Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2022 i The Critic

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FINDING THE RIGHT PATH I disagree with Daniel Johnson’s condemnation (“GERMANY’S CRISIS OF CON-SCIENCE”, JUNE) of the pacifist German intellectuals. They have a difficult path to tread. Germany’s prime aims in the East in both the First and the Second World Wars were to obtain Crimea, with its commanding position on the Black Sea, and the Donbas, which has many valuable minerals besides coal and was the leading industrial region in the entire Soviet Union in the 1930s. There has also been recently a resurgence of far-Right triumphal celebrations in Kiev, such as the commemorative march on 28 April 2021 by hundreds of the former World War II Waffen-SS Division Galicia on the 78th anniversary of their foundation. So, although the German intellectuals sympathise with the aspirations of millions of…

“Why Boris, fancy meeting you here!” We are on our early walk in the park and Nadine, who is one of Bozza’s work friends, has just jumped out of a bush in front of us. “Oh, um, hello Nad,” says Bozza, backing away. “Didn’t know you were a dawn walker.” “Oh I was just passing,” she says, brushing a twig out of her hair. “Now, as I’ve got you, I’ve been doing some thinking.” Nadine reaches into a folder and pulls out a piece of paper. “We need to talk about your fightback.” “Oh yes, I’ve been doing a bit of pondering on that myself, you know. Thought we could do some of the old favourites; bendy bananas, lefty lawyers, silly Strasbourg, bonkers Brussels.” Nadine looks at Bozza the way…

TINA. THIS WAS MRS Thatcher’s favourite acronym, which found itself scrawled across memos daring to argue against key parts of her programme for government. There Is No Alternative. TINA packs a powerful punch because it forces on opponents the obligation not just to oppose a particular set of policies but to advocate a concrete set of alternative proposals, which must themselves stand up to scrutiny. The Church of England’s leadership has relied on tina quite heavily in recent years. When churches are forced to merge, and merge again, and priests are compelled to minister to ever more unwieldy numbers of parishes, plaintive fingers point to depressing budgets and the humble folk at the bottom are told “There is no alternative.” When parishes look in horror at the size of the…

IN MAY THIS YEAR, PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE released an “unburnable” edition of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. To celebrate, Atwood was filmed taking a blowtorch to the copy, later sold for $40,000, with proceeds going to PEN America. The performance felt surprisingly anti-climactic. What exactly was being non-burned? The novel itself — dark, brilliant, politically slippery — or what it has come to symbolise? A red cape, a TV series, a feminist movement losing its grip on reality. Is anyone really scared of those? The past five years have seen the clothing styles of Atwood’s 1985 novel achieve iconic status. The election of Donald Trump, followed by the release of the TV adaptation, combined to make the handmaid’s cape, in the words of the Guardian, “one of the most powerful current…

THE MUSEUM DEDICATED TO JOSEPH Vissarionovič Stalin in Gori, Georgia, has something of a reputation. This tribute to the late Soviet tyrant draws extreme reactions from people — often angry ones. There’s nothing obviously wrong with Gori itself, the place of Stalin’s birth in 1878. A low-rise town of 50,000 residents (7,000 in Stalin’s day), it is surrounded by bold green mountains and is pleasantly leafy and quiet. Yet here Stalin — “Wise Leader and Teacher of Peoples” — had his tempestuous childhood and, since 1937, there has been a shrine to him, a tribute massively amplified after his death in 1953 when a palatial museum was built alongside it. In front, a statue of the man stares fiercely out at you — taller than the 5’4” Stalin, but no…

THE MOVEMENT TO “decolonise the curriculum” has recently been prominent in music, in particular music education in the Western classical tradition. It came to public attention last year after documents obtained through Freedom of Information requests revealed proposals by a small number of academics at Oxford University to present “white European music from the slave period” as a “colonialist representational system”. Some even questioned the teaching of western notation. A statement on the faculty’s website tried to downplay historical and analytical study in favour of music ethnography and popular music. But this year there have been reports of similar moves at Cambridge, though focused on a specific module entitled “Decolonising the Ear” rather than the curriculum as a whole. In truth, this critique of classical music has been going on…

THE DEATH OF MIDGE DECTER, at the age of 94, marks the passing of a golden age of intellectual journalism. Having witnessed all the vicissitudes of the American century from Pearl Harbor to 9/11, and challenged progressive orthodoxies from Lyndon Johnson to Joe Biden, Midge was still battling to the last. When I last met her and her husband, Norman Podhoretz, at our regular rendezvous — Antinucci, the Italian restaurant a few yards down the street from their apartment on the Upper East Side — Donald Trump was still in the White House. And on the merits of the 45th President, the grande dame and the grand old man of neoconservatism did not agree. Norman saw the 2016 election as providential, with Trump taking a stand against the forces of…

“YOU ARE WHAT I LOVE MOST in the world”, wrote the poet and catholic convert Max Jacob, “after God and the Saints who regard you as one of them.” The subject of such praise was born Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Maria de los Remedios Crispin Crispiniano Santisima Trinidad Ruiz, in Malaga in 1881, but quickly discovered that none of those names would do. He took another, one whose three forceful syllables now vibrate like the primary colours of twentieth-century art. It was a killing kind of self-invention that severed him from his father, a painter who had done everything he could to help his son. “In art, it is necessary to kill one’s father,” he commented later. Creative destruction or destructive creation? If there is a difference,…

IN APRIL 2021, ON THE DAY he announced the withdrawal of all US troops from Afghanistan, President Biden walked in light rain along the lines of white gravestones in Section 60 of Arlington Cemetery, where those who fell in Afghanistan and Iraq are buried. Pausing briefly to speak to reporters, he said: “I never thought we were there to somehow unify Afghanistan. It’s never been done. It’s never been done.” This showed contempt for the many millions of Afghans who had worked since the fall of the Taliban 20 years before to build a united republic believing they were one nation, but once again the country found itself defined from outside, framed by others. In 1989 another superpower withdrew after defeat in Afghanistan. The Soviet War was half the length…

In 23 February 1965, a team of six Israeli agents lured Herberts Cukurs, a Latvian exile living in Brazil, to an empty property in Montevideo, Uruguay. The team leader had spent six months posing as an Austrian businessman in São Paulo, Brazil. In this guise he had befriended Cukurs and persuaded him to make some property investments, including the house in Montevideo. Cukurs had been a key figure in a group of Latvian nationalists known as the Arajs Kommando, which took part in what has been called the “Holocaust by bullets”. Before the Second World War, there had been 100,000 Jews in Latvia, 40,000 of them in the Riga ghetto. Around 800 survived. Some 25,000 of these murders occurred in the forest of Rumbula, outside Riga, in the space of…

John Self is The Critic’s lead fiction critic. He lives in Belfast ‘‘I LOVED IT AND COULD HAVE read a thousand more pages of it,” said novelist Emma Cline of Elif Batuman’s debut novel The Idiot (2017). Well, Emma, will 350 pages do instead? My tone is aslant but my aim is true: Batuman’s new novel is a straight sequel to The Idiot, and your response to it will largely be predetermined by that fact. First, a recap. Batuman made her name with The Possessed (2010), one of those memoir-y non-fiction-y essayistic books that are even more all the rage now than they were then. A recollection of her study of Russian literature, blended with accounts of her Turkish family and its history, The Possessed shone brightest when Batuman took…

LIKE FOOTBALL CLUBS, symphony orchestras enter the transfer market in the close season — and I have never known a busier one than the summer of 2022. Just look at the gaps on the map. New York and Chicago are hunting a music director, as are Munich, Amsterdam and Covent Garden. One league down, there are vacancies at the Vienna Symphony, in Toulouse, Seattle, Minnesota, Seoul, Manchester, Moscow (several) and more. It used to be easy to select a music director. Line up half a dozen guest conductors over one season and see which, if any, impress. Then, if the musicians respond to one, turn on the charm and pitch a salary offer just above rival bids, and well below the current ceiling of $4 million. Done deal. Covid, however,…

IF IT WERE A PAINTING it might be called Déformation Professionelle in Three Studies. A trio of recent cases has highlighted that sharp practice in the world of dealers and galleries has never gone away. Historically, anywhere where connoisseurship — the expertise of the eye — plays a part is open to manipulation, and so it continues to prove. Perhaps the most striking of the cases is that of Jean-Luc Martinez, the director of the Louvre, no less, from 2013 to 2021. In late May, he was detained by the OCBC, the French agency in charge of investigating the traffic in illegal antiquities, and charged with “complicity of gang fraud and laundering” and “concealing the origin of criminally obtained works by false endorsement” in relation to objects smuggled out of…

EVERY STORY HAS AN inciting incident. An adultery drama opens with the discovery of a text message, a detective yarn with a body floating in a river. Sometimes it reaches back decades — in the case of Tehran, the superb Israeli thriller series — to 1953 when the CIA, with British assistance, brought down the popular prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh and replaced with him with the autocratic rule of the Shah. That led to the 1979 Islamic Revolution and a regime that openly aims to wipe Israel off the map. Which is why Mossad agent Tamar Rabinyan, marvellously played by Niv Sultan (right), has been despatched to her birthplace, the Iranian capital. Tehran’s co-creator is Moshe Zonder, who also worked on Fauda, the Israeli series about undercover operatives on the…

OF ALL THE THINGS that hold women back in this world — the Kardashians, Femail, randomly having your rights reduced to those of a domestic animal by the pusillanimous reverses of Western governments — insufficient attention has been paid to lunch. Lunch is a crime against women, even when we don’t have to cook it. The work lunch: mugging yourself up and getting there blows off your morning, then you have to trudge through the small talk before choosing the moment to discuss whatever you’re there for before haring back to the office to do the work you could have done while you were at lunch. Social lunch: morning wasted as above but the food is delicious, so why not have a glass of wine, seems a shame not to,…

In Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s epic tale of the Risorgimento, The Leopard, young Tancredi tells his uncle, Prince Fabrizio, “If everything is to remain the same, everything must change.” Imperfectly translated, what he is really saying is if we are to preserve the best and most important things of our traditions and culture, we must make a few important adjustments. The Prince, whose dignity is unbending, balks at the prospect and retires to his memories. Thankfully, there were other aristocrats, and not fictional ones, who struck a more pragmatic posture. One of whom was Count Cavour, neither a Neapolitan nor a Sicilian but prime minister of Piedmont and master of the “trasformismo”. His invention and innovation extended beyond statecraft and state-building to viticulture. The architect of modern Italy — not to…

THINK PINK. I know what your reaction will be: here we go, the kind of muted Hubba Bubba that was millennial pink. Well, you’d be wrong. We’re talking vibe shift, baby. Subtle sappiness is, like, so over, not unlike millennials themselves. In its place comes angst, attitude, hot-pink feminist fury. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you, fuck-you fuchsia. You’ll remember millennial pink: a sort of over-poached salmon, or anaemic Barbie. Flesh colour, should one be a gammon with the trots. Millennial Véronique Hyland coined the term in the summer of 2016, as the “predominant shade bubbling up on everything that was marketed to me”, from Glossier cosmetics to Percy Pigs. This was not the obnoxiously Andrex tone that objects aimed at women were flogged in during the Noughties. Instead, as…

IS BEING PRIME MINISTER A SERIOUS JOB? Is it a role for getting things done or is it essentially decorative? The suspicion must be that it’s now part of the “undignified constitution”. That the occupant of Number 10 is required to caper, splutter, entertain and distract. But not to govern. Judges govern. Foreign agreements rule. Bureaucrats administer, safe from political interference. If we expect none of this authority from our prime minister then, to reverse this time a coinage of Leo Maxse (and not Walter Bagehot), Boris Must Stay. For no leader could so embody our age as he does. Bagehot was no democrat. His opposition to universal suffrage was rooted in his fears about what the new voter would want, and how the parties would deliver it. That they…

THE OTHER DAY, a judge I hadn’t seen for ages took me to task over my book Enemies of the People? I had answered the question posed in my title by asserting that judges were just about the only friends we had. “We are nobody’s friends,” he insisted. “We’re independent.” Well, yes. But what does independence mean in this context? That question was addressed recently by the lord chief justice of England and Wales in a major but little-reported lecture delivered at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Lord Burnett of Maldon focused on institutional independence — the status of the judiciary as an institution rather than the independence of individual judges. There was no mention of this in legislation until 2005, when parliament gave the job of defending judicial independence…

ON MONDAY, 13 JUNE 13 2022the Rt Hon Anthony Charles Lynton Blair PC was installed as (on one reckoning) the 10,017th Knight of the Garter. The Garter, founded in 1348, is the oldest Order of chivalry in the world. Windsor Castle, where the Order is based and where Blair’s investiture took place, is the oldest and largest inhabited castle in the world. And the Sovereign of the Order, Queen Elizabeth II, who conferred the honour, is the world’s oldest and longest reigning monarch and the current incumbent of the world’s second oldest monarchy. Quite where all this oldness leaves the “vision of a new Britain: a nation reborn, prosperous, secure, united”, which Sir Tony (as I suppose we must now call him) aimed to fashion as Her Majesty’s eleventh Prime Minister,…

● The National Health Service is specially designed to cater to a nation of pauper children. Walking down the street recently, I came across the following poster by the NHS: “IF YOU HAVE… BLOOD IN YOUR POO, PEE OR SPIT, DON’T IGNORE IT.” Of course, there has been progress, or at least change: when I was little, poo was known as big-jobs. The poster continues: “THE WAY YOU MAKE AN APPOINTMENT MAY HAVE CHANGED, BUT YOUR GP PRACTICE WANTS TO HEAR FROM YOU IF YOU ARE WORRIED.” This is artfully phrased. Note that there is no promise that your doctor (if in these days anyone can still be said to have one) will see you. You will see or hear from whomever you are allocated to see or hear from:…

THE DECISION OF THE SUPREME COURT in the Prorogation case — R(Miller) v Prime Minister or “Miller 2” — is the most important constitutional law case of this century. No court had previously exercised control over the relationship between Crown and Parliament in the way the Supreme Court did when it held that Her Majesty’s decision on prime ministerial advice to prorogue Parliament was “unlawful, null and of no effect”, with the legal consequence that the Commissioners who entered the House of Lords were to be treated as carrying “a blank piece of paper”. It is true that, as the court said, the circumstances that arose in September 2019 were exceptional. Parliament was deadlocked and the two-year negotiating period allowed by Article 50, as extended, was shortly to expire. It…

BY THE TIME THE VETERAN journalist Christopher Booker died in 2019, he had witnessed enough of the twenty-first century to notice how much his book on the 1960s (The Neophil iacs, published in 1969) resonated with it. Two years into this decade, it’s become apparent to others, too, that there are striking parallels between the themes highlighted in his critique of the 1960s and social trends that test us in the present. “In order to become mature, in short, we must not only reject the authority of our parents — but, at the same time, in order to replace them, we must also learn to kill off our own fantasy selves”, Booker, in Jungian mode, wrote. “Only by killing this fantasy self can a man become fully mature. Unless he…

I FIRS MET ROBERT A. M. STERN IN THE LATE 1980s, when I was finishing my book The American Country House. Some of my American friends refused to believe that even during the Gilded Age such an undemocratic domestic tradition of architecture had existed in the Land of the Free. Not Bob. He had studied them; he was building them himself. He asked me to write an introduction to a book of his own works. I declined, explaining that I’d have to visit the different properties to describe them which would clearly be impossible, given that they were scattered throughout the more affluent parts of the United States. He looked at me in horror and disbelief, raging, “how can you be so culturally insular?” He would get me there; he would…

HE WAS BORN THE SON OF A WOOL CARDER IN Florence in 1386. When he died on 13 December 1466, at the age of 80, he was the most famous sculptor in Italy and so overloaded with commissions that he failed to complete most of them, thereby upsetting and frustrating his many patrons. His career was one of constant innovation: he was the first artist since antiquity to create a free-standing nude statue, as well as the first to cast in bronze a life-size equestrian monument. He was the first artist in any era to use accurate perspective in reliefs, the first to depict saints as individual characters rather than embodiments of abstract virtues — and he was the first to leave parts of his statues and reliefs deliberately unfinished…

Anthony Broxton is a political adviser and public historian IN OCTOBER 2007, THE LOWRY, named after Salford’s most famous son, hosted the Myth of the North exhibition in a bid to change public understandings of the region. As part of the programme, a national poll was undertaken to discover who exactly was the nation’s favourite northerner. The results paid homage to the north’s influence over pop culture as Urmston-born Morrissey and Wigan’s wartime entertainer George Formby came out on top. Meanwhile, the comedians Victoria Wood and Caroline Aherne, also from the north-west, were voted best females. The north’s cultural impact — from The Beatles to Coronation Street to the Haçienda — is firmly established within our national identity. But the north’s politics, and its relationship with the south of England,…

ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE CAMEperilously close to never existing at all. His parents, married in 1793, spent 10 of their first 18 months of matrimony in jail — arrested for the crime of being aristocrats during the height of the French revolutionary Terror. Tocqueville’s great-grandfather was guillotined in April 1794, after being forced to watch the beheadings of his daughter and grandchildren. His newlywed parents were in the queue, awaiting the same fate, but the fall of Robespierre in July meant they were spared. Alexis, the third son of the family, would be born in 1805, and go on to write not one, but two, of the most influential works in the history of ideas. His two-volume Democracy in America (published in 1835 and 1840) has been hailed as, variously, the…

IF 2020 MARKED THE 2,500th anniversary of the beginning, in 480BC, of the invasion of Greece by the Persian King Xerxes, 2022 could be said to mark 2,500 years from its conclusion at the siege of Sestos in 478. Though the pandemic meant celebrations were somewhat muted, a new book by Stephen P. Kershaw provides a fitting commemoration of important historical events. This war was, in fact, the second invasion of the Greek mainland. The first, following the subjugation of the Greek cities of Ionia (in the Aegean and the eastern coast of modern Turkey), was an abortive attempt to capture Athens that ended in failure at the Battle of Marathon in 490. Xerxes’ assault on Greece ten years later was significantly larger and better prepared. The Persians drew upon…

THE CURRENT ITERATION of the trade magazine The Bookseller, earnest yet excitable and full of profiles of happening young people, is probably what Matthew Arnold would have marked down as “a regrettable modern tendency”. Browsing through it the other day the Secret Author was interested to come across an advert for the British Book Awards, otherwise known as the “Nibbies”. “Whether you’re joining us in the room, tuning in to the livestream or catching up with our post-awards highlights show,” the rubric advised, “Lauren and Rhys will be there every step of the way.” Lauren and Rhys? Well, this year’s presenters are Lauren Laverne and Rhys Stephenson, respectively a disc-jockey and a “CBBC presenter and Strictly Come Dancing sensation”. Talented young media folk, naturally, but what exactly are their qualifications…

WITH THAT VACANCY FOR Archbishop of Canterbury looming (as all fervently hope), might I suggest that candidates preferable to recent Koko-the-clown incumbents might be found not among the posturing pygmies of the House of Bishops but rather in the ranks of our infinitely more sainted opera directors? Combining the roles of Olympian moral guru, life guide, relationship counsellor, eco/social-justice warrior, liberation theologian, sex wizard, animal husband and many more, these paragons are uniquely suited to be the spiritual leaders we thirst for in these difficult times. If they have a weakness, I suppose it is that they tend to be not awfully good at directing operas; their attempts to perfect humanity — the true duty of theatre — have had a negative effect on actual audiences, ever-increasingly venal, insanitary, drunk,…

THE APPETITE FOR multi-generation family sagas never wanes from the daddy-issues of Agamemnon and Orestes to Peter Flannery’s Our Friends in the North (recast as a drama for Radio 4). Beth Steel’s House of Shades is a confident new nod to this tradition — a blend of Greek tragedy, ghost story and state-of the nation examination — across 50 years from 1965 and an era of technological optimism under Labour to the sturm und drang of the Thatcher years, concluding with a review of Brexit and its choppy backwash. Steel’s Nottinghamshire background gives her a familiarity with the foibles and tics of a working-class family on the front line of political wars and a fresher take than most of her theatrical peers on the EU referendum: “Everyone was shocked by…

EVERYBODY LOVES READING a good “obit”. Tales of lives lived well, or disgracefully, are always interesting, which is why thousands of readers each day turn first to the obituary pages of the Times and the Telegraph. They may chortle, though the most vivid tributes often involve men and women who performed remarkable feats in times of conflict and then slipped gently back into civilian life. The modern obituary was shaped by Hugh Massingberd of the Telegraph — “Massivesnob”, to the mockers of Private Eye. He did not invent the coded phrases that carry so much freight, the crashing bore “who could be a handful after dinner”, or the tub-thumper “who held firm views”. But, encouraged by his editor, Max Hastings, he added a few of his own. Perhaps the supreme…

DAS LAND OHNE MUSIKhas become the terrain of countryhouse opera. There seems hardly a county without an ersatz Glyndebourne or two. As the season’s height hits its middle C, foreign visitors wonder how a race as unmusical as the English have developed so marked a taste for entertainment Dr Johnson defined as “exotic and irrational”. The answer, of course, is that it’s not the music that matters: it’s the food. Or maybe it’s the dressing-up. With no carnival in their calendar, the English over-value other opportunities for extravagant disguise. Countryhouse opera teases them into dinner jackets and frocks, despite trends that make slackness fashionable. Except in clubland or the Ritz, you can’t look beyond your restaurant table without seeing gym shoes, jeans, unironed zip-fronts and collars loosed over squirmingly curly…

IN THE SAME WAY that children grow, it felt like it happened overnight. Suddenly, the tasselled grass in the meadow that lies between the allotment and the road was brushing my shoulders, while over on our plot, the squash leaves were the size of umbrellas, the artichokes’ spikey flowers had pumped themselves up to resemble medieval weaponry, and the broad beans — sown late and surely seedlings just yesterday — had become a stocky-stalked thicket swamping even the weeds. It’s this way every year, and every year it feels as if a spell has been cast, woven from sun and rain, and giving green-tipped life its ancient cue to go for it. This is usually when we gardeners get to relax just a little, too. Yes, there’s some sowing to…

DID YOU KNOW Jesus was a cricket fan? According to Tom Holland, historian of Christianity and lover of cricket, The Armenian Gospel of the Infancy translates a lost Syriac text that recorded the young Christ playing with bat and ball. Sadly, scorecard scrolls do not survive, and no video footage exists to reveal his technique, but it is tempting to imagine Jesus producing miraculous hitting and bowling with prodigious swing. With his famous catch in the Sea of Tiberius, he must have been an asset in the field, too. I only recently heard about the talents of young Jesus, but I knew already he was a CRICKET OBSESSIVE. I have seen him in the stands at several test matches and, more often than not worse for wear, swilling pints of lager…

EMMANUEL MACRON’S first term was damaged by the farcically violent behaviour of his chum Alexandre Benalla, a security lout. A minor matter eventually, it did not resound outside the hexagon. The president’s second quinquennat is already facing a much graver, potentially international problem which may come to define it. In a hasty evidence-free improvisation on Twitter the interior minister, Macron’s chum, Gérald Darmanin, a shifty sort currently not facing a single rape charge, blamed the chaos at the European Cup Final on 28 May on the “industrial” production and sale of fake tickets (Made in UK) to Liverpool fans. UEFA, Darmanin and the squirming half-witted wellness-drooling sports minister, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, are all desperate to exculpate themselves. The latter two lied throughout three hours of a Senate hearing. CHUM OR NOT,…

Artwashing IN AN ATTEMPT TO MAXIMISE revenue after a two-year hiatus, the geniuses of the Venice Commune decided to kick off Art Biennale a month early this season, overlapping with another major art event, Homo Faber, on the island of San Giorgio. Obviously it poured down, turning the city into a damp Commedia d’arte set of weeping curators, staggering partygoers and implacable boatmen refusing to take anyone anywhere on the perilous spring tides. My week started fairly gently, with a dinner at home for British artist Philip Colbert, in town to stage a stunt for his Lobstars NFT project. An 18-metre inflatable lobster duly set off from Marghera next morning to be floated past San Marco on a barge, but the planning hadn’t extended to finding a boat for event…

IT IS SUMMER NOW AND FRANCE is a fairyland of sunlight. But everywhere they look, the French see only their own shadow. Where does it come from, this little flicker of gloom that follows the French even when their days are long, their evenings warm, the sky empty and blue? For many years the shadow was a taboo that few of them would talk about, even though each could see its reach in their families, communities and politics. Marine Le Pen is its heir; Éric Zemmour is its orphan. The shadow is Algeria — and an unspoken, unbroken, unfinished civil war which for 70 years has bound the French to a place that most of them do not even know. The war gave France the Fifth Republic, the framework for…

I wholeheartedly support the principle of free speech, but I do think that those who say things that offend minority groups ought to be arrested and possibly executed. Take the recent film The Lady of Heaven. I haven’t watched the film, but apparently it is extremely offensive to the Islamic faith. There are only two billion Muslims in the world which, according to mathematicians, is only 25% of the world’s population. This makes them an oppressed minority and deserving of our protection. Thankfully, mass protests outside cinemas have led to screenings of The Lady of Heaven being cancelled. Islamophobes have been quick to point out that all the protesters were men and that we shouldn’t be supporting such a reactionary and patriarchal religion. But the Koran is actually a feminist…

MAY I START WITH the bad news? It relates to Switzerland, where the Federal Statistical Office announced on 5 May that consumer prices had risen by 0.4 per cent in April, to take the increase in the last year to 2.5 per cent. The 2.5 per cent figure was the highest since October 2008, which is undoubtedly a problem. The increase of 2.5 per cent compares with average consumer inflation in 2019, 2020 and 2021 of 0.4 per cent, minus 0.7 per cent and 0.6 per cent respectively. Indeed, over the last five years the typical increase in consumer prices has been just above 0.3 per cent. So, inflation today is running at eight times the kind of figure to which the Swiss are accustomed. In Britain, by contrast, the…

● WICKED WALLIS, Amanda Scrimgeour’s latest outing — a biography of the Duchess of Windsor — was published a couple of months ago. It attracted a long and favourable review in the Daily Mail (“a racy and scandalous tale, told with all this author’s customary wit and brio”) and a short and sniffy one in the Times Literary Supplement, which noted two dozen errors of fact and complained about the absence of footnotes. Amanda has been writing these books for a decade and a half now, ever since she gave up her job as sale-room correspondent for The Field. The first two, Marvellous Marie (as in Antoinette) and Pretty, Witty Nell: A Stuart Romance (as in Gwyn), were historical biographies, and it was not until the publication of A Charmed…

I HAVE BEEN A DIRECTOR of trading companies for over 25 years and not always ones I own. It is only recently that I have felt experienced enough, though in younger days I probably erroneously believed I was. For all that time I have been a solicitor, but in truth I have never been a particularly skilled lawyer. When employed with law firms, I was always better at enticing new clients than doing the work. Fortunately, the last two firms I was with allowed me to front the work others did. Americans call this a rainmaking role. Sometimes it did not rain in the desert and I had to do some legal work, which was unfortunate for all. Usually, I was better at telling clients what to do than actually implementing…

Lola Salem is an Oxonian academic and art critic GIVEN THE INITIAL REACTIONS on social media to an extract from Louise Perry’s new book, there is reason to wager that The Case Against the Sexual Revolution will provoke waves. Perry affirms, however, that she’s merely seeking to inject some “common sense” into some of today’s hottest debates: the differences and sense of harmony between men and women; the nature and telos of desire; love within sexual relationships; the issue of consent as a grail for balancing sexuality’s chaos; the consequences of violence’s glamourisation; the commodification of people; the benefits of marital institution. Nothing in Perry’s book should truly be “ground-breaking” to anyone. Her closing remarks bang this drum a final time: “Listen to your mother!” Whether we like it or…

IN JANUARY 1943 Lieutenant Colonel David Stirling, founder of the SAS, was flown to Rome for interrogation. He had been captured by the Italians on his “most hare-brained scheme yet” — leading a small raiding party deep into enemy territory in Tunisia to attack lines of communication, reconnoitre the terrain and become the first Eighth Army unit to link up with the First Army advancing from the west. Cautious when speaking to the Italians, he was “vain and voluble” in conversation with a fellow “captive”, Captain John Richards. Unbeknown to Stirling, Richards was an Anglo-Swiss stool pigeon, Theodore Schurch, who had deserted from the British army and was working for fascist intelligence. Prior to Schurch’s court-martial for treachery in late 1945, Stirling denied he had revealed any sensitive information. If…

A MAJOR POWER IN EASTERNEurope, an empire that has seen better days and with a long-standing grievance against a much smaller neighbour. It begins a military build-up which many think is a diplomatic bluff — right up to the point when invading troops pour across the border. To general surprise, the smaller power puts up a much tougher fight than anticipated. The invading troops take heavy losses, get sucked into a war of attrition, and the invading state faces humiliation in the eyes of the world. All this sounds familiar from recent headlines. It actually describes the situation in the Balkans following the assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, and his wife Duchess Sophie. If there ever were shots “heard around the world”,…

LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE HE’S WRITten, Geoff Dyer’s latest gets you wondering what exactly a book is. With his uncategorisable blend of memoir, critique, reportage, and flight of fancy, Dyer has done more to strain at the literary leash than anyone since B.S. Johnson. Granted, he hasn’t yet published a novel in loose-leaf form, or a book with holes in its pages so that you can glimpse things that are going to happen in the story’s future. Then again, Dyer would surely take umbrage at that word “story”. Certainly, none of his four novels has much by way of plot or even propulsion. In his new book, Dyer — who has long been drawn to Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence, and has an inexplicable fondness for the spiralling drone of John…

Never the twain… HOW REFRESHING TO HEAR the Bafta-winning Mr McGovern announce that his working-class actors are better off sticking to playing their own and us “posh” folk likewise. Surely this makes sense for all concerned? No longer would we be obliged to endure the rough diamond Glaswegian/Mancunian pretending to join the aristocracy, nor the public school boy affecting affinity with Cockney geezers. Let the drawbridge go up, new harmony awaits: they keep the bird from Line of Duty, we, the fine fillies from the Home Counties. Apart from occasional encounters at increasingly irrelevant awards ceremonies, I see no reason for our paths to cross again? ADDRESSING CRITICISM of the mysterious accent she adopted when recently playing Gertrude opposite McKellen’s ancient Hamlet at Windsor, long-serving English rose Jenny Seagrove now…

THE MOMENT KENDRICK Lamar rapped the words “What the fuck is cancel culture, dawg?” he must have known he’d fixed the kind of response he’d be getting from certain quarters. The line — from “N95”, the lead single from his album, Mr Morales and the Big Steppers — is calculated to aggravate too-online liberals the kind of people who’ve been among Lamar’s biggest boosters. Since his first album in 2011, Lamar has established himself as a voice of smart, savage political commentary on American politics. He’s the only hip hop artist to have won a Pulitzer (for 2017’s Damn). He’s the only popular musician full stop to have won a Pulitzer. He’s significant. Respectable. And he’s got a reputation for dropping the kind of hard truths that are actually easy…

I RECENTLY SAW A FILM that is a testament to superficial cinematic complexity. It was directed by one movie-making dyad, the Daniels (Daniel Kwan, who is Chinese, and Daniel Scheinert, who is not), and produced by another, the Russo brothers (Anthony and Joseph, who have directed four films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe). Everything Everywhere All at Once is a film “about” the multiverse, or rather, the multiverse forms its thematic framework — the idea that there are multiple universes and that it might be possible to “‘versejump” and thus explore multiple identities or versions of oneself. Surely, that is one way of explaining the cinematic urge. Originally written for the Chinese martial arts actor, Jackie Chan, it stars another veteran of the action genre, Michelle Yeoh, as Evelyn, the…

YOU MIGHT WELL THINK that a small private house tucked into a valley down the hill beyond the furthest corner of Petworth Park might not have much relevance to the wider concerns of architecture. But I remember thinking when the house was shortlisted for the RIBA House of the Year Award how nice it was to see an architect playing games with classical architecture, inserting Diocletian windows into blank brickwork, treating classicism as a form of geometry, not detailing. So, I made arrangements to visit it and meet its architect, Adam Richards, whose house it is. Richards belongs to a generation of architects who were taught by Dalibor Veselý and Peter Carl at Cambridge. I have never met either of them and now can’t meet Veselý, a philosophically minded Czech…

DOWN AT THE BOTTOM OF the bean field, the meadow lay thirsty and still. For weeks it hadn’t rained and the River Stiffkey, bronze water on a dark bed of mud, rolled slowly towards the sea. The land was of little interest to the men who farmed on either side, too wet for wheat and too rough to plough. But I suspect it would have been just the sort of place that Elijah, the old poacher whose gun I held over my arm, would have liked, on account of all the hares and a steady number of rabbits. The previous morning in Bunwell, a small South Norfolk village on the old road to Norwich, Mark Lorne, Elijah James’s great-great-nephew, held the gun up to the light and carefully copied the…

I’VE A CONFESSION. The last time I went racing was in 2019. I think. To be honest, it could have been the year before. It was so unmemorable that I can’t remember where or when. The specific reason I haven’t been for — let’s say — 3 years is, of course, the pandemic. For much of that time no one could go racing, and even when courses opened up, health issues meant I still had to avoid public areas. But a couple of months ago I took a day off work to go to a midweek fixture; what is now billed as Royal Ascot Trials Day. I’d been underwhelmed when I saw the paltry fields, but decided I should still go — if for no other reason than that I…

THERE ARE FEW SACRED COWS more sacred than Virginia Woolf. To criticise her adversely in literary circles is a little like animadverting on the character of Mohammed in Mecca — inadvisable. I have known literary types afraid openly to voice their dislike of both her person and her work, which means thereby that unstinting and uncritical praise goes by default. And yet Woolf was a ferocious snob who expressed racist and antisemitic views, more than enough in anybody else to render her worthy of violent denunciation in these fair, well-spoken days. If J.K. Rowling can be cancelled, to use the current inelegant term for secular excommunication, merely for stating a truth so obvious that until recently no one would have thought it worth uttering, surely someone who so denigrated lower-class…

THIS SUMMER SEES THE 50th anniversary of one of the most extraordinary debuts in cricket history. It was the second Test of the 1972 Ashes, and BOB MASSIE was limbering up to bowl for Australia. Three years before, he had been rejected by Northamptonshire while playing for Kilmarnock, not exactly a hotbed of willow and leather. Now he was about to tear England apart. Sporting sideburns so huge they should have had their own postcode, and taking every advantage of the cloudy and cool conditions at Lord’s, Massie took 8 for 53 in the first innings and 8 for 84 in the second to give him a match return of 16 for 137. They were the third best figures of all time, but there was nothing fluky about the way…