Innehållsförteckning för June 2023 från The Critic

IN JANUARY, TRUCK DRIVER Fabian Greco pled guilty to assaulting another motorist, dislocating his jaw and leaving him unable to work for weeks. The judge was minded to send him to prison for 18 weeks, but imposed a suspended sentence instead because the government had asked judges to “relieve the pressure on the prison estates” because “the prisons are full”. The government denied having issued such guidance, a stance rather belied by its activation of contingency plans to lock up sentenced prisoners in police cells because of the lack of prison space. Meanwhile, at the other end of the country, Danny Weatherson, who was convicted of attempted robbery when he was 17, was still in prison after serving 18 years of a 15 month minimum sentence. He did not hurt…

IN 2020, JESUS COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE announced its intention to remove the seventeenth-century marble memorial monument to its benefactor Tobias Rustat (right) from the college chapel where he is buried. Rustat, declared the college, a Stuart courtier described by John Evelyn as a “very simple, ignorant, but honest and loyal creature” acquired his enormous fortune through the slave trade, some of which he then redistributed to Jesus College. He had to go. I am not on the side of the statue-smashers, but I initially unquestioningly accepted Jesus College’s description of Rustat as having made his money through slavery. So I was therefore surprised to discover that Rustat’s involvement in the slave trade consisted of buying a few shares in the Royal African Company after he had already become wealthy. In fact,…

THERE ARE THREE professions which, historically, have been called vocations. People are “called” to medicine, to the bar, and to the priesthood. This probably reflects the fact that these were, historically, the three professions for which you trained at the ancient universities. But it also spoke of a particular relationship between the professionals and those they serve and an obligation to minister, each in our particular callings, to those who present themselves to us. And over the last few years two of those three professions have gone out on strike. Alone among the three, the priesthood hasn’t gone on strike. Which, by the way, has nothing to do with our conditions of service. The Church of England is a terrible employer, with a way of treating its clergy and volunteers…

THE US GOVERNMENT THOUGHT THERE MIGHT be a danger in the Iranian diaspora: communist infiltrators. It was November 1962, a US-backed monarch ran Iran, and Iranian students abroad were organising against him. Working on tips from the Iranian embassy and informants in the community, the FBI gathered a massive dossier on Iran’s exiled “subversives”. After becoming aware of how thorough the surveillance was, Iranian Students Association treasurer Sadeq Qotbzadeh called the FBI, offering to clear up any issues they might have with him. In the interrogation room, he explained that there was no way he could support Communistic atheism as a good Muslim boy. Qotbzadeh described his vision for Iran as a “Jeffersonian democracy”. Other informants (including his ex-girlfriend) told the FBI that Qotbzadeh was an unserious person, certainly not…

AS A LITERARY FORM, THE HISTORICAL novel has enjoyed an uncertain reputation in the English-speaking world. The works of Walter Scott — once universally admired, not least by Goethe, Europe’s greatest writer of the age — gather dust, as do most of his innumerable heirs over the past two centuries. Perhaps only with Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy has the genre recovered popular, if still only grudging critical, acclaim. Even then, it is the TV series rather than the novels that have enabled Thomas Cromwell to effect a kind of posthumous apotheosis, even temporarily supplanting his distant relative Oliver in the public consciousness. That the value of Mantel’s fictions as literature is even more questionable than their historical verisimilitude does not detract from their commercial success. Thus far, however, no other…

IF THE GHOST OF GEORGE ORWELL is haunting anyone, it’s likely to be D.J. Taylor. In his will, Orwell insisted that no biography should be written after his death. His widow, Sonia Brownell, spent the next few decades fending off would-be biographers, and even enlisted Malcolm Muggeridge as a decoy who pretended to be busy at work on the project. Yet having produced the acclaimed biography Orwell: The Life in 2003, D.J. Taylor has now written a second. Even if he has flagrantly defied the great author’s wishes, we should all be grateful for his labours. Taylor is not only a compelling writer, but is also able to distil the essence of a notoriously elusive man. We can never really know Orwell, but Taylor’s work brings us closer to the truth…

THE BEST GEORGE CRUIKSHANK print is, of course, the one he captioned “A radical reformer … a neck or nothing man!” A vast, anthropomorphic, fire-breathing guillotine, dripping with blood and wearing a liberty cap, lumbers towards Britain’s governing class, which scatters before it (below). Made in 1819, the image distils anxieties about post-Napoleonic political pollution. Combining Blakean imagination, powerful draftsmanship, and genuine insight into the Channel-crossing forces re-shaping the country, it is the peak of a junction between prints and politics unique in British history. George pushed forward a tradition inherited from his father Isaac Cruikshank, and Isaac’s peers James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson. Their dense, scabrous, artistically bold, and sometimes surreal images from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are Britain’s best-known category of print satires. The story behind…

ONE OF MY ANCESTORS WAS BRIEFLY the master of one of the jewels of the East India Company’s fleet, a 1,000-ton East Indiaman named the Royal James. This enormous merchant ship launched in 1616 and undertook three voyages to the Far East and Japan in the years to 1630. Between 1613 and 1617, the company had 29 ships: by the end of 1617 eight had returned with cargoes, four had been either lost or broken up, two had fallen into the hands of the Dutch, and 15 were still in the East Indies. It wouldn’t surprise me if John Lyman was appointed master of the vessel because his uncle, Sir John Lyman, was an early “venturer” in the “Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies” — and this…

WHEN I MENTIONED ON Twitter that I was reading Tan Twan Eng’s third novel, writer Richard Osman commented that “The House of Doors is the exact title I’d use if I had to invent an imaginary Booker Prize-winning novel in a book”. Cynicism aside, he’s spot on: Tan’s first novel was longlisted for the Booker Prize, and his second was shortlisted. The House of Doors is unquestionably good enough to complete the trajectory. It is also the latest in a curious sub-genre: that of the biographical novel about a gay (or gay-adjacent) writer, following Colm Tóibín’s brilliant The Master (Henry James) and The Magician (Thomas Mann), Janette Jenkins’s wrongly overlooked Firefly (Noël Coward) and Damon Galgut’s rightly overlooked Arctic Summer (E.M. Forster). IN THE HOUSE OF DOORS THE SUBJECT is Somerset…

● AROUND THE TIME I STARTED writing about music, it was common — obligatory, in some quarters — to refer to Igor Stravinsky as the Great Composer of the Twentieth Century. Memories of the man were still fresh (he died in 1971) and his historic stature seemed secure. Pierre Boulez said: “The death of Stravinsky means the final disappearance of a musical generation which gave music its basic shock at the beginning of this century.” His publisher Ernst Roth said: “After Stravinsky, it will be as it was after Michelangelo.” These perceptions have since shrunk dramatically. Stravinsky, right now, is in freefall. In 2021, few summoned much enthusiasm for an anniversary retrospective that was quickly quelled by Covid. THREE BALLETS FOR SERGEI Diaghilev’s company established Stravinsky’s promise as the voice…

● THE ART WORLD, AS WITH ANY other corporate sphere, relies on data. Anecdotal evidence suggests that, post-Covid and the other assorted turmoils of the past couple of years, galleries and auction houses around the world have returned to the status quo ante; the numbers, however, show that this is far from the case. The Art Newspaper has just published its report on museum visitor figures for 2022 and the results are widely varying. Almost all major art institutions around the world have yet to return to the pre-pandemic levels of 2019 but some are doing much better than others. What is noticeable is that British museums and galleries, or more specifically English ones, are limping along. The top five museums by visitor numbers are the Louvre (7,726,321 visitors), the…

● I REVIEWED MATTHEW QUIRK’S thriller Th e Night Agent for the Financial Times when it came out a couple of years ago and enjoyed it immensely. It’s an intelligent, fast-paced conspiracy tale based in Washington DC. Quirk, a former reporter at the Atlantic magazine, certainly knows his way around the dark side of the American military-industrial complex. Too often adaptations lose something when they are dramatised for film or television — but not this time. The series, now showing on Netflix, is a cracking drama that engages from the first. The Night Agent is Peter Sutherland, a low-ranking FBI officer who spends his nights sitting in a basement of the White House, manning a telephone in case somebody calls. It’s a dull life until, one night, the telephone rings.…

ONE OF THE MANY thrilling things about being a food history geek is that recipes refresh the parts other scholarship cannot reach. Not only does the archival spadework of historical research — inventories, tax accounts, guild edicts — whizz along much faster when one encounters a new way with aubergines, but recipes can provide evidence for otherwise insoluble conundrums. Domestic science gets sexy when it can square up to big macho questions such as the consequences of the 1492 Alhambra Decree for the economies of the western Mediterranean. La mujer y la sarten en la kozina se yevan blen (“the woman and the frying pan get on well in the kitchen”) is a proverb from Ladino, the language of the Iberian Sephardic Jewish community, which combines elements of Aramaic, Hebrew,…

QUIET LUXURY — AREN’T you just sick of it? Behold, the stealth-wealth tropes that 11-year-old TikTokers side-eye as #oldmoneyaesthetic, while otherwise being barely literate. It was the beginning of the end of HBO’s Succession wot did it. Behold, we chavs’ final opportunity to train-spot the logo-less, yet far from unreadable Loro Piana baseball caps (£440-£2,400) sported by its patriarch and young pretender, Brunello Cucinelli polo shirts (from £440), and Max Mara everything else. If the garb donned by the cashmere cognoscenti can whisper rather than shout, it’s because we scumbags lean in to scrutinise it. As if to rub our noses in this, Succession went meta on us with Tom Wambsgans’s Burberry bag disquisition: 2023’s take on Miranda Priestly’s blue jumper oration in The Devil Wears Prada (2006). Cousin Greg…

The EPATH conference opened with a remarkable statement: “We respect everyone’s freedom of speech, but we choose not to listen to it.” “THAT EXPLAINS THE BARNEY!” EXCLAIMED the taxi driver taking me from Kerry airport to a conference in late April in Killarney, a popular Irish tourist destination. The previous day had been unusually busy because my conference coincided with another, and taxis had doubled and tripled up on passengers. One group he ferried had included delegates to both events, he said, and the conversation had got pretty heated. That may not have been precisely what the organisers of the event I attended were hoping for — but sparking debate was certainly their aim. They are Genspect, a group of health professionals dedicated to challenging the excesses of gender medicine.…

WHEN I HEARD THE TWITTER blue ticks had disappeared I was at a party in the British Library, talking to three good friends, all of whom I met through Twitter. Twitter has been significant to me: it’s hard to imagine how I could have built a professional network in journalism from outside London in the absence of social media. But often, it’s been significantly unpleasant. The blue tick system was one of the ways Twitter attempted to limit harassment, and it worked to a degree. Now Elon Musk has rolled it back, impersonation is rife. Along with other Musk-era tweaks, it’s helped to make Twitter feel not just unpleasant, but — horror of horrors for a social media platform — unengaging. There’s a drug that’s prescribed to alcoholics called Antabuse. It…

WE HAD DRIVEN SLOWLY DOWN THE STREET looking for the house which belonged to one of Telford’s most notorious sex-grooming gang rapists. Based on what my sources had told me, it was probably the house with a flourish of Arabic calligraphy painted near the roofline. I’d got out to have a look on foot while my cameraman and producer parked further up the hilly road and readied the camera. That’s when I noticed the two South Asian men in a car watching me. Soldiers call their behaviour “dicking”. It’s a term which comes from Northern Ireland, where it was normal for the IRA to have people watching before an attack, giving a signal when the right moment comes. They inched their car around corners to keep an eye on us…

That bastion of upright British conservatism, the Daily Telegraph, evidently now believes in the legitimacy of gang warfare. How else to explain its reporting of the trial of Thomas Cashman for the murder of Olivia Pratt-Korbel, a young schoolgirl? Thomas Cashman, a 34-year-old cannabis dealer, gunned down the nine-year-old in her own home as he chased a rival during a gangland hit gone wrong. Ah, if only the gangland hit had gone right! Then Joseph Nee, the man whom Cashman was chasing, would have been dead instead of the little girl, and all would have been well. Now it is perfectly true that Nee was himself, by all accounts, a criminal, and I suppose that most of us would rather a criminal were shot dead than a little girl: but…

IN OUTWARD APPEARANCE Professor Jack Tagg looks more like a jazz musician of the 1950s than a retired academic. So uncanny is this resemblance to some gnarled survivor from the age of be-bop that those watching his denimjacketed and peak-capped figure lumbering towards them at a literary festival often assume that the black attaché case he carries will contain the component parts of a musical instrument — a clarinet, say, or an oboe. In fact, this assumption would be mistaken: the case is far more likely to harbour a dozen or so back-numbers of Lamplighter, the quarterly literary magazine whose business Professor Tagg has conducted since the days of Mrs Thatcher’s second term. Lamplighter (available at a very few selected newsagents in the East Midlands area, or on subscription from…

#ACADEMICTWITTER SHOULD BE a corner of social media where wiser counsels prevail. In reality, it is one of the most vacuous and depressing spaces on the internet. It is a world of preening posers, pseudo-academic humblebrags, never-ending book promotions, orchestrated pile-ons, and an unrelenting showreel of distinctly unimpressed cats. Any talk of Twitter is inevitably divisive in universities, since academics’ attitudes to it fall into three distinct camps. There are those too busy with teaching and research to have anything to do with it; they know its demerits far outweigh its benefits, and couldn’t much care what happens in that godforsaken hellscape. Then there are those who use it straightforwardly for academic communication — announcing conferences, advertising vacant posts, or querying particular points of detail. And finally, there are those who…

IN 1700 A MATHEMATICIAN submitted a paper to the Royal Society in which he attempted to calculate, among other things, the rate at which oral testimony — that is, memory — decayed over long periods of time. It’s a quixotic idea, to be sure, but that such a thing might even be attempted speaks not only to the emergence of an empirical mindset, but to the transformations wrought on how people conceived of themselves, their contemporaries, and their families — and how they remembered the past — by the processes of what we call the Reformation. Pay no heed, the Apostle Paul wrote, “to fables and endless genealogies”. His advice fell on deaf ears among the people of sixteenth and seventeenth-century England. The era was, as the historian J.H. Plumb has…

IN OUR PRESENT WORLD OF slogans, slurs and sound bites, few names have had more resonance than that of the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek. To those in Britain on the political left, Hayek has become shorthand for the evils of market fundamentalism and rational economic man. To those on the right, Hayek’s name is forever associated with the moment in 1975, soon after he won a Nobel Prize for Economics, when Mrs Thatcher on a visit to the Conservative Research Department slammed down a copy of his Constitution of Liberty on the table, with the words “This is what we believe”. Rarely, however, have these opposing views been informed by much actual knowledge of Hayek’s thought. As a result, myths have abounded: that Hayek was the high priest of laissez-faire,…

IT IS DIFFICULT NOT TO LOVE a book that begins by comparing Ronnie O’Sullivan’s embrace with Judd Trump at the end of the 2022 World Snooker Championship with Bill Murray’s unheard whisper to Scarlett Johansson at the end of Lost in Translation (2003). It is one of the more low-brow references in Deep Pockets. The books comprises 22 chapters — one for every ball on the snooker table — with such titles as “Time”, “Authority” and “Disorder”. Many of them focus on a single player, and snooker fans will have fun guessing from the titles which of them it will be. “Genius” is about Ronnie O’Sullivan; “Loss” is about Jimmy White; “Sex” is about Tony Knowles. You get the picture. A chapter that is essentially about the novelty hit “Snooker Loopy”…

ROBBIE MILLEN, literary editor of The Times, could recently be found in the T2 section of that newspaper writing about the latest version of the Granta-sponsored “Best of British Young Novelists” list. For those of you not absolutely up to speed with this book world phenomenon, the roster, inaugurated in 1983, has been reanimated in each successive decade. While the class of ’83 included Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes, Rose Tremain and co., subsequent iterations have been thought to lack the original’s collective sparkle. Worse, many of the succeeding “best ofs” have also lacked their staying power. What did Millen think of the list? Although conceding that it was “decent”, he pronounced himself “baffled” and added that it altogether lacked the “sexiness” of what had gone before. He also…

● SO IT SEEMS — AT LEAST according to the recent Covent Garden production of Handel’s fairly ordinary 1737 opera Arminio — that it was not after all the epic slaughter of the Teutoburg forest that did for old Varus and his legions, but the random actions of a gang of teenage members of Arminio’s (the Germanic warlord Hermann’s) family, puffa-clad and with much flouncing, eye-rolling and sighing, that somehow settled those Romans’ hash. Ok, so it was a pretty stupid staging, but it was a nice reminder of opera’s attractively frivolous attitude towards history. Now those inadvertent teen heroes — needy, neurotic, hormonal, wildly subjective, emotionally incontinent … do they remind you of anyone? Operatic characters are surely all teenagers at heart, denizens of Self-Pity City, with their mood-swings,…

● Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor were the idol and diva couple whose reputation off-screen and off-stage has long eclipsed achievements on them. Their allure was partly due to their combination of raw talent and social mobility — Taylor was the offspring of socialite American parents, Burton the son of a Welsh miner and barmaid who scrapped his way to fame. In The Motive and the Cue at the National Theatre, director Sam Mendes and writer Jack Thorne deliver a rehearsal-room tale which reminds us that Burton-Taylor were forerunners of the double acts of todays’ celebrity culture, living out their dramas in front of the cameras. No contemporary dramatic duo can wholly match their fame at its Sixties peak. Taylor caused Burton to grouse that an affair with her…

● FINDING NEW THINGS to say about the greatest presence in our language, in any language, is a formidable task. More words have been written about Shakespeare than any other writer, so it was brave of Radio 3 to invite five actors, writers and directors to speak about the man Anthony Burgess called “one of our redeemers”. Brave, and, as it turned out, magnificent. Reading the First Folio, which occupied The Essay slot, was a triumph. Those who caught the talks will have been sent back to the plays, either on the page or the stage. It was an exercise worthy of the BBC at its best, which begs a world-weary if obvious question: why don’t they try it more often? The best essays were composed by Richard Eyre and…

“YORK HAM WITH SUSSEX royals.” My suggested menu for the coronation picnic on the village green evoked no enthusiasm. I was against the whole idea — and I don’t just mean the picnic. I still find it odd that a king should wish to condemn himself to an oily and uncomfortable procedure, calculated to make the most sacré of heroes look silly, pompous, deluded and anachronistic, in front of merciless cameras, ignorant commentators and baffled spectators. Spanish kings don’t have coronations: divine grace should already have been conferred at the moment of succession, without any need to make monarchs look pretentious or insecure. The British, I suppose, change dynasties so often that no head of state has ever been able to feel safely legitimate without a lot of reassuring flummery;…

WE INHERITED A FEW things from my aunt when she died in 2015: a framed sketch of Marianne in her 1970s prime, a seemingly haunted Bose stereo that began playing “So Long, Marianne” by Leonard Cohen when we plugged it in, and two old-fashioned A4 notebooks from the National Blank Book Company of Holyoke, Massachusetts. It was years before I looked inside them and discovered that they contained labels from wines she had tried with little notes after them, like Sainsbury’s Gewürztraminer “slightly too heavy and spicy, £3.95”, and Mâcon Villages, “£2.75, very good bargain — keep on buying”. The 1980s seemed like a great time for wine lovers. A 1976 Barolo from Vietti drunk in 1984 cost only £4.99. A bottle from the same producer will now be around…

The sorcerer of speed IF YOU FIND YOURSELF between Brescia and Rome in mid-June, you may come across a fleet of achingly beautiful classic cars haring along equally beautiful roads. The 1,000-mile MILLE MIGLIA is now a five-day rally more about fun than competition: but back in the day it was a brutal non-stop race, and in 1955 it witnessed perhaps the greatest single performance in motorsport history. The roads were closed, but they were still unprepared public carriageways rather than racetracks, and spectators in their hordes crowded as close as they dared. Drivers didn’t wear restraints — it was safer to be thrown clear in a crash, though “safer” was very much a relative term — and many preferred not to carry a navigator, wanting to be responsible only for…

RED, WHITE — AND BLUE Stephen Daisley (PART OF THE UNION? MAY) hits the bullseye when he notes that the SNP’s current problems are entirely self-inflicted rather than the work of their visionless political opponents. If readers want an insight into the complete absence of an alternative narrative offered by Scotland’s Unionist parties then they could begin with Lord McInnes of Kilwinning, for 18 years a Scottish Conservative Party director, strategist to Ruth Davidson, and constitutional issues special adviser to Boris Johnson. In April, McInnes told Fortnight magazine that whilst unionists “must be able” to express “their sense of Britishness”, the government trying “to enforce a false Britishness on people … would be counterproductivity at its best. The Union, he suggested “is not to be saved by even more red,…

“Sayonara!” says Rishi cheerfully, walking into the study. He’s just got back from a big trip to see lots of other leaders in Japan. “That’s a traditional Japanese greeting, apparently. Everywhere I went, people were shouting it to me.” In the corner James, who used to write nice things about us in The Times and now spends all day on a website called LinkedIn, puts his head in his hands. “I’m not sure it means exactly what you think it means, darling,” says Akshata, gently. “But I’m glad you had a nice time.” “I had a great chat with the local mayor. He said he’d heard about the local elections, and that people round there knew just how I felt, which was so kind.” “Where were you again?” “Hiroshima.” James…

MANY PEOPLE DESCRIBE ME AS AN EXTREMIST. And yet all I have ever yearned for is social justice and world peace. I am the very definition of a moderate. This is why I believe that anyone who disagrees with me ought to be publicly executed. Allow me to explain my reasoning. I have seen some abhorrent violence in my years of campaigning. Only last week, my friend Charlotte was deliberately misgendered. I believe the exact phrase was: “Sir, would you mind putting your testicles away?” Believe me, we are never going to that garden centre again. And yesterday I heard a “commentator” on the radio claiming that not all white people are privileged. Such violent rhetoric recalls the darkest days of the Third Reich. Why should a white man be given…

AS AN UNDERGRADUATE, I TOOK a paper called “British political history, c.300-c.1100”. For ease of communication, we called it the “Anglo-Saxon paper” — which is all it ever was to me, aside from one week when I madly decided to write on the Picts. “What are you studying at the moment?”, an American student asked me once, as we ambled back from a seminar. “The Anglo-Saxon paper.” She gave me a disapproving look, told me she was more into “global history”, and mumbled something about “WASPs”. I wondered what St Boniface or St Dunstan might have made of the “P” in that acronym. From this interaction I learned of an important cultural divide. Insofar as Americans encounter “Anglo-Saxons” at all, it is in this “WASP” formulation. When Britons encounter “Anglo-Saxon”,…

Cote d’Azur Reports of the death of the Fifth Republic have been greatly exaggerated. There are no pyramids of moutons morts blocking the Grande Corniche. The gilets jaunes whistle cheerfully as they jet-wash the paving stones of the Promenade des Anglais. And the only fire I have encountered is the one used to flame-grill the delicious Provençal octopus served at my local bistro. — Ned WE BRITISH LOVE to gloat over the moments of collective dyspepsia which erupt periodically among our Gallic neighbours. In clubland, the talk is always that the French need a Thatcher to shake themselves from their dirigiste complacency. In France, many on the Left distrust President Macron because of his Roths child career and natural ease in the world of international capital — and they are…

IF YOU ASK THE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE chatbot, ChatGPT, which three politicians are responsible for Brexit, it responds Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and David Cameron. It is not an unreasonable answer: Johnson for leading the Leave campaign and overseeing Britain’s exit from the European Union as Prime Minister, Farage for his leadership of UKIP and role in shifting public opinion towards Brexit, and Cameron for agreeing to hold a referendum in the first place. Although, reading the detailed response, I get the impression this particular AI programme would not have voted Leave. A whole host of politicians would make a Brexit top ten: Sir Bill Cash for making the constitutional and legal case over four decades; Dan Hannan for propagating the case in print and public debate over the same period; James…

THE BLOCKBUSTER HIT MOVIE Independence Day contains a brief scene parodying UFO cults. In the movie, ecstatic members gather on the top of tall buildings in Los Angeles and other major cities to welcome the extra-terrestrial invaders. They are promptly zapped, along with everyone else within firing range of the powerful laser beams. When I saw the movie in the West End on release, a huge cheer went up. The most notorious of these cults was Heaven’s Gate, which gained notoriety in 1997, with the ritual suicide of 39 members in California. They were convinced that the arrival of the Hale-Bopp comet allowed them to escape the “Human Evolutionary Level”. Today we can hear echoes of this rhetoric among technoutopians. They also share an eschatological vision, in which an ecstatic future…

THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY COMPOSERS about the productions of their colleagues are usually interesting, and often controversial. Benjamin Britten is a case in point: his opinions were nothing if not opinionated. He arbitrarily divided music lovers into those who revered Mozart and Schubert, and those who were devotees of Beethoven and Wagner, placing himself firmly in the first camp. Anyone who has heard Britten’s recording with the English Chamber Orchestra of the “Prague” symphony, or his playing alongside Peter Pears in Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise will agree that he had an especial affinity with these masters; but his implicit relegation of the German below the Austrian masters certainly throws down a gauntlet. Britten was indeed possessed of strong and frequently quixotic likes and (especially) dislikes. Chief among these was his…

WHAT IS HISTORY AND WHAT is it for? The first historians aimed to see that “the deeds of humanity should not be forgotten in time”, as the Greek Herodotus put it, and to provide an account of use to future generations: “a possession for all time” in the words of Herodotus’s successor Thucydides. History is about and for human beings; the disciplinary boundary between History and Natural History is very ancient. A new book by Peter Frankopan seeks to change this. This is the “untold history” of the natural world and humanity’s place within it. His aim is to “reinsert climate back into the story of the past as the underlying, crucial and much overlooked theme in global history”. Ironically, what makes this book so timely is the contemporary conviction that…

WE CAN SPEND ALL OF OUR lives paying for some decisions. In the case of a nation, the process of coming to terms with such decisions and taking responsibility for their consequences is the work of generations, and requires eternal vigilance. This is the haunting message of France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain by Julian Jackson, Emeritus Professor of History at Queen Mary, London, and much-lauded author of books on the fall of France in 1940, its Nazi occupation in 1940-44, and a biography of Charles de Gaulle. Here he revisits the trial of Philippe Pétain, a legendary WWI hero who signed the armistice with Germany in June 1940, the first in a series of decisions whose deadly consequences still reverberate in France today. The verdict, Jackson writes at…

THIS MEMOIR BY Emmanuel Carrère, a French master of literary nonfiction, is ostensibly about depression. Five years ago Carrère was desperate enough to have himself committed to an institution and undergo electric shocks. His book tells of his ordeal and shaky recovery, using his lifelong practice of yoga and meditation as a leitmotif (hence the understated title). But Yoga is not solely, or even mainly, about mental illness or stretching exercises. The underlying theme emerges in gradual touches. Those familiar with Carrère’s work first note something odd: he is alone. Carrère usually portrays himself, often unflatteringly, as a social butterfly with an eye for the ladies. He has told us about his failed first marriage, sexual wanderings, and his discovery of true love in his mid-forties. He has not spared us…

BOOM TIME WHILE CELEBRATING fellow baby boomer His Majesty’s coronation, myself and fellow old co-stars also felt it fitting to toast our generation’s undoubted good fortune down the decades. Though these days contending with time’s rigours, we septuagenarians raised a grateful glass to long-ago days of sexual promiscuity, unsullied RP accents, dressing for dinner and decent London house prices. ★ HAVING ADMIRED the versatile talents of Michael Sheen for many a year (his Blair, Frost, Kenny Williams to name but a few), isn’t another, more captivating role overdue? Whenever seeing dear Michael on screen these days, he appears to be channelling precisely the same Welsh windbag I watched only weeks before. ◆ CAST AS THE ONCE-MANLY Bottom at Shakespeare’s Globe, charming actress Mariah Gale enthuses: “What I find beautiful about…

● THERE’S A CRUDE DIVIDING LINE that you can run down the middle of rap music. On one side, gangsta rap, which deals with bitches, money and guns. On the other, progressive rap, which puts a political lens on the black American experience. Except, of course, it’s not that simple. Look at 2Pac, who delivered impassioned lyrics about police brutality and teenage pregnancy, and whose bitter misogyny made him a target of civil rights activist C Delores Tucker, who called rap “pornographic filth”. 2Pac retaliated with the line “C Delores Tucker, you’s a motherfucker/Instead of tryin’ to help a nigga, you destroy a brother” on the (pornographic) track “How Do U Want It”. The argument between Tucker and 2Pac — or, really, between Tucker and rap generally — was, in…

● “ANY LAST WORDS?” The question is directed by a Gestapo officer at Aatami Korpi, a Finnish prospector caught by Nazi soldiers as he makes his way across Lapland with a satchel full of gold. First words would have been a start. Clint Eastwood gave us The Man With No Name. In Sisu, Jorma Tommila plays Korpi as The Man With No Lines. He grunts, screams, moans, yells and, occasionally, sobs. But he doesn’t talk. There’s a lot to love about this movie, made with no budget and starring no one you’ve ever heard of (unless you’re a Finn). It is hilariously violent, and if that’s not your thing, then I cannot emphasise strongly enough that you should not under any circumstances watch it. But if you think you might…

● SIR TERRY FARRELL IS AN older-generation architect (born 1938) who was brought up on a housing estate on the northern edge of Newcastle (“on the edge of the edge”), passed the eleven-plus to attend the local Roman Catholic Grammar School, St Cuthbert’s, and was encouraged by his art master to study architecture at Newcastle University, where he must have been an exceptionally talented student because, after a brief and unhappy year when he worked for the London County Council in County Hall, he won a Harkness Fellowship to the University of Pennsylvania. There, he studied under Louis Kahn and Denise Scott Brown, and, through Denise, met Robert Venturi who was responsible for the first stirrings of hostility to orthodox modernism within the profession, which emerged in 1966 in the…

MOST PIGEON SHOOTERS seem to think that seven is the average number of birds shot in a single outing. I suspect somebody just plucked the number out of thin air a couple of decades ago and it was repeated often enough to work its way into rural lore. Every serious pigeon shooter will have had days when they shoot 100 birds. When woodpigeons find easy pickings, in the form of a crop that’s lying flat, they will flock in from miles and miles around, but equally we’ve all had days when we’ve sat there for hours on end without seeing a single bird in the sky. Some weeks ago, my friend Tom Payne and I were having the second sort of afternoon. It’s not much help to the farmer when…

AS A ROCK BAND, THE POLICE came in for a lot of stick. Their first four singles, which included “Roxanne” and “So Lonely”, were flops when first released in 1977 and 1978. The trio were sneered at by the cool kids of the music press, dismissed as “white reggae”, a term used pejoratively to suggest inauthenticity. Rolling Stone’s review of the band’s first album, Outlandos d’Amour, called it an “infuriating and condescending parlor trick”. How dare they presume to ride in on punk’s coattails? Andy Summers had studied classical guitar for four years at university. Drummer Stewart Copeland’s father had been a CIA station chief. The CIA! Could they possibly be any less rock’n’roll? Rock is meant to be about, as Jack Black’s character puts it in School of Rock,…

ASHES TO ASHES WHERE WERE YOU ON 5 JUNE 1997? I know where I was: sitting in the Eric Hollies stand at Edgbaston with my granddad as we watched England pulverise Australia. Everyone has their favourite ASHES MEMORY, and this was mine. My nan had recently passed away and not long after that sunny day at Edgbaston granddad followed her, as was his wish. The memory is tender for those late moments I enjoyed with the man I dearly loved. But it was — as granddad would insist — also about the sport. Almost immediately Darren Gough knocked over Matthew Elliott. Mark Taylor, Mark Waugh, Greg Blewett, Steve Waugh, Ian Healy and Michael Bevan all followed. The superior Aussies were suddenly 48 for seven. We England supporters were triumphant; the Australians…