Innholdsfortegnelse for August/September 2024 i The Critic

A TOPLESS WOMAN IN MINI-SKIRT, HIGH heels and garish makeup struts down a catwalk. There are crimson crystals representing mastectomy wounds where her breasts should be. She swings a plastic bag, holding what look like the two lumps of bleeding flesh cut from her chest. This is RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars, a spin-off from the long-running franchise featuring men dressing up in parodically feminine fashion. If you subscribe to queer theory, their performance cleverly reveals the way gender norms constrain women. If you don’t, it offers men the opportunity to mock women just as blackface allowed white people in the American South to express their racism. Alert readers will notice that drag isn’t usually performed by people who need surgery to achieve flat chests. But this is Kade Gottlieb,…

SARAH DITUM Doing shots MOST OF THE INVITATIONS I GET THROUGH MY work are to webinars about post-Brexit politics (snore). So when I receive an email asking if I’m free to go on a whisky-tasting trip, I say yes quickly, before the PR can change her mind. And so I find myself in the Highlands, thoughtfully sniffing my way through the varieties on offer at the Balblair distillery. I decide I like the 18-year-old best, and begin to hold some very informed thoughts about the effects of time on flavour; the next day, I have some even more informed thoughts about the effect of the 18-year-old on me. There’s no time for self-pity on the morning after, though, because we’re scheduled to go clay pigeon shooting. It’s my first time…

ON THE NIGHT BEFORE HEdied, Jesus told his disciples “But now, he that hath a purse, let him take it … and he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one.” This is not necessarily the clinching Scriptural argument for the arms trade but it’s pretty much the only one we’ve got so I’m going to run with it. The ethics of investing in the arms trade are interesting. The Church doesn’t do it. The Church Commissioners have a £10.2 billion portfolio of assets to generate income which they are supposed to spend on funding the cure of souls in poorer parishes (which they have mostly redirected to other things, but that’s a separate issue). They are banned from investing in “any company deriving more than…

WHAT MOTIVATESvoters at general elections? Are they concerned with themselves and their own immediate material interests? Or are they worried about the good of the community (or “society” or “nation” or even “race”) to which they belong? After the recent wipeout of the Conservative Party in the general election, these questions have to be asked. There was certainly a gap in policy intentions and ideological positioning between Labour and the Conservatives. But the gap was small relative to that between the number of MPs the two main parties got elected. Some kinds of political branding and rhetoric are successful, and others are not. Politics is, above all, the astute deployment of words. My argument here will be that the words chosen by Rishi Sunak and his colleagues were useless. IN…

FOR HUGH GRANT, IT WAS ANOTHER example of how the internet is destroying all we hold dear. “Fulham Road cinema closing after 94 years,” he wrote on Twitter. “Strangely unbearable. Let’s all sit at home and watch «content» on «streaming». While scrolling.” The closure of a beloved picture house, one whose façade and foyer evoked the golden era of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, is indeed a sad moment. But what if Grant is wrong? Because although this decade has been a horrible one for the movie industry, and although some cinemas are closing, the surprising reality is that there were more cinemas open in 2023 than five years earlier. Indeed, you can make a case that, given how badly the industry was ravaged by pandemic and strikes, what’s amazing is…

OVER A DECADE AGO, THE PRIME MINISTER, David Cameron, appointed an ambassador to a road junction. No.10’s publicity stunt gave “Silicon Roundabout” — the name given to what the Government hoped would become a booming cluster of technology startups at London’s Old Street (right) — a make-believe diplomatic status. It was a surreal time. New Media gurus asked “What Would Google Do?” — consciously echoing the Imitatio Christi. The editor of Wired magazine, Chris Anderson, proposed in his book Free that we should consider abolishing the price of digital goods. Subtitled The Future of a Radical Price, the book was available in hardback for $29.99. All this malarkey served a strategic purpose, however. It was brilliant propaganda, and an exhibition of Californian passive aggression. The world would have to conform…

WHEN YOUR BIRTH IS ANNOUNCED in The Times, it generally means that you are bound for greatness, obscurity or disgrace. During the course of the 66 years that Terence Rattigan lived, he encountered the first on repeated occasions, and, especially towards the end of his life, found himself in the second state in more ways than he would have been comfortable with. If he avoided disgrace at a time when society was intolerant to his homosexuality, it was through a mixture of luck and good judgement. Yet the ever-present sense of guilt and shame that this engendered led to a remarkable degree of compassion and emotional complexity in his drama; the stiff upper lip undercut by a heart beating in double time, and more likely than not to reduce its…

DAVID LLOYD GEORGE WAS THE LAST Liberal prime minister. After his defenestration, the Liberal Party shrivelled into factional infighting, quixotic comeback schemes, and ultimate irrelevance. So it is easy to imagine why the now former Conservative MP Damian Collins, currently reeling from an election which has demolished his own parliamentary party, might think the case instructive. Having seen a 2019 majority of over 20,000 handily overturned by Labour in his constituency of Folkestone and Hythe, Collins must now be wondering whether the Conservatives are destined for the same fate. That this is not, in fact, the theme of his book makes it a bit of a missed opportunity. Governing political parties do not really die in Britain. Lloyd George is the only person ever to have killed one. It may…

“TABLOID” IS A PORTMANTEAU OF “tablet” and “alkaloid”. The word was coined in the nineteenth century by ‘‘T a drugs company to market its medicines, but came to mean anything that had been compressed for easy consumption. Alfred Harmsworth, the brilliant journalist who founded the Daily Mail, was the first to apply it to a newspaper, using it describe the 1 January 1901 edition of the New York World, which he had guest-edited at the invitation of its publisher, Joseph Pulitzer. According to this history of the tabloid press, for many “tabloid” has now become shorthand for “a kind of journalism that prioritises superficial reporting, scandal and sensation over sober facts; that specialises in gossip and innuendo; that creates and then criticises the cult of celebrity; that somehow glorifies crime, trivia and…

WHEN GENERAL GORDON WENT to Jerusalem in 1883, the city offended his evangelical sensibilities. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, filled with incense and superstition, simply would not do: Christ must have died elsewhere. Jerusalem, he thought, possessed the shape of a woman’s body (as ever with Chinese Gordon, one can go wild with Freudian theorising), all of which apparently suggested that another site, just north of the Damascus Gate, was the real Golgotha. Jerusalem, for Gordon and many like him, was a place between heaven and earth, a place where every shrub and every rock held a deeper meaning and revealed something divine. There are, of course, plenty who visit the traditional holy sites of Jerusalem and find them exhilarating: busloads of Christian pilgrims, down from Galilee for the…

BILL EDRICH IS THE LEAST WELL-KNOWN of those formidable England cricketers who brightened British life in the black and white days after the Second World War. Leonard Hutton, the great Yorkshire opening batsman, was knighted. Denis Compton, the Middlesex middle order cavalier, should have been. Peter May, Colin Cowdrey (later Baron Cowdrey of Tonbridge), Tom Graveney, Ken Barrington and Ted Dexter, batsmen of contrasting character, remain much loved. Of the bowlers Fred Trueman, Brian Statham, Frank Tyson and Jim Laker are frequently recalled; Trueman as often for tales about him as for what he did on the field, which was plenty. Edrich, a very good rather than great cricketer, hardly gets a look-in. As the title of Leo McKinstry’s book makes plain, however, Edrich had many lives, and all were…

MUSIC MIGHT BE THE FOOD OF love, but the food of music is beef, and music has been eating exceptionally well since October last year. That’s when Canadian rapper Drake (below) released the track “First Person Shooter”, though the trouble didn’t start with anything Drake said but rather with a guest verse from J Cole including the lines: “Love when they argue the hardest MC/Is it K-Dot? Is it Aubrey? Or me?/We the big three like we started a league.” Aubrey here is Drake (real name Aubrey Drake Graham); K-Dot is Kendrick Lamar, less commercially successful but ultra critically acclaimed (in 2018, he became the first hip-hop artist to win a Pulitzer). And it’s worth pausing to recognise that this was a compliment: Cole was saying that there are three…

PERHAPS MORE THAN ANY OTHER genre, the Western belongs to cinema. We had war stories before we had movies, superheroes came from comic books, and musicals from the stage. Meanwhile cowboys, gunslingers, lawmen, the cavalry — well, they may have begun in nineteenth-century dime novels, but they were made great on the silver screen. And for decades, Westerns were the way filmmakers explored ideas and storytelling. Stagecoach remains the model for strangers forced to work together in the face of external threat, and Shane for a man trying escape his past. They were political: Soldier Blue, just re-released in a high-definition restoration, was a furious Vietnam allegory, showing the US Cavalry as murderous thugs rather than heroes. High Noon reflected McCarthyism, as Gary Cooper’s sheriff found his friends abandoning him.…

WHEN I BEGAN TO WRITE THIS column, my editors promised that I could write one piece about pro wrestling podcasts. [Recollections may differ — Ed.] Quiet, you. As I drift towards my mid-thirties, I’m too old to watch a lot of professional wrestling. I’m too old to watch a lot of TV in general — too old and yet too young. We have an odd relationship with television in our thirties, because we are sensitive to the passing of time yet we have not come to terms with it. Podcasts, though? If I’m listening to a podcast I can pretend to do something more productive as I do it — wander to the corner shop for the third time in the day, or move a cup between different random places,…

MY UNIVERSITY’S LAUNDRYis called St Michael’s, perhaps because the nuns who founded it could turn dirty linen into angelically sparkling raiment. More puzzlingly, for most of the last century, Marks & Spencer sold their wares under the same brand name. Their first label, introduced in 1928 (shortly before the University of Notre Dame decided it needed its own laundry) showed the prince of heavenly chivalry brandishing a sword and displaying his wings. The St Michael brand was first used for textiles and clothes. Perhaps, therefore, it was something in the archangel’s perfectly blanched purity, or in the brightness and durability of his robes of burnished steel, that made him seem an appropriate icon for marketing knickers and bras. Or perhaps shoppers in the late Twenties wanted their women to look…

LONG BEFORE JOHN MAJOR AND DAVID MELLOR appeared at Stamford Bridge wearing matching scarves and when most football fans thought “Nessun Dorma” was a Japanese SUV, there was another sport that brought the country together in a convulsion of delirious democracy: horse racing. The gee-gees has always been the sport of kings and of dustmen. Go to any meeting and you will find toffs, tinkers and everyone in between rubbing shoulders. Most have a flutter (with marginally less corruption than your average general election) and there is every chance the richest will leave poorer while the poorest pick their way home with pockets packed. Racing, especially down in the bookies’ ring, is remorselessly egalitarian. That is not to say that racegoers do not have their own places and spaces. The…

I WON’T BORE YOU BY cataloguing the drab banalities of summer. They are only too apparent. As I write, 2024 is an improvement on most by merit of its unseasonal gloom. However, brace yourself, the outfitting looks set to be worse. For boho’s back, baby, meaning droopy, limp and dismal is the name of the game, plus a side order of damp macramé. As for the irony of free-spirited flower-childness signalled via Gaia-imperilling fast fashion, it ain’t exactly lost. Frankly, this shit has been rumbling away for a while. Twenty years on, the Noughties has stopped qualifying as “last week” and started officially being categorised as “vintage”. Thus slip dresses, “artisanal” quilted jackets, fringing, dodgy crochet, turd brown, Birkenstocks, straw bags and questionable jewellery have been doing the rounds. Borecore has…

THIS MONTH, THE CRITIC IS FIFTY issues old. Later this year, we’ll celebrate our fifth birthday. This magazine owes an obvious debt to Daniel Johnson’s Standpoint, and, to whatever degree we succeed, continues in a tradition behind Encounter, Leo Maxse’s National Review and the perhaps surprisingly small handful of other titles to have occupied this niche. It would be foolish not to note that those publications were habitually also the fruits of much generosity. Thus, Alan Bekhor’s Standpoint, Lady Milner’s National Review, or, indeed, the CIA’s Encounter. From the moment we launched, we have enjoyed similar proprietorial benevolence from Jeremy Hosking. What we have done with that, has been on us. But without it, we could have done nothing. OUR 2019 LAUNCH party happened in the ballroom of a London club on the evening…

HEIRS TO BLAIR Your leading article (BLOODY OPPOSITION, JULY) finds fault with the policies of all Conservative governments since the “worst prime minister, John Major” who you credit with creating “modern Britain”. Mainly, though, it is during the New Labour years that followed Major that you locate the roots of our current discontents. That is not only because of what Blairism achieved in office but also through its adoption by David Cameron’s modernisers. They accepted as holy writ the key mechanisms that ingrained the progressivism of identity politics in law and public sector provision. The Conservative modernisers also stitched up the candidate selection of like-minded MPs, few of whom proved either administratively capable or philosophically stout enough to challenge the liberal consensus they inherited and embraced. Yet, it does seem…

IT’S NOT OFTEN THAT A SINGLE CAREER CAN be said to exemplify the rise and fall of an entire industry, but reading the obituaries of Tristram Powell, who died in March at the age of 83, I realised that almost alone amongst his contemporaries he had managed to pull off this notoriously difficult trick. In case there should have been any doubt as to the symbolic nature of Tristram’s achievements, the Daily Telegraph’s summary of his life went so far as to note that he “flourished in the golden age of BBC arts coverage” — the implication being that this golden age was now as superannuated as the era of the passenger pigeon. But the flourishing, while it lasted, was spectacular. Joining BBC Two on its foundation in 1964, he…

SOME YEARS AGO, SIR MARK BOLEAT GOT A CALL from the Treasury. George Osborne, Boleat was informed, wanted to host an event to commemorate the four-hundredth anniversary of the first meeting of the Treasury Board. And when, Boleat wondered, was the last meeting? “Oh,” came the reply. “About 390 years ago, we think.” At that, the chair of the Policy and Resources Committee at the City of London Corporation knew just what to say. “And the Chancellor would like to have this splendid dinner that he would host in the Guildhall?” “Yes, Mark, he would.” “And he’d like the City to pay for it, wouldn’t he?” “Yes, Mark, he would! You’re very clever today!” “So we hosted it,” Boleat tells me, adding that the whole affair cost £30,000. Such partnerships…

OVER A PINT RECENTLY, A FRIEND DEscribed how, after leaving the infantry, he underwent a prolonged period of physical and psychological exertion in the hope of joining the Special Forces. Gruelling stuff. Despite years of training and an impressive service record, he didn’t make the cut. Yet Evelyn Waugh, at 37 and running to fat after two sedentary decades veering between the bottle and the typewriter, joined 8 Commando. He had been recommended by a friend to Brigadier Sir Joseph Laycock at the bar of White’s. Laycock, who admired Waugh’s work, took him on because their mutual friend said he was “often funnier in fact than in fiction” and “could not fail to be an asset in the dreary business of war”. To spend an afternoon in Waugh’s company is…

BEIRUT: A DISTORTED CITY, WAR-TORN AND familiar, flickered on my grandparents’ black-and-white television during my Eighties childhood in Athens. The reels of gunmen returning fire through ruined buildings in a city resembling mine, engraved early memories. The reports referred to it with its ancient Greek name of Berytus, but my child’s imagination filed it away somewhere geographically distant, while wondering what growing up in an urban battlefield was like. Ten years later, in the winter of 1996, I travelled to Beirut for the first time. As I walked through the raked rubble of its postwar streets, the dysfunctional “Berytus” of my childhood resurfaced. Now that I was physically there, real moments competed with recollected small-screen images; the long rows of extinguished architectural cadavers; a pretty girl in a brightly-coloured sports…

SOUND THE KLAXON, ANOTHER WOMAN HAS lost her job thanks to the gender wars. But in a major twist, the casualty this time was not someone from the gender-critical camp. Tilly Fitzgerald, an influencer and senior bookseller at Waterstones, was sacked by the bookshop because of a vicious tweet she directed at the bestselling author Christina Dalcher. Dalcher had, in civil terms, defended SEEN In Publishing (a new network for those in the publishing world who “recognise the material reality of sex, and support freedom of expression”) against one of many hostile reactions from other publishing figures. Fitzgerald weighed in, assuring Dalcher: “Ooh, I’ll enjoy tearing up your books and popping them in the bin today. Thanks for the heads up.” In response, Dalcher quoted Fitzgerald’s tweet to highlight the…

HISTORY RECORDS NOTHING MORE vile than Hitler and his henchmen. At the height of his power in 1942, Heinrich Himmler boasted that “the Führer has laid this very serious command [extermination of the Jews in occupied eastern Europe] upon my shoulders. No one can take it away from me.” By the end of the Third Reich, Hermann Göring had become a “voluptuary”, wearing lipstick and dressing in a toga, accompanied by a suitcase containing most of the world’s supply of the drug paracodeine. Joseph Goebbels, meanwhile, devoted his brief reign as Hitler’s successor to poisoning his six children. The word “Nazi” has become synonymous with evil. Inevitably, therefore, it has also lost much of its original meaning — a case of Hegel’s “night in which all cows are black”. There…

FOR THE MISSING THREAD, HER SEVENTH book, classicist Dr Daisy Dunn directs her attention to the women of the ancient world. Yet this is not a book about women; rather, it is “a history of antiquity written through women”. Covering three millennia and thousands of miles, it begins with the (possibly matriarchal) Minoan civilisation of Bronze Age Crete and ends in imperial Rome of the second century AD, with frequent ventures eastwards into Persia, Lydia, Egypt and even China. Dunn chooses to push the familiar male stars of the ancient world “to the borders slightly”, in order to shed light on the women who were there too — moving and shaking in influential ways, as this book seeks to convince us — but whose contributions to politics, art, literature, their…

BREVITY IS NOT A CHARACTERISTIC usually associated with Wagner, but it is a happy paradox that many of the best books on the composer have been short (and some of the worst long). A standout in the second category is Robert Gutman’s almost demented biography; the muchmissed Bryan Magee and Michael Tanner have made enduring contributions to the first. They are now joined by Patrick Carnegy’s attractive and thoughtful collection of essays, Wagner’s Theatre, into which he distils a lifetime’s engagement with the composer. It is a pendant to his 2006 study Wagner and the Art of Theatre, which garnered high praise from Pierre Boulez among others (“one of the best documented publications of all the recent literature on Wagner”). Carnegy has been steeped in opera and theatre criticism for more…

IT’S THAT TIME OF YEAR WHEN THIS COLUMN attempts to add flavour to your post-election holiday with a sprinkling of well-seasoned fiction — that is, when we look to those tried and tested novels that are occasionally overlooked in our neophilic rush to the new and wanting. This summer we take inspiration from John Walsh’s very entertaining memoir of 1980s literary London, Circus of Dreams (2022). In it he suggested that 1984 was an annus mirabilis for modern British fiction, where promise burst into ambitious achievement, most strikingly in the form of Martin Amis and his masterpiece Money. The expansion of both the book chain Waterstones and newspaper weekend supplements meant more sales and more coverage for literary fiction. The Booker Prize also seemed to be in its pomp in those…

THE HARPSICHORDIST MAHAN Esfahani tweeted the other day asking, how many handshakes to Hitler? Most respondents touched Adolf at three or four removes. I managed it in one contact. John Denison, his name was. A 20-ish horn player in the London orchestras, he was sent by Sir Thomas Beecham to Bayreuth in 1934 to buy Wagner tubas for a Covent Garden Ring cycle. John located the pub where the brass players drank. After a couple of steins, he was urged to play Rheingold with them the following night. “Hang on, I haven’t got a black suit,” said John. “In the pit no-one can see us,” laughed the musicians. “We wear vests and shorts.” All went noisily down the Rhine until, as the curtain fell, two men in black uniform ordered…

GEORGE STUBBS WAS BORN 300 Stubbs, however, deserves better: he was, after all, one of the eighteenth century’s greatest portraitists — of people as well as animals; a naturalist; a chronicler of rural life; and a subtle interpreter of the interactions between classes. APOCRYPHALLY, STUBBS WAS RUN OUT OF HORKSTOW BY VILLAGERS WHO ACCUSED HIM OF NECROMANCY Above all he was a natural scientist who was determined to “look into nature for himself and consult and study her only”. In his dedication to uncovering what went on beneath the skin he was closer to Leonardo than any other British artist. Indeed, Stubbs was familiar with the subcutaneous world from his childhood. As the son of a Liverpool currier he was used to seeing skin stripped from animals and, working with…

AS THIS GLORIOUS BRITISH SUMMER keeps us indoors, here’s a reminder of some of the shows you might have missed. BBC IPLAYER SPY/MASTER Now that Romania is a prospering member of both the European Union and NATO, it’s sometimes hard to imagine that for more than thirty years it was ruled by two of history’s most malevolent Communist dictators: Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu. Set in the late 1970s, Spy/Master is loosely based on the defection of their real-life intelligence chief: Ion Mihai Pacepa. This smart, fast-paced Cold War thriller unfolds over six episodes as their turncoat adviser seeks sanctuary for himself and his family in the West. Meanwhile the enraged Ceausescus plot their revenge. There’s plenty of intrigue, action and espionage tradecraft as the CIA, the Stasi, the KGB and…

I HAVE NOT BEEN A FAN OF WHAT the Conservative government did over the last 14 years to the country’s architecture. Whatever may have been their good intentions — and it should not be forgotten that many Conservative MPs are admirers of the late Roger Scruton who in 2018 was appointed to chair the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission — in practice they were beholden to developers who were party donors. They gave them as much freedom as possible to knock down old buildings and put up monster new developments designed to attract international firms to London. So, the last 14 years have been disastrous for London. Outside London, most new housing has been nondescript — standardised and characterless housing developments on the outskirts of towns such as Aylesbury and…

THE WINE WORLD WAS STRUCK a blow last year when after years in the doldrums Oddbins finally went out of business and the high street was left a sadder place. The maverick wine merchant chain made wine fun, introducing customers to the sunny delights of Australian and Chilean wine. The British public quickly got the hang of Lindeman’s Bin 65 Chardonnay and Santa Rita Merlot. Oddbins’s next innovation, however, wasn’t quite so successful: Greek wine. I worked for the firm in Leeds in the late Nineties and remember a pallet arriving that had us scratching our heads — the labels were in Greek, not a Latin letter to be seen. Now Oddbins staff were famously over-educated and these letters may not have been a problem in the Oxford branches, but…

It was an unexpectedly moving conversation. We were standing there naked in the woods, halfway through a 14 mile walk, and the former schoolteacher I’d been chatting to for the past hour was recalling the happiest day of his life. He had retired in the spring a couple of years ago, and the following summer when he was out with his usual naturist crowd somewhere in the Home Counties, one of them had suggested a group photo (group photos I came to learn, are quite a thing among nudists). Up until that point, as a teacher, he’d always felt it wise to duck the group shots, just in case one of them ended up on social media and anxious parents started crying “pervert”. He realised, though, that finally free from…

Please, can we talk about presents? I know, not Christmas. But I am genuinely being bankrupted by gift demands. Truly, if you were to tot up my monthly spending I swear the majority goes on tween presents, birthday cards, Emma Bridgewater wrapping paper and donations. And I’m not even talking about my own kids! Or teacher/tutor bribes, or Will’s friends and their interminable triathalons for random charities. Seriously, when did it become normal, when hosting a child’s birthday party, to request that guests transfer cash to the host parents so that their child ends up with “something they really want”? Yup. Apparently, everyone at private school. Only my friend Saskia, who does performative state school, was surprised. And then, in an equally annoying way, began bragging about how the norm…

IS IT BETTER TO BE A GREAT WINNER OF races or a winner of great races? Lasse Virén, who turns 75 this July, didn’t have to choose. He was both. In the Munich Olympics of 1972, Virén won both the 5,000m and 10,000m, the latter in a world record despite having fallen just before halfway. Over the next four years on the athletics circuit, however, he was more of an absence than a presence, let alone the kind of presence befitting a double Olympic champion. Enigmatic and taciturn, he mostly preferred to stay at home in the small Finnish town of Myrskylä, running vast distances through nearby pine forests and sometimes carving out his own trails with shovel and axe. “When you run in the woods,” he said, “you have…

Take advantage of our Super Summer Sale, saving a huge 83%. For just £3 you will receive a 3-month subscription to The Critic (3 magazines delivered to your door). Already a subscriber? Then why not give a gift subscription to someone special! Subscribe today and you will get: • 3 issues of The Critic magazine• Access to digital editions • An 83 per cent saving on the shop price • Rigorous content • Free delivery to your door To subscribe, simply visit: thecritic.imbmsubscriptions.com/sum24 OR CALL: 01293 312250 quoting SUM24 T&CS: CLOSING DATE FOR ORDERS IS 30TH OCTOBER 2024. THE PRICE SHOWN IS A UK DIRECT DEBIT OFFER. 3 ISSUES AT £3 BY DIRECT DEBIT, FOLLOWED BY £10.00 EVERY 3 ISSUES. SAVING IS 83% ON THE SHOP PRICE. IF YOU DO…

WELCOME TO Downing Street, Prime Minister! Now let us tell you how bad things really are. At least, that is the narrative the new Labour government is pushing across the board, feigning indignant surprise at the state of the country they are now governing. Nowhere is this more evident than with the crisis in England’s prisons. Barely a week after his victory, Sir Keir Starmer is already telling journalists left and right that he hadn’t realised how bad the lack of prison spaces in England and Wales had become before he became prime minister, even though all the relevant figures have long been on the government’s website. Indeed, his plan to tackle the crisis — releasing thousands of prisoners after they have served 40 per cent of their sentence instead…

THE STARMER GOVERNment’s first great triumph is already proclaimed: Labour’s return to dominance in Scotland ensures the survival of the United Kingdom. It’s not a wholly implausible claim. After all, Scottish nationalism and hatred of the Tories go together. That Scotland’s largest political party is for the first time since 2015 a unionist one should augur well. The SNP crumbled from 48 to 9 MPs and with that collapse the political wing of the IndyRef2 movement has been, like proud Edward’s army, sent homeward tae think again. Front-runners to become the new leader of the Scottish Conservatives appear to agree. “We must move on from simply opposing independence,” argues Russell Findlay MSP, implying that Labour’s success has shot the Scottish Tory fox. That, too, seems to be the assumption of…

ONLY THE ENGLISH COULD HAVE invented a summer sport that can’t actually be played for large chunks of the English summer. Dry weather, which cannot be relied upon in Britain at any time of the year, is unfortunately rather fundamental to cricket. Each year Wisden, the cricket-lover’s bible that is on its 161st annual edition, includes a review of the previous season’s weather. The hours of play each county team has lost to rain are meticulously recorded: in 2023, Yorkshire was worst affected with 106 and a half hours wiped out while Hampshire fared best with just 40 hours and 15 minutes rained off. For a people with such a fixation on the weather, cricket seems a perfect fit. And so it remains our great summer game, notwithstanding the fun…

THE TIDES OF DIVERSITY AND inclusion started to break on the fine old firm of Cranston & Tackaberry about a decade ago. Curiously, they seem to have had no effect at all on the career of Cecilia Featherstonehaugh (“It’s pronounced Fanshawe, darling”), whose ascent to the heights of editorial director has been achieved in spite of the considerable disadvantages of a cut-glass accent, an education that took in a prep school attended by the Princes of Wales (“Willy was rather a chum”), St Mary’s Convent, Wantage and Somerville College, Oxford, and a grandfather who happens to be the Earl of Uttoxeter. Neither has the firm’s stated aim of producing “books for the modern age to be read by citizens of the world” had much impact on the kind of items…

A RECENT ARTICLE IN THE BIRMINGHAM MAIL CARRIED THE headline “Barclays customers warned to ‘move’ their money elsewhere”. Normally, a warning comes with some kind of threat, personal or impersonal. Furthermore, a threat of the nature suggested by the headline emanates from someone or some organisation. One would have thought that it was the duty, indeed purpose, of a newspaper to reveal who had issued the warning or threat, but nothing of the kind was to be found in the article. Instead, we read: Barclays bank customers have been urged to ditch their accounts and shift their money elsewhere after bank branches in England and Scotland have been covered in red paint and had windows smashed as part of protests by a pro-Palestine group. One assumes, though it is not strictly stated,…

IT’S FOUR YEARS SINCE J.K. ROWLING PUBLISHED the essay in which she discussed her experience of domestic violence and her concerns about the number of girls undergoing gender transition. She became a hate figure overnight. Three months after Rowling’s essay appeared, the novelist Jane Harris organised an open letter of support from figures in the arts including Sir Tom Stoppard, Jenni Murray and Barry Humphries. As you scroll down the letter, the names become less famous. Seventy-two people down, there’s me. I’ve worked in the arts all my life; in theatre, music, and arts festivals. For the last nine years I have been playing the piano for silent films. It’s a niche within a niche. I don’t own a house, and I don’t have a pension, but I enjoy my…

SIR EDWIN LUTYENS (1869–1944) WAS once venerated as one of the greatest architects of the twentieth century. Even if you haven’t heard of Lutyens, you have almost certainly encountered one of his designs. Perhaps the Cenotaph on Whitehall, or the bonkers Castle Drogo in Devon, St Jude’s Church in Hampstead, the Midland Bank on Poultry (now a five-star hotel), or, even farther afield, the grandiloquent Viceroy’s House in New Delhi. But over the past few decades, he has regrettably fallen out of fashion, with his reputational reach limited to a small coterie of Lutyens lovers. This is an appalling oversight. Clive Aslet’s reverential biography attempts to redress this evanescence. He is correct that it’s not just young architects and architectural historians who are “missing out” on this “master of form…

THE PAST IS SUPPOSED TO BE ANOTHER country, a place where they do things differently. By way of various cultural forms it’s also a place that can be visited — for edification, amusement, or sometimes more pernicious reasons. These two books by David Kirby and Robyn Hitchcock are effectively debriefs from two such time trips, the equivalent of two albums’ worth of their authors’ holiday snaps. One focuses its attention upon everyday life in Britain during 1947, while the other tracks the life of a single British person up to and through the calendar year of 1967. What do these two staycations tell us about those “other countries”, and do they shed any light on the Britain we now inhabit? One of the very earliest histories of our people, usually…

MY EARLIEST MEMORY OF CYPRUSrevolves around being plucked out of the sea when I was a toddler. A young cousin had insisted on carrying me out into the waters of a beach near Famagusta, but when either I or the waves had become too much for her to cope with, she dropped me. Fortunately, my father was nearby and rushed over to scoop me out of the brine. But for many years, because my traumatised memory was of the water, and of seeing my father, I was convinced he had been the one responsible for casting me in. It was a terrible injustice inflicted on him by the workings of an innocent and disorientated mind. But in Cyprus, distorted memories, half-remembered truths, and the grievances and suspicions that often arise…

“THE ERA OF CULTURE WARS IS OVER,” announced Lisa Nandy, in her maiden speech as the new Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport in July. For Nandy, our recent “polarisation, division and isolation” will soon be a distant memory, once the UK becomes a “self-confident, outward looking country”. Naturally some will doubt whether the arrival of a new Labour government really will move us out of the darkness into the light, where socially liberal lambs may find sudden comfort at the prospect of lying with hardleft wolves in the field of culture. For the sceptically inclined, it is all too plain that the manifold issues which have given rise to our present “culture wars” are simply too knotty, important and even plain ugly to be nonchalantly dismissed as…

ONE OF THE FUNNIEST GRUB Street exposés ever written is a novel by Nigel Williams called My Life Closed Twice (1977). Its hapless and eternally unpublished hero, Martin Steel, makes a point of keeping and numbering his rejection slips. The 729th of these items is from a Scottish theatre company and runs: “Dear Martin Steel, Sorry about reading your play but we are rather behindhand. I found it quite interesting. Have you any new stuff we might see?” All very encouraging, you might think, and just the thing the apprentice scrivener needs, were it not for the fact that the play in question had been submitted a good four years back. The dilatoriness that used to be such a feature of the literary world in the days when it relied…

SAY WHAT YOU LIKE ABOUT MUSICAL theatre in London, the odd shaft of light does occasionally flash through the grisly scene. I can scarcely contain my excitement, for example, at the prospect of Mozart: Her Story, coming up in November, wherein Wolfy’s “arguably more talented sister”, “Nan”, gets to overturn centuries of patriarchal bullshit somehow or other, yeah? As you slump in despair through Les Mis or the nauseating Hamilton, it is poignant to reflect that next year marks the 150th anniversary of the premiere of Trial by Jury, Arthur Sullivan and W.S. Gilbert’s first joint venture, and the starting gun for the marvels of twentieth-century musical theatre. Their 14 comic operas, written between 1871 and 1896, were the true begetters of the Golden Age of musicals, their patent mix…

SEXUAL AND POLITICAL TENSIONSON college campuses are a rich seam of plot material, from the novelist David Lodge’s droll 1980s send-ups through to David Mamet’s Oleanna. A new era of stand-offs over consent, culture wars and the wavy borderline between overdue “Me Too” reckonings and a culture of hysteria whose flames of accusation burn bright offer theatre an ethical maze for a rising generation to navigate. Alma Mater at London’s Almeida, by the Australian playwright Kendall Feaver, is relevant to current debates about how a generally benign set of students, teachers and parents can end up at mutually destructive cross-purposes — with the emphasis on the cross, as reputations implode and authority is inverted. TAKE YOUR MOST WOKE YOUNG RELATIVE WITH YOU AND YOU’LL BE FIGHTING ALL THE WAY HOME…

A FRIEND WHO ONCE edited a newspaper in Todmorden, where red rose meets white, had a particular foible. Every time the office received a press release from Yorkshire Television proclaiming the talent of “the irrepressible Mollie Sugden”, he would reach for the blue pencil. “The lady is all too easy to repress,” John would say, striking out the adjective. “The irrepressible Sugden,” who was from neigh-bouring Keighley, became the kind of joke Kingsley Amis put into his novel, Girl, 20, where General Franco was (irony alert) “a Christian gentleman”. In real life Amis mocked public utility companies which sent out bumf promising “exciting offers”. Those linguistic horrors! In the modern media world a public figure has only to complete a dozen years of hustling before the dubbing begins. “National treasures”…

YOU CAN SAY WHAT YOU like, Malcolm, but I don’t call that toast.” Athens is presently Europe’s official Coolest City, but the English couple bickering over their breakfast in Monastiraki hadn’t got the memo. Accompanying the art galleries, concept stores, outdoor cinemas and pop-up speakeasies which are redrawing the gloriously chaotic urban landscape of the Greek capital, a proper gastronomic renaissance is taking place, incorporating a revival of traditional kafeneion culture, gastrotavernas and street-corner joints like Guerrilla in Exarcheia, the district that Hackney wanted to be when it grew up. But perhaps the greatest greedy pleasures on offer are the early (or not so early) morning innovations. Bakeries are a big deal to Athenians, and most good ones are sold out by 9am. Lipsopita, sweet/savoury buns with olive oil and…

WHAT IS IT ABOUT THE excitement of owning something that used to belong to someone famous? The extraordinary price of $29,900 paid at Sotheby’s in 1998 for a piece of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor’s wedding cake is the most revealing and ridiculous example of what some call provenance perversion. Provenance is without doubt important, indeed sometimes the critical element in the purchase of a work of art: knowing where something has been throughout its life is critical to verify an object’s history, to establish a firm date when an object existed, a terminus ante quem. Gaps in the history of an object invite questions — indeed, between 1933-45 sometimes deeply uncomfortable questions. If throughout an object’s life (sometimes called the “biography of an object” — see Edmund de…

THE SIX-RACE CARD AT BATH ON 3 JULY WOULD normally, like much of the racing there, be memorable only to anyone looking at the form book. Low-level horses competing at a low-level track for low-level prize money (a total of £40,000 on offer for the entire card). But bad as the pittance paid to connections might be, with most races offering just the £2,983 minimum the British Horseracing Authority allows to be paid to winners, it’s not remotely unusual. The Brighton meeting the day before offered £34,000 overall. No race paid more than that minimum of £2,983. Given the costs involved in owning a horse - at least £25,000 a year in training fees before you even think about vet bills, entries and transport, let alone the actual purchase price of…