Innehållsförteckning för October 2023 från The Critic

BY THE TIME YOU READ this, Dame Sue Carr will have assumed office as Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, or Lady Chief Justice, should it be decided to alter the venerable title. As is the modern public sector custom, the job was advertised online by the Judicial Appointments Commission, along with a candidate information pack (among the selection criteria: “Ability to preside over both Divisions of the Court of Appeal”). Two candidates were shortlisted and interviewed, following which Dame Sue’s name was sent to the Lord Chancellor. The other shortlisted candidate was Dame Victoria Sharp, President of the King’s Bench Division and the long-time favourite for the post. But a legal commentator’s euphemistic remark that her rival had a more “outwardly confident personality” may explain her failure to…

THERE’S A DOOR THAT SEPARATES the Cabinet Office from Number 10. A few days after Liz Truss gave her farewell speech, those of us still left in the building were shoved through it: feeling a little bruised, quietly resentful, leaving behind unrealised plans. Sir Humphrey would have been proud. Yet just seven weeks earlier we were thrilled. Liz Truss had just won the Conservative leadership campaign. She promised to be the low tax, freedom-loving, “go for growth” prime minister we believed could shake Britain out of stagnation. It was because of her ideological consistency that she quickly drew in a team. Throughout her career, Truss pursued an agenda that was unapologetically free-market and socially liberal. Developing her platform was straightforward, driven by policy rather than polling. When I knew she was…

WHEN MÁIRÍA CAHILL WENT PUBLIC about the sexual abuse she said she suffered at the hands of an IRA operative, she thought she had signed her own death warrant. After being betrayed by people within her own community, subjected to repeated interrogations and denied justice, Máiría took the decision in 2014 to waive her anonymity and speak to BBC Northern Ireland’s Spotlight programme. For taking this stand, for coming out as a survivor of sexual violence and of an extrajudicial IRA trial, she was slandered by politicians and smeared by journalists, even in the pages of the Guardian. “The harassment was ferocious, so much so that it was raised in the three Parliaments: Westminster, the Northern Ireland Assembly, and Dáil Éireann,” she reflects nearly a decade after her interview was broadcast.…

THE IRISH “MUSICIAN” Róisín Murphy has been successfully cancelled by brave activists. For some reason, she failed to understand that a commitment to diversity means agreeing with absolutely everything we say. In a comment on Facebook — which she sneakily posted on her own private page to pretend that it was none of our business — she claimed that “puberty blockers are fucked, absolutely desolate, Big Pharma laughing all the way to the bank. Little mixed-up kids are vulnerable and need to be protected, that’s just true.” The monstrosity of such a claim cannot be overstated. Adolf Hitler wrote something very similar in Mein Kampf. Indeed, if you translate Murphy’s words into German, the resemblance becomes even more uncanny. And it’s surely no coincidence that if you squint your eyes,…

EARLIER THIS YEAR, JEFF HARVEY bumped into an old friend, a man in late middle age. Knowing that Harvey had worked on The World at War, his acquaintance began telling the retired editor what the series meant to him. “He started talking about Oradour,” Harvey says, referencing the massacre that graphically introduces the programme’s first episode. Paraphrasing Laurence Olivier’s sonorous narration, Harvey’s friend continued, “Down this road, the soldiers came.” By the time they had gone, that summer’s day in 1944, over 600 French civilians were dead, burnt and shot by the Waffen-SS. But to Harvey’s friend, it was like the war had never ended. “He went to pieces,” Harvey recalls. “It was quite extraordinary — it was like he was there, and this is a 50-, 60-year-old guy.” Listen…

THE READING LIST I GIVE MY first-year students of nineteenth-century European history is headed by a reproduction of a painting. Execution of Torrijos and his Companions on the Beach at Malaga, was painted in 1888 by the Spaniard Antonio Gisbert Pérez, many of whose canvases celebrated liberal causes, and depicts the 1831 shooting of a group of insurgents who had voyaged from Gibraltar to Malaga to raise a standard against the absolutism of Ferdinand VII. It is a supremely atmospheric composition, echoing classics like Goya’s The Third of May 1808 and Manet’s The Execution of Emperor Maximilian, but with a sensibility distinctly its own. None of my students has yet asked why I chose this image. Certainly, it evokes many of the larger problems of the period: constitutionalism and…

EVER SINCE THE POLITICAL STRATEGIST Steve Bannon mentioned, vaguely and dubiously, “Julius Evola and different writers of the early twentieth century who are really the supporters of what’s called the Traditionalist movement, which really kind of eventually metastasized into Italian fascism” on a Skype call to a 2014 conference at the Vatican, Traditionalism has been a topic of contemporary fascination and fear. Across dozens of half-literate magazine pieces and activist blogs, Evola in particular has been denounced as a quasi-supernatural contaminant fuelling an ever-rising far right. Meanwhile the Russian Traditionalist philosopher Alexander Dugin has emerged as an intellectual supervillain to the point where his translators are persecuted, his books are censored by Amazon, and his daughter’s death last year in a car bomb provoked pro-NATO journalists into a ghoulish chorus…

DESPITE WHAT COMMENTATORS as diverse as Ira Gershwin and Barack Obama would have you believe, Christopher Columbus did not discover that the world was round. That honour goes to Aristotle, who in about 330BC first postulated a globe-shaped earth at the centre of a spherical universe. James Hannam’s The Globe takes us on a whirlwind 2,000-year tour d’horizon of how the counter-intuitive theory of a round world became accepted as scientific fact. Hannam takes us first to ancient Babylon, Egypt and Persia to explain the most widely accepted theory both before and after Aristotle: the disc-shaped earth. A dizzyingly rapid condensation of several centuries of Greek theorising then ensues, leading to Aristotle and the experiments of Eratosthenes of Cyrene (c.276-c.195 BC), who famously proved the globe theory by estimating the…

The start of the new opera season this year replicates one of those post-apocalyptic movies with rag-clad wretches staggering from their caves to check out the smoking wasteland outside. Of course, this is also literally true of everything in the country after thirteen years of the Era of Gove, Conservative rule now in effect one of those futuristic flying creatures in Terminator that has simply to turn its eye on any given thing for it to be reduced immediately to death and ash (“levelling-up”). What’s heartening about the British thirst for fair play even in this blasted wilderness is that there are still many megadump-dwelling cheerleaders to be found applauding the carnage, certainly when it comes to the defunding of dreadful things like opera. And their moment is finally here,…

IT’S BEEN A SLOW START to the theatre new term: summer runs are being prolonged to save money and new options have been two-star meagre. That has however highlighted the few serious West End productions which have proved durable enough to run into the autumn and Dr Semmelweis at the Harold Pinter Theatre stands out — not least for being the re-telling of a story of Ignaz Semmelweis, a largely forgotten German-Hungarian doctor who systemised antiseptic procedures on maternity wards. Based on an original idea by Mark Rylance and co-written with Stephen Brown, the result explores the life of a maverick medic overseeing births of poor women in crowded conditions and puzzling over the causes of puerperal fever, rampant killer of so many patients. MARK RYLANCE CHANNELS THE INTENSITY OF…

“BUT LET ME SAY BEFORE IT has to go,” proclaimed Wystan Auden, “it’s the most lovely country that I know.” Which part of England was he describing? Full marks for “the Black Country”. Brought up in Solihull, on the bear-and-ragged-staff side of the second city, Auden had a youthful fascination with the foundries and pits which turned that country north of Birmingham black. In his amusing “letter” of self-revelation he told Lord Byron about a childhood train journey: Clearer than Scafell Pike, my heart has stamped on The view from Birmingham to Wolverhampton. And added: Tramlines and slagheaps, pieces of machinery, That was, and still is, my ideal scenery. Not many visitors have sought the ideal in those cramped parishes. But Uncle Wiz was never bound by conventional thought. Where…

IT’S ONE OF THE big “what ifs” of drink history. What would have happened if English cider-makers who experimented with bottle fermentation in the seventeenth century had perfected the technique of making fizz and marketed it around the world? Would Shepton Mallet look a bit like Epernay, and the Champagne region be a rural backwater rather than the place with the most expensive vineyard land in the world? Instead, the work of learned men like Lord Scudamore, John Beale and Sir Kenelm Digby was capitalised on by the French, not by English cider-makers. There were a few exceptions. Bulmers in Hereford used to make a champagne-style cider which was highly regarded. Sadly, after the Second World War there was something of a race to the bottom in the English cider…

YOU’D HAVE TO BE LIVING UNDER A ROCK not to have noticed that many of the charities that used to fight real and urgent injustices now spend their time on counterproductive hectoring instead. Organisations such as the American Civil Liberties Union, the Human Rights Campaign and our very own Stonewall have abandoned practical policies to help the downtrodden in favour of totalising theories of free-floating oppression and claims of harm, hate and genocide. So extreme has this reinvention been that they now resemble the priestly caste of a joyless, godless neo-religion that preaches against whiteness, cisness and heteronormativity — original sins for which there is no absolution, only eternal self-flagellation. In the title of a recent book by the comedian and author Andrew Doyle, these people are “The New Puritans”. The…

SLIM PICKINGS THIS YEAR for the paparazzi who lurk about the water taxi dock at Venice airport during the Film Festival: the Hollywood strikes by actors and writers left them with barely a sleb to snap. Thank goodness for those hardy perennials the Clooneys whom the city has adopted as its own since they celebrated their wedding here in 2014. One of the saddest sights on the Grand Canal remains the gondoliers who point out the gloriously Tiepoloed Palazzo Papadopoli as no more than the site where “il Clooney” tied the knot. Monsters ink THE FESTIVAL MAY HAVE LACKED MOVIE STARS, BUT not controversy. Mostri in Mostra (Monsters on Show) was the slogan sprayed all over the Lido by the French activist group TRCR (Tapis rouge colère noire) in protest at…

WHO WILL STAND UP for the red-blooded, blue-water capitalists who put the “Great” in Great Britain? I speak, of course, of those vigorous heirs to Walter Raleigh, Robert Clive and Messrs Jardine and Matheson — the board of Unilever plc. In the gloomy post-pandemic City — its narrow streets scarred by boarded-up tailors and unread, wind-blown copies of the Evening Standard — this global consumer goods company, headquartered on Blackfriars Bridge, is a rare bright spot. Now fully British after its (albeit reluctant) decision in 2020 to abandon its historic Anglo-Dutch structure — Unilever refreshes billions with indulgent ice lollies and helps homemakers across the globe with trusted cleaning products. At the same time, the firm pays more than £4 billion a year in dividends, much of which flows into…

Recently I received by email a message from that eminent piece of furniture, the chair of the BRITISH MEDICAL ASSOCIATION, describing its evidence to the independent inquiry on Covid-19, which has just begun. The Swedes have finished their inquiry in a fraction of the time, at a fraction of the cost, and, of course, of many times the quality. In Sweden, they have fewer hangers-on to support. “I spoke,” said the chair, “of how economic policy and austerity had led to widening health inequalities among the UK population … Like all of you, I am adamant that it is our duty to our patients and colleagues, that all the truths and facts come out and be seen …” Can this be the chair of the same organisation that has promoted…

AN UNACCUSTOMED FEELING took hold among attendees at the Conservative Party of Canada’s annual convention in Quebec City in September. For years, they had felt the impoverishment — economic, but also cultural and spiritual — of their country under Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government without being able to do anything to stop it. But polls were now giving the Conservative Party a double-digit lead and a crushing parliamentary majority. For the first time in many years, they felt that victory was at hand. At the centre of it all was Pierre Poilievre, the party’s newly-elected leader. His keynote speech garnered so many unexpected standing ovations that he went over time by more than half an hour. Afterwards, the line to take photos with him stretched across the entire width of the…

AS THE FURY OVER THE Government’s Rwanda scheme calms down, at least temporarily, after the Court of Appeal gave its ruling in June, I thought it might be safe to dip a toe into a side-angle of that ruling, which may, at first glance, appear trivial. One consequence of these judgments now being televised is that we ordinary members of the public can see the vesture now worn by the judiciary when hearing civil cases. They are revolting. They appear to be made out of polyester, or if not polyester, they have managed to find material that certainly looked like polyester. The judicial bands, so long the mark of civic and academic distinction, are no longer the white of every other institution and jurisdiction, but a livid yellow. These don’t…

LAST MONTH, THE ECONOMIST TYLER COWEN interviewed the writer and investor Paul Graham on his podcast. There he asked one of those classic interview questions: if you had a time machine, where would you go? Graham confessed that he struggled to resist the “obvious answer”, ancient Athens. But in the end, he opted for somewhere less conventional. “Provence in 600 — I would be very interested to see that.” He was compelled by “morbid curiosity” to find out “what the hell was going on in Dark-Age Europe”; he was “deliberately using” that term, he added, “because they’re trying to outlaw it”. Who’s trying to outlaw the “Dark Ages”? The campaign is led mainly by academics who, having devoted much of their lives to illuminating the period, have developed a natural…

BOOM-BUST CYCLES are the soap opera of macroeconomics. According to Collins Dictionary, a soap opera is “a drama series about the daily lives and problems of people who live in a particular place”. Other dictionaries emphasise their sentimentality. Another feature is that, even in the best soap operas, much the same sequence of events recurs time and again. Members of the cast come and go, their lines may alter a bit, but that does not make any real difference. The Bank of England may dislike being considered the “particular place” where the UK’s macroeconomic soap opera plays out, but the analogy is inescapable. All its boom-bust cycles have the same general characteristics. In the case of every boom the rate of money growth accelerates. For a few quarters too much…

ON 18 DECEMBER 69, THE EMPEROR Vitellius, who briefly grabbed the supreme power in the civil war that followed the suicide of Nero, realised that his time was up. The army was abandoning him and the troops of a new pretender were closing in on Rome. He descended from the imperial residence on the Palatine hill (whence our “palace”) into the Forum, the symbolic heart of Republican Rome, to abdicate. He gave a tearful speech and surrendered his sword — symbolizing the power to pass the death penalty — to the consul, the chief magistrate of the Republic. And then this solemn and sombre occasion went spectacularly wrong. On his way to deposit the imperial insignia at the temple of Concord, Vitellius lost his nerve and was persuaded to change his…

‘‘FOR MANY RUSSIANS,” writes McGlynn, “the road to shooting civilians in Bucha was paved with battle re-enactments and military dress-up.” In Putin’s Russia, warped memory has substituted Soviet ideology while cultural consciousness has replaced class consciousness. Popular cultural assumptions have been enlisted in a massive push against truth. As McGlynn puts it, “the Kremlin is not dictating the history, so much as appropriating it”. Indeed, Putin’s regime drip-feeds patriotic pabulum into the minds of all children, not merely those specifically studying history, from their first day at school. Many Russian children aged between 12 and 17 belong to military history clubs or visit Country of Heroes, a network of camps where they are taught not only first aid and survival skills but also how to spread historical propaganda. There used to…

A FEW YEARS AGO I WENT TO VISIT the then-nascent wine estate of Rathfinny, nestled above Cuckmere Haven between the South Downs and the English Channel. I was impressed by the scale and the ambition: vines marched far and wide over the rolling hills and valleys; the winery building was of a grandeur I’d never seen in England. But if asked for a word to sum up the essence of the place, I wouldn’t have said “wine”, but “money”. Indeed, the key value the PR person wished to impress upon us was how much the English sparkling wine made here would be selling for, at some indeterminate date in the future. It seemed that had already been decided, in advance of any wine (other than a rather good, lean, steely…

Perfect for the part NEWS THAT THE THOROUGHLY delightful Ms Sutton has been made head of RSC casting at Stratford boosts morale no end! Having proudly counted myself among young Charlotte’s most fervent supporters these past years (one may have even offered some discreet “guidance” along the way), I’ve every confidence the “bold, ambitious, inclusive, and exciting” era she promises shall come to pass. While less principled figures would consider such an appointment advantageous to their own hopes of a deserved Warwickshire comeback — some 27 years after being so scandalously exiled — this humble Stratford trouper merely prefers to toast the success of a talented, and always loyal, friend. ONCE MERELY DEEMED underachieving middle-aged thespians seeking a more secure sort of life, today’s drama school teachers are statistically among…

WHO OWNS AN ARTIST? If you’re the artist in question, you might reasonably believe that the person who owns you is, well, you. Fans often think otherwise. Fans are possessive. Their love is strong, but it’s also conditional, and it can alchemise — with little warning — into hatred. In August, a private Facebook comment by the singer Róisín Murphy was leaked. The comment seemed to be part of a discussion about puberty blockers, which have been used to treat children with gender dysphoria, on the assumption that halting sexual development offers the patient “time to think”. Without blockers, gender dysphoria seems to resolve in most cases. With them, almost all patients will go on to transition: blockers appear to lock children pre-emptively into a decision. Because they prevent sexual…

AT THE BEGINNING of 2021, a grim period of lockdown and Zoom calls, a small scandal ripped through American capitalism. It concerned shares in a computer game retailer, Gamestop. Hedge funds, believing that this was a doomed business in an age of downloads, placed large bets that the company’s shares would fall. Small investors decided they were wrong, and began buying the stock, sending its price soaring. Some very rich men faced wipeout, and some very poor people thought they might have hit the jackpot. And then — well, what happened then is the story of Dumb Money. Riotous, profane, full of heart and very funny, this is a morality tale of David and Goliath. The British are largely unaware of this intensely American story, but don’t let that stop…

I WAS BROUGHT UP TO LOATHE the suburbs, in spite of the fact that my parents lived in them: they moved to Farnham, Surrey, when I was four, driving in a straight line from Salisbury to London and buying a house in the first town they arrived at with a commuter train.My mother, a lover of deep countryside, never disguised her dislike of the bracken and heath surrounding us, the proximity of the military at Aldershot, not to mention the life of the daily commuter which my father had become, lined up on the platform every morning in his Anthony Eden hat. But as I have got older, I look back on the houses owned by the parents of my childhood friends with more affection: the tile-hung, half-rural vernacular of…

WE WERE A COUPLE of days into autumn and it felt, at last, like summer had come. Pigeons drifted low over the wheat, a combine rumbled down the lane, and we sat on the tailgates of our trucks, watching heat rise around the newly-cleared pond. Other than collecting sausage rolls at lunchtime, I’d contributed almost nothing at all. A man on a tractor with a flail mower had cleared the thorn and bramble in the morning; my friend, Richard Negus, had gone at the willow with his chainsaw; and Richard Gould had directed the operation. Some 30 years as a gamekeeper on wild bird shoots (rather than shoots that release farmed pheasants) has given Gouldy a pretty decent understanding of how to make a perfect place for ducks. Gouldy is…

NOW WE’VE GOT THE past few months out of the way we can get back to enjoying ourselves. Summer serves only one purpose: enabling cricket to be played. Otherwise, it’s pointless. Flat racing is, well … flat. Who ever got excited by something described as “flat”? And while summer jumping is useful for the smaller trainers who need to keep the wolf from the door, it’s all a bit dreary. No, the year doesn’t really begin again until October, when the ground eases and trainers start to run some of their decent horses. I’M OLD ENOUGH TO REMEMBER when the mid-October Chepstow meeting marked the start of semidecent jump racing, but that fixture withered to nothing. Credit to Chepstow for putting in some real effort to revive it — this…

A BAD THING IS HAPPENING. Let me tell you, to coin a phrase from my wildly hot former couples therapist Quinn Goodheart, what this “looks like”. So here we are, it’s only October, but Hector’s effing school Christmas fundraiser is already being organised, in typically intense fashion. Mostly by a mother in his class who clearly has some kind of undiagnosed personality disorder. Red flags include: leaping at every opportunity to volunteer for school events, imploring others to do the same, talking loudly about how her $300 bamboo leggings don’t “irritate her hoo-ha” (WTF? I didn’t ask, babe), posting slo-mo videos of her twins (yes, of course she has twins) gambolling in sprinklers, and talking about Nantucket. Where, as we are now all too aware, her husband has some kind…

We are in Manchester, where all the people who think Rishi should be prime minister have come to have a meeting in a big hall. A lot of other people have come too. On Wednesday, Rishi has to make a big speech all about who he is and what he thinks. Akshata and I have dropped in on him while he’s writing it, to see if he’s worked it out yet. He’s sitting with his friend James, who is explaining what his message should be. “We need to hit the idea that this government is a work in progress. Yes, people know there are problems, but they can see us getting to grips with them.” “Britain is broken,” replies Rishi. “Let us finish the job.” “Not exactly,” says James. Just…

PETER FOSTER AND I FIRST MET in a Belfast coffee shop. It was to play a minor role in Brexit history. Managing to combine Remainer sympathies with being the Daily Telegraph’s Europe editor, he kindly set out Theresa May’s three-point plan to get the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) — of which I was director of policy — to support the first sea border inside the UK, the backstop. First, Northern Irish business organisations were to bully the DUP and cut off their donations (that they were scarcely donors at all immediately sets the scene for how politically well-informed May’s team was). Second, our mouths would be filled with gold in return for the confidence and supply (C&S) terms with which the DUP helped sustain May’s minority government at Westminster. But,…

ON 14 OCTOBER, THE AUSTRALIAN people will vote in a referendum that, if successful, will radically alter the governance of Australia forever. The amendment being put by the Labor government of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese seeks to enshrine an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice that will make representations to the Federal Parliament and Government on behalf of only Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders. There is no detail from the Labor Party as to how this “Voice” — this institution or body — will be selected or elected, who will be allowed to be a member of it, or what powers it will have. This will be decided by the Parliament only after the referendum is held, and then interpreted by the High Court. God only knows how the often-activist…

I HAVE MANY MEMORIES FROM THE LABOUR PARTY conferences I attended some three decades ago. Certainly, when you walk in on Tony Benn in his pyjamas you never forget it (we’ll come to that in a minute). As a researcher at the Labour-supporting Fabian Society think tank in the 1990s, the yearly visit to Blackpool, Brighton or Bournemouth was always inked firmly into the diary. Now it’s Liverpool (this year and last) or Manchester (Brighton last hosted Labour in 2019). But I’ve not been to Labour conference since 2004, and have no intention of ever going again if I can help it. Nothing better illustrates how different Labour conference is today than the fact that Bournemouth hasn’t hosted Labour since 2007 and Blackpool last saw the party in 2002. Decamping…

TO SAY THAT THE BRITISH AND THE IRISH HAVE A LOVE-HATE RELATIONSHIP would be an understatement. Neither side can bring themselves to end a feud that has long since lost its raison d’être. Instead, we continue to snipe, to provoke, to begrudge and be begrudged. And we pay little heed to those brave individuals who try to set the record straight while politicians who reignite the old enmities are rewarded. Why, for example, does Leo Varadkar, the Taoiseach, declare that “there will be a united Ireland in my lifetime”? Because he fears Sinn Feín, now leading in the polls. Mr Varadkar makes no mention of the principle of consent. It is, for him, merely a matter of how well the Republic would treat “a minority [of] roughly a million people…

ARTS COUNCIL ENGLAND’S RECENT funding round enticed an unprecedented 1,723 applications. If all of these had been granted, the total funding would have exceeded £2 billion. Ultimately, £445 million was assigned to 985 organisations for the 2023-26 Investment Programme. It is noteworthy that 80 per cent of the funds allocated for music went to organisations involved in classical music, and nearly half of that is dedicated specifically to opera. This focus is impressive given how few contemporary composers write opera. Since the twentieth century, new productions have seen a steep decline and the genre today is, for the most part, of limited interest to the young. Urged to showcase the “impact” of classical music, the art managerial class is on the hunt for coping mechanisms. Some point to the reports…

SIMON HEFFER’S GREAT VIRTUE as an historian is that he attends to the voices we should not necessarily expect. A good example is found in his coverage of the Munich crisis, when the British were contemplating what Neville Chamberlain and the diplomats were doing: on the one hand, buying peace; on the other, caving in to Hitler’s bullying and betraying the people of Czechoslovakia. Naturally, Heffer tells us about the conversations in high places, and the (sometimes shockingly complacent) views of Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister. “These dictators are men of moods. Catch them in the right mood and they will give you anything you ask for.” Heffer also turns to the diaries of the eccentric novelist John Cowper Powys. Few today have heard of, let alone read, Powys, whose…

THIS INTERESTING, SOMETIMES fascinating book is “about the first stirrings of philosophical thinking among the Iron Age Greeks”. But perhaps it’s less about those first stirrings than the last gasps of philosophical thinking in our age. It reminded me of Stephen Hawking’s announcement that philosophy was dead because it couldn’t keep up with physics. The headline of a Telegraph article in 2011 provided the epitaph: “Stephen Hawking tells Google ‘philosophy is dead’.” The physical universe may or may have not begun with the Big Bang; philosophy doesn’t end with a bang but a mention of Google. Adam Nicolson is attempting to revive a pre-Socratic view of the world, probably as a response to the recent rise of practical Stoicism as a popular phenomenon. This is a noble task, but pre-Socratic…

WRITING INTELLIGENCE HISTORY is problematic. The difficulties it presents are essentially twofold. First there is the issue of archives and records. As Calder Walton himself points out, there is today such a huge amount now available that to research the material thoroughly is very challenging. However, some crucial areas remain secret and in all likelihood they will never become accessible. For example, the archives of SIS — MI6 in popular parlance — are never released, and CIA’s releases are selective. There is thus a hinterland of records relating to “the epic intelligence war” that are not available to historians. This limits their perspective and may lend fragility and distortion to some of their analysis. However, this book’s extraordinary chapter notes do testify to the thoroughness of the research that has…

‘‘NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING,” was William Goldman’s succinct precis of the film industry, but it applies to all the consumer arts, particularly publishing. Editors follow the market to some extent, but most new novels are published on a nose and a hunch. Books are thrown overboard weekly in their thousands, and most drop so far and so fast you don’t even hear the splash. So a bit of lucky timing cannot be begrudged. Did Pushkin Press know when they acquired Benjamín Labatut’s The Maniac — his first book to be written in English, and “a work of fiction based on fact” — that two of its featured subjects, J. Robert Oppenheimer and artificial intelligence, would be high on the news agenda bang on the time of publication? (Hell, it even features walk-on…

THERE IS A SENSE OF ENDING in the festival industry, with all the major players in a state of nervous transition. Bayreuth, where you once had to wait years in a ballot for a ticket, now has seats to spare. Salzburg is suffering side-shocks of the Russia-Ukraine war. Lucerne is preparing for regime change. Verbier’s future is clouded in its thirtieth year. Edinburgh is in transition. The formula for producing music at high levels through the long vacation is suddenly cracked, if not broken. A whistle was blown by Ioan Holender, former head of Vienna State Opera, who saw Bayreuth’s box-office slump as “a warning to the entire world of opera”. Holender has scores to settle with Bayreuth chief Katharina Wagner, whose contract is under review. Ms Wagner (right) has…

EARLIER THIS YEAR, the University of Bradford issued a statement announcing that the de Brécy Tondo, a painting bearing a close resemblance to Raphael’s celebrated Sistine Madonna, 1512-1513, in Dresden, was not, in fact, the work of an unknown hand but by Raphael himself. If this is indeed the case, the painting would be the most important addition to the Raphael oeuvre since the discovery in 1991 of the Madonna of the Pinks (La Madonna dei Garofani), now in the National Gallery in London. The Tondo was bought by the collector George Lester Winward in 1981 at a country house sale in Flintshire, North Wales, and given to the de Brécy Trust — which he founded — at his death in in 1997. The painting had belonged to the Wynne-Eyton…

REGULAR READERS OF THIS column have doubtless noticed there’s nothing I like more than a conspiracy thriller. So when Walter Presents, Channel 4’s sub-channel for foreign crime and drama, highlighted the Finnish series Enemy of the People, I immediately marked it down for potential review. Especially as the protagonist is a heroic investigative reporter with a chaotic love life. Did it deliver? Absolutely. I was hooked through all eight episodes. Kreeta Salminen gives a bravura performance as Katja Salonen, a dogged, manically-focused journalist uncovering a sinister web of dirty money, corruption and murder in Tampere, Finland’s second city. The series opens with Katja writing an article about a local footballer, Samuli Tolonen, that sparks a deluge of abuse on social media. Tolonen, now living in Barcelona, makes contact and offers…

IF PARADISE WERE A RESTAURANT, what would it look like? Possibly not a flyblown street corner in Soho opposite a pants shop. Perhaps the name is a knowing nod to the varied heavens in which Rupert Street used to specialise, or perhaps a learned allusion to Chekhov’s description of his journey around Asia in 1892, of which he recorded that he had found hell in Sakhalin and paradise in Ceylon? Maybe the kitchen is just very confident, as well it might be, since Paradise Soho has been rated the best Sri Lankan restaurant in London since it opened in 2019. The space has been rejigged since then and the restaurant is presently split between a long steel bar counter with stools and a row of crampy banquettes, reminiscent of those…

HWAET, STYLE ACOLYTES. What gives? But, wait, more about moi. For something incredibly harrowing happened to me the other day: seismic, life-changing etc. I was forced to endure 20 minutes of film footage in which I appeared listening to a speech at a modish dinner table. You’ll remember when Catherine Zeta-Jones sued for being photographed eating at her wedding? Bitch was right. The experience was akin to one of those Weight Watchers narratives in which the reformed chubster views a photograph and is forced to see themselves as the world sees them. Only here matters were not three-but at least 20-dimensional. And that was merely the chins: a terrible and prolonged agony starring a cartoonishly Falstaffian middle-aged woman. I like to think of myself as exuding a serene sophistication. Instead,…

2023. EVERY CALENDAR NOW gives us this number. Few would think twice about what it means, but a sorry — and stupid — situation has emerged. It is now frowned upon, in the great majority of our educational and political institutions to give this year its due. Talk of “AD 2023” will furrow brows; the proper behaviour is to intone the sanitised nonsense of “ce”. And whatever academics feel on the issue, their university and publication “style guides” will impose the nouveau régime. Of those who have noticed the rapid erosion of AD, and in turn BC, across the Anglophone world in the last two decades many suppose the change to be simply an “inclusive” practice, or just a natural consequence of our ever more secular age. But the reality…