Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2024 i The Critic

A CENTURY AGO TORY PARTY CONFERences reliably had motions deploring the “unbalanced” constitution. Even two decades after the 1911 Parliament Act the complaint was still this: what matters about the House of Lords is not its composition but its powers. This urge to do something about an act specifically intended to be a temporary expedient reflected a concern now completely absent in modern Toryism. Put simply: where once the constitution was the central purpose of Toryism — defending it, maintaining it, justifying it — this tradition is now effectively dead. Tories, as now constituted, just don’t care. “Reform” of the House of Lords is the perfect illustration of contemporary Conservative indifference to the constitution. The new Labour government intends to sweep away the remaining hereditary peers. We could laugh at…

IN SEPTEMBER, THE BAR Standards Board, which regulates barristers in England and Wales, quietly announced a consultation on amending the core duties it requires all barristers to perform. Currently, Core Duty 8 only requires barristers to not “discriminate unlawfully against any person”, a redundant but perfectly sensible rule. The BSB seeks to replace it with a requirement for its regulatees to “act in a way that advances equality, diversity and inclusion”. In addition, all chambers and solo practitioners will be required to promulgate an equality, diversity and inclusion policy and to meet mandatory EDI outcomes. Barristers who run foul of the new rule will face disciplinary action. The predictable outcry aside, few seriously think the duty will not be amended. As anyone who has been involved in these things knows,…

OH MY PARTY, WHAT IS HAPPENING TO YOU? I have always been, through temperament, birth, instinct and enquiry, a Conservative. A member since my youth, I remember being dragged along to constituency events by my parents. At times it feels like being a Church of England congregant, something I also am, as part of a decreasing number of the faithful — ageing participants supporting a leadership cadre of increasingly disconnected views. Just as many C of E members have trod toward Rome, many Tories have turned to Reform. Both are reassured and reanimated by the certainties preached. Yet here I remain, a Conservative Party member and one about to sniff the air at conference. Some might feel this minority pastime a sad indictment of my outlook and social life. I…

I KNOW THAT ON SOME LEVEL, I OUGHT TO BE GRATEFUL. At least I’ve not been categorised as “one of those”. When vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance’s 2021 complaint that his country was being run by “childless cat ladies” recently resurfaced, I could rest assured that none of the insult applied to me. I don’t have cats, whereas I do have children. According to Vance’s worldview, the future should belong to me and mine. So why don’t I feel more flattered? It is always slightly mortifying when a right-wing politician makes comments of this nature, at least if you are the kind of parent who does not wish to be co-opted into some phony battle between breeders and the child-free. Who can forget Andrea Leadsom’s abortive Tory leadership campaign, in which…

THE 2020S HAVE DEMONstrated, yet again, that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. After the Bank of England overreacted to the Covid-19 pandemic in spring 2020 with needlessly large asset purchases, the increase in the quantity of money (on the M4x measure which the Bank itself favours) reached 15 per cent in February 2021. Although many people seem to be baffled by the processes which connect money and the price level, double-digit inflation became very likely. Somewhat absurdly, the Governor of the Bank of England has denied that money was relevant to the recent inflation episode. Andrew Bailey used a recent speech — to fellow central bankers, at a get-together in Jackson Hole, Wyoming — to blame it on the Ukraine war and other alleged shocks from abroad.…

I FIRST MET SIR LARRY SIEDENTOP IN JUNE 2015. One year before Brexit and 800 after the signing of Magna Carta, a rather serious panel led by Dominic Grieve was convening to discuss the latter’s relevance to the modern world. Invited at the last minute by my doctoral supervisor, the man in the chair beside me finally introduced himself as “Larry. Larry Siedentop.” “The author of Inventing the Individual?” “The same. Do you write?” “Yes, I’m finishing my doctorate in law.” “Why aren’t you practising?” “I interned at a law firm last year. The work was dull, the culture soulless, and the people repellent. Never again.” “Good for you, good for you. Here’s my number and address. Visit next time you are in London.” And with that he was off.…

WHEN ASKED WHAT HE WANTED, the veteran American trade union leader Samuel Gompers replied “more”. The authors of this timely book on Britain’s defence strategy, or lack of one, also want “more … more of everything”. They want more money, for more men, more tanks, more aircraft, and more ships. Above all, they want more understanding of what Britain’s strategic aims are and how they can be realised. Both authors are well qualified to write this book. David Richards is a former Chief of the Defence Staff with a long and distinguished military record. He is well known for his intellectual curiosity; I served (full disclosure) on the strategic advisory panel he set up in 2010. Julian Lindley-French is a well respected professor of defence strategy at the Netherlands Defence…

LIBERAL AUTHORITARIANISM IS IN THE ascendancy. From Brazil banning X over concerns about “disinformation” to Keir Starmer’s early release of violent prisoners in order to lock up people for intemperate social media posts following the murder of three schoolgirls in Southport, not to mention the proposed resurrection of “non-crime hate incidents”, the global liberal left is in full prosecutorial mode. Mark Zuckerberg’s recent admission that he had bowed to calls to censor non-compliant posts on Facebook during Covid also reveals what many of us already know. Luke Conway’s Liberal Bullies is therefore timely. If anything, I wish it had appeared earlier as authoritarian states and vigilante citizens persecuting vendettas against political enemies are already far advanced. But we are never without hope, and Conway’s book serves as both a careful…

OCKHAM’S EPONYMOUS RAZOR IS STILL as incisive as it was when first wielded by the English friar and scholastic philosopher six centuries ago. William of Ockham (1287–1347, below) was a pioneer of the theory of knowledge and the great proponent of nominalism, arguing that universal concepts were merely names, not realities. No historian wields Ockham’s razor more effectively than J.C.D. Clark. Clark upholds the Peterhouse High Tory view: the inextinguishable influence of Christianity on “public doctrine” is denigrated or ignored by a secularised scholarly establishment. Hence the latter deserves to be dispatched without mercy. If Cowling was the Sweeney Todd of the historical profession, Clark has raised the dissection of progressive priggishness to an art form. In his last book, Clark demonstrated that Tom Paine, hero of progressive causes on…

IT’S SOMETIMES SAID THAT THE DIFFERENCE between a short story and a novel is that a story contains a moment — often a moment of change for the protagonist — while a novel has a broader sweep. Certainly stories which try to do more can feel cramped and airless (allowing exceptions for genius, such as Borges), and novels that restrict themselves to a single moment tend to try the reader’s patience by shrinking to internal inaction. But what a novel can do is capture a moment of change for a society, and that is what the three novels in this month’s column seek to achieve, with great success. David Peace is one of the most distinctive, and distinguished, British novelists now writing. His work blends interest in the fabric of…

STARS HAVE BEEN FALLING OUT of opera like apples in late summer. Jonas Kaufmann, a serial drop-out, now has a second career as a festival manager. Anna Netrebko is blacklisted for past Putin affinities. Vittorio Grigolo was fired for harassment. Roberto Alagna is over 60. Renée Fleming is 65. The box office has almost run out of lights. With one singular exception. Lise Davidsen commands the art in a way no dramatic soprano has done since Birgit Nilsson and, before her, Kirsten Flagstad. That all three are Nordic may be more than coincidence, but hold that thought. Davidsen, 37 years old and six foot two, is the shining star on whom the opera world has hinged its future. THE METROPOLITAN OPERA IS CASTING a Wagner Ring around her. This season…

MANY ARTISTS, ESPECIALLY THE more callow ones, like to feel that their calling gives them licence to indulge in a bit of transgressive behaviour. But high jinks in the Groucho Club or a bit of drunkenness on television are small beer when compared to the misdeeds of their ancestors. The Soho coterie of the postwar years did their bit. Francis Bacon liked to be beaten up by his rough-trade pick-ups and was once thrown through a plate-glass window; the “Two Roberts” — Colquhoun and MacBryde — were violent in their cups, pounding one another, and MacBryde once, under the guise of a handshake, crushing a glass into the palm of the poet George Barker; while Lucian Freud consorted with the Krays and stole the gold coins his father had secreted…

IN THE SUMMER OF 2013 I WAS talking to a senior French diplomat about the Syrian regime’s slaughter of more than 1,400 of its own citizens, including many children, in a nerve agent attack on Ghouta, eastern Damascus. President Obama had declared that chemical attacks were a red line and crossing it would bring “enormous consequences”. The world waited expectantly for America’s response. France was the only major European country to pledge support for the expected airstrikes. Its military and navy were primed. But my French contact was incredulous. Word came through: stand down. A nervous Obama, fearful of the potential blowback, had cancelled the strikes. Episode 8 of Corridors of Power: Should America Police the World? examines the Ghouta attack and its aftermath in forensic detail. There were indeed…

ONE EVENING IN THE HIGHSUMMER, I found myself bicycling through Canary Wharf. Although in the 1980s, we lived in view of its rising towers, I seldom visit. I think of it as a business district and I have never been to any of its offices. Recently, the press has been very negative about the future of Canary Wharf, greeting the news that HSBC is moving its offices back to the City with disproportionate glee, as if Canary Wharf might have been a failed experiment. So, I was surprised to find its streets full, the waterside restaurants and bars packed. I had thought it would be empty, but it felt energetic, full of life, a contrast, as it happens, to my recent experience of the City. I have realised that Canary…

WHEN HE JOINED PENFOLDS to promote its fortified wines, John Rogerson was described, good naturedly I think, as a “traitor” by someone in the port industry. Rogerson was born and raised in Porto, speaks English with a slight Portuguese accent and has, as he puts it, “lived and breathed port my whole life”. So why move then? Well, it’s not very well known in Britain but Australia has a fortified wine heritage which is almost as rich and long as Portugal’s. For much of the nineteenth and twentieth century the country’s vineyards churned out Empire “ports” and “sherries” for the British market. One Barossa valley producer, Yalumba, was known as the “Oporto of Australia”. Housed in what looks like a huge castle, it had its own distillery and cooperage. Penfolds…

AT THE CELTIC CAFE, ON Market Street in Aberaeron, I sat down to scrambled eggs on toast. Except for a table of old sheep farmers, the place was almost empty. “Shooting today, boy?” one of them called across, switching from Welsh to English. I guess he had noticed my breeks and socks. “Yes,” I replied. “Start of the duck season.” I don’t go to rural Wales very often, but when I do I’m reminded of how friendly it is. I often think the countryside in Britain varies massively in terms of how keen people are to chat. In Norfolk they seldom manage more than four words; in Scotland they do a sort of happy-cum-grumpy thing; in Yorkshire they tend to be rude while telling you they’re just saying it as…

HAD DINNER WITH MY FRIEND Sophie last night, who kept going on about some flyer that one of the big West London private schools had pushed through her door advertising bursaries, a bit like those bloody cards from Savills. She lives in Kilburn, so the school is presumably stuffing these flyers indiscriminately into every average looking terrace — but she was clearly taking it as “a sign” that her ten-year-old Wilf should apply. Wilf is currently at some state primary you have to live opposite to get into, where they make a big deal of not setting homework. Even madder, her husband Alex is convinced it’s a Big Brother situation and that the school must “know” that they have a child of Year Six age on the premises, probably via…

Gender clinics offer a charade that relies on the symbols of evidence-based medicine, trading on the trust hard won by the medical profession at large BEFORE THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, DOCtors were feared rather than trusted. Their brutal, ineffective methods earned them nicknames like quack, leech and sawbone. Their ignorance of how infections spread meant they carried illness and death wherever they went. That changed with the discovery of microorganisms and the invention of vaccines, antibiotics, anaesthetics and all the other weapons with which doctors now fight disease, save lives and ease pain. Few women die in childbirth any more; most children survive into adulthood. And doctors get the credit. Polls around the world routinely rank them as the professionals people trust most. Underpinning this trust is the scientific method, especially…

THE LAST REMAINING hereditary peers are to be thrown out of Parliament. Good, you might say. What place does heredity have in our legislative process? Britain is finally moving into the modern era, you might add. Reforming the House of Lords has been a low-level objective of all three parties of government over the last 20 years, finally Keir Starmer is getting on and doing it. Well before you sans-culottes start burning your breeches, I think someone should make a defence of the House of Lords in general and the hereditary principle in particular. First the easy argument: it works. It works for what we want it do in our constitution. We want the upper house to be a revising chamber, including among its number a sprinkling of experts, to…

HE WAS A PRO-COLONIALIST AND misogynist. That’s the not-inaccurate line on V. S. Naipaul nowadays. A less established writer would find it a hard charge to shake. But Naipaul won a Nobel Prize, which will always ensure him a readership. The books of his little brother Shiva, on the other hand, have never had the acclaim they deserve. The association with V. S. could put readers off entirely, but they would be missing out. In his obituary for Shiva, who died in 1985 aged just 40, Martin Amis wrote, “The moment I finished his first novel, Fireflies [1970], I felt delight in being alive at the same time as such a writer … there are many people with whom I can initiate a long train of quotation — and laughter…

AFTER BEING IN OFFICE FROM 1710 TO 1714, the Tories spent the next 46 years in opposition as the Whigs ruled the roost under George I and George II. During Queen Anne’s reign (1702-14), Toryism’s meaning was clear: the defence of the national interest, the Church of England and social stability. England had been at war with France from 1702 to 1713, and the Tories advocated a “blue water” policy of focusing on the navy and being cautious about excessive commitment to alliances and to European interventionism. In contrast to the Whigs, who were heavily committed to both, the Tories pushed through peace and the Treaty of Utrecht — to the annoyance of the Elector of Hanover, soon to be Britain’s George I. The Tories were pushed into opposition by George’s…

AT ÉGLISE SAINT-NICOLAS, A GLORIOUS GOTHIC church in Caen, Britain’s greatest living abstract artist, Sean Scully, is opening his latest one man show. There are loads of people swarming round him — liggers, journalists, local bigwigs — but he seems to tower over them. He’s a big stocky bloke, with the bearlike gait of a nightclub bouncer, but it’s not just his bulk which sets him apart. He looks like a villain in a British gangster movie. Bald and muscular, with a broad grin and a steely stare, you can tell he’s an artist from the wrong side of the tracks. No other artist divides opinion quite like Sean Scully. He’s renowned on several continents, he’s had acclaimed solo shows in many of the world’s greatest galleries, he’s been showered…

WHAT’S NOT TO LIKE ABOUT AMazon? The company brings the world’s goods to our door, at ever lower prices. We may grumble, but can’t resist. As president, Donald Trump regularly goaded Amazon from the Oval Office, but when the pandemic struck, his White House was obliged to order the FEMA agency to buy $13 million worth of thermometers from the online giant. But behind the logistics miracle are some troubling stories, which the Wall Street Journal reporter Dana Mattioli tells in a new book, The Everything War. Amazon is a subject as vast and hard to map as the rainforest itself, and so much of what it does is out of sight. It’s a giant logistics network, a movie studio, and provides the computing infrastructure that underpins a million and…

OVER THE LAST YEAR, CHATBOTS WRITing half-decent poems and a series of apocalyptic pronouncements regarding AI have plunged us into a civilisational moment. Two main concerns have emerged from a mixture of panic and hype fed by everyone from Rishi Sunak to Elon Musk. First, will it take my job? And second, will it really eventually wipe us all out? Probably not, is the answer given by Cambridge’s inaugural DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning Neil D. Lawrence. The Atomic Human is his grand attempt not just to explain what AI is, but to use it as a means to better understand human intelligence. His mission is quasi-religious: “As machines slice away proportions of human capability,” he writes, we will come to be left with a “kernel of humanity”. It’s this…

IF THE DEFINITION OF A MOVIE STAR IS AN actor you’ll watch in anything, Elizabeth Taylor was the most stellar star of them all. In a career lasting more than half a century she made just one picture which would be worth watching were she not in it. As for the fifty-odd others, the bulk of them can be endured only because of Taylor’s beauteous, bestial presence. Even the most moribund of her films — The V.I.P.s, say, or The Only Game in Town — crackle to life whenever she enters the frame. She was a Klieg light on legs. Not that her gams were great. As Taylor’s fifth (and sixth) husband, Richard Burton, rather ungallantly pointed out, “She has wonderful eyes, but she has a double-chin and an overdeveloped…

SOME TIME AGO PRIVATE EYE produced a quite funny parody of that year’s Cheltenham Literature Festival programme. The distinguished literary journalist John Walsh would be interviewing A.N. Actress about her latest memoir, Ghostwritten. Sir Michael Palin would reminisce about yaks he had befriended on the road to Tibet. The very last entry ran: “‘My Interesting New Novel’ with Barry Witter (cancelled due to lack of interest)”. The Secret Author remembered this entertaining burlesque as he sat down to contemplate The Times’s announcement of this autumn’s roster. “Dench among treasures at Cheltenham book festival” declared the headline, above the revelation that “Richard Osman’s murders, Dame Judi Dench’s Shakespeare and Sir Geoff Hurst’s goals are among the highlights”. We were further informed that “in a show of support for Britain’s literary cultures,…

AMONG OPERA’S MANY FAILURES, one of the feeblest is surely the way it wilfully ignores the most rewarding of all areas of aesthetic endeavour: I refer of course to its inexplicable neglect of vampires, while fannying about with all manner of half-arsed sub-vampire behaviour that simply begs to be taken that extra sanguinary mile. Bloodsucking, in various more or less metaphorical guises, is after all opera’s happiest place, and you could plausibly chart the whole shebang as a coterie of baleful figures (and not always men, forsooth: look at those hard-eyed hooker vamps Carmen and Manon) draining the life out of the saps who make the mistake of falling in their way. Indeed, if opera houses really want to pack the joints out with halfwit children of confused sexual identity,…

TOM STOPPARD IS THE SIMONE BILES of playwrights: the star performer who has brought more exhilarating twists, puns and dimensions to stage language than any writer since Harold Pinter. Of his works, The Real Thing is the most complex and twisty in word and deed. Some mental orienteering is required from the audience from the first scene onwards to get a handle on the complex factual and fictional intellectuals in the early 1980s and the multi-layered entanglements of the core quartet. The Old Vic’s revival under Max Webster’s direction comes more than 40 years after middle-England’s heartthrob Felicity Kendal first starred as the siren Annie, whose serial infidelities obsess her anguished writer husband, Henry A host of stage luminaries have since channelled Stoppard’s witty, gritty explorations of the fragility of…

ERAS END LESS FREQUENTLY than we are encouraged to believe. But a curtain is falling at BBC Sport, where Jonathan Agnew is approaching the last over as cricket correspondent. Although he will carry on as the lead commentator on Test Match Special, “Aggers” signed off in England after the final Test of the summer at the Oval. Only a tour of Pakistan remains. It has been an assured innings, and a long one. Since he assumed the job in 1991, taking over from Christopher Martin-Jenkins, Agnew’s well-modulated voice has been a friendly feature of the British summer. Once a cricketer himself, for Leicestershire and briefly for England, he has represented the game with distinction. Who will follow him? The corporation will obviously look to appoint a woman, or a non-white…

BIKINI SEASON MAY BE OVER, but Arlington isn’t so much a restaurant as what the Sidebar of Shame calls a “revenge body”. In case anybody missed it, in 1981, Jeremy King and Christopher Corbin opened a restaurant on Arlington Street. Le Caprice served a mixture of polished gents’ club classics alongside dishes that riffed brilliantly between things smart people only ate in private and spritzy innovations such as the “legendary” bang bang chicken, a Home Counties take on satay. At the time, it was audacious to the point of being revolutionary — a fashionable restaurant that was relaxed, informal and unchallengingly delicious. Everybody went there and everybody who couldn’t read about it in another Eighties innovation, the lifestyle pages of the colour supplements. Then, in 2005, it was bought by…

THE ART MARKET HAS COME to value artists who have had to endure personal hardship and suffering, as if that was a key element of their creative process. Thus we have lionised the hero artist standing against the world, especially twentieth-century figures such as Egon Schiele, Käthe Kollwitz and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Giorgio Vasari, in his sixteenth-century The Lives of the Artists, gave us a near-divine image of them working alone and inspired by innate genius. Money and commerce were hardly considered alongside their brilliance and innovation. Stretching from the sixteenth century through to the nineteenth century, the same hero figure is found in Vincent van Gogh, who may have formally sold only one painting in his lifetime and died by his own hand. Yet most artists are deeply commercial and…

GRAHAM LEE IS THE ONLY JOCKEY to have won both the Grand National and the Ascot Gold Cup. His unique status is hardly surprising given that so few top jockeys make the switch between jump and flat racing — not least because having managed to climb to the top in one code, it takes monumental self-belief to start all over again in another. More often the switch comes through force of circumstance, such as when a flat jockey finds it too difficult to keep the weight off: the maximum flat weight is 10 stone, which is the minimum jump weight. Jim Crowley was one exception. He had ridden over 300 jump winners before making the reverse switch to the flat at the relatively old age of 27 — a hugely…

POLICY MATTERS Your article (CRITIC ONLINE, 5 SEPT) about the Oxford Chancellor election criticises me for defending Ukrainian oligarchs in court. I will never be embarrassed about defending unpopular people. Nobody chooses the country of their birth, and everyone has a right to a fair defence. More to the point, if you wanted to besmirch the Stratton family name, you should have started with the client who allegedly decapitated her husband before serving up his head with some vegetables. I would rather you focus on the substance of the election, because I am not just the only left-wing candidate, but the only candidate offering any policies of substance. That includes a £15 minimum wage for all staff; abolishing 100% final exams to ease Oxford’s mental health crisis; and opposing any…

ON SATURDAY 7 SEPTEMBER 1940 THE FIRST BOMB OF THE LUFTWAFFE’S SYSTEMATIC BLITZ OF London fell at 43 Southwark Park Road, SE16. It was a grocer’s shop. Twelve minutes later, the first military target was hit, an RAF timber shed in Catford. Fourteen minutes later the first London church affected by the blitz, St Cyprian’s in Brockley, was severely damaged. Over the next 24 hours, 843 bombs fell on the capital, almost exclusively in the south and the east. This was the working-class nineteenth-century London of the docks and of the cheap penny railway ticket, two-storey stock brick homes with dark-green-framed sash windows in streets whose names sang of Victorian imperial confidence: the RAF shed was on Sandhurst Road; St Cyprian’s was on Adelaide Avenue. Over the next nine months,…

SPEAKING OF THOMAS JOLLY, THE DIRECTOR OF THE OPENING ceremony of the Paris Olympics, the chairman of the organising committee, Tony Estanguet, said, “He was a bold choice.” Note that he did not say Jolly was a good choice: the word “bold” was supposed to include that value judgement. But of course it didn’t. An action or choice can perfectly well be bold without being good. It can be bold and stupid, or bold and vicious, or bold and cruel, or bold and any number of horrible things. Boldness is not a good in itself. Bravery is like that too: not a virtue in itself. Those who flew the aircraft into the World Trade Centre demonstrated bravery, but that does not weigh in the balance against the evil they did.…

WE ALL REMEMBER OUR FAvourite childhood authors. It was Enid Blyton for me. I spurned the Secret Seven and the Famous Five in favour of her chronicles of a more recherché investigative outfit called the Five Find-Outers, led by “Fatty” whose name would these days be unlikely to escape the attentions of the sensitivity reader. I was also a keen follower of Blyton’s “Secret” series, comprising The Secret Island, The Secret Mountain and so on, and her “Adventure” series, The Island of Adventure, The Mountain of Adventure and er … so on. Enid was very much of the if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it school of writing. When Gateshead Central Library had yielded up its last of her works, I moved on to Malcolm Saville and his “Lone Pine” series — another set of books…

IN DECEMBER 2020, PORNHUB, THE WORLD’S largest provider of free pornography and the tenth most visited website in the world, was effectively castrated by a middle-aged American mum. Armed with nothing but a laptop and a working moral compass, activist Laila Mickelwait forced the site to remove 80 per cent of its content. Takedown is the story of how she did it. Part memoir, part gripping crime thriller, Takedown describes in forensic detail how Micklewait forced Pornhub to admit it had been knowingly profiting — along with some of the world’s biggest payment providers including Mastercard and Visa — from child abuse, rape and human trafficking. Mickelwait’s crusade against Pornhub was not sparked by reading Andrea Dworkin; she is no strident women’s liberationist. A Christian, she recalls wanting to follow…

IN MARCH 2020, HUNDREDS OF LABOUR supporting women gathered in North Kensington to discuss the party’s proposed pledge to expel members deemed transphobic. The event was protested by a large crowd of trans activists who set off smoke bombs, chanted slogans through megaphones and thumped on the venue’s windows. Inside the hall, the cacophony made it almost impossible to hear the speakers. Afterwards, women were forced to run the gauntlet of activists yelling “TERF!”, while photographers snapped close-ups so attendees could be identified and shamed online. As a volunteer steward that evening, I’ll never forget the sight of women scurrying away, faces covered, terrified of the consequences of exercising their democratic right to free assembly and free speech. That this meeting does not merit even a footnote in Jenny Lindsay’s…

AS BEN SIXSMITH’S DOG, I’M OFTEN BEmused by the behaviour of my human pal. Look at me. I relocated from an animal shelter, where I had spent a year sitting in a cage, surrounded by noise and filth. Before that, I had been homeless — wandering the streets of Upper Silesia — and I don’t even want to think about what happened before that. Despite all this, I’m a happier animal than Ben. Years of pain and loneliness are not going to faze me. Walks make my day three times over. I love my food. I love to play around. I even like taking showers. Him, he gets cantankerous because he had an article rejected. Our canine joie de vivre inspired Mark Rowlands’s powerful new book The Happiness of Dogs.…

HOW DO YOU GET TO BE THE biggest band in the world? There’s a revealing story — just an aside really — in Street-Level Superstar, the new biography of cult music icon Lawrence by the writer Will Hodgkinson. Lawrence (below) was the leader of the band Felt, who were signed to indie label Creation in the eighties. Creation, founded by impresario Alan McGee, was the home of the British underground scene: fuzzy (and sometimes druggy) acts like Primal Scream, the Jesus and Mary Chain, and My Bloody Valentine. These bands did well, but they didn’t go mainstream. They prized cool over PR. Then, in the nineties, McGee found a new band led by two brothers: Oasis. “McGee said that after a decade of dealing with truculent indie bands, he knew…

I FIRST WATCHED THE TERMINATOR on a 12-inch black and white TV, some time in the late Eighties. It’s a reflection of the quality of the film that it still managed to be terrifying. Arnold Schwarzenegger, playing a robot sent from the future on an assassination mission, was at a point in his career when he felt no need to be likeable or tell jokes. His most famous line, “I’ll be back”, would become a punchline, but when first delivered it simply reflected his character’s unstoppable nature. I did eventually see it in colour, but like most people under 60, I’d never seen it on the big screen until this month. Where would I have? Outside of film societies and a few cinemas like London’s Prince Charles, which specialises in…

IN MY LAST COLUMN I LAMENTED how talking can replace doing — and, in turn, how listening can replace talking and doing. Are podcasts the appropriate form of entertainment for a future of living in pods and eating bugs? Are we going to become ever more passive consumers of other people’s thoughts and memories? Hoping to answer in the negative, I turned to Pretty Sure I Can Fly, in which Johnny Knoxville and the writer and comedian Elna Baker interview people who have gone to extremes of doing — ultramarathon runners, boxers, surfers, climbers and even a streaker. Knoxville is an expert on extremes. He started in entertainment by “testing” self-defence equipment on film — peaking when he put on a bulletproof vest and shot himself. As the star of…

PAUL VERLAINE’S SYMBOLIST VERSE SHINES THE LIGHT of absolute truth on our emotions at the waning of the year, casting long shadows across a bright and shining summer, now merely a memory. The poetry of “Chanson d’automne” is even more elegiac given that, this year, our bright and shining summer was not so much a memory to savour, as a hope that went unmet. But no matter, the culprit of our own climate catastrophe, be it La Niña, the polar jet stream, the gods of your temples or Two-Tier Keir, the city was no place to suffer this summer — nor any kind of summer. I have written before about the pleasures to be found in pastoral England. But if your blood is too rich for rustic pursuits, yet your…

HWAET! AND WELCOME BACK to Planet Rag. What gives on the frock front? Well, fashion’s still broken, slowed to a glacial same old, same old. There remains a glut of stealth wealth (swank bore core); corp core (pinstriped bore core) and norm core (pure bore core of the white shirt / cotton t-shirt / grey jumper sort). Wine shades continue to do the rounds, after Sabato De Sarno Gucci’s brought them back into currency, but that’s about as flamboyant as matters get. Even Hazzer Styles, formerly of spangled jumpsuits, Mrs Slocombe blouses and corsages as big as his head, now skulks about in hoodie. Meanwhile, the world of celebrity remains most enthused about the baseball cap, an item I wrote about here back in the pre-Christian era (playing ball, june…