The Critic April 2024

crıtic The c

alexandra wilson: classical music is not “elitist”

lola salem: singers have voices, too helen barrett: where do mediumsized bands play?

haydn middleton: how the kinks really got me

R ichard Bratby: funding crisis ... so what’s new?

A lexander L arman: w.s. gilbert

A DISCORDANT SONG c

Barely a week goes by without further bad news in the world of classical music. Swingeing cuts to orchestras, choirs, ensembles and concert series leave many struggling for survival. Broadcast music is recon gured to be more “accessible” and “inclusive”, by removing great art in favour of Disney evenings, lm music, or a tribute to a faded pop star. ose running the professional associations pronounce on the necessity of such changes, usually adding some shtick about the need to better represent the diversity of modern Britain.

Some of these changes are undoubtedly fuelled by poor economic circumstances, but ideological factors are just as important, with classical music being perhaps the worst casualty of identitarian politics. In earlier decades it was common to see terrestrial broadcasts of full operas and concerts (including many BBC Proms), competitions, and sometimes wider musical documentaries.

Coverage of competitions would concentrate primarily on the playing. André Previn became a household name because he was high-mindedly beamed into every home long before the notes weren’t necessarily in the right order.

This happy order changed. Using terms and concepts championed most in uentially by Greater London Council apparatchiks such as Nicholas Garnham and Geo Mulgan in the 1980s, the emphasis shifted from arts to “creative industries”, with an attack on supposedly impossibly highbrow art and on the alleged “power of the tiny, metropolitan elite”.

Artistic traditions and established masterpieces faded from attention in favour of commercially viable pop stars, fashion designers, even video game designers, many of whose work now looks dated. An obsession with the narrow present superseded the creation or preservation of anything more lasting.

Arch “Cultural Studies” consequentials like Garnham and Mulgan articulated a populist — yet also commercialist — opposition to what was smeared as being a patrician disposition, reeking of privilege,

and, almost even worse, connoisseurship. Yet as too many Tories retreated into philistinism for its own sake, a generation of artistic gures saw all too clearly the bene ts of state patronage.

e New Labour era brought marked increases in arts subsidies. ese have fallen since 2010. But the Right has been caught between defenders of tradition and achievement, and a wing which sees art as

being every bit as much a commodity as Blairites did.

On the Left, one faction supports subsidised art for its own sake, while another denounces much of this as promoting dead, white European males, and perpetuating colonialism, racism, misogyny and, crucially, subventions likely going to the curators of the past. As opposed to living, risible, “creatives” getting taxpayer bungs from their quango mates. Following the public money is always dismally instructive, both in terms of who’s doling it out and who’s raking it in.

No art form has suffered so badly as a result as classical music. Classic literature continues to be taught in schools and literary ction maintains a lively presence in wider culture (fundamentally sustained by vigorous, autonomous private patronage). Visual art, theatre, dance and lm hold their heads up too.

Obviously classical music has to compete with a starkly distinguished popular, commercial equivalent to a greater degree than any other art form. Criticism of contemporary music employs many labels to distinguish micro-genres of recent popular music, mostly from the English-speaking world, but turns 1,000 years of history from multiple continents into a single “style”, namely classical. However, “art” music has retreated into atomised worlds of its own, even by comparison to Pierre Boulez, who tried to

The East Asians respect Western classical music traditions to a degree unmatched in the West

bring challenging music to a wider public, or Karlheinz Stockhausen, whose name for a while resonated more widely than just in avant-garde music circles.

Harrison Birtwistle made some wider impression in his later decades (in part as a result of the controversy around his Panic at the 1997 Proms). But no one thought it extraordinary that his death didn’t have British politicians publicly commenting after the fashion of, say, Jacques Chirac’s e usive lamentations when Iannis Xenakis died in 2001.

Attempts to create a music exhibiting some continuities with tradition, blending a degree of accessibility with aesthetic invention, for which equivalents exist in other art forms and help bridge the gap between the popular and the challengingly contemporary, have been mostly rather half-baked and short-lived, and decreasing numbers of younger composers have learned the required traditional skills.

Classical music is widely despised, having lost — which is to say, gone out of its way to deliberately alienate because of snobbish disapproval of who they were — much of its traditional audience.

If you want to see etiolated art, don’t listen to young musicians, just take in their absurd denunciations of their craft. It is shocking to see such talents turn on their own countries’ greatest cultural achievements with such hostility, a state of a airs which otherwise only usually accompanies major social upheaval.

Even in the early Soviet Union, while there were very short-lived moves to create a new “proletarian culture” (Proletkult), the pleas by a few rather deranged futurists such as Vladimir Mayakovsky to throw established culture into the sea fell mostly on deaf ears. Lenin himself adored Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata, while other Marxist ideologues, including Leon Trotsky, were clear that art could not be reduced to ideology. What is happening to classical music now is worse than anything perpetrated by early Soviet revolutionaries, and even worse than the Zhdanov decree of 1948.

It stands in contrast not only to a more positive view in much of contemporary continental and especially Eastern Europe, but especially to East Asia, wheremultiple generations of young musicians have trained to high levels and are a major presence in orchestras, concert halls and conservatoires in many parts of the world. e East Asians respect and develop Western traditions to a degree not matched in the West, especially the Anglosphere, mired in post-colonial guilt and performative self- agellation of a type which Germany overcame several decades ago. is is as symbolic of wider decline as any economic depression.

The game may already be up in the United States, Canada, Australia and some other countries, but it should not be in the

UK. We should be prepared to defend and celebrate the West’s greatest musical achievements, which have generated sustained audiences in many parts of the world, without always tempering such sentiments with relativising clauses about popular or non-Western cultures (those representing these would not often return the compliment).

And we should be teaching these traditions in schools and universities. Levels of musical literacy (being able to read notation) have declined chronically, and the ability is frequently no longer required in universities. Consequently there are new generations of music teachers themselves unable to teach it.

e “decolonisers” must not be allowed to hijack tertiary musical education with their spurious and hateful arguments and assumed self-superiority to the work they dismiss, creating profoundly hostile environments for classical music, now taught regularly to less than 20 per cent of students.

In some places, you are more likely to learn about obscure faculty composers known only to a few dozen others than about Mozart or Beethoven.

If Beowulf, Dante, Chaucer and Cervantes are worth teaching, then so are Machaut, DuFay, Victoria and Tallis (and not just Spem in Alium). ese composers’ works are outstanding monuments to human musical achievement.

ere will still be a dedicated listenership in 100 years for Bach’s Matthäus-Passion, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Beethoven’s Appassionata, Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, Debussy’s La mer, Stravinsky’s Petrushka, but the education that facilitates serious engagement with these (like that for literature and other art forms) looks increasingly likely to be the preserve of a few, turning claims of “elitism” into self-ful lling prophecies.

As in so many things, we need a better elite. One with an understanding of its responsibilities and a respect for the role it falls to its members to discharge. Betrayal from above is the song of our times and it sounds dreadful. ●

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Helen Joyce

Yuan Yi Zhu: Plain English? 9

Woman about Town

Sarah Ditum: All in the family 10

Nova’s diary

A dentist’s appointment for Liam 11

Politics

Christopher Montgomery: Let the blood-letting begin 13

Serious business

Ned: Consider the way of the tiger 19

Everyday Lies

eodore Dalrymple: “Problematic” art 29

Arty Types

D.J. Taylor on Mirabel Chevenix 31

Sounding Board

Marcus Walker: e “Rave in the Nave” was a regrettable error of judgement 36

My Woke World

Titania McGrath: Transition babies 39 Economics

Tim Congdon: A decade of economic disaster 43

Romeo Coates

Equal opportunities eecing 76

Adam Dant on … Musical statues 52

FEATURES

Why this book will pass unnoticed

Ben Sixsmith says Steve Sailer’s views on race and IQ have placed him beyond the pale for bien-pensant reviewers 14 The real lie of the land

Richard Negus on the Poundland Jacobins who revile landowners as enemies of the environment 16

SPRING MUSIC SPECIAL

The love that dare not speak its name

Alexandra Wilson suggests classical music is being marginalised because it has been labelled “elitist” 20 Singers have a voice, too Lola Salem says the study of Western music has been reduced to a politicised debate about power and class. e truth is more complex 23

Finding the middle ground

Helen Barrett on the new venues for bands that are too big for pubs, but too small for stadiums 25

God save The Kinks

Haydn Middleton on his lifelong passion for four cantankerous lads from the English underclass 27

And the band played on Richard Bratby asks what’s new about cash crises in the arts 30

Profile: W.S. Gilbert

Alexander Larman says the librettist of HMS Pinafore was a slyly subversive comic genius 32

Putting a gloss on big ideas

Daniel Johnson considers the outsize cultural and political in uence of small magazines

Keystones of Britain’s history

James Stevens Curl says too many young people are ignorant of the religious buildings and artefacts that bring the past to life 40

Let there be love

James Innes-Smith says it’s time to bring back passion to the picture houses 44

Chasing votes on foreign soil

James Harding reports on Viktor Orbán’s attempts to enfranchise ethnic Hungarians in Romania 47 How to lose an empire

David Sassoon on the family fortunes of the fabulously wealthy Sassoons 50

STUDIO

William Aslet: Bevis Marks Synagogue 54

BOOKS

Charles Saumarez Smith: Interwar: British Architecture 1919-1939 by Gavin Stamp 58

Jaspreet Singh Boparai: How e World Made e West: A 4,000 year history by Josephine Quinn; Critical Ancient World Studies edited by Mathura Umachandran and Marchella Ward 60

Andrea Valentino: Love and Marriage in the Age of Jane Austen by Rory Muir 62

Nina Power: Six in a Bed: e Future of Love from Sex Dolls and Avatars to Polyamory by Roanne van Voorst 64

Victoria Smith: Transsexual Apostate: My Journey Back to Reality by Debbie Hayton 65

D.H. Robinson: Age of Hope: Labour, 1945, and the Birth of Modern Britain by Richard Toye; e Wild Men: e Remarkable Story of Britain’s First Labour Goverment by David Torrance 67

David omas: More an a Game: A History of How Sport Made Britain by David Horspool 68

Jeremy Black: Empireworld: How British Imperialism Has Shaped the Globe by Sathnam Sanghera 70

Ella Nixon: Mortal Secrets: Freud, Vienna, and the Discovery of the Modern Mind by Frank Tallis 72

John Self: Until August by Gabriel García Márquez; e Gentleman From Peru by André Aciman; e Hole by Hiroko Oyamada 73

THE

April 2024 | Issue 46

“On the plus side, you are going to be immortalised on lots of pub signs.”

THE CRITICS

MUSIC Norman Lebrecht

A great conductor leaves the stage 78

OPERA Robert Thicknesse

Away with the fairies 79

POP Sarah Ditum

State of grace with e Hold Steady 80

ART Michael Prodger

First impressions 81

THEATRE Anne McElvoy

Sarah Snook dazzles as Dorian Gray 82

CINEMA Robert Hutton

A long story short 83

TELEVISION Adam LeBor

Chanel versus Dior in wartime Paris 85

RADIO Michael Henderson

Too much disinformation 86

PODCASTS Ben Sixsmith

Politics with the depth of a puddle 87

ARCHITECTURE

Charles Saumarez Smith

e building that inspired Orwell 88

TABLE TALK

Eating Out

Lisa Hilton detests a pricey new restaurant in Chelsea 90

Eating In

Felipe Fernández-Armesto believes potted shrimps are good for the sole 91 Drink

Henry Je reys seeks out a snifter in the Middle East 92

Art House

Rufus Bird explains why the contemporary art market is growing 94 Deluxe

Christopher Pincher reveals what makes gentlemen tick 94 Country Notes

Patrick Galbraith on the complex e ects of big commercial shoots 96

Turf Account

Stephen Pollard worries about a matter of National concern 96 Style

Hannah Betts says colour is the only a ordable way to stay en courant 98 Hot House

Claudia Savage-Gore wrestles with not giving Hector an iPhone 99

THIS SPORTING LIFE

Nick Timothy: Why the goal glut? 100

Boris Starling: Winning sinner 101

Patrick Kidd: Shock of the new 102

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Therapy is making kids ill

Helen Joyce

If you don’t have words to express a thought, can you even think it? e idea that language shapes cognition is known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, after American linguist Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Whorf, and almost a century after it was proposed, it’s still controversial. Many thoughts aren’t really linguistic — they’re more like visual or other sensory impressions — and anyway, if thinking follows language, how, then, does language arise?

But the twenty- rst century has brought with it a new test for the hypothesis that language at least shapes cognition, even if it doesn’t entirely constrain it: the rise of therapy-speak and its impact on mental wellbeing.

More than a century ago Sigmund Freud gave the world the subconscious, phallic symbols, the Oedipus complex and much more — phrases that encode theories about what it means to be human and to be mentally distressed or well, and which are now commonplace in popular culture.

Batman is the superego and the Joker the id; Darth Vader symbolically castrates his son, Luke Skywalker, by cutting the lightsaber from his hand. Woody Allen’s lms normalised the once-unthinkable idea that your miserable life or marriage might be improved by paying a professional to rummage through your memories and dreams.

All this happened despite few people actually undergoing therapy. What if that changed? For an answer, look to America. e national obsession with self-improvement and reinvention meant therapy was embraced early, and is now on its way to being universal.

a punchbag for infant domestic tyrants. Meanwhile in schools, teachers and counsellors peddle “social emotional learning”, “empathy education” and “feelings check-ins” predicated on similar ideas.

e global in uence of American culture via the entertainment industry and social media ampli es the trend: TikTok is teeming with photogenic young people suggest-selling mental conditions with checklists reminiscent of the cold reading technique employed by stage clairvoyants and other charlatans. Ever found it hard to listen when others talk, or had good ideas but not followed through? Congratulations! You are now the proud possessor of self-diagnosed “attention de cit hyperactivity disorder” (ADHD).

Then there are the apps disintermediating and commodifying therapy. Some o er oneo sessions via Zoom or subscriptions entitling you to unlimited texting with a therapist. e latest, with perky names like Woebot, Earkick and Mindspa, use AI chatbots. Soon, therapy will be like Vitamin B in breakfast cereal or uoride in water: a mass public health intervention dispensed to all.

But unlike Vitamin B or uoride, Shrier argues, therapy as it is practised in America often causes the very harms it’s supposed to cure. One way that happens is by over-diagnosis. A startling sixth of American children aged two to eight have been formally diagnosed with a mental disorder; a tenth of under-18s have been diagnosed with ADHD alone.

What would really help children’s mental health is talk about resilience, strength and recovery

In Bad Therapy, published in February, journalist Abigail Shrier — author of Irreversible Damage, which anatomised the huge increase in the number of teenage girls identifying as trans — turns her fearless gaze on America’s latest malign social trend: a bastardised form of therapy that’s making its youth more fragile and sadder.

A remarkable share of young Americans — at least two- fths of 15-21 year olds — have been treated by some sort of mental health professional. Ideas that originate in therapy are further propagated by a “bad feelings industry” of parenting gurus, teachers and school counsellors. e gurus preach “gentle parenting”, which seems to mean abandoning all authority and turning yourself into

No doubt some of those youngsters have severe emotional or behavioural problems. Whether the prescriptions that often follow diagnosis do any good is another matter. And by attaching labels to an ever-wider range of personal quirks and challenging circumstances, this brand of therapy encourages people to think about them as permanent characteristics to be medicated rather than things they could learn to manage or might outgrow. It frames subpar behaviour as something you possess, not something you do.

Another problem is that simply talking about bad feelings can conjure them into existence. ink of those school wellbeing check-ins: a normal response to being randomly questioned about your emotional state when you’re going about your day is “ ne — until you asked”.

Worst of all, Shrier documents the proliferation

of surveys that ask pupils eye-popping

ods? us suggesting to children that

of surveys that ask pupils eye-popping questions about suicidal thoughts: how frequent, how intrusive, which methods? us suggesting to children that suicide is normal, even common, along with handy hints on how to do it. And indeed the suicide rate among Americans aged 10-24 has risen by two-thirds in a decade. ese are words that kill.

Life can break people, and whether they recover depends in large part on how their culture describes the injury, and the stories it tells about human nature. Which is the norm: resilience or fragility? Does su ering make you wiser or leave permanent scars? If you tell people about panic attacks, selfharm and eating disorders — even with the aim of encouraging su erers to seek help — you teach people that this is how to express psychological distress. And some of them will oblige. is phenomenon was christened the “symptom pool” by Edward Shorter, a historian of medicine. Each society recognises a set of psychological disorders, and patients’ mental distress is tted into one of these by patients themselves in partnership with that society’s authorities, be they witch doctors, faith healers — or wellbeing gurus and TikTok in uencers.

how their culture describes the injury, nature. Which is the norm: resilience or fragility? Does su ering make you harm and eating disorders — even — you teach people that this is how to express psy-

how therapy is making youngsters unhappy

their future brain function.

From abroad, Shrier’s book reads like dystopian science ction. But bad therapy is coming our way. Already British schools are peppering the calendar with mental health days, giving pupils questionnaires that normalise dysfunction and signing them up to apps that ask endless, intrusive questions about their mood.

In his 1992 book From Paralysis to Fatigue: A History of Psychosomatic Illness, Shorter describes ailments no longer seen, such as hysterical blindness (sudden, unexplainable loss of vision) and vicarious menstruation (nosebleeds following a monthly cycle, supposedly because of a “re ex action” of the womb on the nervous system). If people think that’s how bodies and minds work, then that’s how they work. Similarly, tell them that bad experiences are likely to cause rst trauma and then post-traumatic stress disorder, and very often those experiences will.

Bad beliefs don’t just cause mental illhealth, they cause bad treatment. Hysterical blindness and vicarious menstruation were treated by removing women’s reproductive organs, thrusting them into premature menopause and leaving them infertile. Today’s equivalent, arguably, is the mass prescribing of psychoactive drugs to children and adolescents, with unknown consequences for

talk-show host. Friends who are teachers say that stress and anxiety are ubiquitous; perhaps PTSD. at these disorders are often self-diagnosed is the less important

Many youngsters across the Anglosphere now talk like a cross between a wellbeing in uencer and a daytime TV talk-show host. Friends who are teachers say that stress and anxiety are ubiquitous; negative experiences result in trauma and perhaps PTSD. at these disorders are often self-diagnosed is the less important part of the problem: more serious is that these explanations deny agency and responsibility, and make children feel worse, for longer.

By now you may be thinking that all this is a travesty of proper therapy. True enough: a good therapist can help you learn how to let go of unproductive anxiety, rumination, regret and rage, and will avoid foreclosing the possibility of change and growth. It is the opposite of the encouragement to self-absorption Shrier describes.

What would really help children’s mental health is talk about resilience, strength and recovery, not trauma, fragility and relapse. In the meantime, tell yours to let their minds wander during assemblies on mental health and wellbeing, and if they have to ll in some damn-fool questionnaire on these topics, to avoid reading it and answer at random.

Opt them out of everything to do with mental health and complain to the school, too — we haven’t quite reached the situation in many American states, where schools have more rights over children than parents do.

e aim should be to reject these terrible descriptions of the human condition before they have time to take up residence in your head. Remember the wise words of Terry Pratchett in his Discworld novels, where what happens after you die is whatever you believe will happen — and it is therefore, as he deadpans, “important to shoot missionaries on sight”. ●

cLetters

DECOLONISINGSCIENCE

e woke agenda poses a threat to science and maths that is, if anything, even more fundamental than that to the humanities reported by David Butter eld (HOLLOWED -OUT HUMANITIES, MARCH).

Scepticism has been recognised as the bedrock of “natural philosophy” since the days of Galileo and Pope Urban but “inclusion” may now require physics and aboriginal legends to be a orded equal status in the science curriculum.

In 2022, two professors resigned rather than be e ectively forced out of the Royal Society of New Zealand for questioning teaching the equal validity of Maori mythology with scienti c method.

Meanwhile in the UK, “decolonisation” has become a euphemism for “racism”. Chemists at the University of York are engaged in an Orwellian rewriting of history intended to purge signi cant white males from the textbooks.

e head of department, Professor Caroline Dessent, acknowledges that, “Decolonization is one of those things that currently does attract a certain amount of negative publicity. Maybe it’s because people just don’t understand what they’re trying to achieve through it.”

Or maybe we do. is is not the rst time fanatics have sought to remove references to an ethnic group from the scienti c literature. In the 1930s, the Nazis supported attempts to contrive a Deutsche Physik,

“Where am I? Well, remember that

time we couldn’t afford it, but I promised one day I’d go back and get it for you? Well, I’m in the pub next door.”

Write to The Critic by email at letters@thecritic.co.uk including your address and telephone number

which rejected anything associated with what they called “Jewish Physics”. Maths is su ering a similar assault. Professor John Parker, head of mathematical sciences at Durham University, has lamented the prominence of “French or German men” such as Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré and Carl Fredrich Gauss, “all of whom were white”.

e rst two may be unfamiliar to many readers, but they illustrate very well what we stand to lose. Cantor’s work on in nities — some are bigger than others — had philosophical and religious implications that went beyond the purely mathematical.

In the resulting uproar, Poincaré described his ideas as “a grave disease infecting the discipline of mathematics”. eoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli has suggested that the scientists and natural philosophers of the past are worthy of study because “you understand science by looking at the history of science”.

Sadly, our young people may never know of the serendipity, insights, blind alleys and good, hard slog that have characterised the subject through the ages. And they will certainly miss out on a few entertaining spats.

Dr Iain Salisbury

edgbaston

SUPERANNUATEDCREED

Marcus Walker (DUMBING DOWN THE

PRIESTHOOD, MARCH) writes that Christianity today has a crisis of belief. e Church itself is the cause of this crisis. Despite the scholarship of the last two centuries, its theology and liturgy are still anchored in the outdated shibboleth which the Emperor imposed on his squabbling bishops at Nicaea.

No wonder that fewer and fewer people nd it relevant to their lives. One of my children remarked that attending a Eucharist was like going into a foreign country. Insistence on orthodox belief in religion is generally misplaced. What you believe doesn’t matter: what counts is the way a person conducts themselves and their relations with their fellow human beings. e tragedy is that there is no other organisation to do the important work that the Church still does in the parishes: the “Cure of Souls” with love.

Michael Hell birmingham

ONESTEPBEYOND

In his lament concerning the possible abandonment of Nikolaus Pevsner’s Buildings of England (THE END OF PEVSNER, FEBRUARY), Charles Saumarez Smith notes how the expansion of “deliberately terse and telegraphic entries” produced “a much bigger and more ambitious enterprise”.

If this celebrated series survives, I hope the opportunity will be taken to remedy some notorious omissions. I imagine many users of Pevsner will have their favourite lacuna but mine is an extravagant Arts & Crafts house, Brackencli e, at the southernmost extremity of Scarborough’s South Bay.

One of the grandest domestic constructions from the resort’s glory years (1905), it was designed by Walter Brierley, known as “the Lutyens of the North”. Yet there is not a trace in the slender volume Yorkshire: e North Riding. A possible explanation can be found in Pevsner’s “perambulation” of the town described as “long … and strenuous”. It appears that Brackencli e was a building too far for Pevsner.

Christopher Hirst hunmanby, north yorkshire

the critic 8 apr 2024

CARTOONS

Plain English by committee

The e ect of the Woolf reforms was to replace one set of legal jargon with another

Twenty-five years ago, on 26 April 1999, Lord Woolf’s Civil Procedure Rules came into e ect. Replacing two existing sets of procedural rules for England’s civil courts, the new CPR was launched to much fanfare — all of England’s county courts closed for a day the week before in order to prepare for the great occasion — and had the laudable aim of creating a cheaper, simpler, and more predictable dispute resolution process for everyone.

Whether the CPR managed to make English civil justice cheaper or simpler is, of course, very much open to doubt, as anyone who has been near an English court in recent years will know. But one lasting e ect of the Woolf reforms was to purge English law of much of the specialised vocabulary it had developed over the centuries.

To Woolf’s supporters, this vocabulary — and anything in Latin in particular — was at the root of all that was wrong with English civil justice. e common refrain, in the words of a since-disgraced minister, was that Latin contributed to the “mystication of the law” (as opposed to the fact that the Income Tax Act 2007, say, is 773 pages long).

ere was some private grumbling among lawyers, but few wanted to be seen as out of touch, the cardinal sin of the New Labour years. And so “plainti ” became “claimant”, “in camera” became “in private”, and so on.

n

occupation in recent memory. ere were a few survivors of the old tongue, too awkward to be purged entirely. e writ of habeas corpus, for instance, was reprieved because of its fame, though it is o cially known today as a “writ of habeas corpus for release”, just so that everyone is clear as to what it does.

Similarly, pro bono was allowed to survive, because no suitable English-language replacement could be devised. e eventual alternative, “law for free”, was too horri cally twee even for modernisers. is did not stop Lord Woolf from claiming years later that “one reason why pro bono is not playing its part in the provision of legal services as it should, is because of the very words pro bono”. As one commentator tartly remarked, is it really true that there are legions of lawyers desperate to do free legal work who are dissuaded by two small Latin words?

There were a few survivors of the old tongue: habeas corpus was reprieved because of its fame

public may ask, unappreciative of the fact that the renaming was done so as to accommodate his limited intellect and vocabulary. Eventually Part 20 claims were renamed to “additional claims”; but as a leading legal drafting textbook points out, an “additional claim” can mean at least four di erent things, three of which do not fall under Part 20 of the CPR. e authors decided to stick with “third party claim” instead, in de ance of Lord Woolf.

But as L atin was being kicked out of the front door, some of it managed to sneak in again from the back. For instance, the CPR did away with the venerable “writ”, one of the great administrative innovations of Anglo-Saxon England and as un-Latinate a word as exists in the English language.

Its replacement was the unsightly “claim form”, even though both “claim” and “form” have Latin roots. e real sin of “writ” was not that it came from a dead language, but that it looked unusual to modernising eyes.

(We note in passing that the CPR had 51 parts in 1998; today the numbering goes all the way up to Part 89. Habeas corpus on strictly Woolfsian principles should thus have become known as a Part 87 application. And how many laymen know that “part” denotes a subdivision of a particularly long statute?)

On the appointed day, the Plain English Campaign promised to have 2,000 of its members in courtrooms, ready to snitch on lawyers and judges who relapsed into the old language the sort of garden-centre totalitarianism which makes one very glad that England was never subject to foreign

Others of Lord Woolf’s linguistic innovations were simply ba ing, even on his own terms. Formerly, plainti s (sorry, claimants) happily issued third-party claims without the least di culty. But Lord Woolf thought that this bit of relational vocabulary was too much for laymen to handle and renamed them to the evocative “Part 20 claim”. Part 20 of what? the hapless member of the

not all of the changes made by the CPR were bad ones. ere is no reason, for instance, why the Anton Piller order and the Mareva injunction should be forever named after two long-defunct companies which happen to have been involved in what turned out to be landmark cases in the High Court around 1975.

But the overall result of the Woolf reforms, as far as legal language was concerned, was to replace one set of time-honoured specialised expressions with another set of jargon, this time drawn from the public sector linguistic register.

To the average member of the public, relying on a lawyer (if he can a ord one), whether he gets to le a statement of case instead of a pleading remains, as it should, a matter of supreme irrelevance. ●

Woolf’s

Woman About Town

SARAH DITUM

All in the family

To the bookshop Libreria in Shoreditch, to celebrate the launch of Tracy King’s memoir

Learning to ink. It’s a record of an extraordinary life — it opens with a scene of young Tracy being exorcised, after her perfectly reasonable trauma and grief following the sudden death of her father was mistaken for demonic possession. To the economic precarity of her upbringing was

added emotional precarity: it’s a circumstance that would have sunk many.

But more importantly, it’s an extraordinary piece of writing. Partly because she grew up with so much uncertainty (and partly because her parents always encouraged her to be curious), Tracy became a sceptic in the highest sense: never settling for pat answers, always asking the di cult questions, even about her own life. Which makes this an autobiography that’s as compelling as a thriller, with Tracy unpicking the story she was given about her father’s death and piecing together the truth.

Few of us undergo such dramatic and disturbing events as Tracy, but her book makes me wonder about the bits of family lore we all carry with us without ever submitting to the kind of stringent fact-checking Tracy applied to herself. Most likely, we live in a comfortable nest of light ctions: it takes genuine bravery to choose otherwise.

* * *

You must be fun at parties ...

I’m an old hand at literary parties now, but still feel the clammy hand of horror on the back of my neck when I remember one of my early ones. Invited to a prize-giving, I got chatting to a writer whose books I like a lot — and neither of us seemed able to end the conversation and move on. We were simply trapped, the small talk dwindling ever smaller.

But it wasn’t completely wasted time, for her at least. When I read her next novel, it included a painfully recognisable

section in which the main character became trapped with a boring woman at a party. I felt morti ed, and reassured myself with the possibility that there are probably lots of boring women in the world. Still, there’s a comfort in being so stunningly dull that your dullness becomes art.

Beauty myth

W ith a few hours to kill in Euston, I decided to check out the Wellcome Trust’s Cult of Beauty exhibition. It was busy on the Saturday morning I visited, and understandably so — beauty is a hot topic. e ubiquitous sel e means we look at our own faces more than any generation before us. Consequently, beauty has become bigger and bigger business. e average woman can discourse on “actives” and “injectables” with a pharmacist’s expertise.

e point of the exhibition is to make visitors think more about where our ideas of physical perfection come from. But because it’s also in hock to some very modern ideas about identity, there are some strange moments of ideological whiplash. You move from a cabinet presenting corsets as quack-medical torture devices, to a display extolling elective mastectomy as a path to bodily autonomy, with a pair of dismembered breasts presented in specimen jars.

Make your mind up, I’m tempted to say to the curator. Either it’s morally suspect to deform the female torso, or it isn’t. But there’s no point asking for consistency. ere are di erent sets of rules here: women are manipulated into self-disgust by an exploitative set of norms, unless the women in question say they’re not women, in which case everything they do is an act of radical self-acceptance, including cutting bits of themselves o .

* *

Swimming with the tide

Off to Cornwall for a long weekend with girlies. Sea swimming followed by beach saunas, long walks around the coast, generous meals and even more generous negronis poured by my friend the leader writer. Obviously, I needed to be fully kitted out for the three-day trip. As a strictly fair-weather wild swimmer, that meant new swimsuit, new neoprene gloves and socks, and most important of all: new (to me, I’m not a millionaire) Dryrobe.

You know the one: camou age outer, hot pink eece inner,

worn by yummy mummies throughout the nation, ideally with a pair of Uggs (which I also happen to have). It’s basically a maxi-sized parker, big enough to wriggle your arms inside and use as a portable changing roomcum-towel. Even better, it’s got enough pockets that you don’t need to worry about bringing a bag. I love it, and so do thousands of others. But success does come at a cost.

ere’s been a backlash against the Dryrobe-as-casualwear: there was even a Facebook group dedicated to mocking “dryrobe wankers”. As a garment, it’s too utilitarian, too basic, too common. So common that, on emerging from the beach sauna and getting dressed, I found that the next group waiting included a woman wearing the exact same Dryrobe and Uggs combo as me. We exchanged a glance: proud sisters of the wankerhood.

Baby driver

Cornwall was fun. Getting out of it was not. As a non-driver, my journey home started with a 40 minute taxi ride to the station. But, oh no, there was a rail replacement service from Bodmin. So on to the next station, saving me two hours waiting in the rain but costing me another £40. “So you really hate buses?” said the driver complacently, as the meter ticked up.

Painful. But a pain I no longer have to contend with, because I have now passed my driving test — rst time, albeit at the age of 42. It’s a strange level of power to suddenly be granted. But stranger is the thought that I’m giving up my weekly 90 minute chats with my driving instructor after a year. Will I ever know how his kitchen renovation turns out? Probably not. But I’ll never stop hearing his voice telling me to “aim for the yellow bollard” when turning right on big roundabouts. ●

●I can’t find iam, have you seen him ishi has put his head round the door into the room where I’m sleeping. ames, who used to write nice things about us in The Times, erks guiltily and closes the window on his computer screen.

I don’t know why he’s embarrassed, it was ust an email he was writing to some of his old work friends asking if anyone needed someone to write nice things again. pparently he e pects to have a lot more free time by December, or ebruary at the absolute latest.

Dentist appointment, says ames.

I e pect that’s why he’s turned his phone off, says ishi. I wanted to talk to him about what I’m doing in the local election campaigns.

ot of campaign visits

Well, that’s what I e pected. But in the grid, iam’s got me working on spreadsheets every day.

Well, ames says, you do like spreadsheets.

That’s true, I do. I guess I ust thought he’d want me out there fighting the good fight. eading the charge. allying the troops. eeting the voters, doing photo ops, that sort of thing.

ames takes a deep breath. it down for a second, ish. There’s something we ought to discuss.

I haven’t seen you this serious since school, ishi says, smiling. ou haven’t raided my tuck again, have you

ook. The thing is, we’ve done some research, and we think well, you know the Trident submarines es.

ou know how they scare our enemies more when no one sees them and no one knows where they are es.

We think you’re like that.

I’m less threatening if people can see me

No — well, yes — but also you’re more appealing to the voters if you’re not, well, if you’re not there.

h.

o spreadsheets es please.

The door opens, and iam comes in. h, um, P He looks awkward. I was ust at the doctor

Dentist says ames.

es, dentist. Painful toothache, yeah.

ou do make me laugh, iam, ishi says. Every day you come into Downing treet you’re scruffy as anything, but when you have a dental appointment, you comb your hair and put on a nice suit ames and iam are very quiet. Well, says ishi, I’d better get on with my spreadsheets. ●

As told to Robert Hutton

Power stations, factories, wastewater and even hydrogen plants are just a few industries generating incredible amounts of waste heat.

We boast a proud heritage of canals, railroads, and mines: visionary infrastructure projects that elevated our economy – not to mention our quality of living. If we’re serious about making our heating green, affordable, and future-proof, we can bolster our green economy and continue this tradition by building expansive, inter-city Heat Transmission Highways. These harvest and share waste heat from commercial and industrial processes, transporting it directly to large population centres.

The battle against climate change will be won – or lost – in our cities. How long can we afford to keep dumping heat to atmosphere?

www.energiraven.com/highways

Let the blood-letting begin

The Conservative Party must change radically if it is ever to gain power again

Who lost the 1997 general election?

Or, to put that another way, who won?

We know this! Tony Blair. And how? New Labour, obviously. Along with the ird Way, Clintonian campaigning techniques, the red rose, “Bobby”, Philip Gould and e Un nished Revolution, a paradoxically improving economy, Gordon, China, Granita.

Much as this might read as a man in his 50s having a stroke, it’s also a narrative. Which, for some time now, people have grimly asserted Sir Keir Starmer lacks. And how could he possibly win without one of those? Quite handily, it’s turning out.

Not that it didn’t take some sneering to knock away the idea that oppositions somehow win elections rather than governments always, always, always losing them. Snide people had to caw about Labour’s lead being soft, just in case any pundits were tempted to believe this.

And maybe, in the shadow of Bruce Anderson, who cheerfully assured his readers before the 1997 election that the only point at issue was how large John Major’s majority was going to be, journalists have improved. But politicians certainly haven’t.

For the Tory party, the consequence of being humiliatingly tumbled into opposition by the worst-performing leader in their democratic history will be the asking of this question, “Whose fault was it?” Amazingly, I can safely predict, it won’t just be two short names given as the answer.

One of the reasons to believe this is because 1997 now isn’t the fault of John Major and his shabby, incompetent government. Entitled princes of the party, such as Major himself, Michael Heseltine and Ken Clarke never accepted personal responsibility for leading their followers into such an epic disaster.

But their claims almost 30 years ago that, actually, the voters were passing judgement on Bill Cash or Barry Legg were as patently incredible then as they should still be now.

Back in 1997, to win the leadership election even a soul as stolid as William Hague came up with the feline smear of “constantly shifting fudge” to describe Major’s tawdry and risible administration.

As we get ready for the blame game, the first thing to remember is that the Tory party won’t be killed and won’t be replaced

From there, we can have a Tory narrative of our own. Hague became the implausible champion of the traditionalists against the “modernisers” who undermined him at every turn (we’d mention names like Francis Maude, Michael Portillo, Robbie Gibb, Mark MacGregor, Douglas “Nadine” Smith and Michael “Kemi” Gove, if we were that way inclined). en Hague lost and somehow Iain Duncan Smith won. But IDS was incapable, so Michael Howard was installed, but then he lost. And nally, happily ever Osborne, Dave became leader. Not despite, but because he went to a good school.

Cameron then failed to win an election against a man who was then the most unpopular prime minister in history — one so weak that even Andrew Marr, as political editor of the BBC, could be baited by the internet into asking, Gordon, are you mad and on drugs for it?

But what did this result mean? A Tory government with the liberal majority Cameron, Osborne and Gove had failed to get selected and elected. Happy days. en the #thirteenplusyears happened. It would be unkind to bring to mind the arguments Tories inside and outside parliament made in favour of Rishi Sunak becoming leader in 2022, misfortunes such as his inability to win a contest against even Liz Truss notwithstanding. But chie y because it would be so space-consuming on this short and unhappy page as so many made them. So many grown-ups. So here we all are.

As we get ready for the blame game which will underpin every leadership campaign after the general election, there are two key things to remember. e rst and most important is that the Tory party is going nowhere: it won’t be killed and it won’t be replaced. e contender who makes the arguments which win the next Tory leadership election will control the party that will form the government of this country after Labour eventually loses. inking any other party will emerge to do so is fantasy.

e second is why the Tories lost despite everything that was once in their favour — from Corbyn and the Brexit climacteric to a distracting war in Ukraine. All now tears in rain.

Most tellingly, why have the Tories not undone New Labour’s settlement? Answer: because they didn’t want to. Cameron, Osborne and Gove agreed with it, and a fatal mass of the candidates they selected between 2005-2016 and — thanks Dougie Smith — from 2019 onwards think likewise. at’s why the Equality Act was never touched.

You’ll commonly hear near Tufton Street a question like this: “Why don’t we have our own Equality Act? Why isn’t there something we could lumber Labour with in our dying days (‘from hell’s heart I stab at thee’)”?

e answer is why “we” have lost.

Note, the question is what could the Conservatives lumber Labour with? Not what Tory internal coalition could you assemble before the election to pass something? Not what is the “something” which Labour wouldn’t simply, contemptuously remove post-election? But what does the Tory party want to do which the Labour party won’t do?

As currently constituted, the Tory party is going to need to lose a lot more people if it’s ever to win power again. Because most of them don’t appear to want it. ●

WHY THIS NEW BOOK WILL PASS UNNOTICED

Columnist Steve Sailer’s views on genetics and IQ have placed him beyond the pale for bien pensant reviewers By Ben Sixsmith

One of the most influential and widely-read opinion columnists in the Western world is never published in mainstream outlets. Despite being read by major commentators and politicians, he is almost never named, let alone discussed. Steve Sailer, a 65-year-old Californian, has haunted mainstream discourse for decades. You can see his name popping up in New York Times columns by David Brooks and Ross Douthat. He is occasionally published in the American Conservative. Yet the extent to which he is perceived as being politically unmentionable has made him the closest thing that opinion commentary has to an outlaw gure. e once-edgy comedian, Patton Oswalt, quoted Sailer’s line that “political correctness is a war on noticing” on Twitter in 2014 (and has since deleted the tweet). e now-edgy comedian Tim Dillon referenced Sailer’s characterisation of American policy as being “Invade the World, Invite the World” on a recent episode of e Joe Rogan Experience. Online, there is a running joke about how liberal pieties posted on “X” (formerly Twitter) will attract Sailer’s responses like a crime scene attracts Batman.

Reading Sailer’s new collection Noticing out on March 26 but unlikely to be reviewed in the New York Times or the London Review of Books — reveals that readers of Sailer’s blogs and columns over the years have at least to some extent been put ahead of the political curve.

He predicted the Iraq War would be a disaster. In the early 2000s he laid out the populist framework that Trump adopted in 2016. He wrote in 2014 that the next big culture war con agration would be over transgenderism. You don’t have to like his opinions to appreciate that this is a record of analytical substantiveness.

You will encounter many undeniable facts that the journalistic mainstream politely ows around. While everyone was agreeing that black lives mattered in 2020, for example, it was Sailer more than anyone else who pointed out that the American “racial reckoning” had coincided with a massive yet largely ignored spike in murders and road accidents among African Americans which claimed thousands of lives that had mattered.

True, the presentation of such facts might be acerbic — Sailer has described H.L. Mencken as a “role model” — but that does not make them less relevant and troubling.

Y et we are dancing around the real question here — why is Sailer unmentionable? It is almost entirely because he is a leading proponent of the view that Arthur Jensen stirred academic controversy with in his 1969 article for the Harvard Educational Review “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?” and with which Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein all but upended American intellectual life when they authored e Bell Curve in 1994.

is is the contention that human populations have di erent innate cognitive faculties. In more direct terms, Sailer believes that di erent races are on average more and less intelligent than each other and that this probably has a deeply rooted genetic component. I don’t need to spell out why this is controversial. Yes, these are suggested to be average di erences, and not re ective of individual abilities. (Taller people are, on average, better at basketball than shorter people but I am a 6’3 uncoordinated mess.) True, this kind of “hereditarian” belief system tends to hold that Jewish and Chinese people, not white people, are the world’s brainiest.

But the argument that racial disparities are more the result of inherited biological di erences than structural dysfunction or injustice has depressing implications when it comes to the future, and morbid resonance when it comes to historically oppressive and eliminationist political movements.

so controversial is a belief in what is often called “hereditarianism” that believers are excluded from mainstream intellectual life. is year, the philosopher Nathan Cofnas stepped down from his position at Cambridge University amid protests against his claim that “the equality thesis is based on lies”. (“ ere is blood on the hands of Nathan Cofnas,” one student protester was reported to have said, though it is unclear whose blood it was.) e sociologist Noah Carl was dismissed from a fellowship at Cambridge in 2019 for his similar belief in what an open letter called “the discredited race sciences”.

“Discredited” is the important adjective here. e controversial nature of a belief is not necessarily determined by its truth or falsity. Is what Sailer argues true? Many experts in the elds of human intelligence and genetics maintain that is not.

Richard E. Nisbett’s Intelligence and How to Get It argues that environmental factors rather than genetic factors are the dominant in uence on human intelligence. e philosopher and intelligence researcher James R. Flynn encountered Jensen’s arguments about racial di erences in 1969 and

dedicated much of his career to arguing against them. Flynn did much to document the “Flynn E ect”, which refers to long-term improvements in IQ scores around the world (though its e ects appear to have stalled if not reversed in many places more recently).

Still, Flynn had kind words for Jensen even as he disagreed with him. “I never suspected Arthur Jensen of racial bias,” he said, “Over the years, I have found him scrupulous in terms of professional ethics.” He credited Jensen with “showing that the most cherished environmental hypotheses have been sheer speculation”, even as he took on his hereditarian beliefs. (He would later have his book — In Defense of Free Speech: e University as Censor — pulled for discussing free speech in academic life.)

Unfortunate as it might be, there is simply no comparison between Sailer’s views and the ideas of the Flat Earth Society and Answers In Genesis. ere would be no “Mainstream Science on Intelligence” — an open letter signed by 52 academics in relevant elds in support of Murray and Herrnstein’s conclusions in e Bell Curve — for the ideas of creation science, because they could no more get the names than I could form a cricket team in a Polish village. Certainly, that does not mean that such views are correct. Eminent people have been wrong about many things before. But it does make it impossible to reduce the fact of someone possessing these views to malicious or perverse intentions. ere is no partition in academic history over the existence of Nazi genocide.

the question will persist: is Sailer a Confederate or fascist partisan, peddling ethnic supremacism under the bland term “human biodiversity”? If he is then he is hiding it well. Granted, not all fascists are dumb enough to roam around in an “I Hitler” t-shirt. But Sailer has always advocated equal

“We operated on your cat, Mr Schrödinger. We have good news and bad news …”

rights for American citizens and opposed militarism. I can well imagine someone arguing that an essay like “How to Help the Left Side of the Bell Curve”, collected in Noticing, is paternalistic, patronising, reductionist and simply wrong. What I cannot imagine is Alfred Rosenberg not dismissing it as a load of soppy liberal mush. Certainly, he would have had a hernia over “Counting Jewish Achievement”.

Yet Sailer does swim in waters that would have got Il Duce’s blood running. A recent article on one of the outlets that regularly hosts him argues that “the overriding concern of the day, and the primary moral imperative, is to be antiJewish” (the author’s italics), and that all Jewish people should be encouraged to leave the USA (call it a “ nal solution” if you will).

I say this not to suggest that Sailer agrees with it or had anything to do with its publication. I say it to suggest that the sensitivity which informs “political correctness” did not emerge ex nihilo. Claiming that my Norse-style tattoo is a fascist symbol does not become fair if I live around a bunch of people with swastika tattoos, but it becomes less inexplicable.

Still, one has a far greater incentive to move to more unpleasant parts of town if it becomes almost impossible to live anywhere else. We have developed a peculiar model for inclusion and exclusion on the right. An abstract belief in inequalities between di erent peoples provides the grounds for absolute excommunication. But people who supported, and still support, policies which have got insane amounts of non-white people killed are perfectly respectable.

There are prescriptive beliefs that should make someone persona non grata (as everyone believes, while disagreeing on exactly what they are). If someone believed that all people named Ben should be killed I would not be interested in learning about their other curious opinions on the world.

Yet while we should be careful in delineating the boundaries of such prescriptive beliefs, we should be even more careful when it comes to descriptive beliefs. Yes, science and philosophy are never pure elds and will always be corrupted by human biases. But to make certain conclusions socially untouchable is to introduce a thick, impenetrable layer of bias.

I hope Noticing will be read and reviewed. If Sailer is wrong then he has expressed his error in clear terms, not with the caginess of an intellectual opportunist who hides in the thickets of detail and doubt. And in a world of dim columnists poking at the surface of the issues, it seems useful to engage with knowledgeable and ambitious voices even if you think that some of their opinions are erroneous and/or obnoxious.

I suppose it’s simple for me to say that. But that does not make it untrue. ●

Ben Sixsmith is online editor at e Critic

Landowners are reviled as enemies of the environment by the Jacobins of the green movement but these Poundland Robespierres are simply blinded by prejudice

The true lie of the land

RICHARD NEGUS

There is an understated English bird species, so perennially and universally persecuted by circumstance and predator alike, that Shakespeare used them, in both Henry VI and Much Ado About Nothing, as a metaphor for tragic death. It is rare, red-listed in fact, with a mere 40,000 breeding pairs still at large in the British Isles.

For a literary giant it is not that big; 30 centimetres or so in height, a fat one tops out at around 500 grams. e rasping “kerr, kerr” that passes for its song, sounds akin to a farm-gate in need of oiling. Its plumage is muted, like a dank December day in Suffolk. Doomed, tuneless and dumpily dowdy then, yet the grey partridge is an avian superstar, unique in truth, and of the utmost national importance to nature recovery.

Described by the late Dr Dick Potts, former director general of the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT) as “the barometer of the countryside”, the Grey is the prime indicator species for biodiversity in lowland landscapes. So pernickety is this bird regarding food and habitat, that farms with a healthy stock of partridge are guaranteed to have soils that are healthy, alive with micro ora and fauna. Wild food sources will be plentiful and the hedgerows lay thick, grasslands and margins will be species-rich, seething with invertebrate life and there will be a clear balance between predators and prey.

died some 20 years ago, he took over the family estate, including Peppering Farm, on the South Downs. He clearly saw he had two primary tasks.

Firstly to “do” farming well, employing knowledgeable farm sta to assist him in eking out the meagre pro ts one can from food production. Secondly, he looked at the health of the others who call Peppering Farm home — namely the wildlife. He chose the bellwether grey partridge to guide him.

e grey, he knew, belonged at Peppering, but when Dick Potts and his team went counting them, Eddie learned they were missing — all bar a few pitiful pairs, a meagre number diminished still further when an o -piste rambler’s dog gobbled up one of the hen birds. e story of how Eddie took hold of this parlous state of a airs and turned Peppering around from a prairie of arable monoculture to a pro table farm business, which simultaneously boasted a mosaic of biodiverse and meaningful habitats is now told in an exquisite book, e Return of the Grey Partridge, an account expertly written by the naturalist Roger Morgan- Grenville, with Eddie lling in the details.

Put simply, if the grey partridge chooses to live on your land, then so will almost everything else. It is curious then, that while this rare native is so indicative of, and so integral to, the overall good of nature, while it is exalted by a few hundred tweed-clad to s and a cabal of old-school ornithologists, radicals within the environmental lobby don’t think very much of it at all.

Eddie is one of those tweedy curios, a man who has dedicated the past two decades, and a toe-curling amount of his own money, to conserving the grey partridge. An accountant before he became a farmer, he is unlike many of the nouveau lairds; the types who wheeled and dealed their way to millions before buying up a swathe of the Highlands or Home Counties with misty-eyed pipe dreams of damming beavers and wandering bison. Eddie is from proper agricultural stock. When his father

e book is a rarity in the genre of nature writing; there is no political axe to grind, nor any narrative of Us versus em. So balanced is it that it was favourably reviewed by Dr Mark Avery, the former director of conservation for the RSPB. As the title indicates, Eddie succeeded. e grey partridge has returned to Peppering. e 11 individual birds Potts counted in September 2003 have swelled to between 1,000 to 2,000 every year since. Why then, you may ask, have so few heard of this win for nature? Why isn’t Eddie being feted by the Green movement in the same manner as say Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell from Knepp in West Sussex?

It may be because Eddie is a keen shot, and many within the environmental world viscerally despise game shooting; killing, they believe, is wondrous when wolves do it, but not so much when carried out by a man with a shotgun or ri e. In e Return of the Grey Partridge, Eddie is unabashed, making it abundantly clear that a major driver for his project was to create a sustainable yet shootable surplus of grey partridge, with punters paying top dollar for a day’s shooting and thereby funding the ongoing conservation work. e driven grey partridge is indeed the blue riband in sporting terms, the southerner’s answer to the Red

Grey partridge are “the barometer of the countryside”

Grouse — exclusive, wild and challenging.

It could equally be that his methodology for bringing back the Grey jarred with the nature recovery zeitgeist. Eddie’s methods were, in many ways, traditional. He conserved and continued farming. Not for him, simply running away and putting his faith in Gaia to do the hard graft, as propounded by rewilding proponents. He returned sheep to his formerly exclusive arable rotations, which inevitably riled George Monbiot, for whom concrete and petrol are tofu compared with mutton and wool.

Eddie’s replanting and managing of lost hedgerows and his farming uneconomical areas for nature rather than for food, sowing crops that provide bird seed, pollen and nectar, are practices dismissed as “gardening” by Steve Carver, professor of Rewilding and Wilderness Science at the University of Leeds.

Worse still for some hu y academics, Eddie’s eld sta are far removed from the North Face-clad ecology graduates found working on reserves belonging to NGOs. e Peppering conservation team are largely sons of the soil — farm workers, a goth entomologist and a quintet of gamekeepers — the latter’s role in shooting making them “less of a human being” in the diagnosis of the breakfast television authority and RSPB president, Dr Amir Khan.

It could of course simply be that the Grey itself is too nondescript and shy; plain dull when compared with “charismatic megafauna” a word salad term for wolves, lynx and other extinct creatures, species endlessly championed by the never knowingly correct brothers Goldsmith. Eddie’s e orts go unsung by those with unilateral views on wildlife conservation. It may also be that an increasingly in uential section of the environmental lobby has disowned Eddie’s e orts is because Peppering is part of

The sometime Friends of the Earth activist-turnedauthor, Guy Shrubsole, has long had it in for aristocrats, particularly the Duke of Norfolk. Shrubsole organises mass trespasses at Arundel through his Right to Roam movement and has sabotaged legal traps set there to capture carrion crows, one of the most prevalent predators of grey partridge broods. In his 2019 book Who Owns England? Shrubsole makes his prejudice against large landowners, particularly titled ones, clear.

While he gets lost on his way to explaining why this particular section of society incurs his speci c wrath — one supposes wayward rambling comes naturally with Right To Roam — he does get there eventually, revealing that a mere one per cent of the population owns half of the land in England. Yet he saves his most caustic venom for those individuals who own 30 per cent of Albion, aristocrats such as Eddie Norfolk, who he theatrically claims “stole vast swathes of our land through bloodshed, conquest and enclosure”.

As Shrubsole correctly highlights, hereditary peers do enjoy healthy tax breaks and farm subsidies on the land they own, but then so does anyone who owns farmland, rewilders included. It should be noted that regardless of title, all farm subsidies disappear in 2030. e chances are the peers will cling on regardless to their ancestral acres. Whether the land-banking newbies will is another matter. So why do the likes of Shrubsole label to s as destroyers of worlds when so many of them are, as Aldo Leopold de ned the word conservationism, “bringing a state of harmony

the vast Arundel Estate and Eddie is better known as Edward Fitzalan-Howard, 18th Duke of Norfolk.

between men and land”?

Eddie is no anomaly of ducal conservation. Examples of the aristocracy throwing themselves into nature conservation are legion, both historically and contemporarily. e Earl of Leicester, for example, who owns the 10,000-hectare Holkham estate. One only has to read Jake Fiennes’s 2022 book Land Healer to discover what an Earl with a vision and a decent gamekeeper can do both for farming and for wildlife in North Norfolk.

My own neighbour, the octogenarian Sir Kenneth Carlisle has made it his life’s work to conserve grey partridge on his Wyken estate. His son Sam is now taking on the mantle with a near manic zeal. Even at the very top of the tree, who can deny the quite remarkable lifetime of dedication to global wildlife conservation shown by the late Duke of Edinburgh, or for that matter his son, the King?

Since the publication of Who Owns England?, Shrubsole along and a group of fellow young(ish) rebrands have continued to hammer out the narrative that lords are bad and dukes are worse. ese to s, they repeat, do not merely own the land that should by right belong to the masses, they have poisoned it with their farming, killed every bird that ies and every fox that runs and closed the footpaths at the point of a keeper’s gun. ese word, sadly seem to nd traction with an audience who are environmentally engaged and understandably concerned for the future of our declining wildlife. Yet, invariably, these are people with little practical understanding of how agriculture, land management or landscape scale conservation works. Picking on dukes and earls is, I suppose, a canny means of attacking the establishment. Classism towards to s is the last bastion of discrimination that goes unchallenged. Better still if you can hide your sectarianism behind a g leaf of the brightest green.

near £165 million it raised in 2023 to carry out its annual core conservation activities. Although there are a few impoverished lords at large in the UK, most of the hereditary peers are privately wealthy. Yet Shrubsole’s disdain for peers cannot be based upon private wealth. He remains silent about the eight times billionaire Anders Holch Povlsen, despite the Dane being the largest single landowner in Scotland. Admittedly Povlsen has rewilded his 80,000 hectares rather than managing it in an Eddie Norfolk style, which most likely accounts for this inconsistent oversight.

The problem with all this toff-bashing is that while it may scratch a socialist itch, it ultimately does nothing for wildlife. Nature needs space, and obviously large landowners have more of this than smaller landowners. e Peppering project was such a success in part thanks to its scale, covering some 2,000 hectares. I am involved with a farmland nature recovery project in Su olk similar to Eddie’s. Yet the challenges facing our 6,000-hectare “High Su olk Farm Cluster” are far greater than those at Peppering.

In our cluster, as is the case with each of the 100 or so other farm clusters across the UK, multiple small and medium-sized farm enterprises must coalesce and combine to create one nominal land mass for nature. e results for wildlife are promising, yet there is the constant di culty of navigating, aligning and catering for the speci c needs and foibles of each individual farmer within the cluster. Clusters work, but they are nonetheless conservation by committee. Eddie has no such issues, he works under his own benevolent dictatorship.

To be meaningful, nature recovery also needs cash, lots of cash. e RSPB for example forked out over £120 million of the

It seems clear that Shrubsole & co’s trespassing against Eddie Norfolk and his kind, both metaphorically and physically, has nothing to do with any technical disagreement over conservation methodology or even large-scale land ownership itself. It is much more tawdry. ese Poundland heirs to Robespierre simply cannot abide the symbiotic relationship that tweedy eccentrics with hereditary titles have for the land they have owned for so long. It is not so much that these old du ers own the land — they are of the land.

Will Green Jacobinism ultimately overturn the old order of title and privilege? Unlikely — British revolutions are agricultural, industrial and technical. Yet the endlessly vitriolic portrayal of the landowning upper class as enemies of nature recovery will inevitably begin to erode the fragile collaborations that currently exist between lord and layman, shooter and scientist, rewilder and regenerative conservationist. Shame on those bigots I say. Go and choose another target for your hate.

If nothing else, the grey partridge deserve better. ●

Richard Negus is a former soldier who lays hedges on farms, shoots and estates throughout East Anglia. His book Words From e Hedge is now available to pre-order from Unbound at unbound.com/books/words-from-the-hedge

Partridge are mentioned twice in Shakespeare

Consider the way of the tiger

We should learn lessons from Japan as we start to face our own demographic crunch

From the moment I opened the door to him I knew that this year’s nancial health check was going to be even more miserable than my recent company medical.

My nancial adviser avoided eye contact as he clicked open his black leather box briefcase and laid out meaningless bits of paper on the kitchen table. Slowly the ghastly diagnosis emerged.

My investment trusts had gone thrombotic. “More sellers than buyers, I am afraid,” muttered my adviser. e stake in a commercial property fund stacked with empty provincial shopping centres was still gouty. And the spivvy micro-cap fund run by a chum I once drank with in a Leadenhall basement bar was now in a terminal condition.

But, amid the gloom, there was one corner of my portfolio in rude health. A Japanese equity fund I had half forgotten about had jumped 30 per cent.

A fter two lost decades, the Nikkei has been the stand-out performer of the past year, And, while it would be an exaggeration to say that this Asian tiger is once again roaring, there have been some positive real-world changes which have underpinned the froth in the markets.

And there may be lessons from Japan for us, as we face our own unsettling economic future.

Back in the late Eighties and early Nineties, Japan was the future. My daughter’s bedroom was covered in hideous Hello Kitty posters. My son developed repetitive strain injury from over-use of his Nintendo Gameboy.

And in the City, the Japanese were buying everything: train manufacturers, software companies, even Scotch whisky distilleries. We taught ourselves to use chopsticks in greasy yakitori joints and practised that ddly business card thing

the Japanese do.

I even made a stab at learning the language, though I never mastered more than the basics like kono kaisha ni ikura harau ka — that’s Japanese for “How much are you willing to pay for my company?”

en in 1992 the bubble burst and so did the careers of some friends who had been long in Tokyo real estate. So began a long period of stagnation. Bad demographics is the conventional explanation for why the Japanese economy has spent

Japan shows that a nation of geriatrics is still capable of financial reform

Filming the closing prices of the Nikkei on 22 February, 2024

are fewer pushchairs and more knitting circles. And, for all the hysteria about the small boats, the real migration story is the exodus of industrious Eastern European families from Britain in search of a better life for their children in Łódz, Brno or Timisoara.

e message from Japan is clear. Deregulation is the only solution to this slow moving, but inexorable crisis. But it is a message that seems to be lost on our politicians.

is March, Jeremy Hunt announced in

so long in the doldrums. e median age is now approaching 50. e fertility rate is stuck at 1.4 live births per woman. And the overall population is slowly shrinking.

But recent developments have shown that a nation of geriatrics is still capable of reform and progress. e perkiness of the Japanese nancial markets is at least in part a fortunate legacy of the structural reforms put in place by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe before he was shot dead campaigning in 2022.

ese included cutting business taxes, and incentives to get more older people into the workplace. Meanwhile the stu y boardrooms of Japan, under pressure from Western activists, have nally started to prioritise shareholder value.

So what are the lessons for us Brits? Well, you don’t have to be a population scientist to see that we have already entered our own demographic crunch.

In London, primary schools are being mothballed. At my local park cafe, there

his Budget that de ned contribution and local government pension funds would have to declare how much they put into UK equities. He may be well-meaning, but it will turn into another piece of gold-plated compliance bureaucracy, which will add to the City’s general sclerosis.

On the Labour side, Rachael Reeves’s plan to abolish zero-hour contracts seems precisely designed to deter older people from returning to the workplace. anks to the new miracle of electric-powered bicycles, there’s no reason why the over-65s can’t enjoy a life of exibility, fresh air and social contact as a courier for Deliveroo.

It is not inevitable that the UK su ers the same long-term stagnation as the Japanese. But unless our politicians abandon their growing appetite to regulate, to ban and to tax I fear we are headed for a lost decade or two of our own.

Until the Hunts and the Reeves wake up to the risk, I am instructing my nancial adviser to stay short of UK plc and go long on, well, anything else. ● — ned

Classical music was once part of our national life. Today it has been sidelined in schools, is disappearing from the airwaves and the press has drastically cut coverage. Why? Because it has been tarnished with the dread word “elitism”

The love that dare not speak its name

Alexandra Wilson

Back in 1928, a magazine called e Musical Mirror published a satirical yet a ectionate article about the relative popularity of classical music and sport. It imagined a future, 50 years hence, in which concerts drew larger crowds than football matches and presented a spoof review of a recital by the pianist “Schweinhund” at which the audience stormed the platform and 900 people had to be hospitalised for injuries.

In a companion piece, a ctional manager complained that football, “instead of being, like music, a great national sport, was merely the pursuit of the cultured few”, and dreamed of the day when a cup nal would be as popular as a symphony concert. For the time being though, the average man considered football a bit “heavy” and preferred to relax with a Schoenberg sextet.

Needless to say, the 1970s looked nothing like this. Yet classical music did still have a relatively prominent place in everyday British life. Implausible as it might sound today, in 1975 the Daily Mirror chose Monteverdi’s Homeric opera Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria as its pick of the week for the August bank holiday and billed a Christmas broadcast of Puccini’s La bohème as “not to be missed”. Classical music remained part of the mainstream British conversation, so much so that the conductor André Previn could appear for some gentle ribbing on the Morecambe and Wise Christmas special.

Of course, there were trendy kids at school who would no more take an interest in classical music than would pick you, a swotty square, for the netball team. But there were enough of us going out of class for instrumental lessons for it to seem normal. And at weekends we would lug our cellos or trombones to the council-run Saturday orchestra and tape the top 40 o the radio on Sunday, and nobody saw any contradiction between the two.

Never “cool” exactly — and indeed why should it be? — classical music enjoyed a wider surge of popularity during the 1980s. Opera companies reported full-capacity houses such as had never been seen before; rock promoter Harvey Goldsmith started putting on large-scale productions at venues such as the Earls Court arena.

Classical music has an image problem that feels like an existential threat. it has become difficult to make a case for it without apology

Buoyed up by featuring in popular lms from Amadeus to A Room with a View, classical music was even riding high in the charts. Record stores devoted large areas of oorspace to it, even — if my memory serves me correctly — most of the basement of the HMV on Oxford Street. Classical music was never everyone’s cup of tea, but if it happened to be yours, nobody whose opinion you would value was going to laugh.

And so it continued, to a large extent, throughout the 1980s, when it was possible for a teenager like me, with no family background in classical music, to discover it via schoolfriends and to teach myself the piano at a friend’s house.

Today, however, things are different. Classical music has an image problem that feels like an existential threat. e pernicious idea of “elitism” — a word that was only coined in the 1980s — spread like Japanese knotweed through the pages of the press as the century neared its close. In the twenty- rst century, classical music’s stock has fallen further still, to the point where it has become extremely di cult to make the case for it without apology. Why?

Since 2000, classical music has disappeared from most people’s daily lives. It is far less visible in the media. What are the chances of even one or two operas being screened on the BBC at peak time now, let alone 18 or 19 like in the Seventies? And the idea of an opera being broadcast on Channel 4 (a regular occurrence in the Eighties) seems like a joke.

e press has drastically cut its arts coverage, only giving classical music prominent billing for stories that are scandalous or salacious, or for scenarios where the elitism charge can be triumphantly “proved”. Music has been sidelined in schools to a drastic extent, and for those who still have an opportunity to study it, classical music occupies only a small part of the remaining curriculum. A variety of di erent politicians and institutions, often with contradictory agendas, have conspired to bring all this about.

So it is really no surprise that playing classical music or going to concerts should have become something of an oddity, despite the fact that many people will stop, mesmerised, and listen if they hear a talented classical busker in the street or happen to wander into a church where a good amateur choir is

rehearsing. But classical music’s problem is worse than this, for it is now not merely seen as “niche” but as somehow tainted.

There are still, of course, many people in the classical music world who bang the drum loudly for the art they love. But administrators have increasingly pursued the unhelpful path of either presenting classical music in “diluted” form or undertaking weird contortions to present it as something it is not. Driven no doubt by a desperate attempt to shrug o the constant taunts of “elitism”, twenty- rst-century musical institutions have made frantic e orts to rebrand classical music, either trying to make it “sexy” or by promoting it as if it were pop.

In 2005, for example, English National Opera put on a production of Gerald Barry’s challenging new work, e Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, billing it under the headline “Sexual Desire, Dominance, Submission”, illustrated with photographs of a singer in underwear cavorting with a mannequin, and saying nothing more about the music than that audience members should expect the in uence of “Irish folk music”. As Philip Hensher noted wryly in e Independent, “its working strategy for selling a high-minded piece of new music seems to be (1) Tell them it’s dirty. (2) Tell them it sounds like Riverdance. (3) Run like hell before they ask for their money back.”

Arguments rage year after year, meanwhile, about the amount of classical music at the BBC Proms. ough the Proms still markets itself as a festival of classical music, and the vast majority of concerts would be classi ed thus, there are annual rows about the inclusion of other genres: jazz, lm music, world music, or outand-out pop and dance music (see for example 2015’s Radio 1 Ibiza Prom or last year’s Northern Soul Prom).

Many classical music fans welcome such “shaking up” and argue passionately that this is the only way to attract new and younger audiences, though whether listeners actually cross over between genres is a moot point.

Argue for the Proms to be strictly classical and you’re likely to be told to lighten up. Yet one cannot fail to notice that our countless pop and rock festivals feel no similar obligation to include classical artists in their line-ups: they do what they do, loud and proud. Endless debates about the Radio 3 schedules go over similar ground, pitting “fusty” purists against more chilled-out listeners who insist the station will die if it doesn’t adapt to changing times. Meanwhile, Radio 1 continues to do its own thing. I like an eclectic mix of music as much as the next person, but I feel it is legitimate to ask why only one type has to make all the concessions.

And it is a similar story in universities. Most music lecturers who were students in the 1980s and 1990s will have taken an academic degree course devoted entirely to classical music. By the 2000s a wide array of di erent types of music started to feature on the curriculum, and this diversi cation was seen by most as a good thing.

But we have reached a point where the pendulum has swung so far the other way that classical music is struggling to maintain a foothold at all on some university music courses. If any academic were to propose a degree course based entirely around classical music — and I imagine few would dare — they would be regarded as eccentric at best, politically dubious at worst.

we must find the courage to suppress our nervousness about being labelled “snobs” and explain why classical music is worth bothering with

and this is the nub of the embarrassment. Classical music is no longer simply something that people enjoy listening to, playing, studying and writing about; rather, it has been intensely politicised. e relentless elitism barbs have already done a great deal to turn people o classical music, but in recent years these historically illiterate insults have morphed into something even worse, as the elitism stereotype has merged with wider debates about equality in ways that are making the classical music world very edgy indeed.

But there is no reason why classical music shouldn’t appeal to people from all social backgrounds as it used to in the past. (Do read Jonathan Rose’s e Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes if you’re inclined to be sceptical.) And it is downright insulting to suggest that classical music cannot speak to people from non-white backgrounds. Yet narratives that construct such music as the preserve of a privileged, white “elite” abound, and they are even hinted at, or even asserted explicitly, by the very institutions we would expect to be championing the arts.

ere has been a spate of recent books in which arts and social-science academics have made particularly concerted e orts to stress these arguments. In his new book Culture is not an Industry, Justin O’Connor argues that we should reclaim art and culture for the common good, which sounds brilliant, but it soon becomes abundantly clear that he means participatory community art and not the arts in their “highfalutin” manifestations.

Meanwhile, Anna Bull, a former professional musician, argues in her book Class, Control, and Classical Music that the middle classes use such music to “safeguard their privilege”,

reproduce inequality, and “clos[e] o their protected and exclusive spaces to the other groups in society”.

Music students used to be able to sign up for a degree where they could expect to perform classical music, analyse its structures, and learn about its history. It was a given that they had enthusiasm for the object of their study. Nowadays, much time will be devoted to “problematising” this repertoire, the canon will be thoroughly reviled, and students will probably be taught that classical music is the cause of numerous social ills. It is a rare and brave soul who will admit they nd this objectionable. ough the government’s cuts to arts funding and education and general rubbishing of the arts absolutely deserve our contempt, we cannot just sit back and wait for the fantastic renaissance for classical music Labour will supposedly bring about in 2025. For what we are experiencing now is a much deeper problem of ingrained mentalities.

As a nation, we are in thrall to American commercial culture to a greater extent than ever before. We want the new and the edgy and we mock anything that gives the slightest whi of being intellectual, “traditional” or, to put it bluntly, old. We have all, e ectively, morphed into the trendy kids in the school playground.

T here are loud voices, currently holding the microphone, who seem determined to run classical music into the ground. Even Arifa Akbar, e Guardian’s chief theatre critic, recently announced that traditional modes of listening to such music (respectfully and quietly) are elitist. is is only going to get worse. So those of us who really care about classical music, whether listeners, performers, educators, critics or arts administrators, need to be prepared to stand up and speak out.

We must nd the courage to suppress our embarrassment, our nervousness about being labelled “snobs”, and explain why classical music has value, is worth bothering with, and is something anyone can enjoy. And we must stand up for classical music on its own terms and vouch for it without limply falling back on the utilitarian argument that it makes a contribution to GDP. If we don’t, it will be game over for classical music, and soon. e time to stop apologising is now. ●

Alexandra Wilson is Professor of Music and Cultural History at Oxford Brookes University

Study

of the Western canon is often reduced to a politicised debate: power and patronage versus individual genius. The truth is far more complex

Singers have a voice, too

The W estern liberal legacy has reframed “freedom” in an entanglement of misconceptions and skewed viewpoints. In the arts, they tend to be sacralised as an absolute precondition of the artist. Yet for all its lofty intent, art is still a product of human hands and minds. Its object shouldn’t blind us to the unavoidable and less glamorous realities of economic and legal constraints faced by artists.

To acknowledge this is not to reduce intellectual debates to balance sheets. But the limitations matter, since it is precisely within set frameworks that humans thrive, even if it is to transgress or transform them. Creativity involves making the most of what is available to us at a given time. As such, constraints aren’t automatically “negative”, in the sense that they represent a nuisance that needs to be removed at all costs.

e contemporary xation on extolling “freedom” as a cornerstone of artistic expression stems from a attened understanding of history. ose for whom this is the jam and butter often reveal a particular obsession with power dynamics.

e interplay of economics and law with the history of arts has long been perceived through two distinct lenses: a Marxist theory on the one hand, and a classical liberal perspective on the other. Each has its own foundational tale to tell about the art market, whether as a battleground for class struggle or as a catalyst for individual liberation. Between the two grand narratives, the nuances of interpersonal relationships and the way they build on, and enhance, individual skills, desires, and agencies, often get sidelined.

A mong the discarded images, early modern music occupies an interesting place. Musical creation during the Ancien Régime conjures speci c projections of art patronage,

sometimes equated with baroque putti wrapped in golden leaves and ornamented coquetry. We imagine a world where the desires of in uential sponsors dictate the creative process, relegating artists to mere conduits of their whims. While this narrative holds some truth, the oversimpli cation it carries with it perpetuates a damaging cliché not only for understanding how past creation worked, but also how future creation may arise.

Before the modern period, the vast majority of musicians did not have an experience comparable to the contemporary notion of being “self-employed”, a status mindlessly linked to the idea of “freedom”. Carlo Gesualdo (1566-1613) and Barbara Strozzi (1619-1677) demonstrate that personal wealth occasionally a orded composers the luxury of pursuing their craft independently, but these were rare exceptions. Later, the Beethovenian ideal, championing the notion of artistic freedom fuelled by “genius”, tried to contrast itself with an interpretation of the past in which composers were not free agents. is perspective on the Western musical past has been encouraged by the development of various “cultural studies”, which assume that power relationships are best understood as generally bene tting those with the greatest social status. French history is particularly fruitful ground for this explanation, with magni cent absolute kings fervently attached to the arts and their language, defending the artistic grandeur of their terroir. In their quest for a conceptual scapegoat, many intellectuals indulge in cultivating the myth of the “patron-state” in negative terms, a sentiment echoed as early as the 18th century with incorrigible philosophers such as Voltaire and Rousseau.

Yet, this vision of “cultural politics” is an epistemological obstacle, as the late Marc Fumaroli, author of e Republic of Letters, wisely noted. It mirrors our contemporary obsession with “soft power”, another awed and misleading concept founded on a fallacious interpretation of the value of culture and the arts. Such an understanding of patronage and art creation during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries not only lacks accuracy but also serves as fodder for commentators across the political spectrum to validate their preconceived ideas about the nature and purpose of art.

From a leftist standpoint, it is often wielded to critique tangible or fantastical power structures and systems of authority, perpetuating the belief that the Western world has intentionally silenced or marginalised certain voices, particularly those rooted in gender and racial identities. Conversely, from a right-wing perspective, it feeds into the romanticised concept of “beauty”, which discards or denigrates economic and interpersonal constraints to prioritise transcendental principles.

Lola Salem

Ballet Comique de la Reine

Both bleed into the debate that surrounds the “canon”, which represents what we have commonly elected as pieces of art of extremely valuable worth, and what deserves to be performed and taught.

e reality of this intellectual dispute is more complex than a simple dichotomy suggests. e focus on pure aesthetics, for example, pervasive across much of the existing scholarship, transcends the political spectrum and reveals conceptual xations on all sides. In the domain of opera, the fervour of some academics for aesthetics has sometimes debased the study of music production from factual groundings. is scholarly stance becomes easily prescriptive and keen on fabricating narratives, whether “progressive” or “conservative”, especially when coupled with anachronistic psychoanalytical theories and the like.

performers were chosen for their skills and reputation, which in turn enhanced the fame of composers who worked with them

Catherine Clément incarnates the epitome of this problem in Opera, or the Undoing of Women (1979), which enjoys worldwide renown. In this enquiry into female characters in French opera, Clément’s focus on a handful of artistic parameters crafts a ready-made mould for a speci c narrative, that of the eternal weaker sex placed in a situation of submission and punishment, detached from a careful study of primary sources.

Not only does Clément miss the whole Christian depth of the literary material (in which humility, sacri ce, and redemption matter to the highest degree), she also overlooks singers’ own agency, and how they could use their power and in uence on the creative process of music production. e pre-nineteenth century music scene answered to speci c needs set up by existing structures for speci c places, such as the Divine Liturgy in churches and court entertainment for wealthy patrons. However, it doesn’t necessarily mean that individual artists, authors and performers didn’t possess a voice of their own.

The advent of opera houses reliedheavily on a question of administrative and economic inventiveness, which acknowledged the importance of most individuals entangled with opera business as a potential co-creative force. Across Northern Italy, with public theatres such as the Venetian San Cassiano (inaugurated in 1637), and the rest of Europe, competition among singers animated a new market, unafraid to aim for economic pro tability. While secular musical institutions toyed with the implementation of working conventions, performers necessarily learned to negotiate their own rights.

e most prominent singers could have a deep in uence over troupes’ structures, share managerial responsibilities, and intrude on artistic matters. Italian opera is full of cases of castrati and female divas that illustrate this. For example, Francesco Bernardi (a popular castrato known as “Senesino”

who moved to London in 1720) negotiated with the Royal Academy of Music not only for primo uomo roles, but also for a position of artistic in uence in his Londra amatissima. Italian soloists could own the scores they were given during speci c cast productions and travel across Europe with “suitcase arias” (aria di balle) performed without fear of copyright protocols.

e straitjacket conventions of French opera, in addition to the centralised political model of the “Sun King”, have made it harder to project the same principles to music creation there. Yet even in the context of the Paris Opera, which set up the modern system of a xed troupe with a set repertoire, the relationship between directors and singers wasn’t trapped in a hermetic top-down approach. Performers were chosen for their skill and reputation, which enhanced the fame of the composers working with them. is is evidently true insofar as singers’ competencies were taken into consideration by the authors in order to make their work successful. But singers were not passive agents: their choices and preferences impacted decision-making. Even under Lully, reputed for his tight control over his performers, some singers demonstrated that they could have an active role. Marie Le Rochois (c. 1658-1728), hired by Pascal Collasse, one of Lully’s close collaborators, animated violent romantic aspirations among the audience. Her rare voice of bas-dessus (loose equivalent of female alto) and the perfection of her singing and acting consecrated her as an arbiter of good taste. Besides an alleged dispute between the singer and Lully, their dynamic was one of the most fruitful within the troupe, reaching its apex with Armide (1686, above). According to the commentator Titon du Tillet, Lully regularly consulted Le Rochois — as did André Campra and André-Cardinal Destouches — and he often attributed his successes to her.

R econsidering the importance of singers’ “voices” in fashioning and playing the repertoire is crucial for a better appreciation of the Western musical canon. Indeed, it is not simply a set repertoire gathering beautiful works. It is fundamentally a pedagogical tool embodied through performance. Its revival can leave room for the creative minds of today’s artists, but it shouldn’t come at the expense of erasing the individuals who preceded them, not only authors but also performers who had their say and fought hard to be heard. us those who aspire to become patrons of the arts today should take note that philanthropy isn’t a passive hobby, but necessarily relies on entertaining close relationships with those who embody and live art. ●

Lola Salem is a French author, academic and art critic

Where do the acts too big for pubs but too small for arenas play?

Finding the middle ground

Her sound is rootsy A mericana: soothing, conversational songs with lyrics about hope in hard times and the magic of self-belief. Lady Nade — AKA Nadine Gingell — is a vocalist with more than a icker of Nina Simone to her style. Gingell has a solid fanbase in the UK and US, which she earned, like Simone, through regular live performances in modest-sized music venues. Some artists suit venues that o er comfort with a sense of warm encounter, rather than cavernous stadiums built for digitally en hanced extravaganzas, or dank basements with questionable acoustics.

“I’m so happy to be here,” Gingell (right) told the audience when she took to the stage in Bristol — her home city — late last year at the re-opening party for the Bristol Beacon concert hall (formerly the Colston Hall), after a £132 million, ve-year resto ration project by architects Levitt Bernstein. e Beacon — with its concert hall that seats just over 1,800 people — is a signi cant, unusual and possibly risky investment, but it is not unique. Some funders are still backing mid-

sized venues with architecture, interiors and technology that o er audiences an intimate sense of drama and occasion rather than a distant, digitally-enhanced spectacle or a crowded pub backroom, and a greater degree of comfort than a plastic bucket seat. But they have their work cut out to lure audiences, and they are hoping that architectural and design details will set them apart.

Take the ultra-modern, self-consciously angular Aviva Studios in Manchester, a £240 million project by Rem Koolhaas’s Netherlands-based O ce for Metropolitan Architecture (AKA OMA), which opened last October. Or the forthcoming 4,000 capacity venue taking a distinctive shape behind hoardings in Hammersmith, West London, part of the £1.3 billion Olympia redevelopment led by the designer and “soulful” buildings enthusiast omas Heatherwick, scheduled to open from 2025.

Yoo Capital, the developers behind Heatherwick’s new concert space, hope the venue will be an alternative to stadiums for big stars, perhaps a place to play intimate, Las Vegasstyle residences over several nights.

Any new venues in city centres are rarities. According to Music Venue Trust (MVT), small and modestly sized halls are closing more frequently than they are opening. Last year was the hardest year for its membership in a decade — nearly 15 per cent were lost in 12 months alone, clobbered by high energy prices, rising rents, redevelopment and complaints from neighbours about noise, among other miseries.

Bush H all in west London, an ornate Edwardian treasure with a standing capacity of 400, has launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise £42,000 to stay open. Its owners say they are “months away from making a hideous decision”.

Contrast that with the 2.5 million tickets sold by London’s vast, anonymous O2 Arena, far out on the Greenwich peninsula (capacity 20,000) in 2023 — its most successful year to date, boosted by bigbudget, stadium- lling acts such as Madonna.

Beacon Hall was built (or rebuilt) for artists like Gingell, established though no megastar, with its newly con gured auditorium, warm timber panelling, lavish upholstery and crystal-

Helen Barrett

line acoustics. Its refurbishment, funded mostly by Bristol City Council, Arts Council England and the Heritage Lottery Fund, was over budget and a leap of faith. But so far, the signs are encouraging: ticket sales for its rst three months of shows after reopening are up 30 per cent on the same period in 2017/18, the period just before it closed.

e 157-year-old concert hall was once one of Britain’s most signi cant music venues, with a strong history of hosting big-name American acts — Buddy Holly, Miles Davis, Bob Dylan — and British superstars such as David Bowie, as chronicled in a whimsical graphic mural in the bar by the artist Mel Northover. One highlight is e Beatles being struck by a our-bomb on stage in 1964.

But times have changed. During the ve years Beacon Hall was closed for refurbishment, the management team were particularly anxious about slipping o the circuit and their relationships with artists, promoters and its audience drifting away. “We were very worried about that — a huge question was, will anyone come back? And then a global pandemic in the middle of it,” says Louise Mitchell, chief executive at Bristol Music Trust, which operates the venue.

So the refit had to be world-class if they were to return, and the venue stave o the deathstar e ect of regional stadiums. e hall’s exterior, built in 1867, is all decorative brickwork, caramel-coloured stone and neoclassical colonnade and it is grade-II listed. But the interior was just 70 years old, built to replace a structure that burnt down in 1945 though not hit by the Luftwa e, more likely the victim of a discarded cigarette. ( e former name related to its position on Colston Street: Edward Colston, the seventeenth-century Bristol slave trader whose statue was toppled by protesters in 2020, had no connection to the concert hall.)

“killer acoustic issue” as Mark Lewis, the project’s lead architect, puts it: a single, deep balcony hovering above the stalls, whose bulk meant a chunk of the audience lost a sense of being enveloped by music from the stage. For them, the experience was something like listening to a distant megaphone.

So Levitt Bernstein kept the Victorian shell, removed its 1950s interior (though according to William Filmer-Sankey, a heritage consultant who advised on the project, the decision to do so was not taken lightly “given its architectural interest as a hall in the Festival of Britain style”) and built two tiers of balconies where previously there had been one, mimicking the layouts of the world’s great venues.

“It had to be a reminder of Manchester’s industrial history so the materials used on the outside are bog-standard”

e old hall was close to collapse, with little overhead strength to hang modern lighting rigs. A seagull had set up home in a roof void in 2017, dislodging asbestos and closing the venue for three weeks.

“It was not very good at what it was trying to make money from,” says Mitchell. “Rock and pop, which cross-subsidises all the other work. We needed a venue suitable for all kinds of music. I was just grateful that we managed to get to closure in 2018 without a major building failure.”

As well as structural problems, the 1950s layout included a

“We did some studies and looked at the Boston Symphony Hall and the Musikverein in Vienna and we found the proportion of the Victorian walls in Bristol was very close,” says Lewis.

Manchester’s Aviva Studios was also wildly over budget — £130 million more than the original estimates made in 2015. Like the Beacon, it was mostly funded by the local council, Arts Council England, lottery money and, later, by the sale of naming rights.

But this venue is a much more complex proposition: two in one, a cathedral-sized warehouse with capacity for 5,000 people and an adjacent — and lavish — seated auditorium for 1,600, complete with stage and orchestra pit. e two are linked by acoustic doors, which open and close allowing the stage to deepen depending on the performance. “ e warehouse represents the contemporary; the theatre references the traditional,” lead architect Ellen van Loon said at the opening event. “Putting them together takes it to another level.”

Its crab-like shape is self-conscious and certainly brash, though its con dence suits Manchester. Critics have quite rea-

sonably complained about the ordinariness of the materials on the venue’s exterior: concrete, greyish corrugated cladding. “It had to be a reminder of [Manchester’s] industrial history so the materials we used on the outside are bog-standard,” concedes Van Loon. “It’s all quite simple.”

e public areas, too, are sparse, such as the underwhelming ground- oor bar and cafe area, and gloomy internal staircases. But the designers have poured money into the auditorium, with an audio system that tracks individual performers and a network of 60 speakers. Audiences sense where on stage speech or music is coming from, wherever they sit. e seats are generous and wide, the upholstery is luscious.

Whether all this bespoke detailing is enough to make the Beacon and Aviva Studios viable has yet to be proven. Both venues have competition. e Beacon may be the biggest in Bristol city centre, but seven miles to the north at Filton, a Malaysian investor is building a 19,000-capacity arena due to open in the next few years, describing itself as “the number one live destination for the South West”. In Manchester, the 23,500-capacity Co-Op Live — billed as “the UK’s only music- rst arena” — opens this April.

Neither do mid-sized places quite o er audiences the thrilling immediacy and cheap ticket prices of a small gig venue. ey may be struggling to survive, but more than 23 million people still went to gigs in them last year, according to the MVT, in a sector worth more than half a billion pounds annually (though Arts Council England’s new fund for supporting “grassroots music” is just £5m).

“Quite often, they are the rst performances experienced by a young person,” says Mark Davyd of the MVT. Last year’s biggest loss, he says, was the beloved, 220-capacity Moles Club in Bath that shut in December, blaming soaring costs. e 45-year-old venue in a city-centre Georgian basement — sparse, chilly, famously damp — hosted Radiohead, e Cure, PJ Harvey and countless others in the early years of their careers.

“ ey contributed billions. So if the music industry can’t nd a way to keep Moles open, we have a serious problem,” says Davyd. e trust has introduced a nascent scheme for a “National Trust of Music Venues”. Its rst purchase was e Snug in Atherton, Greater Manchester, last year, a tiny venue with a capacity of just 100.

But cerebral artists such as Lady Nade will always need comfortable, mid-sized venues like the Beacon and Aviva Studios. ey are a di erent kind of spectacle, in which architecture and design plays support. eir openings bring hope in hard times. ●

Barrett is a writer and editor based in London

How did four ornery lads rearing up from the post-war English underclass become national treasures?

God save The Kinks

Haydn Middleton

The Kinks are no strangers to our national conversation. Having played their last note in 1996, they’ve now been defunct for nearly as long as they were together. Yet their stock continues to rise. At the 2012 London Olympics, their signature song “Waterloo Sunset” was given a place of honour in the closing ceremony. Five years later their main songwriter and singer, Ray Davies, was knighted for services to the arts. Meanwhile Sunny Afternoon, a West End musical based on their career, picked up a clutch of Olivier awards.

Regularly cited today as the third wheel in a Sixties pop holy trinity completed by e Beatles and Stones, and regarded as hugely in uential on subsequent musical generations, e Kinks have joined the likes of Judi Dench and Alan Bennett as national treasures — or, in the more euphonious words of their fellow Londoner William Blake, “jewels of Albion”. So how did all this happen?

●

I was there, aged nine, at their eruption in July 1964 when my mum allowed me to have my tea in front of the TV for Ready Steady Go! e moment I was pinned to the wall by the bulldozer ri and unhinged vocal of “You Really Got Me”, I took e Kinks’ shilling. Within three months they’d un-

Helen

leashed the frenzied “All Day and All of the Night”. en with their next chart-topper, “Tired of Waiting for You”, they slowed the whole thing down and made menace beautiful.

e Kinks’ music is often touted as quintessentially English, but that opening salvo contained little in the way of George Orwell’s “solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green elds and red pillar-boxes”. As with their brilliantly feral young peers — Animals, Yardbirds, em, Who — future national treasurehood didn’t then look likely. “ e Rolling Stones are not the people you build empires with,” journalist Maureen Cleave noted. Well no, but could Clive of India have come up with “Get O Of My Cloud”?

These bands soon undertook their own form of outreach work, the mid-Sixties “British Invasion” of the USA in which e Kinks’ part fell somewhere between 1854’s Charge of the Light Brigade and a topless Erika Roe’s Twickenham pitch invasion in 1982. Bad management, bad luck and bad behaviour meant they were prevented from performing Stateside again until the end of the decade.

It was during this enforced hiatus that their music truly “went native”, their British pro le kept high by a string of witty, melodically inventive, utterly inimitable story-singles such as “Dedicated Follower of Fashion” and “Sunny Afternoon” reaching a Kinksy zenith with “Waterloo Sunset”.

Once readmitted to the US, e Kinks fell out of favour here, and for their last quarter-century they earned virtually all their success in American charts and arenas — rstly with pop-operatic stage shows derived from a run of mid-period concept albums, then with a barrage of MTV-friendly rock. roughout this long stretch in the domestic wilderness (turned down as insu ciently famous to appear at 1985’s Live Aid, booed o stage at a Barnsley club in 1993) they remained my personal pop touchstone. While I liked a lot of their newer material, with each passing year the more precious their older, canonical songs became to me: a process which has yet to stop. I don’t know to what extent I’m speaking for the broader hardline fanbase, but e Kinks got tied up with my identity.

I think this went beyond the songs. In July 1964, for instance, I’d also been quickened by Cli Richard’s “On e Beach” while feeling no sense of a liation with Cli himself. Not irrelevantly, there were four of the Kinks, and their original line-up’s raw, working-class gang aspect was intensely alluring. For ve sublime years from 1964 they comprised slaughterman’s son Ray Davies on rhythm guitar, younger brother Dave on lead, Mick Avory on drums, and the late Pete Quaife on bass. Only the two Davies boys would be present from start to nish, but this was the gang that drew me in.

Sixty decades of biographies and interviews establish conclusively that for all their wit, they were a curmudgeonly bunch who didn’t seem to like anything much: their name (imposed by management), their rivals (“a load of rubbish,” Ray said of “Yellow Submarine”), pop fans (“What do they

want to buy that crap for?” Ray commented regarding Elvis and Connie Francis) and, infamously, one another.

Dave and Ray’s sibling rivalry has long been a tabloid staple, but Mick and Dave had their moments too, the former in icting on the latter a fearsome onstage head injury in 1965. “Sixteen,” the deadpan drummer corrected a TV interviewer who’d said the wound had required 18 stitches. When it all got too much for Pete, he left in 1969 saying he’d “rather go to prison than play with them any more”.

e Kinks’ English contrarianism seldom looked simply performative. And with Ray, Dave, Mick and Pete perpetually at each other’s throats, their default disa ection couldn’t help but subvert the catchiness of their sound. So if the Sixties swung for e Kinks, it was often with the air of the gibbet. “What are we living for?” they sang on “Dead End Street”, to no reassuring reply, while in a singalong chorus on the 1971 album Muswell Hillbillies they gave it to us straight: “Life is overrated”. Even their most radiant songs could harbour darkness. Why might one narrator be “afraid” unless he gazes on that sunset at Waterloo? Why does another insist he isn’t “frightened of this world” in the paean “Days”? And I’m never wholly convinced by the declaration “Baby, I feel good from the moment I rise” at the opening of “Till the End of the Day” — not least because that single’s ipside, “Where Have All e Good Times Gone?”, asks, “Will this depression last for long?”

When the critic Edna Longley nds “characteristic notes of nostalgia, desire, ironic distaste, elegy … and neurosis” in the coruscating earlier poetry of T.S. Eliot, she could equally well be making a Kinks’ song checklist as, increasingly, the group hymned a world de ned by loss.

Lost relatives, lost communities, lost traditions, lost eras — some knowingly illusory. “Take me back to those black hills that I ain’t never seen,” is a lyric just post-dating their Sixties golden era which would come to haunt them as their new work fought a losing battle with their endlessly re-packaged and re-imagined back catalogue.

It could be the hobbyist historian in me that’s responded to this sense of a longer perspective. And having measured out the better part of my life in Kinks tracks, returning to them is akin to revisiting my own back pages. But whenever I hear their music — still pretty much on a daily basis — it’s no easier to classify than it was on its release. I mean, what is “Kinksy”?

A roll call of other artists an act has performed with often indicates some musical a nity. But this lot have all shared a stage with e Kinks, and if you spot a common thread, please let me know: Sonny & Cher, e Beatles, Blondie, Steely Dan, Bill Ha-

ley & the Comets, Yes, Goldie & the Gingerbreads, e Supremes, Aerosmith, e Dubliners, Bob Dylan, Chuck Berry and Screaming Lord Sutch. (And Felix Mendelssohn once composed in the outbuilding of Ray’s Surrey home.)

“I think if you listen to those records,” Dave said of e Kinks’ Sixties legacy, “you can’t analyse it.” Attempts at objective analysis are indeed as tricky for me as deciding which songs I like best. It’s the fact that they could create such ostensibly disparate gems as “You Really Got Me” and “See My Friends” and “Days” that makes me a devotee, blissfully sliding time after time into the trance-like state of exuberant desperation they all induce.

you could say pop doesn’t really matter, and you wouldn’t necessarily be wrong. But the pop made here over the last 60 years has been at least as good as anyone else’s. (Surely e Kinks’ “Lola” trumps Barry Manilow’s?) So while they might not have been the people you build empires with, they’re exactly the sort you might turn to as your empire fades away and you’re looking for something to feel good about. Fragments shored against our ruin perhaps, but oh how those fragments glow.

e Kinks’ pre-reputational-rehab era now seems a long time ago. Back then, I saw them more as a private hoard, but today I’m delighted to share them while striving to de ne just where I stand in relation to a band I have always felt was “mine”. Which returns me to a word I used earlier, “a liation”.

It derives from the Latin for adopting a son and at some level I did feel adopted by e Kinks. A hellishly dysfunctional family, true, but an awful lot of fun. Six decades later, recalling those four ornery lads rearing up from the postwar English underclass, the a liative boot is on the other foot: I have adopted them. Not that my real family has been left behind. In the care home when I say “Alexa, play e Kinks,” my 92-yearold Mum smiles to hear Ray singing once again, then murmurs to me, “His lovely old voice …” A liation.

And of all the groups this country has produced, e Kinks are maybe the likeliest to have broached the A-word themselves. It’s there on track one of e Kinks Are e Village Green Preservation Society, the 1968 album that makes a perfect entry-point for the uninitiated: “We are the Skyscraper Condemnation A liate/God save Tudor houses, antique tables and billiards.” Now that’s a Kinksy couplet. Whichever way the a liation runs, all I can say from this vantage point, with undying gratitude, is God Save e Kinks! ●

A dramatisation of Haydn Middleton’s e Ballad of Syd & Morgan is on BBC Sounds.

EVERYDAY LIES WITH THEODORE DALRYMPLE

●Relaxing with the Sunday papers after lunch is not what it used to be. Whether the change is in me or the newspapers I cannot be absolutely certain, but these days I find reading them more and more irritating. Recently, for example, I read in one of them an article taking up nearly a whole page, half of which admittedly was composed of photographs, about a film called Poor Things. Could there really be nothing in the world more important to write about than this?

Anyhow, I started reading the article and I suffer from a strange compulsion I must finish whatever I have started to read, however bad it may be. ccording to the article, many critics thought that the film was pornographic, though not the author of the article herself. I must say that her description of it gave me no desire to see it — or rather, gave me the desire not to see it. It was the last paragraph of the article that most irritated me. I quote:

Is there something problematically paedophilic about a child’s brain in a woman’s body? Well, yes! That is the point of art. To be problematic.

The author of this ill-written passage is described as the chief literary critic of The Times and the Sunday Times. It is the kind of adolescent tripe that passes these days for thought: probably the author imbibed it at university. f course art may be disturbing, controversial and the rest, but that is not its point. The purpose of art is not to shock Mum and Dad, even if it may sometimes do so.

The newspaper is aimed at the top educational and cultural decile of the population. It has a distinguished history. That it has sunk so low is enough to make one long for the days of Cyril Connolly, Raymond Mortimer, and Philip Toynbee. ●

Cash crisis in the arts — what’s new?

And the band played on

Richard Bratby

Another week, another classical music funding crisis and if you deal with this shit for a living you know the pattern by now. e story breaks on the Slipped Disc blog and the serious classical journos pause for 24 hours so they can pretend they read it somewhere else. e rest of the sector doesn’t hold back.

Social media lights up with fury, initially directed at whichever funding body has made the decision, but swiftly refocused (the mental gymnastics are Olympic-level) on the usual suspects: the Tories, Brexit, choose your right-wing bogey-

man. Gradually the shock fades; the great and good sign an open letter, and underpaid, exhausted admin sta start picking up the pieces. Again.

So why did I get the feeling, this time, that people were looking at me? Birmingham’s bankrupt City Council has voted to abolish its entire arts budget over the next two years, and because I worked for years in the management of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, and later wrote its history, colleagues assumed I’d have views — ideally loud, angry ones, rather than the resigned ache of someone who’s been through the whole miserable process so often it barely registers any more. But I mean: this is classical music. Surely you’ve seen Amadeus? Haven’t you read Berlioz’s memoirs, or omas Beecham’s; or Crescendo! — Beresford King-Smith’s history of the CBSO (which comes with actual nancial stats)?

I’m guessing not, because to work in classical music and be surprised by a funding crisis is like a sailor being scared of waves. If this one isn’t exactly a tsunami, it’s because the sum that Birmingham gave to its major arts organisations had been shrinking for years. “100 per cent cut!” makes for a scary headline; but when that represents only around 5 per cent of an organisation’s overall income (which is more or less the case with the CBSO and at least two of the other a ected organisations the chamber choir Ex Cathedra and Birmingham Opera Company), well, it’s a knife in the guts, for sure. An ex-colleague was quick to remind me that arts fundraising outside of London can be agonisingly di cult: that 5 per cent will not easily be replaced. But it is (hopefully) survivable.

The paradox is that, artistically speaking, the cbso is in vigorous health. Symphony Hall is still the nest orchestral venue in the UK and musicians and audience both adore the new Japanese principal conductor, Kazuki Yamada. True, a recent change of chief executive has ru ed feathers, but you’d expect that with an organisation that has had only three CEOs in the last 61 years.

It takes a certain kind of personality — the hide of a rhinoceros and the mind of Henry Kissinger — to manage a full-time symphony orchestra, and the recruitment process was said to be di cult. e new boss, Emma Stenning, came from the

theatre world with no top-level classical music experience. at’s not necessarily a bad thing. London-based commentators, some of whom have been waiting for Birmingham to fail since before Simon Rattle’s departure in 1998, have been quick to paint a picture that simply doesn’t match what I’m seeing and hearing here in the Midlands.

True, Stenning made early errors: publishing a bullshitbingo vision statement seemingly lifted from one of those corporate awaydays where everyone can just shout out whatever they think — no wrong answers! Some concerts have been given a lame-sounding makeover, with visuals, and injunctions to clap whenever. Or so I hear; I haven’t attended one yet. ey might be rather fun. Stenning deserves the bene t of the doubt as she attempts to replace the missing £600,000 and negotiate any future relationship with the Council. at’s the real stinger, and it’s emotional as much as nancial.

The CBSO was founded by Birmingham City Council in 1920. at relationship endured for 104 years and its termination marks the end of something more than just an (often inadequate) cash handout. It’s the death of a century-old vision of enlightened civic governance in which great art could be supplied on the rates, as well as streetlights and bin lorries (on its current showing, Birmingham will be lucky to retain even those).

In some ways, that’s the saddest outcome: orchestra and city are each losing part of their shared identity. at seems to call for more than just outrage; we need a deeper conversation about the decline of civic culture, and the future of the arts in our national life. But the immediate problem is a familiar one.

I joined the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra in the 1990s amid a wave of redundancies (a decade earlier, Derek Hatton’s Militant regime had suggested selling o the Philharmonic Hall to serve as a bingo hall). We watched from Liverpool as Manchester’s Hallé Orchestra came within hours of insolvency. “Can we get 20 boxes of subscription brochures to Manchester this afternoon?” asked our then-CEO.

In 1999 the Bournemouth Sinfonietta was defunded into oblivion — ah, that golden New Labour dawn! By then I had moved to Birmingham and straight into another existential

Symphony of a Thousand

nancial crisis. A couple of years in, redundancies were on the table again. It didn’t come to that, but later in the decade I sat on the committee that voted to abolish my own pension.

Read the history. It’s the same story all the way back to 1920 — the City Council’s grant never came close to providing security. e orchestra was in serious trouble as early as 1923, and nancial crises recurred during the Second World War and in the early 1950s.

In 1978, the whole out t nearly self-destructed when the musicians defenestrated both their general manager and their chief conductor, Louis Frémaux, in the space of a weekend. Frémaux, a Frenchman, had fought the Nazis in the Résistance and saw action with the Foreign Legion, receiving the Croix de Guerre for courage. e CBSO players’ committee broke him.

W hat came next was Simon R attle. A ny one of these crises could have nished the CBSO o , but instead it landed (sometimes painfully) on its feet, and I have to believe that it will weather the latest blow. Perhaps there’s a strain of pessi-

D.J. TAYLOR’S ARTY TYPES

Mirabel Chevenix Grande dame

●mism so deep it becomes a weird kind of optimism. But “seen it all before” doesn’t o er much comfort to those in the thick of the ght and make no mistake: Britain’s orchestras need your nancial help, as well as (from government — any government) a huge expansion of incentives to cultural philanthropy.

And if that sounds a bit beyond you personally, you could always buy a concert ticket. To quote the CBSO’s great postwar chairman Stephen Lloyd — announcing the imminent (happily abortive) disbandment of the orchestra in 1952: e Management Committee regrets that it can no longer maintain the orchestra throughout the year. If Birmingham people share that regret, the remedy is in their own hands. ey should ll the Town Hall.

Substitute Symphony Hall for Town Hall — and Birmingham for any community in Britain supporting a professional orchestra or opera company — and that advice still stands. ●

Richard Bratby is a classical music historian and critic

“Er, it did say,” murmurs Chloe the publicity assistant, one eye on the austere-looking elderly lady in the grey cloak stalled in the entrance hall, the other on the queue of people lined up in her majestic wake, “that guests were supposed to bring their invitations with them?”

written, respectfully received, but none of them quite getting to the heart of her personal myth. is, it is fair to say, was based on a reputation for plain speaking, often shading into outright intransigence.

ere is an awful, freezing silence, broken only by the sound of the Reform Club’s wine waiters going about their business. Happily, Chloe’s boss Hermione is equal to the situation. “Mirabel,” she coos, practically abasing herself on the carpet as she does so. “How wonderful to see you. Can I get you a glass of champagne?”

Mirabel accepts the glass of champagne, gives Chloe a look that would melt a bar of soap and is triumphantly escorted into the Reform Club library’s plush interior, where she can shortly afterwards be seen shaking hands with Julian Barnes and Lady Antonia Fraser.

Chloe, meanwhile, once the throng of literati attempting to enter the launch party for this new biography of a member of the Bloomsbury Group has dispersed, is taken to one side and rather sharply informed that if she wants to get on in the world of book publicity, then she really has to know who people like Mirabel Chevenix are.

And who is Mirabel Chevenix? A neutral observer would probably conclude that Chloe can be forgiven her ignorance, for you would have to be well into middle age to recall Mirabel’s exploits in the world of light literature.

On the other hand, these were substantial. Back in the 1970s she wrote a celebrated novel entitled Peacocks on the Lawn, generally assumed to be a blow-by-blow account of a childhood spent on her aristocratic father’s Warwickshire estate, that was made into an equally celebrated lm with John Gielgud and Susan Hampshire.

Other works followed — a Sri Lankan travel diary (Catamaran to Colombo), a discreet yet suggestive volume of memoirs (Tales From the Laundry Room) — elegantly

Satanic Verses controversy, described stupendously

It was Mirabel who, at the heart of the Satanic Verses controversy, described Salman Rushdie as “a tiresome Pakistani gentleman who should be grateful for what the Empire has done for him” and once threw a glass of water over a feminist publisher who made the mistake of crossing her at the London Book Fair. Well into her eighties now and stupendously well endowed by the late Mr Chevenix, Mirabel might be thought invulnerable, were it not for the book recently published by her daughter, Annabel.

is “no-holds-barred exposé”, to quote its blurb, described a childhood halfway between a prison camp and a negligentlyrun boarding school. “I would have liked some helpful advice from my mother,” Annabel wrote of her failed O-Levels and teenage misadventures, “but she was always in Mauritius with one of her lovers.”

Of this unlooked-for betrayal, Mirabel will only remark that Annabel “supposed she was the only person in the world who ever had an unhappy childhood”. e Telegraph loves her and interviews her every other Christmas. ●

The Critic Profile

W.S.

Gilbert

A wildly funny and slyly subversive comic genius who deftly skewered the mores of Victorian England

By Alexander Larman

“ ough the Philistines may jostle, You will rank as an apostle In the high aesthetic band, If you walk down Piccadilly With a poppy or a lily In your medieval hand.”

— W.S. Gilbert, “If you’re anxious for to shine”, from Patience, 1881

Postmans’s park, the public garden a short walk from St Paul’s Cathedral, was immortalised by the play Closer (and its subsequent lm adaptation) as the site of ordinary people remembered for acts of heroism that cost them their lives.

e Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacri ce, as it is known, commemorates those who died in a variety of ways in attempts, whether successful or in vain, to save others. e idea was that of the painter and sculptor G.F. Watts, who wished to commemorate the valiant deeds of ordinary people who might otherwise have been forgotten.

It is because of this insistence on their being “ordinary” that the lyricist, playwright and poet William Schwenck Gilbert was not included in their number, which is understandable. However, Gilbert’s own death, at the age of 74, was just as deserving of recognition as anything else in his life.

While he and his wife Lucy lived at their Harrow estate, Grim’s Dyke, they often invited local residents to come and swim in their ornamental lake, which Gilbert had extended during their time at the house. On 29 May 1911, Gilbert was conducting a swimming lesson for two local young women, Winifred Emery and Ruby Preece. When Preece was in the middle of the lake, not realising how deep it was, she panicked and shouted “Oh, Miss Emery, I am drowning!”

Gilbert, without any hesitation, called out to Preece not to be afraid and that he was coming, before swimming out to the centre of the lake. His last words to her were “Put your hands on my shoulder and don’t

struggle.” Unfortunately, in so doing, Gilbert su ered a massive and fatal heart attack, and his body had to be recovered from the lake, even after Preece and Emery escaped safely.

Giving evidence to the inquest, Ruby Preece recalled, “I put my hand on his shoulder and I felt him suddenly sink. I thought he would come up again. My

feet were on the mud then. Miss Emery called for help and the gardeners came with the boat.”

e image summoned up when Emery later informed Gilbert’s biographers Sidney Dark and Rowland Grey that “it seemed a long time before they recovered the body” is a blackly comic one, that of the grand old man of Victorian lyrics being prodded with boat hooks by the gardeners.

Had Gilbert been able to witness it from whatever celestial perch he found himself in, he would, one hopes, have found it all rather amusing, even if his sudden end was hardly the subject of mirth.

Today, “Gilbert and Sullivan” remain one of the great British duos, like sh and chips, Morecambe and Wise or Cook and Moore. As with those three, one half of the pair remains vastly more important than the other. ey composed a total of 14 comic operas over the quarter-century between 1871 and 1896, and several of their works, including e Mikado, H.M.S Pinafore and Patience, have joined the musical canon, being regularly revived and performed at all levels, from the highest opera houses to the humblest of amateur productions.

Sullivan, who died in 1900 at the age of 58, was a talented composer whose adherence to tuneful pastiche made for pleasant and enjoyable listening. It was little wonder that he was also a proli c writer of hymns (including every schoolchild’s most dreaded march, “Onward Christian Soldiers”) and other sacred and occasional music, although the only time that he ever attempted a serious opera — 1891’s Ivanhoe — was undistinguished and has seldom been revived since.

When Arthur Sullivan expired from a heart attack following an attack of bronchitis, his reputation was assured. Yet Sullivan without Gilbert is a very di erent proposition to the other way around. e one man had talent: the other, genius.

Gilbert had begun writing witty squibs and comic stories for the magazine Fun in the 1860s, after brief and undistinguished careers in the law and the civil service. He had planned to join the army, but the end of the Crimean War meant that recruiting had gone into abeyance, and so soldiering’s loss became wit’s gain.

By the end of the decade, Gilbert’s snappy skills with a rhyming couplet had seen him pressed into service to supply jokes and comic interludes for many of the burlesque shows and variety acts that were currently lling the stages of London’s theatres, which he did with some distinction.

By 1869, Gilbert had created the libretto for the entertainment Ages Ago, which played in repertoire with the one-act musical farce Cox and Box; the latter had its memorably hummable songs composed by

BY

JEFF FISHER

HMS Pinafore played exceptionally well in the United States, which thrilled to its satire of British pomposity

none other than Sullivan, and so the two men began a tentative collaboration in the early 1870s, although their rst work together, 1871’s espis, was not a success.

Gilbert, diversifying from Sullivan for a time, wrote the burlesque farce Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, A Tragic Episode, in ree Tableaux, which not only anticipated Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by a century, but also introduced an element of sly literary satire that would reappear numerous times in his later work: when Claudius confesses his “unspeakable crime” to Gertrude, it is not the murder of his brother, but the composition of a ve-act tragedy in his youth.

R euniting with Sullivan, Gilbert drew upon his short-lived legal experience at the bar to produce a richly enjoyable satire of the English legal profession, Trial by Jury. It featured the rst of Gilbert’s indelible parodies of high society gures in the form of the grandly pompous judge, who declares that, in his legal odyssey:

“In Westminster Hall I danced a dance, Like a semi-despondent fury;

For I thought I never should hit on a chance Of addressing a British Jury —

But I soon got tired of third-class journeys, And dinners of bread and water;

So I fell in love with a rich attorney’s Elderly, ugly daughter.”

Trial by Jury was a hit, and the collaboration between the two men developed swiftly from the tentative to the con dent. 1877’s e Sorcerer mocked both Victorian social mores and bogus supernatural charlatanism, exempli ed by the gure of the “dealer in magic and spells”, the urbane but fraudulent John Wellington Wells, before H.M.S Pinafore (1878) established Gilbert and Sullivan as both a British and an international phenomenon.

Pinafore played exceptionally well in the United States, which thrilled to its satire of British pomposity and incompetence. Gilbert’s lyrics for the songs, “When I was a lad” and “For he is an Englishman” remain two

of his most enduring. e former features Sir Joseph Porter, First Lord of the Admiralty, engaging in a patented Gilbert technique of ridiculing his social advancement as he declares:

“I grew so rich that I was sent

By a pocket borough into Parliament I always voted at my party’s call, And I never thought of thinking for myself at all. I thought so little, they rewarded me By making me the Ruler of the Queen’s Navee!”

It is a shame that many contemporary politicians have regarded Porter’s credo as career advice, rather than satire, but a greater claim to patriotism comes later, when the opera’s hero Ralph, “the smartest lad in all the eet”, can declare that “I am an Englishman, behold me!” as the chorus comment, rmly tongue-in-cheek:

“But in spite of all temptations To belong to other nations, He remains an Englishman!”

Patriotism, humour — the satirical thrust of which may have gone over an indulgent audience’s heads — and tunefulness were a potent combination. ey returned over and over as Gilbert and Sullivan entered their imperial phase, which in 1879 produced e Pirates of Penzance, complete with their most famous patter song, the doublepaced “I am the very model of a modern major general”. e song not only saw Gilbert embrace self-referentiality, as the pompous Major-General Stanley announces that he can “whistle all the airs from that infernal nonsense Pinafore”, but also takes aim at military incompetence, as Stanley concludes:

“For my military knowledge, though I’m plucky and adventury, Has only been brought down to the beginning of the century; But still, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral, I am the very model of a modern Major-General.”

Gilbert was explicitly satirising the future commander-inchief of the British Army, Sir Garnett Wolseley, who was su ciently attered by the compliment that he would

serenade his no doubt terri ed family and friends with impromptu choruses of “I am the very model of a modern major general” at home.

Yet Gilbert’s intentions stretched beyond mocking the traditional pillars of Englishness to take on the then-modish Aesthetic movement. In his next collaboration with Sullivan, 1881’s Patience (1881), he satirised Oscar Wilde as the “ eshy poet”, Bunthorne, who, in the show’s most memorable number, declares himself to be “an aesthetic sham”. Gilbert anticipated the humour of such twentieth century gay playwrights as Coward and Orton — as well, of course, as the work of Wilde himself — when he had Bunthorne soliloquise:

“ en a sentimental passion

Of a vegetable fashion

Must excite your languid spleen

An attachment a la Plato

For a bashful young potato

Or a not-too-French French bean!”

is was subtle; it is not even clear that Sullivan understood his coillaborator’s jokes. Certainly, the relationship between the two men, although still professionally harmonious, was showing signs of strain. Gilbert’s satirical edge was getting sharper with experience, as his targets stretched to include everyone and everything from the House of Lords (in Iolanthe) to women’s educational standards (Princess Ida) and mid-level bureaucracy ( e Mikado), though the sting of the latter was partially disguised by its Japanese setting.

Ever-perceptive, G.K Chesterton remarked of it that “I doubt if there is a single joke in the whole play that ts the Japanese. But all the jokes in the play t the English. ... About England Pooh-bah is something more than a satire; he is the truth.”

Yet Sullivan was consorting avidly and enthusiastically with London’s Pooh-bahs and Ko-Kos at society functions. It is only a minor exaggeration to suggest that while Gilbert tore into British hypocrisy and pomposity, Sullivan thrived on it. He had been knighted in 1883 for “services rendered to the art of the promotion of music” — a suitably long-winded way of describing his ability to compose a tuneful number — and

Sir William Schwenck Gilbert; inset, collaborator Arthur Sullivan; above, a 1935 poster for Pirates of Penzance

took his responsibilities seriously enough to lean on Gilbert to tone down the pro-republican sympathies in one of their nal collaborations, 1889’s e Gondoliers

Their relationship then foundered entirely in a suitably bizarre and very English fashion; Gilbert was angered by their patron Richard D’Oyly Carte charging them £500 for a new carpet for the Savoy eatre, where their shows were staged. When Sullivan took Carte’s side, Gilbert dissolved the partnership. As Sullivan sighed in a letter to his former friend, “I have not yet got over the shock of seeing our names coupled in hostile antagonism over a few miserable pounds.” ey would work together again, but without their former success, and eventually went their separate ways in recrimination and occasional remorse.

In the last years of his life, Gilbert attempted to move beyond witty satire with his 1911 play e Hooligan, an introspective study of a young man condemned to death for the murder of his girlfriend, a world away from the lighter works with which he was synonymous.

Gilbert, by now also a knight of the realm, was wealthy, successful and able to take on only the work that interested him, rather than having to collaborate on lucrative but unexciting projects. He had acquired a reputation, like many humorists, for being gru , even curmudgeonly in his professional life. But this was at odds with the enormous kindness and decency that he demonstrated on other occasions; including, of course, in the nal moments of his existence.

Gilbert has influenced countless other writers, both comic and serious — not least the American screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, who has tried on numerous, sometimes incongruous, occasion to include allusions to Gilbert in everything from e West Wing to his serial killer thriller Malice.

Some have come close to his wit — not least Michael Flanders, whose partnership with Donald Swann was a lower-key and more overly jovial attempt to recreate the Gilbert and Sullivan magic — but few have ever equalled his ability to combine “generous anger”, as Orwell wrote of Dickens, with a rich insight into the vagaries and infelicities of human nature. As Sullivan’s music parps and trills away pleasantly, Gilbert’s lyrics, in all their tongue-twisting, brain-whirling glory, manage to paint an upside-down picture of Victorian England in which black is white, topsy is turvy and disorder rules the roost.

It’s an exhilarating, frequently confounding vision that can, and should, be ranked with the likes of Lewis Carroll and Mervyn Peake in its panoramic splendour, as well as its subversive wit. Still, as he wrote in H.M.S Pinafore, “it’s greatly to his credit/that he is an Englishman.” It is hard to imagine any other nation that this irascible, brilliant gure would have been such an asset to. ●

Alexander Larman’s latest book is Power and Glory: Elizabeth II and the Rebirth of Royalty

The sacred and the profane

Allowing a “Rave in the Nave” in Canterbury Cathedral was a regrettable error of judgement

At 9.20pm they walked across the street to the newly-opened Westminster Abbey Cabaret. It was a night almost without clouds, moonless and starry; but of this depressing fact Lenina and Henry were fortunately unaware. e electric sky-signs e ectively shut o the outer darkness. “calvin stopes and his sixteen sexophonists,” from the façade of the new Abbey the giant letters invitingly glared. “london’s finest scent and colour organ. all the latest synthetic music.”

ey entered. e Sixteen Sexophonists were playing an old favourite: “ ere Ain’t No Bottle in All the World Like at Dear Little Bottle of Mine.” Four hundred couples were ve-stepping round the polished oor. Lenina and Henry were soon the four hundred and rst.

Don’t worry, Westminster Abbey hasn’t fallen. is comes from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where Christianity lies humiliated; its cathedrals and abbeys turned into giant dancehalls, led by a resident of Lambeth Palace called the Arch-Community-Songster of Canterbury. e scene is set in 2540 AD (or 632 After Ford).

but huxley was far too optimistic We didn’t need to wait 632 years from the creation of the Model T for this scene to come to pass. A mere 116 years later nds the Arch-Community-Songster’s own cathedral in Canterbury opened up in 2024 for a series of silent discos trading under the name “Rave in the Nave”. In some ways Huxley was hopelessly optimistic. Where the Sixteen Sexophonists warbled about a “dear little bottle of mine”, the

Rave in the Nave saw revellers tunelessly chanting the lyrics “I’m Horny; Horny, Horny, Horny”.

Footage emerged, tweeted out by the Cathedral club night DJ — triggering outrage. is in turn triggered outrage against the outraged. Many senior gures in the church, bishops included, rallied around a Dean and Chapter engulfed in the storm.

Why do some recoil from the sight of hundreds jiving in the nave while others cannot understand these “pearlclutchers”?

Why do some recoil from the sight of hundreds of people jiving away in the nave of a cathedral while others simply cannot understand those they christen “pearl-clutchers”? It seems as though the defence falls into two parts. e rst basically says, “Yes, it’s not our taste but”, and then scrabbles for an excuse: either that it’s good for mission or essential to bring in funds to keep the roof on. e second actually thinks the event was good and challenges the opponents to explain why “I’m Horny; Horny, Horny, Horny” isn’t appropriate for a cathedral.

the first point I’ve got some sympathy for, I just think they’ve made the wrong call. All of us who have ancient buildings to look after have to make compromises, often in our case allowing lm companies to rent the church.

God and not the signpost saying “look elsewhere”.

W hich brings us to the other argument: the idea that there is no compromise here, that this is a positively good use of the space. For this argument I have no sympathy. It comes, I regret, from that blind spot among the Left-leaning weirds — the Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic folk whose moral compass di ers both in nature and substance from their fellow humans at home and abroad.

Jonathan Haidt, in his excellent study on politics and ethics called e Righteous Mind shows how the weird elite cannot see this as sacrilege because their moral code doesn’t provide for that reading of events. Which is ne were the Dean and Chapter looking after their own home. But many do see a cathedral as sacred. It simply isn’t a situation where everyone can live and let live, because what happens in the presence of the Sacrament, and often a place of martyrdom, where people will be coming in to pray, matters to us, even when we’re not there.

You have to make a judgement call as to whether the money o ered is worth closing the church for a number of days, and what the script will involve. In recent years we said yes to being a street market in Lahore (it’s quite amazing what they can do), but no to being a prison in which a future Empress of France would get raped. At some point everyone will get the judgement wrong; hindsight is wonderful. But we also have to be honest. When we use these transcendent buildings (in which the gap between heaven and earth is at its thinnest) for things that point elsewhere, it’s a fool’s hope that people will see the invitation to worship

Normally our W eird brethren have at the core of their moral code a hatred of any abuse of power by those in positions of privilege. May I suggest to them that they have the privilege of protecting places of enormous sanctity to people without very much power — those less likely to be educated, or rich, or (for that matter) Western.

Even if they can’t see why these places are sacred, perhaps they could see themselves as looking after them for those who do, and to check their privilege (as they would say) when they consider allowing those places to be disrespected in the eyes of millions beyond their cloisters. at way, all of our moral codes might be satis ed.●

Marcus Walker is Rector of St Bartholomew the Great in London

Daniel Johnson on the outsize influence of small magazines

Putting a gloss on big ideas

The term “artificial intelligence” is tautological: all intelligence is arti cial, in the sense of being man-made. ere is nothing new about the notion of robotic intelligence; from the Golem to Google, we have been haunted by the Cartesian model of the ghost in the machine.

It ourished during the Enlightenment and the Romantic reaction against it — the eras that gave us such utopian visions as Condorcet’s Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain and such nightmarish fantasies as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. en came the computer, which in turn gave us the internet and social media. More than ever before, we are obsessed with the unlimited possibilities of AI, leading to transhumanism, the secularised transcendence of humanity.

Yet there is another, more genuinely humanistic and certainly more humane form of AI, in the sense of a collective yet complementary mind that is more than the sum of its individual parts. I mean, of course, the magazine. e old AI has one inestimable advantage over the new. However inadequately, magazines generally pay their contributors. e new AI scrapes anything and everything from the internet without paying a penny to the writers whose intellectual property its algorithms harvest.

It isn’t easy to think of a great writer who wasn’t also at least an occasional journalist

OpenAI, one of the biggest players in the eld, is being sued by the novelists Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham, George RR Martin and 14 other scribblers for theft of intellectual property, risking their livelihoods in the lottery of a class action in a Manhattan courtroom in order to enforce copyright — a legal concept that is well over two centuries old.

By contrast, magazines have enabled innumerable writers to earn a living ever

since their inception. at is, among other things, their raison d’être. To take one example: Mikhail Bulgakov, the Ukrainian-born Russian author of e Master and Margarita, was a doctor but seldom practised medicine. Instead, after the Revolution he preferred to supplement his income by journalism: rst while serving as an army physician in the Caucasus during the civil war; later in Moscow, where he was a minor party functionary.

It was as a journalist that he — like Turgenev, Dostoyevsky and many other luminaries before him — learned the art of expressing himself in an unadorned prose that stills feels contemporary. It is journalistic discipline, too, that saves Bulgakov’s ights of fantasy from descending into whimsy.

Journalism is often despised as the most ephemeral of genres — denied the dignity of literature, which is reserved for supposedly more permanent writing. Yet the periodical you now hold in your hand (or read in its online edition) is a direct descendant of journals that stand proudly among the most enduring owerings of intellectual life.

Another meaning of the word “magazine”is a store of munitions. My own addition to the arsenal of the free press, Standpoint, was founded in 2008. I was editor for just over a decade, during which we made the magazine essential reading across the political and cultural spectrum. Prospect, the centre-Left monthly launched in 1995 by David Goodhart, took him on an intellectual journey that led beyond the liberal consensus. Similarly, Standpoint stood for something both quite speci c and very general: the re-education of the centre-Right and the defence of Western civilisation.

At a recent gathering in Cambridge, the editor of this magazine o ered a generous tribute: “Without Standpoint,” he told his guests, “there would have been no Critic.” He was doubtless correct in this particular case, but his remark touched on a more general truth. If something is worth defending — a tradition, a nation, a civilisation— then magazines will emerge to defend it.

Irving Kristol, co-founder of Encounter and many other political periodicals, used to say to younger writers: “If you have a good idea, start a magazine.” His son Bill took his father’s advice; so did I. Both of us now run online platforms (mine is eArticle), but we have also both had the experience of seeing print magazines we had founded taken over and closed down.

Editors come in many forms. Among our ancestors are men and women of the stature of Goethe and Dr Johnson, Dickens and Balzac, George Eliot and T.S. Eliot. e journalistic lineage is even more vast and varied, from Addison and Steele to Amis (pére et ls) and Stoppard. Indeed, while there have been plenty of great writers who wrote no ction, say, or who

avoided poetry, or who never gave a thought to drama, it isn’t easy to think of a writer who wasn’t also at least an occasional journalist. Quite a few — eodor Fontane and George Orwell are examples — would never have achieved literary greatness without having spent many years as correspondents or reporters.

A magazine does nevertheless require readers as well as writers. ough largely invisible in its pages, the readership is no less important than what is published. If the contributors are the brain cells of the magazine, the readers are its lifeblood. Like organisms, periodicals depend on circulation. Transfusions of cash may extend their lifespan, but not inde nitely.

Money, though, is a sine qua non. One or more investors must be prepared to sustain the magazine, at least until it can survive on its own revenues. e Critic is very fortunate to have Jeremy Hosking to play this role, just as I could never have got Standpoint o the ground in 2008 without Alan Bekhor whose input never felt like interference. A wise editor appreciates advice from a benefactor who is risking his own money.

The case of the Spectator towards the end of the last century illustrates the tricky relationship between proprietors and editors. Ian Gilmour bought the magazine in 1954 and appointed himself editor until 1959. is was not a success, but from 1963 to 1970 Gilmour recruited two outstanding editors, Iain Macleod and Nigel Lawson, who raised the circulation to 36,000. (Both, of course, went on to become Chancellors of the Exchequer.)

In 1967, however, Gilmour sold the magazine to Harry Creighton. Editor and proprietor soon fell out. When Lawson left to stand for Parliament, Creighton o ered the editorship to his talented deputy, J.W.M. ompson, but the latter preferred to move to the Sunday Telegraph rather than endure Creighton’s bullying and parsimony. (Full disclosure: John ompson was my father-in-law.)

e new editor was the ebullient George Gale, but he only lasted three years before leaving to invent the radio phone-in. Creighton thought he could do a better job as editor himself, but the circulation slumped to 13,000 and the losses mounted.

“AI Captain.”

If the contributors are the brain cells of a magazine, the readers are its lifeblood

By 1975 he had had enough and sold up to Henry Keswick, chairman of Jardine Matheson, who installed the amiable Alexander Chancellor. Only once harmony between proprietor and editor had been restored could the Spectator recover its in uence and, decades later, its pro tability.

Even the most admired magazines struggle to break even. During the 1940s, Horizon was the most prestigious shop window in British intellectual journalism. Edited by Cyril Connolly (whose name was emblazoned on the front cover), its revenues were supplemented by Peter Watson, who had inherited a dairy business. Even so, contributors were badly-paid, sta even worse. Yet Connolly himself somehow managed to throw grand parties.

Re ecting on Horizon’s rst year in December 1940, Connolly observed that while he had begun “with a clean record”, he found “that high-brows write more and better than low-brows, young writers care more than old, and the left-wing more than the right-wing”. It wasn’t virtue-signalling but necessity that aligned Horizon with the country’s “looselyjoined progressive forces”.

Inside the back cover was a droll notice, evidently written by Connolly himself, headed: “Horizon’s Begging Bowl”. It explained that each issue cost £150, which could be covered by the sale of 6,000 copies. But the print run was just 5,000. “We are also unable to pay our contributors as much as we should like. If you particularly enjoy anything in Horizon, send the author a tip. Not more than One Hundred Pounds: that would be bad for his character. Not less than Half-a-Crown: that would be bad for yours.”

One wonders how writers of the calibre of George Orwell felt about being “tipped”. His in uential essay, “ e Ruling Class”, which appeared in that same issue, began: “England is the most class-ridden country under the sun.” He was right, then and maybe even now. But journalists like him, though hard up, were also privileged: it was a “reserved occupation”. ey didn’t have to ght.

A post-war child, my own experience of magazines owes much to the Cold War and, in particular, the Berlin Wall. As a young Telegraph correspondent, I played a small part in its downfall. Before 1989, I had reviewed books for the TLS and other journals, but had not broken through in magazine journalism.

Soon after this episode, the Spectator asked me to write about it. en Mel Lasky, the mercurial editor of Encounter, commissioned a cover story about Germany. Encounter was by

then running out of money and closed a year or two later. But its role in educating the transatlantic elites about the enemies of the West cannot be overstated. Since my encounter with Encounter, I have never looked back.

Another key magazine of that era for which I was proud to write was Commentary. From 1960 to 1995, under the inspired and pugnacious editorship of Norman Podhoretz, it evolved from the house journal of the American Jewish Committee into the main vehicle of neoconservative thought. Norman’s equally brilliant successor, Neal Kozodoy, enabled Commentary to make the transition from the era of Cold War to that of culture wars. When Neal retired in 2009, he went on to found the online platform Jewish Ideas Daily, later renamed Mosaic.

What I learned from these Cold Warriors of Manhattan was that magazines are not about fraternising with the enemy. e rst time I met them in the mid-1980s, they took me to lunch. I had come straight from the o ce of the ultra-liberal New York Review of Books. Bob Silvers, its Anglophile editor, had been gracious. But the Commentary guys’ reaction was blunt. “Silvers can go to hell,” said Norman. “Stick with us, Daniel.” I did.

For the past 15 years Commentary has been edited by Norman’s son, John Podhoretz, who has kept it alive and kicking. But magazines struggle to exert the sway over American elite public opinion they had a decade or two ago. e oxygen has been sucked out of the public sphere by social media.

And then came Trump. e aforementioned Bill Kristol, who had founded the Weekly Standard in 1995 with backing from Rupert Murdoch, became the leader of the Never Trump campaign. An unbridgeable rift opened up between Bill and the owners of the Weekly Standard, who supported Trump. He left after Trump’s victory in 2016; the magazine folded less than two years later.

Bill’s new online pulpit, the Bulwark, combines an assortment of public intellectuals, most of whom are not, like him, refugees from the Republicans. But the stakes are so high — American democracy itself — that it has come together and feels like a proper magazine.

In the technology industry, a great deal is riding on the quest for an Arti cial General Intelligence. But this digital idol may prove to be just that — an idol. Human intelligence is unlike machine learning. While AI machines compete to build ever larger language models, human diversity is so in nite that size does not need to be everything. And, like us, magazines are mortal.

e magazine is perhaps the best microcosm of the truth embodied in the United States motto, e pluribus unum. With money, readers and talent all in short supply, magazines have nevertheless helped to save Western civilisation from its worst follies. As Auden’s “September 1, 1939” put it: “We must love one another or die.” To which Connolly added: “We must read one another or vanish.” ●

Daniel Johnson is founding editor of eArticle

TITANIA M cGRATH’S WOKE WORLD

It’s time to transition babies

●the h i icia a neo-fascist organisation. It was bad enough that it appropriated the rainbow flag during the ovid pandemic, thereby erasing GBT people from e istence. But now it has banned puberty blockers for trans children. It should be renamed the NSS: the New Schutzstaffel.

Trans children e ist. Even in the womb, many foetuses can sense their own trans identity. This is why pregnant people often feel them kicking from within. Given the opportunity, the unborn would doubtless declare their pronouns, only it’s very difficult to enunciate with a mouthful of amniotic fluid.

o-called research has apparently shown that most feelings of gender dysphoria are resolved during puberty. But if it is true that children are less likely to transition if they develop into adults, then surely the very process of maturation is a form of anti-trans terrorism.

E perts have also claimed that cross-se hormones and surgery are not appropriate for minors, and that a child cannot possibly give informed consent as they will not understand the concepts of lifelong sterility or the loss of se ual function. These kinds of hate facts are frankly genocidal. Informed consent is a far-right dog-whistle.

Gender identity is innate and fi ed, but also completely fluid. o if a trans teenager who was assigned female at birth has a double mastectomy to become the boy he always was, he can always have them stitched back on when she becomes a girl again.

In fact, we should probably transition all infant babies on the off-chance that they might later realise that they are trapped in the wrong body. This will also prevent anyone from growing up as cis, which will finally mean an end to transphobia. I can’t believe no-one has suggested this before.

ltimately, medical practitioners need to understand that we all have a gender identity. It is an essence, an immaterial spirit capering gracefully within the cosmos of our being. It is only through surgical modification of our bodies to better reflect this enchanting inner sprite that we might become our authentic selves. fter all, we have a duty to follow the science. ●

Titania can be found @TitaniaMcGrath

Far too many young people are woefully ignorant of the splendour and meaning of our rich ecclesiastical architecture — the buildings and religious artefacts which bring to life the story of our island nation

KEYSTONES OF BRITAIN’S HISTORY

throughout the ages, religious architecture has often been the most distinguished any society can produce. I would include the tomb within that category: funerary and ecclesiastical architecture are often closely connected, although the detached mausoleum can often be very ne, standing alone as a great work untroubled by considerations of changes of use or the need to be “updated”.

Today, it is evident that religion is hugely important in geopolitical terms (contrary to received opinion in the West which, in its catatonic state of liberal delusion, has ignored obvious signals for the last 50 years) and it is likely to become a dominant issue as we move uncertainly through the twenty- rst century.

For many decades I have been involved in higher education, and have been appalled by how disconnected are the products of our schools from even a rudimentary knowledge of religion and its manifestations in artefacts and buildings. Study visits to cathedrals and churches usually meant explanations of basic liturgical requirements, de nitions of terms (including the distinctions between symbols and allegories), and much else as well.

It was obvious that a great many, probably a majority, of youngsters had never set foot in a church before and had not a clue what it signi ed, what it was for, or what any part of the building or its furnishings meant. Several were overawed, even terried by the buildings, not ever having experienced anything like the powerful manipulation of volumes and solids to be found in great architecture stu ed with meanings.

But further probings revealed something even more worrying: most youngsters had no sense of connection whatsoever with the history or culture of these islands. ey were adrift, completely unaware of the immense riches that can still speak to us of our past a past which far too many “educationalists” wish to see obliterated.

I recall taking a group to a sequence of churches, to show them Anglo-Saxon remains, Romanesque grandeur, then the evolution of the Pointed style (aka Gothic) and the owering of the most original architecture England ever produced in its socalled Perpendicular Gothic, which emerged in the fourteenth century and continued well into the early seventeenth century.

I explained how such buildings were integral to society, how chantries worked, and how important it was at one time to care

JAMES STEVENS CURL

for the dead. Two students came to me in tears, asking why they knew nothing of any of this and questioning the disgraceful gaps in their education that left them so bereft.

Ever since (at an early age) I became conscious of the importance of the past, I have had a very strong sense of belonging to places and landscapes with family connections, not least the Kentish Weald, where my paternal roots were. So even when quite young, I immersed myself in Anglo-Saxon history, especially in studies of what survived above ground, and always felt very deeply moved when I encountered obvious pre-Conquest architectural features in places as far apart as Bartonupon-Humber in Lincolnshire (late tenth-century work at St Peter’s, Beck Hill), Deerhurst in Gloucestershire (ninth- or tenth-century details in St Mary’s from the great Saxon Minster that served as an important religious centre from the ninth century), and Sompting in West Sussex (eleventh-century masonry at St Mary’s church). I imparted something of my deep love of such remains to my students, who asked for a two-day study-visit to inspect exemplars in the East Midlands.

and so i took a small group on a tour, starting with the eighth- and ninth-century royal mausoleum under the chancel of the church of St Wystan, Repton, Derbyshire, one of the most precious survivals of Anglo-Saxon England, the place of entombment of Mercian kings. With columns decorated with spiral llets (alluding to the Tomb of the Apostle St Peter in Rome and the spiral columns supposedly brought from the Temple in Jerusalem sacked by the Romans under Titus and Vespasian), it is an astonishing and very poignant ensemble [1] . e students were hushed and respectful as I explained the structure and its signi cance to them.

Later, we visited the church of St John the Baptist, Barnack, near Stamford, where the lower stages of the tenth-century western tower display all the main characteristics of Anglo-Saxon architecture, including long-and-short quoins, lesenes (strips of stone suggesting either a timber-framed allusion or a hesitant nod to pilasters), and chunky details [2] .

on the Continent [3]

Inside the building there is a tremendous western arch leading into the tower, but by far the most moving and beautiful object is the Christ in Majesty sculptured relief set into the north wall. Discovered face-down in 1930 in the north aisle, it is an exquisite and highly sophisticated work in the Saxon tradition, but as ne as anything of its early eleventh-century date

e so-called Hedda Stone, in the cathedral church of Sts Peter, Paul, and Andrew at Peterborough (formerly the monastery of Medehamstede and later a great Benedictine abbey), is a very important piece of late eighth-century Anglo-Saxon funerary sculpture in the form of a reliquary, with gures set in closetting arcades, and a pitched roof decorated with inhabited scrolls and interlacing work. Holes drilled into the stone were used to hold relics [4] . is and other remarkable Anglo-Saxon survivals from Medehamstede are now housed within one of the most spectacular Romanesque churches in England, that great Norman abbey-church which became a cathedral at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII, whose rst wife, Catherine of Aragon, was entombed there.

At Breedon-on-the-Hill, Leicestershire, a monastery was founded from Medehamstede some time between 675 and 691 on the site of what had been an Iron Age hill fort, and there, in what from the outside appears to be the somewhat unprepossessing church of St Mary and St Hardulph, is a breathtaking collection of Saxon sculpture cut in high relief, including two friezes and related panels, all of the early ninth century and a magnicent depiction of the Archangel Gabriel in the act of giving a benediction [5] in a style in uenced by the art of Byzantium,

[2]

with drapery, plants, and sta all suggesting a date of c.800, although in uenced by Early Christian precedents. is extraordinarily ne gure probably once formed part of a larger Annunciation scene.

our tour ended in the village of Egleton, Rutland, where I wanted to show the party the spectacular south door of

St Edmund’s Church, with its decorated shafts, capitals, and abaci (the blocks from which the arch springs), the arch having a bobbin motif and chevrons, and the tympanum (contained within the semicircular arch and the carved lintel over the doorway) with a wheel of six petal-like spokes anked by a lion and a winged beast. e hood-mould over the arch rises from animal and human heads [6] . Oversized abaci and some of the decoration suggests a strong Saxon input, although the whole ensemble suggests it is post-Conquest, so represents a merging of Anglo-Saxon and Norman styles.

Afterwards, we went to a hostelry to discuss what we had seen. e mood of the party was partly subdued and partly excited, but the dominant feeling was of resentment that knowledge of our own homeland and its history is continually being devalued or ignored.

“A little lamb, please.”

“Education” in schools is failing youngsters very badly. A vacuum of identity and knowledge has been created, and where you have a vacuum something else will enter the vacant space. It is clear that is happening, when trivia, vulgarity, greed, and falsehoods are valued above depth, beauty, generosity, and truth and even failure is generously rewarded. e evidence of what was vibrant creativity is all around us on these islands, if we can only be bothered to seek it out. If we ignore it, we do so in peril, for we will betray and lose our very souls. ●

Professor James Stevens Curl is the author of numerous works on architecture, including English Victorian Churches: Architecture, Faith, & Revival

JAMES STEVENS CURL (3); CARTOON BY CLIVE GODDARD

[4]

[6]

[3]

A decade of economic disaster

Barring miracles (or an unlikely decision to hold the next general election in January 2025, the last legally-possible month), 2024 will be the nal year of the present Conservative government.

( e other was Norway, with its enormous tax revenues on oil and gas.) Most impressively of all, in ation — typically in the teens per cent in the 1970s — was brought down to the low single digits.

Only one verdict is possible: Conservative rule has been a comprehensive failure Tax is due to exceed 37 per cent by the late 2020s, higher than in 1948 when a Clause 4 socialist government was in power

Although the Conservatives were in coalition with the Liberal Democrats at the start, the period 2010 to 2024 will have been dominated by Conservative policy-making. On the economic front, only one verdict is possible: Conservative rule has been a comprehensive failure.

Output per hour worked has gone up in the 14 years, but by only 0.5 per cent a year. is is the lowest rate of increase in productivity over such an extended period since the Industrial Revolution. Inevitably, living standards have stagnated. Public debt has climbed relative to national output, up from 70 per cent in 2010 to about 100 per cent now.

e surge in in ation in 2021 and 2022 to the highest numbers for four decades was the fault of the independent Bank of England. But, astonishingly, the government has given every appearance of wanting both to take the blame for the double-digit peak and the credit for the subsequent decline back towards the target 2 per cent.

There is an obvious contrast with the previous Conservative government from 1979 to 1997. In that 18-year period, productivity rose by a third and living standards advanced correspondingly.

Moreover, progress on the supply side of the economy was accompanied by strong public nances and moves towards sound money. Britain was one of only two members of the OECD to achieve a fall in the ratio of public debt to national output in that 18-year period.

Undoubtedly, the 1979-97 Conservative government was an economic success relative to the one now ending. Indeed, a case can be made that it was the most successful post-war British government in terms of its economic record.

It broke the worrying pattern in previous post-war decades for the combinations of in ation and unemployment to deteriorate from one cycle to the next. Meanwhile the UK’s supply-side transformation — so that it became a world leader in the export of business services — occurred almost by stealth, as the government withdrew subsidies from heavy industries.

Given the contrast between the two periods of Conservative rule, opinion formers should surely start asking obvious questions. What steps did the Conservatives take from 1979 which led to the benign results? What has gone so wrong since 2010?

Strangely, these questions have not been prominent in the debate before and after Jeremy Hunt’s latest Budget. e politically alert seem instead to have taken their cue from headlines in the Daily Mail and the Telegraph. e prevailing view has been that — somehow — Hunt had to cut taxes and make voters feel better this summer and autumn than they might otherwise have done.

Tax cuts were indeed delivered. e exact sum “given away” is not easy to work out, but £10 billion in a year is a nice, big number and probably not far from the truth.

But is the electorate’s outlook so short term as to be duped by this sort of thing? Relative to

national output, taxes have risen from 31 per cent in 2009 (the last full year of Gordon Brown’s government) to over 35 per cent now. Further, on current plans the prospect is for the ratio to exceed 37 per cent in the late 2020s, higher than in 1948 when a Clause 4 socialist government was in power.

Even worse is that much of the extra tax burden is needed to cover the growing bill for interest on the national debt. Debt interest is the most useless form of public spending: it merely redistributes from taxpayer to bondholder, and adds nothing to national welfare.

The 1979-97 Conservative government’s attitude towards the public nances was very di erent from its counterpart today. In the early and mid1980s atcher and her two Chancellors, Sir Geo rey Howe and Nigel Lawson, were committed to reducing the public sector borrowing requirement year after year.

If they were unable to meet the PSBR targets, taxes would have to increase, as indeed they did, by a signi cant amount, in 1981. Finally, in the 1988 Budget, Lawson announced that in future the rule would be for the public sector to balance its books. e notion of a balanced budget had the virtue of simplicity; it had acted e ectively in the past as a check on overspending.

If the balanced budget principle were reinstated, and if economic growth (even at a low rate) were to return, the ratio of public debt to output would fall.

With the same interest rate, the cost of debt interest would come down. Even better, a recovery in nancial con dence might lead to a drop in yields on government bonds, reinforcing the bene ts on the debt interest front.

As the Conservative government from 1979 to 1997 showed, strong public nances can be an associate of supply-side improvement. Mindless tax cuts — as in the disastrous Truss-Kwarteng episode — are an enemy of growth. ●

Filmmakers have fallen out of love with romantic movies but it’s time to bring back passion to the picture house, says James Innes-Smith

Great love stories, once a staple of British cinema, have pretty much vanished from our screens. e reasons why lmmakers have fallen out of love with the genre include cynicism, changing relationship dynamics and a retreat into solitude. But it is a loss we should feel because a good romantic lm can teach us so much about the human condition.

A quick scroll through my local cinema listings reveals just how far we have strayed from the path of true love. e week I selected, much like any other, includes an all too familiar and American conveyor belt of rehashed superheroes and kick-ass kiddie- icks and something called Bottoms about two teenage girls who “start a ght club in order to nd someone to have sex with before graduation” — as a premise, the antithesis of a romantic love story. ose seeking an amorous night out will struggle to nd anything even remotely smooch-worthy.

Go back to the cinema listings for 1945 when the country was in a far bigger mess than it is now and you nd a very di erent picture. at torturous nal year of war saw the release of several classics including Powell and Pressburger’s I Know Where I’m

Going, Rebecca starring Lawrence Olivier and perhaps the best-loved romance of all, Noel Coward’s Brief Encounter. Here were lms about personal salvation that gave audiences the opportunity to see beyond the carnage of the war years. e plot of Brief Encounter, about a doomed a air between a pair of unhappily married suburbanites, is deceptively simple and yet the story still manages to touch us on a deeply emotional level. Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard’s clipped vowels and chastened dalliances may seem absurd to us now but there is a

Brief Encounter: perhaps the best-loved romance of all

deep sadness underpinning this classic tale of forbidden love. e melancholy is especially poignant because, while Coward dares to question the era’s moral certainty around extramarital a airs, he eventually brings his wayward couple back to their dull but respectable marriages, leaving audiences in no doubt as to their own moral obligations.

It is unlikely such a lm would be made today in an era where moral transgression has become the new enlightenment. If the Celia Johnson character is so unhappy in her marriage, why shouldn’t she dump her boring husband for a better life?

But this modern perspective misses the point of what makes a love story like Brief Encounter so touching. When people stop believing in sacri ce and lose faith in compromise, love becomes just another disposable entitlement drained of all value. Why would anyone want to make a movie about that?

One of the reasons young people have become so cynical about the idea of nding true love is because it seems like so much hassle. With fears around rape culture and consent dominating university campuses, is it any wonder screenwriters have become wary about entering the fray? Much safer for producers to ignore the genre altogether and focus on franchising. Yet without the bene t of cinema’s re ective lens, how are young people supposed to navigate love’s messy but worthwhile machinations?

we used to have R ichard Curtis as a barometer of sorts, shining a light on the awkward triumphs and embarrassing ineptitudes of the English in love. Sadly, the accid sentimentality of 2003’s Love Actually spelt the end of Curtis’s run of popular romantic comedies, leaving a nation bereft of lmmakers willing to take on the mantle. Seen today through the lens of postmodern cynicism, Curtis’s simple boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl narratives seem even more dated than Brief Encounter’s more subtle approach.

Much as Curtis can be credited for bringing romance back to British screens in the 1990s, his lms are essentially harmless u , more comedy than romance. European and American lmmakers have better tried to understand the depths of human passion.

Richard Linklater’s poignant Before trilogy follows the relationship of a couple from when they rst meet at a Parisian bookshop to the turmoil of marriage breakdown and then the pair’s eventual reconciliation. Filmed over nine years, the collaborative scripts brilliantly portray the sad ebbing away of romantic idealism as the aging couple, played by Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke, try to reconcile shifting priorities.

It’s an uncomfortable, uncompromising study of a couple’s attempt to keep the spark of love alive while simultaneously drifting apart. In Sam Mendes’s even more searing 2008 adaptation of Richard Yates’s 1961 debut novel Revolutionary Road we witness how quickly passion can turn to contempt when mutual needs are not met.

It is this yearning for intimacy, rather than intimacy itself, that engages audiences. Watching two people in the throes of passion for ninety minutes is boring because it o ers little insight

CARLTON ITC

into the complexity of human interaction other than showing our capacity for joy, which most of us already understand.

Agreat love story has a lot to tell us about the dangers that befall us once we dare to open our hearts. at is why we feel patronised when a lm lapses into sentimentality; love without risk is just so much saccharine. e genius of Brief Encounter lies not in its portrayal of two people falling in love but in the complex moral dilemma that befalls them after they have fallen in love. Early scenes of the couple on a romantic drive together or giggling at Donald Duck cartoons are the least interesting part of the movie.

Coward’s masterwork is seen as a period piece, but even the halcyon days of the 1990s and early 2000s when cinemas were replete with romantic movies are now part of moviemaking history. Films such as Shakespeare in Love (1998), Sliding Doors (1998) and Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) are from a di erent, more innocent age. So is there a future for romantic lms? Hollywood still knocks out the occasional schmaltzy Valentine ick but they are mostly forgettable. e streamers have produced some meatier fare with lms such as Noah Baumbach’s 2018 ironically titled Marriage Story, a harrowing tale of a warring couple going through a bitter divorce. ere have been a handful of modest British cinema successes over the past decade or so, including  e Wife, a 2017 drama starring Jonathan Pryce and Glenn Close and 45 Years from 2015 in which Charlotte Rampling discovers that her husband Tom Courtenay was once engaged to someone else.

But these rare ed one-o s are largely aimed at older, upper-middle-class Hampstead types looking for a bit of arthouse escapism. is follows a trend amongst British lmmakers for focusing on either the very posh or the very deprived to the exclusion of the vast majority of the population who rarely get to see their own romantic lives re ected back at them. What we desperately need are more Shirley Valentines, Gregory’s Girls and Educating Ritas. For an industry supposedly wedded to inclusivity, lmmakers appear unwilling to produce love stories with a broad appeal.

In an increasingly febrile, disconnected world, it seems unlikely that we will be seeing a resurgence of romantic lms any time soon. Disney’s live action remake of Snow White, due for release in 2025, has already caused controversy after lead actor Rachel Zegler told Variety that the latest reincarnation of the much-loved princess, “won’t be saved by the prince. And she’s not going to be dreaming about true love. She’s dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be.” Zegler even hinted that scenes featuring Prince Charming “could get cut”, which tells you everything you need to know about the state of romantic lmmaking.

A s with so much cultural output these days, social justice activism has subverted movie conventions, particularly around sex and relationships. Traditional boy-

meets-girl narratives have become a mine eld of gender-based sensitivities. Boys can no longer be the dominant force within a relationship while girls must always be on top and in control, especially if it means sticking it to the patriarchy.

is “you-go-girrrl” imperative that implies women no longer need men to feel validated makes a mockery of popular romantic movie conventions such as the handsome hero sweeping a distressed damsel o her feet. Last year’s Barbie movie sought to hammer home the point by showing Ken dolls spending their days cavorting on the beach while the Barbies hold down prestigious jobs such as doctor, lawyer and politician. When Beach Ken, played by Ryan Gosling, seeks a more intimate relationship with Barbie, played by Margot Robbie, she rebu s him in favour of female friendships.

with the exception of netflix’s recent hit, One Day, TV romance hasn’t fared much better, with mainstream channels choosing to focus on the ins and outs of suburban swingers, as in last year’s  e Couple Next Door or the suburban gloom of Marriage about a dreary couple trapped in the tedium of marital graft. Normal People, an adaptation of Sally Rooney’s bestselling novel, has some interesting things to say about the awkwardness of adolescent sexual awakenings but is more concerned with the physical than the transcendent.

Heterosexual love stories have also become increasingly passé as producers seek to diversify content. Yet despite the extended drought, there is a glimmer of hope that traditional love stories may survive the ongoing cultural onslaught. Last year’s Past Lives, Celine Song’s feature debut about two Koreans whose lives intertwine after years spent apart, has captivated audiences and reviewers alike, with two Oscar nominations. is sensitive, mature tale of lost opportunities and the lengths to which people will go to recapture what might have been just goes to show you can’t keep a good love story down.

If only Brits could produce something of equal merit, audiences starved of homegrown romance might start to fall back in love with those sad, beleaguered multiplexes. ●

James Innes-Smith is the author The Seven Ages of Man: How to Live a Meaningful Life

The Before trilogy stars Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy

EXHIBITIONS

FOR DISCERNING TRAVELLERS

We have selected four short breaks including tickets for our favourite spring exhibitions in Europe. The Kirker Concierge is at your disposal to help book tickets for all the latest cultural events or any upcoming exhibition, and we highly recommend discussing your museum visits before you travel – as many major museums now require reservations.

VIENNA

Holbein. Burgkmair. Dürer.

Renaissance in the North

At the Kunsthistorisches from 19 March until 30 June

The Kunsthistorisches Museum’s spring exhibition is devoted to three outstanding pioneers of the Renaissance north of the Alps: Hans Holbein the Elder, Hans Burgkmair, and Albrecht Dürer. It o ers a golden opportunity to experience fascinating works by these artists and to explore how Augsburg became the birthplace of the Northern Renaissance.

3 night holiday price from £956 per person, staying at the 4* Hotel Altstadt

Includes a Vienna Masterticket

PARIS

Paris 1874:

Inventing Impressionism

EUROSTARTRAVELBY

At the Musée d’Orsay from 26 March - 14 July

150 years ago, on April 15, 1874, the rst impressionist exhibition opened in Paris. “Hungry for independence”, Monet, Renoir, Degas, Morisot, Pissarro, Sisley and Cézanne nally decided to free themselves from the rules by holding their own exhibition, outside o cial channels: impressionism was born. To celebrate this anniversary, Musée d’Orsay presents 130 works, bringing a fresh eye to bear on this key date, regarded as the day that launched the avant-gardes.

3 night holiday price from £998 per person staying at the Hotel Le Senat (3* Deluxe)

Includes a 48hr Paris Museum Pass

VENICE

Willem de Kooning and Italy

At the Gallerie dell’Accademia from 16 April until 15 September

One of the most innovative and in uential artists of the twentieth century, this exhibition will be the rst to explore the impact of Willem de Kooning’s two Italian visits, which took place in 1959 and 1969. Due to open to coincide with the start of the 60th Art Biennale, the exhibition will display the art he made in Italy, alongside later paintings, drawings, and sculptures spanning from the late 1950s to the 1980s.

3 night holiday price from £1,098 per person staying at the Pensione Accademia (3* Superior)

Includes private water taxi transfers

BERLIN

Caspar David Friedrich: In nite Landscapes

At the Alte Nationalgalerie from 19 April - 4 August

Marking the 250th anniversary of the birth of the great German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, this new exhibition brings together 60 paintings and 50 drawings from Germany and abroad, including world-famous works such as Monk by the Sea and Abbey in the Oakwood. A central part of Berlin’s Museum Island, the Alte Nationalgalerie was built between 1866 and 1876 in the style of a Greek temple. It was here that a legendary retrospective in 1906 propelled Friedrich to the status of a pioneer of modern painting.

3 night price from £698 per person, staying at the 4* Classik Hotel Alexander Plaza

Includes a 72hr Berlin Museum Pass

Prices are per person and include return ights or Eurostar, private transfers, accommodation with breakfast, tickets to the exhibitions as described, Kirker Guide Notes to restaurants, museums and sightseeing and the services of the Kirker Concierge.

Speak to an expert: 020 7593 2283

www.kirkerholidays.com

Pirate (Untitled II) - de Kooning, 1981 © 2024 The Willem de Kooning Foundation

Ballet Rehearsal on StageDegas, 1874

Moonrise Over the Sea - Friedrich, 1822

Portrait of a Young Man - Burgkmair, 1506

Viktor Orbán has created a pipeline of support for his Fidesz political project by granting full citizenship to thousands of ethnic Hungarians in Romania

CHASING VOTES ON FOREIGN SOIL

JAMES HARDING

It’s a sunny, warm day in late summer. A brandnew, purpose-built kindergarten and nursery school is awaiting its o cial opening. Smiling small children line up, gently marshalled by quietly-spoken female teachers. Boys and girls are resplendent in impeccably laundered and tted folk costume: white frilly-sleeved shirting and red-and-green waistcoats and skirts.

People gather to listen to the children singing, and to the town and Catholic church dignitaries making stirring speeches to mark the opening of this new educational establishment, the Angyalkert (Angel Garden), a free school for 180 children.

Banners and signage festooned with the green, white and red national ag, alongside the arms of state topped with its emblem of the Holy Crown of Hungary, indicate that the main source of funding for this state-of-the-art building — 850 million Hungarian forint (around £2 million) — is from the verbosely-titled Prime Minister’s O ce State Secretariat for National Policy.

Except that this is not Hungary. By road, the nearest point in Hungary to the Angel Garden is no less than 260 miles away, a drive of around six-and-a-half hours.

The Angel Garden is in the town centre of Miercurea Ciuc. Until 1920, the town — Csíkszereda in Hungarian — was

the county town of Hungary’s most easterly county, and part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Today, sitting in the centre of modern Romania, it has a population of around 34,000, more than 80 per cent of whom are indigenous ethnic Hungarians, most of whom can trace their family heritage back to the Székely people who were established in this idyllic region of mineral-water springs, mountains and forests at some point during the epoch when the Magyars arrived in the Carpathian Basin. e position of the Hungarian majority in this region of what is now Romania has not been a particularly happy one since the 1920 Treaty of Trianon reassigned the region from Hungary to Romania. When Queen Marie of Romania made her bid for the whole of Transylvania in the precincts of the Palace of Versailles following the end of First World War, demographics were rmly on her side: Romanians were in the overwhelming majority in Hungarian-ruled Transylvania, historically part of Hungary in some form or another for the best part of 900 years.

But in the area of Transylvania delineated today by the Romanian counties of Harghita, Covasna and part of Mureş, the opposite was so, with Hungarians in the majority. And so Hungary, post-Trianon, was left with a sizeable cultural exclave, situated deep within an ascendant and historically antipathetic country.

Uneasily settling to a new political reality, the Hungarians of the Székely land got on with life, adapting and learning a new language (Romanian) while yearning for the old days in which a Hungarian ruling and administrative class ordered life to their advantage. In 1940, the alliance between Miklós Horthy’s government in Budapest and Nazi Germany secured the return to Hungary of northern Transylvania, but with Hitler’s defeat, the territory was returned to Romania.

Once communism was established after the Second World War, a Romanian nationalist version of it took hold. Nicolae Ceauşescu pursued a vigorous policy of diluting Hungarian populations in historically Hungarian urban centres, moving Romanian workers from distant counties into newly-built factory quarters and changing the demography. With the rise to power of Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party, an ascendant concept of Hungarian nationhood has re-emerged, promoting illiberal, eastern-facing nationalism. e notion of nationhood beyond the boundaries of today’s Hungarian state is encouraged.

this is not necessarily as alarming as it might rst appear. ere is a view that Hungary was treated badly in the postFirst World War settlement that deprived it of more than twothirds of its territory and consigned a third of Hungarian speakers to life in other nation states. Over the course of the twentieth century, newly “exiled” Hungarians became minorities in their own homelands and were often subjected to the kind of treatment which under the old Kingdom of Hungary had been meted out to that country’s minorities.

Orbán’s aim to bring ‘”stranded” ethnic Hungarian life and culture in other countries back into the motherland’s orbit has a potent emotive appeal to the Hungarian consciousness. For several generations, ethnic Hungarians living in Serbia, Ukraine, Slovakia and — most numerously of all — in Romania,

became used to living with a sense of ambiguity over their identity. Many lived through moments when their mothertongue and culture were actively persecuted or begrudgingly admitted only as something for the private sphere of home life, while Hungarian centres of population were often subjected to demographic manipulation.

e arrival early this century of a Hungarian diplomatic mission in Miercurea Ciuc was a step in a sequence of actions designed to capitalise on the deeply-felt cultural allegiance of the local people to their Hungarian language and ancestry. Following Orbán’s re-election in 2010, a law was swiftly passed in Budapest extending full Hungarian citizenship to those of Hungarian ethnicity living outside the country who wished to a rm their Hungarian heritage. To facilitate this, another o ce was established in a town centre building in Miercurea Ciuc to handle not only the applications, but also the solemn citizenship ceremonies which marked their newly-acquired status.

For those who had felt compromised as Romanian citizens with historical Hungarian heritage, the o er of a tangible, ocial connection to an apparently generous and resurgent homeland was both irresistible and reassuring. Church pastors and priests ensured the older generation heard this Hungarian gospel of citizenship of the motherland freely o ered, while local Fidesz-a liated operators organised and paid for taxis to help old people from outlying villages get to town centre o ces to complete the formalities.

Emerging from those citizenship o ces came a steady trickle from across the generations: smartly-dressed individuals and families holding owers, pausing for photos and grasping grandly-worded certi cates and Hungar ian passports. For such people, around 600,000 according to a recent estimate, there would be no more awkward explanations when travelling. Few self-respecting Transylvanian Hungarians had felt unequivocally proud of saying they were Romanian citizens, yet that was what they were until Orbán’s government changed the law. Now, they can travel abroad and say without complicated explanations that they are Hungarian. ey can vote in Hungarian elections, too.

opinion is horri ed by the thump and punch of Orbán’s incendiary rhetoric, while mainstream opinion among Hungarian-speaking Transylvanians assents rapturously.

In the summer of 2022, Orbán extemporised a concept of racial purity, prompting the immediate resignation of one of his most loyal senior advisors (a move she, puzzlingly, later reversed), and strong public criticism from Romania’s president Klaus Iohannis. Last summer, Orbán’s speech focused — among other things — on baiting the Romanian state by appearing to question the territorial integrity of present-day Romania, breaking diplomatic protocol in the process.

Orbán’s government has been quick to capitalise on a receptive and loyal audience for its agenda in places such as Miercurea Ciuc. Orbán’s charisma and appeal to deeply-felt notions of heritage and identity have been highly manipulative and strikingly successful. As a result, the newly-enfranchised citizens have provided a strong and growing pipeline of Fidesz voters (estimated in 2018 at more than 90 per cent of all Hungarian citizenship-holders in Romania), a signi cant factor in the parliamentary elections which returned Orbán and his government to power with another substantial majority in 2022.

Orbán’s annual visit to a Hungarian-language political conference at Tusnád in Romania, a spa town south of Miercurea Ciuc, has become a focal point of this political synergy. Each summer he delivers a keynote speech, and each year liberal

Outside the gates of the 2023 campsite conference, local police held at bay a vocal crowd of ag-waving, placard-bearing Romanianspeakers, brandishing pugnacious slogans about Transylvania’s intrinsically Romanian nature. While the protesters outside last summer’s event could easily be dismissed as inconsequential, Orbán’s prolonged campaign in Transylvania has raised substantial mainstream worries about the long-term e ects of all this political campaigning.

While the newly-enfranchised Transylvanians constitute a stream of faithful postal votes for Fidesz in Hungarian parliamentary elections, those same Transylvanian voters are also vulnerable to being seen by the Romanian media and state as a foreign fth column, undermining Romania’s status quo. A long-held suspicion that Hungarian individuals, businesses and government are acquiring too much in uence in Transylvania is hard to disprove.

Currently the newly-enfranchised Hungarian citizens of Transylvania receive money from the Hungarian government on the birth of each new child. eir children can be educated free of charge in Hungarian government-funded facilities like the Angel Garden, and later at Hungarian-sponsored colleges

such as the Sapientia University of Transylvania.

In the context of Russia’s political machinations in Crimea before the annexation of 2014, and in eastern Ukraine prior to the 2022 invasion in which Moscow ensured fast-track Russian citizenship and passport-issuing, it’s hard not to be disturbed by some parallels with Orbán’s campaign in Transylvania — the more so given his unabashed a nity with Putin and his antagonism towards Ukraine.

What is the point at which Orbán recognises the limit of how far he can push his nation-building project in historically Hungarian territory? e reality of EU and NATO membership and a lack of economic heft mean the potential for Hungary to manipulate national borders could never succeed, even if such an agenda ever became part of the Fidesz project. But that does not negate the potential instability caused by Orbán’s actions.

Orbán’s campaign to bring back into the national fold “stranded” Hungarians living in what have been foreign jurisdictions since 1920 is an unsettling and destabilising project. While setting out to strengthen the heritage and culture of a historically fragmented and marginalised group of people, his project risks turning these new Hungarian citizens into vulnerable and manipulated foreigners in their home countries, increasingly withdrawn from participation in the mainstream of their homeland economies and politics.

But not everyone rises to the bait. Some voices in a more liberal and economically con dent Romania articulate calmer perspective. As Dan Tăpălagă, a Romanian journalist, pointed out in July last year on the G4Media news website, “Orbán will leave at some point, Orbánism may survive for a while, but the Hungarians of Transylvania will stay here. It is Romania’s duty to take care of their future like any other of its citizens.” ●

James Harding is an education specialist who has been a regular visitor to Transylvania since 2000

Joseph Sassoon details the rise and fall of the Sassoon family, whose yearning for social acceptance brought titles and prestige at the cost of what made them so fabulously wealthy

How to lose an empire

Aprovince of the Ottoman Empire, Baghdad in the 1820swas governed by a wãli whose habit was to make money by arresting members of the wealthiest families and demanding a ransom for their release. Among those detained was David Sassoon, a member of one of Baghdad’s most prominent Jewish families, whose father was the pasha’s treasurer. Upon the father paying his son’s ransom, David ed to Bushir in southern Iran in 1830. e following year, he took his family with him for a new life in Bombay.

As a refugee in a new land who had lost his wealth and status in Baghdad, David Sassoon chose to identify with the British Empire, then the world’s strongest power. When in 1853 he was granted British citizenship, he signed his oath of allegiance to the Empire and East India Company in Hebrew — for although he spoke Arabic, Hebrew, Persian and Turkish as well as learning Hindustani, he never bothered with English.

However, he employed tutors to ensure that his children did so, and in 1858 he dispatched his son Sassoon David (S.D.) to London to make his way there, nancially and socially. is he did, acquiring with his father’s subsidy Ashley Park, an estate in Surrey, for £48,500.

When David died in 1864, he left a will anointing his oldest son Abdallah (right) as the family trading company’s next leader. However, David’s second son, Elias, refused to abide by the will. After three years of futile negotiations, the family split into two competing rms: the Bombay-headquartered David Sassoon & Co. and the Bombay and Shanghai-headquartered E. D. Sassoon & Co. Both rms traded in a range of commodities, including tea, silk and pearls. But until the nineteenth century’s end it was the trade in cotton and opium that dominated both companies’ transactions, helping Britain’s policy to export opium to China to balance its imports of silk and tea.

Meanwhile, Abdallah was itching to move to London because he felt that as chairman of a global rm, he should be close to the locus of British imperial power and decision-making. e opportunity came when, in 1872, he was knighted for his public service in India. Duly anglicising his name (as did all the other family members who moved to England) to Sir Albert, he relocated David Sassoon & Co’s headquarters from Bombay to 12 Leadenhall Street (on the site of the former East India Company headquarters and later that of Lloyd’s of London). From its top oor, a sta of translators handled bills of lading and marine insurance written in Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Chinese and Hindustani.

At a large gathering to honour him at the Guildhall, Sir Albert was awarded the Freedom of the City of London in recognition of extraordinary e orts to serve the Empire. “ is is the rst time an East Indian merchant has been admitted to the honour highly prized by its possessor and much coveted by the aspirants to City fame”, recorded the commemorative brochure. “It is the rst time

that the freedom of the City of London has been presented to a Jew.”

Despite the country’s relative homogeneity, rigid class system and antisemitism, Britain proved hospitable to the Sassoon family. ey arrived at a time when the liberalism of the Manchester School — and the idea that free trade would bring about a more prosperous and equitable society — was at its most in uential. David Salomons became London’s rst Jewish Lord Mayor in 1855 and three years later, albeit after a protracted legislative process, Lionel de Rothschild nally took his seat in Parliament.

All the while, the Conservatives were being led in the House of Commons by the (Anglican baptised) Jew, Benjamin Disraeli. ere were limits to this tolerance, of course, and possibly one reason why the Sassoons’ reception into the British aristocracy went so smoothly was that, unlike the Warburgs or Rothschilds, they were not primarily associated with their moneylending business.

Unsurprisingly, they began to equate success as much with being accepted as members of the British aristocracy as with wealth and invested much time, energy, and money to this end. Lavish entertainment was always high on the agenda, and besides their grand houses in London and Brighton, the family also owned estates in the English and Scottish countryside.

Meanwhile, Reuben Sassoon settled at 1 Belgrave Square, described in an 1882 compendium of England’s twelve most beautiful houses as modern, with “very little Oriental about it”. Unusually for the time, the house had three lifts: one

for dinner, another for domestic sta , and one to connect the stable with the street outside. It was seen as one of the most technically advanced homes in London — the numerous bathrooms had showers, and the lift in the stables had been installed so that the horses could be housed above ground level to bene t from natural light. ere were reportedly “so many ingenious mechanical arrangements in Mr. Sassoon’s house, that an engineer is in residence to answer for their perfect working order”.

e Sassoons were enthralled by royalty and established a strong relationship with the Prince of Wales that began during a visit to Bombay and continued for decades, even after he became King Edward VII on the death Queen Victoria in 1901.

Yet more doors were opened through marriages with predominantly Jewish elite European families, such as the Rothschilds and the Poliakovs in Russia. Later, marriages to non-Jewish families became more widespread. For instance, Sybil Sassoon was married in 1913 to George Cholmondeley, the future fth Marquess of Cholmondeley and Lord Great Chamberlain. S.D.’s Bombay-born daughter, Rachel Sassoon, converted to Anglicanism upon marrying the newspaper owner, Frederick Beer (himself a convert from Judaism) and, through his ownership, became the editor of the Observer in 1891, the rst woman to edit a national newspaper. en, upon purchasing its rival, she became editor of the Sunday Times.

By the fourth generation, the links with their Baghdadi Jewish heritage were broken. By the twentieth century Sir Philip Sassoon (grandson of Sir Albert and son of Edward, who became the family’s rst MP after marrying Aline de Rothschild) avoided acknowledging his ancestry. It was rumoured that he wanted to remove from the family’s coat-of-arms the Hebrew script above its Latin motto, Candide et Constanter

Sir Philip achieved what many Sassoons aspired to: in 1912 he succeeded his father as Unionist (Conservative) MP for Hythe, became Under-Secretary of State for Air, and later Chair-

man of the National Gallery. From Port Lympne, his country house in Kent, he entertained a Who’s Who of the early twentieth century: the Curzons, Winston Churchill, Noel Coward, Virginia Woolf and Charlie Chaplin. But under his chairmanship, David Sassoon & Co. went into decline. e poet Siegfried Sassoon epitomised the disconnect between the family’s origins and immersion in British society. His father Alfred married out of the family faith into the English upper class and Siegfried had no idea about his Baghdadi origin or his family’s religion until his father died when he was a teenager. Siegfried, who died a Roman Catholic, loathed those engaged in business, as one poem showed: “I accuse the rich of what they’ve always done before”. He was far from the only Sassoon to feel the impact of the First World War. At least 14 grandsons and great-grandsons of the original David Sassoon held commissions in the British Army. Siegfried’s younger brother Hamo, a second lieutenant with the Royal Engineers, died at Gallipoli in November 1915.

e British branch of the family’s focus on social acceptance came at the cost of fostering innovation and seeking new market opportunities. In particular, it was too slow to move the family business away from the opium trade, which was curtailed by the 1907 agreement between Britain (and India) and China.

The Sassoons’ decline stemmed in part from their success. e titles, social and political standing and the friendships with royalty seemingly came at the cost of what had brought them riches in the rst place. e rm David Sassoon built became marginal in every sphere. After Sir Philip’s untimely death in 1939 and the disruptions of the Second World War, what remained was managed by outsiders who were eventually declared un t by the Bank of England in the 1980s.

Meanwhile, most of the leaders of the second Sassoon branch (E. D. Sassoon) stayed in the East. Headquartered in Bombay and Shanghai, their empire lasted longer. But even a more attentive attitude was no guarantee of making the right calls in a politically turbulent world.

ey made what transpired to be the wrong bet on China in the 1920s and lost most of their assets with the nationalisation that accompanied the Communists’ victory. In 1978, Charterhouse Japhet Ltd acquired E. D. Sassoon Bank and Trust and the Sassoon name — synonymous as the global merchants and “Rothschilds of the East” — slipped from the annals of international trade and nance.

e desire for acceptance and status is not particular to the Sassoons. Something more than money had been lost between the founder and the fourth generation. One astute observer likened the shape of the dynasty to a diamond, “starting at a point, widening out rapidly, and tapering disastrously towards the bottom”. ●

Joseph Sassoon is Professor of History and Politics at Georgetown University. e Global Merchants: e Enterprise and Extravagance of the Sassoon Dynasty is published by Penguin society. His father Alfred married out of the family faith into the those

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Since the nineteenth century, Britain’s oldest purpose-built synagogue, Bevis Marks in the City of London, has survived multiple attempts at its destruction. One made in the 1880s prompted the establishment of the Bevis Marks Anti-Demolition League, which drew the support of William Morris. It survived the Blitz and, more recently, two major IRA bombings.

Today, the synagogue — Sha’ar Hashamayim, the Gate of Heaven in Hebrew — is in a struggle against a new threat, arguably more insidious than those made before. For some time, it has been attempting to see o the planned development of the nearby site of 31 Bury Street for a super-tall o ce building. Its

Above, the interior of Bevis Marks Synagogue in an eighteenth-century engraving

Left, entrance door showing its construction date in both the Hebrew and Gregorian calendars

trustees, and many supporters from local and national heritage groups, fear it would leave the building’s daylight provision at only one hour a day. Heaven’s gate risks being left in darkness.

At rst, it seemed the ght had been won. In 2021, developer Welput’s application for a 48-storey building on the site was rejected on the grounds that it “would adversely a ect the setting” of the Grade 1-listed synagogue due to its “overbearing and overshadowing impact”, a clear admission of the validity of the fears of the synagogue’s supporters. Since then, however, the plans have been resurrected with super cial changes — ve stories have been shaved o the building’s projected 48 — that ostensibly acknowledge the synagogue’s concerns, but do little to change the picture from its point of view.

Attempts to shore up a conservation area surrounding the synagogue have not proved much of a safeguard, as the publication of the City’s draft Local Plan earlier this year has revealed. e plan proposes to de ne the conservation area surrounding the synagogue so tightly as to exclude the neighbouring Bury Street site, while removing a clause preventing the construction of tall buildings in conservation areas. anks to this sleight of hand, by 2028 Bevis Marks will, if nothing changes, literally be living in the Bury Street tower’s shadow, with others inevitably to follow.

It is hard to see this as anything other than an act of gross cultural vandalism against one of Britain’s most important Jewish sites. Sometimes thought of as Britain’s “cathedralsynagogue” for its importance to Anglo-Jewish history, Bevis Marks was one of the very rst synagogues to be built in Britain after the expulsion of the Jews in 1290 (its community rst occupied a building on Creechurch Lane from the 1650s).

Not only is it now the oldest surviving purpose-built synagogue in Britain, the twentieth century’s destruction of continental Jewish places of worship has left Bevis Marks with a claim to being the oldest synagogue in the whole of Europe to be continuously in use. As such, the building tells a story that is both particular to

Bevis Marks Synagogue by William Aslet

Top, the synagogue overshadowed by City towers

Above, St James’s Piccadilly, designed by Christopher Wren Golden afternoon light illuminates the Portuguese Synagogue of Amsterdam

STUDIO

Right, a ”lights out” ceremony to commemorate the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, 2014

Far right; the candlelit interior of the synagogue, which was refurbished in 2023

Britain and speaks to events beyond it.

Bevis Marks is also among Britain’s most intact eighteenthcentury religious buildings. Built under the supervision of the carpenter Joseph Avis and completed in 1701, many of its features are original, including benches that are hinged to enable the storage of prayer books and prayer shawls. To this day, services are often only illuminated by candles placed in the seven great brass chandeliers slung low over the synagogue’s central body.

This building has at times been cast in terms of otherness. A favourite legend has it that its likely architect, Avis, was a Quaker and so from another of London’s marginalised communities. e land purchased for the site, moreover, was tactfully outside of the City’s limits, and its entrance set back from the public highway, leading to the unassuming courtyard from which the building is entered to this day.

ere are undeniable links with the Spanish and Portuguese “mother-synagogue” in Amsterdam, which opened in 1675 and whose congregation paid for one of Bevis Marks’s chandeliers. But, as historian Kenneth Rubens has observed, Bevis Marks, which comfortably seats around 600, is a very di erent building to the massive, 2,000-seater Amsterdam synagogue. Indeed, its more intimate architecture can be better understood in terms of the architectural language of the roughly-contemporary City churches that neighbour it.

e parallels between Bevis Marks and the City churches are numerous. ere’s the unshowy brick exterior (not unlike Wren’s favourite church, St James’s Piccadilly), a galleried interior with rich but undemonstrative woodwork and what looks like a reredos. Of course, these features have been adapted to Jewish worship: unlike in an Anglican church, the galleries were

intended to separate male and female worshippers and the “reredos” is in fact the Echal containing the Torah scrolls. Other features, such as the platform, or Bimah, that dominates the plan, from which the service is led, are sui generis. e points of commonality, though, are striking and speak to a close cultural dialogue. Indeed, Avis, like virtually all the other craftsmen who worked at Bevis Marks, had also worked on these churches. Moreover, the institutions’ needs were were similar. Wren’s belief that churches ought to be “auditories” applies just as well to a synagogue, whose services often focus on reading from the Torah.

Bevis M arks is unique, but the threat it faces is not. It speaks to a far broader concern about the pace of change being allowed by a City prioritising pro t over preservation. When Foster+Partners’ 30 St Mary Axe, alias “the Gherkin”, was nished just over 20 years ago, it was seen by many as being out of scale with its surroundings. Now, it is but a junior — even diminutive — member of the so-called “eastern cluster” of skyscrapers surrounding it.

If today’s cities really do need high-rises, then they have to be built with consideration for more than simply return on investment. e City Corporation’s apparent skewing of the pitch at Bevis Marks shows no such concern, revealing instead an ignorance of what truly makes London a world city. e Corporation could do well to re ect upon the wisdom of those who, with some courage, built Bevis Marks, and who went to such great lengths to harmonise with the buildings around it. ●

William Aslet is the Scott Opler Junior Research Fellow in architectural history at Worcester College, Oxford

A monumental work on British buildings

Charles Saumarez Smith

The Critic columnist

In 1975, Gavin Stamp travelled out to India with Colin Amery, then assistant editor of the Architectural Review, to visit Edwin Lutyens’s buildings for New Delhi, which were beginning to be seen in a more sympathetic light after falling disastrously out of architectural fashion following Lutyens’s death in 1944.

It was the beginning of Stamp’s lifelong interest in twentieth-century classicism and led in 1977 to an exhibition at the RIBA Drawings Collection, Silent Cities, on the tombs that Lutyens and others designed for the Imperial War Graves Commission and, in 1980, to the great Lutyens exhibition, held at the Hayward Gallery.

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least as well as that of England.

It is evident that he has travelled widely in Europe and America looking at buildings of the period, and although the book is intended nally to replace Nikolaus Pevsner’s highly partial and partisan view of the architecture of the period with a broader and more comprehensive study of its multifariousness, he often quotes Pevsner as a fellow student — the only other person who has examined the buildings of England so comprehensively.

It was the task of rescuing Lutyens from the condescension of posterity that led Stamp to the most substantial work of his life, helping to establish the irties Society following the destruction of Edwin Cooper’s original building for Lloyd’s of London in 1979, encouraging Francis Carnwarth to turn Gilbert Scott’s Southwark Power Station into what became Tate Modern, and, after he left teaching architectural history at Glasgow School of Art, writing a new history of British architecture between the wars, which he was still at work on at the time of his death from cancer in 2017.

at work has been retrieved from his computer by his widow, Rosemary Hill. It is a massive and comprehensive overview of the period with a wealth of new information about its buildings and architects, which has, one suspects, been licked into shape by Hill’s literary and historical skills.

The book has now been published under the title Interwar with the help of the Twentieth Century Society and a set of sensationally beautiful black and white photographs by John East. It is a testament to Stamp’s extraordinary depth of knowledge and originality of mind. One feels in reading it that there is not a town hall in England or out-of-the-way suburban church that he has not studied. He knows Luton like the back of his hand and the architecture of Scotland at

Another great strength of Stamp’s book is that he was totally immersed in the contemporary literature of architecture. One feels that he must have had the Architectural Review by his bed. He knows in detail the discussions and debates of all the writers of the period — not just the well-known ones like John Gloag, Clough Williams-Ellis, H.S. Goodhart-Rendel and Trystan Edwards, but also the early writings of Robert Byron, the more obscure writings of John Betjeman when he was an architectural journalist, and the changes in view of Maxwell Fry, trained in Liverpool as a classicist, but a convert in the 1930s to Modernism, and of his teacher, Charles Reilly, head of the Liverpool School of Architecture, who was one of the more authoritative writers on the architecture of the period, publishing a collection of his articles, Representative British Architects of Today in 1931.

His total immersion in the period has enabled Stamp to write a detailed examination of the various styles which were available to architects at the time, like an academic version of Osbert Lancaster’s Pillar to Post, with the continental modernism inspired by the writings of Le Corbusier being treated as only one of them.

Nor was it the most important style, con ned to the work of a relatively small number of young, avant-garde architects, mostly trained at the Architectural Association who were in uenced by the émigré architects. Chief among these was Walter Gropius, who was in London brie y from 1934 to 1937. After he failed to win the commission to design a new building for Christ’s College, Cambridge, Gropius emigrated to Harvard.

Stamp starts with one of his long-standing interests, the need to commemorate the dead of the First World War not just in the cemeteries of northern France, overseen by the Imperial War Graves Commission, but in new buildings in public schools and universities, like the Memorial Chapel designed by Giles Gilbert Scott at Charterhouse. Not surprisingly, these mostly used classicism as a way of memorialising a lost generation.

Classicism was also the natural language for banks.

Gavin Stamp’s posthumous book is a magnificent tour d’horizon, a bible of the styles available to architects between the wars

Now that we have lost branches of the major banks on every high street which stood for reliability and dependability, it is particularly good to be encouraged to look more carefully at this building type which has generally been ignored in other studies. In Piccadilly alone, there are at least two very distinguished examples of the genre — Wolseley House, originally designed in 1921 by W. Curtis Green as a car showroom, but turned shortly afterwards into a branch for Barclays, and Lutyens’s building for Midland Bank which sits alongside St. James’s, Piccadilly so intelligently and deferentially.

Town halls are another building type which bene t from Stamp’s scrutiny since, as with banks, they were a type of building regarded as important, full of a feeling of civic ambition. is is evident, most obviously, in London’s County Hall, built as a match to the Palace of Westminster opposite, but Stamp also includes Nottingham’s Guildhall, Greenwich, Norwich and the great tower of Percy omas’s Guildhall, Swansea. I was only surprised that he did not include Walthamstow Town Hall, a particularly ne example of austere, stripped-back civic classicism, begun in 1938 and recently restored.

I expected the book to end with more of a polemic against international modernism as so much of the book’s purpose is to provide a broader and more

representative history than one dominated by the early manifestations of what Reginald Blom eld called Modernismus. But, as in his accounts of the origins and adherents of other styles, Stamp is unexpectedly broad-minded, deeply well-informed and able to take a historical view of the origins of modernism in the cult of sunshine and athleticism, the desire for new and more convenient ways of living, and the availability of new materials.

I hoped there might be reference to the work of W.G. Newton, the son of the arts-and-crafts architect Sir Ernest Newton. With his father, Newton was joint editor of the Architectural Review, designed the Memorial Hall at Marlborough College, his old school, in conventionally neoclassical style in 1925, but less than a decade later designed its science laboratories in a style of the purest functionalism, perfectly demonstrating the way that architects would switch style when and where they thought it appropriate.

Overall, it is extremely hard to pick any holes in the depth and range of Stamp’s knowledge. He loves bypass Tudor and hates the cult of Christopher Wren. His posthumous book is a magni cent tour d’horizon, a bible of the styles available to architects between the wars. e tragedy is that he did not live to see the conclusion of his life’s work. ●

When classicists attack classics

Jaspreet Singh Boparai

Research into the ancient world has a serious problem with imperialism. e best introduction to this subject is Rajiv Malhotra’s 2016 book e Battle for Sanskrit: Is Sanskrit Political or Sacred, Oppressive or Liberating, Dead or Alive? Malhotra, a devout Hindu, opposes the e orts of American university academics, and speci cally “postmodern Orientalists”, to impose their secular values on ancient Hindu traditions and sacred literature. He regards such Americans as smug, passive-aggressive and laughably hypocritical.

Malhotra claims that too many scholars have latterly been co-opted into academic projects that serve American imperial interests whilst helping various scholars assuage their sense of “white guilt”.

Professionally insecure young people are easily talked into advancing their careers by spitting in the faces of their ancestors, and claiming that (for example) exploitation was built into the very fabric of traditional Hindu society, and Sanskrit holy texts. ey end up selling their dignity in exchange for a pathetic academic salary. is is modern-day intellectual colonialism at its most degrading and humiliating.

It turns out that Sanskrit isn’t the only ancient language to be a ected by academic imperialism. Josephine Quinn’s new book How e World Made e West begins with the curious note:

“I use BCE and CE rather than BC and AD through training and habit, and in order to avoid the partisan phrase anno Domini [‘in the Year of Our Lord’]; I also insist that this notation system still refers not to a truly ‘Common’ but to a ‘Christian’ era.”

How is “in the Year of Our Lord” a “partisan” phrase? is is precisely the sort of fake neutrality that Malhotra warns against. But Christianity is only a secondary target here: the real aim here is to supplant something called “civilisational thinking”; the way to do this, Quinn tells us, is to remove conventional ideas of Classical Athens and Rome from the study of the ancient world.

Quinn is frustrated by the fact that core courses for Oxford undergraduates in Greek history focus on 776 to 336 BC, whilst Roman history runs from 264 BC to AD 54. is is a curious complaint for an Oxford professor of ancient history; even so, one of the aims of How e World Made e West is to move as far away as possible from Latin and Greek texts, and focus on archaeology and “material culture”, to develop a picture of cultural interaction throughout the Mediterranean, and demonstrate that the Ancient Greeks and Romans

weren’t as innovative or sui generis as the Victorians thought they were.

Quinn is at war with the Victorians throughout this book, for whatever reason. It isn’t wholly clear what she’s doing, although it takes her 30 chapters and over 400 pages to do it (plus another hundred-odd pages of notes). But evidently she got something right: there was an eleven-way auction for How e World Made e West. Michael Fishwick, the publishing director of Bloomsbury, told e Bookseller:

“Josephine’s proposal was one of the most exciting I’ve seen, opening up long-forgotten lands of fable and glory, promising a book that will appeal to the imagination as much as the intellect ... I ended up feeling that if one read this book one would know everything you need to know about the ancient world.”

e American rights were sold for a six- gure sum. Someone somewhere was clearly impressed.

Most chapters in How e World Made e West begin with attempts at evocative scene-setting that aim to make the reader feel like he’s right there, in Aleppo in 1349, or Crimea in 67 BC, or on the island of Santorini when a volcano erupted in 1560 BC.

It takes a novelist’s skill to bring such material to life; alas, Quinn hasn’t got it. Still, there is potential in the rst third of the volume especially for any number of good books, on the civilisations of ancient Crete, archaic Mycenae, and the culture of the Cyclades. If only we could read one of those instead.

e problem with this book begins with its fundamental concepts. Quinn fails to articulate any sophisticated notion of what people are, what human society is, how culture is created, or how communities develop. is becomes painfully evident very early on, when there is no clear account of how complex civilisations evolved, in Babylon, Egypt, or anywhere else.

According to this book, autocratic tyranny is fine, as long as a few rich women are allowed to wield power here and there

roughout the volume there is a great deal of material on trade routes and networks of exchange, without much thinking about how these got there in the rst place. One might as well read the Book of Genesis for illumination on the subject.

Too much of Quinn’s narrative relies on scholarship that she is not necessarily in a position to evaluate. Chapter 26, for example, focuses on scholarly culture in Baghdad in the eighth and ninth centuries. e Abbasid caliphs sponsored a programme of translating learned books from a wide range of languages, including Ancient Greek.

It seems that Quinn hoped to explore the ways in which Arab scholars helped preserve classical learning that would otherwise have been lost; then she did a little reading, found out that this was very rarely the case, but didn’t want all those notes to go to waste, so wrote this chapter anyway, even though it is largely irrelevant to the story she is trying to tell.

The classical elements in How The World Made The West are less disappointing than bewildering. Of course, Quinn has every right to be provocative, and some will consider her position on ancient Athenian democracy to be bracingly iconoclastic. But to trash the winners of the Persian Wars, dismiss their heroism and military prowess, and ignore just how badly they humiliated King Xerxes the Great when he invaded mainland Greece, seems a little odd.

Until, that is, you see the real reason for all the sneering: apparently the Athenian democracy wasn’t adequately feminist. According to this book, autocratic tyranny is ne, as long as a few rich women are allowed to wield power here and there. (As an aside, Quinn is the daughter of Baroness Crawley, who served as Labour Party Whip in the House of Lords between 2002 and 2008.)

Quinn is surprisingly weak on Greek and Roman gures including Homer, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and the emperor Diocletian. When discussing the

storytelling device of the “frame tale”, she forgets that this predates One ousand and One Nights by at least a millennium, and can be found in Ovid’s epic e Metamorphoses, Apuleius’s Latin novel e Metamorphoses, and Homer’s Odyssey (the second major poem in the Western tradition), to name only a few classical texts. Yet it is the sections of the book dealing with the Greco-Roman world (as commonly understood) that are arguably the strongest.

It is to be hoped that at least some of the more signi cant mistakes in How e World Made e West will be corrected in the second edition, beginning with the description of the Ancient Greek “Linear B” writing system as “a tool of privilege if not subjection”. According to the last line in the book, “It is time to nd new ways to organise our common world.”

Who will do this for us? Perhaps Quinn is thinking of her own protégés who are responsible for a collection of essays entitled Critical Ancient World Studies: e Case for Forgetting Classics. Apparently this volume owes its existence to her advice.

Critical Ancient World Studies features essays by two tenured academics; otherwise this is the work of PhD students and junior lecturers who were involved in the “Rhodes Must Fall” and “Decolonise the Curriculum” movements. is collection spells out aims that Quinn preferred to leave implicit.

Critical Ancient World Studies articulates a methodology for Classics that seeks to reject: universalism; the idea that anything “white” or “European” is “universal”; any axiomatic connection between “so-called Classics and cultural value”; “positivism”; and, above all the centrality of Ancient Greece and Rome.

Three papers in this volume surpass Quinn’s book in quality. Kiran Pizarro Mansukhani’s “ e Anti-Radical Classicism of Karl Marx’s Dissertation” is outstanding as intellectual history; even those who disagree with its assumptions will learn from it. Krishnan Ram-Prasad writes exceptionally well, and his paper is a pleasure to read, despite the fact that it is under-researched, confused in its aims, and incoherent except in individual paragraphs.

From a purely literary point of view, Ashley Lance’s “Epistemic Justice in the Classical Classroom” is especially valuable, and ought to be transformed into a fulllength memoir. Otherwise, the rest of these rank somewhere between a Goodreads review and a Reddit post.

So much for activism. Traditional Classics stands unchallenged, even by those who carry water like Kipling’s Gunga Din for their colonial masters in American universities. ●

Regency romance

Andrea Valentino

Marriage, the internet gleefully informs me, is just too expensive for people my age. In June 2023, the riving Center of Psychology found that 73 per cent of Millennial and Gen Z couples thought tying the knot too pricey in today’s economy. But is this news?

Take Arthur Wesley, an ambitious young army ofcer, who proposed to Kitty Pakenham. But thanks his miserly captain’s salary, Pakenham’s family twice refused to bless the match. Wesley, now better known as Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, eventually did get his way — but only after 12 years of professional success made the marriage nancially viable.

each year, occasionally pursued by reluctant fathersin-law.

What emerges from all this research is di cult to characterise, with Muir stressing that marriages were as varied as the people who entered them. Some husbands, like the Foreign Secretary Lord Castlereagh, were remarkably devoted. He was determined, he told his wife in October 1800, “never to pass from one Country to another, even for a day, without you”.

Others, such as Andrew Stoney Bowes, were monsters. On one occasion, Bowes threw a dish of hot potatoes at his wife; elsewhere, he burned her face with a candle, before she nally escaped her tormentor after years of su ering. Despite the preoccupation with wealth and status, approaches to class could be just as diverse. She may have been a mere actress, for instance, but Harriet Mellon’s marriage to the banker omas Coutts was apparently happy — as was her second union, following Coutts’s death, to the Duke of St Albans.

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Love and Marriage In the Age of Jane Austen is replete with stories of newlyweds reduced to scrimping, or of men staying unmarried for years until their accounts were in order. As such, it can be hard to read this thoughtful new history without contrasting present with past, Austen’s famous dictum about single men “in possession of a good fortune” looming nearby.

However Regency courtships could be even more brutal. Charles Arbuthnot, a diplomat and politician, could only marry his second wife after insuring his life for £10,000.

yet this book involves far more than the comparative economics of love. Dr Rory Muir evokes the romantic life of Regency Britain in all its variety, from irtations and honeymoons to children and divorce. As the Duke of Wellington’s protracted courtship implies, what the author calls the “upper layers of society” receive most attention, though lawyers, tutors and even an Irish footman make appearances, too. Sources are equally mixed. e author of several books on the Napoleonic Age, Muir waltzes through letters, diaries, and publications with names like the Lady’s Magazine. Given the book’s title, the novels of the time are another predictable focus, doubly helpful when ction often re ected real-world ideas. Just as Mr Bennet warns Elizabeth that her “lively talents” risk leaving her in an unequal marriage, many couples were careful to delight in shared interests, such as hunting or Byron’s poetry. And just as Wickham ran away with Elizabeth’s sister, dozens of men really did elope to Gretna Green

With so many characters bustling about, Muir inevitably expands his narrative beyond the domestic setting: one of this book’s strengths is how it anchors Regency romance in wider societal currents. Shipped o to sea as young as 13, with scant opportunities to meet women, naval ofcers were renowned for marrying fast. In July 1792, Jane Austen’s cousin met Captain omas Williams on holiday. Before the month was out, they were engaged, with a wedding day set.

Given the book’s elite cast, love and sex also mingle with politics. We learn of future prime minister George Canning’s marital a ection in a letter composed the night before his famous duel with Castlereagh. Of Castlereagh himself, attitudes towards homosexuality are vividly demonstrated by his blackmail. His crime, according to the admittedly unstable Lord Londonderry, was being lured into a brothel by a man dressed as a woman.

Between the pubescent sailors and cross-dressing prostitutes, Regency Britain can now seem utterly alien. But if worries about wedding costs are recognisable to some readers, what really endures from Love and Marriage are small human moments that cut across the centuries. e impoverished son of a bishop, Andrew Barnard is a very Georgian gentleman. Yet in letters to his wife — with talk of a secret retreat called “Cuddle Hall” — he feels captivatingly modern.

Or else Harriet Capel, who became infatuated with a much older man: “Oh that some kind creature would put me at once out of my agonies,” she wrote to him. “Is such a life as mine worth having?” ●

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Nina Power Love in a remotelycontrolled climate

The problem with the future is that it’s never quite as interesting or as different as we imagine (or, in some cases, hope) it might be. Human beings still feel old-fashioned emotions like jealousy, lust and disappointment, and no matter how much we might like to pretend otherwise, we will still inhabit ageing and often painful eshy bodies that feel miserable without touch and which long for doughnuts even when too many doughnuts have already been consumed.

If you’re an anthropologist-futurologist like Roanne van Voorst, curious to nd out about what the future of sex might be like, it makes sense that you’d begin your enquiries at the bleeding edge of the new things that people pretend they like. After all, she tells us, experts have claimed that, by 2050, ten per cent of young people will not only have had sex with a robot but will want to live with one.

Perhaps these “experts” are secretly robots pretending to be scientists — who knows? — but this is an extremely depressing claim, regardless of whether the next quarter-century will really see young people get it on with some sort of mechanical sex-slave.

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While Van Voorst is intrigued by sex dolls, virtual dating, the hiring of friends, taking DNA tests to discover partner compatibility, necking sex drugs to induce horniness, paying for sex, loving multiple people at once, and so on, and tries at least some of these things out herself, she thankfully doesn’t go “all in”. e human condition remains unchanged.

She writes: “Without love we lose our life force, fail to thrive, fail to grow.” Loneliness is a massive, and growing, problem for richer countries, where fewer people have children and are more likely to live and die alone. Van Voorst notes that almost half of residents in

So the market for love-lack-plugging entities, whether virtual pals or partner-sharing, is clearly a growing one, and who wouldn’t want to make money from human misery? Dating apps, while promising endless, debilitating choice, are designed for you not to nd a partner, because then you never leave the app. Is polyamory, whereby “several simultaneous, open, loving relationships are maintained”, a solution to all the loneliness? I’m not sure why a human timeshare would be a better solution than mutually picking someone you randomly meet and making a go of it with them, but perhaps I’m missing something.

Van Voorst hangs out with some polyamorous groups (“polycules”) and in one case meets a “friendship baby”, a consequence of one such arrangement where six adults live together. One wonders whether the baby is so keen on polyamory, but no matter: Van Voorst is told that jealousy, while unfortunately ineradicable, nevertheless tells you something about your own insecurity rather than about your partner.

Besides, human beings have always been polyamorous, or at least non-monogamous, she claims, so why not make it into a perky, rationalist, transparent, spreadsheet sort of thing? If I tell you that I want to have sex with your friend, that’s okay, you shouldn’t feel sad about it; in fact, it’s good.

e author seems almost cross with herself that she feels little a nity with polyamory: “How can it be that I feel so comfortable with monogamy, while a slow but steadily growing group of people does not feel the same way and claims that polyamory is the way of the future?”

But the phenomenon in its contemporary form raises a general and troubling question: what model of the self is presupposed in polyamory, or for a person who wants to have sex with a doll (I am not saying these are

Amsterdam and Rotterdam live alone and are not in a relationship.

If we outsource our decisions to machines, we will be less capable of navigating our own feelings

the same people!)? Or for someone who makes relationships in virtual reality but struggles to speak to others in the real world?

Van Voorst seems to take it as read that it’s a good thing for desire to be expressed in these ways, or at least better expressed than repressed, since these phenomena will only grow in the future. erefore we should understand before we judge. But we can see immediate problems with any model of the self that begins with desire, rather than, say, duty or relationality.

We may not want to use a sex robot, but might we want to judge a society that says it’s okay to do so? Sex may be understood increasingly as onanistic, but pornography and the sexualisation of inanimate objects, not to mention a world in which people pay for friendship and sex, tells us something much larger about our culture. And it’s not a happy story.

van voorst’s artificial interactions were ultimately “docile, predictable, controllable”, and in the end she feels more sympathy for her inept robot vacuum cleaner than she does for Nick the sex doll, who has an enormous cock but has screws through his hands and habitually falls over. Van Voorst, one has to say, exhibits a certain naivety regarding the di erences between male and female sexual desire: she ends up speaking a monologue to Nick in the sex doll brothel who (not very surprisingly) is more often used by gay men than heterosexual women.

Van Voorst ultimately sounds a cautious note that none of these great technological or chemical inventions can really replace the surprising (and we might even say, endearingly annoying) aspects of human interaction. She cares more about love at the end of her research than at the beginning. e afterword depicts a lovely morning with her father in a forest where they are told about how tree roots are connected but that these attachments are often severed in the city.

Without human interaction, or its replacement by images, disembodied voices and screens, we will not develop; we will get no feedback on our behaviour. If we outsource our decisions to machines, particularly about love, we will be reneging on a central feature of our humanity itself.

He’s not the messiah, he’s a transwoman

Victoria Smith

It is no fun beingon the wrong side of “the trans debate”. Given the choice between rainbows and kindness or binary sex and bigotry, who’d want to align themselves with the latter? is is why so many feminists, troubled by the insistence that “trans women are women”, go to great lengths to educate ourselves. is whole thing can’t just be what it looks like — men deciding that nothing of ours cannot be theirs, not even the very experience of being us. ere must, we tell ourselves, be more to it than that. Like Debbie Hayton, what we tend to nd — at least if we dare to keep tugging at the thread — is that we were right to start with. Hayton, a post-operative transwoman who came to realise his sex could not be changed, found himself asking similar questions to feminists, and drawing similar conclusions. Gender identity “was impossible to pin down”; it “explained nothing”, or rather, “it explained away the truth”. Alas, there are women who could have told him that years ago. “If I had known in 2012 what I know now,” he writes, “would I have transitioned? In short, the answer is no.” en again, as he muses a paragraph later, “maybe I did need to learn the hard way?”

What Do Men Want?: Masculinity and its Discontents

We will become more machine-like and less capable of navigating the world, let alone our own feelings. Technology will not reduce loneliness at all but serve only to draw attention, when we are not distracted by it, to our isolation. Re-socialsation through church, reading groups, and an embrace of the random unmediated encounter, seems by far the better option. Let us not become the tool of our tools. ●

Transsexual Apostate is a disturbing book, written for disturbing times. It is the story of a personal mania set against a broader cultural and political descent into madness. A decade ago, Hayton — a straight, middle-aged father of two — decided that the issues that had gripped him since childhood could be resolved if he became a woman. Online forums persuaded him that he had in fact always been one. “It might have been fantastic nonsense,” he notes, “but it was the message I wanted to hear […] It was not for me to address a psychological disorder; instead the rest of society needed to a rm my true gender.”

I t is refreshing, but also bizarre, to see this stated so clearly. One of the more comic aspects of Hayton’s account lies in the fact that he, someone who descended so far into delusion, ends up being out-deluded by the world that surrounds him. Hayton begins

There is a part of me that wonders whether becoming an “apostate” functions as a new hero’s journey as a new hero’s journey

to see that the story he has told himself does not make sense just at the point when politicians, HR departments, trade unions and academic institutions commit themselves to repeating it back to him. It all starts to feel a bit LifeofBrian He, the transwoman, cannot persuade wannabe allies that he is not the messiah after all.

Hayton describes his desire to be a woman as “insatiable” but this is not about a book about women. During the course of reading it, I felt torn between gratitude for Hayton’s honesty, and irritation at his lack of curiosity for women as people. ere can be a glibness to it. When discussing how the male fantasy of womanhood can be maintained by engaging in “stereotypically feminine activities”, he jokes about not meaning housework (“the focus is on the self, not the wider world”).

teem … A good-hearted woman is not supposed to mind.” I am guessing that the number of times I scribbled “FFS!” in the margins of Transsexual Apostate would indicate that I am not a good-hearted woman. I do feel sympathy, all the same.

Getting back to reality has been made all the harder, argues Hayton, by a “verb shift from todo to to be — from gender reassignment to gender identity”. ere is a tension between those who go to great lengths to pass as the opposite sex, and those who simply declare themselves to be such. As a story of transition as process — the book opens with a graphic account of Hayton’s reassignment surgery — Transsexual Apostate is very concerned with the doing. e narrative switch comes when transition ceases to provide things to do.

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It is discomforting how freely Hayton owns up to sel shness with regard to his wife and children. One gets the feeling that the reader must be made complicit, granting absolution in exchange for the truth. He cannot help it, we are told. e autogynephilic “compulsion to transition” is, we are informed, “driven by one of the most powerful forces known to man — the male sex drive”. Well, quite. It certainly isn’t driven by any great insight into female inner lives.

W hat did H ayton really aspire to be? T he answer is somewhat disappointing: “trans people wish to be perceived as attractive members of the opposite sex”. Not boring old female subjects, but visually appealing objects of desire. It is better, I suppose, than Paris Lees vaunting the joys of “being eye-fucked on the escalator” or Andrea Long Chu de ning “the barest essentials” of femaleness as “an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eyes”.

Nonetheless, when one considers how much this debate has cost individuals — women losing jobs because they believe sex matters, rape victims denied single-sex care, teenage girls in ight from femaleness, lesbians pressured to sleep with males — one might have hoped for a little bit more. Is this really all this comes down to?

“No one ever asked women,” wrote Germaine Greer in The Whole Woman (1999), “if they recognized sexchange males as belonging to their sex or considered whether being obliged to accept MTF transsexuals as women was at all damaging to their identity or self-es-

Noting the way in which seeing others transition increased his own compulsion to do so, Hayton admits that “it is much easier to live unachievable dreams — as I did throughout childhood — than it is to cope with the realisation that the magic treatment is just out of reach”. ere is a part of me that wonders whether becoming an “apostate”, far from constituting a retracing of steps, functions as a new hero’s journey, another form of self-harm as self-a rmation. Which is not to suggest that Hayton’s voice is not important.

At times I found myself drawing comparisons with Hannah Barnes’ excellent Time to ink (2023), which chronicled the downfall of the Tavistock Gender Service for Children. While very di erent in approach, there, too, I found myself thinking “but this is insane — all of it — so who cares about the details?” Yet I also know that, right now, details matter all too much.

Considered on their own, other people’s delusions and desires are not terribly interesting. As Martha Nussbaum wrote of Judith Butler, “If some individuals cannot live without the sexiness of domination, that seems sad, but it is not really our business.” Such things become our business, however, when workplaces demand we endorse them; when language is distorted to accommodate them; when individuals are demonised for failing to play along. en we cannot look away.

We need those who are willing to speak from the inside — not just the never-deluded, but the un-deluded, too. Transsexual Apostate might have pissed me o , but perhaps the most unlikely truths can set us free. ●

Why Labour has the best history books

D.H. Robinson

Someone I knew back in the day once told me that when he left home he joined all three political parties: Labour because they had the best drugs, the Tories because they had the best women, and the Lib Dems for a night o . His point being, I guess, that the movements still had their di erences, even in the “I agree with Nick” period.

Painful as it is for a Tory historian to admit, obviously, Labour has the best history books — if not the best history, or necessarily any history at all. Part of the reason is that most historians are on the left anyway, so most histories of the right are written with such masticating hostility that you can nd teeth-marks on the spine. Hatred doesn’t necessarily make for bad history: Robert Caro claims not to like Lyndon Johnson. Mind you, 50 years of chasing Johnson’s shade from the Texan hill country to south Vietnam has to invite some kind of psychoanalysis.

With Ageof Hope Richard Toye has written an exceptionally uent history of the Attlee government — and a pleasingly his torical history at that. e early careers of the “Big Five” are woven through the rst half of the twentieth century, threads split over war and paci sm and orthodoxy and sophistry and the other staples of political division, rewound by strikes and division lobbies and more wars and the other staples of political convenience.

and the constituency ceased to exist four years later.

Of course, British Labourism’s dirty secret is that the party has always had far less to do with communism than communing with the dead: even if it has generally dissented from the big-C Communist practice of embalming its leaders — a process which, in any event, would be rather redundant for recent incumbents.

( ere’s a joke to be made about the “EdStone” somewhere around here, but I’ll leave it for now.)

One of several problems with necrophilia in politics — as the culture warriors so helpfully remind us every hour of every day — is that some of the shades were pretty shady. Some people in the past did not do what some people in the present would have done, if only they had been present in the past themselves. e quiet problem with most Labour historiography is that most of the Labour party’s great leaders — Jimmy Callaghan, Hugh Gaitskell, and Clement Attlee — would now be on the hard right.

e problem is the treason of the man who brought Labour to power, Ramsay MacDonald (left), who went one step further than his conservative successors and wound up actually leading a Conservative government. For this reason above all, the present centenary of his rst ministry has been largely ignored.

I might have preferred a bit more philosophical grist; but to criticise a writer for not writing the book the critic would have written is not really criticism at all — although it is common practice in what now passes for the academy. Alongside his savvy understanding of the making of a political movement, and all the anticipated laws and sausages, Toye has a real eye for the past-as-other-country, and many of those who oated in on the socialist tide would denitely be non-doms in the present. On one Labour MP and sometime junior minister, he writes:

George Rogers liked to consult dead politicians via his wife’s mediumship, and claimed they always told him accurately what his majority at each election would be.

“When I rst entered Parliament in 1945 I was told I would be MP for North Kensington for 25 years and then the seat would be abolished.” He did serve until 1970

David Torrance is one of my favourite historians, an exceptional biographer of Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon, and an outstanding historian of unionism, who has now turned his hand to the rst Labour government of 1924. e great strength of the work lies in the biographical studies of “ e Wild Men” themselves, especially the chapters devoted to the Prime Minister — the “mass of contradictions” who normalised the idea of socio-culturally conservative, economically socialist politics as a legitimate creed of government here.

A special mention is owed to an especially endearing vignette of Jimmy omas, Colonial Secretary, who replaced his predecessor’s habit of summoning his secretary with a bell, with the new practice of shouting “come ’ere you bugger” down the corridor: not just an early blow against the creep of the managerial state, but also a reminder of a better time when there was a healthy element of genuine cultural friction within the British political elite. at said, the Earl of Birkenhead reckoned omas was “no more a socialist than … Mr Winston Churchill”.

All of which brings us back to e Problem of Labour and its History. e Labour Party doesn’t have a sense of history, it has “progress”. It must have contracted this disease during its youthful dalliances with the Liberals, who acquired it from a one-night stand with

Thus Labour continues to blunder down that long blind Blairite alleyway, unable to turn back or find an exit

the Whigs at Willis’s Rooms on the heady evening of 6 June 1859. By “progress” I don’t mean the idea of making things better, of course.

Still less do I mean the metahistorical theories of socio-cultural or economic change or return that de ne the timescapes of communism and fascism. By progress, I mean vague appeals to “the way the world is going” as the justi cation of all thought and action: the party’s manic enthusiasm for anything with its own trend-line — be it mass immigration, European integration, whatever.

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Unable to look in any depth at the origins of these trend lines (in certain knowledge of nding something that doesn’t seem right “in the twenty- rst century”), it is swept along by the torrent of events, even while it keeps up the façade of mastering historical change.

us Labour continues to blunder down that long blind Blairite alleyway, unable to turn back or nd an exit, whether led by an embalmed barrister from Holborn or an obscure yodeller from Islington.

From this fate, Tories are safe: that strange British crypto-conservatism, that somehow lives in history but outside time. Its last prophet, no less weirdly, was the greatest modernist poet:

... what there is to conquer by strength and submission, has already been discovered

Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope

To emulate — but there is no competition — ere is only the ght to recover what has been lost

And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions at seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.

For us, there is only the trying. e rest is not our business.

Sometimes (now) this lack of easy anchorage produces breathtaking weakness. But it also makes the Tory spirit di cult to kill: and in defeat, the intellectual arsenal for its renewal is immeasurably greater. ●

David Thomas The fixtures that forged a nation

First, an admission. Your reviewer is a sports nut. It started with the LA Olympics of 1984, glued to the TV with my grandmother, as indiscriminate in her love of any competition as I subsequently became. It didn’t matter when all the football migrated to satellite channels. ere was still wet and windy rugby league on Grandstand, the NFL on Channel 4.

Indoor bowls, outdoor bowls, kabaddi, I had it bad. is matters because the addict implicitly expects something from a book about sport and David Horspool’s fascinating More than a Game will test you if you are looking for the quick thrill of “I hit the ball, Brian, and there it was in the back of the net”.

It starts with some gentle mis-selling. We get those cinematic, climactic snapshots of the Women’s Euros in 2022. Chloe Kelly toe-pokes the ball in, she’s wheeling away, shirt twirling over her head. Pandemonium, the old foe of Germany vanquished, “Incredible scenes!” a commentator hoarsely shouts above the crowd’s roar. You can feel it can’t you, you’re excited? Yeah, well dial that in, as the next chapter is about the role of the medieval tournament in our sporting heritage. Even if you loathed sport, you could enjoy this book — which is why it can both delight and frustrate.

Horspool explores how sport has shaped Britain, pointing out that it is “di cult to think of another element in British history that touches on so many of the most signi cant aspects of past and present”. At 300 pages, its scope is dizzying, covering the medieval tournament, horse racing, cricket, rugby, football, cycling, tennis and the Commonwealth. He o ers a “thematic account” of the history of sport in Britain, covering many that were codi ed here, even if it is futile to argue over where they were invented.

e broad themes that run through the chapters are familiar. Cliques and elites maintain control through racism, misogyny and class barriers. Horspool often neatly couples issues together, boxing and race, rugby and national identity, tennis and sexism. is is no light

read and justi ably angry in places.

Horspool’s skill is in bringing nuance with well researched and little-known examples that had large ripple e ects. Prejudices uctuate in sport with numerous examples of a regression in attitudes and he resists any idea of linear progress in fairness and equality. e chapter on boxing focuses on racial prejudice in the sport, how it both broke down racial barriers but also erected them at di erent points in its history. We learn of the success of Jewish boxers, such as Daniel Mendoza in the late eighteenth century, who gained widespread popularity but often had to respond to anti-Semitic slurs with his sts outside the ring.

Horspool does not argue that Mendoza’s popularity put much of a dent in prejudice, but he was the forerunner of generations of talented Jewish boxers and promoters from London’s East End, including Gershon Mendelo , who boxed as Ted “Kid” Lewis (left, sparring), to Monek Prager (better known as promoter Mickey Du ). Horspool also cites the early-twentieth-century ban on ghts between black and white boxers instigated by Lord Lonsdale, the president of the National Sporting Council whose name adorns the prestigious belts of British championship bouts.

While Lonsdale used his in uence to stop such ghts, boxing’s governing body formalised the rule by stating that any contestants for the Lonsdale belts “must be legally British subjects born of white parents”. e rule persisted until 1948.

T he section on tennis is a gem. Both croquet and tennis bene tted from the invention of the lawnmower in 1830. Tennis began as a genteel pursuit where men and women competed in a low intensity game of what we would now call “patball”, with a high net that made high velocity shots almost impossible. is is a far cry from Serena or Novak lashing a forehand down the line at a hundred miles per hour.

e self-declared inventor of tennis, Major Walter Wing eld, patented the game “Lawn Tennis or Sphairistike”, falsely claiming that this strange word was the Ancient Greek term for tennis. is chapter makes serious points about sexism in tennis, including a re-evaluation of the common belief that the world was so outraged by Suzanne Lenglen stepping out at Wimbledon in 1919 wearing short sleeves. ere is a sweeping, well-executed account of the reasons behind Britain’s obsession with soccer. “Football football, football, all the football all the time … it will never be nally decided who has won the football,” as David Mitchell’s sketch memorably put it. e nature of fandom is a highlight here: “in a way that has no analogue in the world of conventional commercial transactions, customers continue to give their custom while vociferously criticising the product” is a strikingly elegant summary of the football-lover’s bind.

Horspool has a keen eye for the quirky and absurd. ere was no middle stump in cricket until it was mandated by the unerring accuracy of “Lumpy Stevens” whose deliveries often bisected the two stumps used at the time. To put the game in its social context, we are reminded that Lumpy was the Earl of Tankerville’s bowler and might as well have been his racehorse for all the autonomy he had in his play.

e threat of Welsh revivalist preachers to rugby in the frenzied outpouring of religious fervour in 1904–5 seems a frivolous diversion. e author acknowledges it did little to deter anyone from going to Welsh rugby but it is in fact a beautifully rendered origin story for the singing of hymns, and later national anthems, at games.

Horspool doesn’t always give you what you think you want. He will mention John Conteh without reference to his implausibly gifted, measured brutality in the ring or his struggles outside it. Sandy Lyle’s bunker shot at the Masters and his funny little triumph dance are out but a comparison of the similar philosophies of Victorian golf course designers and Capability Brown is in.

His commitment to a one-theme-per-sport approach inevitably sometimes misses a trick. For instance, the boxing chapter is focused on race but the boom in women’s boxing will become a huge part of its history: ve years ago the success of what will be the Taylor-Cameron trilogy was unthinkable.

More than a Game o ers something rich, textured and complex: a thoughtful history of how sport has shaped society and vice versa. You will nd delicious nuggets, several “I never knew that” fascinomas, and the overdue correction of long accepted narratives about our sport-obsessed nation. All ngs considered, Brian, the boy done good. ●

Jeremy Black Weak, flawed, limited; an opportunity missed

Doubtless kindness lay behind Penguin’s absence of response to e Critic’s repeated requests for a review copy for me of this book. My request also failed, but I have gone out and bought a copy, and now understand. Possibly Penguin felt I might be upset to nd no reference to my Imperial Legacies:The British EmpireAround theWorld (2019) in a book described as “a groundbreaking exploration of how British empire has shaped the world we live in today”.

But actually no. With its pretensions and authorial conceit, Sanghera’s book is actually rather a good laugh. He apparently is the word and the way for Britain which “cannot hope to have a productive future in the world without acknowledging what it did to the world in the rst place”, a process that is to be done on his terms in order to overcome a British allergy to the unattractive aspects of the imperial past.

Stripped to its essentials, this is a book that repeats well-established themes and serves them up in a famil-

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iar fashion. Although 461 pages long, only 247 are text and, with a generous typeface that is a pleasure to read, there is only so much space for his analysis. Unfortunately, that is what is on o er.

It might be thought appropriate to establish what was di erent or familiar in British imperialism in a Western European context by comparing in detail, say, Britain’s Caribbean empire with those of France, Spain and the Dutch. It might be thought useful to assess Britain as an Asian imperial power alongside Russia or the Ottomans, China or the Persians.

It might be appropriate to follow the direction of much of the world history approach over the last half-century and assess empires as shared projects in which there were many stakeholders, British and non-British. To turn to the British empire, it might be useful to discuss the oldest “colony”, Ireland, or to assess policy in (Highland) Scotland. It could be appropriate to consider how the causes, context, course and consequences of British imperialism varied greatly.

Sanghera has not risen to the challenge. His study is conceptually weak, methodologically awed, historiographically limited, and lacking basic skills in source assessment. is is a pity, as his position as a journalist, and his link with Penguin, provide an opportunity for using his abilities as a communicator to expand public understanding of the subject.

Sanghera criticises “an enervating culture war on the theme of British empire”. He rightly draws attention to the aws of the “balance sheet” view of British empire, but I am less con dent than he is about how best to consider what he terms “a culture war”. e promotion of “understanding” for which he calls is scarcely val-

Sanghera really should have devoted more attention to the pre-Western history

ue-free, nor does he adequately address the degree to which there have always been “culture wars” in both Britain and its colonies and former colonies. Unsurprisingly so, as there were substantive issues at stake, and questions of goal and identity were very much part of the equation.

From reading journalists’ comment pieces it is hard to avoid the sense that they feel that there is a correct view (theirs, what a surprise), and that others are variously culture wars, populist, ignorant, etc. is is the standard approach to history, notably national history, and, particularly in the case of Britain, empire and slavery. Yet, such a stance scarcely captures the complexities of the issue, a problem very much seen in Sanghera’s work, despite his claim to nuance.

from that in Ireland or Barbados.

To emphasise the British imperial presence can be to downplay local agency. For example, with West Africa, Western imperialism was but one of a wide range of transformative factors, local and international. e impact of Islam from the Sahel has been of greater longterm consequence. Sanghera might disagree, but he tends to shy away from analysis and debate, preferring to select material based on a priori assumptions that re ect a limited understanding of historical processes.

For Nigeria, he refers to “the disastrous merging of very di erent ethnic groups into one political structure”. Maybe so, and worth consideration, but it is not of course the case that such a process awaited the Europeans in West Africa. ere were signi cant empires within the subcontinent, Mali and Songhai being but two. Moreover, the con icts and enslavement seen in the absence of European control scarcely suggest that British imperialism was the true source of con ict.

History Repeats Itself

Take the slave trade. How much of an emphasis should be placed on the pre-existing slave trade in Africa and on African agency in the Atlantic trade? On his Caribbean “research trip” Sanghera found time to note the prices of luxury hotels, but not to visit the best of the museums, that in Guadeloupe. It makes much of both factors, and o ers a far more subtle account (reaching to the present) than you will nd in Sanghera.

Yet one of the four publisher’s readers for the second edition of my The Atlantic Slave Trade (2015, 2024) wanted no mention of African agency. To suggest there is no “culture war” on empire is mystifying, and implies that the present is somehow di erent from the past, when such di erences and exchanges were commonplace, and a key element of identity and politics.

at captures another problem with Sanghera’s work: his tendency to exaggerate the impact of empire and, in doing so, fail to give su cient prominence to earlier factors as well as to the limited chronological span of empire. e latter does not mean that empire was inconsequential, but rather that it has to be placed in context.

is is not only true for Britain. ere is, for example, much to be gained by putting the Japanese imperial episodes in Taiwan and Korea into context. Similarly, the British presence in much of empire, for example Burma or Sudan, was shortlived, and very di erent in impact

T here is a sense of profound laziness in much of Sanghera’s analysis. He really should have devoted more attention to the pre-Western history of the areas he discusses, for, as in Sudan, this history has persisted. In part, empire worked by adapting foreign rule into a practice of shared control, and that is as, or more, signi cant than resistance or violence.

Of course, such a proposition should be contextualised but it is one that deserves attention. So too when discussing the imperialisms, however de ned, of other empires at the present moment, whether China or India, Russia or the United States. By contrast, there is scant intellectual capital invested in Sanghera’s approach. Instead, it is discussion by diatribe that comes to the fore.●

The PlumbPudding in Danger

“Red sky at night, wind farms on site. Red sky in the morning, solar panels dawning…”

A Freudian slip

Ella Nixon

When was the last time you described someone as “anal”? Denoting a fastidious individual, the adjective relates to terms such as the unconscious, the Oedipus complex and the Freudian slip. e last reveals the source who unites them, the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). Frank Tallis’s Mortal Secrets: Freud, Vienna, and the Discovery of the Modern Mind provides insight into the fascinating theories and life of this ubiquitous gure.

Tallis seeks to prove beyond all doubt both that Freud is a cultural icon and that Golden Age Vienna (1900–18) was the birthplace of modernity and the modern mind. Mammoth in scope, Mortal Secrets fuses art, culture, psychology and biography to present a multifaceted view of Freud in his own era and of his posthumous reception.

psychopathologies. Unimaginable at the time, its normalisation in wider culture is largely attributable to Freud and Golden Age Vienna. e languid eroticism and nervous tension of Gustav Klimt’s portraits tell of a gossip society where sex could nally be discussed in a clinical setting. Images provide useful illustration; clothes that seem ascetic today — baggy and shapeless — are contextualised as historically scandalous and neatly indicate our shifted perspectives.

Unfortunately, as the book progresses, the cultural contextualisation of these various theories becomes increasingly directionless and the initial structure less coherent. Nazism, Jung, feminism, Romanticism, nationalism, Buddhism, Shakespeare, Greek myth and climate change all pile up. At several points Freud emerges as a catch-all explanation for the whole history of humankind. Untitled images occasionally mismatch the neighbouring text, leaving the reader to guess their relevance.

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Mythic self-presentation from an early age underpins the enigmatic gure of Freud. When he was a young boy, his mother received a prophecy about his future “greatness” from a mysterious old woman. e enchanting atmosphere of Vienna, with its heady mix of delicate pastries, bustling co ee houses, and sexual sin, serves as the logical backdrop for his subsequent theories about the subconscious.

e individual genius of Freud is contextualised in relation to his contemporaries. Eccentric lecturers such as Jean-Martin Charcot — a theatrical “prince of science” — loomed large in the medical imagination, providing fertile conditions for the emergence of Freud as a charismatic leader. At the same time, he brushed shoulders with artistic greats and infused his mind with the writings of Shakespeare, Dante, and Dickens.

Slipperiness between “disciplines” suggests the applicability of psychoanalysis to many areas of life. Tallis navigates various elds to paint his mosaic prole, but his explanation of psychoanalytical theories are his greatest strength. is comes as no surprise given Tallis’s own profession as a clinical psychologist. Psychosexual development, dream theory and personality structure are succinctly explained, while Freud’s e Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) is summarised in a single sleek passage.

Sexual desire is no longer taboo in the discussion of

However, the most troublesome links are those frequently drawn between Vienna and contemporary society. Some are vaguely interesting: the likening of portraits by Egon Schiele to modern magazine imagery is understandable. But the subsequent link to Grayson Perry’s cross-dressing seems random and unsubstantiated. e resultant book is di cult to categorise — is it a biography, a love letter to Vienna, or an opinion piece?

Tallis’s assertions of Freud’s relevance are insistent. He criticises “Freud-bashers” who cannot distinguish ideas from character aws, yet his own account of Freud is a passionate defence. His repeated return to the age-old debate about whether we can separate work from the life of its author becomes tiresome.

e most convincing links drawn between Freud and society today are implicit. It is easy to infer parallels between his cult-like following and that of current public intellectuals. e ubiquity of Freud speaks to the unfalsi able nature of his theories: they are both compelling and impossible to prove or disprove. For his critics, Freud’s explanations seem rather too compelling, which may explain why he is admired as a genius by some and as a danger by others.

Like a Viennese cream cake, the book is rich in content but di cult to digest. Speci city is sometimes lost in order to cover excessive ground to the point that links drawn between Golden Age Vienna and modern life are increasingly dubious.

In true Freudian fashion, then, we cannot falsify the claims made by Tallis, but they provide tasty thoughts worth chewing. ●

John Self A “lost” novel better left unfound

‘‘T

he lost novel,”it says here, on the cover of Until August, which is published ten years after the death of its author, the Colombian Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez. And why shouldn’t they trumpet it? Márquez was by common consent one of the great novelists of the last century, in uential on several generations of writers after him and the man who popularised the genre of magical realism. (We’ll forgive him the last.)

But if “lost novel” implies a missing masterpiece from the man’s pomp they would imply that, wouldn’t they? then let’s take a sense check. We’re a long way from Márquez’s touchstones One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985): indeed, a long way from full-length ction at all, since nothing he published in the last two decades of his life stretched beyond novella length.

at is the territory we are in with Until August, which clocks up a little under 20,000 words tip to tail. According to the slightly unclear afterword by Márquez’s editor, it was written around 2003–4, though he seems to have needed encouragement to nish it around 2010. e truth is that Márquez su ered from dementia in the last years of his life, and the circumstances which led to the publication of this work are unclear, to say the least. So we will con ne ourselves to the quality of the book as it now spontaneously appears.

it is a story of love and lust from the viewpoint of a 46-year-old woman, Ana Magdalena Bach. Every year, on August 16, she travels to the island where her mother is buried “to place a bouquet of fresh gladioli on her grave”. And, during the four annual visits covered by this story, each year she encounters a di erent man at her hotel and they proceed to do what comes naturally to Gabriel García Márquez characters.

that she doesn’t do it again and again, and again.

Now: it is possible to write a story about a woman in a hotel who indulges in her own pleasures with di erent men and not come over as crass. In fact, the Irish writer Eimear McBride did it a couple of years ago with her novel Strange Hotel. But Márquez is banging a drum from a di erent time, as evidenced by his lip-smacking descriptions of both Ana’s body (“pert breasts”) and the sexual act (“he raised her unhurriedly to the boiling point”).

for certain generations of male novelists, this stu comes with the territory. Márquez is a writer, after all, whose last ction published in his lifetime, Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004), was about a 90-year-old man’s desire to sleep with a 14-year-old virgin: a book with a goal, as Márquez’s fellow Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee carefully put it in his review, “to speak on behalf of paedophilia”.

I could say more about the story, but the sad truth is that there isn’t much more to it. e “gripping exploration of desire, freedom, love and fear” promised by the blurb never becomes gripping, nor does it explore. It begins, it is there, and it ends or at least stops.

Perhaps we shouldn’t expect more from a writer in his eighties when the book was (probably) written. Even without illness, powers fade. Philip Roth found his aptly-named penultimate novel e Humbling so draining to write, and such a failure in execution, that he determined to summon all his ability for one nal, better work the equally aptly-titled Nemesis and then retired. Iris Murdoch wrote her last novel Jackson’s Dilemma when in the early stages of (undiagnosed) dementia: its weakness made sense in retrospect.

ere is nothing in Until August which shows evidence of Márquez’s deteriorating mind – there is even the odd nice line (Ana su ers the “doddering sieges” of one ageing lover) but more importantly, there’s nothing which shows evidence of why he was so admired in the rst place. e lost novel was not crying out to be found.

by contrast, the italian-american writer André Aciman’s star is in the ascendant, even though, at 73 years old, he is already beyond the age Márquez was when he stopped producing substantial work. But then Aciman was a late starter: his debut, and still his most celebrated novel, Call Me By Your Name, was published in 2007.

His new novel e Gentleman from Peru oozes the con dence of a writer who knows he has a faithful The Critic

e rst time it happens, she is shocked by her own behaviour. She is married, after all, and “for the rst time in her life, she had fornicated and spent the night with a man who was not her own”. But she is not so shocked, nor so embarrassed when she returns to her husband,

It becomes clear that we are in a state of irreality, a world of “hinter selves” and déjà vu. The results are surprising but not always subtle

readership that will follow him, tails wagging. ere’s a smoothness even suaveness to the writing which matches the gilded setting: the Amal coast, where a group of young American holidaymakers is whiling away the time while their boat is repaired. While there they see an interesting elderly gentleman white beard, Moleskine notebook, pocket square about whom they speculate. “Painter.” “Mossad.” “Ex-assassin.”

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But they needn’t wonder for long. e gentleman from Peru for it is he makes himself known to the group when he places a hand on the aching shoulder of one of our party and miraculously cures his pain. If there was a faintly fantastical sense to the story before now like one of Roald Dahl’s adult tales or a primped and polished urban myth then from here on the book goes all-in. e gentleman, Raúl, befriends the group and a young woman Margot in particular: but if you’re expecting a Márquezian story of love across the decades, then you’d be wrong mostly.

Raúl is given to gnomic pronouncements “I go back”, “Time stops here” and it soon becomes clear that we are in a state of irreality, a world of “hinter selves” and déjà vu, where the journey he takes Margot on leads her to recognise places she has never been to before. e results are always surprising but not always subtle, taking in heavily symbolic fruit falling to the ground to rot and explanations that drop with a clunk. “ is, according to legend, is possibly where the lotus eaters lived.” “You mean Ulysses’ companions who refused to sail back to Ithaca?” Yeah, those lotus eaters.

But a little charm goes a long way, and the fanciful web that Aciman weaves through a tale no spoilers that takes in Shakespeare, Virgil’s Lugentes Campi and literal spellbinding, is mostly seductive. Whether the book succeeds in its evident aim of creating a new timeless myth, or whether it is a slightly silly diversion, it is in either case probably best read on the sort of hol-

iday that opens the story, when you’re feeling relaxed and welcoming, with your critical faculties temporarily suspended.

last year we learned the astonishing statistic that Japanese writing constitutes a quarter of all translated ction sold in the UK. ese things feed themselves, which means there is now a glut of new Japanese ction in publishers’ catalogues, not all of it worthwhile. Broadly speaking, the books divide into the whimsical (usually involving cats) and the weird; Hiroko Oyamada’s e Hole sits in the latter category. It’s the third of her novels to be published by Granta in short order, this one coming just ve months after her excellent satire e Factory.

It starts straightforwardly enough, with a woman and her husband agreeing to move house to live next door to his parents, rent-free. is entails our narrator giving up her job living the dream, her friend thinks and adopting a life of silence and stasis as a housewife. at this doesn’t suit her is underlined by her experience when she leaves her new home one day and, while pursuing a mysterious creature, promptly falls down a hole. e hole as symbolic as the mysterious creature and as André Aciman’s fruit is so precisely her size that it could have been “made for me”.

We seem to be in the realms of the deranged ction of Kobo Abe, where people are regularly trapped in holes, sand dunes or boxes, but Oyamada’s intentions are more domestic, bringing in Japanese cultural phenomena such as the salaryman and the hikikomori (person who never leaves their home).

Our woman does escape the hole, but she gets trapped otherwise, particularly in conversation with a man who claims to be her brother-in-law and who offers to take her to nd the hole when she nds she can’t stop thinking about it.

e Hole is diverting enough, but there is if you will permit a hole at the centre of it, in that its evasions, and its blend of banality and strangeness, never quite seem to come together into one experience. One of the refreshing qualities of Japanese ction is its appetite for brevity, but on this occasion, less is less. We need more. ●

Who edits the editor?

The bright young things of publishing want to be involved in every line of every new book

The Secret Author has always regarded the Bookseller as a symbol of pretty much everything that is wrong with contemporary publishing. Nevertheless, he took a keen interest in a story that appeared there at the beginning of last month.

Here it was revealed that Ana Fletcher, a former employee at Jonathan Cape who had worked with such luminaries of the modern novel as Martin Amis, Howard Jacobson and Ian McEwan, was founding an agency called Unfolding Edits.

Its aim, Ms Fletcher explained, was to “demystify the art of editing”. ere was quite a lot more of this in a mission statement included on the agency’s website. Trained up to proofread and copy-edit, its proprietor had then discovered that the job of being an editor required far more than these rudimentary skills.

In fact, it involved “thinking about the idea of the book or project, grappling with a book’s shape and structure and helping authors to nd their voice on the page”.

If, as Ana Fletcher suggests, the modern editor is not so much an annotator as a kind of coconceptualist, then this was very far from the case when the rst editors slouched towards the book world’s Bethlehem to be born.

A century ago the job title scarcely existed. Authors were expected to know their business, and as Alec Waugh — who had worked at Chapman & Hall in the 1920s — once remarked, if you had asked Arnold Bennett who his editor was, he would not have known what you meant.

into something a tad more upbeat. is tradition persisted well into the post-war era: Philip Larkin was a much greater in uence on Lucky Jim (1954) than Kingsley Amis’s eventual publisher, Victor Gollancz.

As for publishing rms themselves, much of the evidence suggests that a spirit of laissez faire — unless, that is, parts of the manuscript were judged morally objectionable — prevailed until as recently as 40 years ago.

Paranoiac anxiety attends anything that may be capable of giving o ence, particularly in the area of race or gender

Nicholas Clee, in a recent article in the Literary Review, recalled a conversation with the late Margaret Forster, who revealed that “editing” by her celebrated old-school publisher in the 1960s consisted of “half an hour’s chat, aperitifs and an agreeable lunch”. Taken on by Chatto & Windus’s legendary Carmen Callil in the early 1980s, she was shocked to nd herself compelled to go through the text line by line.

So how does the world of editing look in 2024? It is not true, as is frequently said, that authors aren’t edited any more, for paranoiac anxiety attends anything that might be capable of giving o ence, particularly in the area of race or gender.

In his time the Secret Author has been exposed to every vagary of the modern editorial process: handed notebooks-worth of comment; let o with a phone call; counselled to tear up dozens of pages of the darling work or devote weeks of his life to rewrites; and sometimes edited almost to death.

Editorial advice came courtesy of interested friends: it was John Forster, for example, who persuaded Dickens to change the ending of Great Expectations

As for the motivation behind these sheaves of meticulous comment, this fell into several categories. ere are editors who want to make a better book out of the chaotic mess in front of them, and there are editors who want to impose

their own personality on it. To these can be added a very common phenomenon in a world of slimmed-down lists and a reluctance to commission — the editor who hasn’t as much to do as they would like and compensates by going to town on the work in hand.

All this can be very frustrating, but the chances are that every so often it will be redeemed by a bona de disinterested hotshot worth every penny of their meagre salary and ripe to be rewarded with a heartfelt salutation in the book’s acknowledgements.

Meanwhile, how should an author deal with the voice on the phone murmuring that the manuscript “needs work”, that there are “one or two points that need to be raised” or that character X “doesn’t really work for me”?

An old-school writer would probably suggest that you follow Charles Ryder’s cousin Jasper’s advice on how to treat Oxford dons: “as if they were the vicar at home”. e Secret Author’s trick is this: confronted with what seems an excessive number of queries, perhaps extending to outright pedantry, rst re-read the manuscript and ensure that you haven’t actually produced something under-par.

If, on the other hand, the editor is simply making heavy weather, write them an e usive email, complimenting them on their expertise, assure them that their comments are exceptionally helpful and that you intend to follow them to the letter, wait a fortnight, make a fth of the alterations they suggested and then send the text back with a note insisting that it has been “completely revised.”

e editor will doubtless twig what you are up to, but honour will have been saved on both sides — and that, in publishing, is everything. ●

e Secret Author is a former Professor of English and Creative Writing at a leading British university

Romeo Coates

◆ despite opposition expressed in some quarters, surely the idea for “black-only” audience nights at the Noël Coward eatre deserved to be applauded? If we’re to truly embrace the spirit of vibrant diversity in 2024, being eeced by exorbitant West End ticket prices must no longer be the largely exclusive privilege of the white middle-classes.

while the eagerly-o ended are quick to seize on supposedly disparaging remarks made about scary Sunderland folk by RADA’s inspirational new vice president Cynthia Erivo, one cannot help thinking there’s been a crossing of wires.

After being shown said footage, it seemed clear enough to me that Ms Erivo was merely pointing out she prefers northern cities to “feel like London”.

Perfectly reasonable!

FORTHESAKEOFTRANSPARENCY —

and after repeated goading from certain rivals — this loyal and longstanding member of the Actors’ Benevolent Fund will indeed con rm he’s “disappointed” not to be named among the organisation’s 12 recentlyunveiled board members.

While it would be wrong to deny that particularly in ammatory exchanges occurred prior to this bizarre decision at my expense, it’s now one’s stated intention to draw a line under past hostilities for the sake of the ABF moving forward.

Needless to say, this doesn’t apply to one Mr Simon Callow, whose disloyalty in recent weeks has proved unforgivable.

Chasing the dragon

Once simply known as the home of Burton and Hopkins, Port Talbot becomes a hotbed for Welsh revolution thanks to the latest endeavours of third-best

at the time of writing, i can excitedly confirm yours truly is part of the groundbreaking consortium of seasoned London character actors intent on buying Islington’s long neglected theatrical gem, e Old Red Lion.

Following news the establishment’s up for sale, our blueprint is clear: namely restoring this upstairs fringe venue to former glories, while ensuring our own presently “unfashionable” talents are given a new home, for the undoubted bene t of the public at large. Naturally, should up-and-coming types also wish to see their contrasting visions brought to this most intimate of stages, we baby boomers would consider it a moral duty to nurture the younger generation — for the right price.

One’s own emotional attachment to the place was formed back in 1998 during an early performance of my (since occasionally-acclaimed) production, Oliver Cromwell: e Musical. Moved to hear my entrance as Old Ironsides meet with such joyous roars of approval from the select audience present, I tastefully ignored jealous co-stars’ claims it was the sound of Arsenal fans in the boozer below.

“Between you and me …”

famous son, Mr Sheen.

Having already rashly chosen to abandon the Hollywood residence for a life among the real people back in his home town, dishevelled Michael’s grim BBC drama had all the hallmarks of a ne actor overly preoccupied with pleasing the local hoi polloi. While those esteemed Port Talbot predecessors proved so adept at delivering altogether more poetic visions of Wales while comfortably residing many, many miles away, dear Michael is coming dangerously close to squandering a ne Welsh tradition.

◆ irked to see masterful Irishman Andrew Scott recently denied a BAFTA, Doctor Who boss Russell T Davies complains: “What I think happened there was, when a gay man plays a gay man, he’s not considered to be acting.” We can all agree this blinkered trade’s endless thwarting of talented homosexuals has gone on too long.

following a typically de ating Monday morning telephone conversation with the mis ring agent, one brie y allowed himself to be overcome by a sense of hopelessness.

Disconsolately heading into the living room, the sight of Nigel Havers dressed as a “cowboy” on daytime television served as a timely reminder that mine isn’t the only career in crisis.

delighting celtic comrades with rousing calls to bring down the monarchy, Dundonian show pony Mr Cox bellowed: “ e whole bloody shooting match should go!”

Fast forward eighteen months and twinkle-eyed Brian proudly poses next to our new Queen for the cameras, sweetly purring: “Yurr Majesty.”

Unimaginative types shouting “hypocrisy” at the great man’s expense once again fail to grasp the intricacies of socialist showbiz life.

Pull the trigger

Suffice to say, the sight of Ralph Fiennes taking silly “trigger warners” to task on the BBC was cheered to the rafters from this particular living room!

By contrast, one struggled to be so enthused by the dramatic spectacle of Dame Helen Mirren tearing up an AI-generated speech when addressing an American awards ceremony.

While dashing Ralph’s credentials — not least since defending Ms Rowling from the treacherous boy wizard — are rmly established, history indicates our media-savvy Dame’s allegiances must prove more changeable.

WHEN PREVIOUSLY “BLANKED” by former co-star Bob Powell (1977’s Jesus of Nazareth), I politely speculated in this column whether it might be down to forgetfulness, senility or blindness.

Having more recently experienced an even frostier reception from Ol’ Blue Eyes during a second, similarly brief North London encounter — despite being at pains to engage civilly! — I’m now forced to acknowledge the pettiest of grudges on Bob’s part.

reflecting on dodging the perils of social media, Hugh Bonneville endearingly quipped: “Nowadays I just comment on pictures of golden retrievers. It’s about as edgy as I get.”

With Hugh having recently parted from the rst Mrs Bonneville, I see an aspiring Mrs Bonneville Mark 2 is

having chosen to take public aim at surviving Monty Python colleagues — not to mention their young lady manager’s “disastrous” handling of the nances — California-based Mr Idle wishes it to be known the resulting furore is all down to the dastardly English press. Eric announces he’ll be continuing to ignore sensationalist articles written by grubby London journalists, who cynically quote — word for word — what he’s already personally tweeted to over half a million followers.

already cautiously gracing the public stage. We can rest assured our canny housewives’ favourite will manage sensitive developments with trademark aplomb.

Rogue male

Ever since my ill-fated attempt to address the nephew/ lodger’s underachieving status in life at 34½, the lad’s attitude towards his uncle frankly verges on the chilling. With this angry young man now intent on blaming all and sundry for his shortcomings, along with those fashionable claims of poor mental health, one’s long-ago decision to make him the main bene ciary of the Coates estate looks increasingly ill-advised.

Evidently sensing his elderly relation’s privately having second thoughts (I see the solicitor next Tuesday), the presently murderous look in the rogue’s eyes suggests he’s ready to resort to just about anything to preserve matters to his advantage. Should any suddenly fatal misfortune befall this vulnerable septuagenarian in the coming days, I request the authorities be alerted to the above account. ●

THE CRITICS Music | Opera | Pop | Art

Norman Lebrecht on Music

A great conductor leaves the stage

●Seiji Ozawa was the first of his kind and, in many respects, the last. No conductor from China or Japan ever commanded world orchestras before him, and none has since matched his impact.

After entry jobs in Toronto and San Francisco, Ozawa was music director in Boston for just under three decades. When he left in 2002, the Vienna State Opera made him music director.

Although his opera repertoire was as limited as his German conversation, Ozawa added a much-needed dynamism. In an era of peacock conductors, Ozawa brought an unfeigned and impenetrable exoticism.

Not for him the post-1945 cringe that Japan displayed towards Western culture. Ozawa bore his twin heritages with pride. e son of a dentist in occupied Manchuria, he spoke Chinese as a child and visited China often after Chairman Mao’s death, holidaying with his family while giving masterclasses to young musicians. He buried half of his mother’s ashes in the garden of the family home. He considered himself bicultural.

Repatriated to Japan in 1941, he worked seven years as a household servant for his music teacher, Hideo Saito (in time, he would create the Saito Kinen orchestra in his master’s memory). At 15 he broke two ngers in a rugby scrum, ending hopes of a piano career.

A conducting competition victory in France earned him a summer in Tanglewood, where Leonard Bernstein hired him as assistant with the New York Philharmonic. Herbert von Karajan called him to Berlin. Ozawa syncretised both of

MOST MUSICIANS COULD GRASP WHAT HE WANTED; ANY WHO PROTESTED DID NOT LAST LONG

his mentors, the repressed Austrian Nazi and the unbuttoned American Jew.

Karajan preached precision, authority, personal elegance. Bernstein taught him how to dance on the podium, to sway with the music, go with the ow.

In San Francisco, Ozawa wore ower-power shirts and shiny, long hair. He blew into Boston with Scriabin’s Poem of Fire, rainbow colours splayed across the ceiling. In the stu est of concert halls, he exempli ed a new breed of conductor, one who ignored Beethoven anniversaries but sang Beatles songs.

Ozawa’s musical tastes were eclectic, but tasteful. He performed an eruptive Messiaen Turangalîla and premiered the composer’s opera on the life of Francis of Assisi. Ozawa liked Bartók and Lutoslawski, Poulenc and Dutilleux, Stravinsky and Takemitsu. For the rst half of his term, the Boston Symphony had a wow factor that other US orchestras could only envy.

Ozawa refused to live in Boston, raising

his family in Tokyo and commuting when required. His English was never more than functional. Most musicians grasped what he wanted; any who protested did not last long. “ ose women are making their own graves,” said Ozawa, shrugging o a pair of front-desk dissidents.

He could be pally as Bernstein, callous as Karajan. He conducted mostly without a baton, the better to generate an ethereal ambience. After a concert he could sink six Asahi beers. ere were two arrests for driving under the in uence, both hushed up. Also unreported were quiet acts of generosity to musicians and administrators who had fallen on hard times.

No music director raised more money for his orchestra. Ozawa acted as a sounding board to the heads of the Sony Corporation, Akio Morita and Norio Ohga, as they bought up half of Hollywood.

In return, Ohga donated one- fth of the $10 million cost of a new Ozawa Hall in Tanglewood and paid another million dollars for the privilege of conducting the Boston Symphony.

Once Sony became the world’s second largest music company, it might have been expected that Ozawa would make stacks of records. Actually, his discography is modest, fewer than 50 releases. A 1984 Berlioz Les nuits d’été and a 1993 Franck D minor symphony stand out.

My own favourite is a 1972 William

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Russo piece for blues band and orchestra, with a harmonica solo by Corky Siegel that must be heard to be believed.

For all his remoteness, Ozawa was devoted to Boston. Where others held jobs on three continents, he upheld a traditional maestro-orchestra monogamy, burnishing an identi able sound and style. Even in his last Boston years, when half the orchestra were in open rebellion, Ozawa stayed stubbornly loyal.

In this, too, he was the last of his kind. Boston, after his departure in 2002, lost its way with James Levine and Andris Nelsons, both of whom had parallel jobs elsewhere. e BSO no longer surprises or makes waves; it is just another subscription business in a failing industry. e orchestras of Cleveland, LA and Philadelphia outshine it week after week.

Stricken with esophageal cancer in 2010, Ozawa retreated to Japan, conducting sporadically and nurturing old friendships that transcended language and distance. He had few protégés, with the exception of the French contralto Nathalie Stutzmann whom he spotted as a conductor in the making; she is now music director at Atlanta, Georgia, and a summer xture at Bayreuth.

Ozawa’s legacy is limited by the ephemerality of his vocation. You had to be there to feel the re he lit in familiar works and the passion he invested in the new.

He never articulated his method. In a series of non-conversations with the novelist Haruki Murakami, he gave nothing away. “ e maestro does speak his own special brand of Ozawa-ese, which is not always easy to convert to standard written Japanese,” wrote the frustrated Murakami. One must assume his obfuscation was intentional. Ozawa died on 6 February in Tokyo, aged 88.

Music, for Seiji Ozawa, lay not in words, nor even in notes, but in some supernal realm of hand and eye communication, a gesture and a look that allowed the music to in- and exhale, to be itself, to be. ●

●Owith the fairies Robert Thicknesse on Opera

About bloody time too: finally, a statue is to be raised to London’s transgender sex workers, right outside the ENO, on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. Let’s hope they dedicate an opera to these unsung heroes: it would make a joyous change from modern English opera’s obsession with child abuse and allied miserablisms, and as anyone whose horizons have been abruptly expanded in some Bangkok love-bower would have to agree, it would t perfectly into that other, jollier strain of our native lyric drama, orgiastic, sensual, sexually all-embracing, featuring such marvels as Handel’s Alcina and Michael Tippett’s free-for-all love-feast, e Midsummer

Marriage

having to understand all those e ete sentiments.

is is the true reason why opera in English has only really ever existed viably as pageant or burlesque (or in the case of G&S, both at the same time): nobody could bear the horror of hearing its poetastic vapourings being belted out in English.

Rare examples were tolerated, like Dido and Aeneas, which made the cut by being so brilliantly concise, but everyone really preferred piss-takes like e Beggar’s Opera or the terri cally silly Dragon of Wantley by Handel’s bassoonist Frederick Lampe (possibly the greatest opera of all time, touring the south-east with New Sussex Opera from 14 April, and not to be missed).

now that it’s illegal to suggest any positive angles in the country’s sordid, vicious history, opera nds itself in the odd position of being English culture’s last champion and redoubt, its power as sub rosa propagandist for the blessings of the past based largely on the lucky fact that hardly anyone is aware it exists.

But it’s a tricky position. England’s peculiar attitude to opera — that heady cocktail of snobbery, embarrassment and scorn — has scarcely changed in the 300-odd years that people have been trying to make a go of it, with language itself the perennial dash of controversial bitters.

After some early test-runs in English, it was quickly found that doing it in Italian was way better at keeping the proles out and avoided the shame and boredom of

Unsurprisingly, the most brilliant of all English music-theatre pieces are mostly overlooked. Henry Purcell (left) wrote his “dramatick operas” King Arthur and e Fairy-Queen a few years after Dido, and they were just about the biggest shows of all time, megabuck song-and-dance spectaculars, full of reworks, magic, ying machines, dragons, and (they do say) dancing monkeys. ese works of 1691 and ’92 beat that slowcoach Wagner to his Gesamtkunstwerk wheeze by 160 years.

And they were a proper night out, the “masques” played between the acts of full-length plays: for e Fairy-Queen that was A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Purcell’s interludes are themselves a dreamlike response to the dream of the play: sexy scenes where the woodland comes alive and sensuality gambols amid the deceptions and enchantments wrought by Puck’s love-potion.

e fairies grab the limelight; pleasingly, the rst human to pitch up is a drunken poet, lost in the wood and tormented by these not entirely benign, o -the-leash spirits. But as soon as trans guring night

descends — summoned by the circling, tranced incantation “See, even Night herself is here” — we see that they are embodiments of the subconscious, their purpose to unleash the ecstatic in humans.

Music and words plunge beyond the rational to revel in the magic and blameless confusions of liberating night. e piece’s motto is “One charming night gives more delight than a hundred lucky days”; men and women, in drugged erotic oblivion, live and solve dilemmas of love and sexual politics too intractable for day.

An irruption of tearing grief (the lament “O let me weep”) is more e ective for being completely unexplained. e masques are free-form fantasies that unfold through dance as much as words, and when Purcell launches a metaphoric pageant of the seasons as the new day dawns, you regret how these sweet, aching dissonances and harmonic liberties will have been abolished from music by the time Handel was writing, only 15 years later.

These days nobody does this or King Arthur — appended to a Dryden play, and a vision of national utopia — as written, but the masques alone, freed from

The Fairy-Queen

April). e Fairy-Queen is an English Magic Flute — only a lot sexier, and with better words — a manifesto of human unity born through love, the basis for the restoration of social harmony conjured in King Arthur

Taken together, this pair of “Restoration Spectaculars” are the most powerful urging for reconciliation after 50 pretty rough years in Britain. Of course that half-century of tohu-bohu from 1639 was a tea-party compared to the division, ruination and havoc wrought by Gove (“Unkool”) and the gang in a mere 14, but hey, that’s progress for you.

Purcell’s message is “only love can save us”. ough to be frank, a few thumping military victories over the Scots, Irish and French as well wouldn’t hurt. ●

Go to hgo.org.uk/fairy-queen/ for details of HGO’s production of e Fairy-Queen

Rock as ritual Sarah Ditum on Pop

●“it’s like we’vecome to one of the support groups at the start of Fight Club,” said my husband. He was right: we’d gone to see e Hold Steady at the Electric Ballroom in Camden for the rst date of their annual three-night London run, and all around us there were men emanating the distinctive joy that comes with feeling your feelings

Like most Hold Steady songs, “Carlos” is really a short story set to ri s. And, like a lot of Hold Steady songs, it’s set in a bar — the band, from Brooklyn via Minneapolis, do grimy rock ’n’ roll ballads of blue collar America, where hard work gives way to hard liquor at 5:30pm. If you’re listing to a Hold Steady track, it’s a fair bet that booze, pills and betting are going to be involved.

Minneapblue

their anchors, unleash the theatrical imagination: resourceful directors can produce wonders with them.

Sadly ecstasy, celebration, harmony are not generally the strong suit of our younger directors, who prefer to stage “searing indictments” of this or that. But hope dies last, as they say, and the latest shot is Eloise Lally’s staging with the admirable Hampstead Garden Opera (at Highgate from 19

I don’t want to suggest that a Hold Steady audience is a testosterone-only environment — after all, I was the one who had dragged my husband there. But there is something about the Hold Steady experience that seems to hit particularly sweetly for men. As singer Craig Finn rasps on the song “Carlos Is Crying”, “it’s di erent for boys”.

“Carlos” is about watching a drunk friend go over the emotional cli . “Now Carlos starts crying/ And we’re all kind of frightened,” sings Finn, who’s an expert observer of the comi-tragic moment.

“Every single person at the table stops talking/And he’s sobbing and shaking.” It’s a kind of uninhibited show of feeling, the song implies, that men really struggle to deal with.

But if Carlos’s demonstrativeness is strange, his reasons for crying are all too familiar: midlife disappointment, a sense of squandered chances. “If failure’s a trick then we learned pretty quick,” says Carlos to the song’s narrator. “It just took a few times to get right.” (“Trick” is punning here on the fact that the song’s characters are skater boys who’ve aged out of the boy part.)

the hold steady area grown-up band and always have been. When they started in the early 2000s, they were in their 30s, making them practically ancient in an industry that has always been vampirically attracted to youth.

eir peer group included a whole rash of angular, edgy guitar bands called “the somethings”, all with abstract lyrics and even more abstract haircuts. One of them, e Bravery, became an object of mockery when it turned out they were — gasp — in their late twenties, with a hinterland of other projects behind them. ( e other problem with e Bravery was that they only had one good song, “An Honest Mistake”.) But e Hold Steady weren’t even pretending to be young. If they were ever sent for a consultation

with a stylist, it didn’t leave a mark: they look like regulation middle-aged men. If they’d stepped down from the stage and mingled with the crowd, you’d quickly have lost track of who were the stars and who were the civilians.

were

On stage, though, they radiate charisma. Finn in particular spends his time front and centre with his arms held out in an embrace big enough to hold all of the audience. And the audience returns the love with their entire hearts. Fans call themselves “the scene” (a reference pulled from Finn’s lyrics), and over the decades that e Hold Steady have been playing, their concerts have acquired a whole grammar of audience participation.

For example, the confetti. People show up to Hold Steady concerts with pockets full of paper confetti (not the foil or glitter kind — it’s ruinous for the band’s instruments, and the devil for the cleaning sta ). And at certain points in certain songs agreed on by long tradition, the confetti goes up.

at the electric ballroomas a firsttime scene attendee, there was something completely magical about the way the air spontaneously lled with rainbow-coloured scraps of paper. And there was something even more magical about looking at the forums later and seeing that I’d been part of a planned moment: strangers plotting together to create the show.

It reminded me of another fandom: the Swifties, who make friendship bracelets in tribute to a Taylor Swift lyric and trade them at her concerts. A live performance is a kind of collective worship, and these rituals are a part of it. e audience make the show, in a smaller way than the artist but just as surely.

In other words, a Hold Steady concert is where you’ll nd 40-and-up jeans and tees guys acting like teenage girls and millennial women. Which, of course, is why I’m into it. And just as Taylor has nailed the emotional lexicon of her people, Finn has nailed it for his.

At the end of “Carlos”, Finn belts out the song’s climax, in which the narrator tells his emotional friend: “I love you/ I feel you/ I’m sorry you’re hurting.” But in the live show, of course, he’s singing it to the audience — we take the part of Carlos. For the boys in the

audience, it seemed like a message they were deeply grateful to receive. It feels like being o ered the most generous kind of grace. Whatever sadness you go into the room with, something about Finn’s delivery convinces you that you don’t have to carry it alone. What can music do that’s bigger than that? ●

annual Salon and in choosing to show their works in the studio of the photographer Nadar, the rst to hold an exhibition outside a formal gallery too.

First impressions

●Long before the Impressionists became the Impressionists they had other names. e key members, including Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Berthe Morisot, Degas and Sisley, used to meet at the Café Guerbois near Manet’s studio in Batignolles, north-west Paris, and became known as the “Batignolles Group”.

When the 30 artists associated with the group listed a show containing 165 paintings (there were in fact more) it was an a ront. e exhibition opened two weeks before the Salon as a direct challenge and came just three years after the conclusion of the humiliating Franco-Prussian War and the brutally-suppressed Commune that followed it. is was not an obscure bit of posturing but artistic sedition. ese were febrile times.

THE EXHIBITION WAS SEEN BY 100 PEOPLE A DAY AS OPPOSED TO THE SALON’S 10,000 DAILY VISITORS

In 1873, they formalised this loose faction as the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers. Zola, a boyhood friend of Cézanne, suggested they call themselves “the Actualists”. Degas thought they should be called “La Capucine” after the Boulevard des Capucines where their rst show was held. But when a hostile critic called them “the Impressionists” as a slight they adopted that name instead — or it adopted them.

April 15th marks the 150th anniversary of the rst Impressionist exhibition, held in 1874, an event that has taken on mythic proportions. One critic declared simply that the Impressionists “have declared war on beauty”. ey also declared war on the o cial French art establishment. ey were the rst painters to hold a group exhibition outside the purview of the venerable Académie des Beaux-Arts and its

The exhibition ran for a month and was seen by some 3,500 people — about 100 a day as opposed to the 10,000 daily visitors to the Salon — who paid 50 centimes to enter and 20 for the catalogue. Many were there to sco despite the presence of city sergeants hired at a cost of 141 francs to give the exhibition an o cial air.

Renoir was in charge of the hanging and the pictures were placed by size and by the artists drawing lots. Rather than the Salon’s oor-to-ceiling hang, these paintings were shown at a maximum of two deep.

Despite the element of succès de scandale the exhibition was not nancially viable. Degas and Berthe Morisot each exhibited 10 paintings but sold none; Sisley was the most successful artist, making 1,000 francs; Monet and Renoir made just shy of 200 apiece and Pissarro 130 francs.

However, their Anonymous Society had been formed as a joint stock company with the artists and their patrons buying shares. At the end of the year, the company had assets of 278 francs but liabilities of more than 3,700 francs: each of the exhibitors owed 184 francs and the company was liquidated.

Perhaps more painful was the critical reaction. Not all the notices were bad — some were encouraging, most were indi erent. But as Pissarro complained in a

Michael Prodger on Art

letter, “the critics are eating us alive”. It is the negative reaction that has become the authorised story.

ere was nothing mealy-mouthed about the attacks: “these are paint scrapings from a palette spread evenly over a dirty canvas. ere is neither head nor tail, top nor bottom, back nor front”, said one; “in no country on earth will you nd the things he [Pissarro] paints”, ran another; a third suggested the paintings were the work of a “pleasant evil who amused himself by dipping his brushes in colour, smearing them with tarpaulins and signing them with di erent names”.

It was a phrase of a middling critic named Louis Leroy that gave the group its name. Leroy imagines visiting the exhibition in the company of a traditional painter with the expectation of seeing “the kind of painting one sees everywhere, good and bad, rather bad than good, but not hostile to good artistic manners, devotion to form, and respect for the masters”.

e inability of the artists to paint properly, they decide, means that the pictures are nothing but “impressions” — sketches. In front of a Monet, one of them asks: “What do those innumerable black tongue-lickings in the lower part of the picture represent?” “Why, those are people walking along.”

In front of a Pissarro painting of cabbages, the traditional painter turns scarlet: “I swear not to eat any more as long as I live!” Monet’s Impression, Sunrise provoked the most famous outburst: “A preliminary drawing for a wallpaper pattern is more nished than this seascape.”

A workshop at the Batignolles

Two years later and the slights kept coming. An exhibition of Impressionist works at the Durand-Ruel gallery o ered “a cruel spectacle”, said Le Figaro’s critic. e work of the “ ve or six lunatics” left him with “a heavy heart”. Tell Pissarro, he says, that “the trees are not purple, that the sky is not a fresh butter tone”; inform Renoir “that the torso of a woman is not a mass of decomposing esh with purplish green spots which denote the state of complete putrefaction in a corpse”; warn everyone of the “Frightful spectacle of the human vanity going astray until insanity”. It is the attacks, used by the painters themselves to bolster their contra mundum self-image, that have been remembered. ey must have been as bracingly enjoyable to write as they were to read. However, it just so happens that they were wrong. ●

Michael Prodger is associate editor of the New Statesman

while treated to sundry lm adaptations, has not often graced the stage. is may be because the baggy (and only) Oscar Wilde novel is really a series of vignettes with characters who can feel

SNOOK AND THE WHOLE TEAM DESERVE ALL THE AWARDS NOMINATIONS THIS WILL DOUBTLESS EARN

more like Pirandello constructs than esh-and-blood. We meet Dorian and his libertine in uencer, Lord Henry Wotton, and Basil Hallward, whose image will free Dorian to pursue a life of untrammelled desire, while the picture in the attic records his crimes and awaits, like the day of judgement.

Dorian Gray is at once astute and daring — the most overtly gay of Wilde’s stories in the noir xation on jeunesse dorée — and remarkably daft. We veer from the tragic death of Gray’s muse Sibyl Vane to Dorian’s high jinks and over-exuberant nightlife in a giddy plot that is hard to recall apart from the persistent painting.

Anne McElvoy on Theatre

Snook dazzles as Dorian Gray

●W e start with a picture: well, we would, given that Oscar Wilde’s quirky n de siècle gothic horror, e Picture of Dorian Gray, is about the power of portraits and the quest for eternal youth, themes as old as the Greeks and as contemporary as the anti-aging mythology sold over a million beauty counters.

e balancing allegories of human frailty and vanity are timeless. But Dorian,

The Sydney Theatre Company adaptation at the eatre Royal Haymarket tackles this merry mess with gusto and goes all in on multimedia tricks and stunts over a pacey two hours. What we really need to know is who can carry o a character who is by turns vulnerable, infuriating, sensual, trivial and as camp as a box of Christmas crackers. e answer turns out to be Australia’s Sarah Snook, whose inty performance as Siobhan “Shiv” Roy in TV’s Succession showcased an uncanny ability to sustain a mix of charm and repellence. A dead cert then for Dorian, who veers between lofty self-con dence and manic dread of ageing and death.

In reducing him to a metaphor for holding back the years, it’s easy to forget how controversial Wilde’s gothic ride was

when it was rst published in full-length form in 1891. A review in the Scottish Observer declared that, “Mr. Wilde has brains, art, and style; but if he can write for none but outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph-boys, the sooner he takes to tailoring (or some other decent trade) the better for his own reputation and the public morals.”

Tailoring alas, never did get the bene t of Wilde’s many talents and public morals today are similarly degraded by self-absorption and image control. Snook expertly captures this time-bending aspect of the work, a brooding, lambent presence with gender-neutral qui and pin-sharp eyes, which we often see in close up, projected on numerous screens which slide on and o the stage, shifting our perspective or tricking us into watching one thing while a sudden shift of action occurs elsewhere. e tour de force moment has Snook having dinner with six of her other “selves”. In-jokes about Insta-moments and sel es abound — we watch up close on a giant projection as she edits the lters of herself to iron out imperfections — with the accompanying suggestion that our relentless self-curation is robbing something of the human soul as it goes along.

It’s hard to escape multimedia formats in the theatre these days and many of them are at best enhancements, at worst gimmicky additions. is time, the hype about technological brilliance is fully justi ed, enabling Snook to make the most of the postmodern nature of the work — and showcase her extraordinary versatility and energy in playing all of the characters at once (26 in total).

Marg Horwell’s chromatic costumes and set are a visual thrill, with sly Marc Quinn-esque ourishes of decay and shadowy undertones as the hedonism gives way to stories of suicide, exploitation and mental anguish.

Wilde’s preoccupation with beauty, arti ce and zeal for experience and risk brings a sassy Victorian immorality tale nicely into our own times or indeed any times: there are 1970s disco hit numbers from Donna Summer and 1980s gay anthems from Jimmy Somerville as well as facial injections, druggy parties and evanescent wastrels straight out of the “sidebar of shame” of celebrity coverage. Viewer discretion is advised in the more sicky parts.

Gradually, Dorian’s crimes and neglect catch up with him and the multi-screen experience shows him on the rack of psychological dissolution in disturbing detail. e “wow” factor here is unmistakeable and Snook, together with the brilliant tech team and producer, and Len Blavatnik’s and Danny Cohen’s Access Entertainment deserve all the awards nominations this will doubtless earn.

What gets lost in all the dazzle is the pathos of the novel and the sense that Dorian, like Goethe’s Faust, is a plaything of Manichean forces he can neither constrain nor resist. But we do see, in vibrant technicolour, the trail of damage that the 24-hour, century-old libertines leave behind. is, people, is what happens if you make a deal with the devil, so do think twice. ●

Anne McElvoy presents Power Play for Politico and Free inking on Radio 3.

●If I had the skills to hack the computers of the Apple Corporation, I wouldn’t go hunting for the specs of the new iPhone. What I want to know, more than anything, is at what point people at home stop watching Killers of the Flower Moon.

Martin Scorsese’s vastly overpraised drama is now streaming on Apple TV, which funded the lm. But at three and a half hours long, what percentage of the audience is getting through it in one shift?

How many people are deciding that it’s late in the evening, there’s another 90 minutes to go, and nothing has really happened yet, so they might as well leave the rest until tomorrow? Which leads me to my next question: how many of them

ever nish it?

Like doorstop airport novels that con ate import with page count, movie length seems to have become a way for directors to tell us what serious people they are. Sometimes this can be excused: when you consider that the 1927 lm of Napoleon Bonaparte’s early life weighs in at over nine hours, Ridley Scott could be said to

Long story short Robert Hutton on Cinema

The

Picture of Dorian Gray

The Delinquents

have done quite well to get the whole thing in at under three hours. Other times, as with Scorsese’s latest lm, it just feels self-indulgent.

(As for Christopher Nolan’s Oscar-conquering Oppenheimer, I have what is probably a niche complaint: I’m fascinated by the scienti c, engineering and political challenges of making and dropping the atomic bomb, but bored by the hero’s miserable adulteries. So my feeling wasn’t so much that the lm was too long as that it was long about the wrong things.)

I resent films of this length. Let’s be honest: at my age, my bladder can handle a three-hour screening only if I drink nothing at all in the hours beforehand. So you can get me into a long lm, but your business model better not include selling me an overpriced drink on the way in.

Long movies either start too early or nish too late. Unless children can watch them too, they are impossible for parents. I can only speak for myself, but at no point in the last 18 years has it been straightforward to take three hours to go to the cinema (once you include travel and trailers, you’re going to need a sitter for ve hours). As for home viewing, anything much over two hours is getting broken up into episodes, whatever the director intended.

It’s not just that there are more and more three-hour evening-killers. You’re more likely to nd yourself watching a two-hour lm than you were 30 years ago. In those days, studios knew that a 100-minute lm could be cut up with advert breaks to neatly ll a two-hour timeslot on television.

ese days, streaming has made that less of a concern, and they seem to fear that anything much under 120 minutes will feel insubstantial to audiences shelling out for cinema tickets.

Meanwhile the digitisation of cinema has made it easier to shoot more. When lms were made on, well, lm, a longer movie cost more to both make and distribute. Scott, lming Napoleon with a dozen high-de nition cameras running simultaneously, simply has more material available to him when he’s in the editing suite.

A couple of weeks ago I watched two three-hour movies in two days. e rst, Dune: Part Two, was at least a proper epic. e novel that director Denis Villeneuve is

more-or-less faithfully adapting is twice the length of a normal book, so it’s probably fair enough that he takes more than ve hours over two lms to do it. And the lm has plenty of both plot and action to keep things zipping along.

The second, The Delinquents, was an Argentine heist movie that I badly wanted to like, if only because I have a soft spot for the 2000 Argentine heist lm Nine Queens, and I irrationally hoped, on the basis of this single data point, that heist movies might simply be something at which Argentina was brilliant. ere was indeed much to like about e Delinquents, a tale of two bank clerks trying to escape the drudgery of their lives. e cast was charming, and the premise

MY BLADDER CAN HANDLE A THREE-HOUR SCREENING ONLY IF I DRINK NOTHING AT ALL IN THE HOURS BEFORE

intriguing. But blimey it was long.

Given that the essential mechanics of the lm’s robbery are simple enough to be explained in the trailer, there’s no excuse for demanding the best part of three hours to tell the subsequent tale of personal awakening.

In the days when I started in journalism, reporters on the road would le a story by dictating it down the line to a professional typist. It was an amazing way of improving your writing: as you stood in a cold phone booth, reading out loud from your notebook, you quickly realised what was wrong with your copy.

Worst of all came the moment when the woman at the other end — it always seemed to be a woman — would interrupt to ask, in a bored tone: “Is there much more of this?” All those copytakers were laid o decades ago, but they’ll still be out there somewhere. An enterprising producer could do worse than hiring a bunch of them to listen to directors outlining their screenplays down the phone.

Nothing would improve the quality of modern cinema more than the sound of a Leith grandmother sipping her tea, sighing, and saying: “Marty, how much longer is this going to take?” ●

Dune: Part Two

Adam LeBor on Television

The stench of Chanel Nº 5

●I’ve just finished writing e Last Days of Budapest, an account of the Hungarian capital during the Second World War. Like every author nowadays I dream that my book will be turned into a television series. Until now, received wisdom was that the high production costs of period dramas deter producers.

But that is changing: Masters of the Air, about American bombers during the war, had a budget of $250 million. Todd Kessler’s e New Look, also on Apple TV+, doubtless cost less but the vivid period details are even more nely observed.

Set mainly in Nazi-occupied Paris, the series tells the story of Coco Chanel and Christian Dior. e title takes its name from Dior’s post-war collection. e wartime new look revolved around the sharp lines of Nazi uniforms — some supplied by Hugo Boss — and jackboots.

Much of e New Look is grounded in reality. Chanel, marvellously played by Juliette Binoche, was close to the British ruling elite, some of whom were sympathetic to Hitler. During the war she happily lived in the Hotel Ritz alongside senior Nazis.

Chanel’s utterly ruthless determination to save herself, sacri ce anyone necessary along the way and later reinvent herself as

a member of the resistance makes grimly fascinating viewing.

Dior, somewhat drippily played by Ben Mendelsohn, is a more nuanced character. He supported the resistance but also worked for the Germans. Dior tried valiantly to rescue his sister Catherine after she was sent to Ravensbrück. e violence, terror and degradation of the scenes inside the concentration camp could not be a sharper contrast to the lush salons of fashionable Paris.

e series has little about the deportation of French Jews to Auschwitz, but the grim reality of life under Nazi occupation and its savagery are clearly shown. Teenage resistants, caught by the Germans and their French collaborators, are brutally tortured then shot.

Beyond the sumptuous costumes and glamorous settings e New Look deftly raises sharp questions about the grey areas between compromise and outright

collaboration — questions that are still being asked in France. Chanel N°5 now leaves a decidedly bad smell.

Oppenheimer swept the Oscars, winning seven awards. Robert Oppenheimer, dubbed “the father of the atomic bomb”, appears in Net ix’s epic documentary series Turning Point: e Bomb and the Cold War. e nine episodes are an ambitious attempt to recount modern international history from 1945 up to the present day.

Director Brian Knappenberger takes a classic approach to documentary making, weaving together contemporary footage with talking-heads interviews, including senior gures such as Condoleezza Rice, former U.S Secretary of State, and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

In the hands of unskilled lmmakers this can make for a somewhat ponderous approach. But Knappenberger deftly controls the mix to keep the dramatic tension high, while not patronising the viewer.

Some of the archive footage is unsurprising: Stalin, Churchill and Truman grinning and gladhanding at Potsdam in 1945 while slicing up the globe like a Christmas turkey. But much is unexpected, even shocking. e rst episode opens with the war in Ukraine, but mainly focuses on the invention of the atomic bomb. e weapon had been designed and built in less than a year. Nobody really knew what it

Turning Point: The Bomb and The Cold War

The New Look

would do to a large urban settlement.

Knappenberg deploys contemporary American propaganda to argue that the Japanese — unlike the Germans — were seen as less than human: cartoon gures with gross, distended features, thus tempering any qualms about incinerating an entire city in a single explosion.

Nor was there any concern for Americans near the Trinity test site in New Mexico. As the author Lesley M.M. Blume points out, almost 500,000 people lived within 150 miles of Trinity.

Locals were neither evacuated nor informed. Forty miles away, ten young teenage girls were asleep at a dance camp when the test bomb went o . e explosion threw them out of their beds. Later that day they played outside in what they called “hot snow” — fallout. Only one survived to the age of thirty.

The war in Ukraine is already a proxy ght between NATO and Russia. e Cold War has been reanimated and is warming up. at same fear that saw 1950s schoolchildren practise hiding under their desks in case the bomb went o is back — and not only in Kyiv. e Bomb and the

THE GIRLS PLAYED OUTSIDE IN WHAT THEY CALLED “HOT SNOW” FALLOUT. ONLY ONE SURVIVED TO THE AGE OF 30

Cold War is as timely as it is informative.

Drought, now showing on Channel 4’s Walter Presents, is brighter, more upbeat viewing. It unfolds in the sun-parched, arid borderland between Spain and Portugal.

When a reservoir runs low, two skeletons are discovered lying in the dusty remains of an abandoned village, ooded decades ago. e dead were shot, which is the cue for Inspector Dani Yanes to take on the case. Elena Rivera gives a feisty, convincing performance as the dogged cop determined to nd justice.

She’s an engaging heroine, with the requisite chaotic love life and a taste for stylish leather jackets and drinking alone in bars. But Yanes’s enquiries are not welcomed by the powers that rule the small town where she lives.

And especially not by Luis Barbosa, the sinister local businessman who has very

dark secrets he does not want exposed to the bright Spanish sunshine.

Provincial Iberian life, with its web of gossip, intrigue and double-dealing is vividly evoked — especially when the threats ramp up and Yanes nds her investigation is bringing her perilously close to home. ●

Cure Viral Misinformation doesn’t grab you, there’s e Anti-Vax Files. Other favourites include Death by Conspiracy?, Disaster Trolls and Marianna in Conspiracyland (with illustrations, presumably, by Tenniel). Phew! Time for a tea-break.

Too much disinformation Michael Henderson on Radio

●Now she’s back, with another series to set the songbirds a-twitter. In Why Do You Hate Me? on Radio 4, she investigates the unpleasant and frequently o ensive views expressed on social media. ough the investigations o er little more than reheating comments which are easy to nd if you like that sort of thing, which our fearless sleuth clearly doesn’t.

“Spring is here,” begins one of Rodgers and Hart’s best-known songs. “Why doesn’t my heart go dancing?” at depends on which Spring you have in mind. Is it the season of renewal we greet each April, when all the owers bloom, tra-la, and the nights lengthen? Or is it Marianna of that ilk, the BBC’s “disinformation” tsarina, promoted with unnerving speed, and determined not to let the grass grow under her size sevens?

For this Spring is here, there and everywhere. Only 28, she has already presented several programmes and podcasts with titles so enticing that only the foolish do not pay attention. If How to

One of her guests was Eni A luko, who used to play football for the England women’s team and after stints in club management now talks about the game for a living. Aluko has been on the sharp end of abuse from Joey Barton, a former footballer who doesn’t care for women pundits on television, which is not in itself an o ence. Most of them are as poor as the men. Barton’s words were indeed foul; so lthy that Aluko said she was scared to leave the house. Yet few people would recognise her if she walked down the street and she wasn’t too frightened to board a plane to Ivory Coast, to cover the Africa Cup of Nations.

Spring, we now know, has form of her own when it comes to disinformation. In a CV presented to prospective employers she claimed to have assisted Sarah Rainsford, then the BBC Moscow correspondent, during the 2018 World Cup in Russia. But she hadn’t. She had met Rainsford, she

coughed, but that was about it. Oh dear. Wicket broken, and a long, lonely walk back to the pavilion.

Moreover, she has described herself as a “brilliant reporter”, a claim it is usually wiser to let others make. And now she’s everywhere, poking into the murky corners of social media on our behalf. Some of this work may have value, but do we really need to know how ghastly many of these twitterers are, with their strange obsessions?

She might more profitably use her forensic skills to investigate the “disinformation” within the building she calls home.

Why Do You Hate Me?

Justin Webb, the acceptable voice of the Today programme, was impaled on a zealot’s stick when he referred to “trans women, in other words males”.

e BBC’s “executive complaints unit” upheld a listener’s complaint, but that doesn’t mean he was mistaken. ere’s one for Spring to get her pearly-whites into.

ere’s a book out, naturally, Among the Trolls, which received a favourable notice from Julia Ebner, an Austrian academic who lives in England. In June 2016, one whole day after the EU referendum, she informed Guardian readers that “I no longer feel welcome in this country”. Overnight, apparently, the racists had taken over. Yet eight years on she’s still here, glad to be unhappy.

What is it with people so angry about supposed malefactors that they seek more of their company? When Ebner eventually goes back to Vienna she will nd a house in Berggasse, where a famous doctor tried to answer such questions. He ended up in England, too. Plenty do, when they want to live freely.

Mohit Bakaya, the controller of Radio 4, has given an interesting interview to the Telegraph, in which he explained how the station had to represent all points of view. Finding new listeners while retaining the con dence of old ones is a

noble intention, though it’s clear that no station could, or should be “for everybody”.

What Radio 4 should be is a home for its loyalists, who are overwhelmingly small-c conservatives in the suburbs and shires. ey’re a tolerant bunch, and sometimes they have to be. A Sunday Worship which invited young women from south London to re ect on the Beatitudes might have tempted even St Anthony of Padua to say something naughty.

Presented by Swarzy Macaly, who called upon a rapper and a club DJ to speak of their faith, the Sunday morning show “navigated Jesus’s counter-cultural teachings”, or so the BBC website proclaimed. So that’s what the Sermon on the Mount was all about. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall groove all night long in Peckham.”

Our Lord as a “counter-cultural” gurehead. at’s one for Bakaya to ponder as he seeks younger urban listeners. But he shouldn’t put more than a tenner on the outcome. Otherwise the poorhouse beckons. ●

Politics with the depth of a puddle

●One of the selling points of podcasts, as a media format, is the promise of depth. In TV or radio, journalists and commentators have producers breathing down their necks, insisting that they make a point as quickly as possible. In

podcasts, they have time to develop their thoughts and go “behind the headlines”. at’s the idea at least.

e News Agents promises “expert analysis” from “three of the UK’s top journalists”: Emily Maitlis, Jon Sopel and

Lewis Goodall. e trio are “not just here to tell you what’s happening, but why”.

Excellent! Has everybody got their thought goggles on? We’re swimming into deep political waters here.

Actually, e News Agents has the depth of a puddle. I’ve listened to episode after episode, waiting for insight like a man sitting in the desert, longing for an ice cream. A recent episode about George Galloway’s success in the Rochdale by-election suggested that this was bad for Keir Starmer (you’re kidding me!) and that Galloway is a good orator (get out of here!). e podcast epitomises the super ciality of the media class — xated on process and not its moral and material foundations. It’s not digging up the roots of our political dilemmas — it’s scratching in the soil.

Goodall mentions that Keir Starmer’s support among Muslims is far lower than Jeremy Corbyn’s. Okay, here’s the moment he could be asking why. Here’s the moment he could be analysing the signi cance of such novel demographic phenomena in British life. But he’s moved on, like a frog jumping between lily pads yet never gazing into the depths beneath them.

Electoral Dysfunction, from Sky News’s Beth Rigby, Labour’s Jess Phillips MP and the former Scottish Conservative leader, Baroness Davidson, pledges to “unravel the spin and explain what’s really going on in Westminster and beyond”. BOOM. is is not your grandfather’s politics podcast! “All my knobs are in

Ben Sixsmith on Podcasts

order,” Rigby snorts, “ at’s quite funny when it’s Electoral Dysfunction, isn’t it?”

Yes, we got the pun, Beth. Jess Phillips chimes in to say she knows a local pub called e King’s Head that gets called e Knob. At this point I already needed a drink.

I have to give one thing to the trio — they sound like genuine friends. is is great for their target audience. Podcasts have a parasocial element to their appeal. Hosts unknowingly become our companions. So, if you’re the sort of person who likes chatty banter between straight-talking women, you might enjoy the congenial atmosphere of Electoral Dysfunction. e politicians best the journalists when it comes to analysis, perhaps because, knowing the process from the inside, it isn’t quite so absorbing. Baroness Davidson has a good rant, in the rst episode, about the contrast between Lindsay Hoyle rejecting a call for a new vote on Gaza because of threats to the safety of MPs with Margaret atcher carrying on as normal during IRA bombings. For all I disagree with her politics, this was stirring and unfashionable stu .

Unfortunately, Jess Phillips is an annoyance machine, ensuring that the conversation never reaches interesting depths because it cannot penetrate the surface of her self-regard. Honestly — she grandstands like the lead singer of a hair metal group.

A valid point about MPs’ work having more to do with unheralded local responsibilities than holding forth on international politics has the whi of boastfulness when she speci cally de nes it as her work. Soon, she is making an — in fairness, hastily retracted — reference to “my Muslim community”. Commendably, Rigby plays devil’s advocate on Galloway and jokes that Phillips doesn’t look happy

about it. One can imagine.

Galloway’s previous campaign in Batley, Phillips sneers, “seemed to focus entirely on low-tra c neighbourhoods”. “Up the workers,” she contemptuously adds. If there’s one thing that workers love it’s being ned for driving through the wrong part of town. It can be an appealing aspect of podcasts that famous hosts can relax and be more re ective. But for some this is like a bird shedding its wings.

A month of politically-minded podcasts reached its exhausting apogee with Baroness Warsi and David Baddiel’s A Muslim & A Jew Go ere. A Muslim and a Jewish commentator sharing di erent perspectives could be interesting. Unfortunately, Warsi and Baddiel do not have the chemistry for real conversation, meaning that the show sounds like two podcasts being smashed into one.

Nor do they have the knowledge to match their con dence. Baddiel shoots himself in the foot in almost heroic style when he claims that only in the case of

EPISTEMIC ARROGANCE CAN BE TOLERABLE WHEN IT IS ENTERTAINING BUT I HAD ALREADY ENDURED BADDIEL

anti-Semitism would a political party commission a report “into institutionalised racism … without a member of that minority leading the report”.

Warsi points out that a report into Conservative Islamophobia was led by a non-Muslim. She immediately spoils this triumphant moment by implying that this non-Muslim, Professor Swaran Singh, was actively anti-Muslim. Look up the limpness of her claim for yourself.

Reader, I couldn’t take it. Epistemic arrogance can be tolerable when it is entertaining, but I had already endured Baddiel, a comic veteran, announcing that Warsi’s pronunciation of “from the river to the sea” sounded like “from the liver to the sea”. I could stomach no more strongheaded ignorance and laborious pseudo-jokes. Apologies are due for such negativism this month but there is simply no point in wasting your time on explanatory podcasts that will somehow leave you less informed than you were before. ●

The building that inspired Orwell Charles Saumarez Smith on Architecture

●For most of my life, I have regarded the University of London’s Senate House as a strange and monstrous construction looming in a sinister way o the north side of Russell Square. But a small public exhibition on its rst- oor landing organised by Bill Sherman, the enterprising director of the Warburg Institute, and Richard Temple, London University’s archivist, has encouraged me to think di erently.

e secondary literature on the growth of London has traditionally emphasised the way in which it is the product of organic growth. In this narrative, Sir Christopher Wren’s plan to reconstruct London after the Great Fire on a grand new classical plan was thwarted by brave householders who wanted as far as possible to maintain the recollection of the City’s more random medieval streets.

John Nash’s plans to give London a more classical form with his great blocks of terraces anking the new Regent’s Park and his sequence of new classical spaces leading towards what was originally planned to be a heroic set of new public buildings in Trafalgar Square, may have been the product of a masterplan, but was designed on picturesque principles, so that even Carlton House Terrace feels more like a backdrop to St. James’s Park than a piece of monumental town planning.

W hat this narrative overlooks is the extent to which London was subject to a whole series of neoclassical plans for its development from the 1870s onwards.

One of these was a plan, which has only resurfaced recently, for the total redevelopment of Bloomsbury drawn up in 1912 by C. Harrold Norton for Charles Fitzroy Doll, the surveyor of the Bedford estates.

It was, not surprisingly, vigorously and conventionally neoclassical, a grand beauxarts design which matched the architectural language of the long Ionic façade of the King Edward VII Galleries of the British Museum, designed by John Burnet and opened in May 1914 on the eve of the First World War.

In 1919, William Beveridge, a reforming senior civil servant who had worked for the Ministry of Munitions and then the Board of Trade, was recruited by Sidney Webb, his mentor, as director of the London School of Economics.

When, in 1926, he became vicechancellor of the University of London, he had a vision for the university which led him to persuade the Rockefeller Foundation to donate the funds to buy the land north of the British Museum on which to establish a centralised campus, including a library, the university’s research institutes including the Institute of Historical Research, and o ces for its administration.

Disdaining the normal system of recruitment of an architect by public competition, he and the university’s administrative director, Sir Edwin Deller, toured the country examining suitable precedents and then interviewed four architectural practices over dinner at the Athenaeum.

ey selected the intellectually austere Charles Holden, an active Quaker, much in uenced in his youth by the writings of Walt Whitman. He had originally trained as an arts-and-crafts architect in the o ce of C.R. Ashbee, been part of the successful architectural practice, Adams and Holden, before the First World War, designing

libraries and hospitals, and since the war had been one of the architects for the Imperial War Graves Commission designing cemeteries on the battle elds of northern France, as well as underground stations for Frank Pick on the Northern and Piccadilly lines.

Holden won the competition partly because Beveridge and Deller had been on a private visit to 55, Broadway, the headquarters Holden had designed for the Underground Electric Railways Company of London (forerunner of London Transport), and partly because Holden, alone amongst the candidates and contrary to the Athenaeum’s rules, brought drawings to his interview.

Holden’s initial scheme was for a huge set of axial buildings and courtyards

stretching all the way from the British Museum to Torrington Place, dominated by two towers, the largest of which was the University’s library and Senate House at its southern end.

is was the part of the scheme that was built. At the time, it was the highest new building in London, on a scale which is in many ways more reminiscent of American university buildings than British, although an obvious equivalent is Giles Gilbert Scott’s Cambridge University Library which opened more or less at the same time.

Lord Macmillan, the chairman of the university’s court, described how unusual it was that the building when it opened in 1937 had attracted no controversy, in spite of the fact that it was on such a vast scale.

Was it that everyone accepted a building on such a scale as the headquarters of an institution of higher learning? Or was there an appetite at the time for monumental buildings, equivalent to those in Moscow ?

It was only during the Second World War, when it was used by the government as the headquarters of the Ministry of Information, that it began to attract negative comment, immortalised by George Orwell in 1984 as the Ministry of Truth (Room 101 is adjacent to the exhibition) and described by Graham Greene as a “high heartless building … where the windows were always open for fear of blast and the cold winds whistled in”.

Maybe tastes are now changing again and we should learn to admire the scale of ambition of the Senate House, the quality of its monumental internal spaces, and Holden’s ability to give architectural form to a public belief in learning. ●

LISA HILTON gets the blues at Azzurra THIS PAGE

FELIPE FERNÁNDEZARMESTO is inspired to make potted shrimp by a trip to Hastings

PAGE 91

HENRY JEFFREYS

seeks out a snifter in the Middle East

PAGE 92

RUFUS BIRD considers why the market for classic art is shrinking PAGE 94

CHRISTOPHER PINCHER

on what makes gentlemen tick PAGE 94

EATING OUT

ISloane danger

n the 1950s, deborah, Duchess of Devonshire accompanied her daughter on a culturally improving visit to Paris. As recounted in a letter by Deborah’s sister, Nancy Mitford, the ladies got as far along their itinerary as Notre Dame when the Duchess announced, “Now darling, you’ve seen the outside, so you can imagine the inside. Let’s go to Dior.”

Sometimes, just sometimes, a restaurant comes along which inspires the same con dence. e rst time I walked past Azzurra, just by the Peter Jones end of the bit of Sloane Street that is perpetually being dug up, I knew precisely how preposterously awful it was going to be.

From the location (the soulless no-man’s land between SWs 1 and 3) to the size (vast) to the gilded tangle of shing nets depending from the ceiling, I knew that slaughtering this place was going to be as much fun as the time they got the lawyers in

when I wrote about Sexy Fish.

azzurra is the latest project from David Yeo of Aqua group, which owns ve other sites in London. It promises a “boat to table experience”, inspired by the boss’s immersive travels through Sicily and the Amal coast, which is just lovely, and the azuretoned space (with guest DJs), evokes shimmering water, which might just be re ected in the huge verre églomisé

PATRICK GALBRAITH ponders the complex effects of big commercial shoots PAGE 96

STEPHEN POLLARD fears for the future of the Grand National PAGE 97

HANNAH BETTS says colour is the only affordable way to be en courant PAGE 98

CLAUDIA SAVAGE-GORE pledges not to give Hector an iPhone PAGE 99

Lisa Hilton eats at an obvious, expensive and tasteless Chelsea restaurant she knew she was going to hate

— their description — mirror behind the 16-metre bar. Do admit that’s smart. Also, you will be greeted in Italian. After being greeted in Italian, we were shown to one of four occupied tables in a space which can probably do 200 covers. e guest DJ was nowhere to be seen, but someone had plonked on a playlist of Nineties Café del Mar. Even with such minimal occupancy, the room’s acoustic was tinny and booming; when full it must be infernal. Or buzzy and vibrant, if you prefer.

ere was a bit of shimmering going on in the form of the bum-skimming sequinned dresses of the spectacularly professional trio of ladies enjoying cocktails, though the installation of the Tyrrhenian Sea was perhaps having a bit of a cost-of-living crisis.

e immersive art is the responsibility of a man named Robert Angell, who perhaps hadn’t thought through the implications of spray-painting a job lot of otsam intended to recall the

worthless discards of the Med, but one couldn’t say it didn’t resonate.

obvious, expensive and tasteless, Azzurra’s food perfectly echoes Mr Angell’s ambience. It purports to be the fainest (sic) seafood from British waters, served “mere hours after the catch”, which was a bit confusing where the menu featured Japanese sea urchin and Sicilian red prawns, but the “Indulgent” seafood plate for two at £135.00 duly included Cornish crab, Welsh lobster and Colchester oysters.

I asked if it was possible to have some shallot vinegar for the oysters, but the waiter said they didn’t have that. Or a shallot, some vinegar and a knife, apparently. e prawns were chilly and glutinous, the crab had been shredded into a bowl with some industrial mayonnaise and a strong whi of sewer and the lobster was woolly and embarrassed. We were given some lobster forks, which the waiter kindly explained were to get the di cult bits out, but no-one had the heart to shame the poor beast further, not that it stopped the waiter coming back resentfully to inform us we’d missed a bit before the Indulgence was removed.

a spectacular return to Azzurra form, simultaneously slimy, dry and revoltingly argumentative. Truly, one of the nastiest Italian recipes one could nd outside the Futurist manifesto.

ere’s a list of pretentiously named pizzas from which I tried a “Partenopea”, which came bianca, with some lumps of Italian sausage and a few scraps of broccoli, edible if far from ambrosial.

in the interests of fairness, I should point out that the wine list featured a Verdicchio from the Marche, a grassy, smoky wine not found so often

in London and the sta were nice, apart from the o cious lobster-shamer. ey volunteered to prepare tiramisu for us at the table even after we begged them not to and the manager’s tone when he asked us if we’d had an enjoyable evening was convincingly mournful.

When Azzurra opened, David Yeo noted archly that “we’re not going to be chasing Michelin stars”, so that’s just as well, and perhaps it will make lots of money for its corporate investors. I couldn’t have disliked it more. ●

A longside eight choices of raw, poor-quality sh, Azzurra o ers a piscine a ettati misti with seabass “pancetta” and sword sh “’nduja”, as well as a unique take on sword sh cooked in the style of veal Milanese, i.e. breadcrumbed and fried, which tasted similar to another unique take on sh llet introduced by McDonald’s in 1962. e chef is Sardininan, which at least meant the pasta o erings came in fun shapes. Lorighittas, the chewy, braided form traditionally made in Morgongiori, came in a disappointingly adequate sauce of baby octopus with chilli, tomato and Capo Caccia olive oil, but the casarecce with olive pesto, Bronte pistachio and smoked soy cheese were

EATING IN

SGood for the sole

Felipe Fernández-Armesto pots some shrimp

eagulls squitter overhead. Cracks in the pavement trip your feet. Potholes tear at your tyres. e precipitate topography of Hastings wears down ill-advised retirees, who stagger between slope and strand. Rubbish over ows from bulging bins. On the beach the stones stick in my dogs’ paws.

Along the esplanade civic vulgarianism has vandalised such fragments of faded elegance as Hitler spared. But

there are compensations: the gaunt, ruined outline of the cli top castle, the rickety charm of the unspoiled old town, the delightful church of St Mary Star of the Sea on the High Street, the inspired eclecticism of Bayte — an o -seafront bistro in St Leonard’s — and the wonders of the shmongers. Fish for sale no longer strew the beach as they did in Turner’s paintings, but the varieties he depicted still dominate the local trade: dabs and

Table Talk

gurnards, which former generations foolishly fed to their cats, alongside — at this time of year, when the season for most species overlaps — the plaice and sole that feed shermen’s pride and rich folk’s appetites. When fresh and new they seem to leap from sea to slab like harbingers of spring.

i like flatfish grilled or fried — sole meunière, breaded plaice and chips, or llets of either kind sautéed in olive oil with lots of garlic. April, however, is when Dover sole is at its best, while shell sh reach the end of their traditionally appointed season. It calls for a recipe that combines the incoming and departing treats. To shove a few prawns or langoustines into the pan is a simple and commendable step, which comes naturally to my fellow-Spaniards. But the sights and smells of Hastings, where the Dover sole are insuperable, demand an English dish.

e arguments for using potted shrimps as dressing are decisive. I can think of no other uniquely English shell sh recipe. One can store the results for early picnics, should the English weather allow. And, for immediate consumption as a rite of spring, the combination of toothsome shrimps and spiced butter complements the soft, eshy texture of the sole.

i abhor people who pot any old variety: only the tiny, peculiarly sweet, nutty-tasting brown shrimp of the North Sea is entirely suitable. It doesn’t come from Hastings, and in the EU it would not get an English dénomination d’origine. e Dutch call it Dutch shrimp and the Germans German. Most of the English yield comes from the Wash or from the famed beds of the Lancashire coast, where “Morecambe Bay shrimp” wriggles invitingly in the sand. But there are always a few trays of the fresh catch on the front at Hastings, glistening like heaps of coral and making all the other crustacea there look inelegantly large.

ey are maddeningly ddly to peel. Such are the complexities of modern, industrialised eating that many sheries send their shrimps to Morocco to be peeled by a form of labour that is obscure and rationally inexplicable. But if one gives the molluscs half a minute in briskly boiling water, leaves them to cool, and scrapes at the shells — with untrimmed ngernails, unstinting discipline and inexhaustible patience — alluring nudity will at last emerge.

To preserve the shrimps perfectly, the butter that coats them must be clear. Some shrimp-potters agonise over the e ort to strain away the solids. If one intends to eat the dish promptly the degree of clarity doesn’t much

DRINK

matter. But indi erence to tradition always annoys me and, as in all work of any value, perfection is the only target worth aiming at.

Melting in steam, in a jug with a lip and a curved or concave bottom, makes it relatively easy to pour o the clari ed liquid while leaving the whey to coagulate, like the dregs at the bottom of a claret jug. A scraping of nutmeg or mace, a pinch of red pepper and a sprinkling of dill confer avour and colour.

After a few cool days under the crust of butter the shrimps will garnish Dover sole admirably; the dish will be pinguid enough without the fats that grilling or frying add. So steaming or poaching is called for.

Because I like lots of complementary avours, textures and colours, I favour marinading and poaching the sole in a court bouillon of intense sh stock and wine vinegar, with chopped parsley and fennel, capers and green peppercorns for colour and a few slivers of carrot — but no onion, as it o ends the shrimps.

Decorated with bijouterie from the bouillon and smothered in the sweet, slippery confection, the result will vindicate “England, now that April’s there”. ●

Alcohol and Islam

One of the most unusual travel books of recent years is e Wet and the Dry (published in 2013) in which Lawrence Osborne, an English novelist, travels in the Muslim world in search of a drink. Osborne is something of an expert on the subject, the soi-disant “vodka critic for Vogue magazine” and author of an o beat wine book, e Accidental Connoisseur. He is also an alcoholic. So on his travels he isn’t just seeking

Henry Je reys seeks out a snifter in the Middle East

out a cheeky half of lager, he’s looking to get intoxicated. As one Pakistan businessman says to him: “Are you serious? Get drunk in Islamabad?”

On this subject, Osborne is deadly serious. While most writers on drink shy away from examining their own less than healthy relationships with booze, the opening of the book sees Osborne getting the shakes while being interviewed for Italian television in a bar in Milan. It sets the tone for what follows

as Osborne ploughs deeper into the Islamic world.

He begins his journey, naturally, in that most seductive of Eastern cities, Beirut, drinking wine with warlordturned-vineyard-owner Walid Jumblatt (“thick juicy Americanised wine, more or less revolting”), Martinis in hotel bars and plenty of arak, the national drink of Lebanon.

From there it’s into territory where it’s far less easy to get a snifter or where alcohol is carefully cordoned o for Westerners as in Abu Dhabi, where Osborne gets spectacularly drunk and ends up fully clothed in the hotel swimming pool.

today the islamic world is notoriously proscriptive of alcohol although the Qur’an is less clear on this than you might think. According to Tears of Bacchus: a History of Wine in the Arab World, the clearest anti-alcohol message comes in Surah 5:90-1: “Wine, gambling, idol-worshipping, and divination arrows are an abomination from among the acts of Satan.”

However the words are interpreted, alcohol was not always strictly controlled throughout Islam’s history. How could it be when Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Iran and Iraq are the birthplaces of wine?

once famous for its nightlife.

Osborne writes: “alcohol was more or less freely sold and consumed [in Pakistan] from 1947 until 1977, when Prime Minister Zul kar Ali Bhutto banned its sale”. Today it is now only available from hotel bars and specialist shops for foreigners and non-Muslims.

Osborne nds himself the lone drinker in a bar hidden in a hotel in Islamabad. e bartender tells him about Muslims trying to sneak in for a drink: “We are catching these blighters every week.”

Caliph al-Amin, who ruled from 809 to 813, was said to have a swimming pool of wine.

e wine-sodden, erotic poetry of his friend Abu Nuwas chronicles the nightlife of Baghdad. e other great Islamic bard of the vine was Omar Khayyam, after whom a brand of Egyptian wine is named.

This relative tolerance persisted until very recently as the great cities of the East like Alexandria, Cairo, and Baghdad were cosmopolitan centres with large Christian and Jewish populations. Further east, Karachi was

ere’s still a brewery and distillery in Pakistan called Murree, “drink and make Murree’’ as the advertising slogan says, set up to provide beer for British soldiers. It produces surprisingly good whisky, according to Osborne. ey are not allowed to export it so o cially it is only drunk by non-Muslims within Pakistan.

Isphanyar Bhandara, whose Parsi family own the business, explains the shift: “ e Muslim attitude is getting harder. Liquor, you see, is associated with a Western lifestyle, so it has become a ashpoint of some kind. Muslim hostility to the Western way of life nds its focus in alcohol.” Alcohol is not just intoxication, it’s freedom and sex, it’s men and women mixing.

everywhere, except beirut, it seems the noose is tightening. Night-

clubs in Cairo, which in the 1960s was the cultural capital of the Arab world, are having to become increasingly discreet. From ailand to Pakistan bars have become targets for militants.

And in Turkey, long a beacon of alcoholic tolerance in the East, the Erdogan regime is throttling the wine industry by ramping up taxation — just at a time, sadly, when Turkish wine was becoming worth drinking.

Booze, however, will nd a way. When I visited Vayots Dzor in Armenia a few years back, I noticed that at the side of the road people were selling what looked like Coca-Cola. On closer inspection it turned out to be homemade wine, packaged so that lorry drivers could smuggle it into the neighbouring Islamic Republic of Iran.

One winemaker, Vahe Keushguerian, has gone further, sourcing grapes from Iran itself to be made into wine in Armenia — the rst Iranian wine since the revolution of 1979. Meanwhile in Syria, Domaine de Bargylus managed to produce truly world-class wines throughout the country’s brutal civil war. Even in the strictest country of all there is hope. Osborne didn’t visit Saudi Arabia, perhaps because it would have been too risky trying to get a drink, but earlier this year there was a story in the Associated Press about a liquor store opening in the capital. Before you pack your bags for Riyadh, I should add that it will only be open to non-Muslim diplomats. So not exactly the caliphate of al-Amin. But it’s a start. ●

ART HOUSE

LOut with the old and in with the new

ast month i wrote about how the marketeers at the auction houses have pushed luxury brands as the “gateway drug” for new buyers coming into the art market. However, it remains to be seen in what direction these new Hermès handbagtoting buyers will go.

Will they gravitate toward the ashy, fun, and largely conceptual (and intellectually open) area of contemporary art, such as the insanely popular works by Yayoi Kusama, or perhaps the downright hip street works by Rashid Johnson? Maybe they will nd their happiness in eighteenth-century European furniture and ceramics, seventeenth-century Italian paintings or sculpture? My money is on the former, though my preference is for the latter. e rise and rise in the size and value of the contemporary art market has continued (with a major dip in 2009) for over two decades. Over the same period of time, the traditional — or “classic” — art market (English & French furniture, old master and nineteenth-century paintings, and with a few exceptions, most impressionist paintings) has declined in value.

People often ask me why this classic area of the art market has declined in value, and they are also the same people who state, wistfully, that “it will come back,” relying on the cyclical nature of markets. However, I have my doubts.

this is not a bear market followed by a bull market. First, there is at any single time, a relatively small number of buyers for art; for individual pieces above £100,000, perhaps a few thousand. Art is a luxury, discretionary purchase.

Rufus Bird asks why the market for classic art is shrinking

Of course museums buy great works of art (especially classic, established pieces) when they appear on the market, and sell (“deaccession”) occasionally as well, but their participation and impact in the marketplace is mostly marginal, though valuable.

Second, the contemporary art market (works created by artists born after 1945), is a growth market, not only by virtue of the fact that it is contemporary, ergo works are being created daily, but also new buyers are coming into the market each year.

Visitors to modern and contemporary art museums all over the world are growing and while this may or may not have a bearing on the art market, auction sales in that sector continue to grow year on year and today represent over half of the entire auction market (by both volume and value).

Third, by contrast, while the objects that make up the classic market are still plentiful, it is often said that the greatest works are already in museums and therefore out of circulation. Of course there are occasional discoveries but these are tiny in number and not always museum quality.

ere are still today superb private collections of classic art, and some of these become museums themselves (viz. the yssen-Bornemisza collection) or works are presented to major

CHRISTOPHER PINCHER | DELUXE

What makes a gentleman tick?

●it i ai that ca p t a gentleman by his shoes and his watch. At least, it was said in the days before contemporary incarnations of the noblesse de race (actors, civil servants, sons of peers, trustafarians and anyone in the media) affected to look like they had spent the weekend sleeping in a hedge. Nonetheless, these two items of apparel still have the power to mark the man from the masses, especially a fine watch — which even hedgedwelling sons of privilege have been known to own.

Of course, there are watches and there are watches, and then there are watches. Most of us at one point or another have had a mass-produced timepiece on our wrists, save perhaps the late, great Gianni Agnelli who only ever wore the best and then only over the sleeve of his shirt. We can all probably admit to owning a Seiko, a Sekonda or a Rotary. There is nothing wrong with such watches of course. They keep time and some look rather smart. Yet I suspect that anyone in possession of Rotary would really like a Rolex. For we all look in our lives for things that are better, that will please us and of which we will be proud (even if their cost makes our blood run cold). We see in others what we would like ourselves to be. Hence when Paul Newman first donned his Rolex Cosmograph Daytona, he transformed what was a modish but relatively unknown design into an icon of cool class.

museums (viz. Mellon, Morgan, Kress, Wrightsman et al): again, great works are removed from circulation.

Fourth, the appetite for classic art has changed: today’s taste and fashion are for notions of the contemporary. ere is, perhaps, even a disdain for the scholarly, the antiquarian, the unusual.

We are living in times where the overwhelming trend for art in your house — whether it is furniture, sculpture, ceramics, tapestries, paintings or prints — is for the modernist and the new and, in particular, for the conceptual above the realistic.

this might be explained as follows: at a subliminal level, the historical associations of great works created for wealthy patrons in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries might make some uneasy, the fore-

grounding of links with slave trading, or being linked with Ancien Régime autocratic political structures.

I have never heard a buyer give this as a reason not to buy a beautiful piece, but judging by the furniture and works of art surrounding many leaders of autocratic regimes, their interior decorator, perhaps

Newman was an influencer before that ridiculous term was minted. Subsequent celebrities, thanks often to their agents, for not all stars are themselves inherently stylish, have stalked the red carpet or been snapped in the street whilst sporting all manner of bling bunged their way as brand ambassadors.

Even fictious characters have been roped into the brand game. James Bond wears an Omega Seamaster whilst Dennis Wheatley’s proto-Bond, Gregory Sallust, swanned around in Sulka ties and a Cartier under his cuff.

intentionally, has usually selected something re ecting a grand eighteenth century aesthetic.

Additionally, conceptual art is an intellectual free-for-all. An Yves Klein blue painting allows anyone to impose their thoughts onto the work of art (infamously Klein did just this, covering naked women in blue paint who then pressed themselves onto the canvas).

By contrast, the realistic — and to some extent the historic — is intellectually rooted in time and space. e narrative exists, there is already a tangible link to a society, a way of thinking with which the new owner aligns themselves. If we can’t learn to celebrate and understand those sometimes di cult historical narratives, then the less demanding, open and occasionally simplistic contemporary art will remain in the ascendancy. ●

stretches back almost a century before, Baume & Mercier’s maxim is “accept only perfection”.

And in the beauty and the balance of their precision instruments, you will find only perfection. The Guillod Gunther workshop was renowned for its art in the mid-twentieth century, crafting chronographic masterpieces marked with the “punch of the master”.

Watches like these are part and parcel of a celebrity’s catwalk kit and I place them in a second category of marvellous mechanical instruments which we desire not only because they are beautiful and expensive, but because they are showcased by the beautiful and expensive people that many of us wish to be.

Since then, Baume & Mercier has lovingly launched series after series of the most consistently elegant designs I have seen. Of their latest collection, the moon-phase and date Clifton Baumatic 10736 (left) and Clifton 10583 are two wonderful timepieces, both with white enamelled faces, lacquer finished and encased in pink gold.

watch each

a the there are atche . Slim, simple and elegant chronometers, whose voices speak softly of sophistication but for whom no brash showbiz name stands public sentinel nor do any soi-disant influencers shout their name. These are gentlemen’s timepieces.

Watches like these are part and parcel of a sophistication influencers shout story

I place Baume & Mercier wristwatches in this third and most special category. Founded in 1918, although the Baume comptoir horloger story

For the purists who still like to wind their watch each morning and night, the new Classima 10735 with its sapphire-blue skeleton face through which the movement is visible, is both modern and manual.

dressing table, speaks to others on its owner’s

A watch, more than anything on a man’s dressing table, speaks to others on its owner’s behalf. Chaucer told us that time and tide wait for no man. But a first class timepiece lends weight to any gentleman, carrying him forward on a tide of self-confidence with the added assurance that, wherever his destination, his watch will not cause him to be late. ●

COUNTRY NOTES

OThe big bang

Patrick Galbraith ponders the wider e ects of large shoots

n a bitingly cold Saturday, earlier this year, I was standing next to the head keeper at Holkham in front of a dense wood. It was probably the best shooting invitation I’ve ever had and I was letting myself down. “Tough wind, sir,” he said with a thoughtful nod as another hen bird shot by and I missed with both barrels.

As estates go, Holkham is quite something. Tom Leicester, the current earl, has worked hard to create a place where tourism, agriculture, forestry, and shooting all run alongside each other as highly e ective strands of a bustling whole. Even those who loathe the idea of earldoms, great landholdings, and big houses, seem to give Holkham a free pass.

In part it’s probably because they provide so much access. It’s also partly down to Jake Fiennes, the estate’s conservation manager. In his forthright way, he pioneers some very impressive nature recovery at Holkham and he’s not shy about discussing it.

“Have you had much shooting this year?” the head keeper continued as a high pigeon ew down the line. I told him I’d managed to keep the freezer full. I’d had some geese on Lewis, I’d caught up with enough hares for a party at New Year, and I’d been invited down to Wales to shoot two very big days.

“Bit of a con ict for you sir,” the headkeeper said wryly. And he was right. Over the years, I’ve been a vocal critic of the excesses of commercial pheasant shooting. At Holkham that Saturday we shot a hundred or so and what the Guns didn’t take home ended up at e Victoria, the estate pub.

The sort of days they put on at the place I went to in Wales are very di erent — 400 birds at Bettws Hall is standard fare. It would be wrong to

suggest there’s anything shonky about Bettws — they rear their own game in immaculate conditions, the shooting itself is challenging, and everything ends up in the food chain. ey are far too big to do things badly.

I’ve frequently said that if shooting gets bigger and bigger it will eventually go bang, and Bettws has been at the forefront of commercialisation. I accepted the invitation, in part, because I wanted to see what it was all about. e scale of the whole thing was extraordinary, and it was even shinier than I expected it to be. Champagne owed, canapes came relentlessly, and

there were often so many birds in the sky that it was impossible to pick one.

after the endof the first day, I stood in the pub talking to one of the keepers and he asked me what I thought. I shot straight: “the whole thing is remarkable, but surely putting that many birds down has heavy ecological consequences?”

e young keeper didn’t disagree. “But this pub,” he replied, “this pub is only here because of Bettws and the village shop would close without it.”

Bettws, I learned the following day, employs more than 100 people, as well as countless part-timers. e bene t to a part of Wales that has long struggled economically is immense. And yet the young keeper agreed, as somebody seemingly fascinated by nature and conservation, that sending a few

STEPHEN POLLARD | TURF ACCOUNT

A matter of National concern

●i a c e h t ha e ee ar t atch Red Rum’s astonishing three Grand National winners between 1973 and 1976, but the first I was properly invested in — literally — was Ben Nevis, who ran away with the race in 1980 at 40/1 and helped pay for far more under-age nights in the local pub than a 15-year-old should have had any business with.

The thing about the National is that every winner is memorable — or, rather, becomes memorable through the very fact of winning. I guess it’s much the same as interest in the backstory of Liz Truss; the one fact of her having been PM makes it so.

It’s a cliché that the race is less of a lottery than it used to be. The fences have been softened, the take-off and landing levels have been changed and the qualifying rating has been raised. They’re all sensible changes and have helped square the circle of retaining what anyone writing about the Grand National seems legally obliged to call its inimitable “magic”, whilst ensuring that the race is also, as much as anything else, one of the classiest handicap chases.

But when this year’s race is run on the second Saturday in April, that balance will have undergone a huge shift in the latter direction — a shift which, in my view, will come close to destroying the race’s magic.

ecologists onto the hill to look at the impact on invertebrates of releasing so much game would be interesting.

On that drive in Norfolk, I nally caught up with a hen bird and I told the headkeeper as his spaniel ran out to

retrieve it, that I suppose it was a bit of a con ict but I was glad I’d been. I wasn’t, I don’t think, totally wrong but I hadn’t appreciated quite how much Bettws — and shoots like it — contribute economically.

ti thi ear the ie i e ha ee cappe at 40. That’s a huge and unique number for a race, and one of the reasons the race is far more than just a very good handicap chase. This year, however, there will be no more than 34 runners.

The main story in the run-up to last year’s race was the planned disruption by so-called animal rights protestors. Thanks, however, to a combination of intelligence, security, legal action and overhype by the protestors, the race went ahead without incident. And that is how these threats should be dealt with with racing standing its ground on its own terms.

Instead, in a short-sighted and entirely unnecessary sop to the protestors, the number of permitted runners has been slashed. It won’t satisfy them, of course. It won’t even make the race any safer; as has been widely pointed out,

W e seem to have fallen into a rut where people say things about farming, forestry, and eldsports that often aren’t true. e countryside is immensely complicated and anybody, be they an environmentalist, a nature writer, or even a gamekeeper, who claims to have all the answers is probably a bullshitter. Currently, across Britain, people are campaigning for more land access. Great estates, they’ll tell you, are no country for the common man.

Some of their points are valid but I couldn’t help thinking, as I parked up that Saturday next to crowds of people who were there to do ParkRun, that if some of those land access campaigners spent a Saturday at Holkham, many of them would probably nd, like I did at Bettws, that things are never as simple as they seem from afar. ●

fewer runners will probably mean a faster race. But it will damage the race. And thus racing itself.

that t the pr e ith the ati a Of the 94 original entries, 61 came from Ireland. That’s not so much an issue for the race as an indication of the wider problem with British racing. But of those Irish entries, 26 were from Gordon Elliott and 13 from Willie Mullins. Elliott has said he expects to have between eight and ten runners. That could be almost a third of the field.

Elliott has every right to run as many horses as he and his owners want if they qualify under the current rules, but if the British Horseracing Authority can’t see that this dominance by one trainer is a disaster for the bigger picture, both of the race and racing more generally, then it is even more out of its depth than I had assumed.

i pre i ear ar e i three a t has bet on the National, wagering some £150 million. Six hundred million watch it across the planet. It is, by a mile, the biggest race of the year and thus the biggest contributor to racing’s finances. If the Grand National starts to be seen as merely another handicap, and one with a third of the field supplied by one trainer, we might as well all pack up and go home now.

As for who will win … bear in mind I’m writing this before Cheltenham but my ante post bets are on Hewick at 33/1, Meetingofthewaters at 25/1 and Nassalam at 28/1. ●

STYLE

Wearing shades

Hannah Betts says colour is the only a ordable fashion choice

“What’s the colour we should be wearing?” absolutely no one is asking. Once this was the kind of question wimmin and haute homosexuals were wont to inquire of gurus such as myself, only they now consider themselves too selfdetermining for it. Well, maybe they should revert, this kind of thing being the only means by which the likes of you and I will be able to a ord a slice of fashion action.

You know matters have reached an economic extreme when even fashion journalists — aka receivers of free ' ts — start taking note. In a Washington Post article entitled “ e Reality and Delusion of Milan Fashion Week”, Rachel Tashjian ri ed on the una ordability of garb produced by socialist Miuccia Prada, among others.

“ e clothes have gotten outrageously, laughably expensive … ese clothes are uniformly out of reach of everyone.” Yet, of late, all designers can talk about is the profundity of their engagement with reality. LOLs.

over on substack, where commentators don’t need to be as aligned with the industry, this issue is bubbling, bordering on broil. Jess Graves in her “Love List” discusses how obsessed designers are with targeting the top 3 per cent of EIPs (Extremely Important People). It’s not just that Chanel, Dior and e Row are beyond us, there’s no longer a sense that a civilian might save up for some element of a designer collection.

Rat” Substack: “Fashion feels so disconnected from real life right now. And insane prices don’t help. Sure, Bottega Veneta looked nice. But will I ever spend $11,000 on a top? Nope.”

We plebs aren’t supposed to buy designer-in uenced fast fashion anymore. e mid-market is much talked about, but has a tendency to hurtle ever upward, stalwarts such as Reiss suddenly going after the £895 coat market, or crash down (farewell Jigsaw, opting to plummet after ring designer Jo Sykes).

Meanwhile, vintage buying is no longer niche, but mainstream enough to be an Oscar ex. Prices appear to be polarising accordingly: try to buy something spenny and it’s still too spenny; endeavour to sell o one of your less exorbitant “investments” and reap almost nil.

which brings me back to my earlier point: donning the colour of the moment to semaphore that one is sentient, au courant, alive — and as the only a ordable method of participating in this shit.

As to which colour, beige is still dragging on a bit as that supposedly high-net-worth hue that reads na -as-fuck. Turd brown muddied winter wardrobes, but, desirable it is not.

See Emilia Petrarca in her “Shop

A ash of red has been the street-up obsession du jour meaning it must now be considered over. Outliers are making a case for mustard. Olive and bottle green are looking ubiquitous for autumn. However, for the bona- de pop hits of spring/summer ’24, we’re talking burgundy and cobalt.

Wait, I mean Ancora red (Rosso ancora) and Knight blue, for Gucci and Burberry are taking the punchy step of endeavouring to make a move on said shades.

Obviously, there’s a long tradition of colours being associated with brands. Witness Schiaparelli pink, Hérmes’s (accidental) orange (other packaging ran short during wartime), Chanel’s black, white, red, and, er, beige, but basically black and white thangs. e tradition was revitalised rst in 2021 when Daniel Lee made Parakeet green Bottega green; next in 2022 when Pierpaolo Piccioli took over at Valentino, formerly scarlet in-house hue, “Pink PP” added to Pantone’s o cial scale.

lee, now at burberry, is coopting colour again. And so the brand took over Harrods — exterior included — with Klein, sorry, Knight blue. While Gucci’s new creative director, Sabato De Sarno, wielded Ancora red to signal the brand’s return to understated elegance after the carnival years of Alessandro Michele; “ancora” meaning “still” or “again” in Italian.

All of which is to say, one might want to dig out one’s existing garments in these shades. Cobalt, in particular, has been kicking about for a while. Apart from a slight Nineties’ nod, burgundy hasn’t ourished since the New Romantics. (Still, New Romanticism is back too, more of which anon.)

Brilliant blue is a great freshener-upper as the light brightens into spring;

burgundy tting the preppy, neo-posh boy vibe so many of us are working during the recession. ey also look good together. Ensure any gestures you succumb to are returnable when purchasing online as burgundy, in particular, can be more brown IRL than it appears on, say, piss-poor eBay images. Do I speak from bitter experience? Always. ●

Dial S for screen time

Claudia Savage-Gore pledges not to give Hector an iPhone

So here i am, like everyone with a primary school-age child, dutifully signing pledges that I absolutely will not give Hector a smartphone until he is 14 at the very youngest. In no circumstances will he rock up to Year Seven with the latest iPhone. All eminently wise.

Slight problem, Minnie and Lyra — who are now 15 and 12 — both got iPhones at eleven. I’m keeping this very quiet from the mothers at Hector’s school, immediately changing the subject when they enquire, wide-eyed, when I gave my older kids phones.

I didn’t ask for this! I never set myself up as some kind of Mother Superior, relaying messages from the dark side of puberty. It’s just one of the annoying aspects of having had a third child, the assumption that you have a clue.

And yes, I know, what was I thinking? But back then, pre-lockdowns, everyone was doing it. “Minnie will be the odd one out,” we said. It was “a safety issue”. She was o to boarding school “so it made sense”. And once

Pandora’s box was open, I couldn’t change the threshold for Lyra, without lifelong sibling resentment. And now, surprise, surprise, they are indeed addicts. In fact, I spent half term dissuading Minnie from starting her own TikTok account to review other TikTok accounts. All very meta (lol).

on one level, this only hardens my resolve this time round. Nothing like seeing your daughter reject 50 sel es, to induce biblical levels of guilt and parental hand-wringing. But the fact that I’ve signed a few WhatsApp petitions will mean nothing to Hector.

Ditto, my own social standing if I

were to backtrack on my pledge. Ever since toddlerhood, his mission in life has been to sni out the slightest sibling inequality. So the news that he has to wait three years longer than his sisters is not likely to go down well.

e other thing nobody mentions, is that these middle-class tweens being forbidden phones have had iPads since they were six, for restaurants and ights. And said tablets are online (because, Net ix).

So frankly they can already look at YouTube to their heart’s content, which Hector does, in the form of a terrible Minecraft in uencer whose voice haunts my dreams. Unless you’re prepared to sit with them through their daily hour of screen time, utterly defeating the object of the exercise, the stable door was already open.

Will, naturally, keeps questioning my original sin, in giving Minnie a phone at eleven. Which is really helpful. And I didn’t hear any complaints at the time in fact he was delighted that she nally stopped lecturing him, aged ten, about “always looking at his phone”.

also, in my defence, the entire parenting landscape has changed in the ve years between Minnie’s birth and Hector’s. Truly. Even the colours. We went from nautical JoJo Maman Bebe stripes in the late noughties to that whimsical putty-teabag kiddy palette that has dominated since 2015.

And while I bene tted from the last gasp of Gina Ford and Supernanny with Minnie (joyous permission to ignore and con scate), by the time Hector came along it was full on earthy-sling-parenting, with accompanying panic about sugar and screen time. And now those children are about to come of age, and we’re all freaking out about their smartphone virginity.

A side issue — I could really do without being sent another petition every two days. My screen time is up 60 per cent from looking at links to terrifying articles on tween smartphone use. Irony not lost. ●

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NICK tImothy

Why the goal glut ?

A few decades ago, football bo ns thought the beautiful game was too boring. In 1996, the FIFA president, Sepp Blatter, tried quite literally to move the goalposts. He wanted the sticks widened by the diameter of two footballs, and the bar raised by one.

Fortunately, his ridiculous idea was killed quickly, and Blatter and his UEFA sidekick Michel Platini were driven out amid a corruption scandal. Fans around the world had reacted with horror to the idea, and football — never boring, even when Italy is defending a 1-0 lead — has only grown more exciting.

Take this season’s Premier League, which has seen a stupendous increase in THE NUMBER OF GOALS . At the time of writing, with most teams having played 28 games, the League has seen 907 goals at an average of 3.25 per match. is is a leap from the 2.85 per match last season, the modern low of 2.45 per match in 2006-7, and 2.36 in 1970-71. It is the highest since 1964-65, when Jimmy Greaves and Denis Law were scoring for fun, and most teams had a twenty-goal-a-season striker.

But what is behind the change? Part of the answer is the polarisation of quality between the stronger teams and those at the bottom. At the time of writing, She eld United are bottom of the table, having conceded 74 goals in 28 matches — a ratio worse than any side in Premier League history. Burnley, in nineteenth place, have conceded 62 in 28 — more than two goals per game. Last season, only Leeds United had such a leaky defence, and several seasons have gone by in which no team conceded so many.

She eld United supporters have had to watch their team — just at home — lose 8-0 to Newcastle, 5-0 to Villa, 5-0 to

Newcastle

Brighton, and 6-0 to Arsenal. For good measure, their fans had to watch Brighton beat them 5-2 at home in the FA Cup too.

But the trend is not only caused by low standards at the bottom of the League. Another explanation is the increase in playing time. Last season statistics showed that the ball was in play during Premier League matches for an average of only 55 minutes. e resulting decision to clamp down on time-wasting has, according to some estimates, doubled the amount of additional time this season compared to previous years, with the second half of matches now often extended by ten minutes or even more.

Elementary maths tells us more minutes means more goals — but longer games also mean wearier legs and more mistakes, and more risk-taking by teams searching for an equaliser or winner. And for those cynics and sceptics out there, the extra injury time has not just been cancelled out by more feigned injuries and time-wasting. In January, the Premier League estimated that the time the ball has been in play this season has increased on average by more than three and a half minutes.

But the increase in goals is proportionately greater than the increase in playing time, and this leads us to the most signi cant part of the explanation: changes in the playing style of Premier League teams. For football has become much more proactive and assertive. In recent years teams such as Manchester City under Pep Guardiola have consciously eschewed tactics such as counter-attacking, and aimed, in simple terms, to completely dominate their opposition.

What does this mean in practice? It means maintaining very high rates of possession, requiring patient build-up play and demanding more of players in every position — even goalkeepers and defenders. Gone are the days of meat-headed blockers: modern football asks keepers to sweep far beyond their box, defenders to pass quickly and accurately, and

players celebrate after theIr 8-0 drubbIng of SheffIeld UnIted; RIght, Manchester CIty's ErlIng Haaland Is the PremIer League’s leadIng goalscorer thIs season

defenders and defensive mid elders to withstand the pressure of a “high press”.

Equally, attacking players are expected to press opposing defenders high up the pitch, hunting together as a pack. e new approach also needs players to be tactically astute enough to play their part in exible formations, which can move from, say, a 4-4-2 out of possession to a 3-2-5 with the ball.

Now more teams are playing the City way. Arsenal under Mikel Arteta — a former Guardiola apprentice — seek to dominate their opponents too. Spurs under Ange Postecoglou, Newcastle under Eddie Howe and Aston Villa under Unai Emery are all playing in similar ways.

e emphasis on control and high pressing does not only mean more goals for teams seeking to dispossess their opponents in their own half: it also means more opportunities to counter-attack. “Transition”, in football parlance, is when you win back the ball from the other team and seek to exploit the spaces they left as they attacked. is is not just something left to the weaker teams against their stronger opponents who dominate possession. Liverpool might win the title this year, and Jurgen Klopp’s team are masters of the transition.

For the pursuit of control — and the exible formations that come with it — brings opportunities to score for the attackers. More possession means more chances to create, and more high pressing means more chances to take the ball from your opponents in dangerous parts of the pitch. But this creates opportunities for the other side: to counter-attack, yes, but to beat the press by passing through it or even sometimes, more directly, over it.

And the result, as the data shows, is more entertainment and more goals than for decades. ●

Nick Timothy is the author of Remaking One Nation: e Future of Conservatism and a Daily Telegraph columnist

wInnIng sInner borıs starlıng

An unwanted silver jubilee hangs over this year’s cycling season. It is 25 years since LANCE ARMSTRONG won the rst of his now annulled seven Tours de France, and though he has been expunged from the history books the rami cations of what he did continue to reverberate for they hit at the heart of how and why we watch not just his sport but all sport.

Do we shrug and accept doping as a necessary evil? Do we go the other way and denounce any sport with a doping problem as one without integrity (and if so, do we include rugby, tennis, football, the NFL and so on, because if you think they’re all clean then I’ve a bridge to sell you)? Or do we square the circle with a messy, rational, imperfect mental compromise?

at 1999 Tour needed Armstrong quite as much as he needed it. e previous year’s race had been a disaster: it began

with the Festina team being expelled after one of their sta was stopped at customs with more drugs than a Grateful Dead roadie, and then lurched through multiple police raids and rider protests. Only half the eld made it to Paris, and even that had looked unlikely at times. A charismatic, articulate cancer survivor whose nationality would help open up the sport to vast new lucrative markets was the perfect symbol of rebirth.

Too perfect, of course, as it turned out. But the illusion lasted for years. Why did so many of us believe in him? Because we wanted to. For every journalist who said “this doesn’t smell right” (take a bow, David Walsh), there were millions of fans sucked into the narrative the pedalling cancer-Jesus peddled so seductively: su ering, resilience, redemption, triumph.

Not coincidentally, these are also the touchstones of the Tour itself, a three-week Calvary through 20-odd Stations of the Cross. Every rider re ects our desires back to us, but none of them shone as brightly as this megawatt Texan.

Armstrong on the 1999 tour, and wInnIng It (above)

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And when, gradually, the suspicions became too great to ignore, the justi cations shifted. What about all his work for cancer research (even though his Livestrong foundation focused almost exclusively on cancer awareness)? So what if he was doping: weren’t they all? (Eight di erent men stood on the podium with him during his sevenyear reign, and every one has now been implicated in doping one way or another.)

And so what if he bullied and intimidated rivals and teammates alike? is was professional sport, it was a jungle, he was the apex predator. Oderint dum metuant, as Caligula said: let them hate, so long as they fear.

Two decades on, it’s still impossible to watch cycling without the subliminal soundtrack of those years playing just beneath the surface. Is the sport cleaner now? Almost certainly. “If I was racing [today],” Armstrong has said, “I wouldn’t do it again because I don’t think you have to.” But is it totally clean? Almost certainly not. Wafer-thin margins and enormous rewards mean riders will push the boundaries as far as they can, whether legally (bike tech, training regimes, nutrition) or illegally (doping).

But here’s the rub: there’s a large grey area between the two. e scienti c justi cations for which medications or supplements are allowed and which ones aren’t are often marginal, subjective, or both. e authorities, under-resourced and poorly funded, are always one step behind new products. And as Armstrong himself proved, not failing a drugs test is very di erent from not taking drugs: absence of evidence does not equal evidence of absence.

So when I think of Armstrong’s Tour wins, I think of a damaged, unpleasant man who has nonetheless given me some of the most thrilling sporting moments I’ve ever seen.

I watched him give Jan Ullrich “ e Look” on Alpe d’Huez in 2001, staring into the eyes of his great rival and seeing he had nothing left. I watched his magni cently de ant time trial through 500,000 hostile spectators on the same mountain three years later, brilliantly described by the author Daniel Coyle: “a shaking forest of sts inches in front of his wheel. It seemed as if he was riding down some endless collective throat … He sprinted for the line, low and hard, sts clenched, teeth bared: an image of freshly peeled ferocity, a face that did not ask for applause or love or understanding or anything except the animal respect due a superior force.”

I watched his insanely quick re exes and superlative bike handling to avoid Joseba Beloki’s horror crash on the way into Gap in 2003. I watched him fall on the way up to Luz-Ardiden that same year and then ride everyone else o his wheel, red-eyed with rage and determination. And each year, when

the race was done, I watched his team’s Trek bikes glitter in the dark near the Arc de Triomphe.

But these moments are not lost like tears in Alpine rain: quite the opposite. Doping alone did not allow Armstrong to do those things. ey came from deep within him, from the qualities which ultimately also turned out to be his aws. e man himself may be tainted, but the moments less so: even writing about them just now has brought back the thrill of seeing them live.

It’s easy to denounce those who transgress in the service of their success and our entertainment, but harder to remember the truth of the old cliché: whenever you point a nger at someone, you’re also directing three ngers back at yourself. ●

Boris Starling is an award-winning writer. He has written Open Side with Sam Warburton and Rise with Siya Kolisi

patrıck KıDD

shock of the new

As John Higgins lined up the fteenth black of what had been a awless frame in Riyadh, the Scottish snooker player’s attention was distracted by the arrival of a group of Arabs in owing white robes and headdresses. ey had drifted into the auditorium not, one suspects, out of any particular desire to see a four-times world champion in the second round of the World Masters event, but because they had heard that someone was seven pots away from making a stonking pile of cash.

For this competition in Saudi Arabia, the sponsors had come up with a gimmick. As well as the usual 15 reds and six colours, a golden ball would be placed on the top cushion and come into play if someone made a maximum 147 break. is “RIYADH BALL” was worth 20 points, though since the frame would have been long won by the time it could be attempted, it may as well have been a billion. However, its nancial value would be more than winning the whole tournament.

Anyone who completed a golden maximum would pocket £350,000. e eventual winner, Ronnie O’Sullivan, got a mere £250,000. Only ve players have earned £350,000 in total over the current season.

When the great Joe Davis, who dominated snooker from the 1920s to the 1950s, became the rst to record a recognised maximum break at Leicester Square Hall in 1955, he received a certi cate and a paragraph in the news in brief of e Times. Steve Davis (no relation) got a Lada car from the sponsor

apex predator: Lance armstrong

There is a di erence between innovation and a gimmick and it is not always clear in which category a novelty will end up belonging

in the high jump a century later, going over the bar back- rst rather than straddling it face-on, the unorthodox quickly became the orthodox.

But those were gimmicks introduced by the individual, like Dennis Lillee’s attempt to play with an aluminium cricket bat in 1979, rather than something that tinkered with the essence of the game. SNOOKER’S GOLDEN BALL is more like one of the daft proposals that are sometimes made to open up a drawn football match in extra time by removing players every ve minutes, or when the inventor of lawn tennis tried to encourage people to play it on an hourglass-shaped court.

when he made the rst in professional competition in 1982.

when he made the rst in professional competition in 1982. the World Championship. As orburn addressed the nal ball,

A year later, Cli orburn, a Canadian with a Tom Selleck moustache, received £13,000 (worth about £50,000 today) for compiling the rst maximum at the World Championship. As orburn addressed the nal ball, Jack Karnehm, the commentator, famously growled: “Good luck, mate.” e achievement mattered much more than the money.

Maximum breaks are less rare than they used to be, a result of there being so many professional tournaments. Ten years after Davis drove away his Lada there had still been only ten made. e 50th came in 2004 and the 100th in 2013. When Higgins made a maximum in Leicester in February, it was the 198th in professional competition and the thirteenth by the Scot. Only O’Sullivan has made more.

It remains a ne achievement — O’Sullivan’s 15 maximums have come at the rate of one every 870 frames he’s played — and yet it seldom makes a di erence to a match. Breaks of 70 or above are more valuable and O’Sullivan has had more than 3,000 of those.

There is a difference between innovation and gimmick and it is not always clear in which category a novelty will end up belonging. When cricketers started to BOWL OVERARM in 1864 — only 13 years before the rst Test match — were they looked on as cranks? Had John Wisden, who published his rst eponymous “cricketers’ almanack” that same year, not dismissed ten batsmen in an innings, all bowled, with a round-arm action? It did not take long for bowlers to realise they could be more deadly raining balls down from on high. Like DICK FOSBURY’S “FLOP” (above)

Some innovations catch on. THE CROSSBAR in football, for instance, was not mandatory until 1882, almost 20 years after the FA was created. Before then, some goals had been claimed when the ball passed between the posts 30 yards o the ground. And it took time for a uniform goal to be adopted: in 1888 Kensington Swifts were kicked out of the FA Cup because one of their crossbars was much lower than the other. Nets were added in 1892 to aid decisions, although there have been cases of the ball hitting the net, coming back out and the goal not given.

Cricket’s introduction of a net was less successful. In 1900, MCC announced the trial of having a 3FT HIGH NET around the boundary to encourage strokeplay rather than slogging. If the ball hit it, batsmen would get two runs plus whatever they had run, with the ball not dead until it came back, while hits over the net would only get three. e Times called it “the most fantastic of experiments” and the aws were soon exposed.

In one match at Lord’s, Derbyshire’s Samuel Wood nurdled the ball to the boundary and ran four, then ran two more as the elder threw wildly at the stumps and sent the ball back to the net, making ten runs in all. e experiment lasted for ve matches before MCC decided it was too silly.

Innovations improve a sport; gimmicks make it look ridiculous. As the sheikhs ocked in to watch Higgins’s attempt at golden ball history, perhaps the movement distracted him. He potted the black but ran out of position on the yellow and his ne cut left the ball in the jaws of the pocket. Higgins shrugged; his opponent chuckled. Neither reaction suggested this was serious sport. With no one else coming close to a maximum break in the tournament, the organisers announced that next year the golden ball will be worth £700,000. It will be a curiosity but it won’t bring them credibility. ●

Patrick Kidd writes the Diary and Tailender in e Times

Bonus shot: SaudI ArabIa's "golden ball"