Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2022 i The Critic

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“Go on there, boy, eat up now.” Bozza is putting some brown sludge in my bowl, where he usually puts the steak that Lady JCB’s butler brings round. It doesn’t smell very nice. “Now look, old son, it says here that top breeders recommend it,” he tells me, looking at the tin. “And so do I. Delicious reclaimed meat-type foodstuffs. Have a bit.” I give it another sniff, and turn back to Bozza. He looks tired. “You think you’ve got it bad,” he tells me. “Everyone’s cutting us off. The JCBs have stopped the food. They say I’m too hot to help at the moment. “The kids in the press office aren’t filling the wine suitcase any more, because they’re spending all their money on fines or something. And even…

According to the DAILY MIRROR, a man called Sable Thomas, aged 43, “HAS BEEN SENTENCED TO LIFE IN PRISON AFTER KILLING HIS FRIEND ANTHONY ROOKS.” The Independent reported that “THOMAS WAS JAILED FOR LIFE ON FRIDAY AFTER HE HAD PREVIOUSLY ADMITTED MANSLAUGHTER BY VIRTUE OF DIMINISHED RESPONSIBILITY AT WOOD GREEN CROWN COURT.” The casual reader might suppose that this means that Thomas will spend the rest of his life in prison. Nothing could be further from the truth. In all probability, he will be out in eight years. The “mental health issues” that allowed him to plead guilty to manslaughter rather than to murder will by then have resolved. True, with a so-called life sentence he might be recalled to prison at any time as long as he lives, but…

“Not all the water in the rough rude sea Can wash the balm from the anointed King.” RICHARD II. Not the best king to model the indelibility of kingship, you might think. But Shakespeare uses this line to frame not only his play about the doomed child king, but the dynasty of usurpers that followed him and the marks left — on their reputations and souls — by Henry IV’s washing off the balm from the anointed Richard II. In a funny way, we’re exploring the issue ourselves right now, albeit in a much less Wars of the Roses way. The State Opening of Parliament last month saw three narratives promulgated at the same time by very different people, all of which (deliberately or not) betray a fundamental lack of…

AT THE OXFORD BOOK FAIR IN APRIL, the presence of a hundred exhibitors from all over Britain suggested that Covid had not killed off the antiquarian book trade. But those who buy antiquarian books are not necessarily interested in reading, any more than those who buy hundreds of cases of rare wines are interested in drinking. The second-hand market — for immediate consumption rather than laying down — is a different matter, as Oxford itself sadly demonstrates. In the 1970s, Blackwell’s second-hand department occupied the whole of the top floor. By 2000, it occupied most of the third floor. Now it shivers forlornly in a few feet of the first floor. Will Waterstones, Blackwell’s new owners, bother to keep it? One second-hand bookshop after another has closed in Oxford, leaving…

HEADLINES ARE OF course intended to cause groans over the cornflakes. But some are more groan-worthy than others. A prize should be awarded to the Daily Telegraph. Recently the main story on its front page was heralded with the words, “Sunak faces Cabinet pressure to cut tax: Chancellor urged to tackle cost of living crisis by easing financial burden on public”. Here is economic illiteracy of an extreme form. A nation’s ability to consume depends on its ability to produce. Unless politicians can increase that ability to produce, they cannot affect the total amount of potential consumption. This is an obvious and certain fact of life and should hardly need to be stated. Nevertheless, it appears that some members of the present Cabinet do not accept it. The point can…

WHEN YUKIO MISHIMA’S novel Beautiful Star was published in 1962, it was a complete flop. Although a few critics made polite noises out of respect for Mishima’s reputation as Japan’s foremost man of letters, most panned it. Fewer than 20,000 copies were sold; and his American publishers turned down the translation rights. It is easy to see why. Unlike his earlier works, which had made a virtue of realism, Beautiful Star seems little more than a stilted piece of science fiction. Its protagonists, the Ōsugi, are a prosperous, if eccentric, family from a provincial town, who have realised that they are extra-terrestrials. Each comes from a different planet: Jūichirō, the father, from Mars; his wife from Jupiter; their daughter from Venus; and their son from Mercury. As aliens go, they are…

THE AMERICAN FEMINIST Betty Friedan identified what she called the “problem without a name”, in The Feminine Mystique (1963). In our own era, China has also become defined as such a problem for the West — but as in Friedan’s era, the fact that it’s not easy to specify doesn’t mean it isn’t there. The heart of the issue is two radically different viewpoints from the world’s two superpowers. In 2012, on a visit to Mexico, Xi Jinping, as the new leader of China, declared: “Some foreigners, with full bellies and nothing better to do, engage in finger-pointing at us.” He added: “First, China does not export revolution; second, it does not export famine and poverty; and third, it does not mess around with you. So what else is there to…

STATE-OF-THE-NATION BOOKS can often be unsatisfactorily abstract as their writers delve into shifting identities and evolving social trends, especially when looking back on Britain, and England, since 1945. Jason Cowley, editor of the New Statesman and an important voice of the moderate left, sidesteps the problem by getting under the skin of a series of specific events framed as “stories of modern England” — the Chinese cockle-pickers who drowned in Morecambe Bay, the repatriation of dead British soldiers through the Wiltshire town of Wootton Bassett, the Islamophobic attack in Finsbury Park, and more. The excavation of these events is skilfully handled, but Cowley largely eschews “speaking for England” and makes only a vague attempt to pull strands together and come to any conclusion about the political direction of England and Englishness.…

IF THE MURDER OF MPS ISN’T, Jo Cox-style, simply straightforwardly wrong, then this is the book for you. If histories replete with Peaky Blinders plot details aren’t your thing, then it is not. Great Hatred, an account of the murder of Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson MP, winning wartime head of the Great War army and sometime confidant of Lloyd George, sits in curious succession to unfailingly-poor-to-markedly-bad accounts of the life and death of a man who became the youngest field marshal since Wellington. This, by some distance, is the worst of them. And their number includes The Lost Dictator, a deranged effort to claim we lost our very own Führer when Wilson was shot on the steps of his Belgravia home. It is not possible for me to get over…

WHEN THE SECRET Author first wandered impressionably along Grub Street, the world was full of literary groupings. He was too young to remember the Movement (early 1950s) or the Angry Young Men (later 1950s), and the Sixties Experimentalists (Ann Quin, Alan Burns, B.S. Johnson) which by this time rated only the odd disapproving footnote in quasi-academic symposia. On the other hand, he is old enough to recall the Dirty Realists, coaxed into life by a 1983 Granta anthology, and to smile over the memory of the New Puritans, who advertised a somewhat elusive brand of “minimalism” and “authenticity” and after producing a solitary anthology of their work (All Hail the New Puritans, edited by Nicholas Blincoe and Matt Thorne, 2000) were pretty much never heard of again. It should immediately…

It took a while, but a happy truth is gradually dawning on our summer opera companies. Reasons for hauling oneself to Glyndebourne (and its dog-and-pony ringers) have always been only tangentially connected to the witnessing of opera: viz. bitterly competitive picnicking, pricey snoozes, stress-testing a new mistress, social showboating of a niche kind, indulging the immemorial dream of an England populated solely by homosexuals and emotionally strangulated white people, the thrill of drunk-driving to beguile the weary road home, and so forth. So what’s new? Well, in the old days it used to be wall-to-wall Marriage of Figaro wherever you went. No longer! — they have finally realised that the specific show is of nugatory importance, now these joints have repositioned themselves as part of the ineffable new-look “season”, aimed…

JEZ BUTTERWORTH’S Jerusalem was first staged in 2009, in the acid reflux of the post-financial crash era and the hangover of the Blair era’s unfulfilled promise. Its themes of dysfunctional Englishness twirl around the maypole of its protagonist, Johnny “Rooster” Byron, who channels mysticism, bloody-mindedness, artfulness and delusion across a riveting three hours at London’s Apollo Theatre. Byron (Mark Rylance) resides in easeful squalor in an old Airstream caravan in the woods outside the village of Flintock in west Wiltshire, dealing “whizz” (amphetamines) and on the verge of eviction by clipboard-wielders at Kennet and Avon council. After being officiously “informed” of his imminent ousting, the response blares back through the loudspeaker on top of the caravan: “This is Rooster Byron’s dog, Shep, informing Kennet and Avon council to go fuck…

WHAT MAKES AN IDEAL radio voice? The golden rule, to borrow from Bernard Shaw, witty chap, is there are no golden rules. Voices are as individual as thumbprints. A distinctive quality that pleases some listeners may irritate others. Some voices make us bristle; others we receive naturally, like an old friend. Benny Green (below, top), that master of jazz and the popular song, spoke in the unvarnished tones of the Londoner he was, without trying to lay it on, as so many “mockney” characters do today. Anthony Clare (below, bottom), the psychiatrist who persuaded guests to reveal more about themselves than they might have intended to say, had the pleasing cadences of an educated Irishman; one of the most agreeable sounds to a British ear. Green and Clare, and others…

JUNE IS BUSTIN’ OUT all over. Parties take to the open air. While loyal Englishwomen plan platinum-jubilee street-beanos, Americans’ fancy turns to thoughts of a real nice clambake. Rodgers and Hammerstein’s picture of industrialising New England was authentic: women undertook remunerative work; men in consequence wallowed in diminished responsibility and expanded leisure. Carousel’s clambake menu, however, was unconvincingly long: codfish chowder with bits of salt pork, then roasted lobsters, before the clams arrived, “steamed under rockweed”. It sounds “real nice”, especially set to Rodgers’s music; but a clambake, which is one of Native Americans’ few contributions to gastronomy, corre sponds only to the last course of the feast celebrated in the musical. It’s properly cooked in a pit, over stones hot from driftwood embers, with clams strewn between layers of…

IS THERE ANYTHING MORE magical than digging up homegrown new potatoes? Yes, the gluttonous gardener will respond: the first bite of creamy sweetness when you serve them up with nothing more than a curl of salty butter and a scattering of fresh herbs. Allotments represent all manner of things to those who labour in them, from escape hatch to therapist’s couch, but for me our plot is first and foremost a larder, and June is the month that its shelves start refilling. After autumn’s digging and mulching, and spring’s weeding and feeding, the earth is ready to give back once more. It begins with those first earlies. Ours started out carefully nestled in egg boxes, eye up, by my daughter. We sent them to chit in my mum’s loft, from…

THE 1998 BELFAST AGREEMENT didn’t abolish the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. It affirmed, and in the south formally legiti-mised, its existence. Nor does the Agreement, which has been broken multiple times since its inception — not least by the continued existence of the IRA — and formally overwritten repeatedly, in any way say that there should not be an enhanced trade border between the United Kingdom and Republic in the event of the former leaving the EU. Why would it? Even while both countries were in the EU it was sufficient of a trade border — and an openly invigilated one — that the IRA and its proxies smuggled billions over it. Why then did Theresa May’s hapless government concede the self-serving EU and Irish…

WHAT ARE COURTS for? Top marks for saying that criminal courts determine guilt and apportion punishment. But I’ll have to mark you down if you said the civil and family courts are there to decide any disputes that litigants care to send them. That’s the last thing judges want. You can’t blame them. They were overwhelmed before the pandemic. Courts simply don’t have the resources to resolve more than a tiny handful of the financial disputes that arise between businesses and their customers; between the state and those claiming benefits; or between families who have gone their separate ways. So the judiciary looked around for alternative methods of dispute resolution — arbitration, conciliation and mediation, for example. Don’t dismiss these as “alternative”, insisted Sir Geoffrey Vos, the senior judge responsible…

Both the Reformation and woke take an academic idea and use it to de-legitimate the targeted power structure HAVE WE BEEN HERE BEFORE? Now, in 2022, with war abroad and woke at home, we contemplate the bitter dissolution of the hopes of the late twentieth century. Five hundred years ago, in 1521, Martin Luther’s appearance at the Diet of Worms signalled the death of the brave new world promised by the Year of Jubilee in 1500. There was even, in the Dutch scholar Erasmus, a Fukuyama-like figure who had formulated the hopes in their most extravagant form. Is history repeating? Or only alliterating? When Pope Alexander VI proclaimed the Year of Jubilee there was good reason to believe its promise. The city of Rome itself was arising from its medieval squalor.…

ON THE WALL OF MY STUDY hangs a dusty print of Mr Fox’s Hunt Breakfast on Christmas Day by the illustrator Harry Neilson. Mr Fox is a cheery old boy, dressed in hunting fig, with more than a hint of the Terry Thomas about him. His foxy guests sit alongside, similarly attired, dining off roast pheasant and boiled eggs. On the oak-panelled wall behind them, artworks can be seen featuring huntsmen run to ground or suffering crashing falls from their steeds. Hound masks are mounted on shields, their severed sterns hang like brushes beneath. We obviously know this is fantasy. Hounds kill foxes, foxes don’t kill hounds, nor for that matter do they dress in hunting pink and pass the port, even the most doe-eyed townsman knows this to be the…

THOSE WHO HAD THE PATIENCE for last month’s potted and highly subjective history of the modern performer’s reception of Bach’s Goldberg Variations would have been right to expect a sequel. Having stalked Glenn Gould, we must now grab the Canadian moose by his antlers. For the apostles of Gouldism, seeking unalloyed epic poetry masquerading as the skimmed milk of objective criticism, there are plenty of other writers to satisfy their urges. One might find it more interesting, if provocative, to consider how Gould’s interpretations of the Goldbergs fall within more or less established boundaries already set by other keyboard artists. Might his attitudes, often read by the literati as being deeply insightful, have more to do with the projection of relatively modern anxieties about the music and legacy of Bach?…

PROFESSOR ANDRZEJ NOWAK HAD JUST wrapped up a conference on the work of Solzhenitsyn, in December 1981, when martial law was declared. Overnight, Poland changed. A photograph captured a tank stationed outside a cinema. The film being advertised? Apocalypse Now. Communism was established in Poland, soon after the end of the Second World War, with tremendous savagery. War heroes liable to resist the dictatorial state — such as Witold Pilecki, who had volunteered to enter Auschwitz to gather information — were imprisoned, tortured, and executed. A thriving cultural scene was strangled in its cot. President Bolesław Bierut was a shameless bootlicker of Joseph Stalin. The regime softened in the middle of the 1950s under Władysław Gomułka, until a stagnant economy and political unrest inspired an anti-Semitic purge and the shooting of…

THE BRITISH INVOLVEMENT in the Middle East began with triumph and disaster. After a hard-fought landing at Aboukir Bay in March 1801, General Abercromby’s troops and their Ottoman allies took Alexandria and Cairo before joining forces with Indian sepoys who had landed at Suez and compelling a French army to surrender. One exuberant officer shinned up an Alexandrian obelisk, unfurled the Union Jack and ate a beefsteak. Six years later, British troops once more seized Alexandria to preempt another French invasion. This time the Ottomans made them unwelcome: their Albanian troops ambushed them outside Rosetta and beheaded their wounded captives in full view of the survivors. The British army scuttled out of Egypt and the Albanian commander Mehmet Ali sent a hundred severed heads to Cairo. Jonathan Parry’s magisterial history of…

IN OCTOBER 1926 Ernest Hemingway’s novel, The Sun Also Rises, with its portrait of the disillusionment, aimless drifting and drinking with little moral compass experienced by many of his age, was published in the U.S. to great acclaim. Those who had emerged alive from the Great War were, it seemed, shattered by what they had experienced and were damaged for years afterwards. This is the so called “lost generation”, or at any rate the section of it on which Anne de Courcy focuses, who spent much of the 1920s shrouded by the mists of alcohol and lurching from one relationship to another. At the book’s heart is a portrait of the beautiful and privileged Nancy Cunard, who embodies this relentless quest to find meaning in life. She was the only child…

I AM AT BEST AN ACCIDENTAL BIRDER: any notable avian sightings I’ve managed — Falklands steamerduck, albino jackdaw — have been by-products of expeditions with rod and line, so a book aimed at hardcore twitchers or one freighted with ornithological stats and Linnaean Latin is never going to be my cup of tea. Fortunately, Patrick Galbraith’s engaging debut volume will appeal to the layman as much as to the committed naturalist, being a quirkily enjoyable journey through a slightly netherworldly version of Britain, where certain species are now struggling to survive. By concentrating on ten different birds (from corncrake to capercaillie) In Search of One Last Song covers a fair bit of ground, both geographical and topical, and explores a wide spectrum of reasons for population decline. Numbers of the gorgeous…

MEDIEVAL CHRISTENDOM was filled with powerful women. A few governed realms in their own right, and many others ruled as regents for an underage son or a husband on campaign. They secured international alliances by arranging their children’s marriages. When their families went to war, they raised armies. Even day-to-day, queens shaped the world around them. They manoeuvred at court by exercising patronage and advising their husbands or sons. They supported building projects and patronised abbeys. They corresponded with rulers across Christendom, presenting their interests largely in their own words. Some even commissioned or authored histories to shape the narrative of their family’s rule. Meanwhile, their sexuality played a central part in politics. Queens were expected to bear (male) children. Those who failed could be cast aside, though the papacy tightened…

Love’s labourers lost OFFICIAL STRATFORD commemorations marking the Bard’s 458th birthday predictably proved a celebrity-obsessed affair — the sight of unseemly Australian networker Ms Lette trotting by being proof enough of regrettable additions to the guest list. I’d wager a greater time was had by those of us convening the same day at the nearby Dirty Duck, where many a more humble Royal Shakespeare Company player of yesteryear gathered for heartfelt toasts in his honour. A happy event only later tarnished by the fact our so-called “organiser” unforgivably misjudged the last train back to London, leaving half a dozen actors over 70 stranded for the night at Banbury Station. PUTTING THOSE questionable “celebs” to one side, congratulations should of course go to my old co-star Ken Branagh, who, along with…

SAD NEWS FROM ONE of my friends: she tried to get tickets for Lil Nas X at the O2, but the whole lot had gone within seconds. Apparently we’re not the only ones willing to pay out the big bucks for the chance to see him turn out his signature mix of rap, camp and raw pop joy. So we consoled ourselves by swapping favourite posts from his social media. High up in the list of favourites, there’s the Instagram post where he coyly posed with a highly convincing fake baby bump. “INSENSITIVE AND TRANSPHOBIC”, railed one Disgusted of the Internet, who later walked their take back after the privilege accountants determined they (white trans man) were in fact punching down on Lil Nas X (black gay man). Not that…

VICTORY DAY IN RUSSIA has traditionally been a day for watching old Soviet movies about the Great Patriotic War: classics such as Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes Are Flying (1957), which is available on DVD from Criterion; Vladimir Vengerov’s Baltic Skies (1961); Stanislav Rostotskiy’s The Dawns Here Are Quiet (1972); Leonid Bykov’s Only Old Men Are Going to Battle (1973), free to watch on YouTube; Sergey Bondarchuk’s They Fought for the Motherland (1975), also on YouTube; and Semyon Aranovich’s Torpedo Bombers (1983). The Dawns Here Are Quiet was remade as a TV series, starting in 2015, and you can watch that on YouTube as well. This year, Victory Day was overshadowed by Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine, which has taken a wrecking ball to Russia’s resurgent film industry. For the past…

HAVING WRITTEN IN THE LAST issue about new architecture in Oxford, I thought I should follow up with what has been happening in Cambridge to see if there are differences or parallels, not least because I am myself a graduate of the university and it did a great deal to make me dislike modern architecture from the experience of spending my first year as a student in Fello Atkinson’s so-called Cats & Kings development. It was horrible — anonymous student rooms whose doors had been painted either orange or mud green to cheer the students up and stop them, we were told, from committing suicide. And I spent my first week working in the grand panopticon reading room of Jim Stirling’s History Faculty building which made me much prefer working…

WHEN I WAS YOUNG, I was always told that talking to old people was of the utmost importance. At five years old, I was very clear that listening intently, while an octogenarian coughed their way through a long story, was an essential part of being a nice little boy. Often, though, it was boring as hell. There was my old Italian neighbour who always wanted to talk about the Pakistanis at the end of the street, and then, when I was slightly older, there was a man with foul breath and a ginger beard who would warn me, over and over, about the perils of standing up in a small boat. Much more recently, for complex reasons, I’ve found myself spending a great deal of time with an old lady…

MY FIRST PROPER JOB after college was as the very first graduate trainee at the Jockey Club, in the days before the arrivistes of the British Horseracing Authority took over racing. They’d decided they ought to move into the nineteenth century. Modern organisations had graduate chappies around, so they should get one, too. They meant well. I only lasted six months before the lure of working in politics took over. But I spent those six months in the Disciplinary Department, which managed to be both as fascinating as the name suggests and yet also fantastically tedious, a not-so-glorified filing clerk in the 1980s days before computers took over much of the grunt work. The one thing I took away which remains useful today (other than a determination never to let…

EVERY AUTHOR, WHETHER AN established titan or a quivering neophyte, has a golden expectation of what their first — or indeed subsequent — literary festival will be like. The location will be a charming cathedral city or beautiful rural town, and the audience will be packed. The organisers will be the very definition of charm, hospitality and clued-up experience, and the pre-event drinks in the green room will be a welcome lubricant for an hour of engaged chatter. The questions will be penetrating, but never impertinent; at best, they might even suggest new ideas for future books. The signing will be convivial, the number of books sold plentiful, and all fellow authors encountered will become lifelong friends. As the writer heads home, it is with the warm satisfaction of a…

SPORTSMEN DIDN’T USED TO GET KNIGHTED for their sweaty efforts. Unless you count Sir Francis Drake, the noted sixteenthcentury bowls player. Even W.G. Grace, the greatest Victorian athlete, never got the tap, though there were often calls for it. H.H. Asquith threatened to impose Grace on the House of Lords in 1911 if the Tories didn’t pass his Parliament Act, but Neville Cardus was right to remark that no honour could have burnished Grace’s stature. “He was an institution,” Cardus wrote. “As well might we think of Sir Albert Memorial or Sir National Debt.” Francis Lacey was the first to be knighted for services to sport, on retiring as secretary of MCC in 1926, and only a small handful more were awarded over the next 25 years to administrators, two…

THE 2004 ELECTION which returned Putin as führer for a second term was laughably bent. The pre-Botox model won in excess of 70 per cent of the votes. In the North Caucasus republics he was so loved that the figures were between 91 per cent and 98 per cent. In Moscow he was less adored and soon after the elections he let loose his OMON apes on a rally of non-violent protestors wearing Putin masks. The apes warm up for such events by butting bricks, hurling themselves through plate glass and biting rottweilers. Fixed polls, unchecked paramilitary forces, imprisonment without trial, torture, and the omnipresence of doddery, medal-heavy nostalgics for the maggot fingered, cockroach-moustached Stalin … it sounds rather like a police state. Which has not deterred the curdling cream…

How we lived then FOR THE PAST YEAR, I’ve been writing a book about women and fame in the noughties. It’s a compellingly strange decade to look back on. At the time, I was highly prone to paroting the utopianism of tech libertarians — the internet would make everything better, and everything it made worse would be better really, because online existence was the unavoidable future. One of the lines I remember being routinely trotted out was that the internet was no more to be feared than the printing press — which, in retrospect, does seem a remarkably sanguine take given the fact that the printing press ushered in about two centuries of religious turmoil, war in Europe, witch trials and heretic burnings. Still, I guess information wants to be…

ONE OF THE MOST INSIDIOUS ASPECTS of capitalism is the commodification of absolutely everything. Where capitalism is unregulated, there is nothing that can’t be sold and demand drives supply. This has long been understood on the Left. But what about the human body? In particular, female bodies? Is there a coherent defence to be made on the Left for the exploitative trade that ensnares the most vulnerable women and girls, and treats them as objects to be bought and sold? Elizabeth Nolan Brown, who I debated with in front of an audience in New York recently, seems to think so. She is a senior editor at Reason.com, and one of those who thinks that prostitution is a job like any other; in fact, the oldest “profession”. For me, it is the…

IT IS HARD TO OVERSTATE JUST HOW SINISTER the On-line Safety Bill is. The gravest threat to freedom of speech since section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986, which criminalised “insulting words and behaviour”? That scarcely does it justice. Let’s settle on the most serious threat since the proposal to force state regulation on the press in the aftermath of Levison. The Online Safety Bill, which has already had its second reading in the House of Commons, is intended to make the UK the safest place in the world to go online. If you think “safest” is code for “most heavily regulated” you’re not far wrong. The Bill will empower Ofcom, the broadcast regulator, to fine social media companies up to 10 per cent of their global turnover if they…

At a recent “comedy” show in Los Angeles, a brave audience member peacefully attacked comedian Dave Chappelle in self-defence against his violent jokes. Some reports have suggested that the assailant wasn’t a social justice activist at all, but a victim of mental illness. But the two are by no means mutually exclusive. Many of my best friends are clinically insane. Chappelle is well known for literally erasing the trans community through his hate jokes. This is why it is so important that he is censored. Besides, the fact that Chappelle — a black man — was assaulted on stage is irrefutable proof that his comedy incites violence against minority groups. This incident occurred only weeks after the actor Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Academy Awards for making problematic…

JUST NOW FENELLA is closeted in a private room at the Tate gallery alongside the marketing partner of messrs Tender & Mainprice, chartered accountants. Before them on the coffee table sit reproductions of three of the dreariest watercolours to which Alfred Sisley ever put his name. Although her vis-à-vis doesn’t know it, Fenella — brisk, elegantly got-up and in her early fifties — is about to move in for the kill. There is talk of “synergies”, of the procedural techniques (“innovation”, “clear thinking”, “salience”) that bind together a nineteenth-century painter and a gang of bean counters from Gutter Lane, EC2. Mr Heckinbotham, the marketing partner, is powerless to resist. The plan for next year’s exhibition — Sisley: Impressionist Titan — is hatched on the spot. This is not quite the…

THE JOKE OF JOHN CLEESE’S “Don’t mention the war” routine was aimed more at the British than the Germans. But nearly half a century after that episode of Fawlty Towers was first broadcast, the Germans are again thin-skinned about the war. Not that war: guilt about the country’s past has run its course. German millennials seem as insouciant about antisemitism, especially the left-wing kind, as they are anywhere else. No, it is Russia’s war on Ukraine that has provoked the most intense spasm of moral introspection since the Berlin Wall fell. Then, as now, the intelligentsia was out of step with what was happening in the streets. The Nobel laureate, Günter Grass, was only one of the writers who, posing as the conscience of the nation, warned against unification, even as…

VENICE THIS YEAR is a Cockaigne of art. Eighty countries participate in the 59th Art Biennale, with more than 30 official collateral events alongside major corresponding shows such as Anselm Kiefer at Palazzo Ducale, Marlene Dumas at Palazzo Grassi and Anish Kapoor at the Accademia. The white dust of the Giardini has mercifully settled now the scrum of press week has subsided and while it’s hard to know where to begin, there has never been a better time to appreciate one of the strongest assemblies of exhibits in years. “I say Sonia, you say Boyce!” The crowd at the British Pavilion party at the State Archives were somewhat bewildered by the DJ’s attempts to whoop them into a frenzy, but fractured, slightly recalcitrant voices were the ideal tribute to the…

LATE IN THE SUMMER OF 1641, with Charles I deep in dispute with his Parliament, alarming reports reached Westminster of Catholics amassing arms at Basing House in Hampshire. At this point in time, few expected civil war, but plenty feared an imminent Catholic plot. Recent reform to the Church had introduced lavish ceremonies which looked, to many eyes, like the trappings of Rome, and Charles himself was married to a Catholic. More to the point, England’s Catholics had done it before. Every year, people marked the anniversary of the Gunpowder Treason, which was already stuck in the national consciousness as the quintessential Popish rebellion: an armed coup plotted by dissident aristocrats gathering weapons on their great rural estates and planning subterfuge at the highest levels. Yet civil war came, and…

I T IS NOT EVERY DAY that the leader of one of our great political parties is accused of conspiracy to murder. Yet there has always been a tendency to treat the story of Jeremy Thorpe and his one-time lover Norman Scott as comedy. Not only was the murder plot hopelessly bungled, the walk-on characters in the drama had names which echoed the farces of Joe Orton: Mrs Florence Friendship, Det. Supt. Proven Sharp, Charles Negus-Fancy and Mrs Celia Kettle-Williams, forewoman of the Old Bailey jury that acquitted Thorpe. Beneath the comic façade, the story is a sinister and shocking one, of a man so obsessed with his political advancement that he was prepared to countenance murder. Yet Thorpe’s surprise acquittal in 1979 following the travesty of a trial created a…

IN 2008, CAROLINE ELKINS did a great service for students of empire. Together with several other eminent historians, she served as an “expert witness” in the four-year high court trial, brought against the British government by five elderly Kenyans over atrocities committed during the Mau Mau insurgency of the 1950s. As a result, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office uncovered a massive repository of colonial-era records spirited away from Kenya and elsewhere at decolonisation. Known as the “Migrated Archives”, these more than 10,000 files were afterwards made available to researchers and promise to transform new histories of the end of empire. This “discovery,” for Elkins (below right) and others, was as good as proof of the dark reality of Britain’s empire, revealing patterns of document removal and destruction that amount to a…

THE LOT OF THE model-slash-actor-turned-author is not a happy one. Think of poor Naomi Campbell, who reportedly had not even read “her” ghostwritten novel Swan when it was published in 1994. Comedians generally fare better at the novelling game than straight actors, the putting together of words being their stock-intrade. But Sophie Ward, best known until recently for Heartbeat, Holby City and Boots No 7, bucked the trend with her original and philosophical debut novel Love and Other Thought Experiments (2020), which was longlisted for the Booker Prize. Her second novel The Schoolhouse therefore carries expectation, and not just as a curio. It is less surprising than her debut but shows a similar restlessness — as though, having started late in the game, Ward is determined to write as many novels…

HOW DO YOU DECIDE that a picture is worth $200 million? In the case of Andy Warhol’s 1964 screen print of Marilyn Monroe sold by Christie’s New York in early May, you swallow your dignity and turn huckster. Talking up Shot Sage Blue Marilyn before the sale, Alex Rotter, the auction house’s chairman of twentieth and twenty-first-century art, locked himself in a bear hug with hyperbole. “Standing alongside Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” he claimed ecstatically, “Warhol’s Marilyn is categorically one of the greatest paintings of all time.” Categorically, no less. Despite this — and Rotter, incidentally, was the man on the end of the phone during the auction of Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi in 2017 when the victorious bidder went to $400…

BACK IN THE LATE 1980s I helped launch a young people’s magazine called Fairly Serious Monthly (FSM). We were based at a youth centre by Old Street, in Islington, called the King’s Corner Project. The idea was simple — to create an open-access media project that would give contributors their first chance to be published. I was already a working journalist, but I knew the hardest hurdle was to break through the Catch-22 that made it almost impossible to be published unless you were already published. Our slogan was “Buy It, Read It, Write It”. Our instinct was correct. Through the doors they poured, young would-be writers, reporters, artists, photographers, designers, even advertising sales people. Out there, where real people lived often gritty, hard-scrabble lives, there was a deep wellspring…

LISA HILTON says that Nobu may no longer be uber-fashionable, but it remains a really great place to have dinner THIS PAGE FELIPE FERNÁNDEZ-ARMESTO suggests a sizzling New England clambake for jubilee street parties PAGE 90 PATRICK GALBRAITH listens to old stories that show just how much rural life has changed PAGE 92 CHRISTOPHER PINCHER enjoys the perfect restorative page 92 HEPHZIBAH ANDERSON loves the thrill of digging up the first new potatoes of the year PAGE 94 STEPHEN POLLARD celebrates a golden generation of jockeys PAGE 95 HANNAH BETTS sports a baseball cap page 96 CLAUDIA SAVAGE-GORE ignores the couples’ therapist and draws up a list of healthy resentments PAGE 97 IF NOBU MATSUHISA is the supermodel of the culinary world, known only by his first name, then his…

“Yes, yes please dear boy. You can prepare me a small rhesus negative Bloody Mary. And you must tell me all the news. I haven’t seen you since you finished your last film.” Uncle Monty, the lubricious booby in Bruce Robinson’s wonderful Withnail & I (see drinks columns passim), selects his pre-prandial from a drinks table pregnant with possibilities with all the care one would expect from a seasoned practitioner. And so he might. For a Bloody Mary is perfect at almost any time of day and in every kind of weather. All the best bars serve Bloody Marys. But the best Bloody Mary is served in The Grenadier, the one-time officers’ mess of the Foot Guards and the long-time public house in Wilton Row, Belgravia. Pass beneath the low…

WHEN DOES A platitude become A Thing? Baseball caps have been about in the United States since the 1860s for sporting purposes. During the Seventies, they became available in a one-size-fits-all mode (the “snapback”), allowing them to become popular as a preppy fashion accessory. In the Eighties, they were donned in Blighty as a kind of Americanism along with trainers. Later, in the Nineties/Noughts, one’s father might be given one at a conference, then insist on wearing it to clean the car. They were spotted during the Normcore phase of 2014. Then, suddenly, in winter 2020’s spring/summer 2021 collections, they sprung up on catwalks, notably Celine’s (below), the French brand deploying them in almost every look. Before long, Coach, Courreges and Kenneth Ize were following suit, and designer brands had…

BY THE TIME YOU READ THIS the French Open will be at least halfway done, and RAFAEL NADAL will still be involved barring injury, illness, catastrophe or force majeure. The traditional insurance policy “act of God” get-out clause is hardly applicable here: on the red clay of Stade Roland Garros, Nadal is God. He has won the men’s singles 13 times. In four of those tournaments he has not dropped a single set from first match to last. Of those 13 finals, none have gone to a fifth set. Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer have been taken the distance twice each during the finals of their nine Australian Opens and eight Wimbledon titles respectively. Not Nadal, not in Paris. And finally, he has never lost a final there. When he…