Indholdsfortegnelse for April 2023 i The Critic

DESPITE NINETEENTH-CENTURY German jibes about das Land öhne Musik, Britain has long been the singing nation, thanks to its peerless choral tradition. Cultivated since Tudor times amid an ecology of Oxbridge colleges, amateur choral societies, and church choirs, the BBC entered the scene a century ago to play its own crucial role in the nurturing and dissemination of this cherished tradition, commissioning an endless stream of new works, performed by its expert — if overworked and underpaid — vocalists. So much so that no less a monumental figure than Pierre Boulez could claim that the jewel in the corporation’s entire musical crown is the BBC Singers. These 20 gifted sight-readers, who turn on a sixpence from a Harrison Birtwistle premiere to a Christmas carol and back, are widely regarded as the…

LAW REPORTS HAVE NEVER been ranked highly as a form of literature. And yet, within the printed volumes of higher casuistry, the careful reader may find stories of the human condition which would otherwise have escaped the written record, slices of the mundane forever etched on paper through the process of the law. Predominantly they are about greed and deceit; but even in a place as unpromising as the reports of the old Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division one can occasionally glean a love story. In October 1970, Mr Justice Bagnall, whose usual diet of cases consisted of ugly disputes involving matrimonial property, had an unusual application before him. A Gertrude Meyer sought a declaration that she had been married, and had always been married to Isaak Meyer, deceased. But…

THE CONSERVATIVES TAKE comfort in being Britain’s oldest political party. As history aficionados, some will recall Tacitus’s quip about an ill-fated emperor that “everyone thought they would be capable of governing, until they actually took charge”. The Roman historian was writing about a time of unprecedented political bloodshed, in which supreme power changed hands repeatedly in the so-called Year of the Four Emperors. Nearly two millennia later, Boris Johnson can console himself that his ousting was just the start of a modern tribute act by the Tories in their own Year of the Three Prime Ministers. Rishi Sunak came out on top from the turmoil, elevated to the leadership by the acclamation of Tory MPs. If the British people had hailed him with the same acclaim, he would be safely…

THE LONDON CLASSICISTS OF COLOUR (LCOC)is an activist group for Classics students at the University of London who want to “decolonise” their curriculum. In January this year it released an open letter to the University’s colleges, urging them to “implement a series of changes in their academic approaches, racial and ethnic representations, and treatment of people of colour in student bodies and faculties”. The letter inevitably makes reference to the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, and clearly aligns with that movement’s ideology: that people of black and ethnic minority origin are systematically and structurally discriminated against in all traditional institutions, including academia. Of course, this is nothing new. When I was studying Classics at the University of London a couple of years ago, LCOC were on manoeuvres. Its members were…

IT MUST HAVE BEEN THE CACOFIDDLE THAT DID it. On a December evening 16 months ago, given a brief evening-release by the clown-suited prison-warders purporting to run the country, I found myself at a beguiling concert in a Hampstead church where the little band, as raffish and bohemian as Dexy’s Midnight Runners, swayed and tootled through their tunes. As it happens, the music was seventeenth-century French groove, not the folksy boogie you might expect, but the atmosphere was festive and bibulous, and among the instruments there it stood: the legendary, chopped-down double bass bespangled with bells, a bunch of percussion and a rudimentary swanee whistle — handling a bangin’ sword-fight air from Jean-Baptiste Lully’s music to Le Bourgeois gentilhomme with verve and aplomb, what’s more. But had time itself been…

● The caption of a very large photograph on a recent edition of the Daily Telegraph read, “THE BRITISH TV BOSS WHO DECIDES WHAT YOU WATCH”. The photograph was of the recently appointed chief content officer of Netflix. Do we live in North Korea where, in the public space, speeches of the leader are escapable only by deafness? That many people in Britain subscribe to Netflix is indisputable; but even they choose among programmes that are offered to them to watch. Moreover, Netflix is not a monopoly; other channels are available. It is even possible to watch nothing at all. Does the miswording of the caption matter? I think it does. It implies that you are but the plaything of others; and since readers of the Telegraph are probably, even…

SHOULD THE GOVERNMENT increase taxation on British companies in order to pay large sums to foreign companies? The question may seem silly. Of course the government should not increase taxation in this way, not least because in many cases the British and foreign companies are competitors. However, discussion of these matters is not in the least silly. All too often in modern Britain, politicians and civil servants lose the plot and do things that are against the national interest. In his March Budget, Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, upset many people in the business world by raising the standard rate of corporation tax from 19 per cent to 25 per cent. But he had to do something about the public finances. The budget deficit is forecast to have…

YOU KNOW HOW THIS BEGINS:We all think we know him: dressing gown; the cigarette holder; the utterly imitable voice, recognisable by even the very worst impression. It has become a cliché to note even in passing what a cliché the cliché has become, before polishing off the opening paragraph with the eternal Coward Question: “But what really lies behind the mask?” Until now, biographers’ attempts at an answer have comprised, perforce, fantastical dollops of conjecture, their primary sources being invariably unreliable and sometimes entirely made up: Coward’s autobiographies (from diaries which, as his fame increased, were written with publication in mind — thoroughly expurgated and exaggerated); his contemporaries’ haute couture anecdotes, hacked about and repurposed for the next encomium or hatchet job; dust-sheets slung over his lower-middle-class start in life;…

AT 40, I AM NOW APPROACHING the foothills of Hagdom. Two of the Gen-X women in whose sensible shoes I’m following are established writers, and now first-time authors, Mary Harrington and Victoria Smith. In Feminism Against Progress, the provocative Harrington warns of a future in which humans are conceived of as products. In Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women, the insightful Smith digs into layers of intergenerational misogyny. Both have taken a moment to survey the path below and ahead of them. Each recall how as university students they flirted with attractively airy concepts about identity, before material reality kicked in: “Feminism”, says Smith, “is an idea, not a body; it’s not dragged down by the accumulation of flesh, relationships and compromise.” As with so many women, for Smith (below)…

THE “SPRINGTIME OF NATIONS”, as historians decades later started calling that extraordinary year of revolutions, began in Palermo and Naples in January 1848, when a series of violent demonstrations forced the Bourbon ruler of The Two Sicilies from the throne. In Paris on 23 February the so-called “bourgeois” King Louis Philippe abdicated, the chief minister Francois Guizot fled for his life and France’s Second Republic was declared. Riots broke out in Prague, Wallachia (Ukraine), Venice and Milan; all Habsburg lands where people had struggled for national independence for decades, if not centuries. Pope Pius IX escaped from Rome at the dead of night disguised as a lowly parish priest. There were riots in Berlin, where the Prussian king barely escaped with his life, and in a dozen other German princely…

WRITING ABOUT MUSIC, as the comedian Martin Mull put it, is like dancing about architecture. Novelists who try their hand at the story-about-a-band genre rarely produce their best goods, even when the results are interesting (Don DeLillo’s Great Jones Street, Iain Banks’s Espedair Street, David Mitchell’s Utopia Avenue. What is it about street name titles anyway?). With her debut novel, the Jamaican-born British writer Jacqueline Crooks has taken a different and more assured angle, by writing not about the music itself but the effect it has on the listener: and, in this case, the dancer and raver. Fire Rush — the very title invoking the “arrhythmic electricity” summoned to the body by the music — is set from 1978 to 1982, a world of cassettes, cheques and answering machine messages,…

● IT HAS BEEN 65 YEARS since the New York Philharmonic last appointed the right conductor, so long ago that hardly anyone alive remembers it except as legend. The ensuing vacancy of imagination has meant that every well-intentioned baton since then has been held up against Leonard Bernstein’s and found wanting in every department — music, human and media. Bernstein transformed the Philharmonic. He imported symphonies by Mahler, Nielsen and Ives, promoted living American composers, reached out to young audiences as no maestro before or since and used the power of television to proselytise orchestral music across a mass audience. It helped that most viewers knew him as the super-cool composer of West Side Story. Bernstein was music director for a record 11 years. His successors were doomed by comparison.…

● IN DECEMBER 2017, TWO MONTHS after the first flurry of sexual abuse allegations were levelled at Harvey Weinstein, the Metropolitan Museum in New York received a petition with more than 8,000 signatories. It requested that the museum remove Thérèse Dreaming, a painting of 1938 by Balthasar Klossowski de Rola, the FrancoPolish artist better known as Balthus (left). The picture (right), which had been hanging in the Met since 1998, portrays a pubescent girl, eyes closed in reverie, with one leg propped up so that her skirt and slip fall back exposing her underwear and Mia Merrill, the originator of the petition, wrote that: “it can be strongly argued that this painting romanticises the sexualisation of a child” and that “the Met is, perhaps unintentionally, supporting voyeurism and the objectification…

● IT’S A STRANGE, almost paradoxical life, working as a journalist in a foreign country, as both Jake Adelstein and I can attest. While Adelstein was based in Tokyo in the 1990s I spent much of my journalistic career living in Budapest, covering central Europe and the Balkans. I moved temporarily to Berlin and Paris, but that shining city on the Danube kept pulling me back. I immersed myself in Hungarian culture and politics, shopped at the same supermarkets, drank in the same bars, ate in the same restaurants as the locals. I learnt the language, married a Hungarian and we raised our children there. I became a kind of semi-native by osmosis. Sometimes people thought I actually was a Magyar (until I started speaking Hungarian). Yet however much I…

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LAST MONDAY SOMETHING extraordinary happened. I walked into my bedroom at about quarter to eleven (I had been drinking vermouth in the bath again) and found my girlfriend reading a book. She has made vague attempts before in the five years I’ve known her and she insists that when she was doing history at Oxford she read “loads of books”. But to see her, judging by where the bookmark was, a solid two thirds of the way through something is quite an event. Leaning across the bed and noting that the book was The Cocker Spaniel, Care and Training for Home and Sport, I was reminded about the recent purchase I’d made. “It says you’ve got to read it all the way through before the dog arrives” Constance barked as…

FORGIVE THE BLUNTNESS, but I don’t think you can really afford that holiday you’ve booked this summer. You eat out far too often. And you drink way too much. What’s it got to do with me? Well, I know a lot better than you how you should be spending your money. That’s the rationale behind the so-called “affordability checks” which have sprung up everywhere you try to place a bet and which threaten to destroy racing as a viable sport. Which is, of course, the intention. In my first column here, last May, I wrote that the gambling review was “due soon”. We are still waiting, but its anticipated affordability checks are already with us as a result of bookies running scared of demands by the Gambling Commission. In 2020,…

IN HIS “BLEAKLY COMIC” 1975 play Otherwise Engaged, the dramatist Simon Gray sets up a moment which must be one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen on stage. The drama revolves around the publisher Simon Hench, who wishes to spend an evening by himself listening to Parsifal, but is constantly interrupted by family, friends and nemeses, including his brother, the schoolmaster Stephen, who bears a grudge against Hench’s acquaintance, a louche, hard-drinking writer named Jeff Golding. The hack informed him on a previous meeting that “people — he meant me, of course — only went into teaching because they were latent pederasts”. Asked to retract his statement, it is said of Golding “he offered to take back the latent, and congratulated me on my luck”. And when the writer…

FOR REMAINERS RADICALISED BY Britain’s decision to leave the European Union, it is a surprise that our anguished debates about whether to join in or stand back from European integration has in fact gone on for decades. In 1950, Winston Churchill used a Commons debate to needle Clement Attlee for refusing to contemplate joining the Schuman Plan, which led to the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community and eventually the European Union. A year later, Churchill was back in Number Ten, yet showed no interest in doing what he had previously demanded of Attlee. British concerns about supranationalism and national sovereignty always ran deep. There are few things more important than high politics, but one of them, as Bill Shankly would attest, is football. And here while British,…

BEING INVITED TO TALK AT A CONFERENCE for psychoanalysts in London last month was not, on the face of it, a surprise. The topic was trans identification in children; I’ve written a book on this and other trans-related issues. What was surprising, given the transactivist tactic of demanding “no debate”, was that the event went ahead as planned. My refusal to agree that men who identify as women thereby become women means that when I’m invited to speak, there’s usually trouble. Last March I was asked to present at a conference for NHS psychiatrists — and disinvited after a smear campaign. The conference was eventually cancelled. When philosopher Arif Ahmed asked me to speak at Gonville and Caius College Cambridge in October, the college master emailed fellows and students describing me…

I AM LEARNING TO DRIVE.The most remarkable thing about this is that I’ve managed to get so far through adult life without doing it already — particularly given that I grew up in a village where buses were mythical beasts, to be summoned with sacrifices and beseeching prayers. But I’m doing it now, and it’s going pretty well. Next stop: the theory test, so I’m practising for the highway code multiple choice and hazard perception. If, unlike me, you got your licence pre-2002, you’ll never have experienced the uncanny valley of the hazard perception test: a series of computer-generated clips that simulate the experience of driving with your head stapled immovably to the seat. To pass, you have to identify the hazard and click the screen to show you’d react in…

BROWSING LINKEDIN IS ONE WAY to stalk the lives of half-remembered university acquaintances. There’s the expected glut of management consultants, a mandatory career path for the well-heeled humanities grad. But, for every short-lived stab at a PR-traineeship or hard-won project manager title, there will be a graduate employed in the charity sector. Not everyone is motivated by money — I certainly wasn’t. For do-gooding types who preferred to spend their final year at rallies rather than “women-in-business” conferences, the charity sector might seem a rational choice. After all, jobs in the sector are quite different from the old stereotype of grannies working in charity shops on behalf of starving donkeys. The modern charity sinecure is unabashedly radical, and increasingly commands an immense amount of power and capital. Is it any wonder…

● THERE HAS BEEN MUCH HANDWRINGING in the press lately over the progressive rewriting of Roald Dahl’s books, as though this were a bad thing. If I had my way, every copy of every book by every straight white male would be incinerated. Burning books that we don’t approve of is the only way to stop fascism. Dahl’s books are compendiums of violence masquerading as “fiction”. For instance, he describes the character of Augustus Gloop as “fat”, which is extremely offensive to People of Girth. Thankfully, the sensitivity readers at Puffin Books have replaced the word “fat” with “enormous”. This is much more empowering. I’m forever congratulating my friend Janine on her enormous hips. Other problematic terms have been excised from Dahl’s vile works, including “ugly” and “brute”. In addition,…

Crown your career with the clavichord. You cannot, I admit, play concertos with big ensembles, since it does not roar and thunder like the pianoforte; neither can you, surrounded by a large audience, sound above their shouts of bravo and make their cheers seem like the babbling of a brook … On a clavichord — soft and responsive to every breath of the soul — you shall find the sound-board of your heart. C.F.D. Schubart, Musikalische Rhapsodien (1786) WITH ROOTS REACHING DEEP INTO the recesses of musical memory, past the exotic origins of the lute and the rustic buzz of the shawm and crumhorn, perhaps even beyond the ancient taverns whence came the fiddle, the clavichord nonetheless had its heyday rather late compared to most instruments. In the three or…

MY FATHER ALWAYS LIVED DANGEROUSLY. His first memory, aged three, was of “the anxious, terrified face of my mother” as she coaxed him down from a high wall onto which he had climbed. “Little Paul” was a late child; Nana had lost one child in infancy and was not going to lose him too. Later he recalled an incident at the railway station when he was rescued from falling under a train. Amid the hullabaloo, the stationmaster was summoned, top hat and all. “My mother was no fool,” he recalled. She chided her son: “You have a disconcerting habit of drawing attention to yourself.” Nine decades and millions of words later, it is clear Nana was right. Paul Johnson’s ability to hold the attention of his readers for long enough…

THE EXTENSIVE LITANYof this book’s myriad problems is complicated by the fact that there is so little space in a review of this sort and the text itself is so amateurish. The aimless nature and flimsy discursive style of Dr Leah Broad’s text in the first hundred pages undermines any confidence the reader might have in what she has to say in the next three hundred or so. Such a weakness is positively tragic in light of the book’s ostensible focus on resurrecting public attention to four forgotten female composers, an aim with which reasonably open-minded readers will be in sympathy. Broad’s unwillingness to grapple with the actual music of her four subjects extends in equal measure to her discussion of the music of composers from the canon, which reads like…

AT THE START OF MY SECONDyear studying PP (I had by then blessedly dropped the E) at Oxford, I remember a bright-eyed fresher approaching my philosophy tutor, a man by the name of Bob Hargrave, in the bar. Having successfully identified A Philosopher, the new student eagerly asked: “What is the most profound existential question you can ask yourself?” Taking a drag on his cigarette before flicking the ash into the already-full tray, Bob (right) looked across the table and replied: “Well I’m 58 and my health is on the wane, and so I have to ask myself: have I already had my last sexual experience?” The poor, shocked fresher soon fled. This was not what he had expected from A Philosopher. And yet as he would learn over the…

GLANCE AT THE CONTENTS PAGE of Roger White’s magisterial survey of Georgian landscape buildings and you will see that Chapter 15 is titled “Ruins, Eyecatchers and Follies”. Go much further into the book, and it becomes apparent that this would do as a title for any one of the other 19 chapters. Because wherever you turn in Georgian Arcadia, you’re confronted with ruins, follies and eyecatchers — the richest, most varied collection of beautiful and bizarre structures that you’re ever likely to meet, all proof that while “a man might make a pretty landskip out of his own possessions”, when it came to populating that landscape with buildings, excess and eccentricity were the order of the day. You want somewhere to keep the ducks? Let’s put a three-storey cast-iron pagoda…

HOW TO BE A WRITER (Little, Brown £16.99), Marcus Berkmann’s invaluable guide to the perils of the freelance life, has an ominous little sub-chapter entitled “Getting Paid”. Its highlight, or nadir, is the story of the occasion, five years ago, when Berkmann (right) was rung up by “a languid posh bloke from The Times” and asked if he would like to write a humorous column for Saturday’s paper at a fee of £500 (good money, by the way.) Feigning nonchalance, yet secretly delighted at the prospect of such largesse, Berkmann said that, yes, he supposed he could do this. The piece duly appeared, unaltered, and seemed to go down well. Ten days later, Berkmann telephoned his contact to see about payment. It was too late. Languid posh bloke had been sacked.…

● EVEN BY THE OLYMPIAN standards of the Covent Garden stalls, it was a top effort: the old dude beside me was snoring happily within five minutes of curtain-up on Rusalka. Actually at 200 quid a pop it’s not such a bad deal: for a start, you miss the brain-formattingly dull, virtue-semaphoring production they’ve served up, Dvorak’s music is lovely and lulling, the seats are cosy, and you get two intervals to top up the tanks. Arguably the Royal Opera should think about a cunning pivot into the sleep-therapy sector. March looked uncannily like the good old days in more ways than that, too. While Covent Garden retrenched to traditional strengths, English National Opera over at the Coliseum was on fizzing form with the delayed first instalment to another of…

● JACOBEAN PLAYWRIGHTS ran the Horror Channel of the late seven teenth century, imbued with an appetite for incest, poisoning, and corpses as hearty as any twenty-first century television drama executive in search of a postwater-shed audience. Whenever someone complains that our screens are full of sex, death and female suffering, we might refer them to John Webster’s bone-chillers, The Duchess of M a l fi and The White Devil, or Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women. Long before the jargon of “female empowerment” took hold, these stories also tell us that women are damned if they play the game of sexual availability and just as doomed if they don’t. Yet unlike their Shakespearean predecessors, referenced and parodied by contemporary dramatists, the great playhouse bodice-poisoners get infrequent attention. EMERGING TALENT AND…

● IMPERIALISM IS A TREE with many thorns, as Nigel Biggar has found out. At the BBC they take what headmasters used to call “a dim view” of an historical phenomenon considered to be uniquely British. Except when it comes to cultural imperialism, when programme-makers become mustard keen. Then they can’t get enough. Turn on the wireless at any hour, and you may think this country has been infected by a linguistic virus. Words and phrases that were once regarded as intrusive Americanisms have become commonplace. Curveball (what’s wrong with bouncer?) and stepping up to the plate (taking a fresh guard?) are daily horrors which merit six firm strokes of the cane. The wrong syllables in simple words like “harass”, “marathon” and “research” are stressed repeatedly. “Multiple” does service for…

TABLE-HOPPING USED to be a thing, something you read about in Tom Wolfe novels. Park Avenue people rubbing power shoulders at Le Cirque or Lutece, a merger here, a movie deal there, in between who was skiing in Aspen or summering on Nantucket. It always sounded so glamorous, in an Eighties kind of way, but I’d never seen it done until I lunched at Dorian. Opened last year on Notting Hill’s Talbot Road, the restaurant aspired to be “a bistro for locals” so given its location in the postcode that’s been living its best life since 1997, I had high expectations of both the premises and the crowd. The room is charming and simple — ubiquitous green banquettes, wrap-around bar with a view to the open kitchen, confident plate-glass windows…

I WAS PLANNING ON WRITING about The Restory this month. You know, the haute repair operation with a base in Selfridges, generally considered The Future of Fashion. Only the day I started on this it was declared no more, its founders falling on their needles. The Restory was extremely good at what it did, however its costs were exorbitant even by Planet Fashion standards. When I sampled it, I took in three items: a couture confection that is basically an entire bird’s wing sported across the skull to signal my resentment at weddings; a £300 (thus “mid-market”) Little Liffner leather reticule desperate for a spruce; and a treasured 30 quid pleather Zara clutch in need of an overhaul. We sallied forth with the titfer — generously subbed by Selfridges —…

Write to The Critic by email at letters@thecritic.co.uk including your address and telephone number PLANE UNTRUSTWORTHY A sincere “thank you” for the helpful, fact-filled (unlike Wikipedia) and ultimately depressing article “WHO WATCHES THE WIKIPEDIA EDITORS?” (MARCH). As an example, I would like to point readers to the Wikipedia entry for Norwich City Station (checked 20 March 2023). It states, “The station was further damaged when a badly damaged USAF B24 Liberator bomber was deliberately crashed there to avoid greater loss of life”, with no reference to check this. Suffice it to say that proper history books, for instance A J Wrottesley’s The Midland and Great Northern Joint Railway, and N J L Digby’s The Stations and Structures of The Midland and Great Northern Joint Railway: Volume 2, Norwich to Peterborough…

WHEN, IN 1951, IGOR STRAVINSKY and his wife Vera took tea with the Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna of Russia, his biographer Robert Craft was present, and he was not impressed. Stravinsky bowed deeply; Vera curtsied, and — as Craft noticed, bewildered — “neither spoke until spoken to by the Princess Maria, to whom they listened attentively”. “I was astonished by their transformation in the presence of Romanoff royalty,” confessed Craft years later, in his book Stravinsky: Discoveries and Memories. “By this time the Princess was an unknown and impoverished exile, yet the Stravinskys conducted themselves in a subservient manner that I would never have thought possible.” Poor Craft. This self-described “secular humanist” from upstate New York spent 23 years as sidekick, assistant and Boswell to Stravinsky’s Johnson. He worked harder…

MUSIC, WE KNOW, IS ALL ABOUT PASSION: and I don’t mean Handel’s Messiah. I’m talking about the contemporary currency of passion. I’m talking about the last half-dozen decades of popular music: rock, pop and dance, where a four-to-the-floor beat drives the body and frees the mind so that — as Funkadelic so memorably put it half a century ago — your ass will follow. It is, in short, a visceral thing. (Viscera: the bodily organs, the pumping heart, the squirming guts.) It is instinctive and intuitive — babies can respond to music in the womb — not cerebral or rational. It is the driver of involuntary toe-tapping, head-nodding and booty-twerking. What more is there to say, or think, about pop music than the immortal words of Janice Nicholls on Thank…

MY CHURCH TURNS 900 this month. Nine hundred years is a lot. You feel the transience of your time very strongly when your institution celebrates its nonacentennial. Even my long-reigning predecessor, Rector Abbiss, who finished his 65-year incumbency in 1884 still wearing the ecclesiastical periwig, barely served for seven per cent of the church’s life. And what a lot has gone on in St Bartholomew the Great in those nine hundred years. The church has been an Augustianian Friary, a home for Sir Richard Rich, a Dominican Friary, a Presbyterian Church and an ordinary C of E Parish Church. Its gate witnessed the Peasants’ Revolt, the execution of William Wallace and the burnings at the stake of both Catholics and Protestants. Parts of it have been hived off and restored…

NORFOLK IS NOT MERRY ENGLAND. It never has been, never will be. Cut off from the rest of the country, this water-locked land of barley fields, ruined churches, sandy lanes and Viking names lingers at the end of a long road that leads to nowhere else. At its centre is Norwich, a city to which, in the words of the novelist Ralph Hale Mottram, “most Englishmen have never been”. The stones of Norwich are flint. Brittle and sharp, they are the stuff that arrows are made of, not statues. Beyond Norfolk is nothing but the North Sea: historically, Norwich has looked to its neighbour Amsterdam as much as London, and even now the daily flight from its little airport connects at Schiphol, not Heathrow. Norwich has been a cut-off city facing…

PIANISTS ARE TIGHTROPE-WALKERS. Where some other instrumentalists need a partner, the pianist’s calling is to explore the greatest works of the greatest composers with only a score for company. As many of those composers — Chopin, Liszt, Rachmaninov — were often cosy virtuosi, it is a brave soul who settles in front of a keyboard. You need nimble fingers, and a head for heights. The famous ones have always attracted followers; sometimes zealots. Artur Schnabel, Vladimir Horowitz and Claudio Arrau had noisy fan clubs in “the golden age” of the mid-twentieth century, just as Martha Argerich, Krystian Zimerman and Daniil Trifonov have today. Bridging the gap were Alfred Brendel, Sviatoslav Richter and, when he was still in short pants, Daniel Barenboim. In British musical life, foreign has always meant “exotic”.…

THE LATE SIR CHRISTOPHER MEYER, the closest thing modern British diplomacy has produced to a public figure, enjoyed comparing his trade to prostitution. Both are ancient trades and neither enjoys a wholly favourable reputation. Any modern diplomat will discreetly confirm that the profession is far from the anodyne, flag-emoji civility and coyly embarrassed glamour they project on Twitter. And while none of our modern representatives are working in quite the same conditions as their predecessor Sir Thomas Roe, they may well find uncanny parallels with his unfortunate mission. The fledgling and precarious East India Company, founded in 1600, had sent representatives to the Mughal court before, but they were mere merchants and messengers. The stern rebuff they received called for a formal representative of the King. After the company persuaded James…

IN 1956 YOUNG PETER BURKE, BETWEEN school and university, was doing his military service in Singapore. The officers were only on base from six in the morning till four in the afternoon. After that, Her Majesty’s Service was replaced by self-service: black market scams, protection rackets, beds for the night. Young Burke assumed the officers had no idea what was going on, though one might wonder if their strategic withdrawal to their quarters wasn’t precisely intended to give their men a free hand. Ignorance takes many forms — there is, here, the officers’ blind ignorance and Burke’s wilful ignorance. Ignorance ends with an extended glossary of 59 terms, though many are synonyms and they can quickly be reduced to asymmetrical, invincible, culpable, conscious, creative, group — along with a few other…

● LEWIS CAPALDI IS EITHER an improbable popstar, or an inevitable one, and where you stand on that depends a lot on your relationship to social media. If the first way you encounter the Scottish singer-songwriter is through his songs — guileless, unguarded ballads delivered in a soulful rasp — then the man himself is probably going to come as a surprise. Because Capaldi sings like a heartthrob, but he doesn’t look like most people’s idea of one. Including his own: pale, scruffy and overweight, the 26-year-old regularly jokes about his own unattractiveness. “I’ve found in my travels that I am equally repulsive to women halfway around the world as I am to them in my hometown, which is a heart-warming thing,” he told one interviewer. His image can only…

● DUNGEONS & DRAGONS has never really been cool. It was a shorthand for nerdiness. Those of us who played it in our teenage years generally kept quiet later on about our evenings spent pretending to be a wizard in the Forgotten Realms, slaying goblins and collecting treasure. But since being featured in Netflix’s Stranger Things, the greatest role-playing game of them all is having a bit of a moment. A generation ago, parents worried that D&D, with its talk of spells and demons and fighting, was something that might lead their vulnerable teens down dark paths. Now those teens have grown up and are grateful to be able to offer their own kids a pastime that doesn’t involve a screen. Starter sets appeared in Water-stones. Twenty-sided dice put away…

● JUST BEFORE CHRISTMAS, a visitor to my wife’s annual jewellery exhibition told me about a new housing development in Scotland called Tornagrain. She made it sound Utopian — a new town east of Inverness designed in a way which will incorporate schools and hospitals, solid, well-built houses which people want to buy and has not attracted the wrath of local communities. She had been to visit it as a potential model for new housing in Oxford, which, like so many towns and cities, desperately needs housing, but finds itself thwarted by well-orchestrated, middle-class opposition and — as happened in the Chesham and Amersham by-election — hostility to government housing policy at the polls. I decided to investigate how Tornagrain had come about and what lessons, if any, it might…

EVERYTHING ABOUT Weinert in Argentina suggests that the company has been there for generations. There’s the winery itself, housed in a Romanesque nineteenthcentury building in Mendoza, full of huge oak casks of slowly ageing wine. But most of all it’s in the glass. In a country where the wines can be clean to the point of tedium, Weinert stands out. Its wines are full of heady fruit, like cooked strawberries or maraschino cherries; there’s old leather, nuts and hints of vinegar and farmyard. The nearest comparison would be something like Château Musar from Lebanon or Lopez de Heredia in Rioja. Yet its first vintage was 1976. The founder, Bernardo Weinert, was born in Brazil of Austrian descent. He came from a small German-speaking community in the south of the country…

I NCENSED OVER TEACHERS’ strikes. Literally. Cannot believe that after shelling out for all three kids to attend different private schools the staff at Hector’s and Lyra’s have jumped on the union bandwagon and are striking. I mean, come on! I know, I know, the insane fees are no indication of staff salaries. But the amount the teachers get from parents in John Lewis vouchers is not just in line with inflation rates, it’s like a whole currency of its own. And let’s be real here. Who are these teachers? All bloody childless women under 30. What do they actually need to buy, beyond a few Zara dresses for parents’ evenings and a gallon of Prosecco every Friday after school? They don’t even have to buy lunch, FFS! AT LEAST…