Indholdsfortegnelse for March 2022 i The Critic

THERE’S A STORY GOING AROUND. For some it’s told with lip-smacking anticipation and relish. For others it’s the horror show they had long anticipated and claimed to be fighting against. It goes like this: Boris Johnson, just like Donald Trump before him, wanted to start a revolution; there were forces welling up which called for one; it could feasibly have been done (and was desperately needed). However, both blond beasts failed to meet their rendezvous with destiny. They sat on the throne and did nothing. This fable is entirely wrong and in telling it the only objectives served are in mythmaking and evasion. It is, in short, a glittering legend of the civil service. In Donald Trump’s America, the challenge to whatever it was he and his voters represented was…

THE BBC, perhaps unusually these days, wants to broadcast a story that the government believes would be damaging to national security. According to the Daily Telegraph, which was briefed by a government source, the broadcaster wants to identify a “spy” working overseas. That would involve “a risk to people’s lives”, the source added. In response, the BBC insists it “would not pursue any story unless it was felt it was overwhelmingly in the public interest to do so and fully in line with the BBC’s editorial standards and values”. But that is all it can say. By the time the Telegraph story appeared on 21 January, the government had issued High Court proceedings alleging breach of confidence and breaches of the spy’s human rights. At a two-day hearing planned for…

What really gets Sue Gray’s goat is that there is no black and white between public and private or business and pleasure “I THINK THE PROBLEM IS Boris is running a modern government like a medieval court,” declared Andrew Mitchell MP in the wake of the publication of Sue Gray’s eviscerated report. Instead, he continued, “You need to rule and govern through the structures, through Whitehall, through the Cabinet and National Security Council.” Setting aside the yah-boo word “medieval”, Mitchell’s description of the Johnson regime as a “court” is accurate, even perceptive. But his critique gets things precisely the wrong way round. It is the “court” aspects of Johnson’s government which have delivered its few notable successes and Mitchell’s much-vaunted formal governmental “structures” which have produced its long catalogue of…

IT WAS EARLY 2018 and despite the referendum victory, those of us who had been involved on the winning side were, in the main, finding it hard to secure gainful employment. So a promising message sent to my LinkedIn profile was manna from heaven. Or from Hong Kong, to be precise. “Hi, my name is Kevin, and looking at your profile it is possible that some companies I work with might want to talk to you about using your services in London.” Kevin was his English name. He did, once, tell me his Chinese name, but I will admit I have forgotten it. He said that he was representing some Chinese and Hong Kong firms and they were interested in employing me as a lobbyist in London. Though wary of…

I AM NOT A PURITAN. Neither my churchmanship nor my personality incline me towards Puritanism. My waistline bears witness to the fact that self-denial is not hardwired into my lifestyle choices. Any interest in other people’s lives is primarily for my own personal prurient pleasure and not for their moral improvement. As such I am not a fan of that period of the year when we take a look at our lifestyles and our waistlines and decide to endure a period of personal abstinence in the hope of improving ourselves and, thereby, adding to the span of our days. No, I don’t mean Lent. Lent is — rather counter intuitively — something Cavaliers have always been rather keen on. I’m talking about that month of misery where the Puritan runs…

GOOD SECURITY FOR physical assets is worth having but generally expensive. Questions of affordability often turn on what level of protection is needed or wise. Cheapest is a locked door on an anonymous building. Most expensive is an armed guard with a salesmen’s eloquence for articulating risk. One day soon patrolling will largely be done by robots, but I suppose there will always be the need for the assurance of a person to watch the sentinels, whether they be guards or cameras. Mostly nothing happens, and therefore there is a constant need to guard against boredom and sleep. One of our filling stations’ storerooms was broken into recently under the unwatchful and yet recording eye of the camera and the remote access Control Room. Local youths wearing balaclavas and hoodies…

I DON’T KNOW WHO TAGGED Anthony Holden “Golden Holden” — perhaps Holden himself — but it turned out to be not so much an admiring portent of his career as a savagely ironic joke. I first met Holden in his golden phase when, in 1981, his mentor Harold (Harry) Evans was made Editor of The Times by the paper’s new owner, Rupert Murdoch. What Harry might have guessed, and the small gaggle of loyal sidekicks he brought over from the Sunday Times might have better served him by working out, was that the great campaigning editor, famous for championing the limbless thalidomide children in their legal battle against the drug’s manufacturer, had been coaxed out of his redoubt at the Sunday paper by the lure of becoming editor of the…

DID IT REALLY HAPPEN? Did that place really exist? The further it shrinks in the rear-view mirror, the more wholly improbable the Soviet Union seems, some feverishly over-imagined sci-fi comedy-horror, a fairytale of indecipherable meaning written by a madman. James Birch’s rollicking book about late-80s Moscow, as he dreamed up the plainly ridiculous idea of holding a Francis Bacon exhibition in that peculiar place, pithily brings it all right back with bracing black comedy. As a fellow celebrant of those dog-end Soviet years, memories subsequently overlaid with gaudier images of the later Moscow came storming back. It’s all here: how flying to Moscow always felt like going to prison, shadowed by the queasy fear that you’d never get out. Once there, everything was a hallucinatory dream of booze and hilarity,…

AS A PUBLISHING executive, Richard Cohen edited authors such as Jeffrey Archer, John le Carré, and Fay Weldon. As a fencer he competed at three Olympic Games, wrote a history of swordsmanship, and appeared as an extra in the James Bond movie Die Another Day. With this book he took on his most perilous assignment to date, a history of historians from Herodotus and Thucydides to the present day. I say perilous because already, before the book was published, Random House, his US publishers, had cancelled his contract, the reason being that his initial draft did not include a chapter on Black historians. Cohen subsequently corrected this oversight and the additional 18,000-word chapter is as insightful and entertaining as any in this book, ranging from George Washington Williams, through former…

NEVER ENVY THE WRITER who makes it big with their first novel: they must do their growing up in public. Success doesn’t make the second novel any easier — it may have the opposite effect — and if it is a disappointment, everyone will notice. Martin Amis’s The Rachel Papers was followed by the dismal Dead Babies; Zadie Smith’s White Teeth by the flat, wandering The Autograph Man. Monica Ali’s debut Brick Lane — which, I note with horror, was published almost 20 years ago — was a deserved hit, a satisfying family story both traditional and new, about a young Muslim woman’s arranged marriage to an older man. Her subsequent books were admirable in their refusal to make Brick Lane’s success into a formula, though the results — a…

MUSIC IN AMERICA has not come well out of Covid. The Metropolitan Opera, half-empty, shut down for the month of February. Music directors in New York and Seattle, a Dutchman and a Dane, left their jobs. Bigger European names polished their excuses. A dozen orchestras hired vice-presidents of EDI (equality, diversity and inclusion). The Emerson Quartet, America’s finest, called it quits. Music professors were hauled before woke tribunals. Stephen Spielberg’s West Side Story movie lost most of its investment. At the end of this tunnel, there is a glimmer of light, possibly a game changer. This October, the New York Philharmonic will return to Lincoln Center, a year ahead of schedule. Yes, you read that right. The transformed David Geffen Hall will open a whole year early thanks, in part,…

ONE NIGHT IN LATE 1963, Francis Bacon was at his studio at 7 Reece Mews in South Kensington when he heard a loud crash followed by scrabbling noises. He rushed upstairs to find that a burglar had just slipped and tumbled through the skylight. Bacon confronted him, sized him up and gave him an instant ultimatum: they must have sex there and then or he would call the police. This is how Bacon first met George Dyer, a petty criminal from Borough, just south of the Thames, who would become one of the painter’s great loves. At least it is one version of how they met. Lucian Freud offered a rather less picaresque alternative: the pair met in a club and went back to Reece Mews to seal the new…

WHEN, IN 1492, KING FERDINAND and Queen Isabella of Spain issued the Alhambra decree expelling the country’s Jews, the news was greeted with incredulity in Istanbul, especially by Sultan Bayezid II. If the Spaniards no longer wanted their Jews, he would take them, all of them. “Do they call this Ferdinand a wise prince who impoverishes his kingdom and thereby enriches mine?” he supposedly asked his courtiers. The Sublime Porte was flung open; Spain’s Jews poured in and put down new roots in the Ottoman empire. Yes, there were restrictions, and they had to pay higher taxes. But mostly the Jews were left alone to settle across the Balkans and the Turkish lands and live in peace and prosperity. For many, compared to life in medieval Christian Europe, the Sultan’s…

ITALY HAS A particular relationship with light. I don’t mean the refulgent perfections with which its painters illuminated the world: not Pisanello’s visionary silvered gleam, Botticelli’s aureate translucency or Titian’s richly dense shadows, but electric light, the kind that ruins your dinner from Messina to Milano. Long before Thomas Edison got in on the act, a professor named Antonio Pacinotti at the university of Pisa perfected Faraday’s discovery of alternating current by producing the first direct current generator in 1860, which led to the opening of Italy’s first electricity plant in 1883. DESPITE THIS HEAD START, Italians were tardy in illuminating their homes. By the 1950s, per capita electricity consumption in Italy was 12 per cent of Britain’s and even by 1985 the Italians used 30 per cent less than…

March winds, April showers, bring forth May flowers is a proverb known to every English gardener as well as many schoolchildren. It reminds us of the passing of the cold season and the anticipation of brighter, cheerful things to come. It also reminds us (or at least the some of us who take a peculiar interest in these things) that the vineyards of the northern hemisphere, having slept under a carpet of leaves and brushwood during winter, are ready to waken. But before the blustery month, comes the barren one. February may be a nothing time for most, but for the vintner it is time for the tireurs to clean up the mould and cut back the dead wood to mineralise the soil and make light for the new leaves.…

THIS MONTH’S STYLE TIP is a bobby bargain: a crisp tenner, or thereabouts, to look young, edgy and achingly nihilistic, with no negative results whatsoever apart from a slow and unpleasant death. But, then, isn’t life itself a slow and unpleasant death? One may as well look chic dragging oneself through it. Smoking, man, it’s totally back. I know this because a 12- and 14-year-old informed me. Sucking nonchalantly on their death sticks, they observed: “Every primary school child over the age of 8 has a vape. Their parents may not know it, but they do.” I suppose this should have been clear from the array of paedo-chic flavours: a riot of popsicle peaches, bananas and berries. Although, hats off to a Yank variant called “Mother’s Milk,” obv. I knew…

WHO NEEDS comedians when you’ve got 650 here-today-gone-tomorrow white collar bullshitters, a greedy civil service whirling through a 1000rpm revolving door, and a force of rozzers taking gardening leave till early retirement beckons? All of them people whose speciality is an extreme form of dramatic irony. They stitch themselves up with every utterance, every lie, every boast, every greasing, every act of morally squalid deceit. They are deaf to their words, blind to their actions, moronically unaware of their effects. And they simply don’t know it, for they are denied all self-knowledge. This is the single field in which they excel, which they have mastered with aplomb, yet they fail to acknowledge how practised and proficient they are. Indeed, the less they understand the chasm between vacuous aspiration and duff…

It’s a wrap THERMAL TIGHTS, THERMAL LEGGINGS, thermal socks, two thermal jerseys, trousers, cashmere pullover, overcoat, gloves, scarf: standard working outfit for a day’s filming in central London. The BBC’s budgets are so minute that anything which can be shot out of doors will be, hence all those frames of historians wandering moodily round St James’s Park. I’ve spent more time shivering in the streets of Whitehall than the wraith of Boris Johnson’s conscience. The crew get to wear full polar gear, but appearing on camera requires one to look moderately normal — which is not so easy when the “wardrobe” is the wing mirror of the kit van. Slapping on foundation at 6am with the temperature around zero is like trying to make up a crisp packet. Still, it…

WHAT WERE YOU DOING ON 20 MAY 2020? I bet you’ve thought about it at some point since the news broke of the Downing Street garden party held then, and attended, notoriously, by the Prime Minister (he says for “just 25 minutes”). Those of us who keep a diary have been able to smugly lick a fingertip and leaf back to find out exactly what we were doing on that date. Which means I can now confidently report that on that fateful evening I was doing … nothing. In fact, my diary entry for that day reads only “Sick of lockdown”. But there are many more people for whom 20 May 2020 was a far more important date. In the weeks following the revelations about the garden party — and…

GABRIELLA ONAN’S CAREER took off in an instant. One moment she was a newly-appointed assistant lecturer at the University of Strathclyde wondering if anyone was going to publish her recently completed PhD thesis Venereal Disease in Early Modern Perugia; its social and economic consequences, the next a researcher from Channel Four was on the phone to enquire if she would be interested in appearing as the “technical expert” in a series called Sex Life in Ancient Rome. Gabriella informed her department head that she would be taking a week’s unpaid leave, purchased a couple of black A-line skirts, had her hair done and cheerfully submitted herself to the attentions of the production company’s make-up team. The series — extensively trailed in the Radio Times — was a success: several newspapers…

Like almost everyone else, I regret the throwaway society: I remember the days when even socks were darned and whatever was broken was repaired. How can we value anything very much if we just dispose of it when it breaks or is damaged? My regret, however, does not prevent me from acting like everyone else in a throwaway society. My electric toaster went on the blink recently, I bought another much more cheaply than I could have had the old repaired and took the defunct appliance to the waste disposal site about two miles away. There, at the entrance, was prominently displayed a notice: THE STAFF CANNOT HELP YOU. What did this mean? That the site employed only persons severely handicapped, and therefore that they were unable in the most…

To be woke is a blessing. We are the first human beings who have ever existed who are right about absolutely everything. It’s such a relief to know that our views will never be criticised or ridiculed by future generations. In fact, there are all sorts of benefits to being on the right side of history. For one thing, we can encourage big tech censorship without any fear that it might one day be used against us. But it’s so exhausting having to constantly reeducate the masses. So far this week I’ve got a woman fired for claiming that sex is binary, shouted abuse at an old man collecting money for that imperialist “charity” the Royal British Legion and burned some books by Enid Blyton due to their outdated stereotypes.…

IF YOU’VE EVER WONDERED how letters were delivered in the ancient world, you could do worse than to read Procopius’s Secret History. Every bit as scandal-filled as Donna Tartt’s classic campus novel of the same name, it describes life in the court of Justinian, Byzantine emperor from AD 527 to 565, but digresses brilliantly on the intricacies of the Roman postal service. The cursus publicus was hailed for its efficiency, at least until Justinian got his hands on it. Procopius claimed that a message entrusted to the system could cover ten times the distance of an individual in a single day. It worked by running couriers between a series of stations arranged along established routes. Each was equipped with 40 horses and an equivalent number of grooms and, in some…

AS ANYONE WHO HAS SPOKEN in front of a mic knows, noise can amplify itself out of control. The right thing to do is to quickly stop the feedback signal, turn down the volume, or simply cut the cord. When in April 2020, Francis Collins, the director of the world’s largest biomedical agency, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), sent a letter to Antoni Fauci demanding that an anti-lockdown proposal from “three fringe epidemiologists” be met with “a quick and devastating published take-down of its premises” on the grounds that it “seems to be getting a lot of attention”, presumably he had noise elimination on his mind. Daniel Kahneman and his co-authors Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein, however, won’t have it. In their new book, Noise — A Flaw in…

AT A TIME WHEN STATUES are being pulled down to cleanse public places of shadowy figures from colonial days, many might prefer to bury any such family connections. Iain Sinclair, the veteran novelist, travel writer and scribbler of off-beat books about London (aged 78), bravely and determinedly takes the opposite approach. Long fascinated by grainy family pictures of his great-grandfather Arthur Sinclair — many of which hang on the wall of the downstairs loo of his Hackney house — Sinclair decides to dig into his ancestor’s days as a coffee plantation man in Peru. The Gold Machine is the curious result in which the writer travels to the Upper Amazon in 2019 in the company of his daughter, Farne, to follow in the footsteps of Arthur as far as a…

DESPITE A LONG AND VARIED freelance career, during which he was several times reduced to writing brochures for defence procurement manufacturers and articles about options trading, the Secret Author has never worked as a literary editor. Thirty years ago, he regarded them as a debased and unreliable breed, resolved to exclude anything worth reading from their pages whilst sucking up to established reputations. Now, in a world where books pages are in terminal retreat and most author interviews are there on sufferance, he has undergone a 180-degree turn and regards them as the saviours of our literary culture — spangled impresarios of taste and discernment whom we mock at our peril. On the other hand, the Secret Author’s admiration for the average literary editor doesn’t preclude an interest in the…

EVEN IN THE CAPACIOUS ANNALS of France v. Music, our neighbours’ reaction to Georges Bizet’s Carmen in 1875 was a doozy. A first-nighter which ended with everyone hating everything resulted in history’s arsiest reviews, a curtailed run and the composer checking out (aged 36, really from a broken heart) three months later — after producing the most thrilling opera of the lot. There were extenuating circumstances for the ghastly audience, to be fair. The thing went on for over four hours with three intervals, those devilish devices for sapping the will to live, and the last act started after midnight. The Opéra-Comique was the venue for “respectable” shopkeepers and suchlike drones; imagine the Mail-ish tuttings as watches were furiously checked. No doubt the buses to their zonian hellholes had stopped…

THE PROSPECT OF SEEING A BOOK which brings back teenage struggles with the Brontësaurus canon turned into a larky riff filled me with some trepidation en route to the National Theatre’s production of Wuthering Heights. When it comes to the classics, the director, Emma Rice, is a dedicated shredder of reverence. She brings puppetry, extra-narration, whimsical additions and a bit more of whatever she might fancy to stories from A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Brief Encounter. Her irreverent doctrine of amping-up theatricality with music, racy lighting and supplements of disco music is not to everyone’s taste — it meant her stint as artistic director at The Globe was shortlived. She left after a quarrel over how much deconstruction that reliable tourist attraction of Bard-worship could tolerate. In truth, Rice’s effervescence…

FOR A WOUNDING DEFINITION of the virtuous man it is always worth revisiting Tom Stoppard’s 1982 play, The Real Thing. Stoppard was writing about Brodie, a jailbird turned writer (at least in his own imagination), and in his famous “cricket bat” speech the dramatist’s exposure of peacock-proud liberalism still stings. It’s more powerful for the fact that Stoppard is a genuine liberal, if that word still has any meaning. This is Stoppard armed with the new ball, approaching the crease off his long run, with the breeze at his back: “Every stale revelation of the newly enlightened, like stout Cortez coming upon the Pacific.” Whoosh! And here’s another bouncer: “War is profits, politicians are puppets, Parliament is a farce, justice is a fraud, property is theft.” You can’t fool Brodie.…

DURING A RECENT SPELL of family self-isolation, my daughter became obsessed with a vintage film adaptation of Philippa Pearce’s 1958 kids’ classic, Tom’s Midnight Garden. While it didn’t, strictly speaking, count as home-learning, it was apt in its way, opening as its eponymous boy hero is sent to quarantine with an aunt and uncle while his younger brother lays bedridden with measles. Tom is warned on arrival that he’s going to find it terribly dull, since the childless couple live in a flat with no garden. Their home, however, is part of a once-grand house, and when a grandfather clock in the hall strikes 13, Tom ventures outdoors to find the neglected courtyard transformed into a bucolic idyll. Here, emerald lawns lap technicolour herbaceous borders; there are topiary hedges and…

SO WE WENT TO A dinner party the other day (I know! Come back Omicron, all is forgiven!) and talk turned to the way public schools are expanding across the world. So you have Harrow Beijing, or whatever. This man kept saying it was ‘like Starbucks’ and complaining that each school’s ‘actual values’ aren’t accurately exported, and instead the values of whichever grim ex-pat community the school is in get copied and pasted over everything. Like, you go to Sherborne Qatar, and lo and behold, it’s rather more uptight than Sherborne, Dorset. Didn’t get the Starbucks analogy really, as I thought the whole point of Starbucks is that it’s the same everywhere. Sorry, I know, I’m sounding bitter. It turns out time is emphatically not a healer. I’m still properly…

ANOTHER COUNTRY I’m a fan of Jonathan Meades, but his piece on Welsh and Wales was a nasty mix of cliché, minority-bashing, cultural snobbery and factual inaccuracy. He knows neither the country nor anything of the past and present life of the Welsh language. He doesn’t know who speaks it, where, how long it has existed, or its historic tenacity against… well, people like him: English supremacists triggered by the fear of another language within earshot in “their” country. Meades mentions his opposition to Brexit and the parochial mentalities that led to it. On the showing of this article, he shares rather more than he thinks with the Little Englanders, the atavists and the xenophobes he claims to despise. I don’t recall reading that in his hugely enjoyable Encyclopaedia of…

“See if that wallpaper will come off, it’s worth a thousand quid a yard!” Cazza is shouting to Nimco. The flat is full of open suitcases. That usually means wine time and then a lot of loud singing, but instead of taking bottles out, Cazza is putting things in the cases. “Apparently those candlesticks belonged to someone old called Pitt,” she says. “Put them in the Sotheby’s case.” In the next room, Bozza is putting pieces of paper into the fire and shouting into his phone: “What do you mean, ‘stored in the cloud’? Speak English! I’m not Alan Turing! Well where are these servers? California? Can the SAS go to California? You’re all useless!” He stamps back through to Cazza. “What’s the point of having a burner phone if…

IN SEPTEMBER 2020, ADMINISTRATORS at the University of Edinburgh decided that David Hume Tower should be renamed 40 George Street. According to a statement, Hume’s disparaging comments about non-white intelligence, “though not uncommon at the time, rightly cause distress today”. The affair provided an illuminating insight into the atmosphere of the university, and the climate of British cultural life. There was no attempt to make an overall assessment of the work of one of Britain’s most renowned philosophers. There was no attempt to place his life and work in its proper historical context. A few comments on the outermost peripheries of his expansive oeuvre consigned him to the realms of the unspeakable. This was one of several incidents in Edinburgh which have made the city an extremely vivid case of…

WHEN I WAS TEN YEARS OLD, in 1968, my parents took me and two of my sisters on a safari through Kenya and Tanzania. Having lived there when they first married in the 1950s, they wanted us to see the wildlife before it was all gone. Newly independent Kenya, its population booming, would soon have few lions or elephants left. This was not intended as a political criticism, it was just that there was unlikely to be room for such luxuries in a poor nation striving to feed its expanding population. The first of the game reserves we visited, the Masai Mara, with its abundant big game and beautiful birds, left an indelible impression on my young mind. It helped turn me into a bird watcher and then a biologist.…

GRANDPARENTHOOD IS NOT A CHOICE, but a blessing. As Shakespeare might have said: be not afraid of having grandchildren thrust upon you. Our house having been a multigenerational home for more than a year, and now having become a grandfather for the second time, I can say in all honesty that these are among the best things that have ever happened to me. My first reason for thinking so is that, just as parents should never take grandparents for granted, so grandparents should never presuppose their own existence. For much of the world, infant mortality is still a huge obstacle to the happiness of living to see one’s posterity. Until a couple of centuries ago, that was still the case in this country, even for royalty. In his marvellous new…

THE MUSIC IMMEDIATELY TRIGGERSa response. The graphics follow. And then there is David Suchet. For 13 seasons, from 1989 to 2013, Poirot provided a comfort blanket for Britain. Such style! Such a world of ease! Agatha Christie is all that is required to conjure up a universe of order and morality, the clarity of reason in the search for safety and renewed stability. But not if you read the books of the best-selling novelist of all time. There was little such ease in the novels which were, at once, more varied (from Ancient Egypt to anti-Communism), complex and insightful than modern critics might suggest. The novels were also far more interesting than their television adaptations. Christie’s world is the usual fictional mélange of fact and invention. Whereas science fiction’s inventiveness provides…

NIGEL FARAGE, MICHAEL CRICK tells us at the end of this impressive biography, is one of the great politicians of post-war Britain. He ranks alongside Thatcher, Blair, Salmond and Johnson for impact on our country and its direction, Crick reckons, because without Farage there’d have been no referendum and no Brexit. He may never have been elected to Parliament, but who cares? He’s historically important. I largely agree. I also think Farage’s absence from Parliament at Westminster is a sign of how our political establishment remains unwilling to learn the lessons of that referendum and admit the people who were shut out of national conversation for too long. Glance at some of the people deemed worthy of ermine and tell me Farage shouldn’t have been made a peer long ago.…

HISTORIANS OF THE Third Reich have tried for years to search for the essential smoking gun — the document that shows unequivocally the moment when Hitler ordered the genocide of Europe’s Jews to begin. From everything we know about Hitler’s practice of dictatorship, such a document does not exist. There was perhaps, as Peter Longerich, author of this new study of the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, suggested in an earlier volume, an “unwritten order”. But probably not even an order. Everything that could be known has been examined with forensic thoroughness. What we have are Hitler’s prompts and nudges to those on the anti-Semitic front line to promote ever more radical solutions to the “Jewish question”. About his own paranoid vision of a world Jewish conspiracy that pitted German…

HAVING EMBARKED ON WRITING careers just as the web ripped the financial guts out of the paper industry, my idea of a good time is to phone my best mate every couple of months and bitch about how, ten years before us, even the lowliest hacks had an expense account, whilst, ten years afterwards, world-famous media types make fortunes from unboxing videos. I’m not on TikTok. I had never heard of Clubhouse until last week. Hell, I don’t even have a LinkedIn account. Why would I? My idea of self-promotion was to post my article on Facebook. Once. Then, last October, my friend sent me a Wall Street Journal article about a 21-year-old Texan “electronic music producer” who, having amassed 52,000 followers on social media, dropped out of college to go…

NINE DECADES AGO, in the introduction to the Hebrew translation of Sigmund Freud’s Totem and Taboo, Freud addressed (though not in Hebrew) the gulf between his atheism and his Jewish identity. He reaffirmed that he did not believe in any religion — “including Judaism” — and that he deplored all forms of nationalism — “including Zionism”. In the light of these declarations, he rhetorically pondered: “it may then be asked, what is there left of me that is Jewish, to which I would reply: ‘a very great deal and probably its very essence.’” For many, this is still a live issue, and if a few articulate, secular Jews were gathered together to define and discuss that “very essence”, it would surely be a mentally enriching, stimulating, humorous — and argumentative…

BOY WHO WOULD BE KING I SEE KEN BRANAGH’S been tugging at the heartstrings in his film Belfast, a “semi-autobiographical” account of difficult childhood events. A revealing insight, no doubt, into the environment that helped turn a once innocent boy into the polite but ruthless networker many of us remember Kenny becoming by young adulthood — when nothing or no one got in the way of that often unseemly quest to seize Larry Olivier’s crown. ON READING SHAKESPEARE’S Globe had taken to holding “open castings” for professional actors currently left “under-represented” in this crisis-hit trade, I instructed the unwilling agent to make appropriate email contact. She was duly ordered to inform them that this client was in the under-represented category of “talented/versatile Shakespearean (over 65) with a once flourishing career…

THIS IS A STORY ABOUT A SONG in three acts, which is a story about how music moves through your life. The first time I heard the song in 1997, it was in the usual way I first heard much of the music I’m most attached to: in my bedroom, on a CD album that I’d acquired with nothing more than hope that I’d enjoy it based on a having caught a few singles on the radio and read some reviews. The album was Whatever and Ever Amen by Ben Folds Five, who I had immediately liked because they weren’t a five but a trio, which seemed like a good joke. Actually, they were only barely a trio since Folds himself was the obvious focus and driver of the band:…

Kenneth Branagh’s semi-autobiographical Belfast, which he wrote and directed, is set in 1969 in the city of his birth. Nine-year-old Buddy is a Protestant boy living in a mixed street alongside Catholics. He has trouble reconciling the hellfire and damnation preached by his own community’s priest with Catholic notions of confession and absolution. Buddy loves his maternal grandparents, Granny and Pop (Best Supporting Oscar nominations for Judi Dench and Ciarán Hinds), and he adores the cinema. There are clips from two Westerns, Fred Zinneman’s High Noon and John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, that resonate with Buddy when he witnesses showdowns between Catholics and Protestants, and that will have elicited a warm glow from cinephiles. There are moments of emotional bonding when Buddy’s family go out to see…

I HAVE FOUND IT odd in the recent discussions about public statuary that no mention has been made of the person who has the most recent statues in public spaces in London. This is not, as you might think, Sir Winston Churchill, whose statue by Ivor Roberts-Jones in Parliament Square has been so frequently defaced, nor Margaret Thatcher, whose statue was commissioned by the House of Commons Works of Art Committee, turned down by the House of Commons, had her head knocked off when on display in the Guildhall Art Gallery and has now been sent to Grantham. No, the person who is the subject of the greatest number of modern statues in London is the late Sir Simon Milton. There is a portrait bust of him by Alan Micklethwaite…

BELIEVE IT OR NOT, even among ruddy-faced men who blaze away at plump pheasants while wearing little tweed trousers there can still be a fair dollop of virtue signalling. Currently tucked away at the back of my freezer are six woodcock. For those of you who’ve never had the pleasure, woodcock are chunky wading birds with long bills, round bodies like cricket balls, and intricately patterned russet plumage that allows them to go unseen when they’re hunkered among the warmth of fallen leaves in wintery woodland. They are also, brains and innards included, absolutely delicious. At the tail end of January, in Hampshire, I set out with three local guys and their spaniels. It was one of those mornings when shimmering sunlight runs through the trees like water but frost…

ANTIQUE DEALERS are inexorably drawn to the single chair even although they rarely sell, particularly when a bit broken. Now, a single chair is not inherently valueless. For example, Eileen Gray’s “Dragons” armchair sold for a sliver below €22 million back in 2009 and there are many examples of single chairs selling for tens of thousands. But don’t be beguiled. The vast majority are unsellable box and every dealer’s store will be peopled by ostensibly fascinating items nobody but another dealer would give house room to. The appeal (and simultaneously the trap) is twofold. Firstly, there is the canard of knowing exactly what something is. The other day I bought a single Windsor armchair in yew wood and elm that had the distinctive under-arm baluster splat and crinoline stretcher of…

IN THE 2017 WORLD WAR TWO FILM Darkest Hour, there is a would-be showstopping scene towards the end. Winston Churchill has recently become Prime Minister, replacing Neville Chamberlain, but he is beset by a cabinet, led by the oleaginous Lord Halifax, who favour a course of appeasement towards Hitler and Nazi Germany. Churchill, portrayed under heavy make up and in a fat suit by Gary Oldman, heads to the London Underground to consult a conveniently racially, socially and sexually diverse group of Londoners about what should be done (“What is the matter? Have you never seen a prime minister ride the Underground before?”). One by one, the awestruck Londoners offer their unanimous counsel on what must be done. All declare that they will fight the fascists until the bitter end, and…