Innholdsfortegnelse for August - September 2022 i The Critic

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A LIGHT ON PROROGATION Patrick Lawrence’s article on the Supreme Court’s prorogation decision is welcome (“ERROR OF JUDGMENT”, JUNE). As he notes, the Supreme Court’s analysis of justiciability plainly conflated the existence of the power to prorogue with the manner of its exercise. By requiring the government to have “reasonable justification” to exercise the prerogative power, the decision will surely now render other uses of the prerogative a matter for the courts. The government would likely have had more success if it had acted more honestly. The stated advice to the Queen that five weeks’ prorogation was required to write a Queen’s Speech was patently disingenuous. If, as Lawrence observes, the prime minister’s advice had made it clear why high policy required the prorogation, he would at least have forced the…

Μόνως φιλείν το εαυτώ συμβαίνον και συγκλωθόμενον. Τι γαρ αρμοδιώτερον; Love only what befalls thee and is spun for thee by fate. For what can be more befitting for thee?—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations VII, 57 THE LONER WILL BE ALONE. If not now, then soon enough. Boris ran out of friends to betray and followers to abandon about as soon as a man who started with so few of either could. He disappointed those who had hopes of him, but what of those who merely had expectations? Even then, his premiership contrived to end more miserably than Theresa May’s. For she at least was ground down by events. Whereas Boris Johnson was undone by the pettiest form of himself: the little man breaking free from the great man of history. With his…

IN THE WAKE OF THE 2020 BLACK LIVES MATTER demonstrations, the Archbishops of Canterbury and York felt they had to act. They had a golden opportunity to set in train an inclusive, broadly representative, generous, open-minded process to examine whether there are things about the structures of the Church, or the ways they are operated, which impede the Church’s mission due to conscious or unconscious racism and, if there are, to propose effective remedies. It would be motivated by love of God and neighbour, uninhibited by preconceived theories and categories. It would foster mutual understanding across the whole Church, as a widely-shared endeavour. Any proposals would be based on carefully gathered, objectively evaluated, contemporary empirical evidence. It would, by this, achieve a lasting, generally agreed settlement of this potentially explosive issue…

A funny thing happened on the way to the Forum. Well, not the Forum strictly speaking. I mean the General Synod of the Church of England — but as forum and synod share much of a meaning (as places of meeting for coming together and deliberation) I stand with the funny thing happening on the way to the Forum. And, indeed, at it. The Church of England, for all its reputation as being a bit wet, is not known for being especially peaceable. That brings with it a great burden: we are always seen scrapping in public, and those whose churches like to pretend to a uniformity of thought enjoy sneering at the church which allows true contestation of thought and theology. This is nothing new. Look, for example, at…

TAX-CUTTING TORYISM has been on the rampage. Most of the early Conservative leadership candidates have committed to tax cuts, and in some cases these were to be early and big. The claim was that these would reflect the candidate’s support for Thatcherism, with its signature themes of a small state and low public spending. The truth is not so simple. There is a problem here of what economists sometimes call “time-inconsistency”, although that phrase has a rather different connotation in the highbrow journals. Public expenditure is of two kinds: payments of interest on the national debt and outlays on all other items. The earlier and bigger are tax cuts, the sooner and more rapidly does the budget deficit increase. Further, the larger is the budget deficit, the faster are the…

● To expect truth to emerge from the mouth of a politician is, I suppose, like expecting milk from a sea urchin or peaches from a stinging nettle. Therefore, when JEAN-LUC MÉLENCHON, as persistent in seeking election in France as was the late, lamented SCREAMING LORD SUTCH in Britain, said he was not claiming he would create paradise from one day to the next but he would put an end to hell, he was speaking with forked tongue at the least. In the first place, his assertion that he would not create paradise from one day to the next suggested that such a paradise was attainable, given time and given people such as he to direct its attainment. But if paradise were not immediately reachable, he stated that he would…

ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-SEVEN years ago, a mysterious Afghan pagan tribe, the Kalash, fled Islamic religious persecution to three secretive valleys in a remote corner of what is now north-western Pakistan. In 1998, when I was visiting Lahore, a Pakistani friend told me that little was known about the Kalash, except that they still lived largely as their people had back in their homeland for more than 2,000 years. The Kalash, rarely visited by outsiders, claimed descent from Alexander the Great’s troops who had campaigned through their Hindu Kush homeland. In their refuge, they were said to still practice a similar culture and religion to that of ancient Greece, even worshipping Zeus as their paramount god. In 330BC, Alexander established many cities across what is now Afghanistan — with thousands…

IN HAPPIER TIMES, THE EXISTENCE of Jacob Phillips’s Obedience is Freedom wouldn’t have been necessary. That he felt compelled to fill 200 pages, casting desires as bad and virtues as good, says something about the human condition, given that John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress was published in 1678, while the similarly themed Romance of the Rose has circulated since the days of Robin Hood. Worse, at first glance it might look as though Phillips had fallen into the gimmicky publishing trap of producing an intellectual version of Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life, a penitential calculus of dos and don’ts for a generation lacking truisms, discipline or a half-decent critique of hedonistic utilitarianism. Yet he doesn’t lay it on thick with indignant, shrill lectures that would drive Job to drink. Paragraph…

BUNTING, AVANTI ! What a pleasure to read these letters. We get six decades’ worth, carefully selected, from the 1920s to the 1980s, and any student of twentieth-century literature, or any student of writing, will find much to chew over. Alex Niven is conscious this publication is another piece in the great (often mysterious) Basil Bunting jigsaw puzzle. He argues that “there is still much to do where Bunting scholarship is concerned”. The introduction maps out the critical history since Bunting’s death in 1985: Victoria Forde’s The Poetry of Basil Bunting (1991) and Peter Makin’s Bunting: The Shaping of his Verse (1992), as well as the important work of Peter Quartermain (Basil Bunting: A Poet of the North) and Richard Caddel (Basil Bunting: A Northern Life). More recently the growing Bunting industry…

ON HOLIDAY, I USED TO find Nostalgie FM the perfect accompaniment to a drive through the Loire Valley. A non-stop blend of largely French hits from the sixties to the eighties, it was both a caution against and a potent agent of nostalgia. Most of the songs from this “golden age” turned out to be quite naff, but as the châteaux rolled by, the torch songs of Alain Souchon instilled a yearning for a past in which I had never lived. Indulging in pained regret for lost times might seem a harmless pleasure, but Hannah Rose Woods is here to warn it has become a pathological “fixation”. The Right, she argues, has “weaponised” nostalgia, tapping “inchoate yearnings about fading pride and glory” to fuel hatred against historians who are simply “putting…

LET’S BE HONEST. Out in the world of goyim, there have really been only two Yiddish writers that count. Thanks to Fiddler On The Roof, a fortunate few readers will have discovered the rapturous joys of Sholem Aleichem (on whose collection of stories “Tevye The Milkman” the musical was based). But in the second half of the 20th century, Isaac Bashevis Singer was the Yiddish colossus, a towering figure, even in mainstream literature. A Nobel Prize-winner whose works in neat, black Penguin editions once crowded the bookshop shelves, his novels and short stories charted the shtetl life he had left behind in Poland and the new home that so many of his characters found in America, just as he did when he arrived in 1935. These were tales swirling with…

THE BOOK THE Secret Author most enjoyed reading last month was Marcus Berkmann’s illuminating memoir How to be a Writer (Little, Brown £16.99). The title is deceptive. Rather than producing one of those dreadful self-help manuals full of jauntily-written tips on how to catch the commissioning editor’s eye, Mr Berkmann has simply compiled a chronicle of the 34 years he has spent as a freelance. The encouragement usually offered to tyros is in painfully short supply: this is an overcrowded profession, he grimly maintains, and the last thing anyone involved in it wants is a crowd of interlopers trying to dislodge those still clinging precariously to the coalface. But there is another way in which How to be a Writer differs from practically anything that gets written about bygone book-…

● IT MIGHT SAVE EVERYONE a bit of money and effort to display the following woo-alert before any film, play, TV show, opera etc older than about 20 years: The past happened! Get over it — or piss off. The thought was prompted by exciting news that Covent Garden has frotted away a year, and countless thousands of quid, making Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly more “authentic” — a pursuit as obviously vain and wretched as hiring a Mandarin accent-coach for Chu Chin Chow. You’d hope they might at least have sorted out Puccini’s racist “they-all-lookthe-same-to-me” pentatonics into proper Japanese modes and scales, and perform the blasted thing on bamboo flutes, but no. Anyway, this Italian caricature happily now features “correctly” coloured kimonos and the right kind of shuffling, if you…

● THE SEAGULL FLIES AGAIN, this time, revived, mainly with the same Game of Thrones-led cast at London’s Harold Pinter theatre as it opened with briefly before the pandemic cut short its flight. The famous cast of Westeros includes Indira Varma as Irina Arkadina and Tom Rhys Harries as her evasive lover, Trigorin. Broadly, there are two routes for staging Chekhov’s fine play about frailty, boredom and the drag of leisured or empty existence. The first is to indulge the lavish sweep of the “idiocy of rural life” in late-Tsarist Russia (one of Lenin’s more accurate apercus), giving us the rustle of an ageing actress’s silks, the clank of croquet warding off the tedium of an indolent summer and the deadly allure of unrequited love. The second is to allow…

● HOW THEY LOVE AMERICAN voices on Radio 4. If Start The Week is discussing nuclear physics, Third World debt, or beekeeping, you can be sure some professor from the University of Pough-keepsie will be asked to contribute their two penn’orth. Soul Music, which explores what used to be called “the tingle factor”, also manages to dredge up any number of Americans. There are plenty of folk in this country who could talk listeners through a song or a symphony, but the producers like to rope in witnesses from across the water. As for the Today programme, some presenters seem to have acquired their grasp of racial politics from Black Lives Matter. They’re not shy of inviting Americans on Radio 3, either. Barely a phase of the moon passes without…

AS HOBBIES GO, gardening is moderate in its demands. It doesn’t insist on the financial outlay and questionable Lycra-clad limbs of cycling and it won’t necessitate the weekends away that a friend’s husband has begun claiming for his paragliding. But while it’s less likely than those other pursuits to alter your relationship with your spouse, gardening will change your relationship with the weather. You’ll feel it most during summer months. We all want warmth and sunlight, but give a gardener too many days of unbroken blue skies and anxiety settles. The rest of the country will be stripping off and roasting themselves, you’ll be left contemplating every gardener’s worst nightmare: the hosepipe ban. The British weather being what it is, we could well be in the midst of biblical downpours…

IN RESPONSE TO THE YALE HISTORIAN Timothy Snyder declaring, “This war ends when Ukraine wins”, Critic contributor Sumantra Maitra asked, “what does ‘win’ mean in this context?” Henry Kissinger, as elliptical as ever at 99, was still clear enough that the best “win” Ukraine is getting out of Russia’s invasion is not losing any more. “At no point”, the former US Secretary of State explained, “did I say that Ukraine should give up any territory. I said the logical dividing line for a ceasefire is the status quo ante.” Whatever worldly imprecision Kissinger meant for his successors to contemplate in terms of front lines on maps, his advice was directly for them, and only indirectly for Ukraine’s leaders. The time when Britain was in America’s place today will soon be…

BORIS JOHNSON WILL go down in history as a prime minister who played fast and loose with the rule of law. That’s a much broader concept than merely committing a criminal offence — though Johnson acknowledged having done that, too, by accepting a fixed penalty notice in April for breach of his own government’s lockdown regulations. In August 2019, weeks after he arrived in Downing Street, the prime minister advised the Queen to suspend parliament for an unprecedented five weeks. A month later, the Supreme Court found this unlawful. Some in government thought the court’s judgment was poorly reasoned. But Johnson’s attempt to govern without parliamentary scrutiny showed a lack of respect for constitutional conventions that was to be repeated throughout his time in office. HIS PREFERRED BREXIT DEAL left…

UKRAINE’S EXISTENTIAL STRUGGLE with Vladimir Putin relies in part on what is being built inside a factory off a drab industrial estate in a corner of East Belfast. Since Russia invaded in February, thousands of NLAW an-ti-tank missiles have been sent to Ukraine, where they have been used to lethal effect in destroying Russian armour. The Ukrainians have also deployed Starstreak surface-to-air missiles to reduce the threat from Russian aircraft that have been bombing both military and civilian targets. Both weapon systems are constructed by the French arms manufacturer, Thales, at its base in eastern Belfast which Boris Johnson visited back in June. He came to thank the firm for building the anti-tank rockets that proved decisive repelling Russian armoured columns menacing Kyiv and Kharkiv in the first few weeks…

● I have been thinking this week about privilege. A common myth about privilege is that it is somehow related to class or money. But the truth is that a black millionaire is lower on the privilege hierarchy than the most destitute of white males. If Oprah Winfrey were to kick a white orphan boy in the face, she would still be the one being oppressed. In fact, the orphan would owe her an apology. Not that I am insensitive to the plight of the poor. Believe it or not, there are families out there who can’t even afford to buy a dedicated wine fridge. I really don’t know how people live like that. But that’s not what privilege is about. As a non-white non-binary vegan whose pronouns vary according…

OXFORD, HOME OF LOST CAUSES, and forsaken beliefs and unpopular names and impossible loyalties.” Such was Matthew Arnold’s description, and its truth, though diminishing through time, has been part of its greatness. Oxford harboured John Wycliffe, and defied Henry VIII’s demand for academic support for his divorce. It concealed persecuted Catholics and outlawed Jacobites. Its students still wear academical dress to sit exams, and ply its rivers in bizarre craft powered by long sticks. And it is home to some very eccentric institutions. One of the most eccentric, St Benet’s Hall, is now closing. Few of the founding principles of Oxford’s constituent “houses” would be allowed today. One, founded to support clerics who would pray for the dead of the battle of Agincourt, is today one of the most prestigious…

MENTION HENRY WILLIAMSON and it brings to mind the cool waters of the Devonshire Taw and Torridge, of deep wooded combes, a dog otter named Tarka and its canine nemesis Deadlock. Tarka The Otter has remained in print since it was first published in 1927 and is still considered by many as the benchmark by which nature writers are judged. Despite being an author who Ted Hughes said “made me feel the pathos of actuality in the natural world” through his animal series and discourses on English agrarian social history, Williamson was something of a townie. Born in 1885 in Lewisham it was not until his family moved to then “leafy” Ladywell that the boy enjoyed grass under his feet and muck in his nails. On family holidays to Devon…

JUST AS AUGUSTUS FOUND ROME a city of bricks and left it a city of marble, New York’s robber barons found a city of brownstones and left it a city gilded in gold. From 1870 to 1930, between the end of the Civil War and the start of the Great Depression, this Gilded Age defined the city in ways that continue to enrich its existence today. Amidst the forest of cookie-cutter high rises that now slice through the city skyline, it can be easy to miss the great Beaux-Arts architecture that resulted from these earlier aspirations. Still, most New Yorkers live for what remains of this age of exuberance, especially compared to the International Style of the last 70 years that has brutally tried to supplant it. New York would…

LOOK! WE HAVE COME THROUGH! was a collection of poems D.H. Lawrence published in 1917 to celebrate the early years of his relationship with Frieda Weekley. In borrowing the title, Lara Feigel marks her survival of lockdown, isolated in the Oxfordshire countryside with her partner and children, an experience which allowed her to immerse herself in Lawrence, on whom she had already agreed to write a book. Early fears that this will be another example of misappropriating literature for purposes of self-help prove to be thankfully short-lived. The autobiographical sections are outweighed by some of the sharpest, shrewdest discussions of Lawrence I have seen for a long time. Each of Feigel’s eight chapters homes in on a major topic, and she has fresh things to say in every case, drawing examples…

IN JANUARY 1640, the English court assembled in a vast temporary room beside the Banqueting House in Whitehall to watch a dream unfold. At a safe distance from Rubens’s newly painted ceiling, candlelight flickered on the silver breeches and plumed helmet of Charles I as he climbed the craggy rocks of discord to reach a golden throne. His French queen, Henrietta Maria — dressed by Inigo Jones in carnation red-pink and silver, a helmet on her head and sword at her side — then appeared from a heavenly cloud bursting through rays of light to be enthroned at his side and bring harmony to his fractious kingdom. Three years later the same queen was on the run from Parliament’s forces, on one night forced to lie in a ditch clutching…

IN THAT AT ONCE TEDIOUS and unsettling film, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Bill the candyman chastises a buck-toothed child who asks him how Wonka does it. “My dear boy, do you ask a fish how it swims?” he replies. It is a shallow answer, which sets the tone for the rest of the film. We ought to eat chocolate infrequently but we should always ask why — why things are as they are and why it is that people do what they do. Malachy Tallack’s Illuminated by Water is a bold and quietly beautiful blend of angling, philosophy, conservation, and cultural history. It is a book that is very much hung up on why — what’s the point of fishing, what’s the appeal, and is it still ok to…

• BRITNEY SPEARS DOESN’T WANT your pity. Since November last year, the pop star has been a free woman — released from the conservatorship through which her father had governed her life since 2008, when a California court deemed her incompetent. Abruptly, at the age of 39, she was given the right to have an adult life: to control her own money, go where she wished, see who she wanted, to marry her fiancé (which she did, this year). The narrative demands that this be a splendid, celebratory year for Britney. She has suffered so much for the sake of enriching her family and entertaining the world. In her statement to the court that terminated the conservatorship, she described herself as “traumatised” by the years she spent as a “slave”…

● ONE OF MY FAVOURITE PLACES is the Piazza Maggiore in Bologna, Italy. For on each evening in the last week of June, this vast open space is converted into an open-air cinema for free screenings of classic movies, as part of the Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival. For a cinephile it is hard to top the experience of watching, say, Stanley Donen’s musical Singing in the Rain in the company of a few thousand people. This year I saw the latest restoration of Erich von Stroheim’s Foolish Wives (1922), a silent classic that is celebrating its centenary this year and was presented in a newly-restored version with live orchestral accompaniment. Foolish Wives is a crime melodrama set in Monte Carlo, where someone purporting to be a Russian aristocrat and military…

● ONE OF THE MANY virtues of John Grindrod’s excellent recent book, Iconicon: A Journey Around the Landmark Buildings, published in March, is that he helps to make sense of the sometimes random and apparently shambolic new developments in London and how they came about, initially through the active encouragement of Ken Livingstone, who regarded big, new, high-rise buildings as symbols of London’s prowess. The process continued exponentially through lackadaisical planning controls when Boris Johnson was mayor. One part of this story I did not know about was the development of Olympic Park and the immediately adjacent former industrial neighbourhood of Hackney Wick. When it was announced that London would host the 2012 Olympic Games, I half knew that it was as much a project of urban regeneration in East…

ON THE STEPS UP TO THE blue door a man in a faded red tracksuit leans on one of the stone pillars in the Monday morning sun. All down Jermyn Street windows have been thrown open and flags above shop doors hang still in the heat. I knock three times then push a bottle of Sudafed up my nose, squeeze twice, and lick at the bitter liquid as it runs over my lip. I was 20 before I ever experienced hay fever. I was fishing some-where I shouldn’t have been when it first hit. I’ve not enjoyed June much since. When I get up there, Franco Gussalli Beretta is sitting in the middle of the room in a puddle of sunlight: blue suit, thick grey hair, and a trio of…

LAST MONTH THE Racing Post ran a poll among readers for the greatest race of all time. As far as I am concerned, four of the ten nominated were invalid, being flat races. While I am prepared to concede that the likes of Grundy v Bustino (regularly and ridiculously cited as the “greatest ever”) in 1975 and Dancing Brave’s Arc de Triomphe win in 1986 were both epic, that’s within the definitional constraint of them both being flat races, and thus ineligible for the ultimate accolade. That’s not an insult. Something doesn’t have to be the greatest ever to be memorable, or even a favourite. Football fans, for example, have their own pantheon of favourite players: rarely are they simply a list of greats. I HAVE A SIMILAR LIST of horses:…

WHEN THE PLAYWRIGHT, cricketer and poet Harold Pinter died in 2008, the tributes were fulsome. The actor Michael Gambon, who appeared in several of his plays, described him as “our God”, and the politician Tony Benn, who shared Pinter’s anti-American, anti-New Labour worldview, called him “a great playwright and a great figure on the political scene”. One person whose thoughts on Pinter’s passing went unrecorded was the satirist Craig Brown, who specialised in mocking the writer’s more portentous utterances. Several years later, Brown remarked in an interview that “I saw [Pinter] at a party across a room, and he made a throttling gesture at me and the hostess said to him, ‘Do you want to punch him?’ and he said, ‘I wouldn’t dirty my fists.’” Pinter 1, Brown 0, perhaps.…

DOWN THE YEARS Twickenham’s attraction has altered. The last time I went (and the time before and the time before that) the best of the day was the car park picnic. Picnics in drizzly car parks ought to be miserable. However, should the dishes have been prepared by a master such as Pierre Koffmann and the wines imported by Yapp Brothers, then the occasion becomes an ad hoc regale. And then off we trudge, not particularly willingly, with the Barbour’d hordes to watch a game of set-plays, man mountains, butch choreography, gain lines, “hits” and rules which no one, especially these days the referees, seems to understand. As a spectacle, rugby union has vastly diminished. Where does a ruck end? When is a maul a brawl? The debt to American…

In arcadia ego FOR THE LAST 20 YEARS, every summer has involved a week in Scarborough to visit my husband’s family. It’s a habit that has accrued its own traditions through repetition. A barbecue at a chalet on the North Bay. A trip to the chrome-plated ice cream parlour on South Bay where my (now adult) nephew will get a “mega” (a foot-long cone containing all the award-winning flavours, which he’s somehow never been defeated by). Fish and chips, of course. A compulsory dip in the North Sea, regardless of how cold it is. (This year, pre-heatwave, it was a punishing 12 degrees in the water, just 14 on shore. I plunged in and then ran back to the safety of my cardigan.) The British seaside has gained a few shabby…

WE BRITISH DO LIKE ANNIVERSARIES. This year alone I’ve been heavily involved in the celebrations of two of them: The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee and the Burghley 500, which celebrated the quincentenary of William Cecil, Elizabeth I’s great minister. But, every so often, an anniversary slips us by: uncelebrated and even unnoticed. Even an important one, when the political system was up-ended by a backbench revolt. Even when there are clues. Like the date, 1922. Even when the same places are involved. Like the Carlton Club. Time to give the game away, if it’s not given already. Boris Johnson labours under the illusion that he is another Churchill. Actually the resemblance, astonishing both in gross and in detail, is to Churchill’s other great contemporary, David Lloyd George. Indeed, the parallels between…

DR JOHN SENTAMU’S REPLACEMENT as Archbishop of York is the Most Reverend Stephen Cottrell. Having been suffragan Bishop of Reading and then Bishop of Chelmsford, holding the Church of England’s second most important job means Cottrell (below) will likely also be in the running to succeed Justin Welby as Archbishop of Canterbury, when the time comes. Cottrell’s promotion is a textbook case of what the Church of England presently thinks leadership looks like, and how it measures success. At Chelmsford he was known for large-scale thinking and diocesan initiatives. By the time he left for York, the diocese was managed by its bishop, three suffragan bishops, and seven archdeacons. Yet in 2021 it advertised for a diocesan chief executive on £90,000 a year — a manager to manage the managers…

I REALLY HOPE YOU ENJOYED THE PAST THREE decades given we’ve never had it so good, because the next few decades are going to be horrendous. Wait, let me rewind: where are we, economically? Not day-to-day; not post-Covid or mid-war or mid/whatever-Brexit, but panning out to a longer perspective. This boils down to two macro factors, two tides you can’t swim against: demographics and globalisation. “The political divide of the future will be over the elderly protecting their social safety net and the working-age population their real post-tax incomes.” This was Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan in an influential paper written for the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in 2017, which they expanded into The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival, published in August 2020 before…

‘‘WOMEN THESE DAYShave better things to do than bow to a cake.” Thus said Peter Townend, former social editor of Tatler and gatekeeper of the vestigial debutante scene, before his death in 2002. Despite Townend’s apres moi le deluge predictions, the London Season has not only endured but apparently flourished, particularly after two years of lockdown restrictions. More expansive, international and inclusive, the modern Season now extends far beyond its traditional sporting-based fixtures, including anything from Glastonbury to Art Basel. Extravagant hats, unwashed Henley blazers and buckets of luke-warm Pimms have been supplemented, if not superseded, by architecture installations and superstar DJ sets. Yet might it have lost a little polish in the process? The concept of the “Season” began to coalesce around the Restoration court in the seventeenth century, essentially…

TEMPTATION OFTEN leads to theft. That’s why companies should never have controls that are so lax that employees become tempted. I find it’s usually better for financial performance and the simple pleasures of interaction within businesses to have long-serving employees. For this, you need to provide a competitively-paid and enjoyable workplace. We are fortunate to have some great people who have chosen to work for our family and our businesses for decades and I hope we remember to show our appreciation adequately. But it is not responsible employment to leave tempting opportunities for dishonesty. To know this, as an owner-manager you have to understand your systems, or perhaps the lack of them. I’ve heard it said that, in the restaurant trade, all employees always steal — if you let them.…

THE LONGEVITY OF ELIZABETH II has (mostly) allowed us to avert our attention from the question of the relationship between church and state for a very long time. Given that her 70 years on the throne have seen the relentless rise of the forces of philistine secularism and constitutional vandalism, one cannot help but feel grateful for the benign obscurity that her reign has cast over such issues. Alas, this cannot be the case for much longer. During her coronation in 1953, the Queen made solemn oaths to maintain the “true profession of the Gospel”, “the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law”, and the Church of England. She was anointed with holy oil as the chosen ruler of God in a ceremony that owes its ultimate origins to the monarchy of…

ROCK’N’ROLL YEARS are all the rage these days. Ever since Jon Savage published his monumental 1966 (in 2015), the anni, particularly the 1970s, have been going like hot cakes. David Browne took 1970, David Hepworth grabbed 1971. Ronald Brownstein laid claim to 1974, while former Orange Juice drummer Steven Daly is — as I write — ring-fencing the tipping-point year of 1975. Perhaps pop historians should bid for other available years: would 1979 be worth more than, say, 1985? The latest annum to be bagged is 1972, which happens to be the year when this reviewer became a bopping consumer of records, magazines and badges, and when he officially saw his first live concert (Lindisfarne and Genesis at Lewisham Town Hall, he cringes to confess). But don’t worry, this review…

IN 1973, LEONARD COHEN was on the Greek island of Hydra with his partner, Suzanne Elrod, and their newborn son. The poet and novelist had found fame as a singer-songwriter in the late 1960s, casting a brooding shadow over the Summer of Love. By now, though, he was depressed; almost 40, unhappy in quiet domesticity and in the midst of a creative malaise. “I feel like I want to shut up,” he told an interviewer. Across the Mediterranean, an Arab coalition, led by Egypt and Syria, swept into Israel. It was Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, and the country was taken by surprise. The defence minister, Moshe Dayan, full of hubris after Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six Day War, warned his generals of the imminent…

THE GREATEST THREAT to human happiness is tyranny. Other dangers, such as Climate Change or Covid-19, may well be fearful, but tyranny does not merely end in the sometimes considerable extinction of life (consider the 45 million deaths caused by Mao’s “Great Leap Forward”). More than that, tyranny oppresses the human soul. No one in a tyranny is free, not even the tyrant: it is a society in which everyone is afraid, in which actions are guided by fear before truth or reason, and from which there is no escape. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has revealed the failure of the West to understand and contain tyrannical dictatorships. Tyranny is a type of constitution where one individual controls a monopoly of power. For Plato, it was a state that actively…

ON THE PENETRATING QUESTION of what fiction to take on holiday, this year The Critic offers a novel approach. Why heft around the Dolomites the bulk of an untested hardback, by a wet-behind-the-ears author who isn’t even dead yet, when you can halve the weight and double the probability of a good time by bringing an older book that thousands of satisfied holiday-makers have test-driven before you? This season, then, we recommend a trio of twentieth century novels, each of which offers a different desideratum for the discerning lounger. We begin with what might be a perfect summer novel, thanks to a combination of its brevity, its theme of nostalgic yearning and its August-countryside setting. Indeed, there’s a case to be made for J. L. Carr’s A Month in the…

● This summer’s BBC Proms will be the last festival of British orchestras as we know them. This is not due to Brexit, Covid, Ukraine, inflation, the gas squeeze or any other headline. It is the consequence of half a century of mismanagement and mental indolence on the part of safe-seat executive suits who turned a Nelsonian blind eye to the gathering storm. Well, it’s all over now. The death sentence was delivered by the BBC’s director general, Tim Davie (right), in a statement terminating BBC Four, which televises most of the Proms, and urging the BBC’s six orchestras in London, Manchester, Scotland and Wales to look for “alternative sources of income where possible.” The insincerity of that suggestion is on a par with Vladimir Putin’s “special measures” in Ukraine.…

● The modern obsessions with the intertwined themes of art value and art theft can be traced back to 1876. Then, Thomas Agnew & Sons in London put on display Gainsborough’s bravura portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. The portrait was not just a spectacular work of art — as vivacious as its subject — but had just become the most expensive painting ever sold at auction. The picture had not been seen for 50 years and had belonged to a Mrs Maginnis, who had thought nothing of chopping off the Duchess’s legs so that the picture would fit above her mantelpiece. The lopped aristocrat was discovered there by a London art dealer named John Bentley who bought it for £56 and it then entered the collection of an art…

● STRIKES ARE BACK, and with them, memories of the mid-1980s and the miners’ stoppage. Today it’s the transport workers bringing the country to a halt. Mick Lynch, boss of the RMT union, is having a good class war, jousting effectively with his journalistic interrogators. Yet, the ghosts of another era still hover. Who remembers SOGAT, the now-vanished print workers’ union, once 200,000-strong, that for years effectively ruled Fleet Street and the newspaper business? Or, for that matter, the National Union of Mineworkers? The left and much of the country united around the NUM as the miners fought to save their pits, their livelihoods and their communities. I can still see the yellow buckets for contributions (I might even have held one), hear the rattle of the coins inside and…

MANY SUPERIOR WRITERS have chronicled the long crushing of illusions which marks the progress from innocence to experience, but none (to my knowledge), have discussed the appalling revelation that some people don’t brush their teeth before breakfasting. In public. Really. I’d always had a bit of a thing about the unwarranted intimacy of hotel breakfast rooms; all those creased faces and ill-disguised adulterous hangovers looming at one over the buffet. But I learned only recently that my revulsion at the frowsty, halitotic miasma which inevitably hovers over the toast station of mid-range hotels is due to some antiquated dental advice that you should brush after your branflakes. I don’t want to see you eating branflakes, or indeed to think about why you’re eating them, not with the evidence of the…

• In 1991, Alan Bennett’s one-act play A Question of Attribution was set to celluloid by the BBC. In a key scene, Soviet spy turned Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, Sir Anthony Blunt (portrayed by James Fox), is surprised by The Queen (Prunella Scales) whilst working in the Buckingham Palace picture gallery. Their conversation turns to the famed forger of Vermeers, Han van Meegeren, and the nature of fakes from the genuine article. In artful wordplay Blunt attempts to dodge regal questions about authenticity, knowing of course of his own duplicity. Finally Her Majesty, ever practical, asks “if something is not what it seems to be, what is it?” A beleaguered Blunt replies pleadingly, “An enigma?” Life’s pleasures too, can be enigmas. And as life is said to mirror art…

IF ONE TAKES one’s lead from those young adults not exposing their genitalia on Love Island this summer, then the look of the season is meno-core, aka the Coastal Grandmother Aesthetic. TikTokers are wild for the CG vibe, with us since Man Repeller’s Harling Ross coined the term back in July 2017 to describe a look “inspired by the aesthetic of a middle-aged woman on a low-key beach vacation”. Ross pointed to the classy-ish but casual, chic yet marginally quirky guise of the middleaged heroines of Nancy Meyers’s movies, principally, Diane Keaton in 2003’s Something’s Got to Give. We’re talking seaside ease, sans preppiness, but with homemade-granola boho. A bleached, sludgy morass of sun hats, long sweaters, Birkies and drawstring linens, meno-core is the antithesis of the bandage dress: sexless,…