as a know-all. Readers of The Critic will know him as the magazine’s food columnist, in which capacity he attains the heights of culinary connoisseurship. Indeed, he has written a history of food, among many other subjects. He can be unnecessarily hard on vegans. But he also tells us how to make Napoleon’s Corsican comfort food — potatoes and onions fried in olive oil — more palatable. The dish is, of course, vegan. Felipe’s literary style is similar: he segues from baroque ornamentation to sublime simplicity in a single paragraph. He embraces the minutiae of cartography or seamanship with as much enthusiasm and as light a touch…

Young Mungo Douglas Stuart (Picador, £16.99) The Candy House Jennifer Egan (Corsair, £20) Winter Love Han Suyin (McNally Editions, £13.50) LAST MONTH I WROTE ABOUT the risk to new writers of growing up in public. Douglas Stuart, whose first novel Shuggie Bain won the Booker Prize in 2020, has found a neat way of minimising this: by the time Shuggie won, he had already written his second novel, and so the pressure of following a bestselling prize-winner — it sold half a million copies in its first six months — is, if not eradicated, at least kicked into the long grass. When I interviewed Stuart after his Booker win, his second novel was to be called Loch Awe. Its retitling to Young Mungo may be an attempt to make…

I KNEW VALERY GERGIEV as a creature of the night. While others crashed out, he talked until dawn. Once, in Rotterdam, we listened to a pair of young pianists he had flown over to play the four-hand version of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Afterwards, with window panes still rattling, he visited the two kids in their green room, then sat down and played the whole thing again, two-handed from memory on a backstage upright. We went on to dinner with a bottle of vodka, then for a walk around town while he tried to convince me that Prokofiev was more “important” than the overpraised Stravinsky. Much of his argument was undigested Soviet propaganda — that Prokofiev wrote his best work after returning to Russia in the mid-1930s while his rival…

THE ARRIVAL OF THE annual Art Basel report on the global art market is of particular interest this year since it offers an overview of the relationship between money and art in 2021; that is, both during Covid restrictions and as they began to ease. And what the new report demonstrates above all is the resilience of art as an asset — but also, secondary perhaps, as food for the soul. In 2021, sales by dealers and auctioneers not only recovered all the ground lost to the pandemic but surpassed the last pre-Covid year, 2019. The market surged to more than $65 billion, up some 30 per cent from 2020 to reach the third-highest sum since 2009 as would-be buyers with itchy fingers who had accrued money during the restrictions…

THE FIRST QUESTION facing every spy novelist is whether the protagonist is an expert or everyman. James Bond — and his successors — are experts: trained intelligence officers who can handle a gun, groom a potential asset, conduct and evade surveillance. An everyman protagonist is harder to write but allows for more character development as he or she responds to pressure, obstacles and crises. Eric Ambler’s novels, such as his classic The Mask of Dimitrios, often feature an everyday person rapidly sucked into a deadly vortex of intrigue and betrayal. Among Mick Herron’s many literary achievements is the creation of a new archetype: the inexpert expert, aka the Slow Horses. The Slow Horses are MI5’s internal exiles: the failures and screw-ups who have been exiled to Slough House, a dreary…

MY KNOWLEDGE OF 1970s footballers is limited. But there is one — being the editor of Shooting Times — with whom I feel a sort of connection. About four years ago, I was in the office, digging through the archives, when I came upon a grainy photograph of Jack Charlton reading the magazine to his three children. As well as being a hard-tackling centre-half for “The Peacocks”, he appeared in two world cups, scored 35 goals in internationals, and was known as “the dirty big giraffe”, among Liverpool fans. When Charlton died, in 2020, his family said that for all he enjoyed football, fishing always meant more to him. Charlton was involved in field sports all his life and if you were to ask the average countryman about his greatest…

IT STARTED WITH MY FATHER, who would deposit me in the library on Saturday mornings so he could go and put his bets on. I would then walk to Mecca Bookmakers and wait for him outside. (I was once asked as a tie-breaker in a kids’ general knowledge quiz, “Where is Mecca?” My answer, Northwood Hills, was met with a glare). We would discuss the form, the jockeys, the ground. He’d take me with him to Windsor, Ascot, Newbury, Newmarket and so many other courses. I was captivated. Nothing else was as exciting. Fifty years on, I am as in love with it as I was back then when Lester Piggott was known as a jockey, rather than a criminal, and a woman had yet to ride in the Grand…

IN HIS REVIEW OF The Beatles (aka “The White Album”) published in the Observer in October 1968, the filmmaker Tony Palmer hailed Lennon and McCartney as “the greatest songwriters since Schubert”. The White Album, he insisted, “should surely see the last vestiges of cultural snobbery and bourgeois prejudice swept away in a deluge of joyful music making”. Palmer was not the first, nor will he be the last, commentator to abandon critical faculties in order to claim a place on the “right side of history”. The previous year Kenneth Tynan declared the release of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band a “decisive moment in the history of western civilisation”. There are those who still cling to that claim and, as the gushing response to Peter Jackson’s Get Back, an eight-hour film…

A WALK AWAY FROM THE COTSWOLD town of Stow-on-the-Wold, site of the final battle of the first Civil War, lies the village of Longborough. Blink and you’ll miss it. Though it has been settled for 5,000 years, its mark on cultural life is a recent one, made possible by the conversion of a chicken barn into an unlikely opera house. It was the dream, realised in 1998, of Lizzie and Martin Graham. They got the idea while watching an opera on television. Its 500 seats come from the refurbished Covent Garden. The building’s façade — a literal and metaphorical one, for the auditorium remains rather basic — is topped by statuettes of a trinity of composers. The beloved figures of Verdi and Mozart on either side, with Wagner, no one’s idea of…

IF THE PRIME MINISTER decides to go to the country early, the legislative programme to be announced on 10 May will be the last before the general election. Already, we are told, Boris Johnson is throwing out proposals that he does not regard as vote-winners — including further restrictions on judicial review. What legal reforms may find their way into the Queen’s Speech? The most far-reaching must be legislation to counter state threats. These include overt or covert action by foreign governments that seeks to undermine the interests of the UK but fall short of armed conflict. We used to call this hostile state activity until the ambiguity was noticed; it meant hostile activity by any state and not, as was assumed, any activity by a hostile state. If this…

RISHI SUNAK MAY SEEM to be Chancellor at a difficult time, dealing with the challenges of Covid-19 and the implications of the Ukraine invasion. But he is a fortunate chancellor in a crucial, if highly disreputable, respect. The Bank of England has warned that consumer inflation may be in double digits by the end of the year. As a result, every monthly announcement of the main price indices enacts a large change in the tax take. The increases in the consumer price index (and the retail prices index) are therefore more important to the sustainability of the public finances than the tax increases announced in the recent Spring Statement. How is Rishi Sunak a lucky chancellor? The answers are two-fold. First, inflation is proceeding at such a rapid pace that…

Scientists and intellectuals have long struggled to determine what a ‘woman’ might be. This mysterious concept has evaded the sharpest of minds through human history. It is very much the holy grail of metaphysics, a will-o’-the-wisp dancing on the ever-receding horizon of knowledge. So when Boris Johnson claims he knows what a ‘woman’ is, and that they ought to have ‘single-sex spaces’ and their own categories in sports, we should treat his comments with the derision they deserve. When Keir Starmer was asked if a woman could have a penis during an interview by Nick Ferrari on LBC, the Labour leader’s response was far more incisive and dignified: ‘Uh, Nick, I’m not, er, I, I don’t think we can conduct this debate with, you know, I get this, uh.’ This…

I FIRST HEARD OF THE INDIVISIBLE connection between Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Glenn Gould when I was around 16. It was that time in high school when people began to separate themselves by tribe: the sporty types (constantly eating), the theatre crowd (constantly screaming), the artists (constantly painting each fingernail a different colour), and so on. A member of the tribe that skipped class to read Patti Smith and Sylvia Plath over cups of burnt coffee scoffed at my copy of Trevor Pinnock’s recording of the variations and pronounced that the right recording was by someone named Glenn Gould. How could I not know this? There have been many reprises of this scenario. I have no recollection in this period of ever sitting down to closely listen to Gould’s recordings…

ONE PARALLEL BETWEEN the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the conduct of the Second World War that has hitherto escaped notice concerns the relationship between the dictator and his generals. Just as the German General Staff obeyed Hitler’s orders, even when they knew him to be leading them not only to defeat but to depravity, so the Russian high command has capitulated to Putin despite realising that his war was not only a mistake but a crime. In the Britain of the Sixties, a certain mystique still attached to the generals of the Third Reich. In their stylish uniforms and their gleaming jackboots, they had swaggered. Only two, Keitel and Jodl, were executed at Nuremberg; the rest got away with murder. Even some of those who were convicted of war crimes had…

AS A SHAKESPEARE scholar, Emma Smith is known for her work on the First Folio, a newly-discovered copy of which she authenticated in 2016. But it was with This is Shakespeare (2019) that she reached a wider readership, delighting non-specialists with her subtle yet no-nonsense insights into the plays. That book was based on a series of podcast lectures, its oral origins traceable in the lively accessibility of its literary voice. Her talent for communicating complex material in conversational, occasionally irreverent, prose, is apparent in Portable Magic, which transforms the dusty scholarly discipline of bibliography into a world of wonders. Despite the subtitle, this is not a conventional history in the sense of a chronological narrative. Instead, it is a series of freewheeling essays, based on case studies, in which…

The Greatest Raid: St Nazaire, 1942: The Heroic Story of Operation Chariot Giles Whittell (Viking, £20) OPERATION CHARIOT, the Raid on St Nazaire, has long been known as “The Greatest Raid of All”. The audacity of the plan, the lethal danger of the operation, the inadequacy of the equipment provided, the astonishing courage of the participants and the spectacular success of its primary object have ensured its place in the annals of British martial heroism. In the early hours of 28 March 1942, a force of 623 commandos and naval personnel stole up the Loire estuary to attack the port of St Nazaire. Leading the force was HMS Campbeltown, a superannuated destroyer acquired from the Americans, which had been converted into a floating bomb by the addition of four tons…

CIRCUS OF DREAMS (Constable, £25), John Walsh’s elegant and entertaining memoir of London literary life in the late 1980s and early 1990s, turns a bit less elegant and entertaining in its final stretch. Here Mr Walsh files a traditional Grub Street veteran’s lament about how awful all the young people are these days, how terribly the Booker Prize has degenerated and how negligible would be the welcome for any old-style publishing maverick who applied for a job in the industry in 2022. Such laments rarely do any good. And yet this considerable harangue contains one highly arresting sentence. This is the observation that Sally Rooney, for all the bouquets that have descended on her sober Hibernian head, has, in her best-selling and TV-adapted Normal People, really only produced a superior…

AS EVERYONE KNOWS, opera’s purpose is to convey — at irksome length — unwanted data about things like sex-worker healthcare in nineteenth-century Paris, the untaxing dilemmas of pre-Revolutionary grandees (boring afternoon: hmm, shoot stuff, or shag/whip the servants), pre-modern wars between shithole countries, and a bunch of Italians bickering probably about whether their dough-based food has been undercooked in the manner indicated. We should be grateful that directors have troubled themselves to introduce elements of relevancy. Taking pity on the benighted masses who approach on their knees, crying “Master, sensei, guru, what should we think?”, they bestow their wisdom, gleaned from a lifetime’s studying the mystic scriptures of the Guardian and the London Review of Books. So, at long last, we can see a piece like LeoŠ Janácˇek’s otherwise pointless…

PLAYS ABOUT RACIAL INJUSTICE, the running-sore legacy of slavery and suitable forms of atonement for the sins of forefathers are a dime a dozen right now. Both Broadway and the West End are sensitive to the accusation that they largely fielded white plays for white audiences and are seeking to redress the balance. The result can turn out to be less outstanding drama than a dutiful didacticism. That, at least, is not a charge that can be levelled at To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee’s 1960 novel about a court case in a small town in Alabama in the 1930s which pits the local lawyer, Atticus Finch, first against a white rapist framing a black man for a crime and, as the story unfolds, against a justice system which is…

EASY LISTENING is less easy to pull off than we sometimes imagine. A presenter who sounds homely may also be banal. One who lapses into occasional quirkiness, for comic relief, can appear contrived. To hold the listener’s attention for two hours or longer by being natural, or seeming to be, is a rare gift, and those touched by it are becoming rarer. There can’t be much doubt that the “light” radio performer who made it sound easiest was Terry Wogan, whose breakfast show on Radio 2 ran, in its second incarnation, from 1993 to 2009, attracting eight million listeners. He had first taken the breakfast host’s chair in April 1972 before he went off in 1984 to concentrate on telly but, though he enjoyed success on the box, it was…

IS COMFORT IN THE country still naff? Once upon a time the rules were simple: if the house was freezing, the sofa covered in dog hair and dinner was a mouthful of shot nestling in rotten pheasant breast followed by a Pearce Duff’s “shape”, you could rest assured if not content that you were staying somewhere smart. If the place was “blissfully comfortable with chandeliers in the loo” (in the words of no less a judge than Jilly Cooper’s mother), your hosts were irredeemably nouveau riche. Posh interiors were never decorated, they evolved slowly into an inimitable hodgepodge of Georgian silver, Victorian armchairs and G Plan sofas, walls softly dappled with dark patches where Granny had flogged off the Romney, frayed silk curtains, everything faded and mellowed by time. Then…

I have always enjoyed a liquid Lent. And although each year I forgo a fridgeful of foodstuffs — variously bread, cheese, potatoes, red meat, white meat and sundry others — with blithe ease, I take care about the fluids. For though one must fast, one must leave some liquors on which to feast. One year I gave up everything except beer — and put on half a stone. Another year, remembering that old and surely bogus story about the Russian refugee from the Reds who declared, “between the revolution and the firing squad there is always time for another magnum of champagne”, I drank only bubbles. Such elan might have appealed to émigrés from the Bolsheviks but it held less attraction for my bank manager, and I never did it…

M’LEARNED FRIEND, writer, wit and raconteur, Harry Mount, boasts several axioms regarding matters sartorial. Chief among these is that his clothes should be “retired” to the family holiday home in Wales. Cue Haz strolling about Pembroke with a raffish, vagabond air reminiscent of Zool ander’s “Derelicte” collection, itself a tribute to “Haute Homeless”, Galliano’s Spring/Summer 2000 couture creations for Dior, complete with tin cups, J&B bottles and consumptive slap. The Mountian motto that concerns us here is that which can be applied to party dressing. Namely, that nothing good can come of a a black tie event, the scent of doom lying heavy in the air. He’s right, of course. But, also: FFS. We’ve had — what? — two, three, ten years of lockdown sweatpantery, meaning the desire to dress…

SIR RICHARD TURNBULL, the last governor of Tanganyika, once assured Denis Healey that “when the British Empire finally sinks beneath the waves of history, it will leave behind it only two monuments: one is the game of Association Football (above), the other is the expression ‘Fuck off’”. This was unnecessarily pessimistic. The British Empire bequeathed to our former colonies not only the English language, the rule of law and parliamentary democracy, but many sports beyond football. Indians love cricket, South Africans love rugby, and this summer 43 countries will send their finest to Birmingham to compete in the Commonwealth Games. But among Britain’s former colonies lies an anomaly: the UNITED STATES. For despite their status as participants in the first international cricket match in which the Yanks lost to Her…

PLOTLAND DEVELOPMENTS exist in many forms: virtuously green, asbestos rich, “sustainably” recycled, joyously untutored, madly ad hoc, inventive (former rolling stock, often from Cohens of Kettering, gliders that no longer fly, boats that no longer float). Many of the earliest were converted from chicken huts — which prompted W H Colt to move into bodge-it-yourself timber houses. They are self-expressive, optimistic in the face of sometimes desperate poverty. They exist in many places: the coast near Grimsby, on the plain near Andover, the Gower peninsular, Sheppey, in the Thames valley, at Carbeth north of Glasgow, at Jaywick and all over south Essex, for many years represented by Bernard Braine, a Tory of a type that no longer exists. He quite properly said: “The wholesale demolition of substandard dwellings cannot be…

Evening Vespas LIVING YOUR BEST LIFE hadn’t been invented when I last spent time in Florence but being twenty-one and having Via delle Belle Donne as my address is probably the closest I’ll ever get. Nominally studying history of art at the British Institute, I seem to remember my main preoccupations being how to dismount elegantly from sitting sidesaddle on a Vespa in a mini skirt and which intense public schoolboy doing oil painting at the Charles Cecil school I liked that week. The Charles Cecil boys are still in evidence and seeing my daughter off for a night on the razzle at my old haunt of Campo Santo Spirito might have left me a bit wistful; in fact, I was grateful that these days scooter helmets are compulsory and that…

THE UKRAINIAN FLAG AND ITS COLOURS are proliferating across the British landscape, virtual and real. They are to be seen fluttering above town halls, on people’s social media pages, at football grounds, illuminating buildings, while outside the gates of a fishmongers in Shoreham a massive shrimp has been repainted blue and yellow, its pincers now holding a Molotov (prawn!) cocktail. Accompanying such visual displays has been an outpouring of fundraising efforts, a generosity of spirit washing across the nation. Simultaneously, businesses, universities, local and district councils are actively severing ties with Russia, often far beyond the requirements of official sanctions. “We stand with Ukraine,” say the banners. Indeed, there is a pervasive sense in which — at least for the moment — we are all Ukrainians now. Solidarity and sympathy…

IN THE MORNING AFTER THE Tories’ 2017 election debacle, when Theresa May’s ambitions for Blair-style Commons dominance had crumbled into a lost majority, the chief whip, Gavin Williamson, turned to his private secretary and asked, “Do you think we could do a Walter Harrison?” Both men had seen This House, James Graham’s play about the minority Labour governments of the ‘70s and the extreme manoeuvring of deputy chief whip Harrison which kept them in office. The man he asked, Sir Roy Stone, nodded slowly and replied, “I suppose we can. In fact we’re going to have to.” Sir Roy was a parliamentary oracle. Virtually invisible outside the confines of the Government Whips ‘Office, he was one of the most important figures in Westminster; the consummate professional whose whispered advice to…

THINK HARD, AND YOU MAY REMEMBER a time when a symphony orchestra was a collection of musical instruments rather than an instrument of social policy. It was not that long ago, around the turn of the century, when concert halls would roll out a forthcoming season of symphonic cycles and new commissions, a programme shaped by the taste and proclivities of a music director, the likes and abilities of the musicians and a reasoned assessment of what might make the box office click. No longer. London’s Southbank Centre’s season brochure buries its two resident symphony orchestras beneath the “exciting” addition of new ensembles — the “immersive” Paraorchestra, a worthy group of musicians with disabilities, and Chineke!, an orchestra of ethnic minority musicians. The release goes on to promise “genre-blurring pioneers…

IN SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE, Queen Elizabeth I sets a wager on whether it is possible for the essence of true love to be portrayed in a play. The film’s answer is Romeo and Juliet, and the odious Earl of Wessex, played by a bearded Colin Firth, has to pay up. How would a similar question be resolved in musical terms? A plausible view is that if you had to use the language of music to explain what mature love feels like to a visitor from a distant planet, you could do no better than direct him to Robert Schumann. His music perhaps conveys a more explicit and intimate expression of the state of being in love than that of any other composer. To make this unlikely encounter with an aesthetically…

‘‘JOY”, “AMAZING”, “HAPPINESS”, “wholesome”, “freedom”, “light at the end of the tunnel”, “greatest day of my life”, “euphoria” and “bliss of fairy dust” — what do these words describe? The answer is “top surgery” in a new Snapchat video called “What is Top Surgery Like For Trans Guys”, created by Pink News. If you don’t know what that is, according to the video it is “a procedure that trans men and trans masculine people can choose to have, where breast tissue is removed and the chest is sculpted to have a more masculine appearance”. Put simply, it is a bilateral mastectomy, given to women as a treatment for gender dysphoria. The video paints an uncritical picture of top surgery, as you might expect from the first episode of a series entitled…

‘‘IT IS LACK OF CONFIDENCE, more than anything else, that kills a civilisation,” suggested Kenneth Clark at the conclusion of his 13-part television series, Civilisation, in 1969, “We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.” Events at the time led him to suggest that, as unlikely as it seemed, European civilisation could fall to the barbarians as it had after the fall of Rome when “we got through by the skin of our teeth”. He quoted W.B. Yeats for back-up. It wasn’t that the centre could not hold, it was that there was no longer a centre. Being a self-proclaimed “stick-in-the-mud”, Clark was an odd choice to front the BBC’s ambitious (shot in 130 locations across 11 countries) and expensive (£130,000) project in a season of…

Let’s Do It: the Birth of Pop Bob Stanley (Faber, £25) MIDWAY THROUGH Ian McEwan’s novel On Chesil Beach there is a scene in which the central couple argue about music. Florence, the violinist in a string quartet, can’t stand the racket made by Edward’s rock group. It’s the drumming that really gets her: “the tunes were so elementary, mostly in simple four-four time, [so] why this relentless thumping and crashing and clattering to keep time?”. At which point he kisses her and tells her she’s “the squarest person in all of Western civilisation”. Not while Bob Stanley’s alive she ain’t. Though he is himself a member of a beat combo (St Etienne), and though he has already written a history of modern pop that covers everything from Bill Haley…

Nine Quarters of Jerusalem: A New Biography of the Old City Matthew Teller (Profile Books, £16.99) CLOSE TO THE SECOND STATION of the Cross, a juice-seller’s business is booming from passing tourists. The owner is 41 and had escaped Jerusalem to go travelling for many years after the intifada rebellions of his childhood. As middle age approached, however, he was drawn back. Why? “I love it, man. I love my home,” he says simply. Trade is brisk, too, for the couple who run a hummus shop near the fifth station. It’s the same for the maker of halawa (a sweet sesame confectionery) by the seventh station and the bookseller by station eight. Life goes on without complication along Jesus’s route to crucifixion. Or so it might seem. Beneath the surface…

IN BAGHDAD, SHORTLY AFTER the 2003 war, I visited the place which the city’s Jews had used as their community centre and school. All was quiet in the street as we approached; only a slight movement in a window opposite showed that the neighbours were watching. Inside, dust awaited us and the feel of a place hurriedly abandoned. From a great pile of books I tried to extract one. The others slid and crashed into an antique typewriter. The book, a schoolbook introduction to Hebrew for Arabic speakers, had been printed in the 1950s. It was in 1941 that a pogrom in Baghdad sparked a first major wave of Jewish emigration. In 1951 Israel airlifted thousands of Jews in an operation named after Ezra and Nehemiah, who famously returned to…

HOW CAN YOU EXPLAIN Jimmy Savile to someone who wasn’t there? Watching the Netflix documentary about him with my 15-year-old daughter, I felt a lot of things: queasy, appalled, furious. But most of all I felt embarrassed. Look at this grotesque, with his butchered fringe and his frazzled peroxide bob. Not even handsome. Not even charming. An assemblage of grating tics and obvious depravity. On footage of a 1975 discussion show about his autobiography (called Love is an Uphill Thing, which is, again, obviously revolting), a female panellist calls him out on the lack of personality in the book. What are you really like, she asks him. What are you doing this evening, he answers. She tells him off for deflecting, but in retrospect, deflection isn’t the right word. This…

THIS MONTH I LEARNED a new acronym. mort stands for “middle-of-the-road tearjerker”. coda — another acronym, standing for “child of deaf adults” — is the title of the film that won the Oscar for Best Picture. It is supposedly a mort. Leaving aside its particular merits, I feel moved to ponder those tearjerkers that have produced such a reaction in me over the years. A 1950 Mass-Observation panel of 318 respondents showed that women wept more at the movies than men and that those men who cried were often embarrassed at the fact. “I never cry at the pictures,” said one 22-year-old bank clerk. “It’s only the Welsh that do that — and a lot of silly women.” Men in 1950 tended to avoid those films they suspected might “unman”…

IT IS DEPRESSING how much bad architecture there is in London: so many cheapskate, shoddy commercial buildings expected to make a quick buck for property developers and which have a life span of only 25 years. Of course, there are developers who make efforts to construct high quality buildings. But there is a problem in that they think of each building in isolation, not as part of a wider urban environment; they tend to design for those who are going to occupy the offices, not for those who have to look at the buildings from outside. As a result, the City of London has become gimcrack, looking more like Singapore and Hong Kong than the fine city it once was. As an antidote, I took myself off to look at…

YOU CAN NEVER REALLY know someone until you’ve gardened with them. That’s what I’ve realised now I’m sharing an allotment with my mother. We’re the best of friends ordinarily, yet over the past few months, as we’ve dug and mulched and ordered far too many seeds, any emerging green shoots have had to weather some seriously frosty silences. Now, with our first joint growing season gathering pace, I’m wondering whether to expect a breakaway region up near the compost bin. My mum surrendered her own plot after Covid lockdowns and a broken wrist made tending a difficult patch impossible. Thick tree roots marked one end, irrepressible brambles the other; in between lay heavy clay soil still recovering from damage caused by a pair of Tamworth pigs that lived there before…

SO IT HAPPENED — the unsolicited school camping trip. I say unsolicited, but that’s not really the right word. To recap, this was an entirely unnecessary, utterly non-compulsory trip instigated by the cool kids' parents at Hector’s school. One of the dads came up with it, and created a separate parents' WhatsApp group to invite a select group of us on said trip. And suddenly it went from one man’s terrible idea, to "a thing" that was indeed happening. I said no to start with, even though I could feel the elite nature of the whole thing swaying me. As in, if we said no, or pretended to be busy, would Hector be excluded from the "right" clique for the rest of his school career — potentially adult life? The…

A CENTURY AGO THIS SPRING, an Oxford undergraduate got drunk for the first time. After downing three quarters of a bottle of Madeira, a glass of port and two tumblers of cider, he stumbled into Hertford’s Old Quad and decided to show off by reciting a favourite poem. There was just one problem: the young Evelyn Waugh found he only knew the first line. “There’s a breathless hush in the Close tonight,” he solemnly began, followed, perhaps, by a breathless hush from his friends, broken by the odd fetid hiccup, as he struggled to remember what came next. Sir Henry Newbolt’s Vitai Lampada, written 30 years earlier, compares the tension in a school cricket match to the sturdiness required in colonial warfare. “Ten to make and the match to win,”…