The Critic March 2024

LESS WILL BE BETTER c

More has meant worse. Indeed, when Kingsley Amis in Encounter wrote about expanding higher education that “MORE WILL mEAN WORSE”, that was him in 1960 reviewing the fties — a decade that now looks like a pinnacle from which everything since has fallen away.

Amis was still at Swansea University then, though he was soon to move to Peterhouse for what would turn out to be two bitter and futile years teaching English at Cambridge.

e college was denounced by F.R. Leavis for hiring a “pornographer”, but the contra-Whiggish hopes of its then master, Herbert Butter eld, that this was exactly what the age needed (someone to provoke the Leavisites), were to be disappointed. Amis ed uncongenial collegiate life for fun in the Majorca sun.

What should keep anyone at Cambridge now? Why, indeed, should academic or student alike be at any of our universities? Our February 2023 leading article said the point of them was “intellectual life and academic rigour”.

Yes, the government’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) was doing great harm and external credentialisation of careers by poisonous nonsense such as Athena Swan and Racial Equality Charters was corrosive to the concept of promotion by scholarship.

And universities damage themselves by being led by their most feeble cohort — professional administrators. Yet, despite all this, “freedom of enquiry” remained the goal. Alas, this is what the universities have honestly set themselves against.

In a May 1960 House of Lords debate, William Beveridge said plainly, “the most important purpose of the university [is] to spread knowledge rather than add to it”. is, Amis noted, rested on the assumption that academic standards could be maintained however much tertiary education swelled.

Where Beveridge saw an injustice righted, supposing that access had hitherto been denied, Amis instead sneered at the “delusion that there are thousands of young people about who are

capable of bene tting from university training but have somehow failed to nd their way there”.

How much more so that is today. Rather than expansion being viable when it strives to enrol 50 per cent of all young people (let alone the absurdist three-quarters enrolment Tony Blair would have Keir Starmer’s looming government accomplish) university graduates are, in Amis’s

words, “like poems or bottles of hock, and unlike cars or tins of salmon, in that you cannot decide to have more good ones”. We have decided to have more; they have been worse; they graduated and some of them became dons and they have been worse too. Can this cycle be broken?

This magazine is an unashamed product of the universities. We have devoted this special issue to them because we believe that they can and should be saved. ere is hope. In her article in this issue, a recent undergraduate, Charlie Bentley-Astor, shows that however stultifying the universities are, students can nd subversive ways to ght back. However, what a burden it is on the most intelligent and committed undergraduates that they have to spend their time ghting, rather than studying. eir enemy, of course, being not one another, but their debased instructors.

Michael Lind charts where it rst went wrong: how a delusion about the superiority of the nineteenth-century German “research university” poisoned what had been the Anglophone preference for “the transmission of canonical bodies of cultural and professional knowledge”. is is the honest acceptance that since most undergraduates won’t — and should not — progress to being academics themselves, the proper purpose of the university lies in the forming and shaping of excellence as much as it does in intellectual

John Gray gives a Pharos lecture, Oxford We decided to have more students; they have been worse. Some became dons — and they have been worse too

cultivation. ere is no shame in a school that actually nishes the whole man.

Yet, as Lind notes, “in the arts and humanities” (the hard sciences can be left to look after themselves, or fail by their own measures) “anti-traditional innovation is more like iconoclasm on the part of a new religion”, which triumphantly smashes the idols of the old before erecting its own in their place.

Our Sounding Board columnist, Marcus Walker, dejectedly notes that the Church of England’s current managers wish to do away with the liberating security of clerical stipends, their parishes, and even what its foes accuse of being

“long, costly college-based training”. is leaves us with priests, much like academics, “unable to explain [their purpose], unable to talk authoritatively”. It has been the death of a vocation, and it has been a suicide cult that did it.

It is not difficult to name the new religion. For Maurice Cowling 30 years ago it was simply cultural Marxism, in nitely more dangerous when done within and by the West than Soviet state Marxism could be abroad.

Edward Skidelsky has Foucaultian “regimes of truth” plainly in view too. He, like a handful of other brave academics, has fought back: they have banded together and formed a resistance. eir Committee for Academic Freedom is a courageous and noble endeavour.

Dr Skidelsky is clear-eyed about the scale of what has to be surmounted. e REF plays its part in generating Soviet tractor factory-levels of academic production for the sake of it.

But universities are happily complicit in this false measure of value. Why would it be otherwise when universities are no longer self-governed by scholars but instead run by (and for) self-serving administrators? is circle is vicious but gets even worse.

Our executive editor, Sebastian Milbank, returns to a subject on which e Critic led the way [see Poppy Coburn, “The great foreign student scandal”, February 2023]. rough their risible pretence of “exporting education”, he details how universities mask their visibly failing Ponzi scheme to expand themselves by importing ever greater numbers of dud students from abroad.

Once again, the truth is painful to see: far from the attraction and cultivation of excellence, unworthy degrees are bought by unworthy recipients.

Dr James Orr nails the problem: “ e weakness of the liberal conception of the university is that it treated its enabling norms as self-evident to all, when it turned out they were obvious only to an intellectual class shaped by the cultural memory of its medieval origins.”

Liberals have been the masters for some time now and it is their bitter, fruitless lessons we learn. In large part this is because we lack any faith in our own orthodoxies, or even in the possibility of them. It should not surprise anyone that when we do not believe in our own “true opinions”, the side that o ers a faith, any faith, wins out.

He will blush to be described as such, but our literary editor, Dr David Butter eld, is one of the greatest classicists of his generation. Holding on to and exemplifying a two-thousand-yearold tradition, he ought still to be a fellow of his college too, but he has no home in Cambridge now. is is a damning indictment of the University and everything it has become.

Butter eld in these pages charts the crisis of meaning and loss of con dence at the root of the problem. “Even for the [academic] majority who agree teaching should matter most,” he asks, “does that mean teaching content or process, providing knowledge or skills?”

Crisis, he reminds us, originates in the Greek for decision, and we need to make our minds up.

Amis 64 years ago sought and failed to nd someone who would:

refute the phantom dichotomy of ‘the two cultures’, repudiate the ever-more widely accepted view of the humanities as behind the times, vague, decorative, marginal, contemplative, postponable, while science (which in this context usually means technology) is seen as up with the times, precise, essential, central, active, urgent.

Science, and the claims made for it, are no longer the problem. e humanities remain, as they always shall, the measure of the human condition. Technology is the re, and there is nothing contemptible in its mastery. But the truth lies with the arts.

To save the universities we must accept that the truth may now lie outside them. Excellent initiatives like Pharos in Oxford, or Ralston College in far-o Savannah, Georgia, o er hope. When the present has become a lie about the past, start again. Less will be better. ●

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Ned:

Titania McGrath: Why not the

Sounding

Marcus

This month s cover is illustrated by ob enables, after rancis acon

UNIVERSITIES IN CRISIS

Hollowed-out humanities

David Butter eld on a perfect storm of low expectations, bureaucracy and decolonisation 16 What are universities for ?

James Orr argues that academics must restore colleges and universities to their founding ideals 20

Killing the golden goose

Sebastian Milbank says universities have sold their souls for growth 24 It’s not rocket science

Michael Lind argues that fatuous arts “research” has changed universities into bastions of Leftist ideology 26

Time to stop the rot

Edward Skidelsky says academics must stand up to a toxic alliance of campus radicals and unprincipled managers 29

Campus Confidential

Charlie Bentley-Astor says college conservatives now have to meet in secret to avoid the “cancel” mob 33

The case for more Royals

The 15-minute bait and

Alex Klaushofer says 15-minute cities promise

Profile: Noam

Graham

The

Patrick

Johnny Leavesley argues that with the King and the Princess of Wales out of action, this is no time for a slimmed-down Royal family

The greats’ Dane

Neil Armstrong sees a new play that tells the colourful tale of Burton and Gielgud’s record-breaking

The misanthropic history man

Andrew Orlowski says the best-selling books of historian Yuval Noah Harari are sloppy and simplistic

The Boy who never grew old Barendina Smedley says the renewed popularity of Eric Ravilious is due to his striking modernity and graphic verve

Palmer: Orvieto pottery

BOOKS

Matt Ridley: Wuhan: How the Covid-19 Outbreak in China Spiraled Out of Control by Dali L. Yang 58

Daisy Dunn: Byron: A Life in Ten Letters by Andrew Stau er 60

Alexander Lee: Magus: e Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa by Anthony Grafton

Sean McGlynn: Machiavelli’s E ectual Truth: Creating the Modern World by Harvey C. Mans eld

Richard Hopton: Dethroned: e Downfall of India’s Princely States by John Zubrzycki 65

Daniel Johnson: Napoleon and Goethe: e Touchstone of Genius by Raymond Keene 66

Gavin McCormick: e Children of Athena: Greek Writers and inkers in the Age of Rome, 150 BC–AD 400 by Charles Freeman 68

Tim Abrahams: Property: e Myth that Built the World by Rowan Moore 69

Patrick Galbraith: Under the Hornbeams: A True Story of Life in the Open by Emma Tarlo 70

Lola Salem: Bad erapy: Why e Kids Aren’t Growing Up by Abigail Shrier 71

Patrick Nash: Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class by Rob Henderson 72

John Self: Clear by Carys Davies; Parasol against the Axe by Helen Oyeyemi; e Children’s Bach by Helen Garner

March 2024 | Issue 45

THE CRITICS

MUSIC Norman Lebrecht

How to win at Chopin 78

OPERA Robert Thicknesse

e operatic guide to Europe 79

POP Sarah Ditum

Justin Timberlake’s dilemma 80

ART Michael Prodger

Dramatic deaths of the Dutch masters 81

THEATRE Anne McElvoy

Mad for a compelling new King Lear 82

CINEMA Robert Hutton

A brilliant lm I hesitate to recommend 83

TELEVISION Adam LeBor

War on Nazis in Oz and in the air 85

RADIO Michael Henderson

A Good Read should be better 86

PODCASTS Ben Sixsmith

Where to mainline true crime 87

ARCHITECTURE

Charles Saumarez Smith

Perfect Welsh buildings worth saving 88

TABLE TALK

Eating Out

Lisa Hilton won’t be returning to this restaurant despite its fabulous food 90

Eating In

Felipe Fernández-Armesto gets into a sticky situation over his wife’s jibes 91 Drink

Henry Je reys on an ancient Jewish art that is nally coming good 92 Art House

Rufus Bird considers the auction houses’ love of luxury brands 94 Deluxe

Christopher Pincher on the elegance of classic vintage fountain pens 94 Country Notes

Patrick Galbraith says vegans are turning to meat — and open marriages 96 Turf Account

Stephen Pollard shares his tips on likely Cheltenham winners 96 Style

Hannah Betts says hurrah for the white shirts 98 Hot House

Claudia Savage-Gore tries to embrace “radical acceptance” 99

THIS SPORTING LIFE

Nick Timothy: Seeing blue 100

Boris Starling: Fire and ice 101

Patrick Kidd: Recalling Hobbs 102

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Restoring sanity takes time

Helen Joyce

It’s nearly five years since I met Maya Forstater. a researcher on international tax policy. She had just led an employment claim against the Centre for Global Development, the think tank where she had been doing research on the link between tax policy and economic growth, for discriminating against her for expressing “gender-critical” beliefs — that is, that sex is binary, immutable and important.

We had both become concerned by the government’s plans to introduce gender self-identi cation: she because sex is one of the most meaningful variables in development economics; I because I’d been asked to write about self-ID and the more I looked, the crazier it seemed.

Afterwards, Maya sent me the draft of an article she was writing. Re-reading my reply, I cringe. I was already in a new world where lunatic invention was social justice and material reality was hateful, but I hadn’t yet realised it. I replied that nobody could possibly object to her measured and fact-based arguments. Later that year an employment judge, James Tayler, ruled that they were so heinously bigoted that she deserved to lose her job. at judgment was overturned 18 months later, and last year Maya was awarded substantial damages. at established a precedent: thinking and saying that male and female are objective, meaningful categories cannot lawfully be the basis for discrimination in the workplace.

University faces two more claimants; so does the Green Party. A tribunal is under way against Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre, brought by a former employee, Roz Adams. She was subjected to disciplinary proceedings for asking if she could reassure a woman that the “non-binary” counsellor she had been referred to had been “assigned female at birth” — gender-speak for being a woman.

What will it take to bring bigoted employers to heel? Part of the answer is time. During the past decade, the trans lobby has been stunningly successful in selling false analogies to HR departments: that separate toilets for men and women are like racial segregation; and that insisting people can change sex is “gay rights 2.0”.

Lazy, power-hungry hr managers and sta working in “edi” (equality, diversity and inclusion) pronounce that the arc of the moral universe is bending towards denying sexual dimorphism, and relish imposing their will on others.

Restoring sanity may take longer than the decade it took workplaces to go mad, because so many people have built their professional lives around insanity. I sometimes imagine how astonished they must feel to be nally experiencing pushback.

The mindset of the narcissistic identitarians joining in workplace witch-hunts is that of the Crusaders, who made converts at the point of a sword

But the discrimination continued — and so did the legal cases. Allison Bailey, a barrister, was treated abysmally by her chambers, Garden Court, because of her association with lgb Alliance, a gay rights group that rejects gender identity ideology. Denise Fahmy was harassed in her workplace, Arts Council England, for calling out its biased decision to withdraw a grant to lgb Alliance. Rachel Meade, a social worker, was disciplined by Westminster Council and her professional regulator for pointing out that obfuscation about sex is a child safeguarding issue. Jo Phoenix, a criminologist, was bullied and slurred by colleagues at the Open University for saying that allocating prison places by gender identity rather than sex puts women at risk.

Every one of these women won in court, and by now you’d think employers would have got the message. But still the cases are coming. e Open

Take Shane Andrews, who works for Network Rail. His tweets suggest that he hates women: we’re “bitches”, “sluts”, “slags” and “cows”; “miserable”, “stuck-up”, “dopey” and “ugly”. I know this because Andrews was recently at the eye of a social media storm after being photographed posing at London Bridge by a display of ags representing sexual and gender identities.

Among them was the Progress Pride ag, which signals allegiance to trans ideology, as well as more niche ones representing demisexuality, gender uidity and polyamory. When Andrews responded with his typical charm by calling women who complained “terfs” and “not worth my energy replying/arguing/debating”, they ri ed through his Twitter back catalogue and retweeted the lowlights.

I think that for Andrews, slagging o uppity women was a form of virtue signalling. He had been made boss of Network Rail’s lgbt+ employees’ group, selected to help judge its annual “Women in Rail” awards (no bitches, sluts or slags in the running, presumably) and given an MBE for “boosting inclusivity within the rail industry”. Woman-hating

reality denialism worked for him — un-

reality denialism worked for him — until suddenly, it didn’t. He’s now stepped down from the lgbt+ group and judging women (at least o cially).

Or take Mridul Wadhwa, a man who identi es as a woman who is chief executive of Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre. He didn’t give evidence in the recent tribunal, but judging by what his sta said, the centre was more focused on validating his identity than helping traumatised women. Revealing the sex of a rape crisis counsellor would be an infringement of human rights, one said, since a person’s sex is private information (funny how we can all see it, then).

Another was invited to recognise that telling a woman with gender-critical views that the centre was women-only would be tantamount to lying to her, since as far as she would be concerned, Wadhwa is a man. e witness replied robotically: “We don’t employ any men.”

For Wadhwa, like Andrews, finally facing scrutiny must have come as a shock. For years now he’s been fêted by the Scottish establishment’s faux feminists, up to and including the former First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon. at despite misogyny as blatant as Andrews’s: in 2021, on the Guilty Feminist podcast, Wadhwa said rape survivors who wanted support from an actual woman, not a man claiming to be one, held “unacceptable beliefs that are discriminatory in nature”.

e centre wouldn’t turn such women away, he claimed (in fact, the tribunal heard of one occasion when it did exactly that), because, after all, “sexual violence happens to bigoted people as well”. But the counselling they received would be less about them and more about, well, him: they would be taught to “reframe [their] trauma” and “challenged on [their] prejudices”.

People like Andrews and Wadhwa hold positions of power in many workplaces. Reining them in will be harder than it should be because of widespread misinformation.

Imagine you’re an hr professional belatedly wondering if you’ve got the wrong end of the stick on the whole sex-gender thing. You might turn to A

suggested women were “bitches”, “sluts”, “slags” and “cows”

Practical Guide to Transgender Law by two barristers, Nicola Newbegin and transwoman Robin Moira White.

wasn’t.

But that might not save you from serious missteps. e rst edition, published before the binding Forstater judgment, enthusiastically endorsed the faulty lower court ruling. e second grudgingly acknowledged that yes, gender-critical beliefs were protected, but claimed that “manifesting” them — letting others know you held them — wasn’t.

ments to the contrary, that was obvious

And anyway, it takes but a moment’s since

Even before the recent string of judgments to the contrary, that was obvious nonsense. e law about freedom of belief expressly includes “manifestation”. And anyway, it takes but a moment’s thought to realise that the law can’t possibly concern beliefs that are never manifested, since it can’t reach inside the privacy of our heads.

◉ ◉ ◉

The most basic form of manifestation is simply revealing what you believe, like a Christian wearing a cross or a Jewish man wearing a kippah. What Adams and Phoenix did barely went further. Adams made a polite suggestion to resolve a problem that would have been evident to anyone with gender-critical beliefs; Phoenix set up a network to do research on topics that would naturally interest such a person. And yet both women were called “transphobic” and accused of making their colleagues “unsafe”.

is is crybullying — using false claims of victimisation to harass others. It’s a technique of narcissists, who want to force everyone else to endorse their self-image. Since their identities depend on external validation, they treat refusal to supply such validation as a mortal threat, and may respond with what psychologists call narcissistic rage. us the absurdly disproportionate characterisation of disagreement as hate.

At bottom, the mindset of the narcissistic identitarians joining in workplace witch-hunts is that of the Crusaders, who made converts at the point of a sword. ey do not respect other people’s sovereign consciences, nor accept that their belief system is just one among many. And like the Crusaders, they need to be consigned to history. ●

Letters

RECORD-SETTINGSONS

Patrick Kidd (THIS SPORTING LIFE, FEBRUARY) writes with his customary sagacity about teenage sporting sensations and the di culty so many of them have in sustaining early promise.

He mentions Vinod Kambli who at 16 was discussed in the same breath as his schoolboy contemporary, Sachin Tendulkar, but whose initially promising Test career was over within three years. en again, Kambli still has India’s highest test match average (54). So not a total fail. But might space be found here to recall another Indian cricket prodigy, Pranav Prashant Dhanawade?

In 2015, when he was 15 and playing in an inter-school tournament, Dhanawade set the record for the highest-ever score in a single innings in a recognised match, swatting 1,009 runs. His school declared on an also record-breaking 1,465 for 3. eir opponents replied limply with innings of 31 and 52. Hopefully, rather than feel embarrassed, they have learned to dine out on their role in helping history be made.

Overnight, Dhanawade went from being the teenage son of a rickshaw driver to an international sensation. His state government paid for his subsequent education and cricket coaching.

But the high expectation was a hindrance as much as a help. “Every time I walked out to bat, I used to feel the pressure and that on occasions got the

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

better of me. It became di cult for me as I lost focus at times and played a loose shot,” he admitted in 2021.

By then, Covid lockdowns had denied him — and countless other up-and-coming cricketers at the formative period of their development — two seasons of trials. By 2022, he was playing for Northwick Cricket Club in Cheshire. Age 23, his sights are still set on proving he was not a “one-knock wonder” and playing for India. But of this there is, as yet, no sign.

Dhanawade beat the record which had lasted for 116 years, set in 1899 by A.E.J. (Arthur) Collins, a 13-year-old playing in an inter-house match at Clifton College.

Crowds accumulated along with his profusion of boundaries over the course of his four days at the crease and prompted a report in e Times . He notched up 628 not out.

Aged 16, Collins joined the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich (for whom he scored a century against Sandhurst) and played at Lord’s for the Royal Engineers.

His army career, however, took precedence. Mentioned in despatches, he

was killed at the First Battle of Ypres on 11 November 1914.

Jeremy Barnett Bristol

ARTFORALE'SSAKE

I read with interest the article by Simone Hanna regarding the state of British pubs (THE SAD DECLINE OF LONDON PUBS, ONLINE). I would agree that in older times, perhaps pre-Covid, pubs were more occupied and more likely to stay open until advertised closing times.

But now with increased prices of over £6 a pint fewer people are inclined to part with that kind of money. Gone are the times when o ces cleared out at 5pm and the rst call was “pub anyone?”

In Greenwich I have tried to buck that trend by doing my bit to breathe new life into my local boozer, the Duke of Greenwich, in the form of a cartoon exhibition. is has increased the footfall in the pub and now means an establishment that came out of the pandemic with empty walls has a new impetus and identity. ey now want to book more artists for their walls and have introduced an extended opening timetable to boot with an actual “happy hour”. Maybe it’s time to give pubs a new lease of life through art?

Pete Songi london

FOUNDINGFATHER

I enjoyed Andrea Valentino’s article on Episcopalians in the USA (PREACHING TO AN EVER-DWINDLING CHOIR, FEBRUARY) A big problem must surely be the USA’s foundation myth of having been somehow created by English Protestants — the May ower, the Pilgrim Fathers etc.

How many Episcopalians, and how many Brits, can give the name of the oldest city in the USA? It is not in Virginia, Massachusetts or even Maryland. e oldest city now in the USA is St Augustine, Florida, founded in 1565 by the Spanish admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, many years before the arrival of Protestants from England.

Anthony Weaver london

Laugh? You had to be there

Much, perhaps most, legal “humour” is seldom more than mildly amusing

The trouble with lawyers’ jokes, said the wag, is that lawyers don’t nd them funny, and no one else thinks they are jokes.

Now, this is not entirely the fault of lawyers, who have to contend with modern public life, which is as humourless as it is preachy (I note, without comment, that the “Legal Humour” section of Wildy & Sons’ website includes Geo rey Robertson KC’s memoirs as well as a book by e Secret Barrister).

But it cannot be denied that legal humour, at least in England, has seldom risen to very great heights. Take eobald Mathew, Clement Attlee’s pupil master, who was widely reckoned to be the greatest legal wit of his generation.

His most famous quip — which “acquired legendary status during his lifetime” ran something like this (as retold by an admiring obituarist):

Visiting the library of another Inn, at that time notorious for its recruitment of students from equatorial Africa, Mathew had to make his way through ranks of these dusky lawyers. At length he saw the white face of a friend, held out his hand in greeting, and said: “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.”

Maybe you had to be there. Or not. But making due allowance for changing social mores, one can still nd the occasionally funny line in the law reports. Take this opening from Males J (as he then was), where the plainti :

was formerly a barrister and then a solicitor specialising in tax law. Some people might have found that exciting enough, but since 2005, when he acquired and ran a company making pornographic lms in which he also starred, he has been active in the sex industry. He describes himself now as a wealthy man living a playboy lifestyle. ose who are interested can apparently nd details in the pages of Loaded magazine.

But one suspects his lordship was only able to get away with it because

the plainti was himself a lawyer, and thus safe to mock under the social conventions of humour. e average civil litigant does not see anything funny in being in court, and long gone are the days when the criminal judge could dish out a bit of gratuitous abuse against some petty criminal.

In any case, judicial humour is often said to “occupy a low place in the order of wit”, mainly because lawyers often feel obliged to laugh at it. A legal obituarist once praised a dead judge’s dry sense of humour, before hastening to add that he “never degenerated into judicial joking”.

Theobald Mathew, Clement Attlee’s pupil master, was widely recognised to be the greatest legal wit of his generation

Some judges were notorious. Before he went on the bench, Darling J was renowned for having written “the wittiest book ever written by a legal luminary” (the rst line: “Est operae pretium duplicis pernoscere juris Naturam, says Horace. I believe he wrote thus concerning soup.” You don’t say.) But once on the bench, Darling: would lie back in his chair staring at the ceiling with the back of his head cupped in his hands paying scant attention to any argument but waiting until some footling little joke occurred to his mind. When this happened he would make the joke, the court would echo for about thirty seconds with sycophantic laughter, and then the process would start over again.

get you in front of the Judicial Conduct Investigations O ce. is is not to say that lawyers’ humour is never funny. But the best legal humour tends to be gently observational. A personal favourite is Maurice Healey’s e Old Munster Circuit, which contains some rib-cracking passages in which the author, an old Irish circuiteer, did nothing more sophisticated than to describe the common forms of perjury practised in rural Ireland before the First World War.

Another favourite is A P Herbert, who acquired a certain amount of fame for writing satirical law reports for Punch, some of which were cited as real authorities by real courts. Herbert’s plainti s were often civil libertarians (like himself); his judges decidedly not.

Now, sycophancy aside, some of his lines were funny (a witness at the assizes said he went inside e Elephant pub to make a phone call. Darling: “Was it a trunk call?”), but jokes are not always funny when a man is being tried for his life.

pub

would be the sort of specialising in tax law. Some people

In one of his more famous cases, the following judgment was given by the Lord Chief Justice (the defendant had jumped o Hammersmith Bridge for “fun”):

Sir Max Beerbohm drew a caricature of Darling having jester’s bells added to his black cap, which nowadays would be the sort of reputation which would

e appellant made the general answer that this was a free country and a man can do what he likes if he does nobody any harm ... It cannot be too clearly understood that this is not a free country, and it will be an evil day for the legal profession when it is ... People must not do things for fun. ere is no reference to fun in any Act of Parliament.

In the Britain of 2024, this rings, alas, more true than ever. ●

Woman About Town

LISA HILTON

Launched with fizz

What’s the collective noun for historians? e launch of Bettany Hughes’s captivating new book, Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, at Daunt’s in Marylebone prompted the question, with Kate Williams, Lucy Worsley, Dan Snow and

Hallie Rubenhold catching up over (most superior) champagne. e zz was a very generous gesture of solidarity since, according to the Bookseller’s annual list of the 50 top-selling titles, we’ll all be out of a job unless we bone up on air-fryers.

* * *

A broad church

Ecclesiastical eccentricities: Saint A nthony the Great, considered to be the founder of the Christian monastic system, is also the o cial patron of farmers, pigs and piggy-related products. Every January, a mass is held at Sant’ Antonio Abate in Venice to bless the city’s pets, complete with a solemn delegation from the o cials who oversee the authenticity of San Daniele prosciutto

Cats and dogs were heavily represented in a congregation which also included tortoises, parrots, hamsters and the odd lizard. e pigs were represented by cheerful garlands of salami, with predictable reactions from the canine worshippers. Nonetheless it was a joyful occasion, with much enthusiasm shown in the responses. I was also invited over to Giudecca for the launch of a friend’s new boat. e Wendy is a custom-built wooden marvel complete with sunbathing bench and built-in speakers. Before she was sent on her maiden voyage with a bottle of prosecco, the diocese’s

designated boat-blesser, dog-collar peeking from his sherman’s sweater, poured holy water across her bows and led the guests in the prayer for sailors.

Venetian boats, like Greek ones, still sport the painted talisman against the evil eye, and as the priest spoke we participated in something ancient and stirring and very beautiful. Men have been shing o Giudecca for a thousand years and the words threw a bridge across time, to a moment when setting out into the lagoon was perilous and even deadly.

That said, my freezer is annoyingly crammed with sea bass. The fish were running o the Lido and for several days a flotilla set o at 4am, battling against the bora, the bone-slicing wind that gusts down from the Julian Alps. Lagoon to table sounds both worthy and romantic, and I’m not one to turn down a free fish but these buggers were so fresh that the crabs in their stomachs scuttled round the sink when I gutted them, which is frankly revolting. The sea bass are still lurking, goggling reproachfully every time I go in for the frozen peas.

No carnival knowledge

February is C arnival season, when everyone who can leaves town and everyone who can’t pretends to. It’s a dismal festival, relaunched by the Commune in the 1970s as an ersatz version of the original bacchanal to attract tourist money and all Venetians despise it.

Quite what the visitors are expecting is a mystery, but still they come, year after year, to wander aimlessly in horrible plastic masks and freezing cold in search of a party that isn’t. Not least because, as a French friend remarked recently, “ e problem with Venice is that there’s no sex. ere aren’t even any prostitutes here.”

She has a point: the lack of eligible, or indeed any (straight)

men is a constant lament amongst the ladies in town, whilst the intoxicating whi of depravity which once made Venice the erotic capital of Europe hasn’t been scented since 1797. e smarter hotels reputedly have arrangements with an agency in Monaco when professional services are required, but anyone hoping for some Eyes Wide Shut-style carnival action will be disappointed. ese days, the Bride of the Adriatic remains chaste.

Venice’s tortuous tourist tax

The Commune has been trailing its latest solution to Venice’s hypertourism problem since the 2019 “Balance Law”, which has a lot in common with the UK government’s perpetual postponement of post-Brexit trading arrangements. Every year a new entry tax to the city is announced and then put o , but an experimental period of 30 days is apparently being introduced on 25 April, during which visitors will have to pay ve euros for a daily pass. Obviously, this requires downloading an app which will supposedly generate a QR code, but the system is equally

obviously collapsing before it has been launched. e 27 pages of instructions on the Commune site are complicated and confusing — for example if you are staying in a hotel on what the mayor insists on calling the “old city”, you don’t have to pay the tax, but you do have to register and receive a code of exemption, whilst if you plan to visit any of the minor islands you are not obliged to register so long as you can prove you’re not visiting Venice proper.

at is, you can make a free day-trip to Murano, but woe betide you if you fancy an ice cream while waiting for the vaporetto. Guests of residents are exempt, but only if they give their personal details and length of stay to the app. Clear?

How much public money has been wasted on a scheme which will no doubt yet again be quietly retired is uncertain, but meanwhile the hated mayor Luigi Brugnaro is doing everything in his power to strip Venice of its public services and make long-term housing contracts practically illegal. Brugnaro has a year remaining in o ce and if Venice isn’t Disneyland by the time he leaves it won’t be because he hasn’t tried. ●

●“You forgot to carry the one.” Rishi is helping our neighbour, Big Jeremy, with his sums. In a couple of weeks, he has to do something called the Budget, where he stands in the street with a red case and everyone takes pictures of him. He’s very worried about questions.

“Thanks Rishi,” he says. “But what does debt-to-GDP mean again?”

“Don’t worry. No one’s going to ask you about that. The only people worse at maths than MPs are journalists. Well, except for Evan Davis, but we’ve told the police to shoot if they see him within 100 yards of you.”

Akshata is looking at their plan. “But guys,” she says, “wasn’t it cutting taxes that got Liz Truss into such trouble?”

Rishi and Big Jeremy look up.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Akshata goes on. “Now we’ve decided I should pay taxes for a bit, I’m all in favour of cutting them. But I don’t see why it was bad for her to do it, but it won’t be bad for you to do it.”

“It’s completely different,” begins Rishi. “Liz was cutting taxes because she was deluded. Whereas I’m cutting taxes because I think it’ll turn the polls around.”

“But it didn’t do that when you tried it last year.”

“Ah, well, no. But that was because people thought it was a little pre-election bribe.”

“And what will they think it is this time?”

“A really large pre-election bribe.”

Big Jeremy stands up to leave. “Also,” he says, as he goes to the door, “we’re not actually going to cut taxes. That’s the clever bit! We’ll just say we are. So we keep everyone happy.”

After he’s gone, Akshata speaks quietly to Rishi: “Are you sure about Jeremy? I thought you wanted to get Claire in?”

“I did,” Rishi sighs, “but I think we’re stuck with him. He’s very plausible, so long as he doesn’t have to talk about the economy.”

Akshata puts her hand on Rishi’s knee. “Darling, what will you do if this doesn’t make any difference?”

“But it will! No Tory prime minister has ever gone wrong cutting taxes.”

“Except Liz.”

“Yes. But people thought her Chancellor was nuts.”

“So what did she do?”

“She got Jeremy in.”

“Did that help?”

“No. But everything’s completely different now.” ●

As told to Robert Hutton

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They promise nicer neighbourhoods, but the reality of 15-minute cities is restricted freedom and a town hall tra c-fine bonanza

THE 15MINUTE BAIT AND SWITCH

this time last year i watched with bemusement as a strange new trend emerged in my native Britain. Councils were introducing restrictions on citizens moving about by car. Living in Portugal had given me an observer’s detachment and I struggled to reconcile what I was seeing with the country I knew.

Oxford — my alma mater and the city where I regularly used to lose my bicycle — was at the heart of it. In November 2022, Oxfordshire County Council approved an experimental tra c scheme in a city notorious for congestion. Tra c lters would divide the city into zones, with those wishing to drive between them obliged to apply for permits.

Residents would be allocated passes for up to 100 journeys a year and those living outside the permit area 25. e zones would be monitored by automatic number plate recognition cameras and any journeys taken without permits would result in nes.

Duncan Enright, the councillor with responsibility for travel strategy told the Sunday Times the scheme would turn Oxford into a 15-minute city: “It is about making sure you have the community centre which has all of those essential needs, the bottle of milk, pharmacy, GP, schools which you need to have a 15-minute neighbourhood”.

new services or even assessing existing amenities. Instead, ourishing neighbourhoods were to be achieved by the simple expedient of making it di cult for people to drive across the city. Residents, visitors and businesses would make only “essential” — the word was highlighted in bold — car journeys. And while they would still be able to enter and exit Oxford via the ring road, “a package of vehicle movement restrictions” would “encourage” people to live locally.

traffic management or social engineering? The council’s plan looked like a case of bait-and-switch: citizens were being enticed to accept one thing on the promise of another. And, judging by the increasing revenues other councils were collecting through cameras, the scheme would be a nice earner. e vast amount of media coverage on 15-minute cities fuelled the fundamental confusion at the heart of the Oxford scheme. Instead of examining its implications, journalists characterised those questioning the proposals as “conspiracy theorists” who were wilfully refusing leafy roads and local markets. “What are 15-minute cities and why are anti-vaxxers so angry about them?” ran a headline in e Times. e Guardian published a piece titled “In praise of the 15-minute city” which mocked “libertarian fanatics and the bedroom commentators of TikTok”, claiming they belonged to an “anti-vaccine, pro-Brexit, climate-denying, 15-minute-phobe, Great Reset axis”. What had happened to the newspaper I’d read for decades and on occasion written for, with its understanding of the e ects of policies on ordinary people?

e explanation didn’t make sense. e council was presenting a scheme centred around restrictions on the movement of vehicles on the basis of something quite di erent: the desirability of local facilities. It was part of a plan for a “net zero transport system” which included a commitment to “20-minute neighbourhoods: well-connected and compact areas around the city of Oxford where everything people need for their daily lives can be found within a 20-minute walk”.

Yet the Central Oxfordshire Travel Plan made no provision for

e public debate around the Oxford experiment completely bypassed the obvious practicalities. What about a typical family, juggling work with school runs and after-school activities? Having to drive out of the city and around its periphery for each trip could make their lives impossible. How would those whose work wasn’t accessible by public transport manage on the two permitted journeys a week?

Then there was the question of how Oxonians would transport heavy or cumbersome items. With careful planning, those who didn’t need to use their car for work might manage a trip to the tip or DIY store without going the long way round. But how would such arrangements affect musicians taking instruments to gigs across town? Would enough drivers be willing to use their allowance to take games to Scout and Brownie groups and tools to community gardening sessions?

Putting such points to advocates of the measures on social media invariably engendered the same response: no one would be prevented from going anywhere. All people had to do was get on their bikes; heavy items could easily be transported via cargo bikes. e fact that the age, health or distance ruled out cycling for many went entirely unacknowledged. With a vocal minority

ALEX KLAUSHOFER

Protesters gather in Broad Street, Oxford, to demonstrate against 15-minute cities

supporting restrictions on their fellow citizens, it was clear that something more than enthusiasm for tra c-calming was playing out. A new ideology was emerging.

the origins of britain’s anti-vehicle movement are both international and domestic. e concept of a 15-minute city goes back to 2015 when Sorbonne professor Carlos Moreno coined the term at COP21. Together with its sister, 20-minute neighbourhoods, the idea is that everything the city-dweller needs should be available within a short walk or bike ride.

Moreno was not alone in arguing that Covid had created an opportunity to reorganise urban life. In May 2020, an article by a Reuters journalist on the website of the international NGO, e World Economic Forum, called for the transformation of post-pandemic cities so that residents lived, worked and played within a small area. e idea was supported by UN-Habitat, non-government organisations and universities.

Paris’s mayor, Anne Hidalgo, championed the idea in her election campaign, while the 20-minute neighbourhood was already part of the plan for the Australian city of Melbourne. In Britain, the idea of “liveability” dovetailed with the road closures that began under Covid.

In early 2020, the government provided local authorities with funding for planters to encourage social distancing. Subsequent Active Travel grants were made available to tackle congestion, with councils using Experimental Tra c Regulation Orders to close roads. Returning to Britain after two years away, I was surprised to see the very planters that had borne the Covid-19 signage repurposed for Low Tra c Neighbourhoods.

I was struck by how far Britain had departed from its historically reasonable approach to policymaking. As a public policy journalist in the early 2000s, I often followed the passage of innovative schemes from inception to implementation. Government departments tended to proceed with caution, consulting widely, aware that unintended consequences might create a situation worse than the one the policy aimed to remedy.

Councils keen on trendy concepts such as “localism” knew they didn’t have the power or funds to do much and con ned themselves to awarding modest grants to community projects. By contrast, councils were now assuming power of a completely

di erent order over public space. Why did municipal o cials have the right to decide whose journeys are “essential”?

A closer look at the Oxford scheme heightened my concerns. Exemptions would be given to a “qualifying car club” while a “non-professional carer would be allowed through ‘one trafc lter’”. Health and care workers would be permitted to take the quickest route for “operational journeys”, but not to travel to and from work.

A fundamental shift in the power of the state to regulate how people lived their lives was under way, one that eroded not the principle but the practicality of the freedoms of movement and association. Enforcement would require an unprecedented level of surveillance, with cameras on street corners and at the borders of arti cally-created zones.

And it was happening without public debate. An attempt by Nick Fletcher MP to hold a parliamentary debate on the subject was met with a slew of articles condemning him as a conspiracy theorist. A statement from the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities in response to a March 2023 petition echoed the oxymoronic formulation “restriction gives you choice” I had heard elsewhere: “15-minute cities aim to provide people with more choice about how and where they travel, not to restrict movement.”

A year on, Oxford remains at the heart of Britain’s car wars. Last October, despite ongoing protests, three LTNs in the east of the city were made permanent. ey have been blamed for damaging local businesses and teacher recruitment, increasing ambulance response times and bus journeys. New campaign groups post footage of gridlocked roads on social media daily.

in the meantime, it looks as if the government is changing its tune. “I’m calling time on the misuse of so-called 15-minute cities,” declared transport secretary Mark Harper at the Tory conference. “We shouldn’t tolerate the idea that local councils can decide how often you go to the shops and ration who uses the road and when and then police it all with CCTV”.

Oxford’s plan, partly funded by the Department of Transport, to zone the city is due to begin in the autumn for a trial of six to 18 months. And on 29 February the father of the 15-minute city, Carlos Moreno, will give the annual lecture at Oxford University’s Transport Studies Unit on the idea’s origins and potential.

Moreno has dismissed the concerns of critics. “ eir lies are enormous,” he told the author of a Forbes article: “You will be locked in your neighbourhood; cameras will signal who can go out; if your mother lives in another neighbourhood, you will have to ask for permission to see her and so on.”

Will his vision of the 15-minute city deliver on its life-enhancing promises? Oxford is soon to nd out. I will be watching with interest. ●

Alex Klaushofer writes essays about the changing times on Substack at Ways of Seeing

Sheikh up the Telegraph

We are fortunate that the UAE still wishes to invest in so unstable a country

Not since 1985 has a foreign bid for a British business so animated the Westminster classes. en, the fate of a Somerset helicopter-maker, Westland, sparked a serious and soul-searching debate over whether our future lay with the transatlantic Special Relationship or, instead, across the Channel with Europe.

Fast-forward four decades, and the company in question is a heritage publisher — the Telegraph Media Group — which is facing a takeover by an Emiratis Sheikh. is a air has triggered a rather more low-rent row over Britain’s global status.

e critics fret that this deal would be an acceptance of our lowly role of “Butler to the World”, as Oliver Bullough memorably phrased it in his eponymous book.

Overwhelmed by a deluge of Oriental investment, we have been reduced to the position of pimps, xers and court entertainers for the shady men behind the money — or so the argument goes.

In this context, the potential acquisition of the Telegraph by a group backed by Abu Dhabi’s Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who is vice president of the UAE, is seen as a malign attempt to convert nancial might into political in uence. e pygmies and half-wits of the Tory green benches have been getting into tangles seeking to block the deal, while cloaking their xenophobia. “We cannot separate Sheikh and state,” opined Alicia Kearns. “We would oppose it if the French government wanted to buy the newspapers,” spluttered Iain Duncan Smith.

Weirdly, Julian Lewis went so far as to invoke Taylor Swift — suggesting Telegraph hacks should follow the pop star’s example and redo their old material for a new media platform should the Gul es take control.

Look, I understand there are some elements of Gulf culture which make us queasy, but let’s get things in perspec-

tive. We may not like their treatment of migrant workers, but who among us paid much attention to the conditions of the anonymous souls who dug out the bedrock for our basement conversions?

Similarly, we may not much like the Arab treatment of women. But, then again, if last year’s joyous — and very sober — football world cup inspired even a handful of English fans to forego the “Wife Beater”, then the Qataris will have done womankind a great service.

e important point is this. If we tried, just for a moment, to see the world from the perspective of the marble-lined boardrooms of Abu Dhabi, Doha or Bahrain, we might conclude Sheikh Mansour is, in fact, the natural and best possible owner of the Telegraph.

they are to transition to a digital future.

Historically, the Gulf’s sovereign wealth funds and family o ces have been overweight in the UK because we aligned with their low risk appetite. ey liked our long track record of political stability, sound money and enforceable rule of law.

However, following the Westminster psychodramas of the past few years, I suspect the investment o cers of these cautious-minded funds have been penning agitated reports warning of Britain’s growing “geopolitical risk”, while agging potential asset write-downs.

Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan may want to take out a little insurance

The awful truth is that Arab investment provides an important source of the patient capital that we need to build our economy. Generally, their investment strategies are long-term and multi-generational, investing now to provide for grandchildren when, in a few decades, the oil wells may get capped.

And, though we hate to admit it, we have bene tted splendidly from this far-sighted largesse. anks in large part to Arab investment, the Premier League is the world’s leading sports franchise worth £7 billion to our GDP. Qatari cash built the Shard, which catalysed the transformation of Southwark from a drab backwater into one of London’s more interesting neighbourhoods.

As our high streets founder, Middle East investors are among the few who are still committed to bricks and mortar retail — though admittedly their focus is on high-end outlets like Selfridges and Harrods. More prosaically, Arab money is part of the mix in countless commercial property ventures and infrastructure projects. It is this long-term focus that media groups like the Telegraph need if

With so much “value at risk”, it would be unsurprising if Sheikh Mansour wanted to take out a little insurance, by using the Telegraph acquisition to get a seat at the political table.

Now, the team behind his bid have pledged that the newspaper will retain its editorial independence should they acquire the business. But, in my opinion, such a hands-o approach to ownership would be a lost opportunity both for the Sheikh and this country.

It would be refreshing to have a new, distinctive media voice which promotes the views of those who have the best long-term interests of the economy at heart. Such a voice would celebrate the few politicians who actually care about prosperity, productivity and predictable regulation.

Sadly, in our frivolous culture, thoughtful folk in politics tend to be derided as “bores” or “wonks”. is new media voice would also punish the charlatans, so often lionised by our journalists, who are easily titillated by vanity projects, quick xes and general silliness.

Maybe then we might once again have decision-makers with the seriousness of the Heseltines and Brittans who, for all their many aws, had clear visions for our long-term growth. ● — ned

The bigotry of low expectations, the tyranny of DEI, the canard of “decolonisation”, the rise of the bureaucrats — all have contributed to a perfect storm

Hollowed-out Humanities

David Butterfield

It has long been a cliché to speak of a crisis in the Humanities. As long ago as 1964, J.H. Plumb published a collection of essays under that title. Six decades later, and an article about external crises for the humanities writes itself: declining numbers, declining funding, declining societal value, declining autonomy and declining expectations. ese issues are rehearsed every year, drifting, unabated, in depressing directions. Yet what is rarely spoken of is the crisis within the Humanities: many of those entrusted with nurturing and propagating these disciplines have lost all sense of shared purpose.

To start with first principles: “Humanities” is not modern branding. e term comes from the very epicentre of Roman culture: in a law court of 63 bc, Cicero rst spoke of studia humanitatis (“the pursuits of humanity”) to highlight the learning of his adversary, the austere Stoic grandee Marcus Cato. Fundamentally, humanitas meant the human condition, but it evolved to describe both humane conduct and a liberal education — synonymous with the artes liberales e Humanities continued through the middle ages, with Latin being the lingua franca of all educated discourse: linguistic training was essential, while philosophy and theology took centre stage. Come the Renaissance, the collective disciplinary sense of humanitas was revitalised by gures such as Coluccio Salutati and Leonardo Bruni, both Chancellors of Florence; these self-described “humanists” sought the revival of Latin and Greek culture through literature. eir optimistic vision of the humanities endured, in some form, for the next ve centuries.

As Humanities enrolments decline, many departments have closed — recently at Roehampton, Wolverhampton, Aston, She eld Hallam, University of East Anglia, and now Kent, who propose to “phase out” from their “portfolio” subjects such as Modern Languages, Philosophy and (despite a campus in Canterbury) Religious Studies.

In my own lifetime, the Humanities have steadily lost out to both technology and politics. While the great expansion of universities in 1992, and of university enrolment under Tony Blair from 1997, allowed the Humanities to grow again, that government’s decision to introduce tuition fees encouraged students to weigh up future earnings when making their subject choice. And, as a study in 2020 found, Languages and Philosophy, after Creative Arts, secure the lowest net lifetime earnings, with Medicine, Economics and Law as the predictable top trio. With tuition fees now far higher, many have thought it wiser to follow the money.

When Labour also removed the requirement to study a foreign language beyond the age of 14, most schools gave up the time-consuming and di cult business of teaching languages to gcse. In 2004, some 350,000 students took French gcse, and 130,000 German; now 125,000 and 33,000 do. For A-level entries over this same period, French dropped by half (to 6,510) and German by two thirds (to 2,210). Most British pupils now take no foreign language past 14 and, although the English Baccalaureate requires a foreign language, 60 per cent of schools avoid the EBacc.

The twenty-first century, by contrast, has seen the Humanities decline, both proportionally and, now, in total numbers. In 1961, 28 per cent of British undergraduates studied a Humanities subject; now, only one in 14 students reads English, Modern or Ancient Languages, History, Philosophy, Classics, Music, History of Art, or eology. While this decline is largely due to growth in other sectors, recent years have also seen a real-terms drop. In 2009, 235,000 students read Humanities degrees; 15 years on and more than a fth — some 50,000 students — are choosing to spend their time and money elsewhere.

ese embarrassing decisions were made during those topsy-turvy days when an Education Secretary (Charles Clarke) could opine that “education for its own sake is a bit dodgy”, that government funding should be reserved for studies that have “clear usefulness”, and that “the medieval concept of a community of scholars seeking truth” might deserve one per cent of their current funding to keep them going as “an adornment to our society”. is destructive attitude, though mocked at the time, has now in ltrated the Humanities.

The cultural and disciplinary gap — between (traditional) Humanities, social sciences, and stem subjects — is now greater than ever. But the biggest divide lies between professional academics and bureaucratic administrators, who neither understand nor sympathise with one another. Historically, the fact that administrators were drawn from the ranks

Catiline, plotting to seize power in Rome, is denounced in the Senate by Cicero. As the other senators move away from him, he is left isolated

of academics served as a check on the damage they could do. But the emergence, and mind-boggling expansion, of career administrators has put paid to that. ey, without question, are in charge.

Administrators, who have no knowledge of academic nuance and complexity, impose what they profess to know: the building of connections between disciplines (which usually leads to time-wasting collaborations, or even crude mergers of departments), the “general skills” of teaching and research (which usually obstruct skill or competence in either), the “capture” and management of grants (which bring in overheads to keep the bureaucracy thriving) — and, for many a university, the control of student numbers.

Spurred on by the O ce for Students, a narrowly-de ned set of parameters is applied to Humanities subjects. Chief among them is “employability”, i.e. creating an economically useful individual who will not only get a job at the end of the degree but also be a “socially aware” individual imbued with the attitudes appropriate to “the modern workplace”.

Yes, Humanities departments are compelled to play the administrators’ game. But many have let the game play them, wittingly or otherwise: entire research topics are chosen on the basis of what will have “measurable impact”; the “best practice” for teaching is taken up and rolled out for brownie points, despite its emerging from those who know nothing of the subject’s pedagogical reality.

Academics who do their job out of pure passion yield the administration of resources to bureaucrats, who don’t just control the money but also the terms of promotion. And it is a grim paradox that if you seek success in the university sector, your career progression will be easier by achieving a 2.1 and becoming an administrator than obtaining a rst-class degree, pursuing an academic career, and spending your life as the scholarly serf of overpaid and overbearing mediocrities.

For many working in the Humanities in such a climate, there is a crisis of meaning, a loss of con dence, and an uncertainty about what should matter most. Is it teaching? Re-

search? Widening participation? Social justice? Even for the majority who agree it should be teaching — does that mean teaching content or process, providing knowledge or skills?

ere is no agreement.

Even the core duty of appraising students has become troubled. People’s di erent educational backgrounds, cultural norms, even “ways of knowing” are challenging the holistic and universal principles of the Humanities. If “lived experience” can only be understood and critiqued by someone who shares it, and if discussing such lived experience becomes part of the work submitted for a degree, should it not follow that blind marking must stop, and a suitably “similar” examiner be found for each candidate? Naturally, that would be as ridiculous as it would be unworkable; but as handwringing continues, the outcome is yet more grade in ation and less faith in what degree results denote.

Meanwhile the canard of “decolonisation” continues to busy committee discussions, despite near-total disagreement about what it means and what, if anything, should be done. For most self-appointed “activists”, of course, this was never an intellectual undertaking, but one of destabilisation. It is a cynical extension of the absurd eld of “critical studies”, whose self-styled “theories” are unfalsi able dogmas, and whose supposedly liberatory purpose is both negatively de ned and fundamentally destructive.

dei, edi, die — whatever order the acronym comes in — advances a conformist system bereft of intellectual depth: in an academic context, Diversity means uniformity, Equality equity, and Inclusion exclusion of those who challenge the narrative. is ideological system is unquestionably obstructing freedom in academia: “dei statements” are now tied in with job applications, grant proposals, and criteria for promotion. For a handful of academics, writing these is an act of reverence, for most one of rhetoric; for some, it is a ritual of humiliation, since their traditional and technical work is simply unable to talk the talk of modern progressivism. ose who set about “delivering diversity” — rather than teaching the subjects they are paid to — very often combine

statistical ignorance with a complete lack of curiosity about cause and nuance. Blithe assumptions are made about what a given identity group may want introducing to, or removing from, the syllabus; patronising and o ensive claims are made about what is and is not appropriate for teaching and reading; crude categories are dreamt up and imposed, and only carefully scrutinised when the results seem to point in the right direction of “representation”. Yet the question is not even posed, let alone answered, of what pool of people demands representation, and why.

A case in point: what is the most striking imbalance in Humanities students in Britain? e answer, of course, is the predominance of women. At the national level, more than twothirds of Humanities students are female. At my own university, the School of Arts and Humanities accepted 65 per cent women in 2022, a gure that rises to 70 per cent in Modern and Medieval Languages, and 75 per cent in English. ( e gure for the university as a whole is 51.5 per cent.)

Yet in my two decades at Cambridge, I have not encountered any critical discussion of this disparity, let alone any initiative that might deliver “better representation” of our even-sexed 18-year-olds. e fact is, it does not t anyone’s diversity narrative simply to get more men on the books. So too at the national level does it go largely unremarked that 41 per cent of women attend university compared with 31 per cent of men.

it is to be human. e central, most material consideration for living life is that of being human. What does that mean? What gives life purpose?

It is the Humanities that open up the accumulated wealth of literature, art and culture to allow for profound exploration of these questions — about what is good or bad, beautiful or perverse, worthwhile and salutary or pointless and destructive. ese studies allow us to glimpse universal truths as well as encounter the diversity of humankind in all its fascinating particularities. For it is impossible to nd deep meaning in life without rooting it in values and ideas that transcend not just the self but one’s immediate moment. To any external observer, these claims are self-evident; voice them in academia, eyebrows will rise and heads shake.

must things be this way for the humanities now? no. and i saw a brief glimpse of this last summer

With such con icting motives — ghting for social change, pleasing bureaucrats, helping students, conducting research — life in the Humanities is more confused than ever. Amid the noise, con dence in the transformative power of universities has declined, while a sad bigotry of low expectations grows.

With each year, reading lists are scaled back, and restricted to ever-more-recent publications; sometimes there is even a cap on pages allowed to be set. Closed-book exams are steadily replaced by coursework; dissertations based on research are slowly evolving into re ections on personal experience and “learning journeys”. Meanwhile, class time is taken up by teaching skills that used to be instilled in school: the ability to read critically, write clearly, and structure arguments.

Yet in the “service provider” model, undeniable and near-irreversible grade in ation means that poor exam performance is a greater problem for a faculty (why did teaching and other provisions fail the student?) than the actual candidate (who paid good money for “world-leading teaching”). Awarding higher marks demonstrates a successful course, secures good student feedback, and avoids unwelcome trouble.

W ithout a shared sense of purpose in the Humanities, the eld will either deviate from its tried-and-tested course, or devour itself. What, then, are the Humanities for? At root, they seek to understand what others have produced, individually and collectively, and to learn from them about what

It is no accident that the Humanities survived for millennia in a context where they formed an essential part of liberal education; it is no accident that most universities were founded with some religious commitment undergirding their studies. Harvard’s motto Veritas (Truth), Yale’s Lux et veritas (Light and truth), Princeton’s Dei sub numine viget (She thrives under God’s power), Oxford’s Dominus illuminatio mea ( e Lord is my light) and Cambridge’s hinc lucem et pocula sacra (From here light and sacred draughts) are not idle formulations that sounded good to spin doctors. All are born from the historic importance of Christianity in the university sector.

Times of course change, and after the Scienti c Revolution, the divine became steadily sidelined in academia, out of growing suspicion or disbelief. But when, in our contemporary context, the post-modern and indeed post-enlightenment outlook of many academics rejects the very concepts essential to collaborative academic endeavour and progress — truth, knowledge, objectivity, the scienti c method — the university’s mission inevitably ounders.

To make any sense at all, the Humanities still need approaching in a humanistic light. ey need some higher goal that provides greater direction and purpose to the otherwise unrooted practices of education for mere instruction and research for mere publication. Without that, it is a matter of time before they descend to ideological purposes, thus corrupting the whole humanistic — and, in turn, academic — endeavour.

At last I come to my own subject, Classics — a microcosm that analyses the Greco-Roman world through almost every discipline of the Humanities. Add that Ancient Greek and Latin are both di cult to access in schools and painstaking to learn thoroughly, then the eld plays host to a perfect storm. On the ground, I have never known morale so low: drives for collaborative research leave behind the traditional solo-working scholar; teaching needs grow and research time dwindles; young academics don’t earn enough to live a stable life in university cities; too many graduate students are pro-

duced to nd jobs; the exhaustion has no clear reward or end. It should be a joy and inspiration. Classics enjoys, almost uniquely, an unbroken tradition of formal education from antiquity. e discipline is so central to the history of the West that most of our literature and art, much architecture, and many social norms cannot be explained without reference to the Classical tradition, often mediated by Christianity. is inheritance was not something restricted to a learned elite; until recently, it was a natural part of school education, political discourse, popular culture. To learn in Britain about Homer or Caesar or Boudicca or Augustine of Canterbury was to participate in our shared inheritance.

Yet many things that used to be essential to the pitch about Classics are now frowned upon: universal claims about the human condition; wide-eyed praise of profound poetry, beautiful art, harrowing historiography. Faced with the ocean currents of relativism, any positive value claim about the artistic genius of the Greeks and Romans is treated with high suspicion. Despite the subject’s immense in uence and importance, Classics, the nger-waggers make clear, must treat itself as an academic subject no di erent from any other.

Must things be this way for the Humanities in the twenty- rst century? No. And I saw a brief glimpse of this last summer: on a Greek island, I was surrounded by 30 students reading Ancient Greek, speaking it to each other, amid long-form conversations about what moved them most in these texts. It was so simple, so fresh, and so incredible that the students in question had never studied Greek before, and that their attendance was philanthropically covered by full scholarships. To begin their MA in the Humanities they sat alongside two of the top ve ancient linguists in the world, before returning to Savannah, Georgia, to chart the Western tradition up to the present. at institution, Ralston College, models just how di erent things can be if the Humanities are given the space to breathe and believe.

As for students, they expect and deserve more from the Humanities, especially the most bright and independent. ey want institutions that stand for something and have condence in the higher goods they aspire to. ey resent being thwarted because their ambitions are amenable neither to instrumental employment or fashionable activism.

Whenever students are instructed to “think critically”, they should re ect “for whose good”? All Humanities scholars must do so as well, since this is a genuine crisis (Greek for “decision”) — a moment to decide what matters most.

For my part, Classics is a subject I will always defend. I too have had to decide; and though employed until retirement (if such a thing will even be legal in 2055), I have given up my Cambridge lectureship. e problems are very real, and very urgent, but the biggest of them are best xed from the outside. e Humanities will not regain the essential importance they must have in everyone’s lives without the freedom to ght. ●

David Butter eld is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Cambridge

TITANIA M cGRATH’S WOKE WORLD

Why not the Taliban Line?

●I AM EE I T R E T EE THAT Transport for London has unveiled six new overground lines and not one of them is named after Greta Thunberg (Peace Be Upon Her).

What exactly is Sadiq Khan playing at? Don’t get me wrong: I applaud Sadiq’s efforts to remove offensive advertisements from the Tube, and the way that he manages to lecture Londoners for being racist t roug t e ediu o fire or s

But these new overground lines are not su ficiently rogressive ey are called: t e Lioness Line, the Mildmay Line, the Windrush Line, the Weaver Line, the Suffragette Line and the Liberty Line. Why not name at least one of them after the brave people of colour who have overcome systemic racism to achieve their goals? Why not the Martin Luther King Line? Or the Maya Angelou Line? Or the Taliban Line?

I never use public transport because Daddy always has an e tra Bentley availa le ut do t in it s an e cellent o ortunity to educate t e or ing classes a out social justice. For instance, I have often seen trains and buses ainted in t e colours o t e rogress ride ag ic not only reminds everyone to support LGBTQ+ rights, but also dispels the myth that gay people are able to colourcoordinate.

But some of these new train lines are so offensive that they beggar belief. The “Windrush Line” is named after a slave ship that brought innocent West Indians to the UK: the most racist country on earth. The “Suffragette Line” is named after a TERF terrorist group from the early t entiet century o ore rilly onnets and set fire to horses or something. And as for the “Mildmay” Line … ell don t no at t at eans ut it s ro a ly got something to do with golliwogs.

The “Lioness Line” is the most problematic of all. It refers to a women’s football team that purports to represent the country, and yet it is comprised exclusively of slim and athletic players. Around 63 per cent of adults in this country are either overweight or obese, so why aren’t they represented?

We’d probably lose a lot more games, but at least it would send a positive message. ●

Titania can be found @TitaniaMcGrath

It is up to academics to restore the founding ideals of institutions that have become mired in a morass of managerialism, low standards and ideological activism

What are universities for ?

James Orr

It is harder and harder to escape the feeling that the founding ideals of the university — the preservation, pursuit, and promulgation of learning; the free play of the creative intellect; the incubation of a public-spirited elite — are slowly vanishing in a morass of managerialism, careerism, and ideological capture. Pessimists nd comparisons between tertiary education and highly e cient immigration agencies or assembly lines for a cosmopolitan class as hostile to the country’s past as it is indi erent to its future.

ere isn’t a consensus about the proper purpose of universities, not least because the bene ts they bring to those who pass through them are as many and various as those they contribute to our common life. Yet the two foundational vocations of the sector — the formation of a re ective, informed, and capable citizenry, and the incubation and di usion of higher learning — have been and should remain the primary justi cations for their in uence on public life.

the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a quarter of male graduates in England earn less over the course of their careers than those who avoided university altogether.

The expansion of universities has had a negligible positive impact on social mobility, economic productivity and professional skills, and has sharply exacerbated social and cultural divides. Since almost all universities are residential, the growth in graduate numbers has accelerated a massive demographic churn from poorer to wealthier parts of the country, with many university leavers gravitating eventually to London and the South-East.

A re they discharging these functions? I n crude economic terms, the value of a university degree is the signal it sends to wider society about the degree-holder. e signalling function is twofold: admission to a degree course is a test of cognitive ability while completing it is a mark of conscientiousness. Both of these signals have grown ever dimmer.

As an indicator of aptitude, the degree has been eroded: rst, by the massive expansion in the numbers of degree-holders, which means that their average intelligence has decreased, and second, by introducing admissions criteria that have nothing to do with raw cognitive ability.

At the same time, the conscientiousness signal is being scrambled by rampant degree in ation. e proportion of Firsts awarded has more than doubled since 2011. Transformatively, a quarter of graduates who got into university with three D grades at A-Level graduated with First Class honours in 2022. Moreover, the assessment metric of the class division is now so blunt as to be heuristically useless. Unsurprisingly, the con dence employers now place in the value of most degrees has never been lower.

For a worryingly high proportion of graduates, evidence of the fabled “graduate premium”, the chief justi cation for New Labour’s expansion of the number of graduates from 30 per cent to 50 per cent of school-leavers, is scarce. According to

e gap between domestic annual fees (frozen for years at £9,250, though still the highest in the developed world) and eye-wateringly high international fees is wider than ever, leading to stark and scandalous disparities in admissions thresholds. ere is now incontrovertible evidence of widespread and probably unlawful discrimination against the country’s brightest and best young people in favour of low-quality applicants from overseas hungry for post-study visas.

Graduates leave university with average debts of £50,000 to look for jobs in tight labour markets on the lowest salaries in Northern Europe, all at a time when mass migration has driven up rental costs and housing prices to their highest levels in modern history.

Moreover, it is far from obvious that the economic risks of many degrees are outweighed by the broad and enriching formation that university life once o ered. On the rare occasions that it is expressed, intelligent and well-intentioned dissent from the sacred values of alphabetism, eco-millenarianism, and white-saviourism, is routinely demonised or ignored. Afrmative action in academic hiring — sometimes covert, often celebrated — is beginning to run rampant. Conspiracy theories about systemic hostility to historically marginal groups abound.

Six decades after the British Empire’s dissolution, a cottage industry has emerged hawking unhinged initiatives to “decolonise” academic life. e justi cation for these initiatives is tendentious at best. But their underlying ideology is troubling in other ways. As one academic at the LSE helpfully reminded us on 8 October 2023, “decolonisation is not a metaphor. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Decolonisation, we were invited to infer, is an ideology that had found its concrete

expression in the atrocities committed by Hamas against their collectively guilty colonial oppressors. What happens in the lecture hall does not stay in the lecture hall.

New posts are routinely advertised requiring competence in areas that are so plainly politicised that only the most ideologically aligned have any hope of success. Conversely, scholars with heterodox perspectives who focus on (say) the economic trade-o s of decarbonising the global economy stand little chance of a respectful hearing.

Grant applications and conference invitations promise to liberate “minoritised” gures from the oppression of a scholarly indi erence. Academic publishing itself remains a cartelised industry dominated by a powerful oligopoly. I well remember the mix of glee and disbelief of an investment banker on discovering that there were companies who could acquire their primary product for nothing and, once it had met negligible costs of distribution, sell it at exorbitant prices to institutions who had borne all the costs of producing it in the rst place.

M eanwhile, the dogmas of edi/dei distort decision-making at every level of the modern university in myriad and often unpredictable ways. It is probably true that the endless hectoring of lanyarded commissars and rainbow supremacists is easier to mock and ignore than it is in other sectors. But the fact remains that Britain’s 175 universities employ around 725 full-time sta to help universities to “do the work” enjoined by the most recently created victimhood class.

Few of these roles existed 25 years ago and there is no evidence that, say, the 40 full-time EDI sta at the University of Oxford — hired at an annual cost of £2.04 million — have made it a more congenial place to work for anyone. In short, EDI shakedowns produce perverse incentives and waste millions of pounds better spent on bursaries for undergraduates from low-income families or stipends for graduate students.

e philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre once observed that the older scholastic conception of the university was animated by a highly integrated theological conception of reality. It was the loss of that organising horizon that made inevitable

the emergence of what Clark Kerr once dubbed the “multiversity”. e weakness of the liberal conception of the university is that it treated its enabling norms as self-evident to all, when it turned out they were obvious only to an intellectual class shaped by the cultural memory of its medieval origins. e cosmic vision of the woke supplies the unifying purpose to universities that liberalism still struggles to replicate: a theory of sin and redemption, an origins story, sacred texts, saints and heretics, a complete moral universe. e key di erence between the two outlooks is that the new vision is nakedly political, energised by the Marxist idea that the mission of the intellectual is not to interpret the world but to change it.

Hence the proliferation of contentious “critical” perspectives across the humanities and, increasingly, STEM disciplines too as progressive acadmics launder voodoo disciplines — Queer eory, Critical Race eory, Postcolonial eory — through the reputations of historic institutions to train a new ideological clerisy.

Can anything be done? T here remain some positives and even cautious grounds for hope. Britain still boasts, relative to its size, the nest research university sector in the world. e QS University Rankings 2024 puts four of its universities in the global top ten (Cambridge at second, Oxford at third, Imperial at sixth, and UCL at ninth) and seven in the top 40 (Edinburgh at 22nd, Manchester at 32nd, and KCL at 40th). By contrast, only one university in the European Union ranks in the top 25.

More than a quarter of the world’s countries are led by graduates of a British university (27 per cent — only the US has a higher proportion: 28 per cent). And despite the gloomy predictions of many, Brexit has done little to dent the sector’s international standing: it has rejoined the Horizon Europe research programme and ditched the Erasmus+ Scheme, which was restricted almost entirely to EU universities, in favour of the £100m-a-year Turing Scheme, opening up student exchange programmes with more than 160 countries.

Walk of shame: a group on an ‘Uncomfortable Oxford’ tour outside All Souls College

Moreover, the sector has achieved these results on relatively modest levels of public subsidy. Indeed, one paradoxical advantage of the UK sector is the nancial weakness of its key players relative to its US counterparts. Harvard, by contrast, is a $53 billion hedge fund with a university attached, recently receiving $300 million from the trader Ken Gri n, a donation larger than the endowments of all but four UK universities. at means university leaders here are more responsive to the disa ection of donors, politicians, and the general public. It also means that they have a lower appetite for the legal risks of politicising the culture of their institutions.

And those risks are growing: the arbitration regime created by the Freedom of Speech (Higher Education) Act 2023, which will be fully up-and-running in August, as well as recent court decisions expanding the scope of philosophical beliefs protected under the Equality Act 2010, will go some way to constraining the ideological excesses of administrators and academics.

lege, but it must be exercised to be justi ed.

Researchers and teachers with heterodox views should publish and promote their views. ey owe that to their institutions to prevent its corruption, to junior scholars who do not enjoy the security of a permanent position, to their guild to prevent its politicisation, and, most of all, to the general public, which has a right to expect all sides of an ethically complex or politically contested issue to be fairly articulated.

Extramural solutions should also be explored. Disgruntled donors should stop funding institutions run by cabals bent on destroying them and redirect their benefactions to scholars and enterprises with the competence and courage to explore heterodox research.

those who enjoy the luxury of secure positions should prioritise research that challenges ideological subversion

ese are hopeful signs that the law will provide antidotes that will thaw the well-documented “chilling e ect” of campus conformity and cancel culture on intellectual freedom.

For all but a minority of academics, though, lawfare will be too expensive, time-consuming, emotionally draining, and reputationally risky a process to contemplate. What is needed is the formation of networks of academics to teach and publish on heterodox themes in su ciently large numbers to arrest the “spiral of silence”.

ose who enjoy the luxury of secure positions should prioritise research that challenges ideological subversion of their elds. e adage invoked at his trial by omas More is relevant here: he who has remained silent is deemed to have consented. Academic freedom is a precious professional privi-

The com any has been accused of fostering a culture of sexism. s the ttest bird in the of ce, what s your view on this

Philanthropists should be persuaded of the bene ts of “o shoring” in academia and allocate their bequests to build up research infrastructure along the lines of the Oxford Union or the Hoover Institute, entities that are embedded in the culture of their respective universities but legally insulated against external interference.

Strategies aimed at effecting reformation of universities from within — the “Tridentine Option”, if you will — may stem the sector-wide sclerosis, but they will not reverse it. What is also needed is a “Geneva Option”: much as the Dissenting Colleges and the University of London emerged as pressure valves from the sti ing orthodoxies of Oxbridge in the nineteenth century, new “vice-signalling” universities are necessary to o er a market alternative to the virtue-signalling culture of existing institutions.

e leaders of these new enterprises should avoid the temptation of engaging in a dialogue of the deaf between “woke” and “anti-woke” and focus on recovering the fading liberal norms of tolerating dissent, testing received wisdom, and recognising the value of political neutrality.

To achieve that, they may even nd willing and e ective recruiting sergeants in a new generation of extramural actors who o er a taste of the fruits of deep learning to millions through the medium of long-form podcasts, online learning platforms, YouTube channels and Substack subscriptions. Many academics are leveraging social media to broadcast anonymously their heterodox perspectives on scholarly questions from within the walls of the ivory asylum.

All but the most naïve will be sceptical that these solutions could provide a panacea to the progressive takeover of Britain’s universities. But the battle is not yet lost and those who cherish the inheritance they bequeathed to the world over centuries must ght on every possible front to ensure it is won.

Only then can we hope to arrest and reverse the closing and coddling of the Western mind. ●

James Orr is Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the University of Cambridge

CARTOON

Britain’s universities have lost their soul in a disastrous dash for cash, typified by their reckless pursuit of poorly-qualified overseas students paying inflated fees

Killing the golden goose

Sebastian Milbank

International students were supposed to be the gold standard of the modern British economic model. Even if the hard sinews of British power had withered, we could still boast a leaner, more agile sort of greatness. Call it soft power, call it the knowledge economy, the creative industries or the service sector — in some intangible, postmodern fashion, we were winners. ere were many facets to this blissful Blairite dream, from the idea that buying stu , but not selling it, could make Britain money, to the notion that pit villages could be revitalised if they were better connected to the internet. But perhaps the most shining element of all was the British university. Here was a eld of endeavour we could portray as “world-beating” with at least some honesty — and we had the Times Higher Education league tables to prove it.

In 1999 Blair called for 50 per cent of Britain’s young people to attend university. is was the great West Wing idea that old, dirty, heavy industry would have to be shipped overseas, whilst ex-industrial workers would simply learn to code — or whatever the post-modern economy required. Borders would be open, both to immigrants owing in and jobs pouring out.

leaving us with cash in hand and them with a leg-up in their own countries. We were, as it is still grandly put, “exporting education”.

A minority would stay, of course, working in highly skilled and specialised elds, the best of the best, wielding their rstclass minds for the good of the country. We’d be printing money, attracting top talent, and burnishing our global reputation. For years, international students have been treated in policy debates as a get rich-and-clever-quick scheme without any downside.

Somehow a nation powered by spreadsheet jobs, Mandarin-speakers and shiftless creatives was going to form the nucleus of massive economic growth. History has not been kind to this idea — economic warfare with Russia and China has made a mockery of it and Western leaders are desperately trying to rebuild sclerotic domestic supply chains, especially the Americans.

International students were an important element of the picture, especially in Canada and Britain; the two countries that have most rapidly embraced the expansion and internationalisation of their higher education sectors. While the idea that low-paid workers would generate innovation was for the birds, the case for overseas students offered a surface plausibility. ey would come alone, live in a cupboard, pay astronomical fees for the privilege, and then politely depart at the end of the process,

Advocates called for them to be taken out of migration statistics. Under eresa May, the Conservative government jumped at the idea, setting astronomically high targets of 600,000 international students a year by 2030 as part of its International Education Strategy. e government met this target swiftly, and with 679,970 overseas students as of 2021/2022, Britain has the world’s second largest number of overseas students studying in the country. Only the United States — a country around ve times larger in population terms — exceeds Britain’s numbers, with just over 1 million in 2022/2023.

When things seem to be too good to be true, they usually are. A massive spike in non-EU students, especially post-pandemic, brought more students than ever to British universities from India (rising from 17,800 in 2018/19 to 87,000 in 2021/22), and Nigeria (up from 5,500 to 32,900 in the same period). ese students were generally poorer (one London food bank recently revealed it was feeding 1,000 international students a week); taking shorter, cheaper courses; and unprecedented numbers were bringing dependents. Critics alleged that increasingly it was not education, but British visas, that universities were seeking to export.

Recent investigations have uncovered how so many of these students were enrolled. While home students at elite British universities were having to secure As and A*s at A-level, those coming from abroad were only required to have Bs and Cs. An exposé in the Sunday Times revealed that Newcastle University requires home students

to achieve three As, while setting the bar for overseas students at two Ds and an E.

Defenders, such as Jonathan Portes in the Guardian, pointed out that these were foundation courses, and that such courses exist for British students too. What they failed to mention is that home and international foundation courses are generally distinct, with the latter speci cally and aggressively marketed and branded to overseas students.

In many cases, international students (such as those from Nigeria, Latin America and Pakistan) are required to apply for foundation courses before going on to undergraduate degrees. Additionally, once these courses are completed, students can choose to go directly into the normal second year of undergraduate study — a back door that bypasses the process faced by ordinary domestic students.

The reason we have all these scandals is that the golden goose has stopped laying. We were told a vast supply of capable, well-educated international students was desperate to pay a premium to study at British red-bricks. Numbers were limitless, as were the depth of international pockets. Government reports were full of lines on graphs soaring into the stratosphere, and nobody stopped to ask if there were limits to demand. Now we’re now getting the answer.

Other countries have their own, much cheaper, higher education options. In Australia, some students pay as little as £6,000 in fees. At German public universities there are no tuition fees at all — even for international students. An Indian student would generally pay in the region of £2,600-7,200 a year studying at home. He could expect to pay an average of £22,000 a year for the privilege of studying in the UK.

As well as being far cheaper, local institutions o er courses taught in native languages and linked to national and regional systems of patronage. Outside high value degrees such as en-

gineering, computer science and medicine at the most elite institutions, the strategy of British universities resembles not so much the well-aimed cast for the best and brightest from overseas as an undiscriminating attempt to trawl up whatever shoals can be lured towards the boat. us the dropping of entrance requirements, the promotion of foundation courses and the blind eye turned to students bringing their family with them in search of work.

e zeal with which these overseas students are courted re ects a British higher education sector in trouble — one that has recklessly expanded on the baseless assumption that the modern economy would require an in nitely vast population of university graduates. While some degrees do boost graduate salaries, damning evidence has been ignored that a large proportion of degree subjects leave students no better o .

Indeed, the Telegraph found that graduates with degrees in English literature, translation, photography, public administration, music, lm, fashion and tourism management were actually earning below the average non-graduate salary ve years after completing their degree — in return for expending three years study for which they accrued a £45,000 debt.

Unperturbed, British vice-chancellors and Whitehall policymakers alike remain mindlessly xated on the mythical bene ts to the country of universities focusing on quantity over quality. Having started us down the road towards half of school leavers going on to higher education, Tony Blair now thinks his achievement too modest. In 2022 he called for 70 per cent of British pupils to go on to university by 2040.

Even the bene ts to social inclusion are imaginary. Despite meeting Blair’s 50 per cent goal in 2017, the gap between disadvantaged and privileged pupils has barely shrunk. As more students attend university, more degrees and institutions end up piled at the bottom of the heap. e British university system continues to be what it has been for decades — a ltration system that sorts students by wealth, class and background. International students have helped here too by giving a super cial appearance of diversity, even as domestic intakes remain unchanged.

are residential three-year courses that take millions of young people out of the workforce while saddling them with debt the best approach for higher education? America’s community college and technical school model and Britain’s own Open University are vastly more work-oriented, both in subject matter and exibility, than the behemoth university system that has been promoted instead. Technical skills and adult education are badly neglected in Britain’s system, which remains focused on an elite model of fresh-faced teenagers living in residential halls and “consuming” an academic syllabus.

Nine in ten MPs have degrees. More than half went to a Russell Group university. While 46 per cent of UK students study for STEM (science, technology, engineering, maths) de-

grees, only 17 per cent of MPs have one.

Inevitably, they push the educational model that they know; the one that worked for them. At some level, perhaps, they know or intuit that other models are possible, and that embracing them would come at the cost of the cultural outlook and economic model that they have relentlessly pushed.

e Blairite solution to the disadvantaged is to remake these unfortunates in their own image. Hence “regeneration schemes” premised on trendy apartments, hipster co ee shops and modern art galleries. Hence universities as the primary recipients of government largesse and strategic expansion.

Old school British class elitism has merged with a new internationalist cadre (David Goodhart’s “anywheres”), who share a commonality of lifestyle, economic model and values that nd expression in liberal, globalised cities — think London, Vancouver, San Francisco, New York, Montreal and Dublin — but which are at odds with supposedly backwards-looking national hinterlands. Amidst a feel-good haze of non-speci c creativity and “social justice”, an international class of elites blurs into an international class of servants and supplicants.

get of a 35 per cent reduction in overseas student numbers. What is the purpose of a university? Is it to produce skilled workers or to o er a life-enriching rite of passage? Should it pass on our traditional culture and heritage and be a place where timeless and irreducible truths are contemplated or focus on generating economic growth and innovation? Is creating global citizens and promoting diversity the goal, or increasing social mobility within Britain while also producing a cohesive governing elite?

Some of these aims are contradictory; many would seem to be pursued better if disaggregated and assigned to dedicated institutions. e chief barrier to reform or clari cation is that universities don’t really stand, institutionally, for any of these ideas. What universities are for is themselves.

expansion at any cost has wrought disaster. overseas students must be held to the same standards and their numbers capped

Aggregation is the point. e prestige that derives from institutions that train the leaders of the country, or produce worldchanging discoveries, is packaged and diluted, sold to millions of students, and “exported” all over the world. Likewise, this aggregation fuels the perpetual growth of universities, and their armies of administrators.

T he high priests of this worldview are elite universities. More than all the economic arguments, the in ated fees, or even the promises of innovation, an internationalised campus is an article of faith; a marker of prestige and virtue, a guarantee of entrance to a world that oats free of borders and boundaries. e proponents of open-borders ideology congregate in universities whose intakes are more internationalised and whose management sponsor visas with the wave of a hand.

Borderless globalists urge Britain to imitate countries like Canada, where university participation is higher and proportionately even more international students are enrolled, with 550,580 entering Canadian universities in 2022 — almost as many as came to the UK, but in a country of only 38 million people, as compared to the UK’s 67 million. Even more study visas were granted for other forms of tertiary education, and dodgy degree factories have proliferated which Canada’s immigration minister has compared to “puppy mills”. e consequences for Canada should be a warning, not an encouragement, for Britain to heed. Canada’s headlong pursuit of university and population expansion through mass migration and international student growth has created the inevitable result when supply cannot meet the unrestricting of demand — house prices have exploded to the point where even Justin Trudeau’s liberal progressive government has now imposed draconian restrictions on overseas buyers of property and placed a cap on the intake of international students.

While we’re ramping up numbers, Canada — which is a little further down the road of this approach — is setting a tar-

British universities are engines of patronage, jostling with one another for government funding, laundering research and reputation through the Research Excellence Framework (REF). University graduates have every motivation to defend their institution’s credential-conferring reputation, and the only people empowered to assess them are employed by universities. is is a self-serving and self-perpetuating system. Expansion at any cost expansion just “because” has wrought disaster.

International student numbers must be capped, and candidates held to the same academic standards, regardless of their country of origin. A far greater priority must be given to practical skills and the national interest when it comes to the massive resources invested in education, especially when millions of students are saddled with considerable debt in the process of getting an education.

e intangible bene ts — elite formation, moral education, cultural heritage — must not be lost, but nor is their only home the academic university. With the incredible online learning resources now available, cheap adult education should be a far more widespread feature of local and national policy. It is immaterial that some universities those seeking to protect their lucrative rent-seeking model may regret that this is so.

Vast and inhuman, our universities have lost their soul in the process of reckless expansion. To get it back, and rediscover their humanist purpose, they must learn to think small again. ●

Sebastian Milbank is executive editor of e Critic

When

did elite seats of learning become bastions of radical left ideology? When arts departments started trying to imitate the requirements of research universities

It’s not rocket science

Michael Lind

How did colleges and universities in the United States and elsewhere in the English-speaking world become seminaries of centre-Left and radical Left ideology? at most elite campuses foster political and intellectual monocultures is not open to dispute. In a 2023 poll by the Harvard Crimson, 45.3 per cent of Harvard faculty identify themselves as “liberal” and 31.8 per cent as “very liberal”, a combined total of 77.1 per cent. Twenty per cent considered themselves “moderate” with only 2.5 per cent “conservative” and 0.4 per cent “very conservative”. e good news is that political diversity at Harvard has thus increased since 2022, when only 1 per cent of the faculty were “conservative” and none at all were “very conservative”. Not coincidentally, in 2023 Harvard came last in the free speech rankings compiled by the nonpartisan watchdog, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

and patriotic leaders of society who were generally-educated and articulate.

All of this was seen as hopelessly backward by many American and British academics who studied in German universities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although his writings were not then well-known, Alexander Humboldt and the example of German universities (including the one that Humboldt helped to found, the University of Berlin) inspired the foundation of new American universities such as Johns Hopkins and the remodelling of older ones such as Harvard and Yale.

In the United States, the professoriate is not only politically but literally inbred. In 2022, tenure-track faculty members were 25 per cent more likely than the general population to have a parent with a PhD. en there are the “legacies”. Around 30 per cent of Harvard students have parents or other relatives who are alumni.

How were elite universities in the US and elsewhere captured by a nepotistic, intermarrying caste of liberal and leftwing academics? I submit that Germany is to blame. Not modern Germany, but the Anglophone world’s understanding, or misunderstanding, of the German university system a century ago.

In the nineteenth-century United States, private and public colleges followed the British example of providing a common educational background for the sons, and later the daughters, of the social elite. ey combined a liberal arts curriculum including mathematics, geography, history, rhetoric, and other subjects with Greek and Latin. e emphasis of undergraduate education, like professional education in theology, law, and medicine, was mastery of a traditional subject matter passed down from generation to generation — thus the master’s degree. Many American colleges including Harvard had begun as colonial seminaries and well into the nineteenth century the university president was often a minister. e purpose was to produce religious

e imported Germanic ideal was the research university. Instead of focusing on the transmission of canonical bodies of cultural and professional knowledge, the new emphasis was on scienti c discovery and technological innovation. Because discovery requires critical inquiry, the Humboldtian university was characterised by Lernfreiheit (freedom to learn) and Lehrfreiheit (freedom to teach). Liberated from political or ecclesiastical oversight, academics would be free to engage in bold and innovative scholarship, with teaching de-emphasised.

It seemed like a good idea at the time. Unfortunately, a century later we can see that the attempt to graft the German research university onto the Anglo-American college has gone disastrously wrong.

In the areas of science and technology, the research university has been an outstanding success. In the twentieth century, American research universities like MIT and Stanford were instrumental in developing computer technology, with funding from the federal government and major corporations. Recently, a team of mostly-Harvard researchers funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency announced a potentially revolutionary breakthrough in the technology of quantum computing.

Unfortunately, in research universities the hard sciences set the standards which other departments are expected to meet. For example, a recent study criticised the “productivity” of American faculty members, drawing on data from the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M University, the two major public research universities that have released the necessary data. e report concludes: “At UT Austin, there are 1,748 faculty members who consume 54 per cent of instructional costs but teach only 27 per cent of the student hours

and generate no external funding.”

Having taught at the University of Texas at Austin, as well as Harvard and Johns Hopkins, I can attest that there are many underworked professors. But the report complains that “top scholars who bring in almost all of the research see large amounts of their grants siphoned o to pay for their less productive colleagues”. In the neo-Germanic research university, a “top scholar” is one who wins research grants from the federal government or corporations. is de nition is questionable even in science and engineering departments, and it is absurd when applied to the divinity school or the school of law.

Another import from nineteenthcentury Germany is the PhD. Making the doctorate necessary for tenure in universities has been a disaster for both teaching and scholarship. It has frozen out a great many people who might be dynamic teachers but possess only master’s degrees and have neither the interest nor ability to be creative scholars. And it has created a bottomless land ll of unread academic articles and books created solely to obtain tenure or promotions.

While a master’s degree in the US can be completed in one to three years, in 2020 the median time to earn a doctorate ranged from 6.3 years in physical and earth sciences and 6.8 years in engineering to 9.6 years in humanities and 12 years in education. Getting a dissertation approved, revised, and completed can take three years or longer. e process of obtaining a PhD can be prolonged if the doctoral student lacks adequate nancial aid and must work part-time or full-time.

In addition to the cost in time, there is a cost in money, at least in the US where universities are allowed to charge exorbitant tuitions. In 2021, the average student loan debt for academics with PhDs was $159,625. It is no surprise that around half of all PhD students in America drop out after completing their coursework but without completing their dissertation. ose who run the gauntlet successfully are usually in their thirties. e average age of PhD completion is 31.5 years, but the process takes less time in physical sciences and earth

sciences (29.6 years of age) than in humanities and arts (34.2) and education (38.5). Many have postponed marriage and home ownership until they are nearly middle-aged, for a chance at winning the lottery of tenure at a respectable college or university. e lottery winners come from a few prestigious schools. Eighty per cent of faculty members in the US with PhDs got their doctorates at only 20 per cent of universities.

Once they have acquired life tenure, American PhDs prefer scholarship or sabbaticals to teaching. Instructing students — the mission of the old university, though not the research university — is increasingly viewed as a chore and fobbed o on poorly-paid, non-tenure-track adjunct instructors, who now make up more than 48 per cent of the faculty at American universities.

For a long time the professional schools — like law schools — resisted the research university ideal that provides the physics department as a model and the PhD as a requirement. Now, however, they are succumbing and endorsing the priority of peer-reviewed (translation: unread) research over teaching, as well as requiring doctorates for law school professors.

Noting that law professors in the past tended to be drawn from applicants who had attended an elite school, had been an o cer on the law review, had received high grades, and had clerked for an elite judge, preferably a Supreme Court Justice, Stanford Law declares:

While these accomplishments are still a plus at most schools, the last three have become signi cantly less important in the top third of the market (the top 100 law schools). In their place, three other accomplishments are increasingly valued. e most important one is having produced some scholarly work. e second is having a PhD or other advanced degree in an allied eld of study. ird, many successful job applicants have completed a lab-teaching fellowship or served as a Visiting Assistant Professor at a law school.

Note the mimicry of natural science department jargon — “lab-teaching fellowship”. In ne arts faculties, studios become “labs”. Classroom readings in economics or sociology

become “modules”. Each social science or humanities department must have its own “methodology” — by which is meant “method”; the “-ology” is added just to sound scienti c. Consider the “methodology” used to study world politics, a subject that is obviously di cult to quantify or reduce to general “laws” like those of physics or chemistry. In international relations theory, a sub-discipline of political science, many academics have spent decades insisting that world politics should be studied with the aid of rigorous “Lakatosian research programmes” (Imre Lakatos was a Hungarian philosopher of science who taught at the London School of Economics).

e result has been books and peer-reviewed journal articles that the makers of US foreign policy ignore. I asked one prominent American international relations theorist if contemporary American IR theories, including his own, had ever been referred to as a guide to policy during his time in a presidential administration. He replied, “Not once.”

The Lehrfreiheit of professors makes the Lernfreiheit (freedom to learn) of students meaningless, if most or all of the courses o ered are on fashionable left-wing topics and taught by conventional liberals and leftists. At Harvard, for example, students are required to complete four General Education courses, one from each of the following categories: Aesthetics & Culture, Ethics & Civics, Histories, Societies, Individuals, and Science & Technology in History.

Many of the individual courses are propaganda for left-wing identity politics, such as “Power to the People: Black Power, Radical Feminism, and Gay Liberation” and “LGBT Literature, Politics, and Identity”. Under Ethics & Civics, a student can choose “Borders”: “As a society, we pay particular attention to borders when incidents such as children separated from their asylum-seeking parents or tear gas being used to deter entry throw the legal divide between two nation states into sharp relief.”

it.” Invoking the ideal of Lehrfreiheit without using the term, the faculty members insisted that they alone, as experts, had the right to determine what was to be taught and how, without needing to answer to the university or the larger community.

What science and engineering faculties and the pseudo-scienti c departments of social science and liberal arts and “studies” programs share is a common opposition to tradition. In the case of the sciences and engineering, anti-traditionalism is justi ed; the latest breakthrough in physics or materials science may render irrelevant what has come before.

But that kind of intellectual progress does not exist in a literature department or a history department. In the arts and humanities, anti-traditional innovation is more like iconoclasm on the part of a new religion, which smashes the idols of the old before erecting new idols and imposing a new orthodoxy of its own.

What passes for scienti c discovery in pseudo-scienti c ideologies such as Freudianism, Marxism, feminism, and anti-racism is mere “unmasking”. e ideologue unmasks the apparent reality and reveals the hidden truth.

unlike genuine scientific theories, ideologies cannot be tested or refuted by evidence. to criticise them is to show you suffer from bias

At rst glance, this may look like science. After all, doesn’t physics tell us that apparently solid objects are made up of atoms and sub-atomic particles separated by space? But unlike genuine scienti c theories, ideologies cannot be tested or refuted by evidence. Indeed, to criticise an ideology is to demonstrate inadvertently that you su er from false consciousness or unconscious bias — that you yourself need to be unmasked.

When the political skew of courses and faculty is criticised from the outside, tenured campus revolutionaries undergo a remarkable metamorphosis into mild-mannered, technocratic scholars who are shocked, simply shocked, to be accused of partisan bias. Far from indoctrinating students in progressive ideology, they protest, they are merely teaching students to “ask questions” and engage in “interrogation” of authors. Forceful interrogation, to be sure, of the kind that leads Homer to break down and confess that he is a patriarchal militarist and causes Jane Austen to admit her internalised misogyny in the hope that she might receive a sentence other than cancellation.

After the president of the University of California recently encouraged e orts by faculty to develop a “viewpoint-neutral history of the Middle East”, 150 professors signed a letter in protest. “We nd your use of the term ‘viewpoint-neutral history’ to be wrong in this context and call upon you to rescind

Critics of psychoanalysis are neurotic; critics of Marxism are bourgeois; critics of feminism are sexist; and critics of academic anti-racism are racist. However they mimic the rhetoric of science and technology, the progressive ideologies that have in ltrated and captured institutions of higher learning on both sides of the Atlantic are secular religions in disguise.

What should be done to repair higher education on both sides of the Atlantic can be debated. But it is clear that the transplant of nineteenth-century German ideas into the Anglo-American university over the last century has nearly killed the patient. Scienti c and engineering research universities and institutions are legitimate. But when secular cults have captured the institutions whose purpose is to socialise the next generation of leaders into a common cultural tradition and to pass on bodies of traditional knowledge and traditional skills, it is necessary to root the cultists out of the institutions or to create new institutions that are t for purpose. ●

Michael Lind is an American author and journalist

Students

denounced by tribunals over private conversations, lecturers cowed by ideological agendas, unprincipled managers with little interest in truth or freedom ...

It’s

time to stop the rot

Edward Skidelsky

Iwork at a uk university, teaching and writing about the history of concepts and other out-ofthe-way matters. For many years, I had shied clear of public controversy, but early in 2020, something stirred me from my academic slumber. A student came to me in distress: apparently, his next-door neighbour, overhearing some comments through the wall dividing their rooms and nding them politically inappropriate, had made a report to the university authorities. My student was hauled before a tribunal, convicted of harassment, and stripped of his accommodation rights.

I was amazed. I had thought such things could not happen here. And this was not the only case of its kind. Other stories reached me of students and lecturers being denounced and investigated, often for remarks which seemed to me entirely blameless. Yet when I raised the matter with my colleagues, they told me these things were not really happening, that they were stories made up by the right-wing press. Alternatively, they insisted that such things had always happened, that nothing had changed. I sensed that the subject embarrassed them, so I didn’t press it.

ontological horizons by moving away from a white, Eurocentric curriculum”. Again, it seemed to me that a clear line had been crossed. Universities in democratic countries were not supposed to impose ideological views on their teaching sta . at was Gleichschaltung, “streamlining”, as the Nazis had called it. Yet as before, my colleagues seemed largely unconcerned. ey said that universities had always pushed ideological lines, that their vaunted “neutrality” was just a mask for conservative prejudice. Hardly any of them shared my sense that something fundamental had changed. Why not, I wondered. Could they not see what was going on? Or did they not want to see it?

about a year later, I applied to make a small change to a module I teach and was told to ll in a form stating how the proposed change “broadened epistemological and

“it’s interesting that so many specimens in kew were brought there by imperialists…”

In retrospect, I was being naïve. e beliefs with which I had grown up — that conversations in bedrooms are private, that ideological lines should not be pushed by public institutions — had long since been abandoned by the majority of my colleagues, meaning that their repudiation by the university authorities merely con rmed what was already tacitly conceded. e structure was (as it were) rotten through and through. A small push only was needed to send it toppling. But how had this happened? By what bacillus had our universities been hollowed out? ese were the questions which now nagged me.

One answer to these questions, popular on the right, pins the blame on something variously called “postmodernism”,

“deconstructionism” or “cultural Marxism”. ese are really just labels for a certain intellectual style, whose hallmark is an a priori suspicion of all claims to cognitive and moral authority, particularly when put forward by members of historically privileged groups: whites, males, heterosexuals etc.

We have all become familiar with this style of late. Its catchphrase is “it’s interesting that …”, as in, “it’s interesting that statistics was pioneered by the eugenicist Galton” or “it’s interesting that so many specimens in Kew were brought there by imperialists”. e precise interest of such claims is never spelt out, but their insinuation is unmissable: statistics (or whatever it is) is tainted knowledge, to be drawn on, if at all, only with a parade of bad conscience.

this mode of thought has its stronghold in particular institutions and disciplines. It is rife in the former polytechnics, especially in the various “studies” — “gender studies”, “race studies”, “disability studies” etc. It has invaded English Literature, where it goes by the oddly uninformative name of “ eory”. But wherever it takes up home, its e ects are the same: enquiry gives way to assertion, and standards collapse. No special competence is needed to master the “critical” idiom, just allegiance to the correct standpoint, signalled by use of the approved jargon.

Other disciplines — history, philosophy, economics, law, medicine, mathematics and natural science — have managed better to resist the rot. Here, the requirement to master some weighty body of knowledge or technique creates a powerful esprit de corps among practitioners, transcending di erences of outlook. “Anyone can read Jane Austen, but not anyone can read Aeschylus” is how one professor of Greek put it to me, explaining why English is so much more prone to ideological in ghting than Classics. ere is a good deal of arrogance and narrowness in this attitude, but it is better than the politicised humbug common in the lower reaches of academia.

m a little nervous. This is my rst in erson interview.

Recently, however, the humbug has seeped upwards, like rising damp. Its marks are all over the place — in the calls for “relevance” and “accessibility”, in the jettisoning of classic texts (“pale, male and stale”), and in the insistence on softer, more “feminine” modes of argument.

Sometimes, the scorn for old standards is agrant. “Dishonesty and fabrication in academic scholarship are ethically unacceptable,” write the editors of History and Technology. “But ... ”, they continue ominously, “if we are to confront the anti-Blackness of EuroAmerican intellectual traditions … we must grasp that what is experienced by dominant actors in EuroAmerican cultures as ‘empiricism’ is deeply conditioned by the predicating logics of colonialism and racial capitalism.” is classic Orwellism appears in the course of a defence of Jenny Bulstrode’s awed article on slavery and industrialisation. What its authors really want to say is, “It’s OK to stretch the facts a bit, if it helps combat ‘anti-Blackness’.” But they can’t bring themselves to say that exactly, so they say this instead. (Bad language always partners political dishonesty.) History and Technology is, reputedly, a top journal in its eld. If its stance is typical of the discipline as a whole, history is in dire straits.

Such overt ideologising is still rare, however. More commonly, ideological agendas are smuggled in by the back door, by making loyalty to them a test of professional competence. Nigel Biggar’s “Ethics of Empire” project was denounced by his Oxford colleagues as bad history, but their real concern was that it threatened to reach the wrong moral conclusion, namely that British imperialism was not entirely wicked.

Reputable scientists with unfashionable views on Covid or climate change are smeared as “quacks” and “charlatans” and frozen out of funding. Across the sector, “consensus” — the epistemology of the herd — reigns supreme. Michel Foucault is just a name to most academics, but his dictum that there is no Truth, only “regimes of truth”, accurately describes their outlook.

ideas, then, bear much of the blame for the évène ment of 2020-21. But not all of it. Jacques Derrida and Foucault have, after all, been a presence on UK campuses since the 1970s. Some additional force was needed to catapult their theories, or a degraded version of them, into their current position of dominance.

ere is little mystery as to the identity of this force. Ever since atcher, UK ministers for higher education have endeavoured to “spread the unit of resource”, i.e. extract more value for less money.

First came the RAE (now the REF), the massive eight-yearly evaluation of intellectual “output” on whose verdict the allocation of UK research funding principally depends. Next, teaching was opened up to market forces. Tuition fees were phased in gradually in England between 1998 and 2012, with controls on student numbers simultaneously lifted. e result was the creation of a basically free market in higher education,

with the state’s role limited to that of regulator. Today, public oversight of higher education is exercised by the “O ce for Students”, a semi-independent body with a mandate to protect the interests of “education consumers” — i.e. students — in the same way that Ofgem protects the interests of energy consumers.

the theory behind these reforms — that research and teaching are commodities like any other, produced for the sake of money and with the aim of satisfying consumer demand — is false in fact and demoralising in e ect. Academics worth their salt do not write for money. ey write because they have something worth writing about. If they don’t (and most academics don’t) then goading them into writing anyway can only serve to swell the sea of verbiage. Modern academia is as over-productive of words as the old Soviet Union was of tractors. Teaching is not a commodity either. Commodities supply a want, and most students do not want the truth. ey want a marketable degree and an “enriching experience” — that is, an experience which atters their existing sense of self. e teacher’s task is to cross that want and put in its place a yearning to know. Making teaching a commodity corrupts it, as Socrates understood long ago. e institutions now emerging from the marketising crucible are very di erent from those that entered it some 30 years ago. Senates, the traditional organs of academic self-government, are mostly rubber stamps. E ective power has passed to a new class of managers, at home in the world of metrics and league tables. (“Academics take ten years to grow,” said one in a recent meeting, adding helpfully, “I mean, to recoup their cost in grant income.” He could have been talking about rubber trees.)

gerialism, which will agree to anything that does not impede its primary goal of making money.

is strange new alliance is opaque to many on both left and right, who insist on viewing it through their favoured ideological lens. Leftists rail against “the neoliberal university”. Rightists grumble about “wokery”. e one sees the triumph of capitalism. e other sees creeping Marxism. Both see only in part, and super cially. ey miss what is fundamental: the slow erosion of moral and intellectual standards of which commercialism and wokery are merely the e ect.

A forum has been set up for lecturers of all political stripes to speak up for academic freedom in our universities

T he problem, then, was clear to me. But what could any one individual do about it, other than lie low and wait for the storm to pass? at had been my policy to date, but increasingly I felt it to be an insupportable one. e price to be paid in forced silence was too high. Besides, the situation was not as hopeless as I had initially supposed. At least some colleagues were willing to admit in private that things were rotten in our universities, even if they refrained from saying so in public. Perhaps more dissenters were lurking out there, known only to themselves. e challenge was to get them to speak up and take notice of each other. Our enemies were organised. We had to get organised too.

Encouraged by these thoughts, I and a group of like-minded academics set about creating a “Committee for Academic Freedom”: a forum for UK lecturers of all political stripes to speak out about what is going on in our universities. To date, 306 have put their names to our principles. Admittedly, it has not been easy. Fear and mistrust run deep. Many are convinced that “freedom of thought” must conceal a toxic rightwing agenda — as if the left had no possible interest in intellectual freedom.

In campuses across the country, shiny new buildings spring up while the real value of degrees is run down. Worthless MBAs are doled out to third-rate students from China, whose only quali cation is an ability to pay hefty overseas fees. Of course, many academics remain devoted to their old tasks of teaching and research, but from the institutional standpoint, these are now just means to the securing of teaching and research income. Marketisation has led predictably to “bullshitisation”, as the late David Graeber called it.

It has also led, returning to the main theme, to the Great Awokening. e connection is surprising, but it is not unintelligible. Modern university managers have little interest in truth or freedom. ey have, on the other hand, a good deal of interest in anything that might cause their institutions reputational damage or give grounds for action under the disastrously open-ended Equality Act of 2010. is makes them vulnerable to pressure from the woke, who though few in number are skilled at marshalling the forces of righteous indignation on behalf of their chosen causes. Strident radicalism nds an ideal ally in unprincipled mana-

And even those alert to this sort of Stalinist jugglery can be deterred by the thought that others will number them among the toxic. “If I sign your principles, I will be sent to the Siberia of my eld” one historian wrote to me. At least he was honest. Harder to swallow are the frequent silences and evasions, the unanswered emails, the strange non sequiturs. One has to remember the pressures people labour under, the burdens of status, position, etc.

Still, there are compensations. “At every meal that we eat together, freedom is invited to sit down. e chair remains vacant, but the place is set.” us wrote René Char, French poet and resistance ghter, recording his experience of life in the Maquis. Of course, England in 2024 is nothing like France under the Nazis, yet the freedom Char speaks of — the glorious unrestraint of those who have thrown o some hated system of inhibitions, internal as well as external — is something that we have come to understand and appreciate. It is a great treasure, which we may lose but can never renounce. ●

Edward Skidelsky is a philosopher at a British university.

Dumbing down the priesthood

Unless the Church reinstates rigorous college-based training for clerics, it will wither away

‘‘Key limiting factors”.

Two and a half years ago a restorm engulfed the Church of England as Canon John McGinley, one of the driving forces behind the recent transformation of the Established Church, rhapsodised about a church set free from the “key limiting factors” of “a building and a stipend and long, costly college-based training for every leader of church”.

Slowly but surely the national spotlight has focused on the plans to sell o the church’s physical treasures (a secret report by the disgraced Paula Vennells — leaked last month — revealed plans to dispose of 1,000 churches) and schemes in dioceses such as Truro and Leicester to scrap traditional parish ministry, replacing it with impossibly huge “minster communities” overseen by priests in a car pool-style management structure.

So schemes are well advanced to get rid of buildings and stipends, two of the three key limiting factors. But what about the third, the “long, costly college-based training”? It will come as no surprise to learn that theological education has been lined up for summary execution, too.

There are two dangerous developments working in tandem. e rst is an anti-intellectualism which has crept into the church over the last few decades. Where once the scholarship of ordinary clerics was called the Stupor Mundi of the church, and we could brag there was a scholar in every parish, now the church actively downplays academic study in favour of “contextual learning” and an exercise of pointlessness called “theological re ection” which, as its name suggests, can only work if you have enough theology to use during

this re ection.

To give some meat to this, the Church’s Common Awards programme students are expected to spend ten hours working on “credits”, with ten or 20 credits making a module. Fully half of these credits can be earned by contextual experience, “on placement or in ministerial practice, in activities directly related to the module learning outcomes”.

The crisis of Christianity in the twentyfirst century is one of belief. If priests are unable to talk authoritatively about God, then we are dead

As one experienced tutor from an evangelical college said recently, “I can see that this would work well for practical theology subjects such as pastoral care, evangelism, leadership, worship and liturgy and even ethics. But how might we provide such linked learning in context when studying scripture, church history, patristics, trinitarian theology, or biblical languages?” e honest answer is you can’t. Not in a way that allows you to learn the subject.

A nd that presumes you are doing enough even theoretically to ground your ministry in scripture and the history and doctrine of the church. Many institutions do not give you that option. Where the old school residential colleges demand 40 credits in biblical studies, the new breed of theological institutions do not.

be the same regardless of whether they train full-time or part-time, residentially or non-residentially. Second, nobody should be pushed into a cheaper model of training for any reason other than that this is best for them — most especially not because the diocese would bene t nancially from this decision. Neither of these safeguards exist.

Although Durham University o ers some academic assurance, the di erence in quality between institutions and the lack of a common course against which all students can be assessed leaves many students short-changed.

As for nancial incentives, the national church changed the funding structure in 2017, gifting dioceses any di erence between the amount spent on a student’s training and the amount given for that training by the national church.

Numbers training residentially have crashed since: by 8 per cent in the rst year, by a further 6 per cent in the year after, to a point where some colleges had only four students starting this year. “Long, costly college-based training” is being killed, just like the other key limiting factors.

St Mellitus, now the largest such institution in the Church of England, and an o shoot of Holy Trinity Brompton, only demands 20 credits. at is a tiny amount of time to dedicate to knowing the foundations of our faith.

is ties into the second dangerous development: pushing students into non-residential part-time training. While it is important to o er this kind of training to candidates whose life and family situation prevent them from being uprooted, two essential safeguards should be in place.

This is a disaster. The crisis of Christianity in the twenty- rst century is a crisis of belief: fewer and fewer people believe in the God whom we worship. If priests are unable to explain that God, unable to talk authoritatively of the God whom we meet in scripture and sacrament (and what that sentence even means and why it matters) then we are dead.

We might as well sell the buildings and stop paying the stipends. Contra Canon McGinley and the current leadership of the Church: if we don’t stop limiting long, costly college-based training, the Church which we all want to save will die as surely as if we killed it ourselves.

First, the amount of theology that students are expected to study should

And in many ways we will have done. ●

Marcus Walker is Rector of St Bartholomew the Great in London

Conservative-leaning university students now have to meet in secret to avoid the “cancel” mob and risk derailing their careers for the crime of having unfashionable views, says Charlie Bentley-Astor

Campus confidential

II had heard rumours of Cambridge’s secret s societies — of Sunday morning symposiums devoted to sex and scrambled eggs — each tale too outrageous to be true. But it is not the promise of illicit affairs driving students and academics underground. It is a love of C.S. Lewis.

My discovery and subsequent involvement in these societies had been something of an accident. A Canadian psychologist and all-round troublemaker once said that one should, “Tell the truth. See what happens.”

Within weeks of committing to this experiment, I had been thrown out of every student theatre society in Cambridge for refusing to state my pronouns. “Your presence in the room makes people feel unsafe,” was the judgement handed down to me. Being competent and committed to directing stood for nothing: I had transgressed against the exclusionary commandments of inclusivity.

Tossed into social isolation and career ruination, I began to attend lectures across a number of faculties in search of fresh perspectives: I came across a lecturer who criticised Marx in front of a hall of undergraduates. Despite the danger of backlash outspoken Oxbridge academics regularly face “microaggression” tribunals and attacks in student magazines, the prof resisted the instinct to self-censor. is emboldened me.

is free-wheeling, irreverent humour or sharing articles and ideas that are similar.” e only remarkable thing about them is that discretion and exclusivity is deemed necessary to their survival — that it is necessary to have only trusted people in the room in order to maintain openness and free debate.

Secrecy necessitates the idea that there is something taboo, uncouth, dangerous even, about the act of discussion. It “gives the impression to other students and the public that there is something untoward about what goes on in these societies, when there’s really not,” said one music PhD candidate.

Once you are accepted into these societies, they do not feel secret at all. ey are perfectly pedestrian: wine is drunk and essays bemoaned or admired. Yet, they are serious enough that students fear being exposed. Each of these private, shy, yet often dashing young conservatives I interviewed chuckled at the idea that they belonged to something as heretical and bohemian as a secret salon. Yet, at the suggestion I would write about such gatherings, a cry of consternation arose: “Don’t give us away!”

I reached out to a lecturer who told me of a discussion group for students who found themselves at academic odds with their peers. An introduction was o ered, but rst we must meet.

my “interview” was in a quiet court of a Cambridge college, where I was quizzed about my background and ambitions. e lecturer wanted to know how an English student, theatre kid and barefoot pagan came to be excluded from liberal and tolerant society and to seek the company of Christians. After 90 minutes the professor sat back with a satis ed nod. “I wanted to be sure of you. I thought you were a spy for the other side.” I knew it was a joke, but there was a lingering irony.

ese gatherings exist because genuine interest in exploring the biggest and most enduring questions has withered within the o cial branches of the universities. Members share a belief that they are preserving from oblivion momentous ideas that were once the sacred heart of education — transcendence, truth, beauty, the freedom to disagree.

Attempts have been made to bring these private discussions to the public forum with initiatives such as “Living Freedom”. More often than not, they result in newspaper stories where academics scrabble to denounce their colleagues as “o ensive, insulting and hateful”. e threat of disruption from disgruntled student protesters also perpetuates self-censoring behaviour in audiences and in venues, which routinely cancel events in anticipation of property damage, civil unrest and violence.

mobs of masked students brayed with megaphones, blocked entrances, berated passers-by and drowned out speakers

In its own way, this seems absurd and unnecessary. One history graduate explains that “the ‘secret’ societies I am a part of are hilarious in the sense that most of the conversation

I found myself assisting in the running of these public speaking events, and took it upon myself to scan student newspapers and chatrooms for information about planned protests. I squirrelled out what I could by keeping my ears pricked up in the library and in the local Sainsbury’s — where students seem most secure to boast about their poverty, one-night stands and activ-

ist activities. I reported back to the event organisers who could then get the appropriate security measures put in place to prevent the venue from capitulating to the “hecklers’ veto”.

I gained notoriety for this and began receiving pleas for help from professors whose debates were under threat of cancellation by student protesters. On one occasion, this involved disguising myself as a student activist in dungarees and borrowed Dr Marten’s and ducking into colleges to in ltrate protest coordination meetings. Another time it involved arranging for students to be smuggled through a side gate, and up a winding stair into a private attic o ce.

Kathleen Stock, Jordan Peterson and Helen Joyce were some of the people I found myself supporting. ese were exciting nights. Mobs of masked students brayed with megaphones, blocked entrances to venues, berated passers-by and attempted to drown out the speakers with the hammering of pots, pans and drums — sometimes for several hours on end.

Security sta are hired at these events to frisk audience members and escape routes have to be prepared for speakers. Sometimes there are terrifying moments when the student mob approaches and you cannot tell if they will be bystanders or will barricade the room, throw soup, kick or merely scream. It can leave you vibrating long into the night.

security staff are hired to frisk audience members and escape routes planned for speakers oes

there is nothing especially cambridge-centric about all this. In 2022, a study by King’s College London found that two-thirds of UK university students self-censor on at least one major contemporary controversy, including the “British Empire” (25 per cent), “politics” (34 per cent), and “gender identity” (36 per cent). Students fear voicing heterodox opinions lest it brand them a “troublemaker”. As a conservative, Christian physicist explained to me, “It a ects my references further down the line.”

According to the same polling, “conservative” students self-censor twice as much (57 per cent) as left-wingers. To get a sense of the prevailing attitude, I posed a question on an online public “confession” forum run by Cambridge students. I asked if self-censorship among their right-wing peers was “a mark of progress?”

“Terrible people with terrible opinions have trouble talking about their terrible opinions,” sco ed one student. “Yes, it is progress,” said another. And the most brazen and revealing response? “We need to work together to get the number of rightwing students who self-censor up to 100 per cent,” with a handshake emoji added for good measure. In this welter of self-aggrandisement only one student recognised the “irony of this comment section”.

ere are now over 160 recognised universities in the UK. In 2022, Civitas identi ed controversies at 93 of them relating to the censorship of free speech, with over half experiencing “a ‘cancel culture’ of open letters or petitions which pushed for the restriction of views of sta , students or visiting speakers on campus”. More concerning was that 23 per cent of these episodes were “due to the intervention of external pressure groups”.

As one recent Cambridge graduate, now a curate, recounts, “It is beyond self-censorship. You are now expected to promote certain topics and ideas. If you don’t, then you are suspected and targeted.”

Every student I interviewed about self-censorship conceded and regretted that there was a lack of bravery involved in these publicity-shy groups. Yet, when I asked them if their name could appear in print, all found themselves lacking that same bravery.

Who could blame them? I do not believe their hearts fail

Protest as Helen Joyce speaks at Gonville & Caius college in October, 2022

but their heads dominate. For my part, I speak not through some exclusive wellspring of courage but rather a disregard for my own longevity in this environment: I do not have a family or property or career prospect that I am afraid to lose. While self-censorship can be cowardly, it can also be prudent. ey want to avoid their careers being derailed before they have the chance to get established. ey want to be a contender.

And yet choosing to avoid early cancellation by self-censoring and hiding one’s true beliefs — choosing security over vulnerability — may achieve little more than the mere purchasing of time, and at the price of one’s soul. e plea “I was acting under duress” is a plausible defence but not always the noblest one.

If the debate is to be joined and won it needs proponents who take a stand and dare to have their voices heard. So tell the truth and see what happens. I can guarantee it will not be boring. ●

Charlie Bentley-Astor is a freelance writer and recent Cambridge graduate

EVERYDAY LIES WITH THEODORE DALRYMPLE

●I do not think that The Journal of the American Medical Association intends to be funny, but sometimes it is.

For example, I recently saw on its website a paper titled A Young Pregnant Person With Old Myocardial Infarction. Evidently, the journal is now so misogynist that it considers the word woman an insult in itself.

To the N-word must now be added the W-word; soon, if the linguistic Savonarolas have their way, there won’t be enough letters in the alphabet to designate words which must never be pronounced on pain of excommunication by the monstrous regiment of the righteous. Frailty, thy name is person!

Then there was a paper titled An Uncommon Cause of Acute Chest Pain. It began as follows: “A patient in their 50s presented to the emergency department with 20 minutes of substernal chest pain … ”

Obviously, the doctors looking after the patient were agnostic as to whether the patient was a man or a woman. The use of the plural possessive adjective to describe what belongs to one person is now not only common, but de rigueur, if not outright obligatory: his and her will soon be the two H-words.

Interestingly, the second paper came from China, where of course they are fully accustomed to ideological lying. Perhaps, then, the Chinese are becoming as tediously decadent and trivial-minded as we in the West, which would be good news inasmuch as it would save our bacon; but possibly also, the editors of the journal insisted on intersex language as a condition of publication.

There is a giant ideological lie behind the locutions used in both papers, which is that the sex of a person is simply a matter of choice or of random allocation at birth, an unimportant detail medically. If people choose to believe such rubbish, it is up to them; but when the repetition of such a lie is imposed as a condition of employment or advancement, when everyone must assent in public to what he knows to be false, then has totalitarianism arrived. Who won the Cold War? Certainly, it was not the West. ●

The Critic

Profile Professor Noam

Chomsky

The influential linguistics professor and “libertarian socialist” remains at odds with his government and people and is more outspoken than ever at the age of 95, says Graham Elliott

‘‘Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” e calling card for a linguist ready to knock over the apple cart of mainstream behavioural psychology in 1950s academia. A sentence may be grammatically correct but nonsensical. Grammar reigns, whether at a Surface, Deep or Universal level.

Who is he? Avram Noam Chomsky was born in Philadelphia in 1928 to Ashkenazi parents of Ukrainian and Belarusian origin. His father worked long hours for low wages before becoming a Hebrew scholar and academic, while his mother taught at a synagogue. His parents he has described as “New Deal Democrats”. e boy attended a school established on the principles of John Dewey, the educational reformer and pragmatist philosopher: learning should be experiential; knowledge is to be discovered; creativity is to be encouraged. Noam ourished. Another branch of learning was his uncle’s New York newspaper stand where working-class Jewish men of the Left would gather to discuss the pressing matters of the day. Chomsky would frequent it, listen and formulate ideas.

At 16 he enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania to study philosophy, logic and languages. His initial enthusiasm for the course began to wane and he considered leaving to work on a kibbutz. en, after meeting the linguist and mathematician Zellig Harris, he decided to focus on linguistics. He earned his undergraduate, master’s and doctorate degrees at Pennsylvania. His PhD thesis provided the basis for his rst book, Syntactic Structures (1957).

W hat was Chomsky against and what was he for? e dominant school of psychology in the mid-twentieth century was behaviourism: the study of

observable, measurable activity in humans and animals, using stimuli and responses to reinforce or weaken patterns of behaviour, in carefully controlled laboratory conditions. It was a at-earth, mechanistic, non-transcendental bag of tricks.

Early pioneer J.B. Watson at Johns Hopkins University had ditched introspection and replaced it with rigorous (as well as some unusually cruel) experiments to observe and manipulate re exes, create habits and inclinations. B.F. Skinner, the high priest of Harvard University’s animal laboratories, with considerable prowess in pulling habits out of rats, propagated the notion that the infant learns language through a similar application of cues, utterances and informed feedback. Chomsky called this a travesty. e infant, he averred, begins to master its mother tongue without being explicitly taught. A uniquely human competence

— inherent and inherited — enables the infant to map out the grammar of the language that it hears before being able to speak.

In time, su cient vocabulary is acquired, which allows blank places in the map to be lled in: Sentence = noun phrase + verb phrase + modi er … It is hierarchical and structure-dependent.

e brain’s ability to use a limited number of phonemes (meaningful sounds in the child’s mother tongue) to represent objects, actions and relations allows, in the fullness of time, a system that uses nite means to comprehend and articulate an in nite number of utterances i.e. generative grammar. is con guration of sound, word, grammar and meaning is uniquely human and pari passu applies to all 6,000 or so natural human languages. e commonality that unites all of these is called Universal Grammar (UG). Innate ideas and introspection are here again!

How about his more recent work? eorising and published output has been collaborative and conversational in nature. ere has been speculation on human evolution and primatology, discussions on the history of science, as well as musings on the merging of the linguistic and the neurological into one uni ed science.

In e Secrets of Words (2022) Chomsky ruminates: ”Puzzles and challenges abound, maybe even mysteries that are beyond our cognitive reach.” Stephen Pinker, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and author of e Language Instinct, has stated that Chomsky alters his theories from time to time to avoid becoming “a sitting target”. For example, he now concedes that the higher primates may possess a limited form of the language acquisition device (but without the human vocal tract).

The Great Depression formed Chomsky’s political views. One of his earliest memories was seeing security guards beating women strikers outside a textile factory. Since childhood he has held Far Left views and declares himself to be a libertarian socialist and anarcho-syndicalist.

Starting in the early 1960s, he took part in public protests against US involvement in the Vietnam War, leading to marches with Norman Mailer et al in Washington and at the Pentagon — “the most hideous institution on this Earth”. As dissent has turned to radicalism, his approach seems to be that of someone totally at odds with his country, its governance, foreign policy and the will of the majority of its people. ings got nastier in the 1970s with Chomsky’s response to Pol Pot’s slaughter of up to two million Cambodians. e statements of survivors and written accounts by journalists, as well as a Khmer-speaking French priest, François Ponchaud, were derided by

Things got nastier in the 1970s with Chomsky’s response to Pol Pot’s slaughter of up to two million Cambodians

Chomsky as “distortions at fourth hand”. One wonders if, like Sartre, another intellectual de gauche, Chomsky has a bit of a soft spot for the hard man in a distant land just trying his best to keep his people in line.

He has called Putin’s war against Ukraine “an act of criminal stupidity” and laments both sides’ casualties. Predictably though, he also says that Putin is pushing back against US-driven NATO expansionism, claiming: “NATO is the most violent, aggressive alliance in the world.” In doing so, he neglects to consider or relate to the situation facing the eastern European countries freed from the yoke of the Soviet empire in 1991.

ey realised that the surest way of preserving their newly-found freedom after nearly half a century of Russian domination was through NATO and EC membership. NATO did not lure them in — they were hammering at the door, demanding to be let in.

A fter a career-long association with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Chomsky is now a Laureate Professor in Linguistics, as well as Professor in Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona. At 95 he remains academically and politically active.

What will his legacy be? e key linguistic theories (UG, genetic endowment, language acquisition) and parts of the philosophy of language (language of thought, a priori knowledge, rule-governed innovation) will almost certainly endure. Two generations of linguists, many of whom, schooled in this tradition, have achieved positions of in uence, will ensure that these theories continue to be expounded.

e belief that homo sapiens developed a language faculty — either gradually, through socialisation, or abruptly, as in Creazione di Adamo — at some point 70 to 100 millennia ago is a stab at guessing at a known unknown. ose parts of the work that may fare less well are the jargon-heavy Lectures on Government and Binding (1981) and e Minimalist Program (1995).

His brand of political activism will be carried on by some in academia, by students and others. But will they possess Chomksy’s intellectual heft or authoritative, beguiling, charismatic presence? ●

Graham Elliott writes on language and linguistics

The wrong kind of groupthink

Why do so many economists deny that the value of money is related to its quantity?

Economists in the mass — as a profession, no less — have not covered themselves in glory in the early 2020s. Like everyone, they were caught o guard by Covid, but they blundered in their reaction to it. With few exceptions, they forecast that Covid-19 would lead to years of disin ation and perhaps even of de ation. Instead in 2022 in ation reached the highest levels for 40 years.

Yes, there were exceptions who if I may say so include the author of this column. Right from the start, in late March and April 2020, I could see that the astonishing money explosion then under way would have in ationary consequences. e rst result would be too much money chasing too few assets, so that the prices of shares and houses would be buoyant in late 2020 and 2021.

e second would be too much money chasing too few goods and services and that annual consumer in ation might reach a double digits percentage rate in 2022 or 2023. (I really did make that forecast in spring 2020.)

But we heretics were few in number, and are hardly popular with colleagues and rivals in our so-called “profession”. To be fair, the British public debate has noticed us and, perhaps signi cantly, the latest monetary report from the Bank of England contained a few sentences on recent money growth trends. But on the other side of the Atlantic the attitude of the Keynesian Ivy League economics establishment has been dismissive to the point of rudeness.

one of its members is Princeton’s Paul Krugman, who with his column in the New York Times is widely regarded as the world’s most in uential economist. In May 2021 he used his column to sneer at other pundits (including perhaps yours truly) who had been

worrying for more than a year about the in ationary dangers implicit in excessive money growth.

Krugman drew a distinction between “zombie ideas”, which shamble along “eating people’s brains”, and the much worse “cockroach ideas”, which despite their falsity “always come back”. Monetarists’ claim of a connection between money supply and in ation was — according to Krugman — merely a cockroach idea.

Far too many economists think that if they write papers with algebraic squiggles, it constitutes scientific progress

In his words, the emerging “buzz” about the subject was evidence of “an infestation of monetary cockroaches”. e tension between the monetary and non-monetary analyses of in ation has become so conspicuous that non-economists have been alerted to it.

In its sensible report on the Bank of England in November last year, the House of Lords Economic A airs Committee worried that the Monetary Policy Committee lacked su cient “intellectual diversity”. It recommended that the Bank become “pro-active in encouraging a diversity of views and a culture of challenge”.

the media summarised this as an allegation that the Bank of England su ered from “groupthink”. e characterisation was fair in that, through late 2020 and most of 2021, only one mpc member spoke out against the prevalent complacency on in ation. ( at was Andy Haldane, the Bank’s chief economist, who resigned in June 2021.)

Is the mention of groupthink helpful? In many walks of life groupthink is not just entrenched, but desirable. Indeed, it could be seen as essential to scienti c progress and modern civilization. Surely every physicist agrees with Einstein’s proposition of mass-energy equivalence in the E = mc2 equation and Boyle’s law that gas pressure and volume are inversely proportional

(p1v1 = p2v2, for those who like this sort of thing).

Physicists are therefore subject to groupthink, and quite right too.

e real problem with contemporary macroeconomics is not that policy-makers think together in much the same way, but that their groupthink is plain wrong.

Trying to explain the value of money without reference to its quantity — and hence to understand in ation while overlooking excessive money growth — is preposterous. Only fools could deny that the quantity of money and the price level are related. Am I then saying that at present some people at the top of central banks are fools?

The difficult issue — which bringsin politics and ideology, and even the culture of modern universities and the widespread pathology of “physics envy” is to explain why their folly takes this particular form.

Far too many economists think that, if they write papers with algebraic squiggles, as in the above equations from Einstein and Boyle, their work constitutes scienti c progress simply because they contain the algebraic squiggles.

Keynes once said, “If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid.” Nowadays the parallel might be with eye surgery, which in the last 50 years has achieved miracles. (I have just had cataract surgery in both eyes and, in my early seventies, am enjoying the best vision in my life.)

Dentistry and ophthalmology are bodies of more or less objective scienti c knowledge. is is not at all to decry the special achievements of individual dentists and eye surgeons. ey belong to professions of which they can be proud, and can bless their shared and largely uncontroversial scienti c knowledge as a kind of groupthink. I wish I could say that I belonged to a similar profession. ●

Global politics is not a popularity contest of culture and values. It works on cold national self-interest backed by military might

THE FALLACY OF SOFT POWER

Patrick Porter

You may have missed it, but British statecraft recently scored a triumph. e United Kingdom ranked second in Brand Finance’s Global Soft Power Index, trailing only the United States.

For the Senior Communications O cer of the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Development O ce (FCDO), these were glad tidings that a rm Britain’s stature in the competition for prestige and regard. It followed an “historic 2022, as the world celebrated the Platinum Jubilee and mourned the loss of Her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II”. is recognition follows the UK government’s own claim in the Integrated Review of 2021 that Britain is a “soft power superpower”, an aspiration that surely drives terror into our foes. Yet puzzlingly, Houthi militants persistently re on British and American ships. Haven’t they read the league table?

Does Britain feel like a superpower to you, of any kind? It’s easy to like the thought that Britain exerts strength internationally through its celebrated heritage, from TV studios to the Premier League, from medieval churches to the City. It serves as a psychological balm when our material existence is under strain.

Like most dodgy concepts, “soft power” is a moving target. It can be lazy shorthand for anything non-military, for “diplomacy”, a lever policymakers pull or the velvet glove on the iron rst. But if it’s just the “glove”, it is merely supplementary.

In a more ambitious version, a polity’s culture and values, its institutions, language, art, literature and iconography, will cause others to pre-align their interests with that polity. Yet it works not so much as a hypothesis as a creed. People who should know better, in Whitehall, industry and civil society, revere the image of British “soft power” as axiomatically true. Often asserted, rarely observed, it is evidently something people want to believe without really looking. Let’s look.

Britain’s relative prestige in the world, like its material position, was stronger in 1956 than in 2024. Europe was shattered by the world war and the future Asian giants, India and China, were not yet great industrialising powers. British institutions were internationally respected. Yet in 1956 when national interests clashed over Suez, none of this mattered a jot to the new, actual superpower, the United States.

In that crisis, despite Britain’s eminence and the Anglophilia of American elites, President Dwight Eisenhower coerced Britain out of its campaign against Egypt, with military pressure fouling the sonar of the British ships in the Mediterranean and with economic leverage threatening to sink the pound. Suez was an easy test of soft power theory, and it unked. And all the cultural treasures in the world could not extinguish anti-colonial revolt.

e nation’s infrastructure may creak and crumble, its debt may soar, its borders may be in chaos, its energy infrastructure run down, its hospitals overburdened, its steel industry decimated, its property una ordable, its army and navy depleted, with the navy struggling to crew the surface eet. But rest assured, Britain’s cultural cachet makes it a colossus abroad. Huge, if true.

Any decent conception of power must be partly relational. at is, it must deal with the interaction between moving parts. For soft power to count, it must get others to do things they otherwise might not do. Which brings us back to the Soft Power Index. How does the Index measure and track soft power? Over two glossy pages, its “methodology” hardly deals with behaviour. Rather, it establishes the scale of countries’ soft power by opinion polling, asking people how far other countries bear in uence, familiarity and reputation. is is little more than pub talk, writ large. It supplements this question-begging data with faith statements from luminaries. Even the incisive journalist Andrew Neil claims, “More and more lms and TV series seem to require a London location for at least part of the shoot … [on the show You], Americans dress up in Victorian garb and try to speak with British accents. Series four is entirely based in London. at is Soft Power for you.”

Is it? us formulated, “soft power” becomes circular and unfalsi able. e input of cultural appeal is indistinguishable from its output. We get others to know, like and respect us in order … that they know, like and respect us. Without an account of cause

Aircraft carrier HMS Theseus leaves Portsmouth for the Mediterranean during the Suez Crisis

and e ect, there is no theory of power here at all.

In a Twitter exchange, I suggested to the FCDO Senior Communications O cer that lovely cultural assets (the jubilee and the national mourning for the late monarch) aren’t e ects or proof of soft power. ey are inputs. Did these events get others to alter their behaviour in ways that accord with British interests? Did such events help induce a favourable US-UK trade agreement? Or a UK-Canadian one? Apparently not. And these are countries that eagerly consume British cultural fare.

How reliable has British soft power ever been in Washington, for that matter? e irony of the Anglo-American special relationship is the disconnect between cross-cultural a ection and unsentimental policymaking. From recognition of Sinn Fein to steel tari s, not signing up to the International Criminal Court or the treaty on land mines, from disbanding the Iraqi B’aath party to invading Grenada, America — like all leading states — does what it likes. As for the BBC and its World Service, so often touted not just as a good thing but as a delivery system for British in uence and a guard against disinformation, did its outreach get India not to raid the BBC o ces in Mumbai and New Delhi?

In other words, where’s the beef? when challenged, defenders of the concept typically withdraw into generalities. e FCDO o cer replied that soft power could not have such a “deterrent e ect”, but that “culture, education, monarchy are important to the brand, add to tourism + economy, warm people to the UK in the long term”. Again, the circularity, plus the troubling use of the term “brand”.

Britain in this picture is not so much a country pursuing a way of life in a hostile world as a corporation with a “brand”, existing to attract customers and enjoy “warm” feelings. Under the slightest scrutiny, the “soft power index” turns out to be little more than a tourism index. On that measure, Spain and Mexico are superpowers, while in the ranks of regional heavyweights, ailand outranks Japan.

e whole “soft power” proposition is not just cloyingly self-congratulatory. By making people feel good about their country’s place in the international pecking order, it de ects

from the harder means-ends decisions that a serious country must face. Worse, it encourages the dangerous conceit that soft things — from diplomatic gestures to popular culture — can oset or replace hard capabilities.

Consider the advice of Simon McDonald, former permanent secretary at the Foreign O ce and head of the Diplomatic Service. McDonald’s manifesto, Beyond Britannia, denounces the nostalgic pursuit of great power status embodied in Brexit and argues for a fresh statecraft built around “soft power”.

For him, Britain’s soft power is more latent than manifest, awaiting an enlightened government to unlock it. Since Britain can no longer play the hard power game, it should barter away its nuclear arsenal, downgrade the Royal Navy into a local eet and give up its permanent seat on the UN Security Council to the European Union.

This programme is a gamble. Exchanging a survivable, continuous at-sea nuclear deterrent for greater worldwide repute? Winning hearts and minds by trading away veto power at the UN for an organisation Britain isn’t part of? is grand bargain is staked on the bet that international life is about getting other countries to admire your moral authority and enlightened gestures. Events, however, suggest otherwise.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the “global south” nations from South Africa to Kenya to India to Brazil responded not with virtuous internationalism, but by hedging and trading with Moscow. ey did so even though Russia shows no signs of nuclear disarmament. To the contrary, it issues veiled nuclear threats.

e international arena is not an audience of moralists aching to be “led”, but one of calculating regimes pursuing cold self-interest. McDonald denounces the swaggering, backward-looking nationalism of the Brexiteers. But by suggesting that Britain can revive its in uence via the soft stu , he o ers the image of a global audience waiting for the guidance of British leadership. Who is the “great power” nostalgic and sentimentalist in this story?

We have been here before. Liberal denunciations of the Iraq war of 2003 charge that by invading illegally and unleashing bloody chaos and committing torture, the United States and Britain squandered their “moral authority”. e war was a disastrous blunder, but the “moral authority” complaint runs up against the facts.

Despite public protestations against the military adventure, the French government gave intelligence assistance behind the scenes and soon afterwards integrated its military command into NATO, while Germany provided intelligence assistance in Baghdad and allowed extraordinary rendition ights from its soil. In 2015, after discovering that the NSA had tapped Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone, as Jeremy Shapiro recalls, “German o cials messaged in backroom seminars that the alliance could never be the same. A few months later it was the same.”

To suggest, as McDonald does, that we should turn to “soft power” is not a daring, fresh challenge, but a tired routine. As Perry Anderson said of Francis Fukuyama when he made simi-

HAWKINS

Oh, how marvellous ny lace that has dogs can t be all bad.

lar arguments after Iraq went wrong, “ e miscellaneous proposals with which [the book] ends — greater reliance on soft power, more consultation with allies, respect for international institutions — are of a desolating predictability, the truisms of every bien-pensant editorial or periodical in the land.”

the violence in ukraine and gaza has once again revealed to us that the world revolves around harder currencies, of blood and iron. With a vengeance, today’s battle elds force public debate to reckon with material things: the defence industrial base, energy supplies, mass and logistics, manpower and shipyard capacity.

Britain and its allies checked Putin’s aggressive expansionism not primarily by tweets and summits. ey did so with money, training, military intelligence and guns.

sian soldiers, the term is meaningless.

History does not support the notion that cultural attraction generates behavioural deference. If anything, there is a disconnect. In our time, Saddam Hussein de ed the United States for 13 years even while consuming Frank Sinatra and Jack Daniels. Islamists from Egypt or Saudi Arabia crave the pleasures and technological wonders of the Western societies that they want to burn.

And recall wishful visions two decades ago, that Western offers of prosperity could make a rising China into an equity stakeholder, deferring to American primacy. In more distant times, even invading predators liked the civilisations they looted. Recall the invaders that sacked Rome yet minted coins in the likeness of emperors, or the crusaders who diverted their expedition to plunder Constantinople.

ese are the hard capabilities McDonald claims Britain is no longer capable of wielding. at seaborne trade has resumed through the Black Sea is only possible because Ukraine militarily holds Russia’s eet at risk. Yet asked about Britain’s support to Ukraine, McDonald plays the de nition game: “ ese all to me feel in the soft power side of life: to draw other people’s attention to something, to galvanise activity.” If “soft power” can be reformulated to include arming and training Ukrainians to kill RusUse coupon code 'barkingmad' before 31 March 2024 for 10% off

Without hard foundations, appeals to authority carry little weight. In 1945, Stalin notoriously dismissed papal disapproval: “ e Pope? How many divisions has he got?” is may not capture the full complexity of diplomacy. But it is a better “ rst cut” guide to the world than the Soft Power Index, or mandarins who mistake popularity for strength. ●

Patrick Porter is an author and critic

With the King and the Princess of Wales both confined to the sidelines, this is no time for a slimmed-down monarchy

THE CASE FOR MORE ROYALS

Iwas a H igh Sheriff a few years back. The ancient o ce is held now only for a year in each county as the Crown’s representative to all aspects of law and order, as well as the re service. You can prioritise whatever you want, being in theory answerable only to the Crown and the law, but traditionally it means visiting every re station, police station, law court, remand centre, prison and morgue in the county, as well as giving dinners for the judges. ere was, in my patch, much ceremonial, which I thought hugely enjoyable. Rather than being outmoded or super uous and arrogant, these occasions were inclusive and seemed to cheer everyone up.

e costume — sorry, uniform — of a High Sheri does seem silly and is worn for the ceremonials. Court Dress, including a ru and tights, is Black Rod without the inherent dignity. But at least you get a sword and it is remarkable how many ladies like to stroke the velvet on your chest. Its otherness is the point. When so attired, any people you approach in any circumstance become silent. I found that useful, even if they look bemused.

I have worn it only once since my year of o ce ended, for a friend's party. He muttered as I entered, “Typical, I host a fancy dress and bloody Leavesley comes as himself.”

Being a Deputy Lieutenant is to concentrate on all other civic aspects of county life and at my level is less intense. I wear that uniform mainly at Citizenship Ceremonies to hand over the certi cates and then have my photograph taken with our new citizens alongside a Union Jack and a large picture of the King. ese events were introduced by the Blair government and are perhaps the only constitutional reform it introduced that is any good. Everyone feels proud and smiles broadly. It is a privilege to witness.

of the Lord Lieutenant in your designated geographic area, keeping up with news and passing it on. One sees how busy the Lord Lieutenant and the Vice Lieutenant are. Requests and demands for royal and even just local Lieutenancy patronage are frequent and insatiable.

e Lord Lieutenant is the public-facing glad-hander. e Vice usually delivers the messages of what can and can't be done. Both spend considerable time in meetings and on admin. Every community in the country has public services and volunteer groups eager for royal patronage. Whether the monarchy itself is currently in vogue or is enduring one of its periodic bouts of controversy, it is a symbol of both national and local unity that is perennial and appeals across class, county and race.

There is also an undeniable, yet difficult to pinpoint, romantic élan to its status and longevity which, regardless of its incumbents, partly explains why, say, a local charity in an impoverished backwater will want to seek an association.

e monarchy would not have survived were it not apolitical and were it not able, through the spread of the royal family, to be meaningful nationally. An appointed or elected head of state that was not hereditary — a president (or, as we su ered once before, a Lord Protector of the Commonwealth) would inevitably be London-focused because there would likely only be one of them. And they would likely be an elderly politician or a “national treasure” celebrity. Oh dear.

By contrast, with our royal family one gets “ e Firm”, a plethora of working royals. Except that these days there are fewer of them. When once there were 16 who might be called upon to visit your school or show interest in your business award, now there are e ectively just nine.

Also, the King has cancer. Please God that he recovers swiftly. It was clear long before he became king that he was going to be a dutiful, thoughtful and, in his own way, inspirational monarch. While he receives treatment he is abstaining from public-facing tasks but feels able to continue with the papers and meetings of his constitutional duties.

Regardless of the out t, one usually acts as the eyes and ears

Then there is the Princess of Wales, who is recovering from surgery. As well as being a mother, she has done her share of o cial engagements and not put a foot wrong since joining the family. She is the embodiment of the perfect princess — unlike the other recent entrant, now in exile. e institution is fortunate she agreed to engage with the role so wholeheartedly, as are we. We need her back.

To be a working royal is to be kept very busy, usually on visits which after a short while will seem to be somewhat repetitive. And you are not allowed to make a mistake or be in an unconducive mood, not ever. Consider this: you rise early in your well-appointed house (which may or may not feel like home; it might not be where you usually reside), breakfast hastily whilst reading your daily brie ng. You travel to a distant part of the country to be amiable during, say, seven o cial engagements, meeting several hundred people. ese will invariably include the local

Johnny Leavesley

Lord Lieutenant, a High Sheri , several councillors wearing chains of o ce, schoolchildren, police and many other earnest, nervous, sincere people.

Meeting you might well be the highlight of their year, even if you are feeling tired or bored. You travel home to eat a late meal with your spouse, who has undertaken separate duties in another part of the country. And the next day you both do similar things elsewhere, sometimes together but often apart. It may sound like a cushy number, because surely anyone can cut ribbons, shake hands and deliver a few anodyne remarks? But done well, day after day, it is hard work. Many people would feel trapped, yet the country needs them to carry on.

e King has long wanted a “slimmed-down monarchy”. Uncertain of his own popularity as the late Queen's reign drew towards its close, and sensitive to charges of extravagance, this impetus towards reduction must have seemed compelling. Fortunately, he is popular. YouGov's latest gures have the King at 60 per cent approval, with the Waleses at 72 per cent and the insti-

tution as a whole at 62 per cent. For what it achieves nationally and its worldwide reach, the monarchy is a bargain, costing £2 per person per year. at is paid for many times over from tourism alone.

Is the real question now whether the Crown has been pared down too much? e slimmed-down monarchy model seemed plausible so long as the surviving “working royals” were t and able. Yet having lost the services of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex as well as the Duke of York, one can’t help but ask whether there are enough spares?

One argument for abolishing the monarchy is that it is an expensive anachronism. But the best case for keeping it is precisely because it is an anachronism, a point of colour in a monochrome world. It’s the unifying embodiment of our national identity which remains relevant because “ e Firm” puts in so much work around the country and the world. is is no time for retrenchment, Your Majesty, we need more working royals. ●

D.J. TAYLOR’S ARTY TYPES

Grizelda Buncombe Peripatetic creative writing tutor

●A fascinating story, Rafe, really immersive and transgressive, Grizelda scribbles on the topmost sheet of the many A4 pages strewn over her desk, although I do wonder whether the 93 year-old inhabitant of a Lancashire care home would use a vocabulary that included the expressions “Whatever?” “Get bent” and “I want to sex you up”. But you are making — Grizelda crosses out the words “great strides” on the grounds that it might be considered ableist and substitutes huge progress

It is 7.30 on a Sunday morning in the tiny out-of-town at and Grizelda Buncombe, MA (Bath Spa), PhD (Coleraine), she/they, who likes an early start, is hard at work marking the latest round of coursework.

She is a tall, thin, anguished girl in her mid-thirties, who likes to be known as “Grizzy”, decorously brought up and expensively educated, although no trace of these former associations remains in the way she comports herself around campus or the Estuarine bark with which she addresses her students.

Grizzy has been teaching creative writing for a dozen years now, in nearly the same number of universities and colleges of further education. In an academic landscape where arts courses are frowned upon, the greenery-

yallery in terminal retreat and tenure a sharply receding dream, only an instinct for survival will keep you going; Grizzy, a prudent operator, well able to take care of herself, long ago decided to focus hers on the short-term contract.

Scottish Highlands.

Naturally, a life like this has its drawbacks. University administrative systems aren’t geared to passage migrants and Grizzy is resigned to computer networks that won’t let her into them and vanished passwords.

University administrative systems aren’t whose website notes that she wishes “to

solitary publication of the past half-decade a Grizelda

It has been a picaresque progress this, up and down the British Isles. So meandering, in fact, that Grizzy is sometimes unable to remember one or two of the English departments she has brie y ornamented. Just now she is o ciating as Royal Literary Fund fellow at the University of Uttoxeter, but before that there was a stint as the Raymond A. Boggis visiting lecturer at Oxford Brookes and a community outreach project in the

Worse, there isn’t much opportunity to get on with your own work — Grizzy is a poet whose website notes that she wishes “to explore the space between feeling and its expression from the point of view of the deconceptualised (un) person”, but her solitary publication of the past half-decade has been a small-press pamphlet entitled Stricken Magnolias

Still, there is always the students’ work, in which she takes a rapt and zealous interest. A tantalising dystopia, Hermione, she writes on the next sheet of paper. Although I did wonder why the little green aliens have always to be men. And the private language in which they communicate is not always decipherable to the lay-person. But I can see the e ort you are making.

Privately, Grizzy has her doubts about Hermione, but, as she assures herself — noting as she does so that the THES is advertising a two-year post at the University of Clacton — a little positivity never hurt anyone. ●

Burton and Gielgud were always likely to be a combustible mix. Now the story of their famed Broadway production of Hamlet has been turned into a West End play. By Neil Armstrong

Theatrical legend has it that when Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole were lming Becket in 1963, they decided that they should each play Hamlet on stage. ese were two legendarily thirsty actors, and it is possible that drink may have been taken. ey ipped a coin to determine which of them should be directed by John Gielgud and which by Laurence Olivier, the two greatest Hamlets of the previous era. Burton got Gielgud. History does not record who was thought to have won the toss.

Sir John Gielgud, from a prominent theatrical family, rst saw Hamlet in 1912 when he was eight, and what eight-year-old doesn’t love a four-hour blank verse tragedy about an existential crisis? Gielgud would go on to play the Dane ve times between 1930 and 1946. Burton, a coal miner’s son, was a great admirer. However, the rehearsals in Toronto for their 1964 Broadway production were fraught, with director and leading man continually clashing.

lynn, Gatiss and iddleton as urton, Gielgud and Taylor

tion was a media circus from the o . e biggest lm of the previous year, Cleopatra, had starred Burton as Mark Antony and Elizabeth Taylor as the Egyptian queen. e pair, both married to other people at the time — Taylor to her fourth husband — had begun an a air during lming. It was a high-pro le scandal that even the Vatican weighed into, condemning the relationship as “erotic vagrancy”.

Now Burton and Taylor were the world’s biggest celebrity couple. Taylor was the highest-paid star in the world. Burton was on half a million a movie. e couple were even given their own nickname. Before “Brangelina” there was, the somewhat unfortunate sounding, “Dickenliz”.

Consequently, on 30 January 1964 when the cast arrived at the Toronto hotel where most of them were staying, they found the lobby besieged by hundreds of fans and journalists. at afternoon there was an hour-long press conference. And then it was o to the rehearsal hall, where they had to push through another crowd to get inside.

ose di erences are brilliantly dramatised in e Motive and the Cue, Jack orne’s hit play about the production. Directed by Sam Mendes, the show is currently in the West End and is possibly itself destined for Broadway. Mark Gatiss plays Gielgud, Johnny Flynn is a volatile Burton.

Thorne has drawn on books written by two of the original cast members about the rehearsal process. William Red eld, who played Guildenstern, wrote Letters From An Actor (reissued later this year by Applause). Meanwhile Richard L. Sterne, who had a two-line role, went to the extraordinary lengths of secretly taping rehearsals using a recorder hidden in a briefcase and transcribing the tapes every night. He even hid under a stage for six hours to record Gielgud and Burton in a private meeting.

Sterne claimed that when he later told Gielgud and Burton about his covert activities, they were amused. Perhaps they were. Flynn has said that when he tracked down Sterne’s hard-to- nd book, John Gielgud Directs Richard Burton in Hamlet, it was the copy that had been owned by Burton. e ery Welshman’s involvement meant that the produc-

Prior to their rst read-through, Gielgud described to the cast his big idea, which was to stage the production as if it was “a pre-dress rehearsal run-through. As few props and gimmicks as possible.” For the actual show, the actors would wear whatever normal clothes they would typically wear to a rehearsal. Of course, this was a gimmick in itself. Nevertheless, Gielgud hoped it would “free the verse from all its fustian trappings”.

Red eld and Sterne’s books paint a vivid picture of the rehearsals. Gielgud, nearing 60 and resolutely old school, arrives and leaves wearing a Siberian-style fur hat. He chainsmokes English Oval cigarettes, allowing one to dangle from the corner of his mouth for minutes at a time, accumulating a long ash which then falls on his suit. He has the entire text of the play by heart and wells up with tears when an actor performs particularly well.

At the first reading, Burton, who had played Hamlet before, races through it in a shouty fashion, “as though,” according to Red eld, “ re were consuming the theatre and he had bloody well to get out of the building in order to save his hide”.

But this, it quickly becomes apparent, is not the Gielgud way. “Have a care as to shouting … Don’t overuse it,” he later tells Burton. Gielgud favours an approach to Shakespeare’s verse that the younger actors, including the 38-year-old Burton, considered old-fashioned. Privately, Burton says that he thinks Gielgud’s “singsong” diction is outdated.

And as rehearsals progress, some of the other actors become unhappy. Gielgud wants them to nd their own way into the parts but his vagueness unsettles them. He frequently leaves exchanges unrehearsed. He insists on particular in ections which the players feel make no sense. Gielgud wants Hamlet to say “What a piece of work is a man … in form and moving, how

MICHAEL WHARLEY/NOEL COWARD THEATRE

ichard urton listens intently before ignoring stage direction from

express and admirable.” Burton goes with “express”. Red eld writes that Burton “never says no to John Gielgud. at would be rude. But he frequently does not do as Gielgud asks. In fact he usually does not do as Gielgud asks.”

Director and star do openly argue about how to approach the closet scene, in which Hamlet kills Polonius. Gielgud wants Burton to play the moment triumphantly, in order to give the audience a thrill. Burton thinks that fundamentally wrong and sarcastically suggests getting a brass band into the closet which would also give the audience a thrill. Gielgud nally simply murmurs “Let’s keep working at it, shall we?” is con ict may have been exacerbated by Burton’s heavy drinking. At the close of rehearsal every day, Burton invites a selection of the actors to his dressing room for what Red eld calls “a spot of wassail”. And one evening Red eld is among a group of the cast summoned to Burton and Taylor’s ve-room hotel suite for a drink.

He is greeted by Taylor — “a knockout … a more striking beauty in person than on screen” — who mixes him a drink. Burton is ba ed by Red eld’s choice of tipple, a martini. “Whisky is simpler,” the Welshman says, adding that he couldn’t bear gin but vodka or tequila are acceptable whisky substitutes. Taylor, no slouch when it comes to booze, drinks champagne.

In e Motive and the Cue, she is played by Tuppence Middleton and depicted as a shrewd peacemaker but also as possessed of a devastating sexual charisma that can stun a heterosexual man at 50 paces, and which even the gay Gielgud nds beguiling. “I heard your eyes were dazzling but I wasn’t prepared how dazzling,” he tells her in the play.

Drinking after the end of the working day is one thing, drinking during it another. Red eld records an impromptu but much-needed line rehearsal in a hotel room which descended into boozy boisterousness when Burton declared: “To hell with Hamlet — let’s get pissed.” Sterne mentions Burton having a tray of Scotch and sodas brought to the rehearsal hall “for the group”. In orne’s play this becomes an electrifying scene in which an inebriated Burton turns on Gielgud and humiliates him in front of the cast.

Burton was an alcoholic. By the time he made Where Eagles Dare, four years later, he was consuming several bottles of vodka a day. A 1969 entry in his diary describes him on a health kick. He has a whisky and soda before lunch, “about” two glasses of La te ’60 with lunch, and “two or three” brandies after lunch with “a couple more” whisky and sodas in the evening. is was him being abstemious; on the set of the 1974 lm e Klansman, Burton was drinking so much that his scenes had to be shot with him either sitting or lying down.

e rst public performance of Hamlet, in Toronto, was set for 25 February. e previous night’s dress rehearsal had been a disaster, with Burton forgetting his lines. By now, the other actors were panicking that they were going to look like idiots.

And yet … it was alright on the night. Not brilliant, but alright. Taylor, whose arrival caused a huge fuss, overheard an elderly lady marvelling “Isn’t it full of quotations?” e Toronto critics hated it, but the run sold out and in New York, it set a new record as Broadway’s longest-running Hamlet with 138 performances (Gielgud held the previous record of 132). e New York Times praised Burton’s “performance of electrical power and sweeping virility”. Crowds of 2,000 gathered nightly at the stage door to catch a glimpse of him.

What of the O’Toole Hamlet? Filming commitments meant he could do only 27 performances in the inaugural production of the National eatre Company, which had had a long, tortured gestation. He did not enjoy the experience, later describing Hamlet as “the worst bloody play ever written”.

Notices were “mixed”. Bernard Levin’s less than rave review in the Daily Mail was headlined: “After a wait of 100 years, this will do for a start.” It seems obvious who won the toss. ●

A lm of a Broadway performance of Burton’s Hamlet is available on YouTube. e Motive and the Cue is at the Noël Coward eatre until 23 March

John Gielgud

THE MISANTHROPIC HISTORY MAN

Yuval Noah Harari has become an intellectual superstar, but his best-selling books are sloppy and simplistic By

Andrew Orlowski

In that strangely complacent dreamtime between the nancial crash and the rise of populism, Yuval Noah Harari became a global superstar. e young Israeli history professor is frequently described as the world's most-read public intellectual, while his speaking agency has no qualms about describing him as a philosopher. Harari’s lack of recognisable cultural baggage lends him a mysterious other-worldliness, as if he's a man from another, wiser planet or from the future; a vegan who practices Vipassana meditation for two hours a day and shares the housework with his husband.

He rapidly won the endorsement of celebrities such as Bill Gates, Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg and became a xture at Davos, Aspen and other plush retreats where political and business leaders assemble. Harari has now sold 65 million books. But he remains curiously under-examined.

the professor first shot to fame with the sweeping trans-disciplinary Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. e book begins 70,000 years ago and culminates with speculation about biotechnology and arti cial intelligence. It’s the perfect cheat-sheet for blu ers and the intellectually insecure, the New York Times noted, allowing readers to acquire “apparent mastery of all human a airs” from “biology to economics”.

Sapiens was an ambitious “Big History” that eschewed the conventional narrative of one damned thing after another. Spengler, Toynbee, Braudel and others also attempted to tell big human stories. Braudel coined the phrase la longue durée to refer to narratives based around the evolving structures that govern human a airs, which he contrasted with conventional histoire événementielle, or “event history”.

Harari found a solution in the reductionist pop-science formula pioneered by Jared Diamond for his 1997 bestseller Guns, Germs and Steel. In place of complexity, the story is driven by a crudely materialistic explanation of human development. Harari would only belatedly acknowledge its in uence.

His work was perfectly tuned to the middle-class enclaves where guilt about modern material comforts hangs heavy. e Guardian promoted him heavily: an early piece for the paper asked “Were we happier in the Stone Age?” and asserted that

“industrial farming is one of the worst crimes in history”. Simpli cation allows Harari to make huge swathes of human achievement disappear. “He avoids naming entire libraries of Western philosophical thought and any reference to literature. at is to say, he erases everything that is representative of a part of human culture,” explains the Argentinian historian Mauricio Meglioli. In its place is an odd collection of prejudices, which Harari does not try very hard to hide. e rise of mankind, he tells us, disrupted an otherwise harmonious planet. Daring to temper nature to make life less miserable for us was a terrible mistake. Agriculture was “a Faustian bargain between humans and grains”, in which our species “cast o its symbiosis with nature and sprinted towards greed and alienation”. Was a subsistence life of foraging really that bad, he wonders, when “the forager economy provided most people with more interesting lives”?

these sweeping, unsubstantiated claims were swiftly debunked by academics. Meglioli was particularly infuriated by Harari’s frivolity and elusiveness. He spent a year interviewing former colleagues, publishers and hundreds of experts such as linguistics specialists M.A.C. Huijbregts and Noam Chomsky, anthropologists like Christopher Hallpike and historians such as David Christian, Fred Spier, Patrick Manning and John McNeill to trace the genesis of Sapiens and the claims it makes. e result, Meglioli’s e Story of Sapiens, is a detective story almost worthy of Eco.

Harari's 2004 PhD, “Renaissance military memoirs: war, history and identity, 1450-1600” was meticulous and rigorous and by 2008 he was a star lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Harari's talks “dropped bombs”, says Meglioli, making startling but poorly-substantiated claims. e assembled coursework of 20 lectures became the 20 essays of A Brief History of Humankind. It was a slow burner; Harari self-published an English edition, titled From Animals to Gods: A Brief History of Humankind. e edited 2013 version, by now Sapiens, formed the basis of his sensational success in 2014.

ambiguity and the absence of citations in Sapiens are not accidental, Meglioli advises. For example, the original edition begins with a linguistic revolution Harari says began 70,000 years ago “and nobody

knows why”. By the 2014 edition, this had become a “cognitive revolution”. Language and cognition have a complex relationship, but are not substitutable. is kind of claim perplexes critics including Chomsky, who describes Harari’s account as “fanciful”. Others are less charitable. As Harari’s thesis advisor, Steven Gunn, professor of early modern history at Oxford, puts it, this elusiveness allowed Harari to dodge the fact-checking process: “Let’s ask questions so large that no one can say, ‘We think this bit’s wrong and that bit’s wrong,” Gunn told the New Yorker magazine in 2020. Meglioli notes how Harari once attended academic conferences, but gradually withdrew because "he was terri ed of being questioned".

Harari's sloppiness can also be seen with his loose use of “ ctions”, which he applies both to religions and mythology and to formal constructs such as money or corporations. His most quoted claim, that “wheat domesticated humans” is another evasive conceit. It’s a reprise of Richard Dawkins's concept of a “meme”, whereby ideas and behaviours move like parasites, with people reduced to the role of dumb hosts.

It’s a trick that removes the need to explain human choice. “To understand what in uences a ect people we need to grasp their actual needs and motives,” the late philosopher Mary Midgley countered. Nonetheless, as Meglioli observes tartly, “the select world of billionaires has incorporated him without hesitation as the great storyteller and the next great prophet: a historical need ironically portrayed in e Life of Brian”.

"He’s really the worst prophet I’ve ever read,” says Megliloi. “Most of the predictions he made in the rst book — that wars were over, that pandemics were over — went wrong. “Were we moving, as he claimed in Sapiens, towards empires? No, national sovereignty has been reasserted.”

Harari’s predictions have become even wilder and sillier. AI might produce a “useless class” of people, he predicted, since they “don’t have any skills that the new economy needs”. No wonder Dominic Sandbrook noted in 2018 how much he was beginning to resemble Alan Partridge. Others suggest he is becoming ever more messianic. While Harari is scathing about formal religion, he appears to be creating an ersatz religion of his own, Wesley J Smith suggested in a 2018 essay.

But none of this seems to deter him. His 2016 book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow goes over much of the same ground as Sapiens, adding gloomy predictions of technological transformation. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century repeats the trick. Meglioli estimates Harari has now rehashed the Sapiens formula ten times, including a graphic novel.

ultimately, what drives harari's gloomy quest may not be that complicated at all, Meglioli suggests. “Many teachers and friends had this image of him as the lonely student who hated everyone. About the only philosopher he quotes is Sartre, and it’s a revealing line: ‘Hell is other people’." at logic made him think that people are disgusting and the worst thing in nature. For Harari, hell is humanity. ●

Andrew Orlowski is is a columnist at the Daily Telegraph

Barendina Smedley says Eric Ravilious’s ethereal watercolours have found a new appreciation not because of misty-eyed nostalgia, but because the artist’s striking modernity and graphic verve chime with today’s sensibilities

The Boy who never grew old

In the instructive tale of Eric R avilious’s posthumous reputation, three events stand out. e rst occurred in September 1942, when an RAF Lockheed Hudson took o from its base in Iceland across the sparkling waters of the North Atlantic, and never returned. On board were the pilot, three airmen and an observer — war artist Eric Ravilious. Aged 39, Ravilious was having the time of his life. His friend and fellow artist Edward Bawden called Ravilious “ e Boy”, a nickname re ecting his Peter Pan-like character. At worst this could play out as désinvolture — at best, a gift for nding wonder in the most unpromising situations. His work as an o cial war artist sent him o on adventures, exposing him to di erent ways of working, new qualities of light. Best of all, at least for his art, war gave him access to all the shiny boys’ toys of con ict: ships, submarines, aircraft. His death was tragic, not only for personal reasons — he left behind a terminally ill wife, his own 85-year-old father and three young children — but for its brutal termination of a career so full of promise. Lost at the height of his powers, “ e Boy” never grew old. Unlike his contemporaries, he never had to negotiate a market dominated by abstract expressionism or pop art, nor indeed confront the marginal nature of Britain’s post-war art scene more generally. It was as if his sudden, enigmatic exit — not even a crash site, not even a grave — brought down a shutter. By the time the war ended, those who had managed to survive it were, in general, ready to move on. In the decades that followed who, apart from a few specialists, wanted to think about Ravilious?

The second event took place in 1972. R avilious’s children — John, James and Anne — became orphans in 1951, when their mother, Tirzah Ravilious (neé Garwood), a talented artist in her own right, died of cancer, aged 42. As adults, wishing to know more about their father, they wrote to Edward Bawden, who still lived in the house he once shared with Eric and Tirzah. Under his bed, half forgotten, was a cache of Ravilious’s work.

We shouldn’t exaggerate Ravilious’s post-war obscurity. True, his murals had largely been destroyed, his neo-Regency furniture designs fell out of fashion, some of his war pictures were either lost at sea or suppressed by the censors.

Yet Ravilious’s design for a coronation mug, created for

Edward VIII then rapidly recon gured to suit George VI, was wheeled out again by Wedgwood in 1953. A few of his wood engravings — stock blocks for Everyman’s Library, his playful woodcut for Wisden — received the ultimate accolade, becoming such familiar xtures of British culture as to have apparently existed forever. Many of Ravilious’s watercolours survived in public collections, notably the Imperial War Museum in London.

Still, Bawden’s unearthing of this “new” work marked a seachange. In 1982, the Ravilious descendants made a long-term loan of the artist’s work to the Towner Art Gallery in Eastbourne, Sussex. In 1986, the Towner staged an exhibition reassessing Ravilious’s legacy. And this, in turn, had the e ect of ushing out yet more pictures that had existed, neglected or misunderstood, in private collections.

e 1980s brought the triumph of postmodernism. Supermarkets were crowned with gables and clock towers, Brideshead Revisited was on television, and the public otation of Laura Ashley Holdings was oversubscribed by something like 34 per cent. Forty years after his death, Ravilious had found a way back.

The third relevant event took place in October 2003 when a major exhibition, Imagined Realities, opened at the Imperial War Museum. e context underscored Ravilious’s place as a war artist — not surprisingly, as the bulk of his accessible work was in the IWM collection.

e show, however, presented a vastly expanded vision. Here, Ravilious was lucky. e guest curator, Alan Powers, was equipped not only with deep knowledge of twentieth-century British ne art, but also a crucial sympathy for the architecture and design of the inter-war period. Powers understood how the tension between modernism and tradition informed Ravilious’s design commissions, and carried this over into a sensitive reading of his work.

e decades that followed saw an ever-accelerating Ravilious renaissance, at least in Britain. Milestone exhibitions included James Russell’s Ravilious in 2015, and Andy Friend’s Ravilious & Co: e Pattern of Friendship in 2017. A minor publishing industry has developed around him. It ranges from delectable private press o erings to beautifully produced Mainstone Press

publications, budget-friendly “gift books”, exhibition catalogues and scholarly work galore. In 2022 these were joined by Drawn to War, a feature-length documentary lm.

More di cult to convey is the extent to which, 80 years after his death, Ravilious now serves as a point of reference for writers, artists, graphic designers, musicians, even commercial brands. Like any “vibe”, it’s hard to de ne, yet once appreciated, unmissable. Robert Macfarlane, Angie Lewin, Simon Palmer, Angela Harding, St Jude’s, Sea Power — the list goes on. Disparate in themselves, they have all found something in Ravilious worth making their own.

Born in 1903, R avilious grew up in Eastbourne. His father was, variously, a coachman, furniture dealer, discharged bankrupt and Methodist lay preacher. is mattered, because when young Eric studied at the Royal College of Arts in London, he did so as a design student on a series of scholarships. e course grounded him in architecture, graphic design and printmaking. ere was little emphasis on painting in oils. e course pushed him in the direction of creating work that was accessible, pleasing, capable of nding a market. It’s no discredit to Ravilious — or at least, it shouldn’t be — that there was always an artisan, skill-centred edge to his practice.

His politics, where discernible, were blandly conventional. A member of the left-wing Artists’ International Association, even his friends recognised this allegiance as more social than ideological. His father’s nonconformist Christianity inoculated him against overt religious faith. He fell in and out of love frequently. Peter Pan-like, he soared blithely above everyday attachments — something that comes across in his work.

Ravilious got his start painting murals, making prints and

book illustrations, designing furniture and ceramics. Only later did he make money from painting. His watercolours, mostly landscapes, sold almost exclusively to private buyers in a handful of commercial shows.

In late 1939 he was accepted onto Sir Kenneth Clark’s War Artists’ Advisory Committee scheme. is was no soft option. Commissioned as a captain, Ravilious took part in the Norway campaign in the spring of 1940. He was lucky to have survived, yet delighted in his war work.

Of Norway, he wrote, “I enjoyed it a lot, even the bombing which is wonderful reworks.” Having often depicted reworks before the war, he proceeded to depict shellbursts in similar ways.

If there had always been a degree of detachment in his work — delight in nding a good design and making the most of it, irrespective of subject matter — this was never more remarkable than in his war art. At its best, strong design is ageless — much more so than the special pleading of propaganda, patriotism, even personal anguish. Yet at the same time, the implied sang-froid in the face of death signalled something to his wartime audiences. His war art was no less powerful for being reticent and non-declamatory.

R avilious wasn’t a prolific artist. Self-critical, he destroyed perhaps as many as four paintings in ve. Watercolours, meanwhile, are di cult to display. Small, particularly when compared with twentieth-century oil paintings, one must stand close to see them — a nightmare for exhibition planners. Watercolours present challenges with lighting and conservation. ey reproduce badly in monochrome which, until the 1980s, was the only economical means of art illustration.

Many regard Ravilious as a “traditional” artist, rooted in a pleasingly pre-digital world. ere are ironies, then, in the fact that his present-day popularity hinges on the suitability of his images for mechanical or indeed digital reproduction.

His paintings thrive on screen. Already small, they don’t lose the impact of scale in the same way, say, a big work by Ivon Hitchens might. eir tactile quality is expressed through the nature of the brushwork — often executed with a “starved”, dry brush, using the sort of hatching strokes more familiar from wood engraving. is works well in reproduction. ickly impastoed oils by Freud or Auerbach, in contrast, require three dimensions in order to function.

ere’s one further characteristic that makes Ravilious’s work ideal for our online age.

avilious with ir Kenneth Clark (right), National Gallery, 1940 below, HMS Ark Royal in Action

Ravilious employed hatched, linear brushwork. He also used various resists, sometimes scratching away at his paint to reveal the paper beneath. In other words, he achieved his e ects by leaving much of the paper bare. Whiteness — snow, chalk, clouds, the blindness of looking straight into the sun — is his hallmark. e consequence, even when viewed on a tiny iPhone screen, is to let a great deal of light radiate out from “behind” the image. Compare an online glimpse of a Ravilious watercolour with the most playful Rex Whistler painting, the most luminous Paul Nash oil, and you’ll see the di erence. One looks at on the screen — the other literally shines.

R avilious’s autograph work is expensive — and becoming more so all the time. In June 2003, a Ravilious watercolour titled New Year Snow sold at auction for £35,850. is wasn’t a bad price — several times what a comparable watercolour by Paul Nash was fetching at the time, if rather less than a good Nash oil. In October 2023, however, the same work sold for £280,000. Nor was this the highest price achieved by a Ravilious picture — that honour goes to Pilot Boat, sold for £378,000 in November 2022.

Don’t want to splash out £200,000 on a Ravilious watercolour?

A mere £6,000 buys an original lithograph from the Submarine series; £3,000, a Boat Race bowl; £1,000, one of those compulsively collectable coronation mugs. If, however, that’s beyond your budget, there are alternatives: reproductions galore, of varying expense and quality, of the ceramics and also the pictures. ere are postcards, Christmas cards, advent calendars, tea towels, lens cloths, tote bags, fridge magnets. e now sadly debased

Wedgwood even greeted the coronation of King Charles III with a new “Ravilious” mug.

What’s more, most of these things actually look quite good, for the simple reason that Ravilious’s commercial work was always meant to excel in reproduction, unlike museum shop stalwarts like the Van Gogh tea cosy or the Leonardo da Vinci umbrella. e way in which Ravilious’s reputation has skyrocketed in recent years owes much to our increasingly online way of living. On Instagram, there’s a Ravilious account with 12,500 members. On Facebook, Ravilious is celebrated on at least three di erent groups, the largest with over 11,000 members. ey admire reproductions of his images, congratulate each other on acquiring Ravilious-related items, seek out scenes he depicted, trade views about artists associated with him.

On Twitter, various accounts — one with 42,500 followers — reproduce his work daily. While much of the enthusiasm re ects the austere, luminous beauty of the images, sometimes the appeal is more complicated. Not least, there’s an overlap with those accounts, ostensibly non-political, sharing lm of London streets from the 1950s, with the unspoken suggestion that the past — speci cally, our English past — was in all sorts of ways a happier, safer, better sort of place.

One can over-interpret anything. Still, it’s striking that the IWM exhibition — the show that relaunched Ravilious’s reputation — opened in October 2003, just a few months after the USled invasion of Iraq. If ever there were a moment when British audiences might conceivably seek out an alternative to internationalism, 24-hour rolling news and the anxieties of an increasingly fragile-looking world order, this was it.

bove, an engraving of a Chanticleer left, Chalk Paths, 1935 above, right, Train Landscape, 1940 far right, Chemist Shop at Night,from High Street, 193

There’s no denying that R avilious’s art is inextricable from inter-related issues of nostalgia and Englishness now as it was in his own unstable times. Nancy Mitford’s Highland Fling (1931) features a character — young, worldly — who is hilariously obsessed with the unfashionable kitsch of the Victorian era. e joke is that a semi-ironic appreciation of tradition is a much more sophisticated preference than an unironic preference for modernism. Others, for instance John Betjeman, would later take this and run with it, up to the point where the Young Fogeys of the 1980s were ready to grasp the pleasingly worn-out baton.

All this, surely, is present in Ravilious’s art — those slightly forlorn bathing machines, unpeopled interiors with their unselfconscious multiplicity of pattern, the shop fronts of High Street, even the hand-painted numbering of the railway carriage in Train Landscape (1940). ese things don’t appear because Ravilious was recording his unmediated, everyday experience. Like so much else in his art, nostalgia is a conscious choice. Occasionally he pushes his nostalgic discoveries right up to the boundaries of surrealism. At other times, he cheerfully distorts perspective — his treatment of space is often non-literal — in a playful appropriation of continental modernism. Alan Powers has called this “Cubism for the masses”. Sometimes, indeed, as in Beachy Head, where line and pattern are almost everything, Ravilious irts with outright abstraction.

Ravilious had a modernist’s allergy to the picturesque or sentimental. He rejected the clichés of English landscape painting: church spires, ramshackle Tudor cottages, mossy romantic ruins. His was, manifestly, an edited England — generally rural, often heartbreakingly beautiful, more than a little

numinous — but never an innocent, uncontested one. His idylls were often scattered with disused machinery, laced with barbed wire, observed in the shadow of war. Even his most innocuous scenes have something slightly unnerving about them.

For all his lightheartedness, R avilious was no naive painter. In 1932 the teacher who meant the most to him, Paul Nash, drafted an article titled “Going Modern and Being British”. Nash was clear that it was possible to use modernist means, as it were, to achieve local and particular ends. While others might mock this very English accommodation — notably Nikolaus Pevsner, amusing on the subject of how the English habitually compromise on everything — Ravilious seems to have worked along similar lines.

When, today, we instinctively prefer Ravilious to his heroes Cotman, Towne and Palmer, it is because he’s closer to our own postmodern sensibilities than they were. But there’s also something in the contested nature of his England that we recognise.

e Boy who will never grow old: his is a compromised paradise always on the brink of loss, yet simultaneously one in which it’s still possible to spot the rhythms that convey to us pleasure, beauty, joy. If there is a cool yet somehow blithe detachment in his work — and there is — then perhaps there is also a strategy for transcending the habitual, ugly indignations of our present. ●

Barendina Smedley writes from Norfolk about art, history and culture

Adam Dant on …

STUDIO

Orvieto-ware

by Alasdair Palmer

Medieval pottery does not, today, have the glamour of Italy’s more famous art from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries — those fabulous frescos, mosaics, sculptures and churches that millions of people travel to Italy every year to see. But 120 years ago, at the beginning of the twentieth century, medieval pottery was as ardently sought after as any of Italy’s art. e town of Orvieto was well known to have been a major centre of pottery production in the Middle Ages. e German professor and collector Wilhelm Bode — he of Berlin’s Bode Museum — even declared that all medieval Italian pottery was “Orvieto-ware”.

Orvieto was indeed a great centre of pottery production, as Professor Bode thought — only most of it wasn’t medieval. It was modern masquerading as medieval. But in the early twentieth century few people outside Orvieto were aware of the scale of contemporary production of Orvieto-ware.

Sophisticated taste in Europe and America was just discovering “the primitive”. Picasso and other artists were causing a sensation by copying African and Polynesian masks and sculptures and inserting them into their pictures. Medieval Italian pottery’s simple designs and narrow range of colours were suddenly all the rage. is was an authentic “people’s art”, created by, and for, ordinary folk. Rich American collectors with vast resources such as J.P. Morgan hoovered up vases, jugs and plates. So did British

buyers: much of the V&A’s enormous collection of medieval Italian pottery was acquired in the years before the First World War.

the v&a’s collection now gathers dust, unviewed and unloved — as do many of the substantial collections of medieval Italian pottery in America and Europe built up during the relatively short-lived mania for Orvieto-ware. What happened? Essentially, Italian medieval pottery was a victim of its own success. e enthusiasm for it amongst collectors and museum directors sent prices way up. High prices attracted swarms of forgers, many of whom became extremely competent. eir productions could not be told apart from the originals, even by the most expert of connoisseurs. Forgers became adept at burying their work in appropriate locations in Orvieto, making sure it would be dug up later and declared “a wonderful original”. e proliferation of forgery had a disastrous e ect on prices. Everyone involved in the trade came to realise that there were large numbers of forgeries in circulation. But there was no reliable way of telling a modern fake from a medieval original. Result: buyers avoided what they knew had a good chance of turning out to be fraudulent. e market for Orvieto-ware crashed. It never recovered. Although there are now chemical and other

tests that can de nitively identify a piece as a modern fake, those tests are expensive and tricky to administer. Museums and private collectors are not eager to discover that they own a large number of nineteenth-century fakes so those tests are only rarely applied to items in their collections. When it comes to Italian pottery made at any time from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries, it is still true that no-one can be completely sure what is, and what is not, a fake. All that anyone can be sure of is that many of the pieces of Italian pottery that are claimed as medieval will turn out to date from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century.

that is why the recent discovery of more than a thousand pots at the bottom of a well just outside Orvieto is so extraordinary: for once, everyone can be sure that every apparently medieval piece found there is genuine. is time, there is no possibility of forgery. e pieces were found in a well that was originally built around 1200. It was permanently sealed up and the settlement around it abandoned at the beginning of the eighteenth century. It was only rediscovered last year in the course of excavations of the Etruscan site in the valley next to Orvieto. e rst exhibition of the pottery found at the bottom of that well has just nished at Fondazione Marco Besso in Rome. And what extraordinary pots they are! Looking at them, you can understand why medieval Italian pottery appealed so strongly to connoisseurs a century ago: the rugged simplicity and directness

Left,

Above

of the designs are a striking contrast to the ddly, over-elaborate complexity of the “decadent” ceramics made in the second half of the nineteenth century. eir “naiveté” has a very powerful e ect. It is very easy to imagine them on medieval tables. ey catapult you directly back into the daily life of people 500 or 600 years ago. e amazingly good condition of many of these pieces is down to the water in the well, which never ran dry: at more than 11 metres deep, the well starts six metres beneath the water table. e water seems to have preserved the ceramics in a way that being left in the air would not have done. e pots were laid down in chronological order, with the oldest at the bottom and the most recent at the top — so the deeper down the archaeologists dug in the well, the older the pottery they found.

the oldest pieces are from the beginning of the thirteenth century, which is when a community of Franciscan monks is documented as having started a monastery at the location. e Franciscans would later move to the inside of the town of Orvieto. ey would be replaced by monks belonging to another order, the Servites. It made no di erence to the well,

Above, Orvieto-ware exhibited at the Besso Library in Rome

Orvieto maiolica jars from the second half of the 15th century

left, Orvieto jars from the 13th and 14th century

STUDIO

however, which continued to be used by the local inhabitants, whoever they were.

Over 1,000 pots and other ceramics have been found in the well. Why so many? One explanation, says Professor Danilo Leone, one of the lead excavators of the site, is that people used pots to draw water from that well several times every day. “If, on just one per cent of the occasions they did that, the pot they were using accidentally got detached and fell ... then over ve centuries, you’re going get a lot of pots and jugs at the bottom.”

e accidental drop-o rate must have been much fewer than one in a hundred. Still, whatever the rate of loss, it happened frequently enough for the archaeologists to nd parts of an instrument designed to help people retrieve jugs and vases that fell in to it. e instrument, known as a volpara, looks a little like a hanger with several hooks. Something similar was used by peasants in Italy to sh out items that been accidentally dropped into wells up until the 1950s.

professor lucio riccetti is sceptical of that explanation. He runs the Fondazione Marco Besso and organised the exhibition. He is an expert on medieval Orvieto-ware. “A lot of the jugs found at the bottom of the well are just too small to have been used to draw water from it”, Professor Riccetti told me. “ ey were also far too valuable to use for that purpose. Big jugs have been found at the bottom of the well. ey are plain and undecorated. ose wouldhave been used to collect water from the well. But the small decorated jugs wouldn’t.”

So how did so many small decorated jugs end up there? One

explanation is the plague. When the Black Death arrived in 1348, one medieval view of how it spread maintained that all wells had been poisoned, and anything that had been in contact with water from a well would pass on the plague. So jugs and pots that had been used to hold water from this well were thrown down it in an e ort to ensure they would not spread the disease. e well was sealed up, at least for a period. Once the infection was over, the well came back into use. at theory of how the disease was spread was of course wrong. e Black Death returned to Orvieto and the land surrounding it, as it did to the rest of Italy, many times over the next four hundred years.

A nother explanation is that some of the pottery at the bottom of the well got there because marauding armies threw it down the well. Or perhaps the inhabitants did, hoping to protect it from being pillaged. e valley next to Orvieto su ered a great deal from attacks by soldiers, so both are possible.

e detritus found at the bottom of the well also indicates that there was a kiln, and a pottery workshop, near it. Pieces that had been damaged during the ring process, or where the potter had bungled the design or the execution in some way, were thrown into the well. ese broken shards provide interesting insights into the

process of pottery manufacture.

Judging by the relatively small number of pieces that were thrown away because something went wrong during the course of production, the artisans achieved a high degree of accuracy when manufacturing pottery.

Not every piece of pottery at the bottom of the well turns out to be Orvieto-ware, in the literal sense of having been made in Orvieto or near it. ere are ceramics that were made in many other places: Siena, Florence, Deruta, Faenza, and other cities in north and central Italy. e Servites gave permission for a seasonal market or fair to be held in the area around the well.

It meant that objects were brought here for sale from all over Italy, indeed from all over Europe — and some of them ended up at the bottom of the well. e Servites eventually left, and the site was abandoned, the stones of the church and the monastic buildings taken away and used elsewhere. No one knew the well was there. ere was nothing on the surface to indicate it existed.

the excavations of the valley outside Orvieto started over 20 years ago. e archaeologists were looking for evidence of the sacred Etruscan site of Fanum Vultumnae. ey found an inscription in Etruscan identifying the area as “the place of heaven”, and the foundations of at least two Etruscan temples, one of them sacred to Voltumna, the chief Etruscan god. ey uncovered a “sacred way” leading to that temple. e combination

Above, examples of pieces found in the well

Left, listing of items for auction at Sotheby’s, 1914

was enough for the archaeologists to conclude that this was almost certainly Fanum Vultumnae. Both the Etruscan city of Orvieto, and the sacred site in the valley outside it, were eliminated by the Romans in 264BC. ey besieged Etruscan Orvieto for two years, and then went about their destructive work with a typically brutal thoroughness.

What the Romans didn’t destroy, they converted into baths, houses, public buildings, and temples dedicated to their own gods. By the time the Franciscans arrived in the early thirteenth century, the Roman buildings had long since disappeared. e monks found a small, ruined church which they rebuilt. ey may have been the ones who dug the well. ey certainly seem to have been the people who rst started chucking pottery down it.

Professor Lucio Riccetti states that “this discovery is by far the most signi cant for the study of medieval Italian pottery for decades, and quite possibly ever. Once the nds from the well have all been properly catalogued and reviewed, they will change the way we understand medieval pottery.” And in addition to being historically signi cant, the pottery from the well is also strikingly beautiful. Let’s hope that there will soon be another exhibition of these marvellous objects. ●

Alasdair Palmer is writing a drama about Freddie Scappaticci

How not to investigate the origins of Covid

att idley is co author of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19

Matt Ridley

AThe Critic Books

t 1.30am on 31 December 2019, an eye doctor in Wuhan Central Hospital, Dr Li Wenliang, a member of the Communist Party, received a peremptory summons to attend an immediate interrogation by the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission. He was made to wait until 4am before being ushered into a room.

ere he was questioned about his source for a WeChat message he had sent the previous day warning colleagues of a dangerous new infection on the loose in his hospital. He was forced to sign a humiliating confession of sharing “untruthful information”. He later died of the infection, which came to be called Covid.

e next day his source, Dr Ai Fen, head of emergency medicine at the Wuhan Central Hospital who had passed on the alarming news that an apparent outbreak of “SARS coronavirus” was happening in their hospital, was subjected to a erce rebuke, which revealingly showed why the authorities were so keen to shut these doctors up:

“You disregard the results of Wuhan’s urban construction since the [World] Military Games; you are a sinner a ecting Wuhan’s stability and unity; you are the culprit undermining the City of Wuhan’s forward development.” Civic boosterism trumped public safety.

One person who read the WeChat messages from Ai Fen was Dr “George” Fu Gao, the head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control in Beijing. Just a few weeks before he had by chance taken part in an international exercise in New York to simulate a hypothetical outbreak of infectious coronavirus spread by pigs in Brazil. He was already on record as saying: “SARS-like viruses can appear at any time. However, I am very con dent to say that ‘SARS-like events’ will not occur again, because the infectious disease surveillance network system of our country is well established, and such events will not happen again.” Ouch.

So it was with concern that Gao realised he was hearing about an outbreak of a SARS-like virus not through the surveillance network but through social media.

He raised the alarm with the health minister, who rushed a senior party o cial, Liang Wannian, head of the National Health Commission, to Wuhan on 31 December. ere in the small hours of 1 January, citing “Xi Jinping ought”, Liang took the decision to close down the Huanan Seafood Market, the suspected source of the outbreak, overruling the local clinicians who were already seeing patients with no connection to the market.

ow the CO 19 Outbreak in China iralled Out of Control ali L. ang (Oxford University Press, 6.99)

us began one of the most consequential mistakes in 21st-century history: the refusal of the authorities in Wuhan to admit they had an outbreak of a highly infectious virus, rather than merely an animal-caught zoonosis, and the persecution of doctors who raised the alarm. e main conclusion of Dali Yang’s intriguing book Wuhan: How the COVID-19 Outbreak in China Spiralled Out of Control is that the pandemic could probably have been prevented had the Wuhan authorities acted di erently in the last days of 2019 and the rst week of 2020.

As it was, human-to-human transmission was denied for a further 18 days, medical sta were left in the dark about the risks they were running, the city’s population was exposed to infection and the chance to nip the outbreak in the bud was missed.

This led to a second huge mistake. e Wuhan Municipal Health Commission issued guidelines on how to diagnose the new disease. In addition to clinical symptoms, under the “inclusion-exclusion criteria”, a patient had to have had a link or proximity to the Huanan Seafood Market to be treated as having Covid.

As a result, cases with no link to the market were ignored. “ ey only transferred those [patients] with an exposure history to the Seafood Market, including those we had almost cured,” complained one doctor at the hospital designated for receiving Covid patients. “But they didn’t want any [patient] without a history of contact with [the] Seafood Market.”

After the market was closed the number of patients seemed to stabilise and fall, reassuring the authorities. But inside the hospitals of Wuhan, more and more people were presenting with symptoms and more and more doctors and nurses were falling ill, only for their cases to be deleted from the data by provincial bureaucrats in thrall to the seafood-market dogma. is problem of “ascertainment bias” was also to fool western scientists for years as they continued to argue that because early cases were associated with, or lived near, the market, the virus must have started there. is was and is a circular argument.

uhan

Surely the strong possibility of a laboratory accident deserves a paragraph, if not a chapter, in a book about what went wrong in Wuhan?

is atch riders by the closed eafood arket in uhan, ugust

0 0. ut was it to blame elow, an im rom tu memorial to r Li enliang outside his hos ital

It was George Gao’s low-key announcement in May 2020 that the outbreak had probably not started in the market after all, where no infected animals had been found, that rst alerted me to look further into a disturbing alternative possibility: that this might be a case of a laboratory accident.

So I assumed Professor Yang’s book, published in March 2024, would cover the question of how the virus rst infected the human race, and how the regime dealt with investigating that question. I was to be disappointed. e only sentence in the entire book that deals with this matter reads as follows:

Subsequently, the question of how the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 arrived at the Huanan market in Wuhan — whether it was carried by one or more animals as an intermediate host or by a human who might have become infected with the virus elsewhere — has become one of the most hotly debated issues ever in science and public health.

Not hotly debated enough to be covered in this book, however.

is omission rang alarm bells with me. Surely the strong possibility of a laboratory accident — recognised by the World Health Organisation and Western

governments — deserves a paragraph, if not a chapter, in a book about what went wrong in Wuhan? True, Mr Yang’s main concern is with how bureaucracies function, but he attempts to locate the blame for the mistakes made in Wuhan — and the possible lab leak would be a big one of those.

A clue to the omission soon emerges. Professor Yang homes in on “fragmented authoritarianism”, a term to describe how, in highly dirigiste regimes, local functionaries act to defend their own reputations rather than do the right thing. is, he seems to imply, mostly excuses Xi Jinping from criticism.

The Chinese president is praised for his prompt and decisive leadership in the book. Xi, poor chap, is quoted as lamenting the inadequacy of his minions: “I write my instructions to guard the last line of defense; if I don’t give instructions, will [these o cials] not do any work at all?!”

I suddenly saw the robust criticism of provincial ofcials in this book in a di erent light. Super cially, it is indeed robust:

In short, an open and transparent environment, as seen in Hong Kong and Taiwan, two societies that also had strong memories of SARS, could have mitigated, or corrected most missteps and de ciencies in outbreak response by avoiding information-related crackdowns, encouraging information-sharing and the consideration of alternatives in decision-making, trusting the public with information, and enhancing strategic leadership in such situations.

But the author, Dali Yang, is a professor at the University of Chicago and between 2010 and 2016, was the founding faculty director of the University of Chicago Center in Beijing. He is also a member of the National Committee on US-China Relations, and a member of the China committee of the Chicago Sister Cities International program. His ready access to Chinese sources must require at the very least some caution about saying things that go against Xi Jinping ought. Hence, perhaps, the decision not even to discuss a laboratory leak, the ultimate no-no in Beijing.

And hence the focus on blaming the local government, local health commission, and local CDC, but not the equally huge mistakes made by the central government. As “fragmented authoritarianism” indicates, what people do locally in China is based on a reward system decided in Beijing. So the emphasis on political obedience and social stability at the expense of public safety is the fault of the centre, not the province. One cannot help feeling that the author of this book just happens to con ne himself to criticisms that would be deemed acceptable in Beijing. ●

Man of letters: reading between the lines

aisy unn s new book

The Missing Thread: A New History of the Ancient World Through the Women Who Shaped It will be ublished in ay

Daisy Dunn

Lord byron and his bride had barely left the church when their marriage began to disintegrate. e poet had wooed Anne Isabella (“Annabella”) Milbanke, a niece of Viscountess Melbourne, over a number of years, charmed by her intelligence, “high blood” and moderate prettiness (she was not, he wrote, “so glaringly beautiful as to attract many rivals”).

e young heiress, enchanted by her suitor’s energetic conversation, had agreed to marry Byron after rejecting his initial proposal. e new Lady Byron soon realised how justi ed her original misgivings had been.

were said to have enjoyed a strong sexual chemistry — but she was catastrophically wrong. Waking that night and pacing the hall with his pistol, Lord Byron declared that he was in hell, a phrase Lady Byron might more legitimately have employed of her own situation.

e arrival a short time later of a letter from Augusta Leigh, Byron’s half-sister, introduced Lady Byron to what Stau er labels, in one of the most enjoyable sections of his biography, “the Augusta problem”.

Byron had been having an incestuous relationship with Augusta and, for reasons a modern reader can only guess at, was determined to impose her upon his wife. Reading Augusta’s missive aloud, Lord Byron told his wife that no one in the world loved him as she did, and “no one understood how to make him happy but her”.

The Critic Books

In the words of the poet’s newest biographer, Andrew Stau er, a professor of English at the University of Virginia and president of the Byron Society of America, Byron “dropped his mask of placid bridegroom — or, perhaps, put on his mask of cruelty — and transformed into a villain before her eyes”. Milbanke noticed the di erence in him immediately: she was foolish to have married him, Lord Byron gloated, a man infected with the family madness.

Byron’s father, known as “Mad Jack”, had married for money, squandered £30,000, and absconded to France to hide from his creditors. e young Byron, who would repeat this pattern of behaviour, grew up with his struggling and unpredictable mother, who allegedly bullied him on account of his being born with a deformed foot. e boy escaped his “maternal persecutor” eventually, securing a place at Harrow after inheriting his title (and, later, Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire) from a great-uncle. From there he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, completed three terms, and secured a degree by virtue of his peerage alone.

Back in London, Byron berated his wife for failing to show Augusta su cient a ection, and used “chaotic manipulations” to force the women together. Lady Byron could almost look past her husband’s drinking and overspending but the continued presence of another woman in the relationship reduced her to despair. After giving birth to their daughter Ada at the end of the year (the violently raving poet was locked out of the birthing room), Lady Byron returned to her parents.

yron Life in Ten Letters ndrew tauffer (Cambridge University Press, 5)

stauffer works consciously in the tradition of omas Moore, Byron’s nineteenth-century biographer, opening each of his ten chapters with a transcript of one of Byron’s 3,000-odd surviving letters. e chapter on Byron’s marriage is foregrounded by what Stau er describes, not inaccurately, as “the letter of a ba ed abuser”. In it, Lord Byron asks his wife, “Were you then never happy with me?” Lady Byron had already told him, devastatingly, “Remember that you believed yourself most miserable when I was yours.”

Prior to their marriage, Annabella had described Lord Byron as “a very bad, very good man”. Her sentiments echoed not only Lady Caroline Lamb’s summary of her paramour as “mad, bad and dangerous to know”, but also the ndings of a German phrenologist, who studied Lord Byron’s “very antithetical” cranium in which, he said, “good and evil are at perpetual war”.

as his honeymoon carriage approached Halnaby Hall, a residence of Annabella’s family, Lord Byron fell into a dark mood and made himself scarce. Lady Byron began their holiday without him. She might have hoped that things would improve after her husband returned to consummate their marriage — they

Reading just even the letters reproduced in this biography, Byron’s torturously con icted, antithetical nature is obvious. Stau er may believe, as Mary Shelley did, that Byron’s letters “mirror himself as he was”, but when that self is so changeable, one naturally questions how reliable a lens they provide onto his psyche. Interestingly, Stau er quotes Lady Blessington, one of Byron’s many correspondents, who found him so chame-

Pleasingly, Stau er is neither an apologist for Lord Byron nor a constant chastiser, though just occasionally one feels that he lets his subject o too lightly

leonic a character as to conclude that, “if ten individuals undertook the task of describing Byron, no two, of the ten, would agree in their verdict respecting him ...”

Byron is equally erratic on the page. He steps into a theatrical persona in one letter, e ectively livestreaming — with “time-stamped updates” — his pursuit of a married woman across a billiards table. In other letters, he elides himself with his own characters, particularly Childe Harold, or villains from other works. When he writes to entertain, he overstates his view and magni es his prejudices, to mixed results. But just sometimes, beneath the layer of self-consciousness, we catch a glimpse of him as we imagine he truly was.

as someone who had a complicated relationship with food, it is not surprising to nd him balking at the considerable appetites of his future lover, the singer Teresa Guiccioli. “I only wish she did not swallow so much supper,” he complained; “a woman should never be seen eating or drinking, unless it be lobster sallad [sic] & Champagne, the only truly feminine & becoming viands.” Women in warm climates, he said, are inclined to “grow relaxed and doughy and umpity in a short time

after breeding”. Byron: never one of history’s feminists. Pleasingly, Stau er is neither an apologist for Byron nor a constant chastiser, though just occasionally one feels that he lets his subject o too lightly. For example, Byron bemoaned “altering his life to accommodate” women’s wishes in what Stau er calls “a breathtaking self-deception” masking a partial truth. “Byron gave sel shly to women all his life,” Stau er writes, “often to his own detriment, driven by impulses that sometimes partook of generosity.” One somehow doubts that Lady Byron would have seen it that way.

Ten letters can only reveal so much about a man as deceptive as Byron, who seems never to have had a xed idea of who he was. Stau er’s selection, which spans Byron’s teenage years to his nal weeks in Messolonghi, nevertheless does much to illuminate the many facets the poet constructed for himself.

It was against Byron’s wishes that Lady Byron, Augusta Leigh and his friends burned his memoirs after he died. Byron had hoped to “astonish the latter days of the nineteenth century” with them. Stau er has done a valiant job of making his letters speak for him, lling in the most bewildering, disturbing blanks. ●

sketch by Lady Caroline Lamb of Lord and Lady yron at the time of their brief marriage

agus

The rt of agic from austus to gri a nthony Grafton ( llen Lane, £30)

Alexander Lee Could it be magic?

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-94) had been dead for almost a month when he last spoke to Baptista Mantuanus — and, for a corpse, he was remarkably chatty. Appearing to Mantuanus in a dream, he answered all manner of questions about “hidden things”. He was especially talkative about whether amulets could protect babies from evil. en, in an instant, he disappeared — leaving Mantuanus rubbing his eyes in disbelief.

Whether this really happened is anyone’s guess. Since Mantuanus’s only account appears in a letter to Pico’s nephew, a well-known sceptic, it is quite possible that it may have been tongue-in-cheek. But even if it was, it still testi ed to Pico’s extraordinary reputation as a magician.

lexander Lee is is author of Machiavelli: His Life and Times (Picador)

The Critic Books

of the magus as a Renaissance Sherlock Holmes. Underlying the new magic was the idea of unity. As the Florentine priest Marsilio Ficino noted, the universe was a glorious whole. Everything was bound up with everything else. As such, if you knew about one aspect of the cosmos, you could tell a lot about the rest. e stars and planets not only concealed the truth about men’s lives, but actively shaped the course of human history.

So too, stones, plants, and animals all had “occult powers” that, if understood correctly, could be used to “manipulate the … world … in dramatic … ways”. And the same principle fed an abiding fascination with “miraculous” feats of engineering, mathematics, even cryptography.

By the late fteenth century, magi — like magic itself — had already been around for thousands of years. But until recently, their standing had never been high. Although some medieval theologians feigned a certain interest, their “magic” had been condemned by the Church and dismissed as superstitious quackery.

Pico was di erent, though. A Renaissance man par excellence, he belonged to a new breed of magi. Scattered throughout Italy and the Holy Roman Empire, they owed their “power” to a completely di erent conception of magic. Unlike medieval sorcerers and witches, who “o er[ed] themselves to demons”, they wrought wonders through an understanding of the world and themselves. ough they may not have been scientists per se, Anthony Grafton convincingly shows that they nevertheless belonged “in a dark corner of the same rich tapestry” — and unwittingly helped pave the way for the modern philosophy of science.

No two magi were the same, of course. Each had his own peculiarities. But they shared a common sense of what a “good” magus could do — and what he could not. No matter what, magic could never give him power over nature. But it could give him the knowledge needed to harness its properties. is allowed him to perform actions that, to the uninitiated, might seem miraculous, but which, to the learned, were perfectly straightforward. It was for this reason that Pico described magic as the “completion” of natural philosophy. But you could just as easily think

Like Prospero, magi were absurdly bookish. ey loved to boast about their collections of Latin and Greek classics, and also steeped themselves in Arabic and Hebrew works. Above all, they loved the esoteric. Like Pico, the Venetian friar Francesco Zorzi and the papal confessor Petrus Galatinus both studied Kabbalah intensively.

Magi were also strangely keen to stress their Christian piety. Pico claimed that, because magic gave them a greater knowledge of creation, it elevated their souls and stirred them “to worship their creator with a hotter passion”. It was, in e ect, a spiritual exercise — the stu , not just of dreams, as Mantuanus thought, but of heaven itself.

This is not to say that magi were always as high-minded as they made out — or as di erent from the sorcerers and witches they claimed to despise. ey could seldom resist making a spectacle. In 1546, the young John Dee caused a mechanical beetle to y through the air in the middle of a play — and revelled in the amazement it produced.

Nor did they shy away from magic’s shadier reputation. Sometimes, they actively played on it. Johannes Trithemius’s Steganographia — a pioneering work on cryptography — named di erent coding techniques after demons to cloak them in an aura of supernatural mystery. Now and then, magi even resorted to forgery.

Grafton tells his story with brio. Like any good Renaissance magician, he combines deep scholarship with great enthusiasm and humour. Occasionally, he can get a little too bogged down in the details; he can also be quite repetitive at times. But these are minor quibbles and do nothing to detract from what is a formidable, even magical, achievement. As Heinrich Duden wrote of Heinrich Agrippa’s De occulta philosophia, “Read with care and precision, dear reader, and you will marvel and … not be sorry.” ●

EXHIBITIONS

FOR DISCERNING TRAVELLERS

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

VIENNA Holbein. Burgkmair. Dürer.

Renaissance in the North

At the Kunsthistorisches from 19 March until 30 June

The Kunsthistorisches Museum’s spring exhibition is devoted to three outstanding pioneers of the Renaissance north of the Alps: Hans Holbein the Elder, Hans Burgkmair, and Albrecht Dürer.

It o ers a golden opportunity to experience fascinating works by these artists and to explore how Augsburg became the birthplace of the Northern Renaissance.

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

Includes a Vienna Masterticket

PARIS

Paris 1874:

Inventing Impressionism

EUROSTARTRAVELBY

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

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

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

Includes a 48hr Paris Museum Pass

VENICE

Willem de Kooning and Italy

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

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

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

Includes private water taxi transfers

BERLIN

Caspar David Friedrich: In nite Landscapes

At the Alte Nationalgalerie from 19 April - 4 August

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

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

Includes a 72hr Berlin Museum Pass

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

Speak to an expert: 020 7593 2283

www.kirkerholidays.com

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

Ballet Rehearsal on StageDegas, 1874

Moonrise Over the Sea - Friedrich, 1822

Portrait of a Young Man - Burgkmair, 1506

achiavelli s ffectual Truth

Creating the odern orld

arvey C. ans eld

(Cambridge University Press, 5.99)

Sean McGlynn Encouraging evil for the common good

While there are few scholars who would laud that master of the dark arts Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) as a saintly gure, in his new book Harvard political philosopher Harvey Mans eld goes all out to portray the Renaissance writer as a diabolical character well deserving of his sometime sobriquet “Old Nick”.

tige assured to future princes who followed his advice would thus transfer to him. Mans eld cheerfully and repeatedly admits the speculative nature of his musings, but one must grant that Machiavelli has achieved his aim to a considerable degree, with the publishing industry churning out book after book on him.

stripped to its essence, the volume is remarkably based on just two words: “e ectual truth”. is is Machiavelli’s “e ectual truth of the thing rather than the imagination of it” from e Prince. Mans eld notes how the phrase occurs only once in Machiavelli’s writing and nowhere else in the Renaissance; indeed, he treats it as Old Nick’s own invention.

ean cGlynn is author of By Sword and Fire: Cruelty and Atrocity in Medieval Warfare

The Critic Books

Yet Mans eld does not condemn him; instead, and rather refreshingly, he exhilarates in recognising Machiavelli’s radical genius and in establishing him as the father not only of modern philosophy, but also of the modern world. It is quite a claim, but such is Mans eld’s erudition and inspired enthusiasm that he takes the reader a long way with him. e result is a bold and often brilliant exercise in political philosophy and e ervescent intellectual speculation.

“Machiavellian” is a universally acknowledged adjective to describe unscrupulous cunning in politics. Machiavelli would be well pleased with this: as Mans eld argues with force, if not always quite convincingly, the diplomat and government ocial wrote more for posterity than for advancement in his own lifetime. Here Mans eld focuses on Machiavelli’s masterworks: the Discourses on Livy (written 151519) and his notorious masterpiece, The Prince (written by 1513), neither of which was published in his lifetime. Mans eld rightly hails e Prince as “the most famous writing ever composed on politics” and sets out to show why its author is deserving of universal recognition.

e book encompasses a range of fascinating discussions emanating from this phrase, three crucial ones being Machiavelli’s successors, necessity, and morality. Machiavelli is well known for arguing that the ends justify the means (this is contested by scholars, but it is the e ectual truth of the matter). Necessity is central here, as when Romulus found it essential to kill his brother Remus, excused as “the kind of crime necessary at the beginnings of great accomplishments”.

Niccol achiavelli saw fraud as a cornerstone of successful governance

Rulers should cloak their actions under the guise of necessity; this may be fraudulent, but fraud is a cornerstone of successful governance and is one of the many “evils” to be encouraged for the common good. It is also a requisite of glorious achievement and the ascendancy of the individual; as such, Mans eld says, it is in conict with the “fearful, unambitious self of later liberalism”, with its “namby-pamby self-preservation”.

machiavelli himself certainly thought so. He attempted, not very successfully, to hide his immodesty (deception being central to his political ideas): Mans eld notes how the Discourses’ rst and last words are intentionally “I” and “greatest”. It is hard to dispel the notion that Machiavelli fawned to the new Medici regime in early sixteenth-century Florence — e Prince is dedicated to Lorenzo de’ Medici — seeking a career boost.

But Mans eld depicts a Machiavelli much more ambitious than that, someone whose purpose was to persuade Florence’s rulers to publish these two works and thus allow Machiavelli’s fame and in uence — his fortuna — to in uence the ages to come. e glory and pres-

Mansfield relishes Machiavelli’s revolutionary bad-boy abandonment of misplaced morality and Christian teachings mere encumbrances for the atheistic Machiavelli, for whom sin is a practical failing, not a moral one. “Knowing the world means learning how not to be good,” is Mans eld’s interpretation of Machiavelli’s works; moral condemnation only applies to those who do not succeed in obtaining their goals.

He believes Machiavelli was intentionally paving the way for his successors, who often mitigated or disguised Machiavelli’s extremism. Among these, it is the early-eighteenth-century Baron de Montesquieu who receives the most attention (it must be said, at unnecessary, distracting length). In his The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu accepts Machiavelli as the father of modern philosophy and takes on board his e ectual truth. Machiavelli’s grand ambition, his legacy, had been secured. us, Mans eld claims, we have — as Machiavelli always intended — the philosopher as a guiding prince post mortem. ●

ethroned The ownfall of ndia s Princely tates

John ubr ycki

( urst, 5)

Richard Hopton Marshalling India’s maharajas

The coming of India’s independence in 1947 was an upheaval of immense historical signi cance. It ended more than two centuries of British rule and created the world’s largest democracy. at it is still so controversial is largely the result of the human catastrophe which accompanied the partition of British India; what the historian John Keay has called the “vivisection of a subcontinent”.

Perhaps ten million people ed for their lives in both directions, east and west, the greatest exodus in human history. In the process, at least a million people died in a tsunami of sectarian violence, though the true number will never be known.

Although the creation of two new nation states, India and Pakistan, usually dominates any discussion of Indian independence, there were other important elements at work. One of these was the question of how to deal with British India’s princely states. If the severing of Partition created two new nations, the issue of the princely states concerned the geographic and political integrity of these new nations.

On modern maps, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are clearly de ned (with the exception of Kashmir) as complete, territorially and politically cohesive entities without exceptions or derogations. But in 1947, this was by no means a foregone conclusion. How this problem was overcome is the subject of John Zubrzycki’s latest book, a story he tells compellingly, in uent, un ashy prose.

Zubrzycki writes, “Regardless of the size of their states, India’s princes were the nal source of all authority, their actions never questioned by judiciaries or elected legislative bodies.”

Taken together, the states formed a random patchwork within what would become India and Pakistan. India’s founding fathers feared that unless the states could be persuaded to accede to the new nation, it would become Balkanised, its geographic integrity compromised.

Moreover, although some states had made progress towards democracy and economic development, the vast majority — especially the smaller ones — were regarded by the Indian nationalists of Congress as sinks of feudal autocracy, anachronisms in a modern, forward-looking democracy. Dethroned tells the story of how the states were corralled, most of them in a period of only a few weeks in the summer of 1947, into the new nations of India and Pakistan.

by the end of the Second World War, there were 562 princely states in British India (though estimates of their number vary), whose rulers controlled two fths of India’s land mass and one third of her population. e states varied enormously in size and wealth: Hyderabad extended to more than 82,600 square miles with 16 million inhabitants and had an “income and expenditure [which] rivalled that of Belgium and in 1947 was larger than that of 20 members of the UN”.

At the other end of the scale, there were more than 300 micro-states, with tiny populations and almost non-existent incomes. Bilbari, with an area of 1.6 square miles, had a population of 27. Nonetheless, as

in charge of relations between independent India and the princely states was Vallabhbhai Patel, head of the recently-formed States Department of the interim Indian government. Patel was a formidable politician, the most powerful gure in the Congress party after Nehru. One Western journalist writing shortly after Independence described Patel’s treatment of the princes as being like “a Hindu Cromwell courteously decapitating hundreds of little King Charleses”. Patel’s right-hand man was V.P. Menon, a senior civil servant “with a penchant for Savile Row suits, Cuban cigars and slate-blue Cadillacs”. e responsibility of persuading the princes to accede to independent India was given to the Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten. He was the ideal man for the job. As Menon said, “Apart from his position, his grace and his gifts, his relationship to the Royal Family was bound to in uence the rulers.” He also knew many of the princes personally, counting the Maharajas of Bikaner and Jaipur and the Nawab of Bhopal among his close friends.

It was decided that the princes should be asked to sign an Instrument of Accession ceding to the new government of India their powers over defence, external a airs and communications the railways, roads, and telephone lines which criss-crossed India. Everything else would remain within the princes’ jurisdiction. e problem for Patel, Menon, and Mountbatten lay in the legal fact that Paramountcy, the power which governed the relations between the British Raj and the princely states, would lapse at Independence, rather

The ahara a of Travancore

By the end of the Second World War there were 562 princely states in British India. The princes were final sources of authority, never questioned by judiciaries or elected bodies

ichard

o ton is an author, historian and ournalist

The Critic Books

than be transferred to the new republic. is meant, at least in theory, that the princely states would become independent entities, apart from the matters speci ed in the Instrument of Accession, at Independence.

For the vast majority of states this was simply not practical: they were too small and too poor to function independently. But for the rulers of some of the larger, more prosperous states, it was a beguiling prospect.

travancore, a large stateof six million inhabitants and rich resources on India’s south-west coast, was the rst to y the independence kite. Other states, some of them well within the borders of the new India, also irted with independence or with acceding to Pakistan, including Bhopal, Jodhpur, Dholpur, Bilaspur, Gwalior, and Rampur, but none followed it through.

By 15 August 1947, the vast majority of states had acceded to either India or Pakistan; only Junagadh, Hyderabad, and Kashmir stood apart. Junagadh was occupied by a battalion of Indian troops on 9 November; Hyderabad held out for longer but in September 1948 was overwhelmed by the Indian army in the euphemistically-styled “Police Action”.

Estimates of the number of people, mostly Muslims, killed during the invasion vary from 30,000 up to 200,000. Whatever the truth, as Zubrzycki writes, “ e killing of Muslims in Hyderabad remains the single largest massacre in the history of independent India.” Kashmir’s trauma, by contrast, continues to this day.

From here, Zubrzycki continues the story of the princes and their states through the process of integration into independent India. As a douceur for giving up their hereditary powers and wealth, the princes were granted a government pension — a privy purse — and allowed to retain certain privileges. ese were abolished by Indira Gandhi in 1971 in controversial circumstances. e princes were henceforth ordinary private citizens.

Dethroned is a full, even-handed account of the political and constitutional saga of the princely states. Zubrzycki does not allow nostalgia for a gilded past to creep in: “As the curtain began to come down on the Indian empire … the princes were their own worst enemies.” Likewise, he recognises that the tactics, strongarm and otherwise, used against the states by Patel and Menon were justi ed by their overarching object of creating a cohesive, modern, and democratic India. “ eir appeal to the rulers and to their subjects alike,” he writes, “was to work in the cause of national unity and stability. In the vast majority of cases, it worked.” ●

Daniel Johnson Grandmasters: a meeting of great minds

Chess is, among other things, a wargame. Indeed, its enduring popularity is only explicable by the fact that the wooden board and men are a simulacrum of the clash of esh and blood. It is human to delight in re-enacting in symbolic form what we most dread in reality. And so monarchs and marshals alike have always been partial to chess.

From the Caliph Haroun al-Rashid, at whose court in Baghdad the rst grandmasters of chess ourished in the ninth century, to Tamburlaine the Great, who favoured an expanded “Great Chess” on a larger board to re ect his conquests, and Tsar Ivan the Terrible, who died while playing chess.

But the prime example of a warrior statesman who honed his intellectual and martial skills at the chessboard was Napoleon Bonaparte. As a young man he frequented the Café de la Régence, the celebrated haunt of the philosophes and Encyclopédistes on the Rue Saint-Honoré. ere he describes the “rare pleasure” of watching the grandmasters of the day, Légal and Philidor, observed by “good-for-nothings” with “nothing better to do”.

e games ascribed to the young Bonaparte are almost certainly later concoctions. But as Emperor, Napoleon visited the Palace of Schönbrunn in Vienna in 1809, where he was invited to play against the Turk, the celebrated chess automaton, by its owner, Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, inventor of the metronome.

e automaton was not an early form of AI, but an ingenious contraption that concealed a human player inside. Four decades before, the Turk had been created

ona arte, laying chess on t elena, 1 16

Na oleon and Goethe The Touchstone of Genius aymond Keene ( 4.99)

for the Empress Maria eresa by Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen. One version of this encounter has Napoleon deliberately making illegal moves to test the Turk, which eventually loses patience and knocks over the pieces. He also supposedly lost a game of just 19 moves against the machine. Perhaps its de ance persuaded the Emperor, then at his zenith, that it must indeed be a mechanical device; no human would have dared to risk humiliating the most powerful man on earth.

T his story, along with others, is told by Raymond Keene in his remarkable new book Napoleon and Goethe: The Touchstone of Genius. e author is himself a phenomenon: a chess grandmaster and promoter of mind sports, this is his 207th book.

It runs to fewer than 200 pages and inevitably ignores much well-trodden extraneous biographical material. But where Keene’s book breaks new ground is in the inclusion of a series of chess games to illustrate the evolution of military history. Some of these are by Grandmaster Keene himself, including one played while he was still a schoolboy at Dulwich College.

Even more originally, he includes his own translation of Faust, Goethe’s most famous play. is “performing version” is abridged to a fraction of its original length, but it includes both Parts I and II, on which Goethe worked for most of his long life.

Keene sees the drama as a game of cosmic chess between the eponymous protagonist and his nemesis, Mephistopheles. I have some sympathy with this idea, yet chess is not the obvious metaphor for the Faustian contract. e closest it comes to that is in the sacri ce of material (e.g. a Queen) as part of a “combination” of moves leading to checkmate or a decisive advantage.

Goethe

had grasped that Napoleon was acting as midwife in the birth of the German nation

game of chess with the Knight for his life and those of his entourage, Faust can use his ingenuity to buy time, but his ultimate fate is inescapable.

Goethe had a high regard for chess. In his breakthrough drama, Götz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand, it is described as der Probierstein des Gehirns, “the touchstone of the intellect”. Keene regards this phrase as the highest approbation ever accorded to chess. Signi cantly, the epithet is given to a noblewoman, Adelheid von Walldorf, as she defeats a male opponent who cannot match her intense concentration.

Adelheid is a brilliant but transgressive, even daemonic gure, who is nally condemned to death for adultery and murder. In the patriarchal world of late-medieval Germany, a woman cannot legitimately triumph over men — except at the chessboard.

K eene is the first to devote a book to Napoleon and Goethe. Why, though, bring them together? e two did actually meet in 1808. At their rst encounter in Erfurt, Goethe recalled that they discussed his novel e Sorrows of Young Werther in detail, Napoleon having evidently studied it carefully (he invariably took a copy with him on campaign).

But the main focus of the conversation was on tragedy, and “how far French theatre had strayed from nature and truth”, as the Emperor thought. He disapproved of “fatalistic plays”, adding: “Destiny is politics.”

Napoleon treated Goethe respectfully, as an equal. But the national destiny that mattered to him was that of France, whose role was to dominate Europe and especially the mainly German-speaking lands of the Holy Roman Empire. At this point in its history, the only thing that united Germany was its culture.

Days later, emperor and author met again in Weimar, the tiny grand duchy where Goethe was e ectively prime minister. Together with Wieland, the Nestor of German letters, Goethe was decorated with the Grand Cross of the Légion d’Honneur, the senior class of the order established by Napoleon six years previously.

Goethe was a patriot. But he had grasped that Napoleon was acting as a midwife in the birth of the German nation. As the intellectual leader of the Germans, he disapproved of French domination of his homeland, but he saw Napoleon as an enlightened despot who was dismantling the feudal system and preparing the way for a more prosperous future.

aniel Johnson is the founding editor of TheArticle

Like Faust, however, a game of chess ends when “the King is dead” (the literal meaning of “checkmate”, from the Persian shah mat). Faust ages in the course of the play and it ends with his death. As in The Seventh Seal, the Ingmar Bergman lm in which Death plays a

In Faust Part II, nished just before his death in 1832, Goethe o ers a vision of industry and commerce to be realised by posterity. Modern Germany is in part a legacy of Napoleon the reformer and lawgiver, no less than of Goethe the poet and thinker. ●

The Children of thena Greek riters and Thinkers in the ge of ome, 150 C 400 Charles reeman ( ollo, 30)

Hellenism in Rome

Gavin McCormick

‘‘T

o a wise man,” said the firstcentury wonderworker Apollonius of Tyana, “everywhere is Greece.” at is to say, Greece is not a mere place, but a special state of mind. For Apollonius, on his extensive travels around the Greco-Roman world, the purported truth of this maxim is seldom open to doubt.

Charles Freeman’s latest book, Children of Athena, is a highly readable tour through the lives and accomplishments of some of the great exponents of Greek culture under Rome. He introduces readers to a bracingly varied and energetic cast of characters — the geographers, doctors, polymaths, botanists, satirists, and orators are just part of the repertoire. In an early chapter, we meet the brilliant Greek historian Polybius, who wrote in the tradition of Herodotus and ucydides, while training his sights on the rise of Rome in his own time.

Gavin cCormick teaches Classics in London and is a co editor of Antigone Journal

The Critic Books

e author of Apollonius’s colourful biography, Philostratus, depicts his hero as not just a philosopher but also an impossibly accomplished champion of culture — a confounder of logic and expectations who could vanish in plain sight, now fascinating Roman emperors and foreign sages, now inspiring whole towns into acts of celebration and renewal. e guiding ide ology that drove this hero is a heady mix of philosophy, religion, magic and political insouciance — or, to give it another name, Hellenism.

At the other end of the book’s temporal range, we encounter the mesmerising Neoplatonist philosopher and polymath, Hypatia, who commanded the a ection of the most brilliant Christian students of fthcentury Alexandria, but died at the hands of a rioting Christian mob.

In the context of the third-century world, where Christianity was an increasingly noteworthy presence in the towns and cities of the Roman empire, pagans such as Philostratus were keen to highlight what their own tradition had to o er.

In fact, he seems almost to present his hero as a pagan rival to Jesus. And, in turn, Apollonius — in his successful renewal of the shrines and local cults of Hellas — seems to hint at what Philostratus would like to see happen in his own contemporary context.

Despite living under Rome, Apollonius (and Philostratus) wants to celebrate an emphatically Greek form of culture. e celebration of Greek culture in the Roman world was, of course, nothing new, and it was something the Romans themselves had long enjoyed.

Alongside their admiration for Greek literature, philosophy, art and architecture, there was the successful movement known as the ‘Second Sophistic’ — whose parade of Greek-speaking intellectuals left a heavy imprint on the public life of the High Roman Empire. But it is striking nonetheless that the virtues of Hellas — not Rome itself — were what many educated citizens of the empire turned to when they thought of cultural renewal. Indeed his was precisely the route taken later in the fourth century by the last pagan emperor of Rome, himself a champion of all things Greek, Julian the so-called Apostate.

Freeman manages to strike the balance for such a book: he supplies interesting biographical details while nding space to highlight memorable elements in their surviving writing. A rich vein of learning ripples through his text: Plutarch is introduced as “perhaps the most appealing gure” covered in the book. We gain a sense of how he was a “precursor of James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis”, of how he mattered to Montaigne, Emerson and Nietszche, and of how he inspired Mary Renault.

ome noteworthy figures feature only brie y. Both Philostratus and Apollonius attract barely a passing mention; the fabulously enigmatic Favorinus of Arles, sophist and eunuch, receives no real treatment. Freeman is certainly cursory, then, about some gures about whom more might have been said.

At some points in his narrative, there is a rather simplistic treatment of the complex topic of Greek identity, or “Greekness”. Certainly all gures discussed in the book would have seen themselves as bearers of Greek culture, insofar as they all spoke and wrote in Greek, and relied on a shared set of reference points from the earlier Classical period.

But equally, Greek identity throughout these centuries was a site of continual negotiation and debate: the degree to which “Greekness” was experienced in any simple, certain or unitary sense by those who lived under Rome is an area of ongoing scholarly discussion which is left unbroached here.

e clear merits of the book nonetheless stand for themselves: Children of Athens is an absorbing romp through Greek (and Roman) history, full of learning and interest, which is just what the book’s manifold subjects deserve. ●

Intellectual property

Tim Abrahams

Christopher nolan’s biopic of Oppenheimer o ered up a great shibboleth of online leftism. In the lm, the titular character summarises the philosophy of Marx as “Ownership is theft and so on”. He’s corrected by his squeeze-to-be Jean Tatlock, who says “Property is theft”.

But as ever-online academics were quick to point out, this slogan was actually coined by Pierre Joseph Proudhon. Duh. But not a minor slip, it turns out. Marx, legendarily dismissive of his contemporaries, saved particular opprobrium for Proudhon, with whom he disagreed at a fundamental philosophical level.

In his history of the philosophy of property, Rowan Moore gives prominence to the Levellers, a religious group who advocated shared use of the land in early communist communities. Marx, in a similar tone to his rejection of Proudhon, dubbed their values “crude communism”, which he said emerged from envy and “levelling-down”. Marx preferred the approach of Enlightenment philosophers such as David Hume — for whom Moore has less time.

Hume imagined a world of plenty where “jealousy of interest, which justice supposes, could no longer have place,” Adam Smith, in turn, acknowledged that man’s harnessing of nature could lead to a world of plenty. Society, however, creates arti cial scarcity, leading to social hierarchies that prompt man to better his position in society. Smith cynically believed that scarcity had a social purpose, even if he believed it to be ultimately a mirage.

vate property — at rst as universal private property”. is, of course, is not an empty historical argument. Moore has used his role within the strangely hesitant architectural profession to launch a much-needed debate about how we might massively expand our housing stock. On the cusp of an election, we are also at a point when “jealousy of interest” is at its height, and when Centre for Cities estimates that we have a shortfall of around 4.3 million homes, compared with other European countries.

Is our attachment to property an impediment to housing people? Yes, argues Moore: one of the great contributors of the 2008 nancial crisis was the abundance of capital that had to seek out stupid investments. He evocatively charts the elephantiastic way that mega-basements, gated communities and emirs buying gargantuan mansions in London have changed Britain. More than ever, property has entrenched “divisions between those that have it and those that do not”.

Throughout this otherwise fascinating book, I found myself on the opposite side to the writer on the fault line between abundance and scarcity, missing the counsel not just of Marx but also of mid-twentieth-century capitalist thinkers such as Buckminster Fuller. Would atcher’s Right to Buy scheme have been so utterly calamitous if pro ts from sales had gone into building replacements?

And yet, as any millennial who cannot rely on their parents to help them with a deposit will tell you, the problem with property is not abundance, it is scarcity. In short, our planning system rst gives power to those who wish to stop development, and secondly to those wealthy organisations, such as volume housebuilders, who can weather these protests and provide a limited number of homes whilst controlling supply and therefore price. Any account of how property has become an asset class that doesn’t address this impasse can only ever be partial.

Moore makes abundantly clear that we need new towns and more social housing, but that these are both exceptions to normal, restricted conditions. Although new towns succeed when capturing the uptick in land values, they are, as Moore points out, created by acts of parliament. Mass social housing in the UK was delivered when local authorities, ideologically aligned to central government, accepted funds to confer planning permission on themselves. Plenty is the exception rather than the rule.

Tim brahams is a contributing editor at Architectural Record

e alternative to this is not some free-for-all anarchy, but a system which demands that councils o er sites for building, and that smaller developers are allowed to build without facing business-threatening delays due to protest campaigns. e real theft of property is not that it parcels out a prelapsarian commons; it is the misery caused by our planning culture which pretends it is scarce. Until we become permissive rather than restrictive, as is the case in other countries — until we embrace abundance — this problem will endure. ● Pro erty

Private property does not manage scarcity; it provides legal and social protection that social rents do not. Property is not contingent. Why not grant this immutability to the poorest in our society? As Marx said, “communism is the positive expression of annulled pri-

ocial housing in arlow, ssex

Under the ornbeams True tory of Life in the O en mma Tarlo ( aber, £18.99)

Parklife people

Patrick Galbraith

Under the hornbeams is a strange book, but then it’s a book about a strange situation in a very strange time.

Emma Tarlo’s account of two “hobos”, which is what they are most comfortable being called, living under a hornbeam tree in Regent’s Park during Covid, captures the claustrophobic horror of the oddest period that we are ever likely to live through.

has a long argument with a drunk who likes Gandhi: I agree with you that he was an exceptional man who was trying to bring about a more equal society. He was a leading gure in the struggle against colonial rule in India, and there are people all over the world who continue to be inspired by his ideas about non-violence and ecology. Martin Luther King thought him one of the greatest men in world history, but that doesn’t mean he was without fault. Like all of us he was a product of his time.

e angry drunk is not convinced. Martin Luther King, Gandhi, ecology, and the ethics and oddities of Goldsmiths profs giving drunks an intellectual thrash-

Patrick Galbraith is the author of In Search of One Last Song: Britain’s disappearing birds and the people trying to save them

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It starts with Lockdown being announced. Tarlo, an anthropologist who has previously written a highly-acclaimed book on hair, is living in a at with her husband (also an anthropologist who spends most weeks in Paris) and her son (who should be in Oxford, where he is studying). Tarlo is introduced by a friend to Pascal and Nick, two men — the former of them reserved but wise, the second a seemingly omniscient philosopher — who have lived for the best part of two decades out in the open. ey are not homeless, Tarlo writes, questioning narratives around what that means: the park is their home.

it is a brilliant premise but, frustratingly, it doesn’t quite work. A lot of what makes characters interesting, in ction or non- ction, are their imperfections. Spend enough time with anybody and the cracks appear. In a magazine or newspaper article, where the reader spends less time in a subject’s company, you can get away with it. But relentless perfection in narrative non- ction makes characters seem at. Nick’s only aw is that he’s perfect.

Long passages of quoted speech, sometimes almost half a page, reveal that he is absolutely bang on — as I suppose a Goldsmiths anthropologist would see it — on everything from the Black Lives Matter movement to sexual harassment to notions of property. He’s bang on too on the power of language, on how terms can be reappropriated by downtrodden groups, and the racist outlook of London’s police.

I have no doubt Nick is wonderful but he almost becomes Christ-like. at, to be fair to Tarlo, is one of the great challenges of writing non- ction; people give themselves up to you and you feel, as it seems she feels, duty-bound to repay that generosity by writing them up as wonderful, which is sometimes a disservice as a writer.

Technically, less reliance on reported speech would be good. One assumes that Tarlo worked her dictaphone hard. Nothing wrong with dictaphones but they can lead to large chunks of speech and conversation where less would have been more. Tarlo, for example,

ing down the park aside, the book would have been tighter and ultimately better by cutting a fair bit of fat.  On London’s homeless communityas a subculture, Under the Hornbeams is interesting. Its account of the creation of quasi-family units which can be both essential in order to survive, and potentially deeply damaging when those units are unstable and built on unhealthy relationships is illuminating and will be eye-opening for many readers.

Tarlo is also perceptive when it comes to capturing the horror (it really was horrible) of the Lockdown period. She weeps on Zoom calls, quits her job, everybody around her is deeply stressed, and even the “hobos” are dispossessed, and yet it was, as Under the Hornbeams shows, also a time when strange new communities were formed. Because of the community she nds herself in, a community whose activity is limited to meagre excursions such as going to the park, Tarlo sometimes sees Pascal and Nick doing almost nothing for hours on end.

Except they aren’t really doing nothing; they are thinking and watching and practising the art of just “being”. Under the Hornbeams is a book that reminds writers to go light on dialogue and reminds all of us to go long on talking to those around us and sometimes just to “be”. Do not, Tarlo cautions, ever think that the homeless have nothing. ●

Nick in egent s Park

U bigail hrier ( wift, 0)

Healers who harm

Afew years ago, during a very intense session of expert procrastination, I noticed that the algorithm of my YouTube ads pushed a new sort of service. BetterHelp, the presenter gleefully repeated, aimed at delivering a “personalised therapy for a happier you”. Great life hacks at your ngertips, any time, anywhere. Because “you deserve to be happy”.

Many yearn for a quick x while coping with the ups and downs of postmodern life. But the aggressively jovial BetterHelp marketing was puzzling. What was this service selling that a pint at the pub with friends couldn’t provide?

ere’s something shy in this rebranding of therapy, which seeks to destigmatise the practice by making it look laid-back and essential to everyday life. e issue is not that mental health is made more accessible, quite the contrary. However, therapy as a conversation piece has consequences: psychology jargon is now everywhere, transforming almost any issue into unspoken trauma, diagnosis, and wellness necessities. And yet, as Abigail Shrier reveals in Bad Therapy, this is but the tip of the iceberg.

In her earlier work Irreversible Damage (2020), she showed how the goods and evils of therapy emerged as a thread to understand the surge in “gender dysphoria” referrals. She now dives deeper into the mental health establishment from a US perspective. e focus of Bad Therapy falls on the most vulnerable among us — children and teenagers. Shrier convincingly demonstrates that the very experts who claim to tackle the “mental health crisis” in the West in fact often cultivate it.

la lettre, argued that to be healthy one must learn self-understanding. But Rousseau’s argument existed within a larger paradox of his own making, namely that one man’s meat is another’s poison. Evil and cure are sometimes interchangeable or, worse, indistinguishable. Shrier opens her analysis with the same observation: “healers can harm”. As it turns out, they often do.

In the lucrative business of mental health, the commonest side-e ect of therapy is … more therapy. Despite the credo of expertise that argues in favour of science and measurable data, the sophistication of therapy has led to more depression and anxiety, with little e ort to track long-term results. e recent push for “climate-focus therapy” (whatever that is) is a “choice” made by “experts”, Shrier tells us, that validates and reinforces children’s terrors.

Her insightful interviews outline serious issues in the school setting, where “therapists and non-therapists diagnose kids liberally”. She shows that exigencies and accommodations on behalf of “wellness” create a burden for everyone, preventing teachers from doing their jobs.

This doesn’t mean that all therapists are malign, or people shouldn’t look for help — Shrier herself is open about her own experience of therapy. But then, children are not equipped, as adults generally are, to understand fully what therapy does.

Chasing positivity tends to make children more depressed. Stressing the almighty importance of feelings tends to make them too sensitive. Always a rming and accommodating their worries makes them more salient. Habituating the youth to externalise their “locus of control” produces adults who fail at adulthood. Who knew?

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a charlatan therapist avant

One of shrier’s most heartbreaking revelations is showing how the system tends to “take parents hostage”. e principle of safeguarding is turned on its head and, more often than not, “experts” encourage information to be held back from parents for their children’s sake. By attacking the natural and fundamental relationship between parents and o spring, “bad therapy” emerges as a sort of new bio-power, which encourages intrusive and harmful methods. e in uence of tech on the system makes things worse. erapy on phones, as promoted by companies such as BetterHelp, is the “ultimate morphine drip”. “ anks to arti cial intelligence,” Shrier writes, “the rain shower may soon become a ash ood.” AI is increasingly used to gauge the state of children’s presumed loneliness and inability to t in socially. Mental health algorithms judge as suspicious any denial of one’s natural state of depression.

Too many children and teenagers seem to believe that good mental health is something you “work on” or, to put it more crudely, that you purchase. It is not something they believe can simply arise from living a good, well-balanced life.

Bad Therapy reads as a call to resist the current belief that abnormality is the new normal. Shrier reafrms the value of resilience, healthy relationships, and the old wisdom that “maybe there’s nothing wrong with our kids”. Of course, in a society that has come to glamorise therapy, that is rather harder to sell. ●

ad Thera y hy The Kids ren t Growing

Lola alem is a scholar and art critic based in Oxford Lola Salem

Troubled emoir of oster Care, amily, and ocial Class ob enderson ( orum, 16.99)

Light from darkness

Patrick Nash

Rob henderson is a rare young example of a dying breed: Cambridge scholar, public intellectual and unsentimental writer. ese qualities radiate from his new memoir, Troubled, which recounts his “miraculous trajectory” through family dysfunction, foster care, the United States Air Force and into high academia.

Henderson’s story begins in his personal etymology — each of his names is taken from a family member that abandoned him for one reason or another or, indeed none at all: Robert (his biological father, walked out), Kim (his biological mother, lost to addiction), Henderson (his adoptive father, severed ties). Unsurprisingly, his treatment at the hands of these feckless or vindictive individuals left him “troubled” and landed him in Californian social care.

Bleak as his start in life was, however, Henderson has mercifully not penned a misery-memoir. On the contrary, Troubled is a serious piece of scholarship told through a redemptive but unsentimental autobiographical arc.

The Critic Books

one succeeds in life despite instability and abuse, never thanks to it — and that he would trade away all his considerable achievements to have been spared it.

From the episodes he recounts one can see why: his rst memory is his mother’s arrest on drug charges, the rapid cycling through anonymous foster carers, constant hunger and underage drinking, violence and subpar schools, divorce and threesomes in the family home, the grim cycle goes on. What really stands out in these chapters, however, are the points of light: teaching himself to read as a source of comfort, learning to box at the local gym, receiving basic human kindness from one of his adoptive mom’s partners. Henderson’s childhood, in short, is a quintessentially American tale.

the small town of R ed Bluff in northern California is where Henderson eventually nds a measure of stability and spends his teenage years. It is depicted sympathetically, if not nostalgically, as a traditional blue-collar community a icted by poverty, substance abuse, high murder rates and family breakdown. ese factors, but particularly the last, led the author to enlist with the usaf upon nishing school and nd, at last, an e ective surrogate parent.

It is striking that the main villain of the piece is bourgeoisie bromidics rather than any particular person in Henderson’s early life. At the outset, for example, he skewers the New York Times’s overblown assertion that college is an unquali ed good for the poor by pointing out that while poor graduates earn $335,000 more than non-graduates, rich graduates earn $901,000 more, thereby entrenching elite privilege.

a key theme throughout is the tendency of Western elites — liberal and conservative alike — to reframe social and emotional needs, such as family stability and routine, in economic and educational terms: get an expensive degree to get a profession to get richer, and so on. But, as Henderson’s story attests, such “luxury beliefs” (a term he has coined) may confer status on those professing them but they work against the basic interests of those growing up in unstable, insecure environments blighted by addiction and abuse.

Since most well-o , well-educated readers of Troubled will have no real sense of what it means to experience true deprivation, the opening chapters are exceptionally successful at conveying just how unsparing and corrosive it is. Henderson makes clear that such experiences are never good for character-building —

e highly ordered existence of a serviceman e ectively “fast forwarded” him through his most impulsive young adult years and taught him that success and ful lment depend on vocation, commitment and “avoiding rash and reckless actions” that lead to self-destruction. e contrast with Red Blu , which never quite lets him go, is striking and hammered home each time he returns on leave.

Having achieved a degree of distance from his hometown, bearing witness to its destructive patterns of behaviour on these visits there leads him to an airport copy of Stephen Pinker’s How the Mind Works and, in due course, to Yale.

Any graduate or academic from a prestigious university will recognise Henderson’s Yale of the 2010s: the beige in-jokes such as naming a cat “Learned Claw”, the grasping ambition of the students, the dim-witted and overbearing administration, the ubiquity of radical chic, the conspicuous elderliness of the best professors.

For all that, Henderson is gracious enough to acknowledge the redemptive value of his excellent education in spite of this environment (and the near-identical one during his PhD at Cambridge) which furnished him with ample material to esh out his pitch-perfect concept of “luxury beliefs”.

Readers have Yale and the liberal elite to thank for that much, and him for triumphing over both adversity and diversity. ●

Patrick Nash is a legal academic working in Oxford

Clear Carys avies (Granta, £12.99)

Parasol against the xe

elen Oyeyemi ( aber, 16.99)

The Children s Bach

elen Garner ( eidenfeld Nicolson, £9.99)

John Self Three novelists pushing the bloat out

The art of omission seems to be unfashionable in ction these days. Wordbloat and page-plumping are the literary crises of our age. It’s not hard to see where this might come from. First, there is the same misguided view of value for money that leads to swollen typefaces and longer page counts to make books thicker than ever.

Second, there appears to be a decreasing appetite among editors and publishers for stretching readers, for risking the casual browser bailing early because they don’t immediately “get” the book. Yet the bene ts of allowing the readers to do some of the thinking for themselves are obvious: a reader who is a participant rather than simply a bystander will be more engaged with the work. So this month’s column o ers some novels that still dare to leave the reader’s hand unheld — without, it must be accepted, universal success.

Welsh writer Carys Davies’s third novel Clear follows her previous books West and The Mission House into travel quests and into the minds of ungovernable men. She has always been attracted to loners and explorers: West followed a settler across the American midwest (“I have to go. I have to go and see. at’s all I can tell you”), while e Mission House followed a convalescing English librarian into contemporary India. is time we are closer to home geographically, but there are two men on a journey, not one. It is 1843, and the setting is a remote Scottish island solely occupied by the ageing Ivar, who has lived there all his life. He does not know that the island’s population is about to double with the arrival of John Ferguson, who on the rst page is delivered to the island by rocking boat and then picks his way over the rocks “like a tall, slightly undernourished wading bird”, “silently talking to his absent wife”. His task — this is the era of the Scottish Clearances, where landowners determined that the islands would be better used as homes not for people but for sheep — is to confront Ivar and send him back to the mainland.

So it suits him to be paid by the mile to visit Ivar’s island, even if his patron isn’t con dent of his ability. (“Although he is a churchman,” wrote his brother-inlaw in support, “I can vouch for his ability to make himself generally useful.”)

ey were right to worry: quickly Ferguson comes a cropper and falls down a cli , where he miraculously survives and is rescued by Ivar, who takes him in. is is a handy set-up to be sure, but the magic is in Davies’s handling of her material. She packs a huge amount in — all the background and story so far have come in 40 pages — and never says more than is needed. is is apt, given that Ivar and Ferguson have no common language, so their route to understanding must come through words they can agree on.

Davies tells the story through a combination of internal and external voice, with both men getting their time on the page. e language barrier means there is little dialogue but the story never feels static, precisely because the gap between the men is one the reader has to bridge. If the quarrels that erupt between them — as when Ferguson learns that Ivar has taken his photograph of his wife Mary — seem trivial, that all adds to their humanity as characters. Meanwhile, their narrative is interrupted by Mary’s own story, which provides an external focus and balance. But as Mary makes her journey to meet her husband again, it doesn’t distract the reader but rather adds to the tension as an ending both surprising and inevitable looms. To deliver an epic story in miniature like this — in fewer than 150 pages — is an exceptional achievement.

Helen Oyeyemi is a prodigy:at the age of 39 she is already two decades and eight novels into her writing career. at she hasn’t yet broken through to mainstream success is probably due to the pursuit of her idiosyncratic vision, which sees another eyebrow-raising iteration in her new novel Parasol against the Axe. If you think the title is intriguing but doesn’t make much sense, you’re halfway to the full experience. Beyond the barest outline, this is a book so chaotic and multifaceted that it’s impossible even to approach a reasonable summary.

John elf is The Critic s lead ction critic. e lives in elfast

Ferguson is in transit in more ways than one: he’s one of the hundreds of clergymen who rebelled against the Scottish Church in that year’s Great Disruption, and he’s in need of funds to help the new Free Church.

So here is that barest outline: we’re in modern day Prague, a city the central character Hero Tojosoa is visiting with a pre-wedding party. She brings a novel called Paradoxical Undressing, recommended to her by her son, but every time she (or anyone else) starts reading the book, it turns out to be a di erent story.

Oh, and the novel is narrated by the city of Prague itself. “Isn’t it all right for a city to pull a leg or two?” it

Carys avies

This is the perfect example of a novel that omits, but provides enough rich detail to make the reader’s work pay o

asks us. Indeed it is, and play is what it’s all about. Characters appear without warning and swim along with Hero and us for a time before disappearing. e changing opening chapter of Paradoxical Undressing is presented in full several times: once about a bookshop that accepts only exchanges, not money; once about a judge who looks like “a lesser-known member of the Rat Pack”; once — most substantially and pleasingly — about a “taxi dancer” (don’t ask) named Leah Loew; and so on.

Alongside all this there are subplots with another character, Dorothea Gilmartin, who is at the same time a separate person and also a pseudonym used by Hero, and a mole, and a “not-golem”, and literary-cultural references galore from D.H. Lawrence and Patrick White to Italo Calvino and Suzanne Vega.

The Critic Books

It gallops along with tremendous energy, but what makes it hard to assimilate is the coming and going of so many characters delivered with the Nabokovian air of Oyeyemi’s style. “Taken unawares, she stepped onto a bridge lined with statues that curved her sense of the sky above her and the water beneath her in such delicate increments that upon reaching its midpoint she seemed to be either approaching a position behind herself or coming from somewhere she’d never been.”

Oyeyemi has both put everything in and left everything out: to add the connective tissue to bring the stories properly together would require a book three times the length. e best thing about Parasol against the Axe is that anything goes; the worst thing is that anything goes.

It is to be celebrated that publishers have continued to let Oyeyemi write as she wishes to, and nobody has said to her, “How about a nice historical crime series instead?” — but here is where the practice of not joining the dots for the reader can go too far: or not far enough.

A more perfectly balanced example comes from Helen Garner’s The Children’s Bach. Garner is a big name in her native Australia, with novels, stories, essay collections and even three volumes of her diaries in print. Yet she has been published only sporadically here, and this 1984 novel is, surprisingly, only now ap-

pearing in the UK and the US.

On reading it, the surprise only deepens: this is the perfect example of a novel that omits, but provides enough rich detail to make the reader’s work pay o . It’s a family story, about the seemingly golden couple Dexter and Athena, around whom other characters orbit. We have their two sons, one with a developmental disability; Dexter’s college friend Elizabeth and her young sister Vicki; Elizabeth’s feckless sometime partner Philip and his daughter Poppy; and sundry others.

e novel follows a timeline, and has at least one dramatic conclusion, but not a traditional linear plot. Instead, the narrative swoops and settles on di erent characters, hopping from one to another, sometimes in the same paragraph. Reading it is like watching a home video from the period, seeing just the moments people thought worth capturing.

e story itself features parties, conversations, seductions and disappointments, all captured in succinct, bright prose. One character mocks another as having “a voice like somebody falling o a mountain”. Athena is hard-hearted about her disabled son Billy: “Don’t get romantic,” she tells Vicki. “ ere’s nobody in there.”

An older woman, used to not being listened to, “had slid away into the habit of monologue, a stream of mild words which concealed the bulk of thought and knowledge as babbling water hides submerged boulders”. One scene at a dinner, featuring multiple characters, is a tour de force of control and variety as the viewpoint shifts from one to another.

Control, indeed, is what a book like this is all about. Late in the novel, musician Philip is advising a young songwriter: “You have to steer a line between what you understand and what you don’t. [...] Don’t explain everything. Leave holes. e music will do the rest.” is approach, lest we were in any doubt, is endorsed by a facsimile of a Post-It note in Garner’s hand that is reproduced on the endpaper of The Children’s Bach, presumably a memorandum to herself mid-composition. “Good stu here but compress,” it reads. And compress, and compress, and compress she did, and the book — and the reader — is better o for it. ●

elen Garner

elen Oyeyemi

Not everyone has a novel in them

Literature is the only art in which, it seems, every neophyte is convinced they can succeed

Mrs Secret Author, who knows her onions, recently drew her husband’s attention to a Facebook post that, or so she claimed, simultaneously epitomised all that was best and all that was worst about the modern literary marketplace.

In it a woman — thankfully unknown to us — had decided to le her new year’s resolutions. One of them was to write “a Romance novel”. Clearly this was going to take a bit of time, but the aspiring novelist was con dent that if she started now it would be possible to plan for a pre-Christmas launch.

All this, it turned out, had gone down a storm with the poster’s friends. To a man — well, actually to a woman — they rushed to assure her what a terri c idea it was. Several of them con ded that they, too, had always wanted to write “Romance novels” and it was great that at least one of their number was about to get on with it.

And who was lined up to publish the darling work? Naturally, in this age of limitless technological horizons and level playing elds, the author was going to publish it herself.

There are a number of stock responses to this proud declaration of authorial intent. e snob response is to maintain that such a free-for-all simply devalues the craft of writing and that whatever results will be entirely devoid of merit. e egalitarian response is to suggest that mass access to what a theorist would call the modes of literary production is a wonderful, empowering thing and that objections to it are merely elitist. Why shouldn’t the Facebook poster set up as

the Marie Corelli of cyberspace to the delight of her friends, and who are we to stop her?

Meanwhile, the bookworld traditionalist — not quite the same as the book-world snob, although there are parallels — will probably want to invoke the Writers’ and Artists’ Year Book of the pre-tech age and its assurance (this came in the section about “Vanity Publishing”) that usually, if a book is any good, at some point in its existence somebody somewhere will be prepared to pay money to publish it.

Of the 100 manuscripts that arrived for comment, perhaps half a dozen made it onto the publisher’s desk. One was published

And all this ignores the amusement of professionals working in other art forms. After all, does anyone ever publicly state that they hope to become a painter and that their rst exhibition is booked for six months’ time?

But literature, you see, is different. Unlike painting, or musical composition, or ballet, it is about the only branch of the arts in which the neophyte can make some sort of a showing without seriously embarrassing themselves. Most educated people can string a couple of readable paragraphs together; equally, most of us could, if pressed, come up with a plotline capable of sustaining the average thriller.

One of the Secret Author’s earliest jobs involved reading manuscripts for a literary agent. Almost all the aspiring talents involved could produce a convincing narrative. Where they fell short was in being able to produce plausible dialogue. ey were tough times even then, and of the 100 or so manuscripts that arrived for comment, perhaps half-a-dozen eventually made it onto a publisher’s desk and, of those, exactly one was published. No doubt, if the technology had existed, a

fair proportion of them would have seen the light. But would anyone south of the author and a few admiring friends have bene tted?

And here we come to the real drawback of self-publishing, which is that by its very nature it discourages most of the writers involved from ful lling any kind of potential they may have.

Not long ago the Secret Author was approached by a lawyer of his acquaintance. Our man was writing a crime novel and wanted to know what a professional thought of it. e manuscript turned out to be a cut above the average — well-written, with a serviceable plot, a well-realised sense of place and some salty dialogue. e verdict was: not bad, but could do even better; and the advice was: take some time over this, think hard about what you could do to improve it, and send it to an agent to see what they think.

Did the author do this? No, he went for instant grati cation, published it on Amazon and saw it sink without trace, whereas had he taken pains over it, rewritten it and sought professional advice, it might just — although one never knows — have made it onto a commercial publisher’s list.

Which takes us back to the Facebook-poster and her “Romance novel”. For what really irks is not the idea that you can take up a new career with the same facility that you can insure your labrador, but the assumption that writing is easy.

As Brian Howard, the part-model for Brideshead Revisited’s Anthony Blanche is supposed to have said when he saw his rst Surrealist painting: “My dear, all they are trying to do is paint without any e ort, and we all know where that leads.” We do. It leads to Facebook posts and Amazon listings. ●

e Secret Author is a former Professor of English and Creative Writing at a leading British university

Romeo Coates

Levelling up

Housewife favourite Dominic West’s insistence that provincial audiences prove more appreciative than West End theatregoers strikes a chord with those of us familiar with performing to these distinctly contrasting tribes.

While waddling visitors to the capital’s “ eatreland” are regularly of the self-absorbed variety, I’ve generally found jolly northerners considerably more convivial after travelling to such parts. Let us never neglect to remember what it means to these delightfully down-to-earth folk whenever we London troupers arrive to sprinkle much-needed stardust.

selflessly casting herself in the lead role of Richard III, the Globe’s o cially ground-breaking artistic director Michelle Terry faces regrettable condemnation for lacking real-life hunchback credentials.

Addressing this matter with all necessary delicacy, at the time of writing, the theatre patiently reminds disabled detractors that the twenty- rst- century Shakespearean canon is about “all artists having the right to play all parts”.

What’s more, having already given us her (oddly unappreciated) Hamlet portrayal on the Globe stage, the irrepressible Ms Terry expects to have more right than most!

◆ farewell to Ken Russell’s muse Georgina Hale, whose ongoing aversion towards yours truly after learning I was a Scorpio ensured a challenging week’s lming in 1985.

While Ms Hale’s astrological prejudice even extended to bizarrely refusing to travel with this unfortunate co-star on British Rail, I’ve been advised to resist stating further grievances so soon after the mad old bird’s passing.

feeling a stirring of embers following a chance meeting with an old ame on Earl’s Court Road, the resulting four-hour reunion in a nearby tavern saw me throw caution to the wind when promising to acquire us West End tickets for Plaza Suite.

Having already spent much of the afternoon voicing constant admiration for the show’s two American stars, this still dazzling widow — an Eighties sitcom sexpot of brief note — proved unrestrained in gratitude, prompting one to reasonably anticipate pleasing adventures ahead.

Matters the following morning took a sobering turn, when I discovered this impromptu gesture was amounting to £600! Also rashly committed to wining and dining my eager female companion beforehand, come the night in question it became patently clear that here was a resting actress all too adept at exploiting the sozzled advances of elderly suitors.

As I observed her knocking back a third (large) G&T during Act Two, while now blatantly uninterested in my presence, one bitterly accepted there’d be next to no return on so costly an investment.

“Between you and me …”

◆ belatedly realising the juvenile nephew/lodger is in fact now 34 years of age, I was soon re ecting on the lad’s obvious lack of progress. With only failed careers in “hip hop” and “digital marketing” seemingly to his name, a frank discussion regarding the lie of the land was overdue.

Subsequent attempts to address matters with the deluded fellow made little headway, until he nally felt compelled to launch into a ludicrous diatribe about “privileged baby-boomer property owners” such as myself having the temerity to still be alive!

compliments to David Suchet for so admirably clarifying he can’t possibly watch Poirot successor Ken Branagh’s movie portrayal, for fear the wicked press will want him to be unkind.

David instead tastefully restricts himself to reminding us Ken’s e ort has sadly failed to impress the critics.

Self-determination

Traditionally deemed the pastime of the unful lled eccentric, I reassuringly read that “self-publishing” no longer has the stigma of old.

With my own theatrical memoir, Only the Liars Remain (“a devastating exposé” — Su Pollard), continuing to meet with obstacles from London publishing houses, one feels ready to embrace the spirit of the times by forging ahead regardless.

COMINGUPAGAINSTAWESTEND security woman who had the audacity not to immediately recognise her, Maureen Lipman, honoured at Windsor Castle back in 2021, sweetly barked: “I’m a bloody Dame!” e personal journeys of formerly socialist

nationalist treasures must never be underestimated.

confirmation that Miriam Margolyes’s attempt to seize control of the Actors’ Benevolent Fund has been thwarted proves a rare triumph in precarious times.

ough temporarily hailed outrageous and lovable by a cheerfully hoodwinked media, the very idea of this self-serving troublemaker ever improving matters over at the ABF was the most farcical of propositions from the beginning.

◆ briefly staying with the abf — which counts yours truly as a loyal and longtime member — I’m forced to address recently published allegations suggesting my own allegiances during the ongoing power struggle have proved “changeable” and “duplicitous”.

Rest assured these misguided foes — hopelessly unschooled in the intricacies of theatrical politics — will rue the day this botched assassination was attempted.

Funny girl

Hats off to fetching Lancashire lass Miss Coleman (telly’s one-time Queen Victoria) for using a media interview to highlight the failings of a mis ring agent.

Dispirited by recent dreary screen roles, she pointedly announced: “I keep telling my agent I’m really funny. But I don’t think she’s quite taken it on board.”

While once the domain of the most resourceful gures in London, the largely dead-eyed generation presently hindering the careers of underused/ versatile clients surely deserve to be held more to account.

I might add this is being written just days after one’s own so-called representative unforgivably burned bridges with the folk at Midsomer Murders

long unable to control that compulsive desire to concoct nonsense about the Royals, Brandreth surpassed himself on the airwaves by preposterously claiming our late Queen spent hours “impersonating cast members from Grange Hill”.

Sensing he’d overreached (even by his own remarkable standards), the rogue hastily backtracked, though not without rightly remaining a gure of suspicion. Since labelled a “snake oil salesman” by one prominent telly host, dare we hope the net’s nally closing in?

while regular readers will recall me highlighting the potential for further ghostly Diana adventures post- e Crown, downmarket telly execs were predictably ahead of the game.

Lea ng through the Radio Times, I was perturbed to read our late Queen of Hearts had been reduced to a starring role in Celebrity Help! My House is Haunted, featuring her shameless ex-manservant squealing from a mock-Tudor Midlands residence: “ e Princess is here!”

IRATEMRECCLESTON’S alarming revelation he was falsely accused of potentially career-ending shenanigans during a sex scene with an “A-list actress” shines a now rarely shone light on such dastardly divas.

One’s own eeting leading man days never recovered from a similarly harrowing afternoon’s bedroom lming with a prominent femme fatale of the day, later heard to cackle at this young actor’s expense: “He’s no Ian McShane, is he?” ●

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va

Gevorgyan in com etition in 0 1

Music

Norman Lebrecht on

How to win at Chopin

●in the long winter nights, I dived into the BBC’s back channels and came up with Jakub Piatek’s extraordinary documentary on the 2021 Internatioal Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw. Although I had seen the contest unfold and remembered the results, I was glued to my sofa by the complete and utter insanity displayed in Piatek’s y on the wall.

If you are going to enter a competition, start with Warsaw because it is among the least corruptible, its transparency attained by giving votes to past winners. Having Martha Argerich or Bella Davidovich on the jury is a hedge against shifty piano professors sharing out nal placements between their pupils. Collusions of this kind have taken over the violin world, the result being that no major talent has emerged in this century from any violin competition. Piano, meanwhile, booms and Warsaw is pre-eminent. Over three weeks, 40 contenders from around the world play Chopin all day and into the night for the bene t of a half- lled hall and large local television ratings. In the nal, half a dozen survivors slug it out for the top slot, egged on by teachers, parents, bus drivers and their own damaged egos, trapped in a remorseless kind of Stockholm syndrome that makes them love their tormentors — the judges, and the contest itself.

One nalist, locked in a toilet with her teacher, is heard weeping hysterically and being ordered to stop if she wants to win.

Another is watched over in sleep by his professor, herself a past contestant. A splendid Polish young man thinks he stands the best chance of winning if he has his hair done like Chopin’s; he winds up walking o stage in the middle of the second round, saying something like “I don’t want to do this any more.”

ree Italians maintain a modicum of sanity. One of them recommends, “I would say, whoever wins this competition should spend the €40,000 on a course of psychotherapy.” I so wish she had made it. But winning is a nebulous thing, dependent on a whim. Giving marks to people playing a Chopin polonaise is no di erent from deciding on medals in gymnastics, dressage and judo at the Olympic Games, as we shall see again in Paris this summer. e spectacle is governed by invisible rules that connect to no veri able reality. Did Maurizio Pollini play the G minor polonaise in Warsaw 100 per cent better than the long-forgotten Iranian who came third in 1960? All one can say from lmed evidence is that Pollini had the larger personality and, regardless of points scored, looked as much like a winner as the gymnast Olga Korbut.

the 2021 chopin competition was won by the well-groomed Bruce Liu, a Montreal student of the Vietnamese exile Dang ai Son, who won in 1980 despite

Martha Argerich storming o in protest. Liu (far left) refused to be lmed by Piatek. He said later: “I think that was the challenge, actually, to not get bored of yourself after playing these pieces and practising them for thousands of hours.” e audience favourite, Eva Gevorgyan, was unplaced. Unfairly, in my view.

Defenders of the Chopin Competition claim there are no losers, which is true up to a point. Talking to a couple of also-rans recently, I hear they are still getting lots of concerts around Poland, where every Chopin semi- nalist is guaranteed

DEFENDERS OF THE CHOPIN COMPETITION SAY THERE ARE NO LOSERS, WHICH IS TRUE UP TO A POINT

immortality. One said that the competition had upped her energy levels and her concentration, essential for a lasting career. On the bleaker side of the street, poor Gevorgyan limped o stage thin as a rake, barely able to eke a smile.

some days after watching the Warsaw shoot-out, the death of the CBS TV presenter Charles Osgood reminded me of a 60 Minutes episode he hosted in 1976 on what was then the oldest and biggest music competition in America.

e Leventritt, endowed in 1939, set out to nd the next Vladimir Horowitz. “In the

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world of classical music, the superstars are the pianists,” intoned Osgood. “ ey have the most prestige and make the most money, as much as $10,000 for each performance. To become a top pianist, sooner or later you have to be a winner.”

Leventritt pianists did not compete against each other. ey had to impress a pack of hardened pros that they possessed an ine able supremacy over all others in America’s bicentennial generation. e judges included Rudolf Serkin, Leon Fleisher and Gary Gra man.

Verdicts were harsh. “Do you prefer not to continue?” carped one judge when a player broke down. “In a few moments someone says, ‘you’re terri c, or you’re not worth anything,’” said the unfortunate contender. Seventy were whittled down to 13, then ve. “What do you do with a child who loses this?” said one judge. “ ey’re nished.”

ultimately the 1976 jury decided none should have rst prize. Among the notable losers was a Japanese-British pianist called Mitsuko Uchida. She was 27 and went on to become the most original classical interpreter of our time. e fact that a jury of America’s best pianists considered her worthless tells you all you need to know about the value of competitions.

e Leventritt was hustled out of existence soon after by the glitzier Van Cliburn competition which, in its last edition in 2022, found a genuine Horowitz in the Korean Yunchan Lim (above), who reduced a tough conductor to tears in Rachmaninov’s D minor concerto.

Piano competitions are thriving. e World Federation of International Music Competitions has 110 members. e chances of any Grade-8 piano pupil winning the Chopin is one in ten million. Yet still they come and still they cry. ●

The grand tour Robert Thicknesse on Opera

●Opera’s value as a guide to negotiating the old vale of tears continues to be hotly debated — well, here, anyway; to be fair, it’s got to be a better bet than mime. On the plus side, you can expect loads of hot sex and a richly varied emotional life. en again, you’ll de nitely be spending a lot of time in jail, clap clinic and loony bin. Swings and roundabouts, innit.

Alongside its other tips, it provides the handiest travel guides, Baedeker appendices for deviants of all sorts. Certainly, these depictions of exotic spots, if they happened on telly or anywhere the proles might see them, would long ago have been hurled into the BBC’s dungeon of the damned alongside It Ain’t Half Hot Mum or ames Television’s Love y Neighbour; someone’s bound to nd out eventually, and then there’ll be trouble, but for now this remains the last refuge for fans of racial stereotyping, essentialism, non-crime hate incidents, prejudice and ultra-conscious bias.

content the sober lover of hearty sensual enjoyment at a low price”) or any other of the myriad accommodating persons detailed in this useful volume.

Rome, really, is only for niche sado-masochists: e ectively twinned with Moscow, both sewers of oppression and brutality gussied up with unhealthy, often religiously-enhanced, sexual eccentricity — see Tosca, Khovanshchina, e Coronation of Poppea, Nerone, La vestale, etc.

Nowhere shows opera’s good location sense better than Seville, though in those mediaeval alleys you must be on your guard: be nice to statues, don’t take owers from gypsies, and — ladies! — watch out for smooth operators promising a quickie marriage.

Plus, there’s a barber specialising in close shaves. After that we’re down to eccentric outliers like Armenia or Peking, where Puccini’s Turandot can still get away with having characters named Ping, Pang and Pong, which I think proves the point I made above. London, as you’d expect, gets star billing for its top nosh and women. Or, to put it another way, not exactly. In truth the old girl looks a bit dank and unsexy beside those foreign eshpots; there are tendentious suggestions that romantic prospects here are gloomy, and our hookers second-rate at best.

The most popular location has always been Paris, sweatily described in La Bohème, Traviata, all those Manons, Adriana Lecouvreur, Orpheus in the Underworld and so on as the world’s largest help-yourself cathouse.

Intrigued, the spirited gentleman would pack his copy of e Pretty Women of Paris, a catalogue of the town’s attractions (with addresses), and pay his respects to the “actress” Marie Kolb (“a pleasant little ball of fat”), or, for the thriftier, Gallayx (“will

Venue of choice is the festering Torre di Londra, where a succession of languishing, discarded queens await their fate with a load of harps and doomed threnodies.

For an altogether jauntier picture, we turn to John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera of 1728, which gallantly defends the reputation of Dolly Trull, Suky Tawdry and her sisters. is is a bit more like it, the rackety St Giles-to-Newgate lives of Macheath and his doxies and cutpurses restoring the capital’s scuzzy, plebeian credentials.

The big, legit Tourist Board piece — roaming the country until May with English Touring Opera — is Igor Stravinsky’s Rake’s Progress of 1951, unusual both as a post-war opera that has lasted in the regular rep and as the opera-averse composer’s only proper go at making one.

Stravinsky was taken by Hogarth’s prints — a tragicomic novel in eight pictures — and hired W.H. Auden to write the words. It’s set at the same moment as e Beggar’s Opera, when London life was a teeny bit jollier than it is now with our pocket-Malvolio mayor’s 9.30pm curfew and criminalisation of eye-contact on the Tube, but its sensibility is wholly modern.

It’s a cunning piece, Stravinsky in neo-classical guise writing music that harks back to Mozart while never abandoning his own sound-world; not a pastiche but a musical counterpart of Auden’s very du jour re-engineering of Tom Rakewell’s spiritual downfall.

e text irts with Existentialism and other modish conceits as Tom — not a wastrel but a good-hearted, idle creature — falls victim to the devil in the form of his Jeeves-from-hell sidekick Nick Shadow, whose indulgence of the boss’s wishes

SURE, IT’S AN ENJOYABLE, SPARKLINGLY-WRITTEN JOURNEY BUT THERE’S SOMETHING OFF ABOUT IT

leads the lost soul to Bedlam via Mother Goose’s brothel and marriage to Baba the Turk, the bearded lady of St Giles’s Fair. I suspect that composer and librettist had unfashionably Christian aims in mind, with Tom’s traduced inamorata Anne the conduit of a redemptive love. In reality that’s eclipsed by the coyly cruel fun Auden has toying with Tom, the brittle point-scoring that pervades words and music, an

over-sophisticated frivolity in condemning him for the crime, e ectively, of being a boy. Sure, it’s a smart, enjoyable, sparklingly written journey, but there’s something o about it. For what it’s worth, I reckon Auden’s words would have made a terri c comic opera with music by Bernstein in Candide mode.

Or maybe heartless anomie is London’s appropriate contribution to opera: see also Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Greek, which is Oedipus set in glam Eighties Tufnell Park. It just isn’t Venice, is it?

In the end we should probably be proud that opera sits so uncomfortably in the Muvver City. Opera, here? Leave it aht, mate. ●

e Rake’s Progress tours until May 28. Details at englishtouringopera.org.uk

Timberlake for all that sissy music? Hey … at least he got in Britney’s pants.”

It was the classic double standard. Spears got slutshamed; Timberlake was the stud. Her life spiralled bleakly until she ended up under a conservatorship controlled by her father; his continued breezily.

He was a regular guest on Saturday Night Live, charming his way through lthy comedy songs. He took up acting. And he was a legit music star, merging pop with R’n’B to critical and commercial success.

Justin’s dilemma Sarah Ditum on Pop

●if you ever doubt that celebrity is a kind of hell, imagine this: you’re 43, and you’re still de ned by a relationship that started in your teens and ended when you were 21. Justin Timberlake is a multi-platinum selling artist. He’s been married to the actress Jessica Biel since 2012, and the couple have two sons. None of that matters because the only identity Timberlake is allowed to have is “Britney’s ex”. is is partly his own fault. When Timberlake left the boyband NSYNC in 2002, he launched his solo career o the back of his break-up with Spears. Rumours that she had cheated on him gave him an alibi for graphically kissing and telling on America’s most famous alleged virgin.

An interview with him from the time was trailed with the unimprovably crass cover line: “Can we ever forgive Justin

but spears got her revenge. When her autobiography e Woman in Me came out last year, the most anticipated revelations were the ones about Timberlake, and she didn’t disappoint. Yes, she’d cheated on him — but he’d cheated on her more. When she’d got pregnant, she wanted to have the baby — he’d wanted her to have an abortion, and in the end she did so. e most damaging part wasn’t that he came out looking like a cad (it’s worth remembering that both were no older than 20 when all this happened). It’s that, in Britney’s telling, he came out looking cringe. A stupid white boy who greeted the black rapper Ginuwine with “fo’ shiz fo’ shiz ... What’s up homie?” (Ginuwine didn’t recall the incident). A parody of the “sensitive” man who strummed his guitar while she su ered through the painful aftermath of the abortion.

Part of the reason Timberlake avoided the usual boybander-to-obscurity pipeline was that he seemed to understand who he was meant to be. e noughties liked its popstars a little bit dirty, a little bit dangerous, ready to play along with the gossip culture, and he joined in adeptly. It feels appropriate that one of his best songs is the ballad “Mirrors”: he’s a screen for re ecting back other people’s desires.

what is wanted now, though, seems harder for him to deliver. In the great morality play of celebrity watching, the only role being o ered to him is that of

villain. ere’s a vacancy for a bad guy who can carry the can for everything the entertainment industry got wrong when it comes to women like Spears, and Timberlake is perfectly placed to ll it. at’s not only because of his part in Spears’s story, but also because he was integral to the Superbowl performance 20 years ago that ended with Janet Jackson’s breast exposed — at great cost to her career, and no cost to his. None of his apologies (there have been several, going back to at least 2006) seem to have shaken his position as the world’s premier exemplar of blithe white male privilege. Commentary on him seems driven by a desire to see him fail. Critics declared his Americana-tinged 2018 album Man of the Woods a “retreat into whiteness” (even though he was working with the same black production team who’d been with him since his debut Justi ed). A recent SNL spot had “an air of desperation”, decided one reviewer. ere was unmistakable glee when Spears fans organised to ensure his new single “Sel sh” was beaten in the charts by a Spears song of the same name.

spears herself offered an olive branch, praising his track on her Instagram and apologising to anyone she “o ended” with her memoir. Timberlake opted not to take it. At a recent performance, he introduced his song “Cry Me a River” (written in response to the break-up with Spears) by saying: “I’d like to apologise to absolutely fucking nobody.”

Obviously it’s undigni ed to be publicly rucking with your teenage ex in middle age, but plenty of pop stars run their careers very successfully on beef. As I write, the rappers Megan ee Stallion and Nicki Minaj have been engaged in a mutually bene cial feud, pushing both their (underwhelming) new singles up the charts. e issue is whether Timberlake can pull o the heel turn. At the very least, he needs an edgier musical direction. Yet it’s hard to see what other option he has. Timberlake is caught in the pincers of the cancellee’s dilemma.

If saying sorry is never enough, why not become the monster you’ve already been judged to be? ere’s a kind of relief in just giving up the ght for your innocence and embracing outlaw status. But there’s a cost too: if Timberlake commits to his antihero era, he’ll be letting the people who like him the least author his image. Celebrity truly is a kind of hell. ●

on Art

Netherworld Michael Prodger

●there are numerous estimates about exactly how many paintings were produced during the Dutch golden age. While it may be impossible to reckon even approximately it is not unreasonable to suggest that perhaps between ve and ten million pictures were painted to service the demands of seventeenth-century Netherlanders.

After all, by 1650, Amsterdammers were per capita the wealthiest citizens in Europe and the trickle-down e ects were real. In the 1640s, an English merchant-traveller named Peter Mundy was startled by the omnipresence of paintings in the new nation: “Butchers and bakers … yea many tymes blacksmiths. Cobblers, etts., will

IT IS REMARKABLE JUST HOW MANY GREAT DUTCH ARTISTS MET MISERABLE AND UNTIMELY ENDS

have some picture or other by their Forge or in their stalle.” e homes of many middling sorts were hung with pictures in a profusion that would still be unusual today.

e revered Dutch historian Johan Huizinga believed that his countrymen loved paintings because of their innate and “intense enjoyment of shapes and objects” and an “unshakeable faith in the reality and importance of all earthly things”.

Not for them Baroque display and the religious paintings of the ousted Spanish.

What they wanted were small images of the real world.

an extraordinarily talented cadre of painters emerged to feed this appetite — about one painter for every 2,000 to 3,000 inhabitants — and many of the best of them were closely connected. ey married into one another’s families, lived in nearby streets and had numerous patrons in common.

Webs of connection are easy to trace: Rembrandt, for example, shared a studio in Leiden with Jan Lievens (who was then thought his superior); he later taught Ferdinand Bol, Govert Flinck and Carel Fabritius; Fabritius, the painter of e Gold nch, in uenced Vermeer in Delft; Vermeer and Gerard ter Borch signed the same notary document in 1653; Vermeer also knew Jan Steen, who went to the same school in Leiden that Rembrandt had attended, and was himself friends with Gabriel Metsu and Frans Hals …

Many painters were connected in the nature of their deaths too. It is remarkable just how many great Dutch artists met miserable and untimely ends. For all their talent, painting made few of them rich and most had second jobs — Vermeer dealt in paintings, Jan Steen ran a brewery, Jan van Goyen speculated in tulips and property (and ruined himself twice as a result), and Pieter de Hooch worked as a factotum for a linen merchant.

there were exceptions: the ower painter Rachel Ruysch, for example, lived to 86 and worked for the Elector Palatine, who demanded just a single painting a year in return for a handsome stipend — and to

ritney ears and Timberlake

The Goldfi nch, by Carel abritius

add to her good fortune, she also won the lottery; while Ferdinand Bol married an heiress and retired from painting. Misery, however, was a familiar state for any number of others.

e most dramatic death came to Fabritius. Very few of his paintings have survived, perhaps just 13, but he was, said the contemporary publisher-poet Arnold Bon, “the greatest artist Delft or Holland ever had”. He died aged 32 on 12th October 1654 when the city gunpowder magazine exploded, destroying a quarter of the city and killing more than 500 people.

e “Delft thunderclap” could be heard 150 miles away. Fabritius’s house collapsed on top of him and although he was alive when pulled from the rubble he died shortly afterwards. “ us that Phoenix remained in his thirties,” wrote Bon, “in the midst and at the height of his powers.”

Fabritius’s master Rembrandt famously died a bankrupt, despite being courted by the Medici and Charles I, and was buried in a pauper’s grave. Rembrandt’s old friend Lievens died poor and tormented by the knowledge that he had never lived up to his early promise.

Vermeer died suddenly at 43, broken by debt when the Dutch economy collapsed in 1672. His widow, in a petition for nancial assistance, wrote that the painter “had lapsed into such degradation and decline, which had a ected him so deeply, that he, as though struck by total confusion, had gone from healthy to dead in a matter of a day and a half”.

poverty also hastened the end of the landscapist Meindert Hobbema as it did to Frans Hals too, who had been subsisting on the patronage of admiring fellow artists and a city pension from

Interior of the Oude Kerk, Amsterdam, by manuel de itte

Haarlem. e cow painter Paulus Potter contracted tuberculosis and died at just 28. Hendrick ter Brugghen died of the plague at the age of 40.

Meanwhile, Frans Post was helped to the grave by alcohol, which may also have played a part in the death of Hercules Seghers who died after falling down the stairs. Even the painter of tavern scenes, Adriaen Brouwer, a Flemish artist rather than a Dutchman, died age 32 and was buried in a common grave.

Along with Fabritius, the most vivid end belonged to Emanuel de Witte, an accomplished painter of church interior scenes. According to the early biographer of Dutch artists, Arnold Houbraken, after becoming involved in an argument with his landlord a despairing De Witte hanged himself from an Amsterdam canal bridge. However, the rope broke and he plunged into the water. at night was so cold that the canal froze solid and there De Witte’s body stayed, undiscovered until the ice thawed nearly three months later. Just one more painter who found the golden age tragically less than golden. ●

Michael Prodger is associate editor of the New Statesman

kingship unravelling.

In the nimble hands of South African director, Yaël Farber, it is a modern-dress version, which foregrounds the impact of wealth and untrammelled power on family

TOO MANY DIRECTORS SHOEHORN RACE OR GENDER TWISTS IN, BUT FARBER’S CASTING FEELS ASSURED

dynamics, as the King’s decision to opt for a poorly-calculated early equity release scheme unleashes bloody chaos.

In her last outing at Islington’s Almeida, with Macbeth, Farber presented the murderous duo as a loved-up pair, impelled to satisfy each other’s wants, rather than as engines of ego and mutual destruction. Farber often seeks to direct our attention to themes and characters who end up at the edges of more conventional productions or to upend our fundamental perceptions of classic repertoire.

led by danny sapani as lear, the production’s core cast is all black and the surrounding court white. eatre is awash with disputes about who should play which roles — most absurdly about whether Richard III could be played by an actor without an actual scoliosis humpback.

Anne McElvoy on Theatre

Mad for this fresh take on King Lear

●“an elderly man with memory problems,” was the US Department of Justice counsel’s summary of Joe Biden’s unmoored ramblings, when the President found himself obliged to answer for careless handling of o cial documents. at conclusion would also work as the tagline for King Lear, the most searing dramatic treatment of physical and mental decline through the fractured prism of a

Too many contemporary directors shoehorn race or gender twists into the action, but Farber’s casting and concept feels assured. If there is tacit message in the ethnic switching, it is that power and in uence are indeed topsy-turvy in many ways and territories torn apart in con ict are a pretty durable theme, to judge by the state of the 2020s.

Surrounded by his elder daughters, Goneril (Akiya Henry) and Regan (Faith Omole) and “jewel” Cordelia (Gloria Obianyo), Lear recklessly severs his kingdom. All this happens at stand-up mics with echoes of TV’s e Traitors, in which participants vie to show performative, guileful a ection. A nice touch: Gloucester (Edward Davis) hastily motions to the cameras that it is time to wind up after Cordelia’s challenge to paternal authority brings down the screaming wrath of dad.

Cordelia is such a slim part in lines and presence that directors have a hard choice

to make in establishing the character beneath her de ance. Here, she is at the stroppier end of the spectrum, chin-jutting and clad in genderless white slacks and a cut-o black jacket, while her serpentine siblings slink around in tactile silks and cashmere.

Sapani’s Lear is physically as much as verbally abusive, hurling around props in an adumbration of his eventual angry madness — which raises the uncomfortable thought that Regan and Goneril, vixens of violence later on, did perhaps not fall so far from the tree.

clarke peters (the veteran cop in e Wire) brings his New Jersey melli uous voice and a septuagenarian’s gumption to the Fool. It’s a wise, knowing interpretation which sacri ces the wit and jest of the part, but shades it closer to being an alternative to Lear’s self-perception. e humiliated monarch can, after all, say things in the Fool’s presence that he hides behind anger or majesty with everyone else.

Anguished and physically imposing, Sapani wears a cluster of silver rings on his ngers like regal knuckledusters and his broad physicality underlines the mismatch of sturdy body and dishevelled mind. However, if you like to pick out future “most likely to wow” talent from supporting roles, I commend the Irish musical theatre star Fra Fee as the “bastard” Edmund — deliciously sexy-bad and bringing colour to a role which can be a bit one-note boo-hiss villain. It’s not hard to see why the sisters would prefer a roll in the royal hay with the charismatic imposter than with the wimpy husbands.

inevitably, we spend the end of the rst half of Lear terri ed about the imminent plucking out of Gloucester’s eyes. It’s pure Tarantino here, with the ghoulish siblings purring in pleasure at the torture (having us watch servants throw plastic sheeting over the sofa and use a twenty- rst-century pendant light to illuminate the horror boosts the dread).

Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” recurs as musical refrain, overlaid by a haunting violin sound backdrop. Frankly I am in two minds about the persistent aural enhancement. It’s musically adept and alleviates the “text-heavy” nature of a play that runs to over three hours. But possibly we have got the hang of the idea by the time we get the a cappella version at the end, which felt like an overreach.

e more tolerant side of me says the Almeida — with ticket prices around half or less of those at West End theatres — is angled towards younger audiences and under Rupert Goold as its long-stay artistic director has melded innovation and quality, so the occasional overreach is a price worth paying.

Discomfort Zone Robert Hutton on Cinema

●How do you tell the story of the Holocaust on lm? With Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg, the master of modern popular cinema, took a conventional approach, one also adopted by this year’s One Life: nding a heroic narrative of resistance.

anny a ani as King Lear andra ller as edwig in The Zone of Interest

But without diminishing the subjects of either of those lms, the problem is that a glance at the statistics of the Holocaust tell us that the victories over evil were rare exceptions, barely denting the incomprehensible totals.

Statistics feature several times in e Zone of Interest, an adaptation of Martin Amis’s novel about the home life of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss.

Early on, we see him take a pitch meeting so the occasional overreach is a price worth

e grapevine says Goold might well have ended up as director of the National eatre, pipped to the grandee role by Indhu Rubasingham, as the NT sought to end its all-male run of bosses. e South Bank’s loss is, for now, Islington’s gain. is Lear is a fresh look at a great work — and a reminder that early retirement is not always a trouble-free idea. ●

Anne McElvoy is executive editor of Politico and host of Free inking on Radio 3

from a pair of engineers who believe they’ve developed an improved oven, which will be able to operate constantly, destroying thousands and thousands of ... well, of what?

No one ever quite says, either then or later, when Rudolf and his colleagues discuss percentages and capacity, as they

prepare, with some excitement, to handle the big job of Hungary.

is is characteristic of the lm. e horror is always o -screen, hinted at obliquely as a servant washes Höss’s boots, or when you suddenly realise where his wife Hedwig is getting all her new clothes from. Director Jonathan Glazer keeps the family at a distance, both from the camera and emotionally. We are presented with a series of almost sterile tableaux of unexciting domesticity: a picnic, a birthday party, a visiting grandparent.

e contrast is delivered by the soundtrack. ere’s little music. Instead, always at the edge of hearing, there is the noise of industrial slaughter: grinding, burning. Was that a gunshot? Is that someone screaming?

The gap is between what you see and what you know is happening. e foreground events feel recognisable: Rudolf is an ambitious bureaucrat, whose e ciency at his job has seen him rise from his humble beginnings. Hedwig meanwhile is proud of the house and status that have come with her husband’s success.

Her mother used to clean other people’s houses, and now Hedwig has servants of her own. She sees her older children o to school and takes the baby round her garden, looking at the owers. So far, so bland. And then there is a glimpse of a di erent, equally familiar sight: an SS uniform, a watchtower, a chimney.

Glazer gives us no heroes. But neither do we get moustache-twirling villains. Rudolf and Hedwig are, we’re left in no doubt, fully complicit in what is happening

on the other side of the wall, but its appalling wickedness has become a routine part of their lives.

In one scene, Hedwig pursues Rudolf after he reveals he’s been reassigned. e camera tracks her as she walks briskly round the outside of the worst place on

I RECOMMEND IT ONLY WITH THE GREATEST CAUTION. BUT I’VE FOUND MY MIND RETURNING TO IT

earth to catch her husband and tell him that she wants to stay, that she won’t give up her house and garden. A normal argument in an utterly abnormal context. How does Hedwig keep the horror out of her mind? We never nd out. But perhaps we already know. e modern world is hardly short of things it’s easier not to think about. What walls have we put up, what sounds and smells are we pretending

aren’t there?

Glazer isn’t Spielberg. His lm rejects the conventional tools of cinematic storytelling, both in technique and in structure. ere is no one to identify with or root for, nothing at all to enjoy. On those grounds alone, it probably needs to be seen in the cinema, where you can’t escape. I suspect viewers streaming on a sofa at home will swiftly nd themselves seeking the comfort of distractions.

There are other things about e Zone of Interest that are distancing: art house cinema techniques that I personally nd obscure. Perhaps on a second viewing they would t into place: there are layers here that would repay study. I’m not sure though that I will watch it again. I recommend it only with the greatest caution: it’s not an easy watch. But in the days since I saw it, I’ve found my mind returning to it.

So much so that it has taken over this column. I’d planned to spend much more time on a lm that’s a little more conventional. e Promised Land is a sort of Western, the west in question being Denmark’s.

Mads Mikkelsen, recognisable as a baddie from whatever was the last Hollywood lm you saw, is Captain Ludvig Kahlen, an impoverished former soldier who in 1755 takes up the challenge of cultivating the heaths of Jutland. His secret weapon is a new crop that will grow anywhere: the potato. Unfortunately the local magistrate, an enjoyably endish Simon Bennebjerg, has other ideas.

Vaguely inspired by true events — Kahlen was a real gure — this is a tale that slowly builds as the two men circle each other like the characters in a Sergio Leone gun ght. Mikkelsen makes a great unheroic hero, a man unwilling to ght but unable to give in. e supporting cast are excellent and the landscape looks beautiful.

Finally, if you’re in the mood simply for popcorn, Moon ieves is a Hong Kong heist movie that apparently stars members of the pop group Mirror (no, me neither). A gang of implausibly handsome young men steal luxury watches and try to avoid getting killed by mobsters. It has nothing to say, and great fun saying it. ●

orten ee ndersen, ads ikkelsen and manda Collin in The Promised Land

The Zone of Interest

Adam LeBor on Television

War on Nazis in Oz and in the air

●one cold february morning in 1999 I walked down a muddy path from the village of Domachevo in Belarus into a nearby forest. In 1942, around 2,900 local Jewish people had taken the same track from the nearby ghetto to be machine-gunned into a mass grave.

I was on assignment for e Independent. e rst — and only — British Nazi war crimes trial to reach a verdict was also the rst time that a British court had convened abroad, complete with judge and jury. Anthony Sawoniuk, an elderly retired British rail ticket collector, was eventually found guilty of murder. Sentenced to life, he died in prison six years later.

Britain, like Canada, the United States and Australia, gave sanctuary to legions of Nazi war criminals after 1945. ey included Ukrainians, Belarusians, Hungarians, Latvians and Lithuanians who had joined the Nazis’ auxiliary forces. A good number of the mass killers found refuge in Australia.

Many were recognised by Jewish survivors who passed on their details to the police. ey refused to take any action. Instead, as Our Dad the Nazi Killer reveals,

danny ben-moshe’s engrossing, moving documentary, showing on BBC iPlayer, follows Jack, Jon and Sam Green as they try to uncover the mystery of their father Boris’s life in post-war Melbourne. Apart from his brother Fima, Boris’s entire family was murdered. Boris joined the partisans, where he became an expert in explosives.

Baltic and Ukrainian Nazis aside, post-war Melbourne was a peaceful, seaside paradise. Yet during the 1950s and 1960s former Nazi auxiliaries began to meet mysterious deaths. One man had explosives attached to his head. is was judged a suicide. Others died in freak accidents or were found washed up on the seashore.

Was this the work of Boris? e brothers had long heard whispered stories about their father. Boris met the two key criteria

of any murder investigation. He had the means — his skills as a partisan and the motivation — the loss of his beloved family. Boris ran a jewellery shop where other survivors gathered and reported on the perpetrators they had spotted.

ey then retreated to another room where very serious discussions continued. His sons hired a private investigator, John Garvey, to dig much deeper. Garvey turned up all sorts of telling information and nuggets pointing to Boris’s involvement in the curious deaths. ere was no concrete proof, but that did not really matter.

Our Dad the Nazi Killer is a both a riveting historical investigation into a dark episode of post-war history and a nuanced exploration of the ethics and morality of justice, no matter how rough. Unlike Anthony Sawoniuk, Nazi collaborators in Melbourne did not live in peace for more than 40 years.

masters of the air, now showing on Apple TV+, is one of the biggest blockbusters in television history. With a budget of $250 million, no expense has been spared in telling the story of the US Eighth Air Force 100th Bomb Group.

Its Flying Fortresses, stationed in rural East Anglia, were deployed in some of the most dangerous bombing runs over Germany. A decade in the making, Masters of the Air is the third Second World War series to be produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg.

Masters of the Air is a companion to e Paci c, which followed a company of Marines, and Band of Brothers, which told the story of a group of paratroopers in the

the police tipped o the killers that they were being watched.

Callum Turner and ustin utler in Masters of the Air

101st Airborne Division. All three are based on historical accounts and real-life stories (the earlier two series are currently available on Now TV).

is enthralling trilogy is the anti-Marvel. While Hollywood churns out endless, instantly forgettable superhero franchises, Hanks and Spielberg’s wartime dramas show that viewers still hunger for emotionally engaging, long-form immersive storytelling. e courage of so many young men, who willingly risked and often sacri ced their lives for their country, still inspires awe and admiration.

Masters of the Air’s visuals are spectacular. If you don’t own a decent-sized at-screen television, ideally with surround sound, then nd a friend who does and watch it together. e ariel combat scenes as the German ghters roar in, swerving and banking while the bomber gunners twist and spin in their seats, trying to shoot them down, are nail-biting.

After 25 missions the aircrew were stood down, but the odds were against survival. Britain’s bombers operated at night but the

I

HAVE WATCHED FOUR EPISODES AND MASTERS OF THE AIR IS MARVELLOUS, MASTERFUL DRAMA

Americans ew during the day. at made it easier to hit the target but also ramped up the danger.

Bombing an aircraft factory in Regensburg in August 1943, the group, dubbed the “Bloody Hundredth” lost nine of its 22 airplanes. Each plane had a crew of ten, all either killed or captured when an airplane went down.

the period details are evocative and beautiful. Everything feels right, from the clothes and hairstyles to the wartime pubs, clothes and cigarettes. Wartime London is vividly recreated with its smoke- lled bars and alcohol-fuelled couplings.

e hazard for any wartime series is that there is so much focus on combat that the storytelling takes a back seat. e rst couple of episodes do lack su cient character development. Initially it was hard to work out who was who and who mattered. But after that wobbly start the

characters emerge and the series rapidly nds its feet, or rather its wings.

Several promising storylines include downed airmen escaping from Nazi-occupied Belgium.

Apple releases an episode a week and I have now watched four. Masters of the Air is marvellous, masterful television drama. ●

written word, yet ours is no longer a literary culture; not in the way it was.

With all those channels available you would have thought the BBC could set aside an hour each week for a serious television show about books, and the people who write them. Instead there is a terrible programme, presented by the 49-year-old teenager Sara Cox, which starts from the premise that nobody is really interested unless a few froth-and-bubblers can be persuaded to wa e.

Michael Henderson on Radio

A Good Read should be better

●the adventures of my soul among masterpieces, Anatole France called his literary criticism. Flaubert put it slightly di erently. “I read,” he said, “in order to live.” Hurrah for those Frenchmen! We could always do with a bit of that spirit. A paradox of our age is the number of book festivals which have sprung up in a world obsessed by the image. ere is barely a town in the land which does not have a week of events devoted to the

On the wireless there is A Good Read on Radio 4, which has been presented by Harriett Gilbert since the Tremeloes ruled the hit parade. It’s not a bad programme, in the way the Cox show is grim, but it should be so much better.

gilbert kicked off the new series with a pair of Scottish reviewers. Ian Rankin is always engaging, and he chose well. Emeric Pressburger is best known for the classic lms he made with Michael Powell, as one half of e Archers, their production company. He was also a novelist, and Rankin selected e Glass Pearls, an excellent book about a Nazi sub rosa, working as a piano tuner in post-war London.

As Pressburger was a Hungarian Jew, for whom English was a fourth language, this subject was fertile soil. Astonishingly, given Pressburger’s eminence in the lm world, Gilbert didn’t appear to know he was

Jean ichel as uiat s Cabra

Jewish. Has she ever seen e Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Black Narcissus, or e Red Shoes? ey’re quite well known. e other guest, a Highland balladeer called Colin MacIntyre, went for a memoir of Jean-Michel Basquiat, who achieved a succès de scandale in the 1980s New York art world. He wasn’t very good, but painters didn’t have to be talented to win rich admirers in that credulous white-powder world.

Robert Hughes, the brilliant critic, was less dazzled by the boy wonder. He wrote a superb essay on the “featherweight” who conformed to every cliché in the book by drinking and doping himself into the grave. MacIntyre should read it.

Gilbert gave us something by a French-Afghani about a woman mourning her husband, which was par for the course. Every inch a metropolitan liberal, Gilbert is determined to broaden the range of reading material by pressing upon listeners books that are usually foreign and doggedly earnest. How about some George MacDonald Fraser or Simon Raven, to lighten the tone?

literary taste, though Les Dawson and Kenneth Williams were well-read. is show needs a transfusion. Make way, Harriett Gilbert.

annie nightingale was given a rapturous send-o , which must have puzzled the greybeards. Wasn’t she the blonde disc jockey (below) whose Radio 1 shows supplied background music for revision periods back in the Seventies? She was 83, and still taking to the oor at raves. Rather unseemly behaviour, one might think. ere’s something skew-whi about an octogenarian hoo ng away the late hours with drug-takers when the grandchildren are spending a quiet night in.

do we really need to hear any more of “magic realism”? For one thing, it’s rarely magical, and hardly ever realistic. For another, as Margaret Drabble has written, Dickens invented it in 1840, and carried it o with greater aplomb than these decorated chaps from the non-Anglophone world, however exotic they seem.

For those who put pop music on the back burner three decades ago it was mystifying to read so many tributes to a lady we thought had been shunted into the sidings. “She was pleasant enough,” a pal who worked with her at Radio 1 told me. “But she was a groupie, really.” So that’s how she got the CBE.

isc ockey nnie Nightingale followed musical fashion but fellow J Tony lackburn has loughed his own furrow

If only the host would expand the range of guests. Some weeks there are comedians and groovy journalists. Other weeks there are groovy journalists and comedians. On the second show in the current series there was a female footballer. Well, you feel such a fool without one.

Comedians have never been arbiters of

Tony Blackburn OBE, meanwhile, has turned 81. How gaily we adolescents used to laugh at him in the old days, as we tuned in to John Peel, and how smug we were.

Peel did his bit, but he and Nightingale were feathers for every wind. When the weathercock shifted, so did they. e fear of missing out on the next thing was too shaming. Blackburn never had any wish to be fashionable. He played records he liked, without embarrassment, and he’s still at it on Sunday nights on Radio 2.

And consider this. In 1971 his enthusiasm for “I’m Still Waiting” carried Diana Ross to No 1. It was the best record she ever made, and miles better than some of the rubbish Nightingale played. Chapeau, Mr B. ●

Ben Sixsmith on Podcasts

How to mainline true crime

●in the united states a couple of years ago, a rumour spread on Facebook that a serial killer was on the loose. “Wrong,” said the police. e rumour was false and the photo of the “murderer” that was being passed around was of a man who had been jailed on unrelated charges. Somehow, though, versions of the same rumour popped up in California, Texas, Illinois, Louisiana and Tennessee.

I’m sure some of the people who passed along the rumours were genuinely scared. Others, though, were fascinated. From books, to Net ix documentaries, to podcast series, millions of us cannot get enough of reading, and watching, and listening to media about the worst of crimes and the worst of criminals. It’s nothing new. As Kate Summerscale wrote in e Suspicions of Mr Whicher, “detective fever” has been around since the 1800s. Our fascination with criminals is older still.

e current popularity of true crime stories can lead to some unpleasantly exploitative media. “When listening to a true crime podcast,” the charmless creator of the American true crime podcast Sword and Scale asked his fans on Twitter in 2022, “which race do you prefer the murder victims to be?”

jack hardy and caroline cheetham of the Daily Mail’s podcast e Trial are keen not to behave as if they are enjoying the morbid details of the crimes that they discuss. Funereal music plays in the background, while Hardy and Cheetham’s tone oozes sympathy.

is gets a bit over the top. e pair are so sensitive to the need to emphasise the gravity of the events they discuss that “Welcome to episode one” is delivered in the same sombre tones as “Her body had

entertainment, not pure information, and there is always an exploitative aspect to this.

there is always an exploitative aspect to this. so

when

been found”.

Still, the seriousness is welcome. After all, e Trial is not simply covering historical crimes but alleged crimes for which people are currently on trial. e facts have to come rst — and there must be a clear distinction between what is known and what is alleged.

previous episodes have covered the trial of the nurse Lucy Letby, the killing of Irish schoolteacher Ashling Murphy and the murder of the teenager Brianna Ghey. Now, Hardy and Cheetham are covering the trial of Mark Gordon and Constance Marten (above).

Charged with manslaughter over the death of their baby girl, the public interest in Gordon and Marten’s case is hardly surprising given the nature of the alleged crime, their dramatic ight from social services and the police and Marten’s aristocratic background.

e solemn tone and laser focus on the court proceedings — without extra opinionating from the presenters — amount to a commendable attempt to avoid exploitativeness. e problem is that there is no reason to listen to the podcast except for morbid curiosity. Why else would you follow a podcast about the tragic death of a little girl?

For all of Hardy and Cheetham’s e orts, then, this makes the whole project comparable to an erotic lm in which the participants keep announcing, mid-coitus, that it is in fact an instructional video for biology students.

It’s a nice try, but it is essentially delusional. People are tuning in for

Covering ongoing trials only makes this doubly true. ere are no deeper cultural or psychological themes, at least discernibly, because so many of the facts have yet to be con rmed — besides which, the listener is inevitably encouraged to play at being a detective, which seems unhealthy when no o cial account has been established. is is pure morbidity — the neat alcohol of true crime podcasts.

the same awkwardness haunted the Financial Times reporter Miles Johnson’s Hot Money — e New Narcos, which nished its second season in December but is still available to listen to at Pushkin Industries. Johnson tells the fascinating story of the Kinahan Cartel, a gang of family-oriented Irish mobsters involved in drugs, money laundering and murder, in a bland, chatty style, as if he is reading the nancial news.

Johnson’s interviewees, though, which include some of the detectives who have chased the Kinahans between Dublin and Dubai, are far more charismatic. is makes sense. ey have earned their emotional investment in the narrative. War stories, after all, are best coming from soldiers.

Johnson’s series is both entertaining and disturbing as it explores how “the line between criminal activity and state-backed enterprise, between big business and gangsters, has become fuzzier”. (Was it ever all that clear? Maybe not. But it is a good story nonetheless.) e true crime junkie can get their x of entertainment yet be informed as well.

Meanwhile, ecstasy tra cker turned podcaster Shaun Attwood is still churning out content. Attwood was released from prison in 2007 and has turned himself into a media machine. His various platforms are seething with interviews about gangsters, Meghan Markle, Je rey Epstein, Jimmy Savile, the Illuminati and the paranormal — anything to grab someone’s attention. It’s a tough business, podcasting. But, then, so is organised crime. ●

Save this perfect Welsh building Charles Saumarez Smith on Architecture

●Ca tion deni cum uunte estis dolorernam veliscide laborum ex et et aut ui

over the last sixmonths or so, I have become mildly obsessed about the fate of a perfect example of arts-andcrafts architecture — the Church Institute in Llanfairfechan, a seaside resort o the coast road between Conway and Bangor in North Wales.

In early July last year, I received a text from Andrew Hinchcli who has devotedly looked after the Church Institute and the adjacent Churchmen’s Club, telling me that he and his fellow trustee of the Institute, Pam Phillips, its architect’s granddaughter, had come to the reluctant conclusion that they can no longer look after the two buildings on their own.

ey have decided that they may have to put them on the open market. He knew that I greatly admire the buildings, which I rst saw in 2014, alerted to their existence by Jon Savage, the historian of punk rock. e Church Institute at Llanfairfechan opened in 1911. It was designed free of charge by Herbert Luck North, the arts-and-crafts architect who lived in a nearby house, Wern Isaf, which he had built for himself in 1898 while working for Edwin Lutyens in London.

He moved from London to north Wales in 1901 and established an independent architectural practice, designing small model houses in the locality in the style of Hampstead Garden Suburb — perfect examples of thoughtful, intelligently designed, domestic architecture, free of any residual Gothicism, each one di erent and all of them full of character. Many survive and are rightly admired, although they are less well known than if they were in the home counties.

after the local schoolhad grown too small to accommodate village

meetings, Herbert North’s mother gave the land for the construction of a Church Institute, to be nanced by public subscription. It’s a beautiful building in the heart of the village, used before the First World War for pageants organised by Herbert North’s wife, Ida, as well as ri e practice in preparation for the war.

When the servicemen came back from the war, they were upset to discover that the Church Institute had been taken over by the women of the village, so North constructed an adjacent Churchmen’s Club for the men in the same style with a prominent slate pitched roof and two full-sized snooker tables.

I don’t know anywhere which is so redolent of the community spirit that used to exist in villages and small towns before TV. But, unfortunately, the days when buildings like this might be maintained at the expense of the parish or local landowner are gone. e buildings need sensitive renovation and are a touch forlorn, the Church Institute used for re drills and the Churchmen’s Club reached by a narrow and overgrown footpath alongside the Church Institute.

so, what should happen? M y first thought was that they should possibly be taken on by a public body, perhaps by the National Trust as a visitor centre to encourage people to explore aspects of North Wales other than country houses and Edward I’s castles.

North Wales’s economy is dependent upon tourism. But the National Trust has

more than enough on its plate and the Church Institute is too small to attract its interest.

Next, I was encouraged to think that the Landmark Trust could take them on, converting them into holiday cottages available for rent, using a contemporary architect as they have so brilliantly at Astley Castle north of Coventry. It turns out that they have already looked at them, but are likewise over-committed.

e Twentieth-Century Society is aware of them (they have a Welsh branch) and of the potential risk of insensitive redevelopment. But they take the view that the whole point of their Grade II* listing is that they should be protected if insensitive development is proposed.

I wish I were so con dent. Of course, there is a possibility that they might be bought by a sympathetic developer and

nside the Churchmen s Club

turned into holiday homes, preserving their character. Adam Voelcker, who has written a monograph on the work of Herbert North (the preface was written by the King when he was Prince of Wales), has done outline designs. e buildings could be turned into an architect’s o ce, which would preserve the generosity of their interior spaces, rather than carving them up into bedrooms.

there is a big riskthat they will lose the character which makes them so special. If a developer buys them, then they could be stripped of their ttings, as apparently happened to the local school.

It feels as if e orts to save and protect them should be made now. It is not as if Wales is full of arts-and-crafts architecture of the highest international standard and north Wales needs places to attract visitors.

John Betjeman wrote in 1968, “If one could make a comparison I would say that [Herbert] North is to Wales what Voysey, the early Lutyens and Baillie Scott were to England, and what George Walton and C.R. Mackintosh were to Glasgow and the lowlands of Scotland.” He is one of the unsung heroes of British architecture.

e Church Institute and Churchmen’s Club at Llanfairfechan need, and deserve, to be preserved as far as possible intact. Is there not a way that they could be turned into somewhere which would preserve the spirit and ethos of Herbert Luck North, an architect who built such a remarkable model of early twentieth-century urban development? ●

LISA HILTON

explains why she has no desire to ever return to Forestis despite its fabulous food THIS PAGE

FELIPE FERNÁNDEZARMESTO accepts a challenge and then proceeds to cheat PAGE 91

HENRY JEFFREYS

on an ancient Israeli industry finally coming good PAGE 92

RUFUS BIRD

considers auction houses’ love of luxury goods PAGE 94

CHRISTOPHER PINCHER has a fascination for vintage fountain pens PAGE 94

Barking up the wrong tree

Lisa Hilton despairs of Insta-obsessed diners who can’t see the food for the reels

Aurélie Canzoneri, India Cardona, Ines Fiorini, Starkellen, Tina Lee; if any of these names are familiar then you should be doing my job. ey and thousands like them are the women who can make or break restaurants through their reach on Instagram. at hospitality has been adapting itself to social media for more than a decade isn’t exactly news, but until I saw the ladies in action at Forestis in the Valle Isarco I had no idea of the depth of the shift. is goes beyond appealing plate assembly, or even entire locales being designed to look good on an Insta reel (such as El&N, which pitched itself as “the world’s most Instagrammable café” when it launched in 2017). is is bigger. e entire raison d’etre of Forestis, from the architecture to the co ee cups to the marvellously photogenic sta , appears to be the generation of content for Meta.

Forestis began life as a mountain sanatorium, converted into a hotel in 2015 with the addition of three incongruous-yet-uncompromisingly-stylish towers. e vast spa, the restaurant and the rooms are orientated for maximally magni cent views of the Puez-Odle range. Overall, the feel is contemporary Alpine luxe, spacious, serene and expensively honey-toned.

Children are o cially banned, older people, one suspects, gently discouraged. Not that Forestis is for hedonists in search of Mykonos vibes; this brand of sybarism is serious work. At 7am,

PATRICK GALBRAITH says vegans are turning back to meat — as well as to open marriages

PAGE 96

STEPHEN POLLARD offers some early tips for Cheltenam after his success last year

PAGE 97

HANNAH BETTS on why you should keep your (white) shirt on PAGE 98

CLAUDIA SAVAGE-GORE embraces “radical acceptance”

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three elaborate photo shoots were already in progress in the outdoor pool. e girls posed and pouted as the sun rose pinkly over the peaks, their boyfriends/photographers wrangling ringlights through the snow. One of them turned slowly blue as his subject spent twenty minutes climbing in and out of the sauna plunge, naturally fashioned from a rustic wooden barrel.

They were at it in the restaurant too, a tiered, glass-fronted amphitheatre of curved white leather banquettes. e scale of the view is spectacular, not that anyone was looking at it with their actual eyes. Forestis’s kitchen is run by Roland Lamprecht, whose career throughout Central Europe has focused on “terroir complicity”, which I think means ne dining uncompromised by eco-carelessness.

In the evening, the kitchen o ers three menus, à la carte, a seven-course

set and a detox version which is the set with the carbs removed.

Local grains, cheeses and vegetables are elevated with pickled or fermented relishes, hearty traditional recipes re ned and lightened.

Roasted- our ravioli bathed delicately in a lichen tea, braised winter leeks from nearby Merano perched on pillows of späetzle, cauli ower with mustard, honey and almonds, grilled slivers of polenta striped with seared ricotta and charred roots — the dishes were varied, intense yet harmonious, contriving to achieve far more than the sum of their relatively humble parts.

Woodsy aromatic herbs, bark reductions and pine needles provided spikes of unexpected savour, wild cherries and raspberries lent tart sweetness to just-touched venison.

Desserts were similarly thoughtful, deconstructed strudel, bitter chocolate sorbet. ere was an impressive lack of reliance on conventionally opulent ingredients and even after seven courses one felt one could manage a couple of misty laps, assuming there was space between the ’Grammers.

Unlike the majority of his customers, Lamprecht isn’t concocting an enhanced version of reality, but the huge integrity of his food deserves better than the setting. Not that Forestis is anything but gorgeous, even awless, yet the grim intensity of its like-obsessed clientele casts a pall which even the scenery and the impeccable service can’t overcome.

Eating there is entirely unconvivial, each enclosed table cocooned in self-regard masquerading as privacy. No-one converses, let alone laughs. e wine list is packed with gems, including an exceptional 2015 Lagrein, but everyone except me was too anxious about their close-ups to order from it. e food is exquisitely arranged, carefully piled in contrasting

palette tones and prinked out with micro- owers, but it’s a backdrop, like the white jade snowbanks in the forest outside. Un ltered moonlight can’t compete with the glow of a hundred scrolling screens.

For India, Star & co, this joyless concentration is legitimate enough. ey earn their livings through engagement. Equally, a commercial business which rejected opportunities for such engagement would be wilfully dumb in the present climate. Forestis can do 120 covers a night and maybe they don’t mind if the food comes back uneaten, but it seems a terrible waste in every way.

Clearly, they care profoundly about what they are doing, and one can certainly taste it on the plate, but those carefully-foraged wild mushrooms and cheeky little root artichokes might as well be made of plastic. After visiting

EATING IN

Forestis I found an online support group for recovering Boyfriends of Instagram, where the poor chaps shared their stories of holidays wasted on capturing the perfect shoreline beach angle and destinations dictated by their fashionability on social media.

Forestis has bet the organic farm on Insta ratings but given the cyclonic rather than cyclic speed at which trends now move (2021 is currently described as “vintage”), this might prove unwise in the long term.

A beautiful space in a beautiful place, it really doesn’t need any more sel es. Sadly, until the in uencers move on, it will never be somewhere I’d want to return to. ●

Forestis: Palmschoss 22, South Tyrol, Brixen, Italy, 39042

Sticky situation

Felipe Fernández-Armesto accepts a challenge from his wife

“T

he trouble with you,” my wife began, before pausing dramatically.

I braced myself for a litany of defects. “ e trouble,” she continued, “is that you’re too proud and lazy to follow recipes. You won’t acknowledge anyone else’s ideas and you can’t be bothered to give them a try.”

I took a moment to consider, then dismissed the charge.

I dislike recipes because they come

prescriptively, de haut en bas. Readers of this column know that I eschew imperative verbs. I want to liberate cooks from the didactic tyrants and celebrity pettifoggers. I resent the notion that there’s one way to make anything. I detest recipe-writers’ habitual indi erence to the history and chemistry of dishes — which is usually more interesting than contents lists and purported cooking times. I reject quantitative nit-picking: computation is

Table Talk

the enemy of art. Cookery is inspiration, not engineering.

“You’re just trying,” my wife replied, “to conceal your arrogance and indolence. If you had the humility to just follow a recipe occasionally you might improve your character as well as your cooking.”

Stung by reproof, I foolishly accepted the challenge. e dish she named was cunningly calculated to make me fail. Sticky to ee pudding is the sort of thing I’d never willingly essay: I nd baking boring and pointless when there are professional patissiers easily and cheaply available to outclass the best homebody.

Sticky to ee pudding is, despite its name, a baked sponge cake, cloyed with treacle and dates — unless you believe the late Princess of Wales, who contributed a recipe to a charity cookbook, involving boiling the stodge for three hours. at would work for a suet pudding, but the result with a cake would be inedible. Diana Spencer was evidently as untrustworthy in boulangerie as in broadcast or boudoir.

i pored over my wife’s cookbooks. As I suspected, everyone’s STP recipe was di erent. As I feared, all were revolting. In the historical accounts, evidence of the origins of the dish was coy and contradictory (Canadian or Scots? Teashop or clubhouse?), as if no one were quite proud enough to claim it or unwilling to blame someone else.

“Have you chosen a recipe?” my favourite critic enquired.

I resolved to cheat.

e basic mistake of the recipewriters is to honour the dish’s nursery vocation by omitting alcohol. I can think of no pudding alcohol does not enhance. A further common mistake is to give the confection the consistency of mush. I began to imagine a dish in which rum complemented the treacle and dates, with crisp crust, airy texture and fondant heart.

e dates had to be squelchy and

absorbent, chopped and spread in a shallow dish to soak up a coating of piratically dark rum, with a few extra chunks, so that the structure of a date or two is there to chew on when the pudding is served. A few hours of marinading left only a little liquid unabsorbed.

i’m incapable of pernicketiness in proportions, but roughly equal amounts of butter and the duskiest, most milled muscovado, amounting in combination to not more than twice the weight of the dates, seemed judicious. oroughly creamed, with an egg or two, and a pinch of baking powder and bicarb to add airiness, the mixture went through worrying stages of squelch and lump, while I ladled in as much treacle — black and gleaming — as my biggest

DRINK

spoon would hold, and slopped in the dates and residual rum. My wife bent curiously over the process.

So I exploited her to help with the mixing, which requires strength of arm and character. When the result was smooth, I lled a buttered baking tin — the sort you might use for a madeira cake or small loaf.

“What temperature do you want?” asked my amanuensis. I didn’t think it mattered much. e dodgy scale on our ersatz Aga said, over-optimistically, 245 degrees. I thought that to stick the mixture in for twenty or twenty- ve minutes would probably do.

It did. e rummy aroma would have awakened the 15 men from the dead man’s chest. e crust was dark and sleek, studded with toothsome dates like buried treasure. e sponge beneath was as light and gentle as a fairy’s bed; the small amount of unabsorbed rum gathered in the midst of the cake, to spill, rich and thick, over every slice.

My wife sni ed at my subterfuge. “Still,” she said, “I have to admit it’s the best STP ever.” ere was another of her dramatic pauses. “Except,” she added, “that, for me, there’s too much rum.” ●

Henry Je reys on di cult times for an ancient industry

The last time I went to a trade tasting of Israeli wines, I couldn’t believe the security. ere were thorough bag searches, a scanner, burly guards and if your name wasn’t down, there was no way you were getting in. is was a few years ago but the way things are in London at the moment, it will be even stricter this year. Despite having more acres under vine than Lebanon and Britain being the country’s third biggest export

The wines of Israel

market, Israeli wine is pretty much invisible over here. Both Berry Bros & Rudd and M&S had a go at selling it a few years ago but today if you want to get hold of some, specialist kosher retailers are your best option.

It’s not like the country doesn’t have a rich winemaking history, as anyone with any familiarity with the Bible will know. Adam Monte ore in his history of Israeli wine writes: “Wherever there were Jews, there were winemakers.”

The nished article

is would have carried on under Ottoman rule, though most of it probably wasn’t of export quality.

As in neighbouring Lebanon, modern winemaking came about through European in uence in the late nineteenth century. Similar varieties were planted too: high yielding French ones such as carignan, grenache, and cinsault which were suited to the hot climate. e biggest producer, Carmel, was founded in 1882 by Baron Edmond de Rothschild from Château La te. Its Palwin sweet kosher wine is a stalwart among Britain’s Jewish community.

After the First World War, however, the burgeoning wine industry struggled, cut o from two of its biggest markets: Russia, because of revolution, and America, because of Prohibition. Palestine came under British control. Meanwhile Lebanon’s industry thrived thanks to thirsty and discerning French soldiers, engineers and bureaucrats.

After independence in 1948, Israel was essentially a socialist country; socialism and high quality wine don’t mix. Grapes were grown in vineyards on kibbutzes with an emphasis on quantity not quality, while Carmel had a near monopoly on production.

Perhaps it was bad luck, but in the past the Israeli wines I tried seemed a little too Californian think lavish oak, glossy texture and overripe fruit. But I’ve had some rather more fun wines recently.

israeli wine expert Tal Sunderland-Cohen told me that when he was growing up in the 1980s there was no culture of wine appreciation, though a lot of wine was made for ceremonial purposes. Change, however, was afoot. A group of ambitious growers in the Golan Heights, which was captured from Syria in the 1967 war, began working with a Californian consultant to make premium wines.

Meanwhile the economy was liberalising. Tax was lowered on imported alcohol and people picked up a taste for cheap, good quality Spanish and Chilean wine. So, despite being ancient, the modern industry really only took o in the 1990s.

I was particularly taken with Kishor’s surprisingly delicate grenache, syrah and mourvèdre, a wine that will appeal to Gigondas lovers, and Tura Winery’s crunchy fresh Limited Edition, a blend of marselan and dolcetto. Another exciting development has been the rediscovery of indigenous varieties like bittuni that are thought to date back to Biblical times. “Imagine tasting a wine that King David would have drunk,” said Sunderland-Cohen.

sadly, israel is not very good at promoting its wares. Unlike in Hungary or Australia, there’s no state-backed trade organisation. Instead, writers such as Sunderland-Cohen in London or Adam Monte ore in Tel Aviv act like freelance ambassadors. Lebanon wipes the oor with Israel when it comes to collective marketing.

ere are other reasons why Israel’s wines have failed to conquer the British market. All wines currently exported are kosher, made according to strict Talmudic regulations, and people associate the word with sticky wines like Palwin No. 10, drunk at their neighbours’ son’s bar mitzvah.

And the best Israeli wines are not cheap; Israel is an expensive country. But price doesn’t put people o Burgundy, California or Switzerland. ere is something else.

moshe klein, whose company Drumstick imports wine from Israel, put it bluntly: “ e word ‘Israel’ can mean trouble. It was always the reality and it’s even more these days.” Some of the most fashionable restaurants in London such as Honey & Co and e Palomar are actually Israeli but they brand themselves as “Middle Eastern” so they can pass under the radar.

Even then they might still be subject to attacks — Pita in Golders Green was smashed up in October, before Israel invaded Gaza.

e atrocities of 7 October and the resulting war has hit the wine industry hard. Nobody is visiting wineries, many sta have been called up to ght and people don’t feel like celebrating much. Israel’s wine heartland, Galilee, is up by the Lebanon border and is now su ering from rocket attacks from Hezbollah.

One such winery is Ramot Naftaly where Einav Cohen works. She said: “ ese days, as the village is evicted, what was once our little piece of heaven has turned empty and lifeless.”

It’s hard to be optimistic but Adam Monte ore tries. He wrote recently: “On arrival in Tel Aviv, there was an air raid siren, just to remind us that we are in the middle of a war. e best antidote I know to stress is to drink wine.” ●

The Tura vineyard

Table Talk

Fine art versus luxury goods

Rufus Bird on the auction houses’ love of expensive brands

The hermès’ “kelly” bag, Cartier diamond tiaras, Louis Vuitton anything. Going onto the websites of Christie’s or Sotheby’s one could be forgiven for thinking that these global art businesses sold mostly jewellery, sports memorabilia, handbags, and the odd painting.

It’s handbags one week, a sporting hero’s footwear the next, a musical megastar’s rather fascinating detritus (see Freddie Mercury, Elton John), followed by Picasso, Italian baroque paintings and Regency silver-gilt — all oddly coexisting in a sort of quasi-department store approach to luxury sales, using the auction method of determining who wins the right to buy: the highest o er wins.

Auction houses o ering modern luxury goods alongside old master paintings and sculpture is not new: James Christie held sales of Matthew Boulton’s luxury, gilded, metal-mounted Blue John vases and candelabras in 1770 and 1771. ose sales were not especially successful, yet the process says much about the history of the art market and how we think of art and its relationship with luxury goods today.

at a recent talk, Sotheby’s UK Chairman, Harry Dalmeny, proclaimed that the management of Sotheby’s seems constantly to shift its emphasis from luxury goods to art and back again. Currently, the focus is very much on luxury goods, promoted as the gateway drug for new, younger, funkier clients that the whole art market badly needs.

Sebastian Fahey, Sotheby’s managing director of global ne art recently noted a 200 per cent increase in luxury sales since 2020 at Sotheby’s: “ ere is clearly huge potential for

further growth, and we continue to invest in this area of the business. But this growth is not, and will never be, at the expense of the ne art sales at the core of our business that de ne our brand and our DNA. e new collectors we’re attracting in our luxury sales are already migrating into ne art.”

After Chanel, Chardin? After Louis Vuitton, Vigée Le Brun?

Many people who have worked in auction houses, myself included, join on the back of an art history degree, usually with a deep desire to work close to a dizzying range of art, in return for a

meagre salary. As a way to see a huge range of works of art, from Giambologna to Giacometti, Boulle to Balthus, antiquities to “wet paint” art, it cannot be bettered.

but the auction houses are pushing hard in the direction of the Bond Street retailers: luxury brands dominate — Gucci, Dior, Chanel, YSL, Chopard, Rolex, Ti any — and this lters through into the marketing of art: Turner, Reynolds, Picasso, Monet, Gauguin, Rothko et al and the rstname only club — Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo, probably soon to be joined by the seventeenth-century artist du jour Artemisia Gentileschi (at the National Gallery, she is referred to simply as “Artemisia”).

For most of the twentieth and twenty- rst century, art has been

CHRISTOPHER PINCHER | DELUXE

Pen pusher

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expensive, sometimes very expensive, but it has always been perceived as part of a long tradition of art history reaching back to Vasari’s Lives of 1550.

Now it seems art — certainly historic art of the type found in most major museums — is struggling to nd favour with buyers and so is marketed alongside more desirable luxury objects. Little distinction is made between examples of great art suitable for a museum, and luxury objects found in expensive boutiques on Bond Street.

there was a time (in the 1990s) when traditional art galleries lled the shops up and down Bond Street. ey have been replaced by fashion and jewellery shops; and so it is with the auction houses.

e management consultants who advise on the nances of the auction

houses realised long ago that selling expensive watches, jewellery, basketball memorabilia and handbags in Mayfair and Manhattan was good business. Indeed, these luxury categories realise a greater net pro t margin than other traditional art categories, and avert the

nsur risingly as not so leased it ysel en s ortly a ter dro ed y rize on t e only ard oor sur ace in t e roo and t e da n t ing s attered But over t e years ave uneart ed any ot ers including so e lovely Englis ar ues ic ave long since een lost to istory An unusual olive green Burn a ro t e early s and a lovely ade ent ore s ring to ind

C R E, E E A T E MA HI I T THE reserve o do estic a ers As ell as ater an and ross A erica can oast S ea er ens ounded y alter S ea er on t e eve o t e irst orld ar e atented t e arrel lever refill ec anis ic re ained t e industry sta le or years e ostalgia Art Deco elegance in filigreed silver is ossi ly t eir ost andso e creation taly too is o e to e uisite en design isconti a relative ne co er to t e ar et in riting instru ents as ade ore t an an in s las it its stylis oyager and

tiresome real art world issues of handling physically large pieces of furniture, or tackling di cult attribution matters in sculpture (is this de nitely by Giambologna?) and old master paintings.

e divide and convergence between art and luxury has been an ongoing question for the major auction houses. James Christie in the 1770s pondered whether his company would be a luxury goods business selling modern trinkets or sell old-fashioned objects from aristocratic houses.

At the time, the modern luxury goods business was foundering but the fashion for aristocratic paintings and objects was solid — and so it continued to be until the late 20th century. Now it seems everything coming up for sale at Christie’s and Sotheby’s is a luxury object. ●

o ei lue ontevecc io ic er or onder ully or t ose o ad ire t e artistry o and riting a anese ens oug t to or art o any collection a ase is ro a ly t e ost e clusive a anese a er it a range o and ade o ects o stunning eauty any ere designed in t eir otorri or s o y legendary aster cra ts an aru i ana a including t e gorgeous ortoises ell tooled ro living aterial ersonally y Englis avourites re ain t e ever young lac and gold ar er slee si licity it its ooded ni and y coral coloured on ay Ste art in a crac ed ice casing on ay Ste art and ar er are undou tedly t e ing and ueen o Englis encra t not least ecause ar er as t e re erred instru ent o t e late Eliza et eir s a e design and riting relia ility are as ti eless as as t e old ueen ersel o s ould say a ord a out ni s or t ey atter enor ously ost ens are fitted it a standard ni But i you ta e ride in your and riting and ant it to atc t e eauty o t e instru ent you are using ta e t e ti e to as or an italic or an o li ue ni to e fitted ese are c iselled at an angle to gri t e a er ore strongly and allo or t ic do n ard ut t inner crossing stro es ey also slo t e and it t e result t at your and riting i not calligra ic is ore li ely to e s oot ly legi le at assu es o course t at you ant your signature to e deci ered y curious eyes en signing a large c e ue or a otel register ●

akase en

Under the hammer Old asters, old luggage

Open season

Patrick Galbraith says vegans are turning to meat — and free love

Over the past few years, I’ve written about cooking rabbit pie, frying up squirrel goujons, and making pigeon Wellington. ere have been plenty of other carnivorous episodes, so many in fact that I’ve forgotten lots of them. But what I haven’t shared is that for all the joy those culinary adventures have brought me, there’s been pain too. ere were all those vegans who didn’t eat my rabbit arancini, I had to order a Hawaiian pizza one Saturday afternoon when half my guests didn’t want slow-cooked Hebridean goose and Constance, my now ancée, convinced me about a year ago that the muntjac tartare was a bad idea.

“We’ll make it when it’s just us,” she reasoned, “or when it’s only people we know well. We don’t want to poison new friends with raw venison. And half the people I’ve invited don’t eat meat anyway.”

It sort of seems, though, that things are changing. It should have been obvious when I turned up at the pub in December and the same friends that used to go on about being vegan were telling everybody about their decision to have open marriages.

Veganism, I guess, was interesting for a while but when everyone’s at it, if you’re to have any hope of still being talked about, you’ve got to start sleeping with your neighbours.

L ast month, for a podcast I’m currently working on, I cycled over to Sophie’s Steakhouse in Soho. It’s a sort of midmarket Americana kind of place, but with quality British beef from native breeds. What she wants, Sophie told me, as we stood in front of a large tray of well-aged “axe-handle” ribeyes that were about to be cooked over an open ame, is for people to eat less meat but

for that meat to be better quality stu from farms where conservation is a priority.

She admits there was a time, not that long ago, when it seemed that running a steakhouse was slightly mad. e kitchen had to get creative with the menu in order to cater for all the vegans that turned up (“What do you mean this steakhouse has no plant-based mains?”). But, and I wonder if it’s because post-Covid people just want to enjoy life, those days seem to have passed.

At the same time, vegan restaurants are feeling the bite. Just a couple of

weeks ago, Nomas Gastrobar in Manchester announced it would be adding “responsibly-sourced meat” to its menu, including kebabs. ey seemingly reckoned they were ahead of the curve when they opened in 2020, but it transpires the wagon may have already been rolling at full tilt.

In short, Nomas Gastrobar is nding it has to give the people what they want. Nomas is not the only place facing the music. On the other side of Manchester, Greens, which used to boast about “terrifying carnivores”, closed its doors in January.

I recently read that Truman Capote was paid up to $4 a word when he wrote for magazines in the 1960s. Rates like that and the advance from In Cold Blood allowed him to splash $16,000 on his “black and white ball” at

STEPHEN POLLARD | TURF ACCOUNT

Best bets for Cheltenham

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the Plaza Hotel in New York in 1966 one of the very few parties that ended up with its own Wikipedia page. Rates for magazine work have changed somewhat and accordingly my looming wedding will, I suppose, be a more modest event. I’m planning to shoot two Chinese water deer and slow

cook them over coals. I guess by then I’ll probably still have one or two friends keeping up with the vegan thing, so I suppose I’ll end up walking the hedgerows with a Tupperware to nd them some berries.

What does genuinely sadden me, though, is that many of my friends seem

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IC HE ER TA E RATE IR I ER

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to have pivoted from eating no meat at all on ethical and environmental grounds, to eating all of it, from chickens raised in crates to imported pork from China that comes from pigs that have been raised in ways that would make you cry.

Surely they, as formerly environmentally-conscious people, should have gone from eating like rabbits to only eating things like rabbit. After all, it’s perfectly possible to be very eco and very carnivorous.

For my part, I’m trying to stick with wild game, venison and beef from native breeds. Even though it might be rapidly falling out of fashion, I think at this stage in life, I’ll probably stick with monogamy too. Not least because where would a freelance writer possibly nd the time? ●

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Paul Townend and Galo in es Cham s

STYLE

IKeep your shirt on

Hannah Betts on a ubiquitous new fashion phenomenon

s it a sign of fashion’s being essentially teenage — or merely human — that it invariably exists in a state of contraction? For, when one thing is happening, so its opposite will also be the case.

Accordingly, we are still witnessing a penchant for quiet luxury, elevated normcore, the extraordinary everyday etc., etc. is translates as a focus on clothes rather than fashion, quality, simplicity, minimalism, monochrome, trousers, trench coats, polo shirts and jeans; staples that spell a certain narrative erasure, plus genuine satisfaction/utter tedium, depending on your point of view.

And, yet, at the same moment, we have romance, Renaissance-core, roses, transparency, tin-foil metallics, craft, and a collective crush on “building worlds” the phrase rolled out as part of the rapturous response to John Galliano’s recent couture show for Maison Margiela.

Yes, the same John Galliano cancelled in 2011 for not-so neo-Nazidom. He’s back and bringing us “a walk through the underbelly of Paris”, his underbelly of choice, complete with body-morphing corsetry, tiered latex, expansive areolae, squirrelish merkins, and a veritable ministry of silly walks.

Valentino’s Fall 2023 catwalk (above) , not in the traditional gown, but an oversized white cotton shirt. Burberry, Chanel and Dior followed suit on their ready-to-wear runways, the latter boasting white shirts in no fewer than 17 of its looks, at £1.5-£2k a pop. Victoria Beckham sported one in her Net ix doc to semaphore “low-key” while being ostentatious as fuck, ditto the Prince of Wales’s fam on its Christmas card.

Naomi Campbell showcases her own Naomi X Boss incarnation (£199, hugoboss.com) on the cover of March Elle with an exhortation to “style out the shirt” while Vogue has decreed: “If you buy one new thing, make it a white shirt.” So ubiquitous a phenomenon is this that even the man I sleep with said: “Oh, right, that white shirt with massive jeans thing everybody’s doing” on inquiring what I would be opining about. So, you know, it’s that obv.

in a world of fashion overkill, some new “-core” vomited forth every second, I get the need for an expressionless void. I basically am an expressionless void. However, in Audrey terms, mine’s the black polo neck of Funny Face’s beatnik rather than the white shirt of Roman Holiday’s patrician on the loose.

waitress or grey-faced schoolchild. Maybe they look better on the super beautiful à la the 1988 Lindbergh shoot of future super models disporting themselves on a beach, super thin, super young and/or super blonde. Or maybe I’ve never found an exquisite enough specimen?

this is harder than it seems for the female of the species. Freud was barking up the wrong tree: we don’t have penis envy, we have shirt envy. Former Vogue stylist Pip Durell deployed hers as the impetus for kicking o her modish shirt brand, WNU (With Nothing Underneath), back in 2017, having become frustrated by the lack of decent options.

unless you leave your skirt off, the white shirt anti-trend trend is going to be part of the former vibe rather than the latter. is too was canonised via couture, when Cindy Crawford’s o spring, Kaia Gerber, kicked o

I’ve always fangirled Sharon Stone’s Gap man’s shirt/ritzy skirt Oscars look of 1998, and can entirely see the merits of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy’s 90s sleek-shirted mode (above right). However, if I don a white shirt, I feel drably dull, resembling a put-upon

“I wanted to give the sort of e ortless, middle o ering that men have always had — quality shirts at an accessible price,” she tells me. A third of WNU’s sales are driven by white takes, with the £95 Boyfriend style a bestseller. is basic boyfriend is too basic for me. (Read: I am too basic for it.)

However, WNU’s Dress Shirt in organic poplin (£150, withnothingunderneath. com) is chef’s kiss: with its black-tie bib and option of a double cu . e look is: “I scored some hot piece of city ass,

then stole his shirt to cab home,” a look I once lived and still dig. However, if a degree of borrowed-from-the-boyz oversize is an anathema, then seek out ME + EM’s Cotton Bib Detail Crop Shirt (£165, meandem.com), with its bulk-limiting curtailed waist.

Don your white shirt with a ash of scarlet à la the fashion bitches. I had acquired a Tom Ford-era YSL silk scarf from Vestiaire to be sported in the manner of a post French Rev throat ribbon, only some bastard lched it en route. I declare myself o cially mi ed. ●

Resistance is futile

Claudia Savage-Gore has been driven to “radical acceptance”

Will’s obsession with Zoe, the health app (not mistress), continues. Not a snack goes by without an enlightening comment on Ultra Processed Foods. As a result we’re now being treated to Will’s bread.

It’s gluten free — yup, that’s my husband, wildly late to the party — and retch-inducingly dry. Will keeps saying how great bread tastes without emulsi ers. e children won’t touch it.

New identity as artisanal baker also not ideal as our cleaner only comes twice a week, and Will invariably starts the process the minute she leaves. is is what happens when he’s WFH!

And as much as I’ve tried to explain that Gail’s sourdough is not, in fact, a UPF, Will’s adamant that he needs to “know what’s going into his food”. Damn you, Chris Van Tulleken.

I’m also still hearing way too much about Will’s “gut biome”. It’s only been a couple of years since my active involvement in Hector’s poo ceased, and now I have to hear about my husband’s! Damn you too, Tim Spector.

Essentially, I’ve been driven to “radical acceptance”, as extolled by my friend Jaspar. On paper Jas hasn’t really had to accept anything too bad — his great grandfather invented tin foil or tea bags or something, and his mother is a descendant of Nancy Mitford.

Basically, he’s Getty-level loaded. But apparently this is quite the emotional burden. How I’d love to experience the stress of a giant trust fund (as opposed to a pointless one that just about covers the kids’ school fees).

Anyway, we met on this yoga retreat in Formentera, ve years ago. I was there because I needed to escape the children

Table Talk

(they were all under ten), and Jaspar had just some kind of breakdown — see above re stress of inherited wealth.

Up until then he’d been self-medicating (massive cocaine habit) so he’d come to this place after three months in Ibiza to look at the sea etc. en he ended up staying ve years and is now a “retreat leader” preaching mindfulness, and wearing prayer beads. All of which is acceptable because he looks so like a posh Brad Pitt.

Last time we met he was telling me all about a Buddhist (I think) practice called Radical Acceptance. At rst I was like, yes, yes, keep talking so I can keep staring into your limpid eyes. en it started to actually make quite a lot of sense. Acceptance as an act of protest. Not as a submissive, passive surrender. Not a feeble “we are where we are”. But an active statement. ese, then, are the various things which I must radically accept:

● Will’s references to his “Zoe journey”. Only Jaspar can talk about journeys. Still, radical acceptance

● Will’s bread. Because I don’t actually want a divorce

● Mother in Hector’s class who can’t let any WhatsApp message go without an embarrassed monkey emoji

● Work emails beginning “a gentle reminder”

● My stomach. e pre-baby rigidity was a transient dream. e moveable version is the authentic me

● My “under eye area”. Sounds obscene, and is

● e way the same bulb keeps going in the kitchen

● Realisation I should have bought a deeper butler’s sink in the utility room

● e PTA. At all three goddam schools! ey’re the same everywhere

— perkier than an Oatly carton

● Possibility that Minnie won’t even get into an Exeter-level university

● Reality that Hector won’t get into a school anyone has even heard of

● Lyra’s volume level

● Zoe. And gut-chat ●

NU s ress hirt

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NICK

tImothy

How to destroy football

Anyone who has watched football let alone played at a high standard or studied the game seriously — knows that the latest wheeze dreamt up by the desk wallahs of world football is a dud.

From this summer, FOOTBALL WILL TRIAL BLUE CARDS . Having missed the lessons at junior school about mixing primary colours, the International Football Association Board came up with blue cards as a mid-point between a yellow card and a red. While a yellow is a warning, and a red an instruction to leave the pitch for the rest of the game, a blue card would send a player to a SIN BIN FOR TEN MINUTES of play.

e motive for the change is understandable. e proposal limits blue cards to dissent against the referee and tactical fouls designed to prevent promising attacks. And the inspiration for the change is clear enough too. Sin bins are used in other sports such as rugby. Football fans — sick of the disrespect and cynicism of the high-stakes modern game — often look at rugby with envy. In rugby, players address the referee as “sir” and unlike your average Manchester United mid elder — who these days are indeed very average — would not dream of screaming expletives in the face of a touch judge.

Yet it is not hard to see how the idea will fall faster than Bukayo Saka in the penalty area. First, the incentives to dive and to pressure referees will grow even further. Players already demand referees show a yellow card for any number of fouls. e temptation to get an opponent sent to the sin bin will only encourage such behaviour.

Second, once a team has a player sent to the sin bin, there will be new incentives to play negative and cynical football. ey will take an eternity to take throw-ins, corners and goal

kicks in the hope of winding down the clock. ey will form what is known as a “low block” — a defensive formation that aims to sti e the opposition — while doing little to take the game to their opponents.

ird, it will increase the stakes for marginal and subjective calls. We have all watched matches where a referee tolerates abuse from the likes of professional whingers like Bruno Fernandes, only to book an opposing player for something that seems innocuous.

And we all know there can be little di erence between what commentators call a “coming together” of two players who end up on the ground, and a cynical shove or trip that stops a promising counter-attack. Drastic consequences for almost random decision-making cannot be good for the sport.

And the sport has already become over-complicated. Consider the handball laws, which once seemed pretty clear. My generation was brought up understanding that handball had to be deliberate, and applied to the whole arm, but not the shoulder. “Ball to hand!” was the cry of a player whose arm had been struck accidentally by the ball.

Now the laws say it is handball if the ball touches a player’s hand or arm when the player “has made their body unnaturally bigger. A player is considered to have made their body unnaturally bigger when the position of their hand/arm is not a consequence of, or justi able by, the player’s body movement for that speci c situation.” is complexity has unsurprisingly been a recipe for disaster — with subjective calls having enormous consequences and similar incidents being judged in very di erent ways.

e same applies with o side laws. Attacking players beyond the last defender are not deemed to be o side if they are not interfering with play. But deciding what interfering with play means these days is another mine eld. Players can make

FlourIshIng a blue card (left).

CheslIn Kolbe of South AfrIca In the sIn bIn after receIvIng a yellow card durIng the Rugby World Cup FInal In ParIs

runs just ahead of where the ball is played through to another, they can distract defenders in the penalty area or even six-yard box, and be judged not o side. Inevitably, this creates yet more subjective decision-making with inconsistent outcomes.

Refereeing is not, as some fans claim, corrupt. But it would be naïve to believe that referees are not in uenced by the noisiest managers and players, the high stakes for teams vying for the Premier League title and Champions League places, and the sheer media coverage devoted to certain clubs.

When most fans believe some players and teams bene t most from subjective and marginal calls, this is not the stu of paranoia but the wisdom of crowds. It is the consequence of basic human psychology and the fear of making mistakes.

The introduction into football of VAR — the VIDEO ASSISTANT REFEREE — only seems to make this point more obvious. Using technology has succeeded in rooting out some, some, of the most obvious and egregious errors. But mostly it has ampli ed the fallibility, assumptions and unconscious biases of referees. And it has exposed the fact that both the laws of the game and their enforcement are growing more complex and less predictable than before.

Adding blue cards to this complicated mix risks compounding existing problems with new ones. In so many ways, football is more skilful, tactically sophisticated and entertaining than ever before. But often this is despite, not because of, the administrators and referees, who struggle to enforce existing laws. “You know what [this is] going to do to our game?” asked Tottenham’s manager, Ange Postecoglou, recently. “It’s going to destroy it mate.” To that Aussie candour, we can only say fair dinkum. ●

Nick Timothy is the author of Remaking One Nation: e Future of Conservatism and a Daily Telegraph columnist

fIre and Ice borıs starlıng

Sport at its best is de ned not by one performer but two, by a rivalry which elevates and inspires both participants. John McEnroe was left distraught when Björn Borg walked away from tennis: Ayrton Senna repeatedly tried to persuade Alain Prost to reverse his decision to retire.

So amidst all the hoopla about JÜRGEN KLOPP leaving Liverpool at the end of the season, spare a thought for PEP GUARDIOLA . For eight seasons — Klopp arrived at An eld in October 2015, Guardiola joined Manchester City in August 2016 — they have been the standout managers in the Premiership. But soon there will be only one, and it’s not too fanciful to imagine that when Klopp departs a part of Guardiola will go with him too.

Guardiola has called Klopp “the toughest opponent I have faced as a manager”, which is quite the compliment when you consider some of the other names on that list. “He helped me to

be a better manager: he gave me another level to think about it, to prove myself. It’s the reason why I’m still in this business.”

Theirs is the second great MANAGERIAL RIVALRY of the Premiership era. e rst was, of course, between Alex Ferguson and Arsène Wenger, fuelled by genuine personal animosity and the way in which their respective captains, Roy Keane and Patrick Vieira, acted as their bosses’ on eld ids, snarling and scrapping for every ball. e Jürgen and Pep show is no less intense, but it is not as overtly confrontational. ey are not close friends, but nor are they sworn enemies. eir respect for each other is deep and genuine, and when they praise the other it’s not for the cameras: it’s because they mean it.

Ostensibly, the two men t the obvious template of re and ice, just as McEnroe did with Borg and Senna with Prost. Klopp can be seen as the air-punching, touchline-sprinting, boominglaugh extrovert whose teams play heavy metal football, relentlessly pressing and harrying; Guardiola as the turtleneckwearing, gnomic quote-giving, obsessively professorial

Extrovert Jurgen Klopp

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introvert whose teams are all possession and passing, angles and slick patterns.

But such stereotyping does both men a disservice, for as their rivalry has deepened and matured so too have they borrowed increasing amounts from each other. Trent Alexander-Arnold has followed John Stones in switching seamlessly from defence into mid eld when his team is in possession: Manchester City now press harder and play up and down the pitch much more quickly than they did a few years ago.

ey are still recognisably di erent sides, but they have edged considerably closer together — a merging of thesis and antithesis towards synthesis which would have delighted Klopp’s countryman Georg Hegel.

Perhaps not coincidentally, this has also led to each manager nally winning what they most coveted: the other man’s speciality. Klopp, the man for big European nights, managed to get his hands on Liverpool’s rst Premiership title in 2019/20; Guardiola, serial domestic league winner, secured Manchester City’s rst Champions League last year at the seventh time of asking.

e statistics alone show the extent of their mutual dominance. As Premiership managers, they have reached ve Champions League nals between them and spearheaded a period of English hegemony in Europe (seven of the past 12 nalists have been English). ey are responsible for the four highest points totals in Premiership history, including the only centurions (Guardiola’s 2017/18 side) and the highest-ever losing score (97, for Klopp in 2018/19).

at latter season in particular was extraordinary, with City triumphant by a single point after each side had won their nal nine matches: twin strands of near-perfection as they strived to maintain or close that narrowest of gaps. ree seasons later they did it again: one defeat between them in the second half of the season, and again City holding on to win by a point.

Even — especially — in such circumstances, top-of-thetable clashes can often be cautious, dour a airs. It is testament to both Klopp and Guardiola that this has rarely been the case under them. For example, both their Premiership matches in 2021/22 ended 2-2, and over 180 minutes you couldn’t look away for a second: both sides going at it hammer and tongs with quality and passion.

The Italian manager Arrigo Sacchi said that “Football must be domination and beauty, music and culture.” And it is this, rather than judging either man merely by the abacus, which has made the Klopp-Guardiola rivalry so special. “As Jürgen has said many times,” Guardiola once observed, “titles are just like

numbers. It’s the emotion that people feel during the 90 minutes that they’re watching us that’s the real reason we’re in the job.”

When will Guardiola go? Sooner rather than later, perhaps: last season’s treble means he has won everything there is, and he has already been at City longer than at Bayern and Barcelona combined.

“Maybe when we both nish our careers,” Klopp has said, “we might meet somewhere, sit together for hours and hours, and just speak about the di erent things we saw, in this game and that game.” If by chance you happen to nd yourself in the same restaurant as them that day, send over a decent bottle by way of thanks for what they have given us. It may be some time before we see their like again. ●

Boris Starling is an award-winning writer. He has written Open Side with Sam Warburton and Rise with Siya Kolisi

patrıck KıDD

Hobbs recalled

It took a lot to fluster the man they called e Master. But on March 9, 1929, more than 20 years into his Test career, JACK HOBBS was nally stumped by a Canadian actress in the dining room of a Melbourne hotel. e England and Surrey batsman had returned to the Hotel Windsor with his wife after making 142 in what he had announced would be his nal Test match. As they entered the restaurant, the band struck up “See, e Conquering Hero Comes!”, followed by “For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow”, after which Hobbs was coyly approached by Miss Margaret Bannerman, an actress of the silent screen.

“May I have the privilege?” asked the star of Lady Audley’s Secret and e Gay Lord Quex, before planting a smacker on his reddening cheek. “ e man whose calm on the cricket eld has apparently never been disturbed,” a local paper reported, “was the picture of bewildered embarrassment.”

If any batsman deserved such favour that series it should have been Wally Hammond, whose 905 runs at an average of 113 helped England to win the Ashes 4-1, but the priapic

Introvert Pep GuardIola

Mr and Mrs Hobbs

There is still the Hobbs Gate at the Oval, but how many who walk through it know much of his achievements?

Gloucestershire swordsman was seldom short of kisses. And in any case, few would have disputed (save, perhaps, Mrs Hobbs) that Jack had earned the lady’s a ection having just become, at the age of 46 years and 82 days, the oldest cricketer to make a Test century.

Ninety- ve years on, Hobbs still holds a record that is unlikely ever to be broken. e oldest century-maker in Tests since the Second World War, Pakistan’s Misbah-ul-Haq, was just 42. Only W.G. Grace, in 1896, and George Gunn, in 1930, have registered even a half-century at an older age than Hobbs when he made that hundred in Melbourne. Nor was he done. Despite having said that this would be his last Test, Hobbs played on for another 18 months, making four more fties for England before drawing stumps on his international career.

Though Hobbs was given the title of “The Master” by Douglas Jardine in 1932, when he made a century in each innings against Essex at the age of 49, the M word had rst been associated with him 20 years earlier in e Times after his batting on wet wickets. No more discerning a judge than Herbert Sutcli e, who shared 15 century stands with Hobbs in just 38 Test innings, said that while Australia’s Donald Bradman was unsurpassed on good wickets, his old opening partner stood above all for his brilliance when the conditions were poor.

In all, Hobbs made 199 rst-class centuries — exactly one hundred of them after his fortieth birthday — and he still averaged in the 60s in the season after he turned 50. As his Wisden obituary put it: “ e more his years increased, the riper his harvests.” Bradman, whose Test batting average of 99.94 is as unlikely ever to be beaten as Hobbs’s form in middle age,

made a mere 117 centuries. How much greater could e Don have been if only he had been able to bat on bad wickets?

And how many more rst-class runs than his extraordinary 61,760 could Hobbs have run up if he didn’t believe in letting others have their turn?

“He could have scored thousands more runs,” Wilfred Rhodes, his rst great opening partner, said. Only 16 of his 199 centuries were doubles (the sixth most but far behind Bradman’s 37 and Hammond’s 36) and with 274 fties he must have left some hundreds out on the park. Hobbs saw his job as being to see o the new ball and keep the ship steady when the bowling was lively so that others could cash in. “ at was the time you had to earn your living,” he said.

In 1953, the broadcaster John Arlott organised a dinner to celebrate Hobbs being knighted. e Master’s Club has continued to meet for the past 70 years on December 16, Hobbs’s birthday, where they dine on his favourite menu of tomato soup, roast lamb and apple pie.

Hobbs had been raised in poverty, the oldest of 12 children born to a Cambridge slater. As a boy he practised cricket on the common ground at Parker’s Piece, a good hit but a social chasm from the perfect lawns of the gentlemen amateurs at Fenner’s. Like Gordon Richards, the miner who became the greatest English jockey, Hobbs was given a knighthood in Elizabeth II’s coronation honours, a small sign of meritocracy at the dawn of a new reign.

o shoot in Cambridge is now a Sweaty is know much of his accomplishments?

Six decades after his death at 81, his name may be fading. e Hobbs pavilion on Parker’s Piece that he opened in 1930 became a ai restaurant and his sports shop at 59 Fleet Street is a dry cleaners (an o shoot in Cambridge is now a Sweaty Betty). ere is still the Hobbs Gate at the Oval, but how many who walk through it know much of his accomplishments?

“He lifted the status and dignity of the English professional cricketer,” Wisden said. “A man of the highest integrity, who believed in sportsmanship in the highest sense, teamwork and fair play,” said Sutcli e. “ e greatest batsman the world has ever known,” added Percy Fender, his Surrey captain. “And the most modest man that anyone could meet.” For those who appreciate cricket’s history, the memory of his extraordinary career and character is always worth preserving. ●

Patrick Kidd writes the Diary and Tailender in e Times

The Master battIng for MCC agaInst AustralIa at Trent BrIdge, June 1930