Indholdsfortegnelse for February 2022 i The Critic

IN LIVERPOOL’S WALKER ART GALLERY hangs William Frederick Yeames’s “And When Did You Last See Your Father?” The great, improving picture about the Civil War is much more subtle than the Victorian age’s reputation for melodrama and sentiment might suggest. While the Roundhead interrogators are sympathetically cast, the boy’s childish innocence — and the dangers in speaking the truth — puts the dilemma of honesty centre-stage. Yeames chose the Civil War and Interregnum period to illustrate the drama, much though Victorians thought they had moved on from that era. In the seventeenth century, disagreement had potentially very disagreeable consequences. But in the age of Queen Victoria, British freedoms included the freedom to disagree — in parliament, in the press, in public. How is it, then, that today’s New Elizabethan age…

DO WE NEED A Hate Crime Act? Offences that are motivated by hostility towards victims’ race or sexuality already attract heavier penalties. But the government’s law reform advisers are now recommending clarifications and amendments, ideally in a new act of parliament. In a 545-page report published at the end of last year, the Law Commission acknowledged that most people who responded to an earlier consultation were against its provisional proposals. As a result, the commission’s final recommendations are more conservative. But commissioners pointed out that many responses came from individuals who disagreed in principle with protecting different classes of victims differently. And yet incitement to racial hatred has been an offence since 1965. In the government’s view, there can be no going back. It’s important to stress that we are…

The campaign to put up a statue to Bristol’s greatest benefactor wasn’t about Colston, it was about Bristol “STATUELESS BRISTOL”. In the wake of the Colston affair, the phrase perfectly captures the forlorn state of the city — physically statueless and politically rudderless — as it grapples with the rectification of history by mob rule and, still worse, with the quasi-legitimation of the process by the perverse verdict of a bamboozled jury. There is just one problem. The phrase is not early twenty-first century but late Victorian. And far from being a response to the pulling down of Colston’s statue, it was coined as part of the campaign to have the statue put up. Its author was James Arrowsmith. Arrowsmith was a characteristic Victorian, with unlimited energy, wide talents and…

IT WAS ON CHRISTMAS EVE that I realised I’d been subjected to a social media drive-by shooting. That pinnacle of modern ecclesiastical power, the president of Humanists UK, Professor Alice Roberts had deduced from the headline of an interview I gave to the Telegraph that I was emblematic of Christians “who think that non-Christians are incapable of tackling moral questions”. My delight at being emblematic of anything died quickly as a Twitter pile-on began, of people who, I suppose by definition, had nothing better to do than spend the Season of Goodwill getting angry at strangers via their phones. I suppose you’ve got to do something. It will come as little surprise to you to learn that I was not saying that non-Christians are incapable of tacking moral questions. What…

You can still find occasional copies of Mike Lear’s photography books in second-hand shops. Stout and once expensive hardbacks, issued by highly respectable publishers, they have titles like Spring Buds and Nymphs at Play. Shot in misty soft-focus on rolling lawns and shimmering, flower-strewn meadows, their backdrops are by no means identikit — French chateaux, English stately homes and Hollywood pool-sides have all at one time or another been pressed into service. The cast, on the other hand, are always the same, which is to say pubescent or sometimes pre-pubescent girls in varying states of undress. Even in the mid-1970s, which might be regarded as his professional heyday, there were enough militant feminists around for Mike to have to issue frequent justifications of his oeuvre. His subject, he maintained, was…

WOKE. SLANG. THEY ARE BOTH FOUR LETTER WORDS — a euphemism first recorded in 1923 in a slang dictionary (French author, English lexis), with a reference to the concept of a “four-letter-man,” (a three-letter man, meanwhile, is variously a c-a-d or f-a-g). The one a convenient shorthand for words and deeds deemed racially and socially permissable or, perhaps more important, not; the second a hard-to-define catch-all for what I term the “counter-language”. Opposite poles, one might think. Yet this isn’t simple either. As a concept, “woke” is slang’s worst enemy. A hard-faced, black-clad puritan determined to eradicate every vestige of joyous, colourful slang’s raison d’être. Everything in which slang delights — insults both individual and stereotyped, obscenity, double entendres, an irrepressible propensity to call every spade a spade — has…

GORDON BROWN CELEBRATES his 70th birthday on 20 February. My guess is he will find a purposeful way to do that, perhaps by re-reading some of the notes John Maynard Keynes left in the Treasury’s archives, as Gordon was fond of doing during his reign over British economic policy. Brown got many things wrong, among them the idea that he could somehow bring an end to “boom and bust”, and the belief that he could restrain his impatience with lesser mortals to become a completely successful Prime Minister. But on the most important issues — the need for an independent Bank of England, whether Britain should retain control of its financial and economic destiny by retaining its own currency, how to save the international banking system from collapse, who to…

PLANS ARE AFOOT TO BUILD AN “American Women’s History Museum” in Washington DC. The Smithsonian is masterminding the project, and a council of advisers — among them Billie Jean King and Craigslist founder Craig Newmark — has already been established. It will be another ten years or more before the doors to the building open, but the Smithsonian has given a taste of what is to come through a preliminary American Women’s History Initiative, which can be explored online. Scrolling through, it all looks very exciting. There are sections showcasing objects from the worlds of female education, activism, sport, culture and science — things such as Helen Keller’s watch, the clothes worn by one of the Little Rock Nine in Arkansas in 1957 (both below), and the first maternity uniform…

IN THE WAKE OF THE Second World War, John von Neumann, one of the scientists who had helped build the atom bomb, was convinced that war with the Soviet Union was coming. He advocated a pre-emptive strike by the US. “If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today?” he said. “If you say today at five o’clock, I say why not one o’clock?” His argument, which made him one of the inspirations for Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, was that of the cold-eyed rationalist. Having seen the destruction wrought on his native Hungary by the war that had just ended, he wished to protect his new home, America, from similar harm. A quick war would, he and many others thought, minimise overall human suffering by wiping…

THE FURORE CAUSED BY the posthumous publication of an author’s diaries or notebooks is at least one barometer of their success. Take Sylvia Plath’s heavily abridged journals, published by Ted Hughes in 1982, amidst claims that one of her diaries was lost, dark admissions of another being destroyed, and stories that entries made within days of her suicide had been similarly expunged. And a century earlier, the publication of Dorothy Wordsworth’s diaries suggested her brother’s “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” had in fact consisted in pilfering images and verbatim descriptions from his sister’s journals. So the publication of Patricia Highsmith’s Diaries and Notebooks is ripe for literary gossip of a different kind. Since Andrew Wilson’s first major (and brilliant) biography Beautiful Shadow in 2003 there have been two others: Joan…

ONE OF THE STRONGEST POINTS in J.C. Squire’s favour is the well-nigh fabulous contempt in which he was held by the liberal intelligentsia of his time. F.R. Leavis declared he was the epitome of all that was meant by the word “philistine”. Virginia Woolf reckoned that the literary circles he inhabited were home to a “stinking undergrowth of hack writers”. “Damn his eyes,” Lytton Strachey fulminated, when Squire made the mistake of complaining about the lesbian scenes in D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow. To the specimen 1920s highbrow on his upward march through the foothills of Bloomsbury, he was simply an obstruction, a moss-covered relic from the Edwardian era for whom the whole of the modernist movement could be written off as so much gibberish. Yet the popular notion of Squire…

WAS HELEN OF TROY THE original heiress? The daughter of that fattest of fat cats, Zeus, “the world’s desire”, she is the golden girl who is courted and carried off, a cause of epic conflict, and a bit of a fruitloop with a taste for dodgy men. Once she calms down, her sister offs her husband in his bath, lobbing his bones to the dogs, before getting axed by her son. Rich girls — effing maniacs every one. Alas, Laura Thompson doesn’t include the Spartan in her new tome. Thompson wrote that rather good book on greyhound racing, and it is tempting to see her latest publication in a similar vein. Namely, a study of glossy, emaciated, highly-strung specimens set to charge about for the collective sport. In the age…

INSISTING AN ELEVENTH HOUR CASTING in a TV drama could be the “last chance saloon” for my career, the anxious agent went to great lengths outlining the “dos and don’ts” before I joined my young co-stars. While an exhaustive “don’ts” list appeared to cover one’s entire life and profession pre-2017, the “dos” included making effusive noises about a “non-binary Bond,” referring to actresses as “actors”, and loudly praising anything connected to Phoebe Waller-Whatshername. Resolved to begin 2022 in positive fashion, I endeavoured to seize the initiative the very moment I arrived on set, commencing with an impeccably rehearsed monologue showcasing 21st century credentials. After a spirited beginning on my part, there was a definite moment in proceedings when looks of bemusement came across the faces of the earnest youths present.…

ONE TINY BLACK AND WHITE sticker. That was what the Parents Music Resource Center eventually won in 1985 — after the congressional hearings about obscenity in pop music, after the back-and-forth about the first amendment and freedom of speech, after the women who founded the PMRC (including Tipper Gore, wife of Al) were attacked as “bored housewives” and authoritarian prudes. Just a little sticker with the words “PARENTAL ADVISORY: EXPLICIT CONTENT”. The PMRC’s 1980s crusade against lyrical filth looks, retrospectively, like one of the sillier episodes in the culture wars on both sides. The absurd naivety of the PMRC (Kandie Stroud, a journalist and a PMRC spokeswoman, spoke sorrowfully about how “it’s really changed since the days of the Beatles and Elvis”, apparently forgetting the moral panic both inspired; the…

WE HAVEN’T HEARD AS MUCH about the Oscars being “so white” this year because Will Smith has been the favourite to win the Best Actor award for King Richard (the biopic about the father of Serena and Venus Williams, below) practically since its first screening, and because Denzel Washington shines in Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth. Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog scores heavily on the diversity meter for being directed by a woman and depicting repressed homosexuality. But the trouble with the Diversity monster is that its appetite is rarely satisfied. Puerto Rican immigrants never loved the original West Side Story, a Broadway musical created by four Jews (Bernstein, Sondheim, Laurents, Robbins), when it was first performed in 1957. Originally intended to be about a Jewish girl…

LAST SUMMER, I was invited to a meeting held in the old Garrison Chapel at Chelsea Barracks. It gave me a frisson because I remembered so vividly that Chelsea Barracks and its development had been the site for a pitched battle between the modernists and traditionalists over a decade ago as to what form this part of the city should take. The site, which is enormous, consisted until recently of a heavily fortified parade ground (it was the site of an IRA bomb attack in 1982) and two deeply undistinguished tower blocks designed by a firm called Tripe and Wakeham completed in 1962 (Tripe had died in 1953, Wakeham had the advantage of being a Brigadier). Only the chapel survived of the original barracks which had been laid out in…

ON A RECENT OVERCAST morning, I found myself rummaging among roadside weeds and litter. I was hunting for bits of my car’s wing mirror, mangled by nocturnal vandals in our supposedly sleepy market town. A passer-by, hearing my muttered expletives, couldn’t resist noting that nothing of the kind happens where she lives — in Hackney. She did offer some advice, though. “Smell that bush, it’ll make everything better,” she said, pointing down the street to where a viburnum in full bloom was spilling over a garden wall. The pop of colour would have been tonic enough, its dense clusters of flowers — pink, yes, but ranging from ballet slipper to flamingo — all the more improbable-seeming for adorning otherwise bare stems. But then I caught the scent: vanilla-drenched sweetness with…

THE WAITING, the not knowing, was the worst part. It always is, I suppose. We have closure now, at last. And now that the worst has happened, I actually feel a strange kind of peace in my own powerlessness. My daughter didn’t get into St Paul’s. I can’t believe I’m writing those words. I never thought this would happen. This is like something that happens to other people. But there it is. My Alma Mater has betrayed me, in the most brutal way possible. Not even on the waiting list! Not even, “your child is exceptional, and therefore not right for our shamefully narrow-minded school because we only cater to a very specific type of ordinary child etc etc.” Just the standard, one size fits all, rejection letter. I’d have…

IN THE 67-YEAR HISTORY of the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year BOB NUDD is the one who got away. Or, to use another metaphor from his sport, the one they threw back. Thirty years ago, after winning his second world angling championship, Nudd received 100,000 votes in the competition to decide the year’s top sportsman, but the BBC ruled that he didn’t count as Angling Times had urged its readers to support him. Just as the Guardian recently asked its readers to nominate the person of the year and then dropped the idea when too many went for JK Rowling, Nudd would be the wrong winner. Even though competitive angling, which has three million participants in Britain, is listed on the BBC’s sports website, you couldn’t have a fisherman…

KINGSLEY AMIS IN The Old Devils: “A sign used to say Taxi and now said Taxi/Tacsi for the benefit of Welsh people who had never seen a letter X before.” Whatever officious authority erected that sign was merely boasting about Wales’s precious particularity, its specialness, its not being England. Further, the populace was patronised as if it was comprised of children, to be bossed about by Cymraeg 2050. This is the Welsh Government’s totalitarian project which aims to have one million people speaking Welsh by that date. That’s twice the (much exaggerated) number that is currently claimed to speak the language. What, in this context, does “speak” mean? The capacity to make a simple purchase? Or the ability to discuss why R.S. Thomas, a fundamentalist nationalist whose politics could be…

A miracle recovery THE OMICRON VARIANT (which itself sounds like an undistinguished Netflix action film, probably starring Jason Statham) has swept the country as vigorously as Dick Van Dyke went for the chimneys in Mary Poppins, leaving boredom and fatigue in its wake. Book launches, like every other kind of social merriment, were duly cancelled. At least I managed to make it to a couple in the dying days of 2021, when people were allowed to converse in person without festooning themselves in masks. One especial highlight came at the launch of Andrew Roberts’s excellent new biography of George III. So lavish was the hospitality and so thick with cabinet ministers was the crowd that one distinguished publisher promptly collapsed to the floor. The cry promptly went out “Is there…

WHOSE PROJECT IS “DECOLONISATION”? Is it the work of the colonised, or is it in fact the work, once again, of the colonisers? The Trinidadian Marxist CLR James thought little of the identity politics that preaches anti-racism but demarcates the world into separate, alien races. When James — historian of imperialism, Anglophile, cricket connoisseur — was offered a post in “Black Studies”, he responded “I do not know, as a Marxist, ‘Black Studies’ as such. I only know the struggle of people against tyranny and oppression in a certain political and social setting… It is impossible for me to separate black studies from white studies.” James had a complex relationship with the intellectual legacies of the West, or “the Global North”. He believed one could draw upon its literature, philosophy…

THIS YEAR SEES THE 25th anniversary of the Bank of England’s operational independence, made effective in May 1997 and granted formally in a 1998 Act. Almost certainly, 2022 will also see the most above-target inflation numbers since that change. The Bank will be heavily criticised and proposals will be made for reform. What has gone wrong? The crucial import of operational independence was that the Bank was given more or less exclusive responsibility to keep inflation on track. Its Monetary Policy Committee was meant to be free from Whitehall interference; its job was seen as technical, not political. With the inflation target the focus of attention, this job was to review the macroeconomic situation and to set interest rates. Here was a revolution in policy-making. The future would be different…

One hundred years ago, in 1922, the world changed. Not the real world, of course — that had happened a few years before, with the war — but the literary world, which is always a few ticks behind (Roddy Doyle, at a recent event, when heckled by an audience member asking when he was going to get to the point, replied, “I’m a novelist, so it might take me a few months.”) In the opening years of the twentieth century, as Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring caused a sensation in their respective spheres, Edwardian English literature remained solidly post-Victorian, dominated by chunky realists like Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy. But during and after the war, a new type of literature gained prominence — modernism —…

IF YOU HAVEN’T heard of Vice magazine, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. It offers the best of rigorous investigative journalism combined with awe-inspiring intellectual profundity. Some of Vice’s most ground-breaking articles include ‘Beards Aren’t Cool Anymore’, ‘Gluten-Free People Are Getting Laid Way More Than The Rest Of Us’, and the immortal ‘I Ate Myself Out Using My iPhone And It Was Pretty Good’. So you can imagine my delight when I saw that Vice recently turned its probing eye to that demon in human form, J. K. Rowling. The article was entitled: ‘J. K. Rowling Just Won’t Stop Attacking Trans People Online’. The article didn’t offer any actual examples, but that’s because Rowling has been so manipulative. Her tactic is to not attack trans people in order to…

DECIMUS BURTON was one of the more interesting architects active in the UK from the 1820s, not least because his Classicism was free from the arid pedantry displayed in works of some of his more famous contemporaries such as Robert Smirke and William Wilkins. Like John Nash, he successfully melded Classicism with the Picturesque, notably at the Calverley Park Estate, Tunbridge Wells, Kent (from 1828), a development lovingly chronicled by Philip Whitbourn. Although some of Burton’s works have been destroyed (notably the Colosseum, Regent’s Park [1823-7], which made the young man’s reputation), several of his great buildings survive in London alone, including the beautiful Athenæum Club, Waterloo Place (1827-30), with its Panathenaic frieze by John Henning Sr and Jr. and gilt copy of the Pallas Athena of Velletri by Edward…

ALMOST 30 YEARS AGO, Kelvin Mac-Kenzie, editor of Britain’s best-selling tabloid newspaper, turned the manager of the England football team into a root vegetable when his side failed to qualify for the World Cup. “That’s yer allotment,” ran the front-page headline in The Sun above a photograph of Graham Taylor’s head morphed into a turnip. It echoed a headline after a defeat the previous year that said: “Swedes 2, Turnips 1.” Taylor never forgave Mac-Kenzie for the mockery. Displeasing the sun on the field of play in Mesoamerica 3,500 years earlier was rather more risky business. The rules of the Mayan ball game, a religious devotion as much as a sport, are unknown: it seems to have been a form of keepy-uppy between two teams with points lost if the…

IF THERE IS NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN, at least the shadow may be cast differently as time goes on. We begin our new year — featuring books that follow but also subvert literary traditions — not so much by looking back as by filling in a gap. On one reading, 2021 was such a good year for fiction that it was too short for all its books, and some had to spill over. On another, a publisher releasing a new work of fiction in November creates a hostage to fortune, with insufficient time to build up momentum before it is crushed under the wheels of Richard Osman’s pitiless juggernaut. The gap we are filling in is small but big, in the form of an arguably perfect short novel which…

THE ATTEMPT to manufacture a tenth Beethoven symphony by means of Artificial Intelligence has proved about as intelligent as cloning Albert Einstein out of paper from his wastebasket. The outcome, 21 minutes long, is performed on YouTube by the Beethoven Orchestra of Bonn. It welds fragments of a discarded project onto bits of other symphonies in a manner so uninspiring that it reduces Beethoven to the level of a Hummel. The work’s opening, a student-essay paraphrase of the fifth symphony, is all you need to hear. The rest just gets worse. What possessed the brains of Bonn to think they could create a Beethoven symphony ab virtually nihilo? Probably the thought that fellow-necrophiles had done such things before. NOBODY BOTHERED WITH unfinished music until Mozart died in December 1791. His…

FIFTY YEARS AGO, Stefano Mariottini, a chemist from Rome, was snorkelling near Riace in Calabria. A few hundred metres off the coast, in water eight metres deep, he looked down and saw an arm protruding from the sea bed: he thought he was swimming over a corpse. But, when he dived and touched the arm, it was solid, not flesh. Shortly afterwards he noticed a second figure buried in the sand. Back on shore, Mariottini alerted the police and a week later his two finds were hauled from the Ionian Sea. What he had discovered was a pair of slightly over life-size (6 foot 6 inches) ancient Greek bronze warriors or gods that dated from 460-450 BC. It was an extraordinary discovery; Greek marbles are rare survivors but bronzes have…

THINK OF THE NORDIC COUNTRIES and what comes to mind? Doubtless an enlightened social democrat paradise where women enjoy more equal rights than anywhere else in the world. The 2021 Global Gender Gap report, for example, published by the World Economic Forum, certainly seems to confirm this. The report lists the countries judged most successful in moving towards gender parity. Iceland is number one, followed by Finland and Norway. If this is the case, then clearly nobody has told the high-powered lawyers in Witch Hunt (Heksejakt in Norwegian), a new legal thriller series set in Oslo. Witch Hunt, available on Channel 4’s excellent Walter Presents sub-channel, takes us into a corporate world riddled with corruption, intimidation, crass sexism and institutionalised misogyny. This eye-opening eight-part series about power, crime and dirty…

THE GLOUCESTERSHIRE farmer, standing by the fire in his brown tweed breeks, told me it’d hardly been worth it — up at dawn to drive right across the county, only to return home with almost as many cartridges as he’d set out with. “Four shots for nothing,” he answered with a shrug, when his daughter dared to ask during dinner, “Bag was just 19.” When I pressed him, he explained vaguely that the shoot was part of some sort of rewilding project — “no pheasants put down and it’s cocks only.” I wanted to know everything but he had the look of a man whose wife has just left him for that cute DHL delivery driver and it felt insensitive to push it further. A week later, on the road…

IF YOU WERE TO TRY to guess what an antique dealer’s preferred meal or snack might be you would perhaps imagine that it would be something quite posh or culinarily complex, but the reality is that the humble bacon sandwich has cheered the soul of so many of my brethren that it stands out as Ambrosia amid porridge. Back in the 1980s, when Bond Street and St James’s were still heaving with dealers, there was a tiny kiosk in Avery Row which only functioned between 6.30 am and 11.30. Two large sweaty men in white t-shirts squeezed into a tiny narrow shop: one man buttered bread and applied brown or red sauce, the other stood over a tiny griddle frying bacon. It was a micro-factory. At any given moment the…

CAROLS CORRECTION Alexander Larman (“Sacred Cows”, Dec/Jan) is quite wrong to date “While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks By Night” and “We Wish You A Merry Christmas” to the Tudor period. The former first appeared in 1700 and the latter is not found in any printed source earlier than the 1830s. While it is true that there were a significant number of carols written in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, including “Adam lay ybounden” and “Lullay, lulla, my little tiny child”, nearly all of our most popular and most sung carols today date from the mid-nineteenth century, among them “O Little Town of Bethlehem”, “Away in a Manger”, “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear” (those three all coming from the USA), “Good King Wenceslas”, “In the Bleak Midwinter” and the English…

Bozzo is trying to fix the country. Apparently lots of people live in horrible places, and this is a problem. “Can’t they just go somewhere else?” asks the Trusster. “Agreed,” says Rishi. “Sometimes you can reach your full potential simply by moving next door.” Cazza, who is allowed to be there because they are eating cheese, looks up. “How bad are these places? Is it all John Lewis stuff? They should redecorate.” “Who’s going to pay for that?” asks Rishi. “A charity,” says Cazza. “They can pay for all kinds of things.” “Don’t start that again,” says Bozzo. “I’m still finding WhatsApps I didn’t delete from last time.” “The problem,” Govey announces, “is dogs.” I feel this is harsh. The problem in my experience is usually cats. And squirrels. But…

The European Commission has tried, so far unsuccessfully, to direct its staff not to refer to Christmas, as if mere mention of the word would act on atheists, animists, Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains, Hindus, and no doubt others, much as garlic flowers or crucifixes acted on Dracula (at least as portrayed by Christopher Lee). Oddly enough in these times of multiculturalism, mere words provoke apoplexy, at least metaphorically, as never before. Euphemism, evasion and renaming flourish — supposedly in the name of tolerance, but really as exercises of power. I have noticed that the authors (or sub-editors) of practically all academic books, or books with intellectual pretensions, now eschew the use of BC and AD, as if to use them were to be either a member of, or an apologist…

THEATRE’S SPECIALIST SUBJECT IS HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS. This, together with an openness to new ideas and socially liberal values, has for centuries placed theatre at odds with those who saw danger in such expressions. Plays were censored by the Master of the Revels during the reign of Elizabeth I and London’s stage silenced by parliament’s order from 1642 to 1660. Following the 1737 Licensing Act, the task of playhouse censor rested with the Lord Chamberlain, assisted by his Examiner of Plays. From attempting to police political or religious unorthodoxy, theatre censorship morphed into taking upon itself responsibility for a national moral code: no sex please, we are British. The theatre rose to the challenge as practitioners from George Bernard Shaw to music hall artistes such as Marie Lloyd endeavoured to push…

AMONG THE MOST TREASURED POSSESSIONS in my study, gathering dust but re-read from time to time, are my bound volumes of The Captain magazine. They are a good selection, amounting to about a quarter of the total, of the output of the magazine during its existence between 1899 and 1923 and they’ve been around pretty well all my life. The Captain was part of a stable of magazines founded in the 1890s by George Newnes who had made a fortune from Tit-Bits, arguably the first genuinely mass publication, which he unleashed in 1881. The most famous was The Strand Magazine which published most of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories (though it did not introduce them). Because the two magazines looked alike and The Captain was aimed at a…

THE VERY FACT THAT ELECTRIC vehicles (EVs) wind Jeremy Clarkson up makes them interesting. Never a fan of electric cars, Clarkson recently managed, by a convoluted argument, to suggest that they were bad because they allowed other road users to out-accelerate a Lamborghini from the traffic lights without making a loud noise. But beguiling though their 0 to 30 rates are, EVs’ main appeal is environmental. While it takes time to pay back the carbon emitted in producing the cars, given a green source of energy, EVs reduce the national carbon footprint. This has convinced the government of their worth: stopping the sales of petrol and diesel cars in 2030, and hybrids (which are about making people feel they’ve done their bit) in 2035. I’m convinced too and really want…

SERGIO MUSMECI (1926-1981) is a relatively unheralded engineer-architect in the Italian mode. Like his more famous contemporary Pier Luigi Nervi, who designed the Palazzo dello Sport in Rome, Musmeci’s work carried the torch for a formally exuberant Modernism which began with Le Corbusier. Thanks to a pedagogy which insists beautiful solutions are the goal of engineering — and to a construction industry which views concrete as intrinsically Italian, given that the Romans made concrete from volcanic ash, lime and seawater — the Italians kept the flame of grand gestures in concrete alive, even as Miesian uniformity morphed into the corporate modernism of the International Style in 1950s America. One of the key pieces in this excellent RA exhibition of achitectural photographer Hélène Binet’s work [1] is a triptych of her…

HOW ARE YOU FEELING? TIRED? Happy? Bored? How open are you about your emotional status? As a kid, I was always amazed by the difference in answers to the traditional “How’s it going?” greeting from both my English friends and Irish family. While the Brits would usually reply with something apathetically positive like “Fine, how about you?”, the response from my parents, grandparents or cousins was always more complex. “I can’t complain, I suppose” was a favourite — managing to be both a complaint and a challenge in one. When English people are hungry, they say “I could eat”. When my Grandad wanted lunch, he’d use the Galway saying, “I could eat a child’s arse through a chair.” The chemical wizardry that makes up our emotions and feelings, and how…

BETWEEN THE YEARS OF 2000 and 2015, 738 sub-postmasters and mistresses were prosecuted by the Post Office for theft or fraud. They were for the most part respectable middle class citizens, many of whom had invested their life savings in a village shop with post office attached The explanation was simple: when the Post Office had decided to computerise their accounting system they contracted Fujitsu, a massive Bracknell-based Japanese tech corp, to initiate the change. The result was the Horizon IT system, with terminals installed in Post Offices throughout the country, all of them infected with deadly bugs which made them incapable of doing simple sums. Out of the blue, sub-postmasters would be informed by Horizon on their screens that they were thousands of pounds in the red. Not being…

THE WORD “ MAGISTERIAL” IS OVERused by reviewers of academic books. Too often, it is merely a synonym for “big”. In the case of David Ekserdjian’s latest book, however, “magisterial” is, if anything, an understatement. The Italian Renaissance Altarpiece is his magnum opus in every sense, weighing in at nearly 6lb, thanks to more than 250 superb illustrations, and with 400 double-column pages of text plus nearly 100 more of notes and other scholarly apparatus. It is comprehensive, discussing about a thousand of more than 10,000 altarpieces painted in Italy between 1300 and 1600. The publishers, Yale University Press, deserve great credit for keeping the price at an affordable level, thanks to the generosity of a long list sponsors. Yet this beautiful volume’s real claim to magisterial status rests on…

NOT LONG AGO Private Eye’s “Literary Review” column took it into its head to attack the novelist and critic Philip Hensher. Naturally, the Eye never needs an excuse to attack anybody; neither are its standards consistently applied. And so Mr Hensher’s offence turned out to rest on a conviction that Private Eye itself peddles from one issue to the next: the idea that modern novels are tedious. His exact words, addressed to readers of the Spectator, were that “I couldn’t get very excited about much fiction this year — the Booker shortlist was the dullest I can remember.” No doubt Mr Hensher’s omniscience can sometimes be a bit irksome, but on this occasion he turns out to be bang right. The vast majority of modern novels are tedious, and there…

PEOPLE OFTEN ASK ME: Master, what is the difference between opera and musicals? To which I say: well, duh! — people like musicals. Actually, this has also dawned on the dimwits who run our opera houses, and every so often they attach their rather flaccid suckers to the lucrative market by sticking on Oklahoma! or something, which you might call “introducing the piece to a narrower audience”. It’s totally not fair, of course: musicals, at least in their origins, are very much ours, and while you can keep The Lion King, we’d quite like some of the others back. Though spot-the-difference isn’t usually too difficult — not much in common between the unendliche droning of Wagner and Anything Goes, except now I come to think of it Tristan und Isolde…

ALARMING TEENAGE SUICIDE cults and hidden abuse, moral panics about whether the young know enough about sex or are getting too much of it and useless (or worse) adults — it’s all very now. It is also all very Frank Wedekind in his play set in provincial Germany in the early 1890s. A raw saga of lust and deeper longing, intergenerational strife and tragedies fomented by educational and sexual repression, Max Reinhardt directed the (censored) premiere of Spring Awakening in 1906. It’s not surprising that its themes resonate more than a century on so that a work which saw Wedekind trying out genres of naturalism, expressionism and mysticism should end up as a long-runner on Broadway, with music and lyrics by the Broadway duo Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater. It…

PETER JONES IS probably not a name that means much to anybody under the age of 40. He died in 1990 after suffering a heart attack when covering the University Boat Race, and times have moved on, sweeping Jones and his old-fashioned brethren to the brink of obscurity. He wouldn’t fit easily into today’s diminished regimen. Sport on Two, his bailiwick, transferred to 5 Live in 1994, and the tone and vocabulary of broadcasting has altered almost beyond recognition. The sympathetic listener, who enjoys sport but who takes it with a dash of water, has been overlooked in favour of the club-shirted obsessive. Language has been flattened. Speaking poorly is thought to confer the badge of “authenticity” BEFORE HE BECAME a sports reporter, Jones had taught at Bradfield College, which…

ANDORRA IS NOT a tax haven, oh no. It ceased to be a non-cooperative tax jurisdiction in 2014 and now bills itself as “A Compliant Low Tax Country to Live and Do Business In” Actually, Andorra looks less like a country than an immense service station with mountains, but whilst it may no longer be such a draw for fiscal freedom fighters it has retained its status as Europe’s number one hair-transplant hotspot. Clearly there’s a connection between male-pattern baldness, stupid cars and dodgy accounting, but unless you’re the sort of person who enjoys driving a red Ferrari convertible with the top down at 40mph on congested Pyrenean passes, it doesn’t have much to give in the way of leisure activities. True, there’s an electricity museum which might offer inspo…

What have the Romans ever done for us? Apart from the aqueduct and sanitation, canals and navigation, medicine and education, great wines and fermentation, what have the Romans done for us? This classic rant from Monty Python presages the pub bore by about two millennia. The Romans did a lot, especially on the drinking front. Those long-haul legionaries, packed off by Hadrian to hold the barbarian at bay, didn’t just stuff woollen smalls into their sarcinas to keep out the cold; they carted vines with them to raise along his wall, keep the good times going and remind themselves of home. Of course, we don’t know exactly how reminded they were. Neither Brampton nor Bewcastle are Barolo or Brindisi after all, and we may assume that the grapes grown there…

I ALWAYS WONDER ABOUT people who complain so vociferously about January. It’s as if they’re blind to the inevitability of February. In shitty nappy terms, January is akin to the newborn’s first few deposits: weird, but not too apocalyptic, equipped with a horror-alleviating novelty. February, however, is the real deal: an incessant, truly retch-inducing affair that gets everywhere and stinks. One way I like to push myself over the brink this time of year is to take a look at the inventory I made of last year’s sartorial purchases. I don’t add up the monthly outlay — that way madness lies. Nevertheless, I do cast an eye over the thing, and endeavour to learn from the carnage. For me, 2021 was the year of the brooch, the tank top (as…

WHEN THEIR PREDICTIONS OF doom fell apart spectacularly last summer, sticking the boot into Covid modellers seemed unnecessarily cruel. Cruel because they had tried their best, and unnecessary because the government would surely never take their prognostications seriously again. But then winter arrived and with it the Omicron variant and a new set of “projections” that put us within a hair’s breadth of a Christmas lockdown. Our lives have been in the hands of these glorified numerologists for too long. It must never be allowed to happen again. Some people suspect the modellers of wanting to always ramp up restrictions. SAGE can certainly be accused of being overly cautious and the modellers seem to suffer no financial or professional repercussions from being too pessimistic. But there is one source of…