‘Oy, Posh-Pants!’ ROGER LEWIS

An Uneasy Inheritance: My Family and Other Radicals

By Polly Toynbee Atlantic £20

I’d always thought Polly Toynbee was one of Craig Brown’s brilliant creations, like Bel Littlejohn or Wallace Arnold.

Her condemnation of Auberon Waugh in the week he died as ‘a reactionary fogey whose sneers damaged this country’, for example, is a remark making sense only as satire. Appalled when Bron described a wine as smelling like ‘a bunch of dead chrysanthemums on the grave of a stillborn West Indian baby’, Polly was quite unable to appreciate she was conceivably being confronted by a joke.

As is clear from her dynastic memoir, humour is absent from Polly’s inheritance – classics professors, historians, archaeologists, colonial administrators and Queen Victoria’s ear specialist (or otolaryngologist) –several of them buried in Westminster Abbey – all, we are assured, felt ‘shame at class embarrassment’, ‘tussled with questions of class’ and evinced ‘that same old class guilt’.

It was certainly a posh lineage. The Earl and Countess of Carlisle were Polly’s great-great-grandparents. The Glenconners are somewhere in the background (except, as their peerage dates only from 1911, the Tennants are virtually trade), as are the Mitfords and Bertrand Russell.

One relative may have married a governess in Australia, but at least her uncle was Sir W S Gilbert, of Gilbert and Sullivan fame.

Having established that her ‘liberal ancestors agonised over the excruciating moral embarrassment of social class’, Polly, for whom everything is a cause, takes us through potted (and convoluted) biographies of these well-meaning bores.

Toynbee Hall, where Profumo expiated his sins, was founded by one of them, for example, in 1884 as a playground, library, washhouse and lecture hall for the poor of Spitalfields. Lenin spoke there in 1902. ‘Nowadays the area is mostly Bangladeshi.’

Polly’s great-grandfather was Gilbert Murray, the translator of Latin and Greek and ‘public intellectual’, whose daughter, Rosalind, never stopped hankering for Castle Howard, where her mother had grown up.

Though she is called by Polly ‘my obnoxious grandmother, Rosalind’, she is the only person in this book whom I liked. She wrote racy novels and banished her children to remote reform schools, finding them dull, which they were.

Rosalind, who eventually ran off with an ex-monk, said that because she was upper-class, she’d meet the Blitz with fortitude. Polly is appalled by this haughtiness – but, again, might it not have been a jest, the sort of remark made by Joyce Grenfell or Margaret Rutherford?

Arnold Toynbee, Rosalind’s ‘awkward, socially clumsy and emotionally repressed’ husband, was a prolix historian, decorated by the Emperor of Japan. One of his brothers was bitten to death by an ape in Gibraltar, ‘while lying in a drunken stupor’.

For one of the problems among these people, who night and day were filled with ‘personal guilt over privilege’, was that Polly’s family were prone to a lot of alcoholism – or alcoholism, manic depression and (often) suicide.

Polly’s father, Philip (born 1916), whose brother killed himself at the start of the war, was permanently drunk and endured ‘prolonged and agonising depressions’. A notorious Fleet Street hack, Philip went in for ‘bouts of provocatively outrageous behaviour’, such as vomiting out of taxi windows, urinating in lifts and sliding down banisters naked.

He took Polly on an Aldermaston march, but they never got further than a pub in Knightsbridge. Though his best pal was Donald Maclean, he never noticed he was a spy. Philip ended up growing a beard and finding God in a commune on the Welsh border, ‘a horror scene’, deliberately without water, electricity or other amenities, because they were luxuries, hence representative of ‘moral inadequacy’.

Which brings us at last to old Polly, traumatised as a child when somebody common shouted out, ‘Oy, Posh-Pants! Bet you think you’re better than us!’

In fairness, she has spent a lifetime trying not to be superior, and is commendably honest about herself, saying how, though she once interviewed a welder and spoke to a milkman, ‘we bourgeois leftists’ are ‘too firmly entrenched in the world of privileged security to really take flight and abandon everything’.

Somewhat chillingly, she confesses she’d have been the sort of person to fall for Stalin: ‘Would I have overlooked Soviet atrocities, eyes tight shut for the greater good? I fear I probably would.’

Born in 1946, and to this day a member of the ‘left-wing middle classes’, Polly says ‘most writers are absorbed by the pain of social class’. Really? I’m not – never give it a thought. But then I am self-made. I started with nothing and look at me now. If, for Polly and her pals, ‘the seismic culture shock’ was the rise of Margaret Thatcher, the reason they hate her is that she, too, was a self-made person, and this is their snobbery coming out.

Polly, typically, mentions the working-class habit of calling luncheon ‘dinner’. Her ancestors would never wear scent that wasn’t French, nor ‘touch custard or mayonnaise that was not homemade’, ie whisked up by their cooks. For dads to turn up outside Polly’s boarding school at the wheel of a Jaguar or for mums to be in a fur coat was unspeakably vulgar.

Pontypool-raised Roy Jenkins is sniggered at for enjoying claret, for his ‘assumption of slightly comical upperclass manners’, and generally for his taste for a high life he wasn’t born into, that wasn’t his entitlement. Everything Roy achieved in his career was achieved by merit, which to Polly’s mob is unbecoming.

Everything was handed to Polly on a plate, from the ‘grand, stuccoed house in Pelham Crescent’ to her ‘easeful life of well-paid London journalism’ (£106,000 a year).

She’s rather smug about ‘our clean hands, well-rewarded in cash, esteem and status’, and the chief iniquity was her access to education. Despite her failing her eleven-plus and O Levels, ‘my social class guaranteed I would never be sent to a secondary modern’.

Indeed, like her father with his scant qualifications, she was offered a place at Oxford, though left without graduating, her style understandably cramped by the thought of all those dreary dons in the family tree.

The book contains one truly alarming story. Pregnant, Polly went to see a friend, whose newborn baby was writhing on a rug, screaming and being so thoroughly obnoxious that Polly immediately went and sought an abortion. The baby on the rug grew up to be Boris Johnson.

Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor by Roger Lewis is out later this year

Moth mosaic

Caroline Moore

The Jewel Box: How Moths Illuminate Nature’s Hidden Rules

By Tim Blackburn Weidenfeld & Nicolson £20

I belong to a group who obsessively log and report migrants. And we have a magazine, Atropos, with a skull in its logo.

But the death’s head is on the furry thorax of the Hawkmoth Acherontia atropos. And the mothing community is perhaps the only on-line group to celebrate both migrants and colonisation.

The ecologist Tim Blackburn highlights the ‘vital’ role played by migrants in the natural world. ‘Much of the planet would be bare rock if it wasn’t for migration’, as he writes in The Jewel Box.

His ‘jewel box’ is his moth trap, which he runs both in London and in Dorset. There he can find rubies (Ruby Tiger), pearls (Rusty Dot Pearl) and emeralds of many kinds (Common, Small Grass – but he would have to be lucky to meet Sussex, Essex and Jersey). Gold and silver abound – Golden Twin-spot, Gold Spangle, Silver Hook.

Their names suggest the glistening beauty of a freshly-caught moth. A moth’s wings are covered in minute scales, like a layer of glittering dust.

Every scale is pigmented to create a mosaic of coloured patterns, and each is a nanostructure that also diffracts light, creating an alluring extra shimmer of iridescence. But the dust is easily rubbed off: their beauty is fragile and evanescent.

Those who possess moth traps – I inherited mine from my grandfather –themselves become ensnared.

We are lured into becoming moth addicts by marvelling at not only the beauty and intricate delicacy but also the sheer variety of the species that come to our mercury-vapour lights (the moths are released unharmed the next morning). This makes moths precious for an ecologist, a diamond mine of data.

‘Martha, did you invite people over for dinner this evening?’

Moths are gloriously diverse – far more so than butterflies. There are over 2,500 species of moth on the British list, and only 59 species of butterfly. Only two are likely to be found, as larvae, munching on your jerseys – the best cashmere for preference, because this is more digestible.

Some 850 of these are the larger moths or ‘macromoths’, whose size and exquisitely distinctive wing patterns can usually be identified by amateur recorders.

And there are plenty of us out there. The National Moth Recording Scheme has collated over 34 million sightings of moths across the UK since 2007.

My own list shows that, over 25 years, I have logged 891 species of moth in just one inland Sussex garden, 73 of them Nationally Scarce. By which you will guess that I have passed from the ‘gateway drug’ of the macromoths on to the hard stuff – the miniature marvels of micromoths.

Their diversity is a gift to ecologists; and they differ because every species has come up with a different solution to ‘the question of how to be a moth’.

They colonise different habitats, eat different parts of many different plants, including lichens, fungus and mould slimes (a few feed on animal detritus). They are preyed on by diverse predators – birds, bats, lizards and snakes, small mammals such as hedgehogs and shrews, insects like wasps (parasitoid and vespid), hornets, spiders and beetles.

Moths are an internationally recognised marker of biodiversity; for Blackburn, his ‘moth trap is ultimately a tool for sampling the environment.’

Diversity and identifiability are important; but the fragility and mobility of moths makes them especially revealing. Blackburn, like all trappers, knows of the enormous fluctuation in moth abundance, even when trapping in the same place, not just from week to week, but also from year to year.

There are ‘boom’ years and dud ones; populations peak and plummet.

The moth dynasty is ‘one of the most successful branches of the tree of life’, comprising ‘one in every nine known species’ (160,000 worldwide, including butterflies). But they are highly susceptible to random natural disasters, chiefly weather-related: all trappers know that cold, wet and drought knock back numbers. A hot and humid night produces a full moth trap, as well as sticky bed sheets.

They are also especially vulnerable to man-made hazards. Urbanisation and changes in land management, destroying and fragmenting habitats, create ever smaller and more fragile populations.

This is where migrants play a vital role, revitalising small and failing communities; and why, like a London taxi driver droning on about celebrities he’s had in his cab, I want to tell everyone about the Great Dart I found in my trap. And the fact that the Clifden Nonpareils I find, with underwings like silky Old Etonian ties, may not be migrants at all.

This beautiful Blue Underwing was hunted to extinction by Victorian collectors and became a rare immigrant; but it has recently established breeding colonies in Sussex.

And I had that Zelleria oleastrella in my trap recently, all the way from the olive groves of southern Europe…

Just pay your fare, quickly, and buy the book.

Brain men

Dr Theodore Dalrymple

The Story of the Brain in 10½ Cells

By Richard Wingate Wellcome Collection £14.99

Nearly 50 years ago, I took a taxi to a psychiatric hospital in London.

The driver remained silent during the journey: maybe he thought that he had a dangerous lunatic in his cab. But no, he had been cogitating. As we arrived, he turned to me and said, ‘You know, mate, there’s something very mental about the brain.’

Quite so – but what, exactly? It is the ultimate goal of neuroscience to find out. I hope it will never succeed, for it is certain that the knowledge gained will be confined to only a few who will use it, if human experience is anything to go by, to exploit the rest of us.

Nonetheless, one cannot but be impressed by the progress that neuroscience has made since its origins in the 19th century. This short book by the distinguished neuroscientist Richard

Wingate is part memoir of his personal career as a scientist, part history of the science and part explanation of where it has got to now.

Few books that I have read convey so succinctly the combination of care, determination, obsessiveness and imagination that scientists in a field such as neuroscience require to make an advance in knowledge: an openness to failure, for example, and a willingness to start again.

No one could do other than admire the immense accumulation of technique that allows neuroscientists to inject a single neuron with dye under a microscope, the result of astonishing, and continuing, ingenuity.

As this book conveys very well, scientists are not the bloodless calculating machines of the imagination of non-scientists. They vary enormously in temperament and character, and they are passionate in defence of their ideas. They quarrel, scheme and reconcile, as people do in practically all fields of human endeavour.

We now take it so much for granted that the brain is composed of distinct cells that communicate with one another that we forget that this had to be discovered. The Spanish doctor Santiago Ramón y Cajal first put forward the hypothesis in the 1880s; until then, it was thought the brain was composed of a network.

This remained the view of the Italian Camillo Golgi, the discoverer of a way in which brain cells could be stained so that they could be seen under a microscope.

The two men were awarded the Nobel prize in the same year, 1906. But in his acceptance speech, Golgi continued to attack Cajal’s ideas, even though Cajal, in his acceptance speech, gave full credit to Golgi for his work, without which his own would have been impossible.

It is probable that many people think the brain is composed largely or entirely of Hercule Poirot’s little grey cells. The ten and a half cells of the title (a reference to Julian Barnes’s novel A History of the World in 10½ Chapters) will correct any reader’s false impression.

Included in the ten and a half is the generic type of neurone, an archetype, which children learn about in their biology lessons, but which does not exist in reality.

The elements of autobiography in the book are valuable. They convey to us the almost fantastically painstaking nature of most scientific discovery, in a way that nothing else could. There is a toleration of boredom in pursuit of what would seem to most of us a minor discovery, but one that might lead to many others.

The author spent years teasing out and studying one kind of brain cell, so that knowledge of its structure, connections and function might be advanced. If scientists are not devoid of ambition and personal quirks (as the author makes very clear), there is also something selfless about their work.

There is almost nothing in this book about the way brain cells communicate with one another; or about neurochemistry, the chemistry of which people speak when they tell one another that they have a chemical imbalance in their brains, which is why they behave so badly and are not completely happy.

But a short and exhilarating book about an aspect of neuroscience cannot contain everything that is known, and in this brief book there are many surprising facts. How many of you knew that the polar explorer and philanthropist Fridtjof Nansen was a neuroanatomist of such distinction that he might have won a Nobel prize for his scientific work, had he not gone off exploring polar regions?

Dr Theodore Dalrymple is The Oldie’s doctor

Ede’s Eden HUON MALLALIEU

Ways of Life: Jim Ede and the Kettle’s Yard Artists

By Laura Freeman

Jonathan Cape £30

My only regret at having attended Cambridge is that I never had the chance to visit Jim Ede at Kettle’s Yard while I was an undergraduate.

He created that magical place from four cottages in Cambridge and lived there from 1956 until 1983, when he left for Edinburgh, having given the house and his collection to Cambridge University. Each afternoon, he would welcome any visitors who turned up, making them feel ‘expected’, opening their eyes and minds to art and offering them tea and toast. Students were particularly welcome. It was an experience that changed many lives.

As a preface to her tour of the lives of Ede and the Kettle’s Yard Artists, Laura Freeman allows us to experience such a visit, as it might have happened in Michaelmas term, 1970. She quotes Elizabeth Simpson, a natural scientist at Girton: ‘He had a patter, but if he saw you were into it, he left you alone; left you to look.’ He didn’t change the way she looked just at pictures, but even at slides under a microscope. He taught her ‘to see patterns and connections’.

That was, and is, the essence of Kettle’s Yard. It is a gallery and cabinet of curiosities combined. Beauty may be found anywhere. A vital component is the pebbles Ede and friends picked up over years. They had to be the most perfect pebbles. The poet, gardener and artist Ian Hamilton Fraser inscribed on one that the collection was ‘the Louvre of the pebble’.

Pebbles like these had their small part in modern British art history. In his biography Drawn from Life, the sculptor John Skeaping wrote of a Norfolk holiday in 1931, when his marriage to Barbara Hepworth was crumbling: ‘Henry [Moore], Barbara and I used to pick up large iron-stone pebbles on the beach which were ideal for carving and polished up like bronze.’

Laura Freeman expands this to tell us that Ben Nicholson joined the party, and how, ‘between the sea and the shingle, Ben and Barbara were drawn together’.

Rather than working to a strict chronology, Freeman has organised her book as just such a cabinet, moulding each chapter around a work of art, in the manner popularised (though not invented) by Neil MacGregor in his A History of the World in 100 Objects.

Ede’s own study of Henri GaudierBrzeska, Savage Messiah, was ‘something in between’ a conventional biography and fiction; so is this deeply researched book. It is an approach that has the advantage of telling us about Jim Ede’s artists as well as himself.

The Kettle’s Yard artists were not a school like the Newlynites, nor a set, like the Bloomsberries. He drew them to him in friendship, when he found ‘some quality of light and life and line’ in their work.

That, rather than a style, is what won Henry Moore, Ben and Winifred Nicholson, Joan Miró, David Jones,