Feminists should call it quits Lionel Shriver What kind of Brexiteer are you?

Matthew Parris
11 may 2019 [ £4.75 www.spectator.co.uk [ est. 1828

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PATRICK
BATEMAN
AND ME
Bret Easton Ellis

Monarchy matters
S
trictly in terms of its implications for
the succession, the arrival of the Duke
and Duchess of Sussex’s son this week
was not the most important of royal births.
The boy has been born seventh in line to
the throne, but that position can be expected
to fall rapidly once the Cambridge children
begin to marry. He is not born to be king,
and may never even be granted the title of
prince. Nevertheless, the birth has attract-
ed wide attention and celebration, inspiring
front-page headlines on foreign newspapers
and eliciting interest in Britain from types
of people who don’t normally care about
royal events.
Partly this is down to the new baby’s
parentage. For the first time — at least to
our knowledge — we have a British royal
baby born to an American mother and with
an Afro-Caribbean heritage. But it is hard
not also to view the interest shown towards
the youngest royal in the context of the
current political tumult. This serene event
contrasts so greatly with the squabbling of
our political leaders, and in doing so reminds
us of what is so strong about the system of
constitutional monarchy. While the grubby,
and necessary, business of politics is car-
ried out by our elected representatives, the
stability of our nation is represented by
a head of state who stays aloof from it all.
Britain’s small band of committed republi-
cans must answer the question: what would
it add to our national life to have, say, Tony
Blair or David Cameron installed in Buck-
ingham Palace as titular president, unable to
resist the temptation to poke their noses into
the business of Brexit?
Of course, it is essential to the workings
of a constitutional monarchy that the mon-
arch does not interfere in politics. But that is
the spectator | 11 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
established 1828
more easily done when the figure fulfilling
this role has been born into royal duty. That
is why royal births become such important
events in national life — they are a reminder
that the role of a potential monarch starts at
the very beginning of life.
Yet, in spite of the extraordinary nature
of their lives, we find it easier in many ways
to relate to the royal family than to our pol-
iticians. The rhythms of royal news are so
much more aligned with our own life expe-
rience. Few of us will ever stand for pub-
lic office, but most of us will at some point
have children or will see other members of
our families bring new life into the world.
This serene event reminds us of
what is so strong about the system
of constitutional monarchy
We appreciate how families grow, how they
pass the torch down through the generations
— and how, as the Sussexes demonstrate
so well, they interweave.
The new baby’s broad genealogy has been
described as a sign of modernity — people
of mixed ethnicity are the fastest-growing
group in Britain, after all. It is reassuring,
too, that the pressure exerted by overbear-
ing courtiers on royals over their choices of
spouse — which led to the damaging series
of failed marriages in the Queen’s children’s
generation — has been relaxed.
Princes William and Harry have been
much freer in their choice of partner than
their father was. But there is nothing new
in royal families reaching beyond narrow
genetic pools for marriage partners. Prince
Harry himself is part British, part German,
part Greek. The rest of the population, with
greater opportunities to travel than in the
past, have simply caught up with a practice
— marrying across borders — which has
been usual in royal life for many centuries.
It was fashionable for many years among
people of liberal mind to denigrate marriage.
It was attacked as an outdated, patriarchal
institution — in spite of ample evidence that
children raised within marriage have a far
better life experience, having better health
and being more successful in education. (But
then attacking marriage was more about the
selfishness of the adults, who were seen to
be neglecting the interests of their children.)
But opinions seem to have changed subtly
over the past few years. There are fewer peo-
ple now trying to make out that marriage is
in itself some kind of ritualised way of sup-
pressing women. People who were once apt
to argue this are now among the strongest
supporters of gay marriage — and, having
made the argument for equality, can hardly
rant against heterosexual marriage.
There has been a change, too, in attitudes
towards royal marriages. Many people who
would once have sneered at the pomp sur-
rounding royal weddings, and the attention
paid to them, were nevertheless enthused by
the wedding of Harry and Meghan — and
this enthusiasm has carried through to the
birth of their first child.
Republicans — of the British kind — are
in retreat. Meanwhile, our own royal fam-
ily has recovered from a dark period and
regained much of the respect it had lost.
However low our national stock may tem-
porarily have sunk owing to parliament’s
indecisiveness over Brexit, our royal family
is a reminder of what makes Britain such a
stable and beneficial influence on the rest
of the world.
3
 Too tweedy, p25

Playing the bitch, p21

The gift that keeps on giving, p40

THE WEEK BOOKS & ARTS

3 Leading article 12 Mind games BOOKS
6 Portrait of the Week How exercising your brain can 32 Jonathan Powell
slow cognitive decline Our Man, by George Packer
9 Diary Game of Thrones, Brexit Camilla Cavendish
wars and election battles 34 Simon Ings
Paul Mason 13 John Fuller on Albert Einstein
‘Warnings’: a poem 36 Christopher Priest
11 Politics
May’s compromising position 15 A cook’s notebook Plume, by Will Wiles
James Forsyth The lost art of the British cuppa 37 Andrew Lycett
Prue Leith on Victorian entertainment
17 Rod Liddle
Are the village idiots right? 18 The scourge of the grouse moor 38 Brian Martin
Our upland wildlife is being The King’s Evil, by Andrew Taylor
20 Ancient and modern destroyed — but there is a way out
A show of loyalty Philip Womack
Ben Macdonald A Thousand Ships, by Natalie Haynes
21 Lionel Shriver It’s time for 20 Home truths
feminists to call it quits 39 Lee Langley
Do children do better when Lord of All the Dead, by Javier Cercas
23 Barometer Endangered species, they’re not in nursery?
unequal rights and gravy trains Joanna Rossiter
25 Matthew Parris 22 ‘Go on: cancel me’
Are you a Tweedy or a Trainer? An interview with Bret Easton Ellis
26 From the archive Sam Leith
How to fight Bolshevism 26 Sober reality
28 Letters Marijuana, Qwerty What I’ve learnt from quitting booze
keyboards and pigeon killers Damian Thompson

29 Any other business

The truth behind Huawei: all
telecoms networks are insecure
Martin Vander Weyer

Deborah Ross and Charles Moore are away

Cover by Morten Morland. Drawings by Michael Heath, Castro, Grizelda, Bernie, Percival, Robert Thompson, Nick Newman, Adam Singleton.
www.spectator.co.uk Editorial and advertising The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP, Tel: 020 7961 0200, Fax: 020 7681 3773, Email: letters@spectator.
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Editor: Fraser Nelson

4 the spectator | 11 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk

 An indelible impression, p46 A plea for tea, p15

‘Why does nobody understand me?’, p34

LIFE
ARTS LIFE Leadership candidates in all
40 Justin Marozzi 53 High life Taki parties get used to being asked if
Film’s love affair with Low life Jeremy Clarke
they’ve ever smoked weed – but
the Arabian Nights 54 Real life Melissa Kite worn tweed? How often? Just
42 Theatre 56 The turf Robin Oakley to be sociable? Experimenting
Small Island; Rosmersholm Bridge Janet de Botton at university?
Lloyd Evans
Music
Matthew Parris, p25
Michael Tippett; James MacMillan AND FINALLY . . .
Richard Bratby 48 Notes on… I really haven’t done a lot of
Windermere the things that you’re supposed
43 Leonardo da Vinci – I Faglioni; William Cook
Semele to do to stay famous.
Alexandra Coghlan 58 Chess Bret Easton Ellis, p22
Raymond Keene
44 Radio Competition
Art of Now: Afghan Stars I took the CD from the player and
Lucy Vickery
Kate Chisholm sent it gliding like a frisbee into
59 Crossword Doc
45 Cinema the nettles beside our vegetable
Amazing Grace 60 No sacred cows patch, from where hopefully
Jasper Rees Toby Young it will be appropriated by a
Battle for Britain
46 Exhibitions kleptomaniac magpie.
Michael Heath
Writing: Making Your Mark Rod Liddle, p47
Daisy Dunn 61 The Wiki Man
Rory Sutherland
47 Television Your problems solved
Lunatics; Huge in France Mary Killen
James Delingpole
62 Drink Bruce Anderson
The listener Mind your language
Vampire Weekend: Dot Wordsworth
Father of the Bride
Rod Liddle

CONTRIBUTORS UPCOMING EVENTS

Jonathan Powell, who writes
about the American diplomat Richard
Holbrooke on p32, was a British
diplomat from 1979-1994 and chief of
staff to Tony Blair from 1995-2007.
Simon Ings is culture editor of the
New Scientist and the author of several
novels and books of nonfiction, most
recently Stalin and the Scientists.
He celebrates Einstein on p34.
Christopher Priest, who applauds
Will Wiles on p36, is one of Britain’s
pre-eminent science-fiction authors. His
most recent novel is An American Story.
Spectator readers are invited to
join us for evenings with Michael
Gove (5 June) and Henry Blofeld
(19 June). To book tickets or for more
information, call 020 7961 0025 or go
to www.spectator.co.uk/events.

the spectator | 11 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk 5

 Home
J ohn McDonnell, the shadow chancellor,
blamed Theresa May, the Prime Minister,
for leaking details of talks between the
government and Labour over Brexit. He
said she had ‘blown the confidentiality’ of
the talks and ‘jeopardised the negotiations’.
He was annoyed that the Sunday Times had
said she would agree to a customs union,
something predicted four days earlier by
the Daily Telegraph. Rory Stewart, the new
International Development Secretary, said
the Conservatives had to accept the ‘short-
term pain’ of a Brexit compromise with
Labour. David Lidington, May’s right-hand
man, admitted that the failure to reach
a Brexit agreement meant that the EU
elections on 23 May ‘do have to take place’.
Iain Duncan Smith, a former Conservative
leader, said: ‘Either the Prime Minister sets
the immediate date for departure or, I’m
afraid, they [MPs] must do it for her.’
May met Sir Graham Brady, the chairman
of the backbenchers’ 1922 Committee,
about her future. The Duchess of Sussex
gave birth to a boy weighing 7lb 3oz, the
7th in line to the throne.
G avin Williamson, sacked as defence
secretary, continued to insist that
he was innocent of leaking information
from a meeting of the National Security
Council about May’s hospitality to the
idea of the Chinese company Huawei
having a hand in the UK’s 5G mobile
network. May said there was ‘compelling
evidence’, but Williamson said he would
‘swear on his children’s lives’ he didn’t do
it. Penny Mordaunt was appointed Defence
6 the spectator | 11 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
Secretary and Rory Stewart the prisons
minister was appointed Development
Secretary in her place. The aerospace firm
Bombardier put up for sale its Northern
Ireland operations, employing 3,600 people.
Edward Bramson, who sought more
benefits for shareholders of Barclays, failed
in his attempt to be appointed to its board.
T he Conservatives had their worst local
election results since 1995. Of the 8,335
councillors elected in England, the Tories
gained 1,333 fewer seats than in 2015 and
Labour 82. The Liberal Democrats gained
704 extra seats and the Greens 194. Ukip
was reduced to 31 seats in all. In Northern
Ireland the Alliance won 21 extra seats and
Aontú, an anti-abortion splinter from Sinn
Fein, won a seat. The Southwark coroner
gave a verdict of lawful killing on Henry
Vincent, stabbed by Richard Osborn-
Brooks, 79, whom he had threatened with
a screwdriver while burgling his house; Mr
Osborn-Brooks and his wife have not been
able to return to their home since then
because of fears for their safety.
Abroad
T he evacuation of more than a million
people in the Indian state of Orissa
to avoid Cyclone Fani limited the number
killed to 16. The cyclone destroyed more
than 1,000 houses in Bangladesh. In
Namibia, the second state of emergency
in three years was declared because
of drought. Asia Bibi, the Pakistani
Christian woman sentenced to death for
blasphemy in 2010 but acquitted last year
by the Supreme Court, left the country for
Canada. A cruise ship run by the Church
of Scientology was put into quarantine
at Curaçao after a member of the crew
was found to have measles. A period of
quarantine was lifted in Mongolia after
two people died of bubonic plague from
eating a raw marmot.
A n Aeroflot aeroplane made an
emergency landing in flames at
Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow, killing
at least 41; it was said to have been struck
by lightning after takeoff. Dozens of
civilians died and 12 medical centres were
reported to have been attacked by Syrian
government air strikes in the north-west of
the country. A ceasefire ended a weekend
in which hundreds of rockets were fired
from Gaza into Israel and Israeli jets
responded with air strikes; four Israelis and
25 Palestinians were killed. A petrol tanker
lorry overturned in Niamey, the capital of
Niger, and at least 58 were killed when it
exploded, as many were trying to collect
the spilt fuel. Jean Vanier, the founder of
L’Arche, the movement for integration of
disabled people, died aged 90.
T urkey’s electoral body ordered the
local elections in Istanbul that had been
seen an opposition victory in March to be
held again in June. King Vajiralongkorn of
Thailand completed a three-day coronation
ceremony three years after coming to
the throne. Denver, Colorado, voted in a
referendum to stop criminal proceedings
against people who consumed mushrooms
containing psilocybin. A man in Nantong
failed a breathalyser after eating a helping
of notoriously smelly durian fruit. CSH
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M ultiple copies of a Labour leaflet for
the European elections are being
shared on messaging apps by horrified
activists. Not only does the draft leaflet
omit mention of a second referendum,
it seems to suggest Labour’s MEP
candidates will ‘do a Brexit deal with
Europe’ while actually being members
of the European Parliament. The leaflet
causes a furore among the candidates, is
disavowed by Labour HQ as a ‘draft’, and
the whole caravan of Brexit chaos lurches
forward to its next absurdity.
G ame of Thrones means Monday
mornings are the new Sunday
nights in our household. The battle
of Winterfell is as thrilling as it is
absurd. If you have seen ballistae on
the battlefield, and know they can hit
dragons, why deploy trebuchets? Why
send the Dothraki, the best cavalry in
the world, to attack infantry who cannot
be spooked? A week later, when all the
plotlines have fallen apart, a Starbucks
cup turns up in shot. Maybe Weiss and
Benioff, the showrunners, have never
read The Defence of Duffer’s Drift.
Or maybe sensing they were coming
towards the end, and would be minted
for life, they lost all focus and belief in
their original narrative. If so, maybe they
were taking lessons from Theresa May.
T his is book launch week. I promised
my editors at Allen Lane I would
stick to the big themes of Clear Bright
Future and avoid trench warfare
over Brexit. So I end up on Sky in
trench warfare over Brexit with Isabel
Oakeshott. She is chipper because
Nigel Farage’s new party is on 25 per
cent. I am also chipper because, despite
my public disagreement with the ‘get
Brexit over with’ wing of Corbynism,
the bigger picture is becoming clear. If
the Conservatives go into any election
facing something called the Brexit Party,
having delivered a deal that prevents
Britain doing independent trade deals,
I cannot see them winning it. Sixty-odd
key marginals open up for Labour —
many in places where Chuka Umunna’s
illiberal breakaway stands no chance.
G iven Tory strategists can also see
this, it remains a mystery why
they have not offered Jeremy Corbyn
the spectator | 11 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
Paul Mason
everything he’s demanded in the talks plus
a second referendum. Getting Labour’s
fingerprints — not acquiescence — on a
Brexit deal seems like the only way the
Conservatives can save themselves.
S un Tzu said that if you defend
everywhere you defend nowhere.
Gavin Williamson’s strategy was to attack
everywhere: to send the army in against
knife crime, to turn every encounter with
a Russian frigate into The Hunt for Red
October, to threaten to send an aircraft
carrier to the China sea and — according
to one civil servant — to prepare the
British army to ‘invade Africa’. Naturally,
therefore, attack-minded Gavin emerged
red-faced from a meeting of the National
Security Council, at which May overruled
a demand to ban Huawei from the UK’s
comms infrastructure, and went on the
attack. An attack, unfortunately, that
had the same impact as the Dothraki
cavalry in Game of Thrones. In a brutal
defenestration, it became clear that
attacking the security elite of Whitehall
is not the same as winning an election
in South Staffordshire. The Huawei
decision is so clearly the product of a
clash between geopolitics and short-
term security worries that it’s a shame
the deeper issue has not been explored.
Russia — our most important long-term
threat — is wooing Beijing into a global
alliance against the West. British strategy
towards China has been to ‘hug it close’
economically and damp down any worries
about human rights. But that strategy isn’t
working. Trotsky used to say the British
ruling class thinks in terms of ‘centuries
and continents’. The Williamson affair
is evidence that, at present, they are
thinking in ‘weeks and leadership bids’.
T he local election results show
how close we might be to the
fragmentation of the British party
system. From the inside, Labour looks
like a fractious coalition. Nine years,
meanwhile, seem to have erased the stain
left on the Lib Dems from tuition fees,
while the Greens, who took 1.1 million
votes from Labour at the 2015 election,
might easily do so again. We on the left,
perennial students of Conservative
history, can see clearly what kind of
leader the Tory party needs amid all this:
one who can embody the values of liberal
Britain, face down the xenophobes,
reverse austerity and call time on the
MoD’s neo-imperial fantasies of global
reach. Surveying the parliamentary
parties, both Labour and the SNP contain
a rising generation of politicians who
look exactly like this. The Tories’ problem
is that they do not.
Paul Mason is a journalist,
commentator and former economics
editor of Channel 4 News.
9

May’s compromising position
C
an Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn
reach a satisfactory compromise
on Brexit? The two leaders’ posi-
tions are not, in fact, that far apart. Neither
wants a second referendum. They both think
that the referendum result means that Brit-
ain has to leave the EU. Yet neither wants a
dramatic rupture. They would prefer to inch
away from the union.
Gavin Barwell, Theresa May’s chief of
staff, has remarked that half of what Labour
has asked for in the cross-party Brexit talks
has already been requested from the EU but
to no avail. Even on customs, the standout
issue, the differences between Labour and
the Conservatives are more semantic than
anything else. The government’s proposed
backstop is, in effect, a provisional UK-wide
customs union with the EU, which is not that
different from the permanent customs union
that Labour wants.
The problem for May and Corbyn is the
lack of enthusiasm for a cross-party deal in
their respective parties. If Corbyn compro-
mised, he would infuriate many on his own
side. The most obvious group are those who
want a second referendum because they
believe that will stop Brexit. This group
includes the elected deputy leader Tom
Watson, the shadow Brexit secretary Keir
Starmer and the Labour whips’ office. I
understand that the government is trying to
work out whether it is a third of Labour MPs
who want a second referendum at all costs,
or two thirds. If it is the latter, then the par-
liamentary arithmetic doesn’t work.
There are others, though, on the Labour
benches who are not pro-European, just
anti-Tory. They don’t see why Labour should
help the government out of this mess unless
it is beyond doubt that they’ll split the Tories
in doing so.
There is considerable nervousness in
Tory circles about what a May-Corbyn deal
would mean. One of May’s most likely suc-
cessors within the cabinet worries that any
agreement with Corbyn would boost the
Labour leader’s chances of becoming prime
minister. How could the Tories accuse Cor-
byn of not being fit for office if they had to
rely on him to deliver their most important
policy? Others worry that Labour will only
do a deal if it is a bad one for the Tories.
There are, it is worth remembering, three
the spectator | 11 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
POLITICS|JAMES FORSYTH
different kinds of compromise. One is more
a recognition of reality than anything else.
It is reality that parliament determines
what kind of Brexit deal can pass into law.
So allowing a parliamentary vote to set the
government’s mandate for the next round of
the negotiations, as the Nandy-Snell amend-
ment suggests, is really just a recognition of
this fact. Yes, the government is diluting its
power to negotiate treaties by accepting this
Labour backbench amendment. But as the
current impasse shows, a treaty that parlia-
ment won’t ratify is rather pointless.
In any future negotiation, the govern-
ment will be bound by what parliament
How could the Tories accuse Corbyn
of not being fit for office if they had
to rely on him to reach a Brexit deal?
would accept. So allowing the Commons a
role early in the process is not as much of a
concession as it sounds. In truth, the damage
was done to the UK’s negotiating position
when Theresa May lost the Tory majority in
the 2017 general election. Any prime minis-
ter who wants to negotiate a more emphatic
Brexit would have to have a majority, and
that would entail a general election.
The second kind of compromise is show-
ing that some things really can’t be done.
The point of Barwell’s remark above is that
there are areas where Labour thinks the
government is deliberately trying to create
distance with the EU, when the actual issue
is the EU’s desire to protect its own legal
and institutional order.
Some Tories in government think that
‘What sexuality is your sandwich?’
you could even extend this argument to
Labour’s idea of a customs union. Given
that trade in goods is an exclusively EU
competence, there is no way that Brussels
could accept a customs union in which the
UK — a non-member — had a veto over
trade deals. So why not go and ask Brussels
for one, and wait for the EU to say no?
The problem with this approach is that
the EU isn’t keen on May’s alternative, the
facilitated customs arrangement. This would
allow the UK to operate different tariffs
from the EU but still preserve many of the
benefits of the customs union. Indeed, one
of the ironies of the cross-party talks is that
the EU doesn’t like what either Labour or
the Tories want on customs. As one of those
involved in the talks admits, neither what
Labour or the Tories are proposing is a ‘sim-
ple, turn up on day one’ option.
The third type of concession is the most
problematic — it creates new facts on the
ground. For instance, there is a significant
difference between a standstill on customs
policy and an agreement on a new UK/EU
customs union. The former would create a
presumption that whoever wins the next
election could seek to negotiate the kind of
deal that they want; the latter would not.
If, and it remains a very big if, Labour and
the Tories can come to a Brexit arrangement,
it will be less palatable to Brexiteers than the
deal that May negotiated with the EU. But
considering how determined 10 per cent or
so of the Conservative parliamentary party
are not to vote for any kind of deal, it is hard
to see how Brexit can happen without an
understanding between the two main parties.
Given this House of Commons opposi-
tion to no deal, the only obvious alternative
is to go to the country. But even under a new
leader, the Tories wouldn’t be in a good posi-
tion to fight a general election and couldn’t
be confident what the result would be.
I understand that the deadline for the
cross-party talks to come up with some-
thing is the end of next week. If they do not,
then — as senior government figures admit
— it is hard to see how Brexit will make any
progress before October’s EU Council. At
that point, the European Union might try to
force a decision by giving the Commons 18
days to decide between approving the deal,
leaving without one, and revoking Article 50.
11

Exercising your brain can slow cognitive decline
‘B
eep!’ This is one of the most
maddening computer games I’ve
ever played. I’m tracking a flock
of birds, and when I hit the right one, it
explodes with a satisfying ‘phutt’. But as I
get better at spotting them, the birds scat-
ter ever more wildly across the screen, and
I hear that unforgiving ‘beep’: you missed.
Frankly, I feel like giving up. But many
players don’t dare. For this is HawkEye,
a brain-training programme that claims
it can sharpen my brain beyond simply
getting faster at mouse-clicking. Trials have
found that older people who play enough
hours of this particular kind of game have
fewer car crashes — and even, apparently, a
lower risk of dementia.
‘Every week someone will ask me, will I
be OK if I do crossword puzzles?’ says the
bearded neuroscientist Henry Mahncke,
CEO of the US company Posit Science,
which makes this game. ‘My answer is no.
Yes, you are thinking — you’re trying to find
an anagram or a synonym — but you’re not
making the brain faster or more accurate.
For that you need to challenge yourself.’
Not so long ago, people thought boys
were naturally better than girls at science.
We may be making a similar mistake when
we assume older people can’t learn as well
as younger ones. Until recently, we thought
that the brain cells we were born with were
a lifetime quota and that brains became
fixed in adulthood. But in the past decade,
with the help of MRI scans and experiments
on mice and monkeys, neuroscientists have
demonstrated comprehensively that the
human brain remains plastic throughout
life. Like Victorian cartographers, they have
mapped the landscape of the brain to show
that old dogs can learn new tricks — and in
fact they must, to keep in shape.
When I set out to write a book about the
burgeoning numbers of older people in the
world, and the challenges they bring, I kept
coming across data which suggested that we
are far too fatalistic about many aspects of
longer lives. Many of us can now look for-
ward to an extended middle-age lasting well
into our seventies, even beyond. One in four
Brits is now ‘unretiring’ and going back to
12
Mind games
CAMILLA CAVENDISH
work. The incidence of dementia has fallen
by around a fifth in the past 20 years, part-
ly because of giving up smoking. (The total
number of people with dementia will keep
rising because there are more old people,
but our individual risk has fallen.) It is wide-
ly assumed that productivity declines after
50, but the average age of founders of the
highest-growth US start-ups is now 47. But
policy needs updating. The official defini-
tion of the ‘dependency ratio’, for example,
assumes that all pensioners become a bur-
den on other taxpayers from the age of 64.
If we are to enjoy this extra time, we need
to extend our mental lifespans to match our
Mice develop five times the number
of new neurons when given wheels to
run on and tunnels to explore
physical ones. And that means making the
most of breakthroughs in neuroscience
which show that our brains keep learning
and adapting throughout our lives. Brand-
new neurons have been found even in the
brains of 70-year-olds with terminal cancer.
People have recovered from strokes, despite
permanently damaging whole areas of their
brains, because other areas have stepped in,
like airline passengers seizing the controls
from an unconscious pilot. Scientists are
finding new ways to help people with psy-
chiatric disorders overcome their conditions,
by calming down certain circuits in the brain
and rewiring others.
Growing evidence suggests our brains
need exercise, rather like our muscles. ‘The
best analogy is to the fitness movement,’
says Alvaro Fernandez, a Spaniard who
runs SharpBrains, an independent con-
sultancy tracking brain research in Wash-
ington, DC. ‘We went from having the
general idea of fitness to having gyms,
personal trainers and precise exercises.
If I want to get stronger abs, I do sit-ups.
If I want to be a better all-round athlete,
I lift weights. The same will happen with
the brain.’
It all started with the humble canary.
Unlike other songbirds, which churn
out the same old tunes, canaries are the
hit record producers of the avian world, cre-
ating new melodies every year to attract a
mate. On examining their brains, scientists
discovered that they generate new brain
cells or neurons each spring, almost dou-
bling their brains in size. Later, it was dis-
covered that humans also generate new
neurons. We do this in the hippocampus,
which lies deep under the cerebral cortex,
learning and consolidating new information.
Without it, we would not be able to remem-
ber where we live, or find our keys. (The
reason why Alzheimer’s sufferers find it
difficult to remember such things is because
Alzheimer’s affects the hippocampus before
any other part of the brain.) MRI scans have
shown that London cabbies who’ve passed
the Knowledge have larger hippocampi
than ordinary mortals, as a direct result
of learning the streets. In other words, cogni-
tive exercise can produce physical changes
in the brain.
A big question has been how to put the
new brain cells we create to lasting good use,
by incorporating them deep into mental cir-
cuits. Experiments with mice suggest three
things help: aerobic exercise, social contact
and new challenges. Eighteen-month-old
mice, the equivalent of 65-year-old humans,
have developed five times the number of
new neurons as fellow rodents when given
wheels to run on, tunnels to explore, and
other mice to make friends with. They also
learn to navigate mazes more proficiently
than those raised in duller conditions.
Human brains benefit from aerobic exer-
cise too. One group of older people who par-
ticipated in an aerobic fitness programme
the spectator | 11 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
for three months were found to have signifi-
cantly increased their brain volume, unlike
another group who did stretching and ton-
ing — perhaps because aerobic exercise
increases the blood supply and oxygen to
the hippocampus. Moreover, exercise is
increasingly recognised as protective against
dementia. The 2017 Lancet Commission on
Dementia found that ‘physical exercise and
intellectual stimulation over the lifespan is
associated with reduced risk of dementia in
later life, even among individuals with genet-
ic predisposition to dementia’. That doesn’t
mean that Olympic athletes can’t get Alzhei-
mer’s. But it is increasingly recognised that
lifestyle influences our individual risk.
Just as we get physically fitter, and so can
endure longer workouts, so the neurons
in our brains start to fire faster, and more in
sync with each other, when we repeatedly
focus intensely on learning a new skill. Neu-
rons which ‘fire together, wire together’: they
give out clearer signals. This is important,
because clearer signals improve memory.
One reason we forget things as we get
older, scientists believe, is that our brains
are increasingly struggling through ‘noise’:
fuzzy signals given out by neurons which are
not syncing properly. We process new events
more slowly as we get older, which makes it
harder to form a clear memory of someone’s
name, or who said what at the party.
Many scientists are trying to find ways to
reduce the ‘noise’ in our brains as we age.
One way is challenging ourselves in ways
which require our full attention. There has
Brand-new neurons have been
found even in the brains of
70-year-olds with terminal cancer
been research into the effects of playing a
musical instrument. Musicians who practise
regularly and intensively have been found to
have more grey matter in part of their fron-
tal lobe, and less age-related degeneration in
other parts of the brain, than non-musicians.
One group of people over 75 who frequently
played a musical instrument were found less
likely to have developed dementia after five
years than those who rarely played.
‘You’re never too old to learn,’ says Dr
Lara Boyd, a brain researcher at the Uni-
versity of British Columbia who works with
stroke patients. ‘There’s no drug you can
take — the primary driver of neuroplastic
change in your brain is your own behaviour.
But the dose needed to learn new skills, or
relearn old ones, is very large.’ Some patients
have regained the use of paralysed limbs by
making painstaking, repeated attempts.
Some new skills are definitely harder
to acquire at 50 than at 12, and some are
impossible: perfecting a foreign accent, for
example, can only be done in childhood.
Older people take longer to learn to juggle,
the spectator | 11 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
Warnings
These small warnings (trivial in themselves,
Like the clues in a mystery that will explain everything,
But gradually forming into a pattern of significant decline)
Tell you that your mother has at last finished with you.
She shaped you as carefully as she could
With all that she had, and sent you out
To your long play in those once endless days.
But now the lizard skin, the knotting of veins,
The lumbar drag, the ache in the shoulders,
The poached eyes, the thudding behind the ears,
The unbending joints, the diminished senses:
Which of these heralds the final exasperated shout
That will bring you in at last, at bedtime,
Tired out, yes, but reluctant as always?
— John Fuller
and some cannot master it at all. But this improvements in players: committed players
may be partly about determination. One were half as likely to experience a car crash
African great-grandmother learned to read as non-players.
and write at the age of 90. Some studies sug- The most recent finding from that same
gest that an adult’s own lack of confidence, trial is that volunteers who completed at
especially in their ability to memorise, can least ten hours of training were 29 per cent
be self-fulfilling. That’s a downside of neuro- less likely to get dementia than those in the
plasticity: it is self-reinforcing. ‘Neuroplasti- control groups. These figures are not over-
city can be positive — you learn something whelming. The risk of getting dementia in
new — but it can also be negative,’ says Dr the control groups was only 11 per cent.
Boyd. ‘Your brain is being shaped by every- And no one is claiming that a computer
thing you do, but also by what you don’t do.’ programme can treat dementia once some-
There is now a whole industry provid- one has developed it. Nevertheless, it does
ing online brain-training apps, which claim suggest that certain types of training might
that daily practice will improve your men- improve the brain’s resilience.
tal acuity. It’s wise to view these claims with In 2017, the US National Academies of
some scepticism. In 2016, a company called Science, Engineering and Medicine exam-
Lumosity.com agreed to pay a $50 million ined 17 possible ways to slow cognitive
settlement to the US Federal Trade Com- decline and dementia. The three most prom-
mission over claims of false advertising, ising were physical activity, blood pressure
which the FTC said had ‘preyed on con- management and cognitive training, includ-
sumers’ fears about age-related cognitive ing speed-processing programmes. It said
decline’. An hour spent drilling on a com- that none were yet backed by sufficiently
puter game may not be worth it, a group of strong evidence to launch a public campaign.
experts at Stanford University have warned, But the evidence is growing for all three.
‘if that is an hour not spent hiking, learning ‘No pain, no gain’ urge the physical fitness
Italian, making a new recipe or playing with freaks. This seems to apply to mental exer-
your grandchildren’. cise too. The brain may really be like a mus-
Some types of games, however, show cle, and able to get stronger throughout life.
real promise. The one with the birds that Slumping into a comfortable middle-age
was driving me mad is designed to improve may be tempting. But once we appreciate
speed processing: how fast and accurate- the enormous potential of our brains, it is
ly your brain processes what you see. A clear that we should be avoiding the ruts and
big question about such games is how far doing regular mental heavy lifting: through
improvements from online games general- physical exercise, social contact and new
ise to the real world: can they enable you challenges. Old dogs, it turns out, may be a
to find your keys, for example, rather than lot younger than they thought.
just improve your ability to click? A ten-
year trial of a ‘useful field of view’, or speed Extra Time: Ten Lessons for an Ageing
processing game, has found lasting cognitive World is published by HarperCollins.
13
 A COOK’S NOTEBOOK
I n the past few weeks, on three separate
occasions, I have met three different
women who for years (one for more than
30 years) volunteered for the Samaritans.
All three have now quit. One, Sarah
Anderson, said: ‘Chad Varah [the
founder] must be spinning in his grave.’
The Samaritans has changed, they say.
It still provides a vital service, being the
only 24/7 helpline for potential suicides
or other desperate people — but it’s
become a one-number call-centre,
where the call goes to the next available
volunteer, probably hundreds of miles
away. Face-to-face conversations are
now rare, and they’ve given up their old
‘absolute confidentiality’ policy. Sarah
has set up a new counselling service
called The Listening Place, which refuses
to share information with the authorities.
This means that the NHS cannot fund
the organisation, but even so 400
volunteers have supported more than
2,000 people, many suicidal. Every one
of them was contacted within 24 hours of
being referred (usually by A&E, by their
GP or by other charities), and were seen
within a week, in person, by a volunteer
dedicated to them. Really impressive.
A nyone remember this ditty, usually
said in a Bronx accent? ‘The spring
is sprung, the grass is ris / I wonder
where the boidie is? / They say the boid
is on the wing / But that’s absoid. The
wing is on the boid.’ I think of it every
year when the may is out.
T hings have changed since I last
flogged a cookbook more than 25
years ago. Back then, pomegranate seeds
were unheard of, no one knew of yuzu
juice, and my audiences were 99 per
cent women. Now nine-year-olds tell
me about their cornbread, and real men
make fairy cakes. I’m also struck by the
generation divide. The young want quick
veggie recipes and the greyheads yearn
for devilled kidneys.
I ’m hopeless at names and faces so
when people approach me with the
dreaded words ‘You won’t remember
me…’, they’re right. Usually it transpires
the spectator | 11 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
Prue Leith
that they worked in my catering company
or went to my cookery school. So if I say,
‘Weren’t you at Leiths?’ I get away with it.
But one day a woman came up: ‘You won’t
remember me…’ I went into my routine:
‘Weren’t you at Leiths?’ ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m
your niece.’ No way out of that hole.
W hat’s happened to the famous
British cuppa? In the past, a proper
cup of tea wasn’t hard to find. Squaddies
in the war, bombed-out civilians in
shelters, hospital patients and British Rail
passengers could all get a good reviving,
comforting brew. It’s hardly difficult —
so why is a decent cup made with boiling
water poured on leaves or teabag, allowed
to brew (no mashing!) and served with
fresh milk now a rarity? Tea stewed to
bitterness or weak as gnats’ pee and served
with a disgusting UHT ‘milk stick’ is the
norm. Even our national carrier, BA, can’t
run to fresh milk. Although if you go to the
back of the plane and suck up to the staff,
they’ll probably make you an excellent
cuppa and treat you to their private supply.
One woman wrote to me asking why
residents in care homes could not have
the tea they had at home: PG Tips, Tetley,
whatever. Why indeed? A moment of
pleasure could be so easily delivered.
The difference in cost between a decent
teabag and the cheapest ‘catering’ one is
about 0.3 of a penny.
A nd while I’m whingeing in grumpy-
old-woman style, why don’t
supermarkets ask for contributions to food
banks at the entrance? Once you’ve got to
the till, if you are to respond to the appeal
for baked beans, sugar, spaghetti etc. you
must fight your way back to collect the
offerings and queue all over again. A
reminder at the entrance would make
sense, no?
T he new cookery school at Truro
School is the brainchild of Maria
Taylor, a food teacher I’ve tracked over
the years as she’s transformed the food
in every school she’s taught in: cooking
lessons, catering, teaching of nutrition,
sustainability, food politics, everything.
Lots of schools teach the Leiths basic
course to sixth-formers, but this is
the first school to build a community
teaching kitchen in its car park with
a public café attached, designed for
students, community groups, anyone.
A nother remarkable food teacher,
Rachel Richards in Kingussie
High School near Aviemore, last year
endured a Twitter storm of abuse
because she shows children how to skin,
butcher, clean and cook rabbits, how to
pluck pheasants and how to slow-cook
venison. ‘Teaching children to use
knives to murder animals’ is how the
trolls see it. Her classes are the most
popular in the school, even with the
burly shinty-playing teenagers. The
pupils happily eat veg and I didn’t see
one fat one. Just saying.
A m I the only person who didn’t
‘get’ Hamilton, allegedly the most
successful musical since The Phantom of
the Opera? I thought it OK, but I found
the hip-hop music same-same but not
different and I longed for a thumping
good song. The history lesson was good,
though I doubt I’d have followed it
without the programme notes. It took
me a good 20 minutes to figure out that
the wonderfully camp black guy was
Thomas Jefferson.
C ame home to a comforting glass of
Ilmington apple brandy, made in a
neighbouring village with local apples. I
really am getting old and grumpy.
SPECTATOR.CO.UK/TABLETALK
Prue Leith talks to Lara Prendergast
about her life through food.
15

Are the village idiots right?
T
he former BBC presenter Gavin
Esler has very kindly given us an
insight into how BBC people think
(had we been in much doubt). Esler, who is
now standing for election as a member of
the hilarious Change UK party, said the fol-
lowing: ‘TV news must stop giving airtime
to the “village idiots” of Brexit — the dubi-
ous right-wing supposed “thinktanks” and
pseudo-experts among ERG MPs who sim-
ply haven’t a clue what the implications of
Brexit truly are.’
Remarkable, no? The ‘village idiots’ of
Brexit are people who support Brexit. That’s
a lot more idiots than there are villages,
Gavin. This clown wishes the BBC to dis-
criminate against people who are in favour
of Brexit and stock the airwaves with peo-
ple who are opposed to it. Nobody who is
opposed to it is an idiot, everybody who is in
favour of it is. Esler’s view is common among
that fairly large tranche (about 35 per cent)
of absolutist Remainers who, appalled at
being transgressed by the referendum result,
have hunkered down inside their lager, cas-
tigating all those who favour Brexit as thick,
uneducated, northern Untermensch — even
the thinktanks and the MPs. It is also, beyond
all question, the default position of all BBC
news and current affairs programmes, with-
out exception.
A few weeks ago another former BBC
staffer, Mark Damazer, wrote much the same
thing — so far as one could discern through
the mangled syntax — for Prospect maga-
zine. Mark, like Gavin, is a charming and
personable chap. Mark, like Gavin, glided
from public school to university, then to
the BBC and now back to university. Mark
is Master of St Peter’s College, Oxford,
while Gavin (who went to a less posh pub-
lic school) is Chancellor of the University of
Kent. That is what happens to senior BBC
employees once Auntie has spat them out
like a noisome owl pellet: they get given
attractive sinecures at universities. Mark
was once the deputy head of BBC News, in
which role he summoned programme edi-
tors to his office to lecture them about the
need to be impartial during the forthcoming
American presidential election.
I know, because I was there. And we sat
there in a circle facing Mark, listening to
the spectator | 11 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
ROD LIDDLE
his effusions, our eyes occasionally wander-
ing to the wall behind his desk where he’d
put up lots of posters. ‘Vote Democrat’ and
‘Vote Paul Simon’ and ‘Vote Kennedy’ —
loads of US election posters, every one of
them urging a vote for the Democrats. He
was facing us, away from the posters, so
probably didn’t get the irony.
Mark and Gavin: you have to feel for
them. They have spent their entire lives
immersed in liberal echo chambers and it
has severely stunted their intellects and
their curiosity, as well as imbuing them with
that kind of fascistic streak whereby opin-
ions that differ from their own should not be
heard. Like the BBC, they are magnificent-
ly detached from the people who once gave
Once Auntie has spat them out,
senior BBC employees get given
attractive sinecures at universities
them a living by paying their licence fees.
On the plus side, they will probably be very
popular at their universities, where there is a
great appetite among the woke student body
and the professors for censoring freedom of
speech. And they will thus remain in an echo
chamber until they die, having learned noth-
ing — and it is quite possible that their bod-
ies will not rot in the ground, as happens to
most of us: they will remain intact and pris-
tine and charming, aloof from decay.
You would need to be utterly divorced
from reality to believe that the broadcast
media gives too much time to the pro-Brexit
cause. Blinded by your upbringing and the
blank unanimity among your peers, both
‘I’ve been eating a lot more
sugar since I gave it up.’
at work and over the dinner — sorry, sup-
per — tables. The facts tell a different story.
The Institute of Economic Affairs produced
a study that I’ve mentioned here before,
which showed that in the year following
the referendum, 68 per cent of panellists on
Question Time and Any Questions? were
pro-Remain. But perhaps we should take no
notice of the IEA, because they are a ‘dodgy
right-wing thinktank’. Six months after the
referendum, 72 MPs from across the parties
tabled a motion condemning the BBC for its
relentless bias on the issue of Brexit. But I
suppose they can be ignored because several
of their number were affiliates of the Euro-
pean Research Group. All village idiots,
then, morons, unwashed and foul. Far bet-
ter to put your trust in pro-Remain Treasury
and IMF reports into what would happen in
the first six months if we were stupid enough
to vote Leave: houses worthless, recession,
unemployment up, investment fleeing,
legions of huge mutant zombie crabs stalk-
ing the country ripping the heads off your
children and pissing down their necks.
None of which actually happened. The
reverse happened. Unemployment down.
No recession. No fall in house prices. No
giant mutant zombie crabs either, so far as I
am aware, although I have not visited Wales
recently. Do both Mark and Gavin not find
it alarming that rather often the village idi-
ots are right and the ‘real experts’, i.e. those
on their side, horribly wrong? Do they not
understand that each side has skin in the
game — or do they cleave to the BBC’s asi-
nine Reality Check, in which one individual
is the sole repository of truth for the whole
of mankind? Sitting in his little cubicle in
new Broadcasting House, reading a cou-
ple of reports and then adjudicating for the
good of us all?
Those of us who voted Leave should con-
sole ourselves that Gavin’s approach — the
sheer insulting arrogance of it — was not
tremendously successful during the refer-
endum campaign. But then we might also
accept that they have won, in the end. We’re
not getting Brexit, are we? We’re getting
what these insulated people wanted us to
get all along, because they are an elite which
could not bear to be transgressed. They will
have their way.
17
 The scourge of the grouse moor
Our upland wildlife has been destroyed – but there is an answer
Gamekeepers burn heather to encourage new growth for red grouse to feed on
B
ritain’s hunting estates were once
beautiful. Walking through the New
Forest, we can all appreciate how the
purchase of land for hunting can radically
protect our countryside. Almost a thousand
years after William the Conqueror set aside
this wooded wonderland, we can still enjoy
its aged oak pastures, Britain’s largest herds
of free-roaming grazing animals, and a cho-
rus of birdsong that has been lost in most
other corners of our land.
Britain’s original royal forests model is
recognised around the world as a common-
sense approach to hunting. From Alaska to
Scandinavia, hunters, alongside ecotourists,
invest huge profits to sponsor the natural
world. Hunters take a quota of animals from
these special places — and leave the rest.
This approach, known as ‘sharing’, ensures
landowners make enormous profits, enjoy
the respect of society and bequeath to the
nation extraordinary biodiversity. A Finn-
ish hunting estate will be hunted for elk,
18
BEN MACDONALD
boar, deer and grouse. It will also abound
with eagles, cranes, four species of grouse
and thousands of wading birds. This is the
kind of paradise that any British landowner
would love to own.
Sadly, 150 years ago, our hunting estates
made a terrible mistake. They decided to
turn red grouse into the equivalent of liv-
For the 8 per cent of British land that
grouse moors use, they contribute one
job for every 6.5 square kilometres
ing clay pigeons — and shoot them, without
skill, in their thousands. To do so, they creat-
ed grouse farms in our uplands: wastelands,
scorched to feed just one bird.
After more than 100 years of destroy-
ing our national heritage, grouse moors
have left our countryside immeasurably
poorer. Our upland wildlife — an ecologi-
cal gallery of wildcats, eagles, hen harriers
JIM RICHARDSON / GETTY IMAGES
and many other iconic species — has been
relentlessly wiped out. One shooting estate’s
infamous record illustrates the industrial
scale of the killing. On Glengarry Estate in
the Highlands, between 1837 and 1840 alone,
27 white-tailed eagles, 15 golden eagles, 18
ospreys, 275 red kites, 63 goshawks, 462 kes-
trels, 285 buzzards, 63 hen harriers and 198
wildcats were killed. To put this in perspec-
tive, just 35 wildcats remain today.
Extraordinary acts of desecration are
usually repaired a few generations later,
especially in a country as cultivated as our
own. But the grouse moor debt has never
been repaid. Now, amid the burned wreck-
age, we are supposed to be thankful for the
grouse that are sustained by what was once
an extraordinary landscape.
Yet it is the staggering economics of our
hunting estates that would make any Con-
servative financier see blue. For the 8 per
cent of British land that grouse moors use,
they contribute one job for every 6.5 square
the spectator | 11 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
kilometres. In all, English and Scottish
moors together contribute 0.005 per cent
to Britain’s GDP. Astonishingly, they create
0.008 per cent of its jobs. These are economic
deserts without parallel.
Grouse moors claim they boost local
economies. Those economies beg to differ.
In all, 16 per cent of shooters spend just
one night in a B&B each year. The RSPB’s
tiny but popular reserves brought the same
income to the UK economy in 2009 as all
our grouse moors combined. The English
adult population makes more than three bil-
lion visits to the natural environment each
year, splashing £21 billion in the process. In
Scotland, nature-based tourism is estimated
to produce £1.4 billion per year, along with
almost 40,000 jobs. Britain’s grouse moors,
meanwhile, account for just over 1,772 jobs
directly involved in the industry.
Grouse moors are running at an epic
loss, while destroying both jobs and wild-
life. Unsurprisingly, there is now increasing
pressure to call it a day. But there could be
a very different route — which would be to
follow the older royal forests model. What
I suggest is simple: landowners must rewild
these estates.
Our hunting estates, empty and depop-
ulated, are suited to extraordinary acts of
natural restoration in a way that no other
British land is. Rewilded estates are beauti-
Tory U-turn on shooting birds.
ful and their opportunities diverse. Running
costs are far lower, being governed by free-
growing trees and free-roaming animals,
which help maintain those crucial open hab-
itats for birds such as curlews. Famous and
profitable estates such as Knepp, in Sussex,
are already revealing the astonishing biodi-
The RSPB’s tiny reserves brought the
same income to the economy in 2009
as all our grouse moors combined
versity seen when herbivore rewilding takes
place. But in our uplands, it could take place
on a different scale altogether.
In the past, landowners have acted with
extraordinary vision. More than a century
before the RSPB came into being, the enter-
prising Marquess of Breadalbane reintro-
duced the capercaillie to Scotland. This irate
turkey still rampages through our Caledo-
nian woodlands.
Imagine, then, the steps that could be
taken to rewild a large hunting estate in
northern England. Defying our country’s
savage bureaucracy and the small-minded
people telling you ‘no’, you could regrow
birch and pine forests, reintroduce black
grouse and capercaillie, and release wild
horses and free-roaming cattle on to the hills.
Millions would pay to photograph elk
rutting on your land — but first you would
need to put them back. Needless to say, the
hunting bounties on an animal that last
walked Britain in the Bronze Age would be
enormous. In Finland, spectacular banquets
of the day’s hunt — elk, boar and grouse
— are served. Impressive animals are har-
vested from impressive landscapes. Grouse
moor owners, meanwhile, can only flaunt
their tracts of burned heather.
Those who have the time and money to
hunt also have the capacity to undertake
epic endeavours — and to oversee acts of
restoration. Britain’s landowners have the
power to change past mistakes. Just 175 peo-
ple in England own all our grouse moors.
They could transform our country for ever.
SPECTATOR.CO.UK/PODCAST
Writers worth listening to.

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Wednesday 5 June 2019, 7 p.m.
Emmanuel Centre, Westminster, London

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 Home truths
Do children do better when they’re not in nursery?
JOANNA ROSSITER
A
s any parent of young children will
tell you, toddler groups exist as
much for the adults as for the kids,
and my local meet-up is no exception. We
knock back coffee and compete to see who
has had the least sleep while the children
run riot on trikes. The small talk always
winds its way round to nursery: which ones
are good, which ones are near work, how
much they charge per hour. You’d be for-
given for wondering why any of us chose
to have children, such is the zeal with which
we plot our escape. ‘They just installed
CCTV,’ enthused one mother to me recent-
ly. ‘So I’ll be able to watch her playing from
the office whenever I like.’
I daren’t admit it to my circle of mum
friends, but since having children I’ve
become a secret nursery sceptic. It’s the
speed of change more than anything that
is the cause of my alarm. While my parents’
generation might raise their eyebrows at
putting children as young as six months into
nurseries from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., most of my
middle-class peers don’t bat an eyelid; it has
become so normal it is no longer questioned.
In fact, parents frequently fawn over all the
mod cons that nursery care provides: com-
muter-friendly hours and a feed of updates
straight to your phone throughout the day.
Big Mother is watching you.
But has anyone stopped to ask whether
nurseries are doing our babies any good?
My cohort of parents are taking part in an
unprecedented social experiment. High
house prices and rents mean most families
need two parents at work to pay the bills; and
as a result our children are the first genera-
tion to have been given largely institutional-
ised care since before the age of one.
The research into nurseries, once you
manage to unearth it, is enough to give any
parent sleepless nights. Psychologists have
discovered disconcertingly high levels of the
stress hormone cortisol in children under
two receiving nursery care — much higher
than those left with grandparents, nannies
or childminders. Cortisol has been shown
to affect children’s emotional resilience and
propensity for anxiety and aggression much
further down the line as teenagers.
Parents, of course, do not want to hear
this, especially when, for most of us, nurser-
20
ies are the only affordable way of returning
to work. The easiest response is to brush the
issue under the carpet or go on the attack.
No wonder Jay Belsky, the first academic to
suggest a link between cortisol and nursery,
was labelled a misogynist by the founder
of Mumsnet when he discussed his find-
ings with her on Woman’s Hour. It is nigh-
on impossible to make the case for change
without sounding as though you want to
chain mothers to the kitchen sink.
Even when a parent’s instinct is to seek
out one-on-one care for their children —
the type of care held up as the ideal by
child psychologists — most find it is finan-
cially out of reach. Childcare consumes a
whopping third of British families’ monthly
income. Unless you are a high-flyer or you
have grandparents at your disposal, nurs-
ery care is what’s affordable. Personally I’d
love to have my mother just down the road:
she is as magical as Mary Poppins when it
comes to my children. But work dictates that
we live within touching distance of London,
and she lives two hours away. This geograph-
ical spread is true of a growing number of
families, making parents more reliant than
ever on paid-for care. And to make mat-
ters worse, we’ll all be working well into our
seventies so the problem will only escalate:
very few of us are likely to be energetic
enough at retirement to offer regular child-
care to our grandchildren.
And so off we go with our little ones to
the nurseries, where paperwork is prized
above genuinely responsive care, and poor
salaries mean staff turnover is high. You
don’t have to be a psychologist to realise
that consistent carers are key to children’s
wellbeing in the early years. And yet is it any
wonder that nursery staff don’t stick around
for long when they are paid less per hour
than a hairdresser or dog trainer?
Women have fought hard for equality
in the workplace but at what cost? Too
often, childcare has been treated as an
unglamorous afterthought. There’s no turn-
ing back the clock; stay-at-home moth-
ers are a dying breed. Most parents, myself
included, want to find a way to balance a
career with family life. But to do so with
a clear conscience we need a frank debate
about what’s best for children.
the spectator | 11 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
ANCIENT AND MODERN
A show of loyalty
After the sacking
of Gavin Williamson, a former
No. 10 insider said of Theresa May:
‘One of Theresa’s big faults is that
she basically doesn’t trust any other
elected politicians. She places her trust
in advisers and officials, because they
are loyal to her.’ The Roman emperor
Claudius (r. 41-54 ad) too found it hard
to know whom to trust. He turned to an
adviser of the previous emperor.
Claudius, nephew of the emperor
Tiberius, was born in 10 bc but because
of some disability (his mother Antonia
called him a monster) he was never
taken seriously by the imperial family.
However, when the emperor Caligula
was assassinated in 41 ad, Claudius was
made emperor by the army. Since the
senate strongly disapproved, Claudius
could hardly trust them. But with no
experience of power, to whom could he
turn? Enter the Greek ex-slave Callistus.
Callistus (kallistos meant ‘very
fine’) was a slave freed by the previous
emperor Caligula to become part of his
entourage. A shadowy figure, Callistus
had been Caligula’s go-between, a fixer,
a man who, having no skin in imperial
politics, owed his position to Caligula and
no one else. He is said to have pimped his
daughter to him. With his taste for bribes,
he amassed power and vast wealth —
Pliny the Elder saw his dining room with
its 30 pillars of onyx marble.
But Caligula was a dangerously
capricious master, and perhaps Callistus,
seeing the way the wind was blowing,
was part of the conspiracy to kill him;
he possibly even alerted Claudius. At all
events, it was to Callistus that Claudius
turned when he became emperor,
making him in charge of justice and the
courts (Callistus knew where the bodies,
as it were, were buried). Further Greek
freedmen followed: Pallas as treasury
secretary, Narcissus i/c correspondence,
Polybius i/c research. Here were
ex-slaves, in charge of the law, finance
and access! Senators were outraged but
Claudius felt secure: these were men he
could trust, and if he couldn’t, they knew
what awaited them.
Like Claudius, May has never felt
really at home in the treacherous world
of real politics. Her adviser Sir Mark
Sedwill may be no Callistus — Williamson
could disagree — but at least the Prime
Minister and he know where his loyalty
lies. Or else. — Peter Jones

It’s time for feminists to call it quits
Y
ou would think that the British Film
Institute’s sponsorship of a month-
long festival celebrating some of the
most memorable female characters in cine-
ma would draw plaudits from feminists. You
would be wrong.
Featuring the likes of Nicole Kidman in
To Die For, Meryl Streep in Death Becomes
Her and Bette Davis in The Little Foxes,
the BFI’s programme ‘Playing the Bitch’ is
meant to explore the female anti-hero. But
in a petition originating with academics at
King’s College London, 300 signatories have
objected that the festival’s theme ‘uncritical-
ly parrots rather than questions the misogy-
nist logics that inform so much Hollywood
cinema… The women of Bitches do not sub-
vert gender norms, they inhabit stereotypes’.
With my customarily compulsive counter-
factualism, I urge you to conjure the BFI’s
parallel-universe festival ‘Playing the Goody
Two-Shoes’ — designed to celebrate female
characters in cinema who are unfailingly
kind, selfless, laudable and chaste. (Perhaps
we could screen back-to-back Doris Day
movies, culminating in a riveting remake
of Gone with the Wind, in which Scarlett
relinquishes any claim on Ashley because
hitting on other women’s beaux is impo-
lite, and devotes herself to the abolition of
slavery.) I envision another petition with at
least as many signatures: ‘The Goody Two-
Shoes festival uncritically parrots the misog-
ynistic stereotype of all women as passive,
pliant, subservient, sexually repressed, two-
dimensional, and socialised to be “nice”, at
the price of being portrayed as fully human,
and thus richly, fascinatingly flawed.’ In
other words, you can’t win.
For me, the #MeToo mania has fostered
a numbing déjà-vu. We went through the
whole Betty Friedan brouhaha in the 1960s
of my childhood, Gloria Steinem-ed our way
through the 1970s (thanks, Gloria; I still use
the title Ms), and — though for some reason
we seem to have forgotten all about it —
endured a frenetic foofaraw over sexual
harassment in the 1990s. Our umbrage una-
bating, women appear to be running in place.
For let’s take a screen shot of a single
day’s worth of New York Times headlines
from just this past weekend: ‘Are women
taking the cosmic fall for male greed?’ (a
the spectator | 11 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
LIONEL SHRIVER
con artist is being unfairly singled out for
being female). ‘Men invented “likeability”.
Guess who benefits’ (voters are mean about
female presidential candidates). ‘What
“good” dads get away with’ (men aren’t
pulling their parental weight). Then there’s
the bog-standard ‘The case of a former Har-
vard professor who was accused of sexual
harassment has brought calls for external
review’ and, last but not least, ‘How the first
female dean of NYU’s engineering school
spends her Sundays’. Right now, as for that
paper’s female calls to action against ram-
pant sexism, this would qualify as an off day.
I’d be the first to concede that social rev-
olutions overturning centuries of conven-
tion don’t happen overnight. For women to
The more equitable the society
grows, the touchier and more
prosecutorial the cultural climate
attain political and professional parity was
bound to take more than one generation.
Nevertheless, we do seem to be fighting the
same battle over and over again — except
that we’re not, quite.
Like many a liberation movement, the
fight for women’s equality has steadily suf-
fered from its own success. These many
‘waves’ of feminism roil across an ever more
level playing field. Today’s much-deplored
‘gender pay gap’ is overwhelmingly a sta-
tistical fix, engineered to seem yawning by
comparing carrots and kumquats; in the
main, equal pay for equal work is the form.
More women than men go to university,
while poor white boys sit at the bottom of
every variety of league table. It’s not as if
the balance of power between the sexes is
all perfect, but the scales are roughly even-
ing out, and sometimes they’re tilting unfair-
ly in our direction. Meanwhile, a liberation
movement in its senescence — sensibly on
the way to the trash heap, having largely
achieved its purpose — becomes neurotic,
and pathologically petty.
So we have the BFI bending over back-
wards to commemorate blistering female
performances, only to get it in the neck for
feting the wrong kind of performance. We
have this year’s spectacular outrage that for
female runners the T-shirts issued to finish-
ers of the London marathon are ill-fitting.
We have the nomination of the one Demo-
cratic candidate who has a cracking chance of
beating Donald Trump seriously imperilled
because a couple of women were ‘uncom-
fortable’ years ago when Joe Biden seemed
a little too chummy, and — shockers —
kissed one of them on the back of the head.
This week, too, we have one of America’s
most accomplished filmmakers unable to
sell his memoir — to any publishing compa-
ny, for any price — because a mere whiff of
a suspicion of sexual misconduct clings to his
reputation. Yet his sole accuser, his daughter,
was only seven at the time of this ‘inappro-
priate touching’ that she ‘remembers’. The
young woman has been brainwashed by her
lunatic mother to detest her father for years,
and more than one thorough investigation
by the authorities has failed to verify the
likelihood of any wrongdoing. But, hey, we
gleefully throw Woody Allen and his whole
career under the bus, just to be on the safe
side. His daughter Dylan, being a woman,
must ipso facto be believed.
We’re seeing the same thing happen
in relation to race. The more equitable the
society grows, the touchier and more pros-
ecutorial the cultural climate. Liberation
movements, as they accomplish their objec-
tives, go nuts. There isn’t enough to do, so
underemployed activists pick nits. Unfor-
tunately, we’ve never evolved a protocol
whereby social justice campaigns, having
fundamentally prevailed, call it quits.
A suggestion, then. There’s no paucity
of sexism abroad. Little girls married off to
old men in Africa get fistulas from under-
age intercourse and are ostracised because
they can’t stop peeing themselves. Girls
are still having their clitorises carved out
to keep them from enjoying sex too much.
Saudi women may finally be able to drive,
but they can’t actually go anywhere without
a male guardian’s permission. The Taleban
still burns down schools to keep girls from
getting an education. Turn outward. There’s
plenty of genuine injustice out there to go
round if you’re gagging for it.
SPECTATOR.CO.UK/BALLS
Lionel Shriver talks to Katy Balls on the
Women with Balls podcast.
21
 ‘Come on: cancel me’
Bret Easton Ellis is back – and being savaged for taking on millennials
‘I
grew up in LA where we all thought
fame was a joke,’ says Bret Easton
Ellis. ‘My class was filled with people
from Laura Dern to the girls in Little House
on the Prairie. And it always seemed a bit of
a joke. I never really imagined that was on
the cards for me. And I really haven’t done
a lot of the things that you’re supposed to do
to stay famous.
‘I haven’t published anything in ten years.
I haven’t tried to write that novel that’s going
to give critical acclaim or a prize or two —
which I’ve never won. And I seem to be con-
tinually controversial and rub people the
wrong way. And this has been for 35 years
now and I can’t tell you why: I don’t know.
I mean the big joke is: cancel me. Come on,
cancel me if you can’t stand it so much.’
Yet here he is in The Spectator’s offices to
record our books podcast: a famous writer.
Also one who gets more famous the less he
writes and the more people try to ‘cancel’
him. There’s a good bit of the latter going
on at the moment. The meandering auto-
biographical essays in his new book, White,
have had some corkingly savage reviews
on both sides of the Atlantic, particularly
in response to passages where he inveighs
against millennial culture and liberal hyste-
ria about the Trump administration.
Ellis often seems to revel in poking wasps’
nests. People have crossed the road to base-
ball-bat this book, I say. Was that what you
were expecting? ‘No. Not at all. I’ve never
written a more controversial book than this
since American Psycho and I am stunned.
I saw this as not a political book, and yet
everyone takes it as a political book filled
with rhetoric and political opinion.’
It’s the first time Ellis has published
nonfiction. What made him decide to? ‘My
agent told me it sells better.’ ‘Are you short
of cash?’ ‘Uh — taxes in California…’ He
alludes to a stillborn novel in the introduc-
tion, and he says ‘fiction had been leav-
ing me for a long time’. He’s done a lot of
screenwriting, with patchy success, but ‘I
didn’t know what the novel necessarily was
doing. It didn’t really resemble what it had
been doing in the analogue era, where it was
22
SAM LEITH
a source of news […] That was the kind of
novel that I grew up with. The novel was a
means of communicating not only aesthet-
ics but a sense of a world that we don’t know
anything about. It’s very hard to do now.’
Hence, perhaps, Ellis’s embrace of podcasts
(much of the material in White started life as
monologues for podcasts) and making salty
remarks on Twitter.
One such, notoriously, was a tequila-
fuelled tweetstorm a few years back about
David Foster Wallace — ‘the most tedious,
overrated, tortured, pretentious writer of my
generation’. He says now that Wallace was
‘brilliant’, but: ‘I don’t believe that David
was a fiction writer. I believe that he was a
journalist. He was a nonfiction writer and I
think ultimately the idea of being a novelist
kind of killed, kind of destroyed him.’
Their difference goes to the nub of the
question of the role of fiction. Wallace wrote,
‘For 35 years I’ve seemed to be
controversial and rub people the
wrong way, and I can’t tell you why’
notoriously, that ‘irony is ruining our culture’
— rejecting as a dead-end the pervading
irony of (among other things) Ellis’s then-
lionised style. Ellis half-concedes the point,
but says: ‘I don’t know what he replaced
[irony] with, and I didn’t like what he
replaced it with, whatever that might have
been. It seemed like a gesture to me, like so
much of David Foster Wallace seemed to me
to be a gesture.’
The sections of White that have got Ellis
in trouble are the least interesting passages
in a pretty interesting book. Jibes against
‘snowflakes’, ‘safe spaces’, ‘virtue-signalling’
and so on are nothing you can’t read in any
number of outlets. The bulk of the book is
about his well-off, neglected SoCal child-
hood, the effects of his early celebrity (Less
Than Zero made him famous before he’d
left college, and American Psycho made him
famous worldwide), wry memoir fragments
about hanging out with Kanye West, snort-
ing coke with Basquiat or being overpaid by
Tina Brown to profile Judd Nelson, and a
lot of rumination on music and the movies.
And the anti-snowflake stuff is the public
continuation of a private conversation: ‘My
boyfriend is a passionately progressive lib-
eral millennial who has gotten Trumped for
three years, who has completely fallen apart
because this man is President.’ He sees his
boyfriend as representative. But Ellis is far
from a Trump fan. The Donald was a big
satiric presence in American Psycho. He
just thinks well-heeled liberals have lost all
sense of proportion about him.
What Ellis identifies as one of the cen-
tral themes of the book, though, is at a slant
from politics: the conflict between aesthet-
ics and ideology. In a passage on his hero-
worship of Joan Didion as a young man, he
says that what marked Didion out, more
important than the crosspatch and eccentric
political stances she took, was ‘style’. As he
sees it, cultural gatekeepers now reward ide-
ological correctness ahead of aesthetic flair.
But can you draw the line between aes-
thetics and ideology as simplistically as that?
Aren’t aesthetics ideological? ‘Yes,’ he says.
‘That is true as well. But I lean more towards
finding a meaning in something’s style rath-
er than in its messaging. This generation is
on the surface: the message is the aesthetic.
It’s very different from how I grew up, where
the style was the meaning of something.’
Ellis calls the notion of cultural appro-
priation ‘a terrible thing — a terrible thing
for artists. It’s absolutely anti-art’. But in
White he complains at length that the Oscar-
garlanded movie Moonlight is a failure as
art — in large part because its director is
straight: that it’s a straight man’s idea of a
gay experience. Isn’t that essentially a com-
plaint about cultural appropriation? ‘No.
It doesn’t mean you can’t make it. Look, I
am sure there are straight men who might
have directed that with a little bit more
heat — think of the sex scenes in Broke-
back Mountain — but [Moonlight’s direc-
tor Barry] Jenkins as a straight dude is not
interested in that kind of distraction. I don’t
believe that gay people should only direct
gay films at all. It suggests a society that
the spectator | 11 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
really doesn’t care about art any more and
that only cares about ideology. When ideol-
ogy runs the day, I don’t know what kind of
art that leads to: it leads to a kind of studio-
approved, intellectually woke art which is
usually the worst art you can possibly find.
It’s bizarre that all these critics say: “We
need more movies about, uh, transgender
Latina handicapped people at Sundance —
really these are the movies that we need.”
And I’m saying: you’re goddamn crazy. You
know that’s not true. You know you want a
new Scorsese film. You know you want Sat-
urday Night Fever. You know you want Taxi
Driver. Those are the movies that excite you.
Those are the big spectacle movies that you
all grew up on.’
The nostalgia that suffuses White maps
on to the distinction Ellis has made between
the period of American cultural pomp and
swagger he calls ‘Empire’ and the more anx-
ious ‘post-Empire’ period that the country
now occupies. And most of the distinction
he makes is, as he says, about culture rather
than about politics. He’s not so much about
Making America Great Again as about
Making Hollywood Great Again.
I haven’t met a literary novelist who
bangs on about film as much as Ellis, or who
writes about it as feelingly and as persua-
sively; from the 1970s horror flicks he grew
up on to the hypnotising erotic blankness of
Richard Gere in American Gigolo. ‘All my
friends’ parents worked in Hollywood […] I
was coming of age in the 1970s which is the
Golden Age of American moviemaking […]
Movies were what we aspired to; movies are
what we wanted to make. Movies were the
grand art form.’
Also, he’s profoundly interested in actors.
Doesn’t he, at least a bit, subscribe to the
Trey Parker/Matt Stone view that actors
really just aren’t interesting? ‘Well they very
much aren’t to a degree — and there’s some-
thing about that uninteresting[ness] that
I find fascinating. It’s kind of like the cast
of characters from a lot of my novels. I find
something completely compelling about it.
How does an actor move through his day?
How does he interact with other people
when he’s not acting?’
He says he finds the actor’s combination
of professional likeability — ‘actors have to
be likeable in order to be cast’ — and self-
loathing ‘attractive’. ‘And it has spilled out
into the culture in that we are all actors on
social media to a degree: I’m not saying, you
know, in such a heavy-handed, overly liter-
al way — but there is a performative aspect
that has been enhanced in our lives.’
Ellis is an amiable character — neither
the cantankerous old git nor the icy nihilist of
caricature. But he seems a little melancholy
under the offhandedness. There’s a poignant
aside in White where he says the happiest he
has ever been in his life was the summer of
1991. Did he know that at the time? ‘I did.’
He fixes on that summer because it was the
the spectator | 11 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
moment the storm over American Psycho —
death threats; denunciations in the New York
Times and on CNN; a general assumption his
career was over, that he was ‘cancelled’ —
broke with the book’s publication.
‘It’s very hard to explain to people now,’
he says. ‘It’s like a balloon deflating because
people finally read the book. The book was
finally released. Everyone else was talking
about some fantasy they had about the book
and it all stopped… There was this huge
sense of relief. And I didn’t care any more.
I thought, I’m never going to go through
something like that again. I’m never going
to be this kind of pariah ever again. I’ve
come close but never as much as I was dur-
ing the American Psycho controversy. And
that summer was quite free and joyous. I felt
that I had become an adult.’
A lot of his public persona is not car-
ing what anyone thinks, but it sounds like
‘This generation is on the surface:
the message is the aesthetic. It’s very
different from how I grew up’
he cared very much then. ‘I don’t care how
I’m portrayed. I minded how the book was
being portrayed.’ And yet it took Ellis a long
time to come out as gay — ‘I really didn’t
feel it was really anybody’s business […] I
also didn’t want during that time my books
to be put into the gay ghetto of the gay sec-
tion’ — and even longer to come out as Pat-
rick Bateman. He initially said he modelled
Bateman on his father, but ‘20 years after the
book was published’ started to talk about
how it was ‘based on me and my youthful
unhappiness and my inability — my inability
to become me — and my resistance to
becoming a man in a society whose values I
found abhorrent’.
He now says of American Psycho that,
far from the amoral book naive readers saw
it as, ‘it is an extremely moralistic book. It’s
also quite earnest, and I see that earnestness
throughout the novel if I pick it up, and it
drives me a little bit crazy’. But that book ‘is
going to be on my tombstone. I get it. I get it.’
SPECTATOR.CO.UK/BOOKS
Sam Leith interviews Bret Easton Ellis on
this week’s books podcast.
‘There could be spot fines…’
BAROMETER
Endangered species
The UN claimed a million species of plants
and animals could become extinct. If they all
died out, how many would we be left with?
— The number of new species being
discovered is growing at a faster rate
than species are dying out. In 2011, the
UN Environment World Conservation
Monitoring Centre estimated there were
8.7 million species — 7.77 million of
which were animals, 610,000 fungi and
300,000 plants. At the time, around 1.2
million species had been discovered and
described.
— In 2017, Arizona University came up
with a new estimate: 2 billion. Between 70
and 90 per cent, it said, were bacteria.
Unequal rights
The Sultan of Brunei reversed a decision to
extend the death penalty to men convicted
of homosexual acts. Where is gay sex illegal?
— There are 71 countries where consenting
acts between adults remain a criminal act.
— In 27 of these the law applies only to
same-sex acts between males. In the other
44 the prohibition extends to either sex.
There is no country where only same-sex
acts between females are illegal.
— 11 countries still apply the death penalty:
Afghanistan, Iran, Mauritania, Nigeria,
Pakistan, Qatar, Somalia, Sudan, Saudi
Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Yemen.
— 5 countries specify life imprisonment as
a punishment for same-sex acts: Barbados,
Guyana, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia.
Source: International, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual,
Trans and Intersex Association
Gravy trains
The Caledonian Sleeper train was
relaunched with £150 million worth of
new carriages. Which are the most heavily
subsidised rail services in Britain, measured
in pence per passenger-km?
Northern 10.7
Merseyrail 10.4
ScotRail 10.2
Caledonian Sleeper 9.1
Arriva Trains Wales 8.1
London Overground 2.5
Source: Office of Rail and Road
Slippery slope
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s son has
been born 7th in line to the throne. But for
how long will he hold that position? How
royals have slipped down the lineage:
— Prince Harry was 3rd in line to the
throne when born in 1984. He is now 6th.
— Peter Phillips was 5th when born in
1977. He has now slipped down to 15th.
— David Armstrong-Jones, now Earl
Snowdon, was 5th when born in 1961.
He is now 21st.
23

Are you a Tweedy or a Trainer?
‘T
oo tweedy? Goodness gracious
me!’ Rory Stewart sounded star-
tled. A contender for the Tory
leadership, he was being interviewed by
the BBC’s Paddy O’Connell last Sunday
morning on Radio 4’s Broadcasting House.
O’Connell asked the MP for Penrith and the
Border how he responded to the criticism
that ‘the Conservative party is too tweedy’.
A short discussion of the relationship
between 21st-century Toryism and tweed
followed, during which Stewart revealed
that in his rural constituency ‘quite a lot of
us wear some tweed’. Only ‘some’ tweed,
mind you: Stewart sensed he was on tricky
ground here. Leadership candidates in all
parties get used to being asked if they’ve
ever smoked weed — but worn tweed? How
often? Just to be sociable? Experimenting?
Tried it a couple of times but that was at uni-
versity? Stewart sounded unsure whether
he was being invited to confess a vice or
parade a virtue.
But as both men knew, tweed was a sur-
rogate for an issue unrelated to menswear.
You could equally have brought brogue
shoes, double-breasted suits or red corduroy
trousers into the conversation as potential
skeletons in a Tory’s cupboard, indicators
of more deep-seated tendencies. Or — and
now we’re getting warmer — wind turbines,
gay marriage, HS2, political correctness, split
infinitives, feminism, trans-rights…
…Or Brexit. I have a serious question to
put, and for once (most Spectator readers will
be relieved to hear) it isn’t about whether
we should or shouldn’t leave the European
Union. I’ll half duck that this week. As
charming respondents in our online readers’
comments section like to remind any col-
umnist who dares ask whether Brexit is
actually a good idea: ‘We’re leaving. End of’,
‘Which part of the word “Leave” don’t you
understand?’, ‘We’re out. Get over it’, ‘Suck
it up’, etc. So — again, for once, and for the
sake of argument — I’ll take Brexit as a
given. We’re leaving — OK?
Leaving, however, will only be the begin-
ning. After that, arguably more important
decisions await. Are we to be a socially lib-
eral, progressive-minded, forward-thinking
nation, seizing and shaping a new econom-
the spectator | 11 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
MATTHEW PARRIS
ic future? Or shall we try to swim against
the global current? How is a Leave-minded
Britain, led by Leave-minded politicians,
likely to approach that question?
As I’m not the first to observe, the Leave
movement has proved a formidable coali-
tion of two very different types of Brexiteer,
often with little else in common. One group
is much, much smaller than the other, but
they’ve been vital to the argument, supply-
ing most of the respectable intellectual bal-
last; whereas the larger group have supplied
much of the passion — and, in terms of heft,
the numbers.
It’s trainers and no tie, vs tweed and
brogues. The Tweedies are essentially old-
fashioned (I’m struggling to avoid the word
‘reactionary’) in their mental reflexes. The
The Trainers want a free-wheeling,
outward-looking Britain, while the
Tweedies are essentially old-fashioned
Trainers want a free-wheeling, outward-
looking Britain, socially tolerant, open to
audacity and big ideas. It’s an indication of the
potential chasm, however, that most Trainers
will have to google to find out what a split
infinitive is; while most Tweedies still strug-
gle to get their heads around the idea that
you don’t wear trainers mostly for training.
Within each of these two groups, however,
there really does exist predictable homoge-
neity as to what Trainers might call ‘mindset’
and the Tweedies might call ‘outlook’ .
I state not as a polemical assertion but as
demonstrable through polling data that for
the Tweedies there exist clear correlations
between a range of opinions on non-Brexit
issues in politics and society, and their enthu-
siasm for Brexit. I call these B-indicators.
Anyone with a full suite of B-indicative opin-
ions is almost certain to be a keen Leaver.
Now let’s take a look at the answer
Rory Stewart gave Paddy O’Connell. Ear-
lier in the interview Stewart had argued
for ‘seizing issues like climate change,
which are completely central to my beliefs’.
Confronted now with the tweed issue, he
declared his love for the monarchy, history,
the military, etc — but went on to say this:
‘But I also love London, I love everything
[about it]. I’m talking to you at the moment
from around the corner from Hyde Park,
and… you just look at all the people now
walking through Hyde Park… alive with
modern people, children, French tourists,
Somali visitors…’
Your typical Tweedy, having already
raised an eyebrow at the climate change
stuff, would be grudgingly OK about French
tourists but would seriously wonder what
the hell Stewart was on about in mention-
ing Somalis. Somali ‘visitors’? More likely
asylum seekers, surely? And if she or he
were honest, they’d admit to a faint recoil
from the idea of ‘loving everything’ about
London (and a recoil, too, from my writing
‘she or he’).
And don’t get her (or him) going on glob-
al warming. Opinion polling suggests that
the two most reliable B-indicators are being
in favour of capital punishment, and dismiss-
ing or denying climate change. Immigration
is up there too. You can guess which way the
correlation lies as regards gay marriage and
wind farms, but you might be surprised to
find incipient hostility to large infrastructure
projects, notably HS2.
A neuralgic response to ‘political cor-
rectness gone mad’ and opposition to the
decriminalisation of drugs are two fur-
ther B-indicators. Broadly speaking, this
individual, had they been around in the 19th
century, would have opposed plans for rail-
ways in general, and wanted nothing to do
with votes for women. Today, high-speed
trains and the #MeToo movement serve as
boo-substitutes.
A writer I much admire (and a man I
like), Charles Moore, has accused me of bat-
tling against people when I should be bat-
tling their ideas. But here Charles and I just
have to differ. Ideas attract people. Which
people? I’d always hesitate to judge the idea
until I’d taken stock of the people it attracts.
What other ideas, what other baggage, does
this crew carry?
So sign up for Brexit by all means,
but take a look at the company you’re in,
because you’re signing up for them to take
charge. And when they do, expect a lot more
than Brexit.
25

What I’ve learnt from 25 years off the booze
H
ave you noticed how nearly every-
one in the media has won an award?
Is there even such a thing as a doc-
umentary maker who isn’t ‘award-win-
ning’? Most journalists my age have picked
up some sort of bauble, even if it’s only
from Julia Hobsbawm’s risible lefty
‘Comment Awards’.
I sulked about this for years until a col-
league reminded me that I did have an
award: Private Eye’s ‘drunkest person at
the Spectator party 1991’. I’d forgotten, per-
haps because there was no awards ceremo-
ny. Shame. I like to think of myself clutching
the prize — perhaps a tasteful statuette of
someone doing a technicolour yawn —
while insisting modestly that it should really
have gone to the vicar who fell backwards
into the rose bushes.
Likewise, I was cross that I had never
merited a single article about me in a nation-
al newspaper. Again, not true. I was once in
the Sun, no less. It’s not in my cuttings book,
but from memory the headline was ‘Jour-
nalist’s “joke” costs him £1,000’. I was done
for drunken driving — if you can call it driv-
ing, because I’d failed my test three times
and was too plastered to move my mate’s
car more than a few feet before I toppled
out of the open door into the arms of a lurk-
ing copper. My brilliant defence that it was
a ‘joke’ failed to sway the magistrate. I was
religious affairs correspondent of the Daily
Telegraph at the time. ‘You idiot,’ said the
news editor. ‘If you’d told me in time I could
easily have kept it out of the Sun.’
I’m not sure what year it happened, but
it must have been before 15 April 1994,
because that was the last time I drank alco-
hol. ‘Sober for a quarter of a century — what
an achievement!’ say my friends — and
I have to explain that my continuing bad habit
of gobbling codeine painkillers and benzo-
diazepines hardly counts as sobriety. As for
the ‘achievement’, well, that’s nice of them,
but basically I’m just not doing something
I don’t want to do.
When a waiter waves a glass of cham-
pagne under my nose, I don’t think: ‘Ooh,
that’d be nice, maybe just the one, but I
mustn’t because tragically I’m an alcoholic.’
I think: ‘You bastard, alcohol. Don’t think
26
Sober reality
DAMIAN THOMPSON
you can sidle up to me at a party and make
friends again, not after what you did to me.’
I’m going to spare you what’s known in
Alcoholics Anonymous as a ‘drunkalogue’
— a recitation of all the disasters caused by
alcohol. Or, rather, caused by me drinking
alcohol. The glass didn’t levitate to my lips.
On the other hand, my 15 years of heavy
boozing wasn’t an exercise in wickedness,
even though I did plenty of wicked things
when I was smashed.
One of the tortures of all addictions, not
just alcoholism, is trying to assign moral
responsibility. It’s torture especially for the
Did I really go up to Robbie Coltrane
and tell him I admired him for coming
to terms with weighing 29 stone?
family and friends of addicts. To what degree
should they blame their loved one? The
cruel unpredictability of addictive behav-
iour means they keep changing their minds.
One moment it’s ‘I can’t believe he’s let us
down again’, then ‘Now I can see that this is
a disease, we mustn’t blame him’, and then
‘After all that money we spent on rehab
he does this to us!’ I’ve heard this angry
confusion so many times, and it’s painful
— though not as offensive as the dogma
FROM THE ARCHIVE
How to fight Bolshevism
From 10 May 1919: The heart of the
country is always for moderation.
Nothing could show this more plainly
than the recent by-elections. It was felt
that the Prime Minister had been given
too clean a sheet of paper to write his
policy on, and that it would be good
for him to feel that the country had
criticism to offer, and was, moreover,
able to put on the curb. But this
balancing process was not, and never
is, a violent swoop towards pulling
down everything that exists. There was
certainly nothing revolutionary in it.
from opposing hardliners in the debate
over addiction. One side tells us that there’s
no such thing as addiction, which is just
a euphemism for reckless selfishness; the
other, representing the rehab industry, has
turned it into a ‘disease’ which is best treat-
ed by direct debit.
I’ve tried working out how much I was
at fault. That’s tricky, because semi-black-
outs reduce memories to a surreal dream.
Did I really go up to Robbie Coltrane in the
Groucho Club and tell him I admired him
for coming to terms with weighing 29 stone?
I did, because a slightly more sober friend
watched me. How did it go down? ‘Trust me,
you don’t want to know.’
So have I learned any lessons from
15 years on the bottle and 25 years off it?
Yes, simple ones. First, there’s no clear dis-
tinction between a ‘drink problem’ and
alcoholism (or whatever you want to call it:
it’s just a useful word, not a proper clinical
term). When I walk into a reception, I can
spot the young diary hack who has a nasty
relationship with booze. They don’t realise
it, but they’ll come to hate alcohol, even if
they can’t live without it.
That’s my second point. Once it takes
over, alcohol is as frightening as almost
any other addictive substance, and that
includes heroin and cocaine. Perhaps crystal
meth is worse.
Finally, and this is a bit gloomy, the ordeal
of hopeless drunkenness breaks something
in you. Or it did in me, anyway: years of not
giving a stuff about other people leave their
mark. Ask anyone who knows me. But at
least I can try to behave responsibly, which
was far too much effort when I was hung-
over. I managed to visit my mother in her
nursing home — though not as often as I
should have — and one of the last things that
penetrated her dementia was the knowledge
that I still hadn’t picked up a glass.
She died last year. Afterwards, my belov-
ed sister was diagnosed with advanced ovar-
ian cancer. If you’ll excuse the cliché, I can
be there for her. As opposed to being dead.
SPECTATOR.CO.UK/PODCAST
Damian Thompson and Tanya Gold on
giving up alcohol.
the spectator | 11 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk

Scrutinising charities
Sir: Toby Young was right to raise questions
about War on Want’s links to the Stop
Trump campaign (4 May). The public
rightly hold charities to high standards of
behaviour, and charities are required to
follow clear rules around political activity.
We will be scrutinising the charity’s
activities, and the issues raised by Toby
Young, closely as part of an ongoing
case into the charity. Similarly, we have
examined concerns about the activities
of a range of charitable thinktanks, and
last year issued a regulatory alert to all
charitable thinktanks on the register,
including to warn them about unacceptable
political activity. I can assure your readers
that as an evidence-based regulator, we
assess all concerns raised with us fairly
and consistently against a clear regulatory
framework. We will continue to do so
without fear or favour.
David Holdsworth,
Deputy chief executive, Charity Commission
Marijuana use is not trivial
Sir: It is difficult to decide whether to
condemn Chris Daw QC (‘A bitter
pill’, 4 May) for his defeatism, or for his
wilful ignorance of the true state of law
enforcement in this country. There is no
‘prohibition’ of drug possession, as he
claims. Hardly a week passes without
some police force declaring that it is not
interested in applying laws it is legally
obliged to enforce. On 20 April, marijuana’s
holy day, 5,000 people gathered in Hyde
Park and broke the law, while police stood
about. Not one person was arrested for an
offence which officially carries a maximum
sentence of five years in prison and an
unlimited fine.
This is the culmination of a de facto
surrender which goes back almost 50 years.
It is the users who sustain the entire drugs
trade. Suppliers and dealers would have no
business without their cash. Interdiction
of demand would strike a real blow at the
trade, while legalisation would put the
distribution and sale of marijuana in the
hands of immoral businessmen who will
make Big Tobacco look compassionate.
Mr Daw asserts that ‘nothing will stop’
people from taking drugs. On the contrary.
Japan and South Korea enforce their drug
possession laws and have far lower levels of
use than countries which do not. In 1960s
Britain, enforcement also kept a firm lid
on the number of users. Since then the
strong correlation between marijuana use
and mental illness has become undeniable.
Many families have good reason to know
that there is nothing amusing or trivial
28
LETTERS
about marijuana use. Yet people in a
responsible position, and who ought to
know better, swallow and regurgitate the
propaganda of one of the most cynical
greed lobbies in human history. One day
those who fell for this will be ashamed.
Peter Hitchens
London W8
Origins of Qwerty
Sir: There are a number of reasons for the
dominance of the Qwerty keyboard (Radio,
4 May). When the first typewriters were
invented in the 1880s there were several
competing keyboard layouts. Many of them
followed basic alphabetical order (see the
middle row now), but some common letters
(e.g. A) were removed to the edges, as
frequently used keys tended to jam if they
were too close. However, Qwerty really got
going when it was used for the first eight-
finger touchtyping lessons at the Shorthand
& Typewriter Institute, founded in
Cincinatti in 1882. The final seal of approval
was a speed-typing competition in 1888
between a Longley Qwerty touchtypist,
Frank E. McGurrin, and Louis Taub, a four-
finger operator on a rival keyboard with six
rows and no shift key. Qwerty won hands
down and its apparent superiority was
established. It was then widely adopted for
speed and efficiency.
Verity Kalcev
Lindfield, West Sussex
Bauhaus vs traditionalists
Sir: In Stephen Bailey’s review of two
new Bauhaus books last week (Books,
4 May) he puts the boot into traditionalist
architects, whom he identifies as ‘the
pediment-and-swag brigade’. It is a bit
unfair to attack such an endangered
species, especially when it is one that has
contributed many buildings of beauty.
What the Bauhaus achieved was a
universal acceptance of simple, rectilinear,
cubist forms, generally finished in white, in
order — and this is the crux — to engender
an aesthetic of avant-garde sophistication
to the building and thus to its perpetrators.
It was taken up by the privileged, the
Margot Beste-Chetwyndes of the world,
then foisted on the poor, the penguins and
the public. Talented architects like Wells-
Coates were able to achieve architecture
with it, but in less capable hands the world
has suffered much from the Bland Designs
to which the ‘Idea’ has more commonly led.
John Bennett RIBA
Southwold, Suffolk
Pigeon killers
Sir: Few people who understand nature
would disagree with Mary Wakefield’s
assessment of the recent furore about
shooting licences (4 May). But I think
she may be mistaken as to the assassin
of the pigeon in St James’s Park. The
scene she describes is typical of death by
sparrowhawk, which will have feasted on
the still-living pigeon’s breast before the
crows, which prefer carrion, came upon it.
Sparrowhawks are often mistaken
for pigeons, as part of their flight is very
similar. Perhaps Natural England should
consider informing would-be pigeon
shooters to save them from making a
serious (and illegal) mistake.
David Cowell
Ilkley, West Yorkshire
Shop of fools?
Sir: After reading about Gwyneth Paltrow’s
lifestyle emporium Goop (Notes on,
27 April), I checked my copy of Eric
Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang. This gives
the meaning of ‘goop’ as ‘a fool, a fatuous
person’. What more is there to say?
Claire Sadler
Northgate, Australia
the spectator | 11 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
 ANY OTHER BUSINESS|MARTIN VANDER WEYER
The truth behind Huawei is that
all telecoms networks are insecure
O
n the matter of whether former
defence secretary Gavin William-
son was the real ‘H’ in Line of Duty,
I admit I may have lost the plot. But mean-
while the rest of the media has rather lost
sight of the key issue with Huawei, the Chi-
nese telecoms giant whose involvement in
UK 5G networks was allegedly opposed by
Williamson and others at a National Secu-
rity Council meeting chaired by the Prime
Minister. The nub of this isn’t whether or not
Huawei is closely linked to the Chinese gov-
ernment: let’s just say that objective China-
watchers are unpersuaded by assurances to
the contrary, while acknowledging an ele-
ment of trade-war jingoism in the way US
politicians bandy the accusation. It’s also
fair to acknowledge that so far as we know,
Huawei hasn’t actually been proved to pro-
vide covert surveillance of US or other
states’ secret communications.
The real problem is that the Huawei
Cyber Security Evaluation Centre at Ban-
bury has been unable to certify the compa-
ny’s equipment as secure against sabotage.
‘Further significant technical issues have
been identified,’ reported the centre in
March. ‘No material progress has been made
by Huawei in the remediation of the issues
reported last year.’ The technical detail is
beyond the layman but my eye was caught,
deep in the text, by this admonition: ‘Hua-
wei’s own internal secure coding guidelines
are not routinely followed… and, in some
cases, developers may be actively working to
hide bad coding practice rather than fix it.’
So the trade-off is this: Huawei’s 5G
technology is the world’s most advanced
and likely to be cheaper than the alterna-
tives developed by Nokia of Finland and
Ericsson of Sweden, but unlikely ever to be
safe enough for the transmission of secrets;
it could also allow China to siphon off com-
mercially valuable data. On the other hand,
5G might not turn out to be as exciting an
advance on 4G as it’s cracked up to be, so
maybe we can afford to wait and see who
really offers the best value for money and
the least hackable system.
the spectator | 11 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
More importantly, let’s not forget that
western-made networks are also susceptible
to sabotage, just as western telecoms com-
panies are routinely obliged to co-operate
with their own nations’ intelligence agencies
— and if we could steal China’s secrets in
the same way, we probably would. Nicholas
Weaver, a computer security specialist at the
University of California, writing on the Law-
fare blog, concludes: ‘I don’t believe these
risks are unique to Huawei: the dirty secret
is that most of the world’s computing infra-
structure is a similar nightmare.’
If I were a television dramatist, I might
construct a plot in which the mastermind
Theresa May greenlights a controversial
purchase of Chinese telecoms equipment
and leaks her own secret meeting minutes in
order to advertise the decision to the world.
Then she parks all the kit in a secure ware-
house in Banbury and uses it only to bug the
vulnerable networks of other countries that
have followed her example by buying Chi-
nese. Move over, Jed Mercurio.
Wanted: a good grocer
Sainsbury’s chief executive Mike Coupe
faces a fight for his job after the Competi-
tion and Markets Authority ruled against
his proposed £12 billion merger with Asda
that would have created a supermarket
giant bigger than Tesco and supposedly
better equipped to face down the dis-
counters Aldi and Lidl. The CMA said the
deal would have harmed competition and
pushed up prices, ignoring Coupe’s claims
to the contrary. Investors were also uncon-
vinced, having endured limp profits and
a downward- drifting share price during
Coupe’s five-year tenure.
The truth about Sainsbury’s is that its
success was built on the dedicated ‘retail
is detail’ focus of its founding family: that’s
also how Coupe’s predecessor, Justin King,
succeeded in delivering 36 consecutive
quarters of sales growth. As I reported
when King stood down: ‘Groceries up-front,
gleaming fish, spacious aisles, helpful
staff… a palpable targeting of middle-class
shoppers who demand a balance of quality
and value.’ Instead, Coupe chased deals, his
only real win being the smaller takeover of
Argos. The new Sainsbury’s chairman, Mar-
tin Scicluna, says: ‘One hundred per cent,
he’s got my support.’ But watch this space
— there might soon be a vacancy for a chief
executive who just wants to be a good grocer.
Come on over, Warren
It’s good to know Warren Buffett is ‘ready
to buy something in the UK tomorrow’ but
let’s not pretend that’s all the news we need
to counter the fear that Brexit chaos will be a
major long-term deterrent to foreign inves-
tors. Buffett likes to ‘trust the system’ and
understand the culture in places where he
invests, and regards Britain as ‘awfully close’
to the US in that respect: it’s true that the
English language and law, combined with
relative honesty and reliability, will always
make this a good place to do business. But
foreign direct investment was down by a
third last year and no one seriously expects
it to recover any time soon: we need more
than the endorsement of one 88-year-old
Anglophile billionaire.
Golden eras
Under an auburn-tinted toupee, I’ve been
playing camp Georgie in Make Way for
Lucia, John van Druten’s stage adaption of
E. F. Benson’s gently comic Mapp and Lucia
novels from the 1930s. Like P.G. Wodehouse,
Benson created a light-hearted middle Eng-
land of leisured rentiers untouched by eco-
nomic slump and the scars of war: in cultural
memory, theirs became a golden interlude.
I wonder whether the quarter-century that
ended in 2015 will be similarly mytholo-
gised, despite its booms and busts, as a peri-
od of relative ease and harmony. Compared
with the current mood of bitterness, division
and insecurity, the Major-to-Cameron era
already feels like a long sunlit afternoon of
Earl Grey tea and cucumber sandwiches.
29
 © ROBERTO VILLA/COURTESY OF ASIA HOUSE

Behind-the-scenes Simon Ings describes Christopher Priest by the Arabian Nights

shot by Roberto Villa Einstein’s bafflement by his applauds Will Wiles’s rant Andrew Lycett reveals
from Pasolini’s 1974
Il Fiore delle Mille e worldwide popularity against psychogeography what really amused Queen
Una Notte Rod Liddle feels the urge to Justin Marozzi finds that Victoria: fairground freaks
Justin Marozzi — p40 go to sleep and never wake everyone from Catherine Daisy Dunn discovers
up when listening to Zeta-Jones to Scooby Doo the surprising origins of
Vampire Weekend has starred in films inspired the letter ‘A’
the spectator | 11 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk 31
BOOKS & ARTS
The agony of the ‘almost man’
Jonathan Powell describes the bullying tactics of a remarkable, if deeply
flawed, American diplomat, whose career spanned half a century
Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and
the End of the American Century
by George Packer
Jonathan Cape, £25, pp. 592
You may ask yourself, is it worth one of the
best American non-fiction writers produc-
ing a book of just under 600 pages on an
arrogant and abrasive egotist whose high-
est sustained rank in the State Department
was that of a lowly assistant secretary?
The answer is unabashedly yes. This is
a remarkable work about a remarkable, if
deeply flawed, statesman whose career was
intimately intertwined with the 50 years
of American decline from Vietnam
to Afghanistan.
Nearly all biographies have long, bor-
ing stretches you want to skip. This one has
none. The access to Richard Holbrooke’s
papers and to the uncensored memories of
his wives and mistresses, as well as George
Packer’s own racy writing, makes this
a fascinating and compulsive read. Even
Packer’s constant personal intrusions
into the story to express his opinion, New
Journalism-style, work brilliantly. The
author was told he should write a novel
about Holbrooke rather than a biography
and it often feels as though he has.
Dick Holbrooke first crossed my con-
sciousness in 1994 when George Stephan-
opoulos, then a close aide to President
Clinton, recounted to me with incredulity
the behaviour of the ambassador to Ger-
many during a presidential trip to Berlin.
Holbrooke had repeatedly leapt into ‘the
Beast’ (the President’s armoured limou-
sine), breaking all the rules, and perched
on the jump seat in order to get face time
with the President. The White House staff
were appalled.
It turns out this was not Holbrooke’s
first offence. In 1977 Cyrus Vance, Jimmy
Carter’s secretary of state, had to ask his
personal secretary to write to Holbrooke
saying: ‘You may not insert yourself as
a passenger in the secretary of state’s car
unless this office has specifically approved
your request to accompany him.’ Hol-
brooke would lurk near the entrance to the
State Department to ambush Vance, but
the secretary of state was too polite to com-
32
BOOKS
plain himself. The office warned Holbrooke
that the security detail would keep him out
by force if necessary. The whole of his life he
was actually or metaphorically jumping into
other people’s cars without asking them.
It is hard to believe that any adult
human could ever have been so devoid of
self-awareness as Holbrooke. He ignored
his brother, his parents and his sons, went
through several wives and mistresses and
perfected the art of looking over people’s
shoulders at cocktail parties in search of
someone more important. He even pushed
an elderly couple of Holocaust survivors
off the VIP bus into Auschwitz on the 50th
anniversary to make room for himself, leav-
Typically, Holbrooke wrote his own
letter proposing himself for the Nobel
Peace Prize and got others to sign it
ing them weeping on the pavement. He mis-
judged successive presidents in the way he
dealt with them, correcting Obama during
his job interview and telling him to call him
Richard rather than Dick because his wife
would prefer that.
His life was a constant rivalry with his
early and close friend, the earnest and hon-
ourable Tony Lake, who later became his
nemesis. Lake and Holbrooke joined the
State Department together in 1962 and
were posted to Vietnam, where they played
tennis most days. Holbrooke, however,
chose to have an affair with Lake’s wife,
which transformed him into an enemy.
At every step of the way, Lake was
ahead of him, frustrating his ambition. Lake
resigned on principle over Vietnam, as an
aide to Kissinger. Holbrooke did not. Lake
was secretary to Cyrus Vance on the sev-
enth floor of the State Department while
Holbrooke was on the less prestigious sixth
floor, as an assistant secretary. Lake was
national security adviser to Bill Clinton and
initially vetoed Holbrooke’s appointment
to the administration. Holbrooke opted to
be Hillary Clinton’s adviser in the 2008 elec-
tion while Lake was Obama’s foreign policy
adviser. Obama won.
Lake was by no means Holbrooke’s only
enemy. Nearly all the Democratic national
security advisers had it in for him, from
Brzezinski to Susan Rice. But his battles
weren’t about status. Tony Lake later wrote:
‘What Holbrooke wants attention for is
what he’s doing, not what he is.’
Holbrooke was driven by a burning
ambition to be secretary of state from
an early age. He adopted Dean Rusk, the
father of a school friend and Kennedy’s
secretary of state, as a surrogate father. He
took Averell Harriman, the grand old man
of American diplomacy, as his patron. But
he never made it, perhaps because he tried
so hard. The only time he was considered
seriously was in 1996, but Clinton gave the
job instead to Madeleine Albright. And as
a Democrat he had to wait out the 20 years
of Republican presidents, making money in
New York. He ended up the ‘almost man’,
largely because he had succeeded in alienat-
ing so many of his colleagues.
What makes this book so interesting,
however, is not Holbrooke’s staggering per-
sonality defects and the constant pettiness
of the bureaucratic battles but the span of
his life. His career ran from his first post-
ing to Vietnam under President Kennedy
to his death as Afghanistan envoy under
President Obama. He went to Saigon as an
avowed believer in American power, work-
ing on counter-insurgency, living round
the corner from the hotel where Graham
Greene wrote The Quiet American. He
never tired of quoting Greene: ‘How can
we lose when we’re so sincere?’ Gradual-
ly he became disillusioned by the mistakes
and the lies, working for a while on compil-
ing the Pentagon Papers. Vietnam, and its
lessons, stayed with him for life, so much so
that Obama had to ask him to stop going
on about it in White House discussions of
Afghanistan 50 years later.
Holbrooke participated in most of the
crucial US negotiations in those 50 years.
He was at the first discussions with the
North Vietnamese in Paris in 1968, argu-
ing about the shape of the table. Later he
tried to negotiate normalisation of rela-
tions with Vietnam as assistant secretary
under Carter. But his real moment came
with the Bosnia mediations under Clinton.
Tony Lake had wanted to negotiate him-
self but had the sense to let Holbrooke do
the spectator | 11 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
it instead, giving him a nine-point plan to
work with.
Warren Christopher, the secretary of
state, who intensely disliked Holbrooke,
thought his aggressiveness and self-dram-
atisation were perfect for the Balkan war-
lords. Tudjman of Croatia called him ‘the
Bulldozer’ and Milosevic called him some-
thing worse. He handled the talks bril-
liantly, alternately bullying and charming
the dictators. All of the senior figures in the
administration were haunted by Vietnam
and more recently by Somalia. Only Hol-
brooke understood that bombing the Serbs
was necessary to get them into discussions
about peace, and he eventually overcame
General Colin Powell’s objections.
Finally, he managed to corral all the
parties in Dayton airforce base in Ohio in
November 1995 and lock them up there
until he got an agreement. He had no script
the spectator | 11 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
Richard Holbrooke as US special
envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan
in New Delhi, April 2009, a year
before his death
going into the negotiations and extem-
porised throughout. He described his
method as
Persistence… a kind of relentless harassment
of the parties into concessions that they were
not ready to make unless pressed by the US
with a credible threat of the use of force
and it worked. In fact, Packer reveals that
Holbrooke had all but given up towards the
end of Dayton and it was Milosevic, desper-
ate for a deal, who saved him by making
last-minute concessions and selling out his
Bosnian Serb allies.
Holbrooke succeeded in stopping the war,
but his success is not celebrated in Bosnia.
There are no Holbrooke Squares, or 25-year-
olds called Richard. And as time passes, the
deal looks worse and worse. It created a two-
headed monster of a government that cannot
operate effectively, entrenched sectarianism
and rewarded ethnic cleansing. In typical
Holbrooke fashion, he wrote his own letter
proposing himself for the Nobel Peace Prize
and got others to sign it.
His final job was as Afghanistan envoy
under Obama. He had always been an
interventionist, supporting the Iraq War
and urging Hillary Clinton to do so as well,
convinced that Democrats who were con-
sidered weak on security were unelectable.
But, unlike Kissinger, he wasn’t a practi-
tioner of Realpolitik but rather carried
the banner for FDR’s and Truman’s tradi-
tion of liberal internationalism.
In Afghanistan he tried to apply the les-
sons he had learned from the mistakes of
Vietnam. He recalled all too well Lyndon
The whole of his life, Holbrooke was
actually or metaphorically jumping
into people’s cars without asking them
Johnson’s tragic escalation in 1965 and tried
to oppose the ‘surge’ in Afghanistan in 2010.
The ‘Afghanisation’ of the fighting echoed
the failed ‘Vietnamisation’ five decades
earlier. He knew that trying to choose gov-
ernments in Saigon had been a disaster, but
found himself attempting to replace Presi-
dent Karzai in Kabul. He knew that there
needed to be a political strategy to match
the kinetic strategy in Afghanistan, just as
had been required in Vietnam, where he
agreed with Harriman on the need to talk
to the North Vietnamese. But when he
tried to open talks with the Taleban he was
blocked by Hillary Clinton and Obama.
Finally, he was felled by a heart attack
in a meeting with Hillary in the State
Department and taken to hospital, where
he died under the surgeon’s knife.
His epitaph, and that of American for-
eign policy, is perhaps one he penned him-
self in 2001: ‘What is wrong with nation
building? Somewhere along the road from
Vietnam to Somalia, this once important
part of US national security policy became
a dirty word.’ Why is it that the US, which
did such a brilliant job in nation building
in postwar Germany and Japan, has not
been able to manage it since, from Vietnam
to Afghanistan?
33
 BOOKS & ARTS
GETTY IMAGES

ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Albert Einstein and his first wife, the Serbian physicist and
mathematician Mileva Maric, whom he admitted to treating
as ‘an employee I cannot sack’

hailed the announcement of the results of tortion, and Eddington’s confirmation of

An admirably
elegant theory
Simon Ings
Einstein’s Wife: The Real Story of
Mileva Einstein-Maric
by Allen Esterson and David C Cassidy;
contribution by Ruth Lewin Sime
MIT, £24, pp. 313
Einstein’s War: How Relativity
Triumphed Amid the Vicious
Nationalism of World War I
by Matthew Stanley
Viking, £16.99, pp. 400
Gravity’s Century: From Einstein’s
Eclipse to Images of Black Holes
by Ron Cowen
Harvard, £19.95, pp. 176
No Shadow of a Doubt: The 1909
Eclipse that Confirmed Einstein’s
Theory of Relativity
by Daniel Kennefick
Princeton, £24.95, pp. 320
On 6 November 1919, at a joint meeting of
the Royal Astronomical Society and the
Royal Society, held at London’s Burling-
ton House, the ‘lights went all askew in the
heavens’. That, anyway, was the rhetorical
flourish with which the New York Times
34
a pair of astronomical expeditions conduct-
ed in 1919, after the Armistice but before
the official end of the first world war. One
expedition, led by Arthur Stanley Edding-
ton, assistant to the Astronomer Royal, had
repaired to the plantation island of Princi-
pe, off the coast of West Africa; the other,
led by Andrew Crommelin, who worked at
the Royal Greenwich Observatory, headed
to a racecourse in Brazil.
Together, in the few minutes afford-
ed by the 29 May solar eclipse, the teams
used telescopes to photograph shifts in the
apparent location of stars as the edge of the
sun approached them. The possibility that
a heavy body such as the sun might cause
some distortion in the appearance of the star
field was not particularly outlandish. New-
ton, who had assigned ‘corpuscles’ of light
some tiny mass, supposed that such a massive
body might draw light in, like a lens, though
he imagined the effect was too slight to
be observable.
The degree of distortion that the
Eddington expedition hoped to observe
was something else again. 1.75 arc-seconds
is roughly the angle subtended by a coin
a couple of miles away: a fine observation,
but not impossible at the time. Only the the-
ory of the German-born physicist Albert
Einstein — respected well enough at home
but little known to the Anglophone world
— would explain such a relatively large dis-
the spectator | 11 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
his hypothesis brought the ‘famous German
physician’ (as the New York Times would
have it) instant celebrity.
‘The English expedition of 1919 is ulti-
mately to blame for this whole misery, by
which the general masses seized possession
of me,’ Einstein once remarked; but he was
Picture the 40-year-old Einstein
stepping into a room and literally
causing women to faint
not so very sorry for the attention. Forget
the usual image of Einstein the loveable
old eccentric. Picture instead a 40-year-old
who, when he steps into a room, literally
causes women to faint. People wanted his
opinions even about stupid things. And for
years, if anyone said anything wise, within
a few months their words were being attrib-
uted to Einstein.
‘Why is it that no one understands me
and everyone likes me?’ Einstein won-
dered. His appeal lay in his supposed
incomprehensibility. Charlie Chaplin got it:
‘They cheer me because they all understand
me,’ he remarked, accompanying the theo-
retical physicist to a film premiere, ‘and they
cheer you because no one understands you.’
Several new books mark the centenary
of the 1919 eclipse observations. Though
their aims diverge, they all to some degree
capture the likeness of Einstein the man,
messy personal life and all, while rendering
his physics a little bit more comprehensible
to the rest of us. Each successfully negoti-
ates the single besetting difficulty facing
books of this sort — namely the way sci-
ence approaches its own history. Scien-
tific findings are often best explained as
stories of discovery: emollient tales of
how one or two figures unwove a complex
problem, and in doing so brought human
understanding closer to the truth of things.
This has the huge advantage of making
extremely complicated ideas comprehen-
sible, by building them up brick by brick.
Of course, it’s a terrible way to write history.
Historians, meanwhile, show how the
business of science is as contingent and
dramatic as any other human activity. They
give us a much clearer, more inclusive, more
humane view of what science actually is.
If you want to understand what the science
has revealed, however, you’d best steer clear
of their nuanced accounts, full of thwart-
ed ambitions, contested theories, doubts
and contingencies.
When these two very different approach-
es clash, the fallout can be embarrassing:
witness the way various commentators have
interpreted Einstein’s relationship with
his first wife. Einstein was, by the end of
their failing marriage, notoriously horrible
to Mileva Einstein-Maric; this in spite of
their great personal and intellectual close-
ness as first-year physics students at the
Federal Swiss Polytechnic.
Einstein once reassured Elsa Lowen-
thal, his cousin and second-wife-to-be,
that ‘I treat my wife as an employee I can-
not fire’. Why Elsa, reading that, didn’t run
a mile is not recorded. Albert was a bad hus-
band. His wife was a mathematician. There-
fore, some have supposed, Albert must have
stolen his theory of special relativity from
Mileva. This canard, bandied about since
the 1970s, does no one any favours. The
three separately authored parts of Einstein’s
Wife unpick the myth of Mileva’s influence
over Albert while increasing, rather than
diminishing, our interest in, and admira-
tion of, the woman herself. It’s a hard job
to do well, without preciousness or spe-
cial pleading, especially in today’s resent-
ment-ridden and over-sensitive political
climate, and the book represents an impres-
sive, compassionate accomplishment.
Matthew Stanley’s Einstein’s War focus-
es on Einstein and Eddington and their
fellows, and is rather less nuanced. Stan-
ley’s style is sometimes a little simplistic
and didactic, but I suspect that’s inevitable,
given the sheer scale of what he is trying to
do. He succeeds in wrapping up the global,
national and scientific politics of an era in
a compelling story of one man’s wild the-
ory, lucidly sketched, and its experimental
confirmation in the unlikeliest and most
exotic circumstances.
the spectator | 11 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
The world that theoretical physicists
uncovered in the early 20th century was
truly a blooming, buzzing confusion. And
what was true of physics has since become
true of many other fields, from econom-
ics to biology. Causes do not follow effects
in the tidy, linear way our personal experi-
ence leads us to suspect. Science itself, not
just popular science, is an exercise in radical
simplification. Choices must be made, and
held to.
Gravity’s Century, by the science writ-
er Ron Cowen, is the most condensed of
the books mentioned here; it frequently
runs right up to the limit of how far com-
plex ideas can be compressed without
slipping into falsehood. I reckon I spotted a
couple of questionable interpretations. But
these were so minor as to be hardly more
than matters of taste, when set against Cow-
en’s overall achievement. This is as good a
short introduction to Einstein’s thought
as one could wish for. It even contrives
‘Why is it that no one
understands me and everyone
likes me?’ Einstein wondered
to discuss confirmatory experiments and
observations whose final results were only
announced as I was writing this review.
No Shadow of a Doubt is more ponder-
ous, but for good reason: Daniel Kennefick,
an astrophysicist and historian of science,
is out to defend the astronomer Edding-
ton against criticisms more serious, more
detailed and framed more conscientiously
than any thrown at that supposed cad and
thief, Albert Einstein. Eddington was an
English pacifist and internationalist, who
made no bones about wanting his eclipse
observations to champion the theories of
a German-born physicist, even as jingoism
reached its crescendo on both sides of the
Great War.
Given the sheer bloody difficulty of the
observations themselves, and considering
the political inflection given them by the
man orchestrating the work, are Edding-
ton’s results to be trusted? Kennefick is
adamant that they are, modern naysayers
to the contrary, and in conclusion to his
always insightful biography, he says some-
thing interesting about the way historians,
and especially historians of science, tend to
underestimate the past:
Scientists regard continuous improvement in
measurement as a hallmark of science that is
unremarkable except where it is absent. If it is
absent, it tells us nothing except that someone
involved has behaved in a way that is unscien-
tific or incompetent, or both.
But, Kennefick observes, such improve-
ment is only possible with practice — and
eclipses come round too infrequently for
practice to make much difference. Contem-
Life at the Globe
‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends,
once more/ Or close the wall up with our
English dead…’ Good golly, Henry V
has some thumping lines, doesn’t it? The
final play in this summer’s Henriad at the
Globe — partnered with Merian — shows
us Prince Hal fledged as a king, and a war
leader at that. The subjunctive mood of
the previous plays has become indicative;
even imperative. And it’s a play where
British (OK, in this case English) identi-
ty comes galloping back to the fore as it
has not done since John of Gaunt popped
his clogs in Richard II. Our concern is no
longer civil strife but foreign wars.
It’s no accident that the play has, his-
torically, had propaganda value. The iconic
screen version is Laurence Olivier’s —
which came out in 1944, and in which the
St Crispin’s Day speech (Agincourt) and
‘Once more’ (Harfleur) were given special
poignancy and oomph with real British
troops then fighting and dying in France.
It’s a tribute to the quality of Ken-
neth Branagh’s grittier 1989 version that
it competes with Olivier’s. Perhaps the
standout moment is the seemingly endless
tracking shot in which Branagh, bloodied
and forlorn in victory, carries the dead
body of a boy across the blasted battle-
field to the sound of the Non nobis.
Here’s a caution to the idea that the
only way to read Henry V is as a full-
throated piece of martial triumphalism.
And there’s warrant in the text for that
dead boy. In Act IV Scene 7, Gower and
Fluellen find that French deserters have
slaughtered the camp-followers: ‘Tis cer-
tain there’s not a boy left alive; and the
cowardly rascals that ran from the battle
ha’ done this slaughter.’
Incidentally, it’s traditionally sug-
gested — though not established —
that the play was the first to have been
performed in the new Globe Theatre
in 1599. So visitors to this production
can enjoy a frisson when the Prologue
wonders: ‘May we cram/ Within this
wooden O the very casques/ That did
affright the air at Agincourt?’ That
‘wooden O’? You’re sitting in it. Enjoy.
— Sam Leith
IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE
PRINCIPAL PARTNERS OF
SHAKESPEARE’S GLOBE’S
2019 SUMMER SEASON
35
BOOKS & ARTS
porary attempts to recreate Eddington’s
observations face the exact same challenges
Eddington did, and ‘it seems, as one might
expect, that the teams who took and han-
dled the data knew best after all’.
Far from there being a paucity of good
stories in science, one can come up with
a limitless number of perfectly valid, per-
fectly accurate, perfectly true stories, all
describing the same phenomenon from dif-
ferent points of view. Understanding the
stories abroad in the physical sciences at
the fin de siècle, seeing which ones Einstein
adopted, why he adopted them, and why,
in some cases, he swapped them for others,
helps us understand his work.
And while I can’t say it makes his the-
orising easy, it does give us a gut sense of
why he was so baffled by his ‘revolutionary’
public reputation. It was Einstein’s peculiar
fate that his reputation for intellectual and
personal weirdness has concealed what, for
Eddington especially, was relativity theo-
ry’s chief appeal, namely its architectural
elegance. Eddington’s inspired and vigor-
ous popularisation of Einstein’s work has
also, ironically, replaced the work itself in
the public mind with a set of tropes — from
time dilation effects to travel via ‘worm-
holes’ in spacetime — that now read like
recipes for tired science fiction. The way
massive bodies bend spacetime like a rub-
ber sheet is an image so vivid and useful, it
saturates elementary science classes to the
point of tedium.
Einstein hated such geometrical meta-
phors for a different reason. ‘Since the math-
ematicians pounced on the relativity theory,’
he complained, ‘I no longer understand it
myself.’ Paddling about as we are in the geo-
metrical shallows, we play with thoughts of
bouncy sheets. Einstein had to understand
the behaviours of these surfaces mathemati-
cally in four dimensions (three of space and
one of time), crunching equations so radical-
ly non-linear their results would change the
value of the numbers originally put into them
in feedback loops that drove the man out of
his mind. ‘Never in my life have I tormented
myself anything like this,’ he moaned.
The moment we are able to put him in
the context of co-workers, peers and friends,
we see that Einstein was perfecting classi-
cal physics, not overthrowing it, and that
his supposedly peculiar theory of relativity
— as the man said himself —‘harmonises
with every possible outlook of philosophy
and does not interfere with being an idealist
or materialist, pragmatist or whatever else
one likes’.
A little prophylactic exposure to Ein-
stein’s actual work pays dividends. It sweeps
some of the weirdness away and reveals
Einstein’s achievement: theories that set all
the forces above the atomic scale dancing
with an elegance Isaac Newton, founding
father of classical physics, would have half
recognised and wholly admired.
36
Darkness visible
Christopher Priest
Plume
by Will Wiles
Fourth Estate, £16.99, pp. 368
With his first novel about looking after an
engineered wood floor, and a second novel
about what it is like to stay in a chain hotel,
Will Wiles seems determined to corner the
market in unpromising literary subjects.
His latest novel, Plume, is about a chap who
lives in a rented flat in London and who
works in an office. Hooray! — the sainted
few who are already Wiles fans will learn
this with their hearts pumping with antici-
patory happiness. Mine certainly did.
A quick summary is appropriate, as
Wiles’s novels remain, for now, under-
regarded. Care of Wooden Floors (2012)
was exactly what it said on the tin. The
narrator flies to a European city to house-
sit an apartment of an absent friend called
Oskar. Oskar is fastidiously house-proud,
and demands only that the greatest care
be taken of his specially installed wooden
floor. In a mere eight days a classic comic
inferno ensues.
The Way Inn (2014) was an exercise in
surrealism, disguised as a satire on modern
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business conferences. The protagonist was
in fact the hotel alluded to in the title, one of
a multinational chain. Neither we nor Neil
Double, a conference surrogate who stands
in for unwilling delegates and reports back
later, realise this at first. He loves every-
thing about chain hotels, while we recognise
the same bland budget features we’ve never
really noticed before, and shudder enjoya-
bly. Think Jacques Tati’s Playtime, with the
imaginative energy of J.G. Ballard.
The plume of Plume is the column
of stinking black smoke rising above an
explosion at a fuel depot in Barking. The
sky darkens. Jack Bick, a profile writer for
a magazine, feels as if he is the only person
in London to notice this catastrophic event.
Days later, with the plume still there, and
apparently changing position so that Bick
is constantly aware of it wherever he goes,
we realise that there’s a tremblingly deliri-
ous quality to his perception. Everything is
mounting up against him: he is struggling to
keep his job, his landlord won’t repair his
flat, his neighbour has builders destructive-
ly excavating a few extra floors beneath the
basement, his boss is constantly watching
and timing his movements, he is taunted by
visions of cockatoos, and then there is the
Need. The Need is the clue to everything,
accounting for all his troubles.
Bick is a functioning (just about) alcohol-
ic, in full acceptance of the condition while
denying almost everything else. Into this
mix comes the urgent requirement to write
a profile of a successful novelist called Oli-
ver Pierce. His latest book, a kind of psycho-
geography of London streets, contained
a vivid description of what happened when
he was mugged. When they are in a bar, no
surprise, Pierce confesses that he made the
whole thing up. A scoop for Bick — but
he loses the recording of the conversation,
throwing him again and again into Pierce’s
dangerous comradeship. Pierce wants
another go at being mugged. They trawl the
night streets of bad parts of London, hoping
to meet a thug or two. They fail even at this.
Speaking of psychogeography, Wiles,
through his character Pierce, voices a mem-
orable rant against the whole literary sub-
genre, which he finds intolerable: the lost
rivers of London, the ghost Tube stations.
In fact, Pierce has recently abandoned
an attempt to write the ultimate psycho-
geography of London, ‘pinning down every
mystical wrinkle, backwoods fact and
obscure snip of folklore’. His intention,
Casaubon-like, was to define and finish the
genre, putting everyone else out of the busi-
ness. If only, Wiles implies.
This is the real Wiles: deeply in the world
he describes, but a safe satirical step or two
back from it. A more vivid rendering of mod-
ern London life would be hard to imagine:
the mobile phone taxi apps, pubs recom-
mended by interactive websites, property
scams, job insecurity and terraced houses
the spectator | 11 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
being converted into underground skyscrap-
ers with private pools. The book is joy uncon-
fined: the reader is sucked along unstoppably,
but glorying too with uncomfortable recog-
nition. Fabulous in every sense.
Amusing Queen Victoria
Andrew Lycett
Palaces of Pleasure: From Music
Halls to the Seaside to Football:
How the Victorians Invented Mass
Entertainment
by Lee Jackson
Yale, £20, pp. 304
The Wonders: Lifting the Curtain
on the Freak Show, Circus and
Victorian Age
by John Woolf
Michael O’Mara, £20, pp. 376
The American dwarf ‘General’ Tom Thumb
is only mentioned once in Lee Jackson’s
encyclopaedic survey of Victorian mass
entertainment, and then as an example of
an attraction at the rebuilt Crystal Palace
in Sydenham in 1864. But he is the star of
John Woolf’s breezy personality-driven his-
tory of the ‘freak’ show, an intriguing sub-
set of that wider field of leisure activity.
Tom is first introduced there 20 years
earlier when, aged six and standing just
25 inches tall in red velvet coat and breech-
es, he performs before an enchanted young
Queen Victoria in Buckingham Palace,
together with his manager, P.T. Barnum.
Born Charles Stratton in Connecticut,
Tom was snapped up by Barnum, who made
him the centrepiece of a highly lucrative
showbusiness empire, based on his Amer-
ican Museum in New York, which catered
to the 19th-century demand for freaks and
human oddities. Starting with Joice Heth,
billed as a 161-year-old slave woman who
was once George Washington’s nurse, Bar-
num used hoax, humbug and salesmanship
to promote his business, which endured
till only two years ago in the Barnum and
Bailey circus. Milking his royal connections
was just one example of his chutzpah.
Read in tandem, these two books illus-
trate how, from around 1850, the entertain-
ment industry, particularly in Britain, began
to alter in character, with Queen Victoria
playing a significant role. She did this partly
by giving the royal seal of approval to the
display of freaks, but also, taking her cue
from Prince Albert’s Great Exhibition of
1851 and its later Crystal Palace incarna-
tion, by encouraging mass amusements to
move out of pubs and music halls into larger
exhibition spaces, such as fairgrounds and
theme parks, which stressed education and
inclusivity as well as pleasure.
In this way, leisure paralleled periodi-
the spectator | 11 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
cal publishing, which developed over the
century from bloodthirsty Newgate Cal-
endar digests of murder and vice, through
sensationalist penny dreadfuls, to uplift-
ing family fare, such as the monthly Strand
Magazine. In this period of massive advanc-
es in wealth, education and mobility, ten-
dencies to excess were held in check by an
underlying morality based on evangelical-
It’s deeply harrowing to read of the
tortures endured by ‘freaks’ at the
hands of managers and medics
ism. This ambivalence, often presenting as
prurience, was epitomised by the Queen’s
apocryphal utterance, ‘We are not amused’,
when she clearly was.
In Jackson’s telling this is — initially
at least — a typically British story of the
perilous relationship between alcohol and
probity. He shows how the basic gin shop
gave way to the more salubrious gin pal-
ace, which, with gas lighting, gilding and
seating, attracted a wider clientele, includ-
ing women. Similarly, the pub became the
‘free and easy’, which encouraged singa-
longs, and gradually became more enter-
tainment-orientated as it morphed into
the palace of varieties, saloon and music
The Mexican ‘baboon
lady’ Julia Pastrana was
born with hypertrichosis
and, like many fairground
‘freaks’, was subject to
inhumane examinations
by scientists
ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
hall. At each stage these institutions were
plagued by magistrates who, encouraged
by rival ventures, particularly the theatres,
sought to portray them as dens of prostitu-
tion and crime.
The first purpose-built musical hall
was Charles Morton’s Canterbury Hall in
Lambeth, which was extended in 1854 to
cater for an audience of 2,000. It empha-
sised its respectability, seeking to enter-
tain the whole family, with operatic output
from Jenny Lind, ‘the Swedish nightingale’.
It even contained an art gallery, which led
Punch to dub it ‘the Royal Academy over
the water’.
Other music halls pushed the boundaries
of taste with risqué songs such as ‘Pulling
My Rhubarb Out’ and ‘Are You Good-
natured, Dear?’ (a hooker’s come-on,
which provided a musical hit for Sam Cow-
ell, the first star in this field). These tenden-
cies were reflected in rival venues such as
pleasure gardens and fairgrounds which,
with greater space, strove to compete with
all sorts of exotica, including fire-eaters,
balloonists, trapeze artists, bearded women
and others with bodily abnormalities.
As the century wore on, these attrac-
tions became more global, featuring
Siamese twins, Amazonian troglodytes and
Zulu warriors, in a manner which aimed to
37
BOOKS & ARTS
be educative (in line with Britain’s imperi-
al responsibilities) while often, to modern
tastes, appearing racist and offensive.
Jackson extends the range of mass enter-
tainment to seaside piers, sport (though he
sticks to football) and modern exhibition
halls such as Earls Court. He is wonderful-
ly comprehensive and engagingly readable,
having clearly benefited from an ability to
digest online newspaper reports.
With his narrower focus, John Woolf
favours a narrative style, taking in Queen
Henrietta Maria’s dwarf, Jeremy Hudson,
the 52-stone giant, Jeffrey Lambert, the Mex-
ican-born ‘baboon lady’, Julia Pastrana, and
other ‘freaks’, including Tom Thumb. Such
characters were often abused by managers
and medics (Woolf’s account of the tortures
experienced by the Siamese twins Chang and
Eng Bunker is deeply harrowing). He con-
vinces he is not indulging in an exercise in
voyeurism; indeed, he is alive to the dangers
of related terminology, and is informative
about contemporary developments in medi-
cine, evolution and ethnography.
Those book subtitles are becoming
a trifle long-winded though.
Cat and the King
Brian Martin
The King’s Evil
by Andrew Taylor
HarperCollins, £14.99, pp. 464
The scene is London in 1667, the city recov-
ering from the Great Fire the year before,
with 80,000 people homeless and refugee
camps established on the outskirts. Andrew
Taylor introduces his readers to life as it sur-
vived there and involves them in the politics
of Charles II’s court. Cobblestones are ‘slick
with rain’, rushlights smell vile because of
the rancid fats they were dipped in; in Cov-
ent Garden, thieves, peddlers and beggars
ply their trades ‘like lice in a head of hair’
— and if you want to travel on a Sunday you
must acquire a magistrate’s warrant.
The King’s Evil is the third in Taylor’s
trilogy about the Great Fire of London, but
stands in its own right. It concerns James
Marwood, a government employee and
friend of Cat Lovett, daughter of a regi-
cide, who is accused of her cousin’s mur-
der; Edward Alderley is found dead in
a well at the mansion of Lord Clarendon,
who has fallen out of favour with the King.
Cat had been raped by her cousin and so
has motive.
Fearing a conspiracy against her, she flees
to avoid arrest, thus confirming her alleged
guilt. The manner of Alderley’s death is pre-
sented dramatically in a gripping, shocking,
opening chapter. Marwood is determined
to protect Cat and prove her innocence,
but he is entangled in the King’s intrigues
38
narrator. Natalie Haynes, with
ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
A Thousand Ships, a retell-
ing of the war and the stories
around it, has entered a crowd-
ed field.
Haynes’s central prem-
ise is that heroism is vested
as much in women as in men.
When Menelaus loses Helen,
he creates ‘countless widows,
orphans and slaves’, where-
as Oenone, the wife of Paris,
‘loses her husband and she
raises their son. Which of those
is the more heroic act?’ It’s
a multi-faceted question, and
myriad female voices are
brought to bear in the attempt
to answer it.
There is a neat structure.
Haynes posits a peeved Cal-
liope receiving invocations
from, we assume, Homer.
‘How much epic poetry does
the world really need?’ she
muses (if you will forgive
the pun). Intercut with Cal-
liope’s commentary are the
women’s stories she conjures
Polyxena sacrificed on the pyre of Achilles, to the poet’s unwilling mind.
in a painting by Joseph Stallaert The major strand concerns the
fate of Hecuba, Queen of Troy,
bitter yet regal, as she and
and machinations. At severe risk to his own her few remaining daughters mourn in the
life he must serve the King and protect shadow of their burning city, waiting to be
his Majesty from the blight of scandal. parcelled out to the conquering Greeks.
The plot moves at pace; Taylor shifts The war began with the sacrificial mur-
voice adeptly between Marwood’s and third- der of Agamemnon’s daughter Iphigenia,
person narration, and chapters end with cliff- and the terrible end of Priam’s daughter,
hangers or enticingly unanswered questions: little Polyxena, slaughtered for the hungry
‘Or did he have some other, deeper motive?’, ghost of Achilles, reminds us that this glo-
‘What in God’s name was she doing in this?’ rious myth is bookended by the murders of
It’s a novel filled with intrigue, duplicity, two defenceless young princesses.
scandal and betrayal, whose author now There are two problems with Haynes’s
vies with another master of the genre, approach. The first is that the claim her
C. J. Sansom. book gives voice to the women of epic for
the first time is disingenuous. Euripides got
there first, with his many plays based around
Daughters of Troy women; and Ovid, with his often glittering
Heroides, imagined the abandoned women
Philip Womack of myth writing to their lovers. Though
Haynes acknowledges the sources, she is too
A Thousand Ships faithful to them. The second is that the mul-
by Natalie Haynes tiplicity of viewpoints means that quite often
Pan Macmillan, £16.99, pp. 347 we get straightforward retellings of very
well-known myths, such as the Judgment of
In the past few years there has been a flour- Paris. The ground feels as well-trampled as
ishing of literary responses to the Trojan war. the battlefields before Troy.
To mention a few: Barry Unsworth’s elegant It’s in the interstices, of which I want-
The Songs of the Kings enhanced the narra- ed more, that Haynes is at her best, and in
tive with psychological flair; Alice Oswald’s her intriguing recasting of the whole as an
beautifully distilled Memorial brought ecological fable. The Earth goddess Gaia
a disquieting focus on to the deaths of less- decides that there are too many mortals, and
er heroes, as well as the electric beauty of war is one way of getting rid of them. Man-
the Homeric similes drawn from the natural kind must change.
world; and last year’s The Silence of the Girls If you are new to myths, then this is
by Pat Barker, which successfully imagined a learned, well-fashioned introduction, with
the Iliad with Agamemnon’s slave-girl as the many shining moments of subtle power.
the spectator | 11 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk

A corpse in waiting
Lee Langley
Lord of All the Dead
by Javier Cercas, translated
from the Spanish by Anne McLean
Maclehose Press, £20, pp. 314
Who is a hero? Javier Cercas, in his 2001 novel
Soldiers of Salamis, asked the question, search-
ing for an anonymous hero, a soldier in the
Spanish civil war. The book won major priz-
es and transformed Cercas from a respected
Spanish novelist into an international
literary figure.
Eighteen years on, he returns to the war
with his new novel, Lord of All the Dead.
This time his theme is the nature of hero-
ism itself, interwoven with a more personal
quest: a reluctant picking over the bones of
his great-uncle Manuel Mena, a hero of the
Franco era who became an embarrassment
to his family as the wheel of history turned.
It’s a subversive and disenchanted view
of war in general and the Spanish conflict
in particular, in a fine translation by
Anne McLean.
As in his earlier novel, Cercas is a slip-
pery narrator, shifting in and out of the story,
sometimes taking an overview with a docu-
mentary, almost forensic tone, at other times
assuming the first person role of ‘Javier Cer-
cas’ researching his family’s past — then
pulling the rug from this conceit with post-
modernist glee:
If I were a literato and this were a piece
of fiction I could fantasise about what hap-
pened, I would be authorised to do so. If I were
a literato I could, for example, imagine Manuel
Mena waking his men… I could imagine his fear
and I could imagine him fearless…
And then he hits us with two shocking
pages of the imagined battle: ‘The blazing
red of the blood on the white snow; from the
sobs of the mortally wounded to the deafen-
ing silence of the corpses...’ Enjoying both
the freedom of fiction and the denial of its
use, Cercas cheekily adds:
All this I could imagine. But I shall not imag-
ine it or at least, I’ll pretend not to imagine it,
because this is not fiction and I am no literato,
so I must confine myself to the safety of facts.
Mena was a dashing soldier, remembered
not only for his bravery in battle, but what
the Greeks called kalos thanatos: a beauti-
ful death. Think Achilles. But somewhere
between the idealised hero and the dis-
graced fascist lies a man. Who was Manuel
Mena? How did he live and how did he die?
For years Cercas resisted the idea of writ-
ing his great-uncle’s story. When he finally
embarked on it, he mapped out the life in
every detail: village childhood, friends, an
old peasant who knew him at school. He
walked where Mena had walked, explored
battlefields and, astonishingly, discovered the
room where he died.
The family supported Franco. Much of
the country did, from conviction or from
a desire to stay alive. Mena was a believer,
an idealistic teenage Falangist; he fought on
Franco’s side in the shock unit of the Ifni
Riflemen as a provisional second lieutenant
(aka ‘corpse in waiting’). Only 19 when he
was killed, Mena seemed a lot older — ‘aged
by war’, in Cercas’s telling phrase.
In search of the dead man, Cercas res-
urrects the past, drawing on records and
personal testimony, at times guilty of infor-
mation overload: details of battles won
and lost weigh down some pages. But
when it focuses on people, the book takes
flight. It can be moving, unexpectedly funny,
racy, demotic or deadpan. By the end there’s
little that remains unknown about Mena,
and there’s a sad irony to the achievement
of heroic status: the family saw him as Achil-
les, the hero who gloriously died young.
Cercas reminds us that when Odysseus,
the wily survivor, visits the Underworld in
the Odyssey, Achilles confesses he’d rather
be a surviving penniless serf than lord of all
the dead. So much for kalos thanatos.

SPECTATOR BOOKS
Writers worth listening to
Sam Leith, literary editor of The Spectator, interviews the best names in publishing on their
latest releases, from poetry to politics, fiction to physics

I seem to be continually
controversial and rub
people the wrong way.
I can’t tell you why.
Come on: cancel me if you
can’t stand it so much.
Bret Easton Ellis, author of American Psycho

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the spectator | 11 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk 39

BOOKS & ARTS
Full of eastern promise
Justin Marozzi on film’s love affair with the Arabian Nights
M
ost of Hollywood’s Arabian Nights
fantasies are, of course, unadulter-
ated tosh. The Middle East, wrote
the American film critic William Zinssner,
is transformed into ‘a place where lovely
young slave girls lie about on soft couches,
stretching their slender legs… Amid all this
décolletage sits the jolly old Caliph, miracu-
lously cool to the wondrous sights around
him, puffing his water pipe.’
It is box-office commercialisation at its
worst. As a cinematic franchise, however,
Arabian Nights is the gift that keeps on giv-
ing, which goes a long way to explaining why
Wikipedia has a list of 72 films (nowhere
near complete) based on One Thousand and
One Nights, starring everyone from Cathe-
rine Zeta-Jones to Scooby Doo.
Film fell for the caliphs and slave girls
early. Thomas Edison kicked things off in
1902, producing an Ali Baba and the Forty
Thieves that included dancers from the
Paris Opera. These first film-makers loved
the challenge of conjuring up the fantasti-
cal elements, especially the French technical
virtuoso George Méliès. In his hand-col-
oured Palace of the Arabian Nights of 1905
we hack through fluorescent forests, greet
giant lizards, fight dancing skeletons, Méliès
throwing all manner of early cinematic chi-
canery at the story.
It was in animation, however, that the
Arabian Nights would find its most abiding
home. In fact, the world’s oldest-surviving
animated feature was Lotte Reiniger’s The
Adventures of Prince Achmed, an exquisite
silent ballet made out of hand-cut silhou-
ettes, an early high point for adaptations.
One more will be added to the list later
this month, when Disney releases Aladdin,
directed by Guy Ritchie and reported to be
‘very muscular and action-packed’. Disney’s
latest foray into one of the Arabian Nights’
best-loved tales is a live-action remake of its
1992 hit Aladdin, the then highest-grossing
animated film of all time, in which Robin
Williams stole the show with his charismat-
40
ARTS
ic, shapeshifting genie. This time Will Smith
plays the genie alongside Mena Massoud’s
love-smitten Aladdin, Naomi Scott’s Prin-
cess Jasmine, Marwan Kenzari as Jafar, the
nefarious sorcerer and grand vizier, Navid
Negahban, ‘TV’s favourite terrorist’, as the
sultan and Nasim Pedrad as Dalia.
You might think that such a multicultural
cast would spare Hollywood’s blushes these
days, but you’d be wrong. That would be far
too easy. Cue howls of outrage at the ‘all-
white’ writing and directing team, togeth-
er with multiple accusations of racism and
‘colourism’. The casting of the Anglo-Indian
actress Scott as Princess Jasmine was said
to send the message that ‘brown people are
interchangeable’. Then, last year, Disney
admitted that some extras were ‘browning
‘There are few effects in Star Wars
that cannot be found in The
Thief of Bagdad’
up’ with darker make-up to ‘blend in’ with
crowd scenes. More online anger and vitriol.
At least this time round, the opening
song is less likely to give offence. In 1992,
following complaints from the American-
Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the
original lyrics (‘Where they cut off your ear
if they don’t like your face./ It’s barbaric,
but hey, it’s home’) were changed to some-
thing more anodyne. Let us skip the recent
beheading of 37 men in Saudi Arabia, where
the original lyrics serve rather well if you
substitute ear with head.
As for Jafar, there is no shortage of real-
life brutality for those who like to ponder
the hoary issue of Hollywood and historical
accuracy. Jafar the Barmakid was the vizier,
wine-drinking companion and closest friend
of Harun al-Rashid, the 8th-century Abbasid
caliph scandalously memorialised in the Ara-
bian Nights. In real life Jafar went overnight
from being the second most powerful man in
the Islamic Empire to three hacked pieces of
corpse gibbeted on the bridges of Baghdad.
Like the mostly Shia prisoners executed in
Saudi Arabia, he had fallen foul of an auto-
cratic head of state.
If Hollywood’s Arabian Nights tend
towards the spectacular, entertaining and
ridiculous, then Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1974
film, Il Fiore delle Mille e Una Notte, came
closer to the sublime. For Robert Irwin, the
English historian and expert on the Arabian
Nights, it is ‘perhaps the best and certainly
the most intelligent’ of the many adapta-
tions. For a start, it is truer to the original
bewitchingly layered text, in which stories
are stacked within stories stacked within sto-
ries like Russian matryoshka dolls.
It is freewheelingly true, too, to the una-
shamed and gloriously unprudish eroticism
of the Arabian Nights. Take Harun’s three-
and four-in-a-bed romps celebrated in the
387th Night, where in one incident an Ara-
bian and Iraqi slave girl compete to control
the caliph’s erection while brazenly quoting
the Prophet Mohammed. ‘If someone brings
uncultivated ground to life, it belongs to him
and his descendants,’ says the Arabian. The
Iraqi concubine is having none of it. She
shoves her rival to one side, ‘takes Harun’s
member in both hands’ and, not to be out-
done on questions of Islamic theology, shoots
back with the Prophet’s observation: ‘Game
belongs to the hunter and not to the beater.’
Pasolini pays homage to this tradition
from the get-go. In the original Italian film
poster a naked young man draws back his
bowstring, poised to unleash a phallus-
topped arrow between the open legs of
a naked young woman. Pasolini’s inter-
pretation is one of picaresque eroticism.
Before he can find his abducted slave-girl
lover Zumurrud, the protagonist Nur-e-din
must first endure a series of largely erotic
adventures. The film, which was garlanded
at Cannes, was the final instalment in Paso-
lini’s ‘Trilogy of Life’ after The Decameron
and The Canterbury Tales. He considered
them ‘the most ideological films I have ever
made’, a blast against ‘the repression of the
the spectator | 11 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk

Bring me my arrow of desire: the original Italian film poster for Pasolini’s 1974 Il Fiore delle Mille e Una Notte
tolerant power, which, of all repressions, is
the most atrocious’.
Does it make any difference whether
directors focus on a single tale, or the Ara-
bian Nights writ large? Probably not. We are,
after all, deep in fantastical territory. Magic
carpets get you most places. What matters
more is that there is such a vast chest of tales
to mine. For auteurs such as Pasolini this
offered the chance to experiment, reshaping
the medium, creating cinematic millefeuille;
for Hollywood it meant something quite dif-
ferent. Never-ending tales could lead to nev-
er-ending spin-offs. The Arabian Nights was
Marvel before Marvel: an encyclopaedia of
exotic fantasies, in which Hollywood could
roll out its biggest stars with just a simple
change of tights.
Swashbuckling Douglas Fairbanks starred
in 1924’s Thief of Bagdad — his crowning
performance in one of the great silent films
— and was duly followed by his son, Doug-
las Fairbanks Jnr, who appeared in Sinbad
the Sailor of 1947 alongside Anthony Quinn
and Maureen O’Hara. In some ways the Ara-
the spectator | 11 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
bian Nights allowed Hollywood to coast, to
cruise along in autopilot orientalism. In con-
juring up the fantasy, however, it was forced
to invent. And invent big. To make horses fly,
create multi-limbed goddesses and giant spi-
ders. One of the most inventive — and influ-
ential — adaptations was Alexander Korda’s
1940 Technicolor production of The Thief of
Bagdad, which used blue-screen technology.
‘The film was a breakthrough in technique
and vision,’ writes critic Roger Ebert. ‘There
are few effects in Star Wars (1977) that can-
not be found in Thief.’ Ebert puts the film on
a par with The Wizard of Oz.
Even the best Hollywood adaptations,
however, have, as Robert Irwin put it, ring-
fenced the Nights as something specifical-
ly for children and a vehicle for stars. Not
Pasolini. He preferred to use unknown
actors for his Arabian Nights. It was, he
wrote, ‘a realistic film full of dust and the
faces of the poor’. In fact, the locations were
the real star. Shot in Safavid Iran’s blue-
tiled capital of Isfahan, as well as in the
deserts, wilderness and cityscapes of Yemen,
PEA/ARTISTES ASSOCIES/KOBAL/SHUTTERSTOCK
Eritrea and Nepal, they brought wide-hori-
zon grandeur to the screen.
A forthcoming talk at Asia House pays
tribute to the film’s sumptuous cinematog-
raphy. L’Oriente di Pasolini: The Arabian
Nights Through the Photographs of Roberto
Villa showcases some of the most compel-
ling behind-the-scenes shots: assorted nudes,
slack-lipped camels, architectural studies,
turbaned tribesmen, actor-worshippers at
prayer, portraits of people and places. Villa
says he was trying to understand how Paso-
lini, a controversial Marxist intellectual who
was murdered in mysterious circumstances
a year after the film’s release, approached
his craft. In capturing the fruitful interaction
between Europeans, Arabs and Africans, his
photographs provide perhaps the most elo-
quent answer to the question he set himself:
as a dialogue between West and East.
Aladdin is in cinemas from 24 May.
Roberto Villa will be giving a talk on
Pasolini’s Arabian Nights at Asia House
on 14 May.
41
BOOKS & ARTS
Theatre
Hilarity with heart
Lloyd Evans
Small Island
Olivier Theatre, in rep until 10 August
Rosmersholm
Duke of York’s Theatre, until 20 July
Small Island, based on Andrea Levy’s novel
about Jamaican migrants in Britain, feels like
the world’s longest book review. We meet
Hortense, a priggish school teacher, and her
cool, handsome boyfriend who survive on
a pittance in the Caribbean. Then we skip
back to Hortense’s childhood in a house
dominated by a bullying preacher who for-
bids conversations at mealtime. Then we
cross the Atlantic to Lincolnshire and meet a
chirpy blonde, Queenie, whose auntie runs a
sweetie shop. Does Queenie want a job sell-
ing sweeties? Yes, says Queenie to her auntie.
All this takes ages, and it feels like a deadly
earnest sociology lecture.
Then a stiff young bank clerk enters the
shop and asks Queenie if she’d like to go
for a walk. And the show takes off. Their
awkwardly platonic romance is hilarious,
and although it’s exaggerated for comic
effect it’s not untruthful. In the 1940s it was
possible for partners to marry without hav-
ing touched each other (‘You may kiss the
bride’ — the first contact in some cases).
Another blessing arrives in the form of
Gilbert, a charming, waggish Jamaican air-
man who believes that his RAF uniform
will make him irresistible to women. The
charismatic Gershwyn Eustache Jnr plays
Gilbert’s sexual swagger with a hint of fun
and self-mockery. Cary Grant did the same
thing. In England, Gilbert’s dreams of stud-
ying law evaporate and he becomes a post-
man. But he’s not cowed. He retains his
bullish optimism even when reduced to a
poky bedsit with a gas meter under the sink
42
that sucks the shillings from his pocket.
High-minded Hortense, now his bride,
arrives from Jamaica and her grand
entrance leads to another hilarious scene.
Hortense assumes that the bedsit is a sort
of ante-chamber to a much larger property.
She asks to be taken on a tour of the prem-
ises. But it’s just a bedsit. And the bathroom
is located in the basement several flights
below. In a single second, Hortense’s dream
of a princely future in England collapses.
The show has lots of heart as well as a keen
sense of hilarity and the story’s finale, con-
cerning the fate of an unwanted mixed-race
baby, is agonising and uplifting to watch.
This is a magnificent work of art, a mov-
ing and brilliantly detailed tapestry of Eng-
land in the early post-war years. (But don’t
worry if you miss the first half-hour.)
Ibsen’s Rosmersholm dramatises the con-
flict between revolution and authority. John
Rosmer is an innocent Christ-like pastor born
to a family of aristocrats and raised in a man-
sion where ‘children never cry and adults
never laugh’. He embraces the democratic
agenda of a new government but his forceful
brother-in-law Kroll accuses him of betraying
the ruling class. The play’s emotional pivot is
Rebecca, a liberated woman who has been
‘comforting’ Rosmer since his wife committed
suicide in the millstream. The Rebecca/Ros-
mer relationship will puzzle a modern audi-
ence because they appear to be lovers and yet
the play insists that they aren’t. Rather than
hopping into bed together, they stare intensely
into each other’s eyes, noses half an inch apart,
panting.The envious Kroll, meanwhile, is plan-
ning to destroy them using his influence with
a local newspaper.
The show’s first half is enjoyable as an
intellectual comedy of manners. Duncan
Macmillan’s crisp, quirky adaptation smug-
gles modern buzzwords into an idiom that
feels correctly antique and formal. There are
lots of laughs. The characters discuss a fire-
brand orator who has vanished. ‘I’d heard he
was in prison or a madhouse,’ Kroll suggests.
‘No,’ says Rosmer, ‘he became an actor.’ ‘Ah,
I knew something terrible had happened.’
Another big laugh greets Kroll’s observa-
tion that voting is harmful to the electorate
because it induces them to act against their
own interests. A Remainer, obviously. He’s
also a whisky-fiend who claims to occupy
the chair of the local temperance society.
Giles Terera captures his sonorous, self-
regarding menace brilliantly.
The set by Rae Smith is a beauty. She cre-
ates a grand ballroom lined with oil paint-
ings and varied by vast ravaged fireplaces.
Floor-to-ceiling windows throw light on
every detail of the room’s crumbling stone-
work and finishings. Elegant ruination is
always watchable.
As Rosmer, Tom Burke gives a mas-
terclass in charming affability. (Why can’t
he replace that sulk-pot as Bond?) Hayley
Atwell’s Rebecca has the intellectual brio of
Katharine Hepburn with added sex appeal.
And Peter Wight does a fantastic turn as
the washed-up writer Brendel, who insists
that he never accepts charity while drink-
ing Rosmer’s claret, cadging banknotes from
him and plotting to snaffle a new coat and
boots. Ibsen’s craftsmanship deserts him
in the second half. He leaves two promis-
ing characters, Brendel and Mortensgaard,
unresolved and he opts for a hysterically
morbid finale involving a crunching water
wheel and a flash flood that inundates
the stage. Even a Carry On film wouldn’t
have included anything that silly.
Music
Reaching the Tippett point
Richard Bratby
BBC Philharmonic/Brabbins
Bridgewater Hall
In Oliver Soden’s new biography of
Michael Tippett, he describes how Tippett
wanted to open his Fourth Symphony with
the sound of breathing: ‘as if the orchestra
itself had lungs.’ Tippett had no idea how
to achieve this effect, and at the premi-
ère in 1977 they used an orchestral wind
machine — a canvas band rubbing against a
wooden drum. It proved about as convinc-
ing as it sounds, so at later performances a
musician exhaled down a microphone. The
effect, writes Soden, was reminiscent of an
obscene phone call.
And there the matter and (effectively)
the symphony rested, until Sound Interme-
dia — a team of electronic music wizards
best known for their work with the Lon-
don Sinfonietta — attempted something
new for a recording with Martyn Brabbins
earlier this year. The result could be heard
in this performance by the BBC Philhar-
monic, also conducted by Brabbins, and it
seemed to do the trick — a slightly eerie,
the spectator | 11 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
elemental sound, rising imperceptibly from
within the music; not quite human but
unquestionably organic.
So the symphony quickened into life
as Tippett intended. Brabbins, an under-
valued conductor whose recordings show
a profound sympathy for Tippett’s teem-
ing, utterly idiosyncratic brand of symphon-
ic argument, conducted with purpose and
a sonic grandeur that proved once again
that, two decades after his death in 1998,
we’re only really starting to catch up with
what Tippett has to tell us. The technical
problems are falling away, although in a per-
formance of such epic conviction (and com-
ing after Sir James MacMillan’s comparably
taxing Fourth Symphony), it’s no wonder
that the BBC Philharmonic’s horns buckled
slightly under the strain.
But the years of sniggering about Tippett’s
garish clothes and quirky librettos are past;
and the slightly dated gesture (for 1977) of
writing a full-scale orchestral symphony no
longer looks quite so eccentric. That perspec-
tive, in itself, rested on a reading of musical
history that’s unsustainable in the 21st cen-
tury, and while some 20th-century titans
(including Britten and Stravinsky) engaged
with the symphony only ironically, there was
a parallel tradition of modern symphon-
ists — Martinu, Vaughan Williams, Wellesz,
Dutilleux — for whom the form clearly had
a moral dimension: an assertion of the value
of music on its own terms and an attempt by
the creative mind to find order, meaning and
a sort of hope out of an encroaching chaos.
MacMillan’s Fifth Symphony is due this
Vocal heroes
Alexandra Coghlan
Leonardo da Vinci: Shaping the
Invisible – I Faglioni
Milton Court Concert Hall
Semele
Alexandra Palace
We’ve all read the article. It does the rounds
with the dispiriting regularity of an unwant-
ed dish on a sushi train. Classical concerts are
dying and if they are to survive they need to
evolve, to innovate, to banish (variously)
seating, silence, dress codes (for musicians),
dress codes (for audience), programme
notes, formal venues… But among so much
institutional hand-wringing and professional
self-loathing I’d like to take a moment to cel-
ebrate one classical tribe getting innovation
exactly right: period music groups.
Theirs is a repertoire with a natural advan-
tage; it belongs to an age in which music was
still soundtrack rather than event — an inev-
itable accompaniment to drinking or dying,
dancing, seducing, warring or worshipping,
integrated into the essential business of life.
All of which means not just more relaxed
forms and formats, but smaller, adaptable
forces — the kind of groups you could hide
GUY PEPPIATT FINE ART
18 and 19th Century British Drawings and Watercolours
th
in a priest hole, hire to serenade your mis-
tress, or relocate to a gallery, a living room,
a warehouse. It’s music that moulds itself to
your needs, not the other way around.
And period musicians have taken this
idea and run with it. Whether it’s Red Byrd
brushing polyphony clean of Oxbridge
affectation, Bjarte Eike’s barnstorming
Alehouse Sessions, Bach’s St Matthew Pas-
sion performed with the homeless in Man-
chester’s Campfield Market or the startling
musical collisions and conversations of Lon-
don’s Baroque at the Edge festival, this is
a genre finding its audience not by watering
down but by doubling down — being utter-
ly, unapologetically itself, whether irreverent
or outright intellectual, authentic in the only
sense that matters.
Robert Hollingworth’s vocal group
I Fagiolini have been teaching us this par-
ticular trick for decades, and they’re not
done yet. Their latest project, launched this
week on CD and in concert, goes by the
cumbersome title Leonardo da Vinci: Shap-
ing the Invisible, but takes an agile, offbeat
approach to the Da Vinci anniversary. Hol-
lingworth and art historian Martin Kemp
have matched individual paintings, sketch-
es and diagrams by the artist with music
from seven centuries (not for this group
a predictable ‘Music From Leonardo’s Italy’
programme), creating a project that’s part-

summer, but it was his Fourth (premièred in

13th May to 7th June
2015) that opened this concert, and the par-
allels with Tippett were there for the tak-
ing. Both are vast single-movement spans
for large orchestra, both contain multi-
tudes, and both create perspective by quot-
ing a renaissance composer. Tippett alludes
briefly to Orlando Gibbons. MacMillan
dwells far more reverently on the Scottish
polyphonist Robert Carver, peeling away
layers of the string section to serve as a con-
sort of viols, decorated with the keen, vivid
clatter of steel drums and piano.
Brabbins and the BBC Philharmonic
made the music shine fiercely from within,
and found an unsentimental tenderness in
the long, yearning cello melody at the sym-
phony’s centre. It called to mind another of
Tippett’s maxims: ‘The fundamental diffi-
culty of our time is to be able to write the
heart-easing tune which isn’t a cliché.’ That
concern with the human heart feels central Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827), A Talk me Dead Fellow, inscribed with title on mount,
to both works, though while Tippett lets his pen and ink and washes, 16.5 by 19 cm., 6 ½ by 7 ½ in. One of four Rowlandsons in the exhibition.
Fourth expire into nothingness —the mere Open weekdays 10am to 6pm, evenings and weekends by appointment.
fact of having lived being miracle enough Fully illustrated catalogue available on request or view the catalogue on our website.
— it is hard not to hear MacMillan’s shim- Guy Peppiatt Fine Art
mering final chord as something more 6 Mason’s Yard, Duke St., St. James’s, London, SW1Y 6BU
transcendent. ‘It’s not really a conscious 020 7930 3839
thing,’ MacMillan told an interviewer in JX\#SHSSLDWW¿QHDUWFRXN
2015. Some things still just demand to be ZZZSHSSLDWW¿QHDUWFRXN
said, and it takes a symphony to say them.
the spectator | 11 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk 43
BOOKS & ARTS
lecture-recital, part-meditation, part-con-
versation, and totally captivating.
We get some straight connections: the con-
troversially restored ‘Salvator Mundi’ finds its
soft-focus radiance echoed in the gauzy sfu-
mato of Herbert Howells’s setting of that text.
The mathematical proportions of ‘The Vitru-
vian Man’ are paired with those from Bach’s
The Art of Fugue, delivered wordlessly, Swing-
les-style. It’s neat and clever, but the recital
really opens up when the narrative becomes
looser, more playfully associative.
The painted folds in a Madonna’s skirt
suggest the flowing, interwoven lines of
Victoria’s double-choir Alma Redemptoris
Mater, while a trio of grotesques give us the
exuberant, self-parodying ugliness of Vec-
chi’s musical comedy L’Amfiparnaso. Best
of all is the leap from the unsettling eroti-
cism of Leonardo’s ‘St John the Baptist’
to 20th-century French composer Daniel-
Lesur’s ravishing Song of Songs settings,
sudden cries of ‘Shema!’ shivering across the
lush polyphonic landscape.
The group are musical shapeshifters to a
man, following Hollingworth’s giddy, eclec-
tic imagination wherever it leads, disarming
with self-deprecation and silliness before
devastating you with beauty. This is serious
musicianship that never takes itself too seri-
ously — the Holy Grail of concert-going.
If I Fagiolini prefer to climb in through the
side window of the traditional classical con-
cert, then John Eliot Gardiner and his Mon-
teverdi Choir & English Baroque Soloists
process in full regalia through the front door.
Theirs is the shock-and-awe of excellence,
proving first in 2017’s cycle of Monteverdi
operas and now with their European tour of
Handel’s Semele that the concert hall is far
from the poor cousin of the opera house.
Where so many promoters are help-
ing the medicine of classical music down
with sugary projections or props, Gardiner
trusts the works he presents to be enough.
The musicians themselves are front and
centre here, just as they were in the Mon-
teverdi operas. Yes, there’s an unobtrusive
‘concert staging’ by Thomas Guthrie hap-
pening around the edges, but it’s Handel’s
score that steals the show, helped along by
outrageously fine chorus singing (the kind
of spontaneous unanimity that comes only
from lengthy and meticulous rehearsal) and
orchestral playing that bursts crisp in the
ear in the dry, bright acoustic of the newly
restored Alexandra Palace Theatre.
Marketing that has this as ‘Handel’s sexi-
est opera’ might be stretching a point. Con-
greve’s chastity belt of a libretto is enough
to keep things PG, but there’s plenty of sly
eroticism to be found in the priapic virtuos-
ity of this performance.
Hugo Hymas may be a softer, slighter-
voiced Jupiter than normal, but who could
resist his blooming loveliness of tone, or the
musicality with which he deploys it to woo
Louise Alder’s Semele — nimble, radiant
44
and just a tiny bit vulgar, before finding unex-
pected tragedy in death. Handel promises us
‘endless pleasure’ and Gardiner delivers it by
the silken armful, with not an immersive con-
cept or digital deconstruction in sight.
Radio
Afghanistan’s got talent
Kate Chisholm
The cheering fans, the dramatic Hollywood-
style drum rolls, the excitable host all sound
just like The X Factor or The Voice. It’s hard
to believe that beyond the lights and camer-
as there’s a huge security operation keeping
the singers, TV staff and audience safe. But
the Afghan version of the talent show is still
under attack from the Taleban. In The Art of
Now: Afghan Stars on Radio 4 (produced by
Roger Short) we heard from Massood San-
jar, who set up the TV company that produc-
es the programme, and Zahra Elham, this
year’s winner, voted to the top spot by the
audience, the first woman to win the show
in its 14-year history.
Two generations have grown up in the
40 years that Afghanistan has been torn to
shreds by war, fearing death while out buy-
ing bread or going to school. Even indoors
listening to the radio, their lives were con-
stantly under threat when the Taleban, at the
height of their control from 1996 until 2001,
decreed that all music was banned on pen-
alty of death. Music is still regarded by some
of the mullahs as sinful, promoting ‘sexual
excitement’, and especially if it’s performed
by women, whose voices are said to be ‘pro-
vocative and tempting for men’.
Of the 700 employees of the TV compa-
ny, one third are security guards. Just three
years ago a minibus shuttling staff to work
was blown up, killing seven set-builders,
cameramen and administrative staff and
injuring more than 20 others. Inside the stu-
dio, though, all that is forgotten as music
takes precedence. For the female contest-
ants, singing in public could mean death,
even though they always have their hair
covered and barely move for fear of being
accused of dancing. But they are determined
to assert their talent: ‘This is my passion and
I must see it through.’ They know that music
brings people together, that it doesn’t mat-
ter whether you are singing in Dari, Pashto
or Uzbek, you don’t have to understand the
language, ‘you have to feel it’.
We can ‘bring back hope through music’
says Sanja. In My Cambodian Twin, a Radio 4
drama by Annie Caulfield and Martin McNa-
mara (directed by Emma Harding), we heard
the true story of Sophea, a ceremonial dancer,
who is determined to use her passion and tal-
ent to bring hope back to her war-torn coun-
try. She wants to set up a school for dancers
in Cambodia and hopes that the book Caul-
field is writing about her will help to fund it.
Sophea was seven when the Khmer
Rouge surged into Phnom Penh. She and
her brother and parents were forced to
leave their home immediately and spent the
next four years in a remote district work-
ing as farm labourers. Her brother was kid-
napped on the first day of their exile by
a female guard and never seen again. Caul-
field (played by Pippa Haywood) notices
that Sophea never talks about the Khmer
Rouge in the past tense. ‘The Khmer has no
tenses. The past always is in the present.’
Meanwhile Caulfield herself is facing
a race against time as she struggles to com-
plete her book while battling lung cancer. It
sounds depressing but what comes through
is Sophea’s iron will to survive and Caul-
field’s response — her need to tell that story,
her self-scrutiny — and their shared belief
in the ability of individual cultural endeav-
ours to bring people together, to resurrect
a shared history and save a community.
Babita Sharma’s book of the week for
Radio 4 (produced by Eilidh McCreadie)
tells the story of the corner shop in British
social life, not just furnishing us with emer-
For the female contestants, singing in
public could mean death even though
they cover their hair and barely move
gency milk and cat food but also helping to
create a sense of neighbourhood, of commu-
nity. Sharma’s father arrived in England from
Delhi in January 1965, a 24-year-old with
a return ticket. He never intended to stay but
five years later his future wife also travelled
to the UK to marry him and his return tick-
et was never used. By 1977 he and his wife
and three children were installed in a flat
above a shop in Reading. They were part of
the wave of immigrant families who became
shopkeepers, saving themselves from redun-
dancy in the bleak 1970s when factory jobs
were in short supply and overt racism against
immigrants became commonplace.
At the same time they were responsi-
ble for saving the corner shop from extinc-
tion. The arrival of the first supermarket in
Streatham in 1951 had soon killed off more
than half of them; they were no competi-
tion for the speed and ease of picking out
prepackaged goods from aisles of sparkling
clean shelves. In The Corner Shop Sharma
cleverly links her own memories of shop-
bound life with the last 50 years of Brit-
ish history. She reminds us of the arrival
of the East African Asians thrown out of
their homeland by Idi Amin, the rise of the
National Front (founded in 1967), the power
cuts of the three-day week. And she finds
connections with Margaret Thatcher, whose
early years were also ruled by the shop coun-
ter and the ringing of the bell to announce
a new customer. How much we found about
you, says Sharma teasingly, as you dashed in
for that last-minute bottle of wine.
the spectator | 11 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
 Mighty resurrection: Aretha Franklin in Amazing Grace
Cinema
Body and soul
Jasper Rees
Amazing Grace
U, Nationwide
Each December in Washington DC, the
Kennedy Center Honors anoints five per-
forming artists who have contributed to
American life. In 2015 one of the inductees
was Carole King, to whom Janelle Monáe
and James Taylor sang nicely in tribute.
Then on came Aretha Franklin in a floor-
dragging fur coat. She placed her handbag
on the piano and broke into ‘(You Make
Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman’. As the
Queen of Soul hollered, howled and damn
near put a hole in the roof, King went for-
givably nuts and Barack Obama wiped away
a tear. More than 30 million hits on YouTube
confirmed that here, still, was a singer who
could reach parts off limits to all others in
rock and R&B’s halls of fame.
The other time Franklin had that effect
was in 1972 with her album Amazing Grace.
At 29, the Queen of Soul revisited her gos-
pel roots with two consecutive performanc-
es in a Los Angeles church and sold two
million records. A film commemorating
the event was conceived by Warner Bros as
a concert movie to soar as high as Wood-
the spectator | 11 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
stock, and rake in as many dollars. The direc-
tor was Sydney Pollack, then best known
for They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and no
expert in syncing sound and music. It was
never finished — ‘for technical reasons’,
advises a caption at the start of its delayed
release 47 years on, coyly keeping shtum
about contractual roadblocks and Aretha’s
ornery refusal in later life to let the footage
be exhumed. Has the wait been worth it?
Amazing Grace is certainly not a formal
concert documentary in the style of D.A.
At one point Aretha’s father
comes forward as she sings and
tenderly dabs her dry
Pennebaker’s Ziggy gig from the following
year. The film crew visibly skulk and scurry
like a paparazzi platoon, cameras hoisted
on shoulders, lenses aimed into Aretha’s
personal space. And the star herself is mod-
estly unstarlike, an unreadable tabula rasa
who barely talks, smiles or emits any psy-
chological clues. Whether at the piano or
the lectern, her two modes are eyes wide
open or, in passages of spiritual intensity,
tight shut. The drama, of course, is all locat-
ed in the larynx, which produces a remark-
able display of whispered hums and ecstatic
incantations.
The effort to produce this performance
is written on her skin, which across the
two evenings leaks beads of perspiration
as globular as the jewel clusters dangling
from her earlobes. At one point, her father
C.L. Franklin, the Baptist pastor in whose
Detroit church Aretha first sang, comes for-
ward as she sings to tenderly dab her dry.
Behind her, members of the luscious South-
ern Californian Community Choir, black-
shirted with glistening silver waistcoats, bob
up and down, lured to frenzy as the title song
edges slowly towards climax. Around her sit
world-beating musicians in natty dress going
about their work.
Surprisingly, there are some empty pews
near the back for an event that would now
sell out enormodomes. The second night,
which is shot and edited less conservatively,
brings a wave of crescendos, punctuated by
the speechifying of Aretha’s father and her
warm-voiced musical director Revd James
Cleveland. The few happy-clappy white
faces in the congregation, aside from Pol-
lack’s crew, include renowned devil-sympa-
thiser Mick Jagger.
Aretha Franklin hoped that Amazing
Grace would confer that level of gigawatt-
age. Bathetically, her fleeting multiplex
moment would only arrive six years later
courtesy of The Blues Brothers, made by
a bunch of jokers from Saturday Night Live.
Let’s see if the planned biopic starring Jen-
nifer Hudson as the daughter of a preach-
erman can give her posthumous screen
stardom. In the meantime, this is a mighty
resurrection.
45
BOOKS & ARTS
It’s all Greek to me: a schoolchild’s homework on a wax tablet, Egypt, 2nd century AD
Exhibitions
The write stuff
Daisy Dunn
Writing: Making Your Mark
British Library, until 27 August
The Mesopotamians wrote on clay and the
ancient Chinese on ox bones and turtle shells.
In Egypt, in about 1,800 BC, someone even
found the space to scrawl on a portable sand-
stone sphinx. Look closely towards the base
of the sculpture and you will find a delicate
line drawing of an ox head. Remarkably, this
picture reveals the origins of the letter ‘A’.
At the first stage in its development,
the ox was simplified, so that an engraver
could express it with just a couple of lines.
An Egyptian seal stone shows the animal’s
head in abstract form. Next, the shape was
flipped 90º, so that by the time the Greeks
had adopted the Phoenician system of writ-
ing, in the 8th century BC, it was recognis-
ably an ‘A’. Following some tinkering by the
Etruscans and Romans, it was no longer
possible to tell what was horn, and what jaw.
‘A’ was no longer for ox.
Writing probably first developed in
Egypt, China, Mesoamerica, the Indus Valley
and Easter Island at a similar time, but the
Mesopotamians of ancient Iraq have long
been credited with its invention. The earliest
46
examples of text from across the globe tend
to be more functional than literary. A tiny
cuneiform tablet records the distribution of
barley to farm labourers in about 3,000 BC.
A towering Mayan plinth from 7th-century
Belize sets out a ruler’s family tree.
This superb exhibition does not so much
walk as zigzag you through the history of
writing. The display is arranged along diago-
nals in the basement of the British Library,
which means that you hardly notice when
you stop proceeding chronologically and
slide hundreds of years back in time, as if in
As for James Joyce’s colour-coded
page notes for Ulysses – chaos
in every direction
an exciting but highly intellectual game of
snakes and ladders.
There are ancient wax tablets filled with
writing exercises by schoolboys next to
rigorous 18th-century handwriting manu-
als that instruct in ‘English Round Hand’.
A Japanese ‘mirror of the hand’ calligraphy
album, compiled in the 19th century, fea-
tures writing samples by 8th-century emper-
ors and decorative pages adorned with pen
drawings and gold leaf.
Some of the loveliest objects on display
come from the library’s own book collection.
William Caxton’s first edition of the Can-
terbury Tales sits on one side of the gallery,
and a collection of richly adorned Italian
the spectator | 11 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
BRITISH LIBRARY
editions of classical literature on the other.
Each of the publications has been chosen
because it broke new ground. Venice-based
publisher Nicolas Jenson’s splendid Cicero
from 1470, for instance, is printed in elegant
and rounded ‘roman type’. Most early print-
ers up to then had opted rather for typefaces
based upon gothic script. Just over 30 years
later, Aldus Manutius, another of the titans
of the early print industry, released a collec-
tion of Virgil’s works in a novel and suitably
poetic italic typeface.
In the earliest days of printing, the Chinese
had led the way. Already in the 8th century,
they wove together the fibres of mulberry
trees to create paper that was smooth enough
to carry text. When the Arabs caught wind of
their invention, they allegedly kidnapped the
paper-makers in order to learn their skills.
When it came to rendering so many curving
characters in printable form, however, the
Chinese and Arabs had to work that much
harder. European alphabets lent themselves
more easily to mass production. Even looking
at a ‘Double Pigeon’ Chinese typewriter from
1975 you appreciate the nature of the chal-
lenge. The tray bed of the typewriter, popular
in Maoist China, seems ready to burst with its
2,450 pieces of type.
As ingenious as these machines are, the
simpler tools and books of handwriting in
this show leave a more indelible impres-
sion. Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s quill pen is
a pitiful thing with a broken nib, but imme-
diately you picture it gripped tight in his
industrious hand. He must have written
it out of service. The diaries of Florence
Nightingale are filled with handwriting so
small and neat that you cannot doubt her
meticulousness. As for James Joyce’s col-
our-coded page notes for Ulysses — chaos
in every direction. There is no doubting
which of the pages belonged to the writer.
How would Joyce have coped with just a
block of stone or piece of ox bone to work
on? He’d never have finished.
Television
All in the worst
possible taste
James Delingpole
‘Unfunny, boring and utterly unrelenting,’
says the Guardian’s one-star review of Chris
Lilley’s new sketch series Lunatics (Netflix).
And if that’s not incentive enough, our woke
critical chum goes on to declare the series
‘problematic’. That’s a weaselly way of say-
ing ‘this triggered all my snowflake sensitivi-
ties’ but in such a way as to make it sound
like a loftily objective judgment.
In truth, Lunatics is only problematic
if a) you have no sense of humour and b)
you’d prefer all comedy to be politically cor-
rect, inoffensive and utterly devoid of satiri-
cal edge. Sometimes, Lunatics is so cruel that
it’s almost too painful to watch. But this isn’t
because — yet another complaint being lev-
elled by the wokerati — Lilley is ‘punching
down’. It’s because this reclusive, perfection-
ist Australian writer/comic is a satirist in the
Swiftian tradition: scabrous and unforgiving
in his gleefully misanthropic scrutiny of the
human condition.
Lilley made his name with Summer
Heights High, the 2007 mockumentary set
in an Australian secondary school, which
introduced us to such characters (all played
by Lilley) as the camp, heroically inap-
propriate drama teacher Mr G, Ja’mie the
bitchy snob girl on exchange from a private
school, and the crude disobedient Tongan
student Jonah Takalua.
Jonah was the least funny of these but
I was glad he was there, cheerily giving
the middle finger to all those professional
offence-takers who get a fit of the vapours
whenever a white actor plays outside his
race. But Lilley probably couldn’t get away
it now, not even on Netflix. Future TV his-
torians may well conclude that the cut-off
year for that kind of caper was 2010 when
Matt Lucas and David Walliams played
what now seem like impossibly bad-taste
stereotypical Pakistani and black characters
in Come Fly With Me.
While Lilley’s comedy is quite redolent
of Lucas’s and Walliams’s Little Britain —
a parade of grotesques, many played in drag
the spectator | 11 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
— what’s different is the demented intensity.
Lucas and Walliams are just hamming it up.
Lilley, on the other hand, inhabits his crea-
tions so fully that, though he’s a fortysome-
thing bloke, you can almost believe he is a
17-year-old schoolgirl. Or — in the new series
— a frizzy-haired South African lesbian pet
psychic to the stars, or a former porn star
turned extreme hoarder or an incompetent
real-estate agent with an improbably huge
arse who dreams of becoming a famous DJ.
His mastery of girly mannerisms and
intonations and fatuities is uncanny — to
the point where the real young female actors
who play his various companions interact
with him as if he were one of their own.
He’s equally good at doing blokes — sul-
len, loutish teenagers; twentysomethings on
lads’ nights out. I defy any male to watch the
scene where Quentin (the estate agent) eggs
on his mates in an evening of shot-chasers,
desperately inane banter and excruciating
failed chat-ups without wincing in appalled
remembrance of similar sessions from their
own personal hell.
Possibly this series’ most painful creation
is Gavin, an incredibly obnoxious Aussie
Sometimes, Lunatics is so
cruel that it’s almost too
painful to watch
12-year-old obsessed with sex and testicles,
who — deliciously un-PC premise, this — is
being groomed to inherit an English coun-
try estate because the proper son and heir is
mentally handicapped. Like a lot of Lilley’s
comedy it’s at once absurd, grotesque and
horribly plausible — made real by the dead
straight acting and the superb attention to
detail: Gavin leering at the prim older teen-
ager, Ingrid, who comes to exercise the hors-
es; the despair of Gavin’s adoptive mother,
trying hopelessly to instil responsibility in
him by encouraging him to name and feed
the animals on the petting farm.
If you prefer your comedy a bit more
gentle, I heartily recommend the charming
Huge in France (Netflix). Gad Elmaleh —
known as the Seinfeld of France — more or
less plays himself as a massively successful
French comedian who moves to LA and has
to come to terms with the fact that in the US
he is a complete nobody and that his jokes
just don’t translate.
It’s another of those ‘meta’ comedies like
Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, only
with slightly more surreal, indeed jarring-
ly weird subplots like the one in which the
failed actor lover of Gad’s blonde Ameri-
can ex-wife wanks himself to exhaustion at
a sperm bank to raise money so that Gad’s
15-year-old son (whom he adores, but not in
a pervy way) can get the chest implants he
supposedly needs to become a top model.
The episodes are only half an hour and you
soon become hooked: I watched five, back to
back, and loved every moment.
THE LISTENER
Vampire Weekend: Father
of the Bride
Grade: B–
One of the things not to like about
Vampire Weekend, other than their
cloying preppiness, Ezra Koenig’s
ingratiating voice, the bizarre
cultural appropriation that never
gets called out and the Upper West
Side archness of the lyrics, is the fact
they rarely put more than two decent
songs on an album.
That’s true right back to their very
first: does anyone remember any song
other than ‘Oxford Comma’ (their best
by a mile) and ‘A-Punk’? This latest is
a double album, so, faithfully sticking
to the template, you get four decent
songs. Much of it, actually, is pleasant
in a slightly insipid Paul Simon kinda
way. Very little offends, the hideous
clunker ‘Sunflower’ aside. Shorn of his
chief collaborator, Rostam Batmanglij,
Koenig has broadened his horizons
a little and so the shallow take on Afri-
can music has been largely replaced by
a shallow take on country music —
a big mistake, except on ‘Married In
a Goldrush’ where the prettiness of
the tune eclipses the anodyne playing.
‘My Mistake’ has a sweet tune, too, and
stapled-on terribly contemporary pro-
duction effects by the LA producer DJ
Dahi. ‘Unbearably White’ also carries
you along for a while until a certain
ennui, a wish to go to sleep, and
perhaps never wake, sets in.
Elsewhere there are exquisitely
produced and cheerfully strummed
acoustic guitars. The charming but
winsome ‘We Belong Together’ has
the line ‘We go together like Keats
and Yeats’. It was at that moment, for
reasons I’m not sure I understand,
that I took the CD from the player
and sent it gliding like a frisbee into
the nettles beside our vegetable patch
from where, hopefully, it will be appro-
priated by a kleptomaniac magpie.
— Rod Liddle
47

‘A
love of boats and sailing is the sur-
est of all passports to a happy life,’
wrote Arthur Ransome. Standing
on Windermere Jetty on a crisp clear morn-
ing, gazing out across the cool grey water,
you can see what he meant. Sailing around
England’s largest lake is a great way to
spend a lazy day, and the new Windermere
Jetty Museum is the best place to embark.
There’s been a boating museum in
Bowness since the 1970s, but it used to be
more modest — a collection of old steam-
boats saved from the scrapyard by a local
builder called George Pattinson. Now his
old fleet has a much smarter home: a wood-
en building with stunning views of the lake.
Some of Pattinson’s boats are inside, some
are out on the water, and several more are
being restored in the workshop next door. If
you’re a sailor you’ll love it here but there’s
plenty for landlubbers to enjoy, in particular
lots of fascinating bits and bobs associated
with Arthur Ransome.
Ransome’s timeless children’s books
were inspired by his lifelong love of the
Lake District. He went to prep school
here, he spent his holidays here, and when
he married Trotsky’s secretary, Evgenia
Shelepina, they bought a house near Wind-
ermere. Windermere Jetty has a fine array
of Ransome ephemera: snapshots, letters,
48
NOTES ON …
Windermere
By William Cook
ISTOCK
sketchbooks… best of all, the museum
owns Esperance, the inspiration for Captain
Flint’s houseboat in Swallows and Amazons.
Lakeland purists tend to regard Winder-
mere as too tame and touristy. OK, so it’s not
as dramatic as Ullswater, or as picturesque
as Coniston, but for any newcomer to the
Lake District it’s the natural place to start.
And although it can get hectic in midsum-
mer, it’s easy to escape the crowds. Catch the
ferry across the lake and head up to Hill Top,
the farmhouse where Beatrix Potter made
her home and wrote many of her charming
stories. From here it’s an easy walk to the
Beatrix Potter Gallery in Hawkshead, which
houses a collection of her paintings, and
reminds you what a brilliant artist she was.
Fine Wine
the spectator | 11 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
A few miles away along the western shore
is Wray Castle, where Potter spent her sum-
mer holidays when she was a child.
I spent the night at Lindeth Howe, anoth-
er place where she used to stay. She came
to the area on holiday with her parents and
finished off The Tale of Pigling Bland and
The Tale of Timmy Tiptoes here. When her
father died, she bought this handsome villa
for her mother. Today it’s a comfy hotel with
lots of Potter memorabilia and a restaurant
serving good local grub.
Next morning I was back in Bowness,
recalling my only childhood trips and the
family holidays we took when my kids were
small. It seems busier, but maybe that’s just
nostalgia. Bowness has been a tourist trap
since Victorian times, the gateway to the
Lakes. In some ways it’s got better since
John Ruskin visited as a schoolboy and
complained about the dead cats and dogs
on the beach and dirty water in the bay.
On the train back to London I reread
Swallows and Amazons, for the first time in
40 years. I’d forgotten what a good book it is.
‘The sun was sinking over the western hills,’
writes Ransome. ‘There was a dead calm.
Far away they saw the island and the still
lake without a ripple on it, stretching away
into the distance.’ I shut my eyes and wished
myself back on Windermere again.
No more morally negligible figure
than Harold Wilson has ever
reached No.10
— Bruce Anderson, p62
High life
Taki
New York
Here’s a question for you: if your wife, hus-
band, girlfriend, boyfriend, toy boy even,
lied repeatedly to you about a serious mat-
ter such as fidelity, would you continue to
trust them? I suppose some fools would,
but most wouldn’t. So here’s another ques-
tion: how can the British people even coun-
tenance voting for those they entrusted
with implementing their 2016 decision to
leave the bureaucratic dictatorship that is
the EU? Duh! Actually, I’d be in the UK
by now and trying to stir things up, but I’m
stuck in the Bagel with pneumonia, bron-
chitis, and all sorts of other bugs that caught
up with me while in pursuit of the high life.
Never mind, I have a strong constitution
and will be up in no time, but it’s Britain
and the good old U S of A that I’m worried
about. I’ll move on to that later when I’ve
dealt with this trust thing.
Two weeks ago we all read what Doug-
las Murray had to say about the hit job on
Roger Scruton. I know Sir Roger and great-
ly admire him — and he has a beautiful
wife to boot. So why does a sophisticated
philosopher like him fall for such claptrap
and give an interview (albeit on false pre-
tences) to one of the deputy editors at the
New Statesman, George Eaton. The irony
is that had Roger said what Eaton claimed,
I would have agreed 100 per cent. The true
version let me down a bit. But that’s not the
point. Sir Roger should have known what
young Taki knew a very long time ago: the
left will lie, cheat and go to any lengths to
discredit good people who do not adhere
to the foulest ideologies ever, and that
includes Wahhabism.
But back to the disasters that are Brit-
ain and America. (France? Forget about
her: Macron is an irrelevant frog posing
as a mini De Gaulle. He is nothing but
a con man with a forked tongue who fol-
lows such giants in stature and influence
as Sarkozy and Hollande.) Of course, the
toxin spread by the lying politicians has
the spectator | 11 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
turned this once green and pleasant land
into one with a poisoned atmosphere remi-
niscent of an England 600 years ago. And
the people to blame are extremists such as
Corbyn, out-and-out liars like Theresa May,
and those who are behind the extremists at
the BBC, Guardian and so on. Take it from
Taki: these are people and institutions not
to be trusted or believed, although all of the
above can and would sell you some very
valuable but cheap-in-price beach fronts
off Misurata and Benghazi.
I do feel sorry, though, for all the decent
people of Britain who have never gone to
extremes and who have (like fools) trusted
their chosen representatives. It’s like discov-
ering your mother hooking for spare change.
The only man to have kept his side of the
bargain has been Nigel Farage, and for that
fact alone — being truthful to voters — he
is being attacked by the bandy-legged louts
and their cesspool cousins on the left.
Now for the land of the freebie and home
of the depraved. (One needs to be depraved
to demand that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev — yes,
that nice young man who bombed the Bos-
ton Marathon a few years ago — should
have the right to vote, as some Democrat
candidates are calling for. The people he
and his scumbag brother murdered lost their
lives and their voting rights, and he should
now vote in their place?)
And what about the ‘Edelweiss’ moment?
Maggie (‘the maggot’) Haberman of the
New York Times tweeted, on discovering that
the Marine Corps Band had played the tune
from The Sound of Music at a Trump event
at the White House: ‘Does… anyone at that
White House understand the significance of
that?’ In other words: Nazis, Hitler, Trump,
etc, etc. In fact, the song was written by two
great Jewish Americans, Richard Rodgers
and Oscar Hammerstein, and it’s about as
Nazi as you are Helen of Troy, Maggie.
Which brings me to more bullshit — actu-
ally, great theatre. What about the Oklahoma!
revival? Also written by the same two Nazis,
Rodgers and Hammerstein, the terrific musi-
cal about beautiful mornings and corn as high
as an elephant’s eye has been turned into
a politically correct farce that attacks gun cul-
ture, class discrimination and a corrupt justice
system (that doesn’t give the vote to profes-
sional criminals). I went to see it and walked
out. I probably caught the bug that’s killing
me in that hall infested by lefties.
Finally, a young female jogger is sexually
assaulted and murdered by a thug. His DNA
is found at the crime scene and he confess-
es to the assault. He is then made out to be
a victim of white injustice by black community
leaders in New York and a mistrial is declared.
And the man screaming racism the loudest is
Assemblyman Charles Barron, an elected
official. Jon Snow should come over and make
nice with him. They would be good together.
They both hate whites and both need the
Hubble telescope to locate their penis.
And I leave you with a society item
from the gossip columns: ‘Ma (a hip-hop
hellion) spent six years in the slammer for
nearly shooting to death her ex-pal Make-
da. Released on Wednesday, she declined to
comment while holding hands with her rap-
per hubby, Papoose, and flanked by long-
time mentor Fat Joe.’
Society is greater than ever.
Low life
Jeremy Clarke
So far this latest Mistral wind has blown for
two and a half weeks. The Mistral is said to
blow for three hours, three days or three
weeks. It is also said to unhinge people. I had
just arrived back in France when it started,
and lately I have felt distinctly homicidal for
no particular reason. Every morning, too,
I’ve congratulated God for not making me
responsible for my dreams.
Since this wind got up, I’ve been out to
lunch once and twice to dinner parties. The
lunch was jolly and I was perfectly sane.
After it, the foreign correspondent stood
up, drained his glass, said: ‘Don’t you just
love the smell of tear gas!’ and headed off
to Paris to report to camera from the midst
of a predicted May Day riot. The first of the
two dinner parties was at our place. I felt
out of sorts and said little. Our friend Joy
the same. There was a conversation about
carp that I enjoyed though. The second din-
ner party was at the rented home of a Swed-
ish couple. Because of the wind we were two
couples inhabiting four different universes.
The Swedish man knew about the laws of
economics and thought Sweden was head-
ing for financial catastrophe. Like Macbeth
53
LIFE
I wished the estate of the world undone,
starting with Sweden, and serve them right.
Then, two nights ago we went for drinks
with our new neighbours, an English couple.
We sat around a monumental pitted stone
slab on their tastefully decorated terrace
with magnificent views, drank rosé and ate
cheese, olives and peanuts. They had come
to France six months before.
Since I last saw them they had dined at
the houses of some of our friends and con-
sequently formed the impression that I am a
raving fascist. I have joined the Brexit party,
it’s true. And I don’t join in the two min-
utes of hate for Donald Trump, which is the
modern equivalent of saying grace before a
meal at a dinner party. And OK, hands up,
I do write occasionally for the Daily Mail.
I cheerfully accept that all of these things
fly in the face of the received opinion and
mark me out as nasty and stupid. But unlike
received opinion, I do think freedom of
speech and conscience should be permitted;
and dissent also, which makes me not a fas-
cist but a raving liberal.
Our new neighbours were tickled
pink to think they were entertaining the
first Leaver they had encountered in the
flesh. Once they had teased out that I was
a Leaver, my political ideas, such as they
are, were treated with amused condescen-
sion, as though I were a former Kray associ-
ate or a Moonie. Which is fine. I’m used to
it. But the wind! After two and a half weeks
of this Mistral, I was prone to homicidal
fantasies which could be suppressed only
with difficulty.
We spent a pleasant evening nevertheless,
talking mainly about property prices and how
inexpensive houses are in France compared
with the UK. And yet inexpensive as they are,
they are often wildly overpriced. And house
prices in this part of France are still falling.
The best practice for buyers at the moment
is to offer half the advertised price and, if this
is refused, two thirds. Our neighbours knew
of a house in Ireland advertised seven years
ago for €7.5 million and today the unfortu-
nate owners can’t give it away. Incredible.
Then they told us of the significant reduction
in price they had negotiate for their house
and Catriona told them how much she paid
for hers. I said I’d read that these days you
can get a terraced house in the north of Eng-
land for a quid. Yes, my goodness me, there
are some amazing bargains to be had if you
took the trouble to look around.
We moved on to the local controversy
of the local school bell. The division bell
announcing the end of one school period
and the start of the next has been replaced
with a recording of a musical phrase, repeat-
ed twice, of a traditional children’s song.
The end of the first period, for example, is:
‘Oranges and lemons,/ Say the bells of St
Clement’s’. The village sits in a geographi-
cal amphitheatre and the rising sound is
very audible. Some locals are incensed by
54
this hourly intrusion on their inner thoughts
and have signed a petition to the mayor
denouncing it.
We took a representative poll of the four
of us. Our hosts thought it an outrage and
wanted it stopped. Catriona said she quite
liked it. I said I thought it was probably yet
another of President Macron’s tin-eared
nationwide community-building initiatives,
thereby lowering my intellectual credibil-
ity still further. I see now it was a stupid
thing to say. Maybe this bloody Mistral is
making me paranoid as well as prone to
homicidal fantasies.
Real life
Melissa Kite
A letter before action, or something that
looked very much like it, arrived on my
doormat from an insurance company.
Regarding an incident on 25 October
2018: ‘We are holding you responsible for
the damage caused to our insured’s vehicle
and the related costs,’ it said.
While I had a valid insurance policy, my
insurance company was not responding
and so they were looking to instruct solici-
tors to recover their losses direct from me.
Proceedings would be served directly on
me and not my insurers and could ultimate-
ly lead to a court judgment being entered
against me, it said.
The letter then gave me a final chance to
contact my insurers and bring this to their
attention so they might deal with it for me.
‘There is no need to contact us directly
regarding this matter.’
I think I will be the judge of that.
I assumed that this was either a scam or a
case of mistaken identity. But there was
one other possibility. The only car accident
I have had in the past year was a minor
prang on the track of the field when I hit
a friend’s car on the day Tara, the chestnut
mare, fell ill last winter.
I had called the vet with the old mare
lying on the ground, the vet had come out
and taken bloods, and when the vet departed
in her pick-up truck, I had climbed into my
car with tears in my eyes and backed straight
into my friend’s car that had pulled up unbe-
knownst to me behind the vet’s truck while
I had been discussing Tara.
When the pick-up pulled away, I was not
expecting anything else behind on the nor-
mally deserted track. Glancing only briefly
in my mirror, I ploughed straight back into
my friend’s small car, buckling its front wing
and smashing a headlight.
As tears of impending loss gave way
seamlessly to tears of frustration about
a forced error that was boringly typical of
me — one calamity usually leads to another
like a collapsing row of dominos — I gave
my friend my insurance details and urged
her to claim.
She did, we called it in, I admitted full
liability. Weeks later, my friend got her car
fixed, and I assumed it was all settled. Until
the letter threatening to take me to court.
I ignored the last line telling me not to
call them. That was the biggest cheek of all.
I puffed myself up to full-sized self-righteous
indignation and I rang them to give them
a piece of my mind. I told a nice enough girl
who answered the phone that I could not
make head nor tail of her company’s imper-
tinent accusations.
She told me that my insurers, the Direct
Group, had not been returning their calls.
I pointed out that as I’m not insured with
the Direct Group it was unlikely to return
their calls. My insurer is another company
entirely whose details were passed prompt-
ly to the other side and which has been very
good in dealing with the claim from day
one. How can they not have had contact
with them?
She had no answer for this but she did
say I shouldn’t worry because so long as
I got my insurers to ring them, all would be
fine. The letter was not meant to frighten me.
I told her she must have a funny definition
of not frightening people.
I said I would be reporting the letter to
the ombudsman, but I could barely stifle a
yawn as I said this. Who am I kidding? I can’t
keep on top of all the stuff I’m already meant
to be reporting to various ombudsmen. I’m
up to pussy’s bow with scams and corruption
and botched this and missold that. I’m in no
position to take on new scandals.
I shelved even thinking about another
ombudsman and put my energy into ringing
my insurers, who told me to send the letter
to them.
A day later, they had sorted it out. They
told me the other firm had been sending
their demands for payment for the repairs to
the wrong address and, being so apparently
incompetent that they couldn’t find the right
one, they decided to threaten to take me to
court to get me to sort it out for them. ‘The
reason some firms are doing it like that now
is because it prompts an urgent response.’
What it prompts is an urgent angina attack
and a bad case of hives.
Also, the delay has meant the unresolved
case has dragged on and when my insur-
ance renewed a few months ago I noticed
that despite my protected no claims, I had
incurred a big increase in my premium
because of the ‘ongoing claim’.
You do wonder whether some of these
insurance firms are even trying.
the spectator | 11 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
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LIFE
The turf
Robin Oakley
So the Silver Fox has called it a day. We
will never see Ruby Walsh, the man whom
even Sir Anthony McCoy modestly calls the
best jump jockey ever, riding competitive-
ly again. Though sad for his countless fans
in Britain, it is entirely understandable that
Ruby chose to announce his retirement at
his beloved Punchestown last week after
riding Kemboy to victory in the Gold Cup.
But the racing authorities here must find
an appropriate way of celebrating his stel-
lar career.
Ruby wasn’t as physically resilient as A.P.
and had to cope with some dreadful inju-
ries along the way, but there has never been
a more intelligent rider over obstacles. I will
always remember champion trainer Paul
Nicholls telling me approvingly how Ruby
coped with pressure so much better than
his other jockeys: ‘He was arrogant, he was
tough and he was hard.’ Yet those who seek
to emulate him should note Ruby’s descrip-
tion of how most race riding is actually in the
head. ‘It’s a series of mental tasks rather than
one physical one and brains will beat brawn
every time if you use them the right way.
Your physical strength might only win you
one race in a hundred, if that.’ As his father
Ted reflected, Ruby got into other riders’
minds as well: ‘When he was in front they’d
be thinking, “When is he going to come
back?” and when he was dropped in they’d
be thinking “Where is he?”’ Incomparable.
Let’s hope that the riders of our Twelve to
Follow this Flat season show some of Ruby’s
ability to keep horses relaxed until the right
moment. Whatever happens we are unlikely
to do as well with our Twelve as we did last
year when they returned a healthy profit to
a £10 level stake of £233, helped considerably
by Accidental Agent’s 33–1 Ascot victory. In
assembling that Twelve, I debated including
Michael Dods’s sprinter Mabs Cross but left
her out suggesting: ‘She may not be ready yet
for Group Ones.’ How wrong can you get?
Third in one at Royal Ascot at 20–1, she was
then beaten by a nose in the Nunthorpe at
York at 14–1 and finally triumphed across
the Channel in the Prix de l’Abbaye at 12–1.
She opened her 2019 season with a 6–1 vic-
tory at Newmarket and is first on my list this
year. For handicap sprints, too, I like John
Quinn’s consistent El Astronaute.
Swiftly included was Felix, the Lope De
Vega colt bred and owned by Luca Cuma-
ni’s Fittocks Stud who has been entrusted
56
to Sir Michael Stoute’s care now that Luca
has retired from training. He was fourth
Bridge
over ten furlongs on his seasonal start. Janet de Botton
Another Stoute inclusion is the four-year-
old filly Rawdaa, who caught my eye when
third at Kempton. Charlie Fellowes, who has Imagine you are on Who Wants to Be a Mil-
taken over Cumani’s former yard, has a fine lionaire?. You have just won £500,000 and
prospect with King Ottokar, who won well cannot go home with less than £120,000.
at Newbury last month, while Bell Rock, You use your last lifeline (50/50) leaving you
trained by the much in form Andrew Balding a straight guess to become a millionaire or
for Fitri Hay, scored nicely over seven fur- drop £380K. Even though it’s mathematical-
longs at 33–1 on his Newmarket debut last ly correct to guess, most people would take
October. You won’t, alas, get that price again. the money.
At Goodwood last Saturday I was much We bridge players are luckier. We have
taken with the lightly raced four-year-old lots of clues in the bidding — or lack of it —
filly Enbihaar, trained for Hamdan al-Mak- the opening lead and the carding signals the
toum by John Gosden, as she and the classy opps use. If we find out as much as possible,
Klassique came clear of the pack. Weak the final answer is rarely a guess.
last year while growing into her big frame,
she could repay her connections’ patience Dealer South N/S vulnerable
handsomely. Mark Johnston is apparent-
ly excited with his Frankel colt Fred so he zQ8 7 2
becomes our two-year-old choice, and we y A 10 5 2
must have a filly trained by Ralph Beckett. XK 9
I will take Desirous, a winner over seven
furlongs last October. Since Roger Varian
wJ 4 3
is red-hot this season, I include two of his:
Zabeel Prince, whom he says has improved z J 6 3 zK4
N y J 4
remarkably from two to three and the pacey yQ9 8 7 3 W E
six-year-old Spanish City. Finally, from Rich- XQ 3 S X J 10 8 7 4
ard Hannon’s yard I go for Urban Icon, who wK 6 2 w AQ 8 5
disappointed in the 2,000 Guineas but has
real potential.
And how did we do with our Twelve over z A 10 9 5
the jumps? The galling answer is that we yK6
did pretty well but lost £40 overall to a level XA 6 5 2
stake. In 40 races we scored 11 victories, w 10 9 7
a strike rate most trainers would happily set-
tle for. Seven of the Twelve won races. War-
ren Greatrex’s La Bague Au Roi was one West North East South
of the novice stars of the season and Henry 1NT
Daly’s Atlanta Ablaze won nearly every Pass 2w Pass 2z
time she completed. But too often victories Pass 4z All pass
were at cramped odds for them and for the
other winners Bags Groove, On The Blind
Side, Vision D’Honneur, The Big Bite and Both North and South pushed a fair bit
The Last Day. Don’t lose faith in two who to get to the lousy vulnerable game, against
didn’t win. Paul Nicholls surprisingly ran which West led the y9. At first glance you
four-year-old hurdler Ecco just twice, in the have three losers in Clubs plus a huge prob-
Adonis Hurdle and as a 100–1 shot in the lem in trumps, but at least you have escaped
Triumph at Cheltenham. Timeform called the fatal club lead. You take three rounds
him ‘one to keep tabs on’ and he will pick of Hearts and ruff one in hand, then do the
off simpler targets with ease. Russian Hawk same in Diamonds and ruff one on the table.
went down only a head at Ascot in a race too Another Heart ruff in hand works, East
short for him and the comment was ‘should throwing a Club, and another Diamond is
make a cracking chaser over 3m’. likewise ruffed in dummy. With 8 tricks in
front of you and A 10 of trumps facing Q 8 in
dummy, you exit a Club. West ruffs the third
Club as he only has trumps left and leads the
z6 at trick 12.
Now then, here’s your 50/50 to win a
million or go one down — shame to get it
wrong now! If you’re clear-minded enough,
you will see that it’s not a guess at all! If
West had the King of trumps, East could
have switched to a Spade to beat you when
in with the Club. You play small from
dummy and claim your million.
the spectator | 11 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
LIFE
Chess
Revolutionary
Raymond Keene
The French Defence appears to be somewhat
cautious in nature but can in fact lead to
disruptive middlegame clashes. It was a
favourite of such aficionados of counterattack
as Aron Nimzowitsch, Mikhail Botvinnik and
Viktor Korchnoi. One of my favourite lines was
espoused by world champion Tigran Petrosian,
for example in the following win against a world
championship candidate. Notes to the following
game are based on those in Opening Repertoire:
The French Defence by Cyrus Lakdawala
(published by Everyman Chess).
Olafsson-Petrosian: Bled 1961; French Defence
1 e4 e6 2 d4 d5 3 Nc3 Bb4 4 e5 Qd7 5
Qg4 White engages his queen, going for the soft
spot on g7. 5 ... f5 6 Qg3 b6 7 h4 Bb7 8
Bd3 This is logical now that Black has committed
his bishop to b7. If Black now plays ... Ba6, he will
have lost a full tempo. 8 ... Nc6 9 Nge2 0-0-0
10 Bd2 Nh6 11 a3 Be7 12 Bb5 Rdg8 (see
diagram 1) Petrosian intends to generate kingside
play with the plan ... Nf7, ... g7-g6, ... h7-h6 and
eventually ... g6-g5. 13 Qd3 White should risk 13
Bxh6! gxh6 14 Qf3 a6 15 Bxc6 Qxc6 16 g3 Rg4.
His knights are at least as effective as Black’s
inactive bishops, since one of them will perch on
f4. Of course, the danger with such a line is that
later on the position on the queenside may open
and Black’s bishops may take over. 13 ... Nf7
14 0-0-0 Kb8 15 Nf4 Qc8 16 Nce2 Ncd8
17 Qb3 The queen is out of play on b3 and may
later lose time to ... c7-c5 and then ... c5-c4. White
should play 17 Be3 a6 18 Ba4 c5 19 Qd2 c4 20 c3.
17 ... c6 18 Bd3 c5 19 dxc5 Bxc5 Black
wins a pawn, but Petrosian falls prey to the
positional player’s disease of playing too safely,
which reduces his advantage. He should boldly
recapture with his b-pawn with 19 ... bxc5! 20 Ba6
Nxe5 21 Rhe1 Re8 when White does not have
enough for the pawn. 20 Nh3 Olafsson misses
an opportunity to go for a dark-square bind with
20 Bc3! which seizes control over d4. 20 ...
Nxe5 21 Bf4 Ndf7 22 Bb5 Ka8 23 Nd4
Ng6 (see diagram 2) Now Black’s central pawns
begin to roll forward. 24 Qa4 Bxd4 By
chopping on d4, Black wins a piece on any
recapture with ... e6-e5. 25 Bd7 Qf8 26 Rxd4
White puts up a better fight by confusing the issue
PUZZLE NO. 553
Black to play. This is from Carlo-Haast, Grenke
Chess Open 2019. There is a saying in chess that
when you see a good move, you should look for a
better one. 1 ... Bxe5 is fine for Black but he can
do a lot better. How? Answers to me at The Spec-
tator by Tuesday 14 May or via email to victoria@
spectator.co.uk. There is a prize of £20 for the first
correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal
address and allow six weeks for prize delivery.
Last week’s solution 1 ... Qf6
Last week’s winner Ilya Iyengar,
Amersham, Buckinghamshire
58
Competition
The full English
Lucy Vickery
Diagram 1 In Competition No. 3097 you were invited to
submit a poem about Englishness in the style
WDkDWDr4 of a well-known poet.
0b0qgW0p
The line-up was mostly predictable —
from Chesterton, so-called ‘prophet of
W0nDpDWh Brexit’, through Larkin, Betjeman, Brooke,
DBDp)pDW Housman and, of course, Kipling. But it was
an American, Ogden Nash, whose pen por-
WDW)WDW) trait of us prompted me to set this challenge:
)WHWDW!W Let us pause to consider the English
W)PGN)PD
Who when they pause to consider themselves
$WDWIWDR
they get all reticently thrilled and tinglish,
Because every Englishman is convinced of one
thing, viz:
That to be an Englishman is to belong to the
Diagram 2 most exclusive club there is…
kDqDWDr4 The winners, in a field where the mood
0bDWDn0p ranged from elegiac to caustic, earn £25.
W0WDpDnD If you can take control back of your border
DBgpDpDW And sing of Agincourt and Waterloo
And think your mates are all well out of order
WDWHWGW) To lose their jobs and blame it all on you;
If you can moan and never tire of moaning:
)QDWDWDN Your belt won’t fit; your neighbour’s on the fiddle;
W)PDW)PD The trains are late; the Nanny State; it’s raining;
You can’t squeeze through the aisle of a Lidl;
DWIRDWDR And Brexit’s got you hot under the collar;
You can’t get Heinz baked beans in Magaluf;
And there’s no Burger King in Fuengirola;
The price of curry’s going through the roof.
with 26 Bxe6! Be5 27 Bxd5 Bxd5 28 Rxd5. 26 If you can meet with Spanish, French and German
... e5 27 Rb4 exf4 28 Rxb6 Nfe5 Even And treat those Johnny Foreigners as one:
Towels? In the pool. Act innocent, stay firm and
more efficient is 28 ... Qc5! 29 Rb5 Qd6 30 Ra5
Then you’ll be an Englishman, my son.
Nfe5 31 Rxa7+ Kb8 32 Bxf5 Ne7. 29 Rxb7
David Silverman/Rudyard Kipling
This sacrificial lunge at Black’s king is White’s
only practical chance. 29 ... Kxb7 30 h5
Oft have I travelled in those foreign realms
White can keep fighting after 30 Qb5+ Kc7 31
Where ‘breakfast’ is a concept hardly known,
Be6 Qd6 32 Bxd5! Rb8 33 Qa5+ Kc8 34 Ng5
A dismal meal that sadly underwhelms;
Qb6 35 Qc3+ Qc7 36 Be6+ Kb7 37 Bd5+ Kb6.
I view the wretched table with a groan.
As scary as it looks for Black’s king, the
The Germans offer cheeses, ham, salami;
computer indicates he will eventually
The Swedes, fish paste that’s horrid, salty, briny.
consolidate and win with the extra rook.
The Belgians and the French are just as barmy:
30 ... Qd6 Black’s queen provides her king
A croissant and a cup of coffee (tiny).
sufficient coverage to avoid mate and perpetual
check. 31 hxg6 Qxd7 32 Qxf4 Nxg6
My English stomach needs, when I awaken,
White resigns
Not foreign fare that leaves me feeling wispy,
But eggs and beans, two sausages, some bacon,
Tomatoes, mushrooms, bread that’s fried till crispy,
WDWDrDkD
Washed down, of course, by cups of strong,
sweet tea.
$WDWDWDW An English breakfast is the one for me!
Brian Allgar/John Keats
WDpGrDWD The time has come, the leavers said
0W0W)pDp To talk of ‘English’ things,
PDPDWDW$ Of Morris dancers on the green
And Henley — wasps and stings.
DWgWDWDW We’ll slay the fox, and on the turf
Pursue the sport of kings.
WDWDWIPD
DWDWDWDW We go to Wimbledon and Lords,
Our way of having fun,
We don’t like foreigners: the Poles,
The Frenchies and the Hun,
the spectator | 11 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
 LIFE

It’s scarcely odd we’re all alone,

We’ve chucked out every one. Crossword 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Sylvia Fairley/Lewis Carroll 2407: 11 12

In villages named Piddlewallop, Crapplecock

and Haw,
Stickmen 13 14

We little English niggle out our lives. by Doc 15 16 17 18

We’ve a snobbish type of silence that you’re 19 20 21

wisest to ignore
That’s hardened in us nightly by our wives. 22 23 24

The games we play are oaky-croquet, natterjack 25 26

and guff:
We play them with the earnestness of war. 27 28 29 30
The unclued lights, four of two
But look again; this earnestness is no more than words, individually or as a pair, 31 32 33
a bluff, are of a kind.
Our defeats the highest prized in sporting lore. 34 35 36

We work all day as sagger-knocker, fiddlery or Across 37 38 39

quark 11 After hint turned up,
To build a world that’s all askew and odd. 40 41
end of match had leftist
Most all the other nations think us mad or in outwitted (7) 42 43
the dark 12 Problem with French
As we genuflect to no one but our God. name turning page (6) 44
13 January not starting
In villages named Tummywuckle, Uddershape pleasant round island —
and Smelm, likely to be soaked?
We little English toddle off to bed (9, three words) 3 Do something about A first prize of £30 for the first
Where dreams suggest we look beyond our own 14 Break-time first — that’s London suburb (5) correct solution opened on 27
sweet little realm — the general drift! (5) 5 Something penned by May. There are two runners-up
But we’re English and so nothing more is said. 16 Light-hearted joking when Lehar, I assume? (4) prizes of £20. (UK solvers can
Adrian Fry/G.K. Chesterton taking tea with F-Fawley 6 County no longer known choose to receive the latest
(5) (4) edition of the Chambers
Had I been born, I often think, 19 Data emerged; half 8 Clothes companies? (7) dictionary instead of cash —
To write my thoughts in English ink rejected. What a yarn (7) 9 Hank and Chuck, say — ring the word ‘dictionary’.)
Far from the rags and peasant stink 21 The look of disheartened one fellow’s embracing Entries to: Crossword 2407,
Of humble Ayr, middlemen (4) another (9) The Spectator, 22 Old Queen
My bonnie Jean would walk in mink 24 Tail, small and trim (4) 17 Why, on reflection, you Street, London SW1H 9HP.
And princes bear. 25 Tool for shaping wood can’t go back? (7) Please allow six weeks for
from a spruce possibly (7) 20 Clock up early sales — prize delivery.
What’s Englishness but etiquette, a couple of pounds after
30 Neapolitans ain’t removed
Belief the world is in your debt, wild spree (7, hyphened)
from reviewing European
Ruling the waves with no regret, 22 Eddy, like this theme,
language (7)
Shorn of all shame? hogging large mike (9)
31 Short festival adopting fifty
When we are dead it’s safe to bet 28 Extra name in article
in old age (4) Name
We look the same. about garden feature (7)
34 Just short of a healthy
appetite! (4) 29 Bracelet coming from
But when I want to speak to those Address
35 Met — by accident? factory in region —
That take my verses seriously
(7, two words) not English (7)
I cast aside my ploughman’s clothes
40 Servant returns pocketing 33 Yard behind shop floor (6)
And write imperiously.
rand and other currency 36 Small explosive with
Max Ross/Robert Burns
(5) opening, turning (5)
It’s England’s isle I here invoke 41 Queen new to palace 38 Novelist, leading thinker
Which shapes the soul of English folk. across river (9) and rhymester (4)
Oh! how this land has been endowed 42 Was sound asleep? (6) 39 Beseeching chum for gem
To make its people quietly proud; 43 Fog in 6 after being (4)
unsettled (7, two words) Email
It boasts no grandly towering heights
But offers calm and gentle sights:
Hedge-folded fields, cool woods and streams Down
The eye delight, not wild extremes. 2 Felines carrying little
Its seasons, too, brook no excess weight? (6)
But each will in its turn express
Its spirit in a measured way.
And these deep patterns, I will say, SOLUTION TO 2404: 1+2 = 3+4
Have worked invisibly to fashion
A character not fierce with passion The first and second letters of the unclued lights are the
But made by nature temperate same as the third and fourth ones. All the solutions are
As if it were its native state. words or one phrase eight letters long. ARARAT at 32
W.J. Webster/Rupert Brooke Down matches the pattern but is only six-letters in length
and had to be highlighted.
NO. 310 0: LIFE SUPPORT
First prize D. Thorpe, Totternhoe, Bedfordshire
You are invited to supply an ode to either Runners-up John Honey, Brentford, Middlesex;
Alexa or Siri (the virtual assistants). Please Brian Le Marquer, Horndean, Hants
email entries of up to 16 lines to lucy@
spectator.co.uk by midday on 22 May.
the spectator | 11 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk 59
LIFE
No sacred cows
This extinction warning
just doesn’t add up
Toby Young
A
nyone watching the BBC’s
News at Ten on Monday
would have been surprised to
learn that economic growth poses a
dire threat to the future of life on this
planet. We’re used to hearing this from
climate change campaigners, but I’ve
always taken such claims with a pinch
of salt, suspecting that the anti-capi-
talist left is distorting the evidence.
Apparently not. ‘One million species
at risk of imminent extinction accord-
ing to a major UN report,’ intoned the
BBC. ‘It says the Earth’s ecosystems
are being destroyed by the relentless
pursuit of economic growth.’ So does
this mean the Extinction Rebellion
protestors are right?
I decided to do some digging to
see if one million species really do
‘face extinction in the next few dec-
ades’, as the BBC put it. That claim is
based on a report by the UN’s Inter-
governmental Science-Policy Plat-
form on Biodiversity and Ecosystem
Services (IPBES), but it hasn’t been
published yet. All I could find online
was a press release put out by the
IPBES and a ‘summary’ of the report
‘for policymakers’. The press release
states: ‘The report finds that around
one million animal and plant spe-
cies are now threatened with extinc-
tion, many within decades.’ It gives
no source for this beyond the as-yet-
unpublished report, but the summary
MICHAEL HEATH
60
makes it clear that it’s partly based
on data from the International Union
for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)
Red List of Threatened Species.
The IUCN’s Red List website says
that ‘more than 27,000’ species ‘are
threatened with extinction’. So how
did the IPBES arrive at the one mil-
lion figure? The key passage in the
summary for policymakers reads as
follows: ‘An average of around 25 per
cent of species in assessed animal and
plant groups are threatened, suggest-
ing that around one million species
already face extinction, many with-
in decades, unless action is taken.’
The word ‘suggesting’ is doing a lot
of work there. On the Red List web-
site, it says 98,500 species have been
‘assessed’ — and the IPBES worked
out what percentage 98,500 was of
the total number of species and mul-
tiplied the 27,000 figure accordingly.
That’s a difficult calculation to make,
given that the number of species in
the world is unknown. The most reli-
able estimate is 8.7 million (with a
margin of error of plus or minus 1.3
million), but even the compilers of
that stat acknowledge that 86 per cent
of all species on land and 91 per cent
of those in the seas have yet to be dis-
covered, described and catalogued.
So how exactly did the IPBES
arrive at the magic one million num-
It’s like saying ber? It seems we’re just supposed to
Man City is at take it on faith, which the BBC duly
did. What about the IPBES’s claim
imminent risk that ‘around 25 per cent of species…
of relegation if are threatened’? That seems a little
it has a 10 per pessimistic, given that the number of
cent chance of mammals to have become extinct in
the past 500 years or so is around 1.4
it in the next per cent and only one bird has met
100 years the same fate in Europe since 1852.
the spectator | 11 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
Not bad when you consider how
much economic growth there’s been
in the past 167 years. So what does
‘threatened’ mean? The IPBES is
using the IUCN’s definition, which
is ‘at high risk of extinction in the
wild’. Rather implausibly, the IUCN
includes species in this category that
it designates as ‘vulnerable’, which
it defines as facing a ‘probability of
extinction in the wild’ of ‘at least 10
per cent within 100 years’. About half
the species the IPBES includes in its
25 per cent figure are in this ‘vulner-
able’ category.
Let’s return to the News at Ten.
The BBC newsreader, summaris-
ing the (unpublished) IPBES report,
said that 40 per cent of amphibians
are among those species ‘at risk of
imminent extinction’. Sure enough,
that 40 per cent figure appears in
the IPBES press release and on the
Red List website. But about a third
of those amphibians fall into the ‘vul-
nerable’ category, so describing their
extinction as ‘imminent’ is a bit of a
stretch. It’s like saying that because
Manchester City faces a 10 per cent
risk of being relegated in the next 100
years, the club is ‘at risk of imminent
relegation’. For those who don’t fol-
low football, Man City look likely to
be crowned Premier League champi-
ons on Saturday.
No doubt our ‘way of life’ does
pose a threat to some species, even
if it’s not as many as the climate
change alarmists say. But it’s a pity
the BBC decided not to interrogate
these claims and just regurgitated a
press release.
Toby Young is associate editor of
The Spectator.
 15 per cent over budget and opens a
The Wiki Man year late, perhaps we could not see it
Why aren’t there more as evidence of innate British incompe-
tence. There is a strain of self-loathing
big infrastructure projects? in all our news coverage of public
Rory Sutherland works which implies we are uniquely
bad at them. If anything, we are good
at infrastructure. It’s the bureaucracy
which holds things up.
If it weren’t for press negativity, we
might see still braver investment in
more innovative forms of mass tran-
sit: the Heathrow Pod, for instance; or
aerial micro-trams such as the Beem-
car, a reinvention of Wuppertal’s mag-
nificent Schwebebahn.
Certainly, if we want innovation in
urban transit, we can’t wait for the US

I
n 2012 I finished a meeting in Ber-
lin and headed to Tegel airport.
Apparently mine was a historic
flight, since the airport was to close
that very week. Future flights would
soon land at the wondrous new Ber-
lin Brandenburg airport, which would
be opening ‘within months’.
Seven years later, planes still fly
into Tegel. The new airport may open
in 2020 or 2021; no one knows. So far,
the project has cost €9 billion, triple
the original estimate. The roof is 100
per cent overweight. All the electrical
wiring may need replacing. The esca-
lators were too short, so end not at
floor level but on an ersatz plinth.
Underneath, empty trains run daily
into a six-platform ghost station to
stop the tracks from rusting.
Even Munich — which works well,
cost three times the initial budget and
opened six years late — is a triumph
compared with the new Hamburg
Concert Hall. Costed at £70 million,
it opened five years late with a final
price-tag of £710 million.
With these facts in mind, next time
a bold project such as Crossrail runs
Modern engineering projects are
insanely complicated, and delays or
teething problems are to be expected.
More damaging by far is the relent-
lessly negative sentiment spread by
the media. When Thameslink added
many new routes, many more column
inches were devoted to delayed and
cancelled trains in the first month
than to the enduring benefits these
new services would bring.
It is a topsy-turvy world when
journalists, whose job involves noth-
ing more complicated than concoct-
ing 700 words of faux outrage and
then clicking ‘send’, can casually
abuse people who build complicated
megastructures underground.
If not for press My bigger fear is that cynical news
negativity, coverage makes government far too
we might hesitant to try new things. One of the
reasons I like infrastructure spend-
see braver ing (HS2 aside) is that it pays off
investment twice over: although the cost is justi-
in more fied using banausic economic meas-
ures of work, productivity and GDP,
innovative such projects also deliver unmeas-
forms of ured but significant benefits in the
mass transit quality of everyday life and leisure.
to take the lead. Given what they can
achieve in rocketry, their approach
to transport is woeful. Moreover,
with its fixation on self-driving cars,
the tech sector may have bet on the
wrong horseless carriage.
Autonomous vehicles are an inter-
esting engineering challenge, but from
a wider systems perspective they do
nothing to improve urban congestion
or uncertain journey times. Instead
they will make the problem worse.
Think about it. In effect, India already
has driverless cars, since the cost of a
driver is minor in comparison with
the cost of a vehicle. Yet who has ever
visited Mumbai and remarked ‘Hey,
these guys have really solved the traf-
fic problem!’?
I wrote this article in Austin, the
11th most populous US city. It is 80
miles from San Antonio, the 7th. I
thought I’d make a day trip to pay my
respects to William DePriest Suther-
land, who died at the Alamo. There
is one train a day in each direction. It
takes three hours and 25 minutes.
I took an Uber to the LBJ Presi-
dential Library instead.

DEAR MARY YOUR PROBLEMS SOLVED

Q. I was invited to birthday
drinks in London. On my way
there the name of someone I
haven’t heard from for months
flashed up on my mobile. My
instinct was not to answer —
I’d heard the host of the party
had gone off this woman and
thought it best not to answer in
case the woman asked what I was
doing that night. I didn’t want
to hurt her feelings if she’d been
excluded. Nor did I want to lie.
However, on arrival at the party
my host told me that all was now
well between him and her and
she’d been invited but couldn’t
come. When I rang her the next
day, she said she’d been calling to
say she was sorry she wouldn’t be
seeing me that night. Mary, how
could I have handled this better?
— Name and address withheld
A. You can avoid this sort of
social ambush by texting the
caller immediately with words to
the effect of ‘In library/on walk
without signal/in meeting. Can’t
talk. Text me’. That would have
bought you time to establish with
your host whether the woman
in question had been asked and
allowed you to act accordingly.
Q. Further to your excellent
advice to F.M. in Salisbury (20
April) regarding unwanted
airline conversations, might I
suggest what I have used in the
past? As soon as the aircraft has
reached cruising altitude, you
apologise by adding ‘Sorry, my
ears have popped and I can’t
hear a word you are saying’. This
leaves you clear to un-pop your
ears at any time you feel like
resuming the conversation.
— B.T., Lusaka, Zambia
A. Thank you for contributing
this genuinely useful tip.
Q. I work quite long hours in a
hotel in Venice and my time off is
precious. I have become friendly
with various British people who
have second houses here and am
often invited for meals. Recently
I have observed that wine is
no longer served with what is
often really delicious food. The
host may say ‘We don’t drink
at lunchtime’. Well I do. Any
suggestions?
— Name withheld, Venice
A. Volunteer your unpaid
services as wine editor to a small-
circulation lifestyle manual. This
will allow you to justify your
special needs. ‘I know you don’t
like to drink at lunchtime,’ you
can respond when next invited.
‘But I’m afraid I need to for
professional reasons. Would it be
disruptive if I brought my own?’
Q. I think the reference to the
teenager-friendly gentlemen’s
club (27 April) is to the East
India Club in St James’s Square.
When the Public Schools Club
at 100 Piccadilly merged with
the East India in the 1960s, they
continued to offer seven years’
membership at a reduced rate if
your old school nominates you.
— I.M., by email
A. Thank you for alerting school-
leaving readers to this possibility.

the spectator | 11 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk 61

LIFE

But that was just a mask. The pains
Drink of private life and his wife’s infidelity
Spare us the new often drove him back to faith and stoi-
cism. Often, he must have been tempt-
Bruce Anderson ed to echo Parolles: ‘Simply the thing
I am shall make me live.’ (Not that he
was anything like Parolles.)
Yet by 1960, all seemed serene. The
lower-middle classes, their numbers
swollen by prosperity, were buying
houses, Hillman Minxes and washing-
machines. Labour, trapped between
proletarian primitivism and Hugh
Gaitskell’s Wykehamist priggishness
— not that he was a prig in private life:
Peter Simple’s Bishop Spaceley-Trellis
— cheered on the neophiliacs. The
movement found two leaders. The
first was a wholly meretricious man,
Harold Wilson. No more morally neg-
ligible figure has ever reached No. 10,
a record which will remain inviolate
unless Boris Johnson becomes PM.
The second was a much more con-
siderable politician, whose tragic
death rescued him from a tragic fate.
Once assassinated, John Kennedy was
apotheosised: the lost leader under
whom everything would have been
possible. In reality, he would never

T
here is no new thing under the
sun. Over the weekend, I read
a book which was alarmingly
relevant to our present discontents:
The Neophiliacs, by Christopher
Booker, written at the end of the
1960s. That decade began well. The
country had recovered from the aus-
terities of wartime. It seemed to be an
era of social stability. Most couples
who married expected to stay married
and bring up their children in stable
families. Living standards were rising.
National service was about to end.
The public schools, whose oppressive
regimes had created many left-wing
dissidents, were liberalising.
Politics was also stable. Less than
three years after the Suez debacle,
Harold Macmillan had won a major-
ity of 100. Macmillan was an extraor-
dinary figure; it is doubtful if a more
psychologically complex — but also
politically effective — character has
ever occupied Downing Street. The
inner man had deep psychic wounds,
but equally deep moral and religious
seriousness. The outer could often
seem like an insouciant boulevardier.
merely a hypocrite — seemed unable
to come to terms with the new Britain.
Then it all went pear-shaped.
In recent weeks, London has been
subjected to a children’s crusade,
with hysterical youngsters not only
talking nonsense about the environ-
ment but being taken seriously by the
grown-ups. In the early 1960s, it was
far worse. There was a youth revolt
against the established order, which
In recent often responded with a moral, intellec-
weeks, tual and political collapse. The walls of
London has the establishment fell, and many of its
defenders changed sides. Macmillan
been subjected was unable to cope.
to a children’s The BBC, many dons and a deplor-
crusade able number of clerics — prefiguring
‘Their numbers are on the verge of collapse.’
have been able to pass as much civil
rights legislation as Lyndon Johnson
did, and would have plunged at least
as deeply into Vietnam. By 1968, it
would not have been ‘Hey, hey, LBJ,
how many kids did you kill today?’,
but ‘Hey, hey JFK’. He would have left
office broken and discredited.
The Neophiliacs documents the
degringolade of the early 1960s. Mr
Booker moves on to Jung, whom I
have never read: this book makes me
feel that I should. The conclusion on
the political chaos is summarised in a
quotation from Nigel Lawson, in this
magazine of which he was then editor.
‘The time has come to call a halt
to the restless belief that change itself
is the only ultimate good, and to seek
instead a period of social and intel-
lectual stability during which we can
once again put down roots and gather
strength.’ In 2019, so say all of us.
These lucubrations were fuelled
by Burgundy: a Beaune 1er Cru Les
Epenottes ’13 and a Gevrey-Cham-
bertin ’09, both from Pierre Bourée.
We could not decide which was better.
Neither was neophiliac.

MIND YOUR LANGUAGE

Fungible
‘No darling,’ I said, ‘nothing to do
with mushrooms.’ My husband
had responded to my exclaiming
‘What does she think that means?’
on hearing Theresa May use the
word fungible. This rare word now
crops up in discussion of Brexit,
perhaps caught from lawyers
and business types. They seem to
think it means ‘porous, malleable,
flexible, convertible’.
Dominic Grieve told the
Commons last month that he’d
prefer ‘a longer and fungible
extension’ to the Article 50
process. Stephen Doughty
spoke of a ‘flextension, fungible
extension or whatever’. Jo
Johnson said on another day
that he wanted train tickets to
be ‘fungible between operators’.
Claire Perry assured the House
that ‘scientists are not fungible’.
Nick Clegg told the New
Statesman that ‘time is the most
fungible thing of all’.
The Oxford English Dictionary
rejigged its entry for fungible in
2017, with the definition: ‘Of a
good that has been contracted for:
that can be replaced by another
identical item’, or more generally
‘interchangeable’. A quotation
from America in 1914 says: ‘When
a man puts his grain in an elevator
and draws money against that
number of bushels of grain he
does not necessarily have those
particular bushels of grain. They
commingle.’ The derivation is
from Latin fungi, ‘to perform’,
especially as a stand-in.
What’s lost now is a concept
essential to the idea of usury. In
the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas
defined fungibles as ‘things the
use of which consists in their
consumption: thus we consume
wine when we use it for drink’.
In that, wine differs from a
book. You can charge someone to
borrow a book and use it, and also
ask him to give back the book.
But it would be strange for a pub
landlord to say: ‘Here you are:
pint of bitter, £3.70, and I’ll want
it back when you’ve finished
with it.’
Aquinas and everyone else
said it was immoral to charge
twice for a fungible thing. People
at the time regarded money as
fungible in that sense. If money
is no longer fungible, it is licit to
charge reasonable interest on it,
like rent on a house.
I don’t think I’d use fungible
if I wanted to be clear. With
politicians, that is not always
the object.
— Dot Wordsworth

62 the spectator | 11 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk