Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2025 i The Critic

IS BRITAIN ON THE BRINK? IN THE late 1970s we certainly seemed to be. All the clouds of the twentieth century were by then raining down upon us. Our empire was gone, our economy was bust and our politics was borderline post-parliamentary, as ministers bargained, generally in vain, with trades union barons before they presumed to govern. All of this changed with Margaret Thatcher. Indeed, such is the scale of her achievement in arresting Britain’s precipitous decline that few can properly see the nature of it — precisely because they can scarcely now believe the extent of the problems she faced and, as often as not, successfully faced down. Are what today passes for our governing classes — the leading politicians, the foremost explainers of politics, senior, permanent officialdom, our most…

ONE OF SIR KEIR STARMER’S first gestures when he became prime minister was to declare “We will never withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights” to the leaders of Europe assembled at Blenheim Palace, where, as he reminded everyone, one of “the chief architects of the Convention” had been born (never mind that Clement Attlee was the man who took the UK into the ECHR, and that Churchill’s support for the idea had been very modest). Not a year on, and there are signs that time in office has made the Prime Minister and his party somewhat more pragmatic. Withdrawal is still not on the table, at least to the PM; but in the new white paper on immigration, the government promised to limit the use of Article 8…

ARE HAMAS MORE EVIL THAN THE Nazis? “The Nazis,” Douglas Murray writes in On Democracies and Death Cults, “attempted to cover over the worst of their crimes.” Hamas have also denied the worst of the crimes they perpetrated in their appalling massacre of 7 October. True, the killers filmed their rampages as they perpetrated them. But the Dirlewanger Brigade did not have smartphones. It is certainly possible to make a good case that Hamas are as bad, in moral terms, as the Nazis (if, as Murray writes, less able to murder at such scale). But he feels compelled to make the strongest possible argument, for On Democracies and Death Cults is less a work of analysis than of advocacy. Murray, who has been honoured by Israel’s President Isaac Herzog for…

THERE IS A NEW POPE IN ROME, AND DEPENDING on your denominational identity, he hath, or hath not, jurisdiction in this Realm of England. Either way, it says a lot about the differences between the Church of Rome and the Church of England that the former has seen its leader fall ill, get better, get sick again, die, and be replaced, all in the space of time in which Anglicans have been without an Archbishop of Canterbury. There will be no glossy magazine spreads explaining to readers the baroque processes by which Archbishops are elected, let alone movies starring Ralph Fiennes. But if the clerical leader of the Church of England has faded from public consciousness, its temporal head is infinitely more visible. It is our kings and queens who…

But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking. (Matthew 6:7) IN THE EARLY WEEKS OF SPRING I MADE A 72-HOUR trip across the ocean to New York City, one of those modern unkindnesses to the body which, in this case, was made tolerable only by the wedding of a dear friend and the chance to roam around the antiquarian book fair at the Park Avenue Armory. The spirit of Manhattan was in its usual perennial bloom — brash and energetic, with its characteristic $90 mediocre lunches and the concomitant taxi rides during which one’s entire life flashes in full view somewhere on East End avenue between 66th and 79th. The conversations randomly encountered on…

WHAT HAS BEEN WHISPERED FOR A while on podcasts and in the books of ideologues on the fringes of power has come to pass. Gramsci is the thinker of the day. Christopher Rufo, architect of MAGA’s attempt to dewokeify American universities cites in his new book the Italian communist’s writing on how ideological power operates, particularly the concept of “cultural hegemony”. Rufo did not come to Gramsci’s thinking directly but rather via the cultural policies executed in the early days of Giorgia Meloni in Italy. It is there that the right has grasped the significance of how Gramsci tried to reconcile Marxist economic theory with the way in which the Italian working class had drifted to Mussolini through the concept of “cultural hegemony”, a form of ideological power that operated…

JUST ABOUT EVERY BOOK ON NATURE written in the last 20 years or so has at some stage alluded to that celebrated John Muir quote that runs: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” In those 19 words are cradled many truths, two of which are that, in nature, everything is connected, and nothing is simple. Richard Negus’s wonderful new book, Words from the Hedge, is an important, funny and passionate defence of the British countryside. The hedge is merely the principal actor in a cast of many hundreds, and the particular vantage point from which Negus observes the unfolding drama around him. For Negus, the hedge is the artery through which the wildlife is pumped, the mark…

QUALITY WILL OUT, THEY SAY. OH, REally? There’s no shortage of gifted writers who have never had a sniff of a major prize. The English novelist Sarah Moss, now based in Dublin, is such an obvious example of this that her publicity materials now include one newspaper’s pointed summary: “the best British writer never nominated for the Booker”. Moss’s new novel, Ripeness, might fix that. It opens in what we might call banging style, as a woman has rough sex while trying not to think of Sylvia Plath’s fascist-fantasy poem “Daddy”. The woman is Edith, a middle-aged Englishwoman living in Ireland in 2023, who is divorced and in a relationship with an Irish-German man named Gunter. The present-day sections of the book, featuring Edith’s comfortable relationships with Gunter and best…

A RUSTLING IN THE RECORD schedules warns me that 2026 will be the Year of Havergal Brian. Never heard of him? Don’t panic. He’s an English composer of 32 symphonies that, some proclaim, will bring audiences storming back into concert halls. These believers are not isolated. The classical music community is fringed with faith groups who bang the drum for obscure composers. In Britain alone, there are societies promoting Bax, Bantock, Berkeley, Bliss, Boughton and Butterworth and that’s just the ones beginning with B. I was once pinned for two hours to a business-class seat by a man preaching that Georg Philipp Telemann was a great composer, superior to Bach and Handel. Telemann, an eighteenth-century organist who officiated at five Hamburg churches, is in the Guinness Book of Records as…

IN 1983, THE MUCH-LOVED children’s author Roald Dahl gave an immediately notorious interview to the New Statesman in which he outed himself as an anti-Semite. He told the astonished journalist Michael Coren that “There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity, maybe it’s a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews. I mean, there’s always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere.” Dahl then declared that “Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.” If anyone in the public eye made such remarks today, it would almost certainly be career-ending. For some reason — maybe because Dahl was the biggest-selling, most beloved writer in the world at the time — it made nothing like such a splash four decades ago. But…

CULTURAL APPROPRIATION! As Bobby Darin didn’t quite sing, “That’s the name of the game”! You can’t put sugar in your coffee without incurring the wrath of some folk, and Radio 4 did its best not to let the side down when Artworks reheated the familiar dish known as Paul Simon’s “notorious” LP, Graceland. “Paul Simon’s Political Storm”, the programme was dubbed, and the background tale is certainly interesting. In 1985, having taken a body blow with the commercial failure of his previous LP, Hearts and Bones, Simon took himself to Johannesburg, where he worked loosely with musicians he had admired from his home in Montauk, New York. The result was Graceland, a record named after Elvis Presley’s Memphis mansion. It was a big hit, producing a handful of top ten…

ANNABELLE SELLDORF HAD a tough time following her selection as the architect to re-do the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing, mainly because Denise Scott Brown who, with her late husband, Robert Venturi, designed the Sainsbury Wing which opened in 1991 is still alive, aged 94, and is, rightly, fiercely protective of their legacy. I did not know at the time that Selldorf was selected that, unfortunately, Scott Brown had already taken against her for her renovation of the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, another of Venturi Scott Brown’s major projects. The first images released of the project in June 2022 greatly exaggerated the amount of change being made to the original building, making it look as if it was the entrance to an airport. Hugh Pearman, the former editor of…

IN THE INTRODUCTION TO Nothing if Not Critical, published in 1990, the great art critic Robert Hughes laments how the traditional techniques of painting that had been passed down from the sixteenth century were no longer taught. He writes “virtually all artists who created and extended the modernist enterprise between 1880 and 1950, Beckmann no less than Picasso, Miró and de Kooning as well as Degas or Matisse, were formed by the atelier system and could no more have done without the particular skills it inculcated than an aircraft can fly without an airstrip”. But from the 1950s, the traditional techniques began to die out in art schools. Art became untethered from its roots, resulting in the banal chaos of much contemporary art that Hughes abhorred. Now, in the manner…

IT WASN’T THE SMOOTH HAPPY birth I’d hoped for or envisaged. At about four o’clock on a Friday evening — five days before my new book, Uncommon Ground, was due to be published — an email landed from my editor. It had been forwarded to me and I could see that the original had been sent to various people including the managing director of William Collins and their top man over in Legal. I had never expected my ranging and fairly raking exploration of the land access debate in Britain to be a hit with everybody. The case for foxhunting is complex and the rural illegal rave scene — with its taste for criminal damage and hard drugs — isn’t going to be for everybody, but the fury of this…

I was told off by a BBC interviewer for failing to express sufficient sympathy for trans-identifying men who now don’t know where to pee IT’S MORE THAN A HALF-CENTURY SINCE THE psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross described recovery from grief as a five-stage process: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and finally acceptance. After the Supreme Court ruling that men who claim to be women don’t count as women for the purposes of equality law, it offers a handy way to track how gender ideologues are coping. So far most are bouncing uncomprehendingly between the first two stages, with no sign they understand that their loss may prove fatal — presumably because it barely registered as a possibility beforehand. Three hours before the judgment was handed down, Jolyon Maugham — originally a tax barrister,…

Doing the hustle DON’T TELL THE BOOKERS — I’D HATE THEM TO get the idea that I’m an easy get — but I love being a studio guest on live TV. The lights go up, the cameras roll, the adrenaline flows, and for five minutes or so, you’re relying on your wits to save you from national humiliation. It might not be everyone’s idea of fun, but it definitely makes you feel alive. So when Newsnight invited me to talk about Lily Phillips (the British porn star who has achieved outrage-propelled fame with her extreme sexual stunts), I was more than happy to be the feminist killjoy explaining why this might not actually be an “empowering” career. I shared the sofa with a young woman who put the pro-sex work…

AT THE VERY HEART OF THE POPULIST right — its thrumming, animating core — is anti-elitism. If there is one thing that unites Donald Trump and Nigel Farage, Aleksandr Dugin and Dominic Cummings, Marine Le Pen and a Western nationalist on the internet lavishing praise upon Vladimir Putin, it is a hearty and deeply felt contempt for the incumbent “elites” who have brought us to our current state of high immigration, falling trust, rising budgetary deficits, and a pending demographic crisis. That contempt is well earned, if for no other reason than that it is so obviously lustily and eagerly reciprocated. While fearing his intentions, Whitehall and the organisations it funds might better empathise with the worldview of the aggrieved Islamic extremist who sees the West as an oppressor entity with a…

Today, I got my job allocation as an incoming doctor. After 9 years studying at Cambridge, a PhD, and scholarships … I’ve been placed in Northern Ireland — hours away from any friends or family. So I’ve made the tough decision: I won’t be taking this job. I can’t justify sacrificing my family and my partner of eight years who will now be across the sea for a job that pays £36k. THESE ARE THE WORDS OF SHIROM CHABRA, A RECENT graduate in medicine, as posted a few months ago on Twitter. His situation is the result of a new system brought in last year for allocating “Foundation Year 1” or “F1” positions — the first NHS job freshly minted doctors take after medical school. F1s can be sent all…

FOUR YEARS AFTER THE DEATH OF THE politician, media figure and pervert Robert Boothby — “Bob”, to his friends, “Lord Boothby” to his admirers and “that fat man” to the teenage boys he paid to abuse — a biography was written by his admirer, the historian and Conservative MP Robert Rhodes James. The 1991 life, entitled Robert Boothby: A Portrait of Churchill’s Ally, had been entrusted to Rhodes James by Boothby and his (somewhat unexpected) widow Wanda Sanna, on the strict proviso that the biographer produced a glowing encomium to a great man, rather than the warts-and-all account of a deeply disreputable and unhappy figure. A whitewash duly followed, omitting or toning down huge swathes of Boothby’s rackety life. It is typical of Rhodes James’s dishonest account that it refuses…

WE’VE HAD THE “RIGHT TO ROAM” in Scotland since 2003. When I try and look back beyond this date, I have to confess that I can’t remember a time before the law was changed. Freedom of access is so deeply hardwired into my understanding of the countryside that, on visits to England, I am actively startled by signs which prohibit trespassing. It also happens that I’m a farmer, and I know that this particular knife cuts both ways — but my experience of public access is confused by the fact that I live and work in one of the most obscure corners of Dumfries and Galloway. When tourism operators claim that we’re “Scotland’s hidden corner”, they’re being polite. What they mean is that we’re a black hole: in fifteen years…

BEN COBLEY HAS WRITTEN A GOOD — I dare say a necessary — book. It could have been an even better one. The author subjects the “progressive” mind to a harsh scrutiny, in the course of which he reveals much of the received wisdom of our day as neither wise nor willingly received. But he is less illuminating on the ideas that have animated progressive thought over the past two centuries — above all, of course, the idea of progress itself. Not that Cobley intended to write an intellectual history of progressive movements, or indeed a work of scholarship of any kind. The Progress Trap is a polemic against the foes of its subtitle: The Modern Left and the False Authority of History. And an excellent polemic it is, too.…

YOU ARE, LET US SAY, A “young writer” on the south side of 40, chastened by the findings of the latest industry survey — these show that the mean authorial salary is around £7,000 p.a. — but with your first book contract lying on the desk before you. The Secret Author would like to congratulate you, while proffering a few tips on how you might be able to sustain the career on which you have so optimistically embarked. Civility is all. The old adage about being polite to the people you meet on the way up as you may very probably meet them again on the way down was never truer than on Grub Street. Have a smile ready for the shy girl checking the proofs at the Literary Review:…

SOME ARE BORN NAZI, SOME ACHIEVE Nazidom … but Richard Wagner, it appears, had Nazism thrust upon him. The issue of exactly how many world wars/fascist regimes Uncle Dick was personally responsible for is never going to get stale, of course, but this month a fresh take bursts upon us at Gloucestershire’s own boutique Bayreuth, Longborough Opera. Avner Dorman’s opera Wahnfried (premiered at Karlsruhe in 2017) details — in absurdist revue style — the beginnings of what you might call the toxification of Wagner’s legacy, a particular feast for fans of cherchez la femme, who will be gratified to learn that the whole Adolf pivot was not Richard’s fault at all, but entirely that of his widow and daughter-in-law. Well, the idea that Nazism is essentially a female thing will…

THE BRIEF FOR THE GREATEST JOB of Lalo Schifrin’s career was admirably short: he was to compose a TV theme, music to go alongside the image of a burning fuse. Told the title of the show, he wrote a joke into the music: the meter is long-long-short-short, Morse for the letters M I. Almost everything has changed about Mission: Impossible since the first TV episode aired in 1966, but the theme has remained. As it plays over the titles of the latest film, Final Reckoning, it’s impossible not to smile. The TV series focused on heists and deception, rubber masks and plans that seemed to go wrong before finally going right. There was little in the way of gunplay, with the mysterious Impossible Mission Force focusing on smarts instead. THE…

OUR UNDERSTANDING OF THE world is filled with shadows. Snatches of half-remembered news and rumour lurk there — curious, unexplained and uncategorised. Did that happen? How did it happen? Because of who? I am always glad to find a podcast that can aim a little light into these areas, clearing up mysteries and deepening knowledge. Last month, one series cast its gaze towards a mystery that has skulked in the darkness for almost 25 years. In the aftermath of 9/11, as anger and paranoia understandably raged, American media and political offices began receiving letters containing anthrax spores. Several people died — a photojournalist, two postal service employees and two people whose exposure to anthrax is a mystery. Many others were infected. It felt as if a new front had opened…

THE ART WORLD IS LARGELY A liberal sort of environment, but certain words and concepts have become almost taboo. One word which has always fascinated me is connoisseurship, a term capable of conjuring an entire world. For perhaps more than a century, it was the most valued commodity in the art world. Collectors sought out connoisseurs — usually dealers — to help them form collections of note, filled with great and beautiful works of art. Subject knowledge, judgement of quality and originality or authenticity, perhaps even significance were essential to “connoisseurship”. It was with the benefit of this judgement, a sort of human filter of art, that most of the collections to be found in the great museums in the great cities of the world, certainly of Western art, were…

HERE’S A QUESTION: WHO IS CHAMPION JOCKEY? I’m a lenient quiz master, so you can answer for either the flat or jumps. And no, it’s not Frankie Dettori, who hasn’t been champion since 2004 but remains the only household name jockey. If you said Oisin Murphy or Sean Bowen (over the jumps), congratulations. But I suspect you’re a hard-core racing fan. If, however, you have only a passing interest in the sport … well, I’d be amazed if you knew either. That’s no criticism of them. I’d say Bowen is the best jump jockey to have been based in the UK since A.P. McCoy and Oisin Murphy is a wonderful rider. But the fact that next to no one has heard of them is a damning statement about the way…

SO WILL IS ON OZEMPIC. TWO years behind everyone else, but hey. And despite having actually wanted him to lose weight, I find myself strangely furious. First, I wasn’t expecting him to GO ON about it so much. I thought that was the point of doing it with drugs! Instead of becoming all evangelical about gluten-free, or only eating within a twenty-minute window of 3pm, or chewing endlessly. Just quietly jab yourself. Job done. But no. All I hear about now, is how very not hungry Will is — how much he isn’t craving a drink, how he’s happy to just have lunch and move on. How he’s basically fine. Does this need voicing? Really? Isn’t an absence of a difficulty a solution? And therefore not a worthy conversation topic!…

CAN I HAVE SOME MORE? On Good Friday my Scottish Episcopal church followed the recipe for thin gruel that Marcus Walker identifies in today’s average Anglican sermon [SOUNDING BOARD, MAY]. Over the course of three hours of devotions, “every bien-pensant soft-left cause found in the Guardian” included the suggestion that Hamas has no power (never mind the hostages) and of the importance of watching Adolescence. Also relevant to Christ’s Passion: the world is dominated by unjust immigration officials, and the January 6 QAnon shaman was not the Messiah. Never were we invited to identify ourselves with the crowd that shouted “Crucify!” Because apparently, thank heavens, being a Christian means all blame is external. One preacher was particularly reflective about the criminal crucified alongside Jesus. His retort to this man’s admission,…

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HABENT PAPAM! THEY have a Pope — and congratulations to the Roman Catholic Church for the speedy election of a new head of their church, done with great solemnity and drama. As an Anglican perhaps the greatest cause of envy is the speed. Barely three weeks passed between the death of Pope Francis and the election of Pope Leo XIV. Not so for us. Justin Welby offered his surprise resignation in November, went into retirement in January, and we won’t hear anything until September at the earliest. Will we know the name of the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury by the one-year anniversary of Archbishop Welby’s resignation? Who knows? The Church of England decided not to move forward the scheduled meetings of the Crown Nominations Commission (CNC) by so much as…

THIRTY-ONE YEARS AGO THIS SUMMER, Four Weddings and A Funeral came out and the full horror of British marriages was revealed to the world. The peculiar dress code, the bumbling vicar, the interminable speeches, the enforced small talk, the grotesquery of the seating plan, the awful spectre of the dancefloor, and the endless, endless drinking. The film’s funeral looked much more straightforward, practically jollier, in comparison. Here’s the contemporary version: a big, fat, Oxbridge wedding in the South of France, which involves several events across four days. It’s not solely a British affair. One of the grooms is American, so there’s a softball game before the wedding, and plenty of American guests, but the trademark elements of a modern destination wedding in Europe are there: expensive hotel, long, painstaking itinerary detailing…

MY DAD TOOK ME TO MY FIRST concert — Paul Jones (ex Manfred Mann) with the Blues Band at Cambridge Corn Exchange — when I was nine. At the time, I thought this was about the most exciting thing ever, since Jones was then starring in a children’s BBC series called Uncle Jack about an environmentalist secret agent. It’s possible, though I hope this is a false memory, that I might have shouted “UNCLE JACK!” as he came on stage. Over time, I’ve attempted to return the favour, not always successfully. In 2005, I took my dad to see Texan guitar expressionists Explosions in the Sky in Nottingham. He thought they were quite good, but he managed to take a nap during the support set from Four Tet — now…

THIS IS A TALE OF TWO LUCYS. Lucy Connolly, a childminder and mother, is currently serving a 31-month prison sentence after pleading guilty to distributing material with the intention of stirring up racial hatred. Lucy Powell, an Oxford graduate who has enjoyed a smooth ascent through the gilded corridors of public policy and politics, is now Labour MP for Manchester Central and Leader of the House of Commons. After Axel Rudakubana murdered three young children in July 2024, Lucy Connolly posted a furious, ill-advised tweet about deporting asylum seekers and setting fire to their hotels. A few hours later she deleted it. Two-tier Keir’s justice system went into overdrive and she was swiftly arrested and imprisoned. It’s unclear if she was able to watch Groomed: A National Scandal, Channel 4’s…

AN ALTERNATIVE TITLE FOR JOHN Singer Sargent’s celebrated portrait Madame X (1884) might be, “Be careful what you wish for”. At the time of its painting, Sargent was an up-and-coming artist living in Paris who had already exhibited at the Salon six times; Madame X was another expat, Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, a New Orleans Creole who was one of the celebrated beauties of the Belle Époque. They both wanted something from a collaboration. Sargent needed, he felt, a “statement” picture to establish himself fully in his chosen milieu, while “La Belle Gautreau” wanted a public image that would help disguise the fact that her husband’s money came from guano and ease the social restrictions resulting from her mixed-race heritage. Amélie’s striking looks — hennaed hair, preternaturally pale skin which…

HITCHCOCK’S MASTERLY THRILLER NORTH BY Northwest, in which Cary Grant is pursued across America by agents of a mysterious organisation, is packed full of momentous scenes, memorable lines and magnificent outfits. Grant spends three nights in the same suit, during which time he is doused in Bourbon, thrown from a moving Mercedes, locked in a cell, bundled into a foldaway sleeper compartment, machine-gunned from a crop duster, arrested by the Chicago Police and shot at Mount Rushmore. Yet still Grant’s character, Roger Thornhill, maintains his poise. From his Glen check suit and 21 Club cufflinks to his oxblood Oxford shoes, Grant exudes such suavity that even his enemy has to admit that he is “well-tailored”. Throughout his career, Cary Grant was well tailored by Kilgour, French & Stanbury of London and…