Indholdsfortegnelse for July 2024 i The Critic

A DECADE INTO ITS RULE AND STILL fully protected by an invincible parliamentary majority and undented moral self-righteousness, what might the Labour government look and feel like? Let us imagine its tenor through those it might honour. Take the senior policeman, whose many other virtues notwithstanding, “also plays a central role in delivering the Police Race Action Plan to ensure there is more diverse leadership across the service”. Or the doyen of university admissions who “is committed to helping students from diverse backgrounds [and] supports previously marginalised student groups, care leavers, LGBTQ+ individuals, those with disabilities, and others facing mental health challenges”. Or the future City of London bureaucrat, who “has influenced quoted companies to embrace NetZero targets and the wider ESG agenda and under her leadership, the LSE is now…

TORY TRANS ACTIVISTS In her devastating appraisal of transgender activists who seek to rewrite history and their role in promoting the falsehoods and harms identified in the Cass review (SORRY IS THE HARDEST WORD, JUNE), Helen Joyce rightly draws attention to Ruth Hunt. As chief executive of Stonewall from 2014 to 2019, Hunt was central to turning the gay rights charity into an aggressive promoter of transgender propaganda. As Joyce notes, Hunt was duly rewarded by Theresa May with a peerage. This is unsurprising, for it is worthwhile recalling the central role that the (self-identifying) “moderate” wing of the Conservative Party has played in cheerleading some of the most extraordinary claims of the transgender lobby. In 2017, Theresa May committed her government to changing the Gender Recognition Act so that…

“Have you seen my suit? The tight one. No, the really tight one.” Rishi is looking through his wardrobe. “Darling, half of my clothes seem to have disappeared.” “Oh yes,” says Akshata. “Well, I sent them off to the cleaners.” I don’t know why she’s saying this. Every day when Rishi is off in his helicopter she packs things into boxes that are taken away before he gets back. “That’s a good idea,” says Rishi. “I’ll want to look smart when I announce I’m forming my next government.” Rishi puts on his second tightest suit, complaining that the trousers are too long, and we go downstairs. It’s been quiet around here lately. None of our friends come round any more. Even Jeremy Who Lives Next Door is too busy. “Surrey…

THE GERMAN WORD FOR “DISAPPOINTMENT” IS ENTTÄUSCHUNG, WHICH STRICTLY TRANSLATES as “disillusionment”. It is the word chosen by Thomas Mann as the title of one of his earliest short stories: an encounter with a stranger in the Piazza San Marco. The nameless stranger (“For some reason I mistook him for an Englishman”) is a kind of forerunner of Gustav von Aschenbach, the world-weary protagonist of Mann’s Death in Venice. In Disillusionment the stranger tells his life story as an unbroken catalogue of disappointments. Contemplating the sea, he asks: “Why a horizon, when I wanted the infinite from life?” He concludes: “And so I dream and wait for death. Ah, how well I know it already, death, that last disappointment. At my last moment I shall be saying to myself: ‘So…

HAVE THE TORY POLITIcians in charge of our public finances since 2010 been financial magicians? As will soon be explained, in their years in office the state has borrowed more — relative to national output — than in any previous period of similar length in British peacetime history. Yet somehow the debt position remains respectable by international standards. How have they accomplished this feat? Consider the following numbers, which are sourced from the International Monetary Fund’s magnificent database and show “general government net lending/borrowing (i.e., the budget deficit) as a percentage of gross domestic product” for the years of Conservative rule. (The IMF prepares these numbers for 196 of its member countries!) Year Deficit as a percentage of GDP 2010 -9.253 2011 -7.420 2012 -7.496 2013 -5.382 2014 -5.576 2015…

THE LIFE OF A DEDICATED OXFORD don and literary figure is bound to contain few opportunities for drama, glamour, or adventure. “I enjoy monotony,” C.S. Lewis once admitted to a questioner, and that was surely a fortunate trait, given that he spent 30 years teaching at Oxford, mainly in undergraduate tutorials, before he finally moved to a non-teaching post at Cambridge. Yet such is the fascination that many have with the author of the Screwtape Letters (1942), the Narnia Chronicles (1949-54), and the autobiographical Surprised by Joy (1955), that many readers will relish the details of his Oxford life revealed in this sympathetic and atmospheric biography. Simon Horobin records that Lewis typically taught 24 hours of tutorials a week, a huge burden over the three Oxford terms, which then as…

TIBERIUS WAS 55 YEARS OLD WHEN HE became the second Roman emperor. He ruled from AD 14 to 37, spending most of the second half of his reign on the island of Capri, where he never lost his grip on power despite being over 130 miles from Rome. Like most bureaucratic administrators, he was far from popular. Tacitus (AD 56–120), the greatest of all Roman historians, presents Tiberius as paranoid, ruthlessly cruel, and pathologically unable to say what he meant. The imperial biographer Suetonius (69–122) completes the Tacitean picture of a dour, charmless pervert, miserable even in his increasingly sordid pleasures. Not all writers are quite so hostile to Tiberius: since the Enlightenment he has won qualified praise from thinkers including Montesquieu and Voltaire, who have often been willing to overlook…

AT THE RISK OF RUINING MY RELATIONship with The Critic, I quite like the Republic pressure group. These anti-monarchy campaigners are easy to mock, of course, and not merely because they typify the self-righteous soul of retirement liberalism. After all, despite their antics, the Windsors can still muster the support of comfortably more than half their subjects, not much less than 20 years ago. And though young Britons are increasingly sceptical of monarchy, republican prospects still feel bleak. In a country where building 80 miles of railway becomes too radical a proposition, is a wholesale constitutional revolution really so likely? But on Republic goes, shouting slogans and waving placards. To me, that doggedness feels admirable, as does their refreshingly unsentimental disdain for ermine and crowns. And if, to paraphrase C.S.…

THE PURPOSE OF HUGH WARWICK’S latest book is, he asserts, “to find the middle ground” in a debate over the efficacy and ethics of killing animals for conservation. Cull of the Wild succeeds, but only in part. While the discourse is well written, thoughtful and entertaining in places, he swerves the centrism he seeks, largely due to one glaring omission, of which more later. Warwick is clearly a very gentle man, an expert in the conservation of the now threatened but much-beloved British hedgehog. He is also a “Vague-un”, not fully plant-based, admitting that buttery cakes and real milk in his coffee are responsible for him falling off the vegan wagon. Warwick makes clear from the outset that culling, lethal control or plain, old-fashioned killing one animal to save another…

No golden years HATS OFF TO THE GUARDIANfor finally highlighting the plight of baby boomer stars still unfairly forced to earn a crust at this late stage of the game. Speaking as part of the acting vintage who enjoyed their greatest financial success between 30 and 40 years ago, this former telly regular can confidently state he existed responsibly within his means during “peak” decades — confining myself to three divorces, obligatory overseas travel and humble living arrangements in Kensington/Dorset/Tuscany. One could hardly have foreseen the current sorry state of affairs! Ancient enmity AN APOLOGY TO THE HARDWORKing folk running esteemed retired actors’ establishment Brinsworth House, following regrettable scenes during a recent visit. Having planned to spend the afternoon reminiscing with an amiable former co-star, I instead found myself…

WHEN THE SPOTIFY APP TOLD ME Billie Eilish’s new album had landed, the announcement was surprisingly dictatorial: “Stream hit me hard and soft front-to-back now.” It wasn’t just the imperative that took me aback. It was the insistence I listen to the whole thing as, well, an album. This is kind of counter to the whole promise of streaming, one of the benefits of which is that it turns all music into a pick ’n’ mix from which you can pluck only the tastiest morsels. Freed from the constraints of CD, tape or vinyl, you can pick at will: no more hovering over the skip button, or trying to drop the needle in the right groove. And even better (at least, it was supposed to be better), as a listener…

IT’S A TESTAMENT TO HOW WELL things are going in the current Conservative campaign that when I asked politically-minded friends what election films they could think of, the most popular reply was Brewster’s Millions. Who knows what will be happening when you read this, but at the time of writing, a good explanation for Rishi Sunak’s approach is that he’s trying to lose. Based on a 1902 novel, which had already been filmed four times, the 1985 movie starred Richard Pryor as a baseball player who has to spend $30 million in a month without having anything to show for it. It’s still enjoyable four decades later, though like a lot of 1980s films, there’s an oddly unfinished quality to it, as though the script needed another draft, or a…

Alright, suckers, I’ve had enough of journalism. There isn’t enough money in it for a hustler like me. I need to be stacking paper — and I mean banknotes rather than freelance submissions. Yes, I’m going to become a businessman. I’m going to become a CEO! And where better to learn how to become a successful entrepreneur than Steven Bartlett’s smash hit podcast The Diary of a CEO? Mr Bartlett, 31, co-founded companies such as Social Chain and thirdweb, and launched The Diary of a CEO in 2017. Here, he interviews scientists, celebrities, businesspeople, philosophers and pretty much anyone with a name and a story. Bartlett has a soothing laid-back manner. He barely interviews his guests so much as assists them down the path of their thoughts. In a culture…

VAINGLORY, NOT GLUTTONY, took me to Budapest. The government esteems the Magyar Külügyi Intézet, the Institute of International Affairs. So the invitation to give lectures and seminars made me hope I might do some good. The Institute was full of learning and vibrancy. To go to the opera was like being locked in a jewel casket: plush and intimate, yet grand and glorious (though an over-zealous director managed to make Boris Godunov irrational but unexotic). Other highlights of the trip were slabs of goose liver piled on the cakes of fried dough that Hungarians favour, heaps of peppery tripe with marrow fat, soup stiff with roe and lumps of carp, schnitzels cut from a Mangalica pig (a half-wild beast peculiar to Hungary), abundant boar and venison, the soft round egg…

AGE. IT DOES THINGS TO YOU. One minute, one has no idea what “the season” is, reserving summer for sex and sleep. The next, one is hobbing one’s nob off with the rest of the ton at flower shows, picnics purporting to be country-house opera, and wedding after interminable wedding. From the seventeenth century onwards, landowning clans left their country piles in late spring to amuse themselves while their menfolk festered about Parliament. Think parties and picnics, bashes and balls, sporting, gardening and “artistic” events (term used necessarily loosely). Between the end of Easter until no later than August 12th, anyone who was anyone could be found doing everything; then headed north to kill stuff. Balzac’s 1837 novel, La Muse du département, features a scathing account of this brief spell…

THE PARIS OLYMPICS OF 1924 HAD A number of innovations that survive today. There was the first use of the motto of citius, altius, fortius (swifter, higher, stronger), the first radio coverage and the first Olympic Village. The first Winter Games had been held in Chamonix five months earlier and it had the first closing ceremony in which the flag of the next host country was flown. Yet as far as The Times was concerned that summer, the Dutch flag should have stayed furled and the Games of the eighth Olympiad should have been the last. “Olympic Games doomed” was the headline, followed by the sub-heads “Failure of the ideal” and “Disgraceful scenes”. In a 900-word leading article that described itself as “delivering the funeral oration … of the whole…

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AS I WRITE THIS, SIR KEIR Starmer is on the cusp of becoming prime minister. The first lawyer of any note to be PM since H. H. Asquith KC more than a century ago, his views on legal and constitutional issues are naturally of some interest. This is not least because, as a young radical lawyer, Starmer, once the secretary of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers, held views which are decidedly out of favour in today’s Labour Party. Take human rights. In an 1995 editorial for the Haldane Society’s journal, he began by rubbishing the idea that there was such a thing as universal and inalienable human rights. He then called the European Convention on Human Rights “almost redundant” in the struggle for socialism, endorsing Karl Marx’s critique of…

‘‘WHEN I THINK OF UKRAINIANS, I think of them as the ones driving the tanks when the Soviets crushed the 1956 revolution,” was the first thing I remember a Hungarian host telling me when I was in Budapest to give a book talk — my new book is called The Sources of Russian Aggression — and attend a conference. This was my first time visiting the city and it coincided with a visit by the President of China, in Hungary after a quick trip to Serbia. The Chinese leader delighted in reminding Europe that NATO once bombed a Chinese embassy in Belgrade. That was in a war that ended the post-Cold War tranquillity we briefly enjoyed, replacing it with a quarter century of post-Cold War supranational interventionism over national sovereignty…

THERE IS NO TRADITION MORE STORIED — and more futile — than that of the post-election autopsy. With the dust settled, the ballots counted, and the bodies buried, defeated parties typically spend months engaged in a performative display of soul-searching and wound-licking. Previous leaders are disavowed, new directions charted, and old ideological assumptions questioned. In a year or two, the new-look party is presented in earnest to the electorate, alongside promises that, this time, things will be different. The comparisons to desperate ex-boyfriends write themselves. In the wake of its defeat, the Conservative Party looks set to continue along this well-trodden path of self-discovery. This will all, largely, be a pointless exercise. The reasons for the Conservative Party’s defeat are obvious, and the steps that it must take to reconstitute…

After Donald Trump was found guilty on 34 charges, he said that he was “A VERY INNOCENT MAN”: not just innocent, mind you, but very innocent. Ordinary people who do not do what they are accused of having done, by contrast, are only innocent; Donald Trump is innocent squared, as it were. He never does, or is, anything by halves. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone claim to be very innocent before; while to say of someone that he is very innocent is not necessarily complimentary, suggesting naivety — not what the former president is best known for. I happened to be reading the Cass report on the day Mr Trump was convicted, a sterling if not beautifully-written piece of work, and I noticed the following: Balanced information, which…

YOU MAY HAVE MISSED this as the general election campaign veered between waves of tragedy and farce but the Church of England’s Diocese of Salisbury decided to issue a formal “briefing” on the issues of the election which, while being neither lachrymose nor funny, was certainly depressing. It tries to be a briefing document for anyone in the diocese wanting “to Pray your Part” and it explores many of the issues being discussed in the election. It does not explore them in a neutral way. Questions it encourages people to ask of their candidates include: “Will you eliminate the concept of illegality of those who enter the UK by other non-traditional means?”; “Will you consider abolishing short-term sentences, those of one year and under?”; and “What is your policy on…

MATEUSZ SITEK, A POLISH SOLDIER ON DUTY AT THE frontier with Belarus, was an easy target. As he tried to close a hole in the border fence someone holding a makeshift weapon — a knife taped to a tree branch — rammed it through the gap straight into his chest. Sitek, 21, died a few days later on 6 June. His murder was little noticed in the West, but it caused fury across Poland. Radek Sikorski, the foreign minister, demanded that the Belarusian authorities hand over his killer. They are unlikely to agree. Poland’s border fence is 5.5 metres high, runs for 186 kilometres and is topped with razor-wire. So far this year there have been 17,000 attempts to breach it — and 90 per cent of those caught have Russian…

THE STORY ARC OF THIS “SECRET history” is that the economist Friedrich Hayek invented an extreme form of capitalism known as neoliberalism in his 1944 book The Road to Serfdom which attracted some “fanatical disciples” who set up some think tanks which attracted some “wealthy backers” who pumped in so much money that the think tanks were able to brainwash politicians into abandoning social democracy, thereby leaving us with the redin-tooth-and-claw, devil-take-the-hindmost, laissez-faire capitalism that enslaves us today. This is the umpteenth book by the Guardian columnist George Monbiot, who has something of an obsession with free-market think tanks, and with my employer, the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), in particular. Written with the filmmaker Peter Hutchison, The Invisible Doctrine feels like a communiqué from a parallel universe. I…

I HAVE A CONFESSION TO MAKE: I DON’T GET Marilynne Robinson. She is not short of high profile fans, from historian Tom Holland and Oprah to Barack Obama. The words “greatest living American/Christian novelist” get thrown around a lot. I can certainly understand the idea of Marilynne Robinson, who represents smalltown Midwestern piety in the same way Bruce Springsteen embodied the Rust Belt, Flannery O’Connor spoke for the Catholic south, or Cormack McCarthy reignited rugged individualism. So when Robinson, already heralded as a modern day literary-religious prophet, wrote a book about Genesis, it was greeted in rather the same fashion as when Moses descended from Mount Sinai bearing the Ten Commandments: with rave reviews in outlets across the political spectrum. But whatever other people find in her work, whatever torch burns…

THE PATH TO BECOMING POPE IS A ROAD travelled by only a chosen few. A small group of 266 cardinals have been elected the spiritual leader of Roman Catholicism, whose devotees make up more than a sixth of the world’s population. While each man has worn an important vestment, they’re not necessarily cut from the same cloth. Each has had a unique life, experience and journey to the Vatican. Pope Francis’s path certainly fits this description. He studied with the Jesuits, and is the first member of that order to be elected Pope. His political sympathies often veer to the Left like his childhood teachers, while his social values generally align with Church doctrine. He’s been described as an “everyman Pope” with a significant social media following and sizeable popularity…

RACHEL CUSK IS ONE OF THE MOST INteresting writers in Britain today, for both the content of her books and the path of her career. She started out as an extremely good practitioner of a well-established form: the comic novel of middle-class manners. Yet books like The Country Life (1997) and Arlington Park (2006) had a philosophical meatiness in their thinking that set them apart. And when the scathing response (“one of the worst things that ever happened to me”) to her memoirs A Life’s Work and Aftermath led to a creative crisis, we might have known that Cusk wouldn’t go quietly. Her response was to reforge her work in a way comparable to T.S. Eliot’s with Four Quartets: a new form for a new way of thinking about…

ZIONISM IS RACISM. Men are rapists Opera is elitist. Set aside the first two fallacies for another day. The third has been latterly empowered, ending the careers of young artists and jeopardising the art form’s survival. Consider the prosecution case. Opera is expensive. Its tickets are priced so high they are reserved for the rich who, having forked out, like to dress up. Nights at the opera, seen though a glass darkly, project an ugly exclusivity. Opera is usually sung in a foreign language. Although translation titles are projected above the stage, looking up and down all the time gives you an inferiority complex and a crick in the neck. The interval refreshments are Veuve Cliquot and smoked salmon. Opera lasts twice as long as football. Seats are covered in…

THE TWO MOST FAMOUS NAMES emanating from the French Caribbean during the years of the Revolution and Napoleonic wars were Marie Josèphe Rose Tascher de La Pagerie (better known as the Empress Joséphine) and Toussaint Louverture, a former slave turned revolutionary leader who fought for Haitian independence. There were others too, including one of Toussaint’s brothers-in-arms, Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, the sang-mêlé (mixedrace) general and father of the novelist Alexandre. In the world of French art, at this febrile time, there was also a figure of importance, who has since slipped from view: Guillaume Guillon-Lethiè re. LETHIÈ RE (1760-1832) WAS BORN IN Guadeloupe, one of the three sons of Pierre Guillon, a white French plantation owner and king’s prosecutor, and a freed slave mother — black, mulatto or quadroon — Marie-Françoise (called…

TELEVISION DETECTIVES OFTEN seem familiar. They are usually male, divorced and drink too much. They miss their kids. Sometimes they are alcoholics, battling to not even take a whiff of the hard stuff. Their ex-wives are attractive — much more so than their dishevelled former husbands — and happily coupled up with a much more stable/handsome/richer new squeeze. The tropes are popular, because they work. The challenge for writers is to make the cop in question sufficiently engaging and original within these creative confines. Rebus, now showing on BBC iPlayer, is the second outing for Detective Inspector John Rebus and, gosh, is it good. The first four series, based on the best-selling novels by Ian Rankin, were shown on ITV in the 2000s. The playwright Gregory Burke has reimagined Rebus…

MY COLUMNS ARE NORMALLY about architecture in England. But having recently been to a conference about architectural history in Santiago de Compostela, I want to reflect on the experience of visiting a city which is so remarkably well preserved as a historic environment and manages to avoid (mostly) being just a tourist city, cared for and protected by its inhabitants. I arrived in the early afternoon before the conference started and so had a couple of hours to wander round. I was astonished by how intact it is — the layout of the streets still medieval and interestingly random, with arcades protecting pedestrians from the drizzle along the main shopping street. The architecture is apparently without modern interventions, apart from the Galician Centre for Contemporary Art added by Álvaro Siza…

EVERY ENGLISHMAN HAS HIS second country - usually in southern Europe - where he dreams of escaping the misery and damp of Britain for la dolce vita or la belle vie. France and Italy tend to come out on top here, though Greece and Portugal are also popular choices. For me, however, it has always been Spain. Perhaps it’s my ease with the language. Not that I’m good at it, I just feel less of a tit trying to speak Spanish than I do French. Whenever I land in Spain, feel the warmth on my face and hear a lisped “c” or guttural “j”, I feel like I have come home. Or perhaps it’s simply because I like cheap wine and good food. Last month my longing for Spain was…

I DON’T CAST PARTICULARLY well but on my third attempt, the mayfly pattern dropped onto the water just upstream of the trout on the edge reeds. The fly came round right over the fish, then it drifted up towards the surface, knocked it with its nose, then descended again. I was fishing on the Itchen, just downstream from Twyford with Mark Hedges, the long-standing editor of Country Life. The river, he kept telling me, apologetically, should have been alive with hatching mayflies and the surface should have been dappled with trout rising to gorge themselves on the insects but all was still. The river, on account of the rain there had been over the previous few weeks, was high and rather than being gin-clear as it tends to be in…

“THAT’S ONE OF THOSE IRREGULAR VERBS, isn’t it?” says Bernard Woolley, principal private secretary of the hapless Jim Hacker in the classic television show Yes, Prime Minister. “I give confidential security briefings. You leak. He has been charged under section 2a of the Official Secrets Act.” In everyday life it’s the most common verbs — Winston Churchill’s “short, old words” — that conjugate irregularly. To be, to have, to hold: these verbs break the rules because they predate them. In public life irregular verbs are a sign of political bias and motivated arguments. They’re used by those who want to deceive themselves about what drives them — and to write off their opponents as beneath consideration. The process starts with the “fundamental attribution error”, as psychologists call the tendency to…

IT IS VERY IMPORTANT IN POLITICS, AS IN LIFE, not to get ahead of yourself. In the heady Glastonbury summer of 2017 Jeremy Corbyn was not, in fact, the prime minister. The fall of the Red Wall was not, in fact, the kind of permanent political realignment that would provide opportunities for ambitious Tory thinkers to get themselves selected in safe Conservative seats in the broken heartlands of the north east of England. Boris Johnson could not, in fact, change. At the time of writing, Labour has not won the election, so let’s not get ahead of ourselves. But it looks overwhelmingly likely to do so: something that looked overwhelmingly unlikely when Keir Starmer took over as Labour Leader just four years ago. It’s worth asking why and who, if…

THE LIST OF 121 BOSSES who signed a letter backing Keir Starmer for prime minister conjures a peculiar vision of British business life. Among the signatories were Emma Woods, chair of Ancient+Brave, a “bovine collagen” business offering “wellness” and “self-care” through expensive jars of powdered cowhide. Also putting his name to the list was Asi Sharabi, CEO of Wonderbly, which sells personalised kids’ books with titles such as The Little Girl who Dared to Dream and Daddy’s Magic Hugs. Then there was Max Alexander, the former CEO of Secret Cinema, which charges film fans £140 to spend an evening dressed as a superhero in an East London warehouse. I don’t wish to disparage any of the folk who signed the Labour letter. I salute anyone who creates and builds businesses.…

RINGO STARR’S GRINNING, head-shaking figure flailing away behind his Ludwig drum kit was as much a trademark of the early Fab Four as their collarless jackets and three-part harmonies. In interviews, his deadpan wit was the equal of John Lennon’s more acerbic humour, and the morose persona he presented in the 1964 film A Hard Day’s Night broke just as many female hearts as Paul McCartney’s doe eyes. All this helped make this practitioner of a craft that had previously been a ticket to a lifetime of standing in the shadows of others the most popular Beatle: sales of “I Love Ringo” badges left those for his three colleagues standing. Such was The Beatles’ stature, it made Starr among the most popular human beings alive. However, when it comes to…

WHEN I HEARD RISHI SUNAK WAS ABOUT to call the election, I went online and saw the tragic spectacle unfold in real time. I watched as the heavens opened, and then struggled to hear the Prime Minister’s voice as Steve Bray’s loudspeaker started pumping out “Things Can Only Get Better”. Later, some schoolfriends of exactly my vintage (I turned 18 in May 1997) shared their approval of Bray’s idiocy. Apparently oblivious of the Partridge-esque nature of their exclamations, one wrote “Genius!”, and another, “Back of the net!” I tried not to alienate any more schoolfriends than I already have by commenting, “Jurassic Park!”, or “Smell my cheese”. I was struck by just how abysmally different that moment was from May 1997, the time it was meant to conjure up. Even…

Walking south down Oxford’s Mansfield Road, it is hard not to be stopped in one’s tracks by the porter’s lodge of the Gradel Quadrangles, built for New College [1]. Opened only in April this year, and still awaiting their finishing touches, they are the newest addition to a city that contains arguably the country’s grandest suite of urban buildings but also its most curious. Seen as it is approached, obliquely, the bulging arch of the low-winged porters’ lodge contrasts vividly with the strict, Perpendicular lines of Thomas Worthington’s (rather uninspiring) chapel at Harris Manchester that stands behind it [2]. Looked at from the other side of the street, the lodge is dominated by a tower that looms ominously above it, bringing to mind Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo [3]. A walk around the…

HAVE YOU NOTICED THAT THINGS don’t really seem to work at the moment? Perhaps you have been to Accident and Emergency recently, or tried to catch a train, or are watching the general crisis engulfing British universities. There is lots of dysfunction to go around. Scepticism about claims of a zeitgeist — invariably an argument wrapped up as an observation — is usually correct. Nevertheless, in Britain in 2024 it is very tempting to identify the spirit of the age as the fact that things mostly used to work and now they mostly do not. Why this has happened is perhaps the great question of our times. Dan Davies, a former Bank of England economist and investment bank analyst turned journalist and commentator, thought he had an answer. Davies’s last…

SUSANNA RUSTIN IS ONE OF THE SURPRISing survivors of the present trans culture war, having managed to remain a Guardian columnist despite her heretical view that sex is biological. When at that paper, Suzanne Moore found that when she wrote about “female experience belonging to people with female bodies”, it was always “subbed out”. Her column in March 2020, “Women must have the right to organise. We will not be silenced”, caused a storm: when subsequently 338 editorial, tech and commercial Guardian staff denounced the paper’s “pattern of publishing transphobic content”, she resigned. Rustin’s colleague, Hadley Freeman, barred from writing about 2022 amid what she described as “an atmosphere of real fear”. She had endured the paper running — her words — “glowing profiles of trans activists” such as the…

“SOLDIERS! THE YEAR 1944 WILL BE very difficult. It is our joint task to transcend the purely defensive in its course and deal the adversary such heavy blows that finally the hour will come in which Providence can grant the victory to that nation which deserves it the most.” As the broadcaster turned historian Jonathan Dimbleby goes on to detail in his excellent book Endgame 1944: How Stalin Won the War, it would not be Germany who would come out on top. In probably his finest book thus far, the titanic ideological war Hitler began against the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 climaxes in 1944 with the systematic destruction of the Führer’s armies in the east. It has been a slightly odd experience to read this book during the great…

IT’S NOT OFTEN YOU HEAR OPERA being praised for its progressive zeal. Quite the opposite, in fact: and it’s the people who run it who seem most obsessed with its reactionary infamy — as though it were a drunken uncle at a wedding, liable to do something appalling at any moment. Why else go to such lengths to bowdlerise it for their ideal — albeit sadly imaginary — audiences of global majoritarians, the easily offended and general unwashed? This happens in all sorts of amusing little ways. I fondly recall performances of HMS Pinafore at Holland Park where the management were so horrified by the idea of Little Buttercup’s gypsy plasma they made her say the line “the bumboat woman has mystic blood …” instead. To date, nobody has asked…

BY THE TIME COLE PORTER STARTED his breakneck-speed Kiss Me Kate project in the sombre aftermath of the Second World War, his glory days of pre-war musical hits were fading. Even he sounded defensive about the project. Turning Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew into a multi-sided romance and a comedy of backstage errors, featuring gangsters, mistaken identity and the era staple of divorced couples still hankering for each other — see also, Private Lives (1930) and The Philadelphia Story (1940) — was an expensive business. Porter even included a sly dig at backers who had been initially reluctant to go with the idea, brandishing the Bard in his defence: “Well, Fred, this is sort of a musical version of The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare, you know …” BARTLETT…

● “me reading heine, you somewhere in China”, wrote Ira Gershwin, ever the wit, for his brother George. Even in those days the German writer was a taste acquired by few Anglophones. Now the man known to his family as Harry languishes in the kind of perfumed obscurity which claims most poets. In a Radio 3 feature, The First Modern European, Michael Goldfarb presented Harry, later Heinrich, not as a songwriter’s curio but as a major Romantic figure, whose example continues to put salt in the porridge of European culture. He succeeded, too. It was an excellent programme. Poet, essayist, and the kind of cultural maypole around whom others merrily danced, Heine was born in rich Dusseldorf in 1797, and died in Paris in 1856. Between two revolutions, therefore: the…

SPRING IS THE GAYEST SEASON for London restaurant openings. Arlington, July, The Cocochine, Lita, Oma — which to choose? Sometimes though, amidst the merry whirl of town life, it can be refreshing to dine in a restaurant that isn’t hustling for your attention, a place that no one will ask you if you’ve been to yet, which is entirely free of list-checking, status-adjacent anxiety. Royal China on Baker Street has been exactly such a restaurant since it opened in 2005. It’s not the latest, or the coolest, which makes it fantastically soothing; reliable for unfussy celebrations, quick catch-up lunches or impromptu late-night feasts. If you have recently become divorced or need a venue for a discreet row, the tables are satisfyingly far apart and no one will look at you…

“WE THOUGHT THE protest was an extremely dignified one. They could not have done it in a nicer way,” said Graham Llewellyn, deputy chairman of Sotheby’s and auctioneer at a silver sale in 1975 after a walk-out of silver dealers during an auction following the introduction of the 10 per cent buyer’s “premium”, or fee. Though this event nearly half a century ago was certainly from a different era, it marked the shift in how business is done at art auctions. Auction houses have a fiduciary responsibility to the seller, not to the buyer. Surely, it makes sense to ask the seller to pay a fee. This is how much of the art market works: you go into a gallery, ask the price, maybe haggle a bit and pay. If…