The Critic October 2022

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DEATH ALWAYS SEEMS UNREAL, for all that it is the starkest of realities. And never can the death of a stranger have seemed more real, yet unreal, to most of us than that of Elizabeth II. For how many of us look back on our own lifetimes without always seeing her there in the background too? She was not a fairytale, however age-enchanted the ATS-uniformed young princess alongside Winston Churchill on the Buckingham Palace balcony in 1945 has long seemed to us. She was as real as anything that makes up the stuff of life. Thus we could be forgiven for loyally thinking that the Queen was permanent, beyond mortal constraint. But she has been called to what she knew to be her reward, and we make what we will…

POPULATION PONZI Alistair Haimes (‘OUR REVELS NOW ARE ENDED,’ AUG/SEPT) is wrong to focus our future exclusively on our economic prospects when he sees them as having been underpinned in the past by globalisation and demographics. Globalisation has been of doubtful value to a great many of our fellow citizens; this is evidenced by median wages — the point at which half the population is earning less and half earning more — which have hardly shifted since 2008. Nobody should deny the very real contribution made by new arrivals to our economic and cultural life. The concern is about scale. In 1996, just before the Blair Government began its policy of encouraging large-scale immigration, the UK’s population was 58.2 million. Today it is 10 million higher at 68.6 million —…

WHEN I WAS A child there were seven educational and pedagogic establishments in Salisbury Cathedral Close, all of them contaminated by Anglicanism which was in those days bellicose, harsh, punitive. As I dawdled on my way to school I would pass ordinands, naked save for a dog collar, wrestling to the death; gibbets from which hung decomposing apostates; nuns exhibiting their lacerations, Sten guns and bloodied wimples; stoicf agellants; pious trebles submitting to castration; mitred zealots lapidating blasphemers; pyres of witches … I am possibly overdoing Borowczyk and Potocki. But this was before Vatican II, which in fuenced communions other than Catholicism. It was before John Robinson’s Honest To God and the craze for ecumenical hug-ins. It was before guitar strumming curates thrilled congregations-in-the-round with renditions of Kumbaya and We…

In with the It crowd ONE MIGHT IMAGINE THAT most people would be rather flattered to find themselves described as “the chosen ones”, but not so the “international aesthetes” who according to a French magazine are injecting new life into Venice. Like all cosmopolitan cities, Venice can be extremely parochial (though not so bad as New York), and the latest article set off a chain of bitching at the Ai WeiWei opening on San Giorgio. The first social event of la rentrée, the first time the internationally revered artist has worked in glass, the magnitude and haunting complexity of the 9-metre black glass sculpture La Commedia Umana: not nearly so engrossing as analysis of who was in or out on the latest It list. The Mostra del Cinema presents a…

“Bozza, you didn’t really blow up a Russian tank, did you?” Cazza is reading over his shoulder as he types. “Details! This memoir is about the greater truth. Do you think the bit where I kill the general with my teeth is too much?” “Maybe a bit. Where are you on the title?” “Blood, Sweat and Cheers: My Walk With Destiny.” We are staying in a new house, because we have had to move out of the flat over the office. Bozza says it won’t be for long — “just until they realise Liz is a lemon”—but he is passing the time by writing about his adventures. I think he should include one about a dog who fights crime, like when I solved The Case Of The Missing Party by…