Indholdsfortegnelse for August - September 2021 i The Critic

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WE HAVE A NEW national religion. No, not that one, God bless it with its shiny new George Cross. The ways in which that institution is supposed to have taken on the character and nature of Our State Church is not a new thought. Our new religion is of a very different nature. In truth, it’s not that new either, but not being a devotee, it only really struck me last month when I noticed that it had developed its own versicles and responses. They’re not very subtle, and I imagine they will develop with time, but the content of the exchange was clear: V: It’s coming home. R: It’s coming home. When I heard them, they were said in subtly different tones, in this case the first was assertive…

“Bitch!” It was nearly bedtime, and Cazza and Bozzo were staring at their phones. Usually, when Cazza says things like that it’s because she’s looking at Bozzo’s phone messages, and afterwards she throws things and he has to sleep on the sofa. But this time, she was telling us about someone who was moving in next door. Her name is Nova, and she’s a dog. This is exciting, because I am also a dog. “Bit of a looker!” said Bozzo when he saw her picture. “Not like you eh, filthy mutt?” Cazza looked at him. “No one is more beautiful than my lovely Dillers,” she said, kissing my head. “Maybe they’ll get on. It wouldn’t be the first time a young beauty had fallen for a shaggy old hairball, would…

The distinction between a lie and stupidity is not one which is always easy to make. When an intelligent person says something that is obviously stupid, one may suspect him of lying, but high intelligence and foolishness are certainly no strangers. It is an old saw that there is nothing so foolish that some philosopher has not already said it. Some words, in their modern usages, either invite lies or are in themselves implicit lies. One such word, of course, is diversity. Another is inclusion. Just as the Ministry of Love in Nineteen Eighty-Four was responsible for repression and torture, so the word diversity promotes the imposition of uniformity and inclusion promotes exclusion. The Royal Academy of Arts gave its “commitment” to the “values” of diversity and inclusion as the…

IF YOU WALK ALONG LONDON’S SOUTH BANK, you will see a wall of hearts. Hand painted, the hearts are uneven in shape and size, unsteady as a child’s handwriting that wobbles precariously into legibility. Some are emblazoned with the text “save our NHS”, while others bear the name of the dead rendered anonymously as “Mum” or “Nanny”. All are red, the colour of blood, and, latterly, anger. This is the National Covid Memorial Wall, created by the people, for the people. But do not be fooled into thinking that the pandemic grief has, in any way, been democratized, one heart at a time. Rather, the Memorial Wall represents an act of quasi-guerrilla commemoration, a makeshift shrine to the Fallen of Covid-19 in the absence of an official site of remembrance.…

ONE NIGHT IN THE SUMMER OF 1991 I was standing at the Udvar border crossing in southern Hungary. The air was warm and still. Stars glittered against a black velvet sky. Behind us was a sleepy village of one-storey houses. In front, the flat, silent fields stretched into the distance. But the bucolic scene was deceptive. A short walk away, on the other side of the flimsy barrier, the fomer Yugoslav republic of Croatia had declared independence. The war had started. We had spent the day at the nearby Hungarian town of Mohacs, interviewing Croatian refugees. It seemed incredible-democracy was taking root across the region, but in Yugoslavia, the most modern of the Communist states, families were fleeing with stories of death and terror. We had come to this remote…

LIKE MOST PEOPLE IN THE COUNTRYSIDE, I love foxes. The walls of our houses, cottage or castle, are covered in his artistic representation — Alken, Edwards and Ferneley. Our bookshelves play host to works on the Chase by Sassoon, Trollope and Surtees. Meanwhile down at the village pub, The Fox and Hounds, we drink pints of Tally Ho and try to catch the eye of the foxy new barmaid. The fox, for countrymen and women, is much more than mere “quarry”. He is the four-legged Raffles, a gentleman cracksman, an incorrigible criminal we venerate and regard, whilst simultaneously whooping when he is killed by hounds. RS Surtees personifies this wonderfully muddled thinking with John Jorrocks, the lead protagonist of his 1843 novel Handley Cross. Jorrocks is a cockney grocer turned…

IT WOULDN’T SURPRISE MANY ENGLISH PEOPLE if I described the village I was born in as a green and peaceful place in which the town church, a handsome stone structure, bears inside it a representation of the royal arms. But the arms in question are those of the Dutch monarchy, not the British one, and the village in question is in the Hudson Valley of New York, not the rolling hills of some English shire. New Yorkers think very rarely of old New Netherland but for those with eyes to see the world the Dutch built is ever-present and survives in odd bits and bobs of varying importance — not just in New York but around the planet. In culture, politics, law, and language, the Hollandic empire persists, sometimes in…

A SENSE OF CHAUVINISM — IN ITS ORIGINAL MEANING — led me in early adulthood to regret and even resent that Northern Ireland had few world-class novelists. The problem seemed particularly acute when I looked south and saw how well-supplied Ireland was. Perhaps C.S. Lewis would do, not for Narnia but for the Cosmic Trilogy? Or Bernard MacLaverty, though his output of novels is sparse? Then I discovered Brian Moore (pronounced Bree-an), whose status as the best Northern Irish novelist — who can stand toe-to-toe with the twentieth century greats — seems spiritually buttressed by the fact he was born three months after Northern Ireland itself, in August 1921. Yet Moore retains the tart flavour of a well-kept secret. He is not under-rated exactly, nor does he merit the backhanded…

ONE DAY IN JANUARY 1983, Rob Young volunteered to appear on TV. Along with hundreds of other wannabes, he was instructed to take up position within a giant good morning britain logo that had been pegged out on Bristol’s Durdham Downs. With a helicopter in position overhead, everyone was ordered to scatter aimlessly before coming together to reform the logo. “Beautiful!” blared an assistant through a megaphone. “The director wants you all to know he’s having orgasms up here!” Rob Young, it seems fair to say, has all his life been similarly excited by something on the telly. Like many a child of the sixties and seventies, he was almost as close to the TV as he was to his mother and father. At once minder and mindscape, it looked…

WILL LOXLEY’S Writing in the Dark, an evocation of London literati in wartime, is a bombshell of a first book. Having steeped himself in the diaries, letters and memoirs of an oddly neglected era in English letters, the author has composed a series of vignettes which come as close as possible, at a distance of some 80 years, to recreating his subjects’ stream of consciousness. The reader has the illusion that, yes: it must have been like that to share a taxi with W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, a drawing room with Virginia and Leonard Woolf, an editorial office with Stephen Spender and Cyril Connolly, or a pub with Dylan and Caitlin Thomas. It is, nonetheless, an illusion. We cannot really know, as Connolly did, how it felt to be cooked…

FOREIGN POLICY IS IMPRECISION. It’s the purest form of politics — Oakeshott’s boundless and bottomless sea, with “neither starting-place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to keep afloat.” By that measure, these books by a pair of Foreign Office grandees triumphantly demonstrate their authors’ art form. Woolly thinking, cloudy expression, and the possibility that great matters are at hand, but have been hidden for raisons d’état mortals can’t be expected to grasp, is the best case you can make for these Rolls Royce mandarins. Taken at face value, we have sorry proof for why we’re in the state we are. Their CVs are spookily parodic — obscure West Country public school and Midlands Tudor grammar school, then Oxford, then the Office. Westmacott got Ankara, Paris and DC; Ricketts, by far…

THE QUESTION OF HOW MANY books to take on holiday is a vexed one. My formula (number of days x 2) has the beauty of simplicity, and has disappointment so neatly built into it that I need never face the truth of why I only got through half of one of them. I can tell myself it’s not because I was too lazy, or busy tiring out my children, or too repeatedly semi-drunk to concentrate: it’s because I brought too many in the first place. Just as a man with two clocks never knows what time it is, a man with a toteful of novels will never find a story he absolutely must stick with. Perhaps I should be less ambitious, both in scale and reach. I’ve never felt that…

THE UGLIEST EPITHET EVER attached to a conductor in my time was coined in the late 1980s when two London orchestras were fighting it out for the right to sole residency at the Royal Festival Hall. Neither organisation was in good shape. The Philharmonia Orchestra was conducted by Giuseppe Sinopoli, an Italian psychoanalyst whose ideas floated above the players’ heads. The London Philharmonic was losing the inspirational Klaus Tennstedt to cancer and players were unsure about his successor, a bespectacled Austrian, not yet 30, who went by the assumed name of Franz Welser-Möst. Two backbench musicians duly dubbed him Frankly Worse than Most, an insult aimed not just at the man but the entire maestro breed. All conductors, the tag implied, were rubbish. This one was just WTM. When the…

THE MONA LISA IS NOW AN immovable object. The last time the painting left the Louvre was in 1974 when it was loaned to Russia and Japan and it will probably never travel again. Before that, it had left France just twice since Leonardo brought it in his baggage when he moved to the Loire valley in 1516 to see out the last years of his life as the guest of Francis I. In 1963, the painting travelled to America in a deal brokered by Jacqueline Kennedy and André Malraux, the French minister of culture. Despite a furore at home about potential damage, the painting crossed the Atlantic on board the SS France. The White House had assured the French government that the picture would receive the same level of…

EVERY WAR HAS ITS reporters’ hotel. In Beirut the foreign press gathered at the Commodore, in Saigon at the Continental Palace. In Zagreb in the early 1990s we favoured the Esplanade, a stunningly beautiful, atmospheric art-deco building originally built for passengers on the Orient Express. The hotel opened in 1925 and very quickly became the centre of the city’s social life until it was taken over by the Wehrmacht and the Gestapo. Even during Tito-era communism it retained its air of faded glamour. For a while the Esplanade became my second home, its urbane staff always welcoming. Sirens wailed occasionally and we rushed down to the basement. The streets outside were crowded with armed soldiers but inside the walls were bedecked with photos of famous guests. Going down to breakfast…

“VODKA” CLAIMS LEONID Shutov, the Russian-born owner of Bob Bob Ricard, “should only be drunk with food. That’s the true Russian way.” I tried this on my first visit to his restaurant for Orthodox New Year a decade ago and absolutely right he is. If you’re eating truffled mac 'n’ cheese, truffled Chateaubriand with Champagne jus, truffled mashed potatoes, truffled fries and chocolate truffles, nothing cleaves through like vodka. It works brilliantly until you try to stand up. BBR is the restaurant equivalent of the Greenland shark. Stolid, ponderous, emitting more than a whiff of decay, it glides improbably on, so magnificently self-absorbed that it hasn’t noticed it ought to be extinct. Some satire-immune fool on the Internet wrote that, “if the Great Jay Gatsby owned a restaurant and thrust…

NOW DUFF COOPER KNEW A THING or two about wine. He certainly knew how to consume copious quantities of the stuff. As a youth I conceived the fleeting notion that I should model myself on him, even down to the moustache. It did not take me long to realise that I had neither the brains nor the breeding to quite emulate that wonderful warrior, wit, writer, poet, diplomatist, gambler and bon vivant, though I tried very hard. Cooper was worth knowing, his life worth living, his cellar at the Chateau Saint-Firmin surely worth sampling. “Wine”, he wrote, “has been to me a firm friend and a wise counsellor. Wine has lit up for me the pages of literature and revealed in life romance lurking in the commonplace.” Lit up indeed.…

FASHION YIELDS NO GREATER oxymoron than the term “summer style”. M’learned friend Leandra Medine Cohen, creator of the Man Repeller fashion blogturned-empire-turned-cancelled post-colonial entity, coined the hashtag #lovesummerhateeverythingelse. However, Medine is a long-limbed anomaly, currently looking fantabulous in pants not in the American sense of trousers, but actual pants teamed with flats, bare legs and a Chanel jacket. For those of us for whom this would be ill-advised, warm weather presents a series of sartorial challenges, and I’m not just talking about my college tutor advising me to sport pop socks with my sub fusc because “no one wants thrush during finals”. All the qualities that make clothes a force for good are abandoned in summer — tailoring, plush materials, flights of fancy of the epic sort — in favour…

BY THE TIME YOU READ THIS the Tokyo Olympics will have started, so the prediction contained here as to who will light the cauldron — one of the greatest honours an Olympian can have — will look either brilliantly prescient or woefully off-beam. My risible betting history would suggest that the safe money is very much on the latter, but I think, and certainly hope, that the task will have fallen to SHUN FUJIMOTO. Fujimoto was part of the Japanese gymnastics squad which travelled to Montreal in 1976 with a reputation to protect. The men had won the team all-round event for the last four Games, with the USSR finishing second on each occasion. “We were anxious,” Fujimoto said. “We knew that we couldn’t break the legacy of our predecessors.…

BORIS JOHNSON WAS ADVISED TO “tone down the rhetoric” about Freedom Day. He ended up doing more than that. What was once billed as an “irreversible” lifting of coronavirus restrictions has become just another day in the new normal. Contact tracing is continuing, with hundreds of thousands ordered to self-isolate each week; public transportation networks are still insisting on masks as a condition of carriage; a Covid status certification scheme is being rolled out across the country; nightly BBC bulletins still warn of a coming apocalypse; and travel abroad remains a logistical nightmare. As for leaving decisions about mask-wearing and social distancing to our discretion: prepare now for the finger waving. Basic freedoms were taken from us to fight a virus whose impact the government dares not quantify. Insofar as…

THERE CAN’T BE MANY votes in constitutional reform. And yet the lord chancellor, Robert Buckland, wants to rebalance the constitution in three major areas. What’s going on? As secretary of state for justice, Buckland has introduced a judicial review bill in the Commons — which will be debated in the autumn. Writing here in March, I dismissed the government’s proposals as a solution without a problem. Buckland has now responded to those of us who argued that interfering with this important check on the powers of public authorities would be, in his words, “somehow a waste of energy”. Parliament, the government and the judiciary had a “clear responsibility as custodians of our constitution to make [judicial review] work as well as possible for as much of the time as possible”,…

Boris’s “one, great, indivisible United Kingdom” turns out to be rather like Voltaire’s Holy Roman Empire; it is neither one, nor indivisible, nor united “HOW WOULD YOU LIKE IT,” Boris Johnson asked President Macron of France at the Cornwall summit apropos of the Northern Ireland sausage wars, “If the French courts stopped you moving Toulouse sausages to Paris?” That was “not a good comparison,” Macron snapped back, “because Paris and Toulouse are part of the same country.” Cue much confected outrage from the likes of Dominic Raab, the crop-headed foreign secretary who always looks as though he is trying hard not to hit somebody, and the ineffable Edwin Poots, enjoying his fifteen minutes of modest fame as First Minister of Northern Ireland. And cue most of all for Boris, the…

RECENTLY I HAVE BEEN INVESTIGATING THE HISTORY OF A SWEDISH HERBARIUM. Happily for me, the glory of all Swedish herbaria — formed by the eighteenth-century botanist, Carl Linnaeus, as he systematically classified the vegetable kingdom — is in London, having been acquired after his death by the English scientist, Sir James Edward Smith. This precious and fragile collection, now more than two centuries old, is meticulously preserved in a temperature-controlled vault under Piccadilly. The Linnean Society of London, which owns it, is one of the five learned societies occupying the Victorian wings of Burlington House, either side of the Royal Academy. My visit to this herbarium filled me with both wonder and rage. Wonder because it exemplifies the role that private scholarly associations (and anyone who pays the subscription) have…

HAS ANYONE ACTUALLY asked them? I mean have operatives from the Northern Ireland Food Advisory Committee polled the Men of Peace and their progeny on the Falls Road? Do we know for certain that republicans really want to consume “the great British banger” given the loyalist name, not to mention the constituents of the foul cylinder. Some years ago I described this anti-delicacy as “abattoir slurry in a condom” and demonstrated in a telly film how to achieve the full culinary nadir which also includes flavour enhancers, colorants, stabilisers, emulsifiers, hydrogenators and lots of bread. Nothing has changed. At least I assume it hasn’t. I’m not so rash as to risk trying one: I have gagged on the stench of “full Ingerlish” (including bacon that discharges what might be called…

IMAGINE WAKING-UP TO DISCOVER oneself living in a theocracy; in workplaces and even when chatting with friends it becomes obligatory to signal one’s belief. Kids are subjected to indoctrination sessions at school. The national broadcaster schedules regular religious programmes, and the police, civil service and courts pay a tithe to faith leaders. Citizens who ask questions are socially shunned, becoming legitimate targets for violence and hatred; some find themselves in police cells and at risk of having their children taken into care. The only respite can be found on small corners of the internet, spaces where dangerous apostates meet, renegade sites such as Mumsnet. This isn’t the plot of some hackneyed dystopian novel — this is today’s world as described by Helen Joyce in Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality. There…

AT FIRST GLANCE, the adoration of Jacinda Arden is preposterous. The prime minister of an isolated, rich and safe country is elevated by Meghan Markle, Stephen Colbert and every other chest-beater in the celebrity-liberal complex into a secular saint. She was a rumoured nominee for the Nobel peace prize, even though the most striking feature of her foreign policy has been to back away from recognising China’s crimes against humanity. Prospect magazine hailed her as the second greatest thinker of the Covid-era, and Fortune chose her as the world’s greatest leader in 2021. We have been here before. Progressives showed their need for hero worship with Barack Obama, Angela Merkel and Justin Trudeau. There was a moment in 2013 when the right-thinking hailed Pope Francis as the world’s clearest voice…

EARLY IN HIS FASCINATING biography, John Sutherland relates that Monica Jones, on first seeing Philip Larkin in Leicester University College, was heard to say that he looked “like a snorer”. Sutherland suggests, plausibly, that this was a mishearing for “schnorrer” — slang Yiddish for worthless Jew — and that “Monica was casually anti-Semitic in her conversation”. Within a matter of months the young novelist had embarked on A New World Symphony, focused on an unpleasantly anti-Semitic provincial lecturer, Augusta, with bad teeth and a pulsing vein at her temple. Larkin’s plans for the later part of the new novel show that the aloof, vulnerable, Augusta was to throw off her prejudices and be transported by Mrs Klein, a Jewish colleague whose husband had been killed by the Nazis, to the…

JUST AFTER ISRAEL’S DISASTROUS 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Amos Oz went searching for internal enemies within his own Jewish tribe. The late Israeli novelist, former solider and long-term advocate of peace with Palestinians sought out not only Arabs across the “Green Line” but also fellow Israelis who regarded Oz as at best a naive peacenik or at worse a traitor. Oz’s encounters with Jewish settlers on the West Bank aligned to the Arab-hating “Gush Emumim” or “Bloc of the Faithful” or the anti-Zionist Orthodox Hasidim are particularly memorable for the way the writer holds back his own disdain and allows their words to flow with barely an interruption. His two-month trek into settlements, towns and villages in the autumn of 1982 produced his non-fiction masterpiece, In The Land Of Israel.…

CONNOISSEURS OF THE book-world spat will no doubt remember the corking row which enveloped James Marriott this time last year. Mr Marriott, The Times’s versatile deputy books editor, made the fatal mistake of suggesting that the modern fiction publishing scene was incorrigibly weighted in favour of the female writer and was, as they say, “hounded off Twitter.” Happily, Mr Marriott survived this ordeal and continues to file his amusing articles. And yet the suspicion remained that Mr M was on to something, for a second and much more forensic column in the Observer reached more or less the same conclusion. Statistics from the past year revealed a mere handful of male debuts. Publishers conceded that launching a male novelist onto the review pages and the Waterstones shelf had become an…

RUM SORT OF JOINT, COVENT GARDEN. One minute there’s the boss saying: “We can’t just produce La Traviata and La bohème. That way lies artistic ruin,” the next they unveil a season headlining precisely those old boilers, plus a load more cluckers by Verdi, Puccini, Mozart, Handel, Wagner — y’know, operas from the old days there. Non-insiders might be a bit baffled by all this, as if the head of the RSC was all like: “What, do a bunch of old crap like bloody Hamlet? Piss off!” so I should explain that the people who run these places take a very dim view of proper operas. What they really want is to put on appalling rackets by creatures like Boris Blacher and Hans Lachenmann to leave the rather small audience…

EDGING OUT OF THE PANDEMIC, with steep loans to repay and nervous audiences to lure back to the lost habits of cramming into an auditorium to guffaw and applaud, the Bridge Theatre is one of the newer commercial theatres competing for premier league talent strong enough to carry a production through an unpredictable summer on a long run. On cue here comes Simon Russell Beale, a “he shoots, he scores” bankable performer who is one of the transfers to the Bridge lured by Nick Hytner and co-founder Nick Starr (to audible grinding of teeth at the National). One of the limited number of actors who are stars mainly by virtue of their achievements on stage, rather than big-name interlopers from TV or film, Russell Beale plays arrogant, lonely conflicted characters…

MICHAEL PARKINSON is a man of many accomplishments. Best-known as “the king of the chat show” (it is 50 years this summer since BBC viewers first caught him in that pioneering role), he has also been a producer in the glory days of Granada Television, a roving news reporter, a superlative sportswriter, and that increasingly rare bird, a radio presenter who values knowledge acquired through experience above stage door flummery. The passion that has anchored his life from adolescence to senior citizenship is the mighty river of the American popular song and its tributary, jazz. For years he was licensed by the BBC to share that love with listeners, and he was never lonely. Russell Davies and David Jacobs, superb broadcasters of contrasting styles, lit up Sunday evenings on Radio…

THIS YEAR WAS GOING to be different. This year, I was determined, I’d find time to sit and savour the sultry excess of high summer at the allotment. The flowering, the fruiting, the glorious all-round ripening — I’d drink it in while bees droned and grasshoppers chirped. Let the insects toil; having laboured through spring, I’d have my feet up, lifting a hand merely to pop another strawberry into my mouth. Such a full-blown vision of horticultural indolence was never going to become a reality, but given that gardening is meant to be relaxing I had hoped to at least relax a little. The plot is, though I say so myself, looking glorious right now. I’m particularly pleased with a deep, curved border: bushy globe artichokes stand sentinel along its…

Afternoon delights WE LIVE IN A STRANGE half-liberated, half-imprisoned world right now. It’s not unlike being at Gordonstoun in the late Eighties, or so I imagine, with less cross-country running. But I have been making the most of my afternoons. I have taken libations with various Critic writers and contributors, most notably a fine Margaux and cigar-laden lunch at Boisdale with the wine critic Henry Jeffreys and an equally memorable al fresco repast at the Rose and Crown in Oxford with the Rev Fergus Butler-Gallie. We were fortunate enough on the latter occasion to be joined by Andrew Hall, publican extraordinaire, and much-loved dispenser of good beer and better cheer. Yet he brought sad tidings of the pub’s shifting clientele. “None of the students drink here any more,” he sniffed.…

WHEN I WAS A KID, CALLING someone a “softy” was our go to insult. Spending weeks trying to keep ourselves amused on summer holidays in rural Ireland involved sliding down hillsides on galvanised sheets into fields with bulls or daring each other to grab electric fences. As one of six Beano-loving cousins, Walter the Softy (with all his exceedingly un-pc wimpy, effeminate traits) was the opposite of what any of us wanted to be. We loved Dennis, Beryl the Peril or Desperate Dan from the Dandy — heroes of chaos, pillars of strength. My memories are all happy ones, even when the peer pressure to be strong felt overwhelming. Today, a happiness instructor or wellbeing expert would see our wild escapades as traumatising. Perhaps our parents' decision to kick us…

IT IS A VERY LONG TIME SINCE Rosie Cackle first appeared on our television screens. Cognoscenti sometimes put the date as far back as her fleeting cameo as Neil’s feminist girlfriend in The Young Ones; IMDb reckons that she may even have featured as “uncredited serving wench” in the second series of Blackadder. As for the wider milieu, these were the very early days of what was sometimes described as “alternative comedy”, a sub-genre to which Rosie took with alacrity. She was known for saying “fuck” a great deal and for a good, but not outstandingly funny impersonation of the Conservative politician, Edwina Currie. Styles change, of course, comedians grow old, and by the late 1990s, when everybody said “fuck” a great deal and Mrs Currie was long gone from…

WHAT IS THE MAIN task of the fund management industry? Fund managers act on behalf of savers, the people who are to benefit from pension funds when they retire or have saved via insurance policies to limit risks to their dependents, and so on. Surely, fund managers’ job is to obtain the best possible returns for them. That sounds simple enough. Indeed, regulators make a big fuss about the importance of fund managers putting clients’ interests first, as when orders are placed for stocks and shares. A longstanding problem is alleged to be that fund managers have friends in the brokerage community and allocate excessive commissions to chums. The Financial Conduct Authority insisted, in a 2017 “thematic review”, that the only valid objective was “best execution” for clients. In words…

NINETY MILES WEST-NORTH-WEST of Stanley, Saunders Island is home to the Pole-Evans family, 6,500 sheep, cows, both pet and working dogs, some horses, one pig plainly being fattened up for Christmas, albatross colonies, Johnny Rooks, countless penguins, the occasional dead whale, and the site of the oldest British settlement on the 780 islands that comprise the Falklands. Thanks to the infamously changeable Falklands weather, our little red FIGAS air taxi had been delayed for the morning, so once David Pole-Evans and his wife and daughter (see also: the fire service) had collected us from the airstrip, and we’d driven the few hundred metres over to “the Settlement”, and had a cup of tea, there was only really a couple of hours of mid-autumnal light left in the day. “How far…

You may have heard of Korea, a country in the orient made famous by the sitcom M*A*S*H. I was there briefly during my gap year, and it brought tears to my eyes to see how progressive it was. Virtually everyone I met was a person of colour. So I was deeply moved to read about the Instagram influencer Oli London who — in addition to coming out as nonbinary with “they/them” pronouns — has also come out as Korean. This has resulted in accusations of cultural appropriation, but that would only make sense if Oli had remained white. Besides, Oli has spent over £100,000 on surgery to change the shape of their eyes. Only the most virulent of racists would deny that to be authentically Korean simply requires that one…

AROUND MY WRIST IS THE SORT OF brightly coloured paper band usually used to demonstrate backstage access at a music festival. Instead, I am sitting in the First Congressional Church in Detroit, Michigan. Rather than VIP status, my bracelet points to a different designation, and the single word with which it is emblazoned gets right to the point: “slave”. I have come to Detroit to pretend to be a runaway slave. This nineteenth century playacting is offered by the First Congressional Church. Their Flight To Freedom tour is, according to their website, a “storytelling re-enactment of the original Underground Railroad passage”. It is one of a number of re-enactments around the country that tries to recreate the journey from bondage to freedom, via a hidden network of safe houses, that…

IT’S VERY EASY TO CLAIM THE OTHER SIDE have started a culture war. That while what you’re doing is right, reasonable and well-established, what they’ve started doing is antagonistic, incomprehensible and unprecedented. But sometimes it’s true, and obvious who has started what and why. Especially when there’s an act of parliament setting out your purposes in the first place. That is the case with the National Trust: “The National Trust shall be established for the purposes of promoting the permanent preservation for the benefit of the nation of lands and tenements (including buildings) of beauty or historic interest and as regards lands for the preservation (so far as practicable) of their natural aspect features and animal and plant life.” So say the various Acts of Parliament which, since 1907, have…

ROBERT BURTON CLAIMED TO KNOW not only the date but the precise hour — 9pm — at which he had been conceived. How he might have arrived at this information is very much an open question. Perhaps English parents in the late sixteenth century were freer about these matters than is now customary. The most likely explanation, assuming he did not read about his parents’ coupling in a book (he owned an astonishing 1,738 volumes) is that he counted backwards and, resorting to the astrological calculations with which he filled the pages of notebooks, simply concluded that his mother and father must have come together at the hour of Saturn, destining him to a life of melancholy. Like Sir Thomas Browne, Burton belongs to that extraordinary twilit period in English…

THE CONVENTIONAL VIEW OF historians has been that the proliferation of written constitutions in recent centuries around the globe was primarily the result of a tendency towards democracy. Linda Colley offers a starkly different interpretation and rams it home with cogency and panache. She believes that waves of mainly European hybrid warfare — war pursued by land and sea — were the principal engine behind what she calls “new constitutional technology”. This was not just because wars, like revolutions, brought regimes crashing down, but because warring nation states offered political rights to their citizens (and sometimes to the citizens of those territories they conquered) in exchange for military conscription and increased taxation. And navies cost far more to equip than armies. While it is true that Enlightenment men “addicted to…

THE ROMAN MONUMENTAL ARCH (the term arcus triumphalis only occurs quite late in the Imperial period, notably on two of the many arches erected in North Africa, in what is now Algeria, one at Cirta, of the time of Caracalla (reigned 212-17), and another at Cuicul, built under Severus Alexander (r. 222-35), was a type of formal gateway, set over an axis in commemoration of an event or an individual, through which processions would pass. Many were temporary structures, but several permanent exemplars have survived which have had an immense influence on architectural composition until comparatively recent times. One of their chief functions was to support statuary, notably the quadriga, a chariot pulled by four animals (usually horses), and driven by the individual commemorated. An influential survivor is the arch…

THE LIFE OF ISABEL RAWSTHORNE (1912-1992) reads a little bit like romantic fiction; a girl from a humble background sets out on an adventure and meets a cast of fascinating and influential characters with whom she has dalliances and a few marriages. However, unlike Amber St. Clare in Forever Amber or Vanity Fair’s Becky Sharp, whose chosen fields of operation were the aristocracy and the army, Rawsthorne found herself amongst some of the twentieth century’s greatest artists. She was a model for Jacob Epstein and the mother of his son. She was a muse to Giacometti. She married the composer, Constant Lambert. In her fifties, she was the subject of a number of Francis Bacon portraits. But in Carol Jacobi’s Out of the Cage: The Art of Isabel Rawsthorne, this…

JEALOUS DETRACTORS complaining Jenny Seagrove “bags the plum female roles” in partner Bill Kenwright’s shows, must think again. Cast to play Gayev in Bill’s production of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard from this October, these enlightened times now ensure Jenny also runs off with the male parts! Beware of Basil A BRIEF WARNING TO the vulnerable, who may find themselves in danger of parting with hefty sums for a “meet and greet” with someone claiming to have been John Cleese. Understood at the time of writing to be intent on lurking around a Manchester “convention”, the angry elderly gentleman in question is likely to insist on talking at length about the greatness of Fawlty Towers, the hopelessness of the modern-day BBC, and why being done over in the divorce courts by…

SHOULD I GO AND SEE Rage Against the Machine when they tour next year? On the one hand, they will be brilliant. On the other, there’s zero chance of me getting through the concert without the band making at least one statement that leaves me in a state of high irritation. Probably, I decided, a slogan denouncing Israel for “colonialism”. Then I thought maybe it was unfair to pin my purchasing decision on something I’d only imagined them doing, so I checked their tweets — and there was the post about Israel, exactly as expected. Rage are political, in the radical leftist sense. One of their big influences is Detroit proto-punk band MC5, who matched ferocious guitar attacks with a dedication to Marxism and the Black Panthers (in 2000, Rage…

THE AFRICAN FILM Lingui, from Chad, was in contention for the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Festival, but lost out to Julia Ducournau’s Titane. Despite Chad’s oil-wealth, its population of 16 million inhabit one of the least developed, poorest, and most corrupt countries in the world, and there is barely a film industry there. Mahamat-Saleh Haroun is practically a one-man band and the actresses in Lingui are non-professional. Haroun, who served briefly between 2017 and 2018 as Chad’s Minister of Tourism, Culture and Crafts, was a student in France and has lived in Paris since 1982, having fled his homeland’s civil wars. Yet all but one of his eight features have been made in his native country. “When I was nine years old, one of my crazy uncles took…

UNTIL RECENTLY, most people (including me) would not have known that much of the City of Westminster is lit not by electric street lights, but by Victorian gas lamps. As you walk along the north side of The Mall, cross St. James’s Park, browse the shops in Cecil Court at dusk or wander up some of the alleyways off St. Martin’s Lane, your path is lit not by the bright, white light of electricity, but the softer, more numinous light of gas lamps which have been there since the nineteenth century and provide a sense of the old Victorian city, now so at risk from being turned into a poor man’s version of Dubai. The technology of lighting streets with gas was originally a late eighteenth-century invention. London’s first gas…

I SUPPOSE HE MUST have been there on business but he never went into any dull details. Kazakhstan, as far as my father’s stories went, was simply a place of men battling stray dogs in the street with umbrellas and children heading off hunting on horseback with eagles on their arms. As a thirteen-year-old, I thought it sounded perfect, right down to a joke he was frequently told, which he’s been repeating ever since. “The Kazakhs are the second biggest consumers of meat in the world,” an old boy would say to any western traveller who was prepared to listen. “But who eats more?” the westerner would inevitably reply, whereupon the Kazakh would say, “The wolves of course,” and much fermented mare’s milk would be spilled across the floor as…

I OFTEN REMIND MYSELF OF Mr Toad. As his beautiful caravan is swept from the road he is found in the ditch uttering in a trance-like state the mantra “poop-poop!” The motor car has not only destroyed his dream but in that instant created a new one. In art and in life I live by the philosophy that every loss is a shopping opportunity in disguise. So it is with Mr Toad — he rushes out shopping and cars are all that he desires. For me every sale I make opens up the opportunity to buy something else. I never think of banking the profit; instead I rush headlong into the next purchase. A month ago I sold a pair of commodes I had owned for more than six years.…

SINCE WE’RE HAVING MAJOR difficulties pinning down Hector’s “onward educational journey” I took one for the team and schlepped all the way to Fulham for The Independent Schools annual summer show (essentially a trade event for a bunch of private schools). I had to take the tube because the nanny was collecting Lyra from kung fu, and Will had selfishly taken the Tesla to work. Christ, I’d forgotten what South London’s like. The rot sets in at Earl’s Court, and gets worse with every stop on the District Line. Literally, before I’d even left West Brompton I’d passed three men in gilets and deck shoes (vom) striding through the tumbleweed to their Boden wives. Also a minor character from Made In Chelsea, which was frankly the high point of my…

TRUE FANS KNOW THAT LIVE SPORT is not to be enjoyed, but endured. If the object of our sporting affection is losing, it is miserable. If they are winning, we fear they will throw it all away. Only after the drama can those at home emerge from behind the sofa, and supporters at the stadium or ground stop biting their nails. Only then can the glory be celebrated or the failure lamented. The errors, the injustices, the what-might-have-beens can be debated, sometimes for weeks, months and even years. We still argue about the BODYLINE ASHES SERIES of the early 1930s, and England’s third goal against West Germany in the 1966 WORLD CUP FINAL. Perhaps this is why, with sport, we are so nostalgic. If it is the hope that kills…