Innehållsförteckning för February 2025 från The Critic

AT THE TEHRAN CONFERENCE IN 1943 Churchill presented Stalin with George VI’s gift of the Mech Stalingráda. Acid-etched, the inscription on it reads: TO THE STEEL-HEARTED CITIZENS OF STALINGRAD • THE GIFT OF KING GEORGE VI • IN TOKEN OF THE HOMAGE OF THE BRITISH PEOPLE. In Evelyn Waugh’s Unconditional Surrender the sword of honour is introduced in Westminster Abbey, adored on a “counterfeit altar”, with the press mocked as much as the credulous people. The Times “dropping into poetry” (“Then bow’d down my head from the Light of it./Spirit to my spirit, the Might of it”), while the Express’s gossip columnist suggested it ought to tour the kingdom. We should be grateful then for what we are spared. The prime minister’s recent signature upon the “UK-Ukraine 100 Year Partnership Declaration”…

IN JANUARY THIS YEAR, a Florida jury found against CNN in an action for libel brought by a security contractor, whom the channel had accused of misconduct during the American evacuation from Afghanistan. The jury initially awarded $5m in damages; the network then swiftly settled the case before the jury was due to decide on punitive damages, which could have bankrupted the company. Nothing of the sort could happen in England today. Not only are damages for defamation on a far more modest scale here (the biggest libel verdict, secured by Lord Aldington against Count Nikolai Tolstoy, was a mere £1.5m, while punitive damages are normally deprecated), but defamation actions are now exclusively tried by judges. The most recent libel trial by jury happened in 2012, when Frankie Boyle secured…

THOUGH RICKY GERVAIS AND SACHA Baron Cohen were hot on Steve Coogan’s heels during those early years of the new century, top dog status among his peers and critics remained largely assured. With three triumphant television series featuring Middle England alter ego Alan Partridge in the bag, this dedicated student of comedy history was hankering for the next game-changing move. The 1970s northern lad who had religiously recorded Monty Python television repeats knew all too well his heroes never stood still. And to further raise the stakes, the biggest hero of all was suddenly looming large. “Who better than Coogan?” was a familiar refrain among London comedy cliques when it emerged in 2003 that a screen adaptation of Roger Lewis’s still definitive biography, The Life and Death of Peter Sellers,…

For £10 you will receive a three-month subscription to Britain’s incisive monthly current affairs and culture magazine. SAVE 58% VISIT: thecritic.imbmsubscriptions.com/feb25 OR CALL: 01293 312250 quoting feb25 Three issues of The Critic magazine Free delivery each month of the print edition Full access to digital editions 58 per cent saving on the cover price T&CS: CLOSING DATE FOR ORDERS IS 30TH APRIL 2025. THE PRICE SHOWN IS A UK DIRECT DEBIT OFFER. YOUR SUBSCRIPTION WILL BEGIN WITH THE NEXT AVAILABLE ISSUE. IF YOU DO NOT CANCEL AT THE END OF THE SUBSCRIPTION PERIOD, THE SUBSCRIPTION WILL AUTO-RENEW BY DIRECT DEBIT AT £20 FOR 6 MONTHS. ALL SUBSCRIPTIONS ARE NON-REFUNDABLE. THIS IS A LIMITED OFFER AND MAY BE WITHDRAWN AT ANY TIME. PLEASE NOTE: BY SUBSCRIBING WE WILL CONTACT YOU ABOUT…

A FARCICAL EPISODE UNFOLDS: A PIAnist in a Moscow concert hall plays a Mozart concerto, which is broadcast live on the radio. Stalin’s secretary calls to demand a recording but none has been made. Panic breaks out: the pianist refuses to play again, the producer tries to bribe her, the conductor drops dead of a heart attack, and a replacement — the only one left in the city who hasn’t been arrested or killed — is driven to the concert hall in his nightclothes. The anecdote, of course, is satire, a scene from Armando Iannucci’s film The Death of Stalin, yet as this engrossing new book shows, fiction is sometimes not so very far removed from fact. The Dutch journalist Michel Krielaars gives a vivid account of life in Stalin’s…

I SAW FRANZ FERDINAND in 2003, at the Leadmill in Sheffield, just before they got big. I would love for this to be a story about how I immediately spotted their brilliance and bought all their records. It is not. To my shame, I was not a very good audience — I was on the guestlist and there to see the headliners, a now-forgotten pop-punk outfit called Hot Hot Heat. So instead of paying attention to the raw talent in front of me, I drank free double vodka Cokes and chatted with my friends all through the support. When a man turned around to shush us, I remember feeling sort of sorry for him: poor sap, probably trying to get maximum value from his ticket price by pretending to enjoy…

“MOST OF WHAT FOLLOWS IS TRUE.” The opening words of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid remain the best promise of cinematic non-fiction: you’re getting truth, but not always accuracy. Outside a screening of A Complete Unknown, James Mangold’s telling of Bob Dylan’s journey from college dropout to rock star, there was discussion about the extent to which we were e getting either. We’re definitely getting a belter of a film. Not every film Mangold has made has been brilliant, but he knows how to get the best out of what he’s got: whenever I hear someone sneer at Sylvester Stallone’s talents, I point them to his performance in 1997’s superlative Cop Land. This time the director is working with the hottest young actor in the world, Timothée Chalamet, and…

Canada passed an assisted dying law restricted to the terminally ill in 2016. Three years later it was broadened to cover non-fatal illnesses “THE TITLE OF THE BILL IS VERY, VERY CLEAR,” said Kim Leadbeater MP in the run-up to a Commons vote in November. “It’s called the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill.” As reassurance that her proposed breach of the legal taboo on helping another person commit suicide would remain strictly limited to “terminally ill adults”, this appeal to nominative determinism lacked a certain persuasiveness. Leadbeater was responding to Shabana Mahmood, another Labour MP, who fears that the bill is a “slippery slope towards death on demand”. Such arguments consist of claiming that after a first, fateful step, it will prove impossible to avoid tumbling all the…

Making house calls THE BUILDERS ARE IN. THIS IS, IN THE MEDIUM term, a good thing. When I moved into my house (over ten years ago now), it was in the knowledge that it was a “fixer-upper”. A late-Victorian mid-terrace, it appears that it was last renovated sometime in the seventies, when it was wired, plumbed, given a lean-to kitchen extension — and had all the original features ripped out. That last decision on the part of previous occupants is more than a little heartbreaking. Neighbours whose houses had the benefit of neglect in the twentieth century have beautiful plasterwork detailing, and (most enviable of all) cast iron fireplaces with handsome tiles. What were the owners of my house thinking when they gutted it, replacing anything of any character with…

TWELVE YEARS AGO, SUZANNE MOORE wrote what would become an infamous article for the New Statesman. The subject was female anger, especially in response to government cuts. Moore’s analysis got lost, however, in the outraged response to one line in particular: We are angry with ourselves for not being happier, not being loved properly and not having the ideal body shape — that of a Brazilian transsexual. It was the last two words that did it. Accusations of transphobia abounded. Moore and her family were threatened with violence, while an article by Julie Burchill in her defence was quickly removed from the Observer website. It was a pivotal moment in the so-called “TERF wars”, but not, alas, in the development of any empathy for women dealing with this “ideal body…

“IT WOULD NOT BE TRUE TO SAY that we have been here before,” declared Clive Davis of The Times, before awarding two stars to Leeches, now playing at a community theatre in South West London. “Rather, it would be accurate to say that we have been here repeatedly. Jejune in every sense of the word. ”Happily the author of this searing account of a rack-renting Brixton landlord d was not in the least discomfited. As he remarked, albeit at a slightly earlier stage in his career, “If I got a good review in The Times, I’d know that I’d failed.” HOW OLD IS ARNOLD, OR AS HE PREFERS to be called, “Arnie” Leverett? If Who’s Who, to whose blandishments he finally succumbed on the grounds that “there are people who…

LIKE MANY PEOPLE, I WAS dismayed to see the reports last November that the Telegraph columnist, Allison Pearson, was investigated by Essex Police for a post on X (Twitter). The post — which dated from about a year earlier — had used the words “how dare they” to comment on a photograph. The photograph showed two police officers — represented on X as belonging to the London Metropolitan Police — next to two men holding a flag of a Pakistani political party. Essex Police worried that Pearson’s post might be deemed a “hate incident”, with a spokesman saying that its job was to investigate “crimes without fear or favour”. The post had material factual errors and was undoubtedly ill-advised. For example, the photograph was taken in Manchester, and had nothing…

MONARCHY AND DICTATORSHIP BOTH imply one ruler. Yet they are quite different institutions. Monarchies are not always hereditary — think of the elective Holy Roman Empire and the papacy — but they are intended to be permanent, established by the grace of God, anointed like priests at their coronation. A king never dies: he has a corporeal body that is mortal and a metaphysical one that transcends mortality. Dictators, by contrast, are by definition temporary, even if they die in office, and owe their authority solely to the people. The original meaning of “dictator” was an emergency ruler, usually a general, appointed for the duration of a war or other crisis, but expected to relinquish his authority when it was no longer required. One of the earliest and still most…

IT’S 1957 AND IAN FLEMING, FOREIGN EDITOR of the Sunday Times, is moonlighting for MI6. He sends Norman Lewis to Cuba to sniff about and see whether Fidel Castro’s revolt has any chance of succeeding. In particular, he must sound out Ernest Hemingway. Lewis eventually tracks down the American, then 60 and at the peak of his fame. He is in shockingly poor physical condition, shuffling about like a man well into his seventies, overweight and on the bottle. “This was an encounter that might have been dangerous and undermining to any young man in the full enjoyment of ambition and hope, because it presented a parable on the subject of futility.” Lewis recalled that Hemingway was irascible, impatient, suspicious and unhelpful. As he later told Fleming, “He told me nothing…

THE PRESENTER OF CHILDREN’S HOUR must have felt hard done by. OK, she would have known John Reith’s reputation — the BBC’s director-general had, after all, forbidden an early radio talk on how to make fruit wine (“no intoxicants should be included”), and was furious when listeners abandoned his particularly strait-laced Sunday schedules for the “monstrous stuff” on Radio Luxembourg (mainly dance bands). He even responded to a satirical song about his tendency to ban things, “We Can’t Let You Broadcast That”, by banning it. But surely Reith was overdoing things when he reprimanded the poor woman for livening up a programme about pirates with an impromptu “yo ho ho and a bottle of rum”? Despite the D-G’s gloomy presence, radio’s early decades in this country were a thrilling time for broadcasters…

‘‘WHAT ABOUT MEN?” ANYONE who runs something solely for women — a women’s centre, a course for female leaders, International Women’s Day — gets used to being asked this question. In recent years, the spread of trans ideology has strengthened this assumption that anything reserved for women must be a theft from men. Women’s toilets, changing rooms, rape crisis centres, even prison cells: women who want them protected can’t possibly be motivated by concern for women. Their true aim must be to spite men. Why can’t they just be kind? In this elegant and insightful book, Victoria Smith dubs this mindset JustBeKindism: a “toxic mutation” of an entrenched belief that when women focus their care and attention on other women, they are being big meanies. Womanhood itself is now a…

AT THE START OF THE NEW YEAR, WE all might need a little cheering up, to drown out the suspicion that Albanian president Enver Hoxha had it right when he told the population on New Year’s Day 1967, “The bad news is that this year will be harder than last year. The good news is that it will be easier than next year.” So what better way to achieve this than with books that make us laugh? The first is a novel that, like the god Janus who gives his name to January, looks both back and forward. It looks back because Allen Bratton’s Henry Henry was published in mid-2024, but attracted little attention at the time. Yet it is so impressive that it requires us to break with the…

NO FREE COUNTRY IS SO MINUTELY regulated as France. From Normandy down to Nice, the price of a baguette is fixed at one euro. The width of a boulevard is laid down in the Code Napoléon, as are the duties of priests and rabbis in places of worship. A fonctionnaire in the Ministry of Education can tell you, any minute of the day, exactly which page students are studying in their history lessons. Everything is micro-managed from the top down. So I was not surprised to receive a 72-page book from the Ministère de la Culture, listing all the events the state has planned to salute “the talent, contribution and legacy of this major figure in contemporary creation”, namely the composer Pierre Boulez, born in 1925. Only France could organise…

THOMAS GIRTIN WAS BORN 250 years ago this year and his short life offers one of the great counterfactuals of British art. His friend JMW Turner was also born in 1775 and the careers of the two young painters emerged in tandem. When Girtin died in 1802 aged 27, Turner, always a man with a prickly but profound sense of his own worth, nevertheless ceded ground, confessing: “Had poor Tom lived, I would have starved.” He spoke while moved by emotion and in the spirit of nil nisi bonum but there was something more in his words. At the time of Girtin’s death — usually ascribed to an asthma attack but according to his one-time teacher Edward Dayes a demise exemplifying the “fatal consequences of vice” — it was he…

AMONG AFICIONADOS OF TELEVISION spy series, The Bureau, or Le Bureau des Légendes in the original French, is generally agreed to be the gold standard of modern espionage dramas. I reviewed it in 2020, describing it as “utterly absorbing”. The series follows a group of officers in the DGSE, the French foreign intelligence service, and was made with the agency’s cooperation. The Bureau, I wrote, was made with an expectation that viewers will have an attention span and “intelligent curiosity about the world” — making it impressively authentic and complex. Naturally, after all the critical acclaim, Hollywood wanted a piece of the action. So now we have The Agency, the remake, or perhaps “re-imagining” is a better word, co-produced by George Clooney. New versions of old classics are quite the…

LAST SEPTEMBER, I WENT TO THE annual Robert Maxwell Lecture given at the Athenaeum under the auspices of the Architecture Club. It was by Sheila O’Donnell and John Tuomey, Irish architects not as well-known as they deserve to be on the English side of the Irish Sea, even though they won the RIBA Gold Medal in 2015. They have been jointly responsible with Allies and Morrison for the masterplan of the cultural buildings along the waterfront of Olympic Park, have themselves designed the new theatre for Sadler’s Wells (Sadler’s Wells East) and V&A East in the same sequence, and were responsible for the brick-built Saw Swee Hock Student Centre at the LSE, shortlisted for the Stirling Prize in 2014. Tuomey has also recently published a beautifully written short memoir of…

EARLIER THIS YEAR I SMELLED possibly the most beautiful wine I have ever experienced. It brought to mind the scene from Th e Leopard where Prince Fabrizio is wandering in the garden of his palazzo in Palermo and smells “an erotic waft of early orange blossom”. But while the prince’s garden is overripe, “cloying, fleshy and slightly putrid”, in the wine I tasted the sweetness was tempered by freshness and definitely not “distilled from the relics of certain saints”. It was Ben Ryé, a sweet wine made by a producer named Donnafugata after the fictional estate owned by the prince’s family in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel. Tasting it was an almost perfect commingling of history, literature and sensory pleasure. It comes from Pantelleria, a small island near Sicily where…

THIRTY YEARS AGO I VISITED JERMYN STREET TO buy shirts. I went to Hawes & Curtis which in those days occupied a corner emporium decorated with wooden panelling and staffed by wooden public schoolboys on summer jobs before Sandhurst or a career in publishing. I remember that I bought two double-cuffed shirts and two splendid ties, one being black patterned with small emerald-green shamrocks. I remember the tie because I remember its price. It was ticketed £20, but the floppy haired fop behind the counter charged me only £10. When I pointed this out, the future cavalry cornet apologised profusely. I laughed that it was quite alright and that it was my good turn for the day, to which he brayed “Yes sir, and now you’ve done your good deed…

REGULAR TURF ACCOUNT READERS WILL KNOW that I usually see a half-empty glass when it comes to the future of racing. But it’s difficult not to be encouraged by the attendance figures over Christmas. For years crowd numbers have been in free-fall, thanks to the combination of cost — entry to a decent enclosure is rarely less than £25, plus parking (as blatant a rip-off as exists), a racecard and expensive food and drink and you’re down at least £50 a head before you even start betting — and some pretty basic facilities in all bar top-notch venues, plus changing post-Covid habits. But this year there has been a pretty big rise across the board. Newbury’s post-Christmas fixture saw a 48 per cent rise in the crowd to 9,983. Despite…

SO HECTOR TOOK HIS COMMON Entrance exams, and now … we wait. With distinctly un-bated breath. Frankly, given his performance on multiple past papers I’d have to conclude that if we were offered a place anywhere vaguely selective, or even heard-of, that the VAT on school fees had hit the prep school market hard. Yes, since October we’ve been averaging one paper per evening (shoot me now), plus enforced news-watching followed by newsrelated practice interview questions. The upshot: Will is now slightly better informed. Hector is still a complete loose cannon, likely to argue, for example, that Gaza is in Ukraine. And no, I’m not doing that peculiarly British thing of talking my child down and then marvelling at their freakishly good performance on the day (side issue: why do…

STEREOTYPING THE AFGHANS I would never classify myself as an expert, but I lived and worked for more than three years in Kabul, Kandahar and Jalalabad and have spent the past four years helping to get women — and many of my former colleagues — out of Afghanistan. What Chris Bayliss asserts [BOYCOTTING AFGHANISTAN’S CRICKET TEAM WOULD DO NOTHING FOR WOMEN; ONLINE, 7 JAN] about Pashtun culture is an incorrect stereotype. It is true that traditional Afghan cultures aren't progressive when it comes to women’s rights. But Taliban culture takes it much further. Many men, particularly Pashtuns, want their children to be educated — the Taliban leaders ensure that their daughters study in Qatar and elsewhere. However, the idea that Taliban culture is Pashtun culture is wrong. A cricket boycott…

ARE YOU WEIRD? IF YOU HAVE A Bachelor’s degree, speak English, and only see your cousins at Christmas, the answer is almost certainly yes, or so goes an argument forwarded by Joseph Henrich, author of The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. WEIRD stands for “Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic”, and is used to describe a particular psychological “template” typical of modern Westerners. Drawing on historical and psychological research, Henrich argues that unlike most people in the world and premodernity, we are “highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, nonconformist and analytical. We focus on ourselves — our attributes, accomplishments, and aspirations — over our relationships and social roles.” A familiar, accurate and, to my eyes, not especially flattering portrait of modern Western man,…

WHEN ASKED WHAT is the best historical exhibition I have seen — and, as a former editor of History Today I have seen a few — I usually opt for the British Library’s Henry VIII: Man and Monarch, which opened in 2009, the 500th anniversary of the Tudor monarch’s accession. It was guest curated by David Starkey, then in his pomp as a public historian — arguably the best this country has produced — and well worth his £2m Channel 4 contract (yes, kids, Channel 4 was once a serious outlet). The exhibition showed why (as does its superb catalogue, edited by the Oxford historian Susan Doran). Not only did Starkey vividly recreate Henry’s story and the turbulence of his time and place, emphasising the contingency of the Tudor monarch’s…

“Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.” WHILE ALERT TO THE possibility that this Margaret Thatcher quote could get you cancelled for all sorts of modern reasons, I open with it in order to discuss something far older — in fact the oldest office in continuous existence in the British state (apart, arguably, from the Crown): the Archbishopric of Canterbury. The See of Canterbury was founded in 597 by St Augustine. Wonderfully, there are a few surviving objects from that early mission to the English: a massive stone cathedra in Canterbury Cathedral; the Gospels St Augustine brought with him, most recently used at the King’s Coronation and an ivory crozier head, said to be from the episcopal staff of Pope…

IN ITS RESPONSE TO THE PETITION CALLING FOR a new general election, which those who signed it must have known was of no constitutional force, the government wrote, inter alia: “The Prime Minister can call a general election at a time of their choosing …” Does the use of the PLURAL POSSESSIVE ADJECTIVE WITH A SINGULAR SUBJECT mean that Sir Keir Starmer is uncertain about his sex and that one day in the near future he may appear in the House of Commons as Dame Keir Starmer? I rather doubt it. I think it is more likely to indicate the deep moral cowardice of a government that is unable to face down a fanatical but small lobby group, a cowardice that is typical of ambitious mediocrity. The technique of the…

THE “NOW” OF THIS BOOK’S TITLE IS certainly justified. Oliver Keenan’s Aquinas is very much a figure of the 2020s, offering a way to confront “threats” posed by artificial intelligence, the “climate emergency” and the widespread alienation characteristic of today’s society. He can do so, Keenan contends, because the hallmark of Aquinas’s thinking is communication, “the opposite of alienation”. Indeed, “communication”, “conversation” and “narrative” are Keenan’s central explanatory terms. But is this really Aquinas? Keenan himself says that the book “is a work of conversation with and through the thought of Thomas Aquinas”. Someone who already knows the original texts well will see how, in his own present-day audience-friendly language, Keenan is presenting, often with real philosophical grasp and insight, Aquinas’s theories. His novice readers will, however, be likely to think…

AS EDITH PIAF ALMOST SANG, je regrette plusieurs choses. Every so often I have agonising laser sessions in order to remove my tattoos. Dale Turner, my tattoo remover, is a good sort, though, and has a veritable treasury of amusing anecdotes with which he regales me while I squirm under his red-hot laser lens. “From time to time I recognise people I met years ago,” Dale once said over my whimpering, “who I advised as youngsters not to get tattooed with the name of their then love interest. They always come up to me saying ‘Hey, you’re Dale, aren’t you? I’m so glad you encouraged me not to get that tattoo of ‘Leonora’ with a heart through it!” The great majority of people, though, love their inked skins, and with…

GIVEN HOW HARD COMPOSERS OF contemporary opera evidently find it to write music anyone might want to listen to, it’s no surprise that their judgement in the matter of words is usually pretty catastrophic as well. Sure, What makes a good script? is hardly a new question. The route-one option through the ages has been to pinch something from a book or play. In the old days, composers glutted like vampires on Schiller, Victor Hugo, Walter Scott and their more lurid epigones, where you could count on a preposterous melodrama with bountiful opportunities for the dram pers to wail their little hearts out in aria form. Well, now the theatre’s almost as clapped-out as opera itself, so only a madman would go poking around there for something to “introduce to…

IT’S RUN SINCE 2011 ON BROADWAY and 2013 in London: The Book of Mormon takes its final parodic bow at the end of April at the Prince of Wales Theatre, after 12 years of eliciting pained laughter and groans in its audiences. The rambunctious parody of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and satirical take on the clash between Western missionaries’ bright-eyed evangelism and the benighted African community where they seek souls to save has attracted criticism that it embodies (to cite one broadside of many) “cultural colonialism of the most insidious kind”. Audiences have begged to differ — even in the Mormon faith capital of Salt Lake City — and in several foreign language versions since. The show is also a handy barometer of changing sensitivities about…

WHO REMEMBERS ALISTAIR COOKE? The transatlantic Salfordian was a regular presence in British lives for more than half a century, before his death in 2004 at the age of 95. His weekly Letters from America, which ran for 58 years, were masterpieces of observation. Few witnesses have spoken so clearly, so personally, to the listener. Would he prosper now? The expertise Cooke acquired over seven decades of reporting, for the BBC and the old Manchester Guardian, does not always convince modern producers, who favour rougher, more demotic qualities. Cooke’s art was the kind which concealed art, and he carried it off with the dignity of a prince. Every year, to remind himself of who he was talking to in those Letters, he came back to the UK. On one break…

THE LAST TWO YEARS HAVE been bumpy rides for the art business. Markets go up and down, and companies come and go, but auction houses have evolved their business model only slightly since the eighteenth century. Yet, the quantity of sales (and lots) has reduced over the past decade, begging the question, how is the auction business changing? As 2024 drew to a close, of the two large auction houses, Sotheby’s appeared to have suffered more than Christie’s. The owner of Sotheby’s is the French-Israeli billionaire Patrick Drahi, whose main holding company Altice is saddled with large amounts of debt — reportedly in excess of $50bn. At the end of last year, Drahi completed a deal with ADQ, one of Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth funds, raising some $1bn through the…

THE TEXT MESSAGE WAS FROM a number I didn’t recognise. “Got your name from John,” it read. “He said you could supply us with venison.” I read it twice and was none the wiser. I couldn’t remember meeting anybody called John or telling any such person that I was a meat man. I sat on it for a couple of days and then replied. “Sure I could get you a beast. Butchered and delivered … £65?” I don’t know why I hit on 65 quid, and anybody I’ve mentioned it to since, who knows about these things, tells me that’s really far too cheap but I’d committed blindly and I had every intention of delivering. The plan was that over the Christmas period, I’d get out with my rifle a…

IN 1992, AMNESTY HELD ITS first Oxford lectures. Jacques Derrida, smouldering hotly in his Blake-Carrington-from-Dynasty-hair era, sold out the Sheldonian. Next day, standing outside Wren’s theatre, a chap who hadn’t secured one of the tickets inquired how deconstruction’s silver fox had been. “Crap?” I replied. A frisson emanated from beside me. For, lo, it was the man himself. Given that debate had alluded to the issue: “How can there be torture when the self doesn’t exist?” I felt he had little ground for complaint. If a detainee in an Angolan prison cell was being asked to be insouciant about subjectivity, then so could old Jacques (left). Still, if one’s going to take the trouble to fabricate a self, one may as well dress it. I’ve been listening to Bella Freud’s…