Innehållsförteckning för June 2021 från The Critic

RURAL RIGHTS I read Gawain Towler’s article on Pick for Britain and the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme (SAWS) with great interest (The Critic online, 9 May). He makes some fair arguments regarding the programmes, but he misses some key points on seasonal agricultural work itself. I have learned seasonal agricultural work is much more skilled and difficult than many commentators, and indeed those who sign up to the work, often realise. While I was a Brexit Minister, I was often asked about SAWS. In the course of things, I was surprised to discover, for example, that when picking apples, you must not use your fingertips but rather the palm of your hand or you bruise the apple. It’s not trivial. An experienced seasonal agriculture worker will successfully pick fruit at…

Bozzo is feeding me again! Last year, when Cazza put Bozzo on the Horrid Diet, he stopped leaving takeaway boxes around for me to lick. For a while, we played a game where he hid snacks in cupboards for me to find, but then Cazza took away something called Deliveroo Password. Now he has a new food for me: little bits of paper with numbers on. They don’t taste as good as curry. Perhaps they’re a kind of medicine. I hope they’re not like the Bad Medicine that Caino tried to give me. “Come on, Filthy Mutt,” Bozzo says, using his special name for me. “If you can eat four grand’s worth of first edition Trollope, you can eat these receipts. See if Clever Case can find them after that,…

ALMOST EIGHTEEN MONTHS have passed since Brexit. Are we any closer to answering the vexed question, “Will we be better or worse off outside the European Union?”? In the referendum debate all sorts of estimates were bandied around. Famously or notoriously, the overwhelming majority of official documents argued that the UK would be much poorer. A particularly contentious calculation came in April 2016 from the Treasury, with the publication of the Cmnd. 9250 White Paper. It said that, after 15 years, the UK could be worse off by as much as 9.5 percent of gross domestic product (or £4,300 per household) if Brexit happened without a special trade deal with the European Union. The White Paper’s explanation was that Brexit would result in a loss of “openness” to Europe and…

v. ASENSIBLE PARTY SYSTEM FOR BRITAIN probably wouldn’t have the Labour or Conservative parties. There would be a socialist party, a leftish Green party, a greenish NIMBY party, a working class “fund the NHS, hang the paedos” party, a social democratic and liberal party, a right of centre liberal pro-business party, a national-conservative party, secessionist nationalist parties and some flotsam and jetsam to the right of the nat-cons. Such a realignment would be liberating: we’d no longer have to share a party with people we despise for the sake of winning an election — though both main parties are sweaty, overcrowded political omnibuses, there are also several tribes crammed into the Lib Dems’ creaking Mini. Given the undeniable results of our current electoral system, why don’t Labour and the Lib…

IN 1996, ONE YEAR BEFORE HONG KONG’S return of sovereignty to China, Pun Sing-lui set about the bronze statue of Queen Victoria that sits in the city’s leafy Victoria Park, beside magnificent Victoria Harbour, with a hammer. As well as caving in the royal nose, he poured red paint over the British monarch whose reign embraced both Opium Wars. Pun’s “art performance”, the recent arrival from mainland China said, was a protest against Hong Kong’s “dull, colonial culture”. He demanded “cultural reunification” with the motherland. The attack on the statue was almost universally condemned in Hong Kong, with the 26-year-old slammed as nothing more than a publicity-seeking vandal. Four months later — after a nose job requiring a hydraulic jack, acrylic resin and about £12,000 — the screens hiding Queen…

IT CAME AS A SHOCK when I received a call from a friend to inform me that some of my forebears from many, many moons ago have been named and shamed as profiting from the slave trade. This wasn’t the result of the publication of new information, nor was it the product of assiduous research. It was, in fact, a declaration made by the National Trust, the charity to which Arthur Onslow, the sixth Earl, donated his home, Clandon Park, in 1956. At that time, his sister donated about £1 million in today’s money — the Onslows were too cash-strapped to come up with the resources that the National Trust required to take on the property. I checked online, and sure enough, “Clandon Park: A House Built on the Profits…

AT AROUND 1AM ON 11 June 1921, a telegram from the England cricket selectors finally reached the Hon Lionel Tennyson, captain of Hampshire and playboy about town, who was deep into a night at the Embassy Club on Bond Street. Having been routed by Australia in the first Test of the Ashes, the selectors were shaking up the side for the next and wanted to give him a crack. Could he report to Lord’s for the start of play, just ten hours away? Tennyson rattled off a reply, explaining that he was now on his second cigar and third bottle of fizz, but “having informed you of that, I shall be delighted to play”. It is not clear how quickly — or if — he returned home, a whole 80…

AMAZON’S NET PROFITS increased by 84 per cent in 2020. As Covid-19 swept across America during March and April, Jeff Bezos’s personal fortune increased by $24 billion. In contrast, nearly a million American manufacturing jobs were lost in the decade up to 2010 due to competition from China, whose accession to the World Trade Organisation in 2001 sounded a death knell for car plants and steel works that formed the backbone of organised labour. A new book, Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America by MacGillis, a reporter for ProPublica, charts this parallel rise and fall through the lives of blue-collar Americans living hand-to-mouth in the country’s ravaged former industrial districts. Into this void has stepped Amazon, the multinational founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos, a libertarian who believes that…

‘‘IT IS A PRETTY POEM, MR POPE,” said Richard Bentley, after reading the poet’s version of the Iliad, “but you must not call it Homer”. Translation and travesty, parody and piety intertwine endlessly in rescriptions of fundamental texts. Why not? Mona Lisa is none the worse for an odd moustache. A century ago, Ezra Pound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius both bent the knee and, so Robert Graves insisted, twisted the ear of the great Roman lyricist. On the other hand, my late friend, the classical scholar John Sullivan, saluted Pound’s alleged howlers (he rendered the Latin “minas”, meaning “threats”, as “Welsh mines”) as enlivening renovation. Ole Ez wrote to John, in memorable green ink, to thank him for his endorsement. Usually quicker to derision than to collegial applause, Roman poets…

AN INSTITUTION LED by a self-selecting elite obsessed with the hot topics of today’s culture war alienating increasing numbers of its supporters until they eventually vote with their feet, leaving the very survival of that institution in doubt. The Labour Party or the Church of England? Watching the slow motion self-destruction of the party that purports to speak for the ordinary people of this country is an uncomfortable exercise even for a Tory clergyman who should be reaching for the popcorn and turning up the volume. It’s uncomfortable because it’s too close to home. Like the defeated Labour councillor who told the Daily Telegraph “the voters have let us down”, the leadership of the Established Church have spent the last year or so (in fact, the last half century or…

OF ALL THE GREAT BORES spawned by the pandemic, few can be more insufferable than those people who went to Venice and then deluged you with crappy pictures of some tragic deserted piazza, accompanied by poorly encrypted encomia about how lucky Venice was to have them. A similar fate befell the blameless old joint — a crowd of pseudo-cultural creeps descending like elitist locusts — in 1814, after the French slunk out, having looted it dry since 1797. The place was shabby and ruinous: the population had shrunk by tens of thousands as the young legged it en masse, the harbours were silted up, pot-hounds haunted the weed-infested campi, wood rotted and paint peeled and it smelt frightful. And yet in this purposeless backwater, a wonderful thing had happened: a…

DESPITE HEADING A DEPARTMENT built on podcasts at Economist Radio, my downtime default remains Radio 4. But that tendency is breaking down as the BBC Sounds app improves its offer. It has ditched its crazy earlier strategy of targeting witless shows at the under 35s, figuring out that middle-aged folk are eagerly acquiring the pod habit and need a more balanced offer than footballers and woke comedy. We’re also seeing newcomers to app-listening as talk radio stalwarts such as LBC branch out into it and American podcasters bid for their share of British ears. So I banned myself from tuning to 93.4 FM for a while and used the Sounds app to find a recent HARDtalk. Yes I know, it’s an awful name — who wants to be told a…

Adam Dant | The Novel Parish Map of St-Martin-in-the-Fields, 2021 | £500 | Hand coloured lithograph on 300 gsm Somerset Satin HP | 81 x 56 cm | Edition of 25 TAG Fine Arts’ first post-lockdown exhibition — THE RETURN OF LONDON — is a collaboration with our very own Hogarthian artist Adam Dant at the SMITF Crypt Gallery. THE RETURN OF LONDON celebrates our vibrant cultural life and salutes the reopening of the city’s arts venues on 17th May. Adam’s intricate typographic artworks chronicle London life. The city’s bustling squares and theatres are a positive reminder of the wonderful things to come as restrictions lift across the nation. In close partnership with St Martin-in-the-Fields and the National Lottery Heritage Fund, visitors can trace Dant’s Novel Parish Map of St…

FOR A LONG WHILE we knew almost nothing about the girl who keeps 19 beehives down below our house. It’s the sort of thing everyone likes to pretend happens all the time in rural Scotland but in truth it seldom does. “She just knocked on the door one day,” my mother told me, “and she wanted to know if the field below the orchard was ours.” In my younger years, when I was home from university, I sometimes hung out down there and smoked rollies but it never occurred to me that the seclusion it offered had any potential for bees. I didn’t ask about the arrangement but we’ve always got a steady supply of honey, “one jar per hive per annum,” my mother later explained, “the going rate from…

SIPPING A DOUBLE ESPRESSO in his pine-panelled Mayfair office in Bruton Street, it is hard to think of Simon Phillips as a survivor. The big guy in English antique furniture, his shop is on two floors and if you are looking to acquire furniture this is where you come to buy the best. It won’t be cheap — there are no bargains here — but if you have deep pockets and seek trophies, this is the one-stop shop. Before Simon joined, the business of Ronald Phillips was firmly established as one among the many art and antique dealers in Mayfair. In those days, there were numerous famous names in and around Bond Street: Mallett, Partridge, Colnaghi, The Fine Art Society, Agnews, and many more. Simon’s father ran a tidy, mainly…

WHOSE PROBLEM IS CHINA? As Patrick Porter reminds us in his piece in our China special this month, she’s ultimately America’s. The United States is in first place and China is not. Whatever there is to be “lost”, it’s America’s to lose. But what is at stake for everyone else in the rise of China? And should other nations act before — or even beside America — in dealing with her China problem? The first thing to appreciate is that there is as yet no “war of American succession”. We are plainly not where Britain, America’s predecessor as global hegemon, was when she reeled under the assault of global war from without, and financial and industrial near-collapse within. Next year is the centenary of the Chanak Crisis, when Lloyd George’s…

IN APRIL, THE COURT of Appeal put right the biggest miscarriage of justice it had ever dealt with in a single ruling. No fewer than 39 former Post Office staff were cleared of crimes of dishonesty. All had lost their jobs and some had served prison sentences. Three of them had died. There is much that can be done to prevent a scandal like this happening again — but not if the government continues to reject calls for further safeguards. Apart from the defendant, there are normally three separate parties involved in a criminal trial: the alleged victims, police investigators and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). These cases went wrong because the Post Office was complainant, investigator and prosecutor, all rolled into one. Although criminal proceedings are brought in the…

EQUITY UK, THE ACTORS’ UNION, is now handing out advice to theatre critics, and it is advice backed up by considerable menace. In a list of “guidelines” issued last month “to ensure the work of theatre critics is of the highest quality”, Equity follows a formula we’re now used to from elsewhere. Having assured critics that they’re “free to express themselves openly and honestly without fear or favour”, it then goes on to bind them with the chains and padlocks of numerous caveats. Reviews must be written, the edict goes on, “with sensitivity, empathy and understanding”. Critics must “acknowledge their cultural power and use it responsibly”. They should “define people as they would define themselves”, “use current and inclusive language” and “consider their own potential for bias and/or relative privilege…

OVER THE LAST DECADE, Britain’s free speech advocates have faced a frustrating puzzle. They seem to have the public on their side: a Com-Res poll earlier this year found that half the population agrees with the statement “Free speech is under threat”, and less than a quarter disagrees. The government, too, seems sympathetic. “Freedom of speech is at the core of our democracy,” Boris Johnson declared in February as he outlined plans to appoint a “free speech champion” for the higher education sector. And yet, on the ground — in workplaces, in universities, even in how people relate to their neighbours — there’s never been more fear of expressing an honest opinion. Partly it’s a simple question of power dynamics. When people fall foul of the new speech codes, they…

Round Robiners THE WHITLOWS’ REPUTATIONS were made a very long time ago, so far back that a younger generation can sometimes be forgiven for not knowing who they are. The Self-Fettered Super-Char, Heidi’s impassioned account of her role in the late 1960s women’s movement, marched onto the bestseller lists at about the time Edward Heath arrived in Downing Street. Max’s Twilight on Gosforth, a searing expose of municipal corruption in the industrial north-east, opened at the National in the same week. On the strength of the film rights, Max was able to buy the very agreeable house in Redington Road London NW3 (last Zoopla valuation £6 million) in which the couple still reside. How best to describe the Whitlows, here in their white-haired yet still purposeful early eighties? Old-style Hampstead…

IN 2010, BETWEEN leaving politics and resuming journalism, I wrote two chapters of a novel. It emerged from my experience of representing in parliament what was then the highest number of Muslims in any Conservative-held seat, Wycombe. It imagined a future in which Britain had been riven by plague. Islamist extremists had carved out enclaves in cities governed by ISIS-style sharia. Most of the countryside was ruled by white crime gangs, which were ethnically cleansing any land they seized. Caught between was the suffering majority of all faiths and none. The heroes of the tale were a chain-smoking imam, a transvestite former MP (no relation), and a would-be military dictator: focused, grim-jawed, female, a dead shot, and bearing a distinct resemblance to my former colleague Pauline Neville-Jones, now a peer,…

IT’S A SLIMMER WISDEN THIS YEAR, only 1,250 pages, but Lawrence Booth, editor of this celebrated annual publication for the last 10 of its 158 summers, can permit himself a bow in the bathroom of his house in Barnes, if nobody is looking. To bring out a book of record when so much cricket was lost in 2020 to an international plague tested him almost as much as it challenged the cricketers in their Covid bubbles. Hats off, everybody, to the troupers of the famous yellow Almanack. When you have read some of the contributions, however, you may feel like asking them to put those hats back on. There is a barely-suppressed anger in this year’s Wisden, arising from the Black Lives Matter protests, which seriously impairs the tone of…

KOSHER, A HEBREW TERM meaning acceptable according to the Jewish dietary laws, and thence slanged as honest, legitimate, pure and safe is blessed with an antonym: treyf, in Hebrew “flesh torn by beasts” and literally and figuratively, anything but kosher. The cultural critic Jonathan Meades, keen like many who master one gift to attempt another, has a sideline in art: and in a usage not prominent in the rabbinical lexis, he calls these pieces treyfs. These texts, with or without visuals and to his and their unalloyed credit, are treyfs, too. Milk embraces meat, the raw and cooked run hand in hand, cud is left unchewed and hooves are resolutely uncloven. And blood: there is much blood and nary a shochet in view. Kosher? You should be so unlucky. Meades’…

PULL UP YOUR CHAISE LONGUE for a tale of two debut novels which gives an insight into publishing in Britain. Debuts are fragile but commonplace things: like dandelion spores, they are sent out in their thousands in the knowledge that most will fall on stony ground or, er, be eaten by a bird. [Needs work — Ed.] The literary world conspires in the artificial expectation for a first novel to be a substantial literary achievement: we get features on the best debuts of the year, numerous awards for debut novels (but only one for second novels, where the work really begins), and even in last year’s Booker Prize first novels made up two-thirds of the shortlist. A debut, or rather a debut author, offers a clean slate, unencumbered by previous…

★ WITH DELIGHTFUL English Rose Emily Blunt having been endlessly persecuted for an attempt at Irish in her latest film, isn’t it time to draw a line under this obsessive nonsense? In simpler, happier days of old, a professional actor from the south of England could expect to boast a resumé listing “unspecified Irish”, “northern simpleton”, and “chirpy working-class cockney” without fear of censure. A shot in the arm .. FOR ALL THE APPARENT success injecting the population at the plague’s expense, let us never allow ourselves to forget the real heroes. Over these past months, one has lost count of the number of humble showbiz folk selflessly going to the trouble of taking photos/videos of themselves being jabbed, in the profound belief they’re raising national morale. A personal highlight…

THIS IS EMBARRASSING FOR ME to admit as a feminist, because as a feminist I know that nothing is more sacrosanct than another woman’s reproductive choices. Even to broach the issue is just asking to be hauled up before the court of microaggressions for the crime of conspiracy with the patriarchy, and so I practice a studiously neutral approach to other people’s gravidity — with the shameful exception of Taylor Swift. When it comes to Taylor Swift, my attitude is approximately that of a Tudor courtier sniffing around the queen’s linens. Come on your highness, crack on with the progeny. This is clearly terrible of me, yet here I am, brooding on the possibility of Swiftlets, compelled to explain how I got to this place. It started respectfully enough, at…

THERE IS NO BEST ACTRESS OSCAR for a female animal, otherwise I know which candidate I would have voted for this year. She is a sow called Gunda, she lives on a Norwegian farm, and she is the star of the dialogue-free feature documentary that bears her name (in UK cinemas from 11 June), directed by the Russian filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky. Of course, there might have been a face-off with another female animal star, the subject of the Netflix release My Octopus Teacher, which actually did win the Oscar for Best Documentary, but Gunda could at least have grunted her acceptance speech. I first came across the work of Victor Kossakovsky several years ago when my cinephile friend Mark Le Fanu told me about a remarkable documentary, Tisme!, which was…

YEARS AGO I WORKED AS an assistant for a woman in Belgravia. Between other indignities, I had to fetch her lunch from Elizabeth Street, four iced buns from which she would then lick the icing, handing me back a little tower of saliva-smeared pastries. I disposed of them on the balcony, thinking it might make a change for the pigeons from the coke wraps. Eventually she accused me of treachery and sacked me, but those dusty walks through the creamy necropolis of Eaton Square inspired what I reckoned would be a brilliant business idea. How about a restaurant that serves nothing? A beautifully lit, artfully designed space with a discreet soundtrack of clattering knives and forks? Somewhere for people who hate and fear food to dispense with the excruciating pretence…

ON 21 JUNE, alarms and alarums allowing, the all clear will sound and Great Britain will declare Victory over Virus. There will be celebration; there will be commemoration; there will undoubtedly be libation as the country returns in relief to “normalcy”. Of course, it will be not quite over nor normal; much mopping up of any final pockets of resistance will be necessary, whilst more defence scholarship and spending against new viral enemies will be needed. The pharmo-industrial complex needs be fed. But we may allow ourselves, to borrow from Churchill’s ringing oration, a brief period of rejoicing. And when it comes to rejoicing the Romans are the race to beat. In June alone they managed to fit in four festivals: the Vestalia where women offered up an unborn calf…

WHEN I WAS A TEEN, you could look like a yob, a toff, or “alternative”. That was it. You paid your money, you made your choice. In masculine style terms, said options were represented as a trinity. There was George Michael, all Sun-Inned bouff, nicotine-orange tan, bleached denim and pastels. There was Rupert Everett, he of the floppy fringe, patrician pallor, cheekbones and cricket whites. And there was Some Goth from The Cure: even bigger hair, green complexion, dank robes and badly-applied slap. As a middle-class girl from Birmingham, it was clear which brand of masculinity I would make my object. Yobs we had in spades. These were my classmates, my peers, the dubious-looking individuals who informed me I’d be almost attractive if I read less. Goths abounded in our…

WHENEVER A PRIME Ministerial family is feeling a bit skint it has only to call for Lord Brownlow of Deep Pocket in the County of Dosh and those pecuniary blues will be magicked away. This former rozzer has never needed to importune a passing premier and offer to buy a peerage. He has achieved that status by selflessly helping out. The noble gofer is apparently always on hand to assist however he can. Samantha Cameron, Theresa May and, most recently, the Prime Shit and the First Groundsheet are all in debt to his abundant small change which is, of course, so clean it might have been scrubbed with Fairy by Nanette Newman herself. Milord’s many interests include a house building company bizarrely named Havisham Homes, which suggests mausolea for the…

Duchess of Grub St. THE ARTISTE FORMERLY KNOWN as Meghan Markle — now Meghan, The Duchess of Sussex — has written a children’s book, The Bench. This has been greeted with excitement (in America) and dismay (in Britain). Personally, I’m delighted that one of the world’s most controversial women has decided to take a well-earned break from causing controversy to embark on the more sedate pursuit of a literary career. A profession where, famously, it is impossible to wreak havoc. I shall hope to run into her, swaying slightly as she sips lukewarm white wine, at the end of a bibulous party at Daunt’s on Marylebone High Street. Perhaps, in her refreshed state, she will be willing to spill revelatory titbits of gossip about her fellow royal authors. Did Fergie…

The bourgeoisification of Labour isn’t new. It was catalogued in Orwell’s scabrously entertaining dissection of socialism, The Road to Wigan Pier AS SO OFTEN, THE BEST (AND OF COURSE THE FUNNIEST) analysis of the runaway Tory victory in the Hartlepool by-election came from Rod Liddle. Its theme was that the Labour party has become a vile antithesis, as the party set up to represent working people has abandoned any connection with the working class. The Labour party’s membership is middle class (“the well-orf, the comfortable, the impeccably right-on”); its policies are middle class, with “their obsession with race and interminable gender complexities”; while its leaders old (Corbyn) and new (Starmer) are, in a characteristic Rod-ism, merely the “two cheeks of the same liberal ass”—with liberalism being of course the quintessential…

A recent article in British Vogue posed the question: “Is having a baby in 2021 pure environmental vandalism?” The answer seems obvious to me, given that babies are responsible for 90 per cent of all the world’s carbon emissions. (That’s probably the case anyway; I haven’t really looked into it.) Forced sterilisation is often frowned upon, but the truth is that most of our current problems have arisen from human beings and their tendency to reproduce. Take toxic masculinity. If we were simply to sterilise all males at birth, toxic masculinity would be eliminated within five or six generations. Those who argue for the so-called “continuation of the human race” are missing two key points. First, until we close the gender pregnancy gap, women will be bearing most of the…

HENRY KISSINGER HAS SUGGESTED that the west and China are in the “foothills of a new Cold War”. The Chinese scholar Wang Jisi has called the confrontation more of a “hot peace”, a useful term for a strange relationship where both sides are economically interdependent but diverging ever more sharply on questions of global security and human rights. For the past four years, the relationship has been defined by two individuals: Xi Jinping and Donald Trump. Xi (right) has used the period to define a “new era” in which China has become a power with global influence. He has done so with self-confidence, taking terms that the West thought that it owned and redefining them to suit China’s interests. At Davos in 2017, Xi portrayed China as the true upholder…

World Class. Whenever any British politician uses the word “world-class”, which is with lamentable and increasing frequency, the humble citizen would be well advised to replace it in his mind with “fraudulent”. At best, “world-class” is a phrase used by people with brains of tinsel; more often it is an attempt to mislead people into accepting a rotten present on the promise of a supposedly glorious future. Politicians, alas, are not the only ones to bandy the word about. Their ultimate masters, the bureaucrats, attempt to give their langue de bois the aura of afflatus and use it freely. Here, for example (one of many), is the NHS Digital data and information strategy of 2016: The mission the strategy sets out is to empower the health and care system to…

G.K. CHESTERTON DEFINED THE “good bad book” in 1905 as cracking stories with no pretensions that survive long after readers have forgotten the serious literary fiction of the day. The Sherlock Holmes stories were an example George Orwell cited when he ran with Chesterton’s idea in the 1940s, and you might quote them today. In our vicious and gullible times, we have “false true books”: propaganda works that are deceitful to the point of worthlessness, but reflect a truth about the world because millions believe their ideas and act on them. What Chesterton said of fiction applies to political writing: “The more dishonest a book is as a book the more honest it is as a public document.” Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class is a trashy…

DESPITE ITS PORNOGRAPHY-promising title, Bloomsbury Stud is a fairly orthodox biography of the Hon. Stephen “Tommy” Tomlin (1901-37), best known as a sculptor for his masterful portrait busts of Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey. This particularly beautiful book features a cover with an inlaid reproduction of the 1926 John Banting portrait of a bare-chested “Tommy”, heavy paper, superb and generous illustrations, and endpapers with an autograph poem by its subject. As for the eye-catching title — while waiting for him to turn up, one of his paramours began writing on the wall of his studio a list of his lovers of both sexes, over which Tomlin later painted a tactful fig leaf. Promiscuity is the more usual word for his behaviour, but the co-authors, researcher Susan Fox, and writer, Michael…

ONE OF THE MOST POIGNANT documents I have ever read was a private letter, reproduced in the American press, from a mother to her two sons aged ten and six. It was dated 18 June 1953 and began: “Dearest Sweethearts, my most precious children,” later adding: “Your Daddy, who is with me … sends his heart and all the love that is in it for his dearest boys.” Then, amid a few lines of moral advice, she enjoins her sons to “be comforted”, and concludes by urging them to “always remember that we were innocent and could not wrong our conscience. We press you close and kiss you with all our strength. Lovingly, Daddy and Mommy.” “Daddy and Mommy” were Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. And the innocence Ethel was protesting…

WHAT DO THE following titles, all published in the past dozen years or so and all highly rated by the Secret Author’s acquaintance, have in common? The books in question are The Wake, a novel by Jeremy Page, Next Year Will Be Better, a memoir by John Lucas, Ducks, Newburyport, a novel by Lucy Ellman, Murmur, a novel by Will Eaves, The Book of Sheffield, a compilation edited by Catherine Taylor, and The Ballad of Syd and Morgan, a novel by Haydn Middleton. All of them were well received by the critics, several of them won prizes and one, the Ellman, was shortlisted for the Booker. The answer is that all six were issued by a small, independent press: The Wake was sponsored by Salt Publishing from Cromer, Norfolk, Next…

VISITING LEIPZIG FOR A GUSTAV Mahler cycle in 2011, I stumbled across some new research into the woman who inspired his first symphony. Their connection is well known to Mahlerians, indeed scandalous. Mahler, junior conductor at the Leipzig Opera in 1885, was approached by an army captain with an uncompleted opera by his grandfather, Carl Maria von Weber. Might he have a go at finishing Die Drei Pintos? Mahler, mid-20s and upwardly mobile, was soon dashing over to Baron von Weber’s with sheets of ink-wet score. He stayed for dinner and wrote a bedtime lullaby for the Weber children. Before long he was madly in love with the captain’s wife. Baroness Marion von Weber, 16 years younger than her husband and much closer to Mahler’s age, was a social misfit…

THERE ARE SOME 2,807 historical bronze artefacts from Benin in Nigeria now scattered around 160 of the world’s museums. They number high-relief plaques and sculptures in the round and the majority were looted in 1897 when the British Navy attacked and sacked the royal city of Benin in a punitive raid. The palace of the Oba — the king — and nobles' residences were stripped of their bronzes and ivories. Most ended up in London. In 1898, the Foreign Office sold off a large number of pieces, most of which went to museums in Germany, Austria and America, but there are still more than 1,000 Benin bronzes in British collections, mostly in the British Museum, the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, and the Horniman Museum in south London. Since gaining independence…

IT WAS MARCH 1989, the Berlin Wall was still standing and Albania was Europe’s most repressive Communist dictatorship. We were sitting in a hotel bar in Tirana, the capital, when three drunken English football fans lurched at us, raring to fight. I had travelled there on a trip organised by When Saturday Comes, a football magazine, to see England play Albania in a World Cup qualifying match. I had no interest in football, but I was very interested in Albania, which was then almost impossible for journalists to enter. We travelled by coach from London for two and half days, down the Dalmatian coast and across the border into Albania on foot. Border guards went through our bags and confiscated our newspapers. There were two groups of England fans in…

AS DAYLIGHT HOURS extend towards the summer solstice, so the list of gardening tasks lengthens. If you consult the experts, this month’s is split between two categories: the nurturing and the cruel-to-be-kind. Precious young plants — cossetted, tender specimens despite hardening off — need planting out; thirsty crops like beans and squash must be mulched; and everything seems to require feeding and watering according to particular dietary requirements. There is hoeing, deadheading and staking to be done, thinning out and tying in, pinching out and pruning. If you’re anything like me, it all perpetuates the nagging feeling that you’re falling irredeemably behind, showing yourself up as a person who really has no business mucking around in the soil in the first place. Actually, I started out at a disadvantage because…

SO, BASICALLY, I’VE ALWAYS used Hector’s status as a “summer-born boy” to justify any shortfall in academic achievement. But now his August birthday has proved my nemesis. Because, people, kids’ birthday parties are sodding back! And not only am I condemned to host my first actual social gathering in months, but I also have to host the first birthday party proper in Hector’s class for even longer. Like, hashtag no pressure! Why couldn’t his birthday have been in lockdown? Essentially, as always with the kids’ parties, I have two choices: outsource at astronomical cost, or morph into Carole Middleton on whatever has replaced steroids. Either way, Hector’s parday is basically my new part-time job until August. This is when people talk fondly about how back in the day it was…