Indholdsfortegnelse for February 2023 i The Critic

WHAT IS THE POINT of the British university? Not long ago this question would have been ridiculous: universities allow the expert to instruct the gifted, to the benefit of both the individual and society at large. Ask now, however, and you are greeted by laughter, or despair. In the contemporary university, students pay handsomely for degrees in the confident expectation of Firsts or Upper-Seconds (82 per cent in 2021). Academics fired by political dogma foster like-minded activists under the guise of education. Lecturers whose intellectual ambitions have never risen beyond the pages of “best practice” handbooks clone closed-minded functionaries for middle management. Wealthy dullards from credulous abroad pay eye-watering sums to carry off a “vanity Masters” to embellish gaps on their walls and CVs. And a self-satisfied chorus of overpaid…

‘‘TREASON DOTH never prosper: what’s the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.” Between foreign Islamic State fighters and domestic terrorists, we do not live in an especially loyal age; and judging from a recent Lords’ debate, many of the country’s most distinguished lawyers are still loath to call this crime by its proper name. The occasion was the committee stage of the National Security Bill, when Lord Bethell moved an amendment to insert a modernised offence of high treason which would extend it to attacks against the United Kingdom short of international armed conflicts. Originally included in the Bill, it had been dropped at the insistence of Lord Chancellor Raab, no doubt to make parliamentary time for his eccentric British Bill of Rights. THEIR LORDSHIPS GENTLY…

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In 2009, Wolverhampton was described as the fifth worst city in the world and in 2018 voted the second worst in Britain. Its motto is OUT OF DARKNESS COMETH LIGHT. Of course, these placings mean nothing substantial, and in my opinion there are far worse cities in England than Wolverhampton: which, of course, leaves plenty of room for urban hideousness. I went there recently to dinner, to a Michelin-starred Indian restaurant. Most of the roads nearby were closed to traffic, it was difficult to find a place to park and I went round and round in circles for about half an hour. Access even to pedestrians was closed off, often without warning, so that one had to retrace one’s steps. While I was driving in a state of increasing frustration,…

IN BRITAIN, A PRIME MOTIVATION for going to university is to go away to study, to up sticks and enjoy a “student experience” far from your family and roots. The experience is sold in Britain for £28,000 a pop, and to those from abroad at sums north of £60,000. And that’s just the tuition — even a home student is spending £60,000 over three years when living costs are considered. The only product more expensive in the UK is housing, where the average first time buyer’s deposit is, by an act of cosmic symmetry, also about £60,000. Much has been made of higher education’s dubious benefits to recipients’ future earnings, with results varying widely depending on universities and courses. But the university experience is not really about income enhancement. Instead…

INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS ARE BIG BUSINESS for British universities. Analysis by Times Higher Education from 2020 to 2021 shows that tuition fees from non-European Union international students were worth about £7 billion to universities, roughly 17 per cent of their total income — up from 13 per cent in 2016-17. This financial reliance on overseas tuition fees has allowed the market for international student recruiters to flourish. But there are some warning tremors suggesting that all may not be well. Study Group, a leading provider of international education, recently announced in a private communication to its partners that it plans to halt recruitment of students from Bangladesh. University partners had apparently raised concerns about Bangladeshi students not enrolling in courses. This a swift about-turn. As recently as 13 June last year,…

I AM OFTEN COMPARED TO ROSA PARKS. This is unsurprising, given that I have worked assiduously and selflessly throughout my life in the pursuit of equity and inclusion. The only difference is that I wouldn’t be seen dead on public transport. But I think the time has come to reassess the legacy of Rosa Parks. In many ways, Parks was deeply problematic. Why, for instance, did she insist on sitting in the white section of the bus? She was clearly a self-hating racist. Again and again, I find that so many of the heroes of the civil rights movements fail to live up to my standards. Consider Martin Luther King and his famous “dream” that future generations would be judged not “by the colour of their skin but by the…

CRYPTOCURRENCIES promised a revolution. According to their many libertarian supporters, the creation of these currencies by blockchain technology would end the tyranny of the state in monetary affairs. In future, as computers and mobile phones became barely distinguishable, people would be able to make all their payments over these personal devices. They would give instructions that amounts of the various tokens — bitcoin, ethereum, tether, polkadot, troin or whatever — be transferred between different accounts in blockchain records. The transfers would have just the same effect as those between bank accounts in the old days. Traditional currencies had been issued by central banks backed by government, with their validity in settlement enforced by legal tender laws. Also known as “fiat currencies” (said to be from the Latin fieri, meaning “coming…

IN 1698 WHITEHALL PALACE CAUGHT fire. The vast warren of buildings, which had been central to the monarchy since the 1530s, was destroyed. When the area was eventually rebuilt, it was not kings and queens who returned but prime ministers and their governments. This topographical transformation neatly captures what historian Jonathan Healey argues was the most revolutionary change over the course of the seventeenth century: that “politics was no longer about monarchs”. The political arrangements of the reigns of William and Mary as the century drew to a close would have been “unthinkable” to James I at its start and were a closer approximation to the political system under Elizabeth II than Elizabeth I. Through 100 years of turbulence arose a “remarkable new world, one which — for better or…

IT WOULD BE HARD TO INVENT a more contrasting pair of protagonists for a thriller plot than Stephen Green and Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán. Green — tall, soft-spoken, cerebral, an Anglican priest in his spare time, later a trade minister in the House of Lords — was chairman from 2006 to 2010 of HSBC, the UK-based bank which grew to be the world’s largest during his tenure. Guzmán, now incarcerated for life in one of America’s most secure prisons, was the small, cunning and murderous head of Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel, one of the world’s most sophisticated ventures in the distribution of cocaine, heroin and other narcotics. Remarkably, Guzmán was one of Green’s biggest HSBC customers. In a very indirect sense, of course. But the plain truth — told in…

‘‘WHAT IS ENLIGHTENment?” Kant’s 1784 answer to the question, that the Enlightenment “dares to know”, is famous and paradoxical. Enlightenment, he maintains, requires freedom of the press, but only an authoritarian regime can allow unchecked debate: thus the Prussia of Frederick the Great is the only state where people can “dare to know”. Above all, the freedom that matters to Kant is the freedom to question religious authorities on matters of faith. Kant’s Enlightenment thus strengthens secular authority in order to create the space required for a critique of religious authority. Enlightenment is inseparable from despotism. Gary Kates’s important book offers a new answer to Kant’s question by interrogating a dozen eighteenth-century bestsellers, from Fenelon to Smith. The importance of the book can best be conveyed by comparing it to…

NEWSPAPER READERS IN LATE nineteenth-century Britain would have been well-acquainted with the idea of the Mahdi, the divinely guided redeemer of Islamic eschatology. A search for the term in The Times’s digital archive for the period 1880-1900 turns up 830 results. This interest in Islamic messianism was a response to the rise of Muhammad Ahmad, a Sudanese mystic who declared himself Mahdi in March 1881 and won a series of victories over Anglo-Egyptian forces, culminating in the conquest of Khartoum and the infamous killing of Gordon in June 1885. Muhammad Ahmad is one of several Mahdis treated in the latest work of Yohanan Friedmann, a leading historian of Islam at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Though the Mahdi doctrine is especially associated with the minority Twelver Shii form of Islam,…

THIRTY YEARS AGO, when the Secret Author was but a young shaver wandering wide-eyed along the approach roads to Grub Street, people used to be very exercised by an entity known as the “literary establishment”. In the manner of Bloomsbury, half a century before, nobody was ever quite able to define this tantalising abstract, but like most establishments throughout history it was thought to be corrupt, conniving, conservative, elitist and exclusionary, bent on promoting the careers of its favourite children and anxious to slam the door in the face of promising new talent that declined to abide by its rules. The power it exercised was, naturally, indirect. Some of it resided in institutions (the Royal Society of Literature, say, or the Society of Authors); some of it could be seen…

THOSE WHO WOULD LIKE to be seen as devotees of the Muses are having a fine old time squealing about the Proletcult-style despoliation of the arts in Britain, with public funding being withdrawn by a Visigothic Arts Council from their frivolous pleasures and devoted instead to increasing the wattage of the exciting Blackpool lights and encouraging multiracial bones-playing up north. But all this talk of cultural desertification wilfully ignores the galactic piece of Dadaist performance art that has been evolving before our eyes since the moment in 2016 when the aesthete-activist wing of the Conservative Party seized power and ignited the era of experimentalist absurdism we have been privileged to live through. Clearly intended as a centenary hommage to the founding of Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916, and the…

IT IS 75 YEARS since Tennessee Williams’s Streetcar Named Desire first trundled out of the backyards of New Orleans onto stages and exam syllabuses worldwide. Its freight of lust, anger, prejudice and the seductive, destructive power of delusion turned out to be winning combination. The play’s dissonant chords resonate in a century looking afresh at the power balance between men and women and the tensions of indigenous and new communities. The paradox of Streetcar is that this “stagiest” of works in its 1940s melee of sex, suicide and southern discomfort, maps onto America’s contemporary political divides. There’s not much question as to which other thuggish man-child Stanley Kowalski would have voted for over the last few years and Blanche DuBois would most certainly have complained about the pulling down of…

“WE SHOULD BE KIND, while there is still time”. The words belong to Philip Larkin, moved to tears of remorse after he caught a hedgehog in the blades of his mower. But what is kindness, and is it the highest of virtues? Good questions, one might have thought, for Radio 4’s long-running debate TheMoralMaze. The answers from the four guests will have perplexed, and possibly angered, many listeners. Surely it is not too difficult to agree that one should try to avoid off ending others, though it is not an absolute rule. Newspaper columnists are frequently unkind about people in high places, but their readers expect no less. That’s one reason people buy papers. They want salt in their porridge. It was one of those columns, by Jeremy Clarkson (below),…

A FEW YEARS AGO A publisher I had worked with previously asked me what I wanted to write next. I replied that I’d been thinking about something on the great lost fortified wines of the world. She looked at me askance and then said that she couldn’t think of a less commercial book. I never heard from her again but I still think it’s a great idea and the place I’d start would be western Sicily, home of Marsala. The wines from Marsala were once spoken of in the same breath as sherry, port and madeira. Indeed, Marsala began life as a madeira substitute. In the 1780s the Liverpudlian merchant John Woodhouse visited Sicily, tasted the wines and noted their similarity to madeira, which was all the rage. He fortified…

WHY DID I AGREE to this? It was meant to be a harmless ego boost but instead has induced three days of angst, and three nights of insomnia. Which, by the way, is NOT the peri or even actual menopause, despite what various deeply annoying friends keep hinting. It’s this sodding interview. To backtrack, my friend Pandora’s sister Astrid has a website called The Mama Medley, which is part purveyor of Scandinavian nursery furniture and Parisian kids’ clothes, and part temple to Pandora’s sister. Admittedly, Astrid is an ex-model with four kids who manages to make every barefoot kale cookie she produces look amazing (enabled by her funder husband’s salary and a tonne of staff). But still. All a bit icky. Anyway, Astrid magnanimously interviews a fellow “Mama” every month…

I REMEMBER THE MOMENT I fell out with feminism. Two girlfriends and I had launched a tiny network to support women in the postgraduate study of religion when the question came: “are you including trans women?” An insignificant speck we may have been, yet our intersectional credentials were already under surveillance. Perhaps, in my naivity, I expected at worst a few indifferent glances. Instead I was immediately put on the spot to ensure our tiny collective did not disrupt the intersectional hierarchy of oppression. Feminism, it seems, has become less about women coming together to assert positive change and more a spew of hollow sloganeering. The ineptitude of this feminism was made most clear to me when I returned to university with my four-month-old child for a postgraduate research open…

ENDING UP IN A&E ON New Year’s Eve is no one’s idea of a good time under the best conditions, but with the NHS now creaking to the point of disintegration, it seems especially to be avoided. So it was even more than usually alarming when my son sustained an injury that needed urgent medical attention. But astonishingly, he was seen within two hours. (He was lucky — a doctor informed us that there was one patient who’d been waiting for 39.) Two days later he was called in for follow-up, and that too went smoothly. The signs of dilapidation are there, of course, mostly in the state of the buildings. Hospitals inspire much sentiment (the MP who can claim to have “saved the local hospital” is a happy one…

“There’s just as much truth in what I remember and how I remember it as there is in so-called objective facts.” SO SAYS PRINCE HARRY, and it’s lucky he thinks this because Spare, where this profound philosophical reflection on epistemology can be found, has a number of rather well-recorded moments where the truth as he remembers it (hearing, for example, about the Queen Mother’s death in his room at Eton) do not stand up to the so-called objective facts (his actually being in Switzerland with his father and brother when the news broke, and having to make a well-publicised return from holiday). There are many other examples in the book of situations where, as the late Queen put it, “recollections may vary” and I don’t really want to rehearse them…

ONE SCHOOL OF THOUGHT claims that all literature is political: what matters in a work is the worldview it reflects. It may not be the way most people enjoy books, but it is an academic approach. But that political prism is relevant — indeed inescapable — when a writer claims it for herself — as is the case for Annie Ernaux, who last October became the first Frenchwoman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Regarded as a master of autofiction, she has written about her life and times for almost five decades. In her acceptance speech in Stockholm in December, Ernaux highlighted the activist nature of her art: coming from a humble background — her parents ran a provincial café-cum-grocery shop — she vowed early on to “avenge my…

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN AN ENFANT TERRIBLE GROWS UP? The literary world is littered with the corpses of former wunderkinder — and many of the deceased are still alive. Martin Amis’s fiction started with sex, then drugs, but with late work like The Pregnant Widow and Lionel Asbo, dwindled into self-parody — making a mockery of what used to be satire — and found a subject to meet his mature style only when he stopped trying to be funny. Meanwhile Ian McEwan, known early in his career as Ian Macabre for his frisky tales of incest and sexual murder, has developed into the elder statesman of English letters, who can say with a straight face, “It’s an aspect of getting older that I find in my social circle a handful of…

FOR MANY ENLIGHTENMENT figures, time was less a phenomenon than a predicament. Never had its role in physics been better understood, nor its passage measured more accurately. But the more tangible it seemed, the more elusive it became. Despite the introduction of the Gregorian calendar in 1582, Catholics were still not sure when they should celebrate certain festivals. Major questions of world history were unresolved. And political upheavals had left many rulers out of step with the times. If anyone could put things right, it was Francesco Bianchini (1662-1729). As John Heilbron points out in this biography, contemporaries regarded him as the greatest Italian of his day. According to a Roman epigram, there was nothing he could not understand — and everything seemed to interest him, especially time. BORN IN…

YOU HAVE TO BE A particular type of geek to get excited by historic house inventories: those endless room-by-room lists of tables and beds and tapestries and cooking utensils; the annoyingly unhelpful references to pictures — “Five Portraits, Gilt frames, Glazed”; the cryptic entries that send one scurrying for a suitable glossary — “haulm” and “douter” and “kish”. I am that geek. Ever since the moment back in the 1980s when I first came upon the late Lindsay Boynton’s magisterial edition of the Hardwick Hall inventories of 1601, I’ve been hooked. After Hardwick, I discovered Francis Steers’s Farm and Cottage Inventories of mid-Essex, 1635-1749; and then Karin-M. Walton’s Inventory of 1710 from Dyrham Park. Humble or high-born, I didn’t care, as my unscholarly imagination filled one interior after another with…

WHEN BRITAIN ANNOUNCED its support for the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine by issuing the Balfour Declaration, many high-profile American Jews opposed the move. “I do not believe that it is to the interest of the Jews or the world to isolate them or to separate them with an effort to form a distinct and separate nation,” the Italian-Jewish New York congressman, Fiorello La Guardia declared. “While of course they are racially one, the Jews of America, England, France and Italy are no different than their fellow countrymen.” La Guardia and the other opponents were ignored. The United States government endorsed the Balfour Declaration. Today, a century later, it is the state of Israel’s main ally. Fifteen years ago, after the United States had become bogged down…

WHAT IS THE POINT OF ART history? Today, like the clergy in the nineteenth century, it seems fit only for heirs and spares and to while away the time until you snag a Royal. This wasn’t always the case, of course. It was only 50 years ago that John Berger’s Ways of Seeing smashed onto screens like a fist through canvas. And a few years before that when Kenneth Clark bestrode the glories of western civilisation, a colossus in herringbone tweed. Art history was then a serious business — taken seriously. No longer. So it’s a surprise to find it the subject of two debut novels, Michael Mallon’s The Disciple and James Cahill’s Tiepolo Blue. Both feature protagonists who are, or aspire to be, art academics; and both take place…

VINYL IS BACK, BABY, BACK. If you happen to be my mum and have spent the last five decades cohabiting with my dad’s record collection, you might be inclined to ask sarcastically whether it ever went away. But the introduction of the CD set vinyl sales on the long slide to nothing. So it’s remarkable that last year, vinyl outsold CDs for the first time since 1988. Like Labour’s relentless gains on the Conservatives, this is a story of incumbent failure as well as insurgent success. When vinyl sales began to reverse their long-term decline in 2008, CDs were already beginning to look sickly: the arrival of digital downloads prompted a turn away from physical formats altogether shortly after the millennium. Record companies, slow to recognise that the internet had…

THE ESSENTIAL PROBLEM OF A romantic comedy is simple: given that these two people should obviously be together, why aren’t they? If the reason is that they’re with other people, then those people must at once be likeable enough that you don’t think less of the main characters for being with them, but not so likeable that you’re upset when they are inevitably dumped. In the 1930s, Hollywood solved this problem — and got around restrictions that prevented references to extra-marital sex — with the “comedy of remarriage”: the two people had been together, but had stupidly fallen out, and the film was about them realising this. Modern cinema has given us instead the Perfectly Nice But Unexciting Boyfriend. Sleepless in Seattle makes a good attempt at this, but it’s…

AS A LONG-TERM RESIDENT of East London, I was overjoyed by the publication of the handsome two volumes of the Survey of London on Whitechapel last June. But it has taken me time to digest how much it tells one about the history of Whitechapel through its microcosmic survey of patterns of architectural change. Oddly, it tells one almost as much about the history of the last ten years as it does about earlier centuries, because in documenting what has been happening, for example, to the streets round Aldgate and, in particular, in Aldgate itself, it conscientiously describes who is responsible for the redevelopment of each of the monster new buildings which have been constructed over the last ten years, thereby obliterating what little was left of random, higgledy-piggledy back…

LAST MONTH, AT LUNCH, my sister’s marathon-running boyfriend told me a story about a dead pig falling out the back of a van on a rainy day. He’d been walking through Smithfield Market at the time, heading off to do whatever it is he does, when a large bloke opened the rear door of his wagon and the big flaccid animal flopped into a puddle. “It was actually quite disgusting,”he reported, pushing his glasses up his nose. The consumption of animals and the process through which they end up on our plates is not all roses. The marathon-running boyfriend’s pig story came back to me the other day when I was standing beneath a beech tree in Norfolk looking across at a wounded pigeon at the bottom of a sprawl…

BACK IN THE 1990S, I wrote a weekly betting column for the Evening Standard. It was a brilliant idea by the paper’s deputy editor, Don Berry, because it had a unique feature. The whole point was that I was useless. Newspapers have far less racing coverage today than before but even in these denuded times they still all have their tipsters. They’re varying degrees of useless, but no one ever admits it. As I would recount my various punting exploits to colleagues, Don had the notion that we should make a virtue of the fact that most of my bets lost. And so I became the Mug Punter. The conceit was that we kept a running points tab showing how far up — or, far more often, down — I…

A FEW YEARS AFTER HE HAD RETIRED, Stanley Baldwin was travelling on a packed train. He was in his seventies, lame and arthritic, but forced to stand because nobody would give up their seat for him. Enoch Powell famously observed that all political lives end in failure, but “Honest Stanley” suffered more than his fair share of ignominy and disgrace. Many modern historians are more sympathetic to Baldwin, even on disarmament, on which he was simply wary of public opinion. He was the dominant political figure of the 1920s and 30s. He led the Conservative party for 14 years, and fought five general elections. In each of those, the Conservatives won the largest share of votes, even when they could not form a government. He was prime minister on three…

Write to The Critic by email at letters@thecritic.co.uk including your address and telephone number ANOTHER BBC COVER-UP Your excellent article by Tom Mangold (THE BIG LIE: THE INSIDE STORY OF THE BBC’S BASHIR COVER-UP, DECEMBER/JANUARY) brought to mind another, and arguably more outrageous, cover-up by the bosses at the Beeb because they used at least £330,000 of taxpayers’ money to do so. The Balen Report was commissioned by the BBC to put paid to constant complaints of anti-Israel bias. The moment the report was delivered it was buried. When asked, the BBC refused to say what was in it and refused to publish any part of it. When a Freedom of Information request was made, the Corporation immediately put in train legal action to prevent publication of any part of…

“My priorities are the public’s priorities,” Rishi says. Akshata looks puzzled. “Building a swimming pool?” she asks. “No! Reducing inflation. James says I need to be the people’s prime minister.” James is Rishi’s friend. He used to write nice things about him in the newspapers, but now he’s come to work for us full-time. He’s married to Allegra, who used to work for us and then went to work for Boris and then had to stop working for him because she didn’t go to enough parties. Rishi says it’s good having James around because it reminds him of school, but it’s also sad because it means there isn’t anyone writing nice things about him any more. These days James spends his time explaining politics to Rishi. “People are worried about…

LAST OCTOBER, THE ACTING vice-chancellor of Cambridge University, Dr Anthony Freeling, made a confession, widely reported in the press. He confessed that he is baffled by “decolonisation”. The word, he said, “has been misused to such an extent that I don’t think, if I’m honest, I can give an accurate definition”. I sympathise with his bafflement because “decolonisation” can mean a variety of different things, some of which make good sense, but others, very bad sense indeed. And the bad ones smuggle themselves into university departments under cover of the good. The original and most natural home of “decolonisation” is in former British colonies. There it can mean something entirely reasonable. For example, in 1986 the Kenyan novelist and playwright, Ngugi wa Thiong’o published a book with the title, Decolonising…

IN THE SUMMER OF 1932, as Hitler’s Brownshirts roamed the streets, hunting down their racial and ideological enemies, Max Beckmann began painting the most important picture of his career. Seven feet high and ten feet across, this monumental triptych was a dramatic departure from his previous pictures, which had made him the most feted artist in Germany. Throughout the 1920s, Max Beckmann captured the zeitgeist of the Weimar Republic, mixing sorrow and champagne (as his art dealer, Israel Ber Neumann, put it). His dynamic, claustrophobic paintings evoked the queasy excitement of that era — its narcotic glamour, its dark eroticism, its aura of impending doom. Now, with Hitler in the ascendant and the Weimar Republic on the brink of collapse, Beckmann embarked on a different sort of painting that was…

‘‘EXPERIENCE, THOUGH noon auctoritee/Were in this world, is right ynogh for me,” goes the opening of the Wife of Bath’s first-person prologue in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (c. 1387) — a statement brilliantly translated for our own age in 2000 by the poet Jean Binta Breeze as “My life is my own bible” in her poem “The Wife of Bath in Brixton Market” which reworks Chaucer’s original in modern Jamaican English. Such spin-offs from the archetypal character — who also lies behind James Joyce’s Molly Bloom — intrigue Marion Turner in this fascinating exploration of the Wife and her afterlives. You don’t have to have read Chaucer in the original Middle English, or even a modern literary spin-off, to have heard of Wife of Bath. She’s a brand name all will…

JOHN RUSSELL, 6TH DUKE of Bedford (1766-1839), was a younger son who unexpectedly inherited a dukedom and vast estates including Covent Garden and Bloomsbury, in London, where he built the magnificent neoclassical market hall in the former and completed urban development of the latter around five new garden squares. His wife Georgina (1781-1853) was the daughter of Jane, Duchess of Gordon (1749-1812), the pioneer late-Georgian populariser of the Highlands with her Lodge at Kinrara in Perthshire, two generations before Queen Victoria at Balmoral. The 6th Duke strove to complete his brother’s agricultural and architectural improvements, and to continue the family’s support for Foxite Whiggery; Georgina perpetuated her mother’s love of the Scottish landscape. Their joint marital career is the subject of this book. John felt overshadowed by his more handsome…

‘‘ONE OF THE CENTRAL conflicts of the movie business,” says Charles Elton, “is that the studio wants a director with a vision and then complains about how costly that vision is.” The director Michael Cimino is known for one movie, which was a phenomenal success despite the odds, The Deer Hunter (1978), and another, Heaven’s Gate (1980), which was a such a monumental turkey that it became the poster child for failure, until it was belatedly recognised as a masterpiece 32 years after its release. “Of all Hollywood directors”, says Elton, “Cimino is one of the most fascinating, mysterious, and enigmatic figures, both reviled and praised, his controversial behaviour well-documented but often misunderstood.” Cimino described himself as a child prodigy, though he did not specify in what respect. He grew…

NEW YEAR, NEW LIFE. As we march under cover of bravado into 2023, the first piece of good news is an impressive debut novel whose achievement largely matches its ambition. The New Life by Tom Crewe, an editor at the London Review of Books, is a story set in late Victorian England of men and women we would now call gay — even queer — but for whom the language then was still developing terms. “Inverts” is the preferred epithet in the novel, though one character, casually, prefers “sods”. At the book’s heart is John Addington, married man, father of three, writer and trustafarian (as it wasn’t then called), pushing 50 and only now deciding to live as his homosexual nature dictates. “Is this happening again? Just say,” inquires his…

THERE HAS NEVER BEEN a worse time to go to music college. Fees are astronomical, expenses sky-high. In London, you will spend £9,000 a year on tuition and twice as much on living costs. Any major US college will set you back $80-100,000 a year, for three years. Still thinking about it? Let’s assume your gifted child has done well enough to win a scholarship. Even better, a full upkeep grant of the type that the Curtis Institute (Philadelphia) and Colburn School (Los Angeles) offer. No costs, then, to the parents. But what kind of care will your child receive? One recent Christmas, Juilliard threw all foreign students out of its dorms in order to save on heating. Curtis has a long history of student rape, now independently investigated. At…

IN THE SUMMER of 1943, the Allies landed in Sicily, a precursor to the campaign for the Italian mainland. Control of the newly conquered territories was given to a body known as the Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories. One of the units within AMGOT was the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives programme (MFAA), whose 400 members were tasked with preserving cultural heritage in theatres of war. The work of the “Monuments Men” in northern Europe was brought to wider attention with the 2014 film of that name but they were far from the only people safeguarding buildings, paintings, statues and art works at risk from damage, looting and German-organised theft. The exhibition currently running at the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome, “Liberated Art 1937-1947”, is not about the 27…

BACK IN THE AUTUMN OF 2015 I was a frequent visitor to Keleti station in Budapest. I was living in the Hungarian capital and working as a foreign correspondent. The grand, ochre Austro-Hungarian building was my gateway to many reporting adventures, its trains rolling south to the Balkans or east to Ukraine. But this time the station itself was the story. Budapest was the epicentre of the international migration crisis. Keleti and its surrounds had become a surreal, inner-city refugee camp. Each morning crowds of commuters picked a path through police and hundreds of camped-out migrants. I remember watching a middle-aged man and his young daughter sleeping on cardboard, his arm resting protectively on her shoulders. I was moved by the stories I heard, of families fleeing war and destruction.…

IF EVER A RESTAURANT needed a therapist, it’s the Barry Room. Never have I eaten anywhere so painfully lacking in self-esteem, so hand-wringingly incapable of making eye contact, so desperate not to draw attention to itself. Which is odd, because the Barry Room is the upscale dining room at the House of Lords. Whatever I was expecting as I was escorted through the magniloquent Pugin camp-fest of St Stephen’s Hall it wasn’t the gastronomic equivalent of Fanny Price. The restaurant is reached via a crooked, corporation-carpeted staircase which absolutely doesn’t resemble a thrilling secret passage which might exclude people who didn’t know it was there; once attained the room could be very pretty, the plain stone walls a restful contrast to the hyperchromatic pageantry sprawled all over the rest of…

The King’s Road has seen some sights. Once a private highway so royalty need not queue en route to Kew, by the sixties Chelsea’s high street had metamorphosed into a mecca for modish counterculture. Skimpy skirts and kinky boots electrified the locale as Mitford and Mosley types moved out and Mary Quant and Malcolm McLaren moved in. But little lasts for long and the march of the neo-gentry has seen the scene shift again; the strip is once more the home of the moneyed, if not always the connected, classes. I say little lasts for long because there remain a few fixed points in this ever-changing world. Two of them are Martin Ellis Jones and his partner Alexandra Shanahan. You may not have heard of them, but they know everybody…

YO, BITCHES. AS 2023 takes shape, might I recommend a radical fashion idea? Buy nothing, take a break, collect yourself, take stock, impose a palette cleanse, find out who you are, solve world peace etc. Just don’t acquire a single garment. Instead, sort clothes, mend clothes, rid yourself of clothes. Th ink about clothes, but don’t purchase the fuckers. Automatically, you’re going to be a lot more fashionable. And the longer you keep this up, the more bracingly au courant you will be. I say this because I’m going to be doing it, and, man, I am cool. So cool, in fact, that I’m going to be going clothes sober for the entire year in a breaking no-/ exceedingly low-buy style era. Why? Well, you know, the planet, financial apocalypse,…

WHEN A FORMER RECTOR of St Clement Danes died of tuberculosis on the French Riviera some 150 years ago, it caused little stir back in England. His 1853 tract, Dangerous Errors of Romanism, was scarcely known; his stirring sermon on Crimea, which had earned him a picture in the Illustrated London News, was long forgotten; and the 12 runs he made batting at No 3 for Oxford in the first Varsity cricket match in 1827 did not merit an obit in Wisden. The Church Times did not mention this muscular Christian until 1966, almost a century after his death. For decades his grave in a hilltop cemetery overlooking the Mediterranean lay covered with weeds until it was rediscovered in the 1950s. Yet later this year it will become a place…