Innehållsförteckning för February 2024 från The Critic

IF WE TOOK THE FOREIGN POLICY rhetoric of Western statesmen at face value, we would have to conclude that Western adults are as neurotic and delusional as so many twentysomething Western youth appear to be. Obsessed with social media, moral posturing and feelings, the West’s stated policies seem almost comically divorced from any serious assessment of national interests, capabilities and actual needs. If only there was a “but actually the truth is …” moment. But that’s not going to happen. Because the West is as bad as it looks, for the West acts openly. And our deeds are, if anything, worse than our words: being irresponsible, unworthy of our patrimony and inviting of disaster. To see where we are we should see where we clearly are not. In the case of…

Write to The Critic by email at letters@thecritic.co.uk including your address and telephone number THINNING THE RANKS In his review of Richard Dannatt and Robert Lyman’s Victory to Defeat (MILITARY HISTORY IS SET TO REPEAT ITSELF, DEC/JAN), Patrick Mercer suggests that the savage cuts to Britain’s defence budget were not a consequence of “a peace dividend once the Soviets had imploded” but rather a calculated decision by Tony Blair’s successors who “had seen Tony Blair unseated and humbled by his decision to go to war in Iraq and took the easier, less obvious option of making the Armed Forces simply incapable of foreign interventions". If mitigating personal political risk by emasculating the means of fighting in foreign wars was David Cameron’s intention, why did he jump at the first opportunity that…

“Let me be me!” Rishi is very excited, because he says this is the year he gets a “mandate”. This isn’t a word I’ve heard before, but I think it must mean when people ask you to stop being prime minister. He is having a meeting with his friend James, who used to write nice things about us in The Times, and his other friend Isaac, who has a big beard and tells us nice things about numbers. “There’s this path,” Isaac is saying. “I’ve seen it.” “Is it the path to victory?” Rishi asks. “Yeah, man. Or to something else. I don’t remember. But I saw it in this wild vision I had. It was right there.” He reaches out in front of him. “What was it like?” James…

JUST AS 2016 DEFINED THE POLITICS OF ITS decade, so 2024 has the potential to send an electroshock to political consensus in the 2020s. It starts with Russia. Vladimir Putin’s crusade for a fifth term in office is preordained, but not pro forma. One had only to take in the Wagner Group warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin’s quixotic attempt at a power grab last June to understand that politics in an autocracy is complicated. As Dmitri Tremin, the pro-Putin former director of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Moscow Center, put it; “It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that Russia is run and largely owned by the same people.” As a senior Russian official separately observed: “Russia has privatised politics.” Putin is not invincible — the battlefield performance…

SOCIAL MEDIA CAN THROW UP SOME strange juxtapositions. Scrolling on X (formerly Twitter), I recently saw a clip in which a hairdresser asks her client’s permission to touch her hair. The message is that consent matters at all times — though one might think, if you’re already sitting in the salon, that part is already implied. It’s hard not to view scenes such as this as an example of post-#MeToo overreach. Can’t anything be taken as read these days? Is every single thing a potential assault? This was shortly followed by a clip in which a female hostage released by Hamas after almost two months in captivity discussed her constant fear of rape. No one, we can safely assume, had been asking her whether she consented to have her hair…

FIFTY YEARS AGO, ON 11 SEPTEMBER 1973, General Augusto Pinochet overthrew Chile’s elected government. He went on to lead the country for 17 brutal years, during which inequality soared, the economy boomed, and leftist opponents of the regime were quietly suppressed, imprisoned and killed in their thousands. On that fateful September day, Salvador Allende, Chile’s socialist president, killed himself with a rifle given to him by Fidel Castro. Allende the man, his nation in chaos, died by his own hand. But Allende the icon, the myth, the martyred hero, was born. As with Christian saints, the kingdom of the paragons of the far Left is not of this world and is distinguished by public defeat more often than worldly triumph. But where the paths diverge is that Marxists claim the…

THE GREAT STRENGTH OF ED OWENS’S After Elizabeth is that it takes seriously the monarchy as a fundamentally political institution. While Owens, an historian and “royal commentator”, gives the customary overview of twentieth-century royal triumphs and scandals, his real thrust is considerably more serious than the conventional recitation of the House of Windsor’s flirtations with celebrity and soap opera. Owens casts a historian’s eye over the institution in its modern (nineteenth- to twenty-first-century) form. He is judicious in his analysis of the evolution of cabinet government under Victoria, noting the Prince Consort’s deft use of royal soft power and Victoria’s sly attempts to undermine Mr Gladstone’s liberal ministries. He presents George V as a dull but politically-engaged sovereign, noting his unsurprising Unionism in the context of Irish Home Rule, his careful…

YOU HAVE TO FEEL SORRY FOR BOOKS that pass their shelf life before they’ve even been published. “Due out on 8 December”, quipped Private Eye last year of Harry Cole and James Heale’s book about Liz Truss’s “astonishing rise to power” … “the book, that is, not its subject”. The Genius of Israel, by Dan Senor and Saul Singer, may suffer a similar fate. Sent to the presses last summer and published, infelicitously, in November, it responds to a particular historical moment — the struggle over the structure of Israel’s government. But since 7 October 2023, the debate that once engulfed Israel over the government’s plans for judicial reform has all seemed rather quaint. The Genius of Israel is a follow-up to the same authors’ 2009 bestseller, Start-up Nation, which…

ONE OF THE LEADERS OF THE opposition here profiled, George Tierney, described the role as being “to oppose everything, and propose nothing — and to turn out the government”. In this survey, Nigel Fletcher, who co-founded the Centre for Opposition Studies, a think tank, gives us 42 sketches of the nearly-men (and two nearly-women) of British politics, from Charles James Fox to Jeremy Corbyn. Each sketch is concise, pithy, enlightening, and witty. As you might expect, Fletcher endorses the “inherent value” of the role. “Whether genuine contenders or dutiful placeholders, all of them performed an important democratic function simply by doing the job.” Fletcher has included only those who failed to make it to Downing Street as prime minister. Some were giants who provoke speculation as to what their premierships…

A COMMUNITY DISMISSED BY SOME as “a set of traffic lights on the road from Wakefield to Pontefract” punched well above their weight 40 years ago last summer. On May 7 1983, Featherstone Rovers, a rugby league side from a small mining town in West Yorkshire, defied pre-tournament odds of 100-1 and the distraction of a relegation battle to reach the final of the Challenge Cup at Wembley, where they faced the mighty Hull. Rugby league and coalmining were the alpha and omega of Featherstone. A sociological study in the 1950s found that almost half the town’s population could be found at a rugby match each weekend. More than that went to Wembley: it was said that the only person who didn’t go was the signalman at the town’s level…

All small talk HAVING PERSONALLY talked up the prospect of a dwarf uprising at Hugh Grant’s expense, after he shamelessly nabbed that Oompa Loompa role from a real pint-sized entertainer, one must concede it’s proved a sorry state of affairs since. While initially making plenty of noise about the injustice of it all, months before said movie’s release, the dwarf army notably failed to rise when it came to the crunch. Such deflating levels of listlessness lead one to conclude that showbiz dwarfs — much like my own number, the theatrical obese — lack the all-important “get up and go” compared to more fashionable persecuted types. ★ SITTING THROUGH KEN Branagh’s so-so King Lear, I couldn’t help being distracted by the great man’s unnecessary levels of personal grooming for the…

● A WEIRD THING HAPPENED on the opinion pages of the New York Times at the beginning of this year: the paper published a 5,000-word essay by a writer called Anna Marks, speculating on Taylor Swift’s sexuality. Was Swift, wondered Marks, deliberately dropping “hairpins” to subtly announce herself as not straight? Country music (the genre where Swift got her start) is afflicted with “lingering anti-queerness”, wrote Marks: it needed “heroes”, big names ready to take the risk of outing themselves. But, wondered Marks, “What if someone had already tried, at least once, to change the culture by becoming such a hero? What if, because our culture had yet to come to terms with homophobia, it wasn’t ready for her? What if that hero’s name was Taylor Alison Swift?” Even as…

● IREALISED IN DECEMBER that I’d spent quite a lot of the year watching films that I was supposed to admire but actually found somewhere between disappointing and interminable. Of the three-hour Epics By Great Men, I probably liked Oppenheimer most, but I could live easily with the news that I was never going to see it again. This insight came to me as I found myself smiling from pretty much the first frame of Godzilla Minus One, a Japanese monster reboot that for all its silliness of premise seemed to have rather more to say about the actual impacts of the atomic bomb than Christopher Nolan’s movie. If you think that there’s the slightest possibility that you might enjoy a film about a giant lizard trashing Tokyo, give it…

● MY WORK DEMANDS THAT I SPEND a lot of time alone — and my social life is hardly Beau Brummellian — so I listen to a lot of podcasts. A problem with asking for recommendations is that as surely as a Pole recommends pierogi, a 30- to 60-year-old British man recommends podcasts beginning with the words The Rest Is. It’s hardly surprising. The tremendous, largely deserved success of Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook’s The Rest Is History was bound to lead to imitators. One might as well lament the fact that autumn follows summer. I can’t even blame Goalhanger Podcasts, the production company behind The R is H, for the follow-up, The Rest Is Politics. Granted, the name is deadeningly dull marketing. “The rest is history” is a phrase.…

PETITE PORTIONS, delicately prepared and aesthetically presented: in every informed image of Japanese food, the same values recur. Like poems of few, well chosen words, or a love-letter made appealing by perfect folding and refined calligraphy, Japanese dishes should reveal their merits only to educated sensibilities and disciplined appetites. Spaghetti napolitan, however, subverts expectations: a concoction inspired by post-war envy of crude, hearty G.I. rations in an occupied land, too wary of starvation to maintain traditions of affected austerity. Piles of tomato-tinted noodles slither under lashings of ketchup, garnished with frankfurters — sometimes served whole on top of the heap, like the topmost garnish of choucroute alsacienne. The effect of the clashing colours and synthetic flavours is revolting. Shockingly (because Japanese food is relatively inhospitable to foreign influences) it’s become…

● A LIFETIME AGO, ON EVERY FOURTH FRIDAY AT 4PM, I would make my way to the Waldorf Hotel on Aldwych. Upon entering, sidestepping the elegance of its Palm Court where once Edwardian society was scandalised by the first British performance of a tango and where later Al Bowlly crooned his sweethearts goodnight, I would descend a narrow staircase to the Waldorf’s barbershop where Keith would be waiting. Keith was a wonderful anachronism, a survivor from an era when the likes of Noël Coward, Binkie Beaumont and Richard Todd would have their hair cut and oiled in respectful silence by small, neat men wearing ties and short white coats. Keith was such a man, although by the time he had care of my hair he had found his voice and was…

“SO BETTS,” I HEAR YOU cry, “last year’s low-buy to curtail your style addiction: how’d that work out?” To which I answer: “Look over there! No, really. Oh my God. Did you see it?” Which is to say, it both was and wasn’t a success. I definitely acquired less, a great majority of it second-hand, making only a couple of fast-fashion purchases (okay, four), which will slow down considerably by being worn forever. The few-ish new things I did invest in were better quality, hotly-adored, and fundamental to my very soul. Viz, the ME+EM Bound-Edge Cropped Blazer (was £350, now £175); Jigsaw Puff Sleeve Knitted Dress (to hire from My Wardrobe HQ from £6 a day, www.mywardrobehq.com); and NRBY Patti Velvet Shirt (£160, nrbyclothing.com). As ever, I was staunch in…

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I HAVE BECOME OBSESSED, in the way that that one can only become really fixated with the truly ghastly, with “The Ethicist” column in the New York Times Magazine. In it, advice is doled out to perplexed Americans on topics such as: “My Kid Looks White. Does My Thai Father Make Them Asian?”, “Should I Edit Pink Hair Out Of My Daughter’s Wedding Photos?” and, perhaps my favourite, the great moral quandary of our day, “Can People Claim Spots on the Beach With Empty Chairs?” Who needs the Nichomachean Ethics eh? The issue about all of these faintly comic pearl-clutching incidents is not so much that they aren’t ethical conundrums — everything, after all, is ethics if you look hard enough. Nor is it necessarily an issue that many of…

THE 2023 ALLIANCE FOR RESPONSIBLE Citizenship (ARC) Conference at London’s O2 Arena set itself the task of discovering a better story about the West and pushing back against the narratives of decline that seem to be the motivating force of our intellectual and cultural classes. It was interesting for mapping out a possible new way of thinking, but it also represented the endpoint of the dissident intellectual ecosystem known as the Intellectual Dark Web (idw). The term was coined by Eric Weinstein, the hedge fund manager who worked with Peter Thiel. In a 2018 New York Times profile, Bari Weiss included in the group not only Weinstein, his brother Bret and sister-in-law Heather Heying, the evolutionary biologist, but Jordan Peterson, podcasters Joe Rogan and Dave Rubin, “factual feminist” Christina Hoff…

MANY OF THE BEST stories begin with the virtuoso tweeter Professor Richard Dawkins. In 2020 he declared to his several million followers that “of course” eugenics would work. “It works for cows, horses, pigs, dogs, and roses. Why on earth wouldn’t it work for humans?” He was quick to follow up with a clarification (“for those determined to miss the point”): “I deplore the idea of a eugenic policy. I simply said deploring it doesn’t mean it wouldn’t work”. But the toothpaste would not go back into the tube. Dawkins’s tweets attracted large volumes of criticism and ridicule: “This is racist trash, Richard,” read a representative response from another Oxford University professor. THIS EXCHANGE INTRODUCED me to the concept of “decoupling”. To “decouple” is to consider an idea purely on…

TWO YEARS AGO, VLADIMIR PUTIN launched a war of conquest and extermination against Ukraine. He failed. Yet now he hopes by guile to snatch victory from the jaws of genocide. A decorated officer, Patrick Mercer believes him. “Now [Russia] stands within a spit of victory,” he writes elsewhere in The Critic. He accuses journalists of “lies” about the real extent of Ukrainian casualites and claims that “a subservient media” has reported the war in such a biased manner as to give the impression that Ukraine was winning, doing us a “grave disservice” by “underestimating Russia”. There is, though, no conspiracy about the casualties on either side. NATO’s latest estimate at the end of 2023 was that Ukraine has lost more than 300,000 killed and wounded. US intelligence suggested that Russia had…

5.23 p.m. on a winter Saturday and Manchester City have just drawn 1-1 with Liverpool. Head down over his laptop in the Etihad press box, Jamie Tradescant is hard at work on his match report. “Here at the summit of the Premiership’s Mount Olympus, Pep Guardiola may be regarded as Zeus, tossing an endless series of managerial al thunderbolts over the heads of lesser deities who linger on its subsidiary crags”, he begins. Then, chastened by the thought that last week’s encounter between Burnley and Luton also conjured up one or two classical associations, he presses the delete key and starts again. “Here amid spume and tempest” — light rain did indeed fall periodically during the game — “there is a Lear-like quality to Jürgen Klopp as, byssine and preoccupied,…

ON A GABLE WALL IN HAMBURG’S GRUNGY dockland district stands a newly painted mural of one of the most iconic images in Western art. In other cities you might expect to see murals of famous footballers. Here, you’re confronted by Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog [3]. Wanderer above the Sea of Fog is recognisable the world over — the ultimate image of the Romantic era, the lonely genius at one with nature — but few people outside Germany know much about the man who painted it. That looks set to change. 2024 is Caspar David Friedrich’s 250th birthday, and throughout this anniversary year there are events and exhibitions all over Germany, devoted to the country’s greatest landscape painter. The first of these exhibitions is Art for a…

THE PUBLICATION OF LETTERS BY twentieth-century scholars is an uncommon enterprise, especially when they are issued by a trade press. But then Tolkien was an uncommon scholar. “I was brought up on the Classics,” he recalled later in life, “and first discovered the sensation of literary pleasure in Homer.” At school he also learned Anglo-Saxon and Gothic, and in the latter found “for the first time the study of a language out of mere love: I mean for the acute aesthetic pleasure derived from a language for its own sake”. At Exeter College, Oxford, while preparing for examinations in 1913, he chanced on a Finnish grammar, and became intoxicated: “my ‘own language’ … became heavily Finnicised in phonetic pattern and structure.” His language was, of course, Elvish (Quenya; joined in 1916…

I MAGINE LINING UP FOR AN OLYMPIC FINAL knowing that at least three of the other seven women alongside you are drug cheats. No wonder Sharron Davies is furious seeing it play out again, this time labelled “progressive”. The energy, courage and determination which won her so many swimming medals shine through in this engaging and informative book. It tells two scarcely credible, buttrue, stories, 40 years apart but with strong parallels. They are stories of wilful blindness, of people in powerful positions letting blatant unfairness play out on the world stage, while pretending all is well. With co-author Craig Lord, Davies combines the personal perspective and insight of an Olympian with rich anecdotes, rigorous research and thorough referencing. Not only is it a page-turner, it’s also an essential manual for…

EVERY MAP IS WRONG. Or, to be more precise, every two-dimensional depiction of the earth is doomed to inaccuracy. It is a simple geometric truth that the surface of a sphere cannot be rendered flat. Hence the need for approximate “map projections”, which have been refined ever since Mercator plotted Greenland the size of Africa (Algeria would be a closer match). Correcting for nation size simply leads to other distortions, such as the long, thin representation of the Antarctica “circle” in the Gall-Peters projection. As a result, modern cartographers eschew rectangular world maps altogether. Thank goodness for a rounder alternative: globes. As soon as enough could be speculated of the lands and seas, a globe was the obvious form to depict the knowledge. The oldest known dates from the fifteenth…

GOOD NOVELS HAVE ALWAYS BEEN heavily buffeted in the marketplace of ideas. “Many books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered,” said W.H. Auden, who had clearly never heard of Wuthering Heights. So it’s natural — essential — for publishers to do their best for the titles they believe in, particularly for debut novels, to give them a leg up in a crowded ecosystem. Increasingly this means getting pre-publication praise from other writers, and the more the merrier. Fifty million Booker-shortlisted authors can’t be wrong, goes the logic. But these encomia surely have little effect on browsers and readers, not least because so many of them are generic to the point of anonymity. (To say nothing of the question of whether these writers really read the whole book they are praising…

● IN SLEEPLESS NIGHTS OF THE Gaza war I think about the musicians, improvising in the unfolding awfulness. A week or so after the Hamas massacres, members of the Israel Philharmonic toured hospitals in small ensembles, playing in corridors for casualties, medical staff and visitors. No one was surprised to see them. There are expectations, going back to 1948 that in times of trauma, musicians turn up to provide relief. Grainy photographs exist of Leonard Bernstein playing piano in the desert with a small orchestra. In 1967 Daniel Barenboim brought moral support and Bernstein conducted Mahler’s Resurrection symphony on the Mount of Olives. In 1973, Leonard Cohen camped out with a tank division (left). In this war, the Israel Phil was back in tie and tails as soon as neutralised…

● AMONG RAPHAEL’S MANY ASSISTANTS and collaborators, the most important was Giulio Romano (c1499-1546). According to the seventeenth-century biographer Filippo Baldinucci, Giulio “was so reverent and modest towards his teacher that, while he was alive, he did not even allow his own work to be made into prints, so that no one would think that he was competing with such an incomparable man”. However, a few years after Raphael’s death, reverence and modesty were nowhere to be seen when a series of engravings after Giulio’s designs became both notorious and dangerous. The genesis of the prints is unclear but around 1524, Giulio made a number of drawings probably in preparation for paintings to decorate the Palazzo Te, the Duke of Mantua’s new pleasure palace. GIULIO SHOWED ATHLETIC AND PLIABLE…

● PERHAPS IT’S BECAUSE I HAVE reviewed several fine Dutch television dramas, including The Adulterer and Floodland, that the Netflix algorithm suggested I might like The Golden Hour. It was a good call. This enthralling Dutch crime series had me on the edge of my seat. Just six episodes long, it is tautly directed and skilfully scripted. Mardik Sardagh, marvellously played by Nasrdin Dchar, is an Afghan refugee now living a quiet suburban life in the Netherlands. Happily married, with a daughter, Mardik is a detective. He wants to believe that he is accepted by his colleagues. But doubts linger — especially when Islamist terrorists go on a killing rampage. Evocative flashbacks take us to Mardik’s childhood in Afghanistan, and his best friend Faysal. Faysal’s family were killed at a…

● MANY YEARS AGO, I WAS INVITED to be on the jury to choose an architect to design the museum in Wakefield which became Hepworth Wakefield. From what I remember of this process, we were confronted by a vast number of proposals by architectural practices from all over the world (designing a new museum from scratch is what every architect wants to do). By the time the jury arrived, entries had already been sifted into categories of those we were encouraged to pay close attention to and those we could ignore. Being naturally contrary, I started looking through the rejects. I came across some pictures of a long, low museum in a rural part of northern Japan constructed entirely of wood. I showed it to Edward Jones, also on the…

FROM BEHIND A LARGE ROCK, some 60 yards away, I could hear the shot connecting. A moderated rifle makes a hissing sound and then as the round hits skin and flesh, there’s a muted phut. The first shot was followed by another; then there was a pause before two further shots were fired. I looked up to see 20 hinds, four fewer than there had been, scrambling across the rocky scree with the wind in their faces. Down below us the river was frozen at its edges and the glen was naked in the bright cold. Willie, a man who knows West Affric as well as anybody, stood up from the heather and beckoned me to come up to where he had been shooting with a young ranger called Nicola.…

DELIGHTED TO HEAR THAT my friend Pandora’s trip to St Lucia was a disaster. Pandora has been doing New Year in the Caribbean since school, which induced feelings of acute envy back then (my mother thought winter sun — unless skiing — was tacky), and still gives me an annual jealousy hernia. Anyway, Pandora had an awful time and won’t be returning because the resort had become a Four Seasons, where nobody cared that her family had been visiting for three generations or knew her children’s ridiculous names. Kenzo! FFS. And no, my own kids’ names (Minnie, Lyra, Hector) are not comparable. All of them pass the shouting in Waitrose test. MEANWHILE, WE WERE STUCK in the Home Counties with Will’s parents (shoot me now) on a phone/tablet marathon. Not…

IF YOU GIVE AWAY MONEY, WHY DO YOU DO it? Why those specific causes, and those specific charities? The premise of “effective altruism”, a decade-old trend promoted by neo-utilitarian philosophers and seized on by graduates in tech and finance, is that the rest of us are probably getting it wrong. Whether because we give too little or because we chose the wrong recipient, our donations aren’t doing enough good. But effective altruism is now losing its shine. In November one of its best-known devotees, Sam Bankman-Fried, was found guilty of diverting client funds from FTX, the cryptocurrency trading platform he founded in 2019. Once he was worth $26 billion, most of which he pledged to give away over his lifetime. But in March he is likely to be sentenced to decades…

Frock right off THERE’S A LINE IN THE BLACKLY BRILLIANT sitcom Such Brave Girls that made me feel, as they say, extremely seen. “New clothes are really exciting,” gabbles the mentally fragile Josie during a shopping spree, “because you haven’t had a chance to create any sad memories wearing them yet! I could be a new me!” Clothes are never just clothes. They’re also the experiences embroidered into the fabric through wear — experiences that sometimes make a garment more treasured, and sometimes make you want to throw the thing in a bin and pour bleach on it. A friend arranged a night in the pub for her birthday. One rule: come dressed up. Turned out my “dressed up” setting is a notch higher than most people’s, especially when the venue…

IT WAS AN AGREEABLE NEW Year of raclette, cosy wood fires and cautious skiing — these days, lust for adrenaline is more than offset by fear of fractured femurs. Alas, now it’s back to being woken up in the dark to the twittering of the Today programme’s 6.20 business bulletin. I used to groan every time I heard those dreaded words: “And now, over to our Salford studio … ” But, three years after the BBC shifted its business desk 200 miles north, I have concluded it was, after all, a rather smart move — though not for the “levelling up” reasons given by the Corporation. The decision by our national broadcaster to exile its business journalists from the home of the Stock Exchange and the headquarters of most of…

IN AN IDEAL WORLD, IT SHOULD not have taken a saccharine ITV series to bring the plight of the sub-postmasters victimised by the Post Office’s Horizon accounting software to public attention. Perhaps the scandal, despite years of increasing mainstream media coverage, was simply too complicated to explain in readily intelligible terms, and only a human interest angle, backed with a prime time television slot, could do the trick. Be that as it may, now that the public’s attention has been captured, the question of what to do about Horizon-related criminal convictions has naturally acquired a new sense of political urgency. Some sub-postmasters have already had their convictions quashed by the Court of Appeal, though not all who applied were successful, since the court took the view that the Horizon evidence…

I WAS GIVEN MY FIRST COPY OF NIKOLAUS Pevsner’s Buildings of England in the summer of 1967 when I was going off to boarding school and my kind Aunt Margaret gave me the Wiltshire volume, which had been published in 1963. My first weekend I cycled off to see the church at Clyffe Pypard, which strictly was out-of-bounds, with Pevsner in my pocket. I have been accompanied by copies of Pevsner and his fatter successors on trips to churches, towns and, more recently, modern buildings ever since, although, truth-to-tell, as they have become bigger and more comprehensive, they have become more like works of reference to be consulted at home, rather than used as guidebooks in one’s pocket. I REMEMBER VIVIDLY WHEN THE FIRST SERIES CAME to an end with the publication…

MY FATHER LOVED HIS pigs. Not like he loved his dogs of course, but as a business. From the 1970s we were one of the larger breeders in the country, which at the time was a 6,000-sow herd. This meant about 60,000 pigs. You could not be certain because the number changed with piglets being farrowed and — not so good for business — stock dying every hour. We sold 2,000 pigs a week. It is quite likely that you have eaten some of our bacon. In global terms that is small. There are farms in the US with more stock than the UK’s entire herd. Despite impressive economies of scale, their animal welfare and husbandry standards will not be up to a standard that you would be comfortable with,…

RICHARD WHATMORE’S INTRIGUING new book is a study of eight late eighteenth-century figures one would not expect to be brought together. All, with the exception of the unfortunate Jacques-Pierre Brissot, guillotined in October 1793, were British, and all were convinced, according to Whatmore, that the Enlightenment was at an end. Much of late has been written about the Enlightenment and what it stood for — the numerous volumes produced over the last two decades by Jonathan Israel immediately spring to mind — and Whatmore is only too ready to accept that there have existed a “plurality of Enlightenments”. However, his Enlightenment is not one, in Peter Gay’s phrase, of “modern pagans” and the recovery of intellectual nerve. It is one whose principal achievement was the bringing to an end of…

“WHAT WOULD YOUR GOOD do if evil did not exist?” asks the Devil in Mikhail Bulgakov’ Faustian satire The Master and Margarita. For Wolfram Eilenberger, the light of intellect shines against the presence of evil in his genre-defying book The Visionaries. Neither biography, history nor fiction, Eilenberger’s work interweaves into a “constellation” the fates of four questing female figures (three of them Jewish): Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Ayn Rand and Simone Weil in the decade after Hitler’s rise to power. Founder of a popular philosophy magazine and television programme in Germany, Eilenberger is on a kind of Lucretian mission to interpret philosophy for the multitude; his previous volume Time of the Magicians (on Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Cassirer and Benjamin) was an acclaimed bestseller. Its sequel The Visionaries, entitled Fire…

THOMAS SOWELL, SENIOR FELLOW AT Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, must be the most distinguished anti-intellectual intellectual alive today. His best-known British opponent might be Aidan Byrne, a senior lecturer in English and Media Studies at Wolver-hampton University. On 26 May 2012, Byrne criticised Sowell’s 2010 study Intellectuals and Society on the London School of Economics Review of Books blog, dismissing it as “a diatribe against sophistication, deliberation and complexity”, repeatedly alluding to the author’s “Tea Party” attitudes. He was not calling Sowell genteel: made up of people who now want to “Make America Great Again”. In Byrne’s eyes, Sowell seemed an angry, vulgar populist — and worse. According to the best-known passage in the review: “Sowell’s racial references are disordered and disturbing ‘dog whistles’ … To him, slavery’s cultural legacy…

THE BEATLES’ HISTORY IS RIDDLED with what ifs. What if Ringo had actually been able to sing? What if George had decided after a weekend’s flirtation to put Indian classical music on the back-burner? And what if, in July 1963, a big, bear-like 28-year-old Elvis addict called Mal Evans hadn’t jacked in his day job as a telephone engineer, with an evening sideline as a nightclub bouncer, to become the Fab Four’s roadie and general factotum? Readers are invited to ponder this question throughout the 580 pages of Living the Beatles Legend: The Mal Evans Story. If nothing else, its American author Kenneth Womack (billed by his publishers as “one of the world’s foremost writers and thinkers about the Beatles”) makes an unanswerable case that Mal spared the Boys…

● REFLECTING ON MY DECADES-LONG campaign to destroy opera in Britain, I have to admit in all modesty that it seems to be going rather well. And while everyone credits the Arts Council — and Nicholas Serota’s hommage to East Anglian iconoclast “Smasher” Dowsing certainly scores well for execution, if less for artistic impression — this scarcely gives due recognition to our great opera companies themselves, whose staunch work alienating their audiences and annoying the tits off of everyone else is finally paying off. There will be more of this intensely boring subject anon, no doubt, if we get a particularly slow month. But if the English National Opera can’t sell half the seats for the pitiful number of performances it now puts on, why the hell (you may ask)…

● THE HORROR-MEETS-MYSTERY genre is a lucrative staple of the streaming services and film, while proving much harder for the theatre to nail. Special effects and CGI that wow on the small screen can look clunky on the big stage. Even the hardiest Lloyd-Webber perennial, The Phantom of the Opera, deploys resilient nineteenth-century tropes of flickering candlelight and masks to create its ghostly atmosphere. The Woman in Black, embarking on another national tour this spring, has had a similar durability as, in its own estimation, “the most terrifying theatrical experience in the world”. Newer audiences may feel that being expected to be blown away by these is a bit like being expected to be excited by their parents’ classic rock albums — they are impressive but dated, and a technological…

● SOME WORDS WE do not wish to hear in the coming year: nuanced, pitch-perfect, multi-layered, achingly beautiful, richly-textured, life-affirming. And if anybody is held to be at the top of their game, or the height of their powers, then bundle the offender into the stocks, and buy a tub of rotting tomatoes. Which is not to say there is no place for genuine nuance, as in trying to understand the flaws of those most high. It is to the credit of Matthew Parris that the Great Lives programme he moderates on Radio 4 started the year in clover. Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, submitted Thomas Jefferson for admiration, and argued his case well. For two centuries Jefferson’s status as a great American, and all-round citizen of the world,…

PUTTING FUN FESTIVE activities might come as a relief to many of us, but I’ve always enjoyed the Christmas holidays as an opportunity to catch up with what the youngs are into. About a minute ago this seemed to involve setting up slightly risqué tableaux with Sylvanian families, but this year my teenage daughter and her cousins spent most of their time hilariously stalking their friends’ profiles on the Hinge dating app. Hinge promises “impactful” hook ups, which sounded like something Uncle Badger might get up to with Mistress Mouse, until they explained that Hinge helps users along by providing conversation starters, just like the ones you still get in crackers. Sample prompts included “What do you do on Sundays?” and “If you could have dinner with one person, dead…

THE GLOBAL ART MARKET is worth about $60-70bn annually, and the two major international auction houses turn over about $12bn between them each year: there is usually a few million dollars’ worth separating each. Christie’s turned over $6.2bn last year and Sotheby’s — which won the right to sell the late Emily Fisher Landau’s collection of modern art which totalled $406.4m — will no doubt claim the top spot in 2023. Auctions are often considered the most open and transparent form of art transaction and many purchases rely on auction sale prices as valuation evidence. But how does the often shady and unregulated world of the art market really operate? Who is buying all of this art, and why, and where and what should savvy readers of The Critic buy…