Indholdsfortegnelse for November 2022 i The Critic

WHAT WENT WRONG WITH Liz Truss? How did the clear winner of the first Tory leadership election of 2022 throw it all away? It was by being in office when the music stopped. To see how Truss failed is more than a story of her personal incompetence, it is to appreciate that she squandered no great and glorious inheritance. For the disastrous rule at the Treasury of George Osborne and Philip Hammond and Rishi Sunak (and before them Brown and Darling), left her nothing to fritter away. For a generation Britain has refused to face up to its problems. Now it can no longer look away. No doubt the reaction of the markets to Kwasi Kwarteng’s swiftly aborted “fiscal event” was skittish to the point of hysterical. The strange cult that…

HOW CAN WE ENSURE that police forces are accountable to the public without making them answerable to party politicians? That’s the problem that has dogged the UK’s largest constabulary, the Metropolitan Police. A showdown is scheduled for mid-November. For 170 years, London’s police force was accountable only to the home secretary. That changed in 2000 when parliament created a London Assembly and a Mayor of London. The mayor’s role was strength-ened in 2012 when new legislation established the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime. MOPAC, as it’s called, is not an office with staff sitting at desks. It’s a public office, held by whoever happens to be Mayor of London at the time. Since May 2016, MOPAC has been Sadiq Khan, who practised as a solicitor before serving as a…

Whether they realise it or not, by refusing to explain royal ceremony, the BBC and the mainstream media espouse Bagehot’s view that monarchy is a new opium of the people THE ELEVEN DAYS FOLLOWING the late Queen’s death and the accession of the new King were among the most remarkable of my life. I’d covered royal events before, including the funerals of both Princess Diana and Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother. But this was different, in both length and intensity. It was exhausting but exhilarating. It gave me a front-row seat as the immaculately rehearsed ceremonies of the new King’s accession and the late Queen’s last journey, lying in state and funeral unfolded in scene after scene, like the animated pages of an illuminated manuscript. But were they a liturgy,…

Drag Queen Story Hour is one of the most empowering movements to emerge in recent years. Hiring drag queens to perform in schools and libraries promotes tolerance and prevents children from growing up to be fascists. I often think that if only a drag queen had read “Little Red Riding Hood” to Hitler in his infancy, World War II could well have been averted. Think about it. Drag queens are some of the most oppressed people in society. Why is it that grown men can’t walk in public wearing fluorescent wigs, stiletto heels and enormous prosthetic breasts without being stared at? The last thing these people want to be is the centre of attention. There have been a number of viral videos circulating recently of drag queens twerking in front of…

MENTAL ILLNESS IS ON THE RISE. Feelings of anxiety, vulnerability, mistrust, fear and powerlessness are all increasing. Many feel overwhelmed and paralysed in an unfair and unjust world as passive victims of events that just happen to them. Unfortunately, many of those exhibiting these symptoms are the ones being employed to tell you how to improve your own mental health. Aspiring clinical psychologists now routinely undergo training that builds upon the ideas of Critical Race Theory (CRT) to ensure they see themselves and their future patients through the prism of categorised binary societal divisions. These mandatory guidelines come with incentivised funding provided by such bodies as NHS Health Education England and the British Psychological Society (the BPS). Critical Theory’s tenets assert that characteristics such as sex, sexuality, race and body…

A photograph taken at Paddington Station by Peter Hitchens shows a staircase with every step adorned with an admonition. No mobiles; Don’t rush; One step at a time; Please take care; above all Please use lifts: that is to say don’t take the stairs at all. The warnings give the impression that stairs are very dangerous. It is true that 700 people a year in England and Wales die of falls on stairs, the young often drunk and the old often frail. On the London Underground, however, there were 2 fatal accidents in 2016-7, that is to say ONE FOR EVERY 700,000,000 JOURNEYS. On the modest assumption that each journey involved at least two flights of stairs, and that both the fatal accidents were from falls on stairs, this means…

SOCIETY CHANGES BY increments and it is relatively easy in a free society to ratchet change by framing progression as benign, necessary and inevitable. Sometimes it is, although often low-grade thinking accepts regulatory change as mainstream without considering whether it is desirable. Corporate governance has spent recent years worrying about its own versions of the woke tsunami drenching our culture. Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) came first, more than 30 years ago, as regulations on what you can and cannot do on an operational level, especially regarding pollution, chemicals, the control of health and safety and a certain degree of community stakeholder engagement. This has been mainly for the good. However, corporate governance is stuffed with lawyers and the sort of middle management executives who do not have responsibility for…

MARTIN REES GETS BRISKLY to the point on page two: “The Earth has existed for 45 million centuries, but this is the first century in which one dominant species can determine, for good or ill, the future of the entire biosphere.” That’s an alarming sentence: first, 45 million centuries is more vertiginous than the usual 4.5 billion years; even more vertiginous is the terrible truth that all life now suddenly depends on the sanity or otherwise of humanity. Would that we were all Martin Rees. Rees, Astronomer Royal, former Master of Trinity, Cambridge, and President of the Royal Society, is certainly an establishment figure but, unusually for such folk, he is eminently sane. If Science is to Save Us, like his previous books and articles, is a balanced and careful…

WITH RETROSPECT, Napoleon claimed that there was a specific moment when he first realised he was superior to other men. It was just after the Battle of Lodi (10 May 1796), when he was leading the French revolutionary army in Italy and his soldiers had affectionately named him the Little Corporal: “I said to myself: I am the one who will end the Revolution.” Inspired by Alexis de Tocqueville, William Doyle offers not a history, but a study of the Consulate, the government of France from 1799 to 1804, that Napoleon dominated as First Consul. Doyle considers Napoleon’s success in healing three major wounds inflicted by the Revolution: war, religious chaos, and the absence of stable and effective executive power. Napoleon, Doyle argues, knew that it was not enough to…

IN THE SUMMER OF 1942, with the German army deep inside the Soviet Union, Adolf Hitler launched Operation Blue, an attack from around Kharkiv in south-east Ukraine across hundreds of miles of steppe towards the oil fields of the Caucasus. Part of the plan required the German Sixth Army under General Paulus to secure the flank by seizing the industrial city of Stalingrad on the banks of the Volga. By the middle of September Paulus’s troops were fighting their way, street by street, building by building, and sometimes room by room, through a city reduced to ruins by artillery shelling and the bombs of the Luftwaffe. The fighting was ferocious and, although by November most of Stalingrad was in German hands, several pockets of resistance still held out. Meanwhile, the…

NO ONE WHO HAS laboured for any time in what the Victorian novelist George Gissing used to call “the valley of the shadow of books” can have failed to be amused by A.N. Wilson’s recently published memoir. But you suspect that the amusement will have been two-fold — provoked, naturally, by the book itself, but also by its reception down on the Grub Street front line. As for the contents of Confessions: A Life of Failed Promises (Bloomsbury £20), “Ann”, as Craig Brown once christened him in his “Wallace Arnold” days, is as waspish at 72 as he was at 30 (he is also, as experienced Wilson-watchers have noted, surprisingly vague about some of the chronological details of his own life.) The media coverage, meanwhile, has rolled in from an…

● NO DOUBT EVERYONE HAS a secret favourite among the triumphs of the past 12 glorious years; mine — surely the pivotal point in our fortunes — remains Michael Gove’s 2013 history policy, a reaffirmation of the great Whig narrative of British benevolence which transformed the country into the harmonious happy Eden we now gambol about in, wrapped in glowing pride at the uncountable benefits we and our munificent empire bestowed on the world. Just imagine what might have happened if Michael hadn’t become education secretary — and shudder. Who cares if there was the odd hole in the majestic tapestry requiring to be darned, or, better, ignored? The Frogs do that all the time. And yet forgetting those glitches in the great island story risks denying ourselves much innocent…

● I MISSED THE DOCTOR when its preview season in Islington was truncated by Covid shutdown. Now it arrives at the Duke of York’s theatre in the West End and the timing feels even more apposite. Its subject is the tangled contest between hyper-rationalism and religious belief. In a lacklustre era for intellectually satisfying fare in the West End, this one is a zinger. It is Robert Icke’s adaptation of an Arthur Schnitzler play Professor Bernhardi, which explored tensions between Jewish and Catholic communities in the early years of the last century. Icke allows Schnitzler’s core concerns about anti-Semitism and the clash of white coat and dog-collar their due. But he adds topical strains about the remit and risks of divisive identity politics. Juliet Stevenson is outstanding as a driven,…

● THE CRITIC’S CLAWS, ever sharp, have drawn blood! Clear out the clowns at Radio 3, this column urged last month, and within hours Alan Davey, the station’s controller, had fallen on his sword. Now the search has begun for a successor who may begin the long, arduous process of restoration. Davey is not a clown, but his heart was never in it. Unlike his predecessors, men of hard-won experience such as John Drummond, Nicholas Kenyon and Roger Wright, his professional life was not rooted in a first-hand knowledge of orchestral music. There was no sense of vocation. He was a civil servant, a manager, a swimmer in a different pool. After seven years in a job he never really wanted to do, he may feel relieved to leave the…

TO PROTEST THE STEADY influx of Americanisms into British English is to fight a losing battle. Back in 1935, Alistair Cooke announced that “Every Englishman listening to me now unconsciously uses 30 or 40 Americanisms a day”. In his book That’s the Way It Crumbles: The American Conquest of the English Language, Matthew Engel writes that we’re now using more like 300 or 400 of them. By 2120, he suggests, Americanisms will have completely absorbed the English language. Bummer, right? All the same, there is one bit of US lingo against whose import I’m prepared to wave any numbers of placards. I don’t mean the infernally grating “off of” or “gotten”, nor the slippery bit of verbiage that is “reach out to” when what you mean is contact, often with…

AM I GENUINELY THE LAST person to be introduced to the concept of commuter kids? Literally, how did I not know about this secret racket? Probably because it’s a bit SW postcode, but still. Anyway, it transpires that various buses take certain kids back and forth from London to minor prep schools in the shires, daily. It’s basically reverse commuting — with no horrific house move to Hampshire required. Presumably the entrance interview for a small Berkshire Prep is a damn sight easier than The Hall too. Where you basically need to be Salman Rushdie’s grand-child to get on the waiting list. Apparently, Lambrook School in Windsor is a prime example. No doubt the bus will be increasingly busy now that the Cambridge children have put Lambrook on the map…

SAINT AUGUSTIN IS ONE of the finest monuments of Second Empire Paris, a Haussmannien landmark designed by Victor Baltard — the author, too, of Les Halles, long ago destroyed by municipal vandalism. The church squats on Boulevard Malesherbes north of la Madeleine. It is part neo-Romanesque, part neo-Byzantine, part paleo-Christian, wholly misshapen, wholly pompier. Its aggression is exhilarating, its sullen misproportions almost frightening. Its many elements do not form a synthesis. A collision is perhaps nearer the mark. Its interior is sumptuous, gaudy going on bling. The priests might be expected to wear chunky jewellery but of course they have the props of their job. It is the church of a wealthy area. Former hotels particuliers turned into private banks and embassies line the streets. Those named after painters (Ruysdael,…

Arsenic and old lace ALL OF A SUDDEN, AUTUMN ARRIVES, reuniting me with my cold-weather wardrobe. Dear, cosy, arsenic-green cardigan! Beloved Aran jacket! Tweed blazer, which I bought five years ago reasoning that everyone needs a tweed blazer and then found I had absolutely no reason to wear — this will be your year! I’m sentimental about clothes. Dates slide out of my head, but ask me what I was wearing at a certain time, and all the particulars flood back. That means I am also superstitious about clothes: the dress that saw me through a depressing party is likely to find itself on the reserves bench long-term, no matter how good it looks on. But I rarely get rid of garments, whatever disappointments we might have shared together. I dream…

AWARE THAT QUEEN Elizabeth I said to Robert Cecil, a much greater man than I, “Little man, little man: must is not a word to be used to princes,” I am hesitant to address my new Sovereign Lord with the word “must”. But the Coronation must not be a seriously watered-down affair. The King shows admirable concern for the public purse in these times of serious economic distress but might, if he heeds overly cautious advisers, miss one of the great strengths of monarchy: it is a spectacle. It is a drama that speaks, in language of sign and symbol, to the heart of the nations that own King Charles as their king. On the Saturday after the Queen’s death, I went, with hundreds of others, to the Proclamation of…

MEASURABILITY, REPRODUCIBILITY, independent verification, accurate predictions — these are the criteria that have elevated scientific experimentation to the arbiter of truth in modern society. Besides the long and impressive history of accomplishments and discoveries attributed to these standards, they possess the advantage of an imaginative appeal. Instinctively we associate numbers, repetition and unanimity with objectivity, certainty and permanence. Humanity is fallible, arbitrary and transient, but the mechanical and the impersonal offer us a grip on reality. In our polarised and relativistic age, it is a relief to affirm a field of knowledge as indisputably trustworthy and authoritative. When a sudden crisis — such as the Covid-19 outbreak — compels us to take joint action, it is a necessity. We may splinter in our ideals and habits, but so long as…

MANY WRITERS INSPIRE ADMIRATION; FAR FEWER INSPIRE LOVE. Kurt Vonnegut, who was born 100 years ago this month, was one of those few. Read the critical commentary on his output of 14 novels, clutches of essays, oodles of short stories and plays, and there is the expected praise for his style and approach. “A beautifully fastidious writer, utterly original,” said the hard-to-please James Wood. “Vonnegut looked the world straight in the eye and never flinched,” wrote J.G. Ballard, who should know. But there is something else besides: an element of personal affection for a man they never met. “I feel privileged to have spent several hours in the company of a most genial, affable and upbeat soul indeed,” wrote the novelist Nicholas Royle. One of this year’s Booker Prize shortlisted…

JOSEPH ROTH LIVED HIS LIFE on the peripheries and between the gaps of European civilisation. He was born in Brody, now in Ukraine but then a shtetl at the easternmost edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He yearned to escape west to Vienna, where he arrived just in time for the outbreak of the Great War, and encountered prejudice and frustration. After the defeat and dismemberment of the multinational Habsburg monarchy he never really settled anywhere that could be called a home. “I shit on furniture. I hate houses,” he declared. Instead, he became what he called a “hotel patriot”, forever ready to check out and move on as political and professional borders closed in on him. In Vienna, Berlin, Marseilles, Amsterdam and above all Paris, he measured out his life…

DUTCH HISTORIANFrank Dikötter’s works on Mao, the “People’s Trilogy”, have rightly garnered superlative praise. Through painstaking work in increasingly inaccessible provincial archives, he has documented the horrors of Mao’s rule, made only more chilling through Dikötter’s calm, clear prose and methodical process. Readers need a strong stomach to endure the tales of famine, disaster and political violence that accompanied the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, stories that have percolated through to the West in memoirs and testimonies but were never before so thoughtfully catalogued. Now, like a Hollywood producer intent on extending his hit franchise, comes a fourth in the trilogy, a Mao book without Mao. China After Mao begins with the death of an elder statesman — not, in fact, Mao, but his Premier Zhou Enlai a few months…

WHEN I THINKabout Rebecca Solnit’s remarkable book, Orwell’s Roses, the image of a kaleidoscope comes to mind. As the dictionary defines the term, it’s a delightfully diverse and unpredictable sequence of sights and events. Her starting point is the garden Orwell created at his cottage in the Hertfordshire village of Wallington in 1936, recording how he planted apple trees and roses. When Rebecca went to see what had happened to this garden more than 70 years later, she found the apple trees gone, but the roses blooming prodigiously. George Orwell’s gardening prowess was a surprise to me, I’m ashamed to say. When researching my book on working-class gardeners, I came across a 1974 interview with the son of a publican in Southwold in Suffolk. In the early 30s, his father…

IF YOU HAVE SPENT ANY TIME in leftist spaces over the past 20 years, you’ll have heard repeatedly that the cause of our many social and political ills is neoliberalism. It is rather like the experience of the great social anthropologist, E.E. Evans-Pritchard, during his time living among the Azande people of Central Africa. Evans-Pritchard noted the ubiquitous tendency of the Azande to attribute bad events to the effects of witchcraft. Blight ruined the groundnut crop? Witchcraft! No game to be had in the bush? Witchcraft! Wife sulky and ignoring you? Witchcraft! Banged your toe and now it’s infected? Witchcraft! Everything bad, it seemed, the Azande attributed to the malicious activities of bewitching enemies. “Neoliberalism” functions similarly among large portions of the left today. Growing economic inequality? Neoliberalism! Run-away climate…

● I HESITATE TO try to understand the mind of Liz Truss. Firstly, because it seems like a very weird and inaccessible place. Secondly, because the way things are going she might not even be PM by the time you read this, and then what good will all the trying to understand have done us? Still, one particular Liz Truss decision at the Conservative conference last month was so odd, so unaccountable, so fascinatingly bad — and so much in the purview of this column — that I can’t leave it alone. Specifically: what possessed her to make the entry music for her speech “Moving On Up” by Mancunian house act, M People? I suppose Truss imagined this song would be to her as “Things Can Only Get Better” was…

● THE CHILEAN MILITARY JUNTA headed by General Augusto Pinochet (1973 to 1990) and the Argentine military junta headed by Lieutenant General Jorge Videla (1976 to 1981) continue to provide a rich source of drama for their respective national cinemas. 1976 (or Chile 1976 in the United States) is a well-paced political thriller. Manuela Martelli, an actress who co-wrote the screenplay with Alejandra Moffat, and who directed the film, never knew her maternal grandmother, an art school graduate who died in 1976, but she used her as inspiration for the film’s protagonist, Carmen, another grandmother and the elegantly dressed wife of a society doctor in Santiago. Played with a subtle intensity by Aline Küppenheim, Carmen is a brittle, neurotic woman, who smokes, takes medication, and once had a nervous breakdown…

● BY CHANCE, I WAS STANDING in the entrance hall of Dumfries House at exactly five o’clock on the day the Queen died. I received an unexpected phone call from a friend who told me the sad news, which was not confirmed on television until 6.30pm. I had spent the morning wandering the grounds, which I had not been able to do on previous visits. My visit gave me an opportunity to consider what the Prince of Wales, as he was then, now King Charles III, has achieved at Dumfries House, which may turn out to be relevant to how he exercises his influence, if indeed, he is allowed — or feels it appropriate — to have any. The circumstances in which he took on the restoration of Dumfries House…

WE TURNED TO WATCH the last truck from the quarry clatter its way down the dusty lane, out through the gates, and away towards Stamford. They’ll tell you that the countryside is quiet, that it’s all tranquility, birdsong, and church bells pealing somewhere in the distance but it’s not true. Rural Britain is a place of work. Chainsaws whine, lambs separated from their mothers bleat, and lorries tear down the lanes. When I was young, a logging lorry ran over my dog. She was sunbathing on the tarmac one hot July morning. “Limestone they’re quarrying,” Jamie Tusting said to me, as he pushed the .243 rounds into his rifle, “Mick George the guy’s called. Massive business now,” and then, ducking below the canopy of low hanging oaks, he set off…

SUMMER IS ALL VERY WELL, but let’s stop pretending it’s anything other than a gap between the proper months from October to April. Are there two more depressing words than “beach holiday”? Other than the Proms, which at least help with the ennui, summer is about marking time — finding a way to get through the days, weeks and months until life starts up again as the temperature drops. But I am also being specific about these months. Because in the end everything boils down to racing. And while summer jumping is better than no jumping, it’s barely much better. The real problem with summer, of course, is flat racing. I’ve nothing against it, as such. Something has to fill the months when the ground is wrong for proper racing.…

IN ALAN BENNETT’S The History Boys, it is decreed by the contrarian history master, Irwin, that “if George Orwell had lived, nothing is more certain than that he would have written an essay on the Carry On films”. We are invited to take Irwin’s instructions that the Carry On films represent a valuable insight into British social history with suitable detachment. (The precise, suitably pompous quote is that “while they have no intrinsic merit, they acquire some of the permanence of art simply by persisting, and acquire an incremental significance if only as social history”.) Yet Irwin (or Bennett) was almost certainly right that, had Orwell survived into the Sixties and Seventies, he would have found the Carry On film series both repellent and fascinating. It is literature’s, and history’s, loss…

THE PRICE OF NET ZERO Tim Congdon’s discussion of energy prices (“AN OVERDONE ‘EMERGENCY’”, OCTOBER) omitted important factors affecting energy supply by not including the drive to “Net Zero”. Looking at energy as just the economics of supply and demand misses the effect of political actions. The price of energy is driven up by the adoption of renewables such as wind and solar power because they are inherently less efficient than fossil fuels. In addition to being dearer, renewables need the back-up of natural gas when the wind stops blowing or wind speed becomes too high. But to supply gas only now and then is much more expensive per unit of energy than if it were a regular supply. California provides an example of pro-renewables politics affecting energy supply. Tim…

● “Prime minister, would you like to hold the cat?” I am being taken to see the New Boss. When she first arrived she was very difficult to control and kept marching about the place saying things firmly. Now she just sits under the Cabinet table, sipping cocoa. “Am I allowed to hold it?” she asks. “Have you asked Jeremy?” “The Chancellor says it’s fine, but afterwards you have to sign the papers he’s sent.” I had hoped that the frankly long overdue departure of the previous guy, and his disgusting dog-thing, would make things a bit calmer around here. The new lot are certainly cleaner and there are fewer dog turds in the corridors, but there seems to be just as much screaming and weeping as before. It’s very…

ABOUT 15 YEARS AGO, a classmate of mine began uploading videos to a website called “YouTube”. In the videos, he played little songs and performed skits about gaming, school and “How to be English”. He was a well-liked chap, but it struck everyone as a strange thing to be doing. It was only The Internet. It wasn’t TV. His video on being English went viral before “going viral” was a thing. Hundreds of thousands of young people across the world admired our classmate’s quirky sense of humour and boyish good looks. Soon, he became the first British person to hit a million subscribers and was able to turn making YouTube videos into a full-time job. No one still maintained that it was an odd thing to do. Sure, we had…

SINCE I WAS OLD ENOUGH TO READ ABOUT Africa, I have been fascinated by the Tuareg. For more than a thousand years they were the fierce, veiled, camel-riding, sword-wielding warlords of the Sahara until they were ruthlessly conquered in the late nineteenth century by the French Foreign Legion. But when I told my family I longed to journey to the Tuaregs’ Saharan heartland, they would tap their heads signalling that I was crazy. That chance came after I read that ruthless, nomadic, Tuareg tribes in the small Saharan nation, Niger, ignored world-wide condemnation of their practice of keeping more than 40,000 slaves — women, children, and men — in lifelong bondage. It was known as inherited slavery. These tragic people were born as slaves, possessions of their masters from the moment…

‘‘GORDON BROWN ECONOMICS” was one of the more memorable phrases to emerge from the recent Conservative leadership contest. Liz Truss used it to criticise Rishi Sunak’s support for strong public finances. At one point, Truss widened the attack and claimed that Gordon Brown economics had led to “a slow-growth economy”. So much has gone wrong here that it is difficult to know where to begin. First, the interesting and unexpected feature of Gordon Brown’s economics as chancellor of the exchequer was that it continued policy trends in the preceding Conservative years. With one important exception, Gordon Brown’s economics wasn’t really his at all. At some point in the mid-1990s New Labour’s leaders realised that Old Labour — public ownership and government intervention — was history. They also saw that they…

IN HER DEATH, AS IN HER LONG LIFE, Queen Elizabeth II has shown that the British monarchy still exercises an unseen but immense influence abroad. Nobody in our history has wielded so much “soft power” to such effect. Nowhere is this more true than in Germany. On the day she died, German state broadcasting was interrupted, the Bundestag observed a minute’s silence and countless Germans wept as if for an old friend. “There are no words that can even come close to honouring the outstanding importance of this Queen,” said Angela Merkel. In dubious taste, she enlisted Elizabeth II in the cause of “Europe”, but her “deepest gratitude” for her encounters with the Queen was doubtless sincere. Every Federal German Chancellor since the first, Konrad Adenauer, has felt the same.…

IN ANTWERP’S ROYAL MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS there is a triptych by Peter Paul Rubens which I return to time and time again. The Incredulity of Saint Thomas is one of the most iconic scenes in Christian art, yet the images which arrest the eye are the portraits on the two side panels that depict the painting’s donors: Sir Nicolaas Rockox, the Mayor of Antwerp, and his wife Adriana Perez. Sir Nicolaas was one of Rubens’ closest friends, and this intimate relationship is made manifest in the quality of these portraits. You feel you know these people — you feel you could step into this picture and talk to them. It’s hard to believe they lived four hundred years ago. These portraits sum up why Antwerp is integral to Rubens’s…

AT THE AGE OF 25, ALEXANDER the Great was accorded the title “King of the World”. In the preceding year, he had successfully liberated Egypt and defeated Darius III, the Persian “King of Kings”, dealing a fatal blow to the largest empire in history, which he would soon conquer in its entirety. The Harvard classicist Ernst Badian, reflecting on the fruits of a life defined by scheming, murdering, and warring, wrote 2,295 years later that procuring epoch-defining success had resulted in Alexander discovering with “startling clarity the ultimate loneliness of supreme power”. Loneliness and alienation pervaded Alexander’s adult life. During one balmy evening, the young king found that he had suffered one too many insults from a general, took up a nearby sarissa, and ran his drunken companion through with the…

THIS IS AN IMPORTANT BOOKabout how rich societies are failing to adapt to the breakdown of the old bread-winner-carer gender division - with many negative consequences, especially for non-elite men. It is especially valuable coming from a self-consciously progressive, pro-feminist British man (writing mainly from a US perspective, having followed his wife’s career to America in 2012), who challenges many of the narratives of “toxic masculinity” and the tendency to see gender inequality only through a female lens. Much of the story he tells, which applies with some variations in Britain and Europe, is a familiar one of men slipping behind women in education, in entry into many professions and increasingly in earnings. Women are now the main breadwinners in 41 per cent of US households, with three in ten wives…

IN THE INTRODUCTION TO A Royal Life, Hugo Vickers, royal biographer and historian, announces: “This book is not a biography or memoir.” I disagree. This book is a new and original kind of biography — one that I have never encountered before. Vickers is like a conductor wielding his baton, controlling the voices of both the Duke and the 14 contributors who are brought in to speak about his character and his life. In addition, the Duke’s three children, his wife and his Austrian, Greek, Bavarian and Yugoslav cousins dance in and out of the pages to make their own observations. The text includes excerpts from diaries such as those of the photographer Cecil Beaton, playwright Noel Coward and the journalist Kenneth Rose. Each chapter opens by informing us of the…

THE BORDERLAND BETWEEN popular fiction and literary fiction is now fertile territory. Once upon a time it was easy to tell them apart. Popular and genre fiction were in small format paper-backs, literary fiction larger: now all have been promoted to the once-prestigious size. Growing up, my local bookshop chain made it clear where its tastes lay by having a section headed discerning novels (with the unintended suggestion that the books may reject certain purchasers they deemed unfit). Now everything is literature, or so it’s claimed. Thinkpieces asking why-oh-why popular fiction rarely makes the prize podium are as common as ones on wild swimming. Writers of limited talent who work firmly within their genre are reviewed with as much reverence as a Nobel laureate. And for some it’s not enough…

● THE DAY THE QUEEN DIED I was supposed to be in the high Dolomites, listening to young musicians wrestle with Gustav Mahler’s ninth symphony on original instruments. Mahler composed his last two symphonies in the summers of 1909-10 near the mountain resort of Toblach (Dobbiaco) and, while he did not live to hear them performed, he knew exactly how he wanted them to sound. Mahler was a stickler for timbre. As director of the Vienna Opera, he replaced all the orchestra’s wind, brass and percussion instruments, declaring them unsuited to the volume, velocity and sophistication of Richard Strauss’s shocking new operas and his own universalist symphonies, drifting as they were to the brink of atonality. Other traditions were left unchanged. His violinists used no shoulder rest and cellists played…

● TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, in the autumn of 1997, a selection of works from the collection of Charles Saatchi was put on display at the Royal Academy in London. Ahead of the exhibition, the RA warned visitors that there would be works on view “which some people may find distasteful. Parents should exercise their judgement in bringing their children to the exhibition. One gallery will not be open to those under the age of 18.” The notice may have been meant with the best of intentions but it was an irresistible come-on too. And come-on people did; 300,000 visitors attended Sensation in a little over three months, some of them art fanciers. Many, however, were there simply to see what the fuss was about, drawn by the delightedly appalled response…

● IN 1987 I FLEW TO MOSCOW with a couple of colleagues to report on life for young people in the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev. Glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) were roaring ahead. The Cold War was thawing and even Margaret Thatcher had declared that she liked the Soviet leader. Moscow was a revelation: the imposing grandeur of Red Square, the pristine metro stations bedecked in marble and bas-reliefs, the confident Soviet iconography, all these gave the sense that this was the epicentre of a powerful, global empire. But there were other signs as well. The shoddy apartment blocks made from concrete slabs; dark, narrow roads pitted with potholes, empty shelves in the underlit gloomy shops, perhaps most of all, as Russians explained, an endemic, slothful corruption that had…

DON’T GET YOUR HOPES UP, this is the one in St Albans. In its heyday, the original Ivy on the edge of Covent Garden was the epitome of old-school West End glamour, but since acquiring the site in 2005, the restaurant world’s Dr Evil, Richard Caring, has merched out a further 30 establishments, scattering a bit of theatreland fairy glitter over the kind of small towns Binkie Beaumont spent his life trying to forget about. There must be some kind of folk memory involved in the Ivy chain’s success, a residual thrill of grease-painted razzle which obtains amongst punters who couldn’t give a stuff about the original Ivy legend. What Noel whispered to Larry, or to Kenneth Tynan, Liz Hurley snuggling up to Christopher Biggins on those storied banquettes in…

“Way down among Brazilians Coffee beans grow by the billions So they’ve got to find those extra cups to fill They’ve got an awful lot of coffee in Brazil.” FRANK SINATRA’S SWINGING SALUTE to South America was recorded back in 1961 at the time Ol’ Blue Eyes was backing the blue donkey Democratic ticket to the White House. John F Kennedy’s Camelot was probably more Campari than coffee-based, but it certainly captured the zeitgeist of the times and Sinatra hitched on for the ride. The same could not be said for Latin America, which furnished Kennedy with his fill of problems from Castro in Cuba to Eduardo Haedo of Uruguay and just about everywhere else in between. Even coffee-cultivating Brazilians could not evade an era of coup and counter-coup when…

DEATH GAVE ME TROUSERS. Before my parents began their unseemly exits, I had rarely countenanced such matters, preferring skirts and slink. But, then, shit, bile, and pus hit the fan and suddenly I was spending the majority of my time sleeping on trains or in hospital corridors, requiring practicality for hazmat and survival purposes. Goodbye, Rita Hayworth; hello, Radclyffe Hall. Or, in fact, Jenna Lyons. For I’d rock my trews Noughties-style à la the former J. Crew designer, fitted (Gap) cut-offs with a mannish jacket and some sort of heel. It got me through. Since then, I have marginally expanded my repertoire to include Stories Flared Cotton Trousers (classic lean bootcuts, £65, &otherstories.com), plus summer’s jauntily serviceable Asha Crop Culotte by NRBY (£79, nrbyclothing.com). And that’s it: any proficiency at…