Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2023 i The Critic

WHAT ARE UNIVERSITIES FOR? That question should be answered with one word which has a plain meaning: scholarship. This is not a means to an end, it is the end. And what it ought to produce is nothing more than its intellectual fruits. These should be gathered in a congenial and collegiate atmosphere conducive to study and — except in specific professional disciples such as medicine and law — the activity is not primarily vocational in character. For students, attending university should be a holistic experience and not a credential-harvesting passing of the termly seasons. Yet, of how many British universities can this still be said to be the case? University is justified in terms of pitifully crude — and largely unevidenced at lower-tier level — materialism: what it supposedly…

Last month, Prince Harry graced this country with one of his rare visits in order to testify in his lawsuit against Mirror Group Newspapers for alleged phone-hacking. His Royal Highness was the first senior member of the Royal Family to testify in court in 132 years. On that occasion, the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII), had been at a house party where a guest, the tiger-stalking and married women-chasing Lieutenant-Colonel Sir William Gordon-Cumming, Bt., was accused of cheating at baccarat, a card game then at the height of its inexplicable popularity. Gordon-Cumming had signed a mealy-mouthed non-confession in order to, he said later, protect the Prince’s reputation. All those involved swore to remain silent forever, and Gordon-Cumming promised to not play cards again for as long as he lived.…

THE GOVERNMENT’S RESPONSE to accusations that it has stood inert whilst Britain’s universities have been transformed into institutions intolerant of those who challenge the prevailing orthodoxies was the passing in May of the Freedom of Speech (Higher Education) Act 2023. Critics complain that the new law replicates the obligations placed on universities by Margaret Thatcher’s Education Secretary, Keith Joseph, as part of a massive overhaul of the sector in the 1980s. But that criticism overlooks changes whose cumulative effect is intended to secure a radical shift in assessing the legal and financial risks of failing not only to protect academic freedom but to promote it as well. By far the most promising innovation is the creation of the post of Director for Freedom of Speech and Academic Freedom at the…

I RECENTLY PAID A VISIT TO THE VATICAN, a city in Italy made famous by Tom Cruise when he used it for a location in Mission Impossible 3. There’s an art gallery there and plenty of churches, many of which feature religious paintings. Having examined these images, I can now reveal that Jesus Christ was actually trans. The more I read about Jesus, the more impressed I am. My favourite quotation is: “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man cometh unto the father, but by me. My pronouns are she/her.” (Joan chapter 14, verse 6). Bigots will be furious that I have retrospectively transitioned Jesus, but all the signs are there. Every single picture and statue of Jesus shows her with long hair and sandals, a…

SUMMER BOOKS SPECIAL AT THE AGE OF 89, HENRY MILLER was still writing. His output included 1,400 letters to Brenda Venus, 60 years younger, an American actress, former ballerina and Playboy model. Miller was besotted. For the last four years of his life, blind in one eye and partially paralysed in one leg, she was his paramour and muse. Lawrence Durrell said of their relationship: “She enabled him to dominate his infirmities and to experience all the Joys of Paradise.” Erica Jong was a little less fulsome: “He had the heart of a child beneath his old man’s infirmities.” Of Venus, Jong wrote: “She depicts herself as the last great love of Henry Miller’s life, and I am sure that is what he wanted her to believe (though I happen…

ON 13 DECEMBER 2019, the morning after Boris Johnson’s landslide, an historic fifth term in office for the Conservatives seemed all but assured. You could probably have counted the number of people who really thought Labour could return to government in a single parliament on the fingers of your third hand. Today, Sir Keir Starmer’s path to Downing Street looks almost equally assured. Boris Johnson’s premiership collapsed last summer, having squandered its political capital on a string of self-inflicted scandals. Liz Truss’s kamikaze sprint for tax cuts somehow went even more badly. Meanwhile developments in Scotland, where Nicola Sturgeon has passed the torch to the hapless Humza Yousaf and since been arrested by the police, has triggered a slump in Nationalist support that could bring dozens of Labour’s former strongholds…

‘‘DISCUSSING UGANDAN affairs” has long been Private Eye’s euphemism for sexual relations. Whatever its origins in the sixties, it has now taken on a far more sinister dimension since the signing into law of the Anti-Homosexuality Act 2023 by the President of Uganda last month. It isn’t funny at all. It’s deadly serious. I don’t quite know how to convey how bad it is apart from by quoting from sections of the text, so that is what I shall do. 2. The offence of homosexuality (1) A person commits the offence of homo-sexuality if the person performs a sexual act or allows a person of the same sex to perform a sexual act on him or her. (2) A person who commits the offence of homosexuality is liable, on conviction,…

FAUST OR HAMLET? THE GERMANS have identified passionately with one or other archetype at different times. But why these particular figures, whose heroism is so problematic, rather than less flawed tokens of Teutonic virtues? Faust remains the obvious choice. His story surfaced in 1587 in an anonymous German chapbook, Historia von D. Johann Fausten. Shortly thereafter, Christopher Marlowe wrote his play The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, beginning Faust’s metamorphosis from a legend to a myth and, finally, a meme. For the predominant place of Faust in German culture we have, of course, Goethe to thank. Throughout his long life, the subject would not leave him in peace. His Urfaust was drafted in the early 1770s; Faust: A Fragment was published in 1791; the finished verse play Faust: A…

GERMS HAVE ALWAYS BEFUDDLEDhumans. It’s not only their capacity to cause human suffering but their ability to set us against one another. Take poor Ignaz Semmelweis, a doctor in a Viennese maternity ward of the 1840s. He noted that maternal death was much higher in women attended to by doctors than those looked after by midwives. The midwives, he noted, washed their hands whereas the surgeons shuttled ungloved and unwashed between maternity ward and morgue. His pilot experiment of getting the doctors to wash their hands with chlorinated water showed a startling drop in maternal mortality. A fat lot of good this insight did Semmelweis: his vocal advocacy for hand hygiene banished him to Budapest and eventually to an asylum where he died of septicaemia, even his wife believing he…

THE QUALITY OF BOOKS about architecture covers the full range from excellent to execrable. Recency of publication is not a reliable guide to greatness. Only two weeks ago, I picked up in a second-hand bookshop a luxurious sixpart series called Cathedrals, Abbeys, and Churches of England and Wales, by T.G. Bonney, published in 1892, for just £20. Professor Bonney’s work feels like the last word on the subject. So one must have a very good reason to write another book about architecture, and we all need an even better reason to read it. Le Corbusier once said “the Styles are a lie”. Hugh Pearman, in his new book About Architecture, shares that sentiment, inasmuch as he believes we ought to evaluate buildings for what they do rather than the…

EASTERN EUROPE, THE TERM itself, is a dead stereotype. To give a catch-all name to the multi-layered melting pot of the dozens of ethnic groups from Poland to North Macedonia and all countries in between is a lazy Western construct that bears no resemblance to history. It certainly doesn’t do the land or the people justice. Amid the highly-charged political debate in the United Kingdom about immigration from Eastern Europe, Jacob Mikanowski’s debut is a much-welcomed historical analysis of the region. “For centuries, Eastern Europe has been a place of seekers. Less economically developed than the West, but open to a wealth of religious and messianic traditions … Eastern Europe is, above all, a land of small states with complicated fates.” Indeed. It is a captivating land — of vast…

Graham Elliott writes on language and linguistics WRITING OF OUR PLANET, Rose Macaulay observed, “into every penetrable corner of it and into most of the impenetrable corners, the English will penetrate”. Rigorous in his survey of the previously pink parts of the world map, dialectologist Peter Trudgill covers the remotest, native, English-speaking community (Tristan da Cunha, 1,505 nautical miles from the South African coast), as well as the most northern (Barrow, Alaska at 71 degrees) and most southern (Stanley, East Falkland at 51 degrees). Penetrating indeed. Where did the journey begin, and when? English is descended from Proto-Germanic (PG), spoken 3,000 years ago in an area spanning what is now Copenhagen, Malmö and Ystad. This branch of the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) family had broken away following the move from the Urheimat, or…

LORRIE MOORE IS ONE OF those writers who seems to shift whichever way you look at her. She’s the archetypal “writer’s writer”, acclaimed by her peers and a serious shoulder-to-the-wheel artist who, we sense, never forces the work, lets it come, and publishes slowly as a result. (In four decades there have been four slim novels and four even slimmer collections of stories.) But she is also a reader’s writer, with a following well beyond cult level and an absolute commitment to giving the reader a pleasure on every page. Typically this pleasure comes in the form of wit: she is a very funny writer, but — that shift again — also one whose emotional content can be so intense as to border on sentimentality, without ever quite slipping over. And…

SITTING AT AN AWARDS DINNER next to the leader of a period-instrument orchestra, we fell to talking about conductors, whom she generally disparaged. I asked what she remembered of her early years in the Philharmonia Orchestra. Suddenly, her eyes glistened. “We had Otto Klemperer,” she said. “Nobody ever made us sound like that.”I heard a similar appreciation from Sir Simon Rattle, no respecter of old lions. “Try as I might,” said Rattle when conducting the Philharmonia, “I could not get that Klemperer sound out of their fingers.” Klemperer died 50 years ago this July, aged 88, cared for by his daughter Lotte at their Swiss home. Lotte, a captivating character in her own right, died there 20 years ago this month. A Warner Classics box of Klemperer orchestral recordings has…

BY THE MID-1920S, THE PAINTER Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) was a figure of note in New York. Her large close-up paintings of flowers had caused a frisson and were seen both as metaphors for the female body and, in their nose-tothe-petal simplicity, examples of a new sort of Modernism — a form of non-abstract abstract art. During her career, she made some 200 flower paintings and when commentators likened them to female genitalia she demurred: no, they were just flowers, she said. She went further to cut off invasive psycho-sexual speculation: “I hate flowers,” she claimed, “I paint them because they’re cheaper than models and they don’t move.” Whatever the truth of this disingenuous statement, her admirers do love her flowers. In 2014, her Jimson Weed/White Flower No1 (1932) fetched $44.5…

FOR A SMALL COUNTRY of just over nine million people, Israel produces an extraordinary amount of first-class television. Conflict drives drama, so fighting a succession of wars for survival and overseeing an occupation — and the ethical price that exacts — add a sharp edge to several dramas that I have reviewed here, including Tehran, Fauda and No Man’s Land. But can that enthralling storytelling still thrive in a slower-paced, more complex story — one where doors are opened warily to be peeked around, rather than kicked in and stormed through? Rough Diamonds shows the answer is yes. The eight-part crime series, now showing on Netflix, is a co-production between Israel’s Keshet, and the Belgian De Mensen and VRT. Set in the strictly Orthodox Jewish community in Antwerp, it is…

TWENTY YEARS AGO, Faliraki cleaned up its act. The notorious Rhodian equivalent of Shagaluff had had enough of the familiar story of boozed-up Brits whose antics had transformed a once-idyllic fishing village into an all-inclusive anarchy of “vomit-covered streets, couples having sex in alleyways, late-night punch-ups”. One-euro shots, “Faliraki Fishbowls” and Eurovision Thong Contests were banned and profits fell by 90 per cent until slowly the resort reinvented itself as a budget-conscious family destination. But Faliraki’s beer-gutted shadow still wobbles over Rhodes; fantastic news for anyone interested in exploring the rest of the island, which remains, discreetly, rather chic. Lawrence Durrell would probably have been cancelled by now if anyone still bothered reading him, but whatever one thinks of his private life the joyful, haunting lyricism of his writing on…

BACK IN THE DAYS WHEN THE SIXTIES were still swinging and when gentlemen’s outfitters advertised their wares in shop windows and not in Windows 11, no mannequin, suited, hatted and shod, would be complete without gloves. From Savile Row to Carnaby Street, and every high street in between, the rule was the same. Even Tommy Nutter fell into line. The sartorial signal sent out to all said “you are only properly dressed when your head and hands are dressed too”. Times have changed. The King’s coronation saw an array of outfits ill-fitted to the occasion, not to mention those historic and traditional items of apparel that were absent entirely from it. Gone were the coronets and the tiaras, the breeches and the buckles. All cocked hats were kicked out. Only…

REMEMBER WHEN I wrote about the uniform imposition of black polo necks in February as an “I can’t even” sartorial opt-out? Well, that’s where I am with summer 2023. Only, white, obv., or whatever off-white most becomes one, be it chalk, cream, sludge or stone. Anything over 22 degrees and I’m prostrate. Last year’s 40+ malarkey nearly finished me, and this summer we’ve got that El Niño shit going down. Suffice to say, “I got nuttin’” until October. It’s possible others feel the same, as Vogue recently went from referring to a head-to-toe bleach out as a (yawn) “summer staple” to a week later declaring it a bona fide global vibe: “Whether it’s on the red carpet of Cannes or the bustling streets of New York City” ivory is apparently…

EVERY MEME HAS ITS DAY, AND “RULE 34” — the observation that on the internet you can find porn featuring every imaginable protagonist and situation — is now so banal that it’s been ages since I’ve seen it mentioned. It is said to have originated 20 years ago with a webzine cartoon of a man staring in horror at a screen. The speech bubble reads “Calvin and Hobbes?”, and it’s captioned “Rule #34: if it exists, there is porn of it. No exceptions.” With hindsight, those were innocent times. The intervening decades have seen the arrival of Pornhub, now the world’s largest porn site; smartphones, which put free porn in everyone’s pockets, including children’s; and OnlyFans, which disaggregated and disintermediated live sex work. Porn aesthetics have reshaped women’s bodies, with…

STESSA SPIAGGIA, STESSA MARE (“same beach, same sea”): the rituals of the Italian holiday season have remained unchanged for generations. On 1 May, the bathing stations on the Venice Lido set up their beach huts and umbrellas for the opening weekend, despite it being ten degrees and pouring down. May in La Serenissima is now the season of pac-a-macs and weeping brides. Head for the hills … SMART VENETIANS HAVE CONCURRED THAT it’s no longer the thing to attend the “exclusive” preview days of Biennale — too many people, too many parties, too much fawning coverage of painfully inadequate exhibits. Unless one has to be in town for professional reasons one goes (or pretends to go) up to Cortina, reserving the inauguration of the social season for September’s far more…

IT WAS THE LIVERY COMPANY dinner last night. The additional aperitif at El Vino was, with hindsight, a little unwise — so too was that third glass of port. To top it all, from the way the Master was coughing through the loyal toast, I probably got yet another dose of Covid from the loving cup. Then, as I lay in bed, bilious with the booze and the beef shin, I realised that it was time, finally, to tackle the big issue of our time — the fickle influence of alcohol in western capitalism. Surveying the chaos at the Confederation of British Industry, some commentators have highlighted a post-Brexit crisis of identity, while others blamed poor governance structures. Personally, I suspect that a little less boozing would have averted many…

IMAGINE A PARLOUR GAME WHERE THE AIM IS TO cite two practitioners in one field who are such polar opposites to each other that they make us doubt that it really is one field at all. In cinema, for example, one could offer everything-explodes merchant Michael Bay and nothing-happens master Andrei Tarkovsky. In fiction, one extreme might be Ian McEwan, the young author who shocked literary London with stories about pickled penises and a teenager raping his young sister. And the far side would be occupied by Ian McEwan, darling of the twenty-first century prize lists and bestseller shelves, whose novels have appeared on the Queen Consort’s Reading Room book club, and who once said with a straight face, “It’s an aspect of getting older that I find in my…

THERE ARE FEW THINGS MORE UNSETTLING TO THE decolonised dinner party bores who run the art world than a 61-year-old lesbian who, in her own words, “has fuck all left to lose”. Particularly not one who’s prepared to get lawyered-up to protect freedom of expression. Claudia Clare is a ceramicist. And the exquisite pots she creates tell unpopular stories, often about the ugliest parts of human nature. Clare lampoons the illiberal leftists’ trinity of acclaim for Islamism, prostitution and gender identity, and crucially refuses to abide by the “stay in your lane” creed of identity politics. Yet she is no reactionary. “Feminism,” she reflects, “is the thread that unites all my work. There is no point in demanding rights only for the women who look like me — the women’s…

WHEN I MOVED BACK to London at the start of this year, something was noticeably different. It wasn’t the shiny new Elizabeth Line, nor was it the outdoor pissoirs that now dot the streets of Soho. No, this change is more pervasive, and hard to put a finger on at first. But step into almost any tube carriage and there it will be: noise playing out loud from the smartphone of one of your fellow travellers. Sometimes it’s music, or the sound effects of a game, or full-length videos; on a packed train recently a pair of lads decided to treat us all to the audio of Shrek via one of their phones. But most often it will be just snatches of music or dialogue from one social media clip…

D.H. Robinson I know the quartersof the weather, where it comes from,where it goes. But the stem of me,this I took from their welcome,or their rejection, of meAnd my arrogancewas neither diminishednor increased,by the communicationIt is undone businessI speak of, this morning,with the seastretching outfrom my feet —Charles Olson, “Maximus, to Himself” (1963) YET AGAIN, IT FEELS LIKE A TIMEof waves, and it’s hard to tell the ebb from the flow. The neologism of the time was “clusterfuck”, a word the English language managed to do without for a thousand years until George Osborne got his mitts on the exchequer. Looking at these books spread across the desk, it’s hard to resist the thought that the verb is more pregnant than the noun: that some people are cosmically cluster-fucked; that…

THIS IS A POIGNANT AND REVEALING book, though not always in ways that the author intends. Part memoir, part manifesto, it is the story of a politically active, young woman writer, whose life was hijacked for three years to look after her mother who ended up dying of cancer. Kenway had help, of course, from the NHS, and some paid carers, and she managed to work and even write a book through most of the period. But it left her broken and exhausted and determined to think through how the country can better manage the rising care burden. It is impossible not to be moved by her story, which is full of deft reflections on, among other things, mother-daughter love. Yet I also found myself unsettled by her rage. What, as…

IN AN AGE WHEN MY PHONE can tell me exactly where I am and how to get where I’m going, it’s hard sometimes to imagine a time when navigation was one of any traveller’s great challenges. At the outbreak of the Second World War, the advice to Royal Air Force pilots trying to find their way was, more or less, to look out of the window and see whether anything on the ground looked familiar. The Luftwaffe, though, had a rather more sophisticated means of finding their targets. As Britain braced herself for the bomber onslaught of 1940, there was comfort in knowing that radar would give Hurricanes and Spitfires advance warning of where the attack was coming. But as soon as the sun went down, so did the fighters:…

IT IS NOT UNTIL LITERALLY the last page of the book, first published in 2011, that the author concedes that the Roma originally entered Europe 600 years ago “under false names, concealing their origins and telling tales about why they had to leave their homelands”. And he mentions this, absolutely appropriately, in comparing the impact of the original Roma immigration to “Europe’s reaction to the African and Arab migrants arriving on its shores” at the time of the book’s publication; a migration and a reaction which are today greatly magnified. A cogent book on European societies’ reactions to other cultures, including proper historical analyses, reflecting on the present situation, featuring the long-standing social islands of Roma (and indeed Jews) dwelling in their midst, and at least partially seeking to isolate…

Ben Sixsmith is The Critic’s online editor WHEN I WAS TEACHING English as a foreign language — in Poland, where I still live — I had a student who loved video games. Every week he would talk about video games, video games, video games. It was getting rather dull. “Tell me, Mateusz,” I asked, “Don’t you have some other hobbies?” “Well,” he mused, “Sometimes I hack into people’s email accounts and read their emails.” “So!” I said, brightly, “Video games …” Hackers, Scott Shapiro writes in Fancy Bear Goes Phishing, disturb us with special force because their misdeeds defy our comprehension. It’s easy to imagine what goes into burgling a house: wait till everybody is asleep, find a dodgy window, prise it open and you’re in (apologies to any burglars who…

“BEST SELLER”has some claims to being the funniest short story that ‘‘Best P.G. Wodehouse ever wrote. In it a girl named Evangeline Pembury, greatly to her own surprise and that of her fiancé Egbert Mulliner, produces a best-selling novel entitled Parted Ways. On the strength of this she acquires a suave and Byronic-looking literary agent named Jno. Henderson Banks, who addresses her as “Dear lady” and fixes up a string of lucrative commissions which it is beyond her ability to fulfil. Asked by an increasingly disgruntled Egbert who the man he saw her with the previous night was, Evangeline replies “That wasn’t a man. That was my literary agent.” The Secret Author was reminded of this withering exchange about half-way through a fascinated sit-down with Richard Charkin’s My Back Pages,…

THE OLD DUDE’S BEEN losing his mojo for a while now. The swordsman of Seville can’t really be bothered to haul it out of the scabbard these days. And those trusty lines, the repartee, the badinage and persiflage: even the chocolate-factory ladies of York are beginning to find it a bit ripe. He’s even tried going gay, but a paltry mille e tre just seemed, well, a bitgay. Now you’ll just find him, arthritic, unshaven, eyes like bloody oysters, in the corner of some old pub, sucking on roll-ups and dribbling into his half, swapping wheezy yarns with the equally remaindered Harry Flashman about those nuns in Naples and the stint as tennis coach at St Mary’s. Poor old Don Giovanni. Perhaps Mozart had an inkling this was going to…

A TIME OF SPIRALLING INDUSTRIAL unrest, concerns about Russian influence on democratic politics, rows about the government’s influence on the media and threats to the future of the BBC. The power plays of 1926 look like a more pronounced version of today’s tensions — and the rival claims of government, public service broadcasters, trade unions and the Archbishop of Canterbury — to embody progress and stability. When Winston Went to War With The Wireless at the Donmar Warehouse is the prolific Jack Thorne’s intelligent excavation of the stand-off between Stanley Baldwin’s government and the nascent broadcaster in a year of crisis. Winston Churchill, the bull in the Cabinet china shop as Chancellor of the Exchequer, squares up to the visionary but fragile leadership of the BBC’s John Reith as the battle…

HOW THE LAUDED ONES FALL from favour is a mystery. It seems only the day before yesterday that Kingsley Amis and Iris Murdoch were accorded an honoured place in our literary life. Now they have dropped off fashion’s cliff, though it’s always wise to remember what Tom Courtenay said of fashion, “When you see who is considered to be ‘in’, it’s such a relief to be out.” For three decades after the publication of The Good Companions in 1929, Jolly Jack Priestley was an unignorable presence. These days his novels are read by few, and the only play anyone cares to revive is An Inspector Calls. So it was a bright idea of Stuart Maconie, one of Radio 4’s favoured humming-birds, to ask “Whatever Became of JB Priestley?” FIRST, HE…

WHEN I WAS APPROACHED in 2021 to write a book about English wine, I honestly wasn’t keen. It’s not that I don’t like it, I’ve long enjoyed sparkling wines from Ridgeview, Balfour, Gusbourne, and others, but I just didn’t think there was much of a story there. From the outside it looked as if most producers followed a similar pattern — some chap made a packet in the City and sunk a few spare millions into a vineyard in Hampshire, Kent or Sussex with the aim of making a sparkling wine to beat the French. It was all a bit branded gilet and golf umbrella. I might as well have been writing about accountancy firms, plus there were other books about English wine that did the job admirably. TWO THINGS…

“What on earth are you wearing?” Akshata is worried ● about Rishi. He’s dressed in shorts, flip flops and a hoodie. He looks like the man who comes to clean our Yorkshire swimming pool, except that instead of “Theakston Bitter”, his sweatshirt says “Stanford”. “Alright, dudes!” Rishi replies. “I’ve decided to lean in to my inner nerd. Tech people are in right now. Everyone’s talking about Elon. Voters want to be led by someone who’s in touch with the future.” “And that’s you?” “Hey, do I need to say it in crypto?” “But darling, wouldn’t you be more comfortable in a suit?” “Suits are for squares! I’m going to do PMQs in my dressing gown, like Zuck! It’s time to shake things up.” He waves his phone around. “Does anyone…

THE CENTRAL RULE OF THE BRITISH CONSTITUTION is the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty. The Crown-in-Parliament has total legislative freedom, except that it cannot bind its successors. More prosaically, parliamentary sovereignty means that the government can legislate on whatever it would like, so long as a majority of MPs consent. Nothing is off the table. Parliament can legislate to confiscate the wealth of the richest people in the country, or it can ban trade unions. Parliament can nationalise the health service, or it can close all the mines. Parliament can impose a 100 per cent income tax on the wealthy, or it can abolish the minimum wage. In the British constitution, where there is political will, there is always a way. Once despotic, the power of the Crown-in-Parliament is today unusually…

I RECENTLY PUBLISHED A BOOK WHICH WOULD HAVE BEEN VERY DANGEROUS if anyone had read it. It was called The Phoney Victory, though quite a lot of the few people who bought it wrongly think it was called “The Phoney War”. I can only assume this is because they have wholly missed the point of it. I conceived of it perhaps ten years ago and finally delivered it in the spring of 2018. It had two aims. The first was to question the myth of the Second World War — which has become a British national religion and the prism through which almost everyone now views foreign policy. I especially wanted to explain why the British action of deliberately bombing German civilians was wrong and unjustifiable under Just War principles.…

HOW MANY BRITISH GENERALS HAVE been able to write as well as they could fight? Strangely perhaps, quite a few. Field Marshal Sir Michael Carver (Dilemmas of the Desert War, The Seven Ages of the British Army etc), General Sir David Fraser (And We Shall Shock Them), General Sir John Hackett (The Third World War) and Major General John Strawson (Beggars in Red) are four outstanding soldier-writers that spring immediately to mind. Even Monty wrote his memoirs. In our own day I’ve read plenty of competent books from a slew of men who’ve reached the top of the profession of arms. The work of some, such as that of General Sir Richard Shirreff (2017: War with Russia), Major General Mungo Melvin (Manstein) and Brigadier Allan Mallinson (Too Important for the…

YOU MIGHT NOT THINK that here in the third decade of the twenty-first century there was anyone left in the world like Celestria Parfitt, but nevertheless there she is: an austere, unmarried, elderly woman, daughter of a long-dead baronet, with a hard grey eye and a hairstyle like a 1920s dowager, who for the last 30 years has overseen the archive of one of the smaller Oxford colleges. It was a very long time ago that Celestria — “Miss Parfitt” to her colleagues — first put her aquiline nose into the front quadrangle of St Bede’s. Mrs Thatcher was in her first term then, Lord Fawning, the current warden, the most juvenile of junior research fellows, and Celestria’s monthly salary was remitted to her in the form of a Coutts…

Like a cup of coffee, the Guardian newspaper acts on me in the morning like a tonic, increasing my alertness after sleep. For example, I read the following this morning, shortly after I regained consciousness: Matt Rowland Hill, 38, is the author of Original Sins, about growing up as the son of a baptist minister before falling into a decade-long addiction to heroin while studying at Oxford. I have not read Mr Rowland Hill’s book, which I am perfectly prepared to believe is a very good one. But he did not FALL INTO A DECADE-LONG ADDICTION, he knowingly chose to become and remain addicted, for whatever reason he might have had. He jumped into it. The author is not stupid or an ignoramus. It is impossible that he did not…

TWO YEARS AGO THE Bank of England had just published its May 2021 Monetary Policy Report. It was signed by every member of the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee and was the Committee’s most substantial and authoritative view of inflation over the medium term. From the date of the Report’s publication, it envisaged a brief phase of strong growth and “modestly” above-target inflation but thereafter, “growth and inflation fall back, with inflation around the target [of 2 per cent] two and three years ahead”. In the MPC’s judgement, the delivery of on-target inflation would coincide with steady growth of national output and occur with little change in interest rates. According to a table in its May 2021 Report, the Bank rate would be 0.3 per cent and 0.6 per cent in…

In memoriam Simon Preston CBE, ob. 13.V.2022 & James Bowman CBE, ob. 27.III.2023 I GREW UP IN AN AMERICAN suburb where virtually all of our friends and acquaintances were people who had fled Iran following the catastrophe of 1979. To be an Iranian — whether adult or child — in the 1980s was to be perpetually on the defensive, and the older people I grew up around looked forever worried and tired and somehow quietly, even patiently, ill at ease in their new country. In a word, we were all traumatised. Whether out of genuine faith or from a need to give succour to their pain, a good many of them, my parents included, joined the Iranian congregation of a local Presbyterian church whose head pastor happened to have been…

A dramatisation of Haydn Middleton’s The Ballad of Syd & Morgan is on BBC Sounds DAVID BOWIE CERTAINLY KNEWhow to spring a surprise. In 2013, ten years into a recording silence many feared might be terminal, he caught us all on the hop with The Next Day, his hugely-acclaimed penultimate album. Scroll back another 30 years, and his Let’s Dance collection turned the former nabob of glam rock into an unlikely icon of post-disco, scoring him his career bestseller. And ten years before that — five decades ago this month, on 3 July 1973 — he staggered just about everyone, including two of his bandmates, by telling an audience at Hammersmith Odeon it was witnessing “the last show … we’ll ever do”. It’s no surprise, however, that since Bowie’s death…

THE TRAGIC DEATH OF GEORGE Floyd in 2020 reignited and globalised the protest movement Black Lives Matter. It goes without saying that what happened was a terrible tragedy, but many in Britain, myself included, wondered why a police killing in Minneapolis, 4,000 miles away, would lead to my local bakery publishing a statement on its website. Or, as Tomiwa Owolade points out in This Is Not America, why British anti-racist activists began talking urgently about “indigenous rights”, which mean something quite different in the UK than in America. While it’s true that the pressure-cooker conditions of Lockdown — aided by the dizzying world of social media — created the perfect setting for a moral panic of sorts, our collective reaction posed important questions about the state of liberal societies and their attitudes…

BRUNO SCHULZ WAS BORN in Drohobych, then part of Austrian Galicia, in 1892. Following the Treaty of Versailles, the town became Polish. It was annexed by Soviet Ukraine in 1939 before being occupied by the Nazis in 1941. Schulz (in a self-portrait, above) frescoed the children’s room of an apartment commandeered by the SS officer Felix Landau, a sadistic, conscienceless brute. Landau’s surviving diary is the quintessence of Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil”. “I’m fine, the Jews take care of me. That’s why I send them to heaven,” is Landau in lyrical mode. Schulz’s art is filled with images of men performing obeisance before women. A fetishist with a castration complex, his masochistic aesthetic intersected with Landau’s sadistic psychosis. Like Scheherazade, Schulz traded his art (in this case, murals) for life.…

Sophie Nicholls is a Lecturer in Early Modern History at St Hugh’s College, OxfordT THE IDEA THAT VICTORIAN WOMEN were advised to “sit up and cough” after sex as a method of contraception is one of the more entertaining anecdotes in Jessica Cox’s otherwise sobering book. Readers will not be surprised to find that the experience of pregnancy and childbirth in nineteenth-century Britain was no picnic. Indeed, the organisation of this book reflects the grim nature of its subject matter: each chapter is arranged around themes, which include (in)fertility, maternal mortality, abortion and infanticide. Women who experienced domestic abuse, marital rape and serial unwanted pregnancies fill the pages. It is encouraging, however, even amid these gloomy subjects, to find that most things have changed for the better. The medicalisation of…

ON A COLD OCTOBER DAY in 1967, a lone rider caught sight of a fellow cyclist ahead. Pedalling perfect circles despite the high gear, they steadily closed the gap, calmly overtook, and offered a liquorice allsort: “I thought a gesture was required.” The overtaken rider would go on to set a new men’s record for the 12-hour endurance time-trial; the confectionery-bearing leader would go one further and set the outright record. She was the only woman on the course, and her name was Beryl Burton. Who? To ask is no rhetorical device; it is a genuine inquiry into how I — an amateur devotee of cycling and endurance challenges — had never before heard the name. It is a question I would revisit on finishing Jeremy Wilson’s comprehensive, engaging and…

KIMPETRAS, NOW 30, has been famous twice. Her second era of fame began in 2017, with the song “I Don’t Want It At All” — a hymn to pretty girl acquisitiveness. “I want all my clothes designer/I want someone else to buy ’em,” she coos. It’s deliciously shallow and deeply catchy. In the video, Petras prays to a Paris Hilton shrine. (Who else could play the patron saint of wannabe hotties?) Hilton cameos, and she and Petras make a striking matching set: pouty lips, sleepy eyes and cascades of platinum hair. Pop music has always had a place for a princess. Madonna defined the type in the MTV era: absorbing her cues from Marilyn Monroe, she remade herself as the Material Girl — a blonde bombshell who knows her own…

WHERE, MY FATHER ASKED while flicking through the Disney app on my television, were the films he might enjoy? And what was the Marvel Cinematic Universe? The two questions are related. If you’re not a man under 45, or you don’t have children in your house, the Marvel phenomenon might have passed you by. You’ve seen the posters, but you’re confident that anything with people running around in Spandex can be ignored. But Marvel is the monster that has eaten Hollywood, and the survivors of its arrival have had to rebuild their lives around it. Until a bit over a decade ago, there was no particular reason for anyone in Britain to know about Marvel Comics. The actual comic books were hard to get hold of here, and they only…

ONE OF THE PROBLEMS ABOUT attitudes to contemporary architecture, and particularly those of the current government, is its polarisation. On the one hand, you have think tanks, such as Create Streets, which peddle both policy papers and online comment, hostile to nearly all forms of contemporary architecture apart from the most reactionary. These are the people, like Nicholas Boys Smith, who idolise the late Roger Scruton and are said to bend the ear of the current Secretary of State, Michael Gove. On the other hand, whatever its official pronouncements, most new housing under the current government has been under the auspices of the three big-volume house builders who churn out standardised housing estates which have been built to a uniform model — small brick boxes possibly with a pseudo-Georgian white…

IT WAS ONE OF THOSE dinner parties that didn’t feel like it was going particularly well. Someone had just broken up with their girlfriend for want of someone else; my little puppy wouldn’t stop howling in the hall, and one of our guests was strung out after a hard week. They’d been taking lots of psychedelics in the hope that it was going to cure a long-standing malady but it sounded as though the cumulative microdosing had brought on a pretty macro state of worry. I poured more wine and tried to bring the whole thing down a bit by mentioning a book I’m working on about land access and the complicated fight for the countryside. “I think we sometimes forget,” I said vaguely, “about working people in rural Britain.”…

NOTHING BEATS CRICKET for sporting statistics. I love it when the announcer declares: “This has been the highest fifth wicket stand for Sri Lanka at Trent Bridge between two left-handers whose mothers were called Priya” or such like, and everyone applauds. But it’s even better when someone is so far ahead of his peers that statistics are simply a battering ram with which to express that superiority. Which brings us to Aidan O’Brien. When Auguste Rodin won the Derby on 3 June, it was the Irish trainer’s ninth win in the Epsom classic. No modern trainer has come close (though Lester Piggott rode eight winners). His first, Galileo in 2001, was perhaps the most influential of all, as the horse went on to be the leading global sire and transform…

UP UNTIL THE SECOND HALF of the 1980s, books-of-the-film constituted a culturally invisible but huge chunk of the paperback fiction market. No newspaper or literary journal deigned to review them, but they underwrote vast swathes of the publishing industry. It was a market predicated on era-specific media traditions and technological limitations. The gap between the release of feature films and their first television transmission was one of several years. When they were eventually broadcast, there existed no ability on the part of the viewer to record them. Ditto for TV shows, which were usually shown only once. The only way the public had of readily revisiting moving media was to read the “novelisation”. Almost every major film and TV series was the subject of one or more. It was for…