Innehållsförteckning för August - September 2023 från The Critic

ENVIRONMENTALISM HAS smoothly transitioned from a countercultural force, at odds with capitalism and mainstream politics, to a ubiquitous shibboleth, on the lips of every CEO, politician and academic. As with so many modern orthodoxies, it is not so much that ecologists won the debate, as avoided ever having it. Vital and important questions went unasked and unaddressed. For all the whining about the BBC “both-siding” issues such as climate change, nothing has better served the cause of trendy environmentalism than the succession of useful idiots plonked onto our screens to be subjected to a ritual bear-baiting. In this, as so much else, conservatives have been easily outmanoeuvred and outdistanced by opponents who frame the terms of debate with skilled ease and ensure that the war is won before battle is…

LAST YEAR, A DIVISIONAL Court of the High Court, comprised of a lord justice (a regular judge of the Court of Appeal) and a High Court judge, ruled that the government’s Rwanda plan was lawful. On 29 June, the Court of Appeal reversed the High Court’s ruling and declared the plan unlawful. The Lord Chief Justice would have upheld the High Court’s decision; but he was outvoted by the Master of the Rolls and another lord justice. In other words, of the five senior judges who have heard the case so far, three found for the government and two against. But because they happened to be distributed unevenly across two courts, the numerical minority won the day (for now; the case will almost certainly go to the Supreme Court). To…

ON SILVERDALE GARDENS, a cat is yawning in the torpid summer sunshine. This immaculate cul-de-sac of bungalows doesn’t feel like an economic and cultural battlefield. I’m in New Barnet, where Hertfordshire makes a thrust deep into the belly of historic Middlesex: it’s the liminal region mythologised by the writer Nick Papadimitriou as the “Scarp”, where the Thames basin rises to the chalk uplands to the north. “So they’ll knock down my house?” asks one homeowner. As carefully as I can, I explain the concept behind Street Votes. Street Votes is the flagship housing policy idea that has emerged from the right-leaning think tanks of SW1, and I have come to test the reaction first hand. The policy brainiacs argue that we’re in a housing crisis, and that high property prices…

Arise ye workers from your slumbersArise ye prisoners of want …Arise (we might add) ye parishesof England! LAST MONTH I WAS IN THE unusual position of being the standard-bearer of the Left. Let money pour down like fountains on the poorer parishes of England, said I. Resist, cried the Bishops, for this would create a “dependency culture”. Remember this exchange, the next time the Lords Spiritual intervene in the Upper House on the question of Welfare. I think I need to explain further. It is a truth universally acknowledged that when a priest takes to Twitter to ask for help to prevent a roof falling in or to build a disabled loo some member of the eminently interchangeable National Secular Society or Humanists UK will pop up and demand to…

DOES AI POSE A MASS EXTINCTION threat? Or is this concern merely the latest manifestation of humanity’s need to frighten itself witless? As the year 2000 approached the world fretted over the Y2K or Millennium Bug. Neurotics and newspapers alike predicted that power plants, banks and planes would fail as 1999 became 2000, ushering in pandemonium and death. John Hamre, the US Deputy Secretary of Defense from 1997 to March 2000, foresaw that “the Y2K problem is the electronic equivalent of the El Niño and there will be nasty surprises around the globe”. There weren’t and there was little difference in the outcome between countries which invested millions of dollars and countries which invested none. In the 23 years since then, we’ve gone from “computers are so stupid the world will…

TOBIAS RUSTAT (1608-1694) was a courtier. What he achieved in life he owed not to any spark of ingenuity or enterprise but to one simple human trait — he was devoted to his royal master when the House of Stuart’s fortunes were at their bleakest and was duly rewarded at the monarchy’s restoration. His career offers a valuable insight into the premium that could be placed on such loyalty in Restoration England and the charitable legacy that resulted. Instead, his is a life now substantially misrepresented through the imposition of an entirely different narrative. Tobias Rustat was a devoted follower-in-adversity of Charles Stuart who in 1660 returned from exile to his realm as King Charles II. Rustat came back to England with him and thereafter served in an office conferred…

WARTIME EMERGENcies excepted, Britain’s inflation rate first became an acute problem in the 1960s. The initial policy reaction accorded with the wider enthusiasm at that time for state planning and interference. The government negotiated limits to the maximum increases in wages and prices with the peak organisations of labour and industry, the Trades Union Congress and the Confederation of British Industry. However, experience showed these “prices and incomes policies” — administered by lawyers, civil servants and the like — could be evaded. Businessmen and workers found ways around them, and they were ineffective if demand and output were too buoyant. One of the key clarifications of the Thatcher period was that an appropriately responsible monetary policy was the correct answer to inflation. On coming to power in 1997, New Labour…

THE PAKISTAN AIRLINES FOKKER FRIENDSHIP, a small turboprop, weaved through the high snow mountains of the Hindu Kush an hour after we left Islamabad. The mountain people were isolated from the rest of the world for several months each winter by heavy snowfalls that blocked all the passes and were too dangerous for turboprops. But it was late summer, and the pilot speared through a gap in the mountains. We landed in a valley close by a small town, Chitral. I had come to that faraway place in search of a mysterious Afghan tribe, the Kafirs, who claimed as their ancestors the Macedonian troops accompanying Alexander the Great’s invading army in 333BC. But while there, I came across a tale of British military heroism at the besieged Chitral fortress. It…

I’LL NEVER FORGET MY FIRST encounter with a manuscript. It was a summer afternoon, almost 25 years ago, and I was sitting in the reading room of Worcester Cathedral Library. It was pure luck that I was there, really. A few days earlier, I had bumped into the canon librarian as I was coming out of my last A-level exam; and when I mentioned that I was hoping to read history at university, he had offered to show me the collection. The first manuscript he took down was a volume of Franciscan sermons copied some time in the fourteenth century. If I’m honest, my memories of the manuscript itself are a little hazy. I was too wide-eyed with excitement, too ashamed of my schoolboy Latin to take it all in. But…

TO DECOLONISE THE CURRICULUM or not to decolonise the curriculum, that is the question. In his latest book, Against Decolonisation: Campus Culture Wars and the Decline of the West, Doug Stokes turns his analytical eye for international affairs inwards to give a damning indictment of the “decolonisation” movement. Just what does its agenda of dismantlement spell for UK universities, and the integrity of the West as a whole? Stokes emerges as an intellectual Robin Hood, reclaiming British history for those who are being most underserved by those “educated” elites who push narratives of social justice and white guilt — that is, the white, working-class people of Britain. Ranging through “identity politics” and “social theory”, “racism on campus” and “manufactured moral panic”, Stokes deconstructs the deconstructionists, and asks what their icons’…

THE LIKES OF ISHTAR and Waterworld may have succeeded it in the public imagination as bywords for Hollywood excess, but for a certain generation 1963’s Cleopatra is the quintessential more-money-than-sense film. Throughout the 1950s, “sword and sandal” movies did huge business, from Quo Vadis (1951) to Ben-Hur (1959). An epic about the female pharaoh who purely as political tactic seduced first Julius Caesar and then Mark Antony therefore seemed a slam dunk. So much so that Elizabeth Taylor, in the role of the Queen of the Nile, became the first actor to receive a $1 million fee. As if that wasn’t enough, she insisted for tax reasons that filming take place outside the USA. The terrible decision-making that afflicted the production started there, leaving aside the fact the script hadn’t been finalised…

JOHN BYRON IS PART OF BRITISH naval folklore. The son of nobility and Lord Byron’s grandfather, he served in the Royal Navy as an officer, captain and vice-admiral. He was nicknamed “Foul-Weather Jack” due to his uncanny ability to confront terrible weather conditions on the high seas, and was immortalised in a 1759 portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Byron had another unusual claim to fame. He was a midshipman aboard the HMS Wager, a square-rigged sixth-rate vessel that was wrecked on the south coast of Chile in 1742 and witnessed a mutiny. Byron wasn’t a mutineer, but he had a bird’s-eye view: his account was included in his 1768 autobiography, The Narrative of the Honourable John Byron. David Grann, one of America’s finest authors and long-form journalists, came across Byron’s…

LIKE MANY OTHER PROFESSions, the book trade is keen on jargon: lots of it, and the more the merrier. As with those other professions, it tends to be of two kinds: outward-facing — when publishers communicate with their customers — and inward-facing, when they communicate with other publishers or the people who write the products they sell. Its function — the function of all professional jargon, it might be said — is simultaneously to create an easily intelligible code for the benefit of insiders and (frankly) to mystify and impress those beyond the loop. Publishers’ outward-facing jargon can be conveniently observed in the blurbs printed on book jackets. These are full of code words which, you may be surprised to learn, usually have very little to do with the contents.…

YOU KNOW THE OLD JOKE — why does everyone hate X (say, Geoff Boycott or Hillary Clinton) on sight? Answer: “It saves time.” Over the years film has happily performed this service for opera, such masterpieces as Pretty Woman and Godfather 3 exposing its fancypants sham as the apotheosis of naff, so camp and tragic that only foreigners and perverts can even pretend to like it — usefully helping everyone to the correct attitude without any need to actually try the thing out. Brilliantly for us pervs, of course, this keeps the riff-raff away. The best bit of opera on film comes at the beginning of Werner Herzog’s jolly Fitzcarraldo, where Claudia Cardinale and Klaus Kinski arrive sweaty and oil-stained (actually, only him: you could still eat your supper off…

I MET BORIS BEREZOVSKY, the dark star of Peter Morgan’s West End transfer, Patriots, in circumstances as bizarre as the man himself. A squat mathematician who had excelled as a student of theories of infinity, Berezovsky came to embody the corruption and machinations of post-communist Russia. In the 1990s, covering the hardscrabble Yeltsin years, he had a controlling interest in the main Russian TV station, where the corpse count mounted in the struggles to control the airwaves and advertising revenues. Of the many oligarchs who strutted the stage of Russia’s politics between the chaos of the transition to a market economy slanted in the interests of rapacious buccaneers and the rise of Vladimir Putin’s dictatorship, he was also one of the figures most determined to involve himself in Kremlin power…

DOES THE SEXUALITY of an artist matter? Do we derive particular meaning from a book or a painting if we know its creator is homosexual? Noel Coward is best known for Private Lives; Tennessee Williams for A Streetcar Named Desire. Both are tales of marital tension (after a fashion) written by homosexuals. Does it count? Only to those who, yelling “cultural appropriation”, like to scale the ramparts and summon the mob. Cultural appropriation, a silly phrase favoured by dullards, has been going strong since the Pharaohs. “If you’re gonna steal,” Leonard Bernstein told a friend, “steal classy.” Lenny, according to that friend, had borrowed from Stravinsky for West Side Story. So what if he did? The world is a better place for the theft. Tchaikovsky: a composer, or a homosexual…

YOU MAY SING TO YOUR supper, exalt your soup of the evening, apostrophise your haggis, or even — as Neruda did without obvious irony — assure onions that they resemble Aphrodite’s breasts. But none of these eatables will respond: they are all dead. If you want your nourishment to register your utterances, it must, at least, be alive, like the witchetty grubs, plump with wood-pulp in their guts, that Australian aboriginals chew to death, or the lice that Nenets pluck greedily from their own bodies, or the larvae that infest the honeycombs Ethiopians eat, or the cattle from whose wounds Masai squeeze fresh, refreshing blood. In Western culture, the Bread of Life may answer your prayers, but only one merely material foodstuff is a potentially attentive addressee. Oysters are,…

LAST SUMMER I CONDUCTED an extremely scientific test to ascertain which were the best rosé wines currently available in Britain. This involved getting dozens of samples, from supermarket own labels to some quite smart wines from Provence. Then I invited the neighbours round and we drank them in the garden. The winner wasn’t a celeb-endorsed yacht rosé, instead it came from a small estate called Château la Canorgue in Luberon, a part of the Southern Rhone famed, if famed is the right word, for its bulk red wines. It certainly wasn’t the cheapest wine we tried, currently around £18 from Yapp Bros, but seeing as you can now easily spend upwards of £20 on something quite ordinary in a fancy bottle, nor is it that expensive. I’ve been writing about…

FIFTY YEARS AGO LAST MARCH, a restaurateur in the Hautes-Pyrénées region of France created a casserole of duck breast, bacon, potatoes and onions — le magret en cocotte — that earned the HÔTEL DUPONT a place in the Michelin guide and fame far beyond the small village of Castelnau-Magnoac. Twenty-three years later, Pierre Dupont’s son, Jean, a pig farmer, helped to create something even more mouth-watering that may bring glory to the whole of France: his son, ANTOINE, the world’s best rugby player and the captain who may finally lead his country to lift the Webb Ellis Cup. RUGBY UNION’S WORLD CUP starts in Paris on 8 September when the hosts play New Zealand, a daunting opener. Win or lose, and assuming no slips against Italy, Namibia and Uruguay, France…

Social media pile-ons, abuse and occasional death threats take a toll, but not in the way people expect WHEN PEOPLE ASK ABOUT THE repercussions of publicly refusing to believe in gender identity, the first thing they usually raise is the nastiness of social media. How, they wonder, do the abuse, pile-ons and occasional death threats feel? I flippantly answer that I’m used to them, and pay them no heed. But a more truthful answer would be that they take a toll — just not in the way most people expect. It is of course unpleasant to be called a fascist or Nazi for thinking that men cannot be women. But the name-calling doesn’t lead to soul-searching: when I think very poorly of someone, I don’t care what they think of…

2023 IS APPARENTLY THE YEAR of doing everything I was scared to do as a teenager. First the driving (which is going very nicely thank you), and now the most hated thing of all: I’ve got braces. My first go-round with orthodontics came when I was 12, and ended with me feeling so traumatised that even at 41, I think I’ve cried at every appointment so far. Although given that those appointments included a double extraction followed by surgery to remove a snapped root, I think I’ll let myself off. “Be brave,” said my very sweet orthodontist as she stuck the brackets to my teeth while I silently wept. “Just think of everything Freddie went through.” This was very confusing and it took me a beat to remember that I was…

THREE YEARS AGO, I WROTE A COLUMN for this esteemed magazine in which I urged the public to modify certain phrases. I noted that the term “boy” should be replaced with “ungirl”, “vagina” with “front hole”, and “semen” with “hate syrup”. I am delighted that my recommendations have since been superseded by even more progressive ones. Johns Hopkins University recently produced an “LGBTQ glossary” which redefined “lesbian” as a “non-man attracted to non-men”. And last month, the charitable organisation, Jo’s Cervical Cancer Trust, demanded that the term “vagina” be rejected in favour of “bonus hole” in order to prevent causing offence to non-binary individuals. Some so-called “feminists” have claimed that terms such as “non-man” and “bonus hole” have misogynistic connotations. They fail to understand that activists such as myself are simply trying…

TO JOSEPH OF ARIMATHEA, WANDERING ALBION while clutching his nephew’s final drinking cup, the rolling Somerset hills would have seemed the perfect setting for a New Jerusalem. To King Arthur checking in on the Holy Grail, Glastonbury Tor would have seemed the ideal spot to round-table. And to us in our own millennium, m, this hill is still the stuff of legend: just wander six miles east to farmland south of Pilton in late June, and you will find the greatest of England’s summer myths — the neo-utopian Republic of Glastonbury. With a population a little north of 200,000, the temporary settlement of Worthy Farm is the third largest city in the South-West, trailing Bristol and Plymouth, but edging Bournemouth and Swindon. And, as cities go, the Republic of Glastonbury is…

A graffito on a wall in the street in Paris in which I stay regularly made my heart swell with patriotic pride: ACAB. A popular British locution — “ALL COPPERS ARE BASTARDS” — whose initials are tattooed on a thousand British knuckles has crossed the Channel and must have become current, otherwise there would have been no point in inscribing it on a wall. No doubt those who did so ignored the fact that the initials also stand for “ALWAYS CARRY A BIBLE”, at least once the person so tattooed is taken down the station. In any case, it was obvious that the initials stood in this instance for the former phrase, because nearby in the same hand and in the same paint were inscribed the words TOUT LE MONDE…

WHEN LIFE BECOMES UNLIVEABLE, who are you going to call? A friend? A doctor? A priest? In the transition from the Christian to the liberal notion of property, we no longer belong to God, with all the concomitant demands to look after ourselves. On the contrary, we belong only to ourselves, and thus can dispense with ourselves as we see fit. No more bonds, duties, obligations or higher values. No more worrying about eternal damnation, and no obligation to be grateful for the gift of life either. We live in the era, not only of the fully administered life, as Max Horkheimer put it, but of the total bureaucratising of death. In this vision of the world, suicide is simply one more thing to check off the list. In his…

LADY CAROLINE LAMB LIVES ON in the collective memory as Byron’s spurned lover, the woman who coined a phrase when she called him “mad, bad and dangerous to know”. He, of course, was the impresario of his own personality cult, practically inventing the idea of literary celebrity. But she played out their tempestuous affair, and especially its break-up, at a pitch of operatic performativity that even he found too theatrical. She famously stabbed herself at a ball (“ye dagger scene — of indifferent memory”, as he disdainfully put it). Another attempt to act out her pain and rage was more meticulously pre-planned and included theatrical extras. At Christmas 1812, she got villagers to dance around a bonfire of his love tokens. Her servants wore specially made buttons on their livery…

SURREY IS NOT LARGE: before 1888 it included all London south of the Thames, but today, as much of it has been absorbed by the capital, it is just 40 miles wide and under 17 deep, with a population of around two million. As Ian Nairn, who co-authored the 1962 edition of Surrey with Nikolaus Pevsner, noted, no other English county has been so dominated by a neighbouring city. In the eighteenth century, the ties with London were generally gentle and beneficial, but the coming of the railways in the 1830s and 40s, and the extension of the Underground in the 1920s, caused an explosion of development — growth contained, to some extent, by the Green Belt, established just in time in 1938. The ebullient Roderick Gradidge regarded Surrey as…

IN 1252 MONGKE, THE NEW MONGOL ruler, ordered his brother Hulegu to embark on a new push to expand their empire westwards. Having reminded Hulegu to consult his Christian wife, Doquz Khatun, “in all matters” and to treat those who readily submitted mercifully, he continued, “Grind beneath the feet of your wrath those who resist, along with their wives, children, kith and kin.” Hulegu would have known what was required. The Mongols had already turned death into a performance art designed to sap their would-be enemies’ morale: his and Mongke’s grandfather, the great Chinggis (Genghis) Khan, had executed one opponent by pouring molten metal into his eyes, mouth and ears. With this in mind, Nicholas Morton starts from the simple proposition that the Mongols’ impact was felt long before they…

IN MEDIEVAL SCHOLASTICISM, ARISTOTLE’S reputation was such that he was usually referred to simply as “the Philosopher”. Among the moderns, this book makes the case for treating Baruch Spinoza (1632–77) similarly. And if there is no philosopher but Spinoza, Jonathan Israel is his prophet. Spinoza: Life and Legacy is no ordinary biography. It builds on Steven Nadler’s classic Spinoza: A Life (1999) but its ambition is to assemble and interpret what we know of him on a much grander scale. Its 1,300 pages encompass not only the ancestry, adventures and afterlife of its subject, but provide a panoramic survey of his times, for which Israel’s first major book, The Dutch Republic, laid the groundwork quarter of a century ago. In other ways, too, this monumental volume represents the culmination of…

★ A YEAR AFTER THIS column first identified him as the most fitting successor to publicity-ravenous Gyles Brandreth, how heartening to see retired showbiz vicar Richard Coles stepping up to the plate with such gusto. Combining trademark humility with a ruthless eye on the prize since abandoning his East Midlands flock, there’s barely a town in the British Isles that hasn’t played host to Richard’s endearing brand of self-promotion these past months. ◆ WINDBAG MICHAEL SHEEN’S silly objection to non-Welsh actors playing Welsh characters brings back painful memories of prejudice endured by yours truly. Having chosen to adopt what I reasonably described as a “valleys accent” during a fraught run at Theatr Clwyd in 1985, one faced all manner of Welsh hissing at the time. HATS OFF TO Tony Hopkins…

IT’S BEEN A STRANGE FEW MONTHS to be a man. The publication of Caitlin Moran’s book What About Men? kicked off a mass discourse about the ills of masculinity: even the reviewers who disagreed with her specific analysis of men’s troubles were largely in agreement that there’s something amiss in male lives. More usually, it’s women who get the chin-scratching social issues treatment, so I sympathise with men who find it alienating to be the subjects of this kind of commentary. Especially because the consensus is so unflattering to men, who seem to appear in the popular imagination as emotionally stunted luddites railing against their own irrelevance. There is some truth here: the realignment of the economy towards service has devalued brawn, while the rise of women in the professions…

“IT’S NOT THE YEARS,” a bruised Indiana Jones complained in Raiders of the Lost Ark, “it’s the mileage.” But that was more than four decades ago, and in Harrison Ford’s fifth outing as the bull-whip-toting archaeologist, the years have become a problem for him. On the surface, The Dial Of Destiny is an enjoyable adventure which takes our hero back to the ground where he has always been most successsful, chasing relics across the Middle East. If it doesn’t reach the heights of Raiders or The Last Crusade, it at least erases the memory of Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, a film so misguided that I’ve kept its existence from my children. There have been complaints that the finale is ridiculous. Of course it is, but the Indiana Jones adventures…

I AM NOT NECESSARILY the best person to write about the newly re-opened National Portrait Gallery as I was Director from 1994 to 2002, so may inevitably be over-protective of its previous reconfiguration, including its Ondaatje Wing, designed by Sir Jeremy Dixon and Edward Jones and opened in May 2000. On the other hand, having spent eight years wrestling with the complexities of the layout of Ewan Christian’s late Victorian building and how to manage the displays, I may be in a better position than most to assess what Nicholas Cullinan, the NPG’s current director, Jamie Fobert, his architect, and Liz Smith of Purcell, the conservation architect, have achieved architecturally in its current total reinvention. IN RETROSPECT, THE BIGGEST PROBLEM of the last redisplay was its success. When I arrived…

THE OLD NORFOLK gamekeeper, who was sitting next to me in the Land Rover, shifted uncomfortably and adjusted his hearing aid. “Right, about this pond. There are ponds. There are plenty of ponds but they’re all overgrown. I can show you them. But to be honest it’s a waste of time.” Some months previously, the same gamekeeper had told me that over the years, it had frustrated him immensely that all the duck ponds on the estate had been neglected. What they needed, he reckoned, was a bit of love. They needed somebody to cut back the willows and dig out some of that sludge. But regrettably, my suggestion that I could be that person was going down badly. Seemingly, the only thing worse than the old ponds not being…

THERE ARE ENOUGH aphorisms in racing to fill a book. It doesn’t really matter that most of them are nonsense — such as, “Always back the outsider in a three-horse race”. If you do that the chances are you’ll just be making regular contributions to the bookies’ benevolent fund. But they’re not all wrong. I long ago realised that “Always listen to Ruby Walsh” is a pretty decent approach to understanding what’s really going on, and what should be going on. Walsh isn’t just one of the most stylish and intelligent jockeys who ever sat on a horse; since his retirement, he has become just about the most insightful and pithy racing analyst around. His comments on races put to shame most of what passes for analysis in other sports.…

AT THE QUEEN’S 92ND BIRTHDAY party in April 2018, a strange spectacle played out. Amidst appearances by the likes of Tom Jones, Kylie Minogue and Sting was a performance by the massed ranks of the George Formby Society, backed by the BBC Concert Orchestra, giving a rendition of “When I’m Cleaning Windows”. This was in itself unsurprising; the Queen was an admirer of Formby, and had seen him perform when she was younger. There was even a rumour that she wanted to be president of the George Formby Society, but was dissuaded from doing so on the grounds that it would be infra dig; it is a source of some regret that this did not form the basis of an episode of The Crown, complete with a noted character actor…

GLAD TO BE TRAD Charles Saumarez Smith (MODERN HOUSES THAT BUYERS WANT, JULY) says that people like modern architecture, provided it is well built. He is partly right. Some people like most modern architecture. Most people like some. However, a large body of empirical evidence indicates that most people tend to prefer more vernacular and traditional approaches. These are not the only way to create popular, healthy and happy places, but they are the simplest and easiest. Mr Saumarez Smith notes that “thousands” visit the website The Modern House, which has subsections devoted to postwar design. This is not robust evidence for a “huge shift in public taste”, or for the claim that “people” are not hostile to modern architecture: it just shows that there are some thousands of modernism…

“It’s so unfair!” Rishi has locked himself in his study, where I had been taking a nap. Outside, Akshata is trying to get him to come out. “If you open the door, darling, we can talk about it,” she says. “What’s the point in talking? The universe is against me!” “Well now, why would you say a thing like that? Does your heated mug need rebooting again?” “Everybody is blaming me for everything!” “Oh darling, of course they’re not. Not for everything. They blame Boris for a lot of things, too.” “But they blame me for Boris!” “Well, you did back him to be leader.” “Only because I wanted to be in the Cabinet! Why can’t anyone understand that?” Outside I can hear that James, who used to write nice…

“I THOUGHT IT HAD SAVED MY LIFE,” said Sergey Shastak, referring to a sunflower field that offered a camouflaged lifeline back to the Ukrainian lines. Climbing through the drooping stalks, he soon discovered he was in a minefield. To his left, a unit of Ukrainian troops were assaulting the village of Makiivka. Mortars began to fall. No time to look out for mines. Running, amid strafing bullets and exploding metal he felt light of foot as he made his break for safety. A strange sense, that this time, having come so far, he was not going to die. Why? “I don’t know, man. I felt, in that moment, that someone else was in control of my body.” Who? “This I cannot explain. You have to start thinking about things like…

FAR FROM BEING playthings of the rich, what are often disapprovingly called trophy assets are an important part of a country’s investment attractiveness. Most countries have some and Britain has more than most. To have these shiny baubles for sale, attracting foreign money in serious measure, is a potent aspect of success. When the term is used, one often thinks of real estate. London, as an international rather than English city, is effectively the only UK destination for foreign money seeking a home in such assets. We are comfortably ahead of the capitals and cultured centres of Europe. Delightful as Paris, Rome and Vienna are, they are not serious places for finance or growing businesses, merely Disneylands for adults. Everyone from the Vatican to oligarchs, with every type of Arab…

“I have nothing to declare except my genius.”—Attributed to Oscar Wilde at the New York Customs, 1882 OSCAR WILDE’S QUIP, THOUGH WITHOUT its lightness of tone, might have served as the title of Professor Didier Raoult’s autobiography. A man eminent in his field of microbiology, he shot to fame and media attention at the beginning of the Covid-19 epidemic when he vigorously promoted the combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin as both preventive and life-saving. He soon attracted a cult-like following, not least among whom numbered Donald Trump. Raoult became infatuated with his own infallibility. He was certainly made for gurudom. A man of large presence and personality, to put it mildly, his appearance was not at all what might have been expected of a medical scientist. On the contrary, he looked…

IT IS 9.45 ON A BRISK APRIL morning at the flat overlooking Clapham Common and Mark has been at work for the best part of an hour. His flatmates — a trainee solicitor, an advertising executive and the research assistant to a Tory MP — are long gone and, favouring comfort over monasticism, Mark has relocated himself to the front room. Here, surrounded by last night’s takeaway away containers and their congealing residues, es, a Fender bass guitar and some rugby kit hung up to dry over the fireplace, he is busy texting an ally on the Times Literary Supplement. “How abt I do new Deborah Levy?” Mark proposes. There is a brief delay, during which Mark browses the books section of the previous week’s Private Eye. “Sorry, already fixed,”…

SATIRISED AS “SMELFUNGUS” by Laurence Sterne in A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768), the first great Scottish writer of the Union, Tobias Smollett (1721-71), is now largely forgotten. Unlike Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, Smollett’s picaresque talents have faded from public consciousness, and his poetry, journalism, drama and historical writing even more so. Moreover, if he was not so overlooked, he would now be cancelled because part of his family’s modest prosperity derived from the Caribbean wealth, including slaves, brought in with his wife. And yet Smollett left a series of excitable novels which provide an account of his Britain, one that is shown to be more edgy and problematic than is generally appreciated. Smollett’s scabrous content and often vicious style do not match modern sensibilities, but, as a…

PERHAPS THE MOST ARRESTING sentence in Patrick Deneen’s new book Regime Change: Towards a Postliberal Future is also the only one I noticed in bold type. “What is needed,” this professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame writes, “is the application of Machiavellian means to achieve Aristotelian ends.” That bracing desideratum occurs towards the beginning of the book’s third and concluding section, “What Is To Be Done?” Many readers will recall that this question was made famous in a pamphlet called What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement. Its author was V. I. Lenin, a man who excelled in the application of Machiavellian means to achieve his own, not quite Aristotelian, ends. Regime Change follows Deneen’s 2018 bestseller, Why Liberalism Failed, which purports…

OVER RECENT DECADES, ACADEMIC qualifications have become an essential, or at least highly desirable, entry ticket to an increasing range of careers. (Think journalism, marketing and indeed many other areas of business.) Traditional forms of “experiential learning”, relying on what Tamson Pietsch calls “on-the-job experience and the guidance of practitioners” rather than books and lectures, have been devalued in the process. Her dazzling new book vividly recreates the story of a striking educational experiment to illuminate the history and nature of this major development. The SS Ryndam set sail from New York in September 1926. Some 306 young men, 57 young women and 133 mature students embarked on an eight-month, round-the-world trip which stopped off at 47 different locations. They were given reading lists and a choice of lectures in…

"A MAN WHO FOUGHT IN World War Two made a Christmas movie called It’s A Wonderful Life … our Christmas movie is Die Hard. It’s got to say something about what is happening with our culture.” No, not Billy Graham or the Archbishop of Canterbury, but John Mc-Tiernan — the guy who directed Die Hard. Nick de Semlyen quotes that line in The Last Action Heroes, his gossipy account of the hunks and lunks who dominated Hollywood cinema in the 80s and 90s. Having quoted it, he writes not one word of comment on it. Given that de Semlyen is the editor of the movie magazine Empire, I think Chuck Norris’s Colonel James Braddock could justifiably call him Missing in Action. Don’t get me wrong. I love watching Chuck defeat half a…

EVERY TIME LITTLE ENGLANDERS — including certain British prime ministers — attempt to persuade us that central European disputes are “quarrels in faraway countries between people of whom we know nothing”, history comes back to bite them. Central Europe matters, and as Martyn Rady’s sparkling, witty, elegantly-written and deeply erudite book shows, it has mattered a lot for the last 2,000 years. They may seem eccentric places with unspeakable languages and where people adopt eccentric dress sense, but more often than not conflicts in the “Middle Kingdoms”, as Rady calls them, have changed the world — for good or ill. Tribes and empires from the East (Huns, Goths, Cumans, Tatars/Mongols, Ottomans, Russians) have moved west to conquer vast swathes of territory, creating new states and in time giving birth to…

FOR THIS YEAR’S HOLIDAY READING special — where The Critic suggests some older fiction that might more profitably fill your beach-y or gîte-y afternoons than the latest screamers from the bestseller lists — the theme is, well, death in summer. We offer you the best-known novels by three writers who died, in reputationally-reduced circumstances, in 2023. As an aside, all three novels were published in the early 1980s, and show the range of that decade in British fiction. “You’ve got to stand the test of time,” said Martin Amis, “which is the only test there is.” The test begins now. He also identified what he called the “talent novel” — the book the serious writer delivers, early in their career, which shows they offer more than mere promise. Money (1984)…

IT IS A SAD TRUTH, widely acknowledged, that London is no longer a music capital. World orchestras that passed through once or twice a year no longer stop over. Headline artists save their signature concerts for Paris and Berlin. New music has dried up. There hasn’t been a premiere of world consequence since before Covid. London is falling off the music map. Various reasons and excuses are attached to this decline, among them Brexit, Covid, the Ukraine war, economic woes and a government that is plundering funds from the capital and spreading it around the regions, going out of its way to penalise London orchestras while smiling upon pointless little minority start-ups that are barely above kindergarten level. These are all contributory causes but the cumulation of factors does not…

WHO IS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL woman in art? The choices are innumerable: Botticelli’s Primavera or Titian’s purity figure in Sacred and Profane Love? Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring or Jacques-Louis David’s Madame Récamier? The girl in Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss or John Singer Sargent’s Madame X? The choice for Umberto Eco, however, was easy. In On Beauty (2004) he wrote: “If you ask me which woman in the history of art I would go out to dinner and spend an evening with, the first would be Uta from Naumburg Cathedral.” If Uta couldn’t make it, he confessed he would accept Leonardo’s Lady with an Ermine as a consolation companion. What was seemingly unusual about Eco’s predilection was that Uta von Ballenstedt was a woman of the eleventh century who…

Seeking a television series to see you through the summer? Here are my recommendations: APPLE TV Idris Elba is now so famous, with such a strong screen persona, that no matter which tough guy he is playing, I think “Oh look, it’s Idris Elba.” He delivers once again in HIJACK as Sam Nelson, a broody negotiator flying from the Gulf to London on a hijacked airplane. The show deftly switches between the drama 35,000 feet up and the unfolding story on the ground as the authorities realise that the hijackers have taken control and move into international crisis mode. Cue much staring by nerve-wracked officials at enormous screens tracking the airplane’s progress and frantic telephone calls. Meanwhile, back on board, Sam is masterminding the fightback with a series of clever…

“RURITANIAN” is one of those words I’ve been using for years without ever quite properly knowing what it means. Fake, unfoundedly pompous, something to do with the specious bestowal of military rank … close enough to the proper derivation from the fictional country of Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda: quaint, minor, backward, embodying the pastiche of nationalist narratives. Presently, Ruritania appears to be located in SW1. There the endless Union Jacks, there the lumbering herds of tourists charging towards the Mall for selfies with the buzbied Guards. Belgravia and Bond Street look like sets for Bridgerton, all garlands of bright artificial flowers and faux-Georgian concierges. The strains of the regimental bands can just be heard from the doorway of Fortnum’s, where there is honey still for tea (£14.95 for…

FANCY DRESS — is there any more benighted phrase, conjuring rag weeks, the Sealed Knot, Morris Dancers, and dismal straight transvestism? Admittedly, the best party I have ever attended was a Feast of Bacchus bash. However, this was as much a directive regarding behaviour; as to dress, its assorted nymphs and satyrs rendering as the norm rather than some crashing novelty act. Naturally, I did Titian’s take: all vine wreath, brilliant blue bodice, and sixteenth-century undress. As dawn rose, a fellow maenad was discovered, naked, still gently rocking astride the statue of a bull. Evidently, this was the exception that proves the rule. One of the most tedious aspects of Cecil Beaton’s Bright Young People was their penchant for peacocking theatricals. Compare his foe Waugh’s account in Vile Bodies (1930)…

THE WORLD ATHLETICS CHAMPIONSHIPS are 40 years old this August. Helsinki was the perfect inaugural host back in 1983, free from superpower politics and the boycotts which tarnished both the Moscow and L.A. Olympics in 1980 and 1984 respectively, and with crowds which knew and loved the sport. Carl Lewis won three golds and was labelled “Superman” by L’Équipe; Edwin Moses and Daley Thompson continued to dominate their events; and, less palatably with all we now know about state-sponsored doping, Eastern bloc women won every track event up to 800m and every field event bar the javelin. The javelin was Finland’s sacred event, rooted in the country’s endless forests where every child could grow up hurling branches. Finnish men had won five Olympic golds over the years — the stadium’s tower…

EVERY YEAR, A CELEBRATED CRICKET figure is invited by the MCC to give the COLIN COWDREY LECTURE on the spirit of the game. Cowdrey, the epitome of the sporting gentleman, was an apt choice. This was the man who, during the 1963 Lord’s test against the West Indies, had his arm broken by a searing bouncer. During the final over of the match, with England nine wickets down, needing six to win, or to survive two balls for the draw, Cowdrey emerged (left) to bat with a glove on one hand and a plaster cast on the other. The stumping of Bairstow was within the rules. But was it in the spirit of the game? The Aussies thought so. Your English writer thinks not Eleven years later, with England suffering…