Booklaunch Issue 11

Does Hamas’s internationalism maximise Palestinian leverage?

‘As Brazil’s foreign minister during the 2003 to 2010 government of President Lula da Silva,’ writes Celso Amorim in Daud Abdullah’s new book, ‘Brazil was deeply involved in the struggle for a fair and peaceful solution to the conflict in the Middle East.

‘One of our last decisions in the field of foreign policy was the recognition of Palestine as an independent and sovereign state, which unchained a series of similar moves in Latin America and beyond.

‘During that period, our representative to Ramallah visited Gaza and had discussions with Hamas authorities. I was therefore very encouraged by Dr Abdullah’s words that through the intensification of diplomatic

How to make money in an Iranian kleptocracy: buy, sell or monopolise

efforts and global alliances, “Hamas can play a pivotal role in the restoration of Palestinian rights.”’

‘Discussion of Hamas in the mainstream media and academia has centred largely on its Islamic origins and character,’ adds Ramzy Baroud, Editor of the Palestine Chronicle, ‘somewhat reducing the movement to a confining, stifling discussion on “terrorism” and “suicide bombings”.

‘Abdullah’s book dismantles and reconstructs the old discourses to delve into Hamas’s internal dynamics, continual diplomacy and attempts to break away from its Israel-led isolation. A truly riveting and revealing account.’ See page 5.

Raymond Williams Centenary Year

Raymond Williams (below, top left) made his name in the field of cultural studies, alongside Richard Hoggart, E.P. Thompson and Stuart Hall in the years after the Second World War. His key works were Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961) and these continue to be read. In recent years, Daniel G. Williams has explored a different side to his namesake: his growing commitment to Wales as a focus of academic study and a preferable form of national identity in the face of English hegemony. Extracts from DW’s preface and RW’s writings appear on page 10. Key also to the emergence of Welsh identity politics was James ‘Jim’ Griffiths (below, bottom left), the UK’s first Secretary of State for Wales, whose biography, by D. Ben Rees, is featured on page 8. And on page 9, we carry an extract from Ralph A. Griffiths’s book which shows how a Scottish-American philanthropist primed modern Welsh political advocacy by underwriting an unprecedented programme of Welsh library building. Seen here: Bridgend Carnegie Library, 1907 (photo Colin Burdett | Shutterstock).

The move from carbon to hydrogen may save the planet but undermine the economic stability of states that have built their wealth on oil. That’s why some oil producers are ploughing billions into new technologies that will help them retain their market lead.

Others are concentrating instead on monopolising a shrinking market. It’s cheaper.

It’s also dirtier, in many ways. According to Martin Venning, whose new thriller is set in Iran, alongside the beauty of the country’s landscapes and the diversity of its peoples, Iranian kleptocracy promotes the basest forms of capitalism.

In The Primary Objective, everyone is on the take, from the selling of temporary marriage licences to the extorting of bribes. And when a covert team of investigators gets parachuted in to check out what might be a remote biohazard production site, it turns out that some of the players have wildly conflicting goals. See page 18.

ON OUR INSIDE PAGES

Page 2 The Tin Ear Prize and Bookshop.org

Page 3 Bad language, Lingualia quiz

Page 4 The collapse of the UK legal system

Page 5 Hamas as an international player

Page 6 The Renaissance’s fun machines

BOOKS ABOUT WALES

Page 8 Jim—star of the Attlee government

Page 9 Andrew Carnegie’s library legacy

Page 10 The Raymond Williams centenary

Page 11 Scottish poetry, Australian philosophy

Page 12 Shakespeare’s neighbours in London

Page 14 Valentine Ackland: lesbian trailblazer

Page 15 Henry VIII as patron of the visual arts

Page 16 How Nazis got away with their crimes

Page 17 Helping the taxman outwit the Amazons

Page 18 Might Gulf oil instability end like this?

Page 19 When secret lives are wicked lives

Page 20 How to get your book published

Editorial: Bleakly Rammed Stephen Games

Booklaunch 12 Wellfield Avenue, London N10

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Tell us the truth #2

Your replies to our slightly whimsical questions in Issue 10 about books and bookshops and publishing were very welcome. We now know more about your largely warm relations with your high-street bookseller and your largely negative feelings about Amazon.

Here, quickly, are a couple of answers to our teasers. We told you that over half all fiction sales in 2018 were crime novels and that one book had accounted for more than 30% of the rest. We asked if you could identify that book and whether you were completely fine with it.

The answer was Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine. The clue was in the question.

We also asked who should have won the 2019 Booker Prize—Margaret Evaristo or Bernadine Atwood—and I shouldn’t be having to tell you that we switched the surnames and that both won, although the rules say that the prize should only go to one person. Come on, wake up at the back.

Can you trump this?

We’re evidently more touchy, rather than touchy-feely, than our readers. In the last edition we invited you to

nominate a celebrated author who seems incapable of good writing. What we had in mind was bestseller-writers whose prose is dire and ought to be held to account. One correspondent thought we were wanting you to humiliate amateurs who were just doing their best. Not at all: amateurs deserve every encouragement, and we try to give it.

To illustrate what we had in mind, here are our candidates for the Booklaunch 2021 Tin Ear Prize (like the Booker, we’re honouring two recipients this year). First, Donald Trump. Trump sells big—as he would put it— and all major publishers want a slice of his action. His first book, The Art of the Deal, is said to have sold over a million copies and has just been reissued by Random House (i.e. Penguin).

For a book written by a hired hand—journalist Tony Schwartz, who now says it should be reclassified as fiction—Penguin Random House is benefitting financially from promoting the myth that Trump can think and write coherently, and that what appears under his name is authentic and plausible.

In fact it’s a double myth because the Tin Ear that we’re recognising actually belongs to Schwartz, whose fabrication of Trump’s big-shot language—‘I don’t do it for the money. I’ve got enough, much more than I’ll ever need’— reveals a deafness to truth.

By any standards it’s an outrage, as are Trump’s numerous other titles: Think Big, Great Again, Think Like a Champion, Think Like a Billionaire, and Midas Touch. If you were a publisher, wouldn’t you feel sullied by having these in your stable? And yet, here is Penguin, currently puffing The Art of the Deal on its website as ‘an unprecedented education in the practice of deal-making … the most streetwise business book there is—and the ultimate read for anyone interested in making money and achieving success.’

Shameless. (Rather wonderfully, though, Amazon lists the hardcover of Trump’s Crippled America as having a reading age of 3–5.)

The bookies’ choice

Closer to home is the late Dick Francis—admittedly not a new discovery—but I challenge anyone to read the first chapter of Shattered (a favourite of HRH the Prince of Wales) and not curl up in pain at its many solecisms.

Francis isn’t venal in the way Trump is—his books aren’t doing double time selling as well as telling—but they are no less false, with Francis at his clumsiest and

most pretentious when he thinks he’s being at his most suave (‘the air in his spacious car swirled richly full of smoke [richly full of smoke!] from his favourite cigar, the Montecristo No 2, his substitute for eating’; ‘Priam Jones [Priam!] from arrogance [from!] had just wrecked his own car in a stupid rash of flat tyres [stupid rash!]’).

Unfair to attack him? Just doing his best? If Francis’s yarns about UK racetracks and the Jockey Club make him seem homelier than Trump think again: his 42 novels, selling more than 60 million copies in 35 languages, put Trump in the shade. He’s definitely out there, promoting a vulgarity about language that embraces a crudeness of thought and conscience.

Here, for example: ‘I’d lost my licence for a year through scorching at ninety-five miles an hour round the Oxford ring road (fourth ticket for speeding)’—a souped-up explanation for why the speaker isn’t driving his own car that is both preening (I’m another James Bond) but also condescending about public safety.

Not convinced? How about ‘The sight of the girthwrapped [girth-wrapped!] piece of professional equipment, like my newly dead mother’s Hasselblad camera, [!] bleakly rammed into one’s consciousness the gritty message that their owners would never come back.’ Oh, that’s the gritty message that your newly dead mother’s Hasseblad camera bleakly rammed into your consciousness, is it?

Normally, you’d want a kindly editor to take your writer in hand and help them out. Here, you get the idea that the publisher is complicit. Either an editor has turned a sow’s ear into something only slightly less than a sow’s ear, or they’ve tiptoed round the great man and let him write whatever he likes. Result: popular appeal and the chinging of cash registers. You can’t argue with that. Well, you can and should.

Cui bono? His publisher—oh, it’s Penguin again.

Saviour of the human race?

Maybe our criticisms are too robust. We learn from you that many bookbuyers feel that books are a frail commodity and need protecting, not questioning, especially after the year we’ve just lived through. Bookshops feel the same about themselves; they’re an asset to any community but operate on slender margins and struggle to survive.

It’s on this presupposition that Bookshop.org has come to prominence in the UK. Bookshop.org is a US-based online bookselling platform, which means—as far as bookbuyers are concerned—that it does exactly what homegrown firms like Blackwell does, and Waterstones, and Foyles, and Wordery, and Books Etc, and numerous others—not to mention the egregious but non-homegrown Amazon.

Bookshop.org has a very special USP, though. Its pitch is that bookselling is, in its own words, a ‘fragile ecosystem’ and that it’s here to help. If you can’t get to your local bookseller, you can buy instead from its website, and your bookseller (if it has affiliated to the Bookshop.org network) will get 30% of the sale. If you don’t nominate a beneficiary bookseller, 10% of the sale price will go into a pool, shared equally among all the affiliate shops every half year.

It’s not only booksellers who can benefit. Book websites, literary organizations and individuals can earn 10% of any sale they direct to Bookshop.org, with a matching 10% going into the profit-sharing pool for bookstores.

Rather than promoting itself, therefore, Bookshop. org promotes its mission. ‘Support local bookshops,’ it chimes on its homepage; ‘shop online with bookshop.org.’ And at the top of every webpage it posts a running total of what it has put into the pot for local booksellers since launching late last year. The more time goes by, the more impressive the figure gets. As I write, it’s at just over £1.3 million.

It all looks good and booksellers all over the country have told us they are in favour of it. The bottom line is, it makes money for them. To quote one shop, ‘It’s 30% pure profit, zero overhead. I’ll take that any day!’

With their doors closed by the pandemic since Spring 2020, booksellers have actually been positive about the app since it arrived, rallying to the cause as maidens to a white knight. Of the 950 or so independent booksellers in the UK, almost half are now affiliates. Normally investigative newspapers have fawned over it, and continue to do so. Even Booklaunch affiliated briefly to find out what all

continued on back page

It’s pronounced Fooks Bart O’Fehfon

For our eyes only

The semi-successful (i.e. failed) Israeli lunar probe two years ago was known as Beresheet. The name corresponds to the opening word of Genesis and is meant to be pronounced with three syllables, stressed on the final syllable. The standard transliteration of the final vowel would be i rather than ee, but for once Israeli PR made a sensible decision. (The really sensible decision would have been to choose an entirely different name in the first place. Mind you, they might then have chosen Apocalypse, so perhaps it’s just as well.)

Not all PR or marketing departments make sensible decisions. Brand names are common victims of booby traps: the French breakfast cereal Crapsy Fruit and fizzy drink Pschitt; the Portuguese tinned tuna rejoicing in the name of Atum Bom Petisco, and the Swedish chocolate bar Plopp. Sadly, I can find no evidence for Zit Zitronensaft, Mukk yoghurt, and various other EU products widely referenced on the Web.

Was the Rolls-Royce Silver Mist rebranded for the German market, I wonder? And the Toyota MR2 in France? Certainly the Chevrolet Nova retained its name in the Latin American market (no va in Spanish means ‘it doesn’t go’), but it still, pace Ben Trovato, sold well there. (Ben also claims that the Vauxhall Nova was renamed Opel Corsa when sold in Spain: in fact, the Spaniards built the Opel Corsa themselves and it bore that name from the start.)

The market did compel a name change, however, in the case of Vick vapour rub. In German, the word Vick would be pronounced just like the word Fick!, which is the German form of the f-word. So in Vienna or Munich, the product keeps its English pronunciation but adopts the spelling Wick—which in turn wouldn’t work very well in English-speaking markets.

What about IKEA?—how do you pronounce it? The ‘correct’ Swedish pronunciation sounds like eekáya, with the stress on the middle syllable. In the UK and US, people tend to keep the stress on the middle syllable but adjust the vowels of the first two syllables, so the word sounds like eye-kéy-a. No harm done, but the company was taking a risk. Supposing the Anglophone public had favoured a first-syllable stress. The store would then be widely referred to as ‘ickier’. (What do you mean ‘But it is!’?)

The problem obviously extends well beyond the commercial domain. Speakers of one language can flinch when hearing innocuous personal names, place names, or even everyday words from another language. Anglophones make a reasonable effort to imitate the German pronunciation of Hegel, for instance, but shy away from doing the same with Kant. Conversely, they will strive for an accurate pronunciation of the towns Condom in France and Wankum in Germany. The Germans really should

Lingualia Quiz 3

Can you make sense of the following string of letters?

It will help if you relocate three words. Having done so, send us a word string of your own, together with the answer to ours. Book prizes to the first clever solvers.

RESULTS OF QUIZ 2

What do the following have in common? Dick Carter | Gus Painter | M.A. Carpenter | Charlie Weaver | Max Marsh (aka Max Fracture) | Johnnie Brook | Al Hill |

have given more thought to their vocabulary, before establishing nouns such as Faktor ‘factor’, Vater ‘father’, Bescheid ‘info’, and Fahrt ‘journey’. Sniggering schoolboys are particularly partial to Vakanz ‘vacancy’—double value there. Cf. the Dutch vakantie ‘holiday’. Dutch also, unavoidably, makes very frequent use of kant ‘side or edge’ and vak ‘profession, academic subject etc’.

And the problem exists not just between languages but within a single language. A standard pronunciation in one region might cause cringes in another. According to urban legend, when the Antarctic explorer Sir Vivian Fuchs was being honoured in Leeds, the Lord Mayor opened proceedings by repeatedly referring to ‘Sir Vivian Fucks’. Eventually his embarrassed guest leaned across and whispered, ‘Your honour, it’s pronounced Fooks”, and the mayor whispered back, “I know that, but there are ladies present.”

(In Richard Dawkins’ version of the story, recounted in a letter to The Guardian, the mayor’s reply was ‘Aye lad, I know, but I couldn’t say that in pooblic, could I?’)

Word records: Round #2

Booklaunch Issue 7 discussed the question of which English word is misspelt most often. Here are two further questions about English orthography. Let me know your answers. Here are mine:

1. Which is the richest homograph? i.e. which spelling corresponds to the greatest number of (etymologically) different words?

Tricky. The Web is no help. Short of checking every page of a dictionary, you have to guess and check. My biggest desk dictionary, the New Oxford Dictionary of English (NODE) offers four separate headwords for chase, and four for band. But in the lead (so far) are mole and bay, with five each—for bay, for example, the senses relate to a harbour, a tree, a recess, a colour, and a howl.

2. Which English word has most senses?

The longest entry in the printed OED is apparently for set. But for actual number of definitions, set now comes second to run (according to a recent report)—a mere 430 vs 635. Next in line are go, take and stand, all in the 300s, and then get, turn, put, fall and strike, all in the 200s.

Claud Greenberg | Fred Cream | Len Amber Clue: others in the same category include J.P. Branch and Dick Bouquet (aka Dick Battle aka Dick Ostrich). Another clue: the first item—Dick Carter—is slightly misleading.

Answer: They are all composers: Richard Wagner | Gustav Mahler | Marc Antoine Charpentier | Carl Maria von Weber | Max Bruch | Johann Sebastian Bach | Alban Berg | Claudio Monteverdi | Bedrich Smetana | Leonard Bernstein | Jean-Philippe Rameau | Richard Strauss.

Note: Wagner isn’t standard German; presumably the name originates in its adoption by/ascription to wagoners, but the current term for a carter or driver is Fuhrmann or Fahrer or Führer

Together Wells toreador ear lyre port age André con vie wit, as sure heritage ration swell André ally war rants re side.

JUSTICE IN A TIME OF AUSTERITY STORIES FROM A SYSTEM IN CRISIS Bristol

University Press

Hardback, 232 pages 22 June 2021

9781529213126

RRP £19.99

Our price £17.59 inc. free UK postage

https://www. booklaunch.london

It’s Monday morning on level five of the 16-storey, glass-fronted Manchester Civil Justice Centre. District Judge Hassall has 19 cases on a busy housing list in court seven. First up is an application by a landlord concerning a tenant with mental health problems. The judge accepts that the man is a danger to himself and others as well as a disturbing presence on the estate.

Two solicitors are on today’s duty scheme, which is run by the housing charity Shelter. They cover two lists: one in the morning for antisocial behaviour; and rent arrears possession cases in the afternoon. Tenants can be evicted on account of their antisocial behaviour for breach of a court order or injunction.

Next up is a case concerning the occupants of a one-bedroom flat in a block of 16. The court hears of ‘overwhelming evidence of the supply, sale and production’ of crack-cocaine as evidenced by ‘a constant smell of ammonia’ and the frequent sighting of ‘people wearing respirators’. Neighbouring tenants complain of addicts blocking the stairwell using ‘heroin with foil and needles’. Four residents have received death threats.

Some 19 cases are listed but only four tenants turn up for the morning session. At one point, Judge Hassall

READERS’ COMMENTS

Baroness Shami Chakrabarti: If you are a tribune of the people who has ever poured scorn on ‘activist lawyers’, I dare you to read this. It may just tempt you to reconsider.

Michael Mansfield QC: Successive governments have been keen to suppress the impoverished. ... This book gives a stark measure of a society without due process.

expresses concern about his own potential to ‘over-react’ when a hearing concerns a tenant who is neither present nor represented in court. How can he properly test the evidence without the risk of adding to ‘a chain of fallacies’?, he asks.

The morning’s duty solicitor, Ben Taylor assists on three cases. “It’s a poor turnout,” he says, “but most of the cases were gas injunctions and tenants tend not to come.” Landlords have to provide an annual gas safety certificate and they are allowed access to properties on 24 hours’ notice to ensure that properties are compliant and safe for their occupants and neighbours. Issues often arise when tenants refuse access, and an injunction can be granted to allow entry. ‘If they don’t provide access once an injunction order is given as made by the court they could end up in prison for contempt for two years plus a £5,000 fine,’ Taylor says.

The Ministry of Justice only funds possession proceedings. However, the court expects the duty scheme to deal with all cases. Taylor does do this on an unpaid basis. ‘We might pick up paid work through the scheme but we also want the courts to have a smooth-running system,’ he says. ‘The courts don’t care if it’s possession because of rent arrears or whatever. They just hope that there is a duty solicitor there to help.’

Two connected themes are the increasingly ragged state of disrepair of our courts (the shabby Stratford Hearing Centre is a typical example of a neglected court) and the government’s court closure programme.

Over the last decade, the government has embarked on a massive programme of court sell-offs. Almost half of all courts in England and Wales were closed between 2010 and 2018: 162 out of 323 magistrates’ courts and 90 county courts. Underutilised, neglected courts sit on

You’re a rough sleeper and you’re due to appear in court. What are your chances of gaining equal access to the law?

Jon Robins and Daniel Newman

prime real estate. In answer to a parliamentary question in March 2018, it was revealed that the sale of 126 court premises in England and Wales since 2010 had raised £34 million – ‘each going for little more than the average house price’, as the Guardian put it.

Manchester Civil Justice Centre is a rare thing: not only a new addition to our court estate but an architectural triumph. The £160 million building was commissioned by the New Labour government and opened for business in 2007. It is the first major court complex built in Britain since the Royal Courts of Justice in 1882 and was listed by Design magazine in its top ten buildings of the first decade of the 21st century. The magazine breathlessly described it as ‘a spectacle of justice—a place where justice can be seen to be done’, and one that tapped ‘into the commercial and moral heart of Manchester’. Locals call it ‘the filing cabinet’ on account of its cantilevered floors.

The reality is that people living in the outskirts of Manchester, previously well served by local county courts, struggle to make the journey into town; hence the poor turnout. Just ahead of our visit to Manchester, the government had confirmed a further cull of 86 courts across the country, including 10 in the capital.

EDITOR’S NOTE

it dropped to £58.’

In 2015 the fact-checking charity Full Fact looked at the myth of ‘fat cat’ legal aid lawyers’ fees following an inflammatory remark in Parliament by the then justice minister, Lord Faulks. ‘The question that arises out of social welfare law is whether it is always necessary for everybody who has quite real problems to have a lawyer at £200-odd an hour, or whether there are better and more effective ways of giving advice,’ Faulks had said.

‘There are lawyers, and there are lawyers,’ began Full Fact. Some were very talented and their skills earn them hundreds of pounds per hour; others were equally talented but did not work in sectors that commanded ‘the big bucks’. ‘Squarely into this latter camp fall social welfare solicitors paid by the government to help people who can’t afford a lawyer,’ said the group.

The fact checkers explained that when social welfare lawyers were not paid on a fixed fee, they tended to be paid £50–£70 an hour. For a relatively simple housing case a fixed fee is about £160.

If the case is more complicated, more than a day’s work, an hourly rate might kick in. The rate for legal help and advice is just under £50 per hour for some social welfare cases, just over for others.

Some academic books are theoretical and remote. Not this one. In researching their subject, the authors immersed themselves in the day-to-day workings of the justice system as experienced by people on the edge. Over 12 months they visited a foodbank in London, a community centre in a former mining town, a homeless shelter in Birmingham and a destitution service for asylum seekers on the South coast as well as courts and advice agencies up and down the country. What they discovered was a catastrophic inability to access justice and an equally catastrophic failure to deliver. The result is a passionate critique.

Ben Taylor calls the civil justice centre the ‘last dedicated property investment before the property crash’. ‘All the courts that have been closing are being shoehorned into this building, our Palais de Justice. A huge white elephant which for a long time was half empty,’ he says. Courts in Tameside, Altrincham, Oldham and Bolton have been shut down and relocated to the justice centre’s 47 courts.

There is a bitter irony that the then Department of Constitutional Affairs (now Ministry of Justice), which commissioned Manchester’s extravagant ‘spectacle of justice’, also introduced massive reorganisation of the local legal aid sector, effectively dismantling the delicate network of local legal advice provision.

The advice sector has withered in the intervening years. ‘There has been a desertification of the North West. I’m not sure that’s a word but that’s what I’d call it,’ says Taylor, who has specialised in housing law since 1992. ‘Over the last few years key players have pulled out. LASPO [The Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012] was the last nail in the coffin.’

LASPO removed most housing from the legal aid scheme, with some exceptions. “Homelessness, disrepair where there’s risk to health, and possession proceedings are still in scope,’ says Taylor. Helen Jackson, a solicitor with Shelter, says Shelter ‘props up’ a massively limited legal aid scheme through income from its charitable donations.

Fat-cat lawyers

‘Do you know how much a legal aid lawyer gets paid an hour?’ Ben Taylor asks me. They used to get paid £66 an hour, but he points out that now the rate is £58. ‘It’s an absolute disgrace,’ he says. ‘The £66 rate was decided in 1997. It was that rate for 18 years, then LASPO came and

The Law Society has described the rates of pay as ‘catastrophically’ low and as having led to law firms leaving publicly funded work in droves. The solicitors’ group pointed out that fees paid for civil legal aid provision had not increased since 1994, equating to a 49% real-terms reduction. On top of this, fees were cut by a further 10% in 2011. As a result, the solicitors’ group argued, more than half of local authorities in England and Wales had no publicly funded legal advice for housing.

‘You don’t do this job for the money,’ says Taylor. ‘You do it because you have won the lottery or because money isn’t important. I love this job. I can’t imagine doing anything else. Would I advise anyone to come into this area of law who is interested in being a lawyer? No way. There is no future in legal aid.’

A brutal process

We spoke to a housing judge who works on the South East circuit, on condition of anonymity. How did they manage the frenetic pace of such crowded lists? ‘You develop techniques,’ the judge told us. ‘The number of issues you need to be able to check on a possession case is huge and you have to take a realistic view. You cannot check everything.’

In the judge’s experience, ‘about one third of people don’t turn up; about one third are represented by the duty solicitor; and about a third have had to deal with the landlord, housing association or local authority beforehand.’

How did they feel, presiding over a court where the stakes were so high and yet so few tenants even turned up? ‘In some way making an order that a mother and her three children leave the property is easier than a young single man because the woman and three kids are going to be rehoused by the

Several defining historical events have shaped Hamas’s foreign policy and international relations. These include Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and 1991, Israel’s expulsion of hundreds of Hamas members to Lebanon in 1992, the PLO’s signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 and Hamas’s election success in 2006. Spanning all of these, US-led attempts to isolate and crush Hamas have failed to sway the organisation from the objectives to which it has been committed since it was founded in 1987. Hamas has survived not only military aggression but also concerted and sustained economic strangulation.

External challenges

Of course, mere survival is not enough. If Hamas is to realise its objectives, the movement will have to overcome a number of external and structural obstacles as well as breathe new life into its foreign relations. Externally, the US-initiated and widely imposed classification of Hamas as a terrorist organisation has drastically curtailed the movement’s ability to establish friendly relations with most western countries. Equally, Israel has played a key role in deterring governments, institutions and individuals from engaging with Hamas.

Undoubtedly, Hamas can and should do far more to cultivate relations with countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. Instruments that work in the Middle East or Africa might not be suitable for Latin America and the organisation must, therefore, establish new mechanisms to overcome any legal and security obstacles it encounters. Accordingly, it is in Hamas’s best interests to train and develop a competent diplomatic corps to meet the challenges and demands of coming decades.

Perhaps one of the most contentious issues that has impeded Hamas’s ability to function internationally has been its determination to resist Israeli occupation and pursue national liberation by all means necessary, including armed struggle. Although the right to armed struggle is upheld in UN Resolutions 2955 and 3034 of December 1972, the stronger trend in contemporary international relations is for disputes to be resolved peacefully. On several occasions, Hamas leaders have offered to suspend hostilities with Israel unilaterally in return for Israel’s complete withdrawal from the territory occupied in 1967. As early as February 1994, Musa Abu Marzouq referred to this in the Jordanian newspaper As Sabeel. Ten years later, both Shaykh Ahmad

refugee

Daud Abdullah

Apart from calling for Hamas’s unilateral disarmament and renunciation of violence, Israel and its allies have insisted that the movement recognise Israel as well as all agreements signed between Israel and the PLO. Hamas has refused to meet these demands and remains blockaded in Gaza, driven underground in the occupied West Bank and demonised in most western countries.

At another level, Hamas’s ability to engage on the global stage has been severely undermined by the PLO and its dominant faction, Fatah. Instead of accepting Hamas as an equal partner in the national movement, Fatah has dealt with Hamas, at best, as a rival, and, at worst, as a threat. A striking example of this occurred when Yasser Arafat, and later Mahmoud Abbas, lobbied the South African government to cancel visits by Hamas leaders.

Despite the campaigns of its adversaries and detractors, Hamas has managed to develop cordial working relations with a number of countries. Malaysia, Qatar, Iran, Turkey, South Africa and Russia are all prominent examples. In Europe, non-EU member states such as Switzerland and Norway have engaged with Hamas at various levels. Of the UN’s 193 member states, 137 (71 per cent) have recognised the State of Palestine.

Accordingly, in December 2017, 128 states approved a UN resolution calling on the USA to withdraw its recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Similarly, in December 2018, the Trump administration failed to secure sufficient votes to pass a UN resolution condemning Hamas. However, the results of the 2018 vote must also be seen as a wake-up call—87 countries voted in favour of the resolution, 57 opposed it, 33 abstained and 23 others absented themselves. If Hamas does not win more friends in the UN’s General Assembly soon, that resolution might well become a fait accompli.

EDITOR’S NOTE

Yasin and Abdul Aziz al-Rantisi repeated the offer. Both were assassinated by the Israelis within months of doing so.

Internal weaknesses

Internally, Hamas must address certain structural weaknesses to improve the conduct of its international relations. Over the years, the movement has allowed several institutions to work in the international arena on its behalf. Although this route was chosen out of necessity, it has given rise to discordant understandings, incoherence, a duplication of efforts and a waste of resources.

In addition, while the movement has a well-established tradition of ‘democratic governance’ and leadership rotation, the first generation of leaders will soon have to make way for the next. In 2012, Khaled Meshaal acknowledged this when he announced that he would be stepping down from the leadership to make way for ‘new blood’. Having forged strong bilateral relations with a number of countries, the movement must ensure that the next generation of leaders has the necessary academic qualifications, experience, communication and social skills to function effectively on the global stage.

Undoubtedly, much of Hamas’s international credibility and recognition rests on its domestic strength. Its 2006 election victory marked a watershed in the movement’s international relations—it was after this that countries such as Russia, South Africa and Malaysia engaged with the Hamas-led elected government. However, subsequent confrontations (and the rift with Fatah, which came to a head in 2007) have since deterred foreign interlocutors and impeded Hamas’s ability to expand its international relations. Ultimately, the greatest losses from the rift have accrued neither

Palestinians in the occupied territories live in two separate entities—Gaza and the West Bank— each governed by rival administrations: Hamas and Fatah. In this book, Daud Abdullah explores the ascendancy of Hamas, locally and globally, looking in particular at its foreign relations policies and its success or otherwise in helping Palestinians achieve their national ambitions. The author is the director of Middle East Monitor (MEMO) and a former senior researcher at the Palestinian Return Centre (London). He has lectured in History at the University of Maiduguri (Nigeria) and in Islamic Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London.

to Hamas nor Fatah but to the Palestinian national project. The need for Palestinian national reconciliation and unity cannot be overemphasised.

Meshaal acknowledged this in November 2017, at a conference organised by the Gaza Centre for Studies and Strategies, stating that ‘the Palestinian cause is experiencing an unprecedented decline at all levels.’ He also stressed the need to ‘unify Palestinian ranks and Palestinian national institutions’.

Facing the future

Throughout its history, Hamas’s central leadership has depended on friendly neighbouring or regional countries for sanctuary. This, in itself, has challenged the movement’s independence and decision making. The movement’s experience in Syria was instructive in this regard. While there was no evidence that the Syrian government ever meddled in Hamas’s internal affairs, when the crisis erupted in 2011, Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, expected Hamas to support him. The difficult choice facing Hamas was whether to adhere to its founding principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries, or to support a regime that had provided the movement with all manner of assis-

ENGAGING THE WORLD

THE MAKING OF HAMAS’S FOREIGN POLICY

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tance for a decade. As soon as Hamas had chosen the former, it was only a matter of time before its relationship with Assad’s regime collapsed.

Just as Hamas has aspired to ground its foreign relations on the principle of non-interference, the organisation is strongly committed to a policy of non-alignment with rival regional blocs. It is important to understand that these policies derived from lessons Hamas learned from observing the PLO in the 1970s and 1980s. However, by 2011, Hamas’s relationship with Syria, Iran and Hizbullah had evolved into the so-called Axis of Resistance. Palestine’s liberation was the goal that brought them together and the alliance seemed to show that Hamas’s early idealist approach to foreign relations had given way to a decidedly realist one. Nevertheless, it can be argued that it was precisely because of its idealism that Hamas had to abandon its base in Syria in 2012.

Ideally, Hamas still favours this policy of non-alignment with any bloc, but realities on the ground suggest that the Palestinians will have to forge alliances if they are to realise their national aspirations. Whether the movement succeeds in weaving strands of both idealism and realism into its international relations will be a subject of ongoing debate. However, what can be said now is that its general approach is by no means one-dimensional. It is, as senior Hamas official Imad al- Alami pointed out, prepared to employ every means to secure maximum benefit for the liberation of Palestine and the restoration of its people’s rights in ways that are consistent with Islamic law.

From its inception, Hamas has regarded the Arab and Islamic lands as their ‘strategic depth’; certainly, the formulation of its foreign policies was based on this perception. However, the situation in the Arab lands in 2020 is quite different to what it

continued in the book

READERS’ COMMENTS

Ilan Pappé: Challenges successfully the common misrepresentation of Hamas in the West. A must-read.

Nur Masalha: The most comprehensive account of Hamas’s international relations to date. Meticulously documents the achievements and shortcomings of a dynamic non-state actor.

From its

camp and Muslim Brotherhood origins, Hamas is now the Palestinians’ main advocate. For better or worse?

To understand not just its high art but the mind of the Renaissance, it is necessary to understand its contrivance of humour Philip Steadman

EDITOR’S NOTE

Renaissance Fun is both an examination of how Renaissance entertainments were made to work and a scholarly essay about the impact on Renaissance designers first of Vitruvius and, as his influenced waned, Hero of Alexandria. Vitruvius, who advised the Roman army on every aspect of building and engineering in the 1st century BC, is the better known; Hero, a century later, much less so but his writings on pneumatics and automata inspired 16th- and 17th-century entertainments as well as providing the model for the proscenium-arch theatre. Read how seas were created on stage and how mechanical birds imitated real birdsong.

In November 1643 the diarist John Evelyn set out from England on a series of journeys around the Low Countries, France and Italy in an early version of the Grand Tour. He visited the classical ruins of Rome and southern Italy; and he saw many of the paintings, sculptures and works of architecture produced in the Renaissance of the visual arts of the previous two centuries.

But Evelyn also enjoyed a great variety of other entertainments and amusements, some serious and refined, others vulgar and trivial. In November 1644 he paid a visit to the Jesuit college in Rome, where the polymath Athanasius Kircher entertained him and his friends with ‘many singular courtesies’. For Evelyn’s party Kircher brought out, ‘with Dutch patience’, his ‘perpetual motions, Catoptrics, Magnetical experiments, Modells, and a thousand other crotchets & devises’. ‘Catoptrics’ was the study of mirrors and the reflection of light. Kircher devised several optical entertainments making use of mirrors and lenses, including camera obscuras and magic lanterns.

Evelyn visited many of the great Renaissance and Baroque gardens of Italy and France, and admired their walks, parterres, groves and statuary both ancient and modern. He was entranced by the ‘jettos’ of water that made patterns of spray in the air in the shapes of glasses, cups, crosses, crowns, and suns. Other fountains imitated the sound of thunder or produced artificial rainbows. In May 1645 he went to the gardens of the Villa d’Este in Tivoli, where he enjoyed the scale model of the city of Rome with its stream representing the Tiber. He writes:

In another

a

artificial,

This was not the only water-powered organ that Evelyn saw. He mentions hearing ‘artificial music’ in several places on his travels.

One more type of entertainment about which Evelyn was greatly enthusiastic was the theatre. Arriving in Venice in June 1645, he went to the opera accompanied by ‘my Lord Bruce’ to see a performance of Hercules in Lydia. The music and singing were ‘excellent’, ‘with variety of Seeanes painted & contrived with no lesse art of Perspective, and Machines, for flying in the aire, & other wonderfull motions (2). So taken together it is doubtlesse one of the most magnificent & expensfull diversions the Wit of Men can invent.’ In Hercules the scenes were changed 13 times.

The common factor in all this variety of entertainments was that they depended on machines. The fountains relied on elaborate systems of water control: aqueducts, reservoirs, pipes and nozzles. Animal and human automata were worked by concealed hydraulic, pneumatic and mechanical apparatus. The machinery of the Renaissance theatre brought celestial personages down from the clouds (‘gods from machines’) and brought charac-

ters from the Underworld up from below. Scenery was rotated, slid, rolled and replaced using yet more mechanical devices. Sets were built and painted to create realistic illusions of depth using the new methods of perspective.

How did these machines work? How exactly were chariots filled with singers let down onto the stage? How were flaming dragons made to fly across the sky? (3) How were seas created on stage? (4) How did mechanical birds imitate real birdsong? How could pipe organs be driven and made to play themselves automatically by waterpower alone? (5)

The designers of Renaissance entertainments looked back to the work of their predecessors in the ancient world. They studied such archaeological evidence as remained: the fountains, theatres and ruined villas of Rome and the Empire. Above all they read those few texts on machines that survived from Rome, Greece and Alexandria. These were translated into Latin and Italian and were studied intently by Renaissance engineers in an attempt to recover and recreate some of that lost world of knowledge and expertise.

First among these ancient writers was Vitruvius, a Roman military engineer and architect who lived in the first century BC. His book On Architecture covers the design of theatres and the scenic decoration of the ancient drama. Vitruvius also devotes just a few sentences to painting in perspective, and its use in the design of stage scenery.

The impact of Vitruvius’s writings on Renaissance theatre design from the fifteenth century was very great, and reached a high point in Andrea Palladio’s Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza of 1585. After this, however, Vitruvius’s influence waned, with a move in theatrical taste away from classical drama towards modern comedies and musical entertainments that demanded a very different kind of theatre building, with much more elaborate scenic machinery.

Interest among designers turned to a second ancient writer: Hero of Alexandria, who lived in the first century AD and worked in Alexandria, where he probably taught and studied in that city’s far-famed Museum and Library. His best-known work is the Pneumatics, which despite the title is largely devoted to ingenious and entertaining devices, some of which operated automatically. These provided models for the automaton figures of humans and animals that populated the garden grottoes of late Renaissance gardens (6).

Hero wrote another book, much less well known, On Automata-Making. This describes the construction of two miniature theatres that put on elaborate performances without human intervention. One of these had a proscenium arch with doors that opened onto a series of scenes, in which figures of men and gods moved in front of mobile scenery (7). It is thus quite unlike the classical open-air theatre; but it does bear close similarities to both the form and the workings of the new Italian theatres of the late sixteenth century. Hero’s importance for Baroque theatrical machinery—which has previously been little appreciated—was crucial.

continued in the book

garden

noble Aviarie, the birds

& singing, til the presence of an Owle appeares, on which the[y] suddainly chang their notes, to the admiration of the Spectators (1): Neere this is the Fountaine of Dragons belching large streames of water, with horrid noises: In another Grotto, called the Grotta di Natura, is an hydraulic Organ …

RENAISSANCE FUN THE MACHINES BEHIND THE SCENES

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READER’S COMMENT

Philip Tabor: Who wouldn’t have paid a scudo to see a cast of hundreds, some naked, all shrieking, while stagehands run about setting the scenery aflame? This generously illustrated book is to be relished for its hair-raising descriptions and thoroughness.

WHY ARE MOST BUILDINGS RECTANGULAR? AND OTHER ESSAYS ON GEOMETRY AND ARCHITECTURE

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READERS’ COMMENTS

Adrian Forty: Erudition and subtle wit make this a most enjoyable book.

Kevin Lomas: A must-read … Steadman’s explanations display polymathic knowledge.

Meta Berghauser Pont: A clear ode to the work of Leslie Martin and Lionel March.

Matthew Allen: Approaches rigorously focused questions with a seemingly inexhaustible array of sources.

VERMEER’S CAMERA UNCOVERING THE TRUTH BEHIND THE MASTERPIECES OUP

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READERS’ COMMENTS

David Hockney: This book is terrific.

Brian Sewell: Exegesis at its most intelligent. Quentin Williams: Diagrams demonstrating how Vermeer used the camera are the most cogent I’ve ever seen.

Frank Whitford: Take it from me: this book is really something.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Philip Steadman is Emeritus Professor of Urban and Built Form Studies at UCL.

From my childhood in rural Cardiganshire (now known as Ceredigion), I was aware of two outstanding Welsh politicians—Aneurin Bevan and James Griffiths. Both played an important role in our lives as a result of their efforts to create the Welfare State but, of the two, James Griffiths was ‘one of us’ as he spoke Welsh and came from Betws, in neighbouring Carmarthenshire, whose community closely reflected my home village of Llanddewi Brefi.

Bevan was not a Welsh speaker and Tredegar, his home town, not only seemed far away to those of us who could not afford a motor car but its Welshness was different. Also, due to his proximity and understanding of my part of Wales, James Griffiths never missed an opportunity to visit Cardiganshire at election times and would fill the largest halls with his oratory and socialist fervour.

When I was a student in Aberystwyth I came to know him personally, and appreciated his support for our student magazine, Aneurin. I still remember the thrill of reading his memoir, Pages from Memory, but felt rather disappointed that his remarkable life—from a boy miner in the Amman Valley, to MP for Llanelli (from 1936 to 1970), to the Cabinet, as Minister for the Colonies, Min-

JIM

THE LIFE AND WORK OF THE RT. HON. JAMES GRIFFITHS

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ister of Pensions, Chairman of the Labour Party, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party and first ever Minister for Welsh Affairs—deserved greater recognition.

The life and work of James Griffiths is a romantic saga. His father, William Griffiths, was a blacksmith and was steeped in the issues of the day. He hero-worshipped W.E. Gladstone and later Tom Ellis and David Lloyd George, and was a loyal member of the local Welsh independent chapel in Ammanford. Meanwhile, Griffiths’ mother, Margaret, cared for her four sons and three daughters, never forgetting the two infant children she lost. Due to the family’s financial circumstances, the seven surviving children were all working by the age of 13 and so never progressed to secondary school. As such, their only means of education was the local elementary school and the chapel.

When he started work as a young collier, Jeremiah became known as James, and was already known simply as ‘our Jim’ or ‘Jim yr Efail’ (Jim of the Smithy/ Forge) when he became President of the South Wales Miners’ Federation. At the beginning of his working life he experienced the 1904-5 Religious Revival and the new theology associated with Reverend R.J. Campbell, as well as the extraordinary impact of Keir Hardie as the prophet of Socialism. His conversion from Liberalism to Socialism had taken place by 1908, the year he lost his eldest brother Gwilym in a mining accident and nearly lost his talented, poetic brother David Rees, known by his eisteddfodic name, Amanwy.

It was also the year he took responsibility for a new branch of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in Ammanford. His ILP convictions brought him into the fellowship of a group of young men alienated from the Liberal Party and the chapels which staunchly supported Lloyd George and the Liberal tradition. A pacifist during

READER’S COMMENT

Huw Edwards (BBC): Ben Rees’s analysis of Griffiths’ rejection of the Liberal tradition and his embracing of Labour is fascinating. Griffiths was a loyal child of the chapel and his early political journey was difficult. Students of the Blair, Brown, Miliband and Corbyn projects will appreciate some striking parallels.

the First World War, James Griffiths made a name for himself as a left-wing firebrand, greatly admired by George Lansbury and others who visited the socialist citadel, Ty Gwyn (White House).

He went on to win a scholarship, through the Miners’ Union, to the Central Labour College in London, where he met like-minded miners such as Bevan, Ness Edwards, Bryn Roberts. His ambition was to be a leader in the trade union movement and achieved this through service, ability and charm as well as through the support … of his young bride, Winifred Rutley from Hampshire, with whom he would have four children. He worked as a political agent, then a miners’ agent, finally becoming Vice President and President of ‘the Fed’, the South Wales Miners’ Union (SWMU). In a by-election in 1936 he kept Labour’s firm grip on Llanelli and proudly served his constituency for the next 34 years, gaining wide respect as a defender of the working class.

Griffiths achieved much during his political career and it was a fitting tribute that, at the age of 74, he became the first Secretary of State for Wales, laying the foundations for the future growth of devolved government in Wales.

the 1870 Forster Act and, under Lewis, every child was forced to learn the English national anthem as quickly as possible.

In the last year of young Jeremiah’s schooling, however, a new teacher, Rhys Thomas, joined the staff. Unlike Lewis, who had not given music any significance in the life of the school, Thomas conducted the local brass band and soon formed a school choir, which Jeremiah joined and enjoyed. The new teacher also spoke Welsh whenever possible and his brother, the Reverend John Thomas of Soar Welsh Independent Chapel in Merthyr Tydfil, went on to be the formative influence on the Griffiths children.

The Ammanford chapel was an important influence on the young Jeremiah and his siblings, with morning and evening worship, the Sunday School in the afternoon and the twice weekly Band of Hope. The first Band of Hope of the week was held at five o’clock on Sunday afternoons and its members met to prepare for the different Christian festivals and especially for the many services held during the Christmas season. The Band of Hope … conveyed to the children the values of temperance, leaving Jeremiah a staunch teetotaller for the rest of his life.

D. Ben Rees

At the end of the Victorian era, the Amman Valley and Gwendraeth Valley saw an influx of newcomers who came to seek work in the anthracite coalfield and the developing tinplate industry. Many coal mines were opened in these valleys and were often given poetic Welsh names.

In the 30 years between 1870 and 1900, collieries rapidly opened in rural Carmarthenshire. Indeed, the small village of Cross Inn became an important population centre and was renamed Ammanford, or in Welsh, Rhydaman. As recorded in the 1891 census, Ammanford was a thoroughly Welsh-speaking town, as were all the villages surrounding it, and this remained the case for generations: the 1961 census noted that 79 percent of the population of Betws spoke Welsh. The colliery in Betws was opened in the 1890s and it was mainly responsible for the growth of the village, which stands across the river Amman.

It was in Betws that James Griffiths was born in 1890. His parents named him Jeremiah Griffiths, after the Old Testament prophet, with a secret wish that one day he would be a well-loved preacher in the pulpits of their Welsh Independent denomination, Yr Annibynwyr Cymraeg (the Welsh Independents), an exclusively Welsh-speaking denomination. The newly born baby was christened at Gellimanwydd chapel (known locally by its English name as the Christian Temple).

In his adult life, James Griffiths always paid homage to his upbringing in the Sunday School and the Band of Hope, and in particular, the influence of the local station master, John Evans, who presided at the meetings. Evans had an amazing ability to communicate with the children, and they in turn hero-worshipped him. His first sentence at the beginning of every Band of Hope meetings was always ‘Nawr, ’te, mhlant i’ (Now then, my children) and every Sunday afternoon and week-night meeting began with the well-known children’s hymn, Mae Iesu Grist yn derbyn plant bychain fel nyni (Jesus Christ accepts small children like us).

As well as warning about the evils of alcohol, he taught them to participate in debate and public speaking, and built up their confidence. When Evans died on 5 November 1918 at the early age of 46, Griffiths paid him a hearty tribute in the local weekly newspaper, praising his lost mentor for the ‘wonderful way he had with us’.

The problem of our age [he wrote] is the proper administration of wealth, that the ties of brotherhood may still bind together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship. There remains, then, only one mode of using great fortunes; but in this we have the true antidote for the temporary unequal distribution of wealth, the reconciliation of the rich and the poor.

The charisma and the influence of Evans remained with Griffiths into later life:

Young Jeremiah was educated in the local Board School in Betws and the Christian Temple Sunday School in Ammanford. The headmaster of the Board School, John Lewis, was a staunch Anglican, ran the school for 42 years from 1871 to 1912 and, despite being a Welsh speaker, was never heard speaking Welsh within the confines of the school. The Welsh language was effectively banished from all schools in Wales after continued in the book

Gone are the sermons we heard in those days, few of the exhortations remain, but the memory of John Evans and his Band of Hope remains as a sweet, ennobling influence in our lives.

At the end of every Band of Hope meeting, Evans would recite the verse:

EDITOR’S NOTE

James Griffiths was a remarkable combination of Britishness and Welshness. He was the originator of several UK political institutions in the second half of the 20th century. As Minister for National Insurance he created the modern state benefits system, and introduced the Family Allowances Act 1945, the National Insurance Act 1946 and the National Assistance and Industrial Injuries Act 1948. He also served as the first Secretary of State for Wales from 1964, having campaigned for such a post for 30 years. In Jim, Ben Rees explores his life from his childhood to his rise through colliery politics and his central role in the Labour Party.

Less remembered now than Aneurin Bevan, the MP James Griffiths was arguably the brightest star in the Attlee firmament

The richest man in the world emigrated to America in 1848 but built 35 libraries in Wales. Their impact was transformative Ralph A. Griffiths

EDITOR’S NOTE

Andrew Carnegie was the world’s wealthiest industrialist in the late 19th century and its most generous. He wrote about the importance of philanthropy and led by example, giving away 90 per cent of his own wealth—about $350 million—in his later life. Wales benefited massively. The library system that Carnegie’s bounty created helped to transform Welsh literacy, especially political literacy, at a time when public education was hugely in demand. The author discusses Carnegie’s achievement and legacy as well as looking at his buildings’ likely future.

Free public libraries are at the heart of civil society in the United Kingdom and stand as witness to its quality. During the 20th century they strove to bring knowledge, learning and leisure to the entire population, men, women and children, if more easily in towns and cities than in country districts—and they continue to do so.

At the beginning of the century the challenge was to establish free public libraries from coast to coast and to sustain them by engaging the public that they were intended to serve. At the century’s end, the challenge appears to have been to maintain the publicly funded countrywide library system which had emerged by mid-century to enrich‘the cultural fabric of communities’, despite the consequences of two world wars. This is as true of Wales as it is of the other countries of the United Kingdom.

Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919), the Scots-American industrial entrepreneur and philanthropist, was a pivotal figure during early stages of this saga, in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and more broadly in the USA and elsewhere in the English-speaking world. His permanent legacy is represented by a considerable number of Carnegie Foundation Trusts which continue to support cultural, educational and other causes, and, in Wales, by library buildings which remain part of the country’s social, cultural, educational and architectural heritage.

Carnegie was a remarkably successful industrialist and steel-maker who became one of the world’s most notable entrepreneurs and philanthropists. He is judged to be ‘the world’s first modern philanthropist’ and, according to his fellow billionaire J. P. Morgan, during his lifetime the world’s richest man. In the winter of 2013–14 an exhibition held at the Scottish Parliament by the Carnegie Trust UK (in association with the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland) celebrated his international educational and cultural legacy. His native Scotland has been a handsome beneficiary of this legacy, but Carnegie did not neglect Wales, especially in the way he helped to create public libraries in communities where few or none had existed before.

Yet his Welsh legacy has been neglected, not least because the extent of his personal support for library provision in Wales has not been fully identified and recorded. A proposal in December 2013 that his and the Trust’s philanthropy in Wales should be celebrated with an exhibition at the National Assembly for Wales was not pursued.

However, the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales’s website, www.coflein.org.uk, has begun to record some of the thirty or so libraries which were created as a result of generous gifts by Carnegie himself, totalling thousands of pounds, in the decade before the First World War—and that is aside from the grants he offered and which, for a variety of reasons, were not taken up. The Carnegie libraries of Wales helped to boost the public library movement in Wales and were instrumental in transforming the lives of the communities they served, in all parts of Wales from Dolgellau to Barry, from Tai-bach to Wrexham.

Now that public libraries are facing financial difficulties and, in some cases, a less certain future, Carnegie’s support for towns and parishes which were keen to sponsor free libraries for the general public is an inspiring example of how private wealth can be set to the public good.

Some Carnegie libraries—such as the buildings at Abergavenny (opened in 1906), Bangor (1907) and Treharris (1909)—continue to function as libraries, engaging the public and inspiring pride in those who work in them. A few are neglected (including Aberystwyth’s library, opened in 1906), and yet others have been strikingly refurbished by their local authorities (as at Colwyn Bay (1905) and Cathays, Cardiff (1907)), or are now given over to other public community purposes (as in Brynmawr (1905) and Bridgend (1907)). Only a very small number have been either disposed of (such as the small library at Troedyrhiw) or demolished (as in Abercanaid (1903)).

Like church and chapel buildings in Wales, the Carnegie libraries were built close to the heart of their communities, acting as community centres and meeting places or else, more fundamentally, as freely available havens for quiet contemplation and self-improvement. Today, when the professional public librarian seems to be about to join the ranks of endangered species, the local librarian and their (usually volunteer) assistants who staff these libraries are the successors of those librarians who have placed their specialist knowledge at the disposal of young readers as well as adult men and women, the poor and the better-off and thereby changed lives, deploying what has been identified as their ‘capacity for empathy’.

andrew carnegie was not the first to sponsor free public libraries in Wales, the United Kingdom and the United States. In Great Britain and Ireland he was able to further his ambition within a context set by several Public Libraries Acts passed by parliament from 1850 onwards. These gave powers to a broadening range of local authorities in the second half of the 19th century to establish free libraries and museums. Despite some persistent opposition, boroughs, then towns and then parishes were empowered to levy a halfpenny and then a penny rate for this purpose, provided they secured a measure of democratic endorsement.

This was a major step beyond the earlier creation of privately endowed and subscription libraries.

Scepticism lingered in a number of quarters, and the ambition of some small towns and parishes to have their own libraries outran the ability of their populations to raise sufficient funds from the rates, hence the need for philanthropy to support the public library movement almost from its beginnings. The present-day dilemma for local authorities as the democratic and accountable bodies responsible for public libraries is not new. Whilst still in his 40s, Andrew Carnegie resolved to help.

Carnegie was a visionary, and rare among the wealthy entrepreneurs of his day—and for long after. His philanthropy was not directly linked to his own business interests or to his family, and his countless benefactions were made throughout much of his career, not simply

FREE AND PUBLIC ANDREW CARNEGIE AND THE LIBRARIES OF WALES University of Wales Press

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ralph Griffiths is Emeritus Professor of Medieval History at Swansea University, Hon. Vice-President of the Royal Historical Society and a former Chairman of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales.

towards its end. His gift-giving, especially in the United States of America, gathered speed during the 1880s and 1890s when he was still an active businessman and entrepreneur. Moreover, he formulated a personal philosophy of philanthropy which he publicized in his writings. Among his prolific writings on industrial, economic and political issues are two essays written in 1889 on ‘Wealth’ and ‘Best Fields for Philanthropy’, which were first published in the North American Review His extraordinarily influential essay on ‘Wealth’ was reprinted many times and with the more elevated title, ‘Gospel of Wealth’.

He wrestled with questions of the social and economic purposes of wealth, how it should be deployed by those who possess it and the social equality that it could and should promote. For, like a number of fellow prominent businessmen, he had a fundamental belief in political and social equality allied to equality of opportunity.

The problem of our age [he wrote] is the proper administration of wealth, that the ties of brotherhood may still bind together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship. There remains, then, only one mode of using great fortunes; but in this we have the true antidote for the temporary unequal distribution of wealth, the reconciliation of the rich and the poor.

For Carnegie, charity was not an end in itself, but rather it should ‘help those who will help themselves … to assist, but rarely or never to do all’; neither should giving be ‘impulsive and injurious’. Drawing on his own life and experiences, his conclusion was, for him, inescapable: among ‘the best uses to which a millionaire can devote the surplus of which he should regard himself as only the trustee’ is a ‘free library … provided the community will accept and maintain it as a public institution’. As for the wealthy , his verdict is famous: ‘The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced’. In a later essay, in 1891, ‘The Advantages of Poverty’, Carnegie went so far as to declare that ‘There is really no true charity except that which will help others to help themselves, and place within the reach of the aspiring the means to climb’. His ideas and declared intentions were popularly admired, in Wales as elsewhere, especially in places which were in receipt of his benefactions. In the industrial port of Barry in south Wales, to which he granted the large sum of £8,000 for a new library in 1902, the Christmas eisteddfod held at the Welsh Congregational Chapel in dockland awarded the main prize for extravagant verses on ‘Carnegie’ that rose to biblical hyperbole:

An influence for good, a mighty power Is wealth in hands that know its real worth. Who hold their riches not as fortune’s dower, But held in trust for Him who rules the earth. Who seek not acclamation or reward, But simply follow the Divine command, And, as a faithful steward of the Lord’s, Dispense His bounty with a lavish hand; Which is the man whose name a household word Is now where’er the English tongue is heard. No sporting millionaire is he, who fain Would crown an empty head with wreath of bay,

WHO SPEAKS FOR WALES? NATION, CULTURE, IDENTITY

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READERS’ COMMENTS

Cornel West: The last of the great European male revolutionary socialist intellectuals.

Michael Sheen: A truly landmark publication…. The new afterword shows how Raymond Williams’s thinking is as important and relevant today as it has ever been.

Preface | Daniel G. Williams

Who Speaks for Wales? first appeared in March 2003. It collected in one place the Welsh-related essays of Raymond Williams (1921–88) and was conceived and compiled in the years following the narrow vote for Welsh devolution in the referendum of 1997.

If a distinctive Welsh political culture was to develop, and if devolution was to be a ‘process’ rather than an ‘event’, a sense of common aspiration and interest would need to be forged between the socialist and minority nationalist threads of Welsh political radicalism as embodied institutionally in the Labour party and Plaid Cymru.

Raymond Williams’s thought and writings offered resources for forging a rapprochement between these traditions, and that is what I was attempting to foster in my emphasis in the introduction on the pluralism of Williams’s vision, on the questions asked as opposed to the answers offered, and on the ways in which Williams’s self-defined ‘Welsh-Europeanism’ could be seen as a manifestation of his call on socialists to engage in a project of exploring ‘new forms of “variable” societies in which different sizes of society’ could be ‘defined for different kinds of issue and decision’.

When the volume was launched, the Labour government of Tony Blair was two years into its second term in Westminster. Raymond Williams had warned in the 1980s that destroying public common interests in the name of private solutions would drive whatever was left of the ‘public’ sector into crisis, starved of investment. This is what the Thatcherite neoliberal agenda delivered, perpetuated by Blair’s Labour.

Wales registered an early resistance to this neoliberal programme in the first elections to the new National Assembly in 1999. While Blair openly admitted that he regarded the devolved institutions to be little more than ‘parish councils’, Wales at least now had a vehicle where its political voice could be heard.

In the first elections to the new Assembly, Labour won as expected, but Plaid Cymru surpassed expectations by gaining 30.5% of the vote (outperforming her Scottish sister party, the SNP). Labour learnt its lesson and soon deposed the Blairite Alun Michael, putting Rhodri Morgan in his place as First Minister. Morgan had political roots in the hopes and aspirations of the Labour movement and, as the son of T. J. Morgan, onetime Professor of Welsh at Swansea University, also had a foot in the traditions of Welsh language culture. Evoking the legacy of Aneurin Bevan, Morgan set out to create ‘clear red water’ between ‘classic’ Welsh Labour and Blairism.

Morgan understood that welfare systems have profound effects on the wider social framework. He knew that the principle of ‘social insurance’ was not only efficient but was also a way of underwriting an evolving sense of Welsh citizenship; that ‘universalist’ policies (free bus passes, free prescriptions, free school breakfasts) were essential to binding the richer sections of society into collective forms of welfare. Thus, while Blair was reconstructing the Labour Party along the lines of

Raymond Williams embraced Europeanism and Welsh nationalism. Brexit defeated both. Where does that leave him? Daniel G. Williams

EDITOR’S NOTE

First published in 2003, this collection was the first to bring together Raymond Williams’s musings on the meaning and significance of Welsh identity. At the time it seemed to provide a fresh basis for reviewing ideas of nationalism and socialism in Welsh thought. This new edition, with new material and a new afterword, appears at a very different time, following the apparent rejection of Williams’s Welsh-European vision by Welsh voters in the 2016 Brexit referendum and the great superstructure of analytical socialism that he subscribed to. Nonetheless, says its editor, Williams remains essential reading on questions of nationhood in Britain and beyond.

Bill Clinton’s neoliberal Democrats in the United States, Rhodri Morgan was establishing a new Welsh polity based on European social-democratic values.

This social-democratic vision informed the period of coalition with Plaid Cymru from 2007 to 2011. The affirmative ‘Yes’ vote (63.49%) for Wales to have law-making powers in the referendum of 2011 seemed to suggest that the ‘Welsh European’ project was very much on track.

Retrospectively, the low turn-out of 35.2% in that referendum should have been a cause for concern. The form of ‘Welsh welfarism’ failed to escape the straightjacket of British politics. Labour in Wales had to keep its devolution-sceptic wing happy, making sure that it never appeared ‘too nationalist’. Yet, the party’s electoral success depended on the impression that it was ‘standing up’ for Welsh interests.

The way to alleviate these tensions was to trumpet relatively minor state interventions as ‘standing up for Wales’. Welshness was made equivalent to welfarism, in a process that equated class with cultural identity. The project of common social advancement was largely abandoned by Labour for the administration, alleviation and ultimately—if unintentionally—preservation of relative poverty. This political stagnation led to the rise of the Right-wing populism that was an unfortunate feature of Welsh politics in the 2010s.

We celebrate Williams’s centenary under the dark shadow of the European Union membership referendum of 2016. While Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to remain in Europe, Wales followed England in voting to leave. In the face of a virulent, intolerant Right, there was space to develop a federal vision in which English, Welsh and Scottish Europeans would rejuvenate the Left—a realisation of the rainbow coalition of green, minority nationalist and socialist forces that Raymond Williams imagined in his final years. The failure to do so will haunt progressive politics for a generation.

It remains to be seen whether the writings of Raymond Williams document a vision of a ‘Europe of the peoples and nations’ that was never to be realised, or whether they will become crucial, foundational, texts in the rejuvenation and future fulfilment of that Welsh-European vision. Williams noted that Welsh history testifies to a ‘quite extraordinary process of self-generation and regeneration, from what seemed impossible conditions’. This new Centenary Edition has been prepared with these words in mind.

The

Welsh Industrial Novel | Raymond Williams

The inaugural Gwyn Jones Lecture

April 1978

English middle-class novelists observed the industrial landscape under the crisis of Chartism. All shaped what they saw and showed with narratives of the reconciliation of conflict. That part of their ideology is easily recognized. But all to some extent, and Elizabeth Gaskell to a remarkable extent, succeeded in peopling this strange, fierce world; succeeded, that is, in the crucial transition from Dickens’s type of industrial

panorama to the industrial novel.

It was a remarkable crystallization, but what is also remarkable is that it did not last. As the social crisis faded, other forms of fiction succeeded it. There is a brief and altered example in the 1860s, in George Eliot’s Felix Holt, shaped by the crisis of the suffrage. There is a specific new form, in the 1880s, in the novels of George Gissing, primarily novels of the crisis of the city—of course the industrial city which London’s East End had become, but also that East End against a West End [and] a distancing between the lives of working people and the values of literature.

Lawrence, of course, was to come, but we can understand some of his difficulties if we remember that characteristic comment by Katherine Mansfield on one of his plays that it was ‘black with miners’.

Black with miners, meanwhile, were the valleys of South Wales. There, indeed, was to be a new crystallization, a new form of the industrial novel. But knowing what we do of the history, this coming of the Welsh industrial novel is, at first sight, surprisingly late. It is the lateness as well as the significant emergence that we have now to try to understand.

In certain respects, and notably in ironworking and in mining, the Industrial Revolution came almost as early to Wales as to England. By the middle of the nineteenth century three workers out of five in Wales were in jobs not connected with farming. One in three were in mines, quarries and industrial enterprises. But then in the second half of the nineteenth century there was a further major transformation: the intense development of valleys like the Rhondda, in the independent coal trade; the very rapid expansion of Cardiff as a coal port.

But still, through almost the whole of the nineteenth century, the Welsh industrial novels did not come. There is perhaps one quite general reason for this . The English industrial novelists touched mainly the textile districts, the new mills, or as in Kingsley the sweatshops of London. George Eliot, in the next generation, is in touch mainly with craftsmen, though she is aware, as in Felix Holt, of a mining district, of which she is clearly nervous.

Thus it is not until the second decade of the twentieth century, with Lawrence, that fiction effectively touches the kinds of industry and community which have been most important in Wales. So in that sense, for these kinds of work, there is perhaps no specifically Welsh delay. But there is nevertheless, I believe, a distinguishably Welsh reason for lateness, and this has to do, above all, with the central problems of language and the literary tradition.

The idea of ‘the spirit of place’ abounds in anthologies of literature and poetry. I’ll refer here only to one: the book put out by Richard Aldington in 1944 entitled, precisely, The Spirit of Place

The reason I select this anthology for scrutiny is that it is devoted to the work of one of the very few English writers of the 20th century who have really and deeply interested me: D. H. Lawrence.

I can’t read him much today, because I find his style all too repetitive and hyper-nervously staccatic but he has intuitions, fulgurations, perceptions galore, and a lot of it centres on a sensation of place. Here he is on England:

England, my England! But which is my England? The stately homes of England make good photographs, and create the illusion of a connection with the Elizabethans. The handsome old halls are there, from the days of Good Queen Anne and Tom Jones. But smuts fall and blacken on the drab stucco, that has long ceased to be golden. And one by one, like the stately homes, they were abandoned. Now they are being pulled down. As for the cottages of England – there they are – great plasterings of brick dwellings on the hopeless countryside.

Here he is on Sicily:

Lovely, lovely Sicily, the dawn-place, Europe’s dawn, with Odysseus pushing his ship out of the shadows into the blue. Whatever had died for me, Sicily had then not died: dawnlovely Sicily and the Ionian sea.

But to come now to conceptual and cultural issues. In his Introduction, Aldington has this:

These passages of The Spirit of Place have been chosen because I believe they illustrate a side of Lawrence which is most accessible to English writers, and most likely to delight them. This love of the non-human world both for its own sake and in its relations with human beings is not peculiar to English literature but is a strong and persistent feature, as everyone recognizes. French literature always tends to become absorbed in purely human and social interests; with the Italians of the Renaissance ‘Nature’ was a theme for very formal treatment, while with the modern Italians it is a theme for rhetorical treatment and is made to share the hysteria of the protagonists. In Spain, Azorin is a great exception—for him the visible world exists and he is almost perfect in his evocation of the unique moment of the Spirit of Place. But for him the spirit of time past is as important—Una Hora d’Espagna—and there is always the human figure, always the Latin tendency to conventional formal abstraction. The world of the English is wider and more irregular. They are picture-thinkers, but the picture moves.

There’s a certain amount of truth in this, but only a certain amount, and it’s middle-zone truth.

If it can be said with some degree of validity that the English mentality is more ‘nature-friendly’ than rationalistic France, and that English literature has more nature-writing than the literature of France, which does indeed tend (at least in the middle-zone) to ‘human and social interests’, it has to be immediately noted that it’s by study and analysis of the human that one can move beyond conventional conceptions of individual and social humanity.

The only man to attempt this on the British scene was David Hume, and he had a hard time of it, feeling intel-

lectually at home only in France. It could also be said, in passing, that when Aldington says of Azorin that for him ‘the visible world exists’, he is quoting, verbatim, but apparently unknowingly, or forgetfully, a French writer, Théophile Gautier. It also looks as if he knew nothing at all of, for example, Victor Hugo on the Channel Islands, or Jean Giono in Provence.

But to come back across the Channel.

That the ‘poetry of place’ is a feature of English literature, there is no doubt. Again, anthologies abound. With some rare but notable exceptions (Hopkins, Doughty, Powys), English poetry of place is, to say the least, homely. It began with the praise of country houses on landed property, as seen with Pope, and it tends to stay in that context. Even Wordsworth can come perilously close to the established Housman–Betjeman line. By ‘Housman’, I mean of course A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad, that cycle of sixty-three poems, with its evocations of ‘blue remembered hills’, ‘the broom […] on Wenlock Edge’ and ‘the land of lost content’, and its message—life is short, love is fleeting, death is round the corner—that was carried by so many English soldiers into the trenches of the 1914–18 War, in a spirit of nostalgia, compensation and resignation.

As to Betjeman, John, they were presented by the magazine Time and Tide as follows: ‘Mr Betjeman is genius loci, the fond topographer at our elbow to reveal to us undreamt-of visual and social joys. Here is a proud, passionate, pugnacious, poetical Englishman, writing from the heart about his own country, her land, her buildings, her people.’ And we could extend the list of poets and geography to, say, Crabbe on the Sussex coast, Cowper on the banks of the Ouse, Barnes in Dorsetshire, and so on.

But with this English ‘poetry of place’ we never go beyond locality as localism.

Place as Heimat

It’s because modern man has been exposed there to more plights and perils than England has known, but also because thinking has gone on there in a larger field, with sharper concepts, that it’s to a certain Europe I now turn. There, the equivalent of the English ‘poetry of place’ is a preoccupation with Heimat, the German word now in common usage in this context.

I may say as a preamble that I can’t look without deep emotion at photographs in one of the Heimat books in my library: photographs of the Harz mountains, the Lüneburger Heide, a Black Forest house in the snow, the Schwäbische Alb, early spring on the Bodensee, the cliffs at Rügen, Goethe’s garden house in Weimar, Bacharach on the Rhine, the port of Danzig, the Wanderdünen (moving dunes) on the East Prussian coast.

It was when travelling in Poland and in that Grenzgebiet (border region) between East Prussia and western Russia that I began looking into the local problematics more conceptually and making initial contacts. A hefty collective volume entitled The Face of My Homeland, published in 1996, brings together texts in German,

Malpas and Kenneth White

EDITOR’S NOTE

Jeff Malpas heard Kenneth White on the radio in Australia and wrote to him, exchanging ideas and eventually meeting at White’s home in Brittany. This book is the result of their conversations. It argues that the world is beset by crude fundamentalisms that are destructive of live thought and authenticity, and it contains two essays—one by each writer—and a set of philosophical poems by White. Central to their thinking are ideas about the politics of place, notions of being, and our understanding of what is meant by ‘world’—questions also explored in Malpas’s books on Heidegger: Heidegger’s Topology and Heidegger and the Thinking of Place.

alongside texts translated into German from Polish, Russian and Lithuanian.

What the book sets out to do is gather traces of a ‘sunken world’, referred to metaphorically as ‘the Atlantis of the North’, and it does so with a sense of urgency, a determined cogency and a will to coherence. If it contains texts, marked by nostalgia and pathos, of a homecoming after long years of exodus and exile (‘Who will give us back our dreams?’, ‘Only the storks remain’), if it talks of Selbstfindung (self-discovery), it goes beyond any facile identity ideology and its frequent concomitant, narrow nationalism.

In its search for traces, it goes back into Latin texts, for example, those of Copernicus, from there to the essays of Kant on Enlightenment, and thereafter to the literary writings of such as Arno Holz, Hermann Sudermann, Max Fürst, Ferdinand Gregorovius, with their evocations of the Baltic coast, the lakes and woods of Ermland (now, in Polish, Warmia) and Masuren (Mazury), as well as towns such as Tilsit (Tylza), Wilma (Wilno), Allenstein (Olsztyn), not forgetting Kant’s place, the old grey town of Königsberg.

What I see in this whole enterprise, which involves landscape, history and culture, is the attempt to get beyond anything like regional thematics, small- minded localism, couthy homeliness. If the heart is present, any dwelling in sentimentality is out, the accent is on a place of the mind (geistige Heimat), and if there is a search for identity, it is ‘new identity’, that is, it takes place outside the search for ‘roots’. Over against anything like identity ideology, it is universal value that is put forward. Close to this in my reading is the outreaching to a new sense of Europe, outside the mental categories of the nation-state, and beyond what perhaps can be seen as the intermediary stages of glasnost and perestroika.

More abstractly still, there is the need to cross over limits and boundaries—with the increasing awareness thereby of the need for ‘surroundings’ (Umwelt). Lastly, but not leastly, a word turns up in these pages on which I’d like to insist and give more emphasis to: Anfangsgründe, grounds for a new beginning.

I’ve concentrated here on developments in that high north-eastern territory, but propositions and projects going more or less in a similar direction can be detected all over Europe. In 1990, I took part in a German (English-German) symposium on ‘Regionalism, Nationality and Internationality in Contemporary Poetry’. It did not go far, but it was at least on a potentially interesting line. German contributions included ‘The Landscape Poetry of Jürgen Becker’ and ‘Postwar Berlin, a Playground, a Grey Place’ by Uwe Kolbe. As for English language poetry, the contribu- tions went, in a predictable kind of way, from a study on the poetry of Edward Thomas, followed by others on Geoffrey Hill (‘A Mercia of the Mind’), ‘Tony Harrison and the Poetry of Leeds’, and ‘Myth, Language and Place in Seamus Heaney’s Poetry’. My own contribution was entitled: ‘The Atlantic Seaboard: Poetic Topology of the European West’. It all comes down to the question of topology. continued in the book

THOUGHT, POETICS, WORLD Edinburgh University Press

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Jeff Malpas is Emeritus Distinguished Professor at the University of Tasmania in Hobart and Distinguished Visiting Professor at LaTrobe University in Melbourne.

Kenneth White is a Scots-European writer and held the Chair of Twentieth Century Poetics at Paris-Sorbonne from 1983 to 1996. He publishes in English and French.

An Australian philosopher and a Scottish poet met to explore their different approaches to a common field. Read on Jeff

Shakespeare is too frequently removed from his context. This book learns about him from a hundred of his neighbours Geoffrey Marsh

EDITOR’S NOTE

The years 1593–98 mark Shakespeare’s transition from theatrical arriviste to theatrical professional. Living in Shoreditch, to the north of the Tower of London, he was a regular churchgoer and a recognisable figure among the other residents of his parish. Their stories shed new light on his rewriting of existing stories, his completion of Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Merchant of Venice and the building of his reputation as part of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men at The Theatre. The author’s weaving of primary research and new discoveries takes further the groundbreaking work of James Shapiro.

LIVING WITH SHAKESPEARE

SAINT HELEN’S PARISH, LONDON, 1593–1598

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Geoffrey Marsh runs the Theatre and Performing Arts dept. of the V&A in London. He is the co-editor of David Bowie Is and You Say You Want a Revolution: Records and Rebels, 1966-70.

ILLUSTRATIONS

Above: Tower of London, 1614–17. Below: Leathersellers’ Company wardens, 1604

A man in his late twenties is sitting at an oak writing desk. Wrapped in his cloak, he is reading and rereading a heavily scrawled sheet of paper by the light of a tall wax candle. His finger follows the lines of verse:

To fill with worm-holes stately monuments, To feed oblivion with decay of things, To blot old books and alter their contents, To pluck the quills from ancient ravens’ wings, To dry the old oak’s sap and blemish springs, To spoil antiquities of hammered steel, And turn the giddy round of fortune’s wheel

He dips his quill pen into the inkpot and puts a line through ‘blemish springs’, he can do better than that, but what? And ‘the giddy round of fortune’s wheel’ indeed. He changes his mind and writes ‘springs’ back in. He likes the image of young trees, ‘springs’, contrasting with the heaviness of ‘old oak’s sap’. Then he writes in ‘cherish springs’. The alterations are becoming a blotty mess and he is still unsure.

Somewhere, close by, a baby screams and screams.

The young man puts down his quill pen in frustration and stands up; how can he work in such conditions? He is torn between the apparent safety of Stratford-upon-Avon and his terror of plague-ridden London, which the royal court has abandoned for the comparative safety of Windsor Castle. He needs to be, has to be, around dynamic people, success and money to inspire him. Skulking in plague-free Stratford would be safer but he gets nothing done there, as family, friends and people he hardly knows disturb him with endless tittle-tattle, gossip this and gossip that and requests for loans. News of his success in London has filtered back and people think he has money to spare. His growing fame is becoming a curse where his home town is concerned.

He must, he must get his new narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece finished. He is weeks behind. His first, Venus and Adonis, fortuitously published in May before the plague got started again, has been a critical success. Already, he is spoken of with respect, the flirtatious eroticism appealing to the young men about town and the gentlemen studying law at the Inns of Court.

Now is she in the very lists of love, Her champion mounted for the hot encounter. All is imaginary she doth prove. He will not manage her, although he mount her, That worse than Tantalus’ is her annoy, To clip Elysium, and to lack her joy.

The closure of the theatres since 1592, due to the outbreak of plague, has shown he cannot rely on acting for his livelihood. He needs to find a reliable and generous patron and for that he must be in London, whatever the risks. The winter frosts will soon chase the plague away. What he requires are living quarters where he can write without distraction.

His new work needs to be a powerful success, to show that Venus and Adonis was not a lucky one-off by a provincial with no university education.

Also, there are darker and more disturbing threats at work than just the circling plague. Only five months ago, his colleague and fellow dramatist Christopher Marlowe was killed, stabbed with a dagger in his face, during a drunken brawl in Deptford. Knowing Kit’s quick wit and quicker temper, anything is possible, but there are credible rumours that the authorities decided he knew too much and had him murdered. Thomas Kyd, another talented dramatist who once shared lodgings with Marlowe, was taken into custody. Now he has been discharged but he is broken in mind, spirit and body. Kyd refuses to speak of his interrogation and has slunk away into some unknown alley to nurse his wounds.

As for himself, he is careful about where he goes and what he says. All his papers are now locked in a chest in his lodgings and he keeps the key to himself.

He sits down, picks up his quill pen again, wipes it clean and then dips it into the oak-gall ink. ‘To slay….’ –but to slay what?

To slay the tiger that doth live by slaughter, To tame the unicorn and lion wild, He feels his creative rhythm pick up. He continues writing far into the night.

This book links together three cultural drivers of mid–late Elizabethan London to explore the crucible of one of the greatest periods of English creativity. They involve:

• A man who has moved the world;

• A theatre which was physically uprooted and moved about a mile in 1598/9 to be recast, reopened and renamed; and

• A place, an ancient London parish, particularly its

church, which has never moved but, like its neighbours, witnessed a sixteenth century of cultural, economic and particularly religious upheaval.

it is, therefore, a book about movement, fluctuating stability, human migration and urban change, with the resulting shifts in people, sounds, words, language, ideas, identities—and hence society. Plato wrote: ‘When the sound of the music changes, the walls of the City shake.’ Here, we will be looking at a time when the sound of English theatre changed.

The man is the poet, playwright and actor William Shakespeare (1564–1616).

The theatre is ‘The Theatre’ and was originally constructed in Shoreditch, just north of the City of London, in 1576 before being ‘stolen’, if you can steal a building, in late December 1598. For at least the last four years (1594–8) of its 22-year life, was the main workplace of Shakespeare as a member of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men theatre company. Shakespeare not only wrote and acted with this group but was also one of eight sharers in its profits. It is highly likely that ten or so of his plays, including Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, were premiered there. Shakespeare must also have been involved, at some level, in its ‘theft’. In 1599, the Theatre reappeared, phoenix-like, on Bankside in Southwark, across the River Thames. It had been given a new identity, the Globe and was to become one of the most famous buildings in the world.

The place is the parish of St Helen’s, Bishopsgate, nestling in the north-east corner of the City of London. By modern standards the parish seems tiny, about seven acres or so, just 30,000m2. Today, it is dominated by enormous office buildings like the Gherkin and the Cheesegrater, filled during the day by thousands of workers in financial, insurance and legal services. In the 1590s, it lay just inside the city walls by Bishopsgate, the main gateway to the north of England. Then, it was also a thriving, wealthy, bustling community of perhaps 550–650 merchants, textile traders and leatherworkers with a scattering of MPs, gentry and artists. These individuals were not commuters but residents who lived, worked and usually died together in the parish.

Among them, certainly in 1597/8, was William Shakespeare. As we will uncover, it is likely that Shakespeare lived in St Helen’s for four or five years, from late 1593/4 until 1598, when the Theatre was providing his main livelihood. It is possible that he moved there earlier, perhaps in 1592 or even before.

These five years, just either side of Shakespeare’s thirtieth birthday in April 1594, formed a crucial stage in his career. It has long been recognised that the move to the newly constructed Globe Theatre in 1599 coincided with the start of the sequence of his great tragedies, beginning with Hamlet. Did the roots of this new phase in his imagination lie in his life in St Helen’s or was it leaving the parish that helped liberate this new creativity? Did the inception of Hamlet date back to before 1599 and did the crucible of its moral questioning lie in the final seasons at the Theatre, in dinner-table deliberations with his neighbours and long evenings of introspection, staring out across the graveyard of St Helen’s?

By law, everybody in Elizabethan England had to worship in their parish church on Sunday and for Shakespeare this was St Helen’s, even if he attended other services. Every church was part of the Church of England. To the state, religious and local civic authorities, Shakespeare was no different from any other parishioner. So, on most Sunday mornings, as the church minister John Oliver led his flock through the officially authorised Protestant service, somewhere among the high-backed wooden ‘box pews’ and low oak benches, Shakespeare would have been sitting, listening, standing, repeating the psalms, watching and thinking. Having almost certainly left his wife Anne and three children in Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare would have been an independent man in his early thirties, surrounded by a congregation largely made up of settled families, male apprentices and young female domestic servants.

If one crept into the back of the service on Sunday morning, 23 October 1597, there would probably have been Robert Hubbard near the front, presumably singing in tune as he was classed a gentleman musician, and his fertile wife Katherine. She had given birth to at least 11 children over the last 16 years and although a couple had fallen victim to the high infant mortality rate, she would still have had to shepherd continued in the book

VALENTINE ACKLAND A TRANSGRESSIVE LIFE Handheld Classics Softback, 270 pages 20 May 2021

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Valentine Ackland, poet and inveterate self-mythologising autobiographer, is best-known for cross-dressing, and being the lover of Sylvia Townsend Warner; she was proud of both attributes, but saw herself firstly as a poet. Her life encompassed Communism and Catholicism, war-work and pacifism, a life-partnership and many affairs, and—above all—the contradiction of being a fine poet and remaining littleknown. Even if she hadn’t written, Valentine’s life would have been a remarkable one, representative of that extraordinary generation in Britain whose intellectual maturity coincided with the mid-twentieth century, and who rose to the challenges of that time with such verve and courage. But she did write: poetry of witness, commenting on the political state of the world and the plight of the powerless individual; poetry celebrating the natural world while lamenting its loss to the encroachments of war and progress; love poetry of passionate complexity, and metaphysical poetry which meditates on the human place in the universe. This writing, by a poet deeply connected to her time and committed to interpreting its events and their impact on her own life, gives that life another dimension. Valentine’s work expands the history of one fascinating individual into that of a wider community.

Chapter One: Becoming Valentine

One November evening in 1925, two young women from London arrived at the village of Chaldon, in Dorset. They brought with them two suitcases, a gramophone, and a wooden boxful of records; the bare necessities. Both wore trousers (‘unheard-of then except among perverts’), and had Eton-cropped hair, but this was the androgynous fashion of the moment; they were not a couple. The taller of the two, Mrs Turpin, had come to the country to recover from a recent operation to remove her hymen. Her friend Mrs Braden thought this was tremendously funny.

It was already evening when they reached Wool station, so on the dark journey to the village they would have sensed, not seen, that in turning off the main coast road they were entering an extraordinary hilly landscape. The winding, narrow lane was unmetalled in 1925, a mere cart track to an isolated place, and the cottage they had rented was all that two escaping Londoners could wish. Mrs Wallis’s was pleasingly primitive; tiny, lit by oil lamps and candles, with an earth closet at the bottom of the garden, and a sampler in Molly Turpin’s bedroom picking out the text ‘God is Love’. The two women had tea as soon as they arrived, followed by Bovril with cheese and biscuits for supper shortly after. Molly lay awake for a long time, in her delight at being alone in bed.

In the morning, she saw that they had approached the village along a valley. All around it, great shoulders of the downs heave up, and the little settlement is cupped in a hollow of hills. It seems cut off from the inland world. The drove lane labours up over an immense fold of the downs, skirts the Five Maries—a row of prehistoric barrows—close to the sky, with a view way across

READERS’ COMMENTS

Vanessa Thorpe: Reveals the level of Secret Service confusion about this unconventional pair of writers.

Mia Farlane: I like the biographer’s kindness and straightforward honesty. Such a moving book.

This definitive biography of a cross-dressing poet and political activist reveals a key moment in British lesbian history Frances Bingham

country, and drops sharply down to the coast road. Yet in the opposite direction, no road goes on towards the sea two miles beyond, for there are high chalk cliffs, and although the sound of the waves reaches the village sometimes, and storms can blow seaweed up to the sheep-fields, there is no way down to the beach here. The village itself, a few picturesque thatched cottages of pale local stone grouped round a triangular green, was obviously poor, but it had, most importantly, a pub, The Sailor’s Return

The villagers observed these out-of-season visitors with interest. Rachel Braden, who had been there before, was shorter and curvier than her companion, and obviously ‘fast’, with a touch of theatrical glamour, if not quite a stage person herself. She was chatty, friendly, and argumentative. Her friend Molly Turpin, 19 years old, almost six feet tall and extremely thin, could easily be mistaken for a youth (there was some discussion about her gender) and seemed more reserved, though very polite. She did not look well, being so thin and pale, but the two of them set off walking first thing in the morning, in the direction of the sea, taking some biscuits.

The inhabitants of Chaldon were quite used to artistic visitors renting their cottages. The place had been discovered by a sculptor, Stephen Tomlin, on a walking holiday in 1921. Tommy, as his friends called him, was a charismatic alcoholic (briefly married to Lytton’s cousin Julia Strachey), who caused emotional havoc with every gender wherever he went, and died suddenly in 1937, after having a tooth extracted. He admired the work of T.F. Powys, a hitherto unknown writer whose wife, Violet, was a local woman and who lived in the village. Visiting Theodore Powys had become a reason to see Chaldon; David Garnett (Duncan Grant’s lover in a uncomfortable triangle with Vanessa Bell), Sylvia Townsend Warner (unhappily in love with Tommy), Ralph and Frances Partridge, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, and most of the rest of Bloomsbury passed through.

Once the villagers had seen Lady Ottoline Morrell (the Bloomsbury patron and eccentric host of Garsington) in one of her outrageous hats, two women in trousers would not scandalise them. Chaldon was now fashionable; an artistic colony migrated there every summer, and in the 1920s the place was cheap, unspoilt and beautiful. But beyond that, it had a special atmosphere, a sense of secrecy, of being entirely separate from the rest of the country, not on the way to anywhere.

(The feeling persists; Dorchester taxi-drivers joke ‘Back to civilisation!’ with obvious relief as they turn out onto the main coast road from the narrow village lane.) ‘It was an extraordinary place,’ Valentine wrote later, ‘extraordinary things happened there and extraordinary people were to be found there: and [like Communism] to everyone according to his capacity it gave according to his need.’

On that first day in Chaldon, Rachel set off along an imperfectly-remembered route to introduce Molly to some of the residents. First they walked across the downs towards the sea, to a remote farmhouse called

EDITOR’S NOTE

Chydyok where Theodore’s two sisters, Gertrude and Katie, were living. Gertrude, an artist, wanted to paint Rachel; Katie, a poet, was to fall painfully in love with Molly. Even in summer, Chydyok can seem eerie and windswept; in November it must have been grim.

Rachel’s walk continued, miles further on, to the coastguard cottages along the cliff path where Llewelyn Powys (another of Theodore’s writer siblings) lived with his wife, the American critic and author Alyse Gregory. She would later become a great friend, and ‘Lulu’ (as they called him) a boon companion, but on that day Molly could hardly speak to them for exhaustion. The journey continued round to Beth Car, Theodore and Violet’s house just outside the village, which Valentine later reckoned to be a ten-mile round trip.

Theodore, whose writing was much admired by this period (and parodied so accurately in Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm), was a rural patriarch Molly came to revere greatly, but then she could only sit by his fire in silence. To meet so many of the Powys clan at once would have been an ordeal at the best of times, perhaps.

The next day, still feeling the ill effects, Molly stayed at home. Rachel kept her company, dancing to the gramophone and high-kicking at the cottage beams; later, they tried to smoke the pipes they had acquired.

Molly was starting to worry about imminently returning to her husband, Richard, at whose instigation she had undergone this medicalised rape. In hospital, when she was afraid before the operation, Molly had realised that she had no one to rely on. Neither her mother, her sister, her lover nor any friend had been able to help her escape from the terrible situation she was in; she had not even been able to extricate herself. Then, she had vowed to learn self-reliance, and quickly.

For three days after the operation (which she found painful and humiliating) she refused to see her husband; to her surprise, the hospital thought this quite natural. When he did visit, he made her cry and a kindly nurse turned on him ‘like a tiger’, and forbade him to visit again.

Molly had to stay in the clinic for two weeks, rather than the expected one; before she went in she was unable to eat or sleep, drinking heavily, and physically run down. The nurses had protected her there, but now she had to look after herself. She wrote Richard a letter saying that she would never go back to him, and posted it at the village post office.

When Rachel heard what she had done, she was amused and excited, but she pointed out that Richard would arrive shortly. What could Molly do then? Molly said she would refuse ‘steadfastly’ to go back with him.

‘He is very dull,’ Rachel agreed. ‘He’s quite the wrong person for you, darling; I don’t know what sort of man you would like? Perhaps you’d rather have a woman?’

Molly already knew that she would, much rather, but she was amazed at Rachel’s perspicacity.

‘Do you love women, then?’ she asked.

‘Anything that comes!’ Rachel assured her.

Molly’s lover Bo Foster was a mutual friend; a charming, well-educated woman, ten years continued in the book

Valentine Ackland was a dedicated poet, peace campaigner and environmentalist, as well as being an anti-fascist activist in Spain in the 1930s. It was her lesbianism, however, that mostly seemed to trouble MI5, and newly released files show that she and her partner, the novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner, were both put under long-term state scrutiny and blocked from carrying out under-cover work during the Second World War. The author of this definitive study, Frances Bingham, is a writer, poet and playwright. Her other books include Journey from Winter (2008) and The Principle of Camouflage (2011).

The Tudors were possibly the first English rulers whose faces were familiar to their subjects, and Henry VIII’s desire to be regarded as a European monarch led to his image being disseminated far more widely than that of his predecessors.

The term ‘portrait’ was unknown and painted images were referred to as a ‘counterfeit’ or a ‘duplication’ because they copied the image of a person who was absent. Every portrait in early Tudor England was painted for a specific occasion—to display wealth, power and status or to mark an important event in the life of the sitter. There was no concept in England that art could be purchased purely as decoration for the home. Portraits of men dominated the genre; there were fewer pictures of women and fewer still of children.

Henry VII had used painters, stonemasons, illuminators, poets and historians to project himself as the legitimate King of England through regal image-making. His claim to royal blood was tenuous, derived from his mother Margaret Beaufort, who was descended from Edward III. Henry Tudor had taken the crown by force in 1485, after defeating Richard III at Bosworth Field. His subsequent marriage to King Richard’s niece Elizabeth of York had done much to heal his war-torn

speaks good French, Latin and Spanish; is very religious; heard three masses daily … He is extremely fond of hunting, and never takes that diversion without tiring eight or ten horses … He is also fond of tennis.’

Above all, the young Henry VIII was an enlightened monarch, eager to rival other European rulers not only in war, but in magnificence and the arts. It would be his patronage, and the European artists he imported, which would properly bring the Renaissance to England. Royal agents were sent abroad to recruit these talented artists and soon the finest artists and craftsmen working in England were foreigners.

The first great Italian employed by Henry VIII was the sculptor Pietro Torrigiano, a superbly talented man who had studied alongside Michelangelo in Florence. In the cultural backwater of England, he would design and execute a tomb for Henry VII and Elizabeth of York that would be considered his masterpiece.

Torrigiano arrived in England sometime before 1511, the year he was paid £1,500 to design and produce the tomb of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York. Torrigiano’s name must have proved difficult to spell because he is listed as ‘Peter Torrysany’. He lived in the precincts of St Peter’s, Westminster, while working on the tomb,

Henry VIII and 150 years earlier Linda Collins / Siobhan Clarke

EDITOR’S NOTE

Henry VIII was an ardent patron of the arts whose magnificent tapestries and paintings all relate to one central tale: the glorification of himself and his realm. In this thematic history, two authors each with over twenty years of experience at Historic Royal Palaces peel back layers of Tudor propaganda to show what individual works in the Royal Collection reveal about the king and his insecurities. Their book coincides with Hampton Court Palace’s ‘Gold and Glory’ exhibition (delayed for a year by the pandemic), celebrating the 500th anniversary of Henry’s meeting with François I at the so-called ‘Field of the Cloth of Gold’ pageant.

kingdom, but there were still discontented elements and rivals to his throne.

The new Tudor king needed propaganda to bolster his position. He understood that the illusion of power and wealth was as important as the real thing and was prepared to spend lavish amounts on royal palaces and tapestries. Portraits were mainly commissioned for display at court or for diplomatic purposes. Henry VII’s use of them differed little from that of his immediate predecessors, the Plantagenet Houses of York and Lancaster, who produced portraits to send to foreign courts or to advertise themselves in the marriage market. Images of the king might also be placed within a religious setting, to emphasise how his position was legitimised by his relationship with God and the Church.

In contrast to the extremely high cost of tapestries and the luxury textiles used for court dress, portraits were relatively inexpensive in England. Artists had the status of artisans and would not have charged as much as expert tapestry weavers. Artists were certainly not celebrities; there was no English school of painting and hardly any signed their work. The English didn’t even use the word ‘painting’; they called an image painted on an oak panel a ‘table’; if painted on canvas, it was a ‘cloth’.

Henry VII’s plans to marry Margaret of Savoy and beget more heirs never came to fruition. He died of tuberculosis at Richmond Palace in April 1509. The Tudor matriarch, Margaret Beaufort, followed her son to the grave just two months later. The new king, Henry VIII, declared that he would marry Katherine of Aragon, his brother’s widow, and they were crowned together within two months of his succession.

Young Henry was hailed as the embodiment of a Renaissance prince: cultured, noble, strong and vigorous. A contemporary observer described him thus: ‘he

and his furious temper was legendary. Torrigiano had asked another Italian, Benvenuto Cellini, to assist him, but Cellini refused to work with a man of such violent temper, nor did he wish to live among ‘such beasts as the English’.

Torrigiano’s most famous misdeed—and perhaps the reason he was in England—was his fight with Michelangelo in which he broke the younger sculptor’s nose. In his autobiography, Cellini remembers that Torrigiano said he ‘felt bone and cartilage go down like biscuit beneath my knuckles and this mark of mine he will carry with him to the grave’. Images of Michelangelo confirm this to be true. The conflict took place in the Carmine Church in Florence, when both artists were training at the Medici Academy. Michelangelo appears to have had an annoying habit of looking over the shoulders of other artists and making disparaging comments. Torrigiano’s subsequent disgrace resulted in his departure from Florence.

The early part of the century saw the arrival of many craftsmen and talented painters from Germany and the Low Countries, as well as from Italy. Following the Protestant Reformation of the church, there was virtually no market for religious images in England, so most surviving painted images from this period are in the form of portraiture. Foreign painters complained that English patrons only cared for portraiture and rarely commissioned still life or history painting.

Portraits became increasingly fashionable for the elite, marking rites of passage such as marriage, death, the conferring of honours or a new political post. They were important as a way of demonstrating status, wealth and power, while ownership of the king’s portrait showed loyalty to the Crown, especially after his break with the Pope. Full-length portraits were rare; most were

head-and-shoulders studies, painted to order and still considered to be of much less value than wall hangings. There were, however, paintings in the Royal Collection that were important as dynastic advertisements and objects of glorification. We know something of Henry VIII’s collection because inventories of his pictures were drawn up in 1542 and 1547. Twenty paintings hung in the galleries at Hampton Court in 1547, and 169 hung at Whitehall Palace.

henry dreamed of ruling France, and to this end he joined an alliance with the Pope, the Emperor Maximilian, and his father-in-law, Ferdinand of Aragon. In the summer of 1513, Henry invaded France with a force exceeding 30,000. His troops defeated a French army at the Battle of the Spurs in August—a relatively minor skirmish—and the following month the English took Thérouanne and Tournai, the latter a substantial centre of trade.

The conquest marked Henry out as a force in European politics and gave Henry a taste of military success. However, the war cost him a million pounds, consuming the personal fortune he had inherited from his father and driving up taxes.

KING AND COLLECTOR HENRY VIII AND THE ART OF KINGSHIP

The History Press

Hardback, 208 pages

15 April 2021

9780750996242

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Alison Weir: Packed with absorbing detail and brilliant insights … I was gripped from the first paragraph.

Hilary Mantel: Captures the vivacity and boldness of Tudor England … A sure guide to what to look at and how to look at it.’

Henry’s absence from the country had prompted James IV of Scotland, allied to the French, to invade England in September 1513. The resulting battle left a whole generation of the Scottish nobility, and the Scottish king himself, dead on Flodden Field; it was a resounding English victory for Queen Katherine, whom Henry had left behind as governor of the realm. It would never be celebrated in art; such a victory would not register in Europe, nor in Henry’s imagination as his victories in France did. In any case, Henry himself was not there!

In the early part of Henry’s reign, new designs for armour were sparked by a better understanding of the human body and by changes in courtly fashion. The foot defences known as sabatons, for example, were no longer pointed in the fashion of a medieval shoe but wide and flat, following the pattern of court shoes seen in portraits of Henry VIII. The waist was accentuated and there was a large codpiece. The codpiece was a separate piece of armour made to protect the genitals. It was heavily padded on the inside and it remained in fashion until around 1570. It was usually only found on foot armour and, although it did offer some protection, it was more of a fashion statement taken from courtly costume and it varied in size and shape according to the choice of the wearer.

It is rare for a suit of armour to completely cover the body because the weight of the extra overlapping metal plates made it exceptionally heavy and unwieldy but Henry had such a suit made for him to wear at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, an ostentatious display of wealth and power staged by England and France in 1520 to impress each other.

There is no other example of armour like it in the Royal Collection armouries. It was close fitting and enhanced the young king’s physique.

continued in the book

L’état, c’est moi: the boast of one of art’s greatest royal patrons. Not Louis XIV but

In 1944 the European Advisory Commission was looking ahead to a point when Germany had surrendered, been occupied and needed governing. They decided that purely military rule of a defeated Germany would be the only workable option for at least three years. So the Allied Control Council was established, made up of the three main powers of the Western Allies—the United States, Great Britain, France—as well as the Soviet Union. The Control Council was based in Berlin and its job was to govern Germany and Allied-controlled Austria.

The Council split Germany into four zones of occupation, each run by a different one of the four governing nationalities. Each zone was in turn governed by the commander-in-chief of the respective Allied armies deployed there, whose status and power was similar to that of a Roman proconsul, except with soldiers and aircraft and tanks under his command.

Rules, legislation and orders followed, as the country’s new governors took over control of the entire infrastructure of a country. British engineers worked to repair the water supply in Hamburg, Russian military policemen tried to clamp down on the black market in East Berlin, the Americans repaired roads, and the French tried to reconstruct hospitals. Each of Germany’s four different rulers had wildly conflicting ideas about how to execute the task, and very different opinions and ideas about the citizens and just-demobilised soldiers under their control.

For the SS officers, NCOs and men of the 16th SS Panzergrenadier Division who came back to the country from Italy and Hungary, three particular Allied regulations were to make the most substantial difference to their lives. The first were the regulations concerning war criminals. While the Nuremberg Trials would deliver prison sentences or the death penalty to the most senior Nazi Party officials and officers of the SS and Wehrmacht, whether the nearly two million rank-andfile of the German armed forces were arrested, tried and imprisoned depended on the military justice infrastructure of the zone of occupation to which they returned.

The second vital set of regulations concerned potential justice for crimes committed in countries outside Germany. To begin with, this would be predominantly the priority of that country’s government, in as much as Denmark or Italy or France could put on trial or request the extradition of German servicemen who allegedly had committed crimes there. The Allied Council would extradite Germans to face trial abroad if they were captured in Germany, so the men of the returned SS units knew immediately that they had to avoid arrest.

The third set of Allied regulations concerned ‘denazification’. The aim of this was straightforward: to remove from any form of power or influence any member of the former National Socialist Party or of banned organisations such as the SD, the Waffen or Algemeine SS, the Gestapo or other intelligence services. The Allies knew this was a massive undertaking: nearly 500,000 of these people were in detention centres across the country

already, waiting for background checks to be carried out on them so they could return to freedom and a new life.

The checks were the first step to freedom. Once they had been carried out by military policemen or soldiers, the person in question would be given a background form. This attested to the fact that they hadn’t done anything untoward in the past, committed crimes, belonged to a unit that had massacred and burned villages in reprisals, taken hostages, run detention centres or served in concentration camps.

The background check was called a Fragebogen, or questionnaire, later changed to a Meldebogen, or background form. Once one of these had been filled in, the person would appear before a Spruchkammer, or arbitration board, which would assign them their category. The individual was then considered ‘denazified’ and got a certificate to prove it. This led to two vital steps forward: employability and freedom from prosecution.

Category Five was the lowest, for people who had been proved not to have belonged to any banned organisation and so were free to head for a new start. Category Four was for relatively minor offenders, such as junior civil servants, public transport officials, municipal engineers—people who had not been in any branch of the armed forces but had performed public administrative duties. They were fined and sometimes had their movements restricted, but nothing more. Category Three was for soldiers or airmen who had been in the military but at a low rank: they were put on probation. Category Two was for black marketers, who could be sentenced to ten years in prison. Category One was for former SS, SD and Gestapo officers, Nazi Party officials or major criminals: theirs was the death sentence, or ten or more years in prison.

What made the most crucial difference to the restrictions in each of these categories was not just what the individual German had done during the war, but which nationality was in charge of their zone. The British and Americans tended to be lenient and the French strict; the Russians verged between compliant and psychotic.

Members of the Nazi Party who had been born after 1919 were exempted from strict categorisation, on the basis that they had not had any form of choice in the matter, and that the National Socialist regime had made them what they were, effectively co-opting them physically and psychologically. Categorisation into the highest levels of One or Two could also be avoided if friends or comrades provided testimonials—often called Persilscheine, or ‘whitened by Persil’, as they were so easily falsified.

The British didn’t pay too much attention. With their own domestic economy exhausted and semi-moribund, the last thing they wanted was to support a defeated Germany. Additionally, they knew that Germans were likely to become their allies against the USSR in a new democratic Europe.

So former Nazi Party officials, SS and Wehrmacht men started a lucrative trade in black-market denazification certificates which could be bought and sold like

all the other ‘black’ commodities. In the British zone of occupation, after October 1945, it ceased to be classified as a crime to have been in the Waffen-SS, while in the American zone, to be arrested as an ex-SS man required a person to have held a minimum rank of Sturmbannführer, or major.

No group was more active in providing fake testimony, or providing a fake Spruchkammer, than those former SS men who were forming the embryo comrades association, the HIAG, (Hilfsgemeinschaft auf Gegenseitigkeit der Angehörigen der ehemaligen Waffen-SS, or Mutual Aid Association of Former Waffen-SS Members). It aimed to help the men of the Gestapo, SD and Allgemeine and Waffen-SS to escape Germany if necessary but, preferably, to stay in their new country and take their place in its new judiciary, its business structure, its media, intelligence and law enforcement. This was greatly helped by the fact that the British needed to reconstitute a legal system. A full 90 per cent of German judges had been members of the Nazi Party. The British decided therefre that it would be acceptable if 50 per cent of the judiciary could be staffed by what they called ‘nominal Nazis’. It was these judges and legal magistrates who were responsible for checking the categories on any suspected person’s denazification certificate.

In January 1947, the denazification process was handed over in its entirety to the Germans. For the Allies, it had not been a success; for the Germans, a detested bureaucratic obstacle, made all the more unpopular because it was so easy to circumvent.

The Nuremberg Trials

The Allies hailed the Nuremberg Trials as the ultimate triumph of justice and reason towards a defeated enemy but many Nazi officials, SS officers and Gestapo men simply fled to countries where they could hide or where the government had sympathised with Nazi Germany: Argentina, Paraguay, Spain, Namibia, Syria or Egypt. Others changed their names and identities and blended into the new Germany.

The legal ruling that constituted the authority of these trials was called the London Charter, signed by Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union and the United States in London in August 1945. The resultant court was named the International Military Tribunal and its brief was to try defendants for crimes that fell into the three categories: Crimes against Peace; War Crimes, or violations of the laws and customs of war as embodied in the Hague and Geneva Conventions; and Crimes against Humanity—the extermination of racial, ethnic and religious groups and similar atrocities against civilians.

Around 200 Germans in total would be tried at Nuremberg. The first was Wehrmacht General Anton Dostler, tried on 8 October 1945 for war crimes by a US military tribunal sitting at the Royal Palace of Caserta, outside Naples. He was accused of ordering the killing of fifteen captured US commandos, all Italian-Americans, whose mission was to try continued in the book

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christian Jennings is a British freelance foreign correspondent and author of eight works of non-fiction. Since 1988, he has written on international current affairs, modern history and popular science for publications ranging from The Economist and Reuters to Wired, The Guardian and The Scotsman.

In August 1944 German SS troops executed 560 Italian civilians. All but two of the killers escaped punishment Christian Jennings

EDITOR’S NOTE

How have so many of Hitler’s executioners got away with their crimes? In one test case, survivors of a notorious Waffen-SS massacre in Tuscany spent 75 years trying to ensure that those who massacred their family, friends and fellow villagers did not escape justice. In every case they failed. Ten perpetrators were sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia by Italian courts but were never extradited and died in freedom. Only two of the 16th Panzergrenadier Division were ever prosecuted. Their commanding general was imprisoned for life but released early. Another, the world’s highest-ranking Nazi war criminal, died a free man a year ago. This book asks why.

Bothered by income tax?

So are national governments.

No one knows how to hold big business to account De Mooij / Klemm / Perry

The question whether countries should tax corporations on their income is an old one, yet it has never been more topical than it is today. Tax competition is driving down corporate tax rates in a race to the bottom, and 12 countries today levy no corporate income tax at all.

The pressure from tax competition and the complications that arise in administrating and enforcing corporate income tax are so vast that one may wonder whether it is worth dealing with them or whether it would not be easier to give up and replace lost revenues with other taxes.

Corporate income is a subset of capital income, and so the first question to answer is whether capital income should be taxed or not. If so, the next question is whether there is a role for the corporate income tax in the enforcement of capital income tax, and then how corporate income should be taxed and how such a tax should be implemented.

While tax systems around the world differ, there are

EDITOR’S NOTE

return (see, for example, Mirrlees and others 2011).

However, the income tax literature has also criticized the Chamley-Judd outcome for relying on too-specific assumptions, such as optimization over an infinite horizon. Models that relax the assumptions arrive at different conclusions and offer several rationales for a positive capital income tax rate, both for efficiency reasons and to address equity concerns.

Recent contributions further suggest that the classical Chamley-Judd results are misinterpreted, providing further theoretical ground for the taxation of capital income (Straub and Werning 2020). Overall, the theoretical consensus has been shifting away from the question whether capital income should or should not be taxed towards the question to what extent it ought to be taxed.

Yet others favour an intermediate position between comprehensive taxation of income and zero taxation of capital income. They support separate taxation of labour and capital income under a ‘dual income tax’, with a pro-

Major countries have sophisticated systems of corporate taxation that nonetheless did not anticipate the rise of globalisation and digitisation and that haven’t been able to compete with places such as the Caymans, Bermuda and Switzerland that offer off-shore facilities with lowtax and nil-tax regimes. As a result, tax revenue is lost from multinational companies’ shifting profits to more advantageous jurisdictions. This IMF publication looks at reform efforts already under way and potential radical reform ideas developed by academics.

some common principles underlying them—including with respect to the taxation of international business income. Yet alternative systems exist that are based on different principles and that might avoid some of the distortions and complexities of the current system.

Why tax capital income?

Income generally arises from labour effort, be it wages or entrepreneurial activity, and capital returns in the form of interest, dividends or capital gains. The distinction between labour and capital income is not always easy to make. For instance, self-employed entrepreneurs do not distinguish between payment for the labour effort they put into their own company and their capital investment. The entrepreneurial income they earn is simply the sum of both. Attempts to distinguish labour and capital income for tax purposes then become arbitrary and prone to avoidance: entrepreneurs can easily present income as either labour or capital income, depending on which is being taxed least.

This arbitrage between capital and labour income is at the heart of discussions on the design of the income tax system. For some, the theoretical ideal is to tax the sum of labour and capital income at a progressive rate structure. This ‘global income tax’ prevents arbitrage between labour and capital that could otherwise arise for the taxation of self-employed entrepreneurs.

Others have argued, however, that only labour income should be taxed, while capital income should be exempt. Their argument goes as follows: a tax on (the normal return to) saving increases the relative price of future consumption relative to present consumption.

Chamley (1986) and Judd (1985) show that, in an infinite horizon model, this is inefficient and violates horizontal equity principles: it is always better to tax only labour income and avoid the intertemporal distortion to savings.

The optimal tax on the normal return is therefore zero (see also Atkinson and Stiglitz 1976). This result has led economists to argue for an exemption of the normal

gressive rate scheme applying to labour income and with a flat rate applying to capital, usually at a relatively low rate. …

Capital and economic rents

When discussing the taxation of capital income, it is useful to distinguish between the normal return on capital and economic rents. The normal return on capital is generally defined as the minimum return required to make investors equally well off compared to some benchmark investment, such as a government bond. The remaining profit, over and above the normal return, is called ‘rents’. While the normal return can be called capital income, rents might in fact be subject to bargaining between workers and capital owners—and thus can be reflected either as capital income or as labor income (in the form of higher wages).

Public finance literature is unanimous in advocating taxes on rents as they are in principle nondistortionary. A classic result from theory is therefore that they should in fact be taxed at 100 percent. Practical considerations lead to lower tax burdens, however, because rents are also often ‘quasi rents’, arising from specific investments with a fixed cost. Rent taxes are also deemed equitable since assets are typically owned by the welloff. The more controversial debate outlined earlier in this section on whether capital income should be taxed thus refers to the normal return, not to economic rents.

Why tax corporate income?

There are different types of systems to tax capital income. The so-called classical corporate income tax considers corporations as separate entities from their ultimate owners. As wages and interest are generally deductible, the corporate income tax effectively becomes a withholding tax on equity returns at the company level. Corporate income tax is thus levied separately, besides the personal income tax on equity returns (in the form of dividends and capital gains).

Hence, the classical corporate income tax system implies double taxation. If the combined burden of corporate income tax and personal income tax is higher for corporate businesses than for sole proprietorships, it could induce entrepreneurs to run their businesses in the latter legal form so as to avoid paying the double tax. To mitigate such distortions from the double-tax burden on equity returns, classical systems often apply relatively low flat personal income tax rates on equity income.

In contrast to the classical corporate income tax system, the so-called integration system looks through the corporation and acknowledges that, ultimately, legal entities are owned by people. As only people can ultimately bear the true incidence of taxes, this clearly makes more economic sense. The corporate income tax then operates as a withholding mechanism for the full income tax, and imputation credits are provided for individuals when calculating their personal income tax liability.

The difficulty with integration systems, however, arises from international transactions: imputation credits

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are generally not provided for foreign corporate income tax paid. This can lead to distortions in international capital markets. In the European Union, imputation systems have therefore been abolished, as they are an infringement to the freedom of establishment.

As the integration system illustrates, governments do not necessarily have to tax capital income through corporations. Indeed, the alternative would be to tax capital income solely and directly on the income that people receive, that is, through personal income tax, without any withholding of tax at the corporate level.

So why is there a corporate income tax? There are two main reasons—neither of which is of a fundamental nature; they rather provide a pragmatic case for its existence.

The first reason is based on the relative ease of administration and particularly the withholding role of the corporate income tax. Corporations are convenient collection agents for governments. For instance, besides corporate income tax, value-added tax (VAT) and personal income tax (through pay-as-you-earn schemes) are also often withheld by corporations, as they hold proper books and records and can efficiently be monitored by tax inspectors. Relying on individuals or consumers to pay their tax, based on filed tax returns, would be considerably costlier to enforce.

The withholding role is especially important for profits that are retained in the company, as distributed profits can also be taxed through a withholding tax on dividends. Retained profits, however, simply lead to higher value of the firm and, therefore, to capital gains for the owners. For practical reasons, capital gains at the personal level are seldom taxed on an accrual basis but rather upon realization. Capital owners can then postpone their tax payment by not realizing these gains. Moreover, capital gains in small nontraded companies are especially hard to value and might escape taxation altogether. The attraction of the

Jamshid Turani had never really been interested in politics, probably because he came from what many would have considered to be a privileged background. His father had been a senior economics professor at Tehran University and his mother part of an exclusive group of female entrepreneurs running one of the city’s most successful tea houses. He had a sister with a seemingly unhealthy interest in boys, which really annoyed him, and his parents had always gone along with the notion that she would, in due course, marry a successful figure in the energy business or government.

That meant the pressure of family expectation was on him—yet the academic life was not where his interest lay. With the help of his father’s connections, he had joined the country’s merchant marine—in effect the non-uniform part of the Iranian navy.

His training as a navigation officer had opened up a world of travel possibilities. At a relatively young age, he had already sailed extensively in South Asia, visiting ports in Sri Lanka, Indonesia and China. The experience had given him security and a casual attitude to discipline. The Iranian navy was relaxed about religious observance as long as officers attended a daily contemplation meeting with the ship’s imam.

THE PRIMARY OBJECTIVE Matador

Softback, 399 pages 8 December 2020

9781800461109

RRP £8.99 www.mvenning.net https://www. booklaunch.london

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After nearly ten years at sea, the national shipping company transferred him to an administrative role at the southern port of Bandar Abbas. The job, scheduling Iran’s fragile raw material exports to various parts of the world, offered little stimulation apart from a pay rise and the pride of his mother, who saw the move as a perfect platform for finding a wife. She had already managed to marry off his sister to Abdul, a high-flier in the Interior Ministry. That had been less than a year ago and she was already expecting.

If daily work was a grind, weekend visits home were little better. He was desperate to tell his mother to keep out of his life but never did so. He guessed that his father understood his angst but preferred to concentrate on the latest Stiglitz assessment of the US economy.

Jamshid found the task of scheduling deliveries of crude to countries choosing to ignore US sanctions ever more challenging. Selling cargoes at sea, re-registering ships with third-party nations in transit and managing access to overseas bank accounts still controlled by the state—all of this was becoming the rule rather than the exception. Markets remained thirsty for oil but it was getting harder to transact deals and middlemen’s costs were rising.

Watching the TV news, Jamshid saw no signs of life getting better. Apart from covering the invective-laced utterances of the Supreme Leader railing against the Great Satan and his helpers, especially those in Saudi and the Emirates, time was taken up showcasing daily moans about food shortages and the miscreants caught breaking the country’s strict dress code or gathering to protest for freedom of speech.

It was Thursday night—the time to pack his laundry in anticipation of the trip home next day. The phone

rang. Ravi, a college compatriot who lived nearby, had arranged for a few friends to get together for a meal. Normally Jamshid’s schedule didn’t leave enough time to drive across town to the restaurant, but … why not? After all, their lamb kebabs were the stuff of legend.

Leaving the laundry in his bedroom, Jamshid grabbed his keys and set off into the night. It was the end of the evening rush and the journey took only half the estimated 45 minutes. There was quite a crowd when he arrived. His initial impression was that he had been asked as an afterthought and, as it turned out, in a sense, he was right.

‘My best friend, Jamshid, is here,’ announced Ravi and almost on cue the assembled group roared their appreciation. Jamshid felt uncomfortable. Yes, there were some faces he knew from the sports club but also others he didn’t recognise. A pleasant surprise was to note that this was a mixed group and, although the young women had their hijabs to cover their hair, their formal dress failed to hide their looks.

Ravi continued: ‘This is Bandar’s most eligible bachelor—one with a real head for figures.’

It was clear Ravi liked to be the centre of attention and his expansive introduction made Jamshid blanch.

meet my stallion, Alazaha. He is used to taming the untrained.’

She pressed her card firmly into his hand, winked, took the arm of one of the other young women she’d arrived with and headed for the door. The group chat continued until the shishas came out. That was his opportunity to withdraw.

Driving home, he felt a strange feeling of happiness—a very un-Thursday-night feeling. The food had been good and the company had taken him out of himself.

And what about Mahta? She was something special. He touched the breast pocket of his shirt—just to check he still had her card—and smiled to himself. With hindsight, he had of course been set up, but at the time it seemed like fun and he was overdue some of that. Packing his laundry again, he also looked out for a pair of stout boots that he suddenly saw a future for.

once the four-by-four’s lights had disappeared in the distance, Fawaz pressed ahead. Since crossing the track, the landscape had changed dramatically with fields of potatoes and pomegranates and, away to the right, an orchard of almond trees. The vista had been exposed by the light of the moon and Fawaz quickly

Ask Fawaz and Jamshid Martin Venning

EDITOR’S NOTE

Peace International is a New-York-based global reconciliation and mediation charity that seeks to prevent wars, regional disputes and rebuild civil societies. When a tip comes in that Iran is building a chemical and biological weapons research and production centre, it soon becomes clear that the chosen location—close to the border with Azerbaijan—could destabilise the Gulf region and beyond. A small team of volunteers forms a task force to collect evidence. Entering through a dangerous semi-lawless area, they discover a far more complicated web of challenges than a weapons facility.

‘I wouldn’t go that far,’ Jamshid mumbled.

‘How far would you go?’ enquired the woman nearest to him, seated to his right.

Before he could answer, his eye connected with hers and he felt he was drowning.

‘My name is Mahta—pleased to meet you. From Ravi’s description, I am not disappointed.’

He thought Ravi’s description would not have allowed for a tall, dark 30-year-old with a mouth that couldn’t close, but maybe he was wrong.

‘Nice to meet you,’ he said rather lamely.

‘Well, yes actually,’ she said, replying to the question he had not yet asked, ‘the lamb here is the best in town.’

‘It’s my first time,’ he replied, ‘but I’ve certainly heard of the chef’s reputation.’

She laughed and leaned into his shoulder.

‘OK, so, as a virgin, I assume we won’t get a conversation in before you’ve had your kebab?’

Given his hesitancy, her perky confidence shut him up. He nodded quickly and pretended to be part of another conversation taking place to his left, managed expertly by Ravi. Subsequently, he and the woman both got caught up in the fizzing wave of chat, jokes and gossip and they talk again before the coffee arrived.

‘So, what do you do?’ he asked.

‘Oh, nothing too special—I work for the government.’

It was his turn to laugh.

‘Hah! That’s what everyone says,’ he said.

‘And why not?’ she countered. ‘The pay is OK, the work isn’t challenging and I get time to ride my horse. Do you ride?’

‘Once or twice on holiday but I’m no expert. I do remember getting some bruises for my trouble: they seemed to last for ages.’

‘You need to practise. Call me and you can come and

realised that while the disappearing cloud cover had improved the visibility sufficiently to make night-vision goggles unnecessary, the pale moonlight was reducing his own cover. Turning to the group that was following him, he gestured to lift their goggles and keep low. To avoid being seen, he led the convoy along the edges of the fields.

They picked up speed as they started up the slope away from the river. The fields at this point were not only cultivated but had clear boundaries, and these acted as stopping points for the team to get together. After the completion of the third field, Fawaz signalled the group to gather and spoke in Farsi for the first time. It was only then that Jack realised that the others had a quicker understanding than him and that he was the one having to ask Fawaz to speak more slowly and say things again.

Fawaz was happy to oblige but Dave was not impressed.

‘You’re going to have to do better than this in the next few days,’ he said. ‘I don’t want the locals getting any more suspicious than necessary.’

They were now less than a hundred metres from the edge of Fawaz’s hometown. It was two in the morning and all was quiet. The team was assembled, in full kit, in a boundary ditch. From here Fawaz would continue the journey alone.

Leaving his backpack, Fawaz climbed out of the trench and set off up the track. In rough, stained, grey trousers, a pair of soiled boots with worn stitching on the right sole, an old shirt with a slight tear in the left sleeve and a heavy waistcoat, Fawaz looked as if he had just finished checking pomegranates. The look was right but not the timing: at 2 am, he was in danger of giving himself away to the first person

If demand for oil dips, how will the world’s top oil exporters respond? And at what risk?

How do we survive in wicked times? And does survival make us wicked? New stories from a writer with a mis-spent youth Ruth Hartley

EDITOR’S NOTE

Ruth Hartley writes about the discomfort of ordinary people driven by shame, despair or fear of prosecution to keep hidden the complicated circumstances that trouble them. Based on personal experience and research, her characters fight to survive unconscionable odds, in some cases at any price, whether heroically or disgracefully, in some cases dying unremarked. Her own memoir, When I Was Bad, published in 2019, dealt with her early life as, in her words, ‘a bad white girl’ and ‘criminal’ in flight from the South African justice system.

Not in Front of the Children

A Memoir

Every fourth Sunday after church Mum drove us to Chikurubi prison. I didn’t know why we had to wait outside it in the car. I didn’t know it was a prison. Neither did my sister. I was five. She was three. I knew black people went to prison. I didn’t know that white people did.

Chikurubi Prison stood in the middle of nowhere, a flatwalled, introverted fortress with guns pointing into its own guts. Its brick bulk was too solid to ignore and too dull to remember. Mum drove there in silence. She parked on the dirt forecourt, wound the windows almost shut, got out and locked us inside. ‘I won’t be long,’ she said, a small crease between her eyebrows. The bright sun was hard on her face. She turned away and disappeared through a small opening in a huge double gate.

Around us the flattened valley was cleared of trees and its grass cut short to a stiff ankle-scratching yellow-brown length. The heavy, hazy midday sun pressed down on the stifling car while around it cicadas shrilled like boiling kettles. We may have sweated and squabbled in our Sunday School clothes but I remember succumbing to lethargy and sleep rather than fractiousness.

Mum was always gone exactly half an hour, after which we went home to roast meat prepared by our African cook and carved by our frowning father while Mum smiled and smiled. This strange gap in our Sunday was never commented on and had no connection at all with the rest of our lives.

my sister and I often squabbled, but Uncle Bruce’s first appearance in our home a year earlier occasioned one of our fiercest and most physical fights. Bruce was Mum’s younger brother, a bespectacled adult in the body of an underfed adolescent. We didn’t notice his height because we were even smaller.

Despite his minimal size, Uncle Bruce managed to smuggle a ginger tom-kitten right past our watching parents. It was a gift that didn’t divide in two. Skilled parenting prevented the kitten’s early demise and us from suffering terrible lacerations. We still fell on each other over its name until Mum recombined our opposed choices of Jackson and Peter, suggested by the brand of cigarettes in Bruce’s shirt pocket. Peter Jackson, the tobacco-coloured kitten, remained a thorny problem. Kidnapped by Bruce from a feral cat family, he soon effected his escape. I don’t think my sister and I minded much. Peter Jackson was hard to catch and impossible to cuddle.

Uncle Bruce visited at weekends, bringing other gifts. While he was with us, the grown-ups said little to each other and told us off more than usual. Once he brought some surprisingly gorgeous doll’s clothes. Mummy, calm as ever, asked him where he ‘found’ them, then quietly put them away ‘just to keep them safe’.

The next time Uncle Bruce came by, my sister and I were half-conscious and too ill to scratch our measles pustules. He promised to babysit whilst Mum went to the chemist for medicine. When she returned we were alone. Uncle Bruce had been through the bedroom cup-

boards, found Dad’s illegal pistol, a souvenir from his war service, pocketed it and disappeared.

As soon as my sister and I recovered from the measles we were separated and sent away to live with other families. We returned home many weeks later in a state of shocked alienation to find that Granny Emma had come to live with us. Mum and Uncle Bruce were her children. Dad had built her a small round room with a grass roof behind our house.

Granny Emma smelt of the camphor wood wedding chest in which she still stored her clothes. She crocheted all the time making doilies, tea cosies, and covers for toilet paper rolls. When Granny Emma was surprised or amused, she hooted like an owl. My sister and I found her fascinating. Dad found her annoying. ‘Your Granny deserves respect!’ Mum explained with a smile. ‘Her family were very poor German settlers. She grew up without shoes and had to leave school at fourteen.’

‘Woohooh!’ Granny Emma hooted when I made a drawing. ‘You’re artistic! Just like Bruce!”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to be linked to my uncle. By the time I was nine, I knew he was in prison, though not why. Besides, the proof of Uncle Bruce’s artistry was a charming little story book he had made about my pretty sister, and I was jealous.

Bruce painted a shop sign for my mother’s farm store. It showed a queue of unsmiling Africans waiting for it to open. There was no sunshine in the painting, nor, I guess, in the prison workshop where Uncle Bruce was being rehabilitated, ready for his release and deportation. He had one whole year to wait. I was thirteen by then and at boarding school. It was judged I was old enough to hear some of the truth.

I sat down in my uniform on a school chair while Mum told me about her brother. Uncle Bruce was a South African-born criminal who had served his time. The police would escort him on the train to the Rhodesian border. Then she would travel with him to a Christian organisation that would help him find work in a country he no longer knew.

My mother’s brother was a double murderer. That awful knowledge was a bloated secret inside me. It was not a secret to anyone else in Rhodesian society. Eventually I asked Mum what Bruce had really done and she told me the story in bits and pieces whenever we were alone. ‘Bruce was a wild boy … it was the Second World War … at sixteen, he enlisted in the South African Army and was sent to Italy … became a dispatch rider carrying messages between the British front lines. It was very dangerous work … . Bruce was “Mentioned In Dispatches” for his bravery but as always, he was out of control … he got into a fight, had a duel with another soldier and shot and killed him … . Too young to be executed by a firing-squad, Bruce was brought back in chains to a South African prison. Conditions were so terrible he lost his teeth and became very ill.

‘Granny Emma began a long campaign to get him pardoned on account of his youth and bravery … . Finally she saw General Jan Smuts who did pardon Bruce … . That is how he was able to come to live near us in Rhodesia.’

WHEN WE WERE WICKED MEMOIR AND STORIES

Troubador

Softback, 128 pages 5 January 2021

9782955734445

RRP £12.64

Our price £9.99 on Amazon

See https:// ruthhartley.com

READER’S COMMENT

Michael Holman: Hartley’s lean style gives her writing an authenticity, helped by her acute and sensitive attention to detail.

Note: Ruth Hartley’s children’s novel, The Drought Witch will be published by Gadsden Publishers later this year.

For almost four years Bruce wasn’t mentioned in my hearing. There were other heavy drinkers in the family. Pregnancy and madness became the current family problems, not murder.

Then it was Christmas Eve and suicide time. We were gathered together in the farmhouse sitting-room when the phone rang in the passage.

No other telephone sounds like an old country phone. Ours was a wall-mounted, black metal box with brass hooks to hold the receiver, a stiff noisy dial, and a crank-handle at its side. All the local white farmers shared the same exchange. Three turns of the crank handle, three rings and anyone could pick it up. More rings and it was the central exchange calling. If it rang it was either gossip or very important. We always jumped up and answered at once. Christmas is also the season of thunderstorms and interference on the phone line. We heard crackling and shouting. My sister came back, her voice high-pitched in panic. “I can’t hear! It’s from South Africa!”

Mum took over. The crackling and the distant thunder increased in volume but those of us left in the sitting room heard her repeat odd words in her clear voice.

‘bruce.’

‘car.’ Or was it ‘carbon monoxide’?

‘suicide.’

My stepfather shouted.

‘i do not want to hear another word on this subject.’ Granny Emma was absolutely still. Her expression did not alter. For the rest of Christmas, I couldn’t look anyone in the face. No one mentioned Bruce. My grandmother’s pain and my stepfather’s cruelty were the most extreme I had yet witnessed.

Forty years later my father told me about Bruce’s crime and trial. “Bruce was out of work, on drink and drugs. He burgled a house, broke his parole terms, and was to be sent back to prison in South Africa. He had no plans, but finding my gun made him decide to make a run for the border, get secretly into South Africa and avoid jail. He found a taxi to take him to the border. When the African taxi-driver ran out of petrol and money Bruce shot him dead and hid his body in the boot. Why, we will never know. There was already a manhunt in progress. Soon afterwards the police caught up with Bruce and arrested him.”

The trial was a scandal. The uproar decided my parents to send us away from home even though I was to start school.

During those first days at school, I sat lost and alone, in my new school uniform made two sizes too large for me by my careful mother. It was just loose enough for two boys to drop a couple of giant hairy caterpillars down my back. The fierce prickling began at once. I stood up, turned awkwardly and saw two flailing fiery creatures fall away from under my skirt. My ‘auntie’ collected me from school and put me into a tepid bath of bicarbonate of soda for a whole day. It is only recently that I’ve connected that childhood experience with my destructive and tortured Uncle Bruce and what some parents may have gossiped about in front of their children. continued in the book

Booklaunch

Booklaunch Literary Challenge No.4 “Relay Race”

A favourite game in our family involves making up name chains where the last surname becomes the next first name, thus Upton Sinclair Lewis Carroll Nye Bevan … or Leslie Stephen King Charles Kingsley Amis. I challenge you to produce the longest string, using famous names— or, if you prefer, literary works (This Side of Paradise Lost Horizon …). Want a harder challenge? Why not limit yourself to only male or only female writers, or see if your chain can lead back to where you started. Email your entry to putting “Comp4” in the subject line and supplying your postal address, so we can send you a prize. Winning entries will be published.

Last issue’s winners:

No.3 “Last Brexit to Ooklyn”

ASHBOURNE DERBYSHIRE

Holiday

cottage.

Easy access to Peak District Sleeps 4. Short Breaks. All year. Sorry no pets or smoking.

www.conifercottage.biz

holidays@conifercottage.biz

07779 722668

the fuss was about. But then we withdrew, conflicted about some of what we found.

Well, this was fun. I asked you to choose two literary characters to debate the benefits of Brexit. First out of the slips was Catherine Miller from Wantage who opened ent line, “Colonel Tusk continued as grave as ever, and Mrs May, unable to prevail on him to make any offer himself, nor commission her to make one for him, began to think that, instead of Midsummer, they would not be divorced till Michaelmas.” Angela Broughton in Ipswich offered a song rather than a conversation:

Here’s the background. Big bookselling websites sell at discount: they don’t have the high costs of a brick-and-mortar shop, and mass sales let them operate on low margins. Bookshop.org doesn’t sell at a discount, however—or not much of one. Its marketing challenge is therefore how to persuade bookbuyers to buy books at top dollar and forego the savings offered by other sites.

Mad dogs and Englishmen say No to the Frog and Hun. The Portugese don’t care to, the Slovenes wouldn’t dare to, Irish and Austrians just argue from twelve to one, When Englishmen request a siesta. In the Netherlands and all other lands, there are laws that are quite unfair, In each Baltic state there are rules they hate, which the Britishers won’t wear, Directives that Spaniards swear at, nobody else would shun But Mad Dogs and Englishmen say No to the Frog and Hun.

Its solution is to divert attention from itself and its higher-priced products and onto a rival with lowerpriced products: Amazon, of course. Amazon is guilty of tax-dodging on a monumental scale, and understandably invokes the ire of many online buyers (who nonetheless use it) and of booksellers, for whom it’s the devil incarnate. So Bookshop.org positions itself as David to Amazon’s Goliath.

The difference is, there is no difference between what Bookshop.org sells and what Amazon (and other discounters) sell; it’s the same product. Buyers are getting an ethical alternative only in the sense that some of their money goes to a nominated bookshop or into the pool. They’re paying top whack to feel saintly—which is fine, as long as it’s an informed choice, because Bookshop.org is also taking a cut. It’s hard to imagine that Mr Hunter won’t end up a millionaire several times over, if he isn’t already.

see why they would: for many this is their first experience of online trading. Many have websites that are merely token presences; some have no website at all.

Arguably, Bookshop.org is the greater beneficiary. Affiliates’ pages give the site extra clout, attracting more users (if affiliates advertise Bookshop.org as their home site), longer visits and more data to harvest. Much more.

The question is, how long will users remain loyal to their local shop, once they’ve grown accustomed to visiting the site? This matters because Bookshop.org says its own profits come from untargeted sales. It could be argued that it has a vested interest in buyers’ forgetting.

‘Thanks to Bookshop, there is no reason to buy books on Amazon anymore,’ its website quotes another website as saying, and cites the Chicago Tribune’s quip: ‘Bookshop. org hopes to play Rebel Alliance to Amazon’s Empire.’

I’d like to have included all of Simon Fifield’s rewriting of Sheridan’s The School for Scandal (Lord Britain: When an old country marries lots of young ones, what is he to expect? ’Tis now 40 years since Lady Union made me the happiest of nations—and I have been the most miserable dog ever since! …) but length prevents. I liked Jancis Tye’s exchange between David Davis and Nigel Farrage in Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker.

What’s uncertain is whether bookbuyers’ gravitating to Bookshop.org supports the high street long term. Bookshop.org is no less an online platform than Amazon: just not yet so big (but aiming to be: it originally launched in the USA in March 2020; the UK followed in November; it now operates also in Spain and is lining up other European markets). That means it is no less diverting buyers from local retailers than any other platform. Far from playing Rebel Alliance, you might say Bookshop.org was on the dark side all along.

The mechanics of the site are also prejudicial to user loyalty. A buyer who visits the Bookshop.org app and explores titles in one bookshop will have all sales credited to that bookshop for the next 48 hours, even if the buyer wants to credit the sales to another store. Buyers may not realise this. Others may not even realise they can credit a chosen store or how to do so.

Davis (Looks around Europe for a parliamentary constituency, but can’t find one.)

Farrage: Looking for a seat? Here, have one of mine.

Bad-mouthing Amazon is probably effective but it’s tacky, and slightly tricksy when there are any number of other bookselling sites that offer discounts—sometimes better than Amazon’s—not to mention undercutting by supermarkets. It’s also devious because it identifies discounting with the one company that has a bad record for reasons other than its discounting. It would be more virtuous if Bookshop. org sold itself on its own merits. ‘We charge a bit more but you’ll be helping independent shops earn a few bob.’

Davis: Forty years in that place and I couldn’t find a seat, not one. All them Greeks had it, Poles, Latvians, the lot of them, all them aliens had it. They had my share of adjusted VAT receipts and customs tariffs but I couldn’t find a seat.

Booksellers don’t seem as worried by this as they might once have been. They now recognise that patterns of trading are changing and that online selling is here to stay. They also realise they have to have skin in the game. Bookshop.org gives them that, and a revenue stream—and more besides.

So there are questions—but we’re willing to discount them (ho ho). The feedback we’ve got from booksellers is overwhelmingly positive, and who doesn’t need a rescuer? A better question, perhaps, is: where is the publishing equivalent of Bookshop.org that’s going to pay decent royalties to authors? I don’t see any cavalry mustering on that horizon.

Farrage: You’ve spent too long there. (Sits on the bed, takes out a Class II banana with non-regulation curvature, and starts eating it.)

None of this seems to bother booksellers, who’ve come to see Bookshop.org as their champion. It doesn’t bother the Booksellers Association either. Although Bookshop.org is a commercial operation in competition with other online sales platforms—and, strictly speaking, with bookshops as well—the BA now gives it privileged endorsement, stating on its website that becoming an affiliate of Bookshop.org is ‘an exclusive BA member benefit’. Is it? Bookshop.org makes no such claim in its own Terms and Conditions.

Congratulations to all. But my prize goes to Geoffrey Locke in Stoke-on-Trent who got it bang on—and brief, too: “Brexit?” asked Christian. “Why, from the delectable mountains I saw the gates of the Celestial City.” “But before us lies the Valley of Humiliation!’ cried Faintheart”—and he got out of the mire on that side of the swamp which was next to his own house.

The BA also has an arrangement with ABE, but doesn’t trumpet it. And why doesn’t the BA promote Hive.co.uk, a genuinely UK company, launched ten years ago, which also shares profits with independent bookshops. Hive must be seething.

The BA repeats the American company’s message that ‘Bookshop.org offers UK independent bookshops … the support of its pro-independent, anti-Amazon online platform.’ Members may like it but if I were a professional body like the BA, I’d find such language undignified.

The Big Hippo Guide to Democracy, Referendums, Elections

‘Mark [Mark Thornton, its Partnership Manager] is always available for advice,’ one seller tells us, ‘and the team have been really helpful on multiple occasions. It’s not just being able to sell books online … but being able to access events with high-profile authors that wouldn’t usually give an indie bookshop the time of day. I don’t see much crossover between those that visit the shop and those that shop online. Our customers come from as far as Devon and the Highlands.’

Good deal or no good deal

Questions have been asked—mostly by shops not affiliated to Bookshop.org—about whether the claimed 30% return given to sellers is a good deal. Most affiliates think it is—not that any we’ve spoken to has done the maths. (Nor have we.) Returns in bookselling are unbelievably opaque. We cannot even know how much any shop is owed as a result of having a presence on Bookshops.org’s platform. That’s because Bookshop.org has no real commercial relationship with the booksellers it represents. It doesn’t source its books from them, it doesn’t deliver its books to them. Shops aren’t a structural part of any transaction and they don’t have joint ownership of the site: they are merely beneficiaries of Bookshop.org’s largesse, at its own discretion and on its own terms.

They Called Us Enemy George Takei

IDW Publishing

ISBN: 9781603094504

RRP: £17.99

A stunning graphic memoir recounting the childhood imprisonment of actor, author and activist George Takei within American concentration camps during World War II

Philanthropy v. self-interest

(and all that)

Martin Rowson and Bob Marshall Andrews

Everything with Words

Publication July 25, 2019

Paperback, ISBN 9781911427124, RRP £8.99

The hilarious joint creation of Bob Marshall Andrews, author, barrister, former Labour MP for Medway, thorn in Tony Blair’s side and guest on Have I Got News for You, and multi-award-winning cartoonist, author, illustrator, writer and poet Martin Rowson. Just what you need in Brexit Britain to keep your flag flying and madness at bay

To persuade the public to buy books at close to full price, Bookshop.org also has to suggest that its platform is philanthropic, even though all the players in the game are businesses, including itself. (And isn’t its chief exec, Andy Hunter, just another Jeff Bezos—an entrepreneur with a good idea?) It’s a bit like posing as the books equivalent of the Fairtrade Foundation. It wants you to think you’re buying ethically.

Size Really Does Matter:

The Nanotechnology

Revolution

Colm Durkan

World Scientific Publishing

ISBN: 9781786346612

RRP: £38.00

The End of Online Shopping Wijnand Jongen

World Scientific Publishing

ISBN: 9789813274761

Bookshop.org says that every purchase ends up benefitting the shop it was meant to help, or going into the pool, and we take this on trust. It’s not as if Bookshop.org is a charity and committed to full disclosure. But they all seem like good guys, as the affidavits attest.

RRP: £20.00

The science and history of nanotechnology, followed by reallife examples of how it is used

How the smart, sharing, circular, and platform economies are shaping a new era of alwaysconnected retail

On this basis, affiliate stores happily volunteer as Bookshop.org’s unpaid staff, putting in hours and hours uploading their own choice of books to their ‘shop window’—their page—on the app’s website, and one can

To buy any of the books advertisted on this page, go to www.booklaunch.london and click on BOOKSHOP or point your smartphone here. All prices include free UK delivery.