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BREXIT
BETRAYED
JO JOHNSON
CHARLES MOORE
JAMES FORSYTH
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A bad deal
uring last year’s general election resulted in a calamitous defeat four years
D
and a more streamlined regulatory environ-
campaign, Theresa May declared later. And in 1993, Sir John still had a major- ment that ditches the precautionary princi-
that ‘You can only deliver Brexit if ity of nearly 20. Theresa May has none. ple. Instead, the UK will be bound by level
you believe in Brexit’. Unfortunately, her Already, the DUP MPs who provide her playing field restrictions designed to ensure
deal proves this point. It was negotiated by majority have indicated they will oppose the that this country can gain no competitive
a team of people who imagined their job to deal. Their concerns will be shared by Scot- advantage over the EU27.
be a damage-limitation exercise. They did tish Tory MPs who recognise that a weaker May’s deal is not useless. It does bring
not see Brexit as an opportunity and this is union with Northern Ireland might erode back control of borders, farms, fish and
reflected in the terms put before the cabinet. that between England and Scotland. At first money. Payments to the EU will fall from
The deal falls far short of what was prom- sight, the deal does away with the need for about £10 billion to less than £1 billion, sav-
ised in May’s Lancaster House speech. She an internal customs border between North- ing some £50 billion over a parliament. We
said she’d bring back a clean Brexit, taking ern Ireland and the rest of the UK. But the will be free from the Common Agricultur-
Britain out of the Single Market, the Cus- small print shows that the EU is, in effect, al Policy which has, over the years, done so
toms Union and the jurisdiction of the Euro- much to exacerbate Third World poverty. It
pean Court of Justice. The deal she ended Brexit was never, in itself, going to be will stop our courts having to look to Stras-
up presenting to her cabinet will, in sever- a guarantee of national success. It bourg for direction, protecting the common
al important regards, fail all of these tests. represented the removal of a constraint law tradition on which our justice system
But May has conveniently forgotten her (and the respect for it) is based. For those
tests. She doesn’t mention them any more. being given jurisdiction over goods stand- to whom Brexit was about immigration and
Instead, she talks about the uncertainty that ards in Northern Ireland. The fear is that if money, both boxes are ticked.
might be unleashed by no deal (as a result of the UK later wants to make a clean break But to those for whom Brexit was about
her failure to prepare for it) and the political with the EU, it would have to leave North- sovereignty, and the ability of Britain to
weakness created by the result of the gen- ern Ireland behind. manage its own affairs for a 21st century
eral election she called last year. No. 10 disputes this interpretation, but that requires a global outlook rather than
She will now be tempted to turn parlia- this brings us to the largest single problem European parochialism, this deal is a bit-
mentary approval of the draft Brexit deal with Mrs May’s deal: we would not be able ter disappointment. We will not, really, be
agreed on Tuesday into an issue of confi- to leave it freely, at a time of our choosing. It able to break free from EU protectionism.
dence. She will be inclined to tell MPs that would only be possible with the permission We will end up accepting regulatory dik-
whatever they think of this deal, it is the of an ‘independent arbitration committee’. tats under the guise of ‘level playing field’
only one on the table and the only thing sep- This is exactly the state of ‘vassalage’ which requirements. We will not be able to strike
arating us from a chaotic departure from the Remainers and Brexiteers alike have been new trade deals, to the dismay of Americans
EU on 29 March next year. Either accept it, warning about. and Australians who had hoped for closer
or the government will collapse and Jeremy Brexit was never, in itself, going to be a relations with us — and to the dismay of
Corbyn will be prime minister. guarantee of national success. It represented millions who voted for Brexit, with all its
This is a tactic which May should be care- the removal of a constraint: making it work risks, but now find the government unable
ful to resist. It was tried by John Major with would require using the UK’s new freedoms to share their confidence in the project of
the Maastricht Treaty in 1993, and in the wisely. But the UK will have almost no new the United Kingdom.
strict sense of allowing the then prime min- economic freedom under these arrange- This is why May will struggle for
ister to complete the passage of his bill, it ments. The UK will not be able to become a parliament’s approval. MPs from all parties
may seem initially to have worked. But the more competitive economy 20 miles off the will know that there is a better way of doing
price Major paid was to create a poisonous Continent’s coast, competing for investment this. And that even now, it is not too late
atmosphere in the Conservative party which with the promise of lower taxes, freer trade to find one.
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk 3
Yoko loco, p53
A pirate’s life for me, p44
Cover by Morten Morland. Drawings by Michael Heath, Castro, K.J.Lamb, Bernie, Grizelda, Wilbur, Nick Newmn, RGJ, Percival
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.co.uk
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Distributor Marketforce, 161 Marsh Wall, London, E14 9AP. Tel. 0203 787 9001. www.marketforce.co.uk Vol 338; no 9925 © The Spectator (1828) Ltd. ISSN 0038-6952
The Spectator is published weekly by The Spectator (1828) Ltd at 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP
Editor: Fraser Nelson
LIFE
ARTS SPECIAL LIFE Life is too short to lose friends,
44 Horatio Clare 61 High life Taki particularly difficult ones, who are
The fact — and fiction — of piracy Low life Jeremy Clarke often the most interesting.
46 Exhibitions 62 Peter Mullen Mary Killen, p69
Vuillard & Madame Vuillard ‘If 2018’: a poem
Laura Gascoigne
65 Real life Melissa Kite Wives find it hard to imagine
47 Music Bridge Susanna Gross any sane person seeing anything
Britain’s War Requiem; Turnage’s
to recommend in their useless
Testament
Richard Bratby AND FINALLY . . .
husbands.
56 Notes on… Watling Street James Delingpole, p24
48 Gaming Red Dead Redemption 2
Nick Hilton Patrick West
66 Chess Raymond Keene
Brexit now means slavery,
50 Radio Kate Chisholm according to Jacob Rees-Mogg.
Painting Lorenzo Lotto: Portraits Competition Lucy Vickery
Put that on the bus.
Martin Gayford 67 Crossword Pabulum
Jo Johnson, p9
52 Manuscripts Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms 68 No sacred cows Toby Young
Ed West Battle for Britain Michael Heath
53 Television 69 Sport Roger Alton
James Walton Your problems solved
The listener Yoko Ono: Warzone Mary Killen
Rod Liddle 70 Food Tanya Gold
54 Cinema Fantastic Beasts: The Mind your language
Crimes of Grindelwald Dot Wordsworth
Deborah Ross
55 Theatre
Pinter Three; Don Quixote;
All We Ever Wanted Was Everything
Lloyd Evans
Alistair Elliott
‘The Croissant’: a poem
CONTRIBUTORS
Jo Johnson MP was James O’Malley was the Dr Taj Nathan is a forensic Ursula Buchan, who reviews Nick Hilton is the director of
transport minister and, under interim editor of Gizmodo UK, psychiatrist and clinical the year’s best gardening books Podot, a podcast production
David Cameron, in the No. 10 and has previously written for director of Merseyside NHS on p40, is an award-winning house. He was The Spectator’s
Policy Unit. He is a member TechRadar. On p12 he looks Trust. He is the winner of the gardening writer. Her most first podcast editor. On p48, he
of ‘the Sensibles’ — Tory MPs at the dark side of China’s John Murray Prize for non- recent book is A Green and reviews the video game Red
seeking to soften Brexit. He technology boom. fiction writing, and his essay is Pleasant Land. Dead Redemption 2.
writes a sensible diary on p9. published on p25.
Investment involves risk. The value of investments and the income from them may go down as well as up and investors may not get back the amount
originally invested. This communication provides information relating to a fund known as Merian UK Alpha Fund. This communication is issued by Merian Global Investors (UK)
Limited (“Merian Global Investors”). Merian Global Investors is registered in England and Wales (number: 02949554) and is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct
Authority (FRN: 171847). Its registered office is at 2 Lambeth Hill, London, United Kingdom, EC4P 4WR. Models constructed with Geomag. MGI 11/18/0049.
acquitted of blasphemy after eight years Macron of France signed a book of
Home on death row in Pakistan) for fear of remembrance in a replica railway carriage
heresa May, the Prime Minister, community unrest. Lord Lester of Herne near Compiègne. President Donald Trump
T defended a 500-page technical draft
of the agreement on withdrawal from the
Hill should be suspended from sitting in the
Lords until 2022, its Privileges and Conduct
cancelled his visit to a US military cemetery
because it was raining and he wouldn’t be
European Union. She met immediate Committee said, after he was found to have able to use a helicopter. At a ceremony in
opposition from the Democratic Unionists, offered a woman ‘corrupt inducements to Paris, President Vladimir Putin of Russia
from Jacob Rees-Mogg and from Boris sleep with him’ in 2006 by promising her a shook him by the hand and gave him a
Johnson. Mr Johnson’s brother Jo (a peerage; he denied the allegations. thumbs-up. During a meeting Mr Macron
Remainer) had earlier resigned as a put his hand on Mr Trump’s knee, but later
minister, calling Mrs May’s handling of he British economy grew by 0.6 per in a speech he said: ‘Patriotism is the exact
Brexit a ‘failure of British statecraft on a
scale unseen since the Suez crisis’. The BBC
T cent in the third quarter and the annual
rate of wage increases rose to 3.2 per cent.
opposite of nationalism; nationalism is a
betrayal of patriotism.’
reported that several cabinet ministers Inflation remained unchanged at 2.4 per
had expressed doubts about her Chequers cent. Unemployment rose by 21,000 and t least 48 died in wildfires sweeping
plan back in July. Jeremy Corbyn, the
Labour leader, insisted that Brexit could
the number of people from Cyprus, the
Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia,
A California and scores were missing.
Some 300,000 had to flee their homes. In
not be stopped, but Keir Starmer, Labour’s Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Paradise, 6,700 homes and businesses burnt
shadow Brexit secretary, said the option of Slovenia working in Britain fell by 173,000. down. Thousand Oaks lost scores of houses
a new referendum was still ‘on the table’. The owners of the Daily Mail were said days after 12 people were shot dead in a
Premier Foods put its Ambrosia creamed to be interested in buying the i newspaper bar there by a former US marine who had
rice business up for sale as it began to from Johnston Press. James Brokenshire, served in Afghanistan; he is believed to
spend £10 million to prepare for Brexit. the culture secretary, defended Sir Roger have committed suicide. One of those killed
The Prince of Wales celebrated his 70th Scruton’s appointment as the chairman was Telemachus Orfanos, 27, who had
birthday. of a new public body to encourage more escaped death last year when a gunman
beautiful houses; Labour said he should killed 58 people in Las Vegas.
he nation had spent a weekend be dumped because in 2007 he wrote in
T solemnly marking the centenary of the
Armistice. Big Ben was allowed to strike
the Daily Telegraph that homosexuality
was ‘not normal’. Adam Thomas, 22, and P alestinian guerrillas in Gaza fired
more than 400 rockets into Israel and
11. The Queen closed her eyes in prayer Claudia Patatas, 38, from Banbury, a couple Israeli aircraft hit 150 targets, killing six
and the Prince of Wales laid a wreath at the who had given their baby the middle name people. Turkey sent an audio recording
Cenotaph. Some people criticised Jeremy Adolf, were convicted of belonging to of the killing of the Saudi journalist
Corbyn, for wearing an anorak and a red National Action, a banned Neo-Nazi group; Jamal Khashoggi to western powers and
tie there. Bells rang; poppy petals fell; large a swastika-shaped pastry cutter was found to Saudi Arabia. Sri Lanka’s Supreme
engravings of individuals who had died in at their home. Court suspended the President’s move
the first world war were made on beaches Abroad to dissolve parliament and hold snap
and washed away by the tide; silhouettes elections. A Spanish court ordered the
of the fallen were placed in churches. n events to mark the 100th anniversary of former Catalan leader Artur Mas to repay
The government was said to oppose the
granting of asylum to Asia Bibi (a Christian
I the Armistice, Chancellor Angela Merkel
of Germany and President Emmanuel
the €4.9 million costs of organising 2014’s
illegal vote on independence. CSH
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk 7
Jo Johnson
and pointless exercise. Will we be able he person this country misses most
to do worthwhile trade deals with third
countries? No. Could we turn ourselves
T is Jeremy Heywood. I was lucky to
learn from him during the two years I ran
into a low regulation tiger economy? the No. 10 Policy Unit ahead of the 2015
No. Will we ‘take back control’? No, election. He sent me a nice note after
we cede control to the other European our manifesto came out, welcoming that
countries that will determine the rules it had recognised Britain’s ‘impartial,
governing huge swathes of our economy. professional and highly capable civil
When we were told Brexit meant taking service [was] admired around the world
back powers for Parliament, no one and one of our nation’s strengths’.
said to my constituents that this meant The civil service is now stretched to its
the French parliament and the German limits by Brexit, to the detriment of our
parliament, not our own. This is an Tagliatelle: Diamond, gold and silver rings ability to tackle the challenges we face:
utterly abject and shameful national Cassandra Goad, 147 Sloane Street, London SW1X 9BZ a housing crisis, poor social mobility, an
humiliation. And that’s why I resigned. Telephone: 020 7730 2202 cassandragoad.com ageing society and so on. A great man.
he bad news for Theresa May is that proposals. There will also be much in the is easier to argue that the public deserve
he bullet train from Beijing to Shang- ernment can access data held in different
C
or education records, details of purchas-
Economies are built on trust and China’s magic weapons’ for seizing power: es made or internet activity, will be moni-
economy has matured at an astonishing rate. the united front, the armed strug- tored. This is where we find data from the
Those who support the system say that it’s gle and construction of the Communist social credit system, which is like a finan-
designed to manage low-level misdemean- party itself. Now the priority for China’s cial credit rating but far broader. Anyone
ours and will help create more trust. government is to remain in power. To deemed anti-social (or anti-Communist
But it’s easy to see where the next steps ensure that, President Xi Jinping’s party party) will find themselves blocked from
could lead. You don’t need to read too much is developing a fourth ‘magic weapon’. buying air or train tickets, getting a mort-
dystopian science fiction to imagine how The social credit system is a part of gage or even graduating.
such an opaque system, where a mysterious this, but the ‘weapon’ also extends far Finally, there is the ‘grid system’ infor-
number decides your rights and privileges, beyond it. By combining big data, arti- mation, which divides cities into small
could be used to control a population. Some ficial intelligence, recognition technolo- parcels overseen by citizens who are paid
trials have already led to alarming results. In gy and other police techniques, China’s
government intends to create a compre- The East Germans had a Stasi:
The phone system warned anyone hensive method of political and social
calling a person on a debtor blacklist control. in the 21st century, China
that they were untrustworthy It may not live up to everything enlists far more people
that is promised: after all, government-
one region, the phone system was configured implemented computer systems rarely to report unusual activity to the police.
so that anyone calling someone on a debtor work as well as intended. But it will affect The East Germans had a Stasi: in the 21st
blacklist was warned that they were contact- — is already affecting — Chinese society century, China enlists far more people. In
ing an untrustworthy individual. and human rights more profoundly than Chaoyang district in Beijing, for instance,
While we might trust the people cur- any other reform or development insti- there are around 120,000 paid inform-
rently in charge of the new high-tech secu- tuted by the party. ants in operation. The information they
rity apparatus, how can we be sure that The Chinese government has always provide is sifted through using computer
the people in charge in the future will use been interested in keeping files on citi- power and artificial intelligence.
it responsibly? In other words, even if you zens. In the past, each citizen had a As early as 2000, the Golden Shield
inexplicably trust the Chinese government dang’an, or file, that covered their life. project aimed to link up information
to behave responsibly today, how can you be Nothing could be done without the on all Chinese citizens. At a basic level
so sure that Xi Jinping or his successors will dang’an. Everything was entered in it: it would allow authorities to know eve-
behave the same way tomorrow? China’s marriage, social position, job. But this rything about a particular person within
innovative use of new technology may not was, by necessity, pretty rudimentary. The seconds. But it aimed to go beyond that,
just enable perfect surveillance. It will align magic weapon now being created can predicting who might cause trouble to
an individual’s motives with those of the update that surveillance for an infinite- the regime, anticipating the organising
state itself. ly more complex age by tying all man- of any action deemed inimical to the
Technology is only going to develop fur- ner of information to a person’s personal party, and curtailing the freedom and
ther. Processing power will increase, as will ID number. actions of any suspect citizen, by, for
facial recognition. The number of devices The weapon is to have several com- example, taking away the ability to fill up
containing cameras and microchips will ponents. There is recognition technol- a car with petrol or even, in the future, to
increase too. It will keep getting easier to sift ogy, with databases covering the face, start their engine.
through huge amounts of information, in the voice, fingerprints and DNA of every Unsurprisingly, any tool that helps
hunt for anything subversive. Chinese citizen. Then positional moni- to maintain stability is welcomed by
What China has achieved in such a short toring, including mobile devices, which the party. Meng Jianzhu, the ex-head of
time is staggering. But the announcement even now can report on the location of the security system, hailed big data and
I heard on the bullet train made me nerv- 1.4 billion citizens (the trick will be to use modern information technology at a
ous. It was an ominous reminder that there AI to make that information recoverable conference in September last year, talk-
is a darker side to China’s growth, which in real time), backed up by other public ing of ‘extending social governance to
may soon affect us all. systems, such as linking up more than the smallest social units, such as villages
170 million cameras (said to rise to and communities, in order to realise pre-
SPECTATOR.CO.UK/PODCAST 400 million by 2020). cise governance’. His emphasis was on
James O’Malley and Cindy Yu on China’s Next is lifestyle monitoring. Databases anticipating threats. Earlier in July on a
social credit system. concerning the individual, be they health tour of Guiyang, described by the state >
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk 13
news agency Xinhua as ‘a pioneer of the may not always be seen as a worthy trade-
application of big data technology in various off. The party is building a considerable ANCIENT AND MODERN
sectors, including police work’, he had called constituency of ordinary, non-dissident peo-
Call the polis
on the country’s police to make full use of ple who cannot travel or book hotels with-
big data and AI. In August he repeated the out being subject to over-frequent checks.
message in Xinjiang. The State Council’s These are still early days, although examples
national artificial intelligence development of arrests through technology are multiply-
plan declares that, ‘AI is indispensable for ing and the Supreme Court has announced
the effective maintenance of social stability’. that 6.7 million people have been banned
This is very much in line with the politi- from buying air and train tickets.
cal zeitgeist. Past politburos were populated Party members, too, might be unhap-
by engineers, who saw security solutions in py at what is being filed away about them. If Brussels
terms of grand projects; the current lead- Interesting questions arise: at what level of is willing to offer the British
ership looks to a new age of ‘informatisa- seniority do officials cease to have all their Parliament only a dog’s Brexit,
tion’ and IT as aids in governance, and this personal doings and sayings recorded? Will that should tell Parliament
fits President Xi’s desire for increased cen- citizens who are talented and wealthier everything it needs to know
tral control. So, for example, if students are prefer to emigrate, voting in the only way about any future prospects for
feared as a perennial catalyst for protest, is it allowed them, with their feet? a Britain tied in with the EU.
surprising that the Ministry of Education has New technology is neither inherent- It is about time for Parliament
suggested monitoring their political senti- ly good nor bad: all depends on use, and to say, ‘Enough is enough’. As
ments by collating data from library records, restraint. Facial, voice and DNA recogni- every Greek polis (city state),
however small, averred, its aim
surveys, social media posts and more? tion technology can help in the fight against
was to ensure that it alone was
Xi puts great emphasis on ‘law-based crime and terrorism. Big data and artificial
the arbiter of its own freedom.
governance’; the Chinese phrase should not intelligence can yield otherwise unobtain- Antiochus III, a distant
be translated as ‘rule of law’, because the able conclusions about tackling diseases successor to Alexander the Great,
party is expressly in control of the law. But and finding cures. But this same technology had ambitions in 196 bc to ‘bring
amid the mass of recent legislation there is might also supply would-be totalitarians with all the cities of Asia under his
a previously unimagined power to control. domination, as they once had
Petrol stations allow cars to be So there is a battle of values shaping up been’. But while Antiochus was
between western liberal democracies and a sure that many Greek cities on
filled only through facial recognition new authoritarianism. China’s new system of and around the western coast
linked to ID cards control and repression will accentuate that of Turkey (according to the
battle. President Xi talks of a ‘community historian Livy) ‘were ready to
little which limits the collection and use of with a shared future for mankind’. A quar- accept his yoke because they
had little confidence in their
people’s private data; nor, given the impor- ter of mankind looks set to share its future
location, fortifications, weapons
tance of maintaining stability for regime sur- in every detail with Xi’s party. If the tech- or warriors’, there were two still
vival, are there likely to be safeguards. nology is extended or sold abroad — some holding out and ‘there was a
Last year, Human Rights Watch doc- countries are already importing aspects of danger that if they were allowed
umented the surveillance work already the system — that fraction might rise. And their way, other cities would follow
under way. A voice-recognition database is might eventually, dear reader, include you. their lead’. (Sound familiar?)
being built in Anhui province. In the Xinji- On top of a show of force, ‘he
ang region, where China is engaged in the Charles Parton is an associate fellow at also tried soft words and a mild
repression of the minority Uyghurs, much the Royal United Services Institute. This is reproach for their stubbornness, in
money and effort is being spent combining adapted from an article first published by the hope that he would persuade
elements of the new magic weapon. Petrol the Chatham House magazine, The World them that they would be free,
stations allow cars to be filled only through Today. as they had hoped, just as soon
facial recognition linked to ID cards. In addi- as they made clear that their
freedom was due to him, and not
tion, all Uyghurs must download an app that
to their own desire to seize it’. (All
automatically reports their browsing history,
very EU.) ‘To this they replied
as well as their given location. that Antiochus ought not to be
Can all this be united into a totalitarian surprised or angry if they were not
straitjacket? It depends on support from inclined to submit impassively to
government, business and the public. It’s the deferment of their freedom.’
also unclear if China can afford the costs Which should be our reply to
in the long term. Beyond the computing Brussels. The fact is that no one
development and equipment, there are the could have tried harder than
costs of recognition-system hardware, of the Theresa May to reach a mutually
personnel to run and maintain the system, acceptable deal, but she was
of the payments to the grid system volun- unable to persuade the EU to
teers. If Beijing’s Chaoyang district’s 120,000 abandon their interests for ours.
After all, why should they? Why
volunteers are paid 300 yuan a month, that
should we? So we must walk away.
equates to £50 million a year. Rolled out
As a Greek statesman said: ‘If you
nationwide, the sums become enormous. follow my advice, we shall possess
The bigger risk is that all this erodes the a free polis and be our own
trust between people and party. At present, masters, able to respond like men,
the party offers a balance between accepting on our own terms, to anyone doing
a convenient electronic life in exchange for us good or harm.’ — Peter Jones
personal information and control, but that
14 the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
Retirement tying
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JULIET SAMUEL
few months ago, an aggressive US politicians and regulators turned their fire central bank, Philipp Hildebrand; a former
easants’ Revolts tend not to work out we’re headed for suicide — despite the fact because they didn’t like the result of the first
that Harvard’s admissions gauleiters give rewards, they got them on their own talent.
here comes a point in a New York low ‘personality ratings’ for criteria such as What was missing, until now, was a
Women with Balls An interview series hosted by The Spectator’s Katy Balls
Emma Barnett
BBC presenter & Sunday Times columnist
didn’t get an audience with the Pope would say if he’d turned up today and saw the Pantheon! And the Aventine Keyhole in
here was no reason for Edward ing McNaughton’s landlady and his anato- brush diagnostic labels obscures rather than
of a bureaucracy that favours the most Armistice into effect. ‘When he reported
Hearts as well as heads powerful EU lobbyists without any say in to the prime minister and cabinet on
Sir: Simon Jenkins suggests we should stop those rules. The Single Market is neither 19 November, he was shocked to find them
remembering and start forgetting about the best economic option nor what the ungrateful and vindictive.’
the first world war (‘Don’t mention the population of the UK voted for. Alistair Lexden
war’, 10 November). His beef is with artists David Harper House of Lords, London SW1
in particular, claiming that art ‘drenches Bude, Cornwall
history in emotion’. He prefers to read
history books.
My family at war
No one would argue against history
Admirable timing Sir: I found myself very moved by Liz
books, but surely it is not a question of Sir: The happiness felt by the dancing Hunt’s description of her visit to Danny
either/or. Artists tell a story in a different Admiral Sir Rosslyn Wemyss, supreme Mulholland’s final resting place (‘We will
way from historians, often to a different allied naval commander, on Armistice Day remember him’, 10 November).
audience. They can move people to want to (The Spectator’s Notes, 10 November) was Due to my age, my grandparents were
find out more: to look in the box of letters short-lived. He did not receive the grant able to tell me much of their own second
in the attic, to find out about their family of £100,000 which Parliament awarded world war experiences. Family folklore
connection to the war, to think again about all the other first world war commanders; even claims — quite correctly as it turns out
the past and how it impacts on our present. while they received earldoms, he got a mere — an Agincourt archer as our kith and kin.
Good history books open our minds to new barony, for which he was made to wait a Yet sadly we know nothing of our family’s
ideas and perspectives. Good art opens our year. He told his family these misfortunes involvement in the Great War. Like Liz, it is
hearts and our minds. were the result of disobeying Lloyd high time I righted that wrong.
The 14-18 NOW programme of first George, who had instructed him ‘to arrange Mike Prince
world war centenary arts commissions has that the Armistice should commence at New Milton, Hampshire
invited some of the world’s leading artists 2.30 p.m. in order that he might announce
to create new work in response to the it in the House of Commons between
centenary. With funding from government 2.45 p.m. and 3 p.m’. According to his
Howzat for an error?
and the Lottery — though nothing like the account, Wemyss telephoned George V and Sir: Peter Oborne’s recent review of Simon
sums Jenkins referred to — as well as vital got him to tell the government that the 11th Wilde’s book England: The Biography
corporate and philanthropic support, our hour would be a far better time to bring the mentioned the (statistically) worst-
artists have reached more than 35 million ever first-class cricketer, the Harrovian
people in the UK so far, including many McMaster: out first ball, no wickets, no
young people. catches in his only match. He deserves
Jenkins says he will ponder the war with immortality under his correct initials, which
the help of historians, not artists. That’s fine.
But let others experience the work of artists,
LAND IN THE were J. E. P. (Joseph Emile Patrick) rather
than C. E. B.
who invite us to imagine and participate as HEART OF Harry Beresford
well as think. The fact that we haven’t learnt London SE1
the lessons of history is not a justification LONDON CITY
for forgetting the horrors of war.
Jenny Waldman
Remembering the Iolaire
• Convenient twice daily*
Director, 14-18 NOW Sir: Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence
London SE1 ƐċĂĈŞŖāŐĮħáìŐèììĨ gives a moving account of the loss of two
to London City American troopships off the island of Islay
a few weeks before the Armistice (Diary,
World view ʫ>ÆŖŞŐÆâĞÆĨèġĮţĨĂìÆââìŖŖ
10 November). There was another tragedy
ÆŞáìŐèììĨċŐōĮŐŞ
Sir: David Woodhead (Letters, 10 on 1 January 1919 at the approach to the
November) described Tony Abbott’s ʫ ĮħōġċħìĨŞÆŐſĮĨáĮÆŐè harbour in Stornoway, Isle of Lewis, when
WTO trade solution as ‘disingenuous’ on èŐċĨĞŖÆĨèŖĨÆâĞŖ HMY Iolaire, coming home in a force
the basis of all existing WTO members ʫ>ÆŐìŖāŐĮħ˫ʗʘʴʘʘʨ ten gale and crowded with more than 200
having additional bilateral and regional servicemen, was dashed against rocks
trade agreements in place, and therefore ʫÂĮĨÆġÆĨèʓˇʓˇʒŐĮţŞìōÆŖŖìŖ and sank. The men were within yards of
a WTO solution for the UK would not be ÆŸÆċġÆáġìŞĮáìĨìƏŞŐìĂţġÆŐ the shore and had survived the horrors of
comparable. ŞŐÆŸìġġìŐŖ the Great War only to be killed so near
It is Woodhead who is being their own homes. The effect on the island
disingenuous. The WTO solution ƐſáìʴâĮħ áěìâ
ŞŞĮ ŐċèÆſ communities was devastating: for years, this
Ŗ ʴţ ÆſŞĮ>
represents a fundamental basis upon which ŐĂ ì
âĈÆ ġſ˅aĮĨ
è catastrophe was not talked about.
ÆĨè Æċ
additional trade agreements can be built. Ă Ş ÆžìŖ Źċâì& In the recently published The Darkest
Ĩ
ġţèċ ĈÆĨĂìʴ
ċĨâ â
Those additional trade agreements are not Ĩ ì ŹÆſ ŞſÆĨè ŐŸċâìʴ Dawn, the events of New Year’s Day
ʨh ċġ ċ ì
ċġÆá ÆſŖ
ÆŸÆ ÆţĨè
even essential but they represent a possible ōġţŖ
1919 have been thoroughly researched by
enhancement, especially when the UK Malcolm Macdonald and Donald John
would have the authority to negotiate them MacLeod. There are witness statements,
in its best interests. personal descriptions, maps and analyses,
Staying in the Single Market condemns but the cause of the loss is still debatable.
the UK never to negotiate bilateral Catherine Montgomery Blight
agreements and to be subject to the rules St Austell, Cornwall
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk 29
ANY OTHER BUSINESS|MARTIN VANDER WEYER
Los Angeles/Seattle when they are judged more by their phi- Amazon Go, a supermarket without check-
S stocks briefly rallied after the lanthropy than their potential to accumu- outs where sensors identify you, track any-
© MINISTERO PER I BENI E LE ATTIVITÀ CULTURALI E DEL TURISMO - FOTOTECA DEL POLO MUSEALE DELLA CAMPANIA
the grisly fate of the
regimental cooks who
poisoned John Nicholson’s
soup
Ursula Buchan discovers
that racehorses have a
fondness for rugosa rosehips
Bill Emmott hopes that one
of Japan’s 70,000
centenarians will carry the
Olympic flame in 2020
Laura Gascoigne is
charmed by Vuillard’s
paintings of his mother –
but finds her hard to spot
Ed West thinks ‘once in a
generation’ an absurdly
modest description of the
British Library’s Anglo-
Saxon exhibition
Rod Liddle has a sure-fire
way of getting rid of
unwanted guests: play them
Yoko Ono’s new album
‘Bishop Bernardo
de’Rossi’, 1505, by
Lorenzo Lotto
Martin Gayford — p50
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk 31
BOOKS & ARTS
CHRISTMAS BOOKS II
LOTTE
Daniel Swift at the beginning again and work my way Tom Fort’s classic The Book of Eels, pub-
through the oeuvre. lished in 2003. Fort is narrower in scope
I feel as though I came late to the Sarah I greatly enjoyed the ruminative, gothic but deeper and, aided by what is arguably
Moss party. Nobody told me she was this travelogue The Immeasurable World: Jour- the most slippery, strange but fascinating
divided country’s most urgent novelist. Her neys in Desert Places by William Atkins fish species on Earth, he more complete-
themes: the cycles of history, male absurd- (Faber, £20). Besides the Gobi, Atkins tack- ly conjures the mysteriousness of what
ity, the forms female subversion may take, les a sliver of the fearsome 370,000-sqkm lies beneath.
in irony, sickness and sacrifice. It helps that Taklamakan. It’s a vital topic. ‘It has been
she’s absurdly topical, and that she’s funny. estimated,’ he writes, ‘that desertification Marcus Berkmann
Her new book, Ghost Wall (Granta, £12.99), affects a sixth of humankind and 70 per cent
is the shorter, spikier companion piece to of all arid areas.’ The book is as much history I read non-fiction for work and fiction for
her previous novel, The Tidal Zone. It is as travelogue. fun. This year’s discoveries for me were the
about ancient Britain and its re-enactment The welcome trend for rewriting myths spy novels of Mick Herron and the later,
in the present day, and like all the novels I’ve produced Pat Barker’s The Silence of the more abstract works of the science-fiction
loved best this year, it’s also a parable. Girls (Hamish Hamilton, £18.99), which writer Christopher Priest. Herron’s Jackson
Other parables: I was hugely moved is the Iliad from a female perspective. Lamb books are mesmerisingly good, com-
by Jesse Ball’s allegorical Census (Granta, I loved it. bining the best double, triple and quadru-
£14.99), about love and Down’s Syndrome, ple-crossing traditions of Len Deighton and
and am so glad that the austere Australian Mark Cocker early Le Carré with the mordant humour of
fabulist Gerald Murnane is getting the wide Reginald Hill’s Dalziel and Pascoe novels.
attention he deserves. It has been a fishy year for me, and Charles Priest, who is now 76, has been writ-
Rangeley-Wilson’s terrific Silver Shoals: ing a lot about an invented place he calls
Sara Wheeler Five Fish That Made Britain (Chatto, £18.99) The Dream Archipelago. The Islanders
is among its highlights. The author manages (2011) is an ingenious book of short stories
I gulped down Last Stories by William Tre- to lay bare this country’s abuse of its aston- masquerading as a travelogue; The Adjacent
vor (Viking Penguin, £14.99). Up to his usual ishing former fish abundance, but without (2013) is utterly bizarre, and I may have to
stellar standard but, as we lost him two years name-calling or losing his sense of simple reread it soon to work out what it’s about;
ago, the pages sang like a threnody. Is it pos- wonder at fish as vital, vibrantly wild inhab- and The Gradual (2016) is the next novel I
sible that there won’t ever be another Tre- itants of our encircling seas and waters. intend to start, after I’ve got all this bloody
vor to look forward to? I shall have to start In turn, his book led me to reread work out of the way.
32 the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
A.N. Wilson ple and tells her extraordinary story in Girl Best novel this year by a country mile
with Dove (William Collins, £14.99). Bril- is Normal People by Sally Rooney (Faber,
James Pope-Hennessy’s Life of Queen Mary liantly original, funny and clever. £13.99), the work of an Irish novelist who
was the best 20th-century royal biography. has sprung from nowhere to both liter-
Hugo Vickers bought a copy as a schoolboy Nicky Haslam ary eminence and great popularity in two
and has been an obsessive royal-watcher books. Her characters are those non-existent
ever since. In The Quest for Queen Mary Foremost is Hugo Vickers’s meticulous- ‘ordinary people’, whose emotions, rela-
(Zuleika, £30),Vickers gathers up the inter- ly annotated The Quest for Queen Mary tionships and daily lives she reveals with
views and conversations with the queen’s (Zuleika, £30), and Cressida Connolly’s ele- sympathy and understanding but also cool
friends and relations, collected by Pope- giac After the Party (Viking, £14.99). Adam detachment. Brilliant.
Hennessy, which were too indiscreet to be Zamoyski refreshingly downsizes the Cor- How many biographers can entirely
included in his masterpiece. Almost every sican commander-in-chief in his Napoleon: change not one’s view of their subject but
page is a gem, but the chapter about Henry The Man Behind the Myth (William Collins, what you might call ‘the universal view,’
Duke of Gloucester must be one of the £30). New to me, but first published in 1647, and do so with carefully, calmly presented
most hilarious pieces of English prose in is Baltasar Gracián’s Pocket Oracle and the evidence? I daresay many like me, with an
our language. Art of Prudence, edited by Jeremy Robbins interest beyond the casual in Tudor history,
Two other superb royal books: Lucy (Penguin Classics, £9.99): every maxim a les- thought they had Thomas Cromwell sewn up.
Worsley’s Queen Victoria: Daughter, Wife, son for our time. Worst book of the year? Diarmaid MacCulloch has blown our view
Mother, Widow (Hodder, £25) has much of Hmmm. Perhaps Andrew Morton’s fatuous apart with his long, absorbing and exciting
the abundant charm of its author; and Franc- Wallis in Love (Michael O’Mara, £20). Thomas Cromwell: A Life (Allen Lane, £30).
es Welch’s The Imperial Tea Party (Short A masterpiece of scholarship and my read
Books, £12.99), recounting visits from the Susan Hill of the year.
Russian royal family to their English cous-
ins, is poignant and comic in equal measure. The law is endlessly fascinating, in its history, Graham Robb
rituals, manners, language and, above all, in
Claire Lowdon the people whose lives revolve, temporar- Having just binge-read seven novels by
ily or in the long term, around its practise. Haruki Murakami, I’m expecting his lat-
The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife, In Your Defence: Stories of Life and Law est, Killing Commendatore (Harvill Secker,
1965–2005 by Zachary Leader (Cape, £35). by the barrister Sarah Langford (Double- £20), to be my book of the year, but I think
On his deathbed, Bellow asked a friend: day, £16.99) tells the stories of some of those I’m getting it for Christmas, so I’ll have to
‘Was I a man or a jerk?’ In the second and caught up in its complex workings. It is rivet- wait. It has received the accolade of a Class
final volume of his meticulously objective ing — and quite alarming. II: Indecent Materials rating from the Hong
biography, Leader resists the temptation to Kong Obscene Articles Tribunal.
answer that question. Instead, he gives us all Among the books I have read, I admired
the information from every angle, rewarding Éric Vuillard’s Goncourt Prize-winning
the patient reader with a multi-dimensional novel The Order of the Day (Picador,
portrait of this contradictory, conflicted, bril- £12.99), a fly-on-the-wall account, with occa-
liant, difficult human being. And although sional flights of fancy, of the part played by
this is a big book, it’s actually a miracle of captains of industry in Hitler’s rise.
compression and clarity, given the size of Olivier Rolin’s Stalin’s Meteorologist
the life. Best of all, Leader always makes (Harvill Secker, £8.99) tells the painfully
time to remind us why we’re here: for the engrossing tale of Alexey Wangenheim, a
work itself, which he quotes from generously patriotic pioneer of wind power. It is based
and with relish. Whatever you think of Bel- on the letters and drawings he sent to
low the man, you’ll find it impossible not to his wife and daughter from the Arctic gulag
agree with Leader’s moving conclusion that to which he was inexplicably banished by his
‘the fiction is his great gift — the great gift hero, Comrade Stalin.
of his life’.
William Dalrymple
Honor Clerk
In his magisterial The British in India (Allen
Three books about books. Edward Lane, £30), David Gilmour draws on more
Wilson-Lee’s The Catalogue of Shipwrecked than 30 years of research in the archives. Here
Books (William Collins, £25), the fascinating he presents an astonishing harvest from dia-
history of Christopher Columbus’s illegiti- ries, memoirs, letters and official documents
mate son Hernando, guardian of his father’s of the period, many previously unused.
flame, courtier, bibliophile and catalogu- Prostitutes and punkah wallahs, pig-stickers,
er supreme, whose travels took him to the pagoda-hunters and viceregal palaces — all
heart of 16th-century Europe. Lulah Ellen- British colonial life in India is here present-
der’s Elisabeth’s Lists (Granta, £16.99), the ed in elegant prose: 350 years of battles and
story of the author’s grandmother, whom she durbars, maharajahs’ balls, tiger shoots and
never met, improbably conjured up from the Simla shenanigans distilled in 600 pages of
books of household lists she kept as a dip- telling anecdotes and witty vignettes.
lomat’s daughter and wife — an intelligent Manaku of Guler: The Life and Work of
and moving family narrative. And, finally, a Another Great Indian Painter from a Small
life organised by books: Sally Bayley brought Hill State (Niyogi Books, £73), by India’s
herself up with the aid of Milly Molly Mandy, leading art historian, B.N. Goswamy, com-
Betsey Trotwood, Jane Eyre and Miss Mar- pletes his lifetime of labour researching
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk 33
BOOKS & ARTS
the most talented of all the families of art- And of course the Cratchits’ Christmas pud- and triumphantly proved there’s plenty of
ists at work in India in the 18th century. ding is included. life in the old form yet. Finally, A.J. Finn’s
The book closes a diptych that he opened The Woman at the Window (HarperCollins,
two decades ago with the publication of Sam Leith £12.99) took the conventions of a psycholog-
Nainsukh of Guler: A Great Indian Painter ical thriller and gave them both literary pol-
from a Small Hill State. More and more I find I look above all else in ish and real heart.
The pleasure of reading Manaku of Guler fiction for sureness of touch with sentences
derives in part from discovering the extraor- — and that was abundantly in evidence, in Richard Ingrams
dinary painting of this forgotten genius, as he different ways, in Michael Ondaatje’s War-
brings into visual form some of the most sub- light (Cape, £16.99) and in Catherine Lac- It sometimes seems as though a new Donald
tle of Indian philosophical texts; but equally ey’s short story collection Certain American Trump book is being published every week,
in Goswamy’s close reading of the images, States (Granta, £12.99). Ondaatje’s is an but we ought not to forget the pioneering
and the amount of information he manages elliptical and atmospheric hybrid of family Michael Wolff, whose Fire and Fury (Little,
to wring out of them. He notices, for exam- story and second world war spy caper; Lac- Brown, £20) was the first to give a frighten-
ple, that when Radha instructs Krishna to ey’s an often very funny collection of anx- ingly vivid picture of the leader of the free
paint her breasts with sandalwood paste, iously talky stories about people in crises of world — ‘twinkle in his eye, larceny in his
Krishna does so using his left hand: ‘Is it one sort or another. But both of them have soul’: an ignorant inattentive hoodlum who
possible,’ asks Goswamy, ‘that it was not the unmistakable stamp of knowing exact- likes to spend his evenings watching three
Krishna but Manaku who was actually ly what they’re doing. I was also struck by TV screens at once while guzzling cheese-
left-handed?’ the compressed farce and horror in the 1951 burgers. Though published this year, Wolff’s
Dutch novella An Untouched House by Wil- masterpiece now reads like ancient histo-
Andrew Taylor lem Frederik Hermans, in David Colmer’s ry, with many of the pieces swept from the
new translation (Pushkin, £7.99). board, notably the improbable figure of
Claire Fuller’s Bitter Orange (Penguin, In non-fiction, Paul Kildea’s Chopin’s Steve Bannon, self-styled ‘Trump’s brain’,
£14.99) is a beautifully written novel, mainly Piano: A Journey Through Romanticism who put the words into the President’s
set 50 years ago in a decaying stately home (Allen Lane, £20) was fascinating, even for mouth, notably his outlandish inauguration
where three youngish people play out their a musical ignoramus like me. I also tip my speech. ‘What weird shit is this?’, George
doomed hopes and sinister fantasies dur- cap to Andrew Roberts’s Churchill: Walk- W. Bush was heard to murmur. A comment
ing a long, hot summer. There are echoes of ing With Destiny (Allen Lane, £35). I’m sick that seems to sum up Trump’s regime.
Barbara Vine and Daphne du Maurier here to death of Churchill and did not welcome Tom Bower tried to be on his best behav-
and also, faint but curiously insistent, of Bar- yet another book about him, especially with iour with his biography of Prince Charles,
bara Pym. C.J. Sansom’s Tombland (Mantle, that subtitle, yet Roberts’s telling is so fresh Rebel Prince (William Collins, £20). But
£20), the seventh novel in his bestselling it utterly won me over. though he made a commendable attempt to
Shardlake series, is technically a murder see good in the heir to the throne he could
mystery. In practice, it is also an enthralling Jane Ridley not hope to dispel the impression left with
fictional account of Kett’s Rebellion, the his readers that Charles is every bit as weird
little known and even less understood 1549 Who’s In, Who’s Out: The Journals of Ken- as Trump. One can overlook, perhaps, the
insurrection. neth Rose Volume I edited by D.R. Thorpe eccentricities that Bower describes — the
Finally, if you are a fan of Mick Herron’s (Weidenfeld, £30). An insider’s account, special cushions and loo seats that accom-
wonderful Slough House spy novels, there this gossipy and acute diary will become the pany the Prince on his travels — but what is
is a Christmas treat available in the form indispensable guide to the Establishment in one to make of his belief in the ‘sacred geom-
of The Drop (John Murray, £9.99). A wry the years between 1944 and 1979. etry of the body’, or his recommendation
and elegant novella about what happens to I have enjoyed two books published in that coffee enemas could be effective in the
redundant spooks. paperback this year. Kathryn Hughes’s Victo- treatment of cancer? Bush’s words, however
rians Undone (4th Estate, £9.99), a collection crude, seem the only appropriate response.
Ruth Scurr of stunningly original and thought-provok-
ing essays about such unexpected subjects Jonathan Sumption
Because Christmas is a terrible challenge as Darwin’s beard or George Eliot’s hand.
for all who suffer from eating disorders, And Nicholas Shakespeare’s Six Minutes in As a general rule, biography is a poor way to
I am choosing Laura Freeman’s The Read- May (Vintage, £9.99) is interesting not just learn history. Concentrating on a single life
ing Cure: How Books Restored My Appetite for the story of Churchill’s incredibly unlike- oversimplifies the complex texture of events.
(Weidenfeld, £16.99). This is not a misery ly ascent to the premiership but also for the But there are exceptions, and two of them
memoir or self-help book but a joyful cel- way in which the author uses his novelist’s were published this year. One is Julian Jack-
ebration of literature and a candid account skills to write a gripping and original histori- son’s A Certain Idea of France (Allen Lane,
of how reading about other people enjoy- cal narrative. £35), the best biography of De Gaulle in any
ing real or fictional meals helped Freeman language and the latest evidence of Anglo-
recover from anorexia. James Walton Saxon domination in the field of modern
Vicarious enjoyment of food, which can French history. The other is Diarmaid Mac-
take many forms, including studying reci- My favourite novel of this year was Tim Win- Cullough’s Thomas Cromwell (Allen Lane,
pe books, obsessively watching Bake Off ton’s blistering The Shepherd’s Hut (Picador, £30), a real history to supplant the histori-
or cooking elaborate meals for friends and £14.99): a miraculously assured combination cal fictions that surround Henry VIII’s great
family without participating in them, is com- of beguiling narrative voice, wild landscape, minister. Both of these books manage to
mon among anorexics. Freeman transforms page-turning plot and characters that are study events through a life, and not the other
this into a real pathway to recovery. Invit- simultaneously archetypal and utterly indi- way round. Both are written to uncompro-
ing her readers to share picnics, feasts, good vidual. I also much enjoyed Now We Shall mising standards of scholarship by profes-
suppers and strong teas, she takes them on Be Entirely Free (Sceptre, £18.99), in which sionals who have devoted their lives to their
a quirky literary journey, from Richard Jef- Andrew Miller returned to more orthodox subject. But they know how to tell a good
fries’s Bevis to Joanne Harris’s Chocolat. historical fiction after 2015’s The Crossing story well.
34 the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
Jeff Noon about an adult looking back at traumatic I found the bleak, off-beam, laugh-or-be-
childhood events and trying to work out sick spirit of the age uncannily reflected in
R.C. Sherriff, the author of the play how far they have formed (or deformed) Ben Marcus’s Notes from the Fog (Gran-
Journey’s End, also wrote a number of him into the person he has become. It’s ta, £12.99), a collection of stories that fea-
novels, all but forgotten now. This year, how- even less unusual to write a narrative that tures, inter alia, a pair of architects who
ever, Penguin Classics reprinted The Hop- moves choppily back and forth between ‘made their mark by designing large pub-
kins Manuscript (£8.99), his one attempt the wartime past and the supposedly more lic graves where people could gather and
at a science fiction story. Published in peaceful present. Yet every time we think where maybe really cool food trucks would
1939, it imagines the moon slipping out we’ve pinned down what Ondaatje is doing also park’.
of its orbit and heading towards Earth, in this novel, he somehow manages to wrig-
all seen through the eyes of Mr Hop- gle free. It’s a quite brilliant act of fictional David Crane
kins, a poultry breeder from a tiny village escapology. Why it didn’t make the Man
called Beadle. I loved this book, by turns Booker shortlist is one of the great literary This, like nearly every other for the past
funny and tragic, and filled with poet- mysteries of the year. 200 years, has been a good one for Napo-
ic descriptions of the approaching moon leon watchers. Michael Broers’s Napo-
and the changing landscape. It moves Tim Martin leon: The Spirit of the Age (Faber, £30)
between abject despair and good old- more than delivers on the promise of his
fashioned British stoicism with ease. Since I judged the Man Booker Interna- first volume; while for anyone looking
It’s worth the cover price alone for the tional prize earlier this year, it may seem for a single-volume biography, or an anti-
moonlit cricket match on the village a bit undignified to carry on shilling for the dote to Andrew Roberts’s Napoleon the
green one night before the world is due to winner, but Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights (Fitz- Great, Adam Zamoyski’s Napoleon: The
end. Magical. carraldo Editions, £9.99) is a book that Man Behind the Myth (William Collins,
deserves all the praise I can throw at it and £30) offers a pacy and characteristical-
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst more. It’s a positive constellation of wit ly unintimidated picture of how and why
and deep thought and I’ve read it so many Napoleon achieved what he did and then
Whereas some novelists seem perfectly times that bits of Jennifer Croft’s transla- succeeded in screwing it all up. Not big on
happy to carry on recycling the same old tion have shown up in my dreams. the battles, but 600-plus pages of narrative
narrative tricks, Michael Ondaatje’s War- Richard Powers’s superb eco-doorstop, history will seldom pass so easily.
light (Cape, £16.99) stood out this year for The Overstory (Heinemann, £18.99), had Also, I very much look forward to
its skill in making even the most familiar me wandering about gaping at trees for C.J. Sansom’s latest Shardlake novel,
fictional terrain seem strange and unset- months — little contemporary fiction is so Tombland (Mantle, £20), centring around
tling underfoot. It’s hardly unusual to write attentive to the non-human world — and Kett’s Rebellion.
Kensington Palace
Art, Architecture and Society
Edited by Olivia Fryman
Kensington Palace is renowned for its architecture, splendid
interiors and its royal residents. This new book thoroughly
explores Kensington’s physical beauty and its history,
presenting material drawn from archives, newspapers,
personal letters, images and careful analysis of the building.
‘This compelling upstairs-downstairs history of the ‘home
for homeless royals’ is lavishly illustrated with architectural
drawings, state beds, artworks from the Royal Collection,
and a near-psychedelic (for 1749) depiction of fireworks
over the Thames at Whitehall.’ – Apollo
diner: ‘Torn not cut,’ nam. Bellow himself was hardly a champion
a woman tells the of this war, but he thought, if the president
waitress, so the edges invites you, you show your face.
burn a little and grow And yet on other issues he refused, as
crunchy. I’m quoting he once put it in an interview with the cri-
from memory. If it’s tis Michiko Kakutani, ‘to line up’. Especially
the job of a writer to on civil rights, which got him frequently into
offer a usable short- trouble. Leader writes carefully and thought-
hand for complex fully on tensions in Chicago between the
feelings and impres- Jewish and African-American communities.
sions — ‘the best that Bellow’s provocations fell roughly into three
has been thought and categories: the things he said because he had
said’ — then Bellow thought about and deeply studied the crisis
looks like the natural of American cities, and the culture that came
successor, only a few out of them, and wanted to utter hard truths;
hundred years late, the things he said to get a reaction; and the
to Shakespeare. things he said stupidly or worse. But it’s not
But there’s also always easy to tell them apart.
a kind of sting in such Bellow landed in hot water for a remark
praise, and the stock he made over the phone to James Atlas, who
of Bellow’s reputa- quoted it in a New York Times profile of Bel-
tion has probably low’s friend and co-teacher Alan Bloom:
fallen since his death ‘Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust
in 2005. The second
volume of Zacha- Bellow put his kids through the misery
ry Leader’s brilliant
biography begins of several divorces and battled one of
where the last one their mothers for a decade in court
ended, with the pub-
lication of Herzog of the Papuans?’ Leader remarks: ‘Few
in 1964, and Bellow words by Bellow have done more to alienate
at the height of his liberal and academic opinion than these, or
fame. His success was to banish his fiction from college syllabuses.’
astonishing. ‘Within Bellow himself tried to give an explanation
Saul Bellow, photographed in Paris in 1982. Extraordinary literary a month of publi- for the remark, in an op-ed piece published
intelligence saw him through the mess of his own life cation, Herzog was in the Times: he was only trying to make
number one on the a distinction between literate and pre-liter-
bestseller list, sup- ate societies, of which he had been a student,
planting John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came as Leader points out, for much of his life.
Conflicted genius in From the Cold.’ This for a novel about All of this gets complicated. In culture wars,
Benjamin Markovits a semi-employed academic who wrote a everything is connected to everything else.
book about Romanticism and Christianity And yet sometimes it also isn’t, and writ-
The Life of Saul Bellow: and spent much of his time firing off letters ing fiction has a way of exposing any blind
Love and Strife, 1965–2005 to other scholars about their work. There’s spots in our view of the world. When the
by Zachary Leader something odd, noble, but also disconcerting black pickpocket in Mr Sammler’s Plan-
Cape, £35, pp. 784 about a literary writer who reaches the top of et silently exposes his genitals to the old
the pops by sticking to his esoteric tunes. But Jewish hero, it’s hard to see this as a com-
Boxing writers sometimes try to make com- ‘money kept rolling in’ — including $371,350 plex account of a complex racial situation.
parisons across weight groups. They used for the paperback rights to Augie March and (I don’t think the pickpocket gets a line
to say, for example, that Floyd Mayweath- Herzog. ‘Guys, I’m rich,’ Bellow told his of dialogue in the whole book.) And yet
er was the best pound-for-pound fighter in friend Mitzi McClosky. He was riding a wave. that’s exactly how the Times’s own review
the world. Saul Bellow for many years has One of the oddities of Herzog is that he characterised it by giving him a voice:
had the reputation of the best page-for-page seems much older than he really is — and ‘Silently, underlining the message with
writer. Every paragraph has something that Bellow himself was still shy of 50 when the his eyes only, the Negro says in effect: the
arrests you: an image, an insight, a line of novel came out. Yet you can already see in contest is unequal. Give it up.’ (In a curious
dialogue, or a moral dilemma. both book and man the terms according to twist of fate, the reviewer, Anatole Broyard,
This is the kind of thing: ‘My broth- which he was in danger of becoming dated, was himself mixed race, and at least by some
er picked me up by the trustful affections or losing touch. On civil rights, on the war accounts ‘passed off’ as white for much of his
as one would lift up a rabbit by the ears.’ in Vietnam, on Israel, he found himself drift- life.) Mr Sammler’s Planet won a National
The sentences flow, both natural and vivid. ing away from the literary liberal consensus. Book Award in 1971, Bellow’s third.
Bellow can capture the moment’s peace of During the various students protests at the For a writer who specialised in deep
a commercial traveller, sitting in the garden University of Chicago in the 1960s, Bellow sympathies, Bellow could run short, not
of his lover’s rented apartment: tended to take the administration line. He just in his fiction but in his life. He put his
He breathed in the sugar of the pure morning. also showed up at President Johnson’s White kids through the misery of several divorc-
He heard the long phrases of the birds. House Festival of the Arts in the summer of es and spent a decade of his life battling
No enemy wanted his life. 1965, which other writers, such as Philip Roth his third wife, Susan, in court, without
Or tell you how to eat an English muf- (a friend and follower) and Robert Lowell, much regard for the poison leaching from
36 the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
BOOKS & ARTS
this legal conflict into the family ground- being issued by a small, now-defunct press,
water. And yet Leader’s biography is an
You couldn’t make it up Edinburgh has gained a cult following in
attempt to address another kind of failure Alex Preston recent years, driven by the success of Chee’s
of sympathy — of Bellow’s previous biog- second novel, the gaudy and expansive The
rapher, James Atlas, who knew his subject How to Write an Autobiographical Queen of the Night. The publishing scene at
and let the work be coloured by his personal Novel: Essays the time that Edinburgh was being written
feelings (not to mention his own ambitions). by Alexander Chee was dominated by misery memoirs, the lit-
Leader’s portrait manages to be both sub- Bloomsbury, £9.99, pp. 280 crit landscape by new ideas about trauma
tle and even-handed. Bellow could be a real and recovered memory. It feels like these
jerk, but he could also be a decent colleague, Edinburgh two come together in Chee’s tale of Fee,
a generous teacher, a conscientious by Alexander Chee a Korean American choirboy, aged 11 at the
reader, a lively father and a thoughtful friend. Bloomsbury, £9.99, pp. 228 book’s start, who is abused at singing camp,
And part of the pleasure of the biog- tormented by guilt for not preventing the
raphy is the light it shines on some of the Orhan Pamuk, writing about Vladimir abuse of his friend Peter, and then, years
work. Leader writes well about the books Nabokov’s masterful memoir Speak, Mem- later, dredges up recollections of this abuse
themselves — not just on their biographi- ory, noted that there was a particular ‘thrill’ when he develops an obsessive interest in
cal sources but on their virtues and liter- for the writer who calls ‘something whol- one of his students.
ary faults. Characters from Bellow’s life ly autobiographical fiction, something There are repeated references in Edin-
kept recurring in his fiction (even if, as his wholly fictional autobiography’. When burgh to mythology, both Japanese and
last wife, Janis Bellow, warns, ‘Biographers, Nabokov did this, Pamuk said, it changed Greek, and particularly to tales of metamor-
beware; Saul wields a wand, not scissors’). ‘the secret centre of the story’. The fertile phosis and transformation. We understand
But you also see the way his human failings interplay of fact and fiction animates a pair that this is what abuse does to the victim;
show up in the work. His vivid depictions of of books by the Korean American author that there is always a before and an after, the
women sometimes get in the way of more Alexander Chee: one a collection of essays, shadow-presence of the child who wasn’t
natural relations with them. And the char- the other Chee’s debut novel, published in molested walking alongside the one that was.
acteristic Bellovian narrator, articulate but the US in 2001 but appearing in Britain for It’s painful to read the early scenes of Fee’s
also a little goofy, dreamy and out of it, in the first time. abuse, but much of that pain comes from
need of what he calls ‘reality instructors’, There’s something strangely nostalgic the fact that Chee doesn’t shy away from
is a front that conceals the determination about reading Edinburgh (it’s set in Maine; showing how much the newly pubescent Fee
of the author to get his own way. Bellow the title is a reference to a book that features enjoys some aspects of the abuse, the way
tended to imagine himself in his fiction as in the novel). Written in the early 1990s and that, necessarily, early sexual encounters —
something related to but other than what originally rejected by 24 publishers before even ones as horrifying as these — provide
he was. Instead of the famous, wealthy, blueprints for our adult desires.
world-travelling Nobel Prize-winning nov- Edinburgh is a fine first novel, but the
elist, for example, he figured himself as an reason behind its reappearance is the pub-
academic, or botanist, or musicologist, and lication of Chee’s heartfelt, writerly essays,
the displacement partly accounts for some- many of which detail the strange gesta-
thing missing in his portraits of each: the tion of his debut. In a piece towards the
decent mediocrity of ordinary lives.
But the biography also gives glimpses of
The perfect end of the collection, called ‘The Guard-
ians’, Chee writes of teaching a class about
Bellow’s extraordinary literary intelligence,
shaping and seeing him through the mess of
Christmas present stereoscopic narratives — stories presented
from multiple viewpoints — to his creative
his own life. Bellow’s fourth marriage, to the Treat a loved one – or yourself – to a writing students. This idea of being pre-
Romanian mathematician Alexandra Iones- year’s supply of incisive political commentary, sented with competing accounts of a single
cu Tulcea, failed partly, Leader writes (quot- unmissable book and arts reviews and event is a familiar literary trope, but reading
ing one of the many interesting and subtle the wittiest cartoons in Britain, all Edinburgh alongside essays about it is an
insights of the writer’s children), ‘because she within the pages of The Spectator obscurely compelling experience, as if the
was not going to take care of him... on a deep author were whispering in your ear as you
level the attachment was not strong enough’
And we’ll send you read his book. We are granted privileged
to see him through the final stages. And in A bottle of Pol Roger champagne or a access to the ‘secret centre’ of the story,
fact his last marriage — his fifth — to one Spectator Aspinal wallet, worth £60 witnessing the sublimation of autobiogra-
of his former students, Janis Freedman, turns phy into fiction, the mysterious process of
out to have been his happiest — and did the All for just £99 enchantment by which Chee turns the cha-
heavy labour that he needed it to do. Apart (Saving 58% off the cover price) otic facts of his ruined childhood into the
from anything else, their relationship made elegant, emblematic fiction of Fee.
Ravelstein possible, his last great work, based TO ORDER: Chee describes Edinburgh as a palin-
on the life of Allan Bloom, published when www.spectator.co.uk/A362 ode, an exculpation for a historical sin. As
Bellow was 85. 0330 333 0050 quote code A362 a young man in New York, he appeared in
UK offer only
Leader’s two-volume biography is an a film about gay life called Sex Is… In it,
astonishingly detailed and thoughtful record Chee spoke flippantly of the abuse he suf-
of an important life. American kids playing fered, as ‘an education, even a liberation’.
football in the street tell each other to ‘go Edinburgh is a 228-page refutation of this
long, go deep’, before hurling a pass down- claim, picking through the aftermath of the
field. Leader goes long and deep here, using abuse, showing the repercussions echoing
Bellow as a kind of supersensitive canary down the years. It’s interesting that Hanya
to guide us down the mines of 20th-century Yanagihara, the author of A Little Life, was
culture wars. And whatever else you think one of the editors that turned down Edin-
of him, the guy could sing. burgh. Reading Chee’s debut and essays
38 the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
GETTY IMAGES
‘Attack on the Sealkote mutineers by General Nicholson’s Irregular Cavalry, 1857.’ Illustration by Charles Ball
together has an impact not unlike that of couldn’t. He remitted £100 of his salary back cooks were strung up from the nearest tree
Yanagihara’s novel — the sense that you’ve home to help with his brother’s education. with no further ado.
been plunged deeply into the pain of anoth- He was captured during the first Afghan War Nicholson found his apotheosis during the
er, that you, too, simply by this contact, have and was treated brutally, enduring the terri- Sepoy Revolt of 1857. He formed a Moveable
been changed. It’s not a pleasant reading ble experience of being the first to discover Column, comprised mainly of Punjabis and
experience, but it’s a powerful one. his brother Alexander’s body, murdered and frontier tribesmen out for loot, and marched
mutilated, the genitals severed and placed on Delhi, where during the storming of the
in the mouth. After Afghanistan, the iron city he was shot, possibly by one of his own
Iron in the soul entered Nicholson’s soul. He never trusted or men, and died aged 34. Apotheosis is right —
believed any Indian ever again. for even in Nicholson’s lifetime, a group of
Robert Carver He was certainly brave and dashing, and Indian fakirs had decided that he was a god,
was revered and admired by his men; but
Cult of a Dark Hero: he was disliked for his arrogance and sneer- Flogging and hanging were Nicholson’s
Nicholson of Delhi ing contempt by many of his fellow officers.
by Stuart Flinders Nicholson believed that India was a barba- tools of pacification. The Victorians
I.B. Tauris, £25, pp. 320 rous land and that God had called upon the saw him as noble and chivalrous
British to civilise it by forcibly stamping out
‘I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with crime and disorder. His watchwords were and they would worship him. He had them
a beastly religion’, said Winston Churchill as duty and honour. He was not only a highly flogged for blasphemy, but the cult of Nikal
prime minister in 1942, to his secretary of state effective leader of Indian soldiers but also Seyn lasted into the 21st century.
for India, Leo Amery. a rough and ready administrator in the newly This is the first life since Hesketh Pear-
Like John Nicholson, Churchill had sol- conquered Punjab. son’s 1939 hagiography, The Hero of Delhi.
diered on the subcontinent as a young man, His direct interventions to arrest and pun- Stuart Flinders has gone back and exhumed
and both men saw fighting on the North-West ish miscreants made a strong impression. a great deal of original material, including let-
Frontier. Nicholson was a career officer in Within a year he had reduced a region sunk ters and diaries. He takes a more critical view
the East India Company army. ‘I dislike India in anarchy to peace and order by brutal, vio- than Pearson, but nonetheless still accepts
and its inhabitants,’ he said as a young man, lent methods. Flogging and hanging were many of Nicholson’s qualities as admirable.
and never changed that opinion. Duty, obli- Nicholson’s tools of pacification. For the mid- His conclusion is much the same as Pearson,
gation and a career kept both men in a coun- Victorians he was viewed as a chivalrous hero, whom he quotes: rebellions and mutinies in
try they loathed; the graves of more than brave, noble, self-sacrificing. Modern histori- all armies are put down with great severity.
two million Britons in India demonstrate ans are less complimentary: ‘An imperial- Nicholson was brutal certainly, but territories
that it was not simply a place to get rich ist psychopath’, claims William Dalrymple; are only won and held by main force. As long
in, but a place, too often, to die in at an Ronald Hyams calls him ‘a homosexual as the British empire was regarded as a good
early age. paedophile bully’. thing, Nicholson was seen as a hero. Since the
Nicholson was a fundamentalist evan- ‘I am sorry I am late, gentlemen, but 1960s the zeitgeist has flowed against such
gelical Protestant from Ulster, the descend- I have been hanging your cooks,’ Nichol- men, and unsurprisingly he has been wide-
ant of lowland Scots immigrants. His mother son told the officers in his mess one evening. ly criticised. Well-researched and very read-
was a widow and he had many siblings. ‘If A poison plot had been discovered. The cooks able, Flinders’s book is as fair and balanced
I could earn £200 a year there, I would come had refused to drink the soup and a pet mon- a biography of this contentious figure as we
back to Ulster,’ he wrote to his mother. But he key, force-fed the broth, died in agony. The are likely to see.
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk 39
BOOKS & ARTS
ARTS SPECIAL
Pirates on parade
Horatio Clare explores the fact – and fiction – of piracy
vast there, scurvy dogs! For a nation RPGs — impoverished tactics compared
A
loon pants? His earrings, bee-eater gold?
founded on piracy (the privateer Sir with those of Blackbeard and John Roberts, His sash of vermillion, shining like sillion?
Francis Drake swelled the excheq- whose mere appearance was often enough Where have you seen Jack Sparrow
uer by raiding the Spanish, who were in no to win. ‘We heard them on the radio, scream- before? From the train, beside the tracks. In
doubt that he was a pirate), it is appropri- ing,’ the seafarer repeated. His ship was the trailer park; in the lay-bys and the horse-
ate that Britain should give the international within electronic earshot. The screamers, the drawn caravans of old children’s books. He
archetype of the pirate his language. crew, might easily have been his shipmates. is a Roma gypsy, or ‘land-pirate’ as they were
The language of the Victoria & Albert’s The shooters were not the wolfish freemen called in the 17th century.
exhibition A Pirate’s Life for Me at the of the age of sail but ex-fishermen, almost The ‘pyrate’ was introduced to the world
Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green is certainly fathers and family men, their by ‘Captain Charles Johnson’, who may
a banquet of humour and doggerel. Wheth- options annihilated by war, state collapse have been Daniel Defoe, in his A General
er you arrive a slipperslopper sea-cook, and the plunder of fishing grounds by fleets History of the Robberies and Murders of the
reeking of Havanas, or pushing treasures hailing from happier lands. As the film Cap- Most Notorious Pyrates, published in 1724.
in a pram, you will stare at walls, speak in tain Phillips documents, what is worse than This was the book that first press-ganged
tongues and smile. piracy, now, are the conditions that create it. readers into knowledge of Blackbeard,
These master (and mistress) mariners of ‘Slash bang wallop! Waving a sword and Israel Hands and Calico Jack. Also of Anne
yore have their grappling hooks deep in the shooting is a good way of getting people to Bonny and Mary Read, which left read-
psyche of maritime nations. In their infan- ers, unlike the curators of this exhibition,
cies, modern states needed pirates. The The greatest pirate ever was Ching in no doubt as to the wonder and ferocity
Barbarossa brothers scourged the Mediter- Shih. Widowed, she took over and of female pirates. R.L. Stevenson and J.M.
ranean from a base on the North African expanded her husband’s fleet Barrie devoured their copies and scribbled
littoral. Their regency of Algiers became out their own fleets.
the first corsair state until Suleiman the listen to you, but what really impresses peo- But mental pictures did not sate mass
Magnificent made Khidr Barbarossa grand ple is keeping your gun nice and shiny…’ markets. So all hail Howard Pyle, admiral of
admiral of the Ottoman fleet. French cor- cautions a notice in the V&A. My inner American illustration, whose glowing grape-
sairs — licensed privateers — inflict- mother smiled. Dirt is a worthy foe. shot of sketches, paintings and portraits tore
ed magnificent damage on rival nations, The show begins in a gorgeous space: low through the printed media of 1880s Ameri-
retarding British trade after the Glorious tables, puzzles, treasure maps, clues. Blue and ca, co-opting the Roma into service as west-
Revolution; French kings received a third mauve and parrot-hung, Balthazar’s Bazar is ern culture’s most glamorous villain. The
of the booty. open from 10 a.m, no licensee in sight, serv- post-impressionist pirate Van Gogh was
You find few such stories here. Instead, ing minors. Behind the bar there’s a secret a fan of Pyle’s work writing: ‘He strikes me
parrots, ships’ dogs, cats and monkeys, passage. It teases you into its second space, a dumb with admiration.’
swords and antique firearms. This is what lovely dock, where a Lego schooner tilts and Pyle’s America knew pirates. The US
kids love, as well as the lawlessness and the rides. One Golden Hind-like beauty is slyly navy was formed in response to horrendous
silly words. And as we grow, it sticks. I hon- augmented with a wind turbine astern the tribute and ransom demands from the Bar-
our the Jolly Roger’s signifieds: fun, freedom main mast, ensuring parents pay attention. bary states. The minister to France, Thomas
and mischief. Actual pirates, who I have also But where does the archetypal pirate Jefferson, sanctioned annual million-dollar
encountered on my travels, are different. actually come from? payoffs from 1786 (each representing 10 per
‘We heard screaming,’ a sailor said, in Sure, Brits (and Belgians: take a bow, cent of Federal revenue in 1800). As presi-
the Bay of Suez, as we were ferried off our Hergé, Red Rackham, Captain Haddock dent, Jefferson halted payments in 1801. Two
container ships to land and safety. Recent- and your translators and publishers, Michael Barbary wars later, British and Dutch ships
ly, before armed guards were routine on Turner and Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper) gave supported victorious American squadrons,
vessels in the Red Sea, pirates fired from him his tongue. bombarding Algiers in 1816.
skiffs at ships’ bridges with assault rifles and But whence our popinjay’s colours? His Seawolves, rovers and marooners: they
44 the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
‘He strikes me dumb
have shaped the ways we picture and name The greatest pirate who ever lived was exhibition, is an ugly gap in its smile.
ourselves, from Tiny Rowland to Red Adair. Ching Shih. Widowed, she took over and Few of our children will become pirates,
The attractions of pirate life were mul- expanded her husband’s fleet. With more hopefully, but there is much that they can
tiple. Ships were not over-crewed, so con- than 1,500 ships she controlled more of learn from sea-gypsies. Pirates prized hon-
ditions were better than in the navy; the South China sea than the PRC does our, statutes (their ‘articles’), courage,
management structures resembled a coop- now. She beat the Chinese, British and panache and innovation. One feels sure that
erative (give or take a lunatic captain); but Portuguese navies, was offered peace in Britannia could find work for them now.
your chances of ending up with a parrot, a 1810, married her first mate and retired.
lover and a chest of doubloons were similar That she is invisible, and that her sea-sis- A Pirate’s Life for Me is at the V&A
to an author’s of winning the Booker. ters are insignificant presences in the V&A Museum of Childhood until 22 April 2019.
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk 45
BOOKS & ARTS
© TATE IMAGES
‘The Laden Table’, c.1908, by Édouard Vuillard
ment district. Before being left a widow with (1900), these intimate pictures are a radi-
Exhibitions three children, she had prudently invested cal departure from the usual French fin-de-
All about his mother in a small business producing dresses and siècle celebrations of woman as love object,
made-to-measure corsets for a fashion-con- let alone sex object. They’re a celebration of
Laura Gascoigne scious petit bourgeois clientele. With her ‘her indoors’ from a filial perspective: images
seamstress mother and daughter Marie — of female domestic industry and the atmos-
Maman: Vuillard & Madame coincidentally known as Mimi — among her phere in which it was wrapped — an atmos-
Vuillard employees, Mme Vuillard was a multitask- phere Vuillard had breathed since childhood.
Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham, He was still living at home, aged 61, when
until 20 January 2019 We recognise the figure of Maman, his mother died in 1928. The homes changed
sewing, cooking, cleaning: a domestic as one small rented flat was exchanged for
Fin-de-siècle Paris was not just the art capital goddess worshipped by her son another but the domestic routines continued
of the world, it was also the fashion capital. uninterrupted, the women sewing around
In 1901, 300,000 Parisians were employed in ing materfamilias, managing the workshop the dining-room table while the man of the
the rag trade, and one of them was Édouard and the household while supporting her son house painted in his ‘bedroom studio’. We
Vuillard’s mother. Édouard in his artistic ambitions. recognise the same pieces of furniture —
Stout, sensible and self-sufficient, Mme Édouard returned the favour by featur- the dining table, straight-backed chairs and
Marie Vuillard was no Mimi out of La ing his mother in more than 500 paintings, large armoire, its mirror complicating the
Bohème, embroidering flowers in a draughty of which a small selection is on show at Bir- fiddly perspectives of the cramped spaces.
garret. She was the independent patronne of mingham’s Barber Institute in a charming Above all, we recognise the figure of
a dressmaking atelier — more of a couture exhibition marking the 150th anniversary Maman, sewing, cooking, cleaning, dishing
flat, admittedly, than a couture house, oper- of his birth. Centring on the Barber’s own out parental advice, tending the sick — if not
ating out of rented apartments in the gar- ‘Madame Vuillard Arranging her Hair’ centre stage, then on the periphery of vision,
46 the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
a comforting presence glimpsed through felt Manze tugging back on the reins — acous-
doorways, part patronne, part skivvy;
Music tic chaos being the only alternative.
a domestic goddess worshipped by her son. Britten’s Blackadder Against that was the intense concentra-
With their keyhole views of women in tion of the orchestral sound, the fearless,
confined spaces, Vuillard’s small interiors moment powerfully characterised solo playing of the
feel closer to the Dutch Golden Age than Richard Bratby subsidiary chamber ensemble (five Liver-
to French post-impressionism, but unlike pudlians, seven Hanoverians) and some of
the patterned surfaces in Dutch paint- RLPO & NDR Radiophilharmonie/ the warmest, most beautifully controlled
ings — the tiles and rugs — his patterning Manze singing I’ve heard in four decades of listen-
is pretty much wall-to-wall. Between the Liverpool Cathedral ing to the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic
wallpaper, carpets, upholstery and fabrics chorus. Everyone present rose to the level
worn by his women there is barely a chink. Bournemouth Symphony of the occasion. The soprano soloist Susanne
Everything feels wrapped in a familial fug. Orchestra/Karabits Bernhard sang from the pulpit, and when
More air is let into lithographs such as ‘The Lighthouse, Poole her voice wheeled, glowing, over the whole
Cook’ (1899), a proto-kitchen-sink image ensemble you could believe you were listen-
of his mother drying up; the paintings, by ‘What passing-bells for these who die as cat- ing to a masterpiece.
comparison, are thick with smudges repli- tle?’ We’ve heard a lot, lately, of the knell You’re not, though — are you? I honestly
cating the muzziness of memory. You have that tolls through the opening bars of Ben- can’t decide about the War Requiem. ‘Noth-
to get in close to unlock the puzzle and even jamin Britten’s War Requiem, and at Liver- ing can please many, and please long, but just
then you can’t always tell what’s what. The pool’s Anglican cathedral it was played on representations of general nature’: sure, and
‘Two Seamstresses in the Workroom’ (1893) actual church bells. The Royal Liverpool people certainly respond to the piece. There
are as well camouflaged as tropical fish on Philharmonic Orchestra’s percussionist must have been some 2,000 audience mem-
a coral reef. Graham Johns has had a set specially cast, bers on their feet at the end of this perfor-
There’s nothing voyeuristic about these and as he struck them video screens relayed mance. But still, there’s that feeling of being
images. Vuillard is an insider, not a voyeur; the moment all the way down the cathedral’s lectured by a firm but faintly disapproving
his women are almost part of the furniture. length. The orchestra was a one-off, assem- emotional manipulator — and that the con-
A revealing entry in his journal records his bled half-and-half from the RLPO and the clusion towards which we’re corralled by
NDR Radiophilharmonie Hannover (the all those portentous trumpets and artfully
Vuillard was still living at conductor Andrew Manze holds positions in framed chunks of Wilfred Owen is as pre-
home, aged 61, when his both cities), and this was a major civic occa- scribed as any primary-school project. It’s
mother died in 1928 sion, attended by gold chains of all sizes and become classical music’s answer to Blackad-
preceded by speeches from city worthies. der Goes Forth, simultaneously unchallenge-
reaction on waking to find his mother among In truth, though, you could whistle ‘The able and troublingly simplistic.
the familiar furnishings of his bedroom: ‘In Frog Chorus’ in Liverpool Cathedral and it’d Other acts of musical commemoration are
the middle of all these objects I was aston- still inspire awe. Giles Gilbert Scott’s immense available, and to be fair the classical music
ished to see Maman enter in a blue peignoir structure doesn’t so much echo the music per- world has made some effort to find different
with white stripes. The arrival of Maman was formed within it (though that echo is as vast as perspectives. The BBC Philharmonic is play-
surprising — a living person.’ everything else) as absorb and transfigure it. ing Musik für Orchester by Rudi Stephan
Some pictures hint at stories. ‘The Chat’ Stand on the corner of Gambier Terrace and (who died in the war), Andrew Davies has
(1893), which shows his sister in her wedding Upper Duke Street and the cathedral erupts recorded Bliss’s Morning Heroes — a pro-
dress blushing into her corsage as Maman from the sandstone gorge of St James’s Cem- to-war requiem from 1930 whose haunted
delivers the dreaded last-minute sex talk, etery as if the rock itself is thrusting towards search for meaning in loss feels as sincere as
could be a scene from one of the suffocat- heaven. Construction started in 1904 when Britten feels contrived — and last year The
ing symbolist dramas for which Vuillard was Liverpool was the second port of the Empire. Spectator’s Alexandra Coghlan surveyed
designing sets at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre. By the time it was finished, the city had been recordings of Vaughan Williams’s Dona nobis
The soon-to-be marital bed leering in the reduced to the butt of glib jokes. Yet there it pacem for Radio 3.
background plays as important a role as the stands, this stupendous physical affirmation of In Poole, where the Bournemouth Sym-
two figures. Beds take centre stage in other faith and endurance: perhaps the last building phony Orchestra’s Ukrainian chief con-
pictures: a sickbed in ‘The Lullaby’ (1894), in in European history to be started in the full ductor Kirill Karabits saw his own country
which Maman watches over a feverish Mimi; knowledge that it would take more than one invaded not in 1914 but in 2014, they’ve
a deathbed in ‘Woman near Bed’ (c.1893), lifetime to complete. commissioned a song cycle from Mark-
where she keeps vigil over a hump of bed- Can Britten really measure up against Anthony Turnage. Testament sets Ukrainian
ding that possibly conceals her dying mother. that sort of conviction? Manze and his com- poets to music of such transparent diatonic
In the late 1890s Vuillard acquired bined Anglo-German forces solved the prac- clarity that you might not at first realise that
a hand-held Kodak. A few of the hundreds tical problems of performing in the cathedral it was by Turnage. He’s woven Ukrainian
of photographs he took of his mother — as well as I’ve ever heard. Discreet electron- folk songs into the score: pairs of woodwinds
who printed the photos from negatives in ic enhancement never really imposed itself lament in close harmony and a solo flute
a soup bowl — are in the show. In the last between performers and audience and Manze trails birdsong across the eloquent vocal
one, taken in the year of her death, she is even managed to keep the combined Hanno- lines, sung with understated expression and
towelling her feet after a bath. The pose ver and Liverpool boys’ choirs together with wine-dark tone by Natalya Romaniw.
could be from a drawing by Degas, except the orchestra over a distance of what looked The final song deals harrowingly with
that the model is 89 and bald, her shrunk- like about 50 metres. As for the interpretation: recent events, and tastes all the more bitter
en body dwarfed by the high ceiling of the well, the cathedral enforces its own terms, and for being so lucid, and so obviously without
spacious apartment her successful son can soloists Benjamin Appl and Ed Lyon com- any musical agenda other than compassion.
now afford. As an image, it is too intimiste pensated, understandably enough, with fierce The BSO, whose strings were sombre, sin-
for comfort. Vuillard didn’t paint it, but only over-articulation. At the moments (such as ewy and utterly Slavic, played Testament as
eight years earlier he confessed to his first the first climax of the ‘Libera Me’) where the if it were as much of a classic as the Britten.
biographer: ‘Maman, c’est ma muse.’ music seems to demand furious abandon, you Give it time.
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk 47
BOOKS & ARTS
ROCKSTAR GAMES
groundbreaking 2010 open-world western last throes of death, and the guttural nois-
Gaming video game, has been described as ‘unprec- es it made as it departed were sufficiently
The good, the bad edented’, ‘landmark’ and ‘a masterpiece’. harrowing that my dog (my genuine, on-
It has been greeted with the sort of rev- the-sofa lurcher, not the canine compan-
and the ugly erent praise usually reserved for the lofti- ion the game gives you in order further
Nick Hilton est of high culture, despite being marketed to divest you of any need for interactions
almost exclusively to teenage boys with £50 outside the game) started barking at the
Red Dead Redemption 2 to burn. The game revels in the kitschiest screen. It is a gameworld in which cruelty
Rock Star Games of North American landscapes, the per- is commonplace.
fect metaphor for the poetic mundanity of Right and wrong, good and evil; for all
Every era has its western. For 30 years, the gun-slinging, blood-soaked violence of
from The Big Trail through to The Search- You face the choice of whether to beat the western, the moral poles have remained
ers, John Wayne reigned supreme across to death, strangle or free a man you’ve consistent. If the hero’s family has been
American cinema, a dispenser of justice captured (I beat him to death) murdered, his vengeance is justified. If
forged on the battlefields of the Civil War. the hero is defending an underclass from
Then, from the 1960s, John Ford’s foun- death. In short, it is a good game that knows marauders, his acts of butchery are excus-
dations were mixed with Italian influenc- it’s a good game. able. If the hero is fighting a man who has
es to create the brutal anti-heroes of the But it’s also a game of such attritional murdered a child in the opening scene, then
spaghetti westerns. After that, the western violence as to stop those not totally inured he’s allowed to choke him with a harmoni-
began to feel old-fashioned, and started to in their tracks. This is the western as envis- ca. Those are the rules.
be lampooned in films such as Blazing Sad- aged by McCarthy, not Ford. Within the Our hero here — by no means the Man
dles and Three Amigos for its reliance on first stretch of gameplay you’ll dispatch a with No Name — is Arthur Morgan, a
archetype and cliché, before, at the close of dozen combatants with pistol and rifle, loot simmering avatar of masculine disaffec-
the century, Cormac McCarthy reinvented corpses, lasso and hog-tie fleeing enemies tion. When Clint Eastwood was honoured
it as something sparse, literary and realistic. and, in a particularly gruesome sequence, with a lifetime achievement award by the
And now, this era’s western takes that one face the choice of whether to beat to death, American Film Institute, he remarked that
step further. strangle or free a man you’ve captured. (I his character in the Dollars Trilogy ‘had no
Red Dead Redemption 2, the eagerly opted to beat him to death.) At one point name, so we could fill in our own’. Morgan
anticipated sequel to Rockstar Games’s you are encouraged to fillet a deer in the is no such cipher. He is a gruntingly verbose
48 the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
outlaw with a personality so far from my The stray figures that populate the Auto franchise, in which players could
own neuroticism that he remained a stran- world of Red Dead Redemption do not murder prostitutes, waterboard enemies
ger, even when I repeatedly switched from trouble our sympathy in such ways. Though and pull out their nails if need be. There’s
the third-person perspective, which lingers the landscapes of the game edge closer to been no GTA game for the eighth genera-
behind Morgan, to the first-person, where photorealist facsimiles of the Northwest- tion of consoles since the fifth instalment
all that’s present in your field of vision are ern United States — and though the game was published in 2013, and there are no
his gnarled hands, the loop of a lasso, or the is considered to be one of the biggest writ- sequels on the horizon, with the company
glint of a revolver. And yet when I’m hit- ing tasks in literary history — passers-by focusing on Red Dead Redemption and
ting that O button and Morgan’s (my) fist still recur with the repetitious inscrutabil- a new spy franchise. While GTA was a criti-
is connecting with teeth, causing the con- ity that made ‘…but then I took an arrow cal and commercial triumph, it is hard to
troller to shudder with excitement, the dis- to the knee’ one of the internet’s favour- see how it could be published in 2018 with-
tance evaporates. ite memes. So the player is not much vexed out diluting the atopia that game theorist
What can the world of Red Dead by the prospect of violence against the McKenzie Wark describes as ‘a safe haven
Redemption offer that is new, other than men and women of the American fron- in which to enact the problem of being…
the chance to act as the settler of scores, but without the oppressive stakes of one’s
the dispenser of rough justice? It emerges There is no moral cake to be had here own life on the line’.
back into the pop-cultural zeitgeist hot on at all, as I blow a farrier’s head off Better, then, to add the distance of histo-
the heels of HBO’s big-budget adaptation just to test my new shotgun ry. Just as a dragon immolating prisoners of
of Michael Crichton’s Westworld, where a war in Game of Thrones doesn’t hark back
billion-dollar theme park based on the Wild tier, almost universally labelled ‘Stranger’. to napalm bombs in Vietnam, so the relent-
West gives tourists the chance to rape and There is no moral cake to be had here at all, less gun violence of Red Dead Redemption
murder their way through a horde of almost as I blow a farrier’s head off just to test my doesn’t carry the weight of the Pittsburgh
sentient robots. The show sets up an ethi- new shotgun. shooting. Still, it is unsettling to play a game
cal question — is violence against almost The first-person shooter has always where the mechanics focus so much on
sentient robots really violence — but the had this question hanging over it, from bringing it closer to the tedium of real life
moral ambiguity is quickly undermined by Doom and Half-Life through to Halo and — from cleaning saddles to cooking rab-
revelations about the development of AI. Call of Duty. Is it just a means of letting bits on a campfire — while permitting an
It is also a romping, bloody yarn. The cake off steam? Or is there something unset- unexamined streak of savagery. So, the real
is had and eaten as we are invited to sym- tling about the ease with which we resort question posed by the modern western is:
pathise with the robots while at the same to inhuman violence? Rockstar Games, how close can we get to the act of violence
time revelling in the carnage and the sight which developed Red Dead Redemption, before we get squeamish? And if we never
of sexy, naked replicants. was also responsible for the Grand Theft flinch, what then?
‘Beyond superb!
The performances,
CELEBRATING MUSIC AND PLACE
the choice of
repertoire, the
venues... all perfect
in my opinion!’
Martin Randall Festival participant in 2017
became Queen of Cyprus by marriage and Not only do his saints look like portraits, It is not hard to decode. This expensive-
lived at Asolo, the little town in the Veneto for on occasion his portrait sitters pretended to ly dressed fellow with a fine beard clearly
which the altarpiece was painted. At the time, be saints too. ‘Friar Angelo Ferretti’ (1549) wanted to be shown brooding on love and
this notion would have verged on the blas- is vividly characterised: intense and a little death, and was possibly in mourning. In
phemous, but it rings true. In fact, the saints, haggard. But a butcher’s cleaver is embed- other cases, Lotto’s symbols are more puz-
especially the elderly Anthony Abbot with his ded in his cranium and a large dagger pro- zling. Why, for example, is a green lizard
jutting, pointed beard, look like portraits, too. trudes from his chest. This was because rearing up beside more rose leaves on the
The picture is fantastically naturalistic Ferretti wanted to identify, as we say these desk of another melancholy young man
but simultaneously bizarre and awkward. days, as St Peter Martyr, a Dominican painted between 1530 and 1532? Art histo-
The Madonna hovers inertly in midair a inquisitor assassinated in 1252. rians are still wondering about that.
few feet above the ground, too heavy to Lotto’s clients often acted out a private In 1895 Bernard Berenson claimed Lotto
rise further. It’s easy to see why Lotto was allegory or drama, though not necessarily a as the most modern of all Renaissance art-
overshadowed by his younger rival Titian, in sacred one. In one of the finest, the anon- ists: ‘His spirit is more like our own.’ More
whose great ‘Assumption’ of a decade later ymous sitter fixes us with a sad look, his than a century later, that still feels true —
the Virgin sweeps heavenward with superb right hand resting on a table top. Beneath not just in the naturalism with which he
brio. That kind of grand composition was his fingers are rose petals, and nestling depicted his subjects, their anxieties and
beyond Lotto, whose work didn’t please among them is a beautifully painted min- melancholies, but also in the weird ways they
sophisticated Venetian tastes. iature skull. want to present themselves.
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk 51
BOOKS & ARTS
Manuscripts
Animal magic: Eddie Redmayne as Newt Scamander in Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald
Watling Street
By Patrick West
ll roads lead to Rome, the say- inga Stræt, a name eventually extended to
ISTOCK
ing goes. Well, all roads except for the entire road. The pathway had by then
the Roman road of Watling Street, achieved legend as the avenue on which
which at one end takes you to Dover Boudica was defeated in 60 or 61 ad. It
(Dubris) and at the other Wroxeter (Viro- later came to mark the south-west border
conium) in Shropshire. of Danelaw. St Augustine used it on his way
I was always only vaguely aware of this to Canterbury, as did pilgrims to the city’s
thoroughfare but the name began, in recent cathedral, who returned wearing badges of
years, to nag on my weekly visits to Canter- Thomas Becket as a sign that they had made
bury (Durovernum Cantiacorum). When their virtuous journey. It is thus assumed
approaching the city centre from the station, that it was also the path taken by Chaucer’s
I would see a street sign bearing the name on pilgrims from Southwark.
the side of a branch of Boots. It took some Watling Street fell into disuse thereafter
time to dawn on me that this was the very The defeat of Boudica is believed to and only in the 18th century did it resume
same Watling Street I had been told about in have been fought on Watling Street its role as a thoroughfare, when a toll system
school history classes. The street sign in Can- was established throughout England. By
terbury isn’t unique, though: ‘Watling Street, invaded. Aulus Plautius, conqueror of Kent, the 20th century, most sections of Watling
EC4’ is affixed to a wall a few minutes’ walk also proceeded to straighten the grassy dirt Street had been transformed into modern
from London Bridge station. path for the purpose of conveying his sup- roads, although some parts had fallen into
Strictly speaking, Watling Street isn’t plies and material of war from the Continent. disrepair. ‘A disused stretch of old Watling
a Roman Road, as the trackway was first From Shropshire, one tributary continued on Street, a road which has been unaccount-
used by the pre-Celtic and then the Celtic the historical route to the tip of north-west ably neglected and is actually dangerous for
inhabitants of Britain. The author of St Paul Wales, while another headed north, past fast motor traffic, is to undergo long over-
in Britain (1861), R. W. Morgan, recalled: Hadrian’s Wall to Pictish Scotland. due widening from St. Albans,’ reported
‘From Dover to Holyhead ran the Brit- Its English name derives from the Country Life in November 1936.
ish Causeway, constructed by Dynwal and Anglo-Saxons who settled in St Albans Today, that part of Watling Street has
his son, Beli the Great, 400 bc, called Sarn (Verulamium) after the Romans had gone. become the A5, while the section between
Wyddelin, or the Irish Road.’ They were a tribe named the Waeclingas, Dover and Canterbury is the A2. Along the
Watling Street came to be associated with who dubbed the place Wætlingaceaster. By A2 travels the National Express coach route
the Romans since they were the ones who the 9th century the road passing through 007, after which Ian Fleming, resident of St
paved it, beginning in 47 ad, soon after they the settlement had become known as Wæcl- Margaret’s Bay, named his secret agent.
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includes that awful frog Marshal Foch), was the best and always will be — but the
High life and had not taken such revenge on Ger- modernists leave me cold, as does their
Taki many following the ceasefire 100 years ago, architecture and their fiction. A great poet
we would not have seen the horrors of the who died tragically in a car accident back in
second world war and the atomic bombs 1957 was the South African Roy Campbell,
dropped on the Japanese. Wilson was seen and so said T.S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas.
as a saviour of mankind. The little Prince- Campbell was no sandal-wearing fruit-juice
ton professor’s imagination soared and he drinker, as George Orwell described left-
believed himself to be Alexander the Great. ies in The Road to Wigan Pier. He fought
He bloviated and virtue-signalled end- on my side in Spain, so crappy Bloomsbury
less meaningless bromides and managed types shunned him. Which means he was
to impose such terrible terms on the Ger- lucky. His ‘Horses on the Camargue’ and
New York mans that it is a wonder it took as long as 20 ‘Autumn’ are wonderful and expose the
A little Austrian count was born to my years before they came back for revanche. double standards the left practises every-
daughter last week in Salzburg, early in the Wilson also subjected the defeated Ger- where and on every level. Plato would have
morning of 9 November, becoming my third mans back home to his punitive ideas. War been shunned because he would have seen
grandchild. Through modern technology, I resisters went straight to the pokey despite through them.
was flooded with pictures of a blond, fuzzed the fact that not many Americans wished So there you have it: a quiet week, a new
and pink baby boy less than a day old. The to get mixed up in a European war. Isola- little count, and now I’m bored and need to
mother of my children, who was flying in tionism became a good word after the little leave the rocker and hit the nightspots with
from Gstaad, did not make it on time, which prof messed up. Thank God he had a stroke some young you-know-what. Yippee!
was just as well. Like most women, she tends and his wife ran the country for the rest of
to overreact where babies are concerned. his term.
Unlike us tough guys, who tend to hit the I suppose that the Wilson bum was the Low life
bottle and celebrate instead. first globalist, and now another little man,
And speaking of the fair sex, Lionel Macron, a little frog actually, is telling us Jeremy Clarke
Shriver is some columnist, the best Ameri- how we should all be nice little globalists
can writer by far, and she has sure got the and let little frogs and German Hausfraus
#MeToo phonies down to a tee. We’re lucky run our lives. All I know is that their road
to have her. The one I’m angry at is Mary will lead to the kind of endless immigra-
Wakefield, who only now tells us that some tion conflicts that their predecessors caused
women do fantasise about Greek tycoons. in the Middle East because they thought
But when a real-life Greek tycoon — OK, they knew better. Let everyone and every
mini tycoon — had her in his sights, she ran country decide what is best for them, says
like a Saudi who is facing equal odds. grandfather Taki, and don’t let the Macrons,
Never mind. I’ve been in love with Mary Junckers and Merkels of this world tell us The monument to this French village’s war
for so long that I forgive her. Grandfathers they know best. They don’t, but the Hungar- dead is a plain white stone block with the
are forgiving types, and I don’t mind it when ians, the Poles and the Italians do. Sure, the head of a grizzled old French infantryman
my friends sometimes call me granddad in unelected ones will call them fascist, just as chiselled on top. His big capable hands are
nightclubs and embarrass me in front of they will say that Brexit was not democratic. gripping the block’s edge, as though he is
younger women. The first time someone But look who’s talking: the unelected crooks peering intently over the parapet of a trench.
called me a grandfather I wasn’t one, and of Brussels and the unread hacks of the New On Sunday we assembled around him to
he was on his knees when he said it. I had York Times. Puleez, give me a break, as they honour the 53 local men, from a population
put him there with a foot sweep. It hap- say in Brooklyn Heights. of 1,800, who lost their lives in the first world
pened long ago in Athens and the genuflect- As the Taki family expands, I have to war. Schoolchildren queued at a microphone
ing young man was Greek. I was driving to look to higher things in order to inspire to sing out their names. A ladies choir sang
karate and had made an illegal right turn. the troops. Getting drunk in nightclubs, a plangent song about Verdun. The state bell
He was on his motorcycle and I almost and sometimes even getting into fights, is tolled for 11 minutes. The major made an
crashed into him. I stopped and apologised undignified at my age, however enjoyable it interminable speech in the rain. Everybody
but he came towards me like Orlando Furio- might be. So I’ve been reading some poet- sang the Marseillaise.
so. So I foot swept him, then jumped into the ry to calm me down as I sit on my rock- Around 300 people turned out (beneath
car and drove off. ‘Come back, you cowardly ing chair dreaming of kicking sand into about 100 umbrellas) from a winter popula-
old granny,’ he yelled at me. I was laughing the face of someone disgusting like Philip tion the same size as it was 100 years ago.
so much I almost crashed again. Green. The collection Facing the Persians A regular soldier with a machine gun and
I suppose that old age demands some by my friend and Speccie reader Ian A. a rakish beret patrolled vigilantly, his eyes
gravitas, but I love life too much, and girls Olson was a start. Inspiring stuff. The poem peeled for Islamist terrorists. Apart from the
even more, ever to act my age. Perhaps if ‘Bright Ribbons’ ditto. Olson is a hell of a final singing of the rousing national anthem,
old men such as Woodrow Wilson had not poet and people should get his book. I’ve this young man and the peering poilu were
taken themselves so seriously (and that read some poetry along the way — Keats the only military notes. No medal-boasting
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk 61
LIFE
veterans were present; the only uniforms to piously honour the innocent, manly and Merkel, to the Paris commemorations. Mr
were those of the fire brigade. Otherwise it courageous first world war dead when the Putin appeared to be the only adult. Beside
was all anoraks flapping in the squalls. The social divisions engendered by the more him, everyone else was behaving like hys-
prevailing atmosphere was light-hearted, recent occupation are still festering. And I terically narcissistic teenagers. Or so it
I would say. People on the outer fringes can sympathise. It must be awfully difficult, seemed to me, walking past the screen with
chatted and smoked and at the slightest especially for the youth, to have one’s coun- my empty glass and returning with it full.
provocation — the trendy teacher failing to try overrun by young Nazis, then contained Mrs Macron seemed to think she was
control his daft children, for example — eve- by these Nazis’ elderly fathers and grand- hosting a charity fashion gala for all her
ryone laughed. fathers with a little help from their friends powerful new friends and she was quite
Yet one wondered. One wondered espe- among the occupied. drunk with happiness. The proprietress of
cially about the small plaque that had been After the ceremony, we went to a local the bar we were in was drunk too, but on red
fixed to the monument comfortably within bar. On the huge high-definition TV screen wine. She must have spotted an urgency in
living memory dedicated to ‘Nos glorieux inside they were showing President Macron my drinking behaviour because she laughed
martyrs de la Résistance’. Five names are (looking thin and strained and mad) wel- hideously and mimed injecting heroin into
inscribed on it: Albert Benzo, Jean Gauti- coming other world leaders, including Pres- her forearm with a syringe every time every
er, Félix Maille, Léon Gérard and Gabriel idents Trump and Putin and Chancellor time I went to the bar for another.
Philis. The plaque is modest, the lettering
less well done. The circumstances of the
deaths of Léon Gérard and Gabriel Philis
are these.
In June 1944 a Maquis group calling
itself Battaglia (after two brothers execut-
ed by the Germans) established itself on
the Bessillon, which is a mountainous rock
overlooking the village. Battaglia was sup-
plied and controlled by French communists.
Someone grassed. German soldiers, plus If 2018
a company of ‘auxiliaries’ (many of whom
were local Frenchmen), surrounded the
Students at Manchester University have scrubbed Kipling’s poem ‘If’
At the Paris commemorations, from a wall in the School of Oriental Studies because they claim it is ‘racist’.
Mr Putin seemed to be
the only adult If you can stay in bed when all around have been up hours,
Bessillon. These auxiliaries brought with Vote Green and march to save the planet
them ten hostages taken from the local But can’t switch off a light or shut a bloody door against the draught;
prison, among them 54-year-old Gabriel If you don’t go ten minutes without a sugar snack and fizzy drink,
Philis, the respected secretary to the town
mayor. The ten had been rounded up and And turn vegan ’cos you can’t stand cruelty to eggs,
imprisoned over the previous three days Give up breakfast cornflakes for you can’t be arsed to wash a bowl;
on suspicion of supporting the Battaglia Eat burgers and thrill-seeking mashups all day long,
group. The auxiliaries used them as porters
to carry ammunition boxes to the mountain From personalised plates;
summit. The Maquis group was quickly liq- Still operate your iPhone while wiping your bum
uidated: the hostages — job done; thanks, And take 2,000 selfies in a week;
lads — were summarily shot. Local man
Léon Gérard, 33, a resistance organiser, If you are into Me first and body image
had run up the mountain to warn them, but Wear lingerie as apparel:
too late. He also was shot and died in agony Nude bodysuits, overly distressed denim, graphic T-shirt profanity Califuk
three hours later.
Locals recovered the massacred bod- And gawp out from behind oversized round opticals;
ies and ceremoniously and ostentatious- If not a square inch of your whitewashed frame is undefaced by bilious tattoos
ly interred them two days afterwards. The Nor any protrusion left unpierced, un-ringed
telephone lines from the village were cut
beforehand to prevent any more grassing. If you stream Bebe Rexha, Ariana Grande, Calvin Harris, Jonas Blue and Zane
Today there is a rue Gabriel Philis and And call these music;
a rue Léon Gérard. On VE Day the mayor If you can tell your quinoa from your acai and your poke
was assassinated, shot in the head as he
walked along a road, and everyone knows Retreat to your safe space where no one can offend you,
who did it. We know the assassin’s son by Enjoy the degree course as your Personal Development Journey
sight. Newcomers like me are darkly warned Studying Equestrian Psychology or Ethical Hacking
not to enquire too deeply about the goings-
on during the second world war, however, Receive counselling when you heard someone ate calves’ liver;
because it’s none of our business. Make of your life a Perpetual Infantilisation,
So one did wonder, during last Sun- Then you’ll be a snowflake my dearie.
day’s commemorations around the monu-
ment aux morts, who had stayed away. Also
what a useful, even fun, distraction it was — Peter Mullen
62 the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
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sending your calves for re-education you’re
Real life going to be on the verge of poking someone
Bridge
Melissa Kite in the face with your cane. So I left a seat’s Susanna Gross
space between us.
The nurse was telling everyone how the
gastrocnemius (calf) muscles work, with a It’s no surprise that so many bridge players
view to understanding how incorrect walk- are computer programmers or systems ana-
ing techniques lead to tight calves, which lysts; it’s an ideal game for those who excel
impact on the feet producing problems at logic and puzzle-solving. But at the highest
such as bunions. level, a strong imagination is what really gives
It was, on the face of it, rather embar- you the edge. Certain players have an extraor-
rassing. But I don’t think our bunions were, dinary ability to visualise their opponents’
Left at the Dementia Café, right at the Sleep actually, the result of our own recalcitrant cards, put themselves in their shoes, and then
Office, past the Spiritual Care Centre… tightness, for we all looked rather fit, apart persuade them to go wrong. It’s a rare gift that
This was my journey through the ground from the old woman leaning on her cane. elevates the game almost to an art form.
floor of my local hospital until I came to No. I think the reason we were there Artur Malinowski, the manager of TGR’s
the physiotherapy department where the was that some management consultant had rubber bridge club, is one such player. Dur-
Calf Stretching Education Group was discovered an algorithm proving that if the ing a recent high-stake game, he pulled off
being held. NHS stops doing bunion ops and starts this coup against two formidable opponents,
Hospitals are very different places now- doing calf stretching education groups it Robert Sheehan and Gunnar Hallberg:
adays from the forbidding buildings of my can save millions of pounds.
childhood where doctors and nurses in And so after a lengthy lecture about Dealer North Game all
starched uniforms used to attempt to cure how to walk, we were told to take off
people. our shoes in order to practise on the calf zQ8 6
Now they host Costa Coffee shops and stretching boards. yQJ 3
M&S mini food halls and art exhibitions At this point, the old lady stormed very XJ 9 6
along the walls, which you peruse in spite of slowly out, grunting something about how wJ 8 3 2
yourself as you pass these marvellous new she really had to get on — with hobbling on
departments. You wonder what happens at her bunions, presumably. z 8 7 z 2
the Dementia Café and the Sleep Office The rest of us removed our shoes and N
y 10 8 6 2
y AK9 7 5 W E
and the Spiritual Care Centre. stood on the boards and two nurses — for
X8 4 S X KQ 7 5 2
But mostly you get the feeling that another had appeared — now explained
healthcare has evolved to be about empow- the finer points of calf stretching. w A 10 7 4 wQ 9 5
ering people to feel good about dying. They really were lovely, these nurses.
No more starched, old-fashioned curing. z AK J 6 5 4 2
Hospitals provide education, enlighten- Hospitals provide education, y4
ment, spiritual guidance and a good cap- enlightenment, spiritual guidance X A 10 3
puccino. and a good cappuccino w K6
They offer you the opportunity to take
control of your condition, to pick up your They were polite, sweet, pretty and end-
infirmity and, well, run with it. If you can lessly patient. When one of the women West North East South
run. wouldn’t stop talking about her feet, the Pass pass 4z
I ran all the way down the corridor past lovely nurses just kept smiling and being pass pass pass
the Sleep Office and the Spiritual Care polite and sweet long after the rest of us
Centre because I was ten minutes late for had decided we wanted to stick her feet Robert (West) led the yA, then switched
the Calf Stretching Education Group. where the sun didn’t shine. But these nurses to the X8. Gunnar played the XQ and Artur
It had taken a while to check my car in went on being sweet. Sweet about her feet. won. Next he played z A and a spade to
to the car park by typing my registration They were sweet about my feet too. dummy’s zQ. Gunnar discarded the y10 —
on to a screen. Then, once I got to the phys- They couldn’t have shown more forbear- a clear suit preference signal for diamonds.
io department, I had to check myself in on ance in helping me learn how to stand on The only legitimate chance of making 4z is
another screen. a calf stretching board. I was impressed. I to play towards the wK, hoping East has the
And by then the group had started. A have not felt this welcome in a hospital for wA — as anyone else would. But Artur felt
receptionist came off the phone and told a long time. sure West held the ace: otherwise East would
me to follow her. After a while of us walk- Finally, the lead physio wound the ses- surely not have encouraged diamonds.
ing past rooms and her saying ‘Oo, I don’t sion to a close by declaring: ‘So, do this for Was there anything to be done? Putting
know, I think it might be in here, but then three months and your condition will be East on play was hopeless: he would inevitably
again I don’t think it is’, I decided to just resolved.’ switch to a heart and Artur would be left with
fling open the door to a small gymnasium. ‘You mean I won’t have a bunion any- two club losers. But what if he put West on play
‘Calf Stretching?’ I asked a nurse sitting more?’ I asked. and somehow persuaded him to cash the wA?
in front of a whiteboard as three women ‘No, you’ll still have a bunion,’ she said. After a moment’s thought, this is how he did it:
and one man sat on plastic chairs in front ‘Oh. So resolved in what sense?’ I asked. he played the yQ from dummy and discarded
of her looking marooned. ‘Resolved as in not any worse.’ the X10! Robert now assumed he had started
‘Yes!’ she said, welcoming me in. I went ‘Great!’ I said, and I almost meant it. with XA10 and three low clubs. A diamond
to sit in the second row next to an old lady I have not been cured of my bunion in a switch would therefore be fatal: Artur would
leaning on a walking cane who looked mur- clean, tidy, well-run hospital by courteous, ruff the XK, return to dummy with a trump,
derous. friendly staff. and discard two clubs on the yJ and X9. And
I imagine if you get to a grand age and And in the current climate, I am rating so he cashed the wA and played another club
your GP responds to you being crippled by that experience as excellent. — handing Artur his contract.
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk 65
LIFE
Chess Competition
Paradise mislaid Headline in here
Raymond Keene Lucy Vickery
World champion Magnus Carlsen missed Diagram 1 In Competition No. 3074 you were invited to
several chances to win with black in the first submit a scam letter ghostwritten by a well-
game of his title defence, currently WDkDWDrD known author, living or dead.
continuing in London. Falling for a scam is costly and tedi-
A black win right at the start is by no 0WgWDWDW ous (and more easily done than you might
means ultimately a match winner, but is
rather like breaking serve in the first set of
W0pDWDW0 think), but the comedian James Veitch
found a silver lining when he decided to
the Wimbledon final. DW0WDW1W engage with his persecutors: the ensuing
Alexander Alekhine, in 1927 against José
Capablanca and again Vassily Smyslov in
WDWDP0WD correspondence — lengthy, labyrinthine and
often hilarious — went on to form the basis
1957 against Mikhail Botvinnik, both went DPDPDQDP of a popular TED talk and book.
on to seize the supreme title after black
wins in game one. PDPDKDWH It was a tricky assignment, judging by
the smallish postbag, but you made some
In this case, Carlsen built up a dominating
position after some highly original opening
DWDWDRDW clever choices of author whose prose style
strategy and an inspired temporary pawn lent itself well to the art of phishing: poor
sacrifice and now came the time to reap the spelling (Molesworth via Geoffrey Willans);
Diagram 2
harvest. apparently outlandish claims (Kafka). The
WDWDWDrD winners, printed below, earn £25 each.
Caruana-Carlsen: World Championship,
London (Game 1) 2018; Sicilian Defence 0kgWDWDW Dear Supporter of Justice
W0pDWDWD Someone has been telling lies about Mr. A. He has
been taken in, to his great exasperation, for
(see diagram 1)
Here Carlsen played 34 ... h5 but 34 ... DW0WDWDW questioning on a subject about which he knows
nothing. He had intended to go out in the evening
Qe5, with the intention of invading on the
queenside dark squares, would have led to a
WDWDP0W0 — despite the snow falling, it was a pleasant walk
— when his freedom was arbitrarily curtailed.
winning position as White has no way to DP)PDQDP Despite his protestations, has he been listened to?
organise his defences, e.g. 35 Qh1 Qc3 36 Rc1
Rg3 37 Nf3 b5! and ... c4 will follow ripping PDWIW$WD On the contrary, he has been sedulously ignored.
Has he perhaps misunderstood the gravity of his
White apart on the queenside. DWDWDN1W predicament? Has he offended anyone? It is a bad
dream! Since his arrest, the experience of which he
(see diagram 2) found both troubling and yet trifling, he has had a
Carlsen now played 38 ... Be5. Instead he run of luck which would tax the most decent and
Diagram 3 honest individual. The only way to assist Mr. A. is
should have capitalised on the advance of the
to provide him with a decent Advocate. You can
h-pawn to h4, which enables the thrust 38 ...
Rg3. After 39 Nxg3 hxg3 40 Re2 Qa1 the
WDWDWDrD help by donating to his JustGiving page at www.
white queen and rook are hemmed in by the 0kDWDWDW likeadog.com. Thanks in advance.
Bill Greenwell/Franz Kafka
pawn duo on f4 and g3 and his queenside will
collapse.
W0pDWDWD
Felicitations from the Holy Land,
DW0WgWDW Where I, the sole survivor from a band
(see diagram 3)
Carlsen now played 39 ... Qg7, missing his WDWDP0W0 Of mercenary soldiers stashed away
Much booty; and concealèd it shall stay
last chance to maintain a serious advantage.
He should play 39 ... b5, planning ... b4
DP)PDQDP Until a boat’s procured to sail me home.
I found your name within the Domesday tome,
softening up the queenside dark squares PDKDW$WD A family respected and adored;
after which Black will quickly obtain a And honest — one I wish to share my hoard
decisive attack. White is unable to defend
DWDWDN1W Of riches with, for gems and jewels and gold
against this plan. In England can be fortunately sold.
We’ll partner up, and since we’re men of wit,
I’m offering a fifty-fifty split.
PUZZLE NO. 532 To hire the needed boat, tonight, my man
MICHAEL HEATH
wife has never met. Neither of us elegant blanket of these was Tabasco sauce and one gallon
desired his company. I suggested draped over her coffin. The of water onto the floral blanket,
perhaps we choose another date, canon who celebrated the Mass remembering to protect your eyes
but feathers were ruffled. Mary, commented repeatedly on their when spraying, and to wash your
what would you suggest? beauty. A day later we buried my hands afterwards. Rabbits dislike
— Name and address withheld mother in Sussex. The flowers the taste of hot sauce.
travelled safely and, as they were
A. It would appear that, in laid next to her grave, the only Q. Apropos T.L.’s letter about the
declining to accommodate this utterance from the vicar was ‘The dangers of dancing barefoot, I
Q. A difficult couple of our extra friend, you secretly wanted rabbits will feast well tonight’. recently attended a wedding and
acquaintance always object to play the couple at their own Mary, what is the etiquette on was surprised to see a large box
to other guests at dinner and game and punish them for their sneaking back to the graveyard of (new) flip-flops being loaded
can be very rude to them. In previous rudeness to your friends. to save the flowers from the into a car destined for the dinner-
consequence, we have fallen into However, the tease has backfired. churchyard vermin? Should I dance venue. I was told it is now
a pattern of dining at each other’s Life is too short to lose friends, have sneaked back at dead of de rigueur for these to be provided
houses in London, just the four particularly difficult ones, who night by the light of a ghostly so that those in precipitous heels
of us. They are sticklers for what are often the most interesting. You moon? Like most gardeners, Mum can dance safely once their shoes
they see as correct behaviour. have made your point so move would not have liked the idea of have been removed.
Last week, however, we were quickly on and issue another the rabbits chomping away as she, — L.H., Cornwall
told, the day before we were due invitation before things fester. hopefully, ascended heavenwards.
to host, that they had a friend — N.C., Stanton St. Bernard A. Thank you but party hosts will
staying the night; could they bring Q. My mother died recently. find roll-up, disposable ballet
him along? This was someone I At her requiem in London, I A. You might have sneaked back pumps at £1.50 a pair online; in
vaguely knew, but had not seen arranged to have flowers, seasonal in broad daylight and sprayed a safety terms, a superior option
for 20 years, and someone my and full of autumn colour. An rabbit-repelling solution of 1 tbsp to flip-flops.
Semites? One? Two? Three? 0.5 of This leads to some rage over reserva-
Food a paragraph? tions, as Jews tend to treat kosher res-
Nova kosher For Jews, threat means, inevitably, taurants as their own home and are
renaissance. It is what comes next. amazed that they cannot get a table
Tanya Gold Jews know their duty. Most Jews. Not in their own home thanks to having
Jewdas, the ‘radical voices for the so many relatives whom they hate.
alternative diaspora’, who invited It used to be a branch of Giraffe, in
Corbyn for Passover. They practise which I remember a lurid and very bad
their cod shtetl schtick like Rosen- Sunday lunch. Tish, of course, should
crantz and Guildenstern trapped in be in Hampstead, not Belsize Park, but
Fiddler on the Roof, but they are real- an Israeli restaurant opened in Hamp-
ly hack Marxists who have watched stead last year and the market can’t
too many Tarantino films. We eat bear so much Jewish solidarity.
in our own defence, always, and we Tish is calm, considering it is really
won’t be stopped now. Why would we, an agonised political meeting dis-
ish is a new grand café in Bel- when the glory of being Jewish is real- guised as a grand café that has gone
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