Booklaunch Issue 12

How much can we rely on Keynes to get us out of hock?

In this issue, two economists go head to head.

John Maynard Keynes wrote, after the Great Depression, that governments could head off financial disaster by expanding their programmes of public works. Greater spending would boost consumer demand, and government borrowing could be paid off in the future, when the economy was back on track.

His thinking was widely adopted by the Allies after the war.

But David Kauders argues that with one-fifth of all economic output spent on interest payments, payback never comes. Instead of saving us, national debt is now crippling us.

Pedro Gomes thinks the question is more nuanced. He argues that Keynesian intervention, which dominated until the 1960s, became discredited during the 1970s and was quickly resuscitated in 2007 at the start of the Great Recession, is a useful tool if short and sharp.

If consumer demand is to grow, we not only need money to spend but the time to spend it in. More free time is therefore crucial—and this can be created by instituting a statutory three-day weekend.

Read extracts from both on pages 10 to 11.

A question of character

The case of the disappearing wife—and other mysteries

Holbein, like his Northern European contemporaries Cranach and Dürer, was a realist rather than idealist or dogmatist: he depicted what he saw—not what his mind conceived. Supposedly.

But here’s a challenge. The subject in the painting above is evidently wealthy and “splendidly attired”, wears a necklace and rings, has a smooth complexion and soft, full lips. But is it a man or a woman? And has Holbein deliberately amplified this ambiguity?

A similar question is asked in two other of our books. In Representing the Male, John Perrott Jenkins looks closely at ambivalent representations of miners in Welsh novels while in The Eurasian Steppe, Warwick Ball considers (among much else) the plausibility of female warriors—the Steppe Amazons of mythology. Read extracts from all on pages 12–13, 4 and 7.

Women who marry and give up their name may also give up their identity. When we think of Booth, Shaw, Tawney and Beveridge, we’re thinking of Charles, George Bernard, Richard Henry and William, not of their wives—Mary Catherine, Charlotte Frances, Jeannette and Janet (or Jessy)—whose memories have been disgracefully eclipsed. The Shaw Library at the LSE, for example, is named not after GBS, as many suppose, but his wife Charlotte, one of the School's first trustees. Charlotte regularly supported the LSE and other radical organisations, as well as carrying out the research that GBS needed to write St Joan.

Ann Oakley's impassioned study Forgotten Wives is one of five books in Booklaunch #12 that look at gender issues. We also showcase the need to talk about menopause in Caroline Harris’s M-Boldened, the reality or otherwise of Amazons in Warwick Ball’s The Eurasian Steppe, John Perrott Jenkins's unravelling of masculinity in Representing the Male, and Janina David’s The Hopeful Traveller, a collection of short stories about middle-aged single women trying to find themselves in the years before feminism. See pages 3 to 8.

Dickens was wrong

In Hard Times, Dickens satirises Thomas Gradgrind, the utilitarian teacher, for demanding “nothing but facts”, as if facts were cold and hard. Britannica’s latest offering Listify! proves the very opposite: that facts are a joyous romp for all clever children to gobble up. See pages 15 to 18.

ON OUR INSIDE PAGES

EDITORIAL

Page 2 Bad language, Word records, Lingualia quiz BOOKS ABOUT WOMEN’S ISSUES

Page 3 Janina David’s fables about single women

Page 4 How Welsh fiction fetishises the male

Page 5 History’s erasure of married women

Page 6 Amazons: heroes of the Eurasian Steppes

Page 8 Twenty-one essays about the menopause

CULTURAL HISTORY

Page 9 What Columbo reveals about surveillance

ECONOMICS

Page 10 Unsustainable debt: the case against Keynes

Page 11 Shorter working weeks: the case for Keynes

VISUAL CULTURE

Page 12 Holbein and the depiction of character

Page 14 To see the world as others see it …

CHILDREN’S

Page 15 Britannica’s new wonderbook for kids

ENVIRONMENT

Page 19 After Covid: learning to love the city again

Page 20 Flying-foxes and the threat to human life

The Fabian Window, now installed in the Shaw Library, highlighting the male founders of the LSE. The window was created by Charlotte Shaw’s cousin, Caroline Townshend, from an idea by Charlotte or GBS or both.

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Well out of order, and other flop-flips Bart O’Fehfon

A hobby-horse of mine: compound words and pairphrases, specifically the way they sequence their components—all leading you to an overwhelming question: What is doubly odd about the phrase ‘hammer and sickle’?

The first oddity is that the sequence is the reverse of that in many or most other languages: French, Spanish, Polish, Russian, Hungarian … . Mind you, German has the same sequence that English has, and perhaps it’s the more logical sequence (factory workers were keen on revolution, peasants less so). It’s not clear which sequence came first, and why the other languages switched it. If you know, do let me know.

Second, the sequence ‘hammer and sickle’ is phonetically odd. In the hierarchy of vowels, a short i-sound generally precedes a short a- or o-sound (and every other vowel, for that matter): flip-flop, ping-pong, spic and span, skin and bones, pickpocket, zigzag, Gilbert and Sullivan, Vic and Bob, in and out, bits and bobs, pins and needles, big and small, prim and proper.

In tech parlance, it’s the ‘rule of ablaut reduplication’ at work. The tendency is so powerful that it sometimes overrides other powerful factors, such as: semantics: pitter-patter, chitchat, hippety-hop, splishsplash (cf. the more logical ‘clickety-clack’ and ‘tick-tock’, where the meaningful component comes first)

Bringing back the fun

North London bookseller House of Books invites readers to go on blind dates with a book. It must be working: they’re opening a fourth shop in Islington in October.

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salience: Lib-Lab, sick and tired, no ifs or buts monosyllable preceding polysyllable (Panini’s principle, or end-weight principle): nickel and dime, Little and Large, Mitchell and Webb chronology: trick or treat (cf. the more logical/chronological ‘kiss and tell’, as with ‘your money or your life’, etc)

For the record, there are many exceptions, but in almost all cases there’s a clear reason (sometimes more than one) for the secondary-vowel element’s trumping the i-vowel element:

salience: pen and ink, beer and skittles, gold and silver, life and limb, Tom and Viv, body and spirit, brother and sister.

chronology: point and click, stop and frisk, stand and deliver, shape up or ship out monosyllable preceding polysyllable: fire and brimstone, pure and simple, bells and whistles, slap and tickle, cease and desist, truth and justice, terms and conditions, smoke and mirrors food gradience: gammon and spinach, bourbon and bitters, food and drink, oil and vinegar, steak and kidney rhyme: Brahms and Liszt, Jack and Jill.

In fairness, a few pairs do appear to be genuine unex-

Lingualia Quiz 4

What do the following four sequences have in common? And can you add a further item at the end of each sequence?

—oblige, average, heather, metacarpal, identifiable, internationally —Puck, Shylock, Fortinbras, Bassanio —Grey, Baldwin, Macmillan —Guinea, Germany, Singapore, Madagascar

For a bonus, can you create a themed sequence of your own, with a minimum of four items? Book prizes to the best answers.

RESULTS OF QUIZ 3

Could you make sense of the following string of letters? You needed to relocate three words to do it.

ceptionable exceptions. It’s difficult to explain away the following: alive and kicking, summer and winter, Baddiel and Skinner, double or quits, and hammer and sickle.

Word records: Round #3

Booklaunch Issue 10 discussed the question of the richest homograph, i.e. which spelling corresponds to the greatest number of different words. Here is an associated question. What is the richest homophone? i.e. which sound-sequence corresponds to the greatest number of different words?

In French, the nasalised pronunciation /sa:/ corresponds to seven words: sang, sans, cent, s’en, c’en, (tu) sens, (il) sent

In English, the record is supposedly four—right, write, rite, wright—or, in some American accents meddle, medal, metal, mettle

There are claims, though, for six, at least in nonrhotic accents—aw, awe, oar, o’er, or, ore—or in some Scottish accents air, are (‘one-hundredth of a hectare’), e’er, ere, err, heir (plus three placenames, for good measure: Ayr, Eyre, Aire)—or even seven, if you allow a very large dictionary: raise, rays, rase, raze, rehs, réis, res

If you were thoroughly evil you could always top that with the sound /ded/, as in ‘All attempts at resuscitation failed, and he / she / Blofeld / the heroine / the victim / the cat / etc / etc was pronounced dead’ but anyone seriously suggesting this could also be pronounced dead.

Answer: reposition the words Wells, con and ration and then redistribute the spaces and punctuation to get the following sentence:

To get her to read Orwell’s early reportage and review it, assure her it ages well and really warrants reconsideration.

Well done to Booklaunch reader and former bookseller Jenny Monds in Salisbury, who was first to solve the puzzle and who also produced a formidable example of her own:

Infer no writ. Ten was when Dan, worth teaching, was in ex. Ileitis, still well, reading.

Relocate two words to get the answer. (No prizes on this one, though. Unless, Jenny, you’re feeling flush … ?)

Ernst Stavro Blofeld: pronounced dead.

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

The car tyres crunched over the long drive leading up to the front door and stopped in a pile of fresh snow. Pierrot, who had been silent throughout the journey, now sounded the horn and climbed out without a word.

Strange boy, Alice thought, scrambling out of her seat and sinking up to her ankles in the snow. Why so sulky? I haven’t done anything to him. But isn’t he handsome? I bet he knows it too. Silly, stuck-up kid. Playing hard to get? Well, let him. We’ll see who wins.

The front door opened and there they all were, shivering in their dressing gowns on the threshold: ‘Alice! Welcome! Welcome home!’

Aunt Marie-Madeleine, elegant in quilted silk, hair and make-up immaculate even at such an early hour. Aunt Marie-Thérèse, plump and dishevelled, swathed in a voluminous woollen garment of many hues, her round face shining. And behind them—Paul: Alice’s beloved uncle, the object of her girlish dreams and romantic speculations, the man she had long ago elected as her ‘perfect Frenchman’.

Dragging her rucksack and skis through the snow, she made her way towards the welcoming trio. Pierrot had vanished inside the house. Eager hands pulled her

They are for you, Alice. I’m sure you don’t get them in England.’

‘And where is Aunt Marie-Louise?’ Alice asked. ‘She’s here, I hope.’

‘My wife has her breakfast in bed. It’s her one luxury when we are all here.’ Paul helped himself to a croissant.

‘There is so much work in this house, poor Marie-Louise never stops,’ sighed Marie-Madeleine.

‘Neither do we.’ Marie-Thérèse had returned with a fresh pot of coffee. Taking her place at the table, she buttered a croissant and dunked it in her bowl. Golden rings floated onto the milky surface.

‘How they’ve changed,’ Alice thought. While she had been growing up, they had grown old. There were wrinkles and lines on all the faces. Uncle Paul would not be able now to throw her in the air or whirl her about like a spinning top. Now, his dark eyes looking into her own made her feel she was blushing all over.

‘And how is your mamma? Still so pretty and headstrong and proud? And still alone? And why isn’t she here with you?’

Why indeed?

‘Of course, I can’t forbid you to visit them, Alice. You’re old enough to do what you want. I just wish you

What was it like for middleaged women to strive for empowerment just before the feminist revolution? Janina David

over the front step. Aunt Marie-Madeleine offered a scented cheek for a kiss. Aunt Marie-Thérèse spread her night cream over Alice’s face while she showered her with kisses, her eyes brimming with tears. Uncle Paul first held her at arm’s length to take a good look, then his lips brushed her forehead. The handle of his walking stick dug into Alice’s back while he embraced her with some force. And the question she had been asking herself throughout the journey found its answer: yes, she was happy, enormously happy to be here. Yes, it had been too long since the last visit. Yes, she regretted that long absence, due entirely to the inexplicable whim of her mother. But all that was in the past. Why bother with ancient family feuds? She was here at last, only for one day, alas, her skiing companions were waiting for her in Méribel, but this was only the beginning, the first of many such visits.

Hot chocolate and croissants! Memories of childhood breakfasts flooded back on a wave of unforgettable scents. How hungry she was!

‘You’ve grown so, Alice. You are a young woman. Last time we saw you in Paris, you were a child. We were so happy together, your mother and you and all of us. How long ago it now seems. When was it exactly? Can anyone remember when?’

‘Marie-Thérèse, the coffee’s gone cold. How about bringing us a fresh pot instead of chattering meaninglessly?’

Paul had seated himself at the table. His limp had grown more pronounced, Alice noticed. Marie-Madeleine was crunching daintily on some crispbread, making helpless gestures with her long, red-tipped fingers.

‘So sorry! This is deafening. I can’t hear a thing when I’m eating these. So much healthier than bread or croissants—dear me, no, thank you, I never touch them.

EDITOR’S NOTE

wouldn’t go there. No, I can’t explain why. One day, when you’re older, perhaps. But believe me, darling, it is for your own good.’

It was those last words of her mother’s which decided Alice to visit her French relatives. After all, they were her mother’s sisters. Whatever the reason for the break in the relationship which had happened so long ago, soon after her father’s untimely death, she would try to heal the ancient wound. People as temperamental as her mother—and for all she knew, her aunts too—often let things get out of hand.

‘We must show you the house, Alice. As soon as we get dressed, we’ll take you on a tour. And Paul will show you the grounds. Pity about the snow. We have such a beautiful garden here.’

Alice watched Marie-Madeleine pour a second cup for Paul. Sitting on his right side, Alice took in his every move, every smile exchanged across the table. She observed Marie-Madeleine’s slender hands moving restlessly, kneading stray bread crumbs into small balls. Memories stirred in Alice’s mind. She remembered the same hands, with long, scarlet nails, poised on Paul’s shoulders, as Marie-Madeleine, standing behind his chair, had glared defiantly at her three sisters gathered in the elegant drawing room of the Paris flat. Paul’s wife Marie-Louise, plump and breathless, had soon taken refuge in the kitchen to escape voices raised in an incomprehensible argument. Marie-Thérèse had started stammering and looking wounded, and then things had begun to drop to the floor, shattering—porcelain, crystal and glass—and spilling on the carpet, dark stains spreading everywhere. There had been cries of dismay, a chorus of indignation, and Marie-Thérèse in floods of tears. And Marie-Claire, Alice’s mother, the youngest of the four sisters, had rushed out, cheeks aflame and eyes

In France, Mattie feels 20 again. In Uzbekistan, Diana lets a fellow tourist kiss her. In Germany, Lynn loses her luggage on the Düsseldorf train. Single, middle-aged women just before the birth of feminism, with the past behind them but still looking for their anchor in the present. Their stories include bitter-sweet accounts of the freedoms of postwar life, foreign travel, the rekindling of old friendships and the search for new ones. Set variously in Paris, Kalisz, Samarkand, Hong Kong, Melbourne, Erfurt, Singapore and London, these stories, from a muchadmired veteran writer, offer a teasing mix of realism and fantasy, wish-fulfilment and regret.

blazing, dragging the bewildered child in her wake:

‘This is the last time either of us sets foot in this house!’

The sound of doors slamming and their return home to the modest semi-detached in suburban London. The subject of their French family had vanished from all conversation, leaving Alice to grow into a fatherless adolescence with a fond remembrance of her mysterious and exotic aunts—Frenchwomen are so chic—and a yearning for her handsome and unattainable uncle Paul. And now, she was here.

Let me show you your room, Alice. You’ll be sleeping in the tower.’

‘Oh, but it’s circular!’ Alice looked round with delight at the curving walls and tall windows. The bed was a four-poster.

‘I’ve never slept in such a room before!’

‘You shall be the princess in the tower. This room hasn’t been used since the summer, so it’s a bit cold, but we’ve turned the heaters on, so it should be all right by tonight,’ Marie-Thérèse assured her.

‘And I’m finishing the last curtain. You’ll have it this afternoon,’ promised Marie-Madeleine.

THE HOPEFUL TRAVELLER EnvelopeBooks

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What a pity it would only be for one night, Alice thought.

‘Is there a ghost too?’ she asked, laughing. ‘How old is this house?’

‘It dates from the seventeenth century, although there are some modern additions, and we have installed all the necessary conveniences,’ Paul answered. He was standing so close that she could feel his breath on the back of her neck.

‘And as for the ghost, I’m sure it can be arranged. Would you really like to meet one?’

She turned her head to look at him and felt again the strange power of those dark eyes, which used to fill her with such happiness when she was a child. Then, she used to jump straight into his arms. She regretted that such behaviour was no longer possible. The winter sunshine poured through the tall windows, turning her hair into a golden halo. She could see it in the mirror over the mantel-piece. She smiled at her reflection and saw Paul’s answering smile.

‘Yes, Uncle Paul. I would like to meet a ghost. If it belongs to this house it must be a very entertaining one. I wouldn’t be at all scared.’

‘Well, I can’t stand here all day. There’s a lot of work to be done. Marie-Louise must be wanting help in the kitchen. Come, Alice, say good morning to her too.’ Marie-Madeleine led the way briskly down the stairs, followed by the rest of the family.

They found Marie-Louise already at work, chopping vegetables at the kitchen table. Tears streamed down her plump and rosy face as she advanced, arms outstretched, to embrace the newcomer: ‘How the time flies! Alice, my dear! You’ve grown so, you’re taller than I. Oh, don’t mind the tears, I’m chopping onions!’

continued in the book

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Janina David (born 1930 in Poland) is a Holocaust survivor who escaped the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943, reached Paris in 1946 and emigrated to Australia in 1948. The first volume of her autobiography—A Square of Sky—became a best-seller in Germany, a set text in German schools, and an award-wining play and a film.

REPRESENTING THE MALE MASCULINITY, GENRE AND SOCIAL CONTEXT IN SIX SOUTH WALES NOVELS

University of Wales Press Softback, 256 pages 30 June 2021

9781786837783

RRP £24.99

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Masculinity was once regarded as a nexus of attributes supposedly present in Men that made them different from Women. It was taken to be an arrangement ‘Ordained by Nature’. ‘Real’ men, those engaged in physically taxing and dangerous activities like miners, boxers and soldiers, brought the frisson of danger, strength and an edgy presence to burnish further the allure of masculinity and justify its claim to power.

Within the gender asymmetry [of] the industrial south Wales Valleys, men created and organised the means of production, distribution and exchange, while women managed the household economy and brought up the children.

The historian Deirdre Beddoe had already observed in 1986 that such ‘differences’ made Welsh women ‘culturally invisible’. Welsh men, however, suffered no such handicap. Beddoe records that there was, given their different gender practices from women, a specific image of Welsh men—or, rather, Welshmen, for they appeared to be indistinguishable from each other. Collectivised into one homogeneous group, they were coal miners, rugby players and male voice choristers, patriarchal figures exhibiting an unqualified masculine presence.

Post-structural feminism and post-industrial decline in Wales have made more visible the hitherto marginalised female presence, but reappraisals of Valleys’ fiction have been less forthcoming. This book subjects six Valleys’ novels—Times Like These (1936), Cwmardy (1937), Strike for a Kingdom (1959), So Long, Hector Bebb (1970), Dark Edge (1997) and Until Our Blood is Dry (2014)—to gender-specific reading to argue that it was not only women who were subjected to ‘pejoration, disqualification and exclusion’.

the image of the ‘heroic’ miner gave the miner the small compensation of status, but the structure of Valleys’ industrial capitalism consigned men to labour as expendable wage-slaves, and women to lives of domestic drudgery.

Miners in these novels are required to reconcile the irreconcilable demands of a hierarchical power system where they are accorded subordinate status at work while in theory they are patriarchally sanctioned principals at home. Ideologically subservient, and ‘feminised’, in one context, they are ideologically dominant and ‘masculinised’ in another.

When represented in fiction, and read from a gender-focused perspective, rather than standing as exemplars of a stable patriarchy, figures like Jim and Len Roberts in Cwmardy (1937), D.J. Williams in Strike for a Kingdom (1959) and Gwyn Pritchard in Until Our Blood is Dry (2014) become divided selves, unable to achieve a reconciliation between the personal and public roles they are committed to by the power systems that seek to shape them.

It is principally through three channels—work, family and homosocial bonding—that mining masculinity is exhibited in these novels. Individually and collectively they reveal how a model of masculinity was imposed on

READERS’ COMMENTS

Jane Aaron: Mines a rich seam of gender complexity and contradiction.

Aidan Byrne: A fine addition to the field of Welsh literary masculinities.

Katie Gramich: Shows how a persistently macho culture can repress and warp both women and men.

Six classic South Wales novels feminise men at work and masculinise them at home. Why is that? John Perrott

Jenkins

the Valleys and acquired a self-generating momentum. Illustrated principally through bodily practice requiring strength, courage, skill and endurance, mining masculinity was recognisable in Wales through contact sport, especially boxing and rugby, homosocial bonding and dominance of public space.

In Gramscian terms, so deeply internalised do such cultural processes become that they acquire the status of normalised standards of behaviour to which men should aspire.

The story of the Valleys, of their literature and masculinities, is a story of a hybrid industrial society subjected to immense cultural upheaval, and discontinuous with the more settled gwerin culture of rural mid-Wales. As M. Wynn Thomas explains, the Valleys are ‘a unique society’, producing a literature connecting ‘the writers’ common experience […] of belonging to a place apart’, neither recognisably English nor traditionally Welsh. It is out of this that certain forms of gender definition become distinctive, so that ‘different types of men and women and different types of masculinity and femininity emerge’.

Topographically separated from each other, culturally discontinuous from the rest of Wales but united by a single and dangerous industry, socially hybridised but strongly communal, rich in coal but economically exploited, the Valleys therefore constitute a crucible for examining through its literature the effect which a socio-economic model has had upon masculinity as a culturally defined construct.

four chapters of this book subject a single novel, and the fifth chapter two related novels, to a careful gender-specific scrutiny of its male characters. The first chapter examines Gwyn Jones’s Times Like These (1936), a text that has not fared well when read as an industrial novel, perhaps because Lewis Jones’s more dynamic Cwmardy was published just a year later. Times Like These has enjoyed frequent but brief appearances in surveys of the Welsh industrial novel but it has never been published in Wales, and although Raymond Williams and Glyn Jones were enthusiasts, critical comment has been more cautious in its judgements.

My chapter does not read Times Like These principally as focusing on labour relations and industrial conflict but as a study of masculinities. Accepting that Gwyn Jones, as the middle-class university lecturer son of a working-class striking miner, is himself personally implicated in the social dynamics the novel studies, I suggest that his novel’s imaginative thrust emerges from what Raymond Williams calls ‘the complex interrelations between movements and tendencies both within and beyond a specific and effective dominance’.

More specifically, the chapter focuses principally on four representations of masculinity. The mine owner, Sir Hugh Thomas, is a perversion of the Victorian ‘man of character’, and his henchmen Webber and Henshaw expose how their form of capitalism provides the systemic degradation of the miners they employ. Two ‘residual’ forms of masculinity are represented in the

EDITOR’S NOTE

pastoral practices of the miners whose values interfuse with recognisable elements of eighteenth-century neo-Augustan communal civility represented through the figure of Denis Shelton. [There is also] the culturally liminal figure of Broddam, an upwardly mobile businessman, and through him Times Like These examines the challenges of identity facing the ambitious Anglo-Welshman. In his ‘process of becoming’, Broddam is anxious to acquire the signifiers of the English ‘gentleman’, but is equally anxious to avoid humiliating faux pas His Monmouthshire background is significant here for, like Gwyn Jones, he was born in what Katie Gramich describes as, ‘a notoriously ambivalent county’, neither Welsh nor English at the time.

Lewis Jones’s Cwmardy and We Live (1937 and 1939) have been read together as ‘a major Marxist contribution from Britain to international industrial fiction’. Chapter 2 approaches Cwmardy as generically different from We Live, which tells ‘the larger story’ of ‘community radicalisation’. When read with the focus on the gendering of its two principal characters, the extraordinary achievement of Cwmardy lies in its powerfully humanistic critique of how Len and Jim Roberts are locked into the restrictive patterns of male behaviour where Jim is confined to self-expression through his ‘magnificent body’ (Cwmardy, p. 11), and the temperamentally passive Len is divided between two incompatible roles.

Doctrinally, Cwmardy charts the Bildung figure Len Roberts from youth to stabilised political activist, rather as Zola does with Étienne Lantier in Germinal (published in English in 1894). I argue that the generic form of Cwmardy lies in its subversion of the doctrinal Bildungsroman to show how Len remains ‘a queer lad for his age’ (Cwmardy, p. 14) whatever his age.

When subjected to a gender-focused reading, Menna Gallie’s seemingly innocuous ‘whodunnit’ Strike for a Kingdom (1959) reveals a subversive strategy that may be called ‘sly civility’. Set in the pit village of Cilhendre during the 1926 strike, the novel not only challenges the generic conventions of the whodunnit but allows its female narrative voice to distinguish representations of Welsh miners from earlier portrayals in Welsh fiction that acknowledged commonly accepted models of masculinity.

So Long, Hector Bebb (1970) is generally placed within the genre of sporting fiction as a novel about a boxer. As a figure embodying the characteristics of legendary combative masculinity, Hector Bebb evolved through several draft narratives in which he is, at various points, an unhappily married patriarch, a promising boxer, father of a disabled son, and a minor criminal, to his final incarnation as an essentialised, mythopoeic figure.

Constructed finally through a collage of classical, English and American archetypes, and representing a strict gender dimorphism, Hector Bebb offers a provocative response to 1960s second-wave feminism. (The coincidental publication of Berry’s novel, with its hypertrophic protagonist, and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch in 1970 is one of literature’s less acknowledged ironies.) continued in the book

The latest volume in the series Gender Studies in Wales brings a complex study of how social and economic forces collide in the depiction of masculinity. George Orwell, for example, typified miners as having bodies like “hammered iron statues” with “arms and belly muscles of steel” but also as having the sculpted female form of “a sort of caryatid”, combining physical grace with effortless strength. As the author suggests, Orwell’s writing, whether intentional or not, implies there is more to gender than patriarchally conceived binary distinctions. This book has devoted itself to just such an inquiry.

The subtitle of this book, ‘how women get written out of history’, overstates its argument.

Forgotten Wives isn’t a comprehensive guide to all the strategies that have ever been used to achieve this ignoble aim. But I’ve been researching and writing about gender for more than half a century and I’m tired of careful phrasing and modest claims.

It is obvious to anyone who has followed the trajectory of gender through and beyond the 20th century that the social processes shaping a second-class citizenship for women remain firmly in place. We are drowning in evidence about what these processes are and how they work, but evidence—of which there is plenty in this book—remains hugely important. At the same time, there’s nothing to be gained by understating the impact on all our lives of systematic discrimination against women.

This book argues that the status of women as wives continues to manipulate the status of women in general. Women are seen as proto-wives, wives in the making, wives when they aren’t; they are persistently judged by standards of behaviour, personality and presentation which are tied to the character of the female half of a married couple. Wifehood is the default prism through

ferent; marriage has a different impact on their public lives; intimacy is a gendered experience; and marriage divides the economic position, psychology, and physical and mental health of men and women.

Interestingly, there’s been relatively little social science research on one of the main themes of Forgotten Wives—wives’ relationships to husbands’ work.

The relationship between marriage and gender means that we’ve inherited an enormous skewed collection of narratives shaping the ways in which the lives and achievements of married people are remembered. Forgotten Wives takes a little bit of this history and asks how being married might have altered the ways in which wives and husbands are differently remembered. Its focus is on wifehood as a political filter through which women’s lives are passed so as to yield a product which only partially records what they actually did. Husbandhood calls for comments of various kinds, but it doesn’t have at all the same effects as wifehood. Marriage offers a particular case of forgetting with respect to women: ‘forgetting’ here is an umbrella term that covers assorted forms of ignoring, devaluing, marginalising and distorting. Marriage functions as a paradigm, a cipher, an exemplar of the status of women

are the women?’ question that has traditionally preoccupied opponents of women’s rights. A veritable tsunami of books about forgotten women has hit the bookshops in recent years: broadcaster Jenni Murray’s A History of Britain in 21 Women (2016), and A History of the World in 21 Women (2018); Kerstin Lücker and Ute Daenschel’s A History of the World with the Women Put Back in (2019); Kate Pankhurst’s Fantastically Great Women Who Made History (2018); and Bloody Brilliant Women: The Pioneers, Revolutionaries and Geniuses Your History Teacher Forgot to Mention (2018) by Cathy Newman are just some of them.

But wives? How does being a wife specifically affect the likelihood of an individual female human being’s life and work being given the same consideration as a husband’s? This is a question about wives’ work both outside the home and inside it. The cumulative amount of domestic labour performed by the four women whose lives are recounted in Forgotten Wives to care for husbands, homes and children was truly enormous, but there are few glimpses of it anywhere in any existing accounts of the women’s or their husbands’ lives.

Most importantly, almost no attention is given by biographers and historians to what the famous hus-

EDITOR’S NOTE

When creativity is shared by married couples, it is usually the man who gets the credit. In this first analysis of the overshadowing of married women, Ann Oakley looks at four insufficiently celebrated wives—Charlotte Shaw, Mary Booth, Jeannette Tawney and Janet Beveridge—to discover how an institution originally designed to protect women has in fact protected them into invisibility. In addition to throwing light on her four case studies, the book offers a radical reappraisal of the birth of the welfare state, of which all four were the mothers no less than their husbands were its fathers.

which women’s individual agency is blurred and often effectively dissolved.

There are many ways to illustrate how the default prism of wifehood works. The method I adopt in Forgotten Wives is to take some historical examples of British women married to well-known men and consider how the biographers of these men, and historians who have written about their various projects, have failed to entertain the possibility of the wives also being people who made contributions to history in their own right.

In order to do this it has been necessary to read the original documents left by the women (and their husbands and others) rather than depend on the biographical and historical stories produced by those who have made assumptions about women’s lives and labours based on the gendered stereotypes of wifehood. At the time of writing (November 2020) most archives remain out-of-bounds, and there’s no timetable for their reopening. Rather than waiting for this to be resolved, I decided to finish the book with the material I’d already gathered. By the time it’s published I shall be well into my 78th year and patience doesn’t grow with age. So I need to apologise for the gaps, some of which I know about but many of which I probably don’t, that are a consequence of not having the time or the patience to wait.

There is, of course, an enormous literature on marriage—its history, its anthropology, its sociology, its psychology, its legal, economic and social status. People have been impressed, puzzled, angered and generally fascinated and obsessed with what marriage is and what it does to individuals and society. Much of this literature fastens on the gender disparities that lie at the heart of marriage. Her marriage is not the same thing as his marriage: their domestic and emotional labour is dif-

in societies that are still dominated, despite many moves towards sex equality made over the last hundred years, by the rule of male superiority. Wives are especially likely to be forgotten, more likely than other women, who cannot so easily be concealed behind men (though fathers and even brothers may sometimes do instead of husbands here).

The habit of forgetting Forgotten Wives follows on from the research I did for Women, Peace and Welfare: A Suppressed History of Social Reform, 1880–1920, published by Policy Press in 2018. That earlier book remembers 328 women around the world who were active either in peace movements or developing the tools of social research or in the field of social welfare, and often in all three areas, which many of them saw as fundamentally interconnected.

The peace movement belonged to men, social science was the invention of male theorists and ‘the welfare state’ had a father, but no mother. The writer Joanna Russ listed some standard strategies for demoting women’s writing in her How to Suppress Women’s Writing (1983): she didn’t write it at all; she didn’t write it, he did; she did write it, but she ought not to have done; she wrote it, but look what she wrote about; she wrote only one of it; she had help; yes, she did write it but she’s an anomaly.

A consistent theme was the sidelining of the contributions made by women who were also wives, especially those married to men with public reputations. This phenomenon of wife-forgetting seemed to demand some attention. We are fairly used now to the inroads of scholarship on women’s general invisibility as subjects of study: both academic books and articles and books for the general reader give us no excuse for the ‘where

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ann Oakley is Professor of Sociology and Social Policy at the Social Research Institute, University College London. She has written many academic publications as well as biography, autobiography and fiction. Her book The Men’s Room was serialised by the BBC.

bands might have been able to achieve without this subterranean industry of wifely labour. The gendered assumption that this is what wives do has clouded the vision, so that wives’ domestic labour, being unremarkable, is simply not there at all.

This cultural neglect of domestic labour is one issue. The second issue is what she does to help his work. Husbands thank their wives, in discourse and in publications, but perhaps she was also an author of it, and might have liked the world to know that? Then there is what she herself did as an individual, with some degree of independence from her husband and their joint marital life, and—as two of the case studies in this book show—sometimes it’s an accomplishment he didn’t actually know much about, which can get in the way of other people knowing anything about it at all.

The four women whose lives are discussed in the next four chapters were born between 1847 and 1881 in England, Scotland, Ireland and India respectively. None of them is famous. They married between 1871 and 1909, and what they have in common is that their husbands are well known for the key contributions they made to the formation of Britain’s modern welfare state.

The wives would have known each other: they shared 59 years of mutual existence, although there’s no outstanding record of any especially intimate relationship. The husbands all have multiple biographical entries, including in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) and Wikipedia and at least one fulllength biography each. Only one of the wives appears in the ODNB, and only one (a different one) in Wikipedia, and only one has merited a full-length biography: Charlotte Shaw’s life is recorded under the telling title Mrs G.B.S.

continued in the book

As Virginia Woolf noted of the Carlyles, famous men have always depended on the willing drudgery of their wives

Ann Oakley

THE EURASIAN STEPPE PEOPLE, MOVEMENT, IDEAS University of Edinburgh

Press

Softback, 448 pages October 2021

9781474488068

RRP £19.99

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READERS’ COMMENTS

Thomas J. Barfield: Combines the unique aspects of Eurasian steppe nomadic culture, history and economics over six and a half millennia.

Diana Darke: Ranging from today’s Russia and Turkey to India and China, Ball explores such mysteries as the origins of the Indo-Europeans and the surprising role played by women.

Fifteen days journey from the city of Samarcand, in the direction of China, there is a land inhabited by Amazons, and to this day they continue the custom of having no men with them, except at one time of the year; when they are permitted, by their leaders, to go with their daughters to the nearest settlements, and have communication with men, each taking the one who pleases her most, with whom they live, and eat, and drink, after which they return to their own land … . Ruy Gonzales de Clavijo

One of the most potent images originating in the steppe is that of the female warrior: the Amazon. Whether viewed as the ideal of power, beauty and desire, or the idea of a woman taking over male roles and excelling at them, the image of the female archer on horseback at full gallop or commanding armies is a potent one: history can never resist a warrior queen.

The idea of a warrior woman is still a perennial theme in popular culture. It captured the imagination of the ancient Greeks, persisted into the Middle Ages as late as the fifteenth century and is as alive today as it ever was. In fact de Clavijo’s description above is lifted almost verbatim from Herodotus, so he would not have heard it from informants during his sojourn at Samarkand.

And it does contain a grain of truth: the fact that he locates Amazons to the east of Samarkand, rather than in Anatolia or the Pontic–Caspian steppe of the classical accounts, does at least suggest that reports of high-status women among the steppe nomads east of Samarkand validates the steppe nomadic origin of the classical Amazons myths two thousand years before.

Greeks bearing myths

The origins of the Amazons lie in ancient Greek myth. They are first mentioned by Homer, who describes them as ‘equal to men’ in their fight with Bellerophon. Such a description implies admiration. Since the Bellerophon stories occur before the Trojan Wars, centuries before Homer’s own time, the myth is presumably Bronze Age in origin.

Amazons were encountered by Jason and his Argonauts, another Bronze Age legend, on the southern shores of the Black Sea in Anatolia. But Herodotus and others locate the ‘historic’ Amazons on the shores of the Sea of Azov and other ancient writers to the east of the Don—in other words, at the edge of the known world— and most associate them in some way or another with the Scythians.

They are variously described as either a tribe of Scythians or as a separate tribe who mated seasonally with the Scythian men before sending them away; male offspring would either be sent to the fathers or simply dispatched, with female children retained and brought up to fight.

Herodotus also relates how the women of Scythia revolted against their men-folk while they were away for years raiding Media, and mated with the slaves left behind. This has left indirect traces in both the archaeological and historical record, as Scythians invaded Media in the seventh century BC and established a kingdom there.

The term ‘Amazon’ is suggested as deriving from

The largest free-standing statue in the world, the Stalingrad War Memorial at Volgograd. Arguably, an Amazon. See p.7

From legends of Amazons and Gog and Magog to the emergence of modern Europe as a global superpower Warwick Ball

EDITOR’S NOTE

The Eurasian steppe stretches halfway round the world. To what extent, then, can we generalise about it? Steppe peoples such as Huns, Avars and Turks changed the course of European history. Finns, Magyars and Bulgars formed European nations. The steppe saw the world’s only Jewish Empire. Mongols conquered an empire from the Pacific to the Mediterranean. Can they have anything in common? In the extract quoted here, we look at just one theme: the Amazons as a steppe phenomenon.

a-mazos/a-mastos or a-mazoon (‘breastless’, hence the word ‘mastectomy’), referring to the removal of one breast—or occasionally both—either by cauterisation before puberty or mastectomy after it, according to myth. This arose from the misconception that breasts impeded use of the bow. In fact the breast is no impediment to firing a bow; more likely it was an attempt at ‘de-feminisation’ in the popular Greek imagination— almost the equivalent of emasculation, which creates eunuchs, to make men less masculine. However, most Greek depictions of Amazons show them fully endowed.

Matriarchy in ‘Old Europe’

The suggestion that the Amazon myth was the memory of an earlier matriarchal society was first made in 1861 by J.J. Bachofen, a theory further elaborated by the archaeologist and anthropologist Marija Gimbutas, one of the pioneers in the study of what she termed ‘Old Europe’: the prehistory of south-eastern Europe (extending to Malta in the west and western Anatolia in the east) before the invasion of the Indo-Europeans some time before 4000 BC.

Referring to the pre-Indo-European Neolithic and Chalcolithic cultures of Europe as ‘great civilizations’, Gimbutas interpreted them and the society of ‘Old Europe’ as essentially matriarchal, dominated by the worship of mother-goddesses, living at one with the environment where men were relegated to second place in society. This prehistoric arcadia was brought to an end with the Indo-European invasions that were essentially aggressive, destructive and masculine, ushering in male domination, conflict and wholesale devastation of the environment.

Gimbutas carried out pioneering work in both European prehistory and Indo-European philology, so her studies demand respect. However, doubt has been cast on many of her ‘Old Europe’ theories by many archaeologists (and not just male ones) and much of her Goddess argument is essentially circular.

Archaeological and linguistic studies now regard the Indo-European ‘invasions’ as unwarlike (‘more like a franchising operation than an invasion’, as David Anthony put it) and the warrior myth largely a product of 19th-century romanticism and racial theory. But might matriarchy and female warriors be distant folk memories of the period of migrations into the Balkans from the north in the first millennium?

Evidence from archaeology

There is some evidence for a change from societies with matriarchal elements in the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods to more patriarchal societies in the Bronze Age on the steppe. But this was unlikely to have corresponded with the extreme view interpreted by Gimbutas of a sudden change from wholly matriarchal peaceful Neolithic societies brought about by incoming masculine Indo-European conquerors.

The changes were more likely to have been gradual within the same societies, brought about by a slow evolution from the pastoral and agricultural economies

of the Neolithic to the stock-rearing and semi-nomadic economies in the Bronze Age on the steppe and the consequent increase in male labour.

Some evidence for female steppe warriors has been found in China. At the late 13th century BC Shang royal capital at Anyang, the intact tomb of the ‘warrior queen’ Fu Hao was excavated in the 1970s. Fu Hao was a non-Chinese consort—assumed to be from the steppe—of the Shang king Wu Ding, and her exploits are recorded on Shang oracle bones as leading armies into battle. The grave goods of another tomb of a female at Baifu, north of Beijing, dating from the late 11th–early 10th century BC, included a bronze helmet, numerous horse fittings and over 60 bronze weapons. A second female tomb at Baifu also contained similar grave goods, albeit not as rich. Both are assumed to be non-Chinese, presumably from the steppe.

Excavations of Scythian and—more commonly—Sarmatian burial mounds in southern Russia and Ukraine have revealed the graves of women buried with weapons, usually bows and spears, but occasionally also with swords. This is not so surprising: the very harsh, rigorous life of the steppe nomad demanded a more equal role for women than in the sedentary life of the towns and villages, where women were usually relegated to more traditional roles.

Archaeologists rightly caution against sexing an ancient burial on the evidence of burial objects alone without skeletal or DNA evidence, and one should not jump to conclusions of Amazons simply because a female burial might contain weapons. A sword is just a sword, and might be as symbolic in male burials as in female, simply indicating status or caste (in India, for example, belonging to a warrior caste—kshatriya—is regardless of either sex or fighting prowess).

Evidence from ethnology

The more active role of women on the steppe receives considerable support from ethnic studies. Mongol women, for example, actively participate in traditional male sports and activities such as the hunt as well as— at least until recently—warfare, and partake in decision making on all levels. Gender roles among modern Kazakh nomads were observed to be male-dominated, albeit with a high level of egalitarianism.

A noted example is the life of Qutulun, the daughter of Qaidu Khan, the fourteenth century ruler of the Chaghatai Khanate in Central Asia and a descendant of Genghis Khan. Marco Polo, to whom she was known as Aijaruc (Mongolian for ‘Bright Moon’), describes her as ‘very beautiful, but also strong and brave . . . so tall and muscular, so stout and shapely withall, that she was almost like a giantess’.

Mamluk envoys to the Golden Horde in the 14th century expressed amazement at the equality of Mongol women. Marco Polo, William of Rubruck and John of Plano Carpini all emphasise the high status of Mongol women and their place in decision making, as well as their proficiency in such ‘manly’ pursuits as horse-riding and archery. In the Mongol

continued in the book

The idea of the warrior woman

The female form has been used since antiquity to personify abstract ideas, from the images that personify ancient classical cities to the armed figures who personify modern ideas of liberty, victory, or even modern nations such as Great Britain. In recent history Soviet propaganda promoted Stalin as the ‘father figure’, with the citizen as his ‘family’, but what was lacking in order to make the ‘trilogy’ complete was a mother figure: Stalin’s own wife had committed suicide. However, there was—and is—the ancient idea of ‘Mother Russia’, an idea stemming directly from the earth, from the steppe.

Hence, towering over the capital cities of many of the Soviet Bloc countries—Yerevan, Tbilisi, Minsk, Kiev, Budapest, Bishkek, Riga, for example—are giant mother figures: ‘Mother Armenia’, ‘Mother Georgia’ and so forth, but in fact symbols of Mother Russia’s domination. And those at Yerevan, Tbilisi and Kiev at least are Amazons: they wield swords.

The greatest of all is the gigantic Stalingrad War Memorial at Volgograd, the largest free-standing statue in the world, an Amazon figure wielding a sword and facing the Volga (the ‘blood of Mother Russia’— and one recalls that the Volga in Russia is ‘Mother Volga’), but in facing the Volga it is facing east, not west whence the Germans invaded but the direction from where the steppe hordes came.

Strangely, I can’t remember what age I was when my periods started, but I do remember the emotion that accompanied them: rage.

Rage at this uncalled-for transformation of my body. Rage at the lack of control; that I was no longer the person I had become accustomed to being; the remoulding of what and who I was and how I would be seen. Rage that I might bleed at any time (my periods were irregular for the first few years); that I would be ‘caught out’. Rage, too, at becoming a woman—something that, from what I had picked up during childhood and early teens, and parts of my own family history, seemed a limiting, perhaps even dangerous, thing to be.

At the other end of my oestrogen lifespan, in 2015, rage was again my overriding and defining emotion. I was outraged not so much by the hot flushes (I used to suffer from chronic panic attacks, which for me were a considerably more horrible experience); not so much by the grief of my fertility ending (I had miscarried trying for a second child some years before and so had already faced losing my reproductive ability). It was more about the sensuality and embodiment of menopause: about sex, arousal, the forest architecture of my vagina and, particularly, how I smelled.

This may sound trivial, especially to those whose experience of menopause has been much more physically and psychologically challenging than mine, but for me, it struck at the heart of those feelings of lost control and of my body suddenly becoming another country. My geography—my ecosystem—was changing, and I was a stranger to myself in this strange land. I no longer got wet with desire when I expected to. My scent, when I explored, was not the soft fragrance I had known; instead, as I grappled with trying to pin down and name it, all I could think of was bitter seaweed and burnt rubber. Before menopause, my body was my ‘familiar’ and I felt comfortable with it, even in its ageing (well, most of the time, anyway). I had adapted to the changes that come after giving birth, and the anxieties that those transformations can bring. But this was something else. Somewhere else. And I didn’t like it.

As I navigated through the physiological upheavals—like many others on the same journey, gathering information via the internet, and the occasional conversation with one or two friends—I was gripped by a different kind of anger. Why wasn’t any of this being talked about? Why had I arrived at menopause so unprepared? Why had I not previously been made aware of any symptoms apart from hot flushes? The rhetoric of menopause seemed to be either silence or joke. And as much as humour can be essential in weathering both the absurdities of life and the particular difficulties we each face, all too often the ‘jokification’ of menopause is belittling, uncomfortable and barbed.

As I looked further, I began to unearth books and articles, from the feminist-inspired Our Bodies, Ourselves series, which arose from the Boston Women’s Health Collective in the 1970s with its aims of empowering women through increased health awareness, to Gail Sheehy’s The Silent Passage, first published in the

READERS’ COMMENTS

Kirsty Wark, BBC Newsnight: Please read this book. It will save your sanity, enlighten you, support you and, I hope, make your menopause days sunnier.

Clare McKenna: It’s thanks to women and conversations like these that the story of menopause as something to dread and suffer is changing.

early 1990s. In the original Vanity Fair article that laid the ground for her book, Sheehy referred to menopause as ‘the last taboo, the stigma of stigmas’. This was more than twenty-five years ago; so why does it still feel bold and exposing to speak up publicly about menopause? Why can it still feel for so many of us as though we are making our way through this transition on our own, when it is something that will affect half the world’s population who attain this stage of their lives?

taLking about femaLe bodies, and acknowledging their humanity—their pains, their discomforts, their amazing imperfections, their wonderful physicality—has been a taboo across many cultures for many hundreds and thousands of years. Female physicality remains a subject that can be difficult to discuss outside an intimate circle, whether of friends or relatives, or of those strangers we quickly connect with through the discovery of shared life events.

In women’s medicine, this taboo, and biases around research and drug testing, gender and ethnicity, and believing (or more precisely, not believing) the lived experience of women who present as patients, have led to misinformation and to women going without essential and even life-saving treatments. Women have been systematically omitted from clinical trials, even of treatments for women. Gabrielle Jackson in Pain and Prejudice cites Maya Dusenbery, who wrote how ‘a National Institutes of Health-supported pilot study from Rockefeller University [in the US] that looked at how obesity affected breast and uterine cancer didn’t enrol a single woman’.

Learning and understanding is a collaborative process: it is about a making of knowledge with others; it is a relationship. This relationship may be with people we speak to in person; with collective understandings passed down orally, or with the writings of individuals stretching back through the centuries. It is also a knowledge ‘written in the body’: in our relationship to our selves. Certainly, this is how I have come to view my own knowledge and understanding about menopause.

In the making of this book, I have spoken to and heard from many people, nudging my understanding forward with each encounter. The book itself has also been developed in relationship with my commissioning editor at Flint, Jo de Vries, with whom I have talked through ideas and directions, all along the way. We have each of us been changed by the process. As Jo wrote to me, in the final stages of putting together the manuscript:

One of the most profound things for me has been how much it’s made me think about how I’ve passively accepted so many things about my own menstrual and gynaecological health as being a ‘woman’s lot’. I now realise how often I’ve ignored or felt ashamed of so much of that part of being a woman; how little I’ve educated myself about things that could have been addressed or I could have got help with. Working on this book has really changed my perspective on that and I hope will mean that I can enter the menopause feeling more empowered to ask the right questions and find out information rather than being fobbed off or being too ‘frightened’ or ashamed to complain.

The need for education and empowerment is a theme that runs through the contributions to this book. As I gathered information myself, I decided I wanted to know more about HRT, since hormone therapies (‘replacing’ oestrogen and sometimes progesterone) are often the main treatment route offered by GPs and other health professionals. As Dr Shen points out (see page 293), however, a number of potential symptoms listed for menopause are due to more complex interactions, including lifestyle factors and the ageing process.

I also wanted to know why HRT remains far less prescribed, certainly in the UK, in the early 21st century than in the 1990s. I had known that I did not want to take so-called systemic HRT (for the whole system, in tablet, gel, patch, or implant form) but I did research and opt for oestrogen pessaries to alleviate the vaginal dryness and skin thinning. I talked to Dr Caroline Marfleet, a consultant in reproductive and sexual health who has specialised in women’s health for more than forty years, to discuss this further.

Issues around HRT, which was first introduced in 1965, arose with the publication in 2002 of initial findings from the Women’s Health Initiative, a clinical trial in the US, and results from the Million Women Study in the UK that came out in 2003. These studies taken together suggested links between types of HRT and increased risk of coronary events, stroke, thrombosis and cancers, in particular breast cancer, although later analysis has questioned some of the risk levels given in initial published findings.

The NHS, said Dr Marfleet, does not have a specific policy to avoid prescribing HRT, but ‘some [GP] practices decided against HRT and took a “no risk” approach rather than finding out more’. In part, this was a financial as well as a health decision: they did not want to be called to account in our current ‘blame society’. Dr Marfleet pointed out that recent studies show HRT can have preventative and protective aspects for quality of life and moods, osteoporosis, vulvovaginal and urinary issues, and heart disease (if started within ten years of menopause).

HRT is one hotly debated way in which menopause has become medicalised in the modern age, and in the past few years there have been more radical developments that may change our definition of it altogether. While the Medical Women’s International Association (MWIA) and other organisations define menopause as a natural part of ageing, scientists in Greece have apparently been able to ‘reverse’ it by ‘rejuvenating’ the ovaries of menopausal women using a blood plasma treatment. At the same time, many women are continuing with long-term HRT.

So, one question is whether we now live in post-menopausal, or even non-menopausal times? Some people advocate an acceptance of menopause as an important stage of life: one that should be ritualised and recognised, and that can bring spiritual maturity and wisdom. For others, HRT has been a lifeline through changes that have undermined their physical and mental health, and relationships. Any ques- continued in the book

EDITOR’S NOTE

Menopause isn’t just a matter of hot flushes: it’s part of the life cycle of 51% of humanity and we should all know more about it. In M-Boldened, contributors introduce much-needed conversations on a range of perspectives including the impact of menopause on relationships, revelations affecting our neglect in the UK criminal justice system, harrowing experiences of surgical menopause, the hormonal realities of transitioning and other urgent issues of human rights.

While cult TV detective Columbo watched and was watched, we in turn watched and were watched David Martin-Jones

EDITOR’S NOTE

A TV detective show is a TV detective show, right? Wrong. Each show had its own USP, and Columbo—launched 50 years ago—had to be distinct from a vast offering of alternatives: The Rockford Files, Kojak, McCloud, Banacek, McMillan & Wife, Cannon, Barnaby Jones, Streets of San Francisco, Hec Ramsey. According to David Martin-Jones, the way that Columbo paid attention has parallels with the 24-hour surveillance of modern capitalism, but his study explores also Falk’s iconic acting style, the show’s depiction of Los Angeles and the way our attention is channelled, via television and computers, to influence how we perform and learn.

Something is ‘bothering’ Columbo. There is this one little detail about the case he is working which he just cannot let go. It stays with him even when he is at home with Mrs Columbo, long after the end of the working day. It interferes with his appetite and it won’t let him sleep. This detail is on Columbo’s mind so much that he even makes a special trip back out to the chief suspect’s home, the very next morning, just to ask him (or occasionally it is a her) about it.

This little persistent niggle, this ‘just one more thing’, is what will eventually crack open the case for Columbo and convict the murderer. This is a detail which none of the Lieutenant’s fellow police officers in the LAPD notice, even though they are all professionally trained to look for clues.

Why? Because Columbo has an almost superhuman ability to pay attention. Not to his wardrobe, evidently, or where his pencil might be, but to his work. The cost of this, though, is that the detail will keep on bothering him, night and day, until the case is solved. Until then, Columbo must pay attention to the case 24/7, his work as a detective being an all-consuming attentive labour.

This contemporary life of attentive labour, Columbo shows us was determined by the historical changes of the era in which the show emerged. Columbo’s commencement as a series in 1971 coincided with US involvement in Vietnam and was bracketed on either side by US-backed coups in Indonesia (1965–1966) and Chile (1973) which removed left-wing political opposition to capitalism and ushered in an era dominated globally by neoliberal ideology.

In the USA, it was the Reagan years, during which Columbo was off the air, which saw neoliberal economic policies transform the country. The society which then emerged in the USA and across much of the globe was polarised by wealth inequality. This has led many commentators to conclude that neoliberalism is a form of nihilistic and permanent class war pitting all against all to the benefit of the super-rich.

These historical changes form the backdrop against which Columbo’s paying of attention plays out across the many decades during which the show was on the air. Whilst the manner in which Columbo pays attention to his work does not change much from its first pilot in the late 1960s to its final episode in the early 2000s, what Columbo indicates regarding the ramifications of this does change.

Whodunnit?

This Introduction is designed, like the start of a Columbo episode, to give the game away from the get-go. The ‘murderer’ has already been revealed: attention. The rest of the book, like Columbo’s investigation, sets out to reach the same destination. In other words, the chapters are the equivalent of Columbo’s recreation of the murder to reveal how it was committed.

Chapter 1 provides an overview of Columbo’s genesis, its origins in literature and other popular cultural forms. However, this time, the oft-told story is placed alongside another story, rarely related, of the show’s

emergence at a specific point in the development of the US television industry. Chapter 1 also situates the book at the interdisciplinary intersection of Film Studies, Philosophy and Television Studies.

Chapter 2 includes two dedicated sections which are crucial in outlining the book’s central thesis. One examines how Columbo shapes the way we attend to it through its somewhat unusual narrative structure. This structure is found to function in the manner of a memory game, testing and honing our abilities to pay attention like a more complex version of ‘Kim’s Game’.

Chapter 2 then provides a brief comparative analysis of two exemplary Columbo episodes: ‘Identity Crisis’ from 1975 and ‘Columbo Cries Wolf ’ from 1990. These very different episodes indicate how the regulation of attention shifted. The former episode illustrates how attention was shaped during the Cold War due to the machinations of state security and that particular conflict’s global geopolitics. The latter indicates the monetisation of attention promoted in and following the Reagan years, as ideas surrounding the so-called attention economy began to emerge. It is not that what Columbo does is any different across the two episodes. He typically pays attention to his work in the same ways, he just gets older. However, the changing socio-historical backdrops which the very different episodes reveal do change.

In Chapter 3, Falk’s performance as Columbo is the central focus. This chapter uncovers the many different acting styles which intersect in his performance. These include not only a theatrical style akin to method acting, but also stylistic characteristics of the acting which developed with live television; the influence of the time Falk spent collaborating on US independent films with John Cassavetes and Ben Gazzara (who also work with him on Columbo); and a form of slapstick reminiscent of earlier Hollywood comedic greats, such as Buster Keaton.

By melding aspects of these diverse styles, Falk as Columbo is found to embody the process of paying attention 24/7 necessitated by late capitalism. The ability of the police to scrutinise all aspects of a suspect’s everyday life, to pay attention to them in both public and private spheres, also opens up the question of whether the law under late capitalism still presumes innocence or simply assumes guilt. On this view, Columbo seems a rather Orwellian character, a representative of the all-seeing surveillance state.

Chapter 4 explores why Columbo is perpetually involved in a process of learning about new technology to solve crimes. There is a reassurance regarding the ability of everyone to keep up with the bewildering pace of technological change that is shaping our propensity to pay attention. However, an ambivalence also emerges. With the reach of technology omnipresent, and the world so closely monitored by security cameras, it is debateable how reassuring it is to think of the police as such complete masters of this technology.

Chapter 5 considers the idea that Columbo has class conflict at its heart. In spite of initial appearances,

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Stephen Fry: With Columbo there was always just one more question. David MartinJones asks those questions and comes up with some revealing and fascinating answers. A wonderful contribution to Columbo lore and wider cultural history.

Columbo does not police class per se, but rather, history. Or at least, he attempts to reveal the truth behind how the past is retold, when this truth is twisted or altered by the murderer—as one might edit video footage, for example—to create a false alibi. The fact that the murderers are typically from the elite, in fact, is actually only indicative of their greater access to the technological means necessary to falsify history in this way.

To combat this, Columbo deploys an older form of representation, theatrical restaging of the past. This he does to catch out the murderer in their attempt to falsify it. This is akin to the notion of ‘revenge’ from the theatrical tradition of the tragedy, as in Hamlet’s famous expression, ‘The play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king’. Suddenly Columbo seems less like the invasive operative of Orwellian state surveillance and more of a representative of surveillance from below: common people using technology to watch the watchmen. Paying attention 24/7, then, is now seen to be necessary to ensure the elite do not ‘get away with murder’, that is, get away with falsifying the historical record to their advantage at the expense of everyone else. Less Columbo as Orwellian ‘Big Brother’, more Columbo as defender of social justice.

Chapter 6 ponders where, precisely, Columbo’s LA is located in relation to globalisation. Whilst Columbo often depicts Los Angeles as a city integral to the US nation (in episodes about election campaigns, or the West Coast’s national defence industries), on other occasions LA is figured more as a gateway for interaction with the Pacific Rim. Historically, this latter was the result of the city’s transformation during the 1970s into a gateway city designed to make the most of globalisation by interfacing with the rest of the world. Yet this transformation of the City of Angels led to vast wealth inequalities. Columbo is ultimately aligned with those at the lower end of this scale, especially the homeless. Columbo, on this view, again seems a more positive figure than in Chapters 3 and 4.

Finally, the Conclusion reveals how Columbo indicates the challenges that surround Columbo’s obsessive attention to work. Especially the generalised anxiety which may attend to the role of attentive labourer. It recaps the various manifestations of Columbo which have been uncovered in the preceding chapters, ultimately finding, through comparison with the contemporary television show The Purge (2018–) that in spite of his seemingly moral/amoral approach to the law, Columbo is a defender of the democratic right to life for all.

At times, Columbo seems like the bad guy, an operative of the state security apparatus. At other times, he seems like the good guy, the policeman of history and the guardian of a right to a meaningful citizen’s life for all. Television, of course, is known for holding such contradictory positions in play as part of the pleasure it offers. Rather than evaluating ‘good’ or ‘bad’, then, grasping how attention is shaped is key to understanding the ramifications of Columbo for just how we pay attention nowadays. This seems continued in the book

When someone borrows money to put food on the table, they are in financial difficulty. When they have no hope of even paying the mounting interest bill, let alone repaying their debt, they are bust. This can also happen to a country, when so many people are in financial difficulty that there is no hope of the indebted population honouring its debts, even if some people within it are debt-free.

In this situation the said country has reached its financial system limit. Neither action by the individual, nor policy change by the authorities, can work off the debt because too much is being spent on paying interest. The underlying problem will manifest itself in many ways: curtailed business activity; inability of consumers to keep spending; falling prices of assets that were propped up by easy credit; almost continual recession with only brief flashes of recovery.

The financial system limit of any society is the debt level at which repayment ceases to be viable.

It is customary for economic statisticians to define highly indebted countries according to their government debt levels. However, for the purposes of this book, it is total debt that matters. Total debt is the sum of government debt, corporate plus banking system

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THE SAME AUTHOR

The Greatest Crash How contradictory policies are sinking the global economy: 2011

Understanding Brexit Options What future for Britain?: 2016

Bear Markets When finance turns upside down: forthcoming

debt and personal debt. Personal debt itself consists of overdrafts, bank loans, mortgages and credit card debt.

Of the 36 current members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 28 feature in a list of countries having high levels of personal debt. Personal debt is a developed-country problem. Prosperity has been bought, literally, on credit.

The fashionable proposal is to use fiscal policy (tax cuts, government expenditure) to stimulate economic activity. Such a policy can have no lasting benefit:

1. Stimulating economic activity needs increased credit, but banks will not lend to bad risks just because governments have changed rules for bank capital and bad debts.

2. Tax cuts and/or increased government spending cause government deficits to rise. One could describe this as paying Peter now, to rob Paul in the future. This will lead the world into deflation.

3. New money raised by governments through borrowing will incur low positive real interest rates at the outset, but turn into high positive real interest rates when general price levels fall.

Over the past quarter of a century, rates paid to depositors have collapsed, yet rates paid by borrowers have stayed comparatively high. Comparing paid and earned interest rates reveals how expensive credit is. From 1993 to 2001, the difference between three-month US Treasury Bill rates (a proxy for interest paid to depositors) and the average cost of US credit card debt including financing charges was around 9%. In 2003, in the wake of the dot.com crash, deposit rates hit new lows, with Treasury Bills only paying 0.81%. But at the same time, credit-card borrowers were paying around 14.7% on average, so the difference had risen to 13.9%. The credit crunch subsequently drove Treasury Bills down to nil yield but a few months later credit card rates were climbing, with the

difference, as at December 2019, at around 15.4%.

Debt repayment has a real cost because inflation is so low. When real interest rates are positive and rates paid by borrowers exceed the inflation rate, borrowing consumes financial resources. For example, when inflation is 1% and credit-card borrowing costs 13%, the real rate of interest is 12%. Prior to the era of monetary management by central banks, real interest rates were usually 2% to 3%.

Symptoms of debt problems caused by excessive interest costs vary by country. In many cases, they can be measured directly by statistics such as consumer loan defaults. In Britain, food-bank use is an indirect measure of debt problems.

Following the 1987 stock market crash, the credit floodgates were opened wide to encourage more borrowing. When continuing that policy proved ineffective after the millennium boom and bust, quantitative easing was invented to push credit into the Japanese economy. This was later copied by other central banks although the methodology is now seen as ineffective. Instead of contriving ever-more-extreme measures to expand credit, why not ask what is preventing continued economic growth?

bodies there will be to impose their own onerous sets of rules. More banking overhead will follow but the common good will not be served by driving up total interest costs.

For alternatives to the present debt-based financial system to emerge, bureaucratic design and excessive standards must be constrained from further growth. Then some other kind of financial system might evolve, rendering the financial system limit less significant. Separation of debit and credit invented by the early Italian bankers has reached the end of its useful life. The challenge is to maintain the protections of the present system while providing an environment that encourages alternatives...

Authors who drive ideas forward are often expected to propose next steps, or perhaps prescribe what should be done. There are no easy answers to the problem of deflation caused by excessive levels of debt. The priority should be to stop making the situation worse...

While I was writing the first draft of this chapter, The Economist published an article exploring current economic theories about debt. The theory that government

EDITOR’S NOTE

Why have interest rates paid by businesses and households been rising even though deposit rates are nil? Does the policy of bailing out economies bring dangers? The old argument about sound money versus stimulus, and the belief that governments controlling their own currency can create as much credit as they like, can no longer apply in a world where private-sector debt exceeds public debt and carries a higher, rising, interest cost.

It is impossible for debt to expand to infinity because the cost of servicing it would then also be infinite. The financial system limit is determined by the cost of borrowing. It is best defined as:

in the days when the early Italian bankers invented debit and credit, there was no European Commission, Federal government or British regulator to lay down detailed prescriptive rules. Nowadays, politicians announce their demands, then set retinues of bureaucrats to implement their grandiose projects. The bureaucrats write detailed proposals, ‘consult’ on how the detail will work to ensure a degree of practicality, then write legislation to implement their design.

The entire structure of standards, rules, regulations and delegated bodies making rules, acts to prevent evolution and reinforce conformity. As bureaucratic institutions have grown in importance, so conformity has entrenched group think. This is the nature of our society. All the gears follow their cogs but the assembled whole can be a complete nonsense. Only through diversity can there be any hope of adapting to change but diversity is unwanted. Group-think will flourish until the power of standards-setters and bureaucracies is curtailed...

The more rules that are made, the worse the problem becomes. Why? Because rules ossify the ruled and prevent evolution. According to Dr Hugo Bänziger writing in 2010, the then forthcoming revised Basel rules for bank capital requirements would prompt every bank simultaneously to raise capital or reduce lending when the economic cycle next turns down.

The more governments outsource responsibility for the economic health of nations, the more delegated

debt crowds out productive debt featured in it, as did Modern Monetary Theory.

But what exactly qualifies as productive debt? And why is government debt not productive? These are meaningless diversions. Total world debt is what matters but the aggregate cost of interest and its relation to economic output was not even mentioned. Neither was the inability to expand debt to infinity, nor existence of a central banking economic cycle.

The Financial Times then published an opinion article that correctly noted the ratio of total world debt to economic output but also omitted to identify the same issues. The author thought that transparency would be the key to controlling debt. Instead of describing the wrong kind of debt, an approach this book rejected in Chapter 7, the article suggested that the world’s debt problems arise from the wrong way of looking at debt. This book proposes that the right way of looking at it is to measure interest cost on total debt in relation to economic output.

The coronavirus pandemic will be seized on by the commentariat as the ‘cause’ of this economic crisis and conveniently scapegoated by politicians. The truth is that a deep recession and consequential financial upset was inevitable in a world that could not resolve the conflict between stimulus and austerity, a world that remained addicted to debt, a world that refused to admit the limit to the growth of debt caused by the cost of servicing it.

The central banking economic cycle is a crucial element in this depression. Every crisis—think of the dot-com bust and credit crunch as well as coronavirus— results in panic measures to extend economic stimulus. These measures inevitably add to the debt burden and the deflationary forces in the

Keynesian economics, once society’s white knight, now looks like one of its black riders. Here’s why David Kauders

the proportion of economic output spent on interest on total debt, above which that debt can no longer be repaid in full.

And yet … Pedro Gomes

EDITOR’S NOTE

David Kauder (facing page) argues against John Maynard Keynes. Pedro Gomes argues for him. While pundits were speculating about economic Armageddon in the 1920s, he writes, Keynes prophesied that within a century, people in the West would have less work but grow the economy by between four and eight times. “Keynes was spot on. In the ninety years since then, the US has multiplied its GDP per capita by six and most European countries by five.” Find out how a four-day working week can save the economy just as the five-day week did a century ago.

This book is about a proposal that would bring about a powerful economic renewal if enacted: the four-day working week. In 2019, there was a surge of interest in the idea. It first came about as a radical new management practice implemented by a few quirky firms. Articles soon followed in respectable publications like The Guardian, The Economist, the Financial Times and the New York Times

At the same time, the idea was picked up by some progressive think tanks like the New Economics Foundation and Autonomy. It then found its way into the manifesto of the UK Labour Party for the 2019 general election, and has been spoken about by Jacinda Ardern, prime minister of New Zealand, as a possible way to jump start her nation’s economy.

Still, the idea raises much scepticism and is either viewed as a radical left-wing fantasy or branded as unworkable. After all, if we have always worked for five days each week, why change?

The purpose of this book is to break this narrative and explain the many compelling economic arguments in support of the four-day working week. These ideas come from both the left and right of the ideological spectrum—in fact, no economic theory stands against it. Moreover, it could be implemented much more smoothly than we might imagine.

This book is divided into three parts. The first part explains that although the four-day working week seems like a recent idea, it is not. There was a serious proposal in the US in 1970 called ‘4/40’ (i.e. four days and forty hours of work per week), which was adopted by a number of firms. Most of today’s arguments against the four-day working week were discussed in the US between 1908, when firms first started moving from a six-day to a five-day working week, and 1940, when the five-day working week was adopted nationwide.

My concept of a four-day working week is about much more than the enlightened 4/40-style management practice that has dominated headlines recently. I propose the four-day working week as something bigger: government legislation implemented across the entire economy. Such legislation would reduce the regular working week to a coordinated four days, from Monday to Thursday, and all economic activities conducted over the weekend would operate from Friday to Sunday.

There are many merits of flexible working arrangements (driven by workers), and the management practices supporting them (implemented by firms), and a number of my arguments can also be made to promote them. However, as we shall see, such arrangements are inferior to a four-day working week implemented by government legislation. Only in this way can the full economic benefits for society of reducing the working week be achieved.

The book lays out the eight economic arguments for the four-day working week. Why should we support it?

• Because it is possible.

• Because it will fuel the economy through consumption.

• Because it will increase productivity.

• Because it will unleash the potential of a vast talent pool of innovators.

• Because it will reduce technological unemployment.

• Because it will raise wages and improve the lives of the ‘99 per cent’.

• Because it will give people more freedom to choose what to do with their time.

• Because it will reconcile a polarised society.

To explain the economics behind each of these arguments, I have enlisted the help of four of the most influential economists in history: John Maynard Keynes, Joseph Schumpeter, Karl Marx and Friedrich Hayek. I will view the economy through their eyes. These four political economists lived in different times and held diverging views on how to solve the problems facing societies. However, I believe that each of them, if they were alive today, would wholeheartedly support the idea of the four-day working week as an invaluable step towards improving society.

My eight arguments are all underpinned by sound economic reasoning and supported by the data. Ultimately, the core of each argument relates to what people would do with their extra day off work. They might rest more. They might enjoy leisure activities. They could decide to work. They could use the day for retraining. Or they could devote their time to their passion.

I don’t presume to know what people would do, but whatever choice people made, they would be contributing to the economy. In the words of the NobelPrize-winning economist James Tobin, ‘every leisure act has an economic pay-off to someone’.

The final part of this book examines the practical details of implementing the four-day working week, in both the private and public sectors, and discusses its implications for the environment and GDP, women, and the post-pandemic world.

the working week is an economic, social and political construct. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, people in the Western world worked six days and rested on Sundays. In 1908, a few small businesses in the US implemented a revolutionary practice: the five-day working week. In 1922, the National Association of Manufacturers published a bulletin called Will the 5-Day Week Become Universal? It Will Not. They gave eight reasons against the radical proposal:

• It would greatly increase the cost of living.

• It would increase wages by more than 15 per cent and decrease production.

• It would be impractical for all industries.

• It would help meet a short-term sales decline but would not work permanently.

• It would create a craving for additional luxuries to occupy the additional time.

• It would mean a trend towards leisure and the Arena: Rome did that and Rome died.

• It would be against the best interest of those who want to work and advance.

• It would make us more vulnerable to the economic onslaughts of Europe, now working as hard as she can to overcome our lead.

The objections to the four-day working week today are simply repetitions of these same arguments. They can

FRIDAY IS THE NEW SATURDAY HOW A FOUR-DAY WORKING WEEK WILL SAVE THE ECONOMY

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READERS’ COMMENTS

Sir Christopher Pissarides: Makes a compelling case.

Rachel Ngai: Provides considerable food for thought.

Pietro Garibaldi: Persuasive. Should be on the bookshelves of every socially curious reader.

be grouped into four categories: economic, operational, ethical and comparative. The first and second reasons are economic. They are misguided because they take a static view of the economy. They assume nothing else will change in response to the four-day working week; workers will not change the energy they put into production, managers will not change their practices, and consumers will not change their demand for goods.

In fact, the opposite is true—economies are dynamic and are constantly adjusting.

These economic reasons also ignore the distinction between average and marginal productivity, one of the crucial concepts in economics. The longer you work, your added contribution—your marginal productivity— declines. Workers are less productive in the eighth hour of work than in the seventh, and less productive on a Friday than on a Thursday.

Arguments three and four concern the practicality of shortening the work week. Recently, we could read in The Telegraph: ‘We all know that the four-day week proposal is unaffordable, impossible, imaginary’ or ‘It is too operationally complex’. A ‘crackpot plan’ said Boris Johnson, the UK Prime Minister. These are lazy arguments made by people averse to change and unwilling to judge a proposal by its merits. Moreover, there is no economic substance to an argument of just following the status quo.

Arguments five to seven are ethical in nature. Their modern equivalent is ‘Under the four-day working week, people are just going to watch TV and get dumb.’ These types of arguments are paternalistic and patronising, and behind them lies the view that leisure is somehow perverse or evil. The philosopher Bertrand Russell, in his 1932 timeless essay In Praise of Idleness, summarised it well:

The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich. In England, in the early nineteenth century, fifteen hours was the ordinary day’s work for a man; children sometimes did as much, and very commonly did twelve hours a day. When meddlesome busybodies suggested that perhaps these hours were rather long, they were told that work kept adults from drink and children from mischief. When I was a child, shortly after urban working men had acquired the vote, certain public holidays were established by law, to the great indignation of the upper classes. I remember hearing an old Duchess say: ‘What do the poor want with holidays? They ought to work.’ People nowadays are less frank, but the sentiment persists, and is the source of much of our economic confusion.

Finally, the eighth argument is about external competition. Today it would sound something like: ‘China already produces goods so cheaply that switching to a four-day week will spell a further loss of competitiveness. We cannot afford it now.’ This argument relies on the narrow view of the world economy as a zero-sum game, ignoring how all countries benefit from inter- national trade and cooperation. What’s more, who thinks we will retain our leadership (whatever that means) over China by working a six-day week instead? The economic clout of China accelerated precisely after they adopted the five-day working week in 1995.

Despite these widely held negative opinions, continued in the book

It’s completely counter-intuitive.

Give people more free time, then stand back and watch the economy grow.

Before Holbein, the job of a painter was to typify and idealise. Holbein and friends told the truth. Very dangerous Anne T. Woollett (editor)

EDITOR’S NOTE

Implicit in realistic art is the notion of democracy. To eye up a subject and set down a true likeness gives the artist the upper hand. It presupposes the assertion of honesty, not flattery, and the acceptance of this by the subject. It is only possible if the subject accepts the reversal of power: the requirement to trust the artist’s vision. That is what makes Holbein’s presentation of character so fascinating: it is an omen of the coming of the modern world.

Holbein was one of the most outstanding and versatile German artists of the early 16th century: a superb designer, draftsman and miniaturist, as well as the leading portrait painter in early Tudor England. His career coincided with talented older contemporaries: Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg (1471–1528); Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553), who was based at the court in Wittenberg after 1505; and the Augsburg master Hans Burgkmair the Elder (1473–1531). Holbein appropriated the Flemish trait of vivid realism and achieved the greatest verisimilitude in portraiture of any artist working in the early sixteenth century.

Holbein employed a panoply of approaches to engage the viewer. He combined shrewd implementation of the sitter’s requirements with visual strategies to communicate his sitters’ appearance and status for friends and peers, family, and posterity. The artist regularly adjusted aspects of a sitter during the painting process and continually sought specialised solutions through which to construct a patron’s identity. Allusive inscriptions directly address the viewer, and meticulously rendered interiors connect settings with the human subject. Ubiquitous blue backgrounds simply yet effectively accentuate the objects—and even the animals—that were potent signifiers of community and rank.

As a young artist in Basel, Holbein engaged with the trope of the ‘speaking image’. In his portrait of Benedikt von Hertenstein, the cultivated and splendidly attired young man gazes out confidently and catches the viewer’s eye. When studied from the right, he seems physically to project into our space and to speak the words ‘chiseled’ into the wall: ‘When I looked like this, I was 22 years old, [in] 1517 H H was painting this.’ The chamber references Hertenstein’s interest in classical subjects through its equestrian battle frieze, which also underscores the artist’s expertise in illusionistic decoration.

In 1519, working closely with Bonifacius Amerbach (Erasmus’s future heir), Holbein juxtaposed Amerbach’s powerful features with a large tablet bearing a Latin inscription. Amerbach composed the lines, in which the painting ‘speaks’ about itself in the first person and praises the painted likeness. Holbein enlarged and adjusted the angle of the plaque and later, at Amerbach’s request, revised the wording.

Holbein not only embraced the specificity provided by inscriptions but also developed a mode that placed sitters in settings that spoke for and about them. The occupational portrait had emerged in the Netherlands in the mid-15th century and gained popularity in the 1520s. The artist’s portraits of Erasmus writing helped define an emergent vocation: the scholar. In reference to antique types, Holbein portrayed Erasmus in profile with a thoughtful expression and situated him close to the viewer, as if we are looking over his shoulder. Paneling and a textile decorated with images of animals and foliage behind him suggest the rational and creative aspects of intellectual endeavors through their regular and dynamic forms.

The restricted palette that Holbein used for the portrait of his friend, the mathematician and court astronomer

Nikolaus Kratzer, calls attention to specialised scientific instruments such as the unfinished polyhedral dial in his palm, an instrument that Kratzer designed.

Holbein’s meticulous settings suited ambitious men of business eager to transmit not only their professional pride but also their cultured pursuits. His portrait of Danzig merchant Georg Gisze in a green-paneled study references the mundane objects related to correspondence and accounts as well as personal items. On the folded letters bearing written addresses are Gisze’s name and motto.

Many of Holbein’s surviving Hanseatic portraits position the sitters against a blue background, accompanied by a few significant attributes. The elegant simplicity of blue backgrounds and framing inscriptions served as effective foils for the realistic depiction of satins, fur and other materials that distinguished nobles.

In two double portraits, Holbein portrayed one very specific attribute of privilege: the intimate relationship between the patron and his bird of prey. Robert Cheseman, the king’s falconer, holds a rare gyrfalcon and soothes it with a gentle stroke. In a later panel, a young man calmly displays his alert hawk held close to his chest and unhooded.

Holbein strove to master female dress in portrait drawings and costume studies, and he reveled in their technical challenges. In the Vienna roundel and Portrait of a Woman, he denoted subtle differences of materials in similar creamy hues. In Portrait of a Woman, Iridescent pearl-headed pins close the gown of the sitter at the throat and a gold band decorated with the Crucifixion attests to her virtue. Holbein’s portraits dating from about 1540 present their subjects in a more forthright and opulent manner, in keeping with the culture of personal display. A lush palette, gold embellishment, and elaborate jewels signify status but not identity.

In the mid-1520s, perhaps emboldened by the English tradition of heraldic imagery, Holbein transformed the decorous portrait of a woman seen in three-quarter view with her hands clasped before her. After the portrait was completed, the artist added two significant elements, presumably at the request of the patron: the pet red squirrel and the starling. The squirrel refers to the primary motif on the Lovell family crest, while the starling, appropriately placed next to the sitter’s ear, is a play on the name of East Harling, the Norfolk location of the Lovell estate. If, as seems plausible, the portrait represents Anne Ashby, wife of Sir Richard Lovell, then it may celebrate the birth of the Lovell heir in 1526.

Holbein also embraced the circular format for concise allegorical compositions. His keen understanding of the power of devices to transmit identity and reputation derived from his work for Johann Froben and Erasmus. Following the example of the Venetian publisher Aldus Manutius, who in 1502 with input from Erasmus had adopted as his printer’s device the emblem of a dolphin wrapped around an anchor (“make haste slowly”), Froben devised his own mark.

Holbein accentuated the eminence of Froben’s printing enterprise by enclosing the device—a continued in the book

HOLBEIN CAPTURING CHARACTER

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Anne T. Woollett is curator of paintings at the J. Paul Getty Museum.

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Holbein: Capturing Character accompanies the first major exhibition of Holbein’s paintings to be shown in the United States.

All pictures by Holbein the Younger except Middle row, centre

Top row, left THE ARTIST’S WIFE AND THEIR TWO ELDEST CHILDREN 1528/29.

Oil on paper, glued to a wooden panel, 77 x 64 cm (30 5/16 x 25 3/16 in.). Kunstmuseum Basel, 325

Top row, centre MARY, LADY GUILDFORD 1527

Oil on panel, 87 x 70.6 cm (34 1/4 x 27 13/16 in.). Saint Louis Art Museum, Museum Purchase 1:1943

Top row, right BENEDIKT VON HERTENSTEIN 1517

Oil and gold on paper, laid down on wood, 52.1 x 38.1 cm (20 1/2 x 15 in.). New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, Aided by Subscribers, 1906, 06.1038

Middle row, left HERMANN VON WEDIGH III 1532.

Oil on panel, 42.2 x 32.4 cm (16 5/8 x 12 3/4 in.). New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 50.135.4

Middle row, centre PORTRAIT OF A MAN ca. 1530. by Lucas Cranach the Elder

Oil on prepared paper, 26.2 x 20 cm (10 5/16 x 7 7/8 in.). Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum, 92.GG.91

Middle row, right

A MEMBER OF THE WEDIGH FAMILY 1533

Oil on panel 42.1 x 32.6 cm (16 9/16 x 12 7/8 in.) On the background: ANNO 1533 / ATATIS . SVÆ 39 (The year 1533 / At the age of 39). Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, 5 86B

Bottom row, left

DERICK BERCK OF COLOGNE 1536

Oil on canvas, transferred from panel, 53.3 x 42.5 cm (21 x 16 3/4 in.). New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Jules Bache Collection, 1949, 49.7.29

Bottom row, centre

ERASMUS OF ROTTERDAM ca. 1532

Oil on panel, 18.4 x 14.2 cm (7 1/4 x 5 9/16 in.). New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Robert Lehman Collection, 1975, 1975.1.138

Bottom row, right

BONIFACIUS AMERBACH 1519

Mixed technique on panel, 29.9 x 28.3 cm (11 3/4 x 11 1/8 in.). Kunstmuseum Basel, Amerbach-Kabinett, 1662, 314

A HISTORY OF SEEING IN ELEVEN INVENTIONS

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In Western societies more than 99 per cent of people share the daily experience of sight. We can look at the objects around us and describe them using the same words: a red apple, a white cup, a wooden chair. But the sense of commonality about what we see is an illusion. While two people may have identical visual capability, no two people see exactly the same.

Unlike a camera, eyes don’t capture the image in front of them, then send it off ‘upstairs’ to the brain to be developed, like a film going off for processing. Vision is a processing system, from the way the eyes gather visual information to analysing its components. Eyes move around a scene in all directions, fixing momentarily on something, then moving on, piecing an image together one postage stamp at a time.

In the 1960s a Russian psychologist called Alfred Yarbus discovered that eyes are drawn towards images of other living creatures, especially humans, and particularly the face, eyes and mouth. These are the most important body parts for survival because they reveal important information about a person’s intention and mood.

Yarbus also discovered that, when looking at a scene, our eyes try to interpret it in a narrative way, to piece

READERS’ COMMENTS

Stephen Fry: A magnificently readable survey ... Every page elicits at least one “ah”, “ooh” or “wow”!

Giles Coren: A wonderful, wide-ranging, totally gripping account of the evolution of seeing.

together a story that tells us what is going on. Eyes move back and forward from one character to another, and to details in the scene that the brain thinks will be important in understanding what is happening, ignoring the movements in between each eye fix. It’s similar to the way a film editor works, cutting together various shots to guide the audience through a scene’s story. And incidentally, film editors have learned that editing cuts are most pleasing to the audience if they are made during motion. Harvard neuroscientist Margaret Livingstone believes this is because our visual system is accustomed to processing a series of shifting scenes (eye fixes) separated by movement.

Later eye movement studies reveal that a person’s cultural background can influence gaze patterns. In one experiment two groups, one Western and one East Asian, were shown a series of images of a central object set against a background scene, such as a tiger in a forest or a plane flying over a mountain range. The Western group tended to focus on the main object, while the East-Asian group tended to shift their gaze between the main object and the background. The researchers proposed that the reason for the difference was that Western culture values individuality and independence, hence the focus on the central character, while EastAsian cultures are more interdependent.

Sometimes our brains direct our eyes to focus on the wrong things, leading us to miss important information. This is the stock-in-trade of magicians, fairground tricksters and pickpockets. They are all experts at getting us to focus on irrelevant details while they deceive us before our very eyes. Even the apparently unmissable can become invisible when we are focusing on something else.

A Harvard research team showed subjects a video of

a group of people throwing a ball and asked them to count the number of passes made. Half the subjects didn’t notice a gorilla walking right across the court as they were watching. This phenomenon is known as inattentional blindness.

The same Harvard team sent a researcher posing as a tourist into a park to ask a passer-by for directions. As the researcher/tourist and the passer-by talked, two other team members walked between them carrying a door and swapped the ‘tourist’ for another researcher. Most of the passers-by didn’t notice the change and carried on talking to the second researcher. This is called change blindness.

Within a part of the visual cortex now known as V1, each of the millions of cells is programmed to respond to a single, very specific visual feature. From these basic signals the brain can quickly build an outline of a scene. This is why we naturally recognise simple line drawings: they replicate the most basic way the brain processes images.

The brain doesn’t actively analyse visual information. It reacts. Each individual cell within V1 either fires or doesn’t fire automatically in response to the visual properties of a particular light signal. In the next stage of

EDITOR’S NOTE

nisms add information to an image, wh ch i w y yo c n rea his se t nce. Others take away extraneous detail or adjust what we see to compensate for ambiguity. Consider a chessboard in partial shadow. In terms of its optical properties, a dark square in bright light might be lighter than a light square in shadow. Nevertheless, our eyes will always see the darkened light square as lighter than a brightly lit dark square. Our top-down system is using our past experience and memory to direct our perception. It is an interesting philosophical question as to which version of the chessboard represents the ‘truth’.

Bearing in mind the complexity of the visual processing system, and the varying role the brain plays at every stage of it, one may well imagine that people of different backgrounds might see the same thing differently. Recent research has uncovered several examples of significant perceptual differences across groups.

A 2016 study demonstrated that obese people perceive distances differently from people of average weight. When asked to judge a 25-metre distance, a 150 kg person estimated its distance as 30 metres, while a 60 kg person judged the same distance to be 15 meters. The researchers put this down to a link between a per-

Whenever we contemplate questions of seeing, we find ourselves confronting relativism. However similar our hard-wiring may be, psychologically and conceptually we read the world differently, to the point where we’ll even argue about the data. In 2015, a picture went viral of a dress that some saw as white and gold and others saw as blue and black. It inspired the author to ask: if people in the same time and place can see the same thing differently, how differently did people in distant times and places see things? A History of Seeing offers an intriguing miscellany of answers.

processing, V2, specific cells respond to contours, textures and location. Once again depending on the visual characteristics of each object—in this case, say, colour, shape, or movement—certain cells do or don’t fire. Perception is formed by the combination of all the cells that fire in response to an image’s various visual properties.

From the visual cortex, information is relayed through one of two pathways: the ‘where’ pathway, common to all mammals, and the ‘what’ system that we share with only a few species. The ‘where’ pathway is located in the parietal lobe at the top of the brain towards the back. It is colour blind but detects motion and depth, separates objects from their background, and places things in space.

The second pathway, the ‘what’ system, takes place in the temporal lobe at the sides of the brain over the ears. This pathway perceives colours and, critically, recognises things. It is a more sophisticated system than the ‘where’ system and is thought to be present only in humans and other primates and, possibly, dogs.

The human ‘what’ system has a particular region in the brain dedicated to recognising faces . That is why a young child’s drawings of a person are almost always of a face with stick arms and legs: the face is instinctively what is most important. When we look at faces the brain compares the features we see with a stored database of ‘average’ facial features—eye width, length of face, nose size and so on—all within a split second. Caricaturists exploit this to create pictures that exaggerate the facial features that differ most from the norm. We recognise these images instantly because the artist is deliberately doing the same thing our brain does unconsciously.

The objective of visual processing is to understand what is going on around us, rather than to establish an accurate optical representation. Some top-down mecha-

son’s perception and their ability to act—the assumption being that an obese person would find it more difficult than a slim person to travel the same distance.

The Himba tribe in Namibia live a traditional life away from Western influences. Their language describes colours completely differently from ours. One colour, called dambu, includes a variety of what we describe as greens, reds, beige and yellows (they also use this colour to describe white people). Another colour, zuzu, describes most dark colours, including black, dark red, dark purple, dark green and dark blue. A third, buru, includes various blues and greens.

In 2006 researchers showed Himba people a set of twelve tiles, of which eleven were the same colour and one was different. In the first test the tiles were all green, with one being a slightly different shade. To most Westerners the tiles looked identical but the Himba volunteers spotted the odd one out immediately. The second experiment showed the volunteers eleven identical green tiles and one that, to Western eyes, immediately stood out as being blue. The Himba, however, had difficulty differentiating this tile from the others.

our eyes are almost identical to those of the very earliest vertebrates—our eel-like ancestors who lived in the sea more than 500 million years ago (mya). But the most primitive eyes go back to the time when every living thing on Earth was still microscopic, until something triggered an explosion of frenzied evolution that resulted in the earliest animal kingdom. What sparked that explosion isn’t certain but a good candidate for the trigger is those primitive eyes. Millions of years before anyone coined the term ‘disruptive technology’, eyes may have been the

H w is it th t s me pe pl can re d th s m ss ge wi ho t

d ff c ty, in sp te f ts m ss ng l tt rs? Exactly!

Susan Denham Wade

Still Here

Still Here

Five people who could have (or did!) read their own obituaries

Five people who could have (or did!) read their own obituaries An obituary is a report that appears in a newspaper or other publication shortly after someone has died. As well as reporting the fact of a person’s death, it sometimes contains details about their life and what they achieved during it.*

An obituary is a report that appears in a newspaper or other publication shortly after someone has died. As well as reporting the fact of a person’s death, it sometimes contains details about their life and what they achieved during it.*

1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In 1816, the famous English poet was enjoying a coffee at a hotel when he overheard the people sitting at the next table discussing his recent death, after they had read a mistaken report in the newspaper. Coleridge asked to borrow the newspaper so he could read the article himself … and then, to their great surprise, introduced himself.

1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge In 1816, the famous English poet was enjoying a coffee at a hotel when he overheard the people sitting at the next table discussing his recent death, after they had read a mistaken report in the newspaper. Coleridge asked to borrow the newspaper so he could read the article himself … and then, to their great surprise, introduced himself.

2. P.T. Barnum At the age of 80, the famous American circus showman became seriously ill. Knowing he wouldn’t live for too much longer, Barnum mentioned to a friend that he’d like to know what people would say about him after he died. His friend told this story to the editor of the Evening Sun newspaper in New York City, who published Barnum’s obituary early so he would get his wish. It appeared under the headline: ‘Great and Only Barnum. He Wanted To Read His Obituary; Here It Is.’ Barnum died two weeks later, on 7 April 1891.

3. Josephine Baker

The Americanborn French singer and dancer lived an extraordinary life. Her performances created a sensation in Paris in the 1920s, and she went on to become a spy and member of the secret French Resistance during the Second World War. In 1942, it was widely reported that Baker had died in Morocco in North Africa. She was living there at the time and had been seriously ill, but thankfully her condition had improved. When word got out, newspapers around the world printed new articles announcing that the popular performer was alive after all. Baker continued to dance onstage right up until her death in 1975 at the age of 68.»

3. Josephine Baker

The Americanborn French singer and dancer lived an extraordinary life. Her performances created a sensation in Paris in the 1920s, and she went on to become a spy and member of the secret French Resistance during the Second World War. In 1942, it was widely reported that Baker had died in Morocco in North Africa. She was living there at the time and had been seriously ill, but thankfully her condition had improved. When word got out, newspapers around the world printed new articles announcing that the popular performer was alive after all. Baker continued to dance onstage right up until her death in 1975 at the age of 68.

4. Ernest Hemingway

4. Ernest Hemingway

2. P.T. Barnum At the age of 80, the famous American circus showman became seriously ill. Knowing he wouldn’t live for too much longer, Barnum mentioned to a friend that he’d like to know what people would say about him after he died. His friend told this story to the editor of the Evening Sun newspaper in New York City, who published Barnum’s obituary early so he would get his wish. It appeared under the headline: ‘Great and Only Barnum. He Wanted To Read His Obituary; Here It Is.’ Barnum died two weeks later, on 7 April 1891.

The famous American author was almost killed in a plane crash in 1954. Several newspapers published reports saying that he’d died in the accident. Hemingway, however, wasn’t alarmed by all the false reports of his death – and is said to have collected them together in a scrapbook that he read after breakfast every day while drinking a glass of champagne.

The famous American author was almost killed in a plane crash in 1954. Several newspapers published reports saying that he’d died in the accident. Hemingway, however, wasn’t alarmed by all the false reports of his death – and is said to have collected them together in a scrapbook that he read after breakfast every day while drinking a glass of champagne.

*The first obituaries were published in around 59 bce in ancient Rome. They appeared in newspapers that were made of papyrus and called Acta diurna, which means ‘daily events’ in Latin.

Just One More Thing

Fourteen memorable things people are believed to have said just before they died

Just One More Thing

5. Margaret Thatcher

The British politician never read her own obituary in a newspaper, but officials at 10 Downing Street were contacted by the Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper in 2009, after reports of Thatcher’s death started circulating in Canada. The source of the confusion was the Canadian Transport Minister John Baird, who had sent a message simply reading: ‘Thatcher has died.’ He was referring to his pet cat, which he’d named after the former British Prime Minister.

The British politician never read her own obituary in a newspaper, but officials at 10 Downing Street were contacted by the Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper in 2009, after reports of Thatcher’s death started circulating in Canada. The source of the confusion was the Canadian Transport Minister John Baird, who had sent a message simply reading: ‘Thatcher has died.’ He was referring to his pet cat, which he’d named after the former British Prime Minister.

5. Margaret Thatcher

» To find out what Baker’s last words were, turn to the next page

*The first obituaries were published in around 59 bce in ancient Rome. They appeared in newspapers that were made of papyrus and called Acta diurna, which means ‘daily events’ in Latin.

» To find out what Baker’s last words were, turn to the next page

389

Game Changers

7. Russian prima ballerina Anna Pavlova, in 1931: ‘Get my swan costume ready.’

8. American blues musician Lead Belly, in 1949: ‘Doctor, if I put this here guitar down now, I ain’t never gonna wake up.’

Fourteen memorable things people are believed to have said just before they died

1. The English physicist Sir Isaac Newton, in 1727: ‘I don’t know what I may seem to the world. But as to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than the ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.’

7. Russian prima ballerina Anna Pavlova, in 1931: ‘Get my swan costume ready.’

9. Japanese author Yukio Mishima, in 1970: ‘Human life is limited, but I would like to live forever.’

8. American blues musician Lead Belly, in 1949: ‘Doctor, if I put this here guitar down now, I ain’t never gonna wake up.’

10. French fashion businesswoman Coco Chanel, in 1971: ‘You see, this is how you die.’

2. Madame de Vercellis, a French noblewoman, in 1728: ‘Good,’ she said after apparently passing wind. ‘A woman who can fart is not dead.’

1. The English physicist Sir Isaac Newton, in 1727: ‘I don’t know what I may seem to the world. But as to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than the ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.’

9. Japanese author Yukio Mishima, in 1970: ‘Human life is limited, but I would like to live forever.’

10. French fashion businesswoman Coco Chanel, in 1971: ‘You see, this is how you die.’

11. American-born French entertainer Josephine Baker as she left a party being held in her honour, in 1975: ‘Oh, you young people act like old men. You have no fun.’

3. English travel writer and poet Mary Wortley Montagu, in 1762: ‘It has all been most interesting.’

2. Madame de Vercellis, a French noblewoman, in 1728: ‘Good,’ she said after apparently passing wind. ‘A woman who can fart is not dead.’

4. The American poet Emily Dickinson, in 1886: ‘I must go in, for the fog is rising.’

3. English travel writer and poet Mary Wortley Montagu, in 1762: ‘It has all been most interesting.’

4. The American poet Emily Dickinson, in 1886: ‘I must go in, for the fog is rising.’

5. The Irish playwright Oscar Wilde, in 1890: ‘My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.’

5. The Irish playwright Oscar Wilde, in 1890: ‘My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.’

6. American abolitionist Harriet Tubman, in 1913: ‘Swing low, sweet chariot.’ The words are part of a song that expresses a desire to escape slavery. Tubman sang it with her family just before she died.

6. American abolitionist Harriet Tubman, in 1913: ‘Swing low, sweet chariot.’ The words are part of a song that expresses a desire to escape slavery. Tubman sang it with her family just before she died.

11. American-born French entertainer Josephine Baker as she left a party being held in her honour, in 1975: ‘Oh, you young people act like old men. You have no fun.’

12. The Jamaican musician Bob Marley, in 1981: ‘Money can’t buy life.’

13. English film director and artist Derek Jarman, in 1994: ‘I want the world to be filled with white fluffy duckies.’

12. The Jamaican musician Bob Marley, in 1981: ‘Money can’t buy life.’

14. The American comedian Bob Hope, in 2003, to his wife after she’d asked him how he would like to be buried: ‘Surprise me.’

13. English film director and artist Derek Jarman, in 1994: ‘I want the world to be filled with white fluffy duckies.’

14. The American comedian Bob Hope, in 2003, to his wife after she’d asked him how he would like to be buried: ‘Surprise me.’

Josephine Baker with her pet cheetah, Chiquita

Anna Pavlova performs in the ballet The Dying Swan, by Camille Saint-Saëns.

Cities have been the epicentres of immigration and hold complex histories of communities being remade time and again. Everybody is from somewhere else and there is safety in this. I can bed down very quickly in new cities. My moves have mainly been on my own, without a pre-existing friendship group, and sometimes without ever having been to the city before, so the way I grounded myself in those early days was through food.

Food is one of the first, and most accessible, avenues we can explore to get to know our new context. It is the taste of that first chapati in Ninyuki, Kenya, flat white in Melbourne or pad thai in Bangkok that lingers in the recollection; foods give expression to the very essence of the place, and our emotional connection to food can often transport us back to places that still hold pieces of our heart.

Emiko Davies, writing of her discovery of a Chinese ingredient shop in a Tuscan town, remarks that she almost fainted with joy. This dual sense of choked-up relief mingled with nostalgia is a common feeling for most migrants: the joy of discovering the deeply familiar while being reminded of the gulf of distance.

On the flip side, Candice Cheung provides an alternative view when she talks about homesickness at the sight of a foreign supermarket. Writing about the incomprehensible strangeness of new grocery stores when she moved from Hong Kong to Sydney, she commented that ‘no language quite captures the grief of losing access to your favourite snacks and mystery meats’.

Nowhere connects us more to food culture and tradition than street-food vendors and markets. These public spaces offer a sensory experience and direct human-tohuman interaction that cannot be replicated in sprawling supermarkets. With our precious spare time, we can meet a friend, spend time outside, connect to the wild, reduce waste and fill our pantries all at the same time.

The markets also draw local investment into the surrounding area and lead to increased spending in nearby shops. Over the Christmas period, standing in a queue for my local fishmonger, Fin and Flounder, I observed other customers shuttling back and forth between other shops—nipping to the hardware store, the butcher or the bookshop while they waited to be served at the market.

Food markets interweave community with commerce, and hope with action. In the US, there are approximately 8,000 farmers’ markets—a doubling in the last decade. This way of shopping for groceries and consuming food is hugely positive for local economies as they encourage us to spread our spending both temporally and geographically.

Street food is a particularly powerful way of connecting with the heritage of a food; vendors typically focus on one cuisine, or one snack, perfected over generations, plentiful, cheap, fresh, instant and bursting with flavour.

Street food, hawker food, street shacks and night markets are particularly prominent in Asia, and food critic KF Seetoh likens it to a form of ‘cultural export’ which often fuses different influences. Writing about fusion food, Hetty McKinnon notes that ‘the intermin-

It

gling of flavours, techniques and ingredients from diverse cultures … is heavily rooted in colonial expansion and migration.’

They also reflect the roots of immigrants and often result in a blend of flavours. George Town, Penang, in Malaysia reflects Peranakan, Chinese, European and Indian heritage, while Jakarta’s Big Durian food centre is interwoven with Javanese, Balinese, Minangkabau, Chinese and Dutch influences. The City Fix blog also highlights that markets can play a part in softly addressing urban-planning challenges by making our cites more lively. In Seoul, for example, the pojangmacha (street-food vendors) are celebrated as a way of facilitating urban-planning challenges by encouraging people to stay out late, spend locally and walk rather than drive.

The places we find our street-food vendors and markets across the world suggest that they are able to breathe life into areas that may get less use, like carparks, railway arches and builders’ yards. By inhabiting these darker corners, they help to keep cities friendly and inviting through the hours when crime or antisocial activity are also more likely to happen.

Sitting at the centre of commercial and community life, they often sit behind extraordinary stories of community resilience. Borough Market in London, for example, has bounced back bigger and more vibrant than ever after a series of terrorist attacks in and around it. It also plays a vital role in the community; surplus produce goes to Guy’s and St Thomas’s hospital and local homeless shelters.

In New Orleans, the Crescent City farmers’ market told the story of the city’s loss and recovery as a result of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005. Richard McCarthy, executive director of Slow Food USA and the co-founder of the Crescent City Farmers’ Market, reflecting on the emotional return to market trading in 2005–06 in an interview for National Geographic, showed how fundamental this community was to the city picking itself back up. In the absence of supermarkets, which took much longer to reopen, the commitment to reopen the market showed what McCarthy describes as a ‘rugged, DIY sense of obligation to community, to recovery, and to a return to normalcy. The reopening of a coffee shop, for instance, became an act of love for a city damaged by storm and by thoughtless elected officials.’

His sentiments ring true today, some fifteen years later, as we emerge tentatively from the colossal shared trauma of the coronavirus pandemic. We can see food, which has been by our side for the duration of the virus, as either a source of comfort or concern. Even on the worst days, we are hard pressed to find a restaurant, trader or farmer not working out of a sense of love and dogged determination for the survival of their businesses and their communities.

Covid has highlighted a number of powerful examples of food-nourishing bodies and spirits during the pandemic, such as Meals for the NHS, in which British food producers worked together to provide nutritious food for hospital staff, frontline workers and those in need, and World Central Kitchen—an inspiring initiative

that provides disaster relief and was quick to act when those in St Vincent, Barbados, were impacted by a volcanic eruption.

There’s an added poignancy to these generous acts of nourishment, in that they were coordinated by the very people and industries most economically affected by the pandemic. With their business having been shuttered virtually overnight, they would have been forgiven for being laid low but, better than most, they recognised the value of food—and sharing—in times of crisis.

Markets have a vitality and community importance, which makes them an excellent starting point as we look for alternative models to our food systems. They can, because of their relatively low rent, supply cheap, fresh ingredients in abundance. Socially, they are gathering places for people with shared heritage, those with a curiosity for the new, foodies, the food-curious and even the food-ambivalent. They are safe spaces for solo outings, connecting us with the pulse of the city even if we walk it alone. They can cure broken hearts, bad moods and lost appetites by enveloping us in their warmth.

Markets also give meaning to the spectacle of food and, if the masses drawn to the likes of Barcelona’s La Boqueria or Marrakech’s Jemaa el-Fna are anything to go by, visitors and residents alike are drawn to the buzz that these places create.

Rather than being written off as expensive or bougie* , we should see markets for what they truly are: a lifeline for farmers, artisans, growers and fishers, who can get a fair price for their products. Customers get the kind of quality assurance and buying experience that online or mass retail simply cannot compete with. The way we treasure and preserve them is by shopping in them and spreading our money.

In Italy, which has the largest network of direct-selling farmers’ markets, Campagna Amica has shown that farmers’ markets are taking centre stage in the food-supply chain. According to Salvo Butera, writing in EurActive, the network is made up of some 130,000 farmers, and Italian spending at farmers’ markets is over €6 billion.

Beyond the economics, the civic function of farmers’ markets is being celebrated. Elderly urban residents able to walk to their local market are guaranteed daily access to fresh products and the social connection that comes with market life. The law can help here, too. In Sicily, a regional law passed in 2018 requires municipalities to push shorter supply chains by mandating direct-sales markets and encouraging products with a direct link to the area of production.

Large urban markets can bring together quality food from all over the world, with an emphasis on ethically farmed, small-batch food, as well as iconic gastronomic treats. Borough Market, like most others, is a cacophony of sounds, smells and tastes. Towers of pungent alpine cheese, hanging cuts of meat from Britain’s West Country, delicate handmade dumplings and unearthed vegetables all stand shoulder to shoulder.

The core of the market is its produce, but the interwoven street food, with specialties from all continued in the book

*Aspiring to be a higher class than one is.

DWELLBEING

FINDING HOME IN THE CITY

Flint Books

Hardback, 288 pages

21 October 2021

9780750996020

RRP £20.00

Our price £17.60

Claire Bradbury

EDITOR’S NOTE

Eighteen months after the start of the pandemic, confidence in the city has taken a knock. While lockdown and social distancing kept us safely at home, urban spaces turned into unappetising no-go zones. According to Claire Bradbury, we now not only have to go back to the city, we have to love it and understand why it deserves our love. That means reminding ourselves—or learning for the first time—what it is that cities do well, how we can build on their strengths and how to remain conscious of the city’s virtues at all times.

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READERS’ COMMENTS

Deborah Calmeyer, ROAR Africa: Articulates the very desperate need for “conscious living” vs. the seemingly unconscious current human condition.

Agamemnon Otero MBE, Energy Garden: Crusading for smart cities must stop. We must develop socially smart cities.

may feel like the old logic but we have to fall back in love with the city and enjoy the challenges of urban life

Australian flying-foxes are members of the Pteropus genus, one of several groups of predominantly fruit and blossom eating ‘megabats’ found in many parts of the world. These megabats, alongside their ‘micro’ cousins, make up the larger order Chiroptera, a group of animals known to most of us simply as bats. Chiroptera means hand winged, and the Chiropterans (mega and micro) are the only flying mammals in existence. The wing, a mammalian forelimb adapted for flight, bears the structural traces of its life as a hand or a paw. The Chiropterans are diverse, extensive, numerous and of ancient lineage. One or more species inhabits every continent on Earth except Antarctica. One in every five species of mammals is a Chiropteran, and they are the most abundant of mammals.

These unique creatures entered the evolutionary story in the Eocene, about 52 to 50 million years ago. Chiropterans have slow life cycles, are relatively long lived, and produce small numbers of offspring. They almost certainly evolved from gliding mammals.

There are some outstanding differences between the megabats and the microbats. Megabats do not echolocate, but rather navigate by sight. It is likely that flying evolved first amongst the bats, with echolocation

ANIMALITIES SHIMMER FLYING FOX EXUBERANCE IN WORLDS OF PERIL

Edinburgh University Press

Softback, 240 pages 31 October 2021

9781474490399

RRP £14.99

Our price £13.19 inc. free UK postage

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BY

THE SAME AUTHOR

Hidden Histories: 1991

Dingo Makes Us Human: 1992

Nourishing Terrains: 1996

Country of the Heart: 2002

Reports from a Wild Country: 2004

Wild Dog Dreaming: 2011

developing later in some smaller species. Megabats are phytophagous: they eat plants, pollen, nectar, leaves and fruits. Microbats, by contrast, include carnivorous, omnivorous and hematophagous species. Many of the micros live on insects, but some eat fish and other vertebrates; popular culture seems particularly fascinated by the hematophagous, or ‘blood-eating’, species. The size of megabats, although variable, makes them easy to distinguish. The largest megabat, and therefore the largest flying mammal, is the ‘greater flying-fox’, Pteropus giganteus, ranging across India, Pakistan, Burma and beyond. Its wingspan is up to 170 cm (5 ft 6 ins).

One theory has it that flying-foxes are actually descended from early primates, which would make them distant cousins of ours. According to this theory, little lemur-like creatures’ front legs developed into wings and Pteropids took to the sky. This theory has not withstood the test of DNA investigation very well, but nor has it been completely dismissed. When I first heard about the theory I felt a surge of recognition. A close encounter with a flying-fox induces the strong sense of being in the company of an odd little kinsman. With their small furry bodies and dog-/human-like faces, with their chattery camps full of individuals who are grooming each other and carrying on their daily life—mating, raising babies, guarding teenagers, bickering, competing and remaining attentive to sources of food in the region, it is difficult to understand how anyone could fail to recognise marvellously engaging kinfolk. And perhaps that is part of the problem in some places and at some times for some humans: flying-foxes are so close, and yet they are so different.

the mega branch of the Chiropterans probably originated in the region of Southeast Asia and Melanesia. It includes forty-two genera with 166

species, including blossom bats, tube-nosed bats, dogfaced or short-nosed tube bats, pygmy fruit bats, musky fruit bats, and many more. This far-flung assemblage is spread out across Africa, the Middle East, and islands and costal continental regions across the Asia-Pacific. The subgroup that concerns me, the Pteropids, share this origin but did not move into Africa or the Middle East; rather they kept to islands and the very edges of continental areas from Samoa to Zanzibar.

Dusk slips across the Old World tropics

The earth turns, day follows night, night follows day, the procession is so familiar and unvarying that we take it for granted. But in between these big everyday events there is a mysterious moment, a time of shifting transitions that is neither day nor night. Dusk and dawn are liminal—their swift passage speaks of shadows, offering fleeting glimpses of life in edgy places, and intimating the presence of things that belong not quite to the day or the night. With dusk, in particular, there is an element of mystery: the crepuscular, or twilight, moment is inhabited by creatures who revel in the halflight. Here, amongst dim, shadowy and yet expressive action, interactions resist easy definition. Dusk tells us

their lives and human lives are potentially non-confrontational. However, flying-foxes eat fruit, perhaps not by preference but certainly where available; humans who grow fruit don’t want to lose their crops. Conflict can become so severe that in many places persecutions, even massacres, rather than co-existence, have become the norm. Of the sixty or so species of Pteropids that recently lived in this vast region, several are now extinct, some are functionally extinct, and many more are threatened. Throughout this vast region of the Old World tropics conflict between humans and flying-foxes is on the rise.

The Australian contingent

Flying-foxes need water, and Australia is a challenge for them. Water in Australia is governed ecologically by the fact that this continent is the ‘driest, flattest, most poorly drained, and in fact largely inward draining land on Earth’. About 75 per cent of the continent is ‘acutely arid’ (of which 40 per cent is desert), 10 per cent is seasonally arid and acutely arid in some years, while only 15 per cent is ‘reasonably well-watered’. Water in the desert is extremely unpredictable on an annual basis, and is influenced across the continent by the El

EDITOR’S NOTE

Australian ethnographer Professor Deborah Bird Rose studied animals, humans and environmentalism but also larger issues of ethics, justice and religion. Over the course of 40 years she wrote about dingoes and Aboriginal Australians, among other subjects, becoming increasingly concerned about species extinction. Her research into flying-foxes introduced her to wildlife carers and academically trained scientists among whom, she said, she encountered “more passion, intimacy, cruelty, horror, complexity, generosity and wild beauty than I could ever have imagined”. She died in 2018 of cancer, which had interrupted her writing since 2009.

that there will always be more to Earth life than either day or night can contain.

Dusk is liminal and flying-foxes are also liminal in their own way: they are so clearly mammalian, so clearly at home in flight, and so comfortable hanging upside down in their lively sociable camps, so similar to other animals, including humans, and yet so different. Across island and coastal regions of the Pacific and Indian oceans, dusk slips along, and with it comes the great Pteropid flyout. I imagine a wave in the specific sense of the term: a disturbance that moves across a physical reality that remains in place. At each home site there is noisy conversation accompanied by lots of pushing and shoving. In the half-light, one listens acutely: the rustling becomes more intense; the sound of wings and chit-chat becomes more active, and after a few tentative starts the mass rises up and spreads out.

The twin event—dusk and flyout—starts at the eastern edge of the Pteropid homelands in Samoa, and moves on to islands such as Fiji, Guam and the Marianas; it moves on to Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines. Parts of coastal China, and islands in the South China Sea, the Arafura Sea and the Timor Sea: each place experiences its own flyout. Australia, Papua New Guinea and Indonesia are brushed with dusk and flying-foxes. Across Southeast Asia—Malaysia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Burma—and into parts of Nepal and Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka: still dusk travels, and still the flying-foxes respond. And so it goes, across the vast Indian Ocean to the Seychelles islands, Mauritius and Madagascar. Dusk moves across the whole world, but flying-foxes are limited in their travels. Beyond the islands near the coast of Tanzania there are no more Pteropids.

Given that flying-foxes are arboreal and nocturnal,

Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Locally known as El Niño, this huge trans-oceanic climate dynamic amplifies unpredictability, brings high rates of variation, and is not linked with an annual cycle. It is cyclical, but the time frame is more likely to be a decade than just one year. El Niño gives rise to patterns of extreme oscillation between drought and flood that some ecologists label a ‘boom and bust ecology’. In Mary White’s delightful term, it is a ‘climate-warper’. One result is that Australia is the driest and most unpredictable inhabited continent on Earth.

Most flying-foxes live in the relatively well-watered coastal and near inland areas; they can be encountered in Victoria, New South Wales, the Australian Capital Territory, Queensland, The Northern Territory and the northern part of Western Australia. Some have ventured into South Australia, and a few are even turning up in Tasmania.

In Australia, the largest male flying-foxes weigh about one kilogram and have wingspans of up to 1.5 metres (5 feet). Blacks are the largest, and until recently they lived primarily in the tropical and semi-tropical zones, with full-time inhabitation of some coastal areas, and seasonal trips inland to visit the flowering trees of the great savannah woodlands of the semi-arid regions. With global warming Blacks are extending their range further south where the winters are not as cold as they used to be. Greys live primarily along the south-east coastal region.

Flying-foxes are being monitored at a national scale by the Federal Department of Environment and Energy. There needs to be a more uniform approach to management of human/flying-fox conflicts, according to the scientists who work at the front lines. A number of excellent academically trained scien-

Why flying-foxes? Because the prospect of their extinction exposes the threats to every other species on Earth today Deborah Bird Rose