Indholdsfortegnelse for December/January 2025 i The Critic

Q: WHO, JUST UNDER A CENTURY AGO, WROTE THE FOLLOWING, AND ABOUT WHOM? No doubt the old-fashioned biography will return, and, with the years, we shall once more learn to assist with our fathers’ decorum at the lying-in-state of our great men … Meanwhile, we must keep our tongue in our cheek, must we not, for fear it should loll out and reveal the idiot? We have discovered a jollier way of honouring our dead. The corpse has become a marionette. With bells on its fingers and wires on its toes it is jigged about to a “period dance” of our own piping; and who is not amused? In fact, this pointed little homily on the biographer’s art is taken from the preface to Evelyn Waugh’s Rossetti: His Life and…

THIS OCTOBER A MAJOR SCHOLARLY ACHIEVEMENT WAS realised with the publication of The Price of Victory, the third and final instalment of N.A.M. Rodger’s great trilogy on the naval history of Britain from 660 AD to 1945. It has been an odyssey, albeit one that to complete took more than three times longer than Homer’s hero took to journey home. The first volume, Safeguard of the Sea, was published back in 1997, some six years after Rodger (right) had left his job as Assistant Keeper of the Public Records at the then Public Records Office to join the National Maritime Museum. Having moved to Exeter University, he completed the second volume, Command of the Ocean, covering the period from 1649 to 1815, in 2004. Mindful of the fates of others who…

WHY DID KAMALA Harris lose the US Presidential election? Undoubtedly, a key negative influence on her campaign was inflation. In 2022 consumer prices did not rise at a double-digit annual rate, but the peak number of above 9 per cent was not far off that ignominious threshold. The Biden presidency saw the highest American inflation for over 30 years, and the Democrats and Harris were blamed for it. But the argument here will be that the blame lies elsewhere, that Harris’s elite economist supporters in the Democratic Party, many at top Ivy League departments, have done a thoroughly bad job in analysing the inflation episode. They have let her down. The failure has been largely due to their Keynesian ideological blinkers. When Covid-19 hit in early 2020, the Fed and…

HOW FAR IS RUSSIA, BLOODSTAINED and defiant, a reactive securityseeker, pushing back against Western encroachment? Or how far is it darker than that: an imperial aggrandizer, greedily expanding less for security than for glory, prestige and the sheer rush of it? Or do these two impulses feed off one another? These questions matter. They inform how we interpret Putin’s disastrous lunge into Ukraine in February 2022, how that war can end and its aftermath be best handled, and what our view of what this adversary “is”. Sumantra Maitra’s study, The Sources of Russian Aggression, is a serious book. Rich, well-organised, precise and nicely contentious, it avoids the over-descriptive, lazy insider-ism and “on the other hand”-ism that characterise so much Western commentary on the subject, especially since Russia’s ill-fated invasion of Ukraine.…

IN SEPTEMBER, TWO CITIES IN GERMANY took part in a peculiar bet. Greifswald, a once-bustling trade centre on the Baltic coast, laid down the gauntlet to Dresden: which of their respective marketplaces could gather the most people together dressed in Romantic-era costumes? The occasion for this weird wager was Caspar David Friedrich’s 250th birthday. Friedrich, the celebrated landscape painter whose work has become synonymous with German identity and an otherworldly Romanticism, was born in 1774 in Greifswald, while Dresden later became his adopted home. Between these two places, he found inspiration in the surrounding forests, harbours, seascapes and mountains, inhaling nature to “exhale it again as art”. “Cake for Caspar” may be a hit in Greifswald and Dresden today but it is striking to remember that the paintings now considered Friedrich’s…

IN THE OPENING SENTENCE OF “THE CRUEL REdeemer Lazarus Morell”, Jorge Luis Borges, ever the master of the breviloquent narrative, summarised the plight of the Americas: In 1517, Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, feeling great pity for the Indians who grew worn and lean in the drudging infernos of the Antillean gold mines, proposed to Emperor Charles V that Negroes be brought to the isles of the Caribbean, so that they might grow worn and lean in the drudging infernos of the Antillean gold mines. For the Argentine man of letters, this barbarous crime was the “remote cause”: the terminus a quo that bound North and South America together. This trauma, however, continues unabated. Currently Latin America and the Caribbean accounts for a third of the world’s murders despite having…

HISTORY REBELS AGAINST DIGESTS. It baulks at sweeping generalisations, pouts at dogmas and grudgingly tolerates nuances. That is why the concept of the canon came in handy. Short of time to consider human creation and activity in full, students and teachers find refuge in trusted common references, assiduously curated across generations. Not only because these are representative of a specific period, but also because they offer insights that transcend their time and, in literature and the arts especially, something beautiful and admirable. In the crowded field of bite-sized annals, music rarely gets equal billing with the rest of art history. Compendiums on visual arts, for example, are plentiful; but a concise, illuminating reader on music’s evolution remains hard to find. When I entered the Maîtrise de Radio France aged ten…

IN A YEAR THAT HAS SEEN MORE HISTORY in the making than most, several outstanding books have come from our historians. Sir Noel Malcolm’s Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe: Male-Male Sexual Relations, 1400-1750 (OUP, £25) upends almost everything the academic world thought we knew about the subject. Malcolm demolishes Foucault’s hitherto dominant distinction between sodomy as an act and homosexuality as an identity, offering instead a far more nuanced account of the evolution of same-sexual experience and its modes. It is rare to find such a combination of original and polyglot research, moral courage and crisply elegant prose. ● SIR CHRISTOPHER CLARK’S REVOLUTIONARY Spring: Fighting for a New World, 1848-1849 (Penguin, £30) traverses well-trodden ground, but makes audible the voices of witnesses who had hitherto been drowned out — in particular,…

● THE ONLY THING THAT COULD have made this a bigger year for Charli XCX would have been a different result in the presidential election. Back when Kamala Harris was first announced as the Democratic candidate, Charli — real name Charlotte Gemma Aitchison — was one of the first celebrities to throw her weight behind the Harris campaign by tweeting “Kamala IS brat”. Brat is the name of Charli’s all-conquering 2024 album, but it’s more than that. Brat is a meme: a fuzzy, deliberately ugly sans serif typeface on an aggressively lurid green background. It’s an attitude: “I’m a brat when I’m bumpin’ that,” sings Charli on the song “365”, which closes out the album, suggesting a whole sexy, dirty, druggy world of bolshy hedonism. What all that has…

● THE SCREENWRITER BLAKE SNYDER, who died in 2009, was one of those creatives who taught more successfully than he did. He’s credited with writing just two films, of which the most successful is 1992’s cop comedy Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot. This is famous only because Arnold Schwarzenegger judged d the script dreadful but, in an effort to sabotage Sylvester Stallone’s career, pretended to be interested so that his rival would go for it. But Snyder’s 2005 book about how to structure a film, Save The Cat, is one of the most successful and influential screenwriting manuals ever written. It laid out a precise structure for a successful film, right down to saying which page of the script should feature which elements. There are other books on story…

● FROM HORROR FILMS TO HAUNTED houses, a lot of us have a perverse attraction to fear. Few want to be in actual death-defying circumstances — though some do, like BASE jumpers or cave divers — but we like to experience fear in an environment where it can be safely escaped. It gives us a rush — and it allows us to explore the darker aspects of our consciousness. Bringing our fears to the surface, perhaps, can allow us to understand them better. Haunted houses — that old fairground staple — have a dark modern cousin: extreme haunted houses. Here, the scares are bigger, and more vivid, and more interactive. (This critic attended one interactive house a few years ago, and almost elbowed an employee in the face when they…

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FEW JUDGES ARE KNOWN for their literary distinction, but the old County Court bench, the traditional home of might-have-beens, did produce a fair crop of novelists. Whatever his legal achievements might have been, Thomas Hughes QC (Circuit No. 9, Chester) will always be remembered as the author of Tom Brown’s School Days first and last. H. C. Leon MC (Circuit No. 46, Willesden) only admitted to being the novelist Henry Cecil upon his retirement in 1967; but given that his nom de plume consisted of his Christian names it is difficult to believe he ever fooled anyone. And while John Drabble QC (Circuit No. 1, Northumberland) never achieved popularity with his two gritty, surprisingly modern crime novels, he did leave his name in the records of literature by being the…

THE CRITICS ARE GUSHING about the pneumatic naked tennis. Mrs Ned is agog at Aidan Turner’s fecund facial furniture. Me? I’m salivating over the business deals: the new screen adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s 1980s novel Rivals brings to life an important chapter in Britain’s commercial history. With larger-than-life characters, appalling behaviour and enormous fortunes won and lost, the ITV franchise battles created great headlines for the pink pages. But they also cast a shadow over our culture and media industry, from which we are still suffering today. The fictional Cotswold TV station Corinium, overseen by David Tennant’s petulant, bullying Lord Baddingham, lies at the intersection of three real-world ITV franchises. Each of these businesses’ colourful leaders may have been fuel for Cooper’s fertile imagination. There was David Ormsby-Gore, 5th Baron…

IT IS JUST AFTER 10.30 ON A CHILL January morning at the University of Clacton, and with the Interwar Class (Woolf, Eliot, Pound) safely disposed of and the Post-Colonial Voices seminar (Selvon, Emecheta, Rushdie) arriving at 11am, Dr Max Grubb, comfortably ensconced in his departmental office, is hard at work on a letter. er. “Dear Mr X,” he writes, with a formality as glacial as the January morning, “Having read your review of the Lawrence letters in the Spectator, I feel it my duty to protest at the highly inadequate treatment of his dealings with Lady Ottoline Morrell. In fact, it seemed to me that your knowledge of Lawrence’s life and work, let alone the philosophical grounding that underpins it, was woefully insufficient for the task in hand …” The…

IF YOU COULD BE TRANSPORTED BACK 50 YEARS, to the London of 1974, where would you choose to be a fly on the wall? Surely at 52 Campden Hill Square in Holland Park, the home of Sir Hugh Fraser — the charismatic war hero, Scottish aristocrat and Tory MP — and his wife Lady Antonia, the historian, writer and part-time society beauty. At a Fraser party, Hugh’s right-wing friends and Antonia’s left-wing ones would socialise with writers, bohemians and arts-world panjandrums. Posh Catholics rubbed shoulders with sweary, shaven-headed actors. And in one corner you might find a quartet laughing, debating and — though none of them would have put it so pompously — fostering a revival of intellectual Toryism. They were a striking group: Hugh Fraser himself, a longstanding critic…

PAUL BAILEY’S FIRST INVENTION WAS HIMSELF. THE English author of a dozen exquisite novels, who died in October at the age of 87, was born Peter Harry Bailey, and in childhood invented a twin brother for himself “who spoke in a different voice although he had my face and wore my clothes” called Paul. “It was fun being someone else, escaping from the Peter that I was into the Paul of my imagination.” In his late teens, as an actor, he found there was already a Peter Bailey registered with Equity, and Peter formally became Paul. A life in fiction, then, in more ways than one. And, quite aside from any thoughts of paying tribute, few literary activities could give any sensitive reader as much delight as reading or re-reading Bailey’s…

LAST TIME I WAS IN TOWN, something felt oddly different when I stepped into Clerkenwell Road, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. Then I realised what was missing: bicycle couriers. There were Deliveroo riders galore whizzing about on electric bikes but traditional tattooed road-warrior messengers of the sort that were common in the 1990s and 2000s, I didn’t see a single one. Could one of London’s most distinctive tribes be dying out? According to Jon Day, author of Cyclogeography: Journeys of a London Bicycle Courier, the short answer is yes. He worked for three years as a courier in the early 2010s and even then the profession was in decline. The problem, as with almost everything, is the internet. Thanks to ever-increasing bandwidth all those things…

IN JUNE 2021, A 48-YEAR-OLD MAN HANGED HIM self in London. He called himself an “anti-capitalist queer” and he was a playwright and theatre director celebrated as a genius by his queer, anti-capitalist comrades and the theatres who liked a bit of queer anti-capitalism to spice up their programmes. He was “British theatre’s greatest maverick talent”, according to the Guardian. His name was Chris Goode and his company, Chris Goode and Co, had an idealistic approach to making theatre: “We tell stories that are both accessible and inclusive. And we think out loud about who we are, hoping to catch a glimpse of how we might live better together … we create bold original work that represents queer, dissident, and politically nonconformist perspectives.” Unfortunately, under all that inclusion, queerness and anti-capitalism,…

ACROSS THE OPEN WESTPHALIAN BASIN OF PLUMING steel stacks and wide estuary, the distinctive spires of Aachen Cathedral disrupt the skyline of the region Karl Marx called “the coal and steel heart of Germany”. But at one time, it was from here that the Emperor Charlemagne [1] commanded his empire in Western and Central Europe. An abundance of religious objects in the cathedral treasuries at Aachen and Essen, and an important museum of Russian icons, confirm the Eastern origins of a spiritual programme that manifested itself in the Carolingian and latterly, Ottonian, Renaissance. Charlemagne’s adoption of the imperial project led him to the fallen empires of classical antiquity, but also to the living one of Byzantium whose Greek language and religious differences had shielded it from Western influence for over…

THE 1650S ARE BACK. AGAINST THE backdrop of our new Carolean age, a flurry of books has appeared to illuminate our nation’s brief flirtation with republican government. Paul Lay, quondam literary editor of The Critic, led the way with Providence Lost; Clare Jackson’s Devil-Land won the Wolfson Prize two years ago; Henry Reece’s The Fall documents the last days of the English republic; and the second volume of Ronald Hutton’s monumental biography of Oliver Cromwell has just been released to much fanfare. To their number we may add Alice Hunt’s Republic, a year-by-year narrative of “a daring and unprecedented decade that deserves to be written about and understood as a distinct entity”. Cromwell is at its centre. I was quite old when I learned that Oliver Cromwell counted as a “controversial”…

ART WRITING IS AN INCREASINGLY niche interest, this magazine’s success notwithstanding. Critique is so marginal that contemporary artists and curators hardly bother reading reviews, let alone indulge critics and their arcane ideas of taste. After Brian Sewell’s passing, it has been difficult to imagine that art criticism would birth a celebrity again. Enter The White Pube (yes, that’s a juvenile pun), the pseudonymous practice of Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad who met at art school. Disillusioned with the institution, they have devoted the past decade to critiquing the art world instead. The Pube produces weekly independent reviews of exhibitions, video games, and “cultural” experiences that recently included a visit to the dentist. Their texts often read like social media rants, devoting more space to the writer’s bus journey to…

IN THE UK, AMONG MANY OTHER PLACES, WEare having fewer children and having them later in life, if at all. What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice, co-authored by philosophers Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, does not seek to answer its own question, mounting neither a defence of children nor an attack on their utility. Instead, it is about those who equivocate. It is for people who are unsure whether they want children. That we can individually choose to become a parent is an extremely good and hard-won thing. But Berg and Wiseman are right to point out that merely shrugging and saying, “It’s up to you”, is tantamount to “abandoning the uncertain” to their fate. Though drawing on dozens of interviews and hundreds of survey responses, the book…

THE CLOSEST I HAVE EVER COME TO meeting a Cromwellian solider was not at some Civil War reenactment by the Sealed Knot, but at a Church of England’s “Vision and Strategy Day”. To be sure, the person in question was sporting some nondescript Boden country casuals rather than the customary Roundhead leather cuirass and lobsterpot helmet, but her puritanical outpourings would easily have won her a place in the New Model Army. Had she travelled in time to the mid-seventeenth century, nothing would have held her back from hewing down altar rails with a halberd, or taking potshots at stained glass with an arquebus. “What’s the point of all these expensive old church buildings?” she complained. “They’re nothing special. They don’t mean anything. They’ve got nothing to do with worship. And…

IT’S THAT TIME OF YEAR AGAIN WHEN THIS column helpfully sorts sheep from goats, wheat from chaff and men from boys in our reckoning of the best fiction published in 2024. As ever, we omit from this list the best new titles we have covered already in this column: this year that would include Sigrid Nunez’s The Vulnerables, Helen Garner’s The Children’s Bach, David Nicholls’s You Are Here, Eugenio Montale’s Butterfly of Dinard, David Peace’s Munichs, Lissa Evans’s Small Bomb at Dimperley, Jonathan Coe’s The Proof of My Innocence and Alan Hollinghurst’s Our Eve nings. (Phew, it’s been a bumper year.) What follows, then, is a list of the best books not previously reviewed here. Your correspondent has heard rumours that there may be some very good books of 2024 out…

● I REMEMBER WELL THE DAY THE symphony died. It was August 1975 and I was sitting in a television newsroom when the teleprinter clattered out a Moscow dateline. “Hold the bulletin,” I cried. “Shostakovich is dead.” I was met by a wall of blank faces. “The greatest Russian composer since Tchaikovsky?” I tried. They’d heard of Tchaikovsky. “The Leningrad Symphony?” Not a flicker. My colleagues were world-travelled reporters and editors, well-read in modern history. Yet not one of them went to symphony concerts or took an interest in an art form that had been running about the same length of time as the United States of America. The USA commanded our constant professional attention. The symphony was peripheral. That day, 50 summers ago, I realised the symphony was dead.…

● EACH YEAR, ART BASEL ART FAIR and the bank and financial services provider UBS produce a survey of global collecting. The focus is on high net worthindividuals but their data crunching also yields an overview of wider art-buying trends and shifts. The latest survey, for 2023-24, based on grilling 3,660 HNWIs in 14 regions, has just been published. The art market emerged from the Covid pandemic in the rudest of health, with collectors (and would-be collectors) keen to offload their hoarded cash outside online auction platforms. Now, however, real-world issues such as high interest rates and geopolitical tensions have quenched the euphoria. Although during the course of 2023 the market fell by 4 per cent, to $65 billion, rather more notable is a significant drop in auction sales,…

● IT’S A BRAVE WRITER THAT REimagines The Day of the Jackal. Written by Frederick Forsyth and first published in 1971, the global bestseller remains in print in multiple languages. Its enduring success is especially impressive as the storyline revolves around a real-life attempt to assassinate Charles de Gaulle in 1962. De Gaulle was not assassinated then or at any other time, so readers knew, from the first page, that the protagonist fails. Forsyth’s skill was to make the would-be assassin a sufficiently complex, engaging character, and to deploy plenty of military detail and spycraft — including a now legendary explanation of how to supposedly obtain a passport in the name of a dead person. Ronan Bennett, creator of the eponymous blockbuster television series, available on Sky Atlantic and NOW,…

● ONE OF THE MORE SURPRISING projects to be shortlisted for this year’s Stirling Prize was the so-called King’s Cross Masterplan, the development of the railway yards and urban wasteland north of King’s Cross: unexpected, not because it was undeserving, but because it has been a project of such long gestation, begun in 2000 when Argent, a firm of developers, took on the project as a joint venture with London and Continental Railways. Argent was established in 1981 by Peter and Michael Freeman. They cut their teeth at Brindleyplace, an area of Birmingham which they bought for £3 million in 1992. Its masterplan had been drawn up by Terry Farrell, one of the few architects in Britain interested in large schemes of town planning. Argent then employed a younger generation…

EX AFRICA SEMPER ALIQUID NOVI, except in food. From south of the Sahara, the continent has contributed astonishingly little — relative to its size — to other people’s cuisines. Yams have become naturalised in parts of the U.S., but “soul” food generally has no more to do with Africa than cajun cooking does with France or Tex-Mex with the Aztecs. Okra’s diffusion owes more, I think, to mediators in Arabia and Persia than to the people among whom it originated. Ostrich made a brief flash in the frying-pan in fashion-conscious kitchens late in the last century but has disappeared from supermarket shelves. Most of the dishes I’ve been tempted to try involve ingredients or techniques of foreign provenance: the curries of Cape Malays or East-African Asians, or the French- or Portuguese-inflected…

RONALD LAUDER PROCLAIMED that as a young collector, the two words which excited him the most when visiting an art exhibition were “private collection”. Private collections, unlike most public or state collections, present the tantalising prospect that works might become available for sale at some time in the future, perhaps brought to auction by the art market drivers of death, debt or divorce. The high-minded social, educational and cultural ideals of public museums seem at odds with the art market, no matter how much commercial art galleries try to ape the museum. Is it really possible to reconcile or even subdue mammon with the muse? At least to start with, the two must go hand-in-hand. In order to build a collection, museums must operate in close contact with the commercial…

LAST SUNDAY I LOOKED across the lane from a small cottage I’m renovating and saw something both horrifying and very sweet. Two little children were standing outside a wooden stable, looking in at five kittens that weren’t much more than a couple of weeks old. The children were delighted by the furry creatures and were fascinated to hear, from the lady who rents the stable, that nobody really knows where the kittens’ mother came from — she just appeared one evening, heavily pregnant, and settled down for the night. “Like Mary?” the little girl asked? “I suppose so,” the child’s mother replied. Over the days that followed, I found myself watching the little creatures as they rolled around playfully in the late autumn sun. They are sweet but I really…

NO ONE NEEDS NEW CLOTHES for 2024’s festive onslaught because of the three Ps. For which read: the planet (obv); poverty — does anyone actually have any money any more? I know I don’t; and the patriarchy, because it’s always the patriarchy, amirite? But, also — as I will keep droning on about month after mofoin’ month — because fashion has staggered to a halt. Want to win chic this Christmas? Then, pull out an ancient tux and sport it haughtily sans shirt. That said, if for some reason you are yet to acquire one of Jigsaw’s razorsharp Ashby Velvet Blazers (£240, jigsawoline.com) with its matching, bootcut Mason Velvet Trouser (£160), then just fucking do it, okay? This is the third year of this duo being the Yuletide hill I…

MALCOLM MARSHALL, arguably the greatest fast bowler in history, died 25 years ago this month. He was just 41, and colon cancer had eaten him from the inside out: he weighed only four stone when he died. His funeral in Barbados was broadcast across the Caribbean, and five West Indian captains were among the pallbearers. Cricket in the region has not been the same since. MACO — everyone called him that — was an amalgam of his fellow bowlers’ best qualities. He had Andy Roberts’s guile, Michael Holding’s pace, Joel Garner’s relentlessness and Colin Croft’s aggression. At 5’10”, he was a sapling in the Brobdingnagian forests of his peers. But a man of his sublime talent didn’t need height. He could make the ball rear from the deck with a cobra’s…

The main issue was the WEP’s inability to give a straight answer to the question: what is a woman? ONE OF THE SIGNS YOU’RE GETTING OLDER is that you learn of the death of an actor or singer you’d heard nothing about for ages, and your immediate reaction is surprise that they were not already dead. Thus it was in late October when the Women’s Equality Party tweeted the “important news” that its leaders were recommending that its members vote to shut it down. This despite the party having offered “transformative solutions making a real difference”. (I challenge you to name a single one.) Twitter/X isn’t the real world — it’s more progressive and much more politically engaged. So it’s striking that the tweet, viewed 1.8 million times, garnered a paltry…

LISA HILTON Toasting a maestro GIOACHINO ANTONIO ROSSINI WAS SAID TO HAVEwept thrice in his adult life; once when his first opera was booed, a second time when he heard Niccolò Paganini play and last when he watched, appalled, as a truffle-stuffed turkey fell out of a picnic basket into Lake Como. I owe this anecdote to Michael Contarini Procino, polymath, gastronome and Venetian neighbour who held a dinner in Rossini’s honour for the Venice chapter of the Chaine des Rotisseurs. This glorious fraternity of feasters has more than 25,000 members in 80 countries, all dedicated to conviviality enjoyed over food and wine. Daniele Zennaro, chef at Algiubagio in Cannaregio, served the most delicate risotto, followed naturally by Tournedos Rossini, finest of the nine dishes to bear the composer’s name.…

ONE OF THE MORE DEPRESSing elements of being a priest occurs in care homes. Not the time spent with the elderly there; those are often hours of fascinating anecdotes and profound conversations about life and death. The depressing element is hearing from the staff about the requests many families make. “Does she really need three meals a day?” one asked. Another challenged a monthly haircut for his dad. Also depressing were the farewells, as elderly people were moved far from their friends and families in order not to burn through the inheritance. My experiences in those care homes play out in my head as the details of Kim Leadbeater’s bill to legalise assisted suicide are published. So do the memories of my father’s last illness and death at the beginning…

HOW WILL THE UNITED STATES FOREIGN policy establishment and their supporting commentariat respond to the shocking political resurrection of Donald Trump? Will they grapple with painful realities and examine the deficiencies of foreign and economic policy that helped lead to this point of crisis? Or will they do what they did last time and tell self-serving and fictitious stories about the past, a morality tale of virtuous internationalists battling primitive isolationists — the old Good Old Ways versus Orange Man Bad? An early indication is offered by David Sanger’s article in the New York Times which is so pervaded by standard liberal nostalgia it almost writes itself. For Sanger, Trump’s win “ends a post-World War II Era of US Leadership.” As Sanger tells it, for 80 years there was a…

SHAKESPEARE MENTIONS CHRISTMAS JUST ONCE, IN THE very first scene of Hamlet, when the royal guards are talking about the ghost of Hamlet’s father: Some say that ever ’gainst that season comesWherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated,This bird of dawning singeth all night long;And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad,The nights are wholesome, then no planets strike,No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,So hallow’d and so gracious is that time. As always, Shakespeare’s precise attitude is hard to discern. These words are put in the mouth of a sentry, whose Christian belief is mixed up with popular superstition and astrology. That does not necessarily mean that Shakespeare regarded religion as a set of fairy tales. Yet the play’s Christianity is ambiguous and inconsistent. That said, Hamlet’s…

WILLIAM WARHAM, LAST PRE- Reformation archbishop of Canterbury, died just in time to avoid martyrdom at the hands of Henry VIII. In his final days, the elderly scholar-priest composed a magnificent speech in defence of the law and of the liberty of the English Church, then under threat through the King’s machinations in trying to obtain the annulment that would enable him to marry Anne Boleyn. Had Warham lived to make his speech, he would certainly have met the same fate — and obtained the same renown — as his friends Thomas More and John Fisher, who would later be executed for the same cause. Warham’s illustrious career in Church and government spanned 44 years; he remains the second longest-serving archbishop of Canterbury. As a lawyer, diplomat, and statesman as…

The following statement is to be found in an article in Scientific American about mankind’s prehistory and the assumption that men were hunters while women were gatherers: Inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports. What, one might ask, is inequity — unfairness — in sports? Cheating, or the fact that some people are better at sport than others, no matter how hard the latter try? That some win in competitions in which others lose, without such considerations as natural endowment having been taken into account? The only way of ensuring equity in sport is that all should have prizes, that in a race every competitor should be considered to have…

MOST ACCOUNTS OF THE FINAL phase of Britain’s negotiations with the EU, the phase that actually delivered Brexit and the trade deal, have so far come from the EU side. For those with the patience, My Secret Brexit Diary by Michel Barnier gives a blow-by-blow account of the negotiations, albeit with the detail fading as Barnier himself was gradually elbowed out of the process. There have been more techy accounts out of the EU negotiating team. But from our side, nothing, until Boris Johnson’s own memoir this autumn, and now, the final volume of Tim Shipman’s tetralogy of the Brexit years, Out. For now — at least until my own book is written — Shipman’s account of the Brexit years seems likely to be the definitive story. This final volume,…

I HAVE BEEN LOOKING FORWARD TO WE HAVE Never Been Woke, having used some of the data Musa al-Gharbi had gathered for it in my last book. An empirical sociologist providing measurements of the rise and — hopefully — the beginning of the fall of “wokeness”, as well as wider societal attitudes and reactions to the phenomenon, would be very useful. Unfortunately, large sections of the book do not seem to have been written by an empirical sociologist, but are primarily a polemic against almost all cultural commentators, as well as seemingly the entirety of To this end, al-Gharbi develops the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu on italists are people, including al-Gharbi himself, who make a living in the realm of ideas, rhetoric, data, images, narratives and symbols, and who take these very…

THE IRONICAL QUESTION MARK OF THE title of Justin Jacobs’s Plunder? is a courageous gesture of defiance against the all-pervading backdrop of postcolonial discourse; his book succinctly demolishes the anachronistic concept that museum artefacts are acquisitions of imperial theft. On these shallow misconceptions largely rests our current obsession to rectify the past and return objects to their countries of origin. Jacobs’s work is a critical study of great value, restoring historical context about the complex routes by which artefacts were transferred to museum collections, and a powerful corrective to the scolding dogmatism of decolonisation. The past has always been repurposed to fit the current of the age. Our revisionist zeitgeist reads history backwards, seeks atonement for historic wrongs and restricts interpretation of the past to the values of today. A Sinologist…

We meet professor higgins in Pygmalion (1912) eavesdropping on the impending subject of his sociolinguistic experiment, taking notes on the wretched flower girl’s stretched, strangulated speech. He boasts of placing a man’s accent to within two miles in London, “Sometimes within two streets.” George Bernard Shaw based the acerbic Higgins in part on the abrasive Henry Sweet, the leading philologist and phonetician of the time. He was one of a cadre of nineteenth-century lexicologists and dialectologists who recorded the demotic before its demise from the threefold threat of factory, railway and schoolhouse. Yet English dialects had their champions and readership long before they were considered endangered. The botanist and taxonomist John Ray FRS was a pioneer glossarist whose Collection of English Words (1674) was reprinted three times. However, much of this…

THE JOURNEY TOWARDS RELIGION, FAITH and spirituality is a personal one. Some people immediately identify with their family’s traditions and customs, while others gradually drift into it. Some choose not to follow this path and firmly reject it. There are those (including me) who decide that religion won’t be a part of their lives, but gain respect and admiration for those who have faith. Meanwhile, some people struggle mightily with religion and God. They may try to make sense of the Bible, including the stories and heroes who helped define ancient society. They may wonder if the centuries-old battle between good and evil has any legitimacy in the modern world. They may muse as to whether a line should be drawn between reality and fantasy — and if so, where. They…

● THEY’VE DUG UP POOR OLD ALMA again. You’d have thought the Head Muse (and succubus) of old Vienna had enough on her plate without also being the amazing composer we are now told she is — despite the technicality of not writing anything you might want to hear more than once, and not so much of that. But hey, there are loads of composers you could say that about. The latest exhumation is at the Volksoper in Vienna, in a new opera by the Israeli composer Ella Milch-Sheriff that proposes a grim trajectory in budding musico Alma’s life from the moment Gustav Mahler insisted that there was room for only one composer in their marriage, otherwise who would be making breakfast etc. ALMA WAS A JOLLY, MALICIOUS POSH GIRL…

● IF IT’S A SIGN OF A DURABLE SATIRE that a lot of us can do an impersonation of a deluded nuclear scientist driving the world towards atomic annihilation in Dr Strangelove. Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 parody of Mutually Assured Destruction unleashing accidental war with the Soviet Union captured the intensity and risk of the Cold War arms race in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis, with Peter Sellers as the demented, retired Nazi nuclear scientist serving (or rather puppeteering) a gormless US President, Merkin Muffley. It’s a brave soul who, in the 60th anniversary year, treads in Sellers’s footsteps when it comes to playing multiple parts in bizarre accents, but Steve Coogan (below) has the moxie for it and in Armando Iannucci’s new adaptation at the Noël Coward Theatre…

● ASHES UNDER URICON. THAT’S ONE way of describing the presidency of Joe Biden, asleep at the wheel, before the Democrat powerbrokers handed Kamala Harris the most treacherous of hospital passes. Whack! “Sleepy Joe”, the Irish-American who would struggle to pick out the mother country on a map of the world, no longer troubles the scorers. Bat, pad and wicket. He lost the lot. The giggler anointed in his stead then knocked her stumps over, while munching a word salad. How could they get it so badly wrong? Yet, motes and beams, how did the media class imagine so limited a candidate could possibly prevail? Particularly on this side of the Atlantic, where many pundits mistake familiarity with the United States with genuine knowledge. On Radio 4 Justin Webb hosts…

CLASS INFILTRATION IS THE new sex. Jilly Cooper’s 1988 novel Rivals is on the telly, provoking a spate of rapturous Eighties nostalgia from middle-aged lady commentators. Gins and tonic in the morning! Massive earrings! Rupert Campbell-Black (I hold up my hand). Those young people however, are less interested in the booze and bonking than in the fact that in the divine world of Dame Jilly, everyone aside from the odd doughty housekeeper or maddeningly dishy flat-vowelled groom is posh. The brilliant Emerald Fennell was on to this a while ago with her hit movie Saltburn, which begins at “Webbe”, a fictional Oxford college. Brasenose, where the Oxford scenes were shot, has now put up a flimsy nylon sign over the lodge saying “Brasenose College”. Its purpose is not to inform…

THE SOARING PRICE OF Burgundy is a perennial topic for wine writers. Back in 1986, Auberon Waugh was complaining about how his beloved Chambolle-Musigny Les Amoureuses is “villainously overpriced — largely, I suspect, because it is much sought after by rich Belgian businessmen on dirty weekends with their secretaries”. Waugh didn’t realise he was living in a comparative paradise, because now it’s not just the Belgians who are after his favourite wine. The Americans, Japanese, Chinese and Russians have also discovered Burgundy. There’s too much money chasing limited quantities. Consequently, a bottle of Les Amoureuses from a producer such as Joseph Drouhin will cost about £600 or more. It’s a similar story all over Burgundy, from the grand crus down to the humble Hautes-Côtes de Nuits. But there is one…

● ONE OF THE MOST UNDERRATED AMERICAN authors of the twentieth century is Rex Stout, creator of Nero Wolfe and a canon of some three dozen mystery stories featuring the super-sized sleuth. Set in mid-century, mid-town New York, Wolfe lives in servant-supplied luxury, eschewing society in favour of his gourmet kitchen, his library and his collection of orchids. It is this latter affectation that I think makes Stout’s creation most interesting and which sets him apart from other fictional heroes of the hardboiled detective era. It also places the character firmly in a period which, though strange to us now, would be readily understood by the author’s audience when he introduced Wolfe to the world in 1934. At that time, the Victorian craze for all things orchidean was still a…

● IF YOU WANT AN EARLY CHRISTMAS TREAT, GOOGLE “Wayward Lad King George”. His three wins in 1982, 1983 and 1985 are each, in their own way, about as good as it gets. The nostalgia dopamine hit is off the charts when you realise some of the horses he beat: Night Nurse, Silver Buck, Little Owl and Burrough Hill Lad for starters. And the ride John Francome gave Wayward Lad in 1982 is one of the two greatest I’ve ever seen (the other was also Francome, on Sea Pigeon in the 1981 Champion Hurdle). It’s December — and that means it’s the King George VI Chase at Kempton on Boxing Day. The roll call of winners is a catalogue not just of some of the greatest ever chasers but of…

Am I being unreasonable? Am I? Is it truly unreasonable, irrational — no, wait, I was accused of being hysterical — to expect a Christmas present? To myself. Of some kind. Anything! I’m not asking for what I want. Which would be, since you ask, a new bigger, nicer house, perma-housekeeper, five-plus long haul trips per annum, nutritionist, facelift, children who make the grades etc. No. No, I’m not. All I’m asking for is a present to confirm that someone — namely my sodding husband — gives a shit. I don’t even need to like it. That’s how fucking reasonable I am. But no. Latest marital showdown is Will suggesting that we “give ourselves” the gift of a new sofa. Oh, the irony! A sofa! Of course he wants to…