Booklaunch Issue 4

Not quite so illiterate: the 18th-century poor Page 9

What you need to build your own dragon Page 10

How modern churches vary in style Page 11

Liberalism’s anti-semitic blind spot Page 12

Why we abused animals for the fun of it Page 13

The bursting of T.E. Lawrence’s balloon Page 15

Looking for Daddy: a wartime op that went wrong Page 16

Did Mike Tyson’s tattoo break Maori copyright? Page 14

Vendetta: can a Sicilian emigrée ever escape? Page 17

Surviving psychosis and its delusions: Page 18

Finding serenity in La Serenissima Page 19

Booklaunch Competition and results Page 20

The London Yoot Bible

A tool for linguists and urban clerics

Missionary publishers have always been inventive in using language to win converts. The London Yoot Bible is a first attempt not just to render the Bible into gang speak but to help those involved in youth work visualise gang culture better. While it cannot avoid the charge of patronising those whose language it aspires to represent, it nonetheless aims to offer a legitimate linguistic transcription of a dynamic, hypercontextual patois without any obvious written form

Potential Subscribers

To sponsor the development and publication of this book, please email: rights@booklaunch.london

King James Version Mark 14

12 And the first day of unleavened bread, when they killed the passover, his disciples said unto him, Where wilt thou that we go and prepare that thou mayest eat the passover?

13 And he sendeth forth two of his disciples, and saith unto them, Go ye into the city, and there shall meet you a man bearing a pitcher of water: follow him.

14 And wheresoever he shall go in, say ye to the goodman of the house, The Master saith, Where is the guestchamber, where I shall eat the passover with my disciples?

15 And he will shew you a large upper room furnished and prepared: there make ready for us.

16 And his disciples went forth, and came into the city, and found as he had said unto them: and they made ready the passover.

17 And in the evening he cometh with the twelve.

18 And as they sat and did eat, Jesus said, Verily I say unto you, One of you which eateth with me shall betray me.

19 And they began to be sorrowful, and to say unto him one by one, Is it I? and another said, Is it I?

20 And he answered and said unto them, It is one of the twelve, that dippeth with me in the dish.

21 The Son of man indeed goeth, as it is written of him: but woe to that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed! good were it for that man if he had never been born.

22 And as they did eat, Jesus took bread, and blessed, and brake it, and gave to them, and said, Take, eat: this is my body.

23 And he took the cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them: and they all drank of it.

24 And he said unto them, This is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many.

25 Verily I say unto you, I will drink no more of the fruit of the vine, until that day that I drink it new in the kingdom of God.

26 And when they had sung an hymn, they went out into the mount of Olives.

Mark 15

1 And straightway in the morning the chief priests held a consultation with the elders and scribes and the whole council, and bound Jesus, and carried him away, and delivered him to Pilate.

2 And Pilate asked him, Art thou the King of the Jews? And he answering said unto them, Thou sayest it.

3 And the chief priests accused him of many things: but he answered nothing.

4 And Pilate asked him again, saying, Answerest thou nothing? behold how many things they witness against thee.

5 But Jesus yet answered nothing; so that Pilate marvelled.

6 Now at that feast he released unto them one prisoner, whomsoever they desired.

7 And there was one named Barabbas, which lay bound with them that had made insurrection with him, who had committed murder in the insurrection.

8 And the multitude crying aloud began to desire him to do as he had ever done unto them.

9 But Pilate answered them, saying, Will ye that I release unto you the King of the Jews?

10 For he knew that the chief priests had delivered him for envy.

11 But the chief priests moved the people, that he should rather release Barabbas unto them.

12 And Pilate answered and said again unto them, What will ye then that I shall do unto him whom ye call the King of the Jews?

13 And they cried out again, Crucify him.

14 Then Pilate said unto them, Why, what evil hath he done? And they cried out the more exceedingly, Crucify him.

15 And so Pilate, willing to content the people, released Barabbas unto them, and delivered Jesus, when he had scourged him, to be crucified.

16 And the soldiers led him away into the hall, called Praetorium; and they call together the whole band.

17 And they clothed him with purple, and platted a crown of thorns, and put it about his head,

18 And began to salute him, Hail, King of the Jews!

19 And they smote him on the head with a reed, and did spit upon him, and bowing their knees worshipped him.

London Yoot Version Mark 14

12 Pre Easter on an early ting. When man have shanked the Passover lamb, the gang say ‘which nizz you want us to cook in?’

13 So he send two of his bredren, and he go, ‘Dere’s a man, in the ends, wot carry pure water. Meet up wit him. Follow man.’

14 And when he get to the trap, tell the guy wot own it, ‘My top guy say: “Where is the romp room (with the bottles poppin’) where I am gonna get loose with my yutes?”’

15 and he gonna show you this pad upstairs (all Fendi and Balenci shining). Cook up your meal there— hear me now?”

16 So gang hit road. Trappin in the city, and it just like Jesus told them. So they cook up a mash wit the recipe.

17 And dat evening, Jesus, no wet guy who still hold down da crib, moved wit his boys.

18 And while they is all lacking, he announce, ‘This is for real, mans: one of you is a paigon—one of you’s a snake in the grass.’

19 They are well hurt and say in turn, ‘I’m no paigon. For real. I know I respect my Donny.’

20 And he respond, “What I’m sayin’ is, it’s like one of gang—like one of you who mashes up shows with me on the reg.’

21 Son of Man set out, as it is written in the Good Book (mad religious): now I’m saying’, check this out— don’t you dare disrespect man, or else you’ll get a bang to the teeth. I’ll run up on man with a skeng.

22 And as they ate, Jesus took the grubs, and blessed it (yes lawd), and snapped it. He gave it them, and said, ‘feel like a G, cos you holdin my body.’

23 And he take the cup, and when he had pre’d on a man, he gave it to them: and they all got yakked.

24 He spoke to them, like Samuel L, saying ‘This is the colour of too many wounds. This is the blood of my word, wot I shed for my goons.

25 No more henny, til I’m blessed up.

26 And when they had sung a tune, they hit up the local Mount of Olives.

Mark 15

1 Early morning the chiefs sketch out a plan wid the ancients and profs, decking Jesus, and droppin him to Pilate, a tough guy.

2 And Pilate ask him, ‘So you is Donny of the Heebs?’ And he tell them, ‘Wot you said.’

3 The feds said holla, but he don’t pipe up.

4 So Pilate ask him again, saying: ‘You snitch or else you dotty? The cops have receipt.’

5 But Jesus stay quiet; legendary focus like 300.

6 Now at that feast he said he’d let one out the box, so pick a certi bredren.

7 One yute called Barabbas had boxed up a yute, ran him up with a rusty.

8 And the peoples cried out to bless man. Offer him freedom from the neeks in cell.

9 But Pilate answer, ‘What if I prop the Donny of the Heebs?”

10 Cos he know dat chief priests had made man gush, real emotional talk.

11 But the chiefs pressed on, urging Barabbas to head back to the block.

12 So Pilate answer again, ‘What do the team want me to do wit dis old king?’

13 And they cried out, ‘Batter man.’

14 Then Pilate say, ‘Why, has he snitched or put disrespect on man’s name?’ And they bellowed louder, to ching man.

15 So Pilate, a bottle popper, released Barabbas from cell, and sent Jesus, having chastened man, to get run up.

16 And the troops led him into the hall; and they call together the whole crew, the new links intact.

17 And he was kinda drippin in purple, but wit a crown that stung,

18 And they saluted man, ‘Hail, leader of the T!’

19 And they banged him on the head with a rod, and spat at man, and bowed their knees, on some messed up ting.

20 And when they had disrespected Jesus, they tore off his garms, and hassled man even more.

21 And they told some G Simon, a Cyrenian, who was passing by, to come with the cross.

22 And they brought him to Golgotha, which is a shabby nizz. … continued in the book

These extracts are taken from the New Testament, The Book of Mark, Chapter 14: 12–25 and Chapter 15: 1–22

Put aside other explanations for a moment and consider this: that it’s the dominance of London that explains the outburst of Brexitism in the rest of the country. However far reaching London’s grasp, outsiders see it as self-sufficient, self-satisfied, insular, not needing the provinces and not understanding them. London either outcompetes the regions or blindsides them.

It is the most dynamic city in Europe. It houses a sixth of the UK’s population—equivalent to the whole of Scotland and Wales—and has an economy that makes it the equivalent of a state within a state.

People used to speak of “England” interchangeably with “Britain”; today, they might as well say “London” because the UK can easily be mistaken for an outlier of the capital—the hinterland of a London empire. London’s commuter belt alone has a radius of 100 miles. It’s not unusual for a homeward commute to take over two hours.

This is over-centralisation and we have seen versions of it before. In 18th-century France, absentee aristocrats, grand and remote, clustered around Versailles and had their heads cut off. The patrician class in England, supposedly a model of rural decentralisation, lived on the land and survived.

Industrialisation in the 19th century consolidated the UK as a network of provincial centres. The siting of the capital in the south east corner of the country was uncontentious; it gave easiest access to Europe by sea, but the rest of the country had its own resources to exploit and made its own contribution to Britain’s global might. There were other complaints but few felt done down by London in the way they do now.

Today, with Britain’s captive imperial market long gone, and domestic cheap labour undercut by the Third World poverty that we are content to exploit, cities that thrived on industrialisation and colonialism no longer have any grand economic engine. Liverpool once had its docks, Stoke had its potteries, Sheffield had steel, Hull had fishing, Glasgow and Belfast had ship building. From London’s vantage point, it is not clear what any of them now offer—what the point of them is—and they know it and feel belittled by it.

This is versaillification and it offers ample scope for anger. Those who feel ignored and outdone also feel resentful and it is easy to orchestrate that resentment further, as Nigel Farrage knows only too well.

At the same time, London is insensitive to the way its own interests always come first. Whitehall continues to spend money on High Speed 2, for example, to rush rail passengers between London and the North, while people in the North still lack the basic rail infrastructure for efficient local travel. Too often, London’s gain is the rest of the country’s loss; at best, the rest of the country only wins if London wins more. How could there not be a backlash?

There is a flipside, however. The dynamism that outperforms the rest of the country is also self-injuring. London’s elite may be protected from its worst effects— especially property speculators who live abroad and do not suffer the conditions that their portfolios give rise to—but for everyone else, the quality of life is worsening. From out-of-reach house prices to suburban traffic jams to air pollution, the very appeal of London is clogging it up.

Oddly, however, every government consultant appointed to look at London’s problems calls for more growth, as if size was a test of the capital’s virility (and of the virility of the advisors, perhaps). So, we are told, Heathrow Airport needs to grow, London’s underground railway system needs to grow, London’s office accommodation needs to grow, its housing needs to grow, its density needs to grow, its height limits need to grow, and its utility infrastructure needs to grow too to keep pace with this growth.

According to the Strategic Plan for London, “the only prudent course is to plan for continued growth.”

In short, for London to keep going, it has to keep growing. Those of us who are not in the business of strategic planning will recognise this at once for what it is: a Ponzi scheme—a type of fraud in which new investment is constantly needed to sustain old investment.

It cannot go on. Both for the health of the country and of London, the UK needs to be rebalanced. But how?

Throwing money at the UK’s most depressed regions is an obvious answer, but not one that comes with an obvious strategy or a guaranteed return. Our seaside resorts are a case in point. Since the arrival of airlines and cheap foreign travel, their economies have collapsed, turning once prosperous towns into dormitories for the most needy, but no local authority has yet worked out how to turn them around. Whatever revival may fitfully have

occurred has depended on informal and unplanned gentrification—urban incomers turning Regency terraces into Colefax-and-Fowlered B&Bs while benefitting those at the bottom of the pile not at all.

It is possible, however, that we have been looking in the wrong direction. Rather than looking for ways of rescuing the country, or rescuing it from London, what we need is to rescue London from London. Rather than trying to speed up the regions, London needs to slow down while everyone else catches up.

The Government could do this by relocating one of London’s primary drivers—and there are only two candidates. One is the financial sector. A new banking city created in a region of severe deprivation would be transformative. It cannot happen, however, because banking would resist. If bankers had to leave London, they’d quickly gather in Frankfurt or Paris instead.

That leaves Government with only one other option: relocating itself. Other countries have done so. In the last 200 years, the USA, Finland, Greece, Canada, New Zealand, India, Turkey, Australia, Lithuania, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Tanzania, the Philippines, Nigeria, Germany and Burma have all moved their capitals. Their reasons were different in each case, but all did so to survive. The UK has to decide whether survival is something it wants to invest in; at present it appears that it doesn’t.

Relocating a new capital in a region needing urgent help would re-energise the economy. It would also help the UK to redefine itself at a time when the reasons for the union of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are becoming less obvious. Britain needs to rethink its own rationale. A new capital should symbolise what the Union now stands for and restore the electorate’s faith in it.

Technically we can do it. Half the big architectural and planning firms in the UK seem to have been doing little else over the last 20 years than building new cities in the People’s Republic of China. Creating a new city would confirm our ability to think ourselves out of the dilemma that Brexit and Mr Farrage have articulated and exploited.

What stands in the way is our conservatism. However radical some of us might feel, we mostly dislike change and distrust those who campaign for it. When it come to innovation, the very purpose of Parliament is to restrain the utopian and revolutionary impulses of the populace: that’s why Brexit has taken so long, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing. In our road, rail and air networks, we also have an aged and complex infrastructure that now impose on us the shape that originally shaped them.

Finding a more equitable siting of the capital and ensuring that this re-siting brings equitable benefits to the entire country is the right solution because it would shake the country up at a time when it needs to be shaken up and in the most constructive way. What is difficult, ahead of any popular head of steam, is to predict what slam-dunk arguments might best win hearts and minds. Alongside all the benefits, moving our capital would also be disruptive and expensive, and would be met not just by knee-jerk protests but by articulate, well-researched opposition.

Among the most intransigent opponents would be our MPs, and not only in the south and south-west. For them, there is in London all that life can afford and while the dimmest will find it hard to fathom the arguments for a move, the brightest would mostly likely be cowed into submission by the fear of being deselected by recalcitrant constituents if they did not object as well.

But MPs haven’t exactly led the political agenda in the last three years: it has taken Mr Farrage’s protest parties—first UKIP, then the Brexit Party—to make all the running. With funding but no policies, he has twice shown that clever rhetoric, cleverly deployed, gets results. From nowhere, he now leads the biggest political group in the EU, created just six weeks before the election that brought it to power.

And this was not inevitable. Two thirds of us voted to remain part of the European Communty in 1975; the idea of attributing to the EU whatever woes we may have suffered since then had to be constructed. Setting aside the merits or otherwise of that construction, it has changed the UK’s political geography. From now on, for better or worse, single-issue campaigners will probably prefer to sideline Parliament and go it alone.

The case for building a new London will also, therefore, need to be constructed. The ammunition for it is there, along with the fertile ground of resentment and disadvantage. The question is, who could safely lead it? Any takers?

The Case for a New British Capital Stephen Games

Forty years after first writing about architecture for the Guardian, Booklaunch editor Stephen Games argues that the only way to quell Brexit unrest, revitalise the regions, remodel the Union for the 21st century, and save London from itself is to build a new British capital elsewhere in the country

Taken from New Premises Position Statement 10: The Case for a New British Capital

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The Best I Can Do

Trevor Pateman

INTELLECTUAL IRREVERENCE

X & the Alphabet

The letter X does not pull its weight in the alphabet. There are only 26 letters in the English alphabet and they have their work cut out to represent a million words. How come X is still in a job when it manages to start off only one hundred or so words, most of which we don’t know anyway? And those hundred or so words could all be started off with a Z quite satisfactorily (zeroxes, zylophones, zenophobia). It’s as if the team is a player short.

Well, in its defence, you could say that it has found a second job working as an adjective rather than a letter, fronting up hyphenated words like X-ray and what would normally be hyphenated words like xbox. This is true but not exclusive to X: we have B-movies and G-forces. As a second line of defence, you could point out that at the end of words X does another grammatical job indicating that a word is singular rather than plural: box, cox, fox, pox are all singular, though they would sound the same if spelt bocks, cocks, focks, pocks, and those are at the same time versions which can cope with a plural, so fockses instead of foxes is at least as transparent. Cocks, docks, locks, socks—under the present regime, words ending in cks—are always plurals. The proof of this is demonstrated by the fact that we know that sox as an alternative plural of sock (as in Bobby sox) is just a gimmick.

But this idea that X is doing work for grammar is dubious; it makes it sound like X is moonlighting twice over, just because it has only a part-time job as a letter of the alphabet.

You may be inclined to persist in defence of X and I think that might be because somehow you just feel that a letter of the alphabet surely must be fit for purpose. If it wasn’t, it would have been eliminated long ago. Well, that’s a popular neo-Darwinian way of thinking which used to be summarised in the expression (or eckspression) The Survival of the Fittest. In turn, that doctrine connects to a smiley-faced version of the same idea, All is for the Best in the Best of All Possible Worlds—interfere at your peril.

Trevor Pateman studied PPE in the 1960s at Oxford, where he learnt to write two short essays every week, each based on a day or so in the library. Fifty years and an academic career later, he is still happy to try his hand at any topic, and his collection The Best I Can Do comprises 26 musings organised alphabetically, the subjects sometimes whimsical, sometimes more serious

Title: The Best I Can Do

Author: Trevor Pateman

Publisher: degree zero

Location: Brighton

Pages: 168

Format: Softback

ISBN: 9780993587900

Size: 129 mm x 199 mm

Date of publication: 2016

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The All Is for the Best doctrine is clearly ludicrous and the idea that everything in the world is fully fitted to purpose and can’t be improved on—the fancy name for this idea is eufunctionalism—is falsified by such simple observations as this: the fact that all the cars on the road today are being driven around does not prove that they are all in equally good running order. Likewise, just because the letter X is there in the alphabet being taught every day in school does not mean that it is in as good shape as A or B. Frankly, it’s struggling.

made the switch. Everyone now alive is very happy that they did.

Another story is a bit different. Czechoslovakia’s government had already committed to switching from driving on the left to driving on the right when the country was occupied by Germany in 1939. As a result, the planned transition was accelerated by the simple fact that German military traffic entered the country on the right hand side of the road and stayed there. In some places every driver had switched within 24 hours and, in the country as a whole, the changeover triggered by force majeure was completed within a fortnight and with one fatality.

As another example of changing a co-ordination arrangement, it took the Russian Revolution to impose a more accurate calendar—in Bolshevik Russia, the changeover took place in 1918 with 31 January followed by 14 February. I have a card from a Danish traveller in Omsk writing home on the 14th February and noting that it’s for the first time the same date in both Russia and Denmark. In the early revolutionary period the Soviets also edited the Russian alphabet and spelling, sending in the military to confiscate from printers the type used to set the abolished hard sign. In both cases, change was seen both as a pre-requisite for entering the modern era and as the enforcement of rationality.

We stick with the creaking cultural technology of our old alphabet as with so much else. True, it’s preferable to bloodshed. And, true, that with the arrival of the Internet it would probably now take a world government to change it. But it takes its toll. In British primary schools, there is this thing called Phonics, the product of our best brains and industry, which launches all right on A and B but promptly gets sea-sick on curly C and kicking K (I think that’s called re-arranging the deckchairs) before drowning in X. For school children, it’s a voyage on the Titanic. The survivors are those who manage—probably with parental help—to climb overboard in time. (If you are a parent and want to explore how Phonics is working for your child, here’s a suggestion: When their next birthday comes round, ask them to write down for you the names of the friends they want to invite. Maybe you will have to help and sound out for them, but this time no cheating to turn a – n into Anna and so on down the list and fingers crossed that there is no one in class called Xavier).

Atheists, Agnostics & Abstainers

Trevor Pateman was a pupil of Roland Barthes and went on to teach at Sussex University, specialising in Chomskyan linguistics. He now lives in Brighton

At this point the story ought to shift to the task of explaining what you might call the Persistence of X. Written languages and the alphabets that enable them are surrounded by an ocean of spoken language, constantly moving and shifting. Spoken language is liable to unending and sometimes quite rapid changes, some of them very difficult to describe and explain. You can’t turn them away, any more than you can turn back the waves. Written languages and alphabets float on this ocean. They would not exist without it but their relation to it is changing, uncertain and sometimes disastrous. Spellings change a bit to reflect, after the event, what has happened to intonation or pronunciation—in English in the recent past Rumania and Roumania have given way to Romania. But alphabets barely change at all and then only over extended periods of time. Alphabets may end up having nothing to do with spoken language and, for some languages, that is quite true or partly true.

The alphabet we know connects better to spoken Italian than it does to spoken English, for instance, which may have something to do with the fact that it’s a Latin (Roman) alphabet and Italian is even now a Latin (Romance) language. English isn’t. It just happens to be represented through the alphabet of Britain’s former colonial masters.

Certainly, alphabets, like QWERTY keyboards, are structurally rigid in the sense that it is hard to interfere with one element without disrupting the whole. In addition, alphabets solve a co-ordination problem, ensuring we all behave the same way when there is no obvious right way. So it becomes one of those cases where we really need a government to order a change and ensure that we all follow its lead and, ideally, at the same time. That is, for example, usually the only way you can change from driving on the left to driving on the right. Sweden made the change as late as 1967 and it’s an interesting story: a referendum was held and an overwhelming majority rejected any change; the government bided its time and a few years later

Teetotallers (once called Total Abstainers) and vegetarians are people who renounce something which they may well find attractive—in the case of alcoholics, too attractive. Some vegetarians are repelled by the thought of eating dead animal flesh. Others aren’t: the novelist Jonathan Saffran Foer, for example, author of an extended defence of the vegetarian case, Eating Animals (2000). The smell of your barbecue wafting into his house triggers temptation not disgust. But for him the temptation is one to be resisted, on moral grounds.

I sometimes think of myself as abstaining from religion, both from practice and belief. Some religious things I find repulsive but not all of them. There seem to be attractive aspects to all religions, though I only have experience of one. But when you start to put things in the balance, for me the scales always tip one way.

Start with religious practices. I won’t attend an infant christening. I think it’s morally wrong—mildly abusive—to take your new born child and sign them straight up for something which ought to be a matter for considered choice. When I was baptised into the Church of England in 1947 my godparents (I remember their names but nothing more) were handed little cards to instruct them in their Duties and my parents got a copy which I inherited. It is headed Take this child and nurse it for Me [capital M in the original] and instructs Mr and Mrs Mardell:

1. To pray regularly for my Godchild.

2. To ask myself frequently: Does my Godchild know, or is he being taught, the promises which he made by me [that is to say, through the godparent] at his Baptism, namely:

(a) to renounce the devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world, with all covetous desires of the same, and the carnal desires of the flesh … ?

Yes, that and more is what I am supposed to have promised as a mewling babe in arms with these godparents I don’t know from Adam taking power of attorney because of my own inability to say the words ‘I promise’. … continued in the book

These extracts are taken from the essays “X & the Alphabet” and “Atheists, Agnostics & Abstainers”

Italy has suffered the worst economic performance and the highest rates of corruption of any developed economy. Evidence suggests that the strong reaction by the political system to the Mani Pulite (‘Clean Hands’) investigations may have contributed to this situation.

A sting operation based on a denunciation by the owner of a small cleaning company hired through a public tender led to the arrest of Mario Chiesa, the president of a public retirement centre, who had taken a cash bribe. Shortly after his arrest, the defendant agreed to a plea bargain in court and testified that he had received bribes from several other businesses, setting off a chain reaction that uncovered a widespread, long-standing system of corruption involving businesspeople, politicians, public officials, and members of the police and the judiciary. In addition to enriching government officials personally, the bribes funded the careers and campaigns of most politicians from practically all political parties.

At first, Bettino Craxi, president of the Council of Ministers at the time, commented that the arrest of Chiesa was insignificant, since he was only a ‘lone swindler’ who had besmirched the image of a clean party. Soon afterward, in the wake of an avalanche of indictments, Craxi himself denounced in Parliament a system of illicit political payments involving nearly all politicians and parties. No one in the chamber dared to contradict him, thus highlighting the amazement of everyone about the gravity and scope of the facts coming out every day. Very soon, 4,200 people had been incriminated, including four former presidents of the Council of Ministers, 12 ministers, and 130 deputies and senators. By the 1994 elections, five parties had disappeared, including the Christian Democrats, who had dominated politics since the postwar period.

At that point, the political system mounted its reaction against the investigations, with the political debut of Silvio Berlusconi, a successful building contractor, closely tied to Craxi. Berlusconi also controlled a media empire, with national TV networks, newspapers, and a soccer team. Regarding the accusations of corruption investigated by Mani Pulite, he told historian and journalist Indro Montanelli in 1993, ‘I am obliged to go into politics. Otherwise they’ll arrest me, and I’ll be broke.’ He ran for Parliament and won in 1994, becoming prime minister with the new party Forza Italia, whose slogan was ‘Away with old politics. We want different, new, clean politics!’ He headed a strong media attack against members of the operation, which had to face a true ‘sea of mud’, fed by a war of fake dossiers and accusations that the judges’ real objective was to eliminate all politicians. …

Meanwhile, another lethal attack was launched not only against Mani Pulite but against Italy’s very future, with a series of new laws, many of them unconstitutional and soon to be repealed, but which demonstrated that the political class and the government would do anything to put an end to the operation. Several crimes of corruption were legalized, and sentences were reduced for those that remained on the books, tying the judiciary’s hands regarding punishing these kinds of crimes.

With a demoralized judiciary, after a relentless campaign of defamation, and new laws to ensure impunity from crimes of corruption, Italy’s recent lackluster performance is not at all surprising. It combines the worst ranking in corruption perceptions and in the quality of other governance indicators with the lowest economic growth of any of its peers.

Two decades later, could Brazil follow in Italy’s footsteps? With the arrest in March 2014 of a money changer (doleiro) known in Curitiba for several past crimes, members of the police, federal prosecutors, and federal judge Sergio Moro could not imagine the scale of what they would uncover in the years to come, through what came to be known as Operation Lava Jato (‘Car Wash’). An SUV delivered as a ‘gift’ to a former supply director at Petrobras led to the disclosure of a gigantic corruption and money-laundering scheme involving Petrobras and its main suppliers and contractors, as well as several political parties loyal to the government. Investigations revealed that the scheme went beyond Petrobras to various government agencies, amounting to a serious situation of systemic corruption.

At Petrobras, overbilled construction work contracted out to and done by some of the country’s biggest civil engineering companies was organized in a cartel that lasted many years. Operated by doleiros, the bribes found their way into the overseas bank accounts of Petrobras directors and to the parties responsible for

naming the corporation’s upper echelon, to be used in election campaigns and for other purposes.

Participants include members of the highest ranks of the country’s political and business elite, several of them now—or recently—in prison. Former President Lula da Silva was sentenced to 12 years in prison by an appeals court and is awaiting the outcome of six other criminal cases now being heard in federal trial courts. Four former Petrobras directors have received prison sentences, two of them after making plea-bargain agreements. Dozens of executives in the builders’ cartel were found guilty of paying kickbacks. In its 2015 annual report, Petrobras recognized it had lost 6 billion reais (about US$1.8 billion) to corruption, and in 2018 it signed a US$3 billion settlement with shareholders in the United States. Three of Brazil’s largest building companies—Camargo Correa, Andrade Gutierrez, and Odebrecht—signed leniency agreements with federal prosecutors, committing themselves to abandon illicit practices and return billions of reais to the public treasury.

With the high level of corruption in Brazil, identified by any of the ratings used internationally, it is no surprise to see the country shaken by scandals from time to time, like ‘Collorgate’ in 1992, which led to the impeachment of President Fernando Collor; the ‘budget midgets’ in 1992; the SUDAM case in 2001; Operation Anaconda in 2003; Operation Sanguessuga in 2006; and the Mensalão in 2005 (see Power and Taylor 2011).

What makes Lava Jato different from the previous cases? Lava Jato has been successful for several reasons. Luck put the case in the hands of Judge Moro, who has had a solid career in court as well as expertise in money-laundering crimes. Conversant with the Mani Pulite case, he was one of the first to publish an article on it in Brazil, in 2004. Its coming in the wake of the Mensalão trial was an important advantage (Moro 2018). Despite the slow pace of that trial, it was the first time the Supreme Court had tried and imprisoned icons of the PT (the Workers’ Party) and some government officials for crimes of corruption, criminal conspiracy, and other charges. A 2016 Supreme Court decision allowing defendants to begin serving prison sentences after their conviction was upheld on a first appeal that helped suspects recognize that they could no longer count on endless appeals to stay out of prison, thus encouraging the plea-bargaining option to reduce their impending penalties. Growing international opposition to crimes of corruption and money laundering—in battles against financial schemes for terrorism, drug trafficking, and corruption—facilitated Brazil’s collaboration with countries where the proceeds of corrupt acts had been deposited. Modern ICT has also been used well in the operation, including the rapid publication of testimony and denunciations and live broadcasts of trials. Access to information, along with a free, high-quality press in Brazil, ensured strong public support for the operation, with noisy street and online demonstrations every time Lava Jato appeared to be threatened.

By confronting gigantic, deep-rooted interest groups, Lava Jato became a symbol of the fight against corruption, but it also gave rise to a horde of stakeholders interested in its ruin. Several bills in Congress tried to reduce the independence of judges, to legalize offthe-books campaign donations, to grant amnesty to politicians on the take, and so on. There is an ongoing (2018) attempt to overturn a Supreme Court ruling on the enforcement of a prison sentence after a defendant is convicted by the first appeals court, particularly with regard to the prosecution of former President Lula. Time will tell if Brazil will turn this sad page in its history or fall back under the yoke of powerful interest groups to the detriment of the majority of the population.

As it nears its conclusion and having dealt with the subject matter for which it was created, Lava Jato can be deemed to have been a successful operation, but it is still incomplete—only because of the naturally slow pace of Supreme Court deliberations on accusations against politicians who enjoy special forum privileges. Even so, one cannot expect Lava Jato to put an end to corruption in the country. The skill of the prosecution and the rapid punishment meted out for crimes of corruption, which Lava Jato pioneered, represented necessary, albeit insufficient, steps toward reducing corruption once and for all in Brazil. To reduce corruption meaningfully, it will be crucial to ensure the population’s ongoing engagement in the fight against corruption, breaking with old cultural habits, and the emergence of political leaders who embrace the anti-corruption agenda. Here, as in

Brazil: Boom, Bust and the Road to Recovery Antonio Spilimbergo and Krishnan Srinivasan

Brazil was an economic success story until the 1990s; then everything went wrong. Global and regional crises were partly the cause, but internal problems also contributed. Drawing on detailed work done by the IMF and by leading policymakers, academics and think tanks, this multi-faceted study shows that reforms have brought progress but that courage is still needed to tackle the many challenges that hold the country back

Title: Brazil: Boom, Bust and the Road to Recovery

Editors: Antonio Spilimbergo and Krishnan Srinivasan

Publisher: International Monetary Fund

Location: Washington

Pages: 382

Format: Softback

ISBN: 9781484339749

Size: 152 mm x 229 mm

Illustrations: Tables and Figures

Date of publication: February 2019

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This extract comes from the 20th of 21 essays: “Lava Jato, Mani Pulite, and the Role of Institutions” by Maria Cristina Rondelli Pinotti

Antonio Spilimbergo is the IMF’s Assistant Director in the Western Hemisphere Department and has been mission chief for Brazil, Italy, Slovenia, Russia and Turkey

Krishna Srinivasan is an Assistant Director in the European Department at the IMF and its Mission Chief for the United Kingdom

The Quarter

Naguib Mahfouz

ARABIC FICTION

Foreword by Elif Shafak

I first read the works of Naguib Mahfouz in Istanbul in Turkish. Back then, as a university student, I used to frequent a second-hand bookshop—a low-ceilinged, musty-smelling place with plank floors, just a stone’s throw from the Grand Bazaar.

The owner of the bookshop—a sour-tempered, middle-aged man with thick glasses and a haircut that had never been popular in any era—genuinely loved books and equally disliked human beings. At times he would randomly pick a customer and quiz him or her on their knowledge of literature, history, science or philosophy.

I had seen him scold people before, and though I had never witnessed it myself, urban legend held that he refused to sell books to customers who failed his tests. No doubt there were many other bookshops in the city where you didn’t have to inhale dust or risk bumping your head on the door frames, and where you could choose books without being grilled by the owner. Yet I kept returning to this place. Getting the bookseller’s seal of approval felt like a rite of passage, an unspoken challenge. Young and vain as I was, I secretly wanted him to question me on French, English or Russian novels in translation, which I believed were my ‘strong point’. But on this rainy day in late autumn, he looked at me and asked, ‘So, have you read Mahfouz?’

I froze. I had no idea who he was talking about. Slowly, I shook my head.

attacked by a mob of fundamentalists in the Anatolian town of Sivas, where he happened to be for a cultural festival. His hotel was set on fire and thirty-five people were killed—most of them were poets, writers, musicians and dancers. Once again in human history, fanatics targeted art and literature, words and notes, and destroyed innocent lives.

Mahfouz thankfully survived the attack in Cairo. Always a prolific writer, the physical damage and the constant pain he suffered afterwards considerably slowed him down. This, too, must have saddened him.

Throughout his entire literary journey, Naguib Mahfouz produced stories, novels, plays, scripts, experimenting with forms. One thing remained constant: his unwavering love for Cairo and its people. This city had made him who he was and in return, he re-created Cairo on the page. It is this existential challenge that strikes me most deeply perhaps. Mahfouz clearly yearned for freedom and autonomy, but he also had a remarkable loyalty towards and a longing for the motherland that denied him these basic rights.

Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006) was Egypt’s foremost writer, acclaimed for his urbanism and experimentalism. Over the course of five decades he wrote copiously and remains the only Arabic writer to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature. In this newly discovered late collection of short stories, Mahfouz goes back to traditional storytelling, siting his characters in an unidentifiable pre-modern Cairo populated by demons and the smell of sweet halva. The stories are allusive and lepidopteran, alighting briefly, then moving on without leaving a trace

The bookseller said nothing, though his disappointment was visible. When I finished perusing and walked to the till, ready to pay for the books I had selected, he turned towards me with a frown. For a moment I feared he was going to kick me out of the shop. Instead, he grabbed a book from the shelf behind him and pushed it into my hands. Then he said, loud and clear: ‘Read him!’

The book that the grumpy bookseller in Istanbul sold me on that day was Midaq Alley. For a while, I postponed reading it. Then, about two months later, I started the book, not knowing what to expect. Inside, I found a rich world that was at once familiar and magical, well-founded and elusive. The stories of the people of the alley—families, street vendors, poets, matchmakers, barbers, beggars and others—were so deftly told that I felt as though I knew them, each as the individuals they are. Istanbul, too, was full of such streets and neighbourhoods unable to keep up with the bewildering changes surrounding them, and it remained both isolated and central, both inside the city and on its periphery. By delving into this world with a sharp mind and compassionate heart, Mahfouz had shown me the extraordinary within the ordinary, the invisible within the visible, and the many layers underneath the surface. His writing, just like Cairo itself, pulsed with life and a quiet strength.

Mahfouz’s Cairo was a fluid world. Nothing seemed permanently settled; nothing felt solid. As a nomad I was familiar with that feeling, and suddenly I found myself looking for more Mahfouz books to read.

Title: The Quarter

Author: Naguib Mahfouz

Series: Saqi Bookshelf

Publisher: Saqi

Location: London

Pages: 128

Format: Hardback

ISBN: 9780863563751

Size: 129 mm x 198 mm

Illustrations: 9 b/w scans of Mahfouz’s handwriting

Date of publication: 1 July 2019

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Naguib Mahfouz was brought up in a strict Muslim family in Egypt, becoming a writer and entering the Egyptian civil service after graduating in philosophy from Cairo University in 1934. In the 1950s he became Director of Censorship in the Bureau of Arts ad had a special interest in cinema. In the course of his 34 novels his focus moved from history to politics and the social challenges of modern urban life

And here was the odd part. Mahfouz was not well translated into other languages in the region for a long time. It was only after he received the Nobel Prize in Literature—the first author writing in Arabic to do so— that more of his oeuvre crossed national and ethnic borders. It troubled me back then, and still does, that in the Middle East we do not follow each other’s writers and poets as well as we should.

Over the years I continued reading Mahfouz, mostly in English. He was a political writer. He knew that novelists from turbulent lands did not have the luxury of being non-political. I also read his interviews with interest. In these interviews there were moments when I did not agree with his views, which at times could be nationalistic, but I always respected his storytelling.

Many of his books were banned in Arab countries, in the very language he breathed in. This must have hurt him deeply. Mahfouz knew first-hand how painful it is to carve out a personal space of artistic freedom in lands without democracy and without freedom of speech. Significantly, he was among the literary figures who supported Salman Rushdie’s right to write after a deadly fatwa was issued against the author. It is noteworthy that Mahfouz did this at a time and in a country where it wasn’t easy for him to do so—although he later also made negative comments about Rushdie’s novel, which he said he hadn’t read.

In 1994, Mahfouz was stabbed by an extremist, who accused him of being ‘an infidel’. The year before, in Turkey, Aziz Nesin, a prominent writer and satirist, who had announced his decision to publish The Satanic Verses in Turkish in defence of freedom of speech, was

I was excited when I learned the news that eighteen previously unknown stories by Naguib Mahfouz had been recently discovered among his old papers. Irrational as it may be, there is a part of me that thinks he must be very happy. I imagine him caressing this new book while smoking a slim cigarette, with a cup of strong Turkish coffee by his side. I imagine him with a smile on his face, not a tired one, but the hopeful smile of the young novelist he once was.

The Oven

The disaster had happened. Ayousha had run off with Zeinhum, the baker’s boy. When the news broke, fragments scattered all over the quarter. Down every alleyway, at least one good heart expressed disbelief.

‘God help us all! What a disaster for you, Amm Jumaa, you are a good man!’

The Amm Jumaa in question was Ayousha’s father. Head of the family, he was the father of five strapping lads. Ayousha, his only daughter, was now fated to knock him off his pedestal of decency and respect.

It was only after the scandal blew up that anyone had anything to say about her. She was said to be beautiful and charming. Umm Radi, who sold spice-paste, declared:

‘She’s beautiful; there’s no denying that. But she’s too bold. Glances from those flashing eyes of hers go straight into the heart of the person she’s talking to, so they forget what they’re talking about.’

Amm Jumaa and his sons were devastated and simply stared at the ground. At first, they were so angry that they took to spreading out across the quarter, searching and listening for information. But it was fruitless.

‘Mistakes can lead a person to commit crime,’ the Head of the Quarter eventually told Amm Jumaa. ‘He’s lost, whatever happens.’

Amm Jumaa kept a grip on himself on account of his sons.

‘Just tell yourselves your sister’s dead,’ he told them. ‘God will have mercy on her. Leave everything else to Him.’

Everyone put the story together as they saw fit, but it was predictable enough. The girl had met and fallen in love with the boy as he took the dough to the oven and brought home the bread. It would never be possible for the baker’s son to ask for the hand of the daughter of a rich cloth-merchant; the two lovers had decided to run away. Ayousha collected her own jewellery and as much of her mother’s as she could find, and they fled. The only conceivable conclusion to the story was that they would get married, wherever they were.

That was the end of the story of Ayousha and Zeinhum. It took a very long time for the wound in Amm Jumaa’s family to heal. They went back to their normal lives but suffered the usual downward spiral. The merchant went bankrupt and made plans to sell his house.

In the very depths of his misery, a messenger he did not recognise arrived with the money he needed.

‘This money has been sent by your daughter, Ayousha,’ the man said. ‘Divine will has decreed that it is her husband, Zeinhum, who brings it to you.’

The man’s son-in-law informed him that his wife had sold the jewellery she had taken and used it to open a bakery for him. After some hard times, they were now doing well.

‘Do you see?’ the Head of the Quarter told the mosque Imam. ‘The girl’s come back at just the right moment. You have no need to forgive her sin.’ … continued in the book

Peter Barrett was an English graphic designer who wanted to paint, Susan was a copywriter who wanted to write a novel. Two years after marrying in 1960, and with only enough holiday money to last three weeks, they drove through the Alps and Yugoslavia to try out a new life in Greece. The Garden of the Grandfather is their account, in words, drawings and photos, of what attracted them and other outsiders to Greece and how Greece changed in response

the Grandfather

The Garden of

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The Sixties had ended, but our decade in Greece was continuing as the island changed. Electricity had come to the villages. Prekas had installed a television set. The old men sat and stared at it, enchanted. Markos became fixated on Fleur, of The Forsyte Saga. The quay was enlarged enough for the vapóri to dock. Gone was the flurry of the little boats, the shouts and excitements of embarking and disembarking. Passengers simply walked off! More foreigners found their way to Amorgos. More people wanted to buy land. People on holiday indulged fantasies of alternative ways of life.

Simply by leading our own lives in the way we wanted, we attracted others. Sitting in pride of place in our amphitheatre of Ta Nera, we’d been nervous of development around us ever since we first bought the land. As we and Father Lorenz had managed to get permission to build outside the village, others could follow suit. The first to do so was Dionysia, originally from Chora, resident in Athens, married to a Cretan, Apostolos, who worked as a bus driver in Athens airport. Dionysia owned the parcel of land directly behind us. The building of a small single-storey house was the first challenge to our equanimity. Not only did we feel our space had been invaded, but we felt bad to feel this way; after all, we were the invaders in the first place.

The next challenge came from a rumour that a German architect had bought a large stretch of hillside on which he was going to build a holiday village. The hillside sloped down to the strip of shingle between the church and the rounded hill before the last shingle beach called Maltezi. On this knoll an American couple who’d been living in Athens had built a one-roomed house.

Another American who’d rented a little house the other side of the bay, a short walk from Katapola, was rumoured to be a CIA agent. Two Greeks in suits came to the house one day and asked a number of politely-phrased questions. This was in connection with a London-based plot to rescue a political prisoner held under house arrest on Amorgos. A former government minister, George Milonas, had been arrested in 1968. He’d been pointed out to us in excited, proud, conspiratorial whispers when he happened to pass by as we were having a coffee. He was free to roam the village between nine in the morning and six in the evening, then had to sign in at the police station and remain indoors for the night, with the police on watch outside. We only learnt about his dramatic escape after it happened. Milonas had rigged up the lights in his house to come on at a reasonable hour in the evening and to go off at his usual bedtime. The regularity of his habits, and the seeming impossibility of escape from the island, gave his guardians the confidence to retire to a nearby cafe as soon as Milonas was indoors. The next step was to look out for a couple of tourists who would walk through the village carrying a copy of a certain book. This was the signal that a rescue yacht would be offshore over the next three nights, waiting to pick him up from the beach of Agia Anna, the beach at the foot of the steep descent from Chora to the sea.

In July 1969, while the escape was carried out, we were, as usual, absorbed in our own life, unaffected by the junta except insofar as we experienced the damping-down of conversations in Prekas’s cafenion.

… continued in the book

Peter Barrett

Peter and Susan Barrett

Susan Barrett This extract is taken from the

What’s Wrong with Work?

Lynne Pettinger

The concepts scholars think with are both revealing and obfuscating. They legitimise some thoughts and delegitimise others. Critical discussions in the 19th century about the effects of industrialisation, and then again in the 20th century about the effects of scientific management and the development of production lines, are the heart of much insight into the study of work by sociologists. These critiques, developing from the problematic of how work is organised and the concepts that have been developed as a result of that framing, have generated deep understandings of the burdens and pains of (paid) work. But in avoiding the other questions, they provide only a partial understanding.

The most influential critical analysis emerged from Marx and Marxist ideas. These were developed through studying industrialised capitalism in 19th­century Europe, especially Britain. The common story goes: industrial capitalism, marked by desire for profit, private ownership, a factory system, a complicated division of labour and the routinisation of work, relied on a massive growth in the numbers of wage labourers, as well as transport infrastructures, urbanisation, mechanisation of production processes and so on, as well as new economic ideas. The new workplaces of industrial capitalism were mills, factories and coalmines, and they relied on wage labour: on men, women and children who sold their labour power in return for pay. Working bodies were controlled through disciplining mechanisms like clocks, explicit rules enforced by managers, and the rush and power of the machines themselves, so significant to industrialisation.

Factory work

How does work affect us? As changes occur in how work is organised across the globe, Lynne Pettinger shows that the way in which workers are treated has wide implications beyond the lives of workers themselves. Recognising gender, race, class and global differences, What’s Wrong with Work looks at three kinds of increasingly important work: green work, IT work and the “gig” and considers the ways formal work is often dependent on informal work, especially domestic work and care work

Title: What’s Wrong with Work?

Author(s): Lynne Pettinger

Series: 21st Century Standpoints

(published in partnership with the British Sociological Association)

Publisher: Policy Press

Location: Bristol

Pages: 230

Format: Softback

ISBN: 9781447340089

Size: 216 mm x 138 mm

Date of publication: 24 April 2019

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The common story about factory work has a 20th­century manifestation too. Scientific management emerging from the workplace observations of Frederick Taylor, combined with the rationalising desires of Lillian and Frank Gilbreth, respectively, a psychologist and a timeand­motion expert (famous as the inspiration for the original Cheaper by the Dozen) and with the insights of a host of other American experts, was welcomed by manufacturing companies. It seemed to promise a compliant workforce, a smooth production process, and a regulatory structure that enabled profit making, emblematised in the Fordist production line that emerged in the early 20th century. Here was a heightened, extended, measured and apparently efficient division of labour created by applying technorational theories to human ‘inputs’.

Sociological insights into the effects and implications of Taylorist production for workers came in the 1960s. This is the time when the discipline of sociology expanded, and was even a bit cool. The ‘sociology of industrial societies’, a subdiscipline where discussions about work took place, studied manufacturing to explore issues of status and belonging for male workers such as the car workers in Luton studied by Goldthorpe et al. Alienation was a buzzword, developed by Marxist writers such as Herbert Marcuse to make sense not only of work, but of the rest of life, and most insightfully for studies of work by Robert Blauner in the compellingly titled Alienation and freedom. Alienation for Blauner is not an absolute objective state (as for Marx), but varies according to four factors: the degree of control over work, the sense of purpose of work, the degree of social integration with colleagues and the degree of involvement with work. Blauner’s typology was intended to make it easy to compare work of different kinds.

problems of factory work. It aimed to emancipate workers through action at the level of the firm/organisation. As in the case of labour process theories, it reflects the concerns of its times. It drew on social psychology to address two problems of the day. The first problem was the rather paternalistic concern about how people were recruited to support extremist political parties because they were alienated by their work. Memories of European fascism and contemporary fear of communism mattered. Also in the air of the 1960s, exploding in the spirit of 1968, was a new politics of human life, a politics of subjectivity and identity beyond social class. QWL programmes offered a kind of humane capitalism by working on designing jobs that might not be completely dreadful to do. Designing better jobs meant thinking about what made good work. The 1960s list (with brief explanation) included:

• compensation (pay and benefits);

• safe and healthy (avoids damage to bodies and minds);

• develops human capacity (skill development, involved in decisions);

• growth and security (employability, personal development);

• social integration (organisational climate);

• constitutionalism (employee rights and representation);

• total life (work–life balance);

• social relevance (social responsibility in organisation).

Two ‘good’ attributes to bring the list into line with 21st­century ideas about what people want from life are individual proactivity, where a worker can show initiative in a supportive context, and flexible work that benefits the worker, rather than just the organisation. These ideas reflect the idea that ‘good’ work is not only a question of pay and skill, but also of secure work that feels meaningful, with good colleagues. Like Marilyn Strathern, though, I suspect bullet points ‘allow no growth … create no knowledge’ because they carry no meaning. Or rather, the meaning they carry is the same kind of meaning as a shopping list. There is no space for contradiction or compensation or complexity. What on earth do these attributes actually feel like in work? On the one hand, they’re impossible to disagree with, but on the other hand, that’s because it’s not clear what they involve, or how they can be achieved. It’s complete but it’s not coherent.

QWL faded away in part because alternative management strategies emerged. Kaizen movements that organise work to encourage worker commitment have similarities, but ‘lean production’ ideas showed little interest in the conditions under which employees worked (as ‘lean’ is translated as ‘cheap’); ‘human resource management’ went for quick fixes like statements about not tolerating bullying—far easier and cheaper than getting rid of bullies. QWL left some important insights. One is that how managers and technicians design jobs is important to how they are experienced. Another is that the firm is one point where action to improve work can be taken. …

Clearly, factory work captured the imagination of sociologists of work as they tried to make sense of the effects of how this work was organised on those who did it. It’s right to have concepts to understand factory work, which remains a significant global employer. In both Marxist and non­Marxist theories for thinking about what’s wrong with work, social class is key. That bothers me.

Dr Lynne Pettinger is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick and explores work in contemporary capitalism. She is currently working on how “green-collar” workers bring eco-ethics to market; the role of higher education in producing “employable” workers for global cultural industries; and the impact of the new regulations on care and work practices in the NHS

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Critical Marxist accounts of the production line take Braverman’s Labour and monopoly capital: The degradation of work in the twentieth century as the lodestar. This, and the factory ethnographies it inspired, were essential to a set of concepts for studying work known as labour process theory (LPT). This tradition has been effective in generating analyses with resonance for understanding the damages of work. It prioritises three problems with wage labour: that wage labour brings exploitation as the worker receives less than the value their work adds (they are alienated in Marx’s sense of that concept); that workers cede control of their bodies for the duration of work; and that managerial control over workers’ bodies is achieved by degrading work processes to make them require less skill. Workers are bored, their tacit knowledges unrecognised and unrewarded, their potential and autonomy denied.

The quality of working life

Quality of working life (QWL) research emerged in the US, UK and Scandinavia in the 1960s to understand the

Exclusions of gender and race ‘on the shopfloor’

Of the many, many ethnographic studies of factory work, I’ve picked one to show how easy it is for researchers to obscure important features of working lives. Donald Roy’s ‘Banana time’ has become a classic study for insights into play and boredom in factory work. It discusses the games that four machine operatives (George, Ike, Sammy and Donald himself) make up to help time pass as they do incredibly repetitive jobs. In reading Roy’s paper, it’s easy to miss that there’s another person in the room with them, referred to only twice—once as ‘a female employee who performed sundry scissors operations of a more intricate nature on raincoat parts … [in] a cell within a cell’ and a second time as Baby, one of two black women who held that job during Roy’s research. Roy’s gang warn any black male workers who come to pick up the work they’ve done to ‘Stay away from Baby! She’s Henry’s girl.’ Baby’s own thoughts on her gendered and racialised sexualisation are not recorded, nor does she … continued in the book

This book started with the discovery in the archives at Leeds of a set of pauper letters for the area around Calverley in West Yorkshire on 17 December 1989. My doctorate, then in its very early stages, involved undertaking a family reconstitution for Calverley-cum-Farsley and surrounding villages and subsequently linking it to other sources related to the everyday lives of ordinary people. Until that December, my efforts to understand the experiences of the poor and the place of the poor law in their demographic and socio-economic life-cycle had concentrated on the overseers’ accounts. I had taken this record of payments made to the poor on a daily and weekly basis as a firm record of who got what and thus of the place of the poor law in everyday life in that locality.

The letters of William Spacey turned this comfortable train of thinking on its head. He was not locally resident at the time he wrote, although he had been before and would be afterward. His letters were of the oral writing style that characterises Writing the Lives of the English Poor, with little punctuation, random capitalisation and the poorest of spelling, overlaid with a strong thread of local dialect. They were fascinating as material objects and for what they revealed about a seam of popular literacy that I had been led by the historiographical literature to believe did not exist.

But they were important too for other conceptual reasons. Over a series of letters, Spacey made claims on his settlement parish that included payment of arrears of rent, cash allowances and a demand that the parish supply a midwife for the birth of his eighth child. His letters were polite but firm, and they occasioned several replies from local overseers, both positive and negative. The essence of this process was that poor relief was negotiated, sometimes between the claimant and the overseer and sometimes through the intervention of someone writing on Spacey’s behalf. In this process, he did not get all that he requested, which clearly suggests that what was recorded in the overseers’ accounts represents the end of a process of relief, with the actual amount and form of relief given potentially bearing no relation at all to what was asked for.

Here, however, was a further puzzle because, although I knew that Spacey had gained relief given that his letters acknowledging such survived, there was no record of him in what were seemingly highly comprehensive overseers’ accounts. It took me many months to work out that all relief given to the poor of the town in which Spacey lived was bundled together and given as a lump sum to a local grocer who dispensed relief when business took him to that place. The payment was to him, not the thirteen or so claimants who lived in the same community as Spacey. Further research brought the discovery of sections of the Calverley vestry book, which showed very clearly that the same negotiation process was at the heart of the relief eventually recorded in the overseers’ accounts for the proximately resident settled poor. And a further chance discovery of a payment ledger for a grocer in Leeds who was tasked with paying allowances to those settled in Leeds but resident in the Calverley area added more complexity. None of the poor named in that ledger, although variously observable in the reconstitution, appeared in the overseer’s accounts for Calverley, such that a parallel system of poor relief for the nonsettled poor was actually in process.

The logic of these discoveries had important implications for my doctorate. Subsequently, my work on the Old Poor Law began to reveal many hundreds more collections of letters that mirrored or exceeded those identified for Essex by Thomas Sokoll. A careful consideration of vestry minutes (where letters of this sort were read out or otherwise recorded) and overseers’ accounts (where the costs of receiving and responding to letters were recorded) showed clearly that letters were sent in large numbers to every parish in England and Wales, and indeed in Scotland.

The fact that large collections of letters written by the poor, advocates, overseers and other officials survive in places such as Kirkby Lonsdale or Hulme, I understood, was simply an accident of preservation. All parish archives would once have looked, at least in terms of the volume of letters, like these. Some confirmation of that fact was had when I found that an overseer in the town of Thrapston in Northamptonshire had at some point disposed of individual letters but copied all of them into letter books, which then survived in the town’s archive precisely because they were books.

In this sense, and given the sometimes contemporaneous survival of vestry books for hundreds of parishes,

it became plausible and essential in my view to write about the ‘process’ of poor relief rather than simply about the outcomes that have underpinned almost all of the historiography of the Old Poor Law. A grant from the Wellcome Trust and two grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, along with the efforts of many paid and unpaid research assistants, volunteers and friends, generated a substantial set of letters by or about the poor, allowing me with confidence to reconstruct the tripartite epistolary world of the parish: claimant, advocate and official.

This book, then, is the product of research started in 1989 and shared with and by many others. At its heart is a dual proposition: for both the proximately resident poor and those who wrote from other places, garnering poor relief was a process, and at the heart of this process was the act of negotiation. Without an understanding of these two issues, I suggest, perspectives drawn from end-of-process overseers’ accounts give a very lopsided picture of the character, meaning and role of the Old Poor Law. To put it crudely, two entries of 5 shillings side by side in an overseer’s account do not mean, and were not meant to mean, the same thing. It matters for our understanding of both the meaning of relief and the role of the Old Poor Law what those two people had originally asked for, how and whether they had negotiated, and how parochial officials had received those acts of negotiation. Giving an allowance willingly to a blind woman of 102 years of age was different from giving an allowance of the same amount to a charlatan whom officials wished to heaven that they could get rid of.

Against this backdrop, Writing the Lives of the English Poor presents five central contentions. First, officials, claimants and advocates shared a common pot of language—a common linguistic register, as it were—with which they framed the negotiation process, whether the poor were inside or outside the parish. They spoke (and wrote) in a common currency. Second, claimants and officials understood and accepted that the stories told by and to them would have an element of fiction. In part, this aspect of the letters reflects the organic nature of the claims of individual poor people, but there was also a wider process at work in the sense that uncovering ‘truth’ was for officials likely to be a costly and time-consuming business. The poor marshalled their histories and sought narrative consistency rather than absolute truth. Officials punished narrative inconsistency rather than partial truth and acts of fiction. Third, officials expected, and were expected by the poor and their advocates, to engage actively in the process of negotiation and epistolary communication. A failure to reply to letters or to negotiate in good faith allowed claimants and their advocates to extend their case and solidify their position on the relief lists. Fourth, although officials, advocates and the poor shared a common pot of language, what mattered for the negotiation process was the way that this language was confected in rhetorical terms to press levers of deservingness. I reconstruct this rhetorical infrastructure—which might for instance include dignity, suffering, character and gender—and develop a new model for classifying and analysing pauper letters and other correspondence in the tripartite epistolary world of the parish. Finally, the poor and their advocates used their letters and personal vestry appearances to construct a distinctive ‘pauper self’. Most of those who wrote or appeared before the vestry had experienced long periods of their lives as independent economic actors. Many would go on to regain this status. Writers thus sought to construct themselves as ‘ordinary’ and their temporary dependence as ‘extraordinary’ and in some senses inevitable given the precarious nature of the lives of ordinary people.

Collectively, these arguments add up to a different sort of Old Poor Law from what we see in much of the historiographical literature, one with agency and negotiation at its core and one in which the power and rules of the state were essentially malleable at the local level. The complete and universal inability of parish officers to get the charlatan poor off relief lists and to keep them off, which is played out in deep colour across the letter collections, tells us something important about the essential character and role of the Old Poor Law. Two allowances of the same amount side by side in the overseers’ accounts really are not the same, and those end-of-process accounts really cannot locate the sentiment and meaning of poor relief, especially during the last few decades of the Old Poor Law during its so-called crisis phase. I construct, then, a more positive Old Poor Law

Writing the Lives of the English Poor, 1750s–1830s Steven King

In explaining how the English poor claimed parish funds either side of the 1800s, Steven King challenges long-held preconceptions about the language, power and social structure of ordinary people. Based on hitherto unresearched parish records, he reveals a more sophisticated interaction between advocates, officials, and the poor than was previously understood, and greater literacy in contesting and negotiating appeals for welfare

Title: Writing the Lives of the English Poor, 1750s–1830s

Author: Steven King Series: States, People and the History of Social Change

Publisher: McGill-Queen’s University Press

Location: London, Montreal, Chicago

Pages: 488

Format: Softback

ISBN: 9780773556492

Size: 152 mm x 229 mm

Illustrations: 8 b/w

Date of publication: February 2019

Recommended retail price: £27.99

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Steven King is Professor of Economic and Social History at the University of Leicester. He writes on the themes of poverty and welfare, European industrialisation, historical demography and medical history

How to Build A Dragon or Die Trying

Paul Knoepfler and Julie Knoepfler

BIO-TECHNOLOGY

It is generally thought impossible to have a dragon. In this book, we challenge that assumption and explain how we’d go about making our own dragon. It might require a lot of work, but it could also be a once-in-a-lifetime adventure. It has been fun for us to even just think about how we might make a dragon using interesting combinations cool, cutting-edge technologies. So, we are excited about dragon building, even if it’s potentially difficult and highly dangerous.

To build a dragon, we also needed to learn loads of new information about a wide range of existing real creatures, which although not dragons themselves, in some ways possess equally amazing powers.

Take bombardier beetles. They send potentially deadly, nearly boiling temperature explosions out of their butts as a defense mechanism, which got us thinking about how we could create a fire- breathing dragon.

Then there are electric eels, which have cool, specialized cells called electrocytes that produce electricity. Using their home-brewed electricity, eels can shock other creatures. They can also use these biological electrical systems to sense their environments like a kind of electric radar. These eels got us thinking about how our dragon might initially spark its fire—not just by using a flame, but electricity as well.

Also, just the fact that insects, birds, and bats, along with other creatures, can fly is pretty amazing. In order to fly, we humans have to resort to ‘cheating’—we have to use technological innovations, like planes or jetpacks. Even more remarkable is that certain enormous creatures that once roamed the planet but are now extinct—like Pteranodons—could fly. Pteranodons were about as huge as we imagine dragons could be and scientists think they looked like dragons too.

From learning all this new information, we realized that animals alive today have a whole range of ‘technologies’ that were created by evolution, which are already surprisingly powerful and so could help us make a mighty dragon.

What if you could create your own dragon? This new book, written by a father and his teenage daughter in response to a Year 8 school science project, discusses how powerful technologies such as bio-engineering and CRISPR gene editing might be used to turn imaginary creatures into real, living beings. Alternating between scientific exploration and whimsy, Paul and Julie Knoepfler raise serious questions about where the boundaries of mythology now lie and whether fantasy is nothing more than imagination waiting for technique

Title: How to Build A Dragon or Die Trying

Subtitle: A Satirical Look at Cutting-Edge Science

Authors: Paul Knoepfler and Julie Knoepfler

Published by: World Scientific Publishing

Location: Singapore

Pages: 200

Format: Softback:

ISBN: 9789813275935

Size: 152 mm x 229 mm

Illustrations: 43 col, 7 b/w

Date of Publication: August 2019

Recommended retail price: £25.00

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One of the biggest recent technological innovations goes by the name ‘CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing’ and came from one of the tiniest living things, bacteria. Certain bacteria use CRISPR, which is short for ‘clustered regularly-interspaced short palindromic repeats’ (now you know why everyone uses the acronym CRISPR), as a sort of immune system to fight off viral infections.

While bacteria utilize CRISPR systems to chop up the DNA of invading viruses, researchers adapted clever CRISPR systems to be used instead to make precise mutations in the genomes of cells and even whole organisms. If you remember your biology, DNA consists of four units, called bases: A for adenine, C for cytosine, G for guanine, and T for thymine. CRISPR can be used to make as small a change as, for example, a C to T in the DNA code of the cells of just about any living thing. Alternatively, CRISPR can alter a much larger region, perhaps spanning hundreds or thousands of bases, to tailor gene function.

At the same time as we were ‘oohing and aahing’ about the cool science already in nature, it also became clear to us—while making our dragon-building plan and writing this book—that things could go disastrously wrong for us. In fact, there are many ways we could end up dying along the way! As a result, as we explain to you our dragon- making plan, we will share with you both the cool side of our efforts but also the numerous ways things could go disastrously and even fatally wrong at every step along the way.

to make a breeding pair of dragons. They could, after all, turn out to be excellent parents, and start cranking out baby dragons. On the other hand, from a positive perspective, breeding dragons is the best way to sustain and expand our ‘invention’. We’ve decided that we want to go for it, despite knowing the potential risks to us and the world.

So, where do we start?

The dragon or the egg?

To build our own real dragon, do we begin with the dragon or with the egg?

In truth, we haven’t seen many, reliable reports of dragon sightings lately. So, catching a living, breathing dragon is not going to be a great plan. And even if there were dragons out there for us to try to catch, it’d be nearly impossible to nab one without it or us dying in the process. Besides, even if you could pull it off, the captured dragon could then see us as its archnemesis. Who wants to be the number one enemy of a dragon? Not us.

As for dragon eggs, they are also pretty hard to come by. Unlike in the fantasy world of Game of Thrones (GoT) where character Daenerys Targaryen gets a wedding gift of three eggs that turn out to be real dragon eggs, no one is going to give you a dragon egg as a present or leave one on the side of the road to hatch. Although, when researching this book, we momentarily got excited when we saw this old news article, announcing ‘Huge haul of rare pterosaur eggs excites paleontologists’ in the journal Nature. But, of course, the eggs from these flying reptiles were sadly just fossils.

Can you blame us for envisioning cartons of fresh pterosaur eggs? Almost as easy to find as chicken eggs in the grocery store? If only we could just pop them in an incubator, establish a breeding pterosaur colony, and then try to give them the ability to breathe fire by using exciting new gene-editing technologies, like CRISPR. We’d have made something very close to a dragon.

No one else seems to be building a dragon either that we could try to buy, at least not publicly. And dragon building technology is likely to be super expensive to invent anyway (as well as being difficult to steal). By the way, since we’re speaking of unethical things like stealing...You should know that in the last chapter of this book—on the challenges and ethical dilemmas that arise in this project—we also discuss how not to turn humanity against our dragon-building effort.

And there in Chapter 8 we also present some ideas of how to get the big money we will need for research honestly and without selling out to dodgy investors.

Rather than a product to make money from, we want our dragon to be more like a friend or family member, which could easily happen if we are with them from the start and while they grow up. Have you ever seen the animated movie How to Train Your Dragon or any of its sequels? If so, you will know that the plot has a clever twist—the main character, Hiccup, is meant to kill a dragon at some point, but instead bonds and makes friends with one. In time, the dragon becomes ‘his’ dragon, which he names Toothless.

How is that possible?

Dr Paul Knoepfler is a lecturer in the Department of Cell Biology and Human Anatomy at the University of California, Davis School of Medicine. Primary research is directed at catalyzing new treatments for cancer and advances in translational stem cell biology. Julie, his daughter, worked with him on this book between the ages of 13 and 15

It’s a funny, and sometimes sobering, exercise to imagine oneself dying in all kinds of strange ways. We figure that the most likely way we’d meet our tragic end would be because our dragon either incinerated us or dropped us from a high altitude while learning to fly. Or perhaps both, if it just gets annoyed with us. Imagine it dropping us from up in the sky and then swooping down to flame broil us in mid-air. A wonderful thought, right?

Glitches at any point in our plan could often lead to our demise in other mostly awful, but sometimes funny ways. Imagine being farted to death by our dragon or burped to death if our dragon cannot light the gases it makes to breathe fire. While writing, we tried to keep the possibility of death in mind despite how amazing a real dragon would be. We also had to keep our sense of humour.

And, yes, we realize that a huge disaster on the scale of Jurassic Park could happen if we set about building a dragon based on our plans in this book. We admit that our efforts might affect many other people in the world and not always positively. This hypothetical, large-scale risk is more likely to lead to a real disaster if we decide

Hiccup finds the injured Toothless and somehow cleverly ‘MacGyvers’ (slaps together a fix to a problem with whatever is available) a fix to the dragon’s broken tail. Over time, Toothless and Hiccup become like family to each other. Incidentally, Toothless has plenty of teeth, but since they are retractable, Hiccup gives him that name. Our dragon could have retractable teeth as well, but our task is already a big enough challenge overall, so we haven’t decided whether to bother with fancy tooth options. We do definitely want our dragon to have impressive fangs, however, and poisonous ones would be a bonus.

A funny side note is that the word ‘Pteranodon’ as a scientific name may be translated literally as ‘toothless wing’. We wonder if the creators of How to Train Your Dragon were aware of that meaning when they named the main dragon character Toothless.

Our hope is that by creating and raising our dragon, we’ll build a kind of familial relationship with it, just like the one between Hiccup and Toothless. The dragon should see us in a positive light and to develop a tight bond with us. But then again, sometimes kids grow up to not be exactly ‘fond’ of their parents. Plus, our dragon will be real, unlike Toothless, and also, we cannot find an injured dragon to fix as a means of bonding. If only we could, then we could try to clone it.

… continued in the book

This edited extract comes from the start of Chapter 1: “So, you want a dragon?”

From Brutalist cathedrals made of concrete to rural churches made from local materials, 100 Churches 100 Years celebrates the diversity of British ecclesiastical architecture in the last century. The book charts the development of new materials and changes in layout that reflect liturgical innovation in our buildings of worship. There are also biographies of important designers, along with articles on glass, fittings and the religious buildings of other faiths

The Twentieth Century Society protects outstanding architecture and design across Britain from 1914 onwards, and campaigns for the best buildings from neoGeorgian to post-modern

CHURCH ARCHITECTURE

Twentieth Century Society

Above Bishop Edward King Chapel

Architect: Niall McLaughlin

Structure: Tapered Glulam timber columns

Location: Ripon College, Cuddesdon, Oxfordshire

Year completed: 2013

Denomination: Church of England

Below

Our Lady of Fatima St Paul

Architect: Gerard Goalen

Stained glass: Charles Norris

Location: Harlow, Essex

Year completed: 1960

Denomination: Roman Catholic Listing: Grade II

Title: 100 Churches 100 Years

Editors: Susannah Charlton, Elain Harwood and Clare Price

Series: Twentieth Century Society

Publisher: Batsford

Location: UK

Pages: 208

Format: Hardback

ISBN: 9781849945141

Size: 189 mm x 246 mm

Illustrations: 230 col

Date of publication: 7 March 2019

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Any attempt to categorise British church architecture of the 20th century is impossible, since it changed beyond all recognition. A revolution in liturgical planning and changes in architectural fashion and construction saw church building evolve in both style and plan form.

A large number of new churches were built in the 1920s and 1930s, especially in the burgeoning suburbs of major cities: St Thomas, Hanwell and St Alban, Golders Green typify the advance of church building into residential estates. This phenomenon can be seen across the denominations, all moving quickly lest another group gain an advantage.

Architects of Anglican churches moved towards simplified, economical styles. The hunt for an appropriate idiom, while maintaining a spiritual sensibility, engaged the most prolific architects of the day such as Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, Edward Maufe and Charles Nicholson. The result was brick buildings with plain interiors to be adorned when funds allowed, subtly displaying evolutionary changes in church design such as a movement towards more centralised planning.

Roman Catholic design between the wars often emulated the Romanesque basilican form popularised by J.F. Bentley’s Westminster Cathedral of 1895. The centralised plans of Our Lady and the First Martyrs, Bradford (Jack Langtry-Langton, 1935) and St Peter, Gorleston (by the sculptor Eric Gill, 1939) were the most advanced of their day.

The non-conformists saw attendances decline, which impacted on the number of new buildings. The most interesting include the Sutton Baptist Chapel

(Welch, Cachemaille-Day and Lander, 1934), indebted to German Expressionism, and the Unitarian Church of the Divine Unity, Newcastle (Cackett, Burns Dick and Mackellar, 1939–40).

Post-war building was stimulated by the need to replace wartime casualties and to supply new towns and estates. Many churches maintained the pre-war single-space longitudinal plan-forms, but designs were lighter both in construction, with the use of steel and concrete, and in visual impact, with larger areas of glass. Perhaps the most influential non-conformist architect of the post-war period, Edward Mills, championed the use of concrete folded-plate construction, as seen in his Mitcham Methodist church of 1959. At St Paul’s, Harlow, Humphreys and Hurst used large windows to light the mosaic mural by John Piper.

The Roman Catholic Church codified its services in the mid-1960s—the translation of the dialogue mass into vernacular languages, the celebration of all masses with the priest facing the people and concern for the proximity of the altar to the congregation. Already, however, the Roman and Anglican churches in Britain had embarked on liturgical reforms, proclaimed by art historian-turned-priest Peter Hammond and personified by St Paul, Bow Common, by Robert Maguire and Keith Murray, completed in 1960. The three founded the New Churches Research Group, a multi-denominational forum that promoted a distinctively British new church, geometric in form and with carefully directed use of light and ornament. At Bow Common the altar is placed centrally in the square space.

Of more lasting

… continued in the book

Strange Hate

Keith Kahn-Harris

Zionism, like other nationalisms, is a project that seeks to carve out a space in which a particular people can exercise agency, to determine their own future. However much that agency is constrained given our global interconnectedness, and however much Israeli governments and those who defend them often claim to ‘have no choice’ but to act in a particular way, Israel is a powerful national state with a wide range of possibilities for how it acts in the world. Jews in many countries, including the UK and US, have well-organised and well-resourced forms of communal organisation and representation. The Jewish people are not without agency.

Given this agency, how far do Jews have some level of control over how and whether antisemitism is manifested? Is antisemitism today a response to the actions Jews take and, concomitantly, could a change in Jewish behaviour result in a change in the level of antisemitism?

This is an immensely sensitive area. I was reminded of just how sensitive it is when, in 2018, I made an offhand remark on a friend’s Facebook post about a survey showing that Armenia had higher levels of antisemitism than any other country in the Former Soviet Union. I commented ‘Well, I can’t imagine that Israeli collusion with Turkish denials of the Armenian genocide helped matters’. I regret my comment. While Israel’s past collusion with Turkish genocide denialism disgusts me, as a sociologist I should have known better than attribute a monocausal explanation to a phenomenon like antisemitism. In doing so I was indulging in a common tendency to see most antisemitism today as the inevitable blowback from Israeli actions. For example, an article in the Morning Star (subsequently deleted online), written in June 2018 in the wake of the killing of Gazan protestors in the ‘great march of return’, argued:

Cultural hatreds have always been with us but in the modern world, racists and anti-racists alike are becoming more selective in which minorities they either embrace or reject. In Strange Hate, Keith Kahn-Harris argues that we are less enlightened than we imagine about what it means to live in a diverse society and offers an original take on what contemporary antisemitism can teach us about repairing the persistence of racism and civility in public life

Title: Strange Hate

Subtitle: Antisemitism, Racism and the Limits of Diversity

Author: Keith Kahn-Harris

Publisher: Repeater

Location: London

Pages: 256

Format: Softback

ISBN: 9781912248438

Size: 130 mm x 197 mm

Date of publication: 11 June 2019

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surely the Jewish organisations and individuals who lately were protesting about growing anti-semitism in Britain must see that, as advocates of Israel’s historical and still unremitting brutality against Palestinians, they will inevitably be regarded by some other British nationals as being indirectly complicit in that country’s actions … no amount of protestations about the symptoms of rising anti-semitism or anti-Israel sentiment in Britain and elsewhere will end the problem until its root cause—Israel’s criminal behaviour—is dealt with.

Some have argued that this blowback is in a completely different category to antisemitism. Speaking of the assaults on Jews by French youth, often but not exclusively Muslim, from the deprived banlieus, Alain Badiou explains that ‘what these young people feel is not antisemitism, but rather a hostility, “political but not well politicized”, to what is perceived as the position of the Jews in France’. This is a hair’s-breadth away from not just justification, but even encouragement. The corollary is that, were Israel to be ‘dealt with’, the antisemitism it provokes (if indeed it could be called antisemitism) would simply melt away.

For those who argue that accusations of antisemitism on the left are confected or exaggerated, a similar mixture of acknowledgement and threat comes in the form of warnings that false accusations of antisemitism will end up producing real antisemitism. Sometimes this is expressed as a fear for the future. In July 2018, the British Jewish anti-Zionist Robert Cohen wrote: what if Corbyn loses by a narrow margin? How will the millions who voted for him see the Jewish community and its three-year campaign to brand him toxic?

The ‘Jewish War Against Corbyn’ is not good Jewish communal politics. It’s playing with fire.

These kinds of explanations for antisemitism are unconvincing—to say the least—to Zionist Jews, and even some anti-Zionists may find them uncomfortable. Let us assume for a moment that antisemitism was purely a response to Jewish actions, either in Israel or elsewhere. Does that mean that, should Jews desist from those actions it would simply vanish? Hate has its own dynamic, and when cocooned in the framework of antisemitism, it becomes self-contained, independent of its initial causes. The state of Israel did not burst into a world unsullied by Jew-hatred. Whatever anger the foundation of Israel and its subsequent actions may have caused, pre-existing histories of antisemitism, including within Islam and within the left, often gave form and substance to the outrage.

Yet if we reject mechanistic explanations, what is left? Sometimes, antisemitism is treated as a kind of virus that exists independently of what Jews do or do not do. Antisemitism, in this view, is based on the projection

of fantasies onto Jews; fantasies that have no basis in reality. Israel is simply the latest excuse in a long line of them. The telos of this argument is that, given that antisemitism would exist regardless of the existence of Israel, better to have the state and face this enmity from a position of strength.

Between non-explanations that render the Jewish connection to antisemitism as entirely incidental, and explanations that see it as a consequence of Jewish behaviour, lies the ground on which antisemitism can be understood. Jews and non-Jews stand on this ground, intricately interconnected, as all of us are. Amidst this tangle lies the secret of whether a Jewish change of behaviour could eliminate antisemitism, and how far there is a limit to what they could possibly do.

To even raise the issue of responsibility in conjunction with victimhood—of antisemitism or of any kind—is to risk compounding the wounds that antisemitism causes. How could I even intimate to a Jew who has been attacked on the street or abused online that they might never have suffered had we as Jews behaved differently? Even if it were true, would it not feel like a kick in the teeth? And this isn’t just a Jewish matter. How, for example, is anyone who has been sexually abused supposed to react to discussions about responsibility?

The trouble is, to grant all self-identified victims a complete pass for all types of behaviour is also untenable. And if responsibility can ever only be with perpetrators, it risks the absurdity of seeing all victims as interchangeable: why do some people rape women and others bomb synagogues if women and Jews were not different classes of victims, attacked for different (albeit perhaps related) reasons?

The only way I can find round this impasse is to change the stakes. The reason this whole question is so hard is because so much rests on whether Jews or other classes of people can legitimately be understood as ‘worthy’ victims. What if things were different? What if the acceptance of agency and responsibility could coexist with the acknowledgment of pain and suffering? This would mean taking a principled stance that certain kinds of behaviours—antisemitism, rape, abuse and so on—are wrong regardless of the behaviour of the victim. In and of itself, that isn’t a novel argument. But its implications are rarely worked through to the point that I hope to do—to a place that is very uncomfortable.

Let’s say that Jews really are over-sensitive cynics who act in bad faith to avoid being accountable for the justifiable hatred their behaviour provokes. Let’s say that Israel is a state so piteously cruel and oppressive that its actions directly provoke hostility towards its Jewish supporters from people who would otherwise have never thought ill of them. Let’s say that every single Jew is so callously privileged, so blind to the suffering they cause, that no accommodation can be made with them … It should not matter!

(And do I need to say that that is not what I believe about Jews? I hope not).

Antisemitism and racism, even in its selective variants, is a form of acting and speaking that is more than ‘just’ criticism. It treats others not just as people with whom one disagrees on certain matters, but also as people who are somehow beyond consideration, beyond coexistence, beyond relationship. Everyone comes into contact with people whom one finds hateful from time to time. For the most part, the way we respond to them is to grit our teeth, maintain a façade of superficial politeness and minimise non-essential interaction. But if you have a co-worker you can’t stand, you don’t—or at least you shouldn’t—subject them to violence, conduct campaigns against them, claim they cannot be part of democratic processes, create conspiracy theories about them and refuse to protect them against the abuse of others.

Again, let’s assume that Jews, or a sub-set of Jews, are as hateful as they are painted. If you are to be a true anti-racist, you still have to treat them with some consideration, as you would an unpleasant co-worker. More than that: you have to protect them from others who would not treat them with the same consideration.

To be a true anti-racist you have to ask the question: How can we build a society in which privileged, oppressive, over-sensitive cynics can still enjoy the same level of protection as the good guys? And if you find that thought repellent or horrific, then good—because you should.

This is the ultimate answer to the antisemitism controversy: Not the embrace of some form of soggy liberal … continued in the book

Keith Kahn-Harris is a fellow of the Higher Education Academy, senior lecturer and course team leader at Leo Baeck College, associate lecturer at Birkbeck College, and associate fellow of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research where he runs the European Jewish Research Archive

Crowbar in hand, Isaac Van Amburgh became famous for confronting lions in the confined space of a cage in a new type of public entertainment. His look alone was believed to subdue lions although in performance he manhandled them forcefully. Sensationalist handling acts proliferated and the feat that came to typify 19th-century travelling menageries involved tamers, including lion queen Ellen Chapman, putting their heads into a lion’s mouth. Shows in which captive animals submitted to humans proved extremely popular, and Van Amburgh also appeared fighting tigers and lions in elaborate theatrical pantomimes about imperial wars. By the mid-19th century, lion tamer acts were emulating African safari hunts with pistols fired into the air. Similarly, war re-enactments with animals and nationalistic sentiments not only increased in number but greatly increased in scale, reproducing realistic effects with the latest cannons, gunpowder and trained horse actors lying dead.

Animals were integrated into staged scenarios of confrontation throughout the 19th century, ranging from lion acts in small cages to large-scale re-enactments of war. Public demand for animal shows ensured their expansion. The coercive treatment of, and fraught interaction with, travelling animals in such fighting scenarios infiltrated every aspect of cultural activity: from theatrical performance to visual art, from adventure books to scientific pursuits. Initially presenting a handful of exotic animals, travelling menageries grew to contain multiple species in their many thousands, and these animals in captivity were indirectly or directly caught up in simulations, and actual incidents, arising from the violent actions of humans. A range of human fighting practices coincided with animal exhibition and animal presence in public entertainment that spread globally. From staged enactments of power and nationhood to spontaneous offstage physical fights in menageries, animals were surrounded by notions of fighting that were formal and informal, orchestrated and accidental.

While the theatrical mimicry of fighting reflected cultural fascination with ideas of conflict, acts with animals emerged from, and converged with, social and species processes of actual confrontation, conflict and violence, and overwhelmed any narrative of reciprocated human-animal kindness. While staged battles with animals pandered to national hubris, far less glorious were numerous offstage fights that erupted between humans in and around menagerie cages. An atmosphere of threat and hostility permeated the 19th-century travelling menagerie and first-hand accounts reveal that members of the public attacked animals. The concept of fighting additionally denotes the human effort to subdue struggling animals but keep them alive, while emphasising how animals fought back; animals were not passive in this process or in lives lived in captivity. Animal shows repeatedly demonstrated emotionally conflicted human-animal and human-social relations. Yet, conversely, theatrical rhetoric about reciprocated kindness and pantomime narratives delivered a false impression of affection and harmonious friendship between humans and other animal species. The contention of this book is that since aggression and violence underpinned the exhibition of animals and manifested overtly in the very popular fighting acts and war shows, aggressive violence towards animals shaped public experience. The travelling menagerie and the war re-enactment in circus were thereby contributing to the militarisation of society and its values rather than merely reflecting them. A precept of fighting nature, even war with nature or ‘nature to war against’, haunted 19th-century animal exhibition.

Travelling shows presenting exotic wild animal species increased in parallel with the expansion of the process of hunting to obtain them and this book details how it reached an almost incomprehensible scale in the 19th century—actual total numbers are difficult to estimate. Animals were caught up in a chain of economic transactions that were emblematic of a 19th-century determination to exploit nature, often through force. An immeasurable number of animals were hunted, trapped, transported and traded for profit to European and North American menageries and zoos, and those bought by travelling menageries continued to be transported and moved from place to place. Menageries proliferated in Britain and the rest of Europe in the first half of the 19th century and, as an exported entertainment form, expanded greatly in the USA after the mid-century and in the far reaches of the British Empire in southern Africa, Australia and New Zealand towards

the end of that century. The exotic animals deployed in performance were initially transported from colonial homelands to imperial centres, but through the century they were also moved around colonial regions. Menageries grew into auxiliary businesses accompanying the largest circuses after the 1870s, touring geographically diverse regions and travelling back to Britain and Europe with circuses towards the end of the century.

What ideas of nature did touring menageries, animal acts and war shows manifest? It appears that animals embodied broad concepts of nature, though it was fearful expectations of attack that proved particularly popular with 19th-century audiences. While ideas of a fearful nature were being challenged by social thinking—for example, by Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill, and David Hume and Charles Darwin—the public attended menageries in large numbers. Although themes of aggressive interaction were juxtaposed with displays of an ‘ordered creation’ with animals ‘sedately marshaled’ in the Victorian zoo menagerie, orchestrated performances of conflict attracted attention and even notoriety as they reinforced belief in a need for human dominance. Fighting acts were the lead exhibits in the travelling menagerie and circus pantomime was dominated by war re-enactments with horses. In comparison, where a quality of timidity was accorded to an exotic wild species, the species was invariably relegated to a subsidiary tier of menagerie exhibition.

Animals were caught up in human wars everywhere and the advent of 19th-century war re-enactments with animals made this deployment publicly visible, if not war’s deadly consequences. As imperialist ventures came to be embodied by exotic animals, they became covertly indicative of an imperialism of the human species towards other species. Animals were part of the official technology of war, but they were also scapegoats for human social and personal frustration. Anti-animal cruelty legislation was overtly connected to fears of social revolution and mob violence, and the protection of animals involved modelling ‘restraint of angry impulses’.

During the process of researching 19th-century animal acts, I found recurring descriptions of bad behaviour by spectators, and descriptions of menagerie workers fighting each other and the townspeople. A common thread of fights and fighting emerged from first-hand accounts of 19th-century menagerie and circus menagerie life in Britain, and in the USA and in other parts of the world. This suggested continuity with behaviour patterns identified in the 18th century. Fighting activity was common despite ‘a widespread trend in Europe away from public displays of the suffering and death of both animals and humans’. This aspect suggests an ongoing carnivalesque dimension to the public fair that Mikhail Bakhtin points to in medieval gatherings in which social status could be temporarily reversed and social propriety ignored. Such tendencies did not disappear in the 19th century, and actually expanded with an increased scale of exhibition.

Audiences for touring menageries were largely local. The arrival of a touring menagerie show with staged cage acts frequently coincided with incidents of local conflict and fighting in the attendant crowd. I suggest that exotic animal exhibition implicitly aligned incidents of misbehaviour in the local social environment of the impermanent menagerie with the distant processes of aggressive acquisition in a remote colonial location often at war. Violence surrounded exhibited animals, from the circumstances of their acquisition and trade to their inclusion in staged acts that simulated aggression or depicted official war history, and to the ad hoc bad behaviour among menagerie spectator throngs. Exotic animals in the 19th century became a metaphoric part of narratives of overt and covert human violence that implicated the overarching politics of nationalist and military conquest and economic exploitation as well as local disturbance and unrest indicative of social turmoil. The menagerie exposed social schisms and anxieties within the larger political context.

The open space in which the travelling menagerie was located acquired significance through the temporary presence of the animals and it became a socially ambiguous space, one perceived as unordered. Reflecting on 19th-century distinctions, Ellen Velvin explains that ‘in all zoological gardens the animals are mainly kept for purposes of science, but in the animal shows they are kept for amusement and profit, and the environment is totally different’. While such a division of purpose may have been less manifest in practice, it was this

Fighting Nature

Peta Tait

Throughout the 19th century animals were used in staged scenarios of confrontation, entrenching our belief in human dominance over nature and our right to disregard suffering, however obvious. Fighting Nature examines the history of how animals were mistreated and goaded, as well as the antisocial behaviour this gave rise to, from public taunting to mob violence and, more generally, a tolerance for cruelty and a fascination with conflict, war and colonial imposition

Title: Fighting Nature

Subtitle: Travelling Menageries, Animal Acts and War Shows

Author: Peta Tait

Series: Animal Publics

Publisher: Sydney University Press

Location: Sydney, Australia

Pages: 302

Format: Softback

ISBN: 9781743324301

Size: 148 mm x 210 mm

Illustrations: 3 col 5 b/w

Date of publication: 10 Oct 2016

Recommended retail price: £24.99

Peta Tait is Professor of Theatre and Drama at La Trobe University, Visiting Professor at the University of Wollongong, Australia and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Her recent books include: Wild and Dangerous Performances (2012), Circus Bodies (2005) and Performing Emotions (2002)

A History of Intellectual Property in 50 Objects

Claudy Op den Kamp and Dan Hunter

Mike Tyson’s facial tattoo has been described as one of the most distinctive tattoos in North America. It has attracted controversy as an example of the cultural appropriation of ta moko, the sacred culturally-embedded tattooing practice of the Maori people of Aotearoa/New Zealand. It has also attracted much media attention for its place at the heart of Whitmill v. Warner Bros., a rare litigated instance of a tattooist enforcing their copyright in a tattoo design. More than this, though, Tyson’s tattoo is an excellent example of the tensions that emerge over the protection of traditional knowledge, and the difficulty of claiming one truth in an intellectual property world that was born in the Western philosophical tradition, and is only now beginning to come to terms with its colonial heritage.

Mike Tyson’s ‘warrior’ tattoo was inked by Las Vegas tattooist S. Victor Whitmill in 2003. From the time of Tyson’s first public appearance with the tattoo, Maori activists and scholars were critical of it as a cultural appropriation of ta moko. Tyson’s tattoo is monochrome, curvilinear, features two spiral shapes, and was placed around his left eye. Whitmill has described the ‘flow’ of Maori art as a design influences, and he created it after showing Tyson pictures of Maori moko. In Maori culture, facial moko is a privilege reserved for respected cultural insiders, and it represents and embodies the wearer’s sacred genealogy and social status. Appropriating an individual’s moko is profoundly offensive and akin to identity theft.

But the controversy from the original tattoo wasn’t the last of it. In The Hangover Part II, an exact copy of Tyson’s tattoo was featured on the face of actor Ed Helms as part of a humorous plot device. Whitmill was outraged, and claimed copyright over his tattoo. In 2011 he sued Warner, arguing that they had violated his exclusive right to authorize derivative works. Whitmill’s decision to sue stirred lingering resentments in Aotearoa/New Zealand around the tattoo’s cultural content: in response to the litigation, Maori politician Tau Henare tweeted that it was a ‘a bit rich’ that Tyson’s tattooist was claiming someone had stolen the design, given that he had copied it from Maori without permission. Maori arts scholar Ngahuia Te Awekotuku’s criticism of Whitmill’s assertion of copyright ownership was widely reported:

It is astounding that a Pakeha tattooist who inscribes an African American’s flesh with what he considers to be a Maori design has the gall to claim … that design as his intellectual property.

Numerous professions enjoy being thought of as creative—design, music, cuttingedge science—but not the law, and yet no innovation can be brought to market without the participation of lawyers. In A History of Intellectual Property in 50 Objects, specialists from a range of fields explain the impact of IP in the development of familiar household products, from the corset and the aspirin to the Coke bottle, Viagra and, unusually, boxer Mike Tyson’s now much-copied face tattoo

The tattooist has never consulted with Maori, has never had experience of Maori and originally and obviously stole the design he put on Tyson. The tattooist has an incredible arrogance to assume that he has the intellectual right to claim the design form of an indigenous culture that is not his.

Given the Western intellectual property system’s miserable colonial record, it should come as no surprise that the claim of cultural appropriation was irrelevant to the trajectory of the Whitmill proceedings. Whitmill asserted that he was the author and owner of the copyright in an original artistic work, comprising the tattoo on Tyson’s face. Warner did not dispute that Whitmill created the tatoo or question its provenance, but argued that copyright does not subsist in tattoos. At the preliminary hearing, Judge Perry refused to grant Whitmill’s request for a preliminary injunction to prevent the release of the film; but she did accept the basis of Whitmill’s claim, stating that ‘of course tattoos can be copyrighted.’ As a result she ruled that Whitmill had a strong likelihood of prevailing at trial.

The only time that a connection with moko was mentioned was after the preliminary hearing when Warner released a media statement that it would be pursuing pre-trial discovery to determine whether Tyson’s tattoo was derivative of pre-existing Maori designs. This investigation never eventuated however, as the case settled soon after. In any case, there is no evidence to suggest that Whitmill copied an existing moko.

The invisibility of the claim of Maori cultural appropriation and the primacy of Whitmill’s rights suggest that copyright law is not interested in the aesthetics of imagery, the source of artistic inspiration, or the possibility of competing cultural rights to indigenous design forms. In legal scholarship, this bias in copyright’s functioning is typically attributed to the Western intellectual property systems that are focused on private economic rights and financial gain, and indigenous approaches to intellectual rights and heritage that tend to be centered on collective interests, reciprocal obligations, and respect for natural resources. These divergent underpinnings mean that, in this case, while individual mokos are protected by copyright the same as any other tattoo art, copyright’s cornerstone principles of limited duration, idea/expression dichotomy, material form, and preference for individual ownership will not protect indigenous cultural imagery and art styles from appropriation

Title:

Editors:

Publisher: Cambridge University

Press

Location: Cambridge

Pages: 450

Format: Hardback

ISBN: 9781108420013

Size:

Illustrations: 353 col

Date of publication: 4 July 2019

Recommended retail price: £25.00 Save £3.00 Our price £22.00 inc. free UK delivery

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your

here

Dr Claudy Op den Kamp is Senior Lecturer in Film at the Centre for Intellectual Property Policy and Management (CIPPM) at Bournemouth University and author of The Greatest Films Never Seen (2017)

Tattoo” by Marie Hadley

Everett Collection Inc / Alamy Stock Photo

Tāmati Wāka Nene by Gottfried Landauer (1890)

Professor Dan Hunter is founding dean of Swinburne Law School, Australia, author of Intellectual Property (2012) and co-author of For The Win: How Game Thinking Can Revolutionise Your Business (2012)

The First World War had a devastating effect on Aldington; the ‘Lawrence saga’ of 1950–1955 had an even more shattering impact on his life and reputation. The young Australian poet Alister Kershaw (1921-1995), who became Aldington’s part-time secretary in 1948, had proposed in 1949 that Aldington write a biography of T.E. Lawrence, Kershaw’s personal hero. A full account of his effort to do so—the research and the writing of the biography from early 1950 through to April 1952; the legal and other challenges and delays that followed his submission of the manuscript to William Collins, lasting until the autumn of 1954; the publication of the book at the end of January 1955; and the furore which lasted for months afterwards—is presented in Fred Crawford’s 1998 book Richard Aldington and Lawrence of Arabia: A Cautionary Tale Aldington amassed an enormous amount of material on Lawrence. On 2 January 1951 he speculated to Kershaw on what it concealed:

There is some unresolved mystery about him, which has many aspects, one of which I am sure is homosexuality. You will be staggered when you see my collections of his anti-heterosexual and pro-homosexual statements. … It is a colossal subject to treat with competence, and most difficult to treat frankly without being or seeming hostile.

Two days later he told Henry Williamson: ‘There is some mystery about his family, a skeleton somewhere.’ When, towards the end of that month, he began to unravel the mystery, he was at first reluctant to believe it. It was the well-hidden fact (although Lawrence himself had been made aware of it when still a child) that Lawrence and his brothers were illegitimate. Aldington would be publicly condemned for his lack of decency in revealing this fact while Lawrence’s mother was still alive. However, for him: ‘to attempt to tell the story of Lawrence while ignoring this situation is like putting on Hamlet without the king and queen and, above all, without the haunting ghost.’ He theorised: Might not the main clue, though perhaps not the only one, to Lawrence’s peculiar psychology lie in his relation to his parents, in his discovery of what they thought their sin and its irreparable wrong to him, as well as to the dissonances set up in him by the influence of two powerful and opposite human personalities?

To support his argument, he paraphrased a letter from Lawrence to Charlotte Shaw, one of over 300 available for public inspection in the British Museum but from which he was refused permission to quote. (Fortunately for him, Denison Deasey, another young Australian and friend of Kershaw who formed a friendship with Aldington, spent hours in the British Museum copying them out.) However, he acknowledged that: ‘the fact must not be abused and dragged in to explain everything— he had his own remarkable gifts, and was as powerfully influenced by his environment in some respects as he violently reacted from it in others.’ Furthermore, he expresses characteristic sympathy for ‘yet another highly-gifted man, sacrificed to nineteenth-century snobbery, hypocrisy, philistinism and “respectability” in a generation which was supposed to be in violent revolt against them, he above all!’

What concerned him much more was his discovery, as he delved further into his sources, that much of Lawrence’s own account of his actions in Arabia between 1916 and 1918 was exaggerated or even false. He realised that those who had formed and perpetuated the ‘Lawrence legend’ had been almost entirely reliant on information furnished by Lawrence himself: Lowell Thomas, whose 1919 lecture-film show, With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia, played to massive audiences around the world and was followed by a book, With Lawrence in Arabia, in 1924; Robert Graves, whose Lawrence and the Arabs appeared in 1927; Basil Liddell Hart, whose 1934 book, T.E. Lawrence in Arabia and After, made a case for Lawrence having been one of the greatest military strategists of all time; and Vyvyan Richards, a pre-war friend of Lawrence, whose Portrait of T.E. Lawrence was published in 1936. Studying the correspondence between Lawrence and both Graves and Liddell Hart, Aldington discovered the extent to which Lawrence had influenced the content of these writers’ books while requiring them both to publicly deny his involvement.

He told Kershaw in the summer of 1951 what his own alternative sources were:

Though I have used 7 Pillars occasionally I have avoided repeating Graves’s mere paraphrase of L’s narrative and

above all Hart’s incredibly pretentious ‘military history’, using as authorities the Secret Despatches, the Official War History, Wavell, Barrow, Brémond, Bray, Young and any outside authority who is not merely parroting TEL.

To this list he added, in a further letter, George Antonius, King Abdullah, Sir Ronald Storrs, Colonel Robert Buxton, General Allenby, Captain Rosario Pisani and Colonel Walter Stirling. With the help of the elderly Gustave Cohen, retired professor of mediaeval literature at the Sorbonne, he managed to gain access to official French documents of the period. Another source was a book that had questioned aspects of the Lawrence legend as far back as 1929, Sir Andrew MacPhail’s Three Persons Aldington’s own book became, as he states in its ‘Introductory Letter’, ‘a criticism of those writings which have fostered the Lawrence legend … an analysis of the career of Lawrence the man of action and of the establishment and growth of … the Lawrence legend’—hence its title, Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Enquiry

Testing and disproving several of Lawrence’s tales about his early life accepted unquestioningly by his earlier biographers, Aldington concludes:

Of course it can and will be said that hitherto these exaggerations and untruths I am pinning on Lawrence are trifles, and so they are, though truth itself is not a trifle. But it so happens that they can be convincingly shown to be untrue, while in other cases one may be perfectly certain the tales are false without having complete evidence to prove it. But what are we to think of a man so self-centred, so—there is no other word for it—conceited, so avid of réclame at any price, that he would stoop to such trifling deceits? And if he would deceive in trifles, for the sake of a worthless astonishment and admiration, what guarantee is there that he did not do likewise in more important matters where he cannot be so convincingly checked? And further, what is the value of a reputation which is based on a multitude of just such disprovable or suspect stories?

Ultimately, one issue became a test case. Lawrence had told several correspondents, including his mother, Charlotte Shaw and Liddell Hart, that Churchill had offered him the post of High Commissioner for Egypt, both when Lord Allenby had threatened resignation in 1922 and when he actually left the post in 1925. Churchill wrote in T.E. Lawrence by His Friends (1937) that in 1921, when Lawrence left the Colonial Service, ‘governorships and great commands were then at my disposal. Nothing availed.’ He had, he claimed, told Lawrence: ‘The greatest employments are open to you if you care to pursue your new career in the Colonial Service.’ As Aldington points out, this was several months before Allenby stated his intention to resign his post; furthermore, Egypt came under the auspices of the Foreign Office, not the Colonial Office.

To test Lawrence’s veracity, Aldington had, through Browning and Colin Mann (then Public Relations Officer of the Conservative Party), queried the likelihood of the offer of this post to Lawrence with Leo Amery, who had been Colonial Secretary in the Conservative Government of 1924–1929, with Lord Lloyd, whose father had been appointed to succeed Allenby in 1925 and with Lawrence’s friend Ronald Storrs (the author of the entry on Lawrence in the Dictionary of National Biography). The first two said that they had never heard of the offer and thought it extremely unlikely, while Storrs called it ‘grotesquely improbable’. Alexander Frere had also arranged for Lord John Hope, the Conservative politician, to put the question to Churchill, who had answered (in writing) that Lawrence’s claim was ‘unfounded’.

While gathering his evidence and writing the book, Aldington was in touch with Williamson, who had been a friend and admirer of Lawrence. Williamson and Lawrence had met only twice, and briefly, but their correspondence had spanned the seven years from Lawrence’s writing to praise Tarka the Otter in 1929 until his death in 1935. Williamson’s behaviour towards Aldington during the Lawrence saga was duplicitous, and he would acknowledge this and apologise for it in 1956. Initially he was of great help, undertaking the task of writing to the publishers of Who’s Who to ascertain whether Lawrence himself was responsible for his 1920 entry and sending Aldington copies of his own Lawrence correspondence. When he sensed that Aldington was sceptical about Lawrence’s career, he told him: ‘Write your book as though you were writing of Cathy [i.e. Catha, Aldington’s daughter]. We love TEL as you love Cathy and he is like a son to me. … You have a noble subject. He won’t let you down.’

Richard Aldington

Vivien Whelpton

Richard Aldington was an outstanding Imagist poet and author of the bestselling war novel Death of a Hero (1929) but his reputation was injured by, among other things, his defiance of the literary establishment of his day. The first volume of Vivien Whelpton’s biography (2014, now re-issued in a new edition) explored the crises that followed his service as an infantryman on the Western Front; in the second volume she reassesses his later years and the devastating impact on his career of his iconoclastic 1955 biography of Lawrence of Arabia

Title: Richard Aldington

Subtitle: Novelist Biographer and Exile 1930-1962

Author: Vivien Whelpton

Publisher: The Lutterworth Press

Location: Cambridge

Pages: 415pp

Format: Softback

ISBN: 9780718894771

Size: 156 mm x 234 mm

Illustrations: 64 b/w

Date of publication: 27 July 2019

Recommended retail price: £27.50

Greek Gold Susan Barrett

/ LOOKING FOR AN AGENT

The best way to tackle a long and steep climb is to think hard of something entirely different. This is the trick I learnt on Dartmoor.

But Dartmoor tors are pimples compared to this mountain. I’ve been head down, putting one foot in front of the other, slowly, determinedly, for a long hour or more. The mountainside feels like a wall reaching to the sky. I’m hot and tired and I have not been left to my thoughts. I have a talkative companion who is much the same age as I am but male and fit. He could bound up this mountain in no time at all but he’s kindly keeping to my pace. I’m not sure whether I’m pleased or cross about this. He’s called Heinrich and he comes from Munich. I find him disturbing. He is tall and has rather well-shaped legs which emerge from shorts. Most, but not all, of his wild head of greying hair is tied in a pony tail and threaded through the back elastic of a baseball cap. Side wings hang around his face and merge with his beard. He could stride onto a stage and sing Wagner—he’d be an elderly, dark Wotan rather than a young, blond Siegfried. He’s staying at Michalakis’s place, too, and it was Michalakis who suggested we visit his Sarakatsan shepherd relations together.

What divides us and what unites us?

In this two-part novel by Susan Barrett, a British espionage officer—one of Churchill’s so-called “Secret Army”—and his daughter discover, albeit a lifetime apart, the reality behind myths set in the Pindos mountains of north-western Greece and others that they harbour in themselves and that need to be challenged. Centred on a bungled Special Operations Executive attempt to liaise between rival groups of Greek resistance fighters in 1943 and persuade them to cooperate in an act of sabotage, the story comes together in a search for the truth about one member of the SOE mission by the daughter who never knew him, struggling with bereavement and loss after years of marriage

Publishers and agents

The writer of this unpublished book is seeking representation. To inquire further, please email rights@booklaunch.london

Heinrich and I met over the jug of orange juice at breakfast. He speaks Greek as well as he speaks English. He is a lecturer at Ludwig Maximilian University and an authority on the flora and fauna of the Pindos mountains. This is his third visit to Glikopigi.

‘Is the best base to access the gorge,’ he says, ‘which has wonderful examples of the more rare plants.’

He gives me nuggets of information at each bend in the zigzag path.

‘You have heard of the Glikopigi Doctors? No? People came from far away to be treated by them.’

We trudge on.

‘The last of the doctors was a young Romanian girl who was known for her remedies. Sadly, she fell.’

‘Fell?’

‘Yes. From high up in the gorge. She was after a plant which I think might have been carduus marianus.’ He gives me a quick sidelong glance and lets me have the common name. ‘Milk thistle. Good for lactating mothers. She slipped. Five hundred metres. They found her next day. She left a child, not much more than a baby. Her sister took care of it.’

‘How sad.’

At the next bend, Heinrich goes on. ‘The sister is still alive. A very old lady but in complete possession of her mental capacities.’

I stop. A very old lady might have known my father! ‘Where does she live? In Glikopigi?’

‘Not all the time. She comes and goes from Yannina.’

‘But you’ve met her?’

‘Yes, but she doesn’t know anything about plants.’

Heinrich is back to plants.

I’m pretty well done for when we reach our first target, a cairn of stones on a ridge. ‘I’m going to sit and rest for a while,’ I tell Heinrich.

‘Of course.’

‘You can go on.’

‘No, I will stay with you.’

We drink from our water bottles and eat the oranges Michalakis gave us. I gaze at the view with greater appreciation now that I can breathe more normally. The ridge on which we’re sitting links two peaks. Below is the plateau. I see it is an undulating, grassy plain, ringed by other peaks. It doesn’t look at all suitable as a landing ground for parachutists. Directly below us is a circle of water reflecting the blue of the sky. I can see a few sheep and a collection of grey stone huts. Looking back the way we came, there is no sign of the village but I can tell where it must lie.

The line of the gorge further below is clear. It’s as though the mass of mountain has been riven in two jagged halves by a giant’s chainsaw. I can just make out a gleam of asphalt road circling a tree-covered hilltop. Beyond, further ranges recede in bands of violet-grey, fading to the far horizon. Albania.

‘You see the lake?’ Heinrich is pointing.

‘Yes.’ More pond than lake.

‘It is the habitat of a newt of the salamander order. Mesotriton alpestris. But nowadays it is known as Ichthyosaura alpestris.’ He glances at me and adds, with a smile, ‘Alpine newt’.

I’m beginning to like him. ‘What I’d really like to know,’ I tell him, ‘is the name of the old lady. The sister of the plant collector.’

He thinks for a minute. ‘It’s something like Eleni. Eliane. No, that’s not it. Give me a moment. Ah yes. It’s Ileana.’

I file the name carefully in my memory. I will find Ileana.

Heinrich has become curious about me and asks a few leading questions. We establish that we have both lost partners in the last two years.

‘It’s beneficial,’ he says, ‘to take a holiday. Not at once, but this year I have been ready. You too?’

‘Yes.’

‘What made you choose this area? You like mountains? Wildlife?’ He’s already guessed that neither are at all likely motivations for my being here. How shall I answer? He’d understand, I’m sure; he seems a sympathetic person even if he talks like the translation of a text book. I’m on the brink of telling him my purpose. I want to find the place where my father was shot by the Germans. No, I can’t say that.

Instead I say, ‘We loved Greece, Richard and I. Being here brings him close.’ That’s true.

‘Yes. I know. It hurts—but a healing hurt? Bitter medicine?’

He’s right.

‘Actually,’ I’ve begun before I can stop myself, ‘I’m here to find the place where my father was killed in the war.’ Heinrich stops and turns. ‘Ach, that is a very sad reason.’

I was right to tell him. Of course this present-day German is not responsible for my father’s death. The logical part of my brain knows that perfectly well. It’s the emotional part that gets in the way.

‘He was parachuted in from Cairo. He landed somewhere on this plain. I want to find and talk to one of the shepherds who might know something about it.’

We continue down and onto the plain. As we approach the lake, there’s an outbreak of barking a distance away. A number of dogs—four, five, no, six—are racing towards us. I’m not too happy about this and hang back. When the dogs—large, scruffy, greyish-white beasts— are within twenty yards or so, they slow down to form a ferociously barking line. Heinrich knows what to do. He bends as though to pick up a stone and the dogs back away. He moves towards them, picking up another imaginary stone. The dogs turn tail.

‘Fantastic!’

Heinrich looks pleased. ‘I am never certain the trick will work. But it does every time.’

‘Thank heavens.’

Still, we are both relieved when a shepherd appears from a hut and takes command of the animals. It is Michalakis’s cousin and soon we are sitting on a wooden bench outside his hut, drinking tsipouro

I realise that it is a good thing that Heinrich is with me. For one thing, his Greek is fluent. For another, I don’t think Socrates—yes, that is his name—would have talked to me, were I on my own. He’s a contained, stern and upright old man and Heinrich has to be patient, gently gaining his trust. He explains the reason for my presence and Socrates watches me with small, bright eyes below overhanging eyebrows. Then, cautiously, as if I had passed his test, he tells me that he was a ten-year-old at the time of the landing and saw a parachutist overshoot the plateau and disappear down the big ravine that leads sharply down into the gorge. He was the only one to notice this.

He speaks slowly and clearly and with solemn pride. I follow easily.

‘The day after that landing I crossed the plateau and started down the ravine. I didn’t know what to expect. A dead man? A wounded man? Or no one at all. For a ten-year-old, you can imagine, this was a big adventure. First I found, near the top of the ravine, a container. I knew that some containers contained gold sovereigns and others contained boots and clothes, or rice and flour. This one would have contained gold and it was too heavy to lift on my own, so I left it there and continued down the gully. It’s full of big boulders and steep drops. The best way down is not in the bed of the ravine but higher, through the trees that grow up its sides. About a third of the way down, I found him. He looked dead but in fact he was breathing. I stared at him a long time, trying to decide what to do.’

Socrates goes silent as he picks up the bottle of tsipouro and fills Heinrich’s glass and his own. I’d like some more but say nothing. I need it. I’m riveted by this story. Here I am, sitting on the mountain plateau where my father was dropped. I am close to the ravine where he landed, hurt from the fall! Looking dead! Please go on, Socrates They clink the tiny glasses of spirit. ‘And then—?’ prompts Heinrich.

‘And then I left him. … continued in the book

Susan Barrett had seven novels published by Michael Joseph, Collins and Hamish Hamilton before becoming a psychotherapist. She continues to write fact and fiction, often working with her husband the illustrator Peter Barrett. Greek Gold is her 11th novel

Rumour had it that Ziuzza, my grandmother’s sister, on my mother’s side, carried a gun in her apron pocket—both at home and when she went out. She wore her apron back-to-front, resulting in the pocket being propped up against her belly. She kept her right hand poised there, between her dress and apron as if she had bellyache. I had noticed this suspicious behaviour when on holiday in Sicily with my family when I was twelve. At that stage, never could I have imagined that she was concealing a gun, while she stood there in my grandmother’s kitchen watching me have breakfast. I never saw her sitting down. She brought us thick fresh milk, containing a cow’s hair or two, in the early mornings and often stayed to chat.

She had a dog, Rocco, white and brown, which she tied to a wooden stake in my grandmother’s stable downstairs. It was a lively animal, snapping at whoever passed it, jumping and yapping. The mules, the rightful inhabitants of the stable, were out in the campagna with my grandfather from the break of dawn each day.

A tight silver bun stood proudly on Ziuzza’s head. Her frowning face always deadly serious. Fierce, even. An overly tanned and wrinkled face. Skin as thick as cows’ hide. Contrastingly, her eyes were of the sharpest blue— squinting as she stared, as if viewing me through thick fog. I was scared of her. Truly scared. And all the other women were frightened, too. You could tell by the way they spoke to her, gently and smiling. Careful not to upset her, always agreeing with her opinions. They toadied up to her well and proper. An inch away from grovelling.

And, I found out the rumours about the gun were true. Ziuzza would come and bake bread and cakes at my grandmother’s house because of the enormous stone oven in the garden. I helped carry wood to keep the flames alive. Did my bit. One day the sisters made some Sicilian cakes called cuddureddi, meaning ‘little ropes’. They rolled the dough with their bare hands into thick round lengths in the semblance of snakes. Using a sharp knife, they then sliced the snake-shape in half, longways, spread the lower half of the butchered snake with homemade fig jam. They put the snake together again, slashed it into chunks. Then the chunks were dealt with one-byone and manipulated into little ropes by pinching them forcefully into shape with their nimble fingers.

As Ziuzza bent over to wipe her mouth on the corner of her pinafore, I caught a glimpse of her gun. I was sitting at the table sprinkling the first trayful of cuddureddi with sugar. No doubt about it. It was there in Ziuzza’s big inside pocket of her pinafore. While I was looking at the bulge, she caught me out. We exchanged glances, then our eyes locked. She narrowed her hooded eyelids into slits and crunched up her face. I blinked a few times, then looked around for some more wood to replenish the oven, grabbed a few logs and vanished into the garden.

After she received a sickening threat and Rocco’s bloodied paws were posted to her in a box, she, like her dog, came to a violent end. Ziuzza was shot in her back, in broad daylight, by someone riding by on a Vespa. People with line of sight, from their windows to the body, hurried to close their shutters. Nobody saw who it was. Nobody heard the gunshots, though the road was a main artery from one end of The Village to the other. And nobody called a doctor. It would be taking sides. Which you certainly didn’t want to do. Added to that was the fact that Ziuzza at that moment was on the losing side. She was left to bleed to death in the road like an animal. It wasn’t until the dustcart came round that they removed her body because it couldn’t get by. But nobody commented, it was as if they were removing a big piece of rubbish. It was nothing to them. But instead of throwing it away, they took the body to her home. Nobody was in. So they brought it to my grandmother’s house instead.

This was the lowest point in our family’s history. With time, though, Ziuzza managed to triumph through her son, Old Cushi, who began the escalation. And, later, her grandson, Young Cushi, completed it by becoming the undisputed boss of our village, of the region, and beyond. But the transition was not easy. A bloody feud ensued. Lives were lost on both sides. Some might know who Ziuzza’s enemies were. I didn’t get an inkling. Most of the information I came across was from listening to what the grown-ups in our family were saying. And they never mentioned her rivals by name. Some faceless entity fighting for control of the area.

This is just one of the episodes I remember from our holidays in Sicily. There are many more. Every three

years, I went to Sicily with my parents. Those I remember were when I was nine, twelve, fifteen and eighteen. The last time we went my mother was ill and we travelled by plane. All the other times we travelled by train because poverty accompanied us wherever we went. I think we had some kind of subsidy from the Italian Consulate in the UK for the train fare. It was a threeday-two-night expedition. I remember setting out from Victoria Station carrying three days’ supply of food and wine with us. Especially stuck in my mind was the food: lasagne, roast chicken, cheese, loaves of bread. We’d have plates, cutlery, glasses and an assortment of towels with us. At every transfer all this baggage had to be carried on to the next stage. No wheels on cases in those days. Then we’d get the ferry from Dover to Calais, and so began the first long stretch through France, Switzerland, until we finally pulled into Milan Station, where our connection to Sicily was after a seven-hour wait.

We used to sleep on the waiting-room benches, though it was daytime, until someone complained about the space we were taking up. The Italian northerners had a great disdain for southern Italians. They saw us as muck, rolled their eyes at us, insulted us openly calling us terroni, meaning: ‘those who haven’t evolved from the soil.’ Even though I was young, I noticed it, and felt like a second-category being—a child of a minor god. There was the civilised world and then there was us. My parents didn’t answer back. And it was probably the time when I came closest to feeling sorry for them. For us.

The journey all the way down to the tip of Italy— the toe of the boot—was excruciating. The heat in the train unbearable. When there was water in the stinking toilets, we gave ourselves a cursory wipe with flannels. Sometimes we used water in bottles. Every time we stopped at a station, my father would ask people on the platforms to fill our bottles. Then came the crossing of the Strait of Messina. At Villa San Giovanni, the train was broken into fragments of three coaches and loaded into the dark belly of the ferry. My mother wouldn’t leave the train, for fear of thieves taking our miserable belongings, until the ferry left mainland Italy, while my father and I went up on the deck to take in the view. But we had orders to go back down to the train as soon as the ferry left. Then I’d go up again with my mother. She became emotional when Sicily was well in sight. She would become ecstatic. Talk to any passengers who’d listen to her. Some totally ignored her. She’d wave to people on passing ferries. Laughing and, surprisingly, being nice to me.

Reassembled together again, the train would crawl at a tortoise’s pace along the Sicilian one-track countryside railway, under the sweltering heat. Even peasants who were travelling within Sicily moved compartment when they got a whiff of us. Another event that excited my mother was when the train stopped at a level crossing. A man got out of his van, brought a crate of lemons to our train and started selling them to the passengers hanging out of the windows. My mother bought a big bagful and gave me one to suck, saying it would quench my thirst. Another man came along selling white straw handbags with fringes, and she bought me one.

By the time we reached The Village our bags of food stank to high heaven and so did we.

… continued in the book

The Sicilian Woman’s Daughter

Linda Lo Scuro

According to author Linda Lo Scuro, the role of women in Sicilian culture has been misrepresented. Women, often seen as victims, can also be perpetrators. In her new novel, Maria, daughter of Sicilian immigrants, rejects her origins and works her way up from a troubled and impoverished childhood into the ranks of the English upper-middle classes. Her status is challenged, however, when a minor incident and the subsequent unravelling of her mother’s family history takes her back to her Sicilian instincts and into a mire of vendetta

Title: The Sicilian Woman’s

Daughter

Subtitle: Four generations of

Mafia women

Author: Linda Lo Scuro

Publisher: Sparkling Books

Location: Southampton

Pages: 282

Format: Softback

ISBN: 9781907230691

Size: 129 mm x 198 mm

Date of publication: 22 October

2018

Recommended retail price: £9.99

Linda Lo Scuro lives in London. She has decided to remain anonymous but can be reached via Twitter: @LindaLoScuro

The Episode

Stan L. Abbott

ENGLISH FICTION / MENTAL HEALTH

‘I didn’t have a very good day today,’ I tell Michaela when she gets home from work.

‘They thought I was shoplifting at the Co-op.’

I see Michaela sigh the sigh of a woman close to the end of her tether. ‘Did the crisis team come?’

‘Yes, they gave me some medicine and talked about a brain scan.’

A little later, she says to me, ‘I’ll do that chef/souschef thing with you now.’

I gather up the ingredients for a couscous and take up position by a large frying pan. The radio is on Radio 4. ‘Chop me the onions,’ I say. I notice as I say it that the volume of the radio goes down. When I stop talking, the volume rises again. It is just as though I was turning the volume knob. Yet another amazing new power: I can adjust the radio by telepathy. I wonder if I will soon be able to change channels too.

‘Tomato purée and spices,’ I instruct. Then I hear Michaela’s response of ‘which spices?’ and tell her ‘coriander, paprika and cumin’ even as she asks the question. Her next question will be ‘what next?’ ‘Prepare the meat,’ I say. I could be reading her mind but I don’t think that’s what it is: time is simply moving faster for me than for her. I hear what she says before she has said it. To her, however, it simply seems as if I am talking on top of her all the time.

‘I’ve had enough of this,’ she huffs, slaps down the knife and leaves me to it.

Stan L. Abbott’s unsettling new novel takes the reader inside the mind of a character living through a manic episode.

Victor Turnbull has been struggling to keep his business afloat when injuries sustained in an accident start to affect his body chemistry and in turn his sanity. The Episode recreates the experience of his psychosis as he slips between the boundaries of the real and the imagined, inventing delusional alter egos and losing touch with time

Title: The Episode

Author: Stan L. Abbott

Publisher: Sixth Element Publishing

Location: Stockton-on-Tees

Pages: 644

Format: Softback

ISBN: 9781912218493

Size: 130 mm x 200 mm

Date of publication: 1 March 2019

Recommended retail price: £14.99

Our price £14.99 inc. free UK delivery

To buy this book, visit www.booklaunch.london/sales or point your smartphone here

I have to accept that, while I may have sorted out my physical injury with all that ice and arnica, things are not right in my head. On the one hand, I have acquired superpowers and rare insight into life, the universe and everything. On the other, this is causing me difficulties in everyday life. This elasticity of time, for example: it’s hard to conduct a conversation when you have heard the answers to a question before the person has uttered them. And this inability to retain focus and concentration … Maybe if I can just get a decent night’s sleep tonight.

I take a temazepam but an hour later, it’s had no effect. Furthermore, my mind is full of feline behaviour. I set about scent-marking various entry points to the house: the cat flap, the conservatory door. I use a combination of cat food, urine and lavender. The cats will get to know that this combination means safety. I introduce the cats to these new smell signals. I’m not sure if they have understood yet. I return to my own den, but sleep is elusive. I think dawn comes without it.

I feel really quite fragile and I just can’t get my time synched with other people’s. Michaela has gone to work, leaving me at home with Larry. I have a brainwave: I find a full length mirror that used to be attached to the door of a built-in wardrobe. I lug it downstairs and take it into the garden, where I prop it against the Torbay palm. I take a chair out and sit in the sun, a couple of metres from the mirror, so I can see my full face and, specifically my mouth. I call Larry and ask him to stand behind my right shoulder. I can now see his mouth too. The idea is an immense success: I can coordinate my own words as I speak them with the movement of my lips in the mirror. More importantly, I can see Larry’s words as they exit his mouth. Now, we can have a conversation again, without my talking over him.

sated lion in the Serengeti. My belly aches. I push the tray to the foot of the bed. I close my eyes. The hot afternoon sun bakes the dry grass of the plain beyond the shade of the acacia.

The Crisis Team arrives again. ‘I’m Charlie and this is Simon. You saw our colleagues yesterday. How are you feeling today, Vic?’

‘I don’t know; I don’t feel so good.’

‘Did you feel better after you had the tablet last time?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe. Did I have drugs?’

‘We’re going to give you a slightly higher dose and then we’ll come back and see you later this evening, OK?’

More time bounces past. It no longer moves at any speed that I can identify. I guess mostly it goes forward, but that’s all I can say. Michaela comes into the room and tells me the doctors are coming back with the Crisis Team and she’ll need to talk to them before they see me. She seems agitated.

I think it’s quite late in the evening when they come. I decide this would be a good time to have a shower and put on a brighter face for everyone.

The sub-tropical rain drives down in sheets of warm water. The acacia tree offers little shelter and the lion’s coat is thin, from the dry season. But at least the big cat’s belly is full …

I am in my dressing gown: Michaela is in heated discussion with all these people in another room. I think they are going to try and take me away. I really can’t allow this to happen: I can manage this on my own at home. I can make myself well again.

Larry says, ‘Dad, can I talk to you?’

‘Of course,’ I say. ‘I’ll get my mirror.’ The mirror is still in the garden. I lug it indoors and prop it against the sitting-room wall, and position Larry behind me. But I don’t watch his lips. I am angry. I begin a tirade at Larry, insisting I can manage here at home and that it would be wrong to take me away because I’m ok, I really am ok. ‘I’m ok, I’m ok, I’m ok! ok?’

‘Dad, dad, dad. Stop. Please listen to me for just one moment …’

‘I am not going to be taken away!!!’

‘Dad, just one minute, please. Please!’

I quieten down and Larry comes close and whispers in my ear, ‘They’re going to Section you if you don’t go voluntarily.’

Section Two of the Mental Health Act, 1983. Taking someone into hospital for psychiatric assessment, for their own or others’ safety. They can be detained without their consent for up to 28 days. I know about that.

‘Oh,’ I say. I am defeated. The big cat is past his prime. The lionesses have had their eye turned by the handsome young male. The old cat trudges off through the still damp savanna grass. ‘You’d better tell them to come in,’ I say.

Enter Michaela, the two guys from the Crisis Team and Dr Gordon. I hadn’t expected Dr Gordon. I haven’t seen him for a while.

‘What’s happened to you in the last two weeks?’ he asks me. ‘You were fine when I last saw you.’

‘I don’t know, doctor. I’m not sleeping and I can’t concentrate.’

Stan L. Abbott has worked as a journalist in York and for many national and regional publications. He has run a communications consultancy based in Durham and still provides consultancy in the tourism and aviation sectors. Campaigned to save the Settle & Carlisle Railway. The Episode is his first novel

Suddenly, I feel really quite unwell and start to panic a little. I call Michaela at work. ‘Can you come home? I really don’t feel well …’

‘OK, I’ll come just as soon as I can. Has the Crisis Team been?’

‘No, I don’t think so … No, yes. No, that was yesterday. Is it Friday today?’

Michaela and Larry appear together and suggest maybe I should go to bed and rest. I think maybe that would be a good idea. But I struggle to get to my feet and the stairs become a mountain. I am a hungry lion; I have been wandering the Serengeti for days; I have chased but failed to catch ten wildebeest and I am at the end of my energy reserves. But I can at least still roar. I can roar! I can roar very loud!!! I am now crawling up the staircase. I am spent. But at least I can still roar. The man who stalked his cats has become a lion; a very hungry lion.

I am in bed. I need my phone. I have to keep on top of these work things. And I need some way of communicating with Larry and Michaela downstairs. I am getting hungrier and hungrier.

An eternity passes. Larry finally arrives with a big bowl of pasta. I don’t finish it but I feel full. I am the

‘Why are you talking to me through a mirror?’

‘It’s the only way I can have a conversation, doctor. It helps me deliver my answers to people’s questions when they have finished speaking.’

‘When else would you answer someone’s question?’

‘I hear what people are saying before they have said it.’

‘Victor, we think you need a little time in hospital to help you get better and we’d like to have your consent to be admitted.’

‘I understand, Dr Gordon. I know that if I don’t consent you will Section me and I understand that there are all sorts of additional implications if that happens.’

Dr Gordon nonetheless explains some of those implications as if to underscore the seriousness of the pretty pickle into which I have got myself.

Jean-Paul Sartre: Les Chemins de la Liberté. The existentialists argued that even in the direst circumstances we still retain choice. I can choose not to make a fuss and go to hospital. Or I can choose to argue and make it very much harder for myself ever to come out again.

‘I’ll put some clothes on,’ I say.

‘I’ll help you pack, Dad,’ says Larry.

… continued in the book

The choice I was weighing up in September 2009 was whether to go back to working in a school in Northern Italy or whether to stay on the Isle of Elba. I had tried my best there for several years but felt isolated now, and an unsuccessful stint as a foster parent persuaded me that I did not need any more emotional pain.

For the whole of the 2009–10 school year I thought hard about moving.

As far as my work was concerned, I was lucky to have a very bright head teacher who understood my request for a transfer and devised a way of letting me off teaching without leaving my pupils at a disadvantage.

He unofficially reassigned me to a post as coordinator for adult education, an area I had no direct experience of but which opened up a new world to me, a parallel universe full of many-sided possibilities.

At the time I did not realize the commitment that would be needed for the task. He told me, ‘It will be a demanding but satisfying year, trust me.’

And I trusted. It turned out to be one of life’s gifts: meeting a person who read my needs and my skills and didn’t think twice about keeping me at his school.

The school was a large one and I was in charge of Years 7, 8 and 9, as well as preparing students for university entrance. I was also in charge of Italian language certification for foreigners based on the so-called Common European Framework of Reference for Languages run by the University of Siena, as well as one-year courses and subsequent transfers to two-year courses on the island of Elba, the diplomas co-issued with a secondary school in Florence, and collaborations with prisons, villages, municipal administrations and other local institutions.

Thankfully, the school year went by with a transparency and speed that can only be compared to that of spring water.

Meanwhile, calmly but with determination, I got in touch with contacts in two large northern Italian cities, where I hoped to get my foot in the door by parading my professional experience in Tuscany’s educational sector.

I wanted to halve my teaching work and start writing about the arts for newspapers and magazines.

My guide—my mentor since my university days— was an acutely clever chameleon-like character from Venice, a man of encyclopaedic culture, acutely aware of current cultural trends, who instinctively knew how to navigate as an intellectual entrepreneur. When I phoned him to ask which cities he thought I might thrive in, he answered dryly: ‘Turin or Venice. But Turin is investing better in culture at the moment.’

I gave myself a week to think about it. Going back to Turin would mean returning to a network of professional connections and strong friendships that would support me as they had supported me in my years of difficulties and choices, my years of loneliness in Tuscany!

Moreover, the presence in Turin of my ex-sister-inlaw was a magnet for me—the older sister I had never had. Although I had not seen or heard from her for too long, I was sure it would only take a few seconds to re-open the affectionate back-and-forth in the harmony of our hearts.

But then I would risk falling back into the world of my first marriage. My ex-husband’s family came from Turin, and it was hard to think of going back there and not seeing my beloved nieces and nephews again.

Out of respect for my ex-husband, and out of my desire not to offend family ties, I decided I should stop visiting them. For me they were a delight but for him they were a necessity, a part of his life that he could not do without. In this, I yielded to him, as I always had.

As ever, regardless of my professional needs and the attractions that Turin offered, I allowed the presence of my former family to decide the issue for me.

And so on my horizon appeared a large city, one that floated on the water, lolling, rocking like a cradle.

Un altro sole, quando viene sera sta colorando l’anima mia potrebbe essere, di chi spera ma nel mio cuore è solo mia!

Another sun, when evening comes is painting my soul Some may hope,

But in my heart it’s all mine!

(Zucchero, Così Celeste)

Background

Cooperate with change and affirm life: this was my mantra after the age of 30, after I found I couldn’t get beyond a certain point in my life, and needed to reset myself like a frozen computer.

But when I booted myself up again after having diagnosed what was wrong, my motherboard did not seem to send the right firmware. Or perhaps it was right, but my body could not read its instructions, and it certainly did not match my mind.

Up to that moment, my path through life had been precise, flawless. I had been strong-willed and dutiful, the product of a rigorous education. Now my battery was flat. My operating system was down.

Efforts to jump start me into the next part of my life ended in nothing but high-voltage shocks.

In the emotional and physical collapse that followed, my only refuge was music—the rhythm and the poetic lyrics of the Italian singer-songwriter, Zucchero.

Ridammi il sole che avevo dentro me ridammi il sole che piove dentro me

Give me back the sun that I had inside me

Give me back the sun

It’s raining inside me

And despite all the joy, despite the confusion and delirium of losing touch with all the reference points in my life, there was still an innate sense of being connected to love and friendship and the world. This is what saves us. This is what saved me.

I went through a profound human experience. It was something that enriched me and saved me spiritually, but it was something I could not enter or get out of without finding my own key.

Venice

Here I am again in the swimming city of my happy time after leaving university!

I immediately re-read Venice is a Fish, a lyrical evocation by the Venetian writer Tiziano Scarpa, and rediscovered the magnetism of an island where one feels not isolated at all but at the centre of the world!

My French cousins have always followed my wanderings with interest and curiosity. One of them offered an interesting analysis. He sent me a beautiful message that I still cherish: From Elba: better Venice than St Helena!

He had understood something of my forced, almost penitentiary moves! And I am grateful to him for opening my eyes with the generous and unusual comparison to Napoleon.

In December 2007, on the island of Porquerolles, where I had withdrawn to spend some time writing, I had met an interesting French anthropologist. He had tried to get me to join him in his home with the Inuit; but only my husky would have been ready for a move to frozen Canada!

On my return to Venice, my mentor immediately offered to be my bridge. The city he knew and adored was in his hands and I would collaborate enthusiastically with him in various museum projects that he had taken on to help delay retirement.

We found we both benefitted from working together: he made a come-back and worked full-time for the cultural foundation that he had run his whole life; I supported and would gradually replace him.

Chance, destiny: for most of my life I had not believed in these words. My story shows how much I had to change my mind.

It started quickly. In October 2009 I already knew what project I would be working on in Venice, and whenever I went there during the school holidays, another bit of the jugsaw would fall into place.

The prospect of a move from Tuscany to Veneto buoyed me up. It was a process practically unheard of at the school I worked for, where everyone imagines teachers as limpets living on the same rock all their lives. Instead, during the year of my move, I arranged temporary absences so I could start work on the Rialto.

I was very productive. The director shared with me all his expertise; and I rediscovered what it was to have a father, having lost my own father when I was younger.

In September I arrived in Venice during the frenzy of the film festival. This coincided with one of the worst tornadoes in years, destroying all my books, a disastrous

il sole (Give me back my sun)

Carla Gagliardi

Carla Gagliardi was a literature teacher in Italy until a rare blood disease and its ensuing turmoil led to a breakdown. In this reconstruction of that collapse she watches as she is torn apart and looks for a way to reinterpret herself and her way of life. “Tragedy becomes a magical melting pot,” she writes, “in which faith, friendship, solidarity and openness to the world are lost and found. In falling and rising again—in facing and sharing not only one’s own struggles but those of others—one emerges from one’s suffering unexpectedly enriched”

Title: Ridammi il sole

(Give me back my sun)

Author: Carla Gagliardi

Publisher: Neos Edizioni

Location: Italy

Languages: Italian and English

Pages: 74

Format: Softback

ISBN: 9788866082880

Size: 120 mm x 200 mm

Date of publication: 30 November 2018

Recommended retail price: £15.95

Carla Gagliardi was born and brought up in Italy and now oscillates between London and Venice

This extract from the start of the book has been edited and retranslated for the purposes of a prospective English-language edition

Booklaunch

Booklaunch Literary Challenge

No.4 “Relay Race” Set by Maggie Bawden

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

Last issue’s winners:

No.3 “Last Brexit to Ooklyn”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Big Hippo Guide to Democracy, Referendums, Elections

(and all that)

Martin Rowson and Bob Marshall Andrews

Everything with Words

Publication July 25, 2019

Paperback, ISBN 9781911427124, RRP £8.99

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

Size Really Does Matter: The Nanotechnology

Revolution

Colm Durkan

World Scientific Publishing

ISBN: 9781786346612

RRP: £38.00

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

The End of Online Shopping

Wijnand Jongen

World Scientific Publishing

ISBN: 9789813274761

RRP: £20.00

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

They Called Us Enemy George Takei

IDW Publishing

ISBN: 9781603094504

RRP: £17.99

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

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