Innehållsförteckning för June 2024 från The Critic

THE CRITIC IS BASED IN WESTMINSTER. A minute’s walk from our front door takes you to the front entrance of the Home Office. Who or what can you see between us and them? Junkies. At any time of day or night, here is a Britain that ought to shame politicians into silence. Yet this isn’t a problem that stems from a want of compassion: there is no shortage of that offered up. The disgrace here is the criminally negligent lack of order our rulers inflict upon the governed. And nowhere is this failure of the state starker than here at its heart. What does this public squalor mean? Shit, piss and the ever-present threat of chaotic violence. Foul, unfree streets, dominated by those with the will to do so, while the…

REAL REALPOLITIK Sam Bidwell would like Britain to adopt an “unsentimental” foreign policy in the Middle East, exclusively focused on pursuing its own national interests. (TIME FOR REALPOLITIK IN ISRAEL, MAY). He goes on to identify these interests: to promote stability in the Middle East, to make sure the oil continues to flow, and to prevent large waves of immigration into Europe, especially from communities difficult to integrate because of what he describes as the “poisonous ideology” of radical Islam, which “we should be uncompromising in our efforts to tackle”. We may not wish to quarrel with this basic statement of foreign policy aims, but it does not follow that Britain should therefore be pursuing a more anti-Israel line, as Bidwell recommends. Indeed, a sober evaluation of the geopolitical realities…

“Have you seen my tie?” asks Rishi. “The thin one.” Akshata is helping Rishi pack for his trip to Italy. There’s a meeting of some of the world’s most important leaders, and he has been invited along too. “Darling,” says Akshata, “I don’t understand why you’re so bothered. You hate all foreign events.” “I do,” says Rishi, “but it’s a dangerous world out there, and I’ve realised that only I can keep the nation safe.” “That’s right!” says Rishi’s new friend Ric, who is sitting in the corner, fiddling with his phone. “Not like Sir Fears Harmer.” Akshata makes a face. Last night she asked Rishi why Ric has to come round so much, but Rishi said he liked having him here “because he explains how I’m going to win.…

I AM SLEEPING EVEN MORE poorly than usual, and in those fitful hours between my second visit to the bathroom and the buzz of the alarm clock I am haunted by a recurring thought. What if I was wrong about Liz Truss? Like everyone else, I winced at the blinky interviews and chuckled at the wilting lettuce. On reflection, perhaps we should have all shown her more respect when we had a chance. The thing about prophets is that they can’t all be square-jawed smoothies like Mark Carney. Socrates had foul body odour and aggravated the Athenians so much they made him drink hemlock. Isaac Newton was a borderline incel prone to violent rages. So it goes with Truss. She may have had terrible style, but it is hard to…

FORTY YEARS AGO, A DEBUT NOVEL TURNED the stomachs of the genteel reviewers of the press. “A work of unparalleled depravity,” said the Irish Times. “Perhaps it is all a joke,” offered The Times, “meant to fool literary London into respect for rubbish.” Not everyone hated it: this “outstandingly good” (Financial Times) “truly remarkable novel” (Daily Telegraph) about, er, “a family of Scots lunatics” (Sunday Express) sold more than a million copies, and launched one of the most impressive — and frustrating — literary careers of our time. Iain Banks had been writing novels without success in his twenties (“a million words of crap”, said his friend Ken MacLeod), and decided to give up if he hadn’t been published by the time he turned 30. That notorious debut, The Wasp…

ONCE A UBIQUITOUS FEATURE OF childhood bookshelves, who now remembers The Eagle of the Ninth, published 70 years ago this year? Its author was Rosemary Sutcliff (1920-1992), the prolific historical novelist who wrote over 60 books for children and adults. The Eagle of the Ninth saw a brief revival in interest following a 2011 film adaptation; but alas that American production entirely missed the tonality of the novels and was swiftly forgotten. On paper, Sutcliff — a disabled female novelist — is prime fodder for a literary rediscovery. Her 1978 novel, Song for a Dark Queen, about the life of Queen Boudica, even won a feminist book prize. But in other respects, her work is profoundly unfashionable, and only getting more so. Not for Sutcliff the prurient explorations of trauma,…

“ACTUALLY,” HARRIET BRIGHTLY intones into her mobile, sharp grey eyes trawling the Islington skyline, “I think I can offer you something rather exciting. You know Abigail Rothesay’s new memoir’s due in a couple of months? Orgasm Addict? Naturally everyone’s very interested, but I’m told she’s only doing one interview and I know she’d love it if it could be you.” At the other end of the phone the literary editor of the Daily Telegraph stifles a yawn and murmurs something about space being a bit limited in July. “Well then,” Harriet goes on, a little less brightly, “why don’t I send you Araminta Bogle’s new collection? You remember how much Amanda liked Women and Children Last.” The Telegraph’s literary editor says that, yes, he would quite like to see Araminta…

SHOULD KEIR STARMER FIND HIMSELF in Downing Street after the next election, he will have little to play with in terms of zeitgeist. Unlike Blair, there is no Cool Britannia to tap into. There are few unifying cultural figures and despair seems the only discernible national mood. Starmer has only the recent success of the Lionesses and an oft-quoted anecdote about his dad being a toolmaker to inspire the nation. But there is one nation-renewing narrative on the centre-left that has emerged since 2016. England, unlike the rest of Europe, is a parochial country doomed to nostalgia and irrelevance by its unwavering belief in a series of grandiose historical myths. The real twenty-first century England is being held back by people singing “Rule Britannia” at the Last Night of the Proms…

A CHARACTER IN FRANÇOIS RABELAIS’S Pantagruel, when discussing the expense of rebuilding the city walls of sixteenth-century Paris, suggests a novel solution: why not take a cheap and widely available material, namely pudenda, “arranged in good architectural symmetry”, and construct the city boundaries from that? Judging by Julie Peakman’s book, much the same view prevailed in eighteenth-century London. If Renaissance Paris can provide enough material to satisfy the most prurient of readers, then Peakman’s account of Hanoverian London takes the Ann Summers, bunny-eared, crown. Sandwiched between the Glorious and French Revolutions, hers is a forensic tale of the sexual activities of Londoners as they enjoyed flagellation, mutual masturbation, “eyelid licking” (sic), full sex (as Alan Partridge would put it) and the pox with a coterie of handmaidens from lowly street-walkers to…

IF YOU’VE EVER READ ANYTHING MUCH about British intelligence and special operations in the Second World War, the name Dudley Clarke will have popped up. He was one of the earliest protagonists of “Commando” units and was then involved in deception operations in the Middle East. But the thing everyone remembers about him is that, on 17 October 1941, he was arrested by General Franco’s police in Madrid dressed in women’s clothing, “brassière and all”. This rather undersells the man because, as Robert Hutton’s excellent and entertaining new book makes clear, Clarke had his fingers in many of the most interesting pies of covert operations in World War II, and was also one of the progenitors of the “information war” which has been swirling around us ever since. Clarke was born…

ON 7 JUNE 1526, LUCAS CRANACH STOOD beside Martin Luther and a crying baby in Wittenberg City Church. The child, Luther’s first son— known as “Little Hans” — had been born earlier that day and Cranach had been asked to be the godfather. Cranach was a natural choice. Then well into his fifties, he was one of the family’s dearest friends. He had even introduced Luther to his wife. But Luther’s request also had a deeper symbolism. More than any other artist, Cranach had shaped the Reformation’s “look”. His panel paintings and printed images had forged the visual imagination of the new movement and crafted its identity. If Luther was the Reformation’s father, then — in a very real sense — Cranach was its godfather. So how did he do it?…

THE PHRASE “IT’S NOT CRICKET” ENCAPsulates the notion that something is not fair or is in some way underhand. It reflects, supposedly, a uniquely English sense of fair play, an understanding that life should be conducted according to the gentlemanly conventions of the cricket field. Winning is, of course, important, but not at any cost; it is equally important that the spirit of the game be upheld at all times. “As an expression of noble conduct,” writes Brendan Cooper, “ … cricket is also an expression of England.” In Echoing Greens, Cooper investigates the extent to which cricket has shaped the English imagination, harvesting his evidence from literary and artistic sources: novels, poems, plays, pictures, films, and television. If art holds up a mirror to nature then, surely, it can…

THE LABEL “DIFFICULT” GETS OVER-used for women, but in Courtney Love’s case, you can say she earned it. At 59, she’s lived every cliché of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, and racked up a list of beefs that makes your average rapper look like a Quaker. In her own words: “I always wanted to be known as a bitch.” That makes her perhaps a surprising choice to front a flagship radio series celebrating female musicians (Courtney Love’s Women, on BBC Sounds). But don’t worry: she quickly brought things back on brand with a Standard interview in which she shellacked probably the four biggest female musicians in the world. Taylor Swift? “A safe space for girls” but “not interesting as an artist.” Beyoncé? “I just don’t like her music.” Madonna?…

TO SIT THROUGH THE TRAILER REEL in the cinema this summer is to be offered a series of films that look in some way familiar. Here’s Furiosa, described as “A Mad Max Saga” — a spin-off of a reboot of a film franchise. Here’s Borderlands, based on a computer game. Here’s Bad Boys: Ride Or Die, in which Will Smith plays, for the fourth time, a character he first portrayed in 1995. Hollywood, desperate for stories, has always mined existing content: could that book or toy be filmed? Could that film be filmed again? Good ideas are hard to come by, so if someone else has managed to make one work, you’d be a fool to ignore it. And in the fierce competition for eyeballs, something that comes with a…

THERE ARE FEW THINGS I LIKE more than getting home after a long, hard day at work, kicking off my shoes, cracking open a beer and listening to someone talk about their dreadful life. “Have you ever wanted to start again?” Alice Levine, of My Dad Wrote A Porno fame, says at the beginning of The Price of Paradise. Of course! But I don’t. Because of “responsibilities” and “emotional attachments”. God, I hate them. And if I’m listening to a podcast about someone “starting again”, they’d better have regretted it. I want to hear about disasters. I want to mainline disillusionment. “There will be moments in this story when you want to pull off your headphones and stamp on them,” claims Alice Levine, “And maybe cry out on the bus…

“YOU CAN’T BE TRUSTED,” my wife said, with solemnity she reserves for moments of menace, “to go to Salamanca on your own.” The implied aspersion was not on my morals, which are too strongly fortified to topple in a city of such antiquity and respectability, or on my routine incompetence, which all who know me have learned to live with. What my wife feared was that I would overeat. I always do when I go to Spain. The inevitability of overindulgence is due partly to the fact that Spanish meals are, by most standards, big. At the banquets that mark major conferences and congresses, six courses are normal, eight unexceptional. On the occasion in question, I was bound for the Duero Wine Festival to give a lecture on the history…

THE LATE FATHER OF MY DEAR FRIEND AND FELLOW COLUMNIST Johnny Leavesley was a most astute man of business. Trusted by all who had dealings with him, Jim Leavesley possessed a wealth of wisdom, tailored in memorable terms, which he gave freely to his friends. I was privileged to know him and to be a beneficiary of some of his advice, the best being “always buy quality, buy quantity, buy cheap”. The message is as simple as it is sensible: if you buy the best kit, it will last much longer than inferior brands. And if you buy that kit in bulk, you will benefit from economies of scale. And if you buy bulk in the sales, your normally expensive goods will be a lot less expensive, yet with no diminution…

DID HUMANS BEGIN SPORTING hats 35,000 years ago? The Last Ice Age certainly provided the perfect storm: our brains expanded, we evolved social strategies such as bonding over fab threads, and it was seriously bloody cold. Our hankering after headwear is certainly ancient. The 30,000-year-ish Venus of Willendorf may be sporting a woven headpiece. Bronze Age “Ötzi,” who froze in the Alps around 3250BC, is clad in a bearskin cap; Tollund Man, offed circa 400BC, a pointy sheepskin number. It was only in the twentieth century that humanity discarded its millennia of lid love. One minute, titfers were donned not merely by anybody who was anybody, but one and all. Then, overnight, it appeared — to those who blamed a bare-headed JFK — hats went the way of the Ark.…

THERE HAVE BEEN LONGER TEST CAREERS than JIMMY ANDERSON’s but not many, not recently and not among pace bowlers. The Lancashire seamer has trotted up to the wicket 39,877 times in a Test match (only two nonspinners have even bowled 30,000 times) and when he takes the new ball for the last time in July he will be into his 22nd year as an England cricketer. Exactly 100 teammates have made their Test debut since Anderson became England cap No 613 in 2003 and two were not even born when he first bowled for his country. No 612, Rob Key, is now managing director of the England team and has decided, with Brendon McCullum, the head coach, that now is the time to draw stumps. Anderson, who had been hoping…

Take advantage of our Super Summer Sale, saving a huge 83%. For just £3 you will receive a 3-month subscription to The Critic (3 magazines delivered to your door). Already a subscriber? Then why not give a gift subscription to someone special! Subscribe today and you will get: ☞ 3 issues of The Critic magazine ☞ Access to digital editions ☞ An 83 per cent saving on the shop price ☞ Rigorous content ☞ Free delivery to your door To subscribe, simply visit: thecritic.imbmsubscriptions.com/sum24 OR CALL: 01293 312250 quoting SUM24 T&CS: CLOSING DATE FOR ORDERS IS 30TH SEPTEMBER 2024. THE PRICE SHOWN IS A UK DIRECT DEBIT OFFER. 3 ISSUES AT £3 BY DIRECT DEBIT, FOLLOWED BY £10.00 EVERY 3 ISSUES. SAVING IS 83% ON THE SHOP PRICE. IF YOU…

NICHOLAS AND ROSEMARY Sherman booked a cruise to the Northwest Passage in 2018; but because of adverse ice conditions had to settle for floating off the coast of Greenland for two weeks. They took the cruise operator to court. After losing in the County Court (with £60,000 in costs to boot), they prevailed in the High Court and, in April, in the Court of Appeal. What distinguished the Shermans from most successful litigants there is that they were self-represented, while the cruise company had instructed leading and junior counsel. Some might well think it heartening that ordinary people can still obtain justice in this manner (Mr Sherman does have a law degree, which he has not used professionally). The judges took a dimmer view. All three urged the two parties…

LAST WEEK BRITAIN’S “Minister for ommon Sense” proudly announced banning civil servants from wearing rainbow lanyards. Esther McVey’s latest offensive in her party’s war on Whitehall wokery was dead within 24 hours. The day following McVey’s Colonel Blimp speech, the Cabinet Office refused to issue specific guidance on lanyards, and distanced itself from McVey’s announcement in briefings to newspapers. The episode perfectly encompasses the Conservative Party’s reaction to the total capture of the administrative state by their ideological enemies. First McVey’s target was ridiculous. LGBT lanyards are political; one conservative-minded civil servant I know wore a non-binary lanyard because he believed it would help his promotion prospects to show off how “diverse” he is to his colleagues. Most civil servants who wear these symbols do so as a virtue signal…

LAST DECEMBER, MICHAEL GOVE DELIVERED what might be the most puzzling speech of any senior politician in recent times. Entitled “Falling back in love with the Future”, it opened with an extended paean to the extraordinary legacy of Britain’s Victorian housebuilders: They looked to the future with hope. It was in the nineteenth century that our great cities expanded to become the workshops of the world, the forcing houses of invention and the homes to swelling millions. London spread east as the docklands became a window to the world, west to graceful suburbs such as Holland Park and Notting Hill, north to embrace villages such as Highgate within its ambit, and south from Clapham to Crystal Palace. It became the greatest city on the globe. Stirring stuff. What the great…

HERE’S A FUNNY STORY. A FEW YEARS BACK, I wrote to Ian Hislop, the editor of Private Eye, and told him about a trans rights activist who was using the courts to harass and intimidate women. The man, who had been known under various identities — none of them associated with good deeds — before settling on a female one, targeted his victims by using the police and the courts, opening a legal case and reporting a hate crime on the same day, so as to apply maximum stress and pressure to his targets. He released my home address online, terrifying my wife, and sued me twice. The second case he dropped when someone sent me a message in which he had said “Graham has a simple way to end…

EVELYN WAUGH AND GRAHAM GREENE HAD one of the great modern literary friendships — comparable to Conrad and Ford, Eliot and Pound, Owen and Sassoon. Strikingly similar in many ways, they were close contemporaries and came from professional middle-class families. Waugh’s father was a publisher, Greene’s father a headmaster. Both had successful brothers: the older Alec Waugh was a popular novelist, the younger Sir Hugh Greene was Director-General of the BBC. Waugh and Greene went from minor public schools, Lancing and Berkhamsted, to Oxford — Greene to Balliol, Waugh to the less distinguished Hertford College — where they were acquainted but not close since (as Waugh claimed) Greene “looked down on us as childish and ostentatious. He certainly shared in none of our revelry.” Both men had an unhappy marriage.…

SO MANY MONETARY POLICY decisions have been wrong in the last few years that it is not surprising that politicians and journalists spend time looking out for yet another cock-up. According to numerous media reports, the Bank of England’s programmes of “quantitative easing” are “costing the state” — and hence “the taxpayer” — many tens of billions of pounds. An apparently well-informed demand is then made for a major rethinking, or even the permanent abandonment, of QE-type activities. This is a herring of the deepest vermilion. The essence of QE operations was that the Bank of England borrowed money from the commercial banking system (by adding to its cash reserves) and used the proceeds to purchase government securities (sometimes known as “gilt-edged securities”, or “gilts”) from non-banks. The effects were…

“ANINFERNAL CONSTELLATION.” THAT was how the health campaigner Dr Thomas Nichols described the pubs, breweries and distilleries marked on the eight-foot-square map he displayed at his public talks. As it only covered a half-mile area of London, and contained 276 black dots, you can see how visually striking it must have been. But did it, and the other “drink maps” of late Victorian Britain, actually have any effect on the country’s boozing? This is the question Kris Butler has set out to answer. His book will certainly appeal to cartophiles, illustrated as it is with the maps of British towns and cities used by temperance campaigners. Indeed their beauty was part of the strategy: inspired by John Snow’s famous “cholera” map of Soho (which plotted cases of the disease, centred around…

TRAVELLING THROUGH NEWLY INDEpendent Burma in 1952, Norman Lewis concluded that the country: has freed itself from Western domination almost with the ease of removing an unwanted garment. As a result, no trace of bitterness remains, and a Westerner can travel with at least as much safety as a Burmese from one end of the country to the other, meeting, as I did, with nothing but the most genial and touching hospitality. The great travel writer was beguiled by the charm of the Burmese. He believed they had a promising future so long as they stayed true to their strengths and traditions and didn’t try to replicate Western consumerism. These hopes were half-realised, albeit not as Lewis envisaged. In the ensuing decades of ethnic revolts, communist insurgencies, brutal military dictatorship…

IMAGINE YOU ARE AN INTELLIGENCE OFFICER, trying to penetrate a terrorist group. The good news is that you have managed to recruit someone on the inside, persuading them to work for you with a mix of blackmail and bribes. But now they’ve told you they’re under orders to commit a crime. Do you pull them out or turn a blind eye? How bad a crime is too bad? That is the dilemma explored in this gripping and beautifully written book: what if one of the most useful British agents inside the IRA was also a mass murderer? What if one of the people he killed as he tried to protect his own secret was another British agent? The story of the British agent Stakeknife isn’t new. Indeed, it’s the subject…

IN THE BEGINNING WAS Aword. What was it and what others followed? Steven Mithen’s Language Puzzle seeks to solve this conundrum by rolling out the long-range guns: pre-historic archaeology, anthropology, primatology, and human evolution. The search for his linguistic quarry proves to be a catholic sift through humankind’s advent and our eventual, formative babbling and beyond. From the outset, “taxonomic uncertainty” clouds the emergence and extinction of early hominin species. Some things we know: humans and chimpanzees last shared an ancestor 6 million years ago; in common with us, they use tools (e.g. sticks to bring termites out of mounds), walk on two legs, and have strong social ties, as shown in co-operating, playing, making friends and foes. Like other apes and monkeys, they grunt, bark and screech, but lack…

WHAT GIVES A NOVEL PROMInence? By that I don’t mean distinction, as the two are different qualities. The Swiss writer Robert Walser summed up the difference in his story “The Walk”, when the narrator entered a bookshop and, contemplating a particular volume, had the following exchange with the assistant. “Could you swear that this is the most widely distributed book of the year?” “Without a doubt!” “Could you insist that this is the book which one has to have read?” “Unconditionally.” “Is this book also definitely good?” “What an utterly superfluous and inadmissible question.” Two of this month’s books are among the most prominent releases of the year — prominent because their authors have established a reputation over decades-long careers. Happily (to give satisfaction to Robert Walser’s narrator) they are…

THE BIGGEST NOISE TO BE HEARD in orchestral music is not the click and whirr of audience smartphones shooting TikTok clips in the slow movement. Nor is it the straining of CEOs shoving diversity, inclusion and equity monitors onto the payroll. No, folks, the really big noise in symphony halls is a beanpole Finn who finds himself, aged 28, at the head of four major orchestras, two of them world-beaters. Now how the Helsinki did that happen? Klaus Mäkelä (below) is a conductor and a cellist. Six years ago, he was hired as music director by the Oslo Philharmonic, two years later he added the Orchestre de Paris and in 2022 the Royal Concertgebouw of Amsterdam. Last month, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra inked his name on a million-plus dollar contract.…

THIS YEAR SEES SOME BIG ANNIVER-saries, and some small. Among the big: Giorgio Vasari, the father of art history, who died in 1574; the great German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich who was born in 1774; and the National Gallery, which was founded in 1824. The small slip more easily beneath notice but it would be remiss not to give a nod to a figure on the very fringes of the British art world, George Smart (1774-1846). Smart, in a modest and parochial way, offers an alternative view of Georgian society to the grand narrative of Reynolds and Lawrence or the rural imaginings of Turner and Constable. He has more in common with the satirist Thomas SMART STYLED HIMSELF “ARTIST IN CLOTH AND VELVET FIGURES TO … THE DUKE…

BACK IN MY TEENAGE DAYS I DID AN IQ test for MENSA, the international association for people with high IQs. The results were respectable enough, although I was disappointed that I was not, apparently, a genius — at least at doing IQ tests. Antonia Scott, the heroine of Red Queen, has an IQ of 242, somewhat more elevated than mine, which makes her the smartest person in the world. Scott is a super-solver and the lynchpin of the super-secretive Red Queen project, a Europe-wide agency charged with catching the continent’s nastiest criminals, terrorists and serial killers. Red Queen, now showing on Amazon Prime, is a television adaptation of a best-selling Spanish thriller series by Juan Gómez-Jurado. The first eponymous volume sold more than 2 million copies. The book crackled with…

THE BICENTENARY OF G.E. STREET’S birth is on 20 June 2024, although you can be forgiven for not having noticed. Only the Victorian Society is celebrating with a special issue of their in-house magazine, The Victorian, a new monograph written by the late Geoff Brandwood, and a big dinner in St. James-the-Less, Pimlico, Street’s intensely atmospheric church south of Victoria Station. Street owed his success as an architect to his great skill at drawing, evident at an early age, his training alongside William Butterfield as an architect in Sir George Gilbert Scott’s office, where he helped with the drawings which enabled Scott to win the competition for the new Nikolaikirche in Hamburg, and his involvement with the Cambridge Camden Society, including friendship with its secretary, Benjamin Webb. It was Webb…

THE INSIDE OF CLOS DU TEMPLE winery in the Languedoc looks like a set from the original Star Trek. The wine is housed in a series of 10-foot black bauxite pyramids each topped with gold, or “gold pyramidion overcoming the vats” as the publicity material describes it. One can imagine Captain Kirk stepping out from behind one of them in pursuit of a comely green alien. The whole winery, set on a hillside at Cabrières not far from Beziers, has a 1960s science-fiction feel. The pyramids aren’t just there to look pretty. According to winemaker Benjamin Gadois they “channel the forces of the cosmos into the wine”. Well, I couldn’t let that one lie, could I? I asked him whether they had done trials where you could taste the difference…

A LITTLE OVER A FORTNIGHT ago, I stood down on the sand by the Thames, around a small bonfire. A poet read some of his work and then a lady who had come all the way from Scotland sang a song that she explained was music from the “traveller folk”. It was cold and the rising river shone purple and green beneath the lights of Hungerford Bridge. We were the dregs of a launch party for a new book titled Wild Service, which is a collection of essays written by various people affiliated with the Right to Roam campaign. Guy Shrubsole, the land access campaigner, has a piece in there; Nick Hayes who wrote the Book of Trespass contributed an essay that touches on paganism, and Jon Moses wrote on the…

WHY DO I PERIODICALLY do this to myself? My four-yearly pilgrimage to the Hurlingham Club for the dreaded ISS — not a terrorist organisation, but the Independent Schools Show. Actually, in many ways it does feel like some kind of indoctrination camp, not that any of us needed any persuasion beyond “to board or not to board”. Speaking of which, last week my friend Saskia announced that she was going to go state for secondary, halfway through dinner at Lemonia. Everyone kind of froze, and then said politely how great it was and how emphatically they don’t want their kids to grow up “in a bubble”, and this was why they did forest school and girls’ football and sometimes travelled by Tube. Obviously, we’re all used to Saskia’s need to…

OF THE APHORISMS ATTRIBUTED TO THE Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu none is more famous than that you should build a golden bridge over which your enemies can retreat. If they are backed into a corner, the idea goes, their only way out will be through you. But if running away is easy and tempting, winning may not require wading through rivers of blood. For some who profess the trans neo-religion, the Cass Report, published in April, looks like a golden bridge. Distinguished paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass said nothing in it that critics of gender clinics’ reckless experimentation haven’t been saying for years. But she said it in a government-commissioned report and demonstrated the near-total lack of an evidence base. Just two of 103 academic papers that fit the criteria for…

Toxic relationship ONE OF THE GREATEST SCENES IN CINEMA IS THE moment in Annie Hall when Woody Allen, irritated by a stranger’s pompous lecturing about media theorist Marshall McLuhan, summons the actual Marshall McLuhan to issue a correction in the flesh. “You know nothing of my work! You mean my whole fallacy is wrong,” chides McLuhan. “Boy, if life were only like this!” says Allen’s character, happily. Well, sometimes it is. Shortly before Christmas last year, I was approached by 11:11, the production company of Paris Hilton, one of the subjects of my book Toxic. Not only had she read the book: she liked it enough to want to turn it into a docuseries. Eat your heart out, Woody. Then, the wait for the official announcement, which finally came a…

IS IT PEDANTIC TO REMARK ON MINOR ERRORS in the use of language? I think the answer is that it depends. Error, after all, is the joy of pedants, whether the error be serious or trivial. Recently, I noticed a standfirst in the Economist: “THE FRENCH PRESIDENT ISSUES A DARK AND PROPHETIC WARNING”. What the Economist meant was that the French president prophesied something dark. A warning cannot be known as prophetic until the future it prophesied has come to pass. Whether a warning was prophetic can only be known in retrospect. Is this a small distinction without a difference? In this case, I think not: for the word “prophetic” here implies truth. A warning cannot be called prophetic unless what it warns of has come to pass. A man…

VIOLENCE IS BAD. Violence deliberately targeted against civilians is evil. It seems rather odd to have to say this. For most of my life this would have been axiomatic but since the pogrom unleashed upon the Jews of Southern Israel on 7 October this seems to have become a heavily contested claim. This became clear within hours, as the sheer scale of the slaughter started to filter out. While most people might think that stories of hundreds upon hundreds of civilians murdered, of women raped and mutilated, of children beheaded and burnt alive would cause even strong supporters of the Palestinians to stop short and condemn the brutality, this was not the case for all. A worrying number were willing to say, even as the horror leaked out, that this…

He told us, that he had given Mrs [Elizabeth] Montagu a catalogue of all Daniel Defoe’s works of imagination; most, if not all of which, as well as of his other works, he now enumerated, allowing a considerable share of merit to a man, who, bred a tradesman, had written so variously and so well. Indeed, his Robinson Crusoe is enough of itself to establish his reputation. —Samuel Johnson, 10 April 1778 A UNIFYING THEME IN THE LIFE OF DANIEL Defoe (1660-1731) was the pursuit of the future — a future of individual redemption and social improvement. This pursuit was partly inspired by Defoe’s position as an outsider to the present. A Protestant Dissenter from the Church of England whose joining the unsuccessful 1685 Monmouth rebellion against King James II was…

NO WAY OUT IS THE THIRD BOOK in Tim Shipman’s Westminster-focused account of Brexit and its consequences. All Out War covered the referendum itself. Fall Out dealt with the rise of Theresa May. Out, the fourth and final volume, due in July, will turn to the rise and fall of Boris Johnson — and that of Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak. Which leaves only the fall of Theresa May, the subject of this third volume and the most shaming book I have ever read. This may not seem immediately apparent from its detail. The tale Shipman tells is not, as the cliché has it, the first draft of history. As he points out in his acknowledgements, Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell got there earlier, as have others — but not…

THE SIEGE OF SIDNEY STREET WAS THE finale of a three-act, real-life London drama. It began on 23 January 1909 with the Tottenham Outrage, the payroll robbery of a rubber factory during which its two perpetrators were killed alongside a policeman and a child. Act Two, on 16 December 1910, involved the failed robbery of a Jewish-owned jeweller’s in Houndsditch that led to the killing, by gunshot, of three police officers and the serious wounding of two others. This was “the most grievous single incident in the history of London’s police”, according to this book, unmatched until Harry Roberts’s murder of three policemen in 1966. 100 Sidney Street, where two of the Houndsditch robbers were holed up, was the scene of the drama’s dénouement, on 3 January 1911. By its end…

HAVE YOU EVER SEEN FOOTAGE OF A beetle moving under the control of a parasite? Hollowed out, the horrifying, brainless critter stumbles forward as a hostile entity compels its legs to take stilted steps. This is the grisly picture that comes to mind reading Gareth Roberts’s Gay Shame: The Rise of Gender Ideology and the New Homophobia. In his riotously funny yet gravely depressing polemic, Roberts charts how trans activists took over the once worthy gay rights struggle, devouring the hosts from the inside out and setting the animated corpse on a path to oblivion. Roberts is ruthless in his appraisal of gay male culture, dissecting it with the withering accuracy of a queen critiquing the sartorial choices of passers-by from a Soho café. And he displays basalt balls when…

THE HISTORY OF HISTORY IS OFTEN DErided, even by historians, as mere prolegomenon to the study of the past. And yet it supplies the key to unlock the mystery of why where we come from matters to us at all. Superficially, Oswyn Murray is the archetypal Oxford don, with the progressive baggage that being a Fellow of Balliol implies. When Boris Johnson became prime minister, his old Classics tutor Murray told the Guardian that he was “probably the worst scholar Eton ever sent us — a buffoon and an idler”. If Murray had really despised Boris as an undergraduate, why would he have renounced their friendship by sending his former pupil a formal renuntiatio amicitiae — “an invitation to exile or suicide”? One cannot renounce a non-existent friendship, unless…

IT MIGHT SOUND DEPRESSING TO WRITE “A book about humor while living through a cancer diagnosis, major surgery, and a global pandemic”. Yet David Shoemaker calls it “the most joyful experience of my academic life”. Wisecracks is clearly the work of an academic philosopher adept at teasing out fine distinctions between “offenses” and “harms”, or between “radical subjectivist, intersubjectivist, and objectivist theories of the funny”. Fortunately, it is also lively, provocative, and often very amusing in its determination to challenge many contemporary pieties. Shoemaker focuses not on jokes but on “the banter, teasing, mockery, prankery, taking the piss, leg-pulling, joshing, and quippery” which enliven so many families and friendship groups. Since pranks, for example, involve deliberate deception, such humour undoubtedly raises moral issues, so he describes the book as an unusual…

AMONG THE VARIOUS HORRORS of the recent Carmen at Covent Garden, one of the more commonplace was observing the alphabetti spaghetti of international singers (Bashkir, Polish, Russian, Congolese …) bellowing out approximate French phonemes at the blank-faced English audience. This baffling set-up is considered quite the thing in opera; and there was even more fun to be had back in the nineteenth century, when they translated everything, including Wagner, into la bella lingua di Dante for performance in London and elsewhere. That’s right! L’anello del Nibelungo, Sigfrido, horrid gnomi, you name it, with extra mozzarella. Actually by the 1870s Italian opera itself was looking like a busted flush, consisting only of Verdi — who dried up for 16 years after Aida of 1871. Other places had their own models: in…

IT’S UNUSUAL FOR ACTORS TO VAULT Europe’s many language barriers — and end up with a lead in an Oscarwinning film. But Sandra Hüller is a breakout German talent, an actress from the post-Wall era who exudes a mix of modernity in her uncluttered style and androgynous cool. British audiences will most likely have seen her as the emotionally stunted wife of a concentration camp commandant in Jonathan Glazer’s chilling dissection of deathly fanaticism, The Zone of Interest or as the ambiguous suspect in the spine-tingling French legal drama, Anatomy of a Fall. In her home country, however, Hüller is as well known for her stage acting as for award-winning cinema. HÜLLER’S HAMLET IS GAUCHE, CYNICAL AND LOST IN A WORLD OF DECEIT FROM THE OPENING OF THE PLAY And…

THEIR NOTION OF BALANCE, ROD Liddle has said of the BBC, where he once held a senior editorial role, is simple. You pair a soft leftie, an intellectual kormamuncher, with an ideologue who prefers to fork down a vindaloo. Start the Week, on Radio 4, does its best to underline his point about approved lists. Invited to discuss “protest and patriotism”, the call went out to Jackie Kay, the Scottish versifier, and Caroline Lucas, the Green MP. What could possibly have gone wrong? Lucas has written Another England, a book about English identity, rooted in myth and literature. With some judicious prodding she might have said something valuable. Alas, Adam Rutherford, the locum host, bowled too many balls wide of the off stump, which she let through to the wicketkeeper.…

LIKE NEARLY EVERYTHING else in Venice, Charles Baudelaire’s apartment is available for rent on Airbnb. A lady named Valeria lets it for around £400 per night and though apparently it’s rather poky, it is very handy for the Peggy Guggenheim museum — whose permanent collection features Jackson Pollock’s The Moon Woman, inspired by Baudelaire’s poem, which describes “the fearful goddess, the fateful godmother, the poisonous nurse of all the moonstruck of the world”. Pollock was never quite as polite as he might have been to poor old Peggy. His picture popped into my head as I was trying to decide between tasting menus at the Nolinski Hotel’s newlyopened restaurant the Palais Royal. Six or nine courses? In the end I opted for restraint, meaning I didn’t get to try the…

SINCE THE 1990S ALMOST EVERY consumer market has been transformed by the internet. The art market has tried hard to embrace technology, which has certainly boosted the lower end, but much business continues as it has done for centuries: in person. At the beginning of this century, Sotheby’s conceived a way to disrupt the traditional model by selling online at the lower end in partnership with Amazon. Jeff Bezos explained the intent: “We’re trying to create a whole new auction site, one that makes sense for valuable objects. The point is to break new ground selling fully-authenticated, fully-guaranteed objects online using Sotheby’s experts around the world and its network of more than 2,800 dealers.’’ It was a good idea that came too early. It never took off, and Amazon stuck…

SPORT CAN AMPLIFY AND ACCENTUATE emotions like little else. Hope and despair, agony and ecstasy, triumph and disaster, the best and worst of times: how the pendulum can swing — and how it can take us with it when it does. But the switch from one to the other has rarely been as dramatic as it was on a warm Barcelona night 25 years ago this May. Eighty-nine minutes gone in the CHAMPIONS LEAGUEFINAL: Manchester United 1-0 down to Bayern Munich. The last leg of an unprecedented treble, and all match it’s looked a step too far. Missing their two best players, Roy Keane and Paul Scholes, the team has been off the pace, outfought and outplayed. All those pivotal moments of the season — winning the Premiership on the…