In 1919, writes the author of our Architectural Book of the Year 2024, the American architect Julia Morgan began designing a grand residential complex for the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst on a dramatic hilltop site overlooking the Pacific Ocean in central California. Morgan would spend the next 25 years constructing the sprawling, monumental 115-room project La Cuesta Encantada (“The Enchanted Hill”), more commonly known as Hearst Castle.
Much of the architectural language of Hearst Castle is Spanish Colonial, the predominant style in Southern California at the time [but] Hearst Castle does
not use this style in any comprehensive way, but instead mixes it with Gothic, Italian Renaissance and Mediterranean revival, among many others.
This stylistic variation troubled commentators and fellow architects— including, years later, the Italian novelist and critic Umberto Eco—but all failed to recognise Morgan’s eclecticism as a valid architectural strategy, a skill expressed not in the refinement of one idea but in the assembly of many. Morgan was also unafraid to mix not only references to multiple sources but also the authentic and the imitative.
Thus, in the seamless blending of the
invented and the borrowed, Morgan’s Hearst Castle creates a fantastical world in which “real” elements imported from Europe and “unreal” elements, including copies of “real” elements, are brought together, indistinguishable from one another. And Morgan never lets on which ceilings are imported and which were designed in her studios, or which sculptural fragments are from the first century and which from the twentieth. Seen here, the 15th-century Old Hospital de la Santa Creu,
and Morgan’s
Easy-To-Use Samsung Tablet
Sad message to a former literary superstar
We used to worship at the LRB’s altar. Not any longer
When a friend behaves weirdly, it’s not unreasonable to call them on it—true? For decades, we admired the London Review of Books for the calibre of its reviews. Like it or not, whatever your politics, the LRB defined the country’s intellectual agenda every fortnight.
LRB writers added such depth of context to the writings of others that, reading them, one felt momentarily admitted to a superior club, better equipped to understand the mysteries of a challenging world. Inevitably there was a left-wing bias in the writings, with the magazine’s regular contributors and twenty or so “contributing editors” bringing new interpretations and fresh evidence that outpaced the lazy thinking and old truths of more conventional magazines. And that felt leftish.
All of that now seems very much in the past. Something has happened at the London Review of Books that makes one warier of its contributors and less confident about their judgements. The magazine’s once unrivalled openness has been replaced by a small-mindedness in which the rigour of proper argumentation in now accompanied by labelling, dog whistles and taunts. Fun for those who like that sort of thing; dishonourable if you hold the LRB to a higher account.
So limited has the LRB become in what it will examine openly that it seems to be suffering from locked-in syndrome. This is most apparent in its handling of the Middle East conflict where LRB writers are uniformly one-sided, promoting one narrative while dismissing the other. Such a lack of balanced analysis does a disservice to the complex and deeply contested nature of the conflict.
Historically, we valued the LRB for its aversion to the tendentious. This foundational principle is now habitually violated, with the magazine entrenched in a single ideological camp and reluctant to challenge its own assumptions or critically engage with opposing viewpoints.
Without exception, as far as we can see, LRB writers prove unable to break free from their biases, depicting one set of combatants as wholly innocent and sympathetic, and the other as wholly malign and hateful, as if programmed by the sort of directive one recognises from Terminator movies.
It’s very well done: always fluent, always full of information, and highly persuasive for those with an appetite for it. But it’s also propaganda, driven by a specific point of view, and written in a language that would not be tolerated if applied to any other social class or ethnic group. Such is the frequency of this messaging that readers are very likely to have become convinced of what is said and of the writers’ power of revelation. Der Stürmer was similarly effective in its day: we often underrate propaganda as always crude and obvious; on the contrary, it can be intelligent, sophisticated, difficult for the ordinary reader to find fault with, and attractive to read.
Those who commission these essays are complicit. They evidently have an agenda and are untroubled that repeatedly amplifying the same viewpoints undermines their intellectual credibility, just as
it encourages readers to buy into simple stereotypes held to be immune to questioning.
They appear to have no interest in exploring the true thinking of how those whose mentality they casually parse. Far easier to write off “the other” as uniquely guilty, without ever considering the legitimacy of counter-narratives. It shouldn’t need saying but, for anyone who hasn’t already got the point, this crass divisiveness is racist. It would be recognised as such immediately if it concerned any other group; the LRB has focused in on the one ethnic group the world feels it has a free hand in badmouthing.
That’s not to ask LRB writers to do a volte face and somehow automatically uphold the arguments of the side they have become so skilful at denouncing. That would be equally flawed. Open enquiry should not have a political agenda—in any direction—because openness cannot have a pre-determined purpose. But if the LRB insists on having a moral goal, a better one would be that of bringing people together. As it stands, its writing on the Middle East is reminiscent of the Inquisition—admit you’re a heretic so we can burn you or deny it until we’ve tortured you to death. If the magazine were truly dedicated to a worthy cause, it would focus on transcending existing divisions and fostering dialogue. Enlightenment, in its truest sense, involves bridging gaps and finding common ground, not perpetuating schism. Interestingly, explicitly left-wing publications display a far more balanced
critique of Middle Eastern politics. Despite their predictable ideological stances on issues like corporatism and capitalism, such platforms tend to view both Netanyahu’s government and Hamas with equal disdain, charging both with being equally cursed, equally corrupt, equally sustained by ill-gotten gains, and equally destructive of the working classes whom they ought to be protecting. And because they write from, and support, the working classes, they can afford to condemn Hamas as a reactionary and fascist organization in a way that the LRB cannot and will not.
If no one else, historians who write for the LRB must feel increasingly embarrassed by it. For anyone with a long perspective, it is obvious that over the course of time, parties clash and parties come together. In the Wars of the Roses, nearly 600 years ago, Yorkists and Lancastrians were consumed by mutual hatreds; 500 years ago, Catholics burned Protestants and Protestants burned Catholics. But hatreds pass and the righteous set out to speed the process.
LENGTH AS A FORM OF BULLYING
One of the original attractions of the LRB is that, like the admirable New York Review of Books on which it was modelled, it commissioned professional writers as well as academics, and welcomed longform essays that were free to sidestep the review format. This blend of authorial variety, length and independence brought a welcome change from other literary magazines, most notably the more rigid Times
Literary Supplement
At one time, the LRB’s reviews seemed not only insightful but authoritative. That no longer seems the case, even when they go on at great length. One exceptionally long essay, Andrew O’Hagan’s 60,000word piece on the Grenfell Tower fire, faced unprecedented criticism for alleged inaccuracies and insensitive handling of interview material. Critics from Verso, New Socialist and Libcom.org denounced the essay for its perceived biases and factual errors.
New Socialist described the piece as symptomatic of a middle-class journalism that perpetuates the status quo under the guise of objectivity. It added that magazines are not neutral platforms, that editorial decisions shape but also endorse content, and that the failings of O’Hagan’s piece reflected on the publication as much as on the author.
There turn out to be problems also with the LRB’s cavalier approach to book reviews, which often serve as vehicles for the reviewers’ own agendas rather than rightly deferring to the books themselves. This is a practice that can mislead readers, as many book-buyers will have found to their cost; it also exploits the original works, privileging the reviewers’ interests over the authors’. Such “colonialism” would be found unacceptable in other contexts; at the LRB it seems to be thought of as fair game.
One used to think of the LRB as committed to quality of thought and argument
continued on page 17
NEUTERING THE CIA
WHY US INTELLIGENCE
VERSUS TRUMP HAS LONGTERM CONSEQUENCES
JOHN A GENTRY
Armin Lear Press
26 July 2023
Softback, 528 pages 9781956450699
RRP £22.99
Check our website for discount
EDITOR’S NOTE
US citizens have good reason to be worried by, and want to oppose, Donald Trump’s possible return to the White House. New powers would allow Trump unprecedented freedom of action without fear of ever being held to account, supported by a corrupt Supreme Court and an overturning of the federal government’s ability to limit the eccentricity of state legislatures.
Do official agencies also have the right to fear — and oppose — bad government or must they behave neutrally, as the administration’s loyal and impartial instruments?
The idea that the civil service could adopt a political position of its own strikes at the heart of democracy, but John A Gentry saw just such a response within the CIA when Trump secured the Republican nomination eight years ago, and this wasn’t the first time the CIA had compromised its neutrality.
In his new book, Gentry does not argue in favour of Trump, merely raises concern about the emergence of partisanship within government bodies. This leaves those of us who abhor the prospect of a Trump presidency to ask: are there times when a government agency can be forgiven for taking what it thinks are rightful actions to protect society?
Are there times when objective truth needs to defer to objective fear?
My interest in the intersection of politics and intelligence began in 1986 when, as an intelligence analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), I personally experienced a variant of the “politicisation” of intelligence by intelligence professionals, which traditionally is defined as the injection of political or ideological perspectives into intelligence analyses in order to advance personal, political, or organizational goals.
My primary responsibility then was analyzing the East German economy. It was an interesting and challenging account.
After following the German Democratic Republic for several years, I was under no illusions about the many negative and few good aspects of the country’s communist regime, not least the omnipresence of its internal security service, the Stasi, and its close association with the Soviet Union as a member of the Warsaw Pact.
My assessments reflected these characteristics, as did those of colleagues who followed other East European communist countries.
Yet in 1986 my division chief, Steve K., began to insist that his analysts make the countries we followed look worse than they were, mainly by adding pejorative adjectives in our analytic papers. My immediate supervisor, branch chief Barry B., made sure that I, like all other analysts in the branch, got the word.
Steve and Barry told us that Robert Gates, who then headed the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence (DI, now re-named the Directorate of Analysis, DA), wanted such language in CIA reports. We were given the impression that Gates wanted to curry favor with anti-communist “hard-liners” of the Reagan administration. Interested in pleasing their bosses, Steve and Barry we’re happy to comply. Drafts were rewritten; we were told what types of language were acceptable. additional pejorative adjectives were seen as desirable. Analysts in other DI offices, I learned later, received similar directives.
In retrospect, the politicisation was mild, but it was very unusual given the CIA’s organisational culture of the time, and it produced some unpleasant conversations. Steve and Barrie insisted that we violate a core organizational norm— analytic objectivity. These unpleasant conversations were a major reason I took another job at the CIA soon thereafter and eventually left the CIA in 1990 after twelve years there.
It was not hard, therefore, for me to go to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) in the fall of 1991 when it was considering Gates’s nomination to be Director of Central Intelligence (DCI). Like several dozen analysts who had experienced politicisation in other DI offices, I told SSCI staffers that Gates had politicized intelligence. But, because I had not myself heard him direct the politicisation, I was not asked to testify in public sessions. Years later, after learning more about the situation, I concluded that Gates probably had not directly demanded the politicisation I experienced, that it almost certainly was
initiated by the late George Kolt, our office director, who was widely known internally to have had strongly anti-Soviet views. But Gates remains culpable, in my judgement, for establishing a climate in which this kind of politicisation could occur.
Gates survived a tumultuous confirmation process and, to his credit, as DCI addressed the politicisation issue directly, making clear that he opposed politicisation. The case continues to be a prominent part of CIA analysts’ cultural tradition and still is frequently cited in the intelligence literature as a prominent case of politicisation from the political Right. No senior intelligence officer since has acted as forthrightly against politicisation as Gates did in 1991–1993.
My experiences in 1986 and the revelations of Gates’s 1991 confirmation hearings led to my continuing interest in the intersection of intelligence and politics, what is known as intelligence “producer-consumer relations”, and especially the politicisation of intelligence by professional intelligence personnel.
The politicisation I experienced was a prominent topic in my Lost Promise: How CIA Analysis Misserves the Nation, published in 1993, and in later articles after I returned to studying the US Intelligence Community (IC), and intelligence more generally, as an academic. I tracked the modest but growing literature on the subject, published mainly in the United States, the United Kingdom and Israel. This literature is virtually unanimous in viewing the politicisation of intelligence by intelligence officers—of any kind and in any way—as inappropriate for the intelligence services of democracies.
The portion of this literature addressing US intelligence similarly concludes that politicisation of the sort I experienced is incompatible with the stated and implied purposes of US intelligence and damages the perceived objectivity, credibility, trustworthiness and therefore the usefulness of intelligence.
Because memories of intelligence failures, especially, are long, even small instances of politicisation endure in memories for extended periods of time, often decades, generating a variety of negative consequences, especially a loss of trust in intelligence by senior leaders. This analytic judgement is widely held by knowledgeable students of intelligence and consumers of intelligence. It appreciably informs my assessment of the political activism of intelligence professionals in recent years and to a considerable degree shapes the research questions and analytic approach of this book.
However, for intellectual completeness, to be fair to the political activists who politicize US intelligence, and to recognize that societies evolve and the lessons of intelligence history do, too, I also examine activists’ assertions that their activism is a civic responsibility in extraordinary times and that the activism of recent years is temporary, harmless or even a net positive development for the IC and the country.
In later years I rejoined the IC in other
capacities. First, in 2000–2001, I worked for the intelligence policy office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence, the predecessor of today’s Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence (USD(I)). And, beginning in 2010, I taught at the Defense Intelligence Agency’s training center before joining the National Intelligence University (NIU), which provides a year-long master’s-level program on strategic intelligence for US government personnel. I left NIU in late 2015, after two-and-a-half years there.
In these roles, I taught several hundred students from virtually all IC agencies and interacted regularly with many other intelligence personnel from several agencies. These people, at junior and middle grades and at all stages of careers, gave me first-hand knowledge of the structural, leadership and cultural situation at the time. While I saw evolution in the organizational cultures of IC agencies, my view was that the traditional, core IC ethic of apolitical public service remained strong.
Therefore, when former intelligence officers loudly broke many of the traditional norms of behaviour of intelligence officers by attacking Donald Trump, beginning immediately after he secured the Republican presidential nomination in mid-2016, I like many others was surprised. The activism represented a radically different variant of politicisation from what I had experienced and what was then assessed in the intelligence literature.
In the past in the United States and in most other countries, intelligence loyally served legitimate national leaders even when leader-intelligence relationships were not close. While intelligence occasionally has been involved in coups against leaders, never in the history of any country until 2016 (and since) had intelligence personnnel acted in opposition to a duly elected national leader for such an extended period without generating a strenuous response by the leader—often a purge of offending personnel or even of entire agencies. This anti-Trump politicisation has much greater ramifications for the IC and the United States as a whole than the relatively tame politicisation I experienced in 1986.
The activism receded markedly soon after Joe Biden became president in 2021, making even clearer that the politicisation of intelligence was aimed at Trump. While it is in remission, the changes in the political culture of some IC agencies that triggered the attacks on Trump remain intact, available for reactivation in the event of another serious candidacy by Trump or the election of another Republican president. Hence, it is important to see Trump as the first target of the IC’s new political activists, meaning the full implications of the IC’s bout of political activism from 2016 to 2021 may not be apparent for years.
My main criterion for including the public commentary and written analysis of current and former intelligence officials in this book is that the officials engaged in political
I joined the Diplomatic Service in 1983 alongside 20 others. Our group included 21 different degree subjects, 11 non-Oxbridge graduates (historically an above-average proportion and seen as a step towards diversity) and 11 women (ditto).
Within a year, nearly all of the women had resigned. I interviewed them about their reasons for leaving. One or two said they found the male-dominated, public-school vibe of the FCO alienating. But most said the main problem had been the reluctance of male partners to accompany them on an overseas posting.
Implementing equal opportunities for diplomats has never been a linear process. In the UK, the 1933 Schuster Committee
time originated when all diplomats were men, few women had careers and no one thought twice about packing children off to boarding school for much of their childhoods.
One may debate the damage inflicted on children, adults and relationships, but until the late 20th century, the system ground on.
Now that diplomats are as likely to be women as men, with both partners tending to have careers and many people considering boarding schools the work of the devil, the system is creaking. Some countries do not allow the partners of foreign diplomats to work; many do not recognise foreign professional qualifications.
So what happens to the diplomat posted
Change for better or worse?
In the year 2000, ministers in London decided that British missions in the countries of the European Union were too expensive. Surely, they argued, with so much work being done at the EU level, we could slash diplomatic representation? “Life at work … dominated by the ‘Review of EU Bilateral Embassies’,” I wrote from Berlin, “… has left everyone feeling aggrieved and insecure.” In 2007, the catchily titled “More Foreign, Less Office” review transferred staff from Europe to Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Russia.
The reforms came full circle when, after the vote to leave the European Union in 2016, the FCO deployed more staff to
Diplomatic practice looks outdated. Leigh Turner asks if it can keep up
report considered the admission of women to the Diplomatic and Consular Services and recommended they remain excluded. Evidence from heads of mission published in the report gives a flavour of male sentiment at the time:
“To put it bluntly, the clever woman would not be liked and the attractive woman would not be taken seriously” (Sir H.W. Kennard, Berne)
“The interests of the public service would be better served by endeavouring to secure a more virile type of official than by embarking on the experiment of admitting women” (Sir Patrick Ramsay, Athens)
“It is unthinkable that a diplomatic or consular officer should produce babies and at the same time do her work properly” (Sydney Waterlow, Sofia)
Although female diplomats were admitted in 1946, married women were barred from diplomacy until 1972. The first woman was appointed head of mission the following year; the first married woman not until 1987. By 2008 the UK had 18 female HOMs; by 2012, 38. But critics argued they were often appointed to less important or desirable posts.
In 2018 the Foreign Office installed a ‘mirror challenge’. Based on an idea from Mary Beard, professor of classics at Cambridge University, it featured pictures of the first women to hold 13 of the 26 top jobs, and mirrors for the remaining 13. The idea was to encourage women and other underrepresented groups to imagine themselves in those senior positions and create an expectation that their pictures would soon replace the mirrors.
By 2024, 9 of the 13 mirrors representing jobs never done by a woman had turned: Abuja, Berlin, Paris, Tokyo, Washington, Ankara, Brasilia, Islamabad and the legal adviser in London. Around a third of all UK heads of mission were female. Only the mirrors for New Delhi, Riyadh, the UK mission to the EU and the permanent secretary remained. This did not mean ‘job done’, but it did mark progress in getting the Foreign Office to reflect society.
Ongoing problems
The policy of posting diplomats to distant corners of the globe for years at a
to Beijing whose other half is a history professor at a great university, or to the cardiac surgeon in Washington whose partner is sent off to represent their country in N’Djamena, or to the teacher who doesn’t want to give up their career to accompany their partner to Osaka?
The advent of budget airlines in the 1990s helped ease the crisis for diplomatic families divided by smaller distances. When I was in Moscow from 1992 to 1995, flights back to London were costly and rare. Fifteen years later, a British ambassador there complained to me that his staff flew back to the UK so often (“even for parties at the weekend”) that they had insufficient exposure to Russia to understand the country properly.
The challenges facing diplomats navigating far-flung geographies are a subset of those afflicting all families. More parents are in paid employment. Fewer people live and work where they grew up. But diplomats have a particular requirement to live and work overseas, and to move regularly.
Foreign ministry HR departments have striven to adapt. Innovations include job-sharing between husband-and-wife ambassadors and “commuter packages” for diplomats to fly home regularly rather than relocating whole families. Home, or “nomad”, working enables couples to live together, wherever their employers may be.
But not all diplomacy can be done remotely. Distant, tougher postings have become harder to fill. When asked whether I recommend a diplomatic career, I tend to qualify an affirmative answer by pointing out that it’s challenging for family life.
Many people still yearn for adventure at the utmost ends of the earth. But squaring the circle of relationships, families and work looks likely to remain a constant struggle.
All this underlines the value of not putting all your eggs in one basket of work. Management guru John Hunt, speaking at a London Business School course I attended in 1996, put it well. Statistically speaking, he said, only one of the twenty people in the room would reach the pinnacle of the FCO. “The rest of you, indeed all of you,” he said, “should have something else in your life that gives you intense satisfaction, in addition to your careers.”
This was good advice.
EU posts to deal with the additional tasks Brexit would generate. Many are still there. I did not use emails regularly at work until 1998, when I moved to the economic section of the British embassy in Bonn. Around that time, a friend at the London Business School told me she had been astonished when someone in the next room sent her an email, instead of coming to speak to her. The political section of the Bonn embassy declined to be connected to emails, arguing that they did not need them.
Both turned out to be prescient.
When I returned to the Foreign Office after four years of parental leave in 2006, I found email chaos. Paper filing systems had been abandoned without a working replacement. You could send documents to ten, 100 or 1,000 people at the stroke of a key. People had little time to do anything except process email traffic—much of it irrelevant—and attend meetings.
The fallacy that everyone with a stake in a decision should be consulted—no matter how numerous or how tangential their interest—bred paralysis. It also confused ownership of policy, making decisions worse. As mobile electronic devices proliferated, people felt always on call and overwhelmed. Efforts to regain control with instant messaging or video conferencing had limited impact. A permanent sense of crisis permeated government departments.
Have we lost the plot?
Following the 2016 referendum, the job of implementing Brexit was given to the new Department for Exiting the European Union. IN 2020 the DExEU in turn was abolished, its job supposedly done. Responsibility for EU policy returned to what became the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office with the merger of the FCO with the Department for International Development (DFID) in September 2020. Concurrently, the government slashed the UK’s overseas aid budget from 0.7 per cent to 0.5 per cent of GNP.
The merger between FCO and DFID, coinciding with Brexit and a global Covid-19 pandemic that forced diplomats worldwide to work from home for months, paralysed what was left of the decision-making machinery of both departments. The chief
LESSONS IN DIPLOMACY POLITICS, POWER AND PARTIES
LEIGH TURNER
Policy Press 24 September 2024
Hardcover
240 pages
9781447373926
RRP £19.99
EDITOR’S NOTE
The author, Leigh Turner, is a former UK ambassador who led posts in Ukraine, Turkey and Austria. In this witty review of his intriguing career, he lowers the veil on his interactions with aristocratic and celebrity royalty, and with the brilliant and extraordinary people who taught him valuable life lessons. In addition to astute reflections on Brexit, Russia’s belligerence and the chaos of modern politics, he reveals how diplomats work with spies, how immunity allows killers to escape justice, and how to throw (and be invited to) a great cocktail party.
THE AQAD SWORD
THE HISTORY OF THE SECULAR STATE OF ISFERIN 1 CONRAD CAREW
Conrad Carew’s new novel details the past and present of the magical nation of Isferin, from its troubled early history to the violence of a contemporary rebellion and the emergence of a young, inexperienced warrior who finds himself masterminding a desperate attempt to preserve the nation’s soul.
The philosophical, ethnic and religious conflicts run parallel to the turmoil of our own 21st-century world in a richly imagined allegory that pays tribute to the world-building fantasy writings of Ursula Le Guin, Brandon Sanderson and Stephen Reeder Donaldson.
The story of Qerem’s rise, from a junior official in the remotest desert community to the exalted position of Lord General of the Loyalist Army, is set in the varied landscapes of the state. His struggles against addiction and self-doubt are offset by his possession of two unpredictable weapons: the ancient Aqad Sword and the recently discovered, wildly incendiary, Balil Flame.
In the days before history, Isferin was a land of scattered tribes and remote settlements. The first war to befall the people of Isferin was not to be the last. Across the Great Rift Valley, a new leader imposed himself upon the peasant peoples who lived there, and they became the Defeated. Theirs was a long term of enslavement, and every year that passed increased their passivity and reduced their ancestral pride, so that when the years of enslavement outnumbered the years of freedom, the Shame of Isferin was complete …
Will Qerem’s magical weapons save Isferin or destroy all he holds dear?
Qerem looked out across the Balil Sea. The water was indistinguishable from the night, but the hooded shapes of the Garatian Hills beyond the sea were darker yet, giving relief to grey sea before and grey sky above. One night in three Qerem watched whilst the community of Mivret slept. There was never a sign of movement, so his vigilance was tempered by complacency. The Balil Sea was poisoned. It supported no life.
To his right along the shore, guard fires marked the perimeter of the settlement of Mivret, illuminating sandy deposits at the margin of the sea that glittered dully like a tarnished quartz necklace draped around the sea. The fires were unmanned. Qerem was the sole guardian of the waterfront.
He turned his back to survey Mivret’s compact inner courtyard. An intense yellow glow emanated from the balil furnace housed in the right-hand corner of the square, casting intense but suffused light upon the buildings. Qerem leaned his back against the balustrading of the fourth side and wondered whether the intensity of the balil glow had diminished.
This mattered. The furnace was the blood-pump of Mivret’s life and industry. His nocturnal duty was more concerned
with preservation of the balil-fire than guarding against attack and was a duty exclusively entrusted to the members of the Mivret Melin, the potent inner group of activists appointed by the inhabitants of the commune to plot and steer the commercial and political course of their settlement. So, he eased himself away from the balustrade and walked around the paved outer edge of the courtyard until he stood before the furnace door. A window-sized opening enabled the inspection of the integrity of the balil-fire and allowed an amber glow to illuminate the empty courtyard.
the double click which secured the mechanism—and the balil flame.
Qerem turned back to the courtyard with the gleaming ball of light lingering between his eyes, propped his head on his arms, locked outwards from the elbow on its sandstone lintel, and closed his eyes tight to squeeze out the last remnants of balil-fire.
Scuffling Sounded from below the balustrade. He leaned over, peering into darkness, holding his breath to listen. Nothing. A single rock falling, perhaps, or a nocturnal hyrax. He listened, a frown marring the handsome brightness of his half-lit face. Had a goat escaped from a night enclosure? Nothing more.
Just as he straightened, turning back to the square, a twinkle of light winked at him from below. He bent back down, lower and further, searching hard for that single faint spark and, as he stared, it blinked and split into two even halves. Not one but two glistening spots of light shone back at him.
Qerem shook his head carefully from side to side to test the unlikely vision. The eyes did not waver. Not the eyes of a goat. A leopard? Were they green? He strove to trace the shape of the head which must surround the eyes, but nothing resolved itself.
‘Who is it?’
He unhooked a metal key from a belthook slung at his waist and manipulated it carefully in the lock. The marble was perfectly cool despite the intensity of flame behind. He swung the delicately poised door just far enough to allow a full view of the brilliant fire within and his shadow expanded gigantically up and over the facades of the buildings beyond as the courtyard danced with dazzling balil light. He scanned the interior of the furnace, searching for signs of orange or red infiltrating the outer edges of the bright yellow nucleus. There were none, only a consistent, unadulterated purity that radiated health and potency. He swung the safe-door shut, registering continued in the book
For a moment the eyes remained fixed then a fleeting movement revealed the shape a human face, too brief to announce features, but vivid enough to make him gasp. Face and eyes disappeared in a blink, and he heard brief, frantic rustling as the creature scattered stones and sand in retreat. He spun and sped across the courtyard to the entry gate beside the furnace, flinging through and into the street beyond, sandaled feet skidding then gripping the rough paving, swinging sharply left down the alley which led to the shore. A shadow flitted across the end of the street before him, across his path and away from to shore – towards the dwellings on the outer edge of the commune. Qerem cut right at the next alley to intercept the fugitive. The shadow had been small and upright. He heard the rasping of a wooden shutter nearby, back towards the sea. One street away, perhaps, no more. He stopped dead, catching his breath to listen. No further sound. He gasped air in and out then walked onward, stopping at each door to lay an ear against it, pausing at the entrance to each alley to scan the dark facades before screwing his eyes shut to listen. Nothing. Then, when he opened his eyes once more, he caught the glimmer of candlelight creeping through a shutter. He raised a hand to knock, but froze in mid-action, the movement uncompleted, and lowered his arm. There was greyness all around him at the edge of the night. The
Rosemary Firth and the love of the three anthropologists
EDITOR’S NOTE
For fifty years, Rosemary Upcott (1912–2001) was married to Sir Raymond Firth (1901–2002), professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics for 24 years and a specialist in the study of Pacific Islanders. During that time she had a long-lasting love affair with Sir Edmund Leach (1910–89), who had studied with Firth at the LSE and went on to become provost of King’s
20 June 1941
Edmund to Rosemary Maymyo, Burma
College, Cambridge and president of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
Love, Loyalty and Deceit reveals the story of their social, personal and professional relationships, as well as uncovering evidence of how Rosemary also conducted a secret lesbian affair.
It was compiled by Rosemary’s son, Hugh Firth, and Leach’s daughter, Loulou Brown.
READERS’ COMMENTS
Ralph Grillo: “A riveting, beautifully written book about three remarkable people whose private personalities were often different from their public personas.”
Karin Koller: “Love, Loyalty and Deceit will appeal to a wide range of readers: those who enjoy biography, memoir, social history and the role of women in the mid-20th century.”
In July 1939, Rosemary and Raymond set out to start anthropological fieldwork in the coastal fishing village of Bacho’k, Kelantan, on the north-east coast of Malaya. Two weeks later Edmund headed for Penang, en route to do his own fieldwork among the Kachin, in the hills of northern Burma, not far from China.
Within a couple of months, Germany had invaded Poland and Great Britain had declared war on Germany. With some ambivalence, Edmund joined the army as a reservist, but was allowed to pursue his fieldwork in the mountains because hostilities had not yet begun in the region.
Edmund in Burma and Rosemary in Malaya corresponded frequently over the following year, relaying to each other the progress they were making — or lack of it — with their discoveries.
Each felt removed from the war during its early months. Rosemary and Raymond were based on a tropical beach; Edmund, soon to be married to the painter and novelist Celia Buckmaster, was “having a whale of a time … in Heaven, an entirely unenviable spot 5,000 feet up in the air on a hill crest looking down on China [with] no
Dear Rosemary, [My] dear, you have no idea how delightful it was to get your letter. Celia and I both gorged on it. It’s true of course that you can’t really explain what it is like being blitzed, but at least you give us the feel of life, and we are both so homesick for Bloomsbury that even to be told that it is just dust and ashes is comforting. Please, please write again and do your utmost to describe the feeling of wartime England.
You see our existence here is so wholly artificial and anachronistic, that we are stunted; we can’t grow at all, and quite obviously everyone at home is growing very fast. Goodness knows whether we are going to win or lose this war and perhaps it doesn’t matter so much either way; but what is certain is that a complete social revolution is taking place and you back at home are right in the thick of it, while we out here are just stranded on a sand bank. My entire existence is a complete waste of time. … Do you wonder that I get to the stage of asking very seriously “Would it really make much difference if we did get defeated?” At home on the other hand it apparently takes you all the other way, and the more you get bombed the more patriotically last ditch, backs-to-the-wall, and death-and-glory you all become. Psychologically I suppose it’s what one would expect, and presumably the German reaction to being bombed is precisely the same. …
3 January 1942
Rosemary to Edmund
My dear Edmund
… Perhaps now war has come so near to you, you will not need any more reassurances as to why we, even as intellectuals, are fighting. Really Edmund, you have written me some maddening letters in your life time but in some ways none equals the stupidity of this last of yours. …
Listen, my dear. … you know this is not a game we are playing. And over here, it is not a game we are watching either. For good or evil, morale wins the war, and morale has got to carry those of us who are struggling with the grimness of blackouts, air raids, the irritations of food shortages, the dullness of ordinary family life being broken up, the exasperations of shortages of supply and the temporary and local
5 April 1942
Sylvester Road, Cambridge
My dearest Edmund, How far away you seem now! … My dear I wish I could talk to you ….
I was summoned to London for an interview by a board of seven big bugs at the Board of Trade … and I was offered a job as a junior distribution officer … . I find the job fascinating. We act as scouts for the London headquarters of the Board, to find out how wartime rationing is affecting … the unfortunate housewife, who at the moment cannot get kettles,
LOVE, LOYALTY AND DECEIT
ROSEMARY FIRTH, A LIFE IN THE SHADOW OF TWO EMINENT MEN HUGH FIRTH AND LOULOU BROWN
Berghahn Books 15 September 2023
Softback, 320 pages 9781800739789
RRP £19.95
Booklaunch price £13.96 with Promo code FIRTHBL only from www.berghahn books.com/title/FirthLove
interpreter [and where] nobody understands a word I say.”
Rosemary was acutely anxious for her family, writing to her father in London: “I feel very cut off and ignorant of many details at home which we are dying to know. I don’t know where your address will be, or indeed the address of any of our friends, as I suppose nearly everyone has left London. We do not know if you have been bombed … . All we know is, there is war and it is difficult to apprehend all that will mean to us and to you. …”
Yet Rosemary and Raymond completed their fieldwork and managed to return to Britain, after being saved from the shells of the German heavy cruiser, the Admiral Scheer, by the valiant action of the HMS Jervis Bay, a liner converted into an armed merchant cruiser which the German ship sunk in battle on 5 November 1940.
Edmund meanwhile was caught in colonial Burma, having “been torn from my Kachins and made an officer in H.M. Forces”. Increasingly frustrated by his expatriate colonial compatriots, he wrote frequently to Rosemary.
inefficiencies of organisation and administration; not to mention the real tragedies of things like the loss of the Hood, Ark Royal, Prince of Wales, and so on. … Don’t you see, there is a difference between patriotism and jingoism?
… If we lose libraries by bombing, this is better than having them voluntarily destroyed by a crowd of hooligans acting under official instructions; if men are killed in battle, better they should die there than be murdered under civil authority by police in prisons. If children are bombed, better this than that they should learn to become traitors to their parents. …
God knows when letters reach you now.
Your last, at end of Oct. took about 6 weeks by air. But don’t write such nonsense to me again, my dear please.
Your ever loving Rosemary
saucepans, elastic, sanitary towels (!) and so on. It is fieldwork to a T … . … I think of you a lot just now; and would love some definite news; my last from you was 25 Oct., a hell of a long time ago. All my love to you my dear, anyway. And good luck if you meet a Jap.
Yours ever [Rosemary] …
Over the following decades, Rosemary, Raymond, Edmund and Celia remained close friends as well as colleagues, and Rosemary continued to love both men.
12 January 1986
Rosemary’s Diary
Edmund … came for a night. … Horribly mutilated by further open raw holes in his head from this recurring now eight-yearold skin cancer, he seemed to me, at first, to have moved into a completely closed world of senile self-concern and isolation— talked without interruption of his family’s history in quite unwanted detail, laid about him theoretically, which provoked me to exclaim: “You are a fool, Edmund!”—which shocked Raymond into a curious defensive position for the rest of the evening, as if he felt the two men alone were sensible but facing “this stupid little woman” together! … I went to bed almost in tears of sorrow and regret at his transformation.
But next morning I came down early to breakfast. … We had a good talk about his early religious upbringing, … so that my old feelings for him—for the past year soured to bitterness—were reinstated, and I can accept a situation in which my love for him bears no relation to my present obligations, to any past insults, or any future fantasies of reciprocated passion …
Raymond returned from their mutual attendance at a British Academy meeting very happy—“E was very gentle to us I thought,” he told me—”as if he were a brother. It was a good time together.”
That is as it should be. If Raymond and Edmund feel as brothers, I need not exactly explicate the tangled roots of my own very deep feelings for each of them over half a century and more …
WHERE’S THE HARM?
MY LIFE OF CRIME: AN ALTERNATIVE INTRODUCTION TO CRIMINOLOGY
LENE HANSEN
EnvelopeBooks
12 September 2024
Softback, 266 pages
9781915023216
RRP £17.95
Check our website for discount
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lene Hansen is a criminologist specialising in financial crime. Over two decades, she has worked for exchanges, regulators and litigators in over 20 countries. Initally dedicating herself to the human rights of sex workers, she entered the world of corporate crime after an encounter with the victim of a supposedly victimless crime committed by Robert Maxwell. Her subsequent work on this area led to the offer of a postgraduate place at the University of Cambridge. Since then she has worked for positive change on projects as diverse as the Financial Secretary of Hong Kong’s Peregrine Investigation, the development of derivatives risk systems with the Options Clearing Corp. of Chicago, environmental degradation across Asia, anti-money laundering in Dubai and the fallout of the Royal Bank of Scotland’s takeover of ABN AMRO.
READER’S COMMENT
Professor Barry Rider OBE, Professorial Fellow, University of Cambridge: “Merges the forensic analysis of the criminologist with the experiential insight of the practitioner. A masterclass in regard to threats and their prevention and mitigation.”
How can punishment be designed to help victims, society and perpetrators?
Where’s the Harm? is a textbook designed for criminology students, psychologists, sociologists, educationalists and lay readers. It consists of fourteen chapters based on events in the author’s life in which a crime has been experienced or witnessed, followed by a series of thematic questions.
Two kids, two suitcases, $200 and one wife. That’s how my father drily describes our arrival in Australia, where circumstances brought us to Weipa, a small town in Far North Queensland, that jagged shard pointing north on the Australian map that revels in a cruel and unusual beauty. I recall that the vistas in Weipa were wondrous—alien in many respects, not the least of which was the colour palette. It was, and still is, a rich, rust-coloured bowl of land under a crystalline blue sky, with spherical sunburnt orange pebbles sloughing dust that never washed out properly if you got it onto your clothes.
The Aboriginal mission was close by and all the children from the mission and from our town went to school together, with all the usual banter that arises between communities. Some of my Indigenous classmates were baffled by the logic of cutlery. They didn’t see why metal things kept in a dusty drawer (and probably crawled over by cockroaches, of which there were many around) were more hygienic than freshly washed hands. They had a point.
It was in Weipa that I first became aware of nature and how its beauty showed itself in the smallest things, like the profound wonder of a butterfly’s chrysalis. I recall sitting alone, motionless, in a dry field near our house, the hardy planting of introduced trees and shrubs in military rows forming the mining companies’ pathetic apology to the earth for what they had done to her. I was oblivious to that sadness, amazed instead by my discovery of the chrysalis, spellbound at the magic of the change that was happening inside its sleek shimmering shell. In parallel, although in a decidedly less sleek shell, I became aware of the changes in myself.
Apparently there was someone else, a stranger, who was also aware of those changes. It seems that the one I came to call ‘the Wraith’ had been watching me for some time. I don’t recall being aware of that, or the way that that fateful evening started, but I do know that I was in my spartan room. Perhaps my farmor (father’s mother) was visiting, because there were two little beds for my sister and me pushed up against the walls. One was against the inner wall on the door side, the other against the curtain and louvred windows.
That night I lay on the inner bed, flopped out on my stomach on top of the soft, woven bedding of deep green and blue, probably after a great day of larking around: healthy mischief, they called it in those days. I had my favourite long, striped nightdress on and there wasn’t anything unusual as I fell asleep, breathing peacefully in the tropical heat.
My first dim awareness of the Wraith was when his hands slid up my nightdress, brushing against my thin thighs to reach my underclothes. I had been sleeping soundly and woke groggily, my hand flailing, blindly
grabbing to retrieve my departing garments. I remember sitting up, disoriented, and turning to the shadow, the Wraith, sitting on the bed. A shard of light from the street had snuck in through the louvres and fallen across his light eyes. I kept pushing, confused at his soft, insistent hands. My eight-year-old mind, still half-asleep, thought that those hands must have belonged to someone in my family, someone supposed to be under our roof, but I couldn’t think who.
‘Farmor?’ I whispered, not wanting to wake my sister. ‘Far?’ The shadow didn’t respond. Instead, he pulled my little hand into his lap, where a soft mass stirred under my touch. My hand recoiled from the strangeness of it but his grip around my wrist was firm, pulling it back.
I can’t tell you how long our struggle continued, me trying to fend off the insistent hand pushing up my nightdress while he fought to keep my hand on that strange place in his lap. Time telescoped into a confused tunnel of scuffling. But I do know what happened next. The corridor light snapped on to reveal my father’s muscular silhouette. He was dressed only in his Y-fronts (the wardrobe of a tropical white knight, I guess). Time froze while all three of us took in what was happening. Then my father opened his mouth and ... roared—a semi-naked, Y-fronted, enraged bear. The Wraith was off the bed in a flash, pushing along the wall past my father’s uncomprehending howl of shock and rage.
The next memory I have of that night is being tucked away behind my mother as I answered questions from a policeman, one of three or four officers who had been detailed to investigate. Their looming dark uniforms, their size and stern demeanour all seemed very out of place in the soft-lit haven of our home. I remember shaking, as I stared at the shadows they threw over the cream-and-tan flock living-room wallpaper that so pleased my mother. Her arm draped protectively over me. I had gone into shock and had little comprehension of what had occurred. I still believe that if I had been able to roll over and go back to sleep, I would have woken up the next morning with nothing more than a memory of a strange nightmare, but the arrival of the policemen robbed me of any such misapprehension, shaking me to the core and leaving me completely awake. I knew then that what the Wraith had done, or tried to do, was ‘Wrong’ with a capital ‘W’; the jarring presence of the police proved it.
They found the Wraith easily enough based on the details of his pale eyes and vitiligo. There weren’t many Aboriginals in the district matching that description. In subsequent years my mother told me of the outcome. After the Wraith’s arrest, the tribal council insisted he should be punished under tribal law. Given the fraught local situation, the police had acquiesced. We never
learned what happened to him but I was told later by my classmates that sex with pre-pubescent girls was not unknown in his tribe. Indeed, one young Aboriginal woman later joked to me that if a girl was still a virgin at twelve years old, she was probably ugly. I didn’t laugh.
My parents said that I could talk to them about it if I ever wanted to, but I didn’t know what to say. I am not sure that I’d know what to say now. In retrospect this outcome is strange to me because I now know that there is a widely practised traditional practice of Aboriginal justice, often known as ‘payback’. In this practice, the wishes of the victim and the victim’s family are taken into account; ours most certainly weren’t. One thing was clear to me, however: the rules were different here and life moved on.
The experience left several little hooks in me. Since that night I’ve never slept without being fully clothed and under covers. For at least a decade I couldn’t sleep in a completely dark room and, more than forty years later, I still double-check that the exterior doors are locked before going to bed. Finally, I never put any part of my body over the edge of the bed. That may sound silly but I have evidence of monsters under there.
But my monsters remained night-time monsters; on a daily basis, there was no change. People now ask me how my view of the local Indigenous population changed after the Wraith’s visit but I find that a strange question. I went to school the next day and played with everyone as normal. Why would my attitude to them change? They had nothing to do with what had happened. The world was back in balance—at least during daylight.
Later, this apparently unusual response got turned even further on its head. While at the University of Queensland, I one day sat next to a young Aboriginal woman in a lecture theatre. We got talking and I found myself asking how she had managed to get to university, since many tribes saw the acquisition of a Western education as a betrayal of their culture and an adoption of the white man’s ways.
‘It hasn’t been easy,’ she told me. ‘But my mother felt I was destined for different things and encouraged me.’ Our chat was, I felt, going swimmingly until I made an insensitive comment: I said she must be glad that white people had come along for at least one reason (though, God knows, there are a million reasons to hate us).
‘What reason is that?’ she asked.
‘Well, at least now men are being punished for raping children.’
The atmosphere between us turned icy.
‘Actually,’ she said, ‘you guys have really screwed it up for us.’
I sat, frozen into mute bewilderment for a moment.
She explained that, in her tribe, identifying to the white authorities a man who had raped you would effectively end that man’s life and occasionally that of his family as well. ‘It’s hard enough being employed as an Aboriginal as it is; being an ex-prisoner is a death sentence to any prospects you might hope for. You hear of men coming out of jail having done continued in the book
Architectural Book Awards 2024
Once again, Booklaunch is delighted to have sponsored the Architectural Book Awards, now in their second year. We received a gratifyingly large number of entries from individual authors as well as publishers, as a result of which we identified five categories of book, and announced 32 shortlisted titles (see Issue 19). We now unveil each of the category winners, as well as the overall winner of the competition, the Architectural Book of the Year 2024.
As with last year, unlike other book competitions, the judges of the awards took part anonymously, in order to avoid potential conflicts of interest — always likely in a small field like architecture where people tend to know each other — and also to throw the emphasis on the entrants rather than on the celebrity assessors.
In 2023, the awards ceremony at which the winners were announced was very generously hosted by the Zaha Hadid Foundation in Clerkenwell. This year, the ceremony has been hosted by Maggie’s Barts (see photo above) — one of a network of some 30 architecturally uplifting cancer support centres being developed by the Maggie’s charity, this one designed by the US firm, Steven Holl Architects.
We thank the team at Maggie’s for their gracious welcome.
In late November we will be inviting submissions to the 2025 awards scheme. Further information about how to enter will be found nearer the time on our website at www.booklaunch.london. We can also be emailed at book@ booklaunch.london.
Finally, congratulations to all our very deserving winners.
Winner Architectural Book of the Year 2024 Winner ABA 2024 for Treatises
The Architecture of Influence was a decade in the making. It started out as an undergraduate seminar at Northeastern University in 2013, expanded in 2014 as part of a program grant-funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and was road tested at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design in 2019. The judges of this year’s Architectural Book Awards liked that long trajectory and felt that it resulted in a work of true substance.
The governing thought of the book is to demolish our assumptions about individual creativity and promote the proposition that every creative act involves a borrowing of some kind. Sometimes the borrowing is normal and unexceptional, as one would expect of an architectural work that conforms to a style or a school, but sometimes it is flamboyant and provocative and at other times unintentional and unrecognised even by its own architect.
To anyone brought up in the belief that architectural history is a sequence of heroic novelties, author Amanda Reeser Lawrence’s thinking will come as a challenge, as it will to those who might see the book as flirting with a conservatism that insists simply that whatever claim the new might make, the past got there first.
But this is not an old-versus-new polemic. It is a stressing of how, as a public art, architecture should be viewed as part of a continuity—a collectivity of ownership. That’s something that can be understood better if we compare it to today’s music industry where sampling isn’t an act of creative desperation but one of the keys to creativity. That is to say, we need to stop thinking of precedent and progeny as being in conflict and see design as emerging from a pool of sharable possibilities.
THE ARCHITECTURE OF INFLUENCE
THE MYTH OF ORIGINALITY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
AMANDA REESER LAWRENCE
University of Virginia Press 11 October 2023
Hardcover, 376 pages 9780813950587
RRP £47.48
That, very crudely, is the theory; the evidence that backs it up in this book is taken exclusively from 20th-century America—and, for the team of judges of this UK-based award, that Americanisation of the canon was an eye-opener, not only because of the buildings chosen but because of their “unoriginality”. We in the UK do not think of Hearst Castle, the home Julia Morgan spent nearly 40 years designing for press baron William Randolph Hearst, as a cornerstone of architectural creativity, but the author presents it here as a masterwork of architectural “compilation”—a practice we recognise from its filmic counterpart—Xanadu—in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane
The author’s text is dense, the judges thought, but is often clarified by the inclusion of pairs of pictures showing sources and simulations, sometimes of historic and contemporary work, sometimes of self-copying by the same architect and, in one case, of plagiarism. Here, a project in Beijing by Zaha Hadid was pirated by a Chinese developer in Chongqing, causing a fuss in the press but at the same time
undermining notions of singularity and promoting ideas about cross-referencing that Hadid herself was the first to embrace.
The Architecture of Influence is organised loosely around seven definitions of copying, all somewhat porous and all opposed to dated notions of male-centric genius. That makes this, implictly, a feminist work; oddly, though, apart from Morgan and a couple of references to Mary Beard, Ada Louise Huxtable and a few others, it seems to depict a wholly male universe. Even index references to “Eames”, “Smithson” and “Venturi”, for example, name Charles, Peter and Robert but not Ray, Alison and Denise. We expect that this will change in future editions.
Meanwhile, two other elements delighted the judges: the clever upsidedown before-and-after cover and the text font, which some of us remember from the Architectural Review of the 1960s and 70s. Intentional emulation (copying, evoking, honouring) or accident? Only the team at the University of Virginia Press—Boyd Zenner, Maura High, Ellen Satrom and Mark Mones—can tell us.
Winner ABA 2024 for Guides
There are no two ways about it: we have to start building high-rise homes again. In Asia, 30-storey apartment blocks are common—and densely packed. And height does not prevent flats from having open-air balconies, unlike high-rise offices, which never do. Andrew Beharrell and Rory Olcayto are less ambitious than this: their proposal is for (mostly) four-storey walk-ups, with open-air pavements at each level to obviate the need for lots of lifts.
The arguments for this “deck-access” housing are not watertight, and such blocks were felt to have failed in the past, so the authors have taken a big risk in trying to reignite interest in them. But we need to house our growing population, and revisiting this particular formula, armed with better information about what worked and didn’t work last time round, seems sensible.
That said, what struck the judges about The Deck Access Housing Design Guide was its self-consciously retro character.
THE DECK ACCESS HOUSING DESIGN GUIDE
A RETURN TO STREETS IN THE SKY ANDREW BEHARRELL, RORY OLCAYTO
Routledge, 1st edition 10 February 2023
Softback, 202 pages
9781032218953
RRP £34.99
For one thing, the publication of an A4 paperback reminded us of the Architects’ Journal design guides of the past (although Routledge’s typography is a lot less disciplined) and this was enhanced by the use of blue duotone for the cover and advisory pages—anomalous, given that every picture in the much larger History and Case Studies section of the book is in full colour.
Something is obviously going on here: a private game; a self-conscious emulation of an architectural period which came and went and is now, apparently, asking for readmittance; or maybe a salute to the early years of Pollard Thomas Edwards, the architectural firm which seems to have funded this book and with which both writers have connections.
We couldn’t quite interpret what was going on but we think that, as a guide book, this is a publication that will prove itself in use.
Joint Winners ABA 2024 for Monographs
SEA POOLS
66
SALTWATER
SANCTUARIES FROM AROUND THE WORLD CHRIS ROMER-LEE
Batsford, 1st edition 3 August 2023
Hardcover, 192 pages 9781849947671
RRP £25.00
HOUSES THAT CAN SAVE THE WORLD COURTENAY SMITH AND SEAN TOPHAM
Thames and Hudson, 1st edition
15 September 2022
Hardcover, 256 pages 9780500343715
RRP £25.00
As judges, we thought we knew the range of books we would be assessing this year, but Chris Romer-Lee’s took us by surprise. Protected sea-water bathing ponds don’t seem like the raw material of architecture but Sea Pools persuaded us that they are—that they’re the product of design intelligence aimed at making places people can use, just like any other building.
We were delighted by the geographical ambition of the author’s book and by the sufficiency of his research. We understand also that he is the founder of a firm of London architects (Studio Octopi) specialising in water-related projects and this book seems like an excellent introduction to what inspires him and what should inspire us too.
We need more templates for good housing and Courtenay Smith and Sean Topham, who call themselves “two curious homeowners”, have trawled the world for over 150 projects, many of which have overcome opposition, sometimes at great time and cost, to offer new solutions. Their book identifies 19 different strategies that offer hope and inspiration, such as Brighton University’s repurposing of 19,8000 unwanted toothbrushes for insulation, and a scheme in Cambridge, Mass, that grafts trees together into a single protective form. They look also at housing in Vietnam that can resist flooding and elsewhere that can float. Sixty years ago, we looked to Bernard Rudofsky’s Architecture Without Architects, then to Paul Oliver’s Dwellings in the 1980s for non-mainstream ideas. This could be the next book on from those seminal works.
Joint Winners ABA 2024 for Portfolios Winner ABA 2024 for Travelogues
THE ARCHITECTURE OF SUSPENSE
THE BUILT WORLD IN THE FILMS OF ALFRED HITCHCOCK
CHRISTINE MADRID FRENCH
ALAN HESS (FOREWORD)
University of Virginia Press
30 September 2022
Softback, 274 pages
9780813947679
RRP £25.95
SIR EDWIN LUTYENS
BRITAIN’S GREATEST ARCHITECT?
CLIVE ASLET
Triglyph Books
16 May 2024
Hardcover, 256 pages 9781739731434
RRP £20.00
According to one study, Alfred Hitchcock based his screenplays on places rather than plot and characters. Christine Madrid French offers a comprehensive line-up of what those places were and who designed them, leading to more detailed assessments of how architecture can manipulate us emotionally.
She talks, for example, in a chapter on mansions and motels, about how a motel becomes dangerous rather than a place of shelter; in a chapter on skyscrapers about the penthouse as a metaphor for social privilege. That use of movies as a frame for sidestepping the practicalities of architecture—how they’re engineered, what they cost, how they keep the weather out—and focusing on how they can be perceived was ingenious, the judges thought, and warrants more attention.
Books can be polemic, books can be challenging, and sometimes books can just tell a good story. Clive Aslet’s short biography of Lutyens tells a very good story—not entirely unknown but still packed with enough surprises to keep one reading to the very end.
Since the exhibition about him at the Hayward Gallery in 1981, Lutyens has become a lightning rod in the Culture Wars but, although responsible for some of the most celebrated buildings of the late Empire, had a modesty that left him oddly detached from the architectural profession of his own era.
As editor of Country Life, Aslet has a unique perspective on Lutyens, who had designed the magazine’s offices in Tavistock Square in 1904, and this biography—published by the imprint Aslet set up five years ago—seemed to the judges to offer the perfect vehicle for combining a lifetime of observations about Lutyens with almost conversational informality. If only heroes of Modernism could be written about with similar fluency.
Those of us who know little about South London are always surprised that there’s a creative tension between its endless sprawl of Victorian suburbia and its much longer and more characterful history. Dulwich is a case in point—an affluent, largely self-contained village that owes its survival to the accidents of 17th-century land ownership and its subsequent land management.
At the core of Dulwich: Mid-Century Oasis are Wates, still a family-owned building firm, and Russell Vernon, a local architect retained by The Dulwich Estate
DULWICH MID-CENTURY OASIS
PAUL DAVIS, ELISABETH KENDALL, IAN MCINNES, CATHERINE SAMY
RIBA Publishing, 1st edition 18 September 2023
Softback, 208 pages 9781915722317
RRP £27.00
to come up with a post-war development plan that would allow for the building of an astonishing 31 housing estates without damaging the area’s extensive green space.
Between 1954 and the early 1970s, several thousand new homes were built here—quiet, modest and very liveable: perhaps the closest England has come to the best mid-century housing of Scandinavia—and still surprisingly little known, even to us!
The high-quality A4 coffee-table paperback produced by Paul Davis, Ian McInnes and Catherine Samy now puts mid-century Dulwich on the map without, the judges felt, threatening to upset the balance by sensationalising what it achieved. They offer a wealth of images and research— the 1960s Whytefield Estate, for example, turns out to be based on Radburn, the pioneering 1929 “town for the motor age” built in New Jersey in 1929—and this material is further amplified by residents’ case studies for context.
It’s hard to imagine that a team of doorto-door salesmen for RIBA Publishing won’t, at the very least, be able to sell at least one copy to every household featured in the book—and then some. Good luck to them.
ARCHITECTURE FOR THE POOR HASSAN FATHY
The American University in Cairo Press
February 2000
Softback, 366 pages 9789774245756
RRP £157.32 (used)
ABOUT THE ARCHITECT
Hassan Fathy (1900-1989) was an Egyptian architect who pioneered the idea of “appropriate technology” for his buildings in Egypt. He was born in Alexandria to a wealthy Egyptian family, and studied architecture at the King Fuad University (now Cairo University). After the failure of his Gourna project (discussed here), he returned to Cairo to head the architectural section of Cairo University’s Faculty of Fine Arts, from 1954. In the late 1950s he moved to Athens, promoted “natural energy” schemes in Iraq and Pakistan, and carried out research for a “Cities of the Future” project in Africa.
ABOUT THE WRITER
Sumita Singha is an architect, academic and author. She founded Architects For Change, the RIBA’s equality forum, and is a past chair of Women In Architecture, having served on many RIBA committees over the last 25 years. She is also a nationally elected RIBA councillor and board trustee for education, and a trustee of four built-environment charities. She is the founding director of Charushila, an international design charity. She teaches architecture in the UK and abroad, and is the author of several books including Future Healthcare Design (RIBA Publishing, 2020). She received an OBE for services to architecture in 2021.
An architect with footings of clay
A visit to Egypt leaves Sumita Singha disappointed
The Egyptian architect, Hassan Fathy (1900–89) was famous for experimenting with the kind of unfired mud bricks used by peasants, and for favouring traditional domed and vaulted roofs, and enclosed courtyards. In 1945, he was commissioned to resettle the village of Gourna, which lies on the West Bank of the Nile at Luxor, Egypt. Fathy worked on the project between 1946 and 1952, but there were always problems, including sabotage and flooding, and the scheme was never completed.
In his book Architecture for the Poor (1976), Fathy recounts that there were social as well as architectural goals to his project: giving tomb robbers and fake antiquarians respectable jobs such as carpet weaving, countering parasitic infections found in the local water by creating swimming pools; and improving social mobility by building schools.
In India, where I grew up and studied, we admired Fathy for eschewing globalised Western canons of design and planning, and for basing his own designs on long-standing building techniques indigenous to the region. Inspired by him, I worked in India, France and the UK experimenting with earth bricks and rammed earth.
Last year I was able to visit Fathy’s New Gourna project for the first time and was shown around by the son of the head mason of the project. I was dismayed to find not only that Fathy’s vision lay in ruins but that his social initiatives and building intentions had also been abandoned. Only his mosque lives on as originally built, though now it is the Hassan Fathy Museum. His schools and houses have been rebuilt in concrete and brick; his market is being rebuilt with a mixture of stone blocks, mud bricks and cement. Rising water levels from the Nile and increased soil salinity have required more resilient materials.
Near Old Gourna lies the one-time home of Howard Carter, the British archaeologist who discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922. It had been built with the same techniques that Fathy later adopted and, as well as being a very popular tourist destination, it is also now a museum. Tourists, it turns out, love the romance of buildings like this—but local people don’t: they consider them unprogressive.
Nubians, from what is mostly neighbouring Sudan, traditionally used vaulted buildings for tombs and storage. Considering the association of such structures with death, and the use of mud bricks with poverty, it is not surprising that Egyptians now prefer more aspirational structures. A British architect told me that mud-brick homes were already being abandoned during Fathy’s lifetime. A UNESCO report in 2010 stated that, “The number of original mud-brick houses in [Fathy’s] Gourna is considerably reduced.”
More than that, the case study of New Gourna shows that what we might consider well-intentioned can be regarded by those on the receiving end of it as paternalistic. Fathy’s drivers were traditional and cultural, rather than ecological, as we now like to think of them, but the force of tradition and culture is not a constant. Fathy failed to see that while he was importing ancient building materials and technology from Sudan, the rest of Egypt was promoting modernity, with major concrete projects such as the 1960s Aswan dam.
Most importantly, he failed to recognise the social connotations of building materials. The fact is, communities do not conveniently accept architectural definitions imposed on them by experts. They have ambitions of their own, and architects need to recognise these for architecture to be relevant and valued.
How do we deal with the Victorians’ ‘contextual’ racism?
The Indian Mutiny of 1857 shocked Britain. And Ruskin
In January 1858, John Ruskin gave a lecture at the opening meeting of the new Architectural Museum in South Kensington. He dealt with the idea of art and truth, and what art said about cultural identity, and immediately offered an observation — quoted in the following extract — which we now find odious.
Hence the question: does a knowledge of context enable us to excuse what is offensive and make it at least partly palatable?
The context, in the case of Ruskin’s comments, is that while he was hill-walking in Scotland during the summer of 1857, reports were coming through of the Indian Mutiny against the East India Company, which then administered the sub-continent, involving ferocious massacres of soldiers but also of women and children at Delhi, Kanpur and elsewhere.
Ruskin talked about how art can be interpreted but it is evident that his thinking was influenced by the news. Given the circumstances, does that change how we should view his comments? We invite your thoughts — and ask you to look also at a similar problem on page 22.
As I passed last summer, for the first time, through the north of Scotland, it seemed to me that there was a peculiar painfulness in its scenery, caused by the non-manifestation of the powers of human art. I had never travelled in, nor even heard or conceived of such a country before; nor … was I before aware how much of its charm depended on the little gracefulnesses and tendernesses of human work, which are mingled with the beauty of the Alps.
It is true that the art which carves and colours the front of a Swiss cottage is not of any very exalted kind; yet it testifies to the completeness and the delicacy of the faculties of the mountaineer … and this element among the wilds of our own country I found wholly wanting. The Highland cottage is literally a heap of gray stones, choked up, rather than roofed over, with black peat and withered heather; the only approach to an effort at decoration consists in the placing of the clods of protective peat obliquely on its roof, so as to give a diagonal arrangement of lines, looking somewhat as if the surface had been scored over by a gigantic claymore [a Scottish two-handed sword]. …
While these conditions of Scottish scenery affected me very painfully, … they also forced me into the consideration of one or two difficult questions respecting the effect of art on the human mind; and … for this reason, that while I was wander-
ing disconsolately among the moors of the Grampians, where there was no art to be found, news of peculiar interest [was] every day arriving from a country where there was a great deal of art, and art of a delicate kind, to be found.
Among the models set before you in this institution, … there are, I suppose, none in their kind more admirable than the decorated works of India. They are, indeed, in all materials capable of colour— wool, marble or metal—almost inimitable in their delicate application of divided hue, and fine arrangement of fantastic line. … The love of subtle design seems universal in the race, and is developed in every implement that they shape, and every building that they raise; it attaches itself with the same intensity, and with the same success, to the service of superstition, of pleasure, or of cruelty; and enriches alike, with one profusion of enchanted iridescence, the dome of the pagoda, the fringe of the girdle, and the edge of the sword.
So then you have, in these two great populations, Indian and Highland—in the races of the jungle and of the moor—two national capacities distinctly and accurately opposed. On the one side you have a race rejoicing in art, and eminently and universally endowed with the gift of it; on the other you have a people careless of art, and apparently incapable of it, their utmost efforts hitherto reaching no farther than
to the variation of the positions of the bars of colour in square chequers.
And we are thus urged naturally to inquire what is the effect on the moral character, in each nation, of this vast difference in their pursuits and apparent capacities, and whether those rude chequers of the tartan, or the exquisitely fancied involutions of the Cashmere, fold habitually over the noblest hearts ?
We have had our answer. Since the race of man began its course of sin on this earth, nothing has ever been done by it so significative of all bestial, and lower than bestial, degradation, as the acts of the Indian race in the year that has just passed by. Cruelty as fierce may indeed have been wreaked, and brutality as abominable been practised before, but never under like circumstances … . And, as thus, on the one hand, you have an extreme energy of baseness displayed by these lovers of art; on the other—as if to put the question into the narrowest compass— you have had an extreme energy of virtue displayed by the despisers of art.
And thus you have the differences in capacity and circumstance between the two nations … . Out of the peat cottage come faith, courage, self-sacrifice, purity and piety, and whatever else is fruitful in the work of Heaven; out of the ivory palace come treachery, cruelty, cowardice, idolatry bestiality—whatever else is fruitful in the work of Hell. …
GENDER EQUALITY AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA
LISA KOLOVICH AND MONIQUE NEWIAK (EDS)
International Monetary Fund
11 April 2024
eBook, 428 pages
9798400246968
EDITOR’S NOTE
This book explores the issue of gender equality in sub-Saharan Africa, highlighting challenges and successes in areas such as legal reform, education, health, genderbased violence, harmful practices such as child marriage, and financial inclusion. The book’s underlying belief is that improved gender equality will be good for the regional economy and for sustainable development, as well as for individuals, families and communities — a normal principle driving IMF interventions.
In addition to looking at how initiatives contribute to structural reforms, and at how fiscal and other policies can close gender gaps, the book observes how women and girls still carry a disproportionate care burden, that is often not captured in economic measurement, in spite of the rich background of research that the studies here draw on.
In short, the book aims to serve as a roadmap for policymakers, stakeholders and advocates seeking to harness the untapped potential of gender equality — for its own sake and for the region’s inclusive, sustainable and green development. It calls for concerted efforts to dismantle structural barriers, transform social norms and prioritise genderresponsive policies.
How economic success offers an incentive to men not to beat their wives
ELIMINATING VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN AND BOOSTING THE ECONOMY
Rasmané Ouedraogo and David Stenzel (eds)
One in three women has experienced physical or sexual assault in her life. Worldwide, no place is less safe for a woman than her home. Besides being a fundamental human rights violation, a serious public health concern and devastating for individual wellbeing, violence against women and girls also has high economic costs, leading to reduced productivity, less investment in human capital, and higher demand for health and judicial services. Domestic violence also affects companies, with higher rates of absenteeism and staff turnover, as well as lower output, and the risk of reputational damage.
The Covid-19 pandemic led to increased domestic violence against women, with lockdown measures exacerbating existing situations of abuse and control. According to the International Growth Centre, the number of reported cases of gender-based violence in Nigeria increased from 300 to more than 700 following the introduction of lockdowns in March 2020.
The University of Minnesota’s Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) database goes back to the 1980s to the present, and references several types of violence against women, including physical (hurting, punching, and slapping, among others), emotional (attempts to embarrass, shame, blame, frighten, control, or isolate) and sexual.
According to UN Women, there is an economic cost to this violence, amounting to $1.5 trillion worldwide. Duvvury and others (2013) found that violence against women can cost up to 3.7 percent of GDP in some countries.
Because data is lacking on local economic activity, night-time lighting was taken as a proxy, using figures from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That is because nightlight satellite data is highly correlated with economic activities. After filtering for cloud cover, other ephemeral lights, and background noise, the amount of night-light per capita is calculated by dividing the sum of all night-time light pixel values within a district by the district’s population. The population data comes from the Gridded Population of the World, Version 4 database provided by the Center for International Earth Science Information Network.
Control variables such as the size of the agriculture sector (proxied by the share of cropland), the urbanisation rate (share of respondents living in urban areas), infrastructure (time to a water source and total road lengths), education (average number of years of schooling), conflict intensity (number of conflict-related deaths over the population), and religious fractionalisation (religious beliefs of respondents) are from the IPUMS data set; road lengths are from the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (2013). These variables are usually considered strong determinants of economic development.
What the IPUMS data set shows is that violence against women is pervasive, and appears to depend on the country’s level of development, as violence is somewhat higher in low-income countries. The data also shows that sub-Saharan Africa has the highest rate of domestic violence globally, with more than 30 percent of women having experienced intimate partner violence, followed by the East Asia and Pacific regions. In Afghanistan, Papua New Guinea, Liberia, and Democratic Republic of the Congo, nearly half of all women experienced physical, sexual, or emotional violence committed by a husband or partner.
The percentage of women across sub-Saharan African countries who report -ed physical, emotional or sexual violence by their current husband or partner ranges widely. For example, about 1 percent of women in Comoros reported that a husband or partner punched them with a fist or something harmful, compared with 18 percent of women in Gabon. Women reporting sexual violence ranges from about 2 percent in Burkina Faso to 27 percent in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; emotional violence ranges from about 6 percent in Comoros to 47 percent in Gabon. Slapping occurs frequently, with more than one-third of women reporting being slapped by a husband or partner in Gabon, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sierra Leone, and Zambia. The threat of harm is also common, since nearly 20 percent of women reported they have been threatened with harm in Cameroon, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Uganda.
The data can be used to shed light on whether certain factors, such as laws on domestic violence, endowments, economic conditions, and decision-making power, mitigates or amplifies the effect of violence against women and girls on economic activity:
Effects of laws on domestic violence:
The presence of protective laws against domestic violence has proved effective in reducing physical, psychological and emotional abuse. Laws can not only benefit women seeking to address domestic violence in their relationships but can also help enhance their physical and psy-
chological wellbeing. Some countries are also adopting protective provisions to help ensure that domestic violence does not stop women from working. Legal provisions can help lessen domestic violence by providing women with access to justice (Dugan 2002), enhancing their well-being and boosting their economic output.
Effects of natural resources: Mining zones can be a hostile climate for women in general. Opening new mines can trigger a structural shift in employment patterns in Africa, with women leaving the agricultural fields for informal service jobs around the mining sites (for instance, as vendors) or leaving the labour market altogether. Ross (2008, 2012) emphasized that an increase in natural resources leads to lower female employment, since revenues tend to push out low-wage and export-oriented factories. This in turn increases women’s risk of abuse by their intimate partners. In environments in which women’s dependency is high, domestic violence could be elevated, lowering economic output. In short, the economic costs of domestic violence are higher in resource-rich districts.
Economic conditions and commodity price shocks: A proliferation of intimate partner violence followed the Great Depression. Such downturns can increase abusive behaviour in two ways. First, men who might otherwise have kept negative behaviours in check may succumb to the stress of challenging economic circumstances. Second, worsening macroeconomic conditions increase abusive behavior by increasing uncertainty and fear among a broad population segment. The construction of an interaction variable between commodity prices and violence against women and girls allows an exploration of this assumption. The results show that the economic costs of domestic violence are higher during a commodity price slump, implying that the increase in domestic violence during the pandemic could have detrimental effects on economic development.
Decision-making power and gender gap in education: Many researchers associate intimate
Woman gathering seaweed off the coast of Zanzibar
Rachel Clare Reed / Wikimedia
The week following July Fourth was taken up with travel preparations. Mrs. Woodbine came to help pack and close up the house. She was a widow in her fifties, originally from the rural South. Two or three times a year she traveled up from her home near what she liked to call “the nation’s capital”. Almost the first thing she did when the taxi left her off at the Lashes’ was to change into sensible shoes and a house dress that shifted back and forth across her frame. She was not fat, only very big. Her large hands rested in her lap when she sat in the kitchen and talked at length about her grown-up children, John-Wesley and Arlene, her son-in-law Woody, and her two grandchildren, Junior and Harlan. Mrs. Woodbine also had an aged mother and numerous brothers and sisters as well as cousins who suffered from strange-sounding ailments—one had a collapsed womb and another had something that sounded
tell her brothers and sisters and children and grandchildren. But, of course, no one thought of taking her along.
The week of travel preparations passed quickly. On a Tuesday morning, the Lash family rose early and took a train and then a taxi to their point of embarkation. Mrs. Woodbine tagged along; she insisted on seeing them off before she headed back to Pennsylvania Station and caught her train home. Professor Lash said it was a wonder all their luggage fit into the taxi; Mrs. Woodbine’s suitcase, he muttered to Joyce, took up practically the whole trunk. This was an exaggeration but it was true that everyone had to keep a bag or suitcase on their lap.
The departure shed was already crowded when the Lashes arrived. There were separate lines for the two classes. The Lashes were traveling “tourist”. Arthur had declined his father’s offer to pay for first class; they would all be
Over an hour earlier, a porter had wheeled Horace away. Watching him go, Joyce began to worry. For the next several days, the dog would have to make do with dry food instead of his usual ground beef. Suppose he refused to eat? He would lose weight. He might get seasick. Why couldn’t they have flown? They had all seen a photograph of the president boarding a commercial jetliner. IKE’S HISTORIC FLIGHT, the caption read. But Professor Lash said that jet airplanes hadn’t been thoroughly tested. Marcus thought his father was right: the passengers might survive a crash in an inflatable raft, but Horace, thrown from the aircraft along with the other baggage, wouldn’t stand a chance.
“I keep thinking about poor Horace,” Joyce said. “All alone for four days.”
“It was your idea,” Arthur reminded her.
“I’ll have to see if I can take him for a
Mrs Woodbine! Hadn’t she already said goodbye and kissed them on the cheek?
like tick doolaroo—or else they were down on their luck in some other way.
Ruby Woodbine and young Marcus, the Lashes’s youngest, had once been best friends. She’d laughed at his clever sayings and delighted in his crayon drawings; given him his bath; even comforted him when they were out for a walk and he was gripped by a terrific cramp and had to let everything go. At the Lashes’ summer cottage, she lay next to him on the bed when he took his nap with the windows open and a fan blowing. If he couldn’t fall asleep, Mrs. Woodbine told him about her childhood: how she could make a hen go to sleep by adjusting its wings, and how she’d slept on a straw mattress and walked miles to school, traveling always in a group, in case youngsters were lying in wait with jeers—or worse.
Mrs. Woodbine did not play cards, nor drank, nor danced. Her Daddy had made her promise that she would not do these things, and Mrs. Woodbine thought a promise made to a parent was no different than a promise made to God and therefore binding forever. She made an exception for Go-Fish, and on occasion she took a sip of wine at the dinner table. When this happened, Professor Lash congratulated her on her courage and, in revenge, Mrs. Woodbine put on an ironic smile as she watched the family get ready for Sunday mass. She knew all about incense, holy water and other sorts of idolatry; her own church had swept such nonsense away long ago. “All those monks messing around,” she told Marcus behind his parents’ back. “Never an honest day’s work!”
Mrs. Woodbine would like to have accompanied the Lashes across the ocean, to see for herself a part of the world that hadn’t reformed yet. The family, she understood, would be making a side trip from Vienna to Italy. That aroused Mrs. Woodbine’s curiosity. She’d seen pictures in a magazine of a Roman fountain with water spouting from the mouths of Neptune and his minions. She would like to have seen it all just once, so that she could
perfectly comfortable, he said, with less luxurious accommodations. Joyce had felt momentarily disappointed, but after all it wasn’t her father’s money and she had no right to object.
The S.S. Columbus was supposed to embark at noon, with boarding to commence well in advance. By eleven o’clock there were still no signs of departure. The Lashes began to feel very restless. Marcus wondered if somebody had discovered a gash in the hull; in that case, they would have to go home. More likely, he decided, it was a routine delay, no different from waiting for hours in the pediatrician’s office. In the meantime, children sat on suitcases and folded-up coats; two boys were playing tag. A porter elbowed past, shouting something. Marcus felt nauseous from the stuffy air. His father had insisted on dress shirts and ties, and his mother had made everyone bring trench coats in case of rain.
Val hadn’t been allowed to take his bomber jacket and engineer boots. What would Granddaddy say? Hermann Lasch drew an inflexible line between respectable boys and Strassenbuben
“They’re bound to start boarding any minute. Someone needs to find Val.” Joyce checked her wristwatch. “We shouldn’t have let him wander off.”
“Adrian, go look for him.” Professor Lash folded down a corner of a page in his paperback and shoved it into his jacket pocket. “Or do I have to go myself?”
“We should have put him in the crate with Horace,” Adrian said.
“Just go, Adrian. And don’t dawdle.”
Marcus imagined Val locked up in Horace’s crate. He wouldn’t fit. Even Horace barely squeezed in. His parents had meant to board Horace, but then his mother read a newspaper article about dogs getting sick and even dying in boarding kennels, and none of their friends was willing to adopt a dog for six whole weeks. Horace, Joyce said, would enjoy a change of scenery. The dog was going to be a nuisance, Arthur said, but he was too excited about the trip to argue.
MRS. WOODBINE’S PREJUDICES
MICHAEL LADNER
EnvelopeBooks
26 September 2024
Softback, 254 pages 9781915023056
RRP £11.95
Check our website for discount
walk on deck, even if I have to bribe an officer.”
Marcus had studied the ship’s brochure and seen the picture of officers in white uniforms and braided caps. You could probably be arrested for trying to bribe one of them. Another picture showed a crew member, also in white, serving bouillon to a woman stretched out on a deck chair. According to the brochure, there would be dancing to a live band, betting on wooden horses and a club with a nautical theme for teenagers. Joyce said it would be a good opportunity for Adrian and Val to mingle.
“Val’s going to make us miss the boat,” Professor Lash was saying. “We’ll have to leave him behind—” But then he stopped short, startled by the rapid approach of a tall, big-boned woman. Mrs. Woodbine! Hadn’t she already said her good-byes and kissed each of the boys on the cheek? Shouldn’t she be on her train by now?
“I never knew I had it on me,” Mrs. Woodbine said between breaths, “not until I was on the train!” In one hand she held a sack containing Horace’s blanket, bowl, toys and biscuits. In her other hand she gripped her big suitcase.
“What’s she doing here?” said Val, who had returned with Adrian just in time to witness Mrs. Woodbine’s arrival. He sounded disgusted, as if she were a stranger asking for change.
“She’s brought us Horace’s blanket. Really, she shouldn’t have bothered … .” Joyce’s words trailed off. She looked as if she was standing at the scene of an accident.
“Awfully kind of you, Mrs. Woodbine,” Professor Lash said. “We’re always forgetting things, right boys?”
“Awful kind, my foot!” Mrs. Woodbine took a deep breath. “There I was, the train rarin’ to go. I said, ‘Ruby, you’ve got a-hold of Horace’s things!’ I knew that dog wouldn’t get a wink of sleep without his blanket to lay himself across. I had a feeling the boat wouldn’t leave on time and you all hadn’t boarded
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
Professor Arthur Lash, born Artur Lasch in pre-war Austria, takes his American wife and their three sons back to Vienna, in 1960, to see how well his father is rebuilding his life after regaining the factory stolen from him when Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938.
For Arthur, the journey helps him re-establish his links with the city he was brought up in; for the rest of his family, the new horizons of travel awaken a range of other emotions, all watched over by the wise but needy, Mrs Woodbine, their family nanny and uninvited travelling companion.
In this, his third novel, Michael Ladner draws on his own early years as a child of that generation of exiled Central European academics who found a new home in America.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael Ladner was born in Princeton, N.J., where his Viennese father was a medieval historian at the Institute for Advanced Study, alongside fellow academics Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein. Having been patted on the head approvingly by the latter, Michael went on to take a B.A. from Harvard, an M.A. from New York University, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Claremont Graduate University, with further studies at the San Francisco Art Institute and School of Visual Arts.
A QUESTION OF PATERNITY
MY LIFE AS AN UNAFFILIATED REPORTER
DAVID TERESHCHUK
EnvelopeBooks
19 September 2024
Paperback, 412 pages
ISBN-13: 9781915023155
RRP £17.95
Check our website for discount
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Tereshchuk (b. 1948) was born on the Scottish borders, graduated from Oxford University and now lives in New York City and Dublin. A journalist working mainly in the broadcast media, he spent two decades with commercial television in the UK, reporting, producing and making documentaries, before moving to the US, where he worked for ABC, CBS, CNN, Discovery, A&E and The History Channel.
His earliest work included coverage of violence in Northern Ireland, and then extended into international issues, especially in the Third World. Since 2012 he has been a producer and correspondent for PBS, concentrating on ethical issues.
He currently broadcasts a weekly public-radio review of media criticism, The Media Beat, and writes an online column with the same name, at www. themediabeat.us.
He has been honoured by Britain’s Royal Television Society with its Social Documentary Award, and by the British Association for the Advancement of Science with its Television Award.
Reporting Bloody Sunday was one thing, identifying his father quite another
David Tereshchuk leapt from an unpromising childhood to a high-flying career as a TV journalist, first in London, then New York. During his time, he managed to get revealing interviews from tyrants and the oppressed, but could never coax his mother into disclosing who his father was. That search has haunted him, adding further layers of stress to 27 years of alcohol addiction and ongoing insecurity.
The march began innocuously enough. Very cheerfully, in fact, even though it had a serious political purpose: to protest against the authorities’ recent imposition of imprisonment without trial in the province. Reading back now over contemporary news coverage, I’m struck by the number of English reporters who chose the phrase ‘carnival atmosphere’ to describe the marchers’ bright mood; it evidently reminded them of a summer fair bringing good humour to a country town back home. But as the march reached Aggro Corner the customary skirmishes did break out, young tearaways doing their usual thing and getting chastised for doing it by the main body of marchers and the stewards in charge of marshaling the crowd. The march as a whole took a rightward turn, in an orderly move towards what was known as Free Derry Corner, the area’s traditional spot for speechmaking. Speeches had been planned as the final element in the twohour-long demonstration.
Suddenly firearms came into play. And from then on, this day—30 January, 1972—was destined to be known as ‘Bloody Sunday’. Like every other observer and marcher, I was taken completely by surprise when British paratroopers burst through barriers lining the route, ran towards the crowd and almost instantly began firing. This is the last fucking straw! I thought, as I crushed my nose into the roadway’s asphalt, with high-velocity bullets cracking and whining over me. I was twenty-three and scared witless but my thoughts came fast and embroidered with bravado. I had by then covered enough of The Troubles to have been variously threatened at gunpoint by Protestant paramilitaries and forced to run from Irish Republican Army sniper fire. Now, I blustered to myself in outrage, it’s my own national army that’s firing at me.
I ran and dived for cover, tearing my jeans and cutting my knee, and I huddled behind a rubble barricade feeling as foolish and professionally humiliated as I felt frightened. My job, after all, was to make television, and all I had was a notepad. Wanting to do something of use, I scribbled notes: the time according to my cracked watch-face (4:16 pm), the fractured sobbing of a woman nearby, the number of shots that I was trying to count—an impossible task since they overlapped so much. It was during that notetaking that my eyes locked on the one soldier I remember so well, leveling his rifle at my group of cowering youngsters and pulling the trigger. Like anybody would, I imagine, I dropped my gaze and flattened myself to the ground again. When a break in the firing came, I ran from the danger area. Around me others lay still; whether they were hit or just being
cautious I couldn’t tell. Thirteen men, all Catholic residents of Derry, were shot dead that cold January day, six of them under the age of twenty-one on my side of the rubble barricade. A fourteenth would die of his wounds some weeks later.
Though I wasn’t at first even conscious of choosing a direction, the dash I made for safety somehow led me to the home of John Hume, leader of Derry’s ‘constitutional’ Irish nationalists (as opposed to the IRA, who represented the ‘armed struggle’ brand of nationalism). The door was open, and John’s wife, Pat, took me into their kitchen to bathe and dress my absurdly small injury, while the house filled with all kinds and ages of Derry men and women, many trembling in shock and fury. I heard John roaring on the phone—something this peaceable community organiser hadn’t previously seemed capable of—as he castigated the prime minister’s chief adviser in 10 Downing Street. I heard him repeat the word ‘massacre’ many times, sometimes more fully as ‘unprovoked massacre.’
I went back to work on the streets, hoping to make sense of what had just happened, and I met some colleagues and friends on the way, all trying to do the same. We almost immediately encountered the military’s lie-making machinery start to rev up. At an impromptu sidewalk press conference, a British officer gave us the first official account of what he called ‘the incident’. Just a few of the reporters, including myself, had been on the crowd’s side of the barriers; most had been with the Army and police on their side. But wherever we had been, none of us had seen or heard anyone use a weapon apart from the paratroopers.
‘We came under fire from seven snipers,’ said the officer.
‘Of whom we killed thirteen,’ muttered a Guardian reporter, a friend who would be celebrated in later years for his biting sketches of proceedings in Parliament.
Later in the day BBC News filmed an interview with the paratroopers’ most senior officer on-site, Lieutenant-Colonel Derek Wilford. The no-nonsense interviewer emphasised to the colonel that there was no evidence of any armed attack from the crowd’s side. Wilford contradicted him, embellishing the official lie further. ‘There was a Thompson sub-machine gun fired, between fifteen and twenty rounds, I would say—and an M1 carbine was fired at me as I traversed across the open ground.’
Though I can often be guilty of some abstruse verbosity, I’ve remained puzzled through the years by the colonel’s odd usage, ‘traversed’—not ‘ran’ or anything simpler. Was it the outcome of some previous brainstorming in the officers’ mess, or maybe a coaching session? Did Wilford always talk that way? Or did he summon up
the word specially, in the hope of sounding more formal and official, more authoritative, more credible?
The killings quickly became a cause for global protest. Britain was condemned in many quarters. At the UN there were demands that an international peacekeeping force be sent to pacify the province. In Dublin the British Embassy was burned down by angry demonstrators.
Amid the heightened tension, I was busy covering the aftermath on Derry’s streets. Perhaps to compensate for having had no film crew present during the actual killings, my TV show now sent me two crews from London. When I finally got a call through to our office, even though the whole of Derry’s meagre telephone exchange seemed to be ringing off the hook, my first words to the executive producer, John Edwards, were close to a sob: ‘I’m sorry, John. I got it wrong. Telling you there’d be nothing big.’ His response was as brusque as I’d always known him to be: ‘Who gives a fuck now? Here’s what we’re gonna do … .’ I now had to scamper fast, along with more reporting staff who were rushing over to help: I was to prepare fresh material for filming by both incoming crews. I also had some moonlighting to do. The national weekly magazine, the New Statesman, for whom I’d become a contributor, wanted an immediate eyewitness article from me, including some assessment of the massacre’s impact on the overall Northern Irish situation. The work in every direction was intense. Somehow or other a dogged member of our team managed to get a call through to the Parachute Regiment’s HQ, talked his way into the barracks with one of our crews and filmed interviews in the sergeants’ mess with some of the shooters themselves. My task, meanwhile, was to film civilian eyewitnesses giving their accounts of the shootings. I shipped out to London one day’s worth of such material, and the next evening—somewhat miraculously, given the ever-increasing overload on phone lines—a call reached me from the office about the film’s arrival. It wasn’t good news: sound tapes were missing for some of the rolls of film. The practice in those days (when location material was still shot on film, not videotape) was to capture sound and vision separately and sync them together back at base. Filmed interviews with no sound were of course useless to our editors—a calamity. I really thought my work was being cursed with technical problems; it was still only months since the footage disaster of my Bangladesh coverage. With more experience, I’d come to see my industry as rife with such crises. TV technology, whatever the period and whatever advances it may have brought, has often been a blight as well as an indispensable tool. But whatever may have happened with our Derry sound tapes, I was now charged with locating the backups that our bosses hoped we had made. I felt quite sure our reliable recordist would, as a matter of course, have created a safety copy for all our interviews. Pretty sure, at least. Heavy rain, blowing
but today’s essays are not shy of winning points by resorting to in-jokes and nods to its readers. In one random example, contributing editor David Runciman began an article about the Tories with an opening jab at George Osborne’s imaginary ambitions to become prime minister:
George Osborne would no doubt have loved to be PM, but he probably knew it wasn’t a job for him. Too smirky, too shifty, too obviously at home in city boardrooms—the British public could tell a mile off that Osborne was a bit of a banker.
This is kind of funny: not the banker joke itself, which we’ve all heard before, but the donnish use of it, which makes it sound cleverer than it is. But what’s Runciman doing with it, other than taking off Martin Amis? Sniggering, of course. Can he not snigger? Of course, but it’s not the sniggering that’s the problem: it’s the partisanship that it co-opts. For a fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature, it’s cheap.
The LRB’s use of innuendo and coded language helps reinforce its alignment with a like-minded audience but it is a weakness, not only because it bypasses critical argument but, again, because it is divisive. If you don’t identify with those the magazine wishes to curry favour with, then, by definition you find yourself identified with the magazine’s outcasts.
This may explain the magazine’s declining readership. Six years ago, when Booklaunch first appeared, the LRB could boast 49,000 readers in the UK and Ireland, according to figures vetted by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, to which it is a paid-up member. Since then, the magazine’s readership has plunged by 15 percent to 35,000 in the UK and ROI (although its website still claims the higher figure).
The nudge-nudge wink-wink assault on political enemies is not a hallmark of higher thinking but a descent into vulgarity, and our impression is that readers have noted this and given up on it. If hearsay evidence is true, it appears that many one-time loyal readers no longer see the LRB as virtuous and no longer feel represented by it.
THE CULTURE OF THE SMUG
Who and what does the LRB now represent? According to the playwright and comedian Alan Bennett, albeit nearly thirty years ago, “the LRB has maintained a consistently radical stance on politics and social affairs,” and this is a claim that the magazine evidently relishes. In reality, though, it has only survived because of substantial private backing—ten years ago the family trust of one of its three founding editors (below) was helping it fund a £27 million deficit—and deep pockets have given it the editorial freedom to foster fanciful academic beliefs. At the same time, alongside its courting of such “consistently radical” writers as Tariq Ali and Slavoj Žižek, it now has a side operation selling commercial fripperies, from branded tote
bags to high-priced picnic blankets and umbrellas.
In the next street to its offices near the British Museum, it runs a sprawling brickand-mortar bookshop, made up of three retail units with a rateable value of about £60,000. Whether books (and the decorative cakes it also sells there) help pay the rent or add to its costs is not public knowledge but the benefit seems so tentative that there must be some other value it is selling—perhaps the association with art galleries and heritage centres. Even then, the optics are smack of hypocrisy and double standards.
And just how “consistently radical” is the LRB, actually? The afore-mentioned David Runciman can’t be blamed for being a hereditary peer—becoming 4th Viscount Runciman of Doxford was an accident of birth—but it’s pretty rich of him, in the example quoted above, to take down a former member of the Bullingdon Club for conjecturally aspiring to be prime minis ter when he himself hasn’t so far cared to renounce his peerage.
While the LRB’s stable of writers is of course not packed with peers, it is fas cinating to note how many come from upper-class stock—Mary Wellesley, for example, turns out to be the daughter of the Marquess of Douro and Princess Anto nia of Prussia—and how untroubled the editorial team is about its own social pre tensions and how they might be perceived.
This may be a British problem, where self-conscious intellectualism is one of the goals of public schooling, made pos sible only because smaller classes of high-achieving children are taught more challenging curricula to higher standards by better qualified teachers. As an intel lectual beacon, the LRB evidently attracts those who can perform at a high level, and they in turn contribute to a shared culture of self-assurance, class and affluence.
The leading figures that created Brit ain’s Welfare State rose from humbler, origins: Aneurin Bevan, Ernest Bevin, Jim Griffiths, Jennie Lee, Herbert Morrison, Ellen Wilkinson, Manny Shinwell, George Lansbury, Tom Johnston, James Chuter Ede. Many of them wrote—Lansbury was editor of the Labour newspaper The Daily Herald—but all got their hands dirty and put theory into practice by becoming MPs and government ministers. Bevin, as a trade union leader, always felt deeply out of place visiting 10 Downing Street to hammer out terms. One can’t imagine him or any of the others feeling at home writing for the LRB. Their clogs would soil the carpets.
By contrast, the LRB’s crop of “con sistently radical” writers appears to be anything but the product of the class that requires empowerment. They’re already empowered. They’re also political virgins: all very clever but favoured with exercis ing their cleverness in the abstract: on the page or in the lecture hall. Lucky them: they get rewarded for theorising without ever being required to answer for anything they say.
The darling of the pack appears to be contributing editor Rosemary Hill. “The first time I remember meeting Carmen [Callil] was at a London Review Christmas party,” Hill gushed in 2022. “She came up to me and said: ‘You’re marvellous, darling’”—because that’s how they talk, darling.
Hill, drawn to aristos as a moth to a flame, has written in breathless veneration about Prince Philip (made divine by the South Pacific islanders of Tanna in Vanuatu—so funny); about Queen Mary, his wife’s grandmother; about the Queen
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Howard Jacobson
What literary festivals tell us about the minds of men in love
Check out the first internet entry on the origin of the lines “Tell me where is fancy bred / Or in the heart or in the head” and you’ll be told they’re from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory but also from The Merchant of Venice. I like that “also”. Listeners might be interested to know that my plays A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Love’s Labour’s Lost are also by Shakespeare.
But where is fancy bred? What are the origins of desire? Where is it engendered? And what is it anyway?
These are questions I’ve been discussing recently at literary festivals, in the course of talking about my latest novel, What Will Survive Of Us, with audiences that have more than the usual ratio of men in them. “More than one, then, ho, ho?” I hear a cynical, seasoned festival-goer ask. And it’s a fair gibe. You don’t get as many men at a literary festival as you do on a street corner where there’s a Lamborghini parked. Or you didn’t
Other than being a man and having suffered the pangs of love, I have no qualifications for all this love talk, no degree from Cambridge in Amatory Studies, no diploma from The London College of Engineering and Management in the Mending of Broken Hearts. In my defence, let me be clear that I am not giving advice, either spiritual or carnal. I report from the front line of happiness and sorrow, that’s all, and because I am more interested in myself than anyone else, the happiness and sorrow I describe is—more often than not—my own. Which makes me an expert only on me.
I don’t apologize for that. Most writers are egotists. And, at the last, that might be why they’re read. The story of one life—deeply felt, vividly told, long thought about, conscientiously examined—is the story of all lives.
This, in itself, doesn’t explain, however, why I am suddenly winning out—as an attraction—against the Lamborghini.
It’s accepted wisdom that unless you write adventure novels, thrillers, spy fiction, fantasy or, better still—that holy grail for writers who’d like occasionally to be read by a man—non-fiction, you won’t have many of them in your audience when you give a reading. When they do turn up it’s either to humour a partner or because it’s raining outside the tent. Sometimes they will sit bolt upright and affect a wild-eyed stare of fascination in the hope you won’t notice they are actually asleep. At others they will lean forward, like dogs expecting a treat, wondering if you might say a single thing into which they can sink their teeth. If the man comes with his wife to have a book signed afterwards, he will stand indulgently to one side, wanting me to understand that he’s never read a word I’ve written, never will, and is damned if he can understand why she does. Often, he will volunteer to take a photograph of his wife and me and then offer to take a second to show that, however close together we stand, he isn’t troubled. As a writer of made-up books about feelings I am hardly a threat to the stability of his muscular marriage.
And now, suddenly, the winds are blow-
ing from the opposite direction. I am trying to stay calm about it. I won’t go so far as to claim that the men today are in the ascendancy or, in the rush to buy signed copies to give their mates and get a photo with the author, they are elbowing women aside. But they are visible, awake, and unafraid to ask a question.
How to explain it? Could it be that for years they have been left cold by the conventions of the romantic novel in which love is buffeted by an over-busy plot—the outcome of which we can usually guess by Page One anyway—and are more curious to hear writers whose interest in the nature of love is more philosophical, maybe even scientific? “Tell me where is fancy bred …?” is a question they have time for, not as an adjunct to a story, but as discussed, let’s say metaphysically, by the likes of Empedocles and Plato. Love as a challenge and a conundrum: where does it come from, why does it go away, where does it fly to, what space should we accord it in a serious, busy, considered life?
I recall, as a one-time teacher of literature, that the most listless male students came alive when reading the poetry of John Donne. It was partly the insolent man-of-the-world swagger they loved. But it was also the admixture of feeling and intellection that drew them in. All these years later I still remember a fascinated essay by a student we’d all given up on, about love’s mysterious migrations from body to soul and back in Donne’s The Ecstasy. He was especially moved by the picture of the lovers lying like sepulchral statues while the souls became the locus of love’s alchemy.
I am not aware that women enjoy the poetry of John Donne any less. I am trying to track down the elusivenesss of male attention, that is all. Why Donne, for example, more than Jane Austen?
Men who turn their backs on Jane Austen, thinking her a writer of drily witty romances only, miss out on one of the greatest writers about love who has ever lived. But few of the most fondly read love stories in our literature are searching and intelligent in the way that Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion are. And I would guess that it’s the conventions of these lesser love stories without the intelligent, Donnelike psychoanalytics that have turned many men off them. Of course, I don’t say that’s all that women want to read or write about. But our culture often pretends it is—packaging the books we read as though women’s fancy is bred exclusively in the heart, and men’s fancy bred exclusively on the battlefield. An assumption that demeans men and women alike.
I say I see a change in the complexion of an audience and wonder if age has something to do with it. I am no spring chicken. The love I write about these days is love in the middle years and later. Could it be that the men who have suddenly showed up want to hear about passion, not as a start-up adventure for the young, with the usual narrative mishaps along the way, including the promise that all will be resolved for the best in the end, but as an overwhelming and, as likely as not, unexpected joy found in maturity, an unsought
Originally broadcast under the title “It’s Me or the Lamborghini” on A Point of View, BBC Radio 4, 7 June 2024. Available on BBC Sounds.
lightning strike of fulfilment, or one of those thunderbolts of disappointment and failing powers of which we all live in dread?
The other sort of thunderbolt—that which we call “love at first sight”—can also be numbered among the shocks of love which we are never too old to experience. What is this mysterious phenomenon, which persuades lovers they cannot just have met but must have known each other in some earlier life?
Again, John Donne writes about it better than anyone else.
Twice or thrice had I lov’d thee, Before I knew thy face or name; So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame—
I stumbled over the fourth line when I reached for it during a reading the other day. Two men in the audience found it for me:
Angels affect us oft, and worshipp’d be …
They were of an age to know about angels and of a gender to know all about worshipping them.
Afterwards, at the signing table, a couple approached. The woman stood to one side, indulgently, as though to say she was not a reader of mine and never would be, whereas her companion was my number-one fan. He blushed a little. I blushed a little back.
“In that case,” I said, “I wonder what you’ll make of my theory regarding male attentiveness.”
He was powerfully built and had a ruddy complexion. A farmer, I thought. He listened politely to my theorising, shaking his head. “It’s simpler than that,” he said. “I’m bored with being typecast as tongue-tied. strong-jawed and dominant. You admit to being hopelessly romantic. I relate to that. Thank you.”
His wife took our photograph. We put our arms around each other’s shoulder.
So much for Empedocles and Plato. Men have been giving the novel a miss not because they find the heroine too soft but because they don’t find the hero soft enough.
I go home and check out my jaw in the bathroom mirror.
WHAT WILL SURVIVE OF US HOWARD JACOBSON
Jonathan Cape 1 February 2024
Hardback, 304 pages
9781787334823
RRP £20:00
Check our website for discount
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
Lily falls in love with Sam the minute she sets eyes on him. It takes Sam a day or two longer. Curious, because Lily – independent, headstrong, rational – has never quite believed in love; while Sam – confident, passionate, romantic – thought he understood it inside out.
Lily is an award-winning television documentary maker. Sam is an award-winning playwright. Both are in relationships that have quietly expired, but their encounter makes Lily and Sam come alive again. As they begin to work together on the page and on screen, an affair takes hold that they are powerless to resist. Arriving in mid-life, their relationship opens unexpected new worlds and, for Lily, offers her a surprising form of liberation. But what will happen to them when familiarity, illness and age begin to take their toll? What will survive? Taking us to the edge of desire, love and betrayal across a lifetime, What Will Survive of Us reveals what is left of us when we strip away every layer.
READERS’ COMMENTS
Sunday Times: “A rare gift and one to be treasured.”
William Boyd: “A profound and vital book.”
Daily Telegraph: “Equal parts funny and challenging.”
Until the author of Lingualia brought it to our attention, we at Booklaunch Towers had not come across the word “heteroseme” or the notion of heterosemy. Shame prompted us (as so often during the day) to ask for help from Wikipedia, via Google, and we now know (though “know” may be claiming too much) that heterosemy is a concept in linguistics concerning words with two or more meanings or functions “that are historically related, but belong to different morphosyntactic categories”.
Thus armed, we explored further, and can now offer the following: a summary of a paper about a heterosemic reportive marker, written—or perhaps carved out of rock—by Björn Wiemer of the Johannes Gütenberg University’s Institute for Slavic Studies, in the online journal Baltic Linguistics
We confess we only understand the shorter words here like “not” and “but”, many of the other words representing territory far beyond our own self-assurance about language. We therefore offer a prize to any of our better-informed readers who can rewrite it in a way that won’t make us choke on our past participles. If you can bring humour to it too, that would not be unwelcome. Directions at the foot of Column 4.
(Jump over this bit to the next bit if, as seems likely, you are appalled.)
Lithuanian esą — a heterosemic reportive marker in its contemporary stage
Abstract: From the syntactic point of view, esą is the most diversified Lithuanian evidential marker of all as it covers uses not only in regular paradigms, but also as a function word. This stage can be captured by the notion of heterosemy. Diachronically esą derives from the former neuter of the present active participle of būti ‘to be’, which is homonymous with the regular nom.pl.m form of the same participle. In contemporary Lithuanian, esą has also become an uninflected function word used as a particle and a complementizer after certain groups of verbs. Today its uses as a participle and as a function word coexist. This article provides a corpus-based investigation into the syntactic distribution of this unit, which neatly distinguishes its grammatical und [sic] lexical status and asks in which usage types and why a reportive meaning arises. The study then focuses on frequent cases in which the syntactic status of esą is ambiguous, also taking into account possible discourse pragmatic cues. The second part of the article starts with an argument for considering the function word uses of esą as results of lexicalization. The rest of the study is devoted to a comparison of esą with functionally equivalent evidential units on a broader areal (basically Eastern European) background. This comparison sheds light on differences and similarities in the etymology, evolution and contemporary syntactic and semantic range of functions of lexicalized reportive markers.
(That’s how they speak English at German universities. Impressive, nicht wahr?)
We’ll return to heterosemes in a moment. First let’s look at hypernyms and contranyms, both of which can afford the delight, or pain, of a double-take. These are hypernyms:
• You can reinforce the repair by affixing a patch of flexible material such as leather, material, or vinyl.
• Artists of all kinds attended the festival: dancers, poets, artists and so on.
• Here’s a typical example of her light verse: it contains three verses, each containing four verses.
• Three of my five children are still children.
• Play me any kind of classical music— baroque music, romantic music, classical music—and I’m instantly enraptured.
And now some examples using contranyms (contronyms, auto-antonyms, Janus-words, antagonyms, pharmakon words):
• How will the authorities ever harness AI for the good of society if they continue to harness it?
• You shouldn’t be sanctioning that kind of behaviour, you should be sanctioning it.
• They were still on their way home, so they didn’t hear the burglar alarm go off, but they did hear it go off.
• No one seems to have oversight of the project, which is why it suffers from some oversight or other at least once a week.
• When the Iron Curtain came down in 1946, few would have guessed that it would take as long as 50 years before it finally came down.
So much for double-takes based on hypernyms and contranyms, but that was just to get you in the mood. Our next step, as promised, is to go back to heterosemes or contracontexts, and examples of double-takes based on them:
• My aunt started showing the symptoms of Covid, and she thought she’d had it, but she took the test for Covid and it turned out that she’d had it.
• Thanks to the lockdown, the golf course is abandoned, so now we can sneak in and walk around it, whereas in the past we’ve always had to walk around it.
• That snitch! Sure, the snitch letter was anonymous, and it was typed. But she was the one who typed it. She wanted not to be identified: that’s why she didn’t write it. But she wrote it, all right.
• I’ve brought you two salmon. If they’re too much for you, put one of them in the freezer for later, if that’s not too much for you.
• As a canny businesswoman, she exploited the labour pool in a very efficient way, but she was always careful not to exploit it.
• “This back pain of yours must be such a nuisance. How are you today?” “Better, but still not better.”
• Why do you keep filing your application rather than actually filing it?
• In the old days, the Cambodians used
to fight with the Laotians, but now they fight with them.
• It was dark by the time we reached the summit, so we thought it safest to return by cable car. Our guide scoffed at our decision. We repeatedly urged him to join us but he wouldn’t climb down and insisted on climbing down.
• Your hoover really sucks. Why don’t you get one that really sucks?
Contracontexts don’t have to involve heteromemes. Specifically, instead of repeating the salient word or phrase, they can incorporate its opposite. Here are some examples:
• Your houseguest is certainly an early bird: he was already up at 6.30; in fact, he was already down at 6.30.
• Alex is studying for exams; he’s reasonably laid back about it, though unreasonably so.
• We’re enjoying a lull in work at the moment and we’re not enjoying it.
• “Has Mavis had her exam results yet?” “Yes, a few are still outstanding, but the others are outstanding.”
• His last novel was a critical failure, but at least it’s not his last novel, so he still has a chance to redeem himself.
• You podiatrists are all the same: as students, you practise and practise, and get really proficient, but as soon as you graduate and start practising, you get complacent and stop practising, and the quality of your work slumps.
• There are at least three Jewish history lecturers in the department, but Christina, the only Jewish history lecturer in the county, is not one of them.
• He’s the most curious child I’ve ever met, in that he’s the least curious child I’ve ever met.
• The students from modest backgrounds tend to study very hard and excel; it’s the richer students who mess about and who are generally the poorer students.
• Thwart the hackers: your private log-in details are secured only when they’re unsecured.
• What a mess! If it’s you who’s responsible, that shows that you’re irresponsible.
• Of course it’s a private school. It’s a leading public school, for heaven’s sake.
continued from page 17
Mother; about Edward and Mrs Simpson; and about Charles and Camilla; while her 2020 review, in over 4,000 words, of Anne Glenconner’s memoir Lady in Waiting: My Extraordinary Life in the Shadow of the Crown is mostly an admission of her own fawning fascination. She evidently gets first dibs on partrician biographies, and yet the magazine seems unabashed by her laughable snobbery. Odd for a publication so “consistently radical” to be giving the likes of Royalty Magazine and Country Life a run for their money.
Again, it would be wrong to tar the whole magazine with one brush, but to retain a Sycophancy Correspondent— that’s to say, a correspondent who glories in snobbery rather than analysing it—tells us something about the LRB’s bubble
Quiz 20
Similarities and differences
Question 1
Several winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature share what would seem to be an unusual feature for writers:
S.Y. Agnon, Saul Bellow, Elias Canetti, Kazuo Ishiguro, Patrick Modiano, Wole Soyinka.
A few others have that feature to a limited extent, including:
Samuel Beckett, Joseph Brodsky and Rabindranath Tagore.
Of course, the feature is also common to several famous writers who didn’t win the Nobel prize, such as:
Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov, Arthur Koestler but not Leo Tolstoy, it seems, though you might have thought that he too had the feature. What is this mysterious common characteristic? And, yes, you do need to know something about them.
Question 2
In the following list, all 42 words have something in common, though two of them are odd-men-out. Which are they? Isolate them, then divide the rest into two groups of 20 words each. Explain your answer.
aircraft beam brake breeze bulb candle dim fairy fan fantastic flood gas guiding high industry infantry inner kindle kiss leading lime meter moon opera pilot pollution rain red saber search sentence shed side sky sleeper switch thin touch travel weight wine year.
Clue: several candidate words had to be omitted from the list—flash, green, house, reading, traffic, and work—because they could fall into either group.
Answers, please, by email to book@ booklaunch.london and we’ll offer the speediest responders whatever EnvelopeBook they might choose (see www. envelopebooks.co.uk), together with a round of applause and the thrill of being congratulated by us in the next edition.
mentality, its selective endorsement of various in-groups and its decrying of others whom it feels can be written off with snarky sneers.
This contradiction seems lost on the editorial team, ensconced in their Bloomsburian towers, away from the practical realities they critique and the divisions they promote. As the magazine peddles “fiendishly fun 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzles” and powder-blue mugs and vases with cack handwriting down the sides, it moves further from its founding ethos as an outpost of serious intellectual discourse and closer to a genteel preciosity that any normal person would find repellent.
“Come back,” one wants to say. “Come back, sort yourself out, and once again lead the way. We used to admire you; we wish we could admire you again.”
Puzzle page
Things we’d like to know about
WHAT MAKES POETRY POETRY?
The question of what makes their poetry poetry is something we often ask poets who submit their work for publication and whose writings seem to us no less capable of being laid out as prose, given that the lines do not scan or have metre.
The poet of one such collection has just written to us, and we very much like what we have read, so the question we now put in front of you is not a criticism. If anything, it probably reflects badly on our own boorish pedantry. But nonetheless, we raise the issue: when you read this—
The windows of the old grey house gape at me and its doors are open.
Some time has passed.
In fact, it has been five years.
I no longer wear wool in the midst of the summer or drag my body across the street. I eat.
—what is there of so much value in its line breaks that makes its poetic form better than one without breaks? We ask because we cannot answer the question ourselves:
The windows of the old grey house gape at me and its doors are open. Some time has passed. In fact, it has been five years. I no longer wear wool in the midst of the summer or drag my body across the street. I eat.
Is the latter version anything less than the former? Might it not be more, on account of the absence of visual distraction and its ability to protect us from being intimidated, as we often are, by anything that appears in poetic form?
Stepping back, is poetry now one of those many epiphenomena of identity politics in which a thing is what its owner says it is only because its owner has declared it to be so?
Please advise.
HOW TO SOLVE A HOSTAGE CRISIS
If someone you loved dearly—a parent or child or partner or lover—was being held in a remote village in Syria by ISIS or Al-Qaeda, and their captors had proved intransigent, what would you be prepared to do to get them back?
Let us assume that, true to form, the captors had embedded themselves into the local community so they could better shield themselves from the international community. And let us say, also, that the longer your loved ones are held captive, the more chance there is that they will be badly treated and malnourished, fall sick, and suffer physical and/or psychological torture that will affect them for the rest of their lives.
Given a binary choice between a morally virtuous solution that proved ultimately ineffective and an effective solution that proved morally challenging, which would you opt for?
Are there any circumstances in which you would tolerate the use of military force? Specifically, would you accept a
Three of the writers depicted here have something in common, though one in abbreviated form. The odd one out (though not an aristocrat) is included, in part, on account of their titles. For that reason, we could also have included Tom Clancy, E.L. Doctorow, Nadine Gordimer and Sebastian Faulks. Rosamunde Pilcher could have appeared twice. What are we talking about?
situation in which your loved ones got repatriated but at the cost of deaths among their captors and hosts?
Can you, at the same time, recommend a book that might help anyone struggling with this question to adopt an appropriate reasoning process?
LESS IN SORROW, MORE INGEST
It is important to take account of what we put into our bodies, and to know what foods we need, and how much we need. For this reason, we at Booklaunch endorse WeightWatchers, which not only provides the most comprehensive way of monitoring intake but also encourages an intelligent appraisal of what we consume.
Along with all our other reading, we therefore need to read food labels—but how many of us do? Here are two challenges. Can you—without looking them up—name any of the three products identified below by their ingredients and then can you match them to one of the three columns listing their nutritional information? (Note: ultralow ingredients—milligram and microgram values—have been left out.)
(sunflower seeds, brown linseeds, pumpkin seeds, brown sesame seeds, black sesame seeds) rye flour, malted wheat flour, salt, wheat gluten, spelt flour. Product 3 Wheat flour (55%) with calcium, iron, niacin and thiamin, palm oil, wholemeal wheat flour (16%), sugar, partially inverted sugar syrup, sodium bicarbonate, malic acid, ammonium bicarbonate, salt.
Nutritional values
Energy in kJ 2025 957 257
Energy in kcal 483 234 51
Fat in grammes 21.3g 6.5g 3.0g of which saturates 10.1g 1.0g 0.3g
Carbohydrate 63.6g 37.6g 7.1g of which sugars 15.1g 0.6g 3.4g
Fibre 3.7g 3.1g 0.8g
Protein 7.0g 8.5g 1.1g
Salt 1.3g 0.9g 0.10g
FLIGHT OF THE IMAGINATION
If you are concerned about the need to slow down and reverse the rate of global warming, which of any of the following procedures would you want to promote?
A ban on all air travel, except in cases of an emergency.
Limiting air travel to one return trip of any length per person per year.
Taxing air travel at a rate per mile.
Increase taxation on flights in private jets.
Taxing at a rate per mile the import by air of foods and other consumer products. Excuse immigrants from such taxation on
the grounds that immigrants, once settled, nevertheless like to fly home as often as possible to visit friends and relations.
HOW SHOULD WE VOTE IN THE FUTURE?
Following the recent elections in the UK, we at Booklaunch think there is a need to fix our broken voting system, and we have a solution that we think wil do the trick.
We have a distaste for the promotion of political allegiances: we no more want to know what party anyone belongs to than we want to know what their religion is. In both cases, we think that affiliations should be a private matter, not least because the declaration of them has always proved divisive and counter-productive.
Our proposal is, therefore, to vote on specific policy commitments—“I want the following things done”—and then empower whichever party or combination of parties is committed to carrying out the winning choices.
This by-passes the problem of party loyalty, and the situation where Partisanship overshadows the issues that voters actually want to see achieved.
Can you recommend any books that promote this idea persuasively?
CONTINUING THE SEARCH FOR NON-COGNATES
Remember our quiz of a few editions ago? What English words can you think of whose Dutch, German, French, Italian and Spanish equivalents are etymologically unrelated? We listed a few. Here’s another: toad, pad, Kröte, crapaud, rospo, sapo More please.
Just in case you wondered, frog is not a candidate: kikker, Frosch, grenouille, rana, rana. And, by the way, the Dutch kikker refers not to the frog’s swimming style—kicking—but to the noise it makes: croaking. Even more confusingly, the Afrikaans word for frog is padda, derived from the Dutch word pad, meaning … “toad”!
IT’S ALL ABOUT “MED”
The culture of the Mediterranean once was so dominant as to make the name of the sea—“the centre of the Earth”—seem justified. Even far distant cultures such as China and Japan adopted or accepted this usage, although the name of the sea in Arabic adds the word white—Albahralabiad almutawasit (“the White Middle Sea”), which Turkish reduces to Akdeniz (“White Sea”).
One of the countries bordering the sea, Lebanon, also means white, from the Semitic root LBN (“white” or “milk”) but probably refers not to the sea but to the snow-capped mountains that dominate much of its landscape in winter.
Many of the regions surrounding the Mediterranean are named after their mountains. Syria is thought to derive from the Assyrian term Šuru, which means “highland” or “mountainous region”, as does Corinth, probably from the ancient Greek word κόρος (koros), which means “summit” or “peak”. More, please!
WITHOUT PREJUDICE
EXPLORING INJUSTICE AND EMPATHY IN EARLY 20TH CENTURY ENGLAND ISRAEL ZANGWILL
T. Fisher Unwin, 1896
Kindle: Good Press 9 December 2019
263 pages
ASIN B082KTTX5X
RRP £1.99
EDITOR’S NOTE
Israel Zangwill’s Without Prejudice, first published in London in 1896, is a thought-provoking exploration of social injustice and inequality, set against the backdrop of late 19th-century modernism.
In a vivid depiction of recognisable stereotypes, Zangwill presents an array of characters whose aspirations are both ridiculed and taken seriously, with both attitudes — the satirical and the reverential — held in a dynamic tension.
Zangwill’s authorial stance creates problems for us today, because we can only reach the one by accessing the other, and we may find Zangwill’s irony too self-indulgent to trust that he also means well by it. Cake and eat it, cynics might say.
In addition, at a time when numerous formerly respectable texts are now being systematcally vetted and found wanting, the freedom that Zangwill demands the right to asks too much of us, simultaneously putting him beyond the pale for our culture’s new thought police, and limiting our freedom to admire or to emulate him.
The accompanying extract comes from the very start of Without Prejudice and we ask the same question that we asked about the Ruskin extract on page 13: is there some writing — and some thinking — that should no longer be tolerated, even if we understand the context?
Your thoughts, please, to book@ booklaunch.london.
A VISION OF THE BURDEN OF MAN
And it came to pass that my soul was vexed with the problems of life, so that I could not sleep. So I opened a book by a lady novelist, and fell to reading therein. And of a sudden I looked up, and lo! a great host of women filled the chamber, which had become as the Albert Hall for magnitude—women of all complexions, countries, times, ages and sexes. Some were bewitching and beautiful, some wan and flat-breasted, some elegant and stately, some ugly and squat, some plain and whitewashed, and some painted and decorated; women in silk gowns, and women in divided skirts, and women in widows’ weeds, and women in knickerbockers, and women in ulsters, and women in furs, and women in crinolines, and women in tights, and women in rags; but every woman of them all in tears. The great chamber was full of a mighty babel; shouts and ulula-
‘Give me my deceased sister’s husband,’ shrieked a sixth.
‘Give me my divorced husband’s children,’ shrieked a seventh.
‘Give the right to paint from the nude in the Academy schools,’ shrieked an eighth.’
‘Give me an Oxford degree,’ shrieked a ninth.
‘Give me a cigar,’ shrieked a tenth.
‘Give me a vote,’ shrieked an eleventh.
‘Give me a pair of trousers,’ shrieked a twelfth.
‘Give me a seat in the House,’ shrieked a thirteenth.
‘Daughters of the horse-leech,’ I made answer, taking advantage of a momentary lull, ‘I am not in a position to give away any of these things. You had better ask at the Stores.’ But the tempest out-thundered me.
‘I want to ride bareback in the Row in tights and spangles at 1 p.m. on Sundays,’ shrieked a soberly clad suburban lady, who sported a wedding ring. ‘I want to move
both sexes, without setting one against the other. We are both the outcome of the same great forces, and both of us have our special selfishnesses, advantages, and drawbacks. If there is any cruelty, it is Nature’s handiwork, not man’s. So far from trampling on womanhood, we have let a woman reign over us for more than half a century. We worship womanhood, we have celebrated woman in song, picture and poem, and half civilisation has adored the Madonna. Let us have woman’s point of view and the truth about her psychology, by all means. But beware lest she provoke us too far. The Ewigweibliche has become too literal a fact, and in our reaction against this everlasting woman question we shall develop in unexpected directions. Her cry for equal purity will but end in the formal institution of the polygamy of the Orient—’ As I spoke the figure before me appeared to be undergoing a transformation, and, ere I had finished, I perceived I
‘What would you have me do, O daughters of Eve,’ I cried. ‘What is my sin?’
tions, groans and moans, weeping and wailing and gnashing of false and genuine teeth, and tearing of hair both artificial and natural; and therewith the flutter of a myriad fans, and the rustle of a million powder-puffs. And the air reeked with a thousand indescribable scents—patchouli and attar of roses and cherry blossom, and the heavy odours of hair-oil and dyes and cosmetics and patent medicines innumerable.
Now when the women perceived me on my reading-chair in their midst, the shrill babel swelled to a savage thunder of menace, so that I deemed they were wroth with me for intruding upon them in mine own house; but as mine ear grew accustomed to the babel of tongues, I became aware of the true import of their ejaculations.
‘O son of man!’ they cried, in various voices: ‘thy cruel reign is over, thy long tyranny is done; thou hast glutted thyself with victims, thou hast got drunken on our hearts’ blood, we have made sport for thee in our blindness. But the Light is come at last, the slow night has budded into the rose of dawn, the masculine monster is in his death-throes, the kingdom of justice is at hand, the Doll’s House has been condemned by the sanitary inspector.’
I strove to deprecate their wrath, but my voice was as the twitter of a sparrow in a hurricane. At length I ruffled my long hair to a leonine mane, and seated myself at the piano. And lo! straightway there fell a deep silence—you could have heard a hairpin drop.
‘What would you have me do, O daughters of Eve.’ I cried. ‘What is my sin? what my iniquity?’ Then the clamour recommenced with tenfold violence, disappointment at the loss of a free performance augmenting their anger.
‘Give me a husband,’ shrieked one.
‘Give me a profession,’ shrieked another.
‘Give me a divorce,’ shrieked a third.
‘Give me free union,’ shrieked a fourth.
‘Give me an income,’ shrieked a fifth.
the world with my pen or the point of my toe; I want to write, dance, sing, act, paint, sculpt, fence, row, ride, swim, hunt, shoot, fish, love all men from young rustic farmers to old town roués, lead the Commons, keep a salon, a restaurant, and a zoological garden, row a boat in boy’s costume, with a tenor by moonlight alone, and deluge Europe and Asia with blood shed for my intoxicating beauty. I am primeval, savage, unlicensed, unchartered, unfathomable, unpetticoated, tumultuous, inexpressible, irrepressible, over-powering, crude, mordant, pugnacious, polyandrous, sensual, fiery, chaste, modest, married, and misunderstood.’
‘But, madam,’ I remarked—for in her excitement she approached within earshot of me—‘I understand thee quite well, and I really am not responsible for thy emotions.’ Her literary style beguiled me into the responsive archaicism of the second person singular.
‘Coward!’ she snapped. ‘Coward and satyr! For centuries thou hast trampled upon my sisters, and desecrated womanhood.’
‘I beg thy pardon,’ I rejoined mildly.
‘Thou dost not deserve it,’ she interrupted.
‘Thou art substituting hysteria for history,’ I went on. ‘I was not born yesterday, but I have only scored a few more years than quarter of one century, and seeing that my own mpther was a woman, I must refuse to be held accountable for the position of my sex.’
‘Sophist!’ she shrieked. ‘It is thy apathy and selfishness that perpetuate the evil.’
Then I bethought me of my long vigils of work and thought, the slow, bitter years in which I ‘ate my bread with tears, and sat weeping on my bed’, and I remembered that some of those tears were for the sorrows of that very sex which was now accusing me of organised injustice. But I replied gently: ‘I am no tyrant; I am a simple, peaceful citizen, and it is as much as I can do to earn my bread and the bread of some of thy sex. Life is hard enough for
was talking to an angry, seedy man in a red muffler.
‘Thee keeps down the proletariat,’ he interrupted venomously. ‘Thee lives on the sweat of his brow, while thee fattens at ease. Thee plants thy foot on his neck.’
‘Do I?’ I exclaimed, lifting up my foot involuntarily.
Mistaking the motion, he disappeared, and in his stead I saw a withered old pauper with the Victoria Cross on his breast. ‘I went to the mouth of hell for thee,’ he said, with large reproachful eyes; ‘and thou leavest me to rot in the workhouse.’
‘I am awfully sorry!’ I said. ‘I never heard of thee. It is the nation—’
‘The nation!’ he cried scornfully. ‘Thou art the nation; the nation is only a collection of individuals. Thou art responsible. Thou art the man.’
‘Thou art the man,’ echoed a thousand voices: ‘Society is only an abstraction.’ And, looking round, I saw, to my horror, that the women had quite disappeared, and their places were filled by men of all complexions, countries, times, ages and sexes.
‘I died in the streets,’ shouted an old cripple in the background—‘round the corner from thy house, in thy wealthy parish—I died of starvation in this nineteenth century of the Christian era, and a generation after Dickens’s Christmas Carol.’
‘If I had only known !’ I murmured, while my eyes grew moist. ‘Why didst thou not come to me?’
‘I was too proud to beg,’ he answered. ‘The really poor never beg.’
‘Then how am I responsible?’ I retorted.
‘How art thou responsible?’ cried the voices indignantly; and one dominating the rest added: ‘I want work and can’t get it. Dost thou call thyself civilised?’
‘Civilised?’ echoed a weedy young man, scornfully. ‘I am a genius, yet I have had nothing to eat all day. Thy congeners killed Keats and Chatterton, and when I am dead thou wilt be sorry for what thou hast not done.’
‘But hast thou published anything?’ I asked.
continued in the book
HOTEL OF THE MONTH
Hotel Son Vell 5*, Menorca
Regarded as the most unspoilt island in the Balearics, Menorca is a charmingly tranquil destination which is yet to be discovered by mass tourism. Located 20 minutes’ drive from the city of Cuitadella in the west of the island and set within a 200-hectare private estate with landscaped gardens, olive groves and citrus trees lies the meticulously restored hotel Son Vell. Opened in 2023, the interiors have been carefully designed to create a peaceful, elegant atmosphere with soft tones and antique furniture complementing the rural aesthetic. Facilities include two swimming pools and massage rooms, and there are two restaurants which use the best locally-sourced produce in their dishes.
On the edge of the estate you will also find the Camí de Cavalls, the bridlepath that wraps its way around the island, and the unspoilt cove of Cala de Son Vell, which is a 10 minute cycle ride from the hotel and offers private sea swimming.
Special offer: 4 nights for the price of 3 for stays in September and October 2024 for bookings made in July. Price from £1,592 per person in October and £2,198 per person in September, saving up to £485.
Prices based on two sharing, single supplements on request. Includes return flights, car hire, accommodation including breakfast and the services of the Kirker Concierge for restaurant and sightseeing recommendations.
Speak to an expert: 020 7593 2283 kirkerholidays.com
Booklaunch
Green Heat, Street by Street
Powering Scotland’s Future
Green Havens on Old Industrial Sites
Re-purposed industrial sites can support green industrial clustering, utilizing green electricity to produce hydrogen and support symbiotic industries such as e-fuels, carbon-neutral fertilizers, vertical farming, and renewable industrial processing.
Excess heat generated at these hubs can be captured via regional Heat Transmission Highways, delivering clean and affordable heat to our villages, towns and cities.
By strategically integrating sectors and fostering local growth, we can create green industry jobs, eliminate fuel poverty and achieve net-zero emissions.
Green Energi Havens and Heat Transmission Highways are critical steps in Scotland’s Net Zero journey, demonstrating that a waste-not, want-not future is not just a pipe dream but a necessity.
