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Israel, Palestine and the meaning of protest by Keith Kahn-Harris A few years ago, I attended an ordination ceremony for new rabbis, held at a prominent synagogue that happens to be situated opposite Lord’s Cricket Ground in London. Ordinations here are typically held on Sunday afternoons in the summer and, on this occasion, the ceremony coincided with an international match. One of the teams playing that day was Sri Lanka. They were supported by a few dozen protestors from the Tamil minority, demonstrating against what they considered genocide and war crimes by the Sri Lankan government, which is dominated by the majority Sinhalese. It was a noisy protest, making much use of a megaphone. The police had confined the protesters to a spot over the road from the entrance to Lord’s, just outside the synagogue, so the ordination that year was accompanied by chanted slogans. It was a little disruptive but it didn’t take away too much from the ceremony. One of the rabbis politely asked them in advance if they could be quiet for a few minutes during the most solemn part of the ceremony. They agreed but when the time came, they must have forgotten. No one minded too much. In the last few weeks I have been thinking a lot about that protest. The demonstrators were clearly passionate and angry about what they considered to be mass murder. They were greeted largely by indifference: from those of us involved in the ordination, from the spectators and even (as far as I could tell) from Sinhalese supporters at the match. Was that indifference deserved or was booklaunch.london the Tamil cause one that any decent, fairminded person should either condemn @booklaunch_ldn or support? Did those like me, with no

connection to Sri Lanka, need to care and respond in some way? The truth is, I didn’t know then and I don’t know now. I don’t know very much about Sri Lankan conflict. To demonstrate the limitations of my knowledge, I deliberately didn’t do any research for this article. However: • I think I remember reading that the British empire divided and ruled Sinhalese and Tamils during the colonial period but I don’t know whether they marginalised the Tamils and treated the Sinhalese as the ruling class or vice versa (the British tried both majority and minority rule elsewhere in the empire). • I think I remember that Tamils and Sinhalese are divided by religion. One of them is Hindu, the other Buddhist. • There was a group called the Tamil Tigers who fought for a Tamil homeland and were notable for suicide bombings. • Sometime around the time of the demonstration, the Tamil insurgency was defeated. Tamils were pushed into a small area which was bombed and attacked by soldiers. Many Tamil civilian lives were lost. • India also has a Tamil minority in the south. I think the Indian state supports the Sinhalese side but I could be wrong. That’s it. It may be more than most people know but it’s pretty pathetic and certainly not enough to pick a side, or even to know whether there is any reason to do so. But nobody is asking me to, are they? Even the protestors at the synagogue weren’t asking me to; it was the Sri Lankan state and its cricket team they were focused on. While I’m sure they hoped they would raise awareness of their cause with the general public would, they came across as

very much alone. The Far Left didn’t seem interested enough to try and take over their cause for their own ends, nor did the Far Right. As for the liberal centre … nothing. Contrast this smug laziness with Israel-Palestine. One of the defining characteristics of the way this conflict echoes outside the region is that its protagonists tend to frame it as something everyone should care about. That’s particularly the case with Palestine solidarity activists. The demonstrations we have seen in recent weeks have frequently burst out of their allotted boundaries. Whereas, for all their noisiness, the Tamils at Lord’s were alone and confined to one spot, pro-Palestinian demonstrations are multicultural and spill out onto the Underground, outside McDonald’s and anywhere else. Their message is that this is a cause for everyone. And while support for Israel is less exuberantly public, there is no shortage of activists who will argue that Hamas threatens civilisation itself, not just Jews, and that everyone, therefore, should also care. While solidarity activists on all sides seek to “educate” potential supporters and the wider public, this is not an issue where ignorance provides an excuse. In fact, ignorance isn’t even a barrier to taking part in the general melee. All you need is an emotional pull to one side or another and you’re away. There is a broad sense of entitlement to speak of Israelis/Jews and Palestinians, regardless of knowledge. Social media and the streets are full of triumphant cries of “How can we be anti-semites? We’re anti all forms of racism!” or, from the other side, “There has never been a Palestinian state!” The delight in such ejaculations is palpable, driven by the sense that this is the first time anyone has ever made such an unassailable point. Why is ignorance no barrier to involv-

ing oneself in activism for Israel-Palestine but an insurmountable obstacle to joining Tamils demonstrating outside Lords? Part of the explanation is prosaic. As many people have pointed out, Israel-Palestine is a paradise for foreign press coverage: small, accessible and with great infrastructure. The sheer length of the conflict also plays a role; only the very old can remember a time when it wasn’t at least background noise. And, yes, anti-semitism (or, conversely in the case of pro-Israel activists, philo-semitism) does play a role too. But at the moment I am less interested in explaining the intense focus on Israel-Palestine than in trying to figure out its implications. One thing I am increasingly convinced of is that, at least in the case of this conflict, models of activism that are based on “drawing attention” are flawed. One thing that Palestinians and Israelis don’t lack is attention. Not only do they themselves bear witness, their advocates outside the country do so on their behalf. Even when Gaza’s communications are cut off by the Israeli army, pro-Palestinian activists ensure that this enforced silence ends up being ‘heard’ all around the world. And what good has is done? I don’t know enough to judge whether Tamils and Palestinians have faced similar predicaments but let’s for the moment assume they do. Palestinian solidary activists are a highly diverse bunch; they throng the streets in their hundreds of thousands—and Palestinian lives in Palestine are only getting worse. Tamil solidarity

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

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Booklaunch Literary Challenge No.4 “Relay Race” Set by Maggie Bawden

Last issue’s winners: No.3 “Last Brexit to Ooklyn”

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 delec-

PAGE 2 | BOOKLAUNCH ISSUE 18 | WORDPLAY

Lingualia wordplay More fun than is healthy. Probably

A leonine riff

A BRIEF DIVERSION

Many of the houses within a few minutes’ walk of mine in Leeds feature lion-statue gateposts or doorposts. I’ve lived in the area for 25 years but it was only a couple of years ago that I started noticing this, and only last year that I started wondering about it. Why are lion statues a thing here? Eventually I happened to spot some Sikhs entering one of the houses, and it dawned on me: lion statues must indicate a Sikh household. (I’m told it’s not a formal religious requirement for Sikhs to display a lion outside their residence but it must be fairly common practice. The lion is an important emblem in Sikhism. The word Singh, which all Sikh men should have as a middle name or surname, means “lion” in Punjabi (though its adoption as a name was for the sake of its extended sense of “hero, brave or prominent person”). The only problem is … not all the

Quiz 18

Letters of consequence An old parlour game involves identifying a word containing a specified sequence of letters: —“Find a word that contains the sequence dq” (headquarters) —“Which familiar word contains the sequence xg?” (foxglove), etc.

houses sporting lion statues belong to Sikhs. Some home-owners evidently have other reasons for displaying a lion statue. The obvious one is that it’s a symbol of Englishness or Britishness. Show your patriotism subtly by erecting a lion-statue gatepost rather than crassly by flying a Union Jack from a flagpole in your front garden. Here now are two other manifestations of British lion symbolism: the UK coat of arms (Col. 3) and (Col 4, left) the jersey of the England football team: The coat of arms is complicated. In the one shown above, England is represented by the lion on the left and Scotland by the unicorn on the right, as in the nursery rhyme “The lion and the unicorn were fighting for the crown.” But Scotland is also represented by the small single rampant lion. Here (Col. 4) is a picture of Scotland’s own individual coat of arms, with England three lions shown above.

The challenge for you is to find a word for each pair of consecutive letters in the alphabet; and for each pair in reverse; and for each trio of consecutive letters. The grid is below: fill it in as best you can. And try to come up with fun words rather than dull words if possible. For the sequence AB, for instance, aim higher than cab or about or rabbit. Try something more imaginative, like contraband or inevitability or flabbergasted. Go on, exercise your verbiceps. Stretch your lex. Vaunt your vocab. Release your inner poet. Obviously not all the sequences yield an answer, but most do. And while you’re about it, can you think of any words that contain a string of four (or more) consecutive letters? Prizes for the five most byzantine responses received at Booklaunch Towers: your choice of an EnvelopeBook volume (see www.envelopebooks.co.uk) or a four-issue subscription to Booklaunch. Email Maggie Bawden at book@booklanch .london to compete.

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How did Britain come to be symbolised by a creature whose natural habitat is very far from Northern Europe? Not through any colonialist triumphalism: the symbol long pre-dates modern British colonial ventures, having been adopted in medieval times both by England and Scotland (and Denmark and Finland and Sweden and later by any number of other countries or regions or cities). In England’s case, it probably dates back to Henry II whose wife Eleanor came from Aquitaine and whose coat of arms featured a lion. Their son Richard I was Richard the Lionheart, possibly by association with Aquitaine, but more likely because lions were associated in European folklore with bravery. (A more eco-appropriate symbol for N. European countries, such as the vole or sparrow, doesn’t quite cut it.) The lionisation of the lion might also be due in part to the association of Jesus with the “Lion of Judah”. But there could be one further reason for the proliferation of lion statues in Leeds. The name Leeds is a clue. The demonym (name for a local resident) is either Loiner or Leodensian, both of which are (mistakenly) understood as alluding to lions. The Town Hall and the Central Library and City Museum are all graced with lion statues, outside or within. The lion would seem to be the official Leeds emblem. The only problem this time is that the

official emblem of Leeds is not the lion but the owl. The Civic Hall (just a block or two from the Town Hall) is adorned by several golden owl sculptures and the Leeds coat of arms features three owls guardant (and a hanging sheep). For the record, other cities are also sometimes mistakenly assumed to be etymologically related to lion: —Lyon in France: the name has two Celtic roots: the god Lug and dunos “hill or fort”. —León in Spain: from Latin legio, the city originated as the campsite of an ancient Roman legion. —Leuven, or Louvain, in Belgium (especially shifty, as the German name for the city is Löwen, which also happens to be the German word for “lions”): the roots of the name are two hypothesised N. Germanic words, lo “forest or clearing” and hvein “marsh”. One city whose name does derive from leo, although very indirectly, is Lvov—I mean, Lviv. It was named by its 13th-century founder, King Daniel of Galicia, in honour of his son Lev. The name Lev is a Slavic form of Leo. The Latin form of the city’s name was duly Leopolis, and the demonym in English is Leopolitan. Of course, one other great city also takes its name from a word for “lion”. Think singh again. The name Singapore is based on Sanskrit roots meaning “lion city”. Given that lions are not native to the region, folklore posits that the princely founder of the city mis-identified a tiger that he saw there, and no one dared to correct him. Moral: error is the privilege of power. Unfortunately. (Think Trump.)

Consecutive pairs

Consecutive pairs in reverse

Consecutive trios

AB BC CD DE EF FG GH HI IJ JK KL LM MN NO OP PQ QR RS ST TU UV VW WX XY YZ

BA CB DC ED FE GF HG IH JI KJ LK ML NM ON PO QP RQ SR TS UT VU WV XW YX ZY

ABC BCD CDE DEF EFG FGH GHI HIJ IJK JKL KLM LMN MNO NOP OPQ PQR QRS RST STU TUV UVW VWX WXY XYZ

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FEMINIST BIOGRAPHY | BOOKLAUNCH ISSUE 18 | PAGE 3

Idol with a penis of clay?

WIFEDOM

MRS ORWELL’S INVISIBLE LIFE

ANNA FUNDER

Stephen Games was surprised, when Radio 4 serialised Wifedom in the summer, that BBC producers did not think it claimed too much One of this year’s top performing books is Anna Funder’s, Wifedom (Viking, 2023), which concerns Eileen O’Shaughnessy (1905–45), who married George Orwell in 1936 and died nine years later, just before the end of the war, while undergoing a hysterectomy. Wifedom was serialised in the UK as a Radio 4 “Book of the Week” on publication in August and has generated strong sales ever since. Funder’s focus on O’Shaughnessy is part of a growing trend in critical biography towards examining the role of wives and their often overlooked contribution to the success and celebrity of their more famous husbands. In issue 12 of Booklaunch, for example, we featured Ann Oakley’s angry book Forgotten Wives: How Women Get Written Out Of History (Policy Press, 2021) which looked at the supportive and often crucial work done by Charlotte Shaw (George Bernard Shaw), Mary Macaulay Booth (Charles Booth), Jeannette Tawney (Richard Tawney) and Janet Beveridge (William Beveridge), very little of it acknowledged. The target of such writing is typically a generalised attack on “patriarchy”, which is to say, the systemisation of male power and its exclusion, undervaluing and depreciation of women, by means that may include indifference and cruelty. In the case of Orwell, a review of his writing was catalysed by the discovery in 2005 of six letters from O’Shaughnessy, his first wife, to her best friend, Norah Symes Myles. These appeared two years too late for D.J. Taylor’s important but destructive Orwell: The Life (Chatto & Windus, 2003) but are now included in Taylor’s extensive revision, Orwell: The New Life (Constable, 2023), which also quotes letters from other women whom Orwell had developed an interest in. Thanks to the promotion of Wifedom by its publisher (a subsidiary of Penguin), Funder now seems to have gained the upper hand in the interpretation of Orwell’s indebtedness to O’Shaughnessy, but in fact it was another writer—Sylvia Topp— who first devoted a book to this subject. Her Eileen: The Making of George Orwell (Unbound, 2020) was also acclaimed when

it came out but now stands outside the top 500,000 books in Amazon’s Best Sellers rankings, and is only 4,529 in its Biographies on Novelist & Playwrights listings, where Wifedom achieves an impressive 31 slot. The letters provide scope for speculation about O’Shaughnessy and her role in Orwell’s life. On the back of them, Funder supposes that she influenced and humanised Orwell’s Animal Farm, bringing to it an awareness of human character that was untypical of Orwell, who was socially awkward and insensitive, and untypical of his other writing. It is also suggested that a schoolgirl poem O’Shaughnessy wrote called 1984 which speculated about life fifty years in the future influenced Orwell’s novel of the same name. In spite of this, O’Shaughnessy has little name recognition and is often regarded as Orwell’s less important partner, eclipsed by his second and much younger wife, Sonia Brownell (1918–80), who is thought to have been the model for Julia, 1984’s heroine. Anna Funder, an Australian writer, had already made a name for herself with her book Stasiland (Text Publishing, 2002; Granta, 2011), which looked closely at those who worked for, and against, the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police. The book was well received, winning the 2004 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, with Chris Mitchell of Spike Magazine calling it “an essential insight into the totalitarian regime”; it has subsequently been published in 69 countries and been translated into a dozen languages. The writing had elements of sensationalism in it, however, noted by Giles MacDonogh in The Guardian, who said of Funder’s writing about the culture of spies and informants that it was “racy”, not a word one would necessarily have expected of a study of totalitarian repression and its brutalising of the human spirit. This intentional commercialism was carried over into the book’s marketing, which talked of Funder meeting “Miriam, who as a 16-year-old might have started World War III”, visiting “the man who painted the line which became the Berlin Wall” and getting drunk with “the legendary ‘Mik Jegger’ of

the East, once declared by the authorities to his face to ‘no longer to exist’”. Years later, while thinking about the unequal load she had taken on as a wife and mother in her own life, Funder found herself gravitating to George Orwell, whose writing, and whose high principles about writing, she had always admired. She decided she would take advantage of Orwell’s lambasting of the petty tyrannies of everyday life in the 1930s to liberate herself from the tyrannies of today. To this end, she read six major biographies published between 1972 and 2003, eventually coming across a reference to a private note Orwell had written while dying. It contained two offensive generalisations about women. These changed her orientation from respect for Orwell to disillusion, and led her to reconceptualise Orwell as an emotionally undeveloped bully who took advantage of O’Shaughnessy as an assistant rather than a partner, taking much from her and given her precious little in return. This eventually led to Wifedom, a series of vignettes in which Funder pieces together moments in the Orwells’ lives where either he does something nasty to her, leaving her to swallow her pain, or she does something nice for him, which he fails to show any appreciation of. Among her examples of the former are his request, after spending an evening in a “hotel” in Morocco, to have sex with one of the under-age prostitutes who have been tantalising him all evening over supper, or his failure to join O’Shaughnessy to sign the adoption papers for the son he persuaded her to help raise in 1944, or to leave Paris—which he also enjoyed for its femmes de la nuit—and accompany her to hospital for the operation that she rightly predicted would kill her, even after she had begged him, by letter, and more than once, to do so. Her examples of the latter include Orwell’s silence about her decisive work for the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) in its Barcelona office, the administration of which she took over during the Spanish Civil War, while Orwell was safely continued on page 16

Viking 17 August 2023 Hardcover, 464 pages 9780241482728 RRP £20.00

ANNA FUNDER

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PAGE 4 | BOOKLAUNCH ISSUE 18 | CONSTITUTIONAL LAW The UK’s constitution is changing. Brexit has had a huge impact on the structure of the UK and its relationship with the European Union. This book has not looked at the many changes to the constitution that have been required to implement 30 Brexit. Rather, it has focused on other constitutional changes. While Brexit may have been the catalyst for some of these changes, changes were not needed to achieve the UK’s withdrawal from the EU treaties, or to establish the UK’s new relationship with the EU, or to assess which of the remaining EU provisions that still have direct effect in UK law we want to keep and which we want to revise. These changes may, however, have been prompted by a reaction to the use of a referendum. Some were a reaction to the perception that Parliament in 2019 tried to thwart the will of the people expressed in that referendum by delaying Brexit to pre-

UNCHECKED POWER?

HOW RECENT CONSTITUTIONAL REFORMS ARE THREATENING UK DEMOCRACY

ALISON L. YOUNG

Bristol University Press Softback, 256 pages 28 November 2023 9781529233001 RRP £14.99

EDITOR’S NOTE

Boris Johnson’s self-indulgence while in power eventually led to his being found out and replaced as prime minister, suggesting that the UK’s constitutional checks and balances are working and that abusers will eventually be at least ousted, if not punished. But changes have been taking place in the constitution that have also strengthened governmental powers and weakened political and legal checks, without anyone noticing. Alison L Young sounds a timely warning.

READERS’ COMMENTS Meg Russell, Constitution Unit, UCL: Alison Young is a meticulous and objective chronicler of our constitution. When she says it’s time to worry, we should take that seriously.

Lord Pannick KC: Alison Young understands constitutional law and practice and has a remarkable ability to communicate both the content and the importance of how we are governed. Anand Menon, UK in a Changing Europe: Liberal democracy means checks on the power of elected governments. Alison Young provides a salutary and readable reminder of why this matters.

parliament is sovereign. Any parliament can change the constitution through the enactment of acts of Parliament. Future parliaments can initiate their own changes to the constitution, including reversing earlier constitutional changes. However, as there is no requirement for these constitutional changes to stem from a manifesto promise, and no requirement to consult the electorate before changing the constitution, it is not always the case that these changes are merely implementing the will of the people. Even when manifesto promises are implemented, the manifesto may not be fully followed. Manifestos set out broad aims rather than specific policies. Like referendums, manifestos may also homogenise the will of the people. (Did you read any manifestos before voting in the 2019 general election, or any other election? If you did, how far did they influence you when you cast your vote and are you

which achieves policy objectives by granting broad powers to the government to finalise and implement policy choices. We’ve also seen a greater use of guidance and advice as a way of setting the rules, rather than as a means of clarifying legal obligations and responsibilities made by, or overseen by, Parliament. In addition, there have been what appear to be examples of a lack of self-restraint and a loss of mutual respect by some members of the government for other institutions of the constitution. The Owen Paterson affair, for example, saw the government originally move to reject the conclusions of the House of Commons select committee on standards, intermingling general concerns about the procedures used by that committee with specific concerns as to the outcome of their conclusion. More worryingly, we’ve seen a lack of self-restraint that could give rise to the undermining of the rule of law. The

Constitutionally, we’re not the same country we were even five years ago vent the UK from leaving the EU with no deal. Some of these changes have come from legislation, implementing promises set out in the Conservative Party’s manifesto for the 2019 general election. These include the repeal of the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act 2011 and its replacement with the Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Act 2022, as well as changes implemented by the Elections Act 2022—for example, to broaden the franchise to include expats who have lived outside the UK for more than 15 years and to introduce voter ID. Some changes to legislation did not go as far as might have been implied from the Conservative Party’s manifesto. The Judicial Review and Courts Act 2022, for example, did not remove checks and balances over the government by the courts, focusing instead on creating, or reinforcing, new remedies and limiting one narrow example of judicial review. Some changes have gone further. For example, the changes mentioned in the manifesto to protect democracy did not include the changes made to the oversight of the Electoral Commission. Other changes were not part of the manifesto, for example, changes to the right to protest found in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022. Some appear to have been weakened. The Bill of Rights Bill, for example, is no longer part of the legislative agenda. Yet, as the Illegal Migration Bill 2022–23 demonstrates, there is evidence of bills which are designed to limit or remove the protection of convention rights to certain aspects of UK law. We may also question the extent to which policy choices are good ones if they can depend so radically on the personal choices of ministers and the relative support they receive from the prime minister, the Bill of Rights Bill having been removed, following the replacement of Dominic Raab as Lord Chancellor by Alex Chalk. Constitutional change initiated in this way is nothing new. The Westminster

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holding the political party you voted for to account in terms of how far they are sticking to their manifesto commitments?) We have also seen changes to other sources of the constitution. First, we saw changes made to the Ministerial Code by both Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak. This is nothing new. Prime ministers are expected to reissue the Ministerial Code when they take office. While Johnson changed the code to include the ability of the independent adviser on minister’s interests to play a larger role in initiating investigations, these changes mostly reflect what had become the practice and did not go as far as those suggested by the Committee on Standards in Public Life to provide more effective political checks on ministers. The changes to the nature of the penalties that may be imposed may also have weakened the ability of the Ministerial Code to hold ministers to account for their actions. Rishi Sunak’s changes to the Ministerial Code were mostly cosmetic rather than substantive. However, he too decided not to implement fully the changes to the Ministerial Code suggested by the Committee on Standards in Public Life. The Owen Paterson affair prompted the House of Commons select committee on standards to propose changes to clarify codes of conduct. These changes extend to clarification over lobbying, as well as the procedures used to investigate allegations that Members of Parliament have breached codes of conduct. They followed an independent inquiry and may provide a more effective means of holding MPs to account while ensuring fairness in investigations. There have also been more informal changes to the UK constitution. These are changes to how those in government exercise their powers, as opposed to changes to the law or the internal rules that MPs and those in government should follow. They are more subtle and harder to pin down. We’ve noted a rise in the use of delegated legislation, including skeleton legislation

government seems less constrained by international law, being willing to propose legislation that breaches the UK’s international law obligations. Although the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill was withdrawn in light of the Windsor Framework, the Illegal Migration Bill, if enacted, will require the UK to act contrary to its obligations in international law to abide by interim judgments made by the European Court of Human Rights. Other examples of when those in government have appeared to be less constrained by the legal limits over their powers include the possibility that either civil servants or ministers may be found to have committed contempt of court by producing guidance which would have induced those following it to commit contempt of court by failing to comply with orders of the Parole Board. Then there are examples of a possible lack of respect by the government for the role of the courts: for example, one minister ignored a court order, and the government failed to implement a declaratory order. We have also seen how a government department failed to comply with the duty of candour, such that inaccurate information was shared with those bringing an action for judicial review against the government, making it harder for them to bring their case and ensure the government acted within the law. A further example of a more general lack of respect and a willingness to ignore the views of experts is seen in the willingness of the government to forge ahead with constitutional changes, even when these are contrary to, or go further than, those recommended by independent reports or responses to government consultation exercises. We saw this with the government’s response to changes to human rights reform and the now-stalled Bill of Rights Bill. We’ve also looked at whether Boris Johnson’s prime ministership in particular saw a change in behaviourcontinued towards a in greater use the book

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EUROPEAN HISTORY | BOOKLAUNCH ISSUE 18 | PAGE 5

Challenging the conventions of Habsburg historiography Elizabeth Legge takes stock of her three-volume study One of the problems of historical biography is that the portrayal of famous characters tends to be built around their public personas. One view or another may become predominant, and reputations may become excessively favourable or excessively negative. Imperial Cauldron tries to correct this. A sweeping three-volume saga of the Habsburg family from the end of the Napoleonic Wars up until the end of the Second World War, it aims to pull off a difficult balancing act: on the one hand to get under the skins of the different members of the Habsburg family, and to show who they were as individuals rather than as princes and archdukes and characters in Hollywood films; at the same time, to weave together family relationships in a way that can be lost when focussing too closely on the individual. The Austrian writer Hertha Pauli (1906– 73) grew up in Vienna. In the preface to her book The Secret of Sarajevo she wrote that the chief vehicle of court propaganda was gossip, and that it would triumph for fifty years. It spread, she wrote, from the dark recesses of the Imperial palace in the Hofburg, “shifting this way and that, fanned by factions, revived by its own victims”. It became a consensus, was accepted as fact, became history, and triumphed over logic, crossing every line of opinion and ideology, in Austria and abroad. A case in point is the Empress Elisabeth (Sisi) of Austria (1837–98), who came to be presented in the most excessively romantic terms as the Tragic Empress, the Lonely Empress, the Angelic Empress and always the Misunderstood Empress, an almost unreal figure, the embodiment of goodness and nobility. Her only son, Crown Prince Rudolf, (1858–89) also tended to be depicted as a fairy-tale Prince Charming. The news of his death and that of his mistress Marie (Mary) von Vetsera (1871– 89) therefore came as an enormous shock from which a mass of myths has emerged, the disentangling of which is daunting. One popular version is that Rudolf, who had always been unwell and unstable and who used alcohol and morphine to excess, had by the age of thirty come to believe that only suicide could relieve him from his ills. In this relatively benign version, Mary is seen as the passive partner who loved Rudolf so much that she chose to die with him, but there are other versions in which she plays a more active role, whether pushing him to take that terrible final step or as the evil influence that brought about his entire demise. Such speculation was so shameful to the family that after the suicides, efforts were taken to hide as much of what happened as possible, with the imperial court imposing the most stringent censorship on all the media within its jurisdiction. Foreign publications, however, were under no such ban, and on one day alone, 19 February, 1889, the Austrian police confiscated 4,790 foreign newspapers, a move that did nothing to stem the arrival of news from abroad. In Vienna the fiacre drivers hid stashes of foreign journals under the seats of their cabs. For the princely sum of forty kreu-

zers, passengers could jump in and read up on the latest sensations, and so great was the demand that they got no more than ten minutes for their money. Unless further payment was made, the newspapers then had to be hidden away again. The difficulty for Viennese aristocrats was that much of the gossip was at odds with their idealisation of Rudolph as heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. In wishing to cling to their belief in him as their role-model prince, “the Vetsera girl” therefore had to be portrayed as sullying his reputation. She was accused, after her death, of being hot-blooded, over-sexualised, “oriental” (her mother, Helen, was wrongly thought to be of Greek origin), too worldly-wise for one so young (she was still seventeen when she and Rudolf were found dead in his hunting lodge in Mayerling), and the worse for having lacked a father’s guiding hand. One word comes up again and again about her: that she was “frühreif” (precocious). Was she? Almost without exception, those who had known Mary offer a very different picture: people like her former French teacher, M. Dubray, or her piano teacher, Hermine Tobis. Their reports could hardly have been more different from the chatter that animated Viennese society. Those who knew her considered her to have been a bright, lively young girl whose behaviour was often eagerly childish. What Mary loved was ice skating. Her mother had liked to spend an hour or two during the winter months with her daughters, enjoying the freedom of the ice. The first mention of Mary in this regard came in 1884 after she had joined Vienna’s Eislaufverein (the ice skating club). Newspapers reported that the winner of one of the club’s races was a pretty and highly talented new member. They were referring to Mary. The Eislaufverein had been started by

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Demeter Diamandidi. Diamandidi had a son, Alexander, who was only a few years older than Mary and encouraged the two of them to train together. As an old man in his nineties after the Second World War, Alexander Diamandidi would remember Mary as a delightful young girl who was bright, courageous and outgoing. Alexander also described Mary as modest and considerate—and he was not the only one who had known Mary and who spoke of her warmth and thoughtfulness. In understanding the events that led up to Mary’s last night, we need to bear in mind Herta Pauli’s contention that “gossip became speculation and speculation became fact and fact hardened into history”. Most accounts of the Mayerling Incident, as it became known, are based on books written by Rudolf’s first cousin, Countess Marie-Luise Larisch (1858– 1940). Marie-Luise played a significant role as a go-between, enabling Mary to meet Rudolf in secret. Marie-Luise never let truth get in the way of a good story, however, and seems to have painted a distorted picture of what happened in order to deflect criticism from her own part in facilitating Rudolf’s affair. On Monday 28 January, 1889, when Rudolf and Mary left Vienna for the last time, it was Marie-Luise who took Mary to the Hofburg. That is an established fact. From that moment onwards, nearly everything that has been said about the two of them should be viewed with some scepticism. Most telling is that on 9 February, 1889 the German ambassador in Vienna, Prince Reuß, sent a note to Bismarck in Berlin, saying, “The young girl’s bullet wound is now said to be not to the temple, as has been alleged, but at the centre of the top of her head. She is also said to have had other injuries.” We do not know what those other injuries were; nothing was ever made of them and no conclusions have ever been drawn. The wound and the injuries do not give the impression, however, that the couple’s last moments together were loving. Rudolf’s family was always dysfunctional and individual lives were mostly deeply unhappy, however privileged and luxurious they may also have been. My history, Imperial Cauldron, goes on to describe how family members went from occupying an unrivalled position of power in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to that of near invisibility as private citizens after the First World War. The last emperor, Emperor Karl, and his wife Zita and their family were forced into exile in 1918 when Austria became a republic. The descendants of the Habsburg family were required to swear that they would make no move to restore the monarchy, on pain of being banned from ever returning to the country. Karl and Zita never did take that oath but their oldest son, Otto, did. At the very end of her life in the 1980s, Zita was allowed to return briefly. She was given a rapturous welcome, suggesting perhaps that a huge nostalgia exists in modern Austria for what was lost and even that an appetite exists for bringing back what was lost in the Hapsburgs’ passing.

IMPERIAL CAULDRON

VOL 1. GATHERING SHADOWS VOL 2. THE FADING OF THE LIGHT VOL 3. BITTER LEGACY VOL 4. APPENDICES AND NOTES

ELIZABETH LEGGE ESME Publishing Vols 1, 2 and 3 Hardbacks £20.00 Softbacks £14.99 Vol 4 Hardback £12.99 Softback £10.00

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PAGE 6 | BOOKLAUNCH ISSUE 18 | URBAN PLANNING According to the authors, we have lost the ability to deal with strategic planning issues or design measures aimed at achieving sustainable economic growth. We prefer to avoid anything that’s complex or difficult; at best, we take refuge in short-term fudges that create more problems than they solve. This failure is starkly illustrated by the response to the authors’ proposal for a new city in the Leeds City Region, referred to in the feature that follows. Fifty copies of their discussion document were distributed to leading politicians, media and political commentators. Not a single recipient responded. That document, “Locating Britain’s Second Chamber: An Ambition for A New Government”, is available as a PDF by emailing either nigel. moor2015@gmail.com or prof. clelland@gmail.com, as is “Creating a Heart for the Oxford-Cambridge Arc”, also referred to here.

Urban planning: the nettle that the politicians just won’t grab

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Figure 1: The Leeds City Region. Source Leeds Local Plan 11 September 2019. License under the Open Government License 3.0.

PROF. DOUG CLELLAND Douglas Clelland is a Scottish architect, educator and writer. He has been the Herbert Rowse Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at Liverpool John Moores University (1994–2010) and professor of architecture at the Beuth University of Applied Sciences in Berlin (2013–2016). He is currently emeritus professor at John Moores.

NIGEL MOOR

Dr Moor was for nearly 20 years a planning correspondent for Building magazine and has written for a range of professional and industry journals. He has served as a counsellor at town-, district- and county-council levels, as well as becoming mayor of an Oxfordshire market town.

“The Case for a New British Capital” was a polemic written by the editor of Booklaunch, Dr Stephen Games, in the Summer 2019 edition of the magazine. Explaining how dislike of London’s dominance had contributed to the phenomenon of Brexit, he argued for the building of a new London and wondered who could be trusted to lead such a project. Concluding he asked, “Any takers?” Our response to this challenge is not exactly to produce a new capital, because new capitals are fraught with problems and can take decades to come to fruition. Instead, we aim to rebalance the UK’s political geography by producing a new city in the Leeds City Region (otherwise known as Greater Leeds, an area with a population of 2.3 million and taking in Leeds, Bradford, Wakefield, Halifax and Huddersfield)—see Figure 1. Why a new city rather than locating additional development within existing conurbations, cities and towns? One part of our thinking is that combatting climate change requires a fundamental shake-up in the design of dwellings, industry, communal facilities and transport networks, and a new city provides an opportunity to address this at scale. See Figure 2. It would also be an ideal location for the siting of a new 76-member Senate for the United Kingdom. The UK needs a new type of revising chamber, and a Senate, with directly elected regional representatives, would add momentum to Britain’s attempt to rethink itself. By contrast, locating a Senate in Westminster would merely perpetuate the present regional imbalance. As it is, the cost of repair and refurbishment of the Palace of Westminster is proving intolerable and there are distinct public benefits in putting the building and its repair costs into private management and

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converting at least part of it into, for example, an international world class hotel. We seek to rejuvenate Britain by emulating the postwar ambition that delivered the 32 new towns that today provide homes for 2.5 million people. A new city in Greater Leeds could spearhead the construction of at least 300,000 new homes each year, as well as catalysing fresh thinking on governance and political identity. Dr Games’s essay only encouraged both; it also encouraged fresh thinking per se. This has resonance now that Britain has a more urgent problem than over-centralisation. Levelling up and earlier manifestations of this concept originated at a time when Britain’s economic performance was comparable to that of

other leading nations, when the question was how to share the fruits of the resultant growth more equitably. Today, the problem requiring urgent attention is that the British economy is in a state of inertness. The pragmatic answer to this problem is to pursue growth wherever it has the greatest potential, and one potential candidate is the Oxford-Cambridge Arc, launched with much fanfare by the Coalition Government of 2010. Backed by the National Infrastructure Commission (NIC), the prospect of a growth corridor between England’s two ancient university cities gained considerable momentum at the time. In autumn 2015 the NIC called for a million new homes to be built in the Arc by 2050; shortly afterwards, the then chancellor Philip Hammond

Figure 2: Location for the new city. Source: Doug Clelland & Richard Jones. Nick Page | 07789 178802 | page@pagemedia.co.uk | Advertising

URBAN PLANNING | BOOKLAUNCH ISSUE 18 | PAGE 7 backed this proposal and endorsed the NIC report in his 2016 Autumn Budget. Then in July 2021, the government proposed a framework to help coordinate plans and identify new opportunities. Sadly, electoral reverses in the local government elections of 2021 brought about a loss of nerve, as Conservatives in both Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire lost seats. Since then, progress has been non-existent. A key element of the ambition for the Arc is the construction of the East West Railway (EWR) which will re-establish the rail link between Cambridge and Oxford. This part of the overall ambition for the Arc remains alive. The preferred route alignment has been updated (2023) and will approach Cambridge from the south to serve the Cambridge Biomedical Campus. At Tempsford, the EWR will meet the East Coast main line from London to the north. See Figure 3. The intersection of railway routes at Tempsford will require a two-level station like the one at Worcester Parkway that will improve connectivity between Cambridge, Oxford, Milton Keynes, London and the North. This then becomes the logical centre for a new city to relieve housing pressures on Cambridge and provide an attractive location for a new science park, larger in size than Berlin’s Adlershof, Europe’s current front runner. The need to relieve housing pressure on Cambridge is overwhelming. Other than the exemplar scheme being promoted by Cambridge University at Eddington two miles northwest of Cambridge, much of the area’s recent housing development is nothing more than the building of dormitory estates. The current development at Northstowe, north of Cambridge, is being delivered by housebuilders and landowners with hundreds of houses built, but with no services or facilities. To avoid such uninformed and unsustainable practices, we envisage the new city at Tempsford being promoted by a locally led development corporation which, as at Milton Keynes, would eventually become a unitary council administered by locally elected councillors. This approach has proved to be the most effective in delivering balanced communities as opposed to housing estates. Initial investigations show that there is potential to create a city of at least 300,000 people. We envisage those government departments that relate to science, technology and innovation moving out of Westminster into the central part of this new city. The associated science park would house a centre for industrial research that could serve Biotech, E-Learning, Genomics, Nanotechnology, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) enterprises. See Figure 4. The resulting city would have excellent connectivity, provide housing and employment opportunities that Oxford and Cambridge lack, and have minimal impact on agriculture and existing settlements. No Green Belt land would be involved although, in fact, the landscape quality is low to poor, with haphazard clumps of trees flanking the A1(M) giving the area what little character it has. Much of the 14,000 hectares shown in green on Figure 3 is not seriously farmed but mainly laid to grass, with little livestock or cereals. Whatever market gardening there was in the past is now abandoned. It would be difficult to find an area in the south-east so accessible and receptive to new development. The proposed city centre, extending to 1,200 hectares, contains the existing village of Tempsford and Highfield Farm. From the outset the new city centre should be multi-functional. While predominately

ENGLAND’S FUTURE THE IMPACT OF POLITICS ON SHAPING THE ENVIRONMENT

NIGEL MOOR

The Book Guild Softback, 624 pages 3 October 2022 9781915352170 RRP £19.95

Figure 3: The proposed railway route between Bedford and Cambridge. Source: Press Release from East West Rail (EWR) 26 May 2023.

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Figure 4: Location for a new city within the Oxford–Cambridge Arc. Source: Doug Clelland and Richard Jones. a place for future technologies and relocated Westminster departments, it would also contain residential and other purposes required within the Oxford-Cambridge Arc—in all, a vibrant place of streets, squares and parkland. Comprising some 13,000 hectares they will be designed and constructed as compact liveable and walkable neighbourhoods, well served by open space, public transport and commercial and social infrastructure, creating balanced communities. Historical examples of dense liveable cities such as Portsmouth will be reinterpreted, which together with the application of best practice in decarbonisation will result in a city that is both vibrant and environmentally intelligent. Such a city would provide a Heart to the Arc. Boundaries to both the eastern and western areas of the new city are at this stage approximate: St Neots and the Great Ouse to the north; Sandy to the south; the A1(M) and East Coast mainline on its long sides (except where the new station calls for land on both sides of the tracks). (An alternative to this distributed type of city restricts the amount of land required to the strip between St Neots and Sandy and from the A1(M) to the London–Edinburgh mainline rail route, with an extension east of the Tempsford interchange as shown in Figure 4. By concentrating functions including residential, this alternative would be denser, with taller buildings, streets and squares.)

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The largest science park in Britain is currently at Harwell (280 hectares), so the scale of the opportunity presented here is notable. It offers the chance for Britain to enter the big league, alongside places such as Research Triangle in North Carolina (2,800 hectares), offering communities of expertise that will define the economies of the future. For more than a decade the revolving doors of ministerial change at Westminster have meant that few if any ministers have had time to master the challenges posed by the need to rebalance and economically re-invigorate the United Kingdom. Now, with an election on the horizon, we need to rediscover the vision and determination shown in the immediate postwar period by that generation of politicians who believed in the value of planning and a better Britain … and were proven to be right. In terms of the first proposal in this article, the will to reform Britain’s constitution and the energy needed to level up with seriously well-resourced regionalism for the North demand exemplary political leadership. The second proposal does not require such courage, just the realisation that wherever possible (even if that fails to address the wider agenda of constitutional reform and levelling up), opportunities should be seized to grow Britain’s economy out of our present predicaments with due respect to the natural world. A new city at Tempsford has few equals.

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GOD’S BRAINS

THE SURGING TIDE OF HUMANITY

DOUG CLELLAND

Arena Books, June 2016 Softback, 298 pages 9781909421783 RRP £19.99

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PAGE 8 | BOOKLAUNCH ISSUE 18 | CANADIAN LITERATURE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jody Mason is Professor of English at Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada). She teaches and researches in the area of Print Culture Studies and is the author of publications on cultures of reading and literacy in Canada; the uses of books as instruments of diplomacy and development; and publishing history in Canada, including a forthcoming essay (with Sarah Pelletier) in the journal Book History about Canada’s Guest-ofHonour role at the 2021 Frankfurt Book Fair.

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WRITING UNEMPLOYMENT

WORKLESSNESS, MOBILITY, AND CITIZENSHIP IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY CANADIAN LITERATURES

JODY MASON

England’s Future p7 University of Toronto Press 28 November 2012 Hardback 280 pages 9781442644335 RRP £41.00

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How independent is indie publishing? Word just in from the North Indies Jody Mason surveys the Canadian scene Book buyers and readers in Canada were introduced in 2019 to a new literary imprint called Strange Light, a project spun off from the hugely successful digital literary magazine Hazlitt. Although the fact of its ownership is muted, Hazlitt magazine and Strange Light are both owned by Penguin Random House. Penguin and Random House merged in 2013 to become Canada’s largest book publisher and the world’s largest trade book publisher. 75 percent of the shares of Penguin Random House are owned by Bertelsmann, a German multinational media corporation. Instead of its corporate identity, the magazine’s mission emphasizes its open, experimental, creator- and reader-driven environment. As its website tells us, “Hazlitt is a home for writers and artists to tell the best stories about the things that matter most to them … . Hazlitt is … humane, diverse and committed to stories and writers not heard anywhere else.” Random House of Canada launched Hazlitt as part of its digital strategy in 2012. According to Brad Martin, then president of the company, its goal was to use websites for more than just the traditional purposes of sales and marketing. In 2012, digital self-publishing ventures such as Amazon Kindle Direct loomed large. As Canadian journalist John Barber noted in an article on Hazlitt in 2012, Random House of Canada’s forays into digital publishing constituted an effort to stay relevant—and profitable—at the edge of a “frontier pioneered by innovative outsiders”. The digital publishing sector has only grown since then, as the previously unthinkable success of start-ups such as Canada’s Wattpad, now owned by the South Korean Naver Corporation, attests.

Writing Unemployment p8

Strange Light and Experimental Stories

EDITOR’S NOTE

Writing Unemployment is a landmark study exploring the cultural and literary history of unemployment in Canada during the six decades from the 1920s to the 1970s when modern Canada found its identity as a nation. By examining novels, short stories, poetry, manifestos and agitprop, Jody Mason challenges the dominant literary-historical narrative of the pioneer settler, and contributes new scholarship to ideas about Canada’s modern period and the work of its most important writers.

In 2019, Penguin Random House Canada launched the Hazlitt imprint Strange Light , a project dedicated to the work of “unpredictable, innovative authors telling personal and provocative and experimental stories, even—and especially––those that defy easy categorization.” Strange Light’s debut title, Sara Peters’s I Become a Delight to My Enemies, mixes poetry and prose. In a literary field utterly dominated by prose fiction—the novel—this is indeed “innovative” and “experimental”. Yet Strange Light’s embrace of generic diversification was short-lived; since its inception, the imprint has published mostly novels. Indeed, of the twelve titles that comprise the imprint’s list, eight are novels. Admittedly, there are experiments here: for instance, Rebecca Watson’s Little Scratch exploits mise-en-page to chart the distractions of life under digital capitalism, and Victoria Sees It queers a popular form, the psychological thriller, to interesting effect. Alongside the novels we find memoirs, but if life-writing may sometimes “defy easy categorization,” it is a solidly mainstream form. The “memoir boom” in North America dates to the early 1990s, as Julie Rak’s 2013 study of the genre, “Boom”! Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market, tells us.

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Canada celebrates its independent publishing sector at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair in October. Where is the poetry? The prose poem? The graphic novel? The mixed-genre or mixed-language work that might actually “defy easy categorization”? Admittedly, book buyers in Canada choose novels over poetry. According to Book Net Canada’s statistics, fiction represented just over 25 percent of all unit sales of English-language trade books in Canada in 2018. By contrast, poetry represented 1 percent. Even if it were true, and likely it is not, that an imprint like Strange Light could encourage Canadians to read more poetry and mixed genre work, could Strange Light serve the diversification of Canada’s literary field, as its mission statement suggests?

What About Diverse Ownership?

When thinking about how to introduce experimental stories and diverse points of view to readers in Canada, the primary issue is not one of genre or form. It is also not exclusively a question of publishing writers from a diversity of cultural backgrounds (though it should be noted that Strange Light’s list of authors is more white than not). Both of these factors matter, but they relate to a larger one. The main issue is a question of ownership. Book Net Canada statistics for 2018, which measure sales at 2,200 book retailers in Canada of varying sizes, tell us that Canadian-owned publishers represented just over 5 percent of all English-language trade books sold in that year. (French-language trade publishing in Canada presents a different case.) The remaining 95 percent of the market is claimed by foreign-owned houses. Penguin Random House Canada is the biggest of these, followed by HarperCollins Canada. Together, these two companies dominate literary publishing in Canada. Investigative journalist Elaine Dewar claims that in 2016, Penguin Random House Canada had cornered 32 percent of the Canadian trade book market. We do not have a diverse literary field in Canada; its diversity has shrunk rapidly in the past two decades. Two recent accounts amply demonstrate a narrowing of Canada’s publishing activity: Rowland Lorimer’s

Ultra Libris analyzes the role of cultural policy in this process, while Dewar’s The Handover reveals how “The Canadian Publisher” McClelland & Stewart was sold to Random House despite foreign investment rules that should have prevented it.

Small-Press Publishing in Canada

Nevertheless, since the early 1970s and the introduction of federal block grants to Canadian-owned publishers who are actively producing and marketing Canadian books, a modest small-press community has managed to survive. Publishers such as Kentville, Nova Scotia’s Gaspereau Press; Windsor, Ontario’s Biblioasis; and Penticton, British Columbia’s Indigenous-owned and -operated Theytus Books bring books to readers in Canada that would not otherwise see the light of day. Although now fairly well known as Michael Ondaatje’s first publisher, Toronto’s Coach House Books might also be remembered for its early forms of experimentation. The house made its mark in 1967 with b.p. nichol’s Journeying and the Returns, a slim volume of poetry in a blue and purple cardboard case that also contained assorted objects to be experienced alongside the poems, including a thumb-flip animated poem the size of a stack of sticky notes. More recently, Quebec’s Mémoire d’encrier offers us the unique poetry of Joséphine Bacon: French and Innu-aimun sit on each twinned page, giving the reader access to a language few in Canada have any opportunity to encounter. But these “boundary-pushing books” have a very small audience, and few readers and book buyers might notice that they can be meaningfully distinguished from an imprint like Strange Light. Strange Light and its ilk merit our collective examination: despite a rhetoric of innovation and experimentation, indie-style imprints like Strange Light form part of a company that is already dominating the country’s literary space and that is clearly not indie. This is one more sign of the desertification of Canada’s media ecology, not its diversification.

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SPORT CULTURE | BOOKLAUNCH ISSUE 18 | PAGE 9 KID GALAHAD Directed by Michael Curtiz Warner Bros., 1937

The fighters pound away while Nick Donati (Edward G. Robinson) keens from ringside, waving puppet arms and yelling to his boy to watch the McGraw kid’s right. Beside him is his best giri, Fluff (Bette Davis), and it’s pretty clear that it’s not the fight she’s worried about. A couple of rows back, the vicious gangster Turkey Morgan (Humphrey Bogart, in a suit with shoulder padding stacked like a Simmons mattress) leans in with eyes that flit furtively at Donati of their own accord. But Donati’s too absorbed in his fighter’s flagrant disregard for instruction. He knows bad acting when he sees it, especially when his own fighter flashes a knowing smirk at Morgan before dropping to the canvas to play-nap through the count. Donati can also tell when a boxer’s

tation for films that rejected the notion of cinema as escapism, earning them the moniker ‘the gangster studio’. Actors including Cagney, Alan Ladd and the present Bogart-Davis-Robinson trifecta played to public appetite through thinly veiled incarnations of the hoods that consumed as much newspaper real estate as a topranked heavyweight. The rise in criminal activity during the Great Depression sparked the enactment of the Lindbergh Law, which allowed for the increased jurisdiction of the Federal Bureau of Investigation under its proactive, vigilant director J. Edgar Hoover. But as the public’s faith in government dropped and its appetite for the lurid increased, each new sensational massacre or bust saw a rise in gangsters’ near-mythical status. Although the economy’s recovery in 1934 marked a drop in the national homicide rate by 20 percent over the following

flattering light and angles devised by cinematographers to hide her flaws, Davis made it all seem attainable—despite her early self-assessment as ‘Beautiful, never, striking, sometimes, if I’m lucky.’ Like Fluff, the young Davis embodied both the virgin and the vamp: a dangerous cupcake and catalyst for the neurosis specific to males dubbed the ‘Madonna-whore complex’ (aka ‘psychic impotence’) by Freud. Longworth identifies the source of this contradiction in an industry where nearly all financial backing came from men who ‘fantasise about having sex with young, unspoiled women who lack the age and maturity and life experiences of their own wives’. Perpetually insecure with her looks and sex appeal, Davis wrote in her private journal that ‘sex was God’s joke on mankind.’ Initially uncomfortable among the cattiness of film divas, she ultimately out-catted them all while transcending the

Trump’s allure explained: How movies glamorised the American bruiser being strong-armed, and he’s pretty sure who owns his. Released in a decade when film noir had firmly planted its flag into American culture, Kid Galahad was the first popular boxing film to provide the public an unabashed glimpse into the illicit transactions that were part and parcel of the fight game by the 1920s. It was an easy sell. Boxing had already established itself as a viable subject in silent films. Buster Keaton’s comedy The Battling Butler (1926) depicts a wimpy rich boy who impersonates a fighter to woo his beloved, while Alfred Hitchcock’s The Ring (1927) features two suitors duking it out over a mutual love interest. Five years later, Roy Del Ruth’s talkie Winner Take All (1932) featured James Cagney in another cautionary tale that fightin’ and broads don’t mix. But Kid Galahad was new: while it wasn’t the first boxing film to feature a gangster, it was the first full-blown cinematic glamorization of the criminal activity that had muscled in on boxing during the 1920s and turned into a lucrative industry long after prohibition. Amid the perils of a growing urban landscape, the film set new expectations and standards that spurred a thematic template few boxing films of significance would neglect as the subject gained momentum in the following decades. Adapted from Francis Wallace’s 1936 serialized Saturday Evening Post story of the same name, screenwriter Seton I. Miller preserves the drama of its source while elevating the script to a morality play on how boxing makes money for other people. Bogart and Robinson’s felonious creeps serve as incessant reminders that fighters are little more than cash machines for lowlifes. But bad guys have problems too, and this was Kid Galadad’s primary attraction. If audiences wanted to watch a fighter, they’d have gone to the fights. They’re here for the bad guys. Warner Bros. fast garnered its repu-

three years, the die was cast and the public was hooked. Fight-fixing figured largely in the mix and New York District Attorney Frank Hogan’s 1946 crusade to clean up racketeering in the game only increased demand for ever-more exploitative narratives in life and art. Under director Michael Curtiz’s severe lens, by turns bleached in light and shrouded in shadow, the powerhouse trio turns a ten-cent crime yarn into a drama of pointed, if sometimes ambiguous, morality. As archetypes in a modest parable, Kid Galahad’s characters embody blunt, psychological paradigms wherein fate and motivation are as varied as the individuals that wheel from altruistic to venal to a confused, inchoate blend of the two. The managers of several boxing films to follow would be chewed alive by Robinson’s Nick Donati. Course, truculent and almost heartless, he maintains a sloppy, self-serving moral compass. And while self-serving morality isn’t altogether moral, Robinson brings tenderness to a role for whom, per the pulpy novelisation, ‘the price was the important thing.’ In this business, a guy can’t afford to be forgiving. Donati’s vindictive streak stems from navigating an amicable but uneasy relationship with the mob while keeping his good eye on Fluff. A diamond in a mine of vice and foil to the manager’s natural proclivity toward corruption, she is reductively summmed up in the novel’s cast as having ‘dubbed the kid with a kiss and sent him out to get his lumps.’ The shrewdest of the lot, Fluff’s independence lies in polar opposition to the cheap molls and kept women that populated the nascent film noir, probably because she’s not kept at all. Author and podcaster Karina Longworth characterises Bette Davis’s relegation to an ‘eight’ by Hollywood beauty standards as having garnered her appeal among female filmgoers insecure with the endless string of tens to which audiences of both sexes had grown accustomed. With distinguished poise, professionally applied make-up, tailored wardrobes and

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Madonna-whore dichotomy altogether. Even a bemused Bogart had to admit it: ‘She scared the bejesus out of me.’ (Davis, who appeared with Bogart in her first film, Hobart Henley’s 1931 Bad Sister, found the actor crass, arrogant and churlish. As for Bogart, his intimidation was short-lived: ‘What she needs is a good screw from a man who knows how to give it.’) Davis’s transition didn’t happen overnight. In 1936, she accepted two roles in England, breaking her contract with Warner Bros. for what she hoped were greener pastures. The studio took legal action and the barrister representing Tack Warner told Davis she was ‘a naughty young lady’ before promptly sending her back to the States. When Davis asked if she was legally bound to accept any role the studio assigned her under contract ‘whether it is distasteful or cheap’, a retaliative Warner summarily cast her as a prostitute in Lloyd Bacon’s Marked Woman the same year Galahad was released. At twenty-eight, Davis was about to enjoy her second run as an ingénue. Returning to Hollywood in full-on diva mode, she studiously avoided appearing soft or forgiving on screen, and it is only by dint of Bogart and Robinson’s asperity that she doesn’t chew the scenery in characteristic fashion. A hotel suite fills with guests for a party that Fluff and Donati throw with the shrimpy two grand brought in from the thrown bout, prompting Fluff to remark, ‘We can swim after that splash.’ When a bellhop named Ward Guisenberry (Wayne Morris) is sent up to help with the drinks, his entrance assumes a tidal tug to the loins of every woman in the room. They caress his lapels in a frenzied blitzkrieg and smear his face with lipstick. But Donati’s amusement turns to rage upon hearing that his fighter just took that dive for a whopping $25,000 at the behest of Turkey Morgan. Just as he suspected. continued in the book

SMASH HIT

RACE, CRIME AND CULTURE IN BOXING FILMS

DAVID CURCIO

Armin Lear Press 20 September 2023 Softback, 426 pages 20 September 2023 9781956450804 RRP £19.99

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Smash Hit p9 EDITOR’S NOTE

America in the 1930s offered two ways of experiencing boxing: in the ring and in the movie house. Just as real-life boxers were learning to punch by the rules, cinema offered a way for studio boxers to flout them. In Smash Hit, fight expert David Curcio takes twenty boxing films to offer a hard-nosed exploration of how the genre held a bloody mirror to twentieth-century America’s most prominent social anxieties. What he reveals tells us something about the American public’s love affair with lowlifes and corruption.

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PAGE 10 | BOOKLAUNCH ISSUE 18 | RESCUING DEMOCRACY

THE CIVIC BARGAIN HOW DEMOCRACY SURVIVES

How to protect democracy from Tru

BROOK MANVILLE AND JOSIAH OBER

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Princeton University Press 19 September 2023 Hardcover 312 pages 9780691218601 RRP £25.00

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Brook Manville is an independent consultant who writes about politics, democracy, technology, and business. Previously a partner with McKinsey & Co. and an award-winning professor at Northwestern University, he is the author of The Origins of Citizenship in Ancient Athens (Princeton) and A Company of Citizens: What the World’s First Democracy Teaches Leaders About Creating Great Organizations (with Josiah Ober). Josiah Ober is the Constantine Mitsotakis Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the author of The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece and Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens (both Princeton), The Greeks and the Rational: The Discovery of Practical Reason, and other books.

The good news: democracy has the power to self-repair In September 1787, Dr. Benjamin Franklin emerged from the Pennsylvania statehouse. The summerlong Constitutional Convention, at which the Constitution of the United States of America was drafted, had just ended. He was confronted by Mrs. Elizabeth Powel, a prominent member of Philadelphia’s intellectual and social elite. Eager for Franklin’s take on the closeddoor deliberations, she asked, ‘Well, Doctor, what have we got? A republic or a monarchy?’ That is, would it be self-government by citizens or the rule of a boss? Franklin famously replied, ‘A republic—if you can keep it.’ It was both a promise and a warning. At first glance, this often-repeated story portrays the eighty-one-year-old scientist, diplomat and constitutional framer as a stern grandparent, surrendering keys to an inexperienced and perhaps irresponsible child. Franklin and his fellow ‘founding fathers’ were leaving the convention, about to hand over a masterpiece of governmental design to American citizens, first for ratification and then making it work. They just hoped their fellow citizens would be up to those challenges. But look again: Was it a masterpiece? The common answer has frequently been an unabashed ‘yes’: the US Constitution has been revered as both the source and most perfect embodiment of America’s democratic republic. But of the 70 delegates appointed by the 13 states, only 39 ultimately signed the document. Some of the most prominent of the founders had deep doubts about the viability of their collective enterprise. More recently, the landmark document has been a target of sceptical critique and source of disappointment. Many Americans now complain that the Constitution was fatally flawed from the beginning—in its vague and awkward language, elitist avoidance of majority rule, and authorship by slave-owning hypocrites. For these critics, it is no masterpiece that Franklin helped design; indeed, it is a mess.

Reframing pessimism

Negativity about the Constitution is part of a current trend of democratic pessimism. A generation ago, the collapse of the Soviet Union led to a wave of enthusiasm for democracy, and launched the spread of free and liberal governments around the world. Yet today, democratic systems everywhere are under pressure, polarised and struggling with both internal and external authoritarian challenges. The worry is that democracy is dying. Commentary across national and global media suggests that its demise may be inevitable. History offers a corrective. Yes, some democracies are faltering today and many others collapsed in the past. But four exceptionally well-documented and highly influential democratic experiments—classical Athens, republican Rome, British parliamentarianism and US constitutionalism—endured, or have continued to endure. What can be learned from these cases about how democracies can, at least sometimes, survive? Could historical insights be applied to help save today’s struggling democracies?

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Those questions launched this book. We began by turning current pessimism on its head. Instead of inquiring into the causes of democracy’s death, we looked to history’s long survivors for clues to democracy’s emergence, evolution and strategies for persistence. Ancient Athenian democracy lasted close to two hundred years; republican Rome twice that; and British parliamentary governance started early, developed slowly, but ever since the seventeenth century has evolved towards a democratic system. The United States’ constitutional government has held on through sharp partisan dissension and a bloody civil war for over two centuries. We asked ourselves how these systems of citizen self-government survived (or still survive) for so long: Is there some general pattern, some adaptive strategy, that enabled and sustained (even if unevenly) democracy across multiple generations? Can insight from comparative political history be harnessed to help renew modern democracy?

Democracy’s essence, rise and survival

To tackle those issues, we posed two more basic questions. First, what is democracy? What essentially has it meant to those who created and sustained democratic societies? Second, how does it come into being? Taking history as a guide to political theorizing, we concluded that democracy in its most basic sense means ‘no boss’. Democracy pertains when extensive, socially diverse bodies of citizens govern themselves, accepting no ruler except for one another. That is no mean feat, especially once societies grow beyond the tiny face-to-face communities that were the norm before the development of agriculture. Decision-making in any large organization is always difficult, but it is particularly complex when no individual or small group is in charge. A ‘bossless’ community will always struggle to make decisions that are sufficiently pleasing to enough people to be supported with action. Because choices must be made, and because they cannot please everyone, the outcome will never be perfect. By its very nature, democratic governance is indeed messy—but not necessarily chaotic. Decisions can be made and followed if citizens devise the right procedures. But even the best procedures are useless unless citizens bring the right mindset and behaviours to the task: working together as political equals who prioritise finding common ground in spite of differing preferences and interests. That is to say, democracy can succeed if and when it is understood as a fundamental bargain among free and equal citizens—an agreement to work together to defend the things we the citizens hold in common. Instead of viewing democracy as a static collection of laws and institutions, we reimagine it as an organic, living system— messy indeed, but also purposeful. It operates to include and bond many diverse people who choose the freedom to make their own decisions and live by what they, together, decide. Democracy as bossless self-governance

survives when citizens keep constructively and peacefully interacting and learning from one another, and when they reach for the benefits of freedom and shoulder the burdens of defending them. When they don’t, democracy fails, and before long once-free citizens find themselves answering to a boss. On the second question—how democracy arises—we drew again on the rich historical record of our four cases. We sought to honour the best scholarly interpretations of political development in each case while going beyond a focus on democratic leaders and revolutions. Standard histories often underappreciate the process of negotiation that follows when the fighting stops—or that avoids fighting altogether. The centrality of bargaining to democracy, to its emergence and persistence, is the major theme of our book.

The Civic Bargain and its essential conditions

Based on our analysis of historical cases, we contend that democracy is made possible and preserved over time by deal-making and compromises. Democracy usually must be fought for (bosses like being bosses) but also requires bargaining. To consolidate and sustain self-government, citizens must agree to a civic bargain. Historically, civic bargains of different kinds have been struck and revised by democracies; we describe four of them in our case studies. Whether it is a written document like the US Constitution, coherent body of laws and legal precedents, or unwritten set of norms, the civic bargain specifies who is a citizen, how decisions are made, and what citizens owe one another. It determines how the ‘gives and gets’— the benefits and costs of ruling together for the common good—are distributed. The civic bargain depends on and must in turn actively promote what we call the essential conditions of democracy—the conditions that are necessary for citizen self-governance. The seven conditions listed below are discussed in detail in chapter 1. They are elucidated in the historical case studies of chapters 2–5 and revisited in our summary of findings in chapter 6. 1. No Boss—except one another: citizens govern themselves, directly or through accountable representatives 2. Security and Welfare: ensure common safety, freedom from harm, and basic means of living as a common good for all 3. Citizenship Defined: formally specify who is a citizen, and what that means, including the extent of citizens’ equality, freedoms, and responsibilities 4. Citizen-Led Institutions: maintain institutions of decision-making and conflict resolution under the charge of members of the democracy 5. Good Faith Compromise: prefer common good compromise in political decisions over unilateral demands for perfection 6. Civic Friendship: act as “civic friends” with one another, not as enemies, smoothing the way to continued renegotiate in bargains the book

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POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY | BOOKLAUNCH ISSUE 18 | PAGE 11

THE ROOTS HitOF p9HUMAN ump, Johnson and other pathocrats Smash

DISCONNECTED

Introducing Andrzej Łobaczewski

Steve Taylor, of Leeds Beckett University, thinks politicians should be vetted for psychological health

After suffering under the Nazis during his early life, and under the Soviet rule of Stalin during his later years, Andrzej Łobaczewski studied the relationship between power and personality disorders. Łobaczewski was a Polish psychologist who during the Second World War belonged to the Polish resistance. After the war, he studied at Jagiellonian University in the last class to receive an education uninfluenced by Soviet ideology. As Poland came within the field of Soviet ideological censorship, psychiatry was restricted to Pavlovian concepts while other key ideas, such as genetics and psychopathy, were forbidden. Łobaczewski is not widely enough known today, but deserves to be revisited because of the light he can throw on the changing political character of our age—in the West but also globally. Łobaczewski understood that societies fluctuate between “happy times” and “unhappy times”. According to his analysis, happy times bring prosperity to some, but tend to block any acknowledgement by beneficiaries of how much they have benefited from the oppression or exploitation of others. As they advance, the privileged adopt thought processes that justify their well-being, and Łobaczewski speculated that this self-justification leads in turn to a cycle of national hysteria in which people lose the ability to differentiate between psychologically healthy and psychologically unhealthy leaders. He postulated that as societal hysteria becomes more acute, the population becomes susceptible to pathological egotists, whom he described as “spellbinders”. Such spellbinders bring the whole of society under their grip, giving rise to a form of government that Łobaczewski called “pathocracy”. Spellbinders—individuals with measurable personality disorders—typically hide behind an “ideological mask”, giving them a freedom of action, divorced from their own identities, that allows them to deploy any convenient belief system, including religion, to sustain their own supremacy. Such belief systems need not even be coherent, nor are they necessarily consistent, changing in line with the whims of the leader. The inconsistent public messages of 1984 provides an example of this, as does the flip-flopping of such leaders as Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. Łobaczewski argued that after coming to power, pathocratic leaders then root out the very people who have come to believe in them, usurping their own supporters in a series of showdowns. They also introduce measures which inflict suffering on some or all of their own people, and bring about injustices which can escalate into oppression and even genocide. To legitimise their excesses, pathocrats portray their own people as victims and provoke international conflict as a mechanism for building a sense of shared threat at home, which can only be withstood by their remaining in office and garnering ever-greater support. Donald Trump’s refusal to acknowledge defeat in 2020 and his continuing to garner massive popularity illustrate this phenomenon in our own time.

People with strong narcissistic and psychopathic traits, and with an extremely limited capacity for empathy and conscience, can be described as “hyper-disconnected”. The essential characteristic of such people is their extreme separateness and self-absorption. They are largely cut off from other people and from the world, and immersed in their own desires and ambitions. Hyper-disconnected people have a compulsive need to reinforce their own self-esteem by accumulating power and wealth, and gaining attention and admiration. They are happy to lie, to exploit and to deceive to achieve their goals. To them, other human beings are objects, valuable only to the extent of how useful they are to those wishing to exploit them. Not all leaders are hyper-disconnected. In DisConnected, I propose three different types of leaders: altruistic-idealistic, involuntary (which I divide into the meretricious and the privileged), and disconnected. But since the hyper-disconnected typically feel a strong desire for power and find it easy to attain, it is almost inevitable that they rise to the top. Hyper-disconnected people are attracted to other areas besides politics. They may become involved in criminality or gravitate to the corporate world. A fifteen-year longitudinal study found that at the top of most organisational hierarchies, earning significantly more money than others, were people with psychopathic and narcissistic traits. As the psychologist Robert Hare (author of Without Conscience) has written, psychopaths “are social predators and like all predators they are looking for feeding grounds. Wherever you get power, prestige and money, you will find them.” According to Andrzej Łobaczewski (see column to left), the transition to pathocracy—government by psychopaths—begins when someone with psychopathic traits emerges as a leader figure. While some members of the ruling class are appalled by him (it’s usually a him) and his acolytes, others find him charismatic, mistaking his impulsiveness for decisiveness, his narcissism for confidence, and his recklessness for fearlessness. Soon, other hyper-disconnected people attach themselves to the pathocrat, thinking they will gain power thereby. At the same time, more responsible and moral people resign or get ejected. Before long, the entire government is filled with people lacking in empathy and conscience. This happened in China with Xi Jinping and in the USA with Donald Trump, as the “adults in the room” gradually exited his administration, to be replaced by hardline loyalists. Arguably, a similar process occurred in the UK under Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, as moderate conservatives were replaced by hardline populists.

Psychological Vetting for Leadership Roles

In view of this, it seems absurd that there are no assessments for politicians. If you want to drive a car, you have to train and pass a test; but if you want to sit in the driving seat of a whole country, you simply have to woo voters. And all too often, it’s

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the most ruthless and narcissistic people who push themselves forward. For this reason, I argue in DisConnected that in a perfect world, all leaders, potential or actual, would undergo psychological assessment, to determine their suitability for power. This would include “observer ratings”, where applicants for high office are assessed by their peers, supervisors and co-workers. Psychologists would also examine the applicant’s life history, looking for evidence of empathy and compassion (or the reverse). Past acquaintances, former schoolteachers or university tutors could also be interviewed. Unfortunately, we do not live in an ideal world and such measures, if not modified very carefully, would themselves be oppressive, giving too much power to psychologists, effectively making them kingmakers and vulnerable to corruption and narcissism themselves. Vetting, in any case, smacks of Stalinism and would need voting through by politicians, and few politicians would vote in favour of their own potential exclusion.

CRUELTY AND HOW CONNECTION CAN HEAL THE WORLD

STEVE TAYLOR

Iff Books, 28 April 2023 Softback, 288 pages 9781803410302 RRP £16.99

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Reforming Democracy

What remedial measures are there? In Ancient Athens, decision-makers, selected by sortition (random selection by lot), only served for a limited period. This ensured that ordinary people were represented in government and safeguarded against corruption and bribery. The Athenians balanced the risk of handing responsibility to incompetent people by ensuring that decisions were made by groups, or boards, just as we (mostly) entrust legal decisions to lay juries. Athenian democracy was direct, however, rather than representative. Political decisions—such as the election of military leaders, the nomination of magistrates and whether to go to war—were made at assemblies where thousands of (male) citizens would gather. The ancient Athenians also practised a system of annual ostracism. Whether such measures could be adopted today is moot, but in recent years, many political thinkers have looked again at sortition in. In 2014, Alexander Guerrero, professor of philosophy at Rutgers University, published an influential paper advocating what he called lottocracy as an alternative to representative democracy. In this system, government is undertaken by “single-issue legislatures”, assemblies that focus on specific issues such as agriculture or health care. Members of the legislatures are chosen by lot and make decisions after taking expert advice. The prior question is whether there are merits in a reversion to direct democracy. The attraction of direct democracy is that it constrains the individual with a system of checks and balances, making government less hierarchical and more cooperative, and less attractive to power-seekers The human race has for too long suffered at the hands of psychopathic and narcissistic political leaders. Pathocracy has created, and continues to create, immeasurable suffering and we need to resist it. Power is a seductive and dangerous commodity and it is time to ration it, to stop it falling into the wrong hands.

POLITICAL PONEROLOGY ANDRZEJ ŁOBACZEWSKI

Red Pill / Quantum Future 2022, Softback, 486 pages 9798358582637 RRP £21.00

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PAGE 12 | BOOKLAUNCH ISSUE 18 | AGRICULTURALISM This short book is a critical response to an environmental and political movement known as ecomodernism, and more specifically to a purported ‘rebooting’ of the food and farming system currently popular within it. Ecomodernism got going in the 2000s with early salvos such as Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus’s 2004 essay ‘The Death of Environmentalism’, and guru of 1960s Californian countercultural eco-tech Stewart Brand’s book Whole Earth Discipline. Brand’s subtitle neatly captures ecomodernism’s core tenets: ‘Why dense cities, nuclear power, genetically modified crops, restored wildlands, radical science and geoengineering are essential.’ Other ecomodernist waymarks included British writer Mark Lynas’s book The God Species (2011) and An Ecomodernist Manifesto (2015), co-authored by all four of the aforementioned, along with others, which

SAYING NO TO A FARM-FREE FUTURE THE CASE FOR AN ECOLOGICAL FOOD SYSTEM AND AGAINST MANUFACTURED FOODS

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CHRIS SMAJE

Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 29 June 2023 Softback, 208 pages 9781915294166 RRP £14.99

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Dan Barber: “An indictment — as unremitting as it is undeniable — that cuts through the jargon-filled, technoworshipping agricultural futurists who promise silver-bullet fixes for having your cake and eating it too.”

The Value of Luck p14

Dougald Hine: “A much-needed book — and Chris Smaje is exactly the person to write it. He builds his case with care and humility.”

ism is extremely challenging, as is any realistic attempt to meet present crises. It becomes slightly less challenging once it’s clear that we can’t techno-fix our way out of the crises and we can’t protect nature by alienating ourselves from it—in other words, once it’s clear that the fundamental changes we need to make are political, social and ecological, not technological. To the best of my abilities, that’s what I try to show in this book. I’ll say a little more about ecomodernism, Monbiot and me. But first it might be helpful to give a brief precis and appraisal of his Regenesis to establish some of the themes with which we’ll be concerned in later chapters of this book.

Considering Regenesis

Regenesis begins with a delightful account of an orchard in Oxford that its author helped to plant and, contained in its soil, of some of the amazing small creatures whose com-

Bring back the small farm: the case against George Monbiot’s mod-extremism made a strong play for the profligacy and inefficiency of pre-industrial foragers and farmers. To this list can now be added Regenesis (2022), the recent book by the Guardian columnist George Monbiot, in which Monbiot embraces what might be termed ecomodernism’s classic package—nuclear power, biotech, rewilding and urbanism— while adding a new tool to the box in the form of industrially synthesised food. At the time of my writing this, Monbiot is embarked on a European speaking tour to promote a campaign called Reboot Food under the auspices of an ecomodernist organisation, RePlanet. In Regenesis he approvingly references an organisation called RethinkX, which frames manufactured food as a new production model which it calls Food-as-Software, predicting it will be ‘the most consequential disruption of agriculture in history’. There seems to be a lot of “re-ing’ going on, and a lot of enthusiasm for disruption. Yet, as I see it, the fanfare over manufactured food is little more than a revamp of the existing industrial food system, re-packaging it in a doomed attempt to rescue business as usual for corporations

Saying No to a Farm-Free p12 READERS’ COMMENTS Paul Kingsnorth: “A convincing rejection of the ‘ecomodern’ theology currently being promoted by many prominent environmentalists”

and wealthy consumers that’s as non-disruptive to them as possible. For sure, the current global food and farming system is frozen with numerous fatal errors, so I can see the attraction of a reboot. But pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del on millennia of complex human ecological adaptation may be one of those ill-considered system fixes that only makes the crash permanent. Indeed, all this digital metaphorising of the food system is symptomatic of problems within it caused precisely by too many inappropriate technical upgrades; a bit like the new operating system that you don’t need and didn’t ask for but can’t dispense with even though it does a worse job. The reboot food agenda neglects more usefully disruptive and more promising efforts to rethink the food system from the bottom up by small-scale farmers and activists under the umbrella of food sovereignty, agro-ecology and the local food

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webs rebelling against the monopoly platforms of the industrial food chain. In critiquing food ecomodernism and the reboot food agenda, I focus above all on Monbiot’s Regenesis because it’s probably the most detailed and accessible ecomodernist treatment of the issue, and also because it has garnered high praise from illustrious campaigners and influencers, being described on its jacket blurb as ‘visionary and rigorous and practicable’. In this book I show that it’s not practicable and, on certain crucial matters, it’s not rigorous. As to the vision thing, it’s not entirely clear to me from Regenesis what Monbiot’s social vision really is. But he does provide some clues, and I try to pursue them. In these pages I also sketch an alternative vision to ecomodernism, which, with a nod to Stewart Brand, I’d style: ‘Why energy restraint, diverse mixed farming for local needs, wildlands, human-centred science, popular smallholder democracy, a predominantly distributed rural population, and keystone ecology are essential.’ As I see it, business-as-usual is not an option, and nor is the revamped businessas-usual of the ecomodernists. A global shift to agrarian local-

plex lifecycles, so vital to the wellbeing of larger creatures such as us, scientists are only just beginning to unravel. It moves on to a consideration of complex systems theory and its ideas about feedbacks, resilience and redundancy, before—correctly, in my opinion—concluding that our modern economic and agricultural systems are lacking in resilience. There are some sympathetic remarks here about small-scale farmers, but the sympathy thins as the book proceeds. Perhaps that’s because next up is a strong and largely convincing critique of the numerous ways in which modern agriculture has poisoned the environment, which doesn’t, however, adequately distinguish between different kinds of farmer and the larger forces pressing them to do as they do. Hence Monbiot’s rather less convincing critique of farmers as the most powerful (even ‘mafia-like’) people in the British countryside, disrupting the lives of others who moved there in pursuit of the ‘bucolic idyll’. To my mind, this misses the truth that the most powerful people in the countryside aren’t farmers, or even people who necessarily live in it, but the corporate, governmental and global geopolitical actors whose decisions shape prices for such things as food, energy, land and labour— prices that are driven by the

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AGRICULTURALISM | BOOKLAUNCH ISSUE 18 | PAGE 13 urban structuring of the modern world. In Regenesis, Monbiot has a habit of imputing dysfunctions to farming that are really dysfunctions of the wider political and economic system within which it operates, which is curious in view of the eloquent critiques he’s made of that system in other writings. The critique of agriculture then segues into another one concerning ‘agricultural sprawl’, that is, agriculture’s excessive global land take. Avoiding this sprawl— ‘land sparing’—is, as we shall see in Chapter 3, a key concept for Monbiot. It’s important because agriculture threatens natural habitats and the wild organisms that make their homes in them. The worst offender when it comes to sprawl is livestock farming, which increasingly becomes the villain as the book progresses, closely followed by just about every other kind of farming. In this early part of the book, Monbiot discusses the concept of a ‘Global Standard Diet’. Eating habits have converged worldwide in recent times, involving a narrowing of dietary diversity around a handful of crops eaten directly or indirectly. This, he rightly says, mutually creates and is created by a ‘Global Standard Farm’. He might usefully have added the concept of the ‘Global Standard Consumer’, and asked in turn how this creature has been made politically, and how it might get unmade. Indeed, there’s an unexamined consumerist framing throughout the book that tends to assume that existing market mechanisms and the demand-pull of urban consumers will continue on their merry way, even as our familiar world crumbles in the face of climate change and collapsing ecosystems. As has often been said, it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. But it’s worth trying to imagine the end of capitalism, because on its present trajectory it certainly will spell the end, if not of the world, then at least of the economic and political world system that frames so many of our social assumptions. In subsequent chapters, Monbiot visits various projects and people in the UK who are trying to improve farming and the food system. This includes farmers working to make their practices less damaging to soils and wildlife, and a foodbank near Monbiot’s home. The foodbank visit provides the backdrop for some arguments about the need for cheap food to feed people in poverty and about the impossibility of feeding sufficient people through local food systems, due to the ‘simple mathematical’ fact of humanity’s predominantly urban domicile. The importance of maths and numbers is a recurrent theme in Regenesis. Monbiot wants us to be ‘obsessed by numbers’, and by crop yields in particular, and he laments that not enough people in the local food movement ‘care about the maths’. This neglects the local food movement’s critique of the maths around agricultural yields, overproduction and urbanism and the way it gets politically deployed, which I discuss in later chapters. In Chapter 2. I

also highlight the way that Monbiot’s own maths is unreasonably skewed in favour of manufactured food. That brings us to the denouement of Regenesis. In Chapters 7 and 8, Monbiot makes the case respectively for farm-free manufactured food, and against pastoral mythologies that he believes still hold people in their grip with notions that farming and rural life are good, while city life is bad. There’s a lot to agree with in Regenesis, but there’s an ecomodernist nub to it that I’ll argue is deeply problematic. It’s based on unfeasibly energy-hungry high technology, a fierce anti-ruralism and an apparent commitment to an anti-ecological future for humanity as high-energy urban consumers. I say ‘apparent’ because, as I mentioned earlier, Monbiot doesn’t spell out his social vision or say what he thinks the people who have been moved on from rural livelihoods and supposedly outmoded agricultures—which potentially numbers in the billions worldwide—should do or where they should go. His heavy emphasis on rewilding and manufactured food seems consistent with his associates at RePlanet’s vision for the year 2100 in which 90 per cent of the population lives in cities, yet he leavens his approach with an element of praise for farmers engaged in more nature-friendly forms of production like agro-ecology. Indeed, he has insisted that manufactured food and agro-ecology are complementary, dismissed accusations of partisanship on his part against the latter as a myth, and stated that he doesn’t support the curtailment of peasant farming or relocation of peasant farmers. I’m not convinced. True, Regenesis entertains some doubts and qualifications, and some occasional praise for small farmers and agro-ecological approaches. But these don’t drive the narrative in the way that its ‘farm-free’ case against farming, ruralism and localism does. Monbiot has, after all, written that the problem with intensive agriculture ‘is not the adjective. It’s the noun’, and suggested that manufactured food spells the ‘end of most agriculture’ and will replace not only farmed animals but also farmed plants. He has professed a disruptive ‘Counter-Agricultural Revolution’, asserted the general incompatibility of all farmed landscapes with wildlife and underlined that this also applies to the agro-ecological peasant farming represented by the food sovereignty movement, which he criticises for not emphasising the need not to farm. Heralding manufactured food in a 2020 presentation at the Oxford Real Farming Conference—Britain’s annual gathering for the agro-ecologically inclined—he said that the conference ‘gives me the sense of a typewriter convention circa 1970 talking about their expansion plans’. The Reboot Food campaign that he has fronted invites readers to imagine rewilding three-quarters of the

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world’s farmland and producing the entire world’s protein (presumably they mean for human consumption) on an area the size of Greater London. And Monbiot’s wider appraisal of the food sovereignty movement in Regenesis is effectively ‘nice try, but … maths’. These don’t paint a picture of someone entertaining much of a future for agricultures of any kind, agro-ecological or otherwise. That sense is compounded by Monbiot’s lack of serious engagement with agrarian localist critics and other voices from alternative agriculture. In my case, for example, he has responded only with a handful of dismissive tweets, some of which I cite later in the book in the absence of any more capacious debating material to work with. He has accused other critics of misunderstanding, divisiveness and wrongly pointing the finger at him for trying to solve the environmental crises threatening the very existence of peasant farmers. This reveals a technological, top-down solutionism and a misplaced urbanism that I examine critically in later chapters. As to the accusations of divisiveness, I find these unconvincing in the light of Monbiot’s incautious remarks about agro-ecology cited above, but no doubt opinions will vary on that. What seems harder to dispute is that if Monbiot’s proposals in Regenesis and the reboot food agenda were fully implemented, they would involve the expropriation of a lot of small-scale and traditional farmers. Small farms constitute the majority of farms worldwide and, by some estimates, holdings under two hectares occupy up to 40 per cent of agricultural land areas in lower-income countries. As I discuss in Chapter 5, it’s hard to square a farm-free future with a pro-peasant one. So while it always makes sense to aim for ‘steel man’ rather than ‘straw man’ critiques, I think it also makes sense to identify genuine divergences of worldview. To my mind, what I’ll call Monbiot’s agro-ecological ambiguity seems ultimately rhetorical. It veils the extremism of his proposals effectively to abolish agriculture, livelihood autonomy and ruralism, without giving agro-ecology its due. Plenty of people have readily embraced Monbiot’s farm-free narrative, but there have also been dissenting voices less persuaded by its lustre. Over-represented in these latter ranks are people with some expertise in the food and farming system, who too often have been painted by the new narrative’s proponents as self-interested ‘industry representatives’. Since the manufactured food sector is a veritable goldrush of corporate speculators trying to get a piece of the action, it’s easy to bounce the accusation right back. I’d suggest a rule of engagement might be for all protagonists to try avoiding such ad-hominem arguments. One sceptical correspondent to Monbiot’s newspaper, the Guardian, distinguished between what he called

‘George mark 1—Eco George’ and the ‘mark 2 version—Tech Bro George’. I think there’s something to this. There are resonances between parts of Monbiot’s programme and the disruptive Silicon Valley mindset pressed by the likes of Peter Thiel, who famously proclaimed his 10x rule that new business ventures must dominate their whole sector, being ten times better than the closest alternative, essentially through creating and monopolising the platforms on which they’re based. Other resonances include things like separation from nature, escape from biological limitation, fetishism of hard facts over contested meanings, and binary framing of choices (either farming or wildlife …). While Monbiot imagines manufactured food as a kind of local cottage industry, corporate interest in it seems more focused on its 10x possibilities— what digital analyst Douglas Rushkoff calls ‘going meta’ by virtualising whole industries and monopolising them at previously unattainable levels—albeit in implausible ways that ultimately collide with physical and biological reality. On that last note, the real problem with manufactured food is not that it challenges more familiar styles of farming but that it doesn’t challenge them. Those familiar styles use sunlight as their main energy input, which costs nothing, whereas manufactured food uses generated electricity. In the coming world of energy constraint, that makes it untenable, quite apart from its various other drawbacks—which means, given the various problems with existing agriculture that Monbiot rightly highlights, we need to go back and look more carefully at agrarian localism, agro-ecology and the food justice movement, not as rhetorical counterfoils to an industrial techno-fix but as plausible political paths towards a viable planetary ecology. Part of the appeal of Regenesis lies in its extensive citation of sources, which has prompted some readers to see the book as a meticulous work of even-handed scholarship that’s emerged unmotivated from a solid evidential base. Monbiot has pushed this line, claiming to have been ‘as empirical as possible’, and even apparently to have embraced ‘empiricism’. I look critically at his evidence throughout much of this book, and briefly at the rather naive philosophy of knowledge underlying it. When it comes to big questions about how people ought to live and how societies ought to organise themselves, ‘the evidence’ is rarely unambiguous and many issues can’t be settled by evidence at all. The bottom line is that what somebody advocates in a book isn’t necessarily the right path to take, however many academic citations it has and however much its author insists that all other paths are in error. continued in the book

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PAGE 14 | BOOKLAUNCH Political PonerologyISSUE p1118 | ACTION ADVENTURE

Kebab shop or laundrette? How international crime Saying No to a Farm-Free p12 handles dirty money THE VALUE OF LUCK MARTIN VENNING Matador 19 September 2023 Paperback, 432 pages 9781805140337 RRP £8.99

The Value of Luck p14

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The Value of Luck came from an idea about morality in international business, where what may be illegal in one country may not be illegal in another. It was a challenging narrative to set out, because few of the characters in the story regard themselves as felons, despite engaging in a range of highly organised criminal activities. As we know, much of today’s crime, wherever it may occur in the world, is computer-based fraud of one sort or another, and many of the perpetrators recognise fraud as opportunist rather than villanous. In The Value of Luck the main character sees herself as a serious businesswoman who craves the respect due to anyone running a legitimate business, even though her father had a more relaxed attitude to commerce. As in many cases, the investigators in this novel begin their enquiries by addressing a more basic offence and find themselves sucked into a series of linked crimes which take their work into a much larger dimension.

MARTIN VENNING

So-called low-level crime in our communities has international ramifications, not least in the creative ways that felons find of moving money and the proceeds of their activities across international borders As a result, the forces of law and order face a continuing battle trying to catch up and gather the evidence necessary to apprehend villains and secure convictions. The problem is that the forces for good have limited tools and resources at their disposal, and inadequate rule books about how they can operate—a topic explored in the International Monetary Fund’s book Countering the Financing of Terrorism, featured in the last issue of Booklaunch. Law-enforcement agencies therefore have to interpret their work methods with a degree of flexibility, mixing old methods with new, upgrading their intelligence capability and profiling criminals in the attempt to anticipate their actions, all of which involves collaboration between

crime fighters and those committed to state security. Behind this lies a moral dimension which is hard to calibrate. As the IMF book demonstrated, what is legal in one country may not be legal in another, and as law-enforcement methods develop and different agencies learn to work to common standards, so perpetrators have to reassess their methods and goals, to ensure that the efforts they put in are sufficiently rewarding. My latest novel, The Value of Luck, sets out just such a problem, where an international business with a range of cash-generating activities and investments seeks to legitimise its activities in international markets to ensure its long-term profitability. The book focusses on Ciller Terzili, a young Turkish woman thrown into the maelstrom of her father’s business when he falls into a depression after most of her family are killed in an accident.

Terzili’s story is one of trust and disappointment, as those she confides in let her down, forcing her to become more self-reliant and establishing herself as a leading figure in the Europe’s criminal underworld. In spite of her constant search for security, however, her illegal business dealings have the effect of raising her profile, and her trail of highly profitable criminal enterprises brings her to the attention of Phil Marshall, an officer with the UK’s National Crime Agency. Marshall becomes obsessed with her, not just because of the social and economic cost of her crimes but because his ability to bring down an international crime syndicate will be an essential step in the advancement of his career. Inevitably, the forces of law and crime are destined to collide. In the extract that follows, from the start of the book, Marshall briefs representatives of GCHQ, HM Revenue & Customs and the Cabinet Office.

“Let me summarise the present position as we understand it. Ciller Terzili—that’s a woman, by the way—is a Turkish citizen. She runs an international trading company, Turhan International, nominally based in Istanbul but with representative offices in five centres across the world. She is single and a ‘hands-on’ manager with an enviable grasp of detail on commercial matters. Turhan trades in virtually anything and everything, specialising in high-growth markets from commodities to pharmaceuticals. They are pretty difficult to track as they set up shell companies and single project joint ventures in places where either no one takes an interest or where they are untraceable via nominees. We got close to them about six months ago when they set up a major arms deal for the opposition in Mali, which for some strange reason they routed through Northern Cyprus via a single entity. It was sloppy, by her standards, providing a short trail back to her Istanbul operations. The guy who set it up, Gemlik Canecale, earned Terzili’s displeasure for not covering his tracks so well and got involved in an unfortunate diving accident off the coast near Bodrum, shortly before we were able to issue an international arrest warrant. Unfortunately, with him went the evidence we needed. “As you will have seen from the photographs, Terzili is considered visually appealing, perhaps attractive to some—so she’s high-profile and smart. We think she is running the day-to-day aspects of the business with, or possibly on behalf of, her father, Kerim. He had five kids. Four were pretty feckless and spent their time wasting their daddy’s money. Ciller stood out because she liked making it and didn’t give a shit about who she was prepared to step on to do it. She had an expensive education in Switzerland, but she’s also smart in a streetwise way. Although she works hard, she plays hard too. She is high-profile because she supports a number of charitable causes, including helping to

fund Syrian refugee camps. Her commercial activities are less principled, however. There is anecdotal evidence of widespread below-the-line weapons trades across the Caucasus region and beyond. The supplies come from Turkey, Bulgaria and Ukraine, where her company has known agents and supporters. “Intelligence suggests she is developing a new partnership to cultivate emerging markets, with North Africa thought to be a priority. This is particularly troublesome because potential clients will only be interested in procuring weapons they cannot acquire from state patrons, which means she will be looking to transfer restricted products, technologies or embargoed materials. That’s the big picture, but at this point, it is still conjecture. From our immediate point of view, Terzili has connections to a number of operations closer to home, linked to criminal activity. Some are not that significant yet, such as procuring women for the sex trade via a network of nightclub partners, and facilitating people trafficking into the UK. The family have dabbled in cocaine dealing from time to time but given the falling street prices their activities are not considered to be a threat for now. So, although they are players in these games, they are by no means market leaders. It is their more brazen operations that are of more concern, as they seem to demonstrate a consistency of approach—taking control of the market for doner kebabs through a nominee franchise, Izmir Barbeque, for example, which is estimated to sell one in four kebabs sold here, from a standing start two years ago. The ‘Izmir’ shops tend to be staffed by illegal immigrants and operate as latenight adman centres for fencing drugs and stolen merchandise. Dealing in the theft and export of high-performance cars to parts of the Middle East and Africa seems to be a growing area of business based on some of our most recent interceptions. “But why should we be interested right now? Because we believe their core

trades are fuelling a new spike in violent crime across the country. It seems they are becoming a major service provider to the serious criminal fraternity, thereby helping them to launder millions of pounds earned from robberies and extortion rackets. Evidently, the Terzilis have hit upon a way of making their money disappear with their active support, which means they are getting it back in some way we have yet to discover and, like any other investments, probably with interest. “We have circumstantial evidence that suggests Turhan has taken delivery of large sums of cash in recent months—so large, in fact, that there has either been a discrepancy in the reporting of major thefts or some of the money relates to crimes committed over the past two years that the perpetrators have not known how to clean.” At that moment, a colleague entered the room and passed a note to Marshall. As he read it, the Revenue man took the chance to break Marshall’s commentary. “How much?” “We can’t be sure, but it looks like it’s in the tens of millions and we have no idea what has happened to it, so we need another line of attack. Remember our aim is primarily about recovering the lost wealth. If we are able to secure prosecutions along the way, that is a bonus. We need to establish whether Kerim or Ciller is running the show, but they’ve got some legit investments in the UK, some of the best real-estate in London plus some interesting private equity in new, rising high-growth start-ups including a rural fibre provider, Communi-Kate, plus HeadingtonMeds, the company that patented the new virus jab and the Flit Hydrogen microcar and others. Interestingly, Ciller Terzili does have one major trading activity in the UK where she is not just a passive investor, Global Bus, a luxury international travel coach operation, running daily services from London to Istanbul with callingin points in continued the book

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LITERATURE VERSUS CINEMA | BOOKLAUNCH ISSUE 18 | PAGE 15

QUIET ON THE All not so quiet on the Western Front ALL WESTERN FRONT

Andrew Apostolou considers film director Edward Berger’s handling of Germany’s classic anti-war novel Turning books into films has been a staple of cinema since its early days. For uncomplicated fiction, the process is easy, as the James Bond series illustrates. For more sophisticated prose, the endeavour is demanding. Distilling hundreds of pages into a couple of hours of screentime means cutting characters and scenes without losing the essence of the text, its psychological tensions or its moral messages. Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front has been made into a film three times. The first, in 1930, won two Academy Awards (Oscars) and was the first Best Picture winner to be based on a novel. A British-American adaptation made for TV in 1979 won a Golden Globe and an Emmy. Last year, the first-ever German version came out, and carried away nine BAFTAs and four Academy Awards. The book, originally serialised in one of Berlin’s leading newspapers in 1928 and published in 1929 as Im Westen nichts Neues (literally: “Nothing new in the west”), is one of Germany’s most powerful literary critiques of the vanity of war fever. It examines how young Germans, falling over themselves to fight for the Fatherland in the Great War, are destroyed psychologically and not just physically in the trenches—a portrayal of such disenchantment that the Nazis banned and burned copies of the book when they came to power. Remarque’s novel exposes the reader to a series of processes in which war turns people into animals and exposes their vaunted German education as worthless. The main character, Paul Bäumer, calls his schooling “junk” (Kram in German)—an invalidation reflected in how easily German civilians accept the nonsense of official war reports, and the excesses of military propaganda. When Paul returns on leave, one of his father’s friends, a beer-garden general, informs him that soldiers are too close to the action to understand the war, and that only non-combatants such as himself get the whole picture. Remarque, always detached in his narrative tone, does not comment on this widely shared presumption but merely presents it and lets it speak for itself. He treats Paul’s death the same way. Although sparse in his details, he documents accurately how as 1918 proceeds, the soldiers stop fighting, lose their faith in victory and, by the summer of 1918, come to understand that Germany has lost. Instead of building to a climax, he then allows the story, and Paul’s life, to fade away. With talk of armistice in the autumn, Paul feels isolated and aimless, and is found, in October 1918, face down “as though sleeping”, with “an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come”. We now learn the meaning of the book’s title: the German war diary on the day of Paul’s death reports “Im Westen nichts Neues”— nothing much happening over there—as if reinforcing the irrelevance of life. The playing down of melodrama is what gives the book its strength, and is crucial in conveying the spirit of Remarque’s work. That’s a challenge, because today’s films, or today’s audiences, require action as never before. In his 1930 film, Lewis

Milestone invented an ending that was more dramatic than the book’s but still loyal to its message: drawing on a passage in which Remarque mentions butterflies in front of the trenches, Paul reaches for a butterfly, only to be shot by a French sniper. His life has been pointless. As has the war. The 2022 film, funded by Netflix and directed by Edward Berger, takes Remarque’s understatement and discards it. Everything that had been implied gets magnified. The personal dramas, the focus of the book, are replaced with special effects. Instead of honouring Remarque’s modesty, Berger emulates Saving Private Ryan (1998) with spectacular, gruesome, blood-soaked, mud-drenched combat. There is also a trace of Gunnery Sergeant Hartman from Full Metal Jacket (1987) when a German lieutenant tells troops travelling to the front that their rifles must be as “clean as the thighs of the Blessed Virgin.” The tone is more than wrong, it is anachronistic. Big cinema is not how Remarque thought. Anachronistic also is the subplot invented by the film that moves the ending of the action from October to Armistice Day on November 11, and which adds one final German attack, turning Paul into the last casualty on the Western Front. The attack is a falsity, as is the significance of a date which was etched into British memory but for Germans was just one catastrophe among many—a day to be forgotten. Focusing on November 11 makes a German story into one that is culturally British. It was Admiral Sir Rosslyn Wemyss, the First Sea Lord, who suggested that hostilities cease at 1100 hours on the 11th day of the 11th month; and it is Britain, not Germany, that falls silent every year at that precise moment, in mourning for the war dead. Perhaps most egregious is the conversion of the novel into a hapless apologia for German nationalism which treats the Germans as the victims of civilian interference and French intransigence, rather than as victims of their own militaristic vacuities. The film takes us to German Supreme Army Command on November 7,

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1918 where Matthias Erzberger, the political head of the German delegation to the armistice negotiations, demands that the generals end the war. “Every minute we waste talking here, another soldier dies,” Erzberger pleads, hurrying the story into a hammy race against time, before trying to agree terms at Compiègne with haughty Maréchal Ferdinand Foch and his silent British allies. Erzberger asks Foch for fairness, warning against a peace that the Germans will find too hard to take; Foch ignores him. The portrait of Foch is stereotypical, drawing on the arrogant, foppish Frenchmen of Shakespeare’s Henry V; while French soldiers burn a friend of Paul alive with flame throwers before shooting him, their commander strokes his moustache and fusses about the freshness of his croissants. The greatest betrayal of the novel is the service the film renders to German nationalism and victimhood. It blames Erzberger for Germany’s signing of an unjust armistice, a depiction that echoes his vilification by German nationalists as a traitor and his assassination in the Black Forest in 1921 (portrayed brilliantly in the 1979 Granada production Gossip From the Forest, based on Thomas Keneally’s 1975 historical novel). That notion of the 1918 truce as a treacherous civilian initiative is false and entirely absent from Remarque’s novel. It was instead a part of the German Right’s Dolchstoßlegende (“stab in the back legend”). By making the civilian Erzberger responsible for Germany’s surrender, the film accidentally confirms him as the scapegoat of nationalist fantasy. In reality, the German army wanted a truce; Hindenburg himself instructed Erzberger to accept the Allies’ demands. Remarque felt sorry for his fellow soldiers but had no great warmth for a Germany that had betrayed its youth and slaughtered them on the altar of its own pompous self-regard. Instead, we have a film that turns its back on Remarque’s great novel and gives credence instead, whether intentionally or not, to the very ideas and self-pity that he opposed.

ERICH MARIA REMARQUE TRANSLATION: BRIAN MURDOCH Vintage 1996 Softback, 224 pages 9780099532811 RRP £9.99

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ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Andrew Apostolou is an historian. He has written about military affairs, the Holocaust, and the Middle East. Educated in London at Mill Hill, he has a BA in Modern History from Cambridge University, an MSc in Logic and Scientific Method from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a DPhil from Oxford University.

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PAGE 16 | BOOKLAUNCH ISSUE 18 | FEMINIST BIOGRAPHY

Wifedom

both used the title “1984”, and Orwell may indeed have hushed up his alleged plagiarism of O’Shaughnessy’s unspectacular poem, but the level of his ambition so outpaces hers that it’s hard to see what he had to gain. There is, besides, clear evidence that Orwell worked his way towards the title, because his first draft carried the title 1980 and the second 1982. Funder’s hypothesising isn’t backed up. A reader of Booklaunch, bothered by Wifedom, confided to us that she found the book confusing and annoying and couldn’t work out Funder’s point of view. “She makes things up—about, for example, the reasons for Eileen’s not getting a first-class degree at Oxford, and the assumption that Eileen must have been devastated by her failure. This relentless speculation makes the book neither biography nor fiction. I found its unreliability particularly annoying. “I was also bothered by the assumptions she made about the Orwells’ marriage, making Eileen seem like a perpetual victim, but without any evidence to show that this is how she felt. Eileen may well have enjoyed rural domesticity, editing and typing Orwell’s writing and discussing ideas. Sounds OK to me. “Others have suggested that Orwell’s writing improved once he was married and that Eileen should have received credit for this; perhaps she did, in private. But this is a very common experience—that one partner in a relationship backs up the other—without its being contentious that the partner in support required public recognition or felt cheated about not having got it.” Our reader adds that she enjoyed learning about Eileen’s experiences but felt that too little was said about the historical and societal context. “Eileen wanted to be married. If she had chosen to divorce or separate, her family would have backed her up, but she chose to stay. Orwell wanted to be a writer and was wholly focused on achieving that aim. (He also didn’t want anyone writing his biography, an objection that Funder ignores.) “So I was not impressed with Funder whingeing about her own motherload. Besides, it’s hard to sympathise with her privileged life and her “great” architect husband when she is distressed about finding the exit to the car park and getting her son to the orthodontist. “I liked her even less when I watched her being interviewed on YouTube: very expensive clothes, high-maintenance hair and make-up, and rather smug. (I’m so deep). I decided I definitely didn’t want to be her friend.” And that is the case against—that, and the fact that there is no index. The case

away at the front, fighting the fascists. Here in Barcelona, O’Shaughnessy faced a far worse threat than the fascists: Stalin, in Moscow, wanted to liquidate his supposed anti-fascist allies—the Trotskyites and Anarcho-Syndicalists of POUM and its sister party, the International Labour Party—and it was only a matter of time before his communists reached POUM’s base and took everyone and everything away. She was already surrounded by spies, some known to her, some not. When not dealing with memoranda from their commandant, the Belgian Georges Kopp, O’Shaughnessy spent her time in the POUM office typing up the notes that Orwell had sent her, describing the boredom of life in the dugouts. And when Stalin’s thugs did turn up, it was only her presence of mind that enabled her to squirrel away the most important and incriminating documents. She was also able to warn Orwell to escape, when he eventually arrived back in Barcelona, after having taken a bullet in the throat. In doing so she saved his life. For that, at least, he remembered her. Otherwise, according to Funder, he regarded her as little more than his typist, a little person, to be forgotten about when younger, more attractive gals hove into view. Out of this, Funder constructs two primary complaints: one with the sort of husband that Orwell was, and one with the sort of writer, both arming her for an assault on “the patriarchy” and the abuses that men are able to get away with. There’s no shortage of evidence to allow for such an interpretation, but her interpretations are almost wholly conjectural. In addition, to arrive at her conjectures, Funder introduces the notion of an ideal marriage, against which to take Orwell, and men in general, to task. He’s going to fall short, of course, when held to such a high account—which of us wouldn’t? But the fact of the matter is that O’Shaughnessy was far less censorious than Funder, which leaves us with a book and a set of judgements which tell us more about Funder than about her subject. Having married Orwell, Funder explains, O’Shaughnessy found herself living in a bleak cottage with a corrugated-iron roof in Wallington, a rural Hertfordshire backwater halfway between Letchworth and Royston. It was rough and cold, she spent much of her time alone and Orwell was no comfort to her as her health deteriorated. This does not mean that O’Shaughnessy was uniquely ill-favoured, as Funder ahistorically suggests. She

would have had no more of his company if, like other men in the area, he’d been out of the house all day, working on the land. If O’Shaughnessy had hated it as much as Funder thinks she should have done, she had every opportunity to leave and go back to a much better standard of living with friends in London, but she didn’t. If she was hurt because Orwell demanded that she interrupt her housework to make them both a cup of tea during a break in his writing one afternoon, it evidently didn’t rankle as badly as it rankles with Funder. There was, in any case, evidently room for manoeuvre in their marital relationship; O’Shaughnessy was generally thought to be having an affair of her own with Kopp while in Barcelona. And if the words “my wife” only appear 37 times in Orwell’s writings, and her own name never, it is evident that while Funder says this relegates her to a job description, O’Shaughnessy herself recognised her husband as inhabiting a perfectly legitimate separate existence as a writer (as Mahler did as a composer), one that he did not care to share and that matched his isolation in social life. Orwell didn’t do gregariousness, even at home. He saw himself as driven by a public mission, not just to see and explain and rationalise but to set out the proper protocols of life and literary conduct. Funder now sees those protocols as tyrannical and serve-serving, and thus a microcosm of the doublethink that the political content of his work rails at. But if this is the case, this is surely a reflection of Orwell, the individual, not of “the patriarchy”, which is what Funder wants it to stand for. At the same time, believing that she can stay loyal to both sides of the argument, she is left wanting to credit Orwell for what she holds against him: “It was his insight … that allowed me to see how men can imagine themselves innocent in a system that benefits them, at others’ cost,” and “Patriarchy is the doublethink that allows an apparently ‘decent’ man to behave badly to women.” It is this feisty—racy—writing that seems to have won over the respected feminist writer Claire Tomalin, a former Books Editor at the New Statesman, and—oddly—Tom Hanks, both of whom delivered Penguin Books some powerful endorsements (though Funder had already befriended Tomalin—and her husband Michael Frayn— when she came to London to do research; never believe therefore that endorsements are necessarily objective comments on a book rather than favours for an ally). As for what Funder’s interpretation of O’Shaughnessy tells us about Orwell’s writing, we are on very shaky ground. It of course feels more than coincidental that

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in favour is that Wifedom is a very skilful piece of writing, ingenious in its construction and artful in its pacing. It is packed with detail and background, some harvested from the writings of others, some gleaned from the Orwell Archive at UCL and the Crick Archive at Birkbeck, some gathered on location, and some from the children and grandchildren of those characters around whom the story revolves. The most notable of these are the Orwell Society’s patron Richard Blair, the son of the Orwells, and Richard’s lifelong friend Quentin Kopp, the son of Georges Kopp and the Society’s chair, who jointly led a trip to Catalonia that Funder went on. She also meets elderly residents of Jura, the Scottish island to which Orwell retreated towards the end of his life. But that’s not what makes this a clever book. What make it clever is that Funder is a stylist and her Wifedom is a work of art. She knows throughout that she is taking risks with her material and she takes them anyway, building a mosaic of fragments, the feminism of which is largely a gloss. The truth is that, whatever her political intentions, her facility lies in the suggestive placing and deployment of ideas, which she does to considerable effect; not every extended piece of writing is as entertaining as this. What Wifedom is, though, is hard to say: it doesn’t conform exactly to the requirements of a history, or a novel, or a biography, or a memoir, though in different places it could resemble any of these. It ends up being unclassifiable—a thing in its own right—to be applauded for its invention and ingenuity. That’s not nothing. The question is whether it’s enough.

Israel, Palestine…

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activists are mostly just Tamils and throng the streets in their dozens, occasionally— and they appear to have lost their struggle in Sri Lanka. It may be that speaking out and making noise was an effective driver of social change a few decades ago. In a cacophonous online-driven world, it’s unclear what speaking out actually achieves, at least on questions of geopolitical conflict. At the end of October I tweeted the following: “First they came for [insert victim group] and I did speak out but it achieved nothing because achieving justice is a much more complex task than simply speaking out.” So what then? I’m still trying to work that one out … Keith Kahn-Harris is a regular commentator on Substack: https://keithkahnharris.substack.com

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