Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2023 i The Critic

FORGOTTEN WAR Thank you to Andrea Valentino (HALF A CENTURY OF THE WORLD AT WAR, OCTOBER) for so splendidly conveying why The World at War documentary series succeeded in its task of explaining and communicating the enormity of the Second World War. The article makes a passing reference to the series’ effective sequel, The Cold War, which was also co-produced by Jeremy Isaacs and ran for 24 episodes in 1998. It adopted a similar approach and, besides featuring extraordinary archive footage, it recorded invaluable testimony from the likes of George Kennan, Fidel Castro, Robert McNamara and Mikhail Gorbachev. Generally well received at the time, it quickly faded from view and whilst The World At War continues to be repeated all over the world, and downloaded by schools and individuals, The…

● “Trick or Treat?” Akshata has come into the study, holding something behind her back. Rishi has been printing out spreadsheets and arranging them on the table. “I reject the stale consensus on Halloween,” he tells her. “The question I prefer to ask is: Treat or Trick?” Akshata sighs. “That’s very courageous of you, darling.” “I know. But do I get any credit from the media?” “Well, don’t worry, next year all this will be behind us.” “How do you mean?” Akshata suddenly looks panicked. She puts the brochure she was holding behind her back. It says something about Malibu Real Estate, which I think is a sort of car. Rishi has decided he likes cars now. “What if we got Jeremy Clarkson in?” he asks his friend James. “We…

IN 1511, ALBRECHT DÜRER — the “greatest German artist of all time” — suddenly gave up on painting. Although, over the following decades, he still painted the odd portrait and a few rather fine panels, he never took on another major commission, least of all for an altarpiece. It was a bewildering decision. Even Dürer was probably a little surprised. Although he had trained as an engraver and had already published a number of remarkable woodcuts, he had always believed that painting was the surest route to fame. After cutting his teeth on a few early compositions, he made two trips to Venice to learn from the leading masters. While he was there, he was commissioned to paint the Feast of the Rose Garlands (1506) for the church of San…

THERE WERE MOMENTS as I was reading my friend Máiría Cahill’s shocking and enthralling memoir of growing up in a Belfast enclave run by totalitarian republicans who protected child abusers, when I felt almost sorry for Gerry Adams, whom I’ve found loathsome since in the 1970s he achieved prominence as the IRA’s most gifted apologist. Although he has spent decades preposterously claiming he was never in the IRA, of which he was a ruthless leader, he basks in his reputation as a peacemaker hailed by presidents and prime ministers. How was he to know that Máiría, whom he had known all her life, the favourite grandniece of Joe Cahill, one of the founders of the Provisional IRA and Adams’s eminence grise, would turn into one of his most formidably intelligent and…

WITH THE CENTENARY OF THE Weimar Republic’s founding just gone, and that of Hitler’s rise to power fast approaching, interest in modern German history is as strong as ever. New books about Nazism and World War II still adorn the shelves of most bookstores, while documentaries and historical dramas about the period are watched by millions. The reasons for this are many. The Third Reich has long occupied an outsized space in our historical memory, but war in Eastern Europe has raised the spectre of another, wider conflict — a Third World War — just as democratic backsliding and populism’s growing appeal have us wondering if we, too, are going the way of the Weimar Republic. The present has us again looking at the past, in other words, to find out…

PERHAPS AS A FUNCTION OF MY OWN journey through middle age, I have become increasingly interested recently in late work. This is the writing that comes when a writer has passed what blurb-composers call “the peak of their powers”, but at the same time diligently distils the curiosities of a long life into fiction. Often the late work is compressed and succinct — no time to waste! We saw this in the final novels from those once-garrulous American masters Saul Bellow and Philip Roth: the reader, used to being beaten into submission by their storm of words, found a clarity and control in The Actual (1997) or Nemesis (2010) that had once been well hidden. Ian McEwan said recently that he and Julian Barnes had “agreed that the novella is the…

● POSSIBLY THE LAST THING Iexpected to run into in this life was Yuja Wang playing Pierre Boulez at a David Hockney exhibition in a box-room behind London’s Eurostar terminal. The incongruities are so fantastically disparate they defeat the act of criticism, which is helpful since the organisers made us sign a prior undertaking not to review the event. It was, they said, an experiment by the Chinese-US pianist, her repertoire decisions were spontaneous and the video elements might be controversial. All of these arguments struck me as perfectly reasonable and I had no problem at all signing-up to the review ban. Up to the midpoint, that is, when I felt that what I was witnessing in the King’s Cross Lightroom might actually be the future of concerts for the…

● HISTORY’S GREATEST ART collectors have often been fascinating characters too — the likes of the Medici, Charles I, Isabella Stewart Gardner, and Leo and Gertrude Stein had character and hinterland as well as taste and discrimination: they didn’t just acquire art wholesale, although they could do that too, but commissioned it. Their modern heirs are more likely simply to be very rich — the late Paul Allen with his Microsoft billions; Roman Abramovich (whose collection, according to the Oligarch Files, a recently leaked cache of financial papers, is worth $963 million); and Bernard Arnault, who has finessed his luxury brands, Louis Vuitton, Moët, Tiffany et al, into enough art to fill an entire new museum designed by Frank Gehry in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris. Despite considerably shallower…

● Iran’s intervention in Lebanon in the early 1980s changed the power balance of that country and the wider Middle East forever. Iran first built up a Shia terror movement, Hezbollah. It now supports Hamas with substantial funds and training. The results are clear: Hamas’s recent mass slaughter in Israel showed unprecedented levels of sophisticated, long-term military planning All of which makes Ghosts of Beirut, now showing on Paramount+ and available via Amazon Prime, a highly topical as well as often enthralling series. The Ghost in question is Imad Mughniyeh, once the world’s most wanted terrorist, hunted for decades by both the CIA and Mossad. Backed by Iran, Mughniyeh masterminded numerous deadly attacks, including the 1983 suicide bombings of the American embassy in Beirut and the US and French peacekeepers’…

WHAT DOES THE PHRASE “international jet set” mean to you? Me neither, but there are some places to which this particular cliché clings like Russell Brand’s hands to the intern’s … anyway, it still hangs queasily round the Swiss resort of Gstaad. If “international jet set” were a perfume, it would evoke a redolent base of stale cigar smoke with top notes of Joan Collins’s gusset. Whatever glamorous cachet the words may once have conveyed, they have been reduced to the rapey-eyed oldsters wearing Orlon rollnecks under blazers, listlessly clicking backgammon stones in the lobby of the Palace Hotel through the long, long half hour between breakfast and first orders. And that’s just the ladies. I’d dreamed of going to Gstaad ever since reading Shirley Conran’s inimitably bonkers bonkbuster Lace.…

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AMERE SIX MONTHS AGO, almost the entirety of Britain’s legal commentariat welcomed with glee the death of Dominic Raab’s ill-starred British Bill of Rights which, despite its lofty short title, was essentially a tweaked version of the Human Rights Act 1998, which incorporated the provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights into United Kingdom law. What few of Lord Chancellor Raab’s critics appreciated was the fact that, had his Bill of Rights been enacted, British membership of the European Convention would have become far more difficult to challenge politically. The excesses of the ECHR/HRA regime could always be blamed on New Labour; but with the Bill of Rights the Tories would have effectively assumed political co-ownership of the ECHR. Now, with Raab’s political demise, British withdrawal is once again…

WE WHO CONSIDER OURSELVES “Creatives” — writers, artists, actors, dancers, singers, musicians and so on — tend to loathe the Conservative Party. By temperament, few of us are right-wing. You Tories have always seemed hostile to us. It doesn’t help when so many of you treat our vocations as mere subsidised hobbies. But you still have a chance to win our allegiance: we may loathe you, but we hate and fear the Arts Council, and are looking for someone to protect us from them, since we still need their patronage, for now. Conservatives used to be intelligent patrons of the arts. In the 1930s, you had the most sophisticated cultural operation of any political organisation in a democratic country. Also, thanks to Alexander Korda’s film company, you had soft Tory…

BRITAIN HAS BET EVERYTHING ON WIND, mostly offshore wind, to decarbonise the national electricity grid by 2035 and reach Net Zero by 2050. The commitment is to increase the current 14 GW of offshore wind production to 50 GW by 2030, enough to power around half the UK’s predicted electricity consumption. It is Britain’s only current growing source of energy generation. And yet the wind industry is in crisis. New developments are on hold and the government’s offshore auction in September failed to attract a single bid. Wind farm operators are effectively on strike unless the UK taxpayer ponies up more cash. The reason is that offshore wind is too expensive to be commercially viable, even with inflation-adjusted price guarantees which protect suppliers against intermittency and supply chain problems. Mads…

IT NEVER FAILS. On a recent sojourn into Western Europe from my Budapest hideout, I ran into old friends I hadn’t seen since I moved to Hungary last fall. They were being a bit coy, and I knew exactly why. Eventually the penny dropped: “Isn’t the place, you know, fashy?” To be fair, they didn’t drop the actual f-bomb, but that’s what they meant. It’s what they always mean. They talk to me about my love affair with Viktor Orbán’s Hungary in the way Truman Capote’s friends must have kibitzed with him when he fell in love with an air conditioner repairman. One of my concerned Dutch friends declaimed that gay people get beaten up on the streets of Budapest. “Absolutely untrue!” I shot back. Later in the conversation, he…

ON 22 NOVEMBER 1963 — A FRIDAY — John F. Kennedy, Aldous Huxley, and C.S. Lewis all died within hours of each other. Sixty years on, it is surely Kennedy and Huxley who are most remembered as men who saw the bend of history’s arc: JFK the radical reformer, whose visionary civil rights legislation anticipated the colourblind American future; Huxley the dystopian mystic who foresaw the West’s descent into slavish hedonism in Brave New World. Lewis, by contrast, seemed a relic of eras that were bygone even by the time of his death. Despite being best known as a children’s author and Christian apologist, his day job was as a scholar in medieval and renaissance literature at both Oxford and Cambridge — hardly the best way to keep abreast of the…

● I went to fetch my baguette the other day in Paris, walking past the vomit in the street and the place where the heavily-tattooed man had just hawked his phlegm to demonstrate he was a real man (it could have been England), when I noticed an advertisement posted by the city council. “CHILDREN’S LEISURE ACTIVITIES,” it said, “HAVE NO PRICE.” Now this is simply not true. They have a price, and it may be one that is worth paying; but that is not the same as saying that they have no price. Of course, the leisure activities indicated were those promoted and supervised by the council. In other words, that council, under the much and justly reviled Ann Hidalgo, was praising itself and its own activities, such as the provision…

● I HAVE BEEN WATCHING WITH HORROR the footage from the recent Conservative party conference. It was a gathering of the worst possible people in the worst possible city. Manchester is so unnecessary. There was the predictable hate speech from Rishi Sunak, who claimed that it was “common sense” that “a man is a man and a woman is a woman”. Well, my friend Belinda is a man who temporarily becomes a woman whenever the prevailing southwest wind speed exceeds 8.5 knots. To suggest that Belinda’s identity isn’t “common sense” is the height of bigotry. The only saving grace was Sunak’s new policy of a ban on cigarettes for anyone born after 2008. It’s good to see the state deciding what is best for those citizens who are too stupid…

THE ORIGINAL FRENCH TITLE of this book promises unehistoire laïque of the Middle East. While the publishers of the English translation have opted for the more neutral-sounding “a political history” — laïcité having rather less cultural cachet in the Anglophone world than in France — Jean-Pierre Filiu, professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Sciences Po, still begins by declaring that he has adopted a “secular approach” to the subject. The history of the Middle East, he seems to mean by this, ought not to be seen in terms of the ways in which Muslims, Christians, and Jews have interpreted and lived out the teachings of their respective faiths, but as the product of secular factors such as political ambition, the competition for resources and tribalism. Filiu attempts to capture this…

FROM MY WINDOW SEAT, WHERE THIS essay is being written, my field of vision encompasses the flotsam of a shipwreck — the shipwreck of a self-destructive civilisation. Our sitting room has two lamps salvaged from a Viennese house designed by the Austrian architect Otto Wagner. The brass plate on the Bechstein piano proclaims its origin in Berlin. And the library includes hundreds of books in German, including early editions of the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). That civilisational shipwreck was not only a human but also an intellectual disaster. It brought to an end the era, lasting from the mid-eighteenth to the midtwentieth centuries, during which the German-speaking world had achieved ascendancy in many fields of the sciences and humanities. Its twin poles of Berlin and Vienna had become places…

IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS Stephen J. Gould, followed by Richard Fortey — or at least many now regard these two as the pioneers of popular accounts about fossils and travel. It’s a genre that never goes away, as shown by the spectacular success last year of Thomas Halliday’s Otherlands: A World in the Making. But, in fact, this history of popular geology writing is as old as the geological sciences themselves: take Hugh Miller’s Old Red Sandstone (1841, and still in print) and Charles Darwin’s long series of popular writing, which started with a travelogue of his voyage aboard the Beagle. So what does Ken McNamara’s Unearthing the Underworld add to an already busy bookshelf? The answer lies in the subtitle: A Natural History of Rocks. McNamara attempts to tell…

THE SOCIAL HISTORIAN Dominic Sandbrook could recently be found in the Culture section of the Sunday Times reviewing a book called Imperial Island: A History of Empire in Modern Britain by Charlotte Lydia Riley. Sandbrook, who knows his onions, didn’t seem to think a great deal of Dr Riley’s opus, but his principal complaint was reserved for its deep-dyed censoriousness. The author, he declared, “has a remarkable enthusiasm for telling people off”. The luckless victims of her asperity included Pathé newsreels for celebrating “white athletes and swimmers from Britain”, Ladybird books (these are guilty of “imperial patriotism”) and Melvyn Bragg for daring to describe William Wilberforce as “a great man”. Even Band Aid, one of the great charitable endeavours of the 1980s, is criticised for its “comforting colonial humanitarianism”. DR…

● REALLY, YOU’D THINK THEY MIGHT have learned the lesson by now, the opera apparat: don’t show off, keep your head down, everything will probably be fine. Alternatively, make like the late unlamented chief exec of ENO, wave your arms around and shout about how amazing you are, how your audience is entirely composed of black kidz, and disaster will swamp you. People will remember you exist, the papers will dump chortling scorn on you, the Arts Council will come calling, and goodnight Charlie. Obviously, no good can come from jemmying open the lid and letting light in on opera. But alas, it’s about to happen again: the biggie will be the biopic of Maria Callas (it’s the centenary of her birth) with Angelina Jolie doubtless the eye of a…

● ALAN BLEASDALE’S TELEVISION classic Boys from the Blackstuff is proof that when it comes to TV drama, less can be more. The five-part series was a masterpiece of compression, following a group of unemployed working-class men dodging the DHSS “sniffers” targeting dole fraud, rubbing donkey-jacketed shoulders with right-on clerics and lofty bureaucrats, and enduring (and sometimes relishing) Tom-and-Jerry chases with debt collectors. The series became as central to the culture of the 1980s as Margaret Thatcher, Wham! and shoulder pads — a feat of one-liners and mordant comedy set in the worst days of Liverpool’s decline. “We’re facing the wrong way, lad,” diagnoses George, the Marxist sage of the gang, as cargo trade blossoms with the European Union and the empty docks of the north-west become a place of…

● Michael Palin is not only the most modest member of the Monty Python team — he didn’t order a bigger hat when fame came knocking. He is also the most rounded, having excelled as an actor (rather than performer), globe-trotting traveller, and writer on many subjects. Now, in his eighty-first year, his curiosity remains undimmed, as listeners to Radio 4’s Book of the Week may confirm. It’s a good spot for a writer, 9.45am every weekday, though producers could vet the material more carefully. Too many of the books chosen offer only bread and dripping. Palin’s Great-Uncle Harry: A Tale of War and Empire, however, was a feast. Ostensibly it was a tribute to Lance Corporal H.W.B. Palin, slain on the Somme in September 1916. But he did not…

● NOW DO NOT MISUNDERSTAND ME. Smoking tobacco is bad for your health. You should not do it. To smoke is foolish. Just as you should not drink overmuch whisky or go out in a storm without a coat. These are also dangerous to your health. To get soaked (in both senses) is foolish. Smoking is also bad for the health of others. You should not inflict it upon them. To smoke is selfish. Just as you should not drive a diesel motorcar nor board an airliner. These too are bad for other people’s health. To travel (save by bicycle or hang-glider) is selfish. So, if you are neither foolish nor selfish stop reading right here and hide behind the Guardian. However, if you belong to that vast majority of…

EVERY SPORT HAS ITS SHARE of idiots. One current England football player was, I am told, known by coaching staff at a former club as “pea” because his brain was so small. And that’s just on the field, let alone what you get if listen to any of radio’s ubiquitous fan phone-ins. Racing is no different, as the recent furore over Constitution Hill’s target for this season demonstrated. After the horse’s magisterial Champion Hurdle romp in March, owner Michael Buckley didn’t dismiss the idea that Constitution Hill might, possibly, perhaps, maybe, potentially, conceivably, theoretically, go chasing. Cue a frenzy of excitement about the idea. But at no point did Buckley ever say more than that he was willing to think about it. Which he did. And then decided that the…

REMEMBER NIGHTMARE mother from Lyra’s prep, Talitha? Yoga influencer? I thought Lyra leaving the school might put her off the scent (she and Will had an excruciating masked flirtation after Covid), but no. Here we are, years later, and she “reached out” in October. Which means only one thing. We are due one of Talitha’s Thanksgiving Dinners. We had to do this in 2021, so I already know I will be sick with envy at her flat — it’s in Highgate, so she keeps wanging on about The Heath and swimming in the minging ponds, while I try not to cry about the amazing lighting, kitchen extension, bathrooms etc. Too sick with envy to eat, in fact, which is fine as the only thing more disgusting than a Thanksgiving dinner…

IF YOU’RE A WRITER, ARTIST OR ACADEMIC who has strayed beyond the narrow bounds of approved discourse, two consequences will be intimately familiar. The first is that it becomes harder to get a hearing about anything. The second is that if you do manage to say anything publicly — especially if you talk about the silencing — it will be taken as proof that you have not been silenced. This is the logic of witch-ducking. If a woman drowns, she isn’t a witch; if she floats, she is, and must be dispatched some other way. Either way, she ends up dead. The only counter to this is specific examples. But censorship is usually covert: when you’re passed over to speak at a conference, exhibit in a gallery or apply for a…

First-night nerves BY THE TIME THIS MAGAZINE is in your hands, I will be — after much huffing, straining and shedding of tears — a published author. My book Toxic: Women, Fame and the Noughties will be on bookshop tables and readerly nightstands across the country. How do I feel right now? The honest answer is, sort of terrible. This anxiety is, I’m told, normal. No one feels good about publishing a book. Maybe that’s why it’s traditional to douse all the nerves in not-quite-chilled white wine at the launch event. At least I’ve now undergone the ultimate trial by fire: recording the audiobook, which meant four days of reading my own words back to myself while a producer gently corrected my pronunciation and pacing. If I didn’t hate it after…

WITH DONALD Trump’s improbable plotline so dominating the American political soap opera, little attention is being paid to the other characters seeking the Republican nomination for the White House. There is, however, one candidate who deserves to be better known on this side of the pond, not so much for his potential as a future leader of the free world, but more for his perceptive analysis of what has gone wrong with Western business over the past decade. Despite never having held public office, the biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy is starting to be seen as a credible challenger for the GOP crown, should Trump stumble. This is thanks to his populist, if rather eccentric, platform which includes abolishing the FBI, raising the voting age to 25 and restoring the gold…

WE NEED TO TALK about Wigan. “Why Wigan?” you might ask. Because Wigan is the prototype for a whole new way of being Anglican which is being rolled out across various dioceses and, being the first of this model, it has been the subject of a detailed study and shown to be a disaster. This is not hyperbole. I’m not sure how else to describe a scheme which drives away fully a third of your congregation and results in a collapse of giving by a third, which cost £1.2 million to implement and has resulted in the deficits of the churches involved shooting up from £56,000 per year to £295,666. Let’s go back to the beginning. Wigan was the first project of a vast scheme of national spending called “Strategic…

● THE BRAMMERTON CASTLE CENTRE for the Creative Arts advertises extensively. The London Review of Books, the Literary Review and Saga magazine all play host to its half-page solicitations addressed to “creatively-minded people” who would like to “explore their potential,” with a view to “releasing their inner spirit in an atmosphere calculated to bring out the buried you”. Not much survives of the castle, but enough remains to supply a picturesque backdrop for photographs of the Brammerton team. There are half-a-dozen of these creative behemoths. But somehow the attractions of “leading poet” Archie Sillitoe (who did indeed once publish a poem in the Listener back in 1989), “highly regarded ceramicist” Jerry Cascob (a bearded potter) and a dancing instructor whose last engagement was in panto sometime in the early 1990s…

IN DARK TIMES, MAN NATURALLY seeks a saviour. We need guidance from the murky waters we have wandered into. In dark times for Britain, many of our fellow citizens have sought such guidance from the podcast The Rest is Politics — and, more specifically, from its cerebral host Rory Stewart. Rory Stewart is a very serious man. Reading his memoir about his time in Parliament, Politics on the Edge, you almost find yourself worrying for him. How does he make it through the day? Deciding whether to boil or fry his morning eggs alone must reduce him to agonised introspection — and that is before he starts to think about Afghanistan, populism and whether his co-host Alastair Campbell is going to tweet something heinous and get their podcast summarily cancelled.…

LARRY SUMMERS, president emeritus of Harvard University and one of the world’s most prominent economists, is no stranger to controversy. But — in terms of provocation — three sentences in a speech last month to the Washington-based Peterson Institute must be described as egregious. To quote, “I would suggest that substantial and accumulating deficits and debts are a substantial threat to national security and national power … Budget deficits a decade out comfortably in double digits as a share of GDP now seem a reasonable projection … I think it is reasonable to ask the question: ‘How long can or will the world’s greatest debtor be able to maintain its position as the world’s greatest power?’” All countries have avid watchers of the American economic and political scene, and it…

THE ENGAGEMENT OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY composers with Marxism is less well known than that of their counterparts in other art forms, but it is equally fascinating and no less disconcerting. Music was not an initial priority for Russian Bolshevism. Indeed, Lenin’s tastes were quite traditional. But radical aesthetics arose with the creation of the Proletkult movement which sought a new “proletarian culture”, and the Futurist writings of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Trotsky. A few short-lived musical developments resulted, including composer Arseny Avramov devising a system of 17 tones to replace “bourgeois” chromaticism, and a work presented in the harbour in Baku in 1922, which combined sounds from boats, cars, buses and machine guns with renditions of the Internationale. More enduring was Nikolay Roslavets and the Assotsiatsiya Sovremennoy Muzyki’s (ASM) promotion of works…

‘‘FROM THE INDIAN EMPERORS who contained the nefarious ambitions of the East India Company, to the West African kings who resisted British demands and set the terms of the trade in enslaved people … this book retells the history of early Empire from the all too familiar story of conquest to one of empowering defiance and resistance.” This extract comes from the publisher’s blurb of David Veevers’s ambitious and wide-ranging new book, The Great Defiance: How the World Took On the British Empire. To be sure, competing for shares of the market for slaves against European traders qualifies, at least technically, as “resistance”; but is that really of the “empowering” sort? Empowering to whom? Could a modern and progressive historian really write in praise of African slave-traders for being better at slave-trading…

AS OUR MIND IS STRENGTHENED by communication with vigorous and orderly minds, so it is impossible to say how much it loses and degenerates by our continual association and frequentation with mean and sickly minds.” So wrote the inventor of the essay, Michel de Montaigne, in the 1580s. “Mean and sickly minds” are the subject of Emily Cockayne’s wonderful book on the history of anonymous letters between the 1760s and the 1930s. She has chosen the subject of those who flee from the “art of discussion” and the joys of repartee that Montaigne’s essay describes, and instead seek refuge in anonymous communications. Yet one of the great strengths of her book is not to dismiss the writers of these letters as weirdos existing on the fringes of society, but instead…

NATIONAL TREASURES ARE EASILY taken for granted. And if they stick round long enough, people barely see them at all. For a Parisian, taking the Métro is a daily exercise little different from brushing one’s teeth. It’s a matter of routine, though arguably not a very hygienic one given the smells, the rats, and the strikes. In appearance, there isn’t much poetic material here. “It’s as if Parisians are spoilt by their Metro,” argues Andrew Martin in Metropolitain. But wherever French people see merde, there’s always someone over the Manche capable of appreciating a picturesque glitter. In his new book, Martin attempts that Baudelairean gesture in the form of an “ode” grounded in his irredeemable — I’m tempted to say helpless — love for the French capital and its “beauty perpetuated…

IT WAS A TERRIFIC ROMP, the long summer of Swinging London. Michael Caine kicked off the pivotal year of 1966 in March, when his name went above the title in Alfie. By August, when the Beatles released Revolver, and Pearly Kings did the Lambeth Walk down Carnaby Street, Noel Coward’s “smokily enchanted” city was the capital of the world. Between those bookends, on 30 July, England’s footballers won the World Cup at Wembley, and the country which, legend insists, had invented the game could finally claim to rank above all others. Before 1966, the national team had known only misery; and failure has been a companion in the six decades since. On one tumultuous day, however, eleven young men in strawberry-jam shirts wore crowns. Only two are still with us: the…

● IT WOULD BE NICE TO IMAGINE that most concerts end with the performer in some kind of green room bacchanalia. Nice, but wrong, because the end of one concert is usually the beginning of the next: tours are so tightly scheduled that performers will be ushered off stage and pretty much immediately into the big black luxury coach that carries them to their next date while they sleep. This system is efficient, because it maximises the time spent playing the gigs that make the real money now record sales have been replaced with the piddling revenue from streaming. It’s also safe, because it minimises the artist’s contact with the public. Fans are essential, of course — no fans means no show means no income — but they’re unpredictable. Just…

● “BEFORE THE WAR THE BRITISH cinema had no tradition,” wrote the critic Dilys Powell. Other nations, she said, had found their themes in the 1930s. The French had the underclass. The Russians had revolution. Americans their thrilling, growing nation. “It took a war to compel the British to look at themselves and find themselves interesting.” Writing in 1948, Powell was more right that she could have guessed. Over the next three decades, British cinema would cover many subjects, but it would return, again and again, to one. When people ask why older British generations seem obsessed with a conflict that ended before most of them were born, the answer is that we saw it played out before us again and again on the screen. For most of us these…

● OVER THE LAST 18 MONTHS OR SO, I have been minorly involved in providing advice on some aspects of the planning of the new Faith Museum at Bishop Auckland, a project which resulted from Jonathan Ruffer’s purchase in 2012 of 12 of the 13 paintings by Francisco de Zurbarán of “Jacob and his Twelve Sons” from the Church Commissioners (Bishop Trevor failed to acquire the thirteenth painting at auction in 1756). The Church Commissioners threw in the Bishop’s Palace as well and Ruffer and his wife, Jane, have chosen to dedicate themselves to an immensely ambitious project of renovating the palace and parts of the town, including a new gallery of Spanish Art which opened in October 2021. Not long after the establishment of Bishop Auckland as an independent…

HE LOOKED UP AT ME and cocked his head like a Labrador listening to a duck on the wind. “Well”, he said with a faint smile, “this has certainly never happened before.” I told him I wasn’t wholly surprised that I was the first person to drop out of his Masters degree in Modernism at UCL to head up Shooting Times. That afternoon I walked out, through the quad, for the last time and on the Monday I started as the seventeenth editor of the world’s oldest shooting title. My first assignment was an important one — Hull Cartridge, which was established in that great northern city in 1947, was having a party to celebrate the launch of some new loads. We drank, we talked about goose shooting at length,…

RIESLING, THE GREAT GRAPE of Germany, has long been a cult among wine lovers. Some sommeliers even have riesling tattoos. And while I wouldn’t go that far, if you’d asked me my favourite grape, until very recently I would have said riesling. But the funny thing is that my buying preferences show something different. I’m mildly addicted to a website called Cellar Tracker where I have been recording almost every wine I’ve tried for more than ten years, and it seems the white grape that I drink the most of isn’t riesling at all … it’s chardonnay. All this time I thought I was a sophisticated riesling lover but actually I’m a common or garden chardonnay swiller. Back in the 1990s when I first got into wine, there was a…

I WAS GOING TO REVIEW “Colour Revolution” at the Ashmolean this month, a celebration of the Victorian passion for pigment that runs until mid-February. Now, I adore all things Ash … but colour — it’s jumped the shark, baby. Glorious for the Victorians, but we Caroleans aren’t feeling it. The pandemic obsession with rainbow-hued serotonin dressing (c.f. my seminal March 2021 column) is, like, so over. Colour for colour’s sake is feeling de trop: a tad tacky, insufficiently sleek, non-serious. We will maintain elements, obv. However, the catwalk craving is for the monochrome rather than clown-like. Meanwhile, all that stuff about the death of the heel, binning of the suit etc? Mate, I told you it would be a flash in the pan. WE WITNESSED THE BEGINNINGS of this with…

IN THE PANTHEON OF GREAT British film directors, Michael Powell is somewhere at the top, along with Alfred Hitchcock and David Lean. All three found different ways of escaping the straitjacket of parochialism and Britishness: Hitch by “becoming” American in the late 1930s, Lean by branding international historical epics in the 1960s, and Powell by embracing artifice to convey emotion, by exploring foreignness, and by actively seeking to make films that would appeal to international audiences. Powell’s films, while in so many ways having a quintessentially English flavour and containing so many English types, often give a sense of the world beyond Britain and are part of what film historian Charles Barr has called the “open” tradition in British cinema. At the end of the silent era, Powell worked as…

ON 4 OCTOBER, AS CHAMPIONS LEAGUE football returned to St James’s Park, there was a strange subtext to the fixture. For the visitors were Paris St Germain. At a press conference preceding the game, journalists asked if the identity of Newcastle United’s opponents brought an extra edge to what was already a big occasion. This “edge” was not about Anglo-French rivalry, even though it was in the north-east of England during the Napoleonic Wars that, according to legend, residents hanged a shipwrecked monkey, believing him to be a spy. Nor was it about any history of bad blood between the two teams. No, it was about the identity of the clubs’ owners. Newcastle, owned by Saudi Arabia, were playing PSG, owned by Qatar. Some therefore asked whether the game might…