Indholdsfortegnelse for April 2021 i The Critic

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IF THE SCOTTISH NATIONAL party does well enough in the elections on 6 May, the UK Supreme Court may soon become the focus of public attention once again. At stake will be nothing less than the future of the United Kingdom. The SNP is committed to holding a second referendum on independence for Scotland. The 2014 vote — which rejected independence by 55 to 45 per cent — had the blessing of the UK government. This one will not. Unlike its Westminster progenitor, the Scottish parliament has limited powers. Any act of the Scottish parliament that “relates to” the “Union of the Kingdoms of Scotland and England” is outside its legislative competence. That’s one of a number of matters that were reserved to UK legislators by the Scotland Act 1998.…

“THERE IS NO SUCH thing as a free lunch.” Or so Milton Friedman assured us in the title of a 1975 collection of his newspaper articles. However, economies are complicated mechanisms and Friedman’s dictum is not entirely true. The state has the undoubted ability to create money, nowadays usually delegated to central banks. In a depressed economy — where output is a few per cent beneath its trend level — a sudden injection of extra money balances boosts economic activity, and so increases output and employment. Money injections of this sort — “quantitative easing” — do not in any meaningful sense require costly resources. Central banks seem to have a magic money tree which does provide free lunches. The temptations are then obvious. Once it is understood that central banks…

“I’M QUITE FULL-ON AS A PERSON, quite passionate,” Laurence Fox insists. The actor who is now auditioning to be mayor of London is so direct in conversation that it is a surprise to learn that he has had media training in preparation for May’s election. Where are the usual tell-tale tactics of the politician who has been tutored in interview techniques? Far from trying to divert uncomfortable subjects on to easier territory, Fox gives the impression he could find ignition just by looking at a car key. In Britain, at least, there is always the suspicion that actors who turn into political campaigners draw upon skills of adaptability and emotional artifice far beyond the range of the average one-dimensional rhetorician. With Laurence Fox, it is the disarming frankness, not the…

JUST BEFORE LAST CHRISTMAS, Professor Sarah Whiting, the Dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD), arguably one of the most powerful positions in the architectural world, wrote an open letter to a group called the Johnson Study Group. She told them she was going to rename the house which the American architect, Philip Johnson, built in 1942 as his thesis project when he was a student at the Harvard School of Design. The letter read: At Harvard, the GSD owns a private residence in Cambridge that Johnson designed and built for his thesis project at the GSD, when he attended the school in the 1940s. At the university, the house doesn’t have an official name on record, although it is usually referred to as the Thesis House, or the…

“This is no thaw,” said the dwarf, suddenly stopping. “This is Spring. What are we to do? Your winter has been destroyed, I tell you! This is Aslan’s doing.”— C.S. LEWISThe Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe LENT IS COMING TO AN END. Not just this year’s Lent, but the Lent which we have all been enduring since Mothering Sunday last year. Fasting from social interaction, from family, friends, pubs and restaurants, theatres and concerts — even, I’m told, the gym. This Easter brings with it more than the usual optimism of spring and more than the yearly excitement caused by the resurrection of Christ. There is an echo of the whole Easter story in our national liberation. Not an allegory — a neat puzzle with a clear solution —…

IN THE PRO-BULLFIGHTING LITERATURE, appealing to the authority of cultured aficionados from past and present (Federico García Lorca, Ernest Hemingway, Mario Vargas Llosa) is a fast track to respectability. Francis Bacon is mentioned occasionally, but his British passport and understated presence in bullrings go some way to explaining why his name doesn’t come up more. As his most quoted aphorism on the subject — “Bullfighting is like boxing, a marvellous aperitif to sex” — intimates, neither his work nor his life invites respectability by association. He gave short shrift to anti-bullfighting sentiment: When you go into a butcher’s shop and see how beautiful meat can be and then you think about it, you can think of the whole horror of life — of one thing living off another. It’s like…

ALCOHOL HAS MANY SIDE EFFECTS: euphoria, conviviality, mindless violence, cancer and mental breakdown. But from the point of view of the alcoholic, its most seductive property is its ability to justify itself. “You find the best stories in the pub,” my colleagues and I on the old Fleet Street would hear alcohol tell us as we knocked off for a long lunch, which could last into a long evening. And indeed, as the drink flowed, glistening and glorious ideas for stories appeared that had us falling off our bar stools in helpless laughter. As it flowed some more, they were forgotten and replaced by new ideas more glistening and more glorious. Cut off the flow, the alcohol whispers, and you will become a deadbeat bore, churning out pap and living…

EX LIBRIS J.M. BARRIE AND THE LOST BOYS A“CATCHING OF HAPPINESS” is how Philip Larkin, in a tender moment, referred to one of his godchildren. The phrase might also describe the relationship between another literary darkling, J.M. Barrie and a whole family of children: the Llewelyn Davieses. Their relationship is captured not just in Peter Pan and other works Barrie wrote around them, but in a haunting book by Andrew Birkin first published in 1979, J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys. Birkin had spent years researching the real-life inspirations for Peter Pan while preparing a landmark television series on Barrie. But the book that followed a year later is an unsurpassable account of this disturbing corner of popular literature. The youngest of the boys, Nico, was still alive when Birkin…

HOW TIMES HAVE CHANGED! Soon after Robert Maxwell’s mysterious death at sea in 1991 — he either fell, jumped, or, some said, was pushed off his luxury yacht, the Lady Ghislaine — his chief flunkey Peter Jay (formerly Our Man in Washington) was quoted in the newspaper Today as follows: “I think he had more physical and moral courage than anyone I have ever met.” But here is Jay in John Preston’s flashy, frothy and frivolous new book describing Maxwell as “pre-moral … like some great woolly mammoth stalking through a primeval forest”. It’s a killer quote, all the more so for contradicting Jay’s earlier assessment, of which Preston appears to be ignorant. The book’s “Note on Sources” is broken down by chapter, and includes references to published sources and…

‘‘MEN NEVER DO EVIL SO completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.” Pascal’s aphorism often comes to mind when reading this enjoyable and well-written biography of George Blake, who betrayed hundreds of agents to the KGB when he worked for MI6. Dick White, who ran first MI5, then MI6, thought Blake did “much more damage than Philby”. Kuper describes him as “a serial killer”. But Blake thought of himself as a morally decent and principled man. He was brought up as a Christian, and seriously considered becoming a priest. He believed communism to be “the same as Christianity — only on a scientific basis”. He returned to a version of Christian faith after he escaped from Wormwood Scrubs to Moscow. He had a weirdly precise sense…

Weightier role CONCERN GROWS over frisky housewives’ favourite Hugh Bonneville’s Hollywood-style physical transformation of late. While history suggests such sudden image changes for our top celebrities can be a sure sign of troubled waters ahead, I’m also reminded newly-svelte and airbrushed Hugh, 57, displays reckless disregard for continuity issues when it comes to upcoming filming on the Downton Abbey movie sequel. Surely creator Julian Fellowes is right to expect his star actor puts some extra timber back on before once again inhabiting the more healthily-nourished Earl of Grantham? AS SHE CURIOUSLY INSISTS on speaking with an American accent whenever interviewed by Americans, and an English accent whenever interviewed by the English, one cannot help wondering how that strange girl Gillian Anderson attempts to talk in the presence of both nationalities…

Sarah Ditum on Pop JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE is sorry for everything. He’s sorry about the 2004 Super Bowl half-time show, when he exposed Janet Jackson’s boob during a dance routine — a wardrobe malfunction that knocked her career into the doldrums for a decade after outraged moralists inveighed against her apparently autonomous tit, but which had no consequences for him. He’s sorry how he treated Britney Spears, too. (Timberlake has been particularly criticised for his 2002 “Cry Me a River” video, which featured a lookalike of his ex-girlfriend Britney Spears, and left the audience in absolutely no doubt that the unfaithful girl in the song was her.) In an apology posted on Instagram, he wrote that he was sorry for all his “ignorance” and “privilege” The world noted this, considered it,…

Christopher Silvester on Cinema LAST YEAR, NOT FAR from the Kremlin and the old headquarters of the NKVD on Ostozhenka Street, a restaurant opened called NKVD, featuring reverent Soviet imagery on its walls and on its menus. It was doubly insensitive in that four victims of Soviet terror had lived at the address where the restaurant was located. Earlier this year, a Moscow kebab shop called Stal’in Doner was closed by state officials after only a week. Its staff had worn NKVD uniforms, greeted customers with the period slogan “Life has become better, life has become happier”, and served up Stalinskaya kebabs that were double the size of the standard fare. Such outbreaks of Stalin-era chic have become increasingly acceptable since Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, came to power…

LITTLE SILVER LININGS: small plates have no future. Covid might at least deliver us from the tyranny of tapas. Spanish friends have often confessed themselves literally bewildered by the idea of having tapas for dinner. Whether in Andalucía or Catalonia, tapas were properly bar snacks, tiny portions designed to soak up booze. Turning them into an event is basically the equivalent of the landlord of the Dog and Duck sticking a pickled egg on a plate andcharging you a tenner. Why would you? Someone back in the Nineties conflated tapas with raciónes, larger plates which are meant to be sampled jointly and ordered sequentially, moving from cold to hot dishes. Then a savvy operator on the Ramblas got wise to the fact that Brits on mini-breaks (remember those?), wanted teeny…

‘‘WORLD’S WORST MATADOR FAILS AGAIN” was the Sun’s unintentionally hilarious headline in September 2016. “Useless teen bullfighter gored for FIFTH time in his first five bouts”. The subject of the article was Andrés Roca Rey (right), arguably the best torero in the world, and unarguably the most popular. He was then 19 and in his first season as a full matador — fearless, frenetic, blood-soaked and beautiful. Spain’s afición was already craning forward, wondering whether the Peruvian newcomer would be the next messiah. Plenty of young toreros — plenty of teenage boys in general — disdain their physical safety. But Roca Rey was no thrill-seeker. His repertoire with the capote (the pink and yellow two-handed cape) was dazzling. He kept being tossed because he was trying to find the point…

IT IS FAIR TO SAy that wokeness and indeed basic human decency has yet to reach the world of running. Here I provide a glossary to help new runners from good homes and caring universities master the language and fit into running’s rough world. CHICKED: When a young woman overtakes a middle-aged/elderly male runner. I have never heard a middleaged/elderly woman runner offer a comparable term for being overtaken by a young man. Perhaps TOYBOYED would do. I suggest GRANNED for when you are overtaken by a woman or man who is clearly a grandparent — it happens to me at every race. Even I have yet to be CORPSED: overtaken by a horse-driven hearse with mourners walking alongside at a funereal pace. But give it time. RUNNER’S TROTS: A…

CANCELLATION DOESN’T EXIST, apparently. It is a self-pitying myth invented by petulant conservatives to cover up being on the wrong side of history. Yet “they had it coming” is also audible. It’s what the American journalist Rod Dreher calls the Law of Merited Impossibility: “It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it.” Let us therefore consider someone who was most definitely cancelled — and remains so in his native Ireland — and see what the case of Kevin Myers teaches us. The gleeful controversialist’s memoirs are reviewed in this issue (page 71) by Simon Kingston. His cancelling offence had been to write a column in the Sunday Times’s Irish edition which reproached female BBC journalists whose agents brokered them lower salaries than their male peers.…

SLAVES AND SOURCES David Starkey’s analysis of the National Trust slavery project (March) makes some good points. But there is a much worse example of a slave project, that of the Welsh government’s Slave Trade and the British Empire: An Audit of Commemoration, published in November 2020. It is littered with errors and, astonishingly for a report written by at least three professors, relies heavily on Wikipedia with more than 50 citations from that source. Doubtless the authors would not recommend it as a model to their students. Professor William Gibson CHANDLER’S FORD, HAMPSHIRE David Starkey is right to note that “treating the English country house — à la Sir Roy Strong and the rest — simply as an aesthetic phenomenon, or the fragile quintessence of Englishness is not the…

IN 2004, WITH THE PASSING OF THE Gender Recognition Act (GRA) the UK became the first country in the world to legally recognise trans people as the opposite sex without medical treatment. The Act passed without controversy, and with little media coverage. The law was framed thus: a transsexual person (the terminology used at the time by legislators and most trans people) must acquire a gender recognition certificate from a new gender recognition panel made up of lawyers and doctors. In most cases, to get a certificate a person will need confirmation from a specialist doctor that they have gender dysphoria, have been living in the acquired sex for two years, and that they intend to continue doing so. It is not necessary to have undergone surgery. Anyone issued with…

BIOGRAPHERS OFTEN DELUDE THEMSELVES into believing that their books are “definitive” — the smaller the subject, the greater the delusion. No one can take out a patent on Joseph Stalin or Nelson Mandela, but down in the lower reaches of biography writers can become so proprietorial that all who come after them are viewed as interlopers. Try introducing a past and a present biographer of, say, Gladstone’s private secretary or Thomas Mann’s sister — I guarantee the responses will be frosty. This was rather my feeling when, some years ago, I was contacted by a lady who said that she had a large quantity of papers relating to the historian Sir Arthur Bryant, about whom I had written a biographical essay in my 2014 book The Last Victorians. I felt…

• Recently I received a personal invitation by message on my telephone to “Rejoin the EasyJet community.” I had not been aware until then that I had ever been a member of the EasyJet community, though I was aware that the last time i flew on the airline it had left me stranded ovemight, without assistance or even information, in Berlin when my flight to pairs was cancelled. By the time i had finished paying the costs involved, i could have gone on a two-week holiday instead. But it was the words personal and community that irritated me. Why should I feel any sense of community with tens of millions of people just because I too had on occasion flown by this airline, either because it appeared the cheapest way…

THE BEST DIARISTS ARE flawed individuals who exist on the fringe of great events and are natural observers and acerbic wits. Snobbery helps too. Think Samuel Pepys, James Boswell, Alan Clark. Henry “Chips” Channon (1897-1958) has long been seen as one of these too, but it is only with the publication of these unexpurgated diaries, superbly edited by Simon Heffer, that we can truly recognise quite how perfectly he fits the type. Born into a rich Chicagoan family, Channon fell in love with European culture as honorary attaché to the American embassy in Paris, where we find him when these diaries open in 1918. Living off his parents until 1933, he then married the heiress Lady Honor Guinness, and became Conservative MP for Southend in the 1935 general election. This…

“When I am weaker than you, I ask you for Freedom, because that is according to your principles; when I am Stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles.”FRANK HERBERT, Children of Dune IT IS MOST PECULIAR. If the counter-culture had a dominant theme, it was the right to criticise the establishment and to question orthodoxy of all kinds. Back in the Sixties, it was central to its mission to Expand your Consciousness, man. And it worked. Walls came tumbling down. Yet now, everywhere you look, it seems the elements of society — students, academics, comedians — that one would most naturally associate with that freedom of expression, are introducing caveats and qualifiers to that principle faster than you can cry “Stop Little…

CRITICISMS OF THE BRITISH for living in a Second World War past are frequent. Sean McMeekin, professor of history at Bard College and a talented scholar of the First World War, takes an alternative view by arguing that we are generally living in the wrong war. Drawing on an impressive array of international archives, McMeekin, who acknowledges his debt to Norman Stone, directs attention to Soviet activity. This, however, does not arise from some attempt to praise the Soviet Union as an ally against Germany but, instead, from a determination to present an equivalence between the two in aggression, expansionism, brutality and cynicism. McMeekin does not do this in order to extenuate Germany but rather to throw light on both by means of comparison. In some respects, for example the…

IT’S HARD TO BELIEVE I KNOW, but not all books are as good as publishers say they are. We can’t expect otherwise — that’s their job — though I recall warmly the publicist who once sent me a bundle of books, with a note attached to the third: “Don’t bother with this one.” We need a system where books that publishers really love, where it’s not mere puff, get a special sticker on the front. This month’s selection of novels would wear such a label with pride. Admirers of Gwendoline Riley know what to expect: a new novel every few years, an austere two-word title (Cold Water, Sick Notes), a first-person narrator’s intensive examination of her life with others, in prose that returns your stare. Riley (below) was a prodigy,…

IGOR STRAVINSKY cast such a huge shadow over the cultural estate that when he died, 50 years ago this month, his publisher said that music would be as art was after Michelangelo. We can now confirm that he was right. In half a century, no composer has attained the fame and stature of Stravinsky, none has dined with ease at the Elysée and the White House. Stravinsky was the last of the Great Composers. Once he was gone, they locked the canon and threw away the key. Before you contest that proposition, let’s raise a cheer for the closure of the canon. Across the world right now, from the BBC to the Boston Symphony, dead white male composers are being replaced with diverse unknowns amid a confessional wave of collective…

IN 1625, REMBRANDT was 19 years old and living in his home town of Leiden. Although he was the ninth of 10 children born to a flour-dusted couple — a miller and his wife, the daughter of a baking family — he had been given a classical education among Leiden’s haute bourgeoisie at the city’s Latin school, and then at its university, the oldest in the Netherlands. Rembrandt was an artistic prodigy but he was not the most prodigious young artist in the city. That was Jan Lievens, a year younger than Rembrandt but more advanced in his training. By the age of 13, Lievens had painted a picture of a boy reading by firelight that had been presented to King James I. The two young artists became close friends,…

BACK IN THE LATE 1980s, as the Soviet Union teetered on the brink of collapse, I found myself in a bar in Leningrad, as the city was then still. Mikhail Gorbachev — remember him? — had decreed an anti-alcohol campaign, but there was no shortage of beer and vodka in the homely tavern where we settled down for the evening. The people-watching was engrossing. The atmosphere in the city was quite different to that of closed, claustrophic Moscow. Leningrad looked out to the sea, to Scandinavia, the locals seemed better dressed, more open-minded. By far the most fascinating customers were a quartet of Finns who sat down nearby, fresh off the ferry from Helsinki. They ordered vodka, and steadily downed shot after shot, until one after another they slumped forward,…

IT SEEMED AT THAT MOMENT that the old Roberts radio my mother had always liked so much was going to be kicked across the floor. It was the sweet whistle of a teal that finally did it. “I can’t take it any more,” she shouted, “I can’t take any more of this Radio 4 shit about birdsong and the wonder of being locked down in the countryside.” I had been in Dumfriesshire at that point for just eight weeks but my mother had left the county only once in the preceding year. Currently, when you ring someone in rural Britain and ask how they are, there is a popular stock response: “Oh I’m not doing too badly,” a sheep farmer in the Cheviots said to me last month, “Lockdown round…

Iwas talking to m’learned friend, A.N. Other Fashion Bitch, of late, lamenting that writing about matters style may prove lifeenhancing, but is a sure-fire way to end up destitute. “God, I don’t buy all that tat,” she eye rolled. “I mean, no one buys clothes any more. We’ve got to save the planet.” “Oh, God, yeah, same,” I replied. This is a lie. I buy all the tat. As you read this, I will be buying more tat. I’m not just toying with this shit, or endeavouring to offload it onto you. I want this stuff, crave it, have received psychological treatment for my obsession with it. As a former alcoholic, I am aware that no one is ever a former alcoholic, and that addiction will invariably whack-a-mole up elsewhere.…

The whole history of the West is — to confound the simplicities of the woke — one gigantic act of “cultural appropriation” HAVE YOU NOTICED post-colonial literature? It’s everywhere these days, and I don’t mean in bookshops. Instead it’s the academic specialism du jour. Priyamvada Gopal, the shrill-voiced, foul-mouthed (read her tweets) high priestess of woke, who memorably proclaimed that “white lives don’t matter” and got promoted for it, is Professor of Postcolonial Literature at Cambridge; while the more fragrant Corinne Fowler, who masqueraded as an historian to compile the ahistorical and error-laden National Trust “Report on the Colonial Countryside”, which I anatomised in the last issue, is likewise Associate Professor of Postcolonial Literature at Leicester. Clearly there’s something in the water. To find out what, I turned to the…

POLITICAL PARTIES ARE the lifeblood of democracy — but in today’s Britain the establishment institutions will do everything in their power to stop new parties being formed if they don’t approve of their aims. The worst offender is the Electoral Commission, closely followed by the Charity Commission and Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs — and now you can add the big banks to the list. I have discovered this not once but twice in the past decade, first with Brexit Express BE (BEBE) and now with the Reclaim Party. I have been the sole funder of both parties, although I would love to be able to invite others to contribute. Reclaim is headed by the admirable and courageous Laurence Fox with the vital agenda of arresting the subversion of Britain’s…

TOM COTTON IS A SERIOUS MAN. Pretty much everyone you talk to about the 43-year-old junior senator from Arkansas agrees on that. It’s not hard to see why. Cotton’s style of politics is cool and analytical, his approach deliberate and decisive, his areas of interest weighty — China, law and order, immigration — and his ambitions lofty (the other thing everyone agrees on is that he plans to run for president in 2024). After that, opinions quickly diverge. To liberals, he represents the sinister side of Trumpian authoritarianism. To advocates of a more restrained foreign policy, he is an irredeemable hawk committed to a heavy US involvement in the Middle East and seemingly determined to accelerate the deterioration of relations with China. To libertarians, he is a civil-liberties and criminal-justice…

Privilege, like cocaine, is a white drug. It’s important not to be caught in possession of it. If you’re caught using it, you may be ordered to check your privilege, and recognise that your views are nothing more than a defence of your position in the racial hierarchy in which you secretly believe. The purest form is white privilege, which is the refined product of systemic racism. According to the American feminist Peggy McIntosh, white people carry racial privilege in an invisible knapsack. McIntosh is white. So is Robin DiAngelo, who coined the term white fragility in 2011 and has made a fortune as a race awareness consultant for corporations wishing to insure themselves against discrimination suits from disgruntled employees. Whiteness, DiAngelo claims, endows “psychological advantages that translate into material…

LA TUPINA in Bordeaux is the best restaurant I have eaten in. Michelin stars are counter-indicators. La Tupina has none, never will have. It is an absolute stranger to la cuisine chichiteuse. Until recently it was run by the man who founded it in 1968, Jean-Pierre Xiradakis. His menus sometimes included lamprey, shad roe, eel and elvers. A few years ago he drove my friend and TV producer Frank Hanly and me 50km north from the city to a hamlet called La Belle Étoile on the right bank of the Gironde where his supplier of these creatures moored several specialised boats, one for each estuarial quarry. That morning, as we fished them, we ate the far side of a surfeit of elvers cooked in olive oil, garlic and piment d’Espelette…

• Those on the right side of history have always been supportive of state censorship and the burning of books. I recently saw a beautiful Pathé newsreel from 1933 in which early social justice activists are seen in Berlin’s Opernplatz throwing books onto a bonfire. i'm not quite sure what's going on because I don’t speak German, but I presume they were decolonising a university curriculum or something. We’ve seen similarly empowering imagery with people burning copies of J.K. Rowling’s books and posting the footage online. The Irish pop duo known as “Jedward” tweeted that Rowling’s novel Troubled Blood would make the perfect kindling for a ‘romantic fire’. I haven’t actually read the book, because to do so would be to dignify the outrageous transphobic stereotypes that I’ve decided that…

Boris thought, “To beat Eurocrats, Who better than bureaucrats?” So he tossed A brittle bone to David Frost. Jacob Rees-Mogg, In the tradition of Quintin Hogg, Pursues intellectual rigour, Albeit with insufficient vigour. What would a queen see, Who, beholding her legacy, Could count two who’re divorced, a drop-out, a failed intellectual, And one whose best-known accomplishments were sexual? The attempted purge on Nicola Sturgeon May have resulted, in the case of Alex Salmon From “parasynthetic adjectives referring to florid complexions:” i.e., gammon. Dominic Cummings Was insuperable in down-dumbings And seemed unthreatened by Tut-tut or cut-cut or even smut-smut. But — but He underestimated Princess Nut-Nut. And went phut-phut.…

IT IS RARE ENOUGH FOR A MAJOR WORK BY A MAJOR philosopher to emerge posthumously. What makes the appearance of the fourth volume of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality so remarkable is not just the fact that this text of nearly 400 pages languished in a bank vault for more than 30 years after his death aged 57 in 1984. It is also the book’s seductive, not to say salacious, title: Les aveux de la chair, now superbly translated into English by Robert Hurley as Confessions of the Flesh (Penguin Classics, £25). Given that Foucault died of Aids and a series of biographies have not disguised his promiscuity, readers might expect some kind of self-revelation, or at least a self-justification, in this valedictory volume from beyond the grave. If so,…

OVER THE COURSE OF 40 YEARS Kevin Myers was a draught of fresh air in the often conformist fug of Irish journalism. In the way of draughts, he was persistent and uncomfortable for the “Official Liberal Opposition” of Kavanagh’s poem. He still is. By 2017, the twentieth anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement was approaching. Myers, angular and unclubbable, had reason to believe he had done the Irish state some service and that at least some of it had been recognised. For decades he, with a few others, had unambiguously opposed the violence of the Provisional IRA. He had pointed to the direct connection between the savagery of the Provos and the “physical force” tradition of earlier Irish republicanism. Although in government north of the border and a growing force…

SOME YEARS AGO, when reviewing Frederic Raphael’s collection of writings, The Necessity of Antisemitism, and reading it on the Northern Line, I tried all manner of awkward ways to hide the cover-title from my fellow passengers. I haven’t yet ventured on to the Tube brandishing David Baddiel’s new offering, Jews Don’t Count, but the possibility has awakened memories of my uncomfortable rides with Raphael. Of course, neither of these well-known Jewish authors advocates the idea broadcast upon his particular book-jacket. Raphael’s title was a sophisticated conceit borrowed from Shelley’s essay, The Necessity of Atheism, while the sentiment on Baddiel’s cover is one he is emphatically ascribing to others. And he doesn’t mess about. Following an introductory clutch of celebrity encomia, Baddiel launches straight into a joyless-sounding review in the Observer,…

THE WORLD WAS VERY young when the Secret Author published his first novel. Mrs Thatcher was in Downing Street, there were five “quality” Sunday newspapers, university creative writing departments had barely been heard of and, wonderfully, it was still possible to make a living out of book reviewing. The volume in question sold just over a thousand copies, attracted half-adozen reviews, some of them in magazines that no longer exist (does anyone remember Books and Bookmen, I wonder?) and went into paperback. Everyone, not least the proud author, was modestly pleased. In those far-off days, no great fuss was made of debut works. Publishers used to issue them in batches of four or five a season, see if any of them caught on and not shed too many tears over…

OF ALL THE HORDES who have a beef with opera, the straight-theatre crowd are by far the sniffiest. Naturally enough, their objections start with the peculiar singing, and pretty soon it’s all Johnson’s “exotic and irrational Entertainment” and the laughs that Addison, Pope and those lads got out of Handel; and to be fair, G-Fred’s fat capons, standing around in armour, hooped skirts and big hats, making taxi-hailing gestures and hooting away in Italian, must have been a lot of fun. Or it’s our foolish plots, usually citing the Verdian likes of Trovatore and Ernani — but I ask you, surely anyone who can’t get off on a premise like “wrong baby on bonfire” is lacking some essential bit of the soul. The truth they miss is that these risible…

RADIO 4 IS AS FAMILIar to a middle-class British audience as a lockdown Waitrose delivery. It also has many of the same strengths and weaknesses, being high-quality and undershooting at stand-out moments. Just as you rarely get a surprise in the Waitrose chilled ready-meal sections, the big ask for Radio 4 is: “What have you got for us that is not just another organic chicken tagine?” The positives have been on display in a year when we have staggered downstairs to start a day of Zooms with the Today programme in the background. I have even been so tired on a Saturday after trying to get the teenagers out of bed that I tried the afternoon drama lucky dip. It ranges from the bland sub-genre of J.B. Priestleyderived comeuppances to…

• “SHERRY? SHERRY? SHERRY.” The dialogue between the scheming Withnail, the ingenuous Marwood and the lubricious Uncle Monty is beautifully balanced, not a syllable out of place and laced with venom. Indeed, the screenplay of Bruce Robinson’s 1987 masterpiece, Withnail & I, with its triangle of central figures bome along by a motley collection of supporting characters, maintains a torque and tension worthy of a Rolls-Royce engine. Yet this particular engine is not powered by petroleum, but in the words of its eponymous hero by “the finest wines available to humanity”. For more than 30 years the film has enjoyed cult status among generations of undergraduates, each striving bravely to play “the Withnail Game” — to drink all that the trio drink, quote every other line along with the cast,…

CAN YOU HEAR IT? Can you smell it? When the lawnmowers rev up and the air fills with the unmistakeable scent of cut grass — sweet, crisp, almost quaffable — it’s a sure sign that the growing season is upon us. “Who was the fool who made January first New Year’s Day?” asks Grandpa Spaulding in Ray Bradbury’s nostalgic classic, Dandelion Wine. The day when the grass is finally long enough for cutting, triggering a “great swelling symphony of lawn mowers… that really represents Beginning!” Along with bursting buds and ripening blackberries, the first trim of the year is one of the data points recorded in Nature’s Calendar, the UK’s phenology database. This lengthy biological record stretches back almost three centuries, and contributors began logging the date of their lawn’s…