Skins to inhabit ode iss24

SKINS TO INHABIT O.D.E (-'/ 8LI ½VWX XLMRK [I HS PIX´W OMPP EPP XLI PE[]IVW CADE. Nay, that I meant to do. Is not this a lamentable thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment? That parchment, being scribbled o’er, should undo a man?

Some say the bee stings; but I say ‘tis the bee’s wax: for I did but seal once to a thing, and I was never mine own man since. How now! Who’s there?

Enter some, bringing the Clerk of Chatham.

SMITH. The clerk of Chatham. He can write and read and can accompt.

CADE. O monstrous!

SMITH. We took him setting of boys’ copies.

CADE. Here’s a villain!

SMITH. Has a book in his pocket with red letters in’t.

CADE. Nay, then he is a conjurer.

DICK. Nay, he can make obligations and write court-hand. '%() - EQ WSVV] JSV ´X XLI QER MW E TVSTIV QER SJ QMRI LSRSYV YRPIWW - ½RH LMQ KYMPX] LI shall not die. Come hither, sirrah, I must examine thee. What is thy name?

CLERK. Emmanuel.

DICK. They use to write it on the top of letters. ’twill go hard with you.

CADE. Let me alone. Dost thou use to write thy name, or hast thou a mark to thyself, like a honest plain-dealing man?

CLERK. Sir, I thank God, I have been so well brought up that I can write my name.

ALL. He hath confess’d. Away with him! He’s a villain and a traitor.

CADE. Away with him, I say! Hang him with his pen and inkhorn about his neck.

Exit one with the clerk – Shakespeare, Henry VI Part II. Act IV, Sc ii.

Philip Waller, Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at Merton College Oxford, has produced a thousand-page charmer in Writers, Readers and Reputations – Literary Life in Britain 1870-1918, and in the labyrinth of endless FIKYMPIQIRXW [LMGL [MPP WIRH LMW VIEHIVW FEGO XS LMW FSSO IRHPIWWP] QEH JSV ERSXLIV ½\ LI XIPPW LS[ T Shakespeare’s treatment of the poor and plebeian element in his plays was hotly debated. The actormanager Beerbohm Tree was surprised by this when he delivered a Sunday afternoon lecture on ‘The Humanity of Shakespeare’ to a working class audience in Poplar Town Hall, under the chairmanship of ;MPP 'VSSOW [LS [EW 0SRHSR´W ½VWX 0EFSYV 1E]SV SJ 4STPEV ERH JVSQ 0EFSYV 14 JSV Woolwich. Tree was interrogated – ‘Did he [Shakespeare], or did he not, ridicule the working classes?’

– and much pavement discussion followed the lecture. The editor of T. P.’s Week, Wilfred Whitten, felt that this line of questioning had been excited more by the TSPMXMGEP EKIRHE SJ VIGIRX GVMXMGW XLER F] KIRYMRI HMJ½GYPX] EFSYX YRHIVWXERHMRK 7LEOIWTIEVI´W TPE]W ERH TYVTSWI ,I MHIRXM½IH ³E little green paper-covered book’ published by the Free Age Press in which Bernard Shaw, Tolstoy, and others contended that all PS[ FSVR GLEVEGXIVW MR 7LEOIWTIEVI [IVI ½KYVIW SJ JYR SV IPWI unimportant and that Shakespeare was unable to conceive of anyone humbler than an aristocrat rising to the dignity of tragedy.

We have to assume the episode of Tree in Poplar (did he infuriate his audience at the outset by wit on that name-and-place juxtaposition?) happened in 1901: the last date mentioned, four lines before this passage, is 1864, and Waller’s source is Whitten’s Unposted Letters Concerning Life and Literature (1924) signed ‘John O’London’ as which (says Waller) he wrote, serving as ‘acting editor’ of T. P.’s 1902-11, later founder-editor of John O’London’s Weekly 1919-24. It’s easy to sort out with a copyright library around you, though the discrepancy between 1901 and 1902 may betoken trouble and in general one of the charms and curses of this marvellous book is its author’s perpetual, intricate ice-skating between his somewhat elastic

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chronological limits (it begins, with delicious panache, MR HMWGYWWMRK XLI MQTEGX SJ ½PQ SR XLI PMXIVEXYVI SJ XLI time).

It’s also characteristic of Waller that he will have us know that no great name can intimidate him, having already (p 261) described Shaw’s: With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom. I can despise so utterly as I despise Shakespear [sic in Shaw, not in Waller] when I measure my mind against his. as ‘the nonsensical drumming of a self-advertising showman’ while apparently seeing no reason to tell his readers that this was in a review of Sir Henry Irving’s Cymbeline at the London Lyceum, in the Saturday Review for 26 September 1896, or that Shaw continues: The intensity of my impatience with him occasionally reaches such a pitch, that it would positively be a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him, knowing as I do how incapable he and his worshippers are of understanding any less obvious form of indignity. To read Cymbeline and to think of Goethe, of Wagner, of Ibsen, is, for me, to imperil the habit of studied moderation of statement which years of public responsibility as a journalist have made almost second nature to me.

We may pause while Waller cleans his face from the egg (Shaw was a vegetarian). The review continued on its career of gargantuan moderation: In a true republic of art Sir Henry Irving would ere this have expiated his acting versions on the scaffold, He does not merely cut plays: he disembowels them.

But Irving performing Tachimo in this production gave 7LE[ ³YRUYEPM½IH HIPMKLX [MXLSYX E WMRKPI PETWI MR the beauty of its execution’. What was happening was that Shaw was ensuring his own audience did not dare close its eyes for a moment, nor dream of taking his next critical blow for granted. Oxford might call this nonsensical drumming; elsewhere, we might call it teaching.

True enough, Waller goes on to quote A. G. Gardiner

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vindicating Shaw in the 1920's as demanding that ‘the creative power that kindles us to life must express itself in new forms and new terms’ (p.262). But he needed some work on Dan H, Laurence’s admirable Bibliography of Bernard Shaw before being quite so credulous about John O’London citations of ShawTolstoy’s collaboration on charging Shakespeare with contempt of workers’ and even more work, perhaps, on Shaw himself. Waller handsomely notices Shaw’s composing The Dark Lady of the Sonnets (1910) to aid a Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre, but he might have found it useful to read its preface a little closer: what one demands from a great human TSIX MW RSX XLEX LI WLSYPH ¾EXXIV XLI TSSV and denounce the rich, but that he should weigh them both in the same balance.

Now whoever will read Lear and Measure for Measure [MPP ½RH WXEQTIH SR LMW QMRH such an appalled sense of the danger of dressing man in a little brief authority, such a merciless stripping of the purple from the ‘poor, bare, forked animal’ that calls itself a king and fancies itself a god, that one wonders what was the real nature of the mysterious restraint that kept ‘Eliza and our James’ from teaching Shakespear to be civil to crowned heads, just as one wonders why Tolstoy was allowed to go free when so many less terrible levellers went to the galleys or Siberia.

From the mature Shakespear we get no such scenes of village snobbery as that between the stage country gentleman Alexander Iden and the stage Radical Jack Cade. We get the shepherd in As You Like It, and many honest, brave, human and loyal servants, beside the inevitable comic ones. ... Think of Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Osric, the fop who annoyed Hotspur, and a dozen passages concerning such people!

If such evidence can prove anything …

Shakeapear loathed courtiers.

Waller is quite delightful in the provision of his sumptuous variety of cults and commemorations of past literary giants by endeavours of more uncertainly measured successors, but he could have let ideas dominate such legacies a little more, and perhaps absurdities a little less.

To return to Cade, we may agree with Shaw as to its immaturity, but it also invites closer scrutiny. Without reading it as covert propaganda for Pope Nicholas V (in Cade’s time) or Pope Sixtus V (in Shakespeare’s),

there seems a Catholic allusion in the red-letter book (implying a devotional work celebrating saints’ feastHE]W ERH XLI LSQMGMHEP VIFIPW´ MHIRXM½GEXMSR SJ MX with conjuring, or the calling-up of spirits. Literature and literacy are under attack – partly from Cade’s just grievance (if truthful, which we are continually told he isn’t) as to the power of skin in the making of legalisms whose effect detracts from his humanity.

Skin, therefore, lies at the base of our reading to ourselves, as well as of our swindling one another.

And if we follow Shaw in what he really said, rather than in what Waller said John O’London said the Free Age Press said Shaw said, we can still ask if literature is necessarily the enemy of humanity, or the working classes, or the principle of honesty or anti-snobbery or self-respect. And in one respect absorption in literature – in the writings of others – carries with MX ER EVXM½GMEPMX] [LMGL UYIWXMSRW MXW YWIVW´ LSRIWX] Shakespeare’s Cade with his talk of the skin of the innocent lamb illuminates it for us (so does the action of our editors in choosing skin as the theme of the issue, but the hell with them). The more we devour our book, the more we inhabit another’s skin, and at least temporarily abandon our own. It is not an easy process.

‘It is hard to cast the skin,’ said Kaa [the python] as Mowgli sobbed and sobbed, with his head on the blind bear’s side and his arms round his neck, while Baloo tried feebly to lick his feet.

‘The stars are thin,’ said Gray &VSXLIV ?[SPJA WRMJ½RK EX XLI HE[R ;MRH ‘Where shall we lair to-day? For from now, we follow new trails.’

And this is the last of the Mowgli stories. Rudyard Kipling was directly recalling his own history of casting and growing skins – Indian childhood; humiliation in England; school rebel conformity; Indian journalism; soldiers’ hanger-on/amanuensis; creative writer; European and imperial travel; English literary life; marriage and American domesticity.

1S[KPM´W KVMIJ MR LMW ½REP departure from the jungle he knows, is Kipling’s for so many departures from environments he had come to love, however painfully.

But he intended his book to become new skins for his readers to inhabit, although, fortunately for them, what he had to say as a creative writer was often very different from what he would have wished to transmit as a Tory imperialist militarist. Comparably, a snake

skin may seem repulsive – Kaa does his best but is clearly less cuddleable than Baloo – but it may have its attractions even before enchantment, as Oberon points out to Puck at the end of Act II Scene i in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: there the snake throws her enamell’ d skin, Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in ...

Waller’s Linnaean web of literary life in fact enchants its readers to inhabit while appearing to make them leap from one skin to another, often as much as 10 to each of the 1,000 pages. It must have its limits, some of them obvious. He is amusing on the incessant ITMTLERMIW SJ XLI ½JXL )EVP SJ 6SWIFIV] FIJSVI ERH after his ill-fated one-year premiership); he could have given them a little more credit for the strengthening of Stevenson’s posthumous reputation (but his ironic questions about it are as refreshing as the best old college port); what he cannot do is to make his readers feel what Rosebery’s hearers felt (like many another primadonna before and since Rosebery could bring the most cynical mockers of his posturing to their feet in tumultuous applause: the opera wasn’t over till the fat laird sang). Sometimes skins are not shed fast enough: Trollope visited his son in Australia ‘and featured him as the Harry Heathcote character in a short story, “Malachi’s Cove”’ (p, 291). Oxford University Press nodded at their copy-editing, since the sentence is as it stands meaningless (or, as Waller might say, nonsensical drumming). Trollope used his son as inspiration for the title-role in his short novel Harry Heathcote of Gangoil (1874). ‘Malachi’s Cove’ – not Cave – is set on the north coast of Cornwall, XLSYKL MX MW TVSFEFP] -VMWL F] SVMKMR ½VWX ETTIEVMRK MR 1864 and off the Waller limits. Heathcote is a pleasant, slight story. ‘Malachi’s Cove’ is so powerful that N. John Hall, editor of Trollope’s letters and biographer, likened it to D. H. Lawrence.

But Trollope well knew to keep sex at arm’s length.

‘Trollope’s Lady Carbury, by sleeping with a reviewer, in The Way We Live Now, must be considered extreme’ EJ½VQW ;EPPIV T ERH nobody would consider it more extreme than Trollope whose Lady Carbury did no more than ‘leave her soft, plump hand for a moment in’ the reviewers and then reprimand him for subsequently kissing her, which assured her of her good review from him, and her commission to review the work of another reviewer: but Waller’s book is so delightful that we can only thank him for adding to the enjoyment by leaving a few hares to chase.

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What Waller is describing, ultimately, are Britain’s readers – Britain, and not the U.K., of which Ireland formed part throughout his period. The foremost Welsh historian of our time, also the foremost Historian of Modern British politics – Kenneth Morgan – has written a biography of the most remarkable reader in modern Britain, who carried his love of books throughout his life in a blend of priesthood and panache, who sat for a Welsh seat for over 30 years, and who made British democratic Socialism a work of art: Michael Foot. I am hopelessly compromised in any assessment. Michael Foot, a proud atheist, has been my idea of a saint in politics for the last 50 years, and a saint of great kindness to his devotee. Kenneth Morgan was my inspirational editor for a study of de Valera for his series of political portraits. By all means, therefore dismiss my judgment that Michael Foot: a Life is one of the great biographies of our time, until you have read it. It is as exhilarating, as enjoyable, and as enthralling as I always found its subject, whether in print, in oratory, or in conversation.

But what concerns us here is a theme it necessarily has to assert, the place of Michael Foot’s books in his being. We return to skin in a new form. Foot is the spiritual giant he is – and the intensely lovable person he is – because he is also Jonathan Swift, and George Lord Byron, and H. G. Wells, so made by their books even more than by their lives.

In the case of each of them – and of a staggering number of others – he has made his love of their books force his own readers to rethink themselves in relation to his heroes. His largest book, the twovolume panegyric on his adored leader, Aneurin Bevan, was necessarily a political commentary rather than a political meditation on literature, but even there the process is not so different. Foot’s Bevan stands as an artistic critic on the politics of his time: he is a KMKERXMG ½KYVI FYX [LIVI QSWX FMSKVETLMIW WYFNIGX the world to their subjects, Foot’s Bevan lit it up with Bevan as light. It has been denounced as partisan, and it is, insofar as Foot saw his main business as giving Bevan his voice in its historical context. But of course it also masks points where biographer and subject did not agree, eg. on Celtic self-imagery on which Foot has always been more open-minded than Bevan. To Bevan, Welsh nationalism was a dangerous diversion whose leadership had Axis sympathies in World War II; to Foot, Welsh nationalism (or Scottish or Irish) he might not agree with, but if non-violent it had a right to be heard, and a view to be noted. When Foot fought so patiently and gallantly for devolution and made its ultimate triumph a political possibility,

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he did not do it in the spirit of George Robinson, to destroy nationalism, or of Gordon Brown, to contain it; he was much more anxious to get what good there was to be won from it. Thus when Gwynfor Evans was ready to die on hunger-strike rather than see the Welsh language mortally threatened by the denial of its own TV station, Michael Foot fought and won to prevent his death, partly because that death, as *SSX WE[ MX [SYPH LEZI WIX ;EPIW E¾EQI FYX TEVXP] because he respects Evans’s conviction and sincerity.

Foot convinced Whitelaw, and Whitelaw forced Thatcher to obey. That episode is an odd omission from this book, and it may indicate what seems its one weakness, which is also its subject’s strength. Michael Foot’s love of books and (some of) their authors must have deepened and strengthened his most unpolitical characteristic – his modesty. He was jeered at for wearing his ‘donkey-coat’ at a formal tribute to the war dead, but he was simply treating the war dead as he would treat anyone else – thinking about them, not about himself. Similarly, he has clearly given his biographer vast amounts of factual information, and much useful data whence to make deduction, but the book has suffered simply because Foot would not boast in ways any other politician must do, or die. Morgan worries about Foot’s very odd friendship with the monstrous media magnate, Beaverbrook, and after rocky patches, as self-respect and principle demanded, it was restored, WYVZMZIH ERH ¾SYVMWLIH 2S[ *SSX GIVXEMRP] PMOIH Beaverbrook and would not have kept the friendship alive if he did not. But Foot used the friendship for XLI FIRI½X SJ SXLIVW TVSFEFP] MR QER] [E]W LI LEW RIZIV XSPH 3RI MW ORS[R XS QI JVSQ MXW FIRI½GMEV] In 1956, Llew Gardner, hitherto a devout Communist journalist on the Daily Worker, resigned from party and paper over the USSR repression of Hungarian dissidence. Gardner then discovered what many another ideological refugee has learned, that his old opponents were as ugly as ever regardless of his own change of heart. He could get no job in Fleet Street, apart from Foot’s Tribune and the struggling Sunday paper, The People. Foot got Beaverbrook to take him on, Beaverbrook telling Gardner at the end of the interview ‘Daily Worker – Tribune – Daily Express – going left with every paper,’ this being intended for repetition to Foot, which it got, receiving an amused growl. Fleet Street blacklists were a British equivalent of contemporary McCarthyism: Foot probably did more to erode them, and thus destroy them, than any other person, for none had his mixture of personal ideology and personal access. But beyond that, Foot’s

own political integrity never blinded him to the belief in common ground for human betterment: thus he was convinced that Beaverbrook’s heart lay with his World War I ally, Lloyd George, much more than with the Tories for whom Beaverbrook helped bring Lloyd George down. Equally, where his colleague George Orwell wrote his essay on Swift, ‘Politics v Literature’ (1946 – not as stated here, 1948), admiring Swift’s literature despite his politics, Foot’s fascination with Swift argued for his greatness arising in part from his politics, while laughing with the utmost pleasure at the thought of him, Michael Foot, celebrating a man’s Toryism. He even signalled as much in the caption for his frontispiece of Swift in his masterpiece on Swift’s destruction of Marlborough, The Pen and the Sword 1957): it was by Swift himself.

He was an honest man, I’ll swear: Why, Sir, I’ll quarrel with you there, For I have heard another story – He was a most confounded Tory.

Morgan’s invaluable biography brings out Foot’s tremendous intellectual debt to his father, Isaac Foot, whose love of books literally held his house in thrall and whose literary loyalties his son passionately adopted, Swift large among them. Isaac Foot took up the cause of his literary heroes with the enthusiasm of a Methodist (which unlike his son Michael he remained), and his love of Oliver Cromwell set something of a pattern. – It’s clear from Isaac Foot’s Oliver Cromwell and Abraham Lincoln – a Comparison (a Royal Society of Literature Lecture delivered in 1944, and thus a most relevant celebration of the wartime allies’ links and contrasts) that Isaac Foot was haunted by the near200-year British denial of Cromwell’s humanity, let alone greatness (Isaac Foot’s pamphlet makes a point of stunning importance in showing that the American Civil War, for all of the fame of its losers cherishing their myths, was much more easily digested by its TSWXIVMX] XLER XLI &VMXMWL -WPIW GMZMP GSRžMGXW SJ had been, to judge by the speed of universal literary idolisation of Lincoln, and U.S. historians should have built much more on that perception).

It’s clear that Isaac Foot’s ultimate love for Cromwell was for Cromwell the writer and orator, and damn right too. Carlyle had rescued Cromwell’s letters

and speeches from oblivion, but diminished their [SRHIVJYP LYQERMX] F] EP[E]W ½RHMRK MX RIGIWWEV] XS remind his audience (and his subject) that Cromwell is a hero. Both Isaac and Michael Foot always loved their literary heroes as men, and their achievement was always to make their readers welcome the great ones as friends, not as remote exemplars. Understandably, Isaac avoided Cromwell’s Irish achievement although his son would be more uneasy about them than he was. (In fact, Cromwell’s Irish campaign had very little worse brutality than was common for the day, and the slaughter of Drogheda – the only deliberate massacre – Wexford’s being against Cromwell’s intentions – demolished an English Royalist garrison: Irish Gaelic poets initially rated Cromwell as little worse, and sometimes rather better, than his fellow-English, and XLI VETEGMSYW 'VSQ[IPPMER PERH GSR½WGEXMSR LEH been ordered by the Long Parliament well before Cromwell’s days of power.)

Father and son looked at Swift as another historiographical martyr, and revered Oscar Wilde’s father, William, as the medical authority who made it clear that Swift’s last years were a story of illness, not of madness. Michael Foot’s personal achievement was XLEX ½VWX SJ EPP LI brought his own professional talents to bear on Swift: the author of the great literary indictment of the Chamberlain government, Guilty Men, used his knowledge of polemic to show how Swift’s ‘wonder-working pamphlet’ The Conduct of the Allies brought down the greatest subject in Christendom, XLI ½VWX HYOI SJ 1EVPFSVSYKL ERH XSSO &VMXEMR SYX of the bloody War of the Spanish Succession, when the slaughter of Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde and (worse than all put together) Malplaquet was utterly unable to prevent the French candidate from winning XLI 7TERMWL XLVSRI 1SVKER TE]W ½RI XVMFYXI XS The Pen and the Sword and, with a modesty as unusual as Michael Foot’s, gives assessments by fellow-historians specialising in the period. But in this respect the book is beyond the reach of academic assessors: Foot knew the meaning and practice of polemic, its germination, its fosterage and its potential, and discussed them from the inside. Foot is fond of saying, and Morgan of quoting, ‘Unbiased historians are as insufferable as the people who profess no politics’. Like much of Michael Foot, the ease and simplicity of the remark may make its audience miss its profundity: self-styled unbiased

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historians and people who profess no politics are as a rule dishonest Tories. How can anyone be unbiased as to war? And the heart of The Pen and the Sword is the recognition of Swift’s hatred of war, magisterially utilised in appropriate epigraphs from Gulliver’s Travels.

Equally, in his dazzling vindication of Byron, The Politics of Paradise (1988), Foot made his readers understand the pivotal belief expressed in Don Juan (Canto VII, stanza 41): ‘Let there be light,’ said God, and there was light!

‘Let there be blood,’ says man, and there’s a sea!

8LI ½EX SJ XLMW WTSMPIH GLMPH SJ XLI RMKLX (For day ne’er saw his merits) could decree More evil in an hour than thirty bright Summers could renovate, though they should be Lovely as those which ripened Eden’s fruit, For war cuts up not only branch, but root.

But neither his Swift nor his Byron were left above the reach of readers: it would be impossible to read Foot on either without thereafter thinking of each as perpetually refreshing companions.

I doubt if Kenneth Morgan would ask more of his readers than that they should think of this book as they should think of The Pen and the Sword and The Politics of Paradise: friends for life, certain to refresh, to delight, to illuminate, to invigorate, and ultimately to luxuriate in with all the pleasure of an act of faith.

They are, in fact, skins to inhabit. The biographer is worthy of his subject, as the subject was worthy of his. Morgan in a warm and seminal envoi quotes Foot from the Guardian, 26 May 2006: Men of power have no time to read; yet the QIR [LS HS RSX VIEH EVI YR½X JSV TS[IV Morgan goes on to comment, justly elegiac: No one in his time in [English] politics has even come close to emulating his unifying vision of the synergy of books and action.

With the present-day challenge to the book from electronic forms of information technology, and the relegation of an education that disciplines the intellect in favour of the inculcation of repetitive ‘skills’, no one is likely to do it again. Our public discourse will be much the poorer.

We are, in effect, about to cast skins away which have given dimensions to our humanity far beyond its likely future reach, as skills increase and reading dies, as Thatcherite greed and Blairy spin replace the soul for

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which my atheist idol battled all his life. But if we are thus to conclude ourselves glued forever in a single state-of-the-science skin whose gigantic technology requires deafness, blindness and dumbness, we might take comfort in another of Foot’s heroes, H. G. Wells.

We may have to acknowledge Wells’s appropriateness in ending The Island of Dr Moreau with the reversion of WGMIRXM½GEPP] QEHI QIR MRXS FIEWXW SV MR XLI TVMQMXMZI as the logical outcome of the technology’s farthest reach in ending The War in The Air. But he ends The Food of the Gods very differently. The book is open to the hilarious critique of it by G. K. Chesterton in Heretics: The Food of the Gods is the tale of Jack the Giant Killer told from the point of view of the giant. ... I have little doubt that the giant whom Jack killed did regard himself as the Superman. It is likely enough that he considered Jack a narrow and parochial person who wished to frustrate a great forward movement of the life-force. If (as not infrequently was the case) he happened to have two heads, he would point out the elementary maxim which declares them to be better than one. He would enlarge on the subtle modernity of such an equipment, enabling a giant to look at the subject from two points of view, or to correct himself [MXL TVSQTXMXYHI © 8S YWI E ½RI TLVEWI JSV emotional sanity, was his heart in the right place? Jack had sometimes to cut him up [MXL E W[SVH MR SVHIV XS ½RH SYX Chesterton’s delight in pyrotechnics took his argument to places he might not have wanted to go, rather like a defender of the Papal repression of Galileo losing sight of the Popes who encouraged Galileo. Destruction is not necessarily the best means of discovery. And Wells had anticipated him: the heart of the story is that in the giant from the working class [LS MW ½VWX IRWPEZIH ERH XLIR OMPPIH &SXL EW WXSV] and as metaphor there it reaches gigantic heights of tragedy and of beauty. But the end of the story is, cleverly enough, no end, and we are simply given a last scene where the surviving giants determine on VIWMWXERGI ERH XLIMV PIEHIV MR E ½REP XEFPIEY VIEGLIW for the stars. Morgan’s two end-papers are perfect: in XLI ½VWX XLI ]SYRK 1MGLEIP *SSX WMXW EX E X]TI[VMXIV before a book-lined wall, in the last the older Michael Foot walks away with dog beside him pointed from the camera and stick pointed to the sky. His books can get us some way inside his skin, and there we can ½RH XLI PSZI SJ QER ERH XLI LEXVIH SJ GVYIPX] [LMGL animated his Swifts, his Byrons, his Wellses, and himself.