Hay Festival Conversations 2020

Hay Festival Conversations A collection of discussions, interviews and lectures from Hay Festival Digital 2020

Dedicated with sincere thanks to the #HayMakers who kept us going in times of need.

Thanks to all the writers and thinkers who have contributed to this anthology and to conversations across the world in 2020.

We gratefully acknowledge the support of Baillie Gifford

Baillie Gifford is an independent investment management partnership, headquartered in Edinburgh, and is a leading supporter of literary events and academic research. You can find out more about their literary sponsorship at www.bailliegifford.com/sponsorship

Hay Festival Conversations A collection of discussions, interviews and lectures from Hay Festival Digital 2020 edited by Bill Swainson with an introduction by Stephen Fry

Other Hay Festival Press publications

HAY FESTIVAL CONVERSATIONS Thirty Conversations for Thirty Years

THE ECHOES LAST SO LONG Commemorating the Armistice

Published December 2020 by Hay Festival Press The Drill Hall, 25 Lion Street Hay HR3 5AD United Kingdom www.hayfestival.org Texts: copyright © remains with the contributors 2020 This anthology copyright © Hay Festival Press 2020 With thanks to Peepal Tree Press for permission to reproduce Roger Robinson poems ‘The Missing’, ‘The Job of Paradise’ and ‘On Nurses’.

ISBN 978-1-5272-8255-1 Typeset in Gill Sans

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Contents Introduction 5 1

Afua Hirsch 6

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Ainissa Ramirez 22

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Carlo Rovelli and John Mitchinson

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Elif Shafak and Philippe Sands

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Esther Duflo and Evan Davis

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Gloria Steinem and Laura Bates

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Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac

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David Jarrett and Guto Harri

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Maggie O’Farrell 106

10 Roger Robinson and Peter Frankopan

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11 Simon Schama 132 12 Philippe Sands and Stephen Fry

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Notes on the Contributors

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Introduction

In our agony, we accorded the year 2020 the identity and motive force of a malevolent god. Numbered years are imaginary constructs of which nature and the cosmos knows nothing of course, but the pandemic proved that we are still, science and reason notwithstanding, the same species that has always given names and personalities to volcanoes, earthquakes, pestilences and other destructive forces.

If we have decided that 2020 is the demon to blame for our ills, it is only fair the year should also take its due share of credit for the small number of good things that arose from the horror. 2020, it seems, was a year of markedly increased reading. The book trade roared in all its modalities – audio, electronic and print. The Hay Festival attracted its largest ever audiences for the events that staff and volunteers arranged with such extraordinary efficiency and imagination.

This book serves as a record of some of the most memorable conversations that took place under the Festival’s (enforcedly) virtual tents. No drumming of rain or wild flapping of canvas this year at least. The companionship of wonderful minds on top form, and now in book form. No more than a few feathers to set on the scale against the great leaden weight of the pandemic, you might think, but with feathers you can fly‌

Stephen Fry December 2020

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Afua Hirsch THE CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS LECTURE WHAT IS THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM IN OUR NEWLY WRANGLED WORLD? This lecture took place at Hay Festival Digital on Sunday 24 May 2020 in partnership with the British Council.

THE ASHANTI PIONEER In 1949, in the bottom corner of the fifth page of a newspaper, next to a section called ‘Cocoa Farmer’s Corner’, a newspaper in the then British colony in West Africa, the Gold Coast, published a poem.

The Ashanti Pioneer – then one of a wave of burgeoning new print titles across the African continent – shared with its readers a poem by Hubert H Harrison, a New Yorker born in the Caribbean island, now part of the US Virgin Islands, St Croix.

His poem, a response to Kipling, called sardonically to: Take up the Black Man’s burden Ye cannot stoop to less Will not your fraud of ‘freedom’ Still cloak your greediness?

The poem had actually been written much earlier, as the epilogue for a book that captured the new politics of the Harlem Renaissance. But the journey that led it to appear in a Gold Coast newspaper two decades later, next to advice for cocoa farmers, tells us a lot.

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It was written by a West Indian in New York City. It was then publicised in Britain through the work of a West Indian activist living and working in London. It then found its way into West African newspapers like the Ashanti Pioneer, where it then became a refrain for what would later evolve into Ghana’s successful independence movement, a phenomenon which forced the beginning of the end for the British Empire in Africa. And it did all this through the operative use of daily newspapers, as an expression of what Paul Gilroy has termed the ‘black Atlantic’.

Throughout this period, newspapers like the Ashanti Pioneer were flourishing.

Marcus Garvey’s Negro World appeared not just in New York where it was printed, but in the American South, the fruit plantations of Central America and the Kimberley mines of South Africa.

The print titles that followed in the 1940s made creative use of these new technologies by the post-war black American press, unifying intellectuals, labour movement activists and antiimperialists in Europe, Britain, the Caribbean and the United States, and drawing black American struggles into a wider anticolonial discourse.

In an era before commercial air travel, reliable phone or online networks, these newspapers – the Gold Coast’s African Morning Post and Ashanti Pioneer, Lagos’ West African Pilot, Jamaica’s Public Opinion, Trinidad’s The People – represented a burgeoning multi-sited black press which allowed their readers to be in dialogue with each other across continents.

They offered readers the possibility of viewing themselves not only as part of a local or national community, but as part of a wider collective based on similar racial and colonial experiences.

ALL MEDIA IS SOCIAL This history is useful when we think of the current, existential threat to the media. Before Covid – which I’ll come to – the structural problems facing newspapers in particular were often depicted in a way that pitted the idea of media, on the one hand, against social media on the other.

The past successes of journalism take us back to a time when all media was social. When journalism provided information – grounded in fact, at least some of the time – to news consumers whose interests formed them into 8

communities capable of transcending continents, bound instead by common interests, causes and identities.

There is a theory that the media is now reverting to its roots.

Let’s go back to West Africa, and a typical marketplace. Centuries before colonialism, people gathered to trade not necessarily in places that were most densely populated, but that were best situated to congregate and exchange goods, services and ideas. Markets were where different communities came into contact with each other, and worked as a foci of communications. Contact was human to human, highly personal and interactive. There was immediate accountability from known vendors, who were incentivised to act with integrity because of their reliance on word of mouth recommendations and reputation.

Modern mass media destroyed this way of doing business, making it a one-way flow of information from organisations who became in some cases as removed from their audiences as the powerful the journalists among them were attempting to hold to account.

Advertising and information exchanges have always happened side by side. But as we now see unequivocally, the former would not be able to sustain the latter alone.

WHAT’S GOING WRONG One thing that is unmistakable, whether you look at the Ashanti Pioneer or Britain’s first newspaper, the Daily Courant, founded by a woman named Elizabeth Mallet in 1702 (who found it expedient to publish under her husband’s name).

Newspapers have changed very little in recent centuries, never mind recent years. There are the news reports, editorials and adverts, printed onto sheets of paper that are distributed and sold by subscription and individual purchase.

There is a good dose of sensationalism. Mallet was already a prominent publisher by the time the Courant came out, having racked up experience with her husband publishing something called ‘last dying speeches’ – printed speeches given by condemned prisoners before they were executed at Tyburn in the 1670s and ’80s.

It’s fascinating, but problematic, to realise that a product has changed so little in 9

300 years. And perhaps no surprise to realise that the time for radical change, therefore, is a little overdue.

To use my own reading habits as an example: I’m a professional journalist, and probably the most conventional of my peers, friends and relatives of my generation when it comes to news consumption. I read the Guardian, the New York Times, magazines from Vogue to the New Yorker to Prospect and Runner’s World.

So far, so old-fashioned. But I find things in once unexpected places. I read about cultural appropriation in GQ, colonialism in Teen Vogue, and politics on Twitter. I learn about gentrification through citizen journalists I follow on Instagram. I check in with social justice movements I care about through activists’ documentaries on YouTube. I subscribe to Gal-Dem – an online platform run for people of colour by people of colour. I often find I have more in common with Unruly, a community of black women in New York whose newsletter – which started out as a home hair styling service – now speaks more to my interests in culture and style than my colleagues at The Times, with whom I have more in common on paper, but whose content so often alienates me completely.

I currently watch the Covid Downing Street press conferences because I have to, rather than because I want to. I noted the day there was a question from LADbible. I noted the complete absence of ethnic minority journalists and publications in the room. It took weeks before this changed with, for example, historic black newspaper The Voice being only eventually given access to the daily briefing.

MY JOURNEY – THE VOICE The Voice occupies a special place in my heart because it’s where my journalism career began. In 1995, I started working as a young journalist at Britain’s oldest black weekly. It was still the days when people smoked in the office and to research a story, you went into the archive or to a library.

Like so many black journalists who work in the biggest mainstream publications, the black press gave us a way in, a platform, and a space where senior journalists cared about nurturing our talent. The kind of space which still doesn’t exist in anything more than name or token in many mainstream news rooms.

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But these vital publications are collapsing. After 37 years as weekly newspaper, The Voice has now gone monthly. The Jewish Chronicle, the world’s oldest continuously published Jewish newspaper, went into liquidation last month and was only rescued at the last minute in a messy takeover that merges it with the Jewish News.

COVID The Covid crisis laid bare so many things, and one of them is this.

To quote the words of a recent editorial in Asian newspaper the Eastern Eye – whose owners also publish Asian Trader and Pharmacy Business: “Which other publication would spend time putting the south Asian perspective during this pandemic to the country’s health secretary? Which other publication would tell the heroic stories about pharmacists going above and beyond – putting themselves in harm’s way and contracting Covid-19 – on the front page, rather than burying the story?”

Media created for minority communities, by minority communities, are a good in themselves. And let’s not forget that she who is a minority here may well be part of a diaspora that makes her far from a minority in the global context.

But in the specific example of the Covid crisis, we saw how long it took for the mainstream broadcast and print outlets to recognise how this disease was impacting us.

As we saw the early signs that ethnic minority people were two – in some cases three – times more at risk from Covid, other media organisations seemed either disinterested or unaware. That meant it took weeks before there was enough pressure for an official inquiry, and there is still no clear government policy on the steps employers are expected to take to protect staff who are quite literally more likely to die.

Not feeling able to do nothing – though my work has taken me largely away from on-the-day news these days – together with my colleagues Carole Cadwallr and Iain Overton (who started a project called All The Citizens), former Newsnight presenter Paul Mason and I began broadcasting an alternative news show from our living rooms.

We were asking the questions the mainstream media was not. Why are so

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many black and ethnic minority people dying? When the government says it’s ‘following the science’ on Covid, what does that mean? Why was there so little transparency surrounding advice received and actions taken? How could Britain be so farcically ill-equipped to carry out basic tasks like read emails from the European Union, source necessary quantities of Personal Protective Equipment, and why was it ignoring care homes? It was not rocket science, it was what journalism should be… Following our intellectual curiosity to the right questions and finding experts with the access and experience to answer them.

The process of putting out this show made a few things very clear to me. One, the stranglehold of traditional gatekeepers is loosening even when it comes to the most conventional terrain of the news media organisation – the daily news.

Broadcasting directly to viewers on YouTube and publicising our interviews with scientists and policy experts on social media, we garnered hundreds of thousands of views.

DIVERSITY Secondly, Covid has had a way of laying bare, and exacerbating, existing inequalities. The lack of diversity in newsrooms is one such example. The profile of journalists who broke and pursued stories of ethnic inequality in the Covid death toll was very clear. Black and brown correspondents revealed how health workers, bus drivers, porters and care home workers were being left without protection, less likely to complain and more likely to fall sick and die.

When one of my journalism students – who is Chinese – reported to me the racist abuse he was suddenly receiving on the streets of London in March, I discovered that tropes, suspicions and prejudice towards people of East Asian heritage were being widely experienced around the UK, but little reported.

COLONIAL NARRATIVE And when it came to the colonial narrative that was clearly at work in early stories about Covid and the measures that should be taken to protect against it, the media did little to challenge the ill fated view of our government that it had nothing to do with us.

In February Marcus Ryder, a former senior BBC producer now living in Beijing, compared the UK’s reporting on the Covid-19 outbreak to the reality he was witnessing in China. He described it as “woefully slow and failed to grasp the 12

full magnitude of the problem for a long time”.

A senior British journalist thought Marcus was being ‘alarmist’ when he tweeted that the mortality rate for Covid was between 4 and 5 per cent based on statistics from Wuhan. It later rose to 8 per cent in Italy.

Of those admitted to hospital with the disease in the UK, one third were dying by the end of April, a rate which led to comparisons between the Covid mortality rate here, and Ebola.

And speaking of alarmist, the advertising standards agency banned an ad for face masks in early March, condemning them as “misleading, irresponsible and scaremongering”. They justified this on the basis that the wearing of face masks at that time went against advice offered by the public health authority, Public Health England (PHE).

“The difference between east Asian reporting and UK reporting,” Marcus wrote, “is not just about numbers but tone. I have seen UK current affairs phone-ins advertise their programmes by saying they will be able to ‘allay people’s fears’. I did not know a single person of east Asian descent or living in east Asia, who has been following the outbreak since January, who thinks we are in a place where reasonable fears should be allayed.”

So if people connected to east Asia in Britain have known this since January, why was this not properly reflected in our news output? “The answer, I suspect,” he continued, “is that there simply aren’t enough east Asians deciding the news agenda in UK newsrooms.”

If a patronising attitude towards east Asia helped get us into this mess, a colonial mindset towards African countries will no doubt hinder Britain from getting out of it. I wrote this week about the notable success stories on the African continent, almost all of which had been widely ignored in the British media.

Senegal is developing a Covid-19 testing kit that would cost $1 per patient.

By comparison, the leaflet that came through my door in London last week offered me a private testing kit for £250.

Both Senegal and Ghana, with a population of 30 million, have a low death toll, partly because of an extensive system of contact tracing, utilising a large

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number of community health workers and volunteers. Ghana is also employing other innovative techniques such as ‘pool testing’, in which multiple blood samples are tested and then followed up as individual tests only if a positive result is found. The advantages in this approach are now being studied by the World Health Organisation In Madagascar the plant Artemisia Annua, or sweet wormwood, is drawing particular attention after president Andry Rajoelina claimed it was a ‘cure’ for Covid-19. A different breed of the same plant is now undergoing trials at the Max Planck Institute in Germany.

The reason you probably haven’t heard about this, Rajoelina says, is because of patronising attitudes towards African innovation.

“If it was a European country that had actually discovered this remedy, would there be so much doubt?” he asked on French TV. “I don’t think so.”

An alternative question he could have asked is, if there were diverse newsrooms covering the discovery of this remedy, would such a Eurocentric gaze dominate in the first place?

STRUCTURAL PROBLEMS Covid has laid bare and exacerbated, not created, journalism’s problems.

And these problems are many.

When Covid-19 crept undetected across the world at the start of 2020, journalists were already grappling with three interconnected crises. Populist politicians, fond of attacking journalists on every continent. Things are currently so bad in Britain that even Piers Morgan – famously chummy with Donald Trump, but who in fairness has emerged as a strong voice of accountability at the moment – has found himself subject to a boycott from Number 10.

Newspaper newsrooms, which still generate the majority of original reporting, have seen their advertising revenue collapse, even while demand for their content has grown, in some cases exponentially. New readers and subscribers, while hugely welcome, are not enough to fund the well staffed newsrooms and well fed, edited and moderated news websites on which we now depend.

In the last few days, BuzzFeed – once known for listicles but now a serious and 14

important source of journalism – closed its UK and Australian operations. Like all news websites, subject to the algorithmical whims of Facebook and Google, which dominate the digital advertising market, BuzzFeed UK had already posted a loss of £9.4m last year.

Home to much loved and respected long-form journalism, The Atlantic announced this weekend that it would cut staff by 68 positions, or 17 per cent, in response to the current economy.

Channel 4, already much maligned by the current government, is facing an existential fight for its existence, as the advertising revenue on which it is so dependent has collapsed by 50 per cent. The channel announced last month it is to cut its programming budget by £150m and furlough almost 10 per cent of its staff as it fights to survive the impact of the crisis.

Across the media, organisations are grappling with a situation where they have an unprecedented high in demand for news, journalism and entertainment as people lock down, combined with an unprecedented low in the revenue streams required to fund it.

These challenges add to the deep structural problems already faced by media organisations. The media still creates the news agenda, but access to content is distributed through platform channels like search engines, social media and news aggregators.

A study from the University of Oxford and Reuters of news consumers across 37 different markets showed that these distributed forms of discovery – ‘side door access’ social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, email newsletters, mobile alerts and aggregators – were the main source of access to journalism for two thirds of people, rising to three quarters for the youngest audiences.

The quest to reach these audiences has begun in earnest. And this is the nub of the problem.

This week I received this ad from the online news platform Ozy, which I think summarises much of how news organisations would like to be perceived.

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Uplifting, not depressing. Appealing to the audiences who are young, who are black, who are female. Empowering. Consistent with reinventing the future, not being stuck in the past.

TRYING TO REACH YOUNGER AUDIENCES I can see the point.

When I first joined the Guardian as the legal affairs correspondent in 2008, it was still the last days of a bygone era. I remember the day we switched to ‘web first’ – the idea, hugely controversial at the time, that we correspondents would write web copy first, as soon as a story was ready to go, one which would be published in real time and updated as the story evolved, then putting a lengthier, more considered, one-off print version as a second priority.

I remember the grumbling of an older generation, foreseeing – correctly – that this would mean journalists would be constantly writing for publication, not to mention the other demands that soon burgeoned – for podcasts, blogs and events. Time which took them away from the kind of slow but steady cultivation of sources, or gradual digging they valued as central to the kind of high quality and longer term stories they wanted to write.

They were right. “There are not that many places left that do quality news well, or even aim to do it at all,” Jill Abramson, a former executive editor of the New York Times, lamented.

The New York Times, Abramson writes, declined an early chance to invest in Google, and was instead left trying to make the best of a bad business model, including adding a Style section to attract more high-end advertising revenue.

The idea applies widely to the broadsheets. “If luxury porn is what saves the Baghdad bureau,” Bill Keller, then the newspaper’s editor, said, “so be it.”

The Baghdad bureau’s output is having to compete with a kind of journalism that caters very deliberately to something else.

Jonah Peretti, for example, who co-founded the Huffington Post and then BuzzFeed, talks about finding inspiration in MTV videos – or what he calls “late capitalist visual culture”, and how they “erode the viewer’s sense of temporal continuity” – leaving you with a bad combination of feeling both inflated and needy.

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“Capitalism needs schizophrenia, but it also needs egos,” Peretti wrote. “The contradiction is resolved through the acceleration of the temporal rhythm... This type of acceleration encourages weak egos that are easily formed, and fade away just as easily.”

And so you have new online platforms, as well as updated versions of the old, like the Daily Mail’s ‘Femail’ – which many of my American journalism students will confess (and it usually is a confession rather than something they are proud to admit) – is the only British news website they had ever read.

Serious news organisations are trying hard to reach younger audiences, and they need to be allowed to experiment, and get it wrong.

The Washington Post creating content for TikTok is not a bad idea per se. In theory it could be a creative way to make a 142-year-old paper relatable to the billion mainly young active users of the platform. But in reality there is very little actual journalism in the Washington Post’s TikTok presence. And journalism is what it does.

Where I think media organisations are going wrong relates to their authenticity as brands but also identities. People follow the Post, the Guardian or BuzzFeed because they trust their journalism, and they care about the stories they publish. And for all the threats to journalism – real and scary as they are – the greatest of all is not the decline of print, echo chambers or social media platforms. It’s disinterest and distrust.

A huge inequality is opening up between those who make consuming news part of their everyday lives, and those who don’t. More than the divide based on income or geographic location, the phenomenon of ‘news avoidance’ is on the rise. The Oxford Reuters study gathered data from 37 markets to show that news lovers – the kind to pay the sort of subscription that papers like the New York Times charge – make up only 17 per cent of the public.

For the first time in my life – and this is a big admission for a journalist – my own personal standing within this categorisation has changed. I am experiencing my own personal news avoidance. At a time when the national broadcaster often seems to be sycophantic in its repetition or failure to challenge the government line, when even good, rigorous journalism is depressingly repetitive, and when the entire British media seems more introspective and less international than ever – consumed by the single narrative of how this crisis is 17

playing out on our isles – many of us are questioning whether we actually want to check the news multiple times a day.

ALTERNATIVE MEANS OF STORYTELLING In my case I’ve been experimenting with alternative forms of storytelling at the fringes of journalism. Turning long-term investigations into podcasts. Converting long-form narrative non-fiction projects, like my book Brit(ish), into TV drama series. I’m fascinated by the potential for journalism to find synergy with forms of media that are blossoming, and can – channelling this trite but somehow insightful advert – be empowering.

These forms of media can never be a substitute for newsroom journalism. But they can work hand in hand. Netflix – whose subscriber numbers have surged by almost 16 million over the last quarter in one of the biggest wins from lockdown, found its greatest success was Tiger King – a shockumentary version of true crime which overlaps, but is not the same as, journalism. To appreciate why I draw that distinction, just compare the Joe Exotic story of Tiger King with the Joe Maldonado-Passage of New York Magazine’s reporting by the journalist Robert Moor.

One of the less enthusiastic verdicts by a journalist I respect noted that, entertaining as it was, the producers of Tiger King “lost the plot so many times that they ended up making the series less journalistic than a vicious spectator sport in which the players are poor workers and the abusive narcissists who exploit them.”

CONCLUSION Journalistic journalism is a public good and we need, as a society, to work out how much we value it. The best way to think about that is to imagine how things would be if the marketplace of ideas and stories that our currently diverse media landscape offers collapsed, leaving us with the single narrative of a state public broadcaster or only the most commercially clickbait news website. As the important but largely ignored 2019 inquiry into the sustainable future for journalism found, given the scale of the challenge, there is a strong case for public intervention to support publishers to develop solutions fit for the digital age.

But news organisations have to do their bit too. To make the case for 18

journalism being protected as public good – whether funded through tax reform, charitable status, philanthropy or licence fees – they have to reflect our society and interests. The critical mistake would be to see this as journalism that caters to everyone all the time, or that fuels a kind of tyranny of the majority.

What people care about is journalism that has integrity and authenticity.

Content that tries to please achieves neither of those. Content that reflects the agenda of powerful media magnates achieves neither of those. And the more desperately the press chases readers, the more it resembles our politics.

Journalism needs to be intellectually curious, inconvenient and honest. The subjective quality of those values speaks to the integral role of diversity – of ethnicity, class, gender and age among others – on those who create it.

Tech doesn’t have to be scary. Artificial intelligence will undoubtedly have a role to play in the future of journalism – and its survival. Journalists like me already depend on AI when we use transcription tools to transcribe a long interview – something that would have taken over a whole day before. Or when we subtitle a video with caption software.

At the moment, AI robots perform basic tasks like writing two to six paragraphs on sports scores and quarterly earnings reports at the Associated Press; for example, election counts in Switzerland, and Olympic results at the Washington Post. The outcomes are convincing, but they also show the limits of AI. Deep fakes – one of technology’s truly scary developments in its ability to fake videos that look authentic enough for journalists to treat them as source material – can be spotted by AI more effectively than they can by humans.

But we often forget that technology is created by humans. All our bias, racial, ethnic and gender, is replicated and augmented in algorithms that increasingly control the narrative. The problems, and the solutions – as has always been the case – lie with us. We should all be worried about the potential for technology to perpetuate bias. But let’s not forget we are still doing a great job of doing that all by ourselves.

Paywalls don’t have to be the way they currently are. The current design of monthly paywalls forces us into an ‘all-you-can-eat’ package that leaves those of us who just want one-off or infrequent access – and most people I know fall into this category – totally underserved.

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Imagine if news organisations were able to collaborate to provide access across multiple titles for a single upfront fee. Imagine being able to read a hundred articles of your choice from a library that includes all the publications you occasionally want to visit via a single login and upfront fee. For the people in my network who get most of their news from Facebook or YouTube, you could offer a kind of ‘mainstream media bundle’ for the time they want to check in with what they see as conventional newsroom output that still, most will admit, has immense value.

Having value and having a monopoly are not the same. The news media was several centuries overdue an update, and many of us feel that it didn’t cater to us anyway. The ongoing debacles about coverage of this government’s dishonesty and failures increase the number feeling alienated by the cosy relationship between some prominent journalists and senior politicians. A new generation will follow individual journalists, more than they will follow any particular news organisation. That should only be scary for some journalists, but it offers opportunities for us to connect with and be more accountable to our audience too. We are going back to the future.

Where the media will be social. If we can work out how to fund it, that is no bad thing.

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Ainissa Ramirez THE ALCHEMY OF US HOW HUMANS AND MATTER TRANSFORMED ONE ANOTHER The scientist and science writer examines eight inventions – clocks, steel rails, copper communication cables, photographic film, light bulbs, hard disks, scientific labware, and silicon chips – and reveals how they shaped the human experience.

This lecture took place at Hay Festival Digital on Wednesday 27 May 2020.

Now I’ve been thinking quite a bit about this talk, and it’s dawned on me – as a disclaimer – that I know I’m going to sound a little funny to you. Why is that? Well, I’m being transmitted from the United States to the UK (and all over the world), and I know that the American accent sounds a little funny. If you’re in the United States, well, I know I’m going to sound a little funny to you, because I have a slight New Jersey accent, and where I live that sounds a little funny to people. But what isn’t funny is the way that I use language. And one of the things I learned while writing The Alchemy of Us, was that the way that I use American English was actually shaped by many cultural forces – one of them being a technology, and that technology was the telegraph. You see, the telegraph couldn’t handle lots of messages, so messages had to be shortened.

Sentences became shortened, and the style of short, declarative sentences became a quintessential American style, which is the way I speak! This all happened because of a technology and I would like to invite you to look at the ways other technologies have shaped us.

In our time together, I would like to share with you a little bit about the origin story of The Alchemy of Us. Then I want to share with you also my vantage –

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how I went about writing it. Then I want to take a deep dive and share with you another way that technology has shaped us.

As for my vantage, I’m a materials scientist. I know you don’t know what that is. Most people don’t know what that is. I’ve learned this over the course of my life. I liken materials science to my home state of New Jersey, because both materials science and New Jersey have been overshadowed by their neighbours. For New Jersey, they are New York and Philadelphia, and for materials science they are chemistry and physics. You see, materials science lies at the point where chemistry and physics overlap. It is interested in how atoms bond, so that’s the chemistry part. It is also interested in how those bonds translate into how a material behaves in different situations, so that’s the physics part.

I have to be honest with you. The first time I heard about materials science I wasn’t even interested in it. Why? Well, because it was a prerequisite course back in my college days, which I translated as boring. However, my professor said something on the first day that completely blew me away. He said, “The reason why we don’t fall through the floor, the reason why my jacket is blue, and the reason why the lights work, all has to do with the interaction of atoms; and if you can understand how they do that, you can get them to do new things.” When he said that I momentarily stopped listening to him – and you should always listen to your professor – but I momentarily stopped listening to him because I’m looking at things in the lecture hall with a fresh pair of eyes: My shoes! My shoes were comfortable because they had molecules that were shaped like springs, which brought a comfort to my feet; and my pencil made a mark because carbon atoms slipped past each other; and my glasses allowed my eyes to see because they bent light to my distant retinas. This guy was telling me something that made the whole world make sense to me! It was that moment that I decided I wanted to be a materials scientist.

Now, I had known since I was very young that I wanted to be a scientist. One of the things that motivated me to become a scientist was actually television. I had favourite programmes back in the late seventies and eighties such as The Bionic Woman, The Six Million Dollar Man, and Star Trek (with Spock). But a show that really set me on my path was a public television show called 3-2-1 Contact.

It had a little African-American girl solving problems with her friends, and when I saw her, I saw my reflection. So I had wanted to be a scientist for a very long time, but it was years later where I decided I wanted to be a materials scientist 24

and that’s what you have in front of you today.

Now that I’ve shared with you a little bit about my vantage, let me tell you a little about the origin story of the book.

I’ve been doing materials science for a very, very long time and just like any relationship I wanted to spice things up between materials science and I. So I decided I was going to take a few classes in glass blowing. I was excited to take glass-blowing classes because this was on my bucket list. Also, when I went to visit my glass-blowing class my instructor did something amazing. He got glass out of the furnace, he tugged on it a couple of times, and what he made was a beautiful galloping horse with a mane in the air. just amazing! I said, “I want to be around this guy!” But I have to say that when I visited, I was also very, very afraid. Why? Well, because he said, “Be careful. If you see any glass on the floor don’t step on it, because even if you don’t think it’s hot, if it is hot, it will melt a hole in your shoe.” I said, “Melt a hole in my shoe? What kind of operation is this?” So I was excited but I was also afraid. I was also a little bit more afraid because I come from a long line of people who are slightly clumsy – and by slightly clumsy I mean a lot clumsy. So I knew that if I took glass-blowing classes I would have to be extra, extra careful. With that, I signed up for these classes.

Whenever I went to the class I took a very cautious approach. When it was my turn to work with the glass, I would get my pipe, stick it into the vat (but not very deep), pull out a little bit of glass, blow a small bubble, and then create a small vase. The vase was about as big as my hand and I had about two dozen vases made this way. I would give them to friends and they were very kind because they would accept them and they would also encourage me. One of my friends said to me, “Hey Ainissa, why don’t you make something bigger?”

And I said, “No, no, no. I’m never making anything bigger. Do you realise how hard it is to make something small and come away unscathed and not get burned? I’m pretty satisfied. I’m going to stick to small vases.”

Well, I have to tell you, my friends, that there was one day when I went to my glass-blowing class where I didn’t care to be so safe. That morning when I went to work there were lots of layoffs, lots of hugging, and lots of crying, and as you can imagine when I got to my glass-blowing class I was quite raw. So, when it was my turn to work with the glass, I took my frustration out on the glass. I got my pipe and this time I stuck it deep into that vat and I pulled out a lot of glass, nearly maxing out my muscles and definitely dripping some on the floor. Then 25

I blew a huge bubble. Then I did things that I’d never done before which was I got my piece and I started swinging it, and when I swung it the piece became longer; and then I started twirling it, and when I twirled it, the piece became wider. This, my friends, was turning out to be one of the best glass pieces I had ever made in my entire career of glass blowing. It was so extraordinary that even my classmates, as I was working on it would say, “Hey Ainissa that piece is great!” And I would say, “I know! I can’t believe I’m working on this!”

I had one more step before I was done. All I had to do was put my piece into the furnace for a flash of heat, and then I could remove it from my pipe and put it over to the area where it cooled. But as I was putting it into the furnace, I’m still in a conversation with my friend talking about how wonderful this piece is. I lost track of time! When I pulled it out, my glass piece was an incandescent orange. It was so, so hot. Also, on top of that, my piece which was hanging on like this, was now hanging off like this. I was in trouble.

I had a little bit of knowledge. I knew all I needed to do was rotate this pipe 180 degrees and when I did, I would use gravity and gravity would just lower it and it would right itself. But because it was so hot it kept going. Oops! So I did the same thing, and it did the same thing. It kept going. Okay, so I did it again and it kept going. I didn’t know what to do, I just kept doing this hoping it would cool! “Please, please stop, please just right yourself.” But see, the vase was uninterested in my pleas, and uninterested in my skill and it just rotated off and, boom, landed on the floor. There it was! My beautiful glass piece was no longer beautiful.

My instructor had been watching what was going on this whole time and he ran over with heat-resistant gloves. He reattached my piece to the pipe, put it into the furnace, took it out, opened up the closed mouth, rounded the flattened side, and then he gave it to me. I did a few things that were mostly symbolic. Then I did what I should have done before, which was put it into the furnace for a short amount of time, take it out, remove it from my pipe, and put it over to the area where it would cool.

As it is cooling and as I’m calming down – and unscathed by the way – I started thinking a little bit about this dance between the vase and I: this is a glassblowing class where you shape materials. But it actually shaped me. See, I came to my glass class in a very bad mood and I was leaving in a pretty decent mood.

I was actually pretty happy about life. This made me think, “I wonder how 26

materials and humans have been shaping each other over the centuries? How have we been in a dance with each other creating and co-creating each other?”

This was the birth of The Alchemy of Us! This is what I wanted to embark on: to look at materials of the past and see how they made us what we are today. In order to do this, I had to change my vantage and I had to change the way I looked at materials. You see, when I did materials research I had to think about the future. I wanted to make something that was stronger, better, faster, just like The Six Million Dollar Man. I did it in clean laboratories and I wore a lab coat. I was looking at microscopes and I was looking for something new. So that’s how I had done research.

I likened my work to being a periscope, where I was pointing in the direction that I was going. I was heading towards the future. But in order to explore how materials changed us and got us to where we are today, that periscope had to change its direction and look towards the past. “How did material inventions in the past get us to this moment?” Also, I had to change locations. I was no longer in clean rooms. I was now going to libraries and archives, some of them very, very dusty, where I was handling crumbling papers. But again, I was on the hunt for something new.

Let me share with you what a very, very good day looks like at the archives. As for an ordinary day, a bad day, a good day – they kind of look the same at the archives: it is me opening a book, turning some pages, and writing some notes.

It’s never going to make it into a Hollywood movie, unless it’s a montage, but that’s another story. But let me share with you what an excellent day looked like.

I was working on the first chapter; I wanted to explore how clocks – how timepieces made with materials – shaped culture. And, as you can imagine, of course, clocks instilled this desire for punctuality. But I was on the hunt for looking at how else they had impacted us and I found something that I didn’t anticipate. It ends up that we used to sleep differently. Yes, that’s what I said, “Sleep differently!”

This is what happened: our ancestors, before the Industrial Revolution, would go to bed around 9 or 10 o’clock and then they would sleep for around three and a half hours. Then they would wake up on purpose and they would do things around the house, like sew, clean, or see their neighbours who were up

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too. This would last for about an hour or so and then they would go back to sleep for about another three and a half hours. Everyone slept this way! You can look at old books and see this because it’s called ‘first’ and ‘second sleep’.

I found this and it was fantastic! But, what was the cause for the change? It was actually two things that made it happen. It was the lights. The lights allowed us to go to bed later so that truncated one of the segments. It was also the clock. We had to wake up earlier to go to the factory and so that segment got truncated and it looks like the sleep that we have today.

I was pretty pleased that I had already found how this technology, the clock, along with electric lights, had shaped culture. It had changed how we sleep. But I have to say, my friends, that I was looking for some other way to get across this desire to be punctual and how we became obsessed with time. I have to admit I wasn’t finding very much. So I was in the library, sitting down, and I had a huge stack of books on the history of time and horology. What I was doing was reading them one by one and if it didn’t work or I was not getting what I was looking for I just placed it over here. (As I told you, it’s not going to make a Hollywood movie.)

But one day, I opened up a very, very thick book and I saw midway through the book one sentence that completely blew me away. It said in the nineteenth century there was a woman in England who sold time. I said, “What!?” I said it loudly like that, and I’m in a library and there’s lots of people around me. They all look up to see who’s made that sound, and because I didn’t want them to think it was me, I also looked around and mimicked the same behaviour: “Hey, shush! Stop making noise.” After that, I returned to myself and said (softly), “What!” I looked at the sentence and I said explain yourself sentence. Just like in my former life when I was doing research and I would see data on a trend line that didn’t fit that trend and I would investigate that, well, in this case, it was a sentence in an old book that told me something that I wanted to investigate.

Here’s what I found: in the nineteenth century there was a woman in England whose name was Ruth Belleville and she had the extraordinary business of selling time. She would wake up early in the morning on a Monday and leave her home in Maidenhead, make her way over to London, make her way over to Greenwich and walk up that very steep hill to the Royal Observatory, where the precise time was. The whole time she was carrying with her a pocket watch. She had a pocket watch, which she had nicknamed Arnold. She would 28

give Arnold over to the attendant, and the attendant would look at its time and compare it to their main clock. They would give her a certificate, noting the difference between their clock and her clock. Then, she would make her way down the hill, across the Thames, over to London, and would go to various businesses that needed to know it. She would go to banks and factories and newspapers and train stations. They all needed to know the time.

She’d make her way over to the London Docks because navigators needed to know the time so that they could know longitude. Pubs needed to know the precise time because they had to close at certain hours – if not they would lose their licence. Also, there were a few wealthy people who liked having the precise time in their house, so she would go and visit them. For this unusual line of work, she was called ‘the Greenwich Time Lady’. These people had a subscription for her service. What was even more unusual was her family was in the business of selling time for nearly one hundred years.

I found this to be amazing. A woman who sold time!? This sounds like a person who came right out of a Dickens book, but it was absolutely true. And, as a writer she was a fantastic device because she showed how important time keeping was. So much so that she had a business based on selling it.

If I had told you now that I’m going to start a business and I’m going to go around selling time you would look at me, and you’d be very nice about it, and you’d say, “I don’t think that’s a very good business.” And you’re right, it’s a bad business because we all know the precise time. We already live in a world where time is very much part of our culture. But in Ruth’s age people were starting to enter the age that we are in. She was able to show how obsessed we became with time.

I absolutely loved Ruth and I told everyone I could find about her. “Did you know there was a lady who sold time?” And my friends would be, like, “Yes, you’ve told us already.” So I was completely enamoured with Ruth. But I have to say I also had a set of emotions I didn’t anticipate. One was a little bit of sadness and another was I was a little mad. Why? Well, how is it that a woman with such an extraordinary job could be reduced to one sentence in a very, very thick book. I was committed to reading that book, but most people wouldn’t get through it because, I’ll admit it, it was a little dry. Her extraordinary life was reduced to a sentence that most people wouldn’t see. She would remain hidden. That didn’t sit well with me. In fact, Ruth changed the book. Just 29

like my glass-blowing incident changed the position of the periscope to go from the future to go towards the past, Ruth informed me that I needed to change the focus and look at little-known people who were contributors to science and technology. So that’s the approach that I took in creating my stories.

Those are some of the things that I wanted to get across about the book’s origin and also about my vantage. Let me share with you now how technology has shaped us. I want to share with you a technology that is shaping us right now and you don’t even know it. Why? Because it’s simple and we’re ignoring it.

Let me tell you what it is. It’s the lightbulb. The lightbulb is changing us. Let me back up and tell you a little bit about the origin story.

If you go to American textbooks or history books and you look up the lightbulb, you’re going to see the inventor Thomas Edison. Look, we’re all friends, we all know that Thomas Edison was not the originator of the lightbulb. There are many people who predate his work: Joseph Swann in the UK for one and there are many others as well. So, let’s not argue about that, I agree. But let’s use Thomas Edison as a case study because I want to share with you why he took the approach he did and, more importantly, what was the impact of his invention.

The other thing about American textbooks – which I know have a lot of things missing – when they talk about Edison they just talk about him as this genius who had a flash of inspiration. That is not how it went either with the lightbulb.

In fact, he wasn’t even going to work on the lightbulb. It wasn’t until he heard about this little-known inventor named William Wallace located in Connecticut, who had made a form of electric light, that he considered it. Wallace worked at a brass manufacturer and had emigrated to the US from Manchester. He was also a gentleman tinkerer and he had made an early electric light – an arc light.

Arc lights had been around for some time but this was the first one in the US. The arc light was based on having two carbon blocks that were separated and when you connected them to a circuit, a bolt of electricity connected both of those carbon blocks and that’s what created a huge spark of light. When Edison saw this he was so enamoured with it he’s like, “OK, I need to get into this game of electric lights.” So he left William Wallace’s home inspired to make electric lights. But he was also inspired to take a different approach. You see, Wallace’s approach was a fantastic feat, however the light was just too bright.

You can imagine having one of these bright arc lights in your home: you turn it 30

on and you can’t see anything because it’s just a blinding light. Edison knew he had to take a different approach.

When he returned back to Menlo Park to New Jersey (my home state) he decided he was going to try an incandescent approach. He’d have a little wire called a filament. He’d have electricity go through that wire and that electricity would heat it up and eventually cause it to glow. His job was to figure out what was the best material to be that filament. He tried a lot of different materials; there are a lot of myths about how many different materials he tried. He eventually settled on platinum.

From a materials science point of view, platinum was a good choice. Why is that? Well, it doesn’t melt at high temperatures. If you have electricity going through a metal, causing it to heat up and glow, you don’t want a material that’s going to melt. So that was a good choice! Platinum was also a good choice because it doesn’t react. If it’s in this glass bulb with a little bit of oxygen, you don’t have to worry about soot forming on the surface, which is going to dim the light. Edison made a fine choice from a materials science point of view. He made different circuits based on his platinum filament and he worked really hard to get this thing to glow brighter and brighter. Yet, for all of this effort he couldn’t get platinum wires to glow brightly. Why is that? Well, it turns out that there was a material property that Edison overlooked. See, platinum is actually conductive and what he needed was a material that was resistive. Let me just nerd out for a second and explain what I mean.

Let’s say that I have a wire and let’s compare that to a pipe for water. If water can flow through it very rapidly that’s a conductive pipe – or a conductive wire.

Now what Edison needed was a material that was resistive. So let’s say that we have a pipe and it was full of marbles and pebbles. The water would have a more difficult time getting through. That’s a resistive pipe. What he needed was a resistive wire. Edison eventually had to stop working with platinum, even though he was so committed to it and made many different advances with it.

He switched over to the material carbon. Carbon is a resistive material. So he got a carbon thread, he baked it, baked all the non-carbon parts off, put that into his electric bulb, and pumped out the air. Then on one night there was one bulb that he worked on that glowed for one hour, two hours, three hours, and then eventually forty hours before it went dim. That was the birth of the American electric light.

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Let’s explore what’s the impact, that’s the point of The Alchemy of Us. We know the origin story, but how is it changing us? Well, in order to explain how it’s changing us, I want to take you back to a tradition that happens on the East Coast with children in the summer time. Let me take you back to my backyard a couple of decades ago.

One of my favourite things to do as the sun would set back in the summertime in New Jersey is I would be on the steps and I would look and I would wait.

What was I waiting for? I was waiting for little sparks of light no bigger than my fingertip. As soon as I saw a few I would run into the house and get a jar that I had already prepared. It had a couple of holes in the top. I would run back out and try and capture one of those sparks of light. Those sparks of light, my friends, are fireflies and I absolutely loved them.

I live in New England and I too have fireflies in my backyard now. And the number of fireflies I’ve noticed has been decreasing. So I asked an expert about this because, well, that’s what I do. This is what she said, she said, “Yes, the number is decreasing.” I said, “Why?” And she said, “It has to do with the lights.” I said, “Please explain why.” And this is what she told me. So let me take you back to my backyard to explain what’s going on. These fireflies are actually communicating with each other with a Morse code of flashes. This is how they communicate with each other so that they can eventually meet and make future fireflies.

Let me share with you the scenario in my backyard: a female firefly is on a blade of grass. A male firefly is flying about waist high and he announces himself, “I’m a male. I’m a photinus greeni.” The female firefly looks up and if she likes what she sees, which is about 50 per cent of the time, she flashes back, “I like you.” The male firefly drops like a rock, makes his way over to where she is, and… future fireflies. OK, so that’s the scenario that’s usually happening.

However, let’s just add one additional feature. We have the female firefly on a blade of grass, a male firefly flying about waist high, and now we have a street light. The male firefly enters and he announces himself, “I’m a male. I’m a photinus greeni.” The female firefly looks up, and says, “Is anybody there?” She can’t see him! She doesn’t flash back. No future fireflies! That’s pretty sad!

Let’s do this scenario one more time: a female firefly on a blade of grass, a male firefly flying about waist high, and again that street light. The male firefly announces himself, “I’m a male. I’m a photinus greeni.” The female firefly looks 32

up. She can see him! Oooh! But she doesn’t like what she sees, “no, no.” You see, female fireflies like male fireflies to have bright lanterns. This guy’s lantern doesn’t look so bright in front of that streetlight. So, she doesn’t flash back! No future fireflies! This, my friends, is pretty sad. The human invention of lightbulbs is making life very difficult for fireflies. But fireflies are not the only species being modified by the lights. We are! Yes, humans. We are being shaped by our own lights.

Let me share with you what I learned when I talked to many different scientists.

One scientist told me that we are actually two organisms. He said we have a daytime mode and a night-time mode. In our daytime mode, we have a higher metabolism, a higher temperature and more growth hormone flowing through our bodies. In our night-time mode, all those numbers decrease and we’re kind of in a rest and repair mode. How our bodies know which one to be in, daytime or night-time, has to do with the light.

In order to understand that we have to really think about our eye. In our eye, light hits the retina and that information gets transmitted to our brain and is reassembled as vision. But what we found out just in the last couple of years is that the eye actually had a secret that we didn’t even know about! In the retina is a special photoreceptor that doesn’t contribute to vision. You can think of it as a detector and it’s on the hunt for blue light. When it senses blue light that information goes to the brain and it goes to another part of the brain, which stops secreting melatonin. Melatonin is a chemical compound, which lets all the cells know that it’s in night-time mode. So when it’s shut off the body enters into daytime mode. In short, blue light puts us in daytime mode or growth mode.

When our ancestors were alive, they lived by sunlight and then they lived by candlelight. The sun has a lot of blue light in it and so they were in daytime mode, or growth mode. As the sun set, they entered into night-time mode and they lived under candlelight, which has redder light. But as for you and I, we live under artificial lights all the time, which are strong in the blue. So we’re in growth mode or daytime mode all the time until we fall asleep. That means that there’s more growth hormones going through our bodies.

What are the repercussions of that? Well, it ends up that when our body is swimming in growth hormones, our cells will respond to that overstimulation.

One scientist told me that we are actually taller than our ancestors. Sure, 33

there’s many contributions to that and I’m sure you’re enumerating them right now: we have better nutrition, we have cleaner water, and a better mitigation of diseases. But another factor is actually the electric light. So there’s that! The lights are changing us.

But there’s another thing we should consider too. If we have cells that are awash in a lot of growth hormones, they’re going to respond and grow in ways that we don’t want. This has already been perceived. Scientists have done studies on animals and they’ve subjected them to various types of artificial lights. What they found is they had an increase in risk to a range of ailments from cardiovascular disease, to obesity, to some forms of cancer. They’re not the only ones! We can’t do studies like that on humans. We don’t do that. We don’t do that to humans. But what we can do is look at what people do for a living, why they’re sick, where they live, and we can correlate all those different things and get a sense of what’s going on. Epidemiologists have done that. They have found that a certain population has an increased risk for certain ailments such as cardiovascular disease, obesity, and some forms of cancer and it has to do with when they work. They work at night, underneath the electric lights. Those folks that do shift work, at times other than 9 to 5, which includes security guards to surgeons, have this risk that they need to be mindful of.

Here we have an unintended consequence! Edison and all his friends were in the business of creating electric lights to push back the darkness and this was a great intention because we don’t like darkness. (I know I don’t like darkness.

I’m slightly afraid of the dark and by slightly afraid of the dark I actually mean ‘a lot afraid’ of the dark.) So that was great. But now we see that there’s this connection between the lights and our health. And so what do we do about that? This is what I explain in The Alchemy of Us, there are ways that we can tailor our lives based on this information.

When I talked to a scientist I said, “Hey, I don’t want to go back to olden times.

How do I live in a healthy way underneath these electric lights?” He said, “The prescription is actually very, very simple. What you need is bright mornings and dim evenings. You need to have blue light in the morning and redder light in the evening. So when you wake up, get out of bed, and go take a walk. Get that beautiful blue light from the sun to hit your eye and put you into that wonderful daytime/growth mode. If you can’t go outside the other option is to turn on blue LEDs or compact fluorescent bulbs, because they’re strong in the blue. They will put you into daytime mode. But, as the sun sets we actually need 34

to change our lights, we need to dim all those blue lights and put on lights that are redder. So incandescent bulbs, even though they’re not very efficient, are redder. Also red LEDs, they’re also redder. They will put us into our necessary night-time mode, our repair mode.”

They are not the only things. We need to look at our mobiles, our cell phones.

Our cell phones generate a lot of blue light and that will put us in daytime mode. What we need to do is put them into night-time mode so that we, too, can enter into night-time mode. They’re not alone, we have other devices. We have computer screens and we have television screens. All of them generate lots of blue. With the computer screens, you can also put them into night-time mode so that you can enter into night-time mode. With television screens – I don’t know if they have features to put them into night-time mode – but what you can do is wear some fancy glasses that block the blue. Some of them are expensive, but you can go to the hardware store and get welder’s glasses that push back the blue, that block the blue. Sure, you might look a little funny, but at least you’re in a healthy state of night-time mode. What would you rather have?

Aesthetics or health. It’s your choice.

Well, my friends, these are some of the things I learned while I was writing The Alchemy of Us and I hope you can see the importance of putting technologies under the microscope – even old technologies – so that we can corral them and live in a healthy way once we have information about them. I hope that in the time that we spent together you come away with the fact that we create technology and that technology, in turn, can change us. I hinted at how the telegraph has shaped language and how timekeeping has changed how we sleep. We’ve spent a significant amount of time looking at how the lightbulb has changed us. I hope that after our time together you’ll adopt a new approach when it comes to technology and you won’t just embrace it, but you’ll examine it. You’ll ask it the question, “Now that you’re in my life, how’s my life going to change?” And be OK with that answer. It’s important to examine technology because as I say in The Alchemy of Us in my final sentence: “Such a thoughtful analysis of the impact of inventions benefits society, not just because it’s an entertaining cerebral exercise, but because when coupled with action and social change, it has the potential to help society transcend its condition and favourably further this alchemy of us.”

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3

Carlo Rovelli and John Mitchinson THE ORDER OF TIME The physicist thinks about the nature of time and our emotions. He reflects upon his native Italy’s response to the coronavirus; and on what we really fear – the fact we may all die.

This conversation took place at Hay Festival Digital on Wednesday 27 May 2020.

JOHN MITCHINSON: It’s my pleasure to introduce to you Carlo Rovelli, the great physicist and writer. Carlo has worked in Italy, the USA and Canada, and is now living and working in Marseille, France. His main field is quantum gravity – in particular loop quantum gravity theory, which is something that he leads the world in. But he’s best known to readers in the UK as the author of a string of remarkable books beginning with Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, which has been translated into forty-one languages and has sold over a million copies, Reality is Not What it Seems and, last year, The Order of Time. So it’s a huge pleasure, Carlo, to welcome you to Hay. Your previous book was called The Order of Time, but you have things to say about time that I guess are going to surprise people who merely think of it as a flow, as an arrow going in one direction. Do you want to tell us a little bit about why time is so surprising?

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CARLO ROVELLI: Modern physics has brought to us many surprises regarding the way time works. To understand what happens, remember that we – I mean humankind – we live on this little planet in a particular situation and we only have access to a narrow space of possible experiences. For instance, in the universe typically things move at great speed. There are astrophysical ‘jets’ that move away from black holes in fractions of the speed of light. But here on Earth things move very slowly. At most we take an airplane, which is very slow compared to how things move in the universe. Also, we do not usually see small things. We know that there are molecules in the objects that we touch, but we do not see them. So we have a limited experience. We’re like little children who grew up in a small house and never went much around outside.

When they go out into the world, they realise: “Wow, things are different.”

So, we must remember that our common way of thinking has developed in restricted situations.

This is in particular true regarding the way time works. In the last century, in physics, we have realised that several features of time that we take for granted are only a result of this limited experience of ours.

The most striking of these is the fact that we all experience the same time.

We grow old together. If somebody is two years younger than me, he’s going to remain two years younger than me. We think that this is a feature of time itself, this is part of what time is. But it’s not. It is just an effect of the fact that we live in this peculiar region of the universe where velocities are small and gravitational fields are weak. If we could travel faster – which is just an issue of technology, money – or if we could go to places where gravity is stronger, such as near a bigger planet or a bigger star or even a black hole, we would have the experience of seeing one another grow old at different rates. You could go for a trip and come back in a time that would be ten years for me, but just a few months for you. So, I would have grown much older than you, and you’d have become much younger than me even if you weren’t before.

This is a fact of life, that physics has discovered, measured. But it strikes us profoundly. There isn’t a single time passing for all of us. Each of us has our own time, which depends on where we are and how we move. We should not think of time as a common flow, but rather as a multiplicity of flows. Each object has its own time, and we have equations – Einstein’s theory – which account for how the different times are related: what determines the fact that time goes faster or slower. The single universal time that we use in Newton theory, or we 38

use in our everyday life, with our clocks, is only an approximation, with respect to the complexity of the flowing of time. And that’s only the first step!

JM: It’s magnificent that you can make these ideas so accessible and so clear.

All the way through your book you’ve threaded marvellous observations…

The idea that the events of the world do not form an orderly queue, like the English! They crowd around chaotically like Italians. That it’s a matter of events and processes, not things. Or that the world is made up of networks of kisses, not of stones. Or what you say about subjectivity in the book, the way it limits our understanding… We will make theories, some theories will be better approximations than others. But there is this joy that I get, too, that we can use equations to actually predict some of the processes that you describe in the book. We’re not just blindly theorising, there are some things that might be more probable than others.

CR: What is fascinating in science in general, and in physics in particular, is that it teaches us how to think about the world differently. It has always done so.

Remember Copernicus’s discovery: the Earth is not the centre of the universe, we are rotating on a spinning stone. This discovery changed our view of reality.

Physics does that. But it’s not just an intellectual game of better understanding, it’s a basis upon which we build, that determines what we’re capable of doing.

Ultimately we believe in the results of the intellectual game precisely because it allows us to do things. Thanks to Copernicus, Newton, Faraday and Maxwell, Einstein… we have radios, computers, all sorts of tools that we wouldn’t have if we didn’t understand nature a little bit better.

You have also mentioned an idea I describe in my book: that the universe is not made by things, it’s made by processes and interactions. Think of a cloud, a cloud that we see forming in the air and then slowly dissipating. Is it an object?

It is better to think about it as a process: air goes through it, water condenses and evaporates continuously. But it is the same for a stone, just on different time scales. A stone is the quintessential object, it’s a solid object and it doesn’t seem to have anything of a process about it. But it is only because we look at it for a short time. If we lived much longer, and could view the evolution of things on Earth through centuries and millennia, a stone would just be a momentary getting together of some sand, which stays together a little bit, for a while, and then dissipates; it is something that happens for some time.

In the study of the elementary constitutions of the world, there was a moment 39

when we thought that elementary particles, or atoms, were like little stones moving around, solid indestructible; but that’s not true. The atoms are made by particles that are created and destroyed continuously; they form and dissipate like clouds. The particles that make up the world are not things, they’re happenings.

JM: One of the things that struck me about your book is that our whole concept of time is predicated on heat, on the fact that there is a movement from hot things to cold things that is fundamental to everything – the idea of entropy – and that without that we wouldn’t have a concept of time, which is again one of those things that is mind-blowing when it’s properly explained.

CR: This is a part of this story that we understand well. It started with Maxwell and Boltzmann, in the nineteenth century. It has been increasingly clarified since, and I think it’s become pretty clear today. Actually, there are still some aspects of the story that are unclear, and this is normal in science. But the part we understand is wonderful. Here it is. In our experience of the world, future and past are completely different. Past is fixed, future is open. The world does not appear to be symmetric with respect to the past/future distinction. However, most of physics doesn’t see this difference. If you look at the basic equations of physics, there is no difference between past and future. The only difference appears if there is heat involved. If you think a bit, you see that every time there is a phenomenon that is happening one way but wouldn’t happen backwards; every time a phenomenon is such that filmed and shown backwards in time you would say “That’s impossible”, in all these cases, there is always heat involved. If there is no heat, phenomena can go back and forth. Take a pendulum oscillating regularly: if you film it and show the film in reverse, it is still an oscillating pendulum, perfectly reasonable. But if you show backward the film of a pendulum that slows down and stops, you get something unreasonable: well in this case there was heat, because what slows down the pendulum is friction and friction causes heat. So heat is at the core of the difference between past and future. That’s always true.

JM: I wonder, just going back a bit, when did you know you wanted to be a physicist? What led you into physics as a discipline?

CR: Very late. Many of my colleagues were passionate scientists since they were kids. That’s not my case. I loved science, but I was in love with many more things. I was very curious. I was a troubled adolescent, full of confusion, doubts, 40

rebellion, haunted by all sorts of questionings. I was reading a lot. I began to study physics a bit by chance, out of curiosity, but not particularly attracted by this discipline. When I met modern physics, relativity, quantum mechanics, it was a sudden falling in love. I distinctively remember that moment. I was maybe twenty-five, something like that, when I told myself: “This is marvellous.

Also, I seem to be good at this, I understand this better than my friends.” It took time for me to realise that, because a good thing of Italian school is that we don’t rank students, so the only way to measure yourself is just to talk with your friends. I realised that I was explaining things to my friends far more often than they were explaining things to me. I got fascinated by the ideas in modern physics. I wanted to know more and more and more, and so I went into it naturally. Just curiosity. Also, I didn’t want to have a boring working life and science sounded like adventure to me. I didn’t want to ‘stay in the system’ or ‘follow the rules’. I wanted to go out, my way, discover something new; in science there was a lot of novelty waiting to be discovered. That was what attracted me in science.

JM: It’s interesting because your range of references go from the Grateful Dead to Rilke; each chapter of the book is opened by an epigraph from Horace, the great Roman poet, and the book is as much infused by an interest in philosophy as it is with theoretical physics. That seems to come very naturally to you, an interest in philosophy. Going back – one of your great heroes I think is Anaximander, the pre-Socratic philosopher?

CR: Anaximander is one of my heroes. He’s the guy who realised, centuries ago, that the earth is just a stone floating in the middle of the sky and the sky is not just above our head but is all around us, including under our feet.

Philosophy and history are part of the way I got formed. I’m not interested in overspecialisation. I think that what is interesting in science, in art, in philosophy, is that they give us a rich way of thinking about the world. They all contribute to our overall civilisation. Culture is a set of instruments and tools for dealing with reality, and all disciplines concur in this and make sense only to the extent they are in relation to one another. I think that the best philosophers know science and the best science in history was done by scientists who knew philosophy well. The greatest scientist of the last century was Einstein without any doubt, and Einstein was schooled in philosophy. He refers repeatedly to the influence of Hume or Kant or even Schopenhauer, on him. This is not to say that we don’t need specialisation – we need people who like to take

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one single equation and spend their life on that single equation. That’s fine, I have nothing against those people. But these people alone are not enough for making science go ahead. You need also mixing up. The kind of science I do, which is quantum gravity, trying to understand the quantum properties of space and time, requires a capacity for conceptually rethinking the world. That’s why I’m interested in the nature of time, or the nature of quantum mechanics.

Science is not just adding knowledge, it’s constantly rethinking and going back to the basics and saying: okay we have learned this, now how can we rethink everything globally so that it makes sense with the rest?

JM: And that comes across incredibly clearly from your work. At what point did you feel that explaining things clearly is something that really matters to you. (It certainly feels like that in your book.) You could argue that it doesn’t matter that most people will struggle with loop quantum gravity theory, but I’m intrigued by what it is that drives you to want to write books that get hundreds of thousands, millions of people reading them.

CR: Thank you: the idea of writing books for the large public came very late for me. I didn’t think of writing outside my very specialist work. I have written some treatises which are read by maybe twenty friends and no more! Ok, maybe a bit more than that but certainly not by a large public. Writing for the large public happened almost by itself. My first popularisation book was aboout Anaximander, this Greek philosopher you mentioned before. I was so much in love with him when I discovered his ideas, and he’s not very much known – so I just started writing…

JM: There is just one line of his work in existence, and most of what we know comes from other people— CR: Right! Anaximander played an enormous role in the early development of Greek thinking. I found myself in a peculiar position because of my interest in history and the history of knowledge and at the same time, of my being a scientist. I found that I could see things that the historians not trained in science had more difficulty realising. I put together my notes and friends said, “you should publish this”. My first book, on Anaximander, came out in this accidental way. Later the interest in writing came from the fact that I found that quantum gravity was so beautiful that I wanted to share. Not because I thought people ought to know these things, but because they’re beautiful, and I think that people are deprived of beauty if they cannot appreciate what is going on in 42

modern science. I felt I had this privilege, of knowing these wonderful things. I was talking about this with friends, and I thought maybe I should write. I never expected the reaction of the public that my books have had. It’s marvellous now to have a relationship with the public. I get hundreds of mails – I cannot answer to all of them, I try. I think that there are discoveries in science that not only are not yet appreciated by the general public, but they’re also not yet digested by high-level culture either. Quantum mechanics, for instance, is something that hasn’t yet been absorbed, in spite of it being fashionable. We have all understood now that the Earth spins around the sun, we all know there are electric fields and magnetic fields, and that everything is made by atoms, so there are plenty of things which we have realised, but humankind hasn’t digested quantum mechanics yet.

JM: It’s interesting that in public life, as you say, a general understanding of science always seems to lag behind. We’re in the middle of a moment in the history of our species, with a global pandemic, when the importance of science in the last few months has been pushed right to the top of the agenda. Viruses themselves are very difficult for us to understand, these microbial entities that aren’t quite alive, that are there merely to replicate themselves… But I just wonder, from your perspective as a spokesperson for science and as a physicist, what you think we might or should best draw from this? Again you’ve spoken very beautifully about this – it reminds us that we are leaves in the autumn wind, and it reminds us perhaps that we need to be humble in the face of nature. It’s an important moment, isn’t it?

CR: I do not consider myself a spokesperson for science. Science is made by people that have different opinions. I myself think that there are three lessons we should draw from what is going on with the pandemic and science. The first is that we are not so powerful. We, humankind, are not so powerful, it’s a humbling experience. Our knowledge is limited. Science is not all powerful, humankind is not all powerful. That’s the first lesson. The second lesson I think is that science remains our strongest tool. Pandemics in the past led to far more devastation. Europe in the fourteenth century and through the seventeenth century was devastated by much worse pandemics than this one.

The fact that we share information, we have a chance to have a vaccine, we have epidemiology that allows us to control the number of people who get infected… all this is thanks to science. The public and the governments have learned that we should rely on science. When they have not relied on the

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science they have made disasters. The third lesson is that the decisions to be taken are not scientific, they are political, moral, global, societal, and science cannot help here. Science can help in telling politicians if you take this decision, if you take this other decision, this is going to happen, as far as we know. But then, whether to have more people dying or less economic development and more people poor, this is not a scientific decision. I think society should not hide behind science in these cases. Different countries have taken different decisions because they have different values, they went through a different discussion process; this is good, this is politics. I think we should not confuse science with politics and the decisions are political, not scientific. Governments should listen to science, not use it; they should never disregard it, but they should not hide behind it either, to justify hard decisions.

JM: Do you have a concern that in the populist furore in a lot of countries, including the UK and maybe Italy as well, that the importance of experts has been denigrated in recent years? Do you have concerns about the value in terms of investment and in terms of the science that’s able to happen? That the famous line ‘you’re entitled to your own opinions, but you’re not entitled to your own facts’ no longer holds… It’s a troubling time for the status of science.

I think you’re very right to make the distinction between science and politics, but do you think this is another historical moment that we will come through?

And maybe the virus will help us because it is reminding people that actual important, real science can help us?

CR: I hope so. We definitely have a global problem with people distrusting competence. When I want to know something about the virus or the vaccine, I don’t rely on my own understanding, I rely on people that know those things.

Not doing this – I don’t like to use this language – it’s just stupid. People are hurting themselves by not listening to serious expertise. Unfortunately, as you say, this is happening a lot in the world. It is in the news today that a poll in the United States says that if a vaccine developed rapidly, half of the population of the States would prefer not to take it because they think vaccines are not good. That’s suicidal. I hope it will change. I spent much time telling people: “Think with your own mind, don’t rely on anybody else,” and I find myself telling people, “Well, well, wait. Don’t rely too much on your own mind, trust the others!” Knowledge without rebellion is sterile, but rebellion without knowledge is silly and dangerous. Clearly we have done something wrong in the past to lose the confidence of the people. My opinion is that this is caused

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by the fact that many people have been left behind by the economy, so they lost confidence. The problem is political, not cultural. The root, in my opinion, is the increase of wealth inequality.

JM: Finally, I’d love to know, Carlo, a little more about the wonderful title of your next book that’s coming out in the UK, There Are Places in This World Where Rules Are Less Important than Kindness. Could you just give us a bit of background, because kindness does seem to be something that this world at the minute is a little short on, and it’s an important thing.

CR: It’s a different book than the other books of mine. It’s a collection of articles. I write in the press once in a while, mostly in the Italian press, but sometimes also in the British press. My publisher decided to put together this collection of articles. It talks a bit about science but also about current events, about politics, about philosophers, about travels— JM: About Nabokov— CR: Whom I love. He is one of my preferred writers. He was a scientist, an entomologist. I talk often about the surprising intersections of literature and science and philosophy. The title comes from one of the stories. I will not tell you exactly what happens but at the end of the day this is what I discovered in a mosque during a trip in Africa: the marvel of the people who are capable of putting kindness before rules.

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4

Elif Shafak and Philippe Sands THE ENGLISH PEN PLATFORM GIVING VOICE A conversation about writing into an authoritarian world, finding ways of telling truths and making the case for human rights.

This conversation took place at Hay Festival Digital on Sunday 24 May 2020 in partnership with English PEN. DANIEL GORMAN: I’m honoured to be introducing today’s event, the English PEN Platform ‘Giving Voice’ with two wonderful writers and thinkers – Philippe Sands and Elif Shafak. We’re thrilled at English PEN to be working in partnership with Hay on this event. English PEN is one of the world’s oldest human rights organisations, championing the freedom to write and the freedom to read around the world. With the support of our members, a community of writers, readers and activists, we protect freedom of expression whenever it is under attack. We campaign for writers facing persecution around the world and offer respite residencies for writers. We celebrate contemporary international writing through our online magazine, PEN Transmissions, and we award literary grants for translating new works into English. We bring together outstanding writers, thinkers, readers and activists for unforgettable conversations and we celebrate courageous writing with three annual literary prizes: the PEN Pinter prize, the PEN Ackerley prize and the PEN HessellTiltman prize. In this current context, there is a continued and urgent need for the protection of free expression globally, as well as for collaboration and 47

friendship across borders and, as we move towards the centenary of English PEN in 2021, we ask that you consider joining us.

PHILIPPE SANDS: Thank you, Daniel, and hello, Elif. One of the merits of these types of events is you always learn something new and it doesn’t surprise me at all to know you have a PhD in political science, which is a new piece of information that I, as an academic, am absolutely thrilled to hear. But you are mostly known as a writer of fiction. Your most recent novel has done extraordinarily well – 10 Minutes 38 Seconds – I love that book, as you know we’ve talked about it quite a lot and quite often. You, like me, are in London, in lockdown. How has this process of being in lockdown – coronavirus limitations on your ability to go out and about – how has it made you think about what you are as a writer, what your function is?

ELIF SHAFAK: Thank you so much. First of all it’s wonderful to share this digital space together. I think it’s a bit mixed, isn’t it? Every day is different, almost, because sometimes people think for writers it’s not much of a difference, we are already kind of self-isolating creatures in general. What we do is very solitary. It’s lonely work being a novelist in particular because for weeks, months, sometimes years you live in that imaginary world surrounded by fictional characters. But I don’t think that means it’s an easy process for us to look down on what’s happening in the world. If you are engaged, if you are following, it does affect all of us, psychologically and intellectually. So there are days when I find myself questioning what I’m doing because when people are dying in tens of thousands does it really matter whether I find the perfect synonym for that word? Does it really matter whether I move that comma from that line to the next line? So there are many times when it’s almost an existential questioning, you ask yourself what kind of stories shall we write, and this is something I want to share with you because it matters to me. Sometimes when I read people like Doris Lessing – she of course very beautifully says that literature is analysis after the event – you have to wait for the event to come to an end so that we can digest, process and then write about it in retrospect. I have a lot of respect for that, but I also think more and more that the age we’re living in requires analysis during the event. So how do you respond to events while they’re happening, without waiting for them to come to an end? And I think that’s going to be one of our biggest challenges. So I wonder, do you experience that dilemma? When is this the right time to tell the story? Do we have to wait or can we tell it whilst it’s happening?

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PS: Perhaps you would permit me a little follow-up, because that’s so interesting – the obvious question that I’d like to ask you is: how does that affect what, firstly, you are able to write at this time? I know you’re at home with your children and family and there are parental responsibilities above and beyond the norm, but are you able to write? And if you are able to write, how is the present affecting what you are writing? I know you’re writing a bit of non-fiction because I see some of that, but are you also able to write fiction?

ES: At the moment I’m writing both non-fiction and fiction, actually, because I have a new book coming out about how to remain sane in the age of division.

In a way I had to stop and restart that book because the beginning that I had, the structure that I had, it just didn’t make sense anymore. So I stopped. I went back to the beginning and, almost from scratch, I started rewriting the whole thing. Fiction is a little bit different. I think when I am writing fiction I tend to forget the so-called real world as much as I can. I mean this is a practice that I’ve learned over the years because, coming from a country like Turkey, if I were to not prioritise fiction I wouldn’t be able to write while I’m in the midst of a novel. So I try to stay in that world as long as I can and as deep as I can without worrying about what people might say about the subjects I’m writing on. Only when the book is over and I hand it to my editor do I start to have panic attacks but by then it’s too late because the book is born and it’s independent and free the way it should be. So I think the reason I mentioned this is because for everyone it’s different, but for me personally, I guess, I feel free when I’m in the midst of a novel and sometimes I believe the novel, in particular, at least for me, is one of our last remaining democratic spaces. It’s such an open space, it means freedom for me where I can ask difficult questions about difficult issues and always try to leave the answers to the readers.

PS: That space becomes more acute now. It’s interesting, the non-fiction book you described, I don’t mean this in a bad way – we know each other well enough that we can speak openly – but you’re writing a book about being sane in this world. I think I know what you’re referring to in terms of what’s going on in this country, in Europe, in Turkey, in other countries, in the United States and Brazil – we’ll come on to that later on – but this process of two to three months in lockdown, do you… you said you started again, are you feeling more or less sane than three months ago? In other words, are the stresses and strains, which I think we all feel in different ways about this moment, affecting you and how are they affecting what you’re writing?

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ES: There’s no doubt this is an incredibly difficult time and I think there are lots of negative emotions that are affecting us individually, but also collectively, and I find it healthier to be able to talk about these negative emotions, whether it’s fear, because when there’s so much uncertainty of course there will be fear. But anxiety, it’s almost an existential angst. Also anger, and we have every right to be angry about so many things – as you said, from Turkey to Hungary to Brazil to Venezuela, country after country we have seen very similar patterns of history going backwards and so much is happening so fast. So anger or frustration or disappointment is also a big part of our lives. I think we need to recognise all these negative emotions. But also, being an anxious person myself, I do know anxiety or anger cannot be a motivating force in the long run because they are repetitive and they keep us in our narrow chambers. So the question I’m asking myself is how do we first of all acknowledge these negative emotions – and they’re OK, it’s OK to have these emotions, it’s OK to be worried, and actually if you’re not worried I think you’re not following what’s happening in the world – but maybe the next step is: how do we take these negative emotions and try to turn them into something more positive and constructive and hopefully much more progressive? That, I believe, is going to be one of our biggest challenges.

PS: I’ve been finding, interestingly – I’ve been reading a lot in this period, I read a lot anyway but I’ve got 4, 5, 6 books on the go – but I’m finding in particular fiction more helpful. I think that fiction somehow for me, and I think for each person it’s different, has opened up my imagination and in a sense a space of escape. I’ve been immersed in more fiction than I think I would normally read.

Looking for those books that I can’t end – although there are also authors of non-fiction that I’m reading.

ES: I feel sad when I hear people say I read important books or I read serious books, I read philosophy, history, politics, I don’t have time for fiction, I want to know what’s happening in the world, I want to follow it more closely. I hear these kinds of comments, sometimes from male readers, you know, and it really makes me sad because I think in fiction there is everything. Whatever is in life is present in fiction. There is politics there, there’s history, philosophy, psychology and there’s so much more. But I personally find it easier and healthier to read both fiction and non-fiction, from east and west. To try to go beyond the type of books that we’re using to reading, and it always mesmerises me the way you tell stories, there’s so much research, excavation in your work and you

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are an amazing storyteller. The other day I was again rereading The Ratline and admiring what you’re doing. I’m always curious, is it harder to tell the story when you know these are real people? Real incidents? Because when I rely on my imagination I feel clear, you know?

PS: That’s a question that I’ve encountered at least once. I have written, but it sits in a drawer, about eight years ago what I call vaguely a novel and tried my hand at writing fiction and I found it incredibly difficult to do. I think the reason for that is that I don’t enter this world of writing as someone who was originally a writer. I suppose I have the label of lawyer, and a courtroom lawyer – someone who has to prove facts – and so I constantly have the sense when I’m writing, and like you I love stories and I love tiny points of detail, in part because I think it’s often out of the tiniest details that the greatest truths are capable of emerging. That’s an experience that comes from being in the courtroom, actually, you’re in court for a couple of weeks, the case is trundling along, you’ve got thousands of pages and all these witnesses and the judges ask questions and the witnesses say what they think and in literally every case there will be a single moment where some tiny detail gets focused on and you can watch the entire case sort of turning on its axis as the realisation of what that tiny point of detail means emerges. But in regard to your question, writing non-fiction is in a sense I think much easier because I look over my shoulder, I worry that someone may read something that I have said about some person and I know that I have to be able to defend it. I know I have to be able to support that observation. In the current book it’s the story of a couple, curiously I think you could call it a sort of weirdo love story between Charlotte Wächter and Otto Wächter but I based it on 10,000 pages of their diaries and letters which cover a lot, but not of course absolutely everything. And going through that material, which took four years by some wonderful researchers at University College London and beyond, it meant that we were always able to attach, if you like, evidence to the expression of an emotion by Charlotte, she’s angry, she’s lustful, she’s jealous, she’s irritated, she’s mean, she’s loving… I can always find something in the text to say I can put it on that hook. It seems more difficult in a mechanical sense, but actually it’s easier, and I found the one time that I tried to write fiction – which I think was a complete failure for me anyway – it was much more difficult, because I lost the security of evidence.

And evidence in a sense provides you with a degree of comfort.

ES: That’s fascinating because for me it’s the other way around. Fiction is just

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pure freedom but, that said, I think always whatever subject I focus on I do a lot of research on that subject. I try to read whatever I can find on the issue.

In a nutshell, I think writers need to be two things all their lives; we have to be good readers, curious readers, that childish curiosity, I think we need to keep that alive, but also listeners. I do try to listen to people a lot wherever I go. I try to listen to two things: what they are saying but also how they are saying what they’re saying, with what kind of choice of words. So maybe one thing that academia work taught me better, because I’m not a disciplined person in my daily life, is to take that homework very seriously, take that research process seriously and just read and read and read. Take notes, know what you’re talking about. Once you do that, and that can last for a long time, I think then I feel very free and then I can fly. After that, I just follow my instincts and I think in that regard there are two different ways of writing a novel. One is a bit like engineering, when the writer wants to be a bit more in charge of the text and wants to know how the story’s going to end, what the characters are going to do. I have a lot of respect for that path and I have read amazing novels that have been produced in that way, but it’s not my way. I think I like the second path in which you start with an instinct, you really don’t know what you’re doing. You’re a little bit drunk all the way through, and I like it when my characters surprise me. Sometimes you keep a character on the sidelines but then she takes over, she becomes much more important than you thought she would be. I like that. So to me instinct is very important. To feel comfortable you have to know your terrain, so knowledge is a big part of this as well.

PS: That resonates very much for me and I understand your writing, we’ve talked about this before. You know where you’re starting and you know roughly where you’re heading – but I have to say that applies equally in non-fiction.

With East West Street and The Ratline I knew what my starting point was, but I didn’t know where I was going to end up. I’ve just been through the exercise of writing a proposal for the next book which effectively will be the third in what is a sort of trilogy, and in writing the proposal I’ve left it so ambiguous that it’s wishy washy, because in a sense the act of writing non-fiction, it’s very similar to running a case in court. You know roughly where you want to end up, but you don’t quite know how you’re going to end up there and you begin the process of researching the facts because everything turns in a courtroom, as in a non-fiction book, on the facts and on that basis you come to the challenging question of how to present the facts. But when I start writing I enter a space in which there will be three or four more doors and I find myself going into 52

each of those doors and each of the spaces behind each of those doors, always three or four more doors until I feel overwhelmed and then I step back. And I’ve got a sense of the whole and once I’ve got the sense of the whole then I look at the points that I want to go. But rather like you, I don’t know where I’m going to end up. I’m also like you, very affected by what I write in the times that I live in and if we segue in a sense to what you’ve already alluded to, I’m finding this a time of great uncertainty. In my world, which is essentially a world of international law, rights for individuals and groups, everything is very focused on the 1945 moment when a new world order was created by the victors of the Second World War and they created a thing called the United Nations and they identified a thing called human rights and self-determination and they created principles like freedom of expression and they created international bodies. What is really upending my sense of stability right now is that the two countries that did more than any other to create that order – namely the United States and the United Kingdom – are now turning their back on that order. They are attacking notions of multilateralism; in the United Kingdom it’s Brexit and turning away from an international, outward looking face. In the United States it’s Making America Great Again. We see it in the attacks right now on the World Health Organisation that the United States basically created with the help of others. And so I’m finding myself already destabilised by the foundations of the world that I grew up in being shaken and now on top of this to find the instability of all the certitudes that I had being cast out of the various windows by the arrival of coronavirus and the inability to connect, the inability to travel, the inability to do X, Y and Z. It feels like a very discombobulating moment and I don’t know what the consequences of that will be for our activities as writers, but in terms of the state of the world I have to say that I find it deeply anxious-making right now – and I tend to be an optimist.

ES: Yes, I hear what you’re saying. And as you know, Philippe, it’s been more than ten years since I moved to the UK, to London from Istanbul, and throughout this time I’ve seen so many changes taking place in this country that have surprised me and I think the primary thing that has changed is language and it always starts with language. First, we start to use words differently and the political language itself is full of martial metaphors, militaristic metaphors. Words like surrender; if you think differently then you must be an enemy, or people that don’t agree with me are enemies. That kind of language of us versus them is something that I have heard so many times in Turkey and every time I hear it, 53

to put it more bluntly, when I see tabloids on the front page with the pictures of judges saying underneath ‘traitors’ or ‘enemies of the people’, that really, really makes me stop and pause and start to get very worried because we’ve seen this happening elsewhere and I do not believe that some countries are solid and safe and beyond concerns of human rights or freedom of speech or women’s rights. That was the perception for a very long time. I have heard, when I used to live in Istanbul, with good intentions, western scholars telling me that it was really understandable for me to be a feminist because after all I lived in a patriarchal country such as Turkey, but I never understood why those scholars themselves were not feminists, or why they were not more supporters of human rights. But their perception was that they lived in a more solid world, the Western world, they were beyond these concerns and that human rights and freedom of speech, these were needed in the liquid worlds, in turbulent parts of the world. And I think that dualistic perception of the world has changed dramatically, particularly after 2016, with Brexit, with Trump and, of course, all that has followed since then. And in that sense maybe it’s a good thing that we all know better now that we’re living in a liquid world and we need human rights, we need to fight for human rights, we need to be more engaged and involved everywhere in the world – not just in countries like Turkey. But, if I may add this, I think one of the lessons that I have learned from living in Turkey is we should never forget: Turkey has elections, Turkey has relatively regular elections – it is not a democracy. Russia has elections – it is not a democracy. So I’m not underestimating in any way the importance of the ballot box, what I am saying is that in itself that is not enough if you don’t have rule of law, checks and balances, an open, egalitarian political language, free media, investigative journalism, independent academia, women’s rights, minority rights together with all those components and the ballot box, a democracy can’t survive. Otherwise the best you can have is majoritarianism and majoritarianism leads to authoritarianism – it’s not a long road.

PS: What you say resonates again, but just focusing on one aspect of it, the importance of language and what you’ve noticed in the changing use of language, I had an interesting experience last autumn. I was commissioned by a British newspaper to write a piece about the use of language by the British prime minster and the American president and I had based it on a very wonderful book written by a German writer called Victor Klemperer, published in 1947, who had during the Nazi period traced the way in which language changed. Now I’m not for a moment saying that what is happening in the US 54

and the UK is analogous to what happened back in National Socialist Germany, but I am interested in the way in which the use of language is transformed. I went through the speeches, the literature use of Mr Trump and Mr Johnson and basically concluded, you can formulate it in different ways, that the use of racist tropes and exclusionary tropes can be found in the language of both men and you can conclude that they are either… to use the language of racism – that they are racist. I wrote the piece and it was a long piece, it was 2,500 words and the English newspaper then declined to publish it, but it was published in ten newspapers around the world in lots of different languages. That was the moment when I realised there are limitations also here, not on the ability to publish something like that – I could put it out somewhere, I could put it out on Twitter, I could publish it myself or whatever – but the ability to enter into the discourse of the mainstream press if you adopt a particular perspective and that indicated to me very clearly something here also that is happening. There is a degree of deference to political authorities and to political positions which opens the door I think to lines being crossed of the kind that you described.

I was shocked when I saw that newspaper headline in several countries – ‘enemies of the people’. I’ve never seen anything like that, there’s a convention in Britain that you do not attack the judges, you let the judges do their work and you allow them to proceed and be judges free from that kind of political critique, but that’s now part of the country that we live in. That has created a reinforced sense of the vital need to ensure that there is a balance. On the one hand, of course, those newspapers have the freedom of expression to say those things about judges, but how they exercise that freedom can be very problematic because it creates, if you like, a context in which one thing leads to another. So I think we’re in a very, very difficult moment, and as we get now to the easing of lockdown I think one of the big questions of where we go next on this order that we’ve created in the world on that 1945 moment is whether we are pulled towards greater international cooperation following coronavirus or the opposite – the barriers go up between countries, a form of incipient nationalism is reinforced in countries around the world, as each place turns on someone else. We’re feeling that in the UK and US where the finger of blame is being pointed at China. That may or may not be accurate, but I’m not sure how helpful that is at this particular moment in time when we’re in this mess together as a global community. We have to get ourselves out of it.

ES: Absolutely, we are in this mess together, but I hear what you’re saying and it does resonate with me. It almost feels like we’re at a crossroads and which 55

path we’re going to choose I believe is going to have long-term consequences.

This is going to affect our children’s lives, their children’s lives, so it’s very clear that on the one hand we might see another rise, another wave of nationalism, more populism, because even though across Europe, at least, even though it seems a little bit quieter right now, with rising unemployment, huge structural problems, we’re going to see a fertile basis also for the rise of populist nationalism which does worry me immensely, and basically this instinct that we need to isolate ourselves to be safer, that if we’re surrounded with sameness we will be safer. That is an illusion, we are far too connected, whether we like it or not, all of us are connected, so much so that, as the pandemic has shown us, what is happening in one region in China affects the lives of people living in Canada. It is much wiser to behave with an approach that has an international spirit. Talking about repeating the globalist structure which had its massive problems and we need to be able to talk about the inequalitiy that has been deepened throughout the years, and inequality, I think, has to be at the centre of all our debates, not a footnote. So I’m not talking about perpetuating the existing models, but creating a new model. So in that regard not going back to how things were before because that was not normal either – that’s why I don’t like that question, ‘when will things become normal again?’ Were they ever really normal? We have to think about that. But I would like this to be a crossroads for a new beginning with an internationalist spirit because it is very clear that whether it’s the dark side of digital technologies or terrorism, whether it’s another pandemic or an economic crisis, or climate of course – a major issue in front of us – I think these are global challenges. You cannot deal with these global challenges with the attitude of nationalism and that is where we are right now. In country after country, unfortunately, we see this nationalist spirit rising. So Erdogan’s speech, I hear echoes of that everywhere.

PS: Absolutely, and of course I’m conscious of your Turkish nationality apart from your British position, and Turkey of course is world-beating in many things but one of the things it’s world-beating at is locking up writers, including my and your dear friend Ahmet Altan who’s now in his fifth year in prison simply for expressing views, simply for appearing on a television programme, saying something innocuous which is then interpreted by the President of Turkey in a particular way. Writers will very often be the canaries in the coal mine. It always begins with the writer – it could be the blogger, it could be the poet, it could be the songwriter, it could be the novelist, it could be the non-fiction writer, it could be the journalist, but the pattern that we see everywhere is that the 56

silencing of the independent spirit, the person who writes, is very often where it begins. What can we in this country learn from the Turkish experience?

ES: I’m so glad you mentioned our friend Ahmet Altan, a great writer, journalist and human rights activist. He is in prison, he has been held in prison unlawfully, undemocratically, and what he’s accused of is giving subliminal messages to the people through TV screens even though nobody knows what that means. It’s a surreal, ridiculous accusation, and in a very cruel way he has been released and immediately, hours later, arrested again. This is a pattern that the Turkish government unfortunately has been practising, releasing people and then arresting them again. As you say Turkey has become the world’s leading jailor during this time. It used to be China or Russia in the past and now Turkey is holding that sad record. I think one thing we can learn from countries like Turkey is very fundamental – it can happen anywhere. History does not necessarily go forward and of course this is a question that has troubled many, particularly Jewish German intellectuals who have experienced the catastrophes and stories you are so beautifully writing – what does progress mean? Can we really rely that tomorrow is going to be more developed and better than yesterday? Because if you have that kind of optimism you really don’t need to do that much about it. Tomorrow, things will sort themselves out, right? We had that kind of optimism in the early 2000s. Thanks to digital technologies we were going to arrive there, even those countries that were lagging behind. But what Turkey has shown us is that actually sometimes history goes backwards. Countries can draw circles within circles, generations can make mistakes that their great grandparents made and, if I may add this – if it is true that countries can tumble into nationalism, religious fundamentalism or populist nationalism and eventually authoritarianism, I honestly think we women need to be more worried. I honestly think we women need to be more alert because the first things that will be curbed will be women’s rights and minority rights. So that is a big lesson that I think we can learn from Turkey.

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Esther Duflo and Evan Davis GOOD ECONOMICS FOR HARD TIMES BETTER ANSWERS TO OUR BIGGEST PROBLEMS The 2019 Nobel Prize-winning economist shows how economics, when done right, can help us solve the thorniest social and political problems of our day.

This conversation took place at Hay Festival Digital on Friday 22 May 2020.

EVAN DAVIS: Esther Duflo is an economist at MIT in the US, joint winner of the 2019 Nobel Economics Prize with her husband Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer. They work on poverty and as pioneers of experimental economics – trying things out in random controlled trials. For me, someone who has brought a human side to economics and given that a respectability, because sometimes when we talk about poverty it’s the economics that are impoverished, and Esther has been one of those who has enriched the subject. Now she and her husband authored a book last year called Good Economics for Hard Times – we need good economics because we really are in hard times. Her book, I should say, covers a huge range of topics so forgive me if we bounce around a little bit here. There’s lots to reflect on in there, highly relevant to the times we live in. I think the slogan from the book could potentially be drawn from a sentence in chapter seven – ‘there are no higher laws of economics keeping us from building a more humane world’. Esther, to start us off I wonder if you would accept that that is a rather good underlying theme to everything you put together in the book? Then I want to ask you whether you’re basically a fan of Denmark? Because what I took out of the 59

book was you basically want the world to be more like Denmark, am I right in thinking that?

ESTHER DUFLO: I’m so happy that you liked the book, and in terms of their economic policy, I actually haven’t had a chance to set foot in Denmark. I’m sure it’s very beautiful and a great place to live! In fact, in this Covid crisis,the case of Denmark has been highlighted again as one example to follow and I think it follows directly from what the social system in Denmark has managed to achieve, which is enough respectability and trust in the government to be effective in solving a number of problems that affect an economy and a society, some big, some small, some urgent, some more chronic.

DAVIS: Why in other countries do they not vote for that? Why do poor people not vote for higher taxes on the rich in the United States, for example? We know they don’t like being poor. What is going on that the world doesn’t become more like Denmark?

DUFLO: This is the million-dollar question, isn’t it? But one of the reasons why it doesn’t happen is that the US has managed to keep a culture of success and the American dream and, in fact, has managed to keep the American dream alive as an illusion even as it has disappeared as a reality. So if you look, for example, at social mobility of children compared to their parents today, today it’s actually significantly lower in the US compared to what it was, but if you ask people the question, “what’s the chance that a child born in the lowest quintile of the distribution of income manages to go to the top?”, the Americans give you the highest number. There is optimism that this is a mobile society, this is a dynamic society, and, very much like de Tocqueville describing the America he saw when he visited [in the early nineteenth century], we still have this impression that Americans are moving around geographically and socially.

Actually, it turns out not to be the case; America is much more stuck in place than everybody thinks, and Americans foremost.

DAVIS: It’s fascinating, it comes out in the book. Maybe we should – we’re going to get to Covid by the way, we will ask Esther what we need to do to get over the economic challenges of Covid – but I want to go to the book before that, and Esther, maybe we should go back to the 1980s because when I say you’re a fan of Denmark there’s no doubt you see that period of the 1980s and the Thatcher–Reagan political shift as a very important shift. There’s no doubt that inequality rose very substantially in the UK and US and that, if to a lesser 60

extent, it did rise in other countries too. What I’m interested in is, there’s a really important question in economics: what happened? Was this a political switch that made the rich richer and maybe made inequality rise? Or was it something else that happened? The decline of manufacturing and the inevitable outsourcing of manufacturing to poorer countries? The rise of information technology? What was going on? What has changed in the decades since 1980?

DUFLO: I think this goes back to the sentence that you highlighted as the motor of the book which says there are no higher laws of economics that say things are the way they are because they have to be like that, the laws of the market are just there and there’s nothing we can do… So I think any economic outcome is political at one level or another. There might be some constraint in the technology of production that we are operating under but there are always social choices that are being made. In a sense, it’s really obvious just by comparing the trajectory of income and wealth inequality in the US and UK on the one hand and in Europe on the other hand, where the technological circumstances, the decline of manufacturing, all of that is pretty similar, but the result in terms of distribution of resources is widely different. I think what happened in this period is that – and I would put the blame on many of my very respectable older economic colleagues who were pretty convinced that the perceived American decline in particular vis-à-vis Europe was that they were too cosy to the unions and too nice to the poor and too much distribution and all of this needed to go away and we needed to have much more unfettered capitalism. What this has meant in practice is that slowly but surely, and maybe not even so slowly, the norms that had put some amount of decency on the way that capitalism was operating were eroded. So, in particular, in the 1970s it was not acceptable for the CEO of a company to make oodles times more than the janitor. In the 2010s it’s perfectly acceptable, in fact the janitor is not even employed in the company, they are subcontracted to a firm that has no benefit from being this large operation whatsoever. So that’s just one example, and the idea became ingrained that it is OK to pay very large wage to CEOs because they produce so much value to shareholders and that is just… This happened in the US and didn’t happen to any such extent in continental Europe, with very little difference in actual growth rate or productivity of those economies, suggesting it has nothing to do with a trade-off between inequality and efficiency and everything to do with how you decide to share the value that is produced in a society.

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DAVIS: That, I think, sets up one big area in the book and it gives you a taste at least of some of the thinking. Now I want to move on to a different topic, because a lot of the book is really about – it’s a great book of tales and research studies and randomised controlled trials on different policies – a lot of the book is about how we help people, particularly those who are poor.

Sometimes it’s about the poorer people in the rich world, sometimes the poorer people in the poor world. I’m going to give you a question and I think it will give you a chance to set out some of your own thinking, but I’m putting this question in a very crude way. There are about a billion people in the world who are living on the subsistence level, the kind of $200 a year level, let’s call it.

The British aid budget is about $20 billion a year. What would be wrong with the British – or would you say this is a good idea – of simply finding the billion poorest people and giving them all $50? A sort of amount that they would not normally be able to hold in reserve, which they could use to send a kid to school or to buy a wheelbarrow or any number of things that might make a real difference. Talk me through the arguments about making that a real policy for helping the world’s poor.

DUFLO: So first of all I think that as a policy it would make a lot of sense.

In fact, this is something that we advocate in the book as universal basic income which is that countries, very poor countries, should be able to ensure to everyone a very, very small income that people would be able to access whenever they need it, whenever something bad is happening to them. So we think there would be a lot of value to do that, first of all because there are such things as poverty traps, which is where income and wealth falls below a threshold, a series of unfortunate events ensue and it becomes very difficult to get out of it. So that would avoid that, that would also give people an assurance that this is not going to happen and therefore give them the confidence to take some risks, move about, try and trade, etc. So, as a policy, I think it’s a policy that would be good. But your question is whether the British should use their UK aid money to do just that and there I disagree with that idea because it’s very little money that the UK has to spend and once you’ve spent all the money there is nothing left and it’s not leveraged. The aid budgets are very, very small compared to what developing countries spend on their own citizens. First of all, they are almost negligible, for example India receives absolutely no aid money and has a lot of poor people. Even in the poorest country in Africa aid doesn’t represent such a significant part of the budget. So what’s important for UK aid is not to think how can we spend our money effectively, but it’s to say 62

how can we spend our money such that the countries we are working with can spend their money effectively. Because only in such a way do they get to leverage their money. So, for example, it would make perfect sense for UK aid to run a large experiment where they do exactly what you recommend with 10,000 people for a duration of 10 years, it would cost much less than their entire budget, but at the end of it and even as it progresses we would learn the impact of doing such a thing, and countries the extent to which this is pulled apart, how to do it, what are the technical things to pay attention to when you do such a thing, and they would put their own resources behind it and at the same time there will be a lot of money left in UK aid to try other things like how to convince people to immunise their children, how to work with schools such that kids are educated in the right way and so on and so forth, again not just to do it in a place but to do it in such a way that we are learning how to do it better. To be fair, if there is – although we love the Danes – in terms of foreign aid and how to handle a foreign aid budget, the UK is pretty exemplary for doing something quite close to what I described, doing both evidencedriven and evidence-generating.

DAVIS: I want to get at one or two things that I think come out of your book clearly, and one of them is that I think you, through your work, have grown to respect human beings and not to think that poor people, if you give them money, will spend it on alcohol, or that they don’t know what to do with it.

Your evidence is that people really do think about their welfare and think about it quite carefully, and when we see them making decisions that we hate, maybe like sending children to work – decisions that might make us say “How could you be so cruel to a child?” – often people are making difficult choices and they’re doing it in a more intelligent way than many of us give them credit them for.

DUFLO: Yeah, absolutely. This is very much the theme of our previous book, Poor Economics, and I would like to say that I had that respect for poor people even before I started working on the subject, but I think you’re absolutely right that through my work I keep rediscovering it. I keep rediscovering that people make decisions under complicated circumstances and most people are really trying to do the best they can. And understanding how they arrive at their decisions without trying to impose our own reasoning and morals and value judgement on what they are doing is one of the hardest and most productive things that we have to do – at least that I have to do in my daily work.

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DAVIS: You mentioned that you think giving cash is a good idea, and it does help the poorest people, and you called it a universal ultra-basic income (UBI) – a very popular idea, particularly popular now in the time of Covid, is a universal basic income in the richer countries, not an ultra-basic income but basic income for everybody, maybe $1,000 a month is the figure you talk about in the book. But I don’t get the feeling you’re really as keen on that. You clearly don’t completely hate it, but you’re also not quite persuaded of it, is that right?

DUFLO: Yes, I think you might put it even more starkly. In the book we really give it a lot of credit and I think it’s a good thought to pursue for a long time, but when we come out of this investigation, if I were to advise a government, I would not suggest doing a universal basic income in the rich countries. The reason is you would need to give quite a bit of money for people who have enough to live in dignity and if people don’t have enough to live in dignity that’s really not worth it, and so if you did a universal basic income it would come at the cost of many of the actual policies which are more targeted. The reason is that people in rich countries mostly want to work, they want to be integrated in society and this idea that a lot of partisans of UBI have that people would find the time to volunteer or learn chess or paint or… seems to me a little bit farfetched because when we look at the data the people who are volunteering are not the people who are currently not employed. They are the people already in full time jobs. This is something that your ability to get a fuller, richer life in our society is very much predicated on having a wage. So then the third reason is that we have much better statistics and information in the rich countries which allow us to target our systems to the people who need it the most, for example the people who have lost their job because of trade or are going to lose it soon because of trade, or are threatened by automation for example. Or in the current circumstances, of course, with Covid. But even before that things were declining. And since we are in a position to know who really needs help then if we don’t make it universal we have much more resources to devote to the people who need it the most. We can devote these resources in the form of income that is a much more reasonable income, in the form of training that is actually expensive and would actually work and help to find lodging and so on and so forth. So with a given budget we can do much more if we target.

DAVIS: Yeah, so if you make it universal it tends to be rather low, and you mentioned in that answer—

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DUFLO: It has to be low and barebones, which is fine in poor countries because just the fact that you are sure that you are not going to starve is so important. It’s life defining. But it’s not the same in the rich countries where it’s just insufficient. You take that for granted.

DAVIS: You said something really important that, again, really screams out from the book, Esther, and is I think one of the most important economic insights that economists forgot decade after decade, which is that human dignity really matters. People have a sense that they want to contribute. So much economics is predicated on the idea that, broadly, I want to be lazy and consume and I don’t want to work. You have to pay me to work to compensate me for the horror of working and out of that I can then do my own private thing of consuming and being lazy. It’s amazing that that model has so captured economics, because all the evidence is people obviously want to be paid for work, they don’t want to do it for nothing. But they want to be part of a system in which they can contribute and the entire economic model is just on its head! People take pride out of what they put into the pot, not what they take out of it and the consumption bit is hugely overrated in economics, isn’t it?

DUFLO: Absolutely, and, in fact, one of our tag lines for the book says ‘financial incentives are overrated’. There are multiple experiments showing that if you ensure people have a basic income that doesn’t stop them from working or stop them from seeking out work, so even when taxes are high, even when it’s temporary, they don’t work less. Or if taxes temporarily get lower they don’t work more. So everything points in this direction that taxes don’t lead rich people to work less, welfare doesn’t lead poor people to work more, so we have much more scope for distribution, as far as economic laws are concerned.

It’s funny, as you say, this is a model that’s so ingrained in economics that when I present this work to our colleagues, it’s the one thing they’re really pushing against the most, even though the evidence is so incontrovertible. We have known it for years but not really accepted it and it’s an extremely important insight because it really percolates into many areas. One is we have the ability to tax and spend more. The second is we cannot expect the economic forces of greed and desire to earn more to lead to an automatic adjustment, whether it’s trade or because some people lose their jobs and other jobs get created elsewhere. In the basic economic model people are going to move and hustle to go from the bad job or the lost job to the good job. But in the actual modern world, where dignity and your place in society matters, they might not

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because they might have zero interest in leaving their job as cabinetmaker for twenty years, eventually becoming a master cabinetmaker, to move to London and sell furniture. That’s just not the same thing!

DAVIS: You’ve got this very interesting proposal, it’s just one of the interesting ideas in the book, which is that companies that are closing down, there should be a different policy for the older workers who’ve been there for fifteen years than the newer workers who are going to be able to get new jobs. So when the company shuts or when the company needs to shrink you essentially incentivise the company to keep the older workers because they’re not going to retrain. It’s just one of the interesting ones in the book.

DUFLO: They are not going to retrain, they are not going to move, they are going to become angry, if they’re staying in place without income. This is what leads to the collapse of former industrial towns and the shuttering of the windows and such sights that eventually leads to anger and political uprising that makes solving our collective problems difficult.

DAVIS: There are lots of topics in the book: there’s a chapter on climate change, there’s a chapter on trade – I’ll just take the one on migration, which is actually the first substantive chapter in the book. You follow the economic consensus which is that migrants coming in, unskilled migrants coming in, typically do not lower the wages of the native, unskilled workers. So the fear that the migrants will steal our jobs or lower our wages is massively overdone and there’s huge economic evidence for that. But most of the economic evidence as I understand it, Esther, is there is strong evidence for there not being much effect.

Can you tell me if there’s any evidence, or strong evidence, that says unskilled workers benefit materially? They might benefit a little but is there a strong positive migrant effect on the native population? Obviously, the migrants can benefit very substantially but is there much evidence… Should I really, really support immigration if I’m an unskilled worker? Or could I be fairly indifferent about it?

DUFLO: I think the evidence for the unskilled worker – it’s a very interesting question actually, not very many people have been looking into that. The evidence for the unskilled workers who are in the cities that receive a lot of migrants shows that, typically, there is no effect, either positive or negative. So in the short term nothing happens. We have fewer direct studies of the evidence in the somewhat longer run of the impact on low-skilled workers, but there 66

is one example that suggests, at least in some cases, low-skilled workers in the US, native workers, should welcome the immigrants. In the 1960s, when they kicked out the immigrants who were farming in California, working on all the farms, like you have in the UK people coming from all over to harvest the strawberries and asparagus. So in the sixties people got very concerned that they were taking the jobs from the local workers and finally they removed the visa programme under which these people were coming in and the hope was that it would increase the wages of the locals. Nothing like that happened.

What happened instead is that the California farmers mechanised. So they switched to different crops that were more capable of mechanising which meant there were no jobs for anyone, neither the locals nor the domestic workers, which in the long run cannot be good for the local worker. Another way in which the migrant benefits everyone which does show in those wage studies is that they keep prices low for some services that are consumed by poor people. For example, food services and things like that, so it becomes cheaper to eat out, cheaper to have nannies and gardeners and things like that. People in turn are freed up to go and do their own work. For example, there is a study in Germany which shows that when more migrants come in from eastern Europe the existing people move up in the hierarchy within the company and they end up managing the low-skilled people. So those are examples where you see something positive. I don’t want to exaggerate the case, I’m not saying it’s massive, but there is at least no reason to be worried.

DAVIS: It’s very interesting that one about unskilled immigrants can actually up-skill domestic populations because they’ll do the lower jobs and then they’ll move up.

DUFLO: They don’t have the language advantage so then the local worker will already have some experience and have the advantage.

DAVIS: I see that. Now look, Esther, we need to talk about Covid because people will now have a flavour of your book and the way you tend to think about the world, and they will be interested in everything you’ve said, but there is only one topic we’re thinking about. In terms of economics, we’re going through, obviously, a period in the deep freeze. Some countries have opened the door and are letting some thaw occur, but where do we even start on thinking about the challenges that will face economies over the next year or two?

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DUFLO: So there are two questions. One is whether there will be a vaccine or a treatment or we understand the transmission very well so that, in principle, we can go back to a way of consuming and producing that is not so dissimilar from what we had before. So, assuming that is the case – which I have no idea, that’s not my expertise – but assuming that is the case, then the experience from history suggests that actually the bounce back can be reasonably rapid. If you look, for example, at what happened in Germany after the war, the cities that were entirely wiped off the map came back online very, very quickly. The same thing happened in Japan and the same thing happened in Vietnam after the Vietnam war. People often compare this crisis to the 1929 crisis, but the 1929 crisis was coming out of deep dysfunctioning of the world economy, the world economy collapsed under its own weight, whereas this has come a little bit from the left side and in that lies some hope in the sense that the forces of convergence are such that there will be willingness and interest to all come back and get together so I think that there is actually a good possibility that we recover quite rapidly. Let me add two caveats to that. The first is one that I’m not qualified to speak about – the health side. I think if we don’t manage the health side then something will have to change in the way we produce and consume and this will have a cost. Who will pay for the cost is an interesting debate. The second caveat, even if that is sorted out, the danger we could face now is that the current crisis which kind of is caused by us, induced artificially, acquires a life of its own where it snowballs, because the people who lose their jobs don’t have money to buy things and therefore they don’t buy things, and then the people who produce those things lose their jobs in turn and they also stop buying things, and then we get this snowballing of a small crisis into a huge depression. So that means that what we do now in order to maintain people’s standard of living, to maintain people’s confidence in their future income, is going to be essential in determining whether this is shockingly intense pain versus something that is much more proactive. So, in continental Europe, the actions that were taken, for example, by Angela Merkel and the French president Macron recently are going in the right direction, saying that they are willing to borrow their way out of this, which is a very sensible thing to do.

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Gloria Steinem and Laura Bates THE TRUTH WILL SET YOU FREE, BUT FIRST IT WILL PISS YOU OFF The writer shares her Thoughts on Life, Love and Rebellion with the founder of the Everyday Sexism Project.

This conversation took place at Hay Festival Digital on Friday 22 May 2020.

LAURA BATES: Welcome to this digital Hay Festival event. I’m Laura Bates, founder of the Everyday Sexism Project and I’m thrilled to be joining Gloria Steinem. Gloria truly needs no introduction: a writer, political activist and feminist organiser, she was a founder of New York and Ms magazines, and is the author of many books, most recently The Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will Piss You Off. She has co-produced Emmy award-winning television documentaries on child abuse and violence against women, she cofounded the National Women’s Political Caucus, the Women’s Media Centre and other vital organisations working for women’s equality and received too many prestigious awards to list, including the National Magazine Award, the Society of Writer’s Award from the United Nations, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama. It’s such a huge honour to share this virtual stage with her. I first met Gloria in New York in 2015 and since then have been lucky enough to interview and write about her on more than one occasion.

To read her books is to be in the company of a wise, warm, frank and deeply supportive friend. Her work is iconic and inspirational and her latest book is no different, bursting with her trademark wit, wisdom and generosity of spirit.

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Gloria, welcome, and thank you so much for being with us today.

GLORIA STEINEM: Well thank you, thank you for that very generous introduction, I’m only sorry that we can’t be together as we have in the past, but it’s wonderful to have a transatlantic connection here, when I’m sitting here not having been out of my front door in about three months!

LB: Let me start by asking you about your latest book – the title is glorious, The Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will Piss You Off. Can you start by telling us a little bit about that quote?

GS: Well ‘the truth will set you free’ is of course a time-honoured quote. I first remember it on banners held by young men who were protesting the Vietnam War, by which I think they meant being set free from the draft and free from violence and so on. It’s always been present in my life in one form or another but the ‘first it will piss you off ’ I think is a very important recognition of the fact that what we see as injustice that makes us angry first is both freeing and angering at the same time.

LB: Thinking about first experiences I suppose of recognising that anger, I know that your previous book On the Road was more overtly autobiographical but in some ways this book feels very personal and you write that ‘movements don’t only create change in the outside world, they transform people in them’.

Can you perhaps describe for us that first moment when you were sent to report on an abortion speak-out and tell us how the feminist movement has transformed your life since then?

GS: Yes, this was quite a while ago and we were just starting New York magazine; because I was one of the group of journalists who had started that, I had given myself a column! So to fill that column I was going to cover a hearing held by an early feminist group here in New York City because there had been a hearing in our own state legislature here in New York about somewhat reforming the laws against abortion, and fourteen men and one nun had been invited to testify! So this wonderful group of young women said, actually wait, let’s hear from women who’ve had this experience, and in a church basement downtown they invited women to tell what had happened to them in seeking a then illegal abortion. I was there as a journalist, which is significant because I didn’t yet have the courage to tell the story of my own abortion, I was still feeling that I was supposed to be a journalist and not insert my own

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experience, but it was the first time I had ever heard women standing up, in public, telling the truth about something that was illegal, only happened to women, and suddenly that was a great moment of revelation because I realised this was an experience that one in three American women at that point had needed an abortion at some point in their lives – why was it illegal? Why was it dangerous? Why was it hugely expensive and secret? And dangerous because it was illegal! That was a very big beginning of questioning. This is not right, it doesn’t make sense, why is it not the beginning of democracy that we each have control over our own physical selves?

LB: Does it sometimes feel like not very much has changed?

GS: Well, yes and no. I think a lot, a lot has changed, but I agree with you that this is the subject of backlash because it is the reason why women are subordinated in the first place, which is to control reproduction. The meaning of patriarchy, if we think about it, is father’s right and the ability of men to decide when and whether to lay claim to offspring. So this really is the most fundamental, basic question. We happen to have the one thing that men don’t have, which is wombs, and so controlling our wombs is the most basic – it’s the beginning of most hierarchies and therefore it is the source of most resistance.

For instance, now, perhaps you see in the press in various states in my country conservative right wing legislatures are trying to curtail or restrict abortion or restrict clinics where abortion is given safely and the question in this pandemic whether that is a necessary medical procedure – which of course it is – has also had to be fought for, so because it is so basic it continues to be a source of contention.

LB: And it’s not alone in being one of the many gendered fault lines being exposed by the pandemic, of course, with domestic violence soaring and other areas in which we’re seeing women particularly impacted, for example by increased domestic duties, increased likelihood in terms of losing their jobs. Is there a possibility of an opportunity afterwards to recognise these issues?

GS: I do think that this global tragedy has forced us to do two things – one to realise that we are all connected, the virus does not recognise that we… it doesn’t have an idea of gender, race, class or whatever and neither should we.

And also it reveals the fault lines, for instance in my country it has dramatised the ridiculous fact that we are the only advanced democracy without a national system of healthcare, so I hope and I think and I feel that we are recognising 73

our connectedness and seeing injustices that are dramatised by this emergency and I hope and believe that our consciousness and our actions will be different in the future.

LB: Certainly here as well I think just in the last few days there’s been a petition for an investigation into the much higher death rate amongst black, Asian and minority ethnic people which obviously is another example of a huge inequality being highlighted by the unequal impact of the virus.

GS: I don’t know what’s happening there but here the statistics are being taken, which is a good thing of course, by race and ethnicity and poverty and so on, but the gender aspect of that is… I have a couple of friends who are looking for that, black women in particular in my country, and we haven’t been able to find it. Even though we know women in general are more endangered because of lower income, taking care of children, a whole series of service jobs, a whole series of reasons and we know the racial statistics, but we still haven’t broken them out by gender as well.

LB: Right, I think here as well we’re seeing a complex picture – we’re seeing men disproportionately likely to be affected by the virus itself and the women disproportionately likely to be affected by the spikes around domestic violence and street harassment.

GS: That’s interesting, is that clearly the case? Because I saw here a statistic saying that men were more likely to get the virus and then it disappeared and seemed not to be true anymore.

LB: As far as I know the statistics here suggest that men are far more likely to die as a result of the virus, but we’re also seeing— GS: Do we know why?

LB: I don’t know, but definitely we’re seeing spikes in other ways in which women are experiencing pregnancy discrimination, stories coming out about women being forced into unsafe working conditions, not being given job security, so I think it’s delivering a complicated picture. I was really powerfully struck by the parts of your book about women and self-esteem which made me think about the political nature of self-belief and self-care. In the book you write, ‘The golden rule was written by a smart guy for guys, but we need to reverse it, treat ourselves as well as we treat others.’ Because I know there will 74

be women listening to this who have been made to feel by society that selfcare practices are selfish or non-essential. Can you say a little bit about how women’s self-esteem is linked to activism and political change?

GS: Well, we so much are… Much has changed, but we are still in the paradigm of caregivers, of being responsible for others, and hence the idea for reversing the golden rule is revolutionary, but it’s crucial because if we’re trying to democratise and do away with hierarchy why are we perpetuating it in ourselves? Sometimes I think the best way, or a way, anyway, for women to get out of it – especially if they have daughters – is to realise that the daughters are learning from them and imitating them. So I see women saying, OK, I realise that if I look in the mirror and criticise my body, my daughter is watching me so I’m not going to do that anymore. It’s an intimate way of learning.

LB: Yes, and of course plays into the fact that we’re more likely to do things for other people than for ourselves.

GS: Yes. I think the reversal of the golden rule is a good thing! And it’s not difficult, if we just take the process that we’re going through and change the gender of it we can see what’s wrong.

LB: Yes, a very simple way to approach it. The book makes powerful arguments for recalibrating family life and responsibilities and in particular for reinvestigating our definitions of family and of motherhood. You talk in the book about the benefits for men of experiencing what has long been seen as women’s work and about the idea of mothering as a verb rather than as a noun. Can you say a little bit about that?

GS: Yes, I think we’re all, men and women, each of us uniquely human and striving to be a full human being. Women often realise our full humanity by being active outside the house and men often realise it by being active inside the house. The qualities that are called feminine are just the qualities necessary to raise children – empathy, patience, attention to detail, all of those qualities.

For men to develop them in themselves, which is part of the full circle of humanity – which they have just as women do – is greatly enhanced by when they’re growing up being raised to raise children, being raised to look after themselves, feed themselves, pay attention to detail, whatever it is, so that men get to be whole people too. It actually lengthens their lives because of the masculine role – the idea of being in control and so on – is part of what

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shortens men’s lives. So the more we can raise our sons like our daughters and our daughters like our sons, the more whole people they will be able to be!

LB: And speaking about that privilege of becoming a whole person; you talk about women living out the un-lived lives of their mothers. Can you tell us a little about that from your personal perspective?

GS: I must tell you it took me an alarmingly long time to realise that that’s what I was doing, because my mother was not well and had a difficult life and I was kind of looking after her but striving not to be like my mother or not to live her life – maybe not uncommon. And also I hadn’t known her – in fact I was a teenager – before I realised that she had ever been a journalist or a writer and led an independent life. So it took me a while to realise who she could have been and that ‘could have been’, it’s a terribly sad phrase isn’t it? Might have been, could have been… I did begin to realise that I was living out her un-lived life, which of course one can’t do. Each person has to live out their own lives, but I suspect that there may be quite a few people who are living out the unlived lives of parents.

LB: Absolutely, and I think that intergenerational awareness and handing down of a struggle is reflected in the wider feminist movement as well and one of the things that comes across most joyfully in your work is this strength of intergenerational feminism. In this book you write about working with young women in the movement, and you say ‘because I am older and remember when things were worse, I can bring them the gift of hope and optimism, because they see how unjust things still are and have a stake in the future. They bring me the gift of anger and impatience. I can’t think of a better combination.’

Feminism, I think, is a movement often portrayed from the outside as deeply fractured, often along generational lines. Can you tell us a little bit about organising and working with feminists across divides?

GS: You know I’m not trying to overgeneralise my experience; some of it comes from being as old as I am because I was a fifties person, not even a sixties person! There’s almost no one, there’s maybe one or two people of my age who became part of the movement, so from the beginning I’ve always been working with and organising with women who are at least a decade younger or more like two decades and now I mean four or five decades! I do think that just as a general principle, as I was trying to say there in that quote, that it is very helpful for us to organise across generations and segregating by age is as 76

ridiculous and destructive as segregating by race, or class or gender or anything else. We learn from each other, we need each other. I regret that my culture, at least, and maybe yours too, is in this place where they think it’s OK to have senior communities which cuts off older people from younger ones and to the detriment of both. So I hope we get out of that.

LB: On that point specifically of working with other women, a question from one of our audience members – she asks what advice you have as a feminist when dealing with non-feminist women who are in all areas of life? She says that she finds many non-feminist women are part of the problem in the continuation of sexism in our still very patriarchal Welsh society – they don’t support women who are trying to challenge institutional and structural sexism.

GS: Yes, I mean what she says is absolutely true but it’s important to remember that though women may be a problem for other women, they don’t have the power to be the big problem. Women may be adversaries, but we don’t have the power to be our worst adversaries. For instance, there’s now a not-verygood TV series here called Mrs America and it gives you the impression that a woman named Phyllis Schlafly, who is a very religious and right-wing woman opposed to the equal rights amendment, it gives you the impression that she was the reason it was defeated. In actuality I don’t believe she changed one vote! Nobody could ever discover that she changed even one vote. The insurance industry here opposed the equal rights amendment because if they stopped sex segregating their actuarial tables it would cost them millions upon millions of dollars. She was just brought in at the last minute to make it seem that women were against equal rights, which actually was false, the majority of women always supported the equal rights amendment. Now 90 per cent of us support it and we still don’t have it. The series makes it seem as if women are our own worst enemies, which keeps us from recognising who our own worst enemies are! Not that we aren’t in conflict – yes, we are in conflict – but by and large we don’t have the power to be our own worst enemies.

LB: This idea of the token woman is often used by the media as well in setting up debates, is that something you’ve experienced? How do you handle it when a media debate seeks to create a catfight as a means of undermining feminist arguments?

GS: Well, that’s the problem with this ridiculous television show, I’m sure the actors in it are fine but just the thrust of the story is the problem. So you just 77

have to keep naming it. The same is true racially – people would say, ‘oh, black people can’t get along, no!’ The problem is racism! Hello, excuse me? You just have to keep your eye on where the power and the problem is.

LB: In terms of that idea of tackling the real problem, you refer very powerfully in the book to the period just before or just after a woman leaves an abusive relationship and that we know that is the most dangerous time when she’s most likely to be killed, and you use this as an analogy for our present moment in history, suggesting that the moment at which we are, perhaps, about to be free is a moment of great and present danger. Can you talk to us a little bit about this present moment, about what you perceive to be those great dangers and what we need to do to avoid them?

GS: Well, it’s one of the great lessons of looking at the microcosm and understanding its importance in the macrocosm because it’s just perfectly statistically clear that in a domestic violence situation a woman is most likely to be beaten or killed just before or just after she escapes, because she is escaping control and control is the point. So looking at that nationally or wherever we are, or whatever our larger group is, is very instructive. Speaking from my own country, we are just about at the point of becoming no longer a majority white country. The first generation of babies who are majority babies of colour has already been born and that’s something like 20 or 30 per cent, we don’t know exactly but from public opinion polls people who really believe that they have a right to a hierarchy they were born into, are in fear and backlash; that’s the part of the country that voted for Trump. It was not the majority, he lost the majority, he won by a technicality called the electoral college, I’m sorry to say, which itself only the slave-owning states wanted, and we have to get rid of it. It helps to explain… It’s both hopeful and fearful at the same time, if that makes sense, because we’re at the moment where we are escaping, which is a source of enormous hope, and if we look at the public opinion polls we feel greatly heartened, but we have to recognise it’s also a time of danger and we need to look after each other and understand we can have the backlash like the socalled election of Trump, for whom I apologise to the rest of the world! Does that make sense? So I do think that there is an interesting and useful parallel or insight if thinking about a woman, or a man or a child escaping a violent home and a country in the process of moving towards a more real democracy.

LB: And you very clearly and usefully in your book expand on that connection between a racist backlash and an antifeminist one and you give the example 78

of abortion as fundamentally the intent to control women’s bodies being used in racist as well as misogynistic ways, particularly when it comes to a white supremacist for example. Can you say a little bit about that connection between sexism and racism? One of the questions that I received on Instagram when I mentioned I was going to be interviewing you was somebody asking whether you agreed that in order to be feminist one must also be actively antiracist? Can you say a little about that?

GS: Absolutely, just in a very basic sense if feminism doesn’t include all women it’s not feminism. So fundamentally… racism is antifeminist, if you see what I mean, but also basically because women are, so to speak, the means of reproduction, in order to maintain racism in the very long run you have to have a certain amount of influence or control over who has children with whom.

Certainly the laws in the country reflect that, historically. Miscegenation was more reliably punished than many more serious crimes in our legal system.

So racism reinforces sexism and the need to control women in order to keep races separate and to say one race should have more children or fewer children and so on. Actually the same thing is true often for castes, say in India, or any birth based hierarchy. It redoubles the need for controlling reproduction.

LB: One of my favourite quotes in the book is from Robin Morgan who says ‘hate generalises, love specifies.’

GS: Oh yes, I love that quote! Robin is a first-rate poet, philosopher and activist, she’s our most all-round activist!

LB: As movements for change and as activists for change, what can we learn from that idea in terms of our tactics? In terms of how we move forward?

GS: I think to pay attention to the particular as much as we can. Of course when we create laws we generalise but if we don’t create them with the knowledge of the particular then they become oppressive laws. So I hope that we begin with … of course, I mean love does individualise us, right? I hope that we begin there and generalise only to the degree that it’s inclusive of the individual.

LB: You return, Gloria, again and again in your work to the importance of telling our stories, and happily we are at a moment where women certainly in some countries are beginning to feel able to share their stories in unprecedented numbers. But we also live in an age where people seem to be less likely than 79

ever to listen, particularly to those whose world views don’t match their own.

We often give women advice on how to make themselves heard, but what would you say to those who find it very difficult at the moment to listen?

GS: Well, we don’t learn while we’re talking. That’s kind of stunning, isn’t it?! If we want to learn something we have to listen. It’s actually selfish, don’t you want to learn? Of course we want to learn! So to listen is a profoundly self-improving act and I would also say to just think of democracy in a very simple way, which is if we have more power than the people we’re with, we have to remember to listen as much as we talk. If we have less, we have to remember to talk as much as we listen, which can be just as difficult in an office, or class, or racial situation.

So just simple day-to-day democracy of consciousness, of trying to equalise talking and listening. It’s amazing what an impact it has.

LB: Yes, and how simple. One of the things that you warn of is the risk of empathy being lost when that face-to-face interaction, when that contract of speaking and listening is purely digital. We know of course that the internet has great benefits for feminism but are there risks as well?

GS: Yes, I mean I’m not at all downplaying the importance of the internet because I think it has special importance for women who can communicate in safety at home in a way they might not be able to do otherwise and get information – it’s crucial. But I ask my friendly neurologist here, a friend who’s a great neurologist, if we could empathise in the same way – that is, produce oxytocin, the hormone that allows us to not just learn but to feel what another person is feeling. That is, if somebody holds a baby, male or female, you’re flooded with oxytocin. Or if you see somebody who is having an accident you have an impulse to help them even if you don’t know them. That’s oxytocin, without which probably our species could not have survived. So I asked her if we produce oxytocin from looking at a page or a screen and she said no, not really, it’s really when you’re there with all five senses. I don’t know that there’s been a scientific experiment but I think it seems pretty clear that you need the impulse of all five senses to produce this very precious hormone that allows us to empathise. So I hope we remember that and spend as much time with each other as we do online or with books or communicating in another way. That’s especially difficult right now because of being isolated, so we need to be very aware of that.

LB: And actually also particularly right now it’s been said by certain experts that 80

there are particular dangers around the risks of online abuse, of child sexual abuse and exploitation online and, of course, with young people spending increasing amounts of time on the internet. You write passionately in your book about the differences between pornography and erotica. In the UK we know that 60 per cent of young people have seen online pornography by the age of fourteen and a quarter by the age of twelve. Can you say a little bit about the gendered impact of porn in its modern form?

GS: Well, it would help if we could at least not consign to pornography all of sexuality. I think there’s a lot in just the words, don’t you? Because Porne means female slaves in Greek, Greek female sexual slaves; erotica comes from eros which means love and has connotations of consent and mutual pleasure and so on. So if we just made that distinction, right now I fear that people are giving over all of sexuality to pornography and I’m not… Obviously most of it on the web is pornographic, is about the subordination of women but there must be some erotica there somewhere! Certainly there is in writing, especially by women, as erotica. So if we make it sex versus no sex it just will never change, we have to understand that it’s restoring mutual pleasure, not denying it.

LB: Throughout the book you celebrate rebellion and with your trademark generosity of spirit you encourage readers to seek out others, authors and speakers you have come across, you have worked with. Are there any particular rebels you admire that you would like our audience to go and find out more about?

GS: Oh gosh, there’s so many! Can I send you a list?

LB: Of course, absolutely yes!

GS: There are just so many!

LB: I’ll encourage the audience to read the book and to find those quotes and to go and find out more about this, the women that you do list in the book.

GS: I’ll tell you one, there’s a friend who’s written a book about The Colour Purple as the birth and progress of The Colour Purple from birth to film to play to… It made me realise again what a universal author and revolutionary Alice Walker is. She is completely 100 per cent understandable and in The Colour Purple, of course, she writes in the speech pattern of country people.

Later I met accidentally two different translators of The Colour Purple – one 81

Japanese and one Chinese – and they both told me that each one had used the language of their own country people in order to translate the spirit of The Colour Purple and that in both cases it was the first time that that language had been used in a work of art. So if you do one true thing it stays true. And because Alice does that, I would suggest that people go back to her poetry, her essays and see if they find a friend.

LB: How wonderful, thank you. One last question from me, I find – and I’m sure that you have found in your many, many visits to universities and to schools – that every time I go, particularly to a school, I think, and meet young women, teenagers, there’s so very often that one girl in a classroom who is trying so hard to stand up for what she believes in, who has perhaps come across feminism, who’s dared to use the word and who is finding herself facing a really very fierce backlash. Even now, even in this moment when people are so quick to say that we’re living in a post-feminist world or that suddenly #MeToo has made everything completely acceptable. There are still these girls everywhere who think that they are the only one and who are on the verge of giving up and who feel completely defeated, who are being lambasted by their peers for calling themselves a feminist, they’re called ‘feminazis’, they’re ridiculed. What would your message be for that one girl in every classroom?

GS: I fear that feminazi is a phrase given to the world by an awful guy in this culture, so sorry about that! It’s fascinating because Hitler was devoutly anti-feminist, the very first thing he did was to padlock the family planning clinics and declare abortion a crime against the state. He is living proof that hierarchies begin with controlling reproduction! It could not be more ridiculous!

But I would say to her first of all, trust that voice inside you and find a listener and a friendly voice somewhere. Maybe you’re not finding it in your classroom but maybe there’s somebody in your neighbourhood or just somebody you feel drawn to and never mind if theoretically you’re not supposed to be talking to that person, talk to that person! Trust your own wisdom.

LB: Gloria I can’t thank you enough. You’re not, I know, somebody who easily accepts thanks. When you’re asked very regularly about your advice for younger feminists you unfailingly speak about what you have to learn from them, but as somebody whose activism wouldn’t exist without your example, as one of a generation of feminists lifted by your support and inspired by your ideas, and as a woman whose life has been directly improved by your life’s work, I want to say thank you for everything.

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GS: And I get to thank you even more! Because you are going to continue this after I have gone on some place else and I’m so grateful to you.

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Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac THE FUTURES WE CHOOSE We can survive the climate crisis.We have two choices for our future, which is still unwritten. It will be shaped by who we choose to be right now. So, how can we change the story of the world?

This conversation took place at Hay Festival Digital on Monday 25 May 2020.

CHRISTIANA FIGUERES: It’s very sad not to be in person at the Hay Festival.

I was there a couple of years ago and I just so much enjoyed the vibe and the energy that comes together with so many authors and so many readers who are there. So we are very sorry that that is not possible this year, but thank you very much for allowing us to be with all of you virtually! I speak to you from Costa Rica, which is my home, and, Tom where are you?

TOM RIVETT-CARNAC: Well, I speak to you from Bath in the west of the United Kingdom. I’m also very sorry not to be enjoying the Welsh borders.

Christiana and I run a podcast together, so each week we get to spend an hour producing this podcast called ‘Outrage and Optimism’, so hopefully we’re in a 85

good place to be extremely extemporaneous and share some thoughts with you. What we thought we would do is touch on some of the issues around coronavirus, Covid-19, how that has swept around the world in the last few months and in particular how it has intersected with our collective attempts to deal with climate change. This year, right now, was supposed to be the year that the world pivoted its attention in a major way to dealing with the climate crisis. Of course, one of the impacts of coronavirus has been that the world’s attention has been drawn away from that. So let’s just start by getting into this issue, and I want to start by posing a question to you, but first I want to note the other thing that’s happened with coronavirus, which is that economic activity has dropped to a significant degree and as a result of that emissions are predicted to drop this year by the largest margin in peacetime. In fact, I think it’s the largest margin in history – even including the Second World War. CF: Ever!

TR-C: So that’s a good thing, right?

CF: Wel, yes and no, yes and no. The shutdown of the global economy has led to many environmental – let’s call them ‘benefits’. Because we’re seeing fish come back to the waterways, birds, bees and butterflies come back to gardens that remain unmowed. We have unusual mammals roaming around in urban areas and, as you say, we have clear skies and a drop in emissions that goes a way to an 8 per cent drop. That is unheard of. Unprecedented, which is the most popular word right now – unprecedented because everything that we’re observing is unprecedented! But you know, Tom, what’s interesting is that although at face value all that is actually good news, it really is not to be celebrated because it’s an unintended consequence of this economic paralysis.

It is not a planned, structured, sustained effort of decarbonising the economy, it’s simply paralysing the economy, and it has come at huge human cost as we know. Thousands of people have lost their lives, millions of people who have already lost their livelihoods and likely many more before we begin to take up on the economic activities. So not something to be celebrated, but a very interesting reminder that it is possible. As we know, whether we are able to continue the descent… because as you mentioned, Tom, this year 2020 was the year we were supposed to turn our attention to the climate and as we say in our book The Future We Choose, this is the beginning of the most important decade in human history because over this decade we have to be able to get to one half of emissions over the next ten years. So yes, we will drop by 8 per 86

cent, but the question is: what happens next year? Will we continue to descend or will we have a huge uptake, and that depends on the recovery packages.

TR-C: Well, of course, those are being put together at the moment, and the most recent edition of the Economist is very interesting, it has a piece on the cover that explains that the coronavirus crisis is not inherently good for the climate crisis and may well not contain any of the solutions, but that it could be.

And actually, it could contain many of the seeds by which we could accelerate the solutions to the climate crisis, even though it’s drawn our attention off in a different direction. Of course, what they’re talking about there is given this massive hit that the economy has taken, there is now significant decisionmaking that is going on in capitals all around the world, around how we recover from this crisis. There will at some point be a vaccine to the coronavirus. That is one of the major differences between climate change and coronavirus.

Coronavirus is temporary. It might last for a few months, it could last for a few years, but in the end we will find a vaccine and we will return to some form of normality – although that may be quite different. The climate crisis, if we don’t deal with it in time, will be a permanent disruption that will change human life as we know it and increase human suffering in a permanent way – for people and for the natural world. But, of course, what’s happening now is policymakers are thinking how do we recover out of the coronavirus crisis? And they’re thinking about that from a range of fiscal measures, monetary stimulus measures, policy amendment measures… What needs to happen, Christiana, in order to ensure that the recovery from the coronavirus can also get us on track to dealing with climate change?

CF: Yeah, that also is the worry that I would like to underline, because it’s not diverting attention from, it’s actually an ‘and also’ scenario. Let’s just step back for a second and realise why it is so important to be able to address both of these crises at the same time with the same fresh injection of capital, and that is basically due to two factors. One is scale, and the other is timing. So on the scale, we already know that there are at least 15 trillion US dollars that are going to be invested into the economy in order to recover and be able to spin the wheels of the economy again. And that could go up to 20 trillion.

If that money is put into high carbon assets, high carbon sectors, high carbon companies, then there is no way that any policies and measures or efforts on decarbonising the economy could possibly reach the impact that those 20 trillion dollars are going to have, because they will dwarf any efforts on

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climate change. That is why it’s important to make them overlap. The second factor is timing, and I go back to this. We have to get to one half emissions over the next decade and those 15–20 trillion dollars are right now being allotted, they’re already being allocated and they will define the contours of the global economy for at least that decade. So for both of those reasons – scale and timing – we have to ensure that these so called recovery packages don’t recover the economy to where we were, high carbon intensity, but rather that it takes us on a leapfrog into a much lower carbon economy.

Now the good news thing here is that we already see quite a few countries moving in this direction. In the UK, because that’s where you all are, let’s start there, there is a call from a major group of business leaders for the government to embrace a green recovery and Prime Minister Boris Johnson has already made a very clear statement that the UK’s commitment to delivering net zero emissions remains ‘undiminished’, those are his very words. Now, across the channel in Europe, 180 business leaders, policymakers and researchers have explicitly urged the EU to build the recovery package around the European Green Deal and Spain, very recently, just released a draft law banning all new coal, oil and gas projects in order to establish the direction of the Covid-19 recovery effort. This morning, quite excitingly, I just read that in Canada, over 207 signatories, representing over two thousand allies, signed on to support a resilient recovery. So it’s very interesting that business understands: yes, they are all trying to understand, how do they come out of the crisis, how do they get their workers back into the performance and productivity levels that they had, but they are understanding that this shorter term crisis, which is Covid as Tom has explained, is not going to divert either the resources or the attention to climate but rather to make those solutions converge. The financial sector is equally on the same path with many different investment groups, and of course the Net Zero Alliance that has been very vocal about this. They have asset management of 4.6 trillion and then the number one pillar of asset management Black Rock which just came out recently with a surprising statement. They are the largest asset management company, 7.4 trillion dollars of assets under management, they have pledged to punish the directors of the companies that they at least partially own who might fail to manage environmental risks this year. So all very clear signals of where most people want this to go. But still, the final decision will be taken by government and by multilateral institutions. So a lot of recommendations, a lot of guidance being given by many stakeholders, but the decisions will be made outside of those 88

stakeholders.

TR-C: It’s great to hear all of that assessment of the good momentum that is leading towards the realisation that these issues need to be integrated as we step further forward, but I can also feel quite alarmed about a couple of elements of it, and particularly about the monetary stimulus part of it. So there are going to be enormous amounts of cash that are going to be ploughed back into the economy in a very short space of time. We saw this after the financial crisis where arguably we made many of the wrong choices. We geared the economy into another boom and bust cycle in a reasonably short space of time. Now, if policymakers, finance ministers, central bankers and others, get really frightened about the amount of debt that’s being laden on governments because they’ve taken these extreme measures to deal with the coronavirus crisis and they just try and stimulate the economy and then introduce policy measures to facilitate as much growth as quickly as possible, then you do see the types of changes that you’re talking about, but you also see bailing out of oil and gas companies, as Trump was talking about, bailing out the airlines, just trying to get the whole thing up and moving again. I saw some analysis to say that China’s emissions are worse now, or as bad now, as they were prior to Covid-19 striking Wuhan and leading to the shutdown. So I think your question— CF: Because of coal— TR-C: Yes, coal. So it’s really hard to realise – obviously we’re living in a very extraordinary moment for lots of reasons – but it’s really hard to realise just how consequential it is from a climate perspective and actually it’s just the next few months that are going to make such a difference. So what should we be doing to try to put pressure on those relatively small numbers of policymakers to make the right choices now?

CF: Yeah, well, good question, what should we be doing? I totally agree with your diagnostic, Tom, because I think let’s call them friends and family, all of those who’ve raised their voices in so many different ways in so many different institutions to warn governments that this is the route they have to take.

But ultimately, it is the governments that will make this decision and they’re really caught here. They’re caught because they need to institute millions of jobs as quickly as possible in order to get the wheels of the economy going.

And, of course, they will be bailing out and giving all kinds of financial help to 89

large companies as well. Now, what can we do? I think that we can support institutions that are doing the very deep analytical work on how this might be able to happen. The first ones that came out are the International Energy Agency and now in June they’re going to publish a very unusual report for them which shows various tools that governments can use to reinstate economic activity and do so in a way that helps to avert the worst of the climate crisis. The same thing is being done by the International Monetary Fund that has used many of the special financial schemes that they have to support especially the most hard hit developing countries, but that are preparing a monetary path for countries that wish to engage and pursue that path. The same thing is being done by the regional development banks, to a certain extent by the World Bank as well, and we have seen the report that came from Joseph Stiglitz and Sir Nick Stern giving also the same message and the same analysis. And what is fascinating is the consensus that all of these separate reports are coming down to, because each of them are quantifying the number of jobs – shovel-ready jobs – that can be created right away, and how those jobs in clean technologies and industries are actually longer lasting jobs than the ones that would be carbon intensive. So what can we do? We can raise our voices, we can support these institutions, but ultimately, ultimately, it is governments that are going to make this decision. Now they are talking among themselves obviously, but as you mentioned, Tom, we are in a huge race against the clock here because most of those decisions will be made over the next few months. So it is definitely a race against the clock.

TR-C: I’ve made a little list here whilst you’ve been speaking and I’m going to ask you a question to see if you can tell the difference between the two lists and what the organising principle was of my lists. So first is a list of countries that have done a good job on dealing with coronavirus: Germany, Iceland, Finland, New Zealand and Denmark. Here’s a list of countries that have done a terrible job; UK, US, Brazil. What’s the difference?

CF: I hate to tell you that there’s a gender difference there!

TR-C: It’s interesting though, isn’t it?! The second list is all led by relatively populist men who have come into office promising these big sweeping ideas and somewhat populistic and very nationalistic, etc., and when this crisis has hit, they’ve been proven to not really have the depth of ideas or the management ability to take their countries through it in a way that these collaborative, thoughtful women have.

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CF: Well, starting with denying science or just being completely blind to the suggestions from health professionals, and there’s a very interesting overlap there, because it is basically the same political leaders that have been denying the science of climate change. So whether you deny doctors their advice or whether you deny climate scientists their advice, it’s actually nothing but irresponsible. Because here’s the deal, there is one responsibility – one – that governments everywhere have. Their very, very first responsibility, and that is to protect their citizens. So those countries that have managed to protect their citizens from the worst of Covid-19 have done their job and they are probably the ones that are also doing a better job on climate change. The reverse is also true. Now, not to leave us in such a really bad place, Tom, let me just quickly add that in Costa Rica we have a male president and he has done a wonderful job on Covid-19. We’re currently holding the world record on the lowest mortality rate, we only have twelve people who have died in Costa Rica – so it’s not all men who have denied science.

TR-C: That fact’s been mentioned once or twice on our podcast, now I think about it!

CF: May have been!

TR-C: I think we should talk about our book, but it’s very interesting to get the chance to ask you questions about this. When we go back to when you and I were both at the UN and the months leading up to the Paris Agreement, and it felt at the time like this very challenging political moment and challenging political disagreements between countries – but what was really the breakthrough there was the realisation that to address big global challenges we need to step up on international cooperation and we need to get to a point where nations can, yes, focus on their own citizens and meeting their needs and keeping them safe, but also work in a constructive and collaborative way with other countries all around the world in a manner that promotes fairness as good global citizens. Since then, international collaboration and multilateralism isn’t as trendy as it was in 2015, to put it mildly. This has hit at a moment of deep nationalism. Do you see any signs that that cooperation is being rekindled in the midst of this crisis? Or do you think that it is disintegrating further as a result of what’s happening?

CF: Well, I would love to know your opinion on that Tom, because you’re on the other side of the Pacific! So it would be good to get your opinion on that.

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But let me just take the first part of that question and then send the second part over to you. There is no doubt that the recommendation from health professionals on Covid has been to go home, lock your door and don’t come out. So if you understand what the psychology is behind that, it is very much an isolationist, individualist approach to a global problem. That was necessary and that was recommended by health professionals and those countries that did their best are getting better. Now, the question that I want to hear you talk about, Tom, is what happens in the second phase? Because the fact is that the development of that vaccine – which is the only real measure that is going to get us out of this mess, it’s not locking ourselves up, it is the development of a vaccine – that cannot be done by a single country, a single company. To develop the vaccine, to get it through all of the red tape that it needs to get through for approval, to produce as many as we need to get them down to cheap costs so that we can actually have universal vaccinations, and then to go through the universal vaccinations. Doesn’t that require collaboration? So are we actually in front of a major global collaborative effort that we hadn’t planned, and what is that going to do for our psychology of switching from isolationism to collaboration? Question for you.

TR-C: I think what it touches on is one of the really interesting things that has happened as a result of this crisis, which is it’s been really the first time any of us alive have experienced the fact that the whole of humanity is having a similar type of experience. I say that cautiously, because I don’t pretend that my experience of living where I do in the west of England with a house and two kids and a wife is comparable to a single person living with two children in a part of the world where they have access to less resources. But there has been some commonality in the sense that we’ve been facing this shared issue.

In fact, it’s bound humanity together in a really remarkable way – I feel really connected to those different people when you see Italians singing in cities in Italy and other things that happened more in the early days of this. I think the other thing that has really happened which is more cross cutting is the trust in science and the trust in experts has really massively increased. So we’re now seeing a scenario where the level of confidence in experts and in science has really gone up significantly, so I think that’s really encouraging and I think that can really help us face a multitude of other issues. But the point you make is a really good one, Christiana; there has been an instinct by some national leaders to look after their people and close their borders – it’s a very zero-sum type mentality – fight internationally for limited amounts of resources, etc., etc. You 92

can see the beginnings of prickly international tendency, but the true solution to this can only be international, and we had Yuval Harari on our podcast a while ago, as you know, and he said he would love to see all of these people with nationalistic tendencies say if they were in the US, well, I won’t have the vaccine if it’s French-developed, I want to wait for an American vaccine, or something else. It shows the limits of that theory that we will only find good solutions in our national scenario. So I do think that there are seeds of deeper collaboration amongst people, but there are very noisy, shrill leaders who are being rather obstreperous about their national boundaries and their nationalistic tendencies, which I think is changing the tone of where we are at the moment. Would you agree with that?

CF: Yeah, yeah, I mean what did you call them? Shrill voices – I like that! Because they are shrill voices, but they are so far away from reality and especially on this health crisis, which is the one that is staring us in the face right now, so far away from where we need to go to solve the problem. So I don’t know, obviously the jury is still out and it’s very much crystal-balling and maybe my original sin and my constantly present sin is that I view that the glass is not half full, it’s half empty, and in my final view I am truly looking at the recovery – not the financial recovery but the health recovery – from Covid as being a huge forced collaboration exercise. Because it’s the only way to do this and those countries that want to exempt themselves and be isolationist about it may have very difficult measures to deal with, because borders may not be open to their citizens to coming in. We’re already seeing several countries that are moving to closed borders or to be very, very specific about who can come in and who cannot. That is not a situation that we can live with for a long period of time, but if there are leaders who insist on walking down that isolationist route, they might just find themselves and their citizens isolated by the rest of the world.

Wouldn’t that be sad?

TR-C: I think this is so interesting that this has happened now – we wrote this book a few months ago (it came out in February) and we really wrote it, as Christiana said earlier, because we are facing the most consequential decade in human history and it sounds like an exaggeration to say that, but in fact it’s not. We know that by 2030 we need our emissions to be fully 50 per cent less than they are today and if not then our ability to keep global climate change to under 1.5 degrees will really begin to recede. And the reason that’s important is because we begin to trigger these really quite alarming natural feedback loops

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where changes happen in the earth’s system – the classic example is the white ice of the polar ice cap, the Arctic ice cap, begins to recede, it exposes the dark water underneath, that absorbs more heat and you can then no longer stop it and you get this runaway situation. We’ve left climate so late that we now can’t fail to meet this target. To do that requires something in the order of a 7.5 per cent reduction every year for the next ten years in order to get our emissions to 50 per cent less than they are today. Curiously, that looks approximately like what we’re going to reduce our emissions by this year as a result of the coronavirus.

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David Jarrett and Guto Harri 33 MEDITATIONS ON DEATH NOTES FROM THE WRONG END OF MEDICINE What is a good death? How would you choose to live your last few months? How do we best care for the rising tide of very elderly? A series of reflections on death in all its forms: the science of it, the medicine, the tragedy and the comedy.

This conversation took place at Hay Festival Digital on Thursday 28 May 2020.

GUTO HARRI: Good morning, welcome to the Hay Festival Digital, which I’m pleased to say has expanded the reach beyond our wildest dreams. I’m particularly grateful to those of you who are joining us on this occasion because the title 33 Meditations on Death may not be the most uplifting prospect… but I must assure you, having read this book by Doctor Jarrett, that it’s a great read: playful as well as profound, thought provoking, but also just a fun, good read. I’m delighted to say that this playful and profound character joins us now. I’m going to start straight away. I know this is the day job, I know that what you’ve done for the last three or four decades as a doctor is generally handle the end of life for all of us at different ages, but why take another job and write about the day job and write about death?

DR DAVID JARRETT: Thank you, Guto, for those kind words, I’ve never been described as playful before, nor profound! So that’s a first for me. Over the decades I’ve noticed that something seems to have changed in medicine and also in society. There seems to be some sort of profound problem with the way that we face up to the end of our lives and death. Not just as people, but 97

particularly the families of elderly people I’ve looked after; there’s almost a sort of deluded optimism that medicine can just carry on keeping us going for as long as we’d want and there are very unrealistic expectations as to what medicine can do – particularly when people are very old and approaching the end of their life. There has always been an insatiable appetite for more and more medicine and there are concerns in the profession that there is actually too much medicine. The burden of the treatments that we inflict upon the elderly are almost worse than the actual illnesses themselves. There is sometimes, I think, a lack of courage in the medical profession in facing up to the difficult conversations that one needs to have with patients and their families about what is realistic when people are very old and frail. So over the years, first of all I didn’t have any time because I was very busy. Then I went part-time when I was sixty but had spent the best part of the last decade looking after and visiting very frail parents who I watched slowly decline both physically and mentally. They had some sort of existential suffering of just the exhaustion of being old. And when they finally died I had a bit of a Jack Kerouac writing spree and within a month or so had got some thoughts down on paper that had troubled me perhaps for a number of years. So that’s where it came from.

GH: And in a nutshell you’re saying just because we can prolong life, doesn’t mean we have to – in fact prolonging life at times is prolonging agony and suffering and indignity? But you are going against the strongest and arguably the most noble human instinct which is to avoid death and to stay alive and to embrace this gift of life that we’ve been given?

DJ: Life is a wonderful gift, but there is a point when the burden of just existing, the exhaustion and the suffering… Life doesn’t have meaning just because it exists and I think we have to focus on the quality of our lives rather than the quantity. For many at the very end of their life there is definitely suffering, there is also the problem of cognitive decline and dementia where people lose their memories, they lose the ability to look after themselves, and even to recognise their family. In that situation I feel you’re almost gone anyway and the time is right to leave this world.

GH: I was tickled by your description of what you used to do with some medical students to try and assimilate within them what it might feel like to be that much older, not feel as invincible as an eighteen-year-old, top of the class medical student feels. Tell us about that sort of particular approach.

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DJ: Well, not when I was training but now when medical students learn about geriatric medicine there’s a sort of suit they can put on where they have fuzzy glasses, they have ear muffs so they can’t see and they can’t hear and they’re burdened down with weights with things digging into their heels and their knees. It’s like a sort of instant old-age suit, like those fat suits that actors sometimes wear to make them look overweight, and it’s a complete shock to them because, “Oh, this is what it’s like to be old!” Thankfully the deterioration and degeneration that we all get as we get older creeps up on us so slowly that we thankfully don’t notice it, but it is quite a shock to them. We didn’t have anything like that when I was training.

GH: There are examples of bad deaths right through the book and it’s at the heart of your manifesto not to prolong life just for the sake of it when it’s miserable, but you have some delicious examples of a good death – literally delicious in the example that starts the book. Tell us with the same sort of colour and detail the perfect death for a chef, if you like.

DJ: Well, I thought I’d start with an optimistic view. A few years back the TV cook Keith Floyd had one of those wonderful deaths that we would all love to have. He’d been to some beautiful restaurant in Devon, had a fabulous meal, with wine and brandy and, being Keith Floyd, no doubt a few cigarettes between courses, and then he went home. He was celebrating because he’d just got the all clear from his bowel cancer; he sat down in a chair and died.

Eddie Mair on Radio 4 was interested in this and wanted listeners to ring up with the tales of good deaths that they’ve encountered. There were wonderful stories about much loved friends and relatives having had a great life and then getting on a bicycle and cycling along and then falling down dead in a ditch!

We’d all love that. The Bing Crosby death. He was playing golf and got to the eighteenth hole and suddenly dropped down dead – and I do say in the book that I think he could only have been improved if he had managed to get to the bar before he died! But there are good deaths. Sudden deaths are good on the person who dies but a bit brutal on those who have to witness the death. In that chapter I talk about how I was in my geriatric day-hospital in Petersfield and there was a knock on the door and the nurses said, there’s a cardiac arrest.

I drop everything, run out and there’s a lady outstretched and they’re pumping on her chest and doing all the cardiopulmonary resuscitation things. I saw a little old lady looking on. I took her aside and said, “Do you know this lady?”

And she said, “Oh yes. She’s a friend of mine, she’s ninety-nine years old, always

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been well. She cut her finger and was coming to the minor injuries unit in the hospital and suddenly collapsed.” I thought, well, this is the way to go and as you can’t really do a good cardiopulmonary resuscitation in a community hospital we called it a day and gave the witness a cup of tea, and I felt that, well, she should be able to drop down dead at ninety-nine without too much fuss. Those were the days when we could just let things pass.

GH: Also when you mentioned Bing Crosby trying to get to the bar, I was touched by your recollection of Chekhov, who must be the ultimate hero of somebody like you, starting to write, done medicine for decades, but there’s a tradition amongst doctors which I wasn’t aware of though my own father was a writer and a doctor – I guess in some ways he stuck with that tradition all his life – but the tradition is that you just end it all with a glass between two physicians, and not a glass of morphine necessarily.

DJ: Well that was a story that I saw in a British Medical Journal many years ago and I tore it out and put it in a pile where I put a lot of other interesting little articles and thoughts; thinking, well, I’ll come back to them at one point. Anton Chekhov had terrible pulmonary tuberculosis, as everyone knows. He was a physician and a writer, and he was, I think, at some spa town with his wife and he was deteriorating. They called a doctor – traditionally doctors are meant to give a bottle of champagne to a fellow physician when they’re dying – and Anton Chekhov took a swig of champagne and said “I haven’t had champagne for a long time” and then keeled over and died. And that was an introduction to a chapter on how doctors die because over the many decades of being a geriatrician and looking after the continuing care, the long-term care wards for older people, I’ve looked after many doctors. I was always struck by the fact that there was never any fuss, there was never any unreasonable expectation from them or their family as to what needs to be done. I think because if you work with the old, and particularly those who are dying, there’s no rose-tinted view of death, and none wanted life-prolonging treatments where there was very little chance of a favourable outcome at the end.

GH: You lobbed in that word then, very powerful word – unreasonable – and that’s at the heart of this book as well. You think that modern society makes unreasonable demands on doctors and unreasonable expectations on all of us.

You talk about the rusty hand of the law dangling over you when you’re taking these life and death decisions in hospitals, but it’s partly the legal side of it now.

You think that basically patients have become too demanding in a way, or more 100

often than not the relatives of your patients have become too demanding?

DJ: I think they have an unrealistic expectation of what can be done when people are very, very old and when you’re fighting against the inevitable deterioration that comes due to not just necessarily disease but the ageing process itself. One of the points of the book was to try and stimulate a conversation around what we would reasonably expect to happen at the end of our life. I think it was Rabbi Julia Neuberger, in her report at the end of the North Staffordshire problem some years back, that said that unless there is a national conversation about death then doctors and nurses are going to become the whipping boys for our collective inability to work out what is likely to happen at the end of our lives. So, yes, there’s a need for conversation.

There’s all sorts of things that surface when a loved one is near the end of life… and unless people have given clear guidance, families feel they’ve got to fight on behalf of their elderly, frail, demented mother and make sure everything possible is done. A lot of the conflict arises around artificial nutrition and hydration at the end of life.

GH: Yes, you warn us, basically, that it’s a lot easier, it should be a lot easier, to refuse to start feeding than actually to stop feeding, so that once that dynamic is created, everybody’s stuck with it, but nine times out of ten if not more, it’s not a happy outcome once you get down that avenue of feeding and maintaining people artificially.

DJ: Well, this never used to be an issue. When I started, tube-feeding was a rarity but because these technologies are now available it doesn’t necessarily mean that they should be used. If one is at a point in one’s life where one is so frail and so demented that you cannot raise a glass to your mouth to feed yourself then your life is coming to an end. Now there is great pressure to put tubes in, to feed people either through a tube in the tummy or down through the nose, but all this may not even be prolonging life, but it’s certainly prolonging suffering, There’s this belief that when someone is dying they have to be given fluids otherwise they’ll be dehydrated to death. Whereas if someone is dying, it’s unlikely that they will be feeling thirsty and there’s some evidence that artificial feeding can make things worse. It can cause fluid in the lungs and congestion. The only certain thing is that artificial feeding makes relatives of the dying person feel better – that has been shown.

GH: There are people, are there not, who are incapable of feeding themselves 101

but who are extremely lucid, highly intelligent, you can take a great scientist who can’t feed themselves DJ: Well, obviously there are people like Stephen Hawking – the book is not about people who have disabilities, who have active lives, this is about people who are frail and elderly and have multiple co-morbidities, many illnesses plus their physiological reserve because of their age and the effects of biological ageing are so intense that there is no prospect of them having any life that could be described as either meaningful or enjoyable or in any way abundant.

GH: I said you were playful at the start of this. You start every chapter with a quote – some of the quotes are from great rock artists. You quote Pulp, for instance, and you have got your own take on ‘Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover’ which may unnerve people – 1,050 ways to kill your patient! It left me thinking I’m in my early fifties but not long off where the prospect of being in a hospital where you come along maybe clutching a bottle of champagne would scare the living daylights out of me!

DJ: Well, this book was a bit of a memoir and I was looking back over the things that have haunted me over the years, and every doctor who’s had any clinical responsibility has been involved in what is non-technically called a ‘cock-up’.

We’ve all done them. I describe how we as doctors have these bus loads of patients where things have gone wrong and I think if you’re a surgeon or physician or obstetrician or a paediatrician this bus can be full of the ghosts of cock-ups past. I talk in the book about how this bus sometimes parks itself on your front lawn and you can wake up in the night and start thinking about the things that you’ve done wrong. One of the problems with human beings is that we remember the bad things that have happened to us more than all the good things. The bus loads of patients who, we may not necessarily save their lives but we’ve helped them in some way, well they’re in the distance, we don’t think about them. We do get haunted by the patients that we’ve not served well. I think the patient you are alluding to was when I was a junior doctor. It was Sunday and I’d been in the hospital since Friday morning being called all the time. We used to have seventy-two hours on call at a stretch, sleeping in the hospital. I did a lumbar puncture on a woman with a subarachnoid haemorrhage because we didn’t have CT scans of the brain in those days.

She died on the end of my needle from a condition called coning where the pressure inside the head pushes the brain stem down. I said in the book that I

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killed her as if I’d put a gun to her head and pulled the trigger. In those days – that’s nearly forty years ago – the world was more forgiving. Thankfully these days we have far better facilities in our hospital for scanning and making a diagnosis and there are much better procedures and guidelines to help us. But, yes, there are 1,050 ways to kill a patient! I do say in that chapter it’s ways to kill a patient part one. The editor of the book said, well, is there a part two? I said well, I don’t know, there could be a part two tonight when I’m on call! It’s that rusty axe that hangs over us all. It’s an ever-present fear that we all have.

GH: There’s an obvious question that was in my head when reading the book – what are your thoughts on assisted deaths? Would you push this as a manifesto for euthanasia as well?

DJ: Absolutely not. I don’t want people to think that this is a book about euthanasia or what is now more euphemistically called ‘medical assistance in dying’. I am not in favour. I was brought up a Catholic and although I’m not practising now, I have a sort of hardwired dread of actually ending someone’s life. I don’t in all honesty think it is necessary – certainly not for those very frail elderly people with dementia. They don’t need to be bumped off, they just need to be looked after and not have too many life-prolonging interventions such as flu jabs, statins and blood pressure tablets. All of that can be wound down and de-escalated. If a bump comes along and they get pneumonia or influenza or whatever, then what used to be TLC (tender loving care) is all that is required. I have a problem with medically assisted suicide, although I accept that it’s what most people in the country would consider a reasonable option.

I think for the elderly, the thought that every hospital ward in the country has some old demented person calling out, “Nurse, nurse, help! They’re trying to kill me!” and if that person actually was given a lethal injection I think that would disturb me. But in countries that do have medical assistance in dying such as Canada and Holland I think there are very good procedures in place to make sure it doesn’t become the thin end of the wedge and people aren’t cavalier with it. So I have no real objection to medically assisted dying if people choose to have that, but it’s certainly something I would never consider doing myself.

GH: You mentioned a Catholic upbringing although it’s clear from the book that intellectually at least you’re an atheist. Could somebody read the book and end up thinking that you have a brutal view of life? Quite a utilitarian view that people have outlived their usefulness, time to pull the plug, not leave the plug in, and is there a role for religion at all, do you think?

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DJ: Yes, I am an atheist, but I still have a respect for the rituals of religion that I think Man needs. Some sort of assistance with the difficult problems of life.

Rationally atheism always wins but of course human beings are not inherently rational and I always consider myself both an atheist and a Christian. I would say I follow the philosophical teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. I try and treat people equally, pay my taxes, respect and treat children well, don’t go round casting the first stone, those really important principles about human behaviour.

But as for the role of religion I respect the comfort that religious people get from religion and from the ministers who visit them. One of the problems I think with atheism is it doesn’t offer any comfort to the fundamental shittiness of life that we can’t get away from, particularly when it comes to death. One of the things I think that religion, why it evolved, was to help us control some of our worst behaviour, tribal, violent behaviour, but also it helped us to deal with death and dying and some of the brutal things that inevitably happen in life to all of us. Very few of us get through completely unscathed. I would hope, in a way, that perhaps the secular community could develop, and I know they are trying to develop, atheist ministers or ways of getting all those good things from religion and integrating them into a more rational, secular world.

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Maggie O’Farrell HAMNET On a summer’s day in 1596, a young girl in Stratford-upon-Avon takes to her bed with a fever. Her twin brother, Hamnet, searches everywhere for help. Why is nobody at home?

This lecture was delivered at Hay Festival Digital on Saturday 23 May 2020.

PETER FLORENCE: Welcome to this extraordinary opportunity to celebrate a masterpiece written by Maggie O’Farrell. We’re here to talk about Hamnet, her new novel which follows her memoir I Am, I Am, I Am, and deals with grief and love. It deals with the nation’s – the world’s – most celebrated writer, and the death of his child Hamnet. Although the central character, Maggie, is a woman who we have always known as Anne Hathaway, but you have introduced us to her as Agnes.

MAGGIE O’FARRELL: I have, yes. It’s funny, when I originally started the book, which was actually many years ago, because I’ve tried to write it several times and each time I swerved away to write other books actually – I Am included – I originally conceived the book to be about fathers and sons and the origin of writing and where it comes from in a sense. I suppose because I thought it would mirror the play Hamlet, but when I started researching for the book – and obviously there is so much written about Shakespeare, you could spend the whole of your life reading about Shakespeare and lots of people do – but I was really taken aback, I was very, very unprepared about what I would find about his wife. We know so little about Shakespeare, he’s a man who’s left a very, very scant paper trail, but there’s even less about the woman he married.

We know she was born, we don’t know when because it was before parish records started, and we know that she got married, and we know that she had

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three children but that’s sort of about it, really. We know that later in life she had a very successful malting business, but there’s not much else about her at all. One biographer of Shakespeare has described her as the wife-shaped void.

But what seems to have happened for some strange reason is many, many people, scholars and popular culture alike, has rushed to fill this void with this slew of misogyny and hostility and hatred for her! I was at a complete loss to understand why. If you stopped a passerby in the street and ask, did you know Shakespeare married, they would probably say one of two things, that he hated her and he tricked her into marriage, and there’s absolutely no basis for those views at all. It’s very possible that actually he did love her. I was so shocked by this and so unprepared for it that she, in a sense, hijacked the book.

I became interested not in rehabilitating her, but I think asking readers to open themselves to a new interpretation of her, to try and forget about everything they know. One of the things that I was very pleased to discover, I read her father’s will – Anne’s father died a year before she married William and he left her a very generous dowry and in his will he described her as ‘my daughter Agnes’, which in Elizabethan times would have been pronounced closer to the French ‘Agnès’. It was such a shock because I thought, have we been calling her by the wrong name for 400 years? But in another sense it was actually a gift because I could give this name back to her, because if anyone surely would know her real name it would be her father, so I wanted to give the name back to her and ask everyone who reads the book to think again and to try and imagine a new woman in her place and a marriage of love and mutuality.

PF: Yes, one of the things that obviously we do know about her aside of the documentary evidence is that she captured the romantic interest, and the enduring love, of a man with the greatest capacity for understanding human love and mortality possibly that has ever been.

MO: Yes, so to everybody who will say that he hated her and he ran away to London to get away from her, I would like to say two things back to them. The first thing is when he retired he went back to Stratford to live with her, and that’s not a man who regretted his marriage, I think. At the end of his life, at the end of his career, certainly, he was the equivalent of a multimillionaire – as well as being an actor and a pretty good playwright, he was also an incredibly good businessman. Every single penny he earned he sent back to Stratford, so he lived until the end of his career in really quite modest lodgings in London, but he sent back everything he earned to Stratford where he bought fields, he

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bought cottages, he bought an enormous house for his wife and two daughters a year after Hamnet the boy died, called New Place – it’s no longer there, sadly, somebody pulled it down. But the size of the land it’s on is enormous! One of the biggest mansions in Stratford, and to me that doesn’t sound like somebody whose heart is elsewhere.

PF: I want to come back to him and the way he both informs and is absent from the book, but just let me stay with buildings in Stratford for a second because, although the seeds of this came to you when you were studying highers in Scotland and had the play to read, you’ve also done the footwork and visited that extraordinary place in Stratford that Charles Dickens was one of the first people to help restore, the Shakespeare birthplace, which does give you a real sense of what it might have been like.

MO: Yes, it is astonishing. One of the strangest things about it was usually when you start a novel and you have to imagine the house it happened in, it’s a piecemeal process and you have to really pull it together and you explore it as you might walking a house in the dark at night and you have to grope the light switches and illuminate rooms as you find them. But it was really odd actually going to Stratford for the first time and realising that the house that I’d set this novel in was there! It already existed and it has existed for half a century possibly. The experience of going to Stratford and seeing the house on Henley Street where Shakespeare’s family lived, his father John the glover bought, it really is something I wish everybody could do at least one time in their life.

Shakespeare is a man who is very mysterious in a lot of ways, there’s so little we really know about him, so little concrete evidence about where he was at certain times and places, there are so many longeurs in his narrative. To be able to go to Stratford and walk into the dining room where he would have eaten all his meals as a child and as a young man and to go upstairs and you can see the chamber he shared with his brothers and you can walk into the room where his mother gave birth to him, it’s absolutely astonishing! It seems so unlikely that it survived and we can buy a ticket and walk into it, it’s a magical experience, there’s nothing else like it! And, yeah, thank god for Charles Dickens who realised its value!

PF: So how do you begin to approach engaging him in a story? Because that must come with qualms.

MO: Yes. A lot of qualms, you’re quite right. I have tried to write this book for 109

quite a long time, and I had about three stabs at it and each time I veered away and wrote something else and, actually, after I finished the memoir that I wrote, I sat myself down and gave myself a talking to and I said either you write this or you just forget about it. Hamnet was a ghost in a sense or a shadow that I’ve been living with for a really long time because I read the play, as you said, when I was studying for highers when I was sixteen, and my teacher mentioned in passing that Shakespeare had had a son called Hamnet and even then it really struck me, this kind of symmetry of the names, because of course in Shakespeare’s times the spelling of course was much less stable, so they are the same name, they’re completely interchangeable in parish records at the time. And even then, even though I was a long way off from being a parent, I knew this gesture from a man who was so mysterious spoke volumes to us as an audience and as a reader. You don’t call perhaps your greatest tragedy after your dead son for nothing. It’s something that’s telling us a huge amount and all we have to do is try and listen. So I think it was lots of things that I found challenging about the idea of doing it really, not only of course because it is him and just the two words of his name carry such enormous heft – all of us have our own relationship with Shakespeare in our head, we all have a version of him inside of us, I think. He pervades our very language and he changes and continues to change the way we think about ourselves and the way we think about our relationships with others. So obviously, yes, taking him on did feel like… It’s quite a challenge, that’s true, and I think that’s part of the reason why I never name him in the book, he doesn’t appear by his name – he’s always called the tutor, or the father, or the husband or whatever, the son…

In a sense I needed to divorce him from his reputation at that point because the book starts when he’s eighteen and he’s a long way off from being the William Shakespeare that we know and love. So it was partly that, but also I think I had an odd superstition – I’m not a very superstitious person – but I have a son and two daughters, as Shakespeare did, and I knew in a sense that I couldn’t write this book until my own son was well past the age of eleven.

Not that there was a huge risk of him contracting Black Death?! No, but I knew I’d have to write it and I’d have to put myself inside the skin and the mind of someone who sits at the bed of her child and she’s unable to save him, she has to watch him die and she has to lay him out for burial. I found that I couldn’t write that book until I knew my son was well past that age. It was just an odd superstition about it. So I did make various stabs at it and one of the first decisions you have to make when writing is at what point along the book’s chronology do you choose to jump in? If you imagine that your book starts at 110

A and it goes all the way to B and that can be a span of however many years suits the story – 100 years or two years or a day or whatever – but your first decision as a novelist is where at that point, where along that line do you jump in. So I’d given myself this talking to and I thought, I’m going to have one final stab and if it doesn’t work then I’m going to forget about it. I had a document that I had made various forays into and it was about 20,000 words long and I read it all and I thought, no, this is all wrong, I’ve jumped in at the wrong point.

I’m jumping in much too near to the end and I need to jump in much nearer to the beginning, so I ditched that whole 20,000 words and started again and I just had this picture of a boy. I needed to start with him, Hamnet, I wanted to bring him back to life. I think that was the driving force behind the book – I’ve always felt that Hamnet the boy has been much too overlooked by history and literary criticism and audiences and everyone who reads that play… One of the things I did when I was starting to write the book is I would ask friends of mine who, like me, studied literature at university and I’d say to them, “Did you know that Shakespeare had a son called Hamnet?” And almost every single one of them, nine out of ten of them would say, I had no idea! Someone said to me, you can’t say that, you can’t make that up and I said I promise you I didn’t make it up, it’s true! There are records to show it, there is proof, he had a son called Hamnet. And I felt, well, if they don’t know then he’s not well known enough. I don’t feel that enough people know about him, that enough people realise that without his very early death at the age of eleven we wouldn’t have Hamlet the play, we wouldn’t have Twelfth Night. I wanted to give him a voice and a presence and to say he was important. He was grieved for deeply. The other thing I kept coming up against in these biographies, which are maybe 500 pages long, biographies of Shakespeare, Hamnet the boy would get maybe two references if he’s lucky, his birth and then his death. And often his death was followed by quite a few paragraphs on statistics on infant mortality in the late sixteenth century and the implication was that it was so common for children to die, perhaps it wasn’t really that upsetting at all. It really got me, that presumption that Hamnet wasn’t grieved or not grieved much because all you have to do is read maybe the first act of Hamlet and you can feel it. The whole play is informed and underpinned by this enormous chasm of grief and loss and absence. So I’ve always felt that anyone who suggests Shakespeare and his family didn’t grieve for Hamnet is very, very wrong.

PF: Although the way in which his son’s death impacts upon the playwright is one of the most beautifully explored and played with elements of the book, 111

the heart of it is the mother’s grief, and alongside the extraordinary – the best sex scene I’ve ever read, no really! – the moment in which she lays the child’s body out is one of the most extraordinary tragic pieces of fiction I’ve read for as long as I can remember. She is the absolute heart of this, isn’t she? And whilst you are also throwing a nod to everyone whose partner works away and the frustrations of bringing up a family, or going off to do your job in the city, it’s actually all about her and I love that this isn’t a redress of putting somebody back in where they were missing, it’s actually her story and the domestic life there is the story of the Shakespeares that you’re telling and not the glamorous guy who goes off up to town to make a fortune.

MO: Well, I think I felt that story had been told many, many times. We’re all familiar with versions of it because none of us know the truth. I suppose my wish with this book was to imply and explore the idea that although obviously, and quite rightly so, the locus has always been on his career in London – with good reason that’s been what people have concentrated on! But it’s always seemed to me ever since I heard, in a very cold classroom in Scotland, about the existence of this boy, it’s always seemed to me that the biggest drama of Shakespeare’s life happened off stage, in Stratford, and that’s the death of his son and I think it probably affected him very, very deeply and certainly affected his writing. And so it was that drama that I wanted to inhabit and that drama I wanted to write about – not necessarily the quite well-handled story of him rising from pretty much nothing to the stage in London. I wanted to shift the focus of the camera and say, what about this story? This is a story that we don’t know much about at all.

PF: You talked about where to enter the story, where to enter the plot and one of the marvels of the book is the way in which you play with time. Time has a fluidity – events happen in the past, in the present, and although you write in this continuous present tense which gives it such extraordinary urgency, you show us – which drama on the stage can’t do – the connections and depths that the present is informed by and I think that’s extraordinarily clever.

MO: Thank you! I think with this book I wanted to try and understand what it was like for people in Stratford, how he might have been viewed. London had its own narrative in his life, and of course he was very much involved with the stage, but I was wondering idly one day how people in Stratford might have viewed him. I think it’s entirely possible that none of them actually knew what he was writing, or what his plays were like – it was a four-day walk from 112

Stratford to London, if you were young and healthy, three if you could borrow or use a horse, perhaps less if you could get a lift from someone. It’s a long way and it’s possible – nobody knows of course, but it’s possible – that his wife and daughters never saw any of his plays. But I think I was interested in the idea of how people in Stratford at that time might have viewed him and whether he was considered unusual. He must have been extraordinary even as a teenager.

I was just imagining what it would have been like to be his teacher at school!

His Greek teacher or his Latin teacher or his rhetoric teacher… He must have stuck out like a sore thumb! I think it was just trying to view him not as the man we know but as somebody we don’t know. I suspect that a lot of the people in Stratford saw him as a businessman and a landowner and perhaps somebody who was vaguely connected to the slightly disreputable world of playhouses. I think even he… one of the things that fascinates me about him is he had absolutely no interest in preserving his writing for posterity. Both Marlowe and Johnson made sure their works were collected and printed before they died and Shakespeare did not. He obviously had no interest at all in making sure his plays survived. It’s only down to the actions and diligence of his two friends and colleagues in the King’s Men who, after he died, collected up all his manuscripts and papers and made the first folio, which is the reason we have the plays today. It’s an extraordinary thought, and I find that interesting about him; did he not, perhaps, even know his own value?

PF: It’s extraordinary, also, given that publication of Venus and Adonis made his fortune the first time. It was a book that pretty much everybody had a copy of in the house, somewhere between an Alex Comfort and the Bible. It was the most popular book of his time. Can I just ask you about how you approach Tudor or Elizabethan or Shakespearean times with language? You can’t give the contemporary rules that we have, there’s vocabulary, there’s stuff that you need to resolve in order to maintain the authenticity and the illusion that you’re maintaining an authentic language of his time. How do you start that and what are your rules?

MO: My first and very hard and fast rule was that I was not going to do any cod-Elizabethan dialogue because that would have just been intolerable! The idea that you could read Shakespeare’s plays and then try and emulate his dialogue is not only quite arrogant but also it would be so wrong! If I had picked up that book I would have read it and instantly chucked it across the room. So that was an absolute… that was my springboard, in a sense. But

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you’re right, it was a very interesting challenge writing this book and in a sense it almost felt a bit like going back to the beginning and writing my first book, actually, because I had to completely discard everything I thought I knew about writing books and creating metaphors and themes and analogies because, you know, you can’t just reach for your habitual imagery. You can’t say ‘her scream was as loud as a telephone bell’ because telephones weren’t to exist for a very long time! So in a sense it made me work much, much harder than I’ve ever done before, I think because you have to avoid every single anachronism you possibly can, and I also had a rule that I couldn’t use any word that didn’t have that meaning in the sixteenth century, so I did the last few drafts with the OED beside me and I looked up lots of words and lots of imagery that had to go – my editor is brilliant and she highlighted the word – there’s a scene in which his sister comes to talk to him up in an attic and they’re discussing the fact that he’s fallen in love with Hathaway and I described a scene where the sister is pleating her dress, she’s looking down and pleating her skirt, in concertina folds, and my editor underlined it and said concertinas didn’t exist until the nineteenth century! So obviously that had to go – the only other I can remember is shambles; I had said that something had descended into a shambles and I had to change that because I looked that up in the OED and in those days the word shambles meant to dice and quarter up a carcass! A completely different meaning, you can see where our meaning came from but that had to go as well.

I didn’t want to use anything that grated. I hope I caught them all, I probably didn’t and I’m sure there are people out there who could underline lots of it! But my aim was to get the language – to be modern and not grate on the reader’s ear in that cod-Elizabeth, prithee sirrah, way but also to be as true as I could to the way language would have been used then.

PF: Can I ask one last question before opening this up to the many, many people, thousands of people who are watching this around the world. When you wrote this, I’m presuming over the last thirty years and more particularly over the last couple of years, you cannot have anticipated the context in which it arrived. This is a book about a death from plague and with some bizarre and hideous irony it’s somehow utterly contemporary, it’s of now by accident. I wonder if we’ve been simply unaware that we have always lived with isolation and quarantine and plague and whether the life that you have given these characters in that context is in any way a kind of roadmap for us or will simply help us as readers and as a society to understand where we are and to keep going?

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MO: Obviously I never foresaw what is happening to us now – none of us did, unless you’re Barack Obama, who I think did see it… So, yeah, it was actually a big surprise, I didn’t expect this to happen at all. I think I believed for a long time, and even more so now, that our folkloric memory of the Black Death and its different pandemics, different surges and outbreaks that it had, have always defined us in a sense. I think particularly in Europe and in Britain it is something that we all know about. It’s one of the history lessons we all recognise from school, we all have it, even in our language, the reason why we say ‘bless you’ to people after they sneeze is something that crosses all cultures and languages and was because of the plague, because the sneeze was the first sign of a disease that could kill you in twenty-four hours. It’s the reason why we give flowers to people, because Elizabethans and medieval people believed that if you carried a posy of flowers it would protect you from plague miasma. Even our very geography and the streets of cities that we live on, plague is a very definitive town planner. Many of the green spaces in London, particularly those small pockets of land you get in quite built-up areas, are because underneath them are the mass graves from the Black Death. Not even very long ago the Crossrail engineers unearthed some fourteenth-century plague graves. Where I live in Edinburgh there’s a particular area of the park that goes up and down and all the kids love to cycle on it and sledge in winter, and those are again covering up mass graves from the plague. So it’s an awareness of that pandemic that we walk on every single day and we still speak the language of it. So I think, looking back at a population like the Elizabethans who lived constantly with this stress – Shakespeare’s career would have been constantly interrupted by outbreaks of the plague, the first thing the city authorities did when Black Death came to London was to shut down the playhouses. The capacity of the Globe was about three thousand people, I believe! And if you think, on a hot summer’s afternoon, three thousand people all cramped together, you can see why they were considered to be viral hotspots. So he would have been forced to maybe come home to Stratford to his family or to go on tour to Shropshire, smaller towns, Bath, that didn’t have the plague, so it was something they lived with constantly and they were very, very used to quarantine and to cities being shut down and houses being locked and kept inside for forty days. That’s where the word quarantine comes from, because the Venetians invented the idea of you stay inside for forty days – the Italian for forty is quaranta. So it is ever present in our language and our cities and our geography. If we look back to them the legacy we can take from those pandemics’ legacies is that we will come through it as a population but we will be different, we will have to make 115

ourselves anew and we’re going to have to accept whatever new normal will come after this. And I think… three months after Shakespeare was baptised there’s an entry in the Stratford-upon-Avon register that says Hic incipit pestis (Here begins plague) and a tenth of the town died after that. But luckily that three-month-old baby survived and became the world’s greatest ever writer and I think those three words will be written in our hearts and in our memories and in our minds. We will always remember 2020 as the time when ‘here begins plague’.

PF: Maggie, thank you very much indeed.

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Roger Robinson and Peter Frankopan THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF LITERATURE ONDAATJE PRIZE The chair of this year’s jury interviews the winner of the 2020 Ondaatje Prize.

Writer and educator Roger Robinson has taught and performed worldwide and is an experienced workshop leader and lecturer on poetry.

This conversation took place at Hay Festival Digital on Thursday 28 May 2020 in association with the Royal Society of Literature.

PETER FRANKOPAN: I’m delighted to be hosting a talk with the winner of this year’s Ondaatje Prize. The Ondaatje Prize is awarded every year by the Royal Society of Literature, which is both our partner and sponsor of this event, to reward the work published in the last year that most resonates and evokes a particular place. This year’s winner is the poet Roger Robinson with his book A Portable Paradise. Roger is a poetry superstar and joins us this evening on the Hay Digital stage which allows us to connect and communicate with so many people in so many ways. So Roger, congratulations on winning this year’s Ondaatje Prize for your wonderful book.

ROGER ROBINSON: Thank you very much Peter, it was indeed an honour and it’s been very helpful! Very helpful to my career and my ability to connect with other writers and organisations and to try and get things done.

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PF: Well, we had a fantastic longlist and superb shortlist this year, but when the judges were talking about the prize we had already started to go into a form of lockdown and then, in fact, during the shortlist period into complete lockdown and your book, your poems, spoke to us of a sense of loss, of injustice, of being locked up. Lots of themes that resonated particularly strongly with us. Will you talk to us first of all about how you wrote A Portable Paradise, what are these poems about, how do they tie together and things like that?

RR: Well, I was born in England but I went to Trinidad when I was three, so I was raised in Trinidad and I came back to England when I was nineteen to study and stayed. I’d lived in England longer than I had been raised in Trinidad and I’d stopped having the idea that I was going to go back to the Caribbean and I was planning on having a child. And I started to really turn my eye to what I was bringing my child into and so the original idea was to really have an examination of the idea of paradise. If I could build the paradise in England that I had in Trinidad, if I could make this paradise portable. So the first thing I thought I’d do is really examine philosophically what paradise was about, but as I was beginning to write over a seven year period politics was changing super quickly, and I felt it really fell on me to respond to those politics. So we had Grenfell happen, and many of those people who were victims of the Grenfell fire disaster were immigrants. They came here looking for a paradise and they got the fires of hell. The whole Windrush debacle happened. When you tell an elderly Western Indian person to come in for a meeting and they’re carted off to an island they haven’t been to in 50 something years, what do they think about on the plane? Do they think that they’re going back to paradise? My child’s birth story was fairly convoluted and then paradise began to stand for hope. So paradise began to stand for different things and intersect different stories, intersect politics, intersect some elements of my life, and so the book grew incrementally and each part of it was kind of held together by the idea of paradise.

PF: The poems start with a very powerful sequence about Grenfell, which is such an emotive and difficult thing to write about. There’s a combination of anger and rage about injustice, but there are also, in some cases, very hopeful poems. The idea of seeing people who look like your lost ones and loved ones – how was Grenfell and the tragedy… Was it an easy thing to write about? In the days after the tragedy was it something you felt you wanted to engage with or did it take longer to settle down and to think, how did you articulate what

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you felt and those who’d lost loved ones had gone through?

RR: When I first came to this country, for the first six years in living in England I lived in tower blocks, so I had a sense of what it was to live in a tower block. I felt it viscerally when I was looking at it happening because I had lived in tower blocks before and understood that this could have been people who I knew.

It didn’t take me long to start writing about it at all, because to some extent, because it affected me so strongly I immediately started writing about it, and at first it was just the emotional outpouring and sadness, but then I wanted to try and create empathy for those lives. As the media started to cover it, I wasn’t satisfied with the media coverage because I felt there was a power dynamic between the victims and what needed to be told and that made me want to reduce that power dynamic. I wanted to honour the people who lived there and who survived and who lost lives and that type of stuff. So no, it didn’t take me long, but I wrote a lot more than what’s in the book. I definitely was trying to create empathy for the people who suffered in it.

PF: So I don’t know whether you’d like Roger to read the opening poem, ‘The Missing’, to give a flavour to those who haven’t read the book, to capture the terrible scenes, but also how well articulated in a way that captures the moment?

RR: I’ll read this whole poem because I don’t think it takes that long.

THE MISSING (For the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire disaster) As if their bodies became lighter, ten of those seated in front pews began to float, and then to lie down as if on a bed. Then pass down the aisle, as if on a conveyor belt of pure air, slow as a funeral cortege, past the congregants, some sinking to their knees in prayer.

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One woman, rocking back and forth, muttered, What about me Lord, why not me?

The Risen stream slowly, so slowly out the gothic doors and up to the sky, finches darting deftly between them.

Ten streets away, a husband tries to hold onto the feet of his floating wife. At times her force lifts him slightly off the ground, his grip slipping. He falls to his knees with just her highheeled shoe in his hand.

He shields and squints his eyes as she is backlit by the sun.

A hundred people start floating from the windows of a tower block; from far enough away they could be black smoke from spreading flames.

A father with a child on top of his shoulders; men in sand coloured galiibeas; a woman with an Elvis quiff and vintage glasses, a deep indigo hijab flapping in the wind; an artist in a wax-cloth headwrap all airborne, these superheroes, this airborne pageantry of faith, this flock of believers.

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Amongst the cirrus clouds floating like hair, they begin to look like a separate city.

Someone looking on can mistake them for new arrivals to earth.

They are the city of the missing.

We, now, the city of the stayed.

PF: So this collection opens with poems about Grenfell, but it’s also about lots of different themes. One of the locations is paradise, the idea that we carry around with us an idea of what that paradise might mean. I’d like to come to that, maybe a little bit later, but we also get a picture of London, of Brixton, of broken dreams. These balances between optimism and hope on the one hand, but then of people being cheated, of not having their dreams fulfilled and being taken advantage of also speaks very loudly. Do you balance those deliberately?

How do you find the calibration between hopefulness and, I think, a demand for high levels of justice?

RR: Right, I mean what I’m trying to do all the time is bring people into a story.

I’m not trying to tell the reader what to think, I’m trying to create, for want of a better word, an ecology or culture where people can come into this world, empathise, but take what they want out from it. I think the book is a political book but I don’t consider it a political book. I think it’s politicised, but it’s really more about highlighting how it is to live for a certain group of people, which people may not have an insight into. Many people don’t know about the lives of black and minority ethnic people because they only see them on the media and they don’t interact with them, but what I wanted to show is that their lives, and sometimes structures that plot against the lives, cause a certain amount of suffering that all people should be able to empathise with. Because all people want to raise their family, they want to have access to a good job, they want to have creativity in their lives, they want to have diversity in their lives, they want proper housing, they want food. So I think the interiority of the lives that I talk about in the poems is the interiority of everyone – it’s not just specific to black and minority ethnic people and that’s what I wanted to get over. They are and I am no different from you, but yet we are rendered invisible all the time and what I want in the book is to not make the interiority of their lives and their general living invisible. I wanted to make black and minority ethnic people visible in a way that people can relate to – not in terms of pathos, but in terms 123

of empathy.

PF: And how does poetry help as a medium for that? Does that present challenges? Do you think that gives opportunities to write in different ways about these issues? How do you see your role as a writer in capturing those topics?

RR: Well, you know, I think a lot of inhumanity, racism, allowing structures that are inherently racist to go through, overt racism where people are attacked, is because of the lack of practice of empathy. Poems are essentially empathy machines. If you practise through empathy that type of reading, my hope as a writer is that you can practise that out in the world, that you will start thinking of the world differently because you have practised. It comes to some extent through all types of writing, that empathy, but specifically through poetry and that’s why I think I’m drawn to poetry, because I think it can be very effective.

Also with poetry there’s this sense of you can see the writer and hopefully the reader gets to practise an extreme level of vulnerability, and that makes you move differently in the world. Because vulnerability especially, I can tell you, my experience as a black male is something that is shunned. Black male vulnerability, nobody wants to hear about that, not even in black communities.

But I think that it is a part of being human and I think poetry helps people to practise being human.

PF: And how’s your journey to discover that… I mean, have you always been interested in poetry as a reader and a writer? How have you got to where you are now where you’re writing poetry full time with enormous distinction and success in terms of discovering a medium where you can express these things in such eloquent ways? Has there been a pathway that has opened up in front of you? Have you had to look for it? How’s your journey been to be an Ondaatje Prize-winning poet?

RR: I like that you say that, Peter, just say that again! An Ondaatje Prize-winner!

Just say that all the time! My pathway has been part me and part help. I’ve had incredibly good mentors who have helped me to understand what poetry is about. Mentors like Kwame Dawes, mentors like Bernadine Evaristo, and I’ve had loads of them. But then I’ve also had mentors who don’t know that I was their mentee! I’m just looking at everything they’re saying, everything they’re learning and when they talk and read interviews and even reading people’s books, I learn things. I remember the first time I ever heard a poet called Carl 124

Hancock Rux and I understood what empathy meant. I did not feel sorry for him, I felt what he felt and that was a sea change for me as a writer. In this particular book I try to get away from the ‘I’, even if it’s a literary ‘I’, because I wanted it to not be about me and my head or me and my story. I wanted to change up how people viewed the world. I was hoping this work could elevate itself to a sort of public work and that, with time, it could act as if it were a new form of documentary. I definitely had that feeling, but I had loads of examples of that, so people like Linton Kwesi Johnson and when he wrote about black British people in the 1970s and ’80s and the problems with the police, it’s now a documentary record of living in that time and he’s someone who still performs on a regular basis and his books serve a particular purpose.

Even I considered it high literature, but I couldn’t find a lot of what I consider literature with a capital L writing about black England, so I decided to scratch my own itch there.

PF: One of your poems in this collection, Roger, is called ‘A Journalist Repeatedly Asked Me About Race in a Poetry Interview’. Can you tell us a bit about that one, because I’ve read it so many times now and I can’t tell whether it had to be a negative thing, because again it’s quite ambiguous and I assume that ambiguity is also intentional as a result; but talk to us about that one.

RR: It was meant to be ambiguous, it was actually meant for people to think er… A lot of journalists ask me, “Can I ask you something about race? Is that something you don’t want to hear?” I’m like, no, it’s fine! But sometimes… the overall thing of that poem is that sometimes you are a poet and you’re asked to be a spokesperson for an entire race of people and sometimes you want to say things that from your personal experience you observe, but, you know, you can’t be a spokesperson for a race, because a race of people is not monolithic and I’m not an elected representative for all black and minority ethnic groups, I’m just telling my story about what I observe from my side. But sometimes you can be pushed towards doing that and pushed to be the representation of that and sometimes people forget that I’m a poet. So in many articles or many interviews I’ve done I have to say that I am not a sociologist, I’m not a doctor, because sometimes people ask me, “Why are black people dying from…” I’m not a doctor but this is what I see, I’m not a politician but this is what I think.

Because I am a poet and that’s my main interest. Everything else comes after poetry, so it was mischievous, Peter, I was just trying to be mischievous. It swills, it swills hard and as my friend Caroline Burn says, poems swills be hard so it

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leaves you thinking like uh? What? You know!

PF: You can also be a spokesperson for poetry in the way that a singular, personal voice that you have that represents your views, your ways of telling stories and asking people to engage with them, but then the expectations are that you’re talking about a genre, so is that something that brings its own pressures too?

RR: I mean, I’ve been practising poetry seriously for twenty-five years and I got some recognition at fifty-two. I don’t feel much pressure anymore to be honest with you, Peter, like I ain’t got no pressure on my man. There’s no pressure for me at all, man! I’m just glad that in my lifetime people are going to read the book, that I’m able to affect some kind of change and I can have a dialogue with people who contact me on the website, on emails, from different countries because thanks to things like the Ondaatje Prize my book has been put out to a bigger, wider range of readers and I’m just thankful for that. I know brilliant writers who have never got recognition but they were just as good as me or even better than me or much, much better than me. So I am very aware as a black writer that I am incredibly lucky to be in a time when you can have the conversation about the Ondaatje Prize and I can be there, because there were times when black writers didn’t have that kind of access. People weren’t open to these stories, publishers weren’t open to these stories, readers weren’t open to these stories, so I think I’m lucky to be in a time where people are open to that kind of conversation, and I feel very grateful and I feel like I need to pay heed to a lot of writers before me who were absolutely brilliant and they never got theirs, as I do feel that I have to try with the next generation of writers. Any one of them I can pull through, I’m going to pull through – everybody look out for this poet here, his name is Gboyega Odubanjo, he’s a great poet, he’s going to be a great one – trust me. I’m never wrong about these things.

PF: You said something very interesting, Roger, about mentors and mentees and what you’ve just been saying about bringing new writers on and so forth, it’s such a profoundly important thing about giving inspiration. How is your relationship with mentors now? Do you show your work to other people? Do you listen to their advice? How do you deal with feedback? And then how do you deal with the process of being a mentor to others? Do you let people find you? Do you go looking for them? How do you try and bring people along?

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RR: Bringing people along is not forced. Now a lot of the time, because my time… I used to have a lot of time to read a lot of manuscripts for people, offer suggestions; now I realise my time is a lot shorter, but anywhere I can recommend great young writers, if they have stuff that they want to talk to me about, ideas that they have… So if I’m doing a workshop I try to get them on the workshop for free – as my mentors did for me. So I do my best within the timeframe I have. I can’t do like one-to-ones anymore but what I can do is try to be a role model, give them advice and tell them come and do this thing here, this might be interesting and steer them to where the opportunity is.

My mentors, my main mentors, have become my friends but I still trust them because they always have my best interests at heart and so when they tell me something I take it seriously. I’m at the point where I don’t necessarily have to make every change they say now because I have my own opinions and now I’m not just a mentee, I’m now a sensei! But it’s good, I still go to my mentors and of course one of the publishers, Jeremy Pointing, he’s very good about writing, and between him and Kwame Dawes I have good people there, and Bernadine still weighs in any time I ask. Yeah, it’s very easy for writing in BAME communities, especially literary writing, to die. Especially if you don’t have a few cultural agitators who think about the generational healthiness of literary writing, you know, and I have had people do it for me and I intend to do it for other people – that’s very important for me. I consider that part of the role of my writing. My expanded role now that I have recognition, but I’ve always done it – twenty years ago I started an organisation called Malika’s Poetry Kitchen and I wasn’t anywhere but whatever I had I needed to pass it on to others.

PF: It would be great if you could read us another of your poems, maybe ‘The Job of Paradise’, just to capture the sensitivity, exactly what you said about talking about vulnerability as a man is hard enough, but also in different kinds of communities it means different kinds of things. It would be great to have ‘Job of Paradise’ but then I’d like to talk about your poem about nurses too, which was very well timed, I think, with what’s happening now. If you could read us a couple more that would be great and then we’ll have some questions coming in too.

RR: Yeah for sure.

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THE JOB OF PARADISE It is the job of Paradise to comfort those who’ve been left behind, to think that all those loved and lost live on there like tiny gods.

It is the job of mumbled prayers to help you calm your hurts and fears.

It is the job of the long black hearse to show we head to death from birth.

It is the job of the clean, neat grave to remind us how to live our days.

If only I could live my days till death suffice and make Earth feel like Paradise.

PF: Beautiful, that’s the last poem in the Grenfell section. I wonder what your idea about paradise is, whether it’s another place or whether it’s achievable here?

RR: Right, what I quite like about paradise is how malleable the idea is. Because paradise, in different cultures, means completely different things. If you mention paradise to Christians they conjure up some idea of heaven. If you mention paradise to tourists they conjure up glassy seas and white sands. If you mention paradise to a child, he will think about his toys and sweets. So paradise is chameleon-like to loads of different people and that’s why writing and trying to pin it down was a very interesting thing for me. That’s why the book morphed into different sections of the book. But also in the book there’s a thin line about how valued the black body is. So even like when I decided to put in poems about my son, I put it in because, even though it was what I call personal poems, they were poems where my son’s black body was valued and I thought

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it was on theme and also there was a greater resonance publicly. Because the role of nurses, and Caribbean nurses in particular, I thought even though it was to some extent there was the ‘I’ in it, I thought it wasn’t just personal, it was personal, political and public, and I thought that was interesting and that’s why it’s kept its place. It nearly wasn’t there, it nearly didn’t go in but eventually it did and I’m glad it did. You mention the nurses…

PF: No, I was just going to say in an hour we’re going to be standing in the streets and applauding our health workers, maybe it would be best to read it to us because of those questions of the humdrum, the sacrifice, and the things that people do and the unsung heroes and their importance in our lives so we can carry on looking at paradise on this earth rather than having to wait for the resurrection.

RR: The ‘On Nurses’ poem was shared a lot and a lot of nurses took to it and this ‘On Nurses’ poem was put up in the waiting rooms and stuff, so it was prescient in a way I couldn’t predict, but in a way what I was saying was, ‘Wow, in my time of despair when I needed help, it wasn’t anybody else but the workers who helped me and my son live’, and in a way I think that’s what’s happening now with Covid, even though I wrote this book a long time before Covid, and it’s been reflected in Covid. Because in Covid we realise that we don’t necessarily need hedge-fund managers and billionaires. They’re not going to save anybody. Money’s irrelevant if you’re sick and you can’t breathe – it’s relevant if you have to pay privately. But those are not the people who help.

The people who help were the regular workers and I think there’s a pride in that and so I’m very pro-NHS.

ON NURSES Surely this is more a calling than a job. The doldrums of the nightshift paired with the odd life-threading injury, applying pressure to a gaping wound. Their nurses’ shoes clip-clopping down the halls, the thoughts of patients’ suffering or dead, following them back home.

Surely they know that life is random, how death can creep up on the innocent, but how these things can sometimes pull spirits back from the brink into their bodies. Like midwives to the spirit. In that moment do they forget their training and think, if I do this perhaps 129

they will live? Can you train instinct? I’m not sure. They see it all: the birth, the death, the vomit, the blood, the shock, the disease, the perturbed, the pain, the smiles. I see them pressing their uniforms for the next shift, washing their hands with a soap that makes their palms peel.

PF: As you said, you couldn’t have predicted how topical and how thoughtful that would be with the current Covid crisis. How many things didn’t make it in?

How do you construct a collection of poems? Does it hang together and work like that in one go or do you roll it over again and again? How do you structure something like this?

RR: Well, I had an idea from the beginning that I wanted to examine paradise, but you can only have that idea and then you have to explore it. So in the exploration I wrote 150 poems for this book – so hold on, not good poems, just 150 poems. Whether they were good or bad was not the point. The idea was to get them done. And so from the 150 poems it did two things, it made me see a bunch of themes that were coming out that I wasn’t aware of until I started reading them together, but it also makes me see where I can push the book and where I can pull the boat backwards. So in terms of poems I don’t know how many poems actually make it. Because after the 150 poems I probably wrote twenty extra to connect and support different sections of the book. So there are probably, in terms of poems, two other books. And I would say one of those books is absolute rubbish and the other of those books has some good poems, but not poems that I feel would make the collection better, or stand out on their own and are strong enough. And then you get to the book and then it’s like running a marathon and then you say to yourself, I can make this book better, how can I make this book better? A lot of my friends are really good poets, a poet Nick Makoha, Malika Booker, a lot of good poets I came upon – there was this programme called ‘The Complete Works’ and a lot of black and minority ethnic poets came through there, and one of the things really there, there’s a thing about how can we make a book better? If we don’t have a lot of shots at this, how can we be so process-based that after the process is done there’s nothing else that we can expect from it? Whether it fails or it wins is not the point because you can’t control that, all you can control is the process of making it.

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Simon Schama RETURN OF THE TRIBES NATIONALISM IN THE AGE OF GLOBAL DISASTER The historian explores the isolations and protections of our current situation in a time of coronavirus, and reflects on the clear and present dangers to society and the world.

This lecture took place at Hay Festival Digital on Wednesday 27 May 2020.

PETER FLORENCE: Hello, welcome to this extraordinarily special event, with a man who has been a foundation stone of the Festival for the last thirty-five years. His patronage, his engagement, his generosity of spirit has meant that we have had no better friend, and no more inspiring, articulate and challenging speaker. Welcome to all of the many tens of thousands of viewers in fortythree countries I can see on my screen. Please join me in giving a very warm welcome to Simon Schama.

SIMON SCHAMA: Thank you so much, Peter, thank you. Hello everybody, it’s wonderful to hear that you’re logging on and tuning in from all over the world.

I have to say that right now, like so many of you, I’ve been thinking about the word ‘infectious’, and the odd times that we use it in a sense that makes up happy, as in infectious enthusiasm, contagious laughter, infectious excitement.

And that is something I absolutely associate with the Hay Festival, when that wonderful logo ‘imagine the world’ comes up, all those benevolent infections start to happen and how do I miss you, Hay! But ex tenebris lux, as I believe the gospel of St John tells us, out of darkness comes light, and the light part of it is, of course, an extraordinary new dimension to Hay’s slogan ‘imagine the world’, it really is ‘connect the world’. “Only connect,” said EM Forster, who I rather wish once in those thirty-five years I could have shared a stage with him at 133

Hay-on-Wye – “only connect.” At the Hay literary festival we connect cultures from all around the world, we’ve been the least parochial, insular-looking event you can possibly imagine. I think the whole glorious history of Hay literary festival, for all of those who I would urge to come once ‘it is no dream/we have a vaccine’, you’ll discover that there is no contradiction between local allegiance when feeling the spirit, the history, the culture of this borderland in Wales between Wales and England, between feeling all those things I’m going to be talking about, really stir the emotions, stir the blood and at the same time looking outwards into the brotherhood and the sisterhood of the republic of letters.

So you would suppose, wouldn’t you really, that a pandemic – the pandemonium of the pandemic – would actually make nationalism in some ways redundant, or at least it would circumscribe it. Remember, what was it called, everybody, remember Brexit, remember that? At least it would shrink it to the level of some strange fever dream that we had a long time ago. I was seeing just other day that Poland, for example, a hotbed of resurgence for very fierce, historically very fundamentalist, nationalism, has the tightest immigration restrictions – even tighter than Hungary I think – of all of eastern Europe and yet has one of the highest rates of fatality from Covid-19. It all seems to make it moot, this particular kind of paranoid hysteria about who can come in and who cannot, and yet you all know this actually hasn’t been the way it’s played out, has it? Let me give you an example of how intense and what a tight grip the populist nationalist vocabulary, the sense of the contagion itself, of the infection itself being an invasion – remember all those military metaphors that were used particularly in the early phase – how that’s played out. For a start there is our own local tragic fiasco, really.

When it was pointed out, I think in March, there was a discussion in the EU among the EU health authorities – actually it was earlier than that, I think it was at the latest in February – of joint procurement of medical supplies, all those things one needs, from ventilators to respirators, to all the personal protection equipment that would be needed to face the coming onslaught of the pandemic, and it was pointed out that an invitation was made to the UK, notwithstanding its formal exit, and in fact that invitation had happened on the very same day that the exit of the UK from the EU – 31 January of this year – was happening. And what happened thereafter was an extraordinary kind of mad post-Brexit kerfuffle, really, in which the government tried to say, well,

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we’ve got the email saying we could join in the joint procurement of supplies and then, even more extraordinarily, said well we are no longer members of the EU and so we deliberately took the decision not to be part of this cooperation! It’s since made muffled noises of regret but that was one of the most extraordinary, absurd instances, really, of the priorities of this redundant chauvinism, actually, arguably, costing lives in the hospitals and for our health workers on the front line.

Another example – I won’t give you too many. On 13 April of this year the World Health Organisation (which may not have been perfect – which global institution is? It could have done more to promote better transparency from China, but nonetheless) gathered something like, I think, twenty or thirty scientists from all around the world, including the great Professor Sarah Gilbert from the Vaccine Laboratory in Oxford. These were scientists from fifteen separate countries, published a letter under the auspices of the WHO promising international collaboration in the development of vaccines and also of preventative drugs as well and to make sure that once the Holy Grail had been taken, once actually results had been reached, they wouldn’t simply be partitioned off into the stockpile of one country or another. So that was 13 April, everybody. One day after, Donald Trump actually said that he was freezing funds to the WHO and denounced it essentially as a tool of Chinese propaganda – one day after! I mean really, totally extraordinary.

But this, of course, is part of an ancient syndrome called ‘blame the Asians’ really. This goes all the way back to the appearance of the bubonic plague in 1346 when a Mongol army that was suffering from bubonic plague was besieging a citadel held by Genoese merchants and mercenary soldiers in the port city of Caffa in the Crimea and the Mongols did actually take to catapulting dead bodies infected with the plague over the walls – the very first recorded instance, I think, of conscious biological warfare. So the Genoese ships, according to an eye witness called Gabriele de’ Mussi, took the infection back to Europe and that’s how it arrived. Well, the result of that, however much was apocryphal and however much was true, blame the East for whatever infection happens to be beleaguering the West has been an ancient syndrome.

For example, it was quite common to describe cholera in the late nineteenth century as the revenge of the colonised peoples of the East, the yellow peril and so on. So ‘blame the Asian’ has been an old part of this game, but what I think we take away from this, and some of it will be slightly less depressing

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to hear by the end of my remarks, what we take away with this is really that notwithstanding what you would suppose the commonwealth of science, the commonwealth of imperial reason, would produce a kind of lowering of national borders would actually enhance the claims of internationalism rather than nationalism. Nationalism has proved an extremely sturdy and obstinate sentiment. I’m talking to you from upstate New York, the whole area around New York is about as cosmopolitan a metropolis, of course, as you can imagine, as are Chicago and San Francisco and there is already a sense of bitter polemic going on in the American heartland which is those ugly, cosmopolitan cities in the east and the Midwest and the evil liberal west coast, like San Francisco in particular and Oakland, which somehow have been the nesting places of toxic biological poison and we don’t get that happening in the great heartland. Well, it is absolutely happening in the heartland, actually, infection rates have shot up in the south and the Midwest even as we speak.

But what I want to do is not simply – if this has sounded a bit like a Guardian or a New York Times op-ed – rant at you. I actually want to swerve a bit because it seems to me that it’s a mistake to sneer at the intensity and durability of nationalism. Instead, it’s a bad idea to short-change its staying power. So it sent me back, and the current research I’m doing now, on thinking about what I’m calling tribal allegiance, the allegiance of local belonging which plays such a big part in our world. I’ve been working on issues of allegiance in the history books I’ve been writing for a long, long time but I wasn’t aware of that being the organising principle of my inquiry. Maybe it’s because, like so many Jews, I have found there was absolutely no problem in having a passionate allegiance to the country of my birth and upbringing, Britain, and an allegiance to the entirety of Jewish history and the case of my family history, the history on one side that goes back to Romania and Turkey and on the other side to Lithuania and Vienna, so it didn’t seem to be very problematic. So a bit weird for me, actually, to have said, “Yeah what I really want to do when I specialise in history is write the history of collective allegiance of nationalism.” But rather like Monsieur Jourdain in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme who woke up discovering he’d been speaking prose his whole life, I discover that actually is pretty much, without setting out to do, that does actually occupy much of my parochial patience while I’ve been writing about the Dutch in the seventeenth century or the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I came to see that the great driving engine in the French Revolution, quite as much as the hunger for equality and liberty, was a sense of remaking the nation as a nation of the 136

people.

But in the late 1960s when I started to do graduate work and started to think very deeply about research, there was a kind of fusty air about the historical literature of nationalism. It seemed to belong to a different era of topicality, that it was a way you got to explain the nineteenth century and maybe the extreme diseased mutation of nineteenth-century nation-state building into something like fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. There was a distinguished literature, Professor Ernest Gellner the sociologist, Hans Cohn, who started as a Zionist and then became quite a fierce critic of the Zionist project, and of course Benedict Anderson, much more closely a contemporary of mine in the very important and influential book, which you’ll find cited in almost every study of nationalism, called Imagined Communities. But all of those books, even including the important book by Benedict Anderson, really tended to regard nationalism as a kind of contrivance, a sort of almost conspiracy to distract people really from their real interest which, in the case of a sophisticated Marxist theorist like Benedict Anderson, would be classed in income and inequality, by deluding them into a sense of false consciousness, a kind of secular religion, the religion of the nation. I don’t think that’s entirely wrong, but I think, as I say, a little bit to short-change the depth and rootedness of how we feel about allegiance to a country, to its culture, to its history, to its past. What I do want to say, actually, is that of late, of course, the issue of national allegiance has been converted from something which I’m just about to talk about, something which I do think is very deep in the wiring of collective consciousness, into something which is all about excluding foreigners, is actually creating a fantasy nation which only consists of people with the same coloured skin, the same kind of religion, the same kind of language, this very exclusionist view of nationalism that you’ll find, for example, in what Viktor Orbán has to say in Hungary when he talks about Hungary as a citadel of the defence of Christian Europe against the oncoming hoards – all of whom invariably prove to be, guess what, Islamic and Muslim.

So there is a sense in which actually feeling strongly about being rooted in a particular culture is not a zero sum game. You can feel yourself of an international community as well. What really, again in the Brexit debate, those of you who are tuning in from Britain will know only too well, is the bitterly and unhelpfully and polemically twisted when Theresa May talked about those against Brexit as being citizens of nowhere. Or David Goodhart’s book which made the choice absolute between citizens of somewhere and citizens

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of everywhere – no, you can be a citizen and a child of the education and culture of somewhere and still absolutely feel above all part of the universal community of humanity, there’s no contradiction at all in that. But as I say, I think actually a lot of us – and I shouldn’t actually speak for any of my colleagues – but I certainly anyway did short-change the sense in which nationalism could persist into our own time. As I say, both the literature and discussion about it seemed to have a slightly fusty air… We condescended to it at a great cost, intellectually.

I was brought up short by a particular moment which I remember very, very well, I can date it for you – I’m one of those historians who’s actually quite terrible about dates, as London taxi drivers are always reminding me, quite rightly, but this was a particular date and it was 30 June 1989 and I was already living in America, I was living in Lexington, Massachusetts, which itself has both an English and American patriotic resonance, and I was coming back from my office at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to pick up my kids and I was driving along listening to the equivalent of the five o’clock news on the BBC, the National Public Radio, and there was a report from the excellent NPR radio reporter Sylvia Poggioli from Rome, reporting on a speech from somewhere called Kosovo and I’m ashamed to say if I’d heard of Kosovo I couldn’t have pointed to it on a map. I knew, of course, it was somewhere generally in the region of Yugoslavia, I was that stupid and ignorant, and the speech being written by someone I’d never heard of called Slobodan Milošević and he’d given this speech just two days earlier on 28 June 1989 and this speech was delivered at a place called Gazimestan, not very far away from a battlefield site called the Field of Blackbirds, and the significance in Serbian history was that 28 June was also St Vitus’ day, the national saint’s day, but it was the 600th anniversary of the battle of the Field of Blackbirds in which the Tsar or the prince of the Serbs, Lazar, had been defeated by the oncoming Ottoman Sultan, Sultan the first. In fact, both had died on the Field of Blackbirds and it wasn’t clear that it was a shattering defeat for Serbia. But there one of the romances, which I think are actually at the beating heart of national feeling, is the romance of defeat. The persistently opened wound. Now, Milošević actually was very cunning – he was the first, I think, of the ex-communist apparatchiks to figure out a way of climbing out from under the debris of the collapse of state Marxism and he’d figured out the way to do that was by adopting the cause of the Serbs in Kosovo. The Serbs then constituted about 10 per cent of the population, the rest, nearly 90 per cent, being ethnic Albanian. For some 138

time the Serbs in Kosovo claimed they had lost their rights – what they really resented was the fact that under the Yugoslavian constitution, promulgated by Tito six years before he died in 1974, the constitution was in 1974, Kosovo had been given a quasi-autonomous status. It wasn’t one of the independent republics that made up the Yugoslavian confederation of Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia and so on, that had been given autonomy. There was already this burning sense that Kosovo was being lost to Serbia. In the sense that actually this defeat went on and on and on, demographically it was lost, but also somehow Kosovo belonged to Serbia, its population ought to speak SerboCroat, it shouldn’t be speaking Albanian, it was an outrage that this Serbian propaganda feeling thought that there were Albanian language schools and education and so on. So there was a sense of being, rather like the Sudeten Germans in the 1930s, of being swallowed up unjustly and unhistorically by the Albanian majority.

Now two years before, I hope you’re still with me everybody – I’m sorry it’s a little complicated, Balkan history – oh, I also should add something just to make your homework notes even more complicated – that 28 June, St Vitus’ day, was also the day on which Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, thereby setting off the chain of events that would produce the First World War, so that was also an act of Serbian irredentist pan-nationalist fury.

Now two years before the then leader of the President of the Yugoslavian federation had decided to send this kind of slightly enigmatic, not exactly a nonentity but machine party man, Milošević to Pristina in Kosovo, to the major city, the capital of Kosovo, in order to calm Serbian aggressive feeling down. So he went, but boy, this was I think in March 1987, if I remember that rightly, but instead of acting as a pacifier he threw a bloody great barrel of petrol over the entire situation and then produced a match and set light to it! In other words, he actually acted, he saw that he could differentiate himself from this communist apparatchik, and present himself as the messiah of these burning anxieties and grievances that the Serbs had. So in the House of Culture in Pristina, where the Albanian police were trying to control a very unruly Serbian crowd, Milošević said, no policeman, no Albanian policeman will ever hit a Serb again – tremendous uproar, tremendous applause. He’d actually prepared for this! He’d brought television cameras in, he’d already started the process by which this intense Serbian nationalist propaganda engine would take over Politica, a major newspaper, above all Radio Televizija Beograd (Radio Television Belgrade) which became extremely important, and he and Serbia would 139

essentially arise on the strength of this ferocious romance of defeat, defeat that was going to essentially answer the open wound of loss, of exile.

So on that day, this is what Sylvia Poggioli reported. I was actually so struck by this, everybody, I actually decided to park. I drove off Route 2 going to Lexington, Massachusetts, and thought about this and it was like an old, slightly off meal that you’d had that you’d decided stupidly to put in the freezer and then warmed up. It was this kind of awful visceral queasiness came back to me and I thought, uh-oh, this is very clever and this is very, very bad news.

Two years later on that day, on 28 June, the 600th anniversary of the Field of Blackbirds, Milošević descended on a crowd of one million Serbs who’d not only been bussed in and driven in from metropolitan Serbia but also from Croatia and Slovenia and certainly from Bosnia-Herzegovina, one million of them, at least a million of them; out of the helicopter comes the Serbian messiah Milošević and he gives this long speech and you can all actually see it, it’s archived very readily, I think it’s there on YouTube, and there was a film made about the Battle of the Field of Blackbirds just around the same time.

And he’s very careful not to beat the drums as ferociously as he’d done two years before, not the very violent, nationalist message he’d given in November 1988, in other words a few months before. But nonetheless he said, we are on a new battlefield, not a literal battlefield – although, and this of course was taken up by all the media, we should not rule that out, we should not exclude that entirely. But we are fighting essentially to save the soul of Serbia, and Politica, the newspaper, said we are once again in the time of Kosovo, meaning the time of battle.

You can imagine how that made the Albanian majority feel, and quite rightly, that their autonomy was going to be revoked and in the months after that speech in Gazimestan near the Field of Blackbirds, autonomy was revoked, Albanian education was shut down, the Slovenians and the Croats and Bosnians all took panic at this, of course, were quite rightly alarmed and started to mobilise beginning in Slovenia, seeing it as a programme of militant Serbian nationalism, essentially the conversion of what had been the Yugoslav confederation into a kind of greater Serbia. So essentially a parallel life developed in Kosovo in which the Albanian majority had secret private schools, university courses, café life, in Pristina, but suffered essentially an occupation by Serbian armies and Serbian police and so on. That eventually ended, as you all know, in the war – the last episode of the tragic Balkan wars in 1998–99 which

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was stopped eventually by NATO and the bombing of Serbia itself.

In the time that remains I want to talk about these romances. I use the term in the eighteenth-century sense in which they’ve actually constituted what I really call the kind of anthropological psychology of nationalism and fierce patriotism, and the first document in this is really quite extraordinary because it’s untrue to say that nationalism begins completely in the Romantic movement. It plays a part, I think, in the Reformation. Supporters of Brexit are not wrong to point out that there was an element of English nationalism in the reformation, I think that’s quite right. What was crucial then is there was a sense of actually rebelling against an imperial institution, the Catholic empire itself or the papacy, and the sense of separation out from that, but what was crucial was the translation of the Bible into your vernacular language. Whether you’re German, there’s an intense bolt of German nationalism in Luther’s writing, or whether it’s Tyndale’s Bible in English. If you want to look at the one country, really, which was extremely conscious of its own distinct history, you’d look at the history of the Netherlands, the United Provinces, the Dutch Republic, which I’ve written about before, which actually self-consciously thought of itself as exiting some Catholic international institutions that the papacy or the Hapsburg Empire were imposing on them and chose the metaphor of the chosen people in order to assert the distinctiveness of their own identity.

One of the most extraordinary documents which I think announces a new phase in the history of nationalism is the invention of the word ‘nostalgia’. It was actually first coined, or certainly first published, by a Swiss doctor called Johannes Hofer, a young medical student who in 1688 publishes a dissertation on nostalgia for his doctorate in the Univeristy of Basel and he was conscious, of course, of taking the two pieces of Greek – nostos, the sense of wanting to return, and algia, like neuralgia, the sense of acute pain. And what Johannes Hofer and this dissertation – that was originally published in Latin, then went into vernacular translations pretty quickly all through the eighteenth century – what he claimed to have discovered was deep inside our brain and our psyche, and he was actually riffing off new developments in the physiology of the brain first advanced by an English brain anatomist named Thomas Willis in the 1660s and 1670s. It has been said that our imagination and our patterns lay along the anterior ventricle of our brain. Thomas Willis said that these things which are deeply wired are in the centre of the brain, whether he was right or wrong, I suppose closer to the cortex, but they’re very deep inside us. So Hofer said,

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yes indeed, such is the case that we have discovered that Swiss mercenary soldiers – he is publishing this at the University of Basel – who actually have to serve abroad for the king in France or the papacy in Rome go down with a terrible case of nostalgia so critical that they can’t breathe properly, they can’t eat, in some cases they waste away, they want to kill themselves! And they’re no longer fit for military service. This all sounds slightly comical but it was taken deadly seriously, it was taken really deadly seriously by a Russian general in 1733 who discovered that some of his troops claimed to be suffering from nostalgia and said, well, if you are suffering from nostalgia we’re going to bring cartloads of Russian soil – they were fighting in Germany – and we’ll bury you alive in Russian soil. How’s that? Well, that actually cured the problem quite quickly! But the crucial word in German, once the German edition of Hofer’s doctorate had been published, was heimveh, which we would translate very easily as homesickness. So this was something intense and physiological and above all it occurred to you should you hear ‘Le ranz des vaches’ in French, in Genevois, or Verdois patois, if you heard on the Alpine horn or sung by perfect Swiss maidens the song or the tune that summoned cows back from the summer pasture to the lower slopes for winter then you were likely to go down with a horrible disabling case of nostalgia! So it presupposed an intense longing. And the prescription was keep away from the music, keep away from the food, don’t go near cheese, don’t go anywhere near anything too milky and above all do not actually think about the Alpine valleys.

I say it’s hard to take this seriously, but there was a sense in which the notion of loss and the notion of exile was at the psychological root, was at the centre of feeling in your nationalist allegiance. The etymology is very important, it’s part of your birth, it’s a biological condition. The loss is for your childhood, in a sense.

So when those of us who are not particularly nationalist describe nationalist feverish polemics as a kind of childishness, we are unwittingly, perhaps, paying a backhand compliment to that kind of state of mind. The sense of longing to go back to your mother’s milk, to the songs you heard, to a state of innocence before the world, the city, careerism, the drone of the money market, all caught up with you, go back to somewhere simpler, purer, somewhere that courses in your blood and lodges there in the emotional centre of your brain. That was very early on an important part of what people understood to be the engines driving nationalism. Music and language, these are two other romances – three other romances which I think were very important in constituting nationalist feeling and not just everyone, as a piece of antique intellectual history in the 142

eighteenth century, they stay with us because they are genuinely something that spontaneously we respond to. Not an intellectual, not a library thing, but a kind of gut feeling thing. The romance of language, the romance of music, and the romance of geography, the romance of topography, our vision of where it is we once lived and wished to return to or want to live again.

So the romance of language is really very important and as I say romance – I don’t use this in a trivial sense – I use it in order to suggest a body of literature that centrally says cerebration, reason isn’t absolutely everything. There were two German philosopher writers, JG Hamann, but the most important one of all was Johann Gottfried Herder who was a writer in the 1760s, who publishes one of the most important and earliest books on the origin and development of language. Now Herder was someone who travelled around in Germany, he ends up in Weimar among other places, he meets Goethe, he spends a period of time in Paris which led him to say, “Oh Germans no longer speak” – he put it rather charmingly – “the slime of the river Seine!” Speak German even when you’re in France. So Helder was very important – this is just a sort of caricature of him – he was a profound scholar of the development of language – not just German. He’d mastered an extraordinary number of languages from things like Tajik and Uzbek to Latvian and Finnish, Lapp, and so on, and he didn’t necessarily – because he was a friend of Goethe – he didn’t necessarily think that German culture, German language was necessarily better than English or French or so on. But what he hated was the notion of a kind of artificial international language – in his case French, ‘the slime of the river Seine’!

– because he essentially thought it detached one from what was the wiring of one’s infancy both in music. He was also one of the first to say there are preverbal kinds of linguistic allegiance which you learn essentially from having your mother or father sing you songs and tell you stories before you’re formally educated.

So Herder produces a kind of disposition and an effect on the social effects of the differences of language. So he’s the opposite from Voltaire and David Hume who want to say, with my sympathies, that really mankind is pretty much the same everywhere. ‘Yes, but’… Was the Herderian exception, yes but… Language has this way actually – he said language is thought. He wasn’t a prototype of Wittgenstein, saying that thought is actually controlled by language, that it’s formatively constituted by language, but he did want to say that there is something that happens to thought, that happens in your own

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idiom and there is nothing to be ashamed of or shy of and that in some senses in the eighteenth century the Germans in particular, with whom he was concerned, had lost that sense of the independent dignity and authority of their own language. So he set several hares running, did Herder, which were very important. He was the point that research started to happen into folklore, into stories that became the genuine spreading out of enquiries into the German countryside, to listen to weavers and tanners and shepherds and so on, all of whom sang their own songs and told their own stories, and then Herder and his colleagues would collaborate on an anthology. That then was given as the task to another generation – Von Arnim, Brentano, you might have heard of, you’ll all know about the Grimm brothers, the Grimm brothers also saw that as their mission. When in the course of time much of Germany was either occupied by or had to simply be restricted by being a satellite of the Napoleonic empire, and almost bitterly defeated, there’s the romance of defeat kicking in, the Grimm brothers decided, very self-consciously actually, that even though the political status of an independent Germany had been destroyed, what Napoleon could not tear out would be this deep rootedness of folklore and folksong.

This was happening in many other places at around the same time. It was happening in Scotland, in particular. The genius of Robert Burns was that he submitted many of his poems to a project that was started before him by a man called George Thompson called the Scots Musical Museum. Some of the greatest of Burns’s poems, ‘My Love Is Like a Red Red Rose’, ‘Scots Wha Hae’ and so on were all from the beginning meant to be sung and Burns, being a bit of a handsome daredevil lad, had originally written his poems to be not only sung but also danced to and given demonstrations in the pubs around Mauchline. But the sense of being a musical anthologist was very important and it was passed on, the sense in which Scotland was still suffering from the pain of the romance of defeat; Culloden. Burns’s uncle Robert, after whom he was named, had actually been a Jacobite even though most of Burns’s family had not been Jacobites.

The same thing happened in Wales in Eisteddfod. The first modern day Eisteddfod, I found to my absolute amazement, took place on Primrose Hill in London! But it was essentially an enterprise always meant to bring the medieval Eisteddfod back to Wales under the auspices of Iolo Morganwg, and the Eisteddfod was also essentially a way of reasserting the difference, not

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being apologetic about the Welsh difference or the Scottish difference or the Irish difference. Music, of course, if you think about the last night of the Proms, friends from Britain, or you think about the way ‘Jerusalem’, the way certain kinds of music absolutely, however cosmopolitan and international you may feel, have the hairs on the back of your neck standing up – at least they do for me.

So the romance of topography was very important. Because all these things, the sense that patriotic allegiance is wired into our memories of childhood, the sense that it’s borne along to us through stories and music, that it’s very much sustained in this psychologically problematic defensive crouch when you’re forever wanting to redeem or revenge some sort of defeat that you’ve had, all of those things essentially bundle up together and have a very long life indeed.

All of them, for example, have a place in the way the Confederate South still feels its in existence and wants to avenge defeat; it has its own music, has its own sense of what is and what is not America. You’ll find confederate flags brought along to demonstrations against what the government is trying to do for social distancing and mask-wearing facing this terrible disease. Part of the grotesquely crude polemic against health measures adopted by the governors of different states in the United States is that it’s all somehow an international Chinese conspiracy. Donald Trump is going to run the election campaign on the Asian conspiracy, deep state conspiracy – I bet you.

I want to just say two final things: one is ‘Why did this happen?’ and the answer is partly in that Kosovo story, which I hope wasn’t too boring for you, was we had two gods that failed, didn’t we? We had essentially the state Marxist god that failed, and really in the crash of 2008 we had the neoliberal capitalist god that failed. Now if you think really that all of life is about shopping, we will all feel that now, desperate as we are to get back to the shops! Then, no problem, but essentially the long course of history has proved that people need something else. They need something that they can be passionately wired to.

The cult of the nation, the sense of, if we can take back control we can return to our deep UK-ishness, our deep Englishness, then we can be happy again shot of these terrible conspiracies imposed on us by the EU and everything else. That was part of the feeling and, I think, all sorts of genuine economic and social grievances needed a bottle to be poured into and that bottle was labelled in the way I’ve been describing.

Now the last point, then, is this: is it the case, as I began my remarks, that in some sense the predicament that we’re in – a pandemic, the pandemic 145

pandemonium – makes this footnotes to where we’re going. There was a lot of literature saying that populist nationalism is here to stay. Has the pandemic actually scotched that? I wouldn’t say it necessarily has, particularly because of all the examples I was giving you earlier on about the way it maps out still into nationalist resentments and grudges and passions and feelings. I would say this: that if indeed it is the case, that people need something emotive as well as intellectual to respond to. They need in fact – without being too, for me, uncharacteristically sententious – a mission in life: they’ve got one. It is essentially an international one, it is of course the fate of the Earth itself. The fate of our planet, and the fate of our planet is absolutely intimately twined together with the health of our planet, so with any luck, dear friends, some good may yet come out of this, we may start again. We may actually, possibly have stumbled on a genuine saving course that we can emotionally commit to, that brings together the health of the planet with the health of our own bodies and the health of our own body politic. And if you want to hear more about that, come to Hay, come to that glorious institution which has never had any problem with being of its own place and of the world.

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Philippe Sands and Stephen Fr y THE RATLINE The Ratline offers a unique account of the daily life of a senior Nazi and fugitive, and of his wife. Drawing on a remarkable archive of family letters and diaries, Philippe Sands unveils a fascinating insight into life before and during the war, on the run, in Rome, and into the Cold War. This conversation took place at Hay Festival Digital on Sunday 24 May 2020.

STEPHEN FRY: Ladies and gentlemen, you’re very, very welcome from all over the world to this session which I have been looking forward to all week. A couple of years back I interviewed Philippe Sands about his remarkable book East West Street and since then I provided a voice for a podcast of a story that came out of East West Street, and which has become this remarkable book, The Ratline. I think we should start with a reading, and then I’ll give a bit of background for those who are not familiar with the story that you’ve been uncovering over the last few years.

PHILIPPE SANDS: I’m going to go into the heart of the story. We are in 1942, in the city of Lemberg. Otto Wächter is the Governor, and his wife Charlotte is going to and fro, with her childcare and other duties, between Vienna and Lemberg, as she has recorded in her diaries, which are the basis for this book. I would not have been able to write The Ratline if their son Horst had not given me access to this incredible family archive. We spent three or four years going through it – one pearl of horror or loveliness dropped out of the documents almost on a daily basis. So, I’m going to read from her diaries, from the summer of 1942.

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That summer, Charlotte took the children back to Thumersbach. ‘In my heart I’m very much with you in that wonderful place,’ she wrote to Otto.

Immersed in occupation activity, Otto encouraged her to swim and walk, and to recuperate from another illness. ‘Enjoy yourself,’ he wrote. ‘I’ve such a great desire for you,’ she responded. ‘Visit soon,’ she implored, and bring Hans Frank.

She didn’t explain to Otto why she made the suggestion, keeping her thoughts on a tight hold. The secret truth was that she had fallen in love with the Governor General, her husband’s boss, as her diary made clear.

‘1st February 1942, I wore Frank’s boots sloppily…

4th March, coffee with Frank in Berlin, felt sad when he left for the Führer’s headquarters…

6th March, he played the piano, I wrote. Later on the special train from Berlin to Krakow we sat together as she, Frau Frank, went to sleep. Later that night we played three rounds of Tress, he won twice, I once, very nice. It is so nice to be together, to sleep at 11pm when he realised we were alone he got up with a startle and left abruptly. […]

7th May, at the castle, I breathed in his air, how much I would like to see him again, I just don’t know what to do so tensely do I concern myself with my handsome. I am so in love and long for the moment I will be with him again. I have to wait for the moment. How many times a day do I think of him? He is so spirited, so full of zest, thank god no one knows. […]

21st June, dreamt of the governor general, think of him a lot, it must be love.’

I sent a copy of the diary entries to Hans Frank’s son Nicolas several years after he first introduced me to Horst. ‘Sensational,’ he wrote. ‘Nobody knew till today that she was in love with my father. He wondered, jokingly, whether Horst could even be his brother.’

SF: Wow! And to put that in context for those who might not still be quite sure who Hans Frank was – this man, with whom Charlotte had fallen in love – was the governor general of Poland under the Nazis. He ruled the entire area and was responsible for who knows how many war crimes. He was tried at Nuremberg. And if I can just find the ribbons that pull out from the story, your first book on this subject, as it were, East West Street, was an examination of

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two things. One was the city of Lemberg, also known as Lvov, a Ukrainian city which has had how many names? Lvov, Lviv, Lemberg!

PS: And Leopolis, if we’re Italian!

SF: That’s right! And it was a city where you had ancestors, and also from it came some lawyers who, by a twist of fate, were responsible for the framing of two very important laws that obtain around the world. Laws that cover crimes against humanity and genocide – which are two different things in international law and things in which you, Philippe, are a world expert and, indeed, travel the world in order occasionally to look into cases where one or other of those laws may have been broken – a genocide or a crime against humanity. And Hans Frank was one of those for Poland, which of course contained Auschwitz amongst many other horrific places. We know the story of the burning of the ghetto and other such things. Now the person who governed Lvov or Lemberg after the Soviets had left it and the Nazis took over was a man called Otto Wächter and the story of The Ratline is the story of his escape at the end of the war in a kind of Odessa File way. He has this adventure crossing the Alps and going into Italy. You uncovered the letters and diaries of Otto and his always loyal wife Charlotte – although she fell in love with Hans Frank, she had good reason to stray away from home because her husband did too!

Anyway, that’s enough talk from me. I’m just trying to introduce the background to The Ratline, which is a remarkable adventure and romance, and a kind of investigation into evil too, as all these stories must be. So, what opened this treasure trove to you after you’d written East West Street was meeting the son of Otto Wächter and Charlotte, I believe, is that right to say?

PS: It is right. What had happened was that when I was researching East West Street – rather like preparing for a case, I leave no stone unturned and I read everything I could find on Hans Frank – I came across a remarkable book written by his son Niklas called Der Vater (The Father), which is a sort of 300-page letter of hatred. The first time I met Niklas he said to me, “Philippe, I’m against the death penalty, in all cases, except my father’s.” He despises his father. Right at that first meeting, he said, “You know one day you must meet my friend Horst, the son of my father’s deputy, Otto Wächter,” and I said, “Sure, I don’t know why he’d want to meet me, but let’s see what happens.” One of the strange things that emerged through all of this research was that many of the children of senior Nazis are in touch with each other. It’s not a club, I don’t want to take it too far, but it’s a sort of contact. So Niklas introduced 151

me to Horst, and he warned me, “Horst is different from me. Horst loves his mother and appreciates his father and tries to find the good in his father.” Frank was hanged for murdering four million human beings, Wächter was probably involved in about half a million, so it’s a love story with a little bit of – well, a lot of – terrible mass murder thrown in. But I really liked Horst, he was sweet and gentle and he wore Birkenstocks and a pink shirt and he was transparent and open. He just said, “Look, I disagree with Niklas, he is a crazy man, he hates his father, I try to find the good in my father and that’s an honourable thing to do.”

That’s him speaking. And one thing led to another, he showed me a few letters, a few diaries and then one day Niklas suggested that perhaps Horst could be a new kind of a Nazi – which I think he’s not, and, in fact, Niklas doesn’t think he is either and he made that clear in the end – but Horst said: “What can I do to prove that I’m not a Nazi?” I reflected and said: well, you’ve got these ten thousand pages of your parents’ letters and diaries, if they’re so decent and terrific, why don’t you give them to a museum and let researchers and scholars and whoever wants to look at them make up their minds? He said: terrific idea, and it ended up being the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington – they sent some people over from the archive to scan all of these pages, that took a few days – and then Horst said, would you like the copy of the USB? And I said sure, why not? And a few days later a single USB of 24 gigs came through my letterbox in a tatty, used envelope, I popped it in my computer and most of it was illegible handwriting. I looked at the photographs, which were unbelievable and at some point in that summer – we’re back in 2015 – I had a conversation with Lisa Jardine, the late historian, she’d just given a fantastic lecture, her inaugural lecture at UCL called ‘Temptation in the Archives’, and it’s all about the value of personal correspondence in a historical sense. Lisa was the one who catalysed this project. She said, you must go through that material and find what the true story is – the love, the horror, the murder, the escape, everything. It took four years and I was helped by the most incredible research assistants, without whom this could never have happened.

SF: You and I share a slightly similar heritage, we both come from Jewish European families, Viennese families, so we both are aware of the fact that although no one wants to come from a family that has had members killed by something as appalling as the Holocaust, it’s a lot easier to have the name Finkelstein than it is to have the name Himmler. To be the descendant of a Nazi war criminal must be a very peculiar thing. And people often question why one should follow up a story of the inner lives and loves of war criminals, 152

they are the villains, and of course that is unquestionably true. But if you’re going to understand something as monumentally important, as vast in history, the Everest of human history in some ways, as the Holocaust, it seems to me obvious that you have to understand those who had a choice in the 1930s and ’40s. People like our ancestors, who were rounded up, put on trains and taken to their death, made no choice, they made no moral decision to die. So, in a sense, their story – to say it’s less interesting is obviously nonsense – but in a sense it’s not a story from which we can learn. Whereas the story of people like Otto Wächter and his wife, who were sophisticated people who loved music and wept at operas and paintings, were kind to children; they were human beings and they had a choice. They really did. They might deny they had a choice, but they had a choice and the choice they made was to us an obscene and atrocious choice. Therefore reading their story is a constant excitement because you’re constantly trying to enter their minds and to understand whether they are simply a psychopathology at work, whether they’re just ill or evil in some theological way that is hard to comprehend, or whether there is a trigger to how they were? Because isn’t that what one’s always trying to do when investigating people like that?

PS: Well, you know, I open the book with a line from a writer who’s now become a good friend, a Spanish writer – I don’t know if you’ve read him? He’s called Javier Cercas, and he’s written many wonderful novels, one of which is called Soldiers of Salamis – it’s the one to start with – and he’s been often to Hay. He’s the guy who got me into the Vatican, actually in rather remarkable circumstances, which I describe in the book. He had been invited to give a lecture on faith and literature by the Pope and he helped me gain access to the Vatican hospital room where Wächter died, which I’d not previously been able to gain access to. Before we went to the hospital, we sat in the Sistine Chapel together and I looked at him and said, “Why would anyone care about this kind of stuff? Why would anyone care about Otto and Charlotte Wächter?”

And he just looked at me and he said, “It’s more important to understand the butcher than the victim.” And that struck a chord because until I’d met Nik Frank and Otto Wächter I’d never thought about the folks from the other side of the story. I’d never thought about what it was like to grow up having a father who was a mass murderer, and you’re absolutely right – as I was writing this book what fascinated me the most was the mundanity of their lives. It is a love story between Charlotte and Otto and there are moments along a path as you know, as I know, as everyone who’s watching knows, where you come 153

to a fork in the road. You can go one way, you can go another way, you can do the right thing, you can do the wrong thing, and there were a number of forks in their lives, all of which would come out in the material, but there was one in particular.

On 15 March 1938, the day Hitler arrives in Vienna, he stands on a balcony looking over the Heldenplatz, and hundreds of thousands of Austrians cheer him, and Charlotte is standing there, one metre from Adolf Hitler. We’re talking top-table Nazis; they leave the balcony, they walk down a huge marble staircase (and decades later I followed in their tracks) and at the bottom – she records this, it’s pretty amazing – her husband turns to her and says, “So we have a choice. I can carry on as a lawyer in commercial practice and make a lot of money or I can accept the offer of Governor Seyss-Inquart and join the government. What should I do?” And she gives him the green light. One of the things I was fascinated in, which we don’t know much about, is the role of the spouses, the significant others. Were they just turning a blind eye or were they in some way complicit? She’s just egging him on because the quid pro quo is that in turn for his job she gets access to Himmler, to the Führer, to opera houses, to the Salzburg festival, to film openings with Leni Riefenstahl. It’s a life of art and plenty and luxury, and she loved it, and that’s part of the story I wanted to tell. Except that the power relationship changes the moment the war ends. So for fifteen years of their lives together, Otto is in absolute control and then the war ends and she becomes the powerful one and that becomes even more fascinating.

SF: They become separated, of course, because he has to go into hiding in the hills, literally in the Alps, and this is where the word ‘ratline’ refers to a kind of malign version of the underground railroad that helped the slaves escape to the north in America; this was more like Frederick Forsyth’s The Odessa File and other such things. It was Nazis and Nazi-sympathisers helping wanted senior Nazis and SS officers to escape from the Germans and Russians and the allied law enforcement system that had their names on a list as wanted war criminals and the Catholic Church here, which is why you mention the Vatican I guess, had a grim part to play in the form of one very well-known Bishop, so perhaps you’d just mention that as well? The fact that he was helped?

PS: Well, it’s a pretty shocking story. Charlotte called it ‘The Collapse’, it was the darkest day of their lives, and she loses touch with him. He just disappears off the face of the earth and what emerges only through this material is what 154

happened to him and the period is divided. I mean the first three and a half years he goes and hides in the Austrian mountains, not so far from Charlotte, who is in Zell-am-See, or Salzburg. Every two weeks she toddles off to find him and they meet up and she brings him provisions and clothes, and skis and woolly jumpers, and the sports pages of the newspaper, and reports of the Nuremberg trial, which they’re following from above 2,000 metres – there they remain because they believe that the British and the Americans are too lazy and too stupid to look for them up in the mountains.

Amazingly, Otto was not alone, he was with a young Waffen SS soldier called Burkhardt Rathmann. I asked Horst the son: what Burkhardt was like, and why did he help his dad? Did they stay in touch after the war? Did he stay in touch with his mum? Horst looked at me and just said, “Well, Philippe, you can ask me all these questions, or we can telephone him.” I was amazed! It was 2017 and Burkhardt Rathmann was still alive aged ninety-four, and we went off to see Burkhardt Rathmann. He’d never given an interview in his life, but he believed he was going to be indicted for mass murder, he was an SS killer of Italian and Yugoslav partisans, communists and other undesirables, and I interviewed him for a full day, it was pretty astonishing. My mind was often distracted by a little photograph just above his shoulder, on the bookshelf in his home – a photograph in black and white of the Führer, still on a bookshelf in 2017! Those were the glory days.

They come down from the mountains, Otto is hunted by the Poles, by the Soviets, by the Americans, by the British and decides he’s going to go to South America, and he wants to get there, by going to Rome, and he’s got a way in through what is called ‘The Reich migratory route’, which we now know as the Ratline. What’s unique, I think, about this material is it’s the first time we see from the inside who was helping, how they were helping, where they stayed, who supported them, and you uncover the network. But it’s a detective story because none of the names are transparent. Everyone has been anonymised in the letters and diaries of Otto and Charlotte. The bishop you mentioned is simply referred to as ‘the religious gentleman’; we don’t know who it is, it took four years to find out who it was but in the end we pieced together the entire story. He’s hoping to head off to Argentina when he goes to spend the weekend with a friendly old comrade – the words ‘old comrade’ in this lingo always mean ‘former SS officer’ – and he has a wonderful weekend at Lake Albano, Castel Gandolfo, comes home to Rome and is very sick, very

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ill. He writes home to his wife, we’ve got all the letters, so we know what his symptoms were, and he dies a week later. And Horst, the son, believes that his father was poisoned and that’s the final part of the book – what actually really happened.

SF: Extraordinary. It is a wonderful, wonderful story and I thought I would just read a very short thing, which is a letter from him, because before we feel, if you like, too sympathetic, towards Otto Wächter – poor man, there he is on the run and compared to Hans Frank he was only responsible for half a million deaths, so, oh… obviously that’s not true but it is very easy when you’re following a story from someone’s point of view to feel for them, but this is the perfect example of the famous, to the point of cliché, Hannah Arendt’s phrase ‘the banality of evil’. A letter that Otto writes in 1939 to Charlotte: Many thanks for your lovely letter. There’s a lot going on here. On the one hand, we’ve had some lovely things in the last few days, Schirach, General Arbeitsführer Polentz, R.M. Funk and the Philharmonic was a great success and also a great success for me. Frank was very impressed. On the other hand, not such nice things.

Sabotage, nasty business, car accidents – ultimately an attempt on the life of the Governor General. Tomorrow I have to have another fifty Poles shot. Much love.

That’s how it goes!

PS: As you know better than anyone, Stephen, every word, every line, every sentence holds clues. So, when I first translated that letter and showed it to Horst – who wiggles out of anything that suggests the culpability of his father – he takes the letter, he looks at it and he goes, “Yes, well of course, yes…”

And I say, “What do you mean, ‘yes, well of course, yes’?” And he says, “Look, it says, Philippe, ‘Tomorrow I have to have fifty Poles shot’. It doesn’t say I want to have fifty Poles shot!” So that, of course, shows a way into the mind of the son… But I became quite focused on this letter because I found – curiously enough on Facebook – a reference to an act of killing that had taken place in a small Polish town in Poland on exactly this date, 18 December 1939. The town is called Bochnia and the reference that I found on Facebook suggested that photographs had been taken of the reprisal killing. Basically, what had happened is two German soldiers had been killed in that town, and Adolf Hitler personally ordered reprisal killings of twenty-five Poles for every German killed. It was significant because it was the first act of reprisal killing. That’s plainly a war crime, there’s no ifs and buts about it. But there was some suggestion 156

that there existed a photographic album, that four albums had been made – one for Hitler, one for Göring and one for the widows of each German soldier.

So we took three years trying to locate one of these albums, and eventually we found one in Warsaw. It is shocking, I’ve put some of the photographs into the book, you’ve seen them, and you see Otto Wächter present. Faced with that material, Horst was momentarily – in a way that I’ve not seen him before – speechless. I fully transcribed his reaction on seeing the photograph, but even then eventually he finds a way out of it. The way the human mind works…

SF: Cognizance is a powerful thing…

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Notes on the Contributors AFUA HIRSCH Afua Hirsch is Wallis Annenberg Chair in Journalism and Communication at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Brit(ish) and Equal to Everything, and hosts the We Need To Talk About The British Empire podcast on Audible. She writes for the Guardian and broadcasts internationally.

AINISSA RAMIREZ Ainissa Ramirez is a materials scientist and sought-after public speaker and science communicator. A Brown and Stanford graduate, she has worked as a research scientist at Bell Labs and held academic positions at Yale University and MIT. She has written for Time, Scientific American, American Scientist and Forbes, and makes regular appearances on PBS’s SciTech Now.

CARLO ROVELLI Carlo Rovelli is a theoretical physicist who has made significant contributions to the physics of space and time. He has worked in Italy and the US, and is currently directing the quantum gravity research group of the Centre de physique théorique in Marseille, France. His books Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, Reality Is Not What It Seems and The Order of Time are international bestsellers which have been translated into forty-one languages.

JOHN MITCHINSON John Mitchinson has worked in publishing for decades. He helped to found the television panel game show QI, and has co-written all their books. He was Waterstones’ first marketing director and he has held senior publishing roles at Orion, Cassell and Harvill. He co-hosts Unbound’s ‘Backlisted’ podcast.

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ELIF SHAFAK Elif Shafak is an award-winning British-Turkish novelist and the most widely read female author in Turkey. She writes in both Turkish and English, and has published seventeen books, eleven of which are novels. Her work has been translated into fifty languages. Her latest novel 10 Minutes 38 Seconds In This Strange World was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and chosen as Blackwell’s Book of the Year.

PHILLIPPE SANDS Phillippe Sands is a Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Centre on International Courts and Tribunals at University College, London, and a specialist in International Law. Phillippe has written several books, including the Baillie Gifford Prize-winning East West Street and most recently the Sunday Times bestseller The Ratline.

ESTHER DUFLO Esther Duflo is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics in the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a co-founder and co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). She shared the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2019 with Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer.

EVAN DAVIS Evan Davis is an economist, journalist and presenter for the BBC. Since autumn 2018, he has been the lead presenter of PM on BBC Radio 4.

GLORIA STEINEM Gloria Steinem is a writer, political activist and feminist organizer. She was a founder of New York and Ms. magazines, and is the author of The Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will Piss You Off, My Life on the Road and Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions. In 2013, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama. In 2019, she received the Freedom Award from the National Civil Rights Museum.

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LAURA BATES Laura Bates is founder of the Everyday Sexism Project, a collection of hundreds of thousands of women’s experiences of harassment, discrimination and abuse with branches in twenty-five countries worldwide. She works closely with governments, police forces and schools to tackle gender inequality. She is the bestselling author of Everyday Sexism, Girl Up, The Burning and Men Who Hate Women. She writes for the New York Times, the Guardian and others, and has received a British Press Award and a British Empire Medal, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

CHRISTIANA FIGUERES Christiana Figueres is an internationally recognized leader on global climate change. She was Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) 2010–2016. Since then she has continued to accelerate the global response to climate change. She is cofounder of Global Optimism, co-host of the podcast ‘Outrage & Optimism’ and co-author of the recently published book The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis. She is a non-executive Board member of ACCIONA.

TOM RIVETT-CARNAC Tom Rivett-Carnac is a political lobbyist for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and an author on climate change policy. He is a director of Unknown Road Ltd and a founding director, with Christiana Figueres, of Global Optimism.

DAVID JARRETT David Jarrett has been a doctor for forty years, thirty of which as an NHS consultant in geriatric and stroke medicine. He is a clinician, teacher, examiner and former medical manager with extensive experience of frailty, death and dying and the modern world’s failure to confront the realities. He is author of 33 Meditations on Death.

GUTO HARRI Guto Harri is a broadcaster and strategic communications consultant.

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MAGGIE O’FARRELL Maggie O’Farrell is author of the Sunday Times bestselling memoir I Am, I Am, I Am, and eight novels including The Distance Between Us (Somerset Maugham Award) and The Hand That First Held Mine (2010 Costa Novel Award).

Hamnet was winner of the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction and a Sunday Times bestseller.

PETER FLORENCE Peter Florence is a British festival director, most notable for founding the Hay Festival with his father, Norman Florence.

ROGER ROBINSON Roger Robinson is a writer and educator who has taught and performed worldwide and is an experienced workshop leader and lecturer on poetry.

He was chosen by Decibel as one of fifty writers who have influenced the Black-British writing canon. He has received commissions from the National Trust, London Open House, BBC, the National Portrait Gallery, V&A, INIVA, MK Gallery and Theatre Royal Stratford East where he was also associate artist. His collection A Portable Paradise was the winner of the 2019 TS Eliot Prize.

PETER FRANKOPAN Peter Frankopan is Professor of Global History at Oxford University, where he is Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College, and Associate Director of the Programme for Silk Roads Studies at King’s College, Cambridge. Peter writes for the international press, including the New York Times, Financial Times and the Guardian, and has a regular column in the London Evening Standard. His books The Silk Roads: A New History of the World and The New Silk Roads: The Future and Present of the World are major international bestsellers.

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SIMON SCHAMA Simon Schama is University Professor of Art History and History. He taught history at Cambridge (Christ’s College,1966–76) and Oxford (Brasenose College, 1976–80) and art history and history at Harvard (1980–93). His books have been translated into fifteen languages and have won the Wolfson Award for History, the WH Smith Prize for Literature, the National Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, and most recently, for Rough Crossings, the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for Non-Fiction (2007). His television work for the BBC and PBS as writer–presenter includes two films on Rembrandt; a five-part series based on landscape and memory; and the awardwinning, Emmy-nominated A History of Britain.

STEPHEN FRY Stephen Fry is an actor, comedian, writer and broadcaster. His most recent book is Troy.

PHOTO CREDITS Afua Hirsch © Paul Musso Ainissa Ramirez © Bruce Fizzell Carlo Rovelli © Carlo Rovelli Elif Shafak © Paul Musso Esther Duflo © Bryce Vickmark Gloria Steinem © Beowulf Sheehan Christiana Figueres © Chris Athanasiou David Jarrett © Helen Maybanks Maggie O’Farrell © Marsha Arnold Roger Robinson © Naomi Woddis Simon Schama © Paul Musso Philippe Sands © Paul Musso

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