ANCHOR European Summer

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2 | ANCHOR | CONTENTS

A fresh team has taken on the ever more dubious task of running Anchor Magazine, now in its fourth year.

For our summer edition we have significantly slimmed down, yet are still showing off our best features with contributions from our talented student body and a rare comeback of one of Anchor’s favourite founders.

We don’t need anyone telling us, or Angela, we’re not beach-body-ready!

This issue we dedicate to Europe, and our uncertain future as part of its Union. Featuring articles from both camps, and someone stuck in the middle, as well as taking a look at the wider politics of Europe and explore travel destinations within and beyond its borders. We also delve into EU-topia with Dr Joanne Paul, interview journalist and writer Oliver Bullough, and have a look at some unmissble exhibitions on in London. We hope you enjoy.

And as always, Anchor remains institutionally opposed to the notion that print journalism is dead. To that end, keep supplying us with your most laterally composed prose.

Love, Laura, Ted, Karishma, and Tom

Anchor is a thrice-termly magazine of news, interviews, comment, and frivolity, written and edited by students of the New College of the Humanities, but remains completely independent.

To write for us, advertise in us, or simply comment on how we look, our email is ed.anchormagazine@gmail.com.

To read our previous issues, visit www.issuu.com/anchormagazine.

To follow us on Twitter, our handle is @AnchorMagazine, and on Facebook, we are www.facebook.com/anchormag.

FEATUREd

The Brexit Debate: Out, In, and Undecided p.4

POLITICS

Why Vote Remain is Losing the Battle on Immigration p.7 Direct Democracy or Direct Danger? p.8

BLOOMSBURY The List p.9 | Style Stalker p.10

SCIENCE

Britain: Europe’s Rejected Organ p.12 Book Review: Clarke’s Scientific Imagination p.13

CULTURE

EU-topia: Erasmus, Europe and the Republic of Letters p.14 Ten Albums that Changed the World: Part Two p.16 Exhibitions Not to Miss this Summer p.19

Travel

Ben Berry Misses His Train of Thought p.19 Hebron: A Tail of Two Failures p.20

Comment

Beyond Bedford Square with Oliver Bullough p.22

CONTENTS | ANCHOR | 3

Editors-in-Chief Laura Dubois Ted Simonds Deputy Editor Karishma Patel Assisstant Editor Tom Bostok Cover Designer Ted Simonds Designers Soila Apparicio Laura Dubois Contributors Soila Apparicio Ben Berry Tom Bostok Esther Brown Josh Dell Laura Dubois Ruth Lyons Roman Müller Karishma Patel Dr Joanne Paul Ted Simonds Anchor Founders Jamie Allcock Josh Dell Rory Keddie Special Thanks Meera Khunti

4 | ANCHOR | FEATURED

pro leave tom boStok

When you go to the polling booth, you should vote to leave the EU. These are the considerations that took me to that conclusion, and which some of you may (hopefully) find convincing, too.

First, note that this isn’t an issues referendum. It is, in a phrase you’ll all have heard, a referendum about who decides on issues, not on what those decisions may be. So, if you want less regulation (and less immigration and so on), you’ll want to vote leave, and then vote for a generally right wing party. If you want nationalised industry (which EU Competition law disallows), you’ll need to vote leave, and then vote for a left wing party.

It is emphatically not set in stone that if we leave, we’ll go on a right or a left wing path – as should well be shown by the fact that both Labour and Conservative parties contain divided opinions, and the fact that the party united by Brexit, UKIP, rehomes both from disaffected Tories (down South) and disaffected Labour voters (up North).

That this isn’t an issues referendum is important to remember – it’s why, for example, arguments such as “the Leave campaign hasn’t given us a roadmap of where we go after a leave vote” are rubbish. Asking for that just doesn’t make sense, because leaving the EU is not about where we go next, it is about us getting to choose where we go. When the entire point of a political move is to decentralise power, to give people the freedom to make decisions in their own political communities, asking the supporters of that move to suggest what those decisions will be is nonsensical.

Another bad argument: “if we leave, we’ll be left here alone on an island with the Tories”. Well, fine, make a once in a lifetime decision based on an incredibly short-term factor. In reality, we’ll be left here on an island with whomever you vote for. This is as opposed to being on an island with who we voted for, and then the EU ensuring that we follow the generally centre right policies people who oppose the Tories (and so make this argument) actively don’t like. This is because, shockingly, the EU has relatively the same ideological make-up as the bland wing of the Tory party, that Cameron and Osborne come from, and accordingly the EU ensures countries follow vaguely centre-right economics. Why on earth any real left-winger, who wants to rid themselves of capitalism, would want to join a union of which one of the basic conditions for entry is, always has been, and always will be, a market economy, is beyond me.

You should only support the ideology of the EU if you are ideologically centre-right, in a manner akin to our current government. Yet that doesn’t even mean that that bland, centre-righties who are among us should vote to stay in either, despite being the only ones the EU represents. Only if you are the kind of person who is ideologically centre-right, and is fully willing to crush the voice of anyone who disagrees, willing to take away a democratic right from those who aren’t on the centre-right, should you vote to stay in. I hopefully present myself as not thinking too highly of those so certain of their own correctness that they are prepared to disenfranchise any who have differing views. The basic part of respecting other human beings is respecting that they should have at least as much a say in how their life is run as you do, even if you both disagree on every possible issue.

The other big talking points are immigration and the economy. The economy I can dismiss quite flippantly – if you are more worried about the short term effects for you, rather than the long term effects for you and your children and the countless generations after you, then you are being short sighted and selfish. We can recover from any economic hit (if anything substantial does actually happen to the economy due to Brexit) in five to ten years.

The countless generations in front of us having democratic rights is far more important than the chance of, in the worst case, facing a slightly less becoming job market for the next five to ten years. I don’t much care for arguments about how the economy will react in the next few years. This is bigger than that.

“The countless generations in front of us having democratic rights is far more important than the chance of, in the worst case, facing a slightly less becoming job market for the next five to ten years.”

So, onto immigration. I quite like it, and don’t want to suggest that we need less of it, however, I think we should have fair immigration (nondiscriminatory, non-racist immigration policies). The EU disagrees. The EU ensures, as a fundamental part, that we treat people from different countries differently, based only on their having been from a different country.

This must be the case in the EU – to have a free movement within the EU, it cannot be that any country will give equal treatment for those outside of the EU. If they were to do so, all EU countries would effectively have open borders to all. So, access to some of the best Unis in the world is reserved for the predominantly white, Western residents of EU countries. Access to some of the best jobs, access to some of the best financial centres, access to some of the most developed economies and highest standards of living, is already weighted in favour of privileged, largely white Westerners. Woe betide anyone from India or Africa or South America who wants the same opportunities we have. And why woe betide them? Because it is so much harder for them to come here than it is for others. And why is this? Because the EU’s policy of free movement of peoples within the EU makes it so.

Take a side by side comparison of two people. One is the UKIPers worst nightmare – an Eastern European economic migrant, who doesn’t speak English, and who has no connections or roots here at all. Then, take an Indian student, who has studied in the UK for the past 3 years, who has made lifelong friends here and spent the formative years of her life here.

The first is allowed to come and work here, the second is told that she has to leave within a year, or apply through various tests for a work visa. Being the lovely little liberal that I am, I think both should be allowed to come to the UK. But if we are set on choosing one over the other (as the EU has us do), we should give the warmer welcome to the Indian who has studied here for 3 years. I certainly think that she has more right to be given easy access to the country. But the EU has us, despite her having more right to be here, choose the former case.The one who has more right has harsher treatment, simply because she was born in India, not Europe. Does that smell like racism? It does. Should we vote to rid ourselves of institutional racism wherever we can? We should. Can we change this EU policy from within the EU? We cannot (Cameron, apparently, tried and failed, and it seems to be the basis of the whole union). So should we vote to leave the EU? Yes, I think that we should.

FEATURED | ANCHOR | 5

Pro Remain Laura Dubois

The debate around Brexit has stirred up a lot of heat in recent weeks, keeping us warm in the chilly months of British summer. As both camps have come to more or less agree on the economic benefits of staying in the European Union, many pro-Leave arguments center around the nebulous concept of state sovereignty and on preserving democracy. The sovereignty of parliament has long been a bedrock of Anglo-Saxon democracy, in which the elected representatives of parliament have supreme law-making power.

The supranational regime of the EU allegedly diminishes the sovereignty of the United Kingdom by imposing regulations drafted by anonymous bureaucrats—or at least that is what BeLeavers claim.

These claims are however illusory as the concept of sovereignty has become ambiguous in the context of globalisation. The regulations that the EU ‘imposes’ onto Britain are often intended to facilitate international trade, for example through standardisation of products, and enforce uniform environmental and labour regulations. Eurosceptics point out that some of these regulations are an intrusion into state sovereignty and that it would be more democratic to decide issues such as working hours on national level.

In fact, the EU has been backtracking on regulations to reduce bureaucracy and strengthen the principle of subsidiarity promoting governance at the lowest possible level. The drafting of EU laws is also not as undemocratic as Brexiteers make it out to be—the European Parliament is elected and discusses laws with the Council of the EU, which is composed of national ministers from elected governments.

If sovereignty is defined as the power of parliament to retain supreme authority over all national laws then yes, the EU pools the UK’s sovereignty to some extent, yet it does so to improve the international position of the UK and other members. If sovereignty is defined as political and economic power in the international arena, the EU actually improves the sovereignty of the UK. Under the umbrella of the EU, members unite their power to constitute a united bloc capable of facing other powers like the US or China. Issues such as free trade, environmental degradation and human rights do not halt at borders and it is easier to address them on a supranational level.

Countries therefore give up legislative power to improve their international position—this is not only the case with the EU, but also with institutions like the WTO or the UN Declaration of Human Rights. By leaving, the UK would lose the ability to take part in the negotiations of the EU, resulting in a reduction of its bargaining power and thus its sovereignty in terms of international power.

“If sovereignty is defined as political and economic power in the international arena, the EU actually improves the sovereignty of the UK.” Pro-Leave activists like to emphasise that through Brexit the UK would be able to improve its international position on its own by cultivating relations beyond the EU with its old friends from the Commonwealth. Unfortunately that is an illusion as there is a trade-off between state-sovereignty and the access to the common market. Brexit would result in great economic uncertainty that is already beginning to impact the sterling rate and could result in a ‘self-made’ recession. Although British nationalists reminiscent of past 19th century glory like to claim otherwise, the UK would have

difficulty striking new free trade deals with its former colonies, as they are more interested in trading with the single market than their former oppressors. It is therefore highly unlikely that Britain will be better off on its own, it is more powerful in the Union.

Besides being weaker on an international level, Britain would also lose it influence on the continent itself. The UK won’t be a part of the negotiations concerning its relationship with the EU after leaving, and it is likely that other EU members will not be well disposed towards it during the talks.

German chancellor Angela Merkel points out that “you can have more influence on decisions if you have a seat at the bargaining table”. Other countries like Norway are part of the single market without being a full EU member, yet still have to comply to EU regulations, allow for the free movement of peoples and contribute to the EU budget. A free trade deal with the EU instead of full membership would therefore not resolve the issues of national sovereignty raised by Brexiteers, on the contrary it would exclude the UK from having a say.

Now that we have established that the EU is crucial to Britain’s position in international relations and proven that the sovereignty argument is trivial, lets have a look at the bigger picture. The EU has great significance in promoting peace and stability in Europe in general.

Often forgotten by nostalgic BeLeavers, the EU once united archenemies France and Germany in peace and assured that a nationalist dictatorship like the Third Reich would not rise again. Brexit could fuel already rising far-right movements such as the National Front in France and rekindle nationalist disputes in Northern Ireland and Scotland. The balance of power that Europe is built on could falter if one of its major powers decides to leave. The UK provides a counterpart to the power of Germany, and being the biggest European military power also helps. According to Niall Ferguson “The lesson of history is that British isolationism has often been associated with continental disintegration”. The continental union is crucial in preserving peace and stability in Europe and beyond, and Britain plays a key role in it.

Historically speaking the vision of a Europe promoting peace through cooperation and free trade goes back to Napoleon and Churchill. Beyond political and economic benefits the EU embodies a humanistic ideal of democratic peace instead of rivalry. Thanks to communication and negotiation, countries in Europe share a common vision of what democracy should look like, based on the ideals of liberal philosophers of different nationalities like John Locke or Montesquieu. As a foreign student I have benefited from these ideals myself by being allowed to study in a foreign country as if it was my own. It is this exchange of cultural heritages which is the foundation of the EU and which also underpins its power. Brexit won’t just have political and economic consequences for Britain, it will undermine the democratic and liberal ideal that Europe relies on.

Given the common history of Europe it should therefore not be given up lightly. There is no denying that the EU should be a work in progress, in constant dialogue with its members and in continuous reform, implementing the principle of subsidiarity as well as seeking common solutions. Yet it is backwards to refer to a past glory as imperial power and outdated concepts like sovereignty to promote a nationalist agenda that is, frankly, unrealistic.

The UK has a better chance of increasing its global power within the EU than on its own.

6 | ANCHOR | FEATURED

I don’t know about EU, but I’m feeling undecided SOila apparicio

Many of my politically inclined friends like to presume that I’m going to vote to remain, because it seems the obvious thing to do. They would think that a politics student (nevermind a left-wing inclined one) with a grounded knowledge of the institutional and economic workings of the EU would very clearly see the benefits for the UK and its people. Yet, I don’t. However, this isn’t a case of Euroskepticism, as I’m also not convinced by the so-called ‘fascist doctrine’ that the EU pushes according to the Leave campaign. So when I am asked to clarify how I’m voting, well, I honestly don’t know.

and is far too often ignored in political discourse. To suggest that we ‘don’t do feelings in politics’ undermines both the rationality and irrationality of human behaviour. My grandmother’s choice to vote expressively is just as valid as your choice to vote logically, because what matters to her may well be very different to what matters to you.

Utilitarian arguments in this respect are unhelpful. It becomes very difficult to consider the EU as a benefit when, time after time, the policies of its institutions misalign with the views I have as a European citizen. I find myself When I usually have to make a big decision (Nandos or Sagar), I think; reluctantly agreeing with arguments against the joining of Eastern European what’s the most important factor for me in this states that are much less democratic, and indeed moment? I’m pro-immigration, I’m pro-social much less tolerant, most notably Eastern European development, pro-integration. Issues of national “It becomes difficult to consider government’s isolationist and frankly xenophobic pride and sovereignty don’t matter so much to response to Europe’s refugee crisis. the EU as a benefit when the me. I don’t understand the problem behind the ‘EU deciding on our laws’ (even though this isn’t The important issue for me therefore is a social policies of its institutions the case that Leave makes it out to be), especially one. I want to belong to a Europe that makes the misalign with the views I have as when the community of member states deciding on citizens of Europe, and those who come here these laws are mostly, similarly to the UK, liberal seeking safety from violence that we, Europe, have a European citizen.” democracies. Depending on the outcome of this contributed to and catalysed, a priority. Voting to referendum, the UK may well be without an elected PM, with hints here and remain and helping to develop the EU for all may be the better way to ensure there of a Conservative coup. I find myself agreeing with the more emotive that, but it is no guarantee. Even now, amid the debates and the comments argument my grandmother makes; use it as a protest vote. Use it to get rid of from leaders around the globe, I feel no sense of belonging to the European David Cameron.

Union. I feel no pride in our community. But I do see more of a future for the UK as part of the EU. I am more hopeful than if we were to turn our back.

One’s immediate reaction may be to question the morality of a person Maybe, this glimpse shows that my conscience has unconsciously made the willing to put their personal distaste of our Prime Minister before the rest decision already... of the population’s livelihoods in the face of a Brexit. However, I very much understand her point. Why should she be concerned about the general My indecision is not based on the practical, economic arguments. Unlike a population, when that population has allowed (and indeed voted for) the rise fair proportion of the rest of the electorate, I have sought as much information of the Conservative Party to power? The impact of Conservative cuts is very as possible in aid of which vote I will cast. I still cannot make up my mind. personal to me and by extension my family. We are among the tens of millions My vote will be based on where I see myself, as an international citizen, who have suffered and who continue to suffer. Suggesting that things would as part of the community; neither side has convinced me that they have the be even worse for us without the EU removes the emotional factor that exists greener grass just yet.

POLITICS | ANCHOR | 7

Why Vote Remain is losing the battle on immigration Ruth Lyons

The Brexit debate has become something of a farce over the past few weeks; the only real way to decide which way to go seems to be an arbitrary hokeycokey: “In, out, in, out, you shake it all about.” Do this until you pass out from exhaustion and whichever word you land on, vote. With the Leave campaign now seemingly conceding the economic argument, the Remain campaign is on track for a seemingly decisive victory. Yet, this referendum was never truly about economics. David Cameron’s ‘strong economy’ doesn’t seem to hold any weight against the tidal wave of idealism and national pride that bursts forth from the whirring machine of ‘Vote Leave’.

It seems the ideas of democracy, freedom, and sovereignty do not have a price; something the Remain campaign must comprehend if it is to succeed.

getting your children into a good school is a pipe-dream, and GP’s have stopped taking new patients due to system overload.

After the dust had settled and the economists had said their piece, a new argument emerged, rising from the ashes of the Leave camp and took shape in a Sun headline: “Immigration, Immigration, Immigration”, echoing the strong rhetorical line “Education, Education, Education” that got Tony Blair elected in 1997 (though anyone still wheeling him out in a political campaign seems to be on a suicide mission). Yet it has captured the mood of the nation. On the doorsteps up and down the country, the key issue has been immigration: overcrowded hospitals, primary school places disappearing at light-speed, housing being sold-off and made unaffordable to anyone who isn’t a Russian oligarch or a Saudi prince.

To win this new frontier in the referendum campaign, the Remain camp have one card to play, but for the Conservative Party, it would be the final nail of an already lowering casket.

But, I hear you say, we all know the benefits of immigration. Schrödinger’s immigrant, the one that simultaneously steals your job but also lives on taxpayer’s money through benefits, is a make-believe monster imagined by Nigel Farage after a few beers. In terms of the ‘stealing your job’ rhetoric, it is firstly important to note that 60% of foreign born workers come from outside of the EU, so if you are concerned about this, even with a Brexit the issue would not be resolved. But, is it truly something to be concerned about?

Or is immigration actually more beneficial to the UK than many believe?

If you go to any A&E ward, any nursing home, any school, you’d see the positive effects of free movement; the dedicated workers who keep our country and services running. With recruitment to our health and education sectors already in crisis, a Brexit could shock the system to breaking point.

Additionally, EU migrants are the least likely group to claim benefits. 93% of those claiming some sort of state-welfare are UK-born; from these two combined points, we see that immigration is a blessing to the UK and surely we can put our fears to bed?

But the political Left has become too idealistic. Though immigration has many benefits for our country, these effects are seen by the few and not the many. The Left has systematically defamed all those who express real concerns about our country being ‘too full’ as ignorant and xenophobic. But this position comes from a place of elitism and privilege. If you are a worker in Wolverhampton, a place that has seen a sharp rise in immigration over the last three years, your wages will have decreased by 5%, jobs have become few and far between, getting on the housing ladder is near impossible,

These are real issues and valid concerns, and to shy away from this and ignore the many people across the UK who this affects has been the Remain campaign’s biggest error (well, this and the £3million leaflet debacle). You cannot win a referendum by ignoring the biggest issue in this debate, and hoping that if you scream “you’re all bigots” loud enough, they will go away. In the Left’s silence, the Brexit campaign has seized the hearts and minds of the majority and has begun its long march toward a drawn-out and messy divorce, fighting for custody of Scotland and Gibraltar.

“It is not the fault of immigrants, it is the fault of a government who has failed to build a ‘strong economy’.”

Housing, schools, the NHS, transport, infrastructure: in one sense these issues have been exaggerated and brought into light by immigration, but are not caused by it. The cause is almost a decade of Conservative austerity and governance. All of our services and necessities have been brought under the axe and cut to the bone in the name of ‘savings’. Even without high immigration, the pressure being put on the institutions that keep us fed, sheltered, and healthy are in a state of desolation and collapse; it is not the fault of immigrants, it is the fault of a government who has tried, and failed, to build a ‘strong economy’ on the backs and hardship of hard-working people.

With 40% more cuts to councils still in motion, with or without the EU, the situation will only become worse. This is an argument kept in the darkness and rarely spoken of, because it would mean David Cameron admitting his failures to lead our country out of economic collapse and force him into revealing the true devastation of the cuts. So, we may lose the immigration argument. So, we may lose the referendum.

Yet, as always, there is hope. I said at the beginning of this article that some things are worth more than a price tag, things that are currently being demanded: freedom, sovereignty, democracy, our borders. In the same way, housing, our NHS, schools, and services are also worth more than a price tag and we must demand them. In this debate, as a final plea, I would ask those furious (and rightly so) about the intolerable pressures on services, to not look to the immigrants who contribute so much to our country, but to turn your fire and focus to those in government who are taking so much from us.

8 | ANCHOR | POLITICS

Direct Democracy or Direct Danger?

Esther Brown

“The best argument against democracy is a fiveminute talk with the average voter” - Winston Churchill.

Few quotes have rarely been as apt as this is in relation to the EU referendum.As a student, I rightly have an idealistic perception of democracy, and a belief in direct democracy in particular. However my utopian dreams are shattered as soon as I engage in a discussion over the EU with the average voter, and one group in particular; the over 65’s.

Realistically pensioners, like the rest of us, are better off in the EU. The gloomy economic analysis dominating the papers tells us all we need to know and the sovereignty argument is becoming weaker by the day. What’s more, in OAP language, pensions have more power under the EU, currently, the basic state pension is protected by the triple-lock, which means it rises by inflation, average earnings or 2.5%, whichever is the highest. One of the perks of EU membership are relatively stable and low interest rates, providing pensions with more spending power.

But despite the statistical facts being spoon-fed to the nation by the BBC, the over 65’s are still rallying for this apocalypse.

Last week I accompanied my grandmother to her bingo morning and then to her social club with the aim of asking your average pensioner their justifications for their ‘Brexit’ vote. The most common response was something along the lines of “to make Britain great again”… not on economic grounds or for sovereignty, but an

attempt to turn clocks back. To quote my grandmother, “we are a unique and lovely Island and the only sovereign I want is my Royal family”, and this is the most politically correct argument I could find from the interview. The rest consisted of the EU not being “of God” or Boris Johnson being some kind of a sex symbol. However, at one point my Grandmother did confess to sympathising with the Remain campaign because apparently it is “rather naughty” that Nigel Farage is so frequently pictured with a pint. These, along with other more borderline responses were laughed off by surrounding people. Why? Because the elderly and their outdated opinions are thought of as harmless, rather than racist, a label which would most likely be attributed to someone from another generation holding the same arguments. But these views won’t be worthy of laughs on voting day when a silver haired army turns out at the polling stations.

“My Grandmother did confess to sympathising with the Remain campaign because it is “rather naughty” that Nigel Farage is so frequently pictured with a pint.”

It is such fears that have regenerated the debate on voting age, something that has been topical since the Scottish referendum. Oscar Wilde said that “The old believe everything; the middle-aged suspect everything; the young know everything.” In the Scottish referendum, the argument for lowering the voting age was based primarily on the fact that the young were among the primary stake holders, along with the view that those above the age of sixteen

are equipped to vote. If these are taken as the practical justifications for voting, why are the elderly voting? Let us look at the facts: firstly, they are not the working population and nor will they be, therefore they are not high stake holders, secondly their competence to make decisions is debatable considering some 850,000 people in the UK now suffer from dementia related illnesses.

Such views have led to debate in the media as to whether a DVLC type policy ought to be adopted for voting, whereby over the age of 70 elderly people undergo competence tests every few years, just as they do with driving licenses.

But is this banning of the elderly the way to go? On a political note, the point of banning them in the first place is to improve the quality of votes, but the aim of our democracy is to represent the population, and as equal members of the population, to take away their vote would be against the founding democratic principles of liberty and equality. The admittance of a variety is one of the many values of democracy; is this worth stripping? What’s more, such a policy is likely to incur a movement away from freedom of speech, an important cornerstone of democracy.

Equally it is undemocratic to have a tyranny of the elderly over the young. True democracy is under the same umbrella as Arcadia and the tooth fairy, but what we have is the best of a bad bunch and a process in which we are ever evolving and ironing out creases.

BLOOMSBURY | ANCHOR | 9

THE LIST: Places to Treat yo’self in Bloomsbury

Tap COffee

Delancey & CO.

Chez Mamie

Store st. espresso

If you like exposed lightbulbs and sanded wood furniture, you will probably like Tap Coffee. Good coffee can be sipped alongside cake or other delectable treats in one of three Tap Coffee locations, all within walking distance of NCH! The nearest is just on Rathbone Place, where you can collect loyalty points in the shape of bicycles. Confused?

Don’t be. Buy six coffees, collect six bikes, and get one for free!

Walk in to Dalancey & Co. and be transported to a world where salt beef bagels are the staple of your diet. A futuristic scifi vintage diner located on Goodge Street is just the mix you need to fill up over lunch. Think Twin Peaks fused with Grease, with a dash of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and you’ll get a good impression of the place.

Highly recommended for anytime you want to treat yo’self!

Chez Mamie’s homemade cuisine can be found on Hanway Street, a stone’s throw away from Tottenham Court Road.

An eclectic European style and ambient lighting makes you feel like you’re at home. It’s good food, exquisitely served from friendly staff. Chez Mamie does what it says on the tin (sign), you will feel right at home.

Coffee, coffee, coffee, coffee, coffee! It’s the place to be when hanging around Senate House, or when you’re killing time around NCH. You couldn’t wish for a closer location to drop your bags, pick up a cup, and unwind. With an industrial feel and plethora of hipster clientele, nobody will know if you’re here for the cake or for a little eye candy.

10 | ANCHOR | BLOOMSBURY

LEFT

RIGHT

This is the one man who warrants stepping out of sartorial psychoanalysis.

His mop of blonde has always garnered as much interest as his politics. It is notable that this new haircut was first revealed to the public as he announced his support for Brexit.

We gather it was no mere job to tame the beast, and though clipped to something less exhausting to bat away in the wind, Boris’ attempt to appear serious is futile.

Nigel Farage is one for pattern clash. Known for wearing pinstripes with polkadots, he here couples a chequered shirt and blazer with something alike a Christmas tie. Though he matches quite merrily with the UKIP logo on his plastic bag, his yellow trousers throw nothing into relief.

Boris

Nigel

Angela

David

Out

Out

BLOOMSBURY

STYLE STALKER Karishma Patel

LEFT

RIGHT

Forget 50 Shades, Angela Merkel has the same style of blazer in some 90 shades, depending on occasion.

Greece warranted the green of calm, doubtless needed, and here we see her in a burnt orange.

Though the cut of her deep-pocketed blazer little astounds, there is something to be said for a female Chancellor sporting the lowest maintenance wardrobe in Europe.

For a man professing a preference for nondescript clothing from M&S and Gap, David Cameron seems often to be in designer suits, no doubt from Savile Row. He has admitted that his wife, Samantha, tends to pick his outfits for him, since he likens being in Gap to being at the zoo.

IN

IN

BLOOMSBURY | ANCHOR | 11 Brian

Chloe

LEFT

RIGHT

The camel coat is all the rage this year, and Brian seems to have tapped into the trend with his suavely cut trench coat.

Juxtaposed with a bold, pink jumper and dark blue chinos, we feel no one is better suited to grace A.C. Grayling’s doorway on a Friday.

It takes a modish individual to sport leather shorts, and we feel Chloe is she.

Urban chic takes to the streets in her all-black ensemble, complete with black and white trainers to create a look just casual and comfy enough for hours of NCH lectures.

HELLO SAILOR SWIM MAN-OVER-BOARD SINK SHARK ATTACK

Robin

Josh

LEFT

RIGHT

Robin takes to Bedford Square in his unmistakable, winered coat. Effortlessly draped over with a nondescript scarf, complimented with a pale blue shirt, and rounded off with shoes of dark brown, he absolutely suits his classy, Augustan surroundings.

The Anchor founders are always seen to dress well. Josh is sporting an eclectic fashion, prints are in vogue and those turquoise shoes are enough to get the odd envious stare. All in all, leaning with a debonair gait against the Drawing Room doorway, he is the poster boy for NCH style. And we couldn’t give any less than a rowdy ‘Hello Sailor’.

12 | ANCHOR | SCIENCE

Britain: Europe’s Rejected Organ?

How Britain and her Friends Made the First Synthetic Trachea Ted Simonds

Organ donation proves to be a contentious subject, despite recent attempts to get more organs to more people who need them. Yet today demand still outstrips supply. The only ways of receiving an organ are through either death, or voluntary donation of organs, both of which are dangerous with risks of rejection, and lifelong subscriptions to immuno-suppressants.

It is under such circumstances that the first successful synthetic organ transplant took place, and this is how: Firstly to understand is the novel polymeric nanocomposite material developed just down the road at UCL. This material essentially “contains millions of tiny holes so living cells can grow in it”, says David Green the president of Harvard Bioscience. The artificial trachea was built by Alexander Seifalian of the Karolinska Hospital in Stockholm. He custom built it to the exact dimensions of his patient, altering the recipe of the polymeric nanocomposite material at different points so that his artificial organ had the same versatility as the real thing.

The rigid cartilage rings separated by softer flexible material that formed the base of the fake trachea were then rotated in a bath of stem cells (taken from a 200mm extract of bone marrow) to coat the organ in the living cells required for use. This method was used earlier by Paolo Macchiarini, also working at Karolinska, when bathing an section of windpipe from a donor in stem cells from the recipient. Before implanting the newly built trachea, Macchiarini coated the interior of the custom built organ with epithelial cells taken from the inside of the recipient’s nose, just like the real organ. This new method eliminates the need for a donor at all.

If this bizarre collage of human anatomy makes you scared, or even just confused, you have nothing (much) to fear. The technology used in this form is at its most benign. Do you have vague recollections of mice running around with human ears on their backs? Or of obscure experiments of human-

animal hybrids? You wouldn’t be far from the truth at all. This technology whilst eliminating the need for donors proposed a plethora of weird scientific innovations that make you think “Why?”. Sometime in the not too distant future the bare bones protein shell of animal organs could very well be infused with human stem cells. Very soon, an ex-pig’s heart could find its way into your own corporeal frame. But there is nothing to worry about, this technology is saving lives, and eliminating the unnecessary risk of botched transplantation surgery.

It is such developments that primarily show the need for innovation in transplantation technologies.

Whereas with traditional opt-in donations of organs the wait time can be up to 3 years, with synthetically produced organs there is next to no wait time. These technologies could in the future create an “off-theshelf” supply chain to the organ donation market.

Which, combined with the ongoing (if not ethically contentious) animal organ experimentation, could see the face of transplantation, or rather implantation realities changed for good.

This case study secondly shows the need for a European, and even global, community of science.

Without research at UCL here in London, Harvard in America, and Karolinska University Hospital in Sweden, this important medical breakthrough would not have happened.

Britain stands at the forefront of medical and clinical research, but it is not in isolation that Britain finds itself in such a privileged position, only through collaboration with medical schools all over the world innovations in organ transplantation and countless other advances in science technology are made.

You need to imagine, dearest committed reader, that we are an artificially created organ, on the verge of rejecting ourselves from our recipient; we need to roll around in the stem cells of our European identity, embrace our fellow organ states, and become as healthy and functional as a well-recovered patient.

SCIENCE | ANCHOR | 13

book review: Clarke’s scientific imagination Karishma Patel

It might do, in all this talk of Brexit, to settle down with a book and some galactic perspective.

I recommend picking up The Fountains of Paradise (1979), Arthur C. Clarke’s eclectic work of Science Fiction, a Hugo and Nebula Award winning novel and his signature blend of the mythic and theological with the scientific. Clarke’s 22nd century is a world in which Pangaea is no far cry (the Gibraltar Bridge now spans the Strait of Gibraltar, joining Europe and Africa), and where humans have in fact colonized Mars and are contemplating a vast terraforming project. The focus is, however, the 22nd century analogue of Kalidasa, a Sri Lankan King some three thousand years in the past, and his attempt to create an Edenic Paradise. His Pleasure Gardens, strewn at the foot of the mountain Yakkagala upon which his intricate palace sits, are seen to spew fountains to the stars. In some further effort at God, his 22nd century counterpart, the chief engineer of the Terran Construction Company and architect of the Gibraltar Bridge, Vennevar Morgan, begins building the “Orbital Tower”, a space elevator aligned with the equator, whose counterweight is an asteroid captured by the Federal Republic of Mars. Clarke expands his contemporary world (of the 1970s and 1980s) to the further Universe; international relations, no longer having a place on Earth, are displaced to a short-lived conversation with Starglider, a probe travelling from Alpha Centauri, the twelfth star in its mission to seek other life and indeed before approaching our solar system, it had found some seventeen.

Clarke presents to us a common thread in mankind’s engineering and artistic feats, the hot fervor to

be remembered, outlived, “Then he glanced up at the invisible engineers and scientists, racing round the world in their man-made heavens.”

Though oddly for a self-professed atheist, he intermingles the mystic and scientific, populating the timeline of Morgan’s Orbital Tower with what can only be described as the miraculous. The only earthly mountain suitable for the Orbital Tower is Sri Kanda, the mountain opposite Kalidasa’s Yakkagala and for thousands of years the seat of the Mahanayake Thero, a high Buddhist Monk, and his entourage. Clarke weaves their ancient prophecy into the 22nd century narrative, and while indeed a “miracle” occurs on account of it, we are supplied a sobering counterweight in the form of human mortality and the persistence of death.

“The human imagination inhabits the very Universe, allowing humanity to be creator unto itself.”

The story, it seems, is the only enduring force. And certainly, we still read Virgil’s Aeneid; Homer’s Odyssey. It is such that Kalidasa is remembered by posterity, for the sensuous allure of his story, of his verdant Pleasure Gardens and insatiable blood thirst. The story, Clarke seems to remind us, penetrates the imagination of humanity, dealing not in the distinctly possible or tangible, as he shows the economics and politics of the world must, but rather inhabiting the limitless imagination until such a time as it manifests tangibly. There

is reference to Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon (1865), an engraving of which is placed within the Orbital Tower to commemorate the passing of this feat of imagination into a feat of engineering. Morgan’s Orbital Tower is therefore similar to the tale of Kalidasa, and indeed that of Verne, in that they capture the collective imagination, and indeed Morgan is as enraptured by the Sri Lankan tale as he is his engineering feat. As Shelley wrote at the foot of Mont Blanc in 1817, “And what were thou, and earth, and stars and sea/ If to the human mind’s imaginings/ Silence and solitude were vacancy?” The human imagination inhabits the very Universe with the concept of beauty, allowing humanity to be creator unto itself, chanting “the infinite “I am”’(Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria) to the stars. Both Morgan and Kalidasa attempt to play God, as in Coleridge’s Primary Imagination, shortly described as a continuance of the Biblical “Let there be light”, where the poet is therefore continuously enacting the linguistic parturiency of the Bible. Much as Wordsworth singled the infant out, a human character marginalized enough to best use this divine imagination, Clarke paints us a glimpse of far posterity at the end of the novel, where the emissary from Starglider’s civilization is seen gathering information from human children, for their unique perceptiveness and ability to imagine. Particularly as a History or Philosophy student, if you fancy picking up a book this summer and would usually stray far from the Science Fiction in Senate House Library, The Fountains of Paradise is well worth a read and will tickle your historical fancy.

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EU-topia: Erasmus, Europe and the Republic of Letters dr Joanne Paul

Sometime in the summer of 1516, precisely 500 years ago, the humanist scholar Erasmus seems to have had a very clever thought. He was awaiting the manuscript of a book written by his friend, Thomas More, about an idealistic and impossible far-off land, which More had been calling Nusquama, from the Latin for ‘nowhere’. As a title, it wasn’t bad. But it lacked the subtlety and enigma of the text itself. When the book finally appeared in print in December of that year under Erasmus’s guidance, it had a new title: Utopia.

We can’t know for certain if it was indeed Erasmus who came up with this enduring neologism, it may have been More. Either way, in one word, this title sums up all of the ambiguity inherent in the concept of utopia. As the poem that opens Utopia explains, it could be both ‘U-topos’, the Greek for ‘no place’, and ‘EU-topos’, the Greek for ‘best place’.

Central to the publication of Utopia was Erasmus’s vision of a pan-European Republic of Letters that would transcend borders and push for European peace. He saw that vision fail many times in his lifetime, and he died with it in shreds. In short, although he might have criticized the ‘Bremain’ camp for their unimaginative title, he almost certainly would have supported their aims.

Erasmus was unquestionably a citizen of Europe. Born out of wedlock in Rotterdam to a priest and a physician’s daughter in the late 1460s, Erasmus spent his early years in the loosely-associated set of city states of The Netherlands. His unmarried parents both succumbed to the outbreak of the plague in 1483, forcing Erasmus to take the only option available to him – life in a monastery. Erasmus’s aversion to such confinement drove his subsequent journeying. As soon as he was able, he entered the priesthood and became secretary for the Bishop of Cambrai. He travelled with him to Rome, and from there to Paris and then to England, in 1499.

This trip to England, the first of many for Erasmus, was pivotal. He travelled in the company of William Blount, 4th Baron Mountjoy, a former student, who was well connected in the court of Henry VII. Thus Mountjoy was able to give Erasmus a thorough introduction to the members of the growing

humanist circle in England, including the young Thomas More.

It was also a lucrative trip for Erasmus, who so far had been living in relative poverty on the continent. He gave lectures and enjoyed the company of an elite social class in which he, by this point, had rarely been included. Upon leaving England, however, Erasmus lost £20 to customs officials at Dover.

To put this into perspective, this is the equivalent of almost £10,000 pounds today, a heavy blow to a scholar who never entirely escaped the threat of poverty.

The experience prompted Erasmus to speed up production of his Adagia, a selection of ‘adages’ or pithy wise sayings, first published in June 1500.

Erasmus makes clear in the dedication that this text is offered to his friends in England, a promise that despite his financial loss his friendship had not grown cold.

“Erasmus might have criticized the ‘Bremain’ camp for their unimaginative title, but he almost certainly would have supported their aims.”

Erasmus’s unfortunate experience at the hands of English customs officers also almost certainly inspired him to give first place in his collection to the adage: “Between friends all is common” as marking the entire purpose of the Adagia, which he frames as a freely-given contribution to be shared amongst his friends. Adages themselves, unlike most material possessions, have more value the more they widely-held they are. This idea provides the foundation for Erasmus’s vision of a scholarly “Republic of Letters”, joined by commonownership of knowledge. As he writes in a later Adage: “in rebuilding the republic of letters [res literaria] one must display the spirit of a second Hercules, and no fear or weariness at the prospect of your own loss should discourage you from serving the common good [communi utilitate].”

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The Adagia were revised and reprinted throughout the early 16th century, taking on a more polemical and political edge with each reprinting. Particularly in 1515, Erasmus revised his Adagia in order to attack the martial attitude of Europe’s monarchs, who he considered too inclined to make war against each other. Erasmus was a pacifist, believing that what people held in common – their Christianity and humanity – was far more important than anything which could be said to differentiate them. He particularly attacked the use of national stereotypes to stir up anger between European nations, or what he knew as ‘Christendom’, which he maintained should be united “under one roof”:

Nation clashes with nation, kingdom with kingdom, city with city, prince with prince, people with people and, as even the heathen admit is wicked, relative with relative, kinsman with kinsman, brother with brother, son with father; finally, worse in my opinion than all of these, Christians with fellow men, and worst of all, I must add reluctantly, Christians with Christians.

And for what? A monarch’s claim to land is a weak one, which is bestowed and can be taken away by the consent of the people. Nations, he adds, are constantly changing hands, so it seems absurd to spill blood over the question of whether a piece of land ought “reckoned to be Ferdinand’s or Sigismund’s, whether it pays tax to Philip or to Louis”. Such land claims should be settled, as they are privately: either in court or through a negotiated settlement. This pacifism drives Erasmus to advise diplomacy and unity amongst European leaders: “Let us embrace the cause of peace…. It is to this end that popes, princes, and states must take counsel together. There has been enough shedding of Christian blood now.”

The same year that Erasmus published this plea in his revised Adagia, Thomas More found himself as an ambassador on a trade mission to Flanders, a trip that was hopelessly stalled by diplomatic prevarication. As a result, More made his way to Antwerp, to meet with a member of Erasmus’s scholarly Republic, Peter Giles, and the two engaged in an intellectual discussion on the best state of the commonwealth, which More wrote up as his Nusquama, or Utopia.

Like in Erasmus’s adage, everything in Utopia is held in common. Because there is no greed, there is little need for war, which the Utopians consider “an activity fit only for beasts.” Whether More was advocating for his utopic vision is a separate question, but more important than the content of the book was its production. Utopia, like the Adagia is both a gift to, and microcosm

of, the Republic of Letters. Utopia is a ‘no-place’ which exists only in ink, a commonwealth literally made up of words. Prefaced by letters from members of the humanist republic, Utopia becomes a lively community, knit together by the shared knowledge contained within.

There is an allusion to the replacement of private property with such shared learning in Utopia itself, which harkens back to Erasmus’s unfortunate encounter with the customs officials. The narrator of Utopia, Hythloday, is speaking of the amazing proficiency of the Utopians for classical learning, especially Greek, and notes that on his fourth voyage there, he ‘put on board, in place of my wares to sell, a fairly large package of books, having made up my mind never to return [to Europe]’. Hythloday abandons material and private interests in his decision to live in peace with the Utopians, replacing his belongings with knowledge to share among them. In the same way, to join the Republic of Letters, one must leave material possessions behind, bringing only knowledge to share freely.

“The European Union is a far cry from the Republic of Letters, and it’s not exactly ‘EUtopia’ either.”

Both Erasmus and More, in the Adagia and Utopia respectively, were protesting what they saw to be the unnecessary divisions within Europe and the warfare that resulted. More considered one of his greatest achievements to have been his participation in peace negotiations in Cambrai, which resulted in a European peace he hoped God would “establish and make perpetual.” It, of course, did not last long; war in Europe continued more or less uninterrupted for the following 400 years.

The European Union is a far cry from the Republic of Letters, and it’s not exactly ‘EU-topia’ either; undoubtedly both Erasmus and More would have strong objections to raise of it. They would, however, be committed to any enterprise which sought and maintained peace within Europe. And Erasmus, especially, would be delighted to know he needn’t pay customs duties on his next trip to England.

To continue reading on this subject: William Barker (2001). Introduction to The Adages of Erasmus (Toronto).

Kathy Eden (2001). Friends Hold All Things In Common (Yale).

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Ten Albums That Changed the world: Part 2 Roman Müller

Welcome to the second edition of ‘albums that changed the world’, a series of articles on seminal, world-changing albums, continued from the previous issue of Anchor. In this series of iconic albums dedicated to the art of music, I have judged an album’s status not only by its influence and impact on the respective artists or producers but also by its legacy as a piece of art on future recordings. considered one of the post-war era’s most popular songs and was covered by no less than Hendrix, The Wailers and Green Day. More importantly, this was the song that made Dylan go from pop folk songwriter to global rockstar.

The album also contains some of his most popular songs with ‘Desolation Row’, ‘Queen Jane Approximately’, ‘Ballad of a thin man’ and the title track.

11. Little Richard - Here’s Little Richard (1957) This album will forever represent Little Richard as the founder of Rock’n’Roll and one of the greatest songwriters of all time — listen to ‘Tutti Frutti‘ for a taste of his genius.

Not only was this his debut album, but it also influenced the great Elvis who quotes Little Richard as his biggest influence. Another big name in music history would also end up playing in his band before making it big in the U.K. in 1967 with ‘Are You Experienced?’.

12. Miles Davis - Kind of Blue (1959) Although Miles Davis is better known for his innovative and improvisational approaches to jazz and fusion as illustrated through Bitches Brew, Kind of Blue is without a doubt the greatest straight-up jazz album there is.

Rather than accepting bebop as the be-all-and-end-all of jazz, Davis was influenced by George Russell’s ideas on chromatic scales and modes and decided to create an album entirely based on modality.

For saxophone fans, the album famously features John Coltrane.

13. Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions The Impressions (1963) Curtis Mayfield was probably the greatest author of protest songs of his time. His work with The Impressions went on to influence the entirety of Jimi Hendrix’s rhythm guitar playing which combines rhythm and lead at once at a time when rhythm playing was about playing solid chords and lead playing about hitting singular notes within a given key. This major change in technique developed by Mayfield made singular instruments sound like an entire band.

14. Bob Dylan - Highway 61 Revisited (1965) Highway 61 is a very personal album in that it refers to the American highway that connects Dylan’s hometown of Duluth, Minnesota to the great cities of the Chitlin Circuit (a string of southern blues clubs), which are St. Louis, Memphis (also BB King’s starting point), New Orleans and Mississippi. These cities all were the cradle of Dylan’s favourite musicians and singers. The title “ ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ is widely

15. John Lennon - Imagine (1971)

Despite being one of Lennon’s most iconic songs, this song also served as a peace anthem since its release in 1971. Ironically, John never consciously intended it to be used to such an end and actually wrote it as an anti-establishment song. He famously said in an interview that „ ‘Imagine’ was “virtually the Communist Manifesto” even though he did not belong to any specific movement. The album also contains the Lennon-penned hit ‘Jealous Guy’.

16. Patti Smith - Horses (1975) When I saw Patti Smith in concert for the first time, I had been invited by my uncle but had no real idea who she was. A few years ago I remember looking into my phone’s notes and seeing a random quote saying: “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine”. Even though this might sound benign to a fan, it defines Patti Smith relatively well. She is, before and above all, a punk poet. She said Horses was intentionally “a three-chord rock album merged with the power of the word”. As a debut album, it ranked in the top 50 of the US charts shortly after its release in 1975.

Lyrically, the album draws influences from the French damned poets Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud as well as William Blake and French symbolists. The cover of the record was a photograph taken by Robert Mapplethorpe, globally acclaimed photographer and Smith’s longtime partner. As a work of art, it went on to influence classic punk bands such as The Ramones and Talking Heads as well as Joni Mitchell and Jeff Buckley, whose father had been a major influence on Smith as she was growing up.

17. Stevie Wonder - Songs in the key of Life (1976) Pharrell Williams recently said that singer-songwriters are his favourite artists, which is the reason why

CULTURE | ANCHOR | 17 he loves Stevie Wonder so much.

Despite being the Motown icon that he is, Stevie really tells stories with his music. Whether it is on ‘Isn’t She Lovely’, ‘Black Man’ which also features George Benson, or on ‘As’ with Herbie Hancock, Wonder reached unparalleled lengths.

Later he went on to influence Michael Jackson, Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston who all cite this album as one of their favourite records of all time. How’s that for a legacy?

18. Prince - 1999 (1982) This album is about Prince recording in 1982 like it was 1999. This is a synthesizer-driven album featuring

early uses of drum machines and computer-based sounds, a process that went on to influence not only his contemporaries (especially Michael Jackson) but also the next decades of EDM (Electronic Dance Music) producers such as Daft Punk and Jamiroquai. This is also the first album to feature The Revolution as Prince’s official band.

Released during the Cold War, the album features a political title track opposing nuclear proliferation and embodies Prince’s sexual persona on ‘International Lover’ and ‘Automatic’. By-and-large, 1999 is widely considered to be Prince’s breakthrough album with its follow-up, Purple Rain, being his best-selling one.

19. Daft Punk - Discovery (2001) Discovery counts as one of the first visual albums. Originally released as a concept album, Daft Punk went further into their revolutionary idea in that they offered a ‘Daft Club’ membership card with the record on which they printed a code that enabled the digital download of the record through an online digital service back in 2001. This was revolutionary, as Youtube and Napster would only appear a few years later. The visuals for the album ended up being released as a film titled ‘Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem’ that featured the audio tracks as the soundtrack.

20. J Dilla - Donuts (2006) J Dilla finished Donuts on his deathbed at the age of 32. The magical thing about this album is that it sounds completely normal and would probably not blow you away if you did not know the context of hip-hop as a genre.

Hip-hop emerged from funk music and typically combines drum samples from one R’n’B track (an umbrella term used to describe black music in the 1960s and ‘70s) with instrumental and vocal samples from another R’n’B track.

The great thing about Donuts is that it made every single hip-hop producer use the same techniques to produce their beats. It defined the genre in many ways and influenced countless legendary producers, from Jay-Z to Kanye West through Q-tip (A Tribe Called Quest, Mobb Deep) and Dr. Dre. Unlike all these producers, J Dilla turned the quantizer, an equivalent of autotuning for instrumental parts, off and still made everything sound perfect.

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Exhibitions Not To Miss this Summer recommended by ted simonds

Yayoi Kusama 25th May-20th July Victoria Miro Gallery

Yayoi Kusama has been a presence on the international art world for decades, her ‘Infinity Webs’ and polka dot mayhem have been a staple for her distinctive style since the 50s.

Her latest artistic ejection is in the Victoria Miro gallery in Old Street.

Three mirrored rooms explore themes of space, humbleness, and the artistic experience, whilst a collection of her monochromatic paintings sit at the top of a never-ending staircase. A must-see for anybody, art-fan or not.

Georgia O’Keeffe 6th July-30th October Tate Modern

It is with much sadness that I discovered that Britain has no paintings by the trailblazing American artist Georgia O’Keeffe. Not one permanent collection holds a single painting by the woman whose famous Jimson Weed/ Number 1 is the most expensive piece of art created by a woman to be sold at auction. Yet this sadness was dashed when I saw the iconic New Mexico landscape spread wide across the walls of a tube station. It opens on 6th July, and whilst isn’t free to non-members, is by my book, an unmissable exhibition to see some of the most iconic images from an amazingly absent artist in Britain.

Jeff Koons

18th May-16th October Newport Street Gallery

The visionary American artist Jeff Koons will be familiar to anyone who has seen a huge metallic balloon animal in an art museum. An exhibition at the Newport Street Galley in Lambeth is not for the faint hearted. You are warned on entry to not touch the ‘tactile’ objects on display (ranging from hoovers to enormous eggs). And I dare you to resist the urge of touching the inflatables upstairs. But please take note, this exhibition does feature pornographic content, artful of course, but nonetheless warranting a message of caution from invigilators on the door.

TRAVEL | ANCHOR | 19

BEN BERRY MISSES HIS TRAIN ... ... OF THOUGHT Ben is a real life person, not a character Anchor imagined and created. He accounts (in typical American style) his holiday across Europe’s Schengen Area, and how it was ruined by a fundamental political shift in France.

Hey everyone. I miss all of you. I know it’s only been four days since I’ve seen any of you, but believe me, it feels closer to four and half.

If you noticed that I’m gone, then fear not; I have an exciting story. If you haven’t, then fuck you too. But I digress; I have an exciting tale of politics, silly moustaches, French work ethics, and yours truly. Get ready for the ride of your life as I get caught in the middle of a political fight for the ages.

But to tell the whole story, I need take a few steps back and set the scene. And this story begins where all the best stories do: Sweden’s parliament. In the early 1990’s, as the Englishspeaking world was busy talking about Justin Timberlake’s frosted tips, the Swedes, Danes, and—a bit later the Germans—began to revolutionise the centre-left’s thinking. With tradition socialism amounting to a Michael Foot-shaped disaster and Anglo-Saxon neoliberalism looking a bit, well, gauche, the Northern Europeans sought to use market forces to meet communitarian ends. This new, socialdemocratic governance allowed Germany to maintain economic vitality and Sweden’s public services to become the envy of the world.

This innovation, like electronic hotel keys or monogamy, did not reach France. In 2012 unreformed socialist François Hollande was elected president. Promising to create tens of thousands of public-sector jobs, regardless of whether or not they were needed, and to pay for them with a punitive 75% tax rate, M. Hollande clearly did not fit the mould of the new North-European left. But a series of defeats at the hands of Marine Le Pen’s [1] right-wing Front National (FN), M. le Président gave in, appointing social democrats to key cabinet positions.

And as the President sought the Kendrick Lamar dream of wifey, girlfriend, and mistress, the social democrats picked a fight. If you’re wondering, Président Hollande’s wife, Ségolène Royal, was the woman he defeated in the socialists’ presidential primary. His

girlfriend, at one time the First Girlfriend of the French Republic, then endorsed Mme. Royal’s opponent in a regional election. And is mistress is the one whom the President visited on an effeminate motorbike wearing funny shoes. This being Southern Europe, the women don’t actually feature in the main story.

And that main story is one of a fight. In one corner: Philippe Martinez, leader of France’s militant Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT). M. Martinez, who sports a moustache somewhere between a cartoon villain’s and a Mexican porn star’s, leads the radical-left opposition to the economic reforms of the men in the other corner. And those men are Manuel Valls, France’s Prime Minister and his dashing Economy Minister, Emmanuel Macron.

M. Valls’ attempts to drag the left from 1970’s-style socialism to a more electable and economicallyliterate riff on German social democracy—if it helps, think of M. Valls as a French Tony Blair [2]—have been fiercely opposed by M. Philippe, whose dogmatic trade-unionism makes him allergic to anything that might help employers.

In this particular case, M. Macron’s eponymous debut album, the Loi Macron, promises to relax rules on Sunday trading and wrongful termination. Let’s just say it isn’t exactly topping the charts. With the ability to buy food on a Sunday afternoon being a clear affront to workers’ right, the membership of the CGT and a few allied unions turned to France’s national pastime: industrial action.

And that is where I enter the story. At 6.15 this morning [3] I arrived at Paris- Gare de Lyon to find that my train to Milan was cancelled and that no one bothered to tell me until I got to the station. If you’ve ever been broken up with by a note, you probably know how I felt. And of course, the strikes meant that all of the ticket offices were opening late. Everyone with a cancelled ticket received some great advice: “Get on any train heading south—the ticket inspectors are all picketing, so you can take whichever one you like—and, by the time you get to Lyon, Bordeaux, or wherever else you try going, the ticket offices will be open to provide France’s signature blend of rudeness

and excessive rules” [4]. After flipping a coin, I picked Lyon.

Arriving in Lyon, I queued, was told I was in the wrong queue, queued somewhere else, and finally got to talk to someone. Then, I got to spend some quality time explaining that I did understand the difference between Paris-Gare de Lyon and the town of Lyon. And then, the buck was passed again. As only the French were striking, I was told to board the next train to Switzerland and then travel on to Italy from there. And so, with a lovely hand-written letter from the French train operators asking the Swiss to give me a ticket, I boarded the next train to Geneva. There, I met a lovely Swiss-German ticket agent and asked her for my ticket. Echoing the motto of the country’s refugee agencies, she informed me that “Nothing is for free in Switzerland”. And in Switzerland, I should add, not only is nothing for free, but everything is for expensive as fuck. As I’m writing, I have a two sips of Diet Coke left that probably cost £2.50 each.

But I digress again. And, to be honest, this article is mostly just digression. The moral of this story isn’t “I had a cool holiday that was ruined by a fundamental political shift in France”. Instead, this ought to be the story of that shift, with a pleasant anecdote about how it touched my life. Hopefully Anchor’s editiors can make that happen. _______ [1] Mme. Le Pen often sounds like Donald Trump but is not young or sexually available enough to earn the golden-haired, orange-skinned man’s attention.

[2] For what it’s worth, the Valls Government is also fond of helping the United States bomb the Middle East.

[3] At the rate Anchor reaches the presses, ‘this morning’ will have been about 45 days ago.

[4] That’s not an actual quote.

20 | ANCHOR | TRAVEL

Hebron: A Tale of Two Failures JOSH DELL I left NCH last summer aware of three things: 1) I wanted to get out of London for a while; 2) I wanted to work at a newspaper; 3) I wanted to explore the Judaic side of my roots. Whilst working for The Jewish Chronicle in Golders Green was an option, Israel for any Jew (regardless of their views on it) has a certain something to it. Having studied the Crusades under Dr. Lars Kjaer in my final year and had the Holy Land firmly imprinted on my brain, heading out to Jerusalem made a huge amount of sense.

A few weeks in, I booked a place on a tour organised by a group called Breaking The Silence. Their aim, in summary, is to gather testimony from soldiers after their military service with the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) who served in the occupied Palestinian Territories. In gathering their testimony (the ‘silence breaking’), the NGO’s aim is to raise awareness of the unworkable nature of the Israeli occupation and the state of mind that IDF conscripts, many of whom will never have met a single Palestinian before in their entire life, will be thrown into. The cause of their being in such circumstances, is as a result of Israel’s settlement policy. More explanation is needed, but basically have a look at this map, read a little more and the geography lesson will be over: The map (to the right) illustrates the territory gained by Israelis as a result of the 1967 ‘Six Day War’. The ongoing conflict we see to this day stems from the reality of the Palestinian population living in both Gaza and the West Bank finding themselves living in an area where despite being the majority, they find themselves ruled over by a majority from a different nation entirely. The envisaged two-state solution finds itself thwarted by one thing in particular that is key to Breaking The Silence’s efforts: Israel’s settlement policy. This policy, one that started slowly and has progressed rapidly since the 1990s, manifests in Israeli building settlements of varying size within the West Bank area. Their growth overtime is seen as one of the biggest threats to the twostate solution, in that it continues to blur the boundaries of what defines the Israeli state-proper, and leads to more of Israel’s citizens choosing to resist the peace process due to the possibility that it may result in their being displaced.

“Street after street has been made ‘sterile’ (the actual term used by the Israelis), meaning that the former Palestinian residents are unable to walk along them, unlike their Israeli neighbours.”

Map of Israel’s current boarders (occupied territories in green) had some 2000 litres of milk in that truck, and it all went sour. This was all day long, he simply sat in the sentry post, shackled and blindfolded. Looking back, I am ashamed for two things: first, of my behaviour on the human level.

To simply pick up a person and take over his life just like that? Take him, literally, shackle him, bring somewhere and tell him: “Okay, you sit here.”

Back to Breaking The Silence. Below is an example, from a soldier serving in the South Hebron Hills area, a settlement in the West Bank. It is one of many, many similar experiences gathered (anonymously) by Breaking The Silence.

It is lengthy, but warrants being read in full:

Setting off from the centre of Jerusalem, on the journey to Hebron, I learnt more about the situation from our guide Nadav, a sweet, beardy, sandalwearing History undergraduate who looks like he’d be more at home running a vegan café in Clerkenwell than patrolling the occupied territories. One is therefore all the more surprised to hear his tales of how in part of his service in the occupied territories, a favoured tactic of his unit was to throw glow sticks into Palestinian households in the middle of the night so that, upon waking up, the IDF’s “presence would be felt”.

“There was one case which I think I regret the most. Throughout my service in the Territories, it’s the worst thing I ever did, personally. This man was on his way out of Yatta [main Palestinian town in the area surrounded by several Israeli settlements], he crossed a barrier on his way to Hebron, to a dairy. His truck was carrying milk containers. I think Hebron was under curfew at that time. Anyway, he was not supposed to be allowed through. I caught him just as he crossed the barrier, and it was the third time that week that I caught the same person. The circumstances were different but he was the same person, more or less in the same place. I blew a fuse – I ordered him out of the car, all the stuff. He began to argue and raise his voice. So I did two things: shackled and blindfolded him, and took to him to the sentry post in our jeep. I knew it was somewhere around 10 a.m., He was released sometime between 11 p.m. and 1 a.m., and this was summer time. So he was held in custody all day. He

Our destination is Hebron, a city in the West Bank divided into two sections: H1 and H2. H1, ran by the Palestinian Authority (the main governing body) consists of 120,000 citizens. Israelis are not allowed to enter the area, whilst Palestinians are not permitted to enter into the H2 area. However, problems arise from a more difficult reality: several thousand Palestinians, due to a combination of unemployment and low income, are unable to leave the area, and find themselves in a state of limbo, in which they are subject to international law and at the same compelled to live within the standards established by the Israeli state, that overtly favours the Israeli settlers that they numerically outnumber. The manifestations of this, detailed below, are distressing to say the least, and lie at the heart of Breaking The Silence’s aims: not to be anti-Israel, but to show to the country’s citizens and the wider world the ineffective nature of the settlements, and the difficulties that arise

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Shehuda Street – formerly home to Hebron’s bazaar; all buildings’ doors are now wielded shut from them for both their Israeli inhabitants and the Palestinian populations whose lives they impact.

Our first stop on the tour is the grave of Baruch Goldstein, located just outside Hebron in the settlement of Kiryat Arba. Goldstein, an ultra-Zionist originally from the USA, killed 29 and injured 124 Palestinians at the Tomb of the Patriarchs holy site nearby his grave, in 1994. Israel’s answer in the aftermath of this was to intensify efforts both to protect Palestinians in occupied areas and simultaneously restrict the movement of Palestinians in Jewish settlements in the West Bank. In the case of Hebron, these results continue to exist in the H2 area.

As one walks through the H2 area, formerly the town centre of Hebron before the Israeli settlement began to grow rapidly post-1994, one is struck by the type of living environment that has been established. Street after street has been made ‘sterile’ (the actual term used by the Israelis), meaning that the former Palestinian residents are unable to walk along them, unlike their Israeli neighbours. Every apartment one walks by is covered with metal railings, protection against the assortment of items that the settlers have been known to throw at Palestinians. In one particularly striking moment, we hear the sound of Arabic radio coming out of a Palestinian apartment that has no access to the street below it whatsoever – an Israeli imposed scenario in which the Palestinian population can be heard, but not seen.

As we move through Hebron, more and more IDF soldiers move along with us. Though our first encounter with the settlers is a rather amusing directive from a man in a van to “get on the bus to Mecca”, we are soon followed by the head of security for H2, who proceeds to follow us in some sort of souped-up quad bike and film our every move. It was clear that the Israeli residents of Hebron were acutely aware of the fact that they were not exactly a PR-agency’s dream when it came to making one pro-Israel; it is therefore commonplace to see signs such as those below dotted around H2, justifying the state of affairs in the area.

Eventually, we reached a point at which the pestering upped itself. We were first hustled by two young men, who proceeded to drive their Punto next to us and blare out loud music with the aim of literally silencing the tour.

Things truly escalated however, when a women unleashed a hose out of her window and began to spray our entire group with it. The IDF soldiers with us, unable to do anything to properly stop the settlers (this being the job of the police), merely attempted to move us on, as bags of water were thrown from apartment blocks at us and children not older than five years old looked

upon the group with huge smiles before throwing sandwich bags filled with water.

“The ongoing conflict we see to this day stems from the reality of the Palestinian population living in both Gaza and the West Bank finding themselves living in an area where despite being the majority, they find themselves ruled over by a majority from a different nation entirely.”

Whilst I initially laughed at the proceedings, as we came to a safe place to sit, I realised this laughter was an antidote to what was in reality my own fear. The screams of the woman with the hose, who I later found out was telling us in Hebrew how her husband had been killed by Palestinians and the system in place was there to keep her safe, were the terrified ululations of somebody who was a part of a system that simply does not work. In the aftermath of our watery encounter, the tour ended with a meeting with the local Palestinian NGO Youth Against Settlers. They explained to us that their aim is not (as is feared by the settlers) to displace them, but merely to be given the same set of rights as those possessed by the Israelis. Whether or not this is possible remains to be seen.

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Beyond Bedford Square with Oliver Bullough Interview by Laura DuBois Oliver Bullough is a writer, journalist, and occassional broadcaster.

He lived in Russia and Kyrgyzstan from 1999 to 2006, and continues to travel extensively in the former Soviet Union.

He has published two books, Let Our Fame Be Great (2010) and The Last Man in Russia (2013).

Anchor Magazine asked Oliver about Brexit, his stance on Russia, and the changing face of Eastern Europe, as well as his favourite spots to find a little peace in London.

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You’re an expert in matters concerning Eastern Europe and Russia. Can you tell us a bit about their relationship with the EU? I think the Ukraine crisis has precipitated the realization that Russia has a very different perception of the world than Western Europe. There has been a lot of wishful thinking from European countries towards Russia, thinking that they could be friends with Russia while Russia probably didn’t want to be friends with them at all, at least not in the way they understand the word.

It sounds like Russia feels resentment towards Europe, almost like Putin feels threatened by the EU. Is that because of historical reasons?

I don’t think so. There have always been people in Russia willing to take advantage of the fact that the state is not very well developed, which makes it relatively easy to avoid obeying the law to make money or dominate people.

Russia is still developing as a state, that is not how things happen in Western Europe where states tend to be much more controlling and it is harder to avoid your responsibilities as a citizen. It’s a very different historical development and you can’t just press a button and erase that because 1991 happened and suddenly Russia is supposedly democratic. It is a long process of development that is going to take a long time, if it happens at all. Essentially the two models of state are incompatible. Western Europe likes to preach to Russia that it needs to behave in a certain way, and although some people in Russia agree, many would not be able to keep living the way they are currently.

Do you think the reason behind the inequality between East and West are practices such as money laundering and offshore banking?

It is absolutely. In Eastern Europe, and particularly in the former Soviet countries, the courts are not independent and do what they are told or paid to do, which is why wealthy people keep their money abroad. If all the rich people in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan or Azerbaijan were forced to keep their property in their own country, they would naturally have a strong incentive to make sure that the courts were independent and the government worked efficiently, which would stop corruption. The problem is that because they can put their money offshore, there is no constituency trying to solve the problem. The longer the corrupt, non-democratic, kleptocratic systems continue, the richer the people who are running those countries become.

Can the EU have a positive impact in resolving these issues?

Absolutely, look at the difference between Romania and Ukraine. While Romania isn’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination, it was forced to make a lot of reforms and changes by joining the EU that Ukraine is not able to make. Countries that have joined the EU or are aspiring to become members have an incentive to reform that the other countries don’t have. The EU has been a magician, it has made countries like Bulgaria or Romania relatively clean. Other countries like Ukraine would also benefit from this. It isn’t going to happen any time soon but it would be a very good impulse to help Ukraine move along the reform path that is has been struggling to tread.

What about countries like Croatia who partly protested entering the EU? There are problems with the EU as well, particularly with the Euro, but that is a different issue concerning the architecture of the Union. The way in which the European Union insists on certain standards for members has raised standards of government across Eastern Europe, and things were a lot worse before. A lot of people criticize the EU because they don’t really understand it. The EU isn’t perfect, but the idea that our problems are a consequence of the EU is ridiculous.

So do you believe that people advocating Brexit, such as Boris Johnson, just don’t understand the EU? No, Boris Johnson is very intelligent, but he does whatever he can in order to further his own cause. I don’t think he cares one way or the other about Brexit, he just wants to become Prime Minister.

I’m not saying there aren’t people who genuinely think that Britain would be better off leaving the EU. It probably wouldn’t make that much difference to people like Boris, who are doing well and have successful careers. It would make a difference to people like my kids, who will grow up in a completely uncertain world. It’s a disgrace that middle aged men are advocating a policy that won’t affect them but will cause significant damage to young people.

It is also uncertain what will happen to the two million British people living on the continent.

Exactly. It’s a big generational difference, people over 50 or 60 broadly want to leave the EU because they are nostalgic of the Britain of their childhood, when we had an empire and other countries listened to us because we were powerful. That’s unrealistic, we’re not suddenly going to be given India if we leave the EU. The EU shows that it is much harder to be nice to people than it is to be an arsehole. Many politicians would rather be rude about Germans, and they are annoyed because by being in the EU they can’t.

Would Britain have a chance of doing better on its own?

I think in the short term it wouldn’t make much of a difference, it is a question of what kind of world you want to live in. I want to live in a world that’s knocking down walls instead of building them. There are problems in the EU, it is bureaucratic, top heavy and unwieldy and it’s got french people in it—that was a joke by the way. But it’s still better than the alternative of being stuck on an island with Boris Johnson.

What are the most urgent things the EU should reform?

It would be good if the EU could use its collective power to force tax havens to open up, and act as a supranational tax police. It could also use its collective strength to fight corruption in countries that are not part of the union, like Turkey or Ukraine. In general there should be more coordination within the EU, more thought about what this union was built for instead of being distracted by short-term issues.

Do you think nationalism is one of the major challenges facing the EU? It seems to be on ongoing issue and nobody really knows how to solve it.

We could do with more strategic thinking on a European level about it— but it isn’t just a European problem. Look at what is happening in America and imagine Donald Trump as President! The whole world is struggling to deal with globalisation and it’s affecting everything in unpredictable and unexpected ways. As a result we need greater cooperation between countries, not less. Leaving the EU to avoid the issues of globalisation would be like building a sand castle in way of the tide.

Supranational cooperation seems the way to go. What do you think of London as a global city?

Globalisation requires global cities like London, but at the moment the regulation of finances in London is practically nonexistent and that is a real problem, it’s too open to dirty money. On top of that responses to the financial crisis like quantitative easing have driven up the price of assets everywhere. It has become way too expensive for creative people and innovation in general.

But on the other side, London seems to remain an exciting place.

Where are your favourite spots to hang out in London?

I live in Hackney, so I go to London Fields a lot and I like going to Broadway Market. I like going swimming at the swimming pond in Kings Cross, it’s very nice. You can also go swimming in the ponds in Hampstead Heath, I like it there. What else? I like leaving—to Wales.

The best thing about London is leaving…

Exactly—I like the M4.

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