Indholdsfortegnelse for December 2022 / January 2023 i The Critic

IT IS NOT HARD TO MAKE THE CASE AGAINST the BBC. The revelations that Tom Mangold, a BBC lifer, makes against its handling of the Martin Bashir saga in our cover story this month are devastating. The principal moral engine in this country — and one which has long since supplanted the reach and power of the church — is shown to lack morals itself. But is the case for the BBC better than the one it makes for itself? Arguing against the BBC is mostly only a matter of deciding where to start. There’s the fundamental question of why would we need a government supermarket? Which is to say, why do we need the state to provide something the market amply provides? Services even more vital than BBC Radio 1…

BARRISTERS TEND TO make awful writers, a fact which has not stopped them from filling the shelves of WH Smith with the sort of paperbacks people buy for indifferent aunts. The latest example of the genre is Emergency State: How We Lost Our Freedoms in the Pandemic and Why it Matters by Adam Wagner who, as the blurb cheerfully tells us, is “one of the UK’s leading human rights barristers”. During Covid, Mr Wagner kept a useful tally of lockdown legislation on Twitter, which made him “the country’s pre-eminent expert on covid-19 laws”, again according to the blurb. The book certainly is not lacking in endorsements, with every legal eminence from Baroness Hale to The Secret Barrister expressing their admiration. Part undergraduate thesis, part apologia pro Twitter sua, Wagner’s book…

FROM CHEVENING TO CHEQUERS. FOR ME, two weekends, eight weeks apart, will forever bookend my friend Liz Truss’s time as prime minister. The first, a wash of August Bank Holiday sunshine over the Kent countryside. Walking the grounds of the Foreign Secretary’s home with her on one of the last days of a leadership contest she had already won, listening as she outlined her vision for government, stalking ahead impatiently through the yellowing grass. The second, an October Sunday in Buckinghamshire, an afternoon of bruised clouds and close heat foreshadowing the storm which broke as we dispersed. A small circle of family, ministers and aides, gathered in the Great Hall to say goodbye. A day defined by the quiet dignity and absence of self-pity of its principal protagonist, entirely typical…

The Conservative Party’s almost total loss of its historical tradition is the principal reason for its current plight 20 OCTOBER 2022 IS A DATE I SHALL NOT FORGET. It’s the day when Liz Truss stood outside Downing Street to announce her resignation — the fourth Conservative prime minister to be hounded from office by their own party in six years. It was also the day when I was to lecture at the Danube Institute in Budapest on “British Conservatism post-Boris Johnson”. If I had stuck to my original title, my lecture — on the future of a Party which seems to have decided that it doesn’t want one — would have been almost as short as Liz Truss’s statement. Instead, I decided to take refuge in its past. Invoking Hegel’s dictum…

IT WAS ON THE TEACUP RIDE at the Dunstable Downs Kite Festival that I realised I had a problem. The colour drained from my face, a cold sweat developed and I gripped hold of the wheel tightly like I was on a boat in a rough sea. My six-year-old daughter gave me a look that mingled concern with a little contempt. I grimly nodded and held on tighter. After what seemed an eternity, the ride finished and I staggered off and sat down in a heap on the ground as the nausea slowly began to subside. She asked me if I was ok. I manfully attempted to regain my composure, but it was no good. I was no longer the hero in her eyes. I couldn’t even manage the teacups.…

IF YOU ARE FEELING DESPONDENT about the dismal quality of the current generation of politicians, it may be some comfort to remember that even in the golden age of Rome such complaints were legion. The poet Horace wrote at length about how the ruling class had gone downhill. Once, there had been paragons of virtue such as Cincinnatus, who after saving Rome as dictator laid down his power without demur and returned to live on his humble farm; or the consul Regulus, who refused to make any concessions after being captured by the Carthaginians, although he knew they would torture him to death. Instead of these titans, the modern age had brought forth a base generation. Marcus Licinius Crassus, the richest man in Rome and subject of this new biography,…

IT IS LESS THAN 20 YEARS since Shirley Hazzard won the National Book Award for Fiction, yet if she retains a reputation at all, it is more for how little she wrote — four novels, two short story collections — than what she wrote. Now comes her chance for revival: a new biography that reveals the life to be just as remarkable as the work, and both to be essential to the story of twentieth-century literature. Hazzard’s own story began in Sydney, Australia, in 1931. Her early years were unhappy, marked by her mother’s moods and father’s money worries, and the wider desolation of the Great Depression. Reading was an escape — Hardy, Auden, Dickens — and put a lens on her home country’s cultural deficit. Europe was where she…

NO HAGIOGRAPHY OF EMPIRE is offered by Dominic Lieven, but the level of wisdom offered about the vital human aspects of imperial rulership make this a quietly devastating rebuttal of some of the cruder anti-imperialist critiques of our superficially revolutionary times. He acknowledges the flaws of a system of government which struggled in the face of contemporary challenges. But empire is still “the most prevalent type of polity in history”, with perhaps no enduring successor in sight. His themes are stated as “geography, sovereignty and leadership”. Biography, however, plays a bigger role than the discussion of political structures. Attention focuses on the people who rule and the challenges, constraints and opportunities facing them. A succession of subtle and penetrating profiles illuminates the book. The qualities needed for a dynasty to…

GIVEN THE FACT THAT IRAN has always occupied some measure of media attention in the Anglophone world even before the Islamic Republic made it into a pariah state, it is odd that most politically-minded members of the public or even of the academic classes know little of the Persian Constitutional Revolution of 1906. This may have to do with the oft-repeated myths of Iranian modernity, which to a great extent were propagated by the last shah. In its most basic form, this story of Iran’s emergence as a modern nation starts with the collapse of the morally and politically bankrupt Qajar dynasty (1796-1925), who had abnegated their guardianship of a country humiliated by Western powers and fast crumbling until its salvation by the soldier-king Reza Shah (reigned 1925-1941), whose Pahlavi…

IT’S NOT BEEN A GREAT YEAR for non-fiction books. Indeed, it’s been a while now since the last one, which is probably something to do with the pandemic, as well as the general lack of courage and conviction among too many publishers and commissioning editors, many of whom are relatively inexperienced and partial to modish, censorious obsessions. But the books published over the last 12 months that do pass muster are very good indeed, and would grace any year, vintage or not. I’ll single out three. But before I get to 2022’s holy trinity, its worth mentioning in dispatches a handful of superb works that also achieve the holy grail: a combination of scholarship and readability. MALCOLM GASKILL’S DARK AND compelling The Ruin of Witches: Life and Death in the…

I LIKE TAYLOR SWIFT A LOT. To review: I’ve seen her in concert twice, listened to her albums obsessively (OK, I’m a bit patchier on the first three Nashville-y ones), can measure out the last ten years of my life in her songs, and have advanced theories of Taylorology around her lyrics. I once bought a T-shirt from the official Taylor Swift merchandise store bearing a picture of her cats. I’ve actually worn it. I even use one of her lines as my Twitter bio. It’s a good line too, from “I Did Something Bad” off the Reputation album: “They’re burning all the witches even if you aren’t one/So light me up.” I embraced it as a statement of defiance from a woman who’d dealt with the rougher side of…

BRITAIN HASN’T PRODUCED many great Christmas movies. Something about the collision of untainted hope and unbridled capitalism strikes more chords in the American soul. They stole A Christmas Carol from us and gave it to the Muppets, then tackled the holiday from every angle: the criminal in Bad Santa, the charming in Elf, the violent in Die Hard and all three in Home Alone. All we can offer is Love Actually, which I can never face, and Arthur Christmas. The film I associated with Christmas in my childhood had nothing seasonal about it at all. But The Great Escape was shown more or less every Boxing Day during the 1980s, and I was never allowed to watch it. This wasn’t for religious reasons, unless you count my grandparents’ belief that…

I HAVE FOLLOWED THE CAREER OF David Kohn, a youngish architect (at least young by the standards of architects), originally from South Africa, trained in Cambridge and New York on a Fulbright Scholarship, who I first met when he designed a pop-up restaurant called Flash on the ground floor of the old Museum of Mankind building in Burlington Gardens. Not long afterwards he designed, jointly with the artist Fiona Banner, a boat-like structure on the roof of the Hayward Gallery which you could stay in overnight through Living Architecture, the organisation established by Alain de Botton to allow people to experience contemporary architecture by spending a weekend in it. THE STAIRCASE IS AN EXCEPTIONALLY ELABORATE AND BEAUTIFULLY DESIGNED WOOD STRUCTURE These two early works were an indication that he likes…

WHETHER THEY UNLEASH your inner Andrew Carnegie or expose your suppressed Ebenezer Scrooge, there’s no dodging the seasonal gift round-up. Even we gardeners are portrayed as craving sailcloth smocks, traditional trugs, robotic lawnmowers and thermal weeders — not to mention gloves so luxurious it’s hard to envisage wearing them outdoors, let alone to rummage in the soil with. Then there are the gardening journals. Stationery, it’s reported, is enjoying a boom. I admit that a love of stationery definitely played its part in my career choice. I still collect notebooks of every shape and size, and even in years when I’ve been too busy to keep a diary capacious enough for confidences and intrigue, I’ve kept an appointment diary. Do I really need a gardening journal though? As it turns…

MY UNCLE BY marriage, Eric Gibson, was as distraught as I was at the accident at Munich airport which took 21 lives, including seven Manchester United players, Busby Babes, and left an eighth, the marvellous Duncan Edwards, in an iron lung for two weeks until he, too, succumbed. Eric was a Mancunian who had lived all his adult life in Southampton. A treat that he had promised for later in the season was brought forward as a sort of consolation. He took me to The Dell to a Third Division South match between the Saints and the Canaries (Norwich). I SAID “SORT OF”. I had read accounts of stadium collapses in faraway places such as Bolton and Buenos Aires. The stands were rickety. Eric had lost a leg when the…

THIS TIME OF YEAR IS A particularly bookish one, with launches for the crucial Christmas list and editors requesting mini reviews for their annual recommendations. My choice for the Spectator World last year was Helen Joyce’s brilliantly compassionate Trans. The editor warned me that I would be branded a terf, but I was prepared to stand by the review. Naturally no notice whatsoever was taken. These days I can’t even get cancelled. Skeleton in the cupboard VENICE’S GRANDEST LITERARY EVENT was Servane Giol’s reception for her gorgeous celebration of the city’s palazzi, Venice: A Private Invitation at her home, Palazzo Falier on the Grand Canal. The Falier were one of the most venerable ducal dynasties, scoring their first Doge in 1095. Visitors to the Doge’s Palace are pointed to the…

GEORGE SOROS IS WIDELY KNOWN AS the man who broke the Bank of England. As we will see, the Bank is quite capable, advertently or inadvertently, of breaking governments. The brutal demise of the Truss administration following the mini-budget has been widely attributed to the market’s reaction to the expectation of unfunded borrowing occasioned by tax cuts and the fuel price cap. To the contrary: the market’s behaviour was quite clearly a response to the actions — and inactions — of the Bank of England, before, during and after the mini-budget. One part of, but not all of, the case against the Bank has been cogently made by Narayana Kocherlakota, a well-respected economist and former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, ina Washington Post piece entitled “Markets didn’t oust…

IN TRAUMA AND RECOVERY, THE PSYCHIATRIST JUDITH HERMANdistinguishes between traumatic events that are “natural disasters or ‘acts of God’” and those “of human design”. In the case of the former, she writes, “those who bear witness readily sympathise with the victim”. When it comes to the latter, the situation is more complex. Here, taking the part of the victim is not a natural response. After all, Herman points out, “all the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil." By contrast, the victim “asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering.” Victims are difficult people. They disrupt the untroubled narratives we tell ourselves about the world we live in and the…

IN THE FINAL EPISODE OF SHANE MEADOWS’S This is England ’88 there is an astonishing scene, so beautiful, so moving, so theologically sophisticated that I can scarcely believe it actually appeared on British TV. Throughout the series Lol (short for Lorraine), played by Vicky McClure, is in the depths of suffering. (This article contains major spoilers, as the TV announcers say, “right from the start”.) Submerged in post-natal depression as she looks after her baby daughter, who was conceived during a catastrophic fling with her then-fiancé’s best friend, Lol is also haunted by horribly lifelike visions of her late father, who she killed with a hammer after he tried to rape her. Perhaps it’s worth saying at this point that Shane Meadows’s subject-matter tends to be fairly heavy. Meadows believes there…

JEREMY CLARKSON PRAISED AMSTERDAM as a cool place, “not for its windmills and tulips” but for its “Liverpudlians vomiting on Filipino prostitutes”. Sadly, this was a true enough description. But during the Covid years we saw few Liverpudlian drunks, prompting sighs of relief from residents, even if shops and pubs groaned at the loss of tourist income. But the art world groans as well: for many of the city’s theatres, concert halls, festivals, museums and its opera house also depend heavily on tourism, and they struggled under the Covid lockdown. Closed for months, they could not sell tickets, for the loss of which revenue they are only partially compensated. Moreover, the Corona-crisis engendered an inverse — and perhaps perverse — selective mechanism: the more dependent on government subsidies an institution…

ONE OF THE JOYS OF VISITING parish churches in England and Wales is discovering the monuments they contain. Unlike the other items that one regularly encounters inside churches, such as fonts, stained glass and furnishings, monuments come in all shapes, sizes and ages; everything from humble wall tablets with just a name and date of death to huge vainglorious piles of marble with lengthy inscriptions extolling the virtues of those commemorated. Monuments can tell us a great deal about the past and the lives of the people who lived in those times. Tombs with effigies can show us the clothes or armour of particular eras for which real examples no longer exist. Just about every type of material has been used in creating these memorials, ranging from the basics such…

IF THERE WAS ONE THING THE Romans did well — aside from sanitation, irrigation and concrete — it was polemic. Cicero composed fourteen fiery Philippics against Mark Antony in the 40s BC, and Catullus jibed at Julius Caesar so profusely in his poems that he had to issue an apology. Less famous, but equally explosive, was Caesar’s own collection of vitriol. The Anticato survives today only in fragments, but according to an ancient satirist, it was originally so long that it took up two scrolls and almost outweighed the penis of Publius Clodius Pulcher, apparently among the best-endowed politicians in Rome. Caesar wrote it shortly before he became dictator, with the intention of denigrating the memory of Marcus Porcius Cato, “Cato the Younger”. For years the two men had been…

IN 1888, JOHN EDWARD BODLEY, a superbly moustachioed scribbler, crossed the Atlantic to roam Canada on its newly completed railways. He was the former secretary to Charles Dilke, a Liberal MP who had popularised the idea that the bits of the Empire heavily settled by British emigrants could become a “Greater Britain”, a strong, self-governing federation of Anglo-Saxon democracies. Visits to Canadian cities helped Bodley to gauge how his chief’s imperial idea was faring. As a college chum of Oscar Wilde and a celebrated Francophile who lived in a series of rented chateaux, Bodley had aesthetic standards that Canada struggled to meet. Vancouver was an “amazing town”, but only because it had been so quickly rebuilt after a big fire and was the “least ugly new settlement I have seen”.…

AS A RULE, THE MARKET for historical reputations is volatile, subject to prevailing fads and changing perspectives. Napoleon Bonaparte’s stock, by contrast, remained at a premium for a long time, but it has been falling steadily for a while now, so much so that it is now beginning to look overpriced. The idea of the emperor as a military genius who refashioned the “art of war” in his own image, created and carefully curated by Napoleon himself, then perpetuated by heavyweight strategic writers such as Jomini and Clausewitz in the early nineteenth century and further burnished by generations of historians, has fallen out of fashion of late. Recent scholars have tended to emphasise the flaws and shortcomings of Bonaparte the commander and strategist. They might not all agree with the…

LET ME STATE AT THE OUTSET that this is a fine piece of book-making in every way. Beautifully and comprehensively illustrated, well designed and printed on good paper, with a text that is both scholarly and readable, it is also a much-needed volume, dealing with a neglected and under-valued period in the history of English church-building. Later, more earnest Goths, those approved of by the Ecclesiologists (who could make or break architectural reputations, and did not hesitate to do both), have had things more or less all their own way for far too long: Webster’s book redresses the balance. The stunning colour photographs, many taken specially for the book by the late, lamented Geoff Brandwood and by Webster himself (who has a good eye) are truly marvellous, and demonstrate conclusively…

“THIS WAS A QUIET YEAR. There were no sensational or overpowering entries.” That was Douglas Hurd, chair of the 1998 Booker Prize judges, author of the thrillers Scotch on the Rocks and A Vote to a Kill — and holder of one or two other claims to fame — explaining why the prize that year went to Ian McEwan’s middling novella Amsterdam. Now I know how he feels — at least in part. 2022 has been a quiet year for new fiction, not in volume but in quality. Many confident riders have fallen at the first hurdle, from big beasts old (John Irving) and new (A.M. Homes, Sandra Newman), to overhyped debutants (James Cahill). Prizes from the Costa to the Sunday Times Short Story Award to the Desmond Elliott Prize have…

ONE MORNING HALF A lifetime ago I was sitting in a garret office at the London Coliseum listening to the Queen’s cousin tell me what the public really wanted. The Earl of Harewood — George, when you got to know him better — was managing director of English National Opera from 1972 to 1985. Neither he, nor anyone else, saw any kind of conflict between the “people’s opera” being run by a king’s grandson, an Earl with a vast estate in Yorkshire. This was by no means the weirdest of a catalogue of anomalies and amateurisms that has now led to the defunding of London’s second opera house. Before long, ENO will be taught in college as a model in how not to make an opera. The company was founded…

IN 1895, THE PIONEERING American palaeontologist Edward Cope sold 10,000 pieces from his fossil collection to the American Museum of Natural History for $32,000. Included in the cache was a vertebrae found by Cope three years earlier in South Dakota and attributed by him to an extinct herbivore. In fact, it belonged to a Tyrannosaurus rex and was the first fossil to be discovered of that fabled creature. Since then as many as fifty further T. rexes have been unearthed, most of them partial and comprising far less than half of the original skeleton — the majority of the bones having been washed away, predated or ground to dust over the millennia. For a century or so the fossils’ interest lay largely in their scientific value but in 1997 FMNH…

I USUALLY WRITE ABOUT television dramas I have enjoyed, but this month I’m starting with a warning. Were this an obscure series buried on a streaming service I would not bother, but season two of Gangs of London is a high-profile, big budget extravaganza, its glamorous cast clad in carefully-styled designer wardrobes as they cavort and slaughter each other across the capital. The gangs are Albanians, Kurds, Georgians, Irish mobsters and more. At first I wondered if the drama, showing on Sky Atlantic and NOW, was a parody, a post-modern take on twenty-first century capitalism. There are frequent references to the “investors”, a shadowy group of financiers. Much of the storyline, such as it is, unfolds in expensive offices, upmarket restaurants or perfectly-styled homes that could feature in a glossy…

IT’S ALL OUR FAULT. And yes I do mean all of it. And yes I do mean all of us. By “it” I mean the mess that our country has, by any conceivable metric, fallen into. And we are to blame. We, the body politic of the United Kingdom. “The voter is never wrong” is a maxim politicians have to affect to believe in; not being a politician — being merely a voter — I am safe to say that we, the electorate, are not just wrong, I think we have ADHD. And when we have to face the consequences of our own actions, we delight in nothing more than blaming it on someone else. Let’s take a few really obvious examples. We are outraged by high energy prices, but…

IN ONE OF THE FISHING BOOKS in the lodge at the mouth of the river Grimersta, there is a picture of Ted Hughes as an old man. Moth-eaten jumper, thick grey hair blown to one side by the heavy Hebridean wind, and a dour face with a downturned mouth. Grimersta, a place he called “the loneliest place”, was one of Hughes’s most beloved bits of Britain. He went there most summers with John Martin, a Devon sheep man who I stayed with once, ten Christmases ago. John told me, as we sat by the fire in his thatched farmhouse, that he didn’t do culture but he liked Ted anyway, as he reckoned he was a countryman as much as he was a poet. John died a couple of years ago…

I AM OLD ENOUGH TO remember the days when the BBC’s sports broadcasting was iconic — both the events it covered and the way it covered them. Now it’s just a mishmash of secondhand highlights programmes, some rugby and Wimbledon (and as everyone secretly knows, tennis is the sport for people who don’t like sport). Back in those earlier days, the BBC’s annual Sports Review in December and the award of the Sports Personality of the Year was something everyone looked forward to. But one thing used to grate; even when the BBC’s racing coverage was one of the jewels in its sporting crown, it would rarely get more than a perfunctory mention in the programme. And since it moved to Channel 4 and now ITV, racing hardly gets more…

STOP THE AGIT-PROP Claire Foster and Juliet Harrison (“IDEOLOGY OR THERAPY?” NOVEMBER) are to be congratulated for their tenacity in uncovering the extent to which postgraduate courses in clinical psychology have been subverted to the crude and unscholarly agitprop of Critical Theory activism. Academics and practising clinicians can be as susceptible to modish notions as the rest of us. Thus, it should not surprise us if one or two university clinical psychology departments had succumbed to such obvious intellectual vacuity as the belief that society is a binary divide between privileged and unprivileged groups and that this overrides everything else. After all, is this so different from Marxism’s class war between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, rebranded to prioritise race and gender rather than manual labour now that progressive liberals…

“It’s important we show people that I understand their problems,” says Rishi. “That I’m just like them, whether they’re aristocrats, upper class or working class.” He thinks for a moment. “Well, not working class.” We are having a meeting with Amber, who helps Rishi to get his message across. I’ve been thinking about my own image, too: it’s about time I did a Tatler shoot. Get the message out that there’s a new dog in Downing Street, and she means business. “There’s still a lot of worry about energy bills,” Amber says. Rishi nods. “Oh I know. We’ve had to tell the maids in Kensington to make sure they switch the lights off in each room when they’ve finished cleaning it. Maybe I could do an interview about turning the…

CORNELIA HAS PUBLISHED three novels so far in her brief but distinguished career. Iron Men, her debut, 200,000 words long and set in a neolithic hillfort, was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. According to Lot, its somewhat terser stable-mate, a spirited re-telling of the events at Sodom and Gomorrah, was longlisted for the Booker. Although the situational details were vague, the action of Darkthrone, her most recent work, appeared to take place on a blighted medieval plain, where two warring tribes, the Cru-Anns and the Werbowersts, were locked in perpetual conflict. The distinguishing mark of Cornelia’s writing, aside from its humourlessness, is the extraordinary level of violence on display. Iron Men featured a 20-page cannibal feast. A minor character in According to Lot was ritually dismembered and thrown…

A psychologist at a dinner party which I attended recently spoke about his “CLIENTIN THE COMMUNITY”. Two lies in four words: I suppose this was concision of a kind! His “CLIENT” was a madman known to wield knives in a state of psychosis, a potential murderer who was under compulsory supervision and was plied with medication whether he wanted it or not (mostly not). He was a client in the same way that I am a “CUSTOMER” of His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs — and which, indeed, sometimes addresses me in circulars as such, rather as does a travel agency that hasn’t noticed yet that I last availed myself of its services about15 years ago. I suppose that if ever capital punishment were brought back, the condemned man would be…

20 NOVEMBER 1995 Martin Bashir’s interview with Diana, Princess of Wales is aired on BBC Panorama. It is watched by 23 million viewers in the UK and 200 million worldwide 22 NOVEMBER 1995 BBC graphics artist, Matt Wiessler, first reveals to executives that Bashir had ordered him to forge documents to show Diana’s brother Earl Spencer to help Bashir secure the interview 4 DECEMBER 1995 Steve Hewlett, editor of Panorama and Bashir’s producer, is warned by a deputation of Panorama staff (including Tom Mangold) of the forgeries but dismisses them, saying it was none of their business JANUARY 1996 Bashir is challenged by BBC editorial executives about the forgeries 28 MARCH 1996 Bashir finally admits his deceit to Tim Gardam, head of Weekly Programmes Current Affairs. Gardam immediately sends hand-written…

It is no exaggeration to say that Elon Musk’s annexation of Twitter is the most terrifying development in recent history. Only a fascist would seek to impose free speech on humanity. This is why there has been such a chorus of execration from left-wing commentators, celebrities and influencers. On the day that Musk seized control of Twitter, Washington Post columnist Taylor Lorenz noted that it was “like the gates of hell opened on this site tonight”. Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic wrote that there was “an apocalyptic feel to the ordeal”. But it was the Independent that really grasped the full gravity of this moment. Its headline read — “RIP Twitter, 2006-2022: Dead at the Hands of Elon Musk”. It is a testament to the cool-headed stoicism of left-wing journalists…

THE MOST IMPORTANT episode both politically and economically in 2022 was September’s mini-budget and the spectacular fallout that ensued. Many lessons can be drawn from it, not least the importance of communication. Liz Truss’s government failed to lay the ground for a raft of pro-growth measures that took many by surprise. Given the market reaction, it is easy to forget the mini-budget initially left business groups swooning. The Confederation of British Industry said (not inaccurately) that it represented a “turning point for our economy”. The Institute of Directors called it “a good news day for British business”. And the Federation of Small Businesses said that the Truss government was “off to a flying start”. But despite the pro-growth policy direction being spot-on, the general public did not share this enthusiasm.…

LIZ TRUSS’S PREMIERSHIP was short, but the debris — misjudged ideas and shattered reputations — may take years to clear. According to William Hague in the Times, the message was that “ideology is dead” and “it’s competence we need now”. In his view, Britain needs less rhetoric on low taxes and the small state, and more “pragmatism” over such policy areas as education and the National Health Service. Hague’s target was the free market think-tanks, notably the Institute of Economic Affairs, that supported and advised Liz Truss, just as they supported and advised Margaret Thatcher almost 50 years ago. But the Thatcher agenda was not refuted by the Truss premiership. The case for free markets and sound money developed in twentieth-century Britain as a response to decades of experience of…

PERHAPS LIKE INVESTMENT advisers’ caveats that past performance may not be an assured promise of future profits, historians ought to issue a health warning when making predictions about the future, which can be a precariously exposed business. In 2014, just before Russia invaded Crimea and began to occupy chunks of Eastern Ukraine, Orlando Figes — one of the best historians of Russia writing in the English language — published a brilliant little book, Revolutionary Russia. In it, he declared boldly that as Russia had become weaker since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it was “no longer the aggressive threat it once was. It does not start foreign wars”. It’s best, perhaps, to glide over this. Many of us, after all, have been there with these hostages to…

“HOW MANY BOB DYLAN studies must one man read before you call him a hopeless Dylan obsessive?” was not a line considered for inclusion in Dylan’s totemic “Blowin’ in the Wind” of 1962. But as the latest volume dedicated to the great man hoves into view, the question is worth asking. Folk Music is the latest rumination by Greil Marcus on the phenomenon born Robert Allen Zimmerman in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1941. In the very crowded field of chroniclers of the 1960s prodigy of American song, Marcus is the pre-eminent voice, his authority cemented by Invisible Republic (1997), a commentary on the Basement Tapes (1967-68, spruced up and released in 1975) and a significant event in the restoration of Dylan’s critical reputation, then at its lowest ebb. (In an unimproveable phrase, Marcus…

ONE OF THE PARADOXES of the early postwar era is that, after Germany’s defeat, the Nazis were vilified at the same time that their expertise was sought after by both Cold War superpowers. Germans played key roles in both sides’ space programmes. Less infamous is the part they also went on to play in the Egyptian rocket programme, one of the subjects in this fascinating and disturbing book. After suffering a humiliating defeat in the war that followed the establishment of Israel, the Egyptians wanted revenge. As the British had refused to help them — despite maintaining a deeply unpopular and large presence astride the Suez Canal — Egypt’s sybaritic King Farouq turned to his enemy’s enemy instead. In 1949 he commissioned an Afrika Korps general, Artur Schmitt, to review…

THE JOB OF A POPE IS, COMPARED to that of secular leaders, enviably straightforward. He is absolute ruler of a tiny sovereign state with a vast spiritual diaspora. His judgment is believed by the faithful (or some of them, at any rate) to be not only supreme, but infallible. Where the job starts to get more complicated is in times of global crisis, when popes are expected to provide moral leadership, not just to fellow Catholics but to the whole world. When that expectation comes into conflict with the narrower interests of the church, popes frequently fluff their lines. In 2009, at a time when Belarus’s dictator Alexander Lukashenko was persona non grata elsewhere in Europe, Pope Benedict invited him to the Vatican. Amid handshakes and smiles, the two men signed a…

AS I WENT TO UNIVERSITY in the days before higher education was taken over by a gaggle of mentally ill spinsters, the emergence of woke ideology reached me second-hand and from a distance. It seemed no big deal. Students will be students, I thought. The hysteria was largely confined to the USA and their comical beliefs were so clearly at odds with liberal norms and common sense that it was inconceivable that they would spread beyond campus. How wrong I was. As Andrew Doyle shows in The New Puritans, it took only a few years for Critical Social Justice to infect the corporate world, government agencies and the media. Most worryingly for a system of thought that favours “lived experience” over objective truth, it became pervasive in higher and lower…

NORMAN MAILER, LIKE SOME palooka Pope, was famously unable to abide the thought of contraception, maintaining that shagging without at least the possibility of the female party dying in childbirth simply spoiled the whole business. And opera has always been firmly team Norm here, with certain provisos. As everyone knows, it all takes place in a state of frenzied rut, with absolutely none of the Hazmat protection required by today’s youth, nor any time for the assembly of Cherie-style “equipment” to prevent romps evolving unmagically to rompers. Thus, given its astonishingly low birthrate, you have to assume the backstreets of operatic Seville and Naples are buzzing with unsung abortionists; any females unwise enough to actually conceive are dealt with briskly in Norm-imprimatur fashion, as with Debussy’s Mélisande and her exit…

JOHN GABRIEL BORKMAN IS A prescient archetype for the scape-grace modern tycoon: a man dwelling with the shadow of past misdemeanors and the toll that discovery has taken on his family and former associates. You can meet such men among New York financiers and tech titans or Me Too’d Hollywood execs and ousted media moguls penning memoirs of how badly they were treated for an accounting offence. The contemporary echoes of reputation-crashing must surely have been the thinking of the Bridge Theatre’s artistic director Nicholas Hytner when casting as Borkman Simon Russell Beale, the most bankable star turn of the playhouse seeking to challenge the National Theatre on classical productions. IT IS, HOWEVER, ALSO a hard Ibsen to like — and I speak as a fan of the great Norwegian…

LET US GARLANDS BRING. It is sixty-one years since a young man from Wigton skipped along the yellow brick road from the city of dreaming spires to Broadcasting House, to serve as apprentice stoker at the BBC’s cultural furnace. He’s still there, seeking to stretch our minds. How well you have played your hand, Melvyn Bragg. The Cumbrian is one of life’s optimists, choosing to see bouquets where others spy only dead flowers. He’s had to be cheerful, given the gusts of philistinism that have swept the land. In his middle years he presented a programme on primetime telly, where he discussed proper books with proper writers. Now the BBC fobs off viewers with some superficial guff designed by and for dim teenagers. Six decades: that’s quite an innings. For…

A SUNDAY MORNING in London, my daughter is three. She wakes up, we read a story, go downstairs for breakfast, wrestle her into jacket and boots, go out for a long walk, feed the ducks, a bit of swinging and sliding at the playground. Back home, I check the time. It’s 7.30 am. Brunch has had a bad rap of late. Back in the day when we all wanted to be New Yorkers, brunch was cool and aspirational, a sophisticated, leisurely pastime for the moneyed metropolitan in between yoga in Central Park and the hottest exhibit at the Whitney. The late chef Anthony Bourdain spoiled it when he pointed out in his bestseller Kitchen Confidential that brunch menus are the last staging post for ingredients on the way to the…

I am indebted to Professor Kenneth Weisbrode, the historian and biographer of ambassador David Bruce, for reminding me that not only was this consummate diplomat legendary for his grace and his elegance, for his wit and for his unique triple crown as the United States’s plenipotentiary to France, Germany and Great Britain, but that “the last American aristocrat” was also renowned for his oenophilia. A scion of the Old South, by the time of his birth Bruce’s inheritance was already gone with the wind and he was obliged, with a little help from his family name, to make his own way in the world. America’s entry into the First World War helped him get as far as Paris by the time he was 20. It was there he began a…

CHRISTMAS, AND FASHION — like so many things, is fucked. You know, again. If the pandemic meant no one to manufacture clothes plus nowhere to sport them, we are now presented with no way of affording them should we desire food, warmth, habitation etc. How has Planet Fashion responded? On the one hand, we are being offered safe, supposedly stylish perennials to reflect the ditching of trends in favour of enduring (thus eco-friendly) classics. Solid, but a tad meh. On the other, what trends there are are robustly, intransigently fugly. See the rash of cargo pants, turd browns, clogs, rugby shirts, cowboy boots, shoddily-cut flying jackets, puffers, woolly tights and — truly — fishing waders (thank you, Chanel and Balenciaga). Said novelties bring to mind that Nineties Hollywood rebuff when…

MY MUSICAL LIFE HAS BEEN blessed by gifts that, in youth, were beyond my imagination. The floppy-haired adolescent, clutching a Little Feat LP, roared when his housemaster suggested he might lend an ear to a German called Wagner. Five decades later he has chalked up 130 performances of The Master’s operas, and hopes to hear 130 more. Schubert and Beethoven. Sinatra and Ellington. None played a part in those early years. Yet is the transformation from young groover to ageing melancholic so unusual? Most people in the autumn of their years will have pondered the question: “How did I get here from there?” We manage. If we are honest we must own up to enjoying music that is considered to lie below the salt. “Guilty pleasures”, they are called, even…