Indholdsfortegnelse for March 2024 i The Critic

MORE HAS MEANT WORSE. Indeed, when Kingsley Amis in Encounter wrote about expanding higher education that “MORE WILL mEAN WORSE”, that was him in 1960 reviewing the fifties — a decade that now looks like a pinnacle from which everything since has fallen away. Amis was still at Swansea University then, though he was soon to move to Peterhouse for what would turn out to be two bitter and futile years teaching English at Cambridge. The college was denounced by F.R. Leavis for hiring a “pornographer”, but the contra-Whiggish hopes of its then master, Herbert Butterfield, that this was exactly what the age needed (someone to provoke the Leavisites), were to be disappointed. Amis fled uncongenial collegiate life for fun in the Majorca sun. What should keep anyone at Cambridge…

THE TROUBLE WITH lawyers’ jokes, said the wag, is that lawyers don’t find them funny, and no one else thinks they are jokes. Now, this is not entirely the fault of lawyers, who have to contend with modern public life, which is as humourless as it is preachy (I note, without comment, that the “Legal Humour” section of Wildy & Sons’ website includes Geoffrey Robertson KC’s memoirs as well as a book by The Secret Barrister). But it cannot be denied that legal humour, at least in England, has seldom risen to very great heights. Take Theobald Mathew, Clement Attlee’s pupil master, who was widely reckoned to be the greatest legal wit of his generation. His most famous quip — which “acquired legendary status during his lifetime” ran something like…

THIS TIME LAST YEAR I WATCHED WITH BEMUSEMENT AS A strange new trend emerged in my native Britain. Councils were introducing restrictions on citizens moving about by car. Living in Portugal had given me an observer’s detachment and I struggled to reconcile what I was seeing with the country I knew. Oxford — my alma mater and the city where I regularly used to lose my bicycle — was at the heart of it. In November 2022, Oxfordshire County Council approved an experimental traffic scheme in a city notorious for congestion. Traffic filters would divide the city into zones, with those wishing to drive between them obliged to apply for permits. Residents would be allocated passes for up to 100 journeys a year and those living outside the permit area…

I AM DEEPLY DISTURBED TO SEE THAT Transport for London has unveiled six new overground lines and not one of them is named after Greta Thunberg (Peace Be Upon Her). What exactly is Sadiq Khan playing at? Don’t get me wrong: I applaud Sadiq’s efforts to remove offensive advertisements from the Tube, and the way that he manages to lecture Londoners for being racist through the medium of fireworks. But these new overground lines are not sufficiently progressive. They are called: the Lioness Line, the Mildmay Line, the Windrush Line, the Weaver Line, the Suffragette Line and the Liberty Line. Why not name at least one of them after the brave people of colour who have overcome systemic racism to achieve their goals? Why not the Martin Luther King Line?…

HOW DID COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES in the United States and elsewhere in the English-speaking world become seminaries of centre-Left and radical Left ideology? That most elite campuses foster political and intellectual monocultures is not open to dispute. In a 2023 poll by the Harvard Crimson, 45.3 per cent of Harvard faculty identify themselves as “liberal” and 31.8 per cent as “very liberal”, a combined total of 77.1 per cent. Twenty per cent considered themselves “moderate” with only 2.5 per cent “conservative” and 0.4 per cent “very conservative”. The good news is that political diversity at Harvard has thus increased since 2022, when only 1 per cent of the faculty were “conservative” and none at all were “very conservative”. Not coincidentally, in 2023 Harvard came last in the free speech rankings…

I HAD HEARD RUMOURS OF CAMBRIDGE’S SECRET s societies — of Sunday morning symposiums devoted to sex and scrambled eggs — each tale too outrageous to be true. But it is not the promise of illicit affairs driving students and academics underground. It is a love of C.S. Lewis. My discovery and subsequent involvement in these societies had been something of an accident. A Canadian psychologist and all-round troublemaker once said that one should, “Tell the truth. See what happens.” Within weeks of committing to this experiment, I had been thrown out of every student theatre society in Cambridge for refusing to state my pronouns. “Your presence in the room makes people feel unsafe,” was the judgement handed down to me. Being competent and committed to directing stood for nothing:…

ECONOMISTS IN THE mass — as a profession, no less — have not covered themselves in glory in the early 2020s. Like everyone, they were caught off guard by Covid, but they blundered in their reaction to it. With few exceptions, they forecast that Covid-19 would lead to years of disinflation and perhaps even of deflation. Instead in 2022 inflation reached the highest levels for 40 years. Yes, there were exceptions who — if I may say so — include the author of this column. Right from the start, in late March and April 2020, I could see that the astonishing money explosion then under way would have inflationary consequences. The first result would be too much money chasing too few assets, so that the prices of shares and houses…

A fascinating story, Rafe, really immersive and transgressive, Grizelda scribbles on the topmost sheet of the many A4 pages strewn over her desk, although I do wonder whether her the 93-year-old inhabitant of a Lancashire care home would use a vocabulary that included the expressions “Whatever?” “Get bent” and “I want to sex you up”. But you are making — Grizelda crosses out the words “great strides” on the grounds that it might be considered ableist and substitutes huge progress. It is 7.30 on a Sunday morning in the tiny out-of-town flat and Grizelda Buncombe, MA (Bath Spa), PhD (Coleraine), she/they, who likes an early start, is hard at work marking the latest round of coursework. She is a tall, thin, anguished girl in her mid-thirties, who likes to be…

LORD BYRON AND HIS BRIDE HAD barely left the church when their marriage began to disintegrate. The poet had wooed Anne Isabella (“Annabella”) Milbanke, a niece of Viscountess Melbourne, over a number of years, charmed by her intelligence, “high blood” and moderate prettiness (she was not, he wrote, “so glaringly beautiful as to attract many rivals”). The young heiress, enchanted by her suitor’s energetic conversation, had agreed to marry Byron after rejecting his initial proposal. The new Lady Byron soon realised how justified her original misgivings had been. In the words of the poet’s newest biographer, Andrew Stauffer, a professor of English at the University of Virginia and president of the Byron Society of America, Byron “dropped his mask of placid bridegroom — or, perhaps, put on his mask of…

THE COMING OF INDIA’S INDEPENDENCE in 1947 was an upheaval of immense historical significance. It ended more than two centuries of British rule and created the world’s largest democracy. That it is still so controversial is largely the result of the human catastrophe which accompanied the partition of British India; what the historian John Keay has called the “vivisection of a subcontinent”. Perhaps ten million people fled for their lives in both directions, east and west, the greatest exodus in human history. In the process, at least a million people died in a tsunami of sectarian violence, though the true number will never be known. Although the creation of two new nation states, India and Pakistan, usually dominates any discussion of Indian independence, there were other important elements at work. One…

CHRISTOPHER NOLAN’S BIOPIC OF OPpenheimer offered up a great shibboleth of online leftism. In the film, the titular character summarises the philosophy of Marx as “Ownership is theft and so on”. He’s corrected by his squeeze-to-be Jean Tatlock, who says “Property is theft”. But as ever-online academics were quick to point out, this slogan was actually coined by Pierre Joseph Proudhon. Duh. But not a minor slip, it turns out. Marx, legendarily dismissive of his contemporaries, saved particular opprobrium for Proudhon, with whom he disagreed at a fundamental philosophical level. In his history of the philosophy of property, Rowan Moore gives prominence to the Levellers, a religious group who advocated shared use of the land in early communist communities. Marx, in a similar tone to his rejection of Proudhon, dubbed…

ROB HENDERSON IS A RARE YOUNGexample of a dying breed: Cambridge scholar, public intellectual and unsentimental writer. These qualities radiate from his new memoir, Troubled, which recounts his “miraculous trajectory” through family dysfunction, foster care, the United States Air Force and into high academia. Henderson’s story begins in his personal etymology — each of his names is taken from a family member that abandoned him for one reason or another — or, indeed none at all: Robert (his biological father, walked out), Kim (his biological mother, lost to addiction), Henderson (his adoptive father, severed ties). Unsurprisingly, his treatment at the hands of these feckless or vindictive individuals left him “troubled” and landed him in Californian social care. Bleak as his start in life was, however, Henderson has mercifully not penned…

Levelling up Housewife favourite Dominic West’s insistence that provincial audiences prove more appreciative than West End theatregoers strikes a chord with those of us familiar with performing to these distinctly contrasting tribes. While waddling visitors to the capital’s “Theatreland” are regularly of the self-absorbed variety, I’ve generally found jolly northerners considerably more convivial after travelling to such parts. Let us never neglect to remember what it means to these delightfully down-to-earth folk whenever we London troupers arrive to sprinkle much-needed stardust. ★ SELFLESSLY CASTING herself in the lead role of Richard III, the Globe’s officially ground-breaking artistic director Michelle Terry faces regrettable condemnation for lacking real-life hunchback credentials. Addressing this matter with all necessary delicacy, at the time of writing, the theatre patiently reminds disabled detractors that the twenty-first-century Shakespearean…

IF YOU EVER DOUBT THAT CELEBRIty is a kind of hell, imagine this: you’re 43, and you’re still defined by a relationship that started in your teens and ended when you were 21. Justin Timberlake is a multi-platinum selling artist. He’s been married to the actress Jessica Biel since 2012, and the couple have two sons. None of that matters because the only identity Timberlake is allowed to have is “Britney’s ex”. This is partly his own fault. When Timberlake left the boyband NSYNC in 2002, he launched his solo career off the back of his break-up with Spears. Rumours that she had cheated on him gave him an alibi for graphically kissing and telling on America’s most famous alleged virgin. An interview with him from the time was…

HOW DO YOU TELL THE STORY OF the Holocaust on film? With Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg, the master of modern popular cinema, took a conventional approach, one also adopted by this year’s One Life: finding a heroic narrative of resistance. But without diminishing the subjects of either of those films, the problem is that a glance at the statistics of the Holocaust tell us that the victories over evil were rare exceptions, barely denting the incomprehensible totals. Statistics feature several times in The Zone of Interest, an adaptation of Martin Amis’s novel about the home life of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss. Early on, we see him take a pitch meeting from a pair of engineers who believe they’ve developed an improved oven, which will be able to operate constantly, destroying…

IN THE UNITED STATES a couple of years ago, a rumour spread on Facebook that a serial killer was on the loose. “Wrong,” said the police. The rumour was false and the photo of the “murderer” that was being passed around was of a man who had been jailed on unrelated charges. Somehow, though, versions of the same rumour popped up in California, Texas, Illinois, Louisiana and Tennessee. I’m sure some of the people who passed along the rumours were genuinely scared. Others, though, were fascinated. From books, to Netflix documentaries, to podcast series, millions of us cannot get enough of reading, and watching, and listening to media about the worst of crimes and the worst of criminals. It’s nothing new. As Kate Summerscale wrote in The Suspicions of Mr…

“THE TROUBLE WITH YOU,” my wife began, before pausing dramatically. I braced myself for a litany of defects. “The trouble,” she continued, “is that you’re too proud and lazy to follow recipes. You won’t acknowledge anyone else’s ideas and you can’t be bothered to give them a try.” I took a moment to consider, then dismissed the charge. I dislike recipes because they come prescriptively, de haut en bas. Readers of this column know that I eschew imperative verbs. I want to liberate cooks from the didactic tyrants and celebrity pettifoggers. I resent the notion that there’s one way to make anything. I detest recipe-writers’ habitual indifference to the history and chemistry of dishes — which is usually more interesting than contents lists and purported cooking times. I reject quantitative…

MY FASCINATION WITH FOUNTAIN PENS BEGAN A LONG TIME AGO. I remember very well the first occasion I came across one. As a little boy I was rummaging about in my grandmother’s sideboard (doubtless without permission) when I found a small cigar-shaped tube of emerald green Bakelite. I pulled and its cap came off revealing a gleaming gold nib. I was enthralled. Of course it was old and broken and would not write. This enthralled me all the more so I proceeded, inexpertly, to disassemble my discovery and play with its parts until the remains were scattered across the floor. That was the end of that particular pen. But it was the beginning of my interest in beautiful writing objects. By the time I arrived at university, I had amassed…

IS IT A SIGN OF FASHION’S BEING essentially teenage — or merely human — that it invariably exists in a state of contraction? For, when one thing is happening, so its opposite will also be the case. Accordingly, we are still witnessing a penchant for quiet luxury, elevated normcore, the extraordinary everyday etc., etc. This translates as a focus on clothes rather than fashion, quality, simplicity, minimalism, monochrome, trousers, trench coats, polo shirts and jeans; staples that spell a certain narrative erasure, plus genuine satisfaction/utter tedium, depending on your point of view. And, yet, at the same moment, we have romance, Renaissance-core, roses, transparency, tin-foil metallics, craft, and a collective crush on “building worlds” the phrase rolled out as part of the rapturous response to John Galliano’s recent couture show…

IT TOOK A LOT TO FLUSTER THE MAN they called The Master. But on March 9, 1929, more than 20 years into his Test career, JACK HOBBS was finally stumped by a Canadian actress in the dining room of a Melbourne hotel. The England and Surrey batsman had returned to the Hotel Windsor with his wife after making 142 in what he had announced would be his final Test match. As they entered the restaurant, the band struck up “See, The Conquering Hero Comes!”, followed by “For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow”, after which Hobbs was coyly approached by Miss Margaret Bannerman, an actress of the silent screen. “May I have the privilege?” asked the star of Lady Audley’s Secret and The Gay Lord Quex, before planting a smacker on his…

IT’S NEARLY FIVE YEARS SINCE I MET MAYA Forstater. a researcher on international tax policy. She had just filed an employment claim against the Centre for Global Development, the think tank where she had been doing research on the link between tax policy and economic growth, for discriminating against her for expressing “gender-critical” beliefs — that is, that sex is binary, immutable and important. We had both become concerned by the government’s plans to introduce gender self-identification: she because sex is one of the most meaningful variables in development economics; I because I’d been asked to write about self-ID and the more I looked, the crazier it seemed. Afterwards, Maya sent me the draft of an article she was writing. Re-reading my reply, I cringe. I was already in a new…

Launched with fizz WHAT’S THE COLLECTIVE NOUN FOR HISTORIANS? The launch of Bettany Hughes’s captivating new book, Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, at Daunt’s in Marylebone prompted the question, with Kate Williams, Lucy Worsley, Dan Snow and Hallie Rubenhold catching up over (most superior) champagne. The fizz was a very generous gesture of solidarity since, according to the Bookseller’s annual list of the 50 top-selling titles, we’ll all be out of a job unless we bone up on air-fryers. A broad church ECCLESIASTICAL ECCENTRICITIES: SAINT ANTHONY the Great, considered to be the founder of the Christian monastic system, is also the official patron of farmers, pigs and piggy-related products. Every January, a mass is held at Sant’ Antonio Abate in Venice to bless the city’s pets, complete with a solemn…

NOT SINCE 1985 HAS A foreign bid for a British business so animated the Westminster classes. Then, the fate of a Somerset helicopter-maker, Westland, sparked a serious and soul-searching debate over whether our future lay with the transatlantic Special Relationship or, instead, across the Channel with Europe. Fast-forward four decades, and the company in question is a heritage publisher — the Telegraph Media Group — which is facing a takeover by an Emiratis Sheikh. This affair has triggered a rather more low-rent row over Britain’s global status. The critics fret that this deal would be an acceptance of our lowly role of “Butler to the World”, as Oliver Bullough memorably phrased it in his eponymous book. Overwhelmed by a deluge of Oriental investment, we have been reduced to the position…

IT IS HARDER AND HARDER TO ESCAPE THE FEELING that the founding ideals of the university — the preservation, pursuit, and promulgation of learning; the free play of the creative intellect; the incubation of a public-spirited elite — are slowly vanishing in a morass of managerialism, careerism, and ideological capture. Pessimists find comparisons between tertiary education and highly efficient immigration agencies or assembly lines for a cosmopolitan class as hostile to the country’s past as it is indifferent to its future. There isn’t a consensus about the proper purpose of universities, not least because the benefits they bring to those who pass through them are as many and various as those they contribute to our common life. Yet the two foundational vocations of the sector — the formation of a…

I do not think that The Journal of the American Medical Association intends For example, I recently saw on its website a paper titled A Young Pregnant Person With Old Myocardial Infarction. Evidently, the journal is now so misogynist that it considers the word woman an insult in itself. To the N-word must now be added the W-WORD; soon, if the linguistic Savonarolas have their way, there won’t be enough letters in the alphabet to designate words which must never be pronounced on pain of excommunication by the monstrous regiment of the righteous. Frailty, thy name is person! Then there was a paper titled An Uncommon Cause of Acute Chest Pain. It began as follows: “A patient in their 50s presented to the emergency department with 20 minutes of substernal…

THEATRICAL LEGEND HAS IT THAT when Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole were filming Becket in 1963, they decided that they should each play Hamlet on stage. These were two legendarily thirsty actors, and it is possible that drink may have been taken. They flipped a coin to determine which of them should be directed by John Gielgud and which by Laurence Olivier, the two greatest Hamlets of the previous era. Burton got Gielgud. History does not record who was thought to have won the toss. Sir John Gielgud, from a prominent theatrical family, first saw Hamlet in 1912 when he was eight, and what eight-year-old doesn’t love a four-hour blank verse tragedy about an existential crisis? Gielgud would go on to play the Dane five times between 1930 and 1946. Burton,…

GIOVANNI PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA (1463-94) had been dead for almost a month when he last spoke to Baptista Mantuanus — and, for a corpse, he was remarkably chatty. Appearing to Mantuanus in a dream, he answered all manner of questions about “hidden things”. He was especially talkative about whether amulets could protect babies from evil. Then, in an instant, he disappeared — leaving Mantuanus rubbing his eyes in disbelief. Whether this really happened is anyone’s guess. Since Mantuanus’s only account appears in a letter to Pico’s nephew, a well-known sceptic, it is quite possible that it may have been tongue-in-cheek. But even if it was, it still testified to Pico’s extraordinary reputation as a magician. By the late fifteenth century, magi — like magic itself — had already been around for…

UNDER THE HORNBEAMS IS Astrange book, but then it’s a book about a strange situation in a very strange time. Emma Tarlo’s account of two “hobos”, which is what they are most comfortable being called, living under a hornbeam tree in Regent’s Park during Covid, captures the claustrophobic horror of the oddest period that we are ever likely to live through. It starts with Lockdown being announced. Tarlo, an anthropologist who has previously written a highly-acclaimed book on hair, is living in a flat with her husband (also an anthropologist who spends most weeks in Paris) and her son (who should be in Oxford, where he is studying). Tarlo is introduced by a friend to Pascal and Nick, two men — the former of them reserved but wise, the second…

THE ART OF OMISSION SEEMS TO BE UNfashionable in fiction these days. Word-bloat and page-plumping are the literary crises of our age. It’s not hard to see where this might come from. First, there is the same misguided view of value for money that leads to swollen typefaces and longer page counts to make books thicker than ever. Second, there appears to be a decreasing appetite among editors and publishers for stretching readers, for risking the casual browser bailing early because they don’t immediately “get” the book. Yet the benefits of allowing the readers to do some of the thinking for themselves are obvious: a reader who is a participant rather than simply a bystander will be more engaged with the work. So this month’s column offers some novels that…

IN THE LONG WINTER NIGHTS, I dived into the BBC’s back channels and came up with Jakub Piatek’s extraordinary documentary on the 2021 Internatioal Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw. Although I had seen the contest unfold and remembered the results, I was glued to my sofa by the complete and utter insanity displayed in Piatek’s fly on the wall. If you are going to enter a competition, start with Warsaw because it is among the least corruptible, its transparency attained by giving votes to past winners. Having Martha Argerich or Bella Davidovich on the jury is a hedge against shifty piano professors sharing out final placements between their pupils. Collusions of this kind have taken over the violin world, the result being that no major talent has emerged in this…

THERE ARE NUMEROUS ESTIMATES about exactly how many paintings were produced during the Dutch golden age. While it may be impossible to reckon even approximately it is not unreasonable to suggest that perhaps between five and ten million pictures were painted to service the demands of seventeenth-century Netherlanders. After all, by 1650, Amsterdammers were per capita the wealthiest citizens in Europe and the trickle-down effects were real. In the 1640s, an English merchant-traveller named Peter Mundy was startled by the omnipresence of paintings in the new nation: “Butchers and bakers … yea many tymes blacksmiths. Cobblers, etts., will have some picture or other by their Forge or in their stalle.” The homes of many middling sorts were hung with pictures in a profusion that would still be unusual today. IT…

ONE COLD FEBRUARY MORNING in 1999 I walked down a muddy path from the village of Domachevo in Belarus into a nearby forest. In 1942, around 2,900 local Jewish people had taken the same track from the nearby ghetto to be machine-gunned into a mass grave. I was on assignment for The Independent. The first — and only — British Nazi war crimes trial to reach a verdict was also the first time that a British court had convened abroad, complete with judge and jury. Anthony Sawoniuk, an elderly retired British rail ticket collector, was eventually found guilty of murder. Sentenced to life, he died in prison six years later. Britain, like Canada, the United States and Australia, gave sanctuary to legions of Nazi war criminals after 1945. They included…

OVER THE LAST SIX MONTHS OR SO, I have become mildly obsessed about the fate of a perfect example of arts-and-crafts architecture — the Church Institute in Llanfairfechan, a seaside resort off the coast road between Conway and Bangor in North Wales. In early July last year, I received a text from Andrew Hinchcliff who has devotedly looked after the Church Institute and the adjacent Churchmen’s Club, telling me that he and his fellow trustee of the Institute, Pam Phillips, its architect’s granddaughter, had come to the reluctant conclusion that they can no longer look after the two buildings on their own. They have decided that they may have to put them on the open market. He knew that I greatly admire the buildings, which I first saw in 2014,…

THE LAST TIME I WENT TO A trade tasting of Israeli wines, I couldn’t believe the security. There were thorough bag searches, a scanner, burly guards and if your name wasn’t down, there was no way you were getting in. This was a few years ago but the way things are in London at the moment, it will be even stricter this year. Despite having more acres under vine than Lebanon and Britain being the country’s third biggest export market, Israeli wine is pretty much invisible over here. Both Berry Bros & Rudd and M&S had a go at selling it a few years ago but today if you want to get hold of some, specialist kosher retailers are your best option. It’s not like the country doesn’t have a…

OVER THE PAST FEW YEARS, I’ve written about cooking rabbit pie, frying up squirrel goujons, and making pigeon Wellington. There have been plenty of other carnivorous episodes, so many in fact that I’ve forgotten lots of them. But what I haven’t shared is that for all the joy those culinary adventures have brought me, there’s been pain too. There were all those vegans who didn’t eat my rabbit arancini, I had to order a Hawaiian pizza one Saturday afternoon when half my guests didn’t want slow-cooked Hebridean goose and Constance, my now fiancée, convinced me about a year ago that the muntjac tartare was a bad idea. “We’ll make it when it’s just us,” she reasoned, “or when it’s only people we know well. We don’t want to poison new…

“You forgot to carry the one.” Rishi is helping our neighbour, Big Jeremy, with his sums. In a couple of weeks, he has to do something called the Budget, where he stands in the street with a red case and everyone takes pictures of him. He’s very worried about questions. “Thanks Rishi,” he says. “But what does debt-to-GDP mean again?” “Don’t worry. No one’s going to ask you about that. The only people worse at maths than MPs are journalists. Well, except for Evan Davis, but we’ve told the police to shoot if they see him within 100 yards of you.” Akshata is looking at their plan. “But guys,” she says, “wasn’t it cutting taxes that got Liz Truss into such trouble?” Rishi and Big Jeremy look up. “Don’t get…

IT HAS LONG BEEN A CLICHÉ TO SPEAK OF A CRISIS in the Humanities. As long ago as 1964, J.H. Plumb published a collection of essays under that title. Six decades later, and an article about external crises for the humanities writes itself: declining numbers, declining funding, declining societal value, declining autonomy and declining expectations. These issues are rehearsed every year, drifting, unabated, in depressing directions. Yet what is rarely spoken of is the crisis within the Humanities: many of those entrusted with nurturing and propagating these disciplines have lost all sense of shared purpose. TO START WITH FIRST PRINCIPLES: “HUMANITIES” IS NOT modern branding. The term comes from the very epicentre of Roman culture: in a law court of 63 bc, Cicero first spoke of studia humanitatis (“the pursuits…

INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS WERE SUPPOSED TO be the gold standard of the modern British economic model. Even if the hard sinews of British power had withered, we could still boast a leaner, more agile sort of greatness. Call it soft power, call it the knowledge economy, the creative industries or the service sector — in some intangible, postmodern fashion, we were winners. There were many facets to this blissful Blairite dream, from the idea that buying stuff, but not selling it, could make Britain money, to the notion that pit villages could be revitalised if they were better connected to the internet. But perhaps the most shining element of all was the British university. Here was a field of endeavour we could portray as “world-beating” with at least some honesty —…

‘‘KEY LIMITING factors”. Two and a half years ago a firestorm engulfed the Church of England as Canon John McGinley, one of the driving forces behind the recent transformation of the Established Church, rhapsodised about a church set free from the “key limiting factors” of “a building and a stipend and long, costly college-based training for every leader of church”. Slowly but surely the national spotlight has focused on the plans to sell off the church’s physical treasures (a secret report by the disgraced Paula Vennells — leaked last month — revealed plans to dispose of 1,000 churches) and schemes in dioceses such as Truro and Leicester to scrap traditional parish ministry, replacing it with impossibly huge “minster communities” overseen by priests in a car pool-style management structure. So schemes…

‘‘Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” The calling card for a linguist ready to knock over the apple cart of mainstream behavioural psychology in 1950s academia. A sentence may be grammatically correct but nonsensical. Grammar reigns, whether at a Surface, Deep or Universal level. Who is he? Avram Noam Chomsky was born in Philadelphia in 1928 to Ashkenazi parents of Ukrainian and Belarusian origin. His father worked long hours for low wages before becoming a Hebrew scholar and academic, while his mother taught at a synagogue. His parents he has described as “New Deal Democrats”. The boy attended a school established on the principles of John Dewey, the educational reformer and pragmatist philosopher: learning should be experiential; knowledge is to be discovered; creativity is to be encouraged. Noam flourished. Another branch…

I WAS A HIGH SHERIFF A FEW YEARS BACK. THE ancient office is held now only for a year in each county as the Crown’s representative to all aspects of law and order, as well as the fire service. You can prioritise whatever you want, being in theory answerable only to the Crown and the law, but traditionally it means visiting every fire station, police station, law court, remand centre, prison and morgue in the county, as well as giving dinners for the judges. There was, in my patch, much ceremonial, which I thought hugely enjoyable. Rather than being out-moded or superfluous and arrogant, these occasions were inclusive and seemed to cheer everyone up. The costume — sorry, uniform — of a High Sheriff does seem silly and is worn for…

IN THAT STRANGELY COMPLACENT DREAMTIME between the financial crash and the rise of populism, Yuval Noah Harari became a global superstar. The young Israeli history professor is frequently described as the world’s most-read public intellectual, while his speaking agency has no qualms about describing him as a philosopher. Harari’s lack of recognisable cultural baggage lends him a mysterious other-worldliness, as if he’s a man from another, wiser planet or from the future; a vegan who practices Vipassana meditation for two hours a day and shares the housework with his husband. He rapidly won the endorsement of celebrities such as Bill Gates, Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg and became a fixture at Davos, Aspen and other plush retreats where political and business leaders assemble. Harari has now sold 65 million books. But…

AT 1.30AM ON 31 DECEMBER 2019,an eye doctor in Wuhan Central Hospital, Dr Li Wenliang, a member of the Communist Party, received a peremptory summons to attend an immediate interrogation by the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission. He was made to wait until 4am before being ushered into a room. There he was questioned about his source for a We-Chat message he had sent the previous day warning colleagues of a dangerous new infection on the loose in his hospital. He was forced to sign a humiliating confession of sharing “untruthful information”. He later died of the infection, which came to be called Covid. The next day his source, Dr Ai Fen, head of emergency medicine at the Wuhan Central Hospital who had passed on the alarming news that an apparent…

WHILE THERE ARE FEWscholars who would laud that master of the dark arts Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) as a saintly figure, in his new book Harvard political philosopher Harvey Mansfield goes all out to portray the Renaissance writer as a diabolical character well deserving of his sometime sobriquet “Old Nick”. Yet Mansfield does not condemn him; instead, and rather refreshingly, he exhilarates in recognising Machiavelli’s radical genius and in establishing him as the father not only of modern philosophy, but also of the modern world. It is quite a claim, but such is Mansfield’s erudition and inspired enthusiasm that he takes the reader a long way with him. The result is a bold and often brilliant exercise in political philosophy and effervescent intellectual speculation. “Machiavellian” is a universally acknowledged adjective to…

‘‘TO A WISE MAN,” SAID THE FIRST-century wonderworker Apollonius of Tyana, “everywhere is Greece.” That is to say, Greece is not a mere place, but a special state of mind. For Apollonius, on his extensive travels around the Greco-Roman world, the purported truth of this maxim is seldom open to doubt. The author of Apollonius’s colourful biography, Philostratus, depicts his hero as not just a philosopher but also an impossibly accomplished champion of culture — a confounder of logic and expectations who could vanish in plain sight, now fascinating Roman emperors and foreign sages, now inspiring whole towns into acts of celebration and renewal. The guiding ideology that drove this hero is a heady mix of philosophy, religion, magic and political insouciance — or, to give it another name, Hellenism.…

A FEW YEARS AGO, DURING A VERYintense session of expert procrastination, I noticed that the algorithm of my YouTube ads pushed a new sort of service. BetterHelp, the presenter gleefully repeated, aimed at delivering a “personalised therapy for a happier you”. Great life hacks at your fingertips, any time, anywhere. Because “you deserve to be happy”. Many yearn for a quick fix while coping with the ups and downs of postmodern life. But the aggressively jovial BetterHelp marketing was puzzling. What was this service selling that a pint at the pub with friends couldn’t provide? There’s something fishy in this rebranding of therapy, which seeks to destigmatise the practice by making it look laid-back and essential to everyday life. The issue is not that mental health is made more accessible, quite…

MRS SECRET AUTHOR, who knows her onions, recently drew her husband’s attention to a Facebook post that, or so she claimed, simultaneously epitomised all that was best and all that was worst about the modern literary marketplace. In it a woman — thankfully unknown to us — had decided to file her new year’s resolutions. One of them was to write “a Romance novel”. Clearly this was going to take a bit of time, but the aspiring novelist was confident that if she started now it would be possible to plan for a pre-Christmas launch. All this, it turned out, had gone down a storm with the poster’s friends. To a man — well, actually to a woman — they rushed to assure her what a terrific idea it was.…

OPERA’S VALUE AS A GUIDE TO negotiating the old vale of tears continues to be hotly debated — well, here, anyway; to be fair, it’s got to be a better bet than mime. On the plus side, you can expect loads of hot sex and a richly varied emotional life. Then again, you’ll definitely be spending a lot of time in jail, clap clinic and loony bin. Swings and roundabouts, innit. Alongside its other tips, it provides the handiest travel guides, Baedeker appendices for deviants of all sorts. Certainly, these depictions of exotic spots, if they happened on telly or anywhere the proles might see them, would long ago have been hurled into the BBC’s dungeon of the damned alongside It Ain’t Half Hot Mum or Thames Television’s Love Thy…

“AN ELDERLY MAN WITH MEMORY problems,” was the US Department of Justice counsel’s summary of Joe Biden’s unmoored ramblings, when the President found himself obliged to answer for careless handling of official documents. That conclusion would also work as the tagline for King Lear, the most searing dramatic treatment of physical and mental decline through the fractured prism of a kingship unravelling. In the nimble hands of South African director, Yaël Farber, it is a modern-dress version, which foregrounds the impact of wealth and untrammelled power on family dynamics, as the King’s decision to opt for a poorly-calculated early equity release scheme unleashes bloody chaos. TOO MANY DIRECTORS SHOEHORN RACE OR GENDER TWISTS IN, BUT FARBER’S CASTING FEELS ASSURED In her last outing at Islington’s Almeida, with Macbeth, Farber presented…

THE ADVENTURES OF MY SOUL among masterpieces, Anatole France called his literary criticism. Flaubert put it slightly differently. “I read,” he said, “in order to live.” Hurrah for those Frenchmen! We could always do with a bit of that spirit. A paradox of our age is the number of book festivals which have sprung up in a world obsessed by the image. There is barely a town in the land which does not have a week of events devoted to the written word, yet ours is no longer a literary culture; not in the way it was. With all those channels available you would have thought the BBC could set aside an hour each week for a serious television show about books, and the people who write them. Instead there…

AURÉLIE CANZONERI, India Cardona, Ines Fiorini, Starkellen, Tina Lee; if any of these names are familiar then you should be doing my job. They and thousands like them are the women who can make or break restaurants through their reach on Instagram. That hospitality has been adapting itself to social media for more than a decade isn’t exactly news, but until I saw the ladies in action at Forestis in the Valle Isarco I had no idea of the depth of the shift. This goes beyond appealing plate assembly, or even entire locales being designed to look good on an Insta reel (such as El&N, which pitched itself as “the world’s most Instagrammable café” when it launched in 2017). This is bigger. The entire raison d’etre of Forestis, from the…

The hermès’ “kelly” bag, Cartier diamond tiaras, Louis Vuitton anything. Going onto the websites of Christie’s or Sotheby’s one could be forgiven for thinking that these global art businesses sold mostly jewellery, sports memorabilia, handbags, and the odd painting. It’s handbags one week, a sporting hero’s footwear the next, a musical megastar’s rather fascinating detritus (see Freddie Mercury, Elton John), followed by Picasso, Italian baroque paintings and Regency silver-gilt — all oddly coexisting in a sort of quasi-department store approach to luxury sales, using the auction method of determining who wins the right to buy: the highest offer wins. Auction houses offering modern luxury goods alongside old master paintings and sculpture is not new: James Christie held sales of Matthew Boulton’s luxury, gilded, metal-mounted Blue John vases and candelabras in…

WILL’S OBSESSION WITH Zoe, the health app (not mistress), continues. Not a snack goes by without an enlightening comment on Ultra Processed Foods. As a result we’re now being treated to Will’s bread. It’s gluten free — yup, that’s my husband, wildly late to the party — and retch-inducingly dry. Will keeps saying how great bread tastes without emulsifiers. The children won’t touch it. New identity as artisanal baker also not ideal as our cleaner only comes twice a week, and Will invariably starts the process the minute she leaves. This is what happens when he’s WFH! And as much as I’ve tried to explain that Gail’s sourdough is not, in fact, a UPF, Will’s adamant that he needs to “know what’s going into his food”. Damn you, Chris Van…

Sport at its best is defined not by one performer but two, by a rivalry which elevates and inspires both participants. John McEnroe was left distraught when Björn Borg walked away from tennis: Ayrton Senna repeatedly tried to persuade Alain Prost to reverse his decision to retire. So amidst all the hoopla about JÜRGEN KLOPP leaving Liverpool at the end of the season, spare a thought for PEP GUARDIOLA. For eight seasons — Klopp arrived at Anfield in October 2015, Guardiola joined Manchester City in August 2016 — they have been the standout managers in the Premiership. But soon there will be only one, and it’s not too fanciful to imagine that when Klopp departs a part of Guardiola will go with him too. Guardiola has called Klopp “the toughest opponent…