Indholdsfortegnelse for December 2023 / January 2024 i The Critic

NOVEMBER BROUGHT VAST “FREE Palestine” marches to the streets of Britain and the world. Those who protested were not put off by unabashed demands for Israel’s elimination or that organisers included Muhammad Kathem Sawalha — whose history as a senior Hamas commander has, interestingly, proved no bar to gaining British citizenship. Neither has weeks of coverage of bombed-out Gazan homes softened the views of Israel’s supporters who see it as a necessary price to demolish the nest of pitiless terrorism. Such demonstrations show that we have, rightly, not forgotten the Palestinian people — displaced and rendered stateless for decades — nor the plight of Jews worldwide, attacked, abused and threatened, forced to post security guards outside every school and synagogue. But other conflicts and injustices, as or more terrible, command far…

TAINTED HERO Political heroes are difficult to find these days. This may be one reason why Rod Dreher, along with members of the American Alt Right, has taken to eulogising Viktor Orbán (GUARDIAN OF LIBERAL FREEDOMS, NOVEMBER) along with the Hungarian prime minister’s success in halting economic migrants and his pro-family economic policies, both of which do indeed deserve respect. However, Dreher’s view that many criticisms made of Orbán are the result of liberal bias overlooks the fact that many of the most telling criticisms come from conservatives. In their judgment, Orbán’s policies have brought about a system of crony capitalism in which loyalty to Fidesz, the party he founded as a young anti-communist, has led to the emergence of a new elite similar in important respects to the old…

• “Jingle Bells!” Rishi is singing. “Starmer smells! Corbyn ran away!” We are putting up decorations to get ready for Christmas in a place called Chequers. It is a house in the country like the one we have in Yorkshire, only not as nice. The swimming pool is a lot chillier for a start. But Akshata says we have to make the most of it, because we probably won’t be here next year. She also tells the girls they aren’t to mention that to Rishi. “Is it going to be a surprise for Daddy?” “You know, I think it might be.” It has been a busy few weeks. At the start of November, Rishi came out of his study looking very excited. “I’m Red Meat Rishi!” he told Akshata. “I’m…

● The dishonesty of the standfirst given to a letter to the Guardian struck me at once: DESPERATE MIGRANTS ARE CROSSING THE CHANNEL BECAUSE THEY HAVE NO OTHER CHOICE. In other words, the migrants are automata, machines. Having no choice, they get into the boats and cross the Channel unconsciously, without knowing what they are doing. This is both demeaning and preposterous. If they were human beings, they could choose not to come: they could, for example, choose to stay in France. But this is where the word desperate comes in: poor people, they are fleeing absolute horror, which is why they have no choice. But absolute horror in France? No doubt France has its faults, but they are not such as to induce a state of desperation, certainly not…

MODERN CULTURE IS ENCHANTED by paganism. Go into the spirituality section of any major bookshop and you’ll find new releases with titles like Big Witch Energy or Rebel Folklore spelling a rivival of magical beliefs and practices. On TikTok, Gen-Zs have created virtual subcultures around Wicca and other “heathen” ways, with #WitchTok popularising spells, potions and observing pagan festivals. These movements, appealing to those seeking a romantic, environmentally-focused “return to nature” have been on the ascent in Britain since the 1960s. Filmmakers took note, never more memorably than 50 years ago this month when Robin Hardy’s cult horror film, The Wicker Man, was released. Though better remembered for its vernal imagery and soundtrack by Magnet, the film exposes a fascinating paradox: despite harking back to an ancient past, modern paganism…

STOOD SIDE BY SIDE THESE TWO BOOKS look like a comedy double act. At 820-plus pages long, Nicholas Shakespeare’s Ian Fleming is an Oliver Hardy-sized volume. Adam Sisman’s The Secret Life of John le Carré, on the other hand, is thinner than Stan Laurel’s little finger. No surprises there: whereas Shakespeare offers us what his subtitle calls The Complete Man, Sisman has already given us the full SP on his man in 2015’s John le Carré: The Biography. Alas, far from being the biography, that all but authorised book turned out to be only half a life. Even as Sisman was correcting his proofs, le Carré was putting the finishing touches to his own memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel. Neither book, though, got down and dirty. Sisman stopped being prim only in…

AQUESTION FOR YOUR NEXTChristmas quiz: which knighted British architectural historian went to the same school as the composer Richard Wagner? Answer: Sir Nikolaus Pevsner (1902–83), the émigré German scholar who became one of the most influential public intellectuals in post-war Britain. Pevsner went through a variety of self-reinventions along the way: from secular Jew to Christian convert; early enthusiast for Nazism to anti-Hitler polemicist in wartime Britain; 1920s champion of Modernism to 1960s ally of Betjeman in the campaign to save Victorian Gothic. Both he and Wagner attended the celebrated Thomasschule in Leipzig, albeit nine decades apart. Schooling was not the only thing the two had in common. Both started projects in their mid-thirties so huge in scale and in timespan for their fulfilment that only those with a slightly…

KEHINDE ANDREWS, PROFESSOR OF“Black Studies” at City University, Birmingham, has made a name for himself as the go-to talking head for punchy racial culture war debates on British TV. Once, on the BBC programme The Big Questions, Andrews and I were invited to discuss why “white working-class boys” were underperforming in education. Rather than seek to understand the socio-economic challenges of this demographic, Andrews argued that the claim perpetuated racist pseudoscience. Another time, I debated with him on ITV’s Good Morning Britain about whether Rule Britannia should be banned from the Proms. Unsurprisingly, Andrews accused the song of being wayciss. Now, in The Psychosis of Whiteness: Surviving the Insanity of a Racist World, Andrews elaborates on his racism-explains-everything thesis to explain that, well, racism explains everything. This baffling and wrong-headed…

A BOOKISH FRIEND SAID TO ME recently, “It’s been a terrible year for books.” Well, up to a point. The sheer volume of new novels, together with the difficulty of seeing through the thickets of bandwagonesque trendcentred publishing, mean it’s easy to feel oneself sub fiction. But at The Critic we are here to help. It’s time for our annual guide to the best new fiction of the year, which excludes those worthy candidates — including Tom Crewe’s The New Life, Jacqueline Crooks’s Fire Rush and Deborah Levy’s August Blue — already reviewed in these pages. The “if it’s not one thing, it’s your mother” award MOTHERS HAVE ALWAYS BEEN A RICH SEAM TO mine in fiction: the loving, the monstrous, the absent. In Elizabeth McCracken’s The Hero of This Book,…

Anton … and on ● THIS IS A WARNING OF HEAVY weather ahead. Next year marks the bicentenary of the birth of Anton Bruckner with incoming gales of his symphonies, nine of them numbered and two marked “0” and “00”. To add to the confusion, the symphonies exist in as many as nine different editions made by misguided fans and headstrong conductors. The real Bruckner (below) is not easily identified. The acidulous conductor Hans von Bülow called him “half simpleton, half genius”, which is not far from the truth. Johannes Brahms dismissed his works as “symphonic boa constrictors”. The Vienna critic Eduard Hanslick put down his eighth symphony as a “nightmarish caterwauling”. The British wit Thomas Beecham “noted six pregnancies and at least four miscarriages” in another symphony. It was…

● THINGS GENERALLY TEND to move at a stately pace in the museum world but currently there is a frenetic air to proceedings. In Britain, the reported theft of some 2,000 items from the British Museum set in course a train of events that still has a long way to play out. So far, one curator was dismissed earlier this year, although he professes his innocence, and the former director of the museum, Hartwig Fischer, brought forward his planned departure — or was not dissuaded from jumping — from the post he had held for seven years. The chair of trustees, George Osborne, has admitted the thefts were an “inside job” but has forborne from falling on his sword. the laxity revealed by the thefts has led to renewed calls…

● AMONG TELEVISION aficionados two series often vie for top place: Th e Wire and The Bureau. The Wire, a police drama set in Baltimore, launched more than 20 years ago, but has not dated. Th e Bureau, a spy series available on Amazon Prime, dates from the mid-2010s. Set in the DGSE, the French foreign intelligence service, it also ran for five seasons, roaming from the Parisian corridors of power through Damascus, Tehran, Russia, Iraq and more. Each episode — apart from some of Season Five which went a bit AWOL — felt informed and realistic. The storylines were complex, peopled with nuanced, subtle characters. AS ANTI-SEMITISM SOARS ACROSS BRITAIN, THIS CHILLING DOCUMENTARY IS VERY TIMELY The same immersive viewing pleasure can be found in Dark Hearts, a French…

LISA HILTON enjoys a gastropub that is still at the top of its game three decades after it ditched the pickled eggs THIS PAGE FELIPE FERNÁNDEZ-ARMESTO opts for a taste of pre-industrial luxury to enliven the Christmas feast PAGE 98 PATRICK GALBRAITH wishes we could all reconnect with the natural world PAGE 100 CHRISTOPHER PINCHER raises a glass to the Auld Alliance with a magical meal in an enchanted glen PAGE 100 HENRY JEFFREYS says the most enticing new wines are blends, not single-varietals PAGE 102 STEPHEN POLLARD says horse racing is blind to an existential threat to its future PAGE 103 HANNAH BETTS goes insouciantly glam for the party season PAGE 104 CLAUDIA SAVAGE-GORE finds that Christmas is a time for the family to fall out over school fees and…

IT HAD ALL GONE PERFECTLY. Our alarms went off at 4.20 am, we were on the marsh an hour later drinking sweet coffee in the salty blackness, and by the time light started to seep into the sky, teal were on the wing. As so often happens, the first opportunity of the morning appeared some 15 yards out and had pitched into a creek just behind us before we managed to get a shot off. The cock teal sat there whistling in the stillness totally unaware of our presence. It’s those moments that feel as though you’re a stowaway on a ship, hearing and seeing things that most never will that make wildfowling such a rich way of connecting with the world. Hunting allows us to become part of something.…

FOR A MULTI-BILLION pound industry largely funded by businesses renowned for cold-hearted ruthlessness, racing is astonishingly naive. The sport is facing an existential crisis. For years there have been worries about poor prize money, small fields, declining media coverage and animal rights extremists. These are all important, but they are as nothing compared to the threat posed by so-called “affordability checks”, a euphemism for having to hand over your financial details before having a bet. Anti-gambling campaigners have spent years attacking racing, which is funded to the tune of around £90 million a year by bookmakers. Take away that support and racing will be effectively over as a sport. In April I wrote about the government’s craven backing for affordability checks before it passed the idea over to the Gambling…

HERBERT VAN THAL. A name to conjure with. Were he a fictional character in a pulp shocker, he might be a wealthy socialite accused of murdering his wife or the sole occupant of a crumbling pile in the Carpathian mountains — or perhaps a sinister Mitteleuropean nobleman with a predilection for cruel and unusual punishment. In fact, real-life Herbert van Thal, Bertie to his chums, was a respectable Hampstead-born bookman and for decades his name was emblazoned on the covers of The Pan Book of Horror Stories, which he edited. This best-selling paperback anthology series ran to 30 volumes over 30 years and is fondly remembered as the gateway to an appreciation of the macabre for countless readers, including many who went on to become authors, including Sarah Waters,…

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INTERNATIONAL LAW TENDS to be poorly understood, even among lawyers. But it retains an aura among laymen which frequently leads to its invocation as a form of higher law, though often in a severely mangled form. Recent events such as the wars in Ukraine and Gaza have made the problem even more acute, so that it may be useful to provide here a short primer of some of its salient features. First and foremost, international law does not exist ex nihilo; it is (with vanishingly few exceptions, the so-called peremptory norms, which no country can reject) the result of the consent of states. A few years ago, many newspapers reported breathlessly that nuclear weapons had been banned for the first time under international law. The treaty in question was a…

THE RECENT PUBLICATION of the independent legal review into NatWest’s ill-starred attempt to debank Nigel Farage gives me the excuse to offer what I trust will be the very final words on this curious affair. When you cut through the thousands of hysterical column inches ranting about corporate “thought police” and shadowy “north London elites”, this is a story about reputations. And, with the benefit of a little hindsight, the clear lesson is that reputation is a much more resilient commodity than is generally appreciated. Our tale begins with the now infamous reputational risk committee of Coutts, NatWest’s private bank where the great provocateur was a customer. Thanks to Farage’s freedom of information request, we gained a remarkable window into the machinations of this hitherto obscure body. We hear its…

NO ONE SHOULD BELIEVE THAT THIS country is corrupt in any serious way. Despite decades of networking and friendships it has been shown to me how uninfluential I am. Not that I attempted to flex. When one of our planning applications was called in for adjudication by the secretary of state I was assiduous in not contacting any of the departmental ministers, even though I have known Michael Gove since he was a cub reporter on The Times and I was an even younger politico. For a year I did not attend any Conservative party events nor donate in any way. It was probably wise, I thought, not to allow the generosity of my presence and money to seem conflicted. Political support does not affect planning decisions — unless in…

IF I TOLD YOU THAT A COLLECTION OF POEMS written 2,000 years ago was sent by his wife to a man serving in the trenches of the First World War, and he replied to her that he was devoting five minutes a day amid the fighting to reading them, you might wonder what kind of poetry could possibly speak to the circumstances which that soldier, Raymond Asquith, was facing. The answer is the work of that most humane of ancient poets, Quintus Horatius Flaccus, better known as Horace. The Thames at Twickenham in the early eighteenth century could hardly be a more different environment from the Somme in the Great War, but they have Horace in common. It was in Twickenham, at a safe remove in those days from London,…

THE EMPEROR JUSTINIAN DID NOT sleep. So concerned was he for the welfare of his empire, so unremitting was the tide of business, so deep was his need for control that there simply was not time for rest. All this he explained to his subjects in the laws that poured forth constantly from his government — as many as five in a single day, long, complex, and involved texts in which the emperor took a close personal interest. The pace of work for those who served Justinian must have been punishing and it is perhaps unsurprising that he found few admirers amongst his civil servants. They traded dark hints about the hidden wellsprings of the emperor’s energy. One who had been with him late at night swore that as the…

TWO VOLUMES SIT ON MY DESK: ONE, thick and weighty, features a marble bust of Plato on the cover. The other, slimmer, volume bears the image of Diogenes in his amphora surrounded by dogs. The contrast between the two contemporaries and rivals shines through and it is striking that more than 2,000 years after the height of Athenian philosophy, we are still revisiting them. In their lives we find two fiercely opposed poles of a culture that has profoundly shaped our world. It’s a philosophical grudge match between the towering Goliath of the Western canon — the broad-shouldered champion of metaphysics and founder of the academy to whom all philosophy is a footnote — and the wiry, satirical, bitter-dark ascetic champion of the Cynical school — the tireless puncturer of pretension,…

IN JUNE LAST YEAR GENERAL SIR PATRICKSanders, the Chief of the General Staff, told an audience, “This is our 1937 moment … We must, therefore, meet strength with strength from the outset and be unequivocally prepared to fight …” Just a few months later our already tiny army was slashed by another 10,000 troops whilst its garrison in Estonia — our only troops directly confronting President Putin’s Russia — was reduced by half. Indeed, the comparison with 1937 was stark. It all seemed rather like the title of Robert Lyman’s latest volume, for which he has teamed up with Lord Dannatt, a former Chief of the General Staff: Victory to Defeat. This is a detailed and lucid study of how Britain’s remodelled army of 1917–18 first expanded, then developed tactics…

ANYONE WORKING IN JOURNALISMhas received letters from people claiming to have evidence of a vast conspiracy against them, often handwritten in tiny scrawls over many pages. They are terribly sad, and they go straight into the bin. HarperCollins, receiving such a missive, instead decided to write the author a large cheque, and the result is The Plot, in which former Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries reveals that British democracy is in thrall to a mysterious group known as The Movement, who have picked and then deposed more or less every Conservative leader of the past two decades, apparently in order to advance the career of Michael Gove. Does this sound bonkers? Wake up, sheeple! The conspiracy is well-known within Westminster, apparently: Dorries claims to have spoken to “well over fifty…

IN 2013, ROBIN THICKE RELEASED “Blurred Lines”, a song that would swiftly become infamous for its “rapey” lyrics and objectifying video. Progressive think-pieces denounced it, student unions banned it, and Thicke’s career never recovered. Like many a feminist at the time, I told myself he deserved it. An unexpected effect of reading Toxic, Sarah Ditum’s blistering account of noughties celebrity culture, is that I now feel sorry for Thicke. The period Ditum dubs the “Upskirt Decade” — actually spanning 1998, when Britney Spears released “… Baby One More Time”, to Thicke’s downfall 15 years later — was dominated by blurred lines thinking. If Thicke was considered more worthy of punishment than others, it was only for his unfortunate timing. Following the lives of nine of the noughties’ most famous women, Toxic…

FOR ALL THE TIDES OF fashionable cant that continue to spill out of its upper reaches, the UK publishing industry is, was, and you suspect always will be a deeply reactionary concern. Nowhere is this innate conservatism more flagrant than in the clouds of nostalgia that periodically arise over old-school publishing memoirs and the biographies of titanic book-world figures from days gone by (see, for example, the reviews of Thomas Harding’s recent life of Lord Weidenfeld.) Ah, the publishers of yesteryear, as V.S. Pritchett might have said. Through a haze of boozy lunches and unearned advances, we see their rubicund (and mostly male)faces. These, youinfer, were the good old days, the days before conglomerates and mega-marketing and celebrity children’s books, the days when Jonathan Cape and Secker & Warburg and…

● I HEAR THINGS ARE PRETTY rocky over in the Middle East, but how infinitely more dreadful had the Cambridge “Uni” production of Handel’s Saul actually gone ahead! Just in time, thank God, they realised how inflammatory it would be to perform this unflinching docudrama about Israelite-Philistinian strife — and more to the point, their fellow crybabies might have detected pro-Israelite propaganda in the blatant show of support for David’s disproportionate response to Goliath’s justified resistance, and that would have been curtains for the Opera Society all right. It just goes to show how dangerous music can be, forever meddling in geopolitics — who did this Handel character think he was anyway, Henry Kissinger? History is full of things these guys should have left to professionals like Just Stop Oil…

● THERE NEVER WAS A RIVER in an Ibsen play or a gun in a Chekhov without a drowning or a shooting as the outcome. Nor are there many stage renditions of Irish life in the countryside which proffer good cheer about familial coexistence.Marina Carr’s 1996 play introduced a millennial generation to the Irish Gothic tradition of domestic disharmony. Portia Coughlan’s eponymous antiheroine is played in the Almeida’s revival by Alison Oliver (Frances in Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends in the BBC adaptation). In Carrie Cracknell’s lamp-lit production, Portia’s thirtieth birthday begins with the waif-like celebrant drinking whisky at 10am. A gnawing obsession with a past loved one hints at kinship with Hedda Gabler in Portia’s devastating combination of ennui and bored cruelty to those around her. Married off to…

● SOME SPOTS WILL REMAIN forever blind, however hard we try. Francis Bacon couldn’t draw, and people who can’t draw are bound to find painting a bit awkward. Henry James was a thumping bore, and 2001: A Space Odyssey takes up two hours that might be spent more profitably peeling turnips. Which brings us to the Great Canadian Warbler. Has there ever been such an empty-headed writer of songs as Joni Mitchell? And hark! the way she presents herself as an artist. As Lorenz Hart, a wordsmith several divisions higher, had it: “Look at yourself — if you had a sense of humour, you would laugh to beat the band.” Clerk of the court, kindly read out the charges: The assumption of good taste. The fog of self-admiration. The voice,…

‘‘I GOT SOME!” My mother, round about 1989, plonking a Sainsbury’s carrier bag triumphantly on our scrubbed pine kitchen table. She’d driven to Chester at 7am on a Saturday to queue for a little jar of magic that was going to transform our lives. Ceremoniously, she unscrewed the lid so that we could inhale a whiff of the warm south. My father made spaghetti Bolognese for lunch, with the pesto carefully stirred through the pasta, a heterodox move, but then basil had come late to the north of England. It didn’t matter that whatever dingy mix of rapeseed oil and lonely pine nut the Italians had dumped contemptuously in the pot didn’t really taste of much except slimy grass, or that it sat awkwardly with Dad’s mince and tinned tomatoes.…

• SCOTLAND BOASTS MANY SPLENDOURS. Wherever one looks there is something at which to wonder. Look down upon Lochs Lomond, Lubnaig or Maree at the majesty and the mystery of their deep waters. Look up from Sauchiehall Street, or from Union Street and the Citadel at the glory that is the granite face of Glasgow and Aberdeen. Look in awe upon the twilight glowering that is Glencoe and its fearful history. Scotland is a kingdom ancient and beautiful, adamant and grey. Its story runs deep in the skirling waters of its rivers wherein its salmon spawn and from which its whisky is born. Alongside one such stream lies Glenturret near Crieff. Its local distillery has forged a new interpretation of the Auld Alliance. There the summit of Scottish cuisine has…

YO, MOOKS. And, also, ho, ho, ho mooks. For, lo, the baby Jesus is upon us and He’s a total stickler for what we wear, favouring twinkling this and glittering that, and a whole lot more coruscation going down. At this point, please insert the usual line about sequins destroying the planet. Then, add more deets about some coves’ spangles (Aspiga’s, for instance) being recycled. Next, say that we should be purchasing five garments or fewer a year to save old Mother Earth, when we’re actually caning 28. Can I go back to perving over clothes now? These can totally be clothes you already own. In fact, my sense of what one might sport this Yule is basically what I proposed last year, only still more supine. Not only is…

“THE CONTRARIAN DOGMA IS SIMPLE AND easy to understand,” Christopher Hitchens once proclaimed. “Whatever is popular is wrong.” That lofty dismissal of common taste wasn’t his own — it was first said by Oscar Wilde in 1883 to art students during a lecture extolling aestheticism, or art for art’s sake. “Popularity is the crown of laurel which the world puts on bad art,” Wilde claimed. Despite the pleasure Hitchens frequently took in verbal combat, he wasn’t endorsing contrarianism uncritically. As a conclusion Wilde’s statement was “questionable”, he said; “but as a mindset, it’s not bad”. This is a nice distinction between contrarianism as a principle and contrarianism as an attitude. The former risks degenerating into a niche form of tribalism. The latter can develop into something much more interesting: principled dissent.…

Brought to book THE BBC RECENTLY REPEATEDa documentary series I made some time ago, which provided a lovely opportunity to hear from members of the history community. One lady emailed under the suggestive subject line “inappropriate handling”. She continued: I’m just watching your mini-series To Kill a King and I cannot believe you pawing King Charles 1’s book in the library. Surely the librarian (and everyone else who has seen this) was appalled seeing your mishandling of such a historic book and leaving your greasy prints all over the pages, no doubt which will cause damage … Why on earth they allowed you access to the book when you surely could have used a copy is mind-boggling. You should have known better. I immediately wrote back to the concerned viewer,…

“HANS … ARE WE THE BADDIES?” The moment of ‘‘Hans self-realisation in a Mitchell and Webb comedy sketch as two Nazis in a bunker examine their uniform and realise that their symbol is a skull. “I mean,” says David Mitchell, “what do skulls make you think of? Death … cannibals … beheading … pirates… [and] fun or not, pirates are still the baddies.” Psychological outliers apart, nobody likes to think of themselves as the baddies. And yet, many people do things that are unambiguously evil. They often do them on the orders of institutions, terrorist gangs, or states who have decided that these acts of evil will be officially sanctioned and, often, publicly acknowledged. WE HAVE SEEN THIS MOST recently in the horrific actions of Hamas terrorists in southern Israel.…

HAS THE OLD LADY of Threadneedle Street lost her marbles? Can the Bank of England still do anything right? In its first 25 years of independence from the Treasury and the politicians it delivered an inflation rate which, on average, was exactly on the 2 per cent target. Admittedly, inflation had its ups and downs, and the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009 was a blot on the escutcheon. All the same, for a generation it was widely admired and respected as an efficient part of the British economic constitution. But in the last few years much has gone wrong. In 2020 it embarked on large-scale asset purchases to counter the assumed deflationary effects of the Covid epidemic. This was a misjudgement which caused the rate of money growth to…

PEOPLE OFTEN ASK ME how best to solve the crisis in the Middle East. Perhaps this is because I have close personal experience of different cultures, having spent part of my gap year on one of my father’s private islands in the Seychelles. (Also, when I was a child we had a Vietnamese au pair; I can’t remember its name.) The answer to the Middle East conflict is simple: intersectional slam poetry. I recently announced that I will soon be touring Gaza, Iran and Saudi Arabia — mostly vegan cafes and community centres — in order to perform my poems and spread the message of diversity, equity and inclusion. So while jihad can mean holy war, in most cases it is more like a yoga retreat I will be accompanied…

OUR ISLE MAY BE SCEPTRED, OUR PLOTblessed, but in one respect we English have been rather unlucky. In Dante the Italians have a poet who feels knowable: anyone who glances at the Divine Comedy becomes privy to his likes and dislikes, his tastes and his prejudices, who his enemies are and how he wants them to suffer. The Germans, for their part, have Goethe; and they are fortunate not only that Goethe’s character shines through his writing, but also that his sayings and mannerisms were preserved for posterity by Eckermann. The English, however, are stuck with Shakespeare, and Shakespeare had no Eckermann. Nor did he ever really bare his soul in his plays, always disappearing somehow into his stories and his characters. About those plays there are infinite things to…

THE YEAR 2023 HAS BEENrich in works composed in tempore belli. The most impressive is Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine (William Collins, £26) by General David Petraeus and the historian Andrew Roberts. This is an ambitious and deeply researched volume which does not shy away from the gritty details of combat, as one might expect from a collaboration between the most distinguished commander of the Iraq War and the tireless chronicler of warriors ranging from Napoleon to Churchill. They show how UN ceasefires have been a tactic used by the losing side in every Arab-Israeli war. As the great Middle Eastern scholar Bernard Lewis put it, “We cease, they fire.” Petraeus and Roberts focus on the outstanding commanders whose strategems and strategies were not only grand,…

● YOU CAN STICK YOUR LITTLE biscuits, Proust: music is how I travel in time. Family Sunday lunch, mid-1980s? That’s a double bill of Love’s Forever Changes and Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark (thanks, Dad). Swapping my Co-Op tabard for my Miss Selfridge finest to go clubbing in 1998? “Music Sounds Better” by Stardust. First year of university? Kaleidoscope by Kelis throws me straight back to my dismal Manchester halls. So here’s a weird thing. I put on the new Olivia Rodrigo album, guts, and suddenly it was 1995 again. The crunchy grunge-pop riffs on “all-american bitch”. The old-school feminist beauty standard critique of “pretty isn’t pretty”. Most of all, the droll Valley-girl delivery on “get him back!” — because everything is so excruciating when you’re a teenager, it’s necessary…

● BIOPICS ARE A TRICKY BEAST. Anyone who’s lived a life worth putting on a cinema screen will have done a hell of a lot more than you can squeeze into two hours. You can try to offer a bunch of tiny slices from childhood to adult triumph or defeat, or you can take the approach Aaron Sorkin did writing Steve Jobs, showing a small number of pivotal moments in an effort to explain the man. In making Napoleon, Ridley Scott has gone for a bit of both. The film covers six battles in Bonaparte’s life, from an early victory at Toulon until his final defeat at Waterloo. But the narrative focus is on the general’s relationship with his wife, Josephine. Joaquim Phoenix (below) plays the Frenchman as infatuated. Vanessa…

●ONE OF THE MOST SIGNIFICANT investments in contemporary architecture in the last 15 years has been made by Alain de Botton, the writer and public intellectual who established his reputation young by writing a novel, Essays in Love, published in 1993 just after he had finished studying for his MPhil in Philosophy at King’s College, London. This was followed by How Proust Can Change Your Life in 1997, another bestseller. In 2006, de Botton published Th e Architecture of Happiness, a book which explores the nature of the relationship between architecture and our moral and psychological wellbeing. Very unusually for an author, as a result of giving talks about what architecture could and should be, he decided to put his ideas into practice and, presumably helped by the fact that…

THE USUAL WAY TO LEARN about wine, championed by various “educators” and “communicators”, is to focus on grape varieties and how they taste. You will learn how cabernet sauvignon smells of blackcurrants, sauvignon blanc is redolent of green peppers and gooseberries, and gewürztraminer smells of lychees. Though I don’t think I have ever actually tasted a lychee. In this grape-led way of ordering wine, varieties are at an advantage from a marketing point of view if they are easy to pronounce — which partly explains the success of pinot grigio and malbec (that and consistency; pinot grigio is usually drinkable and a bit bland, and malbec from Argentina is almost always soft and delicious). In contrast, crljenak kaštelanski, a Croatian grape, is going to struggle in the wine aisle of…

SCHOOL FEES PANIC is intense. The irony being that we don’t pay them … our parents do. But naturally the onus is still on Will and me to keep up with the scare stories, while the boomers contemplate their clutter i.e. Imminent VAT on school fees, with impending Labour government. This has now morphed into all the kids’ schools offering us the option to pay a lump sum now, in case of a hike next year. Will went for this in a big way, determined to convince his parents that it would be “an investment in their grandchildren”. Not foreseeing that a) his mother refuses to even entertain the prospect of a Labour government and b) his dad is massively offended by the implication that he might let down his…